How Obama's teacher bailout prevents needed solutions

Stephen Moore has the story of Milwaukee's battles with the teachers union and how Obama's promise of a teacher bailout is preventing Milwaukee from taking the necessary steps to reform their system of paying benefits to teachers.

The story is that Milwaukee has to lay off 428 teachers and people are, of course, upset. However the city proposed a quite reasonable reform of teacher benefits that would have allowed them to keep those laid off teachers and maybe even hire more.

The current health plan costs taxpayers $26,844 per family, compared to the typical $14,500 cost for a private employer family plan. The plan does not require teachers to pay any premiums toward the cost of the health plan—a situation that is all but extinct in private employment. In the spring, the school board offered a new health plan that would reduce costs to $17,172 per family. The plan would have saved money by requiring co-pays.

According to a budget analysis the MacIver Institute obtained from the Milwaukee public school system, shifting teachers to the plan offered by the school board could have saved $47.2 million. This would have prevented, according to the report, the lay offs of "approximately 480 teachers"—more than the number that ultimately lost their jobs.

Sounds like a reasonable solution, doesn't it? But the union absolutely refused and wouldn't even let their members vote on it. They threw those 428 teachers under the bus in order to maintain an unsustainable benefits package. Why not even let the members vote on the proposal?

Ah, that's where the Obama teacher bailout comes in. The union is so confident that he will get it through Congress that they figured they were safe turning down the school board's proposal.

The Milwaukee Teachers Education Association was immovable on benefits in part because it placed a bet on its Democratic friends in Washington rushing to the rescue. "The problem must be addressed with a national solution, a federal stimulus package that will restore educator positions," Pat Omar, the union's executive director said in June. The union's strategy in recent weeks has been to stage rallies demanding a federal bailout, and it used hundreds of school kids at those rallies as political props.

It's time for cities and states to accept that they're in a very bad place and they need to make drastic choices. If they keep depending on Obama and the Democrats to come along and bail them out, they'll never do what they need to do. The Obama bailout is preventing the necessary, albeit painful, reforms that must be made.

Using supposedly neutral science in legal cases

William Saletan is no friend to conservative causes, but he takes up the story of Elena Kagan's interference in the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists' statement on partial birth abortion. While Saletan acknowledges that the final report kept in the original statement that decisions should be between a doctor and patient, he casts a very skeptical eye on Kagan's 2010 explanation of what she did. It's clear to everyone that she, a political appointee, got ACOG to insert a sentence that she'd written that was directly contradictory of the draft report and which then went on to influence judicial decisions that relied on her words.

But Kagan's defense is bogus, too. On Wednesday, at her confirmation hearing, Hatch pressed Kagan about this episode. She replied that she had just been "clarifying the second aspect of what [ACOG] thought." Progressive blogs picked up this spin, claiming that she merely "clarified" ACOG's findings and made its position "more clear" so that its "intent was correctly understood." Come on. Kagan didn't just "clarify" ACOG's position. She changed its emphasis. If a Bush aide had done something like this during the stem-cell debate, progressive blogs would have screamed bloody murder.

And that is the real problem ACOG's report, with Kagan's deceptive sentence inserted, went to form the basis of judges' decisions on partial birth abortion.

She also altered their legal effect. And this is the scandal's real lesson: Judges should stop treating the statements of scientific organizations as apolitical. Such statements, like the statements of any other group, can be loaded with spin. This one is a telling example....

Kagan's memos and testimony confirm that ACOG consulted the White House and altered its statement accordingly. As a result, the statement reframed ACOG's professional findings to support the policy views it shared with the White House.

All of us should be embarrassed that a sentence written by a White House aide now stands enshrined in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, erroneously credited with scientific authorship and rigor. Kagan should be most chastened of all. She fooled the nation's highest judges. As one of them, she had better make sure they aren't fooled again.

They'll be fooled when the spin from the scientists fits what they want to do in the first place. That's what we've learned from this whole episode. And we'd never have known about it if Kagan's nomination hadn't brought these memos to light.

Seeing our future - and it's not a pretty picture

President Obama touted his health care plan as a duplicate of Massachusetts' plan. So now we can look at the mess that is Massachusetts health care and see what our entire country will be undergoing in a few years. First of all, Massachusetts citizens pay the highest premiums of any state. As Joseph Rago reports today, people did exactly what you'd expect.

In a new paper, Stanford economists John Cogan and Dan Kessler and Glenn Hubbard of Columbia find that the Massachusetts plan increased private employer-sponsored premiums by about 6%. Another study released last week by the state found that the number of people gaming the "individual mandate"—buying insurance only when they are about to incur major medical costs, then dumping coverage—has quadrupled since 2006. State regulators estimate that this amounts to a de facto 1% tax on insurance premiums for everyone else in the individual market and recommend a limited enrollment period to discourage such abuses. (This will be illegal under ObamaCare.)

So since rates were skyrocketing, the only answer that the political class in Massachusetts has had is to impose price controls. But unluckily for the politicians, they had no basis for price controls except for their own desires.

s events are now unfolding, the Massachusetts plan couldn't be a more damning indictment of ObamaCare. The state's universal health-care prototype is growing more dysfunctional by the day, which is the inevitable result of a health system dominated by politics.

In the first good news in months, a state appeals board has reversed some of the price controls on the insurance industry that Gov. Deval Patrick imposed earlier this year. Late last month, the panel ruled that the action had no legal basis and ignored "economic realties."

In April, Mr. Patrick's insurance commissioner had rejected 235 of 274 premium increases state insurers had submitted for approval for individuals and small businesses. The carriers said these increases were necessary to cover their expected claims over the coming year, as underlying state health costs continue to rise at 8% annually. By inventing an arbitrary rate cap, the administration was in effect ordering the carriers to sell their products at a loss.

Mr. Patrick has promised to appeal the panel's decision and find some other reason to cap rates. Yet a raft of internal documents recently leaked to the press shows this squeeze play was opposed even within his own administration.

In an April message to his staff, Robert Dynan, a career insurance commissioner responsible for ensuring the solvency of state carriers, wrote that his superiors "implemented artificial price caps on HMO rates. The rates, by design, have no actuarial support. This action was taken against my objections and without including me in the conversation."

Mr. Dynan added that "The current course . . . has the potential for catastrophic consequences including irreversible damage to our non-profit health care system" and that "there most likely will be a train wreck (or perhaps several train wrecks)."

Sure enough, the five major state insurers have so far collectively lost $116 million due to the rate cap. Three of them are now under administrative oversight because of concerns about their financial viability. Perhaps Mr. Patrick felt he could be so reckless because health-care demagoguery is the strategy for his fall re-election bid against a former insurance CEO.

And there is our future. Health insurers going out of business and the government having to take them over. And perhaps that was the long-term goal for ObamaCare. They might have denied that they were voting for a full government takeover, but what is going to happen when the insurers go out of business?

And this is why Mitt Romney should save himself some money and time and forget about getting the GOP nomination in 2012. He just won't be able to rise above his championing of this disaster for Massachusetts health care.

Sorry, comments aren't working

Blogger seems to be having a problem with posting comments today. So, although I'm approving the comments, they're not showing up. I'm sorry about that. Perhaps Blogger will fix these as soon as possible. Yeah, right.

UDATE: Okay, the comments are now published, but not always showing up in the numbering of how many comments there are for each post. Blogger is making progress.

Cruising the Web

Debra Saunders explains how "hollow and vapid" Elena Kagan's Harvard policy was. Her real problem, as for all people who oppose "Don't ask, don't tell" was with the politicians who passed and with Clinton who signed the policy. She just couldn't say that because Clinton was her guy. So she took it out on the military that she pretends now to so respect.

Amazingly, according to USA Today, the tea parties have close to the same ethnic breakdown as the United States does. They are the groups that look like America, who would have thought that if you listened to the media?

Do the Democrats really think that they're going to fool anyone with their "deem and pass" maneuver for the budget. Don't they realize that all these tricks will come back to haunt them when the GOP gets in control and mimics them. That's what happens with each new escalation of partisan parliamentary games. And the real losers will be the American financial picture.

Ed Morrissey casts an approving eye on the new structure that the RNC is proposing for the 2012 primaries. In search of a way to create incentives for states not to bunch up their contests in the early months, they're proposing that statest aht hold their primaries before April will have to award their delegates on a proportional basis. Before, most states awarded them on a winner-take-all basis which was what allowed John McCain to wrap up the nomination relatively quickly. Candidates would be more liable to stay in at least through the April contests because the payoff would be so much bigger. The proportional structure was what kept Obama and Clinton going at it for so long in 2008. But Republicans wouldn't have that problem because the winner-take-all structure would kick in after the March primaries and a leader could solidify a victory very quickly at that point. And voters would have a bit more time to gauge how they feel about the candidates out there. As Morrissey says, this solution is worth at least a try for one election cycle.

Here's an easy $20 million cut. Stop putting up roadside signs touting that any construction had been done with stimulus funds.

Controlling for education, race, gender, and all the other standard features, federal workers earn about 12% more than private employees. As Andrew G. Biggs and Jason Richwine report, "private employees must work 13½ months to earn what comparable federal workers make in 12." Does that seem right to you?

If Obama can win a Nobel Peace Prize for not doing anything, then surely he should be rated as one of our greatest presidents. After all the sort of grading on a curve that lefty academics do for Democratic presidents would take into account their aspirations for Obama's presidency instead of the reality. And that is just what they've done - in a new poll that places Obama as our fifteenth greatest president, three spots ahead of Ronald Reagan, who actually, you know, accomplished some things in his presidency.

Kathryn Jean Lopez rejects the sorts of feminist bean-counting that supposes that women care more about having a female elected to high office or appointed to the Supreme Court than what that female actually stands for.


William McGurn reports some good news: Wal-Mart has won a victory for itself and the people of Chicago that allows them to build Wal-Marts within the city. People can buy cheaper products and there will be more jobs for the people there. THe labor unions that had blocked such expansion for years had to bow before terrible economic times and the need of people for jobs and cheaper prices. It is especially a victory for common sense.

William Jacobson reports that the Harry Reid campaign has set up a phishing website. Cute, eh?

Bret Stephens explains what BP has been up to with Libya and what that had to do with the lying diagnosis to free the Lockerbie bomber under the pretense that he only had a few months to live instead of the 10 years that the same doctor now admits might be his real prognosis.

This is interesting news: administrative judges in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ruled that Obama didn't have the power to unilaterally shut down Yucca Mountain. Since Congress created it, they have to be the ones to shut it down. If the ruling holds up, perhaps we could be back on the side of science instead of crass do-anything-to-help-Harry-Reid-style politics with regard to how to best dispose of our nation's nuclear waste.

John Steele Gordon had a very good essay on the whole concept of American exceptionalism and why it's important.

Watch what Obama does and not what he says

President Obama made a speech last week on immigration. It was his first such speech since taking office. He shot down a lot of straw men arguments such as how his opponents want to expel all the illegal immigrants who are here. He mischaracterized the Arizona law as arresting people just for what they look like. Then he basically lifted proposals that George W. Bush had made on immigration, proposals that Obama had done nothing to support at the time, and pretended that they were his own ideas.

Dick Morris and Eileen McGann ask a good question. If a comprehensive immigration law were so important to him, why didn't he push for it when he had 60 votes. He could have easily gotten it through because there a several Republicans who would have supported it. We m?

The answer of course is that he has no real interest in enacting such a bill. It's all political theater with him. He hopes to rally Hispanic voters once more to come out and vote on this one issue in the hope that they'll finally get that bill that they supposedly are so eager for. At least they could help out in a few key races, most notably Harry Reid in Nevada. But they should know that there will be even less likelihood that such a comprehensive bill would pass in the new Congress after the elections. Obama's rhetoric is just that - words. All that he is good for on this issue. If he really meant it, he would have done something already. You can always tell what a politician is truly interested in by looking at what he does, not being hornswaggled by fancy speeches full of straw men arguments.

Obama plumbs new depths

Byron York highlights an unbelievably revealing interview that the head of NASA, Charles Bolden, gave to al-Jazeera. I know, I know, why in the world is the head of NASA giving an interview to al-Jazeera - that's all part of Obama's grand plan. See, Obama has not only decided to nix plans to return to the moon - there are good arguments on whether or not that was a worthwhile plan - but he has a whole new vision of what the job of NASA should be. And that vision doesn't seem to have anything to do with, well, space exploration or anything to do with the AS of NASA - you know - aeronautics or space. This is what Bolden told al-Jazeera.

When I became the NASA Administrator — before I became the NASA Administrator — [Obama] charged me with three things: One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.

Just pause and read that a few times while your head explodes. The foremost goal of our president for NASA is to reach out to the Muslim world and patronize them so that they can have better self esteem about their contributions to science, math, and engineering.

This is just the sort of unmotivated feel-goodism that has permeated our schools for so many years. Soon Obama will insist that everyone gets a trophy for participating.

As Ed Morrissey writes, this betrays a massive ignorance of how people get truly inspired.

Actually, Muslim nations should be insulted by the idea that the US pays NASA to provide them with paternalistic and patronizing validation and self-esteem boosts. And they probably will be.

The problem Byron uncovers goes farther than just the Muslim outreach, though. NASA has always inspired children and even bolstered international relations, but not because that was its mission. It did those things by pursuing solid goals of exploration of space, which is why Congress funds the agency. Those esteem-boosters came as a secondary result of actual achievement, not as an end in itself. The Obama administration wants to turn this over onto its head by making NASA a bureaucracy dedicated to self-esteem which might at some point have a goal that has to do with exploration of space.

Of course, coming from a president who got a Nobel Peace Prize for absolutely nothing, putting self-esteem and inspiration before the actual accomplishments shouldn't be any surprise for us.

And what math, science, and engineering achievements from the Muslim world does Obama have in mind. I assume he's looking beyond the Persian mathematician, Al-Khwarizmi's, writings on algebra in the 9th century. Hmmm, what is the major feat from the Muslim world in more recent history? Could it be the work Pakistan and Iran have done on developing nuclear weapons? Is that the big accomplishment that Obama has in mind for making them feel good about themselves. Maybe he thinks that the Iranians will trade off their nuclear ambitions for some pat-on-the head puffery from his administration on their scientific contributions.

I sure hope that Congress will look into Obama's plans for NASA. They should call Bolden in and find out if those are truly the top three goals that this administration has for NASA. If so, that's a place in the budget we can cut right away. The Muslim world will just have to work on their self esteem all on their own.

UPDATE: Charles Krauthammer is thinking along these same lines, but, of course, expressing it much better. This is what he said on Special Report last night.

"This is a new height in fatuousness," Krauthammer said. "NASA was established to get America into space and to keep is there. This idea to feel good about their past and to make achievements is the worst combination of group therapy, psychobabble, imperial condescension and adolescent diplomacy."

All true.

The Revolution will be tweeted

Slate had a contest for people to summarize the Declaration of independence in a Twitter message. I love the first runner-up message.

"Our Rights from Creator (h/t @JLocke). Life, Liberty, PoH FTW! Your transgressions = FAIL. GTFO, @GeorgeIII. -HANCOCK et al."

Yet another way that the Obama administration is mucking up things for the rest of us

The NYT ran a story this week about how the Obama administration's determination to crack down on unpaid internships has had the effect of depriving young students of valuable work experience. For years, college students have gotten work experience working as unpaid interns for various businesses and organizations. They were willing to trade their time for those opportunities. I've known so many of my former students who shelled out the money to spend the summer in Washington or New York or elsewhere for the opportunity to get some real world experience to help them build up a resume that would make them more employable when they left school.

But the Obama administration decided that this just wasn't right and exploited young people and was unfair for those young people who couldn't afford to take an unpaid position so they issued new guidelines warning businesses about taking on unpaid interns.

In April, the Obama administration issued a fact sheet listing six criteria aimed at preventing employers from violating the Fair Labor Standards Act with their unpaid internship programs. Among the stipulations: that the training the intern receives must be similar to training that can be obtained in an educational setting, that unpaid interns don’t displace a paid employee, and that the employer does not derive any “benefit” from the intern’s work.

The guidelines, from the Labor Department, have left employers scrambling to bulletproof their internship programs, said Camille Olson, a management-side employment attorney, who represents companies who have been dealing with this issue. Some employers, she said, have converted to paid internships but in the process have cut back on the number of posts they can offer. Others have abandoned their programs altogether.

So now these young people are left without those opportunities. And they can't find a pay job either. Finding the typical summer job that high school kids used to do every year has become more and more rare as businesses have to cut back. So they can't get paid or unpaid jobs. And if they want to try to get college credit so they can fulfill that requirement, they end up having to pay to get that credit. So not only are they unpaid and having to pay for their housing, they also have to shell out up to thousands of dollars to the university in order to get the credit that allows them to work as an unpaid intern.

Most employers aren’t entirely eliminating their unpaid internship programs but are instead becoming sticklers, requiring that schools grant credit to any person they hire for an unpaid internship. That can be difficult for some students. Alyssa Wolice, a journalism major at American University in Washington, had to walk away from three promising internship opportunities — one at a sports organization and two at news organizations — because all three employers insisted she obtain credit from her university.

There were two problems with that stipulation for Ms. Wolice. First, she had already been granted the maximum number of credits that American allows for internships in her degree program. But even if she hadn’t, she says she couldn’t afford the estimated $1,000 she would have had to pay American for the credits.

It's going to be tough enough for these kids to graduate from college and find a job but now they won't even have a summer or two of real-world experience to add to their resume.

The only ones who might benefit are the community colleges that figure out a way to give the credit while undercutting the cost there would be for the students to pay at their regular college for the opportunity to work for free.

So Obama's Labor Department came up with a solution in search of a problem that ended up making things worse for everyone involved. Does this story sound familiar?

Cruising the Web

Happy Fourth of July! I hope all of my readers are having a splendid holiday weekend and sparing a moment to think of why we celebrate this day.

Moving along the lines, everyone should read Jay Nordlinger's essay about KSM's elliptical machine. He's responding to all those criticisms he received when he wrote about how the Red Cross is not allowed to visit Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who has been held hostage by Hamas for four years. He also pointed out that the REd Cross isn't allowed to see the political prisoners being held in Chinese, Cuban, and North Korean prisons but few in Europe or America seems to care about any of that. Nordlinger received a ton of ugly emails complaining that the United States and Israel are just as bad as these other tyrants. Bull feathers! This desire for moral equivalence is really a corrosive part of the left's ideological make up. Read Nordlinger.

The actress who played Padma Patil in the Harry Potter movies has had to go into hiding because her father and brother have attacked her for dating a Hindu man. Perhaps having someone famous being threatened will wake people up to the epidemic of honor killings in Europe. Phyllis Chesler has more on this horrible trend.

More states have been voting to join up into the National Popular Vote plan which is a way of getting around the Constitutional requirements for the Electoral College. As Michael Uhlmann explains why this is an absolutely horrendous idea. New York is now considering joining the interstate compact. Would New York voters have been happy to have had their electoral votes go for George W. Bush in 2004 just because Bush had won the popular vote? It's a recipe for litigation and voter fraud on a grand scale.

One of my commenters linked to this Sports Illustrated story from a year ago about why and how superstar athletes end up broke. The numbers are just amazing. Within two years of retiring 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are close to it. From the NBA 60% go broke within five years. Maybe in that one year they spend in college, they should load up on accounting and money management courses.

How many passes does Michael Steele get for making really stupid comments? His latest, saying that Afghanistan "was a war of Obama's choosing" and that the U.S. shouldn't have gotten involved is egregiously ignorant and insulting to our country's soldiers who are fighting right now there. Bill Kristol is right - Steele should resign. But he won't and the RNC will cover for him. Can anyone point to anything that Steele has done well since he took over as the head of the RNC? Every time I hear him, he's saying something that is cringe-worthy, but this statement was just totally unacceptable.

Timothy Carney illustrates how, for all Obama and Biden's touting of jobs that they've supposedly brought to "jump-start America to lead the world in the 21st century," other actions they've taken have taken away more jobs.

Roger Hedgecock details how the flood of "other people's money" that supposedly virtuous public servants happily give away. And members of Congress such as Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, and Maxine Waters manipulate their votes to benefit their own investments.

Daniel Henninger had a very good column this week about the plague of vague laws that Congress keeps passing. He'd like to see more of the "void for vagueness" test that the Supreme Court used this week to unanimously strike down the law had been used to convict Jeff Skilling of Enron. But we shouldn't have to wait for the law to wend its way to the Supreme Court; vagueness should be a bill-killer before the things even get passed. Unfortunately, being purposely vague is sometimes the only way they can garner enough votes to pass these dang bills.

If you had any confidence in the Obama oil spill commission to objectively examine the Gulf Oil Spill, just forget about it.

Heh. The Democratic Underground has had to institute new rules to prevent its liberal commenters from criticize The One. Just too many people weren't happy with his actions on the oil spill.

Why all the liberal love for Robert Byrd?

All the big shots in the Democratic Party trooped out to West Virginia for Robert Byrd's memorial service. Obama, Biden, Pelosi, Bill Clinton were all there. What did Byrd have going for him besides his longevity? Otherwise, is there some admirable part of his career that represents all that is great in America as those eulogies would have you believe?

Jonah Goldberg has a good column asking about this.

Not long ago, the assembled forces of liberalism were convinced that the Senate was “broken,” that the anachronistic filibuster impeded progress. The Senate itself, with its arcane rules and procedures, had become undemocratic and was in need of vital reform, according to all of the usual voices. John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress and a sort of archbishop of liberalism these days, drew on his deep command of political theory and social science to explain that the American political system “sucks,” in significant part due to the unwieldiness of the Senate.

Well, who better represented those alleged structural problems than Byrd? Nearly every obituary celebrates his “mastery” of the rules. This is from the first paragraph of the Washington Post’s obituary: Byrd “used his masterful knowledge of the institution to shape the federal budget, protect the procedural rules of the Senate and, above all else, tend to the interests of his state.”

Yes, what about his tending to his state’s interests? For several years there’s been a lot of bipartisan indignation over the perfidy of pork and “earmarks.”

Who, pray tell, better represented that practice than Byrd? The man emptied Washington of money and resources with an alacrity and determination not seen since the evacuation of Dunkirk. There are too many of these Byrd droppings in West Virginia to count, but we do know there are at least 30 buildings and other structures in that state named for him. So much for Democrats’ getting the message that Americans are sick of self-aggrandizing politicians.

Think about all those democrats who have been moaning about how our system is broken and we can't get anything done in Congress any more. Well, that is mostly all about the filibuster. So when they're celebrating Byrd as the guardian of the prerogatives of the Senate, that's a big part of what they're celebrating - the very institutions that have liberals like Thomas Friedman wishing we could be more like China.

And then, of course, the liberals are all giving him a pass for his history with the KKK. And they're just gliding over his filibuster of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the brightest star in the civil rights firmament. He is second only to Strom Thurmond in filibuster records. Did Strom Thurmond get half the love and admiration for his career that Byrd's death has sparked?

Other than his mastery fo the Senate rules and his manipulation of his role on the Appropriations Committee back to West Virginia, what else was there about the guy to evoke such admiration?

Why is the administration so incompetent on the oil spill?

The Heritage Foundation has a 10-point to-do list of what the administration should be doing to address the clean-up in the Gulf. They range from actions like waiving the Jones Act and relaxing some EPA regulations that are preventing clean-up actions. Paul Rubin talks about some of these proposals today in the WSJ.

First, the Environmental Protection Agency can relax restrictions on the amount of oil in discharged water, currently limited to 15 parts per million. In normal times, this rule sensibly controls the amount of pollution that can be added to relatively clean ocean water. But this is not a normal time.

Various skimmers and tankers (some of them very large) are available that could eliminate most of the oil from seawater, discharging the mostly clean water while storing the oil onboard. While this would clean vast amounts of water efficiently, the EPA is unwilling to grant a temporary waiver of its regulations.

Next, the Obama administration can waive the Jones Act, which restricts foreign ships from operating in U.S. coastal waters. Many foreign countries (such as the Netherlands and Belgium) have ships and technologies that would greatly advance the cleanup. So far, the U.S. has refused to waive the restrictions of this law and allow these ships to participate in the effort.

The combination of these two regulations is delaying and may even prevent the world's largest skimmer, the Taiwanese owned "A Whale," from deploying. This 10-story high ship can remove almost as much oil in a day as has been removed in total—roughly 500,000 barrels of oily water per day. The tanker is steaming towards the Gulf, hoping it will receive Coast Guard and EPA approval before it arrives.

In addition, the federal government can free American-based skimmers. Of the 2,000 skimmers in the U.S. (not subject to the Jones Act or other restrictions), only 400 have been sent to the Gulf. Federal barriers have kept the others on stations elsewhere in case of other oil spills, despite the magnitude of the current crisis. The Coast Guard and the EPA issued a joint temporary rule suspending the regulation on June 29—more than 70 days after the spill.

The question that Rubin then raises is why is the administration so incompetent. Why aren't they addressing these complaints much faster? Rubin sees three explanations - these people are just incompetent, the administration is more concerned about its supporters such as labor or the environmentalists than the ongoing crisis, or the incompetence is deliberate so that the Obama administration can take advantage of this crisis to pass their desired environmental regulations. I'm not cynical enough to ascribe to the latter proposition. I could believe a combination of the first two reasons plus the fact that the federal government is just so unwieldy that one area doesn't know what the other area is doing. People don't anticipate the roadblocks that the EPA puts up until it all comes to light. And this is where the administration's executive incompetence comes in. They need to be down in the trenches figuring out how the EPA or other agencies are blocking the clean-up and then getting Obama to issue executive orders to speed things up. But that would require him to be much more engaged with the efforts than he seems to be. Yes, the environmental groups might be upset about waiving regulations here and there but they're not going to make a big deal about something that the American people would be so broadly behind - cleaning up the dang oil as fast as possible.

Cruising the Web

Courtland Milloy of the Washington Post was impressed with Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion in the Chicago gun rights case by the historical lesson Thomas provided on the importance of gun rights to protecting the freed slaves. Thomas buttressed his arguments about the intent of those who drafted the Fourteenth Amendment with the testimony of Frederick Douglass who wrote, " 'The black man has never had the right either to keep or bear arms,' and that, until he does, 'the work of the Abolitionists was not finished.' "

Chris Cillizza reports that there is a growing movement in West Virginia to hold the election to replace Robert Byrd this year instead of waiting until 2012. It would take the governor to ask the state legislature to take up the issue when they come back into special session this month to deal with education.

Tom Maguire has a lot of fun shooting down the extremely silly column that Kathleen Parker wrote about how Barack Obama is our first female president for some sort of vague reason having to do with his communication style. Maguire sums up his skewering of Parker by concluding, "And do let's find the bright side - Hillary can run in 2012 on a promise to put a man back in the White House."

Democrats in the House are playing politics to prevent a Louisiana Republican congressman from taking a group of representatives down to the coast to see the situation there before they vote on the energy bill.

The fact that the the Democrats were late last year passing a budget and aren't even making a try this year is playing havoc with how federal agencies figure out their funding.

Weasel Zippers points to the hypocrisy of Barack Obama who ridiculed John McCain for talking about establishing a commission to look at the economic collapse of 2008 and yet has now established four such "blue-ribbon" commissions himself.

It's time that more people point out how the Democrats have straight-out lied about the Roberts Court's ruling on Lily Ledbetter. The Democrats like to pretend that she was punished for not filing her complaint even though she didn't know that she ahd been discriminated against. That is just not what the facts of the case are. She knew for years about the discrimination before she filed suit. Ed Whelan has more from his planned testimony today before the Senate Judiciary Committee to respond to the Democratic complaints that the Roberts Court has demonstrated conservative activism. He demonstrates how fallacious those accusations are.

Is there no end to the powers and wonders of Joe Biden? Jim Geraghty cites this promise that Biden made when he was campaigning in Ohio for Lee Fisher who is running against Ron Portman in a tight race for the Senate: “LeBron James is coming back and Lee is going to Washington,” As Geraghty points out, Biden felt comfortable making that promise but just a couple of days ago he said in Milwaukee that “there’s no possibility to restore 8 million jobs lost in the Great Recession.” That's our Joe.

This is a truly disgusting development out of North Carolina. Krispy Kreme is featuring a Cheerwine donut. That's a concept for a donut that just doesn't work for me. Both are fine separately, but not together. And the reviews are not positive.

Is John Calipari the Devil?

At the risk of offending any Kentucky fans among my readers, this column by Jeff Neuman on John Calipari is so spot on that I had to post it. I was astounded, while watching the NBA draft, to hear John Calipari claim that the fact that five Kentucky players went in the first round was "the biggest day in Kentucky basketball history." Apparently, the new goal of Kentucky fans is to house hot shot players for one year, lose in the tournament and then wave good-bye to those players as they pocketed their big new paychecks. Forget about winning that championship. Such an ambition is so yesterday for ol' Cal. Neuman writes,

Most would agree it was bigger than the day in March when West Virginia beat Kentucky in the East Regional final.

Calipari told Dan Patrick the day after the draft that having so many players taken so early "was like winning the national title."

Patrick could well have asked, "How would you know?" A national championship is as absent from Calipari's resume as his team's accomplishments are from the official NCAA record book.

As for his NBA credentials, in his two-plus years with the New Jersey Nets, he had a .391 winning percentage and no playoff victories, the latter record resulting from three actual losses rather than forfeits after the fact.

Calipari believes the high picks demonstrate his unique ability to prepare players for the NBA. "We're a players-first program," he said.

I think that's great. It's the responsibility of every adult to make sure that young people with basketball skills know that everything's about them.

Four freshmen and a junior are heading to the pros from the Kentucky campus, having learned the vital lesson that nothing will be expected of them beyond the sidelines. Calipari believes that young people will flock to his program, looking to add their names to the school's glorious list of first-round draft choices.

He's probably right. The devil has always been able to tempt the unwary by appealing to their vanity.

As Neuman points out, the true contrast to Calipari's Kentucky team is Mike Krzyzewski's Duke team.

"I was upset that we lost," top draft pick John Wall said of his one Kentucky season, "but you've got to move on about it, and I think we had a great college career."

They take a different approach in Durham, where Mike Krzyzewski started three seniors and two juniors last season, none of whom were drafted at all. Still, Duke did win the NCAA championship, which makes for a pretty great college career in its own way.

What's more impressive - having all those lottery picks on his team and bombing out in the tournament or taking a group of guys with seniors who didn't make the draft and win it all? Those Blue Devils are a different type of Devil from the one whom Calipari represents.

Best wishes for Christopher Hitchens

How terrible that Christopher Hitchens has been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. I wish him all the best with the treatments he will undergo.

Kagan's second attempt to mold medical opinions

While she tried to worm her way around questions about the way that she inserted her own language into the report put out by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, news surfaced of another attempt by Elena Kagan of a second attempt to influence a statement by a medical association on partial birth abortion.

Now, according to a report Americans United for Life furnished to LifeNews.com, Kagan’s lobbying for changes to medical associations’ positions while in the White House is further evidenced by an email found in her White House documents.

The email has Kagan clearly trying to change the position of another medical group, the American Medical Association.

Kagan discussed with other Clinton administration officials whether the AMA could reverse its policy saying there is not an identified situation in which partial-birth abortion is the only appropriate method of abortion. The AMA also noted ethical concerns with partial-birth abortions and said that it should not be used unless it is absolutely necessary.

“We agreed to do a bit of thinking about whether we (in truth, HHS) could contribute to that effort [convincing the AMA to reverse their policy]," Kagan wrote in the email. "Chuck and I are meeting with the AG on Tuesday; Donna offered to send over some doctors this week (though we don't know who or when) to give a medical briefing.”

Responding to Kagan's comments in the email, AUL said: "In other words, Kagan was so opposed to the passage of a ban on partial-birth abortion, she hoped that ACOG and the AMA would suppress or modify their views and aggressively worked to make that happen."

Once again we have a political appointee from Clinton's White House trying to tell a group of doctors what their medical opinion should be. While I'm sure that politicians and their aides often work like this with special interests, there is something particularly smarmy about their trying to influence a supposedly neutral medical judgment. They don't want politicians to tell doctors what to do when it comes to abortion, but they're willing to tell the doctors what their medical judgment should be overall. And Elena Kagan was the one doing the manipulating back in 1990s.

But, by all means, let's ignore those questions and ask her instead of she's on Team Edward or Team Jacob. Seriously, she was asked whom she supported in the Twilight romance. Gag! What adult would even think to ask such a thing in public? Minnesota's own Amy Klobuchar. Better she should have dozed off like her colleague, Al Franken.