Cruising the Web

Figuring out how much teachers make: Add in their pensions and benefits and it's not a bad salary.

Marc Thiessen explains how the judge's ruling that the administration can't use the testimony from a key witness in the trial of Ahmed Ghailani, the man who is charged with supplying explosives to the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania clarifies why the Obama administration is so wrong to be using civilian courts rather than military commissions.

What a surprise - California's proposed budget is full of accounting gimmicks and optimistic assumptions about how much the federal government will hand over to California. I don't know why anyone would want to be governor of this state, but do Californians want to turn this mess over to Jerry Brown?

If the GOP takes control of one house of Congress, ObamaCare could become "zombie legislation."

The media hypocrisy feeding the feeding frenzy over the Meg Whitman housekeeper story.

Andrew Ferguson is spot-on with his analysis of the "paranoid style in liberal politics."

ObamaCare forces three hospitals to be put up for sale

Mark Hemingway links to this story about three Catholic hospitals in Pennsylvania are being put up for sale and officials are citing ObamaCare as one of the major causes for their decision to sell the hospitals.

Mercy Hospital in Scranton is up for sale.

Those who run the place and all other Mercy facilities in our area said Wednesday they are already in talks with organizations interested in buying.

Mercy Health Partners hopes to have a buyer by the end of the year.

Officials said there are numerous reasons for the sale. One big one is the heath care reform bill signed into law this year.

The potential sale includes Mercy Hospital in Scranton, Mercy Tyler Hospital in Tunkhannock and Mercy Special Care Hospital in Nanticoke.

For almost a century there has been a Catholic hospital in Scranton. Now it looks like that will be coming to an end.

The churches seem to be doing well financially but they don't think that that situation will continue as ObamaCare goes more into effect.

They said Mercy isn't struggling but, they added, now is the time to make a sale.

"We are in position of strength and it's always better to make a move for the future from that position," Sister Marie Parke added.

"Actually we're doing well. We're ahead of budget for the year. It's more that when we look out over the landscape of health care over the next five years and the needs of these facilities, the needs of this community, we understand a different level of investment will be needed than what we can do on our own," Cook said.

They said much of that required investment is the result of the health care reform bill passed in Washington.

The CEO said it means the need for more spending and less federal reimbursements.

"Health care reform is absolutely playing a role. Was it the precipitating factor in this decision? No, but was it a factor in our planning over the next five years? Absolutely," Cook added.

Another unintended consequence for ObamaCare.

After a while, how many purchasers will there be out there for other hospitals that decide that this is the time to get out of the business?

Teachers union: it's all about us

The newest stimulus money was supposed to go to school districts to help them to hire new teachers or preserve jobs for those who might be let go. But the teachers union of Fairfax County in Virginia want that money to go to giving them a raise.

After a two-year salary freeze, Fairfax County teachers are lobbying the School Board to spend anticipated federal funds on pay raises instead of hiring hundreds of new instructors.

With budgets shrinking and enrollment growing, teachers have not received even cost-of-living raises, and some are among several thousand employees who have been hit by non-salary pay cuts. County teachers - pleading low morale and difficult schedules - are looking to a possible $21.3 million federal windfall for respite.

But that plan might clash with both the School Board's plans and the spirit of the Obama administration's $10 billion education jobs bill, which federal officials said was intended to save or create 160,000 teaching jobs.

In Fairfax, concerns remain high about a possible budget shortfall in fiscal 2012. Some board members have expressed doubts about using one-time federal funds for an ongoing expense such as a permanent pay raise for the county's 14,000 teachers.

"Because the $21.3 million is not a recurring income, we can't commit to spending it on a recurring expense," said Ilryong Moon, an at-large member of the board....

Raises for existing teachers - while permitted by the jobs bill approved in August - would do little to advance the goal of creating or saving teaching positions. But Fairfax teachers say there would be other benefits to the county's more than 170,000 students.

"The workforce right now is completely physically and emotionally exhausted," said Steve Greenburg, president of the Fairfax County Federation of Teachers. "These teachers have had to take second and third jobs. It's taking its toll."

Greenburg's organization and the county's other teachers union, the Fairfax Education Association, are requesting a 2 percent cost-of-living pay raise for teachers, beginning in the second half of this school year. The cost would be about $18 million in this fiscal year.

Hey, the teachers don't care about such a problem. They want to get a raise locked in so that they'll keep getting the higher wages. And they don't care about hiring new teachers even if that might relieve their exhaustion. It's all about getting more money for themselves. As Andrew Biggs points out, average wages in Fairfax County have dropped by 2.5% in the past two years and there hasn't been inflation so they can't be basing their demands for a pay raise on the cost of living.

Is that really why Congress passed such supposedly emergency spending - to give raises to people who already have jobs?

Cruising the Web

Here's a clip and save about ten tax increases in ObamaCare.

With all the Democratic concern about secret money going to Republicans, I wonder if they're worried about the hidden money that Soros and his pals are funneling into an effort to revamp how Florida does their redistricting. Hmmmm. I wonder if these good government types also supported efforts to change California's redistricting methods.

Old bull House chairmen are running scared. Heh.

Glenn Reynolds links to this story that Illinois has to offer higher rates than Mexico in order to sell their bonds. Higher than Mexico! Unbelievable. And which party has been running that state into the ground?

Mark Gavreau Judge explains why the public despises journalists. It's for they don't write more than what they do write. Nyah. Some of us may despise them for both.

Let's not forget the other hateful things that Rick Sanchez has said just because he said them about conservatives.

The Democrats' secret weapon - enticing the youth vote with pot legalization propositions.

Barney Frank is forced to be nice to constituents. It's tough for him. And so rare that people notice it when he's not being rudely arrogant.

What rumors have wrought

Female lobbyists are upset that John Boehner has issued a warning to male Republicans not to be alone with them.

But female lobbyists are raising new concerns that access to male Republican lawmakers has been further hampered by a warning made earlier this year by House Minority Leader John Boehner.

The Ohio Republican privately told a handful of male Republicans to avoid getting drunk and partying with female lobbyists at after-hour parties on Capitol Hill, according to a July report in the New York Post.

Some women on K Street, who say they are already at a disadvantage to their male counterparts, are upset about the reports of Boehner’s edict and say it represents yet another obstacle. There are just 17 Republican women in the House compared to 56 Democrats, while the Senate has just four Republican women compared to 13 Democrats.

“What year are we in again? Is this 1960?” asked one female Republican lobbyist. “There’s no problem with congressmen drinking at the Capital Grille [Restaurant] with their male lobbyist-friends, which happens every night of the week. But somehow if they do it with a woman, it doesn’t look good. That’s just an outdated attitude and one reason we don’t have more women in top Republican leadership jobs.”

Yeah, yeah. It's such a shame that Republicans are afraid of the appearance of impropriety. But somehow The Hill gets through this whole story about the wary attitude of Republican males without mentioning the latest story built off of rampant rumor-mongering about a Republican man and a female lobbyist. Just last week Page Six, Dana Milbank, and Salon happily ran with a rumor that Boehner had been having an affair with a female lobbyist. So far there hasn't been such a New York Times story. And the guy who started all this off is a Daily Kos blogger who likes to pull such stunts against Republican politicians.

With such attacks that can quickly rocket from a liberal blogger stunt to the pages of daily newspapers and the web, is it any wonder that Boehner is warning his caucus members to be careful?

How ObamaCare affects people in the real world

One doctor writes to explain how, in the real world, the ObamaCare reforms are making health care worse for patients.

Last year, I ordered a CT scan of the chest on a 63-year-old patient whose chest X-ray had revealed a lung nodule. I had no problem getting the test approved by his private insurance company. The radiologist suggested that I repeat the CT scan this year to make sure the nodule hasn’t turned into cancer.

But this year, the same insurance company is denying the test, having clamped down on several elective services while also raising its premiums. This company now has to cover children with pre-existing conditions and can place no lifetime limits on care. It is struggling to preserve its profits as Obamacare kicks in — profits that, to begin with, are only approximately 4 percent of its total revenue.

Next year, my patient will have Medicare. He can’t afford a secondary insurance plan (Medicare Part B covers only 80 percent of most charges), and he doesn’t qualify for Medicaid as his secondary, so he was hoping to join a Medicare Advantage plan — a private insurance plan that seniors can choose to receive, partly at government expense, instead of Medicare. But in 2011, Medicare Advantage is due to be cut $140 billion by the new law, and it is doubtful that the plan he wants will still be available. Harvard Pilgrim, the second-largest insurer in Massachusetts, has just dropped 22,000 patients from its Medicare Advantage plan in anticipation of these cuts. Soon seniors everywhere will have the same problem. In fact, the Medicare actuary estimates that 7 million out of the 11 million people with Medicare Advantage will be set adrift over the next seven years.

One of those patients will likely be my fellow with the lung nodule who needs a follow-up scan.

President Obama clearly hasn’t visited a real doctor’s office recently. If he sat on my office couch, he would immediately discover that real patients are terribly worried about how dysfunctional and expensive all health insurance, public and private, is becoming under the new law of the land. Of course, the problem of spiraling health-care costs and inadequate access to essential services was already happening before, but Obamacare is making it far worse.

Read the rest and remember those sunny predictions that Obama made over and over again about how nothing would change for those of us who liked our health care plans. Tell that to the retirees at 3M.

3M Co. confirmed it would eventually stop offering its health-insurance plan to retirees, citing the federal health overhaul as a factor.

The changes won't start to phase in until 2013. But they show how companies are beginning to respond to the new law, which should make it easier for people in their 50s and early-60s to find affordable policies on their own. While thousands of employers are tapping new funds from the law to keep retiree plans, 3M illustrates that others may not opt to retain such plans over the next few years

The St. Paul, Minn., manufacturing conglomerate notified employees on Friday that it would change retiree benefits both for those who are too young to qualify for Medicare and for those who qualify for the Medicare program. Both groups will get an unspecified health reimbursement instead of having access to a company-sponsored health plan.

Uh oh. That wasn't supposed to be the way that companies responded to ObamaCare.

Democrats that crafted the legislation say they tried to incentivize companies to keep their retiree coverage intact, especially until 2014. The law creates a $5 billion fund for employers and unions to offset the cost of retiree health benefits. More than 2,000 entities, including many large public companies, have already been approved to submit claims for such reimbursement. 3M did not apply.

If more companies like 3M decide that it just isn't worth it for them to provide those benefits for retirees and dumps them into government programs, imagine what that will do to projections of how much ObamaCare will cost us.

The importance of changing the rules

It's not sexy and it is not an easily understandable talking point, but the GOP is on to something important when they talk about changing the rules on how Congress passes bills. Having observed the Democrats crush through enormous bill after bill without having read them with Nancy Pelosi telling us that we have to pass the bill to find out what is in the bill, the American people may understand and fully support such technical changes within Congress. With the Democrats not even passing a Budget Resolution this year, it is clearly time to revisit the rules under which COngress passes through spending increases with little debate or understanding of what is in the huge omnibus bills headed our way during the lame duck session. Some of the ideas that the GOP has inserted into their pledge, as the WSJ writes today, would actually make a great difference.

Another good idea is Mr. Boehner's vow to publish the text of all bills online at least three days prior to a vote, as well as to allow open rules on spending bills. Former GOP leader Tom DeLay gave short shrift to open rules, but Nancy Pelosi has seen that bad habit and raised, making this the first Congress in memory not to consider a single bill under an open amendment process. This has barred spending hawks like Arizona's Jeff Flake from putting embarrassing spending items up for a floor vote.

Mr. Boehner also proposed to break spending bills into smaller bills for each federal agency or function rather than piling education with health care, for example, into a giant log-rolling exercise. The man who would be Speaker didn't say whether he'd let reformers like Mr. Flake onto the Appropriations Committee, where the spending culture is ingrained. But he ought to do so, and we'd recommend that he also impose term limits for Appropriators, so it wouldn't be a life-time pork-barrel sinecure.

Most intriguingly, Mr. Boehner suggested that "we ought to start at square one and give serious consideration to revisiting, and perhaps rewriting, the 1974 Budget Act." Now he's getting somewhere. That law, passed over the veto of a Watergate-weakened Richard Nixon, further rigged the budget process to abet spending. It killed the President's impoundment power not to spend money, and it established the annual "budget baseline" that makes spending increases automatic. Thus even a reduction in the amount of spending increase in a program becomes a budget "cut" that special interests can attack. Mr. Boehner should consult Budget ranking Member Paul Ryan and former Member Chris Cox for reform ideas.

The larger insight here is that Democrats have organized Congress and written its rules to aid and abet their policy priorities. During their last time in the majority, Republicans didn't do enough to rewrite those rules to assist their ostensible goal of limiting government power and reducing spending and taxes. They shouldn't make the same mistake again.

In addition to rewriting the Budget Act, Republicans need to assert control over the scoring conventions at the Congressional Budget Office that typically underestimate spending—see ObamaCare. Ditto for the rules at the Joint Tax Committee that underestimate the impact of tax changes on taxpayer behavior and economic growth.

It is a joke that Congress sends prospective bills to the CBO for scoring and forces them to accept unbelievable premises like imagining levels of economic growth that will not be happening. Or, as we saw with ObamaCare, they force CBO to include projected and undetermined cuts in Medicare that we all know will never happen. It turned the CBO scoring into a total fiction that the politicians could then grab onto and claim that such fantasies were indeed legitimate predictions of how much a bill would cost over time.

If the GOP truly passes such changes, it would have long-term implications that could make a substantial difference in how they do things up there on Capitol Hill. And now is the time to do that.

Don't forget Jerry Brown's record last time he was governor

We lived in California when Jerry Brown was governor before and it amazes me that California seems poised to put him back in office. Thomas Sowell reminds us of one Brown-induced fiasco for which the entire state suffered.

At one time, Governor Jerry Brown was riding high in the Democratic Party, and was considered a rising prospect for that party's nomination for President of the United States. Then something happened that told us all what kind of man he was.

There was an infestation of Mediterranean fruit flies out in California's agricultural heartland in the interior valleys. Despite being urged to allow spraying of insecticide out in the valleys, to nip the infestation in the bud, Governor Brown pandered to the environmental extremists and refused.

The net result was that the "Med flies," as they were called, spread from the valleys out into cities and towns as far west as the San Francisco Bay Area. Faced with a major political disaster, Jerry Brown finally authorized spraying-- over a vastly larger area than when he was first asked. That fiasco spared us a Jerry Brown administration in Washington.

No wonder his supporters have sprung an October surprise about Meg Whitman's housekeeper. They need a distraction from his record.

And then there was his choice for chief justice of the California supreme Court, Rose Bird, who over-ruled every single death penalty verdict that came her way because she was personally against capital punishment and figured that she could ignore the law and rule her personal preferences. Does California really want more of these sorts of appointments and policies? Do they want to continue the policies that have landed California in the budgetary nightmare where it is now? If they put this guy back in office, they deserve what they'll get.

Maybe California needs more than a rule change

Here's a little tidbit from the Los Angeles Times about a rule change that Schwarzenegger has ordered for state welfare reform.

California officials are cutting off use of state-issued welfare debit cards at casinos across the country and on cruise ships, in the wake of Times reports that the aid cards have been used to spend or withdraw millions of dollars in benefits at popular vacation spots including the Las Vegas strip and on ships sailing from ports around the world.

More than $69 million meant to help the needy pay their rent and clothe their children was accessed in all 49 other states, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam, according to data obtained by The Times from the California Department of Social Services.

This follows an earlier rule change to cut off the use of the welfare cards at California casinos and strip clubs.

Maybe the problem isn't that recipients were using their cards to vacation or gamble. Shouldn't the California government be asking themselves about their screening devices for giving welfare benefits out in the first place? If people take those benefits and then feel comfortable enough to spend it at a casino or on a cruise ship, perhaps they didn't need the money in the first place?

Attempting the impossible - explaining economics to politicians

Walter Williams tries to explain the effects of raising taxes on corporations to those politicians who advocate such a change.

What about the politician who tells us that he's not going to raise taxes on the middle class; instead, he's going to raise corporate income taxes as means to get rich corporations to pay their rightful share of government? If a tax is levied on a corporation, and if it is to survive, it will have one of three responses, or some combination thereof. One response is to raise the price of its product, so who bears the burden? Another response is to lower dividends; again, who bears the burden? Yet another response is to lay off workers. In each case, it is people, not some legal fiction called a corporation, who bear the burden of the tax.

Because corporations have these responses to the imposition of a tax, they are merely government tax collectors.

They collect money from people and send it to Washington. Therefore, you should tell that politician, who promises to tax corporations instead of you, that he's an idiot because corporations, like land, do not pay taxes. Only people pay taxes.

And what will be the result? When corporations have less money to spend, they will have less money to hire workers or expand their businesses.

Policies that raise the cost of capital formation such as capital gains taxes, low depreciation allowances and corporate taxes, thereby reduce capital formation, and serve neither the interests of workers, investors nor consumers. It does serve the interests of politicians who get more resources to be able to buy votes.

Arthur Laffer chimes in today with statistics from states have raised their income tax rates on higher-income earners compared to those states with no income taxes. Washington state is facing an initiative backed by Bill Gates Sr. to impose a 5% tax on individuals earning over $200,000 a year and couples earning over $400,000 while reducing some other taxes for others.

To imagine what such a large soak-the-rich income tax would do to Washington, we need only examine how states with the highest income-tax rates perform relative to their zero-income tax counterparts. Comparing the nine states with the highest tax rates on earned income to the nine states with no income tax shows how high tax rates weaken economic performance.

In the past decade, the nine states with the highest personal income tax rates have seen gross state product increase by 59.8%, personal income grow by 51%, and population increase by 6.1%. The nine states with no personal income tax have seen gross state product increase by 86.3%, personal income grow by 64.1%, and population increase by 15.5%.

It's striking how the high-tax states have underperformed relative to those with no income tax. Especially noteworthy is how well Washington has performed compared to states with no income tax.

If Washington passes Initiative 1098, it will go from being one of the fastest-growing states in the country to one of the slowest-growing. And passage of I-1098 will only be the beginning. Just look at Ohio, Michigan and California to see that once a state adopts an income tax, there is no end to the number of reasons that such a tax could be extended, expanded and increased.

Over the past 50 years, 11 states have introduced state income taxes exactly as Messrs. Gates and their allies are proposing—and the consequences have been devastating.

Click on over to see the data.

Of course, it's a lot easier to tap into soak-the-rich populism rather than to limit government spending. And people don't seem to understand what the results will be so they buy into the demagogic taunt that anyone opposing such policies is just sucking up to the rich at the expense of the poor. As Walter Williams explains,

You might wonder how congressmen can get away with taxes and other measures that reduce our prosperity potential. Part of the answer is ignorance and the anti-business climate promoted in academia and the news media. The more important reason is that prosperity foregone is invisible. In other words, we can never tell how much richer we would have been without today's level of congressional interference in our lives and therefore don't fight it as much as we should.

Maybe people today are finally waking up to the result of such policies.

Oh, Rahm, Rahm, can't you do better than this?

It's not good when your "Glad to be home in Chicago" video is filmed in a Washington, D.C. media firm. It just seems a metaphor of phoniness that will haunt his entire campaign.

And then there is this roadblock that may or may not doom his whole campaign - his opponents have a pretty legit-sounding basis for contesting the required 18 month residency in Chicago.

But two of Chicago's top election lawyers say the state's municipal code is crystal clear that a candidate for mayor must reside in the town for a year before the election.

That doesn't mean they must simply own a home in the city that they rent out to someone else. They must have a place they can walk into, keep a toothbrush, hang up their jacket and occasionally sleep, the lawyers say.

Another three election lawyers say Emanuel could be thrown off the ballot on a residency challenge. None says Emanuel will have it easy.

It all depends on how a Chicago judge interprets the fact that Rahm doesn't have a house he can stay in in the city.

But Emanuel's problem as he prepares to run for mayor is that he rented out his house, and the tenant refuses to back out of the lease.

"The guy does not meet the statutory requirements to run for mayor," said attorney Burt Odelson. "He hasn't been back there in 18 months. Residency cases are usually very hard to prove because the candidate gets an apartment or says he's living in his mother's basement. Here the facts are easy to prove. He doesn't dispute he's been in Washington for the past 18 months. This is not a hard case."

Emanuel could argue that he has maintained ownership of the home, voted absentee earlier this year, pays property taxes on his house, lists the address on his driver's license, registers his car there, and always intended to return. Cook County judges give great deference to a candidate's intent.

But Rahm didn't have the intent to live in Chicago until Mayor Daley said he wouldn't run for reelection. If he'd had that intent, he wouldn't have rented out his house and then renewed the lease.

But despite all that testimony, Judge Ray Jagielski ruled that Illinois election law gives great deference to where people say they live, and Luster said he lived with his grandfather in Dixmoor.

The difference between Luster and Emanuel is that Luster could stay at his grandfather's house if he wanted, said attorney Jim Nally. Emanuel's tenant won't let him in.

"I've talked to the guy, and they're pissed," Odelson said of the tenants.

....So while plenty of political people go to work in Washington, D.C., or business people go spend weeks in New York or other places, they have to come home pretty regularly to qualify under that standard, the experts say.

"When he was a congressman, his wife and family lived here, and he would fly home on the weekends," Nally said. "He had a place to sit on the sofa, to keep a toothbrush."

But when Emanuel agreed to become chief of staff, the family moved out to D.C. and the home was rented out to another family that now refuses to break the lease and clear the way for Emanuel to move back in. Emanuel could come back to Chicago to vote, but he could not stop at the house he owns on his way to the polling place, and that does not meet the residency test to run for mayor, Nally said.

It's all up to the Chicago Board of Elections officials. I'm sure those are complete honest folks who don't have any ties to any of the candidates who are swarming around this race. They're from Chicago so they must be honest, right?

UPDATE: John Fund reminds us of how Obama squeezed Chicago election laws in order to win his first election.

Take 1995, when a young candidate for a state senate seat named Barack Obama dispatched a team of lawyers to pore over the nomination petitions of his four opponents -- one of whom was the incumbent state senator. Ronald Davis, an Obama consultant, recalls a conversation he had with his boss at the time: "I said, 'Barack, I'm going to knock them all off.' He said, 'What do you need?'"

Mr. Obama's minions were ruthless in questioning every signature, using voter lists more up-to-date than those used by the other candidates. In the end, Obama lawyers were successful in knocking all four opponents out of the race, allowing the 34-year-old Mr. Obama to run unopposed. Later, he expressed some regret at the bitterness that resulted from his strong-arm tactics. "There's a legitimate argument to be made that you shouldn't create barriers to people getting on the ballot," he told the Chicago Tribune. "To my mind, we were just abiding by the rules that had been set up."

No doubt that is precisely the argument Mr. Emanuel's opponents will employ as they try to use Chicago Rules to bar him from running.

Sweet irony for Rahm Emanuel's run for mayor. Getting a cushy job on Wall Street paying millions for just being a figurehead with political connections is going to start look sweeter and sweeter.

Cruising the Web

Heather MacDonald discusses the real reason why Chicago's youth-crime is skyrocketing. Of course, this isn't a subject that you can expect to hear mentioned in the debates for mayor there.

Jonah Goldberg shoots down the concerns of some liberals that conservatives want to actually make sure that new legislation is, gasp, constitutional. It's the dumbest criticism I've heard about the GOP Pledge. People simply don't understand our nation's history or how the government is set up if they think it's goofy to pass only constitutional bills.

Robert Samuelson explores myths about entrepreneurship. His conclusion - the government provides serious disincentives to start-up companies. And that is where job growth would come from. But government regulations are getting in the way.

The trend in college is to do away with final exams. They're too tough for the students to prepare for and for the professors to grade. So they're cutting things down to bite-sized regular quizzes and projects.

One politically-correct dad writing at Salon struggles with his own biases as he contemplates dressing his infant son in pink pants. There are some barriers that can't be crossed.

If Barbara Boxer is worried about outsourcing, perhaps she should consider the jobs that have been outsourced from California to other states.

Pelosi had to cast the deciding vote to get the House to adjourn without voting on the Bush tax cuts. Could it be her last vote as Speaker?

Before the young cast their vote for Democrats this fall, they should consider what liberal policies are costing their generation. They're the ones who will bear the costs for ObamaCare and unreformed entitlement programs.

Patrick Leahy's bad idea

Justice Kagan is going to need to recuse herself from quite a few cases this term because, as Solicitor General, she was involved in the government's preparation for the case. This is as it should be. But Senator Leahy doesn't want to give up on one of the liberal votes. So he's come up with another idea - how about letting retired justices sit in on the case in place of the recused justice.

It strikes me that this is unconstitutional. The Constitution establishes how justices will get on to the Supreme Court. The president nominates and the Senate approves. It says nothing about bringing in pinch hitters from people who have already retired. While Congress had the power to establish the court system and determine the number of justices on the Court, this seems to be a different matter since it would establish a path to the Court other than the one laid out in the Constitution.

Of course, Leahy isn't concerned about the Constitution. He is just looking for a way to replace one justice with one of the retired justices. As the WSJ points out, that would be either John Paul Stevens, David Souter, and Sandra Day O'Connor. Stevens and Souter are reliably liberal and O'Connor goes back and forth, but in her later years often voted with the liberals. How convenient for Leahy. It's just too bad if he is clearly getting around the Constitution.

This bad idea will die without getting through the Senate, but it does allow Leahy one more chance to trumpet the Democrats' message that they think the Supreme Court is too conservative and partisan. That's their accusation whenever it comes up with a decision they don't approve of. Of course, if they make a decision that the liberals like, then partisanship is no longer a problem.

A tale of two protests

I'm not interested in comparing the Glenn Beck rally and the One Nation rally that labor unions organized this past weekend. People can argue over how many showed up for each and how clean each left the National Mall when they left. To me, there isn't much comparison between a rally where individuals came because they like the message of a radio and TV host and one where unions organized their workers and hired the buses for them to come to Washington.

Looking around the rally, there were Teamsters Local 311, Service Employees International Union Local 1199, Communications Workers of America Local 2336, American Federation of Teachers Local 1, United Auto Workers Amalgamated Local 171, Transport Workers Union Local 100, and representatives of many, many other unions. That's a lot of diversity.

Karnell Dorris and Rose Anderson work in a nursing home in Detroit. They're members of Local 79 of the Service Employees International Union, which chartered buses to bring them and hundreds of others to the rally. They left Detroit at about 8:00 pm Friday for the 13-hour drive to Washington. After spending all day at the rally, they were scheduled for a union dinner, after which they would overnight at a hotel, also paid for by Local 79. For Dorris, the main reasons for coming to the rally were "jobs, justice and education." For Anderson, it was health care, along with a desire to "stop taking from us, trying to make the rich richer."

There was a time when Nancy Pelosi was making fun of the tea parties as as Astroturf. Well, who had the Astroturf this weekend?

No, the comparison that worries me is between the One Nation rally of union workers and the ones that have been roiling France for the past few days. In France, workers are taking to the streets to protest the proposal that the Sarkozy government has put out to raise the official retirement age from 60 to 62. And they're dang mad about it.

More than 200 protests were planned throughout the country.

It is the third day of demonstrations against the proposed reforms, which go before parliament on Tuesday, in the last month.

The government wants the retirement age to rise from 60 to 62.

President Sarkozy says this is essential if the French pension system is to be viable in the long term.

His opponents say society's poorest people will be hit hardest by the changes.

Trade unions in France are proclaiming a success their day of mobilisation against planned reforms of the pension system, says the BBC's Hugh Schofield in Paris.

Yup, unemployment is high in France, though not as high as it is here. But these workers are complaining that they should be able to maintain getting over 20 years of paid benefits in retirement and that any effort to cut down on those taxpayer-funded retirement benefits is unacceptable.

French workers can expect to spend more of their life in retirement than those in any other country, according to figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

Under current rules, both men and women in France can retire at 60, provided they have paid social security contributions for 40.5 years - although they are not entitled to a full pension until they are 65.

The government says it will save 70bn euros (£58bn) by raising the retirement age to 62 by 2018, the qualification to 41.5 years, and the pension age to 67.

Unions and opposition politicians say the plan puts an unfair burden on workers, particularly women, part-timers and the former unemployed who may struggle to hit the 41.5 year requirement.

They have made counter-proposals, including calls for taxes on certain bonuses and on the highest incomes to help fund the pension system.

Now there's the typical solution - tax the rich so they don't have to work as long. People are living longer and in better health but that is no reason why people should have to work any longer in order to get their nice retirement benefits. And when the pool of younger voters is shrinking, there just aren't enough rich folks to pay the taxes to pay for those generous pensions. The workers in the French streets are protesting against reality. They don't like it.

Now what are the people at the union rally at the National Mall rallying for? They want a bigger government are angry that tea partiers are trying to slow down the growth of the federal government, especially as we've seen in the past few years. But the big message from their rally, in addition to bashing conservatives, was that they want more government help for those who are needy.

The crowd Saturday, which stretched down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial then petered out down the sides of the reflecting pool, heard repeatedly that voters must band together to keep the country from going back to conservative policies. Speakers also called for a more robust jobs program funded by the federal government and the passage of big legislative programs, such as overhauling immigration laws and providing more money for education.

They don't seem to have gotten the message that there just isn't the money for those big federal programs that they want. Give them a few years in charge and we'll be facing more of the questions that France is facing now - how can we roll back generous benefits that people have gotten used to even when it's clear that those benefits are unsustainable. Heck, we're there already. Local governments are going broke trying to pay for benefits paid out to their unionized public employees. Any attempt to slow down that landslide to bankruptcy will be met with similar protests. Any attempt to bring some sanity to the health care benefits that we're now on the hook for will bring the elderly and sick to the streets. And the unemployment rate will stay high. But hey, they have theirs now and they won't give up their benefits no matter what the impact it's having on the rest of the community or on our next generation.

Rahm Emanuel's future

My prediction for Rahm Emanuel's future: he will fail in his endeavor to be Chicago mayor and will return to working somewhere on Wall Street. Remember this is a guy who, without any business background or or banking experience went to work at an investment banking firm for 2 1/2 years between working for Clinton and running for Congress. Yet somehow, this financial novice managed to rack up $16.2 million in that period of time. Or the former ballet dancer could return to his other former job as a member of the Board of Directors for Freddie Mac where he earned at least $260,000 a year for going to six meetings a year. And just in case this tidbit escapes all of Emanuel's opponents in the mayor's race, here is the tale of his leadership at Freddie Mac.

“Clinton’s going-away gift to Emanuel was a seat on the quasi-governmental Freddie Mac board, which paid him $231,655 in director’s fees in 2001 and $31,060 in 2000,” Lynn Sweet wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times on Jan. 3, 2002.

During the time Emanuel spent on the board, Freddie Mac was plagued with scandal involving campaign contributions and accounting irregularities. Freddie Mac and its sister organization Fannie Mae were taken over by the federal government in September 2008 after years of mismanagement and scandal. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson put the two beleaguered GSEs into a conservatorship, stripping common stock shareholders of their rights to govern the companies.

In 2006, Freddie Mac was forced to pay a $3.8 million fine to the Federal Election Commission to settle allegations it illegally contributed to congressional candidates between 2000 and 2003 – while Emanuel was on the board and running for and serving in Congress.

“Freddie Mac was accused of illegally using corporate resources between 2000 and 2003 for 85 fundraisers that collected about $1.7 million for federal candidates,” an Associated Press story from April 18, 2006 said. “Much of the fundraising benefited members of the House Financial Services Committee, a panel whose decisions can affect Freddie Mac.”

And, since his successful run for the House of Representatives in 2002, Emanuel has been the beneficiary of campaign cash from Freddie Mac and its sister organization Fannie Mae – $51,750 according to the Center for Responsive Politics Web site OpenSecrets.org.

Emanuel received $25,000 in contributions from Freddie Mac during his first run in 2002, right at the end of his tenure at the government-sponsored enterprise. Freddie Mac was his third largest overall contributor that year.

However, there was an even larger conflict of interest that Sweet pointed out in an editorial column published in the Chicago Sun-Times on Aug. 14, 2003.

“Emanuel’s trust is supposed to be blind, not stupid,” Sweet wrote. “Freshman Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), a former Freddie Mac board member, sits on the very House subcommittee that has oversight of the federal government-sponsored enterprise at the same time that he has outstanding options for 2,500 shares of the company.”

Emanuel told Sweet there was no conflict of interest because he put his financial stake in Freddie Mac into a blind trust and would recuse himself from any votes relating to Freddie Mac.

However, while Emanuel’s was on the Freddie Mac payroll in an overseer capacity, the government-sponsored enterprise was cooking the books. According to a Forbes magazine article from Dec. 11, 2003, the GSE was fined $125 million for understating its earnings by a whopping $5 billion.

“Handed down by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the regulator of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the fine was in response to the company’s admission of almost $5 billion in understated earnings over the past several years,” Ari Weinberg wrote for Forbes.

Although he was compensated handsomely, Emanuel told Sweet his job on the Freddie board was to attend quarterly board meetings and take part in committee meetings, either on the phone or in person.(Links in the original)

So his story is that he got all that money but didn't really do anything. Perhaps his position was just a political plum with no real responsibilities. But that is no argument for voting for the guy.

But why on Earth would Chicagoans want some guy who has barely lived in the city and whose big position of executive responsibility was sitting on the board as Freddie Mac broke the law and ended up having to pay $3.8 million in fines for illegal comapign contributions and then had to pay a whopping $125 million fine for its $5 billion accounting errors? And think of how we're all still paying for Freddie Mac's mistakes and Emanuel's cruddy leadership.

And this is not even getting into what people think of his job working for Obama. Maybe he's popular enough in Chicago for his mantle to give Emanuel a gloss of popularity. But I doubt it. Chicagoans will go for a real Chicagoan in this election. And Rahm will just have to be satisfied with earning a few undeserved million dollars a year as some sort of investment banker.

Doesn't anyone in the Obama White House know any history?

Catch this bit of historical analysis from Rahm Emanuel's farewell address to Obama.

“I want to thank you for being the toughest leader any country could ask for in the toughest times any president has ever faced.”

Hello?! Hasn't he ever heard of the Civil War? Great Depression? World War II?

These guys are so impressed with themselves that they can't even fathom that any president ever accomplished more or faced more difficult challenges. And the President claims to be a Lincoln fan and Emanuel is supposed to be a citizen of Illinois - can't he remember the greatest son Illinois ever produced? He's just giving us a twofer: demonstrating his own egotism as well as his historical ignorance.

I'm sorry Abraham Lincoln's presidency retired the prize for tough times.

Who wants higher taxes?

Steven Malanga exposes the link between the public unions and the call for higher taxes. They need the government to get more money in order to pay for their benefits.

Find a tax increase campaign and you're almost certain to find a government union behind it. The California Teachers Association, for instance, is the chief force behind a November ballot initiative in the Golden State which would raise business taxes. The CTA alone has contributed some $6.4 million of its members' dues money to the campaign, according to filings with the California Secretary of State's office. Other public unions have anted up another $2.5 million.

In fact, since the budget squeeze hit states and municipalities starting in 2008, such tax and spend campaigns have been typical. Researchers at the Heritage Foundation counted some 25 public union-driven efforts in that time. They include successful efforts by Arizona's unions to raise the state's sales tax earlier this year, a ballot initiative in Oklahoma sponsored by the state's teachers' unions to raise education spending by $1 billion, a successful $8 million campaign in Oregon by public unions to defeat initiatives seeking to roll back corporate and personal income tax hikes, and a $4 million advertising effort this past spring designed to pressure New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to raise taxes in his state, which failed.

Think on that the next time you hear someone say how we should be raising taxes.

Cruising the Web

Obama is already yearning for another break from his tough job - in the Tuscan sun.

Here's a mandate from the federal government to get the states to spend millions of dollars: they have to make sure that their street signs are not in all capital letters by 2018. It is supposed to be safer because people take longer to read a sign in all caps and that might cause more accidents. And they need to change the type font on their signs. New York City is estimating it will cost $27 million to replace all the signs there.

Is this a good or bad sign? Spanish-language-programming stations are having to use subtitles in English because second and third-generation Hispanics are not fluent enough in Spanish to follow the steam dialogue.

Michelle Malkin explains why SEIU rank-and-file members should be concerned about how their union bosses are spending their dues. Do they even care about how those leaders have squandered millions of dollars of their dues?

Could it be? Is it possible that the former Marine with degrees from Georgetown and Harvard and an MBA from the Wharton Business School could have a chance to defeat Barney Frank? Meet the candidate who is taking on the guy who brought us Freddie and Fanny's meltdown.

The immorality of an ambivalent Commander in Chief

Charles Krauthammer puts his finger on what is so disturbing about Barack Obama's leadership in the war in Afghanistan. We always knew that he was ambivalent about that war there. He dithered back and forth about the surge that he finally ordered back in 2009 while also announcing that he had a certain date for withdrawing them.

From the beginning, the call to arms was highly uncertain. On Dec. 1, 2009, commander in chief Barack Obama orders 30,000 more Americans into battle in Afghanistan. But in the very next sentence, he announces that an American withdrawal will begin after 18 months.

Astonishing. A surge of troops -- overall, Obama has tripled our Afghan force -- with a declaration not of war but of ambivalence. Nine months later, Marine Corps Commandant James Conway admitted that this decision was "probably giving our enemy sustenance." This wasn't conjecture, he insisted, but the stuff of intercepted communications testifying to the enemies' relief that they simply had to wait out the Americans.

What kind of commander in chief sends tens of thousands of troops to war announcing in advance a fixed date for beginning their withdrawal? One who doesn't have his heart in it. One who doesn't really want to win but is making some kind of political gesture. One who thinks he has to be seen as trying but is preparing the ground -- meaning, the political cover -- for failure.

Now we have the information from Bob Woodward's book that Obama had a political motivation for how he was approaching the war.

Bob Woodward's new book, drawing on classified memos and interviews with scores of national security officials, has Obama telling his advisers: "I want an exit strategy." He tells the country publicly that Afghanistan is a "vital national interest," but he tells his generals that he will not do the kind of patient institution-building that is the very essence of the counterinsurgency strategy that Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus crafted and that he -- Obama -- adopted.

Moreover, he must find an exit because "I can't lose the whole Democratic Party." This admission is the most crushing of all.

Remember. Afghanistan was the war that the whole Democratic leadership pretended was the good war when they were criticizing Bush for taking his eyes off the ball in going into Iraq. Now Obama is worried about losing the Democratic Party. We must not forget that Obama first made his move against Hillary Clinton by criticizing her for her support for the war in Iraq. He built his base originally on the antiwar movement. But now he's commander in chief and ordering troops into Afghanistan but worrying about the Democratic Party's support.

What happened in the interim? Did it suddenly develop a faint heart? Or was the party disingenuous about the Afghan war all along, using it as a convenient club with which to attack George W. Bush over Iraq, while protecting Democrats from the charge of being reflexively antiwar?

Whatever the reason, is it not Obama's job as president and party leader to bring the party with him? This is the man who made Berlin coo, America swoon and the Nobel committee lose its mind. Yet he cannot get his own party to follow him on what he insists is a matter of vital national interest?

Did he even try? Obama spent endless hours cajoling and persuading individual members of Congress to garner every last vote for health-care reform. Has he done a fraction of that for Afghanistan -- argued, pleaded, horse-traded, twisted even a single arm?

Clearly not. Opposing the war in Iraq got him his start in the nomination race. He is ambivalent about sending those troops there.

"He was looking for choices that would limit U.S. involvement and provide a way out," writes Woodward. One can only conclude that Obama now thinks Afghanistan is a mistake. Maybe he thought so from the very beginning. More charitably and more likely, he is simply a foreign policy novice who didn't understand what this war was about until being given the authority and duty to conduct it -- and then decided it was all a mistake.

Fair enough. But in that case, what is he doing escalating it?

Sen. Kerry, now chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, asked many years ago: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Perhaps Kerry should ask that of Obama.

"He is out of Afghanistan psychologically," says Woodward of Obama. Well, he may be out, but the soldiers he ordered to Afghanistan are in.

Some will not come home.

That is why his approach and position on the war in Afghanistan is immoral. That quote from John Kerry had been going through my mind for quite a while concerning Obama's approach to Afghanistan. Krauthammer puts it all together and we see the hollowness of Obama's leadership. The White House might feel that the Woodward book portrays their guy favorably. They don't even see that their commander in chief has no clothes.

Gloria Allred throwing a client under the bus to score political points

I just don't get why we're supposed to be so upset about the story of Meg Whitman's housekeeper. The story, as I understand it, is that they went to an employment agency to hire her and were assured that she was a citizen with as Social Security card. Then later on they receive this letter from the Social Security Agency which is sometimes called a "red-flag" letter. However, looking at the form letter as Allahpundit has posted at Hot Air, the letter states that there is a discrepancy between the number and the name submitted of their employee. The letter suggests four reasons why this might be and they all refer to innocent errors such as something left incomplete on the form or a name change. It explicitly states that the employer cannot use the letter to lay off, suspend, fire, or discriminate against the employee. If the employer does use the letter for such action he or she would be violating federal or state law. Note this phrase from the letter, "Moreover, this letter makes no statement about your employee's immigration status." Some red flag. All the employer is supposed to do is ask the employee to give him or her the name and SSN as it appears on the card but the employee doesn't have to actually show the card. So what did the Whitmans do? Apparently, Meg Whitman's husband scrawled a note on it and told Nicky to look into it. As Allahpundit writes,

That’s where I get confused, though: Did they match? Allred redacted the form for privacy reasons so we can’t tell if the number blacked out above matches the one on the bogus Social Security card that Diaz presented to the Whitmans. The whole point of a letter like this in the immigration context, I thought, is to tell the employer that the number being used by their employee is assigned to a different name in the SSA database. That’s why it’s known as a red-flag letter, yes? But without knowing what the database says — and there’s nothing about that on the form, as far as I see — there’s nothing for Whitman or her husband to compare Diaz’s information to. Essentially, they’re forced to compare Diaz’s false documents to Diaz’s recitation of the numbers on those false documents, which is moronic. Is that right, or have I misread something here?

So I'm not impressed with the production of this letter.

So what we're really supposed to be upset about is that, when Nicky told Meg Whitman and her husband that she was here illegally, they fired her. What were they supposed to do? That's the law. Were they supposed to keep her on in violation of the law? Is that why we're supposed to be upset?

So why did Gloria Allred come forward with this whole story and hold two press conferences and go on all sorts of talk shows to talk more about it? If you can stand it, listen to her interview on the Mark Levin show. Levin presses her on what her complaint is against Meg Whitman. And it's basically that she wasn't reimbursed for her mileage when she was asked to drive. And that they treated her poorly when she told them she was illegal. Somehow she feels abused at her treatment in a job where she was paid $23 an hour.

And this is worth Gloria Allred making a public announcement of her client's law-breaking as being here illegally and falsely using a relative's Social Security number. Why expose her client to that legal jeopardy or is the assumption that, in Obama's America, no one would do anything about someone who admits coming here illegally and using a false SSN?

As William Jacobson points out, the upshot of Allred's attack is that Whitman didn't fire the housekeeper earlier.

Allred may be right that the employer (in this case Whitman and her husband) should not have left it up to the housekeeper to clear up the problem, and should have been more suspicious. Had Whitman or her husband followed up, the housekeeper would have been fired several years ago.

Call Allred a strict constructionist when it comes to the immigration laws, just like the people who are excoriated by the left as racists for seeking enforcement of federal immigration laws.

The message Allred is sending is that if you are going to hire an immigrant, not only must you dot every federal immigration law "i" and cross every federal immigration law "t", you also must not trust the immigrant if a problem arises. At least not if you want to run for public office.

So why isn't the left excoriating Allred? Why isn't Allred being called the most vile names usually reserved for Tea Party supporters or Republicans?

....The other interesting aspect, quite apart from politics, is Allred's willingness to expose her client to legal harm even though the client does not have any meaningful legal claim. This is not a case where Allred's client is a crime victim who comes forward to the police. There does not appear to be a violation of any law by Whitman, but there does appear to be both immigration and possibly criminal violations by Allred's client, who filed false documents with the government. By going public as she has, Allred has exposed her client to significant legal jeopardy in order to score publicity and political points for Allred.

So why expose her client to such legal jeopardy?

Ah, the reason becomes quite clear with this story.

An SEIU-backed independent expenditure campaign, Cambiando California, is launching a new Spanish-language TV ad hitting California GOP gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman for attacking undocumented immigrants -- but then employing one for nine years.

Here's the script (translated to English):
Meg Whitman says she's a different kind of Republican…
But Pete Wilson is in charge of her campaign.
Whitman attacks undocumented workers to win votes, but an undocumented woman worked in her home for nine years.
She says she'll create jobs - but wants to eliminate forty-thousand state jobs, including teachers and nurses.
Whitman says one thing in Spanish --- and something different in English.
The real Meg Whitman has no shame.
She's a two-faced woman

Yup. That's why Allred threw her client under the legal bus. So that liberal groups could then hammer Meg Whitman among Latino voters. They can twist the story and pretend that Whitman and her husband absolutely knew that the housekeeper was illegal all along. Who cares what the SSA letter really said? Who cares that the housekeeper admits that she waited until 2009 to tell them she was illegal and that they let her go? Who cares that Allred has held two press conferences to publicize her client's illegal status?

And what will be the upshot of this sorry episode. Employers now know that, if they have an employee who seems legitimate, they must still question that employee's immigration status and doubt protestations otherwise. If there is some discrepancy, they must toss out innocent explanations and, despite laws otherwise, find some way to get rid of the employee. People will be even more suspicious of hiring immigrants just so they don't have this hassle. But hey, it is all worth it if we can get Jerry Brown back as governor of California.