The Mother of All Obamacare Critiques

Don't miss Mary Katherine Ham and Guy Benson's guest post on HotAir listing the 10 key false promises of Obamacare. It's loaded with supporting links and videos. Here's an excerpt:

Promise #7: Health care reform won’t add "a single dime" to the deficit--and will actually cut it.

Remember that unambiguous, crystal-clear presidential promise from item number six? Here’s another one, delivered to a joint session of Congress and a nationally televised audience: "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits -- either now or in the future. (Applause.) I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future, period."

Right-wing paranoiacs really didn’t believe this one, but the Democrats had an ace in the hole. Leading up the vote--voila!--Pelosi & Co engineered a final CBO score that magically validated the president’s famous words. Go crazy, America! Your massive new entitlement program will reduce the deficit by $130 Billion over ten years!

A number of Debbie Downers made valiant attempts to expose the folly. Former CBO director Douglas Holtz-Eakin crunched the un-manipulated numbers for the New York Times and found that the "real arithmetic" was nowhere near deficit-reducing or -neutral. The truth: Obamacare would bloat the deficit by $563 Billion. The advertised ten-year price tag of $900+ Billion was risible. In reality it sat much closer to $2.5 Trillion, as the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Financial Services Committee inadvertently admitted.

So how did Democrats manage to gerry-rig the CBO’s scoring system to produce superficially solvent math? Rep. Paul Ryan meticulously decimated their "smoke and mirrors" gimmickry at the Blair House summit, thoroughly explaining to the president’s face precisely how his administration and party were misleading the country. . .

In fairness, here’s Obamacare proponent Ezra Klein’s rebuttal to Ryan, which is worth a read for a pretty frank but ultimately unconvincing defense of tricky government accounting. But even in rebutting Ryan, Klein concedes, "The 10-year cost of the bill is really only counting six years of operation. This was a deceptive effort to keep the bill’s price tag under $1 trillion, even as the bill’s price tag was really quite a bit more."

In short, the Democrats’ bogus score relied on:

(a) Double-counting unrealistic, never-gonna-happen Medicare cuts to the tune of $500 Billion.

(b) Pretending the $200B+ "Doc Fix" was a separate, unrelated issue--it has since passed the Senate. For those who think treating "doc fix" as an unrelated issue was fair, they may want to ponder why the expensive measure was included in an early version of the House bill until Democrats needed a better CBO score, at which point it was removed.

(c) Shoehorning 10 years’ of tax revenues into just six years of "benefits."

(d) Double-counting social security tax revenue.

(e) Totally ignoring billions in requisite "discretionary" spending for Obamacare’s implementation.

On the eve of the health care vote, a CBO letter to Rep. Paul Ryan confirmed that, without such gimmickry, the health care bill would add $260 billion over 10 years to instead of reducing it by $138. Both the CMS and the CBO have objected to the double-counting of Medicare savings as paying for Obamacare and shoring up Medicare, but the administration continues to use the misleading metric, even this week.

Passage of the "Doc Fix" alone, coupled with this little wrinkle, has already driven Obamacare into the red. Finally, the current director of CBO has decisively torpedoed the entire "cost savings" charade. Revisiting a previous devastating critique that nearly derailed the process in 2009, Elmendorf has concluded that Obamacare will not "bend the cost curve" of health care spending down.

Putting the federal budget on a sustainable path would almost certainly require a significant reduction in the growth of federal health spending relative to current law (including this year’s health legislation).

Too little, too late. It’s now the law of the land.

Bottom Line: The president’s bill won’t add a single dime to the deficit. It will pile trillions upon trillions of dimes atop an already mountainous debt.

See also AllahPundit and Politico.

(via Legal Insurrection, reader Warren)

Six Years

UPDATE: below

Six years after the terrorists killed 3000 civilians on U.S. soil, the National Review's Mark Steyn faults "the placidity of the domestic front":

Oh, it’s a long, long while from September to September. This year, the anniversary falls, for the first time, on a Tuesday morning, and perhaps some or other cable network will re-present the events in real time — the first vague breaking news in an otherwise routine morning show, the follow-up item on the second plane, and the realization that something bigger was underway. If you make it vivid enough, the JFK/Princess Di factor will kick in: You’ll remember “where you were” when you “heard the news.” But it’s harder to recreate the peculiar mood at the end of the day, when the citizens of the superpower went to bed not knowing what they’d wake up to the following morning.

Six years on, most Americans are now pretty certain what they’ll wake up to in the morning: There’ll be a thwarted terrorist plot somewhere or other — last week, it was Germany. Occasionally, one will succeed somewhere or other, on the far horizon — in Bali, Istanbul, Madrid, London. But not many folks expect to switch on the TV this Tuesday morning, as they did that Tuesday morning, and see smoke billowing from Atlanta or Phoenix or Seattle. During the IRA’s 30-year campaign, the British grew accustomed (perhaps too easily accustomed) to waking up to the news either of some prominent person’s assassination or that a couple of gran’mas and some schoolkids had been blown apart in a shopping centre. It was a terrorist war in which terrorism was almost routine. But, in the six years since President Bush declared that America was in a “war on terror,” there has been in America no terrorism.

I'll never forget the day wholesale terrorism came home. I've written about the friends I lost on 9/11 and about one of the murdered I didn't know personally: Rick Rescorla. Rescorla's story has been told before. But because his "spirit" is inspiring and worth perpetuating, the tale warrants a replay.

Rick Rescorla was an army enlisted man--twice:

He had grown up in a village on England's southwest coast and left at age sixteen to join the British military. He'd fought against Communists in Cyprus and Rhodesia. He then came to America, he said, so that he could enlist in the Army and go to Vietnam. He welcomed the opportunity to join the American cause in Southeast Asia. He worked his way up through the ranks to Sergeant before being commissioned.

As an American Army officer, Rescorla was a "(Viet Nam) war hero. He retired as a Colonel in 1990." Greyhawk takes up the tale:

Have you seen the movie We were Soldiers?

A good one, in my opinion. [NOfP note: agreed.] Given just a couple hours to tell a tale I think all in all the folks involved did a commendable job.

Perhaps it's hard to go wrong, given the source material. We Were Soldiers Once. . .And Young is an account of the battle at Ia Drang Valley, fought in the still early phases of the war in Viet Nam. The book was written by Hal Moore, who was then a Lt Col and commander of the American troops in the valley, and Joe Galloway, a reporter who was at the battle. Their collaboration is a truly human account of men at war [NOfP note: agreed.] - including the enemy viewpoint, as Galloway and Moore's efforts at capturing the battle on paper were thorough enough to include interviews with survivors from the other side.

Take a look at the cover. The prominent figure is Rick Rescorla.

source: The American Solider

As a Stars and Stripes article recounted, "During combat in Vietnam, Lt. Rick Rescorla would sing to his troops to keep their spirits high while under fire." Given his Cornwall origins, Rescorla's favorite tune shouldn't surprise: Men of Harlech, memorably sung in the movie Zulu by the British defenders at Rorke's Drift -- where a record 11 Victoria Crosses were awarded.

Rescorla was a dedicated and inspiring officer. Those who served with him in Vietnam "still tell awestruck stories about Rescorla":

Like the time he stumbled into a hooch full of enemy soldiers on a reconnaissance patrol in Bon Song. "Oh, pardon me," he said, before firing a few rounds and racing away. "Oh, comma, pardon me," repeats Dennis Deal, who followed Rescorla that day in April 1966. "Like he had walked into a ladies' tea party!"

Or the time a deranged private pulled a .45-caliber pistol on an officer while Rescorla was nearby, sharpening his bowie knife. "Rick just walked right between them and said: Put. Down. The. Gun." recalls Bill Lund, who served with Rescorla in Vietnam. "And the guy did. Then Rick went back to his knife. He was flat out the bravest man any of us ever knew."

Early this year, a Bronze statue of Rescorla was unveiled at the new National Infantry Museum in Ft. Benning, Georgia:


source: Mudville Gazette
More photos here.

After Vietnam, Rescorla:

returned to the United States and used his military benefits to study creative writing at the University of Oklahoma. Literary minded, even before college he had read all fifty-one volumes of the Harvard Classics and could recite Shakespeare and quote Churchill. He had started writing a novel about a mobile-air-cavalry unit, and had several stories published in Western-themed magazines. He eventually earned a bachelor's, a master's in literature, and a law degree.

Divorced, with two children, he married Susan Greer in February 1999. (Susan is shown at right in the above picture.) They lived in the Convent Station area of Morristown, NJ [NOfP note: I lived there as a teenager.]. By then, Rescorla focused on corporate security. He rose to become vice-president in charge of security at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.


source: Presidential Medal of Freedom
Morgan Stanley Dean Witter is among Wall Street's largest brokerage houses. By 2001, "The company had 3,700 employees in the World Trade Center — 2,700 employees in the south tower on floors forty-four through seventy-four and 1,000 employees in Building Five across the plaza." Once there, according to friends Daniel Hill and Fred McBee:

Rick Rescorla predicted 9-11. He also predicted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. It is a matter of record. Rescorla was the Vice President for Security for Dean Witter Corporation when he foresaw the coming bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Two years before this first attack, he predicted it would be a truck bomb exploding in the unsecured basement parking area. He went to the New York/New Jersey Port Authority with his warnings and was told to "be concerned with the security of the 40 floors that Dean Witter leases from us and leave the rest to us."

Rescorla wasn't satisfied with that answer:

after being told by Dean Witter/Morgan Stanley that they could not relocate -- that their lease ran to 2005 and maybe after that the move was possible -- Rescorla planned and drilled the Dean Witter/Morgan Stanley staff and employees in the evacuation of the World Trade Center offices that they occupied.

Despite criticism and intimidation, despite ridicule and denigration, Rescorla forced his people to drill. Without warning, he’d sound an alarm and then lead the entire company through a mandatory, rapid, efficient, and safe evacuation practice. They grumbled and they griped, but they did it.

Rescorla installed generators and stair lighting in the event of power failure (which came to be). He assigned office and floor wardens to insure control and accountability of personnel and evacuating. Rescorla insisted on buddy teams – people were to go two-by-two down the stairs in an orderly and rapid manner. Rescorla made sure that elderly and handicapped persons had three or four others to assist them. And he drilled them -- over and over -- again and again -- until it became a conditioned response. As Rescorla said "like a soldier going into an anti-ambush drill."

So Rescorla and Dean Witter, in the South Tower, were as prepared as possible on September 11, 2001. The Port Authority wasn't.

The definitive Rescorla article (later expanded into a book) is James Stewart's The Real Heroes are Dead, in the February 11, 2002, New Yorker:

In St. Augustine, Dan Hill was laying tile in his upstairs bathroom when his wife called, "Dan, get down here! An airplane just flew into the World Trade Center. It's a terrible accident." Hill hurried downstairs, and then the phone rang. It was Rescorla, calling from his cell phone.

"Are you watching TV?" he asked. "What do you think?"

"Hard to tell. It could have been an accident, but I can't see a commercial airliner getting that far off."

"I'm evacuating right now," Rescorla said.


Rescorla "trying to clear people on the 42nd floor"
source: RickRescorla.com

Hill could hear Rescorla issuing orders through the bullhorn. He was calm and collected, never raising his voice. Then Hill heard him break into song:

Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming;
Can't you see their spearpoints gleaming?
See their warriors' pennants streaming
To this battlefield.

Men of Cornwall stand ye steady;
It cannot be ever said ye
for the battle were not ready;
Stand and never yield!

Rescorla came back on the phone. "Pack a bag and get up here," he said. "You can be my consultant again." He added that the Port Authority was telling him not to evacuate and to order people to stay at their desks.

"What'd you say?" Hill asked.

"I said, 'Piss off, you son of a bitch,' " Rescorla replied. "Everything above where that plane hit is going to collapse, and it's going to take the whole building with it. I'm getting my people the fuck out of here." Then he said, "I got to go. Get your shit in one basket and get ready to come up."

Hill turned back to the TV and, within minutes, saw the second plane execute a sharp left turn and plunge into the south tower. Susan saw it, too, and frantically phoned her husband's office. No one answered.

About fifteen minutes later, the phone rang. It was Rick. She burst into tears and couldn't talk.

"Stop crying," he told her. "I have to get these people out safely. If something should happen to me, I want you to know I've never been happier. You made my life."

Susan cried even harder, gasping for breath. She felt a stab of fear, because the words sounded like those of someone who wasn't coming back. "No!" she cried, but then he said he had to go. Cell-phone use was being curtailed so as not to interfere with emergency communications.

Susan tried to compose herself. She called Rick's old friend Mervyn Sullivan, in Cornwall. He'd been watching TV that afternoon when a news flash interrupted the program. "Do you know what's happening?" she asked. He told her he'd been watching CNN for the last twenty minutes. "Rick is in there," she said. "He just phoned me and said he has to stay in there and do what he can. It's so dangerous." Susan started to cry, and Sullivan tried to comfort her, saying that Rick was doing what he had to do. But then his Cornish reserve failed him, and he started crying, too.

From the World Trade Center, Rescorla again called Hill. He said he was taking some of his security men and making a final sweep, to make sure no one was left behind, injured, or lost. Then he would evacuate himself. "Call Susan and calm her down," he said. "She's panicking."

Hill reached Susan, who had just got off the phone with Sullivan. "Take it easy," he said, as she continued to sob. "He's been through tight spots before, a million times." Suddenly Susan screamed. Hill turned to look at his own television and saw the south tower collapse. He thought of the words Rescorla had so often used to comfort dying soldiers. "Susan, he'll be O.K.," he said gently. "Take deep breaths. Take it easy. If anyone will survive, Rick will survive."

When Hill hung up, he turned to his wife. Her face was ashen. "Shit," he said. "Rescorla is dead."

Hill was right -- Susan Rescorla was widowed that day.

Major Robert L. Bateman said this in Vietnam Magazine:

Rescorla would no more have left that tower before every single person was outside than I would start singing show tunes from Broadway. When he called his wife not long after the first plane hit the other tower, he told her not to worry, he was getting everyone out. . . When it appeared that everyone was out, he went back in, heading up those stairs with the rescue workers. That is where he was last seen. He was inside, being himself, when the tower came down on him.

Calling Rescorla "one of the heroes of the day," the Insurance Journal concluded:

All but seven of Morgan Stanley's 3,500 employees working at Two World Trade Center and 5 World Trade Center escaped unharmed. Nobody at the securities firm has any doubt that one person deserves all the credit for that remarkable achievement.

Two things make that statistic truly astonishing. United Airlines flight 175 flew directly into the upper floors of Morgan Stanley's offices in Two World Trade Center. Almost until the moment of the second impact, building management was announcing that the south tower was "secure" and urging occupants of the five undamaged office buildings in the complex to remain at their desks.

The Port Authority later was found liable for negligence for ignoring warnings about the 1993 terrorist bombings.

Rick's hometown of Hayle erected this magnificent monument in his honor:


source: RickRescorla.com



source: RickRescorla.com


The History Channel program on Rescorla is called The Man Who Predicted 9/11 -- it is scheduled to air today at 11pm and 4 hours later at 3am (both EDT).

As reported by Blackfive, President Bush is being urged to award Rescorla the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, honoring distinguished civilian service in peacetime. There's an online petition recommending this award, which I encourage all to sign.

According to the New York Times, America suffers from "Sept. 11 fatigue":

a weariness of reliving a day that everyone wishes had never happened. It began before the first anniversary of the terrorist attack. By now, though, many people feel that the collective commemorations, publicly staged, are excessive and vacant, even annoying.

Remembering those murdered by terrorists isn't "excessive"; celebrating the sacrifice of those like Rick Rescorla is anything but "vacant." And recalling the events of that day strengthen us and help America avoid another attack. As then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani wrote in the Forward to One Nation -- America Remembers September 11, 2001 at 8-9 (Time-Life 2001):

This terrorist attack was intended to break our spirit. It has utterly failed. Our hearts are broken, but they continue to beat, and the spirit of our City has never been stronger. . ..

Now each of us has a responsibility to live our lives with the same courage embraced by those who died in the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the hijacked plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. . .. We need to remain united -- as individuals, as Americans, and as countries committed to live in the civilized world. . ..

As we begin the process of rebuilding our lives and our skyline, we should heed the words of a hymn that I heard repeatedly at the many memorial services I've attended over the past several weeks. 'Be Not Afraid.' As Americans, we need to reassert our fundamental human right to live in freedom from fear. Our nation is strong and united, and now more than ever, we are the land of the free and the home of the brave.

I was deeply depressed after the attacks. Then I heard this hymn at a funeral for a September 11th victim. It's called "Earth and all stars" (Episcopal: 412; Presbyterian 458; Lutheran: 438; Calvinist 433; Mennonite: 47), melody here:

1.
Earth and all stars! loud rushing planets
sing to the Lord a new song!
Oh, victory! Loud hosts of heaven
sing to the Lord a new song!

Refrain:
God has done marvelous things.
I too, I too sing praises with a new song! (repeat)

2.
Hail, wind, and rain! loud blowing snowstorm
sing to the Lord a new song!
Flowers and trees! loud rustling dry leaves
sing to the Lord a new song!..... (Refrain)

3.
Trumpet and pipes! loud clashing cymbals
sing to the Lord a new song!
Harp, lute, and lyre! loud humming cellos
sing to the Lord a new song!..... (Refrain)

4.
Engines and steel! loud pounding hammers
sing to the Lord a new song!
Limestone and beams! loud building workers
sing to the Lord a new song!..... (Refrain)

5.
Knowledge and truth! loud sounding wisdom
sing to the Lord a new song!
Daughter and son! loud praising members
sing to the Lord a new song!..... (Refrain)

Words: Herbert Brokering 1964, Tune: Jan Bender.

Overwhelmed with loss at a funeral, Earth and all stars lifted my spirits like Men of Harlech inspired the 24th (2nd Warwickshire) Regiment of Foot and Morgan Stanley. Sight-reading and singing started the turn-around. Requiescat in pace Karen, Barbara, Linda, Rick and the rest.

Six years on, I'm still an optimist. Contrary to those who would rather ignore or deny 9/11, I'm not weary. And annoyance is down since I canceled the New York Times.

MORE:

Via reader Bob B., pictures of the September 11th Memorial at the National Memorial Cemetery:






(including "Karen Kincaid" and "Barbara Olson")

MORE & MORE:


source: NASA

original caption: This image is one of a series taken that day of metropolitan New York City by the International Space Station's Expedition 3 crew that shows the smoke plume rising from the [sic] Manhattan.

MORE³:

Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online:

"Remember 9/11!" once looked like it was going to be a battle cry for the ages up there with "Remember the Alamo!" Now, the only aspect of 9/11 that is acceptable on a bipartisan basis is sadness. Obviously, with that much carnage and suffering there’s a place for the sadness. But why only sadness?

If I had said in late 2001, with bodies still being pulled from the wreckage, anthrax flying through the mail, pandemonium reigning at the airports, and bombs falling on Kabul, that by ‘07 leading Democrats would be ridiculing the idea of the war on terror as a bumper sticker, I’d have been thought mad. . .

But, I’m hardly alone. The times themselves seem more than a little wacky. Imagine if a more reliably sober-minded sort — say Zbigniew Brzezinski, David Broder — prophesied six years ago that in 2007, Bin Laden would still be at-large and giving televised addresses in which he offered generous blurbs for Noam Chomsky, touted global warming, expressed disappointment with the Democratic majority in Congress and championed a flat tax so low it would make Steve Forbes blush like John Ashcroft at a Pussycat Dolls audition. Most of us would have suggested that Messrs. Brzezinski or Broder should open the window when they cook their meth. And just imagine if some similar Nostradamus of 2001 had foreseen that all of this would pale in controversy compared to the news that the rock-ribbed-conservative senior Senator from Idaho had been busted for signaling “Get out of my dreams and into my stall” in gay semaphore in a Minneapolis airport bathroom (apologies to Billy Ocean, among others). . .

This might sound unfair, but if George Bush had been a better president, John Edwards would never have dreamed of calling the war on terror nothing but a bumper sticker. As it stands right now, if any Democratic candidate other than Joe Biden or maybe Hillary Clinton (!) gets elected we will bug out of Iraq so precipitously it will be indistinguishable from abject defeat in the eyes of the world. And under any of them, the war on terror will become a glorified Elliot Spitzer style legal campaign. That is not a sign that President Bush has adequately led the country or prepared it for the struggles ahead.

It quickly became a cliché that 9/11 changed everything, but when it comes to the basic divisions of the last 20 years, 9/11 didn’t change nearly enough so much as accentuate everything we knew before. And that all but guarantees we’ll have another 9/11 of which to ponder the meaning.

MORE⁴:

SC&A's timely summary:

Six years later and nothing has changed:

This nation is still the greatest nation in the history of mankind.

This nation has contributed to the deliverance of more people from oppression to freedom than any other nation in history.

This nation is home to a citizenship that enjoys more freedoms than any other nation on earth.

This nation, over all others, is the preferred destination for more people seeking freedom and opportunity than any other nation in the world.

This nation did not change on September 11, 2001. On that day, who and what we are as a nation became clear. Contrast our identity, values and morality with those who sought to harm us.

This nation does not fear vigorous debate, free speech or disagreement.

This nation does welcomes legal immigrants and offers them opportunities for success that can be found nowhere else.

This nation, home to the world’s ‘wretched refuse’ is home to the most successful immigrant classes in history.

This nation is the most multicultural nation in the world.

This nation, founded on the principles of religious freedom, continues to provide shelter for all religious expression.

This nation continues to give more foreign aid and assistance than any other nation.

This nation has contributed more to peace on earth than any other.

(via readers Doug J. and Ken R.; California Yankee)

California Government Admits Regulations Kill Huge Numbers of Jobs

California unemployment stands at 12.2%. The bottom is not in sight, as the economy shrank even more in the last six months. The rate was 10.5% only six months ago. California has the fourth highest rate in the nation, only Michigan, Nevada and Rhode Island, at 15.2%, 13.2% and 12.8%, respectively, are faring worse. California construction jobs down 18.5%, manufacturing down 8.6% The only sector that is growing is the education and health care sector (the government supported sector). Even government employment is down 0.7%.


The total California labor force stands at 18.3 million people, down from an all time high of 18.5 million, as people have started to leave the state for who knows where. And now this shocker:

Regulations on small businesses in California have cost the state 3.8 million jobs, according to a report quietly released by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's office this week.

The report, authored by Sanjay B. Varshney, the dean of the business school at California State University Sacramento and Dennis H. Tootelian, a marketing professor at Sacramento State, totaled the "direct, indirect and induced" costs of regulation to calculate the [burden of] $134,122 per small business in 2007 and caused about one job loss per small business.

"This study provides the most comprehensive and complete analysis of the total regulatory burden in California," the authors wrote in their findings.

They relied on data compiled by Forbes and used a complicated formula to calculate the primary and secondary costs of regulations. They concede that "much more work will need to be done to determine the exact nature of potential remedies to the regulatory burden."

So regulations cost the average small business $134 thousand dollars? How about some examples of that? Recall this from June:

Bureaucrat scuffs dream of homeless shoe shiner

He sleeps under a bridge, washes in a public bathroom and was panhandling for booze money 11 months ago, but now Larry Moore is the best-dressed shoeshine man in the city. When he gets up from his cardboard mattress, he puts on a coat and tie. It's a reminder of how he has turned things around.
In fact, until last week it looked like Moore was going to have saved enough money to rent a room and get off the street for the first time in six years. But then, in a breathtakingly clueless move, an official for the Department of Public Works told Moore that he has to fork over the money he saved for his first month's rent to purchase a $491 sidewalk vendor permit.

"I had $573 ready to go," Moore said, who needs $600 for the rent. "This tore that up. But I've been homeless for six years. Another six weeks isn't going to kill me."

Even the bootstrapping homeless sidewalk vendor has to pay off the Government Mafia. It is far easier for him to be homeless in San Francisco, and when he tries to help himself, some bureaucrat has to push him down. Indeed, the homeless flock to San Francisco. Just one reason why California has nearly a third of the welfare recipients in the country.

So, the bottom line is that the California legislature manufactures job-killing regulations, then has to create the biggest welfare program in the country to care for the out-of-work and ne'er do wells. These people have too much time, too much influence and too little sense.

There is hope -- a movement in California to change the full-time legislature to a part-time legislature. Of course, nothing energizes government workers like the thought they might lose their plushy do-nothing jobs.

Prediction: Part Time Legislature in a Landslide next November!

Iran in Infamy

UPDATE: below

Item - The November 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran's nuclear intentions, released this week, came to startling new conclusions:

• We assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons.



• We judge with high confidence that the halt lasted at least several years. (Because of intelligence gaps discussed elsewhere in this Estimate, however, DOE and the NIC assess with only moderate confidence that the halt to those activities represents a halt to Iran's entire nuclear weapons program.)



• We assess with moderate confidence Tehran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, but we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.



• We continue to assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Iran does not currently have a nuclear weapon.



• Tehran’s decision to halt its nuclear weapons program suggests it is less determined to develop nuclear weapons than we have been judging since 2005. Our assessment that the program probably was halted primarily in response to international pressure suggests Iran may be more vulnerable to influence on the issue than we judged previously.

Item - According to the Wall Street Journal:

the NIE's main authors include three former State Department officials . . . Tom Fingar, formerly of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research; Vann Van Diepen, the National Intelligence Officer for WMD; and Kenneth Brill, the former U.S. Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Item - According to former UN Ambassador John Bolton:

[M]any involved in drafting and approving the NIE were not intelligence professionals but refugees from the State Department, brought into the new central bureaucracy of the director of national intelligence. These officials had relatively benign views of Iran's nuclear intentions five and six years ago; now they are writing those views as if they were received wisdom from on high. In fact, these are precisely the policy biases they had before, recycled as "intelligence judgments."

Item - Citing "an intelligence source," the Wall Street Journal says the three principal authors have "previous reputations as 'hyper-partisan anti-Bush officials.'"

Item - Atlas Shrugged calls the authors of the new NIE "saboteurs." Somehow I'm reminded of Richard Clarke.

Item - According to the New York Sun :

The proper way to read this report is through the lens of the long struggle the professional intelligence community has been waging against the elected civilian administration in Washington. They have opposed President Bush on nearly every major policy decision. They were against the Iraqi National Congress. They were against elections in Iraq. They were against I. Lewis Libby. They are against a tough line on Iran.

One could call all this revenge of the bureaucrats. Vann Van Diepen, one of the estimate's main authors, has spent the last five years trying to get America to accept Iran's right to enrich uranium. Mr. Van Diepen no doubt reckons that in helping push the estimate through the system, he has succeeded in influencing the policy debate in Washington.

Item - According to Pundita, "Thomas Fingar is no more suited for US threat analysis work than Miss Beazley."

Item - As noted by Free Frank Warner, in February 2001, Fingar (then Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence And Research) said this before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

[A]lthough the basic understanding of nuclear weapons physics is widespread, nuclear weapons are, fortunately, the most difficult kind to produce or acquire. Access to fissile material is a critical impediment.

Item - As Gateway Pundit recalled, in April 2006, the same official focused, properly, on Iran's potential threat: "The nation's 16 intelligence agencies haven't changed their view of Iran's capability, said Thomas Fingar, chairman of the National Intelligence Council." And Fingar reiterated the point this past April:

At a briefing on Thursday, Thomas Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, said the official view of the intelligence agencies remained that Iran was unlikely to have nuclear weapons before 2010 at the earliest. But he also acknowledged that the mistakes made in assessing Iraq's capabilities had made the intelligence agencies far more cautious about delivering definitive assessments to President Bush.

But on Iran's progress toward nuclear weapons, he said, there has been virtually no dissent. "Certainly none that has surfaced," he said, "and this is a question we revisit all the time."

Item - As reported by The Weekly Standard :

[O]n July 11, 2007, roughly four or so months prior to the most recent NIE’s publication, Deputy Director of Analysis Thomas Fingar gave the following testimony before the House Armed Services Committee (emphasis added):

Iran and North Korea are the states of most concern to us. The United States’ concerns about Iran are shared by many nations, including many of Iran’s neighbors. Iran is continuing to pursue uranium enrichment and has shown more interest in protracting negotiations and working to delay and diminish the impact of UNSC sanctions than in reaching an acceptable diplomatic solution. We assess that Tehran is determined to develop nuclear weapons--despite its international obligations and international pressure. This is a grave concern to the other countries in the region whose security would be threatened should Iran acquire nuclear weapons.

This paragraph appeared under the subheading: "Iran Assessed As Determined to Develop Nuclear Weapons." And the entirety of Fingar’s 22-page testimony was labeled "Information as of July 11, 2007." No part of it is consistent with the latest NIE, in which our spooks tell us Iran suspended its covert nuclear weapons program in 2003 "primarily in response to international pressure" and they "do not know whether (Iran) currently intends to develop nuclear weapons."

Item - Historically, we have failed to predict additions to the nuclear weapons club, suggesting skepticism about the new NIE is warranted.

Item - As linked by Pundita, the Israelis dispute America's sudden intel flip-flop:

Israeli intelligence believes Iran is still trying to develop a nuclear weapon, Israel's defense minister said Tuesday, disputing a U.S. intelligence assessment that Iran has halted its program.

"It's apparently true that in 2003 Iran stopped pursuing its military nuclear program for a time. But in our opinion, since then it has apparently continued that program," Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Army Radio.

Item - If Iran quit bomb-building half a decade ago, why did it block International Atomic Energy Agency inspections required under its commitments to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty? As President Bush said Wednesday:

It is clear from the latest NIE that the Iranian government has more to explain about its nuclear intentions and past actions, especially the covert nuclear weapons program pursued until the fall of 2003, which the Iranian regime has yet to acknowledge. The Iranians have a strategic choice to make. They can come clean with the international community about the scope of their nuclear activities and fully accept the longstanding offer to suspend their enrichment program and come to the table and negotiate, or they can continue on a path of isolation.

Item - As the Wall Street Journal observes:

No less odd is the NIE's conclusion that Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003 in response to "international pressure." The only serious pressure we can recall from that year was the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At the time, an Iranian opposition group revealed the existence of a covert Iranian nuclear program to mill and enrich uranium and produce heavy water at sites previously unknown to U.S. intelligence. The Bush Administration's response was to punt the issue to the Europeans, who in 2003 were just beginning years of fruitless diplomacy before the matter was turned over to the U.N. Security Council.

Item - As Don Surber says:

It is folly on [Democrat Senator] Byrd's part to credit the international community with Iran backing down.

The only thing that changed in 2003 was that we put 100,000-plus troops in the nation to the west of Iran. This was on top of the troops we placed in the nation north of Iran.

Item - Further, the Wall Street Journal argues:

[T]he real issue is not Iran's nuclear weapons program, but its nuclear program, period. As the NIE acknowledges, Iran continues to enrich uranium on an industrial scale--that is, build the capability to make the fuel for a potential bomb. And it is doing so in open defiance of binding U.N. resolutions.

Item - With the media, Democrats, Bush haters, lefty blogs, Iran, Russia and China citing the NIE as proof the Administration's tough stance is wrong, Free Frank Warner notes that "Iran has thousands of centrifuges spinning, enriching uranium, overcoming the "critical impediment.'"

Conclusion - Iran's longstanding policy and wide-ranging actions are contrary to U.S. interests. America's national security depends on readiness to counter the risk posed by the capabilities of potential foes--something we forgot sixty-six years ago today.

MORE:

Jim Hoagland in Sunday's Washington Post:

The publication of an unclassified version of the NIE, which concludes that Iran is "probably" not working on a nuclear weapon at this time, has triggered unintended consequences. Iran's diplomatic hand is strengthened, while foreign diplomats and officials who have pushed their governments to join the U.S. campaign of sanctions and international condemnation are suddenly undermined. "We will be exposed to a lot of criticism at home now," one official from the developing world glumly told me shortly after the estimate was issued.

"They won't say it, but our leaders must be devastated by the way this was handled," an Israeli friend said. "Not by the facts of the report, which can be discussed reasonably, but by the presentation and interpretation of the report. This happens when intelligence agencies become traumatized by previous mistakes and overreact the other way the next time."

Domestically, the most significant fact about the NIE is its public manifestation. The White House was powerless to prevent publication of a document that made Bush aides unhappy and uncomfortable. The administration went along because it knew that the document -- and any attempt to suppress it -- would have been immediately leaked.

MORE & MORE:

As Gateway Pundit reports, students at Tehran U. haven't given up on freedom and democracy: Hundreds staged renewed protests on Sunday, denouncing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The students

burned a copy of Kayhan newspaper, the mouthpiece of the clerical establishment that is bitterly critical of the Iranian reformist movement, [the FARS news agency] said.

According to IRNA, anti-riot police were stationed outside the campus but did not intervene.

There has been a string of demonstrations at Tehran universities in past months as students protest against the replacement of liberal professors, pressure on activists by the authorities and the detention of three students.

The demonstration on Sunday was at least the second within a week at Tehran University after dozens of students held a similar protest on Tuesday.

According to AFP:

"The students chanted slogans and carried protesting placards," IRNA reported.

"Ahmadi-Pinochet, Iran will not become Chile!" chanted the protesters, playing on the names of the Iranian president and late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Fars reported.

Pictures published by the student ISNA agency showed the students crowded round the main gate and bending back its iron railings to allow others through.

A dense crowd of hundreds of people then gathered inside the university grounds for the protest, the pictures showed. "Live Free or Die," read one of the banners.

source: ISNA via Gateway Pundit
Says Instapundit, it's a "catchy slogan." Fleeting Perusal observes:

[T]hose English language signs and banners that students carry with them means that the students inside of Iran want foreign press coverage and want the foreign observers to know what's going on in that country occupied by the mullahs. This needs to be supported by all bloggers who care about freedom and democracy.

MORE³: Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

It is completely false for anybody to claim, on the basis of this admitted "estimate," that Iran has ceased to be a candidate member of the fatuously named nuclear "club." It has the desire to acquire the weaponry, it retains the means to do so, and it has been caught lying and cheating about the process. If it suspended some overtly military elements of the project out of a justifiable apprehension in 2003, it has energetically persisted in the implicit aspects—most notably the installation of gas centrifuges at the plant in Natanz and the building of a heavy water reactor at Arak. All that the estimate has done is to define weaponry down and to suggest a distinction without much difference between a "civilian" and a "military" dimension of the same program. The acquisition of enriched uranium and of plutonium, for any purpose, is identical with the acquisition of a thermonuclear weapons capacity. Iran continues to strive to produce both, neither of which, as it happens, are required for its ostensible civilian energy needs.

The briefing that I was given by the British Embassy in Tehran in 2005, showing the howlingly glaring discrepancy between what Iran claims and what Iran does, is not in the least challenged by the most recent conclusions. To say that Iran has "stopped" rather than paused its program is to offer an opinion, not to present a finding.

Con Artist?

Did Connie strike again? After comments from me and others were erased from her blog, I decided to give ConnieTalk another try, specifically commenting on her recent post about Polaroid. Though Polaroid went bankrupt over six years ago, and stopped selling consumer "instant cameras" last year, it's Polaroid recent decision to close two Massachusetts factories affecting about 150 jobs that Connie decries (emphasis in original):

Polaroid is taking away their famous instant photo cameras with hardly a whisper. . .

There just is not, and never will be, a camera as handy to keep in your closet as Polaroid. . . .Edwin H. Land founded it in 1937 and instant film cameras have been out since 1948; but in 2001, after drowning in the market of digital cameras, they filed Federal Bankruptcy protection and were bought by a subsidiary of Bank One.

Every time the man behind the miracle dies, things go bad. Polaroid...McDonald's...KFC...Disney...Alexander Graham Bell...Hilton...

It becomes an empire that doesn't care for itself for the way the inventor did.

If Polaroid indeed withdraws any further plans to market this product, the U.S. patent (that prevented Kodak from producing instant film cameras in 1986) could be removed. Meaning, anyone would be able to design and market their version of the shoot-and-print camera.

It's high time we supported budding genius minds that have product ideas outside of corrupted national monopolies, and bring small businesses back to thriving in the United States.

This made no sense, as I showed in comments:

As the articles you link to say, Polaroid didn't die because it failed to "care for itself for the way the inventor did." Polaroid went bankrupt because consumers no longer wanted its product. (Similarly, Kodak had to write off its entire film business a few years ago.) It had nothing to do with supporting genius, or where one gets film developed. (Contrary to your example, AT&T did quite well for more than 50 years after Alexander Graham Bell died in 1922.) Rather, Polaroid was felled by "creative destruction," in the form of new and better digital technology--and the creative destruction aspect of capitalism is itself pro-consumer and anti-monopoly. I'm not sure what you would change--force customers to stick with film to keep a factory producing unwanted goods? There's a heck of a lot more jobs in digital photography than the 150 lost by Polaroid's planned closure.

And I have no idea what you're trying to say here:

"If Polaroid indeed withdraws any further plans to market this product, the U.S. patent (that prevented Kodak from producing instant film cameras in 1986) could be removed. Meaning, anyone would be able to design and market their version of the shoot-and-print camera."

First, few people want such a camera to be available--which is why Polaroid went bankrupt. Second, patents are not "removed" (whatever that means) from non-use. They expire after a certain number of years, whether or not the patent holder licenses or uses the idea. Indeed, for the most part, absent deception or an anti-competitive conspiracy, patent holders may refuse to license their patent entirely.

My comment appeared immediately on Connie talk -- albeit without the attempted embedded hyperlinks. This time, I took a screen shot:


(note time 11:47 pm)

Less than two hours later, my comment has vanished.

How did it disappear? Why was it erased? Only Connie knows--and so far, she's been silent or slippery on my blog and hers.

What's it all mean? As evidence of Connie's commitment to openness, diversity, and tolerance, Res Ipsa Loquitur. Look it up.

Get Gringos To Give Up Guns

Violence in Mexico has spiraled out of control. As has the seemingly inseparable myth that most of the weapons used in Mexico come from the United States. Or, in other words, America's allegedly "permissive" Second Amendment is killing Mexico.

The new Administration is perpetuating the fable. In March, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accepted part of the responsibility, "Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians." On April 16th, in a joint press conference with Mexican President Felipe Calderon, President Obama specifically blamed America:

A demand for these drugs in the United States is what is helping to keep these cartels in business. This war is being waged with guns purchased not here, but in the United States. More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border.

Last week's New York Times uncritically repeated the talking point:

Federal agents say about 90 percent of the 12,000 pistols and rifles the Mexican authorities recovered from drug dealers last year and asked to be traced came from dealers in the United States, most of them in Texas and Arizona.

UPI and the Chicago Tribune said the same.

Are the Administration and the liberal media right?

No. Confederate Yankee's Bob Owens has long been in the vanguard of exposing this lie. Even before Obama's speech and the media's sympathetic parroting, Owens linked to this April 2nd FOX News report:

There's just one problem with the 90 percent "statistic" and it's a big one:

It's just not true.

In fact, it's not even close. The fact is, only 17 percent of guns found at Mexican crime scenes have been traced to the U.S.

What's true, an ATF spokeswoman told FOXNews.com, in a clarification of the statistic used by her own agency's assistant director, "is that over 90 percent of the traced firearms originate from the U.S."

But a large percentage of the guns recovered in Mexico do not get sent back to the U.S. for tracing, because it is obvious from their markings that they do not come from the U.S.

"Not every weapon seized in Mexico has a serial number on it that would make it traceable, and the U.S. effort to trace weapons really only extends to weapons that have been in the U.S. market," Matt Allen, special agent of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told FOX News.

In 2007-2008, according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Close to 6,000 were successfully traced -- and of those, 90 percent -- 5,114 to be exact, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover -- were found to have come from the U.S.

But in those same two years, according to the Mexican government, 29,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes.

In other words, 68 percent of the guns that were recovered were never submitted for tracing. And when you weed out the roughly 6,000 guns that could not be traced from the remaining 32 percent, it means 83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S.

Still, it turns out that that figure, too, is wrong, according to FactCheck.org:

[T]he Fox figure of 17 percent is based on a misreading of some confusing House subcommittee testimony by ATF official William Newell. The Fox reporters come up with a figure of 5,114 guns traced to U.S. sources in fiscal 2007 and 2008. That figures to 17.6 percent of the 29,000 figure for guns seized in Mexico, as given by the country's attorney general.

The 5,114 figure is simply wrong. What Newell said quite clearly is that the number of guns submitted to ATF in those two years was 11,055: "3,312 in FY 2007 [and] 7,743 in FY 2008." Newell also testified, as other ATF officials have done, that 90 percent of the guns traced were determined to have come from the U.S. So based on Newell's testimony, the Fox reporters should have used a figure of 9,950 guns from U.S. sources. That figures out to just over 34 percent of guns recovered, assuming that the 29,000 figure supplied by Mexico's attorney general is correct.

Even that number is too low. At our request, an ATF spokesman gave us more detailed figures for how many guns had been submitted and traced during those two years. Of the guns seized in Mexico and given to ATF for tracing, the agency actually found 95 percent came from U.S. sources in fiscal 2007 and 93 percent in fiscal 2008. That comes to a total of 10,347 guns from U.S. sources for those two years, or 36 percent of what Mexican authorities say they recovered.

The mistake the Fox News reporters made was to focus on some numbers given by Newell and Hoover in separate testimony, regarding numbers of guns traced to specific states. But not all guns traced to the U.S. can be traced to specific states. The Fox numbers are "a subset" of the actual total traced to U.S. sources, one official said.

Conclusion: No one should minimize the deadliness of south-of-the-border violence, nor the consequences for America should Mexico become even more of a failed state. But on his world apology tour, Obama shouldn't blame America first, implicitly indict the Second Amendment, or try to solve Mexico's problems by changing U.S. law, as the Washington Times editorialized:

Numerous sources of weapons supply Mexican crime syndicates. Mexico is a virtual arms bazaar filled with AK-47s from China, shoulder-fired rockets from Soviet-bloc manufacturers and fragmentation grenades from South Korea. In the past six years, more than 150,000 Mexican soldiers have deserted from the army, with many taking their standard-issue Belgian-made M-16s with them. Drug runners, who by trade are adept at smuggling, have the ability to sneak weapons across borders from anywhere they want.

The Obama administration has proposed spending $400 million to stop U.S. guns from going to Mexico. A major part of this plan would be to clamp down on gun shops in America. As with all gun control, new laws will not stop the criminals from getting guns but will curtail the rights of law-abiding individuals and businesses.

It continues to be an outrage that the media won't fact-check liberals or lefty arguments with which they agree--especially since the truth was available before Obama's press conference. And it's truly strange that when Obama makes America responsible for another country's anarchy, MoveOn.org doesn't say a word.

Cooling-Off Period

Many Westerners are blind to the bias of the anything-but-objective global warming charlatans. About half of Western scientists seemingly were devoured by pea pods from Mars, and replaced by doctors of doom. Disregarding the scientific method, they use a trillion techniques guaranteeing chicken-little conclusions: inventing, hiding and editing data, tweaking or deep-sixing results to gain a leg-up for the next government grant, gutting objective peer review and banning all but true believers from leading trade journals, while fomenting worldwide witch hunts aimed at the fifty percent who disagree, ignoring factors contrary to their nihilist notion that warming's caused by Western civilization. The truly lazy substitute assertion for observation.

Ironically, though pro-despair forces claim there's a consensus, the current cacophony is anything but: widespread uncertainty, dozens of distinct climate models -- none more reliable than a coin toss -- most of which predict temperature increases within the margin of error, culminating in a treaty presuming warming's from man-made CO₂ (despite growing contrary evidence), which mandates unachievable objectives. Yet, even were warming real, the price tag's still a secret -- in cash, opportunity costs and societal disruption. And almost no one is comparing costs with benefits. Congressional Democrats suppose similar slip-ups in Bush's FY06 budget and social security reform--but believe dividing by zero changes the weather.

The press provides a second layer of lies, headlining every pronouncement of warmer (or cooler) weather, eliding a fact-check that would have revealed, for example, glacier melting has not increased. The media rarely acknowledges scientists who predict no or insignificant global warming. But if noticed, dissenters become hostile witnesses: Scientific American devoted an entire issue to an un-scientific lynching party for warming skeptics. Reportedly, the heretics had to bring their own rope.

Since he wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, the biased science and media complex's most frequent target is Bjørn Lomborg, adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School. But Lomborg combats madness with reason, most recently in this week's Telegraph (U.K.):

Their argument is that global warming is due to mankind's use of fossil fuels, that the consequences 100 years from now will be serious, and that we therefore should do something dramatic. We should make substantial and long-term reductions of greenhouse gases along the lines of the Kyoto Protocol. . .

But to inform us accurately they have to go further than that. They should tell us what will happen even if we implement the fairly draconian measures of Kyoto - which they curiously do not.

They do not tell us that even if all the industrial nations agreed to the cuts (about 30pc from what would otherwise have been by 2010), and stuck to them all through the century, the impact would simply be to postpone warming by about six years beyond 2100. The unfortunate peasant in Bangladesh will find that his house floods in 2106 instead.

Moreover, they should also tell what they expect the cost of the Kyoto Protocol to be. That may not come easy to natural scientists, but there is plenty of literature on the subject, and the best guess is that the cost of doing a very little good for the third world 100 years from now would be $150 billion per year for the rest of this century.

Even after the Brown/Blair exertions to extract more aid for Africa, the West spends about $60 billion helping the third world. One has to consider whether the proportions are right here. . . In fact, . . . Kyoto [caps] . . . actually cost more than the good they do.

In short, climate change is anything but science: it's pure politics--a cynical misuse of pseudo science to stampede voters toward "environmental standards" providing trivial greenish benefits but forcing greater income equality via massive transfers of wealth from the West to developing nations--in effect, a tax on Western Civ. Though most lefties hide the ball, a few lie in plain view, most famously former Senator Tim Wirth (D-Co), later Clinton's Undersecretary of State for climate issues:

We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing - in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.

As John Ray at Greenie Watch argues:

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists.

In sum, ignore alarmist science geeks and the Pulitzer pursuing press. As I've suggested, climate change can be solved by applying (Jonah) Goldberg's rule: "Don’t just do something! Stand there."

More:

MaxedOutMama's arresting metaphor: "It has been clear for years that the Kyoto treaty was a lunatic measure, the triumph of ignorance over science, of innumeracy over numerical literacy, a superstitious virgin sacrifice to a volcano that has not yet even been observed rumbling."

QOTD

This may be the best Charles Krauthammer column ever, from the July 11th Washington Post :

On the day the Colombian military freed Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other long-held hostages, the Italian Parliament passed yet another resolution demanding her release. Europe had long ago adopted this French-Colombian politician as a cause celebre. France had made her an honorary citizen of Paris, passed numerous resolutions and held many vigils.

Unfortunately, karma does not easily cross the Atlantic. Betancourt languished for six years in cruel captivity until freed in a brilliant operation conducted by the Colombian military, intelligence agencies and special forces -- an operation so well executed that the captors were overpowered without a shot being fired.

This in foreign policy establishment circles is called "hard power." In the Bush years, hard power is terribly out of fashion, seen as a mere obsession of cowboys and neocons. Both in Europe and America, the sophisticates worship at the altar of "soft power" -- the use of diplomatic and moral resources to achieve one's ends.

Europe luxuriates in soft power, nowhere more than in l'affaire Betancourt in which Europe's repeated gestures of solidarity hovered somewhere between the fatuous and the destructive. Europe had been pressing the Colombian government to negotiate for the hostages. . .

She was, however, only one of the high-minded West's many causes. Solemn condemnations have been issued from every forum of soft-power fecklessness -- the European Union, the United Nations, the G-8 foreign ministers -- demanding that Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe stop butchering his opponents and step down. Before that, the cause du jour was Burma, where a vicious dictatorship allowed thousands of cyclone victims to die by denying them independently delivered foreign aid lest it weaken the junta's grip on power.

And then there is Darfur, a perennial for which myriad diplomats and foreign policy experts have devoted uncountable hours at the finest five-star hotels to deplore the genocide and urgently urge relief.

What is done to free these people? Nothing. Everyone knows it will take the hardest of hard power to remove the oppressors in Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan and other godforsaken places where the bad guys have the guns and use them. Indeed, as the Zimbabwean opposition leader suggested (before quickly retracting) from his hideout in the Dutch embassy -- Europe specializes in providing haven for those fleeing the evil that Europe does nothing about -- the only solution is foreign intervention.

And who's going to intervene? The only country that could is the country that in the past two decades led coalitions that liberated Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Having sacrificed much blood and treasure in its latest endeavor -- the liberation of 25 million Iraqis from the most barbarous tyranny of all, and its replacement with what is beginning to emerge as the Arab world's first democracy -- and having earned near-universal condemnation for its pains, America has absolutely no appetite for such missions.

And so the innocent languish, as did Betancourt, until some local power, inexplicably under the sway of the Bush notion of hard power, gets it done -- often with the support of the American military. "Behind the rescue in a jungle clearing stood years of clandestine American work," explained The Post. "It included the deployment of elite U.S. Special Forces . . . a vast intelligence-gathering operation . . . and training programs for Colombian troops."

Upon her liberation, Betancourt offered profuse thanks to God and the Virgin Mary, to her supporters and the media, to France and Colombia and just about everybody else. As of this writing, none to the United States.

(via reader OBH)

"I Know It When I See It"1

Pro-Miers lawyer/law professor/author/radio host/blogger Hugh Hewitt strolls down memory lane:

The first President Bush was, I think, close friends with Justice Potter Stewart, who rose to SCOTUS after four years as a federal judge, and who, notably, retired at the age of 66. Stewart's opinions were pointed, and usually correct in my view. His job was to get it right, not construct overarching theories. How will Harriet Miers turn out on the SCOTUS? My best guess is a lot like Potter Stewart, in temperment and tone, and in results.

Patterico's response (emphasis in original) is spot-on:

That’s exactly what I’m afraid of. In terms of results, Potter Stewart voted to uphold abortion rights and strike down the death penalty, to name two of his disappointing decisions. In terms of temperament, the way he went about making his decisions was often rooted in pure arrogance.

Nominated by President Eisenhower (a Republican), Justice Stewart was the O'Connor of the 60s and 70s; indeed, O'Connor succeeded to Stewart's chair in 1981. Like O'Connor, Stewart preferred narrow, fact-based rulings over wide-ranging precedent, famously exemplified by his definition of obscenity, quoted in the title.

Like O'Connor, Stewart also was a "political" justice. Noting that Stewart joined the majority in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973),² Patterico quotes The Brethren's account of Stewart's judicial philosophy:

Abortion was a political issue. Women were coming into their own, as Stewart learned from his daughter Harriet, a strong, independent woman. . . The public was ready for abortion reform.

Still, these were issues of the very sort that made Stewart uncomfortable. Precisely because of their political nature, the Court should avoid them. But [you knew there was a “but” coming, didn’t you? — [Patterico]] the state legislatures were always so far behind. Few seemed likely to amend their abortion laws. Much as Stewart disliked the Court’s being involved in this kind of controversy, this was perhaps an instance where it had to be involved.

Yuk. For a half-century, conservatives dreamed of returning the Court to the founders' job description: interpreting law, not inventing policy. And like O'Connor, Stewart's policy-making decisions are poorly reasoned.

Hugh Hewitt is the best-known pro-Miers conservative. He was Assistant White House Counsel under President Reagan, and so knows the skills needed in Miers's present job. I admire and respect him. So it's revealing that Hewitt's "best guess" backing likens Miers to Potter Stewart.

Six years ago, Governor Bush explained how President Bush would vet judicial nominees:

[L]et me tell you what I'd like to know. I'd like to know are we compatible from a philosophical perspective on a wide range of issues. But the most important view I want to know is are you a strict constructionist, Mr. Jurist? Will you strictly interpret the Constitution or will you use your bench as a way to legislate?

As Patterico shows, Justice Stewart supported non-textual rights. And according to liberal lion Bob Woodward, Stewart embraced judicial legislation. If Harriet's the reincarnation of Potter, the President broke his promise. Hugh Hewitt's advocacy is the best evidence yet Hewitt's wrong.

Miers Oppositum Est.
____________

¹ Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 197 (1964) (Stewart, J., concurring).

² Justice Stewart dissented when Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 484 (1965), read "emanations" from "penumbras" to establish an unwritten privacy right. Eight years later, Stewart signed both Blackmun's Roe majority and issued a concurring opinion explicitly basing the abortion right on Lochner-type non-textual extensions of the 14th Amendment's due process clause: "Griswold stands as one in a long line of pre-Skrupa cases decided under the doctrine of substantive due process, and I now accept it as such." Roe, 410 U.S. at 168.

Note: minor edits 9:30pm