Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell for 12/30/2009

Refusing to interrupt his Hawaiian golf vacation for almost three full days after the Flight 253 attack, President Barack Obama finally emerged on December 28th to assure the American people that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was “an isolated extremist” and that he had already “been charged with attempting to destroy an aircraft.” Continuing to treat the incident like a common law enforcement problem Obama referred to Abdulmutallab as the “suspect” five times and promised he would “not rest until we find all who were involved and hold them accountable.”

Recent Entries Video: Ed Feulner on Conservative Momentum Al-Qaeda Targets Detroit Through Yemen Top Ten Heritage WebMemos of 2009 Public Sector Unions Are Killing California Injustice at Justice; Voting Rights Chief Sent South

Perhaps Obama should have stayed on the links for another 24 hours, because by yesterday it had become exceedingly clear that Abdulmutallab was in no conceivable way “isolated” and was instead very much part of al Qaeda’s larger war on the United States. Here’s what we know so far:

• According to CBS News, as early as August of 2009 the Central Intelligence Agency was picking up information on a person of interest dubbed “The Nigerian,” suspected of meeting with “terrorist elements” in Yemen.
• According to the Wall Street Journal, the father of Mr. Abdulmutallab warned the CIA of his son’s likely radicalization at the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria. That led to a broader gathering of agencies the next day, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the State Department, in which the information was shared.
• According to CNN, information on Abdulmutallab, including his passport number and possible connection to extremists, had been sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, but it sat there for five weeks and was not disseminated.
• Also according to the Wall Street Journal, the National Security Agency who had been monitoring former Guantanamo detainees in Yemen had communications intercepts suggesting a Nigerian was being prepped for a terror strike by al Qaeda operatives in that country.
• And the Washington Post reports that not only did the British government reject an Abdulmutallab visa application this May, but that British Home Secretary Alan Johnson said that U.S. officials should have been told about the rejection and that he believes they were.

Faced with this preponderance of evidence that Abdulmutallab did not act alone President Obama finally admitted yesterday that “a systemic failure has occurred. And I consider that totally unacceptable.” It may have taken Obama four full days to reach this conclusion, after both White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano spent all of Sunday trying to convince the American people that “the system worked”, but his belated acknowledgment of the seriousness of the situation is welcome.

Also belatedly welcome is the acknowledgment that al Qaeda is a major force in Yemen that must be dealt with carefully. The Washington Post describes al Qaeda in Yemen as a ”major new threat to the United States,” but there is nothing new about it. In fact, al-Qaeda’s first terrorist attack against Americans came in Yemen, the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden’s father, who had migrated to neighboring Saudi Arabia before the birth of the al-Qaeda leader. In December 1992, bin Laden’s followers bombed a hotel in Yemen that was used by U.S. military personnel involved in supporting the humanitarian food relief flights to Somalia. And in October 2000, seventeen American sailors on board the USS Cole, were killed in an al-Qaeda bombing in the harbor of Aden, Yemen’s main port.

The Obama administration must stop thinking of al Qaeda and Abdulmutallab as mere criminals. Obama’s blindness to Abdulmutallab’s al Qaeda connections and his insistence on calling him a “suspect” in the “alleged” bombing is the same mindset dictating Obama’s decision to send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other terrorists to New York for a civilian trial in federal court. Hopefully this incident will prod Obama into revisiting that historically bad decision.

QUICK HITS

This is sheer insanity, even by California standards:

From the East Bay Express:

Berkeley High May Cut Out Science Labs
The proposal would trade labs seen as benefiting white students for resources to help struggling students.
By Eric Klein

Berkeley High School is considering a controversial proposal to eliminate science labs and the five science teachers who teach them to free up more resources to help struggling students.

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High’s School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley’s dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.

Paul Gibson, an alternate parent representative on the School Governance Council, said that information presented at council meetings suggests that the science labs were largely classes for white students. He said the decision to consider cutting the labs in order to redirect resources to underperforming students was virtually unanimous.

Berkeley can defund all the ‘white’ programs they want, but until these spineless liberal cowards address the real problems affecting minority students such as fatherless households, gangs, prostitution, rampant drug abuse, and the social stigma of academic achievement being equated with ‘acting white’ and therefore subjecting said achievers to violence, ridicule and ostracization from their own ‘community’, they will accomplish nothing beyond furthering the destruction of the very communities they think they’re trying to help.

…..

-Cnation

Hot Air: Janet Napolitano: “The System Worked”

I suppose one can make that argument — if one assumes that the system includes allowing a man included on a watch list onto an airplane, allowing his visa to remain in force even after his own father informs the US that he’s become a radical jihadi, assuming that any explosive said terrorist will smuggle onto the plane will fizzle out, and that only quick thinking by the other passengers on the plane kept the jihadi from trying it again while he barbecued his crotch. more…..

It is important to remember that the bomb WAS detonated. The only thing that prevented that plane from being blown to bits was the incompetence of either the bomb maker or the bomber himself.

It continues to be Conservative Nation’s position that Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano is not only actively working against the best interests of our once great nation in terms of border security and illegal immigration, but is dangerously incompetent as further evidenced by this situation,  and needs to be removed from her position as head of Homeland Security immediately.

…..

-Cnation

Matrk Steyn: Obamacare is the fast-track to a permanent left-of-center political culture.

Last week, during a bit of banter on Fox News, my colleague Jonah Goldberg reminded me of something I’d all but forgotten. Last September, during his address to Congress on health care, Barack Obama declared: “I am not the first President to take up this cause, but I am determined to be the last.”

Dream on. The monstrous mountain of toxic pustules sprouting from greasy boils metastasizing from malign carbuncles that passed the Senate on Christmas Eve is not the last word in “health” “care,” but the first. It ensures that this is all we’ll be talking about, now and forever. more…..

…………….

Gateway Pundit: Cash for Caulkers… Government Spent $2 Million of Stimulus Money to Caulk 7 Homes (Video)

The US government spent two million dollars of Stimulus money to caulk 7 homes.  more…….

…………….

HotAir: US uncaps Fannie/Freddie support, announces during Christmas holiday

If an administration wanted to pull a fast one on American citizens and keep a move that puts them on the hook for hundreds of billion dollars as quiet as possible while still disclosing it, when would be the best time to take that action?  How about an evening when people all across the country turn off their televisions and laptops to spend time with family and friends, celebrating an important religious holiday?  Could any President be as calculating and cold-blooded as to do something like that? more…..

…………….

Redstate: The Filibuster is Essential for Democracy

The filibuster is essential for democracy, because it protects Americans from a tyranny of the majority, whether that majority be Democrats or Republicans.  Right now, liberals are angry at Congress because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was not allowed to steamroll the minority party, and moderates within his own caucus, to pass a version of ObamaCare with a public option.  The left wants to exterminate the only remaining tool for individual members of the Senate to slow down legislation. more…..

…………….

Washington Examiner: Here’s the real story on America’s unemployment

One of the ways we kid ourselves is calling our unemployment rate 10 percent. In government-speak that’s the “U-3″ number, which counts just current job seekers. What it doesn’t count are “discouraged” workers, who have given up looking, and the “involuntarily part-time” or underemployed workers, who also can’t find full-time work.

That’s the “U-6″ number, a more recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics metric. Today it’s more than 17 percent, which means real unemployment is approaching one in five Americans. And, yes, that’s a (post-Depression) record. more…..

…..

-Cnation

Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell for 12/24/2009

This morning just after 7 AM EST, the United States Senate passed, again on a straight party-line vote, President Barack Obama’s health insurance bill. Originally scheduled for a 9 PM vote tonight, the bill’s Senate passage is a welcome Christmas gift for a beleaguered White House. However, as the First Family jets off for Hawaii, the American people, liberals, moderates, and conservatives are all saying this bill is closer to a lump of coal in their stocking than real health care reform.

Recent Entries Could the Senate Bill Eliminate Private Insurance? Beyond the Constitution: The Healthcare Bill Violates the Rule of Law Obama On Cutting Red Tape: No We Can’t Nothing Voluntary About Obamacare’s Mandate Reid Roils the Abortion Debate

The American Public Does Not Want This Bill: When the American people first turned their attention to President Obama’s health care plan, bare majorities of the American public told pollsters they supported his health care reform plan. But as the debate wore on, and the American people looked past the rhetoric and examined the details of Obama’s proposal, support for the legislation steadily declined. By mid July, more Americans opposed than supported the plan. Now that the House and Senate have both approved separate versions of the bill, strong majorities of Americans now oppose Obama’s plan.

The Left Does Not Consider This Bill Real Reform: We have already documented the strong opposition figures like former-Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean have to what has come out of the Senate. But now powerful members of the House of Representatives, Democrats with actual votes in Congress, are also voicing their strong objections to the Senate bill. House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY) wrote on op-ed for CNN yesterday including: “[U]nder the Senate plan, millions of Americans will be forced into private insurance company plans, which will be subsidized by taxpayers. That alternative will do almost nothing to reform health care but will be a windfall for insurance companies. Is it any surprise that stock prices for some of those insurers are up recently? … Supporters of the weak Senate bill say ‘just pass it — any bill is better than no bill.’ I strongly disagree — a conference report is unlikely to sufficiently bridge the gap between these two very different bills. It’s time that we draw the line on this weak bill and ask the Senate to go back to the drawing board. The American people deserve at least that.”

Moderates Are Disgusted by This Bill: Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), who voted for the House version of Obamacare after getting Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to take taxpayer funding of abortion out of the bill, tells National Review Online: “This shouldn’t be a bill where you use hush money. This isn’t an appropriations bill where you try to get the best projects for your state. … I’ve spoken with a half-dozen members in the last 48 hours, and they’re all really concerned with the Senate bill. We all agree: We’ve lost our objective with health care. Where you live should have nothing to do with the quality or cost of your coverage.”

Conservatives Want Real Reform: Detailing the increased health costs, the trillions in new spending, the billions in new taxes, the loss of Americans’ current health insurance, and the damage it would do to our national debt, Heritage’s health care team concludes their analysis of the Senate bill: “The Senate bill would impose enormous costs on the American people, totaling at least $2.5 trillion for the first 10 years. After the first 10 years, as costs escalated, Congress would need to impose additional major tax increases and impose major cuts in benefits to pay for this health care agenda. The American people want and need health reform, but the Senate bill is clearly not what they have in mind.”

Do not let this Christmas Eve Senate disaster get you down. There is still hope Obamacare will be stopped. The White House is already downplaying expectations, telling selected media outlets that negotiations between the House and Senate over their major policy differences may slip into February. Considering the House is not back in session till January 12th, the Senate till January 18th, and that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) will need at least a weak to score the bill, the American people will have plenty of time to educate themselves further. So take heart: today’s Christmas Eve vote may just be Obamacare’s high water mark.

QUICK HITS

At 7:15 this morning, Obamacare passed the senate 60-39. It took over a billion dollars in taxpayer-funded bribes by Harry Reid to ‘holdout’ democrat senators to get it done, but by God he did it.

It’ll be a miracle if some of these senators don’t start getting bricks through their office windows (no, I’m not advocating).

From The Hill:

The Senate approved sweeping healthcare reform legislation by the narrowest of partisan margins early Christmas Eve morning, placing President Barack Obama closer than ever to signing a longtime Democratic priority into law.

The 60 to 39 tally split directly along partisan lines with Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) absent, underscoring not only the great divide between Democrats and Republicans but also the deftness with which Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) at long last united his fractious caucus by offering key compromises to centrists but keeping liberals in the fold.

Nice spin by The Hill writer Jeffrey Young, who is completely misrepresenting how Reid got the votes; there were no ‘compromises’, these senators were bought outright. With our money. Second, if this vote tells you anything, it should be that there are zero centrists in the Democratic party regardless of those who try to appear as such. These men and women – including my own patently dishonest and staggeringly incompetent senator Kay Hagan – are typical of the morally and ethically bankrupt leftists who now control (and support, for that matter) the Democrat party, and whose principles are governed solely by the highest bidder.

Elections. Have. Consequences.

…..

-Cnation

Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell for 12/23/2009

After the Democrats cleared the second of three 60 vote hurdles last night, Republicans ceded enough debate time back to the majority so that passage of Obamacare through the Senate will take place n Christmas Eve at 8 AM. Conservatives have every right to be disappointed that Senate Republicans did not force the maximum amount of debate possible. But they can take heart in a key point of order that will be voted on later today. Sponsored by Sens. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and John Ensign (R-NV), that vote will lay the groundwork for the possible legal dismantling of Obama’s health program.

Recent Entries Market Responds to Copenhagen Michigan And Nebraska: The Senate Leadership Has Got A Deal For You! Why is the AMA Supporting a 20% Pay Cut for Their Members? Solar Shutdown: Feinstein to Block Energy Projects Young, Invincible, and Now Forced to Shell-Out for Health Care

As we’ve detailed before, the very core of the Senate health plan includes an unprecedented expansion of the power of the federal government over the lives of every American. For the first time in history, every American would be forced to buy federally regulated and approved health insurance or face a $750 fine. As the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) wrote in 1994: “A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action. The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States.” The individual mandate and other questionable measures in the bill raise serious questions as to whether Obamacare could survive a Constitutional test:

Enumerated Powers: Article I allocates to Congress “[a]ll legislative powers herein granted,” which means that some legislative powers were intended to remain beyond Congress’s reach. The Supreme Court recognized and affirmed this fundamental principle from the earliest days of the republic, as Chief Justice Marshall famously observed: “The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written.” Nowhere in the Constitution is Congress given the power to mandate that an individual enter into a contract with a private party or purchase a good or service. Democrats have pointed to both the general welfare taxing power and the commerce clause as possible justifications for the mandate, but as a recent Heritage Legal Memorandum details, neither justification withstands scrutiny.

5th Amendment: The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reads in part: “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Sen. Ensign will argue today: “The Democrats’ health reform bill would require an American citizen to devote a portion of income – his or her private property – to health insurance coverage. … But, Mr. President, if a Nevadan does not want to spend his or her hard-earned income on health insurance coverage and would prefer to spend it on something else, such as rent or a car payment, this new requirement could be a “taking” of private property under the Fifth Amendment.”

Racial Discrimination: On December 10th, the United States Commission on Civil Rights sent a letter to the Senate regarding racially discriminatory provisions in Obama’s health plan. The letter reads: “No matter how well-intentioned, utilizing racial preferences with hope of alleviating health care disparities is inadvisable both as a matter of policy and as a matter of law. … Ensuring that all Americans, regardless of race, have access to quality health care requires both creativity and hard-nosed attention to data. It also requires staying within the requirements of the Constitution. The current race-based provisions of the Senate Health Care bill display none of these qualities.”

Unequal State Treatment: Speaking to Fox News, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) described Sen. Ben Nelson’s (D-NE) deal to support Obamacare in exchange for a bailout Nebraska’s Medicaid costs as “disappointing, sleazy, unconstitutional.” Graham is not the only one examining Cornhusker Kickback. The Attorneys General of Alabama, Colorado, Michigan, North Dakota, South Carolina, Texas and Washington state are jointly investigating the deal to see if special treatment for only one state in the nation at the expense of the other 49 violates the Constitution.

The leftist majority in the Senate is likely to vote down the DeMint/Ensign constitutional point of order, but the very objection itself will help build a record that courts will look at when determining whether or not Obamacare is unconstitutional. The Senate is not the final arbiter of whether or not the laws it passes are consistent with the United States Constitution. That question was settled over 200 years ago in Marbury v. Madison. Although it is always difficult for the Supreme Court to thwart what is perceived to be the popular will, polling consistently shows that this legislation faces strong popular opposition. If that remains true after enactment, the majority of the Justices who are inclined to preserve the enumerated powers scheme and adhere to the original meaning of the text will have little inclination or incentive to stretch the Constitution to reach so decidedly unpopular and far-reaching a law as this one.

QUICK HITS

From Sarah Palin’s Facebook page:

Midnight Votes, Backroom Deals, and a Death Panel

Last weekend while you were preparing for the holidays with your family, Harry Reid’s Senate was making shady backroom deals to ram through the Democrat health care take-over. The Senate ended debate on this bill without even reading it. That and midnight weekend votes seem to be standard operating procedures in D.C. No one is certain of what’s in the bill, but Senator Jim DeMint spotted one shocking revelation regarding the section in the bill describing the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (now called the Independent Payment Advisory Board), which is a panel of bureaucrats charged with cutting health care costs on the backs of patients – also known as rationing. Apparently Reid and friends have changed the rules of the Senate so that the section of the bill dealing with this board can’t be repealed or amended without a 2/3 supermajority vote. Senator DeMint said:

“This is a rule change. It’s a pretty big deal. We will be passing a new law and at the same time creating a senate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law. I’m not even sure that it’s constitutional, but if it is, it most certainly is a senate rule. I don’t see why the majority party wouldn’t put this in every bill. If you like your law, you most certainly would want it to have force for future senates. I mean, we want to bind future congresses. This goes to the fundamental purpose of senate rules: to prevent a tyrannical majority from trampling the rights of the minority or of future congresses.”

In other words, Democrats are protecting this rationing “death panel” from future change with a procedural hurdle. You have to ask why they’re so concerned about protecting this particular provision. Could it be because bureaucratic rationing is one important way Democrats want to “bend the cost curve” and keep health care spending down?

The Congressional Budget Office seems to think that such rationing has something to do with cost. In a letter to Harry Reid last week, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf noted (with a number of caveats) that the bill’s calculations call for a reduction in Medicare’s spending rate by about 2 percent in the next two decades, but then he writes the kicker:

“It is unclear whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would be accomplished through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care.”

Though Nancy Pelosi and friends have tried to call “death panels” the “lie of the year,” this type of rationing – what the CBO calls “reduc[ed] access to care” and “diminish[ed] quality of care” – is precisely what I meant when I used that metaphor.

This health care bill is one of the most far-reaching and expensive expansions of the role of government into our lives. We’re talking about putting one-seventh of our economy under the government’s thumb. We’re also talking about something as intimate to our personal well-being as medical care.

This bill is so unpopular that people on the right and the left hate it. So why go through with it? The Senate is planning to vote on this on Christmas Eve. Why the rush? Though we will begin paying for this bill immediately, we will see no benefits for years. (That’s the trick that allowed the CBO to state that the bill won’t grow the deficit for the next ten years.)

The administration’s promises of transparency and bipartisanship have been broken one by one. This entire process has been defined by midnight votes on weekends, closed-door meetings with industry lobbyists, and payoffs to politicians willing to sell their principles for sweetheart deals. Is it any wonder that Americans are so disillusioned with their leaders in Washington?

This is about politics, not health care. Americans don’t want this bill. Americans don’t like this bill. Washington has stopped listening to us. But we’re paying attention, and 2010 is coming.

- Sarah Palin

Let me be clear, this is an unprecedented new low:.

Dear Congress: Are you sure this is who you want to hitch your political futures to?

Graphic courtesy of Gateway Pundit

…..

-Cnation