Politics, Government & Public Policy: April 2005 Archives

Aside from the interesting property of having two "h"s in a row, tax withholding is evil. However, with proper exemption management you can reduce your yearly refund from or payment to the IRS -- and remember, getting refunds is bad, because the IRS doesn't pay interest. According to this article about refunds on the IRS website, the average federal tax refund is over $2000 -- $40 per week -- not even including refunds for state taxes. I recommend asking your tax advisor, if you have one, about the number of exemptions you should claim, or else use the IRS withholding calculator. The site is pretty handy, and you can also check on when your refund will be processed and how long it will take to get your money.

The proposal by Senator Frist to limit debate on judicial nominees to 100 hours is incredibly sensible and upholds the alleged purpose of the filibuster. The Senate is supposed to have the opportunity to debate every issue thoroughly, but once every point has been made and every mind is set, it's time to vote. Filibusters should be used to ensure that the majority doesn't rush through decisions without proper consideration and illumination, but it shouldn't be a tool for the minority to permanently thwart the majority under the guise of perpetual debate.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) Wednesday called on Democrats to limit their debate on President Bush's judicial nominees to 100 hours and then to guarantee confirmation votes on the nominees. In exchange, Frist said he would not change Senate rules on filibusters.

"Judicial nominees are being denied. Justice is being denied. The solution is simple, allow senators to do their jobs and vote," Frist said in a speech on the Senate floor Thursday.

The Democrats don't want further debate, they just want gridlock. Yes, they are in a position that severely limits their power to screen President Bush's nominees, but they're in that position because they haven't won the power they need through elections. That's how the system is supposed to work.

One of my great hopes for the internet is that it will serve as a collective memory bank that will help mitigate the perpetual forgetfulness of the American public. Most Americans are so fat and happy and forward-focused that it's understandable that we so quickly forget the past, but amnesia comes at a price. Namely, every time some leftists start making predictions of doom and gloom we take them seriously and actually pause to consider their absurd objections. Heck, some of us are often even persuaded, and all because we completely forget the track record of leftist philosophy.

Time will not suffice for me to mention the horrible atrocities of communism and socialism around the world over the last century. Nor can I possibly elaborate further on the nonsensical ravings of environmentalists and pertroleum chicken littles. The anti-war left couldn't even get any of their dire pre-war preditions to come true, despite the best efforts of the media. And now we're supposed to worry about reforming Social Security?

Few Democrats or leftists of any stripe have come forward to applaud Bush's pragmatic, experimental social policy. Yet, they can't confess that their "principle," that government must always grow and never shrink, is something they pulled out of the air. Nor can they draw on the credibility they built up the last time a welfare state program was scaled back. In the Clinton-era debate over welfare reform, we were told (in The Nation) that Aid to Families with Dependent Children was crucial to "the fragile state of grace that suggests we are our sisters' and brothers' keepers. That is what community is fundamentally about." And we were warned that ending AFDC "will destroy that state of grace. In its place will come massive and deadly poverty, sickness, and all manner of violence. People will die, businesses will close, infant mortality will soar, everyone who can will move. Working- and middle-class communities all over America will become scary, violent wastelands."

Show us, please, all those hellish wastelands that have sprung up in the last nine years--and then tell us why we must not make any changes to Social Security.

It's my sincere hope that the internet and its related technologies will help reduce the allure of the idealistic yet infantile left. It's important to remember the hideous effects of "liberalism" and the poverty and enslavement that trail in its wake. The chief irony is that the supposedly "heartless" philosophies of the right end up benefiting everyone more than the supposedly "compassionate" philosophies of the left. That must be galling.

Dozens of leftist millionaires and billionaires convened the "Phoenix Group" in Scottsdale, Arizona, to discuss seeding some new liberal think tanks. The ironic thing is that the only way these think tanks will be able to come up with ideas that work is if they abandon the leftist ideals of these business-savvy but clueless donors.

George Soros told a carefully vetted gathering of 70 likeminded millionaires and billionaires last weekend that they must be patient if they want to realize long-term political and ideological yields from an expected massive investment in “startup” progressive think tanks.

The Scottsdale, Ariz., meeting, called to start the process of building an ideas production line for liberal politicians, began what organizers hope will be a long dialogue with the “partners,” many from the high-tech industry. Participants have begun to refer to themselves as the Phoenix Group. ...

The money details are several weeks away. “There aren’t dollar figures at this point,” Ingersoll said.

Soros, a Hungarian-born financier who donated more than $23 million to pro-Democratic 527 groups last cycle, gave the main presentation, said Ingersoll, who declined to name the other presenters.

Never let it be said again that the Republicans are the party of big money. Still, ideas win elections, and spending money to spread bad ideas isn't likely to be effective.

CNSNews has a story about three Democratic senators who have recently changed their tunes on filibustering.

Sens. Joe Lieberman (Conn.) and Ken Salazar (Colo.) on Wednesday planned to express support for the judicial filibusters taking place right now. But in the past, each man has expressed a different view on the topic of filibusters and judicial nominees. ...

And Sen. Joseph Lieberman - speaking in January 1995, when Republicans were the majority party in the Senate - stood up for the "rights of the majority."

Lieberman called it unfair for Democrats to use the filibuster to "confuse and frustrate the will of the majority."

In January 1995, he and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) introduced a measure that would have eliminated filibusters designed to kill legislation or nominations that had majority support.

I don't have a problem with people changing their minds, but I really wish these senators would explicitly acknowledge their old positions and explain how and why they've changed. It's annoying to me that politicians in general think the public has no memory of the past, but now with the internet and blogs it'll eventually get harder to assume we've forgotten everything that's come before.

Jay Cost has an op-ed up at OpinionJournal about why Hillary Clinton is a terrible politician; it is also posted at Redstate.org. He focuses his critique on something I've also pointed out, namely that Hillary's moves are so obviously calculated that she can't possibly be fooling anyone, which means she isn't a good politician. The only factor Mr. Cost doesn't account for is that Hillary is getting a lot more coverage than most freshman Senators do -- her political positioning may be easy to interpret, but is that because she's a fool or because she's much more visible? Mr. Cost says she's more visible because she's less subtle, but c'mon, her high profile is owed almost entirly to Monica Lewinsky.

If her political accomplishments are unimpressive, why is she so feared? Why is she seen to be a political genius? The answer to this question eluded me for a long time, perhaps because it is so simple. The plain fact is that Hillary Clinton is actually one of the worst politicians in national politics today. She is feared as a brilliant politician only because she is such an obvious politician, which is actually the key mark of a bad politician. ...

This is Hillary's fundamental problem. She is a bad politician because she has a lousy style. She seems, always and everywhere, like an affected, calculating politician. This, by the way, is not simply the perspective of a conservative who has always been suspicious of her. The generally sympathetic MSM speak to the general truth of this argument; they have all been on to Hillary for a long time. People have been talking about her for 2008 or 2012 since the day she announced for the Senate. Everything she does is filtered through that prism. It is an operating assumption for everybody--liberal or conservative--that Hillary calculates in almost exclusively political terms.

That everybody assumes the political when it comes to Hillary is a sign that her style is ineffective. Style is supposed to convince people that this guy (or gal) is one of the "good ones." It is supposed to build the idea that while most politicians act according to strategic calculations and follow the maxims of pragmatism, my congressman does not. Hillary actually has the opposite effect. People think that Hillary is more political than the average politician!

I do agree that Hillary is a bad politician, a poor leader, a poor administrator -- even a poor alleged crook -- and has no chance of becoming president. I sure hope she runs.

Maybe the American Democrats wouldn't feel so bored if they formed a shadow government like the British Tories.

The Shadow Cabinet (also called the Opposition Front Bench) is a senior group of opposition spokespeople in the Westminster System of government who together under the leadership of the Leader of the Opposition (or the leader of other smaller opposition parties) form an alternative cabinet to the government's, whose members shadow or mark each individual member of the government. Members of a shadow cabinet are often but not always appointed to a Cabinet post if and when their party gets into government. It is the Shadow Cabinet's responsibility to pass criticism on the current government and its respective legislation, as well as deciding where amendments to the legislation are necessary.

Of course, who wants to go on the record for or against anything when they're not even in office? Much safer to just wait for an election and test the wind.

How about this: I'll let women be the moral authorities on abortion when they shut up and let men decide who we go to war with. What? No takers? Then how about if we all agree that uteruses don't impart any special insight into abortion that men lack. By extension, the opinions of senators who are "mothers of daughters" are worth no more than those of their merely male colleagues. In fact, based on the women senators I know of (a very small and unrepresentative sample of the general female population, to be sure) motherhood appears to yield opinions that are simplistic and incoherent, rather than insightful. As Illuminaria points out in her brutal fisking, the most pitiful thing is that Susan Paynter thinks that allowing pharmicists the "right to refuse service" is itself a form of government intrusion.

Poking that allows disapproving pharmacists to override us and our doctors when it comes to the filling or refusing of ordinary, everyday birth control prescriptions.

My God, the humanity! Imagine the government poking into our private lives by allowing pharmacists and health care workers to act according to the dictates of their own conscience. Why they should be not poking into private lives by forcing them to do what the government deems right. Excuse me while I faint from horror.....

Anyway, I think it's sad that there are so few rational female voices in politics. There are plenty of canny female commentators, but just about every woman that runs for office is a loon. Maybe that's part of why I'm so leery at the prospect of having a female president.

Despite leftist revisionism, as Hillary is running for president it's important to remember that she likely concealed evidence in the 1990s Whitewater probe, and that all the Clintons' business associates in that venture were indicted by a grand jury and convicted on nearly all counts of fraud and conspiracy. The Clintons themselves would have been criminally prosecuted if the McDougals hadn't fallen on their swords to save them. Some highlights from the Washington Post's Whitewater Timeline.

July 1993 Foster is found dead in a Washington area park. Police rule the death a suicide. Federal investigators are not allowed access to Foster's office immediately after the discovery, but White House aides enter Foster's office shortly after his death, giving rise to speculation that files were removed from his office.

September 1993
First of three meetings in which Treasury Department officials tip off Clinton aides about the progress of the RTC investigation.

October 1993
RTC's criminal referral is rejected by Paula Casey, U.S. attorney in Little Rock and former law student of Bill Clinton.

Aug. 17, 1995
A grand jury charges James and Susan McDougal and Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker with bank fraud relating to questionable loans.

April 22, 1996
David Hale, the former owner of a government-funded lending company who has pleaded guilty to two felonies, testifies at Whitewater trial that in early 1985 then governor Bill Clinton pressured him to make a fraudulent $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal and asked that his name be kept out of the transaction.

May 26, 1996
Gov. Tucker and the McDougals are convicted of nearly all the fraud and conspiracy charges Starr lodged against them 10 months earlier.

May 28, 1996
The White House acknowledges that during four months in late 1993 it wrongly collected FBI background reports on hundreds, including prominent Republicans. Director of personnel security, Craig Livingstone, later takes responsibility.

Aug. 20, 1996
Susan McDougal is sentenced to two years in prison for her role in obtaining an illegal loan for the Whitewater venture.

Sept. 4, 1996
Susan McDougal, who had considered cooperating with prosecutors, says she doesn't trust them. She enters jail for contempt of court rather than testify in front of a grand jury.

Sept. 23, 1996
An FDIC inspector general's report concludes Hillary Clinton drafted a real estate document that Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan used to "deceive" federal regulators in 1986.

April 23, 1998
Susan McDougal, finally serving her two-year fraud sentence after completing her 18-month contempt of court sentence, refuses yet again to testify before Starr's Little Rock grand jury.

Nov. 19, 1998
During the first day of impeachment hearings, Starr clears Clinton in relation to the firing of White House travel office workers in 1993 and the improper collection of FBI files revealed in 1996. He also says his office drafted an impeachment referral stemming from Whitewater in 1997, but decided not to send it because the evidence was insufficient.

"Clears" is relative, and why couldn't the Clintons' be prosecuted for involvement with Whitewater? Because Susan McDougal continually refused to testify and went to jail to protect them? Gee, do you think?