Politics, Government & Public Policy: April 2009 Archives

Quick follow-up to Monday's story: the feds knew that the low-altitude flights around NYC would cause panic and they demanded secrecy anyway.

In a memo obtained by CBS 2 HD, the Federal Aviation Administration's James Johnston said the agency was aware of "the possibility of public concern regarding DOD (Department of Defense) aircraft flying at low altitudes" in an around New York City. But they demanded total secrecy from the NYPD, the Secret Service, the FBI and even the mayor's office and threatened federal sanctions if the secret got out.

Kinda makes you want to put the government in charge of banking and health care, doesn't it?

"That's why I voted for Sarah Palin and her running mate."

Sarah Palin wouldn't be my first choice for President, but it was strangely revealing that John McCain chose a running mate whose popularity completely eclipsed his own among the base of his party.

(Cross-posted at 24th State.)

The Heritage Foundation has an informative graphic:

Greg Mankiw compares the cut to a cup of coffee:

Just to be clear: $100 million represents .003 percent of $3.5 trillion.

To put those numbers in perspective, imagine that the head of a household with annual spending of $100,000 called everyone in the family together to deal with a $34,000 budget shortfall. How much would he or she announce that spending had to be cut? By $3 over the course of the year--approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks. The other $33,997? We can put that on the family credit card and worry about it next year.

The Christian Science Monitor has more coffee analogies.

So why not mash them together?

How serious is Obama about fiscal discipline?

I don't know about believing in it, but that $100 million sure looks like change.

I don't think the CIA interrogation memos should have been released by the Administration, but former Vice President Dick Cheney is right when he says that they only tell part of the story.

"One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn't put out the memos that showed the success of the effort," Cheney said.

Cheney said he's asked that the documents be declassified because he has remained silent on the confidential information, but he knows how successful the interrogation process was and wants the rest of the country to understand.

"I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country," Cheney said. "I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was."

Obama is in perpetual campaign mode and doesn't seem to know what it means to actually be President. When you're a candidate you can play up information that supports you and leave it to your detractors mention anything contrary. You're not (realistically) expected to be a responsible, neutral dispenser of information because you're speaking for yourself and you're trying to win political office. However, once you've won, when you're actually President, you don't just speak for yourself anymore. You can't wield the levers of government power to manipulate information in your favor.

Most Americans understand that there's a trade-off between liberty and safety. It's a clever turn of phrase that "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." but as with most absolutes it cannot be quite right. There are trade-offs in everything, and though it is noble for one man to die for a cause it is absurd for an entire civilization to do the same. People desire both liberty and safety, but when they are obtained they are both temporary and must be constantly defended. Despite Franklin's implication, however, you can never escape the slippery slope between them.

This is the discussion that Candidate Obama doesn't want to have, but President Obama is responsible for leading. Candidate Obama doesn't want to tell people "this much 'torture' bought you this much safety" because he's afraid that the verdict of the American people at large will be different from the verdict of the groups that put him in power. To avoid the discussion, he "leaked" memos that help his cause as if he were a whistleblower rather than The Man. As President he has a responsibility to all Americans and not only his supporters. When he begins to realize that he will perhaps begin to grow into the Office he already occupies.

(Cross-posted at 24th State.)

I just got home from the Saint Louis Tax Day Tea Party... what a blast! It was the first protest I've been to where I wasn't counter-protesting!

I heard that the park rangers estimated attendance at 8,000 to 10,000 people, and based on my own naive counting I believe it. The atmosphere was incredible, the people were nice and enthusiastic, and everything went off without a hitch. Bill Hennessy, Dana Loesch, the other organizers, and Gateway Pundit (did he help organize?) all deserve a lot of credit.

My impression of the rally:

• It's a learning process. Many of the people there didn't seem to know exactly what to do, probably because this was the first rally they'd been to. The organizers didn't seem to lack for anything: they had free signs and took names and email addresses.
• Getting people out the first time is always the hardest. Now that these 10,000 people have been to one protest, it'll be much easier to get them to come to the next one, and to bring their friends.
• Elected Republicans should be worried. This crowd was their natural constituency, but no one hesitated to boo the officials who didn't show up because they weren't allowed to speak. The speakers went out of their way to highlight the failures of the Republican party over the past nine years, and the crowd was pleased to hear it.
• Representative Todd Aiken was a class act. He stood on stage and watched everything, even though he wasn't allowed/asked to speak. He stood there and took it, even while the crowd chanted "vote them out!".
• People were fired up and wanted to know "now what?". The main advice I'd give to the organizers is that they should have told us what to do next. Every attendee should have been given a flier with contact information for local officials, a URL to a website, and some hint of the next rally or activity that's going to happen. Hopefully the email addresses that were collected will be used for this kind of follow-up, but it would have been nice to have something in-hand when I left.

Here's a few seconds of video from the west side of Keiner Plaza. Keep in mind that there are at least as many people on the east side of the plaza on the opposite side of the speakers' platform.

Click the extended entry for pictures.

Glenn Reynolds gives a good overview of the Tax Day Tea Party movement.

The protests began with bloggers in Seattle, Wash., who organized a demonstration on Feb. 16. As word of this spread, rallies in Denver and Mesa, Ariz., were quickly organized for the next day. Then came CNBC talker Rick Santelli's Feb. 19 "rant heard round the world" in which he called for a "Chicago tea party" on July Fourth. The tea-party moniker stuck, but angry taxpayers weren't willing to wait until July. Soon, tea-party protests were appearing in one city after another, drawing at first hundreds, and then thousands, to marches in cities from Orlando to Kansas City to Cincinnati.

As word spread, people got interested in picking a common date for nationwide protests, and decided on today, Tax Day, as the date. As I write this, various Web sites tracking tea parties are predicting anywhere between 300 and 500 protests at cities around the world. A Google Map tracking planned events, maintained at the FreedomWorks.org Web site, shows the United States covered by red circles, with new events being added every day. ...

There's good news and bad news in this phenomenon for establishment politicians. The good news for Republicans is that, while the Republican Party flounders in its response to the Obama presidency and its programs, millions of Americans are getting organized on their own. The bad news is that those Americans, despite their opposition to President Obama's policies, aren't especially friendly to the GOP. When Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele asked to speak at the Chicago tea party, his request was politely refused by the organizers: "With regards to stage time, we respectfully must inform Chairman Steele that RNC officials are welcome to participate in the rally itself, but we prefer to limit stage time to those who are not elected officials, both in Government as well as political parties. This is an opportunity for Americans to speak, and elected officials to listen, not the other way around."

So, do you think they will listen? If not, what next?

ACORN comes across as rather petty as they dismiss interest in the Tea Party movement as beneath them.

"This is the first we've heard of these so-called 'tea parties.' And, frankly, a bunch of small get-togethers by fringe conservative activists dedicated to simply saying 'no' is of little interest to us," said ACORN spokesman Brian Kettenring.

He did not say where the pro-Obama rallies would take place, leaving open the possibility that they may clash with some tea parties. ...

"The idea that ACORN is out to disrupt these meet-ups of fringe activists is yet another conservative fantasy," Kettenring said.

I'll be at the St. Louis Tax Day Tea Party, maybe we'll see some ACORNers there.

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has written an incredibly myopic piece that tries to tie gun rights proponents to mass murders (also ).

After each horrific shooting, some leaders in Washington have said the solution is to do nothing, simply continue to enforce the existing laws, just as we have been doing. The gun lobby, meanwhile, calls for weakening our already paltry laws to get more guns to more people in more places. It is time for the gun lobby to stop stoking fear among gun owners with false claims about the government. It is time for the gun industry to stop capitalizing on those ginned-up fears to spread weapons of war among the public.

The gun lobby's rhetoric has consequences. We have seen how profound those consequences can be.

We have a gun crisis in America. As important as the economic crisis is, the right to be safe at home and work and play needs at least as much attention from our policymakers as the right to economic security. It is time for leaders in Washington to drop empty platitudes after each horrific shooting, and instead do what they're paid to do: show backbone, and enact reasonable laws to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of dangerous people.

Helmke's argument is completely disingenuous: does he really think psychos who want to murder dozens of people will be stopped by yet another law? No, I don't think he does. Is the Brady Campaign only in favor of "reasonable laws" that "keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of dangerous people"? No, they favor banning all guns. (As does President Obama.)

Let's turn the tables: how many people have died because of anti-gun nuts? How many murders could have been prevented if the victim were armed instead of helpless? How many rapes? How many kidnappings? How many robberies? How many millions? Guns are used in self-defense every day.

And of course, what's the difference between a citizen and a peasant? A gun.

Some Afghani MPs are pretty naive!

Safia Sidiqi, a lawmaker from Nangarhar province who condemned the legislation, said she cannot remember parliament debating or even voting on the law and she does not know how it came to be signed by Karzai. She called for the law to be recalled to parliament for debate.

"It is impossible in a two-month session for parliament to pass a law more than 200 pages long," she said of the 263-page law.

Maybe we should send our Congress over there to train them how to pass laws without reading them. Using this keen new approach to government, our illustrious legislators passed a 1000+ page "stimulus" bill in just a couple of days!

I don't like many of her votes in the Senate, many of her policy preferences, or many of the things she stands for, but I just heard her on the radio with Jamie Allman and I do like her. She was much less evasive than most politicians I've listened to, even to the point of acknowledging that many Missourians are angry about the orgy of bail-outs and spending. She didn't say she'd oppose more bail-outs or spending, but she at least admitted that her upcoming town hall meetings are likely to be unpleasant for her.

It's unfortunate that whatever Republican runs against her next is likely to be much less charismatic and straightforward, despite sharing more of my policy preferences.

(Senator McCaskill, if you find this by Googling your name, please show more sense on the abortion issue and quit prostrating yourself before EMILY's List and the abortion industry.)