Congressman: ACORN Investigation "Will Lead to the White House"

Does Obama Listen to Himself?

By Mona Charen

Barack Obama is demonstrating bottomless reservoirs of gracelessness. A full 13 months after his election, in the course of justifying the deployment of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, President Obama could not spare a word of praise for George W. Bush -- not even when recounting the nation's "unified" response to 9/11. To the contrary, throughout his pained recitation of the choices we face in Afghanistan, he adverted at least half a dozen times to the supposed blunders of his predecessor.
It's beginning to sound whiny -- and unpresidential. Enough about the terrible mess he inherited. Let's hear a little more about the tremendous honor that has been bestowed on him. Ronald Reagan inherited a worse situation in 1980 -- inflation at 13.5 percent; the prime rate at 21 percent; the Soviets in Afghanistan; American hostages in Tehran; communist coups in 10 new countries over the previous decade -- but Reagan never impugned his predecessor. As biographer Lou Cannon noted "Reagan ... was generous to Carter in his public statements even though he did not care for him."

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George W. Bush showed the same chivalry toward Bill Clinton, declining to breathe a negative word about him -- even when sorely tempted by the pardon scandal that further tarnished an already clouded tenure. Even now, despite the unremitting barrage from his successor, Bush keeps silent, true to his tradition of civility toward opponents.
President Obama is so spiteful that he warps history to fit his prejudices. Everything was going brilliantly in Afghanistan, he explains, until "the decision was made to wage a second war, in Iraq." Iraq took the lion's share of resources and ruined our international reputation, he argues. But in the next sentence, without acknowledging the surge (far less the courage Bush demonstrated in pursuing it despite tremendous political and military pressure against it), Obama boasts that "we are bringing the Iraq War to a successful conclusion" and "successfully leaving Iraq to its people."
No doubt Obama's "success" in Iraq is attributable, as he sees it, to the fact that "I've spent this year renewing our alliances and forging new partnerships" including "a new beginning" between America and the Muslim world. Oh yes, that's going so well. As the Taliban gain strength in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the chief object of Mr. Obama's flirtation, Iran, spat in the eyes of the U.S. and the U.N. last week by announcing that it will build 10 new nuclear enrichment facilities. This follows contemptuous brush-offs from Iran's bosses. In November, Ayatollah Khameini again spurned Obama's "many private approaches" saying it would be "perverted" to negotiate with the United States.
President Obama has been crystal clear that Bush's "arrogance" led to disaster for the United States. And once again, he's at pains to emphasize his new approach. The president assured the Afghans that "America is your partner, never your patron" (though a miserably poor and besieged country might like a patron very much). The odd thing is Obama's tone toward our "partners" sounded downright scolding in several places. "This effort must be based on performance. The days of providing a blank check are over." That is not exactly partnerish talk. "... We will be clear," he continued, "about what we expect from those who receive our assistance ... We expect those who are ineffective or corrupt to be held accountable."
It would be nice if that standard were applied to Washington, D.C., far less Kabul. But this is the tone of his vaunted new diplomacy? Of Pakistan, the president said, "In the past, we too often defined our relationship ... narrowly. Those days are over. Moving forward, we are committed to a partnership ... built on ... mutual interest, mutual respect, and mutual trust." But then comes the poke in the shoulder: "... We have made it clear that we cannot tolerate a safe haven for terrorists whose location is known and whose intentions are clear."
Well, perhaps President Obama doesn't realize how he sounds. That must be it. He had the gall, after kneecapping Bush, to demand a halt to "rancor" and "partisanship." But the greater outrage was his pious declaration that "we must make it clear to every man, woman, and child around the world who lives under the dark cloud of tyranny that America will speak out on behalf of their human rights"? This from the man whose State Department told China early on that human rights were not our priority; who has decided he can deal with the butchers of Darfur; who averted his eyes from the bloody crackdown on protests in Iran; and who tamely permitted the Chinese to censor his words during his visit.
But there's no cause for self-examination. There's still George W. Bush to kick around.

Bam: Man in the muddle

Perhaps it was inevitable. A man who voted "pres ent" 130 times in the Illi nois Legislature couldn't possibly morph into a savvy and decisive leader of the free world in such a short time.
Yet even the pessimists among us are alarmed by the cloud of uncertainty and confusion hanging over the White House. Less than a year on the job, President Obama seems to have run out of both charm and ideas.
The biggest issues facing a president are the economy and national security. They are the whole ballgame. Everything else is detail.
It is now frighteningly obvious Obama doesn't have a clear, understandable strategy on either.

Helayne Seidman

Robert Morgenthau

It's one thing to lack confidence in a president's plan. It's quite another when he doesn't have a plan.
He began his hokey job summit by conceding many viewed it as a gimmick, then promptly confirmed those suspicions by saying it was time to put aside partisanship. This from the guy who gives blank checks and high praise to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, the most partisan congressional leaders in recent memory.
Obama also said he was open to new ideas, then shot down a corporate executive who complained too many big-government initiatives were creating uncertainty and leading employers to hold off hiring.
The president said it was a "legitimate concern," then plunged ahead by rote to defend health care, carbon taxes and massive education spending -- the very things the exec said were the problem.
Why bother telling him anything? He doesn't listen to what he doesn't want to hear.
He certainly didn't listen to the advisers who warned him his Afghanistan speech would come off as a muddle. It was clear to some in his endless war council that sending 30,000 more troops to fight a war he called vital, then slapping an 18-month limit was by definition a contradiction.
Predictably, liberals blasted the escalation, under which Obama has tripled the American troop presence from about 35,000 to over 100,000. Conservatives blasted the deadline as dangerous to those troops and their mission.
As a fuming Sen. John McCain memorably declared, "You can't have it both ways."
Apparently, you can if you are Barack Obama. At least you think you can.
He is probably taking comfort in a common political conceit. To wit, that bipartisan criticism proves the policy is the sound middle between extremes.
Not this time. This time, the middle path reflects a transparent effort at political compromise that has nothing to do with sound policy. After three months of deliberation, he punted on the central question.

Either the war is vital, or it's not. It can't be vital until an arbitrary deadline.
Two days of hearings on Capitol Hill didn't clarify the issue. Top aides alternately called the deadline flexible and important, leaving the muddle in place.
If Obama has any sense of the dimensions of the doubts he faces, he's keeping it well hidden. He's going to Copenhagen to push for global emissions rules, even as the science consensus he touts was arrived at by cooking the books and squelching dissent.
If he actually succeeded getting the rules in place at home, they would add another burden to job creation and economic growth. Still he plunges forward, unmolested by inconvenient facts.

Facts schmacts, reality is what the White House says it is.
Take the $787 billion stimulus bill, the economic equivalent of an empty suit. Just in time for the jobs summit, Vice President Joe Biden suddenly declared it saved or created up to 1.6 million jobs. That was a cool million jobs more than claimed before.
Poof. A million more jobs. That was easy.
Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau appears determined to end his long career on a sour note -- and a questionable one at that. City Hall found 68 bank accounts it didn't know existed containing $83 million Morgenthau deposited from settlements. The city's insistence he turn the money over led him to accuse the mayor's office of a "power grab" and "chickens- - - comments."
Good thing the 90-year-old prosecutor is retiring. It's clearly time to go.
Pols finally chipping away at pension costs
Finally, good news on the gloom-and-doom deficit front, with the Legislature ratifying deals Gov. Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg struck with unions to reduce soaring pension costs.
Paterson estimates the state will save billions over the long haul, with a new pension tier raising the minimum age for civilians to retire from 55 to 62 and the minimum years required for a pension from five to 10. The provisions, which apply only to employees hired after Jan. 1, also cap the amount of overtime used to calculate benefits. Slightly different terms apply to state teachers.
The city deal, covering only its teachers so far, will save $100 million a year, Bloomy says. New employees will contribute more to their pensions and, as in the state, will need to work at least 10 years to get one.
In truth, the changes are modest, given the huge deficits and the fact that many of the taxpayers who foot the bill for government workers are losing their jobs and nest eggs completely.
Still, this is a good first step in paring back the outrageous cost of labor, with each city worker averaging $107, 000 annually.
Keep the cuts coming.
Noose is tightening for Hevesi
The central mystery in the state pension-fund scandal was whether disgraced Democratic former Comptroller Alan Hevesi got a cut of the gusher of payoffs involved. Although his political consultant, Hank Morris, allegedly got $24 million in fees, outside fixer Ray Harding took $800,000, and Hevesi's top deputies reportedly pocketed hundreds of thousands, probers were not able to confirm suspicions Hevesi benefited from the scam run out of his office.
Until now.
The announcement by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo that investment manager Elliott Broidy had admitted paying $1 million in bribes to officials included at least $75,000 spent on lavish trips and other benefits for Hevesi. In return, Broidy got $250 million of state pension money to invest, which earned him $18 million in fees.
He is giving the money back and is cooperating with Cuomo, as are several others. All of which means Hevesi ought to squirm.
His pattern was to tell people seeking investment money to see Morris, who didn't even work for the government. After Morris received large finder fees, Hevesi, with sole authority for the pension funds, would turn over hundreds of millions for the investors to manage.
The belief that Hevesi was getting a cut of Morris' fees was based in part on the fact he wasn't against stealing. He had pleaded guilty and resigned after being caught using a state employee as a chauffeur and servant for his wife, so prosecutors had reason to think he was getting something for his pension decisions.
Now they have evidence. My bet is there's more to come. Plenty more.
Quite a party trick
Thanks to Tiger Woods, we've learned of a new occu pation. One of the women in volved, Rachel Uchitel, is in variably called a "party girl." Then again, maybe it's just a new way of describing the world's oldest occupation.

Obama Persists on Broad Front as Polls Drop

By Mort Kondracke

President Barack Obama has so loaded up the policy circuits this month that you'd expect a government-wide blackout any minute.

Still, in spite of declining approval ratings for him and most of his policies, he's decided to forge ahead - on Afghanistan, health care, jobs, climate change and deficit reduction. Give him credit for courage and tenacity, even if all the details aren't right.

Even though his Afghanistan speech and health care are at the front of the media agenda, I'd say his most important event this week is today's jobs summit because job creation - legitimately - is the No. 1 issue in the minds of voters.

The mid-November Washington Post/ABC poll showed that Obama's approval rating on the economy has dropped from 60 percent in March to 51 percent, though objectively he's probably not getting the credit he deserves.

Obama inherited what amounts to an economic 9/11, and his stimulus package, the bank bailouts and action by the Federal Reserve really did stave off calamity - at least so far.

As a White House official told me in an interview, "I've heard a lot of criticism about how we did all this spending to no effect.

"The truth is, most economists from right to left agree that the stimulus package had a great deal to do with growth in the third quarter.

"Now the same people who were criticizing us for doing something that had no impact are saying, ‘Yeah, we had growth, but it was only because of the stimulus package.' Well, you've got to choose a horse and ride it."

Indeed, on Monday, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the stimulus raised the gross domestic product in the third quarter by 1.2 to 3.2 percent above what it would have been and increased employment by 600,000 to 1.6 million.

But unemployment still was at 10.2 percent in October and may be higher when November figures come out on Friday.

Even though liberal economists and Members of Congress are arguing for a new stimulus package, a White House official told me, "There's a limit to what government can do in terms of these cycles. Some of it just has to work its way through the system.

"We also have a fiscal crisis so if we overspend to create minimum effects, it just adds to another problem," he said.

Still, Obama has to - and presumably will - do something to stimulate job creation, and it might help if he tried tax cuts for small business as well as possible infrastructure spending and aid to state and local governments.

A tax credit or corporate tax reduction for firms that add jobs to their payrolls might even pay for themselves in tax revenue.

My opinion is that Obama should have concentrated in his first year on the economic crisis and financial services reform to prevent it from happening again - plus Afghanistan and Iran - but he's determined to push forward on a broad front.

Financial reform is unconscionably delayed and banks are paying out big bonuses while not lending, but it's probable Obama will get a health care reform bill to sign by the time he delivers his State of the Union address.

Polls show that a majority of voters disapprove of the health care bills making their way through Congress, but administration officials say they are delighted with their progress and with the contents, especially, of the Senate's measure.

On Wednesday, Obama budget director Peter Orszag declared, "We stand on the verge of a dramatic accomplishment - not only meeting the moral imperative as the world's foremost economic power in dramatically [reducing] the rates of its uninsured, not only doing it in a fiscally responsible way, but also putting in place the key tools that will lead to the health system of the future, emphasizing quality and not quantity."

He's relying on features of the Senate bill - a commission to impose Medicare cuts, taxation of high-priced insurance plans, digital medical records and tests of provider payment reforms - to hold down costs, but some of them are opposed by House Democrats.

Democrats in both the House and Senate, too, are resisting his 30,000-troop surge in Afghanistan - now widely labeled "escalation" - even though he tried to assure them he has an exit strategy in mind.

And on it goes. Obama will be heading off to the Copenhagen climate summit even though his cap-and-trade bill seems dead in the Senate. He'll make commitments there to go along with new promises won from China and India, but it remains to be seen whether any action really will lessen emissions.

Obama has sent so many policy ships out to sea that at least some of them should return successfully. But some could crash on the rocks - and if that includes job creation, he's in trouble.

Mort Kondracke is the Executive Editor of Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill since 1955. © 2007 Roll Call, Inc.

Cringing Over Climategate

A major scandal was exposed. So why won't Obama acknowledge it?

"Science and scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my administration on a wide range of issues, including … mitigation of climate change," President Barack Obama declared in a not-so-subtle dig at his predecessor soon after assuming office. "The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process. Public officials should not suppress or alter scientific technological findings."
Last week's Climategate scandal is putting Obama's promise to the test. If he wants to pass, there are two things he should do, pronto: (1) Start singing hosannas to whoever broke the scandal instead of acting like nothing has happened; and (2) Ask eco-warriors at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit next week to declare an immediate cease-fire in their war against global warming pending a complete review of the science.
Someone--a whistleblower or a hacker--got into the computers of University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit in England, also known as the Hadley Research Center, and revealed reams of e-mails showing that its leading climatologists had engaged in all kinds of scientific shenanigans including manipulating data, destroying evidence that didn't support their conclusions and keeping contrarian scientists from being published in peer-reviewed journals.
The revelations are significant because the Hadley Center is no marginal outfit. It is among the most influential research organizations in the field whose work forms the basis of all official global warming reports, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N. body that serves as the Vatican of global warming.
One e-mail as recent as last month acknowledged that global temperatures plateaued in 1998, something that skeptics have been pointing out for years and warming warriors have been pooh-poohing. "The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment," the e-mail confessed. But instead of celebrating the good news that the planet may not ineluctably fry to a crisp, the e-mail continues with its gloom and doom, blaming an "inadequate observing system" for not picking up on the warming.

This wouldn't be such a big deal if other e-mails didn't show even worse malfeasance. "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith to hide the decline [of temperatures]," one said. To most people with normal IQs, the words "trick" and "hide" in the same sentence would suggest manipulation of data. But the brainiacs at Hadley claim that these are just standard colloquialism that scientists use to describe completely innocent operations.


Really? Then how do they explain this 2005 e-mail by Phil Jones, the director of the center, to the aforementioned Mike. "The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone… We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind." The "two MMs" refers to Canadian researchers Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. And--lo and behold--when one of them asked Jones for his data, what did he do? He hid behind the data protection act. But no, there is nothing premeditated here!
Why was Jones so afraid of the two MMs? Because they had debunked Mike's--or Michael Mann of Penn State University's--infamous "hockey stick" graph that supposedly offered proof positive that humans were warming the earth. It showed that global temperatures had remained flat for a millennium only to spike sharply in the 20th century following the industrial revolution. But McIntyre and McKitrick found that the innocent "tricks" that Mann was performing on the data were so riddled with methodological errors that even the IPCC was forced to remove the graph from its official reports.
One would have thought that the hockey-stick episode would have instilled some humility in the Hadley gang, prompting them to invite ever greater scrutiny and debate of their work. That is, after all, what real scientists would do. Think again. In fact, the e-mails show that they did the exact opposite. Around the time the "two MMs" went public with their analysis in 2003, Mann urged his colleagues to blacklist Climate Research, a journal that had published research by skeptics. "I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal," he wrote. "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit or cite papers in this journal."
This is precisely the kind of perfidy that undermines public trust in the scientific process that Obama pledged to restore. So if Obama had his priorities straight, he would end his radio silence and thank the authors of Climategate for performing a great public service. Indeed, if President Bush had been so lucky, perhaps fate would have contrived a WMDgate for him before he launched the Iraq invasion and saved him from the worst mistake of his presidency.

It is worth recalling that Bush too was relying on an international consensus--especially reports by U.N. arms inspectors--that Saddam Hussein was sitting atop stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction as a justification for war. "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," Bush said in a 2003 prewar declaration calculated to escalate the hysteria level against Saddam. After a two-year-long wild goose chase through the deserts of Iraq, Bush was finally forced to admit that Saddam no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction. But at least the phony consensus on which he based his decision was intact at the eve of the war.
However, Climategate is fast shattering the global warming consensus, and so Obama won’t have even that to hide behind should he go ahead and sign up the U.S. to cut its carbon emissions 80% below 2005 levels by 2050 at Copenhagen next week. There is zero chance right now that Congress will endorse these cuts, which will dwarf the trillion-dollar Iraq price tag. So Obama won't really be able to advance his foolish crusade, but he will lose the opportunity to protect his own integrity by joining the growing chorus of voices--some of them of global warming believers--demanding a thorough investigation of this episode. Former Chancellor Lord Lawson is asking the British government to launch a formal inquiry about it. Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican, is doing the same here in the U.S. Penn State is launching an investigation of Mr. Hockey Stick Mann's conduct. Calls for Phil Jones resignation are rising in England.
But the issues go beyond the misconduct of just one outfit. One of the dirty little secrets of the field revealed by the scandal is that climate scientists, though they are publicly funded, don't as a matter of routine make their raw data publicly available. This makes it exceedingly difficult for their peers to replicate their findings, subverting the scientific method at its core. Judy Curry of Georgia Tech, a stalwart in the field who is convinced that global warming is real, is exhorting her colleagues to end this incestuous tribalism and open their work to scrutiny, even of skeptics." Make all your data, metadata and codes openly available," she urges. Meanwhile, George Monbiot--the British media's alarmist-in-chief who has called global warming the "moral question of the 21st century"--is demanding a reanalysis of the climate science data.
A complete airing of the science of global warming, which is looking less and less avoidable by the day, might eventually vindicate the claims of climate warriors. Or it might not. The only thing Obama can control in this matter is which side he will support: The truth, or--what he accused his predecessor of--ideology.
Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a biweekly columnist at Forbes.

EDITORIAL: Obama in handcuffs

International Criminal Court seeks to extend its jurisdiction

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Imagine if President Obama went to Oslo next week to receive his Nobel Peace Prize and was arrested for purported war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. This bit of historical irony would be possible under an argument being made by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Mr. Ocampo claims jurisdiction over actions of U.S. troops in Afghanistan because Kabul in 2003 acceded to the Rome Statute, which established the court. He said a preliminary examination already is under way regarding possible American culpability in crimes against humanity.
There are 110 ratified parties to the agreement, but of them, only Afghanistan has a major U.S. combat-force presence, and the United States does not recognize the treaty. President Clinton signed the Rome Statute in December 2000, but the Senate did not ratify the treaty, and Mr. Clinton's signature was nullified by President George W. Bush in May 2002. The Bush administration was concerned that the ICC would become a permanent arena for endless harassment of American military personnel and civilian leaders on trumped-up war-crimes charges. But under Mr. Ocampo's logic, the court's jurisdiction would be determined by the nation in which foreign forces or personnel are stationed regardless of whether the forces' home country recognized the treaty. The United States would have to face the music.
As early as September, Mr. Ocampo was investigating allegations of "massive attacks, collateral damage exceeding what is considered proper, and torture" conducted by coalition forces. Those who believe that Mr. Ocampo only has a case against the previous administration should think again.
Several events have taken place under Mr. Obama's watch that could bring charges for war crimes. On May 4, American bombers killed as many as 147 Afghan civilians, 93 of them children, in an air strike in western Afghanistan that locals call the Farah Massacre. On Sept. 4, up to 90 civilians were killed by two 500-pound bombs dropped by a U.S. F-15 fighter on fuel trucks in Kunduz province that had been hijacked by the Taliban but were stuck in the mud. About 500 civilians had gathered to help themselves to the fuel when the air strike hit. Even the widespread use of unmanned drone aircraft to conduct strikes on terror targets is considered illegal activity in some quarters - and that is a program the Obama administration has openly endorsed and expanded.
The United States is well-equipped to defend itself against predatory moves by The Hague. In August 2002, Congress passed the American Service-Members' Protection Act to "protect United States military personnel and other elected and appointed officials of the United States government against criminal prosecution by an international criminal court to which the United States is not party." The act authorized the president to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of or at the request of the International Criminal Court." Presumably, this act authorizes the use of force should the ICC seek to force Americans to trial.
The Obama administration has thus far been largely sympathetic to the global court and its mission. It endorsed Mr. Ocampo's move to indict Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on genocide charges, and in August, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said it is "a great regret, but it is a fact that we are not yet a signatory. But we have supported the court and continue to do so." We wonder if the United States would continue to support the court with the president in handcuffs.

 

He Hasn't Accomplished Nothing

Does anyone have confidence in Barack Obama?

By JAMES TARANTO

Slate's Jacob Weisberg doesn't think Barack Obama has accomplished nothing, and Weisberg ain't usin' no bad grammar neither. Weisberg disputes the "conventional wisdom about Obama"--to wit, that he "hasn't done anything yet." This, he claims, "isn't just premature--it's sure to be flipped on its head by the anniversary of his inauguration on Jan. 20." Or maybe not sure. Weisberg continues:

If, as seems increasingly likely, Obama wins passage of a health care reform a bill by that date, he will deliver his first State of the Union address having accomplished more than any other postwar American president at a comparable point in his presidency. This isn't an ideological point or one that depends on agreement with his policies. It's a neutral assessment of his emerging record--how many big, transformational things Obama is likely to have made happen in his first 12 months in office.

Actually, maybe Weisberg does have a problem with grammar. He certainly has a problem with logic. He claims to have disproved the claim that Obama "hasn't done anything yet"--a formulation in the present perfect tense--by citing something Obama hasn't done yet!
Further, Weisberg's "if" is not an insubstantial one, especially given that any "health care reform" bill would have to be passed by the Senate, which so far has only approved a motion to end debate on a motion to begin debate, and that by the absolute minimum required number of votes. With public opinion increasingly turning against the effort, passage of such a bill can hardly be taken for granted.
What's more, Weisberg himself admits that "health care reform" could be a dubious accomplishment indeed:

The bill he signs may be flawed in any number of ways—weak on cost control, too tied to the employer-based system, and inadequate in terms of consumer choice. But given the vastness of the enterprise and the political obstacles, passing an imperfect behemoth and improving it later is probably the only way to succeed where his predecessors failed.

Despite not being a politician, Weisberg is not as honest as Robert Reich, so he doesn't even mention that ObamaCare could end up impoverishing the young, killing the old, and stifling medical innovation.
Keep in mind that Weisberg is a flatterer, not a critic, of Obama's. When he says the president may end up burdening the country with an "imperfect behemoth," he means it as praise, and lavish praise at that. Objectively, this is faint praise at best--and that is just the tip of the Weisberg. By his standard of presidential greatness--the making happen of "big, transformational things"--George W. Bush was a great president if you believe that the liberation of Iraq was the greatest disaster in the history of American foreign policy.
Yesterday we noted that a Georgetown University scholar had this to say about the president's prolonged show of irresoluteness over Afghanistan: "I don't think he is an indecisive person, I just think this is a tough one." That this was meant as a defense shows how little confidence the speaker has in Obama. The test of decisiveness, after all, is not how one faces the easy questions.
In a related vein is this comment from former Enron adviser Paul Krugman on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos":

If there's one thing that this president is good at [it] is explaining things. That's what he ought to be able to do. And look, I mean, I feel a little bit sorry for him. This was inflicted upon him. This was--he was left a legacy . . . of basically a failed war, a war that might have been won quite easily in 2001, 2002, if Bush hadn't had his eyes on Iraq instead. And now he has got to play catch-up. I'm sure he would prefer not to be doing this at all. He's kind of in a political box. What can you do?

This, of course, is an echo of Obama's own incessant whining about the "mess" he "inherited" when he somehow, through no fault of his own, became president. But there is one additional element here: Paul Krugman doesn't have confidence in Obama. He feels sorry for him.
Obama's strongest sympathizers in the media don't seem to have anything to offer him right now except sympathy. They are able to praise him only by holding him to ridiculously low standards. Does anyone in America have real confidence in Barack Obama? Does he have it in him to inspire it?
Great Moments in Socialized Medicine
"Poor nursing care, filthy wards and lack of leadership at Basildon and Thurrock University NHS Hospitals FoundationTrust led to the deaths of up to 400 patients a year," London's Daily Telegraph reported Thursday:

Figures compiled by a health watchdog showed death rates at the Essex trust were a third higher than they should have been.

Among the worst failings discovered by the Care Quality Commission were a lack of basic nursing skills, curtains spattered with blood on wards, mould in vital equipment and patients being left in A&E for up to ten hours.

Concerns about death rates at the foundation hospital trust were first raised a year ago, but an internal investigation failed to find anything wrong and managers dismissed the concerns.

But the new report found "systematic failings" in the trust's management, all of whom are still in their jobs. The CQC said its confidence in the management's ability had been "severely dented."

Perhaps the only good news in the whole story comes from former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, who observes: "And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn't help thinking that I was watching a form of treason--treason against the planet."
Sorry, wrong quote. We mean this one: "I predict that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society."
Whoops, wrong again. OK, let's try once more: "In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We've all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false."
That's it. Third time's the charm. And do you know what, Krugman is right. The Daily Mail has the number of deaths cited in the "shocking report" as just 70--well, "at least 70." Oh, but wait, the Mail's Saturday follow-up raises the figure to 3,000. The left-wing Observer, a Sunday paper, says 5,000.
But does it really matter? As Stalin is said to have observed, while one death is a tragedy, a million are a statistic. And here's a first for this feature: a tragedy--or prospective tragedy--here in the U.S. It comes from Krugman's New York Times colleague, Nicholas Kristof, who has no connection to Enron.
It seems that 23-year-old John Brodniak has a cavernous hemangioma, "an abnormal growth of blood vessels, and in John's case it is chronically leaking blood into his brain." He suffers from constant pain, impairments of memory and coordination, and nausea and vomiting. There is a danger of premature death should a blood vessel burst. Surgery could relieve his condition, but he says doctors won't operate on him because he's uninsured, and he can't get insurance because he has a pre-existing condition.
If any of our readers are in a position to help this young man, please email us and we'll pass the information along to Kristof.
From the standpoint of public policy, though, the key passage in the Kristof column is this one:

In August, he qualified for an Oregon Medicaid program, but he hasn't been able to find a doctor who will accept him as a patient for surgery, apparently because the reimbursements are so low.

Somehow Kristof thinks he has made an argument for more government control over health care, when in fact the case he has made against it is nothing short of devastating.
Keep America Beautiful
To help pay for the ObamaCare boondoggle, Democrats in the Senate have proposed a 5% tax on "any cosmetic surgery that is not necessary to address deformities arising from congenital abnormalities, personal injuries resulting from an accident or trauma, or disfiguring diseases," the New York Times reports. Such operations already get unfavorable treatment in the tax code, under which they are not deductible medical expenses.
The Times, to its credit, tells the opponents' side of the story, but this comment is a non sequitur:

The 7,000-member American Society of Plastic Surgeons said its internal surveys showed that 60 percent of members' patients earn less than $90,000 a year.

"A lot of people think of this as a tax on rich Republican housewives; rich, nonworking Republican housewives," said Dr. Phil Haeck, the group's president-elect. "And that's not the case."

By definition, someone who doesn't work for pay has an earned income of zero. Thus the ASPS's statistics are consistent with up to 60% of cosmetic-surgery patients being "nonworking Republican housewives," although our guess is that the proportion isn't actually quite that high.
Are Usurious?
Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com has a very amusing follow-up on the Acorn stings. It turns out that in its 2005 annual report, Acorn boasted that one of its employees, Christina Talarczyk of San Antonio, had cooperated with a major broadcast TV network in a hidden-camera journalistic sting not unlike the ones that hit Acorn this summer. Talarczyk, who worked as a tax preparer for the organization, wanted to call attention to "refund anticipation loans," which she believed were usurious:

In March 2004, Christina introduced millions of primetime television viewers to RAL scams when she played an undercover role in a segment of Dateline, NBC's Emmy-winning investigative news program.

Pretending to be a naive tax preparation customer, Christina walked into a Jackson Hewitt office with a Dateline producer who had a camera hidden in his sunglasses. The tax preparation employees were caught on camera as they tried to convince Christina to take out a high-interest RAL. "The Jackson Hewitt employee said it takes the IRS too long to process a refund, and made RALs seem so much faster," Christina explains. "It was surreal to see myself on TV. I had family members calling from Minnesota and New Mexico to tell me they'd seen it."

One suspects many of her Acorn colleagues' families were considerably less proud to see them on TV. Better to sting than to be stung. As a matter of journalistic ethics, though, it's difficult to conceive of a standard by which the Talarczyk-NBC sting would measure up but the Giles-O'Keefe-Breitbart sting of Acorn would not.
Accountability Journalism
The Associated Press manages to find fault with the Obama administration, but the case it makes could hardly be weaker:

President Barack Obama entered the White House promising a new era of openness in government, but when it comes to bad news, his administration often uses one of the oldest tricks in the public relations playbook: putting it out when the fewest people are likely to notice.

Former White House environmental adviser Van Jones' resignation over controversial comments hit the trifecta of below-the-radar timing: The White House announced the departure overnight on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend, when few journalists were on duty and few Americans awake, much less paying attention to the news.

If the White House has a pattern of making news at times when journalists aren't "on duty," doesn't that suggest that news organizations ought to reconsider which hours their employees work?
What's more, the "controversial comments" that led to Van Jones's resignation had been reported by Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck in July. There was ample time for reporters at the AP and other "mainstream" news outlets to bring their readers and viewers the "bad news," had they been inclined to do so. Or maybe all journalists are off duty for the entire month of August.
The Metric System, Explained
A passage in a Reuters dispatch on Bethlehem (the one in the Bible, not Pennsylvania) clarifies something that has long mystified this column:

Foreign tourists are whisked through Bethlehem from nearby Jerusalem on half-day visits organized by tour companies located in Israel. The two cities are divided by just a few kilometers (miles) but also an Israeli wall that complicates the journey.

Of course. "Kilometers" are miles. Now it all makes sense. The one complication is that they're the wrong length.
An Athlete Puts Things in Perspective
"You never forget that day. That was pretty unbelievable for all of us. A lot of us you know, your first chance to play in a Super Bowl and winning the Super Bowl, and of course the circumstances of that year with 9-11 happening and U2 performing at halftime--that was pretty unbelievable."--New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady on Super Bowl XXXVI, quoted by the Associated Press. Nov. 26
We Blame Global Warming
"Hezbollah Blames U.S. for All Terrorism"--headline, CNN.com, Nov. 30