Category Archives: Political Commentary

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

If You Liked The “Stimulus…”

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…you’ll love ObamaCare. Further thoughts here:

In both cases, despite broad public skepticism, the Democrats pushed forward on their bill while the White House intensified its messaging efforts, turning President Obama loose on crowd after friendly crowd in an effort to sell Middle America on a near-trillion-dollar fix whose murky specifics were in flux even as it approached a final vote. Sure enough, in both cases polling found support for the measure slowly creeping up as Congress passed the measure (with virtually no Republican support.) And in the days immediately after each became law, public support even reached scant majorities or pluralities in some places, with many saying that though the bill was imperfect, it sure beat doing nothing at all.

Liberals, covered in the stink of success, are now enjoying that bump. But, as I outline in the piece, if Obamacare’s post-passage public opinion trajectory is anything like that of the stimulus, they shouldn’t get too comfortable. A year out, the popularity of the stimulus falls somewhere between Tiger Woods and John Edwards. — and for similar reasons. The stimulus is widely-perceived to have been a failure because it didn’t keep its promise to stop and reverse job losses. Instead, 49 of 50 states have lost jobs since the stimulus passed.

We’re only a few days out from Obamacare’s passage and already reports are piling in from businesses bracing for tax increases and coverage changes. Wait until it’s been a year.

Maybe they should have read the bill…

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Another Blow To The Warm Mongers

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Apparently cattle aren’t a greenhouse problem.

Is there anything they’ve gotten right?

[Update a couple minutes later]

You know, the correlation between things that leftists dislike (the beef industry, the energy industry, free markets, personal freedom) and things that we’re told are destroying the planet is positively uncanny. I’m sure it’s just coincidence, though.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Frum Update

Charles Murray dishes the dirt on his departure yesterday, and defends the AEI against what he calls Frum’s false charges.

[Late afternoon update]

Mark Steyn weighs in. With (not unexpectedly) a lot of weight:

So, by David’s own account, AEI should have been happy to go on giving him a hundred grand to do stuff he would have been doing anyway and for which he was already being paid. I mean, The National Post of Canada pays him to write for The National Post of Canada. It’s hard to see why AEI should also chip in. As for his other stated contribution to the cause, I’m not sure that hitherto I’ve ever heard the term “landed” applied to Canadian cabinet ministers. No disrespect – many likable chaps on the team – but I gave a speech last year and “landed” half the Canadian cabinet without even trying, never mind invoicing anyone a six-figure sum for the accomplishment.

I’ve never been that impressed by David Frum. Nothing about this episode has increased my respect.

[Late evening update]

Tunku Varadarajan has more, to confirm Murray’s account.

Political Commentary, Space

Good Space Policy News From The Health-Care Debate

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It’s looking like there’s a good (or at least better — Tucson is a pretty Democrat place) chance that Gabrielle Giffords could lose her seat:

But AHCCCS officials concluded Thursday that the health care overhaul’s so-called “maintenance of effort” requirements require Arizona to keep its Medicaid program at current levels in order to keep getting federal dollars. They said the state will incur $3.8 billion of added costs for its Medicaid population before increased federal funding starts in 2014.

She’s one of three Arizona Dems who voted for it. It would be nice to not only get rid of her as chair of the subcommittee, so she will stop stacking the deck in hearings, but out of the Congress altogether.

Business, Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Good News On ITAR

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I’ve long said (to paraphrase Mark Twain) that ITAR is like the weather — everybody talks about it, but no one ever does anything about it. Well, that may be about to change:

The legislation gives the president the authority to remove satellites and related components from the US Munitions List (USML), hence removing them from the jurisdiction of ITAR. (It would not, though, allow the export of such items to China.) Other provisions of the legislation would direct an ongoing review of the USML “to determine those technologies and goods that warrant different or additional controls”, which could benefit the space industry even if the White House didn’t exercise the provision to remove satellites and related components from the list wholesale.

The legislation passed the House last year, but for several months has been sitting in the Senate, raising fears they may never consider it. But speaking on an ITAR panel at the Satellite 2010 conference last week, David Fite, a staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee but speaking only for himself, said things were going “somewhat on schedule” compared to authorization bills in previous Congresses. That schedule would have the Senate passing its version of the authorization bill by the summer and a conference report reconciling the differences between the two in September or October.

It’s unclear from the reporting whether or not this will fix the problem for launch providers, or just satellite manufacturers. For instance, will it make life easier for the suborbital folks? Of course, the biggest problem is this:

“We are in an election year,” cautioned Fite. In his 11 years on Capitol Hill, he said, “I have never seen an environment that has been this partisan.” Bill Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, concurred. “The danger is that this will become a political issue in an election year, which means it’s not going to be addressed on its merits, it will be addressed by slogans.” That will make it harder for reform to make its way through Congress and could also hurt the administration’s other reform efforts.

I’ve also long said that, as it took Nixon to go to China, only the Republicans can fix ITAR (though Duncan Hunter made sure it would never happen all through the Bush administration) because the Dems can’t afford to look weaker on national defense than they already do. I do fear very much that this will become a casualty of the very ugly campaign we’re heading into.

Political Commentary

Repeal And Replace

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A commenter has an interesting idea for the Republicans next year:

Assuming we get a republican congress in November, the way to repeal ObamaCare is to attached a clause repealing ObamaCare in every single appropriations bill next year. As long as Obama continues to veto them, the federal agencies will not get any money at all. Of course, this requires that the congressional republicans have more balls than Gingrich did at the end of 1995 when he “chickened out” first in this game with Clinton. It is up to the tea party movement to support the election of fiscally conservative candidates who will have the balls to step up to the plate to make sure that ObamaCare gets repealed.

That would require Republican control of both houses, which is possible, but not likely (it will be tough to take over the Senate). But if it happens, the nice thing about it is that the “government shutdown” could be spun this time as being the Democrats’ fault. It won’t even have to be vetoed by the president, because they’d likely filibuster the appropriations bill in the Senate to protect an unpopular measure.

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

Message To Dems

6 Comments

People still don’t like ObamaCare. We’re going to follow your sage advice from yesterday, Mr. President, and “bring it ongo for it.”

And it turns out Nancy Pelosi was right — we had to pass the bill to learn what was in it:

Now that the bill has been safely passed and signed into law, the mainstream press is gradually revealing the scores of delightful provisions tucked away in the 2,700 page abomination: job-killing taxes on businesses, innovation-killing taxes on medical products, suffocating regulations on individual freedoms, wealth-sapping taxes on the middle-class, unprecedented intrusions on personal privacy, unconstitutional mandates on individuals, racially discriminatory preferences for favored groups, a Ponzi-scheme-on-steroids financing mechanism, and spending on a galactic, incomprehensible scale.

Not to mention this:

The health care overhaul will cost U.S. companies billions and make them more likely to drop prescription drug coverage for retirees because of a change in how the government subsidizes those benefits.

In the first two days after the law was signed, three major companies — Deere & Co., Caterpillar Inc. and Valero Energy — said they expect to take a total hit of $265 million to account for smaller tax deductions in the future.

With more than 3,500 companies now getting the tax break as an incentive to keep providing coverage, others are almost certain to announce similar cost increases in the weeks ahead as they sort out the impact of the change.

Figuring out what it will mean for retirees will take longer, but analysts said as many as 2 million could lose the prescription drug coverage provided by their former employers, leaving them to enroll in Medicare’s program.

But “if you like your plan, you’ll be able to keep it.” Right? And just think of all the job creation this will mean. For IRS agents.

“Bring it onGo for it,” indeed. For the Democrats, that bill may be the longest suicide note in history.

[Update mid morning]

(Dr.) Paul Hsieh, on the real ObamaCare fraud.