There is a tendency for newly installed presidents, like adolescents suddenly liberated from adult supervision, to do the exact opposite of what their predecessors did. Presidents of both parties indulge in this behavior, though Democrats who campaign as candidates of hope and change are more likely to do so.
If Congress fails to enact health care reform this year -- or if it enacts a sham reform designed to bail out corporate medicine while excluding the "public option" -- then the public will rightly blame Democrats, who have no excuse for failure except their own cowardice and corruption. The punishment inflicted by angry voters is likely to be reduced majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives -- or even the restoration of Republican rule on Capitol Hill.
An 11th Commandment could read: Thou shalt not cheat the meek.
There are two schools of thought on this nation’s health care dilemma. One asserts that the primary issue is the 47 million uninsured.
I always love it when politicians start talking about "the American people" believing this or that, as if we all do and they know it.
As recent AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin tells the story, when a White House aide called him on June 10, Walpin thought the administration was calling him to enlist his support -- as a prominent Republican member of the New York bar -- for the confirmation of Sonya Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court. Instead, Special Counsel to the President Norm Eisen informed Walpin that President Obama wanted Walpin out of his job.
President Obama has a green light and open eight-lane highway for health-care reform. But somehow the guy can't put his foot on the gas.
"We certainly recognize that Chevron does not make a sympathetic victim here," company spokesman Kent Robertson told me over the telephone.
There are no legal grounds for prosecuting Bush administration lawyers who supported the use of enhanced interrogation techniques to thwart planned terrorist attacks, so civil libertarians have the tort system to try to ruin Bush lawyers.
Campaigning to build the widest possible consensus for reform of the nation's health care system, Barack Obama told the delegates of the American Medical Association (AMA) that he wants their support, too.
Rep. Barney Frank, the first member of Congress to be re-elected after coming out, is right in telling gays not to abandon the president.
Many psephologists -- derived from the word for pebbles, which the ancient Greeks used as ballots -- study who wins and loses elections. Lately, I've been looking more closely at turnout. For we live, though most psephologists haven't stopped to notice it lately, in a decade of vastly increased voter turnout.
This has been a tough week for the hopeful ones who believed President Obama's vow to break with the old politics. Every day, it seems, the president caved in to another Democratic interest group working against the public weal.
The big winner of the Obama financial-regulation plan appears to be the Federal Reserve, which becomes the consolidated supervisor of large, systemically important banks.
To quote the esteemed Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the chickens that were hatched in the stimulus package are coming home to roost in the healthcare proposal.
Matt Drudge is obviously not happy: "ABC TURNS PROGRAMMING OVER TO OBAMA; NEWS TO BE ANCHORED FROM INSIDE WHITE HOUSE," his headline screams, in even bigger type than that.
To borrow Niall Ferguson's metaphor, if finance is an evolutionary process, then regulation is its intelligent design -- which, I would add, is a cognate of faith, not science.
Never mind firmer retail sales, rising stock prices and moderating job losses. The greenest shoot is Americans' changing economic fixation. There's less panic over collapsing banks, home foreclosures and the prospect of another Great Depression. Attention has moved to budget deficits and the resulting federal debt. These are worries of a more stable time, when people had the luxury of looking at the long-term.
It shouldn't come as a complete surprise that, as Stephen Hayes reported in The Weekly Standard, detainees in Afghanistan are now being advised of their Miranda rights by American interrogators -- that they have a right to be silent, a right to a lawyer, a right to have that lawyer paid for, etc.
