The NC Senate appointed their conference committee members for the budget negotiations today. The House has not appointed conferees at this writing. All of the members are Republicans and have been vocal in budget debates in the Senate chamber.
I have on several occasions recently posted about Michael Lind’s supposedly “unanswerable” question to libertarians. Several libertarians have handed Lind his arrogant head already and in this piece, my friend Jacob Hornberger does so.
I suggest turning things around and asking the likes of Lind this question: If your omnipotent state is so great, why have people throughout history risked their lives to escape to places where they find greater freedom?
Protip for the Triangle media: Wake County’s new superintendent, Jim Merrill, is a career administrator, not a career educator. An educator provides instruction. An administrator manages the enterprise that allows instruction to occur. Yes, he was a teacher before he became an administrator, presumably in 1984, but since then, he’s held various administrative posts. That means that Merrill has been a public school administrator for nearly 30 years.
And public schools do not pay “educators” $275,000 a year.
I know that the Democratic majority on the Wake County Board of Education want you to call him a “career educator” to contrast his career with that of the previous superintendent, Tony Tata. But I urge you – do not go gentle into that good night.
Kevin D. Williamson‘s latest column for National Review Online highlights a troubling dilemma.
In politics, scale matters. If government spent 1 percent of GDP annually, we’d probably still have waste, fraud, abuse, self-dealing, and all the rest of it, but it would matter less to people. From a moral point of view, a little misuse of public resources is no different from a lot of it, but adults know that the world is not a perfect place and that we’d be lucky to have problems that bug us symbolically or as a matter of principle while causing us very little trouble in fact. That is the inadequately appreciated background to the current dispute over the NSA’s surveillance programs.
On one side of the debate, we have those who prioritize national security — on the left and on the right — who argue that the world presents such intense dangers that the government must be given certain tools to address them. On the other side, we have those who prioritize civil liberties — also on the left and on the right — who argue that our government has shown that it cannot be trusted with some of those powers. The problem is that both sides are correct. Yes, we need to take very strong measures against jihadists and other mortal threats, and no, our government does not give the appearance of deserving our trust with the weapons in its arsenal. …
… Limiting government improves government operations in two ways, one obvious and one less so. The obvious way is that by limiting the scope and variety of government activity, we can focus limited resources — including that most limited of resources, human intelligence — on the functions that are inherently governmental, such as physical security in the form of police, military, border controls, and the like. This is in conservative thinking complemented by the principle of subsidiarity, which allows for a greater scope and variety of government action as one travels down the scale from national to state to local to sub-municipal government. A homeowners’ association can be annoying, but it is not Leviathan. Moving from California to Texas, or from the Katy school district to the Humble school district, is a much less disruptive undertaking than immigrating between countries. It is for that reason that so many American conservatives admire the government of Switzerland, which has a gift for devolving politics.
The second and less obvious way in which limiting government strengthens government is through the elusive and irreplaceable commodity of trust. Like true love and home-grown tomatoes, trust in political institutions cannot be bought or manufactured. It is organic and fragile.
Want more evidence that global warming alarmists are far from the disinterested scientific observers they pretend to be? Check out this Human Events article from James Taylor.
Global warming alarmists have been caught doctoring the results of a widely cited paper asserting there is a 97 percent scientific consensus regarding human-caused global warming. After taking a closer look at the paper, investigative journalists report the authors’ claims of a 97 percent consensus relied on them misclassifying the papers of some of the world’s most prominent global warming skeptics. At the same time, the authors deliberately presented a meaningless survey question that allowed them to twist the responses to fit their own preconceived global warming alarmism.
Global warming alarmist John Cook, founder of the misleadingly named blog site Skeptical Science, published a paper with several other global warming alarmists claiming they reviewed nearly 12,000 abstracts of studies published in the peer-reviewed climate literature. Cook reported he and his colleagues found 97 percent of the papers that expressed a position on human-caused global warming “endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.”
As is the case with other ‘surveys’ alleging an overwhelming scientific consensus on global warming, the question surveyed did not address the issues of contention between global warming alarmists and skeptics. The question Cook and his colleagues surveyed was simply whether humans have caused some global warming. Most skeptics, like most alarmists, believe humans have caused some global warming. The issue dividing the two is whether humans are causing a global warming crisis demanding concerted action.
Nevertheless, global warming alarmists have been reporting the Cook study shows a 97 percent consensus that humans are causing a global warming crisis.
Your correspondent can attest personally that conversations with such well-known climate “skeptics” as Patrick Michaels, Roy Spencer, and John Christy never have suggested either that the world has not warmed during the past century (though global surface temperatures seem to have leveled off at some point in the 1990s) or that people have played no role in contributing to warming. As the article suggests, the skeptics’ skepticism relates to alarmists’ use or misuse of the scientific record to push policies of questionable value.
In what is most certainly a “dog bites man” story, rather than the more journalistically coveted “man bites dog” alternative, Richard Benedetto documents for Real Clear Politics the latest instance in which mainstream media outlets have treated the 44th president much more gently than his predecessor.
In recent days, there has been discussion about how Democrats and liberals, once severe critics of anti-terror surveillance programs when Republican President George W. Bush was conducting them, have been more careful, and less critical, when responding to the massive data collection sweeps that have come to light under President Obama.
“It is jarring to see the left so compliant now that the surveillance has been sanctioned by a Democratic president,” Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote Sunday.
Milbank raised a valid point. But perhaps even more “jarring” are the carefully chosen, softer words used by the news media when reporting on the Obama program, compared to the inflammatory and alarmist language used when his predecessor was in charge.
When news broke in December 2005 that the Bush administration was engaged in phone wiretaps (without court orders) against suspected terrorists, the major news outlets almost immediately labeled the program “domestic spying.”
“In address, Bush says he ordered domestic spying,” said a Page One headline in The New York Times on Dec. 18, 2005.
The Washington Post, reporting on the same radio address, used similar wording in its headline: “President says he ordered NSA domestic spying.”
The Times and Post news articles each went on to use the word “spying” — which has dark, sinister connotations — four more times, although Bush, in his speech, never used it once. The Post followed up with an editorial: “Spying on Americans.” …
… Fast-forward to June 2013. Obama, thanks to an explosive leak by a National Security Agency contractor, finds himself embroiled in a similar flap over the gathering of domestic intelligence. This time, he is in charge of what appears to be the most sweeping “domestic spying” mission ever undertaken. “Unprecedented” is a word Obama likes to use. That’s what it is. And while the news media have not shied away from covering the controversial program and its citizen-privacy ramifications, the style, tone and use of language are far different from the Bush days.
Mostly gone from the reporting is the loaded phrase “domestic spying.” Instead, we find a flurry of euphemisms such as “call monitoring,” “data collection,” “data mining,” “data gathering” and “electronic surveillance.” Most news outlets that continue to use the word “spying” when referring to the current U.S. intelligence gathering programs are foreign newspapers and broadcasters.
Perhaps it’s hard to admit you’ve been suckered by a false messiah.
It doesn’t appear to be posted yet online, but the opening paragraph of a new Atlantic feature from Peter Orszag and John Bridgeland is worth quoting, even out of context.
Based on our rough calculations, less than $1 out of every $100 of government spending is backed by even the most basic evidence that the money is being spent wisely. As former officials in the administrations of Barack Obama (Peter Orszag) and George W. Bush (John Bridgeland), we were flabbergasted by how blindly the federal government spends. In other types of American enterprise, spending decisions are usually quite sophisticated, and are rapidly becoming more so: baseball’s transformation into “moneyball” is one example. But the federal government — where spending decisions are largely based on good intentions, inertia, hunches, partisan politics, and personal relationships — has missed this wave.
Later in the piece, Bridgeland documents the impact of the Program Assessment Rating Tool, a 2002 innovation designed to root out ineffective government programs.
By the end of Bush’s second term, PART had assessed about 1,000 programs. Of them, 19 percent were rated “effective,” 32 percent “moderately effective,” 29 “adequate,” 3 percent “ineffective,” and 17 percent “results not demonstrated” (meaning that the programs couldn’t be assessed, because of insufficient data). This information was used to develop the president’s budget proposals to Congress, but PART was not developed in cooperation with Congress, and Congress gave its assessment little heed.
Still think government spending is no big problem? Check out another highlighted quotation from Orszag and Bridgeland’s article at the right.
Peter Wehner documents for Commentary magazine’s online readers evidence of President Obama’s second-term woes.
According to the most recent CNN poll, President Obama’s approval rating dropped eight points over the past month (it’s down to 45 percent, his lowest in more than a year and a half). The main erosion occurred among people under 30 years of age (-17 points) and independents (-10). Mr. Obama’s approval-disapproval rating among independents is now 37/61.
Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed say they disagree with the president’s views on the size and power of the federal government. Fifty-three percent say Mr. Obama cannot manage the government effectively. And for the first time in his presidency, half of the public says they don’t believe Mr. Obama is honest and trustworthy. (The number of Americans who think he is honest has dropped nine points over the past month, to 49 percent.)
None of these findings is surprising; they are the result of the various scandals and controversies engulfing the administration and a second-term agenda that was dead in the water after 100 days.
The president is hardly in free-fall. But he is in an unusually weak position as he is about to enter the first summer of his second term. It’s not at all clear what large goals and achievements he’s hoping to accomplish. There is, at least for now, a feeling of drift and entropy, with the president and his administration on defense. And next year there’s a mid-term election which historically punishes the president’s party.
The multiple failures of Mr. Obama’s first term are exerting a drag on his second term. This doesn’t mean the president can’t recover. It only means it won’t be easy.
