Category Archives: Politics

Further commentary on shakedown artist Barack Obama

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As I noted last week, the Obama administration believes it’s the civic duty of some Chrysler investors to lose more money than they should by law and contract so that the unions, who are major investors in the Obama administration, can lose less; when said investors balked at the idea, the president threatened to turn the awesome power of his tame PR flacks (aka the White House press corps, an arm of our “independent media”) loose on them to destroy them.

Megan McArdle summarized the situation this way:

I see a lot of liberal blogs crowing that Obama’s really taking it to the hedge funds who are holding out on the Chrysler bankruptcy. Hedge fund managers, you see, have a civic duty to lose large amounts of other people’s money in order to ensure that the UAW makes as few sacrifices as possible in a bankruptcy.

Predictably, I got a couple liberal commenters popping up saying, in essence, “What’s bad about this?”  Well, let’s start off with McArdle again:

Which brings us to the real question, which is, when did it become the government’s job to intervene in the bankruptcy process to move junior creditors who belong to favored political constituencies to the front of the line? Leave aside the moral point that these people lent money under a given set of rules, and now the government wants to intervene in our extremely well-functioning (and generous) bankruptcy regime solely in order to save a favored Democratic interest group.

No, leave that aside for the nonce, and let’s pretend that the most important thing in the world, far more interesting than stupid concepts like the rule of law, is saving unions. What do you think this is going to do to the supply of credit for industries with powerful unions? My liberal readers who ardently desire a return to the days of potent private unions should ask themselves what might happen to the labor movement in this country if any shop that unionizes suddenly has to pay through the nose for credit. Ask yourself, indeed, what this might do to Chrysler, since this is unlikely to be the last time in the life of the firm that they need credit. Though it may well be the last time they get it, on anything other than usurious terms.

Bill Roberts points out an interesting follow-up from one of her commenters:

Government interference, or arbitrary enforcement of the rule of law is a hallmark of bankruptcies in banana republics, and France. When lenders have confidence that the government will enforce bankruptcy laws (ie the rules of the game) will be consistently upheld, they will lend more freely. When lenders fear their contractual rights will be summarily ignored, they will demand equity-like rates of interest, thus stifling economic activity. Credit is a sacred trust.

The point here is not which party is more “deserving” of more or less of a shrunken pie, lazy unions or heartless hedge funds. Lots of folks fundamentally believe the government should do whatever the hell it wants (eg upend absolute priority in bankruptcy) to effect the “greater good”, as defined by a self-designated minority of people. But all government policies have a cost, and those same folks like to pretend that those costs don’t exist. When the Government flouts the rule of law to fit its preferred special interest groups, that has a real cost.

But then, this isn’t the only area in which we’ve seen banana-republic behavior from this administration starting off . . . I’m hoping this isn’t going to become a theme.  (And if anyone thinks the government’s intervention into the Chrysler bankruptcy is anything other than a payoff to the unions, McArdle also does a nice job of debunking that idea.)  For now, though, it has people in the financial market worried, and the backlash is already showing up.

John Derbyshire of National Review Online passes this one along from “a friend in the hedge fund biz” (HT:  Bill Roberts again):

Hey John—Would you like a sound bite from one of those evil hedge fund guys for Colmes’ show tonight? How’s this: “As a professional investor I’d have to be out of my skull to partner with this government on anything.”

This administration has made it quite clear that they can’t be relied upon to honor contracts or legal precedents and if I can’t know what the rules are before the game starts then I’m not going to play. Hedge funds aren’t like the banks . . . we haven’t failed. We aren’t beholden to the taxpayer to make our way. We have contractual and fiduciary obligation which we will honor. People pay us to make them money not to meet a political goal. So Obama had better think long and hard before he tries to bully us like he did the banks, or try to tell us that “he’s the only thing between us and the pitchforks.”

Also, Geithner and Obama have been saying that they plan on balancing the budget once the crisis is past. The press may believe that twaddle about how he’ll do it by “making things more efficient,” but we in the hedge fund industry aren’t so stupid. We’ve looked at the numbers and know what he’s planning to do. I know dozens of people who are already putting the legal structures in place to move their companies and themselves offshore and away from the grip of the tax man. These are some of the smartest most dynamic people in the world and they’ll have no trouble staying ahead of the [dumb] kids . . . over at the IRS.

So unless Obama wants to run out of “other people’s money” a lot sooner than he expected, he had better keep some people around to pay the bills. And if he keeps demonizing the productive and saying that it’s their responsibility to let him spend their money on the unproductive, then we’ll all be gone. I’ll be working my 14 hour days in Bahrain or Singapore, and Obama can go suck eggs. He needs the productive classes a lot more than the productive classes need him.

The problem here for the kind of approach President Obama is using in this situation is that he really does need the people with the money to cooperate for his plan (or any plan) to work, and strong-arming them into cooperation will only work for a very limited time in a very limited way.  The concern this raises among potential investors is succinctly expressed by Thomas Lauria:

The President is trying to abrogate contractual rights; if he will attack that contractual right, what right will he not attack?

I’ve often thought that the great problem with leftist economic theories is that they implicitly assume that people’s behavior doesn’t change as the incentives change—that reactions remain static, and thus that, for instance, increasing taxes on the rich will mean that the rich will pay more taxes.  This is a problem because the assumption is wildly false; thus, above a certain level, increasing taxes on the rich actually decreases the amount of taxes they pay, because their behavior shifts in ways designed to produce precisely that result.  Wealth protection (through tax avoidance) trumps wealth creation, economic productivity drops accordingly, and the economy suffers, hitting those who aren’t rich enough to make that choice—such as, for instance, the members of the UAW.  The same sort of thing will happen if the investment class decides that the government can’t be trusted to honor contracts if it doesn’t like their outcome:  they simply won’t sign contracts they don’t trust, leaving those who need investors to go whistle for them.

As such, the approach the president is employing here is a lot like the approach he employed in dealing with the Somali pirates last month:  good short-term tactics that will breed distrust and prove counterproductive, perhaps severely so, once his opponents wise up to what he’s likely to do.Further exacerbating the situation is the fact that Chrysler won’t be paying back the $8 billion the feds have given them, and the government won’t be getting stock in return for its “investment,” either.

Instead, the wreckage of Chrysler will be divided up among Fiat, Chrysler’s unions, and Chrysler’s debtholders. Which means that the taxpayers’ $8 billion was just a gift to these three consitituencies.

We don’t know about you, but we can think of a few dozen charities that we’d rather have given that $8 billion to than Chrysler’s debtholders, Chrysler’s unions, and Fiat.

Is the White House going to explain this one, or are we just supposed to ignore it?

On the bright side, at least Barack Obama is making his payments to the labor movement for the nice big white house they helped to buy him . . .

Presidential transparency, brought to you by Coppertone

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I posted a bit on this a couple weeks ago, but given how the “most transparent administration ever” keeps smearing sunblock all over its transparency, further comment seems merited.  Michelle Malkin has a good post up today on the subject, which is particularly notable for this trenchant observation:

From Day One, President Obama has demonstrated a rather self-serving selectivity when it comes to transparency. . . .

Openness in government is fine if it hurts America’s reputation, but not if it harms Obama’s.

She adds, “hostility to transparency is a running thread through Obama’s cabinet,” citing serious issues with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ron Sims, as well as David Axelrod.  The problem, however, starts at the top, with the president’s willingness to go back on his word whenever it suits him:

President Obama set the tone, breaking his transparency pledge with the very first bill he signed into law. On January 29, the White House announced that Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act had been posted online for review. One problem: Obama had already signed it—in violation of his “sunlight before signing” pledge to post legislation for public comment on the White House website five days before he sealed any deal.

Obama broke the pledge again with the mad rush to pass his trillion-dollar, pork-stuffed stimulus package full of earmarks he denied existed. Jim Harper of the Cato Institute reported in April 2009: “Of the eleven bills President Obama has signed, only six have been posted on Whitehouse.gov. None have been posted for a full five days after presentment from Congress . . .”

Jack Kemp, RIP

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It’s not typical for a politician’s death to get coverage on ESPN—but then, Jack Kemp wasn’t exactly your typical politician.  To be sure, he wasn’t the only high-profile athlete to go into politics—the U.S. Senate has even seen two Hall of Famers among its members in recent decades, Bill Bradley and Jim Bunning, though both are marginal inductees, and the House of Representatives currently has former NFL QB (and first-round bust) Heath Shuler serving from North Carolina—but successful athletes who become major political figures are rare, and Kemp was both.  He had a rough ride establishing himself in the pros, but when the AFL came along he seized the opportunity with both hands, quarterbacking Buffalo to four playoff appearances and two league championships (and losing another with San Diego in 1961) and making seven AFL All-Star teams.

He then parlayed his fame in Buffalo into nine terms in the House from upstate New York, during which time he established himself as one of this country’s most intelligent, articulate, and vocal exponents of conservative political principles.  I’m sure I’m far from the only one who thinks that the GOP and the nation both would be a lot better off had Kemp won his 1988 bid for the Republican presidential nomination rather than losing to the name recognition of George H. W. Bush, the incumbent VP.  Still, he continued to contribute as President Bush 41’s HUD secretary, then served as Bob Dole’s VP nominee in 1996, bringing energy and conservative enthusiasm to the GOP ticket much as Sarah Palin would for Sen. Dole’s fellow war veteran and centrist Republican John McCain twelve years later.

As a childhood fan of Kemp’s Bills and a neighbor of his in Maryland who writes extensively on both politics and football, Gregg Easterbrook is uniquely positioned to write about Jack Kemp, and his eulogy on ESPN.com is well worth reading because it captures a sense of the broad sweep of the man’s life.  As he notes, and as David Goldman (aka Spengler) points out in his piece on the First Things website, without Kemp it would be hard to imagine the Reagan Revolution happening the way it did.

Former vice-presidential candidate, congressman, and Housing secretary, he was the most improbable and the most important hero of the Reagan Revolution after the Gipper himself. Without Jack’s true-believer’s passion for tax cuts as a remedy for the stagflation of the 1970s, Reagan would not have staked his presidency on an untested and controversial theory. His death should remind us how lucky we were to have leaders like Reagan and Kemp, and a political system that allowed improbable leaders—an ex-actor and a retired quarterback—to appear at providential moments.

It was impossible to be cynical in Jack’s vicinity. He radiated sincerity and optimism. Corny as it sounds, Jack was the real thing, an all-American true believer in this country and in the capacity of its people to overcome any obstacle once given the chance. . . .

What attracted Jack Kemp to supply-side economics was the promise of advancement for ordinary people. . . . He passionately believed in individual opportunity and free markets, and he needed an argument to take to the union rank-and-file who made up the bulk of his district’s voters. Supply-side economics, the premise that tax cuts and corresponding regulatory reform would unleash the creative energies of Americans, persuaded him, and he became its great missionary.

A genuinely independent thinker, Kemp was that rarest of all birds:  an unpredictable politician.  Easterbrook captures this when he writes,

Kemp was keenly concerned with the plight of the poor. The libertarian side of his personality viewed tolerance as crucial. Kemp often broke with other Reagan supporters on women’s and minority issues, respect for labor and an end of discrimination against homosexuality; and though a devout Christian himself—prayer circles are a regular event at his home—he was disgusted by all forms of religion-based bias. His signature issue became Enterprise Zones. Kemp was dismayed by the decline of mostly minority inner cities, and hardly just Buffalo. He felt excessive regulations and legal liability discouraged businesses from investing in urban areas where jobs were needed, while in effect encouraging business to develop unplowed land that ought to be preserved. . . .

When Bush was elected to the White House, he named Kemp Secretary of HUD, a position from which he implemented Enterprise Zone ideas. HUD is an agency that traditionally has not interested conservatives much, because it deals with issues of the impoverished, such as public housing. Kemp dove into HUD’s subject matter with zeal, and over time was proven correct, as the Enterprise Zone was a factor—hardly the only factor, of course—in the spectacular American urban comeback that began in the 1990s. . . .

Beneath the surface of Kemp’s political heterodoxy was a lifelong love of argument over ideas. Kemp clung to many causes viewed as idiosyncratic, such as a return to the gold standard, and advanced “supply side” economic ideas that were in some ways more radical than anything coming from the left. He spent far more time with writers and intellectuals than do most nationally known politicians, and he got more excited about books than about polls. While many politicians want to shake hands with intellectuals at photo ops, Kemp wanted to argue, sometimes well into the night. . . . Unlike so many politicians, who leave behind little but backroom deals and self-congratulation, Kemp’s legacy is one of ideas. As of last autumn, Kemp was still banging out newspaper columns in support of John McCain and in opposition to taxes. Unlike so many political figures who only preach family values, Kemp was married for more than 50 years to his college sweetheart, Joanne Main. . . .

Kemp had read some of my books—he seemed to have read at least parts of every book—and took me aside a few times to talk public policy. It was pleasant, and I wish it had lasted longer. I couldn’t convince Kemp that Obama is not a socialist; to win an argument with him, you would have needed to bring along an army. But I also don’t think he really meant to insult the new president. I think he admired the new president quite a bit. He just liked to provoke political arguments and see where they led. For him, they led to a great life well lived.

Easterbrook ends with a testimony to Kemp’s character; Goldman echoes the theme.

Jack was a leader who loved his country and put it before personal gain. When he left office he had the equity in his house and not much else. But he had four children, including two sons who played professional football, and seventeen grandchildren. . . .

A devout Christian, Jack made far more of a difference than an ex-quarterback with a physical education degree from Occidental College had a right to. He earned our gratitude not only for what he accomplished, but for what he proved about the character of the United States.

A good man, a godly man, a politician who brought his country great benefit—and a mighty fine quarterback to boot:  Jack Kemp was a great American, and this nation is poorer for his death.  Requiescat in pace.

Barack Obama, union enforcer

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Mariner fans once dubbed Seattle Times beat writer Bob Finnegan “Pocket Lint” because he was so deep in ownership’s pocket—his pieces were, dependably, dutiful recitations of whatever the company line happened to be—and now I’m starting to think the nickname may need to be revived for Barack Obama.  We knew the labor movement had him in its pocket, but the whole business with Chrysler is beyond anything I would have expected.  President Obama and his administration essentially took a crowbar and attempted to kneecap a group of Chrysler investors in an effort to win better terms for the United Auto Workers than the UAW will be able to get in bankruptcy proceedings now that the automaker has filed for Chapter 11.  As the ever-invaluable Beldar lays it out,

What the Obama Administration has been trying to do, however, has been to cajole or—it’s now becoming more clear—threaten people who carefully bargained for less risk, and who thereby had to settle for lower rewards all along, into voluntarily forfeiting the protections they bought and paid for in the event of the underlying business’ insolvency. Primarily through Chrysler’s pension and retiree health-care obligations, the UAW is a creditor of Chrysler, but one whose position is less favored by the bankruptcy laws than the investors (debt holders) represented by companies like Oppenheimer Funds or Perella Weinburg. Unlike the UAW, their clients negotiated, bought, and paid for the rights not to have to have to make the same “sacrifices” that equity holders or general unsecured creditors would be compelled to make under the bankruptcy laws. But Obama insists—on pain of presidential demonization and worse—that these so-called “corporate renegades” (who’ve been guilty of nothing other than greater prudence) make those sacrifices anyway, and that they do so specifically in order to benefit the UAW!

This goes beyond populism or pro-unionism. Barack Obama is engaged in an assault on not just the entire system of business in the free world, but on the American rule of law upon which it is founded.

And the crowbar in question?  The White House press corps, as the lawyer for one of those investors told a talk-radio host in Detroit:

One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under the threat that the full force of the White House Press Corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight.

Not that we really needed any further evidence that the MSM is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party machine, but that’s still telling.  The White House, of course, is denying the story; as for the response from the aforementioned reporters?  Aside from Jake Tapper, crickets.

The bottom line here, in Beldar’s words, is that

the Obama administration is engaged in a colossal abuse of power whose magnitude far exceeds a mere subversion of the White House press corps. Barack Obama has become Guido, the thug who everyone knows has not only a nasty habit but a nasty taste for breaking kneecaps. And the beneficiary of his shakedowns are the United Auto Workers.

Regardless of your position on Chrysler, unions, or any of the other parties involved in this mess, that sort of thing isn’t good for anybody for very long.  The rules need to be the same for everyone, and the same at every point in the process.  When the government starts bending them to try to manipulate results—when the process is compromised for the sake of someone’s agenda—the system will adjust in a way that will only hurt our economy, and especially those who are most vulnerable.

The thing is, these folks invested a lot of money in an effort to help Chrysler rebound—yes, in the hopes that they would profit off that rebound; our economy doesn’t run on altruism—and they did so knowing what the rules were if their efforts succeeded and what they were if Chrysler went down anyway.  Let them and others like them get the idea that the government is willing and able to do whatever is necessary to change those rules after the fact in order to skew the results to its liking, and the next time a big company is looking for help (General Motors, anyone?  The New York Times?), the money won’t be there.

Investors are willing to take the normal risks of business, because those risks are predictable, and they’re taken into account in the terms of the contract.  If they perceive a significant risk of ex post facto government intervention on behalf of other parties—risks which are neither predictable nor quantifiable—they’ll sit on their hands, rather than take the chance that the next kneecap the Obama administration aims at will be theirs; and GM, or whichever company totters next, will go down.

The Obama administration and the criminalization of dissent

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I wrote a piece early last October laying out my thoughts as to what the Obama administration would look like, and what his presidency would bring. At some point, I intend to do a full-scale review of that post, evaluating what I got right and what I got wrong, but at this point I think I can call the shot on three connected predictions I made:  that Barack Obama’s talk of bipartisanship would be just empty words belied by a highly partisan administration, that Nancy Pelosi would run rampant, and (most worrisome), this:

I believe the approach we’ve seen from the Obama campaign to dissent and criticism will be repeated in the policies and responses of an Obama-led Executive Branch; given the clear willingness of his campaign to suppress freedom of speech to prevent criticism of their candidate, I believe we’ll see the same willingness from his administration and his chief congressional allies. This will mean a surge in the kind of the strongarm political tactics that we’ve already seen entirely too often this year. . . .

The Obama campaign’s efforts to shout down Stanley Kurtz and David Freddoso (in an effort to intimidate Chicago radio station WGN into canceling their appearances on Milt Rosenberg’s show) ought to be disturbing to anyone who cares about free speech. Of even greater concern should be the Obama “truth squads” in Missouri, where the campaign enlisted allies in public office to threaten prosecution of any TV station that runs any ads about Sen. Obama that the campaign deems untrue. Not only is this approach outrageously biased (one side’s allowed to lie, but the other isn’t?), it gets into some very grey areas about interpretation and intent, and thus raises some real concerns as to the approach an Obama Department of Justice might take to the First Amendment.

This kind of approach, like Joe Biden’s suggestion that an Obama/Biden administration might prosecute the Bush administration, is nothing more nor less than the use (or threat of use) of political power to punish one’s opponents, intimidate critics, and silence dissenters; it’s the sort of thing we’re used to seeing in Zimbabwe, not here—and as the case of Zimbabwe shows, there’s nothing, not even money, that can corrupt a democracy faster, or more severely. I’ve argued before that one of the great problems with our politics in this day and age is that we absolutize our own perspectives—we assume that our own perspectives and presuppositions are the only legitimate ones, and that those who disagree with us can’t possibly be doing so sincerely, but must be acting out of motives that are selfish or otherwise wrong. The criminalization of politics, which we’re starting to see urged by the Obama campaign, is a more extreme version of that problem, because it argues that those motives are not only wrong, but are in fact criminal in nature. The chilling effect of that sort of approach should be deeply worrisome not just to conservatives, but also to true liberals.

Unfortunately, it appears that many leftist Democrats aren’t true liberals, because President Obama has now invited just such prosecutions, and they don’t appear to be worried at all; to its credit, the Boston Globe did call out Janet Napolitano and the Department of Homeland Security for the egregious report that pretty much labeled all conservatives as potential terrorist threats, but an awful lot of Democrats seem to be just fine with it.  Indeed, many who were First Amendment absolutists who loved to wax lyrical about the importance of dissent back when there was a Republican in the White House now seem to think anyone who dares argue with the Anointed One should be drug out into the street and shot.

To repeat:  the willingness of those in power to deal with opposition by criminalizing policy differences—to use brute force as a tool for gaining and maintaining political power—is one of the things that makes places like Zimbabwe the basket cases that they are.  We cannot afford to allow such an approach to corrupt our system.  But even if concern for what’s best for the nation doesn’t restrain the Obama administration from such banana-republic tactics, enlightened self-interest should, as Matt Lewis memorably illustrated (HT:  Joshua Livestro):

There has been a lot of debate on the potential prosecution of Bush Administration officials who offered legal opinions supporting waterboarding—with some even calling for investigations of high-ranking officials like Dick Cheney. However, one thing that hasn’t been given the attention it deserves is the precedent it would set if we were to criminalize national security decisions. Hence, I’ve finally decided to test out the time machine I’ve been building in my basement—and you would be surprised what sort of things grew out of the current debacle.

For instance, the following Associated Press story was filed on April 23, 2013, and if it sounds Orwellian, well, it is:

OBAMA ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS TO FACE PROSECUTION

WASHINGTON—The Justice Department announced today that charges could be filed against numerous Obama Administration officials as a result of last year’s terror attack in Los Angeles. In announcing the indictments, Attorney General John Cornyn said that top officials showed “gross and purposeful negligence” by releasing perpetrators of the attacks from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and demanding that interrogation tactics be softened against chief planner Mehmet al-Meshugeneh, who had already revealed that a major attack was being planned against a major U.S. sporting event.

“By purposefully disregarding crucial intelligence, and in releasing known participants in the plot into Saudi custody, numerous government officials took action which made the Staples Center bombing possible,” Cornyn said. He went on to note that “numerous individuals in the Departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security knowingly pursued policies which would endanger the lives of Americans. They placed their political priorities above the safety of the citizens of this country, and thousands of innocent people died as a result. These people must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

At the White House, Press Secretary Adam Brickley said that President Sarah Palin stands firmly behind the decision. “It’s not as if we relish the thought of prosecuting members of the previous administration,” Brickley said, “but, at this point, there is a clearly established precedent—set in place by the Obama Administration themselves—which says that government officials must be held accountable if they contributed in any way to major breaches of the law. In this case, the individuals under investigation do appear to have purposefully allowed these terrorists to continue their actions—prioritizing international public opinion over the lives of the American people. So, while this may be a politically charged issue, there is a real need to prosecute.”

In the end, the sort of tactics the Obama administration has now begun to employ are ineffective at silencing dissent (as the case of Zimbabwe, along with many other nations, shows)—all they really do is raise the stakes enormously.  If you’re willing to start prosecuting your predecessors, you’re going to get the same treatment from your successors unless you can manage to do one of two things:  a) overthrow the Constitution so that you can become President-for-Life, or b) never make a significant mistake.  Taken all in all, I’d say the first is likelier, and neither exactly probable.

All of which is to say that Barack Obama and his senior staff and advisors would do well to remember, and live by, an ancient piece of wisdom:

“So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”

—Matthew 7:12 (ESV)

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

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With all due apologies to Inigo Montoya . . .

This is what the president promised us:

My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.

So, what’s he doing about it? Well, according to the Washington Times,

The Obama administration, which has boasted about its efforts to make government more transparent, is rolling back rules requiring labor unions and their leaders to report information about their finances and compensation.

The Labor Department noted in a recent disclosure that “it would not be a good use of resources” to bring enforcement actions against union officials who do not comply with conflict of interest reporting rules passed in 2007. . . .

The regulation, known as the LM-30 rule, was at the heart of a lawsuit that the AFL-CIO filed against the department last year. One of the union attorneys in the case, Deborah Greenfield, is now a high-ranking deputy at Labor.

And courtesy of Michelle Malkin:

I wrote two weeks ago about transparency killer Ron Sims, the King County WA bureaucrat nominated to the no. 2 spot at HUD by supposed transparency savior Barack Obama. Those in his backyard who know him best know the lengths Sims has gone to in order to obstruct public disclosure and stop taxpayers from finding out the truth about his office’s shady dealings.

As I mentioned in the column, blogger Stefan Sharkansky sued Sims over his refusal to release public records related to voter fraud during the 2004 contested gubernatorial election. Today, Sharkansky reports, Sims and King County settled for $225,000, one of the largest settlements for public records violations in state history.

I think someone in the administration needs to go look up “transparent” in a good dictionary.

Sarah Palin for the Hoosier unborn

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I would have loved to have been down in Evansville to hear RNC Chairman Michael Steele (even after his recent bout with Foot-in-Mouth disease, I still like the guy) and Gov. Palin, but there was no way I could justify the time; and really, it was an event for the folks in Vandenburgh County, and it would have felt like horning in.  So here’s the next best thing: complete video of her speech in Evansville, beginning with Chairman Steele’s introduction:

Note on building a movement

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Quoth Robert Stacy McCain,

So if you’re a conservative out there in Ohio or Florida or Colorado who’s waiting for RNC HQ to save the GOP, you’re part of the problem. If you want to be part of the solution, you’ve got to become an activist. You’ve got to organize.

Create a movement, and don’t worry about who the leader of the movement is. Be your own leader.

Wise words.  One thing though, Mr. McCain:  We’re doing it.  We’re doing it one flash at a time.

Update:  David Bozeman has some good thoughts on this as well.

Political machines hate reformers

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That, in a nutshell, is the meaning of most of the news stories about Sarah Palin in recent months. It’s the reason for the wrangling between her and the Democrats over the Juneau-area state senate seat; it’s the reason for the fight over her AG nominee, Wayne Anthony Ross; it’s the reason for the sniping from machine tools in the state legislature like Fairbanks RINO Jay Ramras; it’s the reason the New York Times paid a visit to Alaska. This is what all the badmouthing boils down to.

Obviously, the stories about members of her family are not, in and of themselves, in this category; however, the fact that the MSM is more interested in the likes of Levi Johnston than they are in, say, President Obama’s child-rapist half-brother Samson is also a reflection of the fact that political machines don’t like reformers. Now, I don’t happen to think that Samson Obama ought to be a major political story, or indeed that he has any greater significance than anyone else who likes to rape 13-year-old girls, which is one reason I haven’t blogged about him; Barack Obama is human, and therefore a sinner like all the rest of us, and the same is true of his family, and some of those folks are going to be worse sinners than others. What matters is who he is and what he does. However, the same is true of Gov. Palin, even with respect to her children—anyone who thinks it’s possible to be a good-enough parent to ensure that your 17-year-old daughter is immune to the kinds of bad decisions and sinful acts to which 17-year-olds are prone is probably expecting that check from Nigeria any day now.

If Bristol Palin deserves attention from the MSM, well, what Samson Obama did was a heck of a lot worse—by that standard, he ought to be on front pages as far as the eye can see. And he isn’t. Why? Because of ideology, to be sure, but also because President Obama doesn’t threaten the machine—he’s of the machine, he owes it, and he can be trusted to behave accordingly. Gov. Palin isn’t, and doesn’t, and can’t, and so every bit of influence she gains is a direct threat to the (bi-partisan) political establishment that can neither predict nor control her.

This goes all the way back to the very beginning of her political career. (Note: much of this is covered in R. A. Mansour’s excellent post “Who Is Sarah Palin?”) In her first step into politics, she won a seat on the city council of Wasilla. At that point, she had the backing of her mayor. Did she repay his support by being a loyal supporter of his administration, following the expected rules of political patronage? No, she didn’t; when she decided that he was governing badly and in a manner that she considered bad for the community, she challenged him, ran against him, and defeated him. He’s still complaining about her ingratitude.

Later, after she lost the race for lieutenant governor in 2004, the new Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, one of the entrenched leaders of the oil-money-fueled Alaska GOP political machine, appointed her as ethics supervisor and chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. One of her fellow commissioners was Randy Ruedrich, who also chaired the Alaska Republican Party; when she discovered he was guilty of ethics violations, she blew the whistle on him, even though she ended up having to quit the commission (giving up a six-figure salary) to do so. Gov. Murkowski backed Ruedrich, but he ended up paying a significant fine for his actions. In 2006, at least in part because of this and other dubious actions on Gov. Murkowski’s part, she ran against him as a Republican but a party outsider, and beat him.

If you’re keeping score, that’s twice that she was recruited by a Republican incumbent to be a good little foot soldier, declined to be a good little foot soldier in the face of her political patron’s bad conduct, and knocked said incumbent out of office. Those of you with a taste for old political fiction will probably understand why, even more than Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher, the politician of whom Gov. Palin reminds me most is Orrin Knox, the fictional senior U. S. Senator from Illinois (small irony there) in Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent. When it comes to dealing with her own party, she has definitely acted in line with Sen. Knox’s motto: “I don’t give a —- about being liked, but I intend to be respected.”

Now, up until about August 28 of last year, none of this posed any particular problems for the Democratic political machine, either in Alaska or nationally. You see, the national political machine’s biggest concern (in both parties) for holding statehouses has to do with the redistricting that takes place every decade, and Alaska has only one House seat and isn’t likely to gain a second one; as such, that doesn’t apply. Democratic interest in Alaska, then, was primarily focused on trying to unseat the state’s senior U. S. Senator, the corrupt but wily and very powerful Ted Stevens, and its lone House member, Rep. Don Young—and in that effort, Gov. Palin was a great help, which made her the Democrats’ favorite Republican. Sure, they had every intention of trying as hard as they could to unseat her in 2010, but at that point, she was more a help to them than a hindrance. She’d worked with Democrats in the Alaska legislature to replace laws that had essentially been written by oil-company lobbyists—specifically, the tax code on resource extraction and a gas-pipeline bill—with laws that were better for the people and state of Alaska. Back then, while Alaska Democrats weren’t above trying to take her down, they were happy to give Gov. Palin the credit for killing the “Bridge to Nowhere,” because it helped them make their case against the Alaskans who really mattered in her party.

And then John McCain named her his running mate—and everything changed. Suddenly, she was the Alaskan who mattered in her party, because she mattered in the presidential race; she gave the McCain campaign an energy it hadn’t had since the New Hampshire primary—the 2000 New Hampshire primary, that is—and thus became Public Enemy #1 for the national Democratic machine, and so for the Alaska Democratic machine as well. Conservatives4Palin has chronicled at length how the Obama campaign’s officials in Alaska, folks like State Senators Hollis French and Kim Elton, tried to bring her down (even going so far as to promise an “October surprise”), and how St. Sen. Elton got his payoff for his actions in support of the Obama campaign.

That, by the way, was supposed to be a cascading payoff; the Alaska Democratic Party machine thought it could giftwrap St. Sen. Elton’s seat for St. Rep. Beth Kerttula (one of those Democrats who’d supported Gov. Palin until she became a threat to the Obama campaign), and then giftwrap her seat in turn for Kim Metcalfe, who chairs the local party in Juneau. But Gov. Palin doesn’t appreciate machine politics when practiced by either party—she’s willing to work with Democrats, but she’s as opposed to the Democratic machine as she is to the Republican machine, and so she’s been refusing to play along with their back-room maneuvers.

Gov. Palin is now in a difficult, though probably inevitable, position: she is opposed by a bi-partisan coalition of the machine politicians in Alaska, who oppose each other on policy but share a common higher loyalty to the old boys’ club and the perks and procedures to which they’re accustomed. Gov. Palin has the support of a strong majority of the Alaskan people, but only a minority of the state’s politicians. This has meant that the state legislature has been in full foot-dragging mode through the entire session—a fact which they now intend, via the Democratic Party PR department (aka the MSM, specifically the New York Times), to blame on her.

That the MSM will coordinate with the Democratic/Republican machine in Alaska on this is, I believe, a sign of their deepest agenda here—not just their general bias against conservatives, but a deeper bias yet: as much as they bleat about “speaking truth to power,” they are not the outside critics of the machine that they pretend to be. Rather, they are a part of the machine, they are inside the corridors of power, that’s where they want to be, and they really have no true understanding or interest of the world outside those corridors.

This is true, I believe, even of the conservatives within the MSM, which is why a lot of the elite conservative writers have been almost as unfair to Gov. Palin as their liberal colleagues; and if a Democratic version of Gov. Palin were ever to emerge, a true reformer who bucked the party machine, I don’t think the likes of Eleanor Clift and Paul Krugman would be any kinder to that individual than the likes of David Brooks and David Frum have been to Gov. Palin. The initial MSM reaction to the appointment of Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to Hillary Clinton’s vacant seat in the U.S. Senate certainly supports that thought.

In other words, what we’re seeing here is the utter bankruptcy of the MSM as an “independent free press”; they are nothing of the kind. They are organs of elite opinion, constituent parts of the political machine. This, more than ideology, is the reason why they’re so determined to bring Gov. Palin down, because she represents a threat to their worldview on a more basic level even than ideology: she threatens their sense of their own superiority, and the rules by which they operate, and the perks and the comfort zone which those rules ensure, just as much as she threatens all those things for the machine politicians she’s been relentlessly at work to overcome and bring down.

This is one of the reasons why we need the continued rise of the citizen punditry via the blogosphere—we need to reclaim the national discussion on issues from the machine almost as much as we need to reclaim our government. (I say “almost” because whatever its failings, talk radio has also been outside the political machine, for the most part.) And it’s why we need to support Gov. Palin, and why I so much appreciate the independents and moderate Democrats who do, because if she goes down to defeat—if the Alaska political machine defeats her, or the national Democratic machine defeats her—the odds that someone else will try to buck the machine and bring real political reform to this country approach zero . . . from beneath.

Remember this, as you read the stories about Sarah Palin: remember that she’s spent her career trying to reform the machine politics of Alaska, and remember that political machines hate reformers—and they’re the ones who have the money, and the media. All Gov. Palin has is the truth, and the support of those of us who are fed up with the machine. Remember that, and don’t believe the hate.

Update: Welcome to folks dropping by from C4P; my posting has tilted toward religious topics in the last week or so, but even if that isn’t up your alley, you might also find my post in defense of the citizen punditry of particular interest. I hope to have a reflection on Gov. Palin’s visit to Evansville up in the next day or two as well.