Category Archives: Barack Obama

Turning prisons into spring training for terrorists

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So the president tried to one-up Dick Cheney’s speech at the American Enterprise Institute, but it seems he failed to do so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Qd6WG64dFg

What conclusions one draws from these speeches will depend to a great degree on what assumptions one brings to the viewing. To my way of thinking, the contrast with VP Cheney’s serious, unemotional defense of his position exposes the hollowness of much of Barack Obama’s language.  Your mileage may well vary, but given that President Obama has now essentially given his imprimatur to all those things that he denounces as “violating our core values,” as Victor Davis Hanson points out, I don’t see how one would avoid that conclusion; all that liberal angst looks an awful lot like just the same old cynical political calculation anymore.  I will also admit to wondering why the president is so concerned about the legal rights of terrorists in Guantanamo when he doesn’t seem to care at all about the legal rights of Dodge dealers in Florida, but I digress.

Of greater concern is his ridiculously foolish suggestion that we move Guantanamo detainees to US prisons.  That might make sense were it not for the fact that we already have significant jihadist cells operating in our prisons now, as Michelle Malkin notes:

U.S. Bureau of Prison reports have warned for years that our civilian detention facilities are major breeding grounds for Islamic terrorists. There are still not enough legitimately trained and screened Muslim religious leaders to counsel an estimated 9,000 U.S. prison inmates who demand Islamic services. Under the Bush administration, the federal prison bureaucracy had no policy in place to screen out extremist, violence-advocating Islamic chaplains; failed to properly screen the many contractors and volunteers who help provide religious services to Islamic inmates; and shied away from religious profiling. . . .

[President Obama’s] push to transfer violent Muslim warmongers into our civilian prisons—where they have proselytized and plotted with impunity—will only make the problem worse.

The danger here is succinctly summarized by a commenter on one of Jennifer Rubin’s posts on Contentions:

I wonder how long before people (besides, to his credit, Robert Muller of the FBI) figure out that having celebrity terrorists in any U.S. prison—even a super-duper max—will inevitably radicalize the prison population. We are injecting ourselves with a lethal virus, and fooling ourselves that it won’t hurt us. Like putting Napoleon on the Isle of Elba or keeping Lenin on the infamous “sealed train” through Germany, you have to keep ideological foes far at bay. Ideology seeps out. Even if no other prisoner ever comes into direct contact with one of these celebrity terrorists, their mere presence in the same facility will inspire, influence and over time radicalize the population, just like Africanized Honeybees always take over European Honeybee colonies. Obama is scoring a goal in his (our) own net. This is folly in the extreme.

We need to realize that we have a significant home-grown jihadi threat in this country already, and these people recruit in our prisons.  The last thing we need is to hook up wannabe terrorists who’ve been recruited on the inside with experienced terrorists who’ve carried out attacks on the outside; that would be nothing less than turning our maximum-security prisons into a training camp for al’Qaeda.  It’s hard to imagine anything much more unwise than that.

Barack Obama’s Achilles heel

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I commented earlier today on the latest attempt by the OSM (Obama-stream media), in the person of New York Times gossip columnist Maureen Dowd, to pre-emptively defend their adored idol, Barack Obama, by asserting that any terrorist attack during his time in office won’t be his fault, it will be Dick Cheney’s fault. This is, as I noted, not an isolated thing, but part of a broader campaign to ensure that any bad event or outcome is blamed on the Republicans, and primarily on the Bush administration; though a superficially appealing approach, I argued that it infantilizes President Obama and renders him unworthy of respect, because it essentially says that he can’t be held to the same standard as other presidents.  It makes him less effectual, powerful, influential, and important than his predecessor (and even his predecessor’s VP!), and thereby makes him a lesser figure.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I also don’t think people will buy it; we’re too accustomed to the Harry S Truman (“The buck stops here”) approach for many people to swallow “It’s not my fault” coming from our president.  We’ll take a lot of things, but I don’t believe avoidance of responsibility will be one of them.  However, let’s suppose for a moment that I’m wrong.  Let’s suppose that when the first batch of folks the Obama administration releases from Gitmo turn around and help nuke the World Series, or turn a superbug loose on the Washington Mall on the Fourth of July, or whatever they do, that the American public in fact exonerates the president and buys the line that it’s all Dick Cheney’s fault.  Let’s suppose that a year from now, the voters still pin the problems in our banking system on the Bush administration and hold Barack Obama blameless for the failure of his programs.  Let’s suppose that the polls reveal the attitude that if things are getting worse, it’s just because George W. Bush did such a lousy job.

There’s still one thing that the president won’t be able to duck, and it’s something no one seems to be thinking about:  gas prices.  For whatever reason, all the prognostications I’ve seen are ignoring them, effectively assuming that they’ll remain where they were at the beginning of the year—and they won’t.  Indeed, they already haven’t.  Three or four weeks ago, gas prices here were below $1.90 a gallon; right now, they’re sitting at $2.459, and they’re only going to keep going up.  It won’t be long before they’re back over $3 a gallon, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them back over $4 a gallon by Labor Day.

Why?  Because gas prices were driven up in large part by speculation in oil futures, and the biggest thing that drove the price of futures down was Congress’ action in letting the offshore-drilling ban expire.  The prospect of a dramatic expansion in American domestic oil production exerted considerable downward pressure on oil futures, which brought down the price of oil, and thus the price of gas.  That prospect is no longer in place, thanks to the policies of the new administration, which is resolutely opposed to any sort of energy development except for those forms which are supposedly “green.”  That means that the conditions are back in place for oil and gas prices to rise, which they’re already doing; that in turn means that speculating in futures, betting on them to continue to rise, will once again be a profitable activity.  With so many people who are now a lot poorer than they used to be and so few means available for them to correct that situation, it seems likely to me that we’ll once again see speculation start to drive up the price of oil futures, and that the price of gas will once again follow suit.

And if I’m right, there will be no earthly way for Barack Obama or any of his media stooges to blame George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or anyone on the Republican side of the aisle for that—but there will be a great many Republicans, led by Sarah Palin, to say “I told you so.”  It will be all on him, and Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, and the rest of the Democratic cabal now running this country, and no way for them to avoid the blame.

The OSM (Obama-stream media) theme song

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Consequence Free

Wouldn’t it be great if no one ever got offended?
Wouldn’t it be great to say what’s really on your mind?
I have always said all the rules are made for bending;
And if I let my hair down, would that be such a crime?

Chorus:
I wanna be consequence-free;
I wanna be where nothing needs to matter.
I wanna be consequence-free,
Just sing Na Na Na Na Na Na Ya Na Na.

I could really use to lose my Catholic conscience,
‘Cause I’m getting sick of feeling guilty all the time.
I won’t abuse it, yeah, I’ve got the best intentions
For a little bit of anarchy, but not the hurting kind.

Chorus

I couldn’t sleep at all last night
‘Cause I had so much on my mind.
I’d like to leave it all behind,
But you know it’s not that easy

Chorus

Wouldn’t it be great if the band just never ended?
We could stay out late and we would never hear last call.
We wouldn’t need to worry about approval or permission;
We could slip off the edge and never worry about the fall.

Chorus out

It’s a catchy song, and the video (which is below, if you’re interested) is the sort of fun, goofy piece that Great Big Sea likes to do.  It’s also, as I’ve said somewhere, one of the stupidest song lyrics I’ve ever run across.  What does it mean when our actions are consequence-free?  When our actions have no consequences, we say they’re inconsequential; that means they don’t matter, which is why inconsequential is a synonym for unimportant or insignificant.  If nothing we ever did had consequences, if none of it ever mattered, then we wouldn’t matter; if all our actions were insignificant, it would mean that we would be insignificant, our lives would be meaningless.  As I wrote last fall,

The key is that our actions matter because we matter. Indeed, we matter enough to God that he was willing to pay an infinite price for our salvation; and so our actions matter greatly to him, both for their effect on others (who matter to him as much as we do) and for their effect on us. Our actions have eternal consequence because we are beings of eternal consequence; it could not be otherwise.

Only a fool could wish for insignificance; it’s profoundly foolish even to feign a wish for such a thing.

Now, it’s hardly a new or shocking idea to suggest that our media establishment is composed largely of fools, but they’re so far in the tank for Barack Obama that it’s taking them to new and surprising depths of folly.  We see this particularly in the ongoing effort by the MSM—who would be better called the OSM, the Obama-stream media; they’re so deep in his pocket, they’re nothing more than pocket lint at this point—to render the president consequence-free, at least when it comes to negative consequences:  if anything bad happens, it’s all that evil Bush’s fault, or that evil Cheney’s fault, or the fault of some other evil Republican.  The deepest depths of this drivel (so far) have been plumbed by Maureen Dowd, who wrote in the New York Times,

No matter if or when terrorists attack here, and they’re on their own timetable, not a partisan, red/blue state timetable, Cheney will be deemed the primary one who made America more vulnerable.

In other words, it doesn’t matter when it happens, or what happens, or how it happens, or what could have happened, or what the president and his administration have done, or what they haven’t done, or what they could have done, or what they should have done—according to Maureen Dowd, if terrorists ever do anything here again, no matter what, it’s Dick Cheney’s fault.

Now, to a superficial mind, I can see the appeal of this:  it preserves the “blame everything on the GOP” strategy that got the Democratic Party to power, wherein it is asserted that only the GOP can do or cause bad things, while all good things are solely to the credit of the donkeys.  What Dowd apparently fails to see, however, is the way in which her assertion completely emasculates President Obama and his administration.  What she’s essentially saying is that Barack Obama is fundamentally inconsequential and ineffectual, at least by comparison to the previous administration.  George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are the ones with the real power, the ones who really matter; Barack Obama just can’t be expected to compare, or to have the same kind of effect on the world.  He can’t be held responsible if al’Qaeda or somebody else attacks us, because, um, it can’t possibly be his fault, because, uh, well, he just can’t be; there has to be someone else to blame.  The buck doesn’t stop at his desk; that’s above his pay grade, or something.

I’m sorry, but when people start saying things like that about the President of the United States, that’s just pathetic.  But hey, at least he can dance around and look cool, like these guys:

 

Barack Obama tries to duck accountability . . . again

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This from Andy McCarthy on the current state of the argument over releasing more photos from Abu Ghraib.  The Obama administration is claiming to have come up with a new argument against the release, when in fact (as they surely know full well) they’re advancing the same argument made by the Bush administration:

As the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision last September in ACLU v. Dep’t of Defense relates, back in 2005, the Bush Justice Department first argued, in the district court, that the release of the photos “could reasonably be expected to endanger the physical safety of United States troops, other Coalition forces, and civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The judge rejected this argument—incorrectly in my view, for what that may be worth—despite acknowledging the “risk that the enemy will seize upon the publicity of the photographs and seek to use such publicity as a pretext for enlistments and violent acts.” (Opinion at pp. 4-5). Then, as the three-judge Second Circuit panel noted, this national security argument became the Bush Justice Department’s “lead argument on this appeal.” (Id., pp. 8 & ff.) It’s simply false for Gibbs to contend otherwise.

Why all the legerdemain? Because, as I said in the lead argument made in Tuesday’s column (and on which I will elaborate in a new article later today): Obama is using this litigation as a smokescreen. He’s now getting plaudits for reversing himself and his Justice Department (which, in contrast to the Bush Justice Department, didn’t want to fight this case at all—just wanted to release the photos). But he is still trying to get away with voting present—which is to say, he is hiding behind the judges.

McCarthy explains,

It is in Obama’s power, right this minute, to end this debacle by issuing an executive order suppressing disclosure of the photos due to national security and foreign policy concerns. As I’ve noted, there’s no need to get into a Bush-era debate over the limits of executive power here. In the Freedom of Information Act, indeed, in FOIA’s very first exemption, Congress expressly vests him with that authority. See Title 5, U.S. Code, Section 552(b)(1)(A) (FOIA disclosure mandate “does not apply to matters that are …specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and . . . are in fact properly classified pursuant to such Executive order”).

Besides being simple, issuing such an order would be a strong position and the screamingly obvious right thing to do. But it would also be a fully accountable thing to do, and that’s why President Obama is avoiding it. He realizes—especially after he surrendered details of our interrogation methods to the enemy—that he can’t afford to undermine the war effort again so quickly and so blatantly; but his heart is with the Left on this—that’s why he agreed to the release of the photos in the first place and why he is trying to prevent mutiny within his base. So here’s the game: Obama tells those of us who care about national security that he is taking measures to protect the troops and the American people, but he also tells the Left that he hasn’t made any final decisions about the photos and that the question is really for the courts to decide. That’s why he carefully couched yesterday’s reversal as a “delay” in the release of the photos.

Alternatively, of course, if the president really believes that releasing the photos is the “screamingly obvious right thing to do,” he could just go ahead and order it done; but that would also be a fully accountable thing to do, and so would not answer his core objective. McCarthy goes on to note that the administration has not elected to invoke the executive-order provision in its FOIA defense, but rather “a section relating to the withholding of records ‘compiled for law enforcement purposes,'” presumably leading with a weaker argument to increase the odds that the court will order the release of the photos.  That way President Obama can get what he wants without actually having to do it himself and thus take responsibility for it.

Of course, all this involves trying to manipulate the court, and as McCarthy notes, that may not go over well:

I can assure you that federal judges don’t like to be toyed with. Supreme Court justices may not mind if the administration treats the media like a lap-dog and the public like we’re a bunch of rubes; but, regardless of their political leanings, the justices have goo-gobs of self-esteem, and they will not take kindly to being treated like pawns in the Obamaestro’s game. The Solicitor General should expect some very tough questions about why the busy justices should waste their valuable time grappling with a tough, life-and-death legal issue when Obama could simply issue an order—regardless of how the Court rules—suppressing the photos. This, of course, is the question the media should be asking. Unlike the White House press corps, the justices will take the time to understand what’s happening and they will not roll over.

 

Political fairy tales never end right

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Once upon a time, there was a politician who said,

Let me be as clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Governor Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a VP. And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. . . .

You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and you know teenage children, that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off limits. . . .

Our people were not involved in any way in this, and they will not be. And if I ever thought that it was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that—they’d be fired.

That politician was very good at saying things that made people think highly of him, and so in the fullness of time, he grew up and became President of the United States. But along the way, he picked up a traveling companion, a Scarecrow named Joe who said whatever came into his mind, including using Gov. Palin’s youngest child to score political points; and the politician didn’t fire him, or stop him, or tell him to back off. And this was a sign that maybe he didn’t mean what he said after all. And the press continued to do what he’d told them not to do, and he said nothing further; and this was another sign.

And then after the politician became president, there came the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, at which it is traditional to have a comedian make fun of the president, to show that the president can laugh at himself and take a joke. But since this politician didn’t like laughing at himself and taking jokes, they had a comedian to make fun of his opponents instead, including a crude “joke” about Gov. Palin and her family. The comedian told this joke right in front of the politician who had once said,

Let me be as clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics.

In any proper fairy tale, this should be the cue for the politician to step up and say, “I said this was inappropriate, and I meant it. I said we need to respect those with whom we disagree, and I meant it. I said we need to base our politics on political issues, not on character assassination, and I meant it. Stop this nonsense right now.” This should be the cue for the politician to defend the one unjustly abused.

Did he? No . . . he laughed. All his words about the good, the true and the beautiful were just words.

Political fairy tales never end right.

(Crossposted at Conservatives4Palin.)

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 . . .”

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.