The 'Fire Napolitano' Debate [Andy McCarthy]

A post so good from Andy McCarthy that I reproduce it in full:

A couple of months back, Sean Hannity invited me on his nightly panel on a special show that was dedicated to ten of the more problematic figures in the administration — Van Jones, Kevin Jennings, Carol Browner, John Holdren, and some others. (Napolitano was not egregious enough to be included.) Sean pressed me on whether this one or that one should be fired, and I just shrugged my shoulders. The suggestion (not by Sean, but in a lot of the public debate) had been that these people had not been properly vetted. My reaction was that they had been extensively vetted — the "czars," like Jones, were made czars rather than cabinet nominations precisely because they were the people President Obama wanted but he knew they'd never get through a confirmation hearing. Sure, you could fire those ten, but the same guy who picked them would be picking their replacements.

I never thought we should have created a Department of Homeland Security. People's memories are short. The original idea behind DHS was to solve "the Wall" problem — the impediments to intelligence-sharing that were making the FBI, our domestic intelligence service, ineffective. But while DHS was being debated and built, the FBI and the intelligence community furiously called on their allies on Capitol Hill and protected their turf. By the time DHS formally came into being, they made sure it had no intelligence mission — in fact, it had no real clear mission at all except to be the unwieldy home of a huge agglomeration of federal agencies. Basically, we moved the deck chairs around on the Titanic but did nothing to improve homeland security.

Napolitano is an apt representation of Obama-style detachment from national security: She doesn't know where the 9/11 hijackers came from; she doesn't know illegal immigration is a criminal offense; she won't utter the word "terror" (it's a "man-caused disaster," just like, say, a forest fire); she thinks the real terrorists are "right-wing extremists" aided and abetted by our soldiers returning home from their missions; when a jihadist at Fort Hood massacres more people than were killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, she won't call it terrorism and worries mostly about racist blow-back against innocent Muslims; she doesn't see any indications of a larger terrorist conspiracy even after a captured — er, arrested — terrorist tells agents he was groomed for the airplane operation by al Qaeda in Yemen; she thinks the "system worked" on Christmas when every element of it failed; and even her walk-back on the "system worked" comment — i.e., that it worked after the fact because all the planes then in the air were notified to take extra precautions "within 90 minutes" of the attack — is pathetic. You may recall that on 9/11, the first plane hit the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. and the second at 9:16 a.m.; the Pentagon was struck at 9:37 a.m., and, thanks to the heroic passengers of Flight 93, the last plane went down a little after 10 a.m. — about 20 minutes from its target in Washington. A lot can happen in 90 minutes.

When DHS came into being, a good friend of mine put it perfectly: "We already have a Department of Homeland Security and its address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue." It is there, not at DHS, that the problem resides. The President has in place exactly the team he wants. To clamor for Napolitano's firing when she is just carrying out the boss's program is to shift the blame from where it belongs.

The Nigerian Terrorist

From Maureen Dowd:

If we can’t catch a Nigerian with a powerful explosive powder in his oddly feminine-looking underpants and a syringe full of acid, a man whose own father had alerted the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria, a traveler whose ticket was paid for in cash and who didn’t check bags, whose visa renewal had been denied by the British, who had studied Arabic in Al Qaeda sanctuary Yemen, whose name was on a counterterrorism watch list, who can we catch?

Yawneroos and Obammyboppers

Mark Steyn uses the good word Yawneroo here.

Nonetheless, Rich Lowry does "President" van Rompuy a grave injustice. The boringness is, as the computer chappies say, not a bug but a feature. Like everything in Europe, the "presidency" was a backroom stitch-up, and neither the French nor the Germans wanted a charismatic glamorpuss in the gig, stealing their respective thunders. A Belgian nonentity was just what they were looking for. Being a nondescript yawneroo was the minimum entry qualification....

The squealing Obammyboppers of the media seem to have gotten more muted since those inaugural specials hit the newsstands back in late January....

The usual trick is to position their man as the uniquely insightful leader, pitching his tent between two extremes no sane person has ever believed:

"There are those who say there is no evil in the world. There are others who argue that pink fluffy bunnies are the spawn of Satan and conspiring to overthrow civilization. Let me be clear: I believe people of goodwill on all sides can find common ground between the absurdly implausible caricatures I attribute to them on a daily basis. We must begin by finding the courage to acknowledge the hard truth that I am living testimony to the power of nuance to triumph over hard truth and come to the end of the sentence on a note of sonorous, polysyllabic if somewhat hollow uplift. Pause for applause."

The news this week that the well-connected Democrat pollster, Mark Penn, received $6 million of "stimulus" money to "preserve" three jobs in his public relations firm to work on a promotional campaign for the switch from analog to digital TV is a perfect snapshot of Big Government. In the great sucking maw of the federal treasury, $6 million isn't even a rounding error. But it comes from real people – from you and anybody you know who still makes the mistake of working for a living; and, if it had been left in your pockets, you'd have spent it in the real world, at a local business or in expanding your own, and maybe some way down the road it would have created some genuine jobs. Instead, it got funneled to a Democrat pitchman to preserve three nonjobs on a phony quasi-governmental PR campaign. Big Government does that every minute of the day.

Obama's Double Backwards Flip on Health Care

Romesh Ponnuru sums it up succinctly:

In the primaries, Obama distinguished himself from Clinton on health care by opposing an individual mandate. In the general election, he distinguished himself from McCain by opposing taxes on health benefits. So now he is trying to pass bills with both an individual mandate and taxes on health benefits — and his supporters are saying that Congress should go along because he won the election.

Presidents Bush and Obama and Science

Jonathan Adler at VC has a good post with links on the "War on Science" idea that the Bush Administration was hostile to science and that Obama would be friendly to it. The exact opposite is true, of course.

Two weeks ago, Roger Pielke Jr. marshaled evidence that a government contractor with substantial industry ties may have been responsible for misrepresenting the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature in an important government report on climate change. This past week, the EPA was accused of suppressing an agency's employee's comments on the EPA's proposed greenhouse gas "endangerment finding" (the official finding that greenhouse gas emissions may threaten public health and welfare). Here again, Pielke finds the parallel with the Bush Administration's conduct instructive.

From an earlier Adler post, reformatted by me: :

One of the best examples of the politicization of science by the "left" — and one of the few that Mooney acknowledges — is the treatment of agricultural biotechnology, and the decision to subject such products to more stringent regulatory review than those developed with other methods. This policy has no scientific basis, as the National Academy of Sciences has stated many times.

Another example would be claims by environmentalist groups that pesticide residues on foods pose a significant cancer risk, a claim which the NAS has also rejected.

A third would be seeking endangered species listings for the purpose of halting development.

A fourth would be efforts to claim asthma incidence (as opposed to asthma attacks) are related to outdoor air pollution, when there is no data to support such a claim.

A fifth would be the EPA's second-hand smoke study, which a federal court found was driven to reach a predetermined result.

A sixth would be claims that the "precautionary principle" is a "science-based" approach to risk, when it actually reflects a normative policy judgment about how to weigh and evaluate risks.

A seventh would be the compounded conservatisms that are embedded into many agency risk assessments, such as those conducted for the federal Superfund program.

An eighth would be molding "ecosystem management" to satisfy non-scientific normative preferences about how land should be managed.

Inspector-General Link Page

1. A June 22 WP wrapup, including Amtrak IG Fred Weiderhold's resignation and the Library of Congress IG admonishment, as well as TARP, ITC, and Americorps.
2. Chicago Tribune June 18 story on all three IG's, including the International Trade Commission IG who was told her contract would not be renewed shortly after a Senator complained about how she was forbidden access to agency documents ( "It is difficult to understand why the ITC would not have taken action to ensure that the ITC inspector general had the information necessary to do the job," Grassley wrote on Tuesday. Less than three hours after the letter was e-mailed to the agency, the acting IG, Judith Gwynne, was told that her contract, which expires in early July, would not be renewed.)
3. Rasmusen posts.
   1. The TARP IG obstruction
   2. The board of directors and the Americorps IG firing
   3. Links to the 4 key documents on the Americorps IG firing

Scare Force One (2009)

Note: I will be updating this blog post now and then, without noting what is new. The White House internal report on the New York City flyover was released late Friday afternoon, presumably so as to attract minimal media attention, and Louis Caldera, the head of the White House Military Office resigned. This looks like a cover-up to me.

The general impression one gets from the report is that the military is entirely to blame, and there is in fact no reason for Mr. Caldera to resign. He knew little about it, and assumed that the flight was routine, the public was prepared, F16's weren't involved, the flight wasn't low-altitude, and so forth. A large number of details are given, and the tone is severe, but the important questions are left unanswered.

In particular, the big questions are:

1. Whose idea was the mission? In particular, was it Mr. Caldera's? Mr. Obama's? The report says a lot about people not knowing the details of the mission, but knowing the date, etc. is different from knowing the general idea.

2. Who was on the airplane? Were campaign contributors on it? (Update: No, apparently. See the Gates letter to Senator McCain. "There were no non-duty personnel or passengers on board."

3. Why were F16's accompanying Air Force One?

4. Was everyone told to keep this a secret from the public? (Yes-- See the FAA instructions at The Potomac Current air traffic control blog. Note how it excludes mention of the White House, and that it says there is to be no publicity or warnings.) If so, why?

5. Did anybody in the military object to the mission?

6. Where do training missions commonly travel?

7. What was the purpose of the photo shoot? What was to be done with these particular photos?

8. Why is Director Caldera resigning if his role is as minimal and excusable as the Report implies?

Here are excerpts from the May 5 report by the White House Counsel, with my comments. I've posted a plain text version of the report at http://rasmusen.org/t/2009/flyover.txt.

Our review was limited to the White House's involvement in the April 27 flyover. We collected relevant documents from senior White House staff and from the leadership of the White House Military Office ("WHMO"). We interviewed the WHMO Director, Louis Caldera (the "Director"), and the WHMO Deputy Director, George Mulligan (the "Deputy Director"). We did not review the conduct of other federal agencies or departments that participated in the flyover, including the Department of Defense (the "DoD") or the Federal Aviation Administration (the "FAA"). DoD is conducting its own internal reviews into the April 27 flyover.

Not interviewing any of the people actually on the flight, or lower-level employees of WHMO is purposeful ignorance. Even if the purpose is just to review the top WHMO people--*especially* if it is-- you should ask other people what really happened. Especially if you're going to imply the military is to blame, as this report does.

WHMO is comprised of a headquarters staff and seven operational units that employ approximately 2,300 individuals. Most WHMO employees are military personnel who serve in the operational units, and each unit is led by a military commander. The Presidential Airlift Group ("P AG) is one of the seven operational units.

2,300 employees! Just for the executive branch! If they cost $50,000 dollars each, that comes to about $100 million dollars in defense spending just for the White House and whoever else gets ferried around. That's ridiculous.

The April 27 Flight Initial planning for the New York City flyover appears to have begun in March 2009 or earlier.

On Friday, April 3, 2009, representatives of the PAG, the FAA, and several local authorities held a teleconference to discuss "operational issues and public affairs / outreach issues."

Whoa! The report has just skipped over the question of whose idea this flyover was, and who ordered the PAG (the air force people) to do it. In other words, the report is going to skip the big decision and go straight to the petty details.

On Friday, April 3, 2009, representatives of the PAG, the FAA, and several local authorities held a teleconference to discuss "operational issues and public affairs / outreach issues." According to a written summary of the call, the participants discussed the details of the proposed flyover including the date, time, and location of the operation; the altitude of the plane (1,000 feet), and the preferred flight path. The participants recognized "the sensitivity of the aircraft involved," and concluded that "public affairs and outreach efforts must be carefully coordinated and timed."

So this meeting was for details such as the exact date and the flight path. Somebody else had already ordered that there be a photoshoot near the Statue of Liberty. Who?

Coordination with "the general public" was planned to commence two days before the flight. The written summary of the call further specified that "[n]o reference should be made to the Presidential aircraft in any public outreach." However, it suggested that public outreach could reference "DOD aircraft."

Was it decided that the public wouldn't be notified? Notice here that complete secrecy before the mission is not inconsistent with what the report says. "Public outreach" is very general, and might just mean the script for answering questions after the mission.

Note, too, that they decided to lie about the White House's role. Well, literally, Air Force One is Air Force, not White House, and a mission ordered by the White House against the advice of Air Force officials is still an Air Force mission, but I think "lie" is not too strong a word nonetheless.

Neither the Director nor the Deputy Director participated in or were aware of the April 3 teleconference.

Why should they be? They don't care about the exact date and they don't know anything about designing flight paths. The policy decisions had already been made; the April 3 meeting was about operational details.

On Thursday, April 9, the commander of the PAG, Colonel Scott Turner, sent an email to the Deputy Director addressing a number of issues, including a plan to conduct "a photo shoot over the Statute of Liberty on the 27th of this month." During the same time period- either shortly before or after the April 9 email-the Deputy Director spoke to Colonel Turner about the proposed flight. The Deputy Director advised Colonel Turner to determine whether it was feasible or not; if Colonel Turner encountered any problems or objections, the flyover would not go forward. According to the Deputy Director, Colonel Turner likely contacted him because the mission was unusual. If it had been a typical or routine training mission, the Air Force would not have notified the White House.

This makes it sound like it was Colonel Turner's idea. If it was, he should be severely punished, perhaps even court-martialed. That might be the case. But notice that this paragraph does not say that the Deputy Director hadn't heard of the idea before April 9, and it doesn't even exclude the possibility that he ordered it to take place. It does imply that the Deputy Director hadn't heard anything earlier and that he had no idea it was to be kept secret in advance, but it doesn't come out and say that. And this report is being written by smart lawyers, remember.

On Monday, April 20, the Deputy Director believes that he notified the Director for the first time about the proposed flyover. According to the Deputy Director, he briefly described the plan and stated that Colonel Turner was working on the details. He also suggested that when the plan was finalized, the Director may want to inform White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina. The Deputy Director believed that Mr. Messina would want notice because the plan involved the use of the Presidential aircraft and because it was unusual-i. e., it was a photo shoot near New York City and it required a high degree of coordination.

Again: this is the first time the Deputy Director talked about the flyover with the Director, but that's different from saying that the Director hadn't heard of it before. It could be that the Director ordered it done, and the Deputy Director was now filling him in on details such as the date.

On Thursday evening, April 23, Colonel Turner sent an email to the Deputy Director describing the final details of the flight. It stated that for security reasons, details about the flight would be treated as "FOUO" ("for official use only"). Federal, state, and local authorities would be notified on April 24, and coordination with the "general public" would begin "on or after 26 Apr."

What security reasons could there be? Was he afraid terrorists would come with missiles to shoot down an Air Force One with no passengers?

Colonel Turner responded that everything was ready to go and no objections or concerns had been raised.

This is important. The Report itself says concerns were raised at the April 3 meeting. So does this just mean that there were no new objections or concerns? Or maybe no objections in the previous day?

At 12: 11 PM on April 24, Colonel Turner sent another email to the Deputy Director stating that final preparations for the flight were moving forward. He stated that he had "sent a suggested response to any media queries" to public affairs. And he asked, "[ d]o you have any issues/reservations whatsoever?"

It sounds as if Colonel Turner was trying to protect himself here. Maybe he was aware of what a stupid idea this flight was.

Finally, the Director stated that he was not asked to approve the flight. If he had been asked to make a decision, he would have received a formal package requesting his approval and he would have expected earlier and more extensive discussions with Colonel Turner and the Deputy Director.

Well, yes, there was no reason for a formal decision procedure, if the policy decision had already been made in March-- especially if the Director himself (or the President) made the decision then.

We also asked the Deputy Director why he did not notify Messrs. Messina or Gibbs. He did not do so for two reasons. First, he believed-based on his discussions with Colonel Turner and the various emails he received-that experienced professionals had planned the mission, and they had taken necessary steps to ensure the public was notified.

Here the DD is blaming the air force for the fiasco. Maybe he's right, but maybe he's not. We're not given enough info.

On Saturday, April 25, Colonel Turner sent a detailed email that described the planned flyover to General Arthur Lichte, commander of the Air Force Air Mobility Command. The email stated: "Secretary Caldera and George Mulligan have both 'blessed' this event. They were to brief Jim Messina and Robert Gibbs for their awareness only. I wanted to make sure you were fully in the information loop." The email further stated that Colonel Turner had "sent a press release" to Air Force public affairs personnel "in the event there are any media queries" and that the "FAA Public Affairs office in New York is poised to answer any/all questions that arise from the New York IN ew Jersey area."

This does sound as if Col. Turner was to blame. It is the strongest evidence that the whole thing was his idea. But why would a colonel propose a photo shoot? And wouldn't Air Force people be sensitive to the idea that flying in cities is unusual, dangerous, and liable to scare people anywhere, even if they didn't remember 9-11?

According to the Director, this was the first time he learned that the flight reminded people of 9111 and there was a jet fighter trailing the 747 aircraft.

That's a strange sentence. It raises the question again of why fighters were there. Were they taking the pictures? Why not use a slow-flying, cheap, aircraft?

The Director stated that he had no idea that the plan called for the aircraft to fly at 1,000 feet; he feels terrible that the flight had caused harm; and he believes that the White House needed to apologize.

Just how is the airplane supposed to get close to the Statue of Liberty if it's flying at 20,000 feet?

We believe that WHMO's general structure-and specifically, the reporting relationship of WHMO's operational units (such as the PAG) to the White House and to the Military Service Branches-should be examined. We recommend a comprehensive study resulting in recommendations to the President regarding these structural issues.

Ah, yes-- a "structural issue" is at fault, rather than any individual person. Stupid. The problem is not that the White House doesn't get notified of every flight Air Force One makes. If it were, nobody would read such boring reports anyway. The problem is that somebody-- we should learn who--- ordered this particular flight.

Update: There is actually a plausible theory under which the White House can be exonerated: the Air Force Setup Theory. Usually the WHMO is a military officer. Usually the WHMO is somebody more respectable than Mr. Caldera. No doubt the military saw his appointment as a slap in the face. This could explain why experienced professionals would come up with the stupid idea of the flyover. They could propose it, start the planning, make sure it was done as incompetently as possible, and then get the blessing of the WHMO without informing him of the security details or the likely consequences. Then, they could anonymously plant rumors in the blogosphere that the plane was full of campaign contributors. This would provide the mood for the WHMO to be blamed. A full investigation might turn up the real culprits, but they might bet on an Administration desire to nip the scandal in the bud--- along with Administration uncertainty over whether an investigation might indeed show that an Obama appointee was culpable.

The Function of the Office of Legal Counsel

More on the Holder overruling of the OLC. The Washington Post reported

In deciding that the measure is unconstitutional, lawyers in the department's Office of Legal Counsel matched a conclusion reached by their Bush administration counterparts nearly two years ago, when a lawyer there testified that a similar bill would not withstand legal attack.

Holder rejected the advice and sought the opinion of the solicitor general's office, where lawyers told him that they could defend the legislation if it were challenged after its enactment....

Through a spokesman, Holder portrayed the basis for his override of the OLC ruling as grounded in law, not politics.

"The attorney general weighed the advice of different people inside the department, as well as the opinions of legal scholars, and made his own determination that the D.C. voting rights bill is constitutional," Matthew Miller said. "As the leader of the department, it is his responsibility to make his best independent legal judgment, and he believes that although there are reasonable arguments on both sides of the issue, ultimately the bill would constitutionally grant D.C. residents a right to elect a voting representative in Congress."

I finally found a leftwing comment on this. Mark Tushnet says that Holder has not taken any formal, legally binding, action, yet and the bill hasn't passed either, so nothing has happened.

It seems Tushnet is wrong, though. It is true there is not action yet, but that is like saying the "torture memo" was unimportant because when it was issued, no actual interrogation had occurred yet. What Holder has said is that for any DOJ action that depends on the legal question of whether the DC bill is unconstitutional, he is overruling the OLC and the Department is to act as if the bill is constitutional.

A VC comment of mine on AG Holder's decision to back the DC Representation bill in court:

This is of course a much clearer case than in the Bush Administration of the top political leaders overruling the civil service lawyers on a legal stance. So I hope the people who objected to John Yoo's stance call for AG Holder's disbarment even more strongly.

As for myself, though, I find it appalling that anyone thinks the civil service lawyers ought to be making these decisions instead of the elected leaders. The OLC is just a bunch of staffers (mostly civil service staffers-- i.e., lawyers who couldn't get better jobs and who probably have strong ideological preferences). Staffers are supposed to give their best technical expertise to the organization leader, who then makes the actual decision-- in this case, What Shall the Executive Branch's Position be on the DC Bill? I do think the bill is blatantly unconstitutional, but I didn't get elected President and I'm not on the relevant court. I say: Let Holder and Obama defend the position they want in court. And the opinion of his staffers should not be admissible there.

Criminalizing Fossil Collecting on Federal Lands---Carelessly

The American Spectator has a good article on the shockingly bad Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 just passed with little public attention under special parliamentary procedures in Congress that, for example, bypassed the Ag and Judiciary committees. Among other things, it seems it makes fossil collecting on federal lands a crime.

House leaders skipped entirely the jurisdiction of two relevant committees: Agriculture, which has jurisdiction over the U.S. Forest Service, which is actually a part of the Department of Agriculture; and Judiciary, which has jurisdiction over bills that create or make changes to the nation's federal crimes. House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, D-Minn., was so upset he became one of four Democrats to vote against the bill of his own leadership. And serious reservations were also expressed by the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee -- that notorious Blue Dog (Not!) John Conyers, D-Mich. And none other than the American Civil Liberties Union signed a bipartisan letter protesting the criminal penalties in the bill's provisions regarding "paleontological resources preservation."

This section, in the name of protecting fossils on federal lands, makes it a crime to "excavate, remove, damage, or otherwise alter or deface or attempt to excavate, remove, damage, or otherwise alter or deface any paleontological resources located on Federal land" without special permission from the government. Penalties for violations include up to five years imprisonment, and "paleontological resources" are loosely defined as all "fossilized remains…that are of paleontological interest and that provide information about the history of life on earth."

"Paleontological resources" are defined so broadly and the offenses defined so loosely that many fossil lovers -- from scientists to amateur rock collectors -- became concerned that it would criminalize innocent error. After all, many common fossil rocks could be "of paleontological interest" and "provide information about the history of life on earth." Tracie Bennitt, president of the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences, wrote that "we can visualize now a group of students unknowingly crossing over an invisible line and ending up handcuffed and prosecuted. An honest mistake is just that and should be treated accordingly."

As word spread of these provisions, this association was later joined in this objection by CEI, NCPPR, and two groups that don't normally sign on to letters with free-market organizations about lands bills -- the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the ACLU! "We are concerned that the bill creates many new federal crimes using language that is so broad that the provisions could cover innocent human error," the letter from the diverse coalitions stated. "Above all, we are concerned that a bill containing new federal crimes, fines and imprisonment, and forfeiture provisions may come to the House floor without first being marked up in the House Judiciary Committee."

Hillary Clinton's Latest Gaffe, in Mexico

From The Right Coast:

It could have been worse
Tom Smith

For example:

"She doesn't look Mexican!"

"It's so refreshing to see Jesus portrayed as a woman."

"At Mount Holyoke we had a legend of a ghost professor who haunted the basement of the library every Halloween!"

"If I touch it, do I get a wish?"

"And why is she called Our Lady of Guacamole?"

Obama Appointee Richard Holbrooke as an AIG Director

Richard Painter writes at VC:

When I was at the White House, we looked carefully at corporate directorships. Membership on the board of a company with serious corporate governance problems was a strike against a potential nominee....

How then could a high ranking position it the State Department in 2009 go to Richard Holbrooke who was a director of AIG between 2001 and 2008, who was on AIG’s compensation committee, and who resigned from AIG in the summer of 2008 just as things were falling apart? Holbrooke is a talented if controversial diplomat with a track record in Kosovo, and he brings this experience to his present position as liaison between the United States and parties interested in the War in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, news reports suggest that the White House did not think about AIG when appointing Holbrooke, and did not consider whether a man who could not keep AIG’s risk prone management in check can effectively deal with a geographic region riddled with corruption, not to mention Al Queda and the Taliban.

And there is more. Holbrooke left the Clinton Administration for investment banking. The Department of Justice Public Integrity Division later charged that he violated post-employment conflict of interest rules by representing back to the State Department on behalf of an investment bank. The charges were settled with payment of a $5,000 fine. Details are in an August 14, 2000 memo titled 1999 Conflict of Interest Prosecution Survey sent by the Office of Government Ethics to designated agency ethics officials:

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/sudoc/image_32000000478091/32000000478091/DAEOGRAM/00/Do00029.pdf

In 2001 Holbrooke became a director of AIG. According to the Associated Press, SEC filings indicate that AIG paid Holbrooke hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash and stock in 2006 and 2007 (2008 compensation figures are not yet available).

Also:

AIG and the until recently AIG-affiliated Starr Foundation contributed a lot of money over several years to the American Academy in Berlin, itself a good cause. Dig deeper, however, and one finds that the American Academy was founded by none other than Holbrooke who also served as its Chairman. Is it pure coincidence that Holbrooke was one of AIG ‘s outside directors who helped decided how much money AIG’s senior executives got paid? Conflicts of interest of this sort are not per se illegal (perhaps they should be) but they do not reflect well on corporations or the directors who run them.

Movies fro Foreign Leaders

Rob Long has never, as far as I recall, written anything less than first-class:

To those of us who live and work in Hollywood, movies are always the perfect gift. So we're puzzled to read about the controversy that erupted when President Barack Obama gave British Prime Minister Gordon Brown a collection of classic movie DVDs.

It seemed like a chintzy gift to some sniffing British journalists. Impersonal, slapdash, borderline insulting -- the sign, some suggested, of a president in over his head.

But, look, we've all been there. We've all been faced with finding a last-minute gift. We've all sprinted through the aisles of Walgreens, scanning the shelves for something -- anything -- that might possibly, if wrapped stylishly, qualify as a present. President Obama has the added burden of being almost completely broke, so it's only natural that his eye drifts to the discount bin at the video store.

Twenty-five classic movies? Some that he included, like "The Wizard of Oz" and "City Lights," are so old and so well-known that they're practically free. Perfect! Wrap them up in last year's Hanukkah paper -- he's British; he won't notice -- and presto: diplomatic crisis averted.

The Mainstream Media Skip Another Major Story

The Washington Times reports that Mr. Freeman has withdrawn from consideration for the big Obama intelligence job. Yet another stupid Obama mistake--- not to see that the anti-Israel, Saudi-payrolled Freeman would be completely objectionable to most of his party. What's most interesting, though, is Mark Steyn's blog observation, Don't read all about it!, at NR, which I quote in full:

I'm glad to see the back of the Saudi shill Chas Freeman, but I wonder what Mr. and Mrs. America will make of it tomorrow morning, reading for the very first time how the "Outspoken Former Ambassador" (as the AP's headline has it) was scuttled by a controversy their newspaper saw fit not to utter a word about.

As far as I can tell, the only papers in America to so much as mention the Freeman story were the Wall Street Journal, Investors' Business Daily, the Washington Times, the New York Post, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Augusta Chronicle, and the Press Enterprise of Riverside, California.

But if you rely for your news on the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the Detroit News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Miami Herald, or the Minneapolis Star-Tribune — just to name a random selection of American dailies currently sliding off the cliff — the end of the story will be the first time you've heard of it.

The U.S. newspaper has deluded itself that it's been killed by technology. But there are two elements to a newspaper: news and paper. The paper is certainly a problem, but so is the news — or lack of it. If you're interested in news, the somnolent U.S. monodaily is the last place to look for it.

Informing Menendez about the Cuba Policy

Not the first example of amazing Obama Administration political stupidity, but a particularly clear one:

Menendez knew that his hard-line approach to Cuba was a minority view within his party, and that it was at odds with Obama's approach. But he did not expect to discover a significant policy change embedded in the text on an appropriations bill. His policy aides came across the language when the legislation was posted on a congressional Web site.

"The process by which these changes have been forced upon this body is so deeply offensive to me, and so deeply undemocratic, that it puts the omnibus appropriations package in jeopardy, in spite of all the other tremendously important funding that this bill would provide," the enraged son of Cuban immigrants said last week on the Senate floor. Menendez even slapped a hold on a pair of Obama nominees to draw attention to the issue.

It isn't playing by the rules to try to hide Cuba policy in a money bill from members of your own party, and isn't smart to do it when you're sure to be caught. Not only is it rude, but it implies that Obama doesn't care about his own senators' careers: he wanted Menendez to vote for the bill and only then find out his political survival was at risk.

What Obama should have done was realize that Menendez would dislike the new policy and tell him in advance that it was coming, and perhaps make a deal with him. The stupidity and rudeness is in not informing him at all.

Obama Would Have Approved of the Florida Abortion Baby Killing

A lot of people aren't sure about whether a typical abortion at, say 6 weeks, is murder. But who, except Barack Obama and NOW, would disagree about the case described in "Lawsuit: Florida Clinic Botched Abortion, Threw Out Live Baby":

Eighteen and pregnant, Sycloria Williams went to an abortion clinic outside Miami and paid $1,200 for Dr. Pierre Jean-Jacque Renelique to terminate her 23-week pregnancy....

Only Renelique didn't arrive in time. According to Williams and the Florida Department of Health, she went into labor and delivered a live baby girl.

What Williams and the Health Department say happened next has shocked people on both sides of the abortion debate: One of the clinic's owners, who has no medical license, cut the infant's umbilical cord. Williams says the woman placed the baby in a plastic biohazard bag and threw it out....

Police recovered the decomposing remains in a cardboard box a week later after getting anonymous tips.

Here's more detail:

The complaint says one of the clinic owners, Belkis Gonzalez came in and cut the umbilical cord with scissors, then placed the baby in a plastic bag, and the bag in a trash can.

Williams' lawsuit offers a cruder account: She says Gonzalez knocked the baby off the recliner chair where she had given birth, onto the floor. The baby's umbilical cord was not clamped, allowing her to bleed out. Gonzalez scooped the baby, placenta and afterbirth into a red plastic biohazard bag and threw it out....

At 23 weeks, an otherwise healthy fetus would have a slim but legitimate chance of survival. Quadruplets born at 23 weeks last year at The Nebraska Medical Center survived.

An autopsy determined Williams' baby — she named her Shanice — had filled her lungs with air, meaning she had been born alive, according to the Department of Health. The cause of death was listed as extreme prematurity.

Reader, whatever you think about abortion in general, wouldn't you be shocked if a state made Gonzalez's actions legal? Should he be able to say, "Sure I dumped a live baby in the trash can, let it die, and let it rot. That's legal. It's none of your business, or of the woman who had the abortion. She should know that that's what happens after an abortion. Didn't she notice there was no coffin or burial plot charge in the bill?" [He did *not* say that-- but should he be able to?]

What would you think about someone who agrees with that? Well, Barack Obama does. He voted several times against proposals to make baby killing illegal in Illinois, including against the one that eventually passed and which was almost identical to the federal law passed 98-0 in the U.S. Senate.

There is an mp3 and text of Obama's speech opposing the bill. The bill, 92_SB1663, said:

 (b)  Subsequent to the  abortion,  if  a  child  is  born
19    alive,  the  physician  required  by Section 6(2)(a) to be in
20    attendance shall exercise the  same  degree  of  professional
21    skill,  care and diligence to preserve the life and health of
22    the child as would  be  required  of  a  physician  providing
23    immediate medical care to a child born alive in the course of
24    a  pregnancy termination which was not an abortion.  Any such
25    physician  who  intentionally,   knowingly,   or   recklessly
26    violates Section 6(2)(b) commits a Class 3 felony.

Here is a defense of Obama. It is confusing enough that I deduce it is trying to confuse the issue. The argument seems to be that Obama was really against infanticide but in some unspecified way the bills would have restricted abortions more generally. Obama seems to have changed his story a number of times. One of them was the peculiar claim that the bill would have overriden Roe v. Wade, which is stupid since a state statute can't override a Supreme Court decision based on the U.S. Constitution. FactCheck.org says

Obama opposed the 2001 and 2002 "born alive" bills as backdoor attacks on a woman's legal right to abortion, but he says he would have been "fully in support" of a similar federal bill that President Bush had signed in 2002, because it contained protections for Roe v. Wade.

We find that, as the NRLC said in a recent statement, Obama voted in committee against the 2003 state bill that was nearly identical to the federal act he says he would have supported. ...

... It is worth noting that Illinois law already provided that physicians must protect the life of a fetus when there is "a reasonable likelihood of sustained survival of the fetus outside the womb, with or without artificial support."

This last paragraph is important to the Gonzalez case. Would it have made Gonzalez's action illegal? Or would it be interpreted to let Gonzalez, and nobody else, decide whether the baby had a "reasonable likelihood of sustained survival" without any second- guessing by the courts no matter how bad his decision was? The courts usually let doctors get away with a lot-- get away with murder, I was going to write.

In any case, it is clear that Obama thinks that if a doctor were sure that a baby would only live for two days after being born, the doctor should be able to throw the baby into a garbage can to die.

Another Bungled Obama Nominee

LIke everyone in America, I can't keep up with all the failed nominees of teh Obama Administration. Well, maybe stock analysts are keeping up. Anyway, here's another:

Annette Nazareth, a former senior staffer and commissioner with the Securities and Exchange Commission, made "a personal decision" to withdraw from the process, according to a person familiar with her decision.

An American Spectator article is alarming about the Treasury Department:

"We have no one here. There is no leadership," says another senior career Treasury official. "I've never seen anything like it. We have a secretary who seems to have no understanding of what his job entails, and no one in the White House seems to either know it or want to acknowledge it. We have people making decisions who shouldn't be making decisions, and in positions where we should have people making decisions about our domestic economy, our banking system and our Wall Street recovery plan, we have no one. People should be alarmed by this, but no one seems to care."

Liberals at a Conservative College

The Baylyblog found out that even a very conservative Presbyterian denomination's college has many liberal faculty. (For those of you who say, "So what?", keep in mind that there are far more Democrats at this college, which explicitly has a religion requirement for faculty, than there are Republicans at any Big Ten university.)

... thirty-five percent of Covenant's faculty members say they're likely to vote for Senator Obama. That's one third of the faculty supporting the presidential candidacy of the most radically pro-baby slaughter politician in Washington D.C.

... Covenant's faculty was asked to rate "issues for their importance in selecting a (presidential) candidate," and among those listed were "campaign finance reform," "education," "global warming," "health care," and "social justice." And yes, "abortion" was there, but no mention of sodomy or sodomite marriage.

Interestingly, only half the faculty members considered "abortion" to be "Very important" in their selection in their anticipated vote for a presidential candidate. This means half of the faculty members made a conscious decision to respond that abortion was not "Very important." What got a higher rating than abortion?

"Social justice." Abortion had a rating average of 3.23 whereas "Social justice" won with 3.40. (Ten faculty members responded that abortion was either "Not important" (2) or only "Somewhat important" (8), but only one faculty member responded that social justice was "Not important" and just two that it was only "Somewhat important."

For the top rating, "Very important," three issues tied in the faculty's vote: "Abortion," "Health care," and "Social justice," with "Social justice" taking the honors.

Obama's Favorite Rhetorical Fallacy?

Karl Rove notes Obama's love for straw men:

On Tuesday night, Mr. Obama told Congress and the nation, "I reject the view that . . . says government has no role in laying the foundation for our common prosperity." Who exactly has that view? ...

Mr. Obama also said that America's economic difficulties resulted when "regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market." Who gutted which regulations?

Even in an ostensibly nonpartisan speech marking Lincoln's 200th birthday, Mr. Obama used a straw-man argument, decrying "a philosophy that says every problem can be solved if only government would step out of the way; that if government were just dismantled, divvied up into tax breaks, and handed out to the wealthiest among us, it would somehow benefit us all. Such knee-jerk disdain for government -- this constant rejection of any common endeavor -- cannot rebuild our levees or our roads or our bridges."

Whose philosophy is this? ...

Obama Competence Failures

Karl Rove has an excellent WSJ op-ed summarizing the competence failures of the Obama Administration so far.

Steyn on Obama At Sea

I'm glad Obama won. He has inspired Mark Steyn to reach new heights in his writing, and if Art trumps Wealth, that is all to the good. From "Obama, All at Sea":

So how’s that going? Jesus took a handful of loaves and two fish and fed 5,000 people. Barack wants to take a trillion pieces of pork and feed it to a handful of Democratic-party interest groups.

and

Jesus picked twelve disciples. Barack seems to have gone more for one of those Dirty Dozen, caper-movie line-ups, where the mission is so perilous and so audacious that only the scuzziest lowlifes recruited from every waterfront dive have any chance of pulling it off. The ends justify the mean SOBs: “Indispensable” Tim Geithner, wanted in twelve jurisdictions for claiming his kid’s summer camp as a business expense, is the only guy with the savvy to crack the code of the U.S. economy. Tom “Home, James!” Daschle is the ruthless backseat driver who can figure out how to steer the rusting gurney of U.S. health care through the corridors of power. Charles Bronson is the hardbitten psycho ex-con who can’t go straight but knows how to turn around the Department of the Interior.

And, of course, there’s the lovable dough-faced shnook in the front office, Robert “Fall Guy” Gibbs. He didn’t do nuthin’ wrong, but, when seven nominees die in a grisly shootout with a Taxable Benefit Swat Team in the alley behind the Senate, he makes the mistake of looking sweaty and shifty while answering routine questions.

and

A president doesn’t have to be able to walk on water. But he does have to choose the right crew for the ship, especially if he’s planning on spending most of his time at the captain’s table schmoozing the celebrity guests with a lot of deep thoughts about “hope” and “change.”

and

Far worse than his cabinet picks was President Obama’s decision to make the “stimulus” racket the all-but-sole priority of his first month, and then outsource the project to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and Harry Reid.

and

Appearing on The Rush Limbaugh Show last week, I got a little muddled over two adjoining newspaper clippings—one on the stimulus, the other on those octuplets in California—and for a brief moment the two stories converged. Everyone’s hammering that mom—she’s divorced, unemployed, living in a small house with parents who have a million bucks’ worth of debt, and she’s already got six kids. So she has in vitro fertilization to have eight more. But isn’t that exactly what the Feds have done? Last fall, they gave birth to an $850 billion bailout they couldn’t afford and didn’t have enough time to keep an eye on, and now four months later they’re going to do it all over again, but this time they want trillionuplets. Barney and Nancy represent the in vitro fertilization of the federal budget. And it’s the taxpayers who’ll get stuck with the diapers.

and

As President Obama warned on Tuesday, “A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.” If you’re of those moonstruck Obammysoxers still driving around with the “HOPE, NOT FEAR” bumper stickers, please note that, due to an unfortunate proofreading error at the printing plant, certain nouns in that phrase may have been accidentally transposed.

and

But, alas, the foreigners made the mistake of actually reading the “stimulus” bill, and the protectionist measures buried on page 739 sub-section XII(d) ended, instantly, the Obama honeymoon overseas. The European Union has threatened a trade war. Up in Canada, provincial premiers called it “a march to insanity.” Wait a minute: I thought the Obama era was meant to be the retreat from insanity, a blessed return to multilateral transnational harmony?

As longtime readers will know, I’m all in favor of flipping the bird to the global community. But at least, when Rummy was doing his shtick about “Old Europe,” he did it intentionally. To cheese off the foreigners entirely by accident before you’ve even had your first black-tie banquet is quite an accomplishment. Protectionism is serious business to the Continentals. Oh, to be sure, if the swaggering unilateralist Yank cowboy invades some Third World basket-case they’ll seize on it as an opportunity for some cheap moral posturing. But in the end they don’t much care one way or the other. Plunging the planet into global depression, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter.

and

The bloated non-stimulus and the under-taxed nominees are part of the same story. I’m with Tom Daschle: I understand why he had no desire to toss another six-figure sum into the great sucking maw of the federal treasury.

and

Tom and Tim Geithner and Charlie Rangel and all the rest are right: They can do more good with the money than the United States government can. I only wish they followed the logic of their behavior and recognized that what works for them would also work for every other citizen.