One Word: Failure

The Perspective:

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has given the Obama administration a “B-plus” for its first 100 days and has graded the news media a “strong A;” but both should be flunked for failing to admit that Barack Obama is rationing where he shouldn’t and not rationing where he should.

Obama’s sweeping health care reform proposals are ridden with rationing when you look behind the code language and stealth tactics. Just recently, on “Meet the Press,” Lawrence Summers, Obama’s chief economic adviser, talked about “experts” who, using “the right kind of cost effectiveness…estimate that we could take as much as $700 billion a year out of our health care system” by eliminating unnecessary procedures.

Under Obamacare, those “experts” will be government bureaucrats — not doctors. Obama’s stimulus package dedicates $1.1 billion to medical “comparative effectiveness research.” This is Obama-speak for bureaucrats determining if your doctor is using what the government deems are the right procedures at appropriate costs. Other than Gibbs and the see-hear-and-speak-no-rationing mainstream media reporters, who doesn’t acknowledge that health care rationing is baked into Obama’s health care plans?

Rationing is also an important part of other of Obama’s priorities. Although President Obama pays lip service to educational reform, including the expansion of charter schools, Obama opted for rationing when his Education Department ended the Opportunity Scholarship Program that had provided 1,714 mostly black and Hispanic children in the District of Columbia with $7,500 per child in vouchers to move them from failing D.C. schools into private or parochial schools (where their reading scores beat their public school counterparts). Don’t count on Gibbs and Obama’s journalistic cheerleaders to tell you that Obama will cave and allow similar forms of rationing to please the teachers’ unions and that 38 percent of members of Congress have their children in private schools.

Rationing oil exploration, the use of fossil fuels and nuclear energy (in favor of expensive “alternatives” such as ethanol) as well as the rationing of carbon emissions in a “cap-and-trade” program are all elements of Obama’s “green” agenda. Of course the government, which has “bailed out” automakers, is also pressuring them to “ration” the production of cars that don’t meet Obama’s “green” standards. The net effect will be to ration consumer choices and also to impose the largest tax increase (on energy) in American history.

Regarding national defense, Obama’s most ambitious rationing proposal is his call for a worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons. So far, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Al Qaeda and others threatening the United States have shown no inclination to follow Obama’s lead. Will Obama “ration” military spending and efforts against terrorism to the point that the country will be judiciously protected? His first 100 days have raised several questions in that regard.

The one area where Obama has failed to ration is in his massive expansion of government spending, taxation, indebtedness and control. Obama has ignored several opportunities to cut pork projects and other government waste, abuse and corruption.

As President Obama celebrates his first 100 days in office with nary a nod to what he is rationing and what he is failing to ration, consider that he still has 1360 days in office to make either the right or the wrong decisions about rationing.

Since we can’t rely on his press secretary or many in the mainstream media to reveal what’s really happening, it’s important that we don’t ration our vigilance or our outspokenness.

The Far Left

The Perspective:

Longtime conservative leader Morton Blackwell, a Reagan administration alumni and once the youngest Goldwater delegate at the GOP convention, is perhaps best know as the originator of the phrase “Personnel is policy.”

Blackwell’s observation speaks a great truth about American government. Since no one man or woman can do it all, alone, we have followed the French in the development of bureaucratic systems that allow for power and authority to be delegated to subordinates who are responsible, on a daily basis, for the administration of public policy. It is these people, even more than the president, who directly impact the way policies are developed and carried out.

The people chosen to fill positions within an administration, no matter how minor those positions might be, matter; they matter because they are being handed the tools with which to make real decisions that have an effect on the American people, the American economy, our legal system, our national defense and just about any other issue you can name on a day-to-day basis.

Throughout the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama presented himself to the American people as a change-oriented centrist, slightly to the left of the middle of the road. The way he has governed over his first 100 days, however, shows him to be anything but the image he projected, particularly where many of his appointments are concerned. And it is these appointments that will determine the direction of policy in his administration over the next four years.

Some of the names and some of the circumstances are already familiar. Obama may have a Cabinet that, to borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton, “looks like America.” But they certainly don’t pay taxes like the rest of us. Several of his most high level appointees, chief among them Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, have been exposed as having failed to pay the taxes they owed at the time these should have paid them.

Then there is Attorney General Eric Holder, who prior to his appointment may have been best known for helping fugitive financier Marc Rich obtain a pardon in the waning days of the Clinton administration. Since coming into office, however, he shocked the nation when, during a presentation to mark Black History month, he called America a “nation of cowards” on the issue of race. Writer Joe Klein, who is generally sympathetic to the liberal point of view, denounced Holder for his remarks, saying they provided “absolutely no acknowledgement of the incredible progress that has been made over the last 40 or 50 years.”

Janet Napolitano, who leads the Department of Homeland Security, similarly came under fire after her department released a report on so-called rise of right-wing extremism in America that lumped returning veterans and anti-abortion activists into the same group as white power organizations and Timothy McVeigh, who helped mastermind the 1995 bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. Embarrassed, she met with veterans groups in Washington on Friday and gave what an American Legion representative characterized as a “heartfelt” apology.

But it’s not just the apples at the top of the barrel that are reason to be suspicious that a leftward drift is underway. There are plenty of secondary appointments, not all of which are subject to the Senate’s advice and consent, which make up the new administration’s gallery of liberal rogues.

White House Science Advisor Dr. John P. Holdren is a noted alarmist where the idea of global catastrophes is concerned. In 1971, he predicted that “some form of eco-catastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century.” That same year Holdren also claimed that “population control, the redirection of technology, the transition from open to closed resource cycles, the equitable distribution of opportunity, and the ingredients of prosperity must all be accomplished if there is to be a future worth living.”

More recently, in 2006, Holdren suggested that global sea levels could rise by 13 feet by the end of this century. The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report suggests a potential sea level rise of just 13 inches.

Another Obama appointee clearly outside the mainstream of American thought and values is Harold Koh, the Yale Law School dean whom Obama tapped be the State Department’s legal adviser.

Koh is, as columnist Andy McCarthy has written, “a radical trans-nationalist.” His view is that the United States is not, in essence, an independent nation with a natural right to govern its own national security. Rather Koh’s view is this country should be governed by a “trans-national jurisprudence” that “assumes America’s political and economic interdependence with other nations operating within the international legal system.” In Koh’s world, U.S. law should be subordinate to some kind of international code.

Then there is Rosa Brooks, who has been tapped to be a key adviser to the undersecretary of defense for policy. A former columnist with The Los Angeles Times, Brooks once compared the work product of Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel to “the so-called Big Lie theory of political propaganda, articulated most infamously by Adolf Hitler.” In 2007, according to various sources, she characterized Al Qaeda as “little more than an obscure group of extremist thugs, well financed and intermittently lethal but relatively limited in their global and regional political pull.” And she once wrote “George W. Bush and Dick Cheney shouldn’t be treated like criminals who deserve punishment. They should be treated like psychotics who need treatment…. Because they’ve clearly gone mad.”

Hardly the calm, rational and reasoned approach one has every right to expect from a senior Pentagon adviser.

Almost everywhere you look in the Obama administration you can find appointees whose beliefs are clearly outside the mainstream, who are, in a word, extremists. David Ogden, the nominee for the No. 2 job at the U.S. Department of Justice, who, according to FOXNews.com once filed a brief on behalf of a group of library directors arguing against the Children’s Internet Protection Act. The act ordered libraries and schools receiving funding for the Internet to restrict access to obscene sites. But Ogden’s brief argued that the act impaired the ability of librarians to do their jobs. He called it “unconstitutional,” though the Supreme Court later disagreed with him and upheld the act.” He also “argued, on behalf of several media groups, against a child pornography law that required publishers of all kinds to verify and document the age of their models (which would ensure the models are at least 18). The provisions were struck down. — Ogden was quoted at the time saying the potential reach of the law was ‘mind-boggling’ and even ‘terrifying.’”

And then there’s Dawn Johnson, who was nominated to be assistant attorney general and head of DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, who has written that “abortion restrictions reduce pregnant women to no more than fetal containers” and who has opposed the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a ban on partial birth abortion.

Rather than an administration of centrists, the Obama presidency is shaping up to be one in which the dominant voice is that of the American far-left. Right before our eyes, based on the appointments thus far, we are seeing “Changing we can believe in” being transformed into “Change we can’t believe.”