Stop embarrassing us, Mr. Rangel. Resign
By: Mark Tapscott
08/28/09 4:52 PM
Want to understand why 2009 has witnessed the eruption of Tea Party and Town Hall protests of unprecedented intensity? Look no further than Rep. Charles Rangel, the New York Democrat who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee that writes tax law for the rest of us. A parade of steadily more serious revelations was capped with news that Rangel somehow forgot to report as much as half a million dollars in assets and income on his 2007 financial disclosure report. It's impossible to know exactly how much he forgot to report because Rangel and most of the rest of the career politicians in both parties who have run Congress for the past several decades conveniently designed their disclosure form to be as opaque as possible. That's why they can report "ranges" of income and asset value. Let you or I try reporting a range of income on our 2009 income tax return and see what happens. That's why people are angry. The realization is sweeping the ranks of productive Americans that they've been taken for a ride by the professional politicians at all levels of government but especially in Washington - and by their enablers and allies in the liberal media, on campus, the ranks of leftist non-profit activists, in the foundation and think tank worlds, and the ranks of the Fortune 500. And people are up to here with it. Democrats, Republicans, Independents. That's... "The Government Can!”
By: Barbara Hollingsworth
08/28/09 4:32 PM
This Tim Hawkins’ video (www.timhawkins.net), set to the tune of “The Candy Man,” is hilarious. He starts out by saying, “ Hey everybody, gather around! I’m here to give you anything you like. You want free college, energy, mortgages? Whatever you like! You have come to the right place!” My favorite line: “Soon we’ll have to eat our... Obama's labor secretary lets union officials off transparency hook
By: Kevin Mooney
08/28/09 2:49 PM
Never mind about those revised union financial disclosure requirements President Obama inherited from his predecessor. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis now says she won’t make union officials comply. Unions officials complained for eight years that regulations issued by Elaine Chao, President George W. Bush’s Labor Secretary, were more rigorous than required by the Labor Management and Reporting Disclosure Act (LMRDA), which calls for modestly detailed annual financial reports by unions with receipts of $250,000 or more. The Bush-Chao regulations require union officials to disclose financial information that could aid union members’ seeking information on how their union leaders are spending dues money, and to help expose “no show jobs” that put paychecks for ghost employees into union coffers. Before Bush took office, the reports were mostly ignored by the Labor Department. Now, it’s back to business-as-usual. A notice appeared this week on the department’s web site saying the Office of Labor Management Standards (OLMS), whose main job is enforcing LMRDA requirements, won’t be doing its job under Solis: “Accordingly, OLMS will refrain from initiating enforcement actions against union officers and union employees based solely on the failure to file the report required by section 202 of the Labor-Management and... The president can fire the attorney general
By: Michael Barone
08/28/09 2:47 PM
Obama administration spokesmen are portraying the president as unable to overrule Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to have a special prosecutor determine whether to prosecute CIA interrogators who were cleared by Department of Justice career attorneys back in 2004. “This was not something the White House allowed, this was something the AG decided,” a White House spokesman said. Utter nonsense. The attorney general serves at the pleasure of the president, and the president can determine that a prosecution would undermine the national security—a subject on which he has a wider perspective and a greater responsibility than the attorney general—and order that it not go forward. Probably not many in people in Washington remember that Harry Truman once fired an attorney general for, in his view, suborning corruption. In early 1952 the Truman administration was plagued by scandal, including that of the erstwhile head of the Justice Department’s Tax Division, T. Lamar Caudle. On February 1, 1952, at Truman’s instigation. Attorney General J. Howard McGrath, a former governor of and senator from Rhode Island, appointed Newbold Morris as a special assistant attorney general in the Justice Department to investigate corruption. Morris, a Republican, had been elected city council... Kennedy motorcade will pause at Capitol
By: Susan Ferrechio
08/28/09 2:42 PM
Sen. Edward Kennedy's funeral procession will stop at the U.S. Capitol tomorrow around 4:30 p.m. and pause briefly in front of the Senate, his family announced Friday. Kennedy, D-Ma., served 47 years in the chamber and employed hundreds of staffers during that time. Members of his staff past and present have been invited to pay their respects to Kennedy from the Senate steps. According to an announcement made by the family, Kennedy's motorcade will "stop at the Senate steps for a brief prayer so that Senate staff and members of the broader Senate community with whom the Senator worked can bid a final farewell." The motorcade will then travel to Arlington National Cemetery, where Kennedy will be buried near his two slain brothers at a private, 5:30 p.m.... Video: Chappaquiddick was one of Kennedy's favorite topics of humor
By: Charlie Spiering
08/28/09 1:20 PM
There is a lot of ruckus being raised in the blogosphere regarding Ed Klein's comments remembering that Ted Kennedy liked to joke about the horrific Chappaquiddick incident. The video is below: I don't know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, "have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?" That is just the most amazing thing. It's not that he didn't feel remorse about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, but that he still always saw the other side of everything and the ridiculous side of things, too. H/T NRO's Mark Hemingway ] and Hot Air's Ed Morrissey... Crist taps Senate placeholder for Martinez
By: Susan Ferrechio
08/28/09 1:14 PM
Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has tapped his former aide and former deputy state attorney general George LeMieux to fill out the term of retiring Sen. Mel Martinez. Martinez, a Republican, announced earlier this month that he planned to leave office early, which put Crist in an awkward situation since he is planning to run to replace Martinez in 2010. Crist, a Republican, needed a placeholder, and picked LeMieux from a list of party official and state lawmakers. LeMieux is the former chairman of the Broward County Republican Party and managed Crist's 2006 campaign for governor. Martinez congratulated LeMieux and called him "bright, capable and an accomplished... Liberal journalist shocked teacher unions shield incompetence
By: Michael Barone
08/28/09 11:21 AM
I’ve long been fascinated between the divide between the elite supporters of the Democratic party and the institutional supporters of the Democratic party. When you go to a Democratic convention, you see a fascinating cross-section of highly educated lawyers, financial industry titans and other elite-educated and very rich people on the one hand and leaders of labor unions on the other. They seem to get on fairly well, if a little awkwardly. After all, they’re all enlisted in a common enterprise, to install Democratic candidates and appointees in public office. And both the elites and the labor hacks believe, at some level, that they’re doing this in order to help ordinary people and, especially, the poor, in ways that hardhearted conservatives and selfish Republicans would never do. But the elites never spend much time on ground level seeing how the public employee unions actually deliver—or don’t deliver—the services they’re so proud of. And on the rare occasions when they do, when they actually see how public sector institutions operate and how they affect ordinary people and the poor, they are horrified. Case in point: Steven Brill’s New Yorker article on “The Rubber Room,” an account of the thousands of New York City public school teachers who are paid, in the high five figures or even six figures, to... Morning Must Reads -- Mr. Holder's Prerogative
By: Chris Stirewalt
08/28/09 9:14 AM
Washington Post -- Holder's Decision To Probe CIA Hints At a New Dynamic Attorney General Eric Holder has tremendous stroke inside the Obama administration. According to writers Carrie Johnson and Anne Kornblut, his decision to launch a criminal probe of the CIA was met with a presidential nod, even though the administration has publicly acknowledged that such a prosecution will make fighting Islamists harder and be a political liability. The story ends up being mostly treacle about how President Obama is both wise and good based on blind quotes from administration officials. But the nugget of news that Obama gave the tacit okay to Holder does have some consequence. First, it suggests that Obama does not want to say no to Holder, even when it’s in the administration’s best interest. Second, it suggests that Holder will be emboldened by his ability to push the president around. He’s expressed regret for having been an enabler of Bill Clinton’s excesses, so Holder would understandably resent presidential interference. But the story is mostly puffery like this: “‘Obama is approaching the issues as a game of ‘three-dimensional chess,’ said John O. Brennan, an assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism. ‘It's not kinetic checkers. And I think the approach in the past was kinetic checkers.... We'll Read the Bill: Four reasons there's no level playing field for the public option
By: David Freddoso
08/27/09 5:28 PM
You may have heard some opponents of ObamaCare discuss how a government-run public option health insurance plan will drive private insurers out of business. On the other hand, the same folks tend to argue that government generally offers services inferior to and less efficient than those offered by the public sector. The two claims, taken at face value, appear to be contradictory. But a look at what goes into the health care bill offers some needed context. In fact, there are more than a dozen specific factors that might allow the government-run plan to price itself artificially below market. Here are four of them: (1) Reimbursement of Providers Section 223 of the House Democrats' health care bill directs the public option plan to pay Medicare rates for its first three years of operation. (Providers that accept Medicare, would receive Medicare rates plus five percent.) For most services, Medicare pays providers at rates are well below market rates, and sometimes below cost. Denis Cortese, national CEO of the Mayo Clinic, and Jeffrey Korsmo, executive director of Mayo's Health Policy Center, wrote in a July op-ed that [W]e consistently suffer huge financial losses due to the government price-controlled Medicare payment system, which financially punishes providers who offer higher quality care at a lower cost. Last year alone, Mayo Clinic lost hundreds of millions of... Put up The Duke!
By: Julie Mason
08/27/09 4:56 PM
Baby, I'm back! If Newt Gingrich, Chuck Norris, Bill Clinton and very possibly Eliot Spitzer have taught us anything this past year, it's that there are second acts in American life. Michael Dukakis! Welcome back. Massachusetts state leaders are mulling a temp to fill Edward M. Kennedy's Senate seat pending a special election. But Massachusetts is a small state, and apparently most Bay State Dems not currently serving in the U.S. Senate would like to do so. Who to get? Notes Sue Davis (honk) in the WSJ: The two names most frequently mentioned: Vicki Kennedy, who is well-liked, politically astute, and would be a reliable Senate vote if Congress succeeds in passing a health care overhaul, and former governor and 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, who at 75 has no further political ambitions but remains in good standing in the state. Wow. Really? Rick Klein from ABC News quotes a former Dukakis cabinet member saying Dukakis passed health care reform as governor, and wouldn't it be nice if he could be a deciding vote for the reform bill Kennedy wanted to see passed in the Senate? This is mind-boggling. The Democrats have so many problems right now, the last thing they need is Dukakis, with his baggage and bad associations and let's face it, still-pungent whiff of electoral failure, padding around the Senate and reminding everyone of the bad old days... White House says no one "bemoaned" Bush vacations?
By: Chris Stirewalt
08/27/09 3:47 PM
The president is going to add another min-vacation to his August break next week with a a four-day weekend at Camp David. No big deal. But the administration, ever sensitive to criticism, had to rationalize the time at the presidential retreat, with Spokesman Bill Burton saying that the vacation week has been newsier than expected considering the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy. From Politico: "'When you're president, you've always got that job,' Burton said. On Monday, Burton pointed to former President George W. Bush's vacation habits to defends scattered criticism of Obama's August schedule 'As I recall, the previous president [took] quite a bit of vacation himself, and I don't think anyone bemoaned that,' Burton said."" I guess you have to say that perhaps no one bemoaned Bush's vacations -- attacked, lamented, scourged, bashed, snarled over etc. At the Daily Kos, even Obama getaways still provoke recriminations for Bush's time in Crawford, Texas and elsewhere -- Obama NYC Date Night Highlights Bush Vacation Record As Bush was leaving office, CBS had tired of the standard coverage of how much time Bush had spent in Crawford and raised the question of his use of Camp David, measuring the number of days in eight years that the 43rd president spent in the Catoctin Mountain getaway with: 487 Days At Camp David For Bush Bush did spend a lot of time away... Upon return, Obama will be the same, and yet different: WH
By: Julie Mason
08/27/09 3:35 PM
Obama: He's feeling distant. (afp) President Obama on Saturday will deliver the eulogy in Boston for Ted Kennedy, then heads back the Vineyard for one last round of golf (or whatever) before heading home to D.C. on Sunday. But -- which version of Obama will resume public duties after this break that appeared neither restful nor restorative? Will it be: Contemplative, sober Obama? Or assertive, feisty Obama? Religious Obama? Lately we've seen some scoffing, indignant Obama -- riled up over untrumors about abortion and death panels in health care reform. Deputy Press Secretary Bill Burton was inscrutable: "He's going to continue to do a lot of the things that he's done before. He's going to be out there talking to the American people directly about, you know, just how important health care reform is and the sort of reform that he thinks is the best prescription for our country," Burton said. "So I think that you'll see, after he gets a little time to recharge his batteries, spend some time with his family here and then in Camp David, he's going to come back as rip-roaring as he was before." Oh. Obama's back?... FEC okays 'friendly reminder' from Club for Growth about Specter
By: David Freddoso
08/27/09 2:14 PM
By a vote of four to two, the Federal Election Commission decided today that the Club for Growth is within its legal rights to contact Sen. Arlen Specter’s donors in an effort to have them request refunds. The draft advisory opinion of the FEC can be accessed here. The Club had asked for the advisory opinion because it wants to mail people who contributed to Specter's re-election campaign before his April party switch. The mailings will remind donors that Specter offered refunds to those who request them. “Upon request, I will return campaign contributions contributed during this cycle," Specter said in a press release the day he switched from Republican to Democrat this spring. The Club's mailers will include handy pre-printed forms for donors to send to Specter's campaign requesting a refund, said the Club's David Keating. "We didn't think Specter was going to tell anyone, and we didn't think his policy got a lot of coverage," he told The Examiner. "In case people want their money back, we're going to make it as easy as possible." The legal question pertained to the use of donors' personal information culled from FEC documents -- a practice that is tightly regulated. The FEC ruling states that the Club may use the information to make this one mailing, provided that it does not request contributions, use the same list in the future,... Sometimes you can't count on your uncle
By: Michael Barone
08/27/09 1:51 PM
Here’s an amusing item from the Weekly Standard: it seems that one of Barack Obama’s maternal great uncles is not quite on board on Democratic health care plans. Those of us who remember Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner table political debates between members of our extended families—between Aunt Lucille the socialist and Uncle Bob the paleoconservative—will have a certain sympathy for the president on this. His Kansas-bred grandparents and his free-spirited mother seem to have been well to the political left, but their relatives who never joined them in Hawaii seem to have quite different views. File under: American families.... Sen. Landrieu says she's likely to oppose 'public' option in health care bill
By: Mary Katharine Ham
08/27/09 12:28 PM
She was speaking at an open luncheon with limited seating (not a town hall), and was greeted by a small group of protesters. Her line on health care and cap and trade cannot be music to the administration's ears: Landrieu, D-La., who spoke during a chamber luncheon today, also met with local doctors earlier and briefly addressed about 15 demonstrators opposing a public insurance option and Cap and Trade. When asked after her speech if the senator would support a public option under any circumstances, she said, “Very few, if any. I’d prefer a private market-based approach to any health care reform that would extend coverage.” “I’d like to cover everyone — that would be the moral thing to do — but it would be immoral to bankrupt the country while doing so,” Landrieu said. That last sentence is where most of America stands these days, and a blue senator in a red state knows that full well.... Read the CRS report on ObamaCare's treatment of illegal immigrants
By: David Freddoso
08/27/09 11:04 AM
Mark Tapscott noted yesterday that a new Congressional Research Service report is being discussed by Republican members of Congress. It says essentially that notwithstanding all the rhetoric to the contrary (including, most recently, that of Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.), there is really nothing in the House health reform bill to prevent illegal immigrants from getting subsidies from the federal government for their insurance premiums under the plan. Because CRS reports are generally hard to come by, The Examiner has obtained a copy for your reading pleasure. In its subsection on health insurance subsidies (known as "affordability credits"), HR 3200 does state, "Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States." That would seem to solve the problem, but it's more rhetoric than reality. The bill contains no verification requirement or enforcement process for citizenship or legal residency, as exists for other federal benefit programs. The only verification required for the subsidies pertains to family income. Beyond that, as the CRS report notes, everything is left in the hands of the Health Choices Commissioner. House Democrats defeated all attempts in committee to add an enforcement mechanism that would require proof of citizenship or legal... Morning Must Reads -- No Grace Period on Health
By: Chris Stirewalt
08/27/09 7:45 AM
New York Times – Push Grows for Fast Choice on a Successor to Kennedy Many Democrats tried to suggest that Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death should cool passions on health care and make the passage of a bill more possible, but Kennedy hadn’t been part of the legislative process and embattled Sen. Chris Dodd is the custodian of the bill that bears Kennedy’s name, and Dodd is ill-equipped to revive the stalled legislation. President Obama may wrap himself in Kennedy’s legacy, but by Monday morning when Obama goes back to work, the over-the-top coverage of his death and funeral will already be fading from view. Plus, in the parts of the nation where the legislation is in trouble, Kennedy was a notable person, but not a hero. The real impact of Kennedy’s death on the health bill will be numerical. As Examiner colleague Susan Ferrechio tells us, dropping under 60 votes in the Senate – especially because of a death – gives Sen. Chuck Schumer and others militating for the nuclear option, a procedural end-run to pass a health plan with 51 votes, a stronger argument. But in Massachusetts, the factions are lining up behind switching the state law to allow Gov. Deval Patrick to appoint someone to the seat until a special election in January. Kennedy, who seemed to have a successor in mind, asked that the appointee not run for the seat in his... *****
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