The Daily Caller showed a clip from January in which Trey Gowdy asks the questions that bother me with the Benghazi debacle. I like all of Trey’s questions and have one more. Was the Benghazi failure an indicator of a broader policy failure? I cannot help but wonder if our policy in Syria and Ukraine would be a bit more coherent to the rest of the world if the “Media” had started asking some serious questions about a broader policy failure. It took Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine before the Administration got a clue.
An Independent Voter’s Hope For The Benghazi and IRS Investigations
When I look at the Benghazi and IRS investigations I am reminded of children who can no longer play well together without adult supervision. I have no sympathy for their plight. The Democratic party knew where the political boundaries were in government meddling and crossed over them. They killed four people in Benghazi because it was inconvenient for a presidential campaign and used the IRS to suppress political opposition. The Republicans are reminding them of these sins at every opportunity. Now the Democrats are complaining that they did nothing wrong and the voters and media should break up the fight. I am kind of old school on this matter and am willing to let them fight it out. They have way too much piss and vinegar in them to break them up now. It is sad but they have to hurt each other before they can get better. Eventually the vitriol will be replaced with reluctant respect and new boundaries will be drawn to avoid future confrontations. Promises will be made. It has been a long time since the Nixon resignation but it served its purpose. Hopefully these scandals will serve a similar purpose. If the Democratic party gets away with these actions with just a hand slap, they will have set a new standard for political meddling and suppressing political opposition for future administrations. This is not good for either party or a well functioning government during presidential campaigns.
The New Anova Precision Cooker Promises to Be the Best, Most Cost-Effective Sous-Vide Solution on the Market
The folks over at Serious Eats announced a new Anova sous-vide solution yesterday. I always wanted to have one so here was my chance to get one at good price. The funding is via a Kickstarter project and there are still some slots available to back this project for $145 and more.
You Can’t Buy Insurance Until Next November
Last month I wrote a post, Year-Round Sales Of Health Plans, that acknowledged a common fallacy I heard from folks looking at going without health insurance is that they could go get a health insurance plan anytime they needed one. John Goodman wrote a nice article on the subject, You Can’t Buy Insurance Until Next November, at The Independent Institute. Here was my comment,
Nevada mandates year-around sales of health plans, http://www.kaiserhealthnews.or…. It may sound counter-intuitive to Affordable Care Act supporters but insurance companies and exchanges should grab customers whenever they can if they want to reduce the number of uninsured. The biggest threat to the exchanges is that healthy customers might get comfortable going without health insurance. I asked my state representative to submit a bill mandating year-around sales of health plans and he said he would look at it.
I hate to give advice to Affordable Care Act supporters since I am pretty happy with all of the delays but my inner MBA says if you want the exchanges to work, you have to start running them like a business. I have seen Christmas stores that are open longer during the year than the exchanges.
The Case For A Broader Policy Failure Is Rooted In The Unanswered Benghazi Questions
My problem with the Administration’s story about the Benghazi attack is rooted in the question, “What was Ambassador Stevens doing in Benghazi?” Last week we saw a Ben Rhodes Rhodes email that instructed Susan Rice “to underscore that these protests are rooted in [an] Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.” After almost two years I think the case for a broad policy failure is getting stronger and is rooted in these unanswered Benghazi questions.
- What was Ambassador Stevens doing in Benghazi when Britain was pulling out?
I partially accepted the State Department admission that they were stupid when they sent Ambassador Stevens to Benghazi. Considering that Britain and others had pulled out of Benghazi due to attacks, this implies that the State Department deliberately ignored the security situation in Benghazi. So far I have not seen any action by the Administration or the State Department that shows that they have learned anything from this fatal attraction with insularity. So when is the State Department going to start sounding like they have read and understand the local intelligence reports and are listening to what our friends and foes are saying? That is their job. - What was our foreign policy at the time and has it changed for the better?
If we move from the local intelligence failure to policy failure, I am still not sure what our foreign policy objectives are in Benghazi, Syria, or the Ukraine. It looks like we are making it up as we go along and Mr. Putin noticed. I do not think it is much of a stretch to think that our flopping around in Benghazi and Syria gave Mr. Putin the green light to invade Ukraine. Underestimating Mr. Putin was a policy failure. I realize the Administration wanted to distinguish itself as different than the previous Administration but you still have to be a winner. Mr. Putin looks at foreign policy as a war by another means and the Administration looks at foreign policy as t-ball! I doubt that even the most ardent Administration supporter will try and make the argument that the foreign policies decisions in Benghazi, Syria, or Ukraine are working. - Was there a cover-up so that the President could get re-elected and what political changes need to happen to prevent cover-ups by future Administrations?
This is an unforced error by the Administration. Everything they have done to impede the investigation has made the case for a broader policy failure more apparent. Are those four men deaths collateral damage from a Presidential campaign?
Can We Ever Trust The IRS Again?
I hold government bureaucrats to a much higher standard than the average citizen. Government bureaucrats have been given both power and the trust of people. So whether your primary concern is cronyism or government corruption or just plain incompetence, government bureaucrats are guilty until proven innocent. They must embody both virtue and integrity if our government is to function in a reasonable manner. Our founding fathers wrote extensively about virtue so I am puzzled why anyone would let Lois Lerner and the IRS dabble with politics. It was not in the best interest of the IRS or the country.
So let’s review what we know about the IRS targeting particular 503c4 applications for more scrutiny. The advantage of 503c4 corporations is that the donations they receive are tax deductible and anonymous as long as they were focused on social welfare issues like voter registration. This was pretty handy to the NAACP in the early years when they were trying to get more blacks registered to vote. If an organization steps over the political line, the remedy is that the IRS pulls their tax exempt status. If we look at the True The Vote website we can see that their mission is equipping citizens to take a stand for free and fair elections. Using the NAACP as the standard then the True The Vote effort looks very similar but for a different group of people. If the IRS is following standard practices they should approve the True The Vote 503c4 status and gently remind them that they will yank their tax exempt status if they cross over the line. That is what they should have done.
Instead the IRS chose a variety of tactics that brings in to question the integrity of the organization.
- They targeted certain group based on their use of certain words for extra scrutiny.
- They requested more information from the organizations than was required for the IRS to do their job.
- They delayed the approval status for a very long time.
Obviously this involves a lot more effort by IRS then the traditional route of granting 503c4 status and threatening to yank the tax exempt status later. The IRS had the means and opportunity to harass prospective 503c4 organizations but what was the motive?
In the Washington Times today we have begun to gain a little insight into the motive.
IRS emails released Wednesday show that just before the tea party targeting scandal was revealed last year, Lois G. Lerner and her colleagues at the tax agency were talking with the Justice Department about making examples out of nonprofit groups that they felt were violating campaign laws by playing political roles.
Okay, why was the IRS considering suing nonprofit groups when they could easily yank the tax exempt status? Who put them in charge of enforcing campaign laws? This sure looks like a motive and makes it look like they deliberately chose to violate the trust of the people so they could play hard ball politics from the security of the IRS office! Now we are confronted with the dilemma of how to rebuild trust in the IRS without firing everyone. If Congress does not set an example with the IRS now then what will stop a Republican president from using the IRS in the same manner? Thanks to Lois we are reminded that trust is easy to lose but very hard to win back.
Is Federal Land Ownership In The Same Political Quagmire As Slavery in the 1800s?
The federal land ownership question has me puzzled. I understand why it may have been good for the federal government to reserve vast amounts of land from the states when they applied for statehood but I do not understand why they are still doing it now. It kind of reminds me of the problem our founding fathers had with the slavery issue. It was necessary for our founding fathers to agree to protect the slave trade for twenty years so that they could get the votes to pass the Constitution. However when the twenty year time limit expired, Congress quickly passed the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves in 1807. The shelf life for the slavery issue had expired and it was stinking up the place. It was pretty obvious to the supporters of slavery that most of the country had decided that the practice of slavery should be abolished and that slaves should be freed. It was not obvious how this could be accomplished politically. In the end there is nothing like a very uncivil war to remind us that this political issue was not handled well. Not only did both the North and the South lose a large number of men to finally settle the slavery issue but the economy of South was devastated and the job opportunities for the newly freed slaves was primarily as sharecroppers. It was the classic lose-lose scenario that got worse with age.
Once again our country is caught up in another lose-lose opportunity. The country is in an absentee landlord relationship with the western states. If the saying “All politics is local” is true, for whose benefit is the federal government trying to keep up with these local grievances? Even though I question the legality of Mr. Bundy’s actions, he has shown the Putin approach to dealing with the federal government works. Now we get to see if the Administration can be more successful at talking down this situation then they have been with convincing Putin to not invade Ukraine. If the talks with Bundy stall what is the federal government going to do? I am sure that invading Nevada would be amusing spectacle to most people outside of Nevada. Maybe it is time for the federal government to do something it should have done more than 100 years ago and scale down the federal ownership of western lands. It is time to start selling the land and the first place to start would be to sell the grazing land to Mr. Bundy. It is the right thing to do. The shelf life for this absentee landlord relationship has expired and it has begun to stink.
Mr. Bundy and the Second Amendment
I was getting pretty concerned this weekend over the Bundy versus the Bureau of Land Management(BLM) fiasco this weekend. I saw a couple of scenes that looked they were one small step from re-enacting the Waco siege. The Waco siege or otherwise known as the Waco massacre is is not one of the bright spots in American history. It purportedly was about the sale of automatic weapons but it was so botched that the only thing most people remember is all of the people who died unnecessarily. It is a vivid reminder of the pitfalls when you to try to defend yourself against the government. In the case of the Mr. Bundy versus the BLM, wiser heads prevailed and the BLM backed down. What I found interesting is what Mr. Kornze said,
“Based on information about conditions on the ground, and in consultation with law enforcement, we have made a decision to conclude the cattle gather because of our serious concern about the safety of employees and members of the public.”
This weekend I also caught up with Justice Steven’s opinion in the Washington Post on how to fix the Second Amendment. In that piece he argues everything would have been fine with the Second Amendment if the authors had said,
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.
Unfortunately he ignores the fact that our Bill of Rights was based on the English Bill of Rights and common law history. Here is what Wikipedia says.
The right to keep and bear arms (often referred to as the right to bear arms or to have arms) is the people’s right to have their own arms for their defense as described in the philosophical and political writings of Aristotle, Cicero, John Locke, Machiavelli, the English Whigs and others.[1] In countries with an English common law tradition, a long standing common law right to keep and bear arms has long been recognized, as pre-existing in common law, prior even to the existence of written national constitutions.[2] In the United States, the right to keep and bear arms is also an enumerated right specifically protected by the U.S. Constitution and many state constitutions[3] such that people have a personal right to own arms for individual use, and a right to bear these same arms both for personal protection and for use in a militia.[4]
The concept of the “right of the people to keep and bear arms” is derived from the English Bill of Rights 1689 which states:
- That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law.
Now we get to the $64 questions. Were the authors of the second amendment deliberately vague in phrasing this right so as to allow citizens to act as the political counter-balance to thuggish political actions by the executive branch and to allow the judicial branch some discretion in how the law was enforced? I suspect that Justice Steven’s solution would only recognize a militia that was duly authorized by the legislature. This would make a mockery of the people who felt the Bundy’s grazing rights had been trampled on solely to support a misguided environmental concern voiced by a major donor to Senator Harry Reid. The idea that people in the government would engage in thuggish political actions solely to benefit their friends existed long before the Bill of Rights and I suspect King George III would have agreed with Justice Stevens on the importance of restricting the right to bear arms. The right of the people to keep and bear arms appears to have been a veiled threat intended to convince our politicians whether they be Kings, Prime Ministers, or Presidents that they should fear the wrath of their citizens whenever they stop listening and respecting the grievances of the citizens.
The second of the $64 questions is why is Justice Stevens arguing this point at the same time the Administration has garnered their place in history as the best gun salesman ever. This bustling market for guns looks like a bigger problem than one that can be solved by adding five more words to Second Amendment. The more the Administration talks the worse the problem gets. When Vice President Joe Biden gave us his opinion on self defense, my wife went out and bought a shotgun. Now we own two guns and I sarcastically refer to the shotgun as Joe. If Justice Stevens and the Administration really wanted citizens to own less guns then they should seriously consider doing the opposite of what they are doing.
The third $64 question comes from The Second Amendment As Ordinary Constitutional Law piece by Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame. He asserts that the “individual right to arms, not just “state armies”””a right that was, in fact, not at all dependent on the individual’s membership in any organized body or militia” is ordinary constitutional law. If that statement is true then why is Justice Stevens trying to make the link of the right to bear arms to participation in the militia? Isn’t that already settled?
Year-Round Sales Of Health Plans
One of the advantages of having a grandfathered health insurance plan is that you can look around and kick the tires of the new health insurance market place. A common fallacy I have heard from folks looking at going without health insurance is that they could go get a health insurance plan anytime they needed one. That is incorrect for most states. Most states allow health insurance to be sold without restriction only during the “open enrollment” period which recently went from October 1st to March 31st. The only state that mandates year-around sales of health plans is Nevada. The argument against year-around sales is the impact of adverse selection. The interesting question is how does this reduce adverse selection and health care costs?
Let us look at an example. Suppose in August your wife gets a call from the hospital and they say there is a dot on the mammogram and they recommend a biopsy. The earliest they can schedule the operation is in September. Is the insurance company better off if their prospective new customer delays their operation to October? In the immortal words of Hillary Clinton, what does it matter? How are they avoiding adverse selection by delaying treatment to October? For better or for worse the Affordable Care Act has made adverse selection a moot point for insurance companies. For those who are curious my wife’s diagnosis was just another false positive. Hmm… Maybe I need to write my state representative and see if he wants to piss off his party some more.
Student Loans Is The ONLY Consumer Credit That Is Growing!
I was looking at the latest G.19 report from the Federal Reserve and noticed that the only major holder of consumer credit who increased their loans was the Federal Government. For people unfamiliar with this report, this is where the government reports its student loan holdings. It is probably too early to declare the consumer driven economy as dead and buried but you get the gist. It is hard to be optimistic about a growing economy in 2014 when the only folks borrowing money in February were students. Read it and weep!