Moonwalkin' Larry Tribe

Michael Jackson never moonwalked better than Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. The National Review reported this week that Prof. Tribe in March 2009 urged Pres. Obama on the down low not to nominate Sonia Sotomayor to a seat on the Supreme Court. According to blogger Ed Whelan,  the good professor told the president that now-Justice Sotomayor wasn't all that bright, could be "a bully" and might antagonize and further polarize the Court's four conservatives.

According to Whelan, Tribe's purpose in contacting the president was to promote the cause of Solicitor General and former colleague Elena Kagan for the Court vacancy. In order to do that, Tribe put the beatdown on Justice Sotomayor's Court quals. Pres. Obama later nominated, and the Senate confirmed, Elena Kagan for the Court seat vacated by Justice John Paul Stevens.

And what of Tribe, whose law students have included the president himself, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justice Kagan? To his credit he fessed up to contacting the president, but then backpeddled across history's stage more deftly than Michael Jackson every moonwalked to Billy Jean.

In an email he wrote that Justice Sotomayor's performance in her first year on the Court, as well as a second reading by Tribe of her record "amply refuted" his earlier take that she was dumb, a bully and could be a pain in the ass. Huh?

Who says academics can't bust a move now and again?

Just thought you might like to know.

Free Trade

A new Wall Street  Journal/NBC poll concludes that Americans have largely given up on the idea that free trade is good for the economy.

According to the Journal more than half the people polled say that free trade has hurt the U.S. economy. That's up 66% over the last 10 years. It's one thing for blue collar workers, unionized and non-unionized, to feel that free trade is responsible for jobs being shipped to South America or Asia. But 95% of upper income, highly educated respondents agreed that such outsourcing is responsible for our ailing economy.

But free trade is a two-edge sword. The same people lambasting it are the same ones walking out of Walmart with $89 DVD players. The fact is that the issue of free trade goes hand-in-hand with monetary policy. In fact, one of the factors in Congress currently igniting the firestorm over free trade is the value of the Chinese yuan compared to the U.S. dollar and China's apparent unwillingness to let its currency rise in value. Chinese currency manipuation has made Chinese goods a bargain here, and U.S. goods in China hopelessly uncompetitive.

But for many years U.S. monetary policy has resulted in low-cost imports, cushioning the blow from the loss of so many manufacturing jobs. Per capita income may have declined with outsourcing, but the U.S. manipulated the value of the dollar to cushion the blow of lost jobs.

The fact is the number one job of central banks is to value their currencies in such as way as to promote domestic bliss. Neither China nor the U.S. is an exception nor exceptional when it comes to this.

But turning our back on global trade right now is the wrong thing to do. In 1930 Congress passed, and Republican President Herbert Hoover signed, the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill. Why? Because in the midst of economic distress the popular belief was that the U.S. was being disadvantaged in the global trade of agriculture products. Then, as now, Congress believed that taxing imports would improve the economy by "leveling the playing field" for American exports-the same rationale the anti-globalization crowd gives for its opposition to expanding free trade. The result in 1930 was a global trade war that further plunged the U.S. and the rest of the world into what we now know was the Great Depression. Protectionist policies 80 years later would have the same result.

Like it or not we live in a global economy. Igniting a trade war will deny our farmers, manufacturers, service companies and entertainment industry access to important markets and further weaken our economy. Once again, as with healthcare, education, and social welfare, Congress will end up hurting the very people it purports to help.

Just thought you might like to know.

Mainstream Media Fails to Connect the Dots; Polls Show Americans Have Lost Confidence in the President

President Obama continues his globetrotting adventures, trying to look--well, presidential. Meanwhile, back at home, opinion polls have started to show a disturbing trend, if you are an Obama supporter. The President continues to make healthcare the tall poll in his tent, which continues to shift precipitously to the left and away from most Americans. This has quickly eroded the base of good feelings and confidence with which voters swept him into office a year ago.  Check the numbers:

• A November CNN poll shows that 47% of Americans say the top issue facing the country is not healthcare; it's the economy. In fact, only 17% of those polled said that healthcare was their main concern.
• Following the Nov. 7 House of Representatives healthcare vote 54% of those polled said they opposed the plan. Only 45% of respondents said they favored it, according to a Rasmussen poll. 
• An NBC/Wall Street Journal p0ll taken from Oct. 22 through Oct. 29 showed that the President's personal magnetism is fading. When it comes to being honest and straight with the American people, he's dropped to 33%. Two out of every three people don't think he's being honest with us.
• In the same poll his rating for being firm and decisive--witness the waffling on Afghanistan, the constant empty warnings to Iran, and his boogie out of town last week to let Attorney General Holder take the heat for the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civilian court--has slipped to 27%. Three-quarters of those polled don't see him as a decisive leader. 
• Most damning for the President is that a Washington Post/ABC News poll from Oct. 15-18 showed that for the first time a majority of Americans don't believe he can make the right decisions to lead the country.

So while Pres. Obama's acolytes in the media refuse to report such an aggregation of polling, the fact is that the President has lost the support of independents, the largest voting "bloc" in the country and the group most important in his historic election. So said pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.

The President continues to blame President Bush for the country's woes, especially the economy, but even that act is wearing thin with Americans. An October 26 Rasmussen poll showed that two-thirds of Americans aren't drinking the "Our-stimulus-saved-or-created-a-million-jobs" Kool-Aid. 

The percentage of people who think that Pres. Obama "inherited" the current economic crisis from Pres. Bush has dropped steadily over the year, according to Rasmussen. Over the last nine months that number has dropped from 84% to 63%. Today the number of people who blame Pres. Bush for the money mess we're in is about the same as those who now blame the current president. The more the President repeats his "It's Bush's Fault" mantra, the less that people believe it. 

Here's the kicker for the President, the one polling question that shows that his support is a mile wide and an inch deep, as they say in Texas: By a margin of 62% to 27%, majority respondents in an Oct. 26 Rasmussen poll said they trust themselves over the President to make the economic decisions necessary to get back on the road to economic recovery.

To a socialist-leaning Barack Obama, who believes that central planning will solve everything because the government is the answer to all questions, this is a death knell. For ten months this blog has attempted to show that his administration, because of its insular, elite, salon mentality, does not understand the American people and the American character. It sees itself as the savior of a nation that can save itself, thank you very much. Apparently two-thirds of the respondents see things our way.

Barack Obama will never understand that it was rugged individualism and a frontier spirit that settled this country, created great institutions of government, education and commerce to sustain it, and developed a font of goodness that other countries are quick to criticize and quicker still to drink from.  

When it comes to figuring out how to solve this nation's problems, the polls say Barack Obama's on the wrong side of history. We, the people, are on the other side. The right side.

Just thought you might like to know.

Talking Healthcare Again

These posts continue to try and inform the healthcare debate, substituting facts for the emotion and wishful thinking of the left. Here is another quick "cheat sheet" on some of the most contentious issues in the healthcare debate and the facts that address them:

• Voters in November made the point they want healthcare reform. Voters in November voted for change and against Republicans who had started governing like--well, like Democrats. Healthcare is part of that change. But there's a big leap between wanting to reform what we have and ending up with what Pres. Obama proposes. In fact the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows the country is pretty much deadlocked on whether it supports the President's plan. Sure, when asked if they favor having government pay for healthcare the answer is yes. Why not? If you ask anyone if they'd rather have someone else pay their bill--whether that means picking up a tab for dinner, buying them a new car, or paying their healthcare premium--of course the answer would be yes. But polls consistently show that most Americans like the quality of the healthcare they currently receive. The consummate Chicago pol, Barack Obama, reads those polls. That's why he's promising to let consumers keep the care they already have. So while most people agree for the need for reform, few people believe in the radical change that the President proposes.
• Healthcare had gotten too expensive. No doubt. What hasn't? In 1977 I paid $5600 for a slick, tricked out car--my first one that hadn't been someone else's first car. The equivalent car today would cost nearly $40,000. But it would come with a power train, safety features and conveniences undreamed of 32 years ago. So it is with healthcare. It costs more and keeps costing more, but we get so much more--new diagnostic treatments, new drugs, and new technologies that save lives, improve the quality of life, and prolong life.
• 46 million Americans are uninsured. OK, we've beaten this to death, but here it is again. When you back out 1) workers who are transitionally uninsured--that is, they were between jobs and without insurance when the survey was taken; 2) the people who are already eligible for a government insurance program like Medicaid, Medicare or SCHIP but choose not to enroll for whatever reason; 3) the number of illegal aliens who aren't entitled to care anyway; and 4) the millions of "invincibles"--largely young males under the age of 34 who think they'll live forever and choose to spend their money on other things--the actual number of uninsureds is closer to 8 million. A much more manageable problem that hardly calls for the radical changes the President proposes. But OK, let's play the leftist numbers game. Let's say 45 million people are uninsured. That means 260,000,000 are not uninsured. The point holds. Are you really going to turn the system on its head for a problem that affects less than 15% of the population?
  
• American business could be much more competitive if it could shift the cost of employee healthcare to government. You hear this frequently from corporate whiners. They say that they're disadvantaged because European and Asian countries in effect subsidize their global competitors through nationalized healthcare. This is the same corporate foresight brought you Enron, Worldcom and the Fannie Mae economic meltdown. The truth is that the cost of health care in these other countries is just shifted from premiums to taxes. And so what those companies don't pay to insurers they pay to their governments. At least right now U.S. business has some control over how their money is spent on healthcare. When Uncle takes over they'll still be paying for healthcare, only this time it will be through the IRS and they won't have a clue or a say in how the money is spent.
• Nationalized healthcare will simplify healthcare and reduce its cost. Does the IRS simplify paying your taxes? Does the EPA, with its thousands of pages of environmental regulations,  simplify conservation? If government makes healthcare so simple, why do many doctors refuse to take Medicare assignments? If Medicaid is so cost-effective why are up to 40% of its expenditures in some states fraudulent? This one is so stupid as to not require a response.
• A "government option" plan will provide competition for the private insurers. There are 1500 healthcare plans of various stripes out there. If that's not competition, I don't know what is. The issue isn't that there is no competition in our current system. The issue is that the cost allocation mechanisms are all wrong. The true cost of Medicare and Medicaid treatment is partially allocated to those of us with private insurance. The cost of jackpot justice lawsuits are allocated in the form of higher malpractice premiums to providers with no history of litigation . The true cost of employee health insurance is allocated mostly to the employer's customers as healthcare costs are passed on to you and me in the form of higher prices for everything. These misallocations of cost skew the system and negate the consumer advantage of having 1500 companies competing for your business. The one thing we don't need is a government which can't deliver the mail on time, can't educate our children properly, can't secure our borders, and can't balance its own budget putting itself in charge of your health. 

Bottom line, when the President says that he's going to "reform" health care by providing a "public option" and by ensuring that his new system will lower healthcare costs, improve care and still allow you to keep your own insurance, reach for your wallet and hold on tightly. As my mother would say, if it seems too good to be true, it is.

Just thought you might like to know.