Tag: Democrats

Wednesday Links

  • Drop the neocons: “Republicans should take this opportunity to return to their traditional noninterventionist roots and throw their neoconservative wing under the bus.”
  • John Samples on the national impact of this week’s elections: “The evidence suggests the Obama administration might be on the same path that led the Clinton presidency to the election of 1994. But there is an important difference: In 1994, the public had some faith in the alternative to Clinton and the Democrats in Congress.”
Topics: 
Cato Publications, General

One Year Later

By
Roger Pilon

This morning, Politico’s Arena asks:

“Election 09: What’s the message?”

My response:

A note on NY 23, then to the larger message in yesterday’s returns. Already this morning we’re seeing an effort to spin the NY 23 outcome as a warning to Republicans and a hopeful sign for Democrats. Yet the striking thing about that outcome is how close a third-party candidate came in the face of opposition from the Republican establishment. And the ultimate outcome can doubtless be explained simply by absentee ballots, plus voters unaware of the last-minute developments in the race.

Thus, given those factors, the NY 23 outcome is perfectly consistent with returns in the rest of the country. (In fact, Conservative and Republican votes in that race total more than 50 percent.) And the message will not be lost on blue-dog Democrats. If the internal inconsistencies of ObamaCare did not trouble those Democrats before yesterday, they surely must now. The silence coming from the White House last night spoke volumes.

Topics: 
General, Government and Politics

Monday Links

  • The “Karzai problem” in Afghanistan: “The U.S. has assisted and sponsored a corrupt, illegitimate and slightly autocratic regime there while purporting to advance the values of freedom and democracy.”
  • Did it work? Cato’s Jeffrey Miron debates the effectiveness of Obama’s stimulus plan.
  • The limits of American power in Afghanistan.
Topics: 
Cato Publications, General

Why National Democrats are Like Wile E. Coyote

By
Andrew J. Coulson

Illinois state senator James Meeks, an African American Democrat and long-time opponent of school choice, just switched sides.

In doing so, he swells the small but growing ranks of Democrats in Florida, New Jersey, and the nation’s capital, among others, who support giving parents an easy choice between public and private schools.

Like Wile E. Coyote, national Democrats have run off a political cliff in their reflexive opposition to educational freedom.  And like Wile,  they’re experiencing a temporary suspension of the law of gravity – not yet suffering for their mistake.

But we all know that the cloud at Wile’s feet eventually dissipates, and he realizes that he’s no longer on solid ground. By then, it’s too late.

As someone much happier under divided government than one party rule, I hope national Democratic leaders get a clue, and notice that the’ve left solid ground on education. There is still time for Obama and company to make it back to the cliff’s edge, calling for the expansion rather than the termination of DC’s K-12 scholarship program, and voicing support for education tax credits at the state level, as many of the party’s state leaders have already done. 

States are going to continue passing and expanding private school choice programs with or without the support of national Democrats. If president Obama and friends continue clinging to the anvil of government schooling while that happens, we all know how it’s going to turn out.

Beep. Beep.

(HT: Alexander Russo)

Topics: 
Education and Child Policy, General

Nice Insurance Company. Shame If Anything Were to Happen to It.

By
Michael F. Cannon

Just days after the health-insurance lobby released a report criticizing the Senate Finance Committee’s health care overhaul (for not expanding government enough!), Democrats and President Barack Obama lashed out at health insurers, threatening to revoke what the Government Accountability Office calls the insurers’ “very limited exemption from the federal antitrust laws.”

Democrats say they’re motivated by the need to increase competition in health insurance markets.  Right.

According to Business Week:

David Hyman, a professor of law and medicine at the University of Illinois College of Law and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute…considers it unlikely that repeal would fundamentally change the nature of the market. While it might increase competition in some markets, he says, it could actually decrease it in others, such as those where small insurers survive because they have access to larger providers’ data. Changes to the act could therefore hurt smaller companies more than larger ones, he says.

Because the act doesn’t outlaw the existence of a dominant provider but simply prohibits collusion, says Hyman, a repeal would fall short of breaking up existing market monopolies that are blamed for artificially inflating prices. The current move against [the] McCarran-Ferguson [Act], he says, “has more to do with the politics of pushing back against the insurance industry’s opposition to health reform than it does with increasing competition in health-insurance markets.”

Combined with what The New York Times described as the Obama administration’s “ham-handed” attempt to censor insurers who communicated with seniors about the effects of the president’s health plan – the Times editorialized: “the government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services had to stretch facts to the breaking point to make a weak case that the insurers were doing anything improper” – it’s hard to argue that this is anything but Democrats threatening to use the power of the state to punish dissidents.

When Republicans were in power, dissent was the highest form of patriotism.  Now that Democrats are in power, obedience is the highest form of patriotism.

Topics: 
Cato Publications, General, Government and Politics, Health Care, Law and Civil Liberties

Should the White House Be Taking on Fox?

By
Roger Pilon

Today’s  Arena question over at Politico asks:

Is Fox News a “legitimate news organization?” Is the White House smart, or not so smart, to take on Fox?

Is Fox News a “legitimate news organization?” As compared to what? The New York Times? NPR? MSNBC? Please.

The Obama team, Democrats like my good friend Walter Dellinger, and the so-called Mainstream Media (MSM) howl about Fox News for two main reasons. First, Fox is covering news the MSM ignores because it doesn’t “fit.” And second, in part because of that, the Fox audience continues to grow while the MSM audience is shrinking, raising a serious question about whether the MSM is any longer “mainstream.”

Let’s not pretend that the MSM doesn’t “manage” the news. It does it mainly by deciding daily what is and is not “news” and then by deciding how to report that news. Do we need any better example than the current ACORN story? As Fox was bringing the facts to light, nowhere were those facts to be found in the MSM – until they could be ignored no longer. Or take the huge 9/12 anti-big-government rally here in Washington. Fox covered it for the event that it was. Where was it covered in The New York Times? On page A37. And more revealing still, in the NYT electronic edition, the second of three stories posted under “Politics” was headlined “Thousands Rally in Minnesota Behind Obama’s Call for Health Care Overhaul,” the third was headlined “Thousands Rally in Capital to Protest Big Government” – the implication being that the two rallies were equivalent in size when in fact the protest rally dwarfed the Obama rally by many multiples.

But why pretend it’s otherwise? The president himself admits the MSM bias. Speaking at the May 9 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, “I am Barack Obama. Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me. (Laughter and applause.) Apologies to the Fox table.” A good laugh line in that setting, to be sure, but only because he’s said at last what we all know to be true.

Walter Dellinger may write, citing no evidence, that the Tax Day Tea Party protests were “conceived and executed by Fox News,” but he surely knows that’s not true. He hails from North Carolina, albeit now from Duke. He knows that outside that cloister there’s protest in the land. Fox News isn’t generating that opposition to the Obama juggernaut. It’s real, but it’s so much easier for the MSM to blame the bearer of that news than to face the reasons for their own falling numbers: Their “news” doesn’t fit with what so many people see with their own eyes. I’m reminded of the great Groucho Marx line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”

C/P Politico’s Arena

Topics: 
Government and Politics

House Democrats Choose Dishonesty

By
Michael F. Cannon

I’m not a fan of the House Democrats’ proposed takeover of the health care sector.  (If there’s one thing that legislation is not, it’s “reform.”)  But at least House Democrats were honest enough to include the cost of the $245 billion bump in Medicare physician payments in their legislation, unlike some committee chairmen I could mention.

Unfortunately, House Democrats have since decided that dishonesty is the better strategy.  They, like Senate Democrats, now plan to strip that additional Medicare spending out of health “reform” and enact it separately.  (Democrats are already trying to exempt that spending from pay-as-you-go rules, making it easier for them to expand our record federal deficits.)  Why enact it separately?  Because excising that spending from the “reform” legislation reduces the cost of health “reform”!

But why stop there?  Heck, enact all the new spending separately, and the cost of “reform” would plummet!  Enact the new Medicaid spending separately, and the cost of “reform” would fall by $438 billion! Do it with the subsidies to private health insurance companies, and the cost of “reform” would plunge by $773 billion!  All that would be left of “reform” would be tax increases and Medicare payment cuts.  Health “reform” would dramatically reduce federal deficits!  Huzzah!

Except it wouldn’t, because at the end of the day Congress would be spending the same amount of money.

The only good news may be this.  If this dishonest budget gimmick succeeds, then Congress will have “fixed” Medicare’s physician payments.  Absent that “must pass” legislation, the Democrats health care takeover would lose momentum, and would have to stand on its own merit.  That would be good for the Republic, though not for the legislation.

(Cross-posted at Politico’s Health Care Arena.)

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Health Care

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