Zelaya to be reinstated in Honduras deal

In a deal brokered by senior US diplomats, an agreement has been reached that will potentially reinstate Manuel Zelaya as President of Honduras after he was was ousted in June. Under the agreement, interim President Roberto Micheletti will step down and Zelaya will resume his office until upcoming presidential elections at the end of November. The deal must still be approved by Honduras’ legislature, but it’s expected that both of the main presidential candidates will urge their governing body to act swiftly and ratify the agreement so that the Honduran elections may be recognized by the world community.

I had personally hoped that Zelaya would not be able to regain control inside his country after he attempted, in my opinion, to set in motion a path towards amending the Honduran constitution and allowing him to hold on to his power. What happened in Honduras was not a coup, as the legislature and the judiciary all acted in accordance with the Honduran constitution, which the Honduran military then executed (although their mistake was kicking Zelaya completely out of the country). It’s an opinion that’s shared by the Law Library of Congress, which concluded that Honduras was within its rights to remove Zelaya from power, and have stood by their report after shameful calls from Sen. John Kerry and Rep. Howard Berman for its retraction out of concerns for political expediency.

The one good thing about the deal is that Zelaya’s return will be extremely short-lived. Presidential elections take place on November 29th, and the head of the Honduran legislature has signalled they’re in no great rush to ratify the agreement. It would amount to giving Zelaya only a few short weeks back in power, which minimizes any chance of mischief.

And yet … nah. Zelaya surely isn’t be crazy enough to try to seize power in a kind of bizarre counter-coup. Though with Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez as buddies, you never know. Chances are good, though, that Zelaya will get a few more nights in the presidential mansion before becoming a footnote in Honduras’ history. Here’s hoping, anyway. Stop over at Fausta’s Blog for more reaction and roundup.

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Economy grows in 3rd quarter, experts still worried

We’ll get to why they’re worried in a second. The big headline is that the American economy grew at an annual rate of 3.5% between July and September. The report by the Commerce Department boosted world stock markets and was the biggest rate of growth since the third quarter of 2007.

But this news, encouraging on its face, must be tempered by cold realism. This rosy report came from strong performance in two sectors – durable goods and residential investment. Much of the growth there was fueled by government spending in the form of the Cash for Clunkers program that propped up the auto industry and an $8,000 tax credit for first time home buyers that has boosted home sales. Both of those programs cost the taxpayers money ($24,000 per incentivized sale in the case of Cash for Clunkers), both contribute to our national debt, and both of those programs are ending.

It’s telling that if you remove the output of the auto industry, the growth rate was only 1.9%. Granted, that’s still growth, but not quite the headline grabber form before. It leaves economists worried that the gains will be fleeting and insignificant, especially when you consider that business investment fell by 2.5%, indicating that the third quarter doesn’t reflect a fundamental strengthening of the economy but a flurry of spending by the government.

And while it may produce temporary benefits, the permanent damage to our debt is very real, which is yet another reason that individuals and nations cannot merely spend their way out of a recession.

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Pelosi unveils House health care plan

In a ceremony closed to the public, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveiled to much fanfare her version of health care reform that includes a public option. Weighing in at an astounding 1900 pages, it has an estimated (emphasis on estimated) net cost of $894 billion, making each word worth roughly $2.24 million. I say net cost because the CBO said the plan would cost $1.055 trillion over 10 years but estimated revenue on penalties on employers and individuals would bring in $161 billion. Additional revenue comes in the form of other tax increases, some of which have been highlighted by Americans for Tax Reform.

The rests of the costs are offset by cuts to programs like Medicare Advantage, but the biggest shell game in the cost comes in the fact that the estimate doesn’t cover the $245 billion needed to keep Medicare reimbursement levels from decreasing. This is supposedly covered in a separate bill to be introduced in the House (a similar bill was just defeated in the Senate), but it’s an extremely dishonest way to decrease the representation of costs for the House plan.

House Democrats can claim a compromise in backing off their plan to tie doctor reimbursements to Medicare under the “consumer option” (this is the poll-tested term of the week for the plan now, apparently). However, it’s done by shifting costs to states by increasing Medicaid eligibility from 133% of the poverty line to 150%. In addition, some of the cost structures may be skewed based on the fact that benefits aren’t paid until 2013 letting the program run surpluses for the first five years before running deficits the last five. That doesn’t seem like a very favorable trajectory if the goal is saving money.

With such a massive bill, there should be no rush to quickly pass this legislation, especially since benefits aren’t being doled out for years to come. The CBO estimate may be helpful to some now, but the actual scoring of the bill will be interesting, particularly in assessing the program’s cost decades down the road. The size and scope of the public option remains a gigantic sticking point, especially for some moderate Democrats, as well as abortion funding and coverage for illegals.

But three big problems still remain:

• The individual mandate. Despite Nancy Pelosi’s dismissal of a question regarding these concerns, forcing Americans to buy health insurance may be unconstitutional.
• A penalty structure that may make it advantageous for some businesses to drop coverage for their employees. If a small business has a payroll of $500,000 and yearly health costs of $51,000 for 14 employees, they can merely pay an excise tax of 2% equaling $10,000, saving $41,000 a year and forcing their employees to go to the government option.
• Making insurers accept anyone at anytime which increases the likelihood that people will only buy insurance when they get sick. If the yearly penalty is something like $500 a year but the cost of a policy is $1000 a year, then it would be advantageous for an individual to merely pay the penalty until they require coverage, which they will be required to receive. This drives up costs to private insurers and reduces the risk pool, making those with coverage pay more in premiums to cover those who wait to buy in until they need it.

There are  many questions that need to be addressed, and there’s still a long way to go in this debate. With all these uncertainties and areas of concern, I remain strongly unconvinced that what Congress is churning out will favorably impact the cost and quality of American health care.

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Lieberman, Snowe and other moderates to oppose Reid’s public option Senate bill

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced yesterday that he was planning on sending a bill to the Senate floor that has a public option with an opt-out clause for states (although apparently a co-op will also be involved too). He’s going to run into some problems, however, from his previous allies when it comes time to vote on his bill. Sen. Olympia Snowe, who was the pivotal Republican vote to get the Baucus bill out of committee, will not be supporting it, and even more telling, Sen. Joe Lieberman has said he will help filibuster Reid’s health care bill. That’s a solid 41 votes against the bill, and moderate Democratic Senators like Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, and Evan Bayh are equivocating on their support, which isn’t a great sign either.

Can you blame them? Reid’s inclusion of the public option makes the drama over the Baucus bill even more irrelevant. Baucus’ bill, which relied on co-ops instead of a public option, was hailed as a supposedly great compromise bill that got the blessing of the CBO in regards to deficits. Reid has decided to throw all of that aside and press ahead with a public option plan that has already been shown by the CBO to be costly and debt-fueling.

The opt-out clause is a lame attempt at moderation that is pretty much a joke. Unless states have some sort of trade-off for opting out of the public plan (for example, being exempt from the taxes that will pay for it) then there will be no state that has a reason to opt out except out of sheer principle. I would instead prefer to have an opt-out clause for individuals rather than states – but that won’t happen, will it?

The response of Lieberman and Snowe are illustrative of the stupidity of Reid’s move. The public option is a no-go with moderates and centrists of both parties – even in the House the “robust” public option that Nancy Pelosi craves is running into problems with over 50 members of her own party. The bipartisan consensus runs against it, not for it. Reid and Pelosi are caving big time to the left wing of their party, which apparently can’t see beyond anything besides passing a public option at any cost.

It could be that it’s all a dance destined for failure just so the Democratic leadership can tell the base, “Hey, we tried.” In the meantime, other ideas and other efforts at real reform will languish on the sidelines as games of ideology and partisanship are carried out on the floor of Congress. One thing’s for sure – the votes are going to be very interesting.

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NEA Chair: Obama most powerful writer since Caesar

The new chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, Rocco Landesman, addressed grantmakers in a post on the official NEA website. He seems like a nice guy, but he makes a rather over-the-top and completely absurd comparison regarding our current President’s place in literary history:

My answer is pretty simple. There is a new president and a new NEA. The president first. This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.

Since Caesar? Really? Ed Morrissey, Power Line and the Corner remind us that Reagan, Nixon, Clinton, Eisenhower, and Wilson are just a few American Presidents of the 20th century to have written books before they came to office – to say nothing of world leaders in the intervening centuries since Rome. We really have to go back to Julius Caesar to find a writer with more power than Barack Obama?

Landesman acknowledges the political slant the NEA has taken in the eyes of many, and doesn’t seem to care:

To borrow a line from the Artist in Chief, I’m “fired up and ready to go.”Am I starting to sound like an advocate? Well, that seems to be a touchy subject. Some quote-unquote “journalists” have recently accused this agency of losing its independence and becoming a propaganda machine. While I want to state in no uncertain terms that the NEA is not a political agency and that when art becomes propaganda I lose all interest in it, I also want everyone to know that the days of a defensive NEA are over. We have a plan and we are going to, quote, “advocate” for it.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s not worth a lot of heartburn, and it’s no secret that the majority of artists are liberal, and personally espousing those views is fine with me. But it is a curious juxtaposition to see an NEA chair on one hand acknowledge that there’s a groundless belief that the NEA has an organizational bias and then turn around and give such hyperbolic praise to his favorite politician. Coupled with the conference call with the White House that seemed to lay the groundwork for collaboration between the two entities, is it that hard to believe that some conservatives might have a few reservations about the NEA?

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Guest posting on The Moderate Voice

I’ve really dropped the ball in passing along a bit of news regarding myself and this site. A few months ago, Joe Gandelman e-mailed me and asked if I’d like to write a few guest posts for his site, The Moderate Voice. I happily accepted, and I’ve sent him a few of the posts I’ve written here, which he has graciously posted on his own site. I can’t possibly be too effusive in my thanks to Joe, who has been professional and absolutely terrific in his correspondence with me.

In the meantime, I’ve failed to mention anything about it here, and I apologize for that. Here are the posts Joe has published thus far:

• Time For A Little Honesty From Public Option Supporters
• Mixed Messages Being Sent on Public Option
• An Attempt at a Real “Reset Button” on Health Care
• Nobel Peace Prize Now Officially a Joke After Obama Selection
• Obama to Shift Focus Away from Taliban
• Dollar May Be Dropped in Oil Trade
• The White House’s Curious War Against Fox News

Usually, I post here first, then think, “Joe might be interested in something like this.” That delay is why I’ve been remiss in telling you all of the cross-posting. I’ll try to do better in the future. Again, I have many thanks to Joe Gandelman for giving me a great opportunity like this out of the blue. And thanks to all of you for coming by to read this in the first place!

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Broadcast news stands up for Fox, rebuffs White House

There was a heartening turn of events on Thursday that doubled as bad news for the White House in its ill-advised war on Fox News. As part of its petulant campaign against Fox, the Obama administration tried to exclude Fox News from participating in a press pool interview with “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg. To their credit, the Washington bureau chiefs of the other television news networks told the White House that if Fox was to be excluded, none of the rest of them would attend. The White House was forced to back down and allow Fox to be part of the interview.

No one could say it better than Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik:

“I’m really cheered by the other members saying “No, if Fox can’t be part of it, we won’t be part of it,’” said Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik, calling the move to limit Feinberg’s availability “outrageous.” 

“What it’s really about to me is the Executive Branch of the government trying to tell the press how it should behave. I mean, this democracy — we know this — only works with a free and unfettered press to provide information,”

Needless to say, it’s a big win for Fox. Ed Morrissey is absolutely right when he sees this as validation of Fox News by its peers that, yes, it’s a real news network that deserves to be part of the coverage of the goings-on in our nation’s capital. Whatever complaints one might have for slant or bias in coverage by the mainstream media, they deserve a lot of credit for standing on principle with a competitor that has a different slant than they. In that respect, it’s also a victory for freedom of the press.

I have my doubts on whether or not the Obama administration will stand down in its aggression towards a network that has the audacity to *gasp* run pieces critical of the White House’s agenda. Fox News is too easy a target for Democrats and liberals, and the “legitimacy” of its news operation will inevitably come up again. It’s rather ridiculous, as whatever one thinks of Fox’s opinion shows, it has a lot of great reporters and journalists that are doing a fine job: Major Garrett, Wendell Goler, Brit Hume, and Chris Wallace spring immediately to mind.

In the meantime, the administration, in attempting to paint itself as aggressive toward supposedly unfounded criticism, has instead wound up looking petty and thin-skinned. When it comes to describing their tactic of marginalizing their critics, a few words come to mind: petulant, arrogant, immature. One might even call the trend dangerous if one contemplates an executive branch that has no compunction about keeping out in the cold press agencies that don’t drip with praise for its action items.

Just as it would have been a huge mistake for Bush to try to kick out CNN or MSNBC, Obama has made a blunder with approving the war on Fox. After only ten months, his administration can hardly claim to be the post-partisan unifying force it was touted to be. Indeed, the administration’s idea of unity is to ignore and silence anyone that disagrees with it. That’s not unity or bipartisanship – that’s tone-deafness and arrogance on a grand scale.

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Obama admin to slash executive pay

The Obama administration indicated today that it will slash the salaries of executives of companies who received bailout money by up to 90%. Kenneth R. Feinberg is the Treasury Department official in charge of executive compensation and will implement the plan that will see the salaries of 25 execs cut at companies that include Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, General Motors and Chrysler. At AIG in particular, no executive will be able to make more than $200,000 a year.

The government-directed pay cuts illustrate the still troublesome intertwining of private enterprise and public funds. Like many in the country, I have issues with excessive corporate salaries and golden parachutes for the CEOs of failing corporations. It’s a problem that needs to be addressed by shareholders, and it leaves me more than a little uncomfortable when the government begins setting salary caps for supposedly private companies.

It’s true that since these companies were “saved” with taxpayer money the government has a duty to make sure the money is spent responsibly. Still, such a draconian cut makes me a tad nervous. $200K seems like a very small amount for executives in New York City, where the cost of living is much higher. There are owners of businesses here in Dayton, OH that make more than that. Again, I’m no apologist for CEOs who by and large have made extremely poor decisions – but shifting decisions that ought to be made by rightfully indignant shareholders and boards of directors to federal bureaucrats isn’t necessarily a great move in itself either.

This is one of the problems with all the bailout mania that happened this past winter and spring. We are left with a number of large corporations that with a level of direct governmental control can no longer be classed as the private sector. Is there a timetable for returning these companies back to investor control instead of federal control using taxpayer money? If there is, I haven’t yet heard it.

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Justice Dept: Black voters need “Democratic Party” listed

The small town of Kinston, NC, population 23,000, voted to do away with partisan elections, meaning party affiliation would be meaningless in local contests. To comply with the Voting Rights Act, they first had to get the approval of the Justice Department, which in an opinion devoid of logic denied the request saying equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the explicit presence of a Democratic Party affiliation. I could not make this up if I tried (via the Washington Times, heads-up from Hot Air):

Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party. The Justice Department’s ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their “candidates of choice” – identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.

The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters’ right to elect the candidates they want.

The punchline is that Kinston is a one-party Democratic town anyway, one that overwhelmingly voted for Barack Obama.

How much more demeaning and partisan could the Department of Justice become? In essence, they are saying that southern Democratic voters are so racist that only their blind partisanship will overwhelm their hatred to cause them to pull the lever for black candidates. Even more egregious is the notion that only Democratic candidates can ever be a candidate of choice for the black community, an opinion that seeks to paint an entire racial community into a corner that’s advantageous to one political party.

The opinion was handed down by the same Justice official, Loretta King, who dismissed the Black Panther case of voter intimidation in Philadelphia. Evidently Ms. King has more of a problem with the lack of a “D” by a candidate’s name than club-wielding thugs outside a polling station. My favorite criticism has to be from Abigail Thernstrom, member of the US Commission on Civil Rights, who had this to say:

“The Voting Rights Act is not supposed to be compensating for failure of voters to show up on Election Day,” she said. “The Voting Rights Act doesn’t guarantee an opportunity to elect a ‘candidate of choice.’ … My ‘candidate of choice’ loses all the time in an election.”

Sorry, but that’s just funny.

We should always be on the lookout for discrimination in voting laws and practices and ensure that all American citizens of all races have an opportunity to fairly cast a vote. This Justice decision, however, has nothing to do with protecting rights and everything to do with a purely partisan interest in protecting the ability of the Democratic Party to keep certain demographics within its sway – overriding the wishes of a small town to do away with party affiliation in the process.

It’s a remarkably partisan and racially polarizing decision from Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice, and it’s a disappointing step backward in moving toward a color-blind and letter-blind society where people are judged not by the color of their skin or the letter by their names, but by the content of their characters.

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Maturity: Dems lock GOP out of committee room

 

In the latest example of how seriously lacking in leadership Congress has become, one needs to look no further than the actions of Rep. Edolphus Towns, Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who locked the Republican members out of the committee room so they couldn’t meet there when Democrats weren’t present. His reasoning: “They don’t know how to behave.”

Exactly how the Republicans aren’t behaving adds more eye-roll factor to the story. Apparently Towns is upset at numerous attempts by ranking Republican Rep. Darrell Issa to ridicule the majority for failing to look into Countrywide Mortgage’s reported sweetheart deals to VIP’s. The Hill describes the situation fairly well:

For months Towns has refused Republican requests to subpoena records in the case. Last Thursday Committee Republicans, led by Issa, were poised to force an open vote on the subpoenas at a Committee mark-up meeting. The mark-up was abruptly canceled. Only Republicans showed up while Democrats chairs remained empty.

Republicans charged that Towns cancelled the meeting to avoid the subpoena vote. Democrats first claimed the mark-up was canceled due to a conflict with the Financial Services Committee. Later they said it was abandoned after a disagreement among Democratic members on whether to subpoena records on the mortgage industry’s political contributions to Republicans.

A GOP committee staffer captured video of Democrats leaving their separate meeting in private chambers after the mark-up was supposed to have begun. He spliced the video to other footage of the Democrats’ empty chairs at the hearing room, set it to the tune of “Hit the Road, Jack” and posted it on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s minority webpage, where it remained as of press time.

The lockout is retaliation for the embarrassment, which seems a bit petty and childish for the behavior of supposed grown men and legislators. I’m sure you could play the moral equivalence card and legitimately say that Republicans pulled the same kinds of antics when they were in power, but that defence is itself immature as it essentially boils down to, “Well, they’re just as bad as we are!”

It would be my belief that a party that was swept to power in 2006 promising to end the culture of corruption and usher in a new era of civility and bipartisanship would aim for the high road and eschew grade-school tactics like this. Unfortunately, the episode is just another example of the disingenuousness of Nancy Pelosi when she promised the nation the most ethical Congress in history.

At the very least, America deserves a Congress that acts like grown-ups. Seems like quite a few of them need a nap … or a time-out.

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The White House’s curious war against Fox News

Over the last week, members of the White House staff have gone out of their way to single out Fox News as an unworthy news organization. It began with White House communications chief Anita Dunn’s rant on CNN last Sunday saying Fox wasn’t a real news network and was more a wing of the Republican Party. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs continued the theme by claiming there are many stories on Fox that are not true. And the White House doubled down on the strategy yesterday when White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama political advisor David Axelrod both aggressively asserting in almost identical terms that Fox isn’t a real news network.

Some intellectually dishonest enablers in the media have acted as cheerleaders for the administration’s new war on Fox News. Jacob Weisberg at Newsweek makes the ridiculous assertion that Fox News is un-American, and even  laughably claims that the bias of other networks is due to Fox News. Meryl Yourish has her way with his hackneyed attempt at partisan spin, but what’s interesting is that other members of the media are coming to Fox’s defense.

The New York Times says the President is employing a dangerous and historically losing strategy here, especially after campaigning as someone who would listen to his opponents. The Nation accuses the President and his advisors of being a bunch of thin-skinned whiners who would do better to gather their wits about them and at least attempt to elevate themselves above the fray instead of rolling gloriously in the mud. Even Helen Thomas, certainly no friend to Republicans, has told the White House to knock it off.

The aggression of the White House is undoubtedly thrilling to those who enjoy using pejoratives like “Fake News” and “Faux News” when describing the news network that just happens to have the best ratings out of the three big cable news outlets. But beyond satisfying the Fox-haters, what is to be gained by launching a rhetorical assault against a news organization that has, for the most part, been alone in its rightward tilt and subsequent mild criticism of the President’s agenda?

From a purely strategic standpoint, it would seem to me that it gives more credence to Obama’s foes than his supporters would be willing to allow. The NY Times has it right – generally, you “punch up” in politics, and an attack of this orchestrated nature displays a petty unwillingness to engage hostile news organizations or even to stomach criticism displayed on an isolated band of the news spectrum.

Indeed, the administration appears so thin-skinned that it apparently cannot bear to have any negative spin on its agenda or afford to have any news organization go off-message. Anita Dunn had a surprising disclosure in January at a Dominican conference regarding the Obama campaign’s vision of control and the press:

Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” said Dunn.”One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters,” said Dunn, referring to Plouffe, who was Obama’s chief campaign manager.

“We just put that out there and made them write what Plouffe had said as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it as opposed to the press controlled it,” Dunn said.

Couple this with the recent push by the White House toward calling out the very few members of the press who have had questions about the current agenda or who have apparently not lived up to the White House standards of “fair referees.” What emerges is a picture of an administration that after only nine months cannot deal with negative publicity of any kind and reacts in the only way it knows how – smear the messenger and silence the critics.

Whatever your feelings on Fox News, it’s not leadership for a Presidential administration to go after a major news channel simply because their slant doesn’t sit well with them. It’s not the actions of a candidate elected supposedly on bringing the country together to hunt down its critics with such gleeful vigor not even in a year into its term. And it’s not the actions of a healthy democracy with a free press when the party in power seeks to muffle its loudest critics with a bully pulpit that can apparently suffer no rivals.

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Dollar losing status as world reserve currency

 Troubling news on the strength of the dollar as a report comes out showing that banks are moving away from using it as their reserve currency. Central banks increased their foreign currency holdings by $413 billion last quarter to a global total of $7.3 trillion. The bad news for us is that 63% of the new foreign currency being sought by banks is in euros and yen. The dollar accounted for only 37% of new reserves, down from a 63% average since 1999.

The finer subtleties of foreign currency shifts may be lost on the majority of Americans (and I’m no expert by any means), but it’s undeniably a bad sign for the American economy. International finance experts are pointing to an influx of dollars into the world market by the Federal Reserve as one reason for the decline of the value of the dollar. Ben Bernanke printed up tons of them to help stimulate the economy, which has driven up inflation concerns and caused the NY Post to call him “the man who killed the greenback on the operating table.” Many people, including myself in June, warned this could happen as our monetary supply rapidly expanded.

Ed Morrissey points out that this couldn’t have come at a worse time as our government prepares to take on more new spending and more new debt. He also points out that this could become a very big political problem for President Obama as 88% of Americans believe the dollar should remain the dominant global currency.

The administration appears to be taking the stance that a reduced dollar is just fine to stabilize our trade imbalance – provided it doesn’t hurt our standing with creditors. There’s a good chance that it will, particularly as we look to finance ever-widening budget deficits. It’s another reason we should be doubling down on fiscal responsibility and not on growing our federal bureaucracy with all the debt it entails.

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Senate Finance Committee approves Baucus bill

With a vote of 14-9, the Senate Finance Committee approved the healthcare reform bill summary proposed by Sen. Max Baucus. Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe crossed party lines to support the measure, though she said she could not guarantee her future support for the bill depending on the direction legislation takes.

The President and his supporters are pleased with the victory, and there can be no doubt this is a step forward for them, but there are several major reasons why supporters shouldn’t be too overcome with elation, and why opponents shouldn’t despair:

• The Baucus bill does not exist in legislative language form. What passed today was the summary language translation of the Baucus plan. This is what the CBO scored, and when the legislative language is hammered out, it will most likely add costs and adversely affect the budgetary scoring, to say nothing of provisions in the legislative that may be overlooked in the summary form but have hidden consequences for the public.
• The Baucus bill does not contain a public option – but it will have to be reconciled with a Senate bill that does, the bill passed by the Senate HELP Committee. The Baucus bill’s lack of a public option makes it a horrible option for the left, who have expressed their disdain for it. Adding a public option may not be feasible in the Senate, but it will undoubtedly provoke another internecine fight among Democrats.
• Once a final Senate bill is hammered out and potentially passed, it will have to be reconciled with a House health care bill that Speaker Pelosi has assured the nation will include a public option. The addition of a public option may again prove to be a nonstarter in the Senate, and will turn off a lot of House Blue Dog Democrats who have electoral concerns about supporting such a proposal. In the meantime, progressive House Democrats have vowed to oppose a bill that doesn’t contain a public option, which may prompt another messy fight in the lower house of Congress.
• The tax on “Cadillac health plans” has drawn heavy criticism from both Republicans and labor unions, creating a strong pushback against a key funding measure for the plan. This leaves a vast swath of interests on the left and right that are strongly dissatisfied with important parts of the Baucus plan.

What this all means is that it’s unlikely the Baucus bill will survive in a significant manner under assaults from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and under spending and taxation concerns from conservatives. We can’t trust the preliminary scoring of the Baucus bill for these reasons (and the fact that it doesn’t yet exist in concrete form), and I have a strong suspicion that the CBO’s final scoring will be quite a bit more than the $829 billion now being promised (which is by itself a nice chunk of change).

Pressure on lawmakers will still be important as health care reform moves into several new phases. Passage of the bill by the Finance Committee was almost assured simply based on party line voting, and while Sen. Snowe’s support is frustrating, Allahpundit points out that tactically it’s a no-brainer for her to throw her hat in with the Democrats.

What’s key will be the final CBO scoring and whether or not a public option can be surreptitiously shoehorned into the current bill. The health care reform debate advances a step, but its status remains in flux as too many uncertainties and too much infighting loom ahead.

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More Nobel perspective

Is it flogging a dead horse? Perhaps. But a few columnists caught my attention when analyzing Barack Obama’s undeserved Nobel Peace Prize. Ross Douthat of the New York Times says Obama missed an opportunity:

Here was an opportunity to cut himself free, in a stroke, from the baggage that’s weighed his presidency down — the implausible expectations, the utopian dreams, the messianic hoo-ha.

Here was a place to draw a clean line between himself and all the overzealous Obamaphiles, at home and abroad, who poured their post-Christian, post-Marxist yearnings into the vessel of his 2008 campaign.

Here was a chance to establish himself, definitively, as an American president — too self-confident to accept an unearned accolade, and too instinctively democratic to go along with European humbug.

He didn’t take it. Instead, he took the Nobel Peace Prize.

Big mistake

…In any case, it will be far more offensive when Obama takes the stage in Oslo this November instead of Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s heroic opposition leader; or Thich Quang Do, the Buddhist monk and critic of Vietnam’s authoritarian regime; or Rebiya Kadeer, exiled from China for her labors on behalf of the oppressed Uighur minority; or anyone who has courted death this year protesting for democracy in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

And there’s the ever-snarky and always interesting Christopher Hitchens, who also spoke on MSNBC about his views:

In this roseate conception, we have Barack Obama as Tom Cruise, praised and promoted for nipping crime in the bud by arresting people before they actually commit any offense. (A whole new slogan on which to run: “Tough on pre-crime”!)We thus find ourselves in a rather peculiar universe where good intentions are rewarded before they have undergone the strenuous metamorphosis of being translated into good deeds, or hard facts. And it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid entertaining the suspicion that there is something explicitly political in the underlying process of Nobelista decision making. I do not think that I am shying at shadows here, either. Especially of late, the literature awards, on which I am more qualified to pronounce, have reflected the same or a similar mentality. The choices of an Italian anarchist, an Austrian Stalinist, a Portuguese Stalinist, and the hysterical anti–American Harold Pinter are or should be fresh in our minds, and we might remember that this is a Nobel committee that let Vladimir Nabokov and Jorge Luis Borges go to their graves -unrecognized.

…But the task of the chief executive of the United States is more complicated than manifesting a vague and general sympathy for the oppressed. It is, in the last resort, to be a commander in chief, and to consult closely with an elected Congress on the grave matters of war and peace and security. If he manages to get any of this right—if, for a pregnant instance, he manages to negotiate a nonviolent transition to an Iran that has nuclear power but not nuclear weapons (and that perhaps allows its own people to intervene in their own internal affairs)—then he will have done very well, and will deserve much more than a medal and a large check. He is, however, unlikely even to get a hearing on these serious questions without the believable threat of American power and force, economic and diplomatic as well as military. Something in the mental universe of the Nobel committee is palpably hostile to the facts that underpin that consideration.

A case can be made that it isn’t good for sitting presidents to get their recognition and their praise in advance of their actual attainments.

I don’t derive any pleasure in pointing out the obvious – in fact, I’d rather just leave it alone and let people’s common sense be their guide. But Obama’s Nobel is already being used to further inflate his caricature of greatness and to denigrate his critics and opponents, making it more necessary to point out the absurdity of his win in the first place.

It will be interesting to see what kind of speech he gives when accepting the award in December. If it’s humble and embarrassed like his first initial public reaction, my reaction will be positive. But if he uses it as a global stage to loudly trumpet himself and his nascent administration (still glaringly lacking in accomplishment) then he will be cemented as a empty-suited narcissist on a worldwide scale. The path he takes is up to him, and I hope he takes the right one.

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BBC: What happened to global warming?

The BBC has a wonderfully balanced article on global warming that notes that the past 11 years have seen no increase in global temperature and that current climate models have failed to predict such a trend. What’s more, some scientists think we may actually be in a period of global cooling, although the science is far from settled – but that’s kind of the point, isn’t it?

In any case, the faulty models have a prediction we’ll hit soon enough to judge:

The Met Office [UK's National Weather Service] says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly. It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).

So it should be simple, right? If we have at least three years between 2010 and 2015 that are hotter than 1998 than we can give more credence to climate models and anthropogenic global warming, so let’s err on the side of caution and wait till the data comes in before enacting sweeping climate legislation.

But instead we’re told we can’t wait and must pass climate change legislation now with little delay or debate. It’s my contention that before passing industry crippling mandates like cap and trade, we should at least come to a degree of scientific consensus that, despite what you may have heard, has not existed in the climate change debate. It seems we have to answer if warming is happening before saying whether humans and carbon are definitively the cause.

It’s one reason that the rush to get cap and trade through the Senate seems like a disingenuous ploy to control industry (no matter what party or what politician signs on to the effort). If the BBC is beginning to question the validity of global warming claims, the scare tactics might be on the wane, and skepticism and realism may finally have a chance to take charge in the climate debate.

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