BACK ALLEY ABORTIONS ARE NOW SANCTIONED BY BIG GOVERNMENT

BIG GOVERNMENT’S BACK ALLEY

Mark Steyn on Culture

Thursday, 10 February 2011

As I was leaving Fox News last night, I glanced up at the monitor and caught Juan Williams expressing mystification to Sean Hannity as to why Republicans in Congress were wasting the country’s time on a “little thing” like abortion. Gee, I dunno. Maybe it’s something to do with a mass murderer in Pennsylvania, or Planned Parenthood clinics facilitating the sex trafficking of minors. From the Office of the District Attorney in Philadelphia: Viable babies were born*. Gosnell killed them by plunging scissors into their spinal cords. He taught his staff to do the same. This is a remarkable moment in American life: A man is killing actual living, gurgling, bouncing babies on an industrial scale – and it barely makes the papers. Had he plunged his scissors into the spinal cord of a Democrat politician in Arizona, then The New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC and everyone else would be linking it to Sarah Palin’s uncivil call for dramatic cuts in government spending. But “Doctor” Kermit Gosnell’s mound of corpses is apparently entirely unconnected to the broader culture. Why? Well, because it’s all about a woman’s “right to choose”. What women? Well, how about the misses Robyn Reid and Davida Johnson: FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD Robyn Reid didn’t want an abortion. But when her grandmother forcibly took her to an abortion clinic one wintry day in 1998, Reid figured she’d just tell the doctor her wishes and then sneak away. Instead, Kermit Gosnell barked: “I don’t have time for this!” He then ripped off her clothes, spanked her, wrestled her onto a dirty surgical stretcher, tied her flailing arms and legs down and pumped sedatives into her until she quit screaming and lost consciousness, she told the Daily News yesterday… In 2001, Davida Johnson changed her mind about aborting her 6-month fetus after seeing Gosnell’s dazed, bloodied patients in his recovery room, she said. But in the treatment room, Gosnell’s staffers ignored her protests, smacked her, tied her arms down and sedated her into unconsciousness, she said. She awoke no longer pregnant. Oh. Well, “Dr” Gosnell’s just one rogue abortionist. How about the “right to choose” over at Planned Parenthood? There are a whole range of choices – not so much for the illegally smuggled underage foreign sex slave, but at least for her pimp. If you’re a middle-aged guy running a child-sex business, you have the “right to choose” what’s best for that 13-year old Venezuelan hottie you brought over a couple weeks back. As the Falls Church clinic assures him: We don’t necessarily look at the legal status, like I said. That’s good to know. With Planned Parenthood aiding and abetting child prostitution, my friend Rich Lowry argued that the back alley is back: Legal abortion was supposed to end “back-alley abortions,” both their dangers and their entanglements with shady characters. But the practice and the mores of the back alley are with us still, tolerated by people for whom the ready provision of abortion trumps all else. Rich (the editor of National Review) is right. Ever since Roe v Wade, proponents of a woman’s “right to choose” have warned us against going back to the bad old days of rusty coat hangers and unsterilized instruments from money-grubbing butchers on the wrong side of town. Now, happily, the back alley is on the main drag, and with a state permit framed on the wall. In Philadelphia: Furniture and blankets were stained with blood. Instruments were not properly sterilized. Disposable medical supplies were not disposed of; they were reused, over and over again. Medical equipment – such as the defibrillator, the EKG, the pulse oximeter, the blood pressure cuff – was generally broken; even when it worked, it wasn’t used. The emergency exit was padlocked shut. And scattered throughout, in cabinets, in the basement, in a freezer, in jars and bags and plastic jugs, were fetal remains. It was a baby charnel house. In New Jersey: The Department of Health and Senior Services investigated the abortion facility and found dirty forceps, rusty crochet hooks used to remove IUDs, and a quarter-inch of dirt and debris under an examining table. For years, the supposed regulators averted their gaze – as a matter of policy. For abortion’s ideological enforcers, the official euphemisms trump reality. For those on the receiving end of infection, mutilation, sterilization and death, reality has a way of intruding. Ask Nicole Gaither: Nicole Gaither got an abortion from Gosnell in 2001. After four days, she said, the pain was so bad she could barely walk. She returned to the clinic, where, she said Gosnell blithely told her he’d left fetal remains in her. “Stand up! It don’t hurt that bad!” he yelled at her, she said, before suctioning – without any medication – her insides. Ask Patient SB: After inadequately dilating Patient S.B.’s cervix for a D&E abortion, Pendergraft ruptured her uterus and shoved the pre-born baby’s body into the abdominal cavity. She was rushed to the hospital where she received an emergency hysterectomy along with the removal of the dead fetus, which was missing an arm. The arm was later found at Pendergraft’s EPOC abortion clinic. His not reporting that he had removed the arm caused a delay in her care at the hospital as surgeons futilely attempted to locate the missing appendage. Ask Rasheedah Dinkins: Dinkins, who was 22 at the time of the settlement, became severely ill following the abortion and was transferred to Newark Beth Israel Medical Center where she needed blood transfusions and had her uterus removed. She also suffered a stroke due to the serious blood loss and had one of her lungs collapse. The back alley is back, and supersized: The above New Jersey clinic performs 10,000 abortions a year. When the pro-choice rally ends and Cameron Diaz, Ashley Judd and other celebrities d’un certain age return to Hollywood, and the upper-middle-class women with the one designer baby go back to their suburbs, a woman’s ”right to choose” means that, day in, day out, the blessings of this “right” fall disproportionately on all the identity groups the upscale liberals profess to care about – poor women, black women, Hispanic women, undocumented women, and other denizens of Big Government’s back alley. A government back alley, licensed and supposedly regulated, is worse than the old kind, because it implies the approval of the state, and of society. That’s what Gosnell thought he had, when he murdered those babies and mutilated those teenage girls. That’s what Planned Parenthood think they have, when they facilitate the sexual exploitation of Third World children. And, given the silence of the PC media, maybe they’re right. Aside from the intrinsic evil of not only Gosnell but a state that knowingly colludes with him, these “little” abortion stories reveal an almost totalitarian mindset in the “pro-choice” movement’s determination to brook no intrusion of reality upon the official myths. You may be one of those wealthy suburban “feminists” or “new men” indifferent to the fate of eight-pound “blobs of tissue” or 14-year old “women”, but the gulf between propaganda and truth, between the fatuous feelgood bumper stickers and the rusty crochet hooks, is profound – and, in a world where statists and social engineers serve as ruthless enforcers for the prevailing ideology, its deep moral corruption will eventually swallow you, too. America should be at the very minimum deeply disquieted by these revelations. That it is not – that it is dismissed as a “little thing” – is even more disquieting. [*James Fulford argues that "Dr" Gosnell delivered live babies and killed them because he was too incompetent to perform a "partial-birth abortion" - because, in a ever more credential-obsessed America, ever more credentials have been corrupted by ethnocultural political considerations.]

TOTALITARIANISM COMES IN MANY DIFFERENT DISGUISES

No room at the table for the Muslim Brothers

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
February 9, 2011

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/8740/no-room-at-the-table-for-the-muslim-brothers

:

An Egyptian anti-government demonstrator and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood prays near Egyptian soldiers in Cairo. (Getty Images)

FREE AND DEMOCRATIC SOCIETIES take chances. They guarantee freedom of speech and of the press, despite the risk that harmful, foolish, or depraved ideas may be promoted. They require due process of law before an offender can be punished, even though some who are guilty may go free as a result. They give citizens the power to elect their rulers, notwithstanding the strife election campaigns generate -- and the possibility that voters will choose officials who are corrupt or incompetent.

But there are limits. "Liberty and justice for all" does not require empowering even those who seek to do away with liberty and justice. In his famous dissent in the 1949 Supreme Court case of Terminiello v. Chicago, Justice Robert Jackson warned against interpreting the First Amendment so categorically as to fortify "right and left totalitarian groups, who want nothing so much as to paralyze and discredit . . . democratic authority." A commitment to liberal democracy is not an obligation to open the democratic process to parties that reject liberal democracy itself. Jackson cautioned the court's majority to "temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom," lest it "convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."

If even in America, where democratic institutions are old and firmly rooted, it is important to guard against antidemocratic cancers that latch on to political freedoms in order to destroy them, how much more important must it be in Egypt, where a democratic republic is still struggling to be born?

This is why the question of the Muslim Brotherhood -- officially banned in Egypt, but nevertheless the country's largest opposition group -- is so crucial.

The Brotherhood is the world's most influential Islamist organization, and Islamism -- the radical ideology that seeks the submission of all people to Islamic law -- is perhaps the most virulent antidemocratic force in the world today. In Daniel Pipes's phrase, "it is an Islamic-flavored version of totalitarianism." Like other totalitarian cadres, Islamists despise democratic pluralism and liberty in principle. But they are quite ready to make use of elections and campaigns as tactical stepping-stones to power.

As with Adolf Hitler in 1933 or the Czechsolovak communists in 1946, Islamists may run for office and hold themselves out as democrats; but once power is in their grasp, they do not voluntarily relinquish it. Just months after Hamas, a self-described "wing of the Muslim Brotherhood," won a majority of seats in the Palestinian elections in 2006, it violently seized control of the Gaza Strip. More than 30 years after Ayatollah Khomeini took power in Iran promising representative democracy, the Islamist dictatorship he built instead remains entrenched.

In Turkey, where secular democratic norms were long enforced by the military, the Islamist Justice and Development Party, or AKP, won the 2002 elections on a platform of moderate democratic conservatism. Since then, however, the AKP has shed its moderate coloration. "The party has turned authoritarian toward the opposition," writes Soner Cagaptay, who heads the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Anti-government protestors are beaten up by security forces, opposition figures are wiretapped, and independent papers get slapped with punitive tax fines. . . . The AKP has effectively neutered the military. Not just high-ranking officers, but also the government's critics among academics have come under assault, ending up in prison."

As the crossed swords and Koran on its logo suggest, the Muslim Brotherhood is fundamentally antidemocratic.

If Egypt is to have any hope of a transition to a genuine constitutional democracy, the Muslim Brotherhood must not be treated as a legitimate democratic partner. For more than 80 years, it has been a fervent exponent of Islamic, not secular, rule; of clerical, not popular, sovereignty. Its credo could hardly be more explicit, or more antidemocratic: "Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Koran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope."

In 2008, the Muslim Brotherhood's supreme leader publicly called for raising young "mujaheddin" -- holy warriors -- "who love to die as much as others love to live and who can perform their duty towards their God, themselves and homeland." This week, senior Brotherhood figure Kamal al-Halbavi said his wish for Egypt is "a good government like the Iranian government, and a good president like Mr. Ahmadinejad, who is very brave."

Democracy is flexible, but even in the best of circumstances it is incompatible with religious totalitarianism. What the Muslim Brotherhood seeks is the very antithesis of democratic pluralism and a free civil society. Egypt's friends must not hesitate to say so, clearly and emphatically.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).

HERE IS A SHOCKER YOU WILL SURELY FIND INCREDIBLE

THE ROLE OF AN INSPECTOR GENERAL IS TO MAKE SURE THAT ALL ACTIVITY
OF A GOVERNMENT AGENCY IS NOT UNLAWFUL. THE FEDERAL RESERVE EVIDENTLY DOES NOT HAVE A COMPETENT INSPECTOR GENERAL.

http://dailybail.com/home/there-are-no-words-to-describe-the-following-part-ii.html

AMERICA'S MANUFACTURING GLORY IS FAR FROM BEING A THING OF THE PAST!

Made in the U.S.A.

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
February 6, 2011

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/8725/made-in-the-usa

IN ECONOMICS AS IN APPAREL, most fashions come and go. But like the navy blazer or the little black dress, bewailing the decline of American manufacturing never seems to go out of style.

They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back.

So sang Bruce Springsteen in "My Hometown," a hit song from his 1984 album, "Born in the U.S.A.". More than a quarter-century later, that sentiment (if not the song) is as popular as ever.

"You know, we don't manufacture anything anymore in this country," says Donald Trump in an interview with CNNMoney. "We do health care; we do lots of different services. But . . . everything is made in China, for the most part."

The Donald has his idiosyncracies, but on this issue, he is squarely in mainstream.

A recent Heartland Monitor survey finds "clear anxiety about the decades-long employment shift away from manufacturing to service jobs," National Journal's Ron Brownstein reported in December. The "decline of US manufacturing" is giving Americans a "sense of economic precariousness" -- only one in five believe that the United States has the world's strongest economy, versus nearly half who think China is in the lead. "Near the root of the unease for many of those polled is the worry that the United States no longer makes enough stuff." When asked why US manufacturing jobs have declined, fully 58 percent cite offshoring by American companies to take advantage of lower labor costs.

There's just one problem with all the gloom and doom about American manufacturing. It's wrong.

Americans make more "stuff" than any other nation on earth, and by a wide margin. According to the UN's comprehensive database of international economic data, America's manufacturing output in 2009 (expressed in constant 2005 dollars) was $2.15 trillion. That surpassed China's output of $1.48 trillion by nearly 46 percent. China's industries may be booming, but the United States still accounted for 20 percent of the world's manufacturing output in 2009 -- only a hair below its 1990 share of 21 percent.

"The decline, demise, and death of America's manufacturing sector has been greatly exaggerated," says economist Mark J. Perry, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "America still makes a ton of stuff, and we make more of it now than ever before in history." In fact, Americans manufactured more goods in 2009 than the Japanese, Germans, British, and Italians -- combined.

The death of America's manufacturing sector? Not by a long shot. (UN data, via Mark J. Perry)

American manufacturing output hits a new high almost every year. US industries are powerhouses of production: Measured in constant dollars, America's manufacturing output today is more than double what it was in the early 1970s.

So why do so many Americans fear that the Chinese are eating our lunch?

Part of the reason is that fewer Americans work in factories. Millions of industrial jobs have vanished in recent decades, and there is no getting around the hardship that has meant for many families. But factory employment has declined because factory productivity has so dramatically skyrocketed: Revolutions in technology enable an American worker today to produce far more than his counterpart did a generation ago. Consequently, even as America's manufacturing sector outproduces every other country on earth, millions of young Americans can aspire to become not factory hands or assembly workers, but doctors and lawyers, architects and engineers.

Perceptions also feed the gloom and doom. In its story on Americans' economic anxiety, National Journal quotes a Florida teacher who says, "It seems like everything I pick up says 'Made in China' on it." To someone shopping for toys, shoes, or sporting equipment, it often can seem that way. But that's because Chinese factories tend to specialize in low-tech, labor-intensive goods -- items that typically don't require the more advanced and sophisticated manufacturing capabilities of modern American plants.

A vast amount of "stuff" is still made in the USA, albeit not the inexpensive consumer goods that fill the shelves in Target or Walgreen's. American factories make fighter jets and air conditioners, automobiles and pharmaceuticals, industrial lathes and semiconductors. Not the sort of things on your weekly shopping list? Maybe not. But that doesn't change economic reality. They may have "clos[ed] down the textile mill across the railroad tracks." But America's manufacturing glory is far from a thing of the past.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).

SARAH PALIN HAD IT RIGHT FROM THE BEGINNING: THERE WILL BE DEATH PANELS

DEATH PANELS REVISITED

Posted on February 2, 2011 by abyssum

Associated PressKeep your laws off her baby!

‘Death Panels’ Revisited
How Sarah Palin helped defeat ObamaCare’s deceptive advertising.

By JAMES TARANTO

“At a time when there is virtually unanimous agreement that health care reform is needed in this country, it is hard to invalidate and strike down a statute titled ‘The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,’ ” Judge Roger Vinson observed Monday in his ruling in Florida v. HHS, which did just that.

It would have been a lot harder had ObamaCare enjoyed wide political support. But it did not and does not. Americans never bought the bill of goods that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and their supporters in the formerly mainstream media tried to sell. A good deal of the credit goes to Sarah Palin, for coining the phrase “death panel” in an August 2009 Facebook post.

Four months later PolitiFact.com, a project of the left-leaning St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, named the phrase “lie of the year”:

Her assertion–that the government would set up boards to determine whether seniors and the disabled were worthy of care–spread through newscasts, talk shows, blogs and town hall meetings. Opponents of health care legislation said it revealed the real goals of the Democratic proposals. Advocates for health reform said it showed the depths to which their opponents would sink. Still others scratched their heads and said, “Death panels? Really?”

In truth, PolitiFact was more vulnerable to the charge of lying than Palin was, for its highly literal, out-of-context interpretation of her words was at best extremely tendentious. What she wrote was this:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

Palin put the term “death panel” in quotes to indicate that she was using it figuratively. She was not lying but doing just the opposite: conveying a fundamental truth about ObamaCare. Proponents were describing it as a sort of fiscal perpetual-motion machine: We’re going to give free insurance to tens of millions of people and reduce the deficit! As a matter of simple arithmetic, the only way to do that is by drastically curtailing medical benefits.

“Health care by definition involves life and death decisions,” Palin wrote. ObamaCare necessarily expands the power of federal bureaucrats to make such decisions, and it creates enormous fiscal pressures to err on the side of death. Whether it establishes literal panels for that purpose is a hair-splitting quibble. By naming this “lie of the year,” PolitiFact showed itself to be less seeker of truth than servant of power.

President Obama, meanwhile, treated Palin’s criticism as a joke. As we noted at the time, he told a New Hampshire town meeting: “The rumor that’s been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for ‘death panels’ that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we’ve decided that we don’t–it’s too expensive to let her live anymore.” The transcript records that the audience laughed at this callous “joke.”

The perpetual-motion claim wasn’t the only deception at the heart of the argument for ObamaCare. Consider the individual mandate, whose unconstitutionality was the center of Judge Vinson’s ruling. In a footnote, Vinson quotes a critic of the idea as observing, “If a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house.” Guess who? CNSNews.com digs up the full context:

“Both of us want to provide health care to all Americans. There’s a slight difference, and her plan is a good one. But, she mandates that everybody buy health care. She’d have the government force every individual to buy insurance and I don’t have such a mandate because I don’t think the problem is that people don’t want health insurance, it’s that they can’t afford it,” [then-Sen. Barack] Obama said in a Feb. 28, 2008 appearance on Ellen DeGeneres’ television show. “So, I focus more on lowering costs. This is a modest difference. But, it’s one that she’s tried to elevate, arguing that because I don’t force people to buy health care that I’m not insuring everybody. Well, if things were that easy, I could mandate everybody to buy a house, and that would solve the problem of homelessness. It doesn’t.”

Obama ran for office on opposition to the individual mandate, then made it the centerpiece of his signature legislative initiative. Perhaps this should have been “lie of the year.” At PolitiFact.com, it wasn’t even a runner-up.
And what is the individual mandate, anyway? In September 2009, ABC News host George Stephanopoulos argued in an interview with the president that it is a tax increase. Obama strenuously denied it and indeed accused Stephanopoulos of dishonesty:

“For us to say that you’ve got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. . . . George, you–you can’t just make up that language and decide that that’s called a tax increase.”

By last July, the administration was–well, just making up that language and deciding that that’s called a tax increase. As even the New York Times reported:

When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”
And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.

Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.

Lie of the year? Nope, again not even a PolitiFact.com runner-up. The winner for 2010, announced Dec. 16, was “The Democrats’ health care reform law is a ‘government takeover of health care.’ ” This was a “lie,” PolitiFact averred, because the government did not formally nationalize the health-industry via the so-called public option.
The same day that PolitiFact was announcing its 2010 “lie of the year,” an exchange in Judge Vinson’s courtroom was giving the lie to it. As Bloomberg reported:
“We’ve always exercised the freedom whether we want to buy or not buy a product,” Vinson told the Obama administration’s lawyer.

[Justice Department lawyer Ian] Gershengorn said health insurance is “a financing mechanism,” not a product. “It’s not shoes,” he said. “It’s not cars. It’s not broccoli.”

As we wrote at the time:
Under the scheme envisioned by ObamaCare, in which insurers would be obliged to cover all comers, a medical policy would no longer be insurance–that is, a contract to indemnify the policyholder against risk. It would instead be, as Gershengorn describes it, a “financing mechanism” for medical services. . . . Because participation would be mandatory, the “premium,” and not just the penalty for failure to pay it, would effectively be a tax.

In a famous 2003 video, Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator, declared, “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer universal health-care program.” That is, Obama wished for a system of outright socialization of health-care costs, in which the government would pay for medical treatment using tax dollars. ObamaCare differs from such a system only in that ostensibly private insurance companies act as the government’s middleman, collecting the taxes and paying the benefits.

“Government takeover,” like “death panel,” is a true description of ObamaCare’s essence. These phrases are “inaccurate” only in that they cut through formal distinctions designed to deceive the public. (We wish we could use a barnyard vulgarity in place of the unwieldy clause “formal distinctions designed to deceive the public,” but The Wall Street Journal is a family newspaper.)

“Death panel” was especially effective at cutting through the hockey. Lots of people warned about rationing, but, as PolitiFact grudgingly acknowledged, it was Palin’s vivid language that “launched the health care debate into overdrive. The term was mentioned in news reports approximately 6,000 times in August and September, according to the Nexis database. By October, it was still being mentioned 150 to 300 times a week.”

Many of these media mentions were disparaging, “raising issues,” as PolitiFact prissily puts it, about “the bounds of acceptable political discussion.” In other words, Palin’s statement was widely propagated by journalists who thought it “unacceptable.” Americans recognized the essential truth of Palin’s words and strongly opposed ObamaCare.
Palin got the truth out with the help of journalists determined to bolster the deceptions at the heart of ObamaCare. She was instrumental in winning the political argument that looks increasingly likely to render ObamaCare’s legislative victory a Pyrrhic one. Sarah Palin outsmarted the formerly mainstream media simply by being blunt and honest. That is why they burn with a mindless rage against her.

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Thursday, 03 Febraury 11

Homer Nods
In our lead item yesterday, we erred in asserting that "death panel" was a figurative description of the rationing of medical services that would be a necessary consequence of ObamaCare. A reader reminds us of an interview President Obama gave to the New York Times's David Leonhardt in April 2009, which was published in the May 3 issue of the Times magazine.

After Obama tells the story of his grandmother's getting a hip replacement shortly before she died, the following exchange ensues:

Obama: So that's where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that's also a huge driver of cost, right?

I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

Leonhardt: So how do you--how do we deal with it?

Obama: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It's not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that's part of what I suspect you'll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

Obama proposed a "conversation" between "doctors, scientists [and] ethicists" for the purpose of giving "guidance" to government bureaucrats making decisions outside "the normal political channels" as to when to deny medical care.

"Death panel" describes this perfectly. Sarah Palin was even more right than we gave her credit for.

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HERE IS A YOUTUBE THAT IS NOT FUNNY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sI1RbsyT_0

OBAMACARE IS UNCONSTITIONAL

TODAY JUDGE ROGER VINSON, SENIOR FEDERAL DISTRICT JUDGE IN PENSACOLA, FLORIDA, HANDED DOWN HIS DECISION THAT SINCE THE INDIVIDUAL INSURANCE MANDATE OF OBAMACARE EXCEEDS THE POWER OF CONGRESS UNDER THE COMMERCE CLAUSE OF THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION AND SINCE BY THE GOVERNMENT'S OWN ADMISSION THE MANDATE IS NOT SEVERABLE FROM THE OBAMACARE ACT, THE ENTIRE OBAMACARE ACT IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL AND THE GOVERMENT IS ENJOINED FROM ENFORCING IT.

One of the significant statements in Judge Vison's Order was this:

It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.

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• REVIEW & OUTLOOK
• FEBRUARY 1, 2011
• THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
  

The Constitutional Moment

Judge Vinson introduces ObamaCare to Madison and Marshall.

'If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself."

Federal Judge Roger Vinson opens his decision declaring ObamaCare unconstitutional with that citation from Federalist No. 51, written by James Madison in 1788. His exhaustive and erudite opinion is an important moment for American liberty, and yesterday may well stand as the moment the political branches were obliged to return to the government of limited and enumerated powers that the framers envisioned.

As Judge Vinson took pains to emphasize, the case is not really about health care at all, or the wisdom—we would argue the destructiveness—of the newest entitlement. Rather, the Florida case goes to the core of the architecture of the American system, and whether there are any remaining limits on federal control. Judge Vinson's 78-page ruling in favor of 26 states and the National Federation of Independent Business, among others, is by far the best legal vindication to date of Constitutional principles that form the outer boundaries of federal power.

At the heart of the states' lawsuit is the individual mandate, which requires everyone to purchase health insurance or be penalized for not doing so. "Never before has Congress required that everyone buy a product from a private company (essentially for life) just for being alive and residing in the United States," Judge Vinson writes.

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Congressional Democrats and the Obama Administration justified this coercion under the Commerce Clause, so it is fitting that Judge Vinson conducts a deep investigation into its history and intent, including Madison's notes at the Constitutional Convention and the jurisprudence of the first Chief Justice, John Marshall. The original purpose of the Commerce Clause was to eliminate the interstate trade barriers that prevailed under the Articles of Confederation—among the major national problems that gave rise to the Constitution.

The courts affirmed this limited and narrow understanding until the New Deal, when Congress began to regulate harum-scarum and the Supreme Court inflated the clause into a general license for anything a majority happened to favor.

In a major 1942 case, Wickard v. Filburn, the Court held that even growing wheat for personal use was an activity with a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce, thus justifying federal restrictions on the use of agricultural land meant to prop up commodity prices. It wasn't until the William Rehnquist Court, a half-century later, that the Justices began to recover some of the original limits, notably in the Lopez (1995) and Morrison (2000) cases.

Yet even in its most elastic interpretations, the Commerce Clause applied only to "clear and inarguable activity," Judge Vinson writes, the emphasis his. It never applied to inactivity like not buying health insurance, which has "no impact whatsoever" on interstate commerce. He argues that breaching this frontier converts the clause into a general police power of the kind that the Constitution reserves to the states. As the High Court put it in Lopez, obliterating this distinction would "create a completely centralized government."

The Administration contends that not purchasing insurance—inactivity—is really activity, because everyone will eventually need medical care and their costs will be transferred to the insured. But Judge Vinson dissects that as a "radical departure" from the Constitution and U.S. case law. It is "not hyperbolizing to suggest that Congress could do almost anything it wanted," he writes. "Surely this is not what the Founding Fathers could have intended."

He notes that no one can opt out of eating any more than they can from the medical system, so return to the Wickard example of wheat: "Congress could more directly raise too-low wheat prices merely by increasing demand through mandating that every adult purchase and consume wheat bread daily, rationalized on the grounds that because everyone must participate in the market for food, non-consumers of wheat bread adversely affect prices in the wheat market."

Unlike Judge Henry Hudson in Virginia, who also found ObamaCare to be unconstitutional, Judge Vinson addresses the Administration's fallback argument that the Constitution's Necessary and Proper Clause justifies the law even if the Commerce Clause doesn't. He writes that this clause "is not an independent source of federal power" and "would vitiate the enumerated powers principle." In other words, the clause can't justify inherently unconstitutional actions.

Judge Vinson also went beyond the Virginia case in striking down the entire ObamaCare statute—paradoxically, an act of judicial modesty. Democrats intentionally left out a "severability" clause if one part of the bill was struck down, and the Administration repeatedly argued that the individual mandate was "essential" to the bill's goals and mechanisms and compared it to "a finely crafted watch." Judge Vinson writes that picking and choosing among thousands of sections would be "tantamount to rewriting a statute in an attempt to salvage it."

***

We take a measure of vindication in the decision—David Rivkin and Lee Casey, the lawyers who argued the Florida case, first suggested in these pages that the individual mandate was unconstitutional. Judge Vinson's learned opinion has put down a Constitutional argument that will reverberate all the way to the Supreme Court.

HERE IS YET ANOTHER REASON WHY I DO NOT LIKE NEWT GINGRICH

• 
  
• 

• REVIEW & OUTLOOK
• JANUARY 30, 2011, 7:54 P.M. ET

Professor Cornpone

Ethanol lobbyist Newt Gingrich and us—and the future of the GOP

The last time these columns were lambasted by a presidential candidate in Iowa, he was Democrat Richard Gephardt and the year was 1988. The Missouri populist won the state caucuses in part on the rallying cry that "we've got to stop listening to the editorial writers and the establishment," especially about ethanol and trade. Imagine our amusement to find Republican Newt Gingrich joining such company.

View Full Image

Associated Press

The former Speaker blew through Des Moines last Tuesday for the Renewable Fuels Association summit, and his keynote speech to the ethanol lobby was as pious a tribute to the fuel made from corn and tax dollars as we've ever heard. Mr. Gingrich explained that "the big-city attacks" on ethanol subsidies are really attempts to deny prosperity to rural America, adding that "Obviously big urban newspapers want to kill it because it's working, and you wonder, 'What are their values?'"

Mr. Gingrich traced the roots of these supposed antipathies to the 1880s, an observation that he repeatedly tendered "as an historian." The Ph.D. and star pupil of futurist Alvin Toffler then singled out the Journal's long-held anti-ethanol views as "just plain flat intellectually wrong."

Mr. Gingrich is right that ethanol poses an intellectual problem, but it has nothing to do with a culture war between Des Moines and New York City. The real fight is between the House Republicans now trying to rationalize the federal fisc and the kind of corporate welfare that President Obama advanced in his State of the Union. We'll dwell on this problem not merely because Mr. Gingrich the historian brought it up, but because it and he illustrate so many of the snares facing the modern GOP.

***

Mr. Gingrich was particularly troubled by our January 22 editorial about food inflation, "Amber Waves of Ethanol," saying that we "at least ought to use facts that are accurate." For the record, we cited figures from the Agriculture Department showing that four of every 10 rows of corn now go to ethanol, up from about one of 10 a decade ago.

A Gingrich spokesman said that what his boss meant to say is that this redistribution has a "negligible" effect on global food costs, especially compared to "higher fuel and energy prices and rampant speculation in the commodities markets."

Here's how he put in Des Moines, with that special Gingrich nuance: "The morning that I see the folks who are worried about 'food versus fuel' worry about the cost of diesel fuel, worry about the cost of commodities on the world market, worry about the inflation the Federal Reserve is building into our system, all of which is going to show up as higher prices, worry about the inefficiencies of big corporations that manufacture and process food products—the morning they do that, I'll take them seriously."

The morning Mr. Gingrich read the offending editorial, if he did, he must have overlooked the part about precisely those concerns. He must have also missed our editorial last month raising the possibility that easy money was contributing to another asset bubble in the Farm Belt, especially in land prices. For that matter, he must have missed the dozens of pieces we've run in recent years critiquing Fed monetary policy.

Of course, the ethanol boom isn't due to the misallocation of resources that always stalks inflation. It is the result of decades of deliberate industrial policy, as Mr. Gingrich well knows. In 1998, then Ways and Means Chairman Bill Archer tried to kill ethanol's subsidies for good, only to land in the wet cement that Speaker Gingrich had poured.

Yet today this now-mature industry enjoys far more than cash handouts, including tariffs on foreign competitors and a mandate to buy its product. Supporters are always inventing new reasons for these dispensations, like carbon benefits (nonexistent, according to the greens and most scientific evidence) and replacing foreign oil (imports are up). An historian of Mr. Gingrich's distinction surely knows all that.

***

Given that Mr. Gingrich aspires to be President, his ethanol lobbying raises larger questions about his convictions and judgment. The Georgian has been campaigning in the tea party age as a fierce critic of spending and government, but his record on that score is, well, mixed.

As Speaker in 1995, he thought he could govern from Congress, refused to bargain with President Clinton and after a veto was forced to retreat in a way that hurt Bob Dole and nearly cost the House majority. In 1997, he did manage a balanced-budget deal with Mr. Clinton, but the price included phony Medicare cuts on doctors and a new entitlement for children's health care.

Mr. Gingrich stepped down after the GOP lost House seats in 1998, but he re-emerged in 2003 to campaign for George W. Bush's Medicare prescription drug benefit. His personal contribution was to promote the bill's modest market fillips as epic virtues that lesser minds couldn't grasp. Instead, the bill damaged the GOP's fiscal credibility, while Democrats have since rolled back medical savings accounts and private insurance options for seniors.

Now Republicans have another chance to reform government, and a limited window of opportunity in which to do it. The temptation will be to allow their first principles to be as elastic as many voters suspect they are, especially as Mr. Obama appropriates the language of "investments" and "incentives" to transfer capital to politically favored companies. Many Republicans have their own industry favorites, and such parochial interests could undercut their opposition to Mr. Obama's wider agenda.

So along comes Mr. Gingrich to offer his support for Mr. Obama's brand of green-energy welfare, undermining House Republicans in the process. In his Iowa speak-power-to-truth lecture, he even suggested that the government should mandate that all new cars in the U.S. be flex-fuel vehicles—meaning those that can run on an ethanol-gas mix as high as 85%—as if King Corn were in any danger of being deposed.

Yet there are currently dozens of flex-fuel models on the market, and auto makers already get a benefit if they sell them, via the prior fuel-economy mandates that did so much to devastate Detroit. The problem is consumers rarely want to pay more for flex-fuel cars when they get 25% to 30% fewer miles per gallon with E85, according to Energy Department data.

***

Some pandering is inevitable in presidential politics, but, befitting a college professor, Mr. Gingrich insists on portraying his low vote-buying as high "intellectual" policy. This doesn't bode well for his judgment as a president. Even Al Gore now admits that the only reason he supported ethanol in 2000 was to goose his presidential prospects, and the only difference now between Al and Newt is that Al admits he was wrong.

THE OBAMA DEFICIT IS NOT AS BAD AS WE ARE BEING TOLD. IT IS WORSE!

The Error of Big Government

The new Congressional Budget Office analysis of the federal budget is full of bad news, but Republican budget experts still fear the report manages to sugar coat the extent of the problem.

The cumulative federal deficits during President Obama's first term will total more than $5 trillion. By 2021, that number is expected to rise by another $7 trillion, according to the report. CBO forecasts that the deficit as a share of GDP will fall to 3 percent in 2015 from 9.8 percent this year. But this progress is highly doubtful, given budget changes that Congress is likely to make between now and then.

The projections assume that all of the Bush tax cuts -- not just those on the rich -- are repealed in 2011. They assume that 25 million more Americans, mostly in the middle class, will have to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax. And they assume that payments to doctors for treating Medicare patients will be severely cut after 2012. "None of that is likely to happen," House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan tells me. "We have to cut the entitlements to get these deficits down in the out years."

Other budget hawks complain that CB0 fails to take into account the true deficit impact of ObamaCare, which the agency still officially pretends is a debt reducer. "That's just a complete fantasy," says Doug Holtz-Eakin, a former CBO director. "That forecast is off by hundreds of billions of dollars."

Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation recalculated the CBO baseline with more realistic assumptions and found that the 10-year deficits will equal $13.6 trillion through 2021. "Annual deficits never fall below $1 trillion," he writes, "and even that assumes a return to peace and prosperity."

In sum, the Obama deficit and spending blowout in Washington isn't as bad as we're being told. It's worse.

by Stephen Moore

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE

Thursday, 27 January 11

PHILADELPHIA'S HOUSE OF HORRORS

ON THE FIRST WORKING DAY OF THE PRESENT CONGRESS SPEAKER JOHN BOEHNER CAUSED THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION TO BE READ ALOUD ON THE FLOOR OF THE HOUSE CHAMBER. I SUGGEST THAT SPEAKER BOEHNER SHOULD HAVE THE MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE READ ALOUD ALL 261 PAGES OF THE GRAND JURY REPORT INDICTING DOCTOR KERMIT GOSNEL AND HIS ASSOCIATES. THE READING SHOULD BE COVERED LIVE ON C-SPAN FOR ALL THE WORLD THE HEAR.

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Abortion’s awful euphemisms

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
January 26, 2011

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/8654/abortion-awful-euphemisms

GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRACIES and legal panels are not usually known for their vivid writing style. But “vivid” doesn’t come close to conveying the driving force of the grand jury report released last week by the Philadelphia district attorney in connection with the Women’s Medical Society, a long-established abortion clinic operated by Dr. Kermit Gosnell. The report was issued on the same day that Gosnell and nine of his employees were arrested on charges including murder, infanticide, and abuse of a corpse. In 261 pages of shatteringly clear prose, the grand jurors laid out their findings.

The remains of dozens of dead babies were found amid appallingly squalid conditions at this abortion clinic in West Philadelphia.

“This case is about a doctor who killed babies and endangered women,” the report begins. “What we mean is that he regularly and illegally delivered live, viable, babies in the third trimester of pregnancy — and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors. The medical practice by which he carried out this business was a filthy fraud in which he overdosed his patients with dangerous drugs, spread venereal disease among them with infected instruments, perforated their wombs and bowels — and, on at least two occasions, caused their deaths. Over the years, many people came to know that something was going on here. But no one put a stop to it.”

The report goes on to describe a horror-show — a squalid operation in which hygiene was ignored, equipment was broken, and late-term abortions were routine. Pregnant women coming to Gosnell’s clinic were treated with callous disdain, often left for hours to sit, semi-conscious and in pain, on dirty recliners covered with bloodstained blankets. Untrained and unsupervised employees administered powerful drugs to induce labor, and heavy sedatives to keep women from screaming.

Time and again, the grand jury says, late-term babies were delivered alive — fully intact and breathing — and then killed. But Gosnell didn’t use the word “kill” to describe what he or his employees were doing. “He called it ‘ensuring fetal demise.’ The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that ‘snipping.’ Over the years, there were hundreds of ‘snippings.’” The report describes a case in which one of the clinic employees played with a newborn before slitting its neck.

The grand jury report came out just days before the 38^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the endlessly controversial Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in every state. By the usual newsroom calculus, that should have made the ghastly revelations of this “baby charnel house” — the grand jury’s term — a huge story. But outside of Philadelphia, the story got only muted attention.

Even after the story broke, Philadelphia’s local Planned Parenthood chapter could only bring itself to “condemn any physician who does not follow the law or endangers anyone’s health,” and said women in such cases should “complain to the Department of Health.” But the grand jury found that Pennsylvania authorities knew what was happening at Gosnell’s abortion mill, yet deliberately looked the other way. In 1993, with the accession of a pro-choice governor, Republican Tom Ridge, the Pennsylvania Department of Health stopped inspecting abortion clinics. “Officials concluded that inspections would be ‘putting a barrier up to women’ seeking abortions,” the report says, and decided “to leave clinics to do as they pleased.”

Kermit Gosnell, who ran the Women’s Medical Society, an abortion clinic, for decades, has been arrested on multiple charges of murder, infanticide, and abuse of a corpse.

The blunt clarity of the grand jury’s findings could not contrast more sharply with the abstract euphemisms preferred by abortion’s supporters.

In a statement marking Roe v. Wade’s anniversary, President Obama referred not to “abortion,” but to “women’s health and reproductive freedom” and the importance of keeping government out of “private family matters.” Planned Parenthood and NARAL’s Blog for Choice celebrated Roe for enshrining “a woman’s right to choose.” Rarely can those who extoll “choice” bring themselves to acknowledge openly that what is being chosen is death.

Since 1973, Roe has led to the destruction of more than 40 million unborn babies. It has led to a desensitizing debasement of our language as well. Americans have gotten so used to the idea of life in the womb being violently killed in part because they camouflage that killing with feel-good labels like “reproductive freedom” and “choice.” So pervasive is the mindset such language sustains that even when an alleged butcher like Gosnell comes along, the champions of “choice” offer only muted criticism.

Abortion is always a violent and awful thing, whether it happens in a squalid cesspit or in an immaculate doctor’s office. Reasonable people can debate whether abortion should be legal, and under what circumstances. But they ought to be able to do so without euphemistic evasions. Too many Americans have grown too comfortable with abortion’s terrible reality. For that as well, we have Roe to thank.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)

THE FAITHLESS ELECTOR

States with laws punishing faithless electors




THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2008 WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS ONE OF THE MOST CONFLICTED

One of the major points of controversy in the election was the challenge to the eligibility of Barack Hussein Obama to be president of the United States.

I was one of the many persons who did not, and still do not, believe that he was eligible. While many based their objections to his eligibility solely on his place of birth,
contending that he was not born in the United States, I was one of those who, while also believing that he was born in Monbassa, Kenya, believed that he was ineligible because he was not born of two parents who were both citizens of the United States at the time of his birth. The constitutional requirement that one must be a NATURAL BORN CITIZEN OF THE UNITED STATES in order to be eligible for the presidency has traditionally been understood to require that one be born of two such parents. He was not.

In order to head off the casting of ballots for Obama by the members of the Electoral College following the general election in which he received the majority of the popular vote, packets of documentation were sent to every member of the College detailing his ineligibility. It was a great disappointment to many of us that the electors cast their ballots for him when the College met in December, 2008 and the Congress accepted their voting and declared Obama president.

What I did not know at the time was that, while the policy varies from state to state, the majority states require their electors to vote for the candidate for whom they have been pledged to vote. There is such a thing as a faithless elector.

HERE IS WIKIPEDIA'S EXPLANATION OF THE FAITHLESS ELECTOR:

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Faithless elector
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


In United States presidential elections, a faithless elector is a member of the Electoral College who does not vote for the candidate they have pledged to vote for. Faithless electors are pledged electors and thus different from unpledged electors.
On 158 occasions, electors have cast their votes for President or Vice President in a manner different from that prescribed by the legislature of the state they represented. Of those, 71 votes were changed because the original candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote. Two votes were not cast at all when electors chose to abstain from casting their electoral vote for any candidate. The remaining 85 were changed by the elector's personal interest, or perhaps by accident. Usually, the faithless electors act alone. An exception was the U.S. presidential election of 1836, in which 23 Virginia electors conspired to change their vote together.
Political parties choose their slate of electors in each state, and they generally select party members with a reputation for high loyalty to the party and its candidate. Moreover, a faithless elector runs a risk of censure and other political retaliation from his party. Thus, the parties have generally been successful in keeping their electors faithful, leaving out the cases in which a candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote.
Twenty-four states have laws to punish faithless electors.[1] While no faithless elector has ever been punished, the constitutionality of state pledge laws was brought before the Supreme Court in 1952 (Ray v. Blair, 343 U.S. 214). The court ruled in favor of the state's right to require electors to pledge to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged, as well as to remove electors who refuse to pledge. Once the elector has voted, their vote can only be changed in states such as Michigan and Minnesota, where votes other than those pledged are rendered invalid. However, in all twenty-four states, a faithless elector may only be punished after he or she votes. The Supreme Court has ruled that, as electors are chosen via state elections, they act as a function of the state, not the federal government. Therefore states have the right to govern electors. The constitutionality of state laws punishing electors for actually casting a faithless vote, rather than refusing to pledge, has never been decided by the Supreme Court.
To date, faithless electors have never changed the otherwise expected outcome of the election.
List of faithless electors
Electors do not have to vote for the candidate who received the most votes in any particular state. The following is a list of all faithless electors (in chronological order). The number preceding each entry is the number of faithless electors for the given year.
Election year
Faithless electors
Notes
1796
1
Samuel Miles, an elector from Pennsylvania, was pledged to vote for Federalist presidential candidate John Adams, but voted for Democratic Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson. He cast his other presidential vote as pledged for Thomas Pinckney. (This election took place prior to the passage of the 12th Amendment, so there were not separate ballots for president and vice president.)
1800
—
New York elector Anthony Lispenard demanded to be able to cast a secret ballot, rather than a public one as state law required, apparently because he wanted to cast both of his votes for Aaron Burr instead of one each for Burr and Thomas Jefferson. This demand was necessary to force Burr's election as President, since voting for Burr and someone else would have (in theory) simply created a deadlock in the electoral college and a run-off vote, which Jefferson would have likely won. However, Lispenard's demand was rejected by the state, and he voted as pledged, for Jefferson and Burr. Ironically, errors in the Democratic-Republican voting strategy meant that Jefferson and Burr ended up tying 73-73 in the electoral college, meaning that Lispenard could have caused Burr to become President all along by simply not casting his second vote, or voting for someone who was not a candidate, although he had no way of knowing this would be the case when he voted.[2]
1808
6
Six electors from New York were pledged to vote for Democratic Republican James Madison as President and George Clinton as Vice President. Instead, they voted for Clinton to be President, with three voting for Madison as Vice President and the other three voting for James Monroe to be Vice President.
1812
4
Three electors pledged to vote for Federalist vice presidential candidate Jared Ingersoll voted for Democratic Republican Elbridge Gerry. One Ohio elector did not vote.
1820
1
William Plumer pledged to vote for Democratic Republican candidate James Monroe, but he cast his vote for John Quincy Adams who was also a Democratic Republican, but was not a candidate in the 1820 election. Some historians contend that Plumer did not feel that the Electoral College should unanimously elect any President other than George Washington, but this claim is disputed. (Monroe lost another three votes because three electors died before casting ballots and were not replaced.)
1828
7
Seven (of nine) electors from Georgia refused to vote for vice presidential candidate John C. Calhoun. All seven cast their vice presidential votes for William Smith instead.
1832
32
Two National Republican Party electors from the state of Maryland refused to vote for presidential candidate Henry Clay and did not cast a vote for him or for his running mate. All 30 electors from Pennsylvania refused to support the Democratic vice presidential candidate Martin Van Buren, voting instead for William Wilkins.
1836
23
The Democratic Party nominated Richard Mentor Johnson of Kentucky as their vice presidential candidate. The 23 electors from Virginia refused to support Johnson with their votes upon learning of the allegation that he had lived with an African-American woman. There was no majority in the Electoral College and the decision was deferred to the Senate, which supported Johnson as the Vice President.
1860
—
In New Jersey, where a fusion ticket was attempted, a Democratic supporter of Douglas refused to issue fusion tickets that would have supported Breckinridge. As a result, only three Democratic electors were chosen (all supporters of Douglas), and the other four electors chosen were Republican supporters of Abraham Lincoln.[3]
1872
63
63 electors for Horace Greeley changed their votes after Greeley's death, which occurred before the electoral vote could be cast. Greeley's remaining three electors cast their presidential votes for Greeley and had their votes discounted by Congress.
1892
6
In Oregon, three electors voted for Democrat Grover Cleveland, and one for the third-party Populist candidate. All four were pledged to Republican President Benjamin Harrison, who failed to get reelected. Also, in North Dakota, one elector voted for the Democrats and one for the Populists, while the Republicans had won the state.
1896
4
The Democratic Party and the People’s Party both ran William Jennings Bryan as their presidential candidate, but ran different candidates for Vice President. The Democratic Party nominated Arthur Sewall and the People’s Party nominated Thomas E. Watson. The People’s Party won 31 electoral votes but four of those electors voted with the Democratic ticket, supporting Bryan as President and Sewall as Vice President.
1912
8
Republican vice presidential candidate James S. Sherman died before the election. Eight Republican electors had pledged their votes to him but voted for Nicholas Murray Butler instead.
1948
1
Two Tennessee electors were on both the Democratic Party and the States' Rights Democratic Party slates. When the Democratic Party slate won, one of these electors voted for the Democratic nominees Harry Truman and Alben Barkley. The other, Preston Parks, cast his votes for States' Rights Democratic Party candidates Strom Thurmond and Fielding Wright, making him a faithless elector.
1956
1
Alabama Elector W. F. Turner, pledged for Democrats Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver, cast his votes for Walter Burgwyn Jones and Herman Talmadge.
1960
1
Oklahoma Elector Henry D. Irwin, pledged for Republicans Richard Nixon and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., cast his presidential electoral vote for Democratic non-candidate Harry Flood Byrd and his vice presidential electoral vote for Republican Barry Goldwater. (Fourteen unpledged electors also voted for Byrd for president, but supported Strom Thurmond, then a Democrat, for vice president.)
1968
1
North Carolina Elector Lloyd W. Bailey, pledged for Republicans Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, cast his votes for American Independent Party candidates George Wallace and Curtis LeMay.
1972
1
Virginia Elector Roger MacBride, pledged for Republicans Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, cast his electoral votes for Libertarian candidates John Hospers and Theodora Nathan. MacBride's vote for Nathan was the first electoral vote cast for a woman in U.S. history. MacBride became the Libertarian candidate for President in the 1976 election.
1976
1
Washington Elector Mike Padden, pledged for Republicans Gerald Ford and Bob Dole, cast his presidential electoral vote for Ronald Reagan, who had challenged Ford for the Republican nomination. He cast his vice presidential vote, as pledged, for Dole.
1984
—
In Illinois, the electors, pledged to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, conducted their vote in a secret ballot. When the electors voted for Vice President, one of the votes was for Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic nominee. After several minutes of confusion, a second ballot was taken. Bush won unanimously in this ballot, and it was this ballot that was reported to Congress.
1988
1
West Virginia Elector Margaret Leach, pledged for Democrats Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen, instead cast her votes for the candidates in the reverse of their positions on the national ticket; her presidential vote went to Bentsen and her vice presidential vote to Dukakis.
2000
1
Washington, D.C. Elector Barbara Lett-Simmons, pledged for Democrats Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, cast no electoral votes as a protest of Washington D.C.'s lack of statehood, which she described as the federal district's "colonial status."[4]
2004
1
A Minnesota elector, pledged for Democrats John Kerry and John Edwards, cast his or her presidential vote for John Ewards [sic],[5] rather than Kerry, presumably by accident.[6] (All of Minnesota's electors cast their vice presidential ballots for John Edwards.) Minnesota's electors cast secret ballots, so unless one of the electors claims responsibility, it is unlikely that the identity of the faithless elector will ever be known. As a result of this incident, Minnesota Statutes were amended to provide for public balloting of the electors' votes and invalidation of a vote cast for someone other than the candidate to whom the elector is pledged.[7]

225 VOLUMES, 35,367 PAGES 4,200 PROPOSED NEW RULES, ALL AT A COST OF $1.75 TRILLION

Obama, the Great Deregulator?

by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
January 23, 2011

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/8642/obama-the-great-deregulator

WHEN PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA announced last week that he was ordering executive agencies to scrap "outdated" federal regulations "that conflict, that are not worth the cost, or that are just plain dumb," and to ensure that new rules use the "least burdensome" means of achieving their goals, the response from the right was polite but doubtful.

The Code of Federal Regulations now runs to more than 35,000 pages.

"This executive order is hardly a war on red tape," the Competitive Enterprise Institute pointed out, noting that it duplicates a Clinton-era order that has been on the books all along. The Cato Institute's Walter Olson was unimpressed by Obama's single example of an unwarranted regulation: an EPA rule classifying saccharin as hazardous waste. "It was almost as if his point was to pick a regulation so minor that no one cared much about it one way or the other." If the president is serious, The Wall Street Journal editorialized, "this will be one of the great policy walkbacks in American history" -- but it counseled keeping "a Missouri state of mind."

The skeptics can hardly be blamed for not rushing to acclaim Obama as the Great Deregulator.

It was only last spring, after all, that The New York Times -- in a story headlined "With Obama, Regulations Are Back in Fashion" -- was reporting on "the surge in rule-making" and how the administration "has pressed forward on hundreds of new mandates, while also stepping up enforcement." In October, a Heritage Foundation report on "Obama's torrent of new regulation" concluded that the federal regulatory burden was increasing at an unprecedented rate: In fiscal 2010 alone, the administration had adopted 43 major new regulations, at an estimated annual cost to the economy of $26.5 billion, a record.

And even as Obama promises to throttle back the regulatory overdrive, the White House says that ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank -- the massive new laws overhauling health-care and the financial industry, which will create scores of new agencies and generate hundreds of new regulations -- will not be affected. You don't have to be an Obama-wary conservative to assume that the impact of the president's order -- as the Times put it last week -- "is likely to be more political than substantive."

Much harder to make sense of is the outraged response on the left.

Public Citizen, the anti-business lobby group founded by Ralph Nader, slammed Obama's call for restoring "balance" to federal rulemaking as "the wrong way to think about regulation" and accused the administration of "echoing Big Business's talking points." Salon's War Room blog said the president's call for reviewing burdensome rules "reads like an apology to the business community." Rena Steinzor, head of the Center for Progressive Reform, suggested that what the nation needs is not less regulation, but more.

"Think about all the disasters that we have suffered in the last couple of years," she lamented to NPR. "The Deepwater Horizon spill; the collapse of the Big Branch mine; peanut paste with salmonella; Toyotas that suddenly accelerate; cadmium in children's jewelry. What you see is a massive failure of a regulatory system."

That may be persuasive to someone who starts from the simplistic premise that disasters are caused by insufficiently aggressive government oversight. But if more regulation is the right response to every corporate debacle or marketplace calamity, then be definition there can never be enough government control.

As long as there are human beings, there will be failures, foul-ups, and blunders. It is delusional to imagine that we can always protect ourselves with another federal "czar," or with more rigorous regulation. Czars and regulators -- like the politicians who empower them -- are no more honest or infallible than anyone else, and the harm caused by their failures, foul-ups, and blunders can be devastating. To take just one example, think of all the economic agony that could have been avoided in recent years if the government hadn't deliberately weakened market discipline in its quest to expand homeownership.

"By 2010," writes former US Senator and Court of Appeals Judge James Buckley in a new book, "the Code of Federal Regulations consisted of 225 volumes containing 35,367 pages of detailed, fine-print regulations." More than 4,200 proposed rules are in currently in the pipeline at federal agencies. According to a study commissioned by the Small Business Administration, the annual cost of federal regulation surpasses $1.75 trillion -- and that was in 2008. There are many ways to characterize the relationship between Americans and their government. "Underregulated" isn't one of them.

The president's call for restoring regulatory balance is encouraging, no matter how aghast it leaves his critics on the left. As for the rest of us, we'll wait to see if he means it.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe. His website is www.JeffJacoby.com).

ENTITLEMENT TO ECONOMIC SLAVERY AND SOCIAL DEGRADATION

Zina Saunder

The State Against Blacks

'The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do. . . . And that is to destroy the black family.'

By JASON L. RILEY , Devon, Pa.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

22 January 11

'Sometimes I sarcastically, perhaps cynically, say that I'm glad that I received virtually all of my education before it became fashionable for white people to like black people," writes Walter Williams in his new autobiography, "Up from the Projects." "By that I mean that I encountered back then a more honest assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Professors didn't hesitate to criticize me—sometimes to the point of saying, 'That's nonsense.'"

Mr. Williams, an economist at George Mason University, is contrasting being black and poor in the 1940s and '50s with today's experience. It's a theme that permeates his short, bracing volume of reminiscence, and it's where we began our conversation on a recent morning at his home in suburban Philadelphia.


"We lived in the Richard Allen housing projects" in Philadelphia, says Mr. Williams. "My father deserted us when I was three and my sister was two. But we were the only kids who didn't have a mother and father in the house. These were poor black people and a few whites living in a housing project, and it was unusual not to have a mother and father in the house. Today, in the same projects, it would be rare to have a mother and father in the house."


Even in the antebellum era, when slaves often weren't permitted to wed, most black children lived with a biological mother and father. During Reconstruction and up until the 1940s, 75% to 85% of black children lived in two-parent families. Today, more than 70% of black children are born to single women. "The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do, what Jim Crow couldn't do, what the harshest racism couldn't do," Mr. Williams says. "And that is to destroy the black family."


Government programs and regulations are favorite butts of the professor, who is best known today for his weekly column—started in 1977 and now appearing in more than 140 newspapers—and for his stints guest-hosting Rush Limbaugh's popular radio program. Libertarianism is currently in vogue, thanks to the election of a statist president and the subsequent rise of the tea party movement. But Walter Williams was a libertarian before it was cool. And like other prominent right-of-center blacks—Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele—his intellectual odyssey began on the political left.


"I was more than anything a radical," says Mr. Williams. "I was more sympathetic to Malcolm X than Martin Luther King because Malcolm X was more of a radical who was willing to confront discrimination in ways that I thought it should be confronted, including perhaps the use of violence.


"But I really just wanted to be left alone. I thought some laws, like minimum-wage laws, helped poor people and poor black people and protected workers from exploitation. I thought they were a good thing until I was pressed by professors to look at the evidence."


During his junior year at California State College in Los Angeles, Mr. Williams switched his major from sociology to economics after reading W.E.B. Du Bois's "Black Reconstruction in America," a Marxist take on the South's transformation after the Civil War that will never be confused with "The Wealth of Nations." Even so, the book taught him that "black people cannot make great progress until they understand the economic system, until they know something about economics."


He earned his doctorate in 1972 from UCLA, which had one of the top economics departments in the country, and he says he "probably became a libertarian through exposure to tough-mined professors"—James Buchanan, Armen Alchian, Milton Friedman—"who encouraged me to think with my brain instead of my heart. I learned that you have to evaluate the effects of public policy as opposed to intentions."


Mr. Williams distinguished himself in the mid-1970s through his research on the effects of the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931—which got the government involved in setting wage levels—and on the impact of minimum-wage law on youth and minority unemployment. He concluded that minimum wages caused high rates of teenage unemployment, particularly among minority teenagers. His research also showed that Davis-Bacon, which requires high prevailing (read: union) wages on federally financed or assisted construction projects, was the product of lawmakers with explicitly racist motivations.


One of Congress's goals at the time was to stop black laborers from displacing whites by working for less money. Missouri Rep. John Cochran said that he had "received numerous complaints in recent months about Southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics." And Alabama Rep. Clayton Allgood fretted about contractors with "cheap colored labor . . . of the sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country."


Today just 17% of construction workers are unionized, but Democratic politicians, in deference to the AFL-CIO, have kept Davis-Bacon in place to protect them. Because most black construction workers aren't union members, however, the law has the effect of freezing them out of jobs. It also serves to significantly increase the costs of government projects, since there are fewer contractors to bid on them than there would be without Davis-Bacon.


Analysis of this issue launched Mr. Williams's career as a public intellectual, and in 1982 he published his first book, "The State Against Blacks," arguing that laws regulating economic activity are far larger impediments to black progress than racial bigotry and discrimination. Nearly 30 years later, he stands by that premise.


"Racial discrimination is not the problem of black people that it used to be" in his youth, says Mr. Williams. "Today I doubt you could find any significant problem that blacks face that is caused by racial discrimination. The 70% illegitimacy rate is a devastating problem, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with racism. The fact that in some areas black people are huddled in their homes at night, sometimes serving meals on the floor so they don't get hit by a stray bullet—that's not because the Klan is riding through the neighborhood."
Over the decades, Mr. Williams's writings have sought to highlight "the moral superiority of individual liberty and free markets," as he puts it. "I try to write so that economics is understandable to the ordinary person without an economics background." His motivation? "I think it's important for people to understand the ideas of scarcity and decision-making in everyday life so that they won't be ripped off by politicians," he says. "Politicians exploit economic illiteracy."


Which is why, he adds, the tea party movement is a positive development in our politics and long overdue. "For the first time in my lifetime—and I'm approaching 75 years old—you hear Americans debating about the U.S. Constitution," he says. "You hear them saying 'This is unconstitutional' or 'We need limits on government'—things that I haven't heard before. I've been arguing them for years, but now there's widespread acceptance of the idea that we need to limit the government."


Still, he's concerned about how far the country has strayed from the type of limited government envisioned by the Founding Fathers. "In 1794, Congress appropriated $15,000 to help some French refugees," he says. In objection, "James Madison stood on the House floor and said he could not take to lay his finger on that article in the Constitution that allows Congress to take the money of its constituents for the purposes of benevolence. Well, if you look at the federal budget today, two-thirds to three-quarters of it is for the purposes of benevolence."


Mr. Williams says that "if there is anything good to be said about the Democratic White House and the [previous] Congress and their brazen attempt to take over the economy and control our lives, it's that the tea party movement has come out of it. But we have gone so far from the basic constitutional principles that made us a great country that it's a question of whether we can get back."


The place to start, says Mr. Williams by way of advice to the new Republican House, is on the spending side of the federal ledger. "We need a constitutional amendment that limits the amount of money the government can spend," he says. "Let's say 18% of GDP to start. The benefit of a spending limitation amendment is that you're going to force Congress to trade off against the various spending constituencies. Somebody says, 'I want you to spend $10 billion on this,' and the congressman can respond, 'My hands are tied, so you have to show me where I can cut $10 billion first.'"


Mr. Williams says he hopes that the tea party has staying power, but "liberty and limited government is the unusual state of human affairs. The normal state throughout mankind's history is for him to be subject to arbitrary abuse and control by government."
He adds: "A historian writing 100 or 200 years from now might well say, 'You know, there was this little historical curiosity that existed for maybe 200 years, where people were free from arbitrary abuse and control by government and where there was a large measure of respect for private property rights. But then it went back to the normal state of affairs.'"


Hoping to end our conversation on a sunnier note, I pose a final question about race. "A Man of Letters," Thomas Sowell's fabulous book of correspondence, includes a letter the Stanford economist sent in 2006 to Mr. Williams, whom he's known for four decades. "[B]ack in the early years," writes Mr. Sowell, "you and I were pretty pessimistic as to whether what we were writing would make an impact—especially since the two of us seemed to be the only ones saying what we were saying. Today at least we know that there are lots of other blacks writing and saying similar things . . . and many of them are sufficiently younger that we know there will be good people carrying on the fight after we are gone."


Asked if he shares his friend's optimism, Mr. Williams responds that he does. "You find more and more black people—not enough in my opinion but more and more—questioning the status quo," he says. "When I fill in for Rush, I get emails from blacks who say they agree with what I'm saying. And there are a lot of white people questioning ideas on race, too. There's less white guilt out there. It's progress."


Mr. Riley is a member of The Journal's editorial board.


Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A13