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Thursday, November 17, 2011
RUN FOR CONGRESS AND GET RICH
!!!!
Online Journal E-Mail Center
Those
wondering how Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign is gaining steam
despite the candidate's heavy baggage ought to check out the rhetorical
gymnastics he's displayed in responding to recent reports that he earned
$1.5 million as a consultant to Freddie Mac.
UNCLE SAM'S CASH COW
!!!!
If you wonder why European governments are on the brink of bankruptcy, you need look
no further than what is happening here in the United States.
When a significant number of a nation's population is feeding off of the government's cash cow and not working, not producing to benefit the nation's economy, the cow's udder will soon run dry - bankruptcy!
- Leo Rugiens
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/11/17/the-new-welfare-swindle
SSI has replaced AFDC as the New Welfare.
Ever since I moved to the inner city one thing has puzzled me more than any other, and that is how my low-income neighbors get by. Assuming they aren't doing anything illegal, how do they afford their homes, their meals, their gadgets, their cars?
Few seem to work, even part time, for they are home in the morning when I leave for work, home if I stop by for lunch, and home when I return in the evening. They can't work the graveyard shift, for they keep me up half the night with their raucous music. I am left to conclude that they seldom, if ever work. Therefore, their funds must come from elsewhere. And none of them strike me as a trust fund baby.
The best I can figure is they make do with a patchwork of welfare programs. Besides, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which expires after five years, there is housing assistance, WIC (Women, Infants and Children) and Medicaid. There are food stamps, which also can be sold in parking lots for cash, and various lesser programs, such as heating assistance.
Beyond government subsidies, there is no shortage of help available from church and nonprofit groups. My mother volunteers at a pregnancy crisis center where the poor are given free diapers, clothing, and baby formula. Every day she has to turn away scammers who try to exceed their monthly allotment. Our parish sponsors a food pantry and local religious organizations provide free furniture. Meantime, nearly all of my neighbors have cable, big screen plasma TVs, and cell phones (I have none of these). From the smells that waft over our fence, many somehow afford illegal drugs.
But even with government subsidies, housing isn't completely covered. By my reckoning my neighbors must still come up with a few hundred dollars a month for rent and miscellaneous expenses.
THEN A SOCIAL WORKER friend clued me in. Many of the poor also collect federal disability benefits in the form of Supplemental Security Insurance, or "crazy money" as it is known on the streets, since one must "act crazy" to receive it. Oftentimes several people in the same household -- adults and children -- collect checks. This surprised me, since I had never for a moment guessed that my neighbors were disabled.
SSI was enacted in 1974 to supplement the Social Security benefits of disabled low-income seniors, and, as an afterthought, to help pay for the care of severely disabled children from poor families. As with any federal program, SSI has ballooned to Hindenbergian proportions, and now covers virtually any low-income person with any long-term ailment. Not surprisingly, easy-to-fake learning, behavioral, and mental disorders are the most common complaints, especially among children, making up 55 percent of all cases.
Poor adults, who in pre-welfare reform days were offered incentives to be idle and proliferant, are again incentivized to be idle and proliferant. And what an incentive it's been. Last year the Social Security Administration paid almost $50 billion in SSI benefits. More than $9 billion was paid to 1.2 million disabled children.
What's more, recipients are not required to get treatment for their or their children's maladies -- although this may be a good thing, since it is doubtless harmful for kids to take powerful psychotropic drugs for counterfeit or exaggerated symptoms.
My friend visits one such family in which four members collect SSI checks, one adult and three children. One child suffers from asthma, which would probably clear up if the mother -- who is unemployed -- bothered to clean her house. However, she has a monetary incentive not to clean or to seek treatment for her child, for if the asthma cleared up, and this was found out (an unlikely event since SSA workers routinely fail to conduct follow up visits), that could mean one less check. Also, like the now defunct Aid to Families with Dependent Children, SSI encourages dependency and is cyclical in nature. More than half who go on SSI as a child, requalify as adults. And the cycle continues.
Economically speaking, it makes perfect sense for the poor to rely on SSI. Compared to the old welfare, SSI is a plump cash cow. Here in Missouri, one of the least generous states, TANF recipients receive a measly $136 per person per month, while each SSI recipient takes home about $674. A family of four could amass $32,352 annually, not counting other benefits. Besides, since most of my neighbors dropped out of high school, there is not much they could do to earn a living other than work in fast food for minimum wage. And why put yourself through that when you can watch television all day and collect more in aid? Why bother trying to raise yourself up?
In 1988, there were 4.46 million SSI recipients. Today, there are 8 million. It is impossible to know how many of these are fakers gaming the system, but SSI recipients know no color or geographic boundary. Federal data shows that roughly half are white, half black. Nor does the phenomenon apply to all of the poor. My social worker friend visits several severely mentally handicapped persons who work menial jobs rather than accept government largess. They take pride in going to work every day and in setting a good example for their children. My neighbors would think them crazy.
If you wonder why European governments are on the brink of bankruptcy, you need look
no further than what is happening here in the United States.
When a significant number of a nation's population is feeding off of the government's cash cow and not working, not producing to benefit the nation's economy, the cow's udder will soon run dry - bankruptcy!
- Leo Rugiens
The New Welfare Swindle
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/11/17/the-new-welfare-swindle
SSI has replaced AFDC as the New Welfare.
Ever since I moved to the inner city one thing has puzzled me more than any other, and that is how my low-income neighbors get by. Assuming they aren't doing anything illegal, how do they afford their homes, their meals, their gadgets, their cars?
Few seem to work, even part time, for they are home in the morning when I leave for work, home if I stop by for lunch, and home when I return in the evening. They can't work the graveyard shift, for they keep me up half the night with their raucous music. I am left to conclude that they seldom, if ever work. Therefore, their funds must come from elsewhere. And none of them strike me as a trust fund baby.
The best I can figure is they make do with a patchwork of welfare programs. Besides, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which expires after five years, there is housing assistance, WIC (Women, Infants and Children) and Medicaid. There are food stamps, which also can be sold in parking lots for cash, and various lesser programs, such as heating assistance.
Beyond government subsidies, there is no shortage of help available from church and nonprofit groups. My mother volunteers at a pregnancy crisis center where the poor are given free diapers, clothing, and baby formula. Every day she has to turn away scammers who try to exceed their monthly allotment. Our parish sponsors a food pantry and local religious organizations provide free furniture. Meantime, nearly all of my neighbors have cable, big screen plasma TVs, and cell phones (I have none of these). From the smells that waft over our fence, many somehow afford illegal drugs.
But even with government subsidies, housing isn't completely covered. By my reckoning my neighbors must still come up with a few hundred dollars a month for rent and miscellaneous expenses.
THEN A SOCIAL WORKER friend clued me in. Many of the poor also collect federal disability benefits in the form of Supplemental Security Insurance, or "crazy money" as it is known on the streets, since one must "act crazy" to receive it. Oftentimes several people in the same household -- adults and children -- collect checks. This surprised me, since I had never for a moment guessed that my neighbors were disabled.
SSI was enacted in 1974 to supplement the Social Security benefits of disabled low-income seniors, and, as an afterthought, to help pay for the care of severely disabled children from poor families. As with any federal program, SSI has ballooned to Hindenbergian proportions, and now covers virtually any low-income person with any long-term ailment. Not surprisingly, easy-to-fake learning, behavioral, and mental disorders are the most common complaints, especially among children, making up 55 percent of all cases.
Poor adults, who in pre-welfare reform days were offered incentives to be idle and proliferant, are again incentivized to be idle and proliferant. And what an incentive it's been. Last year the Social Security Administration paid almost $50 billion in SSI benefits. More than $9 billion was paid to 1.2 million disabled children.
What's more, recipients are not required to get treatment for their or their children's maladies -- although this may be a good thing, since it is doubtless harmful for kids to take powerful psychotropic drugs for counterfeit or exaggerated symptoms.
My friend visits one such family in which four members collect SSI checks, one adult and three children. One child suffers from asthma, which would probably clear up if the mother -- who is unemployed -- bothered to clean her house. However, she has a monetary incentive not to clean or to seek treatment for her child, for if the asthma cleared up, and this was found out (an unlikely event since SSA workers routinely fail to conduct follow up visits), that could mean one less check. Also, like the now defunct Aid to Families with Dependent Children, SSI encourages dependency and is cyclical in nature. More than half who go on SSI as a child, requalify as adults. And the cycle continues.
Economically speaking, it makes perfect sense for the poor to rely on SSI. Compared to the old welfare, SSI is a plump cash cow. Here in Missouri, one of the least generous states, TANF recipients receive a measly $136 per person per month, while each SSI recipient takes home about $674. A family of four could amass $32,352 annually, not counting other benefits. Besides, since most of my neighbors dropped out of high school, there is not much they could do to earn a living other than work in fast food for minimum wage. And why put yourself through that when you can watch television all day and collect more in aid? Why bother trying to raise yourself up?
In 1988, there were 4.46 million SSI recipients. Today, there are 8 million. It is impossible to know how many of these are fakers gaming the system, but SSI recipients know no color or geographic boundary. Federal data shows that roughly half are white, half black. Nor does the phenomenon apply to all of the poor. My social worker friend visits several severely mentally handicapped persons who work menial jobs rather than accept government largess. They take pride in going to work every day and in setting a good example for their children. My neighbors would think them crazy.
About the Author
Christopher Orlet writes from St. Louis and is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator Online.Tuesday, November 15, 2011
AH, THE SWEET SMELL OF ANARCHY WAFTS ACROSS THE LAND
!!!!
I have been predicting since 2008 that Barack Hussein Obama was, like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, going to lead all of the rats out of their hiding places and the swarm would take over the country. No true disciple of Saul Alinsky, no true community organizer, could possibly resist the temptation to, in the words of Rahm Emmanuel, "let no crises go unexploited." Obama's praise of the denizens of Occupy Wall Street had the desired effect. Rodents appeared in all the major cities of the United States and Canada and began what can only be described as the Obama Anarchy Revolution of 2011.
- Leo Rugiens
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
![[botwt1115]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vhu5gGPtIHIjaMZCiQCUdEMAG0-cSHXJUf0SmJ9OJO6prf4MVShpMZOLBwouqAzYixjX-Ttu1VrG3bgI1Pleiy0MZY5ASTmOpxOqI4xgjjvnAAkU61syHhiTwmZ5uMe6Jo3RfMjWQzSQWMY0oe5sut=s0-d)
Getty Images
Early this morning, former ACLU staffer Lucy Billings, now a New York Supreme Court justice (the Empire State's odd designation for a trial judge), issued a temporary restraining order against the cleanup. According to the Times's account, Billings's order had the opposite effect: Bloomberg said police had begun allowing Obamavillians to return to the park, sans tents and tarps, but they closed the park altogether after receiving word of the injunction.
The Obamavillians, who style themselves "the 99%," plan to retaliate by making the lives of ordinary New Yorkers more difficult. A 2:30 a.m. email from Justin Ruben of MoveOn.org urged recipients to "call 3-1-1 and demand that Mayor Bloomberg respect the protesters' First Amendment rights." The mayor does not answer calls to 311, a nonemergency city information line. The MoveOnsters are urging their supporters to harass people who are just doing their jobs answering the phones for the city.
Leaders of the so-called Occupy Wall Street movement are "vowing to wreak havoc on Thursday by shutting down Wall Street and the subways," the New York Post reports:
Foley Square is best known as the site of the U.S. and New York County courthouses. The plan to target the subways shows the true colors of this so-called movement. It is not merely about class warfare but about sowing chaos and intimidating ordinary people.
The Wall Street Journal reports that there were intimations of violence from some of the Obamavillians:
What do you call a political movement that's half peaceful and half violent? A violent political movement.
Other cities have seen even worse violence. "One police officer was slashed by a razor and another had his uniform torn and cheek cut in a clash with 'Occupy San Francisco' protesters Saturday afternoon," NewsCore reports. A University of California press release announces that the Board of Regents was forced to cancel a meeting, scheduled for tomorrow and Thursday, because of reports "that rogue elements intent on violence and confrontation with UC public safety officers were planning to attach themselves to peaceful demonstrations expected to occur at the meeting."
The Portland (Ore.) Police Bureau cites "reports that nails have been hammered into wood for weapons." ABC News reports another Obamaville rape, this one in Philadelphia. In Denver, HotAir.com reports, thugs invaded a hotel where conservative bloggers were holding a conference. The Orlando Sentinel reports that two Obamavillians there had a knife fight over a drum circle.
Up in Canada, Obamavillians are threatening cyber war, the Toronto Star reports:
Even Donna Schaper, a hard-left clergyman whose sympathies are with the Obamavillians, is forced to acknowledge--though her awkward passive construction is telling--that "some sexual violence was happening" at Zuccotti Park.
At Penn State too, we hear.
Occupy Limbo!
"Occupy Wall Street Camp in Legal Limbo"--headline, CBC.ca, Nov. 15
You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling
Our friend Harry Siegel has done some excellent reporting on New York's Obamaville, but he's been way too impressed by the whole phenomenon. Writing for the Daily Beast, Siegel implausibly asserts that "the movement has emerged as a political force to be reckoned with," then, for emphasis, adds that it is "increasingly potent."
Siegel asked "Occupy Wall Street organizers" if they were "concerned" about re-electing President Obama "or at least [with] not electing [Mitt] Romney." In response, they "shrugged":
Siegel mistakes nihilism for ambition. As he acknowledges, the Obamavillians' approach has consisted in "tabling any specific demands and ignoring all present political realities to ask for the moon." Guess what the answer to that will be?
It's true that, inasmuch as the Obamavillians were Obama supporters in 2008 and are withholding support for him now, they will diminish his re-election prospects. But the Obamaville fad is merely an expression, not the cause, of that disillusion with the Obama fad. As the New York Times reports today from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas:
Politico reports that even minors, once entranced by the president's "big smile, big ears and bouncy personality," have lost interest in the president. Here's one anecdote:
We wouldn't put it past Obama to try a Lego stimulus, though we assume congressional Republicans would block it. But really, when you get down to it, what's the difference between Jeff Smith and Aron Mondschein, other than that Aron is a lot more mature for his age?
I have been predicting since 2008 that Barack Hussein Obama was, like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, going to lead all of the rats out of their hiding places and the swarm would take over the country. No true disciple of Saul Alinsky, no true community organizer, could possibly resist the temptation to, in the words of Rahm Emmanuel, "let no crises go unexploited." Obama's praise of the denizens of Occupy Wall Street had the desired effect. Rodents appeared in all the major cities of the United States and Canada and began what can only be described as the Obama Anarchy Revolution of 2011.
- Leo Rugiens
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
By JAMES TARANTO
After loitering for nearly two months, New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg finally took action overnight, clearing out so-called protesters who had turned Zuccotti Park, a privately owned, publicly accessible plaza in a residential neighborhood of downtown Manhattan, into a squalid Obamaville. "Health and safety conditions became intolerable," the New York Times quotes the mayor as saying--though why it took him two months to figure that out is left unexplained.
Getty Images
Mayor Bloomberg finally does his job.
Early this morning, former ACLU staffer Lucy Billings, now a New York Supreme Court justice (the Empire State's odd designation for a trial judge), issued a temporary restraining order against the cleanup. According to the Times's account, Billings's order had the opposite effect: Bloomberg said police had begun allowing Obamavillians to return to the park, sans tents and tarps, but they closed the park altogether after receiving word of the injunction.
The Obamavillians, who style themselves "the 99%," plan to retaliate by making the lives of ordinary New Yorkers more difficult. A 2:30 a.m. email from Justin Ruben of MoveOn.org urged recipients to "call 3-1-1 and demand that Mayor Bloomberg respect the protesters' First Amendment rights." The mayor does not answer calls to 311, a nonemergency city information line. The MoveOnsters are urging their supporters to harass people who are just doing their jobs answering the phones for the city.
Leaders of the so-called Occupy Wall Street movement are "vowing to wreak havoc on Thursday by shutting down Wall Street and the subways," the New York Post reports:
According to their Web site, the day will include "Mass, Non-violent Direct Action" to "Shut Down Wall Street" at 7 a.m., "Occupy the Subways" in all five boroughs at 3 p.m. and "Take the Square," referring to Foley Square, at 5 p.m.
Foley Square is best known as the site of the U.S. and New York County courthouses. The plan to target the subways shows the true colors of this so-called movement. It is not merely about class warfare but about sowing chaos and intimidating ordinary people.
The Wall Street Journal reports that there were intimations of violence from some of the Obamavillians:
As police dealt with holdouts, hundreds of others scattered into the streets of Lower Manhattan, setting off marches and skirmishes with police that extended as far north as Union Square. Helicopters hovered low and shone spotlights on marchers who filled normally quiet streets with chanting.
Some appeared to provoke confrontation, while others went out of their way to avoid it. As one group marched through SoHo and NoHo, some knocked over trash cans and dumped them on the street. Others came behind them, righted the cans and put trash back in them.
One part of the group chanted "We are peaceful." Others responded with chants of "We're not peaceful."
What do you call a political movement that's half peaceful and half violent? A violent political movement.
Other cities have seen even worse violence. "One police officer was slashed by a razor and another had his uniform torn and cheek cut in a clash with 'Occupy San Francisco' protesters Saturday afternoon," NewsCore reports. A University of California press release announces that the Board of Regents was forced to cancel a meeting, scheduled for tomorrow and Thursday, because of reports "that rogue elements intent on violence and confrontation with UC public safety officers were planning to attach themselves to peaceful demonstrations expected to occur at the meeting."
The Portland (Ore.) Police Bureau cites "reports that nails have been hammered into wood for weapons." ABC News reports another Obamaville rape, this one in Philadelphia. In Denver, HotAir.com reports, thugs invaded a hotel where conservative bloggers were holding a conference. The Orlando Sentinel reports that two Obamavillians there had a knife fight over a drum circle.
Up in Canada, Obamavillians are threatening cyber war, the Toronto Star reports:
Mayor Rob Ford still wants the Occupy Toronto protesters out of St. James Park despite an ultimatum issued via YouTube video by a group claiming to be hacker-activists Anonymous.
"You have said that by next week the occupiers shall be removed. And we say by next week if you do not change your mind, you shall be removed from the Internet," proclaims the video's computer-generated voice, typical of messages from the loosely organized collective of hackers.
Even Donna Schaper, a hard-left clergyman whose sympathies are with the Obamavillians, is forced to acknowledge--though her awkward passive construction is telling--that "some sexual violence was happening" at Zuccotti Park.
At Penn State too, we hear.
Occupy Limbo!
"Occupy Wall Street Camp in Legal Limbo"--headline, CBC.ca, Nov. 15
You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling
Our friend Harry Siegel has done some excellent reporting on New York's Obamaville, but he's been way too impressed by the whole phenomenon. Writing for the Daily Beast, Siegel implausibly asserts that "the movement has emerged as a political force to be reckoned with," then, for emphasis, adds that it is "increasingly potent."
Siegel asked "Occupy Wall Street organizers" if they were "concerned" about re-electing President Obama "or at least [with] not electing [Mitt] Romney." In response, they "shrugged":
"Either way," said Jeff Smith of the occupation's media-team working group. "Obama has been able to pass legislation that John McCain never could have. Could McCain have extended the Bush tax cuts? I don't think he could have. And I think escalating the Afghanistan War would have been much more difficult for McCain. I don't want us to go farther right, but it's the same reason why I feel like CNN and MSNBC are more insidious than Fox news because they give the appearance of a choice or balance--it's when the Democratic Party sold out to the corporate forces that we lost our country, not when the Republicans did it."
In retrospect, 2000 may have represented something even bigger than Ralph Nader's ego.
"I don't think it would be catastrophic [to elect Romney] because the whole point of this movement is that there's no choice so on some level it doesn't really matter all that much who the next president is," Smith continued. "It's totally up to Obama how much this movement hammers him. If he wants to get on the right side of the issues we're talking about, I would say this would be a huge benefit for him." . . .
The movement seems determined to think in more ambitious terms than election cycles, which may just make them a potent force in the coming one as the cascade of economic bad news continues.
Siegel mistakes nihilism for ambition. As he acknowledges, the Obamavillians' approach has consisted in "tabling any specific demands and ignoring all present political realities to ask for the moon." Guess what the answer to that will be?
It's true that, inasmuch as the Obamavillians were Obama supporters in 2008 and are withholding support for him now, they will diminish his re-election prospects. But the Obamaville fad is merely an expression, not the cause, of that disillusion with the Obama fad. As the New York Times reports today from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas:
Across this state--and in others where young voters were the fuel of the Obama organization, voting for him two to one over John McCain--the enthusiastic engine of the 2008 campaign has run up against the reality of a deadened job market for college students.
Interviews here and across the country suggest that most of [the president's] college supporters of 2008 are still inclined to vote for him. But the Obama ground army of 2008 is hardly ready to jump back into the trenches, potentially depriving Mr. Obama of what had been an important force in his victory.
Politico reports that even minors, once entranced by the president's "big smile, big ears and bouncy personality," have lost interest in the president. Here's one anecdote:
Back in 2008, 7-year-old Aron Mondschein from Ellington, Conn., wrote a letter to Obama as part of his class's Flat Stanley project. When he got a response--complete with a picture of Flat Stanley in Obama's Senate office--he got really excited about the election.
"I think that it was the excitement that he was running for president, that he is African-American . . . that was a really big deal for my son; he felt that was important," said Aron's mom, Amy Mondschein. Aron, like most of his peers, has since tuned out.
"If Obama were to set a new law that every boy 10 years old could have Legos, you know, for free, you'd be hearing about it. But right now, he's kind of into his own things," his mother said.
We wouldn't put it past Obama to try a Lego stimulus, though we assume congressional Republicans would block it. But really, when you get down to it, what's the difference between Jeff Smith and Aron Mondschein, other than that Aron is a lot more mature for his age?
Monday, November 14, 2011
THERE IS REASON TO HOPE THAT SCOTUS MAY RID US OF OBAMACARE
!!!!
The first of those four questions is the central one. In enacting ObamaCare, Congress claimed that the power to force individuals to purchase medical insurance from private companies is a legitimate exercise of its authority "to regulate Commerce . . . among the several States." The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, in Florida v. Department of Health and Human Service, held that Congress had exceeded its authority. Other appellate courts have disagreed, making a Supreme Court review all but inevitable.
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If the court holds that the coercive insurance provision is unconstitutional--an outcome that is by no means assured--then the severability question will determine the fate of the rest of the law. As we explained Feb. 1, the trial judge in the Florida case held that it was not severable, which is to say that it is so essential to ObamaCare's legal scheme that if it falls, the entire law has to.
The 11th Circuit struck down that aspect of his ruling, and no other appellate court has held the provision to be inseverable. Yet both parties to the case now take the position that the provision is not severable. The state plaintiffs, like most Americans, would like to be done with the whole monstrosity that is ObamaCare, whereas the administration presumably thinks inseverability would raise the stakes and make the court shy about striking down the law. The justices are entirely free, however, to hold that both sides are wrong and the 11th Circuit was right.
Whatever the court does, it will be one of its most important rulings in many decades. In the 1930s, the justices effectively rewrote the Constitution, reinterpreting the Commerce Clause as an almost unlimited license for Congress to expand the regulatory state. Not until the 1990s and 2000s did the court set any limit at all to that power, in a pair of very narrow cases in which the laws in question lacked any plausible connection to "commerce."
Because the question they raise is novel, the ObamaCare cases will not turn back the tide of New Deal jurisprudence. But if the court strikes down the forced insurance provision, it will finally, after more than 70 years, stop its advance. On the other hand, if the court upholds ObamaCare, it will mark yet another expansion of federal power.
Although the justices will not acknowledge it in their opinions, today's court operates in a very different political environment than did their New Deal-ear predecessors. Back then, the country was in crisis and an expanded federal government seemed to be the solution. New Deal programs were popular and enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress (not that they needed it, so dominant were the Democrats in those days).
Today America is also in crisis, but this time an enormous, sclerotic government is a cause rather than a solution. ObamaCare was enacted with only Democratic votes, it had and continues to have little popular support, and voters have repeatedly expressed opposition to it, by electing Republicans to Congress and passing state initiatives against it.
How will the case turn out? We boldly predict that the result will be somewhere between a 5-4 ruling striking down the insurance mandate and an 8-1 ruling upholding it. All four Democrat-appointed justices are almost certain to vote to uphold, and Justice Clarence Thomas--who in dissents and concurrences over the years has argued for reconsidering much of the New Deal's constitutional legacy--is an almost certain vote against.
Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy have a mixed record on Commerce Clause cases, and Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito have not yet heard such a case since joining the high court. So their votes are in at least some doubt.
The Washington Examiner's Philip Klein praises the lawyers who will argue the case against ObamaCare:
Barnett outlined the legal case against ObamaCare in our July 2010 Weekend Interview with him. At that time, the liberal left was just coming to realize that there is a serious constitutional case against ObamaCare; the conventional wisdom had been that it was frivolous.
Denniston notes that the 5½ hours the court has allotted to oral arguments "appeared to be a modern record; the most recent lengthy hearing came in a major constitutional dispute over campaign finance law in 2003, but that was only for 4 hours." (That case, McConnell v. Federal Elections Commission , yielded no fewer than eight separate opinions.)
"The length of time specified for the health care review was an indication both of the complexity of the issues involved, and the importance they hold for the constitutional division of power between national and state governments," Denniston observes. At the very least, the justices have made fools of all who thought the constitutionality of ObamaCare was a slam-dunk.
By JAMES TARANTO
The news has been expected for months but is of surpassing importance nonetheless. The U.S. Supreme Court announced this morning that it will take up the constitutionality of ObamaCare. The justices actually issued three writs of certiorari in ObamaCare cases, taking up four questions. Blogger Lyle Deniston has the rundown:The Court will hold two hours of argument on the constitutionality of the requirement that virtually every American obtain health insurance by 2014, 90 minutes on whether some or all of the overall law must fail if the mandate is struck down, one hour on whether the Anti-Injunction Act bars some or all of the challenges to the insurance mandate, and one hour on the constitutionality of the expansion of the Medicaid program for the poor and disabled.
The first of those four questions is the central one. In enacting ObamaCare, Congress claimed that the power to force individuals to purchase medical insurance from private companies is a legitimate exercise of its authority "to regulate Commerce . . . among the several States." The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, in Florida v. Department of Health and Human Service, held that Congress had exceeded its authority. Other appellate courts have disagreed, making a Supreme Court review all but inevitable.
If the court holds that the coercive insurance provision is unconstitutional--an outcome that is by no means assured--then the severability question will determine the fate of the rest of the law. As we explained Feb. 1, the trial judge in the Florida case held that it was not severable, which is to say that it is so essential to ObamaCare's legal scheme that if it falls, the entire law has to.
The 11th Circuit struck down that aspect of his ruling, and no other appellate court has held the provision to be inseverable. Yet both parties to the case now take the position that the provision is not severable. The state plaintiffs, like most Americans, would like to be done with the whole monstrosity that is ObamaCare, whereas the administration presumably thinks inseverability would raise the stakes and make the court shy about striking down the law. The justices are entirely free, however, to hold that both sides are wrong and the 11th Circuit was right.
Whatever the court does, it will be one of its most important rulings in many decades. In the 1930s, the justices effectively rewrote the Constitution, reinterpreting the Commerce Clause as an almost unlimited license for Congress to expand the regulatory state. Not until the 1990s and 2000s did the court set any limit at all to that power, in a pair of very narrow cases in which the laws in question lacked any plausible connection to "commerce."
Because the question they raise is novel, the ObamaCare cases will not turn back the tide of New Deal jurisprudence. But if the court strikes down the forced insurance provision, it will finally, after more than 70 years, stop its advance. On the other hand, if the court upholds ObamaCare, it will mark yet another expansion of federal power.
Although the justices will not acknowledge it in their opinions, today's court operates in a very different political environment than did their New Deal-ear predecessors. Back then, the country was in crisis and an expanded federal government seemed to be the solution. New Deal programs were popular and enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress (not that they needed it, so dominant were the Democrats in those days).
Today America is also in crisis, but this time an enormous, sclerotic government is a cause rather than a solution. ObamaCare was enacted with only Democratic votes, it had and continues to have little popular support, and voters have repeatedly expressed opposition to it, by electing Republicans to Congress and passing state initiatives against it.
How will the case turn out? We boldly predict that the result will be somewhere between a 5-4 ruling striking down the insurance mandate and an 8-1 ruling upholding it. All four Democrat-appointed justices are almost certain to vote to uphold, and Justice Clarence Thomas--who in dissents and concurrences over the years has argued for reconsidering much of the New Deal's constitutional legacy--is an almost certain vote against.
Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy have a mixed record on Commerce Clause cases, and Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito have not yet heard such a case since joining the high court. So their votes are in at least some doubt.
The Washington Examiner's Philip Klein praises the lawyers who will argue the case against ObamaCare:
Former solicitor general Paul Clement and Michael Carvin of Jones Day (who also has lots of experience before the Supreme Court) did a masterful job arguing the case before the 11th circuit. Georgetown Law Professor and constitutional law whiz Randy Barnett is also an advisor to the NFIB on the suit. . . . Opponents of the law should be heartened that they'll at least have their A-team handling the case.
Barnett outlined the legal case against ObamaCare in our July 2010 Weekend Interview with him. At that time, the liberal left was just coming to realize that there is a serious constitutional case against ObamaCare; the conventional wisdom had been that it was frivolous.
Denniston notes that the 5½ hours the court has allotted to oral arguments "appeared to be a modern record; the most recent lengthy hearing came in a major constitutional dispute over campaign finance law in 2003, but that was only for 4 hours." (That case, McConnell v. Federal Elections Commission , yielded no fewer than eight separate opinions.)
"The length of time specified for the health care review was an indication both of the complexity of the issues involved, and the importance they hold for the constitutional division of power between national and state governments," Denniston observes. At the very least, the justices have made fools of all who thought the constitutionality of ObamaCare was a slam-dunk.
Saturday, November 12, 2011
GUESS WHERE ALL THE ALLEGATIONS AGAINST CAIN COME FROM
!!!!
By Ann Coulter
David Axelrod's Pattern of Sexual Misbehavior
By Ann Coulter
TOWNHALL, Nov. 9, 2011
Herman
Cain has spent his life living and working all over the country --
Indiana, Georgia, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Washington, D.C. -- but
never in Chicago.
So
it's curious that all the sexual harassment allegations against Cain
emanate from Chicago: home of the Daley machine and Obama consigliere
David Axelrod.
Suspicions
had already fallen on Sheila O'Grady, who is close with David Axelrod
and went straight from being former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley's
chief of staff to president of the Illinois Restaurant Association
(IRA), as being the person who dug up Herman Cain's personnel records
from the National Restaurant Association (NRA).
The
Daley-controlled IRA works hand-in-glove with the NRA. And strangely
enough, Cain's short, three-year tenure at the NRA is evidently the only
period in his decades-long career during which he's alleged to have
been a sexual predator.
After
O'Grady's name surfaced in connection with the miraculous appearance of
Cain's personnel files from the NRA, she issued a Clintonesque denial
of any involvement in producing them -- by vigorously denying that she
knew Cain when he was at the NRA. (Duh.)
And
now, after a week of conservative eye-rolling over unspecified,
anonymous accusations against Cain, we've suddenly got very specific
sexual assault allegations from an all-new accuser out of ... Chicago.
Herman
Cain has never lived in Chicago. But you know who has? David Axelrod!
And guess who lived in Axelrod's very building? Right again: Cain's
latest accuser, Sharon Bialek.
Bialek's accusations were certainly specific. But they also demonstrated why anonymous accusations are worthless.
Within
24 hours of Bialek's press conference, friends and acquaintances of
hers stepped forward to say that she's a "gold-digger," that she was
constantly in financial trouble -- having filed for personal bankruptcy
twice -- and, of course, that she had lived in Axelrod's apartment
building at 505 North Lake Shore Drive, where, she admits, she knew the
man The New York Times calls Obama's "hired muscle."
Throw in some federal tax evasion, and she's Obama's next Cabinet pick.
The
reason all this is relevant is that both Axelrod and Daley have a
history of smearing political opponents by digging up claims of sexual
misconduct against them.
John
Brooks, Chicago's former fire commissioner, filed a lawsuit against
Daley six months ago claiming Daley threatened to smear him with sexual
harassment accusations if Brooks didn't resign. He resigned -- and the
sexual harassment allegations were later found to be completely false.
Meanwhile,
as extensively detailed in my book "Guilty: Liberal 'Victims' and Their
Assault on America," the only reason Obama became a U.S. senator --
allowing him to run for president -- is that David Axelrod pulled sealed
divorce records out of a hat, first, against Obama's Democratic primary
opponent, and then against Obama's Republican opponent.
One
month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was
way down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire
securities trader.
But
then The Chicago Tribune -- where Axelrod used to work -- began
publishing claims that Hull's second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought
an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce
proceedings.
From
then until Election Day, Hull was embroiled in fighting the allegation
that he was a "wife beater." He and his ex-wife eventually agreed to
release their sealed divorce records. His first ex-wife, daughters and
nanny defended him at a press conference, swearing he was never violent.
During a Democratic debate, Hull was forced to explain that his wife
kicked him and he had merely kicked her back.
Hull's
substantial lead just a month before the primary collapsed with the
nonstop media attention to his divorce records. Obama sailed to the
front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10
percent of the vote.
Luckily for Axelrod, Obama's opponent in the general election had also been divorced.
The
Republican nominee was Jack Ryan, a graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard
law and business schools, who had left his lucrative partnership at
Goldman Sachs to teach at an inner-city school on the South Side of
Chicago.
But
in a child custody dispute some years earlier, Ryan's ex-wife,
Hollywood sex kitten Jeri Lynn Ryan, had alleged that, while the couple
was married, Jack had taken her to swingers clubs in Paris and New York.
Jack
Ryan adamantly denied the allegations. In the interest of protecting
their son, he also requested that the records be put permanently under
seal.
Axelrod's
courthouse moles obtained the "sealed" records and, in no time, they
were in the hands of every political operative in Chicago. Knowing
perfectly well what was in the records, Chicago Tribune attorneys flew
to California and requested that the court officially "unseal" them --
over the objections of both Jack and Jeri Ryan.
Your honor, who knows what could be in these records!
A
California judge ordered them unsealed, which allowed newspapers to
publish the salacious allegations, and four days later, Ryan dropped out
of the race under pressure from idiot Republicans (who should be
tracked down and shot).
With
a last-minute replacement of Alan Keyes as Obama's Republican opponent,
Obama was able to set an all-time record in an Illinois Senate
election, winning with a 43 percent margin.
And
that's how Obama became a senator four years after losing a
congressional race to Bobby Rush. (In a disastrous turn of events, Rush
was not divorced.)
Axelrod
destroyed the only two men who stood between Obama and the Senate with
illicitly obtained, lurid allegations from their pasts.
In
2007, long after Obama was safely ensconced in the U.S. Senate, The New
York Times reported: "The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece
(on Hull's sealed divorce records) later acknowledged in print that the
Obama camp had 'worked aggressively behind the scenes' to push the
story."
Some
had suggested, the Times article continued, that Axelrod had "an even
more significant role -- that he leaked the initial story."
This
time, Obama's little helpers have not only thrown a bomb into the
Republican primary, but are hoping to destroy the man who deprives the
Democrats of their only argument in 2012: If you oppose Obama, you must
be a racist.
Friday, November 11, 2011
CAIN CAN, YES HE CAN!
!!!!
WHY CAIN WILL OVERCOME
By DICK MORRIS
Published on DickMorris.com on November 10, 2011
I learned something important from my polling in the Lewinsky scandal. While the political world and the media were focused on the narrow question of who was right, Clinton or Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, most voters opted for a third choice: "We don't care. We don't want to hear more about this. This is no way to run a government or choose a president." Some resented the public discussion of oral sex, noting that their children were watching. They didn't want to hear it.
So it is with the accusations against Herman Cain. We are mired in the worst economic condition in eighty years and will not tolerate more talk about who invited whom up to their room and for what. We don't care. We don't want to know. We want you to go away and let us choose a president based on the serious and grave issues we are trying to consider. We think the media is a distraction and we want it to stop its drumbeat coverage. Pro-Cain or anti-Cain is irrelevant. We want the issue to go away!
This third dimension of public reaction was evident when the CNBC reporters in last night's debate tried to ask Cain about the accusations. The crowd would have none of it. When the reporters tried to couch the questions as relating to managerial ability or the character required of a CEO, they still hooted down the question. In that moment, I realized that Cain would survive for the same reason Clinton made it - we have more important things to worry about.
The media does not admit of this third dimension. Its mavens and executives give themselves the job of deciding what is news. They present the news. We render our verdict on it. That's how its supposed to work. But when the news media goes crazy covering something we don't care about, we make our voices heard. And that's what the audience did last night.
In the meantime, Cain was his usual charismatic, brilliant debater articulating his 9-9-9 proposal better than he ever has and demonstrating its centrality to solving our economic problems. The contrast between the statesmanship and breadth of his remedy and the tawdriness of the charges and counter-charges was evident.
In case the media didn't get the message, it is this: WE DON'T WANT TO HEAR, READ, OR SEE MORE ABOUT THIS STUPID STORY -- GO AWAY!
WHY CAIN WILL OVERCOME
By DICK MORRIS
Published on DickMorris.com on November 10, 2011
I learned something important from my polling in the Lewinsky scandal. While the political world and the media were focused on the narrow question of who was right, Clinton or Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr, most voters opted for a third choice: "We don't care. We don't want to hear more about this. This is no way to run a government or choose a president." Some resented the public discussion of oral sex, noting that their children were watching. They didn't want to hear it.
So it is with the accusations against Herman Cain. We are mired in the worst economic condition in eighty years and will not tolerate more talk about who invited whom up to their room and for what. We don't care. We don't want to know. We want you to go away and let us choose a president based on the serious and grave issues we are trying to consider. We think the media is a distraction and we want it to stop its drumbeat coverage. Pro-Cain or anti-Cain is irrelevant. We want the issue to go away!
This third dimension of public reaction was evident when the CNBC reporters in last night's debate tried to ask Cain about the accusations. The crowd would have none of it. When the reporters tried to couch the questions as relating to managerial ability or the character required of a CEO, they still hooted down the question. In that moment, I realized that Cain would survive for the same reason Clinton made it - we have more important things to worry about.
The media does not admit of this third dimension. Its mavens and executives give themselves the job of deciding what is news. They present the news. We render our verdict on it. That's how its supposed to work. But when the news media goes crazy covering something we don't care about, we make our voices heard. And that's what the audience did last night.
In the meantime, Cain was his usual charismatic, brilliant debater articulating his 9-9-9 proposal better than he ever has and demonstrating its centrality to solving our economic problems. The contrast between the statesmanship and breadth of his remedy and the tawdriness of the charges and counter-charges was evident.
In case the media didn't get the message, it is this: WE DON'T WANT TO HEAR, READ, OR SEE MORE ABOUT THIS STUPID STORY -- GO AWAY!
RACIAL POLITICS IS FAR FROM BEING DEAD, IF THE DEMOCRATS HAVE THEIR WAY
!!!!
The tormentors, journalists, lawyers and an assortment of ladies who appear to have been around the block a few times, have so far failed to destroy him and thus his candidacy. They still have to come up with lower-mileage ladies to make the accusations stick with the Republican base.
Mr. Cain’s remarkable—and unexpected—resilience has upset Democrats trying to find hope for change in their 2012 prospects in a reading of Tuesday’s off-year elections and referendums. The easily persuaded are even finding a little. Politico, the Capitol Hill tabloid that sometimes channels a Democratic party organ, concludes that “the Democrats are not dead yet.” But nothing has changed for President Obama. “For many Democratic candidates who will be sharing the ticket with Barack Obama in 2012,” quoth Politico, “the president is not going to be an asset. And in some states, it’s clear he is going to be a dead weight.”
These Democrats take comfort in two referendums, one in Ohio and another in Mississippi. In Ohio, a state with large and well-financed unions, voters repealed a reform law intended to curb unions’ abuse of workers, and in Mississippi voters overwhelmingly rejected the so-called “Personhood Amendment,” which would have effectively prohibited all abortions anywhere in the state. The amendment was supported, at least tacitly, by nearly every elected official in the state, Democrat and Republican, black and white.
However, Gov. John Kasich, who opposed repeal of the union-reform law in Ohio, remains popular with Republicans, and in Mississippi, Phil Bryant, the Republican, was elected governor in a landslide. Results were similarly mixed on election day across the nation.
The most telling phenomenon this year is the rise and improbable survival of Herman Cain, and what it says about the cheerful goodwill of an oft-maligned American public often accused by liberals of racism, bigotry, indifference, nativism and maybe even mopery. He has done almost everything wrong, as conventional politics is played. He offered conflicting details of his recollections of the allegations against him, and continued to rise in the public-opinion polls in the face of relentless mainstream-media coverage, which has taken everything said against him as gospel and treated his defense as improbable and even a little wicked. He blamed his Republican rivals for leaking misleading accounts of things that happened more than a decade ago. He blamed hacks of the press, who deserve it, but such criticism always sounds like whining. “I am not a creep,” even when true, sounds too much like “I am not a crook.” The checkered history and motives of the anonymous accusers were left unexamined by indifferent editors and lazy reporters posing as gallants and gentlemen.
Still, he has so far escaped the toaster, even when his Republican rivals began to think it was safe to start piling on. Mitt Romney, discreet at first, hinted that it was time for Mr. Cain to come clean. Newt Gingrich, ever the professor unable to stifle a runaway mouth, lectured his “good friend” that he has to “have an answer [to all the questions] and it better be accurate because if it’s not accurate it won’t stand.” You might think that the professor, with the history of emotional abuse of several wives, would have avoided the subject of the sins of others.
The real story here is that racial politics is dead, if the left will allow it. You might think that the prospect, unlikely as it still may be, of a black challenger, nominated by a white conservative party, against a black incumbent president, would be an occasion for cheers, or at least applause. Here’s evidence that the bad old days are swiftly fading into the past. But Mr. Cain is the wrong kind of black man. Some Democrats sneer that the Republicans only found a black man who “knows his place,” employing an insult from an earlier time and place.
The emergence of Mr. Cain as a credible conservative candidate undercuts the liberal canard that the Republican Party is a hopelessly racist party. That was the sub-text of the Democratic campaign four years ago and reprising that for 2012 was nearly all the hope Barack Obama had. Herman Cain’s escape from the toaster, even if temporary, changed that.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
Categories for this column: Race | Politics
No toaster for Herman Cain
By Wesley Pruden on November 11, 2011
The great media toaster isn’t broken, exactly, but it
doesn’t work like it once did. By all accounts, Herman Cain should be
toast now, served hot, a bit scorched around the edges and left
unbuttered. But try as they might, his tormentors have not yet had him
for breakfast.
The tormentors, journalists, lawyers and an assortment of ladies who appear to have been around the block a few times, have so far failed to destroy him and thus his candidacy. They still have to come up with lower-mileage ladies to make the accusations stick with the Republican base.
Mr. Cain’s remarkable—and unexpected—resilience has upset Democrats trying to find hope for change in their 2012 prospects in a reading of Tuesday’s off-year elections and referendums. The easily persuaded are even finding a little. Politico, the Capitol Hill tabloid that sometimes channels a Democratic party organ, concludes that “the Democrats are not dead yet.” But nothing has changed for President Obama. “For many Democratic candidates who will be sharing the ticket with Barack Obama in 2012,” quoth Politico, “the president is not going to be an asset. And in some states, it’s clear he is going to be a dead weight.”
These Democrats take comfort in two referendums, one in Ohio and another in Mississippi. In Ohio, a state with large and well-financed unions, voters repealed a reform law intended to curb unions’ abuse of workers, and in Mississippi voters overwhelmingly rejected the so-called “Personhood Amendment,” which would have effectively prohibited all abortions anywhere in the state. The amendment was supported, at least tacitly, by nearly every elected official in the state, Democrat and Republican, black and white.
However, Gov. John Kasich, who opposed repeal of the union-reform law in Ohio, remains popular with Republicans, and in Mississippi, Phil Bryant, the Republican, was elected governor in a landslide. Results were similarly mixed on election day across the nation.
The most telling phenomenon this year is the rise and improbable survival of Herman Cain, and what it says about the cheerful goodwill of an oft-maligned American public often accused by liberals of racism, bigotry, indifference, nativism and maybe even mopery. He has done almost everything wrong, as conventional politics is played. He offered conflicting details of his recollections of the allegations against him, and continued to rise in the public-opinion polls in the face of relentless mainstream-media coverage, which has taken everything said against him as gospel and treated his defense as improbable and even a little wicked. He blamed his Republican rivals for leaking misleading accounts of things that happened more than a decade ago. He blamed hacks of the press, who deserve it, but such criticism always sounds like whining. “I am not a creep,” even when true, sounds too much like “I am not a crook.” The checkered history and motives of the anonymous accusers were left unexamined by indifferent editors and lazy reporters posing as gallants and gentlemen.
Still, he has so far escaped the toaster, even when his Republican rivals began to think it was safe to start piling on. Mitt Romney, discreet at first, hinted that it was time for Mr. Cain to come clean. Newt Gingrich, ever the professor unable to stifle a runaway mouth, lectured his “good friend” that he has to “have an answer [to all the questions] and it better be accurate because if it’s not accurate it won’t stand.” You might think that the professor, with the history of emotional abuse of several wives, would have avoided the subject of the sins of others.
The real story here is that racial politics is dead, if the left will allow it. You might think that the prospect, unlikely as it still may be, of a black challenger, nominated by a white conservative party, against a black incumbent president, would be an occasion for cheers, or at least applause. Here’s evidence that the bad old days are swiftly fading into the past. But Mr. Cain is the wrong kind of black man. Some Democrats sneer that the Republicans only found a black man who “knows his place,” employing an insult from an earlier time and place.
The emergence of Mr. Cain as a credible conservative candidate undercuts the liberal canard that the Republican Party is a hopelessly racist party. That was the sub-text of the Democratic campaign four years ago and reprising that for 2012 was nearly all the hope Barack Obama had. Herman Cain’s escape from the toaster, even if temporary, changed that.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
NEWT IS NOT OUT, NOT BY A LONG SHOT
!!!!
"Substance" is too cold a word, perhaps, for the intense feeling that candidate Gingrich delivers so coolly in debates. Too cold too, no doubt, to describe the reactions of his listeners, visible on the faces of the crowds attending these forums—in their expressions, caught on C-SPAN's cameras, in the speed with which their desultory politeness disappears once a Gingrich talk begins. Their disengagement—the tendency to look around the room, chat with their neighbors—vanishes. The room is on high alert.
The Gingrich effect showed dramatically at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition forum last month—an occasion for which most of the candidates had, not surprisingly, prepared addresses focused on the importance of religion in their lives. Michele Bachmann told how, after struggle and indecision, she had found her way to God. So did Rick Perry. Rick Santorum provided a lengthy narrative on his personal commitment to the battle against partial-birth abortion—a history evidently from which no detail had been omitted. Ron Paul offered quotes from the Old and New Testaments where, it seems, he located support for his views on the dollar.
There were two exceptions to the lineup of speeches embracing religious themes. One was Herman Cain, who concentrated on the meaning of American freedom and admonished the crowd to stay informed, "because stupid people are running America." The other was Mr. Gingrich. No one else's remarks would ignite the huge response his talk did.
He began with the declaration that Americans were confronting the most important election choice since 1860. America would have the chance in 2012, Mr. Gingrich said, to repudiate decisively decades of leftward drift in our universities and colleges, our newsrooms, our judicial system and bureaucracies.
He would go on to detail the key policies he would put in place if elected, something other Republican candidates have done regularly to little effect. The Gingrich list was interrupted by thunderous applause at every turn. The difference was, as always, in the details—in the informed, scathing descriptions of the Obama policies to be dispatched and replaced, the convincing tone that suggested such a transformation was likely—even imminent.
Mr. Gingrich predicted, too, that late on Election Night—after it was clear that President Obama had been defeated along with the Democrats in the Senate—the recovery would begin, at once. His audience roared with pleasure. No other Republican candidate could have made the promise so persuasive.
Finally, Mr. Gingrich announced that as the Republican nominee he would challenge President Obama to seven Lincoln-Douglas-style debates. "I think I can represent American exceptionalism, free enterprise, the rights of private property and the Constitution, better than he can represent class warfare, bureaucratic socialism, weakness in foreign policy, and total confusion in the economy."
When it came time to answer questions from a panel of journalists, he was asked first about energy, one of those vital subjects that don't tend to yield lively commentary. How would Mr. Gingrich's policies differ from those of the current administration?
Mr. Gingrich launched into a lethal thumbnail description of the Obama administration's energy policy. The president, he said, had gone to Brazil and told the Brazilians he was really glad they were drilling offshore and that he would like America to be their best customer. "The job of the American president," Mr. Gingrich told the panel, "is not to be a purchasing agent for a foreign country—it's to be a salesman for the United States of America."
The former speaker of the House is a dab hand at drawing listeners in, for good reason—he showers them with details, facts and history in a degree no candidate in recent memory has even approached.
Audiences have a way of rewarding such trust.
No one listening that night to candidate Gingrich's reflections on the menace of radical judges from Lincoln's time on down could have ignored the power of his fiery assessment—including the Dred Scott decision, others by courts today that threaten our national security, and much in between.
The Iowa contest ahead is all important for Mr. Gingrich. The same is truer still for Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. Ms. Bachmann has been looking increasingly aware that her hopes are fading. Mr. Santorum now seems to inhabit a world so nearly exclusive in its focus on family and family values that it's hard to imagine him a successful contender for the presidency of a large and varied nation of Americans with other concerns, the non-family kind included.
Then there's Congressman Ron Paul, who last weekend let it be known that if he doesn't like the views of the person who wins the nomination, he won't support the Republican candidate. This is a good reason—one of many—for Mr. Paul to retire himself from further debates. It's a certainty, to put it mildly, that he's not going to be the nominee.
It would be passing strange to have as a candidate for the presidency of the United States an envenomed crank who regularly offers justification for the 9/11 attacks that resulted in the annihilation of 3,000 Americans. It was an act, Mr. Paul explains in these exculpatory sermonettes, to which the terrorists were driven by American policies. Mr. Paul may get all the fond buddy treatment in the world from his fellow debaters, but few Americans outside of his devoted army of isolationist fanatics will forget these views.
That leaves Mitt Romney, and Messrs. Perry, Cain and Gingrich heading the list of competitors for Iowa. Mr. Cain's prospects were good until this week brought accusatory testimony from another woman—one who showed up in person, with plenty of detail. Charges of lies, financial motives and conspiracies notwithstanding, it's hard to see how Mr. Cain weathers this disaster. No outsider can know what actually did or did not happen. But all the snorting in the world about Gloria Allred, the accuser's attorney, isn't going to change the impact of this highly specific accusation.
Whoever his competitors are in Iowa and beyond, Mr. Gingrich faces a hard fight for the nomination. His greatest asset lies in his capacity to speak to Americans as he has done, with such potency, during the Republican debates. No candidate in the field comes close to his talent for connection. There's no underestimating the importance of such a power in the presidential election ahead, or any other one.
His rise in the polls suggests that more and more Republicans are absorbing that fact, along with the possibility that Mr. Gingrich's qualifications all 'round could well make him the most formidable contender for the contest with Barack Obama.
Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
Why Gingrich Could Win
Herman Cain's prospects were good until this week brought accusatory testimony from a woman who showed up in person, with detail.
By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Wednesday, 09 November 11
Newt Gingrich's rise in the polls—from near zero to the third slot in several polls—should come as no surprise to people who have been watching the Republican debates, now drawing television viewers as never before. The former speaker has stood out at these forums, the debater whose audiences seem to hang on his words and on a flow of thought rich in substance, a world apart from the usual that the political season brings."Substance" is too cold a word, perhaps, for the intense feeling that candidate Gingrich delivers so coolly in debates. Too cold too, no doubt, to describe the reactions of his listeners, visible on the faces of the crowds attending these forums—in their expressions, caught on C-SPAN's cameras, in the speed with which their desultory politeness disappears once a Gingrich talk begins. Their disengagement—the tendency to look around the room, chat with their neighbors—vanishes. The room is on high alert.
The Gingrich effect showed dramatically at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition forum last month—an occasion for which most of the candidates had, not surprisingly, prepared addresses focused on the importance of religion in their lives. Michele Bachmann told how, after struggle and indecision, she had found her way to God. So did Rick Perry. Rick Santorum provided a lengthy narrative on his personal commitment to the battle against partial-birth abortion—a history evidently from which no detail had been omitted. Ron Paul offered quotes from the Old and New Testaments where, it seems, he located support for his views on the dollar.
Editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz discusses why she thing Newt Gingrich could win the Republican nomination. Photo: AP.
There were two exceptions to the lineup of speeches embracing religious themes. One was Herman Cain, who concentrated on the meaning of American freedom and admonished the crowd to stay informed, "because stupid people are running America." The other was Mr. Gingrich. No one else's remarks would ignite the huge response his talk did.
He began with the declaration that Americans were confronting the most important election choice since 1860. America would have the chance in 2012, Mr. Gingrich said, to repudiate decisively decades of leftward drift in our universities and colleges, our newsrooms, our judicial system and bureaucracies.
He would go on to detail the key policies he would put in place if elected, something other Republican candidates have done regularly to little effect. The Gingrich list was interrupted by thunderous applause at every turn. The difference was, as always, in the details—in the informed, scathing descriptions of the Obama policies to be dispatched and replaced, the convincing tone that suggested such a transformation was likely—even imminent.
Mr. Gingrich predicted, too, that late on Election Night—after it was clear that President Obama had been defeated along with the Democrats in the Senate—the recovery would begin, at once. His audience roared with pleasure. No other Republican candidate could have made the promise so persuasive.
Finally, Mr. Gingrich announced that as the Republican nominee he would challenge President Obama to seven Lincoln-Douglas-style debates. "I think I can represent American exceptionalism, free enterprise, the rights of private property and the Constitution, better than he can represent class warfare, bureaucratic socialism, weakness in foreign policy, and total confusion in the economy."
When it came time to answer questions from a panel of journalists, he was asked first about energy, one of those vital subjects that don't tend to yield lively commentary. How would Mr. Gingrich's policies differ from those of the current administration?
Mr. Gingrich launched into a lethal thumbnail description of the Obama administration's energy policy. The president, he said, had gone to Brazil and told the Brazilians he was really glad they were drilling offshore and that he would like America to be their best customer. "The job of the American president," Mr. Gingrich told the panel, "is not to be a purchasing agent for a foreign country—it's to be a salesman for the United States of America."
The former speaker of the House is a dab hand at drawing listeners in, for good reason—he showers them with details, facts and history in a degree no candidate in recent memory has even approached.
Audiences have a way of rewarding such trust.
No one listening that night to candidate Gingrich's reflections on the menace of radical judges from Lincoln's time on down could have ignored the power of his fiery assessment—including the Dred Scott decision, others by courts today that threaten our national security, and much in between.
The Iowa contest ahead is all important for Mr. Gingrich. The same is truer still for Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. Ms. Bachmann has been looking increasingly aware that her hopes are fading. Mr. Santorum now seems to inhabit a world so nearly exclusive in its focus on family and family values that it's hard to imagine him a successful contender for the presidency of a large and varied nation of Americans with other concerns, the non-family kind included.
Then there's Congressman Ron Paul, who last weekend let it be known that if he doesn't like the views of the person who wins the nomination, he won't support the Republican candidate. This is a good reason—one of many—for Mr. Paul to retire himself from further debates. It's a certainty, to put it mildly, that he's not going to be the nominee.
It would be passing strange to have as a candidate for the presidency of the United States an envenomed crank who regularly offers justification for the 9/11 attacks that resulted in the annihilation of 3,000 Americans. It was an act, Mr. Paul explains in these exculpatory sermonettes, to which the terrorists were driven by American policies. Mr. Paul may get all the fond buddy treatment in the world from his fellow debaters, but few Americans outside of his devoted army of isolationist fanatics will forget these views.
That leaves Mitt Romney, and Messrs. Perry, Cain and Gingrich heading the list of competitors for Iowa. Mr. Cain's prospects were good until this week brought accusatory testimony from another woman—one who showed up in person, with plenty of detail. Charges of lies, financial motives and conspiracies notwithstanding, it's hard to see how Mr. Cain weathers this disaster. No outsider can know what actually did or did not happen. But all the snorting in the world about Gloria Allred, the accuser's attorney, isn't going to change the impact of this highly specific accusation.
Whoever his competitors are in Iowa and beyond, Mr. Gingrich faces a hard fight for the nomination. His greatest asset lies in his capacity to speak to Americans as he has done, with such potency, during the Republican debates. No candidate in the field comes close to his talent for connection. There's no underestimating the importance of such a power in the presidential election ahead, or any other one.
His rise in the polls suggests that more and more Republicans are absorbing that fact, along with the possibility that Mr. Gingrich's qualifications all 'round could well make him the most formidable contender for the contest with Barack Obama.
Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
THE HIGH-TECH LYNCHING OF A BLACK MAN HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN
!!!!
The high tech lynching of Clarence Thomas sponsored by Anita Hill seems to be serving as the model for the media's high tech lynching of Herman Cain. The unconscionable campaign of
allegations of sexual harassment reveals the hypocrisy of Democrats and their liberal allies.
Hypocrisy because they continually accused the Republicans of racism, but when it began to look like the Republicans might nominate a black man as their presidential candidate, these same
Democrats and their liberal allies do not hesitate to raise the specter of a black man molesting white women. Regardless of the truth of the allegations, the lynching campaign is a scandal in its own right!
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A Face and a Name to the Unspecified Accusations
by James Taranto
The Best of the Web Today
The Wall Street Journal Online
Tuesday, 08 November 11
We now know the name of one of the women who settled a complaint with the National Restaurant Association after alleging sexual harassment by Herman Cain. She is 55-year-old Karen Kraushaar, a married "former journalist and seasoned government spokeswoman." In case you're keeping score, this is the accuser who is represented by lawyer Joel Bennett.
The Daily has lots of other details about Kraushaar: She was a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 2000, when Elian Gonzalez was deported to Cuba. She now works for the Treasury Department. She is "a lifelong horsewoman" who has scoliosis, diagnosed when she was 21. Because of her spinal difficulties, she favors "the Paso Fino breed of horses because they have a gentler gait."
Wow, that's a really detailed story! There's just one thing missing: What exactly does she accuse Cain of having done? "Kraushaar, who lives in Maryland, has no desire to speak publicly about the complaint she filed against Cain," The Daily reports, attributing this information to Bennett.
Oh, well never mind then.
Cain's fourth accuser, Sharon Bialek, yesterday said she had seen Cain at a Tea Party event a month ago. Michael Sneed of the Chicago Sun-Times reports that an eyewitness, Amy Jacobson of Chicago's WIND-AM, says the encounter was far friendlier than Bialek let on. According to Jacobson, as paraphrased by Sneed: "They hugged each other backstage in a full embrace like old friends. She grabbed his arm and whispered in his left ear. She kept talking as he bent to listen, and he kept saying 'Uh, huh. Uh, huh.' "
By contrast, according to Bialek's description of the meeting at yesterday's press conference, "I went up to him and asked him if he remembered me. I wanted to see if he would be man enough to own up to what he had done 14 years ago." She said he failed that test.
Readers are left to decide for themselves if the discrepancy between Jacobson's and Bialek's accounts raises questions about the latter's credibility. To our mind it certainly raises doubts about the reliability of her self-reported motives--but then, such reports are pretty much impossible to check and therefore inherently suspect anyway. As to her claim about what happened, it occurs to us that if it's true, Cain would make a suitable candidate for TSA administrator under President Romney.
The Puffington Host also has a very funny quote from Bialek's media tour:
If that's what she thinks Mrs. Cain would like, she really doesn't understand women.
The Washington Examiner reports there is now a fifth "accuser"--and we use the scare quotes advisedly. In this incident, if one can even call it that, "Cain exhibited no inappropriate sexual behavior." Here's what supposedly happened:
The worst Donella can come up with is that Cain allegedly "did order two $400 bottles of wine and stuck the women with the bill." But c'mon, aren't empowered feminists expected to pick up the check from time to time?
The high tech lynching of Clarence Thomas sponsored by Anita Hill seems to be serving as the model for the media's high tech lynching of Herman Cain. The unconscionable campaign of
allegations of sexual harassment reveals the hypocrisy of Democrats and their liberal allies.
Hypocrisy because they continually accused the Republicans of racism, but when it began to look like the Republicans might nominate a black man as their presidential candidate, these same
Democrats and their liberal allies do not hesitate to raise the specter of a black man molesting white women. Regardless of the truth of the allegations, the lynching campaign is a scandal in its own right!
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A Face and a Name to the Unspecified Accusations
by James Taranto
The Best of the Web Today
The Wall Street Journal Online
Tuesday, 08 November 11
We now know the name of one of the women who settled a complaint with the National Restaurant Association after alleging sexual harassment by Herman Cain. She is 55-year-old Karen Kraushaar, a married "former journalist and seasoned government spokeswoman." In case you're keeping score, this is the accuser who is represented by lawyer Joel Bennett.
The Daily has lots of other details about Kraushaar: She was a spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 2000, when Elian Gonzalez was deported to Cuba. She now works for the Treasury Department. She is "a lifelong horsewoman" who has scoliosis, diagnosed when she was 21. Because of her spinal difficulties, she favors "the Paso Fino breed of horses because they have a gentler gait."
Wow, that's a really detailed story! There's just one thing missing: What exactly does she accuse Cain of having done? "Kraushaar, who lives in Maryland, has no desire to speak publicly about the complaint she filed against Cain," The Daily reports, attributing this information to Bennett.
Oh, well never mind then.
Cain's fourth accuser, Sharon Bialek, yesterday said she had seen Cain at a Tea Party event a month ago. Michael Sneed of the Chicago Sun-Times reports that an eyewitness, Amy Jacobson of Chicago's WIND-AM, says the encounter was far friendlier than Bialek let on. According to Jacobson, as paraphrased by Sneed: "They hugged each other backstage in a full embrace like old friends. She grabbed his arm and whispered in his left ear. She kept talking as he bent to listen, and he kept saying 'Uh, huh. Uh, huh.' "
By contrast, according to Bialek's description of the meeting at yesterday's press conference, "I went up to him and asked him if he remembered me. I wanted to see if he would be man enough to own up to what he had done 14 years ago." She said he failed that test.
Readers are left to decide for themselves if the discrepancy between Jacobson's and Bialek's accounts raises questions about the latter's credibility. To our mind it certainly raises doubts about the reliability of her self-reported motives--but then, such reports are pretty much impossible to check and therefore inherently suspect anyway. As to her claim about what happened, it occurs to us that if it's true, Cain would make a suitable candidate for TSA administrator under President Romney.
The Puffington Host also has a very funny quote from Bialek's media tour:
Bialek said she sympathized with Cain's wife, Gloria. "You know what I want to say to Herman is? If not for yourself, okay, to come forward and admit this, what is his wife going through? You know, that's who I feel for the most in this whole thing," she said in an interview on CNN's "American Morning," according to Politico. "I have to believe she's going through her own personal turmoil. And if not for himself, for the women that he's done this to, just for Gloria, that's his wife, too, he should [come forward]."
If that's what she thinks Mrs. Cain would like, she really doesn't understand women.
The Washington Examiner reports there is now a fifth "accuser"--and we use the scare quotes advisedly. In this incident, if one can even call it that, "Cain exhibited no inappropriate sexual behavior." Here's what supposedly happened:
A former employee of the United States Agency for International Development says Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain asked her to help arrange a dinner date for him with a female audience member following a speech he delivered nine years ago.
Donna Donella, 40, of Arlington, said the USAID paid Cain to deliver a speech to businessmen and women in Egypt in 2002, during which an Egyptian businesswoman in her 30s asked Cain a question.
"And after the seminar was over," Donella told The Washington Examiner, "Cain came over to me and a colleague and said, 'Could you put me in touch with that lovely young lady who asked the question, so I can give her a more thorough answer over dinner?' "
Donella, who no longer works for USAID, said they were suspicious of Cain's motives and declined to set up the date. Cain responded, "Then you and I can have dinner." That's when two female colleagues intervened and suggested they all go to dinner together, Donella said.
The worst Donella can come up with is that Cain allegedly "did order two $400 bottles of wine and stuck the women with the bill." But c'mon, aren't empowered feminists expected to pick up the check from time to time?
"CHANGE YOU CAN HOPE FOR" HE SAID - IS THIS WHAT HE MEANT?
!!!!
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Bruce FancherBruce Fancher after his visit to Zuccotti Park.
But the boys in William Golding’s classic novel were stuck on an
island with no supervision. The same can’t be said of the chronological
adults at Zuccotti Park and the nation’s other Obamavilles. If New
York’s finest in fact are refusing to enforce the law for fear of
provoking the so-called protesters to further violence, it is a gross
abdication of leadership by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who ought to take
assault at least as seriously as he takes salt.
Reader Mike Basham, meanwhile, has a story from Washington’s Obamaville, down the street from the White House:
Don’t Know Much About History
From the Washington Examiner:
- BEST OF THE WEB TODAY
- NOVEMBER 8, 2011
- THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE
This Is What Anarchy Looks Like
More stories of violence at Obamaville.
By JAMES TARANTO
It’s not a good idea to feed wild animals. “Coffee cart owner Linda Jenson and hot dog cart operators Letty and Pete Soto said they initially provided free food and drink to demonstrators” at San Diego’s Obamaville encampment, reports Los Angeles’s KNX-AM. “But when they stopped, the protesters became violent”:According to one city councilman, bodily fluids were used in the attacks.
“Both carts have had items stolen, have had their covers vandalized with markings and graffiti, as well as one of the carts had urine and blood splattered on it,” said Councilman Carl DeMaio. . . .
In addition to the attacks, the vendors also said they recently received death threats.The New York Post reports on a similar situation at the original Obamaville, in Manhattan’s Financial District:
“I’ve been told, ‘Watch your back!’ 10 times,” Stacey Tzortzatos, owner of Panini & Co. Breads, located across from Zuccotti Park, told The Post yesterday.
She and her employees are terrified by the constant threats, which she said began after she demanded the protesters stop using her shop’s restroom as a place to bathe every day.
The final straw came about two weeks ago, when the demonstrators broke a bathroom sink, flooding the shop, and clogged the toilet–setting her back $3,000 in damages. . . .
And on Friday, she said, a crazed squatter burst into the shop and demanded that workers fill a 10-gallon container of water.
When they refused, “he banged it on the ground and started yelling” and threatened the staff, she said.
“He said he was entitled to have it for free.”Reader Bruce Fancher writes to tell us of his visit to Zuccotti Sunday:
I was taking pictures when a muscular young man told me to stop. I don’t like to be told what to do so I answered something along the lines of, “C’mon, it’s a public park.” Apparently, he didn’t care to discuss it further, so took a swing at me and took off. I quickly ran over to a police officer about 25 feet away and, with blood streaming out of my nose described the suspect and pointed out where he was.
The cop was sympathetic, but in the way that he might be sympathetic if I told him that it was going to rain tomorrow and I’d been planning a picnic. That’s a shame, but what could he be expected to do about it? He called an ambulance for me and supposedly filed a police report, but I doubt anything will ever come of it, as the cops I spoke with didn’t seem to be particularly interested in finding the suspect. As one of them told me after I was treated by the EMTs, “Sorry about this, but if I went into the park it would start a riot.” The young woman EMT who treated me told me that this was the fourteenth time that she had personally been down there because of an assault.It sounds as though the atmosphere at New York’s Obamaville has deteriorated considerably since our visit there three weeks ago. We found it populated mostly by innocent and well-intentioned, if confused, young people. Then again, that’s how “Lord of the Flies” began.
Bruce FancherBruce Fancher after his visit to Zuccotti Park.
Reader Mike Basham, meanwhile, has a story from Washington’s Obamaville, down the street from the White House:
My elderly mother lives in a building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Like many of the buildings in that area, most of the floors are offices, but the top three or four are private apartments (this was the brainchild of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who lived in the building next to my mother).
On Sunday, a rowdy group of “protesters” were blocking all the entrances to the building, apparently not realizing that some of the doors they were obstructing were not for evil bankers and businessmen but for elderly ladies who just wanted to get to their homes.
My mother wheeled meekly up in her motorized scooter and politely asked the punk blocking the door to step aside. When he refused, she explained that he was standing in front of an apartment entrance, but he didn’t seem to care. So my saintly mother rammed him with her scooter, and he was so surprised, he moved out of the way.
As she was gliding past him and into her home, she turned to him and yelled, “And put out that damned cigarette!”At least Mayor Bloomberg would find that a happy ending.
Don’t Know Much About History
From the Washington Examiner:
Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson visited the Occupy DC group in McPherson Square on Monday evening after the group marched on police headquarters and city hall.
In an exclusive interview with The Washington Examiner, he compared the occupy movement to the Civil Rights Era sit-ins.
“All of it is occupying for economic justice. Dr. King’s last act on earth was to come to Washington and to occupy the Mall and put the focus on economic justice,” Jackson said. “He said it’s alright [sic] for the wealthy to get wealthy but not at the expense of poor people.”Dr. King was in Memphis, Tenn., not Washington, when he was assassinated in 1968.
Friday, November 4, 2011
HEADS SHE WINS, TAILS HE LOSES
!!!!
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From
the facts we have available, it's possible that the company in the
first case could have defended itself and its executives successfully
had it gone to court. "For sexual harassment to be actionable," Justice
William Rehnquist wrote in the landmark case of Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson
(1986), "it must be sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the
conditions of [the victim's] employment and create an abusive working
environment" (omitting internal quotation marks). Two comments in one
meeting might have fallen short of the quantitative standard of
pervasiveness.
Still, it was undoubtedly wise of the board to fire the pair. The comments surely met the qualitative standard (severity), and it's quite possible that other incidents would come to light in the discovery process to show that the problem was pervasive. Further, the COO's dismissive response put the company at risk of liability under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines that Rehnquist quoted in Meritor:
In the second case, however, the accused man was innocent. The system also "worked" in that he was not fired or formally punished. But the investigation itself was agonizing enough to create what could be described (though in colloquial rather than legal terms) as a hostile environment. And while the accuser ended up leaving the company, in a just world she would have been summarily fired for making an accusation that executives knew to be false.
The fallen nature of man is gender-neutral. Some men are pigs, and some women are liars. Current sexual harassment law deals justly and effectively with the former at the cost of allowing the latter to do great harm to innocent men. The presence of both sexes in the workplace makes necessary some combination of laws, policies and customs to regulate sexual behavior on the job. But the principle of heads-she-wins-tails-he-loses does violence to both justice and equality.
Sexual Harassment Stories
A report from the field illustrates both the need and danger of regulations.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203804204577017862365156578.html?mod=djemBestOfTheWeb_hBy JAMES TARANTO
Yesterday's column, exploring the allegation that unnamed women made unspecified allegations against a unidentified presidential candidate--OK, it was Herman Cain--prompted this email from a reader who asks to join the crowd and remain anonymous:I have been through two such episodes in my career, although in neither case was the allegation made against me. Both of these events, at different companies, occurred in the late 1990s.
In the first incident, we were in a team meeting. One female member came late. The seats were all taken. Our CEO says to her that as there are no chairs, she is welcome to sit in his lap. She leaves the room and brings in a chair. Later in the same meeting, he compliments her on her dress and says something to the effect that the dress probably looks even better off of her. What a card!
She goes to file an action against him and the chief operating officer says basically: Everyone knows he's a jackass. Get over it.
Rather than get over it, she gets an attorney. There is a brief investigation, our board has a Saturday morning phone conference, and by Saturday afternoon we are looking for a new CEO and a new COO.
In the second incident, I had hired a new manager. One of his staff had wanted the job, but she was never on my list of candidates (which I had told her up front). She welcomed him by refusing to do every assignment he gave her. He and I met with the head of human resources and developed her "performance improvement plan," or PIP, as we call them. He went through the plan with her. She left the meeting, went to HR and said he called her a whore and fondled himself during the session.
Everyone knew it was a bunch of BS. He was (and is) as straight an arrow as you could find. The investigation--bringing in every female in the office and asking if he had ever made them uncomfortable or said anything untoward--ripped him apart. He was cleared, and the accuser left before she got fired. But he never got over it and lost his touch with staff. He was much less trusting and still hurts from this.These two stories neatly illustrate both the necessity for sexual harassment laws and the injustice of the way they are currently applied.
Still, it was undoubtedly wise of the board to fire the pair. The comments surely met the qualitative standard (severity), and it's quite possible that other incidents would come to light in the discovery process to show that the problem was pervasive. Further, the COO's dismissive response put the company at risk of liability under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidelines that Rehnquist quoted in Meritor:
The employer will be liable if it has actual knowledge of the harassment or if, considering all the facts of the case, the victim in question had no reasonably available avenue for making his or her complaint known to appropriate management officials.In this case, the system worked. The threat of a lawsuit gave the board an incentive to take swift and harsh action against executives who had engaged in and condoned conduct that was repugnant, grossly unprofessional and possibly violative of the complainant's legal rights.
In the second case, however, the accused man was innocent. The system also "worked" in that he was not fired or formally punished. But the investigation itself was agonizing enough to create what could be described (though in colloquial rather than legal terms) as a hostile environment. And while the accuser ended up leaving the company, in a just world she would have been summarily fired for making an accusation that executives knew to be false.
The fallen nature of man is gender-neutral. Some men are pigs, and some women are liars. Current sexual harassment law deals justly and effectively with the former at the cost of allowing the latter to do great harm to innocent men. The presence of both sexes in the workplace makes necessary some combination of laws, policies and customs to regulate sexual behavior on the job. But the principle of heads-she-wins-tails-he-loses does violence to both justice and equality.
BEING WINKED AT IS WORSE THAT BEING RAPED ACCORDING TO THE MEDIA
!!!!
When innuendo is enough to kill
By Wesley Pruden
This was once a serious country with serious newspapers, back in the day when they were edited by serious editors and a man had the right to confront an accuser before she was allowed to destroy his reputation, career and even his life.
Herman Cain doesn’t look like Jack the Ripper, but Scotland Yard never pursued Mr. Ripper with the passion of the newspapers and television networks so hot after Mr. Cain. He may be guilty of whatever it is that he is accused of—so far little more than a wink, a predatory smile, or even a suggestive smirk. Or he may not be guilty. But in the wonderland of Washington journalism, we demand the verdict first and only then the evidence (if any).
“Sexual harassment” has been established as a crime that only the accuser is entitled to define, and then at her lawyer’s convenience. The accused is not necessarily entitled to know who accuses him, or even to know what he is accused of. The crime is so heinous that the mere accusation is enough to convict. Why waste time on evidence?
Politico, the political daily of liberal pedigree that set the hounds on Mr. Cain, has not said what he is guilty of, or when, or where, or who says so. Innuendo is enough. Politico says it has a half-dozen sources “shedding light on different aspects of the complaints.” Once upon a time, a reporter trying to get a story merely “shedding light” on “aspects” past a gruff old city editor would have been thrown down the stairs if the gruff old city editor was having a particularly bad day.
The more sensational the story, the more skeptical the editors ought to be. Newspapers traditionally withheld the name of a rape victim, for example, but if the man was acquitted of the crime the victim was then identified. Rape, alas, is not regarded as a crime as serious as sexual harassment. The new rules hold that women are the equal of men, with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto, except when it’s more convenient to be “the little woman.”
The most unlikely ladies want to be “the little woman.” In one celebrated complaint, a three-star general of the U.S. Army got a male colleague, a mere two-star, cashiered for touching her “in a sexual way” and trying to steal a kiss. Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy said nothing at the time, holding her fire until ready, and she was ready several years later when the man who offended her was up for promotion. Nothing shrinks a man’s passion, even for patting a bottom or stealing a kiss, quicker than a firm and furious rebuff from the lady. The delicate lady general retired, satisfied, to the rank of Miss, never aspiring to be remembered as Stonewall Jackson or George S. Patton.
Like the “he said-she said” skirmish between the generals, the accusations against Herman Cain have smelled from the beginning, The case against Mr. Cain smells like an exercise manipulated by one of his rivals for the Republican nomination. The Cain camp’s blaming Rick Perry, whose campaign then blamed Mitt Romney, was about par for inexperienced newcomers to a presidential campaign. As a third woman emerged to say she was offended, or shocked, or affronted by something Mr. Cain said or did at a dinner party, descent into a circus was inevitable.
Neither Mr. Cain nor his accusers seem to want to waive confidentiality and let the record of settlements between the accusers at the National Restaurant Association be opened to public review. For their part, the accusers and their lawyers continue to get good mileage out of anonymous hints and intimations. The Cain campaign is reluctant to feed fuel to the fire, tempted to think the episode will recede into another news cycle.
The Republican establishment clearly wishes Herman Cain would go away, and let Mitt Romney, whoever he is or turns out to be, get on with the coronation. But the natives in the grassy reeds and roots are restless, and the Republican establishment has yet to figure out how to deal with peasants newly empowered by Facebook, YouTube, tweets and other novelties and toys of the Internet.
A new Rasmussen poll of Republican voters nationwide, taken Wednesday night, shows Mr. Cain leading Mitt Romney 26 percent to 23 percent, and he has opened a wider lead in South Carolina, in a poll taken two days after Politico set off the carnival of allusion and implication. He’s not dead yet.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Over a period of just three and a half days, NBC, CBS and ABC have
developed an insatiable hunger for the Herman Cain sexual harassment
story, devoting an incredible 50 stories to the allegations since Monday
morning. In contrast, over a similar period these networks mostly
ignored far more substantial and serious scandals relating to Bill
Clinton.
This pattern continued on Wednesday night and into Thursday as the evening newscasts and morning shows highlighted the story 19 times. On Good Morning America, Brian Ross offered innuendo and slung gossip, recounting, "But behind the scenes, several of the campaigns are still urging reporters to continue to dig, George, saying, there's more to be found in the private life of Herman Cain."
When innuendo is enough to kill
By Wesley Pruden
This was once a serious country with serious newspapers, back in the day when they were edited by serious editors and a man had the right to confront an accuser before she was allowed to destroy his reputation, career and even his life.
Herman Cain doesn’t look like Jack the Ripper, but Scotland Yard never pursued Mr. Ripper with the passion of the newspapers and television networks so hot after Mr. Cain. He may be guilty of whatever it is that he is accused of—so far little more than a wink, a predatory smile, or even a suggestive smirk. Or he may not be guilty. But in the wonderland of Washington journalism, we demand the verdict first and only then the evidence (if any).
“Sexual harassment” has been established as a crime that only the accuser is entitled to define, and then at her lawyer’s convenience. The accused is not necessarily entitled to know who accuses him, or even to know what he is accused of. The crime is so heinous that the mere accusation is enough to convict. Why waste time on evidence?
Politico, the political daily of liberal pedigree that set the hounds on Mr. Cain, has not said what he is guilty of, or when, or where, or who says so. Innuendo is enough. Politico says it has a half-dozen sources “shedding light on different aspects of the complaints.” Once upon a time, a reporter trying to get a story merely “shedding light” on “aspects” past a gruff old city editor would have been thrown down the stairs if the gruff old city editor was having a particularly bad day.
The more sensational the story, the more skeptical the editors ought to be. Newspapers traditionally withheld the name of a rape victim, for example, but if the man was acquitted of the crime the victim was then identified. Rape, alas, is not regarded as a crime as serious as sexual harassment. The new rules hold that women are the equal of men, with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereunto, except when it’s more convenient to be “the little woman.”
The most unlikely ladies want to be “the little woman.” In one celebrated complaint, a three-star general of the U.S. Army got a male colleague, a mere two-star, cashiered for touching her “in a sexual way” and trying to steal a kiss. Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy said nothing at the time, holding her fire until ready, and she was ready several years later when the man who offended her was up for promotion. Nothing shrinks a man’s passion, even for patting a bottom or stealing a kiss, quicker than a firm and furious rebuff from the lady. The delicate lady general retired, satisfied, to the rank of Miss, never aspiring to be remembered as Stonewall Jackson or George S. Patton.
Like the “he said-she said” skirmish between the generals, the accusations against Herman Cain have smelled from the beginning, The case against Mr. Cain smells like an exercise manipulated by one of his rivals for the Republican nomination. The Cain camp’s blaming Rick Perry, whose campaign then blamed Mitt Romney, was about par for inexperienced newcomers to a presidential campaign. As a third woman emerged to say she was offended, or shocked, or affronted by something Mr. Cain said or did at a dinner party, descent into a circus was inevitable.
Neither Mr. Cain nor his accusers seem to want to waive confidentiality and let the record of settlements between the accusers at the National Restaurant Association be opened to public review. For their part, the accusers and their lawyers continue to get good mileage out of anonymous hints and intimations. The Cain campaign is reluctant to feed fuel to the fire, tempted to think the episode will recede into another news cycle.
The Republican establishment clearly wishes Herman Cain would go away, and let Mitt Romney, whoever he is or turns out to be, get on with the coronation. But the natives in the grassy reeds and roots are restless, and the Republican establishment has yet to figure out how to deal with peasants newly empowered by Facebook, YouTube, tweets and other novelties and toys of the Internet.
A new Rasmussen poll of Republican voters nationwide, taken Wednesday night, shows Mr. Cain leading Mitt Romney 26 percent to 23 percent, and he has opened a wider lead in South Carolina, in a poll taken two days after Politico set off the carnival of allusion and implication. He’s not dead yet.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
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Networks Hit Cain Story 50 Times in Less Than Four Days; Ignored Clinton Scandals
This pattern continued on Wednesday night and into Thursday as the evening newscasts and morning shows highlighted the story 19 times. On Good Morning America, Brian Ross offered innuendo and slung gossip, recounting, "But behind the scenes, several of the campaigns are still urging reporters to continue to dig, George, saying, there's more to be found in the private life of Herman Cain."
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