Hope

Republicans Get Good News in Polls as They Close the Ballot Gap on Democrats
March 18, 2009 12:14 PM ET Michael Barone

By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Republicans have the lead in the generic ballot in the Rasmussen poll and are running even in that question in the latest NPR poll. The Republican lead in Rasmussen is 41-39 percent, with Democrats at the low end of the 39-50 percent range they've been over the past year and Republicans at the top end of their 34-41 percent range.
Is this just statistical noise? Quite possibly. But if I were chairman of the NRCC I would sure be looking at targeting a whole lot more races than I had imagined I would three months ago.
Rasmussen tells me that he has been tracking this question since January 2004 and that "Occasional polls may have shown the Rs ahead, but it's been a long time." He agrees that this may just be statistical noise, but notes that the gap between the parties has closed since the November 2008 election, and that that is more the result of the Democratic number sagging than of the Republican number rising.
The NPR poll similarly finds party identification today at 42-42 percent, as compared to 51-40 percent Democratic in October 2006. Note that this also represents a decline for Democrats, not a gain for Republicans.
I think there's a danger for Republicans in over reliance on these numbers. That if they just hang back and criticize Obama or the Democrats, then everything will be all right again. That's one possible scenario, but far from the only one, or even the most likely. If in war the enemy gets a vote, in politics the other party gets a chance to do things differently too, as Bill Clinton did successfully (for him, and almost for his party) in 1995-96.
Republicans need to present alternative public policies and their vision for the future. Equality in the generic vote is not enough if most people scorn both parties. Which seems to be about where we are now.

Obama Health Care

Britain apologises for 'Third World' hospital

Mar 18 01:27 PM US/Eastern
The British government apologised Wednesday after a damning official report into a hospital likened by one patient's relative to "a Third World" health centre.
Stafford Hospital in central England was found to have appalling standards of care, putting patients at risk and leading to some dying, according to a report on Tuesday.
Between 400 and 1,200 more people died than would have been expected in a three-year period at the National Health Service (NHS) hospital, according to an investigation by the Healthcare Commission watchdog.
"We do apologise to all those people who have suffered from the mistakes that have been made in the Stafford Hospital," said Prime Minister Gordon Brown, questioned on the matter at his weekly grilling in the House of Commons.
Receptionists with no medical training were left to to assess patients arriving at the hospital's accident and emergency department, the report found.
Julie Bailey, whose 86-year-old mother Bella died in the hospital in November 2007, said she and other family members slept in a chair at her bedside for eight weeks because they were so concerned about poor care.
"What we saw in those eight weeks will haunt us for the rest of our lives," said the 47-year-old. "We saw patients drinking out of flower vases they were so thirsty.
"There were patients wandering around the hospital and patients fighting. It was continuous through the night. Patients were screaming out in pain because you just could not get pain relief.
"It was like a Third World country hospital. It was an absolute disgrace."
The British premier, who has trumpeted huge increases in spending on the NHS since his Labour party took office in 1997, said there were "no excuses" for what happened to patients at the hospital.
Health Secretary Alan Johnson said: "I apologise on behalf of the government and the NHS, for the pain and anguish caused to so many patients and their families by the appalling standards of care at Stafford Hospital.
"Patients will want to be absolutely certain that the quality of care at Stafford Hospital has been radically transformed, and in particular, that the urgent and emergency care is administered safely," he added.
Copyright AFP 2008, AFP stories and photos shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium

My Best Friend

This is a story about the MAN I am fond of calling my best friend. We do not talk everyday nor every month. But when we do talk it is like we are young boys again.

I would like to start in the beginning...I had just moved to Georgia and I was 15 years old and going through a tough time because I had just moved in with my lovely Aunt Jean and Uncle Henry who took me in while my parents were going through a messy divorce. I met this guy who could not have been more different in a lot of ways than me. He was one of those guys that everyone likes and I was a shy guy who had a hard time making friends. He must have sensed that and he reached out to me. He had the most wonderful family with two great Sisters and two great parents. His life was the complete opposite of mine. How we ended up being good friends I will never know except that providence brought us together.

We spent a great deal of time together in our work, school and interest in music. Then he had a major change in his life and he met the most wondeful girl Lisa and a few years later they got married. At this time my friend John started going through a transformation that was amazing to watch. I think he was a guy who always was a believer in Christ but with the help of Lisa he took that belief into action. He would volunteer for as much involvment in the Church as I think he could fit into his busy life while trying to raise a young family and make a decent living at the same time.

As John got older he started doing even more volunteer work. He has made numerous trips abroad for mission work and has raised the two most lovely children I think I have ever met. It is unusual to have a friend that not only do you like but you look up to as a true hero. John Schilling is in fact a hero of mine. There are very few people in life that you meet that have the characteristics of honesty and morality that as a peer you wish you could be as good as they are. I do not know how he became the Man he is but I am truly honored to call this Man my best friend.

Alec Baldwin - Supply Sider?

Alec Baldwin, Right on Taxes
By Mark Goldblatt

In one of the more ironic interviews in recent memory, Alec Baldwin last week told local cable news host Dominic Carter that Governor David Paterson should keep the current tax incentives for film and television companies that set up shop in New York. "I'm telling you right now," the actor warned, "if these tax breaks are not reinstated into the budget, film production in this town is going to collapse, and television production is going to collapse, and it's all going to go to California."
Currently, film and TV companies get a 30% tax break on production costs for shows shot in New York. Baldwin's point was that if you take away that incentive -- in effect, if you raise the tax rates on these companies -- you're going to wind up with less actual tax revenues coming into the state's coffers. A lower percentage of something is still more than a higher percentage of nothing.
What the uber-liberal Baldwin has lately wrapped his mind around is the message conservative economists have preached for decades: Hiking the government's cut of taxpayers' earnings doesn't necessarily mean hiking the total tax dollars the government is taking in.
It's an idea everyone understands, intuitively. Once you start tinkering with tax rates -- and this goes for any kind of tax -- you run the risk of affecting people's behavior. Suppose, for example, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council decided to address the city's dire budget deficit by raising the sales tax on goods and services purchased in the five boroughs from the present 8.35% to 99%. Sounds logical, on paper. Think of all the extra money the city would rake in!
Except we all know what would happen. Consumers would immediately stop buying stuff in the city. They'd shop in New Jersey or Long Island or Westchester County instead. Raising the sales tax from 8% to 99% would more likely bankrupt the city than close its budget shortfall. On the other hand, if you raised the sales tax to 9%, you probably wouldn't affect people's behavior very much -- and you might well wind up with greater revenue. But when it comes to tax increases, there's always a point of (literally) diminishing returns.
If Baldwin has had his moment of clarity, we can only hope that President Obama will soon follow suit-- since the relationship between tax rates and tax revenues seems to be a genuine intellectual blind spot for him. During an April 2008 presidential debate, moderator Charlie Gibson pointed out to candidate Obama -- who had proposed raising the tax rate on capital gains from 15% to as high as 28% -- that when the capital gains tax rate had been raised, during the 1980s, the government collected less money, and when it had been lowered, first by Bill Clinton and then George W. Bush, the government collected more money. Obama's response? "I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness."
Cutting off your nose to spite your face may, under certain circumstances, be fair. But it's always foolish.

Israel

Power Line Blog: John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson, Paul Mirengoff

The shape of Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government has become clear; it will be "right wing." Netanyahu originally hoped to bring in Tzipi Livni and the supposedly centrist Kadima party. But Livni refused to join, citing her commitment to negotiating a "two-state solution" with Palestinians.
Livni may have been acting on principle. Or she may have been hoping to force her arch-rival to form a government that both she and anti-Israelis throughout the world can demonize.
Netanyahu next approached the left-wing Labor party. He was hamstrung, however, by the demands of his largest coalition, Israel Beiteinu, which outpolled Labor in February's election. Israel Beitneinu insisted on the Foreign Ministry (for its leader Avigdor Lieberman) and the Justice Ministry (for Daniel Friedmann who currently holds the post).
The selection of Friedmann apparently meant that Labor would not join the government. But Netanyahu still hoped to bring Labor's leader, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, into his government as a "professional appointment" without his party. Barak seemed interested, but the members of his party were adamantly opposed, and Netanyahu has reporedly given up on this prospect.
Thus, Israel will not have a "national unity" government. In the case of Kadima, the party leader stood in the way. In the case of Labor, the party leader seemed willing, but not the party.
Israel, then, looks to be returning to something like its traditional model, in which the two main factions are a leftist party and a party of the right. The Kadima ploy, a party that attempted to occupy a middle ground, may have run its course. The party itself remains, but its leader has lost any claim to being in "the middle."
This is a victory for clarity. How Netanyahu's coalition will fare is another question

Japan Economics

POWELL: Avoid Japan's mistakes
Benjamin Powell

Those who think the $787 billion "stimulus" bill will chase the blues from the economy should look at Japan's experience in the 1990s, where a succession of interest-rate cuts and Keynesian spending initiatives did little but prolong the downturn. The result was a decade of lost growth.
The United States is facing a financial crisis remarkably similar to the one that struck Japan. We would be wise not to repeat the same mistakes. In both cases, low interest rates helped fuel a financial bubble and inflate stock and real estate prices. The bubbles eventually burst, pummeling stock and real-estate values.
So far the magnitude of the U.S. recession pales in comparison to Japan's. Japan's real estate prices plummeted nearly 80 percent from 1991 to 1998. The Nikkei stock market index fell approximately 70 percent. Much of the contraction occurred in the years following the initial crisis as one government initiative after another failed to revive the economy.
Japan tried decreasing interest rates, bailing out and nationalizing banks, and enacting multiple fiscal stimulus packages. Nothing worked; and there's nothing to indicate similar measures will work better today.
The Japanese adopted fiscal stimulus bills early in the crisis. Between 1992 and 1995 the Japanese passed six different stimulus packages totaling 65 trillion yen. The average yearly stimulus amounted to a little more than 3 percent of the total Japanese gross domestic product (GDP). The nearly $800 billion U.S. stimulus bill amounts to about 6 percent of GDP.
Yet bigger is not better. In 1998, Japan's stimulus effort amounted to about 8.5 percent of GDP. The results were negligible.
The Japanese were a little slower to cut interest rates. By the mid-1990s, however, the official discount rate, or the rate at which financial institutions borrow from the central bank, was down to 0.5 percent. It reached zero a few years later. The U.S. Federal Reserve has been quicker to act. The federal funds rate - the rate at which banks lend to other banks - already is down to near zero percent. But the results are the same: nada.
Washington already has approved $700 billion to bail out ailing banks - and the administration is getting ready to ask for more. Large-scale bank bailouts and nationalization didn't occur in Japan until 1998 and 1999. And when the Japanese finally did step in to bail out their banks the economy responded - with the two worst years of economic decline during the entire troubled decade.
America's move to act swiftly and boldly misses the point. Bank bailouts and fiscal stimulus bills don't work because they strive to maintain the status quo. But the status quo is the problem and exactly what needs to be corrected.
The U.S. housing bubble drew too many workers and too much capital into construction and related industries. So funding public works projects to keep those companies in business is the wrong solution.
Like the Japanese, President Obama is stressing the benefits of infrastructure spending in his proposed stimulus package. He recently boasted, "My plan contains the largest investment increase in our nation's infrastructure since President Eisenhower created the national highway system half a century ago." In response, Caterpillar Corp, a manufacturer of heavy construction equipment, promised it would eventually rehire some of the 22,000 workers it had laid off, though more short-term layoffs were possible.
To achieve long-term economic recovery, market forces, not political forces, need to direct capital and labor to their most productive uses.
"Stimulus" bills that emphasize public works and infrastructure merely prop up the overexpanded construction industries. Yet it these very same businesses and industries that most need to shed workers and contract before recovery can occur. When acts of Congress delay layoffs and restructuring they also delay recovery.
As painful as it might be in the short term, the United States economy would be better served if we allowed the recession to run its course. Unemployment would surely rise and there would be considerable short-term pain. But in the end, capital and labor would be reallocated to other industries and uses, correcting the excesses of the bubble. That would help the economy begin growing again.
Benjamin Powell is a research fellow at the Independent Institute, Oakland, Calif., and an assistant professor of economics at Suffolk University in Boston. He is co-editor of the forthcoming book, "Housing America: Building Out of a Crisis."

George W. Obama?

The Obama Administration this week released its predecessor's post-9/11 legal memoranda in the name of "transparency," producing another round of feel-good Bush criticism. Anyone interested in President Obama's actual executive-power policies, however, should look at his position on warrantless wiretapping. Dick Cheney must be smiling.

In a federal lawsuit, the Obama legal team is arguing that judges lack the authority to enforce their own rulings in classified matters of national security. The standoff concerns the Oregon chapter of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi Arabian charity that was shut down in 2004 on evidence that it was financing al Qaeda. Al-Haramain sued the Bush Administration in 2005, claiming it had been illegally wiretapped.
At the heart of Al-Haramain's case is a classified document that it says proves that the alleged eavesdropping was not authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. That record was inadvertently disclosed after Al-Haramain was designated as a terrorist organization; the Bush Administration declared such documents state secrets after their existence became known.
In July, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the President's right to do so, which should have ended the matter. But the San Francisco panel also returned the case to the presiding district court judge, Vaughn Walker, ordering him to decide if FISA pre-empts the state secrets privilege. If he does, Al-Haramain would be allowed to use the document to establish the standing to litigate.
The Obama Justice Department has adopted a legal stance identical to, if not more aggressive than, the Bush version. It argues that the court-forced disclosure of the surveillance programs would cause "exceptional harm to national security" by exposing intelligence sources and methods. Last Friday the Ninth Circuit denied the latest emergency motion to dismiss, again kicking matters back to Judge Walker.
In court documents filed hours later, Justice argues that the decision to release classified information "is committed to the discretion of the Executive Branch, and is not subject to judicial review. Moreover, the Court does not have independent power . . . to order the Government to grant counsel access to classified information when the Executive Branch has denied them such access." The brief continues that federal judges are "ill-equipped to second-guess the Executive Branch."
That's about as pure an assertion of Presidential power as they come, and we're beginning to wonder if the White House has put David Addington, Mr. Cheney's chief legal aide, on retainer. The practical effect is to prevent the courts from reviewing the legality of the warrantless wiretapping program that Mr. Obama repeatedly claimed to find so heinous -- at least before taking office. Justice, by the way, is making the same state secrets argument in a separate lawsuit involving rendition and a Boeing subsidiary.
Hide the children, but we agree with Mr. Obama that the President has inherent Article II Constitutional powers that neither the judiciary nor statutes like FISA can impinge upon. The FISA appeals court said as much in a decision released in January, as did Attorney General Eric Holder during his confirmation hearings. It's reassuring to know the Administration is refusing to compromise core executive-branch prerogatives, especially on war powers.
Then again, we are relearning that the "Imperial Presidency" is only imperial when the President is a Republican. Democrats who spent years denouncing George Bush for "spying on Americans" and "illegal wiretaps" are now conspicuously silent. Yet these same liberals are going ballistic about the Bush-era legal memos released this week. Cognitive dissonance is the polite explanation, and we wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Holder released them precisely to distract liberal attention from the Al-Haramain case.
By the way, those Bush documents are Office of Legal Counsel memos, not policy directives. They were written in the immediate aftermath of a major terrorist attack, when more seemed possible, and it would have been irresponsible not to explore the outer limits of Presidential war powers in the event of a worst-case scenario. Based on what we are learning so far about Mr. Obama's policies, his Administration would do the same