Sharia, deficits, Cleveland, fiscal Armageddon: We need to talk about zombies. Matt Robare, writing at Discourses on Liberty, has some thoughts on the political ramifications of the zombie-vampire controversy, and cites an earlier article on the subject about which I have an entirely unjustified number of observations.

#more#As hesitant as I am to take issue with America’s Web Site of Record — Cracked — I have some objections to the political analysis of S Peter Davis, who notes that periods of interest in zombies tend to coincide with Republican administrations while interest in vampires coincides with Democratic administrations, and argues that this is because vampires represent everything conservatives hate about liberals and zombies represent everything liberals hate about conservatives. I think he has this exactly backward, but then he’s Australian, so what do you expect?

Mr. Davis maintains that conservatives dislike vampires because they are bisexual-ish sexual predators, irreligious, parasitic, and foreign. Let’s start with the sex. Mr. Davis writes: “Vampires represent a combination of all the things the right fears about the left – a breakdown of traditional morality and sexuality, a rejection of religion (there’s a reason you can ward off a vampire with a cross), and the seduction and corruption of the innocent. . . . And it’s never about traditional, monogamous, heterosexual relationships. . . . Count the number of characters in True Blood who are gay, or at least display bisexual tendencies. You’ll see our point when you run out of fingers.” Anybody who believes that conservatives are much more than rhetorically committed to traditional, monogamous, heterosexual relationships has not spent very much time around organized conservatism, e.g. happy hours at CPAC. I’m sure True Blood is up to its pointy vampire ears in bisexuality, but then so was the lesbian bondage club the RNC was using for fundraisers not long ago. Count the number of characters among elected Republicans who are gay or display bisexual tendencies and you’ll run out of fingers, and possibly toes. And let’s not get started on the panda suits.

Vampires may not be exactly conservative; it’s probably more accurate to call them “right wing” — elitist, hierarchical aesthetes with European roots, occasionally guilt-ridden but unable to deny their predatory nature, i.e. the secret right-wing id. Who would Lestat rather spend an evening with — Evelyn Waugh or some hippie dirtbags? Opera or Phish concert? Tuxedo, or jeans in a jailhouse sag? To ask the question is to answer it.

And of course you can drive off vampires with a cross. You know who you couldn’t drive off with a cross? Christopher Hitchens. (This I know; the only time I ever encountered him was in a church.) Vampire literature takes religion seriously. (Likewise, who among us admiring the revolution of 1776 could fail to sympathize with Milton’s Satan, a bold and cocky revolutionary who, like Thomas Jefferson, swore himself to eternal hostility toward tyranny?) Modern zombie literature, on the other hand, has mostly disposed of the supernatural, locating the source of evil not in the Fall but in an assortment of bugs and viruses.

Conservatives don’t see liberals as vampires — they’re zombies. The closest thing I’ve seen (or smelled) to a zombie apocalypse happened at Zuccotti Park, the shambolic squatters therein denied the ability to act upon their culinary impulses only by the manifest lack of brains available for eating. We may call liberals “bloodsuckers” and whatnot, and, as Mr. Davis notes, Rush Limbaugh did once go on an Obama-vampire riff, but he has his hematophages all wrong. Rush quotes our own venerable VDH:

Watching the tastes, the behavior, the rhetoric, the appointments, and the policy of this administration suggests to me that it is not really serious in radically altering the existing order, which it counts on despite itself. Its real goal is a sort of parasitism that assumes the survivability of the enfeebled host.

Not vampires, but leeches, ticks, bedbugs, etc. “Vampire” is the word we use for liberals when we’re trying to be nice.

On the zombies-as-conservatives front, Mr. Davis argues that zombies are all about consumerism:

The current incarnation of the zombie was given to us almost single-handedly by George Romero, director of Night of the Living Dead and its sequels. Specifically, it’s the second movie in the series, Dawn of the Dead, in which Romero decided his blood-and-guts horror movie was going to double as a metaphor for mindless, mass consumerism (it’s set in a shopping mall, a setting that was borrowed for Dead Rising).

Mr. Robare correctly notes that zombies are serial violators of Say’s Law, ideal Keynesian consumers out there deathlessly stimulating aggregate demand. Never mind that conservatives tend to identify with the producer side of the producer-consumer relationship, who can doubt that the contemporary stand-in for the much-hated Reagan-era shopping mall would be a Trader Joe’s in Brooklyn packed with hipster zombies in search of the right brand of brain-infused kombucha? And if you share the belief that zombies represent ruthless comformists who cannot think for themselves, I invite you to visit the thought-police division of the nearest university.

And I’d be willing to bet that buyers of Ka-Bar’s zombie-apocalypse toolkit skew conservative. Just a hunch.

Krauthammer comments on the presidents “small ball” speech:

If I were the relativist Andrew Bostom takes me for, I would let his post stand. But I am right and Bostom is — I’ll come right out and say it — wrong. There is a difference between analogy and identification, and one need not suggest Christian canon law and sharia are identical or equivalent to note that they are similar in certain relevant respects. Religions are not interchangeable, and I see no equality between my savior’s Cross and my Muslim fellow citizen’s crescent. But this does not mean I’ll stand aside when his religious liberty is attacked.

Bostom has not, I will note, contested my actual claims about the legal uselessness and potential ill effects of anti-sharia legislation. In fact, it’s fair to say that we now are seeing a consensus emerge on the merits of anti-sharia legislation, however grudgingly or silently some agree. My friend David Goldman, no great ally of Islam, admits over at PJ Media that “Anti-Sharia legislation and opposition to the building of mosques may infringe religious liberty. The anti-Sharia movement wields a blunt instrument that carries the risk of collateral damage.” It was just such bluntness and such damage that I warned of in my article.

So, with no one contesting the original points, we’ve moved on to another subject: the “essence” of Islam and sharia, which Bostom hopes to establish in his two posts. That is a fraught task, one difficult enough for the most cautious cultural critic and well nigh impossible for state legislatures.

Andrew Bostom takes a bizarre swipe at me below, claiming that a post of mine had “nothing evidence-based to add — just more flimsy, disproven assertions.” All I said was that to refute Matthew Schmitz’s argument, you’d have to produce evidence or arguments relevant to his central claims. You’d have to show, that is, that we face a real threat of having sharia law imposed by the government, that existing legal protections do not suffice to meet this threat, and that anti-sharia laws are fully compatible with religious liberty. Bostom may have some good arguments and evidence for those views. But none had so far been presented in the Corner. What Schmitz pointed out in his last post is that most of Bostom’s assertions just didn’t have any bearing on those questions.

I don’t think Bostom’s latest post changes anything in this regard. It just repeats his original error of attempting to refute Schmitz by making a bunch of irrelevant claims, while attempting to steal some bases through loaded characterizations (e.g., Schmitz wrote a “diatribe”) and the misuse of words (“relativism” comes in for some abuse: On Bostom’s usage it’s “relativism” to say that Muslims, like Christians, should enjoy freedom of religion.)

Speaking of evidence-free assertions, though, neither David French’s claim that anti-sharia laws are “benign” nor Bostom’s applause for that claim constitute a reason for accepting that claim.

A new Pew research poll demonstrates that perceptions of President Obama and the U.S. overall have soured slightly since 2009, though they remain higher than they did before 2009. They explain:

Global approval of President Barack Obama’s policies has declined significantly since he first took office, while overall confidence in him and attitudes toward the U.S. have slipped modestly as a consequence.

Europeans and Japanese remain largely confident in Obama, albeit somewhat less so than in 2009, while Muslim publics remain largely critical. A similar pattern characterizes overall ratings for the U.S. – in the EU and Japan, views are still positive, but the U.S. remains unpopular in nations such as Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and Pakistan.

Meanwhile, support for Obama has waned significantly in China. Since 2009, confidence in the American president has declined by 24 percentage points and approval of his policies has fallen 30 points. Mexicans have also soured on his policies, and many fewer express confidence in him today.

Pew also notes: “In nearly all countries, there is considerable opposition to a major component of the Obama administration’s anti-terrorism policy: drone strikes. In 17 of 20 countries, more than half disapprove of U.S. drone attacks targeting extremist leaders and groups.”

Interestingly, opinions of American “soft power” have actually improved slightly, with marginally higher support for the spread of American technology and pop culture, democracy, and ways of doing business.

Kevin, you’ll be happy to know that President Barack Obama has jumped on your anti-title bandwagon and has started referring to Mitt Romney as “Mr. Romney,” not “Governor Romney.” 

The Treasury Department expects taxpayers to ultimately lose more than $20 billion on the Detroit auto bailout. President Obama defends those losses as necessary to prevent the domestic auto industry from collapsing.

They were not. The president could have kept the automakers running without losing money. In a new report released yesterday, Todd Zywicki and I find that taxpayers lost money only because the administration paid some $26 billion to subsidize the pay and benefit of UAW members.

Before the bankruptcy, UAW members in Detroit made more than $70 an hour in wages and benefits — a major reason GM and Chrysler went under. The automakers also owed tens of billions to a UAW trust fund that provided gold-plated health benefits to the union’s retirees. In a normal bankruptcy, the UAW would be required to bring this compensation down to competitive rates. Bankruptcy law also calls for all unsecured creditors to receive equal treatment. That did not happen in Detroit.

In the bankruptcy, the union gave only minor concessions for existing workers. The union accepted huge cuts for new hires, but as the president’s former Car Czar admitted, “We did not ask any UAW member to take a cut in their pay.” As a result, GM still pays $56 an hour in wages and benefits, more than any of its foreign “transplant” competitors. Not adjusting labor costs to market rates costs taxpayers more than $4 billion.

The UAW’s trust fund also recovered far more of the money owed to it than other unsecured creditors did. At GM the UAW Trust collected $12.2 billion more than it would have had it been treated like the other unsecured creditors. At Chrysler the administration gave the UAW assets worth $9.2 billion. That was a much greater recovery than the secured creditors got — and the reason the UAW wound up with half of Chrysler.

General Motors further spent $1 billion to restore the pensions of UAW retirees at Delphi, a bankrupt former GM subsidiary, to their former levels. GM had no legal obligation to do so, and did not do the same for the pensions of retirees in other unions or those of non-union employees. Former administration officials have refused to co-operate with the inspector general’s investigation into whether the administration played a role in this decision.

Add these handouts up, and you find that the taxpayers spent $26.5 billion subsidizing the pay and benefits of UAW members. Obama gave the UAW more than the U.S. spends on foreign aid. The UAW subsidies account for the entire net cost of the bailout.

Generous compensation is good, but the taxpayers should not be on the hook for paying it. The average worker makes about $30 in pay and benefits. The administration spent the taxes paid by all Americans to preserve union pay in Detroit. That was not an auto bailout. It was a UAW bailout. 

In just the latest of a long string of leaks about the U.S. government’s counterterrorism efforts, the Washington Post has published an exposé of U.S. military and intelligence operations across the continent of Africa, which had previously been covert. The report begins:

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso — The U.S. military is expanding its secret intelligence operations across Africa, establishing a network of small air bases to spy on terrorist hideouts from the fringes of the Sahara to jungle terrain along the equator, according to documents and people involved in the project.

At the heart of the surveillance operations are small, unarmed turboprop aircraft disguised as private planes. Equipped with hidden sensors that can record full-motion video, track infrared heat patterns, and vacuum up radio and cellphone signals, the planes refuel on isolated airstrips favored by African bush pilots, extending their effective flight range by thousands of miles.

About a dozen air bases have been established in Africa since 2007, according to a former senior U.S. commander involved in setting up the network. Most are small operations run out of secluded hangars at African military bases or civilian airports. . . .

U.S. officials said the African surveillance operations are necessary to track terrorist groups that have taken root in failed states on the continent and threaten to destabilize neighboring countries.

Below is a graphic provided to show the extent of the operations. You’ll note that one area of operations is northern Mali — that is, it appears this administration has leaked so much classified information, we’re now even finding out about what’s happening all the way in Timbuktu.

President Obama had a whole lot of nothing to say at his big economy speech. But savor for a moment the fact that what the president said he said in Cleveland, a city that has been following the his basic economic program for decades: It has lots of public-sector spending, powerful unions, redistributive taxation, lots of government management of the economy, very high levels of education spending, etc. By my count, every member of its city council is a Democrat, save one Green. It hasn’t had a Republican mayor since George Voinovich. It is also the nation’s poorest major city except in those years in which it is the nation’s second-poorest big city, behind Detroit. It’s a consistent contender on the most-dangerous list.

Like our investment in Solyndra, Cleveland spends but doesn’t have much to show for it. Its public schools spend about as much per student as it would cost to send them down the street to the tony University School, where 100 percent of the graduates attend a four-year college, many of them as National Merit scholars. But Cleveland’s schools, despite their spending, don’t get University School’s results, or even those of the more modest Benedictine high school, which spends about half what Cleveland’s public schools do and manages to send 96 percent of its graduates to college. Benedictine does this while operating its own busing system, incidentally.

Funny thing about Cleveland: It is every bit the distillation of urban dysfunction that Detroit is, but it doesn’t have Detroit’s mythic status as a lost city. Which means that Cleveland isn’t even all that good at being our crappiest/second-crappiest city. Hell of a backdrop, Mr. President.

When you’ve lost Jon Alter:

Last month a study in the Mexican peer-reviewed journal Ginecologia y Obstetricia de Mexico found solid evidence that the Guttmacher Institute had greatly overestimated the incidence of abortion in Colombia. Guttmacher analysts frequently try to predict the incidence of abortion in countries where abortion is illegal. In 2011, they published a paper which projected that over 400,000 abortions were performed in Colombia in 2008.

However, this recent study authored by epidemiologist Elard Koch identified a number of problems with Guttmacher’s methodology. First Guttmacher surveyed approximately 300 of the 1,200 hospitals in Colombia. However, it does not appear as if this was a random sample.

Second, they asked various hospital administrators to recall how many patients were treated for illegal abortions within the past month.

They did not rely on actual hard data. Guttmacher then extrapolated these findings to cover the entire country for the entire year. Then, after consulting with some political analysts, human-rights defenders, and medical-service providers they — somewhat arbitrarily — multiplied this figure by a factor between 3 and 5 to arrive at their final estimate.

Koch and his coauthors attempt to use a methodologically rigorous approach to calculate the incidence of abortion in Colombia. They use data from Chile where abortion is restricted and which has a class A vital-records registry to obtain ratios of conceptions, pregnancies, and abortions (both spontaneous and induced). They then use ratios of induced abortions to spontaneous abortions from Spain — which expanded its abortion laws in the mid 1980s — to calculate the number of induced abortions in Colombia. Koch predicts that about 22,000 abortions were performed in Colombia in 2008, a far cry from the 400,000 that Guttmacher projected.

In some respects this is unsurprising. In a 2006 analysis, Guttmacher claimed that anywhere from 700,000 to 1 million abortions were happening annually in Mexico. However, after Mexico liberalized its abortion law in 2007, unofficial estimates indicate that anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 abortions are performed there every year. Sadly, the mainstream media consistently fails to realize that Guttmacher has incentives to overestimate the incidence of abortion in places where it is restricted. Guttmacher often cites the high numbers of illegal and potentially dangerous abortions as a reason to liberalize abortion laws. Additionally, Guttmacher also receives funding from Planned Parenthood, which uses these statistics to call for greater government funding of its international contraception programs.

Pro-lifers should commend Elard Koch and his coauthors for giving Guttmacher’s claims some much needed scrutiny.

— Michael J. New is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at The University of Michigan – Dearborn, a Fellow at the Witherspoon Institute, and an Adjunct Scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter @Michael_J_New

To celebrate Father’s Day this year, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court in North Carolina basically implying that fathers are expendable commodities, and children can be used as pawns in an ideological challenge to a state law that rightly favors households with a married mother and father for adoption purposes. The lead plaintiffs are two women, Marcie and Chantelle Fisher-Borne, who each carried a child and are now demanding that state law recognize them as the “other mother” to the respective children. However, North Carolina law understands the biological reality that a child cannot have two “moms,” hence the lawsuit. Several observations come to mind:

First, the case distorts the purpose of adoption. States implemented the adoption process to ensure that children who have lost their parents, or whose parents cannot care for them, are placed with a responsible father and mother to raise them. Hence, the focus of the adoption system has been the best interests of the children. But the ACLU’s lawsuit shifts that focus to adults, claiming a general “right” for adults to adopt a child, regardless of the child’s circumstances.

In this lawsuit, the children become objects in an effort to shift North Carolina’s adoption laws away from children and toward “adult rights,” and it also targets North Carolina’s wise public policy that children are best raised by a father and a mother.

And where’s Dad in this lawsuit? These women would not have borne any children except with the help of the father, but the ACLU’s lawsuit pushes him offstage. This lawsuit seeks to dehumanize men by making them merely accessories to baby-production, and fragmenting the father by divorcing his reproductive capacity from his role of raising his children.

#more#On Father’s Day 2008, President Obama had a rare lucid moment on this issue with a speech he gave in Chicago, reminding the crowd how he knows “what it means to have an absent father,” and that “we need fathers to realize that responsibility does not end at conception,” and that what matters is “not the ability to have a child — it’s the courage to raise one.”

This lawsuit would benefit from a focus on the recent study by Mark Regnerus, of the University of Texas, that demonstrated children have better social outcomes when raised by their own father and mother than by same-sex couples. The study also points out flaws in earlier studies that claim no differences between children raised by same-sex couples and those raised by opposite-sex couples.

The ACLU’s lawsuit gives the illusion of promoting parental rights, but that is a façade. Parents’ rights will not be advanced by a lawsuit that treats fathers as expendable commodities. It will only serve to promote the desires of adults who, by design, want to deprive children the benefit of being raised by their own fathers.

— Jordan Lorence is senior counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund, which is actively defending marriage laws and amendments throughout the U.S.

In case you didn’t devote 54 minutes of your life today to watching President Obama’s speech, which was supposed to reframe his campaign message, here are some highlights.

His allusion to the private sector “doing fine” gaffe: 

So, Ohio, over the next five months, this election will take many twists and many turns, polls will go up and polls will go down, there will be no shortage of gaffes and controversies that keep both campaigns busy and give the press something to write about.

You may have heard I recently made my own unique contribution to that process.

It wasn’t the first time. It won’t be the last.

On how the Romney campaign will talk about him:

From now until then, both sides will spend tons of money on TV commercials. The other side will spend over a billion dollars on ads that tell you the economy is bad, that it’s all my fault…that I can’t fix it because I think government is always the answer or because I didn’t make a lot of money in the private sector and don’t understand it or because I’m in over my head or because I think everything and everybody is doing just fine.

That’s what the scary voice in the ads will say. That’s what Mr. Romney will say. That’s what the Republicans in Congress will say.

Well, you know, that may be their plan to win the election, but it’s not a plan to create jobs.

On how he doesn’t think government will solve everything always:

So, no, I don’t believe the government is the answer to all our problems. I don’t believe every regulation is smart or that every tax dollar is spent wisely. I don’t believe that we should be in the business of helping people who refuse to help themselves.

UPDATE: Below the jump, the chunk of the speech where Obama bashes tax cuts and decreasing regulations … and the chunk of the speech, delivered a little bit later, where Obama touts how he has cut taxes and slowed down the growth of regulation.

#more#

The tax-cuts-are-bad segment:

We were told that huge tax cuts, especially for the wealthiest Americans, would lead to faster job growth. We were told that fewer regulations, especially for big financial institutions and corporations, would bring about widespread prosperity. We were told that it was OK to put two wars on the nation’s credit card; that tax cuts would create a enough growth to pay for themselves.

…

The failure to pay for the tax cuts and the wars took us from record surpluses under President Bill Clinton to record deficits. And it left us unprepared to deal with the retirement of an aging population that’s placing a greater strain on programs like Medicare and Social Security.

Without strong enough regulations, families were enticed and sometimes tricked into buying homes they couldn’t afford. Banks and investors were allowed to package and sell risky mortgages. Huge reckless bets were made with other people’s money on the line. And too many, from Wall Street to Washington, simply looked the other way.

For a while credit cards and home equity loans papered over the reality of this new economy. People borrowed money to keep up.

But the growth that took place during this time period turned out to be a house of cards. And in the fall of 2008 it all came tumbling down with a financial crisis that plunged the world into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

On his own record:

Over the last three years I’ve cut taxes for the typical working family by $3,600.

I’ve cut taxes for small businesses 18 times.

I have approved fewer regulations in the first three years of my presidency than my Republican predecessor did in his.

And I’m implementing over 500 reforms to fix regulations that were costing folks too much for no reason.

To be fair, Obama could argue that he opposes tax cuts for the wealthy, not for working families and small businesses, and that he wants to maintain certain regulations in the banking industry, but not all regulations. But still, it’s striking — and an indication of how conservative ideology may be popular with the mainstream on these issues — that Obama feels obliged to mention his tax cuts and regulation reform.

From my most recent NRO article, on the case of Woodward and Bernstein versus Nixon: “The Watergate affair was sleazy and discreditable, but Nixon was an unusually talented and successful president. The war on history has been conducted by his enemies. . . . Bradlee-Woodstein bloodlessly assassinated the president, routinized the criminalization of policy and partisan differences, grievously wounded the institution of the presidency, and enjoyed and profited from doing so.”

Whether you agree or disagree, your comments are, as always, most welcome.

Before President Obama spoke today in Cleveland, Mitt Romney spoke for about twenty minutes in Cincinnati, arguing that Obama’s record on the economy was dismal.

“Now, you may have heard that President Obama is on the other side of the state and he’s going to be delivering a speech on the economy,” Romney said. “He’s doing that because he hasn’t delivered a recovery for the economy. And he’s going to be a person of eloquence, as he describes his plans for making the economy better, but don’t forget, he’s been president for three and a half years. and talk is cheap.”

“Action speaks very loud,” he added, “and if you want to see the results of his economic policies, look around Ohio, look around the country, and you’ll see that a lot of people are hurting.”

Romney’s “prebuttal”:

He may have forgotten. He talked about a one-term proposition if he couldn’t get the economy turned around in three years, but we’re going to hold him to his word. Now, I know that he will have all sorts of excuses, and he’ll have all sorts of ideas he’ll describe about how he’ll make things better. But what he says and what he does are not always the exact same thing. And so if people want to know how his economic policies have worked and how they’ve performed, why they can talk to their neighbor and ask whether things are better.

There’s been a lot of chatter of how the Romney campaign is proving to be far feistier than the McCain campaign ever was, and you can add an incident today to the growing list of examples that back up that thesis: Before Obama gave his speech today at Cuyahoga Community College, the Romney campaign bus swung around a couple of times, honking the horn, according to BuzzFeed. 

The next time someone on the left apoplectically accuses you of virulent hatred of (and racial animosity toward) Obama based upon evidence attenuated or imagined, you may wish to direct them to a Fox News report about HBO’s apology for using a model head of George W. Bush for beheading scenes in the series Game of Thrones.

A writer for the series insists that the use of Bush’s likeness was not a political statement. Indeed. Just a random head that happened to be in the studio.

In related news, HBO denies reports that a character resembling Obama will have a recurring role in True Blood. An obvious no-brainer. Although not necessarily a political statement, it clearly would be racist.

Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) introduced an amendment Thursday that would block 2013 Department of Health and Human Services funding unless the agency complies with Senators Rob Portman (R., Ohio) and Claire McCaskill’s (D., Mo.) longstanding request for information concerning agency spending on public relations and advertising. 

“This administration has spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to advertise the president’s unpopular health-care spending law,” said Senator Robert J. Portman (R., Ohio), ranking Republican of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee’s Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight. “HHS should stop stonewalling on this bipartisan oversight inquiry, and just tell us how the money was spent,” said Portman.

Portman, who many GOP insiders believe sits high on Mitt Romney’s short list of potential vice presidents, joined Senator Claire C. McCaskill (D., Mo.) in February to submit inquiries to eleven federal agencies. Every agency has responded to the bipartisan inquiry but HHS.

Portman’s office released new information Wednesday suggesting that HHS has allocated as much as $183 million over the past three years on contracts for public-relations activities, but according to Portman this data cannot be confirmed without a complete response from HHS, which has not been forthcoming.

Documents obtained by JudicialWatch.org in Freedom of Information Act requests last year show that HHS has contracted with public-relations firms in the past. Among the documents released last year is an Acquisition Plan outlining the ad campaign and related correspondence dating from October 25, 2010, to February 10, 2011, between HHS staff and employees at Ogilvy Public Relations World Wide. According to the documents, HHS’s assistant secretary for public affairs (ASPA) contracted for $33.5 million in services from Ogilvy, and projected a $200 million ceiling on similar spending through 2014.

#more#The documents depict not only an expensive public-relations campaign — in one instance paying more than $90,000 in one week for Internet users to click a link to a government website — but also a White House bent on spending taxpayer money to promote the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Health Secretary Sebelius has ignored the request, and the press has ignored her taciturn refusal to hand over information about her agency’s public-relations spending — a significant change since 2004 in the attitudes of both the media and Democrats about government-sponsored propaganda.

In 2004, when an investigation uncovered that the Department of Education had paid media personality Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote No Child Left Behind, critics on the left howled. But unlike 2004, when no direct connection was found between George W. Bush’s White House and the Education Department’s contracts, HHS’s reported contracts cost orders of magnitude more and are riddled with the Obama administration’s fingerprints.

The acquisition plan, transmitted with the subject line, “National Multimedia & Educational Campaign & Grassroots Outreach,” states in the relevant part: “This contract will be used to create ad campaigns of any number for different subject areas and Presidential/Secretarial initiatives.” Task orders related to the plan show HHS asked Ogilvy to coordinate public-relations activities with President Obama’s speaking appearances and other events on the White House’s schedule.

Ogilvy senior VP Margo Gillman wrote HHS/ASPA on December 7, 2010, requesting feedback on concepts from a recent presentation. Gillman wrote, “You mentioned on our last call that you were planning to discuss them with the White House on either Friday or yesterday.”

An additional e-mail sent December 15, 2010, from Chris Beakey at Ogilvy only reveals an even more hands-on Obama administration:

·  We saw the pre-existing conditions and guaranteed coverage issues in the lead of the oped by Sect. Sebelius and Eric Holder in yesterday’s Wash Post . . .

·  One thing the White House Team and HHS really liked about our treatments overall is that we’re reflecting “everyday health challenges faced by everyday people.”

·  You want to spend the bulk of their paid media efforts… on media that reaches African Americans and Hispanics . . .

·  You want us to come up with a list of college towns where we can stage/test the guerilla marketing idea in March . . .

·  You are still amassing budget for overall project, and may siphon in some money from the Obesity task order, so you want us to have some treatments that weave in the prevention theme.

According to the e-mails, the initial purpose of Ogilvy’s initiative was the promotion of Healthcare.gov — the federal website designed to help health-care users understand the president’s wickedly complex reform law. However, Beakey reports a transformation of the PR campaign from Internet-based activities to a comprehensive Obamacare crusade, complete with guerilla tactics aimed at young voters and minorities.

Particularly alarming are phrases such as, “amassing funds”and “siphon in some money.” From where siphoned? How much amassed?

Sebelius’s unwillingness to cooperate with congressional investigators means taxpayers have zero idea whether ASPA’s work with Ogilvy has continued, whether similar projects are underway, or what the cost to taxpayers has been. The health secretary has received numerous opportunities to clear the air; her silence is damning.

Congressional Republicans should join Senator Portman’s effort to stop taxpayer-funded propaganda and force transparency upon an administration that has practiced anything but. Doing so will free the strapped-for-cash Obama campaign from the temptation to siphon or amass anymore taxpayer money to advertise the president’s unpopular health-care law.        

— S. E. Robinson is a freelance writer and native Mainer begrudgingly living in Washington, D.C. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College. 

From a $100 contributor to our fundraising drive: 

Finally reached MSM fatigue.  Cancelled the local paper, and will invest what I save to support conservative causes.  NRO is one of the best!  Thanks, and continue the great work. 

Invest here.

Okay, so it’s not catchy, but it’s the best I could up with for a chant to go with the current cover of Time magazine:

Professional illegal alien (and sometime reporter) Jose Antonio Vargas (in the center of the above photo) has a long piece (behind the paywall) arguing that amnesty is an entitlement that Americans are morally obliged to confer on him and his fellow illegal aliens. When he spoke at Ohio State last month on his “Look at Me! I’m an Illegal Alien!” tour, I was there for a conference and asked him whether all 104 million people from the Philippines (his home country) should be allowed to move here. He said something to the effect of, “of course there should be limits, but they have to part of a broader, comprehensive, blah, blah, blah” — you get the idea. He goes on and on about how the pro-amnesty movement is the 21st-century Underground Railroad, equating it not with the civil-rights movement, a repellent-enough comparison but a now-common trope, but with abolitionism. He’s so obnoxious even some of the lefty professors were uncomfortable with his schtick. The prominence of Vargas’s grievance-driven, rights-based, in-your-face approach to amnesty is the best news restrictionists have had in a long time.

Another possible chant: “We’re Unauthorized, We’re Not Chastised, Get Used to It”. Yeah, it doesn’t roll off my tongue either. If you have better ones, put them in the comments.

When a poll last week showed Mitt Romney a point ahead of Barack Obama in Michigan, I figured it was probably an outlier. But another new poll, conducted by Foster, McCollum, White and Associates, shows Romney just two points behind Obama in Michigan, 45 percent to 47 percent. Perhaps the Wolverine State — auto bailouts and all — really is in play. 

The Arab Spring was supposed to be the transition from dictatorship to freedom. It has become clear that it is a shift from one kind of tyranny to another — that of Sunni supremacists led by the Muslim Brotherhood. In Egypt, the military junta that was supposed to be the temporary, transitional bridge from Mubarak to “democracy” has decided not to be so temporary.

The high court, which the military regime controls, has invalidated Parliament — that would be the legislature to which Egyptians elected Islamists by about a 4-to-1 margin. It has seized full legislative authority for itself. It will now hand-pick a 100-person assembly to write the new constitution (rather than leave that task to the Brotherhood/Salafist-dominated lawmakers elected by the people). Yes, the second and final round of the presidential election will still go forward — pitting the Brotherhood candidate against the Mubarak regime candidate. But the oddity of the presidential election was always that it was being held before the constitution, which will define the presidency’s powers, was written. If a new constitution is actually written, expect the presidency to be a ceremonial post, especially if the Brotherhood candidate, Mohammed Morsi, prevails — as he almost certainly will if the election is above board. 

CNN has the breaking details about the coup.

Via the Daily Telegraph:

…Merkel, addressing parliament in Berlin, rejected “miracle solutions” such as issuing joint euro bonds or creating a Europe-wide deposit guarantee scheme, backed by other leaders such as new French President Francois Hollande and Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti. Instead, she called for gradual steps towards the “Herculean task” of building a European political union. Such proposals were “counterproductive” and would violate the German constitution, she said.  

“It is our task today to make up for what was not done (when the euro was created in 1999) and to end the vicious circle of ever new debt, of not sticking to the rules,” Merkel said.

She warned against overstraining the resources of Europe’s biggest economy, saying: “Germany is putting this strength and this power to use for the wellbeing of people, not just in Germany but also to help European unity and the global economy. But we also know, Germany’s strength is not infinite…”

But I see from the Financial Times that someone’s back, chattering away:

Mr Blair’s said the remedy should be a “grand bargain” between Germany and the rest of Europe to rescue the single currency. This would involve a pooling of European debt and a new push for growth, matched by deficit reduction through pension and welfare reforms…

It is, of course, possible to debate (endlessly) what the next move in the euro-drama should be, but if there’s one thing that is clear it is that Mrs. Merkel should not waste a second of her time listening to Tony Blair. If he’d had his way, Britain would have joined the euro years ago, a move that would have been the crowning act of the demolition job that was carried out on the foundations of the U.K.’s economy during his time in office.  

Buzzfeed today has a report on senior Democrats’ displeasure with Charles Barron’s ascension:

 ”The New York delegation had long been the envy of other states. Loaded with national figures. But it’s fallen into a period of decline,” warned a senior Democrat closely watching the race, and eager to send a message to local officials. “This primary outcome might represent hope for the future or painfully make clear that the caucus has utterly lost it’s way.

“Jeffries shouts star potential. Barron is a reckless clown who would sow division and embarrass the body. There’s only one desirable outcome here.”

A second senior Democrat, who is close to the White House, noted that the Administration had quietly sent its own message: Jeffries, a lawyer who has drawn union opposition for his support for charter schools, was invited to a fundraiser for President Obama at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City two weeks ago, to have his photograph taken with Obama and Clinton — a valuable piece of campaign literature in a heavily African-American district.

Obama does not endorse in Democratic primaries, but the president “wished him luck on the race,” the first Democratic official confirmed.

As I chronicled in my article, Charles Barron is a terrible demagogue, whom the Democratic party should openly disavow. It’s not enough for them to complain off-the-record to Buzzfeed — it’s time for them to take a stand against this bigot.

I have a column in Time this week on the president’s “fine” mess: 

President Obama’s blown press conference added to the sense that Chicago is off its game. This isn’t entirely fair. There’s no politically easy way of dealing with 40 straight months of an unemployment rate above 8 percent. If the economy were creating 300,000 new jobs a month, as it was at this point in Ronald Reagan’s first term, David Plouffe would look every bit as shrewd as he did in 2008 when everything broke his boss’s way.

On the economy, the president’s administration has been hyperactive and ineffectual, a fatal combination, and all he can offer is more of the same. He is stuck on stimulus. It’s not Morning Again in America so much as Groundhog’s Day.

 From Special Report with Bret Baier |

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

On President Obama’s blaming his deficits on President Bush, saying his predecessor had a steak and martini dinner, got up and stuck him with a bill:

The problem with the president’s analogy about the restaurant: He left out where he sits down and orders steak and martinis for the next thousand days and sends [us] the bill.

If you look at the debt publicly held debt, on day he took office — that is the accumulated debt that you and I and all the bondholders up to the government of China hold that we have accumulated for the 230 years of this republic — it was under $6.5 trillion. Today it’s $11 trillion. He has added in three-and-a- half years $4.5 trillion. He has increased our debt by 70 percent in three-and-a-half years.

And the idea that [the Obama deficits] were “baked in the cake” and “structural” is complete nonsense. One war is over. And the other war, the good war, the one he likes, he doubled our expenditures — [and] it will be over in a couple of years anyway. [Yet] he has a deficit, he projects, in the future increasing by $8 trillion [over] the next decade. I think on every count the numbers are false. And I think Americans sense that.

There is a kind of psychological statute of limitations on whining.

Matthew Schmitz’s response — consistent with his initial diatribe against those who object to encroaching sharia — ignores virtually all the substantive evidence I adduced. (Ditto for Ramesh Ponnuru, who chimes in with nothing evidence-based to add — just more flimsy, disproven assertions.)

Schmitz remains in steadfast denial about the liberty-crushing, dehumanizing nature of sharia: open-ended jihadism to subjugate the world to a totalitarian Islamic order; rejection of bedrock Western liberties — including freedom of conscience and speech — enforced by imprisonment, beating, or death; discriminatory relegation of non-Muslims to outcast, vulnerable pariahs, and even Muslim women to subservient chattel; and barbaric punishments which violate human dignity, such as amputation for theft, stoning for adultery, and lashing for alcohol consumption. Refusing to acknowledge sharia’s ugly, living essence, Schmitz instead makes a factually challenged, immoral equivalence between totalitarian Islamic law — a form of state governance — and modern Church canon law, which is deliberately confined to religious affairs, even glibly asserting, “Surely Catholics would love to see canon law cover the globe.”   

In lieu of forthrightly acknowledging all the data that was presented about aggressive sharia encroachment in the U.S., and offering any reasoned challenges to this evidence, Schmitz maintains, falsely, that “the only concrete evidence Bostom offers is a study ‘Sharia Law and American State Courts.’” This tendentious claim is debunked by simply reading what I originally wrote. Schmitz continues to ignore: ominous polling data from U.S. Muslims; jihad-funding trial revelations, and the content of more banal Muslim litigation proceedings; mosque surveillance reports; analyses of Islamic educational institutions and their Muslim schoolchildren’s textbooks; the issuance of obscurantist “fatwas” (Islamic legal rulings) by the respected, mainstream Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America; and an open declaration by one of America’s largest mainstream Muslims organizations, the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA), in its 2010 ICNA Member’s Hand Book, which calls for the (re-)creation of a global Muslim Caliphate, and the imposition of sharia in America.

Matthew Schmitz’s shallow, non-sequitur argumentation is well marinated in cultural relativism. He demonstrates merely that it is far easier to spray groundless charges of bigotry at those who highlight and oppose sharia encroachment, rather than confront the inherent bigotry of sharia itself — even when, as David French notes, appositely,

Laws like the one passed in Kansas (text here) are in fact rather benign and provide minimal intrusion into the freedom of contract — operating, as a practical matter, only to prevent extreme outcomes that would potentially also violate common-law protections against contract terms that violate public policy.

I have great respect for Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas). Furthermore, I think you’d have to go a long way to find a more consistent critic of the Obama administration’s recklessness as custodian of the nation’s defense secrets than I have been. Yet, if I were asked to vote on the legislation proposed by Senator Cornyn and Senator John McCain to force the Obama administration to appoint an “independent prosecutor” to investigate intelligence leaks to the New York Times, I would, without hesitation, vote “nay.” 

The institution of “independent prosecutor” is an unconstitutional monstrosity. If it is actually independent of the executive branch, it is constitutionally invalid because, as Justice Scalia explained in his prescient 1988 dissent in Morrison v. Olson, criminal investigation and prosecution are executive functions and the Constitution vests all executive power in the president. Consequently, the only kind of “special” prosecutor President Obama or his subordinate, Attorney General Holder, could appoint would have to be one that answered to Obama and, no doubt, to Holder. That prosecutor would not be “independent” because the only power he would be authorized to exercise is Obama’s power. Congress cannot endow someone else with executive power — the Constitution has given it to the president, period.

As a matter of politics, moreover, Obama and Holder would never satisfy Republicans and the public with any prosecutor they would appoint. The only way they could do so would be to appoint someone of such undeniable rectitude that the matter of his or her being technically beholden to Holder and Obama would be overlooked. That is not going to happen — not with this, the administration that has politicized law enforcement more than any other in history. 

#more#What Senator Cornyn is asking for is thus legally illegitimate and politically implausible. It is also tactically blunderous. An ongoing criminal investigation gives witnesses a justification for refusing to cooperate with any congressional inquiry into the leaks. They end up saying that, because of grand-jury secrecy or the advice of counsel, they cannot provide any information. The goal of holding the Obama administration politically accountable for acting irresponsibly with the nation’s vital secrets would become difficult, if not impossible, to attain. 

The Constitution gives Congress plenty of ways to hold the administration’s feet to the fire while performing the essential role of spotlighting for the public the inexcusable things the administration has done. It can conduct hearings, call witnesses — the Times stories make obvious which witnesses ought to be summoned — and ask them under oath about their handling of classified information and conversations with the media. If the administration stonewalls, as it is doing in Fast & Furious, it can start cutting the administration’s funding and begin impeachment hearings to inquire further about whether unfit executive-branch officials should be removed from office — which is exactly what Congress should be doing in connection with Fast & Furious instead of the ongoing “contempt” theater.

I am not saying that criminal prosecution is unimportant. I personally think it is unlikely; if, as I suspect, President Obama authorized the disclosures that were made to the Times, there can be no prosecution for disseminating classified information because the president is empowered to authorize disclosures. That is why it is much more important at this stage to hold the president politically accountable than to worry about prosecuting the subordinates who actually did the leaking. But federal criminal law generally applies a five-year statute of limitations to crimes:  There will be plenty of time down the road for a Romney Justice Department, headed by credible attorney general who returns the Justice Department to its traditional rejection of partisanship in the administration of justice, to determine whether there are prosecutable classified-leak cases that merit being indicted.

The other thing to remember about a potential Romney administration is this: It will need to govern. Given the shape we are in, it will need to sweep clean the last four years and make very tough decisions about the future. The worst thing congressional Republicans could do right now to a President Romney’s ability to function is lay the groundwork for the Left to demand the appointment of an independent counsel in connection with every contentious issue — real or manufactured — that inevitably will come up. There are strong legal, political, and tactical arguments for opposing such demands. But if Republicans undermine those arguments now, President Romney and the country will pay a heavy price later.

There is a “growing notion,” says Alliance Defense Fund attorney Jordan Lorence, that “if you believe marriage is only between a man and woman, you cannot operate your business like that.”

Lorence is on the front line of the latest battle to preserve religious liberty. New Mexico’s Human Rights Commission found his clients, a husband-and-wife photography team, guilty of sexual-orientation discrimination for refusing to photograph a same-sex “commitment ceremony.” Last month, the N.M. Court of Appeals upheld the ruling.

I detail this latest assault on conscience rights in my piece today.