Hey Skip and Barack? Looks like you decided to pick on the wrong cop.

Cambridge Sgt. James Crowley has taught a class on racial profiling for five years at the Lowell Police Academy after being hand-picked for the job by former police Commissioner Ronny Watson, who is black, said Academy Director Thomas Fleming.

"I have nothing but the highest respect for him as a police officer. He is very professional and he is a good role model for the young recruits in the police academy," Fleming told The Associated Press on Thursday.

The course, called "Racial Profiling," teaches about different cultures that officers could encounter in their community "and how you don't want to single people out because of their ethnic background or the culture they come from," Fleming said.

With the narrative taking on this much water, this quickly, it's time to move past denial and either shut or give another speech about that race relations dialogue were supposed to be having.

Oh, Bill Cosby was 'shocked' by Obama's comment last night and wishes everyone, including Obama, would just shut up about this.

Here's a headline and story Obama never wanted to see: "Obama stirs racial passions in Harvard case".

Best post-racial President EVEAH!

Related: AG Eric Holder emails to say, "Cowards!" Always nice to have the Attorney General drop by.

Posted by: DrewM at 12:00 PM | Add Comment
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A cautionary note: His death has not yet been confirmed by DNA testing.

Posted by: Ace at 11:04 AM | Add Comment
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It occurs to me that this would all be straightforward, were Obama not determined to lie.

Consider: Providing health care coverage to millions of uninsured is a straightforward proposition, done honestly: You need only jack up taxes by 10-25% on everyone paying taxes and you're all set.

But Obama can't do that, not quite, not having pledged again and again to not raise taxes on the middle class.

But he still needs that funding mechanism.

But his funding mechanism will be primarily disguised costs, and intentionally disguised costs at that.

The simple fact he is imposing rationing on the system and demanding that private insurers stop covering supposedly wasteful tests and expensive drugs is one big disguised cost.*

So everyone currently with insurance will get less insurance in the future, less treatments and drugs covered, maybe for the same price, but probably at a higher price. The fact that your policy was just reduced in value from $10,000 to $8500 (as it covers less) and yet you're still paying for the $10,000 policy is a hidden cost, right out of the gate. You just lost $1500, but Obama hopes you don't notice.

You'll have to pay out-of-pocket for some drugs and treatments formerly paid for by the insurance policy you're paying for. Reducing costs? Of course not; it's raising costs, and diverting your hard-earned money towards the uninsured, but hopefully you won't notice it if it's not actually called a "tax."

Creating an inevitable incentive for businesses to dump you out of private coverage and into the public system? Yet another hidden cost. (Well, hidden now as he can lie about it; it won't be well-hidden when it happens. But by then, of course, private insurance will be crippled and almost gone, so there won't be any chance of reversing it.)

Remember that Obama is determined to pass cap-and-tax at the same time, too. Why? Because he sees the carbon tax as a critical new revenue source for... paying the increased costs of his health care. But once again, he wants the costs to be hidden, embedded in the price of every product and imposed at the point-of-sale by businesses themselves, so that no one notices the government has just stealthily imposed a national sales tax on everyone.

All of these confusing new bureaucratic structures are designed with one goal in mind: To impose costs on taxpayers, but in a subterranean, built-into-the-structure-of-the-thing manner, to hide the fact he's raising costs on taxpayers to provide new benefits to non-taxpayers.

* Note, also, that when people complain about HMOs and insurers, their primary complaint is not that their HMO or insurer is too generous and too willing to cover expensive treatments and drugs. It's the opposite, of course. And yet here is Obama proposing that insurers reduce their willingness to pay for treatment, as some kind of "solution."

Isn't this awfully strange? People complain loudest about their insurance not covering certain treatments, and Obama's "solution" is to create a bureaucracy intended to compel them to not cover even more treatments.

Oh, and he also claims that, somehow, this new layer of bureaucracy and review (review to make sure insurers aren't being overly generous with brand-name drugs) will reduce paperwork and administrative costs.

(Taken out of last post to be stand-alone post.)

Posted by: Ace at 10:49 AM | Add Comment
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Just setting up his Triumphant Comeback. Or so they think.

[The struggles over health care are] all recasting Obama's image. The cool, crisp candidate who captivated voters last fall has been replaced by a president who is constantly calling for action, with little to show for it and his credibility at stake.

Democrats are putting on a brave face, noting that in Congress a legislative standstill can quickly shift into high-gear action.

"I have no question we have the votes on the floor of the House to pass this legislation," Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Wednesday. But she hasn't scheduled a vote.

Around the country, doubts are creeping in. A majority of Americans — 56 percent — still think Obama can pull off an overhaul. But a new Associated Press-Gfk poll found that disapproval of how he's handling health care spiked in the past three months. Disapproval stands at 43 percent, up from 28 percent in April. Overall, just half approve of the way Obama is dealing with the issue.

Obama says it's not about him. "I have great health insurance and so does every member of Congress," the president said in remarks prepared for his news conference Wednesday night. "This debate is about the letters I read when I sit in the Oval Office every day, and the stories I hear at town hall meetings. This debate is not a game for these Americans, and they cannot afford to wait for reform any longer."

But confidence in his approach is slipping. Independents, middle-of-the-roaders who were vital for Obama's election, are increasingly skeptical. Forty-seven percent disapprove of how he is handling health care, up from 30 percent in April, the AP poll shows.

What went wrong?

Obama meanwhile walks back his various no-higher-taxes-on-the-middle-class pledges by now only saying he doesn't want the costs of the expanding health care "primarily" or "completely shouldered" by the middle class.

As Kaus notes:

In standard Washspeak, this means Obama is open to a health reform that taxes middle class families as long as it isn't "primarily" or "completely" funded by taxes on middle class families. But 49% funded by taxes on middle class families? ... However you interpret these sentences, it's hard to see how Obama hasn't given a flashing green light to non-trivial tax increases on middle class families.

I noted in the liveblog that Obama is not giving a clear primary directive on his supposed "vision." Is he seeking to reduce costs of health care for individuals and businesses who purchase health care, or is he seeking to reduce costs of providing health care for the federal government?

Note they are not the same thing at all. For example, raising taxes on the middle class to pay for heath care (both the current schemes and the expanded scheme Obama has in mind) would reduce federal costs. But obviously such taxes will increase the net cost of health care to tax-paying middle-class individuals.

So which is it? Well, whenever Obama talks about the issue, he seems to claim, of course, that his primary goal is to reduce the costs to individuals, but most of his specific suggestions have to do with defraying federal costs. Further, when pressed to answer why we must pass this gibberish in two weeks, he offers the coming insolvency vis a vis the federal system as the doom we primarily seek to avert.

And both are actually disingenuous anyway, as his primary goal is to increase coverage, which will increase both personal and federal costs. His whole "bend the curve"/rationing crap is intended to provide some semi-plausible (but still quite implausible) mechanism by which the government can take on the burden of paying for the health care of tens of millions more people and yet somehow reduce both federal costs and costs to the taxpayer.

Buy providing access to the uninsured doesn't poll well, as taxpayers correctly deduce that this means no benefit for themselves, but rather higher costs and rationing to service the uninsured.

And so this doubly disingenuous sales pitch of doing all of this to reduce private taxpayers' costs, when he's really talking about reducing federal costs by increasing taxes and thus the actual costs to private taxpayers, and even that lie is itself a lie because his primary goal is to cover everyone without regard to cost or solvency.

This is why he is exhibiting no leadership on the issue, as that unnamed Democratic Senator complained. He's obfuscating on the actual primary goal here. His real primary goal is universal coverage, but he won't admit that, so he casts the primary goal as reducing federal costs, but meanwhile conflating that goal with reducing taxpayer costs. And when legislators beg him to choose between these competing and even inconsistent goals, he refuses, and votes present once again.

Obama's found a way to even lie when speaking his go-to prefatory clause, "Let me be clear."

Thanks to AHFF Geoff.

Note: I posted my own vid of Waterloo yesterday before Allah, but mine wasn't embeddable. Allah's version was embeddable, and I like it better anyway. (The costumes! The quite-appropriate sense of seventies decline and malaise!)

So I'll go with his.

Bonus: Gallup has Obama at his highest disapproval rate to date -- 39%. And I do believe his approval rate of 55% is the poorest showing on Gallup, replacing his previous worst approval rating of 57%

Also via AHFF Geoff.

Posted by: Ace at 10:13 AM | Add Comment
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Ouch.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said today that the Senate would not attempt to pass sweeping health care reform until after returning from the August recess.

“It’s better to get a product that’s based on quality and thoughtfulness than on trying to just get something through,” Reid told reporters.

Reid said the Senate would try to complete a package in the fall.

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin said Wednesday that he expected that a bill would not be passed before the upper chamber breaks for recess on August 7.

“All this is no surprise to anyone,” Reid said.

Except for the President who set the August deadline and is now blowing in the wind all by himself.

Yesterday Nancy "I have the votes" Pelosi said she would wait to see what the Senate was going to do before bringing a plan to the floor (assuming they ever write one). Now she knows, nothing.

This isn't Waterloo yet but every Senator and Congressman is going to get more than an earful on how crappy this idea is for the next month or so and it's going to make it a lot harder when they come back.

Keep the pressure up!

Reid does predict that Senate Finance will have their report done by the recess. I doubt it. First, there's less pressure now to have something. That never moves the process alone.

Second, the Finance report is about paying for this crap. Do you really think those guys want to spend their summer vacation as the only politicians in America on record supporting the necessary tax hikes to make this happen? All while every other vacationing member of Congress spends their time attacking those taxes? I don't think so. That's a thin limb for them to go out on with no backup.

*Thanks to Michael Goldfarb (@thegoldfarb) for the joke inspiration.

Posted by: DrewM at 09:40 AM | Comments (3)
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Given how awful his performance was last night on health care (even the gang on MSNBC weren't feeling the thrill) maybe Obama decide it was better to say anything, no matter how stupid, to make sure people had something else to talk about today.

Mission Accomplished!

The white police sergeant who arrested black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. said Thursday President Barack Obama was "way off base" claiming Cambridge officers acted "stupidly" during the incident.

..."I acted appropriately," (Sgt. James) Crowley told WBZ Radio's Carl Stevens Thursday.

"Mister Gates was given plenty of opportunities to stop what he was doing. He didn't. He acted very irrational he controlled the outcome of that event."

"There was a lot of yelling, there was references to my mother, something you wouldn't expect from anybody that should be grateful that you were there investigating a report of a crime in progress, let alone a Harvard University professor."

There's more at the link from the Sergeant who comes across as a pretty reasonable guy.

Perhaps the Cambridge Police should make a deal with Gates...in order to avoid any problems in the future they will no longer respond to calls at his home. I'm sure criminals would find that information rather interesting, especially since the house may have been broken into before.

Jim Geraghty meanwhile asks if yelling at a cop really in an arrestable offense.

According to the police report, Gates was "exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior, in a public place, directed at a uniformed police officer who was present investigating a report of a crime in progress. These actions on behalf of Gates served no legitimate purpose and caused citizens passing by this location to stop and take notice while appearing surprised and alarmed."

Being short-tempered, ill-tempered, shouting, etc., are all bad, but I do not think they ought to automatically trigger an arrest, a trial, and potential imprisonment for six months. (Another quite bizarre detail in the report is that the officer says he provided his name at least twice, but Gates kept demanding it. If Gates's account is correct and the officer would not provide his name, it is troubling.)

Patterico also thinks this maybe a case where a civilian fails the 'attitude test' and winds up under arrest.

I agree that giving cops attitude is a bad idea and I don't think it's a crime, but it seems there was more going on here than that (caveat...like Geraghty, Patterico and Obama, I'm relying on reports and not any first hand knowledge). According to reports, Gates followed the officers out of the home and started yelling at them from his porch. I'm pretty sure you can be charged with disorderly conduct for doing that no matter who you are yelling at.

It seems Gates had ample opportunity to calm down and that would have been the end of things. Instead he seems to have decided that standing in front of his house yelling at people who showed up to protect his home was the way to go. Actions, consequences, etc...

But hey, at least we aren't talking about Obama's craptastic performance last night or the fact that despite Pelosi's claims to have the votes in the House, Henry Waxman canceled his committees meeting on health care for the third straight day for want of votes.

Well played Mr. President. Well played.

UPDATE: Meanwhile in Bizzaro World

The White House says President Barack Obama was not calling a Cambridge, Mass., police officer stupid when he criticized last weekÂ’s arrest of black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Spokesman Robert Gibbs said Thursday that Obama felt "cooler heads on all sides should have prevailed" once the officer realized Gates was in his own home.

I wonder if Gibbs waved his hand in front of the reporters faces while saying it.

Now in fairness, none of the stories about this quote Gibbs directly claiming this. If this is his line, he's a liar and a bad one at that.

Update via @Slublog

Okay here's the full quote via Anti-Harkonnen Freedom Fighter

"Let me be clear. He was not calling the officer stupid, okay? He was denoting that . . . at a certain point the situation got far out of hand, and I think all sides understand that."

Wow, just wow.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:49 AM | Comments (2)
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NATO has released portions of the new tactical directive from Gen. McChrystal and his team. This change in policy has been controversial because it does place dangerous restrictions on the ability of our troops to hit the enemy in certain locations and situations, but it is necessary if we want to change the dynamic of that fight. The document is the outline for how coalition forces will operate in a manner consistent with both safeguarding the populace and engaging the enemy, a tightrope walk for certain. The portions released are unclassified and I will limit my commentary to these. I think that still provides a good look at the implications of this change without openly discussing how particular escalations of force would play out on the ground. Overall this directive shows why Gen. McChrystal replaced McKiernan, he articulates a population-based plan that can succeed given enough time and the support required.

Our strategic goal is to defeat the insurgency threatening the
stability of Afghanistan. Like any insurgency, there is a struggle for
the support and will of the population. Gaining and maintaining that
support must be our overriding operational imperative - and the
ultimate objective of every action we take.

We must fight the insurgents, and will use the tools at our
disposal to both defeat the enemy and protect our forces. But we will
not win based on the number of Taliban we kill, but instead on our
ability to separate insurgents from the center of gravity - the people.
That means we must respect and protect the population from coercion and
violence - and operate in a manner which will win their support.

This opening properly frames the situation we face. We have fought in Afghanistan for far too long with far too little regard for building and maintaining relationships with the many tribal and sectarian leaders and populace. There have been instances where rapport has been built and trust gained, but our rotation policies and focus on kinetic operations have eventually overcome those small victories.

The full analysis at BLACKFIVE

Posted by: Uncle Jimbo at 07:44 AM | Add Comment
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I'm sure you are as shocked as I am to find out there's corruption in Jersey but sadly, it seems to be true.

Among the roughly 30 people arrested by mid-morning were Hoboken Mayor Peter J. Cammarano III and Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell, both Democrats, and Assemblyman Daniel M. Van Pelt, a Republican from Forked River, in Ocean County. Mr. Cammarano, who turned 32 on Wednesday, was elected mayor June 9 and sworn in July 1, after serving as councilman-at-large since 2005.

Also brought to the Newark office of the F.B.I. were the president of the city council in Jersey City, Mariano Vega, and that cityÂ’s deputy mayor, Leona Beldini.

Federal prosecutors said the arrests included several rabbis from enclaves of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn and from Deal and Elberon, communities along the Jersey Shore in Ocean County.

The Asbury Park Press reported that the investigation involved the Deal Yeshiva, a religious school which teaches children in the Sephardic Jewish tradition. The United States AttorneyÂ’s office in Newark scheduled a noon news conference.

Also caught up in the raids is the Governor's Commissioner of Community Affairs.

I know voters in the Garden State are inured to corruption like this but given incumbent Democrat John Corzine's already perilous polling numbers leading to this fall's election, I'd have to say he and other Democrats are having a bad morning.

Posted by: DrewM at 07:34 AM | Add Comment
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Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 05:18 AM | Add Comment
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Ouch. But Rasmussen is a virulent racist anyway, so take this with a grain of salt.

...While most African-American voters (56%) still say the country is heading in the right direction, thatÂ’s down seven points over the past week. Only 28% of white voters agree, showing no change from the previous survey...

Posted by: Purple Avenger at 12:33 AM | Comments (1)
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