Check out the big pith on Jonah Goldberg.

I missed it. Here's a good/bad spin: Romney may be planning to run as himself, a smart technocrat with conservative leanings but moderate gestures.

Will the truth work? Eh, sometimes, strangely enough, the truth is your best bet.

So much for the good news. In general everyone thinks his speech was a disaster, chiefly because he refused to confess error. He acknowledged that everyone wanted him to do so, but he couldn't, as that wouldn't be "honest."

I don't know if I buy the line I myself peddled previously: That Romney's best strategy (let's put aside the truth and talk strategy) is to confess error and repudiate Romney 2007-2008. I think it's too late for that, or at least that wouldn't really help. As today's speech demonstrated (I gather), he really doesn't believe he did wrong, so I guess... kudos for being honest about it? I guess? Maybe?

The individual mandate continues to destroy him. He made a case that this is actually a conservative idea -- and indeed, it was discussed by conservatives as a conservative idea in years past. For example: Newt Gingrich. A conservative case can be made for it -- people should be responsible for their own health care, rather than relying upon the state to take care of them when they get ill.

Unfortunately, a conservative case can also be made against it: The state shouldn't compel people to do this or that thing, supposedly in their own interest.

And the latter position has won, and not by a little bit. On a federal level, the mandate seems unconstitutional (not sure if the Supreme Court will agree, but it looks unconstitutional), and as that's our easiest and maybe best route to undoing ObamaCare, you're not going to find many conservatives defending this bad element.

So... he's pretty stuck. I guess he could make his argument that in 2006-2007, when he endorsed the individual mandate, all of the various constitutional and political issues weren't fully engaged and he didn't appreciate the encroachment on liberty the mandate represents... but of course he's not doing that.

He doesn't seem to understand that by defending RomenyCare he's inadvertently defending ObamaCare and under no circumstances can we have a standard-bearer defending ObamaCare.

Posted by: Ace at 01:31 PM | Comments (268)
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As you may or may not know, this is one conspiracy theory I can get behind.

Cashill lost credibility in my book when he moved from authorism to birtherism.

That said, I still like this theory. I didn't like it based on the authority of Jack Cashill (when I first read his articles I only vaguely knew of him); I liked it based on his evidence particularly Obama's sudden fondness for the nautical metaphors also favored by former Merchant marine Bill Ayers.

Or other oddly similar thoughts:

Identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself you do not really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself.

Now it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right. You are of course never yourself.

Now which one is Ayers and which is Obama? Well technically it's Obama, then Ayers, but maybe it's just Ayers twice. Hey, if you're being paid not a great deal of money to substantially re-write someone's crappy book, you're probably not going to sweat making up new stuff. You're probably going to coast on previous ideas.

He also ran some standard writing analysis programs on the texts, and found that Dreams From My Father scored a 54.8 in readability at a 12th grade reading level. That was divergent from Obama's other works, but oddly close to Bill Ayers' 54.0/12th grade score for Fugitive Days.

Cashill sometimes undermines his own argument by presenting lame evidence -- like really minor parallels about stuff most political writers will mention.

So sometimes I wish he'd separate the wheat from the chaff. But the wheat itself is good.

He's done a vlog recapitulation of his major points. more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:27 PM | Comments (230)
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Bear in mind, $100 billion would not be "major." It would be minor. Symbolic. Chiefly important as it regards predictions of future actions.

Behold the power of this fully-operational media framing device.

And watch how the GOP falls before it.

Picking up where AprilÂ’s budget agreement left off, House Republicans outlined plans Wednesday to cut another $45.7 billion from domestic spending and foreign aid next year, an 11 percent reduction designed to roll back appropriations to the levels set prior to the Democratic victories in the 2006 elections.

Labor, health and education programs, the heart of President Barack Obama’s domestic agenda, would be hardest hit — an $18.2 billion cut from 2011 levels and more than $41 billion or 23 percent from his 2012 request.

Indeed, the committee appears to have overshot its 2006 mark, and the $139.2 billion allocated to this bill is substantially less than what was provided that year and closer to 2004 appropriations during former President George W. BushÂ’s first term.

I suppose that's something, at least, rolling things back to 2006. It's a step in the right direction. But it's just a step.

Posted by: Ace at 11:37 AM | Comments (160)
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Mutterer's Row:

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Liberal news anchor Keith Olbermann has tapped filmmaker Michael Moore and comedian Richard Lewis as contributors for his upcoming Current TV program, the network said on Wednesday

Additionally, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns ("Baseball", and "The Civil War"), Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas and Nicole D. Lamoureux, executive director of the National Association of Free Clinics, will also be regular contributors to the new "Countdown", which premieres on June 20.

"I'm delighted and honored that so many of my friends -- who are not coincidentally among the top progressive and entertainment voices in the country today -- will be joining me as contributors to 'Countdown' on Current," Olbermann said.

Andrew's Dad laughs at how that's put -- the "top progressive and entertainment voices."

Posted by: Ace at 11:12 AM | Comments (219)
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Is it true? Oh God no. It's not even close to true. State and federal employment are stable and slightly growing. The pain of unemployment is borne almost completely by the private sector.

But Obama lies because Obama lies.

Or, possibly, as with George Costanza: "It's not a lie if you believe it's true."

Posted by: Ace at 10:00 AM | Comments (215)
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The seat is left abandoned due to Ensign's resignation. In fairness, Burr is slightly more senior than DeMint, but can we get a little input on these spending committees?

Correction: Commenters point out that Burr has a 91% ACU rating and so I shouldn't have called him a squish.

I shouldn't have. And I should have looked that up. I've now deleted that dubious characterization.

My belief he's squishy comes from the Amnesty Armageddon, when Burr was always one of those Senators we had to keep putting up a phone number for because he would not commit to voting against amnesty.

Maybe not so much squishy as in line with the establishment.

Oh, more: "Laurie David's Cervix" (I think this is an alias) points out Burr is a cosponsor of Toomey's deficit reduction plan. So I guess I must retreat still further.

Posted by: Ace at 09:20 AM | Comments (95)
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This is what the GOP keeps saying-- that if the debt ceiling is not raised, it does not mean a default, because the government will have plenty of money coming in. Just not enough to pay interest on old debt and maintain current spending.

So, if we don't raise the debt ceiling, it just forces the government to cut spending.

Of course Obama could also choose to not cut spending, and just default. But that would be his choice. He cannot say he was forced to do that, or the GOP demanded he do that.

The GAO (Government Accounting Office) had previously ruled it in-bounds for the Treasury to priortize debt service (and avoiding a default) over current spending plans.

There was some question as to whether that ruling still held; Business Insider says they "hear" the GAO just reaffirmed it still applied in a letter to Congress.

Not so much a huge victory for the GOP but the avoidance of a loss -- if the GAO had said the opposite, the Democrats would have the ammunition to claim that no debt ceiling hike = automatic default.

They can't say that now.

Wait, what am I talking about. Of course they can and will say that.

It just won't be true.

In case that matters.

Which it doesn't.

Update: Via Vic -- on Monday, fresh Treasury bill auctions should take us over the limit. So the deadline is upon us.

Posted by: Ace at 08:48 AM | Comments (95)
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Sure, absolutely.

He also then says that he thinks government jobs also should be the most secure of all.

OBAMA: Let me just first of all say that workers like you, for the federal, state, and local governments, are so important for our vital services. And it frustrates me sometimes when people talk about ‘government jobs’ as if somehow those are worth less than private sector jobs. I think there is nothing more important than working on behalf of the American people.

FEDERAL WORKER: I thought I would be more important and secure.

OBAMA: I agree with you.

He also says, later in the clip, that he hopes that when the economy does better, he can hire back the very few unnecessary workers that have been laid off.

Originally from Story Balloon (throw them some hits).

Thanks to laceyunderalls.

Posted by: Ace at 08:31 AM | Comments (137)
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"It absolutely was not necessary" to kill him, he avers.

He also is full of questions which are in fact stupid.

“I think things could have been done somewhat differently,” Paul said this week. “I would suggest the way they got Khalid [Sheikh] Mohammed. We went and cooperated with Pakistan. They arrested him, actually, and turned him over to us, and he’s been in prison. Why can’t we work with the government?”

Everyone but Ron Paul seems to know the answer to that.

Sometimes you'll catch me knocking people who are, in my mind, "overly ideological." This is the sort of endpoint of that, the thing that makes me suspicious of people who are too confident of ideology. Ron Paul has a very advanced case of this, but it's this tendency that makes me suspicious.

Ron Paul is offered a choice here between known reality and actual facts on one hand, and his rigid, dogmatic ideology of "Letters of Marque" and "cooperation with governments" on the other. It's an easy call for him. The ideology is so precious and lovely that it is far preferable to ugly reality and grubby facts.

His ideology is that the U.S. never needs to resort to force to accomplish its foreign policy goals. Because he knows that to be true -- absolutely true, in all cases, with no exceptions -- then it must also follow that wherever we have used force, there must have been alternate options.

Must be. Because, remember, it is never true that we must use force. Ergo, any use of force was a bit of cowboy imperialism. There must have been better, more peaceful options on the table.

Ron Paul draws particular venom from people like me because what he says is exactly what the leftists say. They do the same thing. The exact same thing. When there's a controversial use of force -- and the use of force is almost always controversial, as it should be -- they begin the discussion from the point of view that any and all uses of American might are illegitimate, and that there are -- always, no exceptions -- peaceful options that could have achieved the same results.

And they cannot be backed off this assertion by argument, because it's an irrational article of faith. You cannot reason a man out of an opinion he was never reasoned into in the first place.

On one hand, I have to admit, grudgingly, that from the vantage point of 2011, Ron Paul's urging of restraint and modesty in foreign policy doesn't look so bad to me now as it once did.

But of course these are all easy questions for him. It's not like he's wise, or cunning, or deeply analytic in making his pronouncements. He just makes the same pronouncements irrespective of facts, because the facts can always be changed to comport with this ideology.

His ideology is libertarianism not just at home with our own citizens, but with regard to hostile, even enemy, foreign governments and actors as well.

It's one thing to urge we grant our own citizens full and complete freedom, without coercion, to do as they will, and that all their decisions should be purely voluntary and based only on a knowing selection of that decision.

That's one thing. That's a very ideological position but it is an attractive one.

But no, that's not the end of it. He also believes Pakistan should have the full rights and freedoms of an American citizen, that Pakistan, too, must always agree to things done to it in a knowing and rational decision in which they are always free to select some other choice.

That's why he must ultimately claim that Pakistan would have just agreed to turn over bin Ladin. He needs to believe that in order to treat Pakistan as a human being and American citizen with full and total freedom from coercion. He must posit, as the leftists do, that states we know have evil intent are of course actually willing to behave nicely, if only we respected their freedom to do what they will.

If we respect their right to choose evil, then of course they will choose good.

This is almost not even an ideology. It comes a little closer to a "psychological delusion."

Ron Paul doesn't sound brave, or wise, or noble, or smart to me.

Ron Paul, frankly, sounds like a drunken idiot at a bar, possibly with a history of prior mental instabilities, spouting off perfect stupidity with perfect confidence.

He can't be president. It would be a nightmare. It would be government by lunatic. He'd be briefed on actual facts and then simply say "Those aren't the facts. Report to me new facts consistent with my rigid ideology."

Ugh. Why this clown gets respect in the GOP, I don't know.

If it's the gold standard thing, less disreputable voices are calling for that. Steve Forbes not only endorses it, but predicts we'll be on it in 5 years.

But enough from Ron Paul. I get enough of the slightly-deranged codger act every Thanksgiving. I don't need Crazy Pop-Pop on my TV every three days.

Posted by: Ace at 07:40 AM | Comments (290)
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A little preview of Mitt's big healtcare speech in USA Today.

But our health care system has several well-known problems: high and rising costs, significant numbers of Americans without insurance, and glaring gaps in quality and efficiency.

We can fix these problems. Unfortunately, with the passage of ObamaCare last year, the president and the Congress took a wrong turn. ObamaCare will lead to more spending, greater federal involvement in health care and negative effects on U.S. economic activity. The president definitely forgot the admonition to "do no harm."

My plan is to harness the power of markets to drive positive change in health insurance and health care. And we can do so with state flexibility (unlike ObamaCare's top-down federal approach), no new taxes (as opposed to hundreds of billions of dollars of new taxes under ObamaCare), and better consumer choice (as opposed to bureaucratic, government choice under ObamaCare). This change of direction offers our best hope of preserving both innovation and value.

If I am elected president, I will issue on my first day in office an executive order paving the way for waivers from ObamaCare for all 50 states. Subsequently, I will call on Congress to fully repeal ObamaCare.

The reforms that I propose, which are based on the same philosophical tenets as the reforms I offered during my last presidential campaign in 2008, return power to the states, improve access by slowing health care cost increases, and make health insurance portable and flexible for today's economy.

Follow the link for how he'd approach the issue.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal would like to have a word not just about Romney's Massachusetts plan but also would like to know what the hell he was thinking in the first place.

First the mandates. In a debate in 2007 Romney said, "I like mandates. The mandates work".

As the WSJ demonstrates, no they don't.

In the name of personal responsibility, Mr. Romney also introduced the individual mandate, first in the nation, requiring everyone to buy coverage or else pay a penalty. Free riders, he said, transferred their own costs to others, either through higher premiums or taxes. This is the same argument the Obama Administration is now using to justify the coercion of the individual mandate in the federal courts. Because the states have police powers under the Constitution, Mr. Romney's plan posed no legal problems. His blunder was his philosophy of government.

The people who don't buy coverage though they can afford it aren't really a major fiscal problem—unless the goal of the individual mandate is to force them to subsidize others. People who are priced out of coverage require subsidies—so in practice the logic of the individual mandate is that it is a government mandate too. Entitlements automatically grow and grow, and then the political class begins to make decisions that used to be left to markets and individuals.

Massachusetts took off on this entitlement trajectory after Mr. Romney signed the bill in 2006 and stepped down to run for President two years later. Let's go to the data, all of which are state-reported, in search of evidence of Mr. Romney's "success."

The only good news we can find is that the uninsured rate has dropped to 2% today from 6% in 2006. Yet four out of five of the newly insured receive low- or no-cost coverage from the government. The subsidies will cost at least $830 million in 2011 and are growing, conservatively measured, at 5.1% a year. Total state health-care spending as a share of the budget has grown from about 16% in the 1980s to 30% in 2006 to 40% today. The national state average is about 25%.

The safety-net fund that was supposed to be unwound, well, wasn't. Uncompensated hospital care rose 5% from 2008 to 2009, and 15% from 2009 to 2010, hitting $475 million (though the state only paid out $405 million). "Avoidable" use of emergency rooms—that is, for routine care like a sore throat—increased 9% between 2004 and 2008. Meanwhile, unsubsidized insurance premiums for individuals and small businesses have climbed to among the highest in the nation.

Like Mr. Obama's reform, RomneyCare was predicated on the illusion that insurance would be less expensive if everyone were covered. Even if this theory were plausible, it is not true in Massachusetts today. So as costs continue to climb, Mr. Romney's Democratic successor now wants to create a central board of political appointees to decide how much doctors and hospitals should be paid for thousands of services.

Then they really get tough on him.

The Romney camp blames all this on a failure of execution, not of design. But by this cause-and-effect standard, Mr. Romney could push someone out of an airplane and blame the ground for killing him. Once government takes on the direct or implicit liability of paying for health care for everyone, the only way to afford it is through raw political control of all medical decisions.

Mr. Romney's refusal to appreciate this, then and now, reveals a troubling failure of political understanding and principle. The raucous national debate over health care isn't about this or that technocratic detail, but about basic differences over the role of government. In the current debate over Medicare, Paul Ryan wants to reduce costs by encouraging private competition while Mr. Obama wants the cost-cutting done by a body of unelected experts like the one emerging in Massachusetts.

Mr. Romney's fundamental error was assuming that such differences could be parsed by his own group of experts, as if government can be run by management consultants. He still seems to believe he somehow squared the views of Jonathan Gruber, the MIT evangelist for ObamaCare, with those of the Heritage Foundation.

And then they go in for the kill.

Seriously, it's a brutal take down.

For most politically active conservatives and Republicans (political blog readers for example) at this point you either buy Mitt's, "it's ok if states do mandates but not the federal government" explanation or you don't. My fear is that if Mitt is the nominee health care will either not be part of the debate or Obama will be able to paint Romney as the father of ObamaCare. Repealing HCR isn't likely to be the number one issue next year (the economy, the economy and the economy will bet the top 3 issues) but it should be in our arsenal. I'm not sure how Mitt can convincingly make the case.

Posted by: DrewM at 06:57 AM | Comments (175)
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