Columnist.
With frustration building over Washington's refusal to behave in the public interest, perhaps it's worth noting a drastic solution tried by the Irish. Last Friday, Irish voters cast ballots on a referendum to abolish the country's Upper House, known as the Seanad. Prime Minister Enda Kenny said Ireland didn't need all of its politicians and they should be made to suffer along with everyone else as the country continues to struggle economically.
If Republicans were smart (I know, but stay with me) their focus during the Obamacare debate should have been less on blocking its implementation and more on a page they might have taken from the Democrat's playbook, which is to rally the country to its side by use of sentimentality and the threat of impending doom. The good news for Republicans is that there's still time. It's a sure bet Democrats are right now writing sob stories of tearful children barred from the Lincoln Memorial because of the government "shutdown." The National Zoo in Washington inexplicably turned off its unmanned Panda Cam, which showed video of the newborn panda cub on the Internet. Boohoo.
It's Obamacare activation and government "shutdown" week in Washington, where the consequences of misplaced faith in government are everywhere. Still, "true believers" remain faithful that Obamacare will be the exception to government's past failures in achieving big goals. There are examples galore of government's inability to do things well and at reasonable cost, but that doesn't deter those who continue to believe government can solve every problem.
President Obama's speech to the United Nations General Assembly in New York was flawed, displaying a type of moral equivalency that does not exist for America's enemies. His claim that "The world is more stable than it was five years ago" is demonstrably false. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Kenya, Congo, to name only a few, there are at least as many conflicts as in 2008 and far more now than when the United Nations was created. According to Themner, Lotta and Peter Wallensteen, in "Armed Conflict, 1946-2011", Journal of Peace Research, there were fewer than 20 armed conflicts in 1946. Today there are more than 30.
President Obama pledged to end partisanship, but instead has exacerbated it. He recently accused House Republicans of being extortionists for opposing a raise in the debt ceiling and wanting to defund Obamacare. Dictionary.com defines extortion as "the crime of obtaining money or some other thing of value by the abuse of one's office or authority." Republicans should fling the extortion label back at the president, who wants to raise the debt ceiling, threatening to curtail many government operations if the GOP doesn't surrender.
There is a tradition in politics that is similar to one in the legal profession: When evidence supports your position, make your argument based on the evidence, but when it argues against your position, ignore the evidence and appeal to emotion. The evidence is piling up that "climate change," formerly known as "global warming," is losing evidentiary support, despite recent "preliminary findings" by a group of "experts" from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that a Washington Post editorial suggests may prove, "warming has boosted the chances, in some cases significantly, that certain unwelcome weather or weather-related disasters will occur." The Post and other "true believers" ignore or ridicule a growing body of evidence rebutting their beliefs.
Expecting Syria to live up to an agreement between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for the cataloging, inspection, removal and eventual destruction or sequester of chemical weapons is a subtle seduction. Why would a dictator like Bashar al-Assad relinquish his most potent weapon in the midst of a civil war? President Obama and his sycophants claim it was the threat of military action against Syria that focused Assad's mind. That hardly seems credible after Kerry's promise that any U.S. missile strike would be "unbelievably small."
The late Ukrainian violinist Mischa Elman is considered one of the greatest of all time, but he has nothing on Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has played the Obama administration better than any musician. Washington is astounded at what happened over two days on the Syria front. First, there was a supposed faux pas on Monday in London by Secretary of State John Kerry, who said the only way Syria could avoid a military strike was to give up its chemical weapons. While the State Department was busy walking back his comment, Putin said it was a great idea and offered to facilitate the handover, a proposal to which Walid al-Moallem, the Syrian foreign minister, quickly agreed.
Perhaps if America had a successful track record in the Middle East, President Obama's appeal for a "limited" attack on Syria might carry more weight. But because our attention span in the region increasingly resembles that of a fidgety 4-year-old, an examination of recent history is in order. Consider Iran. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter supported toppling the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Whatever the shah's shortcomings, who believes the theocratic government of the ayatollahs, which replaced him, was better than the one we helped overthrow? At least the shah was not pursuing nuclear weapons or fighting proxy wars like Syria.
Before Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department move forward with a lawsuit to block vouchers for thousands of low-income students trapped in failing Louisiana public schools, he ought to speak to parents whose children benefit from the statewide voucher measured called the Louisiana Scholarship Program. One of those parents is Lakisha Fuselier. Fuselier is a single mother of four. Her 8-year-old son, Albert, is a part of the voucher program. A spokeswoman in Gov. Bobby Jindal's office emailed me her story, which first appeared in The Daily Advertiser last December. "Lakisha Fuselier wanted to do something to help her son, Albert. He was struggling in public school classes," the Daily Advertiser writes. "His academic problems were compounded by a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. ... She knew he needed individual attention, something he was not getting in public school."
Appearing in the White House Rose Garden last Saturday, President Obama apparently experienced a revelation. He acknowledged there are constitutional limits on his power, something he has heretofore mostly ignored while issuing executive orders, bypassing Congress on appointments and deciding which parts of the Affordable Care Act to follow and which to delay or ignore. The president will wait for Congress to reconvene on Sept. 9 and debate whether to grant him authority to attack Syria. It is uncertain whether he will get approval for what he says will be a limited -- and likely inconsequential -- strike.
"Oh, when will they ever learn? Oh, when will they ever learn?" -- Peter, Paul and Mary By the time you read this, U.S. missiles and bombs may be falling on Syria. Why? Syria hasn't attacked us. It does not pose a security threat to the United States. These were arguments made against the Bush administration's intervention in Iraq by some who now urge us to make war on Syria.
Ashton Kutcher, the 35-year-old actor and ex-husband of actress Demi Moore, has never been considered a poster child for the "family values crowd," but at the Teen Choice Awards two weeks ago, he could have easily passed for one. Following screams from young female fans in the audience, Kutcher silenced them with a motivational message that bordered on inspiration. He told them: "I believe that opportunity looks a lot like hard work. ... I've never had a job in my life that I was better than. I was always just lucky to have a job. And every job I had was a steppingstone to my next job, and I never quit my job until I had my next job."
PORTSTEWART, Northern Ireland -- Each visit to the U.K. brings new horror stories about the National Health Service (NHS). Last month, Sir Bruce Keogh, medical director of the NHS, issued a forensic report, commissioned by the government, which found that 14 underperforming hospitals in England had substandard care, contributing to the needless deaths of nearly 13,000 people since 2005. Earlier this year, it was reported that a single hospital in Staffordshire recorded 1,400 "excess" deaths.
It was an atypical August summer day in Washington, D.C., 50 years ago next week. Temperatures were in the low 80s, about 10 degrees cooler than normal. Skies were partly cloudy. Most government officials were vacationing. I was a young copyboy at the NBC News Washington bureau. Correspondent Jack Perkins asked me to accompany him to hear a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial.
When I studied the U.S. Constitution in school, I learned that for a bill to become law it first had to be introduced in either the House or the Senate. Today, a cynic might say for a bill to become law a member of Congress must first be introduced to a lobbyist. Much of government's dysfunction, cost and overreach can be traced to the abandonment of the constitutional boundaries the Founders put in place for the purpose of controlling the lust for power.
President Reagan's speech to the nation 30 ago launched a major arms buildup to confront the expanding military power and political aspirations of the Soviet Union. It followed the disastrous presidency of Jimmy Carter, whose nonperformance during the Iran hostage crisis led to the perception in the Muslim world that America was weak and had lost its resolve to confront enemies. President Obama appears to believe killing Osama bin Laden, which he mentioned for the umpteenth time at his Friday news conference, and conducting drone strikes against terrorists in Yemen and elsewhere is enough to deter terrorists.
STAVANGER, Norway -- The several hundred conservatives on the National Review's summer cruise, which I was asked to attend as a speaker, are united in what they don't like about the Obama administration and congressional Democrats, but divided on the best strategy for winning the Senate in 2014 and the White House in 2016. On a panel titled "The State of the GOP and Conservatism," Bob Costa, the magazine's Washington bureau chief, asks if anyone agrees with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who thinks Republicans should be willing to shutdown the government over the issue of defunding the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
AMSTERDAM -- On the day I visit the Anne Frank House, which is actually the family's hiding place atop Anne's father's business, the wait to get in is as long as three hours. Such is the attraction of this historic site, 53 years after it was opened to the public. Anne and her family were among an estimated 107,000 Jews deported to concentration camps from The Netherlands during the German occupation in World War II.
