Columnist.
The Obama administration has a habit of waiting until late on Friday to release news it believes to be unpopular. Such was the case last Friday when White House spokesman Robert Gibbs put out a statement announcing that President Barack Obama was changing the date of his visit to the United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen from Dec. 9 to Dec. 18 -- when a deal on a climate-change treaty is more likely to be announced -- and that the president is now promising to hand out billions in new foreign aid.
Inconsistent, Indefensible, Inexplicable
The most revelatory passage in the so-called "plain English" version of the health care bill that the Senate Finance Committee approved on Tuesday (without ever drafting the actual legislative language) says that in the future Americans will be offered the convenience of getting their health insurance at the Department of Motor Vehicles. This is no joke. If this bill becomes law, it will be the duty of the U.S. secretary of health and human services or the state governments overseeing federally mandated health-insurance exchanges to ensure that you can get your health insurance at the DMV.
If you are someone who believes killing unborn children is a right that should be legally protected and made available to all pregnant women, and that the government should eventually take over the U.S. health care system, then you must believe that the government should get into the business of killing unborn babies. And if you believe that, then you believe that the law must compel certain government officials to cooperate in the killing of innocents.
Should doctors and hospitals be required by the federal government to maintain a national network of electronic health records for every individual in America that indicates, for example, whether that individual has had an abortion, a sexually transmitted disease, a mental illness or a drug problem? Such a system has already been mandated by the stimulus law enacted in February, and politicians in Washington, D.C., would now prefer not to answer straightforward questions about it. Americans should not let them get away with it. The stimulus law provided for "the development of a nationwide health information technology infrastructure" that would include an electronic health record for "each person in the United States by 2014."
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency in the Department of Homeland Security that is responsible for securing the nation's land borders, says it will increase its goal for the number of border miles it will have under "effective control" in fiscal year 2010, CBP Director of Media Relations Lloyd Easterling told me this week. The goal will be increased from the previously set mark of 815 to at least 894, the number of miles the Border Patrol says is under "effective control" as of now. At the same time, the Border Patrol will carry out a plan to reduce the number of agents deployed on the U.S.-Mexico border by 384. According to DHS, its measure of "border miles under effective control" applies to the entire 8,607 miles for which the Border Patrol is responsible. This includes almost 2,000 miles on the U.S.-Mexico border, about 4,000 miles on the U.S.-Canada border (not counting the Alaska-Canada border) and sectors of coastline in the Gulf of Mexico, Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
In the three days following President Obama's speech to Congress pitching his proposed makeover of the U.S. health care system, the Washington Post-ABC News poll asked this question: "Overall, given what you know about them, would you say you support or oppose the proposed changes to the health care system being developed by Congress and the Obama administration? Now, as recently as late June, President Obama's approval rating was at 65 percent in this same poll. Given that level of support for the president at the beginning of summer, you might have expected that a majority of Americans would now support the proposal the president and his party spent all summer promoting. Not so.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is planning to move several hundred Border Patrol agents away from the U.S.-Mexico border and will not secure a single additional mile of the U.S. border in fiscal 2010, according to the department's annual performance report. The document -- "Department of Homeland Security Annual Performance Report: Fiscal Years 2008-2010" -- was originally published by the Bush administration on Jan. 15 and was updated by the Obama administration on May 7. Excluding the border between Alaska and Canada, the combined length of the U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada is about 6,000 miles (with almost 2,000 miles along the Mexican frontier and 4,000 along the Canadian).
In fiscal 2008, U.S. Border Patrol officers working at checkpoints that are typically set up along roads and highways 25 to 100 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border stopped three people "who were identified as persons linked to terrorism," according to information provided by the Border Patrol to the Government Accountability Office. "In addition," says a GAO report released Monday, "the Border Patrol reported that in fiscal year 2008 checkpoints encountered 530 aliens from special interest countries, which are countries the Department of State has determined to represent a potential terrorist threat to the United States." According to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Border Patrol, the vast majority of illegal aliens and contraband attempting to move across our border through official ports of entry will succeed.
Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, according to the 9-11 commission report, was the mastermind of the Oct. 12, 2000, attack on the U.S.S. Cole that killed 17 U.S. sailors. Nashiri was also the target of an "unauthorized" CIA interrogation technique (that had not been legally vetted by the Justice Department) that is described in a May 7, 2004, CIA inspector general's report that was partially declassified by the Obama administration this week. CIA officers blew smoke in Nashiri's face, according to the report, and they used cigars.
