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The Supreme Court, Conrad Black and Joe Biden's Bad Idea
Tweet Share on Facebook December 11, 2009 Comment (3)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Back when he was in the United States Senate, Vice President Joe Biden came up with the brilliant idea of being able to charge people with the crime of "honest services fraud," something that would permit prosecutors to charge public officials with depriving the public of its intangible right to receive the honest services of public servants.
Billed as an anti-corruption measure, the idea that the violation of an "intangible right" can be considered a crime that can send people to jail should send shivers down the spine of every freedom loving person in the land. Imagine, if you will, the concept applied to the nation's highway system—which would then allow the state troopers to pull you over for "going too fast" (rather than exceeding a specific speed limit). The result would not only be chaotic, it would be a direct threat to liberty.
Even existing legal codes are unclear on the subject, providing very little definition or advance notice to anyone accused of this particular crime of what actions, precisely, constitute honest service fraud. Yet the crime itself gives federal prosecutors with bottomless resources at their disposal the open-ended authority to charge almost anyone with fraud or corruption for public or even private activities, as media mogul Conrad Black can now attest.
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Republicans Want Answers on a Dubious Stimulus Spending
Tweet Share on Facebook December 9, 2009 Comment (7)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
As far as the stimulus package is concerned, President Barack Obama has a lot to answer for. Federal records show that nearly $6 million was provided to firms controlled by Mark Penn, a former senior adviser and pollster to Hillary Rodham Clinton. The funds, which records show helped preserve three jobs at public relations giant Burson-Marsteller, The Hill reported Wednesday, paid for work on a public relations campaign to advertise the national switch to digital television and for polling work by Penn's firm, Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates.
The news has Republicans on Capitol Hill, who are already unhappy with the way the stimulus dollars have been distributed, absolutely up in arms. Several of them, led by South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson, are seeking support from the White House and their congressional colleagues for a bipartisan national commission to investigate how the stimulus money was spent, where it went, and how many jobs the stimulus actually saved or created, the website created for that purpose having failed to do its job.
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EPA Carbon Dioxide Decision Threatens Liberty and the Economy
Tweet Share on Facebook December 8, 2009 Comment (21)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
As President Obama was busily traveling by greenhouse gas-emitting jumbo jet to Copenhagen for an international conference on the weather, Lisa Jackson, his administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, was busy telling the world that the United States government now officially believes carbon dioxide is a threat to public health and welfare.
Jackson's issuance of an endangerment finding, according to Capital Alpha Partners' James Lucier, provides federal regulators "with the basis they need to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act." And, following up on Nobel laureate Al Gore's thesis in his book Earth in the Balance, Jackson also seconded the idea that the internal combustion engine is the greatest threat to mankind's continued existence: "The Administrator finds that the combined emissions of these well-mixed greenhouse gases from new motor vehicles and now motor vehicle engines contribute to the greenhouse gas pollution which threatens public health and welfare."
The potential costs to personal liberty, not to mention the U.S. economy, that could flow from Jackson's finding are enormous. They are also potentially without check, as Jackson is now free to propose through administrative rule-making what Congress is thus far unwilling to pass as legislation.
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Abortion in Healthcare Bill Remains a Puzzle for Democrats—and GOP Opponents
Tweet Share on Facebook December 7, 2009 Comment (11)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Poor Harry Reid. For weeks, his main priority has been to get healthcare legislation through the Senate. And he's pushed hard, using just about every legislative trick available to him. Now, just when it started to look like he was making some progress comes the news that the folks back home have turned against it. In one recent statewide poll, 52 percent of Nevada voters said they didn't want the healthcare reform package Reid has been pushing so hard—and almost half of those said they were "strongly opposed," meaning they are likely to take their anger over the legislation out on their state's senior senator next November when he is once again up for re-election.
Nevada, for all of its Democrats, is not a liberal state. Reid joined the Senate leadership by proclaiming, or at least pretending, that he was a moderate who could help the leadership strike a balance with rank-and-file Democrats from places where liberalism was not the regular order of things. Now, with the House and Senate and the White House in definably liberal hands for the first time in more than a generation, Reid is caught between the national party and the folks back home, only 40 percent of whom say they are at all interested in helping him win re-election.
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Boxer Undeterred By Global Warming E-Mails Scandal
Tweet Share on Facebook December 4, 2009 Comment (29)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
California Sen. Barbara Boxer has taken an odd position in regards to the latest developments in climate science. The publication of hundreds of e-mails between some of the world's leading climate researchers is proving to be an embarrassment to the proponents of man-made global warming.
In the emails, scientists appear to be encouraging each other to keep their stories straight about global warming while discussing strategies to discredit opposing views and deal with data points that inconveniently fail to support the correct conclusion: that human activity have caused a permanent increase in the world's temperatures.
You might think that the embarrassment accompanying the disclosure of these emails—even the liberal Jon Stewart is making fun of them on The Daily Show—would generate at least a pause in the adopt legislation that will cause billions of dollars to be sucked out of the American economy and kill thousands of jobs here at home. And you'd be wrong.
Boxer, who chairs the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works and is a leading legislative proponent of anti-climate change legislation, has not even missed a step toward her eventual goal. Rather than deal with the allegation she intends, to paraphrase the old joke, to go after "the alligator."
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Obama's Speech on Afghanistan Said Nothing At All
Tweet Share on Facebook December 2, 2009 Comment (92)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
It is unlikely that President Obama's remarks announcing the new U.S. policy toward Afghanistan will go down in history as a great speech. Nothing about it was especially memorable. After it was over one was left wondering what took him so long to reach the conclusions he did.
For more than two centuries Afghanistan has proven to be a thorn in the side of the world's empires. The British did not do well there nor did the Soviets, whose occupation of the country contributed significantly to the eventual collapse of their particular kind of tyranny. But the United States is not an empire. We do not engage in foreign wars for the purposes of expanding our territorial claims. We send troops into battle on behalf of ideals like freedom and self-government, something that today is a controversial position.
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Plummeting Polls Show the Cost of Obama’s Afghanistan Dithering
Tweet Share on Facebook December 1, 2009 Comment (13)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
After dithering for many months, President Barack Obama has finally decided on a course of action for Afghanistan. The new plan, to be announced Tuesday during a speech at the United States Military Academy at West Point, may be costly—but not perhaps as costly as the months of indecision have been.
According to the latest Gallup Poll, Americans are increasingly disappointed in the president's handling of events in Afghanistan. Only 35 percent say they approve of the way he is handling things there, down from 49 percent in September and 56 percent in July, an overall decline of 21 points in just four months.
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Global Warming E-Mails Scandal Show Scientists May Have Cooked the Facts
Tweet Share on Facebook November 30, 2009 Comment (103)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
It is starting to look like President Barack Obama, aided and abetted by former Vice President Al Gore, Sens. Barbara Boxer, and John F. Kerry and others, may have lied this nation into a war against man-made global warming.
Preliminary analysis of the contents of thousands of E-mails and documents taken from the computer archives of the Climate Research Unit at England's University of East Anglia—possibly by a hacker, possibly by a whistleblower—indicate a number of the world's most important scientists engaged in research designed to prove that global warming really does exist may have been cooking the books.
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Polls Give Republicans Reasons to be Thankful
Tweet Share on Facebook November 25, 2009 Comment (9)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Just in time for the holiday pollster Scott Rasmussen has found yet another reason for Republicans to be thankful.
According to Rasmussen's latest national telephone survey, the GOP has extended its lead in the Congressional generic ballot test to seven points, representing almost a complete flip from just one year ago. Respondents said they would vote for the generic Republican congressional candidate over the Democrat by 44 percent to 37 percent in the next election.
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Nearly Half the Cost of a Thanksgiving Dinner Comes From Taxes
Tweet Share on Facebook November 24, 2009 Comment (15)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Thanksgiving is a time for family and for reflection, a time to kick back and consider all the ways in which we, as Americans, have been blessed over the previous year. Now, just in time for the holiday the folks at the Americans for Tax Reform Foundation have released a mini-study pointing out one way in which we can be "unthankful."
According to them, nearly half the cost of a typical Thanksgiving dinner for 10 people is taxes. Using figures provided by the American Farm Bureau Federation, ATRF's Center for Fiscal Responsibility has determined the typical tax bite comes to just under 41 percent of the total cost of the meal.
