The Decline of the Obama Presidency
His second term is coming undone not because of scandal but because of decisions made in the previous four years.
John Dos Passos, the novelist and historian, once said: "Often things you think are just beginning are coming to an end." His observation was made in the 1960s. But it's true today of Barack Obama's presidency and the promise of a bright future for his second term.Mr. Obama's re-election stirred grand expectations. The vote heralded a new liberal era, or so it was claimed. His victory was said to reflect ideological, cultural and demographic trends that could keep Democrats in the majority for years to come. His second four years in the White House would be just the beginning.
Now, six months later, the Obama administration is in an unexpected and sharp state of decline. Mr. Obama has little influence on Congress. His presidency has no theme. He pivots nervously from issue to issue. What there is of an Obama agenda consists, at the moment, of leftovers from his first term or proposals that he failed to emphasize in his re-election campaign and thus have practically no chance of passage.
Congressional Republicans neither trust nor fear the president. And Democrats on Capitol Hill, to whom Mr. Obama has never been close, have grown leery of him. In the Senate, Democrats complain privately about his interference with the biggest domestic policy matter of 2013, immigration reform. His effect, the senators believe, can only be to weaken the fragile bipartisan coalition for reform and make passage of major legislation more perilous.
The Obama breakdown was not caused by the trio of scandals—IRS, Justice Department, Benghazi—now confronting the president. The decline preceded them. It's the result of what Mr. Obama did in his first term, during the campaign and in the two months following his re-election. But the scandals have worsened his plight and made recovery next to impossible.
To be clear, the two problems—the decline and the scandals—are different matters. The scandals have not been linked directly to the president. They are vexing to the administration, but they are not the source of its current impotence. Instead, Mr. Obama's power and influence have been sapped as a direct result of his own choices and decisions. He also suffers from shortcomings normal to a second term, such as a new, less able team of advisers and cabinet members and the arrogance fed by an impressive re-election.
In his first term, when Democrats controlled the House and Senate, Mr. Obama ignored Republicans—he didn't need their votes to pass the $800 billion stimulus, the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) and Dodd-Frank, with its fresh wave of Wall Street regulations. Then, after Republicans captured the House in the 2010 midterm election, his efforts to reach agreements with them proved futile.
Why did Mr. Obama fail at compromise? For one thing, he is rarely able to mask his contempt for Republicans, especially those with conservative views. For another, he began to question Republicans' motives, insisting publicly that their paramount goal in Washington is to protect the rich from higher taxes. As a tactic for encouraging compromise, his approach was counterproductive.
Robert Merry, the editor of the National Interest magazine and a longtime Washington journalist, recently pinpointed a bigger reason for the impasse after 2010: "It is a deadlock born largely of the president's resolve to push an agenda for which he has no clear national consensus." In other words, Mr. Obama is too liberal to find common ground with Republicans. The spending cuts he offers are illusory, the tax increases specific.
Then, after the November election, Mr. Obama spurned conciliation. He upped the ante, calling for higher spending, a new economic stimulus and an increase in the debt limit without congressional approval. Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell laughed out loud when he heard the proposal.
Mr. Obama used his last bit of leverage to prevail over Republicans in the fiscal-cliff budget negotiations late last year. With the Bush-era tax cuts due to expire Dec. 31, the president forced Republicans to accept a hefty tax hike on the top 2% of wage earners. His short-term victory has had long-term political consequences. Republicans vowed to oppose new tax increases, which ruled out a "grand bargain" to reduce the deficit and national debt.
The exclusion of Republicans from a role in crafting ObamaCare has also backfired. By failing to ensure that the GOP had some influence on the health-care law, the president gave them no reason to support its implementation. With ObamaCare more unpopular than ever, House Republicans voted last month to repeal it. The vote was largely symbolic, but it was telling that two Democrats joined the effort. Short of repeal, Republican elected officials across the country are committed to making the law's implementation, beginning this year, as difficult as possible.
Nor is tax reform likely to get anywhere this year or next despite Mr. Obama's support, at least rhetorically, for the idea. He wants to eliminate tax preferences and loopholes so the government can collect more revenue. To win those changes, though, he would need make a bargain with Republicans, offering to cut tax rates, including the top rate on individual income, to generate faster economic growth. That clashes with Mr. Obama's zeal for higher taxes on the well-to-do.
Faced with such obstacles, the president could focus instead on his own domestic agenda—if he had one. He doesn't. He's paying the price for a re-election campaign that was based on attacking his opponent, Mitt Romney, and not much else. In the president's State of the Union address in February, he endorsed a $9 minimum wage and universal prekindergarten for 4-year-olds, but those proposals lack a popular mandate. If he had campaigned for them last year, they might have better prospects now.
More often than not, presidents focus on foreign policy in their second terms. But Mr. Obama's practice is to downgrade foreign policy in favor of domestic concerns. Where he has sought to restrain foreign governments—Russia, Iran, North Korea—he has been unsuccessful. His speech in May on national security and the terrorist threat revived an issue from his 2008 campaign, the closing of the terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay. The chance that will happen is slim.
He is also pushing two leftovers from his first year in office, immigration reform and gun control. What's striking about Mr. Obama's handling of both is his complete absence of influence. On gun control, his speeches had zero impact. On immigration, his influence is entirely negative. He can impede a bill. He cannot aid its passage.
All this has left Mr. Obama in a state of weakness. And Democrats are increasingly blaming him. Doug Sosnik, a former senior adviser in the Clinton White House, wrote in a memo last month that Mr. Obama's re-election "was a great political achievement, but the fact that he didn't set out a clear policy agenda for a second term left him without a clear mandate to govern over a politically divided Congress."
Mr. Sosnik, who is now deputy commissioner of the National Basketball Association, added: "There's not a single member of either party [in Congress] who fears paying a political price for not falling in line with the President, making it even more difficult to get members to cast difficult votes."
Mr. Obama's top priority now is winning the House in 2014 while retaining control of the Senate. "I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that we've got Nancy Pelosi back in the speakership," he said last week at a Democratic fundraiser in Chicago. In Mr. Obama's case, "everything" is unlikely to be enough.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324412604578519482313147400.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
Holder's Seat Getting Hotter?
Are the long knives finally getting unsheathed for Eric Holder? Veteran NBC Newsman Tom Brokaw offered this blunt assessment of Holder's viability on Meet the Press:
"Boy, I think it's tough to see how he does in this case," Brokaw said. "But it's up to the president ... He has become obviously the lightning rod for a lot of the criticism just on this panel and certainly in Republican circles. From a political point of view, one of the ways that you can measure the impact of all of this and the fairness of it is think if this had happened in the Bush administration with John Ashcroft as the attorney general. You know full well that the Democrats on the left would be going very hard after them with these issues that are in play."
The New York Times piece cited by both Gregory and Brokaw hints that President Obama's proverbial bus may be revving up its engine:
Over the course of four and a half years, no other member of President Obama’s cabinet has been at the center of so many polarizing episodes or the target of so much criticism. While the White House publicly backed Mr. Holder as he tried to smooth over the latest uproar amid new speculation about his future, some in the West Wing privately tell associates they wish he would step down, viewing him as politically maladroit. But the latest attacks may stiffen the administration’s resistance in the near term to a change for fear of emboldening critics … But that does not mitigate the frustration of some presidential aides. “The White House is apoplectic about him, and has been for a long time,” said a Democratic former government official who did not want to be identified while talking about friends. Some advisers to Mr. Obama believe that Mr. Holder does not manage or foresee problems, the former official said. “How hard would it be to anticipate that The A.P. would be unhappy?” the former official said. “And then they haven’t defended their position.”Brokaw believes Team Obama may be executing a Beltway "two-step," where named administration officials stand by their man on the record, while deputies telegraph the White House's true sentiments on background. In this case, the Times reports that West Wing insiders are trying to nudge Holder toward the door, his central crime being political maladriotness. Their "apoplexy" over the Attorney General isn't on the merits of his terrible decisions and obvious dishonesty, mind you. They're cool with his behavior -- from pressing for Bush-era recriminations, to backing New York City trials for Al Qaeda leaders, to presiding over and misleading Congress on Fast & Furious, to spying on journalists. What they can't abide is Holder's lack of political finesse in carrying out his agenda. These unnamed administration sources say they "wish" Holder would just step down on his own and spare everyone more headaches. What they fail to mention, of course, is that the Attorney General serves at the pleasure of the president. Barack Obama can pull the plug on Holder whenever he'd like; "wishing" has nothing to do with it.
Holder's stewardship of the Justice Department has been controversial, ham-fisted, and exceedingly political. In the midst of the current scandal, Holder has alternatively pleaded ignorance and innocence -- calling further into question his veracity, and his PR team's latest ploy was an abject embarrassment. The Attorney General is a lightning rod. He's an incompetent at best, and a malicious liar at worst. He's being investigated for perjury, the prima facie case for which is rather strong. He's been held in criminal contempt of Congress on a separate issue. And he's carrying out a farcical investigation into himself, which is a public laughingstock. Why hasn't the president tossed Holder overboard, as he's done with other subordinates who've outlived their usefulness? Three prevailing theories: (1) Holder knows too much. Because the Attorney General knows "where the bodies are buried" within this administration, Obama can't afford to alienate him by offering him up as a sacrificial lamb. (2) Obama and Holder's relationship is very strong, so the former is treating the latter with extraordinary patience. Obama places a high premium on political loyalty; in addition to being a close friend and confidante, Holder has been a reliable ally in wielding his power to advance the president's agenda over the years. (3) Cutting Holder loose in the thick of scandalmania (which appears to be expanding by the day) may accomplish little more than emboldening Obama's critics and fueling the media feeding frenzy. I personally come down in the middle of options two and three. Option one would be more compelling if I didn't believe Holder is extremely unlikely to "flip" on Obama under almost any circumstance; he likely sees his legacy as inextricably linked to his boss's, and would therefore do nothing to intentionally harm the Obama presidency.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2013/06/03/holders-seat-getting-hotter-n1611324
‘Temporary’ farm subsidy program may finally meet the reaper
The building is one of the finest on Central Park West. Celebrity residents. Park views. Units priced at up to $24 million. It is most definitely not a farm.But last year, the U.S. government sent $9,070 in farm subsidies to an apartment here.
Sippel does own farmland, but it’s in Missouri. Somebody there does the work.
Still, Sippel gets the federal payments, which were originally meant to keep small farmers afloat. “I’m kind of an absentee landlord,” she said.
The money, it turns out, comes from one cockeyed farm-aid program that was supposed to end in 2003. It didn’t: Congress kept it alive and now hands out almost $5 billion a year using oddly relaxed rules.
As long as recipients own farmland, they are not required to grow any crops there. Or live on the farm. Or even visit it.
The program is one of Washington’s walking dead — “temporary” giveaway programs that have staggered on years beyond their intended expiration dates. Letting them live is an old and expensive congressional habit, still unbroken in this age of austerity.
Now, both the House and Senate are trying to kill off this budget leftover, 10 years late.
“It’s something that was supposed to die [that] has gotten an extra decade of life. So, do the math,” said Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group, which has fought these subsidies for years. In all, the program has cost at least $46 billion more than it was supposed to.
For elected officials, a temporary program is a little act of political magic; it allows them to take credit for creating a program and also for ending it — all at once. The hard job, of course, is actually letting the thing die.
That task is pushed off to future officials, who often push it off again. So Washington is now full of “temporary” programs that are old enough to vote.
The Essential Air Service program, a subsidy for flights to small airports, was supposed to expire in 1988. It’s still alive. The widely popular research and development tax credit has been a temporary measure since 1981. It was renewed, along with more than 50 other temporary programs, in January’s “fiscal cliff” deal.
And — buried among the USDA’s array of aid programs for farmers — there is this death-cheating, farming-optional farm subsidy.
It has become a case study in how a temporary giveaway turns permanent, but it began in 1996 as an idea to save the government money.
A penny-pinching Republican Congress wanted to eliminate the complex system of subsidy payments that had begun in the New Deal, but it didn’t want to make farmers quit cold turkey.
So Congress devised a kind of nicotine patch for farm subsidies. The new program would pay out smaller and smaller amounts over seven years. Then it would end.
To make the changes more palatable to farmers, Congress loosened the requirements for getting the payments. They would be calculated based on a farmer’s past harvests. In the future, farmers could grow the same crops. Or different ones.
“These are not welfare payments. These are declining market transition payments,” said then-Rep. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the architect of the plan. When those payments finally ended, Roberts promised, Congress would have finally gotten “the dead hand of government out of the business of farming.”
Roberts’ seven-year plan held up. For about two years.
Then, in 1998, farm income fell. A drought crippled harvests. The farm lobby howled for help. Congress complied by adding $2.9 billion in extra payments. The declining transition payments would no longer decline before their end date.
In 2002, Congress got rid of the end date, too.
Farm income was on another downswing then. The budget-cutting fever of the 1990s had passed. Congress renamed these giveaways “direct payments” — no longer a transitional measure but an expected, regular transfer from taxpayer to government to farmer.
Roberts voted “nay” as his temporary payments became permanent.
“I guess we put the seed of reform in the ground, and it sprouted up there for a while, and maybe it grew into a noxious weed,” Roberts, now a senator, said in a telephone interview last week.
In 2008, with Democrats in charge of Congress, the payments were renewed again. This time, Roberts was a “yea.” He worried that if they disappeared, legislators would come up with something more expensive and heavy-handed to replace them.
The payments were renewed one more time in January, through the end of 2013.
But problems have appeared. The features that had made these payments a good short-term political gesture — their relaxed rules and regular cash flow — made them terrible as a long-term aid program.
That’s because farm aid is supposed to be a safety net, ready during hard times.
This was not that. This was an ATM, spitting out money in good times and bad.
“Direct payments make no sense at all,” said Harwood Schaffer, a professor who analyzes farm policy at the University of Tennessee. “When corn is $2 a bushel or $7 a bushel, they get the same direct payments. So at $7 a bushel it simply increases their profit.”
Recent analyses of the program have found that it subsidizes some people who aren’t really farming: the idle, the urban, and occasionally the dead.
The idle include recipients at 2,300 farms that haven’t grown crops at all for the past five years, and 622 that haven’t grown anything for 10, according to the Government Accountability Office.
In addition, the program has paid hundreds of millions to people who lived more than 300 miles from the farmland they owned. That’s legal, under the program’s rules, but only if the owner shares in the farm’s financial risks and remains “actively engaged” in farm decisions from afar.
But these rules do not seem to be strictly enforced.
“I am not the farmer. But I have a farmer. And I don’t understand the mechanics of the [payment] whatsoever,” Catharine Snowdon said.
Snowdon lives in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood, but a trust at her address receives direct payments tied to a farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
Last year, the government sent $1,208, according to Agriculture Department data compiled by the Environmental Working Group.
Then, in 1998, farm income fell. A drought crippled harvests. The farm lobby howled for help. Congress complied by adding $2.9 billion in extra payments. The declining transition payments would no longer decline before their end date.
In 2002, Congress got rid of the end date, too.
Farm income was on another downswing then. The budget-cutting fever of the 1990s had passed. Congress renamed these giveaways “direct payments” — no longer a transitional measure but an expected, regular transfer from taxpayer to government to farmer.
Roberts voted “nay” as his temporary payments became permanent.
“I guess we put the seed of reform in the ground, and it sprouted up there for a while, and maybe it grew into a noxious weed,” Roberts, now a senator, said in a telephone interview last week.
In 2008, with Democrats in charge of Congress, the payments were renewed again. This time, Roberts was a “yea.” He worried that if they disappeared, legislators would come up with something more expensive and heavy-handed to replace them.
The payments were renewed one more time in January, through the end of 2013.
But problems have appeared. The features that had made these payments a good short-term political gesture — their relaxed rules and regular cash flow — made them terrible as a long-term aid program.
That’s because farm aid is supposed to be a safety net, ready during hard times.
This was not that. This was an ATM, spitting out money in good times and bad.
“Direct payments make no sense at all,” said Harwood Schaffer, a professor who analyzes farm policy at the University of Tennessee. “When corn is $2 a bushel or $7 a bushel, they get the same direct payments. So at $7 a bushel it simply increases their profit.”
Recent analyses of the program have found that it subsidizes some people who aren’t really farming: the idle, the urban, and occasionally the dead.
The idle include recipients at 2,300 farms that haven’t grown crops at all for the past five years, and 622 that haven’t grown anything for 10, according to the Government Accountability Office.
In addition, the program has paid hundreds of millions to people who lived more than 300 miles from the farmland they owned. That’s legal, under the program’s rules, but only if the owner shares in the farm’s financial risks and remains “actively engaged” in farm decisions from afar.
But these rules do not seem to be strictly enforced.
“I am not the farmer. But I have a farmer. And I don’t understand the mechanics of the [payment] whatsoever,” Catharine Snowdon said.
Snowdon lives in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood, but a trust at her address receives direct payments tied to a farm on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
“I think it’s soybeans every year and corn some other years,”
Snowdon said when asked about the farm’s management. She said she had
never investigated exactly why the payments came. “It’s not a
significant amount of money for me to get excited about it.”
The Environmental Working Group found at least 24 addresses in the District, and at least 21 in Manhattan, that received more than $1,000 in direct payments last year.
The Agriculture Department says it is possible for these urban recipients to turn down these payments.
But it’s very rare.
Now, Congress may end the payouts instead.
In both the House and Senate, committees have passed farm bills that would end these direct payments. They would be replaced with other programs that often require farmers to grow actual crops.
“You got people on Wall Street that probably own farmland,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). “Well, [they] ain’t gonna get ’em anymore.”
Grassley himself will lose direct payments if the bill passes — he got $8,207 last year for a farm he owns in Iowa. Others on Capitol Hill get more. Last year, the program paid $70,574 to Rep. Stephen Lee Fincher (R) and his wife. Fincher, a fiscal conservative from Frog Jump, Tenn., has also called for the payments to end.
Direct payments seem easier to cut now, because farm income is near record highs. Corn, for instance, is selling above $6.60 a bushel.
“It’s become readily apparent that you couldn’t save them,” said Mary Kay Thatcher of the American Farm Bureau Federation. Thatcher got $1,340 in direct payments last year for her Iowa farm.
President Obama has also called for eliminating the payments. So it seems that the subsidy that cheated death is almost gone.
Almost. But not quite.
The House’s farm bill would allow a subset of direct payments — those for cotton farmers — to continue for two years. The reason: There’s a new aid program being set up to help those farmers, but it hasn’t been implemented yet.
To tide them over, the cotton farmers will continue to get payments. At the House Agriculture Committee, they say there’s no reason to worry about that.
After all, these payouts are only going to be temporary.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/temporary-farm-subsidy-program-may-finally-meet-the-reaper/2013/06/02/3e20d25e-c25b-11e2-97fa-0f57decebbbf_story.html
The Environmental Working Group found at least 24 addresses in the District, and at least 21 in Manhattan, that received more than $1,000 in direct payments last year.
The Agriculture Department says it is possible for these urban recipients to turn down these payments.
But it’s very rare.
Now, Congress may end the payouts instead.
In both the House and Senate, committees have passed farm bills that would end these direct payments. They would be replaced with other programs that often require farmers to grow actual crops.
“You got people on Wall Street that probably own farmland,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa). “Well, [they] ain’t gonna get ’em anymore.”
Grassley himself will lose direct payments if the bill passes — he got $8,207 last year for a farm he owns in Iowa. Others on Capitol Hill get more. Last year, the program paid $70,574 to Rep. Stephen Lee Fincher (R) and his wife. Fincher, a fiscal conservative from Frog Jump, Tenn., has also called for the payments to end.
Direct payments seem easier to cut now, because farm income is near record highs. Corn, for instance, is selling above $6.60 a bushel.
“It’s become readily apparent that you couldn’t save them,” said Mary Kay Thatcher of the American Farm Bureau Federation. Thatcher got $1,340 in direct payments last year for her Iowa farm.
President Obama has also called for eliminating the payments. So it seems that the subsidy that cheated death is almost gone.
Almost. But not quite.
The House’s farm bill would allow a subset of direct payments — those for cotton farmers — to continue for two years. The reason: There’s a new aid program being set up to help those farmers, but it hasn’t been implemented yet.
To tide them over, the cotton farmers will continue to get payments. At the House Agriculture Committee, they say there’s no reason to worry about that.
After all, these payouts are only going to be temporary.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/temporary-farm-subsidy-program-may-finally-meet-the-reaper/2013/06/02/3e20d25e-c25b-11e2-97fa-0f57decebbbf_story.html
New Details Emerge on IRS Targeting Conservatives
Republicans’ top House investigator revealed details
of whistleblower testimony on Sunday that suggest the scandal involving
targeting of Tea Party groups by the Internal Revenue Service was more
coordinated than the agency has admitted.One IRS agent interviewed by the committee revealed that orders to target some groups had come directly from Washington, D.C., contradicting statements from the agency’s tax-exempt division chief Lois Lerner and other administration officials.
Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) did not mince words in an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” calling White House press secretary Jay Carney a “paid liar” who, Issa said, is “still making up things about what happened and calling this a local rogue.”
That claim has the left incensed, with some calling on Issa to apologize and others suggesting Republicans may be “overreaching” in their investigation.
The scandal, though, continued to deepen over the weekend after reports that IRS targeting involved 88 employees, suggesting more involvement by agency officials in Washington than the IRS and the White House have admitted.
Personal stories of groups that were apparently targeted for additional scrutiny also continue to emerge. Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney detailed the chilling effect that IRS targeting had on one northern Virginia Tea Party group:
The Manassas Tea Party sought tax-exempt status in May 2010, partly so it could raise money more easily. It wanted to be what’s called a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, to get a tax exemption for itself and so its donors could remain anonymous. (In that IRS category, the donors themselves can’t claim a tax deduction.)
The IRS gave its approval only last January after demanding volumes of paperwork.The weekend also brought news that former acting IRS commissioner Doug Shulman’s wife is an outspoken left-wing activist who has joined Organizing for Action and Occupy groups to protest conservative political spending.
“It was without question stifling,” chairman Dan Arnold said. “We stopped fundraising altogether. We kept our activities at a very low scale. People became less involved because they weren’t quite sure what kind of organization we were.”
Susan Anderson, Shulman’s wife, is an employee of the left-wing campaign finance reform group Public Campaign, which minimized concerns about Tea Party targeting after the agency admitted that it had singled out conservative groups.
Public Campaign receives funding from major labor unions and other liberal political groups.
http://freebeacon.com/new-details-emerge-on-irs-targeting-conservatives/
GSA Blows Quarter Billion Dollars on Breaking Lease; Lies to Congress About It
Just a few blocks away from Nationals Park the federal government holds a below-market lease at 2100 2nd Street, SW, Washington D.C.The 600,000 square foot lease doesn’t expire until May 15, 2018 and is valued at least $48 million in rent and likely represents another $40 million in savings below market rates for commercial real estate.
But, in a time of tight budgets, when taxes have been raised on all Americans to support Washington’s addiction to spending, bureaucrats at the General Services Administration (GSA) have decided to…wait… abandon the cost-effective space, move the employees to a new, higher rent building and pay rent on the vacated building; at the cost to taxpayers of at least $250 million according to sources familiar with the terms of the lease.
And we wonder why the government has such a tough time cutting their budget while having such an easy cutting our household budgets through taxes?
Sources close to Capitol Hill, however, say there is growing outrage over this specific illustration of the waste of more than $250 million taxpayer dollars.
“The GSA is making a major mistake by neglecting to take advantage of existing below market lease rates for an extended term. It is outrageous that they simply seem to be ignoring a significant cost savings to the taxpayer,” said a source close to Congress. “This is a time we all need to be exercising prudent fiscal responsibility, a basic responsibility of the GSA. They have dropped the ball and had better pick it up soon”.
I guess that’s the reason why the GSA has suddenly gone all “Eric Holder” on Congress, testifying to the House subcommittee responsible for the oversight of federal real estate that the broken lease won’t cost taxpayers a dime, when in fact the opposite seems true.
From the Washington Business Journal:
The federal government will be on the hook for at least $30 million in lease payments for the Coast Guard's current Buzzard Point headquarters after the agency moves to St. Elizabeths later this year, according to sources familiar with terms of the agency's lease with Monday Properties Inc.
That would contradict congressional testimony from Dorothy Robyn, public buildings service commissioner for the General Services Administration, who told a House subcommittee May 22 that the federal government has an early termination clause with Monday and will not owe any rent.
Sources say the Coast Guard is allowed to terminate its Buzzard Point lease in May 2015, meaning the government would have to pay the lease term until then. There remains disagreement over how much that exposure would be: Some sources say it would be $30 million, while others say it will be as high as $60 million.
That’s not just Contempt of Congress- or even perjury- that’s Contempt of Common Sense, Taxpayers, Economics and, most likely, at least a minor violation of Einstein’s concept of space-time.
Negotiated in 2008, the lease is estimated to save the government at least $14 per square foot in a real estate market that often fetches $50 per square foot for commercial property. For all intents and purposes, the lease is a shrewd one to hold at a time that the government is trying to save a few dollars.
“Not only is the remaining 18 months of vacant/wasted space a problem,” said a person familiar with the lease, “but also that GSA foolishly terminated early a major federal asset that it had for years into the future – very cheap space that is perfectly well suited for numerous federal requirements. This is possibly the most foolish of all GSA blunders, and hurts the taxpayers the most.”
The government could save a lot of taxpayer dollars if it continued to occupy the building including:
· $60 million in lease liability in an unoccupied building
· $40 million they already spent in infrastructure improvements
· $140-280 million in savings by extending the terms already negotiated at below market rates.
Because of the below-market deal negotiated in 2008, instead of moving out, the government should be moving more people in.
I know we see this type of government waste every day – but hundreds of millions of dollars are going to be wasted by keeping this building unoccupied – an outrage for sure.
But unlike a lot of other government outrages, this one can still be remedied.
Congress? Can you hear us?
Because someone has been taking “Eric Holder” lessons from you.
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/johnransom/2013/06/03/gsa-blows-quarter-billion-dollars-on-breaking-lease-lies-to-congress-about-it-n1611531/page/full
Major Hillary Clinton Supporter Jailed
A major Hillary Clinton supporter was sentenced to more than two years in federal prison on Friday for illegally funneling nearly $200,000 into Clinton’s Senate and White House campaigns, the Associated Press reported.
William Danielczyk, a northern Virginia resident, pleaded guilty to violations of federal campaign finance laws. He admitted to illegally reimbursing employees of his company, Galen Capital, for contributions to Clinton’s campaigns.
According to prosecutors, Danielczyk hoped to secure an ambassadorship or other favorable treatment under a Clinton presidency.
He was sentenced to 28 months in prision.
In imposing his sentence, U.S. District Judge James Cacheris compared Danielczyk’s case to defense lobbyist Paul Magliocchetti, who received 27 months for illegally funneling more than $380,000 to House members controlling the Pentagon’s budget.
Arguing for a lighter sentence, defense lawyer Abbe Lowell said Danielczyk’s case differed from more serious violations in part because Danielczyk did not seek any special favors in exchange for his fundraising efforts.
But prosecutor Eric Gibson disputed that, citing grand jury testimony that Danielczyk had told others he hoped to land an ambassadorship and saw fundraising as a means to achieve it. […]
The scheme was first exposed more than five years ago by The Wall Street Journal. At the time, Danielczyk lied and said he had not reimbursed people for making contributions.
Prosecutor Eric Gibson said the lies to the media were just a small part of Danielczyk’s efforts to hide his scheme, including falsely describing reimbursements to his straw donors as bonuses and “consulting fees” and swapping out a laptop computer with incriminating evidence that he was obliged to turn over to the FBI.http://freebeacon.com/major-hillary-clinton-supporter-jailed/
Kindergarten and the Kafkaesque
To follow up on the recent story about a five-year-old boy suspended for showing a cap gun to his friend on a school bus, Investor's Business Daily relates a charming collection of similar anecdotes regarding such child abuse at U.S. re-education camps -- oops, I mean public schools. Each tale involves a very young child receiving severe punishment for the offense of imagining he had a gun.In the most recent case in question, a kindergarten student in Maryland shows his cap gun to a friend, and is browbeaten for two hours by school officials, without his mother even being notified, until he wets his pants in fear. In another case, a boy caught with "a quarter-sized Lego toy gun" on his school bus is threatened with suspension from the bus, detention, and the demand of a written apology to the bus driver. Perhaps my favorite story, however, were I a fan of surreal horror, would be that of the seven-year-old boy who bites a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun and then says "bang, bang," for which threatening behavior he receives a two-day suspension.
Needless to say, not one of these cases involves an actual threat or danger to anyone. Nor do any of them even indicate malicious intent on the part of the "offending" child; these were just boys playing, having fun, showing off their toys, or goofing around in the lunch room. In other words, their punishment -- any punishment -- seems disproportionate compared to their alleged wrongdoing.
But that conclusion, though correct from the point of view of common sense, is too easy, and actually misses the point. This is where the lines of communication between ordinary humans and progressive authoritarians break down every time. For in the Kafkaesque world of progressive regulatory theocracy, there is no disproportion at all between these children's offenses and their punishments, once you understand that the children were not being punished for threatening or endangering anyone. Rather, they were being punished for "referencing" firearms in a nonjudgmental -- or even (gasp) approving -- manner. In other words, their offense, in each case, was, in adult terms, nothing less than a thought crime.
The boys' harmless actions were unacceptable precisely because they were harmless. That is to say, in the current moral grammar of progressivism, it is an offense against society to think about guns without hating or fearing them -- just as it is an offense to think about Western history without the Marxist context of systemic oppression, to think of female modesty without its radical feminist critique, or to think of wealth without simultaneously thinking of greed. Thus, just as with these other notions, entertaining the idea of guns in an innocuous way is indecent, immoral, and warrants one's removal from the collective.
No one ever mistook a half-eaten Pop Tart for a weapon. And that is precisely why you are forbidden from saying "bang, bang" while wielding a half-eaten Pop Tart. If this still makes no sense to you, that is because you are not crazy. But try, for a moment, to put yourself into the twisted psyche of a progressive authoritarian, and ask yourself this question: What is the message being sent through such rules, and the lesson being taught through their enforcement?
First lesson: guns are bad -- all guns, in any situation, regardless of who has them, or why. Even your gun is bad in your hands. The gun itself is inherently evil, and not to be trusted. And that means you are not to be trusted if you imagine that guns could ever be an innocuous or innocent toy. Having a gun, or even pretending to have a gun, makes you, ipso facto, a bad child. And the same, by implication, goes for your parents, your grandparents, or anyone else who has a gun, or wishes to have one.
As I have recently explained in theoretical terms, the very nature and purpose of compulsory public education is to soften the minds of each new generation for the tyrannical "paradigm shift" to be put into practice once that generation becomes the voting public. Here is an all-too-perfect practical instantiation of my argument. No governing document, and no natural rights theory, will be any match for the majority opinion issuing from a generation raised according to the "all guns are evil" principle.
Second lesson: it is not just guns themselves that are bad; even the thought of guns is unacceptable. Fake guns, Lego guns, Pop Tart guns, finger guns -- "guns" that no one could ever mistake for a real gun -- are offensive. The psychological aim is clear: you will be punished for imagining guns, until the government (er, I mean your teacher) washes that evil image from your dirty mind forever. Learning how to use contraceptives in your bisexual experimentation is an integral part of the elementary school curriculum; smoking dope like President Obama is just good clean fun; but getting caught with the thought of a gun in your mind is a suspension offense, and the police may need to be called in.
The ultimate goal is not to punish such thoughts; punishment is merely the means. The real goal is to break the young soul to self-censorship and self-accusation regarding all thoughts related to personal efficacy, individual power, independence, and self-defense. A submissive citizen does not "cling" to his weapons. Therefore, future citizens must be taught that such "clinging" is a vice. Submission to the collective is the goal. Seen from that perspective, it is quite logical to try to make children self-conscious about how they eat their Pop Tarts, lest they appear to be "threatening" society. Notice, they are not actually threatening any person; their threat, being imaginary, is abstract. It is a threat to "other students" in the abstract, to the collective. The child is learning to feel guilty if he catches himself in possession of thoughts unacceptable to the state as such; that is, he is learning to submit.
Kafka's world is our world. The nightmare logic of infinite bureaucratic authority which drives a man into admitting his own guilt without even understanding what he is accused of is the mechanism of public school indoctrination. And like Kafka's Josef K., we are all, in the compulsory progressive public school, to learn how to self-accuse, to self-incriminate, to self-condemn. And then, at the end of our submissive life of democratic self-enslavement, socialized medicine will treat us to the ignominy of an ending worthy of Josef K. -- "'Like a dog!' he said; it was as if the shame of it should outlive him."
At a personal level, my initial reaction to these school horror stories is that I had better hurry up and finish the book I am writing about public education before I lose the stomach for it. More broadly, however, I can't help thinking that the old philosophical mindbender, "How do you know you are not dreaming right now?" is getting more difficult to answer all the time. Surely no waking reality ever looked like this.
No comments:
Post a Comment