From the wacky to the infuriating, Sen. Tom Coburn's annual Wastebook catalogs government waste in lean times
By Susan FerrichioThe federal government this year made significant cuts to important services and programs while at the same time wasting $30 billion on frivolous expenditures like the "pillownauts" study NASA conducted to learn the effects of lying in bed all day, a new watchdog report shows.
Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., on Tuesday released his fourth annual "Wastebook," a catalog of questionable government spending that is, at best, pretty wacky (funding for "Popular Romance Project" -- $1 million) and, at its worst, infuriating (continuing pay for Army Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter -- $52,000).
Coburn noted in his latest report that the questionable spending continued even while the government was slashing other programs and services to meet the spending mandates of the 2010 Budget Control Act.
The 2013 Wastebook includes 100 examples of what Coburn called fiscal mismanagement that apparently escaped the axe of those sequestration cuts.
Resisting Immigration Reform
Identity politics rejects ending illegal immigration and reforming legal immigration.
By Victor Davis HansonWe are fast approaching what promises to be the year of “comprehensive immigration reform.” In the manner of the “Affordable Care Act,” it will not be comprehensive nor will it reform immigration.
....If there were good-faith efforts to reform legal immigration, again compromise would be easy. We would simply establish criteria that would privilege those with educational degrees and skill sets, make completely crime-free backgrounds mandatory, and ignore ethnic and racial makeup. Yet in the topsy-turvy world we live in today, such reasonable criteria would be anathema to the open-borders lobby, which will fight ferociously against the idea that conviction for a crime or public dependency should be grounds for not extending amnesties to those who came illegally and broke laws to remain in the United States. This, after all, might result not, as is the case at present, in the vast majority of new immigrants coming from Latin America and Mexico but, instead, in classically liberal fashion, in a true diversity of immigrants from Asia, Africa, and Europe as well as our own hemisphere.
If the illegal-immigration debate is not just about providing amnesty for long-residing aliens who, after once breaking immigration law, have avoided arrest and who have been gainfully employed, and if the legal-errimmigration controversy is not about establishing meritocratic criteria that would promote diversity and ignore race and ethnicity, then what drives the current acrimony?
Identity politics. The crux of present-day immigration, both legal and illegal, is the agenda of demography and politics. In crude terms, that translates into absorbing a large pool of mostly liberal future voters who look to government to provide themselves some sort of rough parity with their hosts. If someone comes from Oaxaca to Fresno without English, a diploma, and legality, then soon in his life a government program will have to offer him some sort of assistance, whether for legal advice, food, housing, education, or health care.
More important, a vast cadre of Spanish-speaking citizens is needed to serve the illegal-immigrant community, whether as translators in emergency rooms or to facilitate licensing at the DMV. They too are invested in expansions of state and federal government — as are left-wing politicians.
...What the immigration debate is not about is ensuring that illegal immigration ends and that legal immigration becomes liberal, meritocratic, and ethnically blind.
Remember that, and all the absurd rhetoric of the upcoming 2014 debate will make sense.
Cardinal Dolan’s Religious-Liberty Win
By Kathryn Jean Lopez
This has been a fascinating morning. You’d think a leading news story of the day would be: Cardinal Dolan wins in court against the Obama administration, given the Eastern court in New York yesterday issued a permanent injunction against the Department of Health and Human Services abortion-drug, contraception, sterilization mandate.
...And where the president has bragged, he has now been slapped down by a court in what’s been a high-profile battle. And yet, it appears a bit muted in the news.
'This Is the End of the Presidency'
Tracking the same horrible second-term path as Bush, can Obama learn from the past?
By Ron FournierClaiming a mandate he never had, the newly reelected president foisted a bold agenda upon Congress and the public, then watched it collapse within months—a victim of scandal, cynical opponents, and his own hubris. One despairing adviser declared, "This is the end of the presidency."
That was George W. Bush in 2005. Or was it Barack Obama this past year? Reading Peter Baker's extraordinary account of the Bush-Cheney era, Days of Fire, I found a striking number of parallels between Bush's fifth year in office and the atrocious first 12 months of President Obama's second term.
My takeaway: Obama needs to shatter the cycle of dysfunction (his and history's) or risk leaving office like Bush, unpopular and relatively unaccomplished.
Here are nine analogues between Bush's 2005 and Obama's 2013, starting with …
Bush and Obama made the same mistake. Both men convinced themselves that they were reelected because of their agendas, rather than because of negative campaign strategies that essentially disqualified their rivals—Democrat John Kerry and Republican Mitt Romney. In fact, many of the issues claimed as presidential mandates in 2005 and 2013 actually received relatively little attention from the candidates and from the media in 2004 and 2012....
Of Jane Fonda and Pope Francis
The pontiff understands the power of moral example. Today's liberal high priests do not.
By Bret StephensIn the same week that Pope Francis was named Time's Person of the Year, word arrived of the charitable contributions made by the Jane Fonda Foundation. Grand total for the years 2007 to 2011: zero dollars. The last time Ms. Fonda's Foundation made a charitable gift, reports the Smoking Gun website, was in 2006, to the tune of $1,000.
The Foundation itself has $800,000 in assets. Ms. Fonda's representatives insist she's made larger gifts, particularly through her family foundation, which in 2011 made about $350,000 in contributions from $7.2 million in net assets. But even that's not quite 5%, the legal minimum required to remain a private foundation.
...There's always an excuse for everything, especially when bathed in piety, secular or religious. But the difference between a Fonda and a Francis is that this pope doesn't seem interested in making excuses.
The world will always have its share of hypocrites in high places, and Lord knows conservatives aren't exempt. Still, liberals wondering what went wrong for them politically this season should look beyond the technical and managerial incompetence and the flaws in the policy design. The people who represent liberalism today are an unattractive bunch. They need their own Francis, leading their own moral renewal. Barack Obama isn't it.
Coercion in the Name of Tolerance
The Left doesn’t recognize the liberties of those who oppose same-sex marriage.
By Dennis Prager....Those who support this decision argue that religious principles do not apply here — what if, for example, someone’s religious principles prohibited interracial marriages? Should that individual be allowed to deny services to an interracial wedding? Of course not. Here’s why that objection is irrelevant:
1. No religion practiced in America — indeed, no world religion — has ever banned interracial marriage. That some American Christians opposed interracial marriage is of no consequence. No one assumes that every position held by any member of a religion is the position of that religion.
2. If opposition to same-sex marriage is not a legitimately held religious conviction, there is no such thing as a legitimately held religious position. Unlike opposition to interracial marriage, opposition to same-sex marriage has been the position of every religion in recorded history — as well as of every country and every American state in history until the 21st century.
3. The Colorado baker made it clear to the gay couple — as acknowledged by the court — that he would be happy to bake and sell cakes to these gay men any other time they wanted. Therefore, he is not discriminating against people based on their sexual orientation. He readily sells to people he knows to be gay. What he is unwilling to do is to participate in an event that he opposes for entirely legitimate religious reasons. Until at the most ten years ago, no one would have imagined that a person could be forced to provide goods or services for a same-sex wedding.
4. If a baker refused on religious grounds to provide the wedding cake for a polygamous wedding, should the state force him to do so? If a baker refused to provide a cake to a heterosexual couple that was celebrating living together without getting married, should the state force him to?
Some years ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote a bestseller titled Liberal Fascism. If you think that title is an exaggeration, read the book. Or just watch what liberals are doing to those who oppose same-sex marriage.
In the name of tolerance, the Left is eroding liberty in America.
GM president to taxpayers: Thanks, suckers!
By Thomas Lifson
The outgoing president of General Motors has said that the company will not consider compensating taxpayers for the $10 billion losses incurred in rescuing his company. Todd Spangler of the Detroit Free Press (via USA Today):
The General Motors bailout may have cost the government $10 billion, but GM CEO Dan Akerson rejects any suggestion that the company should compensate for the losses.In strictly legal terms, he is correct. The bailout deal was structured so as to screw taxpayers and bondholders, and protect the unions, who got to keep nearly all of the benefits they extorted out of GM, which incidentally were a major reason the company couldn't keep up with the competition. The fact the these same unions were major benefactors of the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign has nothing to do with their favored status. And incidentally, the law was violated in terms of the treatment of the bodholders, a case that is still making its way through the courts.
He says Treasury officials took the same risk assumed by anyone who purchases stock.
"I would not accept the premise that this was a bad deal," Akerson said during a question-and-answer session at the National Press Club in Washington. He also said the government's $49.5-billion aid to GM helped save billions of dollars in tax revenue and government social services....
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