White House imposes secrecy rules on first lady's lavish, celebrity-filled birthday party

By Byron York
There was a party in the East Room of the White House Saturday night, an affair attended by a reported 500 people, a lavish celebration with celebrities galore, appearances by some of the world's most popular performers, lots of dancing and powerful government officials, including, of course, the most powerful official of all, the President of the United States. And the White House wants to make sure you know as little as possible about it.
The event was First Lady Michelle Obama's 50th birthday party....
....It's not easy to enforce discipline on successful, wealthy, and famous people used to having their own way. But the White House apparently did not want to see photos of the first lady's glittery gala circulating around the Internet. So it imposed a strict rule: No cellphones. "Guests were told not to bring cellphones with them, and there was a cellphone check-in area for those who did," reported the Chicago Tribune. "Signs at the party told guests: No cellphones, no social media." People magazine added: "Guests had been greeted by a 'cell phone check' table where they deposited their camera phones on arrival and it was understood that this was not an occasion for Tweeting party photos or Facebooking details." The publications cited sources who insisted on anonymity for fear of White House reprisal.

Dartmouth professor: MLK Day is a far-right imperialist holiday

By Robby Soave

For most people, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s message was about tolerance and inclusion for all. But for radical activists at Dartmouth College, MLK Day is an excuse to protest “far-right imperialism” and discriminate against conservatives and independents.
Last week, two non-liberal Dartmouth students were barred from attending a meeting held by campus activists for the purpose of organizing public MLK Day activities. They were denied entrance by a female student, who first asked them to state their political affiliation, according to The College Fix.
The students are contributors to The Dartmouth Review — the campus’s independent, conservative student newspaper — and described themselves as independents. This was enough to get them banned from the meeting.

Obama: My low approval ratings might be kind of racist, or something

By Ed Morrissey
How to explain Barack Obama’s dramatically declining approval numbers? Well, there’s the fact that five years of Obamanomics has brought America to its lowest civilian workforce participation rate from about the decade average at the beginning of the June 2009 recovery to a 36-year low. The passage of ObamaCare turned out to be the most competent part of the whole thing, and the rollout has been an utter disaster. On top of that, our foreign policy is at its lowest ebb since Jimmy Carter, and it’s clear now that the Obama administration didn’t bother to prepare for threats in places where even a child could see them. Plus, there’s that whole Lie of the Year — “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”
The President has another theory. Apparently he thinks that people suddenly discovered his ethnicity:

Obama’s election was one of the great markers in the black freedom struggle. In the electoral realm, ironically, the country may be more racially divided than it has been in a generation. Obama lost among white voters in 2012 by a margin greater than any victor in American history. The popular opposition to the Administration comes largely from older whites who feel threatened, underemployed, overlooked, and disdained in a globalized economy and in an increasingly diverse country. Obama’s drop in the polls in 2013 was especially grave among white voters. “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama said. “Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black President.” The latter group has been less in evidence of late.

Er … riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. In order to buy this nonsense, one would have to believe that millions of people approved of him despite his ethnicity for several years before deciding over the last few months to discover their inner Bull Connor. And that just coincided with Obama’s biggest blunders and the exposure of his dishonesty in selling ObamaCare to the public.

Stop Obamacare’s Outrageous Bailouts

By Ramesh Ponnuru
...The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has already achieved “preliminary sustainability,” an official recently told the National Journal. And what’s making the program sustainable? The prospect of a massive taxpayer bailout.
The bailout would come from the law’s “risk corridor” provisions. If insurers pay out more than 108 percent of the premiums they collect from customers in Obamacare’s exchanges, taxpayers are on the hook for about 75 percent of the extra cost. If the insurers make profits that are more than 108 percent of their collections, they have to pay back a similar proportion.
Risk corridors, if they’re limited, can serve a useful function. The Medicare prescription-drug benefit that Republicans enacted during George W. Bush’s administration has its own version of them that works well. Under Obamacare, they could spread the risk among participating insurers. Companies that wind up with relatively healthy populations of customers would subsidize those with relatively sick ones, helping stabilize the system. The Congressional Budget Office, when it last estimated the costs of the Affordable Care Act, assumed that payments to and from insurers would balance and the risk corridors wouldn’t cost taxpayers anything.
We’re looking at a different scenario now. Health insurer Humana Inc. recently warned that enrollees in the exchanges will probably be sicker than anticipated. So few if any insurers will be in surplus, and many will be seeking help. In other words, the exchanges as a whole will be unbalanced and in need of a taxpayer bailout.
....Another assumption the insurers made was that a bailout would be politically sustainable. That assumption will also be tested. Obamacare has always depended, both operationally and politically, on an alliance between the administration and insurance companies. But that alliance is vulnerable. The most controversial element of Obamacare to date -- the coercive measures it includes to get people to buy insurance -- is only there to protect the insurance companies’ viability. A bailout could be just as unpopular a sop to the insurers. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, has introduced a bill to repeal the risk-corridors provision. Its passage would be preferable to a bailout, but it would make more sense to eliminate taxpayer exposure altogether. Let companies in the exchanges subsidize each other, and leave the rest of us out of it.
Insurers are already screaming about Rubio’s proposal, desperate to keep Obamacare’s subsidies even as they ask for relief from its regulations. If Rubio’s bill or something like it passes, they would have to raise premiums and thus make their plans even more unattractive than they already are -- or just withdraw from the exchanges. Obamacare would, in other words, become even less likely to succeed than it already is.

White House week ahead: NSA fallout, prep for State of the Union address

By Brian Hughes
The White House this week will devote its attention to managing the fallout from President Obama's National Security Agency reforms and putting the finishing touches on his swiftly approaching State of the Union address.
In laying out his blueprint for controversial NSA surveillance techniques, Obama renewed the debate in Washington about the tradeoffs between national security and privacy.
...Obama and first lady Michelle Obama on Monday also will participate in a community service project to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
Obama and Vice President Joe Biden Tuesday will meet with members of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration. The president created the group after his last State of the Union address to “identify non-partisan ways to shorten lines at polling places, promote the efficient conduct of elections and provide better access to the polls for all voters.”
On Wednesday, the president and Biden will host an event at the White House for the Council on Women and Girls, chaired by Obama senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. And Obama on Thursday will welcome mayors to the White House for a reception.

The week ahead in economics: Jobs recovery, Davos and the Fed

By Joseph Lawler
...For the week ahead:
Markets and the federal government will be closed Monday for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Congress will be out of session all week.
Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and other top U.S. administrators will travel to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum starting Tuesday.
On Thursday, the National Association of Realtors will release data on sales of existing homes for December, with 4.9 million expected, according to Econoday.
The Federal Reserve may release transcripts from its meetings during 2008. The transcripts will show the decisions that Chairman Ben Bernanke and other Fed officials struggled with in 2008 as the subprime mortgage crisis unfolded and brought down Wall Street, prompting Bernanke to press Congress to pass the TARP bailout, extend trillions of dollars of credit to banks through the Fed's discount window and other programs, and lower short-term interest rates all the way to zero.

Government forces workers into unions to pay for government

By George Will
...On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether the Illinois government’s policy of herding home-care workers into unions violates the workers’ First Amendment rights. It does.
Because organized labor’s presence in the private sector has shriveled from about 35% of the workforce in the 1950s to 6.6% today, public-sector employees are labor’s oxygen. In Democratic-controlled Illinois, the relationship between the party and organized labor is, to say no more, mutually congenial. So, the government declared that providers of home care — including family members — for the elderly and others are government employees because their compensation comes from Medicaid, and because they participate in a state government program and are subject to state regulation.
...Illinois’ scheme is a trifecta of constitutional violations. It violates the right of free association of those who are coerced into a fees-paying relationship with unions — a right that, the Supreme Court has held, “plainly presupposes a freedom not to associate.”
Not to associate, for example, with groups whose expressive activities are offensive to those who are coerced into joining the groups. Second, those coerced into unions are compelled to subsidize with their dues union speech with which they may strenuously disagree. Third, after being transformed by government fiat into government employees, they are denied the First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievances in their own voices, having been forced to allow a union to petition for them.

...They actually are employees not of the government but of the care recipients, who hire the caregivers and determine working hours and conditions.
So what is the point of a union in these circumstances? Enriching the union is the point.
Illinois’ system resembles that in some other states. Until Republicans repealed Michigan’s arrangements, the SEIU extracted more than $34 million from tens of thousands of caregivers. Patently, the purpose of such systems is to enable unions to siphon away, in dues, a portion of caregivers’ pay, some of which becomes campaign contributions for the political party that created the system.

Inequality in a Crony Capitalist World

By Samuel Craig
...Crony capitalism is an expression that’s used a great deal these days, so let’s be clear what it means. Crony capitalism is not criminal activity or outright corruption — though it verges on, and often enters, these spheres. Crony capitalism is about hollowing-out market economies and replacing them with what may be described as political markets.
In political markets, the focus is no longer upon prospering through creating, refining, and offering products and services at competitive prices. Instead economic success depends upon people’s ability to harness government power to stack the economic deck in their favor. While the market’s outward form is maintained, its essential workings are supplanted by the struggle to ensure that governments, legislators, and regulators favor you at other people’s expense. In that sense, crony capitalism certainly constitutes a form of redistribution: away from taxpayers, consumers and businesses focused on creating wealth, and towards the organized, powerful, and politically-connected.
So who are the crony capitalists? Obviously it includes businesses who lobby governments and legislators for exemptions, monopolies, subsidies, access to “no-bid” contracts, price-controls, bailouts, tariff-protection, preferential tax-treatment, and access to government-provided credit at below-market interest-rates.
Invariably such privileges are premised on the claim that a particular business or industry somehow merits special treatment. The former Treasury Secretary, the late William Simon, once recalled watching “with incredulity as businessmen ran to the government in every crisis..… Always, such gentlemen proclaimed their devotion to free enterprise.… [But] their own case… was always unique and… justified [the favor].”
...What, you may ask, has this got to do with inequality? In a word: everything. Crony capitalist arrangements create distinct groups of insiders and outsiders that have nothing to do with classic criteria of justice such as need, merit, and willingness to take on risk and responsibility. All that matters in a crony capitalist world is closeness to state power.

Why did Asef Mohammad trespass on a New Jersey water treatment plant?

By Ethel C Fenig

Was Asef Muhammed just going for a walk one night when he decided oh, just for the heck of it, to jump over a barbed wire fence surrounding a water treatment plant near his home in New Jersey (yes, that New Jersey) and then oh, look, climb into a water holding tank and then, oh, why not? crawl into a pipe where he oh so inconveniently got stuck? Could be. After all, according to the report from the Asbury Park Press (yes, that Asbury Park)

"There is no reason for anyone whatsoever to climb into a pipe," said Rich Henning, a spokesman for United Water. "It is a facility that pumps water, pumps it out of the ground. This is certainly the first time we have ever seen anything like this." In 25 years in this business, I have never seen this happen," Henning said.

Well, there is always a first time. And there must be a reason. What could it be?

After someone heard his cries for help, New Jersey public rescue officials freed him in an expensive and time consuming operation after which Mr. Mohammed

was placed under arrest and will be charged with fourth-degree trespassing, an indictable offense that will be presented to a grand jury, Fountain said.

Trespassing. But why was he trespassing at a water treatment plant? Was he really that thirsty? Or did he have other plans in mind? Not to be racist or anything like that; after all, as someone once said, "At this point in time, what difference does it make?"

Hillary the Hyped

What difference the Senate Intelligence report on Benghazi makes.

By Jonah Goldberg

....When you ask her diehard supporters what she did as secretary of state they start with, “She travelled a million miles! More than any secretary of state.”

Put aside the fact that the “more than any secretary of state” part isn’t actually true — Condi Rice flew more. When you ask, “Okay, what did she get for it?” you get a blank stare or you get some stuff about championing women’s rights. Two people have told me she did good work in Myanmar, but I’ve never really gotten to the bottom of that. I suppose I could look it up, but at the end of the day we’re still talking about Myanmar, which is not the locus of America’s most pressing international problems. (“That’s right, because Hillary prevented the Myanmarese hegemony,” someone at MSNBC just shrieked. “She stopped it cold.”) While the Wikipedia page on her tenure doesn’t even mention Myanmar, it does mention her championing of better cook stoves in the Third World. That’s good. And so is improving the plight of women in various countries where their status ranges between “Slightly More Important than the Village Mule” to “So Incredibly Delicate We Must Keep Them Covered with Burlap Sacks All Day Long Even Though It’s Like 115 Degrees in the Shade Today.”
But when I take out my handy pocket realpolitik calculator, I just can’t make all that add up to much. Particularly when you compare it with our worsening problems in the Middle East, Asia (minus Myanmar!), Europe, Russia, and South America. Those problems are by no means all her fault (nor are they all Obama’s fault). But Clinton was the second most important foreign-policy official.
...Still, it is obvious that this is bad news for Hillary Clinton. No, she won’t be indicted. No, it won’t sink her candidacy (if she runs). Yes, it’s true: There aren’t many Americans who would have otherwise voted for Hillary were it not for Benghazi. But when you have pretty much no real accomplishments to put on the pro side of the scale, and you have a U.S. ambassador murdered in an attack your department could have prevented (and which you subsequently lied about) on the con side of the scale, the scale simply won’t balance in your favor. Nor should it.