Priorities: Pelosi Skips Lerner Vote, Attends Fundraiser in CA

The House voted Wednesday to hold Former IRS official Lois Lerner in contempt of Congress. Lerner repeatedly refused to answer questions surrounding her participation in the IRS targeting scandal. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was conspicuously absent during the vote, opting instead to attend a fundraiser in California.

Obstruction: Reid Blocks Bipartisan Vote on Keystone Pipeline

By Guy Benson

...Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., used a parliamentary maneuver to block a bid by pipeline supporters to include the pipeline measure in an energy efficiency bill moving forward in the Senate. Republicans also were seeking an amendment to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from imposing new greenhouse gas regulations on coal-burning power plants. Reid's actions came after Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell objected to Reid's offer to call an up-or-down vote on the energy bill, with a promise for a separate vote on Keystone later. The partisan wrangling threatened to doom prospects for both the energy efficiency bill and the pipeline measure, which would authorize immediate construction of the proposed pipeline from Canada to the United States. Supporters say the measure is needed to end years of delay by the Obama administration on whether to approve the project...All 45 Senate Republicans and as many as a dozen Democrats support a bill that would force a decision on the project....Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., who has pushed for Keystone approval as a key part of her re-election campaign, expressed frustration that the Senate appeared likely to miss opportunities for both the energy efficiency bill and the pipeline measure.

That would be the same Mary Landrieu who recently bragged to the New York Times that she'd helped forge a filibuster-proof majority in favor of the pipeline. She evidently lacks the sway within her own party to force a vote on the issue. Reid's obstructionist procedural maneuver took place yesterday. Today, he reiterated his opposition to the Keystone project and continued to play parliamentary games designed to prevent an open and fair legislative process. Reid is joined in opposition by a majority of his caucus, including a number of Senators who are beholden to Tom Steyer's big money -- including Mark Udall of Colorado, where the pipeline is immensely popular. Reid says he'll only permit a vote on Keystone if he can shut down the amendment process on another bill... During his tenure, Reid has blocked all amendments -- a move known as "filling the amendment tree" -- far more often than the last six majority leaders combined. His level of vote-blocking obstructionism is unprecedented. When the GOP retaliates, Reid labels them the true obstructionists, and uses the dysfunction he's created as a pretext for additional power grabs. The Keystone pipeline would create thousands of American jobs, improve our relations with our Canadian allies, and help streamline North American energy production. It is environmentally sound -- it's safer and would produce fewer emissions, in fact, than alternative modes of transporting fuel. It is overwhelmingly supported by the American public. By continually throwing up barriers to a decision with broad bipartisan consensus, Harry Reid is placing the special interests of major Democratic donors ahead of what's best for the country, then screaming about the rotten Kochs to distract from his own transparent "dark money" quid pro quo.

VA Wait Lists — A Preview of Coming Attractions

By Brian Joondeph

A Veterans Administration hospital in Fort Collins Colorado, it was recently revealed, falsified its wait times for outpatient clinic appointments. In order to appear to meet the goal of clinic appointments within 14 days, the hospital taught its clerks how to falsify the appointment records to create the illusion that the appointment goals were being met. Many of the 6,300 veterans treated at this clinic actually waited months for their appointments. Yet the clinic clerks were required to “cook the books” else they were punished by being placed on a “bad boy list.” Aside from the moral outrage of treating our veterans in such a callous manner, this episode provides a glimpse of coming attractions for health care delivery in the US.

The Veterans Health Administration is the largest integrated health care system in the United States with 150 medical centers, 1400 hundred outpatient clinics, and 53,000 health care providers. Such systems are, “Poised to play a pivotal role in reform efforts,” according to health care academics. This is the “one stop shopping” model of health care delivery, with all services under one structural umbrella, all providers employed by the system, providing integration and continuity of care. It’s also the progressive holy grail of single payer universal health care. The president is a proponent of such a system, as is his former Medicare chief Donald Berwick. The U.S. health care system is sliding toward single payer, so it would be instructive to consider how the VA news foreshadows the future.

The first place to look would be at the British National Health Service. The aforementioned Donald Berwick told us, “I am a romantic about the NHS; I love it.” The NHS is famous for its wait lists. Their website reassures British residents, “You have the legal right to start your NHS consultant-led treatment within a maximum of 18 weeks from referral, unless you choose to wait longer or it is clinically appropriate that you wait longer.” Consultant means specialist. So that persistent headache, stomach ache, vision loss, or cough will be addressed promptly by an appropriate specialist within four and a half months. Hope the headache isn’t from a brain tumor and the belly pain isn’t from cancer because in 18 weeks, the concern may be moot. If “clinically appropriate,” you may wait longer, such as for a hip replacement. Not life threatening, only painful and inconvenient, so a 6-month wait in Wales is deemed reasonable.

What happens when the wait lists become too long? Several years ago the NHS had over 150 thousand people waiting longer than 18 weeks for their specialist care. New Zealand, with a health care system similar to the NHS, faced this problem in 2007. They promised patients treatment within six months. But when the wait list grew too long, they simply removed 35,000 people from the wait list, sending the patients back to their GP. If the GP could have solved the patient’s problem, they would have and not referred them to the specialist at the public hospital. So back to square one for the patient.

This sounds much like the VA hospital. If the wait list is too long, just remove everyone beyond the targeted wait and voila, the wait list is operating as promised. Don’t think this could happen in the U.S.? The VA hospital in Phoenix had two separate wait lists, “One of them secret, deliberately put in place to avoid the VA’s own internal rules.” That way no one finds out that veterans promised timely care get anything but, in a system, “Where wait times can last more than a year.”

Benghazi Laying Bare Democrats' Abdication of Duty

By Bruce Walker

.....Our Founding Fathers could have embraced a parliamentary government. There is nothing particularly wrong about that sort of government. In fact, every major democracy except America and France has all real power vested in the national legislature. In a parliamentary system, the leaders of the principal party in the best-populated branch of the legislature run the government. When things go bad, those political leaders are replaced, or new national elections are called.

Instead, we have a system in which the president is not a member of Congress; he is not the leader of the biggest party in Congress; he cannot even be a member of Congress, any more than a member of Congress can be part of the Executive Branch. Instead, Congress and the president are supposed to check each other, with each protecting us from the corruption and the incompetence of the other.

What we have instead is a wholly partisan but anti-constitutional system, reaching its dreadful nadir with Obama, in which the president dictates to Congress what bills it ought to pass and his partisan hacks in Congress defend him no matter what. We have all the problems of a parliamentary system – party ruling government and government scrunched into a single unit – without the advantage of full accountability of when things go bad.

Congress, invested with the great majority of constitutional power, has instead become largely meaningless. The exclusive power of Congress to make law has been compromised into virtual nonexistence, as “law” now comes from court decisions, regulations, executive orders – almost anywhere except by congressional action. Its investigations, which ought to pit Congress against the White House rather than Republicans against Democrats, have become little more than political drama, and Democrats in Congress reflexively defend whatever Obama or his puerile flacks do.

Congress is intended to fill the constitutional roles of investigator, prosecutor, and judge of presidential misconduct, which includes the cover-ups and lies of those who work for the president. The loyalty of members of Congress is to their arm of government and not to their party. When Democrats in Congress reject that role, it is as if police investigators, public prosecutors, and judges get together with suspects and coordinate a defense to questions of crime and corruption. Even more, when Democrats in Congress behave like cheerleaders for the suspected and accused officers of the Executive Branch, they abdicate perhaps their most important duty to the people under our Constitution.

One answer, not a good one, is to discard the increasingly notional independence of the branches of our government and instead adopt a truly parliamentary system. The president would be a member of the House of Representatives, and all his cabinet officers would as well, and all of these would serve at the pleasure of the House. Congressional elections would be held at least every two years but also would occur whenever a scandal or a collapse of policy by the government created enough ruckus to force wavering House members to abandon their leadership.

The best solution, which can only happen when a critical mass of congressional Democrats stop being field hands for Obama, is for congressmen to recognize that their office comes with duties that cannot be abandoned simply because shirking responsibility is more fun. Nixon left office forty years ago largely because Barry Goldwater, “Mr. Conservative,” bluntly told Nixon that members of Congress had a duty that trumped party. Is there any Democrat in Congress today so honorable and brave? So far, the silence has been deafening.

Obama Administration to Schools: 'Equal Access' for Illegal Immigrants

By Tony Lee
On Thursday, President Barack Obama's administration issued new guidance to schools, emphasizing that they cannot discourage illegal immigrant students from enrolling by requiring proof of legal status.
As Politico reported, the Obama administration noted that schools "can violate federal law by requiring Social Security numbers or birth certificates when a student wants to enroll," but they can be compliant if they "instead ask for proof of residency in a school district, which a family can do with an electric bill or copy of a lease."
In a "Dear Colleague Letter," the Obama administration stated that under federal law, school districts "are required to provide all children with equal access to public education at the elementary and secondary level." The letter added that they had "become aware of student enrollment practices that may chill or discourage the participation, or lead to the exclusion, of students based on their or their parents’ or guardians’ actual or perceived citizenship or immigration status."
The Obama administration had sued schools in Alabama that had required parents to verify the legal status of their children before enrolling. After a settlement, parents were no longer required to verify the immigration status of their children.
Saying such policies violate federal law, the administration further emphasized that a school district may "not bar a student from enrolling in its schools because he or she lacks a birth certificate or has records that indicate a foreign place of birth, such as a foreign birth certificate."

The House, Including 62 Democrats, Just Defied Obama by Passing Permanent Tax Relief

By Pete Kasperowicz
The House of Representatives on Friday overwhelmingly approved permanent tax relief for companies engaged in research and development, despite a warning from the White House that President Barack Obama would veto the legislation.
Members approved the American Research and Competitiveness Act in an easy 274-131 vote. Despite Obama’s veto threat, 62 Democrats voted for the bill along with nearly every Republican.
The legislation from Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) simplifies the way companies can calculate a tax break on research and development, and makes that relief permanent. But that change would eliminate more than $150 billion in tax revenues for the federal government over 10 years, which had prompted the White House to issue a veto threat.
“By making the R&D credit permanent without offsets, H.R. 4438 would add $156 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years,” the White House said in a statement on the bill. While the White House said it supports making the tax credit permanent, doing so without offsetting the revenue loss in some way “represents the wrong approach.”
The Obama administration criticized House Republicans in particular for moving ahead with a bill that is not “offset,” since Republicans have made a point of ensuring that new spending is offset, usually with spending cuts. The White House noted that the revenue shortfall created by the research and development tax bill is much bigger than the shortfall caused by extending unemployment benefits, which Republicans have insisted must be offset with cuts.
...But Republicans argued this week that tax cuts have traditionally not been offset, or “paid for,” with spending cuts, and that Democrats have been fine with this exception in the past.
“Many on the other side of the aisle have commented about the fact that this job-creating provision is unpaid for,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said. “I would note that this provision, among other extenders, has historically not been paid for.”
They also said that given the weak economy, permanent tax relief that helps companies create jobs should be a priority.

The Devil Wears Obama

By Matthew Continetti
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City has named its collection of used clothes—a sort of consignment shop one must pay to enter and where nothing is for sale—after Anna Wintour. A trustee of the Met since 1999, the editor of Vogue, artistic director of Condé Nast, and inspiration for The Devil Wears Prada has over the years raised some $125 million for the museum. Earlier this week, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Anna Wintour Costume Center, Michelle Obama delivered a speech. Never have I read one quite like it.
...As a bundler for Obama, Wintour has raised a total of $5,448,371 over the course of two presidential campaigns. In 2012 she co-hosted, with the actress Sarah Jessica Parker, a New York City fundraiser for the president to which some lucky commoners were also invited. Dinner cost $40,000 a plate. Start saving now, and you may be able to attend the next dinner. It is likely to take place in the summer of 2016, for Wintour has said that she wants to see President Hillary Clinton on the cover of Vogue.
...“Fashion isn’t an exclusive club for the few who can attend a runway show or shop at certain stores,” Michelle Obama went on, in what must have come as a shock to the exclusive club to which Obama was speaking, the club that meets seasonally in Manhattan, London, Paris, and Milan, that affects a knowing attitude towards the garishly attired models striding goofily down the runway, that shops not at Target and Wal-Mart, not at Macy’s or Bloomingdales, but at Versace and Valentino, at Dolce & Gabbana and Donna Karan.
The first lady would have us believe that fashion is for the masses, for the nameless yokels who have yet to visit the Anna Wintour Costume Center, who have not had their consciousness raised. The dummies. “Maybe they’ll come initially because they love clothes and they love shopping,” Obama said, “but then they’ll learn that fashion isn’t just about what we wear but that fashion is also a business, it is an art; it’s a career that involves science, engineering, accounting, marketing, and so much more.” So much more, like preening and posing, Blue Steel and Magnum, and the piano key necktie.
The point of view of Michelle Obama’s speech can only be described as elitist. Her argument seems to be the following: By looking at the tattered fabrics, at the castoffs and the queenly gowns that Anna Wintour has bought for the Met, young people whose concerns are only superficial—who are interested only in how they look, in what they wear, in where they shop—will be elevated, will be made sophisticated, will be fashioned, so to speak, into cosmopolitans.
“Maybe they’ll think about going to college.” Maybe “they’ll learn what it takes to succeed in the fashion industry; how you need passion, and grit, and a fierce belief in yourself and in your vision.” Maybe “they’ll spend an afternoon learning about Islamic or Asian Art,” and “check out the photographs,” and “view the endless galleries of great American Art” (no mention is made of the Met’s European collections). Maybe they’ll “have an even greater appreciation for our history or a newfound interest in a foreign culture or language.” Behold Michelle Obama’s beatific vision of the future, of grubby mall-goers transformed by a 64-year-old British millionaire into well-dressed scholars of Islamic or Asian art!
Rarely does one encounter a love letter to authority that has been written in such plain language. The word “power” appears frequently, and always favorably, in Michelle Obama’s text. Wintour “is one of the most powerful leaders in the fashion industry.” Wintour is “one of the most powerful women in any industry.” Wintour “has always used her power for so much more.” If only you, the young geometer inspired by the Anna Wintour Costume Center, “will use your power to be an inspiration-multiplier like Anna.”
Michelle Obama is congratulating not power in general but a certain form of power, a form of power that, while wealthy, entitled, insular, catty, and mostly lily-white, allocates its resources to candidates and programs and institutions dominated by the left, acting as an inspiration-multiplier for Democratic donors and celebrity activists, for liberal culture warriors, for social entrepreneurs, for anyone who appropriates the resources of the state to impose on others a particular moral vision.
...And money is what it is all about. It was Wintour who, using a spreadsheet, convinced Jim Messina that the Obama campaign could raise millions from selling $95 Thakoon Panichgul scarves and $75 Tory Burch totes. She has become a force in the Democratic Party, which has traveled the road from pro-Sandinista to pro-Fashionista, from the party of the proletariat to the party of Prêt-à-Porter.
For the Democrats the marriage comes at the price of taking on the fashion industry’s characteristics, of assuming its superciliousness, vanity, mob mentality, fickleness, solipsism, narcissism, flightiness, preciousness, conspicuous consumption, self-importance, snobbery, gaudiness, silliness, and elitism. The Democrats do not seem to mind. “We look forward to all you will continue to contribute in the years ahead,” Michelle Obama told Anna Wintour. I do not doubt her sincerity. In the years ahead Wintour is sure to contribute plenty to the Barack Obama Presidential Foundation, to Ready for Hillary, to the DNC, DSCC, and DCCC, to whatever liberal cause or project or personality that happens to be in fashion.

Russia Conducts Large-Scale Nuclear Attack Exercise

Long-range ballistic, cruise missiles launched

By Bill Gertz
Russia’s armed forces conducted a “massive” nuclear forces exercise on Thursday simulating NATO and U.S. nuclear attacks and involving several long-range ballistic and cruise missile firings.
The large-scale nuclear war drills come amid heightened tensions between Russia and the West over Moscow’s military annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and Russian-instigated unrest in eastern Ukraine.
The exercises were monitored by Russian President Vladimir Putin and coincided with May 9 anniversary celebrations marking the victory in World War II.
“We are checking the preparedness of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, we are holding an exercise,” Putin was quoted as saying, noting that the exercises were planned in November and involved all branches and services throughout the country, including nuclear forces.
Former Pentagon official Mark Schneider said the exercises are unusual and appear aimed the West.
“This type of exercise is normally held in the fall not the spring. Holding it now suggests to me that the intent was nuclear intimidation against NATO over the Ukraine,” he said.
The latest nuclear saber-rattling by Moscow followed the April 14 test launch of a new ICBM, the SS-27 with multiple simulated warheads that potentially violated the 2010 New START arms treaty.
The war games also followed the Obama administration’s recent rejection of a Russian proposal aimed at resolving U.S. and Russian differences over missile defenses. Moscow wanted an agreement with legal restrictions on European-based defenses and the administration rejected the plan and cut off further talks because of the Crimea annexation.