Tag Archives: Obama Administration

If Joe Biden Didn’t Exist, We Would Have To Invent Him

March 18, 2010 – 6:30 am

Anyone really all that surprised to read this?

By Pejman Yousefzadeh | Posted in Chequer-Board | Also tagged , , | Comments

Israeli Politics Made Simple

March 17, 2010 – 6:42 am

If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backs off of building new housing developments in East Jerusalem, his government will fall.

Because the Prime Minister doesn’t want to have his government fall, he won’t back off in response to the Obama Administration’s public denigration efforts.

If the Obama Administration wants to convince the Prime Minister to back off, they will have to use private diplomacy, and throw a sweetener into the deal in order to make it easier for the Prime Minister’s government to survive.

Eric Cantor seems to know this, which is why his advice to the White House to back off in public ought to be listened to. Whether it actually will be listened to is an open question; as the Obama Administration has made clear in a little over a year in office, its actual ability to do foreign policy right is not nearly as great as was advertised during the 2008 Presidential campaign.

By Pejman Yousefzadeh | Posted in Chequer-Board | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments

The Illogic And Injustice Of Deem And Pass

March 17, 2010 – 6:36 am

Law professor and former Tenth Circuit judge Michael McConnell puts the issue succinctly on Speaker Pelosi’s proposed “deem and pass” scheme. I don’t have a WSJ subscription, but fortunately, Michael Cannon does, and he has excerpted the pertinent analysis:

Under Article I, Section 7, passage of one bill cannot be deemed to be enactment of another.

The Slaughter solution attempts to allow the House to pass the Senate bill, plus a bill amending it, with a single vote. The senators would then vote only on the amendatory bill. But this means that no single bill will have passed both houses in the same form. As the Supreme Court wrote in Clinton v. City of New York (1998), a bill containing the “exact text” must be approved by one house; the other house must approve “precisely the same text.”

By Pejman Yousefzadeh | Posted in Chequer-Board | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments

The Obama Administration: Absent From Asia

March 17, 2010 – 12:04 am

Dan Twining rips the Administration both for its Asia policy, and for misrepresenting the Asia policy of the Bush Administration. The Obama Administration’s Potemkin pretensions to concern and interest in Asia policy ought to be exposed by more pundits and observers. Here’s hoping that Twining started a trend.

By Pejman Yousefzadeh | Posted in Chequer-Board | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments

Health Care Reform Myths

March 16, 2010 – 6:44 am

Robert Samuelson demolishes them:

How often, for example, have you heard the emergency-room argument? The uninsured, it’s said, use emergency rooms for primary care. That’s expensive and ineffective. Once they’re insured, they’ll have regular doctors. Care will improve; costs will decline. Everyone wins. Great argument. Unfortunately, it’s untrue.

A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation found that the insured accounted for 83 percent of emergency-room visits, reflecting their share of the population. After Massachusetts adopted universal insurance, emergency-room use remained higher than the national average, an Urban Institute study found. More than two-fifths of visits represented non-emergencies. Of those, a majority of adult respondents to a survey said it was “more convenient” to go to the emergency room or they couldn’t “get [a doctor's] appointment as soon as needed.” If universal coverage makes appointments harder to get, emergency-room use may increase.

By Pejman Yousefzadeh | Posted in Chequer-Board | Also tagged , , , , | Comments

The Ultimate Cop-Out

March 16, 2010 – 6:23 am

Think you’ve seen it all when it comes to the health care reform debate? Well, think again:

After laying the groundwork for a decisive vote this week on the Senate’s health-care bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested Monday that she might attempt to pass the measure without having members vote on it.

Instead, Pelosi (D-Calif.) would rely on a procedural sleight of hand: The House would vote on a more popular package of fixes to the Senate bill; under the House rule for that vote, passage would signify that lawmakers “deem” the health-care bill to be passed.

The tactic — known as a “self-executing rule” or a “deem and pass” — has been commonly used, although never to pass legislation as momentous as the $875 billion health-care bill. It is one of three options that Pelosi said she is considering for a late-week House vote, but she added that she prefers it because it would politically protect lawmakers who are reluctant to publicly support the measure.

By Pejman Yousefzadeh | Posted in Chequer-Board | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments

The Health Care Reform Christmas Tree

March 15, 2010 – 5:31 am

Apparently, special deals in the health care bill are just fine, so long as they affect more than one state. I won’t be surprised if after a while, even that condition becomes negotiable.

No more evidence is needed to conclude that the health care reform effort has essentially turned into a farce. Nonetheless, more such evidence will likely be forthcoming.

It’s too bad that the White House didn’t spend more time working with people like Paul Ryan on how to responsibly reform health care. Instead, it spent time demonizing him for putting out a fiscal roadmap and for trying to offer alternative ideas on health care. Just about every Republican will remember the way the White House treated Ryan and those associated with him the next time a call for “bipartisanship” comes out from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

By Pejman Yousefzadeh | Posted in Chequer-Board | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments

Joy!

March 14, 2010 – 9:58 pm

Moody’s is ticked off:

Moody’s Investor Service, the credit rating agency, will fire a warning shot at the US on Monday, saying that unless the country gets public finances into better shape than the Obama administration projects there would be “downward pressure” on its triple A credit rating.

Examining the administration’s outlook for the federal budget deficit, the agency said: “If such a trajectory were to materialise, there would at some point be downward pressure on the triple A rating of the federal government.”

By Pejman Yousefzadeh | Posted in Chequer-Board | Also tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments

“. . . he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed . . .”

March 14, 2010 – 12:19 pm

So much–again–for increased government transparency:

When he was a senator, Barack Obama pushed through a law setting up a kind of “Google-for-government” website — a one-stop-shop for tracking the $1 trillion handed out in federal contracts.

Obama said the new site would help create a more transparent government.

But now that he is president, Obama’s Office of Management and Budget is responsible for keeping up the website — and government auditors have found deficiencies.

By Pejman Yousefzadeh | Posted in Chequer-Board | Also tagged , , | Comments

“But Republicans Used Reconciliation Too!”

March 13, 2010 – 1:16 pm

The chief excuse used to justify the Democrats pending use of reconciliation to pass a supplemental health care bill–once the Senate’s version is presumably passed by the House–is that since Republicans used reconciliation in the past, Democrats can use it too. And specifically, since Republicans used reconciliation for things like “tax cuts for the rich!”, Democrats can use it to pass health care.

James Joyner points out that Democrats shouldn’t be allowed to get away with making this argument:

By Pejman Yousefzadeh | Posted in Chequer-Board | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments

The Very Unpopular President

March 12, 2010 – 6:47 am

Well, I’ve seen better.

The current poll standings are bad enough, but Patrick Caddell and Doug Schoen point out how much more unpopular the President and Democrats can become:

In “The March of Folly,” Barbara Tuchman asked, “Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests?” Her assessment of self-deception — “acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts” — captures the conditions that are gripping President Obama and the Democratic Party leadership as they renew their efforts to enact health-care reform.

Their blind persistence in the face of reality threatens to turn this political march of folly into an electoral rout in November. In the wake of the stinging loss in Massachusetts, there was a moment when the president and the Democratic leadership seemed to realize the reality of the health-care situation. Yet like some seductive siren of Greek mythology, the lure of health-care reform has arisen again.

By Pejman Yousefzadeh | Posted in Chequer-Board | Also tagged , , , , , , | Comments

Team Obama’s Favorite Economic Myths

March 11, 2010 – 11:17 pm

This ought to kill off some shibboleths . . . assuming, of course, that the mainstream press will do its job and point out the fact that the Obama Administration is peddling misinformation about the economy, and about its own efforts to rescue the country from recession and depression.

I will say that I am more sympathetic to Ben Bernanke than the article appears to be. But that’s about my only major difference with it.

By Pejman Yousefzadeh | Posted in Chequer-Board | Also tagged , , , , | Comments
- March 21, 2010 -

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