April 21, 2013



April 21, 2013

John Murtagh, a victim of Kathy Boudin's bombing spree, asks if the Marathon bomber will get a teaching job at Columbia.

Somewhere near Boston early Monday morning, he packed a bomb in a bag. It was by all accounts relatively crude — a pressure cooker, explosives, some wires, ball bearings and nails . . . nails which, hours later, doctors would struggle to remove from the flesh of bleeding victims.

His motive is unclear. His intent is not: It was to maximize injury, suffering, pain, trauma and, yes, death.

Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be caught, perhaps not.

Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be offered a teaching job at Columbia University.

Forty-three years ago last month, Kathy Boudin, now a professor at Columbia but then a member of the Weather Underground, escaped an explosion at a bomb factory operated in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. The story is familiar to people of a certain age.

Three weeks earlier, Boudin’s Weathermen had firebombed a private home in Upper Manhattan with Molotov cocktails. Their target was my father, a New York state Supreme Court justice. The rest of the family, was presumably, an afterthought. I was 9 at the time, only a year older than the youngest victim in Boston.

One of Boudin’s colleagues, Cathy Wilkerson, related in her memoir that the Weathermen were disappointed with the minimal effects of the bombs at my home. They decided to use dynamite the next time and bought a large quantity along with fuses, metal pipes and, yes, nails. The group designated as its next target a dance at an Officer’s Club at Fort Dix, NJ.

Despite the misgivings of some, it is reported that Kathy Boudin urged the use of “anti-personnel bombs.” In other words, she wanted to kill people not just damage property. Before they could act, her fellows were killed in the townhouse explosion. The townhouse itself collapsed; Boudin fled. ...

 

 

Peter Wehner provides a petulant president post.

In a Rose Garden statement in the aftermath of his failure to persuade the Senate to move on any of his gun control proposals, the president raged, Lear-like, against his opponents. It was a rather unpleasant mix–one part petulance and two parts anger.

In the course of his outburst, the president said this:

"I’ve heard folks say that having the families of victims lobby for this legislation was somehow misplaced.  “A prop,” somebody called them.  “Emotional blackmail,” some outlet said.  Are they serious?  Do we really think that thousands of families whose lives have been shattered by gun violence don’t have a right to weigh in on this issue?  Do we think their emotions, their loss is not relevant to this debate? So all in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington." 

The unidentified “outlet” who used the phrase “emotional blackmail” was Charles Krauthammer, who on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier said this about the background checks:

"The question is: Would it have had any effect on Newtown? If you’re going to make all of these emotional appeals – you’re saying you’re betraying the families — you’ve got to show how if this had been law it would’ve stopped Newtown. It would not have. It’s irrelevant. 
I wouldn’t have objected, I might’ve gone the way of McCain or Toomey on this, but it’s a kind of emotional blackmail as a way of saying, “You have to do it for the children.” Not if there’s no logic in this. And that I think is what’s wrong with the demagoguery that we heard out of the president on this issue."

Krauthammer is once again right and the president is once again wrong. (At some point the president and his White House will discover that it’s not in their interest to get into a debate with Krauthammer. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer can explain why.)

What Mr. Obama has been attempting to do throughout this gun control debate is to build his case based on a false premise, which is that the laws he’s proposing would have stopped the mass killing in Newtown. The families of the Newtown massacre are being used by the president in an effort to frame the issue this way: If you’re with Obama, you’re on the side of saving innocent children from mass killings–and if you’re against Obama, you have the blood of the children of Newtown on your hands. ...

 

 

Jennifer Rubin has more.

Had a Republican president lashed out as petulantly as President Obama did yesterday after the defeat of the background check amendment, calling his opponents liars and stooges of special interests (“shameful” is a really harsh thing to say about the red-state Dems who jumped ship), the mainstream press would have been all over him. (Out of control! Lost his cool! Unpresidential!) But, because most of the press also was incensed at the defeat of anti-gun legislation, his performance was barely criticized.

The refusal to take on entitlement reform doesn’t earn Democrats the “coward” label from the press. “Cowardly,” for example might apply when Democratic supporters of Israel believe that Chuck Hagel is anti-Israel but vote for him anyway for fear of offending the White House. Those obvious examples of political timidity don’t earn the media’s ire because that cowardice leads to results they like. Refusing to rebuke one’s own constituents to vote for a feel-good measure for the opposition is many things (“survival instinct,” “politics as usual,” etc.), but it hardly is as despicable as the media chorus would have you believe.

It’s rich, really, that the fellow who rammed through Obamacare in the face of public opposition with a load of malarkey (Keep your insurance. Won’t add a dime to the deficit. No taxes on the middle class.) would lash out in this fashion.

For this outburst, Obama was surrounded by the Newtown parents, which was telling. He put his muscle behind background checks, which even anti-gun crusader Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) admits had nothing to do with Newtown. (To those lefties who retort “So what?” the response is, “Then stop hiding behind the Newtown parents.”) ...

 

IBD Editors think congress reflected the people's will in the gun control debate.

... Turns out that our republic is working the way it's supposed to. A Gallup poll asking what's the most important problem facing the country shows why what the president is trying to do is indeed a "heavy lift" — only 4% in both April and March cited "guns/gun control," down from 6% in February.

The "economy in general" at 24%, "unemployment/jobs" at 18%, "dissatisfaction with government" at 16% and "federal budget deficit/federal debt" at 11% all dwarfed concerns about guns. And the problems of "health care," three years after ObamaCare was passed, and "ethical/moral/family decline" are both more worrisome to the public than gun control. ...

 

 

Toby Harnden writes on the president in thrall to the CIA killing machine.

ONE balmy evening, Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was relaxing with his family on his father-in-law’s rooftop in the village of Zanghara, south Waziristan.

Two miles above, a Predator drone trained an infrared camera on him as he lay on his back and was joined by his wife and uncle. The images were so clear that it could be seen that the ailing Mehsud was receiving an intravenous drip.

Moments later two Hellfire missiles were launched from the Predator. Once the dust had cleared, all that was left of Mehsud was a bloody torso. Eleven others, including his wife and mother-in-law, had also died.

Mehsud’s death, in August 2009, caused barely a ripple in Washington, but it was extraordinary because he was an enemy of Pakistan, not America.

CIA lawyers had struggled to get approval to kill him but, under pressure from Pakistan, had made the case that he could be added to the “kill list” because the Pakistani Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda operatives. In the US capital some described the strike as a “goodwill kill”.

The incident is recounted in a new book, The Way of the Knife, by Mark Mazzetti. It details how the CIA has got back into the killing business over the past dozen years and how President Barack Obama fell under the spell of the spy agency.

The man who ran as a liberal, anti-war candidate has brushed away concerns about the attacks. During one meeting he responded to a request for an expansion of America’s drone fleet by saying: “The CIA gets what the CIA wants!” ...

 

Amity Shlaes warns about the "tax grope."

First comes Tax Day, then comes the Tax Grope.

That is the attitude of Americans toward tax authorities. Citizens have resigned themselves to the new rates, official and public, that will apply this year to long-agreed-upon definitions of taxable income. Traditional income is fair game.

The taxpayer is alert, though, to something else: future arbitrary impingement by a tax authority in an unexpected way. Sometimes the intrusion comes from an expected party, more uncomfortable and irritating than fatal. But sometimes, the intrusion shocks either by its scale or because it comes as a total surprise.

The grope image goes back to the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine, who wrote of “the Greedy Hand of government.” Back in the 1960s the business writer John Brooks sketched out the grope concept further, writing of the intruding taxing authority approaching as an unwanted suitor, with a “ghastly expression of benignity.”

The most obvious recent grope has been overseas: the garnishment of bank accounts in Cyprus. The depositors simply didn’t expect to pay for the euro’s failings from this part of their fiscal selves. Another Cyprus-related tax grab is a levy just proposed by the German government’s senior economics advisers on those who own valuable houses in countries that ask for bailouts. When, say, an Englishman bought his villa in Portugal, he probably expected to pay taxes on the vacation home, but not this extra surcharge.

Budget Portents

Portents of possible impingements on Americans are evident, too, in President Barack Obama’s budget.

 

Steve Hayward asks how many ways CA can be stupid.

Beating up on California these days is easier than snatching lunch money from the pocket protector of a skinny near-sighted kid.  But why should Victor Davis Hanson have all the fun?  And besides, now that I’m back in my home state after a decade away, the decay is palpable, like roads suffering from obvious “deferred maintenance” to unfinished housing tracts, etc. So what are the main problems facing California right now? 

 

If you’re the ex-Governator, it’s—wait for it now—climate change!  Ah-nold calls it California’s “silent disaster,” and it is nice of him to help us distinguish it from the very noisy and visible disaster that was his governorship.  Can’t he just stick with making saggy superhero movies?  (I mean, have you seen those surreptitious National Enquirer photos of what he looks like these days with his shirt off?  He needs more chest prosthetics these days than Riccardo Montalban in The Wrath of Khan.) ...

 

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NY Post

Tale of two terrorists

Columbia job for Boston bomber?

by John M. Murtagh

Somewhere near Boston early Monday morning, he packed a bomb in a bag. It was by all accounts relatively crude — a pressure cooker, explosives, some wires, ball bearings and nails . . . nails which, hours later, doctors would struggle to remove from the flesh of bleeding victims.

His motive is unclear. His intent is not: It was to maximize injury, suffering, pain, trauma and, yes, death.

Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be caught, perhaps not.

Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be offered a teaching job at Columbia University.

Forty-three years ago last month, Kathy Boudin, now a professor at Columbia but then a member of the Weather Underground, escaped an explosion at a bomb factory operated in a townhouse in Greenwich Village. The story is familiar to people of a certain age.

     [pic]

     Kathy Boudin in police custody in 1983, years

     after committing her crimes.

Three weeks earlier, Boudin’s Weathermen had firebombed a private home in Upper Manhattan with Molotov cocktails. Their target was my father, a New York state Supreme Court justice. The rest of the family, was presumably, an afterthought. I was 9 at the time, only a year older than the youngest victim in Boston.

One of Boudin’s colleagues, Cathy Wilkerson, related in her memoir that the Weathermen were disappointed with the minimal effects of the bombs at my home. They decided to use dynamite the next time and bought a large quantity along with fuses, metal pipes and, yes, nails. The group designated as its next target a dance at an Officer’s Club at Fort Dix, NJ.

Despite the misgivings of some, it is reported that Kathy Boudin urged the use of “anti-personnel bombs.” In other words, she wanted to kill people not just damage property. Before they could act, her fellows were killed in the townhouse explosion. The townhouse itself collapsed; Boudin fled.

She reappeared over a decade later driving the getaway car for the rag tag mix of Weathermen and Black Panthers who held up a Rockland County bank in 1981, murdering three in the process. Survivors of the ambush along the New York State Thruway recount how Boudin emerged from the driver’s door, arms raised in surrender, asking the police to lower their guns. When they did, her accomplices burst from the back of the van guns blazing.

As I said, people of a certain age remember this history. For those that don’t, Robert Redford is kindly about to release a movie recounting the Rockland robbery (albeit relocated to Michigan). By all accounts, the film lionizes the Weather Underground terrorists, Boudin and her accomplices.

Perhaps to bring it full circle, Professor Boudin can soon guest-lecture at a film class at Columbia when the Redford movie is screened.

Other than the passage of time, one can find no real distinction between the cowardly actions of last Monday’s Boston murderer and the terror carried out by Boudin and her accomplices. Yet today we live in a country where our leading educational institutions see fit to trust our children’s education to murderers and Hollywood sees fit to celebrate terrorists.

The Web site of Columbia’s School of Social Work sums up Boudin’s past thus: “Dr. Kathy Boudin has been an educator and counselor with experience in program development since 1964, working within communities with limited resources to solve social problems.”

“Since 1964” — that would include the bombing of my house, it would include the anti-personnel devices intended for Fort Dix and it would include the dead policeman on the side of the Thruway in 1981.

Maybe, if he is caught, Monday’s bomber can explain that, like Boudin, he was merely working within the community to solve social problems.

Perhaps Monday’s bomber will be caught, perhaps not. Perhaps, some day, Monday’s bomber will be offered tenure at Columbia University.

John M. Murtagh is Of Counsel to the White Plains law firm of Gaines, Gruner, Ponzini & Novick, LLP. He lives in Westchester.

 

 

 

Contentions

Obama’s Lear-Like Rage

by Peter Wehner

In a Rose Garden statement in the aftermath of his failure to persuade the Senate to move on any of his gun control proposals, the president raged, Lear-like, against his opponents. It was a rather unpleasant mix–one part petulance and two parts anger.

In the course of his outburst, the president said this:

"I’ve heard folks say that having the families of victims lobby for this legislation was somehow misplaced.  “A prop,” somebody called them.  “Emotional blackmail,” some outlet said.  Are they serious?  Do we really think that thousands of families whose lives have been shattered by gun violence don’t have a right to weigh in on this issue?  Do we think their emotions, their loss is not relevant to this debate? So all in all, this was a pretty shameful day for Washington." 

The unidentified “outlet” who used the phrase “emotional blackmail” was Charles Krauthammer, who on Fox News’s Special Report with Bret Baier said this about the background checks:

"The question is: Would it have had any effect on Newtown? If you’re going to make all of these emotional appeals – you’re saying you’re betraying the families — you’ve got to show how if this had been law it would’ve stopped Newtown. It would not have. It’s irrelevant. 
I wouldn’t have objected, I might’ve gone the way of McCain or Toomey on this, but it’s a kind of emotional blackmail as a way of saying, “You have to do it for the children.” Not if there’s no logic in this. And that I think is what’s wrong with the demagoguery that we heard out of the president on this issue."

Krauthammer is once again right and the president is once again wrong. (At some point the president and his White House will discover that it’s not in their interest to get into a debate with Krauthammer. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer can explain why.)

What Mr. Obama has been attempting to do throughout this gun control debate is to build his case based on a false premise, which is that the laws he’s proposing would have stopped the mass killing in Newtown. The families of the Newtown massacre are being used by the president in an effort to frame the issue this way: If you’re with Obama, you’re on the side of saving innocent children from mass killings–and if you’re against Obama, you have the blood of the children of Newtown on your hands. But it actually does matter if what Obama is proposing would have made any difference when it came to the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. And the fact that it would not have is what makes Obama’s gambit so shameful and disturbing. (I say that as someone who is somewhat sympathetic to the expanded background checks.) 

Mr. Obama’s effort at emotional blackmail has failed, and in bitterly lashing out at those who called him out on his demagoguery, he went some distance toward confirming that he is, in fact, a demagogue. 

Three months into his second term, Mr. Obama is becoming an increasingly bitter and powerless figure. When a man who views himself as a world-historic figure and our Moral Superior commands things to happen and they don’t, it isn’t a pretty sight. See yesterday’s Rose Garden statement for more. 

 

 

Right Turn 

Obama angry in defeat

by Jennifer Rubin

Had a Republican president lashed out as petulantly as President Obama did yesterday after the defeat of the background check amendment, calling his opponents liars and stooges of special interests (“shameful” is a really harsh thing to say about the red-state Dems who jumped ship), the mainstream press would have been all over him. (Out of control! Lost his cool! Unpresidential!) But, because most of the press also was incensed at the defeat of anti-gun legislation, his performance was barely criticized.

The refusal to take on entitlement reform doesn’t earn Democrats the “coward” label from the press. “Cowardly,” for example might apply when Democratic supporters of Israel believe that Chuck Hagel is anti-Israel but vote for him anyway for fear of offending the White House. Those obvious examples of political timidity don’t earn the media’s ire because that cowardice leads to results they like. Refusing to rebuke one’s own constituents to vote for a feel-good measure for the opposition is many things (“survival instinct,” “politics as usual,” etc.), but it hardly is as despicable as the media chorus would have you believe.

It’s rich, really, that the fellow who rammed through Obamacare in the face of public opposition with a load of malarkey (Keep your insurance. Won’t add a dime to the deficit. No taxes on the middle class.) would lash out in this fashion.

For this outburst, Obama was surrounded by the Newtown parents, which was telling. He put his muscle behind background checks, which even anti-gun crusader Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) admits had nothing to do with Newtown. (To those lefties who retort “So what?” the response is, “Then stop hiding behind the Newtown parents.”)

It is hard to escape the conclusion that, as with his nasty reaction to the necessity of extending the Bush tax cuts in 2010 and the results of the election that preceded, nothing so infuriates the president as losing, especially when the loss is a personal rebuke. Make no mistake: That is what this was.

Ron Fournier aptly explained: “The defeat raises questions about Obama’s ability to unify congressional Democrats and to mobilize supporters via his nascent Organizing for Action, a first-of-its-kind political machine controlled by the White House…. Conversely, his rivals may now feel emboldened to block Obama’s entire agenda.”

The president is not solely responsible for the crushing defeat. But he is famously unwilling to build bridges with Congress and foster personal loyalty. His public haranguing does more to unify Republicans than to break dissenters free. These failings came back to haunt him on gun legislation. His stubborn refusal to recognize that it is the intensity of opinion on the gun issue that matters meant that he actually kindled pro-gun forces. Some lawmakers might have agreed with Charles Krauthammer, who chided the president for using Newtown parents as “emotional blackmail” on background checks. This was an example of  something we’ve seen throughout Obama’s presidency: He has more casual supporters than his opponents, but he lights a fire under his most ardent opponents.

It is a shame that the president didn’t deploy the Newtown parents in ways that were germane to the Newtown tragedy and that could have been useful. Ironically, on the day the Manchin-Toomey amendment crashed and burned, the Treatment Advocacy Center sent out an email that read, in part:

Federal gun control legislation has begun making its way through the Senate in the aftermath of Newtown and other recent tragedies, but initiatives addressed at the mental illnesses associated with rampage killings remain to be seen.

“Improving the laws that make treatment possible before tragedies occur needs to be a national priority,” said Doris A. Fuller, Treatment Advocacy Center executive director. “Our mental health system has completely abandoned people with the most serious mental illnesses, their families and communities. Until their needs are addressed, tragedy is predictable.” . . . The Treatment Advocacy Center has proposed three realistic and achievable federal policies that would address the treatment issues at the root of such violence:

1. Foster universal adoption and use of mandated outpatient treatment (“assisted outpatient treatment” or “AOT”) for at-risk individuals by establishing and funding a national AOT demonstration project. AOT has been deemed by the Department of Justice to be an “effective” and “evidence-based” practice for reducing crime and violence. Mental health courts became widespread after a similar federal project in the early 2000s.

2. Promote reform of civil commitment laws and practices with educational programs to train judges, law enforcement and other stakeholders in the effective use of these laws, which exist to safeguard those with the most severe mental illness and the public.

3. Address the catastrophic loss of public psychiatric beds for individuals in psychiatric crisis or with chronic mental illness by repealing the IMD Exclusion, which creates an economic incentive for states to eliminate public psychiatric beds.

Had the president pursued those ends with Newtown families, he might have had a bipartisan victory. Instead, he’s an angry pol whose second term is now on the verge of collapse.

 

 

 

IBD  -  Editors

Exploiting Families Of Sandy Hook Victims Backfires

Gun ownership restrictions that the president said were supported by 90% of the nation have died in a Senate controlled by his party. Exploiting Newtown is haunting the power grabbers.

Just last week it was a political no-brainer. "Ninety percent of Americans support universal background checks," President Obama asserted yet again. This time he was at the University of Hartford, less than an hour's drive from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Ct., where 20 students and six staff members were slaughtered just before Christmas. With Obama were many of the Newtown victims' parents.

"How often do 90% of Americans agree on anything?" the president asked, provoking laughter. "And yet, 90% agree on this ... 80% of Republicans, more than 80% of gun owners, more than 70% of NRA households. It is common sense."

The president added that "there is only one thing that can stand in the way of change that just about everybody agrees on, and that's politics in Washington."

He challenged Congress: "If our democracy is working the way it's supposed to, and 90% of the American people agree on something, in the wake of a tragedy you'd think this would not be a heavy lift."

Turns out that our republic is working the way it's supposed to. A Gallup poll asking what's the most important problem facing the country shows why what the president is trying to do is indeed a "heavy lift" — only 4% in both April and March cited "guns/gun control," down from 6% in February.

The "economy in general" at 24%, "unemployment/jobs" at 18%, "dissatisfaction with government" at 16% and "federal budget deficit/federal debt" at 11% all dwarfed concerns about guns. And the problems of "health care," three years after ObamaCare was passed, and "ethical/moral/family decline" are both more worrisome to the public than gun control.

As moderate Democratic senators, especially those facing re-election next year, run away from gun-restriction legislation, it's no mystery what's happened.

As Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said on Wednesday, "in some cases" the president has used Newtown victims and their families as props. While still grieving, they were flown on Air Force One to lobby Congress, with the president repeatedly insisting -- yelling, in fact -- that "this is not about politics!"

There is something repugnant about the parents of murdered children being exploited several months later. It's especially distasteful when the victims' parents are hardly unanimous on gun control. Note Mark Mattioli, who compellingly called for well-trained, on-site armed guards to protect schoolchildren as a more effective alternative to new gun laws.

Even some of the most pro-gun control Democrats, notably Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, whose 1994 assault weapons ban failed ignominiously, admit as much. Intensified background checks, she conceded, "would not have prevented the tragedy in Newtown."

Well then, why should Newtown be the rationale to rush such a government power grab into law?

 

 

Sunday Times via Real Clear Politics

Obama in Thrall to CIA Killing Machine

by Toby Harnden

ONE balmy evening, Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, was relaxing with his family on his father-in-law’s rooftop in the village of Zanghara, south Waziristan.

Two miles above, a Predator drone trained an infrared camera on him as he lay on his back and was joined by his wife and uncle. The images were so clear that it could be seen that the ailing Mehsud was receiving an intravenous drip.

Moments later two Hellfire missiles were launched from the Predator. Once the dust had cleared, all that was left of Mehsud was a bloody torso. Eleven others, including his wife and mother-in-law, had also died.

Mehsud’s death, in August 2009, caused barely a ripple in Washington, but it was extraordinary because he was an enemy of Pakistan, not America.

CIA lawyers had struggled to get approval to kill him but, under pressure from Pakistan, had made the case that he could be added to the “kill list” because the Pakistani Taliban sheltered al-Qaeda operatives. In the US capital some described the strike as a “goodwill kill”.

The incident is recounted in a new book, The Way of the Knife, by Mark Mazzetti. It details how the CIA has got back into the killing business over the past dozen years and how President Barack Obama fell under the spell of the spy agency.

The man who ran as a liberal, anti-war candidate has brushed away concerns about the attacks. During one meeting he responded to a request for an expansion of America’s drone fleet by saying: “The CIA gets what the CIA wants!”

Mazzetti, a New York Times national security correspondent, examines the CIA’s close alliance with ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, which MI6 has always kept at arm’s length.

Ultimately, the CIA’s relationship with ISI proved disastrous. Mazzetti writes that Admiral Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, had suspicions that someone senior in the Pakistani military or ISI had harboured Osama bin Laden.

The first drone strike in Pakistan was in June 2004, also in south Waziristan, during the Bush administration. It killed Nek Muhammad Wazir, only a marginal threat to America but someone ISI dearly wanted dead. That strike was part of a deal that involved Pakistan opening up its air space for future drone attacks.

According to Mazzetti, Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 until 2004, cast mild doubt on the morality of the drone strikes from the outset. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 he saw a strike on a Mitsubishi truck in Afghanistan live on a screen at CIA headquarters in Arlington. He cracked a wry smile and said: “It almost isn’t sporting, is it?”

The book describes how Obama has overseen the expansion of a “military-intelligence complex” in which the CIA forms brief alliances with US special forces.

Obama is now facing criticism from the Republican senator Rand Paul and some liberal Democrats over the drone programme. Before this began, it was conducted in almost complete secrecy. It received minimal congressional oversight even when, as in the case of Mehsud, the targets have had only a tangential connection to the war in Afghanistan or the defence of America.

Mazzetti argues that the CIA has become “a killing machine . . . consumed with manhunting”, while Obama has in effect overseen a third war after Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is one that carries few political risks but “has created enemies just as it has obliterated them”.

Mazzetti told The Sunday Times: “Obama saw the Iraq war as this complete catastrophe and has seen this as something that’s cleaner and more surgical, but everything has costs and consequences.”

Obama has become intimately involved in signing off kill lists and sealing the fates of individuals in Yemen and Somalia. “What the White House would say is if we’re going to kill people we want the president being in charge of it,” said Mazzetti. “But on the other hand . . . it’s really unprecedented to have a president making specific decisions about who lives and who dies.”

The CIA’s power has grown exponentially under Obama, eclipsing the State Department. Its ascendancy was symbolised by a meeting in the White House situation room in June 2011 in which Cameron Munter, the US ambassador to Islamabad, protested against drone strikes via a secure video link.

CIA drones had just attacked a tribal council meeting in a village in north Waziristan, killing dozens of innocents and enraging Pakistanis. Munter, a donnish figure with a doctorate in European history, had already been in a screaming match with the CIA station chief over a drone strike he believed had undercut US interests. “You’re not the ambassador!” Munter shouted at the CIA man.

“You’re right, and I don’t want to be the ambassador,” the station chief replied, the mocking implication being that the ambassador was just a bit player in Pakistan.

Munter demanded veto power over CIA drone strikes in Pakistan because the killing was out of control. But before he could finish, Leon Panetta, the CIA director, cut him off. “I don’t work for you,” he said.

Hillary Clinton, the secretary of state, began to defend Munter, turning to Panetta to tell him that the ambassador could not be steamrollered.

“No, Hillary,” Panetta responded, “it’s you who are flat wrong.”

Obama’s national security adviser, Tom Donilon, eventually brokered a supposed compromise. Munter could object to specific drone strikes but the CIA could then get approval from the White House. In effect the CIA had won — killing trumped diplomacy.

Munter resigned prematurely from his post and is on a three-year secondment to a Californian university. Admiral Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence and technically Panetta’s boss, was fired for criticising CIA operations.

At the end of his time at the CIA, Panetta, a staunch Catholic, joked: “I’ve said more Hail Marys in the last two years than I have in my whole life.”

Aside from the estimated number killed in Pakistan by American drones of up to 3,308, according to the New America Foundation, another casualty has been the CIA’s traditional mission of providing the president with intelligence about emerging threats and global developments. A senior Obama administration figure told Mazzetti: “The CIA missed Tunisia. They missed Egypt. They missed Libya.” 

Toby Harnden is the Washington bureau chief of The Sunday Times.

 

 

 

Bloomberg News

As Tax Day Passes, the Tax Grope Begins

by Amity Shlaes

First comes Tax Day, then comes the Tax Grope.

That is the attitude of Americans toward tax authorities. Citizens have resigned themselves to the new rates, official and public, that will apply this year to long-agreed-upon definitions of taxable income. Traditional income is fair game.

The taxpayer is alert, though, to something else: future arbitrary impingement by a tax authority in an unexpected way. Sometimes the intrusion comes from an expected party, more uncomfortable and irritating than fatal. But sometimes, the intrusion shocks either by its scale or because it comes as a total surprise.

The grope image goes back to the revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine, who wrote of “the Greedy Hand of government.” Back in the 1960s the business writer John Brooks sketched out the grope concept further, writing of the intruding taxing authority approaching as an unwanted suitor, with a “ghastly expression of benignity.”

The most obvious recent grope has been overseas: the garnishment of bank accounts in Cyprus. The depositors simply didn’t expect to pay for the euro’s failings from this part of their fiscal selves. Another Cyprus-related tax grab is a levy just proposed by the German government’s senior economics advisers on those who own valuable houses in countries that ask for bailouts. When, say, an Englishman bought his villa in Portugal, he probably expected to pay taxes on the vacation home, but not this extra surcharge.

Budget Portents

Portents of possible impingements on Americans are evident, too, in President Barack Obama’s budget.

Into the category of mild grope falls the indexing of certain tax penalties to inflation. Americans are accustomed to some of these penalties being fixed, such as amounts for traffic tickets. Under the administration plan, the penalties will no longer be fixed: They may rise with inflation and, an added zap, may be rounded up “to the next hundred dollars.”

Yes, you read that right: The government is rounding to the nearest “hundred,” not the nearest “dollar.”

Another historically safe zone for taxpayers has been their employer’s portion of the cost of health insurance. What employers pay for their insurance hasn’t traditionally been included in individuals’ taxable income. Now it might be, as the Treasury lets us know in “General Explanations of the Administration’s Fiscal Year 2014 Revenue Proposals,” the cheat sheet on the White House’s fresh intentions published along with the White House budget.

The intended effect is to drive up citizens’ total taxable income and subject more of their income to top rates. And this is a double grope, for in this case the administration also proposes applying the Buffett rule, named after Warren Buffett’s suggestion that rich Americans be taxed at a rate no lower than their secretaries. The Fair Share Tax would raise rates again on income to ensure that the rate the wealthy pay on their newly broadened taxable income isn’t too low.

The administration’s Buffett rule also increases taxation on capital gains and dividends. The Treasury boldly states that dividends and long-term capital gains, which are taxed at a maximum rate of 23.8 percent, should be taxed at higher rates by imposing a new minimum Fair Share Tax of 30 percent on high earners. Thus does Treasury try to push dividends and capital gains, heretofore not subject to the alternative minimum tax, into an AMT-style trap.

Retirement Limits

The area most Americans consider untouchable is their retirement accounts, their IRAs and 401(k)s, which aren’t subject to tax until withdrawal. Slipping money into an individual retirement account has sometimes been difficult, but most Americans assume that their treasure may germinate undisturbed. Many people maintain several such accounts, valued souvenirs of otherwise painfully remembered job changes. Thoughts of these nest eggs growing safely kept many a citizen sane through the ruction of 2009, 2010 and 2011.

This budget would crack the eggs. The Treasury explanation explicitly challenges that principle of undisturbed accrual: “The current law limitations on retirement contributions and benefits for each plan in which a taxpayer may participate do not adequately limit the extent to which a taxpayer can accumulate amounts in a tax-favored arrangement through the use of multiple plans,” the Treasury writes.

Page 18 of the budget suggests that an IRA or 401(k) ample enough to provide pensions of more than $205,000 a year is too high. New penalties apply to money in the plan exceeding a “maximum permitted accumulation.” This reduces whatever benefit was there from compounding. The suggested limit on such savings would be $3 million.

Still these lines should chill even citizens whose 401(k)s fall short of that amount. After all, authorities could lower the limit later, as happened with the erstwhile rich-man’s levy, the alternative minimum tax.

The White House is using executive power to push again for, or even force via regulation, tax increases it has failed to win from Congress. The federal government, desperate for cash, is ready to act as European leaders have acted.

If we seek an explanation why U.S. markets reacted to a small action involving bank accounts on a Mediterranean island, the Obama budget is it. Cyprus signaled not only Europe’s challenges but also a Great Grope that is commencing here.

Amity Shlaes, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the author of “Coolidge.” She is the director of the Four Percent Growth Project at the Bush Institute.

 

 

 

Power Line

How Many Ways Can California Be Stupid?

by Steve Hayward

Beating up on California these days is easier than snatching lunch money from the pocket protector of a skinny near-sighted kid.  But why should Victor Davis Hanson have all the fun?  And besides, now that I’m back in my home state after a decade away, the decay is palpable, like roads suffering from obvious “deferred maintenance” to unfinished housing tracts, etc.

 

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What happened to California, in one photo

So what are the main problems facing California right now?  If you’re the ex-Governator, it’s—wait for it now—climate change!  Ah-nold calls it California’s “silent disaster,” and it is nice of him to help us distinguish it from the very noisy and visible disaster that was his governorship.  Can’t he just stick with making saggy superhero movies?  (I mean, have you seen those surreptitious National Enquirer photos of what he looks like these days with his shirt off?  He needs more chest prosthetics these days than Riccardo Montalban in The Wrath of Khan.)

What’s the next biggest problem?  Well duh, climate change again: according to a new study, climate change is going to wipe out California’s wine industry:

Researchers found the area suitable for wine production will shrink by as much as 73 percent by 2050 in certain parts of the globe — about 70 percent in California — with high potential for stress on rivers and other freshwater ecosystems as vineyards use water to cool grapes or irrigate to compensate for rising temperatures and declining rainfall.

Now, it’s perfectly obvious that the authors of this study know next to nothing about California wine regions, or how the stuff is actually grown.  Here in nearby Paso Robles, the daily diurnal temperature swing is one of the largest in the world; changes in the range (unlikely in any case) will scarcely affect them, or similar regions in the state.  In fact, it is the diurnal range that contributes to the richness of many California wines.  But I expect these researchers must be drinking Ripple while they worked on this study.

Well, at least California remains Number One in a few categories, as David Davenport reminds us at :

• Highest taxes (gasoline, sales and top bracket of income taxes)

• Lowest bond rating

• Highest poverty rate (at 23.5%, the home of 1/3 of those in poverty in U.S.)

• Highest unemployment rate (tied with Mississippi and Nevada at 9.6%)

• Highest energy costs

• Worst state to do business (as judged by Chief Executive magazine 8 years running)

• Most cities going bankrupt

• Prison system so poorly run it has been taken over by a federal judge

Well, I’m sure we can look forward to high-speed rail getting the state back on track.  What’s that?  No?  You don’t say!  From the latest report of Wendell Cox, Joe Vranich, and Adrian Moore at the Reason Foundation:

Current plans are now identified as “Phase 1 Blended,” which the CHSRA estimates will cost as much as $63.2 billion in 2011 inflation-adjusted dollars ($78.0 billion in year-of-expenditure dollars) with the only sources of funding being $9 billion in California Proposition 1A general obligation bonds and $3.5 billion in federal grants. Further funding is highly speculative if not outright non-existent for the remaining capital needed, which may exceed $50 billion.

Don’t worry. I’m sure another tax hike on top income earners can pay for it.

P.S. Almost forgot: California’s state Senate voted last week to prohibit fracking for oil and natural gas.  So the state that perhaps has the largest shale deposits in the nation has looked at the prosperity new oil and gas production has brought to North Dakota, Texas, and western Pennsylvania, and said, “Nah–not interested.  We like staying poor and unemployed in the central valley.”

 

 

 

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