Scott Spiegel

President Obama has invited Sergeant James Crowley and Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to the White House for a beer to clear up hard feelings over Crowley’s arrest of Gates for disorderly conduct two weeks ago.

Notice how, now that the facts have come out, no one is taking Gates’ side anymore; those who initially sided with Gates are arguing that both men are at fault and that we should all “learn from this incident” and move on.

If anyone still cares, the fact is that both sides are simply not at fault.

Here are a few myths about Crowley’s arrest of Gates:

Crowley overreacted in arresting Gates.

Not according to the Cambridge Police Department; the Cambridge Police Patrol Officers Association; the Massachusetts Municipal Police Coalition; the Cambridge Multicultural Police Association; mixed-race police unions across the country; Sgt. Leon Lashley, the black cop who accompanied Crowley; or black public figures such as Bill Cosby and Juan Williams.  Other than that, the experts are unanimous—he overreacted!

Gates’ behavior was not an arrestable offense; Crowley should have walked away after establishing his identity.

According to police protocol in such an incident, you leave the scene only once all actors are quiet and issues have been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.  You do not slip away while one party is still unhinged, screaming like a lunatic, insulting a police officer’s mother, badgering officers, and frightening neighbors who have gathered out of concern.  If the object of investigation shows no signs of calming down, it is not police procedure to leave such a raving maniac poised to cause additional mayhem.  The police have seen too many cases in which angry residents have gone on to cause further trouble; it’s foolish for anyone to second-guess the Cambridge cops and pronounce that they should have known what Gates would do next.  Gates had dozens of opportunities to cooperate with Crowley’s attempts to defuse the situation and back away, and every time he chose not to.  That is why he was arrested.

As a public servant, Crowley should have been more respectful of Gates.

Gates’ wealthy Harvard neighborhood had experienced a rash of break-ins in recent months, including Gates’ own home.  The job of a public servant in Sgt. Crowley’s position is to forcefully protect property owners—once they are definitively identified as such, which Gates made difficult to accomplish—from those who would aggress against them and their property.  That is what Crowley was trying to do.  Had Gates lived in a poor neighborhood and the two men trying to break in been real burglars, and had Crowley let the men get away without proving they lived there, his department would no doubt have been faulted for ignoring “black-on-black crime.”

Crowley arrested Gates for “disrespecting” him.

Crowley did not arrest Gates because Gates “dissed” him—he acted lawfully in response to Gates’ disorderly conduct, which involved Gates’ following Crowley to the porch, yelling epithets about Crowley’s mother, and startling pedestrians.

Crowley engaged in “racial profiling.”

Ignoring the fact that “racial profiling” does not, by definition, take place when an officer has been called to a resident’s home to investigate a burglary, there’s far more evidence that Gates is guilty of “class profiling”—singling out a working-class cop for abuse because he thought Crowley wasn’t powerful or confident enough to stand up to him.

Both men are prejudiced toward those from different backgrounds.

I can’t say how Gates feels about working-class cops, but Crowley had been hand-selected by a black police commissioner to teach a course on avoiding racial profiling, which he has done for the past five years.  I think that gives him just a smidgen of credibility in claiming he does not go around engaging in egregious on-the-job racial discrimination.

It’s Crowley’s word against Gates’.

Not having been there myself, I’ll nonetheless trust the judgment of a universally praised sergeant who taught an anti-racial profiling class for five years; the black sergeant who accompanied him in the arrest; the Harvard University Police officers who appeared as backup and witnessed the scene; the Police Department who trained Crowley and tracked his implementation of protocol; and Emergency Communications and 911 Center staff who received updates on the incident in real-time.  All of those parties support Crowley.

The police dropped the charges against Gates because their case was weak.

The prosecutor’s office, not the Cambridge Police Department, decided to drop the charges, most likely because of Gates’ status in the community and because he raised such a stink about it.  The Cambridge Police Commissioner has since publicly stated that he wishes the charges had not been dropped and Gates were forced to defend his actions in court under a strict examination of evidence.

Obama should have criticized both men for their behavior.

Obama should have refrained from making a summary judgment on a local case until he knew the facts.  He is President now, not a rabble-rousing community activist “promoting awareness” of social ills.

Crowley reports to the mayor of Cambridge, the governor of Massachusetts, and the President of the United States, and should have accepted their criticism without question.

Crowley was backed up by his superiors and his department.  He does not report directly to the mayor, the governor, or the President, and he is not contractually prohibited from speaking up and defending himself against spurious allegations by citizens he is protecting.

In any event, it appears that Crowley was big enough to agree to meet Gates and Obama at the White House.  In the meantime, he can look forward to the audiotapes of the arrest being released and clearing his reputation.

The eagle-eyed sleuths at Investor’s Business Daily recently dug up a nefarious provision in the House’s 1,018-page health care bill that prohibits you from keeping your current private insurance if any changes are made to it.

On p. 16.

This, in a bill whose table of contents and “general definitions” run to p. 14.  So the House has written a bill whose key, most egregious proviso is hidden so poorly that the authors apparently assumed the public couldn’t be bothered to click two pages to get to it.

Evidently this was too much work for President Obama, whose response during a news conference on Monday at Children’s Hospital to a concerned caller from Maine asking if he was interpreting the stipulation correctly was, “You know, I have to say that I am not familiar with the provision you are talking about.”  What part of the bill is Obama familiar with—the cover?

But don’t worry—Obama says, “If you like your health plan, you can keep it.”  He sure doesn’t know any differently!

In Section 102—that is, the second part of the first section, two pages into the bill—ironically titled, “Protecting the Choice to Keep Current Coverage,” the bill puts the following limitation on those who wish to eschew government-approved options and keep their own coverage: “[T]he individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage [must] not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day of Y1.”

So it turns out that if you like your health plan, you can keep it—as long as you don’t start liking your health plan on or after the first day of Y1!

The subsequent clause, which discusses dependents, helpfully notes that if you’re sick of your current individual plan and want to switch to a different plan, you still can’t—but the government will be nice enough to let you enroll new dependents under that plan you hate!

Following this is a clause that graciously requires that after five years, “an employment-based health plan in operation as of the day before the first day of Y1 must meet the same requirements as apply to a qualified health benefits plan.”

So we’ve unearthed yet another loophole in the first 1% of the bill: if you like the health plan you have, and you happen to get it from your employer, which includes 62% of the population under 65, you can keep it—except that after five years, you can’t!

But don’t expect Obama to be familiar with that provision, either—after all, it’s buried deep into the third page of text in the bill.

After you burrow your way through the labyrinthine textual warrens of pages 17-19, you’ll learn that “qualified” plans may not exclude anyone on the basis of preexisting condition.  On p. 21, the bill mandates that premiums may not vary at all, except by age, state, and family size; and that the highest-to-lowest premium ratio by age group may not be more than 2-to-1.

According to these conditions, a 40-year-old who has chosen to smoke two packs of cigarettes a day his whole life and has contracted lung cancer could end up being charged as little as half the rate of a perfectly healthy non-smoking 60-year-old, just because the 60-year-old is older and has chosen not to smoke.  “Health Choices Act” indeed!

Several years ago, when it was revealed that audience members in Oprah Winfrey’s infamous Great Car Giveaway would have to fork over $7,000 each in taxes, the winners at least had the option to sell the car to pay the taxes and keep the difference—or forfeit the car altogether.

H.R. 3200 isn’t so generous—according to the bill, those who are not in a health plan the government finds acceptable will be fined the full cost of the average plan for their family size.  In other words, you can’t refuse to pay for government-approved health insurance for you and your family, whether you even want or receive it or not.

Rasmussen recently reported that Democrats’ perceived trust advantage over Republicans in the area of health care plummeted from 18 percentage points in May to 4 points in June.  No wonder Obama is racing to get this legislation through Congress before they go to August recess: at the current rate, Republicans will be leading on health care by 38 points come September.

In his speech at Children’s Hospital, Obama intoned, “There are some in this town who are content to perpetuate the status quo, are in fact fighting reform on behalf of powerful special interests.”

There are some around this country who are fighting “reform” on behalf of liberty.

In light of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings this week, in which the controversial nominee must face tough scrutiny from senators of both parties on her judicial philosophy, temperament, and fidelity to the rule of law, political commentators on the left are naturally busy suggesting harsh, delegitimizing questions for… Frank Ricci!  The lead New Haven firefighter in the Ricci v. Destefano racial discrimination lawsuit, who will testify in the hearings, has been attacked by Slate magazine, among others, for having previously brought lawsuits against former employers for discriminating against him due to his dyslexia and for firing him for being a whistleblower against his department.

Ignoring the fact that Ricci’s earlier lawsuits have zero legal bearing on the arguments in the Ricci v. Destefano case and that the Supreme Court recently overturned Sotomayor’s ruling against Ricci, why should the other 17 firefighters in the lawsuit suffer if it so happens that Ricci was lawsuit-happy with his previous employers?

Speaking of those other firefighters, Lieutenant Ben Vargas, who will also testify at Sotomayor’s hearings, is the Hispanic firefighter who joined 17 white firefighters in the lawsuit against the New Haven fire department.  Vargas shares some superficial similarities with Sotomayor: both are Hispanic; both were born and raised in the U.S.; both have Puerto Rican parents who came here because they were poor.  Both grew up in troubled, high-crime, urban neighborhoods in the Northeast; both found a way out of their circumstances through hard work in their chosen career paths.

That’s where the similarities end.

Vargas considers himself an American first and foremost; as he said in an interview with the New York Times, “I love my people.  I love my culture…  But I am so grateful for the opportunity only the United States can give.”

In a speech on Hispanics in the justice system, Sotomayor said, “America has a deeply confused image of itself that is in perpetual tension…  [We] insist that we can and must function and live in a race and color-blind way that ignore these very differences that in other contexts we laud.”  Which other contexts are those, Justice Sotomayor—putting out fires in a racially sensitive way?

Vargas was hired by the New Haven Fire Department in 1994 as a result of a discrimination lawsuit brought by black firefighters, but he opposes affirmative action in principle and would prefer to have been hired in a race-neutral context (and believes he may still have been hired if he had been afforded a colorblind assessment).

Sotomayor admits that she benefited from affirmative action and continues to support the policy.

Vargas, as a result of joining the Ricci v. Destefano lawsuit, received no support from the New Haven Hispanic firefighters’ association, of which his brother is a member.  Vargas had the courage to leave the association.

Sotomayor served for 12 years in leadership positions, including setting policy, on the board of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, which, among other dubious accomplishments: (1) defended during her tenure several Puerto Rican separatists who had injured five legislators in a terrorist attack on the U.S. House of Representatives and (2) has a close working relationship with ACORN, the community organization that has been indicted numerous times for violating federal and state laws.

Vargas, after joining the Ricci lawsuit, was physically attacked by a fellow black firefighter in retaliation for his action.

Sotomayor upheld, with summary judgment, New Haven’s dismissal of the promotion exam on which Vargas and 17 white firefighters excelled, a dismissal motivated by the fact that no black firefighters did well enough for imminent promotion.

Vargas was ridiculed by fellow firefighters as an Uncle Tom for joining the lawsuit.

Sotomayor had no qualms about slapping down Uncle Tomás for thinking he could advance in his career based on his merits.

Vargas bravely remained in the New Haven fire department despite the tension and resentment displayed toward him by other firefighters.  He fought his battle for five years, until most of the department eventually came around to his position.

Sotomayor raised enormous controversy over her position and angered Americans who believe disparate racial results alone should not be used to conclude that discrimination has taken place.

The New Haven Hispanic firefighters’ association publicly reversed its opposition to Vargas’ position when the Supreme Court decided to take up the lawsuit, even before the Court decided the case in his favor.

Sotomayor’s position, presumably influenced by her experiences as a “wise Latina,” was abandoned by the Latino organization that represents Vargas’ profession.

Finally, the Supreme Court ruled in Vargas’ favor and overturned Sotomayor’s summary judgment 9-0.

In the New York Times interview, Vargas said, “I want [my three sons] to have a fair shake, to get a job on their merits and not because they’re Hispanic or they fill a quota.  What a lousy way to live.”

In her aforementioned speech, which tacitly supported Hispanic and female quotas in the federal judicial system, Sotomayor said with respect to her profession, “[Some believe] that judges must transcend their personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law…  I wonder whether achieving that goal is possible in all or even in most cases…  [We] may have different perspectives, either as some theorists suggest because of our cultural experiences or as others postulate because we have basic differences in logic and reasoning…  Whether born from experience or inherent physiological or cultural differences… our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging” [emphasis added].

What a lousy way to judge.

Five months after the stimulus bill was passed, we can now say that we’ve witnessed the following under-stimulating results.

Payrolls are falling more than forecast, with employers having cut 467,000 jobs in June, following a 322,000-job decline in May.  Factory jobs fell by 136,000 after dropping 156,000 in May.

Unemployment is at 9.5%, the highest level in 15 years, and is projected to exceed 10% by the end of 2009.  Some economists expect it to remain at historically high levels for years.

The average workweek is at 33 hours, the lowest in 45 years.

Average weekly earnings are down to $611.

The national debt is $11.5 trillion.  The Congressional Budget Office projects the deficit for 2009 to be almost $2 trillion and for 2010 to be more than $1.4 trillion.

The Treasury is increasing its sale of debt to pay for spending.  Treasury offered $1 trillion in notes and bonds in the first half of 2009 and plans to offer another $1 trillion by the end of 2009.

Colin Powell, of all people, is alarmed that Obama’s spending orgy may be swelling government and the national debt: “I’m concerned at the number of programs that are being presented, the bills associated with these programs and the additional government that will be needed to execute them…  [We have] a huge, huge national debt that, if we don’t pay for [it] in our lifetime, our kids and grandkids and great-grandchildren will have to pay for…”  Now he tells us!

Jared Bernstein, chief economic advisor to Joe Biden, whose office is managing the stimulus, says, “It’s working, it’s demonstrably working.”  According to Bernstein, $200 billion in stimulus money has already been obligated or spent.  Case closed!

Note to Bernstein: In order to demonstrate causality, you have to show that: (1) there was a cause, (2) there was an effect, and (3) the cause influenced the effect.  Defenders of the stimulus bill are still stuck on #1: as of June, only 10% of all stimulus funds had been distributed.  Bernstein’s $200 billion “obligated or spent” figure—eerily reminiscent of the administration’s “jobs saved or created” trope—is untrustworthy, because the administration has already been caught lying about money committed to spending projects.

Given the miserable failure of the stimulus bill, naturally Congressional Democrats want… another stimulus bill!  According to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, “We need to be open to… further action.”  Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said that another stimulus would “probably take place towards the end of the year.”  Second-ranking Senate Democrat Dick Durbin said he would leave any decisions on passing another stimulus bill to “the president’s evaluation”—and we all know how cautious Barack “Fiscal Restraint” Obama will be.  Stan Collender, former Congressional budget analyst, said that another stimulus bill may be possible if the economy gets worse: “Right now it doesn’t seem to be justified…  Come September, it might be.”

The first stimulus package was “a bit too small,” according to Laura Tyson, member of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.  Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times, “O.K., Thursday’s jobs report settles it.  We’re going to need a bigger stimulus.”  Biden advisor Bernstein says, “There is no conceivable stimulus package on the face of this earth that would fully offset the deepest recession since the Great Depression.”

Let’s see: the stimulus bill committed a record $787 billion in spending.  Tyson says it should have been “a bit” bigger.  Congressional Democrats and Krugman wanted it much bigger.  Bernstein admits it would have to be infinitely big to work.  Can we give Bernstein the award for inadvertent honesty on this one?

The clincher that the stimulus bill was an abject failure—and that another stimulus bill would be a repeat failure—is the fact that Wall Street has just hit a 10-week low after talk of a second stimulus package recently began.  Amateur analysts suggest that chatter about another stimulus bill is making investors nervous, because—get this—it shows that the economy might not be recovering.  According to Hugh Johnson of Johnson Illington Advisors, “When there’s talk about another stimulus plan, that adds fuel to that fire, it intensifies the concerns about the timing and strength of the recovery.”

Is it possible, just possible, that investors are nervous, not because Congress’ hinting at a second stimulus package implies the economy is not recovering—which I think they can figure out on their own—but because Congress is hinting at a second stimulus package?

If Democrats aren’t persuaded by Republicans’ argument, backed up by ample historical data, that spending vast quantities of wealth not yet created does not stimulate the economy in the long term, could they at least admit their little experiment failed and try the Republican option for a change?

Paul Krugman says of the U.S. Representatives who recently voted against the climate change bill: “[I]if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians… carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided… they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.”

Well, that’s what one Australian Senator, Steve Fielding, recently did in advance of the Australian Senate’s vote on a national emissions trading scheme.  In addition to a fact-finding trip to the U.S., Fielding prepared a series of questions for Australia’s “Minister for Climate Change and Water,” Senator Penny Wong:

Is it the case that CO₂ increased by 5% since 1998 whilst global temperature cooled over the same period?

Wong: “When climate change scientists talk about global warming they mean warming of the climate system as a whole, which includes the atmosphere, the oceans, and the cryosphere (ice, snow and frozen ground)…  [A]t time scales of around a decade, natural variability can mask the atmospheric warming trend…”

Then how do we know warming is happening?  Do we know which factors are “masking” atmospheric warming and to what extent?  If not, how do we know atmospheric cooling isn’t taking place, and natural variability in the other direction isn’t “masking” that?

Wong adds, “[T]he year 1998 was unusually warm…  [T]he use of a highly unusual year to begin the trend analysis will also give misleading results.”  What about the period from the 1940s to the 1970s, during which emissions increased yet atmospheric temperature cooled?  Were the 1940s “a highly unusual decade”?

On ocean temperatures: “[O]nly about five percent of the warming since 1960 has taken place in the air…  Most of warming [sic] since 1960 (about 85 percent) has happened in the oceans.”

In an article last year, NPR reported, “Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message.  These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years” and have even cooled.  Their explanation: “[H]eat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air”—you remember, the air that Wong admits has absorbed only 5% of all warming.

NPR continues: “One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded—and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.”  No doubt these same scientists would have been just as vigilant in calling into question their entire data collection operation had it produced exactly the results they had predicted!

NPR: “The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.”

Let’s see: the Earth has its own atmospheric intermediaries that can nullify the entire influence of mankind on Earth’s temperatures—or not, depending on factors no one understands; and just to be safe, we should destroy industrial civilization.  How about we postpone the obliteration of 21^st century living standards until climatologists get sick of playing with their cute diving robots and start measuring things that actually affect the climate?

With respect to the cryosphere, Wong writes, “Since 1998 there has been continued decline in Arctic sea ice, reduction in the area of snow and frozen ground, melting of glaciers and melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.”

In May 2009, Czech physicist Luboš Motl documented that “global sea ice remains substantially above the normal” level for the month.  According to engineer Dennis Chamberland, as of 2009, glaciers are growing in: Norway, Canada, France, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, Switzerland, Kirghizstan, and Russia.  Glaciers are growing in New Zealand, including all glaciers in the Southern Alps.  In the U.S., glaciers are growing in Colorado, Washington, California, Montana, and Alaska.  In Antarctica in 2007, ice had grown to record levels since data collection began.  Greenland’s icecap is growing at the rate of 7.2 miles a year.  Science magazine reported in 2005 that the Greenland ice sheet is growing thicker.

So Wong seems to have comprehensively flunked Fielding’s Question #1.

Is it the case that the rate and magnitude of warming between 1979 and 1998… was not unusual in either rate or magnitude as compared with warmings that have occurred earlier in the Earth’s history?

Wong: “[B]etween ice ages and warm inter-glacial periods temperatures increased by 4 to 7°C.  However this was a gradual process taking approximately 5,000 years…  Globally, the Earth has already experienced warming of 0.76°C since 1850…”

The period from 1850-2009 is 1/30^th the length of the 5,000-year period Wong references.  Presumably global temperatures over 5,000 years fluctuate.  So how do we know the global warming from 1850-2009—a “blink of an eye” by Wong’s standard—will continue at the same rate?  How do we know we’re not approaching a local maximum and that temperatures won’t start to decline soon?

Is it the case that all [climate] computer models projected a steady increase in temperature for the period 1990-2008, whereas in fact there were only 8 years of warming… followed by 10 years of stasis and cooling?

Wong: “It is not the case that all [climate] computer models projected a steady increase in temperature…”  Rather, simulations collectively predicted an increase “on average.”

I don’t know about you, but I’d really like to see which models predicted what actually happened and which didn’t, and what the models that were right predicted from 2008 on.

John Brignell recently compiled a list of 598 outcomes of global warming cited by environmental alarmists.  A few include: anxiety attacks, childhood insomnia, depression, early marriages, extreme changes to California, flesh-eating disease, heart attacks, lawsuits increasing, and psychiatric illness; all of which I propose had a causal influence in Michael Jackson’s death.

Maybe there’s a U.S. Senator brave enough to question and research the science of global warming before the Senate’s vote on the climate change bill.  If this thing is real, we can’t afford to lose too many more celebrities.