Scott Spiegel

Time magazine recently awarded its vaunted Person of the Year title to “The Protestor.”

The increasingly irrelevant weekly has been moving away from traditional designations of actual, individual human beings as Person of the Year for a while now.  Apparently the left-leaning journal has been ever more swayed by the collectivist notion that there are no individual heroes or titans that drive the world—just influences, movements, and groundswells.  Recent winners of Time’s award have consisted of The Peacemakers (including founder of modern terrorism Yasser Arafat), The Whistleblowers (including an Enron staffer who warned about bad accounting practices), and The Good Samaritans (including certified bobblehead Bono).

At least those titles went to groups of several persons each.  Time’s latest choice encompasses literally millions of human beings.  It’s as vague and vacuous as the phrase “War on Poverty.”

(I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised at Time’s latest addle-headed selection; this is the same magazine that chose Vladimir Putin as Person of the Year in 2007 and, um, “You” in 2006.)

Throughout its lengthy cover story, Time boosts “protesting” as if it were just another Internet craze, like planking, owling, or Batmanning.

In saluting The Protestor, Time recklessly combines the following disparate groups: pro-democracy protestors in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, and Bahrain; anti-corruption protestors in Russia and India; Tea Party protestors; Occupy Wall Street protestors; “Real Democracy” protestors in Spain; public sector union benefit cut protestors in Wisconsin; and austerity cut protestors in Athens and London.  Practically kissing cousins!

In a related photo essay, the editors casually juxtapose portraits of figures from different groups: an Egyptian democracy demonstrator next to an Occupy Wall Streeter; a Tunisian women’s rights advocate beside a Greek austerity protestor.

The spurious comparison of democracy advocates to anti-capitalist ne’er-do-wells is no doubt a means for liberal Time editors to pat themselves on the backs.  By placing leftist rallies in the same league as pro-freedom demonstrations, they grant the former a degree of legitimacy unobtainable through these mob movements’ flimsy philosophical grounding or scant public support.

Predictably, Time focuses on the superficial similarities between Arab Spring and Occupy/austerity protestors, such as their relative youth, use of social media to mobilize, display of slogans, clashes with police, and impatience with “the system.”

In a video explaining the reasoning behind his choice, the author of the Time piece—whose nephew was a figure in the Occupy movement—claims that the Arab protests are a more “extreme” version of what happened in New York.

This is utterly wrongheaded.

Pro-democracy protestors and Occupy/austerity protestors not only have nothing in common, they’re polar opposites.  Arab Spring demonstrators protested for more freedom; Occupy parasites protested for less.

Occupy Wall Street protestors want more government regulation of the financial sector, tougher restrictions on bank lending practices, greater taxation of high-income earners, more wealth confiscation and redistribution, and more government control of health care, college tuition, and private sector wages.  Public sector union members crave more taxpayer dollars for lavish benefits and pension packages few in the private sector receive and more power to bully employees into joining unions.  Austerity protestors demand more government-mandated support for slothful Southern European lifestyles.

Pro-democracy protestors, meanwhile, desire freedom of speech and freedom to run a business without the government throwing them in jail or confiscating their property.

Lumping pro-democracy protestors in Arab dictatorships with Occupy Wall Street malcontents is like massing Martin Luther King followers with Ku Klux Klan marchers and naming Person of the Year “The Racial Justice Advocate.”

Yes, Occupy and union protestors were “inspired” by the Arab Spring and conferred with several of their leaders.  But these groups clearly were stimulated by Arab protestors’ techniques, not their pro-liberty message.

Even the Time piece’s author seems to recognize on some level that he’s comparing apples and oranges.  As he notes, “The protesters in the Middle East and North Africa are literally dying to get political systems that roughly resemble the ones that seem intolerably undemocratic to protesters in Madrid, Athens, London and New York City.”  Then why dishonor the former by tossing them in with the latter?

If protest was on Time editors’ minds—and there certainly was a lot of noisy protesting this year—then their Person of the Year title should have gone to Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire after bureaucratic authorities repeatedly quashed his efforts to sell his wares and make an honest living.  Bouazizi was the single person most responsible for setting off the chain of pro-democracy protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, et al., and the subsequent elections and tumultuous regime changes that will alter the course of Middle Eastern history for better or for worse.



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Over the past few weeks, a controversy has been brewing between conservative commentators Ann Coulter and Mark Levin over the relative fitness of frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination.

In her columns and TV appearances, Coulter has been stumping for Romney and stomping all over Gingrich.  On his syndicated radio talk show, Levin has been denouncing Romney as a non-conservative and bolstering Gingrich as a flawed but superior alternative.

The tiff echoes Coulter’s endorsement earlier this year of Chris Christie, before he insisted he wasn’t running, and Levin’s dismissal of Christie as a RINO.  In both cases, Levin has expressed contempt for the “Republican establishment” trying to decide the GOP nominee, though it would be hard to characterize Coulter as part of any establishment.

Coulter’s endorsement of Romney is a bit puzzling, when one recalls her animosity toward John McCain and her tongue-in-cheek threat to campaign for Hillary Clinton if McCain got the 2008 Republican presidential nomination.  Coulter argued then that Republicans do not win elections when they run moderate candidates, because such candidates appear ideologically weak against genuine leftists such as Obama.  On the contrary, because this is a center-right country, Republicans win when they run unapologetic conservatives such as Ronald Reagan, who offer a contrasting alternative to the Democratic candidate.

Coulter has reconciled this apparent contradiction by arguing that McCain was consistently moderate or center-left.  In contrast, Romney has flip-flopped and been inconsistent, but has switched from liberal to conservative positions.

Levin claims that Gingrich has a stronger track record as a conservative than Romney, including the former’s efforts to get the first Republican majority reelected in the House in 68 years and his implementation of welfare reform.  Levin warns that we can’t trust Romney to go to bat for conservative principles, given his spotty past.

I sympathize greatly with Levin’s frustration that we can’t seem to find a strong, consistent, articulate conservative this election cycle who’s willing to run, doesn’t have heavy personal or political baggage, and can maintain a double-digit showing in the polls.  I worry whether anyone we nominate—Romney, Gingrich, or someone else—will consistently stand up for conservative principles once president.

I’m no Romney fan, and I empathize with those who claim his major virtue is his electability.  However, the more I think about Coulter’s argument—or rather, my take on it—the more I think she’s right, but with one major caveat.

As Coulter explained to Sean Hannity recently, the most important thing we need our next president to do—among the many Democratic messes that have to be cleaned up—is to repeal ObamaCare.  The GOP can’t get rid of ObamaCare without a Republican president, unless they have a supermajority in the Senate, a majority in the House, and no Republican defectors.  None of this is guaranteed.  A Senate supermajority will be especially difficult to achieve, perhaps even more so than putting a Republican in the White House.

As Coulter noted, ObamaCare must be repealed as soon as the 113^th Congress and the 45^th president are sworn in.  One of the many compromises/blunders Congressional Democrats made in order to ram ObamaCare through was pacifying voters with a phony claim that the bill would save money over the next 10 years; they did so by having ObamaCare taxes kick in starting in 2010 but most benefits not begin until 2014.  This gave the GOP a leg up in getting the bill repealed—but it gave them only so much time.  Coulter predicts that once people start collecting their “treats” and federal insurance starts crowding out the private market, the bill will never be repealed.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments for and against the ObamaCare individual mandate in March; however, it is not certain that the court will find the provision unconstitutional, or that Congressional Democrats won’t find some way around the ruling.

Thus, if the most important thing for the next president to do is to repeal ObamaCare, then I would paraphrase William F. Buckley, Jr. and recommend that we vote for the most electable Republican who will repeal ObamaCare.  Assuming that all seven contenders would repeal it—and all have credibly pledged to do so—and that Romney is the most electable candidate, this suggests we go with Romney.  Other issues are important—but not as important as repealing ObamaCare.

The situation recalls moderate Republican Scott Brown’s battle against Democrat Martha Coakley for the late Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat in November 2009.  Brown’s win in liberal Massachusetts, and his swearing in as the 41^st GOP Senator—the one needed to block Democrats’ supermajority—was seen as a referendum on ObamaCare, because Brown had sworn to vote against the House’s version of the bill.  (Democrats cheated by using budget reconciliation to meld the Senate and House bills, but that’s another story.)

Brown ran on a platform of promising to vote against ObamaCare.  As I wrote at the time, Senator Brown could propose “a bill using Medicare funds to subsidize partial-birth abortions for illegal Islamist immigrant tax cheats with Al-Qaeda ties, and he would still be Republicans’ hero for having voted down the health care bill.”

Similarly, Romney could be squishy on all kinds of issues, and conservatives would still be grateful—as long as he repeals ObamaCare.

But here’s the caveat: Is Romney in fact the most electable Republican?  Will RomneyCare, and the fact that Obama cited it as a model for ObamaCare, do him in?  Will Romney be more electable than Gingrich, who formerly supported the individual mandate on a national level?

For those who find some issue other than ObamaCare more important, or are willing to risk not having it repealed for the satisfaction of running a preferable but less electable candidate, my arguments won’t be persuasive.

But for those who think that the #1 priority of the next president should be undoing ObamaCare, Romney’s electability is the pressing unknown that must be discovered.



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Frontrunner-of-the-month GOP presidential contender Newt Gingrich caused a stir at Saturday night’s Iowa debate when he affirmed his previous characterization of “an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and were historically part of the Arab community.”

For once, Gingrich is correct.

The label “Palestine” was used historically to refer to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (and beyond); the term had no political import.  During the first half of the 20^th century, “Palestinian” referred largely to Jews living in Palestine.  The Palestine Post, for example, was printed in Hebrew and English, and in 1950 was renamed The Jerusalem Post.

The British, who controlled Palestine after WWI, divided it in two in 1923, giving 75% of the land—the area that is now Jordan—to Palestinian Arabs, and the remaining 25% to Palestinian Jews.  But that wasn’t good enough to satisfy regional Arabic despots.

In 1947, the United Nations proposed a partition plan to create side-by-side Jewish and Arab states out of the 25% that was left of the original Palestine, west of the Jordan River.  The Arab regimes surrounding Palestine rejected the deal; this resulted in the 1947-1948 Civil War and the creation of the Jewish state.

During the subsequent 1948 Arab-Israeli War, started against Israel one day after it declared statehood, Arab governments encouraged hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs to flee their homes in order to facilitate the onslaught of the invading armies of Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen against Israelis.  These regimes promised to return to Palestinian Arabs the property they had left once Israel was defeated; however, Israel won, and refugees were forced to relocate outside of Palestine.

As Gingrich noted, plenty of Muslim countries could have given Palestinian Arab refugees a state, but none did.  The countries to which refugees scattered—chiefly Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan—suppressed any burgeoning sense of Palestinian identity to a far greater degree than Israel ever did.

Strangely, Palestinian Arab refugees did not protest after the Arab-Israeli war when Egypt and Jordan grabbed the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Jerusalem—the same territories that the United Nations had set aside to serve as their home state.  To this day, Palestinian Arabs insist on being granted, not the territory set aside for them in 1923 in present-day Jordan, not the territory taken over in 1948 by Egypt and Jordan, but one tiny sliver of land in the Middle East that has served as a refuge for Jewish Holocaust survivors and a base for Jews to call their home state.

The “Palestinian people” was a fiction created post-WWII to facilitate the insertion of a fifth column inside Israel to demand endless, untenable land concessions and eventually encroach upon the entire Jewish state.

In an interview with the Dutch newspaper Trouw in 1977, former Palestinian Liberation Organization leader Zuheir Mohsen admitted, “The Palestinian people does not exist.  The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity.  In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese.  Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct ‘Palestinian people’ to oppose Zionism.”

How much clearer can it get?  How much more nakedly could the founders of the Palestinian strategy reveal their modus operandi?

That the Palestinian people are invented is not in question.  The only question is whether they should be awarded their own state.  Anyone who cares about the security of Israel, the only free nation in the region, should answer with a resounding no.

Back to Saturday’s debate: Moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Gingrich if he thought his comments were dangerous.  Gingrich replied, “Is what I said factually correct?  Yes.  Is it historically true?  Yes…  [E]very day, rockets are fired into Israel…  Hamas does not admit the right of Israel to exist, and says publicly, ‘Not a single Jew will remain.’ The Palestinian Authority ambassador to India said last month… ‘Israel has no right to exist.’”

He continued: “The Palestinian claim to a right of return is based on a historically false story.  Somebody ought to have the courage to go all the way back to… the context in which Israel came into existence…  ‘Palestinian’ did not become a common term until after 1977.  This is a propaganda war in which our side refuses to engage.”

In response to Gingrich’s defense, hapless Mitt Romney floundered all over the place, claiming that, although he mostly agreed with Gingrich, it was a “mistake” to call the Palestinians an invented people (though they are), Gingrich had made it “more difficult for [Israelis] to sit down with the Palestinians” (though it’s already impossible), and Gingrich had decided to “throw incendiary words into a place which is a boiling pot” (though the situation is already hopeless).

Despite his ideological missteps, character flaws, and general unsuitability to be our nominee, I’m happy to give credit where credit is due, and in this case it goes squarely to Gingrich.  As he summed up, “It is helpful to have a president of the United States with the courage to tell the truth, [like] Ronald Reagan, who went around his entire national security apparatus to call the Soviet Union an evil empire and who overruled his entire State Department in order to say, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’  Reagan believed the power of truth restated the world and reframed the world…  I will tell the truth, even if it’s at the risk of causing some confusion… with the timid.”

If Gingrich doesn’t get the nomination—and he doesn’t especially deserve to—he may at least serve the same function that other unlikely nominees have served on various issues from Santorum (Iran) to Cain (taxes) to Bachmann (ObamaCare) to Perry (Social Security): namely, to push Mitt Romney to the right.  Based on his comments on the Palestinians, Gingrich may even serve as a model for pressuring our nominee to speak the truth.



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The United States Postal Service is once again threatening to scale back service due to budget shortfalls.

Earlier this year the postal service warned that it would cut Saturday delivery if it didn’t get an emergency infusion of cash from the federal government to pay off its staggering debts.

Last week the USPS announced that, as part of a $3 billion cost-cutting plan to help it avoid bankruptcy, the agency planned to eliminate one-day delivery, such that all letters would be delivered in a minimum of two days, even if they’re only going next door.  To get your letter delivered by the next day, you’ll have to go to the nearest processing center and drop off your letter before final pickup, thus carrying out half of the mail delivery service yourself.

Complicating matters, the postal service expects to close half of its processing centers and reduce its workforce by 100,000 employees over the next few years through layoffs, attrition, and retirement.

The postal service has known about its financial woes for years.  Yet statist Congresses have forbidden it from taking effective action to right its situation.  Its current debt is a result of its failure to make $5.5 billion in annual payments to cover its insanely generous retiree packages.

Many USPS sympathizers insist we should do anything we can to preserve this great American institution.  Senator Susan Collins, RINO of Maine, has proposed the 21^st Century Postal Service Act of 2011.  Recently she wailed, “Time and time again in the face of more red ink, the postal service puts forward ideas that could well accelerate its death spiral.”

I say good riddance.

There are plenty of private, for-profit mail and shipping services that can do exactly what the postal service does—better, faster, cheaper, and more reliably—in part because they remain unencumbered by business-unfriendly postal unions, lavish retirement benefits, and redundant administrative functions.

I feel the same way about bailing out the post office that I do about bailing out my home city of New York’s metro service, which forever seems to be teetering on the edge of bankruptcy and in dire need of just one more blast of cash from Albany.  My recommendation: Don’t give them another penny.  Let the private market absorb as much of these failing public institutions’ business as possible, in order to facilitate the ultimate transition to complete privatization.  In the case of the subway/bus system, that means letting some of the overflow in transportation demand go to taxis, private bus/car services, rental/private cars, carpooling, bicycles, or walking.  It may mean a temporary, painful period of crowding and poor service in which the public clamors for—and finally gets—privatization of the metro service.

In the case of the postal service, it means that United Parcel Service, FedEx, et al. will pick up the slack of no-longer-delivered Saturday mail, and will carry out the next-day mail service the postal service no longer provides.  Companies and private citizens will expand their use of e-mail, faxes, direct deposit, smartphone apps, and online billing and payment to handle important, time-sensitive communications and functions.  This is what they’ve been doing anyway for the past two decades—which is part (but not all) of the reason for the old-fashioned, unenterprising USPS’s woes.

In a surprisingly clearheaded, unsentimental article in The New York Times, Elisabeth Rosenthal admitted, after describing a petition to save Saturday delivery that had appeared in her Manhattan building’s lobby, “I will not say whether I signed.  But I will tell you what arrived in my mailbox that Saturday: two credit card offers; a Linen Source catalog for someone who used to live in my apartment; a notice of a sale on running shoes; some coupons for 10 percent off on pizza delivery; three promotional letters about colleges; and a bank letter about changing terms on my son’s high-school checking account for 2012.”  (Evidently the Times let environmentalist Rosenthal off the leash to criticize the USPS because of the billions of pounds of wasteful junk mail distributed each year.)

For those who plead that the USPS is a great, democratizing institution that delivers a variety of important types of mail to underserved residents who vitally need it: The bulk of USPS’s costs these days are funded by mass market advertisers who get discounts for flooding our mailboxes with glossy flyers and brochures for high-end furniture, home decor items, and clothing.  As with so many instances of government involvement in the economy, the USPS chooses winners by subsidizing mail order companies to send us junk catalogs.

Critics of five-day-a-week service claim that, as an advanced nation, we can’t allow the travesty of not having Saturday mail delivery, which would slow business and render our communications system like that of a developing nation.

Nonsense.  As long as we allow for private enterprise to step in, we’ll be even more efficient and advanced than if the USPS had a greater role in our mail delivery system.  Even most Western European nations have privatized mail delivery.

Why should there be one near-monopolistic, government-controlled service that has legal prerogative to shut out private companies from central mail delivery functions?  Why should our mail delivery system constantly verge on bankruptcy?  What’s advanced about that?

After the USPS cuts Saturday service, the next logical steps are to cut: Friday service, Thursday service, Wednesday service, Tuesday service, and Monday service.



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10. Andrew Cuomo – Yes, really.  As I wrote earlier this year, “When Democrats cut spending and refuse to raise taxes, as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has—i.e. when they abandon their party’s core philosophy and govern like conservatives—they enjoy skyrocketing popularity ratings and set their constituents on a path to financial solvency.”  Cuomo’s late-career, probably temporary, but remarkable conversion followed the example set by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who also stood up to public sector unions, slashed spending, and held down taxes.

9. Darrell Issa – California Representative Darrell Issa held hearings this summer on the Justice Department’s botched, scandalous Operation Fast and Furious gun-trafficking sting operation, including gripping testimony from ATF officials from Phoenix and Mexico.  Recently Attorney General Eric Holder was forced to admit that Fast and Furious was “flawed in its concept and flawed in its execution”—kind of like his boss’s presidency.  Along with the Treasury Department’s pursuit of the administration’s tainted $535 million loan to solar energy company Solyndra, Issa’s persistent work erased the laughable notion that the corrupt Obama tenure has remained blissfully transgression-free.

8. Peter King – New York Representative Peter King bucked controversy by holding hearings on whether Muslim Americans were becoming radicalized and linking with terrorist groups to plot attacks on home soil.  From my column “Liberals’ Game of Cat-and-Muslim”: “[King] held a hearing on whether al-Qaeda is trying to recruit young Muslims in the U.S. and whether Muslim Americans are sufficiently cooperating with federal officials…  [H]undreds of willfully naïve, politically correct New Yorkers gathered in Times Square, steps from where [Faisal] Shahzad tried to kill hundreds of New Yorkers, to protest King’s hearing as racist and Islamophobic.”

7. Mitch Daniels – Second-term Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels navigated such juvenile obstructions as Democratic legislators walking out to protest Republicans’ agenda, and ultimately got the bulk of long-stalled GOP legislation passed in the state.  Daniels wowed CPAC with a speech on fiscal austerity that included such zingers as “Our morbidly obese federal government needs, not just behavior modification, but bariatric surgery” and his reference to federal debt as “the new red menace.”  One of the only feasible GOP presidential candidates both conservative and articulate, Daniels declined to run this year despite widespread pressure to do so.

6. Pat Toomey – The deficit reduction supercommittee boasted only one reliable fiscal conservative: Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey.  All five other GOP members voted for the boneheaded budget bill in August that unnecessarily raised the debt ceiling.  Without Toomey, Republican supercommittee members might have caved to Democratic pressure to raise tax rates on high-income earners.  The committee failed—which, given Democratic intransigence, is the best outcome we could have hoped for.  Toomey’s first year in office after dispensing with Joe Sestak in hostile blue-state territory in the 2010 midterms was a resounding success.

5. Rick Perry – Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry held the distinction of leading the state that oversaw 40% of all new U.S. jobs created since the recovery began, triple the number of the next-closest competitor New York, with over 1 million added since he took office.  Texas’s jobs boom resulted not just from rising oil prices—private sector industries such as construction, hospitality, and professional services also saw growth—but also Perry’s understanding of the hindrance excessive regulation places on incentives to invest and hire.  Perry offered a more conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, thus helping push the GOP front-runner to the right.

4. Herman Cain – Businessman, radio host, rocket scientist, and presidential candidate Herman Cain spent the year touting his 9-9-9 flat tax plan, which would gut the federal tax code and replace it with a 9% federal income tax, 9% corporate tax, and 9% national sales tax.  Rick Perry produced a copycat plan, and Newt Gingrich revived his old plan, and suddenly the nation began seriously debating the merits of flat tax plans for the first time since Steve Forbes’ last run.  And did you know that, back in the day, as president-elect of the National Restaurant Association, Cain was one of the most vocal critics of Hillarycare?

3. Ann Coulter – The left-wing, Obama-endorsed Occupy Wall Street movement that seeped into the national consciousness like a whiff of raw sewage had no concrete antagonists, just the sorry spectacle of a bunch of hippy retreads and trust fund brats battling hypothermia and body lice in tent cities around the country.  Ann Coulter was the conservative who foretold it best, in her bestseller Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.  From the book jacket: “The Democratic Party activates mobs, depends on mobs, coddles mobs, publicizes and celebrates mobs—it is the mob.”

2. Scott Walker – From “Wisconsin’s Government Cheese Revolution”: “Governor Scott Walker… proposed a bill that would… prevent [public sector] unions from forcing members to pay dues, require annual secret ballots on whether to remain unionized, and ask members to contribute a pittance toward their lavish pensions and health care plans.”  Walker’s courage in standing his ground in the face of protestors calling him Hitler and Hosni Mubarak, and Democratic legislators fleeing the state to avoid voting on the bill, presaged the guts that mayors around the country didn’t have in dealing with Occupy Wall Street.

1. Michele Bachmann – Minnesota Representative and Tea Party leader Bachmann embodied the best combination of conservative/articulate out of all the 2012 GOP presidential nominees; it’s inexplicable that she isn’t doing better in the polls.  From my column “CDC Prepares for Outbreak of Bachmann Derangement Syndrome”: “Bachmann has labeled herself a ‘constitutional conservative’—precisely the correct label to use in this bizarre era of pay czars, light bulb bans, and trillion-dollar deficits…  Bachmann [took] leadership roles on… repealing [Dodd-Frank] and replacing ObamaCare with free market reforms.”  Here’s hoping she can at least snag the VP slot.

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The police warned that if protestors didn’t move, force would be used to remove them.  Protestors didn’t move.  Force was used to remove them.

What’s the big deal?

Liberals were aghast at last Friday’s video showing Police Lt. John Pike shooting pepper spray at a row of seated protestors blocking a walkway at the University of California at Davis.  The protestors were barricading the path against officers trying to arrest students who had violated the college’s order prohibiting pitching tents on the quad.

Curiously, the seated protestors had their heads down and eyes covered during the entire 10-second assault.  This may have had something to do with the fact that the sadistic monster Pike had raised his bright-red pepper spray can in the air and shaken it for about five minutes before spraying, in order to warn the protestors about what was coming.  In the video, onlookers can be heard calling out, “Keep your eyes closed!” “Cover your eyes!” and “Protect yourself!” Upon being sprayed, none of the seated protestors appeared to cry out in pain, though it was difficult to hear over the onlookers wailing, “You guys are supposed to protect us!”

One hysterical woman in the video can be heard yowling, “Why are you doing this?  These are children!”—which I guess is supposed to be aurally reminiscent of “It’s for the children!”

For those who don’t belong to the Young Democratic Socialists, pepper spray is a commonly used, non-lethal crowd control agent that is a chemical cousin of mace and other tear gases.  It induces watery eyes, runny nose, and coughing—which can’t be any worse than the symptoms of Zuccotti Lung.

Contrary to occupiers’ claims, the seated protestors were not willing to move out of the way if asked.  Officers can be seen trying to drag protestors away after the pepper spray cans had been pulled out, but the arm-linked protestors refused to move.

The police appear to have carried out their pepper spray raid, not to cruelly inflict distress on the protestors, but to soften them up to make it easier to remove them from the walkway.  As former Baltimore Police Chief Charles Kelly noted, “When you start picking up human bodies, you risk hurting them.  Bodies don’t have handles on them.”  Even after being sprayed, the protestors remained limp, forcing multiple officers to drag them away.

The UC Davis protestors, despite the widespread impression of them as beleaguered innocents set upon by hordes of machine gun-toting Gestapo, far outnumbered the police patrolling them.  UC Davis reports that there were 35 police officers on the scene Friday, compared to 250 protestors and onlookers.

Overwhelming numbers of unhinged protestors in any setting have the potential to wreak havoc, as evidenced by violent Occupy-driven confrontations over the past two months in other U.S. cities.  Even small groups of committed protestors can inflict costly wreckage, as demonstrated by the handful of Occupy protestors in Rome several weeks ago who injured hundreds of people and caused millions of dollars in damage.

The Occupy protestors have no concern for the well-being or safety of police officers, i.e. individuals in a dangerous profession who otherwise protect protestors in their daily lives.  As one commenter at the website Boing Boing ordered, “[D]on’t pepper spray non-violent protester [sic] you intent [sic] to arrest.  Just arrest them and move on.  If you get hurt, so be it.  You are a police officer.  Your job is inherntly [sic] dangerous.”  Yes, their job is inherently dangerous, due to chaos-instigating criminals like Occupy protestors and the people who sympathize with them.

There are numerous ways of hindering police work besides pushing back against cops or throwing bottles, urine, and feces at them (though the Occupy protestors have tried all of those methods!).  Even passive forms of resistance such as building human chains or walls to prevent police from getting by, or sprawling out on the ground and refusing to move, can justify retaliatory force.

Perhaps the cops could have “stepped over” or “brushed past” the protestors, as some Occupy apologists have glibly suggested.  The protestors sob that they were seated and non-violent when they were sprayed.  Boo-hoo.  They aligned themselves with an anarchic, violent mob, and they telegraphed their intention not to comply with police.  Maybe they would have let themselves be peacefully pushed aside had it come to that.  But the police don’t have time to administer a psychological evaluation to each rally participant to determine his or her propensity for causing mayhem under stress.

When cops say move, you move—even if you’re curled in a fetal position on the ground with flowers in your hair listening to Cat Stevens and nursing orphaned kittens.

The UC Davis police could have acted a lot more brutally, including prodding or beating protestors with batons.  The occupiers should consider themselves warned: Trust fund brat refuses to move, trust fund brat gets spray tanned.

Protestors in the UC Davis videos can be heard chanting “Shame on you!” at police after the incident.  Actually, shame on patsy mayors like Michael Bloomberg and Jean Quan for not empowering police to clear out these animals ages ago.

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• UC Davis Students’ Eerie, Powerful Protest Against Pepper-Spray Chancellor [Video] (gawker.com)
• So Unbelievably Horrible And Wrong: Police Officer Pepper-Sprays Non-Violent Occupy UC Davis Protestors. (perezhilton.com)
• UC Davis Police Pepper Spray Student Occupy Protestors, University Investigating Incident (mediaite.com)
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Last summer, during the debt ceiling standoff, Congressional Republicans and Democrats came to a dubious—no, wait: stupid—deal to set up a bipartisan “supercommittee” to negotiate $1.2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade.

The committee comprised three Republicans and three Democrats from the House, and three each from the Senate.  The committee would make spending cut recommendations by November 23, and Congress would vote on them by December 24.  If the committee failed to agree to cuts that can pass in Congress, automatic cuts of $450 billion from defense spending, $450 billion from domestic programs, and $300 billion from reduced interest payments would kick in on January 1, 2013.

What could possibly go wrong?

For starters, there are six Democrats on the panel and only six Republicans.  Since spending bills originate in the House, which Republicans control, why is this a 50-50 proposition?  Would gloating Democrats have been so sporting if this process had unfolded in 2007 or 2009?

The Republicans on the committee aren’t nearly as conservative as the Democrats are liberal.  Only one Republican could be called a consistent, genuine fiscal conservative: newly elected Senator, Club for Growth President, and godsend Pat Toomey.  Republican committee chair Rep. Jeb Hensarling, Sen. Jon Kyl, and Reps. Rob Portman, Dave Camp, and Fred Upton, whatever their virtues, all voted to increase the debt ceiling in August, and thus cannot be trusted.

In contrast, three Democrats on the committee—Reps. James Clyburn, Chris Van Hollen, and Xavier Becerra—bucked the majority of House Democrats and voted not to extend the Bush-era tax cuts last December.

In other words, the GOP appointed moderate-right members, while Democrats appointed members of the Socialist Workers Party.

Then there’s the matter of negotiating strength.  Sen. Max Baucus, a Democratic committee member and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, infamously rammed ObamaCare through the Senate without a single GOP vote.  Whatever you think of his policies, the firmness of Baucus’s past negotiating stances has been solidly demonstrated.

In contrast, Republicans consistently fail to stand up for their side in negotiations with Democrats, always caving in when the accusation of being meanies gets to them.  Already Hensarling is making the rounds telling reporters that tax increases are “a reality” when you’re dealing with Democrats.

There’s also the fact that any agreed upon spending cuts are not binding, and can be weakened or eliminated by future Congresses—which means that any cuts that don’t take effect in the next ten minutes are basically meaningless.  Even the “automatic” cuts slated for 2013 can be “unautomatized” by Congress next year.  As Toomey notes, in the event of failure to reach a deal, “[I]t’s very likely that Congress would reconsider the configuration” of automatic cuts.

Also, the Defense Department says it cannot sustain $450 billion in cuts.  As for the $450 billion to be cut from domestic programs, Congress still has to wrangle over which agencies to target, which means that the supercommittee isn’t really deciding anything, just kicking the can down the road.

Also, other committees are trying to use the supercommittee to slip by Congress unpalatable bills on things like agricultural subsidies for farmers who don’t farm, by capitalizing on its behind-closed-doors nature and refusal to disclose its discussions to the public.

The secretive supercommittee, whose final product will be sent straight to Congress for a vote, with no opportunity for revision or amendment, finds itself just eight days away from the deadline with no resolution in sight.  (This, despite President Obama’s helpfully calling the committee every five minutes to nag them from his courtside seat in Hawaii last week.)

Even within their party, Democrats can’t agree on which job-killing tax increases and illusory spending cuts to propose.  For example, Democrats haven’t decided whether to try to claim that the $700 billion we might not be spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may count as 58% of their spending cut target.

Recently Republicans on the committee agreed to a tax increase that would reform the overall tax code, lower the top marginal rate, and broaden the tax base to incorporate the 47% of the population that pays no federal income taxes (and sponges off the rest of us).  Naturally, Democrats resoundingly defeated that proposal.  At least Republicans were savvy enough to start with a negotiating point that involved cutting taxes for high income earners, so that the final compromise would likely be closer to no tax increases for this group.

Although it’s been said many times, many ways, it bears repeating: All of this chaos is entirely the fault of Congressional Democrats, who have refused to pass or even propose a budget for over two years, thus necessitating all of these recent, panicky, last-minute showdowns.  (Quick: Google “Democrats haven’t…” and see what autocomplete suggests for you.)

The most important lesson conservatives should learn from this farce is one that cannot be stated too often: Never negotiate with Democrats.



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• Congress May Try To Prevent Automatic Cuts If SuperCommittee Fails (outsidethebeltway.com)
• Republicans Mull Tax Increases (businessweek.com)
• Supercommittee Making Little Progress, Lawmakers Warn (huffingtonpost.com)
• GOP wobbles on no-new-taxes vow (thehill.com)
• Congressional “supercommittee” punts on taxes (cbsnews.com)

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Iran’s leadership is working feverishly to develop nuclear weapons, and has been doing so for the past two decades.  President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei have repeatedly pledged to use whatever means they have at their disposal to wipe Israel off the map.

Just about everyone except Israel’s right-wing politicians and John McCain has been denying, distorting, or downplaying these hard truths for years.  Even though the U.S. State Department has listed Iran as the biggest state sponsor of terror for decades, and even though evidence has been piling up that Iran is working to acquire weapons, President George W. Bush did nothing to encourage military strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities during his eight years in office, even after the attacks on 9/11.  President Barack Obama is not likely to deviate from this course.

Israel has been undermining Iran’s progress via indirect channels, including deploying the sophisticated Stuxnet worm, which sabotaged Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges and set their capabilities back a year or two; and authorizing a covert assassination program to take out top Iranian nuclear scientists.  These strategies have been helpful, but they only buy so much time.  They are not enough to prevent Iran from succeeding at its ultimate goal.  Economic sanctions are also not enough to halt Iran’s work.

The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is about to release its most detailed report yet documenting Iran’s secret nuclear weapon development at a site near Tehran called Parchin, its uranium enrichment at a facility in Natanz, and its installation of centrifuges at Qom.  All of this activity has been going on, despite Iran’s lies that its technology will be used only to generate electricity.

The IAEA’s report includes evidence that Iran is in the final stages of assembling and deploying nuclear weapons, including developing an atomic bomb trigger device, altering long-range missile warheads to fit nuclear payloads, setting off test explosions, and running computer simulations of nuclear explosions.  All of these experiments are, of course, just essential for the benign task of keeping Tehran’s hairdryers operating.

The IAEA’s unequivocal evidence incorporates satellite photographs and detailed plans obtained by U.S. spy services revealing technological expertise offered by nuclear states hostile to the U.S., including Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea.  Iran has repeatedly denied UN requests to inspect Parchin to verify Iran’s putatively peaceful intentions and to interview Iran’s top nuclear scientists.

Despite the impending release of the IAEA’s report, the otherwise useless and softheaded agency is not expected to condemn Iran for its activities or directly accuse Iran of developing nuclear weapons.  China and Russia, as permanent members of the UN’s Security Council, are likely to oppose new sanctions against Iran, never mind military strikes.

Recently Israel has been hinting at its intention to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.  Any sane person who doesn’t want the craziest, most dangerous regime on the planet to have the most powerful, destructive weapons in the world in its arsenal should be cheering Israel’s attempt to prevent this Armageddon from arriving.  Instead, most of the free nations of the world—to say nothing of its dictatorships, quasi-dictatorships, and communist states who loathe Israel and the U.S.—will likely scream hysterically if Israel launches so much as a spitball into Iran.

Liberals at home and abroad will cry that Iran is another Iraq, that Iran’s nuclear program is as apocryphal as Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of WMDs.  Regardless of the fact that there were legitimate reasons to go to war with Iraq besides weapons of mass destruction, the evidence of weapons development is much stronger for Iran than it was for Iraq.  In addition, Iraq is a small fry compared to Iran, which has been channeling millions of dollars to terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza for decades.

Obama is not likely to do anything to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons.  Certain Republican presidential candidates—i.e. Ron Paul—seem positively giddy over the possibility of Iran acquiring the means of defending itself against big, bad bullies like Israel.  The U.S. must elect a candidate in 2012 who understands the threat Iran poses and is willing to say so repeatedly, unprompted, in interviews and debates.

In the meantime, Israel remains the U.S.’s front line in the war on terror.  This means that Israel may fight some of our common enemies before these foes advance to our terrain—and that if we support Israel, we may spare ourselves American casualties.

But the longer this charade goes on of pretending Iran means what it says when it’s convenient—that they seek only peaceful uses for nuclear power—and doesn’t mean what it says when it’s inconvenient—that it doesn’t really want to destroy Israel—the more difficult it will be to destroy its nuclear facilities, and the more collateral damage will be racked up when the task is finally accomplished.  Iran’s position strengthens the longer we wait.  Iran’s mullahs are hoping to run out the clock.

The U.S., if it doesn’t have the will to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities, should at least provide any help it can—military, monetary, and moral—to Israel in its attempt to do so.  This is an existential crisis that affects Israel’s ability to remain a viable state in the short-term—and the U.S.’s ability to remain a credible world power in the long-term.



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On Tuesday the Mississippi electorate will vote on a controversial amendment to the state constitution declaring that “the term ‘person’ [is] defined to include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the equivalent thereof.”  The Mississippi Personhood Amendment, as it is known, is echoed by similar ballot measures in a half dozen other states.

Since it is illegal to murder a person in all states, and all states have laws dispensing jail time or even the death penalty for murder, the logical conclusion from these referenda is that they will instantly reclassify a broad swath of society as felons.  Have pro-life advocates prepared state corrections officials for the flood of recently pregnant women, abortion doctors, and “morning after” pill consumers they’ll be sending to the pen or the gas chamber?

Mississippi’s law, the most extreme state personhood referendum on the ballot this year, would ban all abortions, some forms of birth control, and all embryonic stem cell research.

Jessica Valenti notes that Proposition 26 would “prioritize the rights of fertilized eggs over the rights of the women carrying them.”  Passage of the law would lead to the absurdity of proclaiming fertilized but unused eggs in a Petri dish to be persons and outlawing in vitro fertilization.

Pro-life conservatives have been crowing about the recent spate of stealth victories their movement has won on the state level.  In The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes explains that this progress has been possible largely because gay marriage has become the more visible social issue in recent years and has detracted attention from continuing behind-the-scenes efforts to restrict abortion.  Such advances are supported, Barnes argues, by technological breakthroughs in sonogram quality, which have made fetuses seem more developed and autonomous than imagined.

Never mind that the reason new abortion restrictions have passed in multiple states is that Republicans took control of 26 state legislatures in 2010 by campaigning against Congressional Democrats’ stimulus spending and health care plan, and that the GOP did not receive some special mandate to start outlawing abortion.  In the minds of the religious right, the momentum is on their side, and they are becoming increasingly bold in their attacks on abortion rights.  As Barnes approvingly notes, anti-abortion crusaders have become “almost wildly ambitious, and more relentless than ever.”

To give a taste of the recently radicalized movement’s fervor, a pro-personhood newsletter in Mississippi assures voters that, while extreme, Initiative #26 would not criminalize miscarriage.  Oh—well, that’s a relief, then.

Meanwhile, go back in time to January of 2010, when the left was enraged because the Supreme Court had ruled in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations, not-for-profit organizations, and unions have the same rights as citizens to spend money to express their political views by endorsing candidates or parties in the final months and days leading up to elections.

Justice Antonin Scalia ripped into Justice John Paul Stevens’ flimsy dissent, noting, “It never shows why ‘the freedom of speech’ that was the right of Englishmen did not include the freedom to speak in association with other individuals, including association in the corporate form.”  Organizations from the Heritage Foundation to the American Civil Liberties Union supported the decision.

Democrats Charles Schumer and Chris Van Hollen subsequently sponsored the DISCLOSE Act to try to squelch the free speech Citizens United had unleashed, but the bill failed to pass in the Senate.

No, of course corporations aren’t literally persons, or at least single persons.  They are considered “legal persons” under the law, not “natural persons.”  But they are made up of persons, and persons run them and act on their behalf.  Persons own the resources they wield.  Persons control how they are configured and operated to provide products and services that keep the corporations—and their employees’ jobs—in existence.

Why are liberals upset that corporations can exert political influence, when the persons that make up corporations can exert political influence?  How is a 1,000-employee corporation that exerts political influence different from 1,000 employees doing the same?

How is a corporation’s power more offensive than a single billionaire such as George Soros virtually controlling the operations of one of the country’s two major political parties?

Because the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, which Citizens United overturned, contained an exception for media corporations, I suppose Democrats would have us believe that corporations aren’t persons, but newspapers are.

But back to Mississippi.  Despite the claims of the recently ascendant “personhood movement,” a fetus simply is not a person.  It is biologically attached to and dependent on its mother, who is a person.  A newborn baby is incapable of surviving for long on its own; a fetus is even less so.  Unlike a physically-separate baby disconnected from its mother and beginning to move about and explore the outside world, a fetus is passive and lacks agency—the ability to act on its environment to pursue life-sustaining goals.

The Citizens United decision was proper, because it correctly identified the link between an individual’s agency in influencing the political process and the agency of a collection of organized individuals influencing the political process.

The Mississippi referendum falsely attributes agency and personhood to a fetus.  It should be soundly rejected.

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• When is a Person a Person? If Mississippi gets their Way it would be at Conception (ferrellgummit.wordpress.com)
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Presidential candidate Herman Cain has been touting his 9-9-9 tax plan, which would replace the three-million-word tax code with a flat 9% federal income tax, 9% corporate tax, and 9% national sales tax.

Fellow candidate Rick Perry recently proposed a flat tax of 20% on earned income and 20% on corporate income, and a simplification of the tax code, including elimination of loopholes and eradication of the death tax.  Newt Gingrich has similarly suggested a 15% flat tax.

These plans recall the flat tax Steve Forbes campaigned for president on in 1996 and 2000.  All of these plans would massively reduce the U.S.’s collective tax compliance cost to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.  (Though liberals don’t realize it, it would be a fantastic thing for our economy if every employee of the Internal Revenue Service and H&R Block, and every tax lawyer, accountant, and tax preparation service employee lost his job and had to go out and find useful productive employment.)

In response to these thoughtful Republican proposals, liberals are screaming that conservatives’ plan for getting us out of our present fiscal crisis is to “tax the poor.”

If only we could get out of our current budget predicament by taxing the poor.  In fact, we can’t even get out of it by taxing the rich.

As has been amply demonstrated, massively increasing taxes on high earners wouldn’t come close to relieving our budget woes.  These can be alleviated only via radical entitlement reform.  Eating the rich now will not ensure an enriching long-term diet for the nation later.

The reason conservatives have been advocating flatter taxes is not that they want to “balance the budget on the backs of the poor,” or some other such nonsense.  It’s so that the 47% of the population who, due to the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit over the past several decades, pays no federal income tax will be forced to contribute something, however measly, to the country’s tax revenue.

Free market types don’t want to raise taxes on the poor to be meanies.  They just want liberals to stop demanding that high earners pay more, and Democrats to stop spending so much, and are willing to call the left out by shining a blinding spotlight on how little almost half the population pays to fund our government.

Conservatives hope that if the income of the lower-earning half of the electorate were considered fair game, then maybe the voters who receive it wouldn’t be so quick to rally around politicians who want to increase spending via public boondoggles like Obama’s Jobs Act, which will have to be paid for via tax revenue.

If Democratic politicians weren’t constantly dreaming up new ways to steal and waste the hard-earned income of the nation’s most productive citizens, perhaps so many Republican candidates wouldn’t be gaining traction by proposing that a greater proportion of society have some “skin in the game.”

And contrary to Democrats’ claims, a flat tax doesn’t “help” or “benefit” the rich—it merely punishes them a little less.  If Occupy Wall Street types weren’t going around hollering that the rich should be even more exorbitantly taxed than they are now—the highest-earning 1% already shoulder 40% of the federal tax burden, a fact of which most protestors seem blissfully unaware—then the glaring lunacy of their demand that the rich pay their fair share wouldn’t be so ripe for ridicule.

It’s possible that neither Cain nor Perry is the best Republican candidate to deliver the flat tax message, since each seems to have some difficulty explaining the intricacies of his policies to audiences (though see Perry’s fine Wall Street Journal editorial outlining his plan).  But having three of the most prominent candidates pushing for a flat tax may pressure other candidates to endorse similar plans, should they secure the nomination (ahem, Mitt Romney).

Liberals must be scared that these flat tax proposals will resonate with voters, as witnessed by the flurry of recent editorials declaring, not that the plans won’t work, but that smart voters would never, ever go for them.

Conservatives often play the game of asking liberals how much those earners in the highest tax bracket should pay—that is, how much would satisfy the left’s desire to bash the rich.  50% of their income?  60%?  70%?

How about a different game: What percentage of their income would it be fair to ask those in the lower 47% to pay?  Would 10% a year be too much too ask?  How about 5%?  1%?

Something greater than 0.00%?



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