Scott Spiegel

Senator Barbara Boxer recently declared that, before the current round of town hall meetings on health care reform, the last time she had seen such suspiciously well-dressed protestors was during the 2000 Florida election recount.  Well, yes—until Obama’s presidency, that’s the last time Republicans showed up en masse to get really angry about something; screaming and chanting are political tactics more naturally suited to the left.

As for the couture angle—here’s a newsflash for Boxer: Republicans have higher standards than Democrats.  A typical left-wing protest involves twenty-somethings and washed-up hippies in ratty T-shirts and shredded jeans breaking windows at a local Starbucks during the midmorning rush.

The average right-wing protest—invariably held in the evening, since attendees have jobs in the daytime—involves adults who dress as though they would like to elevate community standards, not degrade them.  Participants address their concerns directly to those in power, such as legislators, rather than assailing defenseless third parties, such as coffee franchise employees.  The fact that most conservative protestors come directly from work may explain why they wear suits and skirts, but apparently Senate Democrats believe opinions are valid only if expressed by people sporting Birkenstocks and buttons urging presidential assassinations.

When Boxer and other Congressional Democrats realized that Americans don’t view “well-dressed” as an epithet, they moved in the opposite direction: they claimed that the protestors were scruffy rabble-rousers after all.  House Leader Nancy Pelosi insisted that she had seen demonstrators “carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare.”  Translation: One protestor had a swastika with a slash through it, and others were displaying American flags and ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ banners—you know, symbols like swastikas.

Saddling protestors with the “brownshirt” label didn’t work, so Obama’s Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina warned Democrats who were planning town hall meetings, “If you get hit… punch back twice as hard.”

Evidently some representatives took this message literally: at a town hall meeting in Ohio, Representative Russ Carnahan hired union organizers to deny entry to citizens who looked as though they might oppose health care reform legislation, several of whom were promptly mauled by union thugs and sent to the hospital.  Outside, black conservative Kenneth Gladney was racially slandered and physically attacked and sent to the emergency room by an unidentified opponent for handing out ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags.  Protestors were also roughed up at a meeting held by Florida Representatives Kathy Castor and Betty Reed.

Naturally, Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid’s response to this onslaught of leftist violence and intimidation was… to blame Republicans for not minding their manners.  Reid accused protesters of attempting to “sabotage” the process; he said, “These are nothing more than destructive efforts to interrupt a debate…  They are doing this because they don’t have any better ideas.”

Well, yes, actually, we do have one or two, which you may not have heard, because we’ve only been ranting about them for the past, oh, two decades: malpractice tort reform, Medicare reform, health savings accounts, healthcare tax credits, vouchers for private insurance, and pay for performance.  More generally, competition in the private market for health insurance, and individual autonomy regarding level and type of coverage and risk tolerance.  Other than that, we’re flush out of ideas!

In an effort to quell dissatisfaction among constituents, Democrats in Congress finally decided to listen to town hall participants’ ideas and give thoughtful responses that address their concerns.  Just kidding!  The latest tactics being employed by congressmen across the nation are: (1) showing up at town hall meetings, reciting a few talking points, claiming the crowd is too boisterous when they open their mouths, and leaving; (2) announcing meetings at the last minute in the hope that no one will attend; and (3) holding “virtual” town hall meetings.

For example, Representative Kathy Castor’s spokeswoman defended Castor’s abbreviated appearance in Florida by stating, “We said all along our role was to come and give an update on the bill in Congress…  [T]hat’s what we did.”  And that’s what websites are for.

Michigan Representative John Dingell waited to announce last Thursday’s 6pm town hall meeting until Thursday morning.  Word of mouth spread throughout the day, however, and that evening Dingell faced hundreds of constituents who were not impressed by his deceitful maneuver.

At least Castor and Dingell showed up in person; other congressmen, such as Representative Brian Baird of Washington, are planning virtual meetings with constituents.  According to The Columbian, “If you happen to be sitting near a publicly listed Clark County telephone line on the right day at the right time, your phone will ring…  [T]he exact date and time will be kept secret from the public…  [A]n automated message will ask whether you have a question…  Sitting at his own telephone at an as-yet-undisclosed location, Baird then will choose a name based on its location and the topic…  After the call is over, the recording will be posted on his Web site.”

Baird helpfully notes that this system will allow for “a much better cross-section of the public,” by which he means “a cross-section of the public that is not knowledgeable or concerned enough to attend a town hall meeting.”  Note to Baird: There’s a reason they’re called “town hall meetings,” not “prescreened anonymous secret one-way teleconference recordings.”

In the end, some congressmen have decided to simply give up on their constituents.  New York Representative Tim Bishop chose to suspend town hall meetings in his district until late August—you know, when just everyone will be around—because he concluded there was no point in facing an “unruly mob.”  Senator Claire McCaskill similarly issued a last-minute cancellation of a scheduled event due to “safety” concerns.

In the same way that Democrats denigrate protestors who adhere to a “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” standard, they have sunk to a new low: projecting their party’s historic propensity for mob rule and violent agitprop onto frail, elderly grandparents in bowties and cardigans.

Thanks to the Obama administration’s new Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), also known as Cash for Clunkers, American taxpayers are now subsidizing car owners to do what they would have done eventually—scrap their old cars and buy new ones.

CARS is perversely profligate in numerous ways, among them the fact that it forces car dealers to waste time filling out onerous paperwork to get reimbursed by the government and adding legal riders to contracts with car buyers regarding liability for rebates.  Mechanics must squander effort draining each car’s oil, then donning protective suits and carrying out a dangerous procedure involving pouring sodium silicate on the engines to make them “seize up” and cease to function.

This government-mandated engine-cide is a huge problem for auto parts sellers, who earn the bulk of their income reselling engines, motors, and transmissions—all of which must be intentionally damaged and made unsalable to comply with program rules.  Government inspectors will go around making sure engines have been properly decommissioned, a precondition for dealers and car buyers to claim refunds.

More disturbingly, for those who can barely afford to buy a used car, the reduced supply of used engines will lead to increased, often prohibitive costs for used cars, because so many used car engines—having been decommissioned by mechanics—cannot be resold to potential buyers.  That’s looking out for the little guy!

For those concerned about the “environmental impact” of the program, the plan unfortunately won’t help on that front, either.  According to the director of Columbia University’s Center for Climate Change Law, the energy required to produce a new car years earlier more than offsets any fuel savings from driving a used car for a few more years.  Without the program, car buyers would have ended up buying more fuel efficient vehicles anyway, because most vehicles are made to be more efficient nowadays.

The one thing we can’t foresee is what those in high enough tax brackets who will be funding most of this program would have done with their money if they could have kept it—say, devoted it to more profitable, wealth-creating investments of their own choosing?

If all of this isn’t enough to convince you the program is a slam dunk, there’s also the matter of how it’s being administered.  Congress allotted $1 billion and expected the funds to last 100 days—from July 24 to November 1.  They didn’t enact any sensible precautions on the limits of the program—say, no more than 20 clunkers bought by each of the nation’s nearly 20,000 car dealers—until the program’s impact could be measured.  This is, of course, because Congress is not managing its own money, but rather maintaining an infinite balance sheet.

Shockingly, Congress underestimated the cost of its new program and the rate at which people would lap up free money.  Rae Tyson, a Transportation Department spokesman, insisted on July 28, “When we get close, we will start alerting dealers so they don’t get caught with a deal in the pipeline.  We’re not going to leave them hanging. We’re not going to run out of money in a couple days.”

Two days later—surprise!—the Transportation Department announced that the program had run out of money and would be suspended at midnight.  Tyson should have concluded his statement, “When we get close, we will start alerting dealers…  OK, now!”

So the program’s funding lasted six days.  Assuming a steady rate of access by dealers over the intended life of the program, the actual rate of use so far has been 17 times as high as lawmakers anticipated.  Were the program to be funded at its current rate until November 1, it would blow through $17 billion.

Representative David Obey, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, speaking on behalf of lawmakers who want to dump more money into CARS, declared, “Consumers have spoken with their wallets, and are saying they like this program.”

Note to Obey: “speaking with your wallet” usually means that the wallet owner chooses to purchase a product or service with his own money, not that he gobbles up a heavily subsidized goody that he would have bought in a few years on his own.

Saying Cash for Clunkers has been “wildly successful,” as many reporters have decreed, is like saying that a program designed to give out $4,000 checks to anyone who’s willing to cash them has been “wildly successful.”  Cash for Clunkers would have been a colossal failure if it hadn’t run out of money in less than a week.

The sudden revelation that people like free money led to uncertainty over continuance of the program: word got out from the Transportation Department that the program was bankrupt, but Press Secretary Robert Gibbs insisted to reporters on Friday that it would continue through the weekend and beyond.  In other words, the Obama administration, caught in a jam, with no idea whether additional funding would ever be approved or not, simply lied by sowing confusion over how much money was actually left in the program.

John McEleney, chair of the National Automobile Dealers Association, and numerous car dealers across the country have reported on the risk they face that the government will not reimburse dealers for buying clunkers, given the precarious state of program funding.  They have also complained about the confusion regarding rules and continuance of the program, contradictory statements from government, inability to make future business plans, and the havoc all of this has wreaked on their dealerships.  All of which augurs well for the long-term beneficial effects of CARS on the economy—because if there’s anything the market loves, it’s confusion, conflicting information, delay, and chaos!

House Minority Leader John Boehner noted, “There are a lot of questions about how the administration administered this program.  If they can’t handle something as simple as this, how would [they] handle health care?”

The Cash for Clunkers debacle should be viewed as a test run for Congress’ overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

Break out the sodium silicate.

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 celebration of Obama’s first 100 days in office, PolitiFact.com published a series, “The Obameter: Tracking Obama’s Campaign Promises.”  The site compiles 514 promises Obama made during the campaign and tracks his daily progress in fulfilling them.  PolitiFact assigns each promise one of the following outcomes: Kept, Compromise, Broken, Stalled, In the Works, No Action, and Yes We Can (just kidding on that last one).  They also identify his “Top 25” most important promises.

This seems like such an even-handed, nonpartisan way to evaluate Obama, one we can all agree on.  Indeed, as of Day 96, PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times-housed, Pulitzer Prize-winning site, lists only 5% of Obama’s promises as Kept, 12% as In the Works, and 79% as No Action.

It’s interesting, however, that for PolitiFact, the baseline for success is whether Obama keeps his promises.  The assumption is that his promises are worth keeping.  As Obama said, “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.”

A better way to track Obama’s performance might be to first classify his threats—er, promises—into three categories: Harmful, Inoffensive, and Worthy.  By this system, I determine that 15 out of 25, or 60%, of Obama’s Top 25 promises are Harmful, 24% are Inoffensive, and 16% are Worthy.  Off to a great start!

Second, let’s give Obama 1 point for every Worthy promise he’s kept, a ½ point for every one that’s compromised, stalled, or in the works, and 0 points for every one that’s broken or not acted on.  Give him 0 points for every Harmful promise, no matter what stage it’s in, except let’s give him a ½ point for every Harmful promise he’s broken, because he might just have been appeasing his base during the campaign (though he still loses credit for scaring us).  Inoffensive promises get no points.

And now, PolitiFact’s Top 25 Obama Promises, deconstructed and scored by me:

1. Create a foreclosure prevention fund for homeowners; or, “Pour $10 billion over Niagara Falls.”  Harmful/Kept: 0.

2. Create a tax credit of $500 for workers. If he had made it $500,000, he might have captured my interest.  Inoffensive/Compromise: 0.

3. Repeal the Bush tax cuts for higher incomes; or, “Decrease incentives to work and engage in entrepreneurship; increase income non-reporting and tax loophole exploitation.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

4. Create a National Health Insurance Exchange. I’m allergic to any campaign promise with that many capital letters.  Harmful/No Action: 0.

5. Require children to have health insurance coverage; or, “Drive up the costs of health insurance and provide cover for the government to step in and start rationing.”  Harmful/No Action: 0.

6. Invest in electronic health information systems; or, “Do what hospitals and clinics are already doing, but less efficiently and at greater cost.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

7. Fully fund the Veterans Administration. Gee, this doesn’t have anything to do with rubbing it in Bush’s face over those rats they found in the VA a couple of years ago, does it?  Worthy/No Action: 0.

8. Begin removing combat brigades from Iraq; or, “See if we can lose the war just as we’re crossing the finish line.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

9. Send two additional brigades to Afghanistan. Worthy/Kept: 1.

10. End the use of torture. First, we don’t torture.  So Obama’s promise is to stop splashing water on Muslim terrorists, which means they’ll no longer be bathing daily.  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

11. Close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center. This was never actually fulfillable, because there is no sane option for what to do with the detainees that would be acceptable to anyone but the ACLU.  Harmful/In the Works (supposedly): 0.

12. End warrantless wiretaps; or, “Shoot ourselves in the collective eardrum.”  Harmful/No Action: 0.

13. Seek verifiable reductions in nuclear stockpiles. Any state we don’t trust will, by definition, not negotiate with us to reduce their stockpiles or halt actions to develop nuclear weapons.  Harmful/No Action: 0.

14. Centralize ethics and lobbying information for voters. Sort of like the database Obama created to document contributions made by supporters, in order to ensure foreign nationals were not making donations—oh, wait…  Inoffensive/No Action: 0.

15. Require more disclosure and a waiting period for earmarks. Earmarks make up but an infinitesimal fraction of government spending.  Inoffensive/No Action: 0.

16. Tougher rules against revolving door for lobbyists and former officials. Worthy/Broken: 0.

17. Secure the borders.  Obama will support “additional personnel, infrastructure and technology on the border and at our ports of entry.” This is too vague to mean anything one way or the other.  Inoffensive/In the Works: 0.

18. Provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Lovely, but this isn’t anywhere near the Top 25 issues we face.  Inoffensive/No Action: 0.

19. Reform mandatory minimum sentences. A real liberal would have the guts to talk about decriminalizing drug use, as some libertarian Republicans have.  Worthy/No Action: 0.

20. Secure nuclear weapons materials in four years. See “reduction in stockpiles.”  Any country that would comply is not a threat.  Inoffensive/No Action: 0.

21. Strengthen antitrust enforcement; or, “Stop the next Microsoft before it floods the market with inexpensive technological advancements that make everyone’s life better.”  Harmful/No Action: 0.

22. Create new financial regulations; or, “Make sure every new American company sets up shop in London, Hong Kong, or Singapore.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

23. Create 5 million “green” jobs; or, “Be ready to fight the next round of global cooling after the current round of global warming is over.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

24. Reduce oil consumption by 35 percent by 2030; or, “Encourage caveman chic.”  Harmful/No Action: 0.

25. Create cap and trade system with interim goals to reduce global warming; or, “Make Al Gore give up 80% of his SUV fleet by the time his grandchildren are old enough to drive.”  Harmful/In the Works: 0.

Total score: 1 point out of a maximum of 25, or 4%.  Congratulations, Obama!  I believe that is what’s known in high school as an “F minus minus minus.”

Obama didn’t even get any half-points for breaking any of his harmful promises.  And here, under my system, he could have scored a 30% just by abandoning every one of his rotten ideas.