Four of the most powerful business leaders in America arrived at the White House one day last month for lunch with President Barack Obama, sitting down in his private dining room just steps from the Oval Office.
But even for powerful CEOs, there’s no such thing as a free lunch: White House staffers collected credit card numbers for each executive and carefully billed them for the cost of the meal with the president.
But as The Ticket reported here 54 weeks ago, business friends of Hillary Rodham Clinton have purchased the web domain name HRC2012.
The myth that the poor are deprived of medical treatment in the U.S. is a cherished one in the current debate. When I tried to point out a week or two ago that in France (as in Britain and as on the planet generally) there are two levels of medical service — one for the rich, one for the poor — Yglesias and others similar couldn't wait to point out that at least the French poor can get treatment when they need it. What a stack of angry e-mails.
Yet, in the U.S., as many Americans (although not, apparently, many Europeans or Yglesians) know, under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, anyone who can be dragged through an ER door will receive medical treatment so long as their condition is an "emergency" — and being left to die in the street probably qualifies. In fact, when I asked an expert on this topic (for reasons I can't understand, she didn't want her name or the name of her organization cited) if a sprained ankle or broken leg would qualify as an "emergency," she told me that an ear infection would probably qualify. Common sense would tell you that if you walk into an ER filled with chest-clutching geezers, you might be happier coming back another day, but treatment can't be denied. Hospitals are not allowed to ask about money before giving this kind of medical treatment and ability to pay cannot be a factor in providing it. It's given to all comers, no matter where they're from or what language they speak. As Ramesh Ponnuru pointed out here some years ago, the penalties for violating the statute are severe.
As the finance minister of Sweden, Borg is the chief financial officer of a country long known as a walking billboard for a social welfare state. In Borg's view, the 1970s and 1980s were lost decades for Sweden. Left-leaning politicians pushed government spending, excluding investment outlays, from 22% of gross domestic product in 1970 to 30% in 1980. Real growth fell from an average of 4.4% annually in the 1960s to 2.4% in the 1970s and remained low for the next two decades.
Like many societies, we went too far in our welfare-state ambitions," say
Borg (pronounced "Bor-ee").
Since sweeping to power in 2006, Reinfeldt's center-right Alliance has been shrinking Sweden's welfare state. The government is resisting calls to rescue its struggling auto industry. To hear Borg tell it, his government isn't inspired by coldhearted Darwinism but by cold, hard evidence that the easier the state makes life for people, the easier they take it.
Borg's prescription for growth is simple: cut taxes. His government has slashed the tax rate on low incomes from 30.7% to 17.1%. The combined tax take (national and local; income and other) has fallen by 2.5 percentage points in three years to 46.6% of gross domestic product.
No, it’s not punishing the rich, I think the way I look at it is that if I can afford to do a little bit more so that a whole bunch of families out there have a little more security, when I already have security, that’s part of being a community.
The song "The New Frontier" by Steely Dan's Donald Fagen puts the music of Dave Brubeck - who comes to Britain later this month for a major tour, tied in with the release of a rare new album - in a very specific cultural context. Fagen's innocent narrator recalls a pre-college idyll from the early 1960s. At a party, he's smitten by a girl with Tuesday Weld eyes. "I hear you're mad about Brubeck," Fagen sings. "I love your eyes, I love him too. He's an artist, a pioneer, we've got to have some music on the new frontier." The song is a sardonic take on the optimism of America in the Cold War period; the horn-rimmed, high-minded figure of Brubeck makes a potent symbol for the era's aesthetics. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Dave Brubeck Quartet was the acceptable face of jazz for America's white middle classes. Some people still haven't forgiven him for it.
...
Brubeck's music mixed jazz with classical references and complex time- signatures - "Take Five" is in 5/4 time. It was the kind of soundtrack that could have been designed especially for Mad magazine's parodies of East Coast suburban cocktail parties: narrow-tied advertising execs talked psychoanalysis over too many dry Martinis, before unwisely attempting the frug or the pony. You could even imagine President Kennedy getting down to "Take Five". The single that followed it, "Unsquare Dance", was equally charming, but less of a hit. And it dared to raise the question of whether Brubeck was, in the argot of the times, a bit of a square himself.
Fearmongers!
Much foolishness has become attached to the question of President Obama’s place of birth, and a few misguided souls among the Right have indulged it. The myth that Barack Obama is ineligible to be president represents the hunt for a magic bullet that will make all the unpleasant complications of his election and presidency disappear.
...
One of the unfortunate consequences of this red-herring discussion is that there are plenty of questions about Obama’s background and history that we would like to have answered. In spite of two books of memoirs, there remain murky areas in his biography. And when it comes to those college transcripts, count us among those who’d love to know whether Dr. Bailout ever took an advanced economics class and how he performed in it.
Barack Obama may prefer European-style socialized health care. He may consider himself a citizen of the Earth and sometimes address his audiences as “people of the world,” as though he were born not in another country but on another planet. Like Bruce Springsteen, he has a lot of bad political ideas; but he was born in the U.S.A.
"We have ways of changing behavior and changing those health outcomes so that we don't have to deal with the medical consequences of obesity," added Mr. Levi, who advocates community-based programs that promote physical activity and better nutrition.
(g) a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years: Provided, That any periods of honorable service in the Armed Forces of the United States, or periods of employment with the United States Government or with an international organization as that term is defined in section 288 of title 22 by such citizen parent, or any periods during which such citizen parent is physically present abroad as the dependent unmarried son or daughter and a member of the household of a person.
Hawaii
The relevant Constitutional clause reads as follows:
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
If he is not careful, Barack Obama may end up as one of the least popular presidents in American history. His dream of re-making the world’s greatest power into a large-scale version of modern-day Germany - with high taxation, dominant trade unions, overbearing government bureaucracy, stifling employment regulations, low defence spending, de-nuclearisation, a naive emphasis on soft power, and a constant desire to apologise for the past – is a nightmarish vision that fortunately is opposed by a growing majority of Americans. The spirit of individual liberty and free enterprise remains the most powerful force in the United States today, and any government that goes against it is bound to fail in imposing its agenda.
Update: Here's a nice overhead shot:
What kind of environmental impact is there from maintaining that palatial landscape?
By the way, Friedman has two adult daughters now. One would expect it's about time for him and his wife to downsize and become more patriotic because, as you may know, he likes to say "green is the new red, white and blue".
In what's become a Friday night ritual over the course of the last couple of months, I made cookies last night. From Foodgawker, I stumbled on this recipe. I like my cookies to have some texture to break up the chewiness but I didn't have any cinnamon chips so I added a small handfull of chopped almonds. They came out really good - pretty sweet but very chewy.But the key margin that got him from 45 to 53% were the independents and old Reagan Democrats. And what put them on board was not just their weariness with George Bush, but rather their flawed hunch that Obama was another Clinton rather than Carter, a realist and centrist rather than an ossified ideologue, who could talk well, bring factions together, and govern from the center.
Come again?Police have not classified this incident as a hate crime, said Austin Police Sgt. Richard Stresing, because hate crimes target an individual specifically because of an identifying characteristic, like race. Police say the incident has been classified as criminal mischief and deadly conduct.
Earlier in the day, Gibbs had dismissed a suggestion that the backlash from police groups could be distressing to the White House, given that Obama has enjoyed a positive relationship with the law enforcement community.
"I think the Fraternal Order of Police endorsed McCain," Gibbs fired back, referring to Obama's Republican opponent in the 2008 election. "If I'm not mistaken."
It was kind of a rushed job. The idea was born three months before Lollapalooza and it takes at least two months to get the suit, and they had to make not only enough for the whole band with different designs and different colors, but Jeff also ordered jackets for the Total Pros, our horn section. I think he just wanted to show to be very special for the local audience, for the Lollapalooza audience. Something for the local fans. And then we did wear them again at Tanglewood this year.
They're actually strangely comfortable to wear. It's hard for me to wear a jacket and rock out. I don't do it normally. But certainly in the service of the nudie suit glamour, one must suffer for fashion. I just kept looking around at everybody going, '"Damn!They look good!"
Cohn was born in Kiev as Nuta Kotlyarenko and moved to New York as a child. Initially moving to California to become a boxer, he instead worked as an extra and a costume designer. He moved to Minnesota for a while, marrying in 1934. Cohn and his wife Bobbie moved to New York City, where they opened their first store, Nudie's for the Ladies, which specialized in customized underwear for showgirls.
Nudie returned to California in 1947, where he talked bandleader Tex Williams into auctioning off a horse to purchase him a sewing machine. Opening a store at 5015 Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood, Nudie began designing Hollywood western wear, a style promoted in films from the prewar era. His designs notable for even greater than usual ostentatiousness, including extensive use of rhinestones and themed-appliques. One of his early designs, for singer Porter Wagoner, was a peach-colored suit featuring rhinestones, a covered wagon appliqué on the back, and wagon wheel piping on the legs.
In the past four days, Mr. Obama gave “exclusive” interviews to Jim Lehrer of PBS, Katie Couric of CBS and Meredith Vieira of NBC. He gave two interviews to The Washington Post on one day, one to the editorial page editor and one to news reporters. He held a conference call with bloggers. His hourlong session in the East Room on Wednesday night was his second news conference of the day. And on Thursday, he invited Terry Moran of ABC to spend the day with him for a “Nightline” special.
Perhaps a number will help: 35%. That is the aggregate percentage of United States GDP produced by the three industries that the Democrats hope to restructure from the top down: Health care (17% of GDP), energy (9.8% of GDP), and financial services (8% of GDP). Think about that. Without even considering the transformational impact of proposed anti-business laws of general application, such as the Orwellian "employee free choice act," the Obama administration wants to redesign 35% of gross domestic product from the center. And he proposes to do it all in a rush this summer, lest the decline in his popularity and that of the Congressional Democrats erodes his power to do so.
MORE: A reader makes the useful point that one might also plausibly include the 4% of GDP attributable to the automotive industry. The 39% solution?
Of all the things Obama has said in his half-year in office, I think the most offensive was his assertion that Israel must “engage in serious self-reflection.” The Israelis are experts in “serious self-reflection.” The Jewish people is expert in “serious self-reflection.” They have been seriously self-reflecting for several thousand years — they practically invented the practice. Israelis, since the founding — refounding — of that state, have had to do some urgent self-reflecting, and other reflecting. They live in a tinderbox; their existence and survival are threatened all the time. Barack Obama knows nothing about serious self-reflection compared with the average Israeli — compared even with a relatively unreflective Israeli. It’s their lives that are on the line, not Obama’s. It is they who have gone through war after war, not Obama. And those were wars of attempted annihilation: the annihilation of you-know-who.People always speak condescendingly, ignorantly, and offensively about and to the Israelis. It’s kind of a world specialty. But I think our new American president may have taken the cake.
"I was actually most struck by his answer to the last question, about the arrest of Henry Louis Gates. It’s the kind of question to which a president would normally reply with something like: “that's a local police matter, I don't know the details and I know it will be worked out responsibly,” and move along. Obama gave a lengthy review of the facts, called the police officers involved stupid, and implied they are also liars. Very odd behavior for a president."
Six months into the president’s term, you don’t read much about this post-partisan future anymore. It may be because on almost every big-ticket legislative item (the stimulus, climate change, and now health care), Mr. Obama has been pushing a highly ideological agenda with little (and in some cases zero) support from across the aisle. Yet far from stating the obvious—that sitting in the Oval Office is a very partisan president—the press corps is allowing Mr. Obama to evade the issue by coming up with novel redefinitions.
In his first piece of legislation as Minnesota's junior senator, Al Franken is looking to expand the number of service dogs available to wounded veterans.
Franken wrote in an opinion piece published Monday in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that his proposed pilot program will train "a statistically significant number of dogs" to measure the benefits to veterans living with devastating injuries sustained on the battlefield.
The dogs' companionship, Franken said, provides invaluable health benefits -- both physical and emotional -- to veterans suffering from debilitating injuries and psychological disorders.
How does his press release compare to the actual CBO's projections? Here, there is no mention of the revenue neutrality of the bill. In fact, it shows the bill adding to the deficit.
A Texas Airman stationed at an Air Force Base near Sacramento, Calif. has lost both legs after surgeons reportedly botched a routine surgery to remove his gallbladder.
Colton Read, 20, underwent laproscopic surgery last week at David Grant Medical Center at Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento. Laproscopic surgery is a minimally invasive procedure that involves making a tiny incision to minimize pain and speed recovery time.
MUMBAI, India — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton opened a three-day visit to India on Saturday by urging India not to repeat American mistakes in contributing to global pollution, and she passionately defended U.S. demands for help in fighting terrorism.
"We acknowledge now with President Obama that we have made mistakes in the United States, and we along with other developed countries have contributed most significantly to the problem that we face with climate change," she said. "We are hoping a great country like India will not make the same mistakes."
Frankly, I don’t get it. Democratic leaders in Congress think it’s outrageous they were never told about a program that was never put into effect. The only potential scandal I can see is that the program was never put into effect — and that we’re telling the whole world about it.
Call me crazy, but I just assumed that the CIA was out there trying to kill as many senior members of al-Qaeda as it could. Congress, in the spirit of broad patriotic bipartisan righteousness, authorized the use of force on al-Qaeda after it killed 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001. Now we find out that the CIA lacked the competence or will to hunt down and kill men desperately in need of killing.
It’s as if, years after Pearl Harbor, it was reported that the OSS had never tried to kill senior Japanese or German officials.
Of all the statistics pouring into the White House every day, top economic adviser Larry Summers highlighted one Friday to make his case that the economic free-fall has ended.
The number of people searching for the term “economic depression” on Google is down to normal levels, Summers said.
Under current law, the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, because federal debt will continue to grow much faster than the economy over the long run. Although great uncertainty surrounds long-term fiscal projections, rising costs for health care and the aging of the population will cause federal spending to increase rapidly under any plausible scenario for current law. Unless revenues increase just as rapidly, the rise in spending will produce growing budget deficits. Large budget deficits would reduce national saving, leading to more borrowing from abroad and less domestic investment, which in turn would depress economic growth in the United States. Over time, accumulating debt would cause substantial harm to the economy.
Though Elmendorf was appointed by Democrats and served for three years in the Clinton administration, admirers in both parties said he, too, is largely untainted by politics. The son of a computer programmer from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Elmendorf attended Princeton and Harvard, where his dissertation advisers included a Democrat -- Lawrence H. Summers, now Obama's top economic adviser -- and two Republicans: Bush adviser Gregory Mankiw and Reagan adviser Martin Feldstein.
The health care overhauls released to date would increase, not reduce, the burgeoning long-term health costs facing the government, Congressional Budget
Office Director Douglas Elmendorf said Thursday.
That is not a message likely to sit well with congressional Democrats or the Obama administration, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., said Thursday she thinks lawmakers can find ways to wring more costs out of the health system as they continue work on their bills....
As three House committees began marking up the health care overhaul bill (HR 3200), Pelosi told reporters that she thinks the legislation can eventually wring more costs from the health system.
Is there anyone out who could honestly look at Nancy Pelosi and tell me that they believe she knows what she's talking about?
Congress is attempting to extract as much as $500 billion in Medicare cost savings to pay for health-care reform, but Obama administration officials are concerned that those savings would not result in the transformative fixes the system needs to be stabilized for the long term. White House officials say their own proposals for payment reform would make the system more flexible, allowing it to respond to developments such as breakthroughs in treatment.
Obama administration officials say they are determined to stem soaring Medicare spending, arguing that it is a root cause of the broader health-care crisis that they are trying to address with Congress. Behind the scenes, Obama is pushing for a mechanism that would take Medicare payment authority out of the hands of politicians and invest it in a separate entity, possibly under the executive branch.
When a wise Latina accidentally says "vagrancies of ... the moment" instead of "vagaries of ... the moment" during the oral argument of the Ricci case, we're supposed to ignore the slip-up
Could the best climate models -- the ones used to predict global warming -- all be wrong?
Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the
journal Nature Geoscience. The report found that only about half of the
warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can
be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the
remainder of the warming is a mystery.
In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell wrote about words used in a "consciously dishonest way." "That is," Orwell wrote, "the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different." Americans are right to wonder if their president is using his own private definitions for the words he uses to sell his policies.
Congressional plans to fund a massive health-care overhaul could have a job-killing effect on New York, creating a tax rate of nearly 60 percent for the state's top earners and possibly pressuring small-business owners to shed workers.
New York's top income bracket could reach as high as 57 percent -- rates not seen in three decades -- to pay for the massive health coverage proposed by House Democrats this week.
"...population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution."
and
"The development of a long-term sterilizing capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control. The capsule could be implanted at puberty and might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births."
What mad progressive would say such a thing? Everyone knows that Progressives abandoned eugenics around the time that Margaret Sanger did. Right?
Evidently, President Obama's new Science Czar didn't get the memo. In fact, he has written books espousing these very views and Michelle Malkin has been doing tremendous work on uncovering Holdren's views. And now, Reason - the Libertarian pub, jumps into the fray with a piece on Holdren's scary positions.
The long-term deficit is driven by the aging of the population as well as by growing health-care costs, both contributing to Social Security and Medicare expenses. There is simply no way to close the gap by taxing a handful of high earners. The House actions echo President Obama's unrealistic campaign promise that he can build a larger, more progressive government while raising taxes on only the wealthiest.
July 14 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama may rely only on Democrats to push health-care legislation through the U.S. Congress if Republican opposition doesn’t yield soon, two of the president’s top advisers said.
“Ultimately, this is not about a process, it’s about results,” David Axelrod, Obama’s senior political strategist, said during an interview in his White House office. “If we’re going to get this thing done, obviously time is a-wasting.”
Proponents of tax increases often reference the Clinton 1993 tax increase and the subsequent period of economic growth as evidence that deficit reduction through tax hikes is a pro-growth policy. What these proponents ignore, however, is that the tax increases occurred at a time when the economy was recovering from recession and strong growth was to be expected. They also ignore that the real acceleration in the economy began in 1997, when economic growth should have cooled. This acceleration in growth coincided with a powerful pro-growth tax cut.
"We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. And I have just one interest, and if I am wrong ... somebody else can have my job. I want to see this country prosperous. I want to see people get a job. I want to see people get enough to eat. We have never made good on our promises ... I say after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started ... And an enormous debt to boot!"
A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative terminated by Director Leon Panetta was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential authorization to capture or kill Al Qaeda operatives, according to former intelligence officials familiar with the matter.
"For the number of Muslims to outnumber non-Muslims by midcentury, it would require either breeding on a scale rarely seen in history or for immigration to continue at a pace that's now politically unacceptable. More likely, new controls will slow Muslim immigration. "
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