Immigration Reform

For those who complain that immigration reform proposals amount to amnesty, there are some points to consider.

The most important is that the current policy amounts to de facto amnesty. They are here in the millions and they are not leaving. The longer immigration reform is held up the more intrenched they will become.

The flow of immigrants coming in from Mexico has slowed to a trickle. There are several reasons for this including increased border security and the relative strength of the Mexican economy to the American one. Regardless, stopping the flow of illegals is not as urgent as it was.

There are to many here to deport. Estimates put the illegal population in the US as between 20 and 30 million. The high end is close to 10% of the population. There is no way that they can be rounded up and deported. Any attempt would be politically impossible because it evokes images of Nazi Germany.

There are societal costs to the current system (non-system?). Some illegal immigrants pay their taxes (possibly using someone else's SSN) but not all do. Many are unlicensed and uninsured drivers. Their illegal status makes them reluctant to call the police which makes them victims of crime.

Something must be done about all of this and it has to include a way for the people already here to stay legally. This is not optional nor is it partisan. There is no alternative. So some compromise has to be worked out.

Deal with it.

The NSA

In a sign of how damaging the NSA revelations, President Obama spent Martin Luther King Day on the Tonight Show doing damage control with Jay Leno. According to Obama, the whole thing is President Bush's fault (of course) and Obama reviewed what was being collected and made needed reforms. Not mentioned was that Obama waited 5 years before making any reforms or an acknowledgement that this would never have happened had it not been for the Snowden leaks.

Obama also said that the safety of America is the last thing he thinks about when he goes to bed and the first thing he things about when he gets up. That's comforting to those of us who believes that his thoughts were "How can I screw the Republicans?"

Despite the reforms, the government is still keeping records of every phone call, email, and text message that it can get it's hands on. The justification is that it "keeps us safe". When pressed, the actual desire is to try to identify other terrorists once one has been identified.

There are problems with this approach. One is that it is reactive. It doesn't really keep us safe. Another is that it is too wide a net. Anyone who was ever on the phone (or exchanged emails, etc.) with a suspected terrorist becomes a suspect and possibly anyone who was ever on the phone with that person. The NSA refuses to say why people are added to no-fly lists. What if people are added because they called someone who called someone who is suspected of being a terrorist?

Given the massive amount of data collected, false positives are too likely. A recent report says that 140,000,000 text messages are collected daily.

There are other issues. The data is subject to misuse. Executive orders can be rescinded in private. The government has a spotty record on this. The IRS went after the President's political enemies under Obama and Nixon. Raw FBI files were given to Clinton political advisers. The FBI violated Martin Luther King's rights multiple ways.

The data is not particularly secure. Snowden was just a contractor but was able to access state secrets. The new proposals call for the phone companies to house this data which will make it as safe as credit cards were with Target.

All of this makes the spying hard to justify, even if it was effective. Outside audits say that it has a negligible effect. That makes it impossible to justify.

Candidate Obama promised transparency into programs like this. President Obama needs to follow up on that promise. The NSA needs to quit collecting data on the citizens of the US and of the world unless there is an actual need that has been reviewed by an accountable judiciary.

The Problems with PolitiFact

Last year the fact-checking site PolitiFact drew conservative criticism after they declared that the "Lie of the year" was "[Mitt Romney] Says Barack Obama "sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China" at the cost of American jobs." As it turned out, Chrysler is building a plant in China which is due to open this year. Even granting that the plant will be making Jeeps for the Chinese, it still means that Romney's statement was true.Politifact never went back and reevaluated their assessment.

This year the Lie of the Year was President Obama's statement, "If you like your insurance you can keep it period." This hasn't made conservatives any happier since PolitiFact evaluated this statement several times over the last 5 years and never found it to be false. In their summary they dropped the original evaluation from 2008 which was rated 100% true.

Despite claiming to be neutral, PolitiFact does have left-leaning biases. These break down into three categories.

The first is the rating system they use. Politicians seldom make statement that are totally true or false. They cherry-pick facts or rely on one study when conflicting ones exist. Typically, PolitiFact does a fairly good job of sorting through this. Then the column is given to a panel of editors to rate. This is where things get subjective and biases creep in. It is not uncommon for a liberal who relies on one of many studies to get a rating of "mainly true" while a conservative will get "mainly false". Often the editors seize on some minor point to justify their rating, leaving people who read the entire column scratching their head.

Example: A rating of the claim that ObamaCare does not mandate a background check of "navigators" is examined. They admit that this is true. There is nothing in the law or the related regulations to keep someone convicted of identity theft from getting a job as a navigator. So how do they rate the claim? They give it a Half-True because individual states can mandate background checks.

The second problem is when they already know the answer. They don't even try to search out competing experts. They as experts that will support their conclusion. This is known as confirmation bias. This happens anytime they evaluate statements on Global Warming or the Social Security Trust Fund.

I was going to give a recent example of this where the statement being evaluated was that warming has stopped for the last 15 years but I can't find it on their site. As I remember it, they talked to experts who said that the warming might be going elsewhere than the atmosphere and insisted that 15 years is not significant. They went on to give the claim a Pants On Fire rating. This is strnage given that the statement is true.

The final problem is selection bias. This means choosing statements from conservatives that are more likely to be false an ones from liberals that are more likely to be true. They spent a lot of time fact-checking Michele Bachmann, almost always finding her wrong but they failed to evaluate everything she said. One example was her widely-ridiculed statement that our fore-bearers fought against slavery, giving John Quincy Adams as an example. Pundits insisted that she Fore-bearers meant Founding Fathers and that she had confused J. Q. Adams with his father. In fact, "fore-bearers" simply means people who came before us and J. Q. Adams was a life-long opponent of slavery (among other things, he represented the captives of the Armistad). Given how often Bachmann's statement was quoted, it deserved to be rated.

Obama's Bad Year

There is no question that President Obama had a bad year. Nearly every president has problems in his second term. But Obama's management style made this a particularly bad year.

President Obama is not really interested in every aspect of being president. He loves some parts. When he says "I'm really good at killing people" he really means that he likes going through lists of potential drone targets deciding who will live and who will die. It's the parts that he is not interested in that cause him problems.

Obama does not care much for foreign policy. His original goal was to reverse everything that Bush did. He alienated long-standing allies like Great Britain and India and courted Russia. Since then he has let foreign affairs drift with a reactive policy rather than a pro-active one. He supports whoever is in power until it is obvious that they are about to be removed then he says they should go. The rest of the world no longer trusts him or the US and the Muslim world is outraged by his increasing use of drones.

Domestically he prefers short-term political wins over long-term solutions. These often backfire on him. He was regarded as winning the fiscal cliff showdown at the beginning of the year but that led to the sequester which was supposed to be so harmful that the Republicans would do anything to prevent it. The Republicans decided that a bad set of budget cuts was better than any deal they could get from the White House and Obama was embarrassed when the world failed to end.

Obama hates to hear bad news and the White House is set up to shield him from any. That means that he is constantly surprised by scandals. The failure of the Obamacare web site, the IRS targeting of conservative groups and the constant leak about the scope of NSA spying all caught him be surprise. In each case he excused himself from responsibility claiming that he was as surprised as anyone when he found out about these from the newspapers.

It is difficult to govern properly without full knowledge of events. If Obama had been told about the numerous problems with Obamacare he could have acted differently during the shutdown. He could have agreed to a one-year postponement and spent 2014 excoriating the Republicans. Instead he stood firm until the Republicans surrendered. This gave him a short term advantage in that the Republicans approval rating dropped more than his did but this was drowned out by the failure of Obamacare.

There has always been a great deal of arrogance in the Obama administration. They were sure that they ould remake the world and that lead to overreach. One high-level progressive who deals with the White House complains that "they think their shit doesn't stink". This reenforces Obama's tendency to seek political wins rather than compromise. This also causes him to bypass Congress completely and use executive authority to implement his preferred policies.

There is no sign of any major changes in the White House. No one has been fired. Instead a new spin-artist has been brought in. Inevitably, Obama will have more disasters breakout and will continue to flail about in a reactive mode.

Culture Wars & Santa Penguin

Around a week ago Slate Columnist Aisha Harris wrote a column proclaiming that Santa Claus should no longer be represented as an old white man. In stead he should be a penguin. That inspired Fox News' Megyn Kelly to say that Santa is white as is Jesus. The controversy has spiraled since then.

I'll save Harris's column for last and start with the controversy. The Left has been jumping all over Kelly for her assertions that Jesus and Santa were white. Nonsense, they say. Jesus was Jewish and Santa was Turkish (Harris claimed that he was Greek). This is a subject that most on the Left normally would never touch with a ten foot pole. Normally it's only racists who start saying that Jews and people from the Middle-East in general aren't white. Bill O'Reilly suggested that this is a false controversy stirred up to demonize Fox News. It's hard to argue with that.

The actual Jesus was, of course, Israeli and probably had black hair and brown eyes. Saint Nicholas was from Asia Minor (now Turkey) and also probably had dark hair and brown eyes. Neither would have had brown skin and neither was a sub-Sahara African. Santa Clause came to us through the Dutch who changed his name and celebrated him as the patron saint of children (also mariners and pawn brokers). He was really introduced to Americans around 200 years ago in the classic poem A Visit From St. Nick. The description was of a white man with rosy cheeks. That image was set by the end of the 19th century and refined with some 20th century Coke ads.

So, what brought on Harris's original column? Sometime in the last 20 years or so, black families started putting up representations of Santa with dark skin. When Harris asked her father about this, she was old that Santa is all colors. She internalized this and became offended that the "default representation" of Santa is white. To some extent her original column is a complaint that Santa is supposed to be represented as many colors. Since whites don't do this then the image needs to be taken away from them.

All of this is news to most whites who seldom see the Black Santa and never heard Harris's father explain that Santa is all colors.

Harris is part of a growing minority movement that says, "It hurts my feelings when you remind me that I'm in the minority." This includes complaints about teaching history as "dead white guys".

People need to step back and take a breath. Kelly did not say anything particularly outrageous and the faux-outrage is mainly an attempt to discredit Fox News.

Minorities do need better representation in the media but making over major symbols such as Santa Claus is highly divisive and leads to worsening racial relations.

Is Obamacare Here to Stay?

A few days ago columnist Dana Milbank proclaimed:

But fixing the Web site after its embarrassing launch means that opponents of the Affordable Care Act have lost what may have been their last chance to do away with the law. And supporters can rule out the worst-case scenario: Obamacare isn't going away.

Is this true?

First, the site is working much better than at launch but it still fails 20% of the time. Any private company that rejected 1 out of 5 characters would be out of business fast. It shows how bad the site was at launch that this can be considered fixed.

There is also the issue of the back-end. The information going to insurance companies is often wrong or incomplete. No information has been released about the error rate but the rumor is that up to a third of the applications processed to date have been bad. Again, and private company that screwed up to one third of it's orders could not stay in business.

Obamacare is a lesson in the limits of government. The site was badly implemented by people who had no idea what they were doing. The people at the top had no idea that the site was not working, they discouraged the people below them from giving them bad news. None of this inspires confidence in the government's ability to implement Obamacare.

These are technical issues and can be solved. There are bigger problems coming up. The exchanges have not been attracting the right mix of applicants which will affect future premiums. People will find that they are losing their doctor as well as the policies they like.

There is also the issue of people who lost their coverage. The site will have to sign up nearly a quarter million people daily all month just to break even. If the immediate result of Obamacare is that more people lost their coverage than gain it then popularity for it will drop even more.

So, there will be continuing pressure to repeal Obamacare. President Obama has made it clear that he will fight any attempt to change or repeal it. That makes it harder but it is still possible. A lot depends on how much public sentiment goes. If things keep going bad with the implementation then Congress will end up running from it. Several Democrats are from states with Republican governors. They last ran in 2008 with a Democratic wave and Obama on the top of the ticket. They will have neither of those in 2014. Will any decide to turn their backs on Obamacare and join with the Republicans? It takes 66 votes to override a Presidential veto but that could be reachable.

It will be even more possible if the Republicans regain the Senate and increase their seats in the House. Continuing problems with Obamacare could easily cause this.

Assuming that Obama blocks all efforts at repeal, there is a very good chance that he will be succeeded by a Republican. The next president might even run on a platform of repealing Obamacare.

All of this assumes that the whole thing will be a failure. It is possible that the problems will resolve themselves quickly and that people will forgive Obama for his "if you like your policy you can keep it" lie. It all depends on how much faith you have in big government.

NBC turns on Obama

NBC News featured two stories last night that show that their love affair with President Obama is over.

The first was a detailed look at the deal with Iran. They made it clear that both sides walked away thinking that it had won because of the use of ambiguous language about the enrichment of uranium. While this is supposed to be clarified within 6 months, it was the major sticking point during previous negotiations and is not likely to be easily resolved. This report undercut the Obama claim that the treaty is a win.

The second was more serious. It was on the effect of the Obamacare tax on "Cadillac" health plans on real people. They showcased a couple whose employer-provided coverage was considered too good and cut back. Their deductible was raised from zero to $10,000 and hip surgery that one of them had would have cost a great deal more if she had it next year. This report was a terrible blow to the official line that the only people affected are self-insured with sub-standard policies. It adds a new footnote to Obama's repeated promise that you can keep your policy: as long as it does not exceed an arbitrary maximum.

Put together, these stories sound more like Fox than NBC. Keep in mind that NBC News' sister operations is MSNBC which bills itself as the liberal alternative to Fox and you can see what a significant change this is.

Power Grabs

Remember back when President Bush was a threat to the Constitutional fabric of our government because of the number of signing statements he made? Consider our current administration.

The President has expanded the powers of the office in many significant ways. In some case he has ordered agencies to assume additional power as the EPA has by bypassing Congress and ordering new mileage standards. More worrisome, he has simply used executive orders to bypass laws he finds inconvenient. The most significant of these were his order implementing the Dream Act and his postponing enforcement of elements of Obamacare. Bizarrely, he threatened to veto any legislation that actually gave him the authority for these actions.

Last week the Senate joined the President in grabbing power. They exercised the "nuclear option" and eliminated the filibuster for certain offices.

Obama's power grabs are easy to understand. He has little respect for the Constitution and hates working with Congress so he simply goes around it. He will not have to live with the consequences since he will be out of office before anyone else can follow his precedent.

The Senate is different. There is a good chance that the Democrats will lose control of Congress in a year and the White House in 3 years. There will be lots of opportunities for them to regret setting this precedent. So why did they?

My best guess is that they expect to lose the Senate in 2014 so they see this as their last chance to stock the courts with ideologically left judges.    

Conspiracy Theories

When something big happens there is a tendency to want answers. The most immediate quesition is "how could this happen?" Among those who believe in big government, mainly Progressives and big-government Republicans, the question becomes, "How could the government have let this happen?" This gives rise to conspiracy theories.

On the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's assasination, the many conspiracy theories are being resurected. There is little to any of these. Most of them assume the coperation of the Vice-President, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and leaders from both parties in Congress. The reasons given for assasination are even murkier. They mainly rest on the hope that Kennedy would have reversed himself on Viet Nam and withdrew troops instead of escallating and that vested interests were willing to kill him for this. This isn't even a stretch, it is preposterous.

The need to find meaning through government involvement can be seen in other tragedies. The 911 Truth movement was the same - people could not believe that something that big coud happen without the government allowing or even staging it.

Going back further we find debates about Franklin Roosevelt knowing about Pearl Harbor and allowing it to happen.

The sad truth is that terrible things happen and the government can't stop it.

Obamacare and the Progressives

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Ronald Reagan

That quote bothers President Obama to no end but the rollout of Obamacare proved it and gives a lot of insight into the flaws of the Progressives and their desire for expanding government. There are three main traits that cause major problems.

Overreach

I've complained for years that the Progressives think that they are the smartest people who ever lived. They are like college students who sit around and say "If we were only in power then we would fix everything." Most students outgrow this phase but it is central to the Progressives. They have no idea of their own limits. In the case of President Obama, he doesn't even recognize limits. During the transition following is election in 2008 he complained about how difficult it was for him to hire a cabinet since he could do everyone's job better than anyone else.

With Obamacare, they underestimated how difficult it would be to set up the insurance exchanges. They trusted people who had never managed a major software project to take on one of immense scope.

When the flaws in the web site became undeniable, the first impulse of the left was to complain that the real problem was that they hadn't seized enough control. If they had only implemented Single Payer or made Medicare universal, everything would be perfect.

At the same time, they deny the problems with Single Payer and Medicare. Both are massive programs so they must be perfect.

Paternalism

A base premise of Obamacare is that individuals can't be trusted to make the right choices about their insurance. You might be tempted to buy the wrong coverage or, worse, go without. When people first began complaining about cancelled policies, they were told that the policies they had were junk and that they should be glad to go to the (non-working) exchanges and buy new policies with proper coverage.

This leads right into the third trait:

Politics

For decades, the NOW as complained that women's health insurance costs more than men's (while staying quiet about men's auto insurance costing more than women's). The reason or this is simple - women use more services. That is unacceptable so Obamacare decrees that everyone has to include maternity coverage. Other interest groups are included for the same reason - to reduce the costs for the people who are most likely to use the coverage.

This was a purely political decision and this sort of thing happens every time the government gets involved. Interest groups start asking for special favors.

Put it all together and you have a system that is more likely to make things worst than to make them better.

Obamacare and the Real World

The roll-out of Obamcare and the insurance exchanges offer a look into how government works. By comparing this with how private business handles major projects, we can see why the government is unsuited for handling projects on this scale.

This was a huge project. It should have had a three-year implementation. Instead it was created in less than a year. This was because of politics. Major decisions were postponed until after the election.

Other major decisions such as forcing people to create an account before being able to compare rates were made late in the process forcing a redesign of the web site.

When it was close to the implement date, the company doing the work warned the government officials that there were likely to be major issues but it was decided that a delay in implementation was unacceptable. In fact, the site was not fully operational at launch with important parts such as the security questions waiting for values and problems interfacing between the dozens of agencies involved have not been solved. This was another political decision.

Finally, warnings that the site was going to fail were kept from the President.

As a result of all of this, we had the President of the United States stood before the American people and claimed said that the site would be as easy to use as a travel site. Three weeks later he said that he had found out the problems from the news reports and that they were a combination of glitches and demand.

How would all of this play out in the real world?

First, a product launch date is determined by an estimate of how long the project will take. No one starts with an implementation date and works backwards.

Once a release date is set, other dates are set. Major design changes are frozen far enough ahead to prevent them from interfering with the release date. As the date grows closer, smaller decisions are frozen. As the date approaches, all changes are frozen except for bug fixes.

The features should be frozen by the testing phase. A few feature can restart the testing phase from scratch. The system should also go through a load test to see what will happen under the expected load.

Projects do inevitably fall behind. When that happens, either the release date is moved or features are cut or both.

Upper management is given a realistic appraisal of the status.

Finally, if a bad product does make it out, the person at the top apologizes and people are fired. When Apple implemented a bad maps replacement, their chairman apologized. When Microsoft had a bad roll-out with Windows 8 and the Surface tablets, several top managers lost their jobs and the top man, co-founder Steve Balmer, was forced to accept early retirement.

With Obamacare, major decisions were made based on politics and no one has been held accountable. And this is just a web site.

The Hidden Facts about Obamacare

For the past two weeks, the government shutdown drowned out the coverage of the Obamacare roll-out. It was a disaster but even if that had been covered, there are a host of deeper problems. In increasing importance they are:

The exchanges are a mess. Outside reviews say that the exchanges were written with 1990s technology. They are slow partly because they are exchanging data with dozens of other sites.

The Affordable Care Act isn't. The policies offered are much more expensive that prior coverage. The subsidies help some for people who qualify but even so, many people who managed to get through the software are experiencing sticker shock. The assumption was that healthy people would cover those with pre-existing conditions. It appears that the healthy people still need to pay an unhealthy surcharge to cover the pre-existing people. There was a reason that insurance companies refused to cover pre-existing conditions. It was not that they were heartless or greedy, it was that they couldn't do it and stay in business.

The biggest problem is that Obamacare is going to crash and burn. Between the difficulties in signing up, the poor rates, and the modest penalties for not buying coverage, Obamacare is not going to get enough people signed up. The only people who are motivated to sign up are the ones with pre-existing conditions. Without a large proportion of healthy people subsidizing them, the exchanges will come up short and the rates will rise astronomically. Fixing the software will not fix the problem with the rates. That's baked into the system.

All of this will become self-evident in the next few months. Opponents of Obamacare have until then to think of a workable solution to the problem of the uninsured with pre-existing conditions.

Why Did They Do It?

For weeks, possibly months, leading up to the government shutdown the White House and the Left openly wished for a shutdown. They learned the lessons of the shutdowns under President Clinton - that no matter what really happens, the President can use his bully pulpit to blame his opponents and will come out of it politically strengthened.

At the same time the far right made a hysterical appeal to defund Obamacare. They insisted that President Obama would abandon the program that he sees as his legacy. This played well with fund-raisers and raised the visibility of some Tea Party favorites but is counter-productive.

The result of all this is that the Republican brand has been diminished. Republicans are polling at their lowest numbers in years.

Worse, they helped Obamacare. Last night, NBC's top story was on the shutdown and it's effect on the Republicans. It was not until 8 minutes in that they spent time covering what a total failure the exchanges are. Without the Tea Party, the top story would be how unprepared the programs are. If the Republicans had stayed out of the way then public pressure to delay and replace Obamacare would have grown on its own.

That was a squandered opportunity.

It's time for this vocal group to admit a few realities. They are not the only ones in this fight and other strategies are more likely to succeed. They need to stop attacking compromise and learn from President Reagan who never attacked a fellow Republican in public, no mater what.

Obamacare needs to fail on its own. It is not instantly addictive. Lots of people have been hurt by it. The exchanges are not ready and the rates are too high. Instead of distracting people from these problems, the right needs to be highlighting them.

They also need an alternative. Obamacare passed because of a real problem - the fear of being being uninsured with an expensive illness. The Republicans need a solution to this that they can sell.

Shutting down the government will only hurt Republicans in the 2014 and 2016 elections. The only hope of replacing Obamacare lies in taking the Senate and the White House.

What's Wrong With the Exchanges?

When the insurance exchanges went live last week, people all over the country tried to access the system. Almost none of them got in? Almost none of them got in. The official explanation was that the opening day crowd overloaded the system.

The few who did get in discovered that they had to create an account before they could browse insurance rates. Creating an account includes answering some personal questions based on information from credit agencies. This would be similar to Amazon requiring you to enter your credit card and shipping information before it shows you the top seller list.

Several things are going on. The first is that the system just wasn't ready. Three years is a short amount of time to create a system like this from scratch. The system has not been properly load tested and there are numerous bugs left in the system. It is an alpha release rolled out as a finished product.

The Obama Administration should have admitted that the exchanges weren't ready and delayed implementation. They did not for political reasons.

The requirement to create an account before you see rates is different. It turns web sites on their head but it makes sense if you remember the Obama Administration's history of being to clever by half.

I suspect that the designers had two thoughts in mind. The first was that everyone has to sign up for insurance so they might as well force them to create an account at the beginning.

The second consideration is that the policies in the exchanges aren't that good. If you allowed someone to just browse, they might see this and give up, especially when presented with a complicated enrollment process. By putting the enrollment up front, it means that people have already invested time in the process. Even if they don't like the policies offered, they are more likely to choose one to justify the time and effort they have already put into the exchanges.

Shutdown Follies

Various thoughts on the government shutdown:

The most important one is "What was the Tea Party thinking?" Did thye really think that President Obama would give up what he sees as his legacy? Yes, Obama is willing to cut deals with murderous dictators and rogue theocracies but his heart isn't in those fights. His only interest in foreign affairs was getting out of Bush's wars.

The shutdown was a disaster for the movement to repeal and replace Obamacare. It enforced the belief that, once in place it can't be removed. The headlines should have been about the breakdown of the exchanges and how few of the people who actually get through are signing up for coverage. Instead the top stories are about people hurt by the shutdown with a subtext about heartless Republicans.

What is not getting covered is that it takes two sides to have an impasse. Obama and the Democrats are refusing to negotiate, period. They need to throw the Republicans a bone for the good of the country. Instead they are too busy looking at the harm the shutdown is doing to the Republican brand and counting on that for winning the 2014 elections.

The Democrats are being ingenuous about the dispute. Obama and others emphasize that it is over just one law without acknowledging the massive scope of that one law.

I've also seen the argument that representative government requires that the Republicans accept the law. There is some truth to that. Obamacare was not a major issue in the last election and the Republicans have only managed to take one house of Congress. The flip side to that is that Obamacare was passed with the slimmest of margins, only by using legislative tricks and opinion polls showed that it never had a majority behind it.

The worst thing about the showdown is that Obamacare is not ready but it was implemented anyway. If not for Obama's reluctance to deal with the enemy (Republicans) it would have been delayed for at least a year.

The Battle Over Obamacare

Ted Cruz is waging a personal battle against legislation that he urged the House to pass. This is generally considered to be a stunt. For that matter, so is the House bill which has a clause that would de-fund Obamacare. That clause will be taken out in the Senate and even if it wasn't, the President would rather see the government shut down than sign a law that would de-fund his signature accomplishment.

The fight to stop Obamacare was lost some time ago and, ironically, its biggest opponents killed any chance of stopping it.

The only way to stop Obamacare would have been to take the Senate and the White House. There was a good chance at taking the Senate but the Republicans lost several races against vulnerable Democrats because the Tea Party wing insisted that ideology was more important than winning.

The last chance to stop Obamacare came a bit under 10 months ago. In a close election where voter turn-out was the key to winning, far to many Republicans stayed home rather than vote for a moderate/right Mormon.

Since the Democrats control half of Congress and the White House, there is no way for the Republicans to roll back Obamacare.

That is not the end of the fight but it does make it more difficult. The left insists that Republicans are afraid of Obamacare because they know it will work. This is incorrect. What Republicans fear is that it will work for enough people to form a constituency. Just ask gun control advocates about the power of a vocal constituency.

We've already seen how efforts to replace Obamacare will play out with Social Security and Medicare. Both programs will run out of money in the foreseeable future but efforts at moderate reform have been characterized by ads showing Republicans throwing seniors over a literal cliff. Attempts to repeal Obamacare will get a similar treatment, possibly showing a mean Republican taking a crutch from a child.

Republicans need to take a long view. They will need to keep up their attacks on Obamacare's shortcomings but they also need to come up with a viable replacement. Obamacare may be a bad piece of legislation but it does address some real concerns like pre-existing conditions. If the Republicans don't have an answer for that then they will lose the long war.

They also need to follow the advice of Ronald Reagan who refused to attack fellow Republicans on ideological grounds.

Shootings and Political Expediency

For weeks after the horrific shootings at Sandy Hook, we heard regular updates on how horrible it was and how something had to be done. The same was true for the shooting at the Aurora theater.

But the shooting at the Navy Yard in Washington, DC has already vanished from the headlines. I realize that killing children is more shocking that adults but this still seems callous. What happened?

I suspect that editorial decisions were made to play up the Sandy Hook story and minimize the DC shootings because of political expediency.

The Sandy Hook shooting was used to push new gun legislation. We were told that if we would just outlaw certain rifles and high capacity magazines and have more background checks then we would be safe.

The DC shooting showed how flawed this argument is. Most of the victims were killed with a shotgun and the shooter passed a background check when he bought it. Until now the line has been that politicians don't want to outlaw guns used for hunting, just ones that are too dangerous to be in the hands of regular people. The only gun control law that would have helped is one that confiscated all weapons and that would never pass.

While a tragedy, the Navy Yard shooting served no political purpose so it has already been dropped from the new cycle. We will not see any survivors from the shooting or relatives of the victims appearing with the President. It was all political posturing in order to pass measures that would not have made us safer.

The Obama Doctine

To refer to President Obama's Middle East policy as Amateur Hour is an insult to amateurs. His Syrian policy in particular has been one blunder after another but it is possible to analyze these and use them to construct an overall Obama Doctrine.

First, let's look as his actions. In Egypt he supported all sides at some point or another. The official response to the legal requirement to classify the military coup that created the most recent government is that it is not in the interests of either country to reach a conclusion. We all know that it was a coup but calling it one would require that we cut off aid pending Congressional action.

We intervened in Libya on humanitarian grounds without Congressional involvement but only after we were shamed into it by the British and French.

Syria is where the administration has shown the least competence. At different times during their civil war we have supported President Bashar al-Assad, said that he must go, implied that we would accept a partitioned Syria, and finally partnered with him on removal of his chemical weapons.

Obama clearly wanted to stay well away from the conflict. His red line was an off-handed comment that he never expected he would be called on to enforce. When pushed into it he was on the verge of ordering a cruise missile strike when he changed his mind and sent the decision to Congress to be voted on. At the same time he insisted that he didn't need Congressional approval but he wanted them to vote on a resolution anyway. Weeks later the text of that resolution has not been finalized.

Our current policy also started as an off-hand comment that bordered on being a joke. When asked if anything could stop an attack, Secretary of State Kerry suggested that Syria turn over all of its chemical weapons stores by the end of the week. He clearly meant this as something that could never happen (technically, the end of the week is here and it didn't happen). This inspired Russian head Putin to propose a weapons turnover as a serious policy.

The President should have addressed the American people prior to ordering a strike (or prior to kicking the can to Congress). Instead he waited until after it was sure to fail in both houses before giving a speech. In that speech he explained why it was urgent that we strike but then announced that we would not because of the Russian offer.

It is likely that the talks will go on for a while. There may even be a token turnover of weapons but nothing major. After sticking their necks out for him once, Congressional Democrats will be unlikely to so so a second time. The same is true for France, the only other country to support us.

It is even possible that Bashar al-Assad will continue using chemicals on a smaller scale. It came out that he had been using them for some time. The red line was only crossed when images of dead bodies began showing up on TV.

Put all of that together and you have the Obama Doctrine:

1) The United States will not intervene in the Middle East on humanitarian grounds unless other countries, preferably Great Britain and France, take the lead. We will call this "leading from behind" but it is indistinguishable from following.

2) In the absence of leadership from other countries, it is acceptable for a government to kill unlimited numbers of its citizens using conventional weapons.

3) Governments will allowed to use chemical weapons on its own people as long as it does not make the evening news. If it makes the evening news then the government will have to be punished. This punishment will consist of beginning negotiations to turn over its weapons. No other punishment will be given.

Not exactly the Monroe Doctrine but there you have it.

Which Way on Syria?

For the last two years I have been wishing that President Obama would do something about the humanitarian crisis in Syria. With hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced, President Clinton's vows of "never again" have been forgotten. So, now that Obama is requesting permission to act do I feel so conflicted about it?

I've been weighing this question for the last few days and I finally realized that this is not even a case of doing the right thing for the wrong reason. He wants to do the wrong thing for the wrong reason.

The President's response has nothing to do with the humanitarian crisis. Worse, it is not really about the use of chemical weapons. What clarified the issue for me was a columnist who pointed out that, had Obama not made a speech last year drawing a red line, he would be making a case before the Hague instead of Congress.

But he did draw the line and, as in Libya, he insists that he has the executive poser to act on that without authorization from Congress. He is going to Congress, anyway but not because of a sudden respect for the Constitution or the War Powers Act. He is going to them for political cover.

So, the President wants to take some form of action, the nature of which is still under debate, because of a speech he gave and he wants Congress to share the blame when it inevitably goes wrong.

No wonder the Pentagon and a majority of both parties are reluctant to support him.

So, while I think that the US should have been supporting the non-Islamic rebels for the last two years, I cannot support Obama's current goals in Syria especially when his administration is unable to state clearly what they are. Congress should vote him down.

Obama and Syria

President Obama has painted himself into a corner on Syria. Elected on an anti-war platform, he is reluctant to get involved in new wars. He reluctantly got involved in Libya only after being shamed into it by the European countries. With the exception of France, they are sitting out this conflict so there is no "leading from behind".

For more than two years Obama insulated himself from the war with his "red line" which implied that Syria could slaughter as many of its people as it wanted as long as it was done with conventional weapons. He obviously expected that a warning about chemical weapons would be enough.

When he drew his red line, the President does not appear to have consulted with any allies or members of Congress. There are rumors that he did not even consult with the State Department. He warned of serious consequences but did not give any specifics and possibly did not have any in mind.

Now Syria has crossed the red line (by some reports they have been crossing it on ever-expanding scale for months). The President feels that he has to act but has not good options. There is no support for a boots-on-the-ground approach. Even an air attack has limited support.

Last week it was assumed that he would order a strike with cruise missiles and that this would be limited. At the last minute he decided to wait and ask Congress for permission. While this move was applauded by many, this move was more likely motivated by a desire to share the blame than by a desire to observe Constitutional requirements. This is the same president who ignored Congress and the War Powers act in Libya.

The President knows that any action he takes in Syria will be unpopular, especially with the anti-war base that the Democrats milked for support during the Bush years. In a bit of irony, there were anti-war protests outside of Secretary of State Kerry's house over the weekend. This is the same Kerry who first made his name as a Viet Nam protestor.

It is also possible that the President knows that the actions he has planned will be symbolic and will not change the balance of power in the area.

Politically, appealing to Congress has its advantages. The hawks will not vote for a symbolic strike and the doves will not vote for any action. There will be less fall-out if the measure fails in Congress than if Obama launches it and Syria continues to use poison gas.

A humanitarian and strategic case can be made for crippling strike combined with aid for the non-ideological rebels. Obama could make that case to Congress, the US citizenry, and the world but his heart is not in that option. He hasn't even delivered the small arms that were promised months ago.

Congress should reject anything short of regime change. Sharing blame for a symbolic action made necessary by the President's imprudent red line will not help Congress.

The President made it clear that he believes that he has the authority to order the strike regardless of Congress. If so then he should either act on that or back down instead of trying to share the blame.