Freedom Line Blog

In case you needed further proof of the slightly sadistic quality of the most wall-eyed environmental extremists, I provide you with documentary evidence from Greenpeace, which has produced this video to terrify children into hectoring their parents about global warming:

As James Taylor from the Heartland Institute notes, there’s one big problem with this (well, apart from the reimagining of Santa as Mephistopheles): polar sea ice is doing just fine. But you can understand Greenpeace’s dilemma: it’s hard to make a horror film out of that.

h/t: Jim Lakely

A few weeks ago, I wrote a column here entitled “America’s Fascist Moment.” I generally try to avoid such loaded terms in print, but the reason I used that other F-word was precisely because we’ve allowed its common connotation to obscure its actual meaning.

People usually associate ‘fascism ‘with the worst kinds of authoritarians, especially Adolf Hitler. And, true enough, Hitler was an extreme example of a fascist at work. Generally, however, fascism is a bit more subtle than that (really, though, what isn’t more subtle than the Third Reich?).

What the term actually means is erasing the lines between the state and civil society; ensuring that everything we do is tied to the government. In the famous formulation of Benito Mussolini, it’s “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Needless to say, that’s about as far away as you can get from the traditional American notion of limited government, where the state is only valuable insofar as it serves the people, not the other way around (for the single best volume on this, I recommend Jonah Goldberg’s truly fantastic Liberal Fascism).

When history renders its ultimate judgment on the Obama Administration, any fair reading will note the deep fascist tendencies that pervade this Administration. If you need any proof, you need only look at the headlines of the past few days.

First, you’ve got the President exhorting his disciples to use Thanksgiving dinner to harangue family members about Obamacare, even going so far as to provide pages worth of printable talking points to his minions (I recently took this up at Ricochet).

Then you’ve got the Administration’s continued efforts to force employers to violate their consciences and provide birth control for their employees even if it violates the teachings of their faith, a fight that it was announced today will head to the Supreme Court in the spring.

Finally, there’s the news that Obama’s Treasury Department is proposing cracking down on tax-exempt status for non-profit groups that engage in what the Administration believes to be too much political activity. Liberals and conservatives alike should understand the grave danger that would come with giving the Executive Branch that kind of power to regulate political activity. There’s no such thing as a free polity where those in power get to punish those who aren’t simply for voicing their opinions.

Having a free society, however, doesn’t seem to be a priority for the Obama Administration. This is an Administration that would rather beat its enemies while violating the noblest traditions of American government than lose because they stood on principle. You’d be hard-pressed to think of another White House that ever threatened liberty so directly and so consistently.

It’s becoming clear that the Obama Administration is beginning to lose hope that they can salvage Obamacare and are now just trying to contain the political fallout. From CBS:

After the slow start to enrollment in the Obamacare marketplaces for 2014, the Obama administration is set to delay enrollment for 2015 by a month.

The move will give insurers more time to evaluate the 2014 market and set 2015 premiums accordingly — it also moves the enrollment period past the 2014 midterm elections. It’s the latest Obamacare adjustment that, whatever its aims, is clouded by the continued political controversy over the health law. At least one Republican, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, called the decision “a cynical political move.”

The Health and Human Services Department confirms to CBS News that it plans to reschedule the 2015 open enrollment period for Nov. 15, 2014 – Jan. 15, 2015. Previously, the enrollment period was slated to run from Oct. 15 – Dec. 7, 2014. Insurers also now have until May 2014, rather than April 2014, to submit applications to offer health plans in the marketplace. The changes don’t impact the Obamacare marketplace for next year.

Make no mistake, “Set premiums accordingly” means raise prices based on the internal logic of Obamacare. The Administration knows that Democrats will take a drubbing at the ballot box if yet another round of bad news and increased premiums coincides with the final days of next year’s midterm elections. This is nothing more than a face-saving measure, and one so laughably transparent that it’s not liable to do Democrats much good (especially if Republicans make the Administration’s intentional attempt to conceal health care rates a campaign issue).

It’s a shame the Obama Administration has gotten on the wrong side of so many doctors. They could use some triage right about now.

A quick thought regarding the avalanche of remembrances of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, which happened 50 years ago tomorrow.

As we all know, citing where you were when Kennedy was killed is a generational touchstone for a wide swath of Americans. That’s sort of a broader metaphor for this macabre exercise in nostalgia. Watching the coverage, it’s remarkable (though, alas, not unusual) how much certain Baby Boomers are making it about themselves. Much of the noise surrounding the anniversary has much less to do with Kennedy himself than it does with their nostalgia. The Me Generation may be going gray, but they still haven’t lost that ethos.

One other note: It strikes me as perfectly fair game to try and figure out Kennedy ideologically. You’re hearing a lot of people on the right now point out that he was a tax-cutter, a staunch anti-communist, and someone who embraced America’s global leadership role. All true, and all fair points.

We’re putting more weight on Kennedy’s legacy than it can bear, however, when we indulge in counterfactuals that imagine what would have happened if he hadn’t been killed. To hear certain pundits tell it, JFK would have ended the war in Vietnam before it really started; or he would have eventually become a Republican. It’s basically a “choose your own adventure” book where JFK miraculously always turns out to be exactly who you wanted him to be.

It’s a testimony to how iconic a figure Kennedy was that he invites this kind of speculation a half-century after his death. Let’s remember, however, that it’s all just that: speculation. We have enough contemporary political battles to fight without trying to baptize a dead president into our present-day ideologies.

It’s rare that we get anything other than green inanity in federal energy policy these days, which is why this news is so welcome. From Ben German at The Hill:

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is cutting the amount of ethanol and other biofuels that must be blended into the nation’s fuel supply, a victory for oil companies that call the federal ethanol mandate unworkable.

On Friday, the EPA proposed draft 2014 blending volumes under the federal Renewable Fuel Standard that are lower than the 2013 requirements, and far less than called for in a 2007 law that expanded the mandate.

The EPA is proposing to require 15.21 billion gallons in 2014, down from 16.55 billion gallons in 2013, marking the first time the agency has lowered the target from the prior year.

A senior administration official said the Obama administration is firmly supportive of biofuels, but said  “market, infrastructure and other constraints” warrant paring back the mandate.

If you’re wondering when the hell the Obama Administration actually started worrying about the real-life effects of their policies, the answer is: when it put them at cross-purposes with a well-financed lobby. As the Wall Street Journal notes:

The EPA says it is trying to fix a problem known as the “blend wall,” which occurs when the annual requirement mandated by Congress exceeds the amount of ethanol that can be mixed into conventional blends of gasoline.

Oil companies and refiners have been warning of the blend wall for several years. If the EPA had stuck to Congress’s original target, refiners said they would have hit the blend wall in 2014 for the first time.

Which, of course, the ethanol lobby is using as an argument that this whole thing is one big gift from the government to “big oil.” That’s pretty rich coming from an industry that wouldn’t exist at any substantial scale without political collusion.

What’s the difference between ethanol and gasoline? You don’t need to pass laws to create a market for gasoline. The oil industry isn’t looking for special favors in this case; it’s looking from relief from a government-imposed drag on its business. The ethanol folks, meanwhile, are the ones trying to use state power to force people into buying their product. Which one sounds more corrupt to you?

As Drew noted earlier this week, ethanol is one big disaster. It doesn’t work in terms of economics, it doesn’t work in terms of energy, and it doesn’t work in terms of the environment. In a perfect world, we would’ve been able to abolish its mandate outright. In this flawed one, seeing it reduced at any level is a welcome change of pace.

Since President Obama was—prior to its implosion—so hung-ho about comparing healthcare.gov to cutting edge private sector companies like Apple, Amazon, and Kayak, he certainly can’t mind the kind of data scrutiny that such companies thrive on. Try this one on for size: According to the Los Angeles Times:

Just six enrollments occurred on the opening day for www.healthcare.gov, the troubled Obamacare website, according to documents released late Thursday by a House oversight committee.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, obtained the tally from meeting notes compiled by officials inside the “war room” at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which was overseeing the rollout of the insurance marketplace.

If Apple had first-day numbers like that, someone (actually, many someones) would be fired. Mr. President?

We’ve spent virtually the entire month of October hearing about the practical defects of Obamacare—everything from the failures of the exchange website to the widespread cancellation of insurance plans that don’t comply with the health mandates. Apart from those functional considerations, however, there’s another major drawback to the law: it places America’s health care providers into a Faustian bargain with Washington.

Recall that in order to get many health insurance companies onboard to support Obamacare, the White House made what was essentially a quid pro quo deal: in order to cover the increased costs of covering the chronically ill that the plan would bring into the system, the individual mandate would ensure that young, healthy, actuarially sound Americans would be swept into the system too (the failure of the exchanges, however, is already steering this arrangement towards being upside down financially).

One of the downsides, however, of putting the industry at the government’s mercy is that the feds hold the whip hand when they fail to follow the party line. From CNN:

White House officials have pressured insurance industry executives to keep quiet amid mounting criticism over Obamacare’s rollout, insurance industry sources told CNN.

After insurance officials publicly criticized the implementation, White House staffers contacted insurers to express their displeasure, industry insiders said.

Multiple sources declined to speak publicly about the push back because they fear retribution.

But Bob Laszewski, who heads a consulting firm for big insurance companies, did talk on the record.

“The White House is exerting massive pressure on the industry, including the trade associations, to keep quiet,” he said.

Laszewski, who’s been a vocal critic of Obamacare, said he’s been asked by insurance executives to speak out because they feel defenseless against an administration that is regulating their business — and a big customer.

Government-backed plans accounted for about half of health care policies last year, a number that is expected to grow over the years.

He who has the gold makes the rules, as the saying goes. It turns out there was an additional cost to Obamacare that the insurance companies didn’t factor in: their autonomy.

The idea that this disservice to poor, primarily African-American children is is the product of the nation’s first black Attorney General, serving at the pleasure of its first black president is appalling. From Elizabeth Harrington at the Washington Free Beacon:

The Justice Department is attempting to block parents from defending the Louisiana school voucher program in court, according to a brief filed Tuesday.

… The DOJ is seeking a permanent injunction against the school choice program, which would block access to vouchers beginning in 2014 unless a federal judge approves them. The lawsuit claims the vouchers are “impeding desegregation” because some recipients were in the racial minority at their failing school. Vouchers are awarded randomly by lottery.

The DOJ said in a motion filed Tuesday that parents whose kids have benefited from the program have no legal standing to become defendants in the case.

The racial bean-counting is (A) a fig leaf for the Administration’s real goal of scoring a win against school choice and (B) a window into the collectivist’s soul: they care more about the amalgamation of pigment in any given classroom than the lives of the children living within that skin. Now add to that injury the insult of being told by your government that you have no right to defend your child’s right to a decent education.

Shameful and wrong. Let us hope that the DOJ is defeated—and that the courts treat it with the scorn it so richly deserves,

Adding to the parade of horribles attending the Obamacare rollout that Ashton mentions below is this fact: the websites are inconvenient to consumers because — unlike virtually any other e-commerce transaction — you have to build an account and start submitting personal information before you are so much as allowed to browse your possible options. Reporting in the Washington Examiner, Philip Klein notes that this isn’t a design flaw; it’s an intentional barrier to sticker shock:

As originally envisioned, Healthcare.gov (which serves the residents of 36 states) was supposed to enable individuals to shop for health insurance starting Oct. 1, 2013, just as they would shop for airline tickets on Orbitz.

But unlike Orbitz, Healthcare.gov makes consumers seeking information on their available choices go through a multi-step process to create an account and then log in and enter personal information.

Administration officials imposed these extra steps because they didn’t want consumers to see the base price of the health insurance plans offered – which are inflated by new regulations – before the system could collect their income data and calculate what they’d pay in premiums after receiving government subsidies.

For a program that’s supposedly so benevolent, it’s interesting how often getting the public to accept Obamacare either requires legal compulsion or outright evasion.

Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale, recently decided to do a study examining the relationship  between political ideology and scientific literacy. Though Kahan has not admitted this publicly, it’s reasonable to assume that his intent was the same as most surveys of this stripe: proving that his opponents were idiots. He didn’t get his wish. As Politico reports:

… Kahan posted on his blog this week that he analyzed the responses of more than 2,000 American adults recruited for another study and found that, on average, people who leaned liberal were more science literate than those who leaned conservative.

However, those who identified as part of the tea party movement were actually better versed in science than those who didn’t, Kahan found. The findings met the conventional threshold of statistical significance, the professor said.

Kahan’s results are interesting, though not especially suprising. Anyone who’s spent any time around Tea Party types knows that they’re interested in ideas. You don’t pick up an affection for the Founding Fathers, after all, without cracking a book every now and then. Therein lies the problem, however. Kahan hasn’t spent any time with Tea Party types:

Kahan wrote that not only did the findings surprise him, they embarrassed him.

“I’ve got to confess, though, I found this result surprising. As I pushed the button to run the analysis on my computer, I fully expected I’d be shown a modest negative correlation between identifying with the Tea Party and science comprehension,” Kahan wrote.

“But then again, I don’t know a single person who identifies with the tea party,” he continued. “All my impressions come from watching cable tv — & I don’t watch Fox News very often — and reading the ‘paper’ (New York Times daily, plus a variety of politics-focused Internet sites like Huffington Post and POLITICO). I’m a little embarrassed, but mainly, I’m just glad that I no longer hold this particular mistaken view.”

When Richard Nixon won the 1972 presidential election in a landslide, the New Yorker’s film critic, Pauline Kael, reportedly said that she was shocked because “no one I know voted for him.” That story’s been a metaphor for liberal insularity ever since, but let’s be fair to Kael — she was on an arts beat at a famously liberal magazine.

Professor Kahan, by contrast, is a member of the faculty at arguably the most prestigious law school in the country — a place where one should theoretically be able to develop an understanding of a major stream of American political thought deeper than what can be gleamed from the digital pages of the Huffington Post. The key word there is “theoretically.”

Watching President Obama blunder his way through the government shutdown and the debt ceiling fight has been jaw-dropping. The president can’t seem to score political points even when the other side is fumbling the ball in their own end zone.

Regardless of what you think of the GOP’s tactics going into the shutdown, the polling has been pretty clear that Republicans are shouldering more of the blame than Democrats. All Obama had to do to capitalize was get out of their way.

Instead, his OMB imposed a series of petty, penny ante shutdowns on locations like the open-air World War II Memorial. The resulting anger from the public has led to plans for a Million Vet March on the mall this weekend. To add insult to injury, police actually removed a man from the Lincoln Memorial grounds yesterday who was voluntarily mowing the grass so that it would look nice for America’s veterans. And this whole drama is playing out within a week or so of Harry Reid’s gaffe making it sound like Democrats weren’t interested in funding research to help children with cancer. When you’re offending World War II vets and terminally ill kids, you’re generally doing politics wrong.

The theatrics are little more than a sideshow, however — and that’s probably the reason they haven’t moved the polls any. We’re now coming to the point, though, when the two sides are negotiating over the real substance of these issues. Just a little while ago, the New York Times put up a story saying that the President had rejected a Republican offer to pass a six-week extension of the debt ceiling. In the time it’s taken me to draft this post, they’ve changed it to say only that they’ve “failed to reach agreement” and that both sides are still talking.

If Obama has any sense, he’ll take this deal. The Republican willingness to pass a short-term fix to the debt ceiling represents an acknowledgment that the consequences of not doing so are decidedly more dangerous that those attending a government shutdown (have you noticed that life hasn’t been much different while official Washington is on hiatus?). If the President shoots it down, he will begin to look like the absolutist and he will seem like the one who’s playing Russian roulette with the country in order to bolster his political standing. With any other president, it’d be unfathomable. Obama, however, has a special gift for unforced errors.

Regardless of what you think of the political strategy at work, the federal shutdown we’ve been enduring over the last few days has been an object lesson in how much government we could cut without ever missing it — as I detail in my column this week. In the piece, I look primarily at the bloat in the federal employment rolls, but today brings some underreported news on another key metric: federal regulations.

Last year, the federal government completed work on 1,172 new regulations (less than 30 percent of the full portfolio it was working on). That comes out to about 23 new regulations every week, many of them with massive price tags attached (57 of last year’s new regs were estimated to have costs of at least $100 million apiece). Thus, this bit of news from The Hill is a pure delight:

The Federal Register is practically dried up due to the ongoing government shutdown. There are only two new rules announced for Monday’s edition, and both of them are relatively minor.

The two rules? One limits the hauls of vermillion snapper that commercial fisherman can take in through the rest of the year; the other sets up a temporary safety zone around a bridge in Texas where the Coast Guard is making repairs. Were that this was the way the Federal Register looked every week.

In my column last week, I wrote about how rapidly predictions of catastrophic global warming are unraveling. Despite the fact that the case for skepticism is probably better than ever, the Obama Administration is still proceeding with new EPA regulations to cap carbon emissions, which will have the practical effect of crippling the coal industry.

What’s perhaps most remarkable about this crusade is that the EPA claims the problem can be handled through carbon sequestration — a technology that’s not commercially viable (though this should come as no surprise coming from the same people that think solar and wind power are the wave of the future). As Larry Bell notes at Forbes:

EPA’s latest climate battle plan is to prohibit construction of new coal-fired power plants that can’t achieve 1,100 pound per megawatt hour carbon emission limits. To accomplish this will require plant operators to capture and store (“sequester”) excess CO2, something that cannot be accomplished through affordable means, if at all. [The Institute for Energy Research estimates] that this “regulatory assault” will eliminate 35 gig watts of electrical generating capacity…10% of all U.S. power. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute observes, “If the carbon dioxide emissions standard for power plants proposed by the EPA today is enacted, the United States will have built its final coal-fired power plant.”

The liberal environmental establishment wants to bankrupt the coal industry. That’s their prerogative. But they should at least be honest about it instead of acting like they’re simply helping the industry transition to the next best thing. Perhaps they could take a page out of this fella’s book:

Lost in all of the other drama surrounding the possibility of a government shutdown beginning next week (zero hour is October 1) is this fact: the city of Washington D.C., whose budget is appropriated by Congress (though most of the revenue is raised within the city), will also have to scale back its operations should a continuing resolution not get approved. Or at least everyone except lunatic D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray thinks so. From WAMU in D.C.:

D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray today declared that the city’s 32,000 employees were all “essential” and should be allowed to remain on the job during a possible federal government shutdown that could start next week.

In a letter to the Office of Management and Budget director Sylvia Burwell, Gray wrote: “I have determined that all operations of the District of Columbia are ‘excepted’ activities essential to the protection of public safety, health, and property and therefore will continue to be performed during a lapse in appropriations.”

32,000 employees and not a single one can be spared? Let’s be honest: the city’s going to be a simmering urban hellhole either way. Why not at least save some coin for a few days?

The Second City is far from the first place one would expect to produce a devastating satire of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. The Chicago improv troupe, which — along with the Groundlings in Los Angeles — is one of two major feeder programs for Saturday Night Live, is part of an artistic community whose political sensibilities overwhelmingly incline towards the president. Moreover, they’re located right in his back yard.

The video below, however, — produced back when it still looked like the president would pursue an inept war with Syria rather than the inept peace we have now — is a brilliantly pointed takedown of Obama and his apostles — and also of the entire political sensibility they represent. That it is clearly done through the clenched teeth of sympathists only makes it all the more enjoyable.

The more time passes, the more global warming’s apostles begin to look like members of a doomsday cult. You can only predict the end incorrectly so many times, after all, without losing your credibility amongst all but the true believers. After early leaks of the upcoming report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that the (Nobel Prize-winning, mind you) IPCC had dramatically erred in calculating global temperature changes, a study in the journal Natural Climate Change found that:

Out of 117 predictions [made during the 1990s], three were roughly accurate and 114 overestimated the amount of warming. On average, the predictions forecasted two times more global warming than actually occurred.

More damning still is this news:

A peer-reviewed climate change study released Wednesday by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change finds the threat of man-made global warming to be not only greatly exaggerated but so small as to be “embedded within the background variability of the natural climate system” and not dangerous.

A more thorough summary is here.

I sometimes find the best way to settle your views on an issue is not to read the opinion of those you admire, but rather those whom you despise. Even my favorite thinkers go astray sometimes. The hacks are slightly more consistent.

One of the kings of errancy is the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson, who spends today’s column trying to act as a moral backstop for President Obama in regard to Syria. It’s a throwaway remark early in the piece, however, that gets my hackles up:

At Wednesday’s hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, I thought for a moment that [Secretary of State John] Kerry was going to blow. Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., launched into a self-righteous soliloquy about Benghazi, the IRS, the National Security Agency and what he portrayed as Kerry’s longtime aversion to using military force.

Kerry, you may recall, is a highly decorated Vietnam combat veteran. Duncan is an armchair warrior.

A few quick thoughts:

— I’ll grant you that Duncan comes off as a blowhard in his questioning of Kerry. Hearings on the possibility of war are about as serious a task as a member of Congress faces and his insistence on turning it into a glorified campaign ad are both misplaced and unimpressive. He comes off like a guy trying to sell you insurance at a funeral. That being said, non sequitur droning constitutes about 90 percent of all congressional questioning. You know who used to be the king of that? John Kerry. So forgive me if I can’t muster sympathy when he’s on the receiving end of the same kind of firehose-intensity stream of inanity he spent over two and a half decades dispensing.

— I’ve never understood why, in a nation that from its inception has insisted upon civilian control over the military, we try to settle policy arguments by determining who’s the closest approximation of Leonidas. You know who else was an “armchair warrior”? Franklin Roosevelt, who prosecuted World War II and never served in the military. Abraham Lincoln spent three months in the Illinois State Militia.

And Mr. Robinson should be careful about tying credibility on foreign affairs to time in uniform. Barack Obama didn’t serve. Neither did Joe Biden. And neither did Eugene Robinson, who spends the rest of this column telling us how we should think about Syria.

Liberals spent the last decade mocking conservative “chicken hawks” who had never served in the military but advocated for American intervention overseas. It was a bogus argument then and it’d be bogus (if not satisfying) to turn it back on them now. If we’re going to debate ideas, let’s do it on the merits, not according to the resumés of the people advancing them.

Earlier today, Rick Klein, Political Director for ABC News, tweeted out that 217 members of the House of Representatives have gone on record “as likely to oppose authorizing military force against Syria,” giving those opposed to the resolution a majority in the lower chamber (if we have any pedants in the audience shouting about the fact that it takes 218 to reach a majority, note that Alabama and Massachusetts both currently have one vacant seat).

Now, “likely to oppose” isn’t the same thing as definitely voting no, but anyone who’s staking out territory this early in the process is disproportionately likely to to stick to his guns. And it’s clear that the momentum on this is all going in one direction — and it’s not the president’s.

That’s remarkable, but not particularly surprising. Sometimes you can get a member to vote against his political interest for the sake of ideology. Sometimes you can get him to vote against his ideology for the sake of his political interest. But when both are imperiled simultaneously, the whipping gets much harder. That’s precisely the case with a potential military offensive that polls terribly and hits intellectual pressure points for liberals and conservatives alike.

One dispiriting aspect of this debate is the chorus of conservative voices such as Jennifer Rubin, Hugh Hewitt, and Bret Stephens who’ve conflated opposition to feckless, limited airstrikes in Syria with “isolationism.” It may be fair to say that nearly all isolationists are opposed to taking action in Syria. It does not follow, however, that all who are opposed to taking action in Syria are isolationists. The scope of opposition is far too large to be constituted entirely (or even primarily) of those opposed to American action overseas in all but the most limited circumstances.

I suspect that there are a fair number of conservatives like me — as far removed from the reflexive international reticence of Rand Paul as we are from John McCain’s “anytime, anywhere, for any reason” school of intervention — who just don’t see the strategic payoff here, especially given the manner in which the Obama Administration would be likely to conduct the fight.

America has played too fast and loose with defining our national security interests in recent years. Doing so again — especially when it’s clear that the Obama Administration has no plan that will actually result in a change of circumstances on the ground in Syria — is an exercise in futility. The measure deserves defeat.

Ronald Reagan may have been the only American president to emerge from Tinseltown (excepting the fact that Barack Obama is clearly a character created by Aaron Sorkin), but that hasn’t inspired any loyalty. The new movie, The Butler, is rife with mischaracterizations of racial progress in America (as ably pointed out by Richard Epstein for the Hoover Institution) — and it’s especially unkind to the Gipper. As Steve Hayward, Paul Kengor, Craig Shirley, and Kiron Skinner — Reagan biographers all — note in today’s Washington Post, Reagan demonstrated a lifetime’s worth of tolerance and enlightenment on racial issues.

One of the film’s larger errors is an implicit assertion that Reagan opposed economic sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa out of simple indifference to black suffering. But as his chroniclers note, the reality is much more complicated:

The unfairness of this scene can be demonstrated by any number of historical facts. In June 1981, still recovering from an assassination attempt, Reagan sent his closest foreign policy aide, William Clark, on his first official trip; it was to South Africa to express America’s disapproval. An unsmiling Clark told Prime Minister Pieter W. Botha to his face that the new president and administration “abhorred apartheid.” Clark walked out on Botha.

While accurate in depicting Reagan’s opposition to sanctions against South Africa, “The Butler” does not explain why he opposed them. Reagan saw sanctions as harmful to the poorest South Africans: millions of blacks living in dire poverty. He also feared that the apartheid regime could be replaced by a Marxist/totalitarian one allied with the Soviet Union and Cuba and that communism would spread throughout the continent. South Africa’s blacks were denied rights under apartheid, but communism would mean no freedom of speech, press, assembly, religion, conscience, emigration, travel or even property for anyone. Moreover, in communist nations such as Cambodia and Ethi­o­pia, people had been slaughtered and starved on mass scales. Nearly a dozen nations had become part of the Soviet orbit in the immediate years before Reagan became president. He didn’t want South Africa to undergo the same catastrophe.

Reagan adopted a policy of “constructive engagement,” seeking to keep South Africa in the anti-Soviet faction while encouraging the country toward black-majority rule — no easy feat. In one of his finest speeches, he told the United Nations on Sept. 24, 1984, that it was “a moral imperative that South Africa’s racial policies evolve peacefully but decisively toward . . . justice, liberty and human dignity.” Among his administration’s successes was the Angola-Namibia agreement, which led to the withdrawal of the white South African regime from Namibia and paved the way for that nation’s independence.

Moral preening is always easiest when one bears no responsibility for the consequences. Statesmen weigh trade-offs. Ronald Reagan knew that. Thanks to the current situation in Syria, Barack Obama is about to get a master’s class on the topic.

We’ve seen similarly dismal numbers before, but this new analysis from National Journal is especially grim:

For the vast majority of Americans, premium prices will be higher in the individual exchange than what they’re currently paying for employer-sponsored benefits, according to a National Journal analysis of new coverage and cost data. Adding even more out-of-pocket expenses to consumers’ monthly insurance bills is a swell in deductibles under the Affordable Care Act.

… Whether the quality of care in the new market is comparable to private offerings remains to be seen. But one thing is clear: The cost of care in the new market doesn’t stack up. A single wage earner must make less than $20,000 to see his or her current premiums drop or stay the same under Obamacare, an independent review by National Journal found. That’s equivalent to approximately 34 percent of all single workers in the U.S. seeing any benefit in the new system. For those seeking family-of-four coverage under the ACA, about 43 percent will see cost savings. Families must earn less than or equal to $62,300, or they, too, will be looking at a bigger bill.

… On average, a worker paid between $862 and $1,065 per year for single coverage in 2013, according to Kaiser’s numbers. For the average family plan, defined as a family of four, insurance cost between $4,226 and $5,284. Fewer than half of all families and only a third of single workers would qualify for enough Obamacare tax subsidies to pay within or below those averages next year.

Some of us intuitively grasped a long time ago what the evidence is now making explicit: government intervention never reduces costs, it just redistributes them. A lot of Americans are about to learn that the hard way.