Freedom Line Blog

My column this week explains how AARP, formerly known as the American Association of Retired People, exploited its relationship with liberal politicians to reap a $2.8 billion windfall from ObamaCare.  The massive payout comes from regulatory exemptions that help AARP increase its lucrative Medigap endorsement scheme.

But it’s not like President Barack Obama’s landmark health law ushered in a new era of revenues for the premier non-profit advocate for seniors.  With $458 million in revenues for 2011, AARP would rank as the sixth most profitable for-profit health care company, according to a report by staff members to Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC).

This puts AARP just behind Humana and ahead of industry giants like Coventry, Amerigroup and Health Net.

Best of all for AARP, because it designates much of its revenue as “royalty fees” instead of “commissions” for endorsing certain private Medicare plans it gets to avoid paying taxes on millions of dollars in income to the Internal Revenue Service.

An investigation (pdf) by House Ways and Means Committee members has asked the IRS to investigate whether AARP’s reporting practices violate federal law, and for good reason.

The investigators note that “In 1994 AARP paid the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) a one-time settlement payment of $135 million in lieu of taxes, resolving an audit over tax returns for years 1985 through 1993 for failure to fully pay unrelated business income tax (UBIT) on its commercial activities.”  And, “In 1999, the IRS and AARP once again reached a settlement to conclude tax years 1994 through 1998 with respect to the treatment of revenues AARP received from licensing and selling its name and logo to insurance companies.”

Sounds like AARP merits more scrutiny from the IRS.

Here’s a story that will restore your faith in the next generation — and the power of civil society.

Students and teachers throughout the nation are bridling at school nutritional requirements imposed by the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, a piece of legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in 2010 (it barely merits mentioning that the bill’s head cheerleader was First Lady Michelle Obama). So what could possibly go wrong with some well-intentioned efforts at keeping kids fit? Well, plenty. Here’s Suzanne Perez Tobias, writing for the Wichita Eagle:

The major sticking point: a new federal rule that sets calorie maximums for school lunches — 650 calories for elementary-schoolers, 700 for middle-schoolers and 850 for high-schoolers.

Protesters in Kansas and elsewhere say 850 calories isn’t enough for some high-schoolers, particularly athletes who can burn calories by the thousands.

The students’ reaction? Well, at one Kansas school they created a nice little bit of satire set to the tune of the hit song “We Are Young” — and so far it’s generated more than half a million views. Watch and try not to admire the pluck:

Since we’ve all formed a little cottage industry around providing unsolicited advice to the Romney campaign, I thought it worthwhile to pass along this recommendation from my friend and Ricochet colleague Ben Domenech, writing in today’s installment of his news digest, The Transom (probably the best daily rundown in the nation).

Ben notes the conventional wisdom that the presidential debates (the first of which takes place a week from today) are likely Romney’s last chance to change the trajectory of the race and devises a helpful bit of jiu-jitsu for Mitt to employ:

Romney’s style as a debater is aggressive and that may serve him well – in debates, the first person to appear thin-skinned usually loses – and he’ll have an opportunity to bring that out in response to Obama’s woe-is-me talk, blaming Bush and the Republican Congress for everything under the sun, saying something along the lines of:

“In the private sector, one of the things I did was invest in companies. I learned a lot about how jobs are created, but I also learned a lot about leadership. One of the things I had to do when we got involved with a company was evaluate its leadership and see if it needed a change. And let me tell you, if I got involved with a company that was losing money and jobs hand over fist and piling up debt like there was no tomorrow, and I found out the CEO had been in the job four years and still spent most of his time blaming his predecessor and his co-workers, I’d fire him and get somebody in there who could get results.”

A response like this, besides being one virtually guaranteed to tick off Obama, makes the whining look petty and small. But it would also do something else, too: workers of all types, but particularly blue-collar workers, resent the idea of the incompetent senior management which survives pain while they bear the brunt of it. Romney should do his utmost to speak for those who demand accountability and turn his negative role as one of the suits into an advantage.

Mitt Romney: corner office hero of the working man? If he employed Ben’s tactic, he just might be able to pull it off.

In my column last week, I noted how preposterous it was that the Obama Administration continued to bend over backwards to distance itself from the video (falsely) claimed to have ignited the recent round of violence in the Middle East:

Speaking shortly after the attacks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pronounced, “that the United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video. We absolutely reject its content and message… to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible. It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.”

Let’s assume for a moment that Clinton is right and that the film was made for the express purpose of working global Islam into a lather. Even taking that as a given, should the apology come from the nation of 300 million where one man produced some two-bit agritprop or from the part of the world where thousands took to the streets in violence because of a bit of inert satire tamer (and, remarkably, less coherent) than the average “Saturday Night Live” episode?

Speaking earlier today at the United Nations General Assembly, President Obama prolonged the inanity:

That [violence and intolerance] is what we saw play out the last two weeks, as a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world. I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity. It is an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well – for as the city outside these walls makes clear, we are a country that has welcomed people of every race and religion. We are home to Muslims who worship across our country. We not only respect the freedom of religion – we have laws that protect individuals from being harmed because of how they look or what they believe. We understand why people take offense to this video because millions of our citizens are among them.

I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video. The answer is enshrined in our laws: our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech.

Contra the president, this video doesn’t demonstrate “intolerance.” Stupidity? Yes. Bad filmmaking? Yes. Garden variety prejudice? Maybe. But being critical of the beliefs of others, even to the point of gratuitious rabble-rousing, is not the same thing as “intolerance.” The filmmakers were tolerating Islam; they weren’t advocating that anyone be silenced or harmed. By contrast, Islamists who engaged in violence to the point of cold-blooded murder ostensibly because of a YouTube video were the intolerant ones.

The cherry on top of this whole debacle was the President’s statement on the video to the ladies(?) of The View. As reported by the Weekly Standard:

In the age of the Internet, and you know, the way that any knucklehead who says something can post it up and suddenly it travels all around the world, you know, every country has to recognize that, you know, the best way to marginalize that kind of speech is to ignore it.

Not a terrible idea. And you know what’s a great way to begin implementing this strategy? Not devoting paragraphs to this film at the U.N. when we know that it wasn’t the catalyst for the recent blood lust.

In his column this week Troy noted the “suspicious sign of premeditation” when the American consulate in Libya was invaded by rioters on the 11^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Troy also pointed out other facts undercutting the Obama Administration’s claim that the attacks were a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Islamic YouTube video, such as the use of rocket-propelled grenades, knowledge of a safe house, and the release of an al Qaeda video demanding revenge for an assassinated deputy.

Now, even more evidence is forcing the Obama Administration to backtrack its version of the story.

Eli Lake of The Daily Beast is reporting that U.S. intelligence officials have confirmed that some of the participants had staked out the location prior to attacking.  What’s more, an intercepted communiqué “between a Libyan politician whose sympathies are with al Qaeda and the Libyan militia known at the February 17 Brigade – which had been charged with providing local security to the consulate,” reveals that the politician asked a brigade commander to “stand down for a pending attack.”

The growing body of facts make hash out of the Obama Administration’s initial characterization that the assault was simply and only caused by watching a stupid and little known video.  Instead, it seems far more plausible that the weak foreign policy stances of the Obama Administration emboldened the attackers to strike.  The White House’s reflexive crouch only adds to the problem.

Lachlan Markay of the Heritage Foundation excerpts the top five findings of the Justice Department non-partisan Inspector General’s Fast and Furious report:

1)      The report singles out top Department of Justice officials for wrongdoing

2)      The report appears to contradict sworn testimony by Attorney General Eric Holder

3)      The report faults top Justice Department leadership with failing to adequately respond to the murder of an American border patrol agent

4)      The White House refused to disclose any internal communications to the inspector general

5)      The report fails to consider evidence that a top DOJ official knew the department misled Congress

The fallout has been swift.  On the day the report was released Kenneth Melson, the former acting head of ATF – the DOJ bureau in charge of Fast and Furious – retired, while the DOJ’s Jason Weinstein, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, resigned.

So far, Attorney General Eric Holder has escaped culpability for the gun-walking program that originated on his watch.

We’ll see if congressional Republican investigators use the IG’s report to close the books on Fast and Furious, or use the Obama White House’s refusal to cooperate as proof that more sleuthing needs to be done.

Now that the Chicago teachers’ strike has come to an end (a mostly unsatisfactory one, as chronicled by my colleague at the Manhattan Institute’s Public Sector Inc., Paul Kersey), the issue will likely fall out of national consciousness by week’s end. But there is one fact from this struggle that will remain with me for the foreseeable future. It was buried deep in the recesses of the Wall Street Journal‘s interview from last weekend with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and it’s an extremely telling statistic about the party that considers itself the vanguard of civil rights:

We’re seven weeks from a presidential election in which Barack Obama needs all the cash and foot soldiers that organized labor can provide. His Super PAC’s chief fundraiser is none other than Rahm Emanuel. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party’s chief funders remain teachers unions, groups that also accounted for an estimated 20% of delegates at the recent Democratic National Convention. So you can imagine why Chicago’s unionized teachers struck now, gambling that Mr. Emanuel’s killer instinct may be stayed at least for the season.

One out of every five representatives of the Democratic Party on the floor (or at least at the hosted bar) in Charlotte represented institutions whose lust for self-preservation has the practical effect of killing minority achievement and ambition  in school districts throughout America. Their parents, who are overwhelmingly expected to vote for Barack Obama, ought to pause on that fact. The sacrifice of generations of schoolchildren is too high a price to pay for identity politics.

Following Quin’s lead, the Wall Street Journal offers some ideas on how to reframe Mitt Romney’s 47-percent-of-Americans-see-themselves-as-victims-and-will-vote-for-Obama-no-matter-what:

“I want Americans to be less dependent on government not because it costs too much. We will always help Americans who need our help. I want Americans to be independent so they can realize the pride of accomplishment and the dignity of work and contribute their God-given talents to build a better country.

“I think the success of a Presidency should be measured by how many fewer people need food stamps, how many fewer need disability, not how many more people are added to the rolls. I don’t want to take food stamps away from Americans in need. I want fewer Americans to need food stamps.

Sometimes I wonder if President Obama shares that view. He and his economists keep saying that food stamps and unemployment benefits are a form of ‘stimulus.’ Well, we’ve sure had a lot of that kind of stimulus, and all we have to show for it are more people on food stamps and more people on welfare and more people looking for work. I think a real stimulus is a job, and I intend to help Americans create more of them.”

Read the whole editorial here.

A month ago Troy’s column asked “Will Foreign Policy Still Matter in the Presidential Election?”  At the time, Mitt Romney had just picked Paul Ryan as his vice presidential running mate, and all eyes were on domestic issues like the economy and entitlement reform.

But as ever, Troy saw the big picture by reminding us that, “If recent years have taught us anything, it’s that the issues on which a presidential election are fought can be poor predictors of the ones that dominate the subsequent presidency.”

The 9/11 attacks remain the paradigmatic example.

Now, with Islamist attacks on American diplomatic outposts spreading beyond Libya and Egypt to Yemen, Sudan, and Tunisia, American foreign policy – and each presidential candidate’s view of it – is getting a workout.

It’s about time.

Jonah Goldberg on the difference between conservatives and liberals as stewards of the economy:

At least Reagan argued that the economy would prosper if he were allowed to liberate it from the scheming of self-styled experts. Clinton ran out in front of a parade of free-market successes and, like Ferris Bueller, acted as if he was leading the parade.

In his manifest hubris, Obama believed it was just that easy. He, too, could simply will a vibrant economy into being through sheer intellectual force. But, unlike Bill Clinton, he wouldn’t sully himself by playing “small ball.” Obama would be “transformative.”

This reminded me of Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech last week when he said, “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. My promise… is to help you and your family.”

Free markets and strong families.  Sounds like a good combination to me.

Tomorrow the latest jobs report will be announced by the Labor Department.  Tonight President Barack Obama will accept his party’s (re)nomination for President of the United States.  The Wall Street Journal says that sometime before he delivers his acceptance speech he will know what the numbers say.

This could prompt a side-game for political junkies:

Assuming the president gets a briefing on Thursday before his speech, what might he do with it? He isn’t exactly getting on stage, for one of the most important speeches of his career, to recite Labor Department data. But he conceivably could tweak his adjectives in describing the economy if the employment report is a surprise in either direction. Good luck trying to figure that out while you’re watching.

But don’t let that stop you from trying!

Jonathan Allen of Politico sums up the highly successful line of attack Republicans aimed at President Barack Obama during their nominating convention:

If Republicans landed a punch on Obama, it was the kind of strategic body blow that a skillful pugilist deploys to gain better position for the rest of the fight.

No roundhouse, no jaw-splitter, no knockout. It was the kind of shot aimed at subtly shifting momentum and softening up the opponent in a way that may not be evident to the casual observer.

Allen is right and Obama’s camp knows it.  That’s why they’ve been running a character assassination campaign against Mitt Romney – felon, murderer – instead of talking about any of the President’s accomplishments.

The simple fact is there aren’t any successes directly attributable to Obama worth talking about.  The more the Romney team can make this election a “good man, bad president” referendum on the incumbent, the more likely it is that Obama will be a one-term wonder.

Last week Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach filed a lawsuit on behalf of 10 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents challenging President Barack Obama’s “deferred action” program.

In a recent column I explained how the President’s decision to instruct federal law enforcement not to enforce relevant immigration law is giving some state governments an excuse to further legitimize illegal immigration.

Now the Heritage Foundation is out with an issue brief analyzing the prospects of the ICE agents’ lawsuit.  It doesn’t look good:

The plaintiffs will have a tough row to hoe, regardless of how abusive this new initiative may be in terms of violating the spirit—if not the letter—of the Constitution’s separation of powers, as well as the executive’s obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Although the challenge is by no means frivolous, a court may be reluctant to conclude that the plaintiffs have standing.

Even if they are able to establish an “injury in fact,” a court may be tempted to cite prudential standing rules in order to avoid reaching the merits, and to avoid encouraging federal officials to defy orders of their supervisors as a prelude to challenging the legality of those orders in court. As the Supreme Court stated in Gladstone, Realtors v. Village of Bellwood (1979), “a plaintiff may still lack standing under the prudential principles by which the judiciary seeks to avoid deciding questions of broad social import where no individual rights would be vindicated and to limit access to the federal courts to those litigants best suited to assert a particular claim.”

Key Takeaway: This is a political issue that requires a well thought out policy solution.  Paul Ryan dedicated his career thus far to making the conservative case for budget and entitlement reform.  It’s time for another enterprising Member of Congress to do the same with immigration reform.

Chalk up another win for advocates of school choice. Opposition to school vouchers is usually steeped in language about the policy being “risky” or “untried” (it’s a uniquely liberal gift to prefer guaranteed failure over possible success). But a new study out of the Brookings Institution (no one’s definition of a conservative haven) shows powerful results for young African-Americans:

In the first study, using a randomized experiment to measure the impact of school vouchers on college enrollment, Matthew Chingos and Paul Peterson, professor of government at Harvard University, examine the college-going behavior through 2011 of students who participated in a voucher experiment as elementary school students in the late 1990s. They find no overall impacts on college enrollment but do find large, statistically significant positive impacts on the college going of African-American students who participated in the study.

 

Their estimates indicate that using a voucher to attend private school increased the overall college enrollment rate among African Americans by 24 percent.

To say that Mitt Romney is struggling with black voters would be an understatement. That’s a real shame. Barack Obama may give them rhetorical affirmation and a sense of common identity; but Mitt Romney, who supports greater educational freedom, could actually bring them hope and change.

Just days after the California DMV announced it might use the Obama Administration’s “deferred action” program to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, a group of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are suing to kill it.

From Huffington Post:

Arizona immigration law author and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is representing 10 immigration agents in a lawsuit filed Thursday against Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, for policies they say prevent them from doing their job of defending the Constitution.

“They’re being ordered by their federal-appointee superiors to break federal law, or if they don’t break federal law, according to their orders they will be disciplined,” Kobach said Thursday on a call with reporters. “This is an absolutely breath-taking assertion of authority and an abuse of authority.”

The complaint’s six causes of action give you a flavor of what Kobach means:

1. The Directive Expressly Violates Federal Statutes Requiring the Initiation of Removals
2. The Directive Violates Federal Law By Conferring a Non-Statutory Form of Benefit, Deferred Action, to More than 1.7 Million Aliens, Rather Than a Form of Relief or Benefit that Federal Law Permits on Such a Large Scale
3. The Directive Violates Federal Law by Conferring the Legal Benefit of Employment Authorization Without Any Statutory Basis and Under the False Pretense of “Prosecutorial Discretion”
4. The Directive Violates the Constitutional Allocation of Legislative Power to Congress
5. The Directive Violates the Article II, Section 3, Constitutional Obligation of the Executive to Take Care That the Laws Are Faithfully Executed
6. The Directive Violates the Administrative Procedure Act Through Conferral of a Benefit Without Regulatory Implementation

Fox News reports that thanks to President Barack Obama’s unilateral – and unconstitutional – implementation of the DREAM Act, nearly 2 million illegal immigrants will be coming out of the shadows and proudly telling government officials about their status:

Young illegal immigrants are lining up by the thousands at consulates across the country to take advantage of the Obama administration program allowing them to apply for a two-year reprieve from deportation.

As many as 1.8 million undocumented immigrants could be eligible for the program, which kicked off Wednesday. Under the new rules, applicants can fill out a six-page form, pay a $465 fee and submit documents proving their identity in order to qualify.

Immigration officials say the documents will be closely scrutinized, given the potential for fraud, but there is no uniform standard. Applicants are supposed to show they arrived in the U.S. before they were 16, and that they’re enrolled in school or vocational training, or have a high school degree.

The lines began forming on Tuesday, as illegal immigrants tried to get a leg up in seeking their passport applications.

…

The crowds Tuesday and Wednesday are the most visible demonstration to date of how many people are interested in applying for the administration’s new reprieve program — which is effectively a version of the DREAM Act, which failed to clear Congress.

You read that right.  The Obama Administration’s reprieve amnesty program is based on legislation that never became law.

I support reform of America’s immigration system, and I’m open to some of the elements of the DREAM Act; especially the way it ties military service to citizenship.

What I object to is the Obama Administration’s brazen and arguably illegal implementation of a law that Congress considered and failed to pass.  Acting as though the DREAM Act is law when it isn’t is, quite simply, lawless.

I’ve written before that the importance of Paul Ryan’s brand of conservative reform is that it puts federal policy on a fundamentally different trend line than its current course under President Barack Obama.

From Ryan’s perspective, the American future post-reform looks like one where there’s more money in everyone’s pocket, less going to the government, and a fiscally sustainable social safety net.

As for President Obama, all you need to know is contained in his campaign’s “Life of Julia” web ad.

If Ryan is true to form, then during his time as Mitt Romney’s running mate he’ll accentuate the choice facing voters this fall of an American future that is either growing thanks to a resurgent capitalism or declining under the weight of a galloping socialism.  Perhaps he’ll do so along the lines described by Harvard economist Robert Barro in the Wall Street Journal:

Drawing correct policy implications is hard because one naturally focuses on the jobs and production that are directly saved or lost when the government bails out GM or when Chinese imports expand. In contrast, it is impossible to detail where U.S. jobs and production would have been created or destroyed if GM had been allowed to fail or if trade with China were curtailed.

What is feasible is to look at the overall impact of a set of policies. For example, a general increase in socialistic policies tends to lower economic growth. And, more specifically, the Obama administration’s weakening of individual incentives to work and produce by its sharp expansion of transfer payments can be reasonably viewed as retarding the U.S. economic recovery since the end of the recession in 2009.

With the addition of conservative thinker and budget expert Rep. Paul Ryan to the Republican presidential ticket, we can hope that the economic dialogue will become more serious. And perhaps this added substance will extend beyond the important issue of long-term fiscal reform to encompass the enduring but still crucial debate about socialism versus capitalism.

Ashton’s post yesterday brings up an important point about the Obama Administration’s handling of Medicare. The worst aspect of the cuts he cites, however, is the complete duplicity of the math involved. Basically, the Administration has attempted to claim the same money both as savings and expenditures. The best interpretation is total mathematical illiteracy. The worst is accounting fraud.

Paul Ryan ripped the Administration for this in his famous showdown with the president at the Blair House health care summit in 2010. For an even more bracing version of this dispute, see this exchange between Congressman John Shimkus (R-IL) and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, in which the Secretary, having reached a fork in the road, takes it:

A piece by Amy Chozick in the New York Times this week has to be read to be believed (ok, you’ll read it and you still won’t believe it). Proving that there is absolutely nothing for the media to do in August, Chozick was commissioned to write a piece on President Obama’s relationship with the press, including the Commander-in-Chief’s critical exegesis of the fourth estate. The results are predictably hilarious:

The news media have played a crucial role in Mr. Obama’s career, helping to make him a national star not long after he had been an anonymous state legislator. As president, however, he has come to believe the news media have had a role in frustrating his ambitions to change the terms of the country’s political discussion. He particularly believes that Democrats do not receive enough credit for their willingness to accept cuts in Medicare and Social Security, while Republicans oppose almost any tax increase to reduce the deficit.

Privately and publicly, Mr. Obama has articulated what he sees as two overarching problems: coverage that focuses on political winners and losers rather than substance; and a “false balance,” in which two opposing sides are given equal weight regardless of the facts.

Mr. Obama’s assessments overlap with common critiques from academics and journalism pundits, but when coming from a sitting president the appraisal is hardly objective, the experts say.

Basically, you can close your eyes, point to any sentence at random, and prepare to guffaw.

There’s a lot of awfully stupid analysis here (both the Times and Obama’s). Maybe one of the reasons, for instance, that Democrats’ supposed willingness to rein in entitlements goes unpraised is because there have been some tells that it’s less than sincere — like the occasional fit of the vapors that finds liberals essentially accusing Paul Ryan of going from hospital to hospital unplugging life support machines.

There’s also the Times’ eager embrace of the unquestioned wisdom of (unnamed) “academics and journalism pundits” (FYI, that last one’s not a real job), a not-too-subtle hint that Obama’s frustration, poor soul, is shared by Really Smart People everywhere.

The aspect that I find most telling, however, is the president’s frustration with “false balance,” which it’s hard to interpret any other way than an irritation that the press doesn’t accept his side of the argument as gospel. This is of a piece with what he told the American Society of News Editors at a speech back in April:

“As all of you are doing your reporting, I think it’s important to remember that the positions that I am taking now on the budget and a host of other issues — if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago or even 15 years ago — would’ve been considered squarely centrist positions,” he said in response to a question about Republicans’ criticisms of his spending priorities. “What’s changed is the center of the Republican party and that’s certainly true with the budget.”

…

“This bears on your reporting,” he said Tuesday. “I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. And an equivalence is presented, which I think reinforces peoples’ cynicism about Washington in general. This is not one of those situations where there’s an equivalency.”

For what it’s worth, I actually agree with Obama on “the truth lies in the middle” trope. There are occasions when that’s true, but most times that you hear someone express that sentiment it’s a sign that they’ve put their brain on cruise control and resigned themselves to communicating exclusively through cliches. What’s the midpoint between the death penalty being legal or illegal? What’s the midpoint between going to war with Iran or not going to war with Iran? No one actually lives by “moderation in all things” (“So it’s okay if I just participate in occasional arson?”), but everyone talks that way. That mindset creates especially acute problems in public policy, where splitting the baby almost always yields bad results.

There are two problems, though, with Obama’s analysis. The first is that the only corrective for “false equivalence” is a more ideological press, which presents issues from unapologetic (and admitted) liberal and conservative viewpoints. That’s where we are today and, while there’s plenty of chaff as a result, I’m inclined to think it’s far preferable to an overwhelmingly liberal media trying to create the illusion of objectivity. But that’s not what Obama wants. He’s clearly longing for the days when ‘media’ was a de facto singular noun and those who disagreed with him would have been pilloried as unreasonable without much push back.

The second problem is that Obama himself ascended to office on the basis of little more than ‘false equivalance’. If you’d like to give your brain the equivalent of diabetic shock, go back and read his treacly 2006 best-seller, “The Audacity of Hope,” where nearly every issue discussed is framed with a “on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand” device (he’s sandbagging you, of course — every question is resolved, ostensibly by inches, in favor of liberalism.)

So do I think Barack Obama knows bad writing? Yes. Because he’s practiced it.

Politico reports that in a campaign speech in Colorado today President Barack Obama framed his Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) this way:

“Let me tell you something, Denver, I don’t think your boss should get to control the health care that you get,” Obama told the crowd at a campaign stop in Colorado. “I don’t think insurance companies should control the care that you get. I don’t think politicians should control the care that you get. I think there’s one person to make these decisions on health care and that is you.”

What the President neglected to mention is that instead of employers, insurance companies, and politicians – and despite his comments about individuals – the constituency he really favors making health care decisions is the federal bureaucracy.

ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion is intended to capture millions of Americans newly eligible for government coverage that will be – at least initially – cheaper than their current private provider.  The state-based, but federally-directed, health care exchanges are really just Trojan horse structures allowing HHS to seize control of the states’ traditional role in regulating health insurance whenever a state defies a federal prerogative.

And let’s not forget that the Independent Payment Advisory Board is empowered to act as a backdoor ration board, setting price caps on medical reimbursements that will distort the market and cause shortages.  In socialized systems like Britain and Canada long waiting times are the norm, as are denials of procedures in favor of pain management.

All of these elements – Medicaid expansion, federally managed health exchanges, and IPAB – empower one group: unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats.  To claim as the President does that private individuals will be the ones calling the shots on health care decisions is either foolish or deceptive, and I don’t think the man is lacking in smarts.