It’s Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012….and here’s The Gouge!

Leading off the mid-week edition, today’s installment of the “It’s Only Fair” segment, courtesy of the WSJ‘s Allysia Finley and one Progressive Providencian who doesn’t like the taste of her own party’s policies:

Providence’s Pension Shakedown

 

Town-and-gown relations in Providence, R.I., are growing increasingly strained over—wait for it—pensions. Mayor Angel Taveras is demanding that Brown University fork over $7 million to help cover the city’s $22.5 million budget deficit, which is being driven mainly by pension and retiree health costs. The university doesn’t think that’s fair.

“I don’t think it’s reasonable for the city, having made mistakes and having become insolvent because of those mistakes, to turn to institutions that are successful and to demand that they pay for those mistakes,” Brown President Ruth Simmons told the university’s undergraduate council of students. (We’d love to hear Ruth Simmons explain why individual citizens, many of who took significant financial risk on their road to riches, should fork over more of their earnings while her university doesn’t.)

Brown’s Ruth Simmons: unlike individual Americans who actually took risks on the road to riches, her university shouldn’t have to pay for its success!

Non-profits are exempt from paying local property taxes, but in 2003 they agreed to contribute $48 million to the city’s coffers over the next two decades to cover its rising pension costs. Brown alone has been voluntarily contributing $2.5 million a year and has agreed to pay an additional $2 million, but the city wants at least $4 million more.

If Brown doesn’t concede to Mayor Taveras’s demands, state House Speaker Gordon Fox warns that Rhode Island will pass legislation requiring nonprofits to contribute 25% of what they would owe the city were they taxed as businesses. For Brown, that would amount to between $7 million and $9.5 million a year.

Mayor Taveras says he’s only asking the university to pay its fair share, and it’s true that the college benefits from public safety services just like the rest of the city’s taxpayers and businesses. But it’s also true that the city wouldn’t be in this bind if it weren’t for the generous benefits that local politicians promised to workers decades ago and are now just getting around to reining in.

The city’s pension fund is only 32% funded. Retirement costs would have driven Providence into Chapter 9 bankruptcy this summer had the city council not modified benefits. Last night the council voted to cap pension benefits at $78,000 per year and suspend retirees’ annual cost-of-living increases, which had been averaging between 5% and 6%. All told, the changes will save the city $19 million this year and reduce its unfunded pension liability by a quarter. Even so, the city will have to spend a third of its property tax revenue this year—about $100 million—on retiree benefits.

The lesson in all this is that the costs of unsustainable entitlement programs eventually will hit everyone, even the traditionally tax exempt and especially the most successful.

But hey, it’s only….fair!  Sure, we don’t understand how fair fits into any disproportionate government appropriation of private income or wealth; but if Liberals say it’s fair, it MUST be so.  After all, it’s not like Liberals….

….lie for a living!

And since we’re on the subject of the educated idiots who increasingly populate today’s Ivy League, Conn Carroll’s Morning Examiner carried this commentary by Michael S. Greve, writing at the Library of Law & Liberty:

Yale and the ACA

 

Harvard Beats Yale 29-29: no, this has nothing to do with the article; we just wanted to tweak G. Trevor a bit!

Yale Law School just held a Conference on Jack Balkin’s Living Originalism, a darn good book that merits careful reading and engagement. Jack—the most spirited, generous, smartest, funnest guy you can hope to meet in a habitually dorky profession—assembled the entire Yale School of Constitutional Theory, plus a large segment of the journalistic commentariat. Along with Judge Michael McConnell, I had the pleasure of serving (in the words of one participant) as the shabbos goy.

It was a real pleasure, but I did feel tempted more than once to switch off the lights. It is impossible to convey the constitutional establishment’s near-clinical obsession with, and hysteria over, the possible invalidation of the ACA’s individual mandate. It would, they say, amount to an unconscionable act of aggression on the democratic process. A reversal of the New Deal and a resurrection of the ancien régime of the Second Republic. A judicial coup d’état. The Constitution in Exile. (Never mind that the plaintiffs’ briefs explicitly affirm that Wickard was rightly decided.) Much handwringing arose over the elite media’s commitment to be fair to both sides even when, as here, there is no reasonable other side. The plaintiffs’ briefs are beneath contempt. Randy Barnett is a creature of The New York Times and its addiction to a false neutrality.

Two points about the hyperventilation:

(1) Jack Balkin’s theory goes something like this: the Constitution and especially its more open-ended clauses require construction. The way that happens is that social movements move “off the wall” propositions “on the wall”—that is, suitable for judicial ratification. Whatever the normative attractions of this view, it’s a good description of the entrenchment of liberal positions of equal protection, abortion, and gay marriage—in fact, the full range of liberal commitments. But that’s not good enough for progressives. For them, the process must be irreversible and exclusive: conservatives can’t have respectable social movements, and their ideas must remain off the wall. That’s not Jack Balkin’s position (he explicitly rejects it), and so his friends have no more use for his living originalism than for any other kind (except maybe Bruce Ackerman’s, but that’s another story). The ACA presents the difficulty in neon lights: just as Living Originalism appears in print, a handful of libertarian nutjobs paint the broccoli argument on the wall and half the country (at least) seems to believe them. Small wonder Jack Balkin is getting a lot of liberal pushback.

(2) The Yale School’s apoplexy is in no way driven by a fear that the Court might ding the entire ACA (Medicaid, exchanges, and all): to its denizens, the individual mandate is the ACA. That seems odd. Candidate Obama campaigned against the mandate. The mandate is a very small piece of a very large statute, and it is easily replaceable with, say, a tax. (Most progressives say it is a tax, except in a different form. Well then, re-enact it in the right form.) And the mandate was inserted in the ACA for one reason only—to buy the support of the insurance industry. A progressivism that can no longer tell the difference between a principled commitment and a give-away to special-interest hucksters has some explaining to do, not least to itself.

Me, I can explain it only this way: the resistance is to the very notion of any limit, qua limit. This is why progressivism always exceeds its own reach. You can’t just defend abortion as a constitutional right; you have to defend partial birth abortions. You can’t just defend equal rights for women; you have to insist that spousal abuse is a federal hate crime. You can’t just advocate campaign finance regulation and disclosure; you have to insist that the Federal Election Commission can ban books and movies.

I don’t think that my friends at Yale actually believe any of these positions. (They hold many false beliefs, but they are not insane.) Nor can they seriously believe that, but for their extravagant positions, we would hand over the country to Opus Dei, bind our wives’ and daughters’ feet, allow George Soros or David Koch to buy their very own Congressmen, or for that matter toss ailing widows and orphans into the streets. The real fear is that the Constitution might pose some limit to progressivism’s anything-goes imagination.

One could argue that the Constitution was enacted for precisely that purpose.

Argue?  It’s a undeniable fact….as plain as the ears on Dumb BO’s head.

Speaking of The Dear Misleader, Thomas Sowell offers yet another reason the 2012 election may well be the most important since 1864:

A Cynical Process 

 

Labor unions, like the United Nations, are all too often judged by what they are envisioned as being — not by what they actually are or what they actually do. Many people, who do not look beyond the vision or the rhetoric to the reality, still think of labor unions as protectors of working people from their employers. And union bosses still employ that kind of rhetoric.

However, someone once said, “When I speak I put on a mask, but when I act I must take it off.” That mask has been coming off, more and more, especially during the Obama administration, and what is revealed underneath is very ugly, very cynical and very dangerous.

First there was the grossly misnamed “Employee Free Choice Act” that the administration tried to push through Congress. What it would have destroyed was precisely what it claimed to be promoting — a free choice by workers as to whether or not they wanted to join a labor union.

Ever since the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, workers have been able to express their free choice of joining or not joining a labor union in a federally conducted election with a secret ballot.

As workers in the private sector have, over the years, increasingly voted to reject joining labor unions, union bosses have sought to replace secret ballots with signed documents — signed in the presence of union organizers and under the pressures, harassments or implicit threats of those organizers.

Now that the Obama administration has appointed a majority of the members of the National Labor Relations Board, the NLRB leadership has imposed new requirements that employers supply union organizers with the names and home addresses of every employee. Nor do employees have a right to decline to have this personal information given out to union organizers, under NLRB rules.

In other words, union organizers will now have the legal right to pressure, harass or intimidate workers on the job or in their own homes, in order to get them to sign up with the union. Among the consequences of not signing up is union reprisal on the job if the union wins the election. But physical threats and actions are by no means off the table, as many people who get in the way of unions have learned. Workers who do not want to join a union will now have to decide how much harassment of themselves and their family they are going to have to put up with, if they don’t knuckle under.

In the past, unions had to make the case to workers that it was in their best interests to join. Meanwhile, employers would make their case to the same workers that it was in their best interest to vote against joining. When the unions began losing those elections, they decided to change the rules. And after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, with large financial support from labor unions, the rules were in fact changed by Obama’s NLRB.

As if to make the outcome of workers’ “choices” more of a foregone conclusion, the time period between the announcement of an election and the election itself has been shortened by the NLRB. In other words, the union can spend months, or whatever amount of time it takes, for them to prepare and implement an organizing campaign beforehand — and then suddenly announce a deadline date for the decision on having or not having a union. The union organizers can launch their full-court press before the employers have time to organize a comparable counter-argument or the workers have time to weigh their decision, while being pressured.

The last thing this process is concerned about is a free choice for workers. The first thing it is concerned about is getting a captive group of union members, whose compulsory dues provide a large sum of money to be spent at the discretion of union bosses, to provide those bosses with both personal perks and political power to wield, on the basis of their ability to pick and choose where to make campaign contributions from the union members’ dues.

Union elections do not recur like other elections. They are like some Third World elections: “One man, one vote — one time.” And getting a recognized union unrecognized is an uphill struggle. But, so long as many people refuse to see the union for what it is, or the Obama administration for what it is, this cynical and corrupt process can continue.

For more on the subject of deliberately misleading cynics, we turn to Guy Benson, who reports in Townhall.com:

Confirmed: Pelosi Lied About CIA Briefing on Waterboarding

 

Three years ago, I wrote a satirical column “defending” Nancy Pelosi against accusations that she had lied publicly about being briefed by the CIA about the use of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs) — including waterboarding — on enemy detainees as far back as 2002.  Here’s her infamous denial:

The evidence against Pelosi was so strong that her tale could only be explained one of two ways: Either (a) she was lying, or (b) a vast conspiracy had constructed a web of deceit to ensnare her.  Occam’s Razor revealed the truth, of course, but my column was premised on describing just how implausible the ‘anti-Pelosi witch hunt’ theory really was.

As of that writing, we knew that two separate members of the House Intelligence Committee had personally attested to her presence at a private 2002 briefing, at which EITs were thoroughly described.  A contemporaneous CIA report also confirmed Pelosi’s presence at the briefing, specifying that members were informed about the existence and use of these EITs.  A 2007 Washington Post account corroborated these facts.

And yet, Pelosi stuck to her story.  She claimed that she was not — repeat: was not — told about any of this, further asserting that the CIA had lied by explicitly assuring her that waterboarding had not been used.  In case any shadow of doubt remained, a final piece of this puzzle has fallen into place.  The former CIA counterterrorism chief who conducted the briefing in question has at last spoken out:

In his new book, “Hard Measures,” Jose Rodriguez reveals that he led a CIA briefing of Pelosi, where the techniques being used in the interrogation of senior al-Qaeda facilitator Abu Zubaida were described in detail. Her claim that she was not told about waterboarding at that briefing, he writes, “is untrue.” “We explained that as a result of the techniques, Abu Zubaydah was compliant and providing good intelligence. We made crystal clear that authorized techniques, including waterboarding, had by then been used on Zubaydah.” Rodriguez writes that he told Pelosi everything, adding, “We held back nothing.” How did she respond when presented with this information? Rodriguez writes that neither Pelosi nor anyone else in the briefing objected to the techniques being used.

That’s not merely Rodriguez’s personal recollection; his memory is affirmed by yet another document:

Six days after the meeting took place, Rodriguez reveals, “a cable went out from headquarters to the black site informing them that the briefing for the House leadership had taken place.” He explains that “[t]he cable to the field made clear that Goss and Pelosi had been briefed on the state of AZ’s interrogation, specifically including the use of the waterboard and other enhanced interrogation techniques.”

To recap: Roughly one year after 9/11, Nancy Pelosi and other select members of Congress were told in great detail about a program of EITs that US interrogators were employing to wring actionable intelligence out of captured terrorists.  No one objected.  Years later, when Democrats were indignantly denouncing “torture” as an inexpiable sin of Bush and the Republicans, Pelosi disavowed any knowledge of the meeting she had attended.  She deliberately lied about a sensitive national security question in order to score the cheapest of political points, tossing the American intelligence community under the bus in the process.

….UPDATE – Rodriguez sheds more light on how the use of EITs led to the eventual location and liquidation of Osama Bin Laden:

An al-Qa’ida operative was captured in 2004. He was quickly turned over to the CIA. He had computer discs with him that showed that he was relaying information between al-Qa’ida and Abu Musab Zarqawi… Initially, he played the role of a tough mujahideen and refused to cooperate. We then received permission to use some (but not all) of the EIT procedures on him. Before long he became compliant and started to provide some excellent information…. He told us that bin Ladin conducted business by using a trusted courier with whom he was in contact only sporadically. He said that the Sheikh (as bin Ladin was referred to by his subordinates) stayed completely away from telephones, radios, or the internet in an effort to frustrate American attempts to find him. And frustrated we were. We pressed him on who this courier was and he said all he knew was a pseudonym: “Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.” This was a critical bit of information about the identity of the man who would eventually lead us to bin Ladin.

Also, the mere existence of the elusive courier was confirmed by 9/11 mastermind KSM, who was initially broken using waterboarding.  Barack Obama “righteously” opposed these methods, without which he wouldn’t be spiking the bin Laden football and casting aspersions for political gain today.

Benson went on to list the standards for censure in the House, but we’re afraid he’s wasting his breath.

It’s not a question of whether Pelosi lied; she most definitely did.  Nor is there any doubt her deception had an material adverse impact on national security; it most indubitably did.  It’s simply a question of whether the Republican leadership in the House would find censuring this increasingly irrelevant imbecile worth the time and effort, particularly in the face of a MSM which would pull out all the stops to defend her.  Our money’s on “no”.

In other news of nefarious Dimocrats, for Team Tick-Tock, when it rains, it pours:

Top ICE figure pleads guilty in brazen, $500G scam

 

In a brazen criminal scheme to defraud taxpayers, one of the highest-ranking officials in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court to helping embezzle more than $500,000 from the federal government. Over three years, James Woosley and at least five other ICE employees scammed the agency by fabricating expenses for trips that were never taken and for hotel, rental car and restaurant expenses that did not exist, according to court records.

His son, also named James Woosley, and live-in girlfriend, Lateisha Rollerson — both ICE employees — allegedly ran the scam out of the elder Woosley’s two Virginia homes. ICE employees traveled to Washington, D.C., on business, but instead of staying at a hotel, they stayed with Woosley. Rollerson allegedly created false receipts from hotels like the local Marriott, while Woosley approved their fraudulent expense reports and charged each employee a kick-back fee for half the amount. Prosecutors accused Woosley of receiving about $188,000, some of which he used to buy a new house and a boat.

Sources inside ICE tell Fox News the scam represents total breakdown of oversight within the agency, especially given the periodic background checks and financial examinations given to agents working within the sensitive Office of Intelligence. “It tells us that the vetting process and the checks and balances, the internal controls at ICE, obviously are inadequate,” said Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich., who sits on the House Committee on Homeland Security. “It’s bad enough you find some employees, federal employees, who are misusing taxpayer dollars,” Miller said. “However, in this case, these are … intelligence officers that are handling classified information.”

One ICE employee involved was Ahmed Abdallat, the agency’s intelligence supervisor in El Paso, Texas. Abdallat, a former colonel in the Jordanian Air Force, joined the agency in 1995 and worked throughout the Middle East, including three years in Saudi Arabia.

Abdallat’s salary was by no means enough to make him rich, yet in 2010 he made three wire transfers to Middle Eastern accounts totaling $570,000, and he maintained personal accounts in Jordan totaling $1.2 million, authorities say. Shannon Enochs, an FBI special agent, said during a lengthy court hearing that the FBI does not know where Abdallat got the money but doubted he made it working as a civil servant within the U.S. or Jordanian governments.

Abdallat travelled to D.C. at least 13 times in 2009 and 2010. Each time he submitted travel vouchers that allegedly contained fictitious charges not supported by any receipts or fake receipts created by Rollerson on her home computer. Each time, ICE paid. More serious, however, were his trips to Jordan. Federal prosecutors charged him with eight counts of misusing a diplomatic passport he was not supposed to have to fly to Jordan.

During a search warrant of Abdallat’s home in El Paso, the FBI reported pulling out 29 boxes of evidence, including two Jordanian passports he denied having during background checks in 2000, 2005 and 2010. He also denied having foreign bank accounts, though the FBI found several written in Arabic after serving their search warrant.

As a life-long intelligence officer with clearance to secret and classified papers on terrorism, narcotics and human smuggling along the Southwest border, Abdallat’s file should have received priority review. Instead, he maintained close personal and financial ties to Jordan, apparently without suspicion.

Yet another scandal we could have avoided had only ICE been managed by a woman.

Oh,….never mind!

Next up, courtesy of The Enterprise Blog, James Pethokoukis suggests, unbeknownst to The Obamao, his re-election bid may have its own version of the Mayan calendar:

Why the presidential election could be over at 8:30 a.m., October 26

 

This may be as good as it gets. Sputter-speed growth of around 2% and a moribund labor market. As the above chart suggests, the recovery is losing momentum. Here’s Goldman economist Jan Hatzius:

Goldman Sachs is turning increasingly bearish on the U.S. economy, expecting the nation to have added only 125,000 new jobs in April, as the effects of a warm winter, which buoyed employment late last year, wear off.

The forecast is far lower than the Reuters estimate of 170,000, and the average 177,250 jobs created every month from December to March. According to a report by the bank’s Chief U.S. Economist Jan Hatzius, the jobs report will be a further sign of a weakening economy, where inventory accumulation has accelerated and final demand growth remains sluggish.

“Real income growth remains soft, partly because of higher energy prices, wealth effects are not yet particularly positive, consumer confidence remains modest, and again some of the recent strength in retail sales probably reflects weather effects,” Hatzius said.

And this from Goldman market strategist Abby Joseph Cohen is equally as gloomy:

She said she agrees with Goldman economist Jan Hatzius’s forecast of the second half being more “difficult” than the first. “We have seen some deceleration in economic activity” after a mild winter that might have “puffed up” seasonal growth in the first quarter, she said.

Wait, the second half will be “more difficult” than the first? We might be lucky to have 2% growth in the first half. The econ team at Citigroup seems equally as sober: “The 1Q GDP data, a month of rising jobless claims, and likely back-to-back moderate gains in non-farm employment should dampen remaining optimism that 2013 would be the year of decisive growth acceleration in the U.S. Why should any other quarter in 2012 be markedly better than 1Q?”

And given the reluctance of big banks to make U.S. recession calls, I have to think that plenty of these folks are worrying we might get a negative quarter at some point this year. Imagine the political shock wave if, say, the third quarter dipped even a smidgen. To use President Obama’s favorite analogy, the U.S. economy would be back in the ditch. And that report would be released by the Commerce Department on Oct. 26, just 11 days before the election.

Which means 0830 on October 26th would be time for Team Tick-Tock to….

….cook the books!  You know, like on the Stimulus….Obamascare….unemployment figures….the number of ships in the Navy….and any other fact or figure that highlights their ineptocracy.

On the Lighter Side….

Finally, in a follow-up to yesterday’s item detailing the man who claimed a motorcycle seat had given him a 20-hour erection, it’s the “Match Made in Heaven” segment, courtesy of Bill Meisen und eine hornig fraulein nach Munchen:

She’s just a girl who can’t say Nein: The Munich nymphomaniac claims a second victim after 36-hour sex ordeal

 

Nein, nein!  Eight’s my limit on schnitzengruben, baby!

[A] German nymphomaniac who was arrested after forcing a man to make love to her eight times has struck again. Her latest victim, an African, was found weeping in the street outside her apartment by police after a 36-hour ordeal. He fought back his tears to tell them what had happened.

‘I met her on a bus,’ said the man. ‘She invited me back here. Oh God, it was hell. I can’t walk. Please help me.’ Munich police confirmed his ordeal in a press statement. The woman, believed to be 47, has now been taken into a hospital for psychiatric observation. The man only escaped from her apartment when she fell asleep.

Her first victim Dieter Schulz, 43, met her in a bar in the centre of his home city. She took him back to her apartment and they had sex several times. But when the woman demanded more, the exhausted man said no. (We guess “No” means “no” doesn’t translate well into German!)

A police spokesman said: ‘He complied with the woman’s wishes another few times so he could finally leave the apartment. ‘But when she continued to refuse and demanded even more sex from him, he fled to the balcony.’ Mr Schulz phoned police and pleaded for assistance. ‘You have got to help me,’ he told them. ‘She is trying to kill me with sex. I cannot get out – and I cannot go on!’

When police arrived to question the woman and free Schulz she invited two officers to join her in bed for a ‘quickie.’ They declined.

At least that’s their story….and their sticking to it!

Magoo