One of the conventional cover stories for Barack Obama's broad inexperience is to assert that he's a Constitutional law scholar, so, you know, he's got that going for him.

Of course, that narrative doesn't really explain this tremendous blunder:

President Barack Obama appeared to be taking a page from Richard Nixon's playbook Wednesday when he seemed to declare the suspected Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed guilty and deserving of the death penalty.

In Nixon's case, he pronounced cult leader Charles Manson guilty of several murders while Manson was being tried in a California state court for killing actress Sharon Tate and others.

Obama, in a series of TV interviews during his trip to Asia, said those offended by the legal rights accorded Mohammed by virtue of his facing a civilian trial rather than a military tribunal won't find it "offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him."

...which is funny, because I was given to understand that the whole point of giving this sleaze a civilian trial with a jury was so that the outcome wouldn't be prejudiced by political concerns, such as the kind that might come into play if the President of the United States declares that the defendant will be found guilty and executed.

Obama, who is a lawyer, quickly added that he did not mean to suggest he was prejudging the outcome of Mohammed's trial. "I'm not going to be in that courtroom," he said. "That's the job of the prosecutors, the judge and the jury."

Nixon quickly withdrew his remark as well, saying, "The last thing I would do is prejudice the legal rights of any person, in any circumstances."

But Manson tried to use the comment to his advantage. He stood up in court the next day and showed jurors a newspaper with the headline, "Manson Guilty, Nixon Declares."

The judge took the unusual step of asking jurors their reaction to the headline. "If the president did say that, it was pretty stupid of him," one juror, William T. McBride II, said.

As the Telegraph notes, all it takes is one closet Truther on the jury who decides that Obama's comments are proof of a conspiracy, or any other possible formulation of superstition and prejudice triggered by his carelessness, to wreck the trial. In all likelyhood, it will work out in the end, but it's still imbecilic.

Then, of course, there's today's revealing stammerfest from U.S. Attorney General Eric holder:

SEN. GRAHAM: Well, let me ask you this. Okay, let me ask you this. Let's say we capture him tomorrow. When does custodial interrogation begin in his case? If we captured bin Laden tomorrow, would he be entitled to Miranda warnings at the moment of capture?

ATTY GEN. HOLDER: Again I'm not -- that all depends. I mean, the notion that we... We have captured thousands of people on the battlefield, only a few of which have actually been given their Miranda warnings. With regard to bin Laden and the desire or the need for statements from him, the case against him at this point is so overwhelming that we do not need to...

As much as Holder may have a point about nothing bin Laden says after his capture actually mattering, it seems to have never occurred to the man that we might need to interrogate people we capture on the battlefield prior to their civilian trials, so the nation's top lawyer had never really considered the problem before making this decision, or even the issue of how to try bin Laden should he ever be captured.

In fact, the entire exchange proceeds more or less in this fashion:

I don't know. I'd have to look at that. I think that, you know...Well, I think...Well, that might be the case. I don't know. I'm not...I'd have to look at all of the evidence, all of the...It would depend on how -- a variety of factors....Again I'm not -- that all depends....It would not be something -- (inaudible)...

...but don't worry, Obama is a Constitutional law scholar.

Let's say you're a public employee in a Pensylvania city, and a helpful young man steps up to help clean the city's streets. What should you do?
Some would congratulate him for his civic spirit, but others would have their union file a grievance with the city.

In pursuit of an Eagle Scout badge, Kevin Anderson, 17, has toiled for more than 200 hours hours over several weeks to clear a walking path in an east Allentown park.

Little did the do-gooder know that his altruistic act would put him in the cross hairs of the city's largest municipal union.

Nick Balzano, president of the local Service Employees International Union, told Allentown City Council Tuesday that the union is considering filing a grievance against the city for allowing Anderson to clear a 1,000-foot walking and biking path at Kimmets Lock Park.

"We'll be looking into the Cub Scout or Boy Scout who did the trails," Balzano told the council....given the city's decision in July to lay off 39 SEIU members, Balzano said "there's to be no volunteers." No one except union members may pick up a hoe or shovel, plant a flower or clear a walking path.

When you think about it, that's odd, because even before the layoffs SEIU workers apparently had no inclination to clear the path. Whether it's because nobody told them to or because they didn't bother to is beside the point: it simply never happened, and it doesn't seem like it was ever going to unless someone stepped up.

However, instead of being glad they have a new path to clear, Balzano wants to "look into" the person who did the work. In spirit, it's basically racketeering: "no work gets done in this city without our say-so, or else". Maybe the city should be hiring Eagle Scouts, instead.

For example, the city currently does not have an electrician available because of the layoffs and an employee on an extended sick leave. As a result, the city has been forced to hire an outside union electrician to oversee the installation for the popular Lights on the Parkway holiday display.

"In the spirit of the holiday, we decided to let that go," Balzano said.

How kind of them.

International ANSWER is reportedly back, and violently assaulting Tea Party activists.

We are beginning to see way too many echoes of the 1930s, as national socialist and Marxian socialist thugs try to drive competing political views off the streets. The worst offenders so far have been the Service Employees' International Union, which has repeatedly sent its members out into the streets to beat up anyone who isn't toeing the Obama line on issues like socialized medicine.

Most recently it's International ANSWER, a hard-core Communist group supported by shadowy funding sources that have never been made public, but appear to consist of a handful of rich people.

While drawing parallels to the 1930s might be a bit premature, ANSWER, the organizing force behind many of the violent black bloc protests leading up to the Iraq War, isn't just a "Communist group", it's a thinly-disguised Stalinist front for the Worker's World Party, an organization that praised the massacre at Tiananmen Square and has been labeled a terrorist group by the FBI.


In the video, ANSWER Florida is quoted as inviting their followers, by email, to come join the "militant confrontation" and "beat back" the protesters.

Obama in Shanghai:

President Barack Obama gave China a pointed, unexpected nudge to stop censoring the Internet access of its own people, offering an animated defense of the tool that helped him win the White House - and telling his tightly controlled hosts not to be wary of a little criticism.

"I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes, because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable," Obama said Monday in a town hall with students during his first-ever trip to China. "They can begin to think for themselves."

That's certainly a polite way of addressing it, since that is precisely why China censors the internet: to avoid being held accountable and to prevent people from thinking for themselves. Indeed, Obama's call to end censorship will, itself, be censored.

In fact, that's already how China handles public discourse on internet censorship, even outside of China, thanks to the assistance of helpful United Nations staffers.

The day before Obama spoke out on Internet censorship, officials from the United Nations were reportedly doing their best to support the Chinese position. On Sunday, Open Net Initiative, an anti-censorship group, held a reception as part of the United Nations-sponsored Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. The reception was interrupted when IGF security officials entered the event and demanded that a poster mentioning the Great Firewall of China be removed. When event organizers refused, the UN officials removed the poster themselves.

The poster in question was advertising a new book called Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace, which was being introduced at the reception. One organizer said he planned to file a complaint with the United Nations Human Rights Commission over the dispute.

It's a nice sentiment and, unlike many of Obama's other foreign encounters, not a complete blunder (it took the President only a month or two to so inflame the British press that on both the left and the right there was talk of "the end of the special relationship", and last month he managed to find himself attacked by French President Sarkozy as an appeaser, an irony lost on no one), but Obama may as well be in 1938 Berlin talking about how free speech and a free press will help make Germany more tolerant of ethnic minorities.

Update: Of course.

President Barack Obama prodded China about Internet censorship and free speech, but the message was not widely heard in China where his words were blocked online and shown on only one regional television channel.

Gallup notes an interesting shift in public opinion:

More Americans now say it is not the federal government's responsibility to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage (50%) than say it is (47%). This is a first since Gallup began tracking this question [in 2001], and a significant shift from as recently as three years ago, when two-thirds said ensuring healthcare coverage was the government's responsibility.

I could burn up a page citing Democratic betrayals of voter trust as possible causes or I could join some conservative bloggers in citing this as proof that the Tea Parties are "working" and that American voters understand federalism, but the bottom line is that government-mandated health care can sound great until people find out what it's going to cost and how much harder it's actually going to make many people's lives. Just three years ago, the number who wanted federal intervention peaked at 69%, but the public debate over the issue has separated the ideological theory from the economic reality. Many voters signed on with the Democrats for unicorn-fueled hope and change that would deliver these services for free, and are now realizing that even on the liberal left's flagship issue, that will not be forthcoming.

Via reader Dairenn, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, pressed on the alarming jail sentences that the House version of ObamaCare imposes, chooses not to bother denying it, and, when pressed by KOMO 4 News' Shomari Stone, declares it "very fair". Confronted by CNSNews, she also mocks people who ask her to explain where the Constitution grants the federal government this kind of power, her office dismissing it as "not a serious question".

Asked the same question, Hawaii's Democratic Senator Daniel Akaka admits that he doesn't know if the Constitution provides for it (perhaps a rather more significant admission than declaring that you didn't bother to read the employee handbook at your new job), but it's OK, because they're "helping" people.

"But in ways to help citizens in our country to live a good life, let me say it that way, is what we're trying to do, and in this case, we're trying to help them with their health....It's an idea of making it possible for people and this is what it's all about," he said. "I don't look upon that as a penalty but as a way of getting help with health insurance."

In 1994, when Congress was considering a universal health care plan proposed by then-President Clinton that included a mandate that all individuals purchase health insurance, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) studied the issue and discovered that the federal government had never in the history of the United States mandated that individuals purchase any good or service.

"A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action," said the CBO. "The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States."

This isn't car insurance, where the states own the roads and can define criteria you must meet to drive on them, leaving you the option of not driving. The 2.5% fee you must pay to avoid jail is a fine for choosing, as an American citizen, not to buy insurance from a private insurer. It's essentially a transfer of wealth to the health insurance companies Democrats have been demonizing all along. (The affordable public option, after all, turns out to be more expensive than private coverage.)

Hilariously, Pelosi's blog, The Gavel, has posted a "mythbuster" on the topic which does no such thing. Instead, it defends the notion and euphemistically rebrands it "the shared responsibility provision". That's ironic, since we already share responsibility: the issue they claim they're trying to address, of free riders abusing public programs that absorb the cost of treating those who can't pay, was created by other government programs which Pelosi also champions.

How is this not just another round of squeezing American taxpayers, this time under the threat of imprisonment, to reward lobbyists? After all, as The Huffington Post found, the Obama White House itself is apparently more than willing to hand billions of American taxpayer dollars over to the pharmaceutical industry (and further wreck Medicare) in order to get this so-called "reform" passed.

Besides, remember during the Bush administration, when Democrats feigned outrage at violations of our civil liberties and declared themselves champions of the Constitution in the hopes of finally reconnecting with American voters? Reason Magazine:

"There's nothing in the Constitution that says that the federal government has anything to do with most of the stuff we do," [third ranking House Democrat James] Clyburn [(D)] replied. "How about [you] show me where in the Constitution it prohibits the federal government from doing this?"

It was a rare flash of honesty from an elected official, revealing not only Clyburn's ignorance of the Constitution but his overt hostility to the document’s system of checks and balances.

Even the Commerce Clause, one of the most basic cornerstones of federalism, is "not a serious question" for these people.

Reason Magazine follows the Stars and Stripes Honor Flight, carrying World War II veterans and terminally ill veterans of other conflicts to Washington, D.C.

Democratic New York Governor David Paterson's campaign ad, last week:

"When you become governor, you learn you will make mistakes," the narrator says of Mr. Paterson. "But in the depths of an historic recession, you take what you have learned and have the strength to do what's right for the people of New York."

Paterson, this week:

Paterson: NYS Will Be Broke Before Christmas - Says Only Way To Fix Problem Is To Have Immediate Cuts To Education, Hospitals

I wonder what he learned.

Paterson, already unpopular for his proposed tax on everything New Yorkers like ("sporting events, alcohol, Internet downloads, shopping, taxis, soda, movie tickets, cable TV") to be levied against what are already some of the most overtaxed people in the nation, certainly hasn't learned much from the mass exodus out of the state.

More than 1.5 million state residents left for other parts of the United States from 2000 to 2008, according to the report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy. It was the biggest out-of-state migration in the country.

The vast majority of the migrants, 1.1 million, were former residents of New York City -- meaning one out of seven city taxpayers moved out.

What's worse is that the families fleeing New York are being replaced by lower-income newcomers, who consequently pay less in taxes.

Paterson's "emergency response" to the state's ongoing and worsening situation has consistently been to try to raise taxes on the increasingly smaller (and increasingly poorer) tax base, while simultaneously cutting the services that working New Yorkers depend on.

It shouldn't require empirical evidence to realize that this is a terrible idea, but the Manhattan Institute's City Journal did the research anyway, focusing on comparisons between California (in a similar boat) and Texas.

Unpacking the numbers is even more revealing - and, for California, disturbing. The biggest contrast between the two states shows up in "net internal migration," the demographer's term for the difference between the number of Americans who move into a state from another and the number who move out of it to another. Between April 1, 2000, and June 30, 2007, an average of 3,247 more Americans moved out of California than into it every week, according to the Census Bureau. Over the same period, Texas saw a net gain, in an average week, of 1,544 people. Aside from Louisiana and Mississippi, which lost population to other states because of Hurricane Katrina, California is the only Sunbelt state that had negative net internal migration after 2000. All the other states that lost population to internal migration were Rust Belt basket cases, including New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan, and Ohio.

As Tiebout might have guessed, this outmigration has to do with taxes. Besides Mississippi, every one of the 17 states with the lowest state and local tax levels had positive net internal migration from 2000 to 2007. Except for Wyoming, Maine, and Delaware, every one of the 17 highest-tax states had negative net internal migration over the same period. Conservative researchers' technical explanation for this phenomenon is: "Well, duh." Or, as Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore wrote in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year: "People, investment capital and businesses are mobile: They can leave tax-unfriendly states and move to tax-friendly states."

At this point, defenders of the high-benefit, high-tax paradigm push back. Remember the other half of Tiebout's equation, they say. There's no need for a state to be like Texas if its high taxes and extensive regulations are part of a package deal that yields more and better public goods and an attractive quality of life.

But that, it turns out, is a big "if."...California is decidedly lacking. The biggest factor accounting for California's loss of population to the other 49 states, bond ratings that would embarrass Chrysler or GM, and state politics contentious and feckless enough to shame a banana republic, has to be its public sector's diminishing willingness and capacity to fulfill its promises to taxpayers. "Twenty years ago, you could go to Texas, where they had very low taxes, and you would see the difference between there and California," Joel Kotkin, executive editor of NewGeography.com and a presidential fellow at Chapman University in Southern California, told the Los Angeles Times this past March. "Today, you go to Texas, the roads are no worse, the public schools are not great but are better than or equal to ours, and their universities are good. The bargain between California's government and the middle class is constantly being renegotiated to the disadvantage of the middle class."

Similarly, the CEO of a manufacturing company in suburban Los Angeles told a Times reporter that his business suffered less from California's high taxes than from its ineffectual services. As a result, the company pays "a fortune" to educate its employees, many of whom graduated from California public schools, "on basic things like writing and math skills." According to a report issued earlier this year by McKinsey & Company, Texas students "are, on average, one to two years of learning ahead of California students of the same age," though expenditures per public school student are 12 percent higher in California.

Texas, the article suggests, focuses their resources on the fat tail services that benefit the overwhelming majority of Texans, while California squanders huge sums placating narrow special interest groups like public service unions.

Even billionaire activist Tom Golisano finally gave up and formally emigrated to Florida, making essentially the same point in a farewell editorial piece.

Last week I spent 90 minutes doing a couple of simple things -- registering to vote, changing my driver's license, filling out a domicile certificate and signing a homestead certificate -- in Florida. Combined with spending 184 days a year outside New York, these simple procedures will save me over $5 million in New York taxes annually. By moving to Florida, I can spend that $5 million on worthy causes, like better hospitals, improving education or the Clinton Global Initiative. Or maybe I'll continue to invest it in fighting the status quo in Albany. One thing's certain: That money won't continue to fund Albany's bloated bureaucracy, corrupt politicians and regular special-interest handouts.

Paterson didn't create this mess, but now that the engines have gone out, he certainly seems intent on piloting the plane the rest of the way into the mountainside. Perhaps emblematic of this are the horrible new New York license plates, revealed today, which are so hideous that it may serve to keep people from leaving New York simply so they won't be laughed at by motorists in other states.


As the New York Times explains, forcing drivers to get the new plates isn't just a mere fundraising scheme.

No, the design is meant to "reflect New York's force and its resilience."

I'm confused, too. Apparently, this is accomplished by going retro and imitating the horrible look of the New York license plates of the late 1970s. After all, the 1970s were such a good time for New York City.

The 1970s were a low point in city history as a fiscal crisis almost pushed it into bankruptcy, crime rates soared, and homeless people crowded sidewalks as public services crumbled.

Almost a million people fled New York's Mean Streets during the decade for the safer, more stable suburbs, a population decline that took more than 20 years to reverse.

Now, the whole state gets to relive Carter-era Manhattan. At this rate, New York State is going to quit its job, dye its hair, divorce its wife, and buy a motorcycle before New Year's.

Liberal Democrats have used the healthcare bill to secretly replace your usual, inflation-indexed taxes with taxes that will devour larger and larger portions of the economy over time.

All of those twentysomethings who voted for Barack Obama last year are about to experience the change they haven't been waiting for: the return of income tax bracket creep. Buried in Nancy Pelosi's health-care bill is a provision that will partially repeal tax indexing for inflation, meaning that as their earnings rise over a lifetime these youngsters can look forward to paying higher rates even if their income gains aren't real.

As for the business payroll penalty, it is imposed on a sliding scale beginning at a 2% rate for firms with payrolls of $500,000 and rising to 8% on firms with payrolls above $750,000. But those amounts are also not indexed for inflation, so again assuming a 4% average inflation rate in 10 years this range would hit payrolls between $335,000 and $510,000 in today's dollars. Note that in pitching this "pay or play" tax today, Democrats claim that most small businesses would be exempt. But because it isn't indexed, this tax will whack more and more businesses every year. The sales pitch is pure deception.

Americans of a certain age have seen this movie before. In 1960, only 3% of tax filers paid a 30% or higher marginal tax rate. By 1980, after the inflation of the 1970s, the share was closer to 33%, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis of tax returns.

These stealth tax increases - forcing ever more Americans to pay higher tax rates on phantom gains in income - were widely seen to be unjust. And in 1981 as part of the Reagan tax cuts, a bipartisan coalition voted to index the tax brackets for inflation.

With the unprecedented scope of the deficit spending that we're seeing, assuming 4% inflation may turn out to be very generous. Part of the reason this became such an issue at the beginning of the Reagan years was because, during the stagnant, recessionary 1970s, inflation had been known to exceed 10%.

No matter how bad the meetings at your office are, new details about Hasan's early fascination with Islamic extremism should remind you that it could be much worse.

The title of Hasan's PowerPoint presentation was "The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military."...Hasan's presentation lasted about an hour. It is unclear whether he read out loud every point on each slide.

Under a slide titled "Comments," he wrote: "If Muslim groups can convince Muslims that they are fighting for God against injustices of the 'infidels'; ie: enemies of Islam, then Muslims can become a potent adversary ie: suicide bombing, etc." [sic] The last bullet point on that page reads simply: "We love death more then [sic] you love life!"

Ah, that old chestnut.

Meanwhile, CNN is caught "retouching" the news.

He said he "was sitting in about the second row back when the assailant stood up and yelled 'Allahu akbar' in Arabic and he opened fire," Foster said Monday on CNN's "American Morning."

Foster, 21, said he wasn't clear about whether the gunman said those exact words, noting that "with that much adrenaline, you tend to forget things."

Actually, Foster wasn't referring to that at all, and it's plainly obvious from the video. At the link, Mudville Gazette has the video and misleading story. As Greyhawk explains:

From the day this story broke, CNN has run with a storyline that the killer's actions are typical of all military members - that he's a typical soldier - which means his victims were just like him. As evidence to the contrary mounted they ignored it, but here they willfully and intentionally re-wrote an eyewitness account to make it fit their narrative - something altogether different.

As is too often the case, other media outlets (here, San Antonio's Express News) are now citing CNN's misrepresentation as a source.

I suppose you can't really call it the telephone game, since they're repeating the inaccuracies perfectly.

Saturday, President Obama warned Americans not to “jump to conclusions” about Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan until we had “all the facts”.

Granted, the facts were somewhat preliminary at the time, but it’s not like people were pulling out their jump to conclusions mats to see if they would get to arbitrarily persecute a minority today. A man on a military base killed over a dozen Americans and wounded over three dozen others while shouting “Allahu Akhbar”, and, as NPR had reported the day before, he was apparently known to colleagues for his tendency to hijack psychology lectures and use them as an opportunity to pull out a Koran and warn that infidels would have their heads cut off. His defense of suicide bombing and his anti-Semitic sentiments had even caused some friction with the other Muslim soldiers, who were understandably cool towards his views.

As one of Hasan’s fellow medical professionals at Walter Reed Army Medical Center reportedly put it:

“When I heard the news about Hasan, honestly my first thought was ‘That makes a lot of sense. That completely fits the person I knew.”

Even with what had been made public at that point, tying Hasan’s “quirky” behavior to militant Islamism was less of a “jump” and more of a “leisurely stroll” to conclusions, one that should’ve been made much earlier.

“I told him, `There’s something wrong with you,’” Osman Danquah, co-founder of the Islamic Community of Greater Killeen, told The Associated Press on Saturday. “I didn’t get the feeling he was talking for himself, but something just didn’t seem right.”

Danquah assumed the military’s chain of command knew about Hasan’s doubts, which had been known for more than a year to classmates in a graduate military medical program. His fellow students complained to the faculty about Hasan’s “anti-American propaganda,” but said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim student kept officers from filing a formal written complaint.

“The system is not doing what it’s supposed to do,” said Dr. Val Finnell, who studied with Hasan from 2007-2008 in the master’s program in public health at the military’s Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. “He at least should have been confronted about these beliefs, told to cease and desist, and to shape up or ship out.”

As Tim Blair notes, many media outlets were quick to make actual unfounded leaps, ignoring the little that was known to paint Hasan’s decision to shoot a teenage girl in the back as a natural consequence of his association with the United States Army.

Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Thursday’s deadly rampage raises a red flag over the issue of combat stress...The most common disorder linked to combat stress is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which can develop after exposure to one or more traumatic events that threatened or caused great physical harm.

...and before you state the obvious, that Hasan never saw combat, the Guardian has it covered:

Hasan did not fit the classic pattern of a stressed soldier. But someone listening day after day to troops describing the tension and carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan could end up as damaged as those facing combat at first hand.

Time identifies this as “Secondary Trauma”, a condition which is presumably similar to secondhand smoke, but kills everybody else.

In fact, what’s known appears to point to Hasan’s problems significantly predating his ironic career as a psychologist: the Telegraph ties Hasan to the radical American-born imam Anwar Al-Awlaki, implicated as a spiritual leader to some of the 9/11 hijackers and arrested in Yemen in 2006 while spending quality time with Al-Qaeda militants.

“Hasan’s eyes ‘lit up’ when he mentioned his deep respect for al-Awlaki’s teachings, according to a fellow Muslim officer at the Fort Hood base”.

That article wouldn’t stand alone, but there are other reports indicating that Hasan attempted to maintain contact with Awlaki later. Awlaki certainly has no ambiguity about his feelings regarding Hasan:

Awlaki said the only way a Muslim can justify serving in the U.S. military is if he intends to “follow in the footsteps of men like Nidal....Nidal Hassan (sic) is a hero. He is a man of conscience...”

Quite a few Muslims would beg to differ, but Awlaki must be so proud. Hasan seemingly even loves strippers, which seems to be a recurring theme.

As both of the longtime readers who still check this site know, I’ve made a number of attempts to get Free Will up and running at speed again over the past two years, all of which have ended up slipping away from me for one reason or another. The last serious effort was probably right after the election, when I wrapped up my work on a campaign which had entirely precluded blogging, given the scope of my time commitment. That was a sad thing for me, because my work encompassed some of the most interesting issues and controversies at the time, and I would’ve loved to have been addressing them here instead of there. What I wrote about the election, however, seems to have held true:

There are going to be very practical limits to Barack Obama’s political capital, because his party wants “change” that looks nothing like what voters want, and Obama is going to be helpless to find a happy compromise. There’s clearly no mandate for socialist reforms: 84% of Americans prioritize economic growth over an “equitable” distribution of wealth. The bailout package was opposed by a hearty majority of voters, as is an offshore drilling ban. Democrats weren’t elected to “give their ideas a chance”. Half of all Americans believe that this Congress, a Democrat-controlled Congress, is no better than a random sample from the phone book, and three quarters believe that their elected legislators don’t even understand the bills they’re passing.

To predict that the Democrats will massively overplay their hand in this environment is to predict that the sun will rise tomorrow, that the next Pope will be a practicing Roman Catholic. They will inevitably confuse this for the mandate that they also wrongly thought they had received in 2006.

...and that’s exactly what’s happened. Obama’s promises of transparency, restraint, and fiscal responsibility were farcical, and in the aftermath of the incredible failure and predictable corruption surrounding the stimulus, Republicans have won gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey while House Democrats were barely able to form a majority to pass their flagship bill: a poorly understood and most likely unconstitutional package of health care reforms that satisfies no one and that is loaded with unpleasant surprises for an already disgruntled electorate.

As for Free Will, I’m back in a place where I feel like I would be in error not to resume blogging. There’s too much going on, and this blog, which was originally created so that I’d have a venue for discussing on politics and economics in a way that engages people who are actually interested, is something I should be doing. You might notice that I’m fiddling with the templates, simplifying the layout and cleaning up the markup in ancticipation of finally getting things up to snuff around here. Very shortly, I’m going to have the RSS feed fixed and incorporate some new features, but for the moment, the index and comment templates are updated, and I’m going to resume posting on a regular basis, as well as import some things I’ve written for other purposes on recent issues.

Free Will is back online.

"Now, because I had been a football star, and a war hero, and a national celebrity, and a shrimpin' boat captain, and a college graduate, the city fathers of Greenbow, Alabama decided to get together and offer to let me destroy the Earth."

Rod Blagojevich, removed from office by a unanimous vote of the State Senate, and just to drive the stake home, they unanimously passed a motion from holding any further office in the State of Illinois.

Finally, the Lego Man is gone. Get him to trial so he can get his prison time started.

I hope everyone's getting to enjoy a great Christmas (or your holiday of choice) and New Year's with their loved ones.

My checked luggage is still in D.C., but I spent all night going by rental car from Houston to Dallas, listening to crazy Mexican Christmas carols on the radio to stay awake.

Barreling up I-45, I began to detect a theme: the Sam Houston Tollway, Sam Houston University, Sam Houston National Forest, a sixty foot, gleaming white statue of Sam Houston. Also, it's crazily confusing if street signs dramatically change colors, typefaces and positioning six times in twelve blocks, as they seem to do in the vicinity of Addison.

In any case, here's this year's amusing Christmas photo:



Backstory here.

Drive safely, I hope to blog Friday.

The narcissistic personality disorder is strong with this one.


The "powerful forces" and "political lynch mob" arrayed against him might better be described as "the voting public". His defense attorney, Ed Genson, can't even look reporters in the eye when he calls this a "witch hunt", because he knows Blagojevich is, in fact, a witch.

Governor Rod Blagojevich is out there. He can't be bargained with. He can't be reasoned with. He doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And he absolutely will not stop, ever, until the general fund is empty.

Last week, the Blagojevich situation looked set to paralyze state government entirely:

One result of the long-running deadlock in Springfield is that Illinois has lost billions of dollars in federal funds, money we could have used for roads and bridges.

On top of that, state government is facing a $4 billion to $5 billion shortfall. Some Medicaid providers, including hundreds of doctors, haven't been paid for care they gave to patients six months ago.

A plan to borrow $1.4 billion to speed up those payment checks has hit a huge snag. As part of every big borrowing, Attorney General Lisa Madigan has to sign a formal document. Part of it states that there is no litigation or controversy that threatens the governor's ability to serve in office.

Which, obviously, nobody would sign. Facing state prisons running out of food and nursing homes kicking their patients out, state officials and bond attorneys have reached an agreement to simply revise the language, which apparently now states that the governor's situation is, in fact, incredibly dire and that any whacky and surreal thing at all could happen.

Meanwhile, caught red-handed, on tape, trying to sell a United States Senate seat and extorting firings from the most prominent media outlet in his state, Governor Blagojevich (who had a 4% approval rating before the scandal), has now taken a formal position: "You ain't got nothin' on me, coppers!"

Chicago defense attorney Ed Genson proclaimed that the governor is not guilty, will not resign, and instead will fight the charges against him.

"He's not stepping aside," Genson told reporters outside his Chicago office building. "He hasn't done anything wrong. We're going to fight this case....I think the case is not what it seems and I think that when it comes to pass, you'll see it's not what it seems and you'll find that he's not guilty."

What he's got here is golden, and I don't blame him for not giving it up for nothing. However, "not guilty" != "innocent". If he fights the charges and wins, he's still done something wrong, and he's still unfit to pick up drycleaning. This is just the tiny portion of his total wrongdoing that the Feds happened to catch on tape.

Blagojevich has not spoken to the press yet. He left Genson's offices just before his attorney did, saying that he was looking forward to talking to the general public.

"I can't wait to talk to you guys and to have a chance to be able to say the things I'm looking forward to saying," Blagojevich said. "But there's a time and place for all of that and I'll, uh, we'll soon let you know when it's gonna be."

As long as he's wearing an orange jumpsuit, I'm fine with that, but I expect he's thinking more along the lines of "whoever pays me the most for the rights". According to a memo distributed to Blagojevich's neighbors by his wife, we can only assume that what he's looking forward to saying is "!@#$ you".

The state's first lady avoided any specific mention of her husband's arrest and the resulting crisis engulfing state government. Rather, she had a three paragraph typewritten note delivered to homes along their Ravenswood Manor block, blaming the media for the inconvenience.

The note begins: 'Dear Neighbor, My husband and I would like to apologize to you and your family for the media barrage that has descended on our neighborhood.''

She goes on to write that she hopes the media attention will subside, "not only for the sake of our children, but also for you and your family.''

This is the media's fault.

Right.

Rod Blagojevich has now spent longer making it clear he has no intention of resigning than Eliot Spitzer spent deciding if he should. A few thoughts:

1. The media has barely scratched the surface of what's gone on.

Up to this point, national media coverage has revolved almost exclusively around what's contained in the federal complaint. Obviously, this is driven by the fact that it indirectly involves Barack Obama, but it does not accurately reflect how Rod Blagojevich ultimately ended up in handcuffs or what's really wrong in Illinois. The press is finally starting to dig a little deeper, but there may never be an accurate portrayal of how Blagojevich has systematically turned state government into a criminal enterprise. It's a rare man who thinks nothing of his daughter receiving a $1,500 check for her 7th birthday from a former campaign staffer, just days after giving the staffer's wife a well-paid state job (though she had, herself, failed the state's qualifying exams). Millions of Illinoisans have suffered from the crumbling of state government, and billions of public dollars, both state and federal, have been diverted and squandered in the (apparently incompetent) efforts of Rod Blagojevich to enrich himself and his associates.

Numerous top Blagojevich associates have already been indicted over the years, including Tony Rezko, slumlord and scammer of minority-business programs, and Chris Kelly, the "roofing contractor" whose sister was made head of the Bureau of Real Estate Professions five days after getting her real estate license and who Blagojevich's own father-in-law warned the world was selling state appointments for $50,000. Like Al Capone, they got him on tax evasion.

Dominic Longo, head of the hilariously-named "Coalition for Better Government" (a motley crew of Chicago Democrats with mafioso-nicknames and questionable pasts), ultimately turned on Blagojevich, accusing Blagojevich of ruining Longo's reputation, despite Longo himself being a convicted felon and vote fraudster. The cast of bizarre characters is endless, from a tire-slashing union activist to a cigar-smoking lycanthrope.

Once you get past the idea that the Blagojevich administration is a political organization, his suicidal decisions and insane policies start making a lot of sense: every policy is a confidence game, every photo op is a shakedown, and every newly-created office has an angle. Shortly after his election, a federal judge had to intervene to stop him from giving an effective monopoly over telecom service in Illinois to Mayor Daley's own brother.

In March, it was revealed that Blagojevich had allowed a million dollars to be sent to "the wrong place", an "error" that left the landmark Pilgrim Baptist Church without promised fire-reconstruction aid but which subsequently uncovered a festering pool of shady activity involving FBI informants, a "school" that had "mistakenly" received the money but which was also facing nine civil suits and owing substantial back taxes, a questionable gubernatorial pardon of one of the teachers, and, naturally, Tony Rezko.

Then there's Central Management Services, the state agency tasked with controlling costs. Their mission, as it turned out, was only taken ironically: the agency was so thoroughly corrupt that CMS employees were apparently getting fired because their crooked schemes were foiling the crooked schemes of other CMS employees. A 140-page independent audit revealed that of the six hundred million dollars in savings Blagojevich attributed to CMS, fewer than one hundred million could actually be identified, leading CMS to try and fail to accuse the Auditor-General of corruption, and Blagojevich to claim that they just had "different ways of doing business".

Despite the CMS mission, contractors, including IPAM, a subsidiary of Mesirow Financial, were found to be billing the state for things like parties to celebrate winning CMS contracts. IPAM lost their contract, but a year later, Mesirow was allowed to manage a billion dollars of bonds for the Tollway Authority, itself a hive of scum and villainy, part of a Department of Transportation seeded with unqualified Blagojevich lackeys dubbed "local agency liaisons" and used as a means for Blagojevich to give a six-figure job to his drunk-driving childhood friend Daniel Stefanski, a guy so dirty that the Teamsters, of all people, claimed Stefanski's presence had corrupted their organization.

We now know that even dying, poverty-stricken children were not beyond the grasp of Blagojevich's extortion racket, and the odds are that Republic Windows and Doors did not happen without someone, somewhere, writing a substantial check to purchase Rod's "divine intervention". How about the FamilyCare debacle, in which Blagojevich's attorneys admitted that they "can't identify participants or contact them, monitor premium payments or refund them, and don't even know how much they've collected in premium payments or where the money is"?

Legislators and auditors who got in the way of Rod Blagojevich found themselves blacklisted, as Blagojevich personally tormented his enemies by eliminating funding for anti-gang programs, floodwalls, pandemic flu preparedness, and other spending intended to protect the very lives of Illinois citizens. As part of his insane war to force the legislature to approve his budget, he even took the police power itself hostage, threatening to lay off 90% of the Illinois State Police if he didn't get his way.

Comptroller Dan Hynes even refused to sign some of Blagojevich's checks, opting to have vendors sue the state before he'd help Blagojevich squander more of the state's scarce resources on epic misadventure at a time when the state was sending as little as six bucks and change as "payments" against multi-million dollar debts owed to healthcare providers.

In a just world, forensic accountants would make their careers hunting down everyone involved in creating this disaster, and it would become a literal textbook case for corruption among criminal justice students. We shouldn't be demanding Rod Blagojevich's resignation, we should be demanding seppuku, or perhaps that he be locked up in Arkham Asylum.

2. It is entirely possible that Rod Blagojevich is completely out of his mind.

I'm hardly the first person to suggest this, but Blagojevich has exhibited frightening paranoia since early in his administration. One of his first public embarrassments was the discovery that his office was diverting Department of Corrections prison psychologists to the Orwellian business of monitoring and analyzing media coverage of his leadership. This is a man who is so obsessed with appearances that a bodyguard was tasked with carrying his hairbrush (codenamed "the football", both for it's colossal size and as a reference to the nuclear launch codes carried with the President).

This is a man who, when Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn declined to accept a security detail, simply added Quinn's security detail to his own, then purged experienced bodyguards in favor of his handpicked, inexperienced cronies. The end result was a massive detail that posed a danger to themselves and others, creating a spectacle at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, drinking on the job, chasing skirt, losing their guns, and ramming Volkswagens while doing 90 mph on the shoulder. Blagojevich brought them with him, wherever he went, even closing roads in places as far away as California (apparently without permission of the host states) so that he could speed his motorcade along and make sure everyone "knew who he is".

This is a man who opted to live in Chicago instead of the state capital, because he "didn't want his daughter to change schools". Instead, he billed taxpayers for his staff to take thousands of flights back and forth to Springfield.

The governor's budget director flies on state aircraft nearly once every 2 1/2 days as he tries to find ways to control costs.

This is a man who was repeatedly dinged for ethical concerns over his habit of putting his name in large print all over state publications and websites, at times much larger than the word "Illinois", and who spent half a million dollars on new tollbooth signs for no apparent reason other than to be able to see his own name in lights.

When Eliot Spitzer first came under scrutiny in the incident with Bruno, there were widespread rumors that he had abandoned telephone communications to avoid leaving a trail. Instead, communications were conducted by messengers. By comparison, Blagojevich, fully aware of the scope of the investigation into his administration, didn't just use phones, he even had his wife on the line. Something is certainly wrong with this picture, but whether it's simply a matter of epic vanity, arrogance, and stupidity or a legitimate mental imbalance is unclear. Blagojevich father-in-law Mell says that he's now only concerned about the welfare of his daughter and granddaughter, and he should be: they're in the hands of what may be a narcissistic sociopath.

3. For Blagojevich, this is but another scam.

You might think this is the worst week of Rod Blagojevich's life, but he appears to have accepted his inevitable indictment long ago. The FBI's complaint documents him casually discussing his "legal situation" and plotting to give himself the Senate seat both to escape impeachment from the Governor's office and to give himself access to financial and political resources currently beyond his reach that would be needed to fight the Feds.

Dragged away from his home in handcuffs, Rod Blagojevich simply posted bail and went back to work, presumably to resume criminal activity. Insane or not, his current thinking is almost certainly that he now has an unprecedented opportunity to extort money and favors from all the people he could otherwise rat out to the Feds, something he is highly motivated to do, given that he may very well be facing the prospect of dying in prison. He thought he could get Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to fund his future, so his reality is pretty distorted.

4. Barack Obama thinks that we're all stupid.

It may very well be that nothing untoward happened between the Obama and Blagojevich camps. However, Obama's attempt to make this go away by pretending that they had no idea what was going on, that they hadn't discussed it with Blagojevich, and that we're all crazy to ask makes him look like he's lying in our faces. Indeed, he is, and Philadelphia's Democratic governor Ed Rendell agrees.

Of course they had contact about this, and if the Obama administration is all about transparency and honesty, they should provide complete answers to Politico's Seven Blago Questions for Obama. Instead, they're allowing Blagojevich questions to be censored on their new "Open for Questions" site.

Frankly, if Rahm Emanuel did indeed sell Blagojevich out, he should step right up so we can give him his medal, but instead, they're badly mishandling this. Emanuel claims he's receiving daily death threats, and that's just sad. There's no reason to believe to believe Emanuel has done anything wrong. However, if Emanuel is surprised and outraged that refusing to talk to the media is causing them to intrude further into his life rather than to back off, he must be incredibly naive about what MSM journalists actually do for a living.

5. The Blagojevich arrest should not be allowed to be the end of this.

The culture of corruption that bred the Blagojevich administration does not exist in isolation on the 16th floor of the Thompson Center. It rippled in from Chicago, and has rippled out to pollute nearly every facet of state government. Resolving this requires an extensive and sustained outrage from the electorate, and whipping it up requires getting the public to understand not just that what's happening is wrong, but that it's doing harm in the lives of Illinoisans and to taxpayers nationwide. It is not acceptable, it never was, and the perpetrators should be hounded relentlessly.

Yesterday, Rod Blagojevich defiantly brushed off the news that his phones were tapped:

A defiant Gov. Rod Blagojevich says anyone who wants to tape his conversations should feel free to do it openly because doing it "sneakily" smells like Watergate, the scandal that brought down former President Richard Nixon.

"This is America, you know, and I'd appreciate if you want to tape my conversations, give me a heads-up and let me know," Blagojevich said.

It did smell like Watergate, if you imagine that Blagojevich is, in fact, playing the role of his political hero, Richard Nixon. The reason federal investigators didn't give Blagojevich a "heads-up" is for much the same reason that cops sometimes get no-knock warrants.

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was arrested on Tuesday on charges he brazenly conspired to sell or trade the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by President-elect Barack Obama to the highest bidder in what a federal prosecutor called a "corruption crime spree."

Blagojevich also was charged with illegally threatening to withhold state assistance to Tribune Co., the owner of the Chicago Tribune, in the sale of Wrigley Field, according to a federal criminal complaint. In return for state assistance, Blagojevich allegedly wanted members of the paper's editorial board who had been critical of him fired.

"We were in the middle of a corruption crime spree and we wanted to stop it," Fitzgerald said Tuesday, calling the corruption charges against Blagojevich "a truly new low."

Federal investigators bugged the governor's campaign offices and placed a tap on his home phone and Chicago FBI chief Robert Grant said even seasoned investigators were "stunned" by what they heard on the tapes.

Stunned?

There's no excuse for being "stunned". I got over that five years ago when the brazen criminality of Rod Blagojevich became so painfully obvious simply from reading the paper. Since this blog started, I've written about four hundred posts on Blago's corruption and incompetence, pretty much shouting into the darkness, even while partisan Democrats still tried to assert that Blagojevich was merely a "victim" of the "right-wing smear machine".

You didn't need a degree in political science to put this one together, you just had to have a healthy skepticism of politicians from the most corrupt political machine in America, and a willingness to admit that they're visibly destroying the state. I called this exact scheme with Obama's Senate seat six months ago. Somehow, despite it all being right there in the papers, he managed to get reelected, and the public consensus that his corruption exceeds the typical background noise for Chicago Democrats has really only started to come together in the last year or so.

Fitzgerald took a dramatic step to stop Blagojevich today rather than continuing to gather evidence. My guess is he wanted to stop him before he could poison the Senate with his appointment. Longtime readers know that seeing Blagojevich go to prison has essentially been this blog's primary purpose, so let me put it in writing, to avoid any confusion: this arrest makes me very happy. The only reason it took me this long to post about it is because I've been working nights this week, and didn't find out until I woke up two hours ago to several voicemails, emails, and instant messages wondering why I haven't posted about this yet.

This is like Christmas morning.

Blagojevich considered appointing himself [to the United States Senate]. The affidavit said that as late as Nov. 3, he told his deputy governor that if "they're not going to offer me anything of value I might as well take it."

"I'm going to keep this Senate option for me a real possibility, you know, and therefore I can drive a hard bargain," Blagojevich allegedly said later that day, according to the affidavit, which also quoted him as saying in a remark punctuated by profanity that the seat was "a valuable thing - you just don't give it away for nothing."

The affidavit said Blagojevich also discussed getting a substantial salary for himself at a nonprofit foundation or an organization affiliated with labor unions.

It said Blagojevich also talked about getting his wife placed on corporate boards where she might get $150,000 a year in director's fees.

He also allegedly discussed getting campaign funds for himself or possibly a post in the president's cabinet or an ambassadorship once he left the governor's office. He noted becoming a U.S. senator might remake his image for a possible presidential run in 2016, according to the affidavit. And he allegedly said a Senate seat would also provide him with corporate contacts if he needed a job and present an opportunity for his wife to work as a lobbyist.

"I want to make money," the affidavit quotes him as saying in one conversation.

The affidavit said Blagojevich expressed frustration at being "stuck" as governor and that he would have access to greater resources if he were indicted while in the U.S. Senate than while sitting as governor.

Not only was Rod Blagojevich, the most loathed Democrat in America, the only Democratic governor who managed to prove less popular than Kathleen Blanco in the middle of Hurricane Katrina, still trying to weasel his way into the Presidency of the United States, but he was hoping to have a more powerful office from which to weasel his way out of the criminal charges he so richly deserves. Ironically, the fact that he deserves them is why his hopes of running for President were dashed in the first place.

They've also arrested Blagojevich's chief of staff, John Harris, who apparently was involved in a separate conspiracy involving the Service Employees International Union and, in some undefined and apparently non-implicatory way, Barack Obama.

Under the plan, Blagojevich would appoint a new senator who would be helpful to the president-elect and in turn get a job as head of Change to Win, a group formed by the union. The union would get an unspecified favor from Obama later.

Nothing in the court papers suggested Obama had any part in the discussion. In fact, Blagojevich allegedly said in the same conversation that Obama most likely would not appoint him as secretary of health and human services or to an ambassadorship because of the negative publicity that has surrounded the governor for three years.

One day later, according to the affidavit, Blagojevich allegedly told an associate he knew Obama wanted a specific Senate candidate but "they're not going to give me anything except appreciation." He finished the remark with an expletive.

Illinoisans aren't even going to give him that.

Update: A reader emails:

Q: What did one Illinois prison inmate say to the other?

A: "The food was better when you were Governor."

Heh.

Update: The complaint.

What a relief that the Feds didn't let him finish his term before taking action. He didn't deserve to go out with his dignity intact. Today was a good day.

Update: Ironically, today is United Nations International Anti-Corruption Day. Tomorrow is Rod Blagojevich's birthday.

An instant message from my father: "It's Rod Blagojevich's birthday tomorrow, but he had his surprise party today."

Accordingly, I may not be around.