US military jury clears SEAL in Iraq abuse case

BAGHDAD (AP) — A U.S. military jury cleared a Navy SEAL Thursday of failing to prevent the beating of an Iraqi prisoner suspected of masterminding a 2004 attack that killed four American security contractors.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/04/22/seal-trial-jury-deliberates-iraqi-abuse-case/

The next 2 SEALs in this case will be released too. The prosecution of our military for piddly crap is ridiculous. Remember the prosecution of the Marines accused for the killings in Haditha?

As Government Expands, Beware the Post Office Example - by Byron York

Back when Barack Obama was pushing for a public option in the new national healthcare system, he raised eyebrows with an out-of-nowhere remark about the U.S. Postal Service.

It happened last August at a town hall in Colorado. Obama claimed Americans shouldn't be afraid of a government insurance company -- the public option -- competing against private insurers, because even though the government has vastly more resources than any individual company, "You've got a lot of private companies who do very well competing against the government -- UPS and FedEx are doing a lot better than the post office."

Obama apparently liked the point, because he made it again at another town hall around the same time. "Private insurers should be able to compete," he said Aug. 11 in New Hampshire. "They do it all the time. I mean, if you think about it, UPS and FedEx are doing just fine, right? It's the post office that's always having problems."

It was a jarring moment. Here, Obama was trying to promote a huge expansion of government involvement in the health system, and he pointed to a sprawling, unresponsive and insanely expensive government bureaucracy. (It's also one that nearly every American knows from firsthand experience.) Not exactly the best case for government effectiveness.

Obama's words are coming back now, with news that the U.S. Postal Service is in even more of a mess than we thought. Without serious reform, it's set to lose $7 billion this year and $238 billion over the next 10 years, and a new report from the Government Accountability Office says the post office's business model is "not viable" given current business conditions. The report makes the post office sound like a government version of General Motors, if General Motors itself weren't already a government version of General Motors.

Demand for snail mail has been falling in recent years -- the GAO notes that first-class mail volume has declined 19 percent since its peak in 2001 -- and though the post office has cut some staff, it hasn't done nearly enough to keep up. The post office is supposed to pay for itself, but in recent years has been covering its losses by borrowing from the Treasury. But now, GAO notes, the post office "is nearing its $15 billion borrowing limit with the U.S. Treasury and has unfunded pension and retiree health obligations and other liabilities of about $90 billion."

Labor costs are killing the post office. Wages and benefits make up 80 percent of its expenses. About 85 percent of its employees are covered by union contracts, and many receive benefits beyond those of other federal workers. Union agreements force the post office to maintain more full-time employees than it needs; deny managers flexibility in assigning tasks, like having a retail clerk deliver mail; forbid the post office from outsourcing any city delivery routes; give about 500,000 employees total protection from layoffs; and "require (the post office) to pay a more generous share of employees' health and life-insurance premiums than most other agencies," according to GAO.

The post office operates under restrictions that do not burden private businesses. It has a legal monopoly on some types of letter mail, but it's also required by law to deliver mail to every address in the United States. Over the years, Congress has authorized the construction of too many post offices and the hiring of too many postal employees, and those are hard numbers to bring down. Altogether, it is a shining example of what happens when the government tries to operate like a business, only not really.

If it stands, the new healthcare law will establish government offices and agencies to create and run healthcare exchanges, to closely regulate insurance companies, to establish standards of care, to determine what are appropriate levels of coverage, to ensure compliance with the law -- it goes on and on. It is, well, a huge expansion of government involvement in the health system. And there is little doubt that many of its backers in Congress want to expand it further in the coming years. Some envision a day when the government, which already runs Medicare and Medicaid, runs health care entirely.

What could go wrong? It turns out Barack Obama has already told us: Just look at the post office.

Obama's Plan to Humble America - by Ben Shapiro

On April 6, 20-year-old Ty MacDowell led a march in Portland, Maine, designed to raise awareness of sexism. She did this by walking bare-breasted down the street with two dozen fellow women. MacDowell was shocked to learn that far from decreasing sexism, revealing her bosom drew hundreds of men with cameras. "I'm really upset by the men," she moped, "watching it like it's a parade."

This is called the law of unintended consequences. Anyone with half a brain could foresee the consequences of MacDowell's march -- there's a reason men spend years of their lives perusing the Internet for booby shots.

There are other applications of the law of unintended consequences, however, that are less obvious.

In the 1960s, liberals dramatically expanded the welfare state under the banner of Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society. Johnson and his liberal allies created Welfare, the Job Corps, the Model Cities Program, Head Start, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Medicare, Medicaid and many other governmental make-work, pay-the-poor programs. Johnson referred to these programs as a "beautiful woman." (Johnson was a serial womanizer, so that was his dearest metaphor.)

At the same time, Johnson was escalating spending in Vietnam; from 1965 to 1968, Johnson augmented the military budget by 25 percent. This frightened Johnson to no end. According to historian Robert D. Hormats, "Johnson frequently remarked to his assistant Joseph Califano that the massive financial demands of World War II had killed the New Deal and the increase in funding for the Korean War had killed Truman's Fair Deal, and he was concerned a similar fate would befall the Great Society." Vietnam was, in Johnson's word, a "bitch."

The beautiful woman and the bitch were fighting over the same tax dollars. Eventually, LBJ was forced to raise taxes dramatically in order to curtail the budget crisis that was destroying the dollar. In 1968, the same man who had created the massive social safety nets, comprising a huge portion of the federal budget, suddenly called for "fiscal restraint" and "responsible fiscal policy." Not coincidentally, in that same speech, LBJ announced he would not run for re-election. Only a few years later, Democrats in Congress refused to fund the Vietnam War, instead choosing to continue funding the social programs LBJ had instituted.

In short, LBJ's Great Society had two major short-term unintended consequences: First, the Great Society weakened us on the home front by foisting tax hikes and unsustainable debts on the American people; second, the Great Society weakened us abroad by sucking up cash needed to win the Vietnam War. The Great Society forced a choice between guns and butter, and the Democrats chose increasingly expensive butter, paid for by productive Americans.

LBJ could honestly claim that he had no idea his programs would do such immediate damage to the financial and military status of the country. After all, LBJ bought the Keynesian myth that FDR's programs had spurred the economy and made us stronger on the military front.

President Obama knows better.

Obama's decision to incur unthinkable new debts via gargantuan entitlement programs, to raise taxes in the midst of a depression, to intensify inflation to catastrophic proportions, is specifically calculated to effect the exact same two consequences as LBJ's Great Society program. First, Obama wants to weaken us on the home front by "spreading the wealth around" in the name of equality. Second, Obama wants to use that aggravated economic weakness to undermine America's foreign policy standing around the world.

First, Obama's real domestic agenda. He doesn't care about economic expansion -- this week, even as economic reports intensified general gloom, his economic hit man, Paul Volcker, talked about instituting European-type "value-added tax" (VAT). VATs are merely a long-winded way of dramatically exacerbating sales taxes, which would raise prices. Basic supply and demand dictates that raising prices will lower demand, leading to yet another economic spiral. That's Obama's goal -- as Rahm Emanuel put it so succinctly, Obama is not one to let a good crisis go to waste.

Second, Obama wants to use our economic weakness to undermine our military status in the world. Obama believes the greatest threat to international security is American brutishness. He seeks to alleviate that brutishness by unilaterally cutting our nuclear arsenal, removing honest phrasing like "Islamic radicalism" from our national security documents, and setting egg timers for troop surges.

President Obama does not want a greater, more powerful America; he wants a smaller, more humble America. And he knows how to achieve it. He is not acting out the law of unintended consequences -- he strives for the consequences. Unlike LBJ, Obama acts not out of ignorance, but insidiousness. Like LBJ in 1968, he must be made to pay the price.

What Was Obamacare Really About? - by Byron York

It hasn't attracted much notice, but recently some prominent advocates of Obamacare have spoken more frankly than ever before about why they supported a national healthcare makeover. It wasn't just about making insurance more affordable. It wasn't just about bending the cost curve. It wasn't just about cutting the federal deficit. It was also about redistributing wealth.

Health reform is "an income shift," Democratic Sen. Max Baucus said on March 25. "It is a shift, a leveling, to help lower-income, middle-income Americans."

In his halting, jumbled style, Baucus explained that in recent years, "the maldistribution of income in America has gone up way too much, the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy, and the middle-income class is left behind." The new healthcare legislation, Baucus promised, "will have the effect of addressing that maldistribution of income in America."

At about the same time, Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and presidential candidate, said the health bill was needed to correct economic inequities. "The question is, in a democracy, what is the right balance between those at the top ... and those at the bottom?" Dean said during an appearance on CNBC. "When it gets out of whack, as it did in the 1920s, and it has now, you need to do some redistribution. This is a form of redistribution."

Summing things up in the New York Times, the liberal economics columnist David Leonhardt called Obamacare "the federal government's biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago."

Now they tell us. For many opponents of the new legislation, the statements confirmed a nagging suspicion that for Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress, the health fight was about more than just insurance -- that redistribution played a significant, if largely unspoken, part in the drive for national health care.

"I don't think most people, when they think of the healthcare bill, instantly think it's a vehicle to redistribute wealth," said pollster Scott Rasmussen. "But we do know that people overwhelmingly believe it will lead to an increase in middle-class taxes, and we do know that people are concerned that it will hurt their own quality of care, so I think their gut instincts point in that direction."


By talking openly about redistribution, Baucus and others have gone seriously off message. Democrats knew there was no way they could ever sell a national healthcare bill to a skeptical public by basing their case on income inequality. That's one reason they went to such lengths to argue -- preposterously, in the view of most Americans -- that the bill could cover 32 million currently uninsured people and still save the taxpayers money.

After Baucus' statement, I asked a Democratic strategist (who asked to remain nameless) whether fighting income inequality was one of his goals in supporting the legislation. Never, he said. "That's what the tax code is for."

"It was not to take something away from rich people; it was to provide something to people without coverage," he continued, making a distinction between striving for universal coverage and seeking to redistribute income. But he quickly saw that Democrats talking about redistribution could be politically damaging, echoing the controversy that erupted when candidate Obama famously told Ohio plumber Joe Wurzelbacher, "When you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."

"'Redistribution' is an easy charge to make," the Democrat said. "I'm not surprised that it's an argument critics make; what I'm surprised at is that Democrats are making it."

This week, the DNC group Organizing for America offered a commemorative certificate to supporters who helped pass the healthcare bill. The certificate said, "We achieved the dream of generations -- high-quality, affordable health care is no longer the privilege of a few but the right of all."

The privilege of a few? It is widely accepted that about 85 percent of all Americans have healthcare coverage, and the overwhelming majority are happy with it. There's simply no way anyone could plausibly claim that health coverage is the privilege of a few.

And yet that is the bedrock belief of some who supported the healthcare makeover. So it's no wonder that we're hearing about health care as the redistribution of income. Of course, we're only hearing it after the bill has passed.

Lower Prices and More Foreclosures Will Solve Housing - by Larry Kudlow

With everybody focused on Obamacare, and its new entitlement spending and taxing, the administration has tried to sneak in yet another bailout for housing. Yet again, Team Obama is rewarding reckless behavior, punishing the 90 percent of responsible homeowners who are making good on their mortgages, and setting up a greater moral hazard that will surely lead to an expansion of bailout nation.

I'm talking about an add-on to HAMP, the $75 billion Home Affordable Modification Program, which has been a dismal failure. In fact, the entire foreclosure-prevention effort -- including forgiveness of mortgage-loan principal -- has been a failure.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency reports that nearly 60 percent of modified mortgages re-default within a year. And now comes a new brilliant idea that if you live in your main residence, have a mortgage balance of less than $729,750, owe monthly mortgage payments that are not affordable (meaning greater than 31 percent of income) and demonstrate a financial hardship, the government will subsidize you by offering TARP money to banks and other lenders to reduce your outstanding mortgage balance.

Former Bush administration economist Keith Hennessey highlights the outrage that Team Obama would actually subsidize people making up to $186,000 a year who have a mortgage balance of over $700,000. This isn't even a middle-class entitlement. It's an upper-middle-class entitlement. Actually, at $186,000, it's virtually a top-earner entitlement, according to Team Obama's definition of rich people eligible for tax hikes.

I mean, for a measly $14,000 more in income, the White House will jack up your top personal tax rate and your capital-gains tax rate. But now, for just less than $200,000, you get a brand new spiffy forgiveness plan for your mortgage.

It's a complete outrage.

I don't want you to pay for my mistakes. And I don't want to pay for yours. That's an oft-heard Tea Party complaint, and it's a good one. Why should the 90 percent of folks who make good financial decisions on their homes have to pay for the 10 percent who did not?

Or, put it another way, just because a home loan is "underwater" -- meaning its value is lower than today's current market price -- why should a responsible person whine about it and walk away? Why not service this loan for the longer term and wait for prices to improve? That's called personal responsibility.

Bloomberg financial columnist Caroline Baum argues that lower home prices are the key to solving the housing problem. Popular blogger Barry Ritholtz says we need more foreclosures, not fewer, to solve housing. Both are correct.

Even in the foreclosure process, young families can come in and snap up cheap homes. This is a great boon to the new generation.

And take a look at places like California, Florida and Las Vegas, where foreclosure activity has been high and prices have fallen the most. What you see is a sharp pickup in home sales, which is steadily clearing away the price-depressing inventory overhang of unsold homes. In other words, market forces work.

Bouncing from pillar to post, the White House has unsuccessfully tried mortgage modifications, foreclosure abatements and tax credits. None of it has worked. But the price tag so far for these failed government interventions in the housing market is $75 billion and rising.

Applying TARP money to the housing problem -- originally meant for banks -- is an even greater outrage. TARP should be closed down, now that banks have repaid it, and turned back to taxpayers in the form of government debt reduction.

But the Obama White House rejects market forces. It rejects free-market price adjustments. As a result, it is creating a crazy subversion of normal incentives.

Obamacare -- with its unwillingness to put to work true free-market and consumer-choice competition to hold down health costs -- will turn out to be a failure. And so will Team Obama's clumsy and clunky attempts to substitute government subsidies for free-market home pricing. The failed government subsidy for housing is a leading indicator. Imagine, putting more and more middle- and upper-end income earners on the government dole.

As America's nanny state grows larger, its economy will grow weaker.