Goodbye, Blue Monday

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Goodbye, Blue Monday

Goodbye, Blue Monday

Thanks to The Daley Gator for the Rule Five link!

As if the Obama administration didn’t have enough trouble, now there’s this:  State Department memo reveals possible cover-ups, halted investigations.  Excerpt:

CBS News has uncovered documents that show the State Department may have covered up allegations of illegal and inappropriate behavior within their ranks.

The Diplomatic Security Service, or the DSS, is the State Department’s security force, charged with protecting the secretary of state and U.S. ambassadors overseas and with investigating any cases of misconduct on the part of the 70,000 State Department employees worldwide.

CBS News’ John Miller reports that according to an internal State Department Inspector General’s memo, several recent investigations were influenced, manipulated, or simply called off. The memo obtained by CBS News cited eight specific examples. Among them: allegations that a State Department security official in Beirut “engaged in sexual assaults” on foreign nationals hired as embassy guards and the charge and that members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail “engaged prostitutes while on official trips in foreign countries” — a problem the report says was “endemic.”

The memo also reveals details about an “underground drug ring” was operating near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and supplied State Department security contractors with drugs.

Mind you this isn’t on the scale of the NSA snooping scandal, about which Jay Leno had this to say:

Well, let’s see what’s going on. Hey, Snoop is back in the news. Not Snoop Dogg, Snoop Obama. Yeah, Snoop Obama. A big change at the White House today. They closed the gift shop and opened a Verizon store. Yeah.

Well, this has become a huge controversy after it was revealed that the National Security Agency seized millions of Verizon phone records, and of course this has caused a panic among civil libertarians, constitutional scholars and cheating husbands everywhere. Oh my God.

Crisis-IRS-590-LI_zps0ef81a85How ironic is that? We wanted a president that listens to all Americans – now we have one.

The possible silver lining out of the serial scandals and displays of amateur-hour inability from the White House is this:  With the IRS deeply mired in scandal due to manipulation of the Byzantine tax code, the time has never been riper for major tax reform.

It is only the fact of our obscenely complicated tax code that allowed the IRS scandal to happen in the first place.  Root cause:  Vote-seeking pols parceling out favors.  Every favored group seeks a break written into the tax code; every new economic issue makes pols demand new taxes.  Multiply this by several generations and you have the mess we have now.

I favor the FairTax.  I’d settle for a  flat tax.  But something has to change.  And one of the things that should change is this:  Everyone should pay something.  Everyone should have skin in the game.  No more free rides.  No more buying votes with handouts of taxpayer money.

Rule Five Friday

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2013_06_07_Rule Five Friday (1)No manifesto again this week.  Walking in Memphis (and the concomitant work that brought me here) precluded working on it this week.  Instead:

Obama’s Flight From Responsibility.  Excerpt:

“Hey, don’t look at me — I’m just the president!” That’s the common thread in President Obama’s response to his recent scandal eruptions, from IRS harassment of Tea Partiers to his Justice Department’s spying on AP reporters. Like everybody else, Obama learns about these things via cable news, according to press secretary Jay Carney.

Obama’s flight from responsibility punctured the stratosphere in his recent speech on “the Future of Our Fight against Terrorism” at the National Defense University in D.C. In the speech Obama seemed to position himself as the loyal opposition to his own administration.

2013_06_07_Rule Five Friday (2)This tack by the administration and the President is a little baffling, but perhaps not so much so when you consider that, prior to being President, Barack Obama had never been solely in charge of anything, ever.  No executive experience whatsoever.

But you’d think that after almost four and a half years, he would have picked up a little more sense of how to run the Executive Branch than this.  Even the New York Times is now bemoaning the Obama Administration’s loss of credibility in the face of repeated scandals – and the Times has been a constant and loyal supporter of the Obama administration since the beginning.

Instead, we hear bafflingly inept statements like how the President of the United States reads about major events like the IRS scandal “in the newspapers” just like the rest of us.  Unbelievable – and almost certainly not true.

2013_06_07_Rule Five Friday (3)The Reason article linked above concludes:

Thus, with the IRS imbroglio, for example, it may well be the case that (to rework the old joke from the Reagan era) the left hand doesn’t know what the far-left hand is doing. But surely it’s not too much to expect the president to keep tabs on his own attorney general — one of the four original Cabinet posts dating to 1789.

Moreover, it’s pretty rich to hear complaints about the vast federal bureaucracy from people ideologically devoted to making it vaster still. And it’s utterly galling to hear the president complain, in the NDU speech, about decisions he personally made.

President Bush’s “I’m the Decider” attitude sounded arrogant and grating at the time, but Obama’s denial of responsibility just might make us grow nostalgic for it.2013_06_07_Rule Five Friday (4)

The President is in charge.  He’s the boss of the Executive Branch.  He’s supposed to know what his people are doing, and even if he doesn’t, he’s still the guy in charge.  His name is on the blame line.  An old saw from my days as an Army officer candidate went “you can delegate authority, but you can’t delegate responsibility.”

It’s a basic leadership function.  Authority comes with responsibility, and the more authority you have, the more responsibility you are expected to shoulder.  In the case of senior executive responsibility, you can’t duck it, you can’t dodge it, you can’t give it away.  It’s yours.  You have to make decisions, you have to deal with the results of those decisions – including your decisions on who you choose to work for you.  Like, say, Attorney General Holder.

President Obama apparently hasn’t yet learned this.

2013_06_07_Rule Five Friday (5)

Animal’s Daily News

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Leaping Wet BearAs a self-professed libertarian myself (I’ve often said my personal brand of libertarianism is grounded in one simple principle:  I don’t really give a damn what people do, as long as they leave me alone) I found this interesting:  The Libertarian Populist Agenda.  Excerpt:

The appeal of libertarian populism is that it refuses to cede the philosophical battle to the side of big government – and the permanence of a broken welfare/regulatory state and convoluted tax code – before the argument is even joined. Instead, libertarian populism can and should be cast in the proper light: the sober reality of our dire fiscal situation; the abject brokenness of our welfare state; tax, education and regulatory systems that retard economic opportunity, punish success, hurt the poor and middle class, and reward cronies; and a federal government that wants control over almost every aspect of our lives, from the raw milk we drink to the lightbulbs we use and the toilets we flush.

As an approach which frames limited government not just as a safeguard of personal liberty, but a way to offer wide-ranging opportunities, enhance economic mobility, and undermine rent-seeking elites, it represents a real break from the party’s approach to policy setting over the course of decades. It is bolder, yes – but it is also far simpler, more idealistic, and more coherent. Most Americans of all political walks understand that our broken system is rigged, and not for the little guy, and they resent it immeasurably. When the Beltway Burkeans argue for good governance reforms, they don’t tap into these motivations with anything approaching such passions.

Emerging from Deep Water.

Emerging from Deep Water.

That’s been a big part of the GOP’s problem in the last few election cycles; it was the problem that sank George W. Bush’s presidency.  Both national parties have abandoned liberty and personal responsibility.  Both parties want to infringe on your liberty; the primary difference is in which area.  Since 1980 I’ve been a registered Republican and voted for Republican candidates because they’ve been the lesser of two evils in the area of policy I care most about:  Regulation, fiscal and monetary issues, taxes, foreign policy and crime.

But the lesser of two evils isn’t the same as a positive good.

And no, I don’t and won’t vote third party.  Protest votes are counter-productive; in voting for a third party, especially at the Federal level, you are effectively voting for the party you favor the least.  I know the arguments about “voting on principle,” but the objective realities require that these particular principles be damned, first you have to win.

Maybe if the GOP and its candidates would pay more attention to individual liberty and start proposing things like actually reducing the size and scope of government – as opposed to reducing the rate of growth – they might actually start seeing some more electoral victories.