RUMORS OF GRUBER

Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies, lies.... where is the transparency, oops, "spike" it!

RUMORS OF GRUBER
BY Scott Johnson, Powerline

The late Arnaud de Borchgrave and the still kicking Robert Moss published The Spike in 1980 to expose the power of the media to suppress politically unpalatable stories in the service of covert political interests. The University of Chicago’s Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science Charles Lipson draws on the metaphor of “the spike” to describe what has happened to the revelations of Monday’s Wall Street Journal story reporting the substantial evidence of Jonathan Gruber’s instrumental role in the development of Obamacare. The Journal’s story, ah, belied President Obama’s denials of Gruber’s role this past November. Professor Lipson’s column on the ensuing silence is “Spike it! When the media kill a story for political reasons.”

Professor Lipson writes:
What happens when the news media catch the White House in a demonstrable lie? That depends entirely on whether they like the administration. If they loathe the administration, it’s front-page news. If they like it, they spike the story. As Momma used to remind us, if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. What a great motto for reporters.

That is exactly what the national media have done to an important story about the White House’s intimate working relationship with MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, who helped craft the Affordable Care Act. You may remember Gruber from his infamous videotapes, the ones in which he called the American public too stupid to understand the law. He added their stupidity was helpful to Obama, Pelosi, and Reid in passing the law.

The Obama administration snapped into action. At a press conference, the president noted that Gruber was not employed by the White House and said flatly that he had not played an important role in drafting the law. Nancy Pelosi said the same thing. On background, senior White House officials reinforced the story. They vaguely remembered somebody named Gruber or Goober or something but, fortunately, he played only a marginal role in health care. Thanks for asking. Next question?

Now, this may surprise you, but it turns out the White House knew Gruber very well and knew he played a crucial role in the health care bill. The White House simply decided to lie about it. Perhaps they agree with Gruber’s judgment about your intelligence.

How do we know about Gruber’s role? Not because the White House released any documents, not because the media dug into it, but because the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Utah Republican Jason Chaffetz, got MIT to turn over the relevant emails. There were 20,000 pages of emails back-and-forth between Gruber and the White House in the crucial months when the bill was being crafted and passed.

The Wall Street Journal just revealed the news about the Oversight Committee getting these emails in a major story. The key points are that Gruber was deeply involved in crafting the health care law, he worked very closely with the White House, and, when he became a political liability, the president and his senior aides simply lied about it.

Is that a big story? Not if you are a national TV network or major U.S. newspaper. Except for the Wall Street Journal, they maintained radio silence. Not a peep.

UPDATE: A friend writes to comment: “Why didn’t he connect the dots? isn’t the head of CBS News (David Rhodes) the brother of someone who works high up in the Obama administration (Ben Rhodes)? And what about reporters married to WH operatives? Isn’t it time for the kind of chart the NYT made of the Straussian connections and their supposed links to the Iraq war? That was fanciful, and this is real.”

Three Keys to Understanding the Greek Governments Financial Crisis

Three Keys to Understanding the Greek Governments Financial Crisis

Col. Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

Do not spend any serious time reading about all the nuances and complexities of the current fiscal crisis facing the Greek Government. Here is everything you need to know in a nutshell:

Austerity = Our Government spent its way into bankruptcy and now we have to reduce spending (by the way, for years we lied to everyone about how bad it was).

Bailout Loans = We ran out of our money and now need to spend other people's money.

Anti-Austerity = We are dead broke but refuse to admit it.

Mike

21st century Marxism is stupid (save Groucho!)

21st century Marxism is stupid (save Groucho!)

Col. Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

Do not get me wrong. Marx should be required reading for economists but in its rightful place amongst other classical writers like Smith or Ricardo or Malthus and nothing more.

He is no one’s messiah and never was. 

That is the price Marx must pay when he thought the events of his lifetime provided unerring insights, a key to unlock the future.

To prove the failure of Marxism, two examples will suffice (although many more are quickly available).

Fist, let us visit volume I of Das Kapital (1867) to compare it to the arguments of James Hessen in Learning by Doing (2005) and more specifically to the now obscure case of English cottage handloom weavers. 

For Marx, who was stuck in the 18^th century, loom machines brutally and unjustly destroyed the handloom industry.

Their introduction by capitalists was a degradation ending with the worker as an automaton, a slave. 

Similarly, protecting wagon/horse & buggy workers was better than creating many more higher paying automotive jobs in the early 20^th century and in a later example, a righteous society should have kept paper file clerks on the payroll instead of replacing their jobs with superior information technology positions. 

What nonsense (except in Greece). 

The world is a better place when it progresses. 

Hessen opines that if we are to look to the descendants of the 19^th century English hand-loom workers, any objective observer must conclude that their offspring’s lives are far better off by any “quality of life” measurement: education, health care, housing, nutrition, leisure activities, old age protections, etc.’’ 

Plain and simply, Marx’s nihilistic assessment of free market economies was dead wrong.

That is not all. Marxist "historical determinism" also took a hit and one need only look to feudalism to see the wreckage.  

His feudalistic certainty in 1860s gave way to doubt in the 20^th century that forced his acolytes into tortured definitions of feudalism intended to explain away the ever growing contradictions as historical research expanded our understanding of the past. 

In the end, the "historical determinism” artifice that shored up Marxist theory collapsed like a dry rotted house in a gale. And therein lies the trap Marx laid for himself. 

By seeking to be immediately relevant to a 19^th century audience he killed off the value of the scientific analytic process he took such pains to articulate.

His scientific method was rendered meaningless as it closed itself off to new knowledge. When Marx set in stone “eternal” diktats and prescriptions based on the limited knowledge available in the 19^th century he doomed himself.

So where are we in the 21^st century?

We are at the point where we must once and for all throw out the concept that Marxism holds transcendental truths.

It is a stale philosophy and a failed religion whose rigid dictums have not stood the test of time and no serious thinker should adopt such a fatally flawed treatise.

Would anyone have a home built based on an 1860s plan without electricity, using coal or wood burning heating and candles or kerosene or gas for lighting?

Would anyone send their children to a dentist who used an 1860s textbook that eschewed the cleansing of instruments and held that a good shot of brandy would take care of the pain?

Would anyone undergo surgery by a doctor who held to 1860s methodologies that used deadly metal probes in lieu of x-rays, MRIs or CT scans? Who thought sterilization silly, had no knowledge of antibiotics and thought amputation followed by leaching as an ideal technique in treating traumatic injuries?

Please read Marx but only in the context of a remarkable but outdated thesis.

Mike

Failure of TAA/TPA in the House

Failure of TAA/TPA in the House, Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

All,

The Trade Adjustment Assistance/Trade Promotion Authority did not pass today.

The consequences are simple to comprehend.

If you are an isolationist and believe that America's interests end at the ocean shores then you are happy. The hell with the rest of the world.

If you understand that when America quits a major world stage we are weakened then you get it.

The failure to pass TAA/TPA in East Asia is tremendous victory for China who will fill the vacuum in East Asia as quick as it can. 

This is just one more victory for China in its cold war to marginalize America (on the heels of hacking four million gov't employees private data). Shame on us.

Semper Fi,

Mike