Today’s Gibbsism:

“Let me be clear. He was not calling the officer stupid, okay? He was denoting that, at a certain point the situation got far out of hand, and I think all sides understand that.”

President Obama, opining on the Henry Louis Gates situation, during last night’s presser:

The president said he doesn’t know all the facts about the arrest last week, and does not know what role race played, “but I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be angry, and two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof they were in their own home,” Obama said.

“And number three, there’s a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. And that’s just a fact.”

We’re going to need photoshops of Gibbs in Baghdad Bob outfits before much longer.

To our allegedly post-racial president, I would suggest the following guidelines:  When a reporter asks you your opinion on some current event, and the first words out of your mouth are to the effect that you don’t know all the facts, the next words out of your mouth should be along lines of, “And so I’m going to withhold judgment until I have more information about what actually occurred.  Adding, “because it would be shockingly inappropriate and not a little bit dumb for the President of the United States to sling around unfounded, slanderous accusations of stupidity and/or racism,” is optional, but recommended.

Otherwise people might get the idea you’re trying to have a frank national conversation about race.

During last year’s presidential campaign, at a San Francisco fundraiser, Mr. Obama rather infamously disparaged large segments of the electorate outside the country’s coastal urban enclaves by suggesting that the populace is comprised of individuals who “cling” to guns, or religion, or anti-immigrant sentiment by way of expressing their economic and political frustrations.  Well, add another thing that we’re bitterly clinging to.

Verum Serum characterizes the president’s habit of mind magnificently:

You begin to get the idea that, underneath all his efforts to talk to people like adults, he thinks there are really just two camps: Courageous progressives, e.g. himself and people who agree with him, and backward bumpkins who huddle around failure because they’re too afraid to be more like…him.

It must be an empowering way to see the world. It’s also arrogant, elitist and false. But I wonder if any of that can compare to the psychic kick of seeing oneself as a superhero among benighted mortals.

Platonic philosopher-kings do not answer letters.

Princeton economics professor Uwe Reinhardt makes a fair point to those slinging around the term “rationing,” in the context of healthcare reform, like it’s a dirty word: the free market is itself a form of rationing, inasmuch as healthcare is a scarce resource that is rationed by price.  I agree with Doug Bandow at Cato that the issue isn’t rationing per se, but liberty.  In a truly free market (which we presently do not have, because of the perverse incentives created by existing government regulation of healthcare), rationing decisions are the product of consumer choice based on individual and family circumstances and needs.  In a socialized healthcare system, rationing decisions are the product of arbitrary bureaucratic edict and political expediency.

But then Reinhardt says:

To suggest that the main goal of the health reform efforts is to cram rationing down the throat of hapless, nonelite Americans reflects either woeful ignorance or of utter cynicism. Take your pick.

One needn’t be an ignoramus or a cynic to note the observed propensity of most Democrats and many Republicans to exalt the power of the state at the expense of individual liberty, and conclude that the current healthcare reform efforts are more of the same.  On the contrary: given the extent to which voluptuaries of healthcare reform worship at the feet of Leviathan in virtually every other context, to suggest that the main goal of progressive health reform efforts is responsible fiscal stewardship and/or sheer civic-minded munificence reflects either stunning disingenuity or hilarious naiveté.

We’ve always been at war with Eastasia, notes White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs (who is rapidly distinguishing himself as an even bigger doofus than Scott McClellan):

Turns out the $787 billion “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act” (AARA) was not designed for full economic recovery, but rather to “stabilize” the downturn.  That’s the word from White House officials today, who held off-camera briefings with reporters on how the AARA is working so far.

“This legislation was designed to cushion the downturn,” said White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. “That’s why we have always talked about this as one function of economic recovery.”

When pressed about the change in terminology, Gibbs said he was not trying to temper expectations after the fact. “I can probably find 15 or 20 occasions when I said this in the lead up,” Gibbs said, explaining that he had always defined the AARA as part of a “multi-legged stool.”

Evidently the Council of Economic Advisors didn’t get the memo regarding the goalpost-moving exercise.  Meanwhile, national punchline Joe Biden assures us of the fierce moral urgency of killing the patient in order to save him:

“And folks look, AARP knows and the people with me here today know, the president knows, and I know, that the status quo is simply not acceptable,” Biden said at the event on Thursday in Alexandria, Va. “It’s totally unacceptable. And it’s completely unsustainable. Even if we wanted to keep it the way we have it now. It can’t do it financially.”
 
“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.
 
“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

Er, no, not really, says the CBO: “No net federal cost savings,” which is bureaucratese for, “Oceans of red ink as far as the eye can see.”  And savor the irony of the Vice President delivering this spiel to the AARP, which continues to support this dreck despite, as Dick Morris points out, seniors being most likely to take it in the shorts.

And of course, this is all to say nothing of the President’s pathological lies on the subject of his healthcare plan.

(Hat tip AllahPundit.)

Barack Obama professes nostalgia for “Cominksy Field”.  Not sure where that was located relative to Comisky Park.  Perhaps it’s the home stadium for the “Nittaly Lions”?

Yes, yes, I shouldn’t make fun of The Most Articulate President In A Generation™ like this.  It’s low sport.

It’s a wealth transfer:

The legislation would be paid for by a federal income surtax — up to 5.4 percent on the income of taxpayers making more than $1 million a year — plus hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts in projected Medicare and Medicaid spending.

One need only look at the fiscal basketcase that is the state of California to grasp why this is terrible policy.  California has an extremely progressive income tax such that the top few percentiles of wage-earners pay the overwhelming share of tax — even moreso than the federal income tax.  As a result, the state is extremely susceptible both to boom/bust cycles and to wealthy taxpayers voting with their feet and leaving the state.  Leaving the country is more costly than moving to a different state, but it’s not completely beyond the pale.

Beyond policy, it’s another example of the left’s bone-deep hostility to success and economic liberty.

In the president’s book, The Audacity of Hope, he devotes an entire chapter to explain what he sees as the appropriate method of constitutional interpretation, and why.  He wrestles at some length with originalism (exemplified however imperfectly by Justice Scalia) before ultimately rejecting it as being too hidebound and inflexible to serve the needs of modern American society.  He then goes on to explain his affinity for living constitutionalism/legal realism (as exemplified however imperfectly by Justice Souter).

I regard living constitutionalism/legal realism as lawless, intellectually incoherent, and corrosive to the social compact that a written constitution codifies.  A written constitution is supposed to be hidebound and inflexible; the entire point is to preserve the substance of the social compact by constraining the method and pace of political change.  If, when attempting to ascertain the meaning of a constitutional provision, your inquiry elevates prudential or structural considerations over the question of what the people actually ratified, then you may be doing many things but you are not honestly and faithfully interpreting the law.

I believe that someone who cannot or will not honestly and faithfully interpret the law can certainly have a brilliant career as an attorney or a legal scholar.  But I believe that such a person is fundamentally unfit to be a judge, where honestly and faithfully interpreting the law is a basic requirement of the job.  And I do not care whether that individual is white, black, Hispanic, male, female, straight, gay, or Martian: I’ll take a bi-racial lesbian polygamist who’ll interpret the Constitution faithfully and honestly over a straight white male whose rulings do violence to its meaning.

I believe that Mr. Obama would not have nominated Ms. Sotomayor to the Supreme Court if she did not share his views with respect to constitutional interpretation.  I believe, therefore, that the burden is on the President and his nominee to satisfactorily demonstrate that Ms. Sotomayor will in fact be guided in her decision-making by fealty to what the people actually ratified, rather than to a political agenda, her own policy preferences, or some visceral, case-at-a-time sense of justice.  Particularly in light of the President’s advocacy for Ms. Sotomayor on the basis of her “empathy,” I do not believe they have met this burden, and I think that Ms. Sotomayor’s nomination ought to be rejected by the Senate notwithstanding her resume.

UPDATE: In response to the “you’d oppose anyone Obama nominated” criticism, I can only say if so, it owes to the fact that anyone Mr. Obama would nominate is a voluptuary of living constitutionalism/legal realism.  The notion that constitutional interpretation is a results-oriented endeavor is not without adherents on the right (see, for example, Richard Posner), but seems to be a regrettably common affliction on the left, these days.

Were Mr. Obama to nominate someone like Cass Sunstein, who wasn’t thrall to living constitutionalism/legal realism, I’d support the nomination unreservedly notwithstanding my political disagreements with the President or his nominee.  While I think the Constitution describes a classically liberal system of government, I do not think that only classic liberals/libertarians are qualified to be judges.  Unfortunately, Mr. Obama’s nominees seem likely to be in the mold of Erwin Chemerinsky.

For the record, of former President Bush’s three nominees to the Court, I supported John Roberts unequivocally, was on the fence about Samuel Alito, and opposed Harriet Miers.

From President Obama’s remarks introducing Surgeon General Regina Benjamin:

Over the last several weeks, key committees in the House and the Senate have made important and unprecedented progress on a plan that will lower costs, provide better care for patients, and curb the worst practices of the insurance companies.  It’s a plan that will not add to our deficit over the next decade.  Let me repeat that:  It is a plan that will not add to our deficit over the next decade — and eventually will help lower our deficit by slowing the skyrocketing cost of Medicare and Medicaid.

The idea that anything that emanates from the bowels of Congress can possibly be capable of reducing costs, improving efficiency, and competing with the private sector on a level playing field is utter fantasy, a triumph of impossibly naive hope over real-world experience.  One doesn’t have to be a cynic to observe that virtually every government endeavor — even those like the military, which despite outstanding personnel achieve not excellence but merely tolerable levels of mediocrity — is an expensive, slipshod boondoggle riven with graft and political patronage that would have private investors running away screaming.  The idea that healthcare reform is somehow going to be different is so far removed from reality that it’s akin to a belief in the Tooth Fairy.  You may as well pretend that by artificially increasing the cost of fossil-fuel based energy production and engaging in a lot of wishful thinking, the United States will reduce global warming while simultaneously and at the same time taking meaningful steps toward achieving energy independence — and that it’ll all be economically painless.  Oh, wait…

Moreover, Mr. Obama is simply lying when he says that the “plan” (there are actually several) currently under consideration is revenue-neutral.  The working estimates for the cost of healthcare reform are $1 trillion over ten years.  Even assuming those estimates are correct (and they’re almost certainly too low; there is not an entitlement program in history that didn’t end up costing far, far more than originally anticipated), the Democratic majority still hasn’t figured out how to pay for the whole thing, and are considering various measures to raise revenue such as soaking the wealthy, taxing employer-funded health benefits, and imposing (or increasing) sin taxes on soft drinks and tobacco.  They’re also indulging in the same fantasy as Mr. Obama, i.e., that the plan will at least in part pay for itself through cost savings.  If even one of their rosy assumptions about how much they’ll save or how much revenue they’ll raise doesn’t pan out, we’re talking about billions of dollars more debt, every year, indefinitely.  In short, anybody tempted to believe that politicians and their functionaries are competent to accurately and honestly forecast the costs of a massive, multi-year public undertaking should take a long, hard look at Boston’s Big Dig.

One other thing, from Mr. Obama’s remarks:

If we step back from this challenge right now, we will leave our children a legacy of debt — a future of crushing costs that bankrupt our families, our businesses, and because we will have done nothing to bring down the cost of Medicare and Medicaid, will crush our government. 

It’s precious that the leader of the political party responsible for this unprecedented explosion of red ink:

is now professing to be exquisitely concerned about bequeathing unto future generations a legacy of debt.  It would have been nice if you’d managed to muster a bit of this fiscal rectitude when Congress was larding the stimulus bill with federal funding for skateboard parks and turtle crossings, sir.

Good Lord:

An animal welfare advisory board to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is recommending the city ban the veterinary practice of de-clawing cats, except in cases of medical necessity.

The San Francisco Commission of Animal Control and Welfare voted 5-1 Thursday in support of a ban, arguing the practice is cruel and often done simply for cosmetic purposes or to prevent pets from clawing furniture, Commission Chair Sally Stephens said.

Stephens is correct in that de-clawing a cat is unnecessary, and is almost always done to prevent the animal from wrecking the upholstery or the curtains rather than for some kind of legitimate medical need.  It’s an intrusive procedure (essentially amputation of the last joint of each of the cat’s toes) that results in a long and painful recovery, and leaves the animal without its primary defensive weapon.  It can lead to balance problems for the animal, and in the abstract it robs the animal of an essential piece of its “catness.”

But while we can all disapprove of the procedure and criticize those who have it done to their pets, it’s something else entirely for a government to actually ban the practice under threat of criminal sanction.  Notwithstanding the good intentions of the bureaucrats involved, it is simply none of the government’s business what people do with their cats’ toes.  The last thing any of us needs is an assortment of government busybodies meddling in our decisions about how to care for our pets.

The “there oughtta be a law” impulse that this effort doubtless springs from is enormously destructive.  People need to learn to leave one another alone, and stop trying to run one another’s lives.

I link to this decision because it includes a dissent by Judge Janice Rogers Brown, the last three paragraphs of which in particular make me want to dance in the aisles:

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