Basically all government action redistributes wealth, to one degree or another. Imagine a society in which there is a one-dollar “head tax” (that is, every person pays exactly one dollar), and all it pays for is a fire department. As soon as that fire department saves a house, then that society has effectively just redistributed wealth from the community as a whole, into the pockets of the person whose house got saved. And that’s not even counting the salaries of the firefighters, the suppliers of the various firefighting equipment, etc. It is impossible for government to do anything without effectively redistributing wealth from one person or group to another.
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The Supreme Court just decided to take on an extremely interesting, and difficult, case. Back in 2004, Congress passed the Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act that mandated a two year prison sentence for anyone who “knowingly transfers, possesses, or uses, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person” (called “aggravated identity theft”). The difficulty is that the Justice Department has started charging illegal immigrants with this crime; people who use fake social security numbers, but who never knowingly used them to impersonate another person. Of course, in most cases the Justice Department really isn’t interested in charging people with that crime–they would rather deport someone now than hold them for two years in federal prison–but they are using the charge to cajole illegal immigrants into pleading guilty to lesser immigration charges; in other words, if you decide to fight your deportation, then we’ll throw the book at you.
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OK, the McCain camp either needs to find a new narrative, or they need to drop this whole Bill Ayers thing. McCain is still using the line “we need to know the full extent of the relationship”. The problem is that there have been multiple news organizations who have looked into the relationship, Obama’s campaign has released information on the relationship, Obama himself has addressed the relationship multiple times (including at least one explanation during a debate that McCain himself was present for), there have been multiple interviews and articles written by both Democrats and Republicans about why it is quite normal for anyone involved in education work in Chicago to know Bill Ayers… you get the point.
We DO know the full extent of the relationship: they live in the same neighborhood, they served on the same charity board, and when Obama was a new state senator Ayers hosted a fund raiser for him. That’s the “full extent of the relationship” as far as anyone can remember or document. Everyone who has been paying attention knows that… except, apparently, for John McCain.
So look, if you think that this relationship was inappropriate, fine. Say so, and tell us why we should care. But the argument that “we don’t know the full extent of the relationship” doesn’t pass the laugh test. The only cover up here is that McCain is covering his own ears to the facts that everyone else seems to know already.
My wife and I were flipping through the news shows this evening, just checking out the coverage of the Powell endorsement when we ran across Pat Buchanan on Hardball telling the audience that Powell had betrayed the Republican Party. After all, it was a Republican president that appointed him to the Joint Chiefs and a Republican president that appointed him Secretary of State. Powell was therefore stabbing McCain in the back, according to Buchanan. Moreover, Buchanan knew of no real Republican who was unhappy with either the Roberts or Alito pick, and therefore Powell’s criticism of conservative Supreme Court justices demonstrated that he wasn’t really Republican in the first place.
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Oct 172008
It has become fashionable among news networks to fact check candidate statements periodically, especially the claims made during the debates. In theory, this is great: candidates make an awful lot of misleading and down-right false statements during the course of the campaign and it’s nice to have someone standing there and saying “that’s just not right”. But like everything else in life that ought to be good and noble, you have to read the fine print.
There are two big problems, in particular. Continue reading »
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