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Author: New Neo

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New Neo

Neo is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at the new neo.

Posted by New Neo on March 06, 2014 32 Comments

Why was our intelligence community caught so flat-footed about Putin's intentions in Ukraine? That's a question being asked on Capitol Hill, and in Politico. One possible answer to the query is, "No, it wasn't." That one was given by James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, and...

Posted by New Neo on March 01, 2014 38 Comments
NOTE: for previous coverage of the situation in Ukraine/Crimea, you can follow this live coverage post. Putin is no doubt quaking in his boots at this warning issued by President Obama:
"We are now deeply concerned by reports of military movements taken by the Russian Federation inside of Ukraine," Obama said in a hastily arranged public statement from the White House briefing room. "Just days after the world came to Russia for the Olympic games, it would invite the condemnation of nations around the world. And indeed, the United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine," the president warned.
Costs...costs...what could they be? Here are some possibilities:

Posted by New Neo on February 28, 2014 15 Comments

Attorney General Eric Holder advises state AGs that they may disregard their oaths of office: Holder said state attorneys general do not have to enforce laws they disagree with, specifically when it comes to the issue of gay marriage. "It is highly unusual for the United States...

Posted by New Neo on February 23, 2014 22 Comments
The title of this post may seem somewhat of an oxymoron, but let's look at the numbers:
A clear majority of Americans, 59%, still view Hillary Clinton favorably a year after she left her post as secretary of state. Clinton's current rating is noticeably lower than the 64% she averaged while serving in President Barack Obama's cabinet. The last time she had a higher unfavorable than favorable rating in the U.S. was in February 2008, when she was running for the Democratic presidential nomination against Obama. The latest findings come from a Gallup poll conducted Feb. 6-9.
At the time Clinton signed on as Secretary of State under Obama, it was hard to understand. Those of us who thought it was a bad decision (in the political sense) on her part seem to have been wrong. She is a very smart political animal, and apparently she rightly ascertained that it was only her temporary opposition to the Great Obama that had made her look bad, and that if she joined him it would burnish her image. And so it has, no matter what she actually did while in his Cabinet, because what she did was every bit as awful as what Obama did, and she did it as his underling. Somehow, though, that seems to have helped her in the minds of the American public. Her favorability rating is a great deal higher than his right now. Here's her favorability chart over time:

Posted by New Neo on February 16, 2014 9 Comments
At this point it's tempting to regard the IRS as not-so-secret agents of the Obama administration and the Democrats. This is not paranoia. As Ed Rogers wrote in the WaPo, it is fact:
Encouraged by the lack of a public backlash, an uninquisitive press, cover from the White House and an eager-to-please bureaucracy, the Democrats are boldly counting on the IRS to be their political and policy enforcer.This statement isn’t an overreach by the “vast right-wing conspiracy” or a phony crisis created by hecklers (like me) on the right — it goes back to the early stages of President Obama’s reelection campaign.
Rogers goes on to list some of the more egregious examples of what has occurred and how the administration has been emboldened by the fact that so far there have been few negative consequences to them for their actions. The hue and cry that might have been expected - and to a certain extent came at first, when some of the revelations about Tea Party harassment were revealed - has been muted and blunted. So now the excesses are being further and more openly institutionalized:

Posted by New Neo on February 16, 2014 14 Comments
Workers of the South, unite:
The workers at the VW plant in Chattanooga voted 712-626 to stay out of the union after a lobbying fight in which Republican politicians warned unionization could lead Volkswagen and automobile companies to leave the state. Union officials...blamed politicians who had warned workers that by joining they union, they could hurt their own economic interests. ...UAW officials vowed they would not give up in their effort to organize workers in the South, a region that historically has been much more difficult to unionize.
Give up? Never. They are patient.

Posted by New Neo on February 10, 2014 8 Comments

Allan Bloom's masterwork The Closing of the American Mind is so laden with thoughtfulness that a reader could stop to reflect on nearly every sentence. Plus, Bloom accomplished the extraordinarily difficult task of writing a serious work about education, politics, history, and philosophy in a...

Posted by New Neo on February 02, 2014 20 Comments
Remember Tom Perkins? The guy who wrote a letter to the editors of The Wall Street Journal comparing the war on the 1% not to Kristallnacht, but to the beginnings of a pattern that could possibly lead to something like Kristallnacht further down the road? If you don't remember, here's a refresher on the relevant part of Perkins' letter:
From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent...This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?
Perkins' missive may just be "the most-read letter to the editor in the history of The Wall Street Journal." And now he's been forced to eat a little crow:
Amid the ongoing media furor and an ungallant rebuke from Kleiner Perkins, Mr. Perkins has apologized for the [Nazi era] comparison, without rebuking the larger argument.
It's no surprise that Perkins was made to walk back his Kristallnacht reference---a fact that doesn't take away from his point. Predictably, when a person invokes a Nazi comparison people scoff, and Perkins compounded his scoffability quotient by invoking the Nazi comparison while defending the very rich, who were already not everybody's favorite people for whom to feel sorry. Nevertheless, what Perkins said isn’t even really all that controversial.

Posted by New Neo on January 30, 2014 13 Comments
When I was solidly engaged in not watching Obama's SOTU speech, I thought of the antidote: Winston Churchill. I have long cringed when anyone refers to Obama as a great orator. To me he seems like a terrible one: flat, repetitive delivery; devoid of content (that is, when he's not engaged in flagrant lying, or errors); and cliché upon cliché. But why single Obama out? The US hasn't had a president who's a great orator in a long, long time. Kennedy had some good moments, and Reagan was very good indeed, but I can't think of anyone of Churchillian quality since Lincoln. But "Churchillian quality" is a tall, tall order. Martin Luther King perhaps, but he wasn't a president. It helped that Churchill was a writer who wrote his own speeches. Actually, if you read the William Manchester biographies of Churchill, you'll learn that Churchill actually dictated most of his speeches in the wee hours of the morning to a bevy of night-owl secretaries. Churchill carefully plotted out his delivery, too, and he was a master at it:

Posted by New Neo on January 24, 2014 11 Comments
Newly-elected Virginia AG Mark Herring announced he will be joining the plaintiffs in lawsuits challenging the state’s ban on gay marriage. So not only is he declining to defend Virginia's gay marriage ban, which was passed with 57% of the vote (including Herring's) in 2006, but he is arguing for the courts to strike it down as unconstitutional. If the people of Virginia wanted to repeal the ban, the proper remedy would be to repeal the ban. And there's nothing stopping the judiciary of Virginia from declaring the ban unconstitutional. In fact, they may have several opportunities to do so - but now, because of Herring's announcement, the people of Virginia who voted for the amendment may lack a strong advocate to plead their case. AG Mark Herring is tasked with defending the law of Virginia in court. If Herring wanted to declare it unconstitutional, he should have tried to become a judge rather than running for AG. Republicans in the state seem to agree, not surprisingly:
"It took Mark Herring less than a month to decide he doesn't want to be Attorney General. The first job of Virginia's Attorney General is to be the Commonwealth's law firm, and to defend the duly passed laws of Commonwealth," said Republican Party of Virginia Chairman Pat Mullins.

Posted by New Neo on January 19, 2014 33 Comments
On a recent Hot Air thread about whether it's desirable to impeach Obama I saw this comment:
Impeachment would be like a child throwing a temper tantrum — lots of sound and fury signifying extreme frustration. But in the end Obama would still be there.
Impeachment is not an absolute impossibility before Obama's second term is through. But impeachment would be a very bad idea at this point, even though the GOP controls the House, and even though there's plenty of fodder for impeachment. Just for the sake of argument, let's say that the Republicans in the House have not only the votes but the guts to do it. But the effort would go nowhere in the Senate; they would not get the requisite two-thirds for conviction. The failed process would only anger the public, the great majority of whom would find it to be vindictive overkill (as well as something that gets in the way of whatever it is that they think Congress is supposed to be doing instead). Such an action would increase Obama's approval rating, and perhaps even lead to the Democrats holding the Senate in 2014 or even making advances in both bodies of Congress.

Posted by New Neo on January 15, 2014 16 Comments
We've finally gotten some data on who has actually signed up for Obamacare on the exchanges. At first glance, it would look bad for the insurance companies. There are way fewer young people (only 24% are between the ages of 18 and 34) than the original stated goal. But it doesn't matter for the first year or two because the government has guaranteed to insurance companies that they'll be protected against loss. So the fact that enrollees may be older than expected---and therefore much more likely to make claims and reduce insurance companies' profit margins---is okay because government will take up the slack. And by "government" we mean, of course, the taxpayer. And by "taxpayer" we mean the wealthy taxpayer, although the middle class taxpayer also will pay more in many circumstances. Here's a list of the taxes that are supposed to fund Obamacare. Will they be adequate to cover the fact that nearly 80% of the exchanges' enrollees are getting subsidies so far? It depends on whether this was approximately the number anticipated, and also on whether the tax revenues actually collected will be as great as had been projected. The Byzantine nature of Obamacare is reflected in the fact that one of the largest items in the list of Obamacare funding tax sources is the following:
$60.1 Billion [projected amount of revenue]: Tax on Health Insurers: Annual tax on the industry imposed relative to health insurance premiums collected that year. Phases in gradually until 2018. Fully-imposed on firms with $50 million in profits.
So Obamacare giveth to the insurance companies and then it taketh away. And then it giveth back again, in a sort of shell game.

Posted by New Neo on January 12, 2014 33 Comments
Ever wonder how it is that so many self-proclaimed liberals and "progressives" don't seem to care about preserving liberty? Especially in the last decade or so, as the liberal wing of the Democratic Party has moved ever leftward and the assaults on liberty have cascaded, liberals seem more and more to divide into two camps: those who retain some love of liberty and those who do not. The relative size of these two groups is unclear; my perception is that the first group is far smaller than the second. But the two groups exist, and what seems to differentiate them are (a) the person's need to control others and/or society; and (b) the degree to which the person thinks government can do so effectively and get the desired results. Many liberals state that their motives are "good"---that is, to do good. They say they want people to be happier, healthier, and in general just better. Some actually seem sincere in this, as well as being motivated by a self-serving need to feel that they are good people for wanting to do good. But some liberals and many many leftists, especially activist leftists, have a different motivation: anger, and the desire for power and control. Back when Mayor Bloomberg of New York was heavily engaged in banning Big Gulps, a few liberals I know were offended by what Bloomberg had done, although many others were in favor. That was one of the strongest demonstrations of the sometimes-invisible dividing line between those liberals who still value liberty and those who do not, the latter being the outright and flagrant statists (don't forget, too, that there are Republican statists as well, although far fewer). You may recall Sarah Conly, author of Against Autonomy, an excellent demonstration of the statist impulse and the supposedly do-good one combining to create a vile synergy. And who better to explain it all than Ms. Conly herself:

Posted by New Neo on January 05, 2014 36 Comments

According to a study of the Medicaid expansion program in Oregon, giving people Medicaid appears to increase their ER use, rather than decreasing it as Obamacare proponents had predicted. Why on earth would this be any sort of surprise? I know, I know: the idea was...

Posted by New Neo on January 02, 2014 32 Comments

The New York Times says Edward Snowden should be allowed back into the country and given clemency, but the title of the editorial, "Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower" sets the tone for inaccuracy because the term is not legally applicable to Snowden whether you support what he...

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