According to the L.A. Times, federal officials report that there were 34 deaths in the past decade from Toyota vehicles suddenly and unintentionally accelerating.

Then again, federal officials also report that there were 34 deaths from people not having health insurance while you were reading the last sentence.

A sensationalistic crash that killed four occupants of a Lexus last year in San Diego resulted in nationwide media exposure regarding supposed Toyota design flaws.  Toyota investigated and found that the car’s floor mat had become stuck to the accelerator, preventing it from operating properly.  The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration backed up Toyota: as outlined in the inspection report, “The right clip was installed into the grommet of the carpeting but not installed into the mat.  The left clip was… not clipped to either the carpet or the rubber mat…  [T]he bottom edge of the accelerator pedal had melted to the upper right corner of the mat…  [W]hile it was a Lexus brand mat, it was not the correct application for the vehicle.”

Nonetheless, the incident led to an accumulation of complaints about Toyota and high-profile recalls for problems ranging from Sudden Unintended Acceleration (SUA) to brake problems to faulty steering.  The federal government butted in by holding hearings last month in which they grilled Toyota executives about alleged glitches in their vehicles’ electronic throttles; they also demanded to know when Japanese execs would commit hara-kiri to atone for their sins.

As the Times noted, virtually all of the accident-related deaths reported this year took place before 2010, some as far back as 20 years.  In other words, motorists are jumping on the bandwagon, contributing horror stories to a ravenous media, and helping perpetuate an urban legend.  Or, as one agency spokeswoman diplomatically noted, “It is normal for NHTSA to receive an increase in consumer complaints after a recall is announced and the public learns of a safety defect.”

Toyota’s situation wasn’t helped by a high-profile SUA-type incident Monday on the California freeway (why does everything nutty happen in California?) with a Prius, a model included in the floor mat recall.

As Terence Corcoran of Canada’s National Post notes, these types of incidents and the dozens of investigations that have followed them have never yielded any hard data revealing a design flaw leading to SUA.  To this day they remain a collection of tall tales.

Corcoran’s devastating, multipart, investigative analysis concludes, “All of the reports are anecdotal accounts of out-of-control vehicles for reasons that nobody can ever adequately explain…  Of the millions of cars on the road, only a few hundred anecdotal reports exist, making it far more likely that other things are happening, including driver mistakes and even fluke occurrences that no amount of corporate fixing can avoid…  Audi famously became victim of a[n] SUA craze a couple of decades ago, losing massive market share even though no problem was ever identified beyond driver error.”

Corcoran deconstructs a laughable graph printed in the Wall Street Journal showing that Toyota-related complaints steadily doubled from 2000 to 2008.  Corcoran notes that this chart, not surprisingly, precisely tracks the doubling of Toyota’s vehicle sales from 2000 to 2008, thus demonstrating that safety complaints by percentage of market share have not increased.

In fact, Edmunds.com reports that of the top 20 carmakers, Toyota is 17th in complaints-to-market share ratio, well below GM (#11), Ford (#10), and Chrysler (#7).

In order to slander Toyota, smarty-pants automotive technology professor Dave Gilbert of Southern Illinois University recently demonstrated to gullible ABC reporter Brian Ross how a supposed flaw in the Toyota Avalon’s wiring could trigger SUA.  Viewers watched Gilbert reroute exposed wiring in the front seat to make the car speed up at an alarming rate, while Ross sat incredulous and white-knuckled beside him.

As Toyota patiently explained in a subsequent press conference, electronics systems do not rewire themselves.

Mike Allen thoroughly debunked this explanation in a Popular Mechanics article published Monday: “Here’s what Gilbert had to do to make his Avalon go rogue: He had to cut open three of the six wires that travel from the pedal assembly to the engine computer…  Next he had to insert a specific 200-ohm resistor between the two signal wires.  Finally, he had to generate a direct short between the 5-volt supply lines and the signal leads…  [T]he order of the modification is important.  Apply the 5-volt power lead to the wires before inserting the resistor and the computer would instead throw a fault code and go into limp mode.”

In other words, the only way a Toyota automobile could experience electronically induced SUA is if an automotive technology professor was sitting in the front seat doing it by hand.

Allen notes two other inconvenient facts: (1) SUA can be induced via Gilbert’s manipulations in any other make, not just a Toyota, and (2) not one case of SUA in Toyota’s history has been ascribed to faulty wiring.

So the recent outrage over the supposedly crumbling record of the mass-market car company with the best safety record in the world is due to factors that have nothing to do with Toyota: floor mats not manufactured by the automaker or improperly installed; media sensationalism causing a spike in reported incidents; driver error; and people’s confusion over electronic gadgets they don’t understand.

There’s a political angle to all of this, too.  The hysteria is no doubt being driven by protectionism and suspicion of products made by foreign companies, perhaps fueled by demonstrable defects in Chinese products in recent years, but unfairly aimed at first-world technological powerhouse Japan.

I also assume there is scant support in Democratic Washington for propping up Toyota, a non-unionized company that has doubled its market share over the past decade.  There’s also probably little desire in the administration to help a competitor car company the President hasn’t partially taken over, like GM or Chrysler.

If I were the CEO of Ford, I’d be double-checking my cars’ airbag systems right about now.

Scott Spiegel lives in New York City and writes at: www.scottspiegel.com.

To truly understand the mixed reaction of Baylor, one must understand the infighting that has occurred there for a decade. That is too long a discussion to have now, so here is the one-sentence version: There are those wish Baylor to be a midsized, Baptist, regionally prestigious university, where professors are teachers before researchers; conversely, there are those who wish Baylor to become a highly ranked, research-heavy, national leader in integrating faith and learning—a Texas-Baptist version of Notre Dame. That is oversimplification and both sides are not mutually exclusive, but it works for our purposes at the moment. For the record, I’m more in the latter camp than the former. 

Enter Ken Starr.

Certainly, he is a national figure—but a controversial one, and one who is devoutly Christian but not from a Baptist background. There are those who hail Starr as the type of nationally recognizable figure Baylor has not previously had at the helm, and those who cringe at Starr as only the latest example of Baylor’s foolish departure from its traditions. 

Moving away from the background information, the real issue here is hyper-partisanship. And I don’t mean hyper-partisanship in terms of fighting on Capitol Hill. I actually like when politicians are partisan about politics. True believers on both sides of the aisle should be vociferously defending their principles. Politicians have screamed at each other for centuries and will do so until the end of time. No, the kind of hyper-partisanship that is ugly here is the kind that says we’re going to simply write people off because of partisan or controversial statements or actions. When leftists attempted to make Justice Alito a racist because of his brief membership in a Princeton alumni group skeptical of affirmative action, that was hyper-partisanship at its worst. When conservatives took admittedly weird, but inconsequential comments of Justice Sotomayor, make a mountain of a molehill with them, and attempted to disqualify her from the high court, that is hyper-partisanship at its worst.

This is all important because the criticism against Ken Starr boils down to something like this: He cannot lead a major university because he piloted a right-wing smear campaign against President Clinton. In other words, because Starr was involved in a high profile controversy, he is to be forever outcast as “partisan” and “controversial.” But even if we grant the debatable premise that Starr allow a legal investigation to devolve into a right-wing witchunt… So what? As far as smoking-gun arguments go, this one kind of sucks.

Rather than automatically dismiss Starr as a wing-nut because our culture has the attention span of a gnat and the analytical capacity of a desk lamp, the more appropriate thing to do is to examine Starr in greater depth. In this examination, we must look for patterns and themes—do we see competency and accomplishment or do we see exclusively partisan undertakings and political hackery?

Let’s use three questions to guide us:

1. Is this person objectively qualified?

Objectivity is hard to define these days, so let’s do this through an exercise I call the “blind resume test.” I’m going to give you the highlights of a resume and we’ll see if they are sufficient to qualify someone for president of a university.

Resume X:

- B.A. George Washington Univ, M.A. Brown Univ, J.D. Duke Univ School of Law

- Law Clerk, Judge David W. Dyer 5th Circuit Court of Appeals 

- Law Clerk, Chief Justice Warren Burger

- Private practice, Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher

- Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, DC Circuit

- Solicitor General of the United States

- Partner, Kirkland & Ellis LLP

- Independent Prosecutor, Whitewater and other investigations

- Time Magazine Man of the Year, 1998 (shared)

- Visiting Professor, NYU Law, George Mason Univ School of Law

- Dean, Pepperdine Univ School of Law

That, of course, is the resume of one Ken Starr. Suffice to say, any fair-minded person would say that he is highly qualified for the position.

2. What do this person’s peers in their field say about them?

Well here is a good sampling of praise for Ken Starr from many significant figures. But suffice to say, when you get Republican U.S. Presidents, ACLU presidents, law school deans, and CEOs going to bat for you, then you must be doing something right.

Perhaps even more significant for Starr, he garnered praise from the law school at his incoming school from figures who I’m certain do not see eye to eye with him politically.

Baylor Law School Dean Bradley Toben: “Judge Starr brings to Baylor University a wealth of high profile experience in public service and in professional and graduate education. He has guided Pepperdine School of Law to a new and significant level of prominence. He will now use his gifts and talents to do likewise for our university.”

Prominent Criminal Law Professor Mark Osler: “This is a great choice… As a former prosecutor, there were aspects of the Clinton investigation which deeply troubled me. However, I think that Dean Starr has proven himself at Pepperdine Law as someone who will put the institution first, is a strong leader, and who will finally bring stable leadership to Baylor… I have known Ken Starr for several years, been to his home a few times, and we have discussed our work at length. I have found him to be gracious, strikingly intelligent, and humble.”

3. What if we turned the tables?

Ok, another blind resume exercise:

- B.A. Yale Univ, Rhodes Scholar, M.A. Univ of Oxford, J.D. Univ of Oklahoma School of Law

- Representative, Oklahoma State House of Representatives

- Professor, Oklahoma Baptist Univ

- Governor of Oklahoma

- U.S. Senator from Oklahoma

- Board of Directors, Texas Instruments and American Airlines

- Co-chairman of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board

This is the resume of the current Univ of Oklahoma President, David Boren, a Democrat. Boren is a great fit at the Univ of Oklahoma, and why wouldn’t he be? Who wouldn’t want individuals with the resumes of a Starr or Boren or Robert Gates, or potentially a Hillary Clinton to lead their universities?

When we take emotions and politics out of what is essentially a non-political decision, it is much easier to warm up to highly qualified, highly competent choices.

This overly simple, three layer analysis can be applied to judicial and executive appointments or political candidates. It would weed out the Van Joneses of the world but allow for the Miguel Estradas. This is not to say there are not legitimate grounds for being dismissive of people, I wouldn't want to hire Elliott Spitzer or Mark Foley to run my university. But I wouldn't hesitate to welcome a serious, qualified person with whom I disagree politically to take the top job at a university. 

When we, as a culture, approach people and issues being dismissive and short-sighted, we do so at our own peril. 

Ed. note: Kevin Goll is a proud Baylor alumn.

Last summer, NBC’s Brian Williams wrote a piece called “The Hurt Locker: Hurting for a Fact-Checker” regarding one of the top two contenders for Best Picture at this weekend’s Oscars.  Williams noted, “I found a slew of technical inaccuracies based only on my few trips to Iraq during the height of the conflict.  Seeing the movie made me go back over many of the positive reviews I read…  [I]t is now clear none of them was written by anyone who had spent any time with U.S. armed forces in Iraq.”

Williams suggested that the filmmakers botched the following minor details: the vehicles, the armor, the armaments, the helmets, the uniforms, the communications technology, the military jargon, the unit structure, the command procedure, and the mission logistics.

On the plus side, Williams noted that the filmmakers accurately portrayed soldiers’ fingernails being dirty and their eyelashes being covered with dust.  Score one for cinéma vérité!  Williams also praised the film’s lovely desert scenery.

Williams ended, “I’d like to watch ‘The Hurt Locker’ with a combat veteran, but my layman’s eyes found way too much to quarrel with.”

Fortunately for Williams, combat veterans have already seen the film.  Unfortunately for director Kathryn Bigelow, their criticism of the film is even more scathing than that of Williams.

Paul Rieckhoff, Founder and Executive Director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, recently concluded in Newsweek that “Hollywood’s latest attempt to define the Iraq War and the American troops who have fought in it is just as disappointing as all the others produced so far.”

Rieckhoff, while pointing out additional and more nuanced inaccuracies than Williams, argues that the snowballing accumulation of gaffes in the movie is not trivial, but rather reflects a sloppy, unforgivable rendering of the military that reveals profound ignorance and amounts to great disrespect on the filmmakers’ part.

For example, Rieckhoff criticizes the depiction of the highly specialized Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) group at the center of the film as casually putting on other military hats in their spare time, expertly carrying out sniper missions and kicking in doors and checking buildings for insurgents, jobs for which they would never have been trained.

Rieckhoff writes, “The scene with Jeremy Renner’s character sneaking off base to chase a boy he is worried about is as fictional as Jason Bourne…  The men in my platoon followed rules and orders, and they stuck with their fellow soldiers…  They don’t run around on their own unless they want to be court-martialed—or killed.”

The L.A. Times’ Julian Barnes cites EOD team members in Iraq who damn “The Hurt Locker” with faint praise: they call it “a good action movie if you know nothing about defusing roadside bombs or the military.”  (How about that sound editing!)

Barnes quotes EOD technician Sgt. Eric Gordon: “I would watch it with other EOD people, and we would laugh.”  (Then again, many people I know have had the same reaction to fellow Oscar nominee “Avatar.”)  Gordon compared one soldier defusing a bomb using wire cutters to “a firefighter go into a building with a squirt bottle.”

An even more sobering criticism of the movie involves its portrayal of the main character, Sergeant William James, as a danger-loving, adrenaline-addicted, protocol-shredding commando who wantonly disrupts unit cohesion and endangers unit members with irresponsible, tough-guy playacting.

The Washington Post quotes Iraq veteran Ryan Gallucci stating that he had to keep turning the movie off “or else I would have thrown my remote through the television.”  Gallucci admits that he kept wanting to see James “blown up…  I wanted to see his poor teammates get another team leader, who was actually concerned about their safety.”

In an essay for The New York Times subtly titled “How Not to Depict a War,” EOD team videographer Michael Kamber adds that the film’s many factual errors “are mere details compared to the way Sergeant James repeatedly swaggers up to bombs…  [T]he chances of recklessly approaching even a single command-detonated bomb and surviving are quite small.  Yet we are made to believe that Sergeant James has disabled over 800 bombs in this reckless, cowboy-like fashion.”  (Yes, but will the film win Best Sound Mixing?)

The most damning indictment of the film, however, comes from American-Israeli journalist Caroline Glick.  She notes, “There is no plot.  We don’t know anything about these soldiers.  We don’t know why they joined the US Army.  We don’t know how they feel about Iraq…  All we are given are GI Joes who defuse bombs.  Supposedly by watching them, we are supposed to achieve some deeper understanding of the war.  But really all we see is context-free violence which teaches us nothing about war.  Supposedly James is a hero.  But we don’t have any idea what he’s fighting for.  So why should we care about him?”

So why is “The Hurt Locker” nominated for a gazillion Academy Awards?  My theory is that the movie was made for and enjoyed by people who either (1) know nothing about war, and are curious about what it would be like to be embedded in a particular unit, or (2) care nothing about war, and are delighted to see it depicted as a meaningless, nihilistic exercise that illustrates the futility of picking up arms to fight for one’s country’s security interests.

The former group are are not getting an accurate representation, at least for this group in this conflict.

As for the latter group, Glick writes, “The Hurt Locker works for them because its post-modern, context-free rendering of the war is a picture-perfect far-left portrayal of war.  No, the Americans aren’t terrible, they are nothings…  War is futile.  There is no purpose to war except staying alive.”

Glick counters this: “[S]oldiers aren’t two-dimensional and war isn’t about nothing.  And the war in Iraq is neither futile nor meaningless.  The Hurt Locker was a two-dimensional film about a meaningless war and nothing soldiers.”

In other words: par for the course for Hollywood war films these days.

Scott Spiegel lives in New York City and writes at: www.scottspiegel.com.

Recently the mainstream media was howling with derision over the fact that Sarah Palin had written a few words on the inside of her hand to remind herself of the key themes she wanted to address in her speech at the Tea Party Convention in Nashville last week.

Admittedly, one would have expected subjects such as Energy, Tax Cuts, and Lift American Spirits to be top-of-mind for Palin, who has consistently and admirably embodied these stances throughout her career, including her 2008 vice-presidential run.

What the MSM did not explain was how Obama’s ubiquitous reliance on his TelePrompTer, including at a recent pep talk with sixth-graders in Falls Church, Virginia, somehow reflected a greater skill at extemporizing or a more masterful command of facts on his part.

The Associated Press chided Palin for relying on a memory aid after having mocked Obama’s use of his TelePrompTer.  It’s true: Palin did jot down a few notes to help her stay focused during her 40-minute Tea Party Convention keynote address, the second-most important speech of her career.  Was Obama’s five-minute chat with 11-year-olds at Graham Road Elementary School so important to his legacy that it required twin, six-foot-tall TelePrompTer monitors to help him get every word right?

Meanwhile, Joe “Gaffe-tastic” Biden has continued to demonstrate his propensity for committing more blunders in any given week than Palin has made in her entire life.  Appearing on Larry King last week, Biden stated that the Iraq War “could be one of the great achievements of this administration.”

This is the same Iraq War, you’ll recall: (a) that Obama voted against, (b) that Biden voted for but later turned against, and (c) whose troop surge Obama and Biden voted against and denounced throughout 2008, even after it had demonstrably worked.  In 2007, Biden condemned General David Petraeus as “dead flat wrong” for wanting to go through with the surge rather than immediately withdrawing our soldiers and partitioning Iraq into three ethnic regions.

It would be one thing if circumstances had improved dramatically in Iraq since Obama took office, and the administration had acted quickly to remove troops ahead of schedule, thus saving the U.S. time and money and improving relations with Iraqis.  But the drawdown of 90,000 troops currently taking place was spelled out in 2008, according to a George W. Bush-negotiated arrangement, the Status of Forces Agreement, and is unfolding exactly as written.  So Obama doesn’t even deserve credit for “ending” the war in Iraq.

Saying that Iraq could be one of the great successes of the Obama administration is like saying that the stagehand who pulled the curtain on the debut of Così Fan Tutte is responsible for one of the great successes of the Metropolitan Opera House.

Then there’s Biden’s nutty defense of the Justice Department’s decision to read Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights after just 50 minutes of questioning.  Biden noted that the Bush administration gave the same treatment to shoe bomber Richard Reid in 2001.  Unfortunately, Biden is blissfully ignorant of the fact that the military commissions to detain Islamic terrorists had not even been set up by the time the shoe bomber had struck.  Reid attempted his attack three months after 9/11, whereas Abdulmutallab attempted his attack eight years and three months after 9/11.

Let’s not forget that Biden was one of the chief opponents of the Afghanistan surge Obama reluctantly ordered in late 2008.  Biden had argued behind the scenes for increasing drone attacks to pick off Al-Qaeda members, and against sending more troops to fight counterinsurgents.  Fortunately, Obama didn’t listen to Biden, and the surge is already demonstrating results, as in Tuesday’s apprehension of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the most significant Taliban capture in over eight years.

This has been the pattern for a year-and-a-half now: Palin makes true statements—that the Vice-President is the head of the Senate, that the health care bill would require panels of bureaucrats to ration care—that are denounced as “gaffes” and “lies,” while Biden regularly weaves twisted fantasies out of cotton candy and is heralded as the voice of wisdom and experience.

The clincher that the MSM held Palin to a higher standard than Biden throughout the 2008 presidential campaign is that they constantly compared her record to Obama’s, not Biden’s.  (“The Republicans’ #2 doesn’t have that much more executive and business experience than the Democrats’ #1!”)

It takes some serious intellectual dishonesty for Democrats to claim we are safer with Biden as Vice President than we would have been with Palin.

Scott Spiegel lives in New York City and writes at: www.scottspiegel.com.

Discouraging military service, bean counting minority group members instead of evaluating achievement, injecting irrelevant sexual undertones—sound like conservative stances to me!

As Miss Manners once wrote on sexual orientation, the important distinction these days seems to be not gays vs. straights, but people who think other people’s sex lives are open for scrutiny vs. those who don’t.

A rapidly dwindling number of conservatives have been arguing that the military should preserve its ban on gays serving openly in the military.

The U.S.’s highest ranking military official, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, happens to disagree.  In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, he declared in no uncertain terms that “allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”  Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the nation’s other top defense official, testified alongside Mullen in support of repealing the ban.

Just before President Obama took office, 104 retired admirals and generals had signed a statement urging the next president to overturn the ban.

Apparently all of this wasn’t good enough for Senator John McCain, who had categorically stated in 2006, “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.”  Last week McCain told Mullen and Gates that he still opposes lifting the ban.

I can understand some conservatives’ suspicion regarding overturning the ban on gays in the military, when the last president who tried to do so (Clinton) had nothing but contempt for the military and aggressively eroded its capabilities every year he was in office.

But those opposed to lifting the ban have offered a lame series of unrelated, “they doth protest too much”-sounding excuses more befitting liberals’ shifting defenses of their misguided and unconstitutional policies.

For example, there’s the argument that we shouldn’t “experiment” with the military while we’re in the middle of two wars.

I notice that we weren’t in the middle of any wars in 1993, when President Clinton first proposed lifting the ban.  If anything, we need more recruits now, due to the notoriously long and repeated tours of duty our soldiers have had to undergo in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the need for specialized recruits such as Arabic translators.

The notion that our current roster of troops could do their jobs better if they weren’t distracted by the presence of the estimated 65,000 gay U.S. troops helping them out is ludicrous.  The more soldiers who are trained and willing to fight our wars, the better.  One of the best conservative arguments for the greatness of the U.S. is that we are able to get so many highly qualified people to volunteer for our military, and that so few leave due to conflict or dissatisfaction.

The necessity of maximizing troop strength during wartime is also reflected by the fact that the number of troops discharged for being gay decreased almost every year from 2001 to 2009, even though general military enlistment was up after the September 11 attacks.

For what it’s worth, we did experiment with this policy in recent history, and during a war at that: the ban on discharging gays was suspended during the Persian Gulf War, with no adverse consequences.

Then there’s the highly objective and verifiable suggestion that homosexuality is “incompatible” with military service.

This flimsy proposition is torn to smithereens by the inconvenient facts that gays: (1) currently serve honorably in the military, (2) have served honorably in the military since our country’s founding, and (3) already serve openly in the military in 30 major countries around the world, including nearly every NATO member and other U.S. allies such as Australia and Israel.  American soldiers serve alongside openly gay soldiers in these armies, and I haven’t heard about any mass defections on their part over fellow gay soldiers’ unprofessional conduct.

Conservatives generally reject affirmative action, correctly viewing the policy as amounting to reverse discrimination.  Why are so many conservatives hell-bent on discriminating against gays in the military?  It is true that some conservatives probably fear the day when gay rights groups start loosening standards for gays in the military to promote diversity or to right historical wrongs.  But just because the same thing happened with race and gender doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have granted equal rights to African Americans and women.

Violent felons, card-carrying Marxists, and radical Islamists may all happily serve in the U.S. army.  What sense does it make that, say, an Episcopalian Log Cabin Republican can’t?  Even a gay person who never utters a word about his sexual orientation in the military can be discharged for the act of getting married in one of the five states that allow it.

There’s also the contention that unit cohesion would be disrupted.  Yet the same claim was made regarding racial integration of the military in the 1950s.  This assertion slanders dedicated service members by purporting that (1) gay soldiers can’t do their jobs without making sexual advances toward their peers, and (2) heterosexual soldiers can’t do their jobs without dwelling on the possibility of advances from their peers.  Here I thought conservatives were the ones who held our military in such high esteem.

Admittedly, gays are asking for a tall order from the military: namely—nothing.  Nothing needs to be done to allow gays to serve openly, except for our Commander-in-Chief or Congress to declare that it be so.  Gays already serve.  Heterosexual service members claim they already know who many of their gay unit members are and don’t care.  If heterosexual soldiers can discern the most obvious cases and aren’t uncomfortable around these people, I think they can tolerate the existence of cases so undetectable they otherwise wouldn’t have guessed if they hadn’t found out.

All the military needs to do now is stop wasting time and resources sniffing out gays like contraband and axing them after having spent millions of dollars to train them.

Leftists are usually the ones infusing sexual undercurrents and lurid motives where none exist—pointing out latent homoeroticism in “Winnie the Pooh” or condemning “heteronormativity” in Jane Austen.  Why are some conservatives so intent on insisting that the seething, passionate impetus undergirding military service is… gay lust?

Scott Spiegel lives in New York City and writes at: www.scottspiegel.com.

Ed. Note: The views in this guest-column are those of Mr. Spiegel, and do not, necessarily, always reflect the views of Lasing Liberty.

If deficit spending is the way out of an economic downturn, as leftist economists like Paul Krugman keep telling us, then one way to characterize President Obama’s approach to reviving the ailing economy is “killing it with kindness.”

Another is “tough love”—not the kind where you force hard choices and self-discipline, but the kind where you shoot the poor beast to put it out of its misery.

James Clyburn, House Majority Whip, recently crystallized the Democrats’ position on fiscal responsibility when he announced, “We’re not going to save our way out of this recession.  We’ve got to spend our way out of this recession, and I think most economists know that.”

Here are some fun facts about Obama’s proposed federal budgets over the next decade:

•    The projected deficit for Obama’s 2010 budget is $1.6 trillion, which is 10% larger than the 2009 deficit, which was three times as big as the record 2008 deficit under President Bush.

•    The projected 2010 deficit is 10 times as large as the deficit for Bush’s 2007 budget, the latter of which included funding for the troop surge that won the war in Iraq.  Nearly matching our accomplishment in Iraq, the White House Travel Office has approved a trip for Obama to go to Cambridge, Massachusetts in November to get a Democratic dogcatcher elected in Harvard Square.

•    The projected 2010 deficit will render our national debt 13% bigger on the last day of this year than it is today.  Projected 2010-11 deficits will cause the debt to swell 23% bigger than it is now.  By 2020, the debt will be twice as big as it is today.

•    By 2013 the deficit will recede to $700 billion, a “mere” half of the 2009 deficit, then ratchet up again to $1 trillion by 2020.  Even this will happen only if Congress agrees to drastic spending cuts before 2013, which it has already expressed strong resistance to doing.

•    All of these numbers are conditional on what many private sector economists call overly optimistic expectations held by the current administration regarding growth of the economy.

These sobering statistics raise a number of tough questions about the measures Obama proposes to bring down the deficit—which, naturally, he will never answer satisfactorily.

For example: in his budget address on Monday, Obama stated, “Because small businesses are critical creators of new jobs and economic growth, the budget eliminates capital gains taxes for investments in small firms and includes measures to increase these firms’ access to the loans they need to meet payroll, expand their operations, and hire new workers.”

Why only small businesses?  Why not medium and large businesses?  Who adds more jobs to the economy—Sal’s Pizzeria, a local franchise of Linens ‘n Things, or Microsoft Corporation?

Obama proposes letting the Bush tax cuts expire for families making over $250,000 a year.  He wants to impose a new tax—sorry, “financial crisis responsibility fee”—on banks and corporations who received TARP money, some of whom were forced by the administration to take it.  Obama wants to strip away tax breaks from oil and gas corporations.

So why would Obama want to choke the engines of growth and job creation by saddling them with tax increases?  If the absence of a $5,000 tax credit would hinder a small business from new hiring, what does he think the addition of hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes to corporations would do to their hiring?  Do big corporations hire workers out of the goodness of their hearts, with no concern for the bottom line?

Also, given that many of those families who make over $250,000 are headed by small business owners, how does Obama justify giving them tax credits while simultaneously increasing their taxes?  Is his administration even feigning consistency here?

History shows that cutting individual and corporate tax rates increases long-term tax revenue.  Obama was specifically asked about this proven fact by George Stephanopoulos during a primary debate with Hillary Clinton.  Obama stated outright that even if this pattern were true, he would still favor higher taxes on the wealthy to promote “fair” taxation.

Obama is free to endorse Marxist policies if he desires, but how can he turn around and claim that his proposal to increase taxes for the wealthy is an effective way to reduce long-term deficits?

When you’re handed a hot potato such as the sickly economy—a fate Obama has reminded us of precisely eight million times since he was elected office—the responsible solution is to let it cool down.

Instead, Obama proposes to cremate it.

Scott Spiegel lives in New York City and writes at: www.scottspiegel.com.

Ed. Note: The views in this guest-column are those of Mr. Spiegel, and do not, necessarily, always reflect the views of Lasing Liberty.

The most duplicitous paragraph in Obama’s State of the Union speech was this:

Last year, we made the largest investment in basic research funding in history… You can see the results of last year's investment in clean energy -- in the North Carolina company that will create 1200 jobs nationwide helping to make advanced batteries; or in the California business that will put 1,000 people to work making solar panels…

Since the President insists on calling government spending “investment,” I think it’s important to point out the obvious.  First, the government has no money to “invest” beyond what it seizes from the private sector.  And whether the money comes from direct taxation, borrowing, or printing—one way or another—every American citizen is paying for every “investment.” Government does not create wealth; it leeches it.

Second, these aren’t investments at all, unless you consider investing to be placing money in industries where government artificially (and temporarily) manipulates demand to appease whatever special interest happens to own the party in power.

Here we have the biggest issue: this President is not investing in the American people, as he claims; he is investing in a big government philosophy. The reason more and more Americans are losing their jobs is because the President wants to take money from the private sector to fund liberal pet projects, not to get people back to work.  Who can with a straight face explain how cap and trade, tax increases on the wealthy, and green energy “investments” will actually create jobs?

If there was an actual Obama Investment Co., I’d like to call their customer hotline and ask a few questions about green energy investments:

For every green job created, how many jobs are lost? 

How long can the government artificially raise demand for green technology? 

Is this another cash for clunkers scheme where a government sponsored boom is followed by an easily foreseen bust?

What percentage of every dollar that government seizes for these investments is spent on government overhead?

How do you define "investment"?

As President Obama said in the State of the Union, it’s time we return to common sense.  I agree with his sentiment.  We can start by using words that have real meaning and calling government “investments” what they are—wasteful and unproductive schemes overseen by wasteful and unproductive bureaucrats.

Tuesday Democrats suffered a mortifying trouncing in Massachusetts’ special Senate election, in which Republican Scott Brown zoomed from 17 points behind Democrat Martha Coakley in the polls less than two weeks ago to winning by a handy 5%.

As AP reported, “Brown’s victory was so sweeping, he even won in the Cape Cod community where Kennedy, the longtime liberal icon, died of brain cancer last August.”

To be fair, Coakley did manage to capture 84% of Cambridge, Amherst, and Provincetown, which tend to serve as bellwethers for—well, themselves.

Coakley’s complaint that her poll numbers started to drop right after the Senate passed its version of the health care bill on Christmas rang a bit hollow, given that she campaigned vociferously to vote for that very health care bill if elected to Congress.

In the wake of the clear message sent to them by the people of Massachusetts, Democrats are slowly backing away from their suicidal insistence on passing a bill only 33% of Americans favor and that even they don’t like, considering more bipartisan/free-market solutions, are resolving to address healthcare reform in a more piecemeal fashion.

Gotcha!  Actually, Democrats are considering a number of insane, Mission Impossible-style workaround strategies to thwart the will of the people and pass their health care bill without a filibuster-proof Senate.  These include:

•    Forcing the House to pass the Senate bill, word-for-word, with nary a change in punctuation.  This option would throw out all of the heatedly negotiated agreements between the two chambers conducted in the past few weeks, including the major union employee exemption to the excise tax on “Cadillac plans.”  It would also ignore many of the other differences between the bills for which Democrats in the House say they cannot accept the House version as is, such as language on abortion funding.  House Democrat Bart Stupak, author of the Stupak Amendment, reported on Monday that “House members will not vote for the Senate bill.  There’s no interest in that.”  He added that when the notion was proposed at a caucus meeting among Democrats, “It went over like a lead balloon.”

•    Tricking the House into passing the Senate bill and promising them that it will be morphed into a bill more to their liking “later.”

•    Using the byzantine budget reconciliation process to ram the bill through.  This would subject weary Americans to several more months of reports of Democrats using sneaky, behind-closed-doors, parliamentary procedures no one understands to get their way—a surefire Democratic victory strategy for the midterm elections in November.

If these strategies don’t work, it is conceivable that Democrats may try any of the following makeshift schemes (I hate to give them any ideas, but it’s probably best that we be forewarned):

•    Abolishing the filibuster.  Democrats would of course reinstate the filibuster in time for the November elections, when they will lose one or both chambers of Congress and will need it as protection against devious, heavy-handed Republicans.

•    Concocting some fake scandal involving Scott Brown, or another Republican from a state with a Democratic governor, that forces him to resign, thus allowing the governor of said state to appoint a Democratic replacement Senator.

•    Crowning Olympia Snowe Queen of the Senate and letting her rewrite the bill to her specifications, including funding for her own blueberry farm and stock options in L.L. Bean.

•    “Packing the Senate” à la FDR’s court-packing scheme in the 1930s.

•    Kidnapping Republican legislators and replacing them with genetically engineered Manchurian candidate clones who have been brainwashed to vote for the bill.

Think these scenarios are outlandish?  Democrats have demonstrated that, as House Minority Leader John Boehner noted, “They are going to try every way, shape, and form to shove this bill down the throats of the American people.”

House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi commented that the special Senate election is not a referendum on the health care bill, because—get this—Massachusetts already has universal coverage.  She elaborated, “Massachusetts has health care.  The rest of the country would like to have that too.  So we don’t say a state that already has health care should determine whether the rest of the country should.”  No, I think a state that has already suffered its own version of Obamacare is trying to do us all a favor by warning us about what a nightmare it would be.

Democrats have made it through the town hall gauntlet, they’ve cheated death in squeakers of votes in both chambers, they’ve gone on record in the past 48 hours insisting that they will get health care reform “one way or another” and that “health care will pass no matter what.”  Why should they stop now?

I have one more suggestion for Democrats, which they are less likely to consider than any of the ideas above, including the kidnapping plot, but which might just save some of their skins.

Listen to the American people and kill the damn bill.

Scott Spiegel lives in New York City and writes at: www.scottspiegel.com.

Ed. Note: The views in this guest-column are those of Mr. Spiegel, and do not, necessarily, always reflect the views of Lasing Liberty.

Supporters of the Democrats’ health care bill offer the following take on Tuesday’s special election in Massachusetts between Republican Scott Brown and Democrat Martha “Kennedy” Coakley, a plea they hope will draw on voters’ sense of fairness and magnanimity:

If Brown wins, the health care bill will not be passed.  It is a terrible shame that something this nation has frittered away a year debating and Congress has spent a year drafting, something that may not get another chance again—if at all—for a whole generation, could be dismantled because of the obstinacy of one man who wins a special election in a tiny state.  Brown may even derail Obama’s entire agenda.

As if it will do any good, here’s a point-by-point rebuttal of this selfless appeal by Democrats to our leftist instincts:

(1) The point of a debate is to have two sides present their cases and see which makes the better argument.  The outcome is not predetermined, much as Democrats would like it to be and have tried to make it so.  Republicans spoke, Democrats spoke, and the American people made up their minds: Republicans won.

(2) The fact that we spent a year debating this horrendous bill, in all its myriad forms, is indeed deplorable, when we could have been talking about how to encourage the Iranian protestors, win in Afghanistan, or abolish the Department of Education.  But just because gallons of ink have been spilled and billions of megabytes have been transmitted and trillions of cubic feet of C02 have been exhaled thrashing out numerous claims made by Democrats and debunked by Republicans, doesn’t mean we have to embrace the fallacy of sunken costs and pass something that stinks just to rationalize our squandered effort.

Making a $100 down payment on a $1,000 dishwasher offered by a fraudulent mail-order company that folds does not obligate us to send the company the other $900 so our first $100 isn’t wasted.  If any Democrats want to silently change their positions on the bill and pretend they felt that way all along, I promise you that Republicans will be tactful enough to go along with the charade.

(3) If it isn’t right to pass this legislation in the current generation, just as it wasn’t right to pass it in Hillary Clinton’s generation, or Truman’s generation, or FDR’s generation, then we can afford to wait at least another generation to debate it again, if liberals really insist on holding and losing this contest once more.

(4) Saying that the special election in Massachusetts could destroy the whole health care plan is like saying that the failure of an asteroid to demolish the court building where Bernard Madoff was sentenced destroyed his chance for freedom.  The success of this health care bill has been dangling like an anvil from a spider web since last summer.  The special election in Massachusetts is only the latest in many gusts of wind to threaten to crash the Democrats’ hopes to the ground.

(5) Saying that the travesty of Democrats’ health care bill not passing is due to Scott Brown’s stubbornness upon being elected is like saying that the travesty of Confederate soldiers’ dying is due to Abraham Lincoln’s stubbornness upon being elected.  In addition to its being the right course of action, if Brown wins and votes no on the bill, it will be because he was explicitly elected for that purpose alone, to take that specific action by itself.  Indeed, he barely had to say a word about any of the other issues in order to win fanatical political and financial support from Republicans, Independents, and Democrats in Massachusetts and across the country.

Promising to kill the health care bill is not just the biggest, but the only functional plank in Brown’s platform.  Senator Brown could turn around next month and introduce a bill using Medicare funds to subsidize partial-birth abortions for illegal Islamist immigrant tax cheats with Al-Qaeda ties, and he would still be Republicans’ hero for having voted down the health care bill.

(6) If Obama isn’t buried under a pile of political debris after his dustup with the 41st Senator, and dares to try to foist cap-and-trade, Stimulus II, or other reckless spending debacles onto a battered and bruised Congress, he will find it even harder to pass such legislation than he did the health care bill, and that is saying something.  Indeed, one of the fringe benefits of voting for Brown is that he will block not only the health care bill but anything like it that comes down the chute.

As an opponent of the health care bill, here’s my take on Tuesday’s election, which I hope will draw on any remaining connection to reality liberals may have:

Even if Brown loses, the health care bill still will not be passed.  There are too many gaping discrepancies between the two versions of the bill to be reconciled; Blue Dog Democrats are too nervous about their own reelection campaigns this fall; and soon-to-be-elected Republican majorities in the House and Senate will do everything in their power to reverse any steps taken to enact this wretched bill.

They may even derail Obama’s entire agenda.

Scott Spiegel lives in New York City and writes at: www.scottspiegel.com.

Ed. Note: The views in this guest-column are those of Mr. Spiegel, and do not, necessarily, always reflect the views of Lasing Liberty.