This week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is expected to ask Democratic Representatives to demonstrate their unconditional endorsement of the health care reform bill before Congress by—not voting for it.

In a parliamentary trick known as the “Slaughter Solution”—brought to you by Rule Committee Chair Louise Slaughter, who was last seen on TV at the Blair House summit carping about a constituent’s used dentures—the House would not ever have to actually vote for the unpopular Senate bill in order to pass it.  (Weren’t Democrats the ones clamoring for an “up-or-down vote” for the last three months?)

Instead, according to Slaughter, House Democrats could simply vote for a reconciliation package written to remove any unsavory provisions from the Senate bill and bring it more in line with liberal House members’ liking.  The package would contain what’s known as a “hereby” rule declaring that the Senate bill would be “deemed” to have been “already passed” by the House.  The reconciliation package would be sent to the Senate for approval, and then it and the original Senate bill would go to the President for signature.

The only nagging detail in this plan is that Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution states that every bill “shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate” before it may go to the President.  In other words, a bill must be passed—not “deemed to have been passed”—by both chambers first.

In case this wasn’t clear, the Founding Fathers reiterated, “[T]he votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and nays, and the names of the persons voting for and against the bill shall be entered on the journal of each House respectively.”  (Note: “Yea” in this case does not mean, “Yea, I don’t have to vote for the bill!”)

This little provision was clarified by a 1998 Supreme Court ruling that both chambers must pass identical versions of the bill, thus bestowing their joint approval upon it.  Only minor, budget-related adjustments are permitted through reconciliation.  Conference committees between the two chambers typically meet to work out differences, and then both chambers must vote again on bills with identical wording.

On the off-chance that this still isn’t clear to the Chair of the Rule Committee: Both chambers must vote on the same bill.  One chamber may not pass another bill “deeming” the first bill to be passed and pre-amending it before it is voted on.

In addition to its flagrant violation of the Constitution, Congressional Democrats’ plan involving the Slaughter Rule is based on a flawed reasoning process.  Specifically, House Democrats seem to believe that because the Senate has the upper hand, the House may do to the Senate bill whatever they want in order to appease their constituents.  In the House’s view, the Senate has had their turn with the bill—now it’s the House’s chance to have a go at it.

It is true that most of the 59 Democrats in the Senate who voted for Obamacare would probably accept almost any version of the bill that could pass the House at this point, rather than see a year of effort, their plans for health care reform, and Obama’s presidency go down the drain.

But there’s a fundamental tactical reason that one chamber of Congress is not allowed to proceed according to the Slaughter Solution.

Namely: what if Senate Democrats vehemently opposed the House’s preferred version of the bill?  What right would House Democrats have to trample on the Senate’s bill and unicamerally morph it into one of their own choosing?

What if passing the reconciliation bill required, for example, offering a series of bribes to House members that made the Cornhusker Kickback and Louisiana Purchase look like chump change—a tactic Obama has already signaled he is open to, and one that seems necessary to seal the deal?

Suppose the House inserts objectionable sweetheart deals for the states of representatives who are wavering on the bill.  Then Democrats are right back where they started after Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts, with one chamber being badgered to approve the other chamber’s distasteful version of the bill without having substantive say over its content.

The Slaughter Solution, in addition to being unconstitutional, anarchic, and embarrassingly and transparently desperate, sets an ugly precedent, whereby one chamber of Congress may steamroll the other with impunity, widen the historic trust gap between the chambers, and pass radical legislation that both chambers have not fundamentally agreed upon.

The Slaughter Solution has been referred to as a “self-executing” rule.  Based on the initial reaction of voters to this ruse, Representatives who vote for it may find that this adjective soon comes to describe their careers in Congress.

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

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.