Patrick Kennedy won’t run for re-election

Rhode Island Democratic Rep. Patrick Kennedy will retire after eight terms in office, bringing an end to his House career just months after his father, legendary Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, passed away.

“My father instilled in me a deep commitment to public service,” Kennedy said in a video announcing his retirement. “Now having spent two decades in politics, my life has taken a new direction and I will not be a candidate for re-election this year.”

Kennedy has easily held Rhode Island’s 1st district since 1994 despite the occasional attempt by Republicans to knock him off.

Kennedy’s time in Congress was decidedly uneven. He was rumored to be planning a Senate bid in 2000 but decided against running. He was tasked with chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in that same cycle with expectations within the party that they would seize back control of the House. It didn’t happen.

After his stint at the DCCC, Kennedy took on a far less high-profile role in Congress — emerging only infrequently and not always in the best light. In the spring of 2006 Kennedy crashed his car into a police barricade near Capitol Hill; he entered rehab for addiction and depression days later. Over the summer, Kennedy admitted himself to a rehabilitation facility again.

Patrick Kennedy’s retirement means that for the first time in nearly five decades there will not be a member of the Kennedy family in Congress. His father, who served Massachusetts in the Senate for more than four decades, died on August 25.

Kennedy’s seat, which includes the northeastern reaches of the state, is strongly Democratic. President Barack Obama won the seat by 32 points in 2008 while Sen. John Kerry (Mass.) carried it by 26 points in 2004.

Among the Democrats mentioned as possible Kennedy replacements include: Providence Mayor David Cicilline, Lt. Gov. Elizabeth Roberts and state party chairman Bill Lynch.

State Rep. John Loughlin was already in the race on the Republican side.

Kennedy is the 14th Democrat to announce his retirement plans this cycle. Eighteen Republicans are retiring while Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart is giving up his 25th district seat to run in for the 21st district being vacated by his brother — retiring Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart.

By Chris Cillizza  |  February 11, 2010; 10:47 PM ET

Obama Wants To Track Cellphones – Says, Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Obama Wants To Track Cellphones – Says, Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts

We have no reasonable expectation of privacy? WTF?

From CNet:
 

Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices.

In that case, the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

 

Fourth Amendment:

• Fourth Amendment – Protection from unreasonable search and seizure.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That seems pretty clear to me, but then, my brain is not capable of the labyrinthine nuance achieved by the Obama intellect.

Nigeria’s Christians are on a knife-edge

Nigeria’s Christians are on a knife-edge
After last month’s sectarian riots, Fr Alex Longs explains why life is becoming increasingly hard for Christians in the mainly Islamic north

12 February 2010

One thing should be clear: when violent conflict breaks out in northern Nigeria between Christians and Muslims, it is never Christians who provoke it.

Regrettably, however, our Muslim brothers have so far proved quicker off the mark to tell their version of events. Thus on January 26, in the wake of another Jos crisis, BBC World television carried the news that 150 bodies of Muslims had been discovered at the village of Kuru Korama south of Jos. The source of the story? The Jama’atu Nasirul Islam, a powerful organisation that seeks to promote Islam in Nigeria. It also seems that for news about northern Nigeria the BBC relies heavily on its Hausa Service, and I want to take this opportunity to plead with the British public to investigate this body and see that its pro-Muslim bias is corrected.

Nigeria is a very complex country, and it is not easy to summarise the background to the latest crisis. When the British assumed control of northern Nigeria in 1900, the Fulani Caliphate of Sokoto had already conquered much of the area, so extending the frontiers of Islam. The Hausas, the principal ethnic group among their subjects, were themselves Muslim; hence the Fulani ruling class intermarried with them and began to lose their own identity. Today we sometimes call this key player on the Nigerian political scene the “Hausa-Fulani”, but for convenience they are often known as “the Hausas”.

Many smaller ethnic groups in the north escaped or resisted the Fulani conquest and Islamic penetration. They included the Berom, Afizere, and Anaguta of the area around Jos, the capital of the present Plateau State. Around 1900 they were still somewhat backward in their way of life. Soon, tin was discovered in the area and Jos began to develop as a mining town. Hausas began to move in from further north as traders and artisans; so too did Urhobos, Igbos, Yorubas and others from southern Nigeria. Christian missionaries also arrived, bringing western education along with other benefits. They had considerable success among the indigenous Beroms and others, and Jos became the northern headquarters of many Protestant organisations. Someone has said that “Jos” stands for “Jesus Our Saviour”. A Catholic bishopric was created, later becoming an archbishopric, and the Augustinians established first a seminary (now diocesan), then a monastery. British rule also encouraged throughout the north the spread of the Hausa language, which today is used by millions of northern Christians as a lingua franca and as the main language of worship.

Under colonial rule and subsequently, the Beroms and other indigenous people of the Plateau made considerable progress and they formed 80 per cent of the population when the state was created in 1967. Yakubu Gowon, an Anglican, led Nigeria’s Federal Government from 1966 to 1975. For their part, the Jos Hausas began to demand special recognition, with their own emir and local authority. United and vocal, their self-confidence grew because they had the support of their Muslim “kith and kin” in other parts of the north. Undoubtedly, too, their confidence was a sign of the greater Islamic militancy that has been a marked feature of Nigeria, and of the world as a whole, since about 1980. In 1990, the then federal government, headed by General Babangida, a northern Muslim (as the majority of Nigeria’s heads of state have been), appeared to have conceded to their demands when he divided Jos metropolis into two local government areas, Jos North and Jos South. The grand design of the Hausas then became to capture Jos North, through the electoral process and through more intensive settlement, and eventually to control the state government. But, quite apart from the fact that elections in Nigeria are not free and fair, the Hausas are not in the majority in Jos North and have not won any election.

On the other hand, they have become firmly entrenched in a ghetto stretching for a mile or so to the north of the centre of the metropolis.

Conflicts between “indigenes” and “settlers” have occurred in many parts of Nigeria, because, although the Nigerian constitution says that any Nigerian citizen is free to live anywhere in the country, in practice only the “indigenes” of a state are allowed the full rights of citizens there. The Jos Hausa settlers claim to be indigenes of Plateau, but Christian settlers are not treated as indigenes in states where Hausas are in the majority, such as Kano or Katsina. The “true” indigenes of Plateau, as I might call them, have not helped their own cause because they are not united, and have in the past allowed Hausas to acquire prominent positions in the state, and to acquire land. They have also tended to show as much suspicion of southerners, mostly their fellow Christians, as of the Hausas.

In the series of crises that gripped Jos in 2001, in 2008, and now in 2010, the Hausa strategy has followed a pattern: to launch attacks on Christian lives and property (naturally including churches) in poor areas of mixed population lying on the periphery of the ghetto, so as to end the Christian presence there. When the dust settles, Christians are persuaded to sell their destroyed properties to willing Hausa buyers. The strategy has succeeded to the extent that the area under Hausa control has steadily grown. After the 2001 crisis they proudly called it “the Taliban republic”. Within it, sharia law has been imposed, no functioning church remains, and no Christians live. On the other hand, in each crisis non-Hausas have fought back, and exacted revenge on such a scale that in the grisly calculations that follow, the number of Hausa deaths probably exceeds that of non-Hausas. Revenge killings of Hausas also occur in other parts of Plateau State.

The crisis that erupted on Sunday, January 17 followed just the same pattern. But this time both sides used more guns than ever before. Moreover, the Hausas had the boldness to attack Christians even in areas where the Hausas are relatively few in number, such as Bukuru, lying beyond Jos to the south. As always, it is not easy to establish how the trouble started. But the story most commonly heard, at least among Christians, is that, that very morning inside Nasarawa, a peripheral area just east of centre, a Hausa man brought a large number of Hausa youths allegedly to help him rebuild (or extend) a building, which lies close to a church. The sand they shovelled (perhaps with deliberate carelessness) fell on Christians coming from the church; an argument started; verbal aggression soon led to physical violence. At once, Christians were attacked in peripheral areas throughout the city. But though taken unawares they fought back. The trouble continued on and off until Tuesday, when the federal government ordered the army to take complete control and a 24-hour curfew was imposed. The coming of the army proved a mixed blessing for Christians, because it is unanimously believed that a number of soldiers were Hausa militants in disguise and that they fired on Christians for no good reason.

Our monastery and the adjoining seminary are now surrounded by the ghetto, and even in normal times our peace is remorselessly invaded by prayers and sermons beamed from the powerful loudspeakers of a hundred mosques. During the crisis of 2008 gunmen fired into the seminary from the minaret of a mosque built right opposite the seminary gate. I had to tell the seminarians to lie flat on the ground. The grounds of the monastery were also invaded by a Hausa mob and a few of our students were injured. Since then we have enjoyed the special protection of the army, and we emerged almost unscathed from the present crisis. But in other parts of Jos, and beyond, poor Christians and poor Muslims did not enjoy such protection; and even if they are still alive, many of those who already enjoyed little enough of the world’s goods have now lost everything.

Will the powerful people inside or outside Plateau State who undoubtedly instigated the crisis be identified and punished? Past experience suggests it is unlikely. Meanwhile, for the long term, community leaders in Plateau State, notably our Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama for the Christians and the Emir of Wase for the Muslims, continue on the path of dialogue, while the federal government has established a powerful 15-man committee to try to bring about permanent peace. The rest of us must hope and pray – and be vigilant: for international terrorist organisations have their eyes on this country, and Farouk Mutallab, the would-be Christmas suicide bomber, may not be the last young northern Nigerian Muslim to be recruited by them.

Fr Alex Longs is the prior of the Augustinian monastery in Jos

Intellectuals and Society

Intellectuals and Society

Posted By Robert Wargas On February 12, 2010 @ 12:02 am In FrontPage | 2 Comments

In 1980, during a debate for Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose series, Frances Fox Piven, of Cloward-Piven infamy, tried to lecture Thomas Sowell on race and economics. Her contention was that equality of opportunity had failed and what black people needed was a strong dose of socialism. “That’s why equality of results became an issue…for black people in the United States,” she said, “and they expressed their concern….”

“No, you expressed it, damn it!” Sowell shot back. “It’s what you choose to put in the mouths of black people.”

The moral of the story is that Thomas Sowell does not put much faith in Ph.D. degrees. Three decades later, at age seventy-nine, he once again pounces on armchair theorists and assorted ivory-tower types in his newest book, Intellectuals and Society. Sowell identifies his targets as “people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas.” In other words, ideas are the finished products of their labor. This category could include writers, philosophers, and the literature professor who thinks Hamlet is about a young man struggling with the horrors of capitalist society.

These intellectuals are different from others not only because of their interests, but because of their method of operation and the incentive structure that comes with it. Unlike carpenters, who produce tangible goods, or scientists, who produce theories that must be tested against results, the dealer in pure ideas is cut off from the normal feedback mechanisms that filter faulty notions out of the intellectual landscape. An auto mechanic who can’t fix transmissions is bound to go out of business, just as a civil engineer who designs a bridge that collapses is apt to suffer some problems with his career.

Not so with intellectuals. “Not only have intellectuals been insulated from material consequences, they have often enjoyed immunity from even a loss of reputation after having been demonstrably wrong.” Their insularity can also lead to dilettantism, as the intellectual is not constrained from wandering into fields completely outside his or her own. The pattern is clear: Chomsky the linguist becomes Chomsky the foreign-policy wonk. Michael Eric Dyson the minister becomes the expert on everything racial. Your anthropology professor becomes an expert on healthcare economics.

Though his main topic is focused, Sowell’s context is wide. He discusses economics, war, the law, the media, politics, and race. For decades, these subjects have been the canvases on which intellectuals have painted their grotesque portraits. Sowell documents not only the disastrous ideas themselves—straight out of the mouths of characters like John Dewey—but discusses why those ideas have failed so miserably.

Sowell is one of the greatest debunkers of our time, capable of laying waste to vast fields of demagoguery through slash-and-burn logic and empiricism. No one throws the wrench in the leftist chain quite like him. The most devastating chapter of the book is the one entitled “Intellectuals and Economics,” in which Sowell obliterates common claims about “income distribution,” poverty, and inequality. His bête noire is the person for whom evidence is merely optional filigree. (Who needs evidence when one is flying under the banner of “social justice”?) Bromides about the “widening gap” between rich and poor don’t consider that individuals are constantly moving between income brackets, as Sowell illustrates. Looking merely at statistical abstractions creates the illusion that “the rich” and “the poor” are merely static, immutable categories, rather than mere classifications through which many different people are constantly passing.

Intellectuals’ perverse desire to see some sort of “plan” imposed on society has made for a decidedly sordid history of their ilk. The Progressives of the early twentieth century, for instance, were bona fide racists, and the academic extension of their ideas was the eugenics movement. It comes as no surprise, then, that the revolutionary creeds of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism were especially intriguing to the intelligentsia, despite their being mislabeled today as “conservative” or “right wing” movements. Sowell reminds us that these ideologies were originally considered left wing by the intellectuals themselves. Lincoln Steffens, who glorified Soviet Communism, also reserved praise for Mussolini. Other radical socialists who shared his sentiments included British novelist H.G. Wells and American historian Charles Beard.

Still more saw the ultimate promise of collectivism in the Nazi movement. During the 1920s, W.E.B. Du Bois, prominent black historical figure and devoted communist, became so fascinated with Nazism that he decorated the magazine he edited with swastikas. This love affair was not a one-night stand, either. As late as 1936, Du Bois remarked that “Germany today is, next to Russia, the greatest exemplar of Marxian socialism in the world.”

The ease with which intellectuals migrate from one squalid “ism” to another has necessitated some revisionism on their part. It was only after the West fully realized the horrors of the Italian and German dictatorships that the intellectual Left disowned them in a massive act of historical face-saving. Writes Sowell: “The heterogeneity of those later lumped together as the right has allowed those on the left to dump into that grab-bag category many who espouse some version of the vision of the left, but whose other characteristics make them an embarrassment to be repudiated.”

If there’s any weakness with the book, it’s that Sowell is himself an intellectual, making it easy for left-wing bloggers to dismiss him even if they can’t refute the book’s arguments. There are differences, however, between this book and the putrid machinations of a Noam Chomsky or a Cornel West: Those intellectuals are so sure of their ideas they have no doubt they’d make the perfect blueprint for society. Sowell, on the contrary, has never advocated anything except leaving people alone. Also, part of intellectuals’ decidedly anti-intellectual strategy, as Sowell points out, is their inoculation against empirical evidence. That socialism killed millions in the twentieth century, and that quasi-socialist policies have wiped out inner cities in America, makes no difference to the tenured cultural studies professor.

Sowell, then, while being an intellectual according to his own definition, is in practice far more scientific and accountable. His awareness of human fallibility is straight out of Burke or Hayek. The absence of this quality in radicals is what makes today’s intellectual climate so uninviting. Sowell writes: “Because the vision of the anointed is a vision of themselves as well as a vision of the world, when they are defending that vision they are not simply defending a set of hypotheses about external events, they are in a sense defending their very souls—and the zeal and even ruthlessness with which they defend their vision are not surprising under these circumstances.”

 

Robert Wargas is a writer and graduate student who lives on Long Island, NY.

To order Intellectuals and Society, click here ^[1].

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Obama Admin push for tracking cell phones

by Declan McCullagh, CNET

 Obama says “Americans enjoy no reasonable expectation of privacy”

Two years ago, when the FBI was stymied by a band of armed robbers known as the “Scarecrow Bandits” that had robbed more than 20 Texas banks, it came up with a novel method of locating the thieves.

FBI agents obtained logs from mobile phone companies corresponding to what their cellular towers had recorded at the time of a dozen different bank robberies in the Dallas area. The voluminous records showed that two phones had made calls around the time of all 12 heists, and that those phones belonged to men named Tony Hewitt and Corey Duffey. A jury eventually convicted the duo of multiple bank robbery and weapons charges.

Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. On Friday, the first federal appeals court to consider the topic will hear oral arguments (PDF) in a case that could establish new standards for locating wireless devices.

In that case, the Obama administration has argued that warrantless tracking is permitted because Americans enjoy no “reasonable expectation of privacy” in their–or at least their cell phones’–whereabouts. U.S. Department of Justice lawyers say that “a customer’s Fourth Amendment rights are not violated when the phone company reveals to the government its own records” that show where a mobile device placed and received calls.

Read More:

Professor in Chief

February 12th, 2010

Inside Higher ED

 Obama loves to lecture others

Barack Obama has been called a lot of things since he hit the national stage: Celebrity, elitist and even one who “pals around with terrorists.” But as his poll numbers come back down to earth, and an emboldened conservative movement sharpens its attacks, the label that seems to be sticking to Obama as much as any lately is that of “professor.”

Speaking to Tea Party activists in Nashville last week, Sarah Palin did her part to keep the “professor” dig in circulation.

“They know we’re at war, and to win that war we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern,” the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee told a frenzied crowd.

Obama’s years on the University of Chicago’s faculty have proven a double edged sword. While his supporters accept his higher education experience as evidence of a thoughtful pragmatism, the “professor” label has just as easily been used as a bristly brush, painting the president as an out of touch dreamer who formed theories in the Ivory Tower that can’t be translated into concrete policies from the White House.

The attacks on Obama aren’t new to politics, and they reveal longstanding stereotypes about the professoriate that continue to speak to a subsection of the electorate for whom higher education is regarded with skepticism, a number of political thinkers and academics said in interviews.

Read More:

PROMISES, PROMISES: Jobs bill won’t add many jobs

February 12th, 2010

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, AP

 Wait… a jobs bill that won’t create jobs…. brilliant!

It sounds great: A big jobs bill that would hand President Barack Obama a badly needed victory and please Republicans with tax cuts at the same time. But there’s a problem: It won’t create many jobs.
Even the Obama administration acknowledges the legislation’s centerpiece – a tax cut for businesses that hire unemployed workers – would work only on the margins.

As for the bill’s effectiveness, tax experts and business leaders said companies are unlikely to hire workers just to receive a tax break. Before businesses start hiring, they need increased demand for their products, more work for their employees and more revenue to pay those workers.

“We’re skeptical that it’s going to be a big job creator,” said Bill Rys, tax counsel for the National Federation of Independent Business. “There’s certainly nothing wrong with giving a tax break to a business that’s hired a new worker, especially in these tough times. But in terms of being an incentive to hire a lot of workers, we’re skeptical.”

Read More:

Obama in statistical tie against anyone else for 2012 presidency

February 12th, 2010

by Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup

 Obama is tied with a nameless candidate

Registered voters are about equally divided as to whether they would more likely vote to re-elect Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election, or vote for the Republican candidate.

These results are based on a Feb. 1-3 Gallup poll. Forty-four percent of U.S. registered voters say they are more likely to vote for Obama, 42% for the Republican candidate, and the remaining 14% are undecided or would vote for another candidate.

A year into his first term as president, Obama’s approval ratings are hovering around 50%. The 50% approval figure has been a strong predictor of an incumbent president’s re-election: presidents who averaged 50% or better from January of an election year through Election Day have all been re-elected. This includes George W. Bush, who averaged 51% in 2004, though his approval rating was 48% in Gallup’s final pre-election poll.

Read More:

Obama and the Government Employees

By Ed Lasky

Barack Obama may not have learned much at Harvard regarding the Constitution, but he did learn in Chicago how politics works: the Chicago way. Reward supporters, and keep the bribery as opaque  as possible. Chicago mores have been brought to Washington.

There has recently been a flurry of critical columns examining the devastation done to our nation’s fiscal health by government workers. Our cities, states, and federal government are in critical condition. Cities have begun declaring bankruptcy, and states such as California and Illinois are tottering. The federal government, which supplied a big chunk of stimulus dollars merely to keep states on life support, is running massive deficits and accumulating debts as far as the eye can see. What caused the problems?

There are two sides of the ledger responsible. Declining state tax receipts (considered “earnings” by government) played a role (the receipts side). But the real scourge has been on the expense side of the ledger: salaries and pension benefits given — and I do mean given — to government workers.

Public-sector unions have amassed great power to extract taxpayer dollars from politicians. Politicians reward government workers with our dollars, and they in turn are rewarded at election time by donations, free labor (phone banks, people who pass out flyers), and votes.

“Fully one-third of the ‘stimulus’ money went to state and local governments — an obvious payoff to public employee unions that contributed so much to Democrats,” as Michael Barone noted. Barone describes the corruption at the core of this dealing:

Public-sector unionism is a very different animal from private-sector unionism. It is not adversarial but collusive. Public-sector unions strive to elect their management, which in turn can extract money from taxpayers to increase wages and benefits — and can promise pensions that future taxpayers will have to fund.

The results are plain to see. States such as New York, New Jersey and California, where public-sector unions are strong, now face enormous budget deficits and pension liabilities. In such states, the public sector has become a parasite sucking the life out of the private-sector economy.

Obama and the Democrats have been well-rewarded for their patronage. Unions contributed up to 400 million dollars to Democrats in 2008 and engage in skullduggery to advance their aims. The latest revelation: a union-funded slush fund secretly targeting GOP candidates through the use of money-laundering and front groups. Unions have funded all sorts of political activity — undoubtedly the major reason Obama, in one of his first acts as president, ended union disclosure rules requiring them to report how their members’ dues were being spent. So much for transparency.

This is one reason why the recent Supreme Court decision leveling the playing field, allowing corporations to exercise their First Amendment rights by contributing to candidates, inflamed unions and President Obama. He violated precedent by attacking the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address. Maybe the title should be changed to State of the Unions.

Franklin Roosevelt, of all people, was alert to the danger of this collusion between politicians and unions. He maintained that “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” Yet it has been transplanted; today, a majority of union workers for the first time work for the government. And the government has brought good things to them.

Government work is one sector of our economy that is booming (besides pawnshops and bankruptcy lawyers). Rich Lowry noted the paradox: We suffer, and government workers prosper.

For most Americans, the Great Recession has been an occasion to hold on for dear life. For public employees, it’s been an occasion to let the good times roll.

The percentage of federal civil servants making more than $100,000 a year jumped from 14 percent to 19 percent during the first year and a half of the recession, according to USA Today. At the beginning of the downturn, the Transportation Department had one person making $170,000 or more a year; now it has 1,690 making that.

The New York Times reports that state and local governments have added a net 110,000 jobs since the beginning of the recession, while the private sector has lost 6.9 million. The gap between total compensation of public and private workers has only widened during the downturn, according to USA Today. In 2008, benefits for public employees grew at a rate three times that of private employees. 

Nor does the boom look likely to end anytime soon.

The President’s new budget can be symbolized by the old wartime poster: Uncle Sam Wants You. Until Barack Obama came into office, the number of federal employees had held relatively constant. But that was so 2008. That number jumped from 1.875 million in 2008 to 1.98 million in 2009, and it looks to jump a farther in 2010 — a 14.5% leap in two years. (And the boom is in federal agencies, not the military; hiring at the IRS, EPA, and the Justice Department is a big portion of the increase. Big Brother is getting bloated — maybe we can get Michelle to work on this obesity problem.)

These jobs come with munificent salaries and benefits.

Federal workers now earn, in wages and benefits, about twice what their private sector equivalents get paid. They often have Cadillac health plans and retirement benefits far above the private sector average: 80 percent of public-sector workers have pension benefits, only 50 percent in the private sector. Many can retire at age 50.

The pensions are manipulated upwards and gold-plated, too, as I noted in “Taxpayers: Eat your hearts out, suckers.” Many others have begun to notice the drain on public finances by pensions for government workers, and the public pension tsunami has just begun.

This is the engine driving our ballooning deficits and public debt. Merely rolling federal employee pay back to where it was in 1998 relative to the private sector and shifting state and local government pay back to 2005 relative levels would save $116 billion annually from government costs.

We know this will never happen as long as Democrats are in power. They like this perpetual motion machine. A government bureau, Ronald Reagan quipped, is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on earth. But we can try, and there is certainly potential for Republicans to seize on this problem as it begins to gain traction in the public mind. The issue seems tailor-made for Tea Partiers.

Meanwhile, Big Brother, like many big brothers, has become a bully. The Internal Revenue Service is on a hiring binge to crack down on taxpayers; fees on candy, plastic bags, iPod downloads, sugar, and many other things that make life fun are going up and up; our tax rates are inflating; and studies show that there has even been an explosion in parking tickets and fines for every picayune sort of “violation” that the bureaucrats can dream up in all their spare time — phantom taxes, they have been called. The leviathan must be fed.

The massive debt accumulating will be our responsibility to pay in the decades ahead. Obama blames Bush for the problems he inherited, but we know whom to blame for the problems our children and grandchildren will inherit. This debt will be an albatross around the neck of our economy. Our taxes will go toward these pensions and debt repayment instead of investments that will help our economy grow.

But even this good deal is not good enough for Barack Obama. He is a very mischievous man whose Modus Operandi is to distract and defame and engage in a great deal of sleight of hand. If he truly is a “sort of God” (as one of his adoring Newsweek pundits characterized him), that God would be Janus of two faces. While he talks the talk about the deficit and freezing discretionary spending, Obama engages in a spending binge that would make Imelda Marcos proud. But look what else the Magician-in-Chief  is doing: giving even more money and benefits to government workers, and doing it in a very untransparent and sneaky way.

Barack Obama is planning a major overhaul of the Federal government pay system that would boost pay for government workers while loosening scrutiny on how they do their jobs.

When he released his budget, there was a section titled “Improving the Federal Workforce.” Sounds good, right? But watch what the man and his minions do, not what they say.

First, the document tries to justify the high salaries government workers are paid (responding to the mounting criticism).

But then comes the trickery, disguised as “reform” and “refreshing” the system. This team is addicted to euphemisms (and their thesauruses are well-thumbed).

John Berry, director of the Office of Personnel Management, is engaged in a major effort to overhaul the G.S., or General Schedule, classification and pay system that began in 1949. Change is coming, and it will gladden the hearts and fill the wallets of government workers. In a Washington Post interview, Berry

mused about eliminating the first two ranks of the 15-grade GS system and adding grades 16 and 17. Berry did not explicitly advocate a pay raise for federal workers during the interview, but those in the added grades presumably would be paid more than the current top rate.

Berry made noises about tying pay to performance (consider this chaff to deflect observation and criticism), but then he tipped his hand:

“I’m a strong proponent of breaking the chain to the desk and breaking the chain to the time clock,” he said. He wants government to “move in a direction to empower and trust our employees to get the job done … and not focus so much on where they’re sitting and what hours they’re sitting there.”

Does that sound like a plan to increase efficiency of government workers? Give them higher pay, but allow them to set their own hours and work from…where? Starbucks? Home? The zoo?

And how is this “reform” going to happen? Are the people or our representatives going to have a say in how our money is spent? Need one ask?

The plans are in the final stages and will be put in place by a presidential memorandum or executive order. In other words, they’ll be implemented by presidential fiat. This is the form of government we have now — or at least did, before Scott Brown was elected.

Government work…our growth industry.

Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.

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