ScaifeNet because we can't let Soros have all the fun...

featuring Michael D. Tanner

Adam Schaeffer details how school districts lie to taxpayers.

featuring Mark A. Calabria

Many neoconservatives and the politicians and pundits who love them have abandoned the we've-turned-the-corner-in-Iraq story plot — or the-next-six-months-will-prove-critical-in-Iraq expectation game — a long time ago. But when it comes to trying to salvage their Iraq-War narrative, some hard-core neocons would resort to almost anything, including to coning us — and deluding themselves (hallucination being a familiar trait among members of the Faith-based community) — that the recent election in Iraq has "vindicated" their push to oust Saddam Hussein and invade Iraq.

Forget all the naysayers, they say. You know, those guys who had warned that Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda, that Iraq didn't have WMD's, that the Americans would not be welcomed as "liberators," that the U.S. could not plant a democracy in Iraq, that the invasion of that country would result in enormous costs in life and treasure. They were wrong. And we were right.

The somewhat weird spectacle of those who were directly or indirectly responsible for one of the worst — if not the worst — strategic disaster in American history declaring V(ictory)-I(raq) Day can probably be compared to a scene in which the rats are returning to the sinking ship. The election was a "sign that the war in Iraq, while costly and deservedly controversial, was not for nothing," according to then-and-now Iraq War cheerleader Jonah Goldberg. "Putting Iraq on a path to democracy and decency is a noble accomplishment for which Americans, of all parties, should be proud," he wrote recently. The election "constitute the biggest victory yet for democracy in the Middle East" and demonstrated that "The Bush-Cheney Vision [for Iraq] Wins," argues pop-strategist Thomas Barnett. And even Newsweek magazine, whose reporters and writers were critical in the past of the Bush Administration's Iraq policies, has come out with a cover story titled "Victory at Last: The Emergence of a Democratic Iraq."

"The arguments for abandoning Iraq to Saddam Hussein — and the contention that democracy has somehow been forced upon a reluctant country, will be consigned forever to the graves they deserve," predicted a neoconservative flack by the name of Bartle Bull in The Wall Street Journal. The guy was probably drunk on kool-aid when he wrote the following: "Iraq's Shiites know whom they have to thank for their freedom. Shiism itself, with its reverence of human saints and its roots in Aristotelian reason, has powerful affinities with Western humanism. A Shiite-dominated Iraq means a free Iraq, and it behooves Washington to start acting on the potential in this friendship." Indeed, it's the dawn of a new age of Aristotelian reason and Western humanism in Baghdad.

Other pundits, noting that Obama Administration officials have described the Iraq election as an "achievement," as Robert Kagan has done in The Washington Post, arguing that both "the administration and the Republican opposition are committed to a stable, increasingly democratic Iraq" which supposedly reflects the emergence of new bipartisan consensus on foreign policy that supposedly echoes the ambitious neoconservative principles. Perhaps we need to reiterate the old post-Mission-Accomplished neoconservative slogan, "We're all neoconservatives now!" And now let's be on our way to do a regime-change in Tehran.

Indeed, the leaders of the neoconservative surge assume that the most effective way of winning this recent battle over the foreign-policy narrative is by lowering the bar for victory in Iraq, reminding me of the Onion headline from June 23, 2004, "Coalition: Vast Majority of Iraqis Still Alive" and the "news report" that quoted a U.S. official declaring that "as the Coalition's rule draws to a close, the numbers show that we have an awful lot to be proud of", and asserting that after all, "as anyone who's taken a minute and actually looked at the figures can tell you, the vast majority of Iraqis are still alive — as many as 99 percent. While 10,000 or so Iraqi civilians have been killed, pretty much everyone is not dead."

It is true that the 2007 U.S. troop "surge" may have prevented a humiliating American military defeat in Iraq à la Vietnam. That may be described as great news if you consider the more depressing alternative of helicopters carrying U.S personnel from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad's Green Zone. Isn't it, however, like celebrating the fact that your financial advisor who had promised to help your triple your investment hasn't lost all your money. But measuring one's success should be based on the standards that he or she had set for themselves. So let's recall how the Bushcheney Administration and its disinformers had framed the decision to oust Saddam Hussein and invade Iraq — their own standards for victory there or what they promised us would happen — and measure those expectations against what had really happened:

1. The Bushcheney Administration succeeded in winning the support of Congress and the American people — as well as some allies — by arguing that Saddam's Iraq was a clear and present danger to U.S. national security post-9/11 — that the Ba'ath regime in Baghdad supposedly had ties to Al Qaeda (and perhaps was even involved in the attacks in New York and Washington) — and that it had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that it was planning to use against the U.S. We know now that these main rationalizations for going to war — WMDs in the hands of an alleged buddy of Osama — proved to be based on totally wrong assumptions.

2. Neoconservative ideologues had promised that winning the war in Iraq would be a "cake walk" — a relatively brief and cost-free military campaign that will not require many American troops and vast financial resources (Iraqi oil will pay for it), that the American soldiers will be welcomed with flowers and will end-up withdrawing after a few months after our Iraqi "allies" (Ahmad Chalabi) will form a stable government. We know now that Mission Accomplished didn't happen. U.S. troop are still stuck in Iraq with 4,379 US Soldiers killed, 31,669 seriously wounded. See the rest of the statistics on Iraqi and other casualties and financial costs here.

3. Bushcheney and the neocons also dismissed warnings that the U.S. invasion would open a Pandora Box of ethnic, religious and tribal rivalries between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds and assured us that Iraq would be transformed into a functioning liberal democracy and that a pro-American Iraq could serve as a model for the entire Arab Middle East. And the rest is history, as they say. The Pandora Box exploded and while Iraq has not descended into a full-blown civil war, the collapse of the Ba'ath regime, followed by a series of provincial and national elections has failed to create the foundations for a liberal and secular democracy where the rights of women and minorities are protected. Instead, it helped bring to power the Shiite political parties that are backed by militias and death squads and who maintain ties to the Shiite clerics and to Iran. At the same time, Sunni resentment has made it easier for Al Qaeda and its affiliates to win new recruits while the Kurds have established a autonomous mini-state in the North. The state controls most of the economy, unemployment rate is above 50 percent and according to Transparency International Iraq is the fourth-most-corrupt country in the world. And close to 5 million Iraqis, including members of the middle class, professional and many Christians have been displaced since the U.S. invasion.

4. Recall that the "road to Jerusalem leads through Baghdad," that the ousting of Saddam and the U.S. victory in Iraq was supposed to create the conditions for peace in Israel/Palestine and advance U.S. interests. In fact, the removal of Saddam and his secular Sunni-controlled Ba'ath regime had removed the main military power in the Persian Gulf that was containing the power of Iran and its Ayatollahs. Coupled with the increasing power of the Hizbollah in Lebanon and the election of Hamas in Palestine — two developments that the Bush Administration helped bring about, the invasion of Iraq has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East in favor of Iran and its regional allies and encouraged the Iranians to accelerate their nuclear military program, resulting in the erosion of American influence in the Middle East, harming the interests of its allies in the region, diminishing the chances for Israeli-Palestinian peace, encouraging anti-Americanism and terrorism in the Broader Middle East, and diverting military resources from the fight against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Yes. The Shiites and Kurds of Iraq may be free than they were under Saddam. But it's not clear in what way that advances U.S. interests, especially if the new regional balance of power will end-up producing new regional military conflagrations, like a war with Iran.

And the bottom line is the following: Would the Bush Administration been able to win support from Congress and the American people to invade Iraq in order to liberate the Shiites and the Sunnis there while considering the costs of such a "victory?" With victories like that, who needs defeat?

How do you solve a problem like massive spending? From time immemorial, the Republican Party has answered, "with a line-item veto!" Supposedly, if we give the president the right knife, he can go through appropriations bills line by line, slicing out the fat.

At the recent House GOP retreat in Baltimore, budget hawk Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., offered the blade to Obama, in the form of an LIV bill Ryan co-sponsored with Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis.

Obama seemed receptive: "I don't think there's a president out there that wouldn't love to have it." "We want to give you that scalpel," Ryan affirmed.

Put that way, it sounds infomercial-wonderful. Who knew that with a simple bill you could make the government smaller?

Alas, like many infomercial promises, it's not true. The LIV has been tried at both the state and the federal level. And the evidence suggests that it's the ExtenZe of budgetary remedies.

There's no quick fix for the fiscal catastrophe America's facing. A majority of governors have enjoyed LIV authority for decades. And most of the scholars who've crunched the numbers have concluded that it's hardly a magic pill.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, John McCain 2008's chief economic adviser, did one of the most comprehensive studies on what the state experience suggests about a federal LIV: It's "unlikely to reduce the size of the federal government."

A recent Federal Reserve journal article summarizes the state research: "There is no statistically significant effect on the budget in the long run." Instead, the state LIV "simply alters the composition of spending."

We ran the LIV experiment on the federal level in the 1990s, and the results were much the same. As my colleague John Samples notes in his new book, The Struggle for Limited Government, during the two years President Clinton had enhanced veto power, he cut under $2 billion from a multitrillion-dollar federal budget.

The Supreme Court stripped Clinton of that power in 1998, after Mayor Rudy Giuliani objected to the president's lining out some NYC pork. The court held that the LIV threatened the separation of powers by altering the system the Framers set up for passing legislation.

The Ryan-Feingold proposal avoids that constitutional problem because it's not a true LIV. Instead of giving the president the power to cancel appropriations, it merely allows him to identify, and withhold funds for, parts of appropriations bills he objects to.

The legislation then "fast-tracks" an up or down vote on the offending provisions. It would probably survive a constitutional challenge.

It's nice that the latest incarnation of the line-item veto won't further enhance the imperial president's powers. But if the real thing didn't curtail much spending, why should we expect "LIV Lite" to do any better?

We'd all like to have a mechanism to knock out earmarks. But bridges to nowhere aren't breaking the bank. Our problems, as always, are entitlements and defense, which make up over two-thirds of the federal budget. Anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something.

In fairness, Ryan is one of the few serious budget cutters in the GOP. His "Roadmap for America's Future" would make real cuts in the entitlement programs that threaten to eat our future.

But even if Ryan isn't looking to dodge hard choices, his LIV proposal empowers those who are.

Ryan's Roadmap could put us on the path to fiscal sanity, but it demands serious political courage. His other proposal, the line-item veto, is a mere bandage on the body politic's sucking chest wound. Which do you want to bet has a better chance of passing?

Justice Antonin Scalia holds himself out as the patron saint of originalism, the idea that judges should interpret the Constitution according to its original public meaning. To do otherwise, he adds, is to succumb to government by black-robed philosopher-kings who fill the empty vessel of a "living Constitution" with their own policy preferences.

Last week, however, in a case building on Scalia's own landmark opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller — which found that the Second Amendment protects an individual right — when the justice was faced with a golden opportunity to advance originalism, he blinked. And in rejecting originalism, Scalia cited the un-originalist reason that following a different — and clearly incorrect — line of precedent was "easier."

The case at issue, McDonald v. Chicago, involves a challenge to Chicago's gun ban and seeks to extend the right to keep and bear arms to the states — as nearly all other provisions in the Bill of Rights have been extended.

The Court could take two possible routes, both under the Fourteenth Amendment, to apply, or "incorporate," the Second Amendment right against the states: the Due Process Clause and the Privileges or Immunities Clause.

Scalia has long crusaded against the former, which encompasses the "substantive due process" doctrine. To Scalia, this doctrine — which has protected rights based on alleged constitutional "penumbras and emanations" — embodies the judicial activism that is the bane of his jurisprudence. Scalia has attacked substantive due process as an "atrocity," an "oxymoron," "babble," and a "mere springboard for judicial lawmaking."

Largely as a response to this sort of "judicial usurpation," Scalia has advanced his theory of originalism. To interpret the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, a judge should look at how the amendment was understood at the time of its ratification in 1868.

McDonald presents originalist judges the perfect chance to restore the original meaning of a long-abused constitutional provision: In 1873, a Supreme Court unwilling to accept Reconstruction-era changes to our constitutional order — with the federal government empowered to check state oppression — eviscerated the Privileges or Immunities Clause. By reinvigorating that clause, the Court can scale back a warped Due Process Clause that has been misused in a clumsy attempt to protect individual rights.

Without the Privileges or Immunities Clause, however, the Court must continue extending the un-originalist version of substantive due process to protect the right to keep and bear arms. To give original meaning to the Second Amendment, it must ignore the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment!

Yet this is the line Scalia took last week: Instead of accepting the plain meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause — which uncontrovertibly protects the right to keep and bear arms — the justice chose a route that avoids disturbing a 140-year-old precedent rejected by legal scholars of all ideological stripes.

In 2008, Scalia wrote, "It is no easy task to wean the public, the professoriate, and (especially) the judiciary away from [living constitutionalism,] a seductive and judge-empowering philosophy." But at the arguments in McDonald, he argued that while the Privileges or Immunities Clause "is the darling of the professoriate," he would prefer to follow substantive due process, in which he has now "acquiesced," "as much as [he] think[s it is] wrong."

Given Scalia's epic enmity for substantive due process, why would he now turn his back on decades of his own hard labors and suddenly endorse the controversial doctrine? In his own words, because it is "easier."

Granted, Scalia has been far from a down-the-line originalist. On more than one occasion, where originalism does not achieve the result he wants, he ignores the history and stands by precedent. (Most recently, Scalia voted to uphold the federal power to trump state regulation of medicinal marijuana, even if the drug never crosses state lines.) To explain these variances, Scalia has called himself a "faint-hearted originalist" or an "originalist, but not a nut."

But if the opinion Scalia joins in McDonald matches his signals at argument, the justice will no longer be able to call himself an originalist of any kind. He will have to turn in his O-card and leave Clarence Thomas as the only originalist on the Court. (Not coincidentally, Thomas is the only justice on record as favoring a revival of the Privileges or Immunities Clause.)

The Court has nearly four months before it issues its McDonald opinion. We can only hope that the straying Saint Originalism returns to the catechism he has taught so well.

This Women's History Month, the Cato Institute pays homage to three women, who in the early 1940s unabashedly defended free-market capitalism and individualism in an age that widely considered American capitalism dead and socialism the future. In 1943, Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane and Ayn Rand published three groundbreaking books (The God of the Machine, The Discovery of Freedom and The Fountainhead), which laid the foundations of the modern libertarian movement.

• "Feminism and Women's Rights," The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism

More recently, Cato published two books by noted libertarian feminist Joan Kennedy Taylor, listed below.

• Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Rediscovered, by Joan Kennedy Taylor
• What to Do When You Don't Want to Call The Cops: A Non-Adversarial Approach to Sexual Harassment, by Joan Kennedy Taylor

featuring Brandon Arnold

featuring Timothy Sandefur

In case you lost count, President Obama's remarks on Wednesday were his 35th major speech on health care reform. The news: this time he really, really, really means it when he says it's time to act.

At least I assume it was President Obama. It might have been an animatronic puppet filched from Disney World given its utter predictability. Even the backdrop was an imitation—a legion of white-coated health care workers, the same as at the president's speech on Oct. 5, 2009.

As for the speech itself, it was virtually indistinguishable from any of the previous 34.

It began as usual with the rhetorical trope whereby the president positions himself as the middle ground between two extremes, in this case single-payer advocates and "those who want to do nothing." One imagines that the president starts every day considering that there are those who want him to become a military dictator and those who want him to resign, but he's just going to go on being president.

Having shown how moderate and reasonable he is, the president launched into the usual factually inaccurate claims. "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan," he said. "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor." That's been a part of almost every one of Obama's speeches. However, as everyone from ABC News to Factcheck.org has pointed out, it's simply untrue. Under the regulations and mandates contained in the president's plan, the government would set minimum benefit levels for insurance plans. If your plan had too high a deductible or didn't contain benefits the government thought you should have, you would have to change plans to one that complied with the government's standards, even if the new plan was more expensive or contained benefits you didn't want.

As usual he also claimed that his plan would "bring down the cost of health care" and reduce premiums. Yet the president's own chief actuary has said that the plans under consideration "bend the cost curve upward," that is, actually increase the amount of health care spending. And according to the Congressional Budget Office, the bills do little or nothing to reduce insurance premiums. For millions of Americans, the Senate bill will actually make things worse, increasing insurance premiums by 10 percent-13 percent for Americans who don't receive insurance from their employer and buy their insurance through the non-group market. Those increases are over and above the increases that would occur if we did nothing, and would result in roughly doubling premiums by 2016, according to the CBO.

And there was the bizarre claim that the American people are "waiting for us to act. They are waiting for us to lead." But no major poll has shown majority support for health care reform in more than two months. In the most recent Real Clear Politics average of polls, 50.3 percent opposed reform, with just 40.8 percent in favor.

Finally, there was the predictable attack on insurance companies—no one's favorite industry these days, so a safe target—and the assertion that anyone who opposed his plan wants to do nothing.

As for substance, there were a few cosmetic concessions (an extra $50 million to encourage states to experiment with malpractice reform, undercover stings to fight Medicare and Medicaid fraud, maybe allowing government-run exchanges to sell health savings accounts). But at its heart, the latest version of Obamacare has not changed. It still represents a top down, centralized, command and control approach to reform. The government would require everyone to have health insurance, would determine what benefits that insurance must include, would regulate insurance prices and physician reimbursement, and would micromanage how medicine is practiced. All this would be accompanied by higher taxes and most likely higher insurance premiums.

The president closed by endorsing an obscure parliamentary gimmick known as reconciliation to bypass a Republican filibuster and force a bill through Congress. The American people might oppose health care reform. They might have elected Scott Brown in Massachusetts to be "the 41st vote" against the bill. They might be ready to vote out most any Democrat who supports it.

But never mind all that. President Obama knows best.

And he's told us that—over and over again.

Up is down, night is day, and now, in the best tradition of George Orwell's 1984 newspeak KBR -- the company that was the subject of a recent Department of Defense Inspect General report that found that the Army broke federal procurement rules in 2004, when two commanding generals improperly directed a contracting officer to pay millions of dollars in fees to KBR Inc., when funds should have been withheld, per the language in the contract with KBR - has been awarded its first task order under the newest version of LOGCAP.

For those who don't know, LOGCAP is the mother of all logistics support contracts. Without it the U.S. Army simply can't function.

The award also comes just a week after the Army announced that KBR would not be awarded $25 million in bonuses under the LOGCAP III Iraq support contract because KBR "failed to meet a level deserving of an award fee payment for work it did during the first four months of 2008." Although the Army did not specifically cite it when announcing the withholding of the payment KBR's "failed" work occurred during the time a Green Beret was electrocuted in a barracks shower in Iraq KBR was responsible for maintaining.

KBR was informed of the new LOGCAP task order award, just one day after executives told shareholders about the lost award fees.

The cost-plus, fixed-fee contract, announced Tuesday, is for one base year ($571 million) plus four option years, that, if exercised, could be total $2.8 billion, for work to be done in Iraq.

KBR will provide the following:

· CLSS (Corps Logistics Support Services) at multiple locations in Iraq. Services will include vehicle maintenance (organizational and direct support levels), Supply Support Activity, Central Issue Facilities, Self Service Supply Centers, Ice Plant Services, some Air Terminal Operations and Bulk Fuel Operations to include fuel laboratories.

· TTM (Theater Transportation Mission) which will include multiple transportation functions such as Bulk Fuel Transportation, Sustainment Transportation (movement of maintenance repair parts and other supplies), Heavy Equipment Transport, Movement Control Functions, Material Handling Equipment functions, Recovery Operations and refrigerated transport.

· Postal Services which will include supporting Joint Military Mail Terminal functions, distribution and transportation of mail, augmentation of Army Post Offices, mail handling equipment, mail processing, and receiving and sorting mail.

As a result of criticisms leveled against KBR, the Army Materiel Command ended the previous LOGCAP III contract, which KBR held, and replaced it in 2007 with the current LOGCAP round, dubbed "LOGCAP IV". Unlike the past three rounds, under the current version three contractors (KBR, DynCorp, and Fluor Corporation) were awarded contracts, whereupon the three could compete for future task orders. LOGCAP IV has one base year and nine option years with a total potential of $5 billion per year for three of the contractors but not to exceed $150 billion over the lifetime of the contract.

Little noted is the fact that LOGCAP IV itself is managed by a contractor (Serco-North America) and now is being split geographically between KBR, Dyncorp, and Fluor , which reduces the benefits of a multiple award Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract that was intended to create competition on each task order.

The inimitable Ms. Sparky, who is to KBR and similar companies, what Sherlock Holmes was to Dr. Moriarty, was the first to break the news, in advance of the official notification, that KBR would receive the award.

But whether this is a good idea is far from settled. Before going any further let's acknowledge that LOGCAP workers out in the field do critically important, if unrecognized, work such as providing laundry services and bath facilities, food service, mortuary affairs, sanitation, facilities management, morale, welfare and recreation, information management, transportation, medical services, engineering and construction, and power generation and distribution.

For KBR this is not just about money but also a chance to burnish its reputation, which its management has done a good job of tarnishing over the years thanks to billions of dollars in unsupported charges, shoddy electrical work, hazardous burn pits, and failure to protect its employees from being raped, just to name a few things.

KBR sent out an all hands email to its employees that says, "With so much negative news about KBR and the fact that we have not won a LOGCAP IV task order, it is with great pride that I am able to announce that KBR is now in the LOGCAP IV business."

To some KBR resembles Mario Puzo's Godfather in that it is the position of making the Army an offer it can't refuse As the DoD IG report on the decision not to withhold payments to KBR when it should have done so under the terms of its contract, "The decision to postpone the withholding of funds was influenced by contractor claims that the withholding might adversely impact their ability to provide vital support services to the troops."

Put another way, last May the Commission on Wartime Contracting held a hearing where Jeffrey Parsons, executive director of the Army Contracting Command had this exchange with Commission Ervin:

But it sounds like you are saying that if we were talking about fewer undefinitized contract actions, with less money at issue, that that would have been one thing, but because the number was so large and because the value we are talking about was so large, it is essentially a too big to fail issue here. I want to know what you meant by that and why the Army made that determination. And, by saying that it posed a serious risk to the contractor's ability to support the warfighter, does that mean that had that money not been withheld, that KBR would not have supported our troops in the field?

Mr. Parsons. Sir, that was the unknown. To be quite honest, there was a lot of concern. When you took the total amount of money that had been, that was undefinitized at the time, and applying that withhold would have been a significant amount of dollars, additional dollars that were already either being withheld in some nature or tied up in billing.

So the Head of the Contracting Activity at that time, after taking input from many, many different sources, decided that the risk associated with applying that withhold, given the potential operational impacts, in his judgment, was not the right move to make. So that is why we pursued that deviation.

Charles Tiefer, a professor of government contracting at the University of Baltimore Law School and a member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting said, "Giving KBR this contract while denying them award fees for their enormous problem of accidentally electrocuting soldiers amounts to rapping them on the knuckles on one hand while handing them a multibillion dollar deal in the other."

Not mentioned in all the current news coverage, according to says Charles Smith, who oversaw the LOGCAP contract during the early days of the Iraq war as chief of the Army Field Support Command, is that "the intent of LOGCAP IV was to create the competitive possibility of losing work due to poor performance. Setting a precedent of sticking with the first contractor dilutes competition incentives." If the Army abandons the competitive incentives of LOGCAP IV, some informed observers think we will be back to the problems of LOGCAP III.

Additionally, the award in Iraq was to comply with evaluation criteria, including past performance. The integrity of the contract is damaged if the combatant commanders call the outcome, no matter the evaluation criteria.

Thus far, not all members of Congress are pleased with the KBR award. Congressman Edolphus Towns (D-NY), who heads the House Oversight Committee, wrote to Defense Secretary Robert Gates to question the Army's decision. Senator Byron Dorgan, (D-ND) who chaired several Senate hearings on electrocutions of soldiers in Iraq resulting from shoddy contracting work by KBR, said the Army's past LOGCAP, or logistics, contracts had produced "the greatest waste, fraud and abuse perhaps in the history of our country."

President Obama has more than doubled the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan compared with when he took office. Those forces are chiefly concerned not with the original mission of beating al Qaeda through counterterrorism but rather with trying to build a new nation. On March 18, the Cato Institute will host a conference to discuss conservatives' historical relationship with nation building, and how that relationship impacts the continuing war in Afghanistan. MSNBC host and former U.S. Representative Joe Scarborough will deliver the keynote address.

• "Escalate or Withdraw? Conservatives and the War in Afghanistan," Cato Conference, 3/18/10

featuring Clark Neily

One long-standing hallmark of Western conservative thought is the emphasis on the rule of law. Earlier generations of conservatives understood that, without such constraints, liberty would be imperiled and a free society would ultimately descend into tyranny. As Lord Acton observed, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Even during the 20th century, most conservatives were wary of unfettered pragmatism, and they viewed with horror the assertion of Vladimir Lenin and his communist followers that the end justifies the means. To the contrary, conservatives stressed that even when the goals were worthy, the use of unconstitutional, illegal, or immoral means was not justified.

In recent years, though, a troubling number of prominent figures on the political right have seemingly abandoned that standard, especially with respect to national-security issues. Instead, their sole guiding principle appears to be whether an initiative "works"—in the sense of producing the desired result. Whether that initiative violates fundamental constitutional or moral standards is seen as irrelevant and, frankly, a somewhat quaint consideration. By embracing ruthless pragmatism, these individuals come perilously close to being conservative Leninists.

Signs of such attitudes began to surface during the Cold War, and they were among the reasons why I left Young Americans for Freedom, the Young Republicans, and other conservative organizations. Increasingly, I heard the argument that, because America confronted a dangerous, ruthless, and evil adversary, our country could not be squeamish about the tactics used to thwart that threat. The policies U.S. officials pursued reflected a willingness to cut moral and legal corners to achieve the broader objective. The cynical military coups that the Eisenhower administration executed to topple democratic, albeit left-leaning, governments in Iran and Guatemala were international manifestations of this attitude. So, too, were lucrative military- and economic-aid programs to some of the most odious dictators on the planet, including Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire, the shah of Iran, Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza, and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. Domestically, most conservatives seemed comfortable with government programs that spied on, and even harassed, critics of U.S. foreign policy.

That tendency to disregard legal and moral considerations has resurfaced and become even more virulent in conservative political and policy circles regarding counterterrorism measures since the September 11 attacks. In a series of memos to the President (the most infamous one being the August 1, 2002, "torture memo") conservative legal scholars John Yoo and Jay Bybee, at the time lawyers for the Department of Justice, made sweeping assertions about presidential authority to wage the "War on Terror." Among other arguments, Yoo and Bybee contended that "enhanced interrogation techniques" (a term that was little more than a euphemism for torture) were not barred by the U.S. Constitution, treaties the United States had signed, or any federal statute. Indeed, any congressional act that purported to limit the president's power in that area would be invalid.

More broadly, Yoo and Bybee adopted a breathtaking interpretation of presidential power in the arena of national security. Among other steps, they argued, the president could order the indefinite detention of any terrorist suspect—even a U.S. citizen arrested on U.S. soil—without a trial or even an evidentiary hearing.

How far John Yoo was willing to go in placing the president beyond any legal restraints became apparent in a December 2005 debate with a critic of the Bush administration's policies. When asked whether a president could order that the testicles of a suspected terrorist's child be crushed in order to pressure the father, Yoo astonishingly declined to condemn such an outrageous idea as legally and morally offensive. Instead he replied, "I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that."

The Bush administration sought to put most of the recommendations of the Yoo-Bybee memos into practice. This is troubling on several counts. The Geneva Conventions prohibit not only torture but, in equally categorical terms, the use of "violence," "cruel treatment," or even "humiliating or degrading treatment" of detainees. Moreover, the War Crimes Act of 1996 made any grave breach of these prohibitions a felony. A number of interrogation techniques that the Bush administration approved, most notably waterboarding and extended sleep deprivation, were rather clear violations. The August 2002 memo even approved any CIA enhanced-interrogation technique that did not lead to organ failure or other severe, permanent physical damage.

David Addington, the general counsel in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, chafed at legal restrictions because in his view they would hobble efforts "to quickly [sic] obtain information from captured terrorists." Addington strongly endorsed the most radical claim in the August 2002 memo: that the president could authorize any interrogation method. Treaties, and even U.S. laws, forbidding "any person" to commit torture simply did "not apply" to the commander in chief, he argued.

In a May 2009 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Cheney himself embraced such reasoning and vehemently defended the record of the Bush administration on pragmatic grounds: "In the years after 9/11, our government also understood that the safety of the country required collecting information known only to the worst of the terrorists." And in some cases, "that information could be gained only through tough interrogations." The intelligence officers "who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people." A bold claim, and one that former CIA director George Tenet had made previously: "I know that this program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots."

Cheney's dismissive attitude toward criticism of the policies on moral or legal grounds was especially unsettling. He recounted that one high-level Al Qaeda operative had said that he would talk as soon as he got to the United States and saw his lawyer. "But like many critics of interrogations," Cheney sneered, "he clearly misunderstood the business at hand. American personnel were not there to commence an elaborate legal proceeding, but to extract information from him before al-Qaeda could strike again and kill more of our people."

Other conservative figures echoed Cheney's condemnation of moves by the Obama administration to investigate whether unlawful abuses of detainees had taken place. House Republican leader John Boehner stated,

Our intelligence professionals have done a marvelous job keeping us safe. Faced with threats never before seen in our history, they have provided our troops with crucial information they need to fight our enemies abroad and protect our citizens at home. They deserve our gratitude...

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell was even more succinct: "I think it's important to remember, from 9/11 until the end of the Bush administration, not another single attack on the U.S. homeland. We were obviously doing something right."

Conservative pundits likewise lined up behind the proposition that it was unpatriotic even to advocate an investigation into whether government employees may have violated the law and committed acts of torture. Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas argued that the Bush administration's approach clearly had been successful, and he scorned Obama and others who worried that the tactics may have violated fundamental American values: "History will show that this approach protected our 'values' against those who would destroy them." The American Enterprise Institute's Reuel Marc Gerecht, though, made the most blatant Leninist defense. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, he stated,

Regardless of whether one believes CIA-inflicted waterboarding, sleep deprivation or severe psychological coercion (suggesting that harm could come to a family member of a taciturn al Qaeda detainee) constitute torture, such actions may have produced an intelligence bonanza and saved thousands of lives.

A striking feature of the defense that Cheney and his ideological allies have put forth is the avoidance of any serious discussion of whether the measures were illegal and/or immoral. Moreover, there is almost no willingness to address the point that at least some of the accused terrorists held at the Guantanamo Bay detention center and overseas facilities were innocent. Indeed, the term "accused terrorists" is never used. Proponents of enhanced-interrogation techniques invariably describe detainees as "captured terrorists" or simply "terrorists," as though the guilt of every single individual were beyond dispute.

Yet that notion defies credulity. There were several thousand people captured in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other locations. The Guantanamo facility held more than 775 detainees at the peak, and many more were held at Abu Ghraib and various CIA "black sites" overseas. Even assuming that CIA, FBI, and military personnel were scrupulous in trying to establish the guilt of individuals they captured, it is a certainty that some innocent people were caught up in the sweep. Indeed, given the bitter clan and tribal rivalries in Afghanistan, and the equally bitter Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish animosity in Iraq, it is highly probable that a sizable number of parties were accused by personal or ideological enemies, even when they had no connection to Al Qaeda.

It is difficult enough to accept the reality that U.S. personnel committed acts of torture, even against bona fide terrorists. But it is appalling that some of the people deprived of their liberty for months, and in some cases years, without trial—and subjected to torture—were in fact innocent. Yet approximately 50 percent of the inmates held by the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib were ultimately released without being prosecuted. A number of detainees at Guantanamo have likewise been quietly released. In both cases, the implicit admission is that they were not terrorists.

The "ends justifies the means" defense of the Bush administration's War on Terror tactics proves faulty even on its own terms. Contrary to the assertion by proponents of enhanced-interrogation techniques, there is serious doubt about their effectiveness. In his AEI speech, as on so many other occasions, Cheney failed to provide specifics about terrorist attacks that were foiled or to offer any evidence that those techniques saved thousands, much less hundreds of thousands, of lives.

Moreover, several former officials with experience in interrogation have disputed the claims that significant amounts of valuable information were obtained. Even the validity of information provided by high-level Al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the veritable poster boy for the effectiveness of torture, is now uncertain. As reported by Vanity Fair, one former senior CIA official, who read all of the interrogation reports on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, concluded that "90 percent of it was f–king bullsh-t." Former CIA officer Robert Baer makes the obvious point that "you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture is bad enough."

Even worse, there are indications that such harsh tactics have made the overall terrorist threat worse. Matthew Alexander, the senior interrogator in Iraq on a task force charged with finding Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, made a most sobering observation in The Daily Beast:

I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite the torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight. Consider that 90 percent of the suicide bombers in Iraq are those foreign fighters, and you can easily conclude that we have lost hundreds, if not thousands of American lives because of our policy of torture and abuse.

Fortunately, not all conservatives have succumbed to the temptation to disregard moral and legal constraints on the grounds that terrorism poses a serious threat to the well-being of the American people. Testifying before the House Committee on Armed Services, former State Department official William H. Taft IV, grandson of Robert A. Taft, the leading conservative political figure of his era, provided a reminder of the importance of adhering to principle in troubling times: "It is when we are enraged—when our blood boils—that we most need to adhere to the rule of law as we have established it, not change it to suit our convenience." That is an appropriate rebuke to Dick Cheney, John Yoo, and other conservatives who seem all too willing to embrace Leninist tactics.

Doug Brooks, founder and head of IPOA, a trade group for private military and security contractors, has long claimed that using such contractors is more effective than their public sector counterparts. Indeed, search online for "Doug Brooks and cost effectiveness" and you get 33,500 results.

Now, it appears that he is right, at least mostly, in his view, according to a report released today by the Government Accountability Office.

The report "Warfighter Support: A Cost Comparison of Using State Department Employees versus Contractors for Security Services in Iraq" focused on determining the costs to the Department of Defense and the State Department of using private security contractors for security services versus using federal employees to provide the same services.

The report reviewed four task orders of the Worldwide Personal Protective Services (WPPS) II contracts and one contract for Baghdad embassy security. WPPS is the way the State Department hires private security firms to protect its personnel around the world.

GAO based its review on assumptions provided by the State Department. These included that the State Department would have to recruit, hire, and train new employees who would all be U.S. citizens; the employees would serve 1 year in Iraq and then return to the United States; and the State Department would use the same number of employees the contractors use to provide security.

What the GAO found was:

Our comparison of likely State Department costs versus contractor costs for four task orders and one contract awarded by the State Department for security services in Iraq showed that for three of the task orders and the contract, the cost of using State Department employees would be greater than using contractors, while the State Department's estimated cost to use federal employees was less for the other task order. For example, using State Department employees to provide static security for the embassy in Baghdad would have cost the department approximately $858 million for 1 year compared to the approximately $78 million charged by the contractor for the same time period.

In regard to the remaining task order, the result was only slightly less favorable.

In contrast, our cost comparison of the task order for providing personal security for State Department employees while in the Baghdad region — which required personnel that have security clearances — showed that for this task order, the State Department's estimated annual cost would have been about $240 million, whereas the contractor charged approximately $380 million for 1 year. However, because the State Department does not currently have a sufficient number of trained personnel to provide security in Iraq, the department would need to recruit, hire, and train additional employees at an additional cost of $162 million.

Overall, the difference between the contractors' cost and the estimated State Department cost ranged from about $3 million for one task order to over $785 million for the contract.

See Table 1 on page 6 for a cost comparison for one contract and four task orders using a one-to-one ratio of deployed to stateside employees.

GAO did note that contract requirements are a major factor in determining whether contractors or government personnel are less expensive — especially factors such as whether personnel need security clearances.

For instance, unless the State Department specifies a need for personnel with security clearances — which are generally not available to non-U.S. citizens — contractors typically choose to employ a large percentage of third-country nationals and local nationals to lower contract cost. For example, the contractor providing embassy security in Baghdad employed a large percentage of third-country nationals and local nationals (about 89 percent), whose lower wages contributed to the lower cost of the contract. In contrast, our comparison of the task order for providing personal security for State Department employees while in the Baghdad region — which required personnel that have security clearances — showed that for this task order, the State Department's estimated annual cost would have been about $240 million, whereas the contractor charged approximately $380 million for 1 year.

And when using contractors, the department also incurs administrative costs for awarding the task orders and contract and providing oversight; however, the State Department was unable to estimate these costs. These costs can vary depending on the complexity and sensitivity of the contract. For example, according to State Department officials, the Baghdad Embassy contract provides static security at a fixed site which requires less oversight than the Worldwide Personal Protective Services II contracts which provide for the protective security of U.S. government officials and other individuals traveling in unsecured areas in theatre.

This does not definitively settle the debate as there were some things GAO did not look at such as whether the quality of the services provided by the contractors or whether better services could be provided by the State Department. It also did not evaluate the policy implications of using contractors to perform security functions.

Yet when you look at the availability of bodies for security functions it becomes clear why the State Department will continue to rely on private security contractors. GAO notes:

That in order for the State Department to perform these security missions with its own employees it would cost the State Department approximately $162 million to recruit, hire, and train 6,330 employees. When determining total costs for the department to provide security services, these recruitment and training costs would be in addition to the State Department's estimated annual cost. Overall, for these four task orders and one contract, the State Department is using 3,165 contractors for security in Iraq. However, the State Department only has about 1,500 security agents who are already performing other missions and according to State Department officials, these agents would not be available to perform the security missions provided by the contractors. According to State Department officials, based upon recent experience in establishing a new skill specialty, it would take about a year to have the first security personnel on-board; however, they would not be in sufficient numbers to completely replace the contractors. They said it could easily take them 3 years or longer to hire, train, and fully staff all positions necessary to accomplish the mission. As an example of the length of time it would take to hire and mobilize more employees, State Department officials informed us that after the attacks on September 11, 2001, under their current hiring process it took the State Department 2 years to hire 327 employees using existing career fields (to include recruitment, training, and completing the security clearance process).

But, compared to past efforts, such as this 2005 report and 2008 report by the Congressional Budget Office the GAO report is as close as we have yet seen in comparing apples to apples.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try, try, try again.

With Plans A, B and C having failed miserably, President Obama yesterday unveiled his latest "new and improved" version of health-care reform. He says that this incarnation "incorporates the best ideas from Democrats and Republicans — including some of the ideas that Republicans offered during the health-care summit." Unfortunately, its fundamental premise remains exactly the same — a government takeover of the health-care system.

Start with those "Republican ideas": Though mostly not bad, they're hardly game changing.

• Increase the financial incentives for states to experiment with malpractice reform by $50 million. Wow — a million dollars per state! That undoubtedly has the trial lawyers quaking in their boots.
• Undercover stings to help root out Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Fine — but when fighting fraud in government programs becomes a major concession, it shows just how out of touch Washington has become.
• Increase Medicare reimbursements. OK, higher spending for a program that's already going broke may well be a Republican idea, but it doesn't exactly make Obama's better.
• Allow health-savings accounts to be sold through the government-sponsored exchanges. This could be a positive step — but the details are key, and they remain to be seen.

HSAs have been proven to reduce the cost of health care and have added nearly 3 million people to the ranks of the insured since their inception. But they only really work in conjunction with high-deductible insurance — if your policy already pays for everything, there's not much point to saving for health expenses.

And every version of ObamaCare to date has restricted high-deductible insurance and/or mandated low-deductible policies. Unless the president is prepared to make major changes in those areas, the HSA concession is just bait-and-switch.

All in all, saying that these changes represent a "compromise" with Republicans is a bit like saying that Yankee speedster Brett Gardner is a home-run hitter. It's technically true (he hit three dingers last year), but no one's going to mistake him for Babe Ruth.

The president has also touted the new plan as "smaller" and "leaner." Smaller and leaner than what? This version may actually cost more than the last one — breaking the $1 trillion mark even under the White House's rosy assumptions.

At its heart, ObamaCare hasn't changed. It still represents a top-down, centralized, command-and-control approach to reform.

The government would require everyone to have health insurance, would determine what benefits that insurance must include, would regulate insurance prices and physician reimbursement and would micromanage how medicine is practiced.

All this would be accompanied by higher taxes and, most likely, higher insurance premiums.

It is a plan that says the government knows best — when it comes to a sixth of the US economy and some of the most important, personal and private decisions in people's lives. A few cosmetic concessions can't fix that basic premise.

Obama also made it clear yesterday that he wants Congress to use an obscure parliamentary gimmick known as "reconciliation" to bypass a Republican filibuster and force the bill through the Senate. Democrats will likely manage to get the 50 votes needed in the Senate to use this tactic — but the vote will be far closer in the House, where deaths, defections and resignations have erased the three-vote margin of victory Democrats had last November.

The president was right about one thing yesterday. As he said, "Every argument has been made. Everything there is to say about health care has been said, and just about everyone has said it. So now is the time to make a decision."

Reportedly, as many as nine House Democrats who once voted against ObamaCare, including Rep. Scott Murphy of upstate New York, are now open to supporting the latest version. If they do, in the face of overwhelming public opposition, this new version of health reform could turn out to be Plan L — for "loser."

Failure to admit that raising taxes reduces tax receipts is irresponsible

If New York City decided to increase its cigarette tax by another $5 per pack, would it gain more or less revenue from the extra tax?

Before you answer the question, you should know that New York City already has the highest combined state-local tax rate of $4.25 per pack while the national average state tax is $1.34 per pack, and South Carolina has the lowest tax in the nation of only 7 cents per pack. The bet is that New York would receive less rather than more tax revenue, because some smokers would decide to quit and many others would acquire their cigarettes legally or illegally from low-tax states (New York already has an enormous cigarette smuggling problem). The citizens, and even most of the politicians in New York City, understand that their cigarette tax is already too high to maximize tax revenue, but they argue the high tax discourages smoking and thus is justified on that basis.

The point is, you don't have to be an economist to understand that if you tax something, you tend to get less of it. Thus it makes good fiscal sense to tax products perceived as harmful, such as tobacco and alcohol, up to the point where the tax becomes so high that people engage in large-scale smuggling or produce the product themselves — moonshine stills, etc. Responsible government officials understand the behavioral response to tax rates and thus adjust their tax revenue forecasts to consider the economic disincentive effects as well as the tax avoidance and/or evasion effects.

However, many government officials like to pretend that the effects of tax rates on the willingness of people to purchase goods or services, or work, save and invest are far less than the empirical and historical evidence shows. The Obama administration is now engaging in this type of misrepresentation and forecast fraud, which will result in much higher deficits and lower levels of economic growth and job creation than it claims.

To understand how serious this type of fraud is, think about how government officials would react if a company forecast a huge increase in revenues — and sent press releases of the forecast to the investment community, but failed to reveal that this forecast was based on the intention to double the prices for the company's products while assuming it will not reduce demand. Such actions by company officials would be considered irresponsible misrepresentation, for which they could be held legally liable.

Economists engage in endless debate about the long-run revenue-maximizing rates for any tax, whether it is a cigarette, gasoline, general sales, property or income tax. All of these taxes have been raised and lowered many times at the federal, state and local levels, so there is a good deal of empirical evidence about what the effects are likely to be. For instance, economists do know that taxes on capital (interest, dividends, capital gains) tend to be the most destructive because capital is the "seed corn" necessary for economic growth and job creation, while low-rate taxes on consumption do scant economic harm.

There is little dispute among economists that an increase in the tax on labor from 10 percent to 15 percent would bring in almost 50 percent more revenue (there would only be a small behavioral effect). There is also little dispute, at least among knowledgeable tax economists, that increasing the income tax rate on upper income people from 50 percent to 70 percent will, over the long run, bring in no additional tax revenue and eventually will lead to a loss in revenue.

Despite this knowledge, the Obama administration and the congressional Democrats are proposing a series of tax surcharges and deduction phase-outs in the health care bill on people making more than $200,000 per year. These surcharges, along with the proposed elimination of the "Bush" tax cuts at the end of this year, as well as state and local income taxes, will cause many Americans to face tax rates well over 50 percent and some in the 60 percent range or even higher. Punishing productive work and investment by imposing such high tax rates has been shown time and time again to result in less investment, economic growth, job creation and ultimately, lower tax revenues.

In addition, the Senate just passed a "jobs bill" that is now being considered by the House, which would make it much more expensive to do business in the United States by imposing either a 30 percent withholding tax or very costly and intrusive regulatory requirements on foreign financial institutions. This will divert global capital elsewhere, thus reducing job creation in the U.S. rather than increasing it. The failure to recognize and admit to the fact that productive capital can move around the globe almost at the speed of light and will not stay where it is punished by either excessive taxation or regulation is as criminal as business executives providing false information.

Reasonable people can disagree about the negative effects of tax rates up to a point — but neglect and/or denial of evidence is misrepresentation. The sum of the tax rate increases on productive labor and capital now before Congress may not kill the U.S. economy but will leave it very sick — and ultimately, with less tax revenue. If corporate executives can be sued for misrepresentation, should the people not have the right to sue government officials for providing phony tax revenue and spending numbers?

In the latest issue of Nuclear Proliferation Update, Cato scholar Christopher A. Preble argues that a fundamental debate on the importance of nuclear weapons in U.S. military policy—and of the force structure to support nuclear detterence—is sorely needed. More specifically, says Preble, "As we continue to make deep cuts in our nuclear arsenal, the strategic triad should become a dyad, and we should debate the merits of bombers versus ICBMs versus SLBMs using a specific set of objective criteria."

• "From Triad to Dyad," by Christopher A. Preble
• Subscribe to Nuclear Proliferation Update

The Supreme Court this past week heard oral argument in McDonald v. Chicago — the Second Amendment case with implications far beyond gun rights. The Court is likely to extend the right to keep and bear arms to the states and thereby invalidate the Chicago handgun ban at issue, but they did not seem inclined to adopt arguments that the Privileges or Immunities Clause was the way to go. Comments Cato scholar Ilya Shapiro, "[I]t is a shame that the Supreme Court seems to be wasting a perfect opportunity to bring constitutional law closer to the Constitution."

• "Gun Rights Secure, Liberty Less So," by Ilya Shapiro
• "Revive 'Privileges or Immunities'," by Timothy Sandefur

featuring Tom G. Palmer