Kagan Doing Her Leftist Thing

Shannen Coffin was a deputy attorney general during the Bush administration, and was charged with defending the federal partial-birth abortion act in court. At National Review, he writes that documents released by the Clinton White House show Elena Kagan’s “willingness to manipulate medical science to fit the Democratic party’s political agenda on the hot-button issue of abortion.” The account, if it is true, is a shocking one.

A key event in the politics of partial-birth abortion was a report by a “select panel” of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), a supposedly nonpartisan physicians’ organization. That report included this statement, which the Supreme Court found highly persuasive in striking down Nebraska’s partial-birth abortion ban:

ACOG declared that the partial-birth-abortion procedure “may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.” The Court relied on the ACOG statement as a key example of medical opinion supporting the abortion method.

Here is the shocking part: the ACOG report, as originally drafted, said almost exactly the opposite. The initial draft said that the ACOG panel “could identify no circumstances under which this procedure . . . would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of the woman.” That language horrified the rabidly pro-abortion Elena Kagan, then a deputy assistant to President Clinton for domestic policy. This is what Kagan wrote in a memo to her superiors in the Clinton White House:

Todd Stern just discovered that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) is thinking about issuing a statement (attached) that includes the following sentence: “[A] select panel convened by ACOG could identify no circumstances under which [the partial-birth] procedure … would be the only option to save the life or preserve the health of the woman.” This, of course, would be disaster — not the less so (in fact, the more so) because ACOG continues to oppose the legislation. It is unclear whether ACOG will issue the statement; even if it does not, there is obviously a chance that the draft will become public.

So Kagan took matters into her own hands: incredibly, she herself appears to have written the key language that eventually appeared in the ACOG report. Coffin writes:

So Kagan set about solving the problem. Her notes, produced by the White House to the Senate Judiciary Committee, show that she herself drafted the critical language hedging ACOG’s position. On a document [PDF] captioned “Suggested Options” — which she apparently faxed to the legislative director at ACOG — Kagan proposed that ACOG include the following language: “An intact D&X [the medical term for the procedure], however, may be the best or most appropriate procedure in a particular circumstance to save the life or preserve the health of a woman.”

Kagan’s language was copied verbatim by the ACOG executive board into its final statement, where it then became one of the greatest evidentiary hurdles faced by Justice Department lawyers (of whom I was one) in defending the federal ban. (Kagan’s role was never disclosed to the courts.)

Unless there is some other interpretation of these documents that does not occur to me, it appears that Elena Kagan participated in a gigantic scientific deception. On behalf of the Clinton White House, she deliberately subverted what was supposed to be an objective scientific process. The ACOG report was certainly seen in that light by the federal courts. Federal Judge Richard Kopf was deeply impressed by the scientific integrity of the report; he wrote:

“Before and during the task force meeting,” he concluded, “neither ACOG nor the task force members conversed with other individuals or organizations, including congressmen and doctors who provided congressional testimony, concerning the topics addressed” in the ACOG statement.

This statement was obviously false. The federal courts were victimized by a gross deception and a perversion of both the scientific process and the judicial process, carried out, the evidence appears to show, by Elena Kagan.

Ms. Kagan has a great deal of explaining to do. Unless she can come up with an innocent explanation for these documents, she should not be confirmed.

Comment:  But she will be confirmed.  She will be respected by the Democrats for being above the law.  The Marxists are at the door and about to enter their candidate to sit on the bench of the Supreme Law of the Land.

(The above article was written by John Hinderaker at PowerLine.

Long Hand of George Soros Reaching for Another Heist?

George Soros has been making what he calls a “grave accusation” against Germany. The financier- philanthropist said last week that Germany is endangering the European Union by keeping wages down and pursuing a balanced national budget too aggressively. Germany’s parsimonious attitude, Soros suggests, may bring down the euro.

You get the feeling that Soros is speaking directly to Angela Merkel, trying to give the German chancellor a kindly tutorial. In a speech at Humboldt University, Soros said that Germany had understandable reasons for pursuing thrift. But, he added, the country should spend more and advocate aggressive spending and looser money by the European Investment Bank and the European Central Bank, respectively.

Soros implied that Germany should look to the U.S., where President Barack Obama has spent vigorously and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has created money for the greater good. Soros, the tutor again, underscored that Germany clearly “does not know what it is doing.”

It is time to turn the question around, and make a grave accusation against Soros. It is Soros who is endangering the euro by advocating these spending and loosening policies. They are policies that may give Europe budget problems that render its currency vulnerable to attack by Soros-like traders. Perhaps, like Merkel, Soros is doing his endangering for understandable reasons. Nonetheless, the danger is there, and worth laying out.

Currency Strains

Start with the euro’s creation, as Soros has. Europe unified its monetary policy through the euro before it unified politically, therefore sustaining member countries’ abilities to pursue the kind of independent fiscal policies that can strain a joint currency.

Soros labels this construct “patently flawed.” Clever is another way to describe it. The enormous carrot of access to the euro-land market incentivizes nations to apply the stick of fiscal discipline to themselves. Under that plan, countries that fail to apply the stick with alacrity face the unpleasant choice of initiating extraordinary tax increases and budget cuts to curtail debt or being forced out of the monetary union.

That happened to the U.K. back in the early 1990s, when Soros cost the country $3 billion while he made $1 billion by forcing Britain out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, the euro precursor.

What Merkel Knows

As a former East German, Merkel has visceral knowledge of the enormous waste of human capital that takes place in countries lacking good currencies. Because the East German mark of her young adulthood was a political fantasy rather than a genuine currency, scientists such as Merkel couldn’t purchase the equipment they needed to compete with Western scientists.

Germans like Merkel recall better than Americans what happened when Soros’s raiders hit the U.K., so they know how brutally any non-dollar currency, even the currency of a regional leader, can be brought down.

Beyond Merkel’s personal memory there is the German national memory of the 1920s hyperinflation. That resulted from the decision of a desperate Weimar Republic to inflate its way out of war debts. That hyperinflation so punished middle-class savings and so weakened the 1920s economy that the average German became more susceptible to maniacs like Adolf Hitler and the communists.

Pressure on Germany from Soros, and for that matter, from the Obama administration, makes it harder for Merkel or other European leaders to heed their own sound instincts. Soros’s pressure also obscures a desirable policy path for Germany, one in which it practices fiscal discipline and growth creation so well that other euro nations emulate it.

False Choice

The Keynesian argument that the choice is binary, between spending and pain, is untrue. For one thing, deflation isn’t always painful — in the 1920s, even as Germany agonized, the U.S. thrived during an American deflation. Budget tightening, especially in combination with competitive tax codes, may put all Europe on a growth path that renders its currency a true competitor for the role of global leader over the long run.

The best defense of Soros is that Soros-recommended stimuli by Germany and in euro-land will indeed yield strong growth, and prevent one recession, just as he says. But what happens after that recovery? Europe, like the U.S., isn’t growing fast enough to continue spending its way out of every recession. It is likely that German-tolerated euro-spending on a big scale in 2010 or 2011 would render Europe’s nations the very sort that vulnerable currency traders specialize in annihilating.

The Obama administration for its part is being disingenuous when it makes spending recommendations. As my colleague Sebastian Mallaby at the Council on Foreign Relations notes, the dollar’s status as the currency of reserve amounts to a sort of Kevlar vest against the bullets of currency raiders. The euro possesses no vest.

Soros wants to help the Obama administration and the Keynesian spending that Democrats favor. If Europe spends, that makes the U.S. look less isolated. A big spending Europe also makes the euro less of a threat to the dollar. In any case, it is hard to imagine that what Soros alleges about Germany is true for Soros: that he just doesn’t understand what he is doing.

(Amity Shlaes, senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

This article was printed at Bloomberg.

Reality: Blacks and Hispanics Account for 98% of Reported Gun Assaults in New York City

FIGHTING CRIME WHERE THE CRIMINALS ARE

There was a predictable chorus of criticism from civil rights groups last month when the New York Police Department released its data on stop-and-frisk interactions for 2009, says Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of “Are Cops Racist?” 

• The department made 575,000 pedestrian stops last year.
• Fifty-five percent involved blacks, even though blacks are only 23 percent of the city’s population.
• Whites, by contrast, were involved in 10 percent of all stops, though they make up 35 percent of the city’s population.  

Such stops happen more frequently in minority neighborhoods because that is where the vast majority of violent crime occurs — and thus where police presence is most intense, says Mac Donald: 

• Based on reports filed by victims, blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crime in New York in 2009, including 80 percent of shootings and 71 percent of robberies.
• Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 98 percent of reported gun assaults. And the vast majority of the victims of violent crime were also members of minority groups.
• Non-Hispanic whites, on the other hand, committed 5 percent of the city’s violent crimes in 2009, 1.4 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies. 

Given these facts, the Police Department cannot direct its resources where they are most needed without generating racially disproportionate stop data, even though the department’s tactics themselves are colorblind, says Mac Donald. 

The attack on the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk data is based on the false premise that police activity should mirror census data, not crime.  If the critics get their way, it would strip police protection from the New Yorkers who need it most, says Mac Donald. 

Source: Heather Mac Donald, “Fighting Crime Where the Criminals Are,” New York Times, June 25, 2010. 

For text:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/opinion/26macdonald.html

The above report was published at National Center for Policy Analysis.