By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Jun 28, 2012 at 11:00 AM ET
Today, from 11 am-1 pm, I am hosting an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit, a social network that has the ability to drive huge amounts of traffic back to No Labels and build the movement.
Ask Me Anything is a forum where you can literally ask me anything — and I’ll answer as many questions as I can.
I’m sure we will be discussing the news of the day — the NBA Draft. Oh, and there is news from another Court as well.
Please join the forum.Click here to join the conversation. Click the “UP” arrow next to my original comment to help spread the word to others on Reddit.
You can create an account by clicking “register” in the top right-hand corner of your screen.
By Patrick Derocher, on Thu Jun 28, 2012 at 10:30 AM ET
Shortly after 10 a.m. this morning, in a majority decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court of the United States has upheld the core of President Obama’s signature healthcare law, stating that while the individual mandate is not permissible under the commerce clause, it is under Congress’s taxing authority. However, the Court said that states can opt out of the law, as many have attempted in the past two years. [Washington Post]
In Plain English: The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters. Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn’t comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding.
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Jun 27, 2012 at 1:30 PM ET
As Presbyterians prepare to convene in Pittsburgh for their biennial General Assembly, and plan to consider a resolution to divest from companies that do business with Israel, here’s a stark reminder of moral choice they are making.
As I discussed in my Huffington Post column yesterday, Hewlett-Packard — one of the companies proposed to be boycotted —
is charged with selling “hardware to the Israeli Navy that is used for its operational communications, logistics and planning including the ongoing naval blockade of the Gaza Strip.” Yet, as an official report of the notoriously anti-Israel-leaning United Nations declared in 2011, the blockade was manifestly legal, and it was instituted for the very purposes of upholding the peace. Wrote the Palmer Commission: “Israel faces a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza…The naval blockade was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law.”
Yesterday, came this report from the Washington Free Beacon:
As Gaza militants renew violent rocket attacks on Israeli cities, a Hamas national security minister told a delegation of graduating police officers in the Gaza Strip that they should help liberate Israeli cities, such as Jerusalem, from Jewish control, according to a recently released translation of his remarks.
“None of you should give up playing with all the tools of force and equipment, which will bring us closer to our aspirations: Jerusalem, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Haifa, Akko, and Jaffa,” Hamas Minister Fathi Hammad declared during a Gaza police academy commencement ceremony on June 13, about a week before militants began firing hundreds of rockets into Southern Israel.
“The officers of the class graduating today will become the police chief of Jaffa, the police chief of Haifa, the police chief of Akko, the police chief of Lod, the police chief of Ramle, and of all other places,” said Hammad, an interior and national security minister said, according to a translation of his remarks by the Middle East Media Research Institute.
“Therefore, from this place, we declare to all those who usurped our lands that they must prepare to leave, because we have prepared for jihad,” said the Hamas official, which remains officially committed to the destruction of Israel. “You are going to leave, while we are summoned to battle. We are the owners of this land.”
Hammad’s remarks, which are routinely echoed by Hamas officials, provide context for the currently stalled peace negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.
I hope members of the General Assembly seriously consider whether the interests of peace are best serve by divesting from Israel, and taking the side of brutal thugs like Fathi Hammad who calls for Israel’s very destruction.
The column published this morning here at The Recovering Politician by The RP and his No Labels co-founder, Mark McKinnon, headlines the influential Real Cleafr Policy web site. See below:
By Jonathan Miller, on Wed Jun 27, 2012 at 8:30 AM ET
The RP and his fellow No Labels co-founder Mark McKinnon (George W. Bush’s campaign manager) offer the following thoughts on the presidential appointment process:
This is what a broken government looks like.
Over a year after the 2008 financial crisis, the Treasury Department still didn’t have an assistant secretary for financial markets. In the middle of fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was no Secretary of the Army. And on 9/11, the Bush administration still didn’t have a full national security team in place.
These are the consequences of a broken presidential appointments process. In recent years, the Senate is taking more time to confirm more people, and the problem is especially glaring at the beginning of new administrations. The number of positions requiring Senate confirmation has grown from 280 to 1,400 over the past 50 years, while the average length of time for confirmation has grown from two-and-a-half months to more than 10.
The confirmation process has developed into an embarrassing charade, with highly qualified nominees often held up for petty or purely partisan reasons.
No matter who the next president is, we need a smarter, more efficient system to ensure he can staff his administration with the best people in a timely fashion. No Labels has a three-part solution.
1. Reduce the number of appointees subject to Senate confirmation: The Senate’s “Advice and Consent” on nominations is an important check on presidential power, but it’s not needed for every mid-level official and presidential commission. We should give new presidents more authority to fill less urgent positions and let the Senate focus on the most important nominees who deal with more pressing matters. Encouragingly, a bipartisan bill to do just that has already passed the Senate and awaits action in the House.
2. Identify a “slate that can’t wait” of critical nominees for expedited confirmation: Within a few days of the election, the president should be prepared to name a group of nominees for especially crucial positions, who would be subject to both speedier background checks and Senate review and confirmation.
3. Up or down vote on presidential appointments: All presidential nominations should be confirmed or rejected within 90 days of the nomination being received by the Senate. This time frame includes both committee and floor action. If a nominee’s name is not confirmed or rejected within 90 days, the nominee would be confirmed by default.
Our next president will have plenty of problems to deal with – and worrying about whether he can hire good people should not be one of them. It’s time to fix the presidential appointment process and fix it now.
By Jonathan Miller, on Tue Jun 26, 2012 at 12:30 PM ET
Were you aware that this coming week, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) will be taking a critical vote to divest from companies that do business in Israel?
Many of my Presbyterian friends and family were not aware, and they strongly oppose such action.
Please read my piece in today’s Huffington Post, and if you are moved to take action, I urge you to do so before the weekend’s convention:
On June 30, the biennial General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) will consider the church’s divestment from three American companies because of their sales to Israel. This misguided, ineffectual proposal would have only one meaningful ramification — It would seriously deepen a growing chasm with one of the church’s strongest allies on nearly every issue of social justice: the Jewish people.
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Although I am a devout Jew, I have always enjoyed a special kinship with the Presbyterian Church. My paternal cousins, though intermarriage, are active Presbyterians, and I have been proud to celebrate a lifetime of life cycle events at their church. As a child, when my small synagogue in Lexington, Kentucky could not field a basketball team, I played point guard for First Presbyterian; and as a requirement of my team membership, I attended church at least once a year. And with Presbyterian Church (USA)’s headquarters in nearby Louisville, I’ve had the opportunity to meet and work with several of its national leaders in my former roles as Kentucky’s State Treasurer and Chief Financial Officer.
I learned from these experiences about the wide spectrum of values shared by Jews and Presbyterians. First and foremost is a passion for social justice — whether our inspiration comes from the Hebrew Prophets or the Gospels of Jesus, one of our most sacred missions is to serve the poor, promote the rights of the disenfranchised, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. It’s no wonder that over the past several decades, Jews and Presbyterians have walked arm in arm in efforts to establish equal rights for women, African-Americans, and gays and lesbians; to battle callous government policies that exacerbate income inequality; and to promote peace throughout the world.
A serious cleavage in the interfaith relationship emerged, however, upon passage of a policy by the 2004 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) for a “phased, selective” divestment of Israel. After strong protest by Jewish groups — as well as many Presbyterian parishioners — the 2006 General Assembly reversed course, calling for “corporate engagement” to promote peaceful solutions in the Middle East.
This February, however, citing the failure of corporate engagement to produce results, the church’s General Assembly Mission Council recommended that the church divest its stock from Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions, and Hewlett-Packard “until they have ceased profiting from non-peaceful activities in Israel-Palestine.” The church will consider this resolution at its 220th General Assembly meeting that begins June 30 in Pittsburgh.
Unfortunately, the church’s proposed actions have little grounding in reality. Caterpillar, for example, does not actually sell equipment to Israel; it sells tractors to the U.S. government which then transfers them to about 150 countries around the globe, including Israel. To address the church’s objectives, Caterpillar would have to refuse to sell bulldozers to its own government, a move that would level a devastating,, if not existential blow to the company, its shareholders, and its thousands of U.S. employees.
Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard is charged with selling “hardware to the Israeli Navy that is used for its operational communications, logistics and planning including the ongoing naval blockade of the Gaza Strip.” Yet, as an official report of the notoriously anti-Israel-leaning United Nations declared in 2011, the blockade was manifestly legal and instituted for the very purposes of upholding the peace: “Israel faces a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza…The naval blockade was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law.”
By Jonathan Miller, on Mon Jun 25, 2012 at 3:00 PM ET
Click here to purchase this book. NOW!
It’s rare that I have the opportunity to recommend a book — much less have the time to read one — but I’ve just run across the best work of fiction that I’ve started to consume in some time.
It’s called The Art of Fielding; it’s written by a first time novelist, Chad Harbach; and even after I was able to pry myself from the book to get a little writing done myself, I had a very difficult time trying to stop thinking about it.
Indeed, that’s what the book is about. Although I have only completed half of it, I have never read anything that so brilliantly dissects and examines and illuminates that little voice in your head that won’t stop talking and that leads you do stupid things like insult a friend, run a red light, or throw an errant baseball.
While the subtext of the book revolves around the baseball diamond — befitting today’s debate about Roger Clemens — it is a deeply introspective piece that tells many truths about human behavior and relationships that you don’t first expect. And it has done the impossible, by convincing me to pick up Moby Dick for the first time since I was my youngest daughter’s age.
But first, I will finish The Art of Fielding, and I will have a more complete review when I’m actually done.
But wanted to take this opportunity to encourage the RP Nation to read it and share your thoghts. Maybe we will even have an online book club. Join me.
Clemens was one of the 5 best pitchers of all time, AND he’s been vindicated through an extensive and painful court process. Whether or not the sportswriters agree with the jury’s verdict last week, that’s how our democracy works.
The tougher call– moral and practical — concerns whether others who have admitted, or have been suspected of, steroid use should be prohibited from entering the Hall of Fame.
I don’t believe that steroid use — and obviously then, suspicion thereof — PRIOR TO Major League Baseball’s crackdown on performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) should be a barrier to entry. This is a critical distinction. Players such as Manny Ramirez are an easy case — he continued to use PEDs long after Baseball announced stiffer penalties — despite his contribution to the Red Sox resurrection in 2004, he’s done. (Ryan Braun is a much tougher call, and not just because he’s my favorite Jewish player. I agreed with the decision to reverse his suspension based on technicality — again, that is how our system of due process works — but I’m hopeful that in the years to come, the issue will be clairified.)
Read the rest of… The RPs Debate Roger Clemens: The RP in the Second Hole
By Jonathan Miller, on Thu Jun 21, 2012 at 11:00 AM ET
For those of you who’ve heard the recent news about Facebook’s acquisition of Face.com, a facial recognition startup based in Israel, that’s just a tip of the melted desert iceberg.
Today, from 11 am-1 pm, I am hosting an “Ask Me Anything” on Reddit, a social network that has the ability to drive huge amounts of traffic back to No Labels and build the movement.
