1. " Washington? It's a wonderful world, a place where every problem of life can be reduced to just two words. Gun control. Immigration reform. Climate control. The deficit,...
2."If there's just one life that can be saved," Mr. Obama said Monday in Minnesota, using standard Washington risk-benefit analysis, "then we have an obligation to try it."
3. ...Obama's Washington will try to write a gun law that applies in the same way everywhere for each of the nearly 314 million Americans.
4. ...In 1993, Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act, which created a national background-check system and a list of people forbidden to own a gun: felons, the mentally ill, persons who committed a domestic-violence misdemeanor, drug addicts and the dishonorably discharged. A year later, Congress passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, prohibiting 19 models of semi-automatic assault weapons and limiting ammunition magazines to 10 rounds. In other words, they did then what we intend to do again now.
5. ...the Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004. That year, the government formed a panel of specialists at the National Research Council to assess the effects of these gun-control efforts. Its conclusion was that gun-control was a whimper. It said the data on guns and violence "are too weak to support unambiguous conclusions or strong policy statements."
6. "Drawing causal inferences is always complicated and, in the behavioral and social sciences, fraught with uncertainty." Let's rephrase that. When serious scientists try to solve a problem, they ask, What works? When Washington takes on a problem, it says, Why not?
7. Barack Obama's politics aren't just large. They're colossal. His laws are so big there are parts of them no one has ever seen.Here's a Washington Post summary this week of a story on the Affordable Care Act: "Signing up an estimated 30 million uninsured Americans for coverage under the health-care law is shaping up to be, if not a bureaucratic nightmare, at the very least a daunting task." And we're only in the foothills of Mount ObamaCare.
8. ... the Dodd-Frank law's 2,300 pages, Mr. Obama announced: "It provides certainty to everybody, from bankers to farmers to business owners to consumers." That's right, universal certainty.
9. Conservatives predictably object to all this, but one has to ask: How did liberals, especially on the left and without exception, become such mute footmen for Barack Obama's faceless conglomerate politics?
10. But isn't the federalization of pretty much everything in a diverse country like the U.S. just another exercise in imperial overstretch?...In the 2012 presidential election, nearly 66 million people voted for Barack Obama. We're waiting for one Democrat in Congress to express doubt in the president's pixie dust."
Henninger: Obama's Colossal Politics - WSJ.com
2."If there's just one life that can be saved," Mr. Obama said Monday in Minnesota, using standard Washington risk-benefit analysis, "then we have an obligation to try it."
3. ...Obama's Washington will try to write a gun law that applies in the same way everywhere for each of the nearly 314 million Americans.
4. ...In 1993, Congress passed the Brady Handgun Violence Protection Act, which created a national background-check system and a list of people forbidden to own a gun: felons, the mentally ill, persons who committed a domestic-violence misdemeanor, drug addicts and the dishonorably discharged. A year later, Congress passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, prohibiting 19 models of semi-automatic assault weapons and limiting ammunition magazines to 10 rounds. In other words, they did then what we intend to do again now.
5. ...the Assault Weapons Ban expired in 2004. That year, the government formed a panel of specialists at the National Research Council to assess the effects of these gun-control efforts. Its conclusion was that gun-control was a whimper. It said the data on guns and violence "are too weak to support unambiguous conclusions or strong policy statements."
6. "Drawing causal inferences is always complicated and, in the behavioral and social sciences, fraught with uncertainty." Let's rephrase that. When serious scientists try to solve a problem, they ask, What works? When Washington takes on a problem, it says, Why not?
7. Barack Obama's politics aren't just large. They're colossal. His laws are so big there are parts of them no one has ever seen.Here's a Washington Post summary this week of a story on the Affordable Care Act: "Signing up an estimated 30 million uninsured Americans for coverage under the health-care law is shaping up to be, if not a bureaucratic nightmare, at the very least a daunting task." And we're only in the foothills of Mount ObamaCare.
8. ... the Dodd-Frank law's 2,300 pages, Mr. Obama announced: "It provides certainty to everybody, from bankers to farmers to business owners to consumers." That's right, universal certainty.
9. Conservatives predictably object to all this, but one has to ask: How did liberals, especially on the left and without exception, become such mute footmen for Barack Obama's faceless conglomerate politics?
10. But isn't the federalization of pretty much everything in a diverse country like the U.S. just another exercise in imperial overstretch?...In the 2012 presidential election, nearly 66 million people voted for Barack Obama. We're waiting for one Democrat in Congress to express doubt in the president's pixie dust."
Henninger: Obama's Colossal Politics - WSJ.com
