Vin Suprynowicz

As with many Constitutional provisions, “recess appointments” have come to be used in ways the founders didn’t intend. Presidents now use recess appointments to get a desired appointee into office — at least for a time — over the objections of recalcitrant legislators, especially when the Senate is in the hands of the opposition party.

But President Obama’s recess appointment of Dr. Donald Berwick to the position of Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — July 7, when lawmakers were out of town for their annual July Fourth break — broke new ground, because Dr. Berwick was not a nominee whose appointment had been subjected to inordinate delays or an overtly hostile reception by the Congress.

Dr. Berwick was nominated on April 19, less than three months ago. He had not yet had a hearing. His committee vetting wasn’t complete. Why the rush?

There’s little doubt President Obama wished to avoid the mortifying spectacle of Dr. Berwick being asked to explain his essentially Marxist view that government-run health care is a good thing because it is and ought to be a method of redistributing wealth from the productive to the mendicant classes, in full Senate hearings, on the eve of this fall’s off-year elections, when Democrats may fairly expect to have their heads handed to them by voters, as it is.

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In the past, if anyone asked whether the folks in charge in the nation’s capital were certifiable lunatics, or whether policy decisions were being made by superannuated college kids with no experience out in the real world, who apparently stayed up too late last night, smoking too much dope and listening to too much heavy metal, those questions could be safely dismissed as exaggerations for rhetorical effect.

Last month, however, another wacky Obama appointee, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, told Al Jazeera Arab television that President Obama told him before he took the job that he wanted him to do three things: inspire children to learn math and science, expand international relationships and “perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science … and math and engineering.”

Officials from the White House and NASA on Tuesday stood by Mr. Bolden’s statement that part of his mission is to improve relations with Muslim countries — though NASA soft-pedaled his assertion that such international diplomacy is Bolden’s “foremost” responsibility.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was created by President Kennedy in the early 1960s, tasked with putting a man on the moon and bringing him back safely within the decade.

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Nominated by a president whose party controls both houses of Congress, Solicitor General Elena Kagan’s “confirmation hearings” for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court are largely a formality.

Nonetheless, the nominee’s well-coached insistence on pathetically bland non-answers has been so exasperating — and insulting — that she might as well have placed a video monitor on the witness table, programmed to respond to each question: “I will do my best to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring …” and, of course, to “use resources wisely.”

This is unfortunate, since — while the hearings have been bland — Ms. Kagan is not, and the American people deserve to know more about the characters to whom President Obama is offering a lifetime seat on the nation’s highest court.

When the hearings began, ranking Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions offered a devastating opening statement — though it received little press coverage — “documenting Kagan’s extreme liberalism,” reports Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center.

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I’ve lost track of precisely how many “number one” priorities Barack Obama now has. I believe he recently said cleaning up the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf, drilled on a permit issued by the Obama Interior Department in the spring of 2009, which permit contained no emergency plan to deal with a blowout since federal regulators agreed none was needed, was his new number one priority — just before the president broke for a game of golf.

(“For decades, Libertarians have warned against putting trust in government regulatory bureaucracies like the Minerals Management Service (MMS),” Libertarian Party Executive Director Wes Benedict pointed out last week. “While costing the taxpayers a lot of money, these agencies generally fail to deliver the kind of protections they promise, they tend to become corrupt, and they discourage vigilance on the part of citizens by lulling them into a false sense of security…. Thanks to liability caps provided by the federal government, BP was able to engage in riskier activities than it would have otherwise.”)

Then Mr. Obama — who has blocked non-union skimmers from helping clean up the oil even when they were offered by other nations — extorted a $20 billion slush fund from BP, swore up and down it would not be administered by anyone in the government, and immediately turned it over to his own personal “Pay Czar,” Ken Feinberg.

But back in January in his State of the Union speech — my, how time flies when you’re having fun — Mr. Obama said his No. 1 issue was now going to be jobs. “Jobs must be our No. 1 focus in 2010,” Mr. Obama said, adding “People are out of work. They are hurting. They need our help.”

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President Obama last week made another change of command in the Afghan War, an historically bizarre enterprise that continues to sap American military morale and manpower, yet for which Mr. Obama has already announced his surrender-and-withdrawal date (July, 2011.)

Mr. Obama relieved Gen. Stanley McChrystal due to a profile of the general appearing in the latest Rolling Stone magazine. It’s hard to point to a specific direct statement by the general in that article that triggered the move, but the report captured an unmistakable tone of disrespect for his civilian superiors at the general’s headquarters — a belief that Mr. Obama, Vice President Biden, and the president’s ambassadors to the region are a bunch of posturing clowns more interested in appearances than in results.

As commander-in-chief of the military, Mr. Obama — who Wednesday named popular General David Petraeus to take over the command — had every right to make the change. It could even be seen as politically necessary. Especially to the extent the charges may be true.

Mr. Obama spent an absurdly long time last year deciding to give General McChrystal 30,000 additional troops for the Afghan campaign — half of the 60,000 he requested. (In fact, the roots of their split almost certainly lie in that long period of apparent indecision, and especially the “half measure” finally decided upon, which some have compared to giving a bomber pilot enough fuel to fly half a round-trip mission.)

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As I mentioned the other day, Sequioa Pearce was made to kneel before the Las Vegas police officers who held her at gunpoint in her bedroom Friday night, June 11, and watch them shoot her unarmed fiance in the head.

The 20-year-old, who was nine months pregnant, could see her fiance, Trevon Cole, reflected in the mirror from the bathroom, where he, too, was being held at gunpoint as officers told him to get on the floor. He met her gaze in the mirror. She watched him put his hands up.

“All right, all right,” he said to police, according to Pearce.

Then she heard the shot. The man she planned to marry slid to the floor, blood pouring from a gunshot wound — some have reported a shotgun blast — to the face.

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Sequioa Pearce was made to kneel before the Las Vegas police officers who held her at gunpoint in her bedroom Friday night, June 11.

The 20-year-old, who was nine months pregnant, could see from the darkened bedroom into the bathroom where her fiance was reflected in the mirror.

He, too, was being held at gunpoint as officers told him to get on the floor. He met her gaze in the mirror. She watched him put his hands up.

“All right, all right,” he said to police, Pearce told the Review-Journal the following Monday.

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Imagine you’re unhappy with the performance in office of some incumbent politician. You throw your hat in the ring and proceed to spend months raising the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to wage a viable electoral challenge. Or, maybe you’ve spent decades of hard work amassing the private, after-tax savings necessary to fund such an effort on your own.

In response, your state government takes hundreds of thousands of dollars extracted from taxpayers against their will — including, ironically enough, taxes you yourself have paid — and hands that money to the politician you’re attempting to defeat, explaining it’s “not fair” that you’re raising and spending more money than your poor, pathetic opponent, who only starts out with all the name recognition and other advantages of elected office.

It sounds like far-out fiction, but it’s actually been happening in the state of Arizona, home of “campaign reform” champion Sen. John McCain-Feingold. Arizona election “reformers” wanted to limit the amount of money spent on campaigns, see — handing an automatic advantage to well-known incumbents. To pull this off, they’ve been bribing those who agree to limit their expenditures by handing them tax money for their campaigns.

But the politicians won’t play by those rules if a challenger refuses the government handouts, instead going out and raising a larger campaign chest, privately. The solution? If a challenger who’s not accepting public funds raises “too much” money, Arizona “makes up the difference” by handing more taxpayer funds to the incumbent!

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President Obama on June 9 called for sharply limiting Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, following the May 31 deaths of nine Turkish blockade runners when Israeli forces blocked an uninspected shipment from Cyprus to Gaza, as they repeatedly warned they would.

The White House also announced a $400 million aid package for Gaza and the West Bank.

“The situation in Gaza is unsustainable,” Mr. Obama declared as he met with West Bank Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the Oval Office. He said the attention of the world is on the problem because of the “tragedy” that resulted when the Israelis enforced their blockade against Turks and other activists attempting to bring supplies into Gaza, uninspected.

Had the Israelis allowed the shipments to proceed uninspected, of course, their blockade would have been at an end, no longer subject to any of the “fine-tuning” Mr. Obama now urges. They would then have had only the “word” of the Palestinian Arabs that they do not intend to re-arm.

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A rather heated debate seems to ensuing — in fact, it ensues about every 90 days, merely growing louder at each iteration — about whether the Congress should again “extend unemployment benefits” for the unemployed.

The question that draws the most attention, understandably, is whether this is a good idea. As usual, the main question is of less concern to me than a supposedly “minor, related” concern.

For the record, I understand most of those who are unemployed are unemployed through no fault of their own, and that finding a job during this (government exacerbated) recession — especially an “over-the-table” job paying an income close to that to which the wage-earner had become accustomed — is a nasty and difficult undertaking. (And if you’re over 55? When does quiet desperation cross over into “going nuts”? What’s amazing is how LITTLE violence we’ve seen. Thank Americans’ inner strength and the willingness of families to pull together — not clueless, counterproductive government.)

I also understand that unemployment insurance, as generally constructed, does a much better job of “making whole” the $15,000-a-year worker than the $75,000-a-year worker — something that ought to be fixed.

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