With a cost-benefit analysis system as obtuse and intangible as this, what’s the point of having one? Ah, but that indeed is the point, and exemplifies everything that is wrong with liberal government — all things are executed using the basis of immeasurable metrics.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal commenting on President Obama’s recent executive order for all agencies to implement a cost-benefit system prior to enacting regulation:

No sooner had Mr. Obama told the bureaucracies to subject all regulations to a cost-benefit test than the bureaucrats began telling reporters that they are already a model of modern efficiency, thank you very much. Among many others, the Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement that it was “confident” it wouldn’t need to alter a single current or pending rule. “In fact, EPA’s rules consistently yield billions in cost savings that make them among the most cost-effective in the government.”

Perhaps the EPA’s confidence owes to a little-noticed proviso in Mr. Obama’s order. When the agencies weigh costs and benefits, the order says, they should always consider “values that are difficult or impossible to quantify, including equity, human dignity, fairness, and distributive impacts.”

Talk about economic elasticities. Equity and fairness can be defined to include more or less anything as a benefit. Under this calculus, a rule might pass Mr. Obama’s cost-benefit test if it imposes $999 billion in hard costs but supposedly results in a $1 trillion increase in human dignity, whatever that means in bureaucratic practice. Another rule could pass muster even if it reduces work and investment, as long as it also lessens income inequality.

Any cost-benefit analysis depends to some extent on matters of judgment, but typically the criteria are more economically tangible, such as how to price risk or the discount rate. No business would recognize Mr. Obama’s version, since his “values” loophole boils down to a preference for bigger government. The danger is that his executive order will transform an important tool to check excessive regulation into a way to justify whatever rule the permanent bureaucracy wants.

Read the rest. It’s already happening in the EPA.

Oh, wait, can I say coffin, or might that instigate a mass murderer into action?

The mainstream media’s “blame Palin” crosshairs map has just about died a natural death despite a few blatant liberal mobilizers, the vast majority of the American public being far more rational and reasonable than the vast majority of New York Times reporters and MSNBC/CNN et. al. blowhards.

But there was this little gem from the Washington Post just days after the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords.

Hours after the statement’s release, two law enforcement sources said that FBI agents had found a 2007 letter from Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) to the shooting suspect, with the words “Die, bitch” and “Die, cops” scrawled on it.

The letter, which thanked Loughner for attending an event of hers, was found in a safe in his Tucson home, the sources said.

2007? Sarah Palin wasn’t even part of our political lexicon in 2007.

The notion that there’s a causal relationship between politicians’ rhetoric and a mass murderer is as stupid and silly as when serial killer Ted Bundy attempted — in one last grasp of straw to avoid the electric chair — to blame pornography for his murders.

And that gets us to some entities that do deserve some blame, in incrementing order: the Pima County Sheriff’s office, our mental health system, and most culpable beyond Jared Loughner himself — Mr. Loughner’s parents.

The police have the least blame of the three parties but should be included because Sheriff Clarence Dupnik’s odd behavior seems to be an attempt to shift the spotlight from his department to the conservative body (Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, maybe Ronald Reagan if he looks hard enough). What’s he trying to hide? I don’t think much, honestly, but John Fund brought up some solid points last week:

His fellow lawmen in Arizona are appalled because all of the evidence so far suggests that the gunman is a deeply disturbed individual with no coherent political motives. “I just hope he’s not giving this 22-year-old an alibi by blaming talk radio,” Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio told the Los Angeles Times. …

Sheriff Dupnik would do far better to spend his time figuring out how Jared Loughner managed to buy a gun last November to commit his crimes. He apparently passed a federal background check solely because he had no prison record. But Reuters reports that Sheriff Dupnik acknowledged that “there had been earlier contact between Loughner and law enforcement after he had made death threats, although they had not been against [Rep. Gabrielle] Giffords.” The sheriff’s department was aware that Loughner had been asked by police at a local community college to stop attending classes because of his odd behavior. Several of his fellow students expressed fear of him and said they believed he was unstable.

The real debate in the aftermath of the Arizona shootings should be why a troubled individual was able to compile such a record without attracting more attention from Sheriff Dupnik and his fellow law enforcement professionals. Perhaps if Loughner had been convicted of making death threats, he wouldn’t have been able to clear the federal background check he needed to purchase a firearm last November.

Now saying the police should have acted and the police actually having enough evidence and cause to arrest Loughner are two different things. I tend to think that cops usually get the short end of the stick on such hindsight “what ifs.”

Next, I think the country would be better served by a national conversation on the state of our mental health care than on our political rhetoric. Dr. E. Fuller Torrey demonstrates the importance of just that by explaining how Arizona has one of the worst mental health systems in the Union:

The truth is that these tragedies [mass shootings] are happening every day throughout the United States. The only reason this episode has received widespread publicity is because there were multiple victims and one victim was a member of Congress. Such senseless killings have become increasingly common over the past 30 years, starting in about 1980, when Allard Lowenstein, coincidentally a former congressman, was killed by Dennis Sweeney. Sweeney was a young man with untreated schizophrenia who had been Lowenstein’s protégé in the civil rights movement. Congress was also prominently involved in 1998, when Russell Weston, who also had untreated schizophrenia, killed two policemen while trying to shoot his way into the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

These tragedies are the inevitable outcome of five decades of failed mental-health policies. During the 1960s, we began to empty the state mental hospitals but failed to put in place programs to ensure that the released patients received treatment after they left. By the 1980s, the results were evident—increasing numbers of seriously mentally ill persons among the homeless population and in the nation’s jails and prisons.

Over the past three decades, things have only gotten worse. A 2007 study by the U.S. Justice Department found that 56% of state prisoners, 45% of federal prisoners, and 64% of local jail inmates suffer from mental illnesses.

A 2008 study out of the University of Pennsylvania that examined murders committed in Indiana between 1990 and 2002 found that approximately 10% of the murders were committed by individuals with serious mental illnesses. There are about 16,000 homicides a year in this country. Using the Indiana study as a guide, roughly 1,600 of them are likely committed by people with serious mental illnesses.

In Arizona, public mental-health services are among the worst in the nation. In a 2008 survey by the Treatment Advocacy Center, Arizona ranked next to last among all states in the number of psychiatric hospital beds per capita. If you don’t have hospital beds and outpatient clinics to treat mentally ill people, those people don’t get treated. Thus the tragedy was somewhat more likely to happen in Arizona because mentally ill individuals are less likely to receive treatment there. Although Arizona is the worst state, except for Nevada, in psychiatric-bed availability, there is no state that currently has enough beds for its mentally ill population, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center study. This tragedy occurred in Arizona, but it could easily have happened in any state.

The big picture is even scarier. Based on Arizona’s 2010 population and on estimates by the National Institute of Mental Health of the number of individuals with untreated schizophrenia at any given time, there are today in Arizona over 21,000 individuals with untreated schizophrenia. Most of them, thankfully, are not violent. But a small number of them—about 10% according to my meta-analysis of relevant studies—do become violent, usually because of their delusional thoughts and what their voices (auditory hallucinations) are telling them. This situation holds in every state. It is thus not a question of if such tragedies will occur but rather when and how often.

Okay, so there’s work to be done in this system. Even so, as the old saying goes, one can lead a horse to water but one cannot make the horse drink. Are the parents of Jared Loughner not culpable?

[WSJ] The documents also demonstrate the challenges facing campus police when students exhibit disturbing, even threatening, behavior—even when parents are notified. School administrators and counselors met repeatedly with Mr. Loughner, who twice appears to have been accompanied by his mother, according to the documents. Campus police talked to Mr. Loughner’s father when they delivered the suspension letter to the family’s home on Sept. 29.

The parents may not have known what their son would end up doing, but they certainly knew he was very troubled — troubled enough to be kicked out of college for very bizarre behavior. We can blame all these other forces until Kingdom come, but in the end if the family isn’t willing to help themselves, then nobody else will too.

Give. Me. A. Break.

[ABC News] The Arizona sheriff investigating the Tucson shooting that left U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords critically wounded had harsh words today for those engaging in political rhetoric, calling conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh “irresponsible” for continuing the vitriol. … “The kind of rhetoric that flows from people like Rush Limbaugh, in my judgment he is irresponsible, uses partial information, sometimes wrong information,” Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik said today. “[Limbaugh] attacks people, angers them against government, angers them against elected officials and that kind of behavior in my opinion is not without consequences. … “The vitriol affects the [unstable] personality that we are talking about,” he said. “You can say, ‘Oh no, it doesn’t,’ but my opinion is that it does.” Dupnik said he’d like to see the federal government establish some kind of commission to deal with civility in the United States and make recommendations about how to get it back.

Seriously? Is that why the founders risked everything they had, including their necks, by committing treason against King George; why brave soldiers from Valley Forge to Tripoli to Gettysburg to Normandy to Falluja gave “the last full measure of devotion”… so that we could establish a Federal commission to study and make recommendations on “civility”?

(And name me just one problem a Congressional commission has ever solved — just one!)

Why, how do we not know that someone out there in the Ether Cloud isn’t going to read the Sheriff’s comments and go nuts and kill some people? “Well, I was just fine until I read what Sheriff Dufus said about Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, and gee, it made me want to blast away!” Will that then make Sheriff Dufus liable for mass murder? Or does it only work that way against people with whom HE disagrees?

A commission on “civility.” We are slowly but surely becoming the movie Idiocracy.

As far as civility, I think comedian and magician Penn Jilette of Penn & Teller fame made the best recommendation, certainly better then anything Sheriff Dufus’ Civility Commission could ever come up with:

“Fuck Civility. Hyperbole, passion, and metaphor are beautiful parts of rhetoric. Marketplace of ideas can not be toned down for the insane.”

Or,

“Killers need to restrain and be restrained, not speakers.”

Or,

“Insane people are not ‘consequences.’”

Or,

“Killers are not created by words. Words had nothing to do with this.”

Or,

“You can create any climate you want and good people don’t kill. We’re not responsible for the crazies.”

Or,

“You sure can’t guess how crazy people are going to react to anything. That’s what crazy means.”

And, the best for last:

“Freedom is always the answer.”

Here’s Jay Nordlinger:

Even before Bush was elected president, the kill-Bush talk and imagery started. When Governor Bush was delivering his 2000 convention speech, Craig Kilborn, a CBS talk-show host, showed him on the screen with the words “SNIPERS WANTED.” Six years later, Bill Maher, the comedian-pundit, was having a conversation with John Kerry. He asked the senator what he had gotten his wife for her birthday. Kerry answered that he had taken her to Vermont. Maher said, “You could have went to New Hampshire and killed two birds with one stone.” (New Hampshire is an early primary state, of course.) Kerry said, “Or I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.” (This is the same Kerry who joked in 1988, “Somebody told me the other day that the Secret Service has orders that if George Bush is shot, they’re to shoot Quayle.”) Also in 2006, the New York comptroller, Alan Hevesi, spoke to graduating students at Queens College. He said that his fellow Democrat, Sen. Charles Schumer, would “put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with it.”

Here’s an interesting note found by Atlas Shrugs. It’s another example of the Mainstream Media (MSM) becoming so caught up in acting as paid agents for the Democrat Party that they miss the forest for trees.

We’re to believe that through some strange osmosis person A says something “inciting” that in turn causes person B to not just assassinate a political target but gun down a nine-year-old child and a dozen others. Now we have pundits and politicians actually channeling George Orwell by calling for a ban on rhetoric, on words, on symbols. Meanwhile, as Michelle Malkin demonstrates with factual evidence, the political wing intent on quieting everyone else is the group that demonstrates the likelihood of actually committing violence.

[Atlas Shrugs] We know Loughner was a political radical back in 2007, according to his high school friend, college friend, bandmate and fellow liberal Caitie Parker. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Jared Loughner targeted Giffords as far back as 2007.

There was no Tea Party in 2007, or Palin (who has officially replaced George Bush as the Left bogeyman), so what will the media spin? Nothing. Facts are irrelevant! Pump out the propaganda.

After the shooting, investigators searched a safe connected to the shooting suspect, Jared Lee Loughner, and found a letter apparently sent to him by Ms. Giffords’s office thanking him for previously attending a similar “Congress on your corner” event in 2007.

Much remains unknown about what motivated Mr. Loughner, who is in custody. But the initial evidence, including the constituent letter, has led law enforcement officials to think that the suspect had been thinking about the congresswoman for years, according to people familiar with the case.

Investigators also found paper on which the suspect apparently wrote the word “assassination” and “I planned ahead.” The meaning or significance of that writing isn’t clear.

The suspect has been uncooperative with investigators, according to law enforcement officials. Charges are expected to be filed later Sunday.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller said the charges would include the attack on Ms. Giffords and Judge Roll and other victims, with later additional charges likely. Investigators seized computers during a search of the suspect’s home, and Mr. Mueller said those were being examined.

“Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.” — Former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Here’s Glenn Reynolds:

Those who try to connect Sarah Palin and other political figures with whom they disagree to the shootings in Arizona use attacks on “rhetoric” and a “climate of hate” to obscure their own dishonesty in trying to imply responsibility where none exists. But the dishonesty remains.

To be clear, if you’re using this event to criticize the “rhetoric” of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you’re either: (a) asserting a connection between the “rhetoric” and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you’re not, in which case you’re just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America’s political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.

Where is the decency in that?

Nothing displays the blatant hypocrisy of the liberal intelligentsia like an act of mass murder.

There’s many examples to choose from in the wake of the attempted assassination of Gabrielle Giffords, but take this gem by The New Yorker’s George Packer:

…for the past two years, many conservative leaders, activists, and media figures have made a habit of trying to delegitimize their political opponents. Not just arguing against their opponents, but doing everything possible to turn them into enemies of the country and cast them out beyond the pale. … This relentlessly hostile rhetoric has become standard issue on the right. (On the left it appears in anonymous comment threads, not congressional speeches and national T.V. programs.)

Got that? On the right, it’s standard operating procedure. It must be Sarah Palin! But on the left, it’s just some fringe forum posters, nothing organized by say the Democratic National Convention or a Democrat politician, right?

Mr. Packer must have missed the 2004 Democratic National Convention election guide titled “Behind Enemy Lines,” and putting a bullseye on key Bush states:

Mr. Packer must have missed popular liberal blogger Daily Kos using the bullseye against none other than… Gabrielle Giffords!

Mr. Packer must have missed this this 2006 election advertisement by Democrat Harry Mitchell placing his Republican opponent in a sniper’s rifle sight:

For eight years of the Bush administration I heard nothing but hate-filled, outlandish angry rhetoric from Democrats. But now, all of the sudden, it’s indecent?

The bottom line is one has to be a complete idiot to believe that if only Sarah Palin didn’t run a poorly-designed graphic, or if only Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity weren’t on the air, then we wouldn’t have mass murder.

Don’t believe me? Go ask Gerald Ford’s family what they think of “Squeaky” Fromme.

(Here are some more examples).

Great commentary by Byron York:

On November 5, 2009, Maj. Nidal Hasan opened fire at a troop readiness center in Ft. Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Within hours of the killings, the world knew that Hasan reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar!” before he began shooting, visited websites associated with Islamist violence, wrote Internet postings justifying Muslim suicide bombings, considered U.S. forces his enemy, opposed American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as wars on Islam, and told a neighbor shortly before the shootings that he was going “to do good work for God.” There was ample evidence, in other words, that the Ft. Hood attack was an act of Islamist violence.

Nevertheless, public officials, journalists, and commentators were quick to caution that the public should not “jump to conclusions” about Hasan’s motive. CNN, in particular, became a forum for repeated warnings that the subject should be discussed with particular care.

“The important thing is for everyone not to jump to conclusions,” said retired Gen. Wesley Clark on CNN the night of the shootings.

“We cannot jump to conclusions,” said CNN’s Jane Velez-Mitchell that same evening. “We have to make sure that we do not jump to any conclusions whatsoever.”

“I’m on Pentagon chat room,” said former CIA operative Robert Baer on CNN, also the night of the shooting. “Right now, there’s messages going back and forth, saying do not jump to the conclusion this had anything to do with Islam.”

The next day, President Obama underscored the rapidly-forming conventional wisdom when he told the country, “I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts.” In the days that followed, CNN jouralists and guests repeatedly echoed the president’s remarks.

“We can’t jump to conclusions,” Army Gen. George Casey said on CNN November 8. The next day, political analyst Mark Halperin urged a “transparent” investigation into the shootings “so the American people don’t jump to conclusions.” And when Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra, then the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, suggested that the Ft. Hood attack was terrorism, CNN’s John Roberts was quick to intervene. “Now, President Obama has asked people to be very cautious here and to not jump to conclusions,” Roberts said to Hoekstra. “By saying that you believe this is an act of terror, are you jumping to a conclusion?”

Fast forward a little more than a year, to January 8, 2011. In Tucson, Arizona, a 22 year-old man named Jared Lee Loughner opened fire at a political event, gravely wounding Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, killing a federal judge and five others, and wounding 18. In the hours after the attack, little was known about Loughner beyond some bizarre and largely incomprehensible YouTube postings that, if anything, suggested he was mentally ill. Yet the network that had shown such caution in discussing the Ft. Hood shootings openly discussed the possibility that Loughner was inspired to violence by…Sarah Palin.

Read the rest.

Here’s the Cato Institute’s Roger Pilon. But first, do you remember the old Star Trek (nerd alert: The Omega Glory) where Kirk, Spock, McCoy and a hapless red-shirted security guard beam down to a planet where the inhabitants, calling themselves “Yangs” and “Kohms,” short for Yankees and Communists, have been warring for centuries? A renegade Federation Capt. Ron Tracey, believing that he and his ship’s — the Exeter — remaining crew are marooned on the planet, had been helping the Kohms — right away cluing the audience that Tracey lacks Kirk’s wisdom in figuring out the puzzle of the two warring sides — against the Prime Directive. The Yangs end up capturing Kirk and crew, but Kirk saves the day by realizing that the Yangs are parallel to our culture in every way (nerd alert: Hodgkin’s Law of parallel planet development) including the flag, pledge, and constitution, and explaining at the episode’s end that the “sacred document” the Yangs claimed was only for the eyes of “chiefs, or sons of chiefs” are actually for everyone — and why the document starts “We The People.” The Yang leader, Cloud William, eventually promises Kirk that while he doesn’t fully understand, he swears to allow all his people, and even the Kohms, access to his people’s founding documents.

You have to love this simple recollection by Mr. Pilon that the U.S. Constitution was never intended to be something that only lawyers, or sons of lawyers, or Congressmen, could interpret. Somewhere our law system ran amok, and like the Yangs in Star Trek, we’ve forgotten this basic truth.

Thus the first question the new Congress should ask of any proposed law is: Does the Constitution authorize us to pursue this end? If not, that ends the matter. If yes, the second question is: Are the means we employ “necessary and proper,” as constrained by the principles of federalism and the rights retained by the people that are implied by a government of enumerated powers? In essence, the Constitution is no more complicated than that. It was written to be understood by ordinary citizens.

How, then, did modern constitutional law get so complicated and federal power so expansive? One reason is that several provisions in the Constitution were written broadly to allow for contingencies. But those provisions were never meant to open the floodgates to boundless congressional power. The presumption was that any political redress of unexpected problems would be done with due deference to the larger structure, aims and principles of the document. This brings us to the main reason Congress leapt its constitutional bounds: a fundamental shift in the climate of ideas.

Early 20th-century Progressives, inspired by European social democracies, rejected the Constitution’s plan for limited government, advocating social engineering schemes instead. Rule by government experts was the order of the day. As people and politicians succumbed to those ideas, especially in the states, courts would often block the schemes in the name of constitutional liberty. When Progressives later took their agenda to the federal level, however, and the Supreme Court continued to block it, President Franklin D. Roosevelt unveiled his infamous plan to pack the court with six new members.

The threat cowed the court, which in a pair of 1937 decisions (Helvering v. Davis and NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp) essentially gave Congress the power to redistribute and regulate at will, eviscerating the very foundation of the Constitution: the doctrine of enumerated powers. A year later, in U.S. v. Carolene Products, the court reduced property rights and economic liberty to second-class status under the Constitution. And in National Broadcasting Co. v. U.S. (1943), it allowed Congress to delegate ever more of its vastly expanded legislative powers to administrative agencies in the quickly expanding executive branch.

Now that one-party rule has ended in Washington, we’ll see President Obama use these agencies to bypass Congress and promote his progressive agenda. On Dec. 23, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a schedule for setting greenhouse gas standards for power plants and oil refineries over the next two years, notwithstanding that Congress has rejected cap-and-trade legislation. The Obama administration has also quietly issued regulations providing for the end-of-life counseling that the Senate rejected when it passed ObamaCare. Expect far more of this in the next two years.

The 112th Congress will have its hands full simply monitoring what the more than 300 federal agencies are up to. But if the new members want to get to the root of the problem—if they want to start restoring limited constitutional government—they’ll have to do far more.

First, they’ll have to keep the debate focused on the Constitution, not simply on policy or practicality.

Second, they’ll have to reject without embarrassment the facile liberal objection that the courts have sanctioned what we have today, and thus all a member need do when introducing a bill is check the box that says “Commerce Clause,” “General Welfare Clause” or “Necessary and Proper Clause.”

If these clauses in the Constitution enable Congress to enact the individual health-insurance mandate, then they authorize Congress to do virtually anything. The Supreme Court was wrong in allowing Congress to exercise power not granted it by the Constitution, and courts today are wrong when they uphold those precedents—even if they’re not in a position today to reverse them until Congress takes greater responsibility.

Third, Congress has to start taking greater responsibility. Congress must acknowledge honestly that it has not kept faith with the limits the Constitution imposes. It should then stop delegating its legislative powers to executive agencies. Congress should either vote on the sea of regulations the executive branch is promulgating or, far better, rescind or defund those regulations, policies and programs that never should have been promulgated in the first place (rescission may not be possible during the next two years, but defunding is). And of course Congress should undertake no new policies not authorized by the Constitution.

This is all a tall order, and it will take years. But the alternative—our Leviathan state, which recognizes no limits on its power—is simply unconstitutional.