By John J. Tkacik Jr. and Rep. Thaddeus G. McCotter
China’s cyber-attacks on Google these past several weeks were, sadly, mere replays of state-sponsored Chinese attacks on literally thousands of other American and foreign companies, human rights groups, individuals and, yes, even the U.S. government, including Congress.
A University of Toronto study last year identified more than [...]

Thomas Sowell has a piece up on RealClearPolitics today. Sowell takes a look at the cynicism of passing bad health care legislation simply to say you have passed “any” health care legislation.

Supporters of government health insurance call its passage “historic.” Past attempts to pass such legislation– going back for decades– failed repeatedly. But now both houses of Congress have passed government health care legislation and it is just a question of reconciling their respective bills and presenting President Obama with a political “victory.”

In short, this is not about improving the health of the American people. It is about passing something– anything– to keep the Obama administration from ending up with egg on its face by being unable to pass a bill, after so much hype and hoopla. Politically, looking impotent is a formula for disaster at election time. Far better to pass even bad legislation that will not actually go into effect until after the 2012 presidential election, so that the public will not know whether it makes medical care better or worse until it is too late for the voters to hold the administration accountable.

The utter cynicism of this has been apparent from the outset, in the rush to pass a health care bill in a hurry, in order to meet wholly arbitrary, self-imposed deadlines. First it was supposed to be passed before the August 2009 Congressional recess. Then it was supposed to be passed before Labor Day. When that didn’t happen, it was supposed to be rushed to passage before Christmas.

Sowell rightly points out that while the costs of this folly will be felt immediately, any possible benefit (though more likely the chaos of actual implementation) was held off until after the elections of 2012. Punting responsibility down the road while frontloading costs is the worst kind of arrogance.

From around the web today come a number of interesting stories. John Batchelor points to Janet Napolitano’s comments about the “criminal justice investigation” into the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day.

[H]er rejoinder to Candy Crowley’s not unsympathetic and hardly direct questions suggests that Janet Napolitano does not aim to speak to the facts of any of it. “That’s part of the criminal justice investigation that is ongoing…” Wrong answer. This was an attack against the national security of the United States. It was not the act of a lone criminal named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Treating the attempted detonation of of an airliner as though it were no different than an attempted robbery of a 7-11 is the wrong approach to protecting the security and freedom of the United States.

Realizing that executive pay has a lot to do with executive retention, the US government’ pay czar has approved a compensation package worth nearly $5 million for a top executive at AIG.

A top executive of American International Group has been granted a $4.3 million pay-package bump by the troubled insurance giant’s majority owner — the U.S. government — because the executive has decided to remain with the company. Kenneth Feinberg, the Obama administration’s pay czar, approved an AIG request to grant the executive a long-term compensation package that includes stock options with a current value of $3.26 million and an additional incentive award of up to $1 million. The package comes on top of the executive’s 2009 base salary of $450,000… The executive had been planning to leave the company and had not been granted long-term compensation benefits.

While many people have criticized executive pay, and despite government intrusion in such decisions for bailed out companies, the market typically drives such decisions. In this case, the executive in questions would have left AIG, and tekne his expertise with him, unless he was given comparable pay. The free market still works, even in the face of government meddling.

There are a few items of interest in the news today that we’d suggest taking a look at.

First up, former UN Ambassador John Bolton takes a look at “universal jurisdiction” and the way it is being used/abused by human rights activists to bring charges against legitimate actions by freely elected governments.

It is no accident that arrest warrants never seem to be issued for the likes of Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, since the real targets of universal jurisdiction these days are Western nations. Ultimately, what it targets is the very ideas of sovereign accountability and political independence. These goals largely motivated the 1998 Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court, itself a step toward constraining states’ abilities to police their own affairs, and an institution that the Obama administration yearns to join.

Transferring accountability for decisions from democratic politics to the criminal justice system understandably intimidates policy makers from making perfectly justifiable choices, such as defending against terrorist threats. Moreover, “command responsibility” has been transmogrified from liability for failing to stop known criminal activity, to liability when officials “should have known” their subordinates were committing crimes.

Most of the news out of DC today concerns lots and lots of money – Your money, my money, our money, your neighbors money. The House approved a $1.1 trillion spending bill without any GOP votes. It’s not clear whether the Senate will have the 60 votes necessary to shove the massive spending bill through the chamber.

The 1,088-page, $1.1 trillion measure would provide $447 billion in operating budgets for 10 Cabinet departments, awarding increases averaging almost 10 percent. On top of that comes more than $600 billion in payments for federal benefit programs such as Medicare and Medicaid.

The 221-202 vote to approve the House-Senate compromise bill sends it to the Senate, which immediately voted 56-43 to begin debate. That tally could mean trouble for the bill since it is less than the 60 votes needed to break a GOP filibuster.

In addition, after promising that we wouldn’t lose money as a result of the bailouts, the Treasury is now telling us we’ll need to spend more money to be able to stop spending money, and, oh yeah, we probably won’t get al that money back after all.

There are a lot of interesting stories on the wires today, and here’s our roundup of some of the more interesting headlines today.

In Iran, the three hikers who were arrested over the summer for wandering over the border between Iraq and Iran have now been charged with espionage. Secretary of State Clinton, currently in Germany for the anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s collapse, has renewed US calls for release. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says he hopes the U.S. can persuade his judiciary to let them go. Why he doesn’t try to persuade his own judiciary on our behalf is unclear.

The Wall Street Journal carries a pair of great pieces today. The first, titled Confessions of an ObamaCare Backer, highlights a New Yorker piece that comes clean about what the liberals are really attempting to do with the controversial government takeover of health care.

Mr. Cassidy is more honest than the politicians whose dishonesty he supports. “The U.S. government is making a costly and open-ended commitment,” he writes. “Let’s not pretend that it isn’t a big deal, or that it will be self-financing, or that it will work out exactly as planned. It won’t. What is really unfolding, I suspect, is the scenario that many conservatives feared. The Obama Administration . . . is creating a new entitlement program, which, once established, will be virtually impossible to rescind.”

The second WSJ piece, titled The Man Who Made Pelosi Cry Uncle, tells the story of one principled Democrat who stood firm in the face of Nancy Pelosi to make the Saturday vote to bar federal funding of abortions in the health care bill happen. With a relentless push for an up or down vote on federal funding, Michigan’s own Bart Stupak forced Pelosi’s hand and brought Democrats and Republicans together on the vote (which the WSJ calls one of the only actual incidents of bipartisanship in this entire process.)

In other news government reform news, Sen. Chris Dodd is circulating a bill that would strip the Federal Reserve of its power to regulate banks and instead create a new regulatory regime (including three new agencies) for that purpose.

And finally, in perhaps the most important news of the day, The Rolling Stones Get Your Ya-Yas Out has been remastered and reissued to celebrate the 40th anniversary of one of the all-time great live albums.

The remastered original album takes up the first of three CDs, with the second comprising unreleased tracks from the MSG shows, including acoustic run-throughs of “Prodigal Son” and “You Gotta Move.” The final CD includes previously unreleased performances by opening acts B.B. King and Ike & Tina Turner. Rounding out both the box sets is a DVD containing concert and behind-the-scenes footage.

The super deluxe version includes all this plus vinyl versions of the CDs.

Anthony Dolan has an interesting read up on the Wall Street Journal today. Titled “Four Little Words“,Dolan looks at the resistance Reagan met when the draft of his now famous Berlin Wall speech was being drafted.

In the Reagan Library archives, similar documents chronicling the opposition’s intensity surface from time to time. I was gratified though not surprised to hear a few years back about one NSC staffer’s memo to Deputy National Security Adviser Colin Powell complaining that on multiple occasions, perhaps as many as five or six, I had declined as head of speechwriting—the writer talked about “a heated argument” between us—to remove the offending sentence.

And not only me. Shortly after the speech draft began making its review through the bureaucracy, the speechwriters, as Reagan true-believers, had deployed to do the interpersonal glad-handing that sometimes eases objections to speech passages. The Berlin event for us was the quintessential chance—in front of Communism’s most evocative monument—to enunciate the anti-Soviet counterstrategy that Reagan had been putting in place since his first weeks in office.

Dolan explores Reagan’s Cold-War rhetoric and the world view that brought about the end of Soviet communism. It’s well worth a read.