The other side of the porous border

Just in time for President Felipe Calderon’s visit to the White House, CBS News hears from Agent John Dodson that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms allowed Mexican drug cartels to take hundreds of weapons over the border into Mexico – and not let the Mexican government in on it. The lax policy continued even as the guns “began showing up at crime scenes in Mexico.”

Despite a “schism” – as one ATF supervisor called it – among agents over the matter, the Bureau still allowed the gunrunning (the start of which they had on tape in Phoenix). According to Dodson, ATF was hoping “to see where the guns ended up, build a big case and take down a cartel.” It will surprise no one, I’m sure, to discover that no such thing happened.  The guns did help a cartel cut down ATF agent Brian Terry, though.

An earlier CBS News story has more details: the Phoneix gun stores who alerted ATF to the suspicious buys and were told not to do anything about them; ATF agents ordered not to intercept the shipments; and guns at the scene where Terry was killed traced back to the Phoenix sales that the gun shop owners allowed at the express wishes of the Bureau. All for “big case” that never materialized.

This is yet another example of a certain mentality that drives me nuts: legal ambition above all. The Clinton and Obama Administrations share the crazy belief that prevailing in court is more important than preventing carnage (based on the timeline presented by CBS, this nonsense was hatched in the fall of 2009).

The problem with this silliness is that we’re talking about events outside the United States, meaning geopolitics comes into play – and geopolitics trumps everything. How could ATF be even allowed to decide that a mythical legal case against a cartel was more important than the risk of a crime wave in a friendly neighbor?

This will have reverberations on several matters at once. Any talk about illegal aliens will be met with furious outrage in Mexico City about what we allowed into Mexico. Meanwhile, Calderon suddenly has a perfect excuse for his drug-war campaign going sideways: American guns. It puts him in the clear, gives his party a rare opportunity to play the anti-American card (usually a winning play for the opposition PRI, but much harder for Calderon’s National Action Party to pull off). It even opens the door to a PAN upset in next year’s presidential election (which would probably be better for Mexico as a whole, while making this post completely moot). It may also, in painful irony, give said PAN government some appreciation for better border security – but good luck getting them to admit that publicly after this.

Honestly, someone with an ounce of geopolitical sense would have shot this down (pun intended) before it started. That things went as far as they did tells me either no one in this Administration has any geopolitical sense, or the domestic side of the government has way too much leeway.

Cross-posted to VV

Say what, Mike?

Clearly tired of the “rubber chicken circuit,” Mike Huckabee goes for his usual culinary change-of-pace – his own foot (Politico):

Mike Huckabee seemed to suggest that Barack Obama grew up in Kenya . . .

“One thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American,” Huckabee said in response.

“If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather,” Huckabee added.

Obama grew up where?

Cross-posted to VV and Virginia Bloggers Against Mike Huckabee

Cuomo flips SEIU in New York budget battle

So this is what happens when the budget cutter has a D next to his name (New York Post):

New York has few budget-busters as big as Medicaid, the health-care program for the “poor” that now covers one-fifth of all state residents at costs that have grown by fully 80 percent over the past decade — to a staggering $1 billion per week.

Amazing, then, that the task force appointed by Gov. Cuomo to rewrite the Medicaid rules may have come up with a formula that will finally begin to bring the program under control.

Consider: The plan cuts program spending by nearly $1 billion compared to the current fiscal year and some $2.5 billion from projected program growth for 2011-12.

More amazing still: New York’s health-care cartel — the hospitals and the health-care-workers union, which in the past have joined forces to make Medicaid matters worse — has signed on to this sweeping overhaul.

It “resulted in pain, but it was shared pain,” said George Gresham, president of Local 1199.

FYI, Local 1199 is New York City’s massive amalgamated health care worker union, part of SEIU. That they would have any role in helping bend down the Medicaid cost curve is a political earthquake of about 7.0 on New York’s political Richter scale.

Even better, the union and the hospitals took aim at the trial lawyers. As Bill Hammond explained in the New York Daily News, tort reform in medicine was so important to the industry that they gladly took a $2.3 billion cut as a trade-off.

The ink was barely dry on the proposals when Cuomo surgically implanted them in his budget and – get this – threatened a government shutdown if the divided and politically confused Legislature didn’t pass the whole thing by April 1 (NY Post).

The events in New York – as compared to, say, Wisconsin – are very, very revealing.

First of all, it provides an unexpected and somewhat painful example of how much partisanship matters today. When a Republican governor asks for structural reforms impacting a major faction of Democrats, the entire left mobilizes as if it’s 1968 all over again. Make the Governor a Democrat, and the wisdom of reform suddenly trumps political solidarity.

That one of the very unions leading the anti-reform charge in Wisconsin has manned the ramparts for (an admittedly different) reform in New York gives the (D) by Andrew Cuomo’s name all the more weight.

That said, it’s one thing to have a built-in political advantage for austerity; it’s quite another to use it, and Cuomo is using it big time - to the point of refusing to go along with his own fellow Democrats in the Assembly who are desperate to resurrect the “millionaire’s tax” (New York Post).

Now, Cuomo still has a ways to go here. The Democrats in the Assembly are not used to a political friend in the Governor’s Mansion telling them what they don’t want to hear. Meanwhile, no one really knows what will happen in the State Senate (where the majority Republicans are not known for limiting government spending). Still, he has already managed to flip the health care union, something few thought he could actually do.

If he really does pull all of this off, dissatisfaction with Obama and a Republican field looking increasingly stale could drag Cuomo the son where his father refused to go two decades ago – into a presidential campaign.

Cross-posted to BD