When then-Sen. Obama was running for president, he told the American people, “We have a significant stake in ensuring that those who live in fear and want today can live with dignity and opportunity tomorrow,” adding that “the security and well-being of each and every American is tied to the security and well-being of those who live beyond our borders.” 

As part of this commitment to what Obama called our “common security,” he pledged to increase funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a global health initiative started in 2003 by George W. Bush to prevent the spread of the HIV/AIDS pandemic:

Barack Obama and Joe Biden will commit $50 billion over five years to strengthen the existing program and expand it to new regions of the world, including Southeast Asia, India, and parts of Europe, where the HIV/AIDS burden is growing.

And yet, Obama’s budget is prompting worries “that some of the gains made against the AIDS epidemic since 2003 could be reversed.”  Hidden within the president’s budget this year is a near freeze on increasing funding for the very program he co-sponsored appropriations for in 2008.  President Obama’s $165 million PEPFAR budget increase is on track to be well short, approximately $15 billion short, of what he promised on the campaign trail, breaking an important funding promise Obama told Americans was critical to our security and that should have placed PEPFAR’s budget over $8 billion by this year, as it reached $6 billion in 2008.

But this brings to mind a much more recent promise Obama made. When the president promoted his discretionary spending freeze during his State of the Union address two weeks ago, he promised that “spending related to our national security … will not be affected.” Yet, according to Obama’s logic, this freeze in resources for PEPFAR is a freeze that affects our national security because, as he said in 2006, the HIV/AIDS situation has national “security implications as countries whose populations and economies have been ravaged by AIDS become fertile breeding grounds for civil strife and even terror.”

Unsurprisingly, only Obama can break two promises with one action.

By Michael F. Cannon

Today, the Cato Institute released “Scientific Misconduct: The Manipulation of Evidence for Political Advocacy in Health Care and Climate Policy,” by George Avery of Purdue University.

Avery points to a troubling provision of the Senate-passed health care bill that Democrats are trying to get through the House:

In a section creating a new Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute to conduct comparative-effectiveness research, the bill allows the withholding of funding to any institution where a researcher publishes findings not “within the bounds of and entirely consistent with the evidence,” a vague authorization that creates a tremendous tool that can be used to ensure self-censorship and conformity with bureaucratic preferences….As AcademyHealth notes, “Such language to restrict scientific freedom is unprecedented and likely unconstitutional.”

He warns that government bureaucrats aren’t likely to let that power go unused.

In July 2007, AcademyHealth, a professional association of health services and health policy researchers, published results of a study of sponsor restrictions on the publication of research results. Surprisingly, the results revealed that more than three times as many researchers had experienced problems with government funders related to prior review, editing, approval, and dissemination of research results. In addition, a higher percentage of respondents had turned down government sponsorship opportunities due to restrictions than had done the same with industrial funding. Much of the problem was linked to an “increasing government custom and culture of controlling the flow of even non-classified information.”

Avery observes that such power enables bureaucrats to engage in “data manipulation to cover inconvenient findings,” much as the scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia appear to have done.  Indeed, he points to evidence of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials suppressing an, ahem, inconvenient internal debate.

By David Boaz

Somehow I was reminded of this cartoon today.

That’s what Senate Democrats hope to use as an excuse after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) pledged that they would move forward today with a motion to proceed on Stimulus II:

Senate Democrats will miss their self-imposed deadline for bringing a jobs bill to the floor Monday, and they’re hoping that the weekend’s epic snowstorm will give them some cover. Senate votes scheduled for Monday evening have been pushed back to Tuesday on account of the storm, but it seems unlikely that Democrats would have been ready to proceed Monday, anyway.

As we pointed out in this morning’s research briefing, it’s the increasing chaos that is preventing Senate Democrats from rushing through another round of wasteful binge spending:

• Sens. Max Baucus (D-MT) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) are fighting with Sens. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Dick Durbin (D-IL) over the size and shape of Stimulus II.
• So-called “moderate Dems” like Sens. Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Ben Nelson (D-NE) are getting concerned about their re-election prospects and pushing back on the price of Stimulus II.
• And House Democrats are saying that the Senate Democrats’ bill isn’t big enough, and aren’t happy about Reid trying to break apart the bill they passed in December into smaller pieces.

But among the “blizzard” of chaos, Americans continue to lose their jobs and are left in the dark when it comes to how Stimulus II is being formed. As we highlighted on Friday, the negotiations over Stimulus II seem to be very similar to the negotiations Dems had with their government-run health care experiment: no details, no transparency, and a guarantee of more binge spending. 

By Ilya Shapiro

I previously blogged about the NRA’s misbegotten motion, which the Supreme Court granted, to carve 10 minutes of oral argument time away from the petitioners in McDonald v. Chicago.  Essentially, there was no discernable reason for the motion other than to ensure that the NRA could claim some credit for the eventual victory, and thus boost its fundraising.

Well, having argued that petitioners’ counsel Alan Gura insufficiently covered the argument that the Second Amendment should be “incorporated” against the states via the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, the NRA has now filed a brief that fails even to reference the four biggest cases regarding incorporation and substantive due process.  That is, the NRA reply brief contains no mention of Washington v. Glucksberg (1997), Benton v. Maryland (1969), Duncan v. Louisiana (1968), or Palko v. Connecticut (1937).  (The NRA did cite those cases in its opening brief.)  What is more, it also lacks a discussion of Judge O’Scannlain’s magisterial Ninth Circuit opinion in Nordyke v. King (2009), which the Supreme Court might as well cut and paste regardless of which constitutional provision it uses to extend the right to keep and bear arms to the states!

I should add that the petitioners’ reply brief does cite all of those aforementioned cases (as well as the “Keeping Pandora’s Box Sealed” law review article I co-authored with Josh Blackman).  I leave it to the reader to determine whether it is Alan Gura or the NRA who is better positioned to argue substantive due process — or any other part of the McDonald case.

For more on the rift between the McDonald petitioners and the NRA, see this story in today’s Washington Post (in which I’m quoted, full disclosure, after a lengthy interview I gave the reporter last week).

(Full disclosure again: Alan Gura is a friend of mine and of Cato, and I suppose I should also say that I’ve participated in NRA-sponsored events in the past.)

By Daniel J. Mitchell

Ronald Reagan was born 99 years ago. To remember what made him special, here are a couple of videos.

By David Boaz

Cato senior fellow Tom Palmer is profiled in the Washington Examiner’s Sunday “Credo” column. He talks about the meaning of freedom and about people who have risked their lives to protect the rights of others, and offers some interesting thoughts when asked about “moral relativism”:

You say that for many people, the idea of right and wrong has been degraded in our culture. Why? When did that happen?

The growth of moral relativism is an interesting thing to chart. Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago argued that it was an unintended consequence of a positive development, which was the integration of different races and religions. As that happened, it became the easiest way to tell schoolchildren not to fight by saying, “Everyone and everything is as good as everything else.” It is an easier route to say that there are no moral truths, but the outcome is not more mutual respect. It undermines the foundation of mutual respect.

Moral relativism was a lazy shortcut for a pluralistic society. A better approach is to say you should respect others because they’re human beings, and because they have rights.

Find the whole article here or see it in newspaper-page format on page 34 of the digital edition.

And buy Tom Palmer’s Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice here.

By David Boaz

Charles Krauthammer writes about “liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate” and the conceit that “Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement and self-interest.” He has plenty of contemporary examples, but he also recalls one from a few years ago:

It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozick’s masterwork, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” “proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification.” The right, you see, is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.

Nozick, of course, was a libertarian, not a conservative, as the more insightful obituary by the philosopher Alan Ryan in the British Independent notes: the book’s ”criticism of social conservatism is at least as devastating as its criticism of the redistributive welfare state.” But Krauthammer is right to note the casual assumption by the New York Times that conservatism desperately needed ”philosophical justification.”

Sunday’s Washington Post contains a related article by political scientist Gerard Alexander: “Why are liberals so condescending?”