| Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty July 23, 2014 Our Sudden De Facto Travel Ban on Israel If your direct flight from New York to Tel Aviv suddenly turns around in the eastern Mediterranean and heads back to Paris . . . do you get the frequent-flyer miles for the new longer route?
 I suppose there's a bit of logic to the Federal Aviation Administration's decision to bar all flights into Tel Aviv — after the shoot-down in the Ukrainian skies, surely everyone in the aviation world is more jittery than usual. But by barring flights, we're giving Hamas what they want. We're stopping all U.S. flights into Tel Aviv for 24 hours . . . and then what?
We've just told Hamas that we'll stop our flights into Israel whenever they hit near the airport. The airport is well within range; it's just a matter of firing enough until one gets through the Iron Dome air defense system and scaring away air travelers. With the U.S. decision, most European carriers announced they were cancelling flights to Israel, too. Cruise ships are altering their courses and canceling stops in Israel. Think about it, this is a de facto travel ban to Israel. (Anybody arriving in Israel by boat or overland right now? Didn't think so.) Right now our State Department merely recommends against traveling to North Korea. Right now you can book a flight from a U.S. airport to Havana, Cuba or Caracas, Venezuela. But you can't fly to Tel Aviv… with one exception. Israeli airline El Al is still flying . . . and a guy most folks on the right don't like very much is taking a bold stand: Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg is heading to Israel Tuesday night, flying on El Al in a show of unity with the Jewish state while U.S. and European airlines are canceling flights amid deadly fighting in Gaza. "This evening I will be flying on El Al to Tel Aviv to show solidarity with the Israeli people and to demonstrate that it is safe to fly in and out of Israel," Bloomberg said in a prepared statement emailed by former City Hall spokesman Marc La Vorgna shortly after 8 p.m. "Ben Gurion is the best protected airport in the world and El Al flights have been regularly flying in and out of it safely," Bloomberg continued. "The U.S. flight restrictions are a mistake that hands Hamas an undeserved victory and should be lifted immediately. I strongly urge the FAA to reverse course and permit US airlines to fly to Israel." Bloomberg will be accompanied by one aide and, during his brief stay, plans to meet with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, La Vorgna said. This sure feels like a backdoor way to pressure Israel to accept a ceasefire on terms it doesn't like. Obamacare Will Probably Bounce Back with an 'En Banc' Decision Call me a cynic about this latest court defeat for Obamacare, but it's hard to be cheery when the Department of Justice is going to seek an "en banc" decision from the D.C. Court of Appeals. With an 8 to 5 majority of Democrat-appointed judges, that court is so eager to let Obama have it his way, it might as well install a drive-through lane. "Yeah, can I get a reinstatement of all subsidies and a side of fries?" Heritage's Hans von Spakovsky says it's going to the Supreme Court: While the U.S. Supreme Court accepts only about 1 percent of the cases seeking its review, it's now roughly 100 percent guaranteed that the Court will take up these two cases. The obvious conflict created in the federal circuits by Tuesday's rulings must be resolved quickly, simply because the stakes are so high. The subsidy issue involves enormous amounts of money and is critical to the administration of a major portion of Obamacare. Ah, the Supreme Court . . . where Chief Justice John Roberts has already given a thumbs-up to the individual mandate and subsequently wrote the Hobby Lobby decision to be as narrowly-tailored as possible. Maybe I'm crazy, but it looks like Roberts desperately wants to avoid going down in history as The Man Who Killed Obamacare — knowing that he'll be relentlessly demonized by liberal law professors and legal historians for the rest of time. If Roberts is given more opportunities, he'll try to do as little damage as possible -- not so much because he thinks Obamacare is such a great idea, but because he thinks its proper remedy should come from the legislative and executive branches. No, if Obamacare is going to be repealed, removed, nullified, canceled, or functionally ignored, it's going to be up to us. We can't count on the Supreme Court to save us. QUASI-SPOILER ALERT! Discussing the Ending of The Weed Agency A couple readers have written in, asking about the ending to The Weed Agency, so I figured I ought to lay out why my novel ended the way it did. If you haven't bought your copy by now . . . come on. I know the circulation of the Jolt. And I get the Weed Agency sales figures. So I know some of you out there aren't up to speed! The Weed Agency is . . . $9.97 on Amazon, $7.99 on Kindle, $9.97 at Barnes and Noble, $9.99 on Nook, and IndieBound can steer you to an independent bookseller near you. One reader asked if I had anything against Books-a-Million, and I don't, I just forgot to look it up there: $11.41 over on that site, $9.99 for the e-book. My cut as the author is roughly the same for all formats. Early on, my editors at Crown Forum/Random House told me that the book needed a good ending, and we tossed around a lot of ideas that . . . weren't so hot. ("Could the agency's office building get taken over by weeds?") I knew that the real world had not offered a lot of examples of wasteful, redundant federal agencies being eliminated, and so I couldn't have the heroes — frustrated worker bee Ava Summers and Reaganite crusader Nick Bader — completely triumphant. I aimed to write satire, not fantasy. I tried to end the book with some personal consequence and comeuppance. (SPOILER WARNING, AGAIN) Ava's reasonably happy with her life and her new sense of purpose, exposing the forces that frustrated her when she worked at the Agency. Anti-government waste crusader Bader gets up and keeps fighting the good fight after a lot of defeats. Adam Humphrey walks away unscathed for the most part, but his moment in the sun at the dedication of the new agency-headquarters building is soured; he's left with a nagging sense that his life's work, defending his kingdom within the bureaucracy, had little meaning and is easily forgotten. Wilkins, who began the book as something of a good-government liberal idealist, pays the steepest price for falling under Humphrey's spell and becoming an acolyte of the status quo with his resignation. Jamie is the book's really tragic tale; she chose the stability and security of her unsatisfying government job and wakes up in mid-career, wondering if it's too late to change course. Finally Lisa, the ambitious communications staffer lurking in the background, ends up on top having figured out how to play the game — having become the kind of secretive, closed-minded manager she detested at the beginning of her career. I'm hearing a lot of "this is the funniest depressing book," or "the most depressing hysterical comedy" in the responses. If people finish the book convinced that all is not well with our government, that's in the neighborhood of the response I wanted, although I think I wanted to leave people with the reverse of James Bond's martinis — stirred, not shaken. (Quick note: I'm writing mostly about bureaucracy, which is tied to but not quite the same as high levels of government spending. We could enact entitlement reform tomorrow that would dramatically reduce spending and projections of our national debt, but it would only marginally reduce the amount of federal bureaucracy.) Electing the right people is part of the equation, but it's not enough. Politicians "go native." There are enormous tangible incentives to increase spending and bring home the pork and significantly smaller, less tangible incentives to cut spending. And you need committed crusaders across the board. I think the Gingrich-Clinton era shutdowns showed us it's hard to dramatically shrink the size and cost of government with only control of Congress and the Obama-Boehner era shows us it's even harder controlling just the House. The Bush-Frist-Hastert era showed us that you need Republicans eager to have these fights, even when the fights are difficult and even when they've got other big issues on their plate, like 9/11 and Iraq. Civil service reform would be a big part of the equation; the single biggest difference between government employment and private-sector employment is that it's comparably really difficult to lose your job in the public sector. In the private sector, you can do your job really well and still get laid off. (That's what the dot-com chapter is about.) Job security is really woven into the fiber of the culture of most government offices. Believe it or not, I suspect we could find a decent percentage of federal-government workers who agree with this. Sure, a lot of them get sucked into the clock-in, clock-out, hang-around-for-your pension collective and get assimilated, but a lot of them went to work for the government because they thought they could make a difference. A lot of them want to take pride in their work and workplace, and resent the lazy and incompetent among them as much as we do. As you may have noticed on the Campaign Spot lately, I'm attempting to cover the work of the federal government's Inspector General offices more frequently. It's generally fascinating stuff, and indicates that at least some of the worst cases of waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement get caught and addressed in one form or another. A lot of days we're going to feel like Sisyphus rolling that rock up that hill. The temptation to give up, shrug, and tune out is going to be great. But if we wait for somebody else to address this problem, it won't get addressed. So we care and we expose and we beat the drums and demand accountability . . . because even frustrating, sporadic, marginal victories are better than surrender. ADDENDA: Over on the home page, a look at Obama's exhausted promise, "I will not rest until . . ." Here's how last night's appearance on Greta went… From Our Sponsor:
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