The Conservative Article Annals

As a Liberal I Mocked and Despised Reagan

2012-01-29T05:22:00.000-08:00

By Lincoln Brown
Sunday, January 29, 2012

A friend of mine commented the other day that she was growing tired of the Mitt-Newt volleys and super pacs. After cruising the GOP buffet going back to the days when even Gary Johnson was still all-in, she was leaning toward Rick Santorum. “The problem is.” she lamented “is that he lacks…Santorumism.”

Santorumism?

Suddenly aware that I might be present at the birth of new word in the language of elections, I pressed her for what she meant by that. “I support everything he says in his campaign speeches, but he’s missing Santorumism” she replied. I was still intrigued and had to know what she meant by the word. She had other things to do that day but agreed to explore it with me and we finally distilled what she was trying to say. While she likes what he has to say, but she is disappointed that he seems to lack that ineffable quality of a serious contender. What she wanted was a Santorum with the polish and presence of the Rominee, combined with the pitbull aggressiveness we have seen out Gingrich.

She is not alone in having not entirely committed herself to one of the remaining camps. The Rasmussen Report indicated last week that 33 to 34 percent of those polled indicated that they would like to see someone else get into the GOP race. That’s one third of the respondents, give or take. Last year, John LeBoutillier prophesied that there was someone waiting in the Republican shadows for the right moment to emerge and take the lead in the race.

Everyone in the commentatriat has said that this contest will go right down to the wire at the convention, as Newt and Mitt continue to duke it out. (And yes I am aware Ron Paul will hang in there.) But it has been interesting that the majority has not really seemed to solidify behind one or the other. That may be due to the mercurial nature of the caucus and primary results, but I think it has more to do with the 33 percenters out there. The people I have talked to that do not have radio or TV shows or columns are leaning toward the Rominee, but so far no clear winner has emerged.

I am willing to bet that there are more 33 percenters out there than those Rasmussen talked to: people who see something that they like in each of the candidates but can’t fully commit to putting a sticker on their bumper for anyone yet. And I think I know why.

Every conservative out there is waiting for the Second Coming. No, I’m not talking about that Second Coming, I mean the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan.

Every conservative looks to the Reagan Era as conservativism in its full flower. For many of us, the Reagan Era is our version of Kennedy’s Camelot. In fact, I would argue that Newt got into more trouble last week over his relationship to Reagan than he has for all of the accusations of his peccadilloes. We are Republicans, and thou shalt not mess with Reagan.

And so in the back of our minds, we are looking at the collection of candidates and trying to gauge which will be the most like Reagan

Now let's be clear: as a liberal I mocked and despised Reagan. As a conservative I learned to appreciate and respect Reagan. But fellow believers, Reagan is dead and he will not be returning from Avalon. And even if he were still with us, he served two terms and couldn’t run, anyway.

The country and the world have changed since the 1980’s, and even if the changes were not as drastic as they are, the simple fact remains that Reagan has assumed a status in the GOP mythology that cannot be replicated or even approached.

No candidate will be the next Reagan, and we should stop looking for his face in theirs. Instead, we should wrest the discussion from the media and the Super Pacs, and let the candidates know what we expect from them. We should drive the issues and we must drive the nomination.

GOP No Longer Feels Need To Hide Its Incivility

2012-01-29T05:18:00.000-08:00

By Debra J. Saunders
Sunday, January 29, 2012

Last week, Sarah Palin stepped over the edge of civility. Fox Business host Eric Bolling played a clip of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on "Meet the Press" in which Christie said Newt Gingrich "has been an embarrassment" to the Republican Party.

"Poor Chris," Palin responded. "This was a rookie mistake. He played right into the media's hand." Palin added that Christie must have been shaken up by Romney's second-place showing in South Carolina. "You kind of get your panties in a wad, and you may say things that you regret later. And I think that that's what Chris Christie did."

One can only hope that Palin regrets her rookie mistake of using that brand of crude language on television. Except, just when Palin seems increasingly irrelevant, that quote put her name back in the news.

Days later, when Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer greeted President Barack Obama on the Phoenix airport tarmac, the two got into a testy exchange about Brewer's account of a meeting with the president in her memoirs, "Scorpions for Breakfast." Associated Press photographer Haraz N. Ghanbari snapped photographs of the Republican governor jabbing her index finger at the president of the United States.

Governors: Manners, please. Stanford University political science professor Mo Fiorina considers the tarmac spat indicative of a "breakdown of basic civility, of basic mutual respect, of the degree of animosity within the political class."

A few years ago, I read amazing memoirs, "My Year Inside Radical Islam" by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who converted to Islam as a college student. "No other Muslim will accuse you of not being a Muslim," a friend had told him. "The thought that other Muslims would accept me as a brother in faith even if we disagreed on some theological points was comforting."

Over time, however, Gartenstein-Ross continued to find new sets of rules to which he was expected to adhere if he wanted to see himself as a good Muslim. He wasn't supposed to listen to music. "You should not go to law school," a sheik told him. "If you go to law school, you will have to say the Constitution is good." He had to grow a beard.

Each act of conciliation drove the young man to greater extremes and further isolated him from the rest of society. In 1999, Gartenstein-Ross worked for a foundation that the U.S. Treasury Department later found to have funded terrorist organizations. As his eyes opened, his fanaticism waned.

There are days when this Republican feels as if the GOP is puffing up its own extremist bubble. The GOP has more litmus tests of fidelity than before. There's more rancor, and there's a showy contempt for moderation.

I called Gartenstein-Ross to ask whether he sees a connection between today's pumped-up GOP and his experience in radical Islam. Islamic extremists, he told me, "declare people with more moderate views of Islam to be not Muslim at all." The Republican Party doesn't advocate violence toward apostates, he replied, and liberal groups such as MoveOn.org also push the edge of the envelope, but he saw a similarity: "You have the same element with this desire for purity."

Also, in an age when opinionators are competing for attention, shock talk draws the most attention. Palin trash-talked Christie's undergarments -- presto, she made Politico. Brewer berated the president in a most inhospitable manner -- and her book sales shot up.

Stanford's Fiorina told me that the Republican Party today reminds her "a lot of Democrats in the '70s. It took them four or five elections to figure out that the country wasn't going to elect them."

Fiorina looks at the GOP and sees "what happened to the Democrats." Now the GOP base is "anti-establishment." GOP factions "fight with each other more than the other side."

Then there's this rush to claim victimhood. On Thursday, Palin was on Fox Business claiming that "the establishment" was trying to "crucify" Gingrich. Crucify? How? By letting him talk? First party lemmings alienate everyone outside their little bubble, and then they blame the "establishment" because many voters do not trust them with power.

Obama Calls It Fairness. The GOP Calls It Class Warfare. Scripture Calls It Envy

2012-01-29T05:14:00.000-08:00

By Doug Giles
Sunday, January 29, 2012

Obama, in his State of the Union address and during his initial five-state, multi-million dollar taxpayer funded re-election jaunt has stated repeatedly that his platform and policies are not about class warfare, which means, of course, that his ticket is all about class warfare—or “fairness,” as he likes to call it … or as the Scripture labels it, envy.

You don’t hear much about envy anymore, do you? We hear a lot about greed being bad, but in Obamaland envy is no longer a rank vice but a right and a virtue. However, historically speaking, envy has always been seen as a high-ranking sin. Envy, matter of fact, is second on the Seven Deadly Sins list as it lags behind pride a wee bit in being the nastiest and most common vice.

Ancient in its poison, envy forms a big chunk of the foul compost heap that stimulates the growth of human stupidity. Envy is an extremely toxic sin that doesn’t get the verbal hailstorm that other sins receive in our current entitlement culture with its totemic view of vice. Someone who has been saddled by the envy monkey will probably not make the evening news like a politician who has been caught in bed with a live man or a dead woman or who keeps his freezer stuffed with cash.

No, envy is not that sexy and doesn’t have the buzz that zings around a greedy Goldman Sachs exec. Because this sin doesn’t get MSNBC’s attention like the more juicy transgressions, we tend to see it as less naughty. But be not deceived, my brethren: This sin is disastrous once it sticks its talons into a person, party, religion, or nation.

Another distinguishing feature of the funk of envy is that it is no fun. All vices sport a momentary spice. All of them, that is, except for envy. Envy is the one sin the sinner will never like or admit. You’ll never see someone who is envious chilling out, laughing his butt off, or relaxing with his friends while this demon rules the roost. The more envy grows, the more it drives its impenitent coddler nuts.

So, what is envy? Well … let’s start with what it is not. It’s not admiring what someone else has and wanting some good stuff also. This desire will make you get off your butt in the morning and get busy. It is good to crave; a man’s appetite will make him work. Where envy differs from admiration/emulation is that envy is “sorrow at another’s good” (said Thomas Aquinas). Someone who is centered can watch another person, party, or nation prosper and not grow hateful because of it.

The whacked, petty, envious dolt, however, sees someone else excel and is slapped in the face with the reality that he just got dogged. So, instead of sucking it up and working harder and smarter, the unwise envious freak allows his pride to fuel his wounded little spirit. This sets the dejected perp down a path of disparagement of the prosperous that eventually morphs into the desire to destroy the person, party or nation that has just trumped this sad little person.

Os Guinness, best-selling author and renowned lecturer, states that the sin of envy has several common characteristics:

1. Envy is the vice of proximity. We are always prone to envy people close to us in temperament, gifts or position.

2. Envy is highly subjective. It is in the eye of the beholder. It is not the objective difference between people that feeds envy, but the subjective perception. As a Russian proverb says, “envy looks at a juniper bush and sees a pine forest.”

3. Envy doesn’t lessen with age. It gets worse as we run into more and more people of happiness and success, offering more fodder for envy.

4. Envy is often petty but always insatiable and all consuming. However small the occasion that gives rise to it, envy becomes central to the envier’s whole being. The envier “stews in his juice.” Envy begins with pride and then plunges the person into hatred.

5. Envy is always self-destructive. What the envier cannot enjoy, no one should enjoy, and thus the envier loses every enjoyment. The envier’s motto is “if not I, then no one.” As an eighth-century Jewish teacher put it, “the one who envies gains nothing for himself and deprives the one he envies of nothing. He only loses thereby.”

Y’know, there are many forces tearing at this land and many nations that would like to level our nation. That said, I believe this envious entitlement funk that’s speedily weaving its way into the fabric of our national life will destroy it faster than al-Qaeda could ever al-Hope to.

Do Government Programs Ever 'Fail'

2012-01-29T05:09:00.000-08:00

By Austin Hill
Sunday, January 29, 2012

“Too big to fail.”

Americans have come to loath the idea that some business enterprises are so important and so “big,” that they can’t be allowed to fail - especially as it regards large corporations that “need” government bailouts. But have we developed a similar disdain for government programs that are treated as though they can’t possibly be failures?

After last week’s State of the Union Address and Republican presidential debate, one might think that the issue of “more or less government” in our lives is merely another consumer choice - kind of like Coke or Pepsi, McDonalds or Burger King. For example, as he recently reviewed America’s debate over President Obama’s government healthcare law, Columnist Carl M. Cannon characterized the battle this way:

“To liberals, the Affordable Care Act of 2010 is a step toward ensuring improvements in health benefits, lower costs, higher quality care, economic security and fiscal sanity. Republicans, who invariably call it “Obamacare,” almost universally describe it as costly, intrusive, economically disastrous -- and a violation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.”

In reality, the choices we make for our nation’s public policy are not all of equal merit – some can enhance our freedoms and our quality of life, while others clearly make matters worse. And many government programs that are intended to “solve” problems – most of which come from Democrats, but far too many of which come from Republicans – often times make matters worse.

It’s difficult to argue that President Obama’s healthcare reform law has solved any problems at all (notice that he’s not campaigning on the law’s success, but rather, on an agenda to protect it – “we can’t go back” he often notes). But let’s consider another signature program that the President has championed these past three years – his “Making Home Affordable” mortgage rescue initiatives.

Protecting one from losing their home may have seemed like an act of compassion. But in 2009, it became a matter of federal policy as the government intervened to try to curtail foreclosures.

In March of that year, President Obama introduced the set of federal policies budgeted to cost $75 billion in TARP funds, and which were intended to help make it “easier” for homeowners to remain in their homes and to continue paying on their mortgages.

The effort itself was complex and was formulated with both federal guidelines, and guidelines to be established by each of the individual fifty states. The effort also proved to be so confusing that about six months after the its inception, FreddieMac (one of the lenders that was offering the so-called “affordability assistance” to some of its borrowers) actually hired a private firm to send trained professionals door-to-door in certain regions of the country to explain to homeowners how the program worked.

The objective of “Making Home Affordable”—reducing monthly mortgage bills so borrowers would presumably keep paying on their mortgages—was to be accomplished on a case-by-case basis, and by a variety of means. Among the optional procedures were: lowering the interest rate of the loan (to as low as 2 percent in some cases); reducing the principle on the loan; and extending the term of the loan, in some cases to a maximum of forty years.

The government stipulated that, for certain qualified mortgage holders, loans that were held by the government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be refinanced or otherwise “modified” to provide the borrower with more manageable monthly terms. Not surprisingly, the government was also able to get some of the lenders who accepted “bailout funds” to follow suit, and begin modifying the loans of their struggling clients as well (even though to do so meant that these lenders would be working against their own interests, and foregoing revenues that they were clearly entitled to collect).

It all seemed like a great idea. But as is so often the case when the government intervenes into the free market, the results produced by the “Making Home Affordable” initiatives have been less than desirable. Within the first eighteen months of the program’s beginnings, more than 50 percent of the participants in the program ended up falling behind on their payments again. Our government’s well-intended effort to “solve” the mortgage default problem gave rise to an entirely new problem—the phenomenon of “re-defaults.”

And here’s another problem with the program: it focused on mortgage borrowers who were not keeping their commitments, and extended to them a benefit, while more responsible borrowers who were current on their payments received no benefit from their government at all. This is to say that, for all the good intentions involved, the “Making Home Affordable” program rewarded bad behavior – and produced more bad behavior in the end.

This is but one example of a well-intended government program that has cost the American taxpayer enormous amounts of money, has undermined hard working people who play by the rules, and has produced more negative consequences. Has it failed? Not according to our government.

The choices between big government and limited government are not inconsequential. Americans need to think, before they vote.

Obama Builds the Wrong Car

2012-01-29T05:03:00.000-08:00

By Marita Noon
Sunday, January 29, 2012

Mr. President, you are building the wrong car.

In a May 2007 speech before the Detroit Economic Club, Candidate Obama chastised American automakers for building the wrong cars—while they were building “bigger, faster cars,” “foreign competitors were investing in more fuel-efficient technology.” He stated that “it’s not enough to only build cars that use less oil—we also have to move away from that dirty dwindling fuel altogether.” He noted that “the transformation of the cars we drive and the fuels we use would be the most ambitious energy project in decades.” He promised “generous tax incentives” and “more tax credits” to make this happen. He believed that the additional costs are “the price we pay as citizens committed to a cause bigger than ourselves.” He claimed to be a leader who could make this happen as he intoned, “Believe me, we can do it if we really try.”

While that speech did not mention the Chevy Volt, or even electric cars, it surely laid out his ideology. For the most part, these are campaign promises he has kept. He has driven Detroit to “move away from that dirty fuel altogether.” He has offered “generous tax incentives” and “more tax credits.” To see “the most ambitious energy project in decades” become a reality his administration has handed out loans to virtually every strata in the electric car’s foundation.

He’s bailed out GM—which allowed government manipulation of the market to produce the Volt in the first place.

He’s given billions of taxpayer dollars to “green” energy companies who promised to deliver the electricity—Solyndra is just the one of the myriad of failures in his “ambitious energy project.”

Beacon Power Company received $39 million of its government-guaranteed loan before it filed for bankruptcy. Beacon Power developed new technology that supposedly provides energy storage designed to help the intermittent solar and wind power be used by power grids, which need stable power to remain reliable.

Just this week, another Obama backed company filed for bankruptcy. EnerDel made lithium-ion batteries for electric cars. It received more than $100 million in government funding from the Obama administration, as part of the economic stimulus package and green energy push. One year before EnerDel filed for bankruptcy, Vice President Biden visited the plant and crowed: “A year and a half ago, this administration made a judgment. We decided it’s not sufficient to create new jobs—we have to create whole new industries.” The reason for EnerDel’s demise? “The company suffered when demand for the batteries dropped as fewer Americans than expected opted for electric cars.”

Yes, the Obama administration has worked hard to line up the dominos to insure a “transformation of the cars we drive and the fuels we use.” They have provided “generous tax incentives” and “more tax credits.” But to what end?

The dominos have fallen, one right after the other—all the way up to the Chevy Volt and beyond.

Last week GM launched “national and television print ads” to try to bolster the slumping sales for the Volt. (Every time you see an ad for an electric car, think of President Obama and your tax dollars.) Dealer orders are down. They report: “We just haven’t been seeing the interest. The cost definitely has something to do with it.” GM is considering slowing production due to the less-than-expected demand and has temporarily laid-off 1,200 workers.

In 2011, instead of the forecasted 10,000, 7,671 Volts were sold—which comes out to three-hundredths of 1 percent of US carmakers unit sales. Analysts say there has been a “slow initial uptake of the first models to come on the market.” Many of the Volts that were sold were to government. New York City bought 50. The city of DeLand, FL used part of a $1.2 million federal grant to buy five. Perhaps in effort to save his “ambitious energy project,” President Obama has committed the fed to buying 100+. He’s even pushed his Jobs Council leader, Jeffery Immelt, to buy them. GE will purchase 3000 through the year 2015.

Of course GE is one of the leading suppliers of the charging stations needed to power the Volt—much like those removed by Costco, due to lack of use. After investing a lot of time and money on recharging stations, GE has to do what they can to not let the market slip further away.

But, remember, “we can do it if we really try.” From the first domino to the last, the administration has really tried. The Volt, says the Financial Times, was “fast-tracked through development in a process it likened to a ‘moonshot.’” Adam Jones, an analyst with Morgan Stanley, believes that they are “not yet ready for prime time.” Addressing the removal of charging stations at Costco, general manager for northern California, Dennis Hoover said: “Why should we have anybody spend money on a program nobody’s thought through?” Calum MacRae of PWC’s Autofacts states that electric vehicles “are flawed in terms of convenience.”

Citing statistics for the Nissin Leaf, Forbes Magazine counts the cost of an electric vehicle (EV): “At $0.11/KWH for electricity and $4.00/gallon for gasoline, you would have to drive the Leaf 164,000 miles to recover its additional purchase cost. Counting interest, the miles to payback is 197,000 miles. Because it is almost impossible to drive a Leaf more than 60 miles a day, the payback with interest would take more than nine years.” But, they state: “The cost is not the biggest problem.” “The biggest drawback is not, range, but refueling time. A few minutes spent at a gas station will give a conventional car 300 to 400 miles of range. In contrast, it takes 20 hours to completely recharge a Nissan Leaf from 110V house current. An extra-cost 240V charger shortens this time to 8 hours. There are expensive 480V chargers that can cut this time to 4 hours, but Nissan cautions that using them very often will shorten the life of the car’s batteries.”

Plus, the cost of electricity keeps going up. According to the Energy Information Administration, residential electricity rates have risen from 11.26 cents per kWh in 2008, to 11.51 cents in 2009, to 11.54 cents in 2010. With the increasing regulation on cost-effective coal-fueled generation, and the proposed plant closures, that trend is likely to get even more dramatic.

No wonder initial “uptake” has been slow. Meanwhile, impressive advances in the technology for the traditional internal combustion engine are being made—with some outperforming hybrids. A gasoline powered Ford Focus costs about half of its electric version sibling. Remove the $7,500 US government tax credit and the EV is even less desirable.

Despite Obama telling Detroit that they are building the wrong cars, Americans don’t want what Obama is selling. Washington has poured billions of dollars in making cars that people have to be paid to buy. Meanwhile, Chrysler is enjoying a resurgence thanks to Jeeps. Chrylser is adding more than a thousand jobs to build gas-guzzling vehicles like the Dodge Durango and Jeep Cherokee.

Mr. President, you are building the wrong car.

But this was before his now-public, election-year conversion experience, as expressed in the State of the Union Address. Now, leaving many in his eco-friendly base “more than a little unhappy,” he’s touting fossil fuels—particularly natural gas (even though Nancy Pelosi doesn’t think natural gas is a fossil fuel). In the SOTU, the President said: “The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.”

Imagine if he’d had this revelation in 2007. While I oppose federal tinkering with the markets, since the Obama administration was hell-bent on spending—a so-called “stimulus,” what might the world would look like today if the $2.4 billion spent subsidizing electric cars and their various components had been spent on infrastructure to support vehicles powered by natural gas?

Instead, industry, like Chesapeake Energy, and investors, like T. Boone Pickens, are using their own money and are building the needed fueling stations to allow for compressed natural gas (CNG) powered trucks to crisscross the nation. Without government pressure, and without having to retool, Honda is adapting the Civic to make a CNG-fueled car with a 250 mile range that can be refueled in the same time as a gasoline-fueled automobile (rather than the hours needed for an EV). While prices at the pump have doubled since President Obama took office, and electricity rates are “necessarily” skyrocketing, natural gas’ abundance has dropped prices to the lowest in more than a decade.

On its own, the free market is going to create the “transformation of the cars we drive and the fuels we use,” without any help from the White House. Perhaps it is time to stop throwing good money after bad and allow the Volt to go the way of Baker Electrics’ cars—or keep them for the rich who will buy them even without “generous tax incentives.”
Now that President Obama has had his oil-and-gas-conversion experience and angered his green base, maybe he could go ahead and approve the pipeline. Then we’d know his conversion is real and not just an election-year transformation.

The State of Our Union Is Broke

2012-01-28T15:27:00.000-08:00

By Mark Steyn
Saturday, January 28, 2012

Had I been asked to deliver the State of the Union address, it would not have delayed your dinner plans:

“The State of our Union is broke, heading for bankrupt, and total collapse shortly thereafter. Thank you and goodnight! You’ve been a terrific crowd!”

I gather that Americans prefer something a little more upbeat, so one would not begrudge a speechwriter fluffing it up by holding out at least the possibility of some change of fortune, however remote. Instead, President Obama assured us at great length that nothing is going to change, not now, not never. Indeed the Union’s state — its unprecedented world-record brokeness — was not even mentioned. If, as I was, you happened to be stuck at Gate 27 at one of the many U.S. airports laboring under the misapprehension that pumping CNN at you all evening long somehow adds to the gaiety of flight delays, you would have watched an address that gave no indication its speaker was even aware that the parlous state of our finances is an existential threat not only to the nation but to global stability. The message was, oh, sure, unemployment’s still a little higher than it should be, and student loans are kind of expensive, and the housing market’s pretty flat, but it’s nothing that a little government “investment” in green jobs and rural broadband and retraining programs can’t fix. In other words, more of the unaffordable same.

The president certainly had facts and figures at his disposal. He boasted that his regulatory reforms “will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years.” Wow. Ten billion smackeroos! That’s some savings — and in a mere half a decade! Why, it’s equivalent to what the government of the United States borrows every 53 hours. So by midnight on Thursday Obama had already re-borrowed all those hard-fought savings from 2017. “In the last 22 months,” said the president, “businesses have created more than three million jobs.” Impressive. But 125,000 new foreign workers arrive every month (officially). So we would have to have created 2,750,000 jobs in that period just to stand still.

Fortunately, most of the items in Obama’s interminable speech will never happen, any more than the federally funded bicycling helmets or whatever fancies found their way onto Bill Clinton’s extravagant shopping lists in the Nineties. At the time, the excuse for Clinton’s mountain of legislative molehills was that all the great battles had been won, and, in the absence of a menacing Russian bear, what else did a president have to focus on except criminalizing toilet tanks over 1.6 gallons. President Obama does not enjoy the same dispensation, and any historians stumbling upon a surviving DVD while sifting through the ruins of our civilization will marvel at how his accumulation of delusional trivialities was apparently taken seriously by the assembled political class.

An honest leader would feel he owed it to the citizenry to impress upon them one central truth — that we can’t have any new programs because we’ve spent all the money. It’s gone. The cupboard is bare. What’s Obama’s plan to restock it? “Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary,” the president told us. “Asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.”

But why stop there? Americans need affordable health care and affordable master’s degrees in Climate Change and Social Justice Studies, so why not take everything that Warren Buffett’s got? After all, if you confiscated the total wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans it would come to $1.5 trillion.

Which is just a wee bit less than the federal shortfall in just one year of Obama-sized budgets. 2011 deficit: $1.56 trillion. But maybe for 2012 a whole new Forbes 400 of Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs will emigrate to the Hamptons and Malibu and keep the whole class-warfare thing going for a couple more years.

The so-called “Buffett Rule” is indicative not so much of “common sense” as of the ever widening gap between the Brobdingnagian problem and the Lilliputian solutions proposed by our leaders. Obama can sacrifice the virgin daughters of every American millionaire on the altar of government spending and the debt gods will barely notice so much as to give a perfunctory belch of acknowledgement. The president’s first term has added $5 trillion to the debt — a degree of catastrophe unique to us. In an Obama budget, the entire cost of the Greek government would barely rate a line-item. Debt-to-GDP and other comparative measures are less relevant than the hard-dollar numbers: It’s not just that American government has outspent America’s ability to fund it, but that it’s outspending the planet’s.

Who gets this? Not enough of us — which is exactly how Obama likes it. His only “big idea” — that it should be illegal (by national fiat) to drop out of school before your 18th birthday — betrays his core belief: that more is better, as long as it’s government-mandated, government-regulated, government-staffed — and funded by you, or Warren Buffett, or the Chinese Politburo, or whoever’s left out there.

What of his likely rivals this November? Those of us who have lived in once-great decaying polities recognize the types. Jim Callaghan, prime minister at 10 Downing Street in the Seventies, told a friend of mine that he saw his job as managing Britain’s decline as gracefully as possible. The United Kingdom certainly declined on his watch, though not terribly gracefully. In last Monday’s debate, Newt Gingrich revived the line and accused by implication Mitt Romney of having no higher ambition than to “manage the decline.” Running on platitudinous generalities, Mitt certainly betrays little sense that he grasps the scale of the crisis. After a fiery assault by Rick Santorum on Romney’s support for an individual mandate in health care, Mitt sneered back at Rick that “it wasn’t worth getting angry over.” Which may be a foretaste of the energy he would bring to any attempted course correction in Washington.

Newt, meanwhile, has committed himself to a lunar colony by the end of his second term, and, while pandering to an audience on Florida’s “Space Coast,” added that, as soon as there were 13,000 American settlers on the moon, they could apply for statehood. Ah, the old frontier spirit: I hear Laura Ingalls Wilder is already working on Little House in the Crater.

Maybe Newt’s on to something. Except for the statehood part. One day, when America gets the old foreclosure notice in the mail, wouldn’t it be nice to close up the entire joint, put the keys in an envelope, slide it under the door of the First National Bank of Shanghai, and jet off on Newt’s Starship Government-Sponsored Enterprise?

There are times for dreaming big dreams, and there are times to wake up. This country will not be going to the moon, any more than the British or French do. Because, in decline, the horizons shrivel. The only thing that’s going to be on the moon is the debt ceiling. Before we can make any more giant leaps for mankind, we have to make one small, dull, prosaic, earthbound step here at home — and stop. Stop the massive expansion of micro-regulatory government, and then reverse it. Obama has vowed to press on. If Romney and Gingrich can’t get serious about it, he’ll get his way.

The Myth of GOP Stinginess

2012-01-28T15:21:00.000-08:00

By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, January 28, 2012

Mitch McConnell wanted you to know he was livid on Thursday. The Senate was about to Greece the wheels for adding yet another trillion and change to President Obama’s yet-again tapped-out credit card. “More spending, more debt,” brayed the minority leader. “That’s what we’ve gotten from this administration.” Well, no, Senator, that’s what we’ve gotten from you.

Yes, I know, Obama is the one driving us off the cliff. But as McConnell and his fellow Republicans are well aware, he couldn’t have filled his tank without them — and they are the guys who got us halfway up the summit before handing the president the car keys. No one is falling for this week’s debt-increase “disapproval” charade, the stage for which was set by last summer’s sleight-of-hand, when Republicans agreed to borrow another $2.4 trillion. As if to prove that Obama has not cornered the market on cynicism, the GOP apparently feels the need to insult your intelligence while it helps our latter-day Robin Hood take from the unborn to give to the insatiable.

For the record, it was Republicans who nearly doubled the national debt during the Bush years — increasing it by almost $5 trillion. Some context: It had taken the nation over 200 years to accumulate roughly the same amount of debt rung up from 2001 through 2008 — a time during most of which, besides holding the White House, Republicans held the Senate (with McConnell in the leadership, first as whip and later as leader) and the House (with now-speaker John Boehner in the leadership, first as a committee chairman, then as leader).

Of course, for the Left, enough is never enough. So when Obama took over, he made the GOP look positively stingy — running up more debt in half the time, with perennial trillion-dollar deficits projected as far as the eye can see. With debt rising about $4 billion per day and each citizen’s share nearing $50,000, frightened voters opted to give Republicans a second chance, electing them in historic numbers in the 2010 midterms. This was not because they suddenly loved Republicans. They didn’t — and don’t. It was because the GOP was the only available alternative. And it was because leaders such as McConnell and Boehner, affecting a chastened pose, promised that if given the opportunity, they’d slam on the brakes.

Last summer, they had their big chance: Debt hit $14.3 trillion, the statutory ceiling — “ceiling” being Washingtonese for the point at which the money we’ve borrowed to pay the interest on prior loans for ever-expanding government spending no longer covers the tab because of the added interest on the new loans, necessitating more loans, resulting in more interest, triggering more — well, you get the idea. Now in control of the House and with near parity in the Senate, Republicans were in a position to stop the madness: to decline to authorize more borrowing and thus force spending cuts.

Instead, they did what they always do: They caved. They shriveled in the heat of Obamedia scaremongering about a purportedly imminent sovereign-debt default that would shred the full faith and credit of the United States. It was bogus. As McConnell and Boehner knew, the debt ceiling was scraped only because the total government spending they annually authorize now outstrips revenues by well over a trillion dollars. There was no credible threat of default because revenues remain vastly higher than what it costs to service the government’s bonds. The real threat — the threat too terrible to contemplate — was that our elected representatives might be forced to make hard, accountable decisions about what spending would need to be cut in order to live within their $14.3 trillion limit (i.e., a ceiling about three times as high as what Leviathan cost us in the mid-Nineties, when President Clinton pronounced the era of Big Government over).

So rather than confess that they had no stomach for the fight, McConnell and Boehner settled on two coats of camouflage. The first involved orchestrating the farce we’ve just witnessed: Republicans contrived a byzantine process that enabled them to raise the debt ceiling but dole the new trillions out in installments. As the installments came due, Republicans would pretend to vote against them . . . and hope you didn’t notice that we were talking about installments only because Congress had already voted in favor of the whole debt enchilada.

The second coat is just as disingenuous as the first. With an assist from compliant conservative pundits — who somehow always find a way to rationalize runaway Republican spending for a new entitlement here, a financial-sector bailout there, and a global sharia-democracy enterprise for good measure — GOP congressional leaders treated us to the dolorous refrain that they “control one-half of one-third of the government,” so what could you really expect them to do?

Does that pass your laugh test? Does the Supreme Court’s bloc of reliably progressive jurists ever come to the Left and say, “Gee, we’d love to help you out — maybe create constitutional rights to abortion, to protect murderers against the death penalty, to invent special rights for homosexuals, to curb free speech in election campaigns, to invite terrorist war prisoners to challenge their detention in civilian courts, all those things on your wish list. But as luck has it, we control only one-half of one-third of the government. It just wouldn’t be right to use our power that way”?

I don’t recall our commentariat’s complaining that President Bush controlled only one-third of the government when he decided — against deep congressional and public opposition — to order the surge. I seem to remember the argument being that without the surge, al-Qaeda would achieve a catastrophic triumph in Iraq, and that when the stakes for the nation are that high, elected leaders are obligated to use the power the Constitution gives them to advance the national interest — even if doing so is unpopular, brings down the wrath of the left-wing press, and risks an electoral rout.

The bunkum about controlling only a minority slice of the government is embarrassing. Divided government is not rule by a majority of government officials. Our Constitution’s separation of powers makes different components of government supreme in different areas. The judiciary gets to resolve legal controversies regardless of what the other two branches think. President Obama is convinced he needn’t even consult Congress, much less get authorization, before starting a war in Libya or sending troops to fight in Uganda. Either party in the Senate can reject a perfectly qualified judicial or cabinet nominee even though it is only one-half of one-third of the government.

The same Constitution that gives the judiciary, the commander-in-chief, and the Senate these powers directs that the House of Representatives — the body closest and most responsive to the public — is supreme when it comes to raising revenue. It prescribes, moreover, that money cannot be borrowed on the credit of the United States unless Congress authorizes it. President Obama can demagogue all he likes, but he can’t borrow a dime.

This has nothing to with holding a minority share of the pie; it has to do with holding the share that has primary power over the subject at hand. When it comes to the subjects of borrowing and spending the United States into oblivion, primary power belongs to the Republican-controlled House and to the Senate whose parliamentary procedures ensure that nothing can happen unless 40 Republicans give their assent.

Unbelievably, the United States now has a banana-republic-esque debt-to-GDP ratio of over 100 percent — we’ve borrowed more money than our gigantic economy produces annually. Obama has led us to the edge of the abyss, but Republicans had the wherewithal to stop him. The public’s desperation to stop him was its sole basis for electing them. Republicans know that, yet they couldn’t bring themselves to do the job — and they put a lot more energy into making believe than making the fight.

The debt is America’s existential crisis. For a dozen years, Republicans have been more its cause than its solution. In 2010, they were given a new lease on life based on their assurances that they had changed. But nothing has changed. So remind me what we need them for?

Pax Americana

2012-01-28T15:16:00.000-08:00

By Charles Payne
Saturday, January 28, 2012

Father Father Father (continue to) Help Us

People killin’, people dyin’

Children hurt and you hear them cryin’

Can you practice what you preach

And would you turn the other cheek

Father, Father, Father help us

Send some guidance from above

‘Cause people got me, got me questionin’

Where is the love (Love)

-Black Eyed Peas

Earlier this week, I began an interview on Fox Business by asking the guest if the market had entered into some kind of Pax Romana period. It wasn’t a planned question; it just popped into my head since I knew the guest was bullish on the market. Yesterday another guest described a backdrop for the Fed that wasn’t deflationary or inflation which gives them room to risk zero percent interest rates for the next three years. While the stock market has been anything but peaceful for the past decade and major economies face serious treats, the world itself may be entering a modern version of Roman Peace.

It is certainly counterintuitive in light of American’s two wars, the one we sponsored in Libya, the Arab Spring and the general notion the planet is spinning out of control.

Believe it or not, this might be the most peaceful period in the history of the planet. It’s all laid out in the latest from Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist, and author of “The Blank Slate,” that shook up generally accepted norms about human behavior. In “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” Pinker uses mounds of statistical evidence to first prove violence is down significantly from earlier ages but also reasons for this miraculous turn of events. (I haven’t read the book but plan to do so very soon, but I wonder if it clashes with the premise of “Blank Slate.”)

Each night we are greeted with horrific news of senseless crime, more often than not within our own community, but when that’s not available, the media always has an atrocity from somewhere on the planet. Songs of violence and the quest for peace and justice are always on the airwaves with megahits in the past from the Eagles, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Jackson Browne, Peter Paul and Mary, U2, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, John Meyers, Jimmy Hendrix, Michael Jackson and Bob Marley- to name a few. Most of the time the lyrics, like those from the Black Eyed Peas “Where is the love,” point to a world self-destructing in senseless and hopeless violence.

The answer to that question might be that love is all around us…or at least as much love as there has ever been before.

That Stats and the Reason

People killed in battle

Before countries organized 500 per 100,000

19th century France 70 per 100,000

20th century (with two world wars) 60 per 100,000

Now 3/10 out of every 100,000

Genocide deaths per world population were 1,400 times higher in 1942 then 2008

In US wives killing husbands 0.2 per 100,000 now from 1.2 per 100,000 1976

In US husbands killing wives 0.8 per 100,000 now from 1.4 per 100,000 1976

The main reason for this amazing peace in the world even as media and entertainment paint a picture of a world covered in blood, according to Steven Pinker, smarter people. Apparently the average teenager is smarter with each generation. Pinker points to IQ test which are adjusted to keep the average at 100 so teenagers that now score 100 would have hit 118 in 1950 and 130 in 1910. (I’m not sure I believe this part per se, but I think my son has more knowledge than I had although not sure it means he’s smarter.)

"As we get smarter, we try to think up better ways of getting everyone to turn their swords into plowshares at the same time." Steven Pinker

The world being less violent does make a lot of sense and not only dovetails with the idea I continue to push that never has the entire planet been this upwardly mobile but provides the perfect backdrop for that to happen. It’s difficult to make money and fight civil wars at the same time. Take Angola which suffered under a brutal civil war that lasted from 1975 to 2002 and took 500,000 lives while displacing 1,500,000 additional citizens. Now Luanda, the capital of Angola, ranks as the most expensive for expats to live. Called the Dubai of Africa, a two bedroom luxury apartment rents for $7,000, substantially more than $4,300 in New York, $3,300 Shanghai, $2,456 Rome, and $1,800 Buenos Aires.

Sources for Steven Pinker background http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/22/world-less-violent-stats_n_1026723.html?view=print&comm_ref=false and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate

To me the formula seems to be Smarts + Peace = Prosperity.

American Peace

The period of peace in Rome described by Gibbons is known as Pax Romana and has been the dream of many since then. Beginning in 27BC with the rule of Augustus to 180AD, and the end of the rule of Marcus Aurelius, that 207 period of peace was sparked by the end of civil wars, the spread of the rule of law and strong military protection (but fewer wars). Rome learned to be prosperous with less violent plunder but rather domestic self sufficiency. It is said Augustus convinced his citizens to avoid risky wars through skillful propaganda. On the other end of this period was Marcus Aurelius, author of “Meditations.” His work is timeless and considered to this day to be one of the greatest works of literature ever.

So much of his ideas need to be read by leaders and would-be leaders in this nation today including:

From my governor, to be neither of the green nor of the blue party as the games in the Circus, nor a partisan either of the Parmularius or the Scutarius at the gladiators’ fights; from him too I learned endurance of labor, and to want little, and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with other people’s affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander.

From Fronto I learned to observe what envy, and duplicity, and hypocrisy are in a tyrant, and that generally those among us who are called Patricians are rather deficient in paternal affection.

Wow! It is amazing how timely his observations and advise to the world was then and now. For more of this timely wisdom go to and send your local lawmaker to:

http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.1.one.html.

End of Peace and the decline of Rome began through a combination of class warfare, the invasion of Huns and terrible leadership. So in this world of nuclear bombs, a billion handguns and amazing animosity, it would seem the peace is tenuous at best. Of course according to the Black Eyed Peas this peace doesn’t exist in the first place. For our nation where crime has been declining for years it’s truly amazing and belies the notion that gun ownership kills people or increased poverty would unleash a wave of lawlessness.

Yet with our difficult financial circumstance and mean-spirited leadership we could tumble out of this otherwise Pax Americana. I hope Pinker is right and we are too smart for that, but there is another formula at work too.

Less Prosperity + Harsh Propaganda of Blame = Something Less than Peace.

Economists Finally Get One Thing Right for 2011: Obama a Failure

2012-01-28T15:09:00.000-08:00

By John Ransom
Saturday, January 28, 2012

Not that we needed any reminding from economists that Obama’s economic plan has sucked wind since inception, but a new survey released by the AP says that a large majority of economists polled rate Obama’s economic performance fair-to-poor.

So, the folks who told us at the beginning of the year to expect 3 percent GDP growth have bailed on Obama now that he’s screwed up their magical predictions for the year.

There must be year-end bonuses involved for them.

I’m not saying that all economists are Obamanauts, I’m just saying that of the ones polled by the AP, it’s likely none of them saw a stimulus program or a TARP program that they didn’t like.

In a story in the Washington Post, the AP reports that “Half of the 36 economists who responded to the Dec. 14-20 AP survey rated Obama’s economic policies ‘fair.’ And 13 called them ‘poor.’ Just five of the economists gave the president “good” marks. None rated him as ‘excellent.’”

I don’t know how many surveys the AP sent out, but I’m guessing that a large number of economists politely voted “not present.”

That means that 86 percent of economists think Obama’s done little to help the economy.

Indeed some of the economists think that Obama hasn’t wasted, er, borrowed, er, saved/created- or something- enough of our tax money on programs that don’t work.

And I was wondering what an economics degree was worth just the other day.

Now I know the answer: A lot less than I thought.

“They’ve generally tried to take the right kinds of measures but have often failed to lead with enough vigor to overcome political obstacles,” William Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services told the AP.

Thank God they have failed. That’s failure I can believe in. Hillary was right. We can’t afford all the Democrats bright ideas. And according to polls and mid-term elections, the chief political failure has been in hoodwinking enough voters to go along with the economists.

News flash to Cheney: You’re wrong about the vigor thing, and also wrong about the “right kind of measures” thing.

If one thing is true of Obama’s administration it’s that they have generally marched in the wrong direction with a kind of arrogance that should be reserved only for those who are occasionally right about something- anything- economic.

This is the monster that was created when Obama got the presidency and a Nobel Prize for frothy, high calorie rhetoric like “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” “The Audacity of Hope,” and other wordy cakes and pastries with no nutritional value.

If Obama made as many easy economic decisions as he has vacations this year, we’d be seeing decent economic growth. In fact, if we could get Obama to take more vacations and not make ANY decisions, it’s likely real unemployment-U6- wouldn’t be at 16 percent. Despite economists predictions, expect unemployment to climb in the second half of 2012.

TARP hasn’t worked out, the home mortgage modification program hasn’t worked out; Frank-Dodd isn’t protecting us from systemic banking failure, rather it’s only systematized systemic banking failure; Obama’s green programs have been called by the Washington Post- yes, the Post- a program designed for political payoffs, not jobs; industry has been under a deluge of regulatory actions that amounts to the rape of the US economy; kleptocrats, who can not keep their hands off what others own, have been put in charge of everything under Obama and called Czars, like it’s a good thing.

We’ve gotten to the point where a small minority of people can march in the street calling for nationalization of everything, forgiveness of all debts and a sizable group of Americans, including noted economists, think that that is normal.

We fought a world war and a cold war, for this?

Most amazing of all is the high marks that the economists give Mitt Romney because he has business experience.

“Romney’s a technocrat,” economist Allen Sinai told the AP, like the term technocrat is a good thing. “He’s not an ideologue. He has a history in the real world of business.”

Yep. We heard the same thing in Europe.

Memo to economists: It’s not business failures that got us into this mess, political failures did.

Economists, bankers, technocrats and messiahs won’t save us here.

Only voters and politicians can.

State of the Union Flop

2012-01-27T09:34:00.000-08:00

By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, January 26, 2012

Once upon a time, small ball was not Barack Obama’s game. Tuesday, it was the essence of his State of the Union address. The visionary of 2008 — purveyor of hope and change, healer of the earth, tamer of the rising seas — offered an hour of little things: tax-code tweaks to encourage this or that kind of behavior (manufacturing being the flavor of the day), little watchdog agencies to round up Wall Street miscreants and Chinese DVD pirates, even a presidential demand “that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.” Under penalty of what? Jail? The self-proclaimed transformer of America is now playing truant officer?

It sounded like the Clinton years with their presidentially proclaimed initiatives on midnight basketball and school uniforms. These are the marks of a shrunken presidency, thoroughly flummoxed by high unemployment, economic stagnation, crushing debt — and a glaring absence of ideas.

Of course, this being Obama, there was a reach for grandeur. Hope and change are long gone. It’s now equality and fairness.

That certainly is a large idea. Lenin and Mao went pretty far with it. As did Clement Attlee and his social-democratic counterparts in post-war Europe. Where does Obama take it? Back to the decade-old Democratic obsession with the Bush tax cuts, the crusade for a tax hike of all of 4.6 points for 2 percent of households — ten years of which wouldn’t cover the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus alone.

Which is why Obama introduced a shiny new twist — the Buffett Rule, a minimum 30 percent rate for millionaires. Sounds novel. But it’s a tired replay of the alternative minimum tax, originally created in 1969 to bring to heel all of 155 underpaying fat cats. Following the fate of other such do-goodism, the AMT then metastasized into a $40 billion monster that today entraps millions of middle-class taxpayers.

There isn’t even a pretense that the Buffett Rule will do anything for economic growth or job creation (other than provide lucrative work for the sharp tax lawyers who will be gaming the new system for the very same rich). Which should not surprise. Back in 2008, Obama was asked if he would still support raising the capital-gains-tax rate (the intended effect of the Buffett Rule) if this would decrease government revenues.

Obama said yes. In the name of fairness.

This is redistribution for its own sake — the cost be damned. It took Indiana governor Mitch Daniels about 30 seconds of his State of the Union rebuttal to demolish that idea. To get the rich to contribute more, explained Daniels, you don’t raise tax rates. This ultimately retards economic growth for all. You (a) eliminate loopholes from which the rich benefit disproportionately (tax reform) and (b) means-test entitlements so that the benefits go to those most in need.

Tax reform and entitlement reform are the really big ideas. The first produces social equity plus economic efficiency; the second produces social equity plus debt reduction. And yet these are precisely what Obama has for three years steadfastly refused to address. He prefers the easy demagoguery of “tax the rich.”

After all, what’s he got? Can’t run on his record. Barely even mentioned Obamacare or the stimulus, his major legislative achievements, on Tuesday night. Too unpopular. His platform is fairness, wrapped around a plethora of little things, one mini-industrial policy after another — the conceit nicely encapsulated by his proclamation that “I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or to Germany.” As if he can command these industries into existence. As if Washington funding a thousand Solyndras will make solar economically viable.

Soviet central planners mandated quotas for steel production, regardless of demand. Obama’s industrial policy is a bit more subtle. Tax breaks for manufacturing — but double tax breaks for high-tech manufacturing, which for some reason is considered more virtuous, despite the fact that high tech is less likely to create blue-collar jobs. Its main job creation will be for legions of lawyers and linguists testifying before some new adjudicating bureaucracy that the Acme Umbrella Factory meets their exquisitely drawn criteria for “high tech.”

What Obama offered the nation Tuesday night was a pudding without a theme: a jumble of disconnected initiatives, a gaggle of intrusive new agencies, and a whole new generation of loopholes to further corrupt a tax code that screams out for reform.

If the Republicans can’t beat that in November, they should try another line of work.

Obama's Vision for a Spartan America

2012-01-27T09:25:00.000-08:00

By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, January 27, 2012

President Obama's State of the Union address was disgusting.

The president began with a moving tribute to the armed forces and their accomplishments. But as he has done many times now, he celebrated martial virtues not to rally support for the military, but to cover himself in glory -- he killed Osama bin Laden! -- and to convince the American people that they should fall in line and march in lockstep.

He said of the military: "At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They're not consumed with personal ambition. They don't obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach."

That is disgusting.

What Obama is saying, quite plainly, is that America would be better off if it wasn't America any longer. He's making the case not for American exceptionalism, but Spartan exceptionalism.

It's far worse than anything George W. Bush, the supposed warmonger, ever said. Bush, the alleged fascist, didn't want to militarize our free country; he tried to use our military to make militarized countries free.

Indeed, Obama is upending the very point of a military in a free society. We have a military to keep our society free. We do not have a military to teach us the best way to give up our freedom. Our warriors surrender their liberties and risk their lives to protect ours. The promise of American life for Obama is that if we all try our best and work our hardest, we can be like a military unit striving for a single goal. I've seen pictures of that from North Korea. No thank you, Mr. President.

Of course, Obama's militaristic fantasizing isn't new. Ever since William James coined the phrase "the moral equivalent of war," liberalism has been obsessed with finding ways to mobilize civilian life with the efficiency and conformity of military life. "Martial virtues," James wrote, "must be the enduring cement" of American society: "intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built." His disciple, liberal philosopher John Dewey, hoped for a social order that would force Americans to lay aside "our good-natured individualism and march in step."

This is why Obama's administration believes a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. This is why Obama has been prattling about "Sputnik moments" and sighing over his envy of China and its rulers. This is why his spinners endeavored to translate the death of bin Laden as some sort of vindication of his domestic agenda: because he cannot lead a free people where he thinks they should go.

At the end of his address, Obama once again cast the slain bin Laden as the Vercingetorix to his Caesar. (Vercingetorix was the defeated Gaulic chieftain whom Caesar triumphantly paraded through Rome.) "All that mattered that day was the mission. No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves," Obama rhapsodized.

The warriors on the ground "only succeeded ... because every single member of that unit did their job. ... More than that, the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other -- because you can't charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there's somebody behind you, watching your back. So it is with America."

"This nation is great because we worked as a team. This nation is great because we get each other's backs."

No. Wrong. It is not so with America. This nation isn't great because we work as a team with the president as our captain. America is great because America is free. It is great not because we put our self-interest aside, but because we have the right to pursue happiness.

I don't blame the president for being exhausted with the mess and bother of democracy and politics, since he has proved so inadequate at coping with the demands of both. Nor do I think he truly seeks to impose martial virtues on America. But he does desperately want his opponents to shut up and march in place. And he seems to think this bilge will convince them to do so.

What I can't forgive, however, is the way he tries to pass off his ideal of an America where everyone marches as one as a better America. It wouldn't be America at all.

Romney Should be Proud

2012-01-27T09:21:00.000-08:00

By Mona Charen
Friday, January 27, 2012

It's as predictable as vultures at a carcass. When a wealthy Republican is running for office, the press will make his wealth a handicap. Recall that when George H. W. Bush was running in 1988, he was derided as a "preppy." George W. Bush was the undeserving scion of the ruling class. We were told never mind that he had succeeded in business on his own. Though John McCain had been a fixture on the national stage since 1980, no one had paid much attention to his wealth until he was the Republican nominee, at which point his many houses suddenly became a matter of profound national importance.

Democrats, of course, are permitted to be rich without fear of undue scrutiny. John F. Kennedy was wealthier than Mitt Romney, or would have been had he lived to collect his inheritance. Lyndon B. Johnson was born poor and died very rich. He didn't earn his money in the private sector. He used political influence to first purchase and then maintain monopolistic radio licenses in his wife's name.

There wasn't much fuss about John Kerry's great wealth in 2004. Kerry didn't earn his fortune either but secured it through two advantageous marriages. Teresa Heinz Kerry is rumored to be in the billionaires' club. Good for her. Though, she didn't earn it either, but rather married the heir of the ketchup fortune. John Kerry was an advocate of raising taxes on the rich, but he, like Warren Buffett, declined to contribute more than required to Uncle Sam. In fact, he was caught mooring his yacht in Rhode Island so as to avoid Massachusetts' taxes. Oh, and before he married Teresa Heinz, there were a number of years when Sen. Kerry donated nothing at all to charity.

Now it's Romney's turn, thanks not just to the press but to Newt Gingrich, who gleefully mouths every left-wing jibe that proves handy. In Florida, he disparaged Romney as a Swiss-bank-account-holding, "automatic $20 million a year" guy. Gingrich, who earned his own not inconsiderable fortune (Tiffany's account anyone?) by selling influence, is joined in his dismay at Romney's larger fortune by other exceedingly wealthy men. NBCs Brian Williams (annual salary: $13 million) shared the news about Romney's tax returns this way: "He did it to help stop the questions about his wealth, but in releasing his taxes, he reveals what most Americans will regard as unimaginable wealth...."

Oh, "unimaginable wealth" -- how shocking. The amount that Brian Williams contributes to charity is not public knowledge. But Newt Gingrich's contributions are available. Though his adjusted gross income was $3.1 million in 2010 (is that "imaginable wealth"?), Gingrich donated only $81,133 to charity, or 2.6 percent of his income -- below the average rate for his income group.

Gingrich and the liberals seem to think that paying taxes is "patriotism" -- to quote Joe Biden, who gave a grand total of $368 annually to charity in the decade before 2008. By their own standard, their patriotism is a little rusty. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was only the most prominent, but far from the only Obama appointee to acknowledge that he hadn't paid the taxes he owed. And the IRS recently announced that 36 members of President Obama's executive office staff owe the government $833,970 in back taxes.

Conservatives think people should obey the law, and that includes paying taxes. But we don't worship the state or its "Greedy Hand" (see Amity Shlaes).

Far from being embarrassed about his wealth, Romney has every reason to be "unimaginably" proud. He didn't inherit his money (He gave away his inheritance), and he didn't earn it by parlaying his government post into contracts for services as a "historian." He earned every penny through his own talents in the private sector. He then paid all the taxes he was required to pay.

Beyond that, Romney's tax returns reveal the most generous charitable donor in recent history. The Romneys donated about 14 percent to charity in 2010 and about 19 percent in 2011. The average donation for people at the Romneys' level of income is 6 percent.

Would Romney's money have done more good if he'd forked those extra millions to the IRS rather than to the Mormon Church and the other charities they selected? Well, that would certainly have provided a few more bucks for Solyndra and the urgently necessary high-speed rail stretch from Fresno to Bakersfield. But, on balance, private charities are probably a better bet for improving the world.

You'd think Gingrich would understand that.

Preparing the Military for Future Threats

2012-01-27T09:15:00.000-08:00

By Earl Tilford
Thursday, January 26, 2012

With breaking news of a U.S. Navy SEAL team successfully rescuing two hostages from pirates in Somalia, military pundits are quick to note how the deployment of small, elite units will fit in with President Barack Obama’s vision for modernizing the U.S. military. Yet, while small, elite units are indeed crucial to the modern military, so too is a balance of force structures, doctrines, and technologies appropriate to a variety of challenges. At the strategic level, preparing for 21st-century threats means thinking holistically on a global scale.

First, we must define the threats. China and Russia present the greatest long-range threat to U.S. national security interests. More immediately, the threat issues from a nuclear-armed Iran, especially if Tehran’s alliances extend beyond Syria to North Korea, Venezuela and—not unthinkably at some point—a drug-cartel dominated Mexico. At another level, insurgencies and civil wars in Africa and South America are likely to continue. Additionally, threats from international terrorism, in some cases allied with the four rogue states cited above and, possibly, criminal cartels, enlarges the threat profile.

With the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and the current winding down of our presence in Afghanistan, . While the Navy and Air Force have formulated an air-sea concept for meeting future threats from major powers or would-be regional hegemons like Iran, the Army struggles with how to recapture the conventional war-fighting concepts and skills lost or, at the least, degraded during the last decade.

In a way, the present harkens back to the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam conflict when the predominant attitude was, “We ain’t doing that again.” Attention turned to more conventional forms of warfare attendant to stopping a Soviet attack at the Fulda Gap during the era of Air-Land Battle. The reality is, counterinsurgency, irregular warfare, and terrorism are not going away. U.S. national security strategy must, therefore, indulge in a delicate balance of priorities to meet a full range of threats, or we face total defeat at the high end of the spectrum on the one hand, or death by a thousand cuts through inappropriate organization, doctrine, and training at the lower end.

China—and to a lesser extent Russia—and perhaps North Korea and Iran, demand a strategy built around force projection over long distances. That means investment in high tech (and high cost) systems like aircraft carriers, long-range submarines, and attack aircraft. The high cost of these systems, however, is a plus. Government spending on defense means good jobs for highly skilled workers that will stimulate the economy by boosting both production and service-industry jobs to employ the less skilled. The technological fallout from research on (needed) high-tech weapon systems will infuse new vitality into American leadership in a wide variety of fields from electronics to automotive engineering. In short, build more warships, submarines, and high-tech fighter planes like the F-22 and F-35, along with 20 to 40 more B-2s to replace the B-52s in our inventory. We should also look at the stealth bomber for the period beyond 2040.

The most likely scenarios involving the Army and Marine Corps will be in areas of global instability, most notably Africa. These can be met with special operations forces and with highly deployable brigades capable of unleashing overwhelming firepower on any potential threats to U.S. interests or to our allies. The role of the Reserve components will remain important should a conflict become more protracted, requiring a longer-term employment of ground forces. The added capabilities inherent in air power and precision strike from the air, space or sea will prove critical in diminishing the conventional capabilities of any mid-range threat that might result from an Iran or similar forces.

To be unprepared for threats ranging from pirates to major powers is a threat to our nation and its economic prosperity. The alternative will be protracted conflict coupled with increasing subservience to entities with the will to dominate.

Promoting Economic Freedom

2012-01-27T09:12:00.000-08:00

By Rich Tucker
Thursday, January 26, 2012

Americans like “freedom.” The very word conjures up powerful images: The Spirit of 1776, the allied victory in World War II, or the West’s victory in the Cold War that spread freedom beyond the Berlin Wall.

But freedom isn’t always and everywhere on the march.

For 18 straight years, The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal have teamed up to track economic freedom around the globe with their Index of Economic Freedom. Last year, they found that economic freedom worldwide declined, mainly because so many countries tried -- without success -- to spend their way out of recession.

“The tension between government control and the free market has heightened around the world, particularly in developed countries,” the Index editors write. “Eroding hard earned gains in economic freedom in years past, the mounting burden of reckless government spending in many cases has overwhelmed gains in economic freedom achieved in other policy areas.”

Last year, the global average economic freedom score was 59.5 (out of a possible 100). That’s down 0.2 point and is the second-lowest score in the last decade. The economic freedom scores of 75 countries improved, but 90 lost ground.

One of the decliners was the United States. Sadly, this was the continuation of a trend. As recently as 2009, the U.S. was ranked sixth in the world and was rated “economically free.” Last year our country dropped to ninth and was considered “mostly free.” This time, we’re barely in the top ten, coming in just ahead of Denmark and far behind the three “free” economies: Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia.

It’s important that the world begin reversing this trend, because economic freedom is good for countries and people alike. “Poverty intensity, as measured by the United Nations’ new Multidimensional Poverty Index that assesses the nature and intensity of poverty at the individual level in education, health outcomes, and standard of living, is much lower on average in countries with greater economic freedom,” the editors write. Furthermore, “countries’ improvements in economic freedom also increase their income growth rates, speeding economic and social progress.”

The key reason that economic freedom is in decline is the on-going economic slowdown. Countries, especially the U.S., but many others as well, are trying to borrow and spend their way back to prosperity. It hasn’t worked, of course. President Obama’s $800 billion “stimulus” bill predictably failed to create jobs or generate growth. What it did do is saddle the country with unprecedented debt, a key reason why our government may need to, again, increase its debt ceiling.

Let’s stipulate that, in passing the stimulus bill, our leaders meant well. Still, “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding,” warned Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. By relying on the federal government to solve problems, instead of free people acting in their own best interests, our leaders are endangering the economic freedom that made this country great.

Still, the government’s failures mean we still have to choose a better path. “People worry about government waste; I don't,” economist Milton Freidman said in 1991. “I just shudder at what would happen to freedom in this country if the government were efficient in spending our money. The really fascinating thing is that our private sector has been so effective, so efficient, that it has been able to produce a standard of life that is the envy of the rest of the world on the basis of less than half the resources available to all of us.”

There’s no reason the U.S. can’t, once again, become a leader in economic freedom. This can be the year we move back toward lower taxes, smaller government and less debt. That would point the way toward a future with more economic freedom, and the opportunity that goes with it.

The Tax Rate Scandal

2012-01-26T11:49:00.000-08:00

By Mark W. Hendrickson
Thursday, January 26, 2012

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney casually estimated that his effective tax rate is around 15 percent, progressives immediately pounced on the issue. To this ideological minority with its Ahab-like obsession on class warfare, a rich American paying an effective tax rate of “only” 15 percent is, a priori, a scandal of the first order.

Yes, this story is a scandal (actually, a series of scandals) but not the one that progressives think it is.

It is scandalous that so many journalists and commentators have gotten their basic facts wrong. They have conflated average “effective” tax rates with statutory rates. Under our complex and convoluted tax code, no American pays an effective rate that is as high as his top marginal rate (the statutory rate on the last dollar of income). As it turns out, Romney’s effective tax rate of 15 percent is higher than the effective tax rate of approximately 97 percent of taxpayers.

An even greater scandal is that Romney’s tax rate is as high as it is. Most of Romney’s income comes from his investments, i.e., from capital. Of course, those still influenced by the defunct labor theory of value and Marxian class envy think that taxing capital makes sense. They deride investment income as “unearned” income, as if capital doesn’t contribute anything of value to economic production, when, in fact, we owe our wealth almost entirely to capital.

Capital, far from being the cruel exploiter of labor, is labor’s major benefactor. Human labor and natural resources are found around the world, but the rich countries are the ones in which the productivity of human labor (and therefore wages and standards of living) have been multiplied by capital.

Americans’ relatively high standard of living exists because, according to the opponents of capitalism, greedy capitalists have “exploited” us more than people in poor countries. Well, we should be thankful for this type of so-called “exploitation.” Taxing capital diminishes its supply, thereby crimping labor’s productivity and lowering workers’ standards of living. Any tax on capital above zero percent is scandalously stupid and perversely anti-labor.

A third scandalous aspect of the Romney tax-rate story is that the very people making the tired, tedious complaints that America’s income tax code is “unfair” are those who are primarily responsible for the unfairness. Fairness, or justice, means equal treatment before the law. In taxation, that presents two options: Either tax everyone the same amount or tax everyone at the same percentage rate. There is no principle that defines the “right” degree of progressivity in tax rates; such rates are essentially arbitrary, determined by who holds political power—a “might makes right” calculus devoid of ethical content.

Finally, the most egregious scandal in the story about Mitt Romney’s tax rate is that the discussion about taxation is distracting us from what is, by far, the major problem our elected officials in Washington need to address: out-of-control federal spending. Granted, a flat tax, if not a consumption tax, would be a huge improvement over the current monstrosity that is our 72,000-plus-page tax code. However, we can survive our flawed tax code for decades, whereas runaway federal spending threatens our country’s financial viability in the short run.

Uncle Sam is racing toward a fiscal train wreck that requires a massive cutback of the 75-percent increase in federal spending that has been added over the past dozen years, but neither party is talking along those lines. The Republicans are willing to trim around the edges, whereas the Democrats are digging in their heels against even those token cuts.

Here’s an experiment you can try: Ask any candidate running for federal office this year how he or she would cut $1 trillion in spending. They won’t have a clue. That’s the real scandal of Election Year 2012.

Obama Policies Failing Americans

2012-01-26T11:43:00.000-08:00

by Todd Tiahrt
Wednesday, January 25, 2011

One didn’t need to be a political insider to know that in this year’s State of the Union the president would address the public’s concern over scarcity of jobs and an unsteady economy. Attempts to assuage these worries included overviews of new proposals to spur growth and examples of success stories already unfolding as a result of his work.

Unfortunately, the reality is quite different. This administration’s policies have failed the American people. The recovery President Obama promised is not happening; and worse, he is destroying many new opportunities for job creation.

Last week, the White House acted in its political interest at the expense of U.S. workers when it rejected a permit for the Keystone XL project. Analysts estimated construction alone of the pipeline from Canada’s rich oil sands to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico would create 20,000 new jobs. Overall, it would generate more than 340,000 job opportunities through refining, distribution, sales, and other related industries.

With the U.S. rejecting its energy supplies, Canada may opt to transport those valuable resources to China instead. In the long-term, that means Obama’s political maneuvering will not only undermine current work toward economic recovery; it also throws our future energy security into jeopardy.

This move flies in the face of the president’s call earlier this month for industry leaders to rebuild our labor base and “insource” more jobs. And the Keystone XL pipeline is far from being the lone example of such hypocrisy. While Obama publicly chastises American industry for not bringing more jobs back home, he’s quietly giving taxpayer-funded military contracts to our foreign competitors.

Consider the case of American aircraft manufacturing company Hawker Beechcraft and the competition with Brazilian company Embraer to produce “Light Air Support” aircraft for the U.S. Air Force. In December the administration, out of the blue, disqualified Hawker from the bid without providing reason. On December 30th 2011, Obama’s Defense Department awarded the contract to Brazil’s Embraer.

The decision, effectively, amounted to the White House outsourcing 1,400 potential U.S. jobs. It means America won’t be able to add 500 new engineering jobs and 300 more highly skilled aircraft manufacturing jobs at its Wichita, Kansas facilities. To make matters worse, Embraer is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for corruption and bribery in relation to their foreign military contracts.

Adding to the jobs lost in our defense and energy sectors, Obama has undercut the healthcare industry too. Boston Scientific Corp., a Massachusetts-based medical device manufacturer, plans to cut 1,400 jobs over the next two years. The reason? The company cannot afford to keep those workers and pay the new 2.3 percent excise tax that will be imposed under Obama’s healthcare reform.

Like Boston Scientific, other medical device companies will be forced to make difficult choices as well. At a Medical Device Industry Council meeting, nearly 90 percent of the 100 firms attending said they must also reduce costs to afford the Obama administration’s increasing regulatory and tax policy burden.

The fact is the president’s consistent politically motivated decisions counter the national interests of the U.S. public. Those hurting for a paycheck in Massachusetts, Kansas, and across the country tuned into Obama’s address Tuesday night looking for more than some of the empty promises he’s delivered in the past. Yet, what they heard was more than his ‘regularly scheduled programming.’

Ballot-Box Zombies

2012-01-26T11:39:00.000-08:00

By Deroy Murdock
Thursday, January 26, 2012

Liberals love to laugh off voter fraud. It’s “a made-up problem invented by GOP operatives,” Robert Koehler snickered in the Huffington Post on January 5. Regarding ballot hijinks, Democratic national chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz chuckled: “There is almost none.”

But the recent news is not so funny. One probe recorded on tape how easily anybody can vote on behalf of dead Americans. Elsewhere, the total ballots cast by the dead exceeded the winning margins in several high-profile elections. These cases confirm the urgent need for all voters to prove that they are alive and to correctly identify themselves via photo ID — just as Americans do on non-election days.

James O’Keefe — the conservative video journalist whose hidden-camera sting operation doomed ACORN — struck again during the New Hampshire primary. O’Keefe’s organization, Project Veritas, dispatched three videographers to the Granite State. On January 10, they visited precincts in Manchester and Nashua and asked poll workers, one by one, if their voter rolls bore the names of several deceased people. Believing that O’Keefe’s collaborators were those registered, the poll workers handed out 10 ballots, never once asking for photo ID.

“Live Free or Die,” a poll worker reassured one investigator whom she thought was Reynold Caron, who passed away last October 14. “This is New Hampshire. No ID needed.”

O’Keefe’s men immediately gave back each ballot and insisted that they wanted to leave each precinct and return with photo ID, although none was required. O’Keefe’s team members never cast these ballots. They returned them, unmarked, to precinct workers.

All of this is available on videotape at ProjectVeritas.com.

New Hampshire Democrats seem unconcerned that their voter rolls contain the names of dead people and that, absent ID rules, fraudsters could conveniently vote the ballots of the expired. Instead, Democrats want to indict these whistleblowers.

“They should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, if in fact they’re found guilty of some criminal act,” Democratic governor John Lynch told WMUR-TV.

Republicans, however, consider this deadly serious.

“Despite the Governor’s veto of the photo ID bill last year, the House will begin again this year to restore confidence in our elections by passing legislation to require a photo ID,” New Hampshire’s Republican house speaker William O’Brien said on January 13. Following Project Veritas’s revelations, Granite State legislators recently began debating two photo-ID bills.

Meanwhile, South Carolina attorney general Alan Wilson told the U.S. Justice Department on January 19 that his office has documented 953 cases in which ballots have been cast by dead voters in the Palmetto State. Democrats can giggle all they want, but 953 is a potentially game-changing number of votes.

Recall that Willard Mitt Romney originally won the Iowa caucuses by just eight votes, only to have a closer count reveal that Rick Santorum actually prevailed by 34 votes (with eight precincts’ votes still missing).

After an indecisive November 2008 election, Sen. Al Franken (D., Minn.) eventually won a final recount in which he defeated GOP incumbent Norm Coleman by 312 votes.

And, of course, 537 ballots gave George W. Bush Florida’s electoral votes and, consequently, the White House in 2000.

Thus, 953 haunted ballots could have reversed any of these races. Perhaps they already did.

The easiest way to disfranchise the dead is to require every voter to show photo ID. Those who lack identification should get it for free. Reasonable accommodations can be made for the infirm.

And let’s not hear the Left’s scratched record about how mandating photo ID for voters is step one on the road to lynching. If that were true, then demanding photo ID at America’s airports would make the TSA the KKK. The Left’s oft-cited claim that blacks are too befuddled to possess or acquire photo ID is pure racial profiling. Just how lame does the Left think black Americans really are?

ID cards would help cleanse America’s increasingly soiled voting system. Photo IDs also would allow dead people to rest in peace rather than rush to the polls every Election Day.

Britain’s Free-Speech Problem

2012-01-25T07:20:00.000-08:00

By Suneal Bedi & William C. Marra
Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Imagine if New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady were accused of hurling a racist remark at an opponent during an NFL game. Public condemnation would be swift, but it would be unthinkable — not to mention unconstitutional — for prosecutors to bring criminal charges against the Patriots’ signal-caller.

Not so in Britain, where John Terry — the captain of both the English national soccer team and Chelsea, one of the nation’s most powerful clubs — faces trial on February 1 for allegedly racially slurring an opponent during a recent soccer match.

Terry is no stranger to controversy. In 2010, he was removed as captain of the national team after allegations surfaced that he’d had an affair with a teammate’s girlfriend; he was reinstated as captain a year later. England’s soccer authorities have yet to punish Terry for his latest alleged transgression, as they await the outcome of his legal battle.

If the accusations of racism are true, then the England captain should be swiftly and thoroughly censured. But his punishment should come from soccer’s governing authorities and the court of public opinion, not the criminal courts. Prosecuting Terry or anyone else for hateful speech is misguided and counterproductive.

Terry’s criminal prosecution highlights the gulf between American and British understandings of free speech, and the disconcerting extent to which the land of John Milton and John Stuart Mill is comfortable limiting its citizens’ freedom of expression. Although this is apparently the first time a British soccer player has been prosecuted for racially insensitive remarks made on the pitch, the principle is well established that Britons may be subject to criminal sanctions for taboo speech.

The charges against Terry stem from an October match between Chelsea and Queens Park Rangers. Terry, who is white, is accused of calling QPR’s black central defender, Anton Ferdinand, a “black c***.” Terry does not deny using the phrase but challenges the context in which it was said. His defense is that Ferdinand asked him whether he had used the slur, and Terry simply replied, “No, I didn’t call you a black c***.”

Prosecutors in England charged Terry with a “racially aggravated public order offense,” in violation of the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act. The act authorizes jail time, though Terry faces only a $4,000 fine.

Tragically, accusations of racism are not new in European soccer. Fans sometimes jeer black opponents with monkey noises. Only eight days before Terry allegedly slurred Ferdinand, Liverpool striker Luis Suarez was accused of slurring a black opponent in another English Premier League match. Suarez’s fate has been the inverse of Terry’s — he does not face criminal prosecution, but has been suspended eight matches and fined about $63,000 by the League.

Bigotry exists in America too, but we do not criminally sanction hate speech. We have a faith in the “marketplace of ideas,” the belief that truth is most likely to emerge through the free exchange of ideas and not through censorship. Americans tend to believe that the best way to combat hateful speech like Terry’s alleged slur is to expose it to the antiseptic of public debate, and we are skeptical of empowering the government to label certain ideas “right” or “wrong.”

Unfortunately, we are an outlier in our understanding of the freedom of speech. Whereas we view the freedom of speech as an individual right that should rarely give way to competing social goals such as equality and dignity, Britain, like much of the West, is more comfortable giving stock to those competing interests.

This difference is reflected in contrasting textual guarantees of the speech right. The First Amendment categorically states that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” By contrast, Britain’s Human Rights Act of 1998 (which codifies the European Convention on Human Rights) declares that “everyone has the right to freedom of expression,” but quickly adds that the freedom may be restricted as “necessary in a democratic society,” for example to prevent disorder or protect health and morals.

These different conceptions of speech matter. The Terry prosecution is just the latest example. Consider, for example, virulent anti-war protests. Last March, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a tort lawsuit brought against the supremely bigoted Westboro Baptist Church for staging an anti-gay protest at the funeral of an American serviceman. Upholding the group’s right to speak, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that although speech can “inflict great pain,” “we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.”

A British court, faced with a similar set of facts, reached the opposite conclusion last February. The court found that the criminal prosecution of protesters who shouted slogans like “burn in hell” and “baby killers” at a parade of British soldiers did not conflict with the Human Rights Act’s free expression guarantee. The court held that the prosecution was a proportionate response to the threat posed by the speech. “[T]he focus on minority rights should not result in overlooking the rights of the majority,” the court said.

The trouble with Britain’s approach is that it empowers the government to pick “right” and “wrong” ideas, and nudges us down a slippery slope where more and more thought may be censored. It enlarges government, and chills speech that straddles the border between permitted and proscribed speech. “Thus,” law professor Charles Fried has written of speech codes, “the holders of noxious ideas are suppressed and the rest of the community is impressed and intimidated by this display of political might.”

The different role of American and British courts is also critical. America has a system of judicial review and judicial supremacy, meaning federal courts may strike down laws they believe are unconstitutional, and the executive and legislative branches must follow the courts’ judgments. By contrast Britain has Parliamentary supremacy, meaning courts may not strike down laws or otherwise place meaningful limits on Parliament’s legislative powers. In other words, American courts are strong and receive deference from the political branches, whereas British courts are weak and must defer to Parliament.

Thus British courts cannot strike down laws they believe are inconsistent with the “freedom of expression” protected by the Human Rights Act. The courts must still enforce the offending laws; at most, they may issue an advisory “declaration of incompatibility” that Parliament is free to ignore. But if John Terry were prosecuted in America, a court could (and likely would) strike down the law, and the charges would be dismissed.

By giving courts, rather than the legislature, the final word on the freedom of speech, America provides more robust structural protections for the right. This is because on balance, independent courts insulated from the political process are more likely than legislatures to protect minority rights like the freedom to deliver unpopular speech. It is unsurprising that Britain, which leaves the scope of the right in the hands of Parliament and the political process, has a less vigorous freedom of expression.

This has salience for the Republican presidential primary. Newt Gingrich has proposed scrapping our system of judicial supremacy and stripping the Supreme Court of its status as final arbiter of the Constitution. Gingrich would not adopt the British model and make the legislature supreme; instead, he would make the three branches co-equal interpreters of the Constitution, and he would empower the executive and legislative branches to ignore court decisions with which they disagree.

Even under Gingrich’s plan, courts would retain the authority to dismiss prosecutions they believe are inconsistent with the First Amendment. But in many other instances, by empowering the executive to ignore “wrong” court opinions, Gingrich’s plan would likely give the political branches final say on whether individuals enjoy speech rights.

For example, if Congress and the executive prohibited a minority political group (think the Westboro Baptist Church) from holding a rally or staging a parade, there is little courts could do to preserve that group’s right to hold the rally. The group will probably be silenced — and who is to say our own credos will not be next in the crosshairs?

The proper allocation of power between unelected judges and elected politicians is a difficult question that admits of no easy answer. But whatever the value of Gingrich’s proposal for other areas of the law, one important downside is that it threatens to undermine the vitality of our speech rights. If the prosecution of John Terry troubles you, so too should proposals to strip the Supreme Court of its final word on matters of free speech.

Obama’s Green Robber Barons

2012-01-25T07:15:00.000-08:00

By Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Had enough of fat-cat Barack Obama, his jet-setting wife, and his multi-millionaire Chicago consigliere/real-estate mogul Valerie Jarrett attacking the “rich”? Well, brace yourself. You’ll be hearing much more from the White House about the “wealthy few” who aren’t paying their “fair share” as Obama’s reelection campaign doubles down on class-war demagoguery.

As usual, there’s always a set of immunity charms for the privileged friends and family of the ruling class. When it comes to all the Green Robber Barons who have reaped an obscenely unfair share of billions of tax dollars from the Obama administration, the envy trumpeters will be quieter than a nest of church mice.

Obama’s State of the Union address defiantly pitched a new round of clean-energy spending orgies to help the “middle class.” But how have the serial bankruptcies and near-bankruptcies of federally subsidized solar companies — all on Obama’s watch — helped anyone but an upper-crust elite of ecocrats and their lobbyists and consultants?

Bankrupt Solyndra, billionaire George Kaiser. In the wake of the half-billion-dollar Solyndra stimulus bust, company officials revealed plans to hand out hefty bonuses totaling $500,000. Months before the politically connected solar-energy manufacturer went belly up, it was doling out bonus payments of between $40,000 and $60,000 to several executives. Last week, a local CBS News crew caught employees at the Silicon Valley headquarters trashing solar-panel glass tubes worth an estimated $10 million.

The now-abandoned Taj Mahal complex (as its facilities manager dubbed it) cost ordinary Americans more than $733 million. But billionaire Democratic donor and frequent White House guest George Kaiser, whose nonprofit foundation was Solyndra’s biggest investor, is still sitting pretty. He and the other private investors in Solyndra will recoup their losses ahead of the taxpayers. And while they blast their GOP opponents, double-standard Democrats will remain AWOL on the glaring tax-avoidance strategies of the wealthy Kaiser Family Foundation.

Bankrupt Beacon Power, fat Democratic coffers. This green-energy storage plant filed for bankruptcy last fall after a $43 million injection of Obama Department of Energy loan guarantees. Federal Election Commission filings show that CEO William Capp contributed to the 2008 Obama campaign, as well as to several left-wing New England Democratic candidates. Beacon Power lobbyist Steve Wolfe was a former aide to the late senator Ted Kennedy. Beacon sought bankruptcy shelter two days after the White House responded to fiscal watchdogs’ demands for a review of the Department of Energy’s shoddy loan-monitoring programs.

Bankrupt SpectraWatt, red-faced Goldman Sachs. A solar-cell company based in New York, SpectraWatt went belly up last August despite a half-million-dollar federal stimulus boost and lucrative backing from politically connected Goldman Sachs — whose ties reach deep into the Obama Treasury Department, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, White House National Economic Council, and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue itself. The eco-failure was dumped in a fire sale for less than $5 million.

Teetering Nevada Geothermal, cheerleading Harry Reid. Despite $150 million in federal DOE and Treasury Department subsidies — not to mention personal lobbying by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — this alternative-energy project is on the brink of failure. A Deloitte audit grimly concludes that the company “has incurred net losses over the past several years, has an accumulated deficit of $44.0 million and an anticipated inability to retire its long-term liabilities.” According to CBS News, the company’s latest SEC filings warn of multiple defaults.

My scouring of White House visitor logs shows nine visits from another Green Robber Baron, Illinois-based Exelon’s CEO, John Rowe, who met with the president and former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel multiple times. As Forbes magazine reported, the clean-energy company “has very deep ties to the Obama Administration. Frank M. Clark, who runs ComEd, helped advise Obama before he ran for president and is one of Obama’s largest fundraisers. Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, worked as a consultant to Exelon. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, helped create Exelon” — where he raked in more than $16 million over two years.

Remember: “Fairness” is in the eye of the wealth redistributors.

A Redistributive State of the Union

2012-01-25T07:10:00.000-08:00

By Michael Tanner
Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Shortly after President Obama was elected, NBC News interviewed a young woman from Detroit named Peggy Joseph. She explained that she was excited about Obama’s election because “I won’t have to worry about putting the gas in my car. I won’t have to worry about paying my mortgage.”

In the three years since, President Obama may not have actually paid her mortgage or filled up her tank, but judging from last night’s State of the Union address, he’s still trying.

The president’s address — more campaign speech than policy platform — was long on calls for “fairness” and “opportunity,” but it really boiled down to the president’s vision of a society where government does everything for everyone — financed, of course, by higher taxes on “the rich,” who need to pay “their fair share.”

The president’s argument ignores the fact that the rich already pay a disproportionate share of federal income taxes. In fact, the much-reviled 1 percent earns 16 percent of all income in this country, but pays 36.7 percent of all federal income taxes. One might conclude that this group is already paying its fair share.

Take, for example, the president’s renewed push for a so-called “Buffett rule,” based on the idea, in Obama’s oft-cited formulation, that investors such as Warren Buffett should not pay a lower effective tax rate than their secretaries. He even had Buffett’s secretary, Debbie Bosanek, sitting in the presidential box.

Buffett makes most of his money from investment income (capital gains and interest), and he pays a capital-gains tax rate on that money. That tax rate could theoretically be lower than the tax rate that Ms. Bosanek pays on her wage-based income, although only if Ms. Bosanek’s income is fairly high and she took few deductions. However, the president’s narrative ignores the fact that Buffett’s income had already been taxed at the corporate level. When the effect of both taxes is combined, the real effective tax rate is closer to 45 percent. That is quite a high rate on an inherently risky activity — investing — that our tax code should encourage.

And significantly, note that the president’s solution to this supposed problem is not to reduce taxes on Ms. Bosanek, but to raise them on Mr. Buffett.

That is because the president sees the Buffett rule and his complaints about other tax loopholes as simply a tactic, the camel’s nose under the tent, in his desire for more money for the federal government. That is why his actual tax proposals, hidden behind rhetoric about “millionaires and billionaires” and the “wealthiest 1 percent,” would actually raise taxes on people earning as little as $200,000 per year, as well as many small businesses. And many of his proposals will probably hit people with incomes even lower.

And he wants that money so that he can spend it.

The president might have given lip service to the need to reduce deficits and the debt, but most of his speech was a laundry list of government programs to spend more money doing more things for more people. From health care to housing, from worker education to industrial policy, from “green energy” to college loans, the president sees the government as both the engine of our prosperity and the guarantor of fairness.

The president’s vision of the state of the union is a zero-sum one in which, if some people get rich, it must make other people poor. If Warren Buffett makes money, then Peggy Joseph won’t have gas for her car. The only alternative is for the government to step in and make Mr. Buffett pay for Ms. Joseph’s gas.

Of course there is another option.

We all seek a society in which every American can reach his or her full potential, in which as few people as possible live in poverty, and in which no one must go without the basic necessities of life. More important, we want a society in which every person can live a fulfilling life. But the evidence is now inescapable that the best way to achieve that goal is not through welfare-state redistribution of wealth, but through the creation of more wealth. We should judge the success of our efforts not by how much charity we provide to the poor, but by how few people need such charity.

Would it not be a better America if we could make it possible for Ms. Joseph to get a better job so that she could afford her mortgage and her gas? For that matter, wouldn’t we like a country where she could afford a bigger house and a second car? Nothing that the president has proposed would help bring that about.

Poverty, after all, is the natural condition of man. Indeed, throughout most of human history, man has existed in the most meager of conditions. Prosperity, on the other hand, is something that is created. And we know that the best way to create wealth is not through government action, but through the power of the free market. Last night, President Obama said, “This nation is great because we worked as a team [and] have each other’s backs.” Others might suggest that this nation is great because we are free.

We will probably spend the next year debating these two visions. Last night’s speech was the start.

A Brass Age?

2012-01-25T07:06:00.000-08:00

By Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, January 25, 2012

This may be the golden age of presumptuous ignorance. The most recent demonstrations of that are the Occupy Wall Street mobs. It is doubtful how many of these semi-literate sloganizers could tell the difference between a stock and a bond.

Yet there they are, mouthing off about Wall Street on television, cheered on by politicians and the media. If this is not a golden age of presumptuous ignorance, perhaps it should be called a brass age.

No one has more brass than the president of the United States, though his brass may be more polished than that of the Occupy Wall Street mobs. When Barack Obama speaks loftily about “investing in the industries of the future,” does anyone ask: What in the world would qualify him to know what are the industries of the future?

Why would people who have spent their careers in politics know more about investing than people who have spent their careers as investors?

Presumptuous ignorance is not confined to politicians or rowdy political activists, by any means. From time to time, I get a huffy letter or e-mail from a reader who begins, “You obviously don’t know what you are talking about . . . ”

The particular subject may be one on which my research assistants and I have amassed piles of research material and official statistics. It may even be a subject on which I have written a few books, but somehow the presumptuously ignorant just know that I didn’t really study that issue, because my conclusions don’t agree with theirs or with what they have heard.

At one time I was foolish enough to try to reason with such people. But one of the best New Year’s resolutions I ever made, some years ago, was to stop trying to reason with unreasonable people. It has been good for my blood pressure and probably for my health in general.

A recent column of mine that mentioned the “indirect subsidies” from the government to the Postal Service brought the presumptuously ignorant out in force, fighting mad.

Because the government does not directly subsidize the current operating expenses of the Postal Service, that is supposed to show that the Postal Service pays its own way and costs the taxpayers nothing.

Politicians may be crooks but they are not fools. Easily observable direct subsidies can create a political problem. Far better to set up an arrangement that will allow government-sponsored enterprises — whether the Postal Service, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, or the Tennessee Valley Authority — to operate in such a way that they can claim to be self-supporting and not costing the taxpayers anything, no matter how much indirect subsidy they get.

As just one example, the Postal Service has a multi-billion-dollar line of credit at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Hey, we could all use a few billions, every now and then, to get us over the rough spots. But we are not the Postal Service.

Theoretically, the Postal Service is going to pay it all back some day, and that theoretical possibility keeps it from being called a direct subsidy. The Postal Service is also exempt from paying taxes, among other exemptions it has from costs that other businesses have to pay.

Exemption from taxes, and from other requirements that apply to other businesses, are also not called subsidies. For people who mistake words for realities, that is enough for them to buy the political line — and to get huffy with those who don’t.

Loan guarantees are a favorite form of hidden subsidies for all sorts of special interests. At a given point in time, it can be said that these guarantees cost the taxpayers nothing. But when they suddenly do cost something — as with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — they can cost billions.

One of the reasons for so much presumptuous ignorance flourishing in our time may be the emphasis on “self-esteem” in our schools and colleges. Children not yet a decade old have been encouraged, or even required, to write letters to public figures, sounding off on issues ranging from taxes to nuclear missiles.

Our schools begin promoting presumptuous ignorance early on. It is apparently one of the few things they teach well. The end result is people without much knowledge, but with a lot of brass.

Finally, Redford "Squares Away" on the 99 Percent

2012-01-25T07:03:00.000-08:00

By Lincoln Brown
Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Let me state on the record that I think it is great that Robert Redford made a pile of money in the movie business, built a resort in the Utah mountains and can afford host the winter tradition of the Sundance Film Festival when Hollywood’s best and brightest stars descend each year on Utah’s trendiest ski town Park City to see the latest indie films. Redford earned his cash fair and square and can do with it what he wants as far as I’m concerned. And also for the record, I really liked him in “Butch Cassidy And the Sundance Kid” and “All The Presidents Men”.

And I like Park City. The people are nice, there are interesting stores, cool art galleries, and great restaurants. But it is expensive. My wife and I only go there for a weekend on special occasions, such as our anniversary for which we set money aside.

So let me add that despite living about 90 minutes from Park City, I certainly can’t afford to attend the Festival. Many Utahns can’t. It’s a pricey proposition and most of us in the Beehive State don’t have the kind of scratch it takes to rub elbows with the tinsel town elite. I don’t know if it is 99 percent of us that can’t afford to go, but most of us can’t swing it. We have time clocks to punch, loads to haul, jobs to do, children to feed, and bills to pay. So as tempting as it might be to savor the crisp mountain air in one of the hottest towns in the west with the folks who grace the pages of Variety, it just isn’t a reality for the majority of us.

Sundance isn’t a reality for most of us here.

The article on Fox News quotes Mr. Redford as saying "We show stories of what people in America are really dealing with, and really living with, against a consequence of having a government that’s let them down," Redford said. "People can come and say, ‘God, at least we’re seeing how people are really living in America, and what they’re up against.’ We square away on the 99 percent."

Well, okay, I think it is fantastic that Sundance wants to show the stories of what people in America are really facing. But what would be equally, if not more fantastic is if Mr. Redford would come and hear the stories of the Uintah Basin.

It’s a story I’ve told before on these pages: During the last energy boom in Utah, jobs in the Uintah Basin rose from 5,500 in 2001 to 9,000 in 2008. In the fall of 2009, the Department of the Interior rescinded 77 energy leases in Utah and Colorado. during 2009, 3,121 jobs disappeared. 70 percent of those job losses occurred in the construction and mining industries. By July of 2009, one thousand people in the Uintah Basin were collecting unemployment benefits. People not only lost jobs, they lost homes, they lost businesses, they lost their self sufficiency and their faith in a government that had “let them down”

There’s a story from that year. In fact there is a ream of stories from that year. Here are a few:

“In the last year I have seen my friends lose their houses due to mortgage foreclosure. I have seen people struggling to feed their children making decisions between buying groceries or paying bills.”

"My husband used to get 40 hours a week and now (he) is lucky to get more than 20 hours a week which isn’t enough to pay the bills much less buy food for our children.”

“I work at a restaurant locally owned for 35 years. I went from working 30 hours a week to 13, but even worse, we are risk of shutting our doors.”

“My husband does not work in the oil field however; his work is highly impacted by the growth and development of our city. The sales tax revenues continue to plummet since this whole public lands mess began. He did not receive a cost of living raise this year. We had been counting on that raise to help with the money for treating our 3 year old autistic son….If the leaders could come to our beautiful town now, I hope they would see the empty homes and weeping wives and children after they learn their husband and father’s job would no longer exist."

These are real stories, from real people. Real 99 percenters. They don’t drink coffee at Starbucks. Many drive trucks, not imported cars. They prefer steak to European haute cuisine, and many of them shop at Wal-Mart.

But they are just as much members of the Human Family as anyone at Sundance this year. And those people would like to be able to buy a home, send a kid to college; they may even want to earn enough money to go to the Sundance Film Festival one year.

And they love the land they live on. They work, hike, bike, hunt and recreate on it. They would no sooner see it ruined than they would set fire to their own homes. I’d daresay they love that land more and know it better than the people from other parts of the country trying to keep everyone off of it. The industry is starting to recover here, but I still wonder why these people had to undergo their trials in the first place.

And natural gas is clean, and it is cheap. It heats homes, cooks food and can fuel vehicles. And it does it at a price that is affordable to Americans from one end of the continent to the other. And yes, in order to get at it, you have to punch a hole in the ground, and put in a well. But I fail to see how a temporary gas well on land that by law must be reclaimed, erected by companies who are working every day to lessen their impact on the environment and try to find ways to improve wildlife habitat are somehow worse than a permanent resort. Yes Sundance provides a service and employs people, but so does the natural gas industry on a much greater scale. I know fracking is being demonized, but space does not permit me to discuss that here. That’s another column for another time.

I know it is “in” to be green, and Mr. Redford has never been a fan of the natural gas industry, or the process needed to get to the energy. But there is more to the story than many would let on. “Energy companies are destroying the land and air” is a great, and seductive battle cry. But it is not an accurate battle cry, and there is much to the story that has not been told.

Again, it is an American success story that Mr. Redford was able to do so well, build a resort and start a film festival. More success to him, I say. But there are 99 percenters out there who would also like to be American success stories, too.

It’s admirable that he wants to tell the stories of the 99 percenters. But I would like (and no I’m not being snarky here) for him to come to the Uintah Basin, and learn the rest of the story behind the 77 Leases, the natural gas industry, and the 99 percenters who want to start businesses, hire people and earn a living in that industry and those ancillary businesses that come with it. It may not be the story he is expecting, or even wants to hear. He may have to clear away some propaganda and preconceived ideas, and it may not be the politically correct story he would like to tell, but it is a story worth telling.
And yes, the President is talking about expanding the natural gas industry but that’s tomorrow’s column.

The Question Is Not 'Electability,' but 'Re-electability'

2012-01-24T13:15:00.000-08:00

By David Limbaugh
Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Republican internecine squabbles this primary season seem to turn on the vying candidates' respective electability against incumbent Barack Obama. But if even uber-liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has finally awakened to President Obama's arrogance, what does it say about his electability?

It's understandable that a lib would take so long to turn on the messiah, having invested so much in his presidency. But I wonder whether these people ever realize how late they are to the party and how utterly devoid of profundity their belated epiphanies are.

Dowd starts off her latest column describing Obama's opening appearance at a fundraiser at the Apollo in Harlem: "For eight seconds, we saw the president we had craved for three years: cool, joyous, funny, connected."

Unless you are a liberal utopian, such as my friend Mark Levin describes in his latest masterpiece, "Ameritopia," you wouldn't place so much faith in one deliberately mysterious man to usher in a new, unspecified era, and you especially wouldn't hold on to the painfully unrealistic hope that after three years, this man will finally present himself to be someone he has never been.

Savor a few of the tardy revelations Dowd has now come to see with pungent clarity:

"The man who became famous with a speech declaring that we were one America, not opposing teams of red and blue states, presides over an America more riven by blue and red than ever."

"The man who came to Washington on a wave of euphoria has had the presidency with all the joy of a root canal."

Dowd quotes Obama's lament to CNN's Fareed Zakaria that he is only seen as "cool and aloof" because he stays at home with his daughters instead of going "to a lot of Washington parties." Dowd will have none of this, saying that Reagan didn't socialize with the press, either, "but he knew that to transcend, you can't condescend."

Dowd seems surprised that in Jodi Kantor's new book, "The Obamas," Kantor paints a portrait of "the first couple" as people who feel aggrieved and misunderstood and who, in Dowd's words, "do believe in American exceptionalism -- their own, and they feel overassaulted and underappreciated."

Twisting the knife further, Dowd says that the Obamas, in their minds, haven't disappointed Americans. "We disappointed them."

Dowd quotes Michelle Obama, who apparently spoke too soon when she said she was proud of America for the first time when her husband was elected. The first lady said: "The question isn't whether Barack Obama is ready to be president. The question is whether we're ready. And that continues to be the question we have to ask ourselves." The Obamas, according to Dowd, are still convinced that presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett is correct that Obama is "just too talented to do what ordinary people do."

Dowd also seemed incredulous to learn that when Democrats took a shellacking in the 2010 midterm elections, Obama "did not seem to comprehend the anxiety that had spawned the Tea Party, or feel any regret," and that he told one Democratic congressman defeated in that anti-Obama wave that his loss was "for the greater good of the country."

No offense, Maureen, but we could have spared you three years of pining, even four if you care to go back to the campaign. From the beginning, for those not blinded by messianic delusions, Obama revealed himself as singularly divisive, narcissistic, cool and aloof, and dictatorial and as one who believes he is a gift to America rather than the other way around.

When Obama gave a bizarre shoutout to Dr. Joe Medicine Crow as a preamble to what was supposed to be a somber memorial to the victims of the Fort Hood shooter, British journalist Toby Harnden observed that he exhibited "curiously bloodless" behavior and a "strange disconnectedness." After his agenda was repudiated in the election for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat, Obama said he wanted the American people to take another look at his plan. When Democrats lost the 2010 congressional elections, he didn't show the slightest recognition that he had anything to do with it. The American people, he said, just wanted the parties to work together.

We've known that those in Obama's extreme leftist base are discontented with him because, amazingly, they don't believe he's been liberal enough. But now we have a prominent media liberal in Maureen Dowd acknowledging that he is an empty shell. With that in mind, how about the vaunted independents?

Think about it, folks. Next time you hear someone telling you how unelectable this or that potential Republican candidate is, consider how un-reelectable Obama is. His messianic image is gone; he has a disastrous record; and even liberals are discovering that he is insufferably arrogant and contemptuous of the American people.

Deconstructing Jonathan Alter’s “Five Myths about Barack Obama” in the Washington Post

2012-01-24T04:02:00.000-08:00

By Daniel J. Mitchell
Tuesday, January 24, 2012

The Washington Post is a left-wing newspaper, so I’m never surprised to find examples of biased reporting.

Last month, for instance, I made fun of the Post for asserting that Germany was “fiscally conservative.”

I also mocked the Post last March, when a reporter hysterically claimed that a proposal to trim $6 billion from a $3,600 billion budget would “slash” government.

Today, I want to analyze a column by Jonathan Alter.

Entitled “Five Myths about Barack Obama,” it’s in the opinion section, where people are supposed to present a point of view.

So I’m not going to complain about bias, but I am going to disagree about some of his judgments. Here are the five supposed myths, along with my two cents on whether Alter is correct.

Myth 1. Obama is a socialist.

I basically agree with Alter. As I explained two years ago, a true socialist wants “government ownership of the means of production.” To be sure, most self-avowed socialists today have given up on that goal and instead focus on redistribution. And since Obama also is a redistributionist, I understand why people call him a socialist. Nonetheless, it is much more accurate to call him a statist or corporatist.

Myth 2. Obama is a tool of Wall Street.

Alter is right and wrong. Obama is pursuing policies that Wall Street doesn’t like, such as class-warfare tax hikes. On the other hand, he supported the TARP bailout and pushed for the Dodd-Frank bailout legislation that was supported by Goldman-Sachs and the other big players on Wall Street.

Myth 3. Obama is an effective public speaker.

I’m not sure what to say about this assertion. I don’t find his pedantic ramblings effective or persuasive, but I’m not the target audience.

Myth 4. Obama’s stimulus failed.

This is Alter’s most absurd assertion. To bolster his claim, he cites a handful of institutions that have Keynesian models, including the laughably inaccurate crowd at the Congressional Budget Office. Wow, what a revelation. Keynesians support Keynesianism. What’s next, a poll of Obama campaign staff showing that people support the President’s reelection? Read this post for a good explanation of how Keynesianism has failed.

Myth 5. Obama is a weak leader.

This isn’t my area of expertise, but I mostly agree with Alter’s assessment. For better or worse (and you know how I feel), the President put everything on the line to enact Obamacare. That was bad for the nation, but I suppose it required effective leadership.

In closing, the Washington Post does deserve some credit for having diversity on the opinion page. Yes, Alter’s column has a leftist perspective, but the paper routinely carries people like George Will, Robert Samuelson, and Charles Krauthammer.

That doesn’t excuse the Post for displaying bias in news articles, as I mentioned above, but I think it’s better than the New York Times (damning with faint praise).

Lastly, it’s worth noting that the Post’s editorials are dogmatically statist (though it does support Postal Service privatization, perhaps because that affects the paper’s bottom line).

Gay Rights Still Trumping Freedom of Speech, Religion

2012-01-24T03:57:00.000-08:00

By Michael Brown
Sunday, January 23, 2012

Did you hear what happened to Aryeh Ralbag, chief rabbi of Amsterdam? He was suspended from his post by his own Orthodox Jewish community “for cosigning a declaration which said homosexuality was a ‘treatable’ inclination.” Oh the crime!

The declaration, signed to date by 185 rabbis, community leaders, and mental health professionals, states that, “The Torah makes a clear statement that homosexuality is not an acceptable lifestyle or a genuine identity by severely prohibiting its conduct.” It also claims that, “Same-sex attractions can be modified and healed,” that “Behaviors are changeable,” that there is a “process of healing,” and that there is a Jewish commandment of “love and compassion.”

The end of the statement reads, “We need to do everything in our power to lovingly uplift struggling individuals towards a full and healthy life that is filled with love, joy and the wisdom of the Torah.”

Yet for signing this very kosher, Orthodox Jewish statement, the Orthodox Jewish community of Amsterdam suspended their chief rabbi.

They were concerned that, “Rabbi Ralbag’s signature may give the impression the Orthodox Jewish community of Amsterdam shares his view. This is absolutely untrue. Homosexuals are welcome at the Amsterdam Jewish community.” (Presumably this includes sexually active, out and proud, “Orthodox gays.”)

Rabbi Ralbag told The Jerusalem Post he found it “scandalous that a chief rabbi cannot state the Torah viewpoint for his community without being penalized.” And he described his suspension as “intolerant on the part of the Jewish community – it is to deny the community’s rabbi the right to express the halachic [Jewish legal] standpoint. This is unheard of.”

Apparently he was not aware that freedoms of religion and speech are frequently trumped by gay rights and perceived gay sensitivities, even in (or, especially in?) a “tolerant” country like the Netherlands. He has now learned that when it comes to gay issues, “tolerance” is a one-way street, and rather than being “unheard of,” such discriminatory acts are becoming more common, not to mention more egregious.

Out of the scores of examples that could be cited (including two concerning my friend and colleague, Dr. Frank Turek, well-known to Townhall readers), here are just three from 2010 and 2011.

On September 27, 2011, the Culturewatch website cited a report from the UK that, “Jamie Murray was warned by two police officers to stop playing DVDs of the New Testament in his cafe following a complaint from a customer that it was inciting hatred against homosexuals. Mr Murray, 31, was left shocked after he was questioned for nearly an hour by the officers, who arrived unannounced at the premises. He said he had turned off the Bible DVD after an ‘aggressive inquisition’ during which he thought he was going to be arrested and ‘frog-marched out of the cafe like a criminal’.” (Yes, you got that right: Murray was interrogated by police for playing Bible DVD’s in his own Christian café.)

Here in the States, Dr. Kenneth Howell, an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois, was fired in 2010 “after a student complained that he was ‘offended’ by Howell’s academic discussion of the Catholic Church’s position on homosexual behavior in an Introduction to Catholicism course. The student was not even enrolled in the class.”

So, a Catholic professor teaching a course on Catholicism (within the school’s Religion department, at that) was fired for accurately conveying to the students what Catholics believe about homosexuality. (In Howell’s own words, written in an email to the students, “I tried to show them that under utilitarianism, homosexual acts would not be considered immoral whereas under natural moral law they would.”)

It was only after a national outcry, along with pressure from attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund, that Howell was reinstated.

More recently, Vicki Knox, a special education teacher at Union High School in New Jersey with 20 years of experience, was suspended because of anti-homosexuality comments she posted on her personal Facebook page. She was upset because a display board was put up in her school celebrating Lesbian Gay Bi Transgender History Month, expressed her disapproval on her Facebook page, along with her abhorrence of homosexuality. (She also expressed her strong Christian faith.)

Whether you agree with the tenor of her comments or not, she certainly had the legal right to express herself. Yet she has been suspended and there are ongoing attempts to get her fired. Whatever happened to freedom of speech?

As expressed by John Paragano, a former local government official and municipal judge, “Hateful public comments from a teacher cannot be tolerated. She has a right to say it. But she does not have a right to keep her job after saying it.” Really?

So, it is fine for a school to publicly celebrate homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgenderism – no matter how many students or teachers are offended – but when a teacher expresses her personal disagreement, she is in danger of losing her job.

That’s why I’ve been urging my fellow religious leaders, along with all those in roles of moral and educational influence, to “speak now or forever hold your peace,” and to do so today. Tomorrow might be too late.

Democrats Cry Extremists

2012-01-23T08:52:00.000-08:00

By Lurita Doan
Monday, January 23, 2012

Democrats seem to have two preferred adjectives to describe Republicans this year-- racist and extremist. Angry charges of "Extremists!" have become common and ubiquitous. Rarely do leading Democrats, such as Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, ever talk about Republicans without adding the charge of extremist. Listen to them and it becomes quite clear that they believe "extremist" Republicans in Congress are the root of all evil. And, that these very "extremists' that are responsible for the American credit-worthiness downgrade, loss of competitiveness, high unemployment, and a sluggish economy. Golly.

Charges of "extremists" Republicans have grown so common, that Democrat leaders such as Wasserman-Shultz have recently taken an even greater leap in logic and lament that fact that these same “extremist” Republicans are responsible for a break down in common civility and even hateful violence. Not only has the main stream media missed the irony of that charge, but all too often they echo the very same charges of “extremism”.

A closer look at what Democrats mean by "extremists" is long overdue--so what (by Democrat standards) does it really mean to be “extreme”?

Let's see. The Tea Party is considered by Democrats to be "extreme" because they gather in huge numbers to protest profligate spending, out-of-control expansion of government, excessive intrusion of government into the private sector and individual lives and, of course, because they are concerned with a growing trend to ignore the Constitution. So, according to Democrats, anyone with those kinds of beliefs is "extreme".

What else do Democrats consider "extreme"? More than anything else, anyone talking about the $15 Trillion ($15,000,000,000,000.00) of debt our nation has incurred, anyone who is worried about how we are going to repay that debt is automatically viewed as a “extremists".

Democrats, by comparison, almost never voluntarily talk about the huge national debt and annual trillions of dollars of spending deficits. For good reason too. Long ago, Democrats understood the dangers of reminding voters that our national finances are precarious, spending unsustainable, and our debt has ballooned.

Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, has not bothered to approve a budget in over three years because it is likely that he does not want Americans to know just how dire out national finances have become. Instead, Reid hopes to squeeze one more Democrat golden egg (green jobs programs, posh bailouts to cronies such as Solyndra, dubious high-speed rail lines to nowhere, subsides for unions) before the Golden Goose that was once the American economy is smothered and killed by the enormous new burdens and bureaucratic impediments he and others in the Democrat party have so unwisely championed.

Not too surprisingly, anyone who questions the wisdom of the many dodgy, new spending proposals or the need to balance our books by limiting the need for new loans to pay for all the madness is quickly labeled an “extremist”. Those who, accurately, point out that the awful mathematics of our debt make it a certainty that future generations will be obligated to pay off the staggering debt, or that they may be forced to suffer with a declining standard of living are also labeled “extremists”.

But, I call the Republican's concerns about intrusive, expansive government and out-of-control spending something else. I call it prudent.

Currently, the United States has approximately $4 trillion dollars of short-term debt. "Short term" means debt that has to be repaid within the next 6 months. Even in these out-of-control times, most Americans would consider that $4 trillion dollars is a LOT of money.

So what exactly is $4 trillion dollars? First, it's the amount that the national debt has increased under Obama in the pat three years. Consider: "If you spent $1 million a day since Jesus was born, you would have not spent $1 trillion by now..."

4 Trillion is just about 5% of the entire world's GDP. So consider-- 5% of the entire world's work efforts is needed just to pay back our short-term obligations and fund the government’s existing obligations. That doesn't even address the other $11 trillion dollars of long- and mid- term debt that Americans owe. Even now, Obama and his allies in Congress are eager to ADD to the debt with additional programs and an expansion of entitlements.

Many Americans would say this scenario is very, VERY scary. Democrats call folks who worry about this-- "extremists".

But, Obama, Reid and Pelosi seem to believe that the responsibilities for payment can always be delayed. They seem to think that the once-strong American, economic engine, our financial resources and national flexibility, are limitless.

Democrats take for granted the sacrifices other generations have made to bequeath a vibrant economic system to us. They assume it will go on forever--despite the foolish choices they have made to hobble the very economic system which they depend upon to produce the wealth that they have promised to distribute to their favorites and political supporters.

Anyone with the courage to suggest that America’s ability to borrow from the future is not limitless is today labeled an "extremist". Democrats decry "extremists" who believe that debts will one day come due, that the unwise reliance upon foreign countries such as China, to continue to finance (nearly 40% and growing) our annual expenditures will soon cause the country enormous problems.

So by all means, let the Democrats call me an "extremist". For like the other “extremists" in Congress that have recently been ridiculed for attempting to slow down the spending as the debt now climbs toward $16 trillion, I am afraid that economic turmoil awaits.

If out-of-control federal spending doesn't stop soon, this will all end badly. Perhaps a better definition for an “extremist” is to describe someone that has done the math and come to the realization that we are making foolish and dangerous economic decisions.

Republicans are “extremely” worried about the future. If you are not already an “extremist”, you will be one soon as you watch Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi continue on in their merry way adding trillions more to the national debt, hoping that someone else will have to pay for it all.

Why Do Obama Officials Get Rich?

2012-01-23T08:47:00.000-08:00

By Rich Lowry
Friday, January 20, 2012

Stephanie Cutter, an adviser to the Obama reelection campaign, wrote a scathing memo the other day about Mitt Romney’s experience at Bain Capital, subtitled “Profit at Any Cost.”

Cutter sounded like a sworn enemy of private equity. Except a few years ago, she was a spokeswoman for J.C. Flowers, a private-equity firm. Why do work for J.C. Flowers when there are so many other worthy ventures needing communications help that don’t make insane amounts of money and pay incredibly well?

Presumably Cutter wanted to be as well compensated as possible, by J.C. Flowers and the “several Fortune 500 companies” her communications firm served, according to her bio. This is utterly unremarkable but for the fact that she is part of an Obama team that argues there is something inherently wrong with income inequality. In his signature Osawatomie, Kan., speech, President Barack Obama asserted that rising inequality hampers those at the bottom. If that’s so, shouldn’t the people around him endeavor to keep from adding to the injustice by making too much money?

But none of them goes out and gets poor. Very few of them, it seems, even go out and get middle-class. They get rich. Many of them climb right into the 1 percent. Obama economic adviser Alan Krueger gave a speech recently lamenting the shrinking middle class, without mentioning that the reason for its diminishment is that so many people have risen all the way out of the middle. By Krueger’s (perverse) standard, major Obama officials have heedlessly contributed to the destruction of the American middle class by earning too much.

Consider only the chiefs of staff. President Obama’s new chief of staff, Jacob Lew, made $1.1 million in one year working for Citigroup. His prior chief of staff, William Daley, made $8.7 million in roughly one year working for JPMorgan Chase. His original chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, made $16 million working for an investment firm. Judging by this record, President Obama only feels comfortable entrusting his affairs to men who have earned outrageous paydays.

The Obama 1 percenters abound. President Obama’s first national economic director, Larry Summers, earned $600,000 as president of Harvard, then went to a hedge fund where he made $5 million in one year, before joining the administration. His first budget director, Peter Orszag, left to make $2 million to $3 million a year at Citigroup. His current national-security adviser, Tom Donilon, got $7 million from his work at Fannie Mae from 2000 to 2003.

Certainly Obama’s top aides don’t have to make millions in finance, but they’d almost have to go out of their way not to get rich. In the aggregate, they are smart, highly educated, and hard-working. They tend to marry people with the same characteristics. They have relatively stable families. They have success — indeed, the 1 percent — written all over them. They probably would be scandalized to work at a private-sector job paying “only” $50,000, the median household income in the U.S.

In a report that has the tone of a revelation about it, the New York Times discovered that the 1 percent is a “varied group, one that includes podiatrists and actuaries, executives and entrepreneurs, the self-made and the silver spoon set.” By one estimate, the 1 percent starts at households making $380,000 a year. That means in 2005, Michelle Obama alone was almost making enough to hoist the Obama household into the dreaded 1 percent with her $316,962 job at the University of Chicago Hospital.

Is it too much to ask that one high-profile Obama official leave government and refuse to make more than $70,000 a year out of solidarity with the middle class and commitment to income equality? Of course it is. Just as the definition of a recession is when someone else loses a job, greed is when someone else makes a lot of money. For anyone hoping to get to the top, the collective message of current and former Obama officials should be clear: Do as they do, not as they say.

Chinese Manufacturing vs US Innovation

2012-01-23T08:42:00.000-08:00

By Jeff Carter
Monday, January 23, 2012

Long article in the New York Times this morning on Apple($AAPL), American jobs, corporate greed and the global economy. After reading it, you lose hope. You shouldn’t. Steve Jobs said it correctly when he was quoted, “This country is insanely great.”

The article has a lot of good information in it. But, like most newspaper articles what’s left unreported or unsaid might be more compelling than what made the newspaper. You also have to remember that in his state of the Union address, Obama is going to rant on China. It’s an easy straw man to puncture when so many American’s are hurting. No surprise Obama’s mouthpiece, the NYT, is helping set the table.

To humanize the story, the reporter picks one engineer that gets caught in a bad spot. He loses his job with Apple and winds up making $10/hr to check busted iPhones. There are some things we don’t know. What is his engineering degree in? The reporter never asks the engineer the question (or at least never reports the answer if they did), “You were laid off from Apple. Apple sits in the most incredibly productive ecosystem in the world. Why didn’t you go work for a start up?” Literally thousands of Silicon Valley companies were created since he was let go in 2002. Don’t get me wrong, I feel for the guy, and have a lot of empathy for him. No one knows better about being engineered out of a job than a pit trader. I don’t think the reporter asked the right questions for a story about the future of the American job market.

The description about the manufacturing ecosystem that exists in Shenzen, China is pretty amazing. There are other places like that around the world that have amazing ecosystems. Silicon Valley has the most incredible start up ecosystem that everyone would love to replicate. For almost a century, Detroit had a highly efficient vehicle manufacturing ecosystem. It wasn’t only cheap labor that killed it. There were many factors that brought the auto companies down. The ecosystem of farming in the middle United States is a highly interconnected web and responsive to the market.

The unspoken concept that the author never gets to is that automation is eating traditional manufacturing jobs. People are going to be forced to reinvent themselves over and over. Saying the words “highly skilled” is leading people astray. We should be saying “adaptable skills”. Teaching yourself to be “Highly skilled” induces you to pursue one in demand skill. Instead of learning how to think, you just try and attain credentials. The problem with that is that you are assuming too much career risk because if that skill becomes useless due to technological advancement, you are on the street. What and how are you learning what you learn today that can be adapted over time so that you can put yourself into useful positions?

When framed that way, the way one looks at education changes significantly. It pays to be able to critically think. Not only that, but you will have to be able to pivot relatively quickly. Some engineering degrees are valuable, because they can do the nuts and bolts things necessary to make things happen.

For example, there is a rush to learn how to program today. Programming is an incredibly useful skill today. But, only to a point. As long as you can learn new ways to code, new ways to apply new languages to different types of systems, you will be valuable. But, if you can only learn one way to code, eventually that becomes obsolete and you are no different than anyone else.

Can the US compete with China? Sure it can, but not within the parameters of the article. No one in the US is going to work for $17 bucks a day and live in a dormitory. But in China that is a higher standard of living than where they came from. Over time, as the Chinese get richer, those metrics will change. It’s not as if the Chinese aren’t human. Their tastes and mores will change over time. We are competing with China. America is the most innovative, adaptable society ever known to man.

Take this problem:

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Someday, a computer program will be able to oversee most of those 200,000 assembly line workers. Right now, the opportunity costs of developing that program, testing it out, tinkering with it, and establishing it are way more expensive than simply taking 15 days and doing it in China. What’s true today might not be true tomorrow. Even China is losing jobs to Vietnam because there are different economies of scale in that country.

Here is another point from the article that if looked at in one way makes you depressed. Looked at another way gives you hope.

Manufacturing glass for the iPhone revived a Corning factory in Kentucky, and today, much of the glass in iPhones is still made there. After the iPhone became a success, Corning received a flood of orders from other companies hoping to imitate Apple’s designs. Its strengthened glass sales have grown to more than $700 million a year, and it has hired or continued employing about 1,000 Americans to support the emerging market.

Corning had to establish plants overseas because the ecosystem was there. They needed to be close to demand for supply chain management. They still have hired people in the US to support that ecosystem. Now, where do you think that Corning is investing their money to discover the next generation or next iteration of glass? I guarantee you it’s not in China. That ecosystem doesn’t exist there.

Which is a more valuable ecosystem? The Chinese manufacturing one or the creative next generation one? I know where I would put my money.

Europe’s Fiscal Crisis Is Caused by too Much Government, and Deficits and Debt Are Merely Symptoms of that Problem

2012-01-23T08:34:00.000-08:00

By Daniel J. Mitchell
Monday, January 23, 2012

I don’t expect a good outcome to the European fiscal crisis, largely because nobody seems to understand that the real problem is excessive government spending.

The economic illiterates in the press sometimes say the fight in Europe is between austerity and Keynesianism, but that’s not accurate. It’s really a battle between those who think big government should be financed by taxes and those who think big government should be funded by taxes and debt.

And it doesn’t help that the supposedly conservative governments in places such as Spain, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom are run by statists.

The good news is that some people understand the real problem. The bad news is that they generally don’t live in Europe. Writing for the Australian, Professor Judith Sloan cites the Rahn Curve as she explains the need to reduce the size and scope of the public sector.

Here’s some of what she included in her article.

The real question that a number of European and other countries should be asking themselves is this: what should be the role of government in terms of providing an environment for economic prosperity and security? There is absolutely no doubt that the size of the public sector and the intrusion of government have grown to excessive proportions in a number of these countries. A pervading sense of entitlement – on the part of retirees, welfare recipients, parents, university students, public servants and others – has been encouraged by these governments, but now threatens to block reform. …What is required is a complete rethink of the role of government. …According to the Rahn curve, the rate of economic growth initially increases with government spending (as a proportion of gross domestic product). Establishing and funding a quality judicial system, defending a country, ensuring the safety of citizens, funding (but not necessarily providing) some basic services: these are legitimate functions of government. But beyond a certain point (about 20-25 per cent of GDP) long-term economic growth tends to fall as government spending rises. This is the zone – well above 25 per cent in most instances – in which EU countries find themselves. …There are a number of reasons why the size of government really matters. After all, government spending has to be paid for by taxes, and almost all taxes reduce rewards for effort. …Moreover, government spending is often not subject to rigorous cost-benefit analysis in the same way private spending is.

To be fair, some people in Europe understand this issue, including economists at the European Central Bank who recently produced a study finding that, “…using a long time span running from 1970-2008, and employing different proxies for government size… Our results show a significant negative effect of the size of government on growth.”

And Swedish economists also have acknowledged the negative relationship between government spending and economic performance, writing that, “…there is a negative correlation between total government size and growth. It appears fair to say that an increase in total government size of ten percentage points in tax revenue or expenditure as a share of GDP is on average associated with an annual lower growth rate of between one-half and one percentage point.”

But these are lonely voices in Europe.

I’ve also weighed in on the topic from this side of the Atlantic, having produced this paper when I worked at the Heritage Foundation, and I also narrated this video for the Center for Freedom and Prosperity.

Unfortunately, all this research isn’t having much impact. Only the Baltic nations have done the right thing and reduced spending. The Germans also have been semi-responsible in the past couple of year, though that’s not saying much. And the Swiss were smart enough not to go overboard for big government in the first place.

What about the other European countries? Well, even though their economies are falling behind, their governments are going bankrupt, and their societies are becoming unstable, the politicians in the rest of Europe don’t seem to care about all the real-world evidence.

They’re still spending like there’s no tomorrow. I just hope American politicians won’t be foolish enough to provide a bailout when the house of cards comes tumbling down.

The GOP’s Suicide March

2012-01-22T10:28:00.000-08:00

By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, January 19, 2012

‘Are you better off today than you were $4 trillion ago?” — Former presidential candidate Rick Perry

It’s the campaign line of the year, and while the author won’t be carrying it into the general election, the eventual nominee will.

The charge is straightforward: President Obama’s reckless spending has dangerously increased the national debt while leaving unemployment high and the economy stagnant. Concurrently, he has vastly increased the scope and reach of government with new entitlements and oppressive regulation, with higher taxes to come (to offset the unprecedented spending).

In 2010, that narrative carried the Republicans to historic electoral success. Through most of 2011, it dominated Washington discourse. The air was filled with debt talk: ceilings, supercommittees, Simpson-Bowles.

What’s the incumbent to do? He admits current conditions are bad. He knows that his major legislative initiatives — Obamacare, the near-trillion-dollar stimulus, (the rejected) cap-and-trade — are unpopular. If you can’t run on stewardship or policy, how do you win re-election?

Create an entirely new narrative. Push an entirely new issue. Change the subject from your record and your ideology, from massive debt and overreaching government, to fairness and inequality. Make the election a referendum on which party really cares about you, which party will stand up to the greedy rich who have pillaged the 99 percent and robbed the middle class of hope.

This charge, too, is straightforward: The Republicans serve as the protectors and enablers of the plutocrats, the exploiters who have profited while America suffers. They put party over nation, fat-cat donors over people, political power over everything.

It’s all rather uncomplicated, capturing nicely the Manichaean core of the Occupy movement — blame the rich, then soak them. But the real beauty of this strategy is its adaptability. While its first target was the do-nothing protect-the-rich Congress, it is perfectly tailored to fit the liabilities of Republican front-runner Mitt Romney — plutocrat, capitalist, 1 percenter.

Obama rolled out this class-war counter-narrative in his December 6 “Teddy Roosevelt” speech and hasn’t governed a day since. Every action, every proposal, every “we can’t wait” circumvention of the Constitution — such as recess appointments when the Senate is not in recess — is designed to fit this re-election narrative.

Hence: Where does Obama ostentatiously introduce the recess-appointed head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau? At a rally in swing-state Ohio, a stage prop for Obama to declare himself tribune of the little guy, scourge of the big banks and their soulless Republican guardians.

For the first few weeks, the class-envy gambit had some effect, bumping Obama’s numbers slightly. But the story was still lagging, suffering in part from its association with an Occupy rabble that had widely worn out its welcome.

Then came the twist: Then came the most remarkable political surprise since the 2010 midterm: The struggling Democratic class-war narrative is suddenly given life and legitimacy by . . . Republicans! Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry make the case that private equity, as practiced by Romney’s Bain Capital, is nothing more than vulture capitalism, looting companies and sucking them dry while casually destroying the lives of workers.

Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO nods approvingly. Michael Moore wonders aloud whether Gingrich has stolen his staff. The assault on Bain/Romney instantly turns Obama’s class-war campaign from partisan attack into universal complaint.

Suddenly Romney’s wealth, practices, and taxes take center stage. And why not? If leading Republicans are denouncing rapacious capitalism that enriches the 1 percent while impoverishing everyone else, should this not be the paramount issue in a campaign occurring at a time of economic distress?

Now, economic inequality is an important issue, but the idea that it is the cause of America’s current economic troubles is absurd. Yet, in a stroke, the Republicans have succeeded in turning a Democratic talking point — a last-ditch attempt to salvage re-election by distracting from their record — into a central focus of the nation’s political discourse.

How quickly has the zeitgeist changed? Wednesday, the Republican House reconvened to reject Obama’s planned $1.2 trillion debt-ceiling increase. (Lacking Senate concurrence, the debt ceiling will be raised nonetheless.) No one noticed. It made page A16 of the New York Times. All eyes are on South Carolina and Romney’s taxes.

This is no mainstream-media conspiracy. This is the GOP maneuvering itself right onto Obama terrain.

The president is a very smart man. But if he wins in November, that won’t be the reason. It will be luck. He could not have chosen more self-destructive adversaries.

Illinois Leftist Does a Facepalm, Confirming that Higher Taxes Enable Higher Spending While Trying to Make the Opposite Point

2012-01-22T10:19:00.000-08:00

By Daniel J. Mitchell
Sunday, January 22, 2012

Two days ago, I explained that tax increases are bad policy.

More specifically, I warned that giving more money to government exacerbates fiscal problems because politicians respond to the expectation of more revenue by spending more than otherwise would be the case. And since they usually over-estimate how much revenue a tax hike will generate, that creates an even bigger fiscal mess.

Not surprisingly, I cited Europe to bolster my case. The tax burden has increased enormously in Europe over the past several decades, but that obviously hasn’t prevented a fiscal crisis in nations such as Greece and Portugal. And tax hikes haven’t precluded deteriorating conditions in countries such as Belgium and France.

But I also cited Illinois, which just got downgraded by Moody’s – even though state politicians just imposed a record tax hike.

This caused some angst for a lefty blogger in Illinois, who wrote that, “Operational spending is down since the Illinois tax hike.”

I gather he thinks this is some sort of gotcha moment, but two sentences later he admits that, “If Illinois hadn’t increased its taxes, it would’ve had to cut $7 billion more from spending to balance its budget.”

In other words, his post confirms my point about higher taxes translating into higher spending. He openly admits that the tax hike was a substitute for spending restraint.

What makes his concession so remarkable is that my argument wasn’t even based on one-year fiscal decisions. I”m much more concerned with trend lines, and you can see from the chart that Illinois politicians have been promiscuously profligate in recent years.

Indeed, I developed “Mitchell’s Golden Rule” to underscore the importance of restraining the burden of government so that, over time, it grows slower than the private economy. That obviously hasn’t been happening in Illinois in recent decades – and it’s not likely to happen in future decades if politicians figure out ways of grabbing more revenue.

Speaking of revenue, my accidental friend from Illinois also tries to debunk my point about the Laffer Curve by writing that, “The Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability has repeatedly said this year that revenues from the tax increase are coming in as the ‘politicians’ expected.”

Well, I don’t know about you, but this is not exactly a rigorous rebuttal. He doesn’t provide a revenue forecast from the pre-tax-hike era or a more recent forecast from the post-tax-hike era, so we can’t make any comparisons. Instead, we’re supposed to blindly accept vague assurances from some Commission.

This doesn’t mean that forecasts don’t exist or that the bureaucrats were wrong about their short-run projections. But that’s not the main issue. The key question is what will happen to revenue over a period of years, particularly once entrepreneurs, investors, and businesses have time to adjust their behavior in response to the more onerous tax regime.

The changes can be enormous, as demonstrated in this post showing how rich people paid five times as much federal income tax after Reagan cut the top tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent.

It will take a few years before we have a decent idea about the consequences of the Illinois tax hike. But since Illinois is copying European-style fiscal policy, don’t be too surprised if the result is European-style economic malaise.

Obama vs. Christie and the Future

2012-01-22T10:13:00.000-08:00

By Emmett Tyrrell
Thursday, January 19, 2012

WASHINGTON -- Whose job would you want to have? Would it be President Barack Obama's or Governor Chris Christie's in the great state of New Jersey? Would it be President Obama's, whose budget woes are getting graver, or would it be Governor Christie's, whose budget is at least looking to be survivable?

Now Obama is facing the choice in his budgetary decisions. Does he raise taxes only on families making $1 million a year? Or does he, as he has heretofore promised, ra ise taxes on families making $250,000?

Governor Christie has had an easier choice. He has promised a 10 percent cut on every New Jerseyan's income. He has stopped the bleeding in New Jersey. He has cut 375 government programs. He has capped property taxes. He has confronted public employees with reasonable cuts in their bloated health care and pension benefits.

It's all part of what he terms "the New Jersey comeback." New Jersey's state budget was a kind of Ponzi scheme when he came to office, and time was running out. Now he has the budget back on track, and it's time for a tax cut for everyone.

Interestingly, his Democratic opponents in the state legislature say the cut amounts to a pittance. It means a mere $275 for families earning $100,000. Their alternative is a tax increase, but only on millionaires. My guess is that a goodly number of New Jerseyans will see thorough this.

The Democrats began their binge by raising taxes on the very rich. Yet there was not enough money to pay for their munificence by taxing the very rich. So the Democrats worked their way down to the middle class, and the result was the economic basket case from which Christie is now freeing all New Jerseyans.

Obama has to make his decision by early next month, when he decides on his budget: Raise taxes on everyone making over $250,000 a year or only on millionaires? Of course, in 2010, he took a dreadful drubbing at the polls on taxes, and it could happen again. Some Democrats have agreed with the Republicans. They say people making $200,000 to $250,000 are not making that much money, particularly if you live in a place like New York.

Democratic Senator Charles Schumer has seen the light. He has said of people with such incomes, "They are not rich, and in large parts of the country, that kind of income does not get you a big home or lots of vacation or anything else that's associated with wealth in America." And he went on, "They are firmly in the middle class. Same with small-business owners in that class."

What will our president do? I say he will include families making $250,000 in his tax cuts. Moreover, if reelected, he will increase taxes on the middle class. Obama is a redistributionist. He believes more ardently in redistributing wealth than in creating it. Follow the course of Obama's earlier redistributionist, Franklin Roosevelt, and you will know the direction in which Obama is going.

In the current issue of The American Spectator, Burton W. Folsom Jr. and Anita Folsom write that FDR "lamented" in the late 1940s that "too many people are earning money and not contributing to the government." Thus, he and his New Dealers got to work raising taxes. From "1940 to 1942, the number of Americans paying income taxes jumped almost ten fold, from 4 million to 39 million. Furthermore, the starting tax rate skyrocketed from 4 percent to almost 24 percent." No wonder FDR is one of Obama's heroes.

Yet Obama is a reactionary. He believes in the past, a past of vast government control of the economy, redistribution and slow growth. Christie and Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin believe in growth. The future is theirs.

The Sinking of the West

2012-01-21T09:24:00.000-08:00

By Mark Steyn
Saturday, January 21, 2012

Abe Greenwald of Commentary magazine tweets:

Is there any chance that Mark Steyn won’t use the Italian captain fleeing the sinking ship as the lead metaphor in a column on EU collapse?

Oh, dear. You’ve got to get up early in the morning to beat me to civilizational-collapse metaphors. Been there, done that. See page 185 of my most recent book, where I contrast the orderly, dignified, and moving behavior of those on the Titanic (the ship, not the mendacious Hollywood blockbuster) with that manifested in more recent disasters. There was no orderly evacuation from the Costa Concordia, just chaos punctuated by individual acts of courage from, for example, an Hungarian violinist in the orchestra and a ship’s entertainer in a Spiderman costume, both of whom helped children to safety, the former paying with his life.

The miserable Captain Schettino, by contrast, is presently under house arrest, charged with manslaughter and abandoning ship. His explanation is that, when the vessel listed suddenly, he fell into a lifeboat and was unable to climb out. Seriously. Could happen to anyone, slippery decks and all that. Next thing you know, he was safe on shore, leaving his passengers all at sea. On the other hand, the audio of him being ordered by Coast Guard officers to return to his ship and refusing to do so is not helpful to this version of events.

In the centenary year of the most famous of all maritime disasters, we would do well to consider honestly the tale of the Titanic. When James Cameron made his movie, he was interested in everything except what the story was actually about. I confess I have very little memory of the film except for Kate Winslet’s lush full breasts and some tedious sub-Riverdance prancing in the hold, but what I do recall traduced the memory of honorable men: In my book, I cite First Officer William Murdoch. In real life, he threw deckchairs to passengers drowning in the water to give them something to cling to, and then he went down with the ship — the dull, decent thing, all very British, with no fuss. In Cameron’s movie, Murdoch takes a bribe and murders a third-class passenger. The director subsequently apologized to the First Officer’s hometown in Scotland and offered £5,000 toward a memorial, which converted into Hollywood dollars equals rather less than what Cameron and his family paid for dinner after the Oscars.

On the Titanic, the male passengers gave their lives for the women and would never have considered doing otherwise. On the Costa Concordia, in the words of a female passenger, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboat.” After similar scenes on the MV Estonia a few years ago, Roger Kohen of the International Maritime Organization told Time magazine: “There is no law that says women and children first. That is something from the age of chivalry.”

If, by “the age of chivalry,” you mean our great-grandparents’ time.

In fact, “women and children first” can be dated very precisely. On Feb. 26, 1852, HMS Birkenhead was wrecked off the coast of Cape Town while transporting British troops to South Africa. There were, as on the Titanic, insufficient lifeboats. The women and children were escorted to the ship’s cutter. The men mustered on deck. They were ordered not to dive in the water lest they risk endangering the ladies and their young charges by swamping the boats. So they stood stiffly at their posts as the ship disappeared beneath the waves. As Kipling wrote:

We’re most of us liars, we’re ’arf of us thieves, an’ the rest of us rank as can be, But once in a while we can finish in style (which I ’ope it won’t ’appen to me).

Sixty years later, the men on the Titanic — liars and thieves, wealthy and powerful, poor and obscure — found themselves called upon to “finish in style,” and did so. They had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats, and sail off without them. They, too, ’oped it wouldn’t ’appen to them, but, when it did, the social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure and across all classes.

Today there is no social norm, so it’s every man for himself — operative word “man,” although not many of the chaps on the Titanic would recognize those on the Costa Concordia as “men.” From a grandmother on the latter: “I was standing by the lifeboats and men, big men, were banging into me and knocking the girls.”

Whenever I write about these subjects, I receive a lot of mail from men along the lines of this correspondent: “The feminists wanted a gender-neutral society. Now they’ve got it. So what are you complaining about?”

And so the manly virtues (if you’ll forgive a quaint phrase) shrivel away to the so-called “man caves,” those sad little redoubts of beer and premium cable sports networks.

We are beyond social norms these days. A woman can be a soldier. A man can be a woman. A seven-year-old cross-dressing boy can join the Girl Scouts in Colorado because he “identifies” as a girl. It all adds to life’s rich tapestry, no doubt. But I can’t help wondering, when the ship hits the fan, how many of us will still be willing to identify as a man.

A day or two after the cruise wreck, I read the obituary of a man called Ian Bryce, who found himself at Dunkirk in 1940, when an ad hoc flotilla of English fishing boats, pleasure cruisers, and other “little ships” evacuated Allied troops cut off by the advancing Germans. Young Bryce, a 17-year-old midshipman, singlehandedly rescued 109 British soldiers, eight Belgian officers, two Frenchmen, and two Jewish refugees in multiple trips in a motorboat under Luftwaffe fire. Nobody asked Captain Schettino to do anything extraordinary, only his duty.

Abe Greenwald isn’t thinking big enough. The Costa Concordia isn’t merely a metaphor for EU collapse but — here it comes down the slipway — the fragility of civilization. Like every ship, the Concordia had its emergency procedures — the lifeboat drills that all crew and passengers are obliged to go through before sailing. As with the security theater at airports, the rituals give the illusion of security — and then, as the ship tips and the lights fail and the icy black water rushes in, we discover we’re on our own: from dancing and dining, showgirls and saunas, to the inky depths in a matter of moments.

Today the wealthiest nations in human history build cruise ships rather than battleships, vast floating palaces dedicated to the good life — to the proposition that, in the plump and complacent West, life itself is a cruise, sailing (as the Concordia’s name suggests) on a placid lake of peace and harmony. Since the economic downturn of 2008, the Titanic metaphor — of a Western world steaming for the iceberg but unable to correct course — has become a little overworked, the easiest cliché for any politician attempting to project urgency. But let’s assume they’re correct, and we’re heading full steam for the big ’berg. When we hit, what’s the likelihood? That our response will be as ordered and civilized as those on the Titanic? Or that we will descend into the hell of the Concordia?

The contempt for “women and children first” is not a small loss. For soft cultures in good times, dispensing with social norms is easy. In hard times, you may have need of them.

Obama's Phony War on the Rich

2012-01-21T09:15:00.000-08:00

By John C. Goodman
Saturday, January 21, 2012

Ever since the First Couple entered the White House, their social life has swirled around the very rich. Hollywood actors, pop star singers, Wall Street hedge fund managers, billionaire investors — these are the fabled "top 1 percent" in terms of income and wealth.

The Obamas invite them to White House dinners. They vacation with them on Martha’s Vineyard. They party with them. They sup with them at $35,000-a-plate fundraisers.

(Have these affairs ever included an auto worker? A mine worker? How about someone who is unemployed and looking for a job? What about someone who has lost his home? As far as I can tell, the bottom 99 percent never seems to make the cut.)

Here is what we are being asked to believe. During his three years in office, the president has come to realize that all of the people he plays golf with, has dinner with and collects millions of dollars from have too much. All of the people he never sees, never talks to and never socializes with have too little. So the president’s campaign-for-re-election theme will be: take from his friends and give to all those strangers.

Is any of this believable?

If you are inclined to take it seriously, let me remind you that you have heard it all before. Remember the 2008 presidential campaign? Health care was the number one issue. Remember the Democratic primary mantra? It was "universal coverage." And how was it to be paid for? Almost every serious candidate for the Democratic nomination gave the same answer: taxes on the rich. Barack Obama was explicit: "If you make less than $200,000 your taxes will not go up at all."

So what happened? We got Obama Care, at a cost of almost $1 trillion over the next ten years. And who is going to pay for all that? You are. And so is everybody else. My best estimate is that only about one-fifth of the cost of this measure will fall on the shoulders of the "rich." The vast bulk of the burden will fall on everyone else.

According to the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, about 73 million Americans earning less than $200,000 a year will see their direct taxes rise as a result of ObamaCare.In addition there are indirect taxes that no one will be able to avoid. These include:

-A "medical devices" tax that will reach everything from bedpans to wheelchairs and crutches will raise $20 billion over the next ten years; it will hit pacemakers and artificial hips and knees, as well.

-A tax on health insurance plans will raise about $60 billion.

-A tax on prescription drugs will raise another $27 billion.

The Republican staff of the Senate Finance committee estimates that these three taxes alone will ultimately push up health insurance premiums for a typical family of four by about $1,000 a year.

A tax on tanning salons is already collecting revenues from ordinary folks. Because of new restrictions on the use of medical accounts (Health Savings Accounts, Health Reimbursement Arrangements, and Flexible Spending Accounts), people are now paying more for such over-the-counter items as Claritin, aspirin and Advil. All told, "medicine cabinet" taxes are expected to raise about $45 billion over the next ten years.

Then there is the tax on sickness. Right now, people can deduct medical expenses in excess of 7.5 percent of their income. That figure will soon rise to 10 percent. Families who have the misfortune of incurring high medical bills will have to pay more to Uncle Sam as a result.

Pity the elderly and the disabled. More than half the cost of the health reform bill will be paid for by reduced spending on Medicare — a whopping $523 billion reduction over the next ten years. Although this is technically a spending reduction rather than a tax increase, the economic impact is the same.

Medicare’s chief Actuary predicts that in eight more years, Medicare will be paying doctors and hospitals less than what Medicaid (for poor people) pays. If so, senior citizens will be lined up behind welfare mothers, seeking care at community health centers and at the emergency rooms of safety net hospitals.

Will seniors be able to survive by paying more out of pocket to offset the reduction in Medicare spending? Maybe. But if they do so, it’s going to them 10 percent of their Social Security checks within eight years.

Here’s the bottom line: when President Obama talks taxes on the rich, expect even more taxes on the middle class.

But what about the rich? Is the president really going to sock it to his friends and golfing buddies?

Would you believe that under the president’s higher-taxes-on-the-rich proposals most of Warren Buffett’s income won’t be taxed at all. More on that in a future column.

Obama's Ex Girlfriend

2012-01-21T09:12:00.000-08:00

By Bill Tatro
Saturday, January 21, 2012

Let the games begin.

Gingrich’s ex-wife is paraded out for a tell-all about her marriage, creating doubts about Newt’s morality.

Rick Perry’s hunting camp rock of decades ago gets more ink than the Iranian war games, and he’s questioned about his bigotry.

Herman Cain is confronted with old girlfriends and we all know how that turned out.

I’m sure that if Michele Bachmann had fared better, we would have learned that she kicked her dog and underfed her dozens of children, making her a contemporary Mommie Dearest.

As for Ron Paul, well, in the media most dismiss him as just a wacko. The mainstream media, contrary to their continued denouncements, is definitely biased.

I’m sure that comes as no revelation. In fact, it’s probably a column not even worth writing. Dismiss it, forget it, and move on. That’s where; once again, it got me thinking.

Why has no former grade school, high school, or college classmate of Barack Hussein Obama ever been found?

I’m sure his old classmates could have shed light on his personal life, such as his interests and hobbies.

Why hasn’t an old girlfriend emerged to tell about a wonderful date, or what a great boyfriend he was and how he was so sincere and understanding?

I believe Obama is a Marxist, in fact, I think he’s a Fascist. Why don’t any of his former teachers come forward and defend him from statements like mine? As Romney’s Bain Capital job is examined inside and out, where is the same examination of Barack Obama?

The mainstream media would say “Old news, just old news, move on.” “He’s the President.”

Unfortunately, had the bias been dispensed with originally, maybe these questions would have been answered.

No matter how old it is, an unanswered question is still an unanswered question. This President evokes uncertainties of both character and behavior every single day.

Statements and decisions that create an almost totalitarian atmosphere require that questions be asked and answers given. If these critical inquires are not made by the mainstream biased press, then they should be made by us, the citizens of the United States.

Will the same scrutiny be given to both Presidential candidates this time? More than likely, the answer is no.

However, there should be equal scrutiny, and we must not only ask it and request it, but we must demand it.

An Ignored 'Disparity': Part IV

2012-01-21T09:10:00.000-08:00

By Thomas Sowell
Friday, January 20, 2012

Different histories, geography, demography and cultures have left various groups, races, nations and civilizations with radically different abilities to create wealth.

In centuries past, the majority population of various cities in Eastern Europe consisted of people from Western Europe -- Germans, Jews and others -- while the vast majority of the population in the surrounding countrysides were Slavs or other indigenous peoples of the region.

Just as Western Europe was -- and is -- more prosperous than Eastern Europe, so Western Europeans living in Eastern European cities in centuries past were more prosperous than the Slavs and others living in the countrysides, or even in the same cities.

One of the historic advantages of Western Europe was that it was conquered by the Romans in ancient times -- a traumatic experience in itself, but one which left Western European languages with written versions, using letters created by the Romans. Eastern European languages developed written versions centuries later.

Literate people obviously have many advantages over people who are illiterate. Even after Eastern European languages became literate, it was a long time before they had such accumulations of valuable written knowledge as Western European languages had, due to Western European languages' centuries earlier head start.

Even the educated elites of Eastern Europe were often educated in Western European languages. None of this was due to the faults of one or the merits of the other. It is just the way that history went down.

But such mundane explanations of gross disparities are seldom emotionally satisfying -- least of all to those on the short end of these disparities. With the rise over time of an indigenous intelligentsia in Eastern Europe and the growing influence of mass politics, more emotionally satisfying explanations emerged, such as oppression, exploitation and the like.

Since human beings have seldom been saints, whether in Eastern Europe or elsewhere, there were no doubt many individual flaws and shortcomings among the non-indigenous elites to complain of. But those shortcomings were not the fundamental reason for the economic disparities between Eastern Europeans and Western Europeans. More important, seeing those Western European elites in Eastern Europe as the cause of the economic disparities led many Eastern Europeans into the blind alley of ethnic identity politics, including hostility to Germans, Jews and others -- and a romanticizing of their own cultural patterns that were holding them back.

What happened in Eastern Europe, including many tragedies that grew out of the polarization of groups in the region, has implications that reach far beyond Europe, and in fact reach all around the world, where similar events have produced similar polarizations and similar historic tragedies.

Today, in America, many denounce the black-white gap in economic and other achievements, which they attribute to the same kinds of causes as those to which the lags of Eastern Europeans have been attributed. Moreover, the persistence of these gaps, years after the civil rights laws were expected to close them, is regarded as something strange and even sinister.

Yet the economic disparities between Eastern Europeans and Western Europeans remains to this day greater than the economic disparities between blacks and whites in America -- and the gap in Europe has lasted for centuries.

Focusing attention and attacks on people who have greater wealth-generating capacity -- whether races, classes or whatever -- has had counterproductive consequences, including tragedies written in the blood of millions. Whole totalitarian governments have risen to dictatorial power on the wings of envy and resentment ideologies.

Intellectuals have all too often promoted these envy and resentment ideologies. There are both psychic and material rewards for the intelligentsia in doing so, even when the supposed beneficiaries of these ideologies end up worse off. When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

Both politicians and intellectuals have made their choice.

Middle America Longs for Conservatives To Stand Up To Liberal Bullying

2012-01-20T08:17:00.000-08:00

By David Limbaugh
Friday, January 20, 2012

I wish Republican politicians would have faith in the largely conservative electorate and not behave as though they'll make themselves unelectable unless they pander to Generic Moderate. Who is that guy, anyway? Have you ever met him?

Recently, we've seen a few examples of the liberal narrative's rearing its oppressive head and starkly different reactions to it. The first was Mitt Romney's reportedly telling The Wall Street Journal that as a wealthy person, he thinks he lacks the credibility to aggressively push tax cuts. Mitt is also looking timid about releasing his tax returns. He needs to fight back -- consistently -- instead of surrendering to the liberal narrative that success is evil. Mitt should take a lesson from Newt Gingrich on counterpunching against false liberal charges and innuendo.

Newt put on a clinic in his defiant response to moderator Juan Williams' racially charged questions during the Fox News GOP debate in South Carolina.

I honestly like Juan Williams and believe, based on observing him over the years, that he's a decent human being with a good heart. But for whatever reason, regrettably, he was wearing race on his sleeve that evening, and his race-baiting line of questions, in my opinion, was indefensible.

Juan first tried to lay a race trap for Rick Santorum when asking him whether the time "has come to take special steps to deal with the extraordinary level of poverty afflicting one race of Americans."

Santorum hit it out of the park, unapologetically answering, "If Americans do three things, they can avoid poverty ... work, graduate from high school and get married before you have children."

Perhaps Santorum was not Juan's intended prey, for he chose not to follow up by suggesting that Santorum's answer contained racist code. But if Juan believes that politicians should specifically tailor remedial policies to certain races, why doesn't he condemn President Obama for reversing welfare reform when the evidence proves that it reduced black poverty, black childhood poverty and black illegitimacy?

Juan showed no similar restraint with Newt, suggesting that his recent statements that black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps, and that poor kids could work as janitors in their schools were insulting, particularly to black Americans. Juan said his email and Twitter accounts have "been inundated with people of all races who are asking if your comments are not intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities." Juan said Newt sounded as if he were trying to belittle people (read: blacks) when calling Obama "the food stamp president."

Newt refused to yield an inch, which was exhilaratingly refreshing, not just to me but to a great number of people in the audience who are sick and tired of being accused, in so many words, of being racist purely by virtue of the race-neutral policies they support.

Not only did Newt reject the loaded premise of the question; he even responded in race-neutral terms, offering a powerful defense of the old-fashioned work ethic and infusing it with an example from his own personal experience. Then he looked Juan right in the eye and said, "The fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history." Newt then capped it off with an encore affirmation of his belief that every American, irrespective of his background, is endowed by God with the right to pursue happiness and that he is going to continue to help poor people get jobs, even if that makes liberals unhappy.

This, in my words, is what Newt was also telling Juan: "Juan, along with other Americans, I am sick and tired -- do you hear me, Juan? -- sick and tired of not being able to give voice to America's founding principles without being accused by sanctimonious liberals of bigotry or lacking compassion. Read my lips, Juan: Conservatism is not racism; conservatism is more compassionate than liberalism; conservatism brings real results rather than peaking, like liberalism, at the point of allegedly good intentions. Look at this audience, Juan. Like me, they're fed up with the finger-pointing. If you want to point fingers, look no further than President Obama, who, in the name of helping Americans, is bankrupting this nation and whose policies are destroying the economy, with minorities being hardest hit. So please spare me the lectures, Juan."

Newt demonstrated how conservatives should communicate truths and respond to slanderous attacks in the public arena. It's time all conservatives learned to overcome this morbid fear of their own shadows when it comes to articulating conservative principles. It's past time that they stand up to the liberal and PC bullying. There is a strong, aching hunger in Middle America for our side, our leaders, to fight back. Newt's subsequent surge in no small part is a resounding reflection of that. Let's take back the narrative.

Oops, Maybe ObamaCare’s Cost Controls Won’t Work after All

2012-01-20T08:15:00.000-08:00

By Michael F. Cannon
Friday, January 20, 2012

One of ObamaCare’s big selling points was that it would launch lots of pilot programs so that Medicare bureaucrats could learn how to reduce health care costs and improve the quality of care. Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office threw cold water on the idea.

In 2010, Peter Orszag and Ezekiel Emanuel explained the promise of ObamaCare’s pilot programs:

[The law's] pilot programs involving bundled payments will provide physicians and hospitals with incentives to coordinate care for patients with chronic illnesses: keeping these patients healthy and preventing hospitalizations will be financially advantageous…And the secretary of health and human services (HHS) is empowered to expand successful pilot programs without the need for additional legislation.

Atul Gawande wrote even more glowingly:

The bill tests, for instance, a number of ways that federal insurers could pay for care. Medicare and Medicaid currently pay clinicians the same amount regardless of results. But there is a pilot program to increase payments for doctors who deliver high-quality care at lower cost, while reducing payments for those who deliver low-quality care at higher cost. There’s a program that would pay bonuses to hospitals that improve patient results after heart failure, pneumonia, and surgery. There’s a program that would impose financial penalties on institutions with high rates of infections transmitted by…

You get the idea.

The thing is, pilot programs in Medicare are not new. And in a review of dozens of Medicare pilot programs released yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office revealed they aren’t very successful, either:

The disease management and care coordination demonstrations comprised 34 programs…

In nearly every program, spending was either unchanged or increased relative to the spending that would have occurred in the absence of the program, when the fees paid to the participating organizations were considered…

Only one of the four demonstrations of value-based payment has yielded significant savings for the Medicare program.

No big deal, you say. Startups fail all the time. What’s important is not that 37 startups failed, but that one succeeded.

That’s how things are supposed to work. But as Alain Enthoven explained to Gawande, the really perverse thing about Medicare pilot programs is that even the successful ones die:

Gawande got it wrong about pilots…The Medical Industrial Complex does not want such pilots and often strangles them in the crib. For example, nothing lasting and significant came of the pilot to reward people for getting their heart bypass surgery at regional centers of excellence. I don’t remember the details of how it died, but I believe it was tried and went nowhere. No doubt every hospital thought it was a center of excellence and wanted to be so rewarded.

Another more recent example is durable medical equipment. David Leonhardt had an excellent article in the New York Times on June 25, 2008 called “High Medicare Costs Courtesy of Congress.” Someone had sold the good idea that prices of durable medical equipment should be determined by competition, and there was a provision in law for pilots to test competition. The industry lobbied hard to stop it and promulgated scare stories. “Grandma won’t get her oxygen.” Leonhardt recounts how Democratic and Republican leaders got together and postponed the pilot— and, I suspect, postponed it forever. There were proposals to test health plan competition, fought off by the industry of course. So this is not a fertile political environment for pilots. In fact, one of the most important lessons that has come out of the current “reform” process is the enormous power of the medical industrial complex and their large financial contributions and armies of lobbyists to block any significant cost containment.

Rather than a reason for more government interference in health care, the death of these pilots is a consequence of government interference. If the federal Medicare program weren’t such an enormous player in the U.S. health care sector, industry lobbyists (and their servants in Congress) wouldn’t have so many ways to protect themselves from competition by more efficient providers.

Enthoven summed up ObamaCare’s approach to cost control best:

The American people are being deceived. We are being told that health expenditure must be curbed, therefore “reform is necessary.” But the bills in Congress, as Gawande acknowledges, do little or nothing to curb the expenditures. When the American people come to understand that “reform” was not followed by improvement, they are likely to be disappointed. Our anguish is only intensified by the fact that the Republicans are no better at fiscal responsibility, probably worse as they demagogue reasonable attempts to limit expenditures.

Congress is sending the world an unmistakable signal that it is unable or unwilling to control health expenditures and the fiscal deficit. That is not going to make it easier to sell Treasury bonds on international markets. I fear this will lead to higher interest rates.

FYI, Enthoven wrote those words in 2009.

Fracking: The Radical Left's Latest Weapon of Fear

2012-01-20T08:06:00.000-08:00

By Bob Beauprez
Friday, January 20, 2012

In 1977, President Jimmy Carter warned Americans of a pending "national catastrophe" in a prime time nationally televised speech. "The Oil and natural gas we rely on for 75 percent of our energy are running out." Resources were being depleted so fast that the world "could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade," Carter said.

Rather obviously, Carter's end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it prediction didn't happen.

Had Carter been right, by now much of the agenda of the radical environmentalists would have been a fait accompli. Weaning America off oil, natural gas, and coal to heat our homes, power our cars, and run our factories would have taken care of itself due to a scarcity of the resources. But, Carter was wrong – dramatically wrong.

Since America and the World didn't run out of fossil fuel resources shortly after Carter made his doomsday prediction, the anti-oil, gas, and coal crowd lead by Al Gore moved on to the threats of global warming claiming we were doomed to drown from rising seas created by global warming. The culprit again was fossil fuels, of course. Much of that prediction has been debunked or at least greatly minimalized, too.

Instead of running out of oil and gas as Carter predicted, the inventory of America's recoverable domestic reserves has increased dramatically. During the past three decades, scientists and energy industry experts continued to improve techniques to harvest known reserves and discover new ones. A Congressional Research Service report to Congress in late 2009 indicated that America's combined supply of recoverable natural gas, oil, and coal exceeds every other nation on earth; even far greater than Saudi Arabia, China, and Canada combined!

The CRS report was independently confirmed last month by the Institute for Energy Research with the release of the North American Energy Inventory. The IER study says the U.S. has more than 1.4 trillion barrels of recoverable oil reserves; 1.7 trillion barrels when combined with Canada and Mexico. That's enough for 250 years of U.S. consumption according to the IER, and more than the entire world has used in the previous 150 years.

Additionally, the North American continent has 4.2 quadrillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas reserves – enough to last the next 175 years at current rates of consumption according to IER. Once upon a time, back in the days of Jimmy Carter, the environmentalists were encouraging more usage of natural gas as the "clean" alternative to coal and oil. However, that has grown out of fashion with the go-green purists including Barack Obama, who prefer to funnel hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into pie-in-the-sky green energy boondoggles like Solyndra while discouraging and even eliminating oil and gas production at every opportunity.

Since we didn't run out of oil and gas, and the whole global warming thing stalled, the latest fear-strategy adopted by the radical environmentalists is to attack the technology – hydraulic fracturing – that is behind our ability to harvest the massively greater amounts of energy resources.

Hydraulic Fracturing – or "fracking" – has greatly expanded the recoverable reserves of oil and gas. Fracking has been used since the 1940s in over a million wells, and the technology continues to be improved and refined.

As defined by The Geological Society of America, fracking involves pumping liquids down a well into subsurface rock units under pressures that are high enough to fracture the rock, creating a network of interconnected fractures that will serve as pore spaces for the movement of the oil and natural gas to the well bore to be lifted to the surface.

When combined with horizontal drilling, fracking has turned previously unproductive reserves into some of the most abundant fields in the world such as the Marcellus formation in Pennsylvania, the Bakken in North Dakota, and the Niobrara in Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Kansas. (See a brief animated demonstration of hydraulic fracturing here.)

In recent years, environmentalists have relentlessly attacked fracking claiming it might cause groundwater contamination, even though in virtually all cases the fracking is done hundreds or thousands of feet below ground water levels. And, since few people have even a slight understanding of the geology or the technology, public perception is easily influenced and the media is often a willing co-conspirator in fanning the hysteria.

To be sure, there is some risk involved with fracking as with any mechanical process. However, when asked directly during a Senate Committee hearing in May, 2011 even EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson testified that she was "not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water." Jackson came to the EPA with a well established reputation as an environmental activist and has pursued that agenda aggressively at the agency. Other EPA officials have previously offered the same testimony to Congress.

Still, the radical left's quest continues with a public relations war raging against fracking technology. Jackson's EPA is moving forward toward new federal regulations, even in the face of heavy pushback from states that historically regulated energy development operations within their borders.

The liquids used in the fracking process are virtually all water and sand mixtures – as much as 99.5% according to published reports. The Geological Society of America explains that the small amount of chemicals are used to thicken the water into a gel that is more effective at opening fractures, reduce friction, prevent corrosion of equipment, control pH, and kill bacteria. "Proppants" – usually aluminum or ceramic beads – are also added to "prop opened" the fractures once the fluids are removed so the oil and gas can escape. Until recently, energy companies have guarded their formulas as proprietary secrets, but public pressure and new regulation are causing them to make public their ingredients.

That ground water can be and has been contaminated is a given, and in many cases, fingers have been pointed at the energy industry and specifically at fracking technology. But, as EPA Administrator Jackson admitted, in spite of scores of investigations, there is no scientific evidence linking any ground water contamination to fracking. But, that doesn't stop some in the Obama Administration from pushing their agenda forward to satisfy a core constituency.

In west-central Wyoming, the small town of Pavillion has complained about water quality and possible contamination for years. In fact, the U.S. Geological Survey detected organic chemicals in Pavillion's well water 50 years ago, long before any fracking was done in the area. But, when somebody suggested the water quality problems might be linked to the gas wells the EPA jumped in and started a study three years ago.

On December 8, 2011 the EPA published a "draft report" of findings suggesting that there may be a connection to Pavillion's water problems and fracking. Why the agency chose to publish a report that had not been subjected to independent peer review or even by state officials in Wyoming is a question that answers itself. "The agency is dominated by anticarbon true believers, and the Obama Administration has waged a campaign to raise the price and limit the production of fossil fuels," opined the Wall Street Journal. Environmentalists and many in the media rejoiced – and the movement got the headlines they longed for:

EPA Lowers the Boom on Fracking in Wyoming
EPA Finds Hydrofracking Chemicals Contaminate Drinking Water
Gas-Fracking Chemicals Detected in Wyoming Aquifer, EPA Says
EPA says 'fracking' probably contaminated well water in Wyoming

The Governor of Wyoming, Matt Mead, was quick to respond and he certainly should have both the health of his citizens and the state's industry paramount in his mind. On the day the EPA report was released, Mead called it "scientifically questionable" and said more and better testing was needed before anyone could reach a definitive conclusion. Most concerning to Gov. Mead was that the EPA based their conclusions "on data from two test wells (not operating water wells) drilled in 2010 and tested once that year and once in April, 2011. Those test wells are deeper than drinking wells," the Gov. said, causing him and others to wonder how the EPA could reach their conclusion.

Mead had appointed a working group to study the Pavillion problem that included local residents, state agencies, Indian Tribes, the EPA and the BLM. But, the EPA didn't even make their report available to the rest of the group until shortly before releasing it to public. A highly critical house editorial in the Casper Star-Tribune on Dec. 26 said, "…process and politics have trumped good science…The EPA's process-oriented almost ho-hum approach does a disservice to Wyoming whose residents need answers about their water, and whose economy hinges on the safe and successful practice of fracking."

In a feature editorial, the Wall Street Journal stated the obvious, that everybody wants clean drinking water. "But we also need to be sure that regulators aren't spreading needless fears so they can enhance their own power while pursuing an ideological agenda." The WSJ summarized many of the same questions and concerns that Gov. Mead and others have raised about the EPA report:
•The EPA study concedes that "detections in drinking water wells are generally below [i.e., in compliance with] established health and safety standards." The dangerous compound EPA says it found in the drinking wells was 2-butoxyethyl phosphate. The Petroleum Association of Wyoming says that 2-BE isn't an oil and gas chemical but is a common fire retardant used in association with plastics and plastic components used in drinking wells.

•The pollution detected by the EPA and alleged to be linked to fracking was found in deep-water "monitoring wells"—not the shallower drinking wells. It's far from certain that pollution in these deeper wells caused the pollution in drinking wells. The deep-water wells that EPA drilled are located near a natural gas reservoir. Encana Corp., which owns more than 100 wells around Pavillion, says it didn't "put the natural gas at the bottom of the EPA's deep monitoring wells. Nature did."

•To the extent that drilling chemicals have been detected in monitoring wells, the EPA admits this may result from "legacy pits," which are old wells that were drilled many years before fracking was employed. The EPA also concedes that the inferior design of Pavillion's old wells allows seepage into the water supply. Safer well construction of the kind normally practiced today might have prevented any contaminants from leaking into the water supply.

•The fracking in Pavillion takes place in unusually shallow wells of fewer than 1,000 to 1,500 feet deep. Most fracking today occurs 10,000 feet deep or more, far below drinking water wells, which are normally less than 500 feet. Even the EPA report acknowledges that Pavillion's drilling conditions are far different from other areas of the country, such as the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania. This calls into question the relevance of the Wyoming finding to newer and more sophisticated fracking operations in more than 20 states.

Of the EPA's report, the Star-Tribune said, "If it's not sloppy science, it's poor policy." And, the editors go on to make the damning accusation that "the Pavillion study is not about science, (but) about politics."

For an administration committed to perverted energy policies that drive fossil fuel prices higher in hopes that increased energy costs will make green-energy more attractive, all this increased oil and gas production creates a real problem. Just last week the press was reporting that because of increased supplies, natural gas prices fell to their lowest level in over two years. You might think that lower consumer costs would be well received at the White House, but not in an administration committed to implementing policies to get America's energy prices "to the levels in Europe," as Energy Secretary Steven Chu admits.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has banned drilling on millions of acres of federal land. Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe says 83 percent of all federal land is already off-limits for energy development, and Salazar is constantly adding more. Where he can't ban it, he makes it ever more difficult to get leases and permits to drill. Legislation passed by Congress in 2005 reaffirmed that Congress wanted the states, not the federal government, to regulate gas drilling, but that doesn't stop this administration. As mentioned above, the EPA wants to muscle the states out of the way, and assert federal control and restrict fracking. The Pavillion report helps them make their case. North Dakota Governor Jack Dalrymple says the proposed EPA rules restricting fracking "would have huge economic impact on our state's energy development. We believe strongly this should be regulated by the states."

That more is in play with the Pavillion report than just clean water for 160 Wyoming residents is pretty obvious. Steve Forbes says the Obama Administration is repeating all the mistakes of the Carter Administration's failed energy policies, and has already established "the most anti-oil and gas record in U.S. history." While there may eventually be proven some connection between gas wells and water contamination in Pavillion, we have to wonder if the Administration hadn't already reached a conclusion about fracking and the energy industry, and was just looking for a convenient excuse to help them make the case.

Tom Doll is the Supervisor of the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, and as such is the state's top regulator. Doll is also a native of Wyoming, graduate of the University of Wyoming as a petroleum engineer, and has more than three decades of field experience in the industry. According to Doll, the contamination EPA found in the Pavillion monitoring wells could be explained by natural causes or by the EPA because of the way the agency drilled, completed and tested the wells. "We really raised a lot of questions, provided four pages of questions on the monitoring wells: How they were drilled and completed, how they were sampled," Doll told the Casper Star-Tribune. Those questions were submitted to the EPA on Nov. 22, less than two weeks after the state and the Pavillion working group got a look at the draft report, but 16 days before the EPA released it to the public. "We posed all those questions to the EPA and they haven't gotten answers back yet on those concerns," Doll said.

As a candidate for President, Obama pledged that good science would guide policy in his Administration, but his actions belie his words. He says he's for jobs and for economic recovery, yet he dithers on approval of the Keystone Pipeline. Obama claims that, "Last year…oil production from federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico reached an all-time time high," but his own energy department reports production in the Gulf is down by 300,000 barrels per day after his misguided moratorium. He spews the radical left's lie that "we only have 2 percent" of the world's energy reserves when numerous government and independent reports prove America has vast resources if only our government would let them be harvested.

My dad often warned me about people who "would say one thing, but do another." That's the kind of President and Administration that is in Washington now. So, if you heard Barack Obama last month at a press conference say that his administration is "all in" for domestic energy production; believe just the opposite. Expect more debilitating, delaying, costly regulation. Expect more federal land and off-shore reserves to be put off-limits. Expect more "sloppy" reports like Pavillion designed to move a political agenda. And, expect billions more of borrowed dollars to be squandered on false green-gods like Solyndra in order to mollify and reward his political cronies. This isn't about science, and it isn't about good government. It's just politics; Obama style.

ABC News Produces Empty and Biased Story on Mitt Romney and Tax Havens

2012-01-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

By Daniel J. Mitchell
Friday, January 20, 2012

Exactly 10 days ago, I predicted that the press would attack Mitt Romney for using tax havens. In that post, I wrote that, “…based on the questions, it appears that the establishment media wants to hit Romney for utilizing tax havens… As far as I can tell, none of these reporters have come out with a story. …But I think it’s just a matter of time.”

Sure enough, like the swallows returning to Capistrano, it’s happened. Two hacks at ABC News, Brian Ross and Megan Chuchmach, revealed (brace yourself for a real scoop) that Mitt Romney is a rich guy and some of his investments are based in funds domiciled in the Cayman Islands (gasp!).

Wow, what a revelation! This must be Pulitzer Prize material. Pray tell, what wrongdoing did the story uncover? Well, let’s excerpt the key passages from the article.

Mitt Romney has millions of dollars of his personal wealth in investment funds set up in the Cayman Islands, a notorious Caribbean tax haven. A spokesperson for the Romney campaign says Romney follows all tax laws and he would pay the same in taxes regardless of where the funds are based. …Romney has as much as $8 million invested in at least 12 funds listed on a Cayman Islands registry. Another investment, which Romney reports as being worth between $5 million and $25 million, shows up on securities records as having been domiciled in the Caymans. …Romney campaign officials and those at Bain Capital tell ABC News that the purpose of setting up those accounts in the Cayman Islands is to help attract money from foreign investors, and that the accounts provide no tax advantage to American investors like Romney. Romney, the campaign said, has paid all U.S. taxes on income derived from those investments. …Bain officials called the decision to locate some funds offshore routine, and a benefit only to foreign investors who do not want to be subjected to U.S. taxes.

You’re probably thinking you missed something, because there’s nothing to the story. But that’s because the reporters don’t have anything. And if you think I excerpted unfairly, feel free to read the whole article.

The only thing you’ll discover is that Ross and Chuchmach are biased hacks. Because not only did they write a story about nothing, they also quoted two left-wingers, Jack Blum and Rebecca Wilson, and failed to give the other side even an inch of column space.

Blum is a former John Kerry staffer who is most famous for making unsubstantiated claims (which he later admitted were fabricated) that tax havens resulted in $100 billion of lost revenue to the Treasury each year.

And Rebecca Wilson works for Citizens for Tax Justice, a union-funded group so radical that even congressional Democrats usually are reluctant to work with them.

But what about the other side of the story?

1.Did the article quote me, since I’ve been working on these issues for more than a decade? No.
2.Did the article quote anybody from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, the organization most active in the fight to defend low-tax jurisdictions? No.
3.Did the article quote Richard Rahn, the Cato Institute Fellow who was a Board Member of the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority? No.
4.Did the article quote any of the academic scholars who have written about so-called tax havens, such as Jim Hines of the University of Michigan or Andrew Morriss of the University of Alabama? No.
5.Did the article quote Bob Bauman, the former Congressman and offshore expert who serves as Legal Counsel of the Sovereign Society? No.

Fair and competent journalists would have done those things, but not the dynamic duo from ABC News.

Instead, they quote two hard-core lefts. And in a gross display of editorializing, they also referred to the Cayman Islands as a “notorious tax haven.”

Yet what is “notorious” about being a prosperous multiracial society with living standards considerably above American levels?

Moreover, Cayman has a tax treaty with the United States and an overwhelming share of the investment in the jurisdiction is completely legal institutional money – just like the Romney investment funds.

But I guess a place like the Cayman Islands must be bad, at least to biased people from the press. After all, a place with no income taxes, no capital gains taxes, no payroll taxes, and no death taxes must be condemned.

I’m not a Romney fan but I believe in honest and intelligent debate. Too bad ABC doesn’t.

Strongest Case Against Romney a Few Sheets Short of a Ream

2012-01-19T13:09:00.000-08:00

By Ann Coulter
Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Mitt Romney has spent more than 20 years in private enterprise, making thousands of business decisions affecting hundreds of companies that led to more than 100,000 new jobs and billions of dollars for employees and investors. So you can see why the left despises him.

Among Romney's thousands of business decisions, the one I gather his opponents consider his absolute worst was the decision to close a paper plant in Marion, Ind. Which wasn't his decision at all.

It was labor trouble at the Marion plant of a Bain-acquired company, Ampad, that formed the basis of Teddy Kennedy's desperate 11th-hour attack on Romney in their 1994 Senate competition. Plant worker Randy Johnson was featured in Kennedy campaign commercials against Romney and disgruntled workers were lavished with Dickensian lachrymosity in The Boston Globe.

In the current presidential campaign, Democrats -- and some Republicans -- have returned to Ampad and the Marion plant as their case in chief against Romney.

The "King of Bain" movie that a pro-Newt Gingrich super-pac just bought with money donated by a gambling magnate cites only one company closed by Bain when Romney was even there.

Guess which one? That's right: Ampad.

The Democratic National Committee has retained Johnson to go on tour in order to more fulsomely describe the horrors perpetrated by Bain Capital on workers at that plant. As salt-of-the-earth Johnson explains, he lost his job at Ampad because Romney "didn't care about the worker."

It is beyond journalistic malpractice for media outlets showcasing the bitter and lying Johnson to neglect to mention that he was the union president who led the strike that forced Ampad to close the plant.

And yet The New York Times, MSNBC and others who have publicized Johnson's sob story regularly refuse to convey that crucial fact. This would be as if a judge excluded the fact that the defense's principal witness is the defendant's mother.

By 1994, the unionized Marion plant was becoming a losing operation to every company that owned it. It was a paper plant, and in the early 1990s, the paper business was beginning to go the way of the buggy whip, as the world became computerized.

(Randy Johnson suffered? Paper magnate Peter Brandt nearly lost Stephanie Seymour over the collapse of the paper market.)

Bain Capital specialized in rescuing troubled companies, so in 1992, it bought the faltering paper-based office products business, Ampad, from the Mead paper company. Far from shutting down Ampad, Bain started buying up more firms in the industry to add to Ampad's portfolio, hoping to create efficiencies and synergies.

In July 1994, Bain-controlled Ampad bought Smith-Corona's struggling paper business -- home to the famed Marion plant.

(Despite shedding its paper business, Smith-Corona went bankrupt the next year. Nobody uses typewriters anymore. Ironically, a century earlier, people said Smith-Corona typewriters would never replace the pen. They probably railed against Smith-Corona as "vulture capitalists" destroying the pen industry.)

Seeking to succeed where Smith-Corona had failed, Bain's Ampad sought to renegotiate a suicide pact-union contract at the Marion plant. But instead of renegotiating, union president Randy Johnson thought it would be a great idea to immediately go on strike.

As long as the nation is still in the fifth stage of grief over Steve Jobs' death, with gushing tributes to his contributions to our wonderful new world of computerized books, letters, memos, newspapers, CDs and classified ads, ask yourselves: Would the mid-1990s have been a good time for workers in an industry made vulnerable by the new, paperless information age to stage a long, acrimonious strike?

Union president Randy Johnson thought it was. The Democrats (and some Republicans) apparently do, too.

Romney wasn't even at Bain during Ampad's acquisition of the Smith-Corona business, much less for the strike at the Marion plant. He was on a leave of absence from Bain to run against Sen. Ted Kennedy. Nonetheless, a dozen workers fired from Ampad's Marion plant showed up in Massachusetts to bird-dog Romney in the final months of his campaign.

It worked. Romney's lead disappeared and, after celebrating with a few cocktails, Kennedy returned to the Senate to continue wrecking the country.

About six months later, Ampad closed the Marion plant for good. As Ampad's president, Charles Hanson, explained at the time, the company had "sustained severe economic damage as a result of our inability to manufacture products at our Marion plant." Apparently, the only thing this ruthless capitalist lackey cared about was that the factory actually produce product!

In any event, it's highly unlikely that Bain would have anything to do with a day-to-day management decision to close a plant, anyway.

Bain led Ampad to thrive over the next few years, buying up more companies in 1995, hiring more workers and making investors nearly $100 million. By 1996, Ampad was being described in Chief Executive magazine as "a stronger, profitable competitor in a consolidating -- and reviving -- domestic industry."

Alas, people kept using those damn computers and shopping for discount paper at Staples and similar stores, and in 1999, Ampad had to file for bankruptcy protection.

Contrary to every single news report on Bain's involvement with Ampad, Bain did not drive the company to bankruptcy by looting it. To the contrary, Bain built up the company, added other companies to it, turned it into a "profitable competitor" that paid handsome dividends for a few years. (And by the way, the company would have gone bankrupt a lot sooner if it hadn't closed down the non-producing Marion plant.)

But in the end, that wasn't enough.

If years of furious acquisition, followed by bankruptcy nearly a decade later had been Bain's secret plan all along, Bain would be the most ham-fisted looter in history.

Politicians' morbid fear of technological advances in the free market has real-world consequences. You will recall that the mainstream media-adored FBI agent Colleen Rowley's main indictment of the bureau after 9/11 was that the FBI had really old computers, preventing it from anticipating the greatest terrorist attack in world history.

In response to Rowley's charges, for example, the Times' Maureen Dowd denounced federal law enforcement agencies for being "antiquated," "inept" and "bloated." (She also said: "I want to see some agents lose their jobs." Maureen Dowd: Inadvertent Romney Supporter.)

Of course, if the Democrats, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry were running things, the FBI would still be using paper and pens -- maybe quill pens -- all in order to save Randy Johnson's union job! Instead of a Xerox machine, they'd have a monk in the back room creating copies of documents by hand so as not to be accused of "vulture capitalism" for eliminating the monk's job.

I don't know how Mitt Romney is supposed to explain free market capitalism to career politicians, much less describe the intricacies of a thousand business decisions in two minutes during a debate.

But we know that Bain's acquisition of Ampad is the left's best shot against Romney's business career. We may presume they don't have anything better, or we'd be hearing about it.

The anti-Romney hysterics don't get to come back later with another company allegedly looted by Bain that I'll have to spend another week researching. Henceforth, I shall refer you back to the Ampad example -- their smoking gun -- which, as we have seen, is not even a water pistol.

Militant Islamism, Islamism, Islam

2012-01-19T13:02:00.000-08:00

By Clifford D. May
Thursday, January 19, 2012

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has described the Muslim Brotherhood as “secular.” Vice President Joseph Biden recently said that the Taliban “is not our enemy.” According to John Brennan, assistant to the president on counterterrorism, terrorists who proclaim they are motivated by religion should not be described using “religious terms.” Where do ideas such as these come from? The answer, in large measure, is from advisers — so perhaps it would be instructive to examine more closely what those advisers are actually saying.

U.S. Navy Commander Youssef H. Aboul-Enein “has advised at the highest levels of the defense department and the intelligence community,” according to the jacket notes on his book, Militant Islamist Ideology: Understanding the Global Threat, published by the Naval Institute Press. Raymond Ibrahim, a young analyst for whom I have great respect, recently gave the book a withering review. My reading is less harsh. I think that Commander Aboul-Enein, who was born in Mississippi and raised in Saudi Arabia, is grappling, seriously and sincerely, with the pathologies that have arisen from within the Muslim world, and is struggling to formulate a coherent American response. That should not suggest, however, that his efforts have been entirely successful.

Aboul-Enein states that the “challenge to America’s national security in the twenty-first century” comes from “Militant Islamist Ideology.” Good for him for not defaulting to “violent extremism,” a term designed to hide rather than to reveal. He urges that policy makers adopt a “nuanced” approach to this challenge — one that “disaggregates” Militant Islamism from both Islam and Islamism.

To charge that “all Islam is evil,” he says, is a mistake. For many Muslims, Islam is “a source of values that guide conduct rather than a system that offers solutions to all problems.” It is no less incorrect, he adds — with more intellectual honesty than many other analysts have demonstrated — to “insist that all Islam is peaceful.” Islamic scripture provides ample justification for hating, oppressing, and killing non-Muslims. But it is neither accurate nor productive, argues Aboul-Enein, to confirm the militants’ claim that theirs is the only authentic interpretation of Islam — that Muslims not waging a “jihad” against “infidels” are, at best, misguided; at worst, traitors to their faith.

As for Islamists, he confirms that they seek “unacceptable outcomes for the United States in the long run.” Allow me to offer one example: Muhammad Badi, supreme leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, said last year that Muslims should strive for “a government evolving into a rightly guided caliphate and finally mastership of the world.”

Despite that, Aboul-Enein argues that Islamism has “potential” as an “alternative to Militant Islamist Ideology.” His rationale: Islamists intend to achieve their objectives not through violence but “within the political and electoral frameworks of the countries in which they operate.”

This is where, in my view, he gets lost in the analytic woods. Islamists may prefer ballots to bullets. But is that because, as Aboul-Enein asserts, they “abhor the violent methodologies espoused by Militant Islamists”? Or is it because they see elections as a less bumpy path to power?

Sheikh Yousef Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual leader, has said that Islam will “conquer Rome . . . not by the sword but by preaching.” But if you were to infer that he has a moral objection to violence, you’d be wrong. The proof: Qaradawi has praised Hitler for his “punishment” of the Jews, adding, “Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.”

What’s more, Aboul-Enein’s book is filled with examples of Islamists who became Militant Islamists — who picked up weapons when peaceful means failed to achieve the ends they sought, and who did so without remorse.

He devotes an entire chapter to Sayyid Qutb, who evolved from an Islamist intellectual into “perhaps the most influential Militant Islamist thinker of the late twentieth century.” Among the experiences that militarized Qutb: a fellowship in the U.S. in 1948‒50. In the sleepy rural town of Greeley, Colo., Qutb attended church socials where men and women danced together. Based on such shocking experiences, he developed an “utter contempt for American society, which he viewed as decadent.” (Given a chance to avoid execution in Nasser’s Egypt in 1966, Qutb told his sister: “My words will have more meaning if they execute me!”)

Aboul-Enein can’t quite decide whether Hamas, which is committed to the genocide of Israelis, “is an Islamist or Militant Islamist group.” He seems conflicted, also, in regard to Saudi Arabia, praising King Abdullah, who, he writes, has “attacked terrorism, praised Saudi security forces in breaking cells, and exposed the realities of their ideology.”

However, Aboul-Enein also notes: “Saudis have unfortunately been heavily involved in Militant Islamist groups, even volunteering to fight American forces in Iraq.” And it was Saudi royals who gave refuge and teaching positions to such exiled Militant Islamists as Sayyid Qutb’s brother, Muhammad Qutb, and to Abdullah Azzam, whose slogan was “Jihad and the rifle alone.” Among their star students at King Abdul-Aziz University in Jeddah was the young Osama bin Laden.

Aboul-Enein laments, too, the fact that “Saudi Islamist Wahhabism,” the ultra-orthodox variety of Islam that is the kingdom’s state religion, is “colonizing Islam around the world through money and proselytizing,” and that these efforts are changing “the character of Muslim nations such as Indonesia or Morocco, marginalizing Sufism or the Maliki school of Sunni Islam in North Africa” in ways that are “not in the long-term interest of the United States or other nations.”

Perhaps most difficult to square in Aboul-Enein’s analysis is simply this: On the first page of his book, he describes Militant Islamists as Muslims who call for “the strictest possible interpretation of both the Koran (Muslim book of divine revelation) and the hadith (the Prophet Muhammad’s actions and deeds).” On the last page of his book, he endorses Pres. George W. Bush’s charge that “Militant Islamists have hijacked Islam.” But can strictly interpreting Islamic scripture really be synonymous with hijacking Islam? If not, small wonder that so many American officials advised by Aboul-Enein and others sound confused.

Expecting the Worst from President Hypocrite

2012-01-19T12:56:00.000-08:00

By John Ransom
Thursday, January 19, 2012

Obama told us that he had a plan to end US dependence of overseas sources of energy.

“If I am President,” he told us in 2008, “I will immediately direct the full resources of the federal government and the full energy of the private sector to a single, overarching goal — in ten years, we will eliminate the need for oil from the entire Middle East and Venezuela.”

Last March, two years into this ten year plan, Obama gave a major policy speech on energy that the White House pitched for weeks. It was necessary to give the speech because, well gosh, wouldn’t you know it? Obama’s only energy policy so far was to enrich his favorite Democrat donors.

The major thrust of the speech was that greedy oil companies weren’t producing enough oil and Obama was sick and tired of the do-nothing oil companies standing in the way of progress.

“Right now, the industry holds tens of millions of acres of leases where they're not producing a – a single drop,” the president said according to the CSMonitor.com. “They're just sitting on supplies of American energy that are ready to be tapped. And that's why part of our plan is to provide new and better incentives that promote rapid, responsible development of these resources.”

Obama told us that he has a plan for jobs too.

He promised that if we just spent $1 trillion on a jobs plan guided by the White House that he would create 3.5 million jobs. He was off by 9 million. Instead of adding jobs, the country has lost 1.1 million jobs and 4.4 million people have permanently left the workforce.

Last summer, two years into this four-year job plan, Obama gave a major speech on jobs that the White House pitched for weeks- because it was a fundraiser. It was necessary to give the speech because, well gosh, wouldn’t you know it? Obama’s only jobs policy in the first two years was to enrich his favorite Democrat donors. The one area Obama crowed about was so-called green energy jobs. But those jobs cost $5 million apiece and, as the Washington Post pointed out, were mostly about financial payback for the president’s political supporters.

The thrust of the speech, the president gave last summer was that the economy wasn’t growing because a do-nothing Congress was stopping the president.

From National Review:

‘This Congress, they are accustomed to doing nothing, and they’re comfortable with doing nothing, and they keep on doing nothing,” President Obama whined at a September 15 Democratic National Committee gathering in a private Washington residence.

I only point out all of the above because right now the president is standing before the entire nation with his pants bunched up around his ankles.

And he’s grinning, hoping you won’t notice.

Because today is the day that Obama increased the amount of energy we need to import from places like the Middle East and Venezuela; today is the day that he crushed hundreds of thousands of US jobs. He did it because he can't be bothered to do ANYTHING, except campaign.

Today is the day he morphed from President Do-Nothing to President Hypocrite.

He did it by killing the XL Keystone pipeline which would bring a million barrels per day of North American oil to US refineries, create at a minimum 200,000 jobs and open up the US heartland for domestic development of oil- and the millions in jobs and domestic GDP it would create.

So much for jobs, so much for energy, so much for the economy.

So much for a president with a focus on jobs, jobs, jobs.

And it shows why his presidency will be considered a grand failure.

Obama has just told us that environmentalists mean more to him than your job, your kids, our economy, our safety.

“It is in both our economic and national security interests to use the oil and gas reserves right here in our own backyard instead of continuing to spend billions to OPEC nations every year,” said Rep John Sullivan, Vice Chairman of the House Energy and Power Subcommittee. “Iran, a country that is wreaking havoc with the global oil markets must be smiling today. Congratulations Mr. President, you just gave a victory to Iran.”

But that doesn’t mean we won’t still fight Iran.

Because his decision on XL also exposes Obama as the hypocrite he’s become.

Far from being a success, Obama’s present war in Libya, a war fought by his own admission for oil, is one of the most damning indicators that the president is a confused, rudderless, purposeless man, condemned to a drunken-walk life in a purgatory of liberal thinking.

No blood for oil?

Obama chooses only blood, but no oil. Not even oil for his country.

Hurrah for progressives!

They have this neat trick of working for equality by promising slavery to all.

This country really is at an XL crossroads. If we pick the wrong road we could be lost forever.

Because Obama’s policies amount to little else than energy, job and income rationing; policies pushed by UN globalists, extreme eco-groups and the billionaires’ lobby.

It’s the leadership of planned failure in the quest for diminished expectations.

And it’s working too.

When it comes to my expectations for Obama, I’m learning to expect the very worst.

An Ignored 'Disparity': Part III

2012-01-19T12:52:00.000-08:00

By Thomas Sowell
Thursday, January 19, 2012

Anyone who has ever been in a Third World country, or even in a slum neighborhood at home, is likely to wonder why there can be such dire poverty among some people, while others are prospering.

Both politicians and intellectuals have tended to have simple answers to that question, even if these simple answers have been different in different eras.

A hundred years ago, the prevailing answer was that some people are innately and genetically inferior. Not only was this answer thundered from political platforms in redneck dialect by politicians in the Jim Crow South, the same message was delivered in cultured and lofty tones from academic podiums in the most prestigious colleges and universities across the country.

Nor was this unique to the United States. In Britain, a study of high-achieving families by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, concluded that the reason for their achievements was genetic superiority. From there it was a short step to seeing various races as genetically superior and inferior.

More ominously, Galton saw those who were inferior as a drag on society who should be eliminated. As often happens when a big idea seizes the imagination of the intelligentsia, their strongest argument is that there is no argument -- that "science" has already proved what they believe.

As Sir Francis Galton put it: "there exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race."

The idea that those with different views had only "sentiment" on their side, while he had science, was common among intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic.

Eugenics -- a term Galton coined -- became a crusading creed, and eugenics societies were set up by such stellar intellectuals as John Maynard Keynes, H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw in England. In the United States there were 376 college courses devoted to eugenics in American colleges and universities in 1928.

By the end of the 20th century, the pendulum had swung to the opposite end of the spectrum. Now differences in achievements among classes, races or the sexes were seen as being a result of discriminatory treatment. And, again, as with the intelligentsia of the Progressive era, those with different views were dismissed with a word -- often "racist" now, as compared to "sentimental" in the earlier period. But in neither era were views different from the crusading creed of the day seriously engaged.

In our supposedly more enlightened time, it became dangerous even to express differing views on the subject on leading college and university campuses.

A very fundamental question was seldom asked, in either the earlier or the later period: Was there ever any realistic reason to expect the same achievements among races, classes or other subdivisions of the human species?

Could we really have expected Eskimos to have the same ability to grow pineapples as the people of Hawaii had? Could the Bedouins of the Sahara really know as much about fishing as the Polynesians of the Pacific? Could the people of the Himalayas have the same seafaring skills as people living in ports around the Mediterranean?

On a more general level, could people living in isolated mountain valleys realistically be expected to develop their own intellectual potential as fully as people living in cities that were international crossroads of commerce, cultures and ideas from around the world?

When the Spaniards discovered the Canary Islands in the 15th century, they found people of a Caucasian race living at a stone age level. Isolation and backwardness have gone together in many parts of the world, regardless of the race of the people involved.

Historical happenstances -- the fact that the Romans invaded Western Europe but not Eastern Europe, for example -- left a legacy of written languages in Western Europe that people in Eastern Europe did not have until centuries later.

But the innumerable factors affecting human achievements are not only complex and hard to untangle, they offer neither politicians nor intellectuals the opportunity to simply be on the side of the angels against the forces of evil. Factors which present no opportunity to star in a moral melodrama have often been ignored in favor of factors that do.

Wake Up and Smell the Energy

2012-01-19T12:49:00.000-08:00

By Thomas Pyle
Wednesday, January 18, 2012

The world’s oil market seized in recent days amid heightened tensions between the United States and Iran in the Strait of Hormuz. Oil-rich Iran, sensitive to the prospect of global sanctions on its exports, hinted that it would attack American shipping in the strait.

Approximately 35 percent of all oil shipped by sea, and 20 percent of all oil traded worldwide, travels through the strait, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The vast majority of oil exported from the Middle East passes through this strategic sea lane. At its narrowest point, the Strait of Hormuz is just 35 miles wide, qualifying it as one of the most vital choke points on the planet.

Market analysts become jittery when even a whiff of a potential oil supply interruption permeates the air. This latest incident resulted in a $5 to $10 a barrel spike in futures. The fact that oil prices didn’t leap higher is a vote of confidence that ultimately, Iran will not deliver on its threats. All bets would be off if Iran followed through on its blockade threat, however, and consumers could see a 50 percent increase in oil prices within days, according to energy analysts.

If there is an upside to the Persian saber-rattling, it is the potential to serve as a wake-up call to Washington’s policymakers on the urgent need to increase America’s domestic energy production.

The good news for Americans is that domestic energy resources are so vast that our power needs can be met for generations to come, according to the "North American Energy Inventory” released in December by the Institute for Energy Research. That is, if Washington will do its part by getting out of the way.
In terms of oil, the proven reserves of 1.79 trillion barrels available in North America is more than will likely ever flow through the Strait of Hormuz and in fact twice that of all the OPEC nations combined. That’s enough to fill the tank of every passenger car in the United States for the next 30 years. Our natural gas future is even brighter. An estimated 4.244 quadrillion cubic feet of recoverable resources could keep every home well-heated for the next 575 winters at current usage rates. With proven reserves of 497 billion short tons of coal, our need for electricity will be satisfied for the next 500 years at the current level of consumption for electricity generation. Ill-advised policymakers and federal regulators are the only barrier separating consumers from affordable domestic energy. These needless regulations and restrictions have little to do with safe, clean energy production and everything to do with political cronyism and irrational green agendas. The result: America remains far too vulnerable to shifting events on the other side of the globe. Perhaps the incident in the strait is enough to provide Washington with the impetus it needs to finally unleash domestic energy production and put tens of thousands of Americans back to work in the process.

Socialism Bombs Out Again

2012-01-19T12:46:00.000-08:00

By Rachel Marsden
Wednesday, January 19, 2012

Once again, socialism has put a silver fork in itself. Standard & Poor's has downgraded France's AAA credit rating, giving the country the side-eye on its claims to have its debt under control. This means the country will now have to pay it all back at an even higher interest rate.

Who are we kidding? No one's paying back any debts right now. You need money to do that. When was the last time France had any extra cash lying around? It's like raising the interest rate on the credit card of an addict who's pumping capital into his veins faster than any German, Chinese or Russian can slip him a tenner.

No amount of hot air and spin could ultimately keep socialism afloat. It's a good lesson for those in America and other parts of the world who think that Europe is in any way an exemplary, sustainable alternative to free-market, limited-government capitalism.

If capitalism is perceived to not be working in America -- as the Occupy Wall Street movement has argued -- it's because the system isn't capitalist enough. It's because a lack of oversight has led to corporate welfare and an unlevel playing field -- socialist government intervention in business, in other words. Similarly, if the U.S. health care system has problems, it's because of private insurers' heavy-handed lobbying of government and government's willingness, in turn, to meddle when its palm is adequately greased. That, too, is a problem for which more capitalism -- less government and a free-market -- is a cure.

And now, again, we have proof that the system long considered the model for successful socialism finally has been choked out.

This isn't French President Nicolas Sarkozy's fault. He's spent the five years since he took office doing his best to move the country off the rail of socialism and onto one of personal independence, trying to change the rhetoric and the way the French think about such things. But how do you explain to a Labrador retriever the exhilaration of being free like a wolf, despite not having someone place a full bowl in front of you at regular intervals?

The French want less debt, but they also want the same lengthy vacations and no government cutbacks in jobs or services -- mainly because those are precisely their jobs. They also expect their kids to all go to "management school," after which they will never have to produce anything in the French workplace -- not even a signature, as there will be a stamp for that ... made in China.

Sarkozy just happens to be the guy sitting in the hot seat now that the socialist policies of every president since Charles de Gaulle have finally taken their toll. Unfortunately for Sarkozy, he's facing re-election in the spring. The French can either re-elect Sarkozy, whom they don't personally like because they find him hyperactive, somewhat grotesque and overly involved in petty matters, or they can do the same thing that's led to France's failure to date. That is, elect the friendly, funny, "aw shucks" Socialist Party candidate who only has personal qualities going for him.

Rather than get softer, Sarkozy needs to use the credit downgrading as an opportunity to take an even harder line in favor of limited government. Stop talking and start swinging the ax like the killer in a bad slasher film. Start by decimating a few levels of French government. Flatten that baby like a crepe. Set the example with the political class and make these so-called elites go out and start real businesses. Have people with kids take financial responsibility for them rather than supporting them from cradle to grave. Limit immigration to those who can contribute economically or professionally as ascertained by a points system like the one in Canada. Those who want to import their entire families from another country can move back there if they're that homesick.

And businesses in France are paying enough taxes, as are the people. The problem is that their taxes aren't sufficient to support the nanny state, so get rid of it. Anyone who doesn't like it can move to Scandinavia, where apparently socialism still "works" for those who love paying exorbitant taxes.

This is France's big chance, its Overton window -- the moment when previously unforeseen possibilities suddenly become possible because of an unexpected and significant event. It's the ultimate shot at setting France on course with a bold new model, not just a rebooted version of an old, failed model. Until that happens and the root of the collapse is addressed, the problem won't begin to disappear.

Romney Is Right on Corporations

2012-01-18T13:21:00.000-08:00

By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, January 18, 2012

‘Corporations are people, my friend,” Mitt Romney declared in a testy back-and-forth with hecklers last summer in Iowa.

It was among the first of what appears to be a growing list of gaffes Democrats will use to hang around Romney’s neck in the less than certain but more than likely eventuality that he is the Republican nominee for president.

Much like his more recent statement about how he likes to “fire people,” the corporation remark has been taken grossly out of context. The “fire people” line simply referred to the fact that he likes to use his power as a consumer to deny his support to firms — specifically insurance companies — that don’t provide good service. Who doesn’t like doing that? Let me know who you are and I will gladly sell you a lifetime supply of unicorn repellent. No refunds, of course.

Meanwhile, his point about corporations being people was simply that raising taxes on corporations means raising taxes on people, because the corporations will pass the costs of those taxes on to consumers.

It didn’t matter. Romney has something of a gift for making his arguments sound worse than they are. A “corporate raider” — as unfair as that term may be — just shouldn’t be using the phrase “I like to fire people” in any context, never mind amid a really awful economy. I don’t care if the full sentence is “I like to fire people who hurt puppies,” you know which snippet the Democratic National Committee will use.

Similarly, Romney’s point about corporations was entirely valid, as some liberal writers, such as Jonathan Chait, have acknowledged. But particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in 2010 — which opened the political process to more “corporate money” (loosely defined) — the Left has been on a tear about the evils of “corporate personhood.” It didn’t matter that Romney wasn’t addressing that topic. And if Romney is the nominee, it won’t matter that his views are entirely mainstream. Expect a very long debate over the question: Are corporations people?

Okay, corporations aren’t people in the whole carbon-based humanoid life-form sense. If they were, then Stephen Colbert would be right that Romney was a serial killer when he worked at Bain Capital.

All corporate personhood means is that corporations are legal entities that have certain rights or “standing” under the law. The law does this for several reasons, but first among them is the simple fact that people don’t lose their rights when they associate in groups, whether it’s a corporation, a labor union, a nonprofit organization, or even a newspaper.

As legal scholar Ilya Shapiro writes, “It cannot be any other way; in a world where corporations are not entitled to constitutional protections, the police would be free to storm office buildings and seize computers or documents. The mayor of New York City could exercise eminent domain over Rockefeller Center by fiat and without compensation if he decides he’d like to move his office there. . . . [R]ights-bearing individuals do not forfeit those rights when they associate in groups.”

It’s really that simple. When liberals insist that corporations aren’t really people-people, they do so on the false assumption that conservatives were running around like Charlton Heston in Soylent Green, shouting, “Corporations are people! They’re people!” Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissent in the Citizen United ruling, writes “[C]orporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.”

Agreed. But so what? The law doesn’t, in fact, treat corporations just like people. Corporations can’t vote or be drafted. And people can’t sell fractional shares of themselves. The war on corporate personhood is really nothing more than a novel ploy to regulate corporations more.

What I find most fascinating about the debate over corporate personhood is the fact that the people who defend corporate personhood don’t anthropomorphize big business nearly as much as those who oppose it. After all, if Justice Stevens is right about corporations not having beliefs, feelings, and desires, why do we hear so much about “corporate greed.” Non-human entities can’t be greedy, can they?

Obama’s Racial Politics

2012-01-18T13:16:00.000-08:00

By Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Never has America been more assimilated, integrated, and intermarried — as is evident in everything from politics to popular culture, from statistics to anecdotes. Yet from late 2007 to 2012, Barack Obama has been establishing new rules of racial referencing. In general, his utterances follow a disheartening pattern. When he is ahead in the polls, has won an election, and is not campaigning, then he emphasizes the unity of the country. But when he is running for president, or campaigning for others, or sinking in the polls, he and his closest associates predictably revert to charges of racial bigotry, albeit usually coded and subtle. America is redeemed when it champions the Obamas, but retrograde when it does not.

Obama’s race-based strategy is predicated on some unspoken assumptions: Any short-term damage incurred by engaging in racial tribalism can easily be later erased by soaring teleprompted speeches on racial harmony; the media will either not widely report his emphases on race or generally support his charges; a person of color can hardly be culpable of racial polarization himself given the history of racial discrimination in this country.

In a recent speech before a Latino audience, President Obama, in blasting congressional Republicans, recalled that he had run for office because “America should be a place where you can always make it if you try; a place where every child, no matter what they look like, where they come from, should have a chance to succeed.” The obvious conclusion from his increasingly frequent “look like” trope is that his critics predicate success in America on just the opposite criteria. That is, supposedly racist opponents do not wish every child to succeed, and so it certainly matters to them a great deal what Americans should “look like.”

Recently, First Lady Michelle Obama complained about a description of her White House infighting in an otherwise favorable account of the first family, written by a New York Times reporter. She suggested that the book’s criticism was unfair because “That’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since, you know, the day Barack announced, that I’m some angry black woman.”

Oddly, the first lady did not cite anyone who, in fact, had tried to stereotype her as an “angry black woman.” To be sure, “people” have characterized her as “angry,” given her prominent role in the 2008 campaign, during which she repeatedly found herself in dramas of her own rhetorical making (saying Americans were “just downright mean”; never having been proud of America before the nomination of her husband; etc.). But no one suggested that her overt anger derived from being either “black” or a “woman.”

Again, these invocations of race always raise logical antitheses: Do only those who do not find Mrs. Obama “angry” escape her charge of racism? Second, the race-obsessed Mrs. Obama forgets that outspoken first ladies, especially those like herself who have refined tastes and are political infighters, are always natural media targets. The press savaged Nancy Reagan on topics as diverse as her purchase of new White House china, her reliance on astrology, and her legendary infighting with chief of staff Don Regan. Fairly or not, Mrs. Reagan never quite shook the stereotype that she had roamed the West Wing as a sort of Lady Macbeth with aristocratic appetites — a theme of Mr. Regan’s memoirs. It is likely that Michelle Obama will not either.

Attorney General Eric Holder has often found race a convenient refuge from criticism — most recently accusing his congressional auditors of racism, for their grilling him over government sales of firearms to Mexican cartel hitmen. Again, there is an obvious inference: To the degree that you do not criticize Eric Holder you are not racist; to the degree that you do, you may well be. Holder, remember, earlier called his fellow countrymen “cowards” for not sharing his own particular take on racial relations, as if all of a craven America had now become Barack Obama’s clueless Pennsylvania clingers. In exchanges over his office’s dismissal of voter-intimidation charges against New Black Panther Party members, Holder described African-Americans as “my people.” Again, note the natural corollary once we descend into these racial quagmires: If Holder can talk of his “people,” are those who do not share his racial heritage not then quite the attorney general’s “people”?

Our new racial profiling ripples out from the top. When Rick Perry referred to “a big black cloud that hangs over America — that debt that is so monstrous,” he was accused of racism; the second half of the quote was conveniently omitted. Chris Matthews referred to Perry’s support of federalism with the quip, “This is going to be Bull Connor with a smile.” Lee Siegel just wrote in the New York Times that “Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.” Think for a minute of prominent public figures who at one time or another have been accused by the Obama team of either being racist or playing racial politics against them: Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Darrell Issa, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum. The list grows in direct proportion to the uncertainty of Obama’s political fortunes.

President Obama and his supporters insist that they deemphasize matters of race, but their record in just the last four years reveals a veritable obsession with it, in a manner that was never true of prior minority members serving in high office — think of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, or Alberto Gonzales. We are not that far away from Obama’s appearance on the national scene as a serious presidential candidate in early 2008. Yet he has already reformulated racial discourse in America, most famously blasting Pennsylvania whites who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them,” and introducing “typical white person” into the national lexicon and the racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the national consciousness. The mythography of the 2008 campaign was that Barack Obama overcame the burdens of racism; the reality was that racial intemperance during that long year came principally from Barack Obama himself or his personal pastor — and, in our disturbed culture, even to acknowledge that fact earns the charge of “Racist!”

Obama has mainstreamed the practice of profiling friends and enemies on this reactionary basis of racial identity. In a Democratic National Committee video in April 2010, Obama called on “young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women . . . to stand together once again.” Are those not included in his categories, then, not to stand “together” again? Shortly before the November 2010 congressional elections, Obama suggested told a huge audience in Philadelphia that Republicans “are counting on black folks staying home.” In one of his most surreal speeches before the Congressional Black Caucus, Obama in affected fashion adopted the supposed patois of Black America in defining collective interests by shared race: “Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We’ve got work to do.” Separately, he appealed to Latino voters not to stay home from the 2010 election, but instead to “punish our enemies” — and not to fall prey to the Republicans’ “cynical attempt to discourage Latinos from voting.” I don’t think a president of the United States has ever, at least since the pre–Civil War era, openly called on a racial group to join with him to punish political adversaries.

Obama stereotyped the Cambridge police department as having “acted stupidly” for detaining his friend Henry Louis Gates, an African-American Studies professor at Harvard. He allegedly complained to political supporters that racial bias explains much of the Tea Party’s opposition to his administration. The wonder is not only that the president of the United States constantly refers to race, but that his serial obsession now earns snores rather than surprise.

Indeed, President Obama’s example has radically brought the politics of race into almost every conceivable forum. Members of the Black Caucus now routinely either allege outright racism or exhibit racist attitudes themselves if opposition arises to the Obama agenda. That is a serious charge, but it is one supported by numerous examples. For Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D., Mo.), white presidents must be “pushed a great deal more” to address black unemployment than would a black president. For Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D., Tex.), argument over the debt ceiling is proof of racial animosity toward Barack Obama; for Rep. Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), Republicans are trying to deny blacks the vote; for Rep. André Carson (D., Ind.), the Tea Party wishes to lynch blacks and hang them from trees; for Rep. Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.), Rick Perry’s job creation in Texas is “one stage away from slavery,” and on and on and on. Icons of popular culture — whether a Morgan Freeman (“It’s a racist thing”) or a Whoopi Goldberg (“I’m playing the damn [race] card”) — routinely accuse Americans of racism for their growing unhappiness over the record of the Obama administration.

What can we expect in 2012? Race all the time at every venue. In 2008, there were two general themes to the blank-slate candidacy of Barack Obama: (1) America could change history by electing its first African-American president, and (2) a vote for Barack Obama was a repudiation of the then-unpopular George Bush. But four years later there is now an Obama record of dismal economic growth, huge deficits, astronomical new national debt, high unemployment, fresh class and racial divisions, and a failed reset/outreach foreign policy that had promised breakthroughs with Iran, the Palestinians, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela, based on redefining traditional notions of friends and enemies.

Who would wish to run on a record like that?

But the alternative? In 2012, unlike 2008, there is less novelty in Barack Obama as our first black president. And George Bush is now four years into the past. For Obama, then, we are left with a demonized “them.”

Sometimes “they” are the suspect “1 percent” who enjoy their privileges through ill-gotten gains. Sometimes they are reactionary enemies of big government. And sometimes they are veritable racists — the sorts who stereotype minorities, who are cowards, who turn away voters from the polls, who do not like Americans who look different from them, who object to record debt largely as a way to disguise their own racial bias — and who surely need to be punished.

This is going to be an ugly campaign. The Obama team will revert to race unceasingly, in cry-wolf fashion, and thus cheapen the currency with every charge. In turn, the more we will hear allegations of “racism,” the less people will pay attention to them. And so all the more frequently will such discounted slurs have to be repeated — sort of like pushing about wheelbarrows of Depression-era inflated German marks to purchase ever fewer commodities.

There will be many legacies of Barack Obama. Racial divisiveness is proving the most disturbing.

The European Crisis in 2012

2012-01-18T13:08:00.000-08:00

By George Friedman
Wednesday, January 18, 2012

For much of the fourth quarter of 2011, it appeared the eurozone was doomed. Debt was piling up for several key states, and those with the ability to assist lacked the political will to do so. But the European Central Bank (ECB) stepped in in December with measures that have postponed -- not solved -- the European crisis.

Italy's Debt Crisis

The core of the Continent's ongoing problems is that most of its wealth is in the north, while the region's periphery cannot grow without outside credit. That credit was made available with the creation of the eurozone in 1999, putting member states into the same capital pool. Many states -- most notably Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland -- were able to access credit in unprecedented volumes, generating debt loads that are proving unsustainable. Barring extensive, ongoing, outside financial support, these states and much of the European banking system will go bankrupt.

Starting in early 2010 these inconsistencies began ripping through the facade of European stability, and it became obvious that sovereign defaults were imminent unless outside support became available. The question became from whence that outside support would come -- or if it would come at all. The Northern Europeans have sought to limit their exposure to the financial troubles of the periphery, grudgingly granting assistance only when the debt loads threatened the disintegration of the eurozone itself. Such irregular aid was sufficient to manage the financial problems of the small states of Greece, Portugal and Ireland -- whose combined bailouts only totaled about 430 billion euros ($545 billion). However, as the end of 2011 approached, it became clear that the next country likely in need of a bailout was Italy -- and conservative estimates put the cost of such a bailout at 800 billion euros, not even taking into account the weakness of the country's multitrillion-euro banking sector.

Barring large-scale support, Italy -- with its 2 trillion euros in national debt -- was sliding quickly toward default. By December 2011, investors were regularly demanding some 7 percent on its government debt -- roughly twice what it had been paying during most of the euro era. Such high and rising borrowing costs for a country with a debt load of 120 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) largely made a default inevitable. Simply stabilizing its debt at current levels would have required sustained budget cuts roughly four times what the Italian government is currently attempting (another 3.5 percent of GDP). Considering the political difficulty of such a task, an Italian default was highly likely to occur early in 2012. In February alone, Italy must refinance more than 60 billion euros, with another roughly 40 billion euros coming due in both March and April.

European states were unwilling to increase their commitments, extra-European states were uninterested in paying into funds without more European commitments, and the IMF lacked the resources (by half) to bailout Italy. The only institution that even theoretically could help was the ECB, which, as the manager of the eurozone money supply, could purchase sufficient volumes of Italian government debt to stabilize the system. But ECB President Mario Draghi explicitly stated on Dec. 8 that the ECB could not help: "We have a treaty, and Article 123 prohibits financing of governments." The refusal of the ECB and European governments to come to the rescue of peripheral states in general and Italy in specific meant the end of the euro era was nigh.

The ECB Steps In

But the ECB changed its stance just one day later, leaking news that it was prepared to purchase up to 20 billion euros a week of stressed eurozone government debt. That amounts to potentially one trillion euros per year. Not only is that more than enough to buy up all of Italy's debt, it is potentially enough to purchase roughly 80 percent of the 1.25 trillion euros in eurozone debt that comes due in 2012. Even adding in planned new debt issuances only raises the total volume of all sovereign eurozone debt to 1.5 trillion; the ECB could potentially buy up two-thirds of all that by itself.

Barring severe miscalculations on the part of ECB officials managing the purchases or national governments issuing the bonds on the issue of timing, it will be impossible for a eurozone country to default in 2012.

Backstopping the eurozone system even further, the ECB also formally announced Dec. 9 that it was granting all eurozone banks access to unlimited, low-interest liquidity loans with up to a three-year maturity. There have been similar programs offered before, but never with such long terms, such low rates or in such volumes. The liquidity program should prevent any eurozone bank from defaulting on its debts as well as granting them sufficient credit access that all may continue to participate in the sovereign debt markets if they so choose. Banks flocked to the new facility: On the first day, the ECB granted 490 billion euros in such loans.

Taken together, the ECB actions have turned the dissolution of the eurozone in 2012 from a near-certainty to a near-impossibility. Issues that have been critical in recent months -- the poor and weakening state of European banks, high and rising Italian borrowing costs, the possibility that eurozone states will have their credit ratings slashed, the ability of the eurozone bailout fund to raise large volumes of cash, the utter disinterest of the Chinese and Arab oil states in assisting Europe -- suddenly became irrelevant.

There will still be a painful -- and deepening -- recession. There will still be volatility as the ECB attempts to withhold assistance from time to time to encourage reforms. But the European crisis, at least for now, has departed the field of finance. Instead, in 2012 the European crisis will take a demonstrably political tone.

It's (Not) The Economy, Stupid

2012-01-18T13:04:00.000-08:00

By Michael Prell
Wednesday, January 18, 2012

What happens if the economy gets better?

If you are a Republican candidate, who has built a campaign around being a better manager of the economy, a better economy (without the benefit of your management) would spell the end of your campaign.

We can see this happening now.

A small downtick in the jobless rate from a catastrophic 9% to a slightly less catastrophic 8.5% has spurred an obedient media to declare that the economy has turned a corner, thanks to the management of the Obama administration, and to change horses now would put America’s economic recovery at risk.

Of course none of this is true. But none of this will matter if the Republican nominee runs a campaign solely on which candidate will better manage the economy.

The 2012 election is not about the economy. It is a battle for the heart and soul of America. The idea of America. The American philosophy.

Barack Obama is a philosophical warrior. He set the philosophical stage for his re-election campaign in Osawatomie, Kansas on December 6, 2011. In that one speech, he invoked the theme of ‘fairness’ fifteen times.

As I have written before, a non-thinking urge for fairness lies dormant within all children, and becomes dominant within those who fail to grow up. Case in point: the Occupy Wall Street Movement, whose sole unifying idea is that it’s “not fair” that some people have more than others. That worldview resonated with Barack Obama, who said to them in November: “You are the reason I ran for office.”

A child with one toy will look at another child with three toys and cry to his mommy: “It’s not fair!” A bully child will forcibly take one toy from the other child to restore “fairness.” But a truly bad child will demonize the other child for having three toys, whip up the playground into a jealous frenzy, and march on the “unfair” child to take away all of his toys.

If it’s childish when a child does it, then what is it when the leader of the free world does it?

The President is not a child. Therefore, I believe his internal polling shows that he can stoke the childlike instincts of a plurality of voters, and get re-elected under the banner of “fairness.”

We used to have something called “The American Dream.” It was the belief that America was the land of opportunity. The place where the world’s huddled masses could come to make better lives for themselves. The land where anyone could grow up to be President.

This desire to be #1 is deeply ingrained in the American character. If being #1 means having more toys – congratulations – you have achieved the American Dream. And your “unfair” allotment of toys (or cars or cash or corporations) will stand as a beacon in this land of opportunity: an inspiration for others to use their blessings of liberty to pursue the American Dream.

They might even open a toy store.

In the late 1970’s, America suffered under a president who sought fairness over freedom and equality over the American Dream. In his now-infamous “Crisis of Confidence” speech in 1979, President Carter said “Our nation must be fair...I will lead our fight, and I will enforce fairness in our struggle”

Carter’s philosophy was defeated by Ronald Reagan’s philosophy, which he articulated when he launched his campaign: “I cannot and will not stand by and see this great country destroy itself. Our leaders attempt to blame their failures on circumstances beyond their control, on false estimates by unknown, unidentifiable experts who rewrite modern history in an attempt to convince us our high standard of living, the result of thrift and hard work, is somehow selfish extravagance which we must renounce as we join in sharing scarcity. I don’t agree that our nation must resign itself to inevitable decline, yielding its proud position to other hands.”

The philosophical heir to Jimmy Carter is in the White House now. It took a philosopher to beat Jimmy Carter. And it will take a philosopher to beat Barack Obama.

It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the philosophy.

An Ignored 'Disparity': Part II

2012-01-18T13:01:00.000-08:00

By Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, January 18, 2012

One of the ways of trying to reduce the vast disparities in economic success, which are common in countries around the world, is by making higher education more widely available, even for people without the money to pay for it.

This can be both a generous investment and a wise investment for a society to make. But, depending on how it is done, it can also be a foolish and even dangerous investment, as many societies around the world have learned the hard way.

When institutions of higher learning turn out highly qualified doctors, scientists, engineers and others with skills that can raise the standard of living of a whole society and make possible a better and longer life, the benefits are obvious.

What is not so obvious, but is painfully true nonetheless, is that colleges and universities can also turn out vast numbers of people with credentials, but with no marketable skills with which to fulfill their expectations. There is nothing magic about simply being in ivy-covered buildings for four years.

Statistics are often thrown around in the media, showing that people with college degrees earn higher average salaries than people without them. But such statistics lump together apples and oranges -- and lemons.

A decade after graduation, people whose degrees were in a hard field like engineering earned twice as much as people whose degrees were in the ultimate soft field, education. Nor is a degree from a prestigious institution a guarantee of a big pay-off, especially not for those who failed to specialize in subjects that would give them skills valued in the real world.

But that is not even half the story. In countries around the world, people with credentials but no marketable skills have been a major source of political turmoil, social polarization and ideologically driven violence, sometimes escalating into civil war.

People with degrees in soft subjects, which impart neither skills nor a realistic understanding of the world, have been the driving forces behind many extremist movements with disastrous consequences.

These include what a noted historian called the "well-educated but underemployed" Czech young men who promoted ethnic identity politics in the 19th century, which led ultimately to historic tragedies for both Czechs and Germans in 20th century Czechoslovakia. It was much the same story of soft-subject "educated" but unsuccessful young men who promoted pro-fascist and anti-Semitic movements in Romania in the 1930s.

The targets have been different in different countries but the basic story has been much the same. Those who cannot compete in the marketplace, despite their degrees, not only resent those who have succeeded where they have failed, but push demands for preferential treatment, in order to negate the "unfair" advantages that others have.

Similar attempts to substitute political favoritism for developing one's own skills and achievements have been common as well in India, Nigeria, Malaysia, Fiji, Sri Lanka and throughout Central Europe and Eastern Europe between the two World Wars.

Such political movements cannot promote their agendas without demonizing others, thereby polarizing whole societies. Time and again, their targets have been those who have the skills and achievements that they lack. When they achieve their ultimate success, forcing such people out of the country, as in Uganda in the 1970s or Zimbabwe more recently, the whole economy can collapse.

Against this international background, the current class warfare rhetoric in American politics and ethnic grievance ideology in our schools and colleges, can be seen as the dangerous things they are. Those who are pushing such things may be seeking nothing more than votes for themselves or some unearned group benefits at other people's expense. But they are playing with dynamite.

The semi-literate sloganizing of our own Occupy Wall Street mobs recalls the distinction that Milton Friedman often made between those who are educated and those who have simply been in schools. Generating more such people, in the name of expanding education, may serve the interests of the Obama administration but hardly the interests of America.

Ending the Palestinian ‘Right of Return’

2012-01-17T02:14:00.000-08:00

By Daniel Pipes
Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Between 1967 and 1993, just a few hundred Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza won the right to live in Israel by marrying Israeli Arabs (who constitute nearly one-fifth of Israel’s population) and acquiring Israeli citizenship. Then the Oslo Accords offered a little-noted family-reunification provision that turned this trickle into a river: 137,000 residents of the Palestinian Authority (PA) moved between 1994 and 2002, some of them engaged in either sham or polygamous marriages.

Israel has two major reasons to fear this uncontrolled immigration. First, it presents a security danger. Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet security service, noted in 2005 that of 225 Israeli Arabs involved in terror against Israel, 25 of them, or 11 percent, had legally entered Israel through the family-unification provision. They went on to kill 19 Israelis and wound 83; most notoriously, Shadi Tubasi suicide-bombed Haifa’s Matza Restaurant in 2002 on behalf of Hamas, killing 15.

Second, it serves as a stealth form of Palestinian “right of return,” thereby undermining the Jewish nature of Israel. Those 137,000 new citizens constitute about 2 percent of Israel’s population, not a small number. Yuval Steinitz, now the finance minister, in 2003 discerned in the PA encouragement for family reunification “a deliberate strategy” to increase the number of Palestinians in Israel and undermine its Jewish character. Ahmed Qurei, a top Palestinian negotiator, later confirmed this fear: “If Israel continues to reject our propositions regarding the borders [of a Palestinian state], we might demand Israeli citizenship.”

In response to these two dangers, Israel’s parliament in July 2003 passed the “Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law.” The law bans Palestinian family members from automatically gaining Israeli residency or citizenship, with temporary and limited exemptions requiring the interior minister to certify that they “identify with Israel” or are otherwise helpful. In the face of severe criticism, then–Prime Minister Ariel Sharon affirmed in 2005 that “The State of Israel has every right to maintain and protect its Jewish character, even if that means that this would impact on its citizenship policy.”

Only 33 of 3,000 applications for exemptions, according to Sawsan Zaher, an attorney who challenged the law, have been approved. Israel is hardly alone in adopting stringent requirements for family reunification: Denmark, for example, has had such rules in place for a decade, excluding (among others) an Israeli husband from the country, with the Netherlands and Austria following suit.

Last week, Israel’s Supreme Court, by a 6–5 vote, upheld this landmark law, making it permanent. While recognizing the rights of a person to marry, the court denied that this implies a right of residency. As the president-designate of the court, Asher Dan Grunis, wrote in the majority opinion, “Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide.”

This pattern of Palestinian emigration toward Jews goes back almost to 1882, when European Jews began their aliyah (Hebrew for “ascent,” meaning immigration to the land of Israel). In 1939, for example, Winston Churchill noted how Jewish immigration to Palestine had stimulated a like Arab immigration: “So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased.”

In brief, you didn’t have to be Jewish to benefit from the Zionists’ high standard of living and law-abiding society. One student of this subject, Joan Peters, estimates that a dual Jewish and Arab immigration “of at least equal proportions” took place between 1893 and 1948. Nothing surprising here: Other modern Europeans who settled in under-populated areas (think Australia or Africa) also created societies that attracted indigenous peoples.

This pattern of Palestinian migration has continued since Israel’s birth. Anti-Zionist they may be, but economic migrants, political dissidents, homosexuals, informants, and just ordinary folk vote with their feet, preferring the Middle East’s outstandingly modern and liberal state to the Palestinian Authority’s or Hamas’s hellholes. And note how few Israeli Arabs move to the West Bank or Gaza to live with a spouse, though no legal obstacles prevent them from doing so.

The Supreme Court’s decision has momentous long-term implications. As Eli Hazan writes in Israel Hayom, “The court ruled de jure but also de facto that the state of Israel is a Jewish state, and thus settled a years-long debate.” The closing of the back-door “right of return” secures Israel’s Zionist identity and future.

The Keynesian School of Economics Leads to Violence

2012-01-17T02:10:00.000-08:00

By Jeff Carter
Tuesday, January 17, 2012

We are seeing the end game played out over and over in different cultures all over the world. There is one thread of similarity. All of them have practiced Keynesian economics for decades. The belief that more government spending and bigger government to solve society ills has degenerated into a stagnant economy with no growth and in many parts of the world it’s unsafe to walk down the street.

Riots have taken place in “civilized” first world countries. Spain, Italy, Greece, even France and England. Unemployment in some of them is over 20%, and for younger people that have never been hired it can be significantly higher. Even in America, we have seen mini-riots with the Occupy Wall Street crowd and in places like Wisconsin and Ohio that have tried to undo years of bad economic policy. The Arab spring was caused more by economics than it was anything else. An educated populace had no place to work, and no underlying economy to create jobs.

If you don’t understand the technical differences between the Keynesians and the Classical economic principles, you surely have heard iconic words and seen them practiced. You just didn’t realize it. “Prime the pump”, “government stimulus”, “government investment” are typical phrases used to easily translate Keynesian policies. This is just government allocating its resources to different projects. Governments cannot invest. They are not bound by the same constraints as private business.

Classical economics principles rely on the private sector to jumpstart and drive economic growth. Instead of spending money to prime the pump, they adjust tax policy and regulatory policy to change the incentives in the broader economy. Businesses, and people respond to those incentives. Because classical economists see most government spending as relatively useless, they are called “heartless”. The fresh water economists would slash government spending. Since most government spending is on social welfare, the politicians and bureaucracies that benefit from that spending go on a vicious attack.

The problem is that eventually the socialist/Keynesian school runs out of other people’s money to spend. They can’t raise taxes high enough, and the market forces them to pay ever higher interest rates to access public markets. When governments increase spending, businesses cut back. The net present value tables always catch up to them.

At this point in the cycle, they generally have created a situation where there are haves and have nots. Forced to cut spending on the people that receive a government check, those people riot. In Rome, Italy the streets are becoming unsafe.

The killings were “an offence to the Eternal City” and risked turning the Italian capital into “an immense favela where shoot-outs happen as they did in the Wild West,” said La Stampa, one of the country’s most respected daily newspapers. “In one year, Rome seems to have spun out of control.”

The violence has spread from the graffiti-clad sink estates on the outskirts of the city to the tourist-friendly piazzas and cobbled streets of the centre.

Last year there were two murders and seven kneecappings in Prati, one of the city’s most upmarket areas, lying not far from the Vatican.

Many of the killings have been well organised hits carried out in broad daylight, with few of the culprits caught, spreading fear and trepidation among the city’s nearly four million inhabitants

There doesn’t seem to be a transitional period for this base human behavior to occur. One day things are fine, the next you fear for your life.

When Keynesian economics are practiced, poverty and lower standards of living take hold. I have spoken with college students that spent time in Spain. Every evening people would be scouring city dumpsters looking for morsels to eat. When Oprah visited middle class people in ~~Belgium~~Denmark she asked, “Where’s all your stuff?”. The answer is they don’t have any stuff. They can’t afford it.

When governments ramp up their debt loads and ramp up the amount they spend on government programs, there is only one outcome. Eventually the merry go round stops. People get off and look at each other. Some have enjoyed the ride. They either built a business and got rich, or they used crony capitalism to insulate themselves and are well off. The rest of the poor saps are stuck with nothing. They have to survive, so basic human survival instincts take over.

That is the danger of accumulating so much debt. We are starting to see it played out in various economies throughout the world. Unless America changes it’s ways, or we get a huge upsurge in economic growth that will placate the debt for the short run, we are on the same miserable trail to nowhere.

Three Conservative Victories

2012-01-17T01:58:00.000-08:00

By Cal Thomas
Tuesday, January 17, 2012

While most attention is focused on the presidential race and Republican hopes to oust President Obama from office, some significant steps were taken last week on issues dear to the hearts of conservatives.

In Texas, a federal appeals court upheld the state's sonogram law, which requires that women seeking abortions view a picture of their baby before having the procedure. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling, which had issued an injunction, preventing the law from taking effect. The decision allows the state to begin enforcing the law, mandating doctors to give pregnant women "truthful, non-misleading and relevant" disclosures before they have an abortion.

The appellate court logically said, "The State's interest in respect for life is advanced by the dialogue that better informs the political and legal systems, the medical profession, expectant mothers, and society as a whole of the consequences that follow from a decision to elect a late-term abortion."

Full disclosure for women should be a winning issue for Republican presidential candidates.

Elsewhere on the social issues front, a Marion Superior Court judge in Indiana upheld that state's school voucher law. Judge Michael Keele rejected arguments from opponents that the nation's largest school voucher program is unconstitutional because parents might send their children to religious schools.

Judge Keele ruled that since scholarship vouchers are given to parents, who then decide which school best serves their children, the state does not directly fund private religious schools. About 4,000 children are currently enrolled in Indiana's voucher program.

Then there is the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. EEOC. At issue was whether a church or religious organization could hire and fire ministers according to their theological beliefs and teachings. The Obama administration had argued that the plaintiff, Cheryl Perich, a teacher, was discriminated against when she tried to get her job back at the church's school in Redford, Mich., following a medical leave. When the school refused to dismiss Perich's temporary replacement and rehire her, she filed an employment discrimination claim, which violated Lutheran doctrine that says, "disputes over ministry should be resolved (internally) ... and not by civil courts."

The Supreme Court did not rule on whether Perich was wrongfully terminated, but instead on whether she had the right to sue at all for employment discrimination. In ruling, the Court upheld what is known as a "ministerial exception," which allows religious bodies to make their own personnel rules in order to promote their religious beliefs without government interference. The Obama administration had argued the church enjoys no special protection under anti-discrimination laws. In its unanimous ruling, the Court rejected that argument as "untenable."

It will be interesting to see if the "ministerial exception" can be extended to the Obama healthcare law in the event it withstands constitutional challenge. A decision is expected this spring. The Health and Human Services Department, under the pro-choice Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, is trying to require that health insurance policies include contraceptive and abortion services. Churches will supposedly be exempt from this requirement, but other religious organizations like universities and hospitals will not be.

As Matthew J. Franck wrote last week in the Catholic scholarly publication First Things, "The only "religious exception" offered so far by the Department of Health and Human Services to its contraceptive coverage mandate is an exemption so narrow, for religious organizations that employ and serve only their own co-religionists, that even the ministry of Jesus would not qualify."

There is the potential for further advancement on life and education issues if the Republican presidential candidates talk of informed choice when it comes to abortion and education for children fortunate enough to have been born.

That is, if they are smart enough to do so.

An Ignored 'Disparity'

2012-01-17T01:55:00.000-08:00

By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, January 17, 2012

With all the talk about "disparities" in innumerable contexts, there is one very important disparity that gets remarkably little attention -- disparities in the ability to create wealth. People who are preoccupied, or even obsessed, with disparities in income are seldom interested much, or at all, in the disparities in the ability to create wealth, which are often the reasons for the disparities in income.

In a market economy, people pay us for benefiting them in some way -- whether we are sweeping their floors, selling them diamonds or anything in between. Disparities in our ability to create benefits for which others will pay us are huge, and the skills required can develop early -- or sometimes not at all.

A recent national competition among high school students who create their own technological advances turned up an especially high share of such students winning recognition in the San Francisco Bay Area. A closer look showed that the great majority of these Bay Area students had Asian names.

Asian Americans are a substantial presence in this region but they are by no means a majority, much less such an overwhelming majority as they are among those winning high tech awards.

This pattern of disproportionate representation of particular groups among those with special skills and achievements is not confined to Asian Americans or even to the United States.

It is a phenomenon among particular racial, ethnic or other groups in countries around the world -- the Ibos in Nigeria, the Parsees in India, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Germans in Brazil, Chinese in Malaysia, Lebanese in West Africa, Tamils in Sri Lanka. The list goes on and on.

Gross inequalities in skills and achievements have been the rule, not the exception, on every inhabited continent and for centuries on end. Yet our laws and government policies act as if any significant statistical difference between racial or ethnic groups in employment or income can only be a result of their being treated differently by others.

Nor is this simply an opinion. Businesses have been sued by the government when the representation of different groups among their employees differs substantially from their proportions in the population at large. But, no matter how the human race is broken down into its components -- whether by race, sex, geographic region or whatever -- glaring disparities in achievements have been the rule, not the exception.

Anyone who watches professional basketball games knows that the star players are by no means a representative sample of the population at large. The book "Human Accomplishment" by Charles Murray is a huge compendium of the top achievements around the world in the arts and sciences, as well as in sports and other fields.

Nowhere have these achievements been random or representative of the demographic proportions of the population of a country or of the world. Nor have they been the same from one century to the next. China was once far more advanced technologically than any country in Europe, but then it fell behind and more recently is gaining ground.

Most professional golfers who participate in PGA tournaments have never won a single tournament, but Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods have each won dozens of tournaments.

Yet these and numerous other disparities in achievement are resolutely ignored by those whose shrill voices denounce disparities in rewards, as if these disparities are somehow suspicious at best and sinister at worst.

Higher achieving groups -- whether classes, races or whatever -- are often blamed for the failure of other groups to achieve. Politicians and intellectuals, especially, tend to conceive of social questions in terms that allow them to take on the role of being on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.

This can be a huge disservice to those individuals and groups who are lagging behind, for it leads them to focus on a sense of grievance and victimhood, rather than on how they can lift themselves up instead of trying to pull other people down.

Again, this is a worldwide phenomenon -- a sad commentary on the down side of the brotherhood of man.

Capitalism (That's What I Want)

2012-01-16T09:37:00.000-08:00

By Katie Kieffer
Monday, January 16, 2012

The Beatles once rocked America with their cover version of “Money (That’s What I Want).” Today, I’ll rock you with my version. Capitalism don't get everything it's true. What it don't get I can't use. Now gimme capitalism (that's what I want).

Anti-capitalist sentiment is creeping into American culture and we need to immediately halt this trend. Even Republican presidential nominees Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are plunging toward the vortex of need-based morality by aggressively attacking Mitt Romney—not for his socialist slips like RomneyCare—for his businesslike communication style and his record as co-founder of Bain Capital Ventures.

When Romney recently said: "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me," he inadvertently gave his rivals fuel to attack him as a profit-hungry job-killer.

Santorum preaches that Romney fosters social division by using the widely accepted term “middle class” instead the politically correct term “middle income.” Gingrich calls Romney a “looter.” And Perry quips that Romney is a “vulture” who pursued “get-rich schemes.”

Bain invested in a steel mill (GS Technologies) that eventually failed; layoffs ensued and Bain relied on help from the U.S Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation to fulfill pension obligations. What Perry, Gingrich and Santorum fail to point out is that absurd union demands and government regulations (not warped capitalism) were largely responsible for the downfalls at GS.

It’s very dangerous to attack capitalism and capitalists for American job losses because, as financial commentator Peter Schiff explained on Fox News, our own government played a major role in steamrolling corporations and contaminating the financial markets:

“This wasn’t created by the free market. All this excess leverage is there because of the government; it’s there because of the Fed. They did this; they infected us with this disease. The fact that all these companies are now dying … what they did is they provided Wells Fargo and all these companies with free money and let them go up and leverage it up. And it’s like, I use the analogy, if a kindergarten school teacher … passes out Pixy Stix and soda pop and then leaves the classroom and she comes back and the kindergarteners have wrecked the place, who do you blame?”

In 2009, economist Jim Grant pointed out the Fed’s role in ravaging America’s free market system. He said on CNBC’s Squawk Box that inflation: “is based principally upon the rate of money-printing. … Inflation is too much money. … [And, with low interest rates, the Fed] has embarked on a vast experiment and moral hazard."

The vulture comparison reflects Perry’s misunderstanding of both capitalism and vultures. Ron Paul points out that businesspeople routinely reorganize their companies in order to operate efficiently within the free market and, in the long run, reorganization can create jobs. In nature, vultures operate by eating and safely disposing of toxic carcasses. Vultures never intentionally infect healthy creatures with toxic waste and then feed off them (that’s closer to how the Communist Party of China operates, not vultures.)

The problem with painting rich businesspeople like Romney as evil is that money and capitalism are not evil. Rather, I contend that socialism is toxic. For, socialism is irrational; it denies man’s inherent right to own private property by using “need” as the standard for morality.

Socialism also leads to communism, as seen in the land of America’s Communist Sugar Daddy:

“In China, the government can force farmers to sell their land to developers, often at rock-bottom prices, to fuel a state-run real estate machine that disproportionately enriches the elites. But rural folk, who have rising expectations for a better life, are pushing back, as evidenced by a highly visible battle over a landgrab in the fishing village of Wukan, where a local leader recently died in police custody. This is just one of thousands of protests in China every year—about 60% of them related to land disputes, according to Ran Tao, a senior fellow at the Brookings-Tsinghua Center. … [China has] hundreds of millions living on less than $2 a day—and cheap land to exploit, particularly in the West, ” writes Rana Foroohar in TIME Magazine.

If you define morality on the basis of need, bullies rule society. Might makes right and politicians will seize land, power and wealth for themselves because they supposedly need it more than commoners who scrape by on $2 a day. When need is the standard of morality, you lose control over your livelihood. Any powerful bureaucrat can take your money or property and call himself “Robin Hood” but you can’t get mad or call the cops or take him to court because he’ll just say he “needs” your property more than you do.

Now gimme capitalism (that's what I want).

Obama Has Failed Black Americans

2012-01-16T09:29:00.000-08:00

By Lurita Doan
Monday, January 16, 2012

Today Americans are remembering a great leader of our past, while at the same time thinking about how poorly our current President’s leadership compares. President Obama has done a great many things to undermine our nation and his failed policies have only deepened our economic troubles, expanded our debt, coarsened our dialogue and divided our citizens. Obama's policies have been especially damaging and painful to the Black American community, for no modern President has served the Black community as poorly as Barack Obama.

Obama's historic presidential victory provided him with a splendid opportunity. He had the bully pulpit and the opportunity to use it to talk about important matters. Obama could have advanced an important message to the Black American community about education, independence and initiative. Instead, Obama chose to reinforce the ties of dependency and, to quote Margaret Thatcher, "to entrap, to demoralise and then ignore" the plight of Black Americans in the United States.

During his term as President, Obama has produced a woeful record of poorly conceived policies combined with equal parts of failing to lead. Obama has made a mockery of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision of race relations.

Reverend King urged advancement based on "content of character" rather than "color of our skin". Americans, and especially blacks, once had hoped that Obama's historic rise to the Presidency would signal a new rebirth of effort and interest in the “content of our character’’ but that hope is now lost.

Obama is uninterested in the "content of character" issue. What a pity, for there is nothing more urgent. Consider that today, despite the fact that Obama has run up impossible debts with borrowed money to spend on pet projects, the unemployment rate for Black Americans is stuck at nearly twice the national average at approximately 16 percent, rates not seen since the Great Depression.

For younger Black Americans, in cities such as New York, the unemployment rate is a shocking 34 percent. But the misery continues. Far too many Black Americans are idle in prisons and jails. Obama once lamented that there are more Black men in prison and jail than in college. And perhaps saddest of all, nearly 70% of all Black American babies are born to single mothers.

Ironically, years ago, as a candidate, Obama seemed more determined to address the "character content" issue and received widespread praise for a speech when he said "if we are honest with ourselves, we'll admit that too many fathers are missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it."

But sadly, once elected, Obama never again has taken up the issue.

Obama has pushed a mishmash of policies and ill-considered schemes that are making the problems with the Black American community much worse. Take for example the urgent need to reform schools and the specific need to give minority kids an honest chance at a decent education, instead of being forced into a failed public school system that is widely recognized as a dead end.

Obama, could have taken the side of thoughtful reformers (such as Michele Rhee), many of whom are members of his own Democratic party but Obama choose not to do so. Instead, with eyes focused only on the next election, Obama has been unwilling to confront the politically powerful teachers' unions.

Unlike Martin Luther King, Jr. who, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, argued against Black Americans being, " completely drained of self-respect and a sense of "somebodyness", Obama encourages the "hatred and despair of the black nationalist", advocating dependency and class warfare, creating expectations that only government entitlements can create wealth, and that government has the right to redistribute wealth.

Martin Luther King, Jr. called for " normal and healthy discontent" to be "channeled through the creative outlet", but Obama does not believe in free enterprise, or the American Dream or the ability of entrepreneurship to improve one's lot in life. Nor does Obama believe, as did Dr. King, that in the Black Community, " our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America"--and when Obama espouses policies of dependency, he dooms another generation of Black Americans to the "soft bigotry of low expectations."

Obama has never been a man of ideas. Even the title of his autobiography (The Audacity of Hope) was first coined by Rev, Jeremiah Wright in a sermon. Americans can see that Obama doesn't believe in free enterprise, and he doesn't believe in American exceptionalism. Obama is the "wooden ventriloquist" of the Democrat Party apparatchik, interested only in herding Black Americans, like sheep, to the polls, certain that despite his destructive policies, Black Americans, somehow, will vote for him again.

And so, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s bold vision for Black Americans, a vision of hope, a vision of equality and occupying an equal place in the execution of the American Dream must await a new generation of Black leaders because one thing is clear, Obama ain't it.

Obama Officials Say We Don't Trust the Government Enough. Why Would We?

2012-01-16T09:27:00.000-08:00

By Michael Tanner
Monday, January 16, 2012

With ObamaCare still as unpopular as ever — the latest Rassmussen poll shows Americans favoring repeal of the new health-care law by a 53-40 margin — the Obama administration has developed a new theory as to why. We simply don’t trust government enough.

Donald Berwick, who is leaving his post this month as director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services, told The New York Times that health-care reform was a lot like the moon shot. Americans weren’t rocket scientists, he noted. They didn’t understand everything the government was doing, but they still believed in the government’s ability to send men to the moon. Why couldn’t it be the same with health-care reform, he lamented.

Well, perhaps because NASA wasn’t trying to shoot most of us into space. On the other hand, all of us will be impacted by this health-care law. Indeed, health care involves some of the most personal, private and important decisions in our lives.

Or maybe its because we’ve already seen enough results of ObamaCare to have a pretty good idea that it’s not going to work.

For example, a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation shows family premiums increasing by a whopping 9% this year, three times more than the previous year’s increase. The average family policy now costs more than $15,000 per year. Not only has ObamaCare failed to slow premium growth, but at least 2 percentage points of that increase is directly attributable to the health-care law’s provisions.

ObamaCare is also already reducing our health-insurance choices. The new law has already driven a number of insurance companies out of the market, meaning there will be less competition and fewer choices. Moreover, the new law has already cut back on flexible-spending accounts used by some 30 million workers, slashing permissible contributions in half and limiting what account funds can be used to pay for. And just released regulations from HHS may well eliminate most health savings accounts, effecting another 10 million workers and their families. And, of course, once the individual mandate kicks in, in 2014, assuming its not struck down by the Supreme Court, all of us will have to purchase a government-designed insurance plan, even if it is more expensive or contains benefits that we don’t want.

We also know that ObamaCare is going to cost us more in debt and taxes. A new study from the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the subsidies in the bill will add $1.36 trillion to the national debt over the first seven years after the bill is fully implemented. And at a time when 47% of Americans already pay no income tax, the bill’s tax credits will remove as many as 8.1 million more Americans from the tax rolls.

And we know that the health-care law will slash payments to physicians and hospitals, meaning it will be more difficult for us to find and see a physician. The government’s own actuaries estimate that these payment cuts could force as many as 15% of hospitals to close.

Finally, we should remember that ObamaCare contained a Ponzi scheme-like, long-term program, the CLASS Act, that was so actuarially unsound that even this administration had to pull the plug on it.

“Trust us,” just doesn’t seem like an adequate response to these problems.

On issue after issue, the Obama administration has made it clear that they believe they know better than the average American. We should just turn our lives over to them and trust them to make decisions for us.

No doubt we all make mistakes in our lives. But in the last few years, we’ve seen the government invade a country that turned out not to have weapons of mass destruction, ran up $15 trillion in debt, all but bankrupted Medicare and Social Security and nudged us toward a housing bubble that nearly brought down the economy. Should we really trust a government that thought shipping guns to Mexican drug lords and giving $535 million to a money-losing solar panel company were good ideas?

In fact, that will ultimately be the big question in next year’s elections. Whom do you trust to run your life, yourself or the self-appointed experts from the government? And that’s not rocket science.

Postmodern Political Correctness and Christianity

2012-01-16T09:24:00.000-08:00

By Mike Adams
Monday, January 16, 2012

I’m often asked how Marxism took root in the American university system. I’ve never been fully satisfied with my standard answer to the question. Given my background in psychology, I sometimes seek psychological explanations to the exclusion of broader historical explanations. But I do believe there is something different about the mind of the man to whom Marxism appeals.

The Marxist is less willing to compete with others. He is content living in a world where everyone is similarly situated. He relinquishes the prospect of success for the assurance that he cannot fail. The same mentality is often found among those who seek refuge in the academy. There is little chance that the academic will find fame or fortune. But a few years of hard work will be rewarded with promotion and tenure and all of the security that comes with it.

Marxism was once the dominant philosophy in higher education – at least within the social sciences and humanities. But one would be hard pressed to make the case that Marxism remains the dominant philosophy on college campuses today. That title now belongs to postmodernism - although the two philosophies cannot be divorced from one another. Marxism is an economic and political philosophy. Postmodernism is a broader worldview. But postmodernism could not have achieved its rapid ascent without Marxism.

The Marxist emphasis on class struggle has fueled the postmodern assault on objective truth. It has led to the idea that truth is simply a byproduct of power struggles between warring factions. That idea has dangerous moral ramifications.

Postmodernism poses a threat to college students and to the very existence higher learning itself. For many students, postmodern education lights a well-paved path that leads directly to moral relativism. The two are not the same thing. But postmodernism eventually compels moral relativism. If there is no objective truth then moral positions cannot be objectively true. When morals become private or subjective, they tend to be built around personal conduct – simply to accommodate personal conduct. That is why many college students find themselves trapped in a downward moral spiral in the wake of abandoning the idea of objective truth. I am speaking from personal experience as well as years of observation.

Sixteen years ago, I had an experience for which I am most grateful. I was in a prison in South America interviewing prisoners and prison guards. I witnessed firsthand a very brutal clubbing of a young prisoner. I heard prison guards admit that they shot prisoners in the back on their way out of the prison. This was just after they tricked them into believing they were free to go. The same prison officials told stories of suspects shocked into giving false confessions. This was after police officers wired the suspects’ testicles to car batteries as they sat locked in police vans undergoing coercive questioning.

I needed to witness that beating and hear those stories in order to be shocked out of my own childish belief system. The day I walked out of that prison, I left behind my faith in moral and cultural relativism. I realized that forced confessions, brutal beatings, and staged escape executions were all objectively wrong. The time and place of such atrocities is irrelevant. They are examples of purely objective evil. But there is good news accompanying this realization. As C.S. Lewis often said, the shadow proves the sunshine. Therefore, the heart is sometimes awakened to a greater appreciation of the truth after witnessing its collision with falsity.

When I returned to my position in the secular university, I realized we were doing something more than simply promoting a worldview that made it easy for students to spiral downward morally. We were also clinging to a philosophy that was threatening the very existence of higher education as we know it. That philosophy was being encoded into campus rules that threatened permanent entrenchment of the very ideas which gave them birth.

I’ve written of many conflicts involving such policies – the most notable cases involving campus speech codes. But I often wonder how many times the reader has taken the time to examine the common themes that run through the many cases. It is worth taking a moment to reflect back upon some of the worst.

In 2006, two young conservative women contacted me for help. They had protested The Vagina Monologues because the play encouraged use of the c-word as a way of describing women. After posting a sign saying “We are not (c-words)” feminists invoked the university speech code. They claimed that they, as feminists, could use the c-word as a term of endearment. They then claimed that their detractors could not use the same word if they did so in a derisive way. In other words, the constitutionality of the c-word hinged upon the thought behind the word at the time of its utterance. This was more than simple thought control. It was state-enforced though control undertaken for the ostensible purpose of protecting fragile feminists from being offended.

These speech code supporters are the same people who advocate abortion. They are also the same people who hurled abusive racial epithets at those two plaintiffs I brought to the Alliance Defense Fund. But we won this case in both the court of law and the court of public opinion. Those will be familiar themes when we dissect the next case in part two of this series.

How to Stop a Liberal from Talking

2012-01-15T05:54:00.000-08:00

By Mark Baisley
Sunday, January 15, 2012

In his book How to Stop Dialogue In Its Tracks, Sacha Baron Cohen provides three awkward statements for guys that can be employed to bring a lousy date to a quick conclusion; “I just believe that environmentalists should mind their own business.” Or, 2. “Don’t you find the obsolescence of the slide rule to be terribly regrettable?” And, 3. “Does the Roe versus Wade decision trouble you as much as it does me?”

In recognition of the 39th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling this week, I am going to jump right on topic number three. OK, there is no such book calledHow to Stop Dialogue In Its Tracks. But if there were, Sacha Baron Cohen surely would have been the author.

In spite of there having been a Supreme Court ruling in 1973, the pro-life versus pro-choice political debate remains unsettled in America after all these years. There are three good reasons for this.

First is the abject sloppiness of the Roe versus Wade legal ruling. The majority opinion, delivered by Associate Justice Blackmun, cited a right to privacy given to pregnant women by way of the due process clause in Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. Here is that very wording of the amendment:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The reason that you don’t see the word “privacy” anywhere in there is because Section 1 was written to eliminate the practice of slavery in the privacy of the plantation. The notion that behavior done in private should be exempt from state laws is a Pandora’s Box that could apply to the worst of domestic behavior if carried to its logical conclusion. Harry Blackmun did not pull the idea of privacy out of sound jurisprudence. He pulled it out of his own jurist posterior.

Judge Robert Bork wrote this about the Roe v. Wade ruling in his landmark book, The Tempting of America, “Unfortunately, in the entire opinion, there is not one line of explanation, not one sentence that qualifies as legal argument.”

The second reason that the abortion matter is not settled is that it is disquieting to people of good conscience. And to my fellow pro-lifers, I will assert that we need to mature our side of the debate to a point where pro-choice proponents do not feel like we are casting judgement against them. Please understand that they are dealing with a personal uneasiness in their own lives. We should be about winning their hearts rather than defeating their priorities.

I believe that the primary reason that settling answers about abortion are so elusive is that the wrong questions were asked by the Supreme Court in 1973, led by Chief Justice Warren Burger. During the Roe v. Wade hearings, the justices posed questions in an attempt to establish conclusions about when life begins in the development of an unborn human. The prosecution provided expert testimony, presenting the latest scientific guesswork of the period. All of the phases of in-utero fetal development were described to the court.

Out of that conversation, the notion of trimesters was adopted in the majority opinion. The court reasoned that during the first trimester, the fetus was not to be considered a person. With that understanding, the Fourteenth Amendment wording, “nor shall any State deprive any person of life” would not apply.

As the fetus develops, states are allowed to add restrictions on abortions up to the point of birth. But no personhood is assumed until a live birth is complete. Even the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 merely outlaws the procedure. It does not attempt to outlaw the destruction of the fetus, which is likely how the law was possible to be upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007.

The mess that will not be resolved began with the assumption by Justice Burger that the Supreme Court had the authority to determine when life begins; that they owned the role of assigning personhood to the fetus at a point in development; that the Supreme Court Justices could endow people with the right to life.

The problem is that the Burger court forgot that the Supreme Court is an instrument of the government, instituted by the people and deriving their just powers from the consent of those people. A branch of that government should not even entertain the idea that they are in the position of the Creator.

As the founders realized and recorded, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The Supreme Court does not endow us with our rights. They merely secure the rights already endowed to us by our Creator.

So, when does life begin?

Interesting conversation for a good date, but not the business of government employees; even those employed as Supreme Court Justices.

How Progressives Work

2012-01-15T05:48:00.000-08:00

By Derek Hunter
Sunday, January 15, 2012

As hype around the general election ramps up, it looks like progressives again will do anything to hold on to power and advance their agenda. Events this week gave us a peek behind the curtain into the mind of the honest, “tolerant” class and exposed how they work. Let’s take a look.

The Shell Game

One thing about political lefties: They assume the general public is even dumber than their ideas. Surveys repeatedly show Americans are not liberal, that the word evokes a negative reaction from a large percentage of people.

So what do they do? They start calling themselves “progressives” and continue to push the exact same left-wing, anti-liberty agenda people have roundly rejected in the past. But a turd sandwich agenda with a fancy wrapper and a focus-grouped name (one whose history is fully and devastatingly exposed by Jonah Goldberg in his best-selling Liberal Fascism) won’t make a turd sandwich any more palatable. That’s why they have to mislead and obfuscate about who they are, what they’re doing and why.

This week, the day after asking for another trillion dollars in spending, President Obama gave a speech about how he wants to shrink government. His plan to combine several departments within the Commerce Department, shrink the federal work force by about 1,000 and save an estimated $3 billion over 10 years, was hailed as “bold” by progressives and an example of how seriously he takes our current fiscal mess.

They were counting on, and got, compliance by the media in not reporting that this “bold initiative” save approximately 3/4 of one day’s worth of the deficit Obama has racked up ($4 billion). That means that if the president’s plan were enacted, by 6 p.m. today, the federal government will have added the same amount of debt as this “bold” plan saves over 10 years.

Progressives play a constant game of three-card monte with their intentions, couching their goals in sad, worst-case scenarios presented as the norm, always with accompanying anecdotes about those who suffer or will suffer without some expansion of government.

They will raise and spend millions to publicize the suffering of one person from wealthy donors who wouldn’t give a dime directly to aid the person being exploited. It’s always the same – their big government, one-size-fits-all solution is always the only way to address some problem that never will confront the vast majority of Americans.

You’ll hear plenty of examples of these in President Obama’s State of the Campaign, er, Union address later this month.

The Hypocrisy

Aside from exploiting the less fortunate, Progressives also are hypocrites – they have to be. There’s no way Michael Moore, Keith Olbermann or any of the media elites who routinely go on TV to lament “greed” would dare live the lives they seek to impose on others.

There are no negative consequences to progressive’s hypocrisy. They rail against capitalism and wealth by engaging in, ahem, capitalism to amass wealth. Michael Moore doesn’t work for free – or even for a reasonable price.

This embrace of hypocrisy allows Democrat National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to decry the incivility of political discourse one minute and imply the Tea Party is responsible for the tragic shootings last year in Tucson the next.

It allows President Obama to give a speech that complains about Republicans’ unwillingness to work with him one minute, then create unconstitutional powers to bypass Congress and claim Republicans want to poison the air and water and starve children and the elderly the next.

When you’re neither bound by reality nor held accountable for your words and actions by your bedfellows in the media, there become simply no limits on what you can seek to impose on others.

The Silencing

Progressives will exploit anything and anyone to advance their agenda. Individuals are props; groupthink rules.

This week a video of Marines urinating on dead Taliban fighters surfaced. Why they did it, I have no idea. Actually, I imagine it has something to do with that odd less-than-friendly feeling you get toward someone who has killed your friends and tried to kill you. I have had a tiny bit of experience with this. Years ago, someone pointed a gun at me from a car driving through a gas station in Detroit. Even though this person didn’t shoot, I continue to have these less-than-friendly feelings. I can’t imagine how I would feel if they did shoot and I did survive.

Should these Marines have done this? No. Is it the moral equivalent of harboring those who murdered 3,000 civilians in our country, filmed themselves beheading prisoners or strapping bombs to children and sending them into crowds? Absolutely not. But don’t tell that to progressives.

Progressives saw an opportunity to attack the military and those who support them, and they couldn’t resist.

My friend, Dana Loesch, after having had enough of the Left’s attacks on the military over this, took to her radio show and said, “Now we have a bunch of progressives who are talking smack about our military because there were Marines caught urinating on corpses, Taliban corpses. Can someone explain to me if there’s supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of a Taliban fighter? Someone who, as part of an organization, murdered over 3,000 Americans? I’d drop trou and do it too.”

It’s a sentiment I’ve heard from countless active duty military members who can’t say so publicly and by veteran and Congressman Allen West, R-Fla., who said, “Unless you have been shot at by the Taliban, shut your mouth. War is hell.”

Keith Olbermann, Media Matters and just about every fascistic progressive organization jumped on Dana’s comments in the hope of getting her fired from CNN. These leftists, who defend using tax dollars to pay someone to dip a crucifix in urine and call it art, claim freedom of speech as sacred, as long as you agree with them. But they failed miserably on this one as CNN backed up Dana’s right to her own opinion.

But it’s the latest example of people who will fight to defend someone’s right to urinate on the U.S. flag, unless they’ve set it on fire, or ignore an Occupy Wall Street mutant defecating on a police car because they agree with them but will actively seek to silence anyone who dare speak something with which they disagree. It’s the progressive way.

The End

Progressives won’t tell you their true intentions because they can’t. They know how unpopular they are. For a group who continually espouses “democracy” as a virtue, they routinely ignore the clear will of the majority. It’s “agenda über alles” for them, period.

But that agenda doesn’t apply to them. They’re the smart ones, our betters. With only positive consequences for hypocrisy, and so many lemmings willing to give them millions of their dollars to tell them how evil money is, it pays to be a hypocrite.

With an army of vacuum-headed, non-thinking flying monkeys waiting for attack orders at their disposal, progressives have become their own modern Stasi – relentlessly harassing those with whom they disagree. Opposing ideas aren’t engaged. Those who hold them are to be personally destroyed.

The more they are rejected the more militant they become, so as the election approaches expect to see more anger, more hatred, more hypocrisy, more personal attacks and all the other things for which these “tolerant” progressives are known.

Do Social Conservatives Care About Capitalism

2012-01-15T05:42:00.000-08:00

By Austin Hill
Sunday, January 15, 2012

The Republican primary races are underway, and pundits are abuzz about whether or not religious social conservatives will embrace Mitt Romney.

That’s an interesting and worthwhile question. But here’s another interesting question: do religious social conservatives care about the free market economy, and capitalism?

I’ve pondered this question over the years, in previous columns and in various talk radio venues. When I do, I usually get very angry, visceral answers – responses like “of course we do,” and “how do you dare even ask?”

Despite the anger and discomfort, this is an important question to be asking. Religious social conservatives are large in number and can influence the outcomes of elections. And as our nation is currently at an economic crossroads, it remains to be seen what our country and our country’s economic system will be like in the future.

But before we think about capitalism, ponder this for a moment: who are “religious social conservatives,” anyway? According to research from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 70 Percent of American adults identify with some form of evangelical Protestant Christianity, mainline denominational Protestant Christianity, Catholicism, Orthodox Judaism, or Mormonism.

Obviously, adherents to these various faith traditions do not all think alike on issues of culture and public policy. However many members of these religious groups share common, strongly-held beliefs and values, so it is not surprising that over the past several decades they have often exhibited similar responses to public policy concerns amid America’s changing cultural landscape.

This is to say that not every individual who practices one of these religious traditions necessarily qualifies as a religious social conservative. However, the religious social conservative movement is comprised of members all of these various faith communities, while the movement is most certainly dominated by Evangelical Protestant Christians.

The earliest beginnings of this movement can be traced back to the social upheaval of the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s youth culture, and the 1973 Roe versus Wade Supreme Court decision. After decades of non-participation in elections and public policy debates, many devoutly religious Americans became alarmed by a “hippie” generation that was determined to overthrow our culture’s authority structures, and by their government arbitrarily determining that unborn children were not really human beings.

Thus, “social conservatism” emerged as a movement that was focused on the most basic of all social structures – the traditional family. Over the past several decades, concerns about the life of the unborn child, the rights of parents, and the definition of marriage have all taken center-stage among social conservatives, while each of these concerns have been openly regarded as “moral issues” that are worthy of religious peoples’ attention.

While the long-standing concerns of social conservatives remain in-play today, the United States now finds itself at another turning point. Will our country continue as the “most free” among the world’s free market economies? Or will the U.S. devolve in to more of a European-styled, socialistic economy, where private individuals and businesses make fewer decisions with their own economic resources, and politicians and government bureaucrats make more of those decisions?

Given our nation’s economic crossroads, and given that social conservatives are so influential among the American electorate, the religious social conservative movement needs to look within itself and answer this question: should economics be regarded as one of the “moral issues” that is worthy of our attention? And if it is, then which economic system do social conservatives prefer – our free market capitalistic system, or a more socialistic, government-controlled system?

Economic systems and policies are, after all, an expression of how a society regards both its weakest and most powerful members and everybody else in between. Likewise, economic policies often play a key role in determining who “wins” and who “loses” in a society, and they can either encourage or discourage positive, productive behavior.

Social conservatives can begin addressing economic issues by first confronting a very common assumption that is widely held as true – the assumption that capitalism is an economic system built on greed and selfishness, while socialism is a system based on generosity and “fairness.”

Despite its prevalence, this is a false assumption. When properly understood and implemented, capitalism is an economic system that allows every willing participant the opportunity to gain entry into the marketplace; demands that every participant abide by a uniform set of rules; rewards people according to a system of merit; and allows private individuals and organizations the freedom both to succeed, and to fail. Special governmental favors – bailouts and so forth – are an anathema to a capitalistic economic system.

Socialism, however, places in the hands of politicians and governmental bureaucrats the power to take away increasing amounts of wealth from certain individuals (generally the more wealthy in a society), and re-distribute that wealth to people that are believed to be “deserving” of it. In such an economic system, personal responsibility, a system of merit, and one’s freedom to succeed and to fail, are all undermined.

Economics is absolutely a “moral issue,” and our nation’s economic dilemmas are numerous and profound. Will the influential social conservative movement have a voice in setting the course for our nation’s economic future?

Obama: Incompetent or Evil?

2012-01-15T05:37:00.000-08:00

By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, January 13, 2012

The most acute division on the right — the one that will give Mitt Romney the most trouble — is not between moderates and hard-core right-wingers, between electability-minded pragmatists and ideologues, or between the Tea Party and the Republican establishment. It is between those Republicans who disagree with Barack Obama, believing his policies to be mistaken, and those who hate Barack Obama, believing him to be wicked. Mitt Romney is the candidate of the former, but is regarded with suspicion, or worse, by the latter. The former group of Republicans would be happy merely to win the presidential election, but the latter are after something more: a national repudiation of President Obama, of his governmental overreach, and of managerial progressivism mainly as practiced by Democrats but also as practiced by Republicans.

It is unlikely that those seeking a national act of electoral penance for having elected Barack Obama are going to get what they are after. For one thing, the number of Americans who believe President Obama to be merely incompetent is far greater than the number of Americans who believe him to be, not to put too fine a point on it, evil. For another, that larger group of voters is, for once, probably right.

Presidents are cultural lightning rods, the last two more so than many others. This has some weird effects. George W. Bush was hated and loathed by the Democratic base, which is aggressively anti-religious and seeks to impose a liberal cultural homogeneity on the nation (the totems of which are gay marriage, abortion on demand, and the environmental liturgy) to such an extent that even unremarkable initiatives sent them into a panic when they bore the imprimatur of W. President Bush’s office of faith-based initiatives, for example, represented the sort of thing that could easily have been signed into law by Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Far from representing the camel’s nose of Christian theocracy poking under the tent of the First Amendment, the office’s oversight council today includes the president of Seedco, the founder of Asian Indian Women of America, Rabbi David N. Saperstein, the president of Catholic Charities, the head of Big Brothers Big Sisters America, and the director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies — an all-American mix, with no Torquemada or Chillingsworth to be found. But because the initiative touches on religious organizations and was brought into being by President Bush, it was greeted in many quarters as though it were a revival of the Salem witch trials. Faith-based initiatives may be a good idea or a bad idea, but the program is not what its most hysterical critics thought it was.

President Obama, for his part, has signed some truly awful pieces of legislation into law: the stimulus package, Cash for Clunkers, and, most notably, Obamacare. Bad as these are, the reaction among some conservatives has been overblown, and I write that as the author of a book that contains the sentence, “Of course Obamacare is socialism.” The president has been described as a budding Hitler, a bush-league Stalin, a saboteur, a revolutionary, etc. But as lamentable as President Obama’s agenda has been, there is not much that is especially remarkable about it. President Obama is not a revolutionary Bolshevik; he is a conventional liberal of a very familiar kind. Obamacare is precisely the same sort of program that a Pres. Al Gore or a Pres. John Kerry might have signed into law. The most remarkable thing about President Obama is that, unlike even the masterly Bill Clinton, he managed to get a big part of the Democrats’ health-care agenda enacted as law. He did this with a major assist from his predecessor, who left him with a much more liberal Congress than might otherwise have been elected.

A different Democrat, or a Republican, would have put together a different kind of stimulus package, and probably (probably) a smaller one, but the wrongheaded thinking behind it is hardly revolutionary. Cash for Clunkers and Solyndra are the most characteristic of President Obama’s initiatives, marked as they are by fanciful thinking, cronyism, and futility. But President Obama presses the Right’s buttons in more or less the same way President Bush pushed the Left’s, and that is about something other than (or in addition to) his policy choices. It is about who he is. At this point, Democrats will say, in that smug way of theirs: “And who he is is black, and that’s what this is all about.” I am not such a Pollyanna (or so deaf) as to believe that the tone of the president’s skin is a complete non-issue among his most bitter critics, but it is a much smaller issue than Democrats such as Eric Holder would have you believe.

Mitt Romney’s critique of President Obama is not that of Newt Gingrich, who has borrowed Dinesh D’Souza’s formulation that Obama’s views are grounded in the “Kenyan anti-colonialism” of his estranged father. Nor is it of the “Hitler Believed in Government-Run Health Care, Too” variety one hears among the lesser luminaries of talk radio. Romney’s critique is that Obama is a manager in way over his head, that he does not know what he is doing, and that his attempts to solve problems he does not understand are making things worse. This seems to me the more credible explanation. But if you are the sort of person who believes that President Obama is trying to destroy America, then Romney’s rhetoric is bound to prove unsatisfying, and you will go seeking sterner stuff — from Gingrich, from the cannier Rick Santorum, from also-rans such as Michele Bachmann or future also-rans such as Rick Perry, or from Ron Paul, if that’s your thing. Among my correspondents, there are many who are very plain about the fact that they would rather lose with Gingrich or Santorum than win with Romney.

Conservatives who suspect that Romney isn’t really in his heart of hearts one of us probably are correct. He doesn’t smell like a right-winger. But, given the cultural aspects of the presidency mentioned above, there may be some advantages to electing Mr. Plain Vanilla, assuming that he can get himself elected. It is very likely that whoever the next president is, he will be working with a Republican Senate and a Republican House, albeit a Republican House that may have a few fewer Republicans than today’s. If Paul Ryan, John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell wish to send the White House a balanced-budget deal, a President Romney might have an easier time negotiating it than would a lightning-rod President Gingrich or President Santorum, because it will feel more like a piece of prudent fiscal legislation than like a partisan assault on all that Democrats hold sacred and dear. The package could be precisely the same, but the politics change considerably depending on who is signing the bill into law. And, inconvenient as that fact is, there are going to be Democrats around in 2013, probably a lot of them. If you think that we can balance the budget and reform entitlements while ignoring them, you are kidding yourself.

This will be especially important when it comes to repealing Obamacare, the first step of which is: Do not announce that you are repealing Obamacare. The smart way to repeal Obamacare is to revisit the legislation and to amend it in ways that remove the worst of its statist overreach and replace it with the best available free-market alternatives. The Wyden-Ryan approach is one possible model for amending Obamacare, but it is not the only one, and it is not sufficient by itself. In any case, it will be more effective to amend the legislation in such a way that it is effectively repealed and replaced than to have an emotionally satisfying but probably unwinnable fight over repeal per se. The Supreme Court may give Republicans an assist on this by ruling against the mandate, which, regardless of any additional rulings about the remainder of the legislation, would render the entire package economically unworkable and necessitate reopening the case. This, too, probably will be easier to accomplish with a bloodless manager such as Romney at the helm than an ideological flamethrower.

In the next four years, Republicans should pass a major fiscal-consolidation package that balances the budget, and replace Obamacare in the course of enacting a broader entitlement-reform program. That’s a lot of work. That is the necessary domestic agenda. It requires winning, first of all, but it also requires getting some congressional Democrats on board and winning some support from Democrats and independents in the electorate. That will not feel good, but it is necessary.

For conservatives, it is a question of whether we choose a president based on who he is or based on what he can do. Those conservatives who believe that the way forward is to nominate the anti-Obama hold that Americans are so fed up with the president that they are ready to elevate a hardcore ideologue to the presidency. Andy McCarthy is representative of them when he writes that Gingrich is a “plausible candidate this time around, when in many cycles he would not be, because the main issue is Obama’s radicalism — the president has people frightened enough that what would appear to be insurmountable baggage in some elections could be cancelled out this time around.” But who are these frightened Americans for whom “the main issue” in 2012 is going to be Obama’s so-called radicalism? (And what do we call the 35 percent of Americans who support a Canadian-style single-payer health-care system? Insurgents?) Are we so sure of their support? In what states do they live, and why do they fail to show up in the polling data, which consistently find that voters’ main concerns are the economy, jobs, and related issues?

As the original campaign consultant put it, the critical thing in every battle is to know your enemy, to know yourself, and to know the terrain. That means, among other things, refusing to tell yourself fairy tales about how everybody is really on your side and just waiting to discover the fact.

Where Have All the Liberals Gone?

2012-01-14T16:12:00.000-08:00

By John C. Goodman
Saturday, January 14, 2012

There are two conservatives for every liberal in America. That's the message of a recent David Brooks column as well as a Gallup survey. I think the imbalance is much starker. I would guess there are four conservatives for every liberal. Maybe even more.
Here's a test I invite you to take. Watch C-Span's morning call-in show and listen to what people who phone in on the "Democrat" or "liberal" line have to say. When is the last time you heard a caller say, "We should all pay higher taxes so that the government can provide us with universal day care"? Or how about, "We should all pay higher taxes so the government can provide us with universal long term care"? I bet you can't remember ever hearing that.

Here is what I suspect you will hear: Teachers complaining that teachers aren't paid enough. Union members complaining about competition from workers overseas. Senior citizens whining about the meagerness of Social Security or Medicare benefits. Minority callers advocating more affirmative action. And what is the common denominator of these comments? Self-interest.

Yes, I know. Special interests are in both parties. Why wouldn't they be? Yet as I wrote in my analysis of "progressivism," the left in America has elevated special interest privilege to an art form.

Here's the point: people wanting more, more, more are nothing more than people pursuing their own self interest in politics. They are not in principle different from any other special interest group. Importantly, they have nothing in common with what we normally have in mind by the term "liberalism."

There is a reason for that. There are very few people around who want to give government more power over their money, their property or their lives. And Brooks is probably right about the reason why: Most people don't trust government. In fact, only 10 percent trust the government to do the right thing most of the time, according to opinion polls.

Here is a second test. Keep watching C-Span. After the outside callers are gone, most days you get to watch Congress in action. Have you ever watched a series of speeches on the House floor? Have you ever watched a real Congressional debate? Try it some time. Then ask yourself this question: Do you trust the people you are watching on TV to manage your retirement pension? Or do you have more confidence in your employer or Fidelity or even Merrill Lynch? Do you trust the people on the House floor to manage your health care? Or do you have more confidence in your employer or even UnitedHealthcare or Aetna?

Congress in action most days reminds us of school children insulting and taunting each other. It's like a group of adolescents desperately in need of adult supervision. It's the opposite of the civil, rational deliberation that the Founding Fathers must have hoped for.

It takes a very special kind of person to watch lunacy in action and then decide to give the lunatics more control over your life. There are such special people, of course. They are disproportionately congregated in Hollywood, on the campuses of the nation's colleges and universities and in the elite news media. What are the common characteristics all too many of them share? Arrested development (they never bothered to grow up), aversion to the rest of humanity (they really are elitists), a lack of common sense (they've never really managed anything) and a failure to master the syllogism (they approach the world emotionally, not logically).

Here is something you need to understand: liberalism is not an ideology. It's a sociology. It's not a way of thinking. It's a way of responding to the world emotionally.

What was the core issue during the dispute over the constitutionality of ObamaCare's requirement that everyone buy health insurance? It was whether there are any limits to government power. If the government can force you to buy health insurance, can it also require you to eat broccoli every day, one federal judge asked. Surprisingly, liberals in general refused to draw a line on the hypothetical broccoli mandate. They were unwilling to say that it's unconstitutional for the government to tell you what you must eat for lunch.

Then George Stephanopoulos during the Republican presidential debate the other night surprised Governor Romney with a truly off-the-wall question: Do you think state governments should be able to outlaw contraceptives? Romney was nonplused, as were the other candidates. They can be forgiven for not knowing that all true liberals believe that it is unconstitutional for government to tell you what contraceptives you can and can't use.

Think about that. It's permissible for government to tell you that you must eat broccoli, but impermissible for government to tell you that you can't have a contraceptive. Anyone who thinks this way isn't thinking at all. He's emoting.

That's why you don't find very many real liberals in places like Dallas, Cincinnati or Indianapolis. But you do find a lot of people in those cities who are self-interested. If liberals get votes in cities like these, it is only because they are appealing to self-interest.

Obama's America

2012-01-14T16:08:00.000-08:00

By Rich Galen
Friday, January 13, 2012

This is the first of an occasional series of what I am calling "Obama's America."

While the political elite are focused on the Republican primary fight, the rest of America is focused on looking for (or keeping) a job; hoping the kids are actually learning something at school; despairing over, while staring at, their evaporating retirement accounts; and wondering, while they watch geniuses like me verbally spar with other geniuses on cable talk shows who, if anyone is actually watching the store.

I started thinking about this while contemplating the Was-Bain-Capital-The-Bane-Of-The-American-Economy action in South Carolina. Mitt Romney is a big boy and has a good campaign. They opened the door to the attacks by Newt Gingrich by attacking Gingrich in Iowa.

The world, to torture what Lincoln once wrote, will little note, nor long remember what they say about each other there, but we should start taking close notes of what our political leaders are doing in and to America.

Like it or not, Barack Obama is President of the United States. And, by that I mean, whether he likes is or not; or whether we like it or not.

One week from today will mark the fourth anniversary of Barrack Obama's inauguration. He, as all new Presidents are, was full of hope, full of ideas, and full of himself.

Near the beginning of the speech he delivered on the Capitol Steps he said:

On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.

Alas, like so many of the 43 men who delivered that address before him, the soaring rhetoric crashed under the weight of the same "petty grievances and false promises" he had promised to erase from the national blackboard.

"Bold" would not be an adjective most of us would use to describe President Obama's leadership style. President Obama has, in the words of his supporters, chosen to lead from behind.

In dealing with the Congress he went from completely ignoring the Republican Minority when Democrats controlled both Chambers, to completely ignoring the entire Branch by ruling via Executive Order and redefining the Constitution after the 2010 mid-term elections in which his policies and leadership style cost Democrats control of the U.S. House and broke the back of the near filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate.

In Obama's America, your opponents are too disobedient and negotiations with them are too tiresome. There is only one President in all the land, and it is he.

In dealing with the American economy - a problem he, indeed, inherited, he has consistently retreated to his "community organizer" roots and embrace the "worn-out-dogma" of us versus them. Rather than reduce the "recriminations" he talked about, he has created more government agencies to watch over fewer growing businesses to institutionalize recriminations against economic growth.

In Obama's America, economic success is no longer something to be proud of, is something to be embarrassed about, investigated for, and taxed on.

In Egypt he stood by as the group of demonstrators caused the overthrow of a bad leader - President Hosni Mubarak - to, like the Hydra of Greek Mythology, be replaced by a group of bad leaders - the very generals who had protected Mubarak and done his bidding during the decades of his rule.

Foreign policy, in Obama's America, is based upon the French model: We want to have a big say, but that whole "big stick" thing is so, so 1900's.

The world, at the best of times, is an uncertain place. The world in 2012 is uncertain, unstable, and unpredictable. We need President Obama to step up and assume the mantle of the position the people of America have bestowed upon him.

We need him to act like the president of the United States.

The Ron Paul Faction

2012-01-14T16:02:00.000-08:00

By Mark Steyn
Saturday, January 14, 2012

In the 2010 election the New Hampshire Republican party took 298 out of 400 house seats, 19 out of 24 state-senate seats, and all five seats on the executive council. A little over a year later, in the state’s presidential primary, the same (more or less) electorate gave over 56 percent of its votes to a couple of moneyed “moderates,” one of whom served in the Obama administration and the other of whom left no trace in office other than the pilot program for Obamacare. Another 23 percent voted for Ron Paul. Supporters of the three other “major” candidates in the race argue that, if only the other two fellows would clear off, a viable conservative alternative to Mitt Romney would emerge. In fact, even if you combine Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum’s share of the vote, it adds up to a mere 19.5 percent: Were Bain Capital to come in and restructure the “conservative” candidates into one streamlined and efficient Newt Perrtorum, this unstoppable force would be competitive with Jon Huntsman.

According to George Mason University’s annual survey of freedom in the 50 states, New Hampshire is the freest state in the union, so one would expect there to be takers for Ron Paul’s message. On the other hand, facing a very different electorate in Iowa, Paul pulled pretty much an identical share of the poll. It may be time for those of us on the right to consider whether it’s not so much the conservative vote that’s split but whether conservatism itself is fracturing.

No candidate is ideal, and we conservatives are always enjoined not to make the perfect the enemy of the good — or in this case the enemy of the mediocre: Sitting next to me last Tuesday on Fox News, the pollster Frank Luntz said that Romney in his victory speech was now starting to use words that resonate with the American people. The main word he used was “America.” On Tuesday night Romney told us he wants to restore America to an America where millions of Americans believe in the American ideal of a strong America for millions of Americans. Which is more than your average Belgian can say. The crowd responded appreciatively. An hour later a weird goofy gnome in a baggy suit two sizes too big came out and started yakking about the Federal Reserve, fiat money, and monetary policy “throughout all of history.” And the crowd went bananas!

It’s traditional at this point for non-Paulites to say that, while broadly sympathetic to his views on individual liberty, they deplore his neo-isolationism on foreign policy. But deploring it is an inadequate response to a faction that is likely to emerge with the second-highest number of delegates at the GOP convention. In the end, Newt represents Newt and Huntsman represents Huntsman, but Ron Paul represents a view of America’s role in the world, and one for which there are more and more takers after a decade of expensive but inconclusive war. President Obama has called for cuts of half a trillion dollars from the military budget. In response, too many of my friends on the right are demanding business as usual — that the Pentagon’s way of doing things must continue in perpetuity. It cannot.

America is responsible for about 43 percent of the planet’s military expenditure. This is partly a reflection of the diminished military budgets of everyone else. As Britain and the other European powers learned very quickly in the decades after the Second World War, when it comes to a choice between unsustainable welfare programs or a military of global reach, the latter is always easier to cut. It is, needless to say, a false choice. By mid-decade the Pentagon’s huge bloated budget will be less than the mere interest payments on U.S. debt. Much of which goes to bankrolling the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Nevertheless, faced with reducing funding for China’s military or our own, the latter will be the easier choice for Washington.

So the assumptions of the last 60 years are over — and not just because of the cost. If America’s responsible for 43 percent of global military expenditure, why doesn’t it feel like that? Why does the United States get so little bang for the buck? It is two-thirds of a century since this country won a war (and please don’t bother writing in to say what about Grenada? or Panama?). In the days after 9/11, many Bush-administration officials assured us that this time it would be different, and even liberals believed them. A decade later, Washington can’t wait to get the hell out of the Hindu Kush, and the day after they do it will be as if they never set foot on that benighted sod. Illiterate goatherds with string and fertilizer have tied down the hyperpower for twice as long as it took America to win the Second World War. Something is wrong with this picture.

Ron Paul says he would pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan “as quickly as the ships could get there.” Afghanistan is a landlocked country, but hey, that’s just the kind of boring foreign trivia we won’t need to bother with once we’re safely holed up in Fortress America. To those who dissent from this easy and affordable solution to America’s woes, the Paul campaign likes to point out that it receives more money from America’s men in uniform than anybody else. According to the Federal Election Commission, in the second quarter of 2011, Ron Paul got more donations from service personnel than all other Republican candidates combined plus President Obama. Not unreasonably, serving soldiers are weary of unwon wars — of going to war with everything except war aims and strategic clarity. I would hazard that the recent video of U.S. Marines urinating on Taliban corpses is a coarser comment on the same psychosis, and the folly of fighting a determined and murderous enemy by distributing to your officers bulk orders of that charlatan’s bestseller Three Cups of Tea. There is a logical progression from three cups of sweet tea to those acts of micturition that the Pentagon would do well to ponder.

That said, the isolationists are delusional. Two centuries ago, when Napoleon sold a constrained Appalachian republic the port of New Orleans, he crowed, “I have given England a maritime rival who sooner or later will humble her pride.” Instead, a young America enjoyed (excepting one or two hiccups) the blessings of the Pax Britannica for over a century. It’s relatively easy to be a romantic isolationist republic when the Royal Navy’s out there enforcing global order. Likewise, after 1945, Britain’s imperial decline was cushioned by Washington’s assumption of the old lion’s role as order maker. But the notion that America can retain all the comforts and prosperity of global dominance while shrugging off all the responsibilities is fantasy. “Fortress America” is less a fortress than a state of denial, yet it’s one with increasing appeal to many Republican voters.

With characteristic timidity, Mitt Romney says that as commander-in-chief his Afghan strategy would be determined by the “commanders in the field.” More tea and sympathy! But a lazy deference to the inviolability of the present arrangements for another two-thirds of a century of unwon wars will not suffice. I am in favor of a leaner, meaner military — emphasis on both adjectives. A broke America will perforce wind up with the first. But, if we want the second, the foreign-policy Right will have to make a better case than it has this primary season.