Friday, October 29, 2010
C.A.A. on Break
I will be out of town this weekend and not able to post to the C.A.A. Regular updates will resume on Monday.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Taking the Public Out of NPR
Defunding NPR now would be like fixing a leaky faucet while your house is on fire.
Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
First, a confession: I listen to NPR. Sometimes, when I have to explain this fact to my right-wing brethren, I’ll forgo trying to make the case that much of what NPR does is simply great radio and instead I’ll note that it’s more useful to listen to enemy broadcasts than more friendly fare.
This is a serious point. Like never before, it’s now possible to get all of your news from avowedly non-liberal or explicitly right-wing media outlets. (It’s been possible to dine exclusively on liberal fare since World War II, at least.) Growing media diversity is great, but with it comes the danger of ghettoization. If we all retreat to our respective clubhouses and simply consume the news and views that are most conducive to our worldviews, the odds for political progress diminish.
This is neither a strictly conservative point nor some gauzy celebration of moderation and compromise. Politics is ultimately about persuasion, and if you can’t understand where your opponents are coming from, you’ll never be able to convince them they’re wrong or convince the majority of Americans your arguments are right. In fact, you may not even have the better arguments if you’ve never tested them on people who don’t naturally agree with you.
The near suicidal idiocy of NPR’s decision to fire Juan Williams — allegedly for his comments on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor about Muslims — will only worsen this trend. For good reason, millions of conservatives don’t trust NPR — and the rest of the mainstream media. And because Williams’s comments were entirely defensible, even laudable (he honestly admitted a reflexive prejudice and then condemned the idea that policies should be guided by such prejudices), NPR’s stated reason makes no sense.
NPR claims it fired Williams because its journalists can’t offer “opinions.” This is a pathetic joke. By that standard, NPR’s Nina Totenberg — and many of her similarly opinionated colleagues — should have been fired years ago.
It’s obvious that NPR simply didn’t like the fact that Williams was sharing his talents with Fox News, even as a liberal. Less obvious, but perhaps just as telling, NPR seems to be lending way too much weight to the complaints of groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the left-wing gadflies at Media Matters for America. If you dance when outfits like these whistle their usual tunes, odds are that you tilt to the left.
NPR should be defunded, but not because it’s liberal. If NPR were right-wing (stop laughing!) it’d still be wrong for the federal government to be in the news business or to subsidize one set of views over another. The same goes for PBS. I have no huge problem with funding documentaries about bears and mummies, but state-run television news is an embarrassment in the age of C-SPAN and YouTube.
Heck, it already dropped the word “public” from its name — it’s now just NPR. If it can stop being public in name, it can stop being public in deed.
Still, Republicans would be crazy to make this a priority after the midterm elections. Andrew McCarthy, my friend and National Review colleague, insists that defunding NPR should be a test case about the fiscal seriousness of the coming GOP House majority. He compares NPR funding to a person wildly in debt charging a fancy chandelier to his credit card while defaulting on his mortgage and his kids’ tuition. If we can’t defund NPR, he asks, how are we going to repeal Obamacare?
I take his point, but the analogy is flawed. Take it from a former public television producer: PBS and NPR have spent decades target-hardening their budgetary bunkers. Busting them would take an enormous amount of time and effort, with miniscule reward. Indeed, Democrats would love it if Republicans allowed themselves to be baited into what would essentially be a culture-war fight over public radio (the last “war on Big Bird” was a disaster for the GOP).
Meanwhile, Obamacare’s roots are weak, it’s exposed and unpopular — and it represents a far greater threat to fiscal health. Forget chandeliers; going after NPR now would be like fixing a leaky faucet while your house is on fire. You can get around to that, after you’ve dealt with the crisis at hand.
Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
First, a confession: I listen to NPR. Sometimes, when I have to explain this fact to my right-wing brethren, I’ll forgo trying to make the case that much of what NPR does is simply great radio and instead I’ll note that it’s more useful to listen to enemy broadcasts than more friendly fare.
This is a serious point. Like never before, it’s now possible to get all of your news from avowedly non-liberal or explicitly right-wing media outlets. (It’s been possible to dine exclusively on liberal fare since World War II, at least.) Growing media diversity is great, but with it comes the danger of ghettoization. If we all retreat to our respective clubhouses and simply consume the news and views that are most conducive to our worldviews, the odds for political progress diminish.
This is neither a strictly conservative point nor some gauzy celebration of moderation and compromise. Politics is ultimately about persuasion, and if you can’t understand where your opponents are coming from, you’ll never be able to convince them they’re wrong or convince the majority of Americans your arguments are right. In fact, you may not even have the better arguments if you’ve never tested them on people who don’t naturally agree with you.
The near suicidal idiocy of NPR’s decision to fire Juan Williams — allegedly for his comments on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor about Muslims — will only worsen this trend. For good reason, millions of conservatives don’t trust NPR — and the rest of the mainstream media. And because Williams’s comments were entirely defensible, even laudable (he honestly admitted a reflexive prejudice and then condemned the idea that policies should be guided by such prejudices), NPR’s stated reason makes no sense.
NPR claims it fired Williams because its journalists can’t offer “opinions.” This is a pathetic joke. By that standard, NPR’s Nina Totenberg — and many of her similarly opinionated colleagues — should have been fired years ago.
It’s obvious that NPR simply didn’t like the fact that Williams was sharing his talents with Fox News, even as a liberal. Less obvious, but perhaps just as telling, NPR seems to be lending way too much weight to the complaints of groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the left-wing gadflies at Media Matters for America. If you dance when outfits like these whistle their usual tunes, odds are that you tilt to the left.
NPR should be defunded, but not because it’s liberal. If NPR were right-wing (stop laughing!) it’d still be wrong for the federal government to be in the news business or to subsidize one set of views over another. The same goes for PBS. I have no huge problem with funding documentaries about bears and mummies, but state-run television news is an embarrassment in the age of C-SPAN and YouTube.
Heck, it already dropped the word “public” from its name — it’s now just NPR. If it can stop being public in name, it can stop being public in deed.
Still, Republicans would be crazy to make this a priority after the midterm elections. Andrew McCarthy, my friend and National Review colleague, insists that defunding NPR should be a test case about the fiscal seriousness of the coming GOP House majority. He compares NPR funding to a person wildly in debt charging a fancy chandelier to his credit card while defaulting on his mortgage and his kids’ tuition. If we can’t defund NPR, he asks, how are we going to repeal Obamacare?
I take his point, but the analogy is flawed. Take it from a former public television producer: PBS and NPR have spent decades target-hardening their budgetary bunkers. Busting them would take an enormous amount of time and effort, with miniscule reward. Indeed, Democrats would love it if Republicans allowed themselves to be baited into what would essentially be a culture-war fight over public radio (the last “war on Big Bird” was a disaster for the GOP).
Meanwhile, Obamacare’s roots are weak, it’s exposed and unpopular — and it represents a far greater threat to fiscal health. Forget chandeliers; going after NPR now would be like fixing a leaky faucet while your house is on fire. You can get around to that, after you’ve dealt with the crisis at hand.
WikiLeaks’ Selective Morality
Despite its claims of uncovering bad behavior by governments around the world, WikiLeaks chiefly targets the U.S. military.
Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
There has never been anything quite like WikiLeaks in American military history. We are engaged in a great experiment to see whether the U.S. military can still persist in a conflict when it knows that any and all of its private communications can become public — and will be selectively aired and hyped by people with a preconceived bias against it. Had the public known in real time from periodic media leaks about operational disasters surrounding the planning for the D-Day landings, intelligence failures at the Bulge or Okinawa, or G.I. treatment of some German and Japanese prisoners, the story of World War II might have been somewhat different. But then, in those paleolithic days FDR and Winston Churchill did not have to be flawless to be perceived as being far better than Adolf Hitler.
So we now have a war within a war — one to defeat the enemy, and quite another, to preemptively backtrack, footnote, and explain the context of one’s actions for future armchair judges and jurors who will adjudicate battle behavior from the library carrel. Note here that no other government bureau or private entity functions under quite such rules of engagement — the communications of Mr. Obama’s staff are not public; we don’t read the internal memos of Warren Buffett or Bill Gates; the minutes of New York Times editorial meetings remain private; we don’t even get to read the private communications and discussions that the often petulant Julian Assange conducts with his own WikiLeaks team and learn whether there is dissent among his staff over his own ethics and methods. Surely a leaker of any and all things should not demand privacy for himself?
Note also that there is no attempt at systematic or coherent leaking. WikiLeaks mostly targets the West. It may now and then leak to us something about dastardly behavior by an African or Chinese bureau or religious sect, but it really does not tend to uncover things about the Russian, Iranian, Cuban, or Chinese armed forces in any way commensurate with its fixation on the U.S. military. It either has no wish to, has no means to, or is very afraid of the consequences — in the fashion of the reaction to the Danish cartoons — should it choose to do so. I suppose that WikiLeaks believes that the Western military can “handle” a climate of zero confidentiality and still protect the likes of Mr. Assange and his team. After all, as a high-profile, elite Westerner, he assumes a level of comfort, security, civil rights, freedom, and affluence in his many international travels and operations not accorded to most who live under other systems, and impossible without the protective umbrella of the military he seems so bent on destroying.
Nor do we know why some documents are leaked and published and others are not. In one sense, Mr. Assange is a rogue version of Bob Woodward: The would-be archival leaker knows that if he gets his particular documents to WikiLeaks promptly, his own preferred narrative will emerge; if he does not, perhaps someone else will preempt him by leaking different archives, which may include evidence of his own culpability, or at least a version of events not to his liking.
So WikiLeaks’ morality is quite selective. Mr. Assange takes a divine view that as judge and juror — and executioner — it is up to him to decide the ethics of what to, and what not to, release — though the public has no idea of his nontransparent modus operandi. But while we may be shocked for a while at the Machiavellian nature of our own military, that morning outrage soon passes amid the sheer clutter of the daily news. What persists, however, is the danger to thousands in the field who helped the U.S. military — not on the WikiLeaks supposition that we must be perfect to be good, but in the more mundane belief that we were far better than the wretched alternative on the battlefield. So, yes, we ponder the morality of WikiLeaks in the newsroom; thousands of others less fortunate do so far, far away, anticipating a bullet to the head.
Finally, I expect Mr. Assange’s organization soon to implode. You see, despite all its utopian chest-thumping about seeking out secretive evil the world over, it is really designed, in Daniel Ellsberg fashion, to expose bad faith and cruelty on the part of the evil capitalist military-industrial Western state. But right now, that apparatus here in the Great Satan is being run by the likes of the hyper-liberal Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, with the enthusiastic sanction of the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and CBS News. Bush’s Iraq War was and is still fair game, and we can all indulge in groupthink outrage about his minions. But WikiLeaks is now flitting around within the red zone, and any leaks about Afghanistan or Iraq post January 2009 reflect upon a left-wing Obama government. A public perception of inappropriate military policy would endanger an entire far-left social experiment at home. The result will be that either Mr. Assange and his team pull back, or, more likely, the outraged media will abruptly decide that his leaking grows stale and he has already had more than his 15 minutes of fame. Who knows, maybe the head of NPR will soon scoff that Mr. Assange should first check in with his psychiatrist or his publicist — take your pick.
Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
There has never been anything quite like WikiLeaks in American military history. We are engaged in a great experiment to see whether the U.S. military can still persist in a conflict when it knows that any and all of its private communications can become public — and will be selectively aired and hyped by people with a preconceived bias against it. Had the public known in real time from periodic media leaks about operational disasters surrounding the planning for the D-Day landings, intelligence failures at the Bulge or Okinawa, or G.I. treatment of some German and Japanese prisoners, the story of World War II might have been somewhat different. But then, in those paleolithic days FDR and Winston Churchill did not have to be flawless to be perceived as being far better than Adolf Hitler.
So we now have a war within a war — one to defeat the enemy, and quite another, to preemptively backtrack, footnote, and explain the context of one’s actions for future armchair judges and jurors who will adjudicate battle behavior from the library carrel. Note here that no other government bureau or private entity functions under quite such rules of engagement — the communications of Mr. Obama’s staff are not public; we don’t read the internal memos of Warren Buffett or Bill Gates; the minutes of New York Times editorial meetings remain private; we don’t even get to read the private communications and discussions that the often petulant Julian Assange conducts with his own WikiLeaks team and learn whether there is dissent among his staff over his own ethics and methods. Surely a leaker of any and all things should not demand privacy for himself?
Note also that there is no attempt at systematic or coherent leaking. WikiLeaks mostly targets the West. It may now and then leak to us something about dastardly behavior by an African or Chinese bureau or religious sect, but it really does not tend to uncover things about the Russian, Iranian, Cuban, or Chinese armed forces in any way commensurate with its fixation on the U.S. military. It either has no wish to, has no means to, or is very afraid of the consequences — in the fashion of the reaction to the Danish cartoons — should it choose to do so. I suppose that WikiLeaks believes that the Western military can “handle” a climate of zero confidentiality and still protect the likes of Mr. Assange and his team. After all, as a high-profile, elite Westerner, he assumes a level of comfort, security, civil rights, freedom, and affluence in his many international travels and operations not accorded to most who live under other systems, and impossible without the protective umbrella of the military he seems so bent on destroying.
Nor do we know why some documents are leaked and published and others are not. In one sense, Mr. Assange is a rogue version of Bob Woodward: The would-be archival leaker knows that if he gets his particular documents to WikiLeaks promptly, his own preferred narrative will emerge; if he does not, perhaps someone else will preempt him by leaking different archives, which may include evidence of his own culpability, or at least a version of events not to his liking.
So WikiLeaks’ morality is quite selective. Mr. Assange takes a divine view that as judge and juror — and executioner — it is up to him to decide the ethics of what to, and what not to, release — though the public has no idea of his nontransparent modus operandi. But while we may be shocked for a while at the Machiavellian nature of our own military, that morning outrage soon passes amid the sheer clutter of the daily news. What persists, however, is the danger to thousands in the field who helped the U.S. military — not on the WikiLeaks supposition that we must be perfect to be good, but in the more mundane belief that we were far better than the wretched alternative on the battlefield. So, yes, we ponder the morality of WikiLeaks in the newsroom; thousands of others less fortunate do so far, far away, anticipating a bullet to the head.
Finally, I expect Mr. Assange’s organization soon to implode. You see, despite all its utopian chest-thumping about seeking out secretive evil the world over, it is really designed, in Daniel Ellsberg fashion, to expose bad faith and cruelty on the part of the evil capitalist military-industrial Western state. But right now, that apparatus here in the Great Satan is being run by the likes of the hyper-liberal Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid, with the enthusiastic sanction of the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and CBS News. Bush’s Iraq War was and is still fair game, and we can all indulge in groupthink outrage about his minions. But WikiLeaks is now flitting around within the red zone, and any leaks about Afghanistan or Iraq post January 2009 reflect upon a left-wing Obama government. A public perception of inappropriate military policy would endanger an entire far-left social experiment at home. The result will be that either Mr. Assange and his team pull back, or, more likely, the outraged media will abruptly decide that his leaking grows stale and he has already had more than his 15 minutes of fame. Who knows, maybe the head of NPR will soon scoff that Mr. Assange should first check in with his psychiatrist or his publicist — take your pick.
Liberalism’s Pessimistic Elites
Among the liberal establishment, there is gloom, selfishness, and demographic cynicism.
Michael Knox Beran
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
The liberal establishment has already rendered its verdict on the 2010 election: Voters are angry because they aren’t very smart.
“We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on,” Sen. John Kerry says, “so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening.” Vice President Joe Biden argues that the Obama administration’s accomplishments are “just too hard to explain” to voters who are presumably too dim to understand them. Maureen Dowd writes in the New York Times that Sarah Palin “has made ignorance fashionable,”while Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post discovers that the “dirty little secret” of American politics “is that most Americans don’t really know what they think about the issues that so animate the political conversation in Washington, and what they think they know about them is often wrong.”
The notion that voters are less than rational has been endorsed by President Obama himself, who earlier this month said that part of the reason “our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared.”
The pessimism of the liberal establishment about the capacity of voters to cast intelligent ballots in next week’s election is matched only by their doubt about the capacity of citizens to make intelligent choices in their own daily lives. The two pessimisms are closely related and go far toward explaining why liberal elites continue to cherish a vision of rule by beneficent experts not unlike that of the nine ranks of philosophical mandarins in old China, each distinguished by its characteristic button.
The belief that the common man is an idiot is the perennial cri de coeur of mandarinism. If most people are fools on whom “facts and science and argument” have little effect, it makes sense to deprive them (as discreetly as possible) of as much liberty of action and electoral leverage as practicable. It makes sense to enact laws that limit their freedom of choice and “nudge” them into making the approved decisions. It makes sense to outsource regulatory and purse-string power to administrative czars and quasi-independent bodies, to stimulus and bailout sages, to all those boards and commissions of experts which, being insulated from the power of voters to hire and fire their representatives, have proved to be less accountable to democracy than elected lawmakers and magistrates.
Yet the policies that make sense to the credentialed elites of mandarin-world are being questioned as never before by voters who appear to have had enough of them.
A recent Rasmussen survey found that 65 percent of voters “say they prefer a government with fewer services and lower taxes” to “one with more services and higher taxes.” (By contrast, 70 percent of what Rasmussen calls the “political class” want “more services and higher taxes.” Another Rasmussen poll finds that most likely voters believe that “their representative in Congress does not deserve reelection if he or she voted for the national health care law, the auto bailouts or the $787-billion economic stimulus plan.”
The voters who have taken these stands may not be masters of public policy, but they are right to reject mandarin-world, for several reasons:
(1) Mandarin-world is grounded in a neo-Spenglerian vision of the decline of the West. The low cost of labor in China and India, the liberal elites reason, spells the end of American prosperity as we have known it; the idea that reliance on the country’s traditional creed of liberty and limited government will turn things around and lead to innovation, growth, and jobs is a fantasy. Instead the mandarins seek to reconcile Americans to European-style stagnation by imposing new costs and burdens on the economy. As a result of the health-care law’s fiats, some consumers may see their insurance premiums rise by more than 20 percent in the coming months. AT&T, Verizon, 3M, Caterpillar, and John Deere have already taken charges against earnings as a result of the law, which in addition to its other dirigiste provisions mandates a vast expansion in 1099-MISC reporting requirements that will soon entangle small businesses in a mass of red tape. And that’s just the beginning. In January, in what is being called “the biggest tax increase in American history,” the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are due to expire, and the death tax is to be recalled to life. Between now and 2016, an array of other taxes is to be phased in. In the gloomy future envisioned by the mandarins, a growing cadre of experts will divide an ever-shrinking pie while the rest of us wait in line for one of the president’s shovels.
(2) Mandarin-world encourages taxpayer-subsidized privilege. Even in hard times, the mandarins who have their fingers on the levers of the machine prosper. The Federal City, awash in stimulus funds, is the only boom town left in the country. Wall Street, after its wallow in TARP dough, is doing just fine. Public-sector workers, the Praetorian Guard of the liberal establishment, have never had it so good. If all power corrupts, mandarin power corrupts in a uniquely obnoxious way.
(3) Mandarin-world is founded on demographic cynicism. As much of the country looks forward to chastising the mandarins in November, the liberal cognoscenti are smiling in their sleeves. Demography, they believe, is on their side. Liberal theorists argue that as the number of non-Hispanic whites falls relative to the overall population, growing non-white minorities will continue to favor the Democratic party. Together with members of the “millennial generation” (those born between 1978 and 2000), they will guarantee a series of Democratic victories in the coming years. “While it is possible that the millennial generation [voters] may become more conservative as they age,” demographer Ruy Teixeira tells the Daily Kos, “evidence suggests that they are likely to remain largely progressive.” The “party of no” (as Teixeira calls the GOP) “has a limited shelf life.” Translation: A rising tide of minority votes will enable the mandarins to continue to enlarge the “progressive” public-sector-dependency regime. It is a deeply cynical argument, one that presupposes that many non-white Americans are not possible converts to the country’s opportunity culture and will instead remain sunk in the dependency culture of modern liberalism.
The pessimism of the liberal elites grows out of the paradoxical nature of their situation as apologists for mandarinism in a democracy. The mandarin who oscillates between government work and lucrative assignments from private firms eager to exploit his connections to the powerful; the banker whose bonuses are implicitly subsidized by a too-big-to-fail policy he has lobbied the state to adopt; the teachers-union bigwig whose grandeurs are underwritten by stinted schoolchildren “waiting for superman”; the progressive lawmaker who oversees the financial industry and accepts gifts from its tycoons — none of these potentates can reconcile the grace and favor he enjoys on account of his privileged relation to the state with his egalitarian professions of fairness. Dissimulation is the school of morose spirits; and the continuous practice of hypocrisy will in time degrade the tone of even the most sanguine mind.
The sourness of the elites sheds light on their dark romance with an Old World mandarinism in which the citizen (in Tocqueville’s words) is “accustomed to find a functionary always at hand to interfere with all he undertakes,” and a central authority that “says to him: ‘You shall act just as I please, as much as I please, and in the direction which I please.’” Mandarinism assorts well with the elitist’s low opinion of others’ potential and his conviction that he himself is always the smartest one in the room. At the same time, the power the mandarin derives from his policies does something to make up for the burden of dissembling he bears in selling his program to people who are not intelligent enough to appreciate the virtues of a directing elite.
Most people may not be geniuses, but smart people aren’t all that bright either. That is why Tocqueville, although he was himself a highly cultivated aristocrat and deeply learned man, argued that freedom is the best policy. He favored not the pessimistic mandarinism of Europe but the optimistic American faith that the citizenry should to the greatest extent practicable be left “free in its gait and responsible for its acts.” “It profits me but little,” he said,
Michael Knox Beran
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
The liberal establishment has already rendered its verdict on the 2010 election: Voters are angry because they aren’t very smart.
“We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on,” Sen. John Kerry says, “so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening.” Vice President Joe Biden argues that the Obama administration’s accomplishments are “just too hard to explain” to voters who are presumably too dim to understand them. Maureen Dowd writes in the New York Times that Sarah Palin “has made ignorance fashionable,”while Steven Pearlstein of the Washington Post discovers that the “dirty little secret” of American politics “is that most Americans don’t really know what they think about the issues that so animate the political conversation in Washington, and what they think they know about them is often wrong.”
The notion that voters are less than rational has been endorsed by President Obama himself, who earlier this month said that part of the reason “our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we’re hard-wired not to always think clearly when we’re scared.”
The pessimism of the liberal establishment about the capacity of voters to cast intelligent ballots in next week’s election is matched only by their doubt about the capacity of citizens to make intelligent choices in their own daily lives. The two pessimisms are closely related and go far toward explaining why liberal elites continue to cherish a vision of rule by beneficent experts not unlike that of the nine ranks of philosophical mandarins in old China, each distinguished by its characteristic button.
The belief that the common man is an idiot is the perennial cri de coeur of mandarinism. If most people are fools on whom “facts and science and argument” have little effect, it makes sense to deprive them (as discreetly as possible) of as much liberty of action and electoral leverage as practicable. It makes sense to enact laws that limit their freedom of choice and “nudge” them into making the approved decisions. It makes sense to outsource regulatory and purse-string power to administrative czars and quasi-independent bodies, to stimulus and bailout sages, to all those boards and commissions of experts which, being insulated from the power of voters to hire and fire their representatives, have proved to be less accountable to democracy than elected lawmakers and magistrates.
Yet the policies that make sense to the credentialed elites of mandarin-world are being questioned as never before by voters who appear to have had enough of them.
A recent Rasmussen survey found that 65 percent of voters “say they prefer a government with fewer services and lower taxes” to “one with more services and higher taxes.” (By contrast, 70 percent of what Rasmussen calls the “political class” want “more services and higher taxes.” Another Rasmussen poll finds that most likely voters believe that “their representative in Congress does not deserve reelection if he or she voted for the national health care law, the auto bailouts or the $787-billion economic stimulus plan.”
The voters who have taken these stands may not be masters of public policy, but they are right to reject mandarin-world, for several reasons:
(1) Mandarin-world is grounded in a neo-Spenglerian vision of the decline of the West. The low cost of labor in China and India, the liberal elites reason, spells the end of American prosperity as we have known it; the idea that reliance on the country’s traditional creed of liberty and limited government will turn things around and lead to innovation, growth, and jobs is a fantasy. Instead the mandarins seek to reconcile Americans to European-style stagnation by imposing new costs and burdens on the economy. As a result of the health-care law’s fiats, some consumers may see their insurance premiums rise by more than 20 percent in the coming months. AT&T, Verizon, 3M, Caterpillar, and John Deere have already taken charges against earnings as a result of the law, which in addition to its other dirigiste provisions mandates a vast expansion in 1099-MISC reporting requirements that will soon entangle small businesses in a mass of red tape. And that’s just the beginning. In January, in what is being called “the biggest tax increase in American history,” the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are due to expire, and the death tax is to be recalled to life. Between now and 2016, an array of other taxes is to be phased in. In the gloomy future envisioned by the mandarins, a growing cadre of experts will divide an ever-shrinking pie while the rest of us wait in line for one of the president’s shovels.
(2) Mandarin-world encourages taxpayer-subsidized privilege. Even in hard times, the mandarins who have their fingers on the levers of the machine prosper. The Federal City, awash in stimulus funds, is the only boom town left in the country. Wall Street, after its wallow in TARP dough, is doing just fine. Public-sector workers, the Praetorian Guard of the liberal establishment, have never had it so good. If all power corrupts, mandarin power corrupts in a uniquely obnoxious way.
(3) Mandarin-world is founded on demographic cynicism. As much of the country looks forward to chastising the mandarins in November, the liberal cognoscenti are smiling in their sleeves. Demography, they believe, is on their side. Liberal theorists argue that as the number of non-Hispanic whites falls relative to the overall population, growing non-white minorities will continue to favor the Democratic party. Together with members of the “millennial generation” (those born between 1978 and 2000), they will guarantee a series of Democratic victories in the coming years. “While it is possible that the millennial generation [voters] may become more conservative as they age,” demographer Ruy Teixeira tells the Daily Kos, “evidence suggests that they are likely to remain largely progressive.” The “party of no” (as Teixeira calls the GOP) “has a limited shelf life.” Translation: A rising tide of minority votes will enable the mandarins to continue to enlarge the “progressive” public-sector-dependency regime. It is a deeply cynical argument, one that presupposes that many non-white Americans are not possible converts to the country’s opportunity culture and will instead remain sunk in the dependency culture of modern liberalism.
The pessimism of the liberal elites grows out of the paradoxical nature of their situation as apologists for mandarinism in a democracy. The mandarin who oscillates between government work and lucrative assignments from private firms eager to exploit his connections to the powerful; the banker whose bonuses are implicitly subsidized by a too-big-to-fail policy he has lobbied the state to adopt; the teachers-union bigwig whose grandeurs are underwritten by stinted schoolchildren “waiting for superman”; the progressive lawmaker who oversees the financial industry and accepts gifts from its tycoons — none of these potentates can reconcile the grace and favor he enjoys on account of his privileged relation to the state with his egalitarian professions of fairness. Dissimulation is the school of morose spirits; and the continuous practice of hypocrisy will in time degrade the tone of even the most sanguine mind.
The sourness of the elites sheds light on their dark romance with an Old World mandarinism in which the citizen (in Tocqueville’s words) is “accustomed to find a functionary always at hand to interfere with all he undertakes,” and a central authority that “says to him: ‘You shall act just as I please, as much as I please, and in the direction which I please.’” Mandarinism assorts well with the elitist’s low opinion of others’ potential and his conviction that he himself is always the smartest one in the room. At the same time, the power the mandarin derives from his policies does something to make up for the burden of dissembling he bears in selling his program to people who are not intelligent enough to appreciate the virtues of a directing elite.
Most people may not be geniuses, but smart people aren’t all that bright either. That is why Tocqueville, although he was himself a highly cultivated aristocrat and deeply learned man, argued that freedom is the best policy. He favored not the pessimistic mandarinism of Europe but the optimistic American faith that the citizenry should to the greatest extent practicable be left “free in its gait and responsible for its acts.” “It profits me but little,” he said,
that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life, and if it so monopolizes movement and life that when it languishes everything languishes around it, that when it sleeps everything must sleep, and that when it dies the state itself must perish.Tocqueville’s wake-up call has seldom been more pertinent.
Brass Oldies: Part II
By Thomas Sowell
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Songs that are "golden oldies" have much less pleasant counterparts in politics-- namely, ideas and policies that have failed disastrously in the past but still keep coming back to be advocated and imposed by government. Some people may think these ideas are as good as gold, but brass has often been mistaken for gold by people who don't look closely enough.
One of these brass oldies is the idea that the government can and must reduce unemployment by "creating jobs." Some people point to the history of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when unemployment peaked at 25 percent, as proof that the government cannot simply stand by and do nothing when so many millions of people are out of work.
If we are going to look back at history, we need to make sure the history we look at is accurate. First of all, unemployment never hit 25 percent until after-- repeat, AFTER-- the federal government intervened in the economy.
What was unemployment like when the federal government first intervened in the economy after the stock market crash of 1929? It was 6.3 percent when that first intervention took place in June 1930-- down from a peak of 9 percent in December 1929, two months after the stock market crash.
Unemployment never hit double digits in any of the 12 months following the stock market crash of 1929. But it hit double digits within 6 months after government intervention-- and unemployment stayed in double digits for the entire remainder of the decade, as the government went in for one intervention after another.
The first federal intervention in June 1930 was the passage of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs by a Democratic Congress, a bill signed into law by Republican President Herbert Hoover. It was "bipartisan"-- but bipartisan nonsense is still nonsense and a bipartisan disaster is still a disaster.
The idea behind these higher tariffs was that reducing our imports of foreign goods would create more jobs for American workers. It sounds plausible, but more than a thousand economists took out newspaper ads, warning that these tariffs would be counterproductive.
That was because other countries would retaliate with their own import restrictions, reducing American exports, thereby destroying American jobs. That is exactly what happened. But there are still people today who repeat the brass oldie that restricting imports will save American jobs.
You can always save particular jobs in a particular industry with import restrictions. But you lose other jobs in other industries, not only because other countries retaliate, but also because of the economic repercussions at home.
You can save jobs in the American sugar industry by restricting imports of foreign sugar. But that results in higher sugar prices within the United States, leading to higher costs for American candy producers, as well as American producers of other products containing sugar. That leads to higher prices for those products, which in turn means lower sales at home and abroad-- and therefore fewer jobs in those industries.
A study concluded that there were three times as many jobs lost in the confection industry as were saved in the sugar industry. Restrictions on steel imports likewise led to an estimated 5,000 jobs being saved in the steel industry-- and 26,000 jobs being lost in industries producing products made of steel.
Similarly, the whole idea of the government itself "creating jobs" is based on regarding the particular jobs created by government as being a net increase in the total number of jobs in the economy. But, since the government does not create wealth to pay for these jobs, but only transfers wealth from the private sector, that leaves less wealth for private employers to create jobs.
Songs that are golden oldies bring enjoyment when they return. But brass oldies in politics just repeat the original disasters.
A statistical analysis by economists, published in 2004, concluded that federal interventions had prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s by several years. How long will future research show that current government interventions prolonged the economic crisis we are living through now?
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Songs that are "golden oldies" have much less pleasant counterparts in politics-- namely, ideas and policies that have failed disastrously in the past but still keep coming back to be advocated and imposed by government. Some people may think these ideas are as good as gold, but brass has often been mistaken for gold by people who don't look closely enough.
One of these brass oldies is the idea that the government can and must reduce unemployment by "creating jobs." Some people point to the history of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when unemployment peaked at 25 percent, as proof that the government cannot simply stand by and do nothing when so many millions of people are out of work.
If we are going to look back at history, we need to make sure the history we look at is accurate. First of all, unemployment never hit 25 percent until after-- repeat, AFTER-- the federal government intervened in the economy.
What was unemployment like when the federal government first intervened in the economy after the stock market crash of 1929? It was 6.3 percent when that first intervention took place in June 1930-- down from a peak of 9 percent in December 1929, two months after the stock market crash.
Unemployment never hit double digits in any of the 12 months following the stock market crash of 1929. But it hit double digits within 6 months after government intervention-- and unemployment stayed in double digits for the entire remainder of the decade, as the government went in for one intervention after another.
The first federal intervention in June 1930 was the passage of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs by a Democratic Congress, a bill signed into law by Republican President Herbert Hoover. It was "bipartisan"-- but bipartisan nonsense is still nonsense and a bipartisan disaster is still a disaster.
The idea behind these higher tariffs was that reducing our imports of foreign goods would create more jobs for American workers. It sounds plausible, but more than a thousand economists took out newspaper ads, warning that these tariffs would be counterproductive.
That was because other countries would retaliate with their own import restrictions, reducing American exports, thereby destroying American jobs. That is exactly what happened. But there are still people today who repeat the brass oldie that restricting imports will save American jobs.
You can always save particular jobs in a particular industry with import restrictions. But you lose other jobs in other industries, not only because other countries retaliate, but also because of the economic repercussions at home.
You can save jobs in the American sugar industry by restricting imports of foreign sugar. But that results in higher sugar prices within the United States, leading to higher costs for American candy producers, as well as American producers of other products containing sugar. That leads to higher prices for those products, which in turn means lower sales at home and abroad-- and therefore fewer jobs in those industries.
A study concluded that there were three times as many jobs lost in the confection industry as were saved in the sugar industry. Restrictions on steel imports likewise led to an estimated 5,000 jobs being saved in the steel industry-- and 26,000 jobs being lost in industries producing products made of steel.
Similarly, the whole idea of the government itself "creating jobs" is based on regarding the particular jobs created by government as being a net increase in the total number of jobs in the economy. But, since the government does not create wealth to pay for these jobs, but only transfers wealth from the private sector, that leaves less wealth for private employers to create jobs.
Songs that are golden oldies bring enjoyment when they return. But brass oldies in politics just repeat the original disasters.
A statistical analysis by economists, published in 2004, concluded that federal interventions had prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s by several years. How long will future research show that current government interventions prolonged the economic crisis we are living through now?
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Referendum Day
Next Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2010, is no ordinary Election Day.
Dennis Prager
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
It may be commonplace for commentators to announce that every election is “the most important election in our lifetime” or something analogous. But having never said that of a presidential election — let alone an off-year election — this commentator cannot be accused of crying wolf when I say that this off-year election is not simply the most important of my lifetime. It is the most important since the Civil War.
The reason is that unlike all previous elections, this one is actually a referendum on the direction of the United States of America.
If the Democrats win:
• The American people have announced, consciously or not, that they support the Democratic party’s “fundamental transformation” — those were President Obama’s words when he campaigned, and he has lived up to them — of America from a liberty-based state of limited government into an equality-based welfare state with an ever-expanding government.
• America will change from a country that emphasizes producing wealth to a country that emphasizes redistribution of wealth.
The Left has never been primarily interested in creating wealth. Its primary goal always and everywhere has been to redistribute it. That so many businessmen and much of Wall Street are only now awakening to this fact is only a testament to the staggering lack of wisdom in big business.
• America will produce increasingly narcissistic citizens.
For proof, just look at the virtual shutdown of much of France and the ubiquitous rioting of vast numbers of its citizens over a tiny change in its welfare state — raising the age of retirement from 60 to 62. The idea that one will work two more years before receiving benefits until death so offends vast numbers of French — including young people who have every reason to believe they will live until the age of 100 — that they are fighting it as if their very lives were in jeopardy. That is the self-centeredness that all welfare states engender in their citizens.
• America will further reinforce the conviction that minorities are victims who must be protected from their fellow Americans by the state.
Latinos, Blacks, Muslims, gays, and vast numbers of women have been told by the Left and its political party that they are all persecuted by a country that is SIXHIRB — Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist, and Bigoted. That America is the least SIXHIRB country in the world is a fact that has been all but drowned out by the left-wing domination of television- and print-news media, all the entertainment media, and the high schools and universities.
• America will continue to undermine its unique ability to Americanize people of all ethnic, national, racial, and religious backgrounds.
With a Democratic victory, the country’s very motto — E Pluribus Unum, “Out of Many, One” — will continue to erode, as ethnic and racial identities rather than one American identity are increasingly celebrated. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, has just announced that Germany’s experiment with multiculturalism has “utterly failed,” but the Left and its political party, the Democrats, have redoubled their efforts to supplant E Pluribus Unum with multiculturalism.
• America will continue its economic slide.
With a Democratic victory, unsustainable debts will mount, wealth-producing companies will continue to flee from higher taxes and more regulations, energy use will be taxed in the name of environmentalist utopianism, and the government will continue to print dollars.
• America will become increasingly secular.
With a Democratic victory, the Left’s goal of rendering America’s other motto — “In God We Trust” — an anachronism will come closer to fruition. Leftism is a jealous god. As in Western Europe, the Judeo-Christian roots of this country are ceasing to play the indispensable moral role they have played since before America’s Founding.
And what would constitute a Democratic victory next Tuesday? Anything other than a Republican landslide. Any other result will be trumpeted by the media and by Democrats as solely a result of an economic recession and the normal losses the dominant party experiences in off-year elections.
In other words, the only way to ensure that the electoral results are interpreted as a repudiation of the growth of the state and other Democratic and leftist goals is through an enormous Republican victory. Only then will America understand that this election was not first about jobs. It was, above all, about America.
Dennis Prager
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
It may be commonplace for commentators to announce that every election is “the most important election in our lifetime” or something analogous. But having never said that of a presidential election — let alone an off-year election — this commentator cannot be accused of crying wolf when I say that this off-year election is not simply the most important of my lifetime. It is the most important since the Civil War.
The reason is that unlike all previous elections, this one is actually a referendum on the direction of the United States of America.
If the Democrats win:
• The American people have announced, consciously or not, that they support the Democratic party’s “fundamental transformation” — those were President Obama’s words when he campaigned, and he has lived up to them — of America from a liberty-based state of limited government into an equality-based welfare state with an ever-expanding government.
• America will change from a country that emphasizes producing wealth to a country that emphasizes redistribution of wealth.
The Left has never been primarily interested in creating wealth. Its primary goal always and everywhere has been to redistribute it. That so many businessmen and much of Wall Street are only now awakening to this fact is only a testament to the staggering lack of wisdom in big business.
• America will produce increasingly narcissistic citizens.
For proof, just look at the virtual shutdown of much of France and the ubiquitous rioting of vast numbers of its citizens over a tiny change in its welfare state — raising the age of retirement from 60 to 62. The idea that one will work two more years before receiving benefits until death so offends vast numbers of French — including young people who have every reason to believe they will live until the age of 100 — that they are fighting it as if their very lives were in jeopardy. That is the self-centeredness that all welfare states engender in their citizens.
• America will further reinforce the conviction that minorities are victims who must be protected from their fellow Americans by the state.
Latinos, Blacks, Muslims, gays, and vast numbers of women have been told by the Left and its political party that they are all persecuted by a country that is SIXHIRB — Sexist, Intolerant, Xenophobic, Homophobic, Islamophobic, Racist, and Bigoted. That America is the least SIXHIRB country in the world is a fact that has been all but drowned out by the left-wing domination of television- and print-news media, all the entertainment media, and the high schools and universities.
• America will continue to undermine its unique ability to Americanize people of all ethnic, national, racial, and religious backgrounds.
With a Democratic victory, the country’s very motto — E Pluribus Unum, “Out of Many, One” — will continue to erode, as ethnic and racial identities rather than one American identity are increasingly celebrated. Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, has just announced that Germany’s experiment with multiculturalism has “utterly failed,” but the Left and its political party, the Democrats, have redoubled their efforts to supplant E Pluribus Unum with multiculturalism.
• America will continue its economic slide.
With a Democratic victory, unsustainable debts will mount, wealth-producing companies will continue to flee from higher taxes and more regulations, energy use will be taxed in the name of environmentalist utopianism, and the government will continue to print dollars.
• America will become increasingly secular.
With a Democratic victory, the Left’s goal of rendering America’s other motto — “In God We Trust” — an anachronism will come closer to fruition. Leftism is a jealous god. As in Western Europe, the Judeo-Christian roots of this country are ceasing to play the indispensable moral role they have played since before America’s Founding.
And what would constitute a Democratic victory next Tuesday? Anything other than a Republican landslide. Any other result will be trumpeted by the media and by Democrats as solely a result of an economic recession and the normal losses the dominant party experiences in off-year elections.
In other words, the only way to ensure that the electoral results are interpreted as a repudiation of the growth of the state and other Democratic and leftist goals is through an enormous Republican victory. Only then will America understand that this election was not first about jobs. It was, above all, about America.
Brass Oldies
The tarnished myth of “tax cuts for the rich.”
Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Classic songs from years past are sometimes referred to as “golden oldies.” There are political fallacies that have been around for a long time as well. These might be called brass oldies. It certainly takes a lot of brass to keep repeating fallacies that were refuted long ago.
One of these brass oldies is a phrase that has been a perennial favorite of the Left: “tax cuts for the rich.” More than 80 years ago, the “tax cuts for the rich” argument was refuted, both in theory and in practice, by Andrew Mellon, who was secretary of the Treasury in the 1920s.
When Mellon took office, there was a large national debt, the economy was stagnating, and tax rates were high, though the tax revenues were still not enough to cover government expenditures. What was Mellon’s prescription for getting out of this mess? A series of major cuts in the tax rates.
Then, as now, there were people who failed to make the distinction between tax rates and tax revenues. Mellon said, “It seems difficult for some to understand that high rates of taxation do not necessarily mean large revenue for the Government, and that more revenue may often be obtained by lower rates.”
How can that be? Because taxpayers change their behavior according to what the tax rates are. When one of the Rockefellers died, Mellon discovered that his estate included $44 million in tax-exempt bonds, compared to $7 million in Standard Oil securities, even though Standard Oil was the source of the Rockefeller fortune.
For the country as a whole, the amount of money tied up in tax-exempt securities was estimated to be three times as large as the federal government’s expenditures and more than half as large as the national debt.
In short, huge amounts of money were not being invested in productive capacities, such as factories or power plants, but were instead being made available for local political boondoggles, because the money was put into tax-exempt state and local bonds.
When tax rates are reduced, investors have incentives to take their money out of tax shelters and put it into the private economy, creating higher returns for themselves and more production in the economy. Andrew Mellon understood this then, yet many in politics and the media seem not to understand it now.
Mellon was able to persuade Congress to lower the tax rates by large amounts. The percentage by which tax rates were lowered was greater at the lower income levels, but the total amount of money saved by taxpayers was of course greater on the part of people with higher incomes, who were paying much higher tax rates on those incomes.
Between 1921 and 1929, tax rates in the top brackets were cut from 73 percent to 24 percent. These were what the Left likes to call “tax cuts for the rich.”
What happened to federal revenues from income taxes over this same span of time? Income tax revenues rose by more than 30 percent. What happened to the economy? Jobs increased, output rose, the unemployment rate fell, and incomes rose. Because economic activity increased, the government received more income tax revenues. In short, these were tax cuts for the economy, even if the Left likes to call them “tax cuts for the rich.”
This was not the only time that things like this happened, nor was Andrew Mellon the only one who advocated cutting tax rates in order to increase tax revenues. John Maynard Keynes pointed out in 1933 that lowering the tax rates can increase tax revenues, if the tax rates are so high as to discourage economic activity.
Pres. John F. Kennedy made the same argument in the 1960s — and tax revenues increased after the tax rates were cut during his administration. The same thing happened under Ronald Reagan during the 1980s. And it happened again under George W. Bush, whose tax-rate cuts are scheduled to expire next January.
The rich actually paid more total taxes, and a higher percentage of all taxes, after the Bush tax-rate cuts, because their incomes were rising with the rising economy.
Do the people who keep repeating the catch phrase “tax cuts for the rich” not know this? Or are they depending on your not knowing it?
Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Classic songs from years past are sometimes referred to as “golden oldies.” There are political fallacies that have been around for a long time as well. These might be called brass oldies. It certainly takes a lot of brass to keep repeating fallacies that were refuted long ago.
One of these brass oldies is a phrase that has been a perennial favorite of the Left: “tax cuts for the rich.” More than 80 years ago, the “tax cuts for the rich” argument was refuted, both in theory and in practice, by Andrew Mellon, who was secretary of the Treasury in the 1920s.
When Mellon took office, there was a large national debt, the economy was stagnating, and tax rates were high, though the tax revenues were still not enough to cover government expenditures. What was Mellon’s prescription for getting out of this mess? A series of major cuts in the tax rates.
Then, as now, there were people who failed to make the distinction between tax rates and tax revenues. Mellon said, “It seems difficult for some to understand that high rates of taxation do not necessarily mean large revenue for the Government, and that more revenue may often be obtained by lower rates.”
How can that be? Because taxpayers change their behavior according to what the tax rates are. When one of the Rockefellers died, Mellon discovered that his estate included $44 million in tax-exempt bonds, compared to $7 million in Standard Oil securities, even though Standard Oil was the source of the Rockefeller fortune.
For the country as a whole, the amount of money tied up in tax-exempt securities was estimated to be three times as large as the federal government’s expenditures and more than half as large as the national debt.
In short, huge amounts of money were not being invested in productive capacities, such as factories or power plants, but were instead being made available for local political boondoggles, because the money was put into tax-exempt state and local bonds.
When tax rates are reduced, investors have incentives to take their money out of tax shelters and put it into the private economy, creating higher returns for themselves and more production in the economy. Andrew Mellon understood this then, yet many in politics and the media seem not to understand it now.
Mellon was able to persuade Congress to lower the tax rates by large amounts. The percentage by which tax rates were lowered was greater at the lower income levels, but the total amount of money saved by taxpayers was of course greater on the part of people with higher incomes, who were paying much higher tax rates on those incomes.
Between 1921 and 1929, tax rates in the top brackets were cut from 73 percent to 24 percent. These were what the Left likes to call “tax cuts for the rich.”
What happened to federal revenues from income taxes over this same span of time? Income tax revenues rose by more than 30 percent. What happened to the economy? Jobs increased, output rose, the unemployment rate fell, and incomes rose. Because economic activity increased, the government received more income tax revenues. In short, these were tax cuts for the economy, even if the Left likes to call them “tax cuts for the rich.”
This was not the only time that things like this happened, nor was Andrew Mellon the only one who advocated cutting tax rates in order to increase tax revenues. John Maynard Keynes pointed out in 1933 that lowering the tax rates can increase tax revenues, if the tax rates are so high as to discourage economic activity.
Pres. John F. Kennedy made the same argument in the 1960s — and tax revenues increased after the tax rates were cut during his administration. The same thing happened under Ronald Reagan during the 1980s. And it happened again under George W. Bush, whose tax-rate cuts are scheduled to expire next January.
The rich actually paid more total taxes, and a higher percentage of all taxes, after the Bush tax-rate cuts, because their incomes were rising with the rising economy.
Do the people who keep repeating the catch phrase “tax cuts for the rich” not know this? Or are they depending on your not knowing it?
If Dems Lose, Obama Will Blame Everyone But Himself
By Byron York
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Assume the polls are correct and Republicans win control of the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in next month's elections. What lessons will the White House learn? Will Barack Obama interpret the vote as a repudiation of much of his agenda, or will he conclude that he made a few tactical errors but was still right on the big issues?
Bet on the latter. All indications coming out of the White House suggest that if Democrats suffer major losses, the president and his top aides will resolutely refuse to reconsider the policies -- national health care, stimulus, runaway spending -- that led to their defeat. Instead, they will point fingers in virtually every direction other than their own. Come November, it's likely the D-for-Democrat that the president refers to so often will actually stand for "denial."
The White House has given us plenty of clues in recent days as to how Obama will react to a possible Democratic drubbing at the polls. Here are five.
1. Obama will blame voters, not himself. At a small fundraiser in Massachusetts recently, Obama suggested Democrats are in trouble because recession-weary Americans simply aren't thinking clearly. "Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared," Obama said. "And the country is scared." If Democrats lose, Obama is likely to fault voters' irrationality and not anything he has done.
2. Obama will spin the outcome as an illegitimate GOP victory. In recent weeks, the president and top administration officials have accused the Chamber of Commerce of illegally using foreign contributions to fund ads critical of Democrats. There's no evidence to support the charge, but Obama has laid the foundation for a simple explanation of Democratic defeat: Republicans cheated.
3. Obama will blame a broken process. In a recent New York Times article, reporter Peter Baker asked a number of White House aides about mistakes Obama has made in office. "The biggest miscalculation in the minds of most Obama advisers," Baker writes, "was the assumption that he could bridge a polarized capital and forge genuinely bipartisan coalitions." By that standard, a post-defeat Obama will be guilty more of overestimating Republicans and the culture of Washington than of making mistakes on his own.
4. Obama will reaffirm, not reconsider, his achievements. The president says he has already kept about 70 percent of the promises he made in the 2008 campaign. Now, his main task will be to shield those accomplishments from GOP challenge. Aides constantly tell reporters that Republicans intend to roll back Obamacare and Wall Street reform, and the president plans to spend as much time as it takes fighting those efforts. "There's going to be a lot of work in [the next two years] just doing things right and making sure that new laws are stood up in the ways they're intended," Obama told Baker.
5. Obama will resist real change inside the White House. The president has lost several top aides in recent months: Rahm Emanuel, James Jones, Lawrence Summers, Christina Romer, Peter Orszag and others. So far, Obama has preferred to replace departing insiders with other insiders. His reluctance to bring in a high-level adviser from outside his circle suggests he wants to keep doing what he's doing.
Tie all those threads together, and in the wake of a Republican victory in November you can virtually guarantee the White House will not concede that the president hurt himself by pushing an unpopular national health care program through Congress; by pushing nearly a trillion dollars in stimulus spending that failed to reduce unemployment as predicted; by pushing a costly cap-and-trade agenda; or by advocating any number of other initiatives that flew in the face of voter sentiments.
In a recent campaign ad, Colorado Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck says the public tried to tell White House and Democratic leaders not to go ahead with those unwelcome measures. "They heard us, and yet they ignored us," Buck says, adding: "And folks, on Nov. 2 they will ignore us no more." Republicans no doubt hope Buck is right. But so far Obama is sending signals that even if he loses big in November, he'll make excuses, point fingers and try to keep going just as before.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Assume the polls are correct and Republicans win control of the House, and perhaps even the Senate, in next month's elections. What lessons will the White House learn? Will Barack Obama interpret the vote as a repudiation of much of his agenda, or will he conclude that he made a few tactical errors but was still right on the big issues?
Bet on the latter. All indications coming out of the White House suggest that if Democrats suffer major losses, the president and his top aides will resolutely refuse to reconsider the policies -- national health care, stimulus, runaway spending -- that led to their defeat. Instead, they will point fingers in virtually every direction other than their own. Come November, it's likely the D-for-Democrat that the president refers to so often will actually stand for "denial."
The White House has given us plenty of clues in recent days as to how Obama will react to a possible Democratic drubbing at the polls. Here are five.
1. Obama will blame voters, not himself. At a small fundraiser in Massachusetts recently, Obama suggested Democrats are in trouble because recession-weary Americans simply aren't thinking clearly. "Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument do not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared," Obama said. "And the country is scared." If Democrats lose, Obama is likely to fault voters' irrationality and not anything he has done.
2. Obama will spin the outcome as an illegitimate GOP victory. In recent weeks, the president and top administration officials have accused the Chamber of Commerce of illegally using foreign contributions to fund ads critical of Democrats. There's no evidence to support the charge, but Obama has laid the foundation for a simple explanation of Democratic defeat: Republicans cheated.
3. Obama will blame a broken process. In a recent New York Times article, reporter Peter Baker asked a number of White House aides about mistakes Obama has made in office. "The biggest miscalculation in the minds of most Obama advisers," Baker writes, "was the assumption that he could bridge a polarized capital and forge genuinely bipartisan coalitions." By that standard, a post-defeat Obama will be guilty more of overestimating Republicans and the culture of Washington than of making mistakes on his own.
4. Obama will reaffirm, not reconsider, his achievements. The president says he has already kept about 70 percent of the promises he made in the 2008 campaign. Now, his main task will be to shield those accomplishments from GOP challenge. Aides constantly tell reporters that Republicans intend to roll back Obamacare and Wall Street reform, and the president plans to spend as much time as it takes fighting those efforts. "There's going to be a lot of work in [the next two years] just doing things right and making sure that new laws are stood up in the ways they're intended," Obama told Baker.
5. Obama will resist real change inside the White House. The president has lost several top aides in recent months: Rahm Emanuel, James Jones, Lawrence Summers, Christina Romer, Peter Orszag and others. So far, Obama has preferred to replace departing insiders with other insiders. His reluctance to bring in a high-level adviser from outside his circle suggests he wants to keep doing what he's doing.
Tie all those threads together, and in the wake of a Republican victory in November you can virtually guarantee the White House will not concede that the president hurt himself by pushing an unpopular national health care program through Congress; by pushing nearly a trillion dollars in stimulus spending that failed to reduce unemployment as predicted; by pushing a costly cap-and-trade agenda; or by advocating any number of other initiatives that flew in the face of voter sentiments.
In a recent campaign ad, Colorado Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck says the public tried to tell White House and Democratic leaders not to go ahead with those unwelcome measures. "They heard us, and yet they ignored us," Buck says, adding: "And folks, on Nov. 2 they will ignore us no more." Republicans no doubt hope Buck is right. But so far Obama is sending signals that even if he loses big in November, he'll make excuses, point fingers and try to keep going just as before.
Why Vote Conservative?
By Terry Paulson
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
It’s time to take a stand. Many of you have already voted, but if you are still undecided, let me explain why you should vote for the most conservative candidates in this pivotal election.
This mid-term election is but one season finale in an ongoing American soap opera with ups and downs, rebounds and victories, tragedies and moments of great patriotic pride. Why is this season finale so critical?
The playing field that the winning politicians will face is daunting. Before the victors are even seated, the current players will be challenged to pass austere budgets on the federal and state level. The country faces a growing deficit, a weak economy, high unemployment, and new and existing unfunded liabilities whose costs are exploding. Making tough choices will mean pain in the form of cutbacks in services and potential loss of some government jobs and benefits.
The Democrats’ response is to run from their record and their president with campaign ads that stress personal attacks, not issues. Here are some key issues I would hope you’d consider in making your vote:
For the second straight year, the federal government has created a trillion-plus deficit, $1,290,000,000,000. In an interview with the New York Times' Peter Baker, President Obama has also admitted that a core premise of his nearly trillion-dollar stimulus package was false. He’s acknowledged that "there's no such thing as shovel-ready projects," admitting that the core premise of his nearly trillion-dollar stimulus was false. The stimulus did not create the immediate jobs planned. Vote for conservatives who will stop wasting taxpayer money!
Second, Herbert Hoover said, "Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt." Many of the young adults who voted for the president, our grandchildren, and generations not yet born are facing a national debt that is exploding. Progressive politicians make promises they can’t deliver and then send future citizens the bill. Believe in yourself, not politicians bearing entitlements they haven’t even taken the time to read before passing. There’s always “free cheese” in a mousetrap. You are seeing the result of such unaffordable promises with rioters taking to the streets in France and Greece. Vote for conservative candidates who will defund wasteful agencies, put the brakes on runaway entitlements, and work to repeal or unfund President Obama’s healthcare plan that is already proving too costly to implement.
Remember dad’s lectures, “As long as you live under my roof, you’ll live under my rules.” With 60% of Americans receiving more than they pay to the government, they’re dependent. They’re under government’s roof and subject to their rules. What don’t liberals want to control? They’re regulating everything from peanut butter to light bulbs and from fast food to carbon footprints. Is that the America you want to live in? If you want freedom, vote conservative. If you want a regulated nanny state, vote liberal.
Had enough of high taxes? Mark Twain said, “The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.” The new healthcare plan authorizes hiring 18,000 new IRS taxidermists to take more of your money. Vote for conservatives committed to keeping all taxes as low as possible and letting you spend more of your own hard-earned money.
Finally, don’t vote for any candidate who believes that America’s better days are over—global warming’s coming, more austerity and high unemployment for the foreseeable future, and future generations living at a lower standard of living than their parents.
Democrats say that Republicans have no answers. Their answer is YOU! Reagan came into office at a time of malaise and freed up American workers, investors and entrepreneurs to invent a better future and keep more of the rewards they deserved for doing so. We are America, and we are not done!
With the right incentives and policies, Americans can again lead the way in inventing the future. It won’t be immediate, but it will come. Incentives and our free enterprise American Dream still work. Let it do so again by voting for the most conservative candidates available.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
It’s time to take a stand. Many of you have already voted, but if you are still undecided, let me explain why you should vote for the most conservative candidates in this pivotal election.
This mid-term election is but one season finale in an ongoing American soap opera with ups and downs, rebounds and victories, tragedies and moments of great patriotic pride. Why is this season finale so critical?
The playing field that the winning politicians will face is daunting. Before the victors are even seated, the current players will be challenged to pass austere budgets on the federal and state level. The country faces a growing deficit, a weak economy, high unemployment, and new and existing unfunded liabilities whose costs are exploding. Making tough choices will mean pain in the form of cutbacks in services and potential loss of some government jobs and benefits.
The Democrats’ response is to run from their record and their president with campaign ads that stress personal attacks, not issues. Here are some key issues I would hope you’d consider in making your vote:
For the second straight year, the federal government has created a trillion-plus deficit, $1,290,000,000,000. In an interview with the New York Times' Peter Baker, President Obama has also admitted that a core premise of his nearly trillion-dollar stimulus package was false. He’s acknowledged that "there's no such thing as shovel-ready projects," admitting that the core premise of his nearly trillion-dollar stimulus was false. The stimulus did not create the immediate jobs planned. Vote for conservatives who will stop wasting taxpayer money!
Second, Herbert Hoover said, "Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt." Many of the young adults who voted for the president, our grandchildren, and generations not yet born are facing a national debt that is exploding. Progressive politicians make promises they can’t deliver and then send future citizens the bill. Believe in yourself, not politicians bearing entitlements they haven’t even taken the time to read before passing. There’s always “free cheese” in a mousetrap. You are seeing the result of such unaffordable promises with rioters taking to the streets in France and Greece. Vote for conservative candidates who will defund wasteful agencies, put the brakes on runaway entitlements, and work to repeal or unfund President Obama’s healthcare plan that is already proving too costly to implement.
Remember dad’s lectures, “As long as you live under my roof, you’ll live under my rules.” With 60% of Americans receiving more than they pay to the government, they’re dependent. They’re under government’s roof and subject to their rules. What don’t liberals want to control? They’re regulating everything from peanut butter to light bulbs and from fast food to carbon footprints. Is that the America you want to live in? If you want freedom, vote conservative. If you want a regulated nanny state, vote liberal.
Had enough of high taxes? Mark Twain said, “The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.” The new healthcare plan authorizes hiring 18,000 new IRS taxidermists to take more of your money. Vote for conservatives committed to keeping all taxes as low as possible and letting you spend more of your own hard-earned money.
Finally, don’t vote for any candidate who believes that America’s better days are over—global warming’s coming, more austerity and high unemployment for the foreseeable future, and future generations living at a lower standard of living than their parents.
Democrats say that Republicans have no answers. Their answer is YOU! Reagan came into office at a time of malaise and freed up American workers, investors and entrepreneurs to invent a better future and keep more of the rewards they deserved for doing so. We are America, and we are not done!
With the right incentives and policies, Americans can again lead the way in inventing the future. It won’t be immediate, but it will come. Incentives and our free enterprise American Dream still work. Let it do so again by voting for the most conservative candidates available.
Monday, October 25, 2010
The Road to Serfdom
By Bruce Bialosky
Monday, October 25, 2010
As you may know, The Road to Serfdom is the classic book written in the early 1940’s by Friedrich Von Hayek that defined the threat imposed by the unchecked growth of central government and the resulting loss of individual freedom and liberty. Folks, we are headed in that direction. This election will determine whether we surrender to the Washington oligarchy and the media elites or we reassert the values that have been the shining hallmark of this great country for over 200 years.
We have repeatedly been told that the next election is the most important of our lifetime. This time it's the truth. In fact, it may be the most critical election in America since 1860. In 2008, the nation elected a President and Congress committed to the wholesale expansion of government and the commensurate reduction in individual freedom. That may not be what people thought they were voting for, but that’s what they got. Any vote that leaves Congress in the hands of the Pelosi-Reid Democrats endorses that path. But a vote against the Democrats will repudiate their policies of invasive government and limitation of individual choice.
This simple belief was the catalyst of a popular movement that is now known as the Tea Party. These people didn’t have a strong political affiliation; they were just fed up with the expansion of government at every level – by both parties. The real legacy of this election, a reaction to the insults, abuse, and baseless attacks on the Tea Party by the left and its media allies, is how its members were driven into the arms of the Republican Party, who welcomed them with a renewed faith in fiscal conservatism. The whole scenario speaks volumes about what constitutes both parties.
Tom Friedman, columnist for The New York Times, has for years been an intellectual guru for the left. In his September 28th column, he wrote: “Leadership today is about how the U.S. government attracts and educates more of that talent and then enacts the laws, regulations and budgets that empower that talent to take its products and services to scale, sell them around the world – and create jobs here in the process.” There is almost no consideration of the individual in this stunning statement, and yet it’s the fundamental basis of what they believe – that government is the central point of any job creation.
Contrast that with what was said in the debate between Democrat Richard Blumenthal and Republican Linda McMahon, candidates for the Senate seat from Connecticut. When asked by Mrs. McMahon “How do you create a job?” Mr. Blumenthal blabbered a 193-word answer. Mrs. McMahon responded “Government, government, government. Government does not create jobs. It’s very simple how you create jobs. An entrepreneur takes a risk. He or she believes that he can create a good or service that can be sold for more than it costs to make it. If an entrepreneur thinks he can do that, he creates a job.” Wow.
This is what the upcoming election is about, and the American people must hand the Democrats a crushing defeat – something more than loss of the House of Representatives. To demonstrate the resolve of the people, the Democrats need to be mercilessly crushed. The American people need to make clear that they will not accept the job-killing agenda that was thrust upon them. We need to tell the Democrats that when we most needed government to get out of the way so that we could create jobs, you were radicalizing America with a leftist agenda that we will not allow to stand.
We cannot fall for desperate pitches by Democrats who swear that they’re going to stand up to Reid or Pelosi. No matter what they say, they will vote for Reid as majority leader or Pelosi as Speaker. So when a good man like Joe Manchin of West Virginia says he is against the Obama agenda, he will still vote for Democratic leadership that burdens us with big-spending liberals like Chuck Schumer, Tom Harkin and Patrick Leahy. When Democrat Bobby Bright of Alabama says that he won't vote for Nancy Pelosi, he’ll still vote for a Democratic Speaker – which means that House committee chairmen like Henry Waxman, Barney Frank and John Conyers will still be drafting their free- enterprise-killing bills that control more and more aspects of every American’s life.
This is truly a national election -- a historic election. The leftist agenda has to be completely repudiated by the American people. The Congress and the President have to be explicitly told that what we earn is our money, and anything we pay to you is by our good graces. They have to be firmly told that we are sick of our governmental employees making more than twice what we earn in the private sector. That we don’t accept their backroom deals that have put our national government and more than half our states on the fast track to bankruptcy. Ultimately, they have to learn that government must live within its means – and that we determine the means.
Unless we do this now, at this moment in history, we will truly be on the road to serfdom and there will be no redemption.
Monday, October 25, 2010
As you may know, The Road to Serfdom is the classic book written in the early 1940’s by Friedrich Von Hayek that defined the threat imposed by the unchecked growth of central government and the resulting loss of individual freedom and liberty. Folks, we are headed in that direction. This election will determine whether we surrender to the Washington oligarchy and the media elites or we reassert the values that have been the shining hallmark of this great country for over 200 years.
We have repeatedly been told that the next election is the most important of our lifetime. This time it's the truth. In fact, it may be the most critical election in America since 1860. In 2008, the nation elected a President and Congress committed to the wholesale expansion of government and the commensurate reduction in individual freedom. That may not be what people thought they were voting for, but that’s what they got. Any vote that leaves Congress in the hands of the Pelosi-Reid Democrats endorses that path. But a vote against the Democrats will repudiate their policies of invasive government and limitation of individual choice.
This simple belief was the catalyst of a popular movement that is now known as the Tea Party. These people didn’t have a strong political affiliation; they were just fed up with the expansion of government at every level – by both parties. The real legacy of this election, a reaction to the insults, abuse, and baseless attacks on the Tea Party by the left and its media allies, is how its members were driven into the arms of the Republican Party, who welcomed them with a renewed faith in fiscal conservatism. The whole scenario speaks volumes about what constitutes both parties.
Tom Friedman, columnist for The New York Times, has for years been an intellectual guru for the left. In his September 28th column, he wrote: “Leadership today is about how the U.S. government attracts and educates more of that talent and then enacts the laws, regulations and budgets that empower that talent to take its products and services to scale, sell them around the world – and create jobs here in the process.” There is almost no consideration of the individual in this stunning statement, and yet it’s the fundamental basis of what they believe – that government is the central point of any job creation.
Contrast that with what was said in the debate between Democrat Richard Blumenthal and Republican Linda McMahon, candidates for the Senate seat from Connecticut. When asked by Mrs. McMahon “How do you create a job?” Mr. Blumenthal blabbered a 193-word answer. Mrs. McMahon responded “Government, government, government. Government does not create jobs. It’s very simple how you create jobs. An entrepreneur takes a risk. He or she believes that he can create a good or service that can be sold for more than it costs to make it. If an entrepreneur thinks he can do that, he creates a job.” Wow.
This is what the upcoming election is about, and the American people must hand the Democrats a crushing defeat – something more than loss of the House of Representatives. To demonstrate the resolve of the people, the Democrats need to be mercilessly crushed. The American people need to make clear that they will not accept the job-killing agenda that was thrust upon them. We need to tell the Democrats that when we most needed government to get out of the way so that we could create jobs, you were radicalizing America with a leftist agenda that we will not allow to stand.
We cannot fall for desperate pitches by Democrats who swear that they’re going to stand up to Reid or Pelosi. No matter what they say, they will vote for Reid as majority leader or Pelosi as Speaker. So when a good man like Joe Manchin of West Virginia says he is against the Obama agenda, he will still vote for Democratic leadership that burdens us with big-spending liberals like Chuck Schumer, Tom Harkin and Patrick Leahy. When Democrat Bobby Bright of Alabama says that he won't vote for Nancy Pelosi, he’ll still vote for a Democratic Speaker – which means that House committee chairmen like Henry Waxman, Barney Frank and John Conyers will still be drafting their free- enterprise-killing bills that control more and more aspects of every American’s life.
This is truly a national election -- a historic election. The leftist agenda has to be completely repudiated by the American people. The Congress and the President have to be explicitly told that what we earn is our money, and anything we pay to you is by our good graces. They have to be firmly told that we are sick of our governmental employees making more than twice what we earn in the private sector. That we don’t accept their backroom deals that have put our national government and more than half our states on the fast track to bankruptcy. Ultimately, they have to learn that government must live within its means – and that we determine the means.
Unless we do this now, at this moment in history, we will truly be on the road to serfdom and there will be no redemption.
Call Me Former Senator Barbara Boxer
By Martha Montelongo
Monday, October 25, 2010
Who can forget California Democrat Senator Barbara Boxer’s put-down of Brigadier General Michael Walsh, during a June 2009 committee hearing? When he addressed her as “Ma’am,” in answering a question about the New Orleans levee system, she petulantly interrupted: “Could you say Senator, instead of Ma’am? I worked so hard to get that title, so I’d appreciate it.”
“Ma’am” is a term of respect given by military personnel to superior female officers. So she’s right. She didn’t deserve it. Her behavior was once again disrespectful, arrogant, condescending-and demeaning to a Congress whose public esteem is deservedly at a record low.
As Californians head to the polls November 2, they should ponder very carefully whether they really want, and can really afford, another six years of Barbara Boxer.
The Golden State’s junior senator has long been dismissive of anyone who dares to disagree with her, no matter what experience, expertise or evidence they might bring to a Senate proceeding. She epitomizes the overbearing attitude of the power elite, the ruling class that thinks it knows more than we do, is better than us, and is in Washington not to serve or represent us, but to rule us.
In 2005, the late Dr. Michael Crichton testified before the same Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, stressing the need for sound science and above-reproach analysis in making laws and public policies. He offered not his well-deserved reputation as an author and filmmaker – but his expertise as a Harvard-educated physician and medical researcher.
Dr. Crichton expressed his growing concern that science is being politicized, misused and abused to advance an unproven global warming hypothesis, and justify policies that will adversely affect our energy supplies, jobs, living standards and liberties. Those policies will also give Washington politicians and bureaucrats unprecedented power and control over our lives.
Science, he emphasized, relies on “independent verification.” A scientific hypothesis or assertion “is valid and merits acceptance only if it can be independently verified.” The Food and Drug Administration, he noted, has strict rules governing the conduct of drug research, to ensure honesty and integrity, and protect the public’s health and welfare. The gold standard is randomized double-blind studies that involve four separate teams: one plans the study, another administers the drug to patients, an third assesses its effects, and a fourth analyzes the results.
“The teams do not know each other, he observed, “and are prohibited from personal contact of any sort, on peril of contaminating the results.” Deviate from those rules, and your $100-million study will be declared null and void. But in climate “research,” every one of these rules is routinely and deliberately violated, to further an agenda that will affect, not just a company or small group of patients, but every single American business, citizen and community.
In climate science, Dr. Crichton pointed out, “it is permissible for raw data to be modified by many hands. Gaps in temperature and proxy records are filled in. Suspect values are deleted because a scientist deems them erroneous” -- or inconvenient. Researchers “may elect to use parts of existing records, and ignore other parts.” Peer review “by pals” is unavoidably biased,” but commonplace in the climate arena. Predictions are treated as facts.
Crichton singled out Penn State University Professor Michael Mann and his infamous “hockey stick” temperature graph as a prime example of this unacceptable, politicized science. That’s because the hearing preceded Climategate and its revelations that Mann and other researchers hid data, and the IPCC’s use of student papers and environmentalist press releases as “peer-reviewed science.”
Meteorologist and hurricane expert William Gray followed Dr. Crichton, emphasizing that computer models are not valid predictive tools. They don’t factor in precipitation, ocean circulation or solar effects properly, and their predictions have been totally out of synch with real world temperature and storm data.
Dr. Gray challenged the notion that carbon dioxide is driving climate change, and noted that Earth has been through countless climate cycles, none of them caused by humans. He rejected Senator Boxer’s claim that there is no disagreement “among the real experts” that humans are causing unprecedented warming, and thus the intensity and frequency of storms.
Dr. Gray also questioned the impartiality and expertise of her favorite “real expert,” astronomer James Hansen, who repeatedly rails about “runaway” global warming and “death trains” carrying coal to power plants. Gray also predicted, “in 15 or 20 years, we are going to look back on this whole business [of manmade climate disasters] as the Eugenics movement.”
The junior senator went on a tear, firing off prosecutorial questions, interrupting every response – then pouting, “I am asking you something, I still don’t have an answer.” She attacked Dr. Gray for not having enough climate papers peer reviewed by processes and people that systematically refuse to review or publish them. She blasted Crichton and Gray for not being climate change experts – but accepted without question statements by a Brookings Institution lawyer with no training in any branch of science. The “few dissenters” to her global warming disaster claims, she harrumphed, are funded by oil and coal companies.
Last year she did it again. National Black Chamber of Commerce CEO Harry Alford had introduced an expert study his organization had commissioned, concluding that cap-tax-and-trade legislation would result in 1.3 million fewer net jobs, increase energy and consumer costs, and hurt minority families, despite any green jobs supposedly created through massive taxpayer subsidies. Boxer wouldn’t hear it.
She presented two letters that supposedly contradicted Alford’s study, by making meaningless claims about global warming and renewable energy. The NAACP “approved a historic resolution addressing climate change legislation,” said one. “Clean energy will unlock millions of jobs, and NAACP support is vital to ensuring that these jobs help rebuild urban areas,” said the other.
“What does that mean?” Alford wanted to know. “You’re trying to put up another black group to contradict me.” These people “would be proud” that they were being quoted in this committee hearing, Boxer retorted in her most imperious and condescending tone.
When he responded to her accusation that he wasn’t from California – noting that he was born and raised there and still owns property in the state – she stopped him with a testy “Let me talk to you.” (In other words, “Don’t get uppity with me.”)
Barbara Boxer is on a mission. She intends to control our economy, opportunities and lives. Put the federal government in charge of an American energy and free enterprise system that created more health and prosperity than any other system in history. And replace hydrocarbon energy and the tens of millions of jobs it sustains – with “green” jobs created by using money confiscated from families, businesses and our grandchildren to subsidize favored companies and minority groups that will help ensure that liberal politicians are reelected in perpetuity.
She is not about to let some uppity black man, contrary economic analysis or “fake” experts like William Gray and Michael Crichton derail her scheme. No wonder the left-leaning San Francisco Chronicle dis-endorsed her, saying: “Her most famous moments on Capitol Hill have ... been ones of ... delivering partisan shots. There is no reason to believe that another six-year term would bring anything but more of the same uninspired representation.”
On November 3, let’s call her FORMER Senator Barbara Boxer.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Who can forget California Democrat Senator Barbara Boxer’s put-down of Brigadier General Michael Walsh, during a June 2009 committee hearing? When he addressed her as “Ma’am,” in answering a question about the New Orleans levee system, she petulantly interrupted: “Could you say Senator, instead of Ma’am? I worked so hard to get that title, so I’d appreciate it.”
“Ma’am” is a term of respect given by military personnel to superior female officers. So she’s right. She didn’t deserve it. Her behavior was once again disrespectful, arrogant, condescending-and demeaning to a Congress whose public esteem is deservedly at a record low.
As Californians head to the polls November 2, they should ponder very carefully whether they really want, and can really afford, another six years of Barbara Boxer.
The Golden State’s junior senator has long been dismissive of anyone who dares to disagree with her, no matter what experience, expertise or evidence they might bring to a Senate proceeding. She epitomizes the overbearing attitude of the power elite, the ruling class that thinks it knows more than we do, is better than us, and is in Washington not to serve or represent us, but to rule us.
In 2005, the late Dr. Michael Crichton testified before the same Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, stressing the need for sound science and above-reproach analysis in making laws and public policies. He offered not his well-deserved reputation as an author and filmmaker – but his expertise as a Harvard-educated physician and medical researcher.
Dr. Crichton expressed his growing concern that science is being politicized, misused and abused to advance an unproven global warming hypothesis, and justify policies that will adversely affect our energy supplies, jobs, living standards and liberties. Those policies will also give Washington politicians and bureaucrats unprecedented power and control over our lives.
Science, he emphasized, relies on “independent verification.” A scientific hypothesis or assertion “is valid and merits acceptance only if it can be independently verified.” The Food and Drug Administration, he noted, has strict rules governing the conduct of drug research, to ensure honesty and integrity, and protect the public’s health and welfare. The gold standard is randomized double-blind studies that involve four separate teams: one plans the study, another administers the drug to patients, an third assesses its effects, and a fourth analyzes the results.
“The teams do not know each other, he observed, “and are prohibited from personal contact of any sort, on peril of contaminating the results.” Deviate from those rules, and your $100-million study will be declared null and void. But in climate “research,” every one of these rules is routinely and deliberately violated, to further an agenda that will affect, not just a company or small group of patients, but every single American business, citizen and community.
In climate science, Dr. Crichton pointed out, “it is permissible for raw data to be modified by many hands. Gaps in temperature and proxy records are filled in. Suspect values are deleted because a scientist deems them erroneous” -- or inconvenient. Researchers “may elect to use parts of existing records, and ignore other parts.” Peer review “by pals” is unavoidably biased,” but commonplace in the climate arena. Predictions are treated as facts.
Crichton singled out Penn State University Professor Michael Mann and his infamous “hockey stick” temperature graph as a prime example of this unacceptable, politicized science. That’s because the hearing preceded Climategate and its revelations that Mann and other researchers hid data, and the IPCC’s use of student papers and environmentalist press releases as “peer-reviewed science.”
Meteorologist and hurricane expert William Gray followed Dr. Crichton, emphasizing that computer models are not valid predictive tools. They don’t factor in precipitation, ocean circulation or solar effects properly, and their predictions have been totally out of synch with real world temperature and storm data.
Dr. Gray challenged the notion that carbon dioxide is driving climate change, and noted that Earth has been through countless climate cycles, none of them caused by humans. He rejected Senator Boxer’s claim that there is no disagreement “among the real experts” that humans are causing unprecedented warming, and thus the intensity and frequency of storms.
Dr. Gray also questioned the impartiality and expertise of her favorite “real expert,” astronomer James Hansen, who repeatedly rails about “runaway” global warming and “death trains” carrying coal to power plants. Gray also predicted, “in 15 or 20 years, we are going to look back on this whole business [of manmade climate disasters] as the Eugenics movement.”
The junior senator went on a tear, firing off prosecutorial questions, interrupting every response – then pouting, “I am asking you something, I still don’t have an answer.” She attacked Dr. Gray for not having enough climate papers peer reviewed by processes and people that systematically refuse to review or publish them. She blasted Crichton and Gray for not being climate change experts – but accepted without question statements by a Brookings Institution lawyer with no training in any branch of science. The “few dissenters” to her global warming disaster claims, she harrumphed, are funded by oil and coal companies.
Last year she did it again. National Black Chamber of Commerce CEO Harry Alford had introduced an expert study his organization had commissioned, concluding that cap-tax-and-trade legislation would result in 1.3 million fewer net jobs, increase energy and consumer costs, and hurt minority families, despite any green jobs supposedly created through massive taxpayer subsidies. Boxer wouldn’t hear it.
She presented two letters that supposedly contradicted Alford’s study, by making meaningless claims about global warming and renewable energy. The NAACP “approved a historic resolution addressing climate change legislation,” said one. “Clean energy will unlock millions of jobs, and NAACP support is vital to ensuring that these jobs help rebuild urban areas,” said the other.
“What does that mean?” Alford wanted to know. “You’re trying to put up another black group to contradict me.” These people “would be proud” that they were being quoted in this committee hearing, Boxer retorted in her most imperious and condescending tone.
When he responded to her accusation that he wasn’t from California – noting that he was born and raised there and still owns property in the state – she stopped him with a testy “Let me talk to you.” (In other words, “Don’t get uppity with me.”)
Barbara Boxer is on a mission. She intends to control our economy, opportunities and lives. Put the federal government in charge of an American energy and free enterprise system that created more health and prosperity than any other system in history. And replace hydrocarbon energy and the tens of millions of jobs it sustains – with “green” jobs created by using money confiscated from families, businesses and our grandchildren to subsidize favored companies and minority groups that will help ensure that liberal politicians are reelected in perpetuity.
She is not about to let some uppity black man, contrary economic analysis or “fake” experts like William Gray and Michael Crichton derail her scheme. No wonder the left-leaning San Francisco Chronicle dis-endorsed her, saying: “Her most famous moments on Capitol Hill have ... been ones of ... delivering partisan shots. There is no reason to believe that another six-year term would bring anything but more of the same uninspired representation.”
On November 3, let’s call her FORMER Senator Barbara Boxer.
Revisiting Clarence Thomas’s ordeal
By Star Parker
Monday, October 25, 2010
Ginni Thomas’s call to Anita Hill has, not surprisingly, provoked columns and blogging speculating what motivated the call, some wanting to relive those hearings of 20 years ago.
But how about considering the simplest and most straightforward scenario?
Mrs. Thomas knows that her husband was slandered. That his name and reputation remain tarnished as result of the sleaziest kinds of lies and character assassination delivered by Anita Hill. She knows, better than anyone other than Clarence Thomas himself, the pain her husband endures as result of these lies.
The alleged point of those Senate hearings was to examine a man’s qualifications and confirm his nomination as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Justice Thomas’s performance on the Court over these twenty years has been exemplary. One might not agree with his conservative views, but his scholarship, professionalism, and original contributions are well established.
So is it inconceivable that Ginni Thomas might consider reaching out to Anita Hill to consider, after all this time, extinguishing, as only she can, the sordid cloud of innuendo that she created?
But it’s more than just how Clarence Thomas feels.
The “high-tech lynching,” as Thomas described it, was not about destroying one man, but destroying what that man stands for.
Would anyone believe for a microsecond that Anita Hill would have showed up in Washington if Clarence Thomas was a liberal?
This was not about a man’s qualifications for the Supreme Court but the threat of conservatism and the emergence of a black conservative icon that black Americans could look to and learn from.
When runaway slaves were captured and dragged back to the plantation, they were whipped in view of all, until no skin was left, so the lesson would be clear about what happens to renegades.
The civil rights movement, a movement about human freedom, morphed, after passage of the Civil Rights Act, into a left wing political movement. Freedom, once the prize, became the threat. It became all about politics and power.
Organizations like the NAACP, once about protecting life, liberty, and property of Americans of color, became about advancing a left wing political regime.
As Clarence Thomas writes in his autobiography “My Grandfather’s Son”, “Hypersensitive civil-rights leaders who saw racism around every corner fell silent when my liberal enemies sneered that I was unqualified to sit on the Court…”
It’s now business as usual that black conservatives are non-persons to traditional black civil rights organizations.
When the city of Oakland passed an ordinance aimed specifically to prevent a black pastor, Walter Hoye, from distributing pro-life literature outside an abortion clinic preying on black women, no civil rights organizations showed up.
When Crystal Dixon, a black Christian woman, was fired from her job at the University of Toledo for writing an op-ed in a local paper arguing that the homosexual rights movement is different from the black civil rights movement, no civil rights organizations showed up.
Justice Thomas writes that during his ordeal he received a call from Jehan Sadat, widow of the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. She offered words of encouragement, saying that “…They are laughing at the United States around the world….Women around the world are suffering real oppression.”
There is particular irony here. Anwar Sadat was a leader who chose to think for himself. He decided to look truth in the eye and courageously step forward in the name of freedom and peace and reach out to Israel. For this he was assassinated.
Human liberty is about courage, dignity, eternal truths, and personal responsibility.
It’s why those wedded to a world defined by politics and uniformity feel so deeply threatened by men like Clarence Thomas and Anwar Sadat.
So it’s not so amazing that a woman like Ginni Thomas would reach out to Anita Hill. And it is not so amazing why a woman like Anita Hill would find this bizarre.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Ginni Thomas’s call to Anita Hill has, not surprisingly, provoked columns and blogging speculating what motivated the call, some wanting to relive those hearings of 20 years ago.
But how about considering the simplest and most straightforward scenario?
Mrs. Thomas knows that her husband was slandered. That his name and reputation remain tarnished as result of the sleaziest kinds of lies and character assassination delivered by Anita Hill. She knows, better than anyone other than Clarence Thomas himself, the pain her husband endures as result of these lies.
The alleged point of those Senate hearings was to examine a man’s qualifications and confirm his nomination as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Justice Thomas’s performance on the Court over these twenty years has been exemplary. One might not agree with his conservative views, but his scholarship, professionalism, and original contributions are well established.
So is it inconceivable that Ginni Thomas might consider reaching out to Anita Hill to consider, after all this time, extinguishing, as only she can, the sordid cloud of innuendo that she created?
But it’s more than just how Clarence Thomas feels.
The “high-tech lynching,” as Thomas described it, was not about destroying one man, but destroying what that man stands for.
Would anyone believe for a microsecond that Anita Hill would have showed up in Washington if Clarence Thomas was a liberal?
This was not about a man’s qualifications for the Supreme Court but the threat of conservatism and the emergence of a black conservative icon that black Americans could look to and learn from.
When runaway slaves were captured and dragged back to the plantation, they were whipped in view of all, until no skin was left, so the lesson would be clear about what happens to renegades.
The civil rights movement, a movement about human freedom, morphed, after passage of the Civil Rights Act, into a left wing political movement. Freedom, once the prize, became the threat. It became all about politics and power.
Organizations like the NAACP, once about protecting life, liberty, and property of Americans of color, became about advancing a left wing political regime.
As Clarence Thomas writes in his autobiography “My Grandfather’s Son”, “Hypersensitive civil-rights leaders who saw racism around every corner fell silent when my liberal enemies sneered that I was unqualified to sit on the Court…”
It’s now business as usual that black conservatives are non-persons to traditional black civil rights organizations.
When the city of Oakland passed an ordinance aimed specifically to prevent a black pastor, Walter Hoye, from distributing pro-life literature outside an abortion clinic preying on black women, no civil rights organizations showed up.
When Crystal Dixon, a black Christian woman, was fired from her job at the University of Toledo for writing an op-ed in a local paper arguing that the homosexual rights movement is different from the black civil rights movement, no civil rights organizations showed up.
Justice Thomas writes that during his ordeal he received a call from Jehan Sadat, widow of the late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. She offered words of encouragement, saying that “…They are laughing at the United States around the world….Women around the world are suffering real oppression.”
There is particular irony here. Anwar Sadat was a leader who chose to think for himself. He decided to look truth in the eye and courageously step forward in the name of freedom and peace and reach out to Israel. For this he was assassinated.
Human liberty is about courage, dignity, eternal truths, and personal responsibility.
It’s why those wedded to a world defined by politics and uniformity feel so deeply threatened by men like Clarence Thomas and Anwar Sadat.
So it’s not so amazing that a woman like Ginni Thomas would reach out to Anita Hill. And it is not so amazing why a woman like Anita Hill would find this bizarre.
MIA: American Student Outrage
By Lurita Doan
Monday, October 25, 2010
American college student activists, long seen as a bellwether for populist outrage, are missing in action. They are not staging protests concerning political, social and financial issues which affect them more directly and more profoundly than another other generation of Americans. Current college student passivity is both surprising and disappointing.
Last week, more than a million French students and workers rioted in protest of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recommendation to increase the retirement age by two years from 60 to 62. From Lyons to Marseilles to Paris, French student anger over decisions about their futures dominated French news. Raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 in a country that only has a 35 hour work week seems hardly dire, yet French students took to the streets.
American students, by comparison, have staged only lukewarm protests over the changes to state university education loan policies, to the plight of the treatment of farm workers in Florida, and outrage over cancellation of sign language classes. Students have even protested oversexed apparel advertisements, but on the critical issues of the day, where a misguided Congress and the Obama Administration have enacted flawed policies that will shackle American youth to a future of burdensome debt and a lower standard of living, students have been silent. The question is why?
Are American students too uninformed to understand that extremists in Congress have mortgaged their futures? Could students have been brainwashed by the teachings of left-leaning, Keynesian academics that are reflexively knee-jerk pro-Obama, regardless of the policy? The Obama Administration has implemented a series of long-term, economically destructive policies that will affect the ability of current college students to have a better standard of living than their parents. In September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that unemployment among college age students was up dramatically from 2009 reaching at a national high of 9.1%. And, with national unemployment remaining high at 9.6%, and expected to continue that way for some time, given the Obama's Administration's anti-business bias, newly minted college graduates face a grim employment future.
Healthcare reform, which many college students supported, will almost certainly turn out to be one of the greatest of curses. Students will be forced to spend hard-earned cash on medical plans that benefit them little but do much to subsidize the medical costs of older citizens and illegal immigrants currently in the system. Even the benefits of remaining of mommy's and daddy's medical plan for a year or two after college whilst entering their new, adult-worker lives, is a decision that will cost a person between the ages of 21 to 26 approximately $21,000.00.
With the economic downturn, still unimproved despite over a trillion dollar spent on fictitious "critical infrastructure projects" that were allegedly going to generate or save 3.5 million jobs, older American workers have less ability to retire, so they remain in their jobs, which has the unintended consequence of reducing upward mobility in the younger work force. This decision, coupled with all the other financial mismanagement by government will cost each American $44,200.
In addition, Obama's financial reform legislation made it more difficult for middle-class students to obtain family backed collateralized loans from banks while, college costs have been rising at two times inflation. Despite some increase in the amount of funding for federal PELL grants, because of the economic downturn, that funding must now cover more students, so the amount of the average Pell grant actually decreases.
These so-called "enhancements" from the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009 will cost students exorbitantly since the additional $1 billion of funding was provided with dollars borrowed from the Chinese, a debt that American young adults will be responsible for repaying. The bigger point is that the Obama Administration has made a conscious decision to engage in wealth re-distribution schemes to reward older Americans, punish success, and reward the most financially irresponsible while simultaneously punishing the most thrifty. When added together, Obama has placed a tremendous burden on the youth of today.
American college students seem oblivious to the Administration's plans that enslave them with dependency and burdensome taxes. You'd think there'd be some anger; you'd think there'd be some outrage; you'd think, like the French, they'd be rioting in the streets. For now, at least, it seems that American student outrage is MIA, and our country will be the worse for it.
The poet Kahlil Gibran, told us that our children " souls dwell in the House of Tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams." We may all be glad of that since the Obama Administration has ensured that the House of Tomorrow for the young people of today is the stuff of nightmares.
Monday, October 25, 2010
American college student activists, long seen as a bellwether for populist outrage, are missing in action. They are not staging protests concerning political, social and financial issues which affect them more directly and more profoundly than another other generation of Americans. Current college student passivity is both surprising and disappointing.
Last week, more than a million French students and workers rioted in protest of French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s recommendation to increase the retirement age by two years from 60 to 62. From Lyons to Marseilles to Paris, French student anger over decisions about their futures dominated French news. Raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 in a country that only has a 35 hour work week seems hardly dire, yet French students took to the streets.
American students, by comparison, have staged only lukewarm protests over the changes to state university education loan policies, to the plight of the treatment of farm workers in Florida, and outrage over cancellation of sign language classes. Students have even protested oversexed apparel advertisements, but on the critical issues of the day, where a misguided Congress and the Obama Administration have enacted flawed policies that will shackle American youth to a future of burdensome debt and a lower standard of living, students have been silent. The question is why?
Are American students too uninformed to understand that extremists in Congress have mortgaged their futures? Could students have been brainwashed by the teachings of left-leaning, Keynesian academics that are reflexively knee-jerk pro-Obama, regardless of the policy? The Obama Administration has implemented a series of long-term, economically destructive policies that will affect the ability of current college students to have a better standard of living than their parents. In September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that unemployment among college age students was up dramatically from 2009 reaching at a national high of 9.1%. And, with national unemployment remaining high at 9.6%, and expected to continue that way for some time, given the Obama's Administration's anti-business bias, newly minted college graduates face a grim employment future.
Healthcare reform, which many college students supported, will almost certainly turn out to be one of the greatest of curses. Students will be forced to spend hard-earned cash on medical plans that benefit them little but do much to subsidize the medical costs of older citizens and illegal immigrants currently in the system. Even the benefits of remaining of mommy's and daddy's medical plan for a year or two after college whilst entering their new, adult-worker lives, is a decision that will cost a person between the ages of 21 to 26 approximately $21,000.00.
With the economic downturn, still unimproved despite over a trillion dollar spent on fictitious "critical infrastructure projects" that were allegedly going to generate or save 3.5 million jobs, older American workers have less ability to retire, so they remain in their jobs, which has the unintended consequence of reducing upward mobility in the younger work force. This decision, coupled with all the other financial mismanagement by government will cost each American $44,200.
In addition, Obama's financial reform legislation made it more difficult for middle-class students to obtain family backed collateralized loans from banks while, college costs have been rising at two times inflation. Despite some increase in the amount of funding for federal PELL grants, because of the economic downturn, that funding must now cover more students, so the amount of the average Pell grant actually decreases.
These so-called "enhancements" from the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009 will cost students exorbitantly since the additional $1 billion of funding was provided with dollars borrowed from the Chinese, a debt that American young adults will be responsible for repaying. The bigger point is that the Obama Administration has made a conscious decision to engage in wealth re-distribution schemes to reward older Americans, punish success, and reward the most financially irresponsible while simultaneously punishing the most thrifty. When added together, Obama has placed a tremendous burden on the youth of today.
American college students seem oblivious to the Administration's plans that enslave them with dependency and burdensome taxes. You'd think there'd be some anger; you'd think there'd be some outrage; you'd think, like the French, they'd be rioting in the streets. For now, at least, it seems that American student outrage is MIA, and our country will be the worse for it.
The poet Kahlil Gibran, told us that our children " souls dwell in the House of Tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams." We may all be glad of that since the Obama Administration has ensured that the House of Tomorrow for the young people of today is the stuff of nightmares.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Obama Undermines Hard Work and People Who Play By The Rules
By Austin Hill
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Profits at many American corporations are looking pretty good these days, yet companies aren’t hiring.
Many American banks are flush with cash, yet they aren’t making many loans.
And despite President Obama’s repeated promises that his “healthcare reform” legislation would “lower the cost of healthcare,” many health insurance providers are raising the premiums they charge their customers (some by as much as forty percent) as the new law is phased-in.
So why, after nearly twenty-two months of President Obama “gettin’ people some help” (his folksy way of describing his interventions into the private sector economy), is the economy at a standstill, and in some instances getting worse?
Because Obamanomics has put the economy in a state of uncertainty and chaos, and it penalizes hardworking, productive people who play by the rules.
That sounds like a gross generalization, now doesn’t it? And I must be one of those unsophisticated simpletons that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Vice President Biden have recently lamented about, whose tiny little mind can’t comprehend all the complex goodness that President Obama and his Administration have brought about – right?
Well, let me apply my simple mind as best as I can, and consider a few facts. And let’s start by looking at the Obama Administration’s intervention into two of the most troublesome areas of our economy in the last three years -the real estate, and mortgage lending markets.
There’s no doubt that when Barack Obama took office in January of 2009, home values and mortgages were in free-fall. After years of the federal government enabling so-called “subprime mortgages,” which were mortgage loans extended to less-than-qualified borrowers, and after years of highly unregulated adjustable rate mortgages, two lethal conditions ensued both at the same time: the interest rates on those “ARM” loans began to reset upward, while the value of real estate properties began to decline.
Against this backdrop, the Obama Administration set out to do what many people believed at the time was a compassionate thing – and began “rescuing mortgages.” If the Administration could bring the skyrocketing rate of foreclosures to a halt, so the reasoning suggested, then home values would eventually stabilize and a vital sector of our economy would eventually start growing again.
So in March of 2009, President Obama unveiled the “Making Home Affordable” initiatives, a set of federal policies that would make it “easier” for people to stay in their homes and keep paying their mortgages. But how can the government arbitrarily make it “easier” for somebody to pay their debts, when they’ve already made commitments and signed loan documents and then end up with insufficient funds?
The Obama Administration’s approach to this task was multi-fold. In some instances, the “Making Home Affordable” program called for the lender to arbitrarily lower the interest rate of the loan (to as low as 2% for some borrowers); in other situations, the Obama Administration managed to force banks that had accepted government “bailout funds” to eliminate portions of the principle that a borrower owed on a mortgage, or to extend the terms of a mortgage to 40 years or more.
It all seemed so “compassionate,” like a “quick fix” idea that would obviously stop the foreclosure crisis and stabilize the markets. Except that by September of 2009 the fallout of President Obama’s meddling was becoming apparent: despite all the good intentions, well over fifty percent of borrowers who had sought help from the “Making Home Affordable” program had already fallen behind on their mortgage payments again. Worse yet, mortgage lenders, having been stung and strong-armed with a slew of new governmental requirements and mandates and guidelines, were turning away qualified borrowers with good credit and good money.
That was in 2009. Now, in the fourth quarter of 2010, home foreclosures are on the rise again and the Obama Administration, having already spent untold billions of our tax dollars trying to stop home foreclosures, is threatening mortgage lenders with new “fees” and “fines” if they move to quickly to foreclose on a delinquent loan. Meanwhile, interest rates remain at rock-bottom lows, while qualified borrowers are still not getting banks to lend on any consistent basis.
And herein lies the problem: rather than incentivizing banks to begin lending again to qualified borrowers, the Obama Administration’s efforts to “fix” the mortgage crisis have been entirely focused on providing “help” to people who aren’t playing by the rules, who aren’t keeping their commitments, and who aren’t paying their mortgages on time. And because of federal mandates and “guidelines,” private lending institutions are obsessed with “providing help” to people who are for whatever reason not keeping their commitments, rather than providing great service to customers who are paying their bills, or lending to highly qualified would-be borrowers.
This is an example of how President Obama’s attempt at “gettin’ people some help” has actually hurt. And his force-fed healthcare “reform” has in similar ways sent the entire private sector of our economy into a state of uncertainty and chaos.
May we all cast a vote in favor of hard work, and the people who play by the rules, this November.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Profits at many American corporations are looking pretty good these days, yet companies aren’t hiring.
Many American banks are flush with cash, yet they aren’t making many loans.
And despite President Obama’s repeated promises that his “healthcare reform” legislation would “lower the cost of healthcare,” many health insurance providers are raising the premiums they charge their customers (some by as much as forty percent) as the new law is phased-in.
So why, after nearly twenty-two months of President Obama “gettin’ people some help” (his folksy way of describing his interventions into the private sector economy), is the economy at a standstill, and in some instances getting worse?
Because Obamanomics has put the economy in a state of uncertainty and chaos, and it penalizes hardworking, productive people who play by the rules.
That sounds like a gross generalization, now doesn’t it? And I must be one of those unsophisticated simpletons that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Vice President Biden have recently lamented about, whose tiny little mind can’t comprehend all the complex goodness that President Obama and his Administration have brought about – right?
Well, let me apply my simple mind as best as I can, and consider a few facts. And let’s start by looking at the Obama Administration’s intervention into two of the most troublesome areas of our economy in the last three years -the real estate, and mortgage lending markets.
There’s no doubt that when Barack Obama took office in January of 2009, home values and mortgages were in free-fall. After years of the federal government enabling so-called “subprime mortgages,” which were mortgage loans extended to less-than-qualified borrowers, and after years of highly unregulated adjustable rate mortgages, two lethal conditions ensued both at the same time: the interest rates on those “ARM” loans began to reset upward, while the value of real estate properties began to decline.
Against this backdrop, the Obama Administration set out to do what many people believed at the time was a compassionate thing – and began “rescuing mortgages.” If the Administration could bring the skyrocketing rate of foreclosures to a halt, so the reasoning suggested, then home values would eventually stabilize and a vital sector of our economy would eventually start growing again.
So in March of 2009, President Obama unveiled the “Making Home Affordable” initiatives, a set of federal policies that would make it “easier” for people to stay in their homes and keep paying their mortgages. But how can the government arbitrarily make it “easier” for somebody to pay their debts, when they’ve already made commitments and signed loan documents and then end up with insufficient funds?
The Obama Administration’s approach to this task was multi-fold. In some instances, the “Making Home Affordable” program called for the lender to arbitrarily lower the interest rate of the loan (to as low as 2% for some borrowers); in other situations, the Obama Administration managed to force banks that had accepted government “bailout funds” to eliminate portions of the principle that a borrower owed on a mortgage, or to extend the terms of a mortgage to 40 years or more.
It all seemed so “compassionate,” like a “quick fix” idea that would obviously stop the foreclosure crisis and stabilize the markets. Except that by September of 2009 the fallout of President Obama’s meddling was becoming apparent: despite all the good intentions, well over fifty percent of borrowers who had sought help from the “Making Home Affordable” program had already fallen behind on their mortgage payments again. Worse yet, mortgage lenders, having been stung and strong-armed with a slew of new governmental requirements and mandates and guidelines, were turning away qualified borrowers with good credit and good money.
That was in 2009. Now, in the fourth quarter of 2010, home foreclosures are on the rise again and the Obama Administration, having already spent untold billions of our tax dollars trying to stop home foreclosures, is threatening mortgage lenders with new “fees” and “fines” if they move to quickly to foreclose on a delinquent loan. Meanwhile, interest rates remain at rock-bottom lows, while qualified borrowers are still not getting banks to lend on any consistent basis.
And herein lies the problem: rather than incentivizing banks to begin lending again to qualified borrowers, the Obama Administration’s efforts to “fix” the mortgage crisis have been entirely focused on providing “help” to people who aren’t playing by the rules, who aren’t keeping their commitments, and who aren’t paying their mortgages on time. And because of federal mandates and “guidelines,” private lending institutions are obsessed with “providing help” to people who are for whatever reason not keeping their commitments, rather than providing great service to customers who are paying their bills, or lending to highly qualified would-be borrowers.
This is an example of how President Obama’s attempt at “gettin’ people some help” has actually hurt. And his force-fed healthcare “reform” has in similar ways sent the entire private sector of our economy into a state of uncertainty and chaos.
May we all cast a vote in favor of hard work, and the people who play by the rules, this November.
A Witch Hunt for Bigots Singes American Media
By Debra J. Saunders
Sunday, October 24, 2010
"Political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis, where you don't address reality," Juan Williams observed rather prophetically on Bill O'Reilly's show Monday night, before he made the comments that got him fired from his assignment as senior news analyst for National Public Radio.
This is what Williams said: "I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.
"Now, I remember also that when the Times Square bomber was at court, I think this was just last week. He said the war with Muslims, America's war, is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don't think there's any way to get away from these facts."
Williams tempered those remarks with the caveat that President George W. Bush clearly stated that America is not at war with Islam. And: "Wait a second though, wait, hold on, because if you said Timothy McVeigh, the Atlanta bomber, these people who are protesting against homosexuality at military funerals, very obnoxious, you don't say first and foremost, we got a problem with Christians. That's crazy."
Too late. Williams already had handed ammo to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. _CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad called on NPR to investigate Williams on Wednesday. In a statement Awad charged, "NPR should address the fact that one of its news analysts seems to believe that all airline passengers who are perceived to be Muslim can legitimately be viewed as security threats."
CAIR is an identity-politics organization that trolls for opportunities to take offense. Whenever anyone acknowledges the nexus between terrorism and radical Islam -- not Islam, but radical Islam -- CAIR cries foul. Wednesday afternoon within hours of the CAIR complaint, NPR rewarded CAIR's campaign of intimidation with a scalp.
NPR announced it had severed its contract with Williams, as his remarks "were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR."
Should the public then assume that NPR's editorial standards demand that journalists ignore Islamic extremists who declare jihad -- even while noting that it's crazy to lump all Muslims as extremists? Ironically, NPR's editorial standards comport with what Williams said about political correctness feeding the air of unreality.
On Thursday, NPR President Vivian Schiller denied that the firing was about Fox News. I don't buy that. As Politico reported last year, NPR tried to pressure political correspondent Mara Liasson to sever her ties as a commentator on "Fox News Sunday" and its "Special Report." In 2009, NPR asked Williams to not use his NPR identification when appearing on "The O'Reilly Factor." (Monday night, O'Reilly no doubt tweaked NPR management when he said to Williams, "You actually work for NPR, OK?")
Indeed, NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard told "Talk of the Nation" Thursday that the network should have given Williams an ultimatum -- NPR or Fox News.
Eric Boehlert of the left-wing MediaMatters used Williams' firing to call on NPR to sever its association with Liasson, as well. Wrote Boehlert, "I'm not suggesting Liasson has said anything as offensive as Williams, or that she has that kind of track record while appearing on Fox. I'm just saying that if you look at NPR's code of ethics, there's simply no way Liasson should be making appearances on Fox."
What an insidious pursuit. MediaMatters lives to pillory Fox News for being too conservative -- at the same time, it tries to drive moderate commentators off Fox programming.
MediaMatters doesn't want balance on Fox News. MediaMatters doesn't want an exchange of ideas. MediaMatters wants to push Fox further to the right. Its toxic tactics are designed to widen the left-right divide in America by marginalizing not only conservatives, but anyone who associates with conservatives.
I've talked to people at CAIR and MediaMatters. I know folks who work for NPR. They all think they're smart, and yet they've just sent a bonehead message to the American public.
Way to go, ye titans of tolerance. You've just broadcasted that an African-American moderate with a solid civil-rights record can lose his job and be branded as a bigot for quoting a convicted terrorist and admitting to a moment's hesitation if he sees someone in Muslim garb on a plane.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
"Political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis, where you don't address reality," Juan Williams observed rather prophetically on Bill O'Reilly's show Monday night, before he made the comments that got him fired from his assignment as senior news analyst for National Public Radio.
This is what Williams said: "I'm not a bigot. You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.
"Now, I remember also that when the Times Square bomber was at court, I think this was just last week. He said the war with Muslims, America's war, is just beginning, first drop of blood. I don't think there's any way to get away from these facts."
Williams tempered those remarks with the caveat that President George W. Bush clearly stated that America is not at war with Islam. And: "Wait a second though, wait, hold on, because if you said Timothy McVeigh, the Atlanta bomber, these people who are protesting against homosexuality at military funerals, very obnoxious, you don't say first and foremost, we got a problem with Christians. That's crazy."
Too late. Williams already had handed ammo to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. _CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad called on NPR to investigate Williams on Wednesday. In a statement Awad charged, "NPR should address the fact that one of its news analysts seems to believe that all airline passengers who are perceived to be Muslim can legitimately be viewed as security threats."
CAIR is an identity-politics organization that trolls for opportunities to take offense. Whenever anyone acknowledges the nexus between terrorism and radical Islam -- not Islam, but radical Islam -- CAIR cries foul. Wednesday afternoon within hours of the CAIR complaint, NPR rewarded CAIR's campaign of intimidation with a scalp.
NPR announced it had severed its contract with Williams, as his remarks "were inconsistent with our editorial standards and practices, and undermined his credibility as a news analyst with NPR."
Should the public then assume that NPR's editorial standards demand that journalists ignore Islamic extremists who declare jihad -- even while noting that it's crazy to lump all Muslims as extremists? Ironically, NPR's editorial standards comport with what Williams said about political correctness feeding the air of unreality.
On Thursday, NPR President Vivian Schiller denied that the firing was about Fox News. I don't buy that. As Politico reported last year, NPR tried to pressure political correspondent Mara Liasson to sever her ties as a commentator on "Fox News Sunday" and its "Special Report." In 2009, NPR asked Williams to not use his NPR identification when appearing on "The O'Reilly Factor." (Monday night, O'Reilly no doubt tweaked NPR management when he said to Williams, "You actually work for NPR, OK?")
Indeed, NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard told "Talk of the Nation" Thursday that the network should have given Williams an ultimatum -- NPR or Fox News.
Eric Boehlert of the left-wing MediaMatters used Williams' firing to call on NPR to sever its association with Liasson, as well. Wrote Boehlert, "I'm not suggesting Liasson has said anything as offensive as Williams, or that she has that kind of track record while appearing on Fox. I'm just saying that if you look at NPR's code of ethics, there's simply no way Liasson should be making appearances on Fox."
What an insidious pursuit. MediaMatters lives to pillory Fox News for being too conservative -- at the same time, it tries to drive moderate commentators off Fox programming.
MediaMatters doesn't want balance on Fox News. MediaMatters doesn't want an exchange of ideas. MediaMatters wants to push Fox further to the right. Its toxic tactics are designed to widen the left-right divide in America by marginalizing not only conservatives, but anyone who associates with conservatives.
I've talked to people at CAIR and MediaMatters. I know folks who work for NPR. They all think they're smart, and yet they've just sent a bonehead message to the American public.
Way to go, ye titans of tolerance. You've just broadcasted that an African-American moderate with a solid civil-rights record can lose his job and be branded as a bigot for quoting a convicted terrorist and admitting to a moment's hesitation if he sees someone in Muslim garb on a plane.
Liberals Attempt to Stifle Soldiers’ Ability to Vote
By Doug Giles
Saturday, October 23, 2010
The Left has so derailed and so thoroughly misread America that it would be a miracle if they won cheap seats to Leif Garrett’s “I Was Made for Dancin’ Comeback Concert” at the Light-A-Fart Nursing Home in Bugtussle, Texas come November 2nd.
The only way the woefully unpopular progressives can score much on anything in the upcoming mid-terms is via uncut, unmitigated, and unsubstantiated Graysonisms, steering clear of Obama’s policy toxicity, voter fraud, making certain the military doesn’t get to vote, and through ballot box blocking once a Tea Party mark is made.
Yep, the desperate, rudderless Left is freakin’ out and yelling:
- “Bring on the Obama Kool-Aid from election past!”
- “Bring back the effective fraudulent freaks of ACORN, SEIU and their multitudinous gross and seedy Mugabe-esque “Community” organizations to register 100,000 corpses and Disney characters to cast ballots and steal this son of a monkey!”
- “Release the hounds of ‘Aqua Buddha’ and commence the Sabrina the Teenage Witch Hunts!”
- “Someone ‘forget’ to send our troops their ballots!”
- Oh, and I almost forgot: “Unleash the petite one, King Samir Shabazz, with his paramilitary jumpsuit and his baton, dammit! We gotta win this thang!”
How progressive. How hope and changy. How low can you go, BHO?
All of the above smack is repugnant.
However, of the aforementioned ditties, one that really gets me PO’ed is how these socialistic slime dealers and election stealers are trying to keep tens of thousands of our military men and women from receiving their absentee ballots and thus their ability to vote.
Now, the numb nuts in NYC, when busted, said it was an “honest mistake.” I, in part, believe them. To me this is quasi-understandable. Here’s why: We all know the powers that be in NYC were busy kissing Imam Rauf’s Muslim butt over the Ground Zero Mosque, and therefore they probably just forgot to mail out the ballots to our soldiers who’re dodging bullets abroad from … um … Muslims. I get it. They goofed up. I hear it’s hard to multitask when you’re kissing someone’s _ _ _.
Being the Christian dude that I am, I’ll err on the side of grace and grant you that one oversight of 20,000 military absentee ballots mysteriously failing to make it to Afghanistan is possible. But it sure starts looking kinda/sorta weird when it not only happens in New York City but then, coincidently, where thousands of deployed troops failed to get their ballots to vote in this election—as in thousands of troops from thirty-five Illinois counties. That’s THIRTY-FIVE Illinois counties! (Question: what current famous politician whose middle name is Hussein hails from Illinois?)
Again, being the gracious guy that I am, if one county forgot to mail GI Joe his ballot, couldn’t that just be a mistake? Okay, I get it, nobody is perfect (cough).
But if two counties do it? Alright, it’s starting to look a wee bit weird, but hey, everyone makes mistakes, eh (choke)?
But when it ramps up to thirty-five frickin’ counties in Illinois forgetting to post ‘em to our warriors in harm’s way while the same scallywags hand-deliver them to inmates in Illinois’ state prison system then all I’ve got to say is please, pettifoggers, go sell crazy somewhere else.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
The Left has so derailed and so thoroughly misread America that it would be a miracle if they won cheap seats to Leif Garrett’s “I Was Made for Dancin’ Comeback Concert” at the Light-A-Fart Nursing Home in Bugtussle, Texas come November 2nd.
The only way the woefully unpopular progressives can score much on anything in the upcoming mid-terms is via uncut, unmitigated, and unsubstantiated Graysonisms, steering clear of Obama’s policy toxicity, voter fraud, making certain the military doesn’t get to vote, and through ballot box blocking once a Tea Party mark is made.
Yep, the desperate, rudderless Left is freakin’ out and yelling:
- “Bring on the Obama Kool-Aid from election past!”
- “Bring back the effective fraudulent freaks of ACORN, SEIU and their multitudinous gross and seedy Mugabe-esque “Community” organizations to register 100,000 corpses and Disney characters to cast ballots and steal this son of a monkey!”
- “Release the hounds of ‘Aqua Buddha’ and commence the Sabrina the Teenage Witch Hunts!”
- “Someone ‘forget’ to send our troops their ballots!”
- Oh, and I almost forgot: “Unleash the petite one, King Samir Shabazz, with his paramilitary jumpsuit and his baton, dammit! We gotta win this thang!”
How progressive. How hope and changy. How low can you go, BHO?
All of the above smack is repugnant.
However, of the aforementioned ditties, one that really gets me PO’ed is how these socialistic slime dealers and election stealers are trying to keep tens of thousands of our military men and women from receiving their absentee ballots and thus their ability to vote.
Now, the numb nuts in NYC, when busted, said it was an “honest mistake.” I, in part, believe them. To me this is quasi-understandable. Here’s why: We all know the powers that be in NYC were busy kissing Imam Rauf’s Muslim butt over the Ground Zero Mosque, and therefore they probably just forgot to mail out the ballots to our soldiers who’re dodging bullets abroad from … um … Muslims. I get it. They goofed up. I hear it’s hard to multitask when you’re kissing someone’s _ _ _.
Being the Christian dude that I am, I’ll err on the side of grace and grant you that one oversight of 20,000 military absentee ballots mysteriously failing to make it to Afghanistan is possible. But it sure starts looking kinda/sorta weird when it not only happens in New York City but then, coincidently, where thousands of deployed troops failed to get their ballots to vote in this election—as in thousands of troops from thirty-five Illinois counties. That’s THIRTY-FIVE Illinois counties! (Question: what current famous politician whose middle name is Hussein hails from Illinois?)
Again, being the gracious guy that I am, if one county forgot to mail GI Joe his ballot, couldn’t that just be a mistake? Okay, I get it, nobody is perfect (cough).
But if two counties do it? Alright, it’s starting to look a wee bit weird, but hey, everyone makes mistakes, eh (choke)?
But when it ramps up to thirty-five frickin’ counties in Illinois forgetting to post ‘em to our warriors in harm’s way while the same scallywags hand-deliver them to inmates in Illinois’ state prison system then all I’ve got to say is please, pettifoggers, go sell crazy somewhere else.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
How America Can Stand By Arizona
By Russell Pearce
Saturday, October 23, 2010
I knew Arizona’s SB 1070 would be controversial when I introduced it, but I did not expect the national immigration debate to revolve around a state law.
While the anti-American open borders Left attack me and the law as “racist,” “nativist” and their other empty smear words, the vast majority of the people of Arizona and America support the law.
Naturally, politicians of both parties on the state and local level are trying to jump on the bandwagon as the election approaches.
On the state level, dozens of gubernatorial and attorney general candidates are campaigning to enact SB 1070 style legislation. Even Democrats like Georgia’s Roy Barnes say they’d sign such a bill. Of course a politician’s promise isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
Even if they would in fact sign the bill, they must also pledge to fight the Obama administration and its far left buddies like the ACLU and Mexican American Legal Defense Fund who are sure to file lawsuits and do whatever they can to block implementation of the law.
On the federal level, just saying “I support SB 1070” is even emptier without any commitment to fight the open borders agenda of the Obama administration and the courts.
Any Senate candidate who supports SB 1070 needs to guarantee that they will vote against any activist judge. Any RINO who voted for a board member of “LatinoJustice” (which filed an amicus brief against SB 1070) like Sonia Sotomayor knew how she would vote on immigration cases.
Additionally there is legislation that can affect the legal challenges against SB 1070.
Sen. Robert Menendez’s Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2010 would try to nullify every single state and local law that fights illegal immigration. Congressman Luis Gutierrez’s CIR ASAP Act with over 100 Democratic co-sponsors does the same thing.
Menendez’s bill also restricts the 287(g) program to allow state and local law enforcement to enter into formal agreements with federal immigration authorities to fight illegal immigration. Gutierrez’s bill completely repeals it.
287(g) is a useful program, but it is unfortunately viewed by many as a permission slip that must be granted by the federal government to allow states and localities to enforce immigration law. Former INS Commissioners Doris Meissner and James W. Ziglar wrote an Op Ed in the Washington Post claiming that SB 1070 is unconstitutional because it goes beyond what is permitted by 287(g).
Obama and Janet Napolitano restricted the agreement so that it can only be used to enforce the law against illegal aliens who also commit other crimes, and unfortunately many local law enforcement agencies stopped pursuing the law.
When Maricopa County Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio cracked down on illegal immigration without getting permission from Obama, they threatened to revoke his 287(g) status. When Sheriff Joe refused to balk, they filed suit against him with a frivolous civil rights claim.
The truth is that Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act explicitly acknowledges that states have the inherit authority to enforce immigration law stating:
"Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to require an agreement . . . in order for any officer of a State . . . to communicate with the [Secretary of Homeland Security] regarding the immigration status of any individual . . . or otherwise to cooperate with the [Secretary] in the identification, apprehension, detention, or removal of aliens not lawfully present in the United States."
Rep. Marsha Blackburn’s Clear Law Enforcement for Criminal Alien Removal [CLEAR] Act further clarifies the states’ rights over immigration by “reaffirming the existing inherent authority of States…to investigate, identify, apprehend, arrest, detain, or transfer to Federal custody aliens in the United States…for the purposes of assisting in the enforcement of the immigration laws of the United States in the course of carrying out routine duties. This State authority has never been displaced or preempted by Congress.”
I’m flattered that my law has become a litmus test on immigration, but I hate to see Democrats and RINOs pretend to defend it to win votes. In Arizona a number of vulnerable Democratic Congressmen including Gabrielle Giffords and Ann Kirkpatrick tried to sound tough by opposing the federal lawsuit with much fanfare. Yet these same Democrats opposed SB 1070 initially, and they refuse to defend Arizona’s right to enforce the law. Rather they simply demand that the federal government take action (i.e. amnesty.) Needless to say, they have not co-sponsored the CLEAR Act.
With friends like these, SB 1070 does not need enemies. Any candidate or politician on the federal level who claims to support SB 1070 needs to put their money where their mouth is. This means supporting the CLEAR Act and acknowledging a state’s inherit right to enforce the law, opposing activist judges, and demanding that the federal government enforce all laws.
Of course the federal government needs to enforce its own laws and secure the border. But until they do, the least we can ask of them is not to interfere with states that care about the rule of law.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
I knew Arizona’s SB 1070 would be controversial when I introduced it, but I did not expect the national immigration debate to revolve around a state law.
While the anti-American open borders Left attack me and the law as “racist,” “nativist” and their other empty smear words, the vast majority of the people of Arizona and America support the law.
Naturally, politicians of both parties on the state and local level are trying to jump on the bandwagon as the election approaches.
On the state level, dozens of gubernatorial and attorney general candidates are campaigning to enact SB 1070 style legislation. Even Democrats like Georgia’s Roy Barnes say they’d sign such a bill. Of course a politician’s promise isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
Even if they would in fact sign the bill, they must also pledge to fight the Obama administration and its far left buddies like the ACLU and Mexican American Legal Defense Fund who are sure to file lawsuits and do whatever they can to block implementation of the law.
On the federal level, just saying “I support SB 1070” is even emptier without any commitment to fight the open borders agenda of the Obama administration and the courts.
Any Senate candidate who supports SB 1070 needs to guarantee that they will vote against any activist judge. Any RINO who voted for a board member of “LatinoJustice” (which filed an amicus brief against SB 1070) like Sonia Sotomayor knew how she would vote on immigration cases.
Additionally there is legislation that can affect the legal challenges against SB 1070.
Sen. Robert Menendez’s Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2010 would try to nullify every single state and local law that fights illegal immigration. Congressman Luis Gutierrez’s CIR ASAP Act with over 100 Democratic co-sponsors does the same thing.
Menendez’s bill also restricts the 287(g) program to allow state and local law enforcement to enter into formal agreements with federal immigration authorities to fight illegal immigration. Gutierrez’s bill completely repeals it.
287(g) is a useful program, but it is unfortunately viewed by many as a permission slip that must be granted by the federal government to allow states and localities to enforce immigration law. Former INS Commissioners Doris Meissner and James W. Ziglar wrote an Op Ed in the Washington Post claiming that SB 1070 is unconstitutional because it goes beyond what is permitted by 287(g).
Obama and Janet Napolitano restricted the agreement so that it can only be used to enforce the law against illegal aliens who also commit other crimes, and unfortunately many local law enforcement agencies stopped pursuing the law.
When Maricopa County Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio cracked down on illegal immigration without getting permission from Obama, they threatened to revoke his 287(g) status. When Sheriff Joe refused to balk, they filed suit against him with a frivolous civil rights claim.
The truth is that Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act explicitly acknowledges that states have the inherit authority to enforce immigration law stating:
"Nothing in this subsection shall be construed to require an agreement . . . in order for any officer of a State . . . to communicate with the [Secretary of Homeland Security] regarding the immigration status of any individual . . . or otherwise to cooperate with the [Secretary] in the identification, apprehension, detention, or removal of aliens not lawfully present in the United States."
Rep. Marsha Blackburn’s Clear Law Enforcement for Criminal Alien Removal [CLEAR] Act further clarifies the states’ rights over immigration by “reaffirming the existing inherent authority of States…to investigate, identify, apprehend, arrest, detain, or transfer to Federal custody aliens in the United States…for the purposes of assisting in the enforcement of the immigration laws of the United States in the course of carrying out routine duties. This State authority has never been displaced or preempted by Congress.”
I’m flattered that my law has become a litmus test on immigration, but I hate to see Democrats and RINOs pretend to defend it to win votes. In Arizona a number of vulnerable Democratic Congressmen including Gabrielle Giffords and Ann Kirkpatrick tried to sound tough by opposing the federal lawsuit with much fanfare. Yet these same Democrats opposed SB 1070 initially, and they refuse to defend Arizona’s right to enforce the law. Rather they simply demand that the federal government take action (i.e. amnesty.) Needless to say, they have not co-sponsored the CLEAR Act.
With friends like these, SB 1070 does not need enemies. Any candidate or politician on the federal level who claims to support SB 1070 needs to put their money where their mouth is. This means supporting the CLEAR Act and acknowledging a state’s inherit right to enforce the law, opposing activist judges, and demanding that the federal government enforce all laws.
Of course the federal government needs to enforce its own laws and secure the border. But until they do, the least we can ask of them is not to interfere with states that care about the rule of law.
Have a Happy United Nations Day. After All, You Paid for It!
By Brett Schaefer
Saturday, October 23, 2010
October 24 is United Nations Day - an official, international public holiday commemorating the organization's creation in 1945. In the minds of most Americans, United Nations Day probably ranks on par with, say, “Leif Erikson Day” in terms of importance. But as long as our calendars prompt us to remember the UN, let’s take a look at it.
At age 65, the UN has become a sprawling international conglomerate ostensibly overseen by its 192 member countries. Core UN functions employ more than 22,000 people and boast a biennial budget of approximately $14.5 billion (including both regular and extra-budgetary resources, to use UN terminology). Those figures don’t include its peacekeeping operations, with more than 122,000 personnel and a $7.3 billion annual budget this year. Nor do they include the budgets and staff of the World Health Organization, UNICEF, UNESCO or dozens more international bodies affiliated with the UN.
The UN is routinely asked to address numerous diplomatic, economic and security issues. Sometimes, it succeeds in its missions. The more technical organizations in the UN system, like the Universal Postal Union (which having been established in 1874 actually predates the UN) and the International Civil Aviation Organization, have been quite helpful in coordinating international correspondence and travel. UNICEF has successfully inoculated millions of children. The WHO helped eradicate small pox. United Nations peacekeeping missions are often useful and more welcome than direct U.S. intervention.
However, the UN is not always the best option for pursuing critical missions, nor are all its activities useful. For instance, UN peacekeeping has a decidedly checkered past with the Rwandan genocide and Srebrenica massacre occurring on its watch. UN efforts to promote human rights often devolve into farce . Indeed, turning to the UN for help on issues where it lacks expertise, authority, moral clarity or capacity can make international problems worse. One harsh reality about the UN: It is a brutally political organization. Its 192 member nations constantly fight to advance their various, often competing, interests. Since most of these nations are neither economically nor politically free, they routinely vote against U.S. interests.
The UN is also often wasteful, corrupt, and mismanaged. Witness its Iraqi Oil-for-Food program. The most expensive scam in history, it netted Saddam Hussein more than $10 billion in illegal revenue. UN procurement is frequently tainted by fraud, and incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN personnel are notoriously widespread. The UN Secretary-General and the member states seem to have little interest in addressing these problems. Americans have every right to be upset by the UN’s inept management and the anti-American tone that typically pervades its meetings. After all, we’re paying for it—literally.
The U.S. is the largest financial contributor to the UN. Americans pay 22 percent of its regular budget, more than 27 percent of the peacekeeping budget, and a similarly disproportionate share of the bill for other UN affiliated organizations, funds and programs. And each year, the UN demand on U.S. taxpayers seems to increase. Since 2000, the UN regular budget has more than doubled and the peacekeeping budget has tripled.
To put that into perspective, consider that, over the last decade, while the U.S. was funding a global war on terrorism, two major military operations, and an unprecedented “stimulus” program, the UN increased its regular budget at an even faster clip. In fiscal year 2009 alone, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget reports, the UN raked in more than $6.3 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars. Last December, the administration voiced no objection when the UN decided to increase U.S. dues for UN peacekeeping resulting in more than $100 million in increased annual costs to U.S. taxpayers.
Our huge financial contribution to the organization makes the routine defeat of U.S.-led efforts to improve UN transparency and accountability incredibly frustrating. It also leaves many Americans wondering if the UN is more trouble than it’s worth. A February 2010 poll by Gallup found that only “thirty-one percent of Americans say the United Nations is doing a good job of solving the problems it has had to face.”
Beyond doubt, the UN is a difficult forum that often works against America interests. But most nations strongly support it. Since the organization is not going anywhere soon, the U.S. has little choice but to deal with the organization. Dealing with the UN successfully requires a healthy skepticism about its utility. We must see the UN for the political organization it is, recognize its strengths and weaknesses, and be willing to fight for our own policies and interests. The latter requires toughness. We must be willing to halt support for unproductive programs and leverage our financial contributions to push for reform. And we must be willing to walk away when negotiations in the UN move in a direction counter to our national interests.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration often appears to lack the requisite skepticism. Instead, it seems eager to involve the UN in a number of issues--such as disarmament, development, global warming, and human rights--in which the UN is particularly feckless or counterproductive.
Looking to Congress to offset the toughness deficit is often just as frustrating. Lawmakers last year agreed to pay U.S. peacekeeping arrears to the UN with no reform strings attached. Hopefully, the new Congress will be more willing to learn from past experience: When pushing for UN reform, nothing speaks louder than Congress’ power of the purse .
The UN record has some high points, but, overall, the disappointments outweigh them. But a holiday is a holiday, even if it’s not as thrilling as Halloween. Although, come to think of it, many of the people honored and offered the UN soapbox upon which to spout bizarre conspiracy theories and frightening threats are a lot scarier than the typical Halloween monster.
So this Sunday, take a moment to realize the UN is doing a lot and—with the Administration’s blessings and your tax dollars—will likely be doing a lot more. And let’s hope for change, so that those resources won’t be squandered on activities that promote the interests of repressive regimes such as Iran or China or Cuba rather than freedom-loving peoples everywhere.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
October 24 is United Nations Day - an official, international public holiday commemorating the organization's creation in 1945. In the minds of most Americans, United Nations Day probably ranks on par with, say, “Leif Erikson Day” in terms of importance. But as long as our calendars prompt us to remember the UN, let’s take a look at it.
At age 65, the UN has become a sprawling international conglomerate ostensibly overseen by its 192 member countries. Core UN functions employ more than 22,000 people and boast a biennial budget of approximately $14.5 billion (including both regular and extra-budgetary resources, to use UN terminology). Those figures don’t include its peacekeeping operations, with more than 122,000 personnel and a $7.3 billion annual budget this year. Nor do they include the budgets and staff of the World Health Organization, UNICEF, UNESCO or dozens more international bodies affiliated with the UN.
The UN is routinely asked to address numerous diplomatic, economic and security issues. Sometimes, it succeeds in its missions. The more technical organizations in the UN system, like the Universal Postal Union (which having been established in 1874 actually predates the UN) and the International Civil Aviation Organization, have been quite helpful in coordinating international correspondence and travel. UNICEF has successfully inoculated millions of children. The WHO helped eradicate small pox. United Nations peacekeeping missions are often useful and more welcome than direct U.S. intervention.
However, the UN is not always the best option for pursuing critical missions, nor are all its activities useful. For instance, UN peacekeeping has a decidedly checkered past with the Rwandan genocide and Srebrenica massacre occurring on its watch. UN efforts to promote human rights often devolve into farce . Indeed, turning to the UN for help on issues where it lacks expertise, authority, moral clarity or capacity can make international problems worse. One harsh reality about the UN: It is a brutally political organization. Its 192 member nations constantly fight to advance their various, often competing, interests. Since most of these nations are neither economically nor politically free, they routinely vote against U.S. interests.
The UN is also often wasteful, corrupt, and mismanaged. Witness its Iraqi Oil-for-Food program. The most expensive scam in history, it netted Saddam Hussein more than $10 billion in illegal revenue. UN procurement is frequently tainted by fraud, and incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse by UN personnel are notoriously widespread. The UN Secretary-General and the member states seem to have little interest in addressing these problems. Americans have every right to be upset by the UN’s inept management and the anti-American tone that typically pervades its meetings. After all, we’re paying for it—literally.
The U.S. is the largest financial contributor to the UN. Americans pay 22 percent of its regular budget, more than 27 percent of the peacekeeping budget, and a similarly disproportionate share of the bill for other UN affiliated organizations, funds and programs. And each year, the UN demand on U.S. taxpayers seems to increase. Since 2000, the UN regular budget has more than doubled and the peacekeeping budget has tripled.
To put that into perspective, consider that, over the last decade, while the U.S. was funding a global war on terrorism, two major military operations, and an unprecedented “stimulus” program, the UN increased its regular budget at an even faster clip. In fiscal year 2009 alone, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget reports, the UN raked in more than $6.3 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars. Last December, the administration voiced no objection when the UN decided to increase U.S. dues for UN peacekeeping resulting in more than $100 million in increased annual costs to U.S. taxpayers.
Our huge financial contribution to the organization makes the routine defeat of U.S.-led efforts to improve UN transparency and accountability incredibly frustrating. It also leaves many Americans wondering if the UN is more trouble than it’s worth. A February 2010 poll by Gallup found that only “thirty-one percent of Americans say the United Nations is doing a good job of solving the problems it has had to face.”
Beyond doubt, the UN is a difficult forum that often works against America interests. But most nations strongly support it. Since the organization is not going anywhere soon, the U.S. has little choice but to deal with the organization. Dealing with the UN successfully requires a healthy skepticism about its utility. We must see the UN for the political organization it is, recognize its strengths and weaknesses, and be willing to fight for our own policies and interests. The latter requires toughness. We must be willing to halt support for unproductive programs and leverage our financial contributions to push for reform. And we must be willing to walk away when negotiations in the UN move in a direction counter to our national interests.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration often appears to lack the requisite skepticism. Instead, it seems eager to involve the UN in a number of issues--such as disarmament, development, global warming, and human rights--in which the UN is particularly feckless or counterproductive.
Looking to Congress to offset the toughness deficit is often just as frustrating. Lawmakers last year agreed to pay U.S. peacekeeping arrears to the UN with no reform strings attached. Hopefully, the new Congress will be more willing to learn from past experience: When pushing for UN reform, nothing speaks louder than Congress’ power of the purse .
The UN record has some high points, but, overall, the disappointments outweigh them. But a holiday is a holiday, even if it’s not as thrilling as Halloween. Although, come to think of it, many of the people honored and offered the UN soapbox upon which to spout bizarre conspiracy theories and frightening threats are a lot scarier than the typical Halloween monster.
So this Sunday, take a moment to realize the UN is doing a lot and—with the Administration’s blessings and your tax dollars—will likely be doing a lot more. And let’s hope for change, so that those resources won’t be squandered on activities that promote the interests of repressive regimes such as Iran or China or Cuba rather than freedom-loving peoples everywhere.
Will America Accept Bureaucratic Rationing of Healthcare?
By Holly Pitt Young
Saturday, October 23, 2010
The numbers are as startling as tragic. According to the Daily Mail, “Up to 20,000 people have died needlessly early after being denied cancer drugs on the NHS, it was revealed yesterday. The rationing body NICE has failed to keep a promise to make more life-extending drugs available.”
British cancer patients are routinely denied access to critical life-extending drugs because of their costs.
The Telegraph noted two year ago, that the British health care system’s decision to deny patients four kidney cancer drugs on the NHS was denounced by doctors as 'poor' and 'unsuitable'. They said it was a "tragedy" that Britain's leading role in cancer research was not being translated into treatment for all patients, who were often left struggling to pay for the drugs themselves. The decision has led patients to mortgage their house in order to obtain the drugs and treatment they need to survive.
The occurrences on the other side of the pond are notable not because they are rare, but because they are commonplace. There are no howls of protests from patients who are powerless and are forced to live under the dictates of bureaucrats who make life and death decisions based upon budget constraints and not what’s best for the patients. This is the fundamental basis of government-run health care.
And Americans are perhaps 60 days away from our cancer patients suffering a similar fate.
That’s because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has apparently opened the door to using cost as part of their evaluation process for drugs. The late-stage cancer drug Avastin has been proven effective in extending the life of cancer patients. Rather than testing the safety and efficacy of the drug, the FDA created a new standard that would allow patients who could afford the drug to use it, while those who cannot would be denied their use.
They are considering “de-labeling” the drug for breast cancer patients – essentially allowing Medicare and private insurance to deny coverage of the drug under their policies.
The FDA has moved a final decision about the fate of Avastin and breast cancer patients until after the elections. Not a great sign.
Will the American people accept the bureaucratic dictates that will deny them to a valuable treatment option or will they stand up and say rationing is not the American way?
Saturday, October 23, 2010
The numbers are as startling as tragic. According to the Daily Mail, “Up to 20,000 people have died needlessly early after being denied cancer drugs on the NHS, it was revealed yesterday. The rationing body NICE has failed to keep a promise to make more life-extending drugs available.”
British cancer patients are routinely denied access to critical life-extending drugs because of their costs.
The Telegraph noted two year ago, that the British health care system’s decision to deny patients four kidney cancer drugs on the NHS was denounced by doctors as 'poor' and 'unsuitable'. They said it was a "tragedy" that Britain's leading role in cancer research was not being translated into treatment for all patients, who were often left struggling to pay for the drugs themselves. The decision has led patients to mortgage their house in order to obtain the drugs and treatment they need to survive.
The occurrences on the other side of the pond are notable not because they are rare, but because they are commonplace. There are no howls of protests from patients who are powerless and are forced to live under the dictates of bureaucrats who make life and death decisions based upon budget constraints and not what’s best for the patients. This is the fundamental basis of government-run health care.
And Americans are perhaps 60 days away from our cancer patients suffering a similar fate.
That’s because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has apparently opened the door to using cost as part of their evaluation process for drugs. The late-stage cancer drug Avastin has been proven effective in extending the life of cancer patients. Rather than testing the safety and efficacy of the drug, the FDA created a new standard that would allow patients who could afford the drug to use it, while those who cannot would be denied their use.
They are considering “de-labeling” the drug for breast cancer patients – essentially allowing Medicare and private insurance to deny coverage of the drug under their policies.
The FDA has moved a final decision about the fate of Avastin and breast cancer patients until after the elections. Not a great sign.
Will the American people accept the bureaucratic dictates that will deny them to a valuable treatment option or will they stand up and say rationing is not the American way?
Friday, October 22, 2010
Three Charts that Will Infuriate Taxpayers
Every small-government voter should see these graphs — and vote on Election Day.
Deroy Murdock
Friday, October 21, 2010
With just 12 days until the November 2 elections, pro-market, small-government candidates, activists, and concerned citizens should study and then disseminate three charts that perfectly encapsulate the status quo that, if all goes well, the midterm vote will capsize.
The first of these looks as intricate as an integrated circuit. Titled “Your New Health Care System,” this schematic shows how Obamacare’s hundreds of moving parts will fit together and whirl — or not, as rising health costs at Boeing, McDonald’s, and the United Federation of Teachers (to name a few affected organizations) already reveal.
Staff members at the Congressional Joint Economic Committee “spent four months, night and day, and weekends” assembling this amazing graphic, Rep. Kevin Brady (R., Texas) tells me by phone. “They vetted it based on all 2,801 pages of the Obamacare legislation. They captured this new law’s stunningly complexity.”
Well, almost.
Literally scores of icons and symbols show how the president, the secretary of health and human services, the IRS, and other existing federal actors and agencies interact with Obamacare’s new entities including, among many others, the Elder Justice Coordinating Council, the Medicare Prescription Drug and MA-PD Complaint System, and the National Oral Health Public Education Campaign.
Even worse, the JEC’s diligent personnel could not fit all of this new law’s boards, commissions, mandates, and other elements onto this chart. So, by way of shorthand, they created “bundles of bureaucracy.” Beyond those functions delineated in the chart, these seven collective symbols respectively represent clusters of four loan repayment and forgiveness programs, four other new regulatory programs, 17 insurance mandates, 19 special-interest provisions, 22 other new bureaucracies, 26 other new demonstration and pilot programs, and 59 other new grant programs. These 151 additional items within Obamacare do not appear individually on this diagram. As Representative Brady explains, “If we included all of these units, this chart would be three times larger.”
Anyone who believes the JEC concocted this out of thin air should think again. Beneath each new program or agency, policy analysts cited the section in the Obamacare law that empowers that particular intervention in the American people’s medical decisions. The lines that connect programs to mandates indicate the pertinent passages of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that bind them together.
The JEC’s 25-megabyte creation is difficult to transmit via e-mail. However, a convenient link opens a PDF that allows readers to zoom in and explore this chart in amazing and shocking detail.
Even those who believe that government actively should heal the American people must wonder if that goal really required something this staggeringly convoluted.
As it is, the JEC’s chart is both an incredibly impressive piece of graphic design and a jaw-dropping glimpse of the health-care Hell that awaits the American people, unless they elect a new Congress to shutter this entire fiasco before it renders this republic irretrievably ill.
The second chart appeared in the New York Post on September 6 and is based on a Heritage Foundation analysis of figures from the U.S. Labor Department, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Haver Analytics. Between December 2007, when the Great Recession began, and last July, the private sector lost 7,837,000 jobs (down 6.8 percent). Local-government employment dropped 128,000 positions (minus 0.9 percent), while state governments shed 6,000 positions (less 0.1 percent). Meanwhile, Washington, D.C., boomed. Federal employment zoomed by 198,100 slots as Uncle Sam’s workforce expanded by 10 percent.
This graph’s whiff of Marie Antoinette should boil every patriot’s blood. While the American people live increasingly ascetic lives, and even city halls and statehouses have displayed some restraint, Washington, D.C., increasingly resembles Versailles — an out-of-touch, extravagant, and callous place that fuels little beyond the nation’s disgust, fury, and organized rebellion. As the party rages within the Beltway, federal revelers scream, “Let them pay taxes!”
Finally, USA Today on August 10 published this front-page chart based on Bureau of Economic Analysis data. It shows that in 2009, the average private-sector employee saw compensation of $61,051 ($50,462 in wages and $10,589 in benefits). Among state- and local-government workers, the relevant figure was $69,913 ($53,056 in wages and $16,857 in benefits). For federal-civilian employees, the picture was far prettier: Compensation stood at $123,049 ($81,258 in wages and $41,791 in benefits).
These nauseating numbers show federal employees earning 201 percent of the average private worker’s compensation. Federal benefits equal 395 percent of private-sector benefits.
This bloat is bipartisan. While President Obama’s spending spree has exacerbated the inequality of federal vs. private compensation, this problem reaches into the irresponsible Bush-Rove years. Between 2000 and 2009, private salaries and benefits grew by 8.8 percent after inflation. Among federal civilians, however, salaries and benefits exploded by 36.9 percent.
Liberal pundits who wonder why so many Americans are so angry today should examine these graphs, which should answer that question.
If these charts infuriate you, please forward them to your friends. Copy and hand them to your co-workers. Distribute them on street corners.
And ask everyone who sees them to do one thing on November 2: vote.
Deroy Murdock
Friday, October 21, 2010
With just 12 days until the November 2 elections, pro-market, small-government candidates, activists, and concerned citizens should study and then disseminate three charts that perfectly encapsulate the status quo that, if all goes well, the midterm vote will capsize.
The first of these looks as intricate as an integrated circuit. Titled “Your New Health Care System,” this schematic shows how Obamacare’s hundreds of moving parts will fit together and whirl — or not, as rising health costs at Boeing, McDonald’s, and the United Federation of Teachers (to name a few affected organizations) already reveal.
Staff members at the Congressional Joint Economic Committee “spent four months, night and day, and weekends” assembling this amazing graphic, Rep. Kevin Brady (R., Texas) tells me by phone. “They vetted it based on all 2,801 pages of the Obamacare legislation. They captured this new law’s stunningly complexity.”
Well, almost.
Literally scores of icons and symbols show how the president, the secretary of health and human services, the IRS, and other existing federal actors and agencies interact with Obamacare’s new entities including, among many others, the Elder Justice Coordinating Council, the Medicare Prescription Drug and MA-PD Complaint System, and the National Oral Health Public Education Campaign.
Even worse, the JEC’s diligent personnel could not fit all of this new law’s boards, commissions, mandates, and other elements onto this chart. So, by way of shorthand, they created “bundles of bureaucracy.” Beyond those functions delineated in the chart, these seven collective symbols respectively represent clusters of four loan repayment and forgiveness programs, four other new regulatory programs, 17 insurance mandates, 19 special-interest provisions, 22 other new bureaucracies, 26 other new demonstration and pilot programs, and 59 other new grant programs. These 151 additional items within Obamacare do not appear individually on this diagram. As Representative Brady explains, “If we included all of these units, this chart would be three times larger.”
Anyone who believes the JEC concocted this out of thin air should think again. Beneath each new program or agency, policy analysts cited the section in the Obamacare law that empowers that particular intervention in the American people’s medical decisions. The lines that connect programs to mandates indicate the pertinent passages of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that bind them together.
The JEC’s 25-megabyte creation is difficult to transmit via e-mail. However, a convenient link opens a PDF that allows readers to zoom in and explore this chart in amazing and shocking detail.
Even those who believe that government actively should heal the American people must wonder if that goal really required something this staggeringly convoluted.
As it is, the JEC’s chart is both an incredibly impressive piece of graphic design and a jaw-dropping glimpse of the health-care Hell that awaits the American people, unless they elect a new Congress to shutter this entire fiasco before it renders this republic irretrievably ill.
The second chart appeared in the New York Post on September 6 and is based on a Heritage Foundation analysis of figures from the U.S. Labor Department, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Haver Analytics. Between December 2007, when the Great Recession began, and last July, the private sector lost 7,837,000 jobs (down 6.8 percent). Local-government employment dropped 128,000 positions (minus 0.9 percent), while state governments shed 6,000 positions (less 0.1 percent). Meanwhile, Washington, D.C., boomed. Federal employment zoomed by 198,100 slots as Uncle Sam’s workforce expanded by 10 percent.
This graph’s whiff of Marie Antoinette should boil every patriot’s blood. While the American people live increasingly ascetic lives, and even city halls and statehouses have displayed some restraint, Washington, D.C., increasingly resembles Versailles — an out-of-touch, extravagant, and callous place that fuels little beyond the nation’s disgust, fury, and organized rebellion. As the party rages within the Beltway, federal revelers scream, “Let them pay taxes!”
Finally, USA Today on August 10 published this front-page chart based on Bureau of Economic Analysis data. It shows that in 2009, the average private-sector employee saw compensation of $61,051 ($50,462 in wages and $10,589 in benefits). Among state- and local-government workers, the relevant figure was $69,913 ($53,056 in wages and $16,857 in benefits). For federal-civilian employees, the picture was far prettier: Compensation stood at $123,049 ($81,258 in wages and $41,791 in benefits).
These nauseating numbers show federal employees earning 201 percent of the average private worker’s compensation. Federal benefits equal 395 percent of private-sector benefits.
This bloat is bipartisan. While President Obama’s spending spree has exacerbated the inequality of federal vs. private compensation, this problem reaches into the irresponsible Bush-Rove years. Between 2000 and 2009, private salaries and benefits grew by 8.8 percent after inflation. Among federal civilians, however, salaries and benefits exploded by 36.9 percent.
Liberal pundits who wonder why so many Americans are so angry today should examine these graphs, which should answer that question.
If these charts infuriate you, please forward them to your friends. Copy and hand them to your co-workers. Distribute them on street corners.
And ask everyone who sees them to do one thing on November 2: vote.
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