By Debra J. Saunders
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Occupy Oakland is aptly named. When forces occupy a city, they know that occupied turf is not their home. They can maraud, loot, vandalize, abuse the locals, and then leave. They can treat other people's property as their own.
The occupiers don't have to clean up after themselves. They don't have to worry about paying for the workers who clean up after them, either.
Occupiers don't have to exert self-control. They can freely act upon their rage, while defenders of occupied territory must concentrate on protecting what others want to harm.
Occupiers do not have to fear that they will be punished for the damage they have inflicted on the city of Oakland. About the worst that most occupiers might fear is that if they break the law, they will be arrested, held and released. Most won't even have to make bail.
Occupy Oakland protesters broke in to City Hall on Saturday, sprayed graffiti, toppled a historical model of City Hall and children's artwork, stole and then burned an American flag, and otherwise trashed the people's building. Police arrested some 400 people. Mayor Jean Quan likened the activists' behavior to "a tantrum" as she complained Occupy activists have been treating the city "like a playground."
Except that children treat their playgrounds better. And children don't organize their tantrums. But the playground analogy works when you look at what Occupy posts on the Internet: "The march and the pigs played a game of cat and rat, we, the rats with our tiny sharp teeth bared, they, the dumb slow cats with their fancy technology and weaponry."
Oakland cannot afford to police and clean up after Occupy activists. City Hall already has had to eliminate jobs to shave $28 million from a $388 million budget. Quan estimates that since tents first went up in Frank Ogawa Plaza in October, the Occupy tab has exceeded $5 million.
It defies all logic that activists, who see themselves as champions of fairness and advocates for the poor, have chosen to become a fiscal drain on the financially strapped city.
Clearly, the protesters didn't choose Oakland because it is a financial hub or because its downtown is rich and powerful. They chose Oakland because Oakland doesn't fight back.
Quan finally ordered police to remove the illegal Occupy encampment in Frank Ogawa Plaza last fall. When a protester ended up in the hospital, Quan took so much heat that she invited the tents back.
Later, she changed her mind again. Since then, when protesters intermittently have gotten out of control, the police have arrested them for remaining at the scene of a riot or wearing a mask to avoid identification -- and sometimes, rarely, for battery or assault. Then what? We don't know.
When I called Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O'Malley's office to find out how many Occupy Oakland arrestees have been prosecuted, a spokeswoman told me the DA does not keep track of Occupy cases as a group.
Throwing objects at cops, occupying city space, blocking people on their way to work or vandalizing city property -- these might as well be minor crimes in the Bay Area.
I know from covering protests gone bad in San Francisco that police frequently complain that prosecutors do not take activist arrests to court. Prosecutors complain that police fail to supply them with the evidence they need to win a conviction.
Occupy Oakland has been choking City Hall and draining its coffers for months. Are there any consequences? It seems, pun intended, there is no there there.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Jan Brewer's Photo With Obama
By Phyllis Schlafly
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
The now-famous picture of Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer shaking her finger at President Barack Obama is both appropriate and deserved. In America, we don't have rulers entitled to the deference and obsequiousness other countries show to their kings; our elected officials are ordinary citizens whom we are free to criticize.
Obama apparently took offense at the way Gov. Brewer described her meeting with the president in the Oval Office. She said he had been "condescending," "patronizing" and just wanted to lecture her, instead of showing any willingness to hear Arizona's concerns about border problems. He also didn't answer the governor's five letters.
Her description sounds authentic because that's exactly how he treated her when they met on the tarmac as he was campaigning for re-election. The background of this meeting is the insulting way Obama is treating Arizona by suing that state for trying to enforce laws against illegal aliens, withdrawing National Guardsmen from the Mexican border, initiating a civil rights investigation of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and the scandal of the "Fast and Furious" gun-sale operation.
Fast and Furious was a secret Obama administration program to sell guns to Mexican gangs, so the Democrats could later make a political case for gun control. It backfired when some of those guns were found at the scene of the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
The U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed the power of states to take steps to enforce laws against illegal immigration. The Legal Arizona Workers Act of 2007, which requires Arizona employers to use the Internet-based, E-Verify system to confirm that a new employee is lawfully in the U.S. was upheld by the Supreme Court last year.
Obama is now having his Justice Department sue Arizona to try to get the court to strike down another Arizona law. It authorizes police to question people about their immigration status if the police have reason to believe the person is an illegal alien.
There are many other ways that Obama is trying to frustrate state and citizen efforts to stop the tide of illegal aliens crossing our southern border. He shows no respect for the financial burden this puts on states from problems of crime, illegal drugs, public schools and hospital care.
Illegal aliens from Mexico are believed responsible for more than a third of deliberately ignited wildfires in Arizona over the last five years, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. Illegal aliens are believed to have started 30 of 77 fires from 2006 through 2010 that were investigated, and that figure doesn't include 2010, the worst fire year in Arizona history, when two fires destroyed more than 60 homes.
In December 2010, Obama's Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano flew to Mexico City to sign a "trusted traveler" agreement. This allows pre-screened Mexican airline passengers to bypass lengthy airport security checkpoints, a plan for which Mexico's interior ministry secretary said 84 million Mexicans are expected to qualify.
I'm curious. Why couldn't Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., have been labeled a trusted traveler so he also could avoid airport hassle?
Word has leaked out which proves that, despite congressional law to the contrary, the Obama administration is granting amnesty to illegal aliens through backdoor procedures. The smoking gun is the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Memorandum called "Administrative Alternatives to Comprehensive Immigration Reform."
This memorandum asserts that because Congress has not passed comprehensive immigration reform, USCIS can extend benefits and/or protections to many individuals and groups by issuing new guidance and regulations, exercising discretion with regard to parole-in-place, deferred action and the issuance of notices to appear, and adopting significant process improvements. These policies will enable thousands of aliens who entered the U.S. illegally to become lawful permanent residents.
For example, USCIS could allow employment authorization for H-4 dependent spouses of H-1B visa holders who are applicants for permanent residence. And where there is no authority for granting residency to an illegal alien, USCIS could grant it anyway by alleging "extreme hardship."
The 72-page "National Drug Threat Assessment 2011" issued by the U.S. Department of Justice National Drug Intelligence Center warns us that "The illicit trafficking and abuse of drugs present a challenging, dynamic threat to the United States. ... Major Mexican-based TCOs (transnational criminal organizations) ... control the movement of most of the foreign-produced drug supply across the U S. Southwest Border. ... The Southwest Border remains the primary gateway for moving illicit drugs into the United States."
Barack Obama wasn't interested in accepting Gov. Brewer's invitation to visit the border himself. He just wants to use executive-branch powers to stop Arizona from doing anything to defend itself.
Obama picked a fight with a female governor and she didn't roll over. Three cheers for Jan Brewer.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
The now-famous picture of Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer shaking her finger at President Barack Obama is both appropriate and deserved. In America, we don't have rulers entitled to the deference and obsequiousness other countries show to their kings; our elected officials are ordinary citizens whom we are free to criticize.
Obama apparently took offense at the way Gov. Brewer described her meeting with the president in the Oval Office. She said he had been "condescending," "patronizing" and just wanted to lecture her, instead of showing any willingness to hear Arizona's concerns about border problems. He also didn't answer the governor's five letters.
Her description sounds authentic because that's exactly how he treated her when they met on the tarmac as he was campaigning for re-election. The background of this meeting is the insulting way Obama is treating Arizona by suing that state for trying to enforce laws against illegal aliens, withdrawing National Guardsmen from the Mexican border, initiating a civil rights investigation of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and the scandal of the "Fast and Furious" gun-sale operation.
Fast and Furious was a secret Obama administration program to sell guns to Mexican gangs, so the Democrats could later make a political case for gun control. It backfired when some of those guns were found at the scene of the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
The U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed the power of states to take steps to enforce laws against illegal immigration. The Legal Arizona Workers Act of 2007, which requires Arizona employers to use the Internet-based, E-Verify system to confirm that a new employee is lawfully in the U.S. was upheld by the Supreme Court last year.
Obama is now having his Justice Department sue Arizona to try to get the court to strike down another Arizona law. It authorizes police to question people about their immigration status if the police have reason to believe the person is an illegal alien.
There are many other ways that Obama is trying to frustrate state and citizen efforts to stop the tide of illegal aliens crossing our southern border. He shows no respect for the financial burden this puts on states from problems of crime, illegal drugs, public schools and hospital care.
Illegal aliens from Mexico are believed responsible for more than a third of deliberately ignited wildfires in Arizona over the last five years, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. Illegal aliens are believed to have started 30 of 77 fires from 2006 through 2010 that were investigated, and that figure doesn't include 2010, the worst fire year in Arizona history, when two fires destroyed more than 60 homes.
In December 2010, Obama's Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano flew to Mexico City to sign a "trusted traveler" agreement. This allows pre-screened Mexican airline passengers to bypass lengthy airport security checkpoints, a plan for which Mexico's interior ministry secretary said 84 million Mexicans are expected to qualify.
I'm curious. Why couldn't Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., have been labeled a trusted traveler so he also could avoid airport hassle?
Word has leaked out which proves that, despite congressional law to the contrary, the Obama administration is granting amnesty to illegal aliens through backdoor procedures. The smoking gun is the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Memorandum called "Administrative Alternatives to Comprehensive Immigration Reform."
This memorandum asserts that because Congress has not passed comprehensive immigration reform, USCIS can extend benefits and/or protections to many individuals and groups by issuing new guidance and regulations, exercising discretion with regard to parole-in-place, deferred action and the issuance of notices to appear, and adopting significant process improvements. These policies will enable thousands of aliens who entered the U.S. illegally to become lawful permanent residents.
For example, USCIS could allow employment authorization for H-4 dependent spouses of H-1B visa holders who are applicants for permanent residence. And where there is no authority for granting residency to an illegal alien, USCIS could grant it anyway by alleging "extreme hardship."
The 72-page "National Drug Threat Assessment 2011" issued by the U.S. Department of Justice National Drug Intelligence Center warns us that "The illicit trafficking and abuse of drugs present a challenging, dynamic threat to the United States. ... Major Mexican-based TCOs (transnational criminal organizations) ... control the movement of most of the foreign-produced drug supply across the U S. Southwest Border. ... The Southwest Border remains the primary gateway for moving illicit drugs into the United States."
Barack Obama wasn't interested in accepting Gov. Brewer's invitation to visit the border himself. He just wants to use executive-branch powers to stop Arizona from doing anything to defend itself.
Obama picked a fight with a female governor and she didn't roll over. Three cheers for Jan Brewer.
Hellish War of Envy
By Charles Payne
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
While Virgil speaks to Geryon, Dante talks to another group of souls nearby squatting on the sand, the Usurers, or moneylenders. Their faces are unrecognizable from the burns and ash, and are identified only by the insignias of the moneybags around their necks.
"The Divine Comedy"
Dante Alighieri
Animosity and outright hatred toward moneylenders and bankers has been a fabric of life since modern day banking evolved in Europe. Despite the clearly positive impact on economic growth and overall quality of life birthed by the flow of money and ability to borrow, societies have held pockets of resentment. That resentment spread to other wealthy individuals and institutions. While the degree of this hatred waxes and wanes throughout time, it always blooms in more difficult economic conditions. Resentment of moneychangers was so intense in his day that Dante had them share the seventh circle of hell, with blasphemers and sodomites.
In fact, Dante was born of ancient urban nobility, and his grandfather and father were moneychangers.
Pew … This Smells Bad
This brings me back to that Pew Research Center report on the conflict between rich and poor. With 66% of respondents saying they believe there are "very strong" or "strong" conflicts between rich and the poor, we are at a place where efforts to redefine American capitalism will be pushed as hard as ever. This has been the plan from day one which is amazing since back a few years ago those that suggested as much were written off as loony tunes. That moment is certainly here and the central issue of 2012. The big guns include president Obama, the media, Hollywood and Warren Buffett.
Warren Buffett's challenge to republican lawmakers to donate money to lower the federal debt, that he would match them dollar for dollar (in case of Mitch McConnell the match would be three dollars), was the tackiest piece of political foolishness I've heard in a long time. The timing was perfect, however, if you are looking to build a head of steam toward changing America into a socialist economy. The usual culprits including Time magazine with Buffett on the cover, singling out individual villains like McConnell, have been planned for a long time. Buffett said in New York Times piece his tax rate was 17.4%, or less than his secretary's, but he did pay $6,938,744. He should have paid more… if he thinks that's the right thing to do.
Instead Buffett is once again providing cover for a new world in which successful people would be punished while non-successful people would have no real incentive to try harder. It's really offensive Buffett wants small businesses and households earning more than $250,000 to pay higher tax rates because he thinks his taxes are too low. Once again he should have paid more… if he thinks that's the right thing to do. But a childish challenge to lawmakers that earn in a year what he earns in a minute is like Mike Tyson challenging a toddler to a sparring session. It's disingenuous, but the idea is to provide cover.
It's all about everyone being rewarded from a giant pot of money even if they have no skin in the game.
"We need a tax system that takes very good care of people who just really aren't as well adapted to the market system, and to capitalism, but are nevertheless just as good citizens, and are doing things that are of use in society." - Warren Buffett
I'm not sure if being good at watching television is one of the skills that should motivate me to skimp on my son's college fund and instead pour money into the general Good Care fund. What about slots, in general it might be a deadly sin but probably worthy of payment in the new world of good citizens. I guest people who squander money and refuse to save can dip into the Good Care fund since it would be clear they aren't adapted to capitalism beyond the point of being consumers only. In this system why struggle through college…heck why struggle through high school? It will be GEDs and free checks from the Good Care fund for everyone.
Everybody Hates the Rich
The Pew report points out that 73% of democrats perceive conflict between rich and poor, up from 55% in 2009. Shockingly a majority of Republicans see that conflict, too, with 55% agreeing up from 38%. And the number that must make the White House drool is independent voters at 68% from 45%. Perception about the road to becoming rich underscores the notion it's about who you know more than how hard you work.
- 46% say the rich know the right people or were born into wealthy families
- 43% say the rich got that way of their own hard work, ambition or education
Interesting, despite this perceived conflict, the report mentions a Gallup survey that says fewer people believe income inequality is a problem that needs to be fixed than felt that way in 1998 (45% vs. 52%).
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
While Virgil speaks to Geryon, Dante talks to another group of souls nearby squatting on the sand, the Usurers, or moneylenders. Their faces are unrecognizable from the burns and ash, and are identified only by the insignias of the moneybags around their necks.
"The Divine Comedy"
Dante Alighieri
Animosity and outright hatred toward moneylenders and bankers has been a fabric of life since modern day banking evolved in Europe. Despite the clearly positive impact on economic growth and overall quality of life birthed by the flow of money and ability to borrow, societies have held pockets of resentment. That resentment spread to other wealthy individuals and institutions. While the degree of this hatred waxes and wanes throughout time, it always blooms in more difficult economic conditions. Resentment of moneychangers was so intense in his day that Dante had them share the seventh circle of hell, with blasphemers and sodomites.
In fact, Dante was born of ancient urban nobility, and his grandfather and father were moneychangers.
Pew … This Smells Bad
This brings me back to that Pew Research Center report on the conflict between rich and poor. With 66% of respondents saying they believe there are "very strong" or "strong" conflicts between rich and the poor, we are at a place where efforts to redefine American capitalism will be pushed as hard as ever. This has been the plan from day one which is amazing since back a few years ago those that suggested as much were written off as loony tunes. That moment is certainly here and the central issue of 2012. The big guns include president Obama, the media, Hollywood and Warren Buffett.
Warren Buffett's challenge to republican lawmakers to donate money to lower the federal debt, that he would match them dollar for dollar (in case of Mitch McConnell the match would be three dollars), was the tackiest piece of political foolishness I've heard in a long time. The timing was perfect, however, if you are looking to build a head of steam toward changing America into a socialist economy. The usual culprits including Time magazine with Buffett on the cover, singling out individual villains like McConnell, have been planned for a long time. Buffett said in New York Times piece his tax rate was 17.4%, or less than his secretary's, but he did pay $6,938,744. He should have paid more… if he thinks that's the right thing to do.
Instead Buffett is once again providing cover for a new world in which successful people would be punished while non-successful people would have no real incentive to try harder. It's really offensive Buffett wants small businesses and households earning more than $250,000 to pay higher tax rates because he thinks his taxes are too low. Once again he should have paid more… if he thinks that's the right thing to do. But a childish challenge to lawmakers that earn in a year what he earns in a minute is like Mike Tyson challenging a toddler to a sparring session. It's disingenuous, but the idea is to provide cover.
It's all about everyone being rewarded from a giant pot of money even if they have no skin in the game.
"We need a tax system that takes very good care of people who just really aren't as well adapted to the market system, and to capitalism, but are nevertheless just as good citizens, and are doing things that are of use in society." - Warren Buffett
I'm not sure if being good at watching television is one of the skills that should motivate me to skimp on my son's college fund and instead pour money into the general Good Care fund. What about slots, in general it might be a deadly sin but probably worthy of payment in the new world of good citizens. I guest people who squander money and refuse to save can dip into the Good Care fund since it would be clear they aren't adapted to capitalism beyond the point of being consumers only. In this system why struggle through college…heck why struggle through high school? It will be GEDs and free checks from the Good Care fund for everyone.
Everybody Hates the Rich
The Pew report points out that 73% of democrats perceive conflict between rich and poor, up from 55% in 2009. Shockingly a majority of Republicans see that conflict, too, with 55% agreeing up from 38%. And the number that must make the White House drool is independent voters at 68% from 45%. Perception about the road to becoming rich underscores the notion it's about who you know more than how hard you work.
- 46% say the rich know the right people or were born into wealthy families
- 43% say the rich got that way of their own hard work, ambition or education
Interesting, despite this perceived conflict, the report mentions a Gallup survey that says fewer people believe income inequality is a problem that needs to be fixed than felt that way in 1998 (45% vs. 52%).
War Through Weakness?
By Cal Thomas
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
One of the memorable slogans from the Reagan administration was "peace through strength." Reagan believed a strong defense was a safeguard against enemy attacks and the best hope of victory should America go to war.
President Obama is taking the opposite approach. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently announced cuts in defense spending of $487 billion over the next 10 years. Supposedly, these cuts will reduce the federal deficit, but Congress always finds new ways to spend money, so I am not optimistic.
The cuts were announced before critical questions were asked: What is America's role in the world in the 21st century? Where does the military fit into that role? The administration thinks a sleeker, more mobile military -- like SEAL Team Six, which has had recent successes taking out Osama bin Laden and rescuing hostages from Somali pirates -- is the way to go, but even the highly-trained SEALs can't confront, say, a nuclear threat from Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or China's increasing military power. The administration says it will preserve its manpower and weapons systems in the Middle East and shift resources to Asia.
Ships and planes take time to build. If America is not building them to ward off present and future threats, someone else -- like the Chinese -- will. The world does not remain stagnant and threats are not always obvious.
Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), chairman of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, says he is "deeply concerned" by the announced defense reductions, including the elimination of "at least 12 new Navy ships over the next five years and retiring at least nine ships earlier than planned."
Akin also worries about what will happen to the estimated 100,000 soldiers and Marines who will become unemployed in a struggling economy.
According to the website U.S. Government Spending.com, defense spending fluctuated in the last century. It hit a peak of 42 percent of GDP during World War II, declining to 10 percent during the Cold War to about 5 percent today.
Reagan's defense buildup followed cuts during the Carter administration. Reagan increased defense spending from 5.6 percent of GDP in 1979 to 7 percent of GDP by 1986. President George W. Bush's administration increased defense spending from 3.6 percent of GDP near the end of the Clinton administration in 1999, to 6 percent in 2010, to confront Islamic extremism.
The Obama administration, usgovernmentspending.com adds, plans to drop defense spending to 4.6 percent of GDP by 2015.
Do these reductions parallel a decline in the threats against America and American interests? Quite the opposite. The administration engages in wishful thinking about the so-called "Arab spring," which is devolving into a religious tornado with the radical Muslim Brotherhood calling the shots in Egypt and elsewhere and the Taliban poised to regain control in Afghanistan.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai have agreed that NATO should pull out all combat forces from Afghanistan by next year, not 2014, as planned. This can only encourage the Taliban, who have recently been sending signals they are not the bad guys most people rightly think they are.
A recent Wall Street Journal story noted that public statements by the Taliban make them sound more "moderate," adding, "The big unknown is whether this new rhetoric represents a meaningful transformation -- or is merely designed to sugarcoat the Taliban's real aims."
It's a safe bet to say it's the latter.
The "big unknown" is what a sound U.S. defense strategy should take into account. As former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once put it, "There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns ... there are some things we de not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."
It is to protect not only against the "known knowns," but the "unknown unknowns" that a credible defense strategy should be maintained. Cutting our defenses without a plan of action is an invitation to war.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
One of the memorable slogans from the Reagan administration was "peace through strength." Reagan believed a strong defense was a safeguard against enemy attacks and the best hope of victory should America go to war.
President Obama is taking the opposite approach. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta recently announced cuts in defense spending of $487 billion over the next 10 years. Supposedly, these cuts will reduce the federal deficit, but Congress always finds new ways to spend money, so I am not optimistic.
The cuts were announced before critical questions were asked: What is America's role in the world in the 21st century? Where does the military fit into that role? The administration thinks a sleeker, more mobile military -- like SEAL Team Six, which has had recent successes taking out Osama bin Laden and rescuing hostages from Somali pirates -- is the way to go, but even the highly-trained SEALs can't confront, say, a nuclear threat from Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or China's increasing military power. The administration says it will preserve its manpower and weapons systems in the Middle East and shift resources to Asia.
Ships and planes take time to build. If America is not building them to ward off present and future threats, someone else -- like the Chinese -- will. The world does not remain stagnant and threats are not always obvious.
Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), chairman of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, says he is "deeply concerned" by the announced defense reductions, including the elimination of "at least 12 new Navy ships over the next five years and retiring at least nine ships earlier than planned."
Akin also worries about what will happen to the estimated 100,000 soldiers and Marines who will become unemployed in a struggling economy.
According to the website U.S. Government Spending.com, defense spending fluctuated in the last century. It hit a peak of 42 percent of GDP during World War II, declining to 10 percent during the Cold War to about 5 percent today.
Reagan's defense buildup followed cuts during the Carter administration. Reagan increased defense spending from 5.6 percent of GDP in 1979 to 7 percent of GDP by 1986. President George W. Bush's administration increased defense spending from 3.6 percent of GDP near the end of the Clinton administration in 1999, to 6 percent in 2010, to confront Islamic extremism.
The Obama administration, usgovernmentspending.com adds, plans to drop defense spending to 4.6 percent of GDP by 2015.
Do these reductions parallel a decline in the threats against America and American interests? Quite the opposite. The administration engages in wishful thinking about the so-called "Arab spring," which is devolving into a religious tornado with the radical Muslim Brotherhood calling the shots in Egypt and elsewhere and the Taliban poised to regain control in Afghanistan.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai have agreed that NATO should pull out all combat forces from Afghanistan by next year, not 2014, as planned. This can only encourage the Taliban, who have recently been sending signals they are not the bad guys most people rightly think they are.
A recent Wall Street Journal story noted that public statements by the Taliban make them sound more "moderate," adding, "The big unknown is whether this new rhetoric represents a meaningful transformation -- or is merely designed to sugarcoat the Taliban's real aims."
It's a safe bet to say it's the latter.
The "big unknown" is what a sound U.S. defense strategy should take into account. As former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once put it, "There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns ... there are some things we de not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."
It is to protect not only against the "known knowns," but the "unknown unknowns" that a credible defense strategy should be maintained. Cutting our defenses without a plan of action is an invitation to war.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Democrat Leaders Condone Treason
By Lurita Doan
Monday, January 30, 2012
The recent FBI lawsuit filed against John Kiriakou, former CIA agent and former Democrat Senate staffer, for treason (multiple counts of allegedly violating the Espionage Act and the Intelligence Identities Protection Act) is serious business. But, a close review of the details of the case seems to indicate that Vice President Biden, while serving in the Senate as the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, condoned this treason in order to boost his political profile and to further his political agenda.
There has long been a mutually beneficial circle among the Democrat leaders in congress, leakers (usually former civil servants) and the mainstream media. The Beneficial Circle's efforts seem to be directed at discrediting Republican policies and GOP leaders.
The "Circle" works in this way: Step #1--an "investigator" or other civil servant expresses a shared political agenda with a leading Democrat and promises salacious "insider" anecdotes to support the claim. The “investigator” is encouraged to leak the sensitive information to one or more members of the press.
Step #2--The press "scoops" the story and publishes this "exposé", usually on page 1. A Democrat member of congress, usually a committee chairman who has the power to call a hearing, is shocked by the revelations of the press and calls for a hearing to expose alleged Republican corruption and alleged wrongdoing.
In the case of Kiriakou, the Democrat playbook worked. He left the CIA, and then, went to work as a consultant for McLarty Associates, where, among other tasks, he co-authored an inflammatory editorial in the LA Times, "The Other War We Are Losing", criticizing the Bush Administration's Afghanistan and Middle East policies and actions and broadcasting the message that he had an axe to grind with the Bush Administration.
Despite the oath he had taken to uphold the Constitution, and despite the possibility that he might be endangering American lives abroad, Kiriakou went forward with the disclosure of classified data, allegedly leaked to three members of the media. (As a former station chief for counter-terrorism in Pakistan, Kiriakou was certainly aware that disclosing even the most discreet information about operatives and operations in the field was wrong, dangerous and could lead to lives lost.)
Now for Step #3 of the Beneficial Circle's media playbook, The next day, right on cue, then-Senator Joe Biden, who, at the time was serving in the Senate and serving as the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, called for a special counsel to be appointed to look into the allegations of water boarding and the destruction of interrogation tapes.
At the time, Biden was also running for President, and he seems to have been eager to make his mark among potential voters. Biden was also fully opposed to Bush anti-terrorism policies. Without a doubt, Mr. Kiriakou was now publicly providing just the sort of inflammatory anecdotes and inside information that Biden and others (Note: Senator Barack Obama also served on the Senate Foreign Relations committee during this period of inquiry) were so eager to exploit. And so they did just that.
But not once does it appear that Biden or Obama publicly questioned the ethical problem of relying on information from someone committing treason.
Nor was Biden or Obama interested in talking to other CIA agents who might have offered a different opinion or who might have revealed the fact that Mr. Kiriakou was keenly interested in advancing a political agenda that others did not support.
It is important to note that leakers always have an advantage over the 99% of other government employees who do not leak, for leakers know full well that other civil servants that could potentially refute the most salacious charges or provide a different perspective will refuse to do so.
Most government employees know it is wrong to leak sensitive and classified information and they are simply not going to do it.
But back to the Beneficial Circle. Following Biden's request that a Special Counsel be appointed, the Washington Post and the New York Times performed their roles as expected with stories trashing the Bush Administration, all based upon a single source of Mr. Kiriakou.
Mainstream media, but particularly the New York Times and the Washington Post, seem to be suffering from Jayson Blair Syndrome, where reporters write and newspapers publish what they want readers to believe, news stories that advance their political agenda, filled with innuendo and half-truths, rather than stories that have been researched from multiple primary sources.
What makes the Kiriakou case even more interesting is how the "beneficial" circle continues. After his "exposé", Kiriakou then went to work for the very committee to which he provided the leaked information-- though by this time, Biden was Vice President and former Presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, was chairman of the committee.
Kiriakou seems to have been brought on board as an investigator, as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer, to help continue the committee's Bush-bashing hearings on water boarding and foreign policy in the Middle East.
By this time, Kyriako's leak had provided valuable services to Biden, Obama, and Kerry by giving them selective intelligence leaked from the CIA, and providing the opportunity for the to look tough on the issues of water boarding, which at the time was a hotly contested election issue.
So, why then did they hire Kiriakou? Was it wise to reward Kiriakou (that knowingly committed treason) with a high level job in the Senate? This job, too, requires a security clearance and trustworthiness. But none of that seemed to matter, for the Democrats had found their man, and so, Kiriakou was rewarded for services rendered with a new job of working for the Democrat Senate Staff. As an "Investigator" in 2009 and then later as a "Senior Investigator where he served until April 30,2012.
Now that the Kiriakou affair has blown up in their Democrat faces, and make no mistake--the FBI affidavit pulls no punches about their views regarding the illegality of the data improperly shared or the seriousness of the consequences of the revelations, we are seeing the Democrat's end game.
Having been exposed, Democrat leaders and the mainstream media are now trying to back as far away from their support of Kiriakou as they can. A recent Washington Post article on the arrest and charges against Kiriakou did not mention that he worked in the Senate for a Democrat or a former presidential candidate.
Fingerprints are being erased and the tracks are being covered by the very cabal that set this entire sad episode into action in the first place.
Get ready. Americans will see the final chapter soon as Obama and other senior Democrat leaders try to claim credit for getting tough with CIA leaks, hypocritically ignoring their critical role in the debacle.
Sure, they will make also some speeches glorifying whistle-blowers. But, I guarantee you they will not mention the often devious role they play, seemingly encouraging and abetting disgruntled federal employees to commit treason. Nor will they ever hint at the harm they are doing the nation with these underhanded tactics.
I am fully in support of the important role that whistleblowers play in ensuring the integrity of our nation's government. But, Kiriakou surrendered any pretense to being a whistleblower when he went to work for the Democrat Senate staff. From that point onward he was no longer a concerned whistleblower but, instead, a fully committed political operative working for the Democrat party.
Perhaps F. Scott Fitzgerald summed it up best when he said: "They were careless people--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
Monday, January 30, 2012
The recent FBI lawsuit filed against John Kiriakou, former CIA agent and former Democrat Senate staffer, for treason (multiple counts of allegedly violating the Espionage Act and the Intelligence Identities Protection Act) is serious business. But, a close review of the details of the case seems to indicate that Vice President Biden, while serving in the Senate as the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, condoned this treason in order to boost his political profile and to further his political agenda.
There has long been a mutually beneficial circle among the Democrat leaders in congress, leakers (usually former civil servants) and the mainstream media. The Beneficial Circle's efforts seem to be directed at discrediting Republican policies and GOP leaders.
The "Circle" works in this way: Step #1--an "investigator" or other civil servant expresses a shared political agenda with a leading Democrat and promises salacious "insider" anecdotes to support the claim. The “investigator” is encouraged to leak the sensitive information to one or more members of the press.
Step #2--The press "scoops" the story and publishes this "exposé", usually on page 1. A Democrat member of congress, usually a committee chairman who has the power to call a hearing, is shocked by the revelations of the press and calls for a hearing to expose alleged Republican corruption and alleged wrongdoing.
In the case of Kiriakou, the Democrat playbook worked. He left the CIA, and then, went to work as a consultant for McLarty Associates, where, among other tasks, he co-authored an inflammatory editorial in the LA Times, "The Other War We Are Losing", criticizing the Bush Administration's Afghanistan and Middle East policies and actions and broadcasting the message that he had an axe to grind with the Bush Administration.
Despite the oath he had taken to uphold the Constitution, and despite the possibility that he might be endangering American lives abroad, Kiriakou went forward with the disclosure of classified data, allegedly leaked to three members of the media. (As a former station chief for counter-terrorism in Pakistan, Kiriakou was certainly aware that disclosing even the most discreet information about operatives and operations in the field was wrong, dangerous and could lead to lives lost.)
Now for Step #3 of the Beneficial Circle's media playbook, The next day, right on cue, then-Senator Joe Biden, who, at the time was serving in the Senate and serving as the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, called for a special counsel to be appointed to look into the allegations of water boarding and the destruction of interrogation tapes.
At the time, Biden was also running for President, and he seems to have been eager to make his mark among potential voters. Biden was also fully opposed to Bush anti-terrorism policies. Without a doubt, Mr. Kiriakou was now publicly providing just the sort of inflammatory anecdotes and inside information that Biden and others (Note: Senator Barack Obama also served on the Senate Foreign Relations committee during this period of inquiry) were so eager to exploit. And so they did just that.
But not once does it appear that Biden or Obama publicly questioned the ethical problem of relying on information from someone committing treason.
Nor was Biden or Obama interested in talking to other CIA agents who might have offered a different opinion or who might have revealed the fact that Mr. Kiriakou was keenly interested in advancing a political agenda that others did not support.
It is important to note that leakers always have an advantage over the 99% of other government employees who do not leak, for leakers know full well that other civil servants that could potentially refute the most salacious charges or provide a different perspective will refuse to do so.
Most government employees know it is wrong to leak sensitive and classified information and they are simply not going to do it.
But back to the Beneficial Circle. Following Biden's request that a Special Counsel be appointed, the Washington Post and the New York Times performed their roles as expected with stories trashing the Bush Administration, all based upon a single source of Mr. Kiriakou.
Mainstream media, but particularly the New York Times and the Washington Post, seem to be suffering from Jayson Blair Syndrome, where reporters write and newspapers publish what they want readers to believe, news stories that advance their political agenda, filled with innuendo and half-truths, rather than stories that have been researched from multiple primary sources.
What makes the Kiriakou case even more interesting is how the "beneficial" circle continues. After his "exposé", Kiriakou then went to work for the very committee to which he provided the leaked information-- though by this time, Biden was Vice President and former Presidential candidate, Senator John Kerry, was chairman of the committee.
Kiriakou seems to have been brought on board as an investigator, as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer, to help continue the committee's Bush-bashing hearings on water boarding and foreign policy in the Middle East.
By this time, Kyriako's leak had provided valuable services to Biden, Obama, and Kerry by giving them selective intelligence leaked from the CIA, and providing the opportunity for the to look tough on the issues of water boarding, which at the time was a hotly contested election issue.
So, why then did they hire Kiriakou? Was it wise to reward Kiriakou (that knowingly committed treason) with a high level job in the Senate? This job, too, requires a security clearance and trustworthiness. But none of that seemed to matter, for the Democrats had found their man, and so, Kiriakou was rewarded for services rendered with a new job of working for the Democrat Senate Staff. As an "Investigator" in 2009 and then later as a "Senior Investigator where he served until April 30,2012.
Now that the Kiriakou affair has blown up in their Democrat faces, and make no mistake--the FBI affidavit pulls no punches about their views regarding the illegality of the data improperly shared or the seriousness of the consequences of the revelations, we are seeing the Democrat's end game.
Having been exposed, Democrat leaders and the mainstream media are now trying to back as far away from their support of Kiriakou as they can. A recent Washington Post article on the arrest and charges against Kiriakou did not mention that he worked in the Senate for a Democrat or a former presidential candidate.
Fingerprints are being erased and the tracks are being covered by the very cabal that set this entire sad episode into action in the first place.
Get ready. Americans will see the final chapter soon as Obama and other senior Democrat leaders try to claim credit for getting tough with CIA leaks, hypocritically ignoring their critical role in the debacle.
Sure, they will make also some speeches glorifying whistle-blowers. But, I guarantee you they will not mention the often devious role they play, seemingly encouraging and abetting disgruntled federal employees to commit treason. Nor will they ever hint at the harm they are doing the nation with these underhanded tactics.
I am fully in support of the important role that whistleblowers play in ensuring the integrity of our nation's government. But, Kiriakou surrendered any pretense to being a whistleblower when he went to work for the Democrat Senate staff. From that point onward he was no longer a concerned whistleblower but, instead, a fully committed political operative working for the Democrat party.
Perhaps F. Scott Fitzgerald summed it up best when he said: "They were careless people--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made."
Eat, Pray, Love, But Don't Be a Black Conservative
By Crystal Wright
Monday, January 30, 2012
Apparently, all black people walk, talk, eat, pray alike AND fit squarely in the Democrat Black box, basking in the glow of liberalism. There also is a “black issues manual,” which I have yet to see, that all blacks must adhere to. Wait, there’s more.
Unlike whites and Hispanics, blacks claim another phenomenon-- black ambassadors sometimes loosely called “our leaders,” who speak on behalf of “ALL blacks and their black issues.” If you think Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, etc. you get it. (Of course this is despite the fact, many blacks don’t call these clowns our leaders but somehow the liberal media trots them out over and over as the voices of black people. Again, as if all us blacks think alike or rather are incapable of thinking and have to have ambassadors tells us what to think and how to vote.
If this wasn’t enough monolithic brainwashing to make you sick, gird your loins.
Don’t make the mistake as a black person like I did and choose to be a Republican because you believe in opportunity, educational freedom (school choice, vouchers, charter schools), economic growth and small government. If you do, you will be called awful names by black Democrats. You will likely be hunted down by the “black police” to determine if you’re “black enough” and subjected to relentless name-calling and mocking such as “you just want to be white” or “how can you be a Republican.” To which, I respond, “How can you be a Democrat?”
What’s curious is no other race, White, Hispanic or Asian, gives over 90% of their vote to one party but blacks. In exchange for this block vote, Democrats, including President Obama, our first black president, take the black vote for granted each election cycle because they don’t have to work for it.
Since I began my blog, most of the hateful email and tweets I receive come from black liberals. I find this ironic since the Democrat party touts itself as the party of tolerance and as DNC Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz recently said it is “the natural home to minorities.” Some tolerance!
To give you a taste of the kind vulgar, distasteful and racist comments I receive, I thought I would share with you some unsavory tweets hurled at me while I joined BET’s Ed Gordon Tuesday night as the only black Republican woman providing analysis of President Obama’s State of the Union Speech.
Cedric the Entertainer, as he refers to himself, didn’t like my commentary that Obama’s speech was more Obama blaming Bush, Republicans and everything under the sun for his failed policies. So, he tweeted the following check out his tweet:
https://twitter.com/#!/CedEntertainer
A series of more vulgar tweets were made by his followers.
https://twitter.com/#!/nkrumah336
In America, no matter what your race, you have the freedom to believe in any religion or support any political party you choose. What’s really pathetic about these racist attacks is instead of responding with a counter viewpoint, people like Cedric and others respond with ignorance.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Apparently, all black people walk, talk, eat, pray alike AND fit squarely in the Democrat Black box, basking in the glow of liberalism. There also is a “black issues manual,” which I have yet to see, that all blacks must adhere to. Wait, there’s more.
Unlike whites and Hispanics, blacks claim another phenomenon-- black ambassadors sometimes loosely called “our leaders,” who speak on behalf of “ALL blacks and their black issues.” If you think Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Cornel West, etc. you get it. (Of course this is despite the fact, many blacks don’t call these clowns our leaders but somehow the liberal media trots them out over and over as the voices of black people. Again, as if all us blacks think alike or rather are incapable of thinking and have to have ambassadors tells us what to think and how to vote.
If this wasn’t enough monolithic brainwashing to make you sick, gird your loins.
Don’t make the mistake as a black person like I did and choose to be a Republican because you believe in opportunity, educational freedom (school choice, vouchers, charter schools), economic growth and small government. If you do, you will be called awful names by black Democrats. You will likely be hunted down by the “black police” to determine if you’re “black enough” and subjected to relentless name-calling and mocking such as “you just want to be white” or “how can you be a Republican.” To which, I respond, “How can you be a Democrat?”
What’s curious is no other race, White, Hispanic or Asian, gives over 90% of their vote to one party but blacks. In exchange for this block vote, Democrats, including President Obama, our first black president, take the black vote for granted each election cycle because they don’t have to work for it.
Since I began my blog, most of the hateful email and tweets I receive come from black liberals. I find this ironic since the Democrat party touts itself as the party of tolerance and as DNC Chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz recently said it is “the natural home to minorities.” Some tolerance!
To give you a taste of the kind vulgar, distasteful and racist comments I receive, I thought I would share with you some unsavory tweets hurled at me while I joined BET’s Ed Gordon Tuesday night as the only black Republican woman providing analysis of President Obama’s State of the Union Speech.
Cedric the Entertainer, as he refers to himself, didn’t like my commentary that Obama’s speech was more Obama blaming Bush, Republicans and everything under the sun for his failed policies. So, he tweeted the following check out his tweet:
https://twitter.com/#!/CedEntertainer
A series of more vulgar tweets were made by his followers.
https://twitter.com/#!/nkrumah336
In America, no matter what your race, you have the freedom to believe in any religion or support any political party you choose. What’s really pathetic about these racist attacks is instead of responding with a counter viewpoint, people like Cedric and others respond with ignorance.
The fickle finger of fairness?
By Paul Jacob
Sunday, January 29, 2012
“Life,” my parents often told me, “isn’t fair.” But President Barack Obama isn't so negative: yes it can be fair.
“We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by,” our president informed the nation last week, in his annual State of the Union address, “or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”
The implications of such fairness are immense.
And make no mistake about the meaning of President Obama’s pronouncement for real change. The president went further, promising, “No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts. An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody.”
Did you hear that? Surely, it’s not just a slogan. You can take that to your closest bailed-out bank!
So, what must the president’s diagnosis of our current State of the Union really mean? And what must be his proposed treatments?
For starters, Obama clearly says, “we need to change our tax code so that people like [him], and an awful lot of members of Congress, pay [their] fair share of taxes.”
Hear! Hear! Isn’t it high time that, as the president asks, a billionaire must “pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes?”
Obama calls this “the Buffett Rule” after Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. The rule isn’t about collecting the $1 billion in back taxes owed by Buffett’s company — no doubt that check is in the mail, or will be after another decade of litigation with the IRS.
The Buffett Rule is simple: “If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.” And because we’re talking about fairness here, ladies and gentlemen, the rate must be 30 percent for everyone — just like secretaries, who apparently pay extraordinarily-high tax rates.
We’re all in this together, after all. And we certainly “don’t begrudge financial success in this country,” the POTUS told us. “We admire it.”
And fair is fair.
Now, some may be confused about the president’s precise definition of fairness, because he also promised that, “if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families, your taxes shouldn’t go up.”
Heavens to Betsy! We must all already be paying 30 percent like those rich guys’ secretaries! No wonder my wife keeps complaining about how hard it is to make ends meet.
But have no fear. There is a silver lining. Obama “will not walk away from the promise of clean energy.”
What does this mean for you?
In a nation of fairness, under BHO’s new New Deal, we’re all going to be given hundreds of millions of dollars in government loans to go into business. Imagine a nation with possibly 300 million highly capitalized clean-energy businesses!
Before the assembled masses of official Washington, Obama informed us, “In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries.” Now, I don’t know if the world needs such batteries — the lithium-ion battery manufacturer Enert just filed for bankruptcy after getting $119 million in federal government loans — but a loan that size sure will cushion us rich guys having to pay 30 percent of our (about to be sky-rocketing) income in taxes.
An unsettled question is just exactly how much is the right amount to loan to each new American clean-energy entrepreneur. Hard to say. But the now defunct Solyndra got $573 million to build solar panels and bankrupt Enert $119M, so somewhere in between sounds, well, fair.
The usual nay-sayers and Obama-haters will assert that these investments will flow to the well-connected. Granted, a recent report found that 80 percent of “green energy” loans the federal government has made thus far have been deposited by top donors to President Obama.
But that wouldn’t be fair. And the new meme is fairness.
Plus, anyone can see from the State of the Union speech that the president has changed. For example, I was struck by Obama turning so completely against the welfare state per his unequivocal stand of “no bailouts” and “no handouts.” I would have never guessed he’d make that commitment.
And, in fact, have you noticed the mainstream media is so shocked, they’ve barely mumbled two words about this sea-change?
No more can opponents such as Newt Gingrich suggest that Obama is “the food stamp president.” Food stamps are clearly a “handout,” meaning, of course, that the program is over. And kiss Pell Grants and farm subsidies and housing subsidies and welfare (whatever its latest name is) and all the myriad other federal government giveaways goodbye.
It may take weeks or months — or perhaps it won’t even be possible to end these various programs until closer to Election Day — but this is clearly the only direction for the new Obama nation. It’s about time we embraced a fair deal, where no one gets bailouts or handouts on the backs of those working hard to earn a living.
Still, when President Obama accomplishes this fantastic feat — forming a system of fundamental fairness — what will parents tell their children?
Sunday, January 29, 2012
“Life,” my parents often told me, “isn’t fair.” But President Barack Obama isn't so negative: yes it can be fair.
“We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while a growing number of Americans barely get by,” our president informed the nation last week, in his annual State of the Union address, “or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.”
The implications of such fairness are immense.
And make no mistake about the meaning of President Obama’s pronouncement for real change. The president went further, promising, “No bailouts, no handouts, and no copouts. An America built to last insists on responsibility from everybody.”
Did you hear that? Surely, it’s not just a slogan. You can take that to your closest bailed-out bank!
So, what must the president’s diagnosis of our current State of the Union really mean? And what must be his proposed treatments?
For starters, Obama clearly says, “we need to change our tax code so that people like [him], and an awful lot of members of Congress, pay [their] fair share of taxes.”
Hear! Hear! Isn’t it high time that, as the president asks, a billionaire must “pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes?”
Obama calls this “the Buffett Rule” after Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. The rule isn’t about collecting the $1 billion in back taxes owed by Buffett’s company — no doubt that check is in the mail, or will be after another decade of litigation with the IRS.
The Buffett Rule is simple: “If you make more than $1 million a year, you should not pay less than 30 percent in taxes.” And because we’re talking about fairness here, ladies and gentlemen, the rate must be 30 percent for everyone — just like secretaries, who apparently pay extraordinarily-high tax rates.
We’re all in this together, after all. And we certainly “don’t begrudge financial success in this country,” the POTUS told us. “We admire it.”
And fair is fair.
Now, some may be confused about the president’s precise definition of fairness, because he also promised that, “if you make under $250,000 a year, like 98 percent of American families, your taxes shouldn’t go up.”
Heavens to Betsy! We must all already be paying 30 percent like those rich guys’ secretaries! No wonder my wife keeps complaining about how hard it is to make ends meet.
But have no fear. There is a silver lining. Obama “will not walk away from the promise of clean energy.”
What does this mean for you?
In a nation of fairness, under BHO’s new New Deal, we’re all going to be given hundreds of millions of dollars in government loans to go into business. Imagine a nation with possibly 300 million highly capitalized clean-energy businesses!
Before the assembled masses of official Washington, Obama informed us, “In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries.” Now, I don’t know if the world needs such batteries — the lithium-ion battery manufacturer Enert just filed for bankruptcy after getting $119 million in federal government loans — but a loan that size sure will cushion us rich guys having to pay 30 percent of our (about to be sky-rocketing) income in taxes.
An unsettled question is just exactly how much is the right amount to loan to each new American clean-energy entrepreneur. Hard to say. But the now defunct Solyndra got $573 million to build solar panels and bankrupt Enert $119M, so somewhere in between sounds, well, fair.
The usual nay-sayers and Obama-haters will assert that these investments will flow to the well-connected. Granted, a recent report found that 80 percent of “green energy” loans the federal government has made thus far have been deposited by top donors to President Obama.
But that wouldn’t be fair. And the new meme is fairness.
Plus, anyone can see from the State of the Union speech that the president has changed. For example, I was struck by Obama turning so completely against the welfare state per his unequivocal stand of “no bailouts” and “no handouts.” I would have never guessed he’d make that commitment.
And, in fact, have you noticed the mainstream media is so shocked, they’ve barely mumbled two words about this sea-change?
No more can opponents such as Newt Gingrich suggest that Obama is “the food stamp president.” Food stamps are clearly a “handout,” meaning, of course, that the program is over. And kiss Pell Grants and farm subsidies and housing subsidies and welfare (whatever its latest name is) and all the myriad other federal government giveaways goodbye.
It may take weeks or months — or perhaps it won’t even be possible to end these various programs until closer to Election Day — but this is clearly the only direction for the new Obama nation. It’s about time we embraced a fair deal, where no one gets bailouts or handouts on the backs of those working hard to earn a living.
Still, when President Obama accomplishes this fantastic feat — forming a system of fundamental fairness — what will parents tell their children?
Sunday, January 29, 2012
As a Liberal I Mocked and Despised Reagan
By Lincoln Brown
Sunday, January 29, 2012
A friend of mine commented the other day that she was growing tired of the Mitt-Newt volleys and super pacs. After cruising the GOP buffet going back to the days when even Gary Johnson was still all-in, she was leaning toward Rick Santorum. “The problem is.” she lamented “is that he lacks…Santorumism.”
Santorumism?
Suddenly aware that I might be present at the birth of new word in the language of elections, I pressed her for what she meant by that. “I support everything he says in his campaign speeches, but he’s missing Santorumism” she replied. I was still intrigued and had to know what she meant by the word. She had other things to do that day but agreed to explore it with me and we finally distilled what she was trying to say. While she likes what he has to say, but she is disappointed that he seems to lack that ineffable quality of a serious contender. What she wanted was a Santorum with the polish and presence of the Rominee, combined with the pitbull aggressiveness we have seen out Gingrich.
She is not alone in having not entirely committed herself to one of the remaining camps. The Rasmussen Report indicated last week that 33 to 34 percent of those polled indicated that they would like to see someone else get into the GOP race. That’s one third of the respondents, give or take. Last year, John LeBoutillier prophesied that there was someone waiting in the Republican shadows for the right moment to emerge and take the lead in the race.
Everyone in the commentatriat has said that this contest will go right down to the wire at the convention, as Newt and Mitt continue to duke it out. (And yes I am aware Ron Paul will hang in there.) But it has been interesting that the majority has not really seemed to solidify behind one or the other. That may be due to the mercurial nature of the caucus and primary results, but I think it has more to do with the 33 percenters out there. The people I have talked to that do not have radio or TV shows or columns are leaning toward the Rominee, but so far no clear winner has emerged.
I am willing to bet that there are more 33 percenters out there than those Rasmussen talked to: people who see something that they like in each of the candidates but can’t fully commit to putting a sticker on their bumper for anyone yet. And I think I know why.
Every conservative out there is waiting for the Second Coming. No, I’m not talking about that Second Coming, I mean the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan.
Every conservative looks to the Reagan Era as conservativism in its full flower. For many of us, the Reagan Era is our version of Kennedy’s Camelot. In fact, I would argue that Newt got into more trouble last week over his relationship to Reagan than he has for all of the accusations of his peccadilloes. We are Republicans, and thou shalt not mess with Reagan.
And so in the back of our minds, we are looking at the collection of candidates and trying to gauge which will be the most like Reagan
Now let's be clear: as a liberal I mocked and despised Reagan. As a conservative I learned to appreciate and respect Reagan. But fellow believers, Reagan is dead and he will not be returning from Avalon. And even if he were still with us, he served two terms and couldn’t run, anyway.
The country and the world have changed since the 1980’s, and even if the changes were not as drastic as they are, the simple fact remains that Reagan has assumed a status in the GOP mythology that cannot be replicated or even approached.
No candidate will be the next Reagan, and we should stop looking for his face in theirs. Instead, we should wrest the discussion from the media and the Super Pacs, and let the candidates know what we expect from them. We should drive the issues and we must drive the nomination.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
A friend of mine commented the other day that she was growing tired of the Mitt-Newt volleys and super pacs. After cruising the GOP buffet going back to the days when even Gary Johnson was still all-in, she was leaning toward Rick Santorum. “The problem is.” she lamented “is that he lacks…Santorumism.”
Santorumism?
Suddenly aware that I might be present at the birth of new word in the language of elections, I pressed her for what she meant by that. “I support everything he says in his campaign speeches, but he’s missing Santorumism” she replied. I was still intrigued and had to know what she meant by the word. She had other things to do that day but agreed to explore it with me and we finally distilled what she was trying to say. While she likes what he has to say, but she is disappointed that he seems to lack that ineffable quality of a serious contender. What she wanted was a Santorum with the polish and presence of the Rominee, combined with the pitbull aggressiveness we have seen out Gingrich.
She is not alone in having not entirely committed herself to one of the remaining camps. The Rasmussen Report indicated last week that 33 to 34 percent of those polled indicated that they would like to see someone else get into the GOP race. That’s one third of the respondents, give or take. Last year, John LeBoutillier prophesied that there was someone waiting in the Republican shadows for the right moment to emerge and take the lead in the race.
Everyone in the commentatriat has said that this contest will go right down to the wire at the convention, as Newt and Mitt continue to duke it out. (And yes I am aware Ron Paul will hang in there.) But it has been interesting that the majority has not really seemed to solidify behind one or the other. That may be due to the mercurial nature of the caucus and primary results, but I think it has more to do with the 33 percenters out there. The people I have talked to that do not have radio or TV shows or columns are leaning toward the Rominee, but so far no clear winner has emerged.
I am willing to bet that there are more 33 percenters out there than those Rasmussen talked to: people who see something that they like in each of the candidates but can’t fully commit to putting a sticker on their bumper for anyone yet. And I think I know why.
Every conservative out there is waiting for the Second Coming. No, I’m not talking about that Second Coming, I mean the Second Coming of Ronald Reagan.
Every conservative looks to the Reagan Era as conservativism in its full flower. For many of us, the Reagan Era is our version of Kennedy’s Camelot. In fact, I would argue that Newt got into more trouble last week over his relationship to Reagan than he has for all of the accusations of his peccadilloes. We are Republicans, and thou shalt not mess with Reagan.
And so in the back of our minds, we are looking at the collection of candidates and trying to gauge which will be the most like Reagan
Now let's be clear: as a liberal I mocked and despised Reagan. As a conservative I learned to appreciate and respect Reagan. But fellow believers, Reagan is dead and he will not be returning from Avalon. And even if he were still with us, he served two terms and couldn’t run, anyway.
The country and the world have changed since the 1980’s, and even if the changes were not as drastic as they are, the simple fact remains that Reagan has assumed a status in the GOP mythology that cannot be replicated or even approached.
No candidate will be the next Reagan, and we should stop looking for his face in theirs. Instead, we should wrest the discussion from the media and the Super Pacs, and let the candidates know what we expect from them. We should drive the issues and we must drive the nomination.
GOP No Longer Feels Need To Hide Its Incivility
By Debra J. Saunders
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Last week, Sarah Palin stepped over the edge of civility. Fox Business host Eric Bolling played a clip of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on "Meet the Press" in which Christie said Newt Gingrich "has been an embarrassment" to the Republican Party.
"Poor Chris," Palin responded. "This was a rookie mistake. He played right into the media's hand." Palin added that Christie must have been shaken up by Romney's second-place showing in South Carolina. "You kind of get your panties in a wad, and you may say things that you regret later. And I think that that's what Chris Christie did."
One can only hope that Palin regrets her rookie mistake of using that brand of crude language on television. Except, just when Palin seems increasingly irrelevant, that quote put her name back in the news.
Days later, when Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer greeted President Barack Obama on the Phoenix airport tarmac, the two got into a testy exchange about Brewer's account of a meeting with the president in her memoirs, "Scorpions for Breakfast." Associated Press photographer Haraz N. Ghanbari snapped photographs of the Republican governor jabbing her index finger at the president of the United States.
Governors: Manners, please. Stanford University political science professor Mo Fiorina considers the tarmac spat indicative of a "breakdown of basic civility, of basic mutual respect, of the degree of animosity within the political class."
A few years ago, I read amazing memoirs, "My Year Inside Radical Islam" by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who converted to Islam as a college student. "No other Muslim will accuse you of not being a Muslim," a friend had told him. "The thought that other Muslims would accept me as a brother in faith even if we disagreed on some theological points was comforting."
Over time, however, Gartenstein-Ross continued to find new sets of rules to which he was expected to adhere if he wanted to see himself as a good Muslim. He wasn't supposed to listen to music. "You should not go to law school," a sheik told him. "If you go to law school, you will have to say the Constitution is good." He had to grow a beard.
Each act of conciliation drove the young man to greater extremes and further isolated him from the rest of society. In 1999, Gartenstein-Ross worked for a foundation that the U.S. Treasury Department later found to have funded terrorist organizations. As his eyes opened, his fanaticism waned.
There are days when this Republican feels as if the GOP is puffing up its own extremist bubble. The GOP has more litmus tests of fidelity than before. There's more rancor, and there's a showy contempt for moderation.
I called Gartenstein-Ross to ask whether he sees a connection between today's pumped-up GOP and his experience in radical Islam. Islamic extremists, he told me, "declare people with more moderate views of Islam to be not Muslim at all." The Republican Party doesn't advocate violence toward apostates, he replied, and liberal groups such as MoveOn.org also push the edge of the envelope, but he saw a similarity: "You have the same element with this desire for purity."
Also, in an age when opinionators are competing for attention, shock talk draws the most attention. Palin trash-talked Christie's undergarments -- presto, she made Politico. Brewer berated the president in a most inhospitable manner -- and her book sales shot up.
Stanford's Fiorina told me that the Republican Party today reminds her "a lot of Democrats in the '70s. It took them four or five elections to figure out that the country wasn't going to elect them."
Fiorina looks at the GOP and sees "what happened to the Democrats." Now the GOP base is "anti-establishment." GOP factions "fight with each other more than the other side."
Then there's this rush to claim victimhood. On Thursday, Palin was on Fox Business claiming that "the establishment" was trying to "crucify" Gingrich. Crucify? How? By letting him talk? First party lemmings alienate everyone outside their little bubble, and then they blame the "establishment" because many voters do not trust them with power.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Last week, Sarah Palin stepped over the edge of civility. Fox Business host Eric Bolling played a clip of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on "Meet the Press" in which Christie said Newt Gingrich "has been an embarrassment" to the Republican Party.
"Poor Chris," Palin responded. "This was a rookie mistake. He played right into the media's hand." Palin added that Christie must have been shaken up by Romney's second-place showing in South Carolina. "You kind of get your panties in a wad, and you may say things that you regret later. And I think that that's what Chris Christie did."
One can only hope that Palin regrets her rookie mistake of using that brand of crude language on television. Except, just when Palin seems increasingly irrelevant, that quote put her name back in the news.
Days later, when Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer greeted President Barack Obama on the Phoenix airport tarmac, the two got into a testy exchange about Brewer's account of a meeting with the president in her memoirs, "Scorpions for Breakfast." Associated Press photographer Haraz N. Ghanbari snapped photographs of the Republican governor jabbing her index finger at the president of the United States.
Governors: Manners, please. Stanford University political science professor Mo Fiorina considers the tarmac spat indicative of a "breakdown of basic civility, of basic mutual respect, of the degree of animosity within the political class."
A few years ago, I read amazing memoirs, "My Year Inside Radical Islam" by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who converted to Islam as a college student. "No other Muslim will accuse you of not being a Muslim," a friend had told him. "The thought that other Muslims would accept me as a brother in faith even if we disagreed on some theological points was comforting."
Over time, however, Gartenstein-Ross continued to find new sets of rules to which he was expected to adhere if he wanted to see himself as a good Muslim. He wasn't supposed to listen to music. "You should not go to law school," a sheik told him. "If you go to law school, you will have to say the Constitution is good." He had to grow a beard.
Each act of conciliation drove the young man to greater extremes and further isolated him from the rest of society. In 1999, Gartenstein-Ross worked for a foundation that the U.S. Treasury Department later found to have funded terrorist organizations. As his eyes opened, his fanaticism waned.
There are days when this Republican feels as if the GOP is puffing up its own extremist bubble. The GOP has more litmus tests of fidelity than before. There's more rancor, and there's a showy contempt for moderation.
I called Gartenstein-Ross to ask whether he sees a connection between today's pumped-up GOP and his experience in radical Islam. Islamic extremists, he told me, "declare people with more moderate views of Islam to be not Muslim at all." The Republican Party doesn't advocate violence toward apostates, he replied, and liberal groups such as MoveOn.org also push the edge of the envelope, but he saw a similarity: "You have the same element with this desire for purity."
Also, in an age when opinionators are competing for attention, shock talk draws the most attention. Palin trash-talked Christie's undergarments -- presto, she made Politico. Brewer berated the president in a most inhospitable manner -- and her book sales shot up.
Stanford's Fiorina told me that the Republican Party today reminds her "a lot of Democrats in the '70s. It took them four or five elections to figure out that the country wasn't going to elect them."
Fiorina looks at the GOP and sees "what happened to the Democrats." Now the GOP base is "anti-establishment." GOP factions "fight with each other more than the other side."
Then there's this rush to claim victimhood. On Thursday, Palin was on Fox Business claiming that "the establishment" was trying to "crucify" Gingrich. Crucify? How? By letting him talk? First party lemmings alienate everyone outside their little bubble, and then they blame the "establishment" because many voters do not trust them with power.
Obama Calls It Fairness. The GOP Calls It Class Warfare. Scripture Calls It Envy
By Doug Giles
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Obama, in his State of the Union address and during his initial five-state, multi-million dollar taxpayer funded re-election jaunt has stated repeatedly that his platform and policies are not about class warfare, which means, of course, that his ticket is all about class warfare—or “fairness,” as he likes to call it … or as the Scripture labels it, envy.
You don’t hear much about envy anymore, do you? We hear a lot about greed being bad, but in Obamaland envy is no longer a rank vice but a right and a virtue. However, historically speaking, envy has always been seen as a high-ranking sin. Envy, matter of fact, is second on the Seven Deadly Sins list as it lags behind pride a wee bit in being the nastiest and most common vice.
Ancient in its poison, envy forms a big chunk of the foul compost heap that stimulates the growth of human stupidity. Envy is an extremely toxic sin that doesn’t get the verbal hailstorm that other sins receive in our current entitlement culture with its totemic view of vice. Someone who has been saddled by the envy monkey will probably not make the evening news like a politician who has been caught in bed with a live man or a dead woman or who keeps his freezer stuffed with cash.
No, envy is not that sexy and doesn’t have the buzz that zings around a greedy Goldman Sachs exec. Because this sin doesn’t get MSNBC’s attention like the more juicy transgressions, we tend to see it as less naughty. But be not deceived, my brethren: This sin is disastrous once it sticks its talons into a person, party, religion, or nation.
Another distinguishing feature of the funk of envy is that it is no fun. All vices sport a momentary spice. All of them, that is, except for envy. Envy is the one sin the sinner will never like or admit. You’ll never see someone who is envious chilling out, laughing his butt off, or relaxing with his friends while this demon rules the roost. The more envy grows, the more it drives its impenitent coddler nuts.
So, what is envy? Well … let’s start with what it is not. It’s not admiring what someone else has and wanting some good stuff also. This desire will make you get off your butt in the morning and get busy. It is good to crave; a man’s appetite will make him work. Where envy differs from admiration/emulation is that envy is “sorrow at another’s good” (said Thomas Aquinas). Someone who is centered can watch another person, party, or nation prosper and not grow hateful because of it.
The whacked, petty, envious dolt, however, sees someone else excel and is slapped in the face with the reality that he just got dogged. So, instead of sucking it up and working harder and smarter, the unwise envious freak allows his pride to fuel his wounded little spirit. This sets the dejected perp down a path of disparagement of the prosperous that eventually morphs into the desire to destroy the person, party or nation that has just trumped this sad little person.
Os Guinness, best-selling author and renowned lecturer, states that the sin of envy has several common characteristics:
1. Envy is the vice of proximity. We are always prone to envy people close to us in temperament, gifts or position.
2. Envy is highly subjective. It is in the eye of the beholder. It is not the objective difference between people that feeds envy, but the subjective perception. As a Russian proverb says, “envy looks at a juniper bush and sees a pine forest.”
3. Envy doesn’t lessen with age. It gets worse as we run into more and more people of happiness and success, offering more fodder for envy.
4. Envy is often petty but always insatiable and all consuming. However small the occasion that gives rise to it, envy becomes central to the envier’s whole being. The envier “stews in his juice.” Envy begins with pride and then plunges the person into hatred.
5. Envy is always self-destructive. What the envier cannot enjoy, no one should enjoy, and thus the envier loses every enjoyment. The envier’s motto is “if not I, then no one.” As an eighth-century Jewish teacher put it, “the one who envies gains nothing for himself and deprives the one he envies of nothing. He only loses thereby.”
Y’know, there are many forces tearing at this land and many nations that would like to level our nation. That said, I believe this envious entitlement funk that’s speedily weaving its way into the fabric of our national life will destroy it faster than al-Qaeda could ever al-Hope to.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Obama, in his State of the Union address and during his initial five-state, multi-million dollar taxpayer funded re-election jaunt has stated repeatedly that his platform and policies are not about class warfare, which means, of course, that his ticket is all about class warfare—or “fairness,” as he likes to call it … or as the Scripture labels it, envy.
You don’t hear much about envy anymore, do you? We hear a lot about greed being bad, but in Obamaland envy is no longer a rank vice but a right and a virtue. However, historically speaking, envy has always been seen as a high-ranking sin. Envy, matter of fact, is second on the Seven Deadly Sins list as it lags behind pride a wee bit in being the nastiest and most common vice.
Ancient in its poison, envy forms a big chunk of the foul compost heap that stimulates the growth of human stupidity. Envy is an extremely toxic sin that doesn’t get the verbal hailstorm that other sins receive in our current entitlement culture with its totemic view of vice. Someone who has been saddled by the envy monkey will probably not make the evening news like a politician who has been caught in bed with a live man or a dead woman or who keeps his freezer stuffed with cash.
No, envy is not that sexy and doesn’t have the buzz that zings around a greedy Goldman Sachs exec. Because this sin doesn’t get MSNBC’s attention like the more juicy transgressions, we tend to see it as less naughty. But be not deceived, my brethren: This sin is disastrous once it sticks its talons into a person, party, religion, or nation.
Another distinguishing feature of the funk of envy is that it is no fun. All vices sport a momentary spice. All of them, that is, except for envy. Envy is the one sin the sinner will never like or admit. You’ll never see someone who is envious chilling out, laughing his butt off, or relaxing with his friends while this demon rules the roost. The more envy grows, the more it drives its impenitent coddler nuts.
So, what is envy? Well … let’s start with what it is not. It’s not admiring what someone else has and wanting some good stuff also. This desire will make you get off your butt in the morning and get busy. It is good to crave; a man’s appetite will make him work. Where envy differs from admiration/emulation is that envy is “sorrow at another’s good” (said Thomas Aquinas). Someone who is centered can watch another person, party, or nation prosper and not grow hateful because of it.
The whacked, petty, envious dolt, however, sees someone else excel and is slapped in the face with the reality that he just got dogged. So, instead of sucking it up and working harder and smarter, the unwise envious freak allows his pride to fuel his wounded little spirit. This sets the dejected perp down a path of disparagement of the prosperous that eventually morphs into the desire to destroy the person, party or nation that has just trumped this sad little person.
Os Guinness, best-selling author and renowned lecturer, states that the sin of envy has several common characteristics:
1. Envy is the vice of proximity. We are always prone to envy people close to us in temperament, gifts or position.
2. Envy is highly subjective. It is in the eye of the beholder. It is not the objective difference between people that feeds envy, but the subjective perception. As a Russian proverb says, “envy looks at a juniper bush and sees a pine forest.”
3. Envy doesn’t lessen with age. It gets worse as we run into more and more people of happiness and success, offering more fodder for envy.
4. Envy is often petty but always insatiable and all consuming. However small the occasion that gives rise to it, envy becomes central to the envier’s whole being. The envier “stews in his juice.” Envy begins with pride and then plunges the person into hatred.
5. Envy is always self-destructive. What the envier cannot enjoy, no one should enjoy, and thus the envier loses every enjoyment. The envier’s motto is “if not I, then no one.” As an eighth-century Jewish teacher put it, “the one who envies gains nothing for himself and deprives the one he envies of nothing. He only loses thereby.”
Y’know, there are many forces tearing at this land and many nations that would like to level our nation. That said, I believe this envious entitlement funk that’s speedily weaving its way into the fabric of our national life will destroy it faster than al-Qaeda could ever al-Hope to.
Do Government Programs Ever 'Fail'
By Austin Hill
Sunday, January 29, 2012
“Too big to fail.”
Americans have come to loath the idea that some business enterprises are so important and so “big,” that they can’t be allowed to fail - especially as it regards large corporations that “need” government bailouts. But have we developed a similar disdain for government programs that are treated as though they can’t possibly be failures?
After last week’s State of the Union Address and Republican presidential debate, one might think that the issue of “more or less government” in our lives is merely another consumer choice - kind of like Coke or Pepsi, McDonalds or Burger King. For example, as he recently reviewed America’s debate over President Obama’s government healthcare law, Columnist Carl M. Cannon characterized the battle this way:
“To liberals, the Affordable Care Act of 2010 is a step toward ensuring improvements in health benefits, lower costs, higher quality care, economic security and fiscal sanity. Republicans, who invariably call it “Obamacare,” almost universally describe it as costly, intrusive, economically disastrous -- and a violation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.”
In reality, the choices we make for our nation’s public policy are not all of equal merit – some can enhance our freedoms and our quality of life, while others clearly make matters worse. And many government programs that are intended to “solve” problems – most of which come from Democrats, but far too many of which come from Republicans – often times make matters worse.
It’s difficult to argue that President Obama’s healthcare reform law has solved any problems at all (notice that he’s not campaigning on the law’s success, but rather, on an agenda to protect it – “we can’t go back” he often notes). But let’s consider another signature program that the President has championed these past three years – his “Making Home Affordable” mortgage rescue initiatives.
Protecting one from losing their home may have seemed like an act of compassion. But in 2009, it became a matter of federal policy as the government intervened to try to curtail foreclosures.
In March of that year, President Obama introduced the set of federal policies budgeted to cost $75 billion in TARP funds, and which were intended to help make it “easier” for homeowners to remain in their homes and to continue paying on their mortgages.
The effort itself was complex and was formulated with both federal guidelines, and guidelines to be established by each of the individual fifty states. The effort also proved to be so confusing that about six months after the its inception, FreddieMac (one of the lenders that was offering the so-called “affordability assistance” to some of its borrowers) actually hired a private firm to send trained professionals door-to-door in certain regions of the country to explain to homeowners how the program worked.
The objective of “Making Home Affordable”—reducing monthly mortgage bills so borrowers would presumably keep paying on their mortgages—was to be accomplished on a case-by-case basis, and by a variety of means. Among the optional procedures were: lowering the interest rate of the loan (to as low as 2 percent in some cases); reducing the principle on the loan; and extending the term of the loan, in some cases to a maximum of forty years.
The government stipulated that, for certain qualified mortgage holders, loans that were held by the government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be refinanced or otherwise “modified” to provide the borrower with more manageable monthly terms. Not surprisingly, the government was also able to get some of the lenders who accepted “bailout funds” to follow suit, and begin modifying the loans of their struggling clients as well (even though to do so meant that these lenders would be working against their own interests, and foregoing revenues that they were clearly entitled to collect).
It all seemed like a great idea. But as is so often the case when the government intervenes into the free market, the results produced by the “Making Home Affordable” initiatives have been less than desirable. Within the first eighteen months of the program’s beginnings, more than 50 percent of the participants in the program ended up falling behind on their payments again. Our government’s well-intended effort to “solve” the mortgage default problem gave rise to an entirely new problem—the phenomenon of “re-defaults.”
And here’s another problem with the program: it focused on mortgage borrowers who were not keeping their commitments, and extended to them a benefit, while more responsible borrowers who were current on their payments received no benefit from their government at all. This is to say that, for all the good intentions involved, the “Making Home Affordable” program rewarded bad behavior – and produced more bad behavior in the end.
This is but one example of a well-intended government program that has cost the American taxpayer enormous amounts of money, has undermined hard working people who play by the rules, and has produced more negative consequences. Has it failed? Not according to our government.
The choices between big government and limited government are not inconsequential. Americans need to think, before they vote.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
“Too big to fail.”
Americans have come to loath the idea that some business enterprises are so important and so “big,” that they can’t be allowed to fail - especially as it regards large corporations that “need” government bailouts. But have we developed a similar disdain for government programs that are treated as though they can’t possibly be failures?
After last week’s State of the Union Address and Republican presidential debate, one might think that the issue of “more or less government” in our lives is merely another consumer choice - kind of like Coke or Pepsi, McDonalds or Burger King. For example, as he recently reviewed America’s debate over President Obama’s government healthcare law, Columnist Carl M. Cannon characterized the battle this way:
“To liberals, the Affordable Care Act of 2010 is a step toward ensuring improvements in health benefits, lower costs, higher quality care, economic security and fiscal sanity. Republicans, who invariably call it “Obamacare,” almost universally describe it as costly, intrusive, economically disastrous -- and a violation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution.”
In reality, the choices we make for our nation’s public policy are not all of equal merit – some can enhance our freedoms and our quality of life, while others clearly make matters worse. And many government programs that are intended to “solve” problems – most of which come from Democrats, but far too many of which come from Republicans – often times make matters worse.
It’s difficult to argue that President Obama’s healthcare reform law has solved any problems at all (notice that he’s not campaigning on the law’s success, but rather, on an agenda to protect it – “we can’t go back” he often notes). But let’s consider another signature program that the President has championed these past three years – his “Making Home Affordable” mortgage rescue initiatives.
Protecting one from losing their home may have seemed like an act of compassion. But in 2009, it became a matter of federal policy as the government intervened to try to curtail foreclosures.
In March of that year, President Obama introduced the set of federal policies budgeted to cost $75 billion in TARP funds, and which were intended to help make it “easier” for homeowners to remain in their homes and to continue paying on their mortgages.
The effort itself was complex and was formulated with both federal guidelines, and guidelines to be established by each of the individual fifty states. The effort also proved to be so confusing that about six months after the its inception, FreddieMac (one of the lenders that was offering the so-called “affordability assistance” to some of its borrowers) actually hired a private firm to send trained professionals door-to-door in certain regions of the country to explain to homeowners how the program worked.
The objective of “Making Home Affordable”—reducing monthly mortgage bills so borrowers would presumably keep paying on their mortgages—was to be accomplished on a case-by-case basis, and by a variety of means. Among the optional procedures were: lowering the interest rate of the loan (to as low as 2 percent in some cases); reducing the principle on the loan; and extending the term of the loan, in some cases to a maximum of forty years.
The government stipulated that, for certain qualified mortgage holders, loans that were held by the government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be refinanced or otherwise “modified” to provide the borrower with more manageable monthly terms. Not surprisingly, the government was also able to get some of the lenders who accepted “bailout funds” to follow suit, and begin modifying the loans of their struggling clients as well (even though to do so meant that these lenders would be working against their own interests, and foregoing revenues that they were clearly entitled to collect).
It all seemed like a great idea. But as is so often the case when the government intervenes into the free market, the results produced by the “Making Home Affordable” initiatives have been less than desirable. Within the first eighteen months of the program’s beginnings, more than 50 percent of the participants in the program ended up falling behind on their payments again. Our government’s well-intended effort to “solve” the mortgage default problem gave rise to an entirely new problem—the phenomenon of “re-defaults.”
And here’s another problem with the program: it focused on mortgage borrowers who were not keeping their commitments, and extended to them a benefit, while more responsible borrowers who were current on their payments received no benefit from their government at all. This is to say that, for all the good intentions involved, the “Making Home Affordable” program rewarded bad behavior – and produced more bad behavior in the end.
This is but one example of a well-intended government program that has cost the American taxpayer enormous amounts of money, has undermined hard working people who play by the rules, and has produced more negative consequences. Has it failed? Not according to our government.
The choices between big government and limited government are not inconsequential. Americans need to think, before they vote.
Obama Builds the Wrong Car
By Marita Noon
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Mr. President, you are building the wrong car.
In a May 2007 speech before the Detroit Economic Club, Candidate Obama chastised American automakers for building the wrong cars—while they were building “bigger, faster cars,” “foreign competitors were investing in more fuel-efficient technology.” He stated that “it’s not enough to only build cars that use less oil—we also have to move away from that dirty dwindling fuel altogether.” He noted that “the transformation of the cars we drive and the fuels we use would be the most ambitious energy project in decades.” He promised “generous tax incentives” and “more tax credits” to make this happen. He believed that the additional costs are “the price we pay as citizens committed to a cause bigger than ourselves.” He claimed to be a leader who could make this happen as he intoned, “Believe me, we can do it if we really try.”
While that speech did not mention the Chevy Volt, or even electric cars, it surely laid out his ideology. For the most part, these are campaign promises he has kept. He has driven Detroit to “move away from that dirty fuel altogether.” He has offered “generous tax incentives” and “more tax credits.” To see “the most ambitious energy project in decades” become a reality his administration has handed out loans to virtually every strata in the electric car’s foundation.
He’s bailed out GM—which allowed government manipulation of the market to produce the Volt in the first place.
He’s given billions of taxpayer dollars to “green” energy companies who promised to deliver the electricity—Solyndra is just the one of the myriad of failures in his “ambitious energy project.”
Beacon Power Company received $39 million of its government-guaranteed loan before it filed for bankruptcy. Beacon Power developed new technology that supposedly provides energy storage designed to help the intermittent solar and wind power be used by power grids, which need stable power to remain reliable.
Just this week, another Obama backed company filed for bankruptcy. EnerDel made lithium-ion batteries for electric cars. It received more than $100 million in government funding from the Obama administration, as part of the economic stimulus package and green energy push. One year before EnerDel filed for bankruptcy, Vice President Biden visited the plant and crowed: “A year and a half ago, this administration made a judgment. We decided it’s not sufficient to create new jobs—we have to create whole new industries.” The reason for EnerDel’s demise? “The company suffered when demand for the batteries dropped as fewer Americans than expected opted for electric cars.”
Yes, the Obama administration has worked hard to line up the dominos to insure a “transformation of the cars we drive and the fuels we use.” They have provided “generous tax incentives” and “more tax credits.” But to what end?
The dominos have fallen, one right after the other—all the way up to the Chevy Volt and beyond.
Last week GM launched “national and television print ads” to try to bolster the slumping sales for the Volt. (Every time you see an ad for an electric car, think of President Obama and your tax dollars.) Dealer orders are down. They report: “We just haven’t been seeing the interest. The cost definitely has something to do with it.” GM is considering slowing production due to the less-than-expected demand and has temporarily laid-off 1,200 workers.
In 2011, instead of the forecasted 10,000, 7,671 Volts were sold—which comes out to three-hundredths of 1 percent of US carmakers unit sales. Analysts say there has been a “slow initial uptake of the first models to come on the market.” Many of the Volts that were sold were to government. New York City bought 50. The city of DeLand, FL used part of a $1.2 million federal grant to buy five. Perhaps in effort to save his “ambitious energy project,” President Obama has committed the fed to buying 100+. He’s even pushed his Jobs Council leader, Jeffery Immelt, to buy them. GE will purchase 3000 through the year 2015.
Of course GE is one of the leading suppliers of the charging stations needed to power the Volt—much like those removed by Costco, due to lack of use. After investing a lot of time and money on recharging stations, GE has to do what they can to not let the market slip further away.
But, remember, “we can do it if we really try.” From the first domino to the last, the administration has really tried. The Volt, says the Financial Times, was “fast-tracked through development in a process it likened to a ‘moonshot.’” Adam Jones, an analyst with Morgan Stanley, believes that they are “not yet ready for prime time.” Addressing the removal of charging stations at Costco, general manager for northern California, Dennis Hoover said: “Why should we have anybody spend money on a program nobody’s thought through?” Calum MacRae of PWC’s Autofacts states that electric vehicles “are flawed in terms of convenience.”
Citing statistics for the Nissin Leaf, Forbes Magazine counts the cost of an electric vehicle (EV): “At $0.11/KWH for electricity and $4.00/gallon for gasoline, you would have to drive the Leaf 164,000 miles to recover its additional purchase cost. Counting interest, the miles to payback is 197,000 miles. Because it is almost impossible to drive a Leaf more than 60 miles a day, the payback with interest would take more than nine years.” But, they state: “The cost is not the biggest problem.” “The biggest drawback is not, range, but refueling time. A few minutes spent at a gas station will give a conventional car 300 to 400 miles of range. In contrast, it takes 20 hours to completely recharge a Nissan Leaf from 110V house current. An extra-cost 240V charger shortens this time to 8 hours. There are expensive 480V chargers that can cut this time to 4 hours, but Nissan cautions that using them very often will shorten the life of the car’s batteries.”
Plus, the cost of electricity keeps going up. According to the Energy Information Administration, residential electricity rates have risen from 11.26 cents per kWh in 2008, to 11.51 cents in 2009, to 11.54 cents in 2010. With the increasing regulation on cost-effective coal-fueled generation, and the proposed plant closures, that trend is likely to get even more dramatic.
No wonder initial “uptake” has been slow. Meanwhile, impressive advances in the technology for the traditional internal combustion engine are being made—with some outperforming hybrids. A gasoline powered Ford Focus costs about half of its electric version sibling. Remove the $7,500 US government tax credit and the EV is even less desirable.
Despite Obama telling Detroit that they are building the wrong cars, Americans don’t want what Obama is selling. Washington has poured billions of dollars in making cars that people have to be paid to buy. Meanwhile, Chrysler is enjoying a resurgence thanks to Jeeps. Chrylser is adding more than a thousand jobs to build gas-guzzling vehicles like the Dodge Durango and Jeep Cherokee.
Mr. President, you are building the wrong car.
But this was before his now-public, election-year conversion experience, as expressed in the State of the Union Address. Now, leaving many in his eco-friendly base “more than a little unhappy,” he’s touting fossil fuels—particularly natural gas (even though Nancy Pelosi doesn’t think natural gas is a fossil fuel). In the SOTU, the President said: “The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.”
Imagine if he’d had this revelation in 2007. While I oppose federal tinkering with the markets, since the Obama administration was hell-bent on spending—a so-called “stimulus,” what might the world would look like today if the $2.4 billion spent subsidizing electric cars and their various components had been spent on infrastructure to support vehicles powered by natural gas?
Instead, industry, like Chesapeake Energy, and investors, like T. Boone Pickens, are using their own money and are building the needed fueling stations to allow for compressed natural gas (CNG) powered trucks to crisscross the nation. Without government pressure, and without having to retool, Honda is adapting the Civic to make a CNG-fueled car with a 250 mile range that can be refueled in the same time as a gasoline-fueled automobile (rather than the hours needed for an EV). While prices at the pump have doubled since President Obama took office, and electricity rates are “necessarily” skyrocketing, natural gas’ abundance has dropped prices to the lowest in more than a decade.
On its own, the free market is going to create the “transformation of the cars we drive and the fuels we use,” without any help from the White House. Perhaps it is time to stop throwing good money after bad and allow the Volt to go the way of Baker Electrics’ cars—or keep them for the rich who will buy them even without “generous tax incentives.”
Now that President Obama has had his oil-and-gas-conversion experience and angered his green base, maybe he could go ahead and approve the pipeline. Then we’d know his conversion is real and not just an election-year transformation.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Mr. President, you are building the wrong car.
In a May 2007 speech before the Detroit Economic Club, Candidate Obama chastised American automakers for building the wrong cars—while they were building “bigger, faster cars,” “foreign competitors were investing in more fuel-efficient technology.” He stated that “it’s not enough to only build cars that use less oil—we also have to move away from that dirty dwindling fuel altogether.” He noted that “the transformation of the cars we drive and the fuels we use would be the most ambitious energy project in decades.” He promised “generous tax incentives” and “more tax credits” to make this happen. He believed that the additional costs are “the price we pay as citizens committed to a cause bigger than ourselves.” He claimed to be a leader who could make this happen as he intoned, “Believe me, we can do it if we really try.”
While that speech did not mention the Chevy Volt, or even electric cars, it surely laid out his ideology. For the most part, these are campaign promises he has kept. He has driven Detroit to “move away from that dirty fuel altogether.” He has offered “generous tax incentives” and “more tax credits.” To see “the most ambitious energy project in decades” become a reality his administration has handed out loans to virtually every strata in the electric car’s foundation.
He’s bailed out GM—which allowed government manipulation of the market to produce the Volt in the first place.
He’s given billions of taxpayer dollars to “green” energy companies who promised to deliver the electricity—Solyndra is just the one of the myriad of failures in his “ambitious energy project.”
Beacon Power Company received $39 million of its government-guaranteed loan before it filed for bankruptcy. Beacon Power developed new technology that supposedly provides energy storage designed to help the intermittent solar and wind power be used by power grids, which need stable power to remain reliable.
Just this week, another Obama backed company filed for bankruptcy. EnerDel made lithium-ion batteries for electric cars. It received more than $100 million in government funding from the Obama administration, as part of the economic stimulus package and green energy push. One year before EnerDel filed for bankruptcy, Vice President Biden visited the plant and crowed: “A year and a half ago, this administration made a judgment. We decided it’s not sufficient to create new jobs—we have to create whole new industries.” The reason for EnerDel’s demise? “The company suffered when demand for the batteries dropped as fewer Americans than expected opted for electric cars.”
Yes, the Obama administration has worked hard to line up the dominos to insure a “transformation of the cars we drive and the fuels we use.” They have provided “generous tax incentives” and “more tax credits.” But to what end?
The dominos have fallen, one right after the other—all the way up to the Chevy Volt and beyond.
Last week GM launched “national and television print ads” to try to bolster the slumping sales for the Volt. (Every time you see an ad for an electric car, think of President Obama and your tax dollars.) Dealer orders are down. They report: “We just haven’t been seeing the interest. The cost definitely has something to do with it.” GM is considering slowing production due to the less-than-expected demand and has temporarily laid-off 1,200 workers.
In 2011, instead of the forecasted 10,000, 7,671 Volts were sold—which comes out to three-hundredths of 1 percent of US carmakers unit sales. Analysts say there has been a “slow initial uptake of the first models to come on the market.” Many of the Volts that were sold were to government. New York City bought 50. The city of DeLand, FL used part of a $1.2 million federal grant to buy five. Perhaps in effort to save his “ambitious energy project,” President Obama has committed the fed to buying 100+. He’s even pushed his Jobs Council leader, Jeffery Immelt, to buy them. GE will purchase 3000 through the year 2015.
Of course GE is one of the leading suppliers of the charging stations needed to power the Volt—much like those removed by Costco, due to lack of use. After investing a lot of time and money on recharging stations, GE has to do what they can to not let the market slip further away.
But, remember, “we can do it if we really try.” From the first domino to the last, the administration has really tried. The Volt, says the Financial Times, was “fast-tracked through development in a process it likened to a ‘moonshot.’” Adam Jones, an analyst with Morgan Stanley, believes that they are “not yet ready for prime time.” Addressing the removal of charging stations at Costco, general manager for northern California, Dennis Hoover said: “Why should we have anybody spend money on a program nobody’s thought through?” Calum MacRae of PWC’s Autofacts states that electric vehicles “are flawed in terms of convenience.”
Citing statistics for the Nissin Leaf, Forbes Magazine counts the cost of an electric vehicle (EV): “At $0.11/KWH for electricity and $4.00/gallon for gasoline, you would have to drive the Leaf 164,000 miles to recover its additional purchase cost. Counting interest, the miles to payback is 197,000 miles. Because it is almost impossible to drive a Leaf more than 60 miles a day, the payback with interest would take more than nine years.” But, they state: “The cost is not the biggest problem.” “The biggest drawback is not, range, but refueling time. A few minutes spent at a gas station will give a conventional car 300 to 400 miles of range. In contrast, it takes 20 hours to completely recharge a Nissan Leaf from 110V house current. An extra-cost 240V charger shortens this time to 8 hours. There are expensive 480V chargers that can cut this time to 4 hours, but Nissan cautions that using them very often will shorten the life of the car’s batteries.”
Plus, the cost of electricity keeps going up. According to the Energy Information Administration, residential electricity rates have risen from 11.26 cents per kWh in 2008, to 11.51 cents in 2009, to 11.54 cents in 2010. With the increasing regulation on cost-effective coal-fueled generation, and the proposed plant closures, that trend is likely to get even more dramatic.
No wonder initial “uptake” has been slow. Meanwhile, impressive advances in the technology for the traditional internal combustion engine are being made—with some outperforming hybrids. A gasoline powered Ford Focus costs about half of its electric version sibling. Remove the $7,500 US government tax credit and the EV is even less desirable.
Despite Obama telling Detroit that they are building the wrong cars, Americans don’t want what Obama is selling. Washington has poured billions of dollars in making cars that people have to be paid to buy. Meanwhile, Chrysler is enjoying a resurgence thanks to Jeeps. Chrylser is adding more than a thousand jobs to build gas-guzzling vehicles like the Dodge Durango and Jeep Cherokee.
Mr. President, you are building the wrong car.
But this was before his now-public, election-year conversion experience, as expressed in the State of the Union Address. Now, leaving many in his eco-friendly base “more than a little unhappy,” he’s touting fossil fuels—particularly natural gas (even though Nancy Pelosi doesn’t think natural gas is a fossil fuel). In the SOTU, the President said: “The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.”
Imagine if he’d had this revelation in 2007. While I oppose federal tinkering with the markets, since the Obama administration was hell-bent on spending—a so-called “stimulus,” what might the world would look like today if the $2.4 billion spent subsidizing electric cars and their various components had been spent on infrastructure to support vehicles powered by natural gas?
Instead, industry, like Chesapeake Energy, and investors, like T. Boone Pickens, are using their own money and are building the needed fueling stations to allow for compressed natural gas (CNG) powered trucks to crisscross the nation. Without government pressure, and without having to retool, Honda is adapting the Civic to make a CNG-fueled car with a 250 mile range that can be refueled in the same time as a gasoline-fueled automobile (rather than the hours needed for an EV). While prices at the pump have doubled since President Obama took office, and electricity rates are “necessarily” skyrocketing, natural gas’ abundance has dropped prices to the lowest in more than a decade.
On its own, the free market is going to create the “transformation of the cars we drive and the fuels we use,” without any help from the White House. Perhaps it is time to stop throwing good money after bad and allow the Volt to go the way of Baker Electrics’ cars—or keep them for the rich who will buy them even without “generous tax incentives.”
Now that President Obama has had his oil-and-gas-conversion experience and angered his green base, maybe he could go ahead and approve the pipeline. Then we’d know his conversion is real and not just an election-year transformation.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
The State of Our Union Is Broke
By Mark Steyn
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Had I been asked to deliver the State of the Union address, it would not have delayed your dinner plans:
“The State of our Union is broke, heading for bankrupt, and total collapse shortly thereafter. Thank you and goodnight! You’ve been a terrific crowd!”
I gather that Americans prefer something a little more upbeat, so one would not begrudge a speechwriter fluffing it up by holding out at least the possibility of some change of fortune, however remote. Instead, President Obama assured us at great length that nothing is going to change, not now, not never. Indeed the Union’s state — its unprecedented world-record brokeness — was not even mentioned. If, as I was, you happened to be stuck at Gate 27 at one of the many U.S. airports laboring under the misapprehension that pumping CNN at you all evening long somehow adds to the gaiety of flight delays, you would have watched an address that gave no indication its speaker was even aware that the parlous state of our finances is an existential threat not only to the nation but to global stability. The message was, oh, sure, unemployment’s still a little higher than it should be, and student loans are kind of expensive, and the housing market’s pretty flat, but it’s nothing that a little government “investment” in green jobs and rural broadband and retraining programs can’t fix. In other words, more of the unaffordable same.
The president certainly had facts and figures at his disposal. He boasted that his regulatory reforms “will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years.” Wow. Ten billion smackeroos! That’s some savings — and in a mere half a decade! Why, it’s equivalent to what the government of the United States borrows every 53 hours. So by midnight on Thursday Obama had already re-borrowed all those hard-fought savings from 2017. “In the last 22 months,” said the president, “businesses have created more than three million jobs.” Impressive. But 125,000 new foreign workers arrive every month (officially). So we would have to have created 2,750,000 jobs in that period just to stand still.
Fortunately, most of the items in Obama’s interminable speech will never happen, any more than the federally funded bicycling helmets or whatever fancies found their way onto Bill Clinton’s extravagant shopping lists in the Nineties. At the time, the excuse for Clinton’s mountain of legislative molehills was that all the great battles had been won, and, in the absence of a menacing Russian bear, what else did a president have to focus on except criminalizing toilet tanks over 1.6 gallons. President Obama does not enjoy the same dispensation, and any historians stumbling upon a surviving DVD while sifting through the ruins of our civilization will marvel at how his accumulation of delusional trivialities was apparently taken seriously by the assembled political class.
An honest leader would feel he owed it to the citizenry to impress upon them one central truth — that we can’t have any new programs because we’ve spent all the money. It’s gone. The cupboard is bare. What’s Obama’s plan to restock it? “Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary,” the president told us. “Asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.”
But why stop there? Americans need affordable health care and affordable master’s degrees in Climate Change and Social Justice Studies, so why not take everything that Warren Buffett’s got? After all, if you confiscated the total wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans it would come to $1.5 trillion.
Which is just a wee bit less than the federal shortfall in just one year of Obama-sized budgets. 2011 deficit: $1.56 trillion. But maybe for 2012 a whole new Forbes 400 of Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs will emigrate to the Hamptons and Malibu and keep the whole class-warfare thing going for a couple more years.
The so-called “Buffett Rule” is indicative not so much of “common sense” as of the ever widening gap between the Brobdingnagian problem and the Lilliputian solutions proposed by our leaders. Obama can sacrifice the virgin daughters of every American millionaire on the altar of government spending and the debt gods will barely notice so much as to give a perfunctory belch of acknowledgement. The president’s first term has added $5 trillion to the debt — a degree of catastrophe unique to us. In an Obama budget, the entire cost of the Greek government would barely rate a line-item. Debt-to-GDP and other comparative measures are less relevant than the hard-dollar numbers: It’s not just that American government has outspent America’s ability to fund it, but that it’s outspending the planet’s.
Who gets this? Not enough of us — which is exactly how Obama likes it. His only “big idea” — that it should be illegal (by national fiat) to drop out of school before your 18th birthday — betrays his core belief: that more is better, as long as it’s government-mandated, government-regulated, government-staffed — and funded by you, or Warren Buffett, or the Chinese Politburo, or whoever’s left out there.
What of his likely rivals this November? Those of us who have lived in once-great decaying polities recognize the types. Jim Callaghan, prime minister at 10 Downing Street in the Seventies, told a friend of mine that he saw his job as managing Britain’s decline as gracefully as possible. The United Kingdom certainly declined on his watch, though not terribly gracefully. In last Monday’s debate, Newt Gingrich revived the line and accused by implication Mitt Romney of having no higher ambition than to “manage the decline.” Running on platitudinous generalities, Mitt certainly betrays little sense that he grasps the scale of the crisis. After a fiery assault by Rick Santorum on Romney’s support for an individual mandate in health care, Mitt sneered back at Rick that “it wasn’t worth getting angry over.” Which may be a foretaste of the energy he would bring to any attempted course correction in Washington.
Newt, meanwhile, has committed himself to a lunar colony by the end of his second term, and, while pandering to an audience on Florida’s “Space Coast,” added that, as soon as there were 13,000 American settlers on the moon, they could apply for statehood. Ah, the old frontier spirit: I hear Laura Ingalls Wilder is already working on Little House in the Crater.
Maybe Newt’s on to something. Except for the statehood part. One day, when America gets the old foreclosure notice in the mail, wouldn’t it be nice to close up the entire joint, put the keys in an envelope, slide it under the door of the First National Bank of Shanghai, and jet off on Newt’s Starship Government-Sponsored Enterprise?
There are times for dreaming big dreams, and there are times to wake up. This country will not be going to the moon, any more than the British or French do. Because, in decline, the horizons shrivel. The only thing that’s going to be on the moon is the debt ceiling. Before we can make any more giant leaps for mankind, we have to make one small, dull, prosaic, earthbound step here at home — and stop. Stop the massive expansion of micro-regulatory government, and then reverse it. Obama has vowed to press on. If Romney and Gingrich can’t get serious about it, he’ll get his way.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Had I been asked to deliver the State of the Union address, it would not have delayed your dinner plans:
“The State of our Union is broke, heading for bankrupt, and total collapse shortly thereafter. Thank you and goodnight! You’ve been a terrific crowd!”
I gather that Americans prefer something a little more upbeat, so one would not begrudge a speechwriter fluffing it up by holding out at least the possibility of some change of fortune, however remote. Instead, President Obama assured us at great length that nothing is going to change, not now, not never. Indeed the Union’s state — its unprecedented world-record brokeness — was not even mentioned. If, as I was, you happened to be stuck at Gate 27 at one of the many U.S. airports laboring under the misapprehension that pumping CNN at you all evening long somehow adds to the gaiety of flight delays, you would have watched an address that gave no indication its speaker was even aware that the parlous state of our finances is an existential threat not only to the nation but to global stability. The message was, oh, sure, unemployment’s still a little higher than it should be, and student loans are kind of expensive, and the housing market’s pretty flat, but it’s nothing that a little government “investment” in green jobs and rural broadband and retraining programs can’t fix. In other words, more of the unaffordable same.
The president certainly had facts and figures at his disposal. He boasted that his regulatory reforms “will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years.” Wow. Ten billion smackeroos! That’s some savings — and in a mere half a decade! Why, it’s equivalent to what the government of the United States borrows every 53 hours. So by midnight on Thursday Obama had already re-borrowed all those hard-fought savings from 2017. “In the last 22 months,” said the president, “businesses have created more than three million jobs.” Impressive. But 125,000 new foreign workers arrive every month (officially). So we would have to have created 2,750,000 jobs in that period just to stand still.
Fortunately, most of the items in Obama’s interminable speech will never happen, any more than the federally funded bicycling helmets or whatever fancies found their way onto Bill Clinton’s extravagant shopping lists in the Nineties. At the time, the excuse for Clinton’s mountain of legislative molehills was that all the great battles had been won, and, in the absence of a menacing Russian bear, what else did a president have to focus on except criminalizing toilet tanks over 1.6 gallons. President Obama does not enjoy the same dispensation, and any historians stumbling upon a surviving DVD while sifting through the ruins of our civilization will marvel at how his accumulation of delusional trivialities was apparently taken seriously by the assembled political class.
An honest leader would feel he owed it to the citizenry to impress upon them one central truth — that we can’t have any new programs because we’ve spent all the money. It’s gone. The cupboard is bare. What’s Obama’s plan to restock it? “Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary,” the president told us. “Asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.”
But why stop there? Americans need affordable health care and affordable master’s degrees in Climate Change and Social Justice Studies, so why not take everything that Warren Buffett’s got? After all, if you confiscated the total wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans it would come to $1.5 trillion.
Which is just a wee bit less than the federal shortfall in just one year of Obama-sized budgets. 2011 deficit: $1.56 trillion. But maybe for 2012 a whole new Forbes 400 of Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs will emigrate to the Hamptons and Malibu and keep the whole class-warfare thing going for a couple more years.
The so-called “Buffett Rule” is indicative not so much of “common sense” as of the ever widening gap between the Brobdingnagian problem and the Lilliputian solutions proposed by our leaders. Obama can sacrifice the virgin daughters of every American millionaire on the altar of government spending and the debt gods will barely notice so much as to give a perfunctory belch of acknowledgement. The president’s first term has added $5 trillion to the debt — a degree of catastrophe unique to us. In an Obama budget, the entire cost of the Greek government would barely rate a line-item. Debt-to-GDP and other comparative measures are less relevant than the hard-dollar numbers: It’s not just that American government has outspent America’s ability to fund it, but that it’s outspending the planet’s.
Who gets this? Not enough of us — which is exactly how Obama likes it. His only “big idea” — that it should be illegal (by national fiat) to drop out of school before your 18th birthday — betrays his core belief: that more is better, as long as it’s government-mandated, government-regulated, government-staffed — and funded by you, or Warren Buffett, or the Chinese Politburo, or whoever’s left out there.
What of his likely rivals this November? Those of us who have lived in once-great decaying polities recognize the types. Jim Callaghan, prime minister at 10 Downing Street in the Seventies, told a friend of mine that he saw his job as managing Britain’s decline as gracefully as possible. The United Kingdom certainly declined on his watch, though not terribly gracefully. In last Monday’s debate, Newt Gingrich revived the line and accused by implication Mitt Romney of having no higher ambition than to “manage the decline.” Running on platitudinous generalities, Mitt certainly betrays little sense that he grasps the scale of the crisis. After a fiery assault by Rick Santorum on Romney’s support for an individual mandate in health care, Mitt sneered back at Rick that “it wasn’t worth getting angry over.” Which may be a foretaste of the energy he would bring to any attempted course correction in Washington.
Newt, meanwhile, has committed himself to a lunar colony by the end of his second term, and, while pandering to an audience on Florida’s “Space Coast,” added that, as soon as there were 13,000 American settlers on the moon, they could apply for statehood. Ah, the old frontier spirit: I hear Laura Ingalls Wilder is already working on Little House in the Crater.
Maybe Newt’s on to something. Except for the statehood part. One day, when America gets the old foreclosure notice in the mail, wouldn’t it be nice to close up the entire joint, put the keys in an envelope, slide it under the door of the First National Bank of Shanghai, and jet off on Newt’s Starship Government-Sponsored Enterprise?
There are times for dreaming big dreams, and there are times to wake up. This country will not be going to the moon, any more than the British or French do. Because, in decline, the horizons shrivel. The only thing that’s going to be on the moon is the debt ceiling. Before we can make any more giant leaps for mankind, we have to make one small, dull, prosaic, earthbound step here at home — and stop. Stop the massive expansion of micro-regulatory government, and then reverse it. Obama has vowed to press on. If Romney and Gingrich can’t get serious about it, he’ll get his way.
The Myth of GOP Stinginess
By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Mitch McConnell wanted you to know he was livid on Thursday. The Senate was about to Greece the wheels for adding yet another trillion and change to President Obama’s yet-again tapped-out credit card. “More spending, more debt,” brayed the minority leader. “That’s what we’ve gotten from this administration.” Well, no, Senator, that’s what we’ve gotten from you.
Yes, I know, Obama is the one driving us off the cliff. But as McConnell and his fellow Republicans are well aware, he couldn’t have filled his tank without them — and they are the guys who got us halfway up the summit before handing the president the car keys. No one is falling for this week’s debt-increase “disapproval” charade, the stage for which was set by last summer’s sleight-of-hand, when Republicans agreed to borrow another $2.4 trillion. As if to prove that Obama has not cornered the market on cynicism, the GOP apparently feels the need to insult your intelligence while it helps our latter-day Robin Hood take from the unborn to give to the insatiable.
For the record, it was Republicans who nearly doubled the national debt during the Bush years — increasing it by almost $5 trillion. Some context: It had taken the nation over 200 years to accumulate roughly the same amount of debt rung up from 2001 through 2008 — a time during most of which, besides holding the White House, Republicans held the Senate (with McConnell in the leadership, first as whip and later as leader) and the House (with now-speaker John Boehner in the leadership, first as a committee chairman, then as leader).
Of course, for the Left, enough is never enough. So when Obama took over, he made the GOP look positively stingy — running up more debt in half the time, with perennial trillion-dollar deficits projected as far as the eye can see. With debt rising about $4 billion per day and each citizen’s share nearing $50,000, frightened voters opted to give Republicans a second chance, electing them in historic numbers in the 2010 midterms. This was not because they suddenly loved Republicans. They didn’t — and don’t. It was because the GOP was the only available alternative. And it was because leaders such as McConnell and Boehner, affecting a chastened pose, promised that if given the opportunity, they’d slam on the brakes.
Last summer, they had their big chance: Debt hit $14.3 trillion, the statutory ceiling — “ceiling” being Washingtonese for the point at which the money we’ve borrowed to pay the interest on prior loans for ever-expanding government spending no longer covers the tab because of the added interest on the new loans, necessitating more loans, resulting in more interest, triggering more — well, you get the idea. Now in control of the House and with near parity in the Senate, Republicans were in a position to stop the madness: to decline to authorize more borrowing and thus force spending cuts.
Instead, they did what they always do: They caved. They shriveled in the heat of Obamedia scaremongering about a purportedly imminent sovereign-debt default that would shred the full faith and credit of the United States. It was bogus. As McConnell and Boehner knew, the debt ceiling was scraped only because the total government spending they annually authorize now outstrips revenues by well over a trillion dollars. There was no credible threat of default because revenues remain vastly higher than what it costs to service the government’s bonds. The real threat — the threat too terrible to contemplate — was that our elected representatives might be forced to make hard, accountable decisions about what spending would need to be cut in order to live within their $14.3 trillion limit (i.e., a ceiling about three times as high as what Leviathan cost us in the mid-Nineties, when President Clinton pronounced the era of Big Government over).
So rather than confess that they had no stomach for the fight, McConnell and Boehner settled on two coats of camouflage. The first involved orchestrating the farce we’ve just witnessed: Republicans contrived a byzantine process that enabled them to raise the debt ceiling but dole the new trillions out in installments. As the installments came due, Republicans would pretend to vote against them . . . and hope you didn’t notice that we were talking about installments only because Congress had already voted in favor of the whole debt enchilada.
The second coat is just as disingenuous as the first. With an assist from compliant conservative pundits — who somehow always find a way to rationalize runaway Republican spending for a new entitlement here, a financial-sector bailout there, and a global sharia-democracy enterprise for good measure — GOP congressional leaders treated us to the dolorous refrain that they “control one-half of one-third of the government,” so what could you really expect them to do?
Does that pass your laugh test? Does the Supreme Court’s bloc of reliably progressive jurists ever come to the Left and say, “Gee, we’d love to help you out — maybe create constitutional rights to abortion, to protect murderers against the death penalty, to invent special rights for homosexuals, to curb free speech in election campaigns, to invite terrorist war prisoners to challenge their detention in civilian courts, all those things on your wish list. But as luck has it, we control only one-half of one-third of the government. It just wouldn’t be right to use our power that way”?
I don’t recall our commentariat’s complaining that President Bush controlled only one-third of the government when he decided — against deep congressional and public opposition — to order the surge. I seem to remember the argument being that without the surge, al-Qaeda would achieve a catastrophic triumph in Iraq, and that when the stakes for the nation are that high, elected leaders are obligated to use the power the Constitution gives them to advance the national interest — even if doing so is unpopular, brings down the wrath of the left-wing press, and risks an electoral rout.
The bunkum about controlling only a minority slice of the government is embarrassing. Divided government is not rule by a majority of government officials. Our Constitution’s separation of powers makes different components of government supreme in different areas. The judiciary gets to resolve legal controversies regardless of what the other two branches think. President Obama is convinced he needn’t even consult Congress, much less get authorization, before starting a war in Libya or sending troops to fight in Uganda. Either party in the Senate can reject a perfectly qualified judicial or cabinet nominee even though it is only one-half of one-third of the government.
The same Constitution that gives the judiciary, the commander-in-chief, and the Senate these powers directs that the House of Representatives — the body closest and most responsive to the public — is supreme when it comes to raising revenue. It prescribes, moreover, that money cannot be borrowed on the credit of the United States unless Congress authorizes it. President Obama can demagogue all he likes, but he can’t borrow a dime.
This has nothing to with holding a minority share of the pie; it has to do with holding the share that has primary power over the subject at hand. When it comes to the subjects of borrowing and spending the United States into oblivion, primary power belongs to the Republican-controlled House and to the Senate whose parliamentary procedures ensure that nothing can happen unless 40 Republicans give their assent.
Unbelievably, the United States now has a banana-republic-esque debt-to-GDP ratio of over 100 percent — we’ve borrowed more money than our gigantic economy produces annually. Obama has led us to the edge of the abyss, but Republicans had the wherewithal to stop him. The public’s desperation to stop him was its sole basis for electing them. Republicans know that, yet they couldn’t bring themselves to do the job — and they put a lot more energy into making believe than making the fight.
The debt is America’s existential crisis. For a dozen years, Republicans have been more its cause than its solution. In 2010, they were given a new lease on life based on their assurances that they had changed. But nothing has changed. So remind me what we need them for?
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Mitch McConnell wanted you to know he was livid on Thursday. The Senate was about to Greece the wheels for adding yet another trillion and change to President Obama’s yet-again tapped-out credit card. “More spending, more debt,” brayed the minority leader. “That’s what we’ve gotten from this administration.” Well, no, Senator, that’s what we’ve gotten from you.
Yes, I know, Obama is the one driving us off the cliff. But as McConnell and his fellow Republicans are well aware, he couldn’t have filled his tank without them — and they are the guys who got us halfway up the summit before handing the president the car keys. No one is falling for this week’s debt-increase “disapproval” charade, the stage for which was set by last summer’s sleight-of-hand, when Republicans agreed to borrow another $2.4 trillion. As if to prove that Obama has not cornered the market on cynicism, the GOP apparently feels the need to insult your intelligence while it helps our latter-day Robin Hood take from the unborn to give to the insatiable.
For the record, it was Republicans who nearly doubled the national debt during the Bush years — increasing it by almost $5 trillion. Some context: It had taken the nation over 200 years to accumulate roughly the same amount of debt rung up from 2001 through 2008 — a time during most of which, besides holding the White House, Republicans held the Senate (with McConnell in the leadership, first as whip and later as leader) and the House (with now-speaker John Boehner in the leadership, first as a committee chairman, then as leader).
Of course, for the Left, enough is never enough. So when Obama took over, he made the GOP look positively stingy — running up more debt in half the time, with perennial trillion-dollar deficits projected as far as the eye can see. With debt rising about $4 billion per day and each citizen’s share nearing $50,000, frightened voters opted to give Republicans a second chance, electing them in historic numbers in the 2010 midterms. This was not because they suddenly loved Republicans. They didn’t — and don’t. It was because the GOP was the only available alternative. And it was because leaders such as McConnell and Boehner, affecting a chastened pose, promised that if given the opportunity, they’d slam on the brakes.
Last summer, they had their big chance: Debt hit $14.3 trillion, the statutory ceiling — “ceiling” being Washingtonese for the point at which the money we’ve borrowed to pay the interest on prior loans for ever-expanding government spending no longer covers the tab because of the added interest on the new loans, necessitating more loans, resulting in more interest, triggering more — well, you get the idea. Now in control of the House and with near parity in the Senate, Republicans were in a position to stop the madness: to decline to authorize more borrowing and thus force spending cuts.
Instead, they did what they always do: They caved. They shriveled in the heat of Obamedia scaremongering about a purportedly imminent sovereign-debt default that would shred the full faith and credit of the United States. It was bogus. As McConnell and Boehner knew, the debt ceiling was scraped only because the total government spending they annually authorize now outstrips revenues by well over a trillion dollars. There was no credible threat of default because revenues remain vastly higher than what it costs to service the government’s bonds. The real threat — the threat too terrible to contemplate — was that our elected representatives might be forced to make hard, accountable decisions about what spending would need to be cut in order to live within their $14.3 trillion limit (i.e., a ceiling about three times as high as what Leviathan cost us in the mid-Nineties, when President Clinton pronounced the era of Big Government over).
So rather than confess that they had no stomach for the fight, McConnell and Boehner settled on two coats of camouflage. The first involved orchestrating the farce we’ve just witnessed: Republicans contrived a byzantine process that enabled them to raise the debt ceiling but dole the new trillions out in installments. As the installments came due, Republicans would pretend to vote against them . . . and hope you didn’t notice that we were talking about installments only because Congress had already voted in favor of the whole debt enchilada.
The second coat is just as disingenuous as the first. With an assist from compliant conservative pundits — who somehow always find a way to rationalize runaway Republican spending for a new entitlement here, a financial-sector bailout there, and a global sharia-democracy enterprise for good measure — GOP congressional leaders treated us to the dolorous refrain that they “control one-half of one-third of the government,” so what could you really expect them to do?
Does that pass your laugh test? Does the Supreme Court’s bloc of reliably progressive jurists ever come to the Left and say, “Gee, we’d love to help you out — maybe create constitutional rights to abortion, to protect murderers against the death penalty, to invent special rights for homosexuals, to curb free speech in election campaigns, to invite terrorist war prisoners to challenge their detention in civilian courts, all those things on your wish list. But as luck has it, we control only one-half of one-third of the government. It just wouldn’t be right to use our power that way”?
I don’t recall our commentariat’s complaining that President Bush controlled only one-third of the government when he decided — against deep congressional and public opposition — to order the surge. I seem to remember the argument being that without the surge, al-Qaeda would achieve a catastrophic triumph in Iraq, and that when the stakes for the nation are that high, elected leaders are obligated to use the power the Constitution gives them to advance the national interest — even if doing so is unpopular, brings down the wrath of the left-wing press, and risks an electoral rout.
The bunkum about controlling only a minority slice of the government is embarrassing. Divided government is not rule by a majority of government officials. Our Constitution’s separation of powers makes different components of government supreme in different areas. The judiciary gets to resolve legal controversies regardless of what the other two branches think. President Obama is convinced he needn’t even consult Congress, much less get authorization, before starting a war in Libya or sending troops to fight in Uganda. Either party in the Senate can reject a perfectly qualified judicial or cabinet nominee even though it is only one-half of one-third of the government.
The same Constitution that gives the judiciary, the commander-in-chief, and the Senate these powers directs that the House of Representatives — the body closest and most responsive to the public — is supreme when it comes to raising revenue. It prescribes, moreover, that money cannot be borrowed on the credit of the United States unless Congress authorizes it. President Obama can demagogue all he likes, but he can’t borrow a dime.
This has nothing to with holding a minority share of the pie; it has to do with holding the share that has primary power over the subject at hand. When it comes to the subjects of borrowing and spending the United States into oblivion, primary power belongs to the Republican-controlled House and to the Senate whose parliamentary procedures ensure that nothing can happen unless 40 Republicans give their assent.
Unbelievably, the United States now has a banana-republic-esque debt-to-GDP ratio of over 100 percent — we’ve borrowed more money than our gigantic economy produces annually. Obama has led us to the edge of the abyss, but Republicans had the wherewithal to stop him. The public’s desperation to stop him was its sole basis for electing them. Republicans know that, yet they couldn’t bring themselves to do the job — and they put a lot more energy into making believe than making the fight.
The debt is America’s existential crisis. For a dozen years, Republicans have been more its cause than its solution. In 2010, they were given a new lease on life based on their assurances that they had changed. But nothing has changed. So remind me what we need them for?
Pax Americana
By Charles Payne
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Father Father Father (continue to) Help Us
People killin’, people dyin’
Children hurt and you hear them cryin’
Can you practice what you preach
And would you turn the other cheek
Father, Father, Father help us
Send some guidance from above
‘Cause people got me, got me questionin’
Where is the love (Love)
-Black Eyed Peas
Earlier this week, I began an interview on Fox Business by asking the guest if the market had entered into some kind of Pax Romana period. It wasn’t a planned question; it just popped into my head since I knew the guest was bullish on the market. Yesterday another guest described a backdrop for the Fed that wasn’t deflationary or inflation which gives them room to risk zero percent interest rates for the next three years. While the stock market has been anything but peaceful for the past decade and major economies face serious treats, the world itself may be entering a modern version of Roman Peace.
It is certainly counterintuitive in light of American’s two wars, the one we sponsored in Libya, the Arab Spring and the general notion the planet is spinning out of control.
Believe it or not, this might be the most peaceful period in the history of the planet. It’s all laid out in the latest from Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist, and author of “The Blank Slate,” that shook up generally accepted norms about human behavior. In “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” Pinker uses mounds of statistical evidence to first prove violence is down significantly from earlier ages but also reasons for this miraculous turn of events. (I haven’t read the book but plan to do so very soon, but I wonder if it clashes with the premise of “Blank Slate.”)
Each night we are greeted with horrific news of senseless crime, more often than not within our own community, but when that’s not available, the media always has an atrocity from somewhere on the planet. Songs of violence and the quest for peace and justice are always on the airwaves with megahits in the past from the Eagles, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Jackson Browne, Peter Paul and Mary, U2, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, John Meyers, Jimmy Hendrix, Michael Jackson and Bob Marley- to name a few. Most of the time the lyrics, like those from the Black Eyed Peas “Where is the love,” point to a world self-destructing in senseless and hopeless violence.
The answer to that question might be that love is all around us…or at least as much love as there has ever been before.
That Stats and the Reason
People killed in battle
Before countries organized 500 per 100,000
19th century France 70 per 100,000
20th century (with two world wars) 60 per 100,000
Now 3/10 out of every 100,000
Genocide deaths per world population were 1,400 times higher in 1942 then 2008
In US wives killing husbands 0.2 per 100,000 now from 1.2 per 100,000 1976
In US husbands killing wives 0.8 per 100,000 now from 1.4 per 100,000 1976
The main reason for this amazing peace in the world even as media and entertainment paint a picture of a world covered in blood, according to Steven Pinker, smarter people. Apparently the average teenager is smarter with each generation. Pinker points to IQ test which are adjusted to keep the average at 100 so teenagers that now score 100 would have hit 118 in 1950 and 130 in 1910. (I’m not sure I believe this part per se, but I think my son has more knowledge than I had although not sure it means he’s smarter.)
"As we get smarter, we try to think up better ways of getting everyone to turn their swords into plowshares at the same time." Steven Pinker
The world being less violent does make a lot of sense and not only dovetails with the idea I continue to push that never has the entire planet been this upwardly mobile but provides the perfect backdrop for that to happen. It’s difficult to make money and fight civil wars at the same time. Take Angola which suffered under a brutal civil war that lasted from 1975 to 2002 and took 500,000 lives while displacing 1,500,000 additional citizens. Now Luanda, the capital of Angola, ranks as the most expensive for expats to live. Called the Dubai of Africa, a two bedroom luxury apartment rents for $7,000, substantially more than $4,300 in New York, $3,300 Shanghai, $2,456 Rome, and $1,800 Buenos Aires.
Sources for Steven Pinker background http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/22/world-less-violent-stats_n_1026723.html?view=print&comm_ref=false and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate
To me the formula seems to be Smarts + Peace = Prosperity.
American Peace
The period of peace in Rome described by Gibbons is known as Pax Romana and has been the dream of many since then. Beginning in 27BC with the rule of Augustus to 180AD, and the end of the rule of Marcus Aurelius, that 207 period of peace was sparked by the end of civil wars, the spread of the rule of law and strong military protection (but fewer wars). Rome learned to be prosperous with less violent plunder but rather domestic self sufficiency. It is said Augustus convinced his citizens to avoid risky wars through skillful propaganda. On the other end of this period was Marcus Aurelius, author of “Meditations.” His work is timeless and considered to this day to be one of the greatest works of literature ever.
So much of his ideas need to be read by leaders and would-be leaders in this nation today including:
From my governor, to be neither of the green nor of the blue party as the games in the Circus, nor a partisan either of the Parmularius or the Scutarius at the gladiators’ fights; from him too I learned endurance of labor, and to want little, and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with other people’s affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander.
From Fronto I learned to observe what envy, and duplicity, and hypocrisy are in a tyrant, and that generally those among us who are called Patricians are rather deficient in paternal affection.
Wow! It is amazing how timely his observations and advise to the world was then and now. For more of this timely wisdom go to and send your local lawmaker to:
http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.1.one.html.
End of Peace and the decline of Rome began through a combination of class warfare, the invasion of Huns and terrible leadership. So in this world of nuclear bombs, a billion handguns and amazing animosity, it would seem the peace is tenuous at best. Of course according to the Black Eyed Peas this peace doesn’t exist in the first place. For our nation where crime has been declining for years it’s truly amazing and belies the notion that gun ownership kills people or increased poverty would unleash a wave of lawlessness.
Yet with our difficult financial circumstance and mean-spirited leadership we could tumble out of this otherwise Pax Americana. I hope Pinker is right and we are too smart for that, but there is another formula at work too.
Less Prosperity + Harsh Propaganda of Blame = Something Less than Peace.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Father Father Father (continue to) Help Us
People killin’, people dyin’
Children hurt and you hear them cryin’
Can you practice what you preach
And would you turn the other cheek
Father, Father, Father help us
Send some guidance from above
‘Cause people got me, got me questionin’
Where is the love (Love)
-Black Eyed Peas
Earlier this week, I began an interview on Fox Business by asking the guest if the market had entered into some kind of Pax Romana period. It wasn’t a planned question; it just popped into my head since I knew the guest was bullish on the market. Yesterday another guest described a backdrop for the Fed that wasn’t deflationary or inflation which gives them room to risk zero percent interest rates for the next three years. While the stock market has been anything but peaceful for the past decade and major economies face serious treats, the world itself may be entering a modern version of Roman Peace.
It is certainly counterintuitive in light of American’s two wars, the one we sponsored in Libya, the Arab Spring and the general notion the planet is spinning out of control.
Believe it or not, this might be the most peaceful period in the history of the planet. It’s all laid out in the latest from Steven Pinker, Harvard psychologist, and author of “The Blank Slate,” that shook up generally accepted norms about human behavior. In “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,” Pinker uses mounds of statistical evidence to first prove violence is down significantly from earlier ages but also reasons for this miraculous turn of events. (I haven’t read the book but plan to do so very soon, but I wonder if it clashes with the premise of “Blank Slate.”)
Each night we are greeted with horrific news of senseless crime, more often than not within our own community, but when that’s not available, the media always has an atrocity from somewhere on the planet. Songs of violence and the quest for peace and justice are always on the airwaves with megahits in the past from the Eagles, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Jackson Browne, Peter Paul and Mary, U2, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, John Meyers, Jimmy Hendrix, Michael Jackson and Bob Marley- to name a few. Most of the time the lyrics, like those from the Black Eyed Peas “Where is the love,” point to a world self-destructing in senseless and hopeless violence.
The answer to that question might be that love is all around us…or at least as much love as there has ever been before.
That Stats and the Reason
People killed in battle
Before countries organized 500 per 100,000
19th century France 70 per 100,000
20th century (with two world wars) 60 per 100,000
Now 3/10 out of every 100,000
Genocide deaths per world population were 1,400 times higher in 1942 then 2008
In US wives killing husbands 0.2 per 100,000 now from 1.2 per 100,000 1976
In US husbands killing wives 0.8 per 100,000 now from 1.4 per 100,000 1976
The main reason for this amazing peace in the world even as media and entertainment paint a picture of a world covered in blood, according to Steven Pinker, smarter people. Apparently the average teenager is smarter with each generation. Pinker points to IQ test which are adjusted to keep the average at 100 so teenagers that now score 100 would have hit 118 in 1950 and 130 in 1910. (I’m not sure I believe this part per se, but I think my son has more knowledge than I had although not sure it means he’s smarter.)
"As we get smarter, we try to think up better ways of getting everyone to turn their swords into plowshares at the same time." Steven Pinker
The world being less violent does make a lot of sense and not only dovetails with the idea I continue to push that never has the entire planet been this upwardly mobile but provides the perfect backdrop for that to happen. It’s difficult to make money and fight civil wars at the same time. Take Angola which suffered under a brutal civil war that lasted from 1975 to 2002 and took 500,000 lives while displacing 1,500,000 additional citizens. Now Luanda, the capital of Angola, ranks as the most expensive for expats to live. Called the Dubai of Africa, a two bedroom luxury apartment rents for $7,000, substantially more than $4,300 in New York, $3,300 Shanghai, $2,456 Rome, and $1,800 Buenos Aires.
Sources for Steven Pinker background http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/22/world-less-violent-stats_n_1026723.html?view=print&comm_ref=false and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate
To me the formula seems to be Smarts + Peace = Prosperity.
American Peace
The period of peace in Rome described by Gibbons is known as Pax Romana and has been the dream of many since then. Beginning in 27BC with the rule of Augustus to 180AD, and the end of the rule of Marcus Aurelius, that 207 period of peace was sparked by the end of civil wars, the spread of the rule of law and strong military protection (but fewer wars). Rome learned to be prosperous with less violent plunder but rather domestic self sufficiency. It is said Augustus convinced his citizens to avoid risky wars through skillful propaganda. On the other end of this period was Marcus Aurelius, author of “Meditations.” His work is timeless and considered to this day to be one of the greatest works of literature ever.
So much of his ideas need to be read by leaders and would-be leaders in this nation today including:
From my governor, to be neither of the green nor of the blue party as the games in the Circus, nor a partisan either of the Parmularius or the Scutarius at the gladiators’ fights; from him too I learned endurance of labor, and to want little, and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with other people’s affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander.
From Fronto I learned to observe what envy, and duplicity, and hypocrisy are in a tyrant, and that generally those among us who are called Patricians are rather deficient in paternal affection.
Wow! It is amazing how timely his observations and advise to the world was then and now. For more of this timely wisdom go to and send your local lawmaker to:
http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.1.one.html.
End of Peace and the decline of Rome began through a combination of class warfare, the invasion of Huns and terrible leadership. So in this world of nuclear bombs, a billion handguns and amazing animosity, it would seem the peace is tenuous at best. Of course according to the Black Eyed Peas this peace doesn’t exist in the first place. For our nation where crime has been declining for years it’s truly amazing and belies the notion that gun ownership kills people or increased poverty would unleash a wave of lawlessness.
Yet with our difficult financial circumstance and mean-spirited leadership we could tumble out of this otherwise Pax Americana. I hope Pinker is right and we are too smart for that, but there is another formula at work too.
Less Prosperity + Harsh Propaganda of Blame = Something Less than Peace.
Economists Finally Get One Thing Right for 2011: Obama a Failure
By John Ransom
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Not that we needed any reminding from economists that Obama’s economic plan has sucked wind since inception, but a new survey released by the AP says that a large majority of economists polled rate Obama’s economic performance fair-to-poor.
So, the folks who told us at the beginning of the year to expect 3 percent GDP growth have bailed on Obama now that he’s screwed up their magical predictions for the year.
There must be year-end bonuses involved for them.
I’m not saying that all economists are Obamanauts, I’m just saying that of the ones polled by the AP, it’s likely none of them saw a stimulus program or a TARP program that they didn’t like.
In a story in the Washington Post, the AP reports that “Half of the 36 economists who responded to the Dec. 14-20 AP survey rated Obama’s economic policies ‘fair.’ And 13 called them ‘poor.’ Just five of the economists gave the president “good” marks. None rated him as ‘excellent.’”
I don’t know how many surveys the AP sent out, but I’m guessing that a large number of economists politely voted “not present.”
That means that 86 percent of economists think Obama’s done little to help the economy.
Indeed some of the economists think that Obama hasn’t wasted, er, borrowed, er, saved/created- or something- enough of our tax money on programs that don’t work.
And I was wondering what an economics degree was worth just the other day.
Now I know the answer: A lot less than I thought.
“They’ve generally tried to take the right kinds of measures but have often failed to lead with enough vigor to overcome political obstacles,” William Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services told the AP.
Thank God they have failed. That’s failure I can believe in. Hillary was right. We can’t afford all the Democrats bright ideas. And according to polls and mid-term elections, the chief political failure has been in hoodwinking enough voters to go along with the economists.
News flash to Cheney: You’re wrong about the vigor thing, and also wrong about the “right kind of measures” thing.
If one thing is true of Obama’s administration it’s that they have generally marched in the wrong direction with a kind of arrogance that should be reserved only for those who are occasionally right about something- anything- economic.
This is the monster that was created when Obama got the presidency and a Nobel Prize for frothy, high calorie rhetoric like “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” “The Audacity of Hope,” and other wordy cakes and pastries with no nutritional value.
If Obama made as many easy economic decisions as he has vacations this year, we’d be seeing decent economic growth. In fact, if we could get Obama to take more vacations and not make ANY decisions, it’s likely real unemployment-U6- wouldn’t be at 16 percent. Despite economists predictions, expect unemployment to climb in the second half of 2012.
TARP hasn’t worked out, the home mortgage modification program hasn’t worked out; Frank-Dodd isn’t protecting us from systemic banking failure, rather it’s only systematized systemic banking failure; Obama’s green programs have been called by the Washington Post- yes, the Post- a program designed for political payoffs, not jobs; industry has been under a deluge of regulatory actions that amounts to the rape of the US economy; kleptocrats, who can not keep their hands off what others own, have been put in charge of everything under Obama and called Czars, like it’s a good thing.
We’ve gotten to the point where a small minority of people can march in the street calling for nationalization of everything, forgiveness of all debts and a sizable group of Americans, including noted economists, think that that is normal.
We fought a world war and a cold war, for this?
Most amazing of all is the high marks that the economists give Mitt Romney because he has business experience.
“Romney’s a technocrat,” economist Allen Sinai told the AP, like the term technocrat is a good thing. “He’s not an ideologue. He has a history in the real world of business.”
Yep. We heard the same thing in Europe.
Memo to economists: It’s not business failures that got us into this mess, political failures did.
Economists, bankers, technocrats and messiahs won’t save us here.
Only voters and politicians can.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Not that we needed any reminding from economists that Obama’s economic plan has sucked wind since inception, but a new survey released by the AP says that a large majority of economists polled rate Obama’s economic performance fair-to-poor.
So, the folks who told us at the beginning of the year to expect 3 percent GDP growth have bailed on Obama now that he’s screwed up their magical predictions for the year.
There must be year-end bonuses involved for them.
I’m not saying that all economists are Obamanauts, I’m just saying that of the ones polled by the AP, it’s likely none of them saw a stimulus program or a TARP program that they didn’t like.
In a story in the Washington Post, the AP reports that “Half of the 36 economists who responded to the Dec. 14-20 AP survey rated Obama’s economic policies ‘fair.’ And 13 called them ‘poor.’ Just five of the economists gave the president “good” marks. None rated him as ‘excellent.’”
I don’t know how many surveys the AP sent out, but I’m guessing that a large number of economists politely voted “not present.”
That means that 86 percent of economists think Obama’s done little to help the economy.
Indeed some of the economists think that Obama hasn’t wasted, er, borrowed, er, saved/created- or something- enough of our tax money on programs that don’t work.
And I was wondering what an economics degree was worth just the other day.
Now I know the answer: A lot less than I thought.
“They’ve generally tried to take the right kinds of measures but have often failed to lead with enough vigor to overcome political obstacles,” William Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock Financial Services told the AP.
Thank God they have failed. That’s failure I can believe in. Hillary was right. We can’t afford all the Democrats bright ideas. And according to polls and mid-term elections, the chief political failure has been in hoodwinking enough voters to go along with the economists.
News flash to Cheney: You’re wrong about the vigor thing, and also wrong about the “right kind of measures” thing.
If one thing is true of Obama’s administration it’s that they have generally marched in the wrong direction with a kind of arrogance that should be reserved only for those who are occasionally right about something- anything- economic.
This is the monster that was created when Obama got the presidency and a Nobel Prize for frothy, high calorie rhetoric like “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” “The Audacity of Hope,” and other wordy cakes and pastries with no nutritional value.
If Obama made as many easy economic decisions as he has vacations this year, we’d be seeing decent economic growth. In fact, if we could get Obama to take more vacations and not make ANY decisions, it’s likely real unemployment-U6- wouldn’t be at 16 percent. Despite economists predictions, expect unemployment to climb in the second half of 2012.
TARP hasn’t worked out, the home mortgage modification program hasn’t worked out; Frank-Dodd isn’t protecting us from systemic banking failure, rather it’s only systematized systemic banking failure; Obama’s green programs have been called by the Washington Post- yes, the Post- a program designed for political payoffs, not jobs; industry has been under a deluge of regulatory actions that amounts to the rape of the US economy; kleptocrats, who can not keep their hands off what others own, have been put in charge of everything under Obama and called Czars, like it’s a good thing.
We’ve gotten to the point where a small minority of people can march in the street calling for nationalization of everything, forgiveness of all debts and a sizable group of Americans, including noted economists, think that that is normal.
We fought a world war and a cold war, for this?
Most amazing of all is the high marks that the economists give Mitt Romney because he has business experience.
“Romney’s a technocrat,” economist Allen Sinai told the AP, like the term technocrat is a good thing. “He’s not an ideologue. He has a history in the real world of business.”
Yep. We heard the same thing in Europe.
Memo to economists: It’s not business failures that got us into this mess, political failures did.
Economists, bankers, technocrats and messiahs won’t save us here.
Only voters and politicians can.
Friday, January 27, 2012
State of the Union Flop
By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Once upon a time, small ball was not Barack Obama’s game. Tuesday, it was the essence of his State of the Union address. The visionary of 2008 — purveyor of hope and change, healer of the earth, tamer of the rising seas — offered an hour of little things: tax-code tweaks to encourage this or that kind of behavior (manufacturing being the flavor of the day), little watchdog agencies to round up Wall Street miscreants and Chinese DVD pirates, even a presidential demand “that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.” Under penalty of what? Jail? The self-proclaimed transformer of America is now playing truant officer?
It sounded like the Clinton years with their presidentially proclaimed initiatives on midnight basketball and school uniforms. These are the marks of a shrunken presidency, thoroughly flummoxed by high unemployment, economic stagnation, crushing debt — and a glaring absence of ideas.
Of course, this being Obama, there was a reach for grandeur. Hope and change are long gone. It’s now equality and fairness.
That certainly is a large idea. Lenin and Mao went pretty far with it. As did Clement Attlee and his social-democratic counterparts in post-war Europe. Where does Obama take it? Back to the decade-old Democratic obsession with the Bush tax cuts, the crusade for a tax hike of all of 4.6 points for 2 percent of households — ten years of which wouldn’t cover the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus alone.
Which is why Obama introduced a shiny new twist — the Buffett Rule, a minimum 30 percent rate for millionaires. Sounds novel. But it’s a tired replay of the alternative minimum tax, originally created in 1969 to bring to heel all of 155 underpaying fat cats. Following the fate of other such do-goodism, the AMT then metastasized into a $40 billion monster that today entraps millions of middle-class taxpayers.
There isn’t even a pretense that the Buffett Rule will do anything for economic growth or job creation (other than provide lucrative work for the sharp tax lawyers who will be gaming the new system for the very same rich). Which should not surprise. Back in 2008, Obama was asked if he would still support raising the capital-gains-tax rate (the intended effect of the Buffett Rule) if this would decrease government revenues.
Obama said yes. In the name of fairness.
This is redistribution for its own sake — the cost be damned. It took Indiana governor Mitch Daniels about 30 seconds of his State of the Union rebuttal to demolish that idea. To get the rich to contribute more, explained Daniels, you don’t raise tax rates. This ultimately retards economic growth for all. You (a) eliminate loopholes from which the rich benefit disproportionately (tax reform) and (b) means-test entitlements so that the benefits go to those most in need.
Tax reform and entitlement reform are the really big ideas. The first produces social equity plus economic efficiency; the second produces social equity plus debt reduction. And yet these are precisely what Obama has for three years steadfastly refused to address. He prefers the easy demagoguery of “tax the rich.”
After all, what’s he got? Can’t run on his record. Barely even mentioned Obamacare or the stimulus, his major legislative achievements, on Tuesday night. Too unpopular. His platform is fairness, wrapped around a plethora of little things, one mini-industrial policy after another — the conceit nicely encapsulated by his proclamation that “I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or to Germany.” As if he can command these industries into existence. As if Washington funding a thousand Solyndras will make solar economically viable.
Soviet central planners mandated quotas for steel production, regardless of demand. Obama’s industrial policy is a bit more subtle. Tax breaks for manufacturing — but double tax breaks for high-tech manufacturing, which for some reason is considered more virtuous, despite the fact that high tech is less likely to create blue-collar jobs. Its main job creation will be for legions of lawyers and linguists testifying before some new adjudicating bureaucracy that the Acme Umbrella Factory meets their exquisitely drawn criteria for “high tech.”
What Obama offered the nation Tuesday night was a pudding without a theme: a jumble of disconnected initiatives, a gaggle of intrusive new agencies, and a whole new generation of loopholes to further corrupt a tax code that screams out for reform.
If the Republicans can’t beat that in November, they should try another line of work.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Once upon a time, small ball was not Barack Obama’s game. Tuesday, it was the essence of his State of the Union address. The visionary of 2008 — purveyor of hope and change, healer of the earth, tamer of the rising seas — offered an hour of little things: tax-code tweaks to encourage this or that kind of behavior (manufacturing being the flavor of the day), little watchdog agencies to round up Wall Street miscreants and Chinese DVD pirates, even a presidential demand “that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18.” Under penalty of what? Jail? The self-proclaimed transformer of America is now playing truant officer?
It sounded like the Clinton years with their presidentially proclaimed initiatives on midnight basketball and school uniforms. These are the marks of a shrunken presidency, thoroughly flummoxed by high unemployment, economic stagnation, crushing debt — and a glaring absence of ideas.
Of course, this being Obama, there was a reach for grandeur. Hope and change are long gone. It’s now equality and fairness.
That certainly is a large idea. Lenin and Mao went pretty far with it. As did Clement Attlee and his social-democratic counterparts in post-war Europe. Where does Obama take it? Back to the decade-old Democratic obsession with the Bush tax cuts, the crusade for a tax hike of all of 4.6 points for 2 percent of households — ten years of which wouldn’t cover the cost of Obama’s 2009 stimulus alone.
Which is why Obama introduced a shiny new twist — the Buffett Rule, a minimum 30 percent rate for millionaires. Sounds novel. But it’s a tired replay of the alternative minimum tax, originally created in 1969 to bring to heel all of 155 underpaying fat cats. Following the fate of other such do-goodism, the AMT then metastasized into a $40 billion monster that today entraps millions of middle-class taxpayers.
There isn’t even a pretense that the Buffett Rule will do anything for economic growth or job creation (other than provide lucrative work for the sharp tax lawyers who will be gaming the new system for the very same rich). Which should not surprise. Back in 2008, Obama was asked if he would still support raising the capital-gains-tax rate (the intended effect of the Buffett Rule) if this would decrease government revenues.
Obama said yes. In the name of fairness.
This is redistribution for its own sake — the cost be damned. It took Indiana governor Mitch Daniels about 30 seconds of his State of the Union rebuttal to demolish that idea. To get the rich to contribute more, explained Daniels, you don’t raise tax rates. This ultimately retards economic growth for all. You (a) eliminate loopholes from which the rich benefit disproportionately (tax reform) and (b) means-test entitlements so that the benefits go to those most in need.
Tax reform and entitlement reform are the really big ideas. The first produces social equity plus economic efficiency; the second produces social equity plus debt reduction. And yet these are precisely what Obama has for three years steadfastly refused to address. He prefers the easy demagoguery of “tax the rich.”
After all, what’s he got? Can’t run on his record. Barely even mentioned Obamacare or the stimulus, his major legislative achievements, on Tuesday night. Too unpopular. His platform is fairness, wrapped around a plethora of little things, one mini-industrial policy after another — the conceit nicely encapsulated by his proclamation that “I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China or to Germany.” As if he can command these industries into existence. As if Washington funding a thousand Solyndras will make solar economically viable.
Soviet central planners mandated quotas for steel production, regardless of demand. Obama’s industrial policy is a bit more subtle. Tax breaks for manufacturing — but double tax breaks for high-tech manufacturing, which for some reason is considered more virtuous, despite the fact that high tech is less likely to create blue-collar jobs. Its main job creation will be for legions of lawyers and linguists testifying before some new adjudicating bureaucracy that the Acme Umbrella Factory meets their exquisitely drawn criteria for “high tech.”
What Obama offered the nation Tuesday night was a pudding without a theme: a jumble of disconnected initiatives, a gaggle of intrusive new agencies, and a whole new generation of loopholes to further corrupt a tax code that screams out for reform.
If the Republicans can’t beat that in November, they should try another line of work.
Obama's Vision for a Spartan America
By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, January 27, 2012
President Obama's State of the Union address was disgusting.
The president began with a moving tribute to the armed forces and their accomplishments. But as he has done many times now, he celebrated martial virtues not to rally support for the military, but to cover himself in glory -- he killed Osama bin Laden! -- and to convince the American people that they should fall in line and march in lockstep.
He said of the military: "At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They're not consumed with personal ambition. They don't obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach."
That is disgusting.
What Obama is saying, quite plainly, is that America would be better off if it wasn't America any longer. He's making the case not for American exceptionalism, but Spartan exceptionalism.
It's far worse than anything George W. Bush, the supposed warmonger, ever said. Bush, the alleged fascist, didn't want to militarize our free country; he tried to use our military to make militarized countries free.
Indeed, Obama is upending the very point of a military in a free society. We have a military to keep our society free. We do not have a military to teach us the best way to give up our freedom. Our warriors surrender their liberties and risk their lives to protect ours. The promise of American life for Obama is that if we all try our best and work our hardest, we can be like a military unit striving for a single goal. I've seen pictures of that from North Korea. No thank you, Mr. President.
Of course, Obama's militaristic fantasizing isn't new. Ever since William James coined the phrase "the moral equivalent of war," liberalism has been obsessed with finding ways to mobilize civilian life with the efficiency and conformity of military life. "Martial virtues," James wrote, "must be the enduring cement" of American society: "intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built." His disciple, liberal philosopher John Dewey, hoped for a social order that would force Americans to lay aside "our good-natured individualism and march in step."
This is why Obama's administration believes a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. This is why Obama has been prattling about "Sputnik moments" and sighing over his envy of China and its rulers. This is why his spinners endeavored to translate the death of bin Laden as some sort of vindication of his domestic agenda: because he cannot lead a free people where he thinks they should go.
At the end of his address, Obama once again cast the slain bin Laden as the Vercingetorix to his Caesar. (Vercingetorix was the defeated Gaulic chieftain whom Caesar triumphantly paraded through Rome.) "All that mattered that day was the mission. No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves," Obama rhapsodized.
The warriors on the ground "only succeeded ... because every single member of that unit did their job. ... More than that, the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other -- because you can't charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there's somebody behind you, watching your back. So it is with America."
"This nation is great because we worked as a team. This nation is great because we get each other's backs."
No. Wrong. It is not so with America. This nation isn't great because we work as a team with the president as our captain. America is great because America is free. It is great not because we put our self-interest aside, but because we have the right to pursue happiness.
I don't blame the president for being exhausted with the mess and bother of democracy and politics, since he has proved so inadequate at coping with the demands of both. Nor do I think he truly seeks to impose martial virtues on America. But he does desperately want his opponents to shut up and march in place. And he seems to think this bilge will convince them to do so.
What I can't forgive, however, is the way he tries to pass off his ideal of an America where everyone marches as one as a better America. It wouldn't be America at all.
Friday, January 27, 2012
President Obama's State of the Union address was disgusting.
The president began with a moving tribute to the armed forces and their accomplishments. But as he has done many times now, he celebrated martial virtues not to rally support for the military, but to cover himself in glory -- he killed Osama bin Laden! -- and to convince the American people that they should fall in line and march in lockstep.
He said of the military: "At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They're not consumed with personal ambition. They don't obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together. Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach."
That is disgusting.
What Obama is saying, quite plainly, is that America would be better off if it wasn't America any longer. He's making the case not for American exceptionalism, but Spartan exceptionalism.
It's far worse than anything George W. Bush, the supposed warmonger, ever said. Bush, the alleged fascist, didn't want to militarize our free country; he tried to use our military to make militarized countries free.
Indeed, Obama is upending the very point of a military in a free society. We have a military to keep our society free. We do not have a military to teach us the best way to give up our freedom. Our warriors surrender their liberties and risk their lives to protect ours. The promise of American life for Obama is that if we all try our best and work our hardest, we can be like a military unit striving for a single goal. I've seen pictures of that from North Korea. No thank you, Mr. President.
Of course, Obama's militaristic fantasizing isn't new. Ever since William James coined the phrase "the moral equivalent of war," liberalism has been obsessed with finding ways to mobilize civilian life with the efficiency and conformity of military life. "Martial virtues," James wrote, "must be the enduring cement" of American society: "intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command must still remain the rock upon which states are built." His disciple, liberal philosopher John Dewey, hoped for a social order that would force Americans to lay aside "our good-natured individualism and march in step."
This is why Obama's administration believes a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. This is why Obama has been prattling about "Sputnik moments" and sighing over his envy of China and its rulers. This is why his spinners endeavored to translate the death of bin Laden as some sort of vindication of his domestic agenda: because he cannot lead a free people where he thinks they should go.
At the end of his address, Obama once again cast the slain bin Laden as the Vercingetorix to his Caesar. (Vercingetorix was the defeated Gaulic chieftain whom Caesar triumphantly paraded through Rome.) "All that mattered that day was the mission. No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves," Obama rhapsodized.
The warriors on the ground "only succeeded ... because every single member of that unit did their job. ... More than that, the mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other -- because you can't charge up those stairs, into darkness and danger, unless you know that there's somebody behind you, watching your back. So it is with America."
"This nation is great because we worked as a team. This nation is great because we get each other's backs."
No. Wrong. It is not so with America. This nation isn't great because we work as a team with the president as our captain. America is great because America is free. It is great not because we put our self-interest aside, but because we have the right to pursue happiness.
I don't blame the president for being exhausted with the mess and bother of democracy and politics, since he has proved so inadequate at coping with the demands of both. Nor do I think he truly seeks to impose martial virtues on America. But he does desperately want his opponents to shut up and march in place. And he seems to think this bilge will convince them to do so.
What I can't forgive, however, is the way he tries to pass off his ideal of an America where everyone marches as one as a better America. It wouldn't be America at all.
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