The scariest advice comes at the first link, from Slate. The article is titled, I kid you not, "How To Pick A Fight With Your Relatives This Thanksgiving." They forgot the modifiers ("moronic, racist relatives") but don't worry, they cover that in the article.
You've prepared all year in Internet comment sections and by yelling at Fox News on the television screen, and now you find yourself face-to-face, in close quarters, with actual Republicans, right across the table. They're not going anywhere, and neither are you. Despite what you’ve heard about avoiding holiday conflict, now is your time to fight...
That's not the sentence I'm referring to, however. It's this one.
Stick to short, sarcastic, tendentious remarks to get things going. "I'm thankful for all that free stuff Obama gave me."
Oh, I'm sure that'll make you the hit of the gathering, lefty. I certainly hope this is written tongue-in-cheek, though based on the many other outlets advising similarly, I suspect it's not. Remember, if Barack Obama didn't walk into Abercrombie and slap two Ben Franklins on the counter for a pair of jeans and a t-shirt then he didn't really give you any "free stuff."
On some level, then, the president plainly agrees with critics of Obamacare, this page included, that the law needs to be rewritten: He and his administration keep rewriting its major components — remember the mandate that sizable employers offer coverage in 2014? — as practicalities and politics demand.
But in this country we don't change bad laws by presidential fiat. We change them by having Congress rewrite them or by starting from scratch. Obama doesn't want to reopen this law for fear that Republicans and some Democrats will substantially rewrite it. But that's what has to happen.
We understand why the president and leaders of his party want to rescue whatever they can of Obamacare. On their watch, official Washington has blown the launch of a new entitlement program ... under the schedule they alone set in early 2010.
What we don't understand is their reluctance to give that failure more than lip service. Many of the Americans who heard their president say Thursday that "we fumbled the rollout of this health care law" would have been pleased to hear him add: So we're admitting it. This law is a bust. We're starting over.
Epic failure of the development and launch of the federal exchange website? Check
Modifications to the stipulations of the law by whim of the executive? (Delaying the employer mandat until after 2014 midterms) Check
Handouts to favored businesses, favored constituencies? Check
Fraudulent statements about the nature of the new law? ("If you like your plan you can keep it. Period.") Check
Fraudulent statements about the nature of the law's financing. (It's a mandate! No, wait, it's a tax!) Check
Fraudulent statements about the cost of the law globally as well as individually? (Remember the mythical $2500 individual savings, and the mythical deficit reduction?) Check
Lies in testimony to Congress from those in charge? Check
The main question at this point is whether this was all intentional. Is this an intentional chaos designed to create a demand for single payer? It wouldn't surprise me in the least. One thing may work against that strategy: failure of the government on this scale should raise serious doubts on that front also.
From the inimitable Mark Steyn, writing at National Review and discussing the IRS' appetite for doing things that decent, honorable, moral government servants ought to know they shouldn't:
If you don’t instinctively know it’s wrong to stay in $3,500-a-night
hotel rooms at public expense, a revised
conference-accommodations-guidelines manual isn’t going to fix the real
problem.
So we know the IRS is corrupt. What happens then when an
ambitious government understands it can yoke that corruption to its
political needs? What’s striking as the revelations multiply and
metastasize is that at no point does any IRS official appear to have
raised objections. [emphasis mine] If any of them understood that what they were doing
was wrong, they kept it to themselves. When Nixon tried to sic the IRS
on a few powerful political enemies, the IRS told him to take a hike.
When Obama’s courtiers tried to sic the IRS on thousands of ordinary
American citizens, the agency went along, and very enthusiastically.
This is a scale of depravity hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of
the United States, and for that reason alone they should be disarmed and
disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far more circumscribed
powers.
I use a phrase in my office, with my employees, and at home, with my children, that applies here, in spades: "When in doubt, do the right thing." As Mr. Steyn rightly points out, it's striking that it took three years for the harassment policies to come to light, that nobody stepped forward sooner. "When in doubt, do the right thing." I rarely expect and less-rarely see such character from politicians. But the government employees of the IRS do not work for politicians, they work, or rather they should work, for all of the American people. All of 'em. And when politicians, for whom re-election and ideological victory are all-consuming, direct you to do things you know are wrong, shouldn't one of these individuals have had the ... well ... the balls to stand up and put a stop to it? Just one stand-up guy, one Gary Cooper? Anyone?
Reuters, apparently completely unfamiliar with both partisan political campaigning and federal responses to natural disasters, thinks the following is "newsworthy:
NJ governor pledges to vote Romney despite praising Obama
NEW YORK (Reuters) -
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie defended his praise for President
Barack Obama after superstorm Sandy, but said he would stick with his
fellow Republicans and vote for Mitt Romney in Tuesday's election.
"I endorsed Mitt Romney 13
months ago because I thought he was the best guy for the job," Christie
said on Sunday during a news conference, reaffirming his support for
the Republican candidate.
But support for Romney
does not mean that he cannot appreciate the "good job" that Obama did
while responding to the historical storm that hit the U.S. Northeast
last week, Christie said. Sandy knocked out power to some 2.4 million
New Jersey residents.
Governor Christie not only endorsed Mitt Romney for president, but has campaigned actively to see Mr. Romney elected. And some journalists clowns at Reuters thinks that a few words of praise for the man ultimately at the head of the response team in a time of state emergency after a nearly unprecedented natural disaster might change Christie's vote? I just turned to my wife and said that this may be the dumbest story I've seen this entire election.
It doesn't do anything for a poll's credibility to be seen as inept once the results roll in. Which made the UNH/WMUR poll for several months fairly inexplicable. I work in a business that brings people from all walks of life into a private room with me, and often topics not related to medicine crop up. With the election looming, politics was number one on that list. The number of people openly espousing a desire for four more years of President Obama was infinitessimally small. Almost everyone who brought the topic up expressed disdain for ObamaCare, disdain for the president, and disgust for the economic policies. (sidenote: I never bring these things up. The patient has to be the one to initiate that kind of conversation. And I never offer my opinion first if they do.)
So what had the state's opinion poll been telling us? Let's look back at results in the Real Clear Politics listing of New Hampshire data from the UNH/WMUR poll over the last 6 months.
April 4-20: Obama 51, Romney 42 - O+9
July 5-15: Obama 49, Romney 45 - O+4
Aug 1-12: Obama 49, Romney 46 - O+3
Sept 4-10: Obama 45, Romney 40 - O+5
Sept 27-30: Obama 54, Romney 39 (!) - O+15
Sept 30-Oct 6: Obama 50, Romney 44 - O+6 (they must have realized the previous poll was junk)
Oct 17-21: Obama 51, Romney 42 (UNH Only) - O+9
That's pretty consistent. On average, the UNH/WMUR and UNH polls have Obama with a 7.3% lead. If you eliminate the one clear outlier, it still would leave Obama with a lead of 6% overall, including the most recent (to this point) polls at Obama at +6% and +9% respectively. And notice that that last poll listed was two weeks after the first debate, so it's not like that produced much movement, unlike other polling organizations.
Ah, but the election's getting close. What's more important, your credibility, or discouraging the opposition voters? For UNH and WMUR, credibility wins out.
Twelve short days after the Oct 21 poll with a nine point Obama lead and now it's tied up in two consecutive polls? That much of a shift in polls hasn't occurred within any other NH poll. For example, at the virtually the same time (10/21-10/23 or therabouts) that UNH/WMUR had it O+9, ARG had it R+2, Rasumussen R+2, and even PPP had it O+1.
A few days ago I told you that Romney will win NH. I stand by that. And now the UNH poll, in order not to be made to look foolish, is finally reflecting what is really going on in the state. My prediction? Tomorrow they'll release another poll showing a Romney lead.
Okay, now I'm really out on a limb here. Below is my electoral map, produced at Real Clear Politics. (You can go here and create your own map. It can't be less likely than mine). Light colors = leaners. Medium colors = likely. Deep colors = solid.
Yeah, I know. Shocking. Way outside the bounds of current expert opinion. Although ... Dick Morris sees a landslide coming, Karl Rove sees a solid Romney victory, and lots of folks find something more than a bit fishy in usually relatively honest polls. A few comments are quite obviously necessary by way of explanation.
Most important, I think, is to realize that Barack Obama's mojo just ain't what it was in 2008. Then he rode a wave of euphoria over hope and change, capitalizing on a horrific economic collapse and several years (at least) of Bush fatigue replete with non-stop bashing by the DPM (Democratic Partisan Media)*. In 2008 the GOP was depressed. They were not enthused by the McCain
candidacy, Obama-mania was raging, and the DPM had successfully
"other-ized" Sarah Palin. The national vote even with that "perfect storm" of opportunity was 53-46, a 6.5 million vote spread out of 124 million votes cast. Democrats and Obama voters came in waves; Republicans stayed home. Obama won independents by 8, 52-44.
But now? He's had three plus years to get things moving economically. He hasn't. He preaches class warfare and re-distribution. He organizes a job council, then doesn't meet with them. He piles up $6 trillion in increased debt. Realizing that's a problem, he creates the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission, then ignores the findings. He blocks the Keystone XL pipeline, making Canada sell their oil to China and stomping on more American jobs. He funds through the Department of Energy loan program a steady stream of green boondoggles, costing American taxpayers even more of their hard-earned bread. He rams through a takeover of one-sixth of the economy against the will of the people, and with their freedom and choice in medicine curtailed they predictably do not grow to love the program.
So is it likely that waves of enthusiastic Democratic voters will be flooding the booths come Tuesday? I think not. What about Republicans? Every poll confirms an enthusiasm gap in favor of the GOP. That's a lot different from 2008. Gallup is currently showing a 5 point Romney advantage with likely voters, based in large part on the greater enthusiasm of GOP voters to get to the ballot box. Just about every survey shows Mr. Romney flipping Mr. Obama's advantage with independents, winning them by 8-14 points. Also, Gallup shows men going for Romney by 57-43, a 14 point spread, vs. losing women by 54-46, an 8 point spread.
You'd have to have a boatload more ladies than men voting to make up for that deficit.
So it's 315. Mitt Romney will win Pennsylvania - didn't they elect Pat Toomey just two years ago? He'll win Ohio - barely - but it'll be closer than the national vote because Mr. Obama has been doing all he can to hold that state. He'll win Virginia and Colorado. He'll win Iowa, Wisconsin and New Hampshire. I don't have him getting over the top in Minnesota, Oregon, Michigan or Nevada, but those states will be close. Very close. I have Connecticut and New Jersey close, but I think Sandy will probably keep those with the president, as the representative of federal assistance.
I could be wrong, but Mr. Romney's sizeable advantage with independents should swing the popular vote, the electoral college, and the presidency in his direction. I'm just hoping that each and every state, no matter on which side it falls, is both outside the margin of fraud and outside the margin of litigation. We don't need another Gore-athon like Florida 2000, and we don't need thousands of disappointed conspiracy theorists screaming DIEBOLD!!! at the top of their hyper-partisan lungs because their candidate came up 120,000 votes short. We need a definitve answer on November 7; here's hoping we get that.
Exactly four years ago, on October 30, 2008, The Joust The Facts endorsement for President of the United States reviewed the lack of accomplishment, inexperience, nebulous feel-good gestalt and nefarious associations of then-Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. It's worth revisiting not only to see what the problems with his candidacy were four years ago, but mainly to see just how obvious those deficiencies were to even a political neophyte like myself. I don't think the Wall Street Journal or NY Times will be calling me looking for their next political columnist. Particularly not the Times. But here's a snippet - see if anything rings true to you, given what we now know.
Sen. Barack Obama has run a very strong campaign, knocking off first
the presumptive nominee when the campaign started, Sen. Hillary Clinton,
and now standing on the doorstep of a general election win over war
hero and Republican nominee Sen. John McCain. Mr. Obama delivers an
elegant speech, professing a politics of "hope" and "change." While
both are nebulous concepts at best they do resonate. "Hope" and
"change" make him look and sound forward-looking and optimistic. But
campaigns do not make the candidate. Rather, the candidate is what he
is, and all of the pomp and window dressing and platitudes and Greek
columns in the world can't change that.
If that is indeed the
case, then what is Sen. Obama? He's only been in the public eye since
2004, when he stepped onto the stage at the Democratic Convention wowing
the audience with his speech on his way to the Senate. The media
hasn't helped us to know more, failing to scrutinize adequately his many
questionable past associations and pronouncements, glossing over some,
excusing some, ignoring some...
We know that Mr. Obama has had quite a few associations with Marxists.
Yes, I used the word. He has espoused redistributionist economics, in
his tax plan where income tax credits can go to those who pay no income
taxes, in his discussion of the civil rights movement in 2001 in the now famous tape, and in his off the cuff explanation to Joe The Plumber.
It is hard to argue that his economic philosophy is not more socialist
than free-market, and even harder to argue that that philosophy will
lead to rising incomes, rising GDP, and more jobs. Having seen
stagflation before, I don't want to see it again. His energy policy is blind to the need for additional drilling and nuclear power, the latter of which is quite 'green', certainly green enough for France.
Let me emphasize that important line:
It is hard to argue that his economic philosophy is not more socialist
than free-market, and even harder to argue that that philosophy will
lead to rising incomes, rising GDP, and more jobs.
Check, check and checkmate. America has seen in Obama's economic stewardship falling incomes, anemic and stagnant GDP growth, and job creation insufficient to bring back the lost jobs from the recession. Some of Mr. Obama's job claims were dependent on a new metric, jobs "created or saved." Here's a convenient video of the deception involved in Mr. Obama's claims of robust job creation, courtesy of Political Math.
And with that record we now have $6 Trillion more in national debt, in just 4 years time. So economically his record has been less than stellar, much as I had anticipated four years ago.
Recall, also, that Mr. Obama's signature achievements in his four years are the 'stimulus,' ObamaCare, killing Osama Bin Laden and saving GM. Let's go in reverse order. "Saving" General Motors meant transferring wealth from bondholders and taxpayers to the company's autoworkers, and the company is still on shaky footing - look at the sales of the Volt, for example. And yes, Bin Laden is dead. The intelligence community found him, Seal Team 6 got the job done, and Mr. Obama gave the operation the thumbs up. Terrorist fighter? Benghazi!
ObamaCare is one of the worst monstrosities foisted upon American citizens imaginable. Nancy Pelosi famously said that we had to pass the bill to know what was in it. Well, now we know, and we don't like it. Bottlenecks, waiting lists, doctor shortages, losing your doctor, paying more for insurance, paying for insurance coverages you don't need or want, loss of freedom, IPAB. The administration knows what medicine you need, and they want you to swallow it and like it. Oh, and there's $716B less for Medicare, by the way.
The 'stimulus' didn't stimulate, and it's not because it was too small. What, we needed $12 trillion in new debt, not just $6 trillion? Private businesses hiring private individuals to grow their businesses is the engine that moves the economic wheels, and with the specters of ObamaCare, fiscal cliffs, exploding debt and blossoming over-regulation, that just isn't happening.
So we can see that Mr. Obama lived up to expectations here at Joust The Facts. He failed. But what about Mitt Romney? Well, he has much more of a record than Mr. Obama did four years ago, having successfully governed Massachusetts, a deeply blue state, as a Republican governor. His RomneyCare is bad, but it pales in comparison to the much more coercive ObamaCare, and it may have been the best he could have done with a legislature that, being 85% Democrat, could pass what it wanted and override his veto. He stepped in and righted the troubled Salt Lake City Olympics from 2000-02. He has been a successful executive.
The economy needs to have politicians stop playing politics with it, and Mr. Romney knows this. Mr. Obama came in and turned his back on Republicans from the start; huge congressional majorities his first two years didn't improve that attitude. Mr. Romney won't be so dismissive. Entitlements need reform. Mr. Obama didn't tackle this necessary task during his first two years with his huge majorities, and he didn't do so with a Republican House. Mr. Romney will.
Mitt Romney knows that businesses need certainty, the ability to see their future and plan for it. Mr. Obama sees business as a large piggy bank that should be required to hire workers and pay higher taxes, or as a way to push an ideologicalagenda in ways that help his bigger donors. Mr. Romney is a capitalist, and conveniently the American economic soul is also capitalist. The debates did Mr. Romney the primary service of exposing his reasonableness to a wider audience. His jump in the polls after the first debate is attributable to the fact that he didn't and doesn't look and sound like the soulless caricature of him touted by the Obama campaign. He looked ... what's the word ... presidential.
And indeed he is. Joust The Facts issues a hearty and hopeful endorsesment of Mitt Romney for president.
In A Few Good Men Jack Nicholson, as Col. Nathan Jessup famously declared to Lt. Daniel Caffey (played by Tom Cruise), "You can't handle the truth!" The question today is, can the White House? In the second presidential debate Barack Obama declared self-righteously that he had identified the Benghazi terrorist attack an "act of terror" in the Rose Garden speech the next day. That requires very generous inference from the speech. Then spokespeople, representatives and administration officials, including press secretary Jay Carney, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and UN Ambassador Susan Rice, spent the next 2 weeks identifying a spontaneous demonstration generated by outrage over an obscure internet video trailer as the real source of the problem. Have a look.
(Reuters) -
Officials at the White House and State Department were advised two hours
after attackers assaulted the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi,
Libya, on September 11 that an Islamic militant group had claimed credit
for the attack, official emails show.
The emails, obtained by Reuters
from government sources not connected with U.S. spy agencies or the
State Department and who requested anonymity, specifically mention that
the Libyan group called Ansar al-Sharia had asserted responsibility for
the attacks.
The brief emails also show how U.S. diplomats described the attack, even as it was still under way, to Washington.
U.S.
Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in
the Benghazi assault, which President Barack Obama and other U.S.
officials ultimately acknowledged was a "terrorist" attack carried out
by militants with suspected links to al Qaeda affiliates or
sympathizers.
Administration
spokesmen, including White House spokesman Jay Carney, citing an
unclassified assessment prepared by the CIA, maintained for days that
the attacks likely were a spontaneous protest against an anti-Muslim
film.
While officials did mention
the possible involvement of "extremists," they did not lay blame on any
specific militant groups or possible links to al Qaeda or its affiliates
until intelligence officials publicly alleged that on September 28.
At the very least, such emails should have tempered the full-court press that deflected blame to the allegedly offending video. A question I asked earlier is this:
If it is irresponsible to declare this a terrorist attack without definitive evidence that it was, why was it not also irresponsible to absolve terrorists and affix the blame to the video without the same definitive evidence?
I'd also be interested in why such mendacity would be necessary. Perhaps it was thought that it might deflect the questions about lax security. After all, if it was an un-anticipated spontaneous demonstration that ran amok, how could such an event have been anticipated? Perhaps it was because the White House sees insults to Islam as the source of Islamic rage. Which, of course, leads to the incorrect conclusion that according to the administration such rage and killing is understandable if not justifiable whenever insults to Islam occur, and also to the conclusion that the First Amendment in the US Constitution should not protect such speech. Perhaps it's because with Romney winning on the economy, Obama couldn't afford to lose face in foreign policy before November 6. In that event, who would then be playing politics with the loss of American lives?
Ambassador Susan Rice's earnest Tour de Jon Lovitz on five Sunday morning talk shows several days after the attack focused on the video and the word "spontaneous" and made nary a mention of a terrorist attack as the most likely explanation. Yet that appears to be the one that should have been foremost in administration thinking. Spontaneous, indeed.
From Robert Samuelson, at Real Clear Politics about yet another insidious design flaw in the unpopular health care reform known in Orwellian fashion as the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act," or more colloquially as ObamaCare. Mr. Samuelson's article addresses the definitions of full-time and part-time workers. For the latter under ObamaCare the employer does not have to provide health insurance; once you reach 50 of the former, however, you do. The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines part time as less than 35 hours, while the PPACA defines part-time as less than 30 hours. Problem? Yes.
The argument about Obamacare is often framed as a moral issue. It's
the caring and compassionate against the cruel and heartless. That's the
rhetoric; the reality is different. Many of us who oppose Obamacare
don't do so because we enjoy seeing people suffer. We believe that, in
an ideal world, everyone would have insurance. But we also think that
Obamacare has huge drawbacks that outweigh its plausible benefits.
It creates powerful pressures against companies hiring full-time
workers -- precisely the wrong approach after the worst economic slump
since the Depression. There will be more bewildering regulations, more
regulatory uncertainties, more unintended side effects and more
disappointments. A costly and opaque system will become more so.
A rough transcript of a poll call - from an actual human this time! - that I answered tonight. I fielded the call, and rather than hanging up (I really didn't have much else to do at the time) I decided to answer and see where this was heading. And so it began benignly with the first two questions:
PP: Using strongly favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable, and strongly unfavorable, what is your opinion of [candidate for president]? And using the same grading, how about [candidate for president]?
and then
PP: If the election were held today, would you be voting for [candidate for president] or [candidate for president]
I answered these - they actually presented the choices evenly, and without bias in the presentation. But then it started
PP: I'd like to ask your opinion of several public policy issues. Are you in favor of or against privatizing Medicare.
Me: You're asking the wrong guy. I'm a doctor, and I'm well informed about the issues of Medicare. Neither side is proposing privatizing Medicare. Rather the ...
And then she cut me off and moved on to question two.
PP: Are your in favor of or against cuts to social security and Medicare?
Me: Again, that's a rather broad brush you're using. Are you referring to the money that was transferred from Medicare to Obamacare to try to make that solvent? Or is there another specific policy proposal that your referring to?
And so we moved on to question three, still with no answers for the first two policy questions. Funny, they seemed to want a dull "yes" or "no", and I wanted a policy discussion. And so we moved on.
PP: Are you in favor of or against tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans?
Me: You seem to be referring to the so-called "expiration of the Bush Tax Cuts." You should know, however, that the current rates have been in place for 9 years and "extending the tax cuts" is really preventing a tax rate increase ...
It used to be that "talking points" were the cherry-picked facts that you wanted to get out, to paint your side, your point of view, your plans in the most favorable light possible. The Democrats changed that at some point - I think it was during the Bush-Gore election squabble in Florida, but it could have been earlier - to mean something completely different. The word "fact" has a definition. A fact is a known truth, something in reality and completely truthful, something that either exists or has existed and is known. Sure the talking points were cherry-picked, but at least they were based in reality.
Now, however, what the Democrats' talking points represent is spin. These are imaginary facts, impressions, and unfavorable interpretations of the other side that you want reported. If a fact no longer has to be based in reality it can then can simply be invented. Don't talk about Romney's actual tax plan, talk about the tax plan as you want people to believe it exists. It is even more acceptable, encouraged actually, when the entity generally responsible for holding you accountable for your statements, journalists, are so in the tank that they never challenge your assertions. Last night Mr. Obama finally got challenged on his 'facts,' and it wasn't pretty.
Here's a dramatization of Mitt Romney's response to many of Mr. Obama's talking points. (mild language warning)
Of course, Mr. Romney would never use such language, and he did go on to eviscerate the talking points with cold, hard, real, truthful facts. Winner by knockout, I'd say. A compassionate referee would have stopped the fight in the third round. That's a fact, but don'tjusttakemyword for it.
Read this comment to a James Pethoukoukis post at AEI about Howard Dean stating that the Democrats "don't begrudge Mitt Romney his money." I'll have a comment myself about that to follow. But this one? Nail, struck on the head, etc.
Anyone with eyes can see where the Left
is trying to push American society, which is to a place where the “1%”
are the politically-connected people who support the Democratic party
and everyone else is left with the crumbs of whatever a top-down command
economy can produce.
So, I sort of give Dean the benefit of the doubt that the Left
doesn’t begrudge people wealth per se, but the “right people” have to
have that wealth and Mitt Romney (or any member of the GOP or anyone who
generally opposes the Left’s political agenda) isn’t part of that
“right people”.
We already saw this movie. It ran from 1917 to 1991 and was called “The Soviet Union."
Priceless. And while the Left does seem to begrudge Mitt Romney his money, at least partly, it may be more that they begrudge him the presidency because of his money. What, are wildly successful businessmen somehow ineligible for the presidency? Do you have to inherit the money (the Kennedys), marry it (John Kerry) or steal it from hard working doctors in court (John Edwards) to be eligible to run?
9/22/12 2010: Here's the whole clip from CNBC. Note that a) Harry Reid has been lying through his teeth about Romney and taxes and b) the "look, a squirrel!!" strategy pointed out, that these questions about Romney's wealth and Romney's taxes only bubble to the surface when the Obama campaign needs a distraction from some bad news...which the loyal press then provides.
What are, "crime, welfare, the President's economic an governing philosophy, birth certificates (even when joking)?" Among many, many others, I'm sure. MSNBC's Toure helpfully informs us that a) only Republicans can be accused of racism dog whistles, and b) pretty much anything members of the GOP say that can be even remotely construed as putting a minority member of society in a less than glorious light is de-facto racism.
So if you're a Democrat, like Sen. Harry Reid, you can describe Obama complimentarily as "light-skinned" with "no Negro dialect" and you're safe. If you're a Republican, like Mitt Romney, and you express concern that work requirements put in place during Clinton-era welfare reform are being softened, you're the equivalent of Bull Connor aiming firehoses. And the final judge on this is a far-left progressive on MSNBC
Thanks. I'll remember that.
"Shut up," he explained.
(And, by the way, I get to decide who's a partisan hack that should be ignored)
Over the last week or so we've been deluged with stories attempting to pre-emptively delegitimize the Supreme Court's decision on the ObamaCare health care law, the inappropriately named Affordable Care Act. The latest was from Roger Simon, writing at the ostensibly non-partisan Politico yesterday. He does so by quoting extensively from Jeffrey Toobin, whose viewpoints are wholly partisan. And from former Justice John Paul Stevens, who was on the losing side of the Bush-Gore election dustup in 2000.
At this writing, I do not know how a majority of the justices will rule on Obama’s health care plan, which was passed into law by Congress. Two branches of government have spoken, but their speech is but a whisper compared with the shout of our high court.
The die was cast in 2000. And it would take the most dewy-eyed of optimists to expect the court’s decision to be anything other than political.
Justice John Paul Stevens, now retired, wrote in his dissent in Bush v. Gore in 2000: “Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
That is a lot to lose. But we have lost it. And getting it back may be a long time in coming.
You see, if the court rules the individual mandate constitutional and allows the law to stand, then it's the correct decision and the members of the court were able to overcome their political slant. If they determine the mandate unconstitutional, then it's purely politics. It must be easy to be on the left. You're always correct, and any disagreement can only be because of political bias.
Recall, however, just how weak the arguments in favor of the individual mandate were in court. The same Jeffrey Toobin called them a "train wreck."
Today’s arguments focused around the central constitutional question of whether Congress has the power to force Americans to either pay for health insurance or pay a penalty.
According to CNN’s legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, the arguments were “a train wreck for the Obama administration.”
“This law looks like it’s going to be struck down. I’m telling you, all of the predictions including mine that the justices would not have a problem with this law were wrong,” Toobin just said on CNN.
And on the question of a limiting principle, Justice Steven Breyer got silence from Donald Verrilli. Remember also that there's no severability clause in the law, meaning that if any part is struck down the whole law should be by right. It's not the SCOTUS that wrote the law that way. Justice Antonin Scalia remarked that on the issue of severability it would be "cruel and unusual punishment" to require them to read the whole law and pick and choose how it should have been written. Recall also that the government did a poor job as well in arguing for the Medicaid payment extortion written into the law, whereby states would lose federal dollars entirely if they didn't expand their state program in a way acceptable to the feds.
The court’s divisions were on vivid display Wednesday during a discussion of the law’s Medicaid expansion, which gives states more federal money if they agree to enroll more of the poor. States can refuse, but only if they pull out of the program altogether.
The states challenging the legislation say that is not an option. The Medicaid program has grown so large that it is impossible to forgo federal funding and still provide medical care to the poor, they say.
"Nice state you got there. It'd be a shame if something were to happen to it." Of course, that's the Obama administration modus operandi, demonstrated this week against Arizona who had the temerity to try to control the flow of illegals across their southern border by applying federal laws.
So, as you read all the articles today screaming about the health care law being overturned (my prediction), remember just how weak the arguments were in its favor just three short months ago.
6/28/12 0935: More:
Ace has a nice roundup, including a link to a Reason compendium of pre-emptive strikes.
Gabe Malor at Ace of Spades addresses Mr. Toobin's nonsense in Roger Simon's Politico piece about the Roberts court overturning more legislation. Unfortunately for Mr. Toobin, he doesn't read the NY Times. From Mr. Malor:
Just three laws per term! Far, far from being "eager" to overturn legislatures, as hack Toobin dribbled, and obviously, indisputably playing no unusual role in "second-guessing laws," as Fallows alarmingly squeaked, the Roberts Court has been a model of restraint. Restraint is, naturally, one of Chief Justice Roberts' well-known characteristics and it was remarked upon during his confirmation hearings. One could even creditably call the Roberts Court the most restrained, incrementalist Court of the modern era. (I assure you, these numbers have not changed appreciably in the past two years.)
Should the mandate be overturned today, liberals will repeat their lie endlessly in order to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and to tarnish the Chief Justice's good name. You know better. Do not believe this sad, angry lie. And do not let some foolish lemming repeat it in your presence. The truth is that the Roberts Court has been unusually restrained in overturning laws when compared to its predecessors.
Here's Brian Williams informing you about the gunwalking program Fast & Furious, about which, if you had previously been relying on Mr. Williams to inform you, you might not have been aware it existed.
So that's it. A little political dustup in Washington between those evil racist partisan Republicans and the noble African American Attorney General Eric Holder. Just another example of our "broken politics.
Not exactly. Here's Bill Whittle, in 7 pithy minutes, giving you the full story. "A few processes under the radar" indeed.
John Hinderaker at Powerline Blog documents three instances in which Mr. Holder's testimony to Rep. Issa's committee has been, ahem, less than truthful. Two of the items were so obviously false retractions were required.
But heck, we don't even have to go to a full-throated evil racist conservative to get the information out. America's news source The Daily Show and Jon Stewart can do the job.
Curious, I thought. Puzzling even. How could that be, when every day we're hearing about the steadily rising national debt? So I had a look at the U.S. National Debt Clock. Sure enough, click on it every two seconds and America's debt notches upward about $100,000. It's now less than 300 billion short of $16 trillion. Recall that just about a year ago there was a showdown over raising the debt ceiling above the statutory limit (at the time) of $14.294 trillion. Last time I checked, $16 trillion was nearly $2 trillion more than $14.294 trillion. So I needed more information. And there, in the story itself, I found the answer.
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Everyone knows America has too much debt. What they don’t know is that things are getting better, not worse.
Little by little, our economy is reducing its debt burden, slowly repairing the damage caused by 10, 20 or 30 years of excess.
If you want to know why economic growth has been so tepid, here’s your answer. Four years after the storm hit, the economy is still deleveraging. And it’s very hard for any economy to grow when everyone is focused on increasing their savings.
Total domestic — public and private — debt as a share of the economy has declined for 12 quarters in a row after surging over the previous decade.
The rapid rise in federal debt over the past four years has distracted us from the big picture. The level of public debt is indeed worrisome, but it’s not as big a worry as the economy’s total level of debt — public and private...
As much as we hear politicians, pundits, tea-party patriots and the Congressional Budget Office obsessing about government debt, it was excessive private debt — not public debt — that caused the 2008 financial meltdown. And it was private debt — some of it since transferred to the public — that lies behind the current European debt crisis. (Greece is unique in having a public sector that ran up spending while its private sector is rather conservative.)
And then I took a look at the author of this MarketWatch story, and suddenly it all made sense. It's Rex Nutting, the journalist who fed the Obama campaign the punch line that Mr. Obama has really been the stingiest of presidents in terms of growth of government spending. He conveniently ignored the fact that the 2009 budget was held for Mr. Obama to sign by the Democrat-controlled congress, ignored that the non-stimulating 'stimulus' was wholly his and his alone, and ignoring the fact that the burst in spending was to be temporary with TARP and the 'stimulus' and should have returned to lower levels in 2010 and 2011 but didn't. Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute took apart Mr. Nutting's central thesis without even digging in to the politics of the budgets, and there were a host of other validcritiques.
So Mr. Nutting is at it again. It was all about the headline. "U.S. DEBT LOWER!!!" Huzzah! Huzzah! Presto! The Obama campaign, almost miraculously, has a new talking point to throw at the less-informed. But it's private debt - the debt held by private individuals in the private economy - that's dropping. Mr. Nutting buries the data 16 paragraphs into the story.
In the U.S., household debt has now fallen to 84% of GDP from a peak of 98%. Nonfinancial corporate debt has fallen to 77% from a peak of 83%. Financial sector debt has plunged from 123% of GDP to 89%. Public debt has risen to 89% from 56% [of GDP].
The U.S. government debt keeps climbing rapidly, and will soon approach once again a statutory debt ceiling. Private debt, not so much. Well, when people feel economically threatened they retrench - pay down debt, save, spend less. Why would they be economically threatened. Stagnant jobs, falling home equity, falling median income, soaring government debt, future entitlement debt bombs, threats of higher taxes, and continued drunken-sailor spending by our elected officials in Washington. Not to mention soaring energy costs, an anti-business NLRB, and a regulatory regime intent on stepping on the neck of business growth.
So no, although I'm certain that Mr. Nutting's latest venture will be quoted by administration flacks as evidence of the boss's frugality, Mr. Obama doesn't get credit for falling "total" U.S. debt, except to the extent that the stagnant, low growth economy he has engineered is making people worried enough to reign in their personal debt.
"Democracy died tonight...the end of the USA as we know it." No, actually. Democracy died when leftists/progressives threw a temper tantrum and fled Wisconsin rather than allow Governor Walker's reforms to be passed by the democratically elected legislature and signed into law by the democratically elected governor. And then, having lost that irrational, tantrum-fueled battle, they decided to try to undo the legal actions of duly-elected representatives by packing the court with a sympathetic jurist ... and failed. Then having lost the chance to have a court overturn the laws, they decided to continue the tantrum and stage recall elections, basically over a policy disagreement ... and failed. This is not the end of the USA. We would have been much closer to "the end of the USA as we know it" had they been successful with any of these irrational tantrums. The way to settle policy differences is by winning a regularly scheduled election. The problem with that approach is apparent, what with the overwhelming win by the governor due to the success of his reforms, turning a $3.6 billion deficit into a surplus without a tax increases or service cuts.
"We just got outspent $34 million to $4 million dollars." What, we're not counting outside expenditures from, say, the unions, who poured as much as $30 million into the effort? I'm sure this guy was disappointed in Mr. Obama outspending John McCain in 2008 too.
"If the people you see here behind me can't get it done, it's done."
Buddy, it's done. Trust me, or just read the returns yourself. And stop wallowing in self-pity and despair. The "end of the USA as we know it" won't come from democratically-run elections going against you. Instead, it'll come when the losers of such elections take to the streets to overturn them.
Comes from the Heritage Foundation discussion of tonight's State of the Union speech by President Obama. Early on in the speech Mr. Obama proposed (yet another) jobs program. They address this idea here.
More Job Training Programs on Top of All the Other Redundant and Ineffective Programs – David B. Muhlhausen, Ph.D.
Tonight, President Obama called for the federal government to engage in new job training and employment initiatives, especially for the hard to employ.
Before Congress signs off on any new initiatives, we must recognize that President Obama wants to add several new programs on top of the 47 job-training programs already operated by the federal government. Further complicating the matter, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has concluded that there is little evidence that these programs are effective.
When federal job training programs have been evaluated using random assignment to job training and control groups, these scientifically rigorous evaluations overwhelmingly find that these programs are ineffective. For example, Job Corps, the federal government’s flagship program for hard-to-employ youth, has been found to be ineffective on several measures:
Compared to non-participants, Job Corps participants were less likely to earn a high school diploma (7.5 percent versus 5.3 percent);
Compared to non-participants, Job Corps participants were no more likely to attend or complete college;
Four years after participating in the evaluation, the average weekly earnings of Job Corps participants was only $22 more than the average weekly earnings of the control group; and
Employed Job Corps participants earned $0.22 more in hourly wages compared to employed control group members.
Instead of adding new programs to an already bloated job training system, the President and Congress should stop wasting taxpayer dollars by terminating these programs.
So the President proposed a jobs program, on top of the 47 that already exist, of a type and structure that hasn't been demonstrated effective. It sounds like a good idea superficially, if you're not paying attention, but he knows the data and proposed it anyway. Your tax dollars at work. Well, at least it'll create more government jobs running the program, so it's got that going for it.
By the time this post is published the results in New Hampshire will be all but complete. Mitt Romney wins (38% currently), followed by Ron Paul (23%), Jon Huntsman (17%), Rick Santorum/Newt Gingrich (or perhaps Newt Gingrich/Rick Santorum) (10% each). Rick Perry seems to have fully imploded, with only 1% in the Granite State primary, though his focus has been on South Carolina. Still, I would like to review some of the pros and cons for each of the candidates, and issue a true horserace endorsement.
Let me first stipulate that each of the remaining Republican candidates would be preferable to another four years of the stumbling imperial presidency. From anti-constitutional recess appointments to profligate spending and ever-enlarging seas of red ink, from turning federal agencies like the EPA and IRS into the imperial storm troopers of liberal ends to agenda-driven perversions of justice, through vote-buying with taxpayer funded giveaways, the U.S. really can't afford another four years of Mr. Obama's ideological vision of America. The candidate that is eventually chosen to face Mr. Obama simply must beat Mr. Obama.
Second, I think it is incumbent upon Republicans to come up with a candidate who articulates an inclusive and welcoming vision, but notably without embracing the divisions - race, class, gender, etc. - into which the left wishes to divide America. The left wants social justice, and apparently that is different from rule-of-law justice. The left wants to divide into groups then pander to each group. The candidate needs to expand on an America that gives opportunity to all, fully, but most importantly equally as individuals.
Third, I've been awfully disappointed in the nature of the attacks on Mitt Romney lately. Ronald Reagan and his 11th commandment are rolling over in their graves. For a long time I was quite proud of Newt Gingrich for refusing to attack any other Republican, always focusing his attacks on the President. If you're going to try to elevate your primary support, the argument against Mr. Romney ought to be over the Massachusetts healthcare reform as governor, and not over his work in the private sector. Tonight Rick Perry called it "vulture capitalism." Shameful.
I'd like to say that there is one candidate who embodies everything I'm looking for as November 2012 looms in the not terribly distant future. There isn't. Mr. Perry hasn't shown himself to be solid enough as a speaker, and solid enough as a debater that I would feel confident that he can compete in that biggest contest. I think he entered the race for the wrong reasons - primarily because others thought he should. He needed to do a lot more homework, a lot more preparation before taking this leap.
Mr. Romney's flaw is primarily that Massachusetts healthcare reform. Recall, I'm a doctor whose office used to be in Massachusetts and is now in New Hampshire. But I still operate in Massachusetts, and I see the problems with this law. It is - marginally - better than ObamaCare, but the architect of Romney's is the same left-wing MIT economist that consulted with the administration and pushed ObamaCare regularly in the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine. Mitt Romney needed to come up with a better solution to that problem than he has; he is not, as a result, the best spokesman against Mr. Obama's signature legislation.
Mr. Huntsman infuriated me by doing something I listed above as a no-no, parroting the liberal line on global warming/climate change. "Listen to the scientists?" Does he mean the ones shown to be committing academic malpractice in the climategate emails? Does this mean the EPA can kill the capitalist golden goose unilaterally? He's also a little too isolationist internationally. Pulling all the troops home is desireable, but not at the cost of American security. Still, he has a reasonable economic policy outline, perhaps the best one.
That said, his foreign policy views are far more conservative than Mr. Paul's. Ron Paul may be very conservative with domestic fiscal policy, but the pure libertarianism of the rest of his package is a non-starter. And he definitely needs a better explanation of his newsletters. I don't think he's electable in a general election, and I'm not alone in that assessment.
Mr. Gingrich has a number of problems, not least of which is that he was effectively Palin-ized during the 1990's by the liberal media and Democrats (BIRM). He was the "Gin-grinch" that stole Christmas, remember? There are a lot of people that won't vote for him because they remember that false caricature. And that loveseat shot with Nancy Pelosi discussing global warming/climate change? Ugh. To his credit he has renounced that previous stand.
Mr. Santorum is against big government, except when he's for it. And unfortunately he seems to be for it mostly for social causes, which are down the list of my priorities for the next four years. I don't like his debating style, as he begins every answer with a recitation of his credentials. And he has been less good at attacking Mr. Obama than at attacking his Republican friends.
But you've got to go somewhere. To win, I'll take Newt Gingrich, and hope that he's able to overcome the various albatrosses hung around his neck. He's the sharpest debater, and with his time as speaker is very good at making the media uncomfortable when they would rather make him uncomfortable. He'll make Mr. Obama very uncomfortable too. To place, I'll take Mitt Romney. ObamaCare notwithstanding, Mr. Romney is more conservative than you have been led to believe; it's reasonable to argue that much of Mr. Romney's supposedly liberal stances in the past were the actual political posturing, running as he was in Massachusetts and against Ted Kennedy. For show, it's Jon Huntsman. Hey, he played keyboards in a rock band growing up, you gotta like that. But please, modify that stance on climate change to at least recognize that the Climate-gate scandals may be problematic.
You may have heard that the Union-Leader endorsed Mr. Gingrich. Here's a snippet.
We sympathize with the many people we have heard from, both here and across the country, who remain unsure of their choice this close to the primary. It is understandable. Our nation is in peril, yet much of the attention has been focused on fluff, silliness and each candidate's minor miscues...
Readers of the Union Leader and Sunday News know that we don't back candidates based on popularity polls or big-shot backers. We look for conservatives of courage and conviction who are independent-minded, grounded in their core beliefs about this nation and its people, and best equipped for the job.
I might remind Mr. Stern that China's 5 year plan is just that, a "plan." Remember that Mr. Obama also had a "plan" for a boatload of "green jobs." How's that workin' out for you?
Coming today from the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens, on the subject of global warming climate change.
Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.
As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.
Speaking of Mr. Gore, there is a legal aphorism that at least this site attributes to him:
When the law is on your side, argue the law. When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When neither the law or the facts are on your side, hollar.
Given that Al Gore has been doing a lot more "hollaring" than arguing, perhaps the laws (of science) and the facts are not really on his side.
Exit Question: Will Jon Huntsman need to "revise and extend" his own remarks on the topic?
HUNTSMAN: Listen, when you make comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said, when you call into question the science of evolution, all I'm saying is that, in order for the Republican Party to win, we can't run from science.
Politicians govern by concensus. Scientists don't.
David Frum, ostensibly a Republican, asks in New York Magazine "When did the GOP lose touch with reality?" Judging by his composition it's a fair question to turn back on the inquisitor.
He starts out by trying to emphasize his Republican street cred.
I’ve been a Republican all my adult life. I have worked on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, at Forbes magazine, at the Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes, as a speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration. I believe in free markets, low taxes, reasonable regulation, and limited government. I voted for John McCain in 2008, and I have strongly criticized the major policy decisions of the Obama administration.
Believes in free markets? Check. Low Taxes? Check. "Reasonable" regulation. Well, one man's reasonble is another man's unreasonable. Let's just file this one under "less regulation than Mr. Obama wants" and move on. Limited government? Check. Voted for McCain in '08? Given the other choice you'd kind of have to, so check. Criticized the major policy decisions of the Obama administration? Haven't we all, Mr. Frum.
So it's all good. Until we hit the next paragraph.
America desperately needs a responsible and compassionate alternative to the Obama administration’s path of bigger government at higher cost. And yet: This past summer, the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate. In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed. In the face of evidence of dwindling upward mobility and long-stagnating middle-class wages, my party’s economic ideas sometimes seem to have shrunk to just one: more tax cuts for the very highest earners.
Let's take these one at a time, and see how the square with his assertions of his limited government/low tax/free market declarations. First up: "the GOP nearly forced America to the verge of default just to score a point in a budget debate." The GOP did nothing of the kind. What the GOP did do was to insist on substantial budget cuts (limited government) and no tax increases (low tax) in exchange for increasing the debt ceiling. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, wanted a blank check. He was looking for a way to avoid any spending cuts while raising taxes on the upper earners - which analyses have shown is not enough to pay for such spending anyway, and which Mr. Obama himself admitted is the wrong medicine in a sluggish economy.
Next we have this: "In the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Republican politicians demand massive budget cuts and shrug off the concerns of the unemployed." Okay, I think we're in agreement about the economy. Where your reality testing is suspect, Mr. Frum, is in what follows that generally supportable statement. Republican politicians have never demanded "massive budget cuts," only a reduction in the growth of future spending. You've fallen into the baseline budgeting trap. "Massive cuts" to beltway insiders and liberal journalists means decreasing the rate of growth of government spending from 10% to 4%. To those of us in the real world that's a 4% increase in spending that would be a lot more affordable and reasonable than 10%.
I'm also concerned that you think Republicans "shrug off concerns of the unemployed". I suspect you are referring to those politicians resisting the call to provide endlessly flowing unemployment benefits. Already they've been extended to nearly 2 years, and Republicans are cruel to want to stop them there? Studies show that extending unemployment benefits extends unemployment. Or perhaps you're referring to the Republicans' insistance that Democrats who want this live by their "pay-go" standard and cut spending elsewhere to fund it. Or maybe you're living in pure fantasy land, and you believe, as apparently the president does, that extending unemployment benefits "creates jobs." Regardless, this is not "shrugging off concerns of the unemployed," and putting it that way is pure demagoguery of the sort I'd expect from Sen. Harry Reid, among others.
Let's move to your final preposterous assertion in that section, that Republicans simply want "more tax cuts for the very highest earners." Aside from presidential candidates and their proposals for various flat, flatter, and flattest tax reforms (which would help the struggling private economy, many believe), is there anyone in Congress who has proposed cutting only the top marginal rate? By the way, if you're going to suggest that preventing the rates from rising with expiration of the Bush cuts is a cut in marginal rates then you misunderstand the concept. That is preventing an increase, not pushing for a cut. Let's assume you really are for "low taxes," as you state. Then wouldn't blocking a tax increase be desireable?
But there are more puzzling assertions in this essay.
It was not so long ago that Texas governor Bush denounced attempts to cut the earned-income tax credit as “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.” By 2011, Republican commentators were noisily complaining that the poorer half of society are “lucky duckies” because the EITC offsets their federal tax obligations—or because the recession had left them with such meager incomes that they had no tax to pay in the first place. In 2000, candidate Bush routinely invoked “churches, synagogues, and mosques.” By 2010, prominent Republicans were denouncing the construction of a mosque in lower Manhattan as an outrageous insult. In 2003, President Bush and a Republican majority in Congress enacted a new prescription-drug program in Medicare. By 2011, all but four Republicans in the House and five in the Senate were voting to withdraw the Medicare guarantee from everybody under age 55.
I'll have to move swiftly though this miasma, in order not to bore the readers, but this is nonsense.
The push to reform Medicare (by making it a grant program to buy insurance rather than a government provided insurance benefit) shows allegiance to private enterprise, to individual freedom of choice, but mostly to the principle of fixing future problems before they are unfixable. Medicare's future unfunded liability is nearly $100 Trillion. That's Trillion, with a T. Those under 55 are ten years away from qualifying for Medicare. Ten years.
The mosque in "lower Manhattan" was to be 2 blocks from Ground Zero of the 9-11 attacks, an understandably sensitive location. Rather than an example of Americans being insensitive to Muslim sensibilities, it is instead an example of Muslims being insensitive to non-Muslim sensibilities.
And Democrats (among others) have now so bastardized and warped the tax code that half of Americans pay no federal income tax. That's not good for America, and in particular it's not good, for those who want a growing and vibrant economy, to stifle those who would provide jobs and economic growth with a steadily heavier burden of taxation. You know what's at the end of the road of steadily more progressive taxation, don't you?
So Mr. Frum, what we have here is a non sequitur. You assert that you want limited governnment, less regulation, low taxes and that you oppose Mr. Obama's policies. Your objections show us, however, that you don't really want those things. You ask in this article whether you're crazy. You're not. You are, however, deluding yourself if you think that Republicans should and will support Democrat, or even Democrat-lite policies of centralized control, bigger government, higher taxes, more regulation and balkanization, all of which stifle economic growth and freedom.
The question isn't "when did the GOP lose touch with reality?" The question, Mr. Frum, is when did you become a Democrat?
*no time now, I hope to be adding some links later for reference.
11/21/11 2020: A ha! I got the links added - and a few grammatical corrections as well.
Newsbusters' Noel Sheppard notices MSNBC's Martin Bashir calling on Speaker of the House John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to either raise taxes on the "wealthiest" Americans or resign. That's ridiculous enough, but I noticed another problem or two. Martin Bashir is, as he proves in the transcript, both economically and politically ignorant. First economics:
So here’s a message to the House leadership, Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Mr. Cantor. 68 percent of Americans and 68 percent of all millionaires believe that it’s time to raise taxes on the wealthiest individuals so that this nation’s economy can start moving again.
"Raise taxes on the wealthiest individuals so that this nation's economy can start moving again?" And that's going to jump start the economy and spur hiring how? Do I need to cite the long list of economists, Republicans, and yes, Democrats who have chimed in that it's not a good idea to raise taxes in a down economy? I could start with the President himself.
But that's only the warm-up act. Referring to Congress, Mr. Bashir asks:
But honestly, what have they done? What have they done to address the persistently high level of unemployment? What have they done to reduce the vast gulf between the haves and the have-nots in America.
Is that the job of Congress? To "reduce the vast gulf between the haves and the have-nots in America?" Can anyone tell me where the Constitution authorizes the Legislative branch to intervene in that way? Heck, does the Constitution authorize any branch of government to equalize economic results among the people?
I'm not going to belabor the point. It's simply a shame that he's in a position to influence the debate on TV.
I've been watching with amusement the preposterous, unhelpful and ill-informed protests known as OWS, "Occupy Wall Street" as it were. There are "Occupy" protests in other cities, including our own Boston locally, as well as Toronto, Oakland, Sydney, LA and a host of others. Most are comprised of a relative few individuals, who claim, without justification, to represent the "99%", as in the 99% who aren't among the top 1% of annual income in the nation.
Every day there's another howler coming out of the movement. We'll go randomly through a few of the amusing and occasionally disturbing vignettes.
Both Ace of Spades and James Taranto today wrote about the discovery that if you appear to be giving out free food (or anything else, really, for free), freeloaders will want to partake. Imagine that. OWS is slapped with the realization that resentment and a feeling of being abused can result from someone usurping your property rights and taking your stuff. From Taranto a serious take:
In truth, the Obamavillians are learning why Obama is wrong--why socialism doesn't work. A society that makes a virtue of dependency ultimately encourages freeloading and grifting. The instinct to prevent it is a healthy one. A lot has been written about the similarities and differences between Obamaville and the Tea Party, and here is one: Whereas the latter arose out of the instinct to reward self-reliance and discourage dependency, the former is having it awakened by an encounter with the real world.
Ace's more humorous look at the dustup:
Yeah,what right do the homeless and prisoners have to represent themselves as society's downtrodden. Impostors! They're not oppressed like the college graduates with too much debt from pricey private colleges!...
Amazing... they don't want to share their own stuff with people they don't have any particular common bonds with. And they're resentful of Other people coming in and acting like they have the right to take their stuff...
But note within their little society, they themselves set up a hierarchy "those who belong" and "losers and derelicts we wish to exclude."
Do they not get that that's what they are to us?
Here Ace explains why money exists, a concept seemingly foreign to the occupiers. Short answer: it's a medium of exchange for items of value.
I think you guys (again, the guys in this video) are working for the same reason as Peter Schiff: Money. Which is, in turn, simply a convenient unit of exchange for the most precious commodity in the world: Time.
When you buy a loaf of bread, you are giving up some of your time, in the convenient unit of exchange called money, by which you were paid for your time, for someone else's time.
This is why virtually everybody works.
And have you heard about the drummers? The percussionists threatened to disrupt the occupation, as if identifying disruption were possible in such a ragtag organization.
The drummers’ refusal to be silenced has opened cracks in the leaderless movement. The general assembly that has formed to oversee the protests proposed to limit the drumming to two hours per day, but the drummers fought back.
The Heritage Foundation took a conservative's look at what are, as best as anyone can tell, the demands of the occupiers. Hijinks ensue. Here's a snippet, with Demand #9 and parts of its response, but the whole piece is worth a read.
9: Passage of a comprehensive job and job-training act like the American Jobs Act to employ our citizens in jobs that are available with specialized training and by putting People to work now by repairing America’s crumbling infrastructure. We also recommend the establishment of an online international job exchange to match employers with skilled workers or employers willing to train workers in 21st century skills.
James Sherk, Senior Policy Analyst in Labor Economics at the Center for Data Analysis:
Public works projects will not reduce unemployment. Government spending does not create new wealth in the economy, it reallocates existing spending. Some workers get jobs on the public works project, at the expense of jobs that do not get created elsewhere in the economy...
Sadly, government job training programs also do not live up to their hype... The government has not learned how to do effective job training. Fortunately, OWS do not have to wait for the government to act. Private sector online job exchanges like Monster.com already match millions of employers with workers every year.
Read the whole list of demands. It's a giant Marxist wish-list. I particularly like the demand for student loan relief. Hey, no one held a gun to your head forcing you to go $150k in debt for your degree in primitive cultures, why should others be forced to pay it off for you? I paid off my student loans, you pay off yours. You know what else? My wealthiest friend started out owning a gas station and working construction jobs. Figure it out.
Finally, perhaps the most unintentinally amusing comment on the OWS protests comes from Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, who claims, with curious pride, that
“I created much of the intellectual foundation for what they do,”
"Intellectual foundation." You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
I caught a bit of this in the OR lounge on Friday morning.
Wow. 150,000 people signed the petition? Wow. And this 22 year-old woman with two part-time jobs started the ball rolling. Unbelievable. Wow. Bank of America must be shaking in their boots at this huge grassroots movement. Wow.
Molly Katchpole launched a petition against Bank of America, which was signed by more than 131,000 customers and counting, saying she would take her business elsewhere unless the company drops its plan to charge $5 for debit card purchases.
Katchpole closed her accounts, cut up her debit and credit card on the sidewalk, and left with $400 cash she says she intends to deposit in a credit union.
WASHINGTON -- Molly Katchpole has had it with Bank of America.
The 22-year-old cleared out her account, and cut up her debit card after the bank decided to charge customers five dollars a month just to use their debit card.
She's so mad that she started a petition to let the bank know the charge goes too far. In just one week, she's collected 150,000 signatures.
For his part, President Barack Obama said consumers were being "mistreated" by the bank.
"You can stop it because if you say to the banks, 'You don't have some inherent right just to, you know, get a certain amount of profit, if your customers are being mistreated, that you have to treat them fairly and transparently,'" he told ABC News.
"Bank of America customers, vote with your feet," Durbin urged in outraged reaction to the new "service charge."
"Get the heck out of that bank," Durbin exhorted. "They are overcharging their customers even for this new debit card reform. It is hard to believe that a bank would impose [such a fee] on customers who simply are trying to access their own money on deposit at the Bank of America."
Mr. Durbin mentions that Bank of America received bailout funds (conveniently omitting the forced assumption of the debt of the failing Countrywide Mortgage, Senator Dodd's lender of choice, and Merrill Lynch, preventing Merrrill from Lehman's fate). And Molly Katchpole, she's just an innocent 22 year old trying to earn a living at two part-time jobs. As sympathetic figure as you'll find. Just a young kid struggling to make ends meet. Well, maybe not.
Newly graduated gal looking to ruffle some feathers, change minds, and have great conversations with fellow professionals in labor and progressive politics advocacy. [emphasis mine]
Specialties
Persuasive writing and speaking, social media, leadership, research - labor and progressive politics, art and architectural history.
"Labor and progressive politics advocacy?" Whoa. She lists her employment as "Account Manager at Winning Over Washington". So I went and had a look at Winning Over Washington (WOW) to see just what they're up to. Turns out WOW is a communications and public relations firm. The list of clients? SEIU, NEA, AFL-CIO, Democratic National Committee, Democratic Governors Association, EMILY's List. You know, the usual broad spectrum of interests, from far left to farther left. Wow, indeed.
So Ms. Katchpole is an account manager at a far-left PR firm. A firm which might well be interested in demonizing banks in order to deflect blame from the failed policies of a Democratic administration, perhaps? Here's another website where she lists her job as: online organizing for progressive politics.
Now that took me almost no time at all. Wouldn't it seem that CNN, MSNBC, and the others that ran with this story could take a second to find out that this grassroots movement is the finest quality astroturf that money can buy rather than presenting it absent that important context?
Bank of America employs thousands and thousands of people. The cash they earn is how they pay those individuals. Or are we not all about jobs anymore? Oh, and about that $5 monthly fee. If you find that charge outrageous, then individually close your account and move it to a community bank or credit union. But remember, it's the equivalent of a monthly grande skinny vanilla latte with an extra shot. I'm fairly certain Ms. Katchpole knows that as well.
President Obama’s re-election campaign argues in a memo set to be released this morning that Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney — the two frontrunners for the Republican nomination — have “embraced policies that the American people oppose” on Social Security and immigration.
And in the case of health care reform, the polls were roughly 55-35 against just at the time it was passed and signed - "against the will of the American people," as it were. And it continues to be unpopular.
There are, of course, other examples. But logical consistency has never been Mr. Obama's strong suit.
Ed Morrissey shows that even on Social Security and Immigration Mr. Obama is out of the mainstream himself.
'Suddenly, liberal Democrats are making the same argument about the tax code that I've been making for 20 years," laughs former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey. "Welcome to the party." Mr. Armey, who along with Steve Forbes has been the torch bearer for the flat tax since the early 1990s, believes that the latest applause line from President Obama that "billionaires should pay the same tax rate as janitors" may be the political gateway to sweeping tax reform.
Mr. Forbes sees an opening here too and says: "The flat tax is the perfect issue for these times. It fixes the economy and doesn't cost a dime."
Mr. Moore outlines the essentials of a flat tax. A single rate. A carve out for the first $30,000-$40,000 of family income. And few if any deductions, limiting how low you can go on what you owe.
That's why the flat tax is the fairest tax of all. The combination of a single tax rate with a family-size allowance—shielding, say, the first $35,000 of income for a family of four—ensures that everyone would pay the same marginal tax rate above that level. A family of four with an income of $70,000 would pay an average tax rate of about 8.5%, whereas the members of the Buffett billionaire club would pay 17%...
"I keep waiting for a Republican candidate to take the plunge," says a half-frustrated Steve Forbes. Then he adds one more flat tax selling point: "You know it ends all this crony capitalism in Washington. From now on, if Obama invites you to the White House, you'd know it's because he really loves you."
Republican candidates are shy to "take the plunge" because they can see the false demagoguery of "tax cuts for the rich" a mile away, and they don't want to walk down that road. But at least if one does they can use Mr. Obama's own words to sell the idea, on the principle that "billionaires should pay the same tax rate as janitors."
Quoted in James Taranto's indispensible "Best Of The Web" today, Barack Obama does seem to be strongly endorsing a flat tax.*
"Yeah, right," I hear you say. "Don't mess with us, Giacomo. This guy's all about class warfare and redistribution and you expect us to believe he really wants a flat tax?"
"Now, the Republicans, when I talked about this earlier in the week, they said, well, this is class warfare. You know what, if asking a billionaire to pay their fair share of taxes, to pay the same tax rate as a plumber or a teacher is class warfare, then you know what, I'm a warrior for the middle class."
You see? He wants billionaires to pay the "same tax rate" as a plumber or teacher. The very same rate! Not only that, but he defines paying the same rate as a "fair share" of taxes. Look I think this is something we can all get behind. Let me hear you out there! O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!
*A flat tax, in case you have forgotten, is an income tax system where all taxpayers at all income levels pay the same percentage of their income in taxes. For example, if the rate is 15% and you make $50,000 annually you would pay $7500 to the IRS. If you made $5 million annually you would pay $750,000.
**If you want to see graphically just how classless and undignified is the Obama White House, check out the transcript of those remarks in Cincinnati a little more completely. Here are two excerpts.
THE PRESIDENT: We've got some folks I just want to make sure are acknowledged here today. First of all, the Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, is in the house. Give him a round of applause. (Applause.) We've got the mayor of the great city of Cincinnati -- Mark Mallory is here. (Applause.) We've got the mayor of Covington, Mayor Denny Bowman. (Applause.) Senator Rand Paul is here.
AUDIENCE: Booo --
And this one:
Behind us stands the Brent Spence Bridge. It’s located on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America. It sees about 150,000 vehicles every single day. And it’s in such poor condition that it's been labeled "functionally obsolete." Think about that -- functionally obsolete. That doesn’t sound good, does it?
AUDIENCE: Nooo!
THE PRESIDENT: It’s safe to --
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Kind of like John Boehner. (Laughter.)
Now this, mind you, is the official White House transcript of the remarks, and they think it's appropriate to document that the audience of Obama sycophants and union goons booed Senator Rand Paul, and that an audience member, not an official speaker at the event, made a joke about Speaker John Boehner being "functionally obsolete." As Russell used to say in Bill Cosby's "Fat Albert" cartoon, "You're from the NCAA. No Class At All."
From, of all places, an Associated Press Fact Check by Stephen Ohlemacher, discussing whether "millionaires and billionaires" really do pay less in taxes than secretaries. They start by quoting Mr. Obama who, to be fair, is only parroting the class warfare nonsense that Democratic politicians have been spouting since the advent of the late Ted Kennedy. (His older brother Jack didn't lead him down this particular path.)
"Middle-class families shouldn't pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires," Obama said Monday. "That's pretty straightforward. It's hard to argue against that."
Now from the AP:
The data tells a different story. On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.
There may be individual millionaires who pay taxes at rates lower than middle-income workers. In 2009, 1,470 households filed tax returns with incomes above $1 million yet paid no federal income tax, according to the Internal Revenue Service. That, however, was less than 1 percent of the nearly 237,000 returns with incomes above $1 million.
The two questions that remain? One, someone explain to me again what "paying your fair share" really means, in dollars and cents. Two, how can Democratic politicians continually spout nonsense like this?
Mr. Obama says "It's hard to argue against that." Well, it would be hard to argue against if it were true.
9/20/11 1610: Oops...link to AP fact check added. My bad.
Right on cue, the Wall Street Journal editorial page features a summary of Mr. Obama's tax-raising plans I referred to in the last post. It's not pretty, and no matter what's in the American Jobs Act this collection of economic anchors isn't likely to let the American economic ship cruise freely.
Mr. Obama said last week that he wants $240 billion in new tax incentives for workers and small business, but the catch is that all of these tax breaks would expire at the end of next year. To pay for all this, White House budget director Jack Lew also proposed $467 billion in new taxes that would begin a mere 16 months from now. The tax list includes limiting deductions for those earning more than $200,000 ($250,000 for couples), limiting tax breaks for oil and gas companies, and a tax increase on carried interest earned by private equity firms. These tax increases would not be temporary.
What this means is that millions of small-business owners had better enjoy the next 16 months, because come January 2013 they are going to get hit with a giant tax bill...
The article itemizes the taxes
allowing Bush rates to expire, 2013, a programmed tax increase that includes an increase in the capital gains rates
elimination of itemization from "the wealthy," 2013
expiration of the proposed temporary tax credits for 2012, no longer available 2013
two new taxes hidden in ObamaCare, including a 2.9% surcharge on investment income
Yeah, small business owners will be crawling over each other to be first in line to increase their company expenses in personnel costs and health care costs by adding jobs with all that in their future.
All of this assumes that American business owners aren't smart enough to look beyond the next few months. They can surely see the new burdens they'll face in 2013, and they aren't about to load up on new employees or take new large risks if they aren't sure what their costs will be in 16 months. They can also reasonably wonder whether Mr. Obama's tax hike will hurt the overall economy in 2013—another reason to be cautious now.
It's painfully obvious at this point that for the President it's not about the economy. It's not about jobs. And it's not about unleashing the American entrepreneurial spirit. The president doesn't care a whit about the private economy, I'm sad to say. It's about the redistribution, stupid. And America, composed as it is of Americans, should just say no.
You can subtitle this one, "I'll get my tax increase yet, you wascawy Wepubwicans!"
Over at Powerline John Hinderaker publishes the text of a letter from Senator Jeff Sessions to Mr. Obama's Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Jacob Lew. If you thought that when President Obama took to the airwaves last Thursday in front of a joint session of Congress to introduce and sell his American Jobs Act that there a) actually was an American Jobs Act and b) that bill was ready for Congress to evaluate it's economic impact, well, think again. The letter reads in part:
When we received a copy of the legislation yesterday, we were expecting the Office of Management and Budget–which enjoys a five hundred person staff–to provide a precise and detailed estimate of the fiscal impact of the president’s proposal. But no such information was provided.
This is not satisfactory.
Perhaps even more troubling, however, is that despite the emphatic promise that we would learn yesterday how the bill would be offset, this information is missing too.
Given the depth of the economic crisis we now face–slow growth, high debt, and chronic unemployment–the lack of fiscal detail that has been provided to Congress is both disappointing and irresponsible...
When the president submitted his budget in February you declared: “our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore.” In reality, the budget would have increased our debt by $13 trillion.
Read that last paragraph again. The budget submitted would increase over 10 years the cumulative national debt by $13 trillion. Recall that we just raised the debt ceiling due to passing $14.5 trillion cumulative debt - that amount accumulated over the course of 235 years. So when the OMB director states that their budget "will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore," it's not because of spending restraint. It's because of plans for much, much, much higher levels of taxation.
Mr. Hinderaker helpfully includes an excerpt from a Washington Examiner editorial making the ploy evident. The Examiner notes that Director Lew outlined some of the increased revenues the President is seeking in this bill - and they're the same ones he wanted as part of deficit reduction earlier in the summer. Wanted, but didn't get. The Examiner editorial asks a very pertinent question.
Pressed to explain how Obama could use the same tax hikes to both meet the debt deal’s deficit reduction targets and pay for his new stimulus plan, Lew admitted that even Obama can’t count the same tax increases for two separate purposes. Instead, Lew said that Obama would be introducing a whole new slate of tax hikes next week, when he plans to give yet another deficit reduction speech.
Obama again insisted Monday that his second stimulus will be “fully paid for.” This is problematic on several levels. If Stimulus II is fully paid for with immediate tax hikes, then it isn’t the kind of deficit spending that Obama’s Keynesian logic demands. If it is only paid for later, at the end of the 10-year horizon, then this amounts to a budget gimmick, because Obama will be long gone from office by then.
That is, if the tax hikes go into effect now for the jobs bill, then the bill is "paid for" with tax increases - tax increases on job producers in the middle of a stagnant economy with no job growth. If the tax increase are delayed, and Keynesian "spend now, settle up later" is the plan, then it amounts to kicking the can down the road, burdening future congresses, future presidents, and future taxpayers with irrationally exhuberant debt. $13 trillion in 10 years indeed.
But look again at the statements of Mr. Lew. "Instead, Lew said that Obama would be introducing a whole new slate of tax hikes next week." I assume these would be in addition to those listed already. Ugh. These will be once again proposed with a prominent class warfare backdrop, and the word "fairness" will figure prominently, I'll bet. There won't, of course, be any definition of "fairness," and there won't be any mention of the fact that such tax increases burden businesses, investors, and job producers at the very point in time that they're needed most.
And if the "wascawy Wepubwicans" fail to raise the taxes that Mr. Obama's filibuster-proof Democratic congress previously refused to raise during a time of economic uncertainty? I can see the demagoguery coming, it's coming 'round the bend. And we won't see the sunshine since I don't know when.
I only have two questions. First, if this proposed bill is all that, why wasn't it proposed a long, long time ago? Second, what makes this bill so much different from the utterly failed 'Stimulus' I?
As an aside, did you catch the snickers and murmurs when he said that this isn't political grandstanding or class warfare - immediately after accusing Republicans of protecting "the most affluent citizens and corporations." Pfffft. Here's a link to CNN's "Live Blog," which has a transcript, more or less.
By the way, I think he's becoming Don Quixote, tilting at windmills that aren't there. For example:
I reject the idea that we need to ask people to choose between their jobs and their safety. I reject the argument that says for the economy to grow, we have to roll back protections that ban hidden fees by credit card companies, or rules that keep our kids from being exposed to mercury, or laws that prevent the health insurance industry from shortchanging patients. I reject the idea that we have to strip away collective bargaining rights to compete in a global economy.
Nobody has ever asked people to choose between jobs and safety. Nobody has proposed that credit card companies can hide their fees (hint: even before reforms were instituted they informed you, in the junk mail you usually threw away unopened.) Nobody wants kids gulping down mercury. And the last two are simply his defenses for ObamaCare and unions, both of which are stifling job growth and harming economic competitiveness.
There are no new ideas in this speech. The game is up. This president is all about redistribution, government control, union power, and environmental shackles on the productive sectors of America. He's not about economic growth, global competitiveness, energy security, individual rights and individual freedoms. I have yet to hear anything that would change that.
From today's Wall Street Journal's 'Notable & Quotable' feature, a snippet from a 1956 speech by Congressman Howard Buffet of Nebraska.
The last 40 years have seen a gigantic expansion of political power over economic affairs by the federal government. This change is linked by many scholars to the passage of the income tax law in 1913. This law revolutionized the taxing system in two ways:
1. It gave the government new powers over the economic status of the individual. This change has curtailed the ability of the individual to achieve economic independence.
2. The part of his production taken from the producer cumulatively increases the power of the federal government proportionately with the increase in its income. This power is not created; it is simply taken away from the people. . . .
George Sokolsky, noted columnist, says it this way: "When human beings become dependent upon the political power of the state for their livelihood, the independence of person must disappear. It is the identification of economic power with police power that destroys the right of the individual to liberty."
Or, to quote another American, our third president, in a much earlier time, “A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.” Thomas Jefferson also said this: “Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms (of government) those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”
Anyway, there's more at the link, including a quote that could be applied directly to the government health care grab in ObamaCare:
If the government is to guarantee you what the consequences of your actions will be in this case, security, then the government must take control of your activities. For with responsibility—even self-arrogated responsibility—must go authority
This means that if politicians are to supply your security, they must control your work, your spending, and your saving...
A second possibility is that he is simply not up to the task by virtue of his lack of experience and a character defect that might not have been so debilitating at some other time in history. Those of us who were bewitched by his eloquence on the campaign trail chose to ignore some disquieting aspects of his biography: that he had accomplished very little before he ran for president, having never run a business or a state; that he had a singularly unremarkable career as a law professor, publishing nothing in 12 years at the University of Chicago other than an autobiography; and that, before joining the United States Senate, he had voted “present” (instead of “yea” or “nay”) 130 times, sometimes dodging difficult issues.
I read that and, as did Charlie Brown when Lucy Van Pelt explored the psychological reasons for his malaise in "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and asked him if he had pantophobia - fear of everything - I wanted to jump to my feet and scream "THAT'S IT!!!" Serves you right, Dr. Westen, for being "bewitched by his eloquence."
And, I might add, those of us who were not "bewitched by his eloquence," or trying to feel better about America and ourselves by voting for a black man for president, but were instead simply trying to find the best available candidate for the job recognized and acknowledged all of these items ahead of the election. A curriculum vitae this thin would in political circles disqualify a Republican candidate from consideration, so why not Mr. Obama?
8/8/11 1750: Wherein the splendid James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal's great "Best of the Web" daily column writes in a similar (identical?) vein. Perhaps more eloquently, but still ...
He also sizes up the additional maneuvering in Dr. Westen's essay, and it's well worth your time to have a look.
Westen and Klein, and other like-minded progressives, have revealed that they dream of a strongman uniting the "masses." If that requires vilifying selected groups of Americans, they don't mind and may even view it as a plus.
Even if he wanted to, Barack Obama could not be a strongman, in part because he is a weak man and in part because America's constitution is a strong charter of liberty. But if Obama had the means and inclination to impose a dictatorship, is there any doubt that Drew Westen and Joe Klein, at least at the outset, would goose-step with gusto?
A "strongman uniting the masses." That thought does bring forth some thoroughly undesireable images.
He didn't just say that, did he? The President doesn't like the choices the voters made emphatically in 2010? Maybe if he rounded up and imprisoned the dissidents.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air runs the "Obamateurism of the Day" feature (here's a link to a list of them), wherein our president's least presidential moves are chronicled. It's definitely worth a look each day. I have a feeling this one will actually make it as tomorrow's "OOTD".
Laura Ingraham juxtaposing Obama and Carter. Brilliant. Shhhh ... don't tell anyone, but do you think there might be a theme, some sort of underlying principle, that guides misguided Democratic policy choices?
Chris Matthews thinks the screeching kids in the back seat are now trying to drive the car. Don't tell him, but the problem is that the screeching kids have been driving since January 2007*, and the adults, realizing we're lost, are trying to claw their way back into the front seat and behind the wheel.
The heart of Mr. Obama's press conference today, via The Hill:
President Obama on Friday kept up the pressure on Republicans to agree to revenue increases in a deal to raise the debt ceiling, claiming 80 percent of the public supports Democrats' demand for tax increases.
"The American people are sold," Obama said. "The problem is members of Congress are dug in ideologically."
Throughout the press conference, Obama blasted Republicans for ignoring what he said is the will of the American people by rejecting tax increases that would balance out spending cuts in a debt package.
Let's leave aside the assertion that "the American people are sold" on increasing taxes. (They're not.) Why, particularly, do spending cuts need to be "balanced" by tax increases? There are three reasons I can imagine, and none of them have anything to do with what's "best" for the country.
because in the interest of "fairness" more money needs to be collected and distributed from those who have
because in the interest of "compromise" Mr. Obama expects Republicans to roll over and give him the tax increase his filibuster-proof Democratic Congress wouldn't give him, even with low GDP growth and high-unemployment
because by demagoguing Republicans into agreeing to raise taxes he hopes to turn them all into George H. W. "read my lips" Bush before the next election.
I think the first reason is the driving force, but the third, with the President already in full re-election lockdown, is definitely a major consideration. Funny, none of those reasons involve actually helping economy grow and create jobs. Or perhaps in his next press conference Mr. Obama could explain how raising taxes will do that.
The so-called "Blue Dog" Democrats, the "centrist" Democrats who are just so much more conservative than those fire-breathing liberals who lead the Democratic party (and for whom these Blue Dogs voted, I might add) are upset at Republicans over the debt-ceiling negotiations.
But this time around, moderate Democrats are starting to sour on the process, arguing that the intractability among Republican rank and file is threatening their support.
“I’ve been for cutting the deficit for a long time, that’s what the Blue Dog mantra is about — but not in a radical way and not in the way that harms the economy. These folks are hijacking the issue as a way that is very unfortunate, and they’re voting ideology versus what I think is in the best interest of the country,” said Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-Calif.), a member of the moderate Blue Dog Caucus.
You know, Representative Cardoz, (D-Calif.), maybe they're just voting for what they think is in the best interest of the country. You know, voting their conscience, as opposed to yours. But if you think it's better to sharply raise taxes on the job creators in America's private economy, in the middle of history's most-sluggish recovery and a stagnant job market, then by all means join with Mr. Obama and denigrate the intentions of the Republicans, and demagogue the issue in class warfare terms.
The Daily Caller, in the person of reporter Amanda Carey, gets it wrong in a story trumpeting the "offer" from President Obama to "put Medicare and Social Security cuts" on the negotiating table. That's the headline, at least. In the story she phrases it somewhat more eloquently, as "major changes to Social Security and Medicare."
The Obama administration, in seeking $4 trillion in spending cuts in a debt limit deal, has put major changes to Social Security and Medicare on the table if Republicans agree to increased tax revenues.
The offer caters to both sides in the debt limit negotiations and according to the Washington Post, President Obama will urge congressional leaders on Thursday to seize the opportunity to act. The compromise, however, still puts both Republicans and Democrats in tough spots.
Democrats have vowed to protect Medicare and Social Security, while Republicans still argue that tax increases are not realistic legislative proposals. If leadership from both parties agree to the Obama’s compromise, the next move will be to sell the plan to their respective bases and to members of Congress.
Ms. Carey, judging by her thumbnail photo that accompanies the story, is way too young and recently graduated from J school to understand why her formulation in the third paragraph is so inaccurate, so I'll outline it for her here.
Republicans primary argument is not that "tax increases are not realistic legislative proposals," though indeed they are not. Their primary argument is that tax increases will take money from the private economy that is necessary for future economic growth. If your primary goal is job creation and a GDP growth then you don't siphon capital from the job creators. (If your goal is redistribution then fine, have at it.)
Finally, Mr. Obama is desperately seeking to be seen as the adult offering reasonable compromise between the sniping children in party leadership. He's not. If he were, we wouldn't have seen the harmful 'stimulus' outsourced to the Democratic leadership of Pelosi/Reid, we wouldn't have seen the moronic cash for clunkers program, we wouldn't have seen ObamaCare pushed through on a one party vote while a recovery was attempting to take hold, we wouldn't have seen no Democratic budget proposal for two years (other than Mr. Obama's - which was voted down 97-0 earlier this year), we wouldn't have seen the drilling moratorium and pushes for carbon taxes that would both increase the price of fossil fuels and siphon more money from the economy, and we wouldn't have seen repeated demands for "tax increases on the wealthy" and the ridiculous sniping over corporate jets. He still is looking for "increased tax revenue" despite previously admitting that increasing taxes in the midst of economic malaise is not helpful.
If Democrats wanted to solve the problem their "compromise" should consist of a) admission that our current tax structure is quite progressive already and that any tax rate increase for the foreseeable future is harmful, b) admission that both Medicare and Social Security need reform, not "cuts," and not demagoguery, and c) admission that ObamaCare was a bad idea that will only make matters worse both economically and in terms of personal freedom and choice. The country needs to make the safety net programs sustainable and promote economic growth, and not use them for political gain and redistribution.
By the way, Ms. Carey can be excused a bit, for she is young. NYT Columnist David Brooks, on the other hand, has no excuse. In this tantrum of a column he both misrepresents the position of the Republican opposition and then denigrates them, for good measure.
The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. A thousand impartial experts may tell them...
"The legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities?" "A thousand impartial experts?" Surely, he must be joking. Mr. Brooks is referring to his tribe as "intellectual authorities," and being in agreement with him they are therefore "impartial." But Mr. Brooks, I think, is well aware that there are, of course, other tribes, other "intellectual authorities" equally "impartial" in the eyes of others.
7/7/11 1205: Ed Morrissey: it's not a revenue problem, its a spending and recession problem. So fix the spending and the recession - the revenue will follow.
Over at Legal Insurrection Michael Alan recognizes the signs. He embedded a video from Mary Katherine Ham that contains more evidence that "spreading the wealth around" is the real goal. I'll follow his lead and embed the video also.
Gee, and to think, you all could have found that here 5 days ago. And I don't think he's thinking just about removing corporate jet subsidies.
He has, in his unscripted moments, a thoroughly redistributionist soul.
Fast forward. With the 'stimulus' that cost the country over $800 billion dollars in deficit spending (which did not, incidentally, keep the unemployment level under 8%), combined with keeping that additional spending on into the future, combined with the trillion-dollar ten-year cost of ObamaCare, combined with annual deficits of $1.4 to 1.7 trillion and the failure to address the not-so-long term problems with funding Social Security and Medicare, combined with the demagoguing of "the rich," "oil companies," "business" (and, frankly, anyone who isn't a union member or a registered Democrat), let's see if you can guess what Mr. Obama wants out of the talks to raise the debt ceiling.
The key disagreement is over taxes. Democrats, including Obama, say a major deficit-reduction agreement must include tax increases or the elimination of tax breaks for big companies and wealthy individuals. Republicans are demanding huge cuts in government spending and insisting there be no tax increases.
Let's remember that, first, it is possible to see steadily decreasing deficits even without tax increases and "huge cuts" in spending, to use the phraseology of the AP report. Here's Cato's Dan Mitchell, and he'll inform you in this video about the "current services baseline" that puts the lie to those "huge cuts."
Second, remember Mr. Obama's tendency to look at the economy as a political tool for rewarding his supporters and punishing those who are not, a tendency which largely explains why he has failed to help it recover. He's been too busy rewarding the UAW and unionized Boeing employees, among others, and punishing non-unionized workers in red South Carolina, Boeing itself, and GM and Chrysler bond-holders. Who could possibly object to job-killing, economy-stifling tax increases if they're hitting the "right" people?
Who indeed. Mr. Obama doesn't just want the UAW to have a large stake in GM. He'd like his administration to have its own large stake in the entire U.S. economy, so that the wealth can best be "spread around." There is, after all, a point where "you've made enough money," and apparently he and the Democrats in Washington know just where that is.
The debt ceiling will need to go up, but taxes shouldn't, and spending cuts should be the focus of everyone in the room. If Mr. Obama wants tax increases, make him propose them for 2012. He won't do that, of course. There's an election later that year.
6/26/11 1515: Via The Corner, Sen. John Kyl lays it out.
Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R., Ariz.) says a deal to raise the debt ceiling will come down to whether or not President Obama abandons his “ideological bent” to raise taxes on the American people.
“The president has to make a decision,” Kyl said on Fox News Sunday. “Which is more important to him, solving this problem reducing spending somewhat or making sure that we raise taxes on the American economy? If that’s his ideological bent here and under all circumstances that’s what he is going to insist on, we’ve got a big problem.”
"Ideological bent," "redistributionist soul," whatever. The point here is that it's apparent that Mr. Obama has a belief that higher tax rates on the producers and job-creators in and of itself is good, regardless of the economic disincentives and contraction that might occur. I shouldn't have to point this out, but there is a name for someone with such an ideological bent.
At the end of the day, President Obama must decide how the country will proceed. “He’s got to make that choice,” Kyl said. “And the best choice, I think, is not doing anything to harm the economy.”
A case of mistaken identity has entangled a small family-owned Des Moines company in union protests and led to a death threat.
Angry callers are mistaking Koch Brothers, a Des Moines office supply firm, with the brothers who own Koch Industries, the global energy conglomerate. Billionaires Charles and David Koch have fought Wisconsin unions, financed the tea party and opposed climate change rules.
Mr. Taranto notes, sardonically, that death threats seems to be "a way of life" for "union thugs" and blames Paul Krugman, who earlier in the column was noted to have written a couple of columns arguing against civility in political discourse.
I think a couple of other questions are worth asking. First, reading between the lines, is the Des Moines Register inferring by omission that had the threats been directed against the global conglomerate Kochs rather than the local office supply Kochs they would have been understandable, perhaps even acceptable? Second, are violent leftists so stupid that they can't figure out in advance who they want dead?
From the Wall Street Journal editorial page, discussing the 'hard choices' Mr. Obama made in reducing spending with his proposed budget.
The White House actually touts as tight-fisted a budget proposing a record $1.645 trillion deficit for fiscal 2011, due largely to a new surge in spending to 25.3% of GDP. That's more spending than in any year since 1945. Federal debt held by the public—the kind we have to pay back—will rise to 75.1% [of GDP] in 2012, which is the highest since 1951 and more than double what it was as recently as 2007. [chart at the link]
This $3.73 trillion budget does a Cee Lo Green ("Forget You," as cleaned up for the Grammys) to the voter mandate in November to control spending. It leaves every hard decision to the new House Republican majority. And it ignores almost entirely the recommendations of Mr. Obama's own deficit commission. No wonder the commission's Democratic co-chairman, Erskine Bowles, said Monday that this budget goes "nowhere near where they will have to go to resolve our fiscal nightmare." And he's an ally.
How unserious is this budget? Although the White House trumpets $2.18 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade, those savings are so far off in the magical "out years" that you can barely see them from here. More than 95% of the savings would happen after Mr. Obama's first term in the White House is over, and almost two-thirds of the promised deficit reduction would arrive after 2016. Pretending to cut deficits by pushing all real cuts into the future is Budget Flimflam 101.
Mr. Obama's budget put him in the position of back-bencher, not national leader. By letting the House Republican majority make all of the hard choices on programs and entitlements he and his minions in the media will be able to demagogue the 'cuts' and cruelty of the needed spending restraint. Well, back to what worked. He cut his teeth in politics by railing against the evil George Bush administration; why not rail some more against the evil Republican budget plan?
And don't give me these meaningless ten year totals, designed simply to make the sum total sound impressive. The out-years always change. There's no obligation on future congresses and future presidents to even use those projections as guidelines. And this budget has little if any spending reductions. The tax increases ("expiration of the Bush tax cuts" in liberal-speak) Mr. Obama is counting on for 2013 will probably be just as bad an idea then and won't pass a Republican House.
He's abdicating responsibility on spending restraint because, frankly, spending restraint is hard. Better just to vote "present" and let grown-ups make the hard choices. And then denounce them.
Politico has, today, the type of story that we're going to see repeatedly until Republicans actually, finally, choose a candidate to run against the incumbent president in 2012. How much more meaningless can polling be than polling a presidential contest between the current White House resident and someone who hasn't even declared candidacy and isn't supported - yet - by even all Republicans, let alone independents. This is comparing apples to ... imaginary oranges.
If the presidential election were to happen today, Barack Obama would win eight swing states and one electoral vote-giving congressional district that he won in 2008 but George W. Bush won in 2004, a new poll has found.
Obama would win all his match-ups against four likely presidential candidates — Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney — according to surveys conducted by Public Policy Polling over the last three months.
In Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Nebraska’s second congressional district, Obama would win by an average of seven points.
Romney does the best in match-ups against Obama, trailing by an average of six points. Huckabee trails by eight points, Gingrich by 12 and Palin by 16 points.
I have several thoughts. First, only seven points on average? That should shock the president's team. This is a man who's actually seen his flagging support stabilize and improve slightly, now that, overwhelmingly, the country put a checkrein on his most liberal impulses. And it's seven points against people who haven't declared? Wow.
Second, Ms. Palin only trails by 16 points? That's remarkable, considering the universal media venom spewed upon her every utterance and written word. Sure, she's some things that could be questioned. Who hasn't? But it's not as if she suggested that drugs should be illegal to prevent an economic benefit. Huh? Ms. Palin has also stirred the pot in ways that no other conservative could. "Death panels"* indeed.
Finally, the only reason these polls - and PPP is a Democratic polling firm - are being done is to provide support for the media-preferred narrative of re-election inevitability. There's a certain percentage of the population - 2, 3, 4% - who simply want to know they're voting for the guy/gal who will win. Fewer Democrats and Obama-leaning independents will bother to traipse to the polls if they think their effort is futile. Some polling takes the voters temperature, and some is designed to cool them off or heat them up. This is the latter, and Politico.com is happy to report the narrative.
Call me when one of these candidates officially declares, and I'll open my eyes. Call me again when the campaigning starts and I'll get up from my chair. Call me once more when a Republican frontrunner emerges, and maybe I'll start checking out a poll or two. Until then this falls firmly in the category "propaganda."
*"Death panels" is in quotes because that's how she wrote it in the original
I haven't commented to this point on Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the Clinton policy toward gay soldiers instituted when President Clinton discovered that, back in 1993, full repeal of the ban on gays was fully a bridge too far. With a super-majority in the Senate (until the election of Scott Brown, which really didn't change things regarding DADT) and a large majority in the House, President Obama has been under pressure to act on this for two years. The cowardly lions in the Democratic caucus sustained huge losses in last month's election, and so now there is urgency among the rejected lame ducks to pass much of the rejected agenda that they hadn't the courage to pass earlier. DADT falls into that category.
I haven't weighed in on the policy to this point for a number of reeasons. I don't have military experience, and so my opinion on the real-world effects of repeal on the services is not as well-informed as some other commenters. I also understand that the camps are tightly drawn, and there is not much opinion to be swayed. On the other hand, when it comes to being swayed by opinions myself in this instance I'm inclined to listen to the actual military commanders who have to deal with those real-world effects among their troops.
As a result, it seems to me that the repeal of DADT that occurred in a Senate vote yesterday marks the fall of a reasonable middle. DADT enforced the principle that private behavior is private, because said private behavior cannot be allowed to alter the effectiveness of troops in the field. Was that fair to gays in the military? Not really, but the over-riding concern was and should be the functioning of units. What's the miltary really for, after all?
On the other hand, I am also sufficiently impressed with the discipline and professionalism of the American military via observation that I believe that the more open policy will eventually have no real effect. What I will be troubled by for a while is how the transition may alter that effectiveness, particularly with ongoing combat operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere. I'm also troubled by celebrations of the change by pressure groups that have less concern for military functioning than for militant demonstrations.
Let's hope I'm right, and that the American military will continue to be the most effective and honorable fighting force the world knows.
The NY Times' Paul Krugman clearly believes that growing the economy and job growth should be secondary concerns to class warfare and redistribution. That seems to be the take-away message from this column on the wrangling over January's coming tax increases. (note: he routinely employs the "let the tax cuts expire" dodge that liberal prefer)
Democrats have tried to push a compromise: let tax cuts for the wealthy expire, but extend tax cuts for the middle class. Republicans, however, are having none of it. They have been filibustering Democratic attempts to separate tax cuts that mainly benefit a tiny group of wealthy Americans from those that mainly help the middle class. It’s all or nothing, they say: all the Bush tax cuts must be extended. What should Democrats do?
The answer is that they should just say no. If G.O.P. intransigence means that taxes rise at the end of this month, so be it.
So Mr. Krugman's answer, then, is this: If the price of avoiding a tax increase for the "middle class" is a tax increase for job creators and investors, then let them all eat cake. To hell with economic growth and reduced unemployment! Mr. Krugman tries to hide the significant differences in job creation like this:
...To be sure, letting taxes rise in a depressed economy would do damage — but not as much as many people seem to think.
A few months ago, the Congressional Budget Office released a report on the impact of various tax options. A two-year extension of the Bush tax cuts, it estimated, would lower the unemployment rate next year by between 0.1 and 0.3 percentage points compared with what it would be if the tax cuts were allowed to expire; the effect would be about twice as large in 2012. Those are significant numbers, but not huge — certainly not enough to justify the apocalyptic rhetoric one often hears about what will happen if the tax cuts are allowed to end on schedule.
Let's leave aside the fact that economic projections are mere fantasy, or don't you recall that the White House Budget Director predicted that the 'stimulus' would keep employment to 8% or less? Let's assume that there'll be a drop of 0.3% if the current rates are continued, the upper end of CBO projections. That translates to about 500,000 additional employed by year end 2011. The projection is that the effect would double for 2012, perhaps an additional 0.5% drop. Mr. Krugman would like you to believe that a 0.8% fall in unemployment by year end 2012, or an additional 1,500,000 jobs isn't worth it. It's far preferable for him to encourage Mr. Obama to stand up to those evil Republicans, the greedy SOB's.
I'm sorry, but I think it is is preferable to pursue policies that spur economic growth and job creation. I suspect you do also.
As an aside, in making his case Mr. Krugman also pretends that gutting social security and Medicare are necessary if the tax increases fail to go into effect. Again, speaking of gutting entitlements, I won't deal right now with ObamaCare's directive to cut $500B from Medicare and to set up a rationing board. But I will let Cato's Dan Mitchell tell him how the budget deficit can decline through spending control and economic growth.
Unwilling to delay until tomorrow mistakes that could be made immediately, Democrats used 2010 to begin losing 2012. Trying to preemptively drain the election of its dangerous (to Democrats) meaning, all autumn Democrats described the electorate as suffering a brain cramp, an apoplexy of fear, rage, paranoia, cupidity - something. Any explanation would suffice as long as it cast what voters were about to say as perhaps contemptible and certainly too trivial to be taken seriously by the serious.
It is amazing the ingenuity Democrats invest in concocting explanations of voter behavior that erase what voters always care about, and this year more than ever - ideas. This election was a nationwide recoil against Barack Obama's idea of unlimited government.
The more he denounced Republicans as the party of "no," the better Republicans did. His denunciations enabled people to support Republicans without embracing them as anything other than impediments to him.
Some liberals got it, but not Mr. Obama. No, he insisted in his first press conference that it was really that he didn't move quickly enough to enact his central control over even more areas of American lives. No, what Americans were really asking for was to get that Cap & Trade passed, and to let them have ObamaCare in full now, rather than in 2014.* Charles Krauthammer nailed this on Fox News last night, after the press conference.
When he was asked about three times at the beginning of the press conference, ‘Do you think people were repudiating you or voting against the health-care plan?’ And he acted as if he was being questioned about the natural order of stuff, as if the reporters were questioning the elliptical orbit of the planets. He couldn’t understand how anybody could not see the beneficence of health-care reform. …
He gets this incredible landslide against him and his policies — and he believes … that the progress isn’t rapid enough. He’s just had a refutation of two years of his agenda and his ideology, and he pretends as if nothing has happened.
Some liberals see it, though. Doyle McManus in the LA Times:
When the Democrats lost in 1994, Clinton's reaction the next day was: "They sent us a clear message. I got it."
You didn't hear words like that from Obama on Wednesday. He blamed his party's reverses on the slow pace of economic recovery, on the "ugly mess" of deal-making in Congress and on the White House bubble that makes him look isolated. The only specific failing the president acknowledged on his part was his failure to keep the business community on his side. Where Clinton accepted — grudgingly — that his party had overreached and needed to move toward the center, Obama insisted that everything his administration had done was right, even if some of it was misunderstood.
It's the policies, stupid. It doesn't seem that Mr. Obama will ever admit that any of the policies he pursued were mistaken. It bodes poorly for rolling back some of these mistaken efforts, it bodes poorly for economic growth and recovery over the next two years, and it bodes poorly for Mr. Obama's chances in 2012. I don't think he's concerned about that if he can put in place sufficient immovable nanny-stateism before that day of reckoning arrives. It'll be the task of the Republican House in 2011 to do what they can to stabilize the damage, and preserve options for moving the immovable in the future.
*Note: The only reason the numbers came close to showing that it was paid for was because of that 2014 start date, 10 years of taxes for 6 years of government healthcare.
Updating James Carville's famous phrase from Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign for the 21st century, it really is all about the policies, stupid. Public Policy Polling carries an interesting graphic looking at the President's approval with net +/- for each state with a Senate race in play. One state - just one - has net approval of the President - Connecticut by only +2. In every other state Mr. Obama is what PPP refers to as a "big drag" on the Democratic candidates.
If this election is a referendum on Barack Obama then o boy are Democrats in trouble...
There's a lot of good Democrats tonight- both incumbents and challengers- who are going to lose and it won't be because of anything they did wrong. It's just hard to overcome an incumbent President of your party being so unpopular with the people most motivated to vote.
It's the policies, stupid. People have realized what some of us saw before the election in 2008. Mr. Obama is a man of the left, an ideologue not prone to compromise on any of his core beliefs. He is firmly convinced that a wise and just omnipotent government (which his hubris tells him is obviously the case with him in charge) can alter the economic and political landscape to favor unions, friends of Democrats and Democratic voting constituencies without detriment; takeover large chunks of the economy and micromanage them to the benefit of all; generate economic growth by removing dollars from the economy, funneling them through government middlemen (thus depleting them) and then re-inserting them at less than par value; dictate human behavior and when challenged ignore those who object.
The 'stimulus' package did not stimulate. ObamaCare is in sheep's clothing a takeover of the healthcare system, which will be killed by redtape, underfunding, 'incentives' and mandates. Cap & Trade was unable to pass even for a Democratic Congress with huge majorities in both houses, so Mr. Obama's EPA will do it by regulatory fiat. Amnesty for illegal immigrants without border control is de facto abdication of American sovereignty, yet he's in favor of it. He's not terribly serious about either winning wars or fighting terrorism, as evidenced by his failure to ever define winning.
No, it's not the messaging, but the policies that led to the messages. It's not something a few appearances by the First Lady can fix. It's not just the economy, but rather the further detriment to the economy that came about through ineffective and in particular damaging policy choices. These aren't "moderate" policy choices in any sense of the word. And it's not that we are "hard wired not to always think clearly when we're scared, or that voters are just uninformed. For example, I'll be most people know that bad mortgage policy emanating from Washington and from Fannie and Freddie was at the root of the economic fall. The banks administering the bad loans were carriers, not the source of the problem.
The American people are smarter and more observant than Mr. Kerry and Mr. Obama give them credit for being. Pollster Scott Rasmussen may be right that people won't be voting for the GOP as much as voting against the Democrats. Okay, I can live with that. It's the policies, stupid.
Four years ago in the Republican purge of November 2006, when Democrats took control of the House of Representatives, Republican Charlie Bass (NH-2) was ousted from his seat by Democrat Paul Hodes, who is now running what is very likely a losing battle for the Senate against Kelly Ayotte. Back then I wrote this about the loss by Mr. Bass:
I kept hearing about the vaunted Republican turnout machine in the run-up to the election. And yet, those voters simple evaporated, never showed up. How can we tell? Let's look at the loss of Congressman Charlie Bass to Paul Hodes in NH-2, which happens to be my district. Using rough numbers, in 2004, (admittedly a high profile Presidential year) Mr. Bass received 193,000 votes to Mr. Hodes 125,000, in a state that John Kerry won (barely). In the last midterm year, 2002, Bass received 125,000 votes out of 220,000 votes total. This year there were roughly 205,000 votes, or despite the intensity of the runup to this election, a 7% drop in total votes. Bass received only 93,000, 100,000 fewer than he got in 2004. Where did all these voters go? They didn't go to Hodes, who received 108,000 votes, less than he got in 2004, and only 13,000 more than the Democrat got in 2002.
So where did they go? They went shopping.
The problem for Mr. Bass in 2006 wasn't the tidal wave of votes in favor of Paul Hodes. It was the ebb of votes that he received. Voters, after much Democratic demagoguery ably assisted by a complicit media, became disenchanted with the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq and punished those associated with it by going shopping. Mr. Bass was a casualty.
Now, I'm not an avid Charlie Bass backer. I supported Jennifer Horn in the primary. But I like him, his ideas, and the 'R' next to his name much more than his the comparable characteristics of his opponent in this year's attempt to return to the House. Ann Kuster is an unreconstructed leftist. Not only does she favor ObamaCare, she wants the 'public option', i.e., single payer. She's in favor of raising taxes on the job creators in a recession. And she's proudly a "community activist," and certainly a Democratic activist. As the NH Union-Leader said in their endorsement of Mr. Bass,
Hodes' liberalism was too much for the voters of the 2nd District, which is more moderate than the 1st District, but not as liberal as Vermont. But New Hampshire Democrats have not been able to maintain the facade they erected in 2004, with which they present themselves as traditional New Hampshire moderates, not the Vermont-style liberals they really are. Last month, they nominated someone even more liberal than Paul Hodes to run for the 2nd District seat: Concord lobbyist Ann McLane Kuster.
Kuster is so liberal she thinks Obamacare didn't go far enough in taking over the health care and health insurance industries. She actually thinks the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 caused the recession. She supports the stimulus and thinks Washington should pass another one.
The people of New Hampshire want representatives in Washington who will put the brakes on the Obama agenda, not accelerate it. In the 2nd District, that means electing an actual moderate, not a liberal who pretends to be one. It means electing Charlie Bass.
This is probably not the year to be either type of activist. This year, with the Obama Administration's policy overreach, which I plan to discuss in a subsequent post and which is comparable as a motivating factor to the Iraq war in 2006, Charlie Bass will win. The Boston Globe reported recently a UNH poll and found that in NH-2 it was Kuster 43% - Bass 40%. I don't generally do predictions, but today it will be Bass 53% - Kuster 46%. It's going to be hard for Ms. Kuster to find voters motivated for more of what the Democrats in Washington are peddling. Today those voters decide not to go shopping ... or perhaps because of the economy they can't. This one will flip to the Republicans, and it won't be that close.
11/2/10 1100: The Cook Political Report has a neat little dashboard gadget. Just slide along the second bar graph and find the race you want. Bass-Kuster is in the "toss-up" category in the toward the left end of the green bar. Check whatever race interests you.
11/3/10 1730: Looks like my political predicting days have not yet arrived. I thought there'd be more conservative voters showing up at the polls, but although Bass won he underperformed, at 48 to 47% for Kuster, a 4000 vote margin. And total votes were only about 213,000, fairly typical for a midterm in NH 2nd district despite having Kelly Ayotte highlighting the Senate race and a close gubernatorial contest along with policy issues. Well, New Hampshire, with no sales tax and no income tax, has weathered the economic seas better than most. Unemployment is still roughly 5.5% here.
