(Re)State of the Union

I mean, really....it doesn't even seem like he's trying anymore.

Rehashing the same tired lines, delivered at an 8th grade reading level. It just reinforces the perception that President Obama likes the idea of being President much more than actually doing the job. Good thing the GOP has such a strong field of candidates....

Gridlock Isn't Bad When It's Wanted

The Providence Journal editors did their best, Sunday, to blame Republicans and otherwise minimize the culpability of President Obama for his questionable recess appointments during the dubious recess that legislators don't believe they had. It's curious to note that no mention is made of the fact that two of the four nominees were put forward just two days before the Senate's scheduled adjournment, not leaving time for even basic background checks. Hardly gridlock.

But what's interesting is the notion that the American people care about this sort of battle:

On purely political grounds, the president would seem to be in a strong position. Many Americans can readily sympathize with his frustration since the 2010 elections saddled him with stronger opposition and a Republican-led House.

Who, exactly, do the editors believe did the saddling? (Or is "many" a term indicating "people with whom we associate"?) By the election results alone, we can see that many Americans thought it important to stop, or at least slow, President Obama's rampage through the national laws. Many of those who care about bureaucratic appointments, at least to the point of being aware that they exist, may very well want gridlock.

And even those who do not might pause to consider — as the editors do not — whether the president bears some responsibility for nominating candidates whom his duly elected opposition will find uncontroversial enough to expedite their confirmation.

GOP's Circular Firing Squad: National Edition - None of these guys are beyond reproach

I haven't committed strongly to any of the GOP presidential hopefuls, mainly because they're all different flavors of meh. But one of them is going to win and run against Obama. It's up to the GOP to figure out who has the "best chance" of beating the President. The one thing that has annoyed me the most, though, are the various supporters of each candidate getting all "holier than thou" when it comes to defending their pick vs. the others. None of these guys are "all that." Just take the three front-runners.

Mitt Romney has flip-flopped enough to warrant a website devoted to chronicling the pattern. His ideology seems to be "I'm running for President". He seems wooden and too-perfect & it doesn't "feel" like he can relate to the average person.

But before you Gingrich-ites or Paulians get all self-righteous, be careful. Gingrich was for Romney's health care reform before he was against it.

“The health bill that Governor Romney signed into law this month has tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system,” said an April 2006 newsletter published by Mr. Gingrich’s former consulting company, the Center for Health Transformation.

Except now, apparently, Gingrich's people are claiming that Newt didn't really write that endorsement. Uh. Yeah. That's kinda what Newt called Ron Paul out on when Paul disavowed the racist stuff in Paul's own newsletters, saying he didn't write them (which is probably correct...or maybe not.). So, memo to self--newsletters written under your own name aren't your responsibility.

As for Paul....his either an isolationist or a non-interventionist, depending on how you interpret his foreign policy stances. But it seems he doesn't let such things as moral imperatives instruct his decision-making. He said he wouldn't have fought WWII if it "only" meant saving the Jews from the Holocaust. And he thought that Lincoln fighting the Civil War to free the slaves was a mistake. 'Cause the slaves would have been freed eventually, anyway. (Of course, the fact that the South kinda started it with that whole secession thing....). Those are two pretty big, albeit theoretical, "take a pass" items.

All of them have good ideas. Despite his flipping and apparent lack of an ideological touchstone, Romney would be competent. Gingrich is a big ideas guy. Paul makes sense in some fiscal areas and when it comes to cutting government. It's just a matter of how much of the negative baggage you think the voting public can take along with the good ideas. Maybe there's some acceptable ratio. Or maybe it will just come down to media spin and "optics." Just like last time. Great.

Congress Pays

If you haven't already, take some time to watch the 60 Minutes piece on congressional insider trading. Taking the lead from work done by Peter Schweizer for his new book Throw Them All Out, the story delves into how so many of our elected officials manage to end up as millionaires after a few terms in Washington, D.C. Maddeningly, the practice is legal and not exclusive to members of one party. (And, according to WPRI, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse has apparently engaged in the practice, though he--according to a spokesman--"is not actively involved in the management of this investment account"). For example, to pick a couple high-profile individuals:

During the healthcare debate of 2009, members of Congress were trading health care stocks, including House Minority Leader John Boehner, who led the opposition against the so-called public option, government funded insurance that would compete with private companies. Just days before the provision was finally killed off, Boehner bought health insurance stocks, all of which went up....former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband have participated in at least eight IPOs. One of those came in 2008, from Visa, just as a troublesome piece of legislation that would have hurt credit card companies, began making its way through the House. Undisturbed by a potential conflict of interest the Pelosis purchased 5,000 shares of Visa at the initial price of $44 dollars. Two days later it was trading at $64. The credit card legislation never made it to the floor of the House.

Schweizer explains why he wrote the book:

This is not a book about corrupt political leaders. It is instead about a compromised political system. The purpose of the book is not to single out certain individual members, but to look at a broad pattern of financial transactions and expose possible insider trading and conflicts of interest. The book reveals a pattern of suspicious stock trading by members of congress from both parties based on their financial disclosure statements and legislative activities....the political leaders named here are the beneficiaries of these trades and were anyone else in America to engage in these sort of trading patterns, they would likely receive scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Indeed, private citizens might very likely go to jail were they to do this as it relates to their own jobs.

The real scandal is that in our current system of government, these trades are perfectly legal. We wouldn’t tolerate professional athletes betting on their games. So why do we let our leaders do it on something far more important?

The Power of (Urban) Myth

This is the first time I've heard this version* of a rather infamous story involving a certain current Presidential candidate:

It was the spring of 1980.

I was 13 years old, and we were about to leave Fairfax, Va., and drive to Carrollton, Ga., for the summer. My parents told my sister and me that they were getting a divorce as our family of four sat around the kitchen table of our ranch home.

Soon afterward, my mom, sister and I got into our light-blue Chevrolet Impala and drove back to Carrollton.

Later that summer, Mom went to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta for surgery to remove a tumor. While she was there, Dad took my sister and me to see her.

It is this visit that has turned into the infamous hospital visit about which many untruths have been told. I won't repeat them. You can look them up online if you are interested in untruths. But here's what happened:

My mother and father were already in the process of getting a divorce, which she requested.

Dad took my sister and me to the hospital to see our mother.

She had undergone surgery the day before to remove a tumor.

The tumor was benign.

As with many divorces, it was hard and painful for all involved, but life continued.

As have many families, we have healed; we have moved on.

We are not a perfect family, but we are knit together through common bonds, commitment and love.

My mother and father are alive and well, and my sister and I are blessed to have a close relationship with them both.

The one I've heard--umpteen times--is the Newt Gingrich served his cancer-stricken wife divorce papers while she was on her deathbed. So now it turns out she's still alive. And now, as Paul Harvey once said, you know the rest of the story.

*Which, you know, just might be the definitive version given it's an eyewitness account and all. Right. I'm sure conspiracy buffs will totally take this one at face value.

Food for (Weekend) Thought

From Kevin Williamson writes:

Between the candidates’ debates and my conversations with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, it seems to me that there is a persistent, dangerous disconnect between our political conversation and reality.

He lists some points:

1. There is no austerity.

2. There was no deregulation.

3. You can’t trust Republicans on spending.

4. Wall Street loves Democrats.

5. People who voted for Barack Obama on civil-liberties grounds are fools.

6. If you aren’t for massive entitlement reform, you’re for massive tax hikes.

7. But taxing the rich won’t close the deficit.

8. The housing bubble was largely a political creation.

9. Well-meaning politicians are just as dangerous as self-serving ones.

10. There’s no way out of this jam without big cuts to popular programs.

And here's some additional support for a couple of the above points:

8. The housing bubble was largely a political creation.

4. Wall Street loves Democrats.

How Long Do They Get To Stay?

How long do the Occupy Providence protesters get to stay in the park with tents up, food kitchens cooking, medical tents operating? How long until the city tells them that it's time to go, they had their time for protesting and now they're done? Of course, whenever that comes, they'll all claim that their constitutional right to assembly has been violated. Was this what the writers of the US Constitution had in mind when they put that into the First Amendment?

At least the city and state has some precedent. Remember Camp Runamuck*? The tent city group who pitched their tents under the I-195 overpass as a way of protesting the homelessness problem in Providence? After a few months, the state told them it was time to go and the city promptly erected fences in the area to keep people out.

I don't think there'll be any fences put up around Burnside Park any time soon, but the Occupiers made their statement, they got their press and now what? When does it just become another tent city? If the protesters want to keep protesting, then why not have a daily or weekly march? They don't all have to live in tents to do that. Simply set a specific time each day or week and then hold the protests.

The protesters in other cities have been going at it for longer than Providence, however that shouldn't keep the authorities here from taking a stand, thanking the protesters for keeping it civil but tell them they're welcomed back any time to protest but now it's time to go.

*link is to a newspaper in New Orleans as many links to old projo.com stories no longer return any content.

Even if it's Amazing, It's not fair, so I hate everything

Trying to figure out this Occupy thing? Right now, this seems to explain it the best (h/t):

Remember this bit by Louis CK (thanks for reminding me, Will)?


Protest song!


...a sultan and student both have iPhone 4s...it's not fair

Overall, much of the logic seems to go something like this (h/t):

ADDENDUM: I put this is all under our "On a lighter note...." category because there is humor in the unknowns surrounding the Occupy movement. Still, there are serious questions that haven't been answered.

Now, a movement that started with no concrete goals as a simple protest of power must decide what to do with some power of its own. Can a leaderless group that relies on consensus find a way for so many people to agree on what comes next? Can it offer not only objections but also solutions? Can a radical protest evolve into a mainstream movement for change?

Unfortunately, from what I have heard of the solutions, they roughly approximate the tongue-in-cheek poster above. In writing about the recent passing of Steve Jobs, Kevin Williamson illustrated that there is a dichotomy:

The beauty of capitalism — the beauty of the iPhone world as opposed to the world of politics — is that...[w]hatever drove Jobs, it drove him to create superior products, better stuff at better prices. Profits are not deductions from the sum of the public good, but the real measure of the social value a firm creates. Those who talk about the horror of putting profits over people make no sense at all. The phrase is without intellectual content. Perhaps you do not think that Apple, or Goldman Sachs, or a professional sports enterprise, or an Internet pornographer actually creates much social value; but markets are very democratic — everybody gets to decide for himself what he values. That is not the final answer to every question, because economic answers can satisfy only economic questions. But the range of questions requiring economic answers is very broad.

I was down at the Occupy Wall Street protest today, and never has the divide between the iPhone world and the politics world been so clear: I saw a bunch of people very well-served by their computers and telephones (very often Apple products) but undeniably shortchanged by our government-run cartel education system. And the tragedy for them — and for us — is that they will spend their energy trying to expand the sphere of the ineffective, hidebound, rent-seeking, unproductive political world, giving the Barney Franks and Tom DeLays an even stronger whip hand over the Steve Jobses and Henry Fords. And they — and we — will be poorer for it.

And to the kids camped out down on Wall Street: Look at the phone in your hand. Look at the rat-infested subway. Visit the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, then visit a housing project in the South Bronx. Which world do you want to live in?

Well, When You Put It That Way

Mark Steyn may be the perfect columnist for his times, because one really needs a flair for humor of the absurd to comment appropriately on the absurdity of modern Western governance:

The estimated cost of the non-bill is just shy of half a trillion dollars. Gosh, it seems like only yesterday that Washington was in the grip of a white-knuckle, clenched-teeth showdown over whether a debt ceiling deal could be reached before the allegedly looming deadline. When the deal was triumphantly unveiled at the eleventh hour, it was revealed that our sober, prudent, fiscally responsible masters had gotten control of the runaway spending and had carved (according to the most optimistic analysis) a whole $7 billion of savings out of the 2012 budget. The president then airily breezes into Congress and in 20 minutes adds another $447 billion to the tab. That’s what meaningful course correction in Washington boils down to: seven billion steps forward, 447 billion steps back.

This $447 billion does not exist, and even foreigners don't want to lend it to us. A majority of it will be "electronically created" by the Federal Reserve buying U.S. Treasury debt. Don't worry, it's not like "printing money": we leave that to primitive basket-cases like Zimbabwe. This is more like one of those Nigerian email schemes, in which a prominent public official promises you a large sum of money in return for your bank account details. In the case of Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner, one prominent public official is promising to wire a large sum of money into the account of another prominent public official, which is a wrinkle even the Nigerians might have difficulty selling.

As Steyn points out, there is no bill to pass, yet, still:

... back on the campaign trail the chanting goes on, last week's election results in Nevada and New York notwithstanding. America has the lowest employment since the early Eighties, the lowest property ownership since the mid-Sixties, the highest deficit-to-GDP ratio since the Second World War, the worst long-term unemployment since the Great Depression, the highest government dependency rate of all time, and the biggest debt mountain in the history of the planet.

It's time we start learning, lest we prove ourselves crazy through repetition.

Two Republican Victories in Congress

The Republicans won two US House seats by special election yesterday, in Nevada and New York. In Nevada, Republican Mark Amodel won the seat replacing Dean Heller who was appointed to replace John Ensign. The Nevada win wasn't unexpected as that district has never elected a Democrat in its history, but a 22-point victory was bigger than expected.

The more surprising result was Republican Bob Turner winning in New York's 9th district, a seat previously held by Mark Weiner, of Twitter fame. Turner's 8-point win doesn't sound like much until you learn the demographics of the district.

the district is registered three to one in favor of Democrats and the Queens party machine is strong, they had over 1,000 volunteers in the district in a get out the vote effort knocking on doors over the weekend and the past two days. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has spent more than $500,000 in television ads in the district.

Outside groups also poured money in the race and Sheinkopf estimates that the Democrats could have outspent Republicans “six or eight to one” in the race.

So if this is a heavily Democratic district with a great volunteer effort and a huge war chest and still loses, that can't be a good sign for Democrats and President Obama heading into the 2012 election season.

Turner ran a campaign that could and probably should be replicated here in Rhode Island. The focus of his campaign was to run against Congress and President Obama rather than his opponents. This makes great sense as Congress always has horrible popularity polls. Currently, realclearpolitics.com has a job approval rating of just 13%. President Obama has an approval rating of 44% and disapproval of 51%. Turner came pretty close to blatantly admitting his focus was on the President and not his Democratic opponent. One of the campaign issues was the President's stance on borders in Israel, and Turner admitted:

“It’s not about my position or his [Weprin] which are pretty identical, it’s the president’s position and if you are with the party or against it, simple as that and will this district, which is surprisingly overwhelmingly Democratic, will they go along with the president and be able to be taken for granted as it were or will they send this message of protest and dissatisfaction,” Turner told ABC News.

Maybe a similar strategy could be adopted by candidates in RI running against David Cicilline, Jim Langevin and Sheldon Whitehouse. Run against the body instead of the individual and put a focus on the job approval ratings. Individual polling numbers are often quite higher than those for Congress as a whole. However, in spite of his 17% approval rating in March, I'd be willing to guess that Cicilline might be pleased to get up to a 13% job approval rating pretty soon.

Only fourteen months to find out whether this was a sign of things to come.

Who Pays for Past Mistakes

Generational warfare: It's bound to happen here in Rhode Island with the pension crisis. It's also happening nationally on the budget deficit debate with the new Super Congressional panel set to convene. Education Policy wonk Rick Hess offers his perspective:

You're either with the kids or with those rushing to the ramparts to defend retiree entitlements. So, which is it?

Consider the President's vague calls last week to spend billions more on school construction and preserving school staffing levels (which would've been more compelling if he had offered any inkling as to how we might pay for it). Obama finds himself unable to do more than offer marginal, dead-on-arrival programs because the feds have spent more than half the budget just mailing checks to retirees, covering health care bills, and paying interest on the accumulated debt. Everything else—schools, financial aid, the FBI, defense, transportation, the environment, NASA, foreign aid, you name it—has to make do with what's left.

As Julia Isaacs at the Brookings Institution has pointed out, the federal government now spends about $7 on seniors for every $1 it spends on children....Do we really think it's a good idea to spend half of all non-interest spending on making retirement ever more comfy?

Past or future? Which will it be? He provides an important breakdown of we pay for current Medicare spending:

[T]oday's retirees have contributed taxes that amount to less than half their Medicare outlays. Today's Medicare payroll tax doesn't fund Medicare--it funds only Part A (hospital expenses). Premiums cover just 25 percent of Part B (doctor treatments and visits). And premiums for Bush's Medicare drug program (Part D) cover just 10 percent of the cost. The rest of the hundreds of billions in outlays for these programs is vacuumed out of general revenue. (See here for a good breakdown on Medicare funding.)

And Social Security:

Social Security has the government reflexively spending hundreds of billions to mail out monthly checks to the wealthiest segment of the population, without an ounce of thought as to whether that's the best use of borrowed funds (the famed Social Security "trust fund" being, you know, nonexistent). The Social Security Administration reports that more than 20 percent of those 65+ have incomes over $65,000 a year. In a nation where median household income is in the $40,000s, is it really radical to rethink how much we mail to these households every month?

As for taxes:

Toss in all of the tax deductions that President Obama called for eliminating this summer, including the corporate jet deal, and you address another $400 billion over 10 years, or less than 2 percent of the shortfall. So, just keeping the deficit from exploding will involve all those taxes and trillions more in cuts. Those demanding substantial new spending then need to raise hundreds of billions beyond that, through additional cuts or tax increases....Even with hefty tax increases, protecting existing entitlements ensures that we won't have much available for schools, colleges, or anything else.

He urges education advocates to step up to the plate and take on the AARP and similar groups so that more money can go towards kids and education.

In short, it's possible to get our house in order, free up dollars for schooling, and shift dollars towards youth. But doing so requires facing down the massive, intimidating seniors' lobby.

Shared sacrifice involves asking Baby Boomers and retirees to step up and, you know, sacrifice. It doesn't mean holding harmless the generations who voted themselves free stuff through the good times and doesn't rely almost entirely on raising taxes and curtailing benefits for the under-40 set.

Hess' bailiwick is education and his goal is to increase funding for it. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with Hess' priorities, his argument helps to lay out the choice that needs to be made: should the people who benefited or made the mistakes in the past be held most accountable for those mistakes? Or should their kids and grandkids?

Toning Down the Rhetoric?

On Monday, Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, Jr, urged labor to "win the war" on the Tea Party, told the President "we are your army" and "let's take these son of a ****** out" amid cheers from the crowd.

Just your usual Teamster rally? Not exactly, not when the President then follows those words with a speech on the same stage. No condemnation for the words, nothing asking Mr. Hoffa for civility in public discourse, as he did back in January

"...only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to our challenges as a nation, in a way that would make them proud.”

Waging war on the Tea Party? We are your army, ready to march? Take them out? This is what the President considers to be civility in public discourse?

The President has been asked to condemn the words of Mr. Hoffa and all we have so far is White House Press Spokesman Jay Carney stating,

"These weren't comments by the President," he said.

"The President wasn't there -- I mean, he wasn't on stage. He didn't speak for another 20 minutes. He didn't hear it. I really don't have any comment beyond that."

And later

"Mr. Hoffa speaks for himself and the labor movement, and the President speaks for himself."

It's now been a few days and Mr. Hoffa has had time to think about his comments. Asked what he thinks in hindsight,

"I would [say it again] because I believe it," he said. "They've declared war on us. We didn't declare war on them, they declared war on us. We're fighting back. The question is, who started the war?"

Carrying this to a ludicrous extreme, if a racist gets up on stage and goes off on a ridiculous anti-Obama diatribe and then Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann or Mitt Romney follow that speaker on the stage, will Obama and the Democrats be fine with an explanation of "Hey, those were the comments of that guy, not ours!" Of course not. That would be just as unacceptable as the President's current stance on Hoffa's rhetoric.

Whitehouse/Langevin Profiting From Wall Street Banks

If you read things from the progressive caucus and others who follow it closely, big business, big banks and Wall Street firms are the devil. You can also read about some of their darlings like Sheldon Whitehouse and the now-near-untouchable Jim Langevin. However today, GoLocalProv.com has a front page article on the worth of Rhode Island's Washington delegation. I congratulate each of these people on their wealth and money management that they've achieved, but in the article, one part really jumped out at me:

Whitehouse also reports collecting between $15,001-$50,000 in interest each with dozens of publicly traded assets including Goldman Sachs, ... Bank of America, Bear Stearns

and

Langevin also owns stock in General Electric and Goldman Sachs (between $6,002-$17,500)

It would seem to me that these guys are trying to have it both ways. They get their base all stirred up about these big bad Wall Street banks and how they need to be investigated, but at the same time, they're financially involved in them. It sure isn't in the best interest of Whitehouse or Langevin to open any great investigations, as that could cause the stock values to plummet if there was a real negative finding. If you're making upwards of $50,000 just on *interest* in a company like Goldman-Sachs, you sure don't want to see that value drop.

A Bad Economy Is in the Democrats' Favor Structurally

William Jacobson makes an interesting point regarding the intersection of the economy and electoral politics:

Workers giving up hope, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low, is keeping Obama's reelection hopes alive. If the headlines screamed that unemployment was 11.4%, even I might begin to believe [that the U.S.A. would not give Obama a second term].

We've already begun to see commentary and political cartoons attempting to smear Republicans on the grounds that it's in their electoral interests for the economy to stay sour until the next election. There is some truth to that, but inasmuch as it's a bipartisan reality with every election, it's hardly a strong moral condemnation.

Rephrased, a bit, what Jacobson is saying is that it would help the Republicans if the statistics better reflected, to voters, how bad the condition of the economy really is. But there's a deeper way in which this particular data point helps the Democrats: Workers who give up move toward dependency on the government, and the Democrats are the party of dependency. If you're struggling to find work in the private sector, you're more apt to want the market to be free to thrive, to want employers to be given more space to invest and hire. Those who throw up their hands are thereafter more likely to put out their hands to collect whatever money the government directs toward them.

Fairness Doctrine Signs Off. But Does the Senior Senator from Massachusetts Approve?

The Fairness Doctrine has been deep sixed by President Obama's FCC. Bravo.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said that the decision to eliminate the Fairness Doctrine was part of a larger mandate proposed by the Obama administration to ease regulatory burdens by getting rid of duplicative or outdated measures.

Ever since reading about this rare bit of good news out of Washington, I've been trying to match it to the fatuous comments made a couple of weeks ago by Senator John Kerry (D-Sailing).

The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual.

It doesn't deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do.

... Okay, so if "the media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance", he must oppose the Fairness Doctrine, as he himself would define it. Except he's on record as supporting the Fairness Doctrine. But he wants the views of certain political groups not to get equal time from the media. So he opposes the Fairness Doct ...

Forget it. My fault for attempting to pierce the thought process of a man who once said,

I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.

I'm going back to vacuuming my car and other hurricane preparations.

Wisconsin

In case you missed it in Wisconsin

After tens of millions of dollars spent by outside interest groups, dozens of attack ads and exhaustive get-out-the-vote efforts, Democrats on Tuesday fell short of their goal of taking control of the state Senate and stopping the agenda of Gov. Scott Walker.

Republicans won four of six recall races, meaning the party still holds a narrow 17-16 majority in the Senate — at least until next week, when Sens. Robert Wirch, D-Pleasant Prairie, and Jim Holperin, D-Conover face their own recall elections....Going into Tuesday, Republicans controlled the body 19-14, so Democrats needed to win at least three seats and hold onto two more next week to take over.

"The revolution has not occurred," said UW-Milwaukee political science professor Mordecai Lee, a former Democratic lawmaker. "The proletariat did not take over the streets."

Yeesh. No wonder they didn't "take over the streets"...who the hell wants to be considered (or considers themselves) part of the "proletariat" these days?

The Whole Government Edifice Preparing to Come Down

This AP article, from the pre-budget-ceiling-deal days, does nothing so well as emphasize the instability on which big-government advocates would have our entire society rest. Its main point is that the states are not well prepared to absorb cuts in the aid that the federal government sends them each year.

"We have the potential for disaster should there be a major realignment in federal funding that results in a cost shift to states," said Nevada state Sen. Sheila Leslie, a Democrat from Reno who recently discussed the issue with Obama administration officials in Washington. "In short, we are teetering on the edge right now, and a cost shift could send us over the cliff."

Now that Congress and the President have reached a deal to skirt the federal government's spending problem for a while longer, do you think that states will take the reprieve as an opportunity to trim and reform their own behavior so as to be better situated as the probability of cuts in federal funding continues to increase?

I wouldn't bet on it — not the least because the better prepared the states are, the less pressure there will be on the feds to keep the payments rolling in. Brinkmanship isn't just a periodic political strategy between the parties; it's a strategy for operating municipalities, states, and the federal government in a system built on confiscating the wealth of people who actually generate it.

Here's the only voice of sanity in the entire article:

Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell said he believes substantial funding cuts would have less of an impact on his state than allowing the federal government to stay on its current course of mounting debt.

America Learns that Rhetoric Isn't Leadership

Andrew Malcolm:

Barack Obama's weakness is thinking he can talk his way in or out of virtually any opportunity or difficulty.

Being a Real Good Talker helped him get the job heading the law review. And entering politics. And succeeding early there, albeit within Chicago's rigged system. And being an RGT thrust him onto the national stage at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 when delegates had the foolish notion that John Kerry and John Edwards could win.

Obama is very proud of his talking....Trouble is, real leadership is more than talking and calling for things. It takes a while, but over time listeners begin to notice rote rhetoric, predictable patterns, empty words.

Dana Milbank

The economy crawls, the credit rating falls, the markets plunge, and a helicopter packed with U.S. special forces goes down in Afghanistan. Two thirds of Americans say the country is on the wrong track (and that was before the market swooned), Obama’s approval rating is 43 percent, and activists on his own side are calling him weak.

Yet Obama plods along, raising gobs of cash for his reelection bid — he was scheduled to speak at two DNC fundraisers Monday night — and varying little the words he reads from the teleprompter.

To the above, Glenn Reynolds adds:

It’s as if, in some sort of national spasm of carelessness and self-deceit, we elected a guy entirely unqualified by experience or personal characteristics to the single most important office in the land, to serve during a period of unusual troubles that he was not equipped to address.

Tough way to learn a lesson, America.

A PolitiFact Social Security Stretch

One can only wonder whether the Providence Journal's PolitiFact team reads their own newspaper. The other day, they did what they love most to do (whacking Republican candidates) and graded Senatorial candidate Barry Hinckley "false" for saying that "there's no money in Social Security." Theirs is not a new argument — it's one that partisan Democrats have been making for years:

Those who say the fund has no money, or that it has nothing more than a bunch of IOUs from the federal government, are referring to the fact that Social Security doesn't have $2.5 trillion in cash sitting in a vault somewhere. The federal government has loaned the money to itself, using the cash to pay for other expenses.

But these aren't IOUs, which generate no interest. The loan is in the form of special-issue Treasury bonds that earned $117.5 billion in interest in 2010, according to the latest trust fund report.

The reader suspects from PolitiFact's stretched analogy that the Hinckley's point is being deliberately missed:

So maybe a better analogy would be: Saying that Social Security has no money is akin to saying that you're broke if you have 20 cents in your pocket but $20 million in the stock of a heavily leveraged company.

Only if you are the sole proprietor of that company and the company itself is broke. I could draw up papers from Anchor Rising promising me a million dollar bonus, but that doesn't make me a millionaire. Even more: Currently, the government can only pay itself the Social Security IOUs because it borrows almost half of every dollar it spends, making the system not unlike a Ponzi scheme.

Indeed, the folks at PolitiFact should have read this Q&A-style article, which the Providence Journal ran on the first page of its Nation section on July 29:

Q: What about the Social Security Trust Fund? Can't that be used to pay Social Security benefits?

A: No. The government will continue to collect Social Security taxes, but the taxes flow in across the month, while the checks go out at the beginning of the month. Normally, the Treasury advances money to Social Security at the start of each month to pay that month's checks, then gets repaid as the tax money comes in. But the Treasury can't make that advance if it doesn't have cash. And while the Social Security Trust Fund has more than $2.5 trillion in assets, that money is invested in U.S. government securities. Usually, that's a good thing because U.S. government securities are considered the world's safest investment. In this case, it's a problem because if the government doesn't have money, it can't cash in the securities.

It's too bad Hinckley didn't think to cite that article as a source. It would have been amusing to see PolitiFact take it on.

... By the Way, Why Is VP Joe Biden Charging Us Rent to Protect Him?

$2,200/month, to be more specific.

As Jon Stewart asks ,

How do you collect rent from the guy you depend on to save your life?

"Hey guys, it's August 1. Where's the rent??"

"Oh, oh, I'm sorry. I must have left my checkbook in my other bullet-proof vest."

Charting Political Blame for Deficit & Debt

Byron York has a piece about how Obama supporters, Democrats, etc. take it as an article of faith that all of our economic woes are due to "the past 8 years" (ie; under President Bush). He provides some numbers from the OMB to refute that charge. In an attempt to provide a picture of what he's talking about, I also went to the OMB for data and came up with the following:

York's analysis (bulleted by me):

* Revenues fell in Bush's first two years because of a combination of the tech bust and the start of the tax cuts. But then things took off...[for]...a 44 percent increase from 2003 to 2007. (Revenues slid downward a bit in 2008, and a lot in 2009, when the financial crisis sent the economy into a tailspin.)

* [T]he Bush administration ran up deficits of $158 billion in 2002; $378 billion in 2003; and $413 billion in 2004. Then, with revenues pouring in, the deficits began to fall...[to] $161 billion in 2007...[which], with the tax cuts in effect, was one-tenth of today's $1.6 trillion deficit....Deficits went up in 2008 with the beginning of the economic downturn -- and, not coincidentally, with the first full year of a Democratic House and Senate.

* When Bush took office in January 2001, the debt was about $5.7 trillion, according to Treasury Department figures....When Bush left office in January 2009, the debt was $10.6 trillion. He had increased the national debt almost....$5 trillion over both terms (...$2 trillion came under a Democratic Congress)....The debt stood at $10.6 trillion when Barack Obama took office in January 2009. Now, it's about $14.4 trillion. The president has increased the national debt nearly $4 trillion in his first two and a half years in office.

As York continues, obviously, Bush did not have a stellar spending record (No Child Left Behind, Prescription Drugs, TSA, etc.). But it's clear that, while both parties had their hands in the cookie jar, when Democrats gained control of everything they basically just turned the cookie jar over.

The Assumptions Underlying Harrop's Insanity

One would think that members of an editorial staff would offer each other the service of gently warning their coworkers when they near the deep end. Or perhaps Froma Harrop is firmly convinced of the approaching death of newspapers and is effectively auditioning for a part in the far-left blind heat machine.

Granted, her tirade against the Tea Party movement, Republicans, and even President Obama has the incongruent quality of being both inane to the point of offense and unoriginal. It's one thing for a writer with a well-paying publicly visible job to rant like an overly righteous undergrad; it's quite another if she does so with an undergrad's lack of originality, and a column that Jeff Jacoby published in the Boston Globe the same day that Harrop's diatribe ran illustrates that we'd already heard it all. Here's Harrop's version:

Make no mistake: The Tea Party Republicans have engaged in economic terrorism against the U.S. — threatening to blow up the economy if they don't get what they want. And like the al-Qaida bombers, what they want is delusional: the dream of restoring some fantasy caliphate in which no one pays taxes, while the country is magically protected from foreign attack and the elderly get government-paid hip replacements.

Americans are not supposed to negotiate with terrorists, but that's what Obama has been doing. Obama should have grabbed the bully pulpit early on, bellowing that everything can be discussed but not America's honor, which requires making good on its debt obligations. Lines about "we're all at fault" and "Republicans should compromise" are beyond pathetic on a subject that should be beyond discussion.

Oh, please, Mr. Obama, follow Harrop's advice! Better yet, Democrats, please do not hesitate to find a candidate who promises her a taste of the red meat that she knows to be just beyond the rabid foam that coats her lips.

For the sake of finding some way of salvaging intellectual discussion from Harrop's ravings, though, pause for a moment to consider what she must believe to be true in order to come to her conclusions:

In the last half century, Congress has raised the debt ceiling 49 times under Republican presidents and 29 times under Democrats. The votes were cast without drama because the idea of this country defaulting on its debts was unthinkable. This last-minute deal notwithstanding, the dangerous precedent whereby America's promise to pay what it owes can be brought into political play has been set. ...

Republicans are ultimately going to take the rap over this debt-ceiling outrage. The full faith and credit of the United States is not a matter over which reasonable people may disagree, and the larger public knows that in its heart.

Two assumptions must be met for this to be logically consistent, and I don't think the "larger public" shares those assumptions. They're certainly arguable enough that a rational person would restrain her rhetoric when standing upon them to speak (or snarl, as the case is).

First, she assumes that the debt ceiling ought to be little more than a mile marker on the highway — passed with scarcely a notice and signifying nothing of substantial concern. To the contrary, I suspect the average attention-paying American would think it reasonable for the debt ceiling to be, at the very least, a mechanism for generating real political heat whenever elected representatives pass it. This is a "real success" of the Republicans' debt-ceiling maneuvers (albeit inadequate to current challenges), as Charles Krauthammer states:

... because of the Boehner rule — which he invented on his own out of whole cloth in that speech he gave at the New York Economic Club a few months ago in which he said a dollar of debt ceiling increase has to be matched by a dollar of spending cuts (which, Jay Carney is right, there's no logical connection, but now there is a political indelible connection) — every time the debt ceiling will come up, there's going to be a debate in the country. This is a real success.

Second, Harrop assumes that every expenditure of government is akin to an immutable debt resting on the "full faith and credit of the United States." Real cuts to government spending may be difficult, but they can be accomplished without a financial default. One wonders whether the reason that the Fromarian ilk has rattled off its hinges is that they fear a society inclined to reconsider — and force their elected representatives to reconsider — whether government can in fact do everything.

Put differently, they fear a civic process in which it is no longer adequate to force a policy into law — by legislation, by executive order, by bureaucratic regulation, or by judicial decree — but rather, in which paying for that policy and its enforcement must be justified every year.

Downness and the Debt Ceiling

Yesterday, I gave some thought to shifts in government policy and in American culture that may ultimately be behind our economy's failure to recover satisfactorily. Much like the productive people who have been leaving Rhode Island because they've assessed that the opposition to needed reforms is simply too powerful, many Americans know what must be done but expect it to be near impossible to make it so. In that respect, the debt ceiling was like a small-scale prod at enemy lines to test the strength of its forces.

The standard line among Democrats, and even many Republicans, is that cutting government spending would just be too hard. All of the government's "promises" are sacrosanct — from Medicare to welfare programs to public school funding — and there simply isn't enough waste and fraud to be squeezed out of the system to cover the deficits (even if officials and bureaucrats were inclined to do the squeezing).

To be fair, they've got a point. A look at Kevin Williamson's prescription for government spending cuts shows just how many powerful groups would have to be bucked. That's certain to be a problem with democracy once elected officials realize that they can stitch together bought constituencies. Everybody's going to want their own ox to be the last one gored.

But cutting has to be done. Our government has been operating with a policy-first approach — assuming that the resources will be found to do whatever politicians and their backers think is right. Rhode Island is dying proof of the silent sunset clause in such an approach. If the federal government couldn't even be forced to abide by its already-astronomical borrowing limits — if it couldn't be forced to make honest-to-goodness, non-fudged and actual cuts to projected spending — then what hope is there?

Very little. If we collectively find it to be impossible to cut spending and begin mitigating our reliance on Big Government, it might be beyond impossible to change the cultural problems that underlie our approach to civics. Another bubble may come along and allow us another decade of ignoring the disease, as the Internet and housing bubbles did, but we'd only be worse off for it, in the long run.

As it happens, Mr. Williamson commented, yesterday, to one of my recent posts, saying that he's "given up writing about the deterioration of our culture," because there's "not much left to say." In a final analysis, the deterioration of our culture is the only thing to say. Repeating the common sense analysis of our errors is the only way to make people (gradually, culturally, almost subconsciously) shift their behavior and civic practices. Even if the necessary changes are beyond our society's abilities, right now, ensuring suffering on a massive scale and initiating the risk that our weakness might inspire global-scene-changing actions on the part of other peoples, the right path will be easier to find when we've come back around to it if it is well described.

Chicago in the White House

Michael Walsh characterizes President Obama's leadership style as "the permanent insurgency":

Do nothing, lie in wait, and then counter-attack. Never present a plan if you can possibly help it, but deal exclusively in bromides and platitudes as you stake out the moral “high ground” and get ready to ambush the other guy. Think of it as the Permanent Insurgency campaign.

Walsh goes on with the description, concluding:

So the later Boehner walks into the trap, the quicker Harry Reid trumps him, and the sooner Obama can can declare for the umpteenth time that the time for talk is over, emerge as a hero — and get the debt-ceiling debate safely past the shoals of the next election, which is all he really cares about. Because, in case you hadn't noticed, running for office is the only thing the Punahou Kid knows how to do.

Insurgencies emanating from the top executive office in the country seem likely to be especially dirty.

Malkin on the Denouement of the Wu Drama

Michelle Malkin's opening paragraph about Congressman Wu's announcement yesterday made posting her column irresistible.

Wu-hoo! Welcome to another freaky ethics fiasco brought to you by the D.C. den of dysfunctional Democrats. This one comes clothed in a Tigger costume, wrapped in blinders and bathed in the fetid Beltway odor of eau de Pass le Buck.

She has a good point about the timing of his departure, by the way.

Liberal David Wu is a seven-term Democratic congressman from Oregon who announced Tuesday that he'll resign amid a festering sex scandal involving the teenage daughter of a longtime campaign donor. He won't, however, be vacating public office until "the resolution of the debt-ceiling crisis." Translation: Call off the U-Haul trucks. Wu's staying awhile.

The Senate Still Scamming

It would appear that the U.S. Senate is in need of some major upsets, the next election cycle:

The plan, released this week by the bipartisan "Gang of Six" senators, punts on many of the most difficult issues, leaving it to congressional committees to fill in the details later. But supporters say it provides a framework to simplify the tax code, making it easier for businesses and individuals to comply while eliminating incentives to game the system. ...

The plan would simplify the tax code by reducing the number of tax brackets from six to three, lowering the top rate from 35 percent to somewhere between 23 percent and 29 percent. That could provide a windfall for wealthy taxpayers because the 35 percent tax bracket currently applies to taxable income above $379,150.

To help pay for lower rates, the plan would reduce popular tax breaks for mortgage interest, health insurance, charitable giving and retirement savings. Other tax breaks would be spared, including the $1,000-per-child tax credit and the earned income tax credit, which helps the working poor stay out of poverty.

All told, the plan would amount to a $1.2 trillion tax increase over the next decade, which means that it's all just a political trick. Worse, it's a trick that would increase taxes on productive, charitable middle class families while decreasing them for the wealthy. (Although, the article hints that capital gains taxes might be in for an increase down the road.)

The Senators are hoping, no doubt, that they'll be able to confuse voters with talk about cutting taxes and simplifying the tax code. If that's the case, however, I think they're underestimating the extent to which Americans are now paying attention to such Rhode Islandish schemes.

It's the cuts, stupid

It's tedious to follow the debt ceiling/budget deficit wrangling, I know. Around here, we have the ProJo trumpeting tax increases as the "obvious fix" and telling the Republicans "to do what grownups do" while explaining that "the health-care reform law passed last year would have begun to kick in its projected savings for the government" by 2015. Just trust Obama, right? After all, he's proposing $3 in cuts for every $1 in tax increases (or something like that). Really (and a second source)?

Sen. McConnell has been in talks with Obama and Democrats. We wanted to do something serious and big. Yesterday, he asked point blank how much the Biden-led deal would actually cut from next year's budget. Sen. McConnell has been in talks with Obama and Democrats. We wanted to do something serious and big. Yesterday, he asked point blank how much the Biden-led deal would actually cut from next year's budget. The answer he received was $2 Billion, and it's all smoke and mirrors. In exchange, [Democrats] want $1 Trillion in tax hikes. It's not the kind of deal we're at all interested in. We won't accept guaranteed tax hikes in exchange for fantasy future spending cuts. It's not going to happen. We're going to fight like hell to do what we've said we want: Real spending cuts and caps, a vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment, and real entitlement reform. ">The answer he received was $2 Billion, and it's all smoke and mirrors. In exchange, [Democrats] want $1 Trillion in tax hikes. It's not the kind of deal we're at all interested in. We won't accept guaranteed tax hikes in exchange for fantasy future spending cuts. It's not going to happen. We're going to fight like hell to do what we've said we want: Real spending cuts and caps, a vote on a Balanced Budget Amendment, and real entitlement reform.

Got that? $1 trillion in tax hikes now and $2 billion in budget cuts. Yeah, seems fair.

Providence used as example of how "Compensation Monster [is] Devouring Cities"

Steve Malanga looks at the national problem of cities in over their heads (particularly because of pension promises) and uses Providence (and New Haven, CT) as examples:

Cities are also running out of fiscal alternatives to deal with their deficits. Like states...many cities have used one-shot revenue deals, hidden borrowing, and other gimmicks to bolster their finances. The weak economy has lasted so long, though, that these techniques have been exhausted. To balance its 2010 budget, for example, Providence, Rhode Island, borrowed some $48 million (using its fire stations and headquarters as collateral); it also drained most of its reserve fund, which shrank from $17 million to $2 million in just one year. Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings subsequently downgraded the city’s bond ratings by two notches, essentially ending its ability to use fiscal gimmicks. But Providence still faces a budget squeeze because its retiree costs amount to 50 percent of tax collections.

Nationally, the rate of growth of such local expenditures outpaced state and federal:

Local governments also helped bring on their current budget nightmares by carelessly expanding hiring and wages in recent boom years. In the decade leading up to the 2008 financial crash, the number of workers for cities, towns, and schools increased 16 percent, even though the country’s overall population grew just 12.5 percent. Wages also increased, and, of course, the hiring frenzy made those pension obligations even worse. The result: over the same decade, the total in wages and benefits that public schools paid to teachers and noninstructional staff (to take one category of public-sector worker) jumped an amazing 72 percent, despite moderate increases in student enrollment.

As Ted Nesi highlighted, albeit over a longer period, local government payrolls increased while state payrolls went down. Some argue that the cuts in state jobs have led to the increases at the local level. But, looking at Nesi's chart, it's obvious the local growth doesn't equate to the state reduction.

Stimulus = $278,000 per job

You know they're trying to hide something when they release a report on the Friday afternoon of a long holiday weekend.

[T]he White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, a group of three economists who were all handpicked by Obama...reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.

In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.

Of course, that would have removed the ability of bureaucrats and friends of "O" to skim off the top.

ADDENDUM: There was a second part to this post that got "lost" in the interwebs. Honest, I included it first time around. Here it is:

Jake Tapper tweeted that the White House isn't happy with the way the report is being framed, quoting Liz Ozhorn, "a White House spokesman for the stimulus bill":

[T]he Weekly Standard report “is based on partial information and false analysis. The Recovery Act was more than a measure to create and save jobs; it was also an investment in American infrastructure, education and industries that are critical to America’s long-term success and an investment in the economic future of America’s working families. Thanks to the Recovery Act, 110 million working families received a tax cut through the Making Work Pay tax credit, over 110,000 small businesses received critical access to capital through $27 billion in small business loans and more than 75,000 projects were started nationwide to improve our infrastructure, jump-start emerging industries and spur local economic development. The nonpartisan CBO has confirmed that the Recovery Act delivered as promised, lowering the unemployment rate by as much as 2 percent, boosting GDP by as much as 4 percent and creating and saving as many as 3.6 million jobs."

Countering this, Reuters blogger James Pethokoukis tongue-in-cheek tweeted "But what about multiplier effect?" (reference) .

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty notes that, taking the White House "corrective" into account, and using higher employment estimates, then it comes out to $185,000 per job. So much better! Geraghty also notes that the White House is following a new rounding standard:

Also note that the White House does some convenient rounding of their own. In their defense, they state, “The nonpartisan CBO has confirmed that the Recovery Act delivered as promised, lowering the unemployment rate by as much as 2 percent, boosting GDP by as much as 4 percent and creating and saving as many as 3.6 million jobs.”

Actually, that stretches what the CBO actually said. Their report puts the maximum impact on the unemployment rate at 1.8 percent and as low as .6 percent, and that it boosted “(inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.1 percent and 3.1 percent.”

I'll stress it again: if it was all good, they wouldn't have released it on a Friday afternoon before the holiday weekend. It would have been a prime time speech on July 4th right before the fireworks!

About Bachmann's "Founding Father's fought Slavery" statement

Apparently we're at the point in Campaign 2012 where we play the game of dissecting political statements for "gotcha moments." The pols have to be ready for the questions, so they should work to make sure they mitigate damage by reading up beforehand. That being said, of all the things to talk to a Presidential candidate about, why focus on interpretations of who exactly was a Founding Father? But, since it was broached....

The question, from ABC's George Stephanopoulos, and Bachmann's answer:

Stephanopoulos: [E]arlier this year you said that the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence worked tirelessly to end slavery. Now with respect Congresswoman, that’s just not true. Many of them including Jefferson and Washington were actually slave holders and slavery didn’t end until the Civil War....

Bachmann: Well if you look at one of our Founding Fathers, John Quincy Adams, that’s absolutely true. He was a very young boy when he was with his father serving essentially as his father’s secretary. He tirelessly worked throughout his life to make sure that we did in fact one day eradicate slavery….

Stephanopoulos: He wasn’t one of the Founding Fathers – he was a president, he was a Secretary of State, he was a member of Congress, you’re right he did work to end slavery decades later. But so you are standing by this comment that the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery?

Bachmann: Well, John Quincy Adams most certainly was a part of the Revolutionary War era. He was a young boy but he was actively involved.

First of all, because "some" Founders had slaves doesn't mean that "some" didn't fight against slavery. This isn't an "either or" kinda thing. Besides, someone else offered an opinion on this (H/t)

Who were our fathers that framed the Constitution? I suppose the "thirty-nine" who signed the original instrument may be fairly called our fathers who framed that part of the present Government. It is almost exactly true to say they framed it, and it is altogether true to say they fairly represented the opinion and sentiment of the whole nation at that time. Their names, being familiar to nearly all, and accessible to quite all, need not now be repeated....

In 1784, three years before the Constitution - the United States then owning the Northwestern Territory, and no other, the Congress of the Confederation had before them the question of prohibiting slavery in that Territory; and four of the "thirty-nine" who afterward framed the Constitution, were in that Congress, and voted on that question. Of these, Roger Sherman, Thomas Mifflin, and Hugh Williamson voted for the prohibition...[t]he other of the four - James M'Henry - voted against the prohibition, showing that, for some cause, he thought it improper to vote for it.

In 1787, still before the Constitution, but while the Convention was in session framing it, and while the Northwestern Territory still was the only territory owned by the United States, the same question of prohibiting slavery in the territory again came before the Congress of the Confederation; and two more of the "thirty-nine" who afterward signed the Constitution, were in that Congress, and voted on the question. They were William Blount and William Few; and they both voted for the prohibition...This time the prohibition became a law, being part of what is now well known as the Ordinance of '87....

In 1789, by the first Congress which sat under the Constitution, an act was passed to enforce the Ordinance of '87, including the prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern Territory. The bill for this act was reported by one of the "thirty-nine," Thomas Fitzsimmons, then a member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania. It went through all its stages without a word of opposition, and finally passed both branches without yeas and nays, which is equivalent to a unanimous passage. In this Congress there were sixteen of the thirty-nine fathers who framed the original Constitution. They were John Langdon, Nicholas Gilman, Wm. S. Johnson, Roger Sherman, Robert Morris, Thos. Fitzsimmons, William Few, Abraham Baldwin, Rufus King, William Paterson, George Clymer, Richard Bassett, George Read, Pierce Butler, Daniel Carroll, James Madison.

Thanks for clearing that up, Mr. Lincoln.

Is this a stretch? Perhaps, but no more, really, than the gymnastics that Stephanopoulos went through just to get to this point.

NPV Would Not Make RI Any More "Relevant"

At least one motivation offered by local supporters of the the National Popular Vote compact, that NPV would lead to more attention for Rhode Island in Presidential elections, makes no sense at all.

George Will explained in a column from about a decade ago how there is no improvement in the relative importance of small states under NPV...

Were it not for electoral votes allocated winner-take-all, would candidates campaign in, say, West Virginia? In 1996 Bill Clinton decisively defeated Bob Dole there 52 percent to 37 percent. But that involved a margin of just 93,866 votes (327,812 to 233,946), a trivial amount compared to what can be harvested in large cities. However, for a 5-0 electoral vote sweep, West Virginia is worth a trip or two.

I also remember Will opining, following the 2000 Presidential election, that if the Bush campaign had had a rough idea about how things were likely to turn out that year, their best strategy for improving their odds under a popular vote scenario would have been to ramp up their turnout machine in the Houston metro area.

You could imagine a similar logic applying if the 2012 election were held under NPV rules, with the Barack Obama campaign deciding in the case of a close race not to seek extra votes in a smattering of small cities across the country, but to devote additional resources to getting every vote possible out of the President's political base in Chicago.

The Houston metro area has about 6 million people in it, and the Chicago metro area has about 9.5 million, while Rhode Island has only 1 million people. There is no serious reason to believe that NPV will suddenly make Rhode Island any less "neglected" in Presidential elections, when NPV makes large urban areas into the places that provide the most efficient possibilities for increasing electoral margins.

National Popular Vote Bill Being Heard this Week

One late addition (posted Monday for a hearing Wednesday) to this week's House Judiciary Committee agenda is a bill to have the state legislature disregard the choice made by Rhode Island voters in a Presidential election, and allocate RI's electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote instead. In 2009, a similar bill got out of committee, but was defeated on the House floor by a 28-45 vote. It should be noted, however, the current Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee has expressed support for national popular vote in the past.

Previous Anchor Rising takes on why NPV is a bad idea are available here, here, and here. The legitimate, and constitutional, solution to a perceived problem with the Electoral College is to increase the size of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Heads Up, Federal Retirees, Obama and Geithner are Tapping Your Retirement Fund

Nothing to worry about, though, it's a loan and not a confiscation. You have no problem lending your retirement to someone who is over fourteen trillion dollars in debt, right ...?

The Obama administration will begin to tap federal retiree programs to help fund operations after the government loses its ability Monday to borrow more money from the public, adding urgency to efforts in Washington to fashion a compromise over the debt.

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has warned for months that the government would soon hit the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling — a legal limit on how much it can borrow. With the government poised to reach that limit Monday, Geithner is undertaking special measures in an effort to postpone the day when he will no longer have enough funds to pay all of the government’s bills.

A Message Full of Coincidence

So, as Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice headed toward the climactic "you're fired" of tonight's episode, NBC periodically killed the sound to play a jingle and run ticker text about a pending important message from President Obama. The actual interruption came right as the show built up to a crest.

Apparently, Osama bin Laden has been confirmed as dead. I'm not sure if just happened or at some point today, yesterday, last week, but it sure is curious that this big announcement would have to be made on a Sunday night with only an intense twelve minutes remaining on a show produced by a political competitor of the president's.

I wouldn't take this so far as to imply political motives, but it's also very helpful to Mr. Obama, considering unrest about gas and grocery prices and growing dissatisfaction with his military activities.

10:59 p.m.

The President hasn't come on, yet, but the commentators on NBC are making bin Laden's death out to be much more than it really is. He was a symbol, but whether he's been alive or dead has been largely irrelevant for the past six years. The real success of the decade-long war effort is the lack of additional large-scale terror attacks on U.S. soil.

From the commentary, thus far, the administration has been gathering details all day and has the terror master's body.

Birtherism Dies an Easy Death

At the end of a long post describing the ease with which President Obama could have ended the birther controversy long ago, Andrew McCarthy concludes as follows:

So, assuming as we should the legitimacy of the long-form birth certificate produced yesterday, the only thing that makes sense is that Obama knows the mainstream media is in his hip pocket. That is, he knew that he would not be held to the same standard as other politicians, and that if he acted in an unreasonable manner by withholding basic, easily available information that any other person seeking the presidency would be expected — be compelled — to produce, the media would portray as weirdos those demanding the information, not Obama and his stonewalling accomplices. And he also knows that, having now finally produced the document only because the game was starting to hurt him politically, the media will not focus on how easy it would have been to produce the birth certificate three years ago, or on how much time and money has been wasted by his gamesmanship; they'll instead portray him as beleaguered and the people who have been seeking the basic information (i.e., doing the media's job) as discredited whackos.

It's hard to say what's more depressing, Obama's cynicism or the zeal with which the media does his bidding.

One can imagine the media presentation had any given Republican drawn out the saga for so long, let alone a media-loathed figure like Sarah Palin. But when entire segments of society (news media, academia, Hollywood, and so on) are so slanted, politics is a different game depending whether one aligns with them or not.

Remember the Good Ol' Days (Before 2006)

Hey, remember when gas was $2.20 a gallon and the unemployment rate was 4.4%? What happened with that? …Oh, right, the Democrats won the 2006 Congressional elections.

That observation was made by Moe Lane and picked up by Glenn Reynolds. It's worth promulgating because it's a simple way to point out that what we were told was so bad back in 2006--the Bush Economy (negativity implied)--sure looks a helluva lot better to average Americans now, doesn't it? Then it all changed. Too simplistic? Perhaps. But since when is simplicity out-of-bounds in politics.

Budget "Deal" Skullduggery - Shouldn't Have Expected Any Different

So that $38.5 billion budget deficit reduction deal? Not really much of anything.

[T]he cuts ...includ[e] cuts to earmarks, unspent census money, leftover federal construction funding, and $2.5 billion from the most recent renewal of highway programs that can't be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation. Another $3.5 billion comes from unused spending authority from a program providing health care to children of lower-income families....the spending measure reaps $350 million by cutting a one-year program enacted in 2009 for dairy farmers then suffering from low milk prices. Another $650 million comes by not repeating a one-time infusion into highway programs passed that same year. And just last Friday, Congress approved Obama's $1 billion request for high-speed rail grants — crediting themselves with $1.5 billion in savings relative to last year.

About $10 billion of the cuts comes from targeting appropriations accounts previously used by lawmakers for so-called earmarks...Republicans also claimed $5 billion in savings by capping payments from a fund awarding compensation to crime victims. Under an arcane bookkeeping rule — used for years by appropriators — placing a cap on spending from the Justice Department crime victims fund allows lawmakers to claim the entire contents of the fund as budget savings. The savings are awarded year after year.

Conservative Republicans and Tea Party faves weren't too jazzed about all of this:

Even before details of the bill came out, some conservative Republicans were assailing it. Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., said he probably won't vote for the measure, and tea party favorite Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., is a "nay" as well.

The $38 billion in cuts, Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., wrote on his Facebook page, "barely make a dent" in the country's budget woes.

In all, only about $352 million in real spending was actually cut. Regardless of the reality of the actual cuts, Mark Steyn observes:

The joke re the original $38.5 billion deal was that, in the time it took to negotiate it, we added as much again in new debt (we’re borrowing about $4 billion a day). We didn’t know the half of it: Never mind negotiating, in the time it takes to type up the bill, we’ve borrowed as much as it “saves”. By the time this thing’s through, the cost of the Secret Service detail lugging the Obamaprompter to whichever grade school he announces the final definitive historic budget “cuts” at will be three times as much as any actual savings.

Just nibbling for show.

Wisconsin Watch III

According to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Waukesha County's initial tally of its election returns didn't include over 15,000 votes that were cast in the Wisconsin election on Tuesday. With those votes added in, David Prosser now has a 7,000+ vote lead over Joanne Kloppenburg in the state supreme court election.

For the record, here's the observation I made at 12:51 on election night...

Well isn't that special. The number of precincts reporting from Waukesha just jumped to 100%, without the overall total jumping from the last time I checked. 96.5% of precincts in, about a 1,900 vote lead for Prosser.

I assumed at the time it had to do with the county totals and the total total being updated separately, and that someone had forgotten to punch in Waukesha's county level numbers earlier in the evening, but this may have been around the time that the error occurred.

It's Been a Good Decade: Why Public Employees Make So Much of Freezes or Minor Cuts

To those of us not in the public sector, it seems outsized when public employees and politicians make so much of temporary pay freezes or a few minor cuts (or reductions in the expected increases!). Red Jahncke adds some context that will help us understand their perspective by explaining how, nationwide, local and municipal government employee compensation has outpaced the private sector. He backs it up with two tables (6.2D and 6.5D) from the National Product and Income Accounts of the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Table 6.2D shows that, nationally, state and local government worker compensation grew 45 percent from 2000 to 2007 — plus another 8 percent in the next two recession years, while private-sector compensation grew only 33 percent from 2000 to 2007 and — surprise, surprise — fell 3 percent in the recession. [Incidentally, the chart also shows that Federal Gov't grew 52% 2000-07, 11.5% during the next two recession years~ed.].

Table 6.5D reveals that, during the 2007-2009 recession, private-sector employment fell by 8 million jobs to a level below its total in 2000, while state and local public-sector employment grew by 185,000 jobs, reaching 1.3 million, or 9 percent, above its total in 2000.

As Jahncke notes, public sector salaries were ahead of private before the Great Recession. He continues:

The 2007- 2009 data speak to the issue of fairness — massive job losses and pay cuts in the private sector, continued job gains and a smart compensation boost in the public sector. In 2010, relatively few jobs were regained in the private sector or lost in the public sector.

And the data for the full decade speak to the issue of sustainability: How can slower-growing private-sector income produce the taxes to fund a public-sector payroll growing at almost twice the pace?

The answer is that it can’t, and it isn’t.

So now we get even Democrats making cuts and both they and the unions think they're making significant sacrifices. Given their experience over the last decade, I can understand why they think that. But they have to understand that the sacrifices they are making now have already been wrung from private sector employees over the last decade. So forgive us if we don't hail them as martyrs for giving some of what they earned--even during the Great Recession--back.

Wisconsin Watch Cont'd

Continuation of this post.

[10:40] According to the AP results, 10 of the 12 remaining Milwaukee precincts have come in along with the 8 previously outstanding precincts from Ashland County. Prosser still leads, now by less than 400 votes. One outstanding precinct from Dane County (73-23 Kloppenburg), one from Jefferson County (58-42 Prosser), and six from Sauk County (55-45 Kloppenburg) are potential sources of big swings in a 400-vote margin.

[10:45] Kloppenburg now up, by 140 votes, mostly as the result of Sauk County's remaining precincts. Now the question is whether the remaining Jefferson precinct gives Prosser a margin over Kloppenburg that is 140 votes greater than the remaining Democratic leaning precincts, including 2 from Milwaukee and 1 from Dane (Madison).

[10:55] In one of those the county-level changes while the totals don't occurances that happen from time to time , Dane county now shows all in, with Kloppenburg's lead holding at 140.

[10:59] Kloppenburg now up by over 350. The Jefferson County precinct that is outstanding has to have a large population that breaks big for Prosser for him to retake the lead, plus 2 Milwaukee County precincts are still out. (Note: I don't know how absentee ballots factor into the results at this point)

[2:30] With one precinct left to report, Kloppenburg is up by 206 votes. The one precinct is in Jefferson County, so I'd expect that number to tighten, but something along the lines of a 70-30 Prosser majority from a large precinct would be needed to flip the result.

Wisconsin Watch

According to the Associated Press, Joanne Kloppenburg has opened up a slight 4,000 vote lead with 57% of the precincts reporting in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election that will likely decide if Governor Scott Walker's collective bargaining package of laws is allowed to stand.

Looking at the county-by-county results, I am willing to bet that Prosser wins.

[11:20] Prosser now up by almost 20,000 (62% of precincts in) with Waukesha County, a sizeable Republican stronghold, only about 1/4 in. Waukesha's outstanding votes will likely cancel out, at least, the outstanding votes from Milwaukee and Dane (Madison) Counties.

[11:30] Prosser's lead is now less than 1,000 (67% of precincts reporting) because a big chunk of Milwaukee precincts just came in. I stand by my prediction.

[11:35] Kloppenburg now up by 600 votes, 69% of precincts reporting.

[11:40] Kloppenburg is now up by more than 5,000 votes. Dane County (currently 73-23 for Kloppenburg) has 58 precincts yet to report. Milwaukee County (currently 55-45 for Kloppenburg) has 149 precincts yet to report. And Waukesha County (currently 73 - 27 for Prosser) has 146 precincts yet to report.

[11:45] Kloppenburg up by about 7,000. No change in the big 3 county remaining precincts.

[11:53] Kloppenburg still up by more than 7,000 with 77.5% of precincts reporting.

[11:55] On the AP Board, two medium size counties still are showing 0 precincts reporting, Fond du Lac and Grant. Fond du Lac went 54% for McCain in the 2008 Presidential election and Grant went 62% for Obama, if you believe Wikipedia.

[12:00] Kloppenburg now up by about 18,000 votes, presumably due to another influx from Milwaukee. 53 precints left from Milwaukee to report, 58 from Dane, and 79 from Waukesha. Plus 77 from Fond du Lac and 52 from Grant.

[12:05] Big lead now for Kloppenburg, about 35,000 votes. Dane has 41 precincts left to report, Milwaukee and Waukesha unchanged. All but one precinct from Grant is in, but the total number of votes from the county is very small.

[12:11] Hang on folks, this is going to be a nail-biter (as if anyone is actually reading this in real time). Kloppenburg's lead is now cut to about 4,000 with 88.8% of the vote in. Amongst other things, Fond du Lac came in with a 6,000 vote margin for Prosser and 14 Waukesha precincts came in.

[12:15] 89.6% of precincts in, Kloppenburg leads by less than 4,000. 41 precincts from Dane, 29 precincts from Milwaukee, and 73 precincts from Waukesha yet to report. If it's close, the 28 precincts yet to report from Washington County (Wisconsin, not Rhode Island) could have an impact.

[12:25] 90.5% of the vote in. Kloppenburg still with a 3,300 vote lead. But if the numbers from the counties still outstanding roughly parallel their results so far, it still looks good for Prosser.

[12:30] Kloppenburg's lead is now less than 2,000, almost 92% of the vote in. Still 41 precincts from Dane to report, just 13 from Milwaukee, and 73 from Waukesha (currently 73-27 for Prosser). Other counties that could still create noticable swings are Washington, Ozaukee, and Eau Claire.

[12:33] Prosser now on top by less than 1,000 votes. Not coincidentally, 5 precincts from Waukesha County have reported since the 12:30 update.

[12:36] 93.5% of the vote in, Prosser still on top by less than 1,000 votes. But Dane County is now almost tapped out for Kloppenburg, just 5 precincts left to report.

[12:40] As Washington County finishes reporting, Prosser opens up a 4,000+ vote lead with 94% of the vote in (and a big chunk of the remaining vote to come from Waukesha County).

[12:44] About 1/3 of Eau Claire's precincts reporting in have helped Kloppenburg narrow Prosser's lead to less than 2,000 votes.

[12:51] Well isn't that special. The number of precincts reporting from Waukesha just jumped to 100%, without the overall total jumping from the last time I checked. 96.5% of precincts in, about a 1,900 vote lead for Prosser.

[12:59] A few precincts reporting from Milwaukee have put Kloppenburg back on top, by about 1,700 votes, with 96.6% of the vote in. 2 precincts left to report from Dane, 12 from Milwaukee.

[1:02] Now it's Prosser by 5,000, with 97% of all precincts reporting. Not really sure where those votes came from.

[1:15] Prosser has about a 1,600 vote lead, with 2 Democratic leaning counties (Milwaukee and Eau Claire) and one Republican leaning county (Marathon) still with a number of precincts left to report.

[2:00] 98.5% of precincts reporting, according to the Associated Press. Prosser leads by under 1,900 votes. However, almost all of the remainging precincts are from counties that are currently leaning Democratic (Marathon is completely in; Milwaukee has 12 precincts still out; Eau Claire has 21 precincts still out; Ashland County, currently going 71-29 for Kloppenburg, has 6 precincts still out and Sauk County, currently going 55-45 for Kloppenburg, has 8 precincts still out.

[2:20] According to the AP, Eau Claire is now in and has closed Prosser's lead over Kloppenburg to less than 600 votes. The 12 remaining precincts from Milwaukee, plus 1 from Dane and a few others will close the remainder of the gap if they vote in the same proportion as the rest of their counties have so far. Based on this, I now have to give a slight edge to Kloppenburg.

Ya Know, the Obama Admin's Word for W*r is Just as Silly as Sarah Palin's

Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes to reporters on Air Force One.

“I think what we are doing is enforcing a resolution that has a very clear set of goals, which is protecting the Libyan people, averting a humanitarian crisis, and setting up a no-fly zone,” Rhodes said. “Obviously that involves kinetic military action, particularly on the front end.

Palin during On the Record with Greta van Susteren.

I haven't heard the president say that we are at war. And that's why I, too, am not knowing, do we use the term "intervention," do we use "war," do we use "squirmish," what is it?

Even Jon Stewart was skeptical of the admin's term.

The difference as to intent should also not be ignored. Rhodes was attempting to avoid a word that would underscore the fact that the Obama admin had initiated a bellicose action against another country.

Palin just goofed up.

Semi-related item: Let the record show that it was Jay Severin, just before his suspension this week for unrelated remarks, who first plugged the admin's term into Edwin Starr's song.

Kineticmilitaryaction!

Huh!

(Yeah!)

What is it good for??

Absolutely nothing!

Uh Huh!

Kineticmilitaryaction!

Huh!

(Yeah!)

Latest Developments in Wisconsin: Early Reports of Unquantified Concessions; Pre-Mature Floor Votes

It is now being reported that, in exchange for leaving inviolate collective bargaining rights, Wisconsin's public labor unions are purportedly ready to discuss monetary concessions. Some newspapers have reported this development as full capituation by the unions on all matters of monetary compensation in the bill. (Let's keep in mind that this would still place their compensation above that experienced by the private sector). That these newspapers may have been overly optimistic, however, becomes clear upon an examination of the actual words uttered.

The Milwakee Journal Sentinel, for example, reports that

[state Senator Jon] Erpenbach said the offer was "a legitimate and serious offer on the table from local, state and school public employees that balances Gov. Walker's budget."

Not, "the unions have agreed to Governor Walkers term's if he will abandon his proposed changes to collective bargaining". No, the union has made an offer that balances the governor's budget. Okay. On what basis does it balance the budget? How much of the offer involves the union's compensation and how much pertains to budget cuts unrelated to the union's contract?

And this, from the Wisconsin State Journal.

Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, and Marty Beil, executive director of AFSCME Council 24, said in a conference call with reporters that workers will do their fair share to narrow Wisconsin's budget gap.

Again, not agreeing to Gov Walker's terms; agreeing to take on their "fair share" of the budget gap. What does their vision of "fair share" look like?

Whatever the monetary concession involved, by the way, Governor Walker has declined to omit the language from his bill which would partially restore management rights. Or, to phrase it in public union-speak, the governor refuses to back away from his wholesale attack on collective bargaining and on unions and workers around the world.

An editorial in yesterday's Milkawkee Journal Sentinel correctly draws our attention back to the parties responsible for Wisconsin's budget mess - its prior elected officials.

Walker's predecessors are the real problem here. At least Walker is being honest about the gravity of the problem. Gov. Scott McCallum collateralized a humongous settlement with tobacco companies to plug a big budget hole. Gov. Jim Doyle raided the state transportation fund and the Wisconsin Injured Patients and Families Compensation Fund (which now, under court order, must be repaid). These one-time gimmicks allowed them to ignore the real problem and claim political success. All the while, the cost of Wisconsin's current services exceeded the revenue that was coming in.

I would only add, don't leave out prior Assemblies, who possessed the ultimate power to nix all of these bad budgets and, instead, chose to codify them.

Meanwhile, in the current Assembly, the government geek part of me was fascinated, not to say considerably amused, by an attempt of the House to bring Gov Walker's bill (yes, that bill; the subject of all of this uproar) up for a vote.

In the Wisconsin Assembly on Friday, Republican leaders had called lawmakers to the floor at 5 p.m. to take up Walker's bill to fix a budget shortfall by cutting public worker benefits and bargaining rights. But they began business just before that hour, when Democrats were not yet on the floor.

Democrats charged into the chamber and shouted to stop the action as Republican staff urged their leaders to "keep going, keep going." Republicans took the voice vote, putting the bill in a stage that prevented it from being amended in that house. Assembly Minority Leader Peter Barca, a Democrat, called the move an "illegal vote" and demanded that Republicans rescind it.

"Unbelievable!" Barca screamed. "Unprecedented! Un-American! Not in keeping with the values of the state! You should be ashamed of yourselves."

Minutes later, Republicans agreed to effectively cancel the vote by allowing the bill to return to a stage in which Democrats can offer amendments.

Fabulous! The drama resumes Tuesday when the Assembly reconvenes, presumably once again sans AWOL dem senators.

Polarized Politics

One hears frequently about the Tea Party extremists who are binding the hands of Republican moderates (I know, I know), but a pull away from center is hardly a GOP phenomenon:

Bell's defection is one of dozens by state and local Democratic officials in the Deep South in recent months that underscore Republicans' continued consolidation of power in the region — a process that started with presidential politics but increasingly affects government down to the level of dogcatcher.

"I think the midterms showed you really can't be a conservative and be a member of the Democratic Party," Bell said.

The much-lamented polarization goes both ways, and one interpretation is that the American people are just not satisfied with the slow drift toward a bureaucratic superstate facilitated by parties of only mildly different flavor.

Another interpretation is that people are trying to pull a leftward-drifting political class back toward the center-right. Either way, the disruption of the old order is not necessarily an unhealthy development. Perhaps we'll wind up with real political competitions rather than elections that merely adjust the speed at which insiders tug the polity in their preferred direction.

At Least RI isn't Hawaii (well, in this instance)

What state has the most Democrat dominated legislative body? The Hawaii state senate. Byron York explains:

In Hawaii, there are 25 members of the state Senate. Twenty-four are Democrats. And then there is Sam Slom.

Slom, the lone Senate Republican in the state of President Obama's birth, has represented East Honolulu since 1996. He hasn't always been the only GOP senator; in the last session, there were two. But Republicans fared poorly at the polls in November, and Slom was left alone.

Which means that Democratic bills to increase state spending, to impose new regulations and mandates and to create new government departments are often passed on votes of 24-1. "I represent a point of view that would not be represented," the conservative Slom says, "even if it's just one voice."

There are 15 committees in the Senate. Most Democrats serve on three or four. But to make things bipartisan, Slom -- you may call him Mr. Minority Leader -- has to serve on all 15. That means he spends his days racing from one committee meeting to the next, making sure there's at least one question from a conservative point of view.

So cheer up RI Republicans, it could be worse!

Not Your Father's CPAC

CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, is held every year and serves as a sort of bellwether for the conservative movement. According to Roger L. Simon, there was a different twist this year:

The party staged by Andrew Breitbart for GOProud — the gay Republican and conservative group — was as close to a game changer as things get and the most interesting event at CPAC by far, at least to this point — and that’s meant as no insult to CPAC. With sexy Sophie B. Hawkins singing to a boisterous, supportive crowd, the party almost obliterated in one night the conception that Republicans are anti-gay and gave the impression that young libertarians — and some not so young — are taking over the GOP. Pretty soon it may be cool to be a Republican and square to be a Democrat.

Simon does check himself for possibly being a bit hyperbolic, but that libertarians seem to be taking over CPAC--Ron Paul is an annual crowd-pleaser--is an interesting development. Meanwhile, more socially conservative groups opted not to attend CPAC this year.

Tea Party House Members Demand--and get--More Cuts

It shouldn't go unremarked upon that the Tea Party Republicans in the US House of Representatives took a stand and prevailed earlier this week.

The revolt of freshman and conservative Republicans over spending cuts for this fiscal year ended almost before it began, because it prevailed so rapidly. The rebellion started in rumblings back in the lawmakers’ districts; gathered in the defiance of Republican dissenters on the appropriations committee; and reached full force at yesterday’s conference meeting, knocking GOP leaders back on their heels and quickly convincing them to give in to the Tea Party’s demands.

“We may be freshmen, we may be rookies in this game,” says Rep. Steve Womack (R., Ark.). “But there is no question that the leadership respects our opinion.”

GOP freshmen were frustrated when, earlier this month, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) released his proposal to cut $58 billion in non-security spending for the remainder of the fiscal year. Perhaps more than anything, they were confused. To begin with, it wasn’t exactly clear how much money they were planning to cut — in addition to Ryan’s $58 billion, the numbers $74 billion, $43 billion, and $32 billion were floating around. It seemed that few could agree, because it depended on what baseline and category of spending you were using.

Whatever the actual figure, it was short of the $100 billion Republicans had promised to cut in the “Pledge to America.”

So they blocked the measure and took on the leadership and prevailed. That's why they were sent there. Hopefully, the message has been received by the old guard. Things do indeed look to be different this time around.

Harrop's Crocodile Tears

On Sunday, ProJo columnist Froma Harrop (I know, I know....) cried crocodile tears over the loss of the Moderate Republican.

I used to vote for select Republicans running for national office. That’s become next to impossible because Tea Party groups have pushed GOP leaders to treat any cooperation with the Democratic foe as abject surrender. You might like your Republican, but your Republican is no longer free to act his or her conscience without being called all kinds of things.

Its because of the populist Tea Partiers, you see. You just can't practice the ol' noblesse oblige like ya used to!

[B]oy, it’s painful to see grown statesmen cower at the commands of puffed-up “revolutionaries” inflicting damage on their party, never mind the country...I want a two-party system that offers acceptable choices. And I want a political leadership that can do America’s business without having to sate the populist passions of folks unacquainted with economic realities or the art of compromise.

Now, the Democrats have the right idea, right? Moderates still thrive in the Democratic Party, what with the Democratic Leadership Council...oh, wait....

The Democratic Leadership Council, the iconic centrist organization of the Clinton years, is out of money and could close its doors as soon as next week, a person familiar with the plans said Monday.

The DLC, a network of Democratic elected officials and policy intellectuals had long been fading from its mid-'90s political relevance, tarred by the left as a symbol of "triangulation" at a moment when there's little appetite for intra-party warfare on the center-right.

There are also a lot of conservative Democrats fleeing to the GOP. Of course, most of those are from the South (that's why they're called "conservative" and not "moderate", incidentally) and that just doesn't count in Harropia. (Like the moderate Democrats who may be going after the individual mandate in Obamacare). The truth is that there are ideologues on both ends of the political spectrum who have always made life difficult for the middle-of-the-roaders. Plus, Harrop's problem is related to her basic misconception of what moderate really is: the country is more conservative than not, after all, so real moderates are more conservative than she allows.

ADDENDUM: Michael Barone has more thoughts.

The Message We Heard

I suspect that those of you who watched the state of the union speech heard it recited similarly to this:

(via the Corner)

Impressions on the State of the Union

So what were my impressions of President Obama's State of the Union speech? Don't have any. Didn't watch it and had a pleasant night. These things have way jumped the shark and long-ago devolved into an inside-the-beltway circle jerk dominated by the post-game spinmeisters trying to tell you what it all "really" means. It took me a few years to come around--and over the last few years I've felt it was my duty as a blogger to watch 'em--but now I've decided I've just got more interesting things to do besides wasting an hour watching the annual laundry-list read. Although, I do have one question: Sputnik?

The State of the Rhetoric

The first state of the union speech that I'm aware of having watched was one given by President Bill Clinton, and I remember being astonished at his series of promises to everybody. All hands out would be filled. Such speeches are little more than political drama, pumped by media organizations looking for some easy, pre-generated headlines.

It would be different if the speech were more of what one might expect of an annual presentation by the President before the legislature: A reckoning and one-night-only declaration of truth and principle. Instead, predictably, it's all about how everything that the President has done has been wonderful and successful... but the work's not done, so he's got to do a lot more. And so on.

Personally, I'm way too busy to sit down for that sort of civic obligation. If I'm going to devote my limited time to pure drama, I want it at least to be entertaining.

A Promise to Watch For

Among the articles on my list to mention is this profile of House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R, CA) from the December 20 National Review. To be honest, I haven't had a chance to investigate the progress of the following promise (and it's not something that I'd expect the mainstream media to promote), but it's a worthy one, and it's worth watching:

"When I was in the minority, I saw what the majority did to destroy debate on the floor," McCarthy sighs. "Bills got written in the back of a room by a select few. In the last two years, we haven't even had an 'open rule,' which enables amendments to be offered. That model is over: My job is to ensure that good policy gets through — encouraging an honest debate, where all members, Republicans and Democrats, are equal."

McCarthy promises to immediately usher in a new operating culture on the House floor. "Any member will be able to offer an amendment on a spending bill," he says. "We will open up the floor, not only for both parties, but for the American people to get involved in the process. That'll lead to the best legislative product. From cameras in the Rules Committee to putting bills online at least 72 hours before a vote, we will enable people to know what's happening, read the bills, and understand the debate. Better ideas will emerge, and the process will keep leadership power in check. It'll be a healthy change."

McCarthy emphasizes that both Boehner and Cantor have been nothing but supportive of his sunshine-centric approach. "Looking at how many freshmen there are, and knowing so many of them, it's clear that they are the closest thing to a direct message from the American people. We get that," he says.

Romney Flashes

RealClearPolitics reports that he has chosen a political director (what the heck is that??) and a pollster.

The Boston Globe reports that, on Tuesday, he resigned from the Board of Directors of the Marriott.

Meanwhile, as we speak, Mitt Romney is on an educational tour in the Middle East.

And a poll taken last week in New Hampshire of 1,400+ likely Republican voters gives him a substantial lead in that state's fabled (overblown?) primary.

When Who You Are Is an Insult

Speaking of propaganda, here's an interesting political whack from the gay-issues Washington Blade:

"No doubt [David Cicilline] will carry on the record of retiring Rep. Patrick Kennedy in ensuring Rhode Island's first district is represented by an effective congressman in promoting equality for all people," Cole said.

Cicilline defeated John Loughlin, a Rhode Island State Assembly member, who was accused by some of using gay-baiting tactics late in the campaign. Loughlin ran ads emphasizing that he's a husband and a father — possibly a reference to the fact that Cicilline is gay and single — and defended "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" during a debate.

Yes, you heterosexual breeders, simply by being proud of your family — by noting your adherence to the family structure on which Western Civilization advance was based — you are engaging in sly "gay-baiting tactics." What that assertion will translate into in a culture with same-sex marriage as the pervasive law of the land, one can only imagine. No doubt, traditionalists who refer to their spouses' opposite gender (by using the words "husband" and "wife") will be seen as insinuating bigotry.

Not recalling any instance of "gay baiting," or even of somebody accusing him of it, I asked Loughlin what the Blade might be referring to. All he could think of was this article in... the Washington Blade:

But in the final weeks of the campaign, Loughlin has made several statements that could be considered digs at Cicilline based on his sexual orientation.

In a "Voice of the Candidate" clip that aired on a local NBC affiliate in Rhode Island, Loughlin repeatedly mentions that he is a father and a husband — possibly a reference to the fact that Cicilline is gay and single.

"I've been married for 23 years to my wife, Susan, and we have two daughters," Loughlin says. "I know about the struggles of working families in Rhode Island because I'm part of one. I've had to worry about how to pay for dance lessons, summer camp and all the extras that come from raising children."

A Couple of Questions on the Debt Ceiling

What's the point of a debt ceiling if Congress is going to spend in such a way as to make changing it obligatory? And shouldn't it require a vote to change the debt ceiling before enacting policies that will certainly exceed it?

The federal debt is limited to $14.3 trillion, but the debt now stands at nearly $13.9 trillion and is growing daily. Congress last raised the debt ceiling in February 2010 and is expected to consider raising it again as early as March. ...

Austan Goolsbee, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said that refusing to raise the debt ceiling would essentially push the country into defaulting on its financial obligations for the first time in its history.

"The impact on the economy would be catastrophic," Goolsbee told "This Week" on ABC. "That would be a worse financial economic crisis than anything we saw in 2008."

I don't believe Goolsbee's analysis; the U.S. government and the U.S. economy are not (yet) synonymous. Holding legislators and executives to a maximum budget — and the debt ceiling is a fail-safe beyond an actual in-the-black budget — will just require them to change their policies and reduce their waste. If they refuse to do these two things, then they are the ones causing the catastrophe.

Not Back to the Partisan Script

The question could be posed, it would seem, whether Ross Douthat is more broadly representative in his apparent desire to return to the two-party script (emphasis added):

But in the past month of lame-duck activity, we've witnessed a return to political normalcy. The Republican midterm sweep delivered the coup de grace to the liberal fantasy by dramatically foreshortening what many pundits expected to be an enduring Democratic majority. But it also dropped a lid, at least temporarily, on the conservative freakout. (It's hard to fret that much about the supposed Kenyan-Marxist radical in the White House when anything he accomplishes has to be co-signed by John Boehner.)

Boehner should beware of listening to the pundits. He is not sufficient to "co-sign" objectionable legislation from the Democrats because his elevation as a balance to them is provisional. The Tea Party wave has no illusions that establishment Republicans are sincerely in step with them, and those who've pushed it forward can be quite recalcitrant when the subject comes up of trusting in the necessity of the GOP's brand of compromise.

Douthat gives the impression that, above all, partisan incumbents are now on safer territory. They are not.

The altered terms of the political debate in America

It is the day after the 237th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party. How appropriate.

Over most of our lifetimes, the terms of the political debate were centered around who would give more goodies to the American people. Human nature being what it is, most people gladly took whatever the government gave them. Few thought seriously about the coercive nature of those governmental actions and how they created new behavioral incentives that altered future outcomes, adversely impacting our political and economic liberties. The Democrats regularly won that debate against what I used to call the (former Republican minority leader in the House) Bob Michel Republicans who offered no alternative visions of liberty and the proper role of government in our lives. The Republicans lost in large part because all they stood for was Democrat-lite spending. When you can have the whole thing, why settle for a partial handout?

Then, at points during the last decade, Republicans in the White House and Congress decided to spend like drunks and do some bailouts. From a branding standpoint, the impact was significant because the differences between the two parties on domestic economic issues became largely indistinguishable. At least until Obama, Reid and Pelosi took over.

The Obama administration and Democratic Congress during the last two years made everyone else before look cheap by comparison via their massive governmental spending increases, trillion dollar deficits, unaccountable czars, aggressive regulatory actions, and governmental bailouts or takeovers of various parts of the economy - especially Obamacare.

The impact of the overreach was two-fold:

First, by trying to have the government take over control of many parts of our life via aggressively statist policies, the American people's instinctive love of liberty arose in rebellion.

Second, the trillion dollar deficits for as far as the eye can see - together with the looming bankruptcies of Social Security, Medicare, and certain states and local governments, including their pension programs - merged with the visible consequences of similar spending/debt crises in Europe to raise the specter that there could be ultimate financial consequences to our country's well being in the not-so-distant future that would destroy the America we know and eliminate the American Dream for our children and their children.

The net effect is that the terms of the political debate in America were fundamentally altered in recent times, culminating so far in the 2010 election results, the mandate in Obamacare being declared unconstitutional, and rejection of this week's omnibus bill in the Senate. The debate is no longer about who can hand out more goodies. The debate is now about liberty and financial solvency.

What we don't yet have answers to is exactly how the altered debate will translate into truly different outcomes. Will there be a modified public understanding of the proper role of government in our lives and what new government policies would be required to reflect that modified role? Or is there still enough status quo inertia that we will hurtle off a cliff and be forced to live with financial insolvency and statist public policies that continue to take away our liberty?

It is also not yet clear whether either major political party is capable of adapting to the new terms of the political debate. If they cannot, their role in national politics will be marginalized over time because the status quo is unsustainable. There will likely be much turmoil before it all settles out but I am hopeful that, as part of the oft-messy process of change, there can be a great reawakening of our body politic that helps us rediscover the true meaning of liberty and develop a deepened attachment to the limited and constitutional government principles given to us by our Founders. We all have to admit that there has never been a period during our lifetimes with more public discussion about the US Constitution and its meaning.

As lovers of liberty, our obligation is to contribute regularly to this ongoing civic debate by offering both reasoned philosophical ideas - as we seek to persuade people who are open to such exchanges - and new policies - where we are prepared to do battle in the political trenches, as necessary, to implement the ideas.

Continue reading "The altered terms of the political debate in America"

Tabulating Rhode Island's FY2011 Federal Earmarks

For those interested, HERE is a working list of all of the earmarks contained in the lame duck FY2011 budget. I assume it will be continually updated as required (hence, the "working"). I've also broken out the RI earmarks from messr's Reed, Whitehouse, Langevin and Kennedy and you can download it HERE.

All told, according to the latest info, RI's Congressional delegation has requested $53,625,000, broken down as follows:

* Approximately $41.4 million tabbed for Department of Defense projects
* $2.65 million is tabbed for EPA--particularly wastewater improvement projects--and Parks Service projects
* $2.5 million for economic development projects (broadly defined) with money going to the John H. Chafee Center for International Business, Rhode Island School of Design and URI
* Approximately $7.12 million is going to various projects under the Dep't of Labor, HHS, & Education.

Persuasion by Proxy President

Despite a day that was keeping me on the jump Friday, I got to listen to Fred Thompson at the moment when, in his low key way, he was suggesting a more conciliatory way (in contrast with the approach taken by President Obama) that the president could have presented the unemployment-bennies-for-tax-rate-extension compromise legislation.

Such an approach would include a recitation of advantageous points about the bill to be preceeded by the caveat that

This bill is not perfect but...

In retrospect, the only flaw with this advice is that Thompson failed to specify which president should make this case.

Former President Bill Clinton made a surprise appearance Friday afternoon to speak on behalf of President Obama’s tax deal he recently struck with Republicans. The deal extends the Bush tax cuts that affect all household, even the ones that make the most income. ...

Clinton told reporters that he thought the deal was a good one and that there was not anything else out there any better.

And

There's never a perfect bipartisan bill in the eyes of a partisan," Clinton said. "But I really believe this will be a significant net-plus for the country."

Er, yes. Perhaps next time, however, we can advance to a tableau of President Obama out there solo but with a discreet earpiece to catch Coach Clinton's quiet promptings (and then eventually, out there sans earpiece) so as to preserve the image of the current president being ... well, the current president.

Step Increases in Federal Pay or How to get a raise while your pay is frozen

President Obama, triangulating his way to 2012, has proposed to freeze federal employee pay for 2 years. Given that said employees have received raises throughout the current recession, it's probably about time. But let's not forget those step increases! As regular AR readers know, year to year, each unionized employee moves up a job "step" and receives a pay bump--what many would consider a "raise". In union-speak, just going up a step isn't a raise; a "real" raise is the percent increase in each step from year to year. Last year, for instance, federal workers saw a pay increase of 1.5% (PDF).

Each GS level has ten steps, with varying built in raises. For instance, according to the basic General Service (GS) table, a GS-10 receives a $1,526 increase for each step. So, if you were at step 9 in 2010, you received a base salary of $57,979. Next year, with no raise (per se), you will move to step 10 and your base salary will increase to $59,505. That's the kind of pay freeze I'd like to have! Yet, the Federal Employee union heads and liberals are caterwauling because President Obama proposed a 2% raise in March, which, for example, would have increased the GS-10 step increases to around $1,556 (around $30/step). So instead of making $59,505, our fictional GS-10 at step 10 could have been making about $59,535. Yup, 30 bucks less of a raise than one that was once mentioned is what has 'em up in arms.

“Of course, he’s playing politics,” said Derrick Thomas, a national vice present of the American Federation of Government Employees. Thomas oversees the federation’s 2nd District, which represents 100,000 federal workers in New England, New York and New Jersey. “He’s caving in to the Republicans, to the Cato Institute, to the Heritage Foundation, at the expense of his workers.

“It’s really disappointing.”

A pay freeze could affect thousands of federal employees for years to come as their retirement benefits are dependent on the “High 3,” the highest average basic pay they earn during any three consecutive years of federal service.

“I don’t think it’s quite right; we’re going to get slammed with that,” said Roland B. Sasseville, the current Pawtucket chapter president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association. “If they freeze it now, [federal workers] are going to have a lull in their earnings.”

“Today’s announcement ... is bad for the middle class, bad for the economy and bad for business,” said Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO.

Don't let them fool you, their unionized workers are still getting raises. As for the non-union federal workers, this 2 year pay freeze is small potatoes after uninterrupted pay increases during the last decade or so, regardless of inflation or recession.

Money Out, Money In

Ian Donnis makes an interesting observation:

Cicilline and other Democrats have been out front in decrying the US Supreme Court's decision in the Citizens United case, which unleased a new wave of 527 spending.

But US News recently found that five of the seven biggest super PACs this year supported Democrats.

The storyline one often hears from Democrats opposed to Citizens United is that evil corporate sources will unleash their financial heft to overwhelm the kind, sweet efforts of regular ol' voters, but clearly, the Left is not without its moneyed special interests. Indeed, it typically seems to be the case that Democrats are the larger beneficiaries when bigger money is allowed into campaign battles.

That makes sense, in a general way. As a group, those who would advocate for larger government stand to profit more from their investment in the party that favors it than the party that, if not opposing it, favors it less.

Why, then, do Democrats oppose change to campaign finance law that appear to benefit them disproportionately? Principle is probably part of it, in some cases, just as it is by principle that conservatives might oppose restrictions on campaign finance even though their side might be harmed more greatly by them. It appears more likely, by my lights, that Democrats and the Left are content with the imbalance that they have built up in areas immune to campaign finance (mainstream media, union activism, and so on). Perhaps, as well, they've been receiving the now-disclosed money all along through channels that are not so easily traced.

Bobby Jindal: Make Congress Part Time

Gov Jindal of Louisiana puts forth this excellent proposal in an interview with former Rhode Islander and current Human Events editor Jason Mattera. Amazingly, it doesn't even appear to be unconstitutional as the Constitution does not specify the duration of a Congressional session.

A determination of what comprises "part time" would have to be made. One month per year sounds good to me but I'm open to other suggestions. Under this proposal, members of Congress need not worry about a loss of base remuneration. They would keep their current salaries because, as Jindal points out,

We used to pay farmers not to grow crops

Similarly, we'd be a lot better off if we paid Congress not to legislate.

Concurrently, congressional staffing levels would have to be cut way back. There'd be no point in making our elected representatives part time if a full-time, non-elected bureaucracy remains in the Capitol to make mischief that can be swiftly gaveled into law when the witching month arrives.

I'm Sure Nothing Like This Goes on in Rhode Island

It's all about protecting the establishment — Republican or Democrat:

[Alaskan Republican Joe Miller's] campaign has posted on their site three affidavits from voters concerned that irregular activity occurred at their polling places. One says that, although he was the tenth voter at his location, he saw a ballot box stuffed with "hundreds" of ballots. Another claims that the 15 write-in ballots she reviewed had Sen. Lisa Murkowski written in in what looked like similar enough handwriting that it could be from the same person.

There's more. And liberal radio host Shannyn Moore notes a different kind of irregularity:

Despite heavy national media coverage and historic Citizens United money spent on Alaska’s hotly contested and much-watched three-way US Senate race, the results, if we are to believe them, were a surprisingly low voter turnout. In fact, this election was one of the lowest turnouts since they started tracking ballots cast versus registered voters in the mid-1970s.

It's almost as if the circumstances were massaged to make it possible for a once-a-century write-in candidacy success. The Alaskan Republican Party is asking Miller to concede, naturally.

A Cautionary Note for Republicans

A self-reinforcing ailment appears to be involved with Nancy Pelosi's retention of her leadership role in the U.S. House:

"She is the face that defeated us in this last election," declared Florida Rep. Allen Boyd, who was among those who lost re-election fights. However, Pelosi, who presided over big Democratic gains in the 2006 and 2008 elections, remains popular among the liberals who dominate her caucus more than ever. Dissident moderates could not find enough votes to force her aside.

In fact, the Democrats kept their entire leadership team intact despite election losses that President Barack Obama called "a shellacking." They elected Steny Hoyer of Maryland to keep the No. 2 post and Jim Clyburn of South Carolina to hold the third-ranking position, which will be renamed "assistant leader."

As Democrats in less-liberal districts lose their seats with the shift of independents back toward Republicans, the liberals' voice in the national party will become more overwhelming. That doesn't mean that certain scenarios wouldn't lead them back to dominance of the House, but it does mean that the competition will remain the Republicans' to lose. Americans, generally, don't like what they've seen in the Democrat Left.

Republicans should learn an additional lesson. Among the reasons they lost Congress and the Presidency over the last decade was their drift from principles of limited, transparent government. Sticking to that unifying theme doesn't mean — as libertarians, liberals, and "moderates" like to aver — that elected officers should suppress the issues of their conservative base. But it does mean that conservatives shouldn't allow short-term victories on their issues to overwhelm the message or the practice. They can and should work to control immigration, stop the advance of same-sex marriage, and end the practice of abortion, for example, but they shouldn't, like the Democrats, throw the rules of government out the window and ignore clear messages from voters in the process.

Frustrated Populism

Charles Krauthammer summarizes why touching our junk has become a tipping point:

Homeland Security's newest brainstorm - the upgraded, full-palm, up the groin, all-body pat-down. In a stroke, the young man ascended to myth, or at least the next edition of Bartlett's, warning the agent not to "touch my junk."

Not quite the 18th-century elegance of "Don't Tread on Me," but the age of Twitter has a different cadence from the age of the musket. What the modern battle cry lacks in archaic charm, it makes up for in full-body syllabic punch.

Don't touch my junk is the anthem of the modern man, the Tea Party patriot, the late-life libertarian, the midterm election voter. Don't touch my junk, Obamacare - get out of my doctor's examining room, I'm wearing a paper-thin gown slit down the back. Don't touch my junk, Google - Street View is cool, but get off my street. Don't touch my junk, you airport security goon - my package belongs to no one but me, and do you really think I'm a Nigerian nut job preparing for my 72-virgin orgy by blowing my johnson to kingdom come?

With regards to airport security in particular, it is Krauthammer's last point addresses the chief annoyance about our current system. Others have noted that the TSA "provides far more security theater than security" as it proceeds with a politically correct approach that treats everyone as a suspect--including 10 year old girls, grandmothers and nuns--while refusing to apply even the most basic of profiling. Many have mentioned the Israeli approach and, having been through that particular process myself, I can attest that it is both effective and reassuring, but it can be very time consuming (especially if you're a single male--of any race--traveling alone). So, I'm not sure if that can be extrapolated to a U.S. scale. The bottom line is that there has to be a better way than what we're doing now.

Krauthammer's larger point is that this airport security brouhaha is the latest in a pattern of "Big" everything (government, business, brother) pushing around average Americans, who've had just about enough, thank you. Americans are mad as hell and are starting to lash out at anything they perceive as ridiculously hypocritical or antithetical to common sense. Like entities that benefit from a different rule set--from Wall Street bankers to government employees to health care waivers--than they do. Or like looking up a nun's habit but not screening cargo from Yemen. The resulting mood, frustrated populism if you will, isn't going to go away any time soon.

A Moratorium on Controversy Requires Postponement of Change

So a group of gay conservatives and some Tea Party figures are urging the Republican Party to keep away from social issues while they've got a role in untangling our big-government mess. One particular comment highlights, in a humorous way, the strange assumptions that social liberals make about the universality of their causes:

"When they were out in the Boston Harbor, they weren't arguing about who was gay or who was having an abortion," said Ralph King, a letter signatory who is a Tea Party Patriots national leadership council member, as well as an Ohio co-coordinator.

I'd suggest that anybody who'd been openly gay or advocating for abortion may very well have found himself in the water with the tea. The notions that governments should redefine marriage to eliminate its opposite-sex character and that people had an unassailable right to kill their own children in the womb would not have come up because the would have been found universally appalling.

This is not to say that our forebears, right on taxation and representation, were necessarily correct in their social views. But unity on civic matters is easier to separate from social matters when there's already cultural unity on the latter.

What this means for current conservatives is that the libertarian types cannot expect their socially conservative allies to tie their own hands while liberals advance their own causes. What it must mean not "to act on any social issue" is that libertarians and social conservatives must accept the status quo and work together to prevent attempts at radical change while the economic and political-theory issues are predominant.

That'll be a tough promise to keep. After all, judges must still be appointed, and social conservatives, with an eye on the long term, will not forgo the opportunity to change the judiciary's take on Roe v. Wade. On the other side of the coin, the persistence of liberals on such issues as same-sex marriage may require social conservatives to seek a Constitutional amendment just to maintain the current state of affairs.

What libertarians and "moderates" usually intend when they urge conservatives to hold off on "pushing" social issues is for liberals to keep up the fight for their shared causes while conservatives sit on their hands. That's not likely to prove feasible.

Hitchens Splendidly Rips Apart the President's "Enemies" Remark

... twelve days ago in Slate.

Keep in mind that this dissection is carried out by a supporter of President Barack Obama. Christopher Hitchens voted for the president and, elsewhere in this article, states his readiness to defend the president and his policies during the campaign. (Hitchens points out that he was pre-empted from doing so by ... well, the president's inexplicable unwillingness to do so himself).

Much worse, though, was the president's remark last week, made on a Univision radio show, in which he expressed disappointment with Spanish-speaking voters who proposed to "sit out the election instead of saying, 'We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.' " Almost everything is wrong with this statement. The first is its awful tone: a crude appeal to ethnicity and to a spoils system of reward and punishment with which to accompany it. The second is the unspoken but highly dubious assumption that Americans (or future Americans) of Mexican and Cuban and Guatemalan and Salvadoran origin can all be collectivized under the lump headings of Hispanic or Latino. The third is the patronizing supposition that this putative bloc is somehow owned by the Democratic Party. And the fourth—to restate my objection above—is that it legitimizes any politician who couches his or her appeal in ethnic or tribal or confessional terms. Again, and whoever opens it, such an auction will always be won by the sectarians. Why, it could almost be called divisive.

Where the Jobs Are

First, according to USA Today:

The number of federal workers earning $150,000 or more a year has soared tenfold in the past five years and doubled since President Obama took office...Federal workers earning $150,000 or more make up 3.9% of the workforce, up from 0.4% in 2005....Since 2000, federal pay and benefits have increased 3% annually above inflation compared with 0.8% for private workers, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Second, Newsweek reveals that 7 of the 10 richest counties in America are suburbs of Washington, D.C.

I'm sure this is just a coincidence.

What a difference: Chafee versus Christie

RI governor-elect Chafee.

NJ governor Christie.

Night and day.

Prepare yourself for the next generation of Kremlin-style lies from the RI NEA and recall how Anchor Rising publicly destroyed their lies several years ago in East Greenwich - here and here.

ADDENDUM #1:

More Christie here, here, here, and here. You just have to watch the videos to get the full sense of Christie's leadership in difficult times.

This public sector union response to Christie should not surprise you.

RI has a choice over the direction of its destiny. Will it eventually choose a courageous path (more here) or simply continue with the status quo as the state hurtles toward the cliff?

Letting People Help Themselves, and Each Other

The line that I've italicized from an article by John Miller that profiled then-Senate-candidate Marco Rubio in an October issue of National Review helps to explain why Rubio won, and why conservatives are so excited about it:

Rubio's favorite subject is American exceptionalism. It's at the heart of virtually everything he says, whether he's addressing a classroom of college students at Southeastern University in Lakeland or trying to summarize his candidacy in the one minute Univision allotted for closing remarks. "America is not just different, America is better," he says. "People didn't vote for a left-of-center, Western European social democracy — and that's not what Obama sold us, either." He warns that if the United States stays on its present course, debt and taxes will sap the entrepreneurial spirit that has defined it from the start. "Big government doesn't hurt the people who have it made," he says. "Big government wipes out the people who are trying to make it."

We've particular reason to take that assertion to heart, in Rhode Island, because the policies that are strangling the state aren't harming the very wealthy (as local progressives like to claim) so much as the young and ambitious who wish to build something for themselves, their families, and their communities. As a consequence, such people have been fleeing the state for years, and there's no hope of recovery unless that trend is reversed.

Winning Without Winning

Jeffrey Anderson offers some context for the Senate election results:

In the midst of a resounding national rebuke at all levels of government, the Democrats have been taking some solace in having held the Senate. But to put the Republicans' Senate gains this week into perspective, Republicans won an even higher percentage of Senate races than House races (they won 65 percent of the 37 Senate races, versus approximately 56 percent of the 435 House races). And, counting Lisa Murkowski as still being a Republican (a spokesman for her campaign says the Alaskan would caucus with the GOP if she beats Joe Miller in their still-undecided race), there have been only two elections since 1950 in which Republicans have gained more Senate seats than the six they gained in 2010. One of those elections was in 1980, when voters swept Ronald Reagan into the White House. The second was in 1994, in response to the Democrats' ill-advised attempts to pass Hillarycare. So while the Republicans' gains in the House — surpassing those of 1994 and likely doubling those of 1980 — are more historic and important, the GOP's Senate pickups in 2010 aren't too shabby either.

Yes, the Tea Party wave did sweep Christine O'Donnell through the Republican primaries in Delaware and Republicans away from ultimate victory, there, but such outcomes are periodically inevitable when a movement raises principle at least to parity with political calculation. As Anderson notes: take away the enthusiasm that elevated O'Donnell, and you take away the enthusiasm that won the House and brought near-historic gains the Senate.

Now the task is for the Republican Party to follow suit and lead rather than calculate.

Clarity

Glenn Reynolds writes:

With the election over, Republicans are arguing about whether they should address Democrats via compromise, or confrontation. Both have their places, but I have a different suggestion.

Clarity.

With the deficit and the debt ballooning, with the economy remaining in the tank, and with tough choices on the horizon, what Americans need more than anything is clarity about what those choices involve, about who is making them, and about who is avoiding them.

Sometimes clarity will mean confrontation...

...Often when Washington insiders talk "compromise," they really mean engineering a situation where nobody really has to take a position, or responsibility. In those circumstances, clarity is better served by forcing positions into the open, even if doing so involves confrontation.

Sometimes, of course, compromises can bring clarity -- when it's clear what's being given up, and what's gained in exchange. Generally speaking, though, the Washington approach is to pretend that there's a free lunch, rather than to acknowledge the trade-offs.

This must change. Voters deserve to know the truth, and a compromise that won't work if voters know the truth isn't really a compromise at all, but a con.

A move for clarity will meet much resistance...

One way to [ensure transparency and make sure the facts come out] is to stay on message, of course. Another is to follow House Minority Leader (and, soon, Speaker) John Boehner's advice, and "listen." During the Obamacare debacle, Democratic representatives and senators ran away from constituent meetings and town halls. The last thing they wanted to do was listen to their constituents.

By way of contrast, Republicans should engage constituents early and often, and -- publicly -- encourage Democrats to do the same...

By listening to voters at town hall meetings, Republicans can not only show that they care, they can accomplish something else. They can actually learn something.

By not listening to voters, and not being straight with them, Democrats committed political suicide. Republicans should take a lesson, and promote clarity. In these times, voters will reward that.

More here and here.

Reflections on the nature of free markets, different ways of being pro-business, liberty and the attributes of a healthy democracy

2+ minutes of pithy comments by Milton Friedman on greed, enlightened self-interest, and how societies and free markets work.

A succinct summary on the two meanings of being pro-business from Don Boudreaux, who writes for the Café Hayek blog and is a professor of economics at George Mason University:

There are two ways for a government to be ‘pro-business.’ The first way is to avoid interfering in capitalist acts among consenting adults – that is, to keep taxes low, regulations few, and subsidies non-existent. This ‘pro-business’ stance promotes widespread prosperity because in reality it isn’t so much pro-business as it is pro-consumer. When this way is pursued, businesses are rewarded for pleasing consumers, and only for pleasing consumers.

The second, and very different, way for government to be pro-business is to bestow favors and privileges on politically connected firms. These favors and privileges, such as tariffs and export subsidies, invariably oblige consumers to pay more – either directly in the form of higher prices, or indirectly in the form of higher taxes – for goods and services. This way of being pro-business reduces the nation’s prosperity by relieving businesses of the need to satisfy consumers. When this second way is pursued, businesses are rewarded for pleasing politicians. Competition for consumers’ dollars is replaced by competition for political favors.

There is much talk today about the polarization in America and how different factions should compromise by acting in a bipartisan fashion. But such talk is absurd because it ignores several critical and unavoidable issues:

First, policy differences are often based on competing world views. Those differences cannot be wished away by superficial talk about bipartisanship. For example, if you believe in the first definition of being pro-business, i.e., that only the private sector can actually create jobs and the government’s proper role is to promote economic liberty by incenting the private sector to do so, then no size of any stimulus bill will be acceptable. Nor is there any middle ground if you believe that Obamacare represents the socialization of medicine and you don’t believe in socialism. These positions are not about being the "party of no." Instead, they are a clarion call for an alternative public debate about statism, about whether we aspire to become like a European welfare state. Then, instead of ramming down a statist solution to the healthcare issue onto America, we could agree that the status quo for the delivery of medical care isn’t good enough and use that as an alternative starting point from which to conduct a legitimate public debate about different solutions. Polarization will only genuinely dissipate after there is sufficiently open and reasoned public debate about such principles and the desired endpoints of policies that derive from them so that a consensus can begin to form across America.

Second, both political parties have inhibited such a debate. Public choice theory teaches us that we should not be surprised that the parties are focused primarily on promoting their own self-preservation, by sustaining power for the sake of power instead of promoting reasoned debates about how a belief in the ordered liberty of our American Founding should impact our public policies. Such is the added price we pay for having given up on limited government. But, if we believe in liberty, then the people in America have to stand up and insist on the debates. Which is why the Tea Party is perceived to be such a threat to both parties' establishment figures. That debate will take time and will appear messy along the way. But only an arrogant, self-absorbed narcissist will underestimate (more here and here) the American people's ability to instinctively figure things out. Just like the American people rejected the Republicans in 2006 and 2008, the 2010 election was a repudiation of the arrogance of a Democratic party that refused to listen to the American people in recent times. Political gridlock is nothing more than the American people telling the government to stop in its tracks until the the debates can be held.

If the debates are inhibited by the political class, then there will be more repudiations in the coming elections:

...This isn't a wave, it's a tidal shift—and we've seen it coming for a long time. Remarkably, there have been plenty of warning signs over the past two years, but Democratic leaders ignored them. At least the captain of the Titanic tried to miss the iceberg. Congressional Democrats aimed right for it...

But none of this means that Republicans are winning. The reality is that voters in 2010 are doing the same thing they did in 2006 and 2008: They are voting against the party in power.

This is the continuation of a trend that began nearly 20 years ago. In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected president and his party had control of Congress. Before he left office, his party lost control. Then, in 2000, George W. Bush came to power, and his party controlled Congress. But like Mr. Clinton before him, Mr. Bush saw his party lose control.

That's never happened before in back-to-back administrations. The Obama administration appears poised to make it three in a row. This reflects a fundamental rejection of both political parties.

More precisely, it is a rejection of a bipartisan political elite that's lost touch with the people they are supposed to serve. Based on our polling, 51% now see Democrats as the party of big government and nearly as many see Republicans as the party of big business. That leaves no party left to represent the American people.

Voters today want hope and change every bit as much as in 2008. But most have come to recognize that if we have to rely on politicians for the change, there is no hope. At the same time, Americans instinctively understand that if we can unleash the collective wisdom and entrepreneurial spirit of the American people, there are no limits to what we can accomplish...

Elected politicians also should leave their ideological baggage behind because voters don't want to be governed from the left, the right, or even the center. They want someone in Washington who understands that the American people want to govern themselves.

William Voegli offered this sage advice several years ago: “A healthy democracy does not require blurring political differences. But it must find a way to express those differences forcefully without anathematizing people who hold different views.”

The sections titled Issues #1, 2 and 4 in this lengthy May 2010 blog post highlight some of the underlying core beliefs that animate a world view which believes in free markets and liberty. These are the meaty topics worthy of public discussion.

A more intense level of public debate has begun across America in recent months. Here's to it continuing in a vigorous manner until a meaningful new consensus can form in the country.

Continue reading "Reflections on the nature of free markets, different ways of being pro-business, liberty and the attributes of a healthy democracy"

What Will the President Do?

The biggest political question on the table is how President Obama will react to the Republican's gains, this election. Victor Davis Hanson notes that Obama's post-election speech didn't indicate that he understands the message that the American people are trying to send to him. But here's the interesting paragraph from Hanson's post:

Had not some zealots talked of possible 90-to-100-seat gains, the Democrats would be in greater shock today at the near-historic 60+ House pick-up, along with a stunning near sweep of state legislatures and governorships, as well as gains in the Senate — and all a mere 21 months after the beginning of hope and change. The idea that we are going to copy EU socialism is dead. So is Keynesian massive borrowing. So is the promised second wave of Obamism, such as cap-and-trade and blanket amnesty. Obama's supporters can brag that erstwhile absolutely safe senior Democratic senators like Boxer and Reid managed to get reelected, but they must understand that Obama's vision and his method of enacting it simply turned off the vast majority of the country.

I agree that the short-term prospects of American socialism are bleak, although it's possible that the virus has already been injected into our system of government to reemerge after a period of welfare-state gestation. But in trying to predict the actions of Democrats, I can't help but hear echoes, in Hanson's reassurances, of the declarations that ObamaCare was dead after Republican Scott Brown won in Massachusetts. What Obama and the Democrats proved, then, was that they were not operating according to political expectations. This election was largely a consequence of that fact, but it's not certain that they'll change their script, when the tea leaves were already plain to see last year.

11:30 p.m. U.S. Senate and House Tugs of War

Taking Fox News's online balance a step farther, I've thrown together these simple graphics:

U.S. Senate

U.S. House

10:15 p.m. U.S. Senate and House Tugs of War

Taking Fox News's online balance a step farther, I've thrown together these simple graphics:

U.S. Senate

U.S. House

9:09 p.m. House and Senate Tug of Wars

Taking Fox News's online balance a step farther, I've thrown together these simple graphics:

U.S. Senate

U.S. House

Blumenthal Wins Connecticut, Manchin Wins West Virginia

The WPRO news dept. (630 AM) is reporting that Democrat Richard Blumenthal is projected to defeat Republican Linda MacMahon in the Connecticut Senate race, and Democrat Joe Manchin has won the West Virigina Senate race. This begins to take the "Republican Takeover of the Senate" scenario out of play.

8:15 p.m.: Senate and House Tug of War

Taking Fox News's online balance a step farther, I've thrown together these simple graphics:

U.S. Senate

U.S. House

A Vague Election Night Mood

For some reason, I've been glum, today. Stresses at work have much to do with it, to be sure, but some of my mood has to do with concern about what voters will do, tonight. What portion of voters have even a generally accurate sense of the people and policies for which they're voting tonight? That cuts both ways, of course, although it's a particularly dangerous question and answer in Rhode Island.

But then a couple of findings in my evening reading brought a paradoxical improvement in my mood. First was something that Ted Nesi gleaned for his election night liveblog:

Another fascinating data point from the national exit polls — "about 4 in 10 voters said that they supported the Tea Party movement," according to The New York Times.

That's not exactly where us Tea Party types would want that number to be. But then I came across this AP story, to which the Providence Journal gave the following headline and lead:

Vote outcome could add to uncertainty, Analysts doubt expected GOP gains will spark business growth

Here's a taste of reporter Paul Wiseman's piece:

A standoff between the Obama administration and emboldened Republicans will probably block any new help for an economy squeezed by slow growth and high unemployment. Congress might also create paralyzing uncertainty for investors and businesses by fighting over taxes, deficits, health care and financial regulation.

My first instinct, of course, was to argue: That just means that the Republicans must have enough of a majority to overpower the President; at least he'll do less harm for the last two years of his term; there will be no uncertainty if the Republicans just full-out undo what the Democrats have done to our country; and so on. But then it occurred to me that Wiseman and the AP are just trying to stoke any lingering doubts among independents and Democrats who might be considering some Republican candidates, today. The same is true of the New York Times (although, not, I'm pretty sure, Ted Nesi).

In short: The mainstream media is on the Democrats' side. Just look at the Providence Journal's endorsements. That being the case, it's foolish to take anything less concrete than actual election results as accurate... especially if it appears in a mainstream publication. Me, I'll be getting the important, RI-based news of the evening from the Board of Elections.

Projections are Live...

Networks are starting to make their projections. Here's CNN's first two of the night...

Early returns showed Republican running strongly, with Rand Paul projected by CNN to win his Senate race in Kentucky and another conservative, Dan Coats, projected to win the Senate race in Indiana...

Coats will take over the seat held by retiring Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh, giving Republicans their first pick-up of the night.

More from Drudge

Exit polls only, no real numbers yet...

IL 49-43 Kirk [R]...
KY 55-44 Paul [R]...
NV TIED...

Here We Go...

Drudge has his first set of exit polls up...

EXIT POLLS:
Arkansas: Boozman (R) defeats Lincoln (D)
Ohio: Portman (R) defeats Fisher (D)
North Dakota: Hoeven (R) defeats Potter (D)
Wisconsin: Johnson (R) defeats Feingold (D)

Guarantees are none.

The Ghost of Election Day Past

According to Elizabeth Crum at National Review Online's election blog, a couple of names familiar to Rhode Island political-watchers are showing up in the Nevada Senate race, those names being "Harrah's" and "Jan Jones"...

Executives at the casino giant Harrah’s pushed company employees to vote early in an all-out effort to help the Harry Reid campaign, according to internal emails obtained by Battle ‘10.

The stepped-up effort began Wednesday when a Reid staffer sent an email pleading for help to Harrah’s top lobbyist, Jan Jones. Soon after, Marybel Batjer, Harrah’s vice president of public policy and communications, distributed that plea via email to executives throughout the company...

On Friday, Western Regional President Tom Jenkin sent out a follow-up email showing a total vote count for Harrah’s properties along with the percentages of employees who had voted at each property. Attached to the email was a spreadsheet showing employee names and at which property they worked. Supervisors were asked to fill in codes explaining why their employees had not yet voted.

The Harrah’s employee who forwarded the emails asked not to be identified due to fear of reprisal. The employee said the pressure from upper management was “disturbing.”

“We were asked to talk to people individually to find out why they had not yet voted and to fill in these spreadsheets explaining why,” the employee said. “I did not feel comfortable doing that.”

Those who voted against casino referendum four years ago can pat themselves on the back for preventing a truly destructive beast from being unleashed on RI politics.

Dirtiest Campaign Ever? Thus has it always been claimed....

Thanks to the folks at Reason.com for reminding people that political campaigns have been dirty for quite some time (say, a couple hundred years, at least).

Welfare queens and their pimps: Why the November 2 election matters

They come in all shapes and sizes.

Don't like any of them. Yes, indeed, not then and not now (and now).

The labels or times may change but not the fundamental issue that any government big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away. More on bizarre incentives created by campaign finance reform, where the focus is on the symptoms but not the root cause, and crony capitalism, where the big and powerful feed at the enlarged government trough at the expense of those who lack comparable resources to buy favors.

If we truly treasure liberty in America, then next Tuesday's vote is the first major step toward reclaiming it. Our freedom is never safe, especially when there is a bloated government filled with politicians and bureaucrats who don't recognize and honor the core principles of our Constitution.

ADDENDUM #1:

How about some "old-time" reflections that are actually substantive and suggest a different view of America and public policies?

A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest; be sure to follow the links

American Exceptionalism

"Who You Gonna Call?" The Little Platoons

Lawrence Reed on Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy

Challenging the increasing momentum toward a nanny state

Summing it up -

Roger Pilon from a 2002 Cato Institute publication, as quoted in the American Exceptionalism link:

We are all created equal, as defined by our natural rights; thus, no one has rights superior to those of anyone else. Moreover, we are born with those rights, we do not get them from government - indeed, whatever rights or powers government has come from us, from "the Consent of the Governed." And our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness imply the right to live our lives as we wish...to pursue happiness as we think best, by our own lights...provided only that we respect the equal rights of others to do the same. Drawing by implication upon the common law tradition of liberty, property, and contract...its principles rooted in "right reason"...the Founders thus outlined the moral foundations of a free society…

In the end, however, no constitution can be self-enforcing. Government officials must respect their oaths to uphold the Constitution; and we the people must be vigilant in seeing that they do. The Founders drafted an extraordinarily thoughtful plan of government, but it is up to us, to each generation, to preserve and protect it for ourselves and for future generations. For the Constitution will live only if it is alive in the hearts and minds of the American people. That, perhaps, is the most enduring lesson of our experiment in ordered liberty.

Marco Rubio.

ADDENDUM #2:

The bottom line from 2006:

I hope the Republicans lose control of the House of Representatives in tomorrow's election.

...My disgust with the Republican Congress is intense...

...it is a time to focus on the big picture:

The current Republican party needs some time in the wilderness in order to rediscover its currently lost connections to beliefs in limited government, to the defense of freedom and ordered liberty. Hopefully, they can find some new leaders with principles in time for the crucial 2008 elections.

And what could be better for the American people than to see the House be led for two years by a bunch of left-wing lunatics, to experience a sampling for 2 years before 2008 of what little the Democrats can offer during a time when our country is engaged in a world war with Islamic fascists dedicated to destroying America.

The overriding problem here is we have two political parties who stand for nothing but either the retention or gaining of political power for the sake of power itself...

Well, the Democrats under Obama have indeed stood for something, an overbearing statism largely disconnected from principles of liberty and the rule of law. So we have belatedly tried the left-wing lunatic model for the last 2 years. Let's now send those statists packing on November 2 and hope the Republicans learned something during their time in the wilderness.

The bottom line in 2010 is that until enough people get serious about dismantling much of the engorged government and returning rights to the people, none of this will amount to more than rearranging chairs on the USS Titanic.

But that doesn't have to be our future, if we have the will and courage as a nation to chart a new course.

ADDENDUM #3:

Scott Rasmussen:

...This isn't a wave, it's a tidal shift—and we've seen it coming for a long time. Remarkably, there have been plenty of warning signs over the past two years, but Democratic leaders ignored them. At least the captain of the Titanic tried to miss the iceberg. Congressional Democrats aimed right for it...

But none of this means that Republicans are winning. The reality is that voters in 2010 are doing the same thing they did in 2006 and 2008: They are voting against the party in power.

This is the continuation of a trend that began nearly 20 years ago. In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected president and his party had control of Congress. Before he left office, his party lost control. Then, in 2000, George W. Bush came to power, and his party controlled Congress. But like Mr. Clinton before him, Mr. Bush saw his party lose control.

That's never happened before in back-to-back administrations. The Obama administration appears poised to make it three in a row. This reflects a fundamental rejection of both political parties.

More precisely, it is a rejection of a bipartisan political elite that's lost touch with the people they are supposed to serve. Based on our polling, 51% now see Democrats as the party of big government and nearly as many see Republicans as the party of big business. That leaves no party left to represent the American people.

Voters today want hope and change every bit as much as in 2008. But most have come to recognize that if we have to rely on politicians for the change, there is no hope. At the same time, Americans instinctively understand that if we can unleash the collective wisdom and entrepreneurial spirit of the American people, there are no limits to what we can accomplish...

Elected politicians also should leave their ideological baggage behind because voters don't want to be governed from the left, the right, or even the center. They want someone in Washington who understands that the American people want to govern themselves.

Angelo Codevilla on America's ruling class - and the perils of revolution.

From two liberal Democrats comes these critical words about Obama:

... In a Univision interview on Monday, the president, who campaigned in 2008 by referring not to a "Red America" or a "Blue America" but a United States of America, urged Hispanic listeners to vote in this spirit: "We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us."

Recently, Obama suggested that if Republicans gain control of the House and/or Senate as forecast, he expects not reconciliation and unity but "hand-to-hand combat" on Capitol Hill.

What a change two years can bring.

We can think of only one other recent president who would display such indifference to the majesty of his office: Richard Nixon.

We write in sadness as traditional liberal Democrats who believe in inclusion...

Indeed, Obama is conducting himself in a way alarmingly reminiscent of Nixon's role in the disastrous 1970 midterm campaign. No president has been so persistently personal in his attacks as Obama throughout the fall. He has regularly attacked his predecessor, the House minority leader and - directly from the stump - candidates running for offices below his own. He has criticized the American people suggesting that they are "reacting just to fear" and faulted his own base for "sitting on their hands complaining."...

We are also disturbed that the office of the president is mounting attacks on private individuals, such as the founders of the group Americans for Prosperity. Having been forged politically during Watergate - one of us was the youngest member of Nixon's enemies list - we are chilled by the prospect of any U.S. president willing to marshal the power of his office against a private citizen.

The president is the leader of our society. That office is supposed to be a unifying force. When a president opts for polarization, it is not only bad politics, but it also diminishes the prestige of his office and damages our social consensus...

Or, as Charles Krauthammer wrote:

...In a radio interview that aired Monday on Univision, President Obama chided Latinos who "sit out the election instead of saying, 'We're gonna punish our enemies and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.' " Quite a uniter, urging Hispanics to go to the polls to exact political revenge on their enemies - presumably, for example, the near-60 percent of Americans who support the new Arizona immigration law.

This from a president who won't even use "enemies" to describe an Iranian regime that is helping kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. This from a man who rose to prominence thunderously declaring that we were not blue states or red states, not black America or white America or Latino America - but the United States of America.

This is how the great post-partisan, post-racial, New Politics presidency ends - not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a desperate election-eve plea for ethnic retribution...

David Harsanyi points out how Obama has a lack of faith to trust the American people and is implementing processes that only magnify the power of the nanny state.

Arthur Brooks and Paul Ryan offer an alternative view:

As we move into this election season, Americans are being asked to choose between candidates and political parties. But the true decision we will be making—now and in the years to come—is this: Do we still want our traditional American free enterprise system, or do we prefer a European-style social democracy? This is a choice between free markets and managed capitalism; between limited government and an ever-expanding state; between rewarding entrepreneurs and equalizing economic rewards.

We must decide. Or must we?

In response to what each of us has written in the preceding months, we have heard again and again that the choice we pose is too stark. New York Times columnist David Brooks (no relation) finds our approach too Manichaean, and the Schumpeter columnist in The Economist objected that, "You can have a big state with a well-functioning free market."

Data support the proposition that Americans like generous government programs and don't want to lose them. So while 70% of Americans told pollsters at the Pew Research Center in 2009 they agreed that "people are better off in a free market economy, even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time," large majorities favor keeping our social insurance programs intact. This leads conventional thinkers to claim that a welfare state is what we truly want, regardless of whether or not we mouth platitudes about "freedom" and "entrepreneurship."

But these claims miss the point. What we must choose is our aspiration, not whether we want to zero out the state. Nobody wants to privatize the Army or take away Grandma's Social Security check. Even Friedrich Hayek in his famous book, "The Road to Serfdom," reminded us that the state has legitimate—and critical—functions, from rectifying market failures to securing some minimum standard of living.

However, finding the right level of government for Americans is simply impossible unless we decide which ideal we prefer: a free enterprise society with a solid but limited safety net, or a cradle-to-grave, redistributive welfare state...

More and more Americans are catching on to the scam. Every day, more see that the road to serfdom in America does not involve a knock in the night or a jack-booted thug. It starts with smooth-talking politicians offering seemingly innocuous compromises, and an opportunistic leadership that chooses not to stand up for America's enduring principles of freedom and entrepreneurship.

As this reality dawns, and the implications become clear to millions of Americans, we believe we can see the brightest future in decades. But we must choose it.

Just say no to Barney

One of the unanticipated benefits of leaving Rhode Island is that I moved into Barney Frank's congressional district.

Which means I get to vote for his opponent, Sean Bielat.

Just in case you needed some reminders about Mr. Frank's legacies:

Jeff Jacoby
Russ Roberts
Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell
Larry Kudlow
Larry Kudlow
Washington Times
Sheldon Richman
Duncan Currie
Wall Street Journal
National Review
Stephen Spruiell
Russ Roberts
Russ Roberts

More by Russ Roberts on the financial crisis.

We can only hope.

ADDENDUM #1:

Wow, indeed. And check out the RGA video.

ADDENDUM #2:

Go to the videos here and here.

Rift in the Democratic Party

This post--"An Open Letter to Rush Limbaugh"--from "Hillbuzz", a pro-Hillary Clinton blog, is starting to get some play. The writer, Kevin DuJan, explains that, while a lot of Hillary Clinton supporters hold a grudge over the 2008 Democratic Party nomination process, that isn't the only reason that they are intent on getting back at Obama and his version of the Democratic Party.

When Obama and the DNC attacked Hillary and her supporters, they permanently alienated tens of millions of us from the party. I know for a fact I am not the only guy...who is working every day to bring down the Obama White House and Democrat Party. Not for Hillary, though I love the woman, but for America...because I love this country even more.

He provides some details of the nasty tactics he witnessed--including voter fraud and intimidation tactics--and asks other Democrats to take a breath and re-think some things:

[E]ven if you called yourself a Democrat for 32 years, the way I did, because everyone you grew up with and everyone in your family was a Democrat, that in 2010 it’s time to ask yourselves what that really means.

Do you want to be in a party that calls people racists for stepping out of line and voicing opposition to the socialist lurch of the current administration?

Do you condone voter fraud and the shameless, undemocratic tactics employed by Democrats?

Do you wish to associate with the likes of ACORN, the SEIU, the Black Panthers, and all the other thugs, goons, and degenerates the Obama campaign and White House employ as the DNC’s muscle on the ground?

It is crystal clear that being a patriotic American who loves this country is intellectually incompatible with being a Democrat. If you love America and want it to prosper, the Democrat Party is at absolute odds with everything we need for a thriving, successful economy.

I wonder how many Rhode Island Democrats feel the same way.

Still Making Stuff

Kevin Williamson thinks that President Obama's proposed infrastructure bank is essentially the White House's play to get in on the corrupt Congressional practice of earmarking (subscription required). The article's worth a read, but this tangential paragraph is what caught my eye:

Even though the extraordinarily productive service sectors of the U.S. economy create a lot of output that can be delivered by e-mail rather than by truck or train, manufacturing remains the second-largest single sector, trailing only wholesale trade. In fact, the idea that the United States has entered a "post-industrial" phase is largely a myth. Measured by output, the U.S. economy is much more industrial-looking than Washington's scary bedtime stories about McJobs and outsourcing would suggest: After wholesaling and manufacturing, the biggest sectors are indeed those service-oriented industries — retailing, finance, and health care — but these are followed by a massive construction industry that is nearly as large as the health-care sector. In terms of economic output, the warehousing and transportation of goods bigger than the software industry or the accommodations and food-services industry — to take the two poles of the services economy — and several times the size of the education sector. U.S. factories, as Cato Institute scholar Daniel Ikenson has reported, produce 21.4 percent of the world's manufacturing value added, 60 percent more than China's (without a billion semi-indentured workers earning Third World wages or a for-profit police state — take that, Tom Friedman!). We're making a lot of stuff and moving it around.

Take that as a reminder that the United States still has a foundation on which to build... and much still to lose.

President Killjoy: Obama Signals Against a Jump to Hillary for 2012

Of course, the entertainment value of the semi-controlled motor mouth of the current VP [top ten Biden gaffes available here] is not to be underestimated. This is undoubtedly why, on more than one occasion during the last couple of years, either voluntarily or at someone's quiet request, he appears to have gone missing.

But to speak frankly from the perspective of the opposition, it would have been preferable to have had the soap opera that is Hillary Clinton, with all of her machinations and baggage, standing next to President Obama in the upcoming presidential campaign spotlight.

Unfortunately, the odds of that development dropped considerably last week.

"The single best decision that I have made was selecting Joe Biden as my running mate," Obama said. "The single best decision I have made. I mean that. It's true."

Obama was in Delaware with Biden campaigning for Democratic Senate nominee Chris Coons, but in his speech seemed to address the rumors that circulated after Bob Woodward said making Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Obama's vice president in 2012 was "on the table."

Plenty of Anti-GOP News, Still No DOJ News

As of Monday's edition, the Providence Journal had still not deigned to mention Congressional testimony about racial bias in Obama's Department of Justice. Indeed, yesterday's paper revisited the apparently more-important testimony of comedian Stephen Colbert that migrant farm workers do work that a Hollywood celebrity might find arduous.

Curiously, as well, Sunday's paper featured an entire above-the-fold page (B7) of arguable advocacy for national Democrats. Top left was an "analysis" declaring the GOP's "Pledge to America" to be a heavily poll-tested document, with all of the insinuations that come with such a quality:

Billed as a Pledge to America, the House Republican campaign manifesto is as much political straddle as conservative call to action, long on poll-tested goals, short on controversial specifics and designed to reassure independent voters who abandoned the party in the last two elections.

In case that tint wasn't adequate, the piece immediately below gave President Obama almost as much space to do his hyper-partisan schtick about the "disastrous decade" that he managed to make worse. Filling the rest of the page was an article about potential third-party election spoilers, with a heavy emphasis on moderate (read: "liberal") Republicans edged out in primaries by dissatisfied conservatives:

Nine-term Rep. Mike Castle of Delaware is the third prominent Republican to consider a third-party bid this year after a suffering a stinging setback at the hands of tea-party-backed conservatives.

If Castle decides to make an independent run for Senate, he will join Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski in refusing to let GOP primary voters force them into retirement.

Some folks presume that media bias is a subconscious slip into what editors and journalists believe just to be objective truth, but it simply isn't possible that a quasicompetent editor wouldn't see how this collection of stories would come across.

Mix-N-Match a GOP Presidential Ticket

Are you pleased at the sight of Sarah Palin edging towards the ring, hat in hand? No? Then who would you prefer?

Choose from the fairly comprehensive list of candidates offered at the Values Voter Summit straw poll this weekend

Michele Bachmann | Jan Brewer | Chris Christie | Mitch Daniels | Jim DeMint | Newt Gingrich | Mike Huckabee | Bobby Jindal | Bob McDonnell | Sarah Palin | Ron Paul | Tim Pawlenty | Mike Pence | Marco Rubio | Mitt Romney | Paul Ryan | Rick Santorum

or toss in a wild card.

I'm still mulling over the best person for the top of the ticket. The exceedingly frank and unabashed style of Governor Chris Christie, however, strikes me as an excellent fit for VP.

A Primary Night Reminder

Not to bring Charles Krauthammer back into the negative spotlight, but there's a key consideration that he's left out of his assessment of the GOP's primary races:

Now, we are in a cycle where we have seen that this is not a normal Democratic administration. It's highly ideological. It's instituted changes over the last 18 months that are structural — and some of them irreversible, like Obamacare — and it will try to do the same in the next two years or six.

If you're a Republican and you're a conservative, you want a majority in the Senate that will stop that agenda and you have to elect the most electable. Delaware is not Alaska. In Alaska you can endorse a Joe Miller, who's going to win anyway, even though he's more conservative. In Delaware, O'Donnell is going to lose, and that — that could be the difference between Republican and Democratic control, and make a difference about the Obama agenda in the future.

What's missing is the degree to which the Tea Party movement is not just a reaction to the Obamanation, but to trends that even Republicans have helped to advance. In other words, voters do not trust the GOP to "stop that agenda." Republicans will slow it down — rather, advance it more slowly — but that is no longer a satisfactory objective. The edge of the cliff is too near.

The Presidents on the President

Here's an interesting video about a new work of art by Jon McNaughton (via Michelle Malkin):

McNaughton's Web site has an online version of the painting that shows closeups and offers clickable summaries for each president (and other components of the painting).

The Silent Majority Isn't Static

David S left a comment to a recent post by Marc that indicates a lack of subtleties in his view of the political order:

- the silent majority-? Marc, where were the silent ones during the last election? The election that was this country's last real political referendum. Were the silent majority unable to rouse themselves for an election about the course forward concerning two full scale wars that had ground on for years? Were they equally uninterested in a tanking economy? Did they just decide they had better things to do on election day? Silent majority? I know its a Nixon term, but it probably can be applied to the present administration and not a noisy minority.

Considering the facts that we are in the midst of war and recession and fear and superstition- when the going gets tough, the cowardly go to tea parties.

The obvious rejoinder is that "the silent majority" did, in fact, rouse itself in the last election. The anger now evident on the political scene is attributable to its sense that it was duped. The American people thought that they were getting, with Obama and the Democrats, a centrist, reasonable party. The assumption, generally, is that the two major parties are mere shades of the same thing, and the United States wanted the other shade, after the Bush presidency. Instead, the Democrats' mantra, when they'd been handed power, became "elections have consequences," and they've set about proving that those consequences were not to Republican partisans so much as to the American people — the silent majority.

Consider:

"Now, a lot of those voters appear to be bolting to the GOP," Holland said. "Republicans now have a whopping 38-point advantage on the generic ballot among voters who dislike both parties."

Republicans also have a large and growing advantage among independents. Sixty-two percent of independents questioned say they would vote for the generic Republican in their district, with three in 10 saying they'd cast a ballot for the generic Democrat. That 32-point margin for the Republicans among independents is up from an 8-point advantage last month.

The hope, now, is that the Republicans will at least conclude that the real consequence of elections is to the elected — that they must actually govern as if they are representatives. As the emergence of the Tea Party shows, this may be the last chance for the "shades of the same thing" bipartisan structure to function to the satisfaction of voters. The Republicans are benefiting from the lack of other options, and if they do, indeed, win hugely in November, they've only got this one chance to prove that a third option is not needed.

Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

A lot has been said about the August 28th rally on the Mall last weekend. As a non-Beck guy (not anti- just agnostic) and having a lot to do last weekend, I frankly didn't pay too much attention to the event and the aftermath. Now that I've caught up a bit, I think Rich Lowry is pretty close in what it's all about:

This was the revolt of the bourgeois, of the responsible, of the orderly, of people profoundly at peace with the traditional mores of American society.

In other words, it's not a revolt so much as a retrenchment. While I think Lowry conflates the 8/28 and Tea Party movements a bit--it seems there may be some differences of emphasis (morals/tradition/religion or fiscal concerns, respectively)--they are pretty much the same bunch of people--average, middle-class Americans who our coastal/beltway elites like to call the bourgeois. Lowry continues:

For more than a hundred years, the bourgeois have been accused of being insipid, greedy, and unenlightened. To the long catalogue of their offenses can now be added another: unenthralled by Barack Obama, the Romantic hero seeking to transform the nation.

The tea party represents a revolt against his revolution, and thus a restoration. If a tea-party-infused Republican party were to take Congress and manage to cut federal expenditures by a sharp one-fifth, that figure would only be back to its typical level of recent decades of roughly 20 percent of GDP. If the party were to succeed in making the federal government more mindful of its constitutional limits, it would only be a step toward the dispensation that obtained during most of the country’s history.

Quite a revolt! Something about standing athwart History comes to mind....But Republicans shouldn't get too full of themselves, no matter what the current over/under on November looks like:

The last time Republicans benefited from a wave election, they had their own Beckian figure at the top in the person of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. They wallowed in their revolution and let Gingrich’s ideological grandeur define them — to their regret in the end. If the wave comes this time, Republicans should endeavor to be a sober and responsible party for sober and responsible people, resolutely cleaning up after the failed Obama revolution.

As the last two "wave" elections--one each won by the GOP and the Democrats--have shown, the quickest way for a political party to undercut such a win is to display vast quantities of hubris in the wake of a supposed mandate. In each case, the party that won went too far, reneged on promises or decided that ideals were worth sacrificing for the mirage of long term power. Americans want change, but not that kind or that much.

Now we see average folks clamoring for something else, anything else, to stop what they believe is a disaster in the making. They don't like the direction the country is taking politically so they've started Tea Parties. They don't like the long cultural decline so they find themselves inspired to hold a rally on the Mall. In short, average folks--the silent majority--are speaking up like never before. They've got nothing left to lose.

Gridlock is Good

Via this piece against the implementation of a Value-Added Tax (ie; "A VAT is a terrible idea if it triggers bigger government, and a VAT is a bad idea if it merely finances bigger government."), I came across the below from a decade-old interview with Milton Friedman. It was 2000 and we had a budget surplus. Why?

Milton Friedman: The...reason you have a surplus today, in my opinion, the credit for that has to be given overwhelmingly to gridlock.

Peter Robinson: To gridlock?

Milton Friedman: If you had had a Democratic House and Senate, as well as a Democratic president, you would not have a surplus today in my opinion. They would have spent it. Similarly if you had had a Republican president as well as a Republican House and Senate, I doubt that there would have been a surplus today. Because they would either have spent it or had tax reductions.

Peter Robinson: So when President Clinton steps forward to take his bows, you don't applaud at all?

Milton Friedman: Well, I applaud. He provided gridlock.

Peter Robinson: Okay, you applaud but for a different reason than the one he supposes.

Milton Friedman: The winning thing that really contributed to our successful economy over recent years is that the government has stayed out pretty much, with the White House and the Congress and the Senate haven't done much.

Seems like the last ten years have pretty much proven him right.

National Budget Deficit Trends

Randell Hoven (h/t) uses CBO figures and a simple chart to put the lie to the now familiar claims that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and Bush tax cuts caused a $3 Trillion budget deficit.

The CBO breaks that cost down over the eight calendar years of 2003-2010. Below is a picture of federal deficits over those years with and without Iraq War spending.

As Hoven points out, the deficits actually were shrinking until 2007, then started back up in 2008. What happened in between? Democrats took over Congress. Hoven adds some context (we all love context!):

The sum of all the deficits from 2003 through 2010 is $4.73 trillion. Subtract the entire Iraq War cost and you still have a sum of $4.02 trillion.

No one will say that $709 billion is not a lot of money. But first, that was spread over eight years. Secondly, let's put that in some perspective. Below are some figures for those eight years, 2003 through 2010.

* Total federal outlays: $22,296 billion.
* Cumulative deficit: $4,731 billion.
* Medicare spending: $2,932 billion.
* Iraq War spending: $709 billion.
* The Obama stimulus: $572 billion.

There is an important note to go along with that Obama stimulus number: the stimulus did not even start until 2009. By 2019, the CBO estimates the stimulus will have cost $814 billion.

If we look only at the Iraq War years in which Bush was President (2003-2008), spending on the war was $554B. Federal spending on education over that same time period was $574B....

So spending $572B in two years stimulates an economy, but spending $554B over six years ruins one?

Depends on who did what, right?

Go Get 'Em, Nancy!

For some reason, it never occurred to the Speaker that the negative reaction of many millions of people to the construction of a mosque within the crash zone of Ground Zero was spontaneous and not in response to a pre-arranged, pre-paid campaign.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is raising questions about who is funding criticism of the so-called "Ground Zero mosque."

Pelosi told KCBS is San Francisco yesterday that she joins "those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded." She added: "How is this being ginned up?"

Thanks, Speaker Pelosi, I'll pass on the gin. But you leave no stone unturned or astroturf farm uninvestigated as you track down the funding of this ... er, conspiracy. The longer you're in pursuit of untamed waterfowl, the less time you'll be able to devote to inflicting awful legislation on us.

Take Two on the Proposed NY Mosque: Feeling Compelled to Comment, President Obama Succeeds Only in Stating the Broadly Obvious

Breaking weeks of silence on the subject, President Obama remarked on Friday,

Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country.

That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.

When this was hailed as an endorsement of the mosque, President Obama hastened to clarify yesterday.

I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right that people have that dates back to our founding.

... my intention was simply to let people know what I thought. Which was that in this country we treat everybody equally and in accordance with the law, regardless of race, regardless of religion.

Now there's a perfectly bland, blanket statement; something appropriate to observe of our Constitution to an auditorium of school children or on Independence Day or perhaps the next time you're abroad. Can you say something a little more specific to the situation, please? A mosque two blocks from Ground Zero. No one is saying that proponents don't have the right to place it there; some are saying it isn't right to do so. What is your opinion, sir?

The ObamaCare Scam

The healthcare legislation should never have become law, and as time goes on, we continue to discover what a shoddy bit of law-making it was:

Talk about a paperwork nightmare: Tucked into the massive new health care law is a demand that nearly 40 million U.S. businesses file tax forms for every vendor that sells them more than $600 in goods. ...

The goal of the provision was to prevent vendors from underreporting their income to the Internal Revenue Service. The government must think those vendors are omitting a lot because the filing requirement is estimated to bring in $19 billion over the next decade. ...

Republicans want to repeal the filing requirement and pay for it by changing other parts of the new health care law, a strategy that Democratic leaders won't support. Democrats want to repeal the filing requirement and pay for it by raising taxes on international corporations and limiting taxpayers' ability to use special trusts to avoid gifts taxes. Republicans won't support that.

Because of the method of the legislation's enactment, nobody caught this problem before it passed, and those who were aware of it were either too ignorant to foresee (or object to) the consequences or thought it would offer a nifty trick for repealing the problem and increasing taxes after the legislation had squeaked through to passage. Frankly, the whole bill is a scam and an atrocity and should be repealed in full.

Barring that, the Republicans are exactly right: repairs to the law should be made within the law.

Swap Out Hillary C. for Joe B. in 2012??

That's the idea that "Tingles" Matthews has been exploring. From NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard.

The panel of the syndicated "Chris Matthews Show" this weekend campaigned for Hillary Clinton to replace Joe Biden as Vice President in order to assist Barack Obama's re-election in 2012 and set her up for a successful presidential bid in 2016.

As NewsBusters reported Wednesday, Chris Matthews on that evening's "Hardball" had former Virginia governor Doug Wilder and New York magazine's John Heilemann on to discuss the merits of this strategy.

The "Hardball" host must have found this quite compelling, for he decided to do an entire segment on his weekend program with guests Erin Burnett of CNBC, Kelly O'Donnell of NBC, Howard Fineman of Newsweek, and Heilemann.

Substitute Hillary's baggage and personality for Biden's gaffes? "Obama/Clinton 2012"? Wouldn't that be a dream ticket ... for the Republicans?

The Trouble with Obama (and Don't Forget His Legislative Enabler)

Joe Bernstein articulates it under Justin's post.

My objection to him is simple-he's a left wing ideologue who's made bad appointments and seems to not be competent and experienced enough for the job.

I would not argue, only amplify: President Obama is leading the charge on some really bad policies. Government take-over of our healthcare system; a willful disregard for our sovereignty via amnesty for undocumenteds and a refusal to control our borders; a pointless war on fossil fuels (and, therefore, a war on basic items like heat, AC, lights and most vehicles, not to mention, in the process, our wallets); spending beyond the wildest dreams of an inebriated sailor [edit: who, as Warrington correctly points out, at least spends his or her own money]; higher taxes.

Heavily complicit in all of this is Congress with, we should make careful note, Rhode Island's delegation whole-heartedly backing all of these bad rotten government initiatives. In fact, none would ever see the light of day were it not for Congress, which solely possesses the power to reject or implement them.

The trend of the president's approval rating indicates that Joe and I are not the only ones who object to the actualization of Barack Obama's presidency. It is mete also that his accomplice faces a reckoning at the polls on November 2. Indeed, though he goes on to make the case that the failure stemmed from an unwillingness to tack sufficiently leftwards, Robert Reich interestingly points out that it is the president's legislative agenda which now threatens the continued viability of both his own reelection and a Democrat-controlled Congress.

The President may have a fight on his hands even to hold on to what he’s already achieved because his legislative successes have been large enough to fuel strong opposition but not big enough to strengthen his support. The result could be disastrous for him and congressional Democrats. ...

A stimulus too small to significantly reduce unemployment, a TARP that didn’t trickle down to Main Street, financial reform that doesn’t fundamentally restructure Wall Street, and health-care reforms that don’t promise to bring down health-care costs have all created an enthusiasm gap. They’ve fired up the right, demoralized the left, and generated unease among the general population.

Topics Local and International

Last night Monique and Tony Cornetta talked, on the Matt Allen Show, about Iran, teachers' unions, and partisan ethics. Stream by clicking here, or download it.

On Ethics: Maxine Now, Maxine Then

When, last October, the House Ethics Committee placed Congressman Charles Rangel in exactly the same spot that Speaker Gingrich found himself fourteen years earlier, Congresswoman Maxine Waters observed

"What happens is, unfortunately with the requirements for disclosure that we all have, mistakes are made," she said. "And you do get a chance to correct them. And so it looks as if he is correcting those mistakes."

Regarding Gingrich's situation, however, the congresswoman had not adopted quite the same understanding tone. Courtesy Charlie Spiering at the Washington Examiner; h/t Fred Thompson.

"The house ethics committee found the Speaker guilty guilty guilty!" raged Rep. Maxine Waters on the House floor on December 7 1995. ". . it's about time, believe me the American people do not appreciated double standard, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, no one should be so big, so important, so powerful, that they can violate the rules of this house and the laws of this country and not suffer the consequences. . ."

Issues Big and Small

I've been preoccupied, today, with the sorts of thoughts that are hugely important to the individual, but quotidian details on a larger scale... and there's been so much on that larger scale that might otherwise have merited consideration. The economy, obviously:

The recovery lost momentum in the spring as growth slowed to a 2.4 percent pace, its most sluggish showing in nearly a year and too weak to drive down unemployment. ...

... the recovery has been losing power for two straight quarters. That raises concerns about whether it will fizzle out. Or worse, tip back into a "double-dip" recession. ...

In the revisions issued Friday, the government estimated that the economy shrank 2.6 percent last year -- the steepest drop since 1946. That's worse than the 2.4 percent decline originally estimated. The economy's plunge underscores why the unemployment rate surged to 10.1 percent in October, a 26-year high.

Businesses appear to have the resources to expand, but it's all about the uncertainty, and uncertainty has been the theme of the current Congress and administration. Thousands of pages of invasive law creating new bureaucracies to impose unwritten regulations. Those with resources, in other words, have reason to hold their breath.

The Gulf spill is another big item, today:

The generally accepted view of the Deepwater Horizon disaster has focused on the blowout preventer and the non-standard procedures BP conducted just before the explosion and fire. However, most of the damage and the main source of the spill came from the collapse and sinking of the DH platform rather than the initial explosion. A new report by the Center for Public Integrity, based on testimony from people on scene and Coast Guard logs, contains evidence that the platform sunk because of a botched response from the Coast Guard, which failed to coordinate firefighting efforts and to get the proper resources to fight the fire.

And the controversy will continue. Of course, now that BP has promised its billions in aid and the investigations into the incident pick up steam, we hear this:

Yes, the spill killed birds — but so far, less than 1% of the number killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years ago. Yes, we've heard horror stories about oiled dolphins — but so far, wildlife-response teams have collected only three visibly oiled carcasses of mammals. Yes, the spill prompted harsh restrictions on fishing and shrimping, but so far, the region's fish and shrimp have tested clean, and the restrictions are gradually being lifted. And yes, scientists have warned that the oil could accelerate the destruction of Louisiana's disintegrating coastal marshes — a real slow-motion ecological calamity — but so far, assessment teams have found only about 350 acres of oiled marshes, when Louisiana was already losing about 15,000 acres of wetlands every year.

Sometimes, it's difficult to know what to believe, when the issue isn't right there in front of you. Another argument, I'd suggest, for small, decentralized government.

Now back to my personal preoccupations...

Obama in Two Acts... or Not

Anchor Rising readers who share my reading habits have surely come across Charles Krauthammer's warning to opponents of President Obama not to underestimate him:

The net effect of 18 months of Obamaism will be to undo much of Reaganism. Both presidencies were highly ideological, grandly ambitious, and often underappreciated by their own side. In his early years as president, Reagan was bitterly attacked from his right. (Typical Washington Post headline: "For Reagan and the New Right, the Honeymoon Is Over" — and that was six months into his presidency!) Obama is attacked from his left for insufficient zeal on gay rights, immigration reform, closing Guantanamo — the list is long. The critics don't understand the big picture. Obama's transformational agenda is a play in two acts. ...

The next burst of ideological energy — massive regulation of the energy economy, federalizing higher education, and "comprehensive" immigration reform (i.e., amnesty) — will require a second mandate, meaning reelection in 2012.

Readers may also have encountered Jonah Goldberg's simultaneous exposition of a seemingly contrary view:

In 2008, American liberalism seemed poised for its comeback. The pendulum of Arthur Schlesinger's "cycle of history" was swinging back toward a new progressive era. Obama would be the liberal Reagan.

Now that all looks preposterous. Of course, considerable blame can be laid at a White House that seems confused about how to relate to the American people when the American people don't share the White House's ideological agenda. Indeed, the White House seems particularly gifted at generating issues that put it crosswise with the majority of voters — from the Arizona immigration lawsuit to the cotton-mouthed explanations about whether or not it considers NASA's primary mission to be boosting the self-esteem of Muslim youth.

Goldberg's central objective, with that piece, is to convey his vague sense that something in the rules has changed. Difficult economic times are not making Big Government more popular, but less; an environmental tragedy has not caused the American people to throw caution to the wind in a burst of zeal for alternative energy.

The cultural dimension will be important to explore, but on the political point, Goldberg subsequently took up the juxtaposition of his piece with Krauthammer's:

Obama's ambition creates opportunities that wouldn't have existed if he opted for a more cautious approach. The risk reward is high for him — and for the opposition. In football, war, or poker, or plenty of other imperfectly analogous situations, when one side goes for broke it creates vulnerabilities the other side can exploit. If Obama had stuck with short passes and a running game, he might not have run up the score so high but he would be in better shape politically.

Goldberg is not convinced that there's a grand political plan — or at least one that Barack Obama is competent to execute. Even during his campaign, he was too apt to slip into rhetoric about rubes with their religion and guns and about economic redistribution, forcing him to rely even more heavily on his showmanship. On the other hand, he proved a master showman.

I'd suggest that, while underestimating the man is inadvisable, focusing on him is even more so. Obama was elected, ultimately, as a centrist healer, and he managed his "historic" achievements only because he had the bare majority of both houses of Congress, with compliantly leftist co-partisans, to ram them through. And the president owes those majorities to the concerted and cynical trashing of his predecessor by the Democrats and by the forces of media, both news and entertainment.

What all of those forces — the president and his allies — have accomplished in the past two years is to remind the American people that they have no good options in the voting booth. The principle of the lesser of two evils has returned with a vengeance, and it may just be that the partisans have revved up public emotions to the degree that a majority of voters will not accept mere incremental loss of their autonomy from government as the "lesser" evil.

So the question isn't whether the president will attempt to rework his presentation in response to a new political reality, after November. He'll surely try, although a period of lame-duck gift-giving by exiting Congressional Democrats will make his efforts more difficult, even if he plays off them as a moderate only reluctantly complicit in the scheme. The question is whether he can play the Republicans and the American people so well that they return to him his one-party government.

But even that goes too far in crediting Obama as the sole actor on the stage. The one question is actually two:

1. Can Republicans control themselves sufficiently to move with the mandate of popular disaffection, rather than attempt to swim against it for immediate political and personal gain?
2. Will the American people be fooled again by The One?

On neither count am I confident in the preferable outcome, but while we oughtn't underestimate Obama, neither should we forget that history doesn't really divide into a series of strong personalities. The story isn't the main characters, but the tides that they ride.

The Nation's Boom Town

In his post earlier today, Justin wondered if there was a link between the Washington, D.C. suburbs' educational success and talk of a ruling class that I brought up yesterday. Heh, well...

America is struggling with a sputtering economy and high unemployment — but times are booming for Washington’s governing class.

The massive expansion of government under President Barack Obama has basically guaranteed a robust job market for policy professionals, regulators and contractors for years to come. The housing market, boosted by the large number of high-income earners in the area, many working in politics and government, is easily outpacing the markets in most of the country. And there are few signs of economic distress in hotels, restaurants or stores in the D.C. metro area.

As a result, there is a yawning gap between the American people and D.C.’s powerful when it comes to their economic reality — and their economic perceptions.

This disconnect has been going on for quite some time, but it looks even worse now. You can be sure that politicians and bureaucrats manage to find a way to get money into their own communities--including the public schools where their kids attend.

Uncle Sam employs about 10 percent of the area’s 3 million-person work force — or by federal procurement dollars, more than $20 billion of which landed in nearby Fairfax County, Va., alone last year.

“This is our auto industry, or financial services, or entertainment,” said Stephen Fuller, director of George Mason University’s Center for Regional Analysis, alluding, respectively, to the economic foundations of the Detroit, New York and Los Angeles metropolitan areas. “The federal government is our business. And on top of that, we have an administration that’s clearly expanding the role of the federal government in the context of the national economy — as a manager and as a provider of funds. That hasn’t been the case in the past, except in the case of wars.”

Then again, according to the Obama Administration, we're in a war against pretty much everything, which requires government mobilization!

And more money is on the way, in the form of well-paid agency jobs associated with reforms of the nation’s health insurance sector and financial markets: Both bills call for substantial new federal oversight by agencies such as the Health and Human Services Department and the Internal Revenue Service. And the professionals who take those jobs will need homes, buy furniture and pay taxes, said David Robertson, executive director of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, “and that’s going to have a multiplier effect in our region.”

The Center for Regional Analysis projects the federal government will add 6,500 new jobs in the area each year through 2012.

It's a boom town, for sure.

Taking on the Ruling Class

Glenn Reynolds and his readers are commenting on Angelo Codevilla's piece about the "Ruling Class". Who are they?

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

They are the leaders of both parties and government--especially the federal--bureaucracy; and though it's not a "party thing", the ruling class finds a more comfortable home amongst Democrats with a few wannabe Republicans tagging along. That's been particularly the case in Rhode Island. Their motive is power. They seek to wield power for its own sake, or because--following the Progressive tenets that supported the emergence of this new ruling class--they know better than the average person how to run things and what is best. They play rhetorical games to get this power and make deals--with unions, big business--to keep it. Yet, they are still the minority. Indeed, as Codevilla states, there are more people in America not in the "ruling class" who he calls the "country class"--those not oriented towards government for a solution to all problems (there are even some within government in this "class").

In general, the country class includes all those in stations high and low who are aghast at how relatively little honest work yields, by comparison with what just a little connection with the right bureaucracy can get you.

How old-fashioned: believing that it is what you know (and do) over who you know. Codevilla continues:

It includes those who take the side of outsiders against insiders, of small institutions against large ones, of local government against the state or federal. The country class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary people are more unequal than ever.

That is why ordinary folks are organizing on the local level to try to take back some power. But it will be tough slogging: this new generation of reformers will be faced with a more legalistic and bureaucratized government than previous generations.

Continue reading "Taking on the Ruling Class"

Silence About the All-Important Felon Vote

If you get your news from a mainstream media source, you might not have heard — as Dan Gifford notes — about the apparent likelihood that Senator Al Franken (D., MN) was elected based on the illegal votes of felons:

• A conservative watchdog group Minnesota Majority has gone through voting records reportedly finding that at least 341 convicted felons voted illegally in just two of Minnesota's 87 counties during the 2008 general election. Undoubtedly other felons voted illegally in other counties.
• After culling through 500 initial allegations of felons illegally voting, the Ramsey County Attorney's Office told The Minneapolis Star Tribune Monday that they are seriously investigating about 180 cases. Another 28 felons have already been charged. Hennepin county, which includes Minneapolis, winnowed 451 initial cases down to 216 that they are still looking at. Some other felons have already been charged. Both the Ramsey and Hennepin county attorneys are Democrats.

Franken won by 312 votes. Liberals will note that the news above comes via Fox News, which in their minds instantly invalidates it; that which is not reported by an alphabet channel does not actually happen. Of course, that's why non-liberals correctly understand Fox News to be the most balanced of the television news options.

Gifford suggests that even liberal Democrats like most journalists ought to find interest in the Franken voter fraud case, inasmuch as Franken cannot be ousted from office, at this point, and they could cast the story toward advocacy of allowing felons to vote legally. Unfortunately, shedding light on the matter might make voters elsewhere suspicious, conservative watchdog groups across the country might begin researching the results in their own states, and bloggers and alternative information sources might rack up more scoops.

A Juxtaposition of Eras

You probably won't get through a bag of popcorn during this Friday night film — indeed, you could almost watch the whole thing while your popcorn pops — but Andrew Klavan's humorous and cutting comparison of the dark days of the Bush Era with Obama's Recovery Summer is worth a watch:

The Question Is Whether It's Curable

You may have come across the commentary that the co-chairmen of a debt and deficit commission initiated by the president offered to the National Governor's Association:

The commission leaders said that, at present, federal revenue is fully consumed by three programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. "The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans -- the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed by China and other countries," [Republican Senator from Wyoming Alan] Simpson said.

"We can't grow our way out of this," [former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine] Bowles said. "We could have decades of double-digit growth and not grow our way out of this enormous debt problem. We can't tax our way out. . . . The reality is we've got to do exactly what you all do every day as governors. We've got to cut spending or increase revenues or do some combination of that."

Bowles called the national debt "a cancer." Glenn Reynolds thinks "the whole point of the commission is to give political cover to tax increases," which may be the case. The question that follows immediately, however, is: Cover from whom? Cornell Law Professor and Barrington resident William Jacobson might suggest that the people of the United States have already tired of the game:

Barack Obama was not elected because of a progressive political shift in the nation. The nation remains a country which believes, according to polling by James Carville and Stan Greenberg, that:

"The best way to improve our economy and create jobs is to cut government spending and cut taxes so businesses can prosper and the private sector can start creating jobs."

Yet everything the Democrats do goes in the opposite direction. ...

Democrats took advantage of a crisis, and then doubled-down by massively increasing our national debt to advantage preferred political constituencies.

The elections will tell, ultimately, but my expectation is that the American electorate won't look at the bill of particulars and see taxation as the reasonable response. Of course, the two questions that follow that assessment are:

• Have the national Democrats managed to lock themselves in, as their state members have in Rhode Island?
• Have the Republicans learned their lesson sufficiently to avoid returning to the disappointing practices of their dominant years during the Bush administration?

If the answers are "yes" and "no," respectively, then our nation is in for grave times, indeed. On the second question, though, there's hope (I hope) that an infusion of tea-party Republicans will be enough to inoculate a Republican Congress against recidivism.

So the New-and-Now-Defunct Non-Space Goals for NASA Were Just a Trial Balloon?

Well, at least that would be sort of related to space, unlike the goals themselves, which have apparently been ... withdrawn.

[NASA Administrator Charles] Bolden caused a global stir last week when he said President Obama had asked him to reach out to Muslim leaders on science issues. He made the comments during an interview with Al Jazeera while visiting Egypt.

But White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Monday, "That was not his task, and that's not the task of NASA."

Gibbs said White House officials have spoken to Bolden and NASA about the comments.

At first, I thought perhaps KLo at the Corner had exaggerated when she described this as the White House throwing Bolden under the bus. Just last week, however, the White House had reaffirmed the goals, though embellished with a nice little I-meant-we-would-all-do-this-together, internationalism florish, nor had they corrected Bolden when he first outlined the goals publicly in February. Possibly it wasn't Bolden that White House officials needed to speak about this matter but his boss who, almost two years after winning a presidential election, is obviously still in community-organizing mode, albeit on a much larger scale.

Planning Their Moves for After the People Speak

Don't miss John Fund's widely cited premonition that President Obama and the Congressional Democrats are planning implementation of a last-minute wish list after the election:

It's been almost 30 years since anything remotely contentious was handled in a lame-duck session, but that doesn't faze Democrats who have jammed through ObamaCare and are determined to bring the financial system under greater federal control. ...

Many Democrats insist there will be no dramatic lame-duck agenda. But a few months ago they also insisted the extraordinary maneuvers used to pass health care wouldn't be used. Desperate times may be seen as calling for desperate measures, and this November the election results may well make Democrats desperate.

The message to bring to this summer's "meet your representatives" events will be that consequences can follow a politician and a party even when out of office and out of power... after, of course, all of the horrible legislation is reversed and then some. As disheartening as it may be to acknowledge that ideals of representative government are waning (and may always have been naive), that's the world in which we live. It's unlikely to affect the likes of Sheldon Whitehouse to have constituents call and express their hopes that he won't participate in efforts to explicitly subvert the will of American voters. Perhaps it will have a marginally greater effect if he worries that his actions in the fall will define public perception of his character for the rest of his life.

Steele's Afghanistan Hackery

Look, I know that for the first time in eons, a GOP chair visited the state and threw the RI GOP some red meat and there was much rejoicing. But it looks like he's engaging in some purely disingenuous political hackery here:

Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama's choosing. This was not something that the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in...if he is such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan?

Apparently he forgot the part that it was President Bush--with the broad support of the American people--who correctly got us into Afghanistan because the government in power--the Taliban--aided and comforted a terrorist organization that killed 3,000 Americans. In what has become a regular routine since Steele took over, some are calling for his resignation. We'll see, but one thing is for sure: this sort of hackery is what turns people off to politics (and specifically the GOP). Unbelievable.

UPDATED: The Bill Will Come Due

Kevin Williamson has totaled America's public debt, and his essay makes for scary reading:

So that's $14 trillion in federal debt and $2.5 trillion in state-and-local debt: $16.5 trillion. But I've got some bad news for you, Sunshine: We haven't even hit all the big-ticket items. ...

... "Half the states' pension funds could run out of money by 2025," [Northwester University Prof. Joshua Rauh] says, "and that's assuming decent investment returns. The federal government should be worried about its exposure. Are these states too big to fail? If something isn't done, we're facing another trillion-dollar bailout." ...

So how much would the states have to book to fully fund those liabilities? Drop in another $3 trillion. Properly accounting for these obligations, that takes us up to a total of $19.5 trillion in governmental liabilities. ...

The debt numbers start to get really hairy when you add in liabilities under Social Security and Medicare — in other words, when you account for the present value of those future payments in the same way that businesses have to account for the obligations they incur. Start with the entitlements and those numbers get run-for-the-hills ugly in a hurry: a combined $106 trillion in liabilities for Social Security and Medicare, or more than five times the total federal, state, and local debt we've totaled up so far. In real terms, what that means is that we’d need $106 trillion in real, investable capital, earning 6 percent a year, on hand, today, to meet the obligations we have under those entitlement programs. For perspective, that's about twice the total private net worth of the United States. (A little more, in fact.)

Little wonder the Democrats in power think nothing of layering on the billions: Billions hardly register in the face of that mountain of debt. The cover of the penultimate National Review, in which Williamson's piece appears, shows a distressed boy looking at a chalkboard that reads "130 Trillion: What We Owe." The image got me pondering how one could illustrate the size of a trillion dollars, and I'm still pondering. One idea is to start in the upper left corner of the chalk board with a single dot, labeled "trillion." The next row would be labeled "billions" and would require 1,000 small dots. The next row, "millions," would easily exceed the capacity of the average classroom chalkboard.

My personal circumstances are such that the lessons of debt are hourly on my mind. To oversimplify, a slightly less luxurious lifestyle a decade ago (with dinners out and the like) would have meant that I wouldn't be quitting coffee because a large $8 can of grinds every two weeks or so is something I can live without.

It brings the mind back to that episode of Seinfeld that made famous the phrase, "serenity now." More fitting would be the modification,"austerity now."

ADDENDUM:

Kevin Williamson checked in to send along a graphic illustration of $1 trillion. The upshot:

In case you can't see it, that's a standard-sized man in the bottom left-hand corner. (Check the link for an explanation.)

It's the Authority, not the Science

Jonah Goldberg spotted in the news an instance in which the Obama Interior Department appears to have misrepresented the opinion of some scientists whom it consulted regarding a possible ban of offshore drilling:

The draft these experts saw was substantively different from the document that bore their names. The draft called for a moratorium on issuing new permits, not stopping existing drilling (a move many experts believe would be unsafe).

One of the experts, Benton Baugh, president of Radoil, told the Wall Street Journal that if the draft had said to halt drilling, "we'd have said 'that's craziness.'"

As Goldberg writes, "there is something ugly and hypocritical about glorifying the absolute authority of scientists and sanctimoniously preening about your bravery in 'restoring' that authority" — only to ignore what they say when it's "politically expedient." Actually, I'm sure Goldberg would agree that progressives' periodic lauding of science is primarily, if not entirely, all about political expedience.

When candidate Obama said he would "restore science to its rightful place," he meant that he would treat it as an unassailable, procaimedly "objective," conversation-ending weapon in philosophical debates. The prerequisite, of course, is that science must agree with his own views on a particular issue.

The very necessity of politics arises because there is no objective measure when it comes to policy decisions that must balance competing interests and complement subjective considerations like religion and ethics with practical needs and objectives. Tyranny lurks behind the elevation of any particular input as if it alone settles the question, especially when determination is handed to a limited group with information beyond the comprehension of everybody else.

Is it any wonder why, "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" is so appealing?

To paraphrase, "Government acres is the place to be, government jobs are the life you see...":

Under the Obama administration, the government is doing such a good job that it's decided to reward itself. Last year, Uncle Sam paid out $408 million in bonuses to 1.3 million federal workers...That $408 million figure only counts bonuses that were handed out to about 65 percent of the federal work force. The FOI request didn't cover awards handed out by the Defense and Treasury departments, security agencies, the White House, Congress and various other federal agencies and commissions. In 2008, the last year information was available, the Department of Defense alone handed out $92 million in bonuses to its 687,000 employees.

Federal bonuses are being doled out liberally, even as federal salaries are exploding. From December 2007 through June 2009, the number of federal workers earning six figures increased from 14 to 19 percent. In 2008, average federal compensation, including pay and benefits, was $119,982 -- considerably more than the $59,909 average in the private sector, according to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the midst of a brutal economic downturn that saw millions of jobs lost and unemployment soar above 10 percent, the Office of Personnel Management data shows the federal workforce actually added nearly 100,000 jobs from December 2008 to December 2009.

Bonuses for good performance are nice in theory, and in they work in private sector, when they are paired with consequences (you know, getting fired) if you don't perform. As the article points out, though, in government, it's "all carrot and no stick."

Failure to Stop the Gulf Oil Gusher is Not Obama's Katrina

... of course, Katrina was not Bush's Katrina. The only "serious" criticism that could be leveled is that he failed for several days to read the minds of a Governor and a Mayor who couldn't stop sitting on their hands long enough to pick up the telephone and ask for help.

But I'm risking an unnecessary discussion of events long behind us. So let's set that aside for the moment and see if we can agree on the definition of a "Katrina". How about this?

It is a situation in which a POTUS 1.) is aware of a disaster 2.) is cognizant that governmental resources exist that could help to abate that disaster and 3.) fails to send those resources knowing full well that they are needed and have been called for.

Clearly, then, the Gulf oil disaster fails item #2 of this test. Contrary to the observations this week of some critics (a list that includes even lefties Carville and Matthews), no branch of the United States government possesses the skills or equipment to deal with an uncapped, gushing oil well one mile under water. This is very much a specialized area of expertise.

Now, could President Obama have attempted to identify another company, possibly another oil company, and elbowed aside BP so as to give this other company a shot at stopping the gusher? Yes, maybe. It would have been a maneuver not without risk, though. If the other company had failed, for instance, could BP have claimed that they would have succeeded? What about the matter of liability? Would the president have reduced BP's liability and placed some liability onto the US government in doing so? Certainly some high powered attorney would have so argued in court.

Another thing. Was it the height of brainless bureaucratic numb-scullery for the US Army Corps of Engineers to call for an environmental impact study before they would consider authorizing the installation of sand berms to protect marshes and other areas along the coast? No question. Several people in that agency need to be fired immediately after they complete the voluntary lobotomies that they had clearly started to undergo just prior to reviewing the application for these sand berms.

(Feel free to take a snack break here as I try to explain.)

These berms were requested, ladies and gentlemen of the Army Corps of Engineers, to try to stop some of the MILLIONS OF GALLONS OF CRUDE OIL WHICH HAS SPILLED INTO THE GULF OF MEXICO, a situation which YOU HAVE OBVIOUSLY NOT HEARD ABOUT even though for the last month, it has been COVERED 24/7 WITH BLARING HEADLINES AND FLASHY GRAPHICS BY EVERY MEDIA OUTLET KNOWN TO MAN.

(Where were we? Oh, yes.) Again, though, the berm denseness of the Army Corps cannot be pinned on the president, at least not until the Louisiana Congressional delegation started jumping up and down in unison, which is something that they did fairly late in the game.

Is the president being too cute by half about the exact circumstances of the termination of employment of Elizabeth Birnbaum, the newly former head of the US Minerals Management Service? Sure he is. And it's not making him look good. But it, too, is a secondary matter - even if he had handled it perfectly, it wouldn't have stopped the oil spill.

There is a very, very, very long list of fiscal, economic, sovereignty, national security and foreign policy proposals and decisions for which the president can be criticized in depth. The steadfast refusal of the mainstream media over the last year and a half to see or discuss 95% of that list makes it very tempting to jump on the president when such a glaringly visible disaster presents itself. We need to resist that, though, both in the interest of our own integrity and so as to retain credibility when we bring up the items on that extremely long list. Failure to cap an underwater oil well is not on that list.

Les Phillip, Alabama congressional candidate

The video quality may be poor but the words from Alabama congressional candidate Les Phillip are some of the best I have heard in a long time.

Rainy Day Patriots Speech Highlights.

Here, again, is his ad posted earlier.

His campaign website is here.

From December 5, 2008: Anyone want to bet on what direction Obama wants to take America?

Reposting a December 5, 2008 post entitled Even Lenin would be impressed:

Melanie Phillips:

Trevor Loudon has got hold of a fascinating analysis of Prez-elect Obama's administrative appointments by Mark Rudd and Jeff Jones, two former Weather Underground terrorists (chums of Obama's old ally [chance acquaintance], the unrepentant former WU terrorist William Ayers). The two of them are now on the board of Movement for a Democratic society, in turn the parent body of Progressives for Obama, the leading leftist lobby group behind Obama's presidential campaign. And waddya know - just like me they believe Obama is practising stealth politics with a degree of sophistication and success with which 'even Lenin would be impressed.' As they say, Obama knows that he must be subtle and reassure even the most conservative of his opponents if he is to achieve his radical goals...

Read Phillips for key excerpts from the articles by MDS members. Here is the link to Trevor Loudon's writeup with more complete information.

Phillips continues:

The key is the stupidity of so many of Obama's opponents, amplified by the credulousness and prejudices of the media and the ignorance of the public. The shallow Republicans and their supporters in the media and blogosphere have in large measure fallen for Obama's stealth politics hook, line and sinker. As a result of his 'centris' appointments which have got them absurdly cooing over people like Clinton and Holder, Gates and Jones, their guard is now totally lowered. They still don't know the true nature of what has hit them -- and at this rate will never know until they wake up one morning to a transformed America and a free world that has lost the war being fought against it.

And the more the left shrieks 'betrayal', the more American conservatives will wrap themselves in denial. But characters like Rudd and Jones are the horse's mouth. They know from the inside the manipulative and stealthy game that is being played here. Lenin would be impressed indeed.

As further background, here are a series of Obama posts from the general election:

Clarifying the deeper problems with Barack Obama
Summarizing the philosophical problems with Barack Obama's view of the world
More troubling thoughts about the One
Crisply defining the core problem with Obama's economic and tax policies
On Obama's economic and tax policies
Multiple choice options regarding Obama's "spread the wealth" comment
Any bids for $75,000?
Socialism
Yep, that'd be my reaction
Obama and ACORN's overt and criminal voter fraud acts
McCarthy: Stifling political debate with threats of prosecution is not the "rule of law" - it's tyranny
Obama on his desire for a civilian national security force
Does Obama believe in liberty?
Obama vs. McGovern on eliminating secret union elections
Obama's fundraising: Insufficient transparency and yet more unanswered questions
A rare Zen moment of simplicity
Senator Obama's naive, ahistorical, and unrealistic foreign policy viewpoints: His Achilles Heel for the November election
On Obama's disarmament priorities
On Obama's healthcare policies
On Obama's extreme abortion beliefs
Obama's views on coal industry
Oh my, it just never stops: In the tank for Obama
Creepy, indeed
Creepy, again
An argument for divided government

Anyone want to bet on what direction Obama wants to take America?

Go Bama

Some things speak for themselves:

Rick Barber, Congressional candidate.

Les Phillip, Congressional candidate.

Dale Peterson, Ag Commissioner candidate.

ObamaCare Less and Less Popular

Imagine how unpopular it will be when its costs really start to kick in:

Support for repeal of the new national health care plan has jumped to its highest level ever. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 63% of U.S. voters now favor repeal of the plan passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law by President Obama in March.

Prior to today, weekly polling had shown support for repeal ranging from 54% to 58%.

And by "costs," I don't mean just the direct cost to the federal government, which (for those who've forgotten) is not the sum total of the United States. For one example, Americans are pretty good at intuiting this sort of outcome:

A study by the National Center for Policy Analysis shows that tax credits in the new healthcare law could negatively impact small-business hiring decisions.

The new law provides a 50 percent tax credit to companies offering health coverage that have fewer than 10 workers who, on average, earn $25,000 a year. The tax credit is reduced as more employees are added to the payroll.

The NCPA study finds the reduction in tax relief to be a cost concern for companies looking to hire additional workers, but operate on slim profit margin yet still provide employee health coverage.

Incumbents — making government less efficient and American life more difficult, year after year.

Blumenthal to the New London Day: Get my (Lack of) Middle Initial Right

When it was pointed out to Connecticut AG Richard (this space deliberately left blank) Blumenthal that newspaper articles had picked up and repeated his lies, thereby unwittingly contributing to his stolen valor, Mr. Blumenthal indignantly replied that he could not keep track of all news reports about himself.

Not so fast. An editorial in Wednesday's New London Day dryly reports

And why did Mr. Blumenthal not act quickly to correct inaccurate reports in state newspapers that described him as a Vietnam veteran? The candidate explains he can't track all news reports about him. Yet this newspaper knows from experience that Mr. Blumenthal is quick to correct unflattering statements published about him or to refute opinions with which he disagrees. One reporter got a call from the attorney general for inserting a middle initial in his name. He has none.

An ad and a spoof of another ad

Dale Peterson for Alabama Ag Commissioner. (More on the ad here.)

Another interpretation of GM CEO's recent ad. (Full story here.)

The Obligation of Participation

Jay Nordlinger's profile of Florida congressional candidate Allen West is interesting reading, overall, but this passage should haunt the days of all productive Rhode Islanders (emphasis added):

After the Army, West taught high school for a while — history. He is especially pleased that some of his students went on to service academies. Then he went to Afghanistan as a civilian adviser, training Afghan officers. He says he felt "a yearning in my heart" to do this. And then, politics called. West quotes Plato: "One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors."

The story of our state — and its characteristic apathy — in a sentence.

Challenging the increasing momentum toward a nanny state

It seems increasingly relevant so here is a re-run of a February 7, 2009 post, with some updates:

As Obama, Pelosi and Reid accelerate the implementation of statist practices in America - building on what Bush started - it is helpful and necessary to reacquaint ourselves with fundamental economic principles and some specific significant issues animating today's public debate.

FUNDAMENTAL ECONOMIC PRINCIPLES

The 17-blog post series below was originally put together in 2006 and contains excerpts from the writings of Thomas Sowell, Reason magazine, Bruce Caldwell, Friederich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Arthur Seldon, Gordon Tullock, Jane Shaw, Lawrence Reed, The Freeman magazine, Leonard Read, Donald Boudreaux, John Gray, Bertrand de Jouvenel, and Michael Novak, with links to others like Walter Williams, David Boaz, and David Schmidtz:

Part I: What is Economics?

Part II: Myths About Markets

Part III: Why Policy Goals are Trumped by Incentives They Create & the Role of Knowledge in Economics

Part IV: The Abuse of Reason, Fallacies & Dangers of Centralized Planning, Prices & Knowledge, and Understanding Limitations

Part V: The Relationship Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom

Part VI: More on the Relationship Between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom

Part VII: The Role of Government in a Free Society

Part VIII: The Unspoken, But Very Real, Incentives That Drive Governmental Actions

Part IX: More on the Coercive Role of Government

Part X: The Power of the Market

Part XI: Prices

Part XII: I, Pencil - A Story about the Free Market at Work

Part XIII: It is Individuals - Not the Society, Government or Market - Who Think & Act

Part XIV: On Equality

Part XV: Consequences of Price Controls

Part XVI: The Ethics of Redistribution

Part XVII: What Does "Social Justice" Mean?

No matter how emphatically these politicians rant and rave in their effort to re-write history, they cannot re-write the basic laws of economics. As a Reverend once said, those chickens will come home to roost at some point. The only question is when and how big a price we will pay when it happens.

PRIMERS ON ECONOMICS

As some of the above posts note and as further ammunition for the public debate, these books are excellent primers on important economic topics:

Henry Hazlitt - Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics

James Gwartney et al - Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity

Milton and Rose Friedman - Free to Choose

Thomas Sowell - Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy

Thomas Sowell - Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One

An excellent site for articles, blogging, and podcasts on a broad range of economic issues is Library of Economics and Liberty.

Furthermore, the budding public debate in America touches on these significant issues, highlighted below and drawing on the 17 blog posts:

Continue reading "Challenging the increasing momentum toward a nanny state"

A refreshing change

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie destroys reporter for calling him confrontational.

No painting with bland pastels. Courageous. A good thing in times of uncertainty.

Taking Stock

In his latest, Victor Davis Hanson admits that he's beating a dead horse when it comes to "media polarities" that "are getting to the point of absurdity." Perhaps so, but its worth taking stock every now and again and doing the ol' compare and contrast:

Bush, the lazy golfer while we were at war; Obama the engaged commander-in-chief playing golf for needed relaxation more in one year than in Bush’s eight. Katrina, the emblem of federal inaction and culpable incompetence; the BP slick, either a result of private greed overwhelming noble federal auditors or proof of the Obamian competent response. Bush’s illegal war clearly alienating Muslims and thus creating terrorists daily; laughable excuses from a terrorist that Obama’s stepped-up targeted Predator assassinations “created” would-be killers such as himself. Right wingers in bed with Wall Street oligarchs greedily crafting federal policy for the exploiting class; Obama for some odd reason, no doubt in the end a noble reason, taking more money from the likes of Goldman Sachs and British Petroleum than any politician in history. The Bush-Cheney nexus shredding the Constitution with the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, Predators, and renditions; Obama the civil libertarian reluctantly forced to maintain or expand such protocols, albeit at last under a watchful liberal eye. Bush’s “lost” war in Iraq miraculously soon to be Obama’s “greatest achievement.”

What is the theory behind all this other than partisanship or cynicism? I think it involves the power of faith and the irrational, in some cases not confined to the left. (e.g., I once got a prominent conservative angry at me when I suggested Reagan embraced large deficits, signed an amnesty bill, wanted nuclear disarmament, and raised payroll taxes). Politics is a religion, never more so than in the case of Obama. And true believers always prefer the saintly explanation rather than the most logical.

That we're all guilty of having the ideological blinders on at one time or another is true enough. But I also think that it's a basic human characteristic that we don't like to admit we were wrong or were mistaken in our judgment (like in who we support politically) and this is made worse by a tendency to go "all in" with someone and being unable to tolerate acute criticism when warranted.

Big government, crony capitalism and the latest from Government Motors

Big government, whom some foolishly think is the pathway to so-called social justice for the little guy, actually has the opposite effect. It incentivizes big corporations, big unions and other powerful organizations to feed at the enlarged government trough to buy favors at the expense of those unable to pay for a place at the trough. This leads to what used to be called "corporate (or union) welfare" and some now call "crony capitalism."

Whatever the label, the result is the same: Transparent competition in the marketplace that benefits consumers is trumped by the non-transparent buying of legal or regulatory favors that benefit the few at the expense of the many. In other words, big government enables the powerful to prey on others, as predicted by public choice economic theory. How ironic it is then that when the structural incentives created by big government cause the forecasted negative outcomes, the advocates for big government call for yet more of the same.

Why do these negative outcomes surprise any of us? Take ObamaCare, where the Congress passed and the President signed a 2,200-page bill that no one had read. Forget for a moment how passing such a large bill that no one read should startle all of us into loud protests. The bill now goes to unelected, unaccountable, nameless, faceless bureaucrats for the development of endless pages of regulations, the existence of which will only further ensure their job stability. Does anyone really think those uniform regulations drafted in the vacuum of government office buildings in the nation's capital will provide easier access to better healthcare services by being responsive to the differing needs of a cross-section of citizens in, say, Peoria, Illinois, Chandler, Arizona, Tucker, Georgia, and Yakima, Washington? But you can be assured that large insurers and medical service companies will have their lobbyists walking the hallways to influence the regulations in ways that are responsive to their own economic needs. Again, the irony: These companies do it not because they are evil but because they are responding rationally to their adjusted self-interest as determined by the new economic incentives created by the ObamaCare legislation.

So when government seeks to play God and takes over activities best done by the free market, there are adverse consequences. (Just like so-called "campaign finance reform" in an era of big government has created its own set of perverse incentives that result in more money flowing into politics in different and often less visible ways.)

Government Motors, aka General Motors, is merely one recent example. Taxpayers' money was used to bail them out, allowing them to avoid the hard choices of restructuring the company to profitability - either on their own or in a traditional bankruptcy process. Now GM touts in a very public ad how they have paid back their government loan ahead of schedule and with interest. And GM went even further with their CEO writing a WSJ editorial entitled The GM Bailout: Paid Back in Full - The investment of U.S. and Canadian tax dollars worked. Except (with H/T to Instapundit) they misled everyone by not disclosing that the loan was only a small part of the total bailout and they repaid it with other federal government-provided funds that were sitting in a separate escrow account available for their working capital needs. (More on the government dollars that flowed to GM.) It gets worse: Apparently this ad is part of a campaign to lay the groundwork for GM to get billions more of DOE government aid at a lower interest rate, again funded by the taxpayers at a time of record budget deficits.

Contemplate the perverse incentives created by these unfolding developments. How would a corporation ordinarily fund new projects? Usually out of positive operating cash flow generated from profits of the business, a scenario that would only happen after the project successfully competed against other internal capital project alternatives advocated by other executives through showing more compelling projected financial returns. (Of course, this funding approach would require GM to be profitable and generating positive cash flow, but I digress.) Alternatively, GM could get the money from new equity investors or lenders. Which means they would have to convince those investors or lenders to bet on their plan, in part based on the merits of the plan and in part based on management's past track record. In parallel, these investors and lenders are getting measured quarterly by their own funding sources based on the quality of their performance in comparison to other current investment alternatives available to the funding sources. If equity investors or lenders enter into bad deals, their funding sources will pull back, adversely impacting their business. So the equity investors and lenders have an incentive to deeply scrutinize a GM deal and evaluate its merits in competition with all the alternative deals they could do at the time. But that is not how crony capitalism works: GM only has to privately curry favor in Washington, D.C. among bureaucrats who become more influential when they respond favorably to such behavior, who become even more influential when they have larger projects like the new DOE loans, who have no effective mechanisms for oversight and accountability, and who suffer no adverse consequences if they enter into bad deals.

By the way, to add insult to injury for taxpayers, the political pressure to rush through bankruptcy without the requisite time for an adequate restructuring of their cost structure no doubt contributed to GM (and the other ward of the state, Chrysler) losing billions of dollars last quarter in their first quarter after exiting bankruptcy. For all we know, the rationale for the DOE loan could be to fund changes that ordinarily would have been accomplished in a proper bankruptcy restructuring. Meanwhile Ford, which faced market realities the free market way, turned a profit.

The loss of liberty and cost to taxpayers are profound when you look at the particulars of crony capitalism created by big government.

Why do we tolerate this erosion of our freedom?

ADDENDUM #1:

With another H/T to Instapundit, Megan McArdle on Department of . . . Huh?:

It was bad enough that we had to bail out the banks, but at least you could make a reasonable argument that we had to--we know what happens when you allow widespread bank runs, and its generally pretty disastrous for the citizenry. But you know what happens when a large auto manufacturer fails? Its employees and customers have to do business somewhere else...

It was sheer political theater, and incredibly corrosive to public trust in our government institutions, as well as a gross misallocation of economic resources. The role of the state is to prevent human suffering, not prop up failing enterprises that happen to have politically well-connected employees. I am genuinely struggling to come up with what principled argument Andrew might be making in his head for what has always struck me as a pretty blatant handout to a powerful Democratic interest group.

ADDDENDUM #2:

With an updated H/T to Instapundit, Hot Air writes NY Times: GM, Treasury lied about bailout repayment:

This article by Gretchen Morrison in the New York Times is significant for two reasons. First, the Times has decided to give this significant coverage, which means the story of GM's misleading claim of paying back the taxpayer-funded bailout will continue to have some legs. More importantly, it also points the finger at Treasury and the Obama administration for its complicity in allowing CEO Ed Whitacre to make those claims without challenge...

[quoting from the Times' article]: G.M. also crowed about its loan repayment in a national television ad and the United States Treasury also marked the moment with a press release: "We are encouraged that G.M. has repaid its debt well ahead of schedule and confident that the company is on a strong path to viability," said Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary.

Taxpayers are naturally eager for news about bailout repayments. But what neither G.M. nor the Treasury disclosed was that the company simply used other funds held by the Treasury to pay off its original loan.

Hot Air also references a Power Line post where Scott Johnson wrote:

Whitacre and GM omitted two facts that render their public relations blitz highly misleading. They are the kind of omissions that constitute securities fraud when made by a company in connection with the purchase or sale of a security or when a company reports its financial results...

GM's fraudulent public relations blitz took place with the support of the Obama administration, up to and including Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner. Geithner's participation makes his tax cheating and related testimony pale in comparison.

In retrospect, it is obvious that GM undertook the blitz at the behest of the Obama administration. It is symptomatic of the era of national socialism in which we find ourselves, and for which GM is a leading indicator.

Apparently crony capitalism makes reality optional and accountability non-existent. And liberty is reduced.

ADDENDUM #3:

Mark Tapscott's Did Obama administration tell GM to lie about its TARP repayment? provides links to written Congressional requests for more information about what happened, including these words from Senator Grassley to Treasury Secretary Geithner:

In reality, it looks like GM merely used one source of TARP funds to repay another. The taxpayers are still on the hook, and whether TARP funds are ultimately recovered depends entirely on the government's ability to sell GM stock in the future. Treasury has merely exchanged a legal right to repayment for an uncertain hope of sharing in the future growth of GM. A debt-for-equity swap is not a repayment.

I am also troubled by the timing of this latest maneuver. According to Mr. Barofsky, Treasury had supervisory authority over GM's use of these TARP escrow funds. Since GM's exit from bankruptcy court, Treasury had approved the use of the escrow funds for costs such as GM's obligations to its parts supplier Delphi.

Tapscott concludes with this observation:

...Accusations and worries of improper government interference with business are inevitable results of government picking winners and losers in the private economy, as was done with the trillions of tax dollars used by the Bush and Obama administrations to bail out Wall Street investment firms, GM and Chrysler, insurance giant AIG, and multiple banks.

There is a name for the kind of regime that allows private ownership of businesses but effectively tells them what to produce and sell. It's called Fascism. America is far from there, but becoming a bailout nation is a significant step in the wrong direction.

ADDENDUM #4:

Competitive Enterprise Institute: General Motors Deceptive Advertising Challenged by Watchdog Group in FTC Filing.

Who gets to play God?

Obama:

Now, what we're doing, I want to be clear, we're not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that's fairly earned. I mean, I do think at a certain point you've made enough money.

What does "success fairly earned" or "enough money" mean?

Who defines "success fairly earned" or "enough money"?

What if different people define "success fairly earned" or "enough money" differently?

Who defines the consequences of having more than "enough money"?

Who enforces such consequences?

If anyone thinks the definition or consequences of "enough money" is unjust, to whom do they turn for relief?

In other words, who gets to play God?

Any way you cut it, implementing policies consistent with Obama's words will require coercive actions that diminish liberty. There seems to be a certain amnesia about the coercive nature of government. Of course, it might be reasonable to say there is no amnesia for people who never recognize coercion because they have always sought power more than they have loved liberty.

On a more practical level, Nobel Laureate Hayek wrote about the impossibility of efforts to centrally plan such "solutions" in the first place in his seminal 1945 paper entitled The Use of Knowledge in Society. Glenn Reynolds referenced the paper in a recent editorial:

...The United States Code - containing federal statutory law - is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117 pages long and composes 226 volumes.

No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can't be aware of all the real-world complications it's producing, it can't even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it's doing.

There's good news and bad news in that. The bad news is obvious: We're governed not just by people who do screw up constantly, but by people who can't help but screw up constantly. So long as the government is this large and overweening, no amount of effort at securing smarter people or "better" rules will do any good: Incompetence is built into the system.

The good news is less obvious, but just as important: While we rightly fear a too-powerful government, this regulatory knowledge problem will ensure plenty of public stumbles and embarrassments, helping to remind people that those who seek to rule us really don't know what they're doing.

If that doesn't encourage skepticism toward big government, it's hard to imagine what will.

ADDENDUM #1:

Michelle Malkin: Barack Obama, America's Selective Salary Policeman - "At some point, you have made enough money" is not a maxim that Obama's team of rich CEO's and well-paid bureaucrats has ever observed.

J.P. Freire: Obama made $5m in 2009 and tells us we've made enough?

ADDENDUM #2: