Bob's Human

2012-02-04T21:11:00.000-08:00

John Hinderacker, Powerline

BUDGET? WHO NEEDS A BUDGET?

Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress have set a new standard of irresponsibility: for the third year in a row, Harry Reid announced that he would not allow a vote on a FY 2013 budget to come to the floor of the Senate. “We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year,” Reid told a conference call with reporters.

This year? How about last year, or the year before? The Obama administration has become a budget-free zone, in flagrant violation of federal law, which prescribes a process for developing a federal budget which the Democrats have simply flouted. Has our nation ever seen such fecklessness? $15 trillion in debt, the credit of the United States being downgraded, hundreds of thousands leaving the labor force, and the Democrats don’t think our government should have a budget? Or a plan to dig our way out of a $15 trillion hole? How out of touch can the Democrats be?

Senator Jeff Sessions responded to Reid’s thumbing his nose at federal law:

It’s been more than 1,000 days since Senate Democrats have offered a budget plan to the American people. Now, once again, the Senate’s ineffectual Democrat majority balks at the task of leadership. Majority Leader Reid is denying the American people the opportunity to become engaged in the debate about the nation’s fiscal future and the difficult choices we face. He obviously continues in his belief that it would be politically foolish for his members to go on record in support of any long-term vision. But by refusing to lay out a budget plan for public examination—a fact no one can deny—the Democrat Senate has forfeited the high privilege to lead this chamber. If Sen. Reid and his members stand by this announcement, it means that the American people will go through yet another year of crisis without Senate Democrats unveiling and standing behind a financial plan for our future.

Budget Control Act spending caps, crafted behind closed doors and rushed to passage at the 11th hour under threat of panic, do not even approach the definition of the budget process that the law requires. They are not in any way or any sense a Senate Democrat budget plan. There is no argument that can be made that these caps are a long-term vision for this country—not on taxes, not on entitlements, not on spending, not on debt. Presumably, this obvious fact is why Chairman Conrad has said he will mark up a budget in our Committee. However, this process will be eviscerated if Sen. Reid refuses to allow a budget resolution to come to the floor.

I will continue to insist that the public process be carried out and that Senate Democrats bring an actual budget resolution to the Senate floor.

Paul Ryan said:

Earlier today, Senate Democrats confirmed that they’ve given up on budgeting. What a disgrace. Senate Majority Leader Reid’s refusal to budget is a recipe for crisis. By refusing to confront the storm clouds ahead, Senate Democrats are committing our nation to a future of debt, doubt and decline.

The Democratic Party has demonstrated that it is incapable of leading and incapable of governing. Why would anyone vote for a Democrat for any office?

2012-01-26T18:13:00.000-08:00

Important read....

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

All,

There is an old debating adage that the one who asks the questions controls the debate. When we are asked if the highest earners are paying their fair share of taxes, we become trapped in the wrong debate.

The problem we are facing is how to create jobs and promote economic growth. The only solution lies in the private sector economy and focusing on how much high earners send in taxes to Washington D.C. is a sure path to failure.

We need to ask the right question: Are the highest earners doing their fair share to create jobs and grow our economy? The answer to this question gets to the heart of the problem.

If high earners buy tax-free municipal bonds for public works and infrastructure then they are doing the right thing.

If high earners invest their monies in new businesses that create jobs then they are doing the right thing.

If the owners of businesses purchases new equipment and are able to deduct that as a business expense then they are doing the right thing.

The entire premise that what determines whether or not high earners are “good people and decent Americans” is the amount of tax dollars they send to politicians in Washington D.C. is plain wrong.

More often then not, high earners are doing the best thing for America when they seek to invest in the private sector and NOT send those dollars to Washington D.C.

If we are going to put American back on top then we first need to ask the right questions.

Mike

2012-01-22T08:56:00.000-08:00

The Dem mantra touts Barry's origins as an "organizer" and his ongoing efforts to help the middle-class... who believes that? An organizer isn't really concerned with the plight of the middle-class but the vote!

2011-12-28T23:04:00.000-08:00

By Steven Hayward, Powerline
OBAMA AND THE F-WORD

One of my holiday projects is to finish my rereading of the complete corpus of Whittaker Chambers (with a retrospective essay on his overlooked theological interests to follow eventually), and a couple days ago I read through an article Chambers wrote for The American Mercury in 1944 about the rise of Italian fascism. Somehow this paragraph reminded me of someone . . . familiar (“let’s see, start’s with ‘O’ I think. . .”):

Civilized countries, like civilized individuals, like to keep their budgets balanced. For years old-fashioned Italian leaders tried to make income and outgo jibe. But in 1876 there came to power a modern politician for whom red entries had no terror, but even a certain charm. Agostino Depretis, Italy’s first Liberal prime minister, started Italy on the road to fascism. He was a journalist who discovered that the key to modern power politics is the masses and their mouthpieces, the Left politicians. With their help, he managed to stay in power for eleven years. He owed this achievement to a technique that seemed inspired then, but is familiar enough now: he had no program. He simply promised every sort of reform regardless of whether or not his promises were contradictory. Thus he promised to reduce taxation but increase public works, to restore prosperity but introduce social security. This catholicity attracted men from all schools of thought. Oppressed tenants and underpaid workers, reactionary landlords and big employers all sought to collect on the promissory notes which he issued on his way to power.

Seems to me you could easily rewrite this paragraph and apply it to Obama, spanning the range from the Occupy lowlifes to Obama’s Goldman Sachs financiers.

While we’re on the Chambers beat, I was surprised to discover that Chambers reviewed Saul Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals in Time magazine in 1946. Who knows what might have been edited out of the rather spare review that was printed, but what survived makes clear that Chambers clearly perceived that Alinsky was a not just an extreme liberal, but a Radical with a capital R, who had no use for American liberals or liberalism. “A liberal is [a person] who puts his foot down on thin air,” Chambers quotes Alinsky from his book. Chambers adds that “The author has glimpsed a vision which is greater than his ability to put it in practical terms.” To the extent that Obama seems otherworldly, aloof, and/or clueless, it is because he really is a dedicated Alinskyite, whose desire to change America fundamentally should be taken seriously. It helps explain why his heedless irresponsibility is in fact purposeful.

2011-12-18T23:16:00.000-08:00

Enough said...

2011-11-21T14:28:00.000-08:00

I am a Vietnam vet and I agree with the following words written by Mike Walker (Col. USMC, retired) in response to a note from a friend. I was always impressed with the Vietnamese people, their intelligence and sense of family. I've always thought that it would only be a matter of time that they would move to an open society.

Harry,

Thanks for the heads up on the Vietnam-HD show on the History Channel. Cannot imagine a presentation that balanced being made in the 1970's or 1980's.

In an ironic sense, the golf course is a good thing that came from the war. On balance, I think we did leave a mark on Vietnam that has proven to be more positive then negative.

The war, as any war, was horrific. After you get past that then the question for the current Government of Vietnam was to make sense of why we fought against them.

When I got mobilized in 1990 found myself in Thailand for about a month with the Thai Royal Marines who were defending their border from the Vietnam-backed State of Cambodia (SOC). One of the things brought back to the G-2 was the SOC counterinsurgency structure developed by the Vietnamese to defeat the Khmer Rouge et al. It was an exact duplicate of the US structure used in the RVN, right down to Military Regions and a shoestring CORDS program. Obviously the NVA thought we were doing something right back then.

I think they looked to how we worked with Japan and Germany after WWII and how we stood by South Korea after the war there and then the Vietnamese looked to see how the Soviets and the Peoples Republic of China treated them after the war.

I think they finally concluded that we were wrong in their eyes but for honorable and respectable reasons. I think they realize that the United States is far better and stronger ally than any one else they could hope to find. Today, our military relationship with Vietnam is strong and growing. As the golf course shows, American values and American concepts of economic freedoms are something to emulate in Vietnam.

Perhaps in the end, the idea of what the United States was fighting for then in Vietnam proved to be more powerful than what happened geopolitically.

How the worm turns.

Semper Fi,

Mike

http://www.dananggolfclub.com/

2011-11-19T12:47:00.000-08:00

OBAMA’S JOB-DESTROYING MACHINE GRINDS ON

John Hinderaker, Powerline

I can’t figure out whether it is due to malice or incompetence; all I know is, if you wanted to hurt America’s economy, you would do pretty much everything the Obama administration does. Energy policy is the absolute worst. First Obama delayed (and perhaps killed) the Keystone pipeline. Michael Ramirez sums up that decision, which can be explained only as an economically irrational attempt to shore up the president’s liberal base in advance of next year’s election:

It seems that every day brings a new Obama administration outrage. Today, it was the USDA’s decision to delay shale drilling in Ohio:

President Obama’s United States Department of Agriculture has delayed shale gas drilling in Ohio for up to six months by cancelling a mineral lease auction for Wayne National Forest (WNF). The move was taken in deference to environmentalists, on the pretext of studying the effects of hydraulic fracturing. …

Speaking of the WNF gas drilling, one environmentalist group spokesman suggested that moving forward with drilling “could turn the Ohio Valley into Ozone Alley,” even though Wayne National Forest already has nearly 1300 oil and gas wells in operation which this study does not affect.

It has been estimated that that drilling in the Utica shale will produce up to 204,500 jobs by 2015. The Obama administration claims that those jobs have only been delayed and are not gone forever. Sure. In the unlikely event that Obama is re-elected, the only constraint on his economically destructive policies will be gone, and we can expect him to do everything possible to kill energy production and destroy job creation.

2011-11-12T07:53:00.000-08:00

Contradictions galore.....

Obama ♥ the Big Guys

Big government, big labor, and big business in bed together.

Fred Barnes, Weekly Standard

By his own account, President Obama is the champion and protector of the little guy. He said last week he wants no one left “in a second-class status in this United States of America.” He’s “determined” to “make sure that nobody out there is going bankrupt just because somebody in their family is getting sick.” He’s committed to making Washington “responsive to the needs of people, not the needs of special interests [and] not just people who are hurting now, but also responsive to future generations.” Obama identifies himself with the 99 percent.

Yet the winners in the nearly three years of Obama’s presidency are the big guys — big business, big labor, and big government. Corporate profits have reached record levels. The influence of the biggest labor unions has surged in Washington, where it matters most. The federal government has grown in size and reach.

Meanwhile, the weak economy has hurt small business, the country’s number one job creator. Temporary tax breaks haven’t helped, and the threat of new taxes and a fresh barrage of regulations have put a crimp in expansion and hiring. Big business isn’t expanding or
hiring much either. A headline in Slate reflected this: “More Profits, Fewer Jobs.”

Labor leaders have entrée at the White House and federal departments and agencies as never before. The most frequent visitor to the White House in Obama’s first year was Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union. The president delayed trade treaties with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia until they were altered to satisfy labor officials. If Obama understands that higher levels of unionization are associated with greater joblessness, he’s never let on.

Big government is a cliché that’s all the more true in the Obama era. Federal employment grew by 140,800 in Obama’s first two years, and the clout of federal officialdom has increased substantially. The Environmental Protection Agency has mounted a regulatory offensive the business community and Republicans have challenged but failed to halt. Obamacare, scheduled to go fully into effect in 2014, would give Washington control over the way health care is dispensed, financed, and regulated — not a takeover, but close to it.

“If you are big in today’s Washington, you lead a charmed life,” Washington consultant David Smick says.

In Obama’s case, there’s more to the gap between what he professes and what his administration has produced than meets the eye. Yes, his hypocrisy is breathtaking. But it represents the way he prefers to govern. Dealing with a few big institutions, even if they are dinosaurs, is easier than consulting more widely. So is relying on government to remedy every national ill, rather than letting markets, private groups, and individuals play pivotal roles.

“What an irony for an administration that claims populist roots,” Smick says. “Policy prescriptions for the most part use the top-down approach. Bring out the GE guy and various big labor bosses to deal with the jobless nightmare when the bulk of the solution involves fostering small business start-ups.”

Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric’s CEO, happens to be chairman of Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. GE is famous for having paid no corporate income taxes in 2009 and 2010 and shipping thousands of jobs overseas. The council’s membership consists of 23 corporate chiefs, two labor leaders, one economist, one biologist, and zero representatives of small business.

For contributions to his reelection campaign, Obama has tapped the segment of big business he’s referred to as “fat cat bankers”: Wall Street. According to the Washington Post, he has raised more from financiers and bankers than all of the Republican presidential candidates combined. He’s raised more at Bain Capital than Mitt Romney, who cofounded the firm.

Wall Street has reason to be grateful. “During Obama’s tenure, Wall Street has roared back, even as the broader economy has struggled,” Zachary Goldfarb of the Washington Post wrote last week. “Wall Street firms . . . earned more in the first two and a half years of the Obama administration than they did during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration.”

Smaller community banks haven’t fared as well. Wall Street banks have the manpower to comply with new restrictions endorsed by Obama and passed by Congress. Small banks don’t. Big banks are thriving while interest rates are near zero. The loan business of small banks suffers because of these rates.

At the same time, corporations are sitting on nearly $2 trillion amassed during the Obama era. If invested, the money would surely stir economic growth and job creation. But Obama has refused to remove impediments to investment, chiefly future tax hikes and regulations.

Organized labor is also a big-time funder of Obama’s campaign, as you might expect given the president’s sensitivity to every need of big unions. He’s turned the National Labor Relations Board into a knee-jerk advocate of the most extreme pro-union positions. And his Labor Department no longer requires labor leaders to disclose many specifics of their expenditure of union money. This hamstrings government oversight and leaves union members in the dark.

In Obama’s strengthening of big government, the biggest beneficiaries are unelected bureaucrats. They’re unleashed. The new health care law would create 159 new boards, commissions, or programs, including the Independent Payment Advisory Board with power to decide what Medicare pays for and, by extension, what private insurance companies cover. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created with sweeping authority over how money is loaned to consumers. The bureau is empowered to write its own rules and decide its budget without depending on Congress for funding. The Federal Reserve delivers the money.

Last week, Obama veered from his top priority with unemployment at 9 percent: more jobs. A Canadian company plans to hire as many as 20,000 workers to build an oil pipeline from the province of Alberta to Texas. Its application, pending since 2008, has sparked growing protests by environmental activists. Obama promises to decide personally whether to approve the pipeline. And last week, he took a preliminary step, delaying the decision until after the 2012 election. So for now, the little guy lost. The winner: big green.

2011-10-31T18:12:00.001-07:00

2011-10-29T12:32:00.001-07:00

2011-10-23T11:02:00.000-07:00

Mike Ramirez really has a way... gets another "hat trick"...

2011-10-19T18:10:00.000-07:00

Occupy Wallstreet Nonsense… contributed by Mike Walker…

Here is the reality of the "war on corporate greed." Simply brilliant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY8LKII_MNA

Here is the reality of the "war on corporate greed."

There are a lot of people that need this math class.

2011-10-10T20:56:00.000-07:00

You know this is an elitist thing. The opportunity to say, "I was there." This is not how change is made. These guys are disorganized and relatively incoherent. It is a diversion and another symptom of our lack of common purpose.

2011-10-05T17:25:00.001-07:00

2011-09-26T16:07:00.000-07:00

Why S&P downgraded the U.S.- this puts it in perspective...

• U.S. Tax revenue: $2,170,000,000,000
• Fed budget: $3,820,000,000,000
• New debt: $ 1,650,000,000,000
• National debt: $14,271,000,000,000
• Recent budget cut: $ 38,500,000,000

Let's remove 8 zeros and pretend it's a household budget:

• Annual family income: $21,700
• Money the family spent: $38,200
• New debt on the credit card: $16,500
• Outstanding balance on the credit card: $142,710
• Total budget cuts: $385

Hope this helps!

2011-09-24T12:46:00.000-07:00

Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired) shares his educated views on international politics that have far-reaching consequences...

All,

I will skip the arguments that the U.N. had the right idea in the first place when it urged a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. An inverse twist to the logic of Winston Churchill comes to mind: The United Nations always gets it wrong after trying everything that was right.

The problem with the Palestinian application for statehood is not its primary objective. Anyone with any sense must admit that the Palestinian people must have statehood. The problem lies in its position on Israel. Anyone with any sense must admit that Israel has a right to be a state. Therein lies the rub.

For the U.N. to admit a state that has an avowed mission to destroy another member state is to destroy the United Nations. It is intellectual, moral, and ethical fraud to ignore that reality. On 29 November 1947 the U.N. adopted a dual-state solution (U.N. Resolution 181 (II)). The reaction in the Arab region at that time, to include the Palestinian leadership, was to destroy by any means possible U.N. Resolution 181 (II). The sole objective was the destruction of any Jewish state. They failed, and rightly so. Thus, here we are, nearly 68 years later, and heirs to that destructive policy, the heirs to those who sought the destruction of the 1947 U.N. dual-state plan, now propose to maintain their hate-filled aims and be rewarded for it.

It would be better to rename the United Nations the Warring Nations. Let us embrace the concept that entrance into the U.N. can be predicated on the goal of the destruction of fellow member states. Let the weak states beware. Let us embark on the path to World War III and be done with it.

Semper Fi,

Mike

2011-09-20T15:21:00.001-07:00

2011-09-03T20:08:00.000-07:00

Remember how this was going to be an administration that was set apart from the past... what's with all the blame? Especially as we close in on almost three years of constant blame... with no solutions but lots of opportunities to "spend"... and, well, blame!

Didn't we know? Didn't the national media have a responsibility to report on Barry's lack of experience and his tendency to side-step issues as a state senator in Illinois. Now it has come to this. An incompetent administrator being steered by a gaggle of academic visionaries to the utter detriment of the American people and the people of the entire world. BH

Can a president truly become irrelevant?

BY JAZZ SHAW, HotAir

When Barack Obama draws criticism from Republicans and conservatives, it’s about as much of a breaking news flash as Dog Bites Man. We begin to move into Man Bites Dog territory, however, when a mounting wave of unrest comes from his own left flank – a scenario which has not only come to pass, but shifted into a significantly higher gear this past week. One of his latest detractors is found coming from the sector which would normally contain his biggest cheerleaders. This just in from Michael Tomasky at the Daily Beast.

More dispiriting news, this time about the White House overturning the EPA’s proposed new rules on smog. That comes a few hours after the jobs report from Friday morning, one of the bleakest yet. And it comes a few days in advance of what everyone expects will be a small-thinking, modest, blah jobs speech by the president. It’s not only getting to the point where it’s getting hard to see him winning reelection. It’s getting to the point where it’s hard to imagine people taking him seriously for the remaining 14 months of his current term…
I keep thinking back lately to that candidate and team I watched in 2008. The candidate really had his finger on something. The team almost never made a serious mistake. When a mistake did happen, they did a respectable job of digging their way out of it. They had some fight in them. Well, I’ve learned something new from these folks: Up until now, I’ve thought that running a strong presidential campaign is a sign that one can probably govern fairly well too. But there appears to be little correlation between the two.

Tomasky’s article is not coming from some default position of criticizing the White House. In fact, he goes to great lengths to continue the recent meme about how Republicans are intentionally fighting job growth to damage the president’s reelection prospects. (An interesting theory, all things considered. It’s as if they seem to believe that there’s a magical switch deep in the bowels of the US Capital Building which could suddenly put everyone back to work, but John Boehner is refusing to flip it so the GOP can pick up a few more seats next year.)

But the complaints being aired are interesting none the less. A couple of them are the usual recent gripes about Obama “backing down” on the ozone regulations and “giving in to the Republicans” on spending cuts. But the one I found the most telling was the comment, “a small thinking, modest, blah jobs speech..”

What is driving President Obama from a position where he can exert any real influence on the political process – even from inside his own party – is not failed or detrimental policies. (Though there have been more than a few of those.) It’s the image he has come to project of being completely impotent in the face of any opposition, petulant when people fail to immediately go along with his brilliant vision, and incapable of wielding the power of the Oval Office to any tangible extent.

This isn’t exactly something new, either. The first warning signs should have come when Obama was negotiating the extension of the Bush tax cuts. Instead of turning the chore over to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, (as he did on so many other issues like the health care law) he appointed himself chief negotiator with the GOP. Obama wanted the middle class tax cuts, but wanted to end the one for the highest rates. The Republicans, on the other hand, wanted all of the tax cuts. So Obama compromised by giving the GOP everything they wanted, which included the piece Obama wanted. I remember doing a radio hit during that period where I characterized the negotiations like this:

REPUBLICANS: OK, Mr. President. What we want is for you to buy us this really expensive dinner, complete with filet mignon, truffles and a bottle of sixty year old scotch. We know it’s expensive, but if you’ll do this, we’ll let you buy us lunch too. And that’s going to cost a lot less
OBAMA: (scratching chin) Well… I really did want to buy you lunch. OK. I’ll take it!

Not exactly Donald Trump level deal making skills on display there…

There were more examples where his base was disheartened, but they were just leading up to the speech debacle this week. Without rehashing the entire thing, it was one of the most childish, petulant displays of an ineffective temper tantrum I’ve seen in ages. But perhaps the worst part – at least in the eyes of his progressive supporters – was that he once again immediately backed down the moment Boehner showed the slightest sign of resistance. And now he is scheduling one of the most rare of Washington occasions – an address to a joint session of Congress which is not the State of the Union speech – and even his die-hard supporters seem to be considering watching a re-run of Benny Hill that night instead. Nobody seems to think this will be more than another flaccid campaign appearance which will waste one of the chief executives’ most powerful tools for zero results.

Moves like this leave the Democrats adrift in terms of strategy, with the titular head of their party effectively Missing in Action on the political battlefield. Is it any wonder so many of them are throwing up their hands in dismay? It’s not that Obama isn’t pursuing the correct policies to make them happy. It’s that he’s completely ineffective in getting any of them accomplished, despite controlling the White House and the upper chamber of Congress.

All of this brings us back our joint entry and exit question: can a sitting president ever become completely irrelevant in American politics? And has Barack Obama already achieved that dubious distinction?

2011-08-18T17:42:00.000-07:00

Barry stated right from the get-go that he would stand on his principles even if it meant that he was a "one term President"..... he has. Most (96%) of his Senate votes and Illinois Senate votes were cast as "present" not "yay" or "nay"... he didn't want to "position" himself politically. That is his "principles" then and now. He doesn't want to stick his neck out. The only leading that he does is from the "bully pulpit" not from legislative skill. The grandest accomplishment was his "Obamacare" which was entirely driven and written by the minions of Pelosi and Reid, thus it is earmarked with all of their liberal pork barrel inclusions and the entire massiveness of it has doomed it. The general idea was great, provide medical care where needed. Pelosi and Reid saw the sign saying "free donuts" and went crazy with their feeding frenzy! What was needed was leadership that balanced social need and financial resources.

Do you remember how long it took him to setup a surge in Afghanistan? It took like 4-5 months ... and well into the waiting the US general in charge was asked what he had said to Obama and he responded that the president had never gotten in touch with him, ever! I'm afraid that this is typical of his principled approach... BH

Top 10 Reasons Obama Won’t Win Reelection
by http://www.humanevents.com/

With bad news seemingly everywhere, here is something to give hope to conservatives: the Top 10 Reasons Obama Won’t Win Reelection.  

1. Jobless rate too high: With the latest Labor Department report showing the unemployment rate at 9.1%, jobs will likely remain the No. 1 issue for voters. Well over 2 million jobs have been lost since Obama took office, and he wasted a trillion dollars on a stimulus bill that didn’t stimulate. Unfortunately for the American people, his policies will keep the jobless rate high, right up to November 2012.  

2. Economy in doldrums: It’s not just jobs, but everything about the economy remains snake-bit. With housing slumping and the stock market tanking, all Americans are feeling the impact of the down economy. With the threat of a double-dip recession looming, don’t expect a turnaround in time to help Obama’s reelection.  

3. ObamaCare looms: With health care costs continuing to rise, it is clear that ObamaCare wasn’t the answer. As the implementation of the highly unpopular health care measure nears, more workers will be dumped from their employers' health care plans, taxes will rise and fewer doctors will be available—giving voters more reasons to dump its architect.

  4. Out-of-control debt and credit downgrade: The debt-ceiling deal did little to fix the long-term debt problem, as the U.S. is still on tap to borrow $7 trillion over the next decade, adding to the $4 trillion Obama has already racked up since taking office. With the S&P downgrade, Obama goes down in history as the first President to lose America’s AAA credit rating.

  5. Depressed base: Progressives are having buyer’s remorse and are trying to convince everyone that Obama is not even much of a liberal. The anti-war left certainly won’t be out in force on Election Day. Nor will black turnout match 2008’s historical number. More of the young will stay home. The excitement of electing the first black President has worn off and even his staunchest supporters are disappointed that Obama hasn’t fulfilled their expectations.  

6. Opposition energized: The Tea Party didn’t even exist in 2008, and the 2010 midterm elections showed the country rejects the President’s big-spending policies. No matter which Republican gains the party’s nomination, expect an energized grassroots opposition to Obama’s second term.  

7. Changes in battleground states: The terrain that Obama faces in his reelection bid will be more difficult to navigate in 2012 than four years ago. He starts out by losing six Electoral College votes from states he carried in 2008 due to population changes registered by the 2010 Census. Then the 2010 midterm elections saw Republicans win governors’ races previously held by Democrats in key battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan—all states Obama won in 2008.  

8. Foreign policy mess: From the Libyan war to mixed signals given to Middle East protesters, from the Russian “reset” to China’s economic belligerence, there is not much that Obama can tout as a foreign policy success. Now with deficit hawks setting their sights on the Pentagon, Obama is likely to preside over the dismantling of America’s superpower status.

  9. Media less a adoring: Obama will still have most of the media on his side for his reelection bid, but they certainly won’t be getting thrills up their legs, admiring the crease in his pants, or writing how the seagulls were awed. Even Obamaphile Chris Mathhews has turned on the President, saying a recent Obama speech sounded like a Fox News commercial, a harsh epithet coming from the MSNBC host.  

10. Aloof, inept: Now that America has seen the President up close for nearly three years, the magic that many believed in during his hope and change odyssey is clearly gone. His aloof personality and scolding partisanship will not endear him to the electorate this time. As his falling approval ratings attest, he increasingly looks pathetically inept and not up to the job he was elected to do.

HUMAN EVENTS is the news source President Reagan called his "favorite newspaper" and we still hold high the Reaganesque principles of free enterprise, limited government and, above all, a staunch, unwavering defense of American freedom.

2011-08-18T07:10:00.000-07:00

2011-08-10T06:57:00.000-07:00

Big win for Wisconsin and the rest of us...

Wisconsin GOP's Stand Could Reverberate Elsewhere

Associated press

Madison – A stand by Wisconsin Republicans against a massive effort to oust them from power could reverberate across the country as the battle over union rights and the conservative revolution heads toward the 2012 presidential race.

Democrats succeeded in taking two Wisconsin state Senate seats away from Republican incumbents on Tuesday but fell one short of what they needed to seize majority control of the chamber.

Republicans saw it as a big win for Gov. Scott Walker and a confirmation of his conservative agenda, the hallmark of which was a polarizing proposal taking away most collective bargaining rights from public workers.

"Republicans are going to continue doing what we promised the people of Wisconsin -- improve the economy and get Wisconsin moving back in the right direction," Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said in a prepared statement after the victory.

Walker attempted to strike a bipartisan tone in victory, saying that he reached out to leaders in both parties.

"In the days ahead I look forward to working with legislators of all parties to grow jobs for Wisconsin and move our state forward," Walker said in a prepared statement.

Democrats and union leaders tried to make the best of the historic GOP wins. There had been only 13 other successful recalls of state-level office holders nationwide since 1913.

"The fact of the matter remains that, fighting on Republican turf, we have begun the work of stopping the Scott Walker agenda," said Democratic Party Chairman Mike Tate.

Phil Neuenfeldt, president of the Wisconsin State AFL-CIO, said voters sent a message that there is a growing movement to reclaim the middle class.

"Let's be clear, anyway you slice it, this is an unprecedented victory," he said.

Still, it was far less than what Democrats set out to achieve. And while they still plan to move ahead with recalling Walker, maintaining momentum for that effort which can't start until November will be difficult.

Sen. Luther Olsen, one of the four Republicans who won, said he hoped the victories would "take the wind out of the recall for Walker, but I'm not sure."

Two Democratic senators face recall elections next week, but even if they prevail, Republicans would still hold a narrow 17-16 majority.

Four Republican senators held on to their seats Tuesday. They were Olsen and Sens. Sheila Harsdorf of River Falls, Rob Cowles of Allouez, and Alberta Darling of River Hills. Two Republicans -- Randy Hopper of Fond du Lac and Dan Kapanke of La Crosse -- were defeated. Former deputy mayor of Oshkosh Jessica King beat Hopper and Democratic state Rep. Jennifer Shilling beat Kapanke.

A ninth senator, Democrat Dave Hansen of Green Bay, won his recall election last month.

Collectively, more than $31 million has been spent on the recalls, largely from outside conservative groups, unions and others.

Republican and Democratic strategists were leery of reading too much into the results heading into next year's campaign in which Wisconsin is expected to be a key swing state.

Democratic strategist Chris Lehane said the results could provide "some early radar warnings" about the 2012 races.

"At a minimum, we already know that the conservatives are providing energy for progressive to fight back like an angry badger that otherwise may not have existed," he said.

Lehane said Wisconsin's tumultuous year since November's elections has been a microcosm of the current "rollercoaster" era of U.S. politics.

Wisconsin voters had mixed emotions about the necessity of the recalls.

Wayne Boland, 41, a Whitefish Bay man who works in marketing for a medical equipment maker, said he voted for the Republican Darling "not because I entirely agree with everything the Republican Party has done or the governor" but because they're working toward addressing the state's problems.

Republicans won control of both houses of the Legislature and the governor's office in the 2010 election just nine months ago.

Democrats had hoped enough wins in the recalls would have allowed them to block the Republican agenda, but the GOP will hold on to their majorities that have allowed them to rapidly pass bills through the Legislature.

The elections were also closely watched in other states undergoing similar partisan battles.

A coalition of unions and labor-friendly groups fighting a Wisconsin-style collective bargaining overhaul in Ohio said the outcome of the recall elections will have little bearing on whether Ohio's law is repealed this fall.

The effort in Wisconsin was about recalling specific Republicans who voted for the anti-union bill while the push in Ohio is about repealing the law itself. That makes it difficult to compare the two states, said We Are Ohio spokeswoman Melissa Fazekas.

Supporters of the Ohio law also are distancing their state from the fight in Wisconsin.

"We're not focused on Wisconsin, and Ohioans aren't looking to another state to tell them where they should stand," said Jason Mauk, spokesman for Building a Better Ohio, a group defending the collective bargaining law.

Ohioans will vote Nov. 8 on whether to accept or reject the union-limiting law signed by Republican Gov. John Kasich in March that limits bargaining rights for more than 350,000 police, firefighters, teachers and other government employees.

Unlike Wisconsin, Ohio's Constitution makes no provision for recalling elected officials.

2011-08-06T06:23:00.000-07:00

The Economy

A word from Mike Walker, Colonel USMC (retired)

All,

OK, so things are getting tough. Sorry, grew up a while ago and my first “American” instinct is to roll up my sleeves, tighten my belt, and get things going in the right direction.

That means I have a big heart plus a ready and helping hand for those who are in need but little or no sympathy for whiners, enablers, and “self-defined victims.” In other words, I am a progressive that puts a lot more faith in Ben Franklin who liked to quote Aesop than a far too cynical Saul Alinsky. “God helps those who help themselves” is my motto. That means I have no political friends.

Nonetheless, here is my gratuitous advice.

We got it wrong. By “we” I mean Democrats and Republicans, Wall Street and Elm Street, all the branches of government and the other cats and dogs to boot.

America needs jobs and jobs means focusing like a laser on small businesses.

We had our chance when it was an easy fix and blew it (was preaching this when George Bush was president in 2008 and have not changed my tune by one note). Now we need to do the best we can in the circumstances we are now facing.

Bush and Obama gave me a nice little tax break as a middle class American in the name of “stimulus” that cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Shame on both of them. Giving me a couple of hundred dollars is nice but those bucks gave me no ability whatsoever to create a job.

Now, based on some super-duper macroeconomic theory of trickle-up or trickle-down or trickle-on-your-pant-leg after too many beers this is supposed to create jobs. Bunk.

Focus like a laser on small businesses.

To be truthful, Uncle Sam is largely out of the game. I write that because the odds that the collective bureaucratic wits in DC will do everything in their power to create federal rules, guidelines and laws to help creating wealth for small businesses who then hire people is a bridge too far.

The DC crowd has a greater understanding of what it takes to put an astronaut on Mars than they do in removing barriers to small business wealth and job creation.

The ability to create jobs in the political realm now largely lies with state and local governments. The most important component is helping community banks extend responsible loans and lines of credit to small businesses.

That was the big failure of TARP. I supported TARP and still do but it was flawed. It was crippled by the myopic mind-set that overwhelmed the judgment of DC and Wall Street (the NY Fed, banks, and insurance firms behind all the CDS’s) when TARP was created in 2008. The lesson is that macroeconomic solutions will ultimately fail if you don’t address the underlying microeconomic issues.

In this case the underlying issue was helping community banks. When the national monetary policy is to set the Federal funds rate as close to 0% as possible you hurt the cash flow to Main Street. If you add the increased and prudent requirements for financial institutions to keep cash to cover the sour and reckless loans on their books from years ago you virtually starve small banks.

How can a community bank borrow cash to make loans when it can’t help but come in last in return on investment in a 0% world? They can’t and thus get far too little money from the big boys now desperate for higher returns. When Federal fund rate is at 0% no one in the depository system and beyond wants to loan money to the little banks that fund small businesses that drive job creation.

Even if the little banks tried to attract the money from the big boys by offering a higher return on the loan they would be committing suicide. Why? Because everyone would assume they are offering a better return on the loan because they are so desperate for cash that they MUST BE IN FINANCIAL TROUBLE. Kill them!

Thus, not enough money goes to community banks so small businesses are cash starved and hundreds of thousands of new jobs are never created.

To hell with the close-minded Keynesians from their perch atop Mount Olympus.

Regards,

Mike

2011-08-05T09:01:00.000-07:00

Obama Is and Is Not Carter

By Victor Davis Hanson

There is a lot of anguish on the left that Barack Obama is starting to resemble Jimmy Carter, as if his whining, ineffective style and lack of intestinal fortitude will doom the liberal agenda in the way that Carter once did as well. That analysis is upside down. Obama remains a formidable, albeit teleprompted, speaker, about the best emissary of the leftist worldview imaginable. He is young and vigorous in a way Bill Clinton was and Jimmy Carter was not. The problem is not Barack Obama the person, but Barack Obama’s hard-core leftist agenda. Bill Clinton evolved into a centrist who eventually reflected usually what 51 percent of the electorate wanted. In contrast, Jimmy Carter was, like Obama, an ideologue, but with an ideology that few Americans embrace.

Obama’s lackluster polls do not necessarily reflect any sudden lack of charisma or a distracted president chumming it up on the golf links, but the growing awareness of the American people that they, for a variety of reasons in 2008, elected another Carter-like liberal whose economic policies of higher taxes, bigger government, and larger deficits don’t work, and whose ill effects are enhanced, rather than mitigated, by presidential jawboning aimed at the very productive classes who do most of the hiring. He is proving a sort of national catharsis, presenting statist, centrally planned ideas in their most attractive passage, and in the process, as the economy stalls, souring Americans on the substance rather than the style.

So there is one difference, and a very important one at that, between Carter and Obama. The so-called progressive community for over 30 years could blame the Carter implosion on his own inept delivery, wooden personality, and grating preachy style. But in Obama they had a figure right out of central casting — young, charismatic, non-traditional, ‘post-racial,’ glib, and at times eloquent. So the present mess, unlike that of 1977–80, cannot so easily be attributed to packaging rather than content, a fact which has far more profound consequences to the leftist cause.

As I understand most liberal critiques, it goes something like this: “Carter’s ineptness doomed an otherwise noble cause; Clinton’s political mastery proved a success, but at the expense of compromising the cause; Obama at last has Clinton’s flair but is a committed liberal, and therefore will succeed where the two others failed.” I think we are seeing that such analyses are flawed, and a far better one will prove to be: “Even a Barack Obama cannot advance a fundamentally unsound agenda.”

2011-08-02T07:09:00.000-07:00

Buckle up, venture to this site to get your lunch handed to you... http://www.usdebtclock.org/

2011-07-31T15:22:00.000-07:00

Debt Crisis Shows Obama Lacks Presidential Skills

By MARY KATE CARY

As the negotiations and the vote-getting on raising the debt ceiling have dragged on these last two weeks, it's became clear that President Obama really is not a good negotiator. Several times, just as a deal seemed imminent, the discussions have collapsed—and very publicly. There were leaks from the administration, he-said-she-said accounts from both sides, angry White House press conferences—just a "parade of horribles," as lawyers would call it. The result is a rising tide of public disgust and frustration. Not only has he lost bipartisan support in both the House or the Senate, his lack of ability to persuade people to join his cause has cost President Obama the vital center of the electorate.

According to yesterday's Pew Research national survey, with results collected just this week, only 31 percent of independent voters want to see Obama re-elected, down from 42 percent in May. Two months ago, Obama held a 7 point lead among independent registered voters two months ago, but independent support has swung 15 points the other way, giving an 8 point advantage to a generic Republican. "This is consistent with a drop in Obama's approval among all independents. Currently, a majority (54 percent) disapprove of Obama's performance for the first time in his presidency," according to Pew.

Maybe it's because Hillary Clinton's "three in the morning" ad was right—maybe he just doesn't have the experience to be president. Of the top 100 jobs that would qualify one to be president, being a law professor isn't one of them. A plumber would be better qualified than a law professor. Seriously—a plumber is a problem solver who has to keep customers happy. A used car salesman knows how to close a deal. A UPS deliveryman knows how to meet a deadline. A diplomat knows how to be, well, diplomatic. Meaning he doesn't lecture people about "eating their peas" when he needs them to jump on board.

Think about some of our former presidents and their qualifications for the job. Bill Clinton had been a governor, a job that involves being an executive decision-maker. Ronald Reagan had headed the Screen Actors Guild and worked for General Electric, in addition to being governor. President Bush 41 had served as ambassador to the U.N., liaison to Communist China, head of the RNC during Watergate, director of the CIA during its most difficult years, and had even served as a freshman Republican in a Democratic Congress. Harry Truman had run a men's clothing store that failed in a recession and narrowly escaped bankruptcy—certainly something that would have prepared him for the job today. Surely some of them got elected for reasons other than their qualifications—after all, the desire for economic or political change can be a powerful force among voters, no matter who is running— but certainly some presidents' past experiences helped them once they got in office.

Peggy Noonan writes today that "the secret of Mr. Obama is that he isn't really very good at politics, and he isn't good at politics because he doesn't really get people." I think that's right. Being a plumber or a used car salesman—or a union organizer or a men's clothing store owner or the liaison to Communist China—requires you to know how to deal with people and how to negotiate in good faith. Being a law professor doesn't.

2011-07-26T13:39:00.000-07:00

Barry's dilemma, the world is watching!

What would the Penguin do to take over Gotham?

Of course, the fish eater was much more transparent!

Why Obama's rhetoric doesn't work...
Matthew Continetti, The Weekly Standard

Since he first appeared on the national stage in the summer of 2004, Barack Obama has stood for national unity. He has said he believes in compromise. He has advertised himself as a post-partisan president who will bridge the divide between liberals and conservatives. During the campaign, Michelle Obama went so far as to say that her husband would fill the "hole in our souls." The country is "fed up," the president said in his July 25 address to the nation, "with a town where compromise has become a dirty word."

Whether Obama truly believes in national unity, or simply says these things for political gain, is irrelevant. Let's assume Obama wants to be a statesman of import who leads the whole country, not just a political party. If that's the case, why does he consistently undermine his calls for unity by pitting one group of Americans against another?

Consider the president's speech this week on the debt ceiling. I can't remember a more transparently cynical attempt by a president to position himself for reelection. On one side, Obama says, are himself, the majority of Americans, and Ronald Reagan, all of whom support a "balanced approach" to deficit reduction. On the other side are "a significant number of Republicans," the "wealthiest Americans," the "biggest corporations," and all those who want to "place a greater burden on working families."

In just a few words, Obama divides the country by party, class, and aspiration. The message of his speech is not that reducing spending will enable all Americans to thrive. In Obama's world of zero-sum politics, one group prospers at another's expense. In the name of fairness, Obama seeks to lead the majority ("middle-class families") against the minority ("millionaires and billionaires").

Obama not only subverts his stated purpose of unity. He threatens his larger purpose of reelection as well. For much of our history, Americans have shown distaste for class-based populist appeals, whether on the right or the left. They have consistently preferred a consensus model of politics in which "a rising tide lifts all boats" and the divide between rich and poor is less important than the American dream of self-improvement. The message that "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America" helped Obama win the White House in 2008. His abandonment of consensus politics for coalition politics may help him lose it in 2012.

From Jim Geraghty, Morning Jolt, NRO

Come On, Man, Write It Down Before Somebody Forgets It

It sounds like an Onion story:

[Chuck] Todd asked Carney about the White House's reluctance to release its plan to deal with the national debt and raising the debt ceiling. Carney acknowledged the White House was playing games. "We're showing a lot of leg," he said. When Todd pressed for details -- "Why not just release it?" -- Carney seemed surprised. "You need it written down?"

What a difference two years makes. In the spring of 2009, with Republicans in the minority in the House of Representatives, the White House and its Democratic allies were demanding specifics. The House GOP had to produce an alternative budget, the White House demanded, in order to show that they were serious about governing.

To paraphrase the CBO, they can't score a lot of leg.

Guy Benson is left incredulous:

Yes, actually, wedoneed "something printed." Since his unmitigated failure of a budget was unanimously defeated in the Senate, this president has refused to offer a specific plan of his own on virtually anything at all. Instead, he talks about "visions" and "contours" and "frameworks" -- and tries to blame his opponents when his poor leadership is exposed. Over the last five days, the president has (a)undermined a bargain with John Boehner by introducing an unacceptable eleventh-hour condition, (b) rejected "out of hand" a bipartisan compromise that he found to be politically unpalatable, and (c) delivered a speech that painted his opponents as the intractable extremists. In light of this behavior, it's entirely reasonable for Americans to wonder what, precisely, Barack Obama's proposed solution might be. Today, the White House dismissively waived off that question as a GOP talking point and condescendingly inquired if the journalist who dared to ask it was capable of taking notes.

I'll close with an unsolicited word of advice, and a friendly reminder from the CBO director. The advice: When you're already plumbing new depths of unpopularity, dialing up your arrogance isn't a winning strategy. Even David Brooks finds it unseemly.

At Pajamas Media, Bryan Preston sees this as another manifestation of the legendary Obama work ethic:

Yes, Jay, the American people elected your boss in the hope that he might occasionally do his job. Show his work. Demonstrate a little competence once in a while. Is that too much to ask?

Apparently it is. As we blogged yesterday, Obama's bizarre reticence to lead is as much a headache for his own party as it is for the GOP. Maybe more, since Reid et al just can't come out and blast him the way they would a Republican president. So Congress sidelined him over the weekend, but as long as he's the president he can't really be sidelined: He has to sign something.

And agitate against whatever is heading for his desk before he signs it,of course.

2011-07-08T06:40:00.000-07:00

Sen. Rubio: "We Don't Need New Taxes, We Need New Taxpayers"

Watch the video... http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/07/07/sen_rubio_we_dont_need_new_taxes_we_need_new_taxpayers.html

Extract...

"Our total debt is about to reach the size of our entire economy. That's kind of the framework in which we're operating in when we discuss this. Now, I actually think we're closer to some sort of agreement on this, Sen. Ayotte, than a lot of people realize.

"I've heard the term thrown around in the last couple days, a 'balanced approach' to dealing with it, and I think there's agreement that there has to be a balanced approach. I certainly have always said that you cannot simply cut your way out of this problem. You have to have a combination of cuts and growth, growth and revenues to government. I think the debate is, how do you accomplish these two things? And I'm not going to focus so much on the cut part of it today. I want to focus on the revenue part of it because that's the part the president and some of my colleagues here have focused on over the last day, this idea of getting more revenue or this new term, 'revenue enhancers,' which is Washington talk for more money to the government.

"And, according to the president, some in his party, most in his party I should say, the idea is simple that...in America that are making a lot of money, more money than maybe they should be making, and they just need to pay more in taxes. And if these people pay more in taxes, then all of these problems will get a lot easier to deal with. That's kind of the viewpoint they bring to this debate.

"Yesterday, we saw, and I know tomorrow the majority leader, we'll be voting here on the floor on something the majority leader has offered up, something called the 'sense of the Senate,' which people watching at home may wonder, 'What is that?' Well, that basically means what's on the Senate's mind. The 'sense of the Senate,' this thing that we're going to be voting on tomorrow, is basically that you've got a bunch of people in this country that make over a million dollars, and that these people need to do more to help with the debt. That's basically the 'sense of the Senate' that there's going to be a vote on tomorrow -- very interesting things.

"So, I looked at it because ultimately this is a serious issue. So, let's explore this with an open mind. Let's not be doctrinaire, let's not be blindly ideological. Let's look at this from a common sense perspective, this idea that all these millionaires and billionaires, if they just paid more taxes, these problems would be solved. Let's analyze it. This is all about math.

"And here's the fact: the fact is it doesn't solve the problem. First of all, if you taxed these people at 100 percent, basically next year you said, 'Look, every penny you make next year the government's going to take it from you,' it still doesn't solve the debt. Not only does that not solve the debt problem, but I looked at a host of other -- a great publication that came out today from the Joint Economics Committee, our colleague Sen. DeMint chairs it. And it kind of outlines some of the tax increases being proposed by our colleagues in the Democratic Party and the president to solve the debt problem. And you add them all up, you add all of these things up -- the jet airplanes, the oil companies, all of the other things they talk about -- you put them all together in one big batch, and you know what it does? It basically deals with nine days and 23 hours worth of deficit spending. Nine days and 23 hours of deficit spending. That's how much it solves. So all this talk about going after people that make all this money, it buys you nine days and 23 hours. Let's round it off. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. It buys them 10 days of deficit spending reduction. That's what all this stuff rounds up to.

“So, here's the bottom line: These tax increases they're talking about. These so-called revenue enhancers, they don't solve the problem. So what do we do then? Because clearly we have to do two things.

"One, we have to hold the line on spending, if you keep digging yourself in the hole, the hole is going to bury you. But the other thing is, how do you start generating revenue for government so we can start paying down this debt? And that’s what the debate should be about.

“We already know these taxes they're talking about don't work. So, here's what works. Here is what I would suggest works in a balanced approach, using the president's terminology. Let's stop talking about new taxes and start talking about creating new taxpayers, which basically means jobs. Now, here in Washington, this debt is the number one issue on everyone's mind, and rightfully so. It is a major issue. But everywhere else in the real world, the number one issue on people's minds are jobs. And I'll tell you every other problem facing America -- a mortgage crisis, home foreclosure crisis, this debt problem -- all of these issues get easier to deal with if people are gainfully employed across America.

"And the impact that unemployment's having across this country is devastating. We hear about unemployment in facts and figures. They give us numbers, Sen. Ayotte, 'Oh, X percent people are unemployed.' Well, there's stories behind every one of those people. You know who a lot of these people are that are unemployed in America? They are people that have done everything they've been asked to do, and they've done it right. Maybe they served their country overseas, maybe they went to college and got a degree and now came back home. Maybe they worked for 10 or 20 years and did a really good job at work, and now, you know what, they can't find a job. Or maybe they were lucky enough to find a job after losing their original job, but it pays them half as much, and they work twice as long.

"That is the real face of unemployment in America, of people that are hurting. And our job here is to do everything we can to make it easier for them to find a job, not harder. And I think that's what we have to do when it comes to a balanced approach and when we talk about revenue.

“We don't need new taxes. We need new taxpayers, people that are gainfully employed, making money and paying into the tax system. And then we need a government that has the discipline to take that additional revenue and use it to pay down the debt and never grow it again. And that's what we should be focused on, and that's what we're not focused on.

“So you look at all these taxes that are being proposed, and here's what I say. I say we should analyze every single one of them through the lens of job creation, issue number one in America. I want to know which one of these taxes that they're proposing will create jobs. I want to know how many jobs are going to be created by the plane tax? How many jobs are going to be created by the oil company tax that I heard so much about? How many jobs are created by going after the millionaires and billionaires the president talks about? I want to know: How many jobs do they create?

“Because I'll tell you, and I'm going to turn it over to Sen. Ayotte in a second. I'm interested in her perspective on this as a job creator, as the spouse of a job creator who runs a small business, as someone like me who just came off the campaign trail. Let me tell you something. I traveled the state of Florida for two years campaigning. I have never met a job creator who told me that they were waiting for the next tax increase before they started growing their business. I've never met a single job creator who's ever said to me I can't wait until government raises taxes again so I can go out and create a job.

"And I'm curious to know if they say that in New Hampshire because they don't say that in Florida. And so my view on all this is I want to know how many jobs these tax increases the president proposes will create because if they're not creating jobs and they're not creating new taxpayers, they're not solving the problem."

2011-07-05T19:54:00.001-07:00

2011-06-27T14:05:00.000-07:00

Michael Barone

Being There

Obama is not so much Jimmy Carter 2.0 as the second coming of Chauncey Gardiner.

Which past leader does Barack Obama most closely resemble? His admirers, not all of them liberals, used to compare him to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

Well, Obama announced his candidacy in Lincoln’s hometown two days before Abe’s birthday, and he did expand the size and scope of government. But no one seriously compares him with Lincoln or FDR anymore.

Conservative critics have taken to comparing him, as you might imagine, to Jimmy Carter. The more cruel among them, like The Weekly Standard’s Jay Cost, say the comparison is not to Obama’s advantage.

But there is another comparison I think more appropriate for a president who, according to one of his foreign-policy staffers, prefers to “lead from behind.” The man I have in mind is Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 movie Being There.

As you may remember, Gardiner is a clueless gardener who is mistaken for a Washington eminence and becomes a presidential adviser. Asked if you can stimulate growth through temporary incentives, Gardiner says, “As long as the roots are not severed, all is well, and all will be well in the garden.”

“First comes the spring and summer,” he explains, “but then we have fall and winter. And then we get spring and summer again.” The president is awed as Gardiner sums up, “There will be growth in the spring.”

Kind of reminds you of Barack Obama’s approach to the federal budget, doesn’t it?

In preparing his February budget, Obama totally ignored the recommendations of his own fiscal commission, headed by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson. Others noticed: The Senate rejected the initial budget by a vote of 97–0.

Then, speaking in April at George Washington University, Obama said he was presenting a new budget with $4 trillion in long-term spending cuts. But there were no specifics.

Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf was asked last week if the CBO had prepared estimates of this budget. “We don’t estimate speeches,” Elmendorf, a Democrat, explained. “We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech for us to do our analysis.”

Evidently “first we have the spring and summer” was not enough.

Then Obama deputed Vice President Joe Biden and congressional leaders to handle negotiations over raising the debt ceiling. Biden apparently did a good job of letting everyone set out their positions and interact.

But last Thursday two influential Republicans, Rep. Eric Cantor and Sen. Jon Kyl, left the bargaining table and said that they wouldn’t return until Democrats dropped demands for tax increases. After all, if the Democrats hadn’t been able to raise taxes on high earners when they had large majorities in December’s lame-duck session, what makes anyone think this more Republican Congress will raise them now?

Cantor said it was impossible to make progress unless Obama got personally involved. Top Senate Democrat Harry Reid said the same thing. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, fresh from making a bipartisan compromise on public-employee benefits, offered succinct advice: “First, the president can show up.”

Well, Obama has agreed to do that Monday. But while Chauncey Gardiner, in his befuddlement, tried to answer questions squarely, Obama has seemed less interested in the substance of public policy than in framing issues for the next presidential campaign.

That was plainly the case in the decisions on Afghanistan he announced Wednesday night. Regardless of conditions on the ground, the president promised that the last of the surge troops will be removed by September 2012, the month Democrats hold their national convention.

As for Libya, Obama pretends we’re not involved in “hostilities” and has been content to “lead from behind.” Another sop to the antiwar Left.

Sometimes it seems he’s president of the AFL-CIO, not the U.S.A. The man who said he wanted to double exports in five years has nothing to say about his National Labor Relations Board appointee’s attempt to shut down a $1 billion plant being built by the nation’s No. 1 exporter.

And don’t forget the enviro types. Obama is releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, but his appointees are barring drilling in the Gulf and Alaska and refusing approval for a natural-gas pipeline from Canada.

On all these issues, Obama seems oddly disengaged, aloof from the hard work of government, hesitant about making choices.

That doesn’t sound like Lincoln. Or Roosevelt. Or even Jimmy Carter. More like “then we have fall and winter.”

2011-06-25T16:57:00.000-07:00

We need a leader with a vision, not a reaction to polls or election cycles...

2011-06-18T05:35:00.000-07:00

I have been a member of two unions over the course of my working life.... that's 17+23 years, and never have felt that I could trust "the brotherhood"... example, I have worked at two schools in the district that I work in. Both were hotbeds of union activity. Active members (presidents, etc) were both long-time friends and relatives of mine. There is one basic question that I have continually brought up, "Can you give the membership an accurate accounting of our $900 per year individual union dues?" They never have! Several years ago they faked it by sending out an expenditures list that was horribly vague, rather than be viewed as an answer to a "brother's" question, it was more a slap in the face.... as in, "Shut up, you don't know what's good for you like we (the central committee) do!"

And what's with the Teamster Union setting up shop in police departments (thirty years now)... and the correct images of Chicago politics and the fox being let loose in the henhouse...

I have remained a member out of misguided obligation. This year with the help of a friend wrote a letter to the union redirecting my dues to the Unity Home (a surprising California law allows this).... but, its time for me to take a stand and simply quit the union! I'm almost ready to retire... Somehow I have to make up for all of my years of turning a blind eye to "the brotherhood"... so, beware my brothers and sisters, I'll work to reduce your influence.... next!

Twilight of the Unions

Scott Johnson, Powerline

In "The union-owned Democrats" (the Washington Post's headline) and "Union owned and operated" (NRO's headline), Charles Krauthammer devotes his weekly column to compiling the notable services that Barack Obama has performed on behalf of his paymasters in organized labor. "Instructive cases all," Krauthammer comments, "demonstrating how those who lose popular support -- Democrats at the polls, unions in their declining membership -- can subvert and circumvent the popular will by judicial usurpation (Wisconsin) or administrative fiat (Boeing)." It's a story that reeks.

Mark Hemingway provided a comprehensive look at the phenomena in a recent Weekly Standard cover story. Hemingway deduced that the violent spasms of the union struggles we have witnessed in recent months represent death throes. He characterized the situation as "Unionsdämmerung," the twilight of the unions. I think that Hemingway makes a powerful case, but that there should probably be a question mark next to the title.

Hemingway covers a lot of territory in his article and reminds readers of stories that may not have registered in the rush of news this spring. Here Hemingway supports the thesis of his article with a union leader's own assessment of the prospects:

Unions themselves are deeply pessimistic about the future. Until last fall, when he left the SEIU, Stephen Lerner was director of the union's high-profile campaign for reform of the banking and finance industries. He's not just any other union official--according to Washington Post wunderkind Ezra Klein, Lerner is "considered one of the smartest organizers, if not the smartest organizer, working in the labor movement right now. . . . At a time when a lot of people in labor have become, if not resigned to their fate as a marginal force in American life, increasingly confused as to how to reverse it, Lerner has a lot of fight left in him."
So how does the labor movement's smartest organizer propose to save unions from irrelevancy?
According to audio of Lerner speaking at a recent closed session at Pace University that was leaked on the Internet, Lerner thinks the labor movement has to "destabilize" the country. There needs to be a mass strike on paying mortgages, student loans, and, bizarrely, local government debt. (How local governments are expected to continue paying the salaries and pensions of unionized employees after defaulting on their bonds is unclear.)
Lerner expressed the hope that this would force banks into insolvency. They would then have to renegotiate all their mortgages and loans. It would also "bring down the stock market," depriving the rich of their wealth. Lerner approvingly cited the fatal and destructive riots over austerity measures in Greece and solemnly invoked the famous Cloward-Piven strategy--a theory cooked up decades ago by two leftist sociologists that urges forcing the government into a crisis so as to address economic injustice.
Finally, Lerner announced the first target of this campaign--JPMorgan Chase. Why? "So a bunch of us around the country think, 'Who would be a really good company to hate?' We decided that would be JPMorgan Chase."

Hemingway quotes Lerner: "Unions are almost dead. We cannot survive doing what we do." Krauthammer himself intimates the ultimate failure of the favoritism and corruption that are propping up the unions. Along with the other evidence adduced in his article, Hemingway deepens this qualification of the events depicted in Krauthammer's column.

2011-05-29T16:57:00.000-07:00

Oops, I've always wondered about all of this as well... how many times can that same phrase be used until everyone knows that something is not right with those who should know better and use it at every turn? BH

Unexpectedly!

Scott Johnson, Powerline

Michael Barone elaborates on Glenn Reynolds' theme: why is it that after two years, bad economic news is still "unexpected?"

As megablogger Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, has noted with amusement, the word "unexpectedly" or variants thereon keep cropping up in mainstream media stories about the economy.
"New U.S. claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly climbed," reported CNBC.com May 25.
"Personal consumption fell," Business Insider reported the same day, "when it was expected to rise."
"Durable goods declined 3.6 percent last month," Reuters reported May 25, "worse than economists' expectations."
"Previously owned home sales unexpectedly fall," headlined Bloomberg News May 19.
"U.S. home construction fell unexpectedly in April," wrote the Wall Street Journal May 18.
Those examples are all from the last two weeks. Reynolds has been linking to similar items since October 2009.

Barone lays part of the blame, at least, on the fact that legacy media are cheerleading for the Obama administration:

It's obviously going to be hard to achieve the unacknowledged goal of many mainstream journalists -- the president's re-election -- if the economic slump continues. So they characterize economic setbacks as unexpected, with the implication that there's still every reason to believe that, in Herbert Hoover's phrase, prosperity is just around the corner.

I think that is correct. Nowadays, agenda-driven journalism is about the only kind we have.

Obama and his policymakers told the country that we would recover from the deep recession by vastly increasing government spending and borrowing. We did that with the stimulus package, with the budget passed in 2009 back when congressional Democrats actually voted on budgets, and with the vast increases scheduled to come (despite the administration's gaming of the Congressional Budget Office scoring process) from Obamacare.
All of this has inspired something like a hiring strike among entrepreneurs and small-business owners. Employers aren't creating any more jobs than they were during the darkest days of the recession; unemployment has dropped slowly because they just aren't laying off as many employees as they did then.

Do you remember when Democrats accused Presidential candidate George W. Bush of "talking down the economy?" It was a silly charge then, and journalists' efforts to "talk up the economy" today are likely to be equally ineffective. Irrational exuberance is not as easy to generate as some journalists may have believed.

2011-05-14T07:25:00.000-07:00

Another must read contributed by Mike Walker, USMC Colonel (retired)

Comments on a dubious e-mail

All,

You are familiar with all manner of bunk communicated via e-mail. Received the same probably spurious e-mail from two friends today but felt it was worth sending on a few words in reply. It dealt with Israel, the New York Times, and Islam. In a nutshell, it posited that the problem facing Israel is Islam.

Is Islam the primary ‘problem’ facing Israel? I argue no. Anti-Semitism is more accurate but still wanting and neither term explains the essential support of the political left in the West. We need to look carefully at some of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict to get a better understanding.

During the first decades following the birth of the State of Israel the bordering regimes and organizations fighting to destroy Israel were overwhelmingly both secular socialists and Arab nationalists. This, over time, made them attractive to the western left especially after the Cold War put Israel squarely in the western camp.

That is the critical fact in understanding why so many in the left in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere are so vehemently anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian today.

Starting in the 1970’s, the violent radical left (Rote Armee Faktion (RAF) in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, Japanese Red Army, etc) were all brothers and sisters in arms against Israel. The RAF trained in the Middle East (to include Saddam's Iraq) under the sponsorship of Palestinian terrorist groups and they coordinated their attacks (recall the hijackings carried out by the Abu Nidal Organization designed to free RAF prisoners in German jails). The Japanese Red Army was actually formed in Lebanon not Japan and its leader was also a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Their shared opinion on religion was that it was an archaic opiate of the masses à la Marx. Islam played no role for the radical left, Arab or otherwise, yet the goal, the destruction of the State of Israel, remained unchanged from that of the 1940’s and 1950’s.

These radicals have long been romanticized as heroes by too many on the left both here and abroad. That means that a pro-Palestinian/anti-Israeli policy is de rigueur in those circles today. If you are an authentic leftist then you must oppose the State of Israel and you must take up the Palestinian cause. There are, however, contradictory forces working away at the ranks in the left that make this issue more controversial and offers a hint to a different outcome in the future.

The main contradictory force came to life with the rise of the Islamic theocracy movement that began in Iran in 1979 under the Shi'a ayatollahs that sent shock waves throughout the Islamic world. This gave rise to bin Laden as a leader in a Sunni counterrevolutionary movement and re-legitimized the Sunni theocracy philosophy preached by the Muslim Brotherhood.

It created an endless friction point for the far left that abhors the concept of God, religion, and the male-dominated culture associated with radical Islam. This works to weaken the decades-old and unquestioning support of the Palestinian cause and rejection of the State of Israel by the left.

The second is the inescapable fact that there are millions of Israelis and millions of Palestinians at the same place. Neither is going to go away and somehow both need a state. That is the legitimate argument that strengthens the left in its anti-Israeli crusade yet causes a dilemma regarding the fate of the citizens of Israel except for the most extreme and genocidal of their brethren.

The final force at work is the old adage 'My enemy's enemy is my friend.' Both the hard left in the West and the Islamist radicals hate the capitalist democratic system. As it stands today, both are more than ready to hold their respective noses and grasp the hand of the other in common cause against the free-market West. But that begs the question, what will happen if the common enemy is removed? As Hobbes put it, life during that ensuing civil war will be nasty, brutish, and short.

It is true that Islam plays a greater role today than at any other time in the ranks of those bent on destroying Israel but as the historical record shows it has never been a necessary and sufficient condition to seek that destruction.

Semper Fi,

Mike

2011-05-07T06:42:00.000-07:00

Mike Walker, Colonel USMC (retired)

The death of UBL has led to a spate of misinformation regarding the relationship between the Taliban and al Qaeda. Basing decisions on misinformation at this point would be a tragic and far-reaching mistake.

First, let us go over the history between these two organizations. Al Qaeda was led, until this week, by UBL. The Taliban is led by Mullah Omar. The current alliance between the two began in earnest when Mullah Omar invited UBL and al Qaeda into Afghanistan from the Sudan within months of the Taliban taking control of Kabul in 1996.

The leaders of the two movements were indivisibly joined in the tradition of that region, i.e. the feudal intermarriage between the two families to cement the alliance. Most reliable open source reports cite the fact that a daughter from each family married into the other’s family. They are joined together in blood on many levels.

In May 1998 al Qaeda declared war on the United States during a conference hosted by the Taliban in Afghanistan. In 1999 al Qaeda began detailed planning and training for the 9/11 attacks from camps provided to them by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

By 9/11 2001 al Qaeda was an official unit in the Taliban Army in Afghanistan and was designated as 055 Brigade. In other words, the fighters in al Qaeda and the fighters in the Taliban were seamlessly integrated in common cause against us on the battlefield from day one.

The Taliban alliance with al Qaeda is a strong today as it was on 9/11.

Second, we need to understand how important personal leadership is to movements like this. When Zarqawi, the head of al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), was killed in 2006 the organization carried on normally for a few months. But after the previously planned operations were completed AQI began to falter. New and well-coordinated operations did not easily follow and the organization soon faded as a viable threat to Iraqi sovereignty.

A fair portion of this collapse was due directly to the loss of the ‘great leader.’ It was not simply a case of a key billet that urgently needed to be filled as is the experience in the Western or Eastern military tradition where the army is bigger than any one person. It was a hole that could never be filled. In organizations like al Qaeda the leader often is the organization. This is especially true when the heart and soul of the organization is so deeply based on faith in God as are the al Qaeda and Taliban movements.

The inescapable question now facing every true believer in al Qaeda is why did God kill UBL? That leads almost immediately to asking why has God forsaken us, why are we being punished, what did we do that was so wrong? The death of UBL is not simply the loss of a key or even the key leader; it represents a shattering of the previously unchallenged belief that UBL was the righteous arm of God. Clearly he was not. Great personal piety is no excuse for merciless and compassionless murder of innocents.

The death of UBL has caused a crisis of faith in the ranks that al Qaeda will probably never recover from. A similar fate probably awaits the Taliban should Mullah Omar meet his just deserts.

Finally, let us go over what we do not know. We do not know that UBL was only a figurehead or symbolic leader. We do not know that he was an active leader running operations directly from his compound in Pakistan. We will, however, know which assumption is true shortly.

Open source reports claim that significant amounts information in the form of documents and electronic storage media were captured. Reportedly, he had several "thumb drives" whose information was so sensitive that he carried them on his body at all times.

If that reporting is largely true then that information will be exploited by the intelligence community and we be able to assess just how involved UBL was in al Qaeda operations. Perhaps more importantly, we will find out how deeply UBL was or was not involved in operations conducted by the Taliban, Haqqani Network, and Hekmatyar's Hezb-i-Islami Faction in Afghanistan.

If he was an active member of the enemy’s Afghan operational leadership then that could have a profound effect on both the Taliban and Haqqani Network (or less likely, on Hekmatyar's) spring offensives now underway in Afghanistan as those plans may now be compromised.

My bet is that UBL was actively involved. Too many intelligence and operational leaders underestimated UBL too many times in the past. The assumption that he was a mere figurehead may become one more miscalculation on our part in understanding the threat we face on the battlefield.

Semper Fi,

Mike

2011-04-16T08:09:00.000-07:00

Mike Walker and Mike Ramirez combine to warn us... are we listening? Mike Walker is a retired USMC Colonel and Superintendent of Business Services for a California school district.

What happened to the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform report?

Why are we playing partisan games over the Obama and Ryan plans when a very good plan was already submitted? It was not a creature of political bloodletting. Is that why it was ignored in hyper-partisan Washington?

Gee, it was comprehensive, balanced, and bipartisan. It was the product of a very talented group of Americans even for those jaded by Washington shenanigans. More importantly, why are we waiting? We need to act and we need to act now. Here are two stories from the “trenches” of the governmental budget crisis in California.

A Local Lesson

Our school district, like almost every district in California, has been hit with the largest budget cuts since the Great Depression and will likely surpass those cuts in the coming months. Some of us learned that acting early to cut expenditures is everything in an on-going fiscal crisis like the one in California and one America is facing in Washington DC. Yet amid this unprecedented crisis we are not laying off employees this year. Many are asking why. It is because we were amongst the school districts that acted early to reduce expenditures.

When we eliminated around 25 positions for the 2009-10 school year it reduced expenditures by about $1.5M per year. For the upcoming 2011-12 school year that yields a total expenditure reduction of $4.5 million.

Comparable school districts that did not act in 2009 but put off the reductions until 2011 are still facing the same $4.5 million problem. Ours is already fixed. Their problem is not. They now have to eliminate about 75 comparable positions to get the $4.5 million reduction for 2011-12.

That is now gutting their educational program. We will have the equivalent of fifty more professional educators serving the same number of students next year and we met the same $4.5 million goal. The delay taken by our peers was a terrible miscalculation. The lesson is that putting off painful cuts does not lessen the problem it exacerbates it.

A State Lesson.

A few weeks ago the California State Legislature passed a little over $10 billion in cuts to expenditures in order to help address a $26 billion deficit for the 2011-12 fiscal year. If they had made the exact same cuts starting with the 2009-10 budget, something many in and out of Sacramento had proposed, then the immediate crisis would be over and California would be looking at a $4 billion surplus on 30 June 2012. Instead, Sacramento, like a lot of California school districts, resisted making timely cuts. Instead of taking painful yet prudent cuts when first confronted with the crisis they dithered and delayed thereby creating a nightmare scenario in the here and now.

Learn from our mistakes. If we want America to wait until the budget cutting is truly savage in its consequences then do what most did in California, keep playing politics and kicking the can down the road with accounting gimmicks.

If we are serious about fiscal responsibility then we should start by pulling together simply as Americans and implement the Commission’s plan now. There will be plenty of time to have a debate, politically driven or not, over the Obama and Ryan plans later.

Regards,

Mike

2011-04-09T15:24:00.000-07:00

Paul Ryan's Growth Plan

Larry Kudlow , The Caller

Larry Kudlow is the host of CNBC’s “The Kudlow Report.”

Of all the discussion about Paul Ryan’s big-bang budget plan, the element I like best was caught in this Wall Street Journal op-ed title: “The GOP Path to Prosperity.” In other words, it’s a growth budget. It has plenty of spending cuts, but it also has significant pro-growth tax reform.

Obsessing over the debt is not by itself a policy. Advancing the economy and setting the stage for more job creation is a policy. Mr. Ryan kept an important dose of Ronald Reagan in both the spirit and reality of his plan. Limited government, lower tax rates, and deregulation (of energy) will all promote the path to prosperity.

The other big-picture thought is that the fiscal-policy ball is moving in the right direction. Most of what is being proposed faces a rocky political future. But the direction is unmistakable: less government, lower taxes.

This really started back in December with the extension of the Bush tax cuts and the withdrawal of the trillion-dollar omnibus continuing-resolution spending bill. It continues into the new year with new CRs. Whether Speaker Boehner gets $30 billion or $40 billion in cuts, the direction is clear: lower spending.

Just before the election, John Boehner told us he would stop the bad stuff. Looks like he has. And now Mr. Ryan keeps the drumbeat going with a 2012 budget that would cut $179 billion from the president’s budget baseline. In 2013, Ryan would take down over $220 billion. Over ten years, Ryan would lop off $6 trillion. The key point is not the actual numbers, but the direction of the numbers. Spending is coming down.

Ryan included the thinking of Dave Camp (the Ways and Means chair) on tax reform, which is a 25 percent top rate for individuals and businesses with a full-scale reduction in all the tax-credit, K Street, flotsam-and-jetsam loopholes. That’s very pro-growth.

Ryan also includes deregulation of energy for drill, drill, drill — another big growth and jobs measure.

The health care entitlement picture is going to be very muddled, and the outcome is impossible to figure. So I’ll leave that aside for a moment. The only thing Ryan neglected to do was highlight the need for stable money to stop the damaging Fed rollercoaster. But with so much on his plate, I can understand that omission for now.

Ryan basically stole the budget bacon from President Obama, who should have put this kind of plan in his State of the Union. He didn’t. And now he’s got to play catch-up. The Senate Democrats are utterly hopeless. But the public mood is still where it was last fall: less government spending and borrowing. Ryan delivers on that and then some with his tax-cut growth booster.

The cause of the debt bomb is too much spending and too little growth. Ryan attacks this with new spending rules and tough policy decisions. He also provides the new flat-tax reform incentives to grow the economy.

So if we look at the debt bomb as a share of GDP, what will happen — if Ryan prevails even modestly — is the numerator of debt will steady while the denominator of growth is unleashed.

We will be fine. I can almost hear Paul Ryan saying, “I will not allow America to become Greece.” Amen.

Larry Kudlow is the host of CNBC’s “The Kudlow Report.”

2011-03-24T15:43:00.000-07:00

The empty-office presidency

BY ED MORRISSEY, HotAir

My new column for The Week focuses on the, er, unique handling of the launch of a new war by Barack Obama. Before we get to my take on Obama’s absence on a South American tour during the start of hostilities against Libya, though, let’s first get Dana Milbank’s takeon what he casts as Obama’s tactical error. Ducking out of town while the bombs started falling, Milbank writes, allowed Republicans to paint Obama as weak:

But the “weak leader” charge gained traction over the weekend, as Obama chose to launch the attack on Gaddafi’s forces while on an excellent adventure in South America with his family.
At about the moment the Tomahawk missiles began to rain down on Libya, Obama was joking with Brazilians about Carnival, the World Cup and the Olympics. Rather than hearing an Oval Office address announcing the new war, Americans got word from the president in a scratchy audio recording. As thousand-pound warheads pounded Libyan forces, Obama was kicking a soccer ball, seeing the sights and watching cowboys in sequins.
It was perilously close to George W. Bush’s My-Pet-Goat moment, when then-President Bush continued reading a storybook with children on Sept. 11, 2001, after he was told that the second World Trade Center tower had been hit. Bush later said he was trying to maintain calm; likewise, White House officials tell me the decision to proceed with the South America trip was made in part to convey that the Libya bombardment was not a major military action.
Obama administration officials calculated that he would take a hit for proceeding with the voyage. But they appear to have been surprised by the force of the weakling complaint, coming not just from usual suspects such as Karl Rove but from liberals such as my Post colleague Richard Cohen, who saw Obama “quite literally distancing himself from the consequences of his own policy.”

Sorry, Dana, but this isn’t comparable to Bush’s My Pet Goat moment. For one thing, Bush may have waited a few minutes to finish up with the kids, but he didn’t absent himself from the response for four entire days. Bush didn’t leave the country to finish reading the book to the kids, either. Second, the 9/11 attack came as a surprise to Bush, while Obama launched this war himself and left the country knowing full well it would take place in his absence.

Let’s talk about that decision for a moment, too. The White House wants to argue that the trip had been planned for months, and that they deliberately chose not to reschedule it as a show of strength. Milbank buys into that, too:

Since his earliest days on the campaign trail in Iowa, he has made clear his aversion to the flavor-of-the-day news cycle, instead measuring his progress toward a few broad-brush goals, such as American competitiveness and America’s standing in the world. If something — like, say, the uprisings in the Middle East — doesn’t fit unambiguously within his big goals, his instinct is to brush it off.
“I know everybody here is on a 24-hour news cycle,” he told reporters once. “I’m not. Okay?”

The problem for Milbank and the White House is that they have already established a precedent on postponing previously-scheduled trips when emergent situations occur, as I point out in my column:

Obama had scheduled his tour of Latin America months earlier, but the same was true of his trip to Indonesia in 2010. That trip got postponed twice as domestic politics intruded on the president’s schedule. First, Obama pushed the date from March 2010 to June 2010 in order to push his health care reform bill to final passage. In June, he postponed the trip again, this time to take more control of the Gulf oil spill. It’s hard to argue that ObamaCare ranked as a higher priority than going to war, and yet Obama refused to delay his trip to Rio de Janeiro, where photo ops depicted him playing soccer in the street and watching children dance in the first two days of his war.

Recall that the trip to Indonesia wasn’t just your typical foreign junket, either. Obama had insisted that only a man of the world such as he could heal the breach between the West and the Muslim world, and he pledged to leverage his unique life story to bridge that gap. The speech in Cairo was part of that strategy, as was the trip to the most populous Muslim nation — Indonesia. It carried considerably more weight for Obama’s global strategy than a trade tour of South America. Yet Obama postponed that trip twice, with one postponement occurring so that he could flack ObamaCare a little more to get Congress to pass it.

That’s an interesting set of priorities. Obama refused to leave the country whenObamaCare was at risk, but refused to postpone a trip while putting the US military in harm’s way in Libya for the first time.

Note too that Obama wasn’t the only one out of the country, either:

And where was the defense secretary at this time? The second in civilian command of the military also left town on the 20th. Gates was scheduled to leave on the 19th, but he waited a day to “keep tabs” on the military action in Libya. Did he fly to consult with a member of the military coalition imposing the no-fly zone to coordinate efforts, as Obama announced two days earlier? Not exactly; Gates flew to Russia, which had to be talked out of vetoing U.N. Resolution 1973.

Once again, let’s remember the stink that arose when Chris Christie and his lieutenant governor Kim Guadagno both left New Jersey for vacations at the end of last year and a freak snowstorm locked up the Garden State. Liberals screamed about the dereliction of duty in having both executives out of state when an emergency arose. Now we have the two men in civilian command of the military out of the country when starting a new war.

My column concludes that most presidents would have welcomed the opportunity to demonstrate leadership at this moment. Obama preferred to play soccer in the streets and do a samba chair dance instead.

2011-03-20T10:01:00.000-07:00

ONE-THIRD OF A FRENCH FRY SHORT OF A BIG MAC MEAL

John Hinderaker, Powerline.com

How can we put the current debate over the federal budget into a tangible perspective that anyone can understand? This morning I read a post by Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute in which he criticized the Washington Post's characterization of the $6 billion cut in the most recent continuing resolution as "slashing" the federal budget:

Federal spending has soared by more than $2,000,000,000,000 during the Bush-Obama years, pushing the burden of government up to $3,800,000,000,000, yet the reporters who put together this story said that an agreement to trim a trivially tiny slice of 2011 spending would "slash the budget."
As Charlie Brown would say, good grief. This is the budgetary equivalent of going on a diet by leaving a couple of french fries in the bottom of the bag after bingeing on three Big Mac meals at McDonald's.

That struck me as a pretty good analogy. I wondered: if you do the math, what part of a Big Mac Extra Value Meal would a $6 billion budget cut represent?

The arithmetic is pretty simple, due to the extensive nutrition information that McDonalds makes available online. A Big Mac Extra Value Meal has three components: a Big Mac, a large order of french fries, and a medium soda. The McDonalds site tells us that a Big Mac has 540 calories, a large fries has 570 and a medium Coke has 210, for a total of 1,320 calories.

Meanwhile, the federal budget is currently around $3.8 trillion, which means that a $6 billion cut represents one 633rd of the total. What would be an equivalent cut in a Big Mac Extra Value Meal?

One variable is not readily available online; that is, how many french fries are there in a large order? To answer that question, I went to a nearby McDonalds at lunch time, paid for a large order of fries, and counted them. There were 87. (I counted fries regardless of size, but did not count the hard bits in the bottom of the container.)

This allows us to complete the calculation. If there are 570 calories in a large order of fries, and 87 fries per order, each french fry, on the average, contains 6.5 calories. One 633rd of the total calorie content of a Big Mac Extra Value Meal is 1,320/633, or 2.1 calories. That equals almost exactly one-third of an average sized french fry.

So, consider: if you were to go on what the Democrats consider a starvation diet, and "slash" your calorie intake to exactly the same degree that the Republicans' $6 billion cut has "slashed" the federal budget, you would do the following. Go to McDonalds and order a Big Mac Extra Value meal. Eat the Big Mac. Drink the Coke. Eat 86 of the 87 french fries. Carefully take the last fry and bite off two-thirds of it. Put the remaining one-third of one fry back in the bag.

If you seriously think that you have just "slashed" your diet, you are a Democrat. Most likely, an overweight Democrat.

2011-03-18T22:04:00.000-07:00

Pretty sad, our strongest allies consistently rebuffed, critical international situations ignored, and our "Ditherer-in-Chief" fiddles with his image as the world burns... and we can do nothing but watch this excruciatingly slow train wreck unfold.

A little more... from Express.co.uk

By Anna Pukas

INEFFECTUAL, invisible, unable to honour pledges and now blamed for letting Gaddafi off the hook. Why Obama’s gone from ‘Yes we can’ to ‘Er, maybe we shouldn’t’...

Let us cast our minds back to those remarkable days in November 2008 when the son of a Kenyan goatherd was elected to the White House. It was a bright new dawn – even brighter than the coming of the Kennedys and their new Camelot. JFK may be considered as being from an ethnic and religious minority – Irish and Catholic – but he was still very rich and very white. Barack Obama, by contrast, was a true breakthrough president. The world would change because obviously America had changed.

Obama’s campaign slogan was mesmerisingly simple and brimming with self-belief: “Yes we can.” His presidency, however, is turning out to be more about “no we won’t.” Even more worryingly, it seems to be very much about: “Maybe we can… do what, exactly?“ The world feels like a dangerous place when leaders are seen to lack certitude but the only thing President Obama seems decisive about is his indecision. What should the US do about Libya? What should the US do about the Middle East in general? What about the country’s crippling debts? What is the US going to do about Afghanistan, about Iran?

What is President Obama doing about anything? The most alarming answer – your guess is as good as mine – is also, frankly, the most accurate one. What the President is not doing is being clear, resolute and pro-active, which is surely a big part of his job description. This is what he has to say about the popular uprising in Libya: “Gaddafi must go.” At least, that was his position on March 3.

Since then, other countries – most notably Britain and France – have been calling for some kind of intervention. Even the Arab League, a notoriously conservative organisation, has declared support for sanctions. But from the White House has come only the blah-blah of bland statements filled with meaningless expressions and vague phrases. Of decisive action and leadership – even of clearly defined opinion – there is precious little sign.

What is the Obama administration’s position on the protests in the Gulf island state of Bahrain, which the authorities there are savagely suppressing with the help of troops shipped in from Saudi Arabia? What is the White House view on the alarming prospect of the unrest spreading to Saudi Arabia itself? Who knows? Certainly not the American people, nor the leaders of nations which would consider themselves allies of America.

The President has not really shared his views, which leads us to conclude that he either doesn’t know or chooses, for reasons best known to himself, not to say. The result is that a very real opportunity to remove an unpredictable despot from power may well have been lost. Who knows when or if such an opportunity will come along again?

Every day for almost the last two months our television screens, radio broadcasts and the pages of our newspapers have been filled with the pictures, sounds and words of the most tumultuous events any of us can remember in the Arab world. The outcome of these events, once the dust has settled, could literally change the world. Yet Obama seems content to sit this one out. He has barely engaged in the debate. Such ostrich-like behaviour is not untypical of the 49-year-old President who burst through America’s colour barrier to become the first African-American to occupy the White House.

Two days after taking office in January 2009, he pledged to close down the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, which has become notorious for holding detainees for years without trial. Obama promised to lose the prison within 12 months and to abolish the practice of military trials of terrorism suspects. It was an important promise. America’s reputation had been severely tarnished by revelations about the conditions at Guantanamo, by reports of waterboarding and extraordinary rendition (transporting prisoners to a third country for torture) and by the appalling treatment of detainees in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Closing Guantanamo was a redemptive gesture. Two years on, not only is the prison still in use but its future is as assured as ever. Ten days ago, the President signed an executive order reinstating the military commissions at the island prison. Human rights organisations were outraged. “With the stroke of a pen, President Obama extinguished any lingering hope that his administration would return the United States to the rule of law,” said Amnesty International while Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, declared the President’s action to be “unlawful, unwise and un-American.”

White House spokesmen insisted the President was still committed to closing Guantanamo, which currently has 172 detainees in custody. It was Congress, they said, that had refused to sanction the transfer of the prisoners to the US mainland for trial, leaving no option but to keep the prison open in Cuba. Very little has been achieved in the quest to secure peace in the Middle East. Under Obama, US foreign policy is founded on extreme caution. At first this cool-headedness was a welcome change from the naked aggression of George W Bush and his henchmen Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

It is also true that the President is constantly stymied by a hostile, Republican-ruled Congress. But Obama’s apparent reluctance to engage with momentous events is starting to look like more than aloofness. Some tempering of America’s role as the world’s No1 busybody may be no bad thing but under Obama the US appears to be heading towards isolationism. He is hardly doing much better at home. Economically, the US is in big trouble but the national debt is not shrinking.

Ditto the country’s ecological health; the American love affair with the car and oil remains undiminished despite any alleged commitment. But the White House appears to shy away from any tough action. The energy with which Obama entered the White House seems to have all gone in the push to bring in health care reform, which many Americans didn’t want (or still don’t realise they want).

All of which means that it is starting to look as if Obama and the Democratic Party have but one aim in mind for the rest of this presidential term: to get elected for a second. That means not doing anything that might upset any number of special interest or niche groups, which in effect means not doing very much at all. So, not too many harsh but necessary measures to tackle the financial deficit; no clear direction on where America goes with Afghanistan, even though the war there is going nowhere except from bad to worse.

The Obama government can’t even give clear direction on whether the American people are in danger of exposure to nuclear fallout from Japan following the devastating earthquake and tsunami. The US Surgeon General Regina Benjamin advised San Francisco residents to stock up on radiation antidotes, prompting a run on potassium iodide pills, while the President said experts had assured him that any harmful radiation would have receded long before reaching the Western shores of the US.

Yes we can was a noble and powerful mantra which secured for Barack Obama the leadership of the free world. Those than can, do. It is time he started doing.

2011-03-05T06:51:00.000-08:00

Mike Walker, Colonel USMC (retired)

If only...

All,

Here is an AP quote from the President regarding a potential lock-out/strike in the NFL:

"I'm a big football fan," Obama said, "but I also think that for an industry that's making $9 billion a year in revenue, they can figure out how to divide it up in a sensible way and be true to their fans, who are the ones who obviously allow for all the money that they're making."

If only it went like this:

"I'm a big Government fan," Obama said, "but I also think that for a government that's taking in $billions a year in tax revenue, they can figure out how to divide it up in a sensible way and be true to their taxpayers, who are the ones who obviously allow for all the money that they're taking in."

Regards,

Mike

2011-02-27T07:43:00.001-08:00

2011-02-24T05:29:00.001-08:00

2011-02-11T19:50:00.000-08:00

Two Strikes for Clapper

A look at who is looking out for us... with Mike Walker, Colonel USMC (retired)

All,

Our Director of National Intelligence is becoming more and more unintelligible. On 10 February 2011 he argued too long that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is "largely secular." First, we will ignore the obvious connection, as Director Clapper apparently did, that the word "Muslim" in Muslim Brotherhood stressed the importance of a sincere faith in God but instead implied some self-serving hyperbole or archaic leftover on the part of the good Egyptian brothers.

Even given that shallow excuse, how could James Clapper speak with such certain ignorance in a public hearing? For if what Director Clapper averred is to be believed then the words "largely" and "secular" have no meaning.

Here are a few quotes from the Muslim Brotherhood's Official English website (http://www.ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=813):

"Ever since the Egyptian people in is (sic) majority, along with other African and Asian peoples, embraced Islam in the deep-seated conviction that it is a true religion revealed to a true Prophet by the lord of Mankind, Islam has fully and totally arranged the life and all activities of those peoples. The two basic sources of Islam are the Glorious Qur"an and the Sunnah which is both a theoretical explanation and a practical application of the Glorious Qur"an."

Gee, is that a "largely secular" statement, Mr. Clapper? If so, how about this quote:

"The call of the Muslim Brotherhood was based on two key pillars:

1-The introduction of the Islamic Shari`ah as the basis controlling the affairs of state and society.  2-Work to achieve unification among the Islamic countries and states, mainly among the Arab states, and liberating them from foreign imperialism."

Still largely secular, James? How about this:

"As for the first pillar, about 97% of the Egyptian people are Muslims, the majority of the Egyptian people are Muslims, the majority of whom perform the rites of worship enjoined by Islam. They abide by the Islamic ethics and apply to themselves to most of the rules whose enforcement does not require any government intervention or license. But legislation, the judiciary and economic and social dealings are founded on non-Islamic bases, thus creating a state of alienation between the people’s creed, on the one side, and their forms of activity which are governed by rules that contradicted their creed, on the other. The lack of any connection between the policies of the authorities in power and the legislations, on the one hand, and the Islamic Shari`ah on the other, led to the emergence of many social, economic, and political practices that are invalid under the Islamic shari`ah. It was incumbent on the Muslim Brotherhood in such a situation to adopt a system for sound Islamic education and the spreading of Islamic principles and ethics as well as the education of the Muslim individual, family, and society into commitment to Islamic ethics and principles."

Gee, that reads like a "largely secular" government is the problem and an exclusively "non-secular" form of government is the solution for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Director Clapper needs to do more than "clarify" his words. The crisis in Egypt is of great import to the United States. Our intelligence community, led by Director Clapper, has the responsibility to accurately present the facts to the American people. Mr. Clapper failed miserably in that regard during his remarks to Congress on the Muslim Brotherhood.

There is an old rule in the intelligence business; if you lose your credibility then you lose everything. Director Clapper was profoundly wrong in a matter of urgent national importance. "Clarifying" is disingenuous and a disservice.

OK, so we should be easy on the good fellow, right? No. Perhaps you recall this previous "Clapper fiasco" as recounted during CNN's 22 December 2010 Situation Room broadcast:

"BLITZER: But if the structure of America's intelligence (inaudible) organization is at the center of the new controversy. The national director of intelligence James Clapper in an interview this week that was televised, he was asked about a terror-related arrest in Britain which had occurred 12 hours earlier. The news was all over the TV networks, but Clapper had no idea. How could that be? CNN's Brian Todd is digging deeper for us tonight. Brian?   BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Wolf, this is being called a simple glitch by Clapper's staff and not reflective of his work as DNI, but that glitch led the man who leads 16 intelligence agencies to be very embarrassed in front of network TV cameras.   (BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)  TODD: If you were watching CNN or any other news network on Monday, you may have known about this -- the arrests of 12 men in Britain allegedly plotting a terror attack. You may have known about it, but on Monday afternoon, several hours after the arrests, the U.S. director of national intelligence did not know when asked during an ABC interview.   DIANE SAWYER, ABC NEWS: London -- how serious is it? Any implication that it was coming here, any of the things that they have seen were coming here? Director Clapper?   BRENNAN: The arrests of the 12 by the British this morning...   (CROSSTALK)  BRENNAN: And this is something that the British informed us about early this morning.   TODD: White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan quickly jumped in, but ABC's Diane Sawyer later came back to Clapper, who oversees 16 intelligence agencies.   SAWYER: I was a little surprised you didn't know about London, Director Clapper.   JAMES CLAPPER, DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE: Well, I'm sorry. I didn't.   TODD: The DNI's office called Sawyer's first question confusing and ambiguous. Brennan said before that interview, Clapper had been working on developments on the Korean peninsula and the START treaty.  BRENNAN: Should he have been briefed by his staff on those arrests? Yes. And I know there was breathless attention by the media about these arrests, and it was constantly on the news networks. I'm glad that Jim Clapper is not sitting in front of the TV 24 hours a day and monitoring what comes out of the media.   TODD (on camera): What do you make of that comment? Backspin?

OK, here's where we are at, Clapper Strike 1 is dismissed as a "glitch."

Clapper Strike 2 is dismissed as just needing "clarification."

Are we going to wait around until Strike 3 before we realize the wrong guy is in the job?

Right now, I have more faith in the "clapper light switch" than DNI James Clapper. The sales pitch "clap on-clap off" is somewhat credible while Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is not. He seems to be operating more on a mindset of "wishful thinking" than an analysis of the cold hard facts. That is the path to disaster.

Semper Fi,

Mike

2011-02-02T17:59:00.000-08:00

Helen Whalen-Cohen's piece "Say What?"from Town hall…

It's like something out of "1984."

In George Orwell's dystopia, "thought police" monitored citizens to make sure that they didn't disparage The Party. In today's world, college students all over the country face restrictions on speech in the form of "speech codes." These dicta include harassment policies, "free speech zones," "tolerance" policies and outright bans on "hate speech." The aim of these policies is noble -- to prevent discord and foster respect on campus -- but in the culture of political correctness run amok, such proscriptions often eclipse students' rights to express themselves freely.

Speech codes are regulations prohibiting speech that is otherwise protected by the First Amendment. They are prevalent -- and pernicious -- on college campuses.

How are student bodies affected by this wave of political correctness? Is it helping campuses maintain civility or causing deeper harm?

Speech restrictions no longer have to be issued from on high. After being immersed in a culture that values political correctness over First Amendment rights for long enough, students are learning to censor each other with two words: "I'm offended."

Greg Lukianoff calls it "unlearning liberty." As the president of FIRE, he has watched students trend away from discussion and towards policing one another. In an interview with the website Spiked, he points out that students are learning to let offense trump discussion, ending conversation: "There's a very predictable result, which is that if you allow the ultimate trump card against free speech to be a claim that 選'm offended,' then people learn very quickly to say they are offended." As Lukianoff notes, students learn to call on campus administration to quiet voices that they would rather not hear. What role will they expect the government to play in their lives after graduation?

Indeed, many students advocate speech codes today, a product of learning that they have a right not to be offended and that that right can be violated by someone else's thoughts. Campus policies such as "Stop Bias" are adding fuel to the fire. It asks students to find and report instances of bias anonymously (including bias surrounding "actual or perceived" marital status). The school's website even encourages students to report political differences as a form of bias, saying that Barack Obama or Sarah Palin can be listed as the "victims." This is not an example from Stalinist Russia, but Syracuse University. Such programs are ostensibly meant to create a safe space for discussion. But will encouraging students to police each other accomplish that goal?

Programs like these teach that the right response to offense is not debate, but censorship, and that it is appropriate to turn to university administrators to remedy the supposed harm. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me -- until I get to college.

2011-01-17T17:23:00.001-08:00

Oh California...

Contributed by Mike Walker, USMC Colonel (retired)

All,

1. California is not broke. The government in Sacramento is broke. That is a huge distinction. The average California Joe's and Jane's will go to work, pay their taxes, buy dinners, pay the rent, and get on with life in a pretty nice place to live. The US and California economies will NOT tank if the dysfunctional Sacramento government goes through an ugly fiscal meltdown.

2. Sacramento is more broken than broke. In the worst case scenario, the State government will not cease to exist. California's government will still take in, on average, well over $1,000,000,000.00 per WEEK. Put another way, it currently collects in the neighborhood of $200 million a day, seven days week, 52 weeks a year on average, even during a deep recession.

So, again, the US and California economies will NOT tank if the dysfunctional Sacramento government runs out of cash momentarily. It will be embarrassing, ugly, and painful for some but not the end of the world.

Why is this happening? The reason why California's government is always on the verge of going broke, in good times and in bad, is that it is unable to stop spending above and beyond the average +$1 billion it takes in every week.

3. THE worst thing that can happen is for the US taxpayer to bailout California's government. Most of you may not know this but the California state budget (1 July 2010-30 June 2011) passed in October 2010 already has included a Federal bailout. No kidding.

The elected officials in Sacramento already voted in a $5 billion Washington D.C. bailout (that does not exist) in order to try (in vain) to balance the government of California’s budget. That deserves the gold ribbon for chutzpah.

A good thing that could happen is for the US government to give California's government an emergency LOAN but only if Uncle Sam requires Sacramento to abide by the same kind of emergency loan rules that Sacramento imposes on, say, a bankrupt public school district.

Uncle Sam must require the California government to create a balanced multi-year projection (MYP) of its budget for the current and two subsequent fiscal years in order to receive the loan. Uncle Sam should further require the California government to create a fiscal action plan (FAP) to permanently solve the budget disconnect between revenues and expenditures. Uncle Sam should not release the bulk of the loan until both the MYP and FAP are enacted to the satisfaction of Uncle Sam.

Uncle Sam needs to appoint a Federal Fiscal Advisor who will go to Sacramento with power to approve or disapprove California State government expenditures. The Federal Fiscal Advisor should remain in place until such time that the California government pays back the loan. If California's elected officials refuse then let them live on their $200M a day and be done with it.

Warm regards from sunny California,

Mike

2011-01-15T11:47:00.001-08:00

2010-12-30T09:04:00.000-08:00

California’s Central Valley: Zimbabwe West?

ED MORRISSEY…. HotAir

Until recently, California’s Central Valley was one of the nation’s most productive agricultural regions. Not only did it feed itself, the state of California, and the entire country, it also produced exports to other nations. That kind of enterprise employed a lot of people in Central California, from farm hands to wholesalers, and created a high standard of living.

That continued right up to the moment that the federal government got more concerned over the Delta smelt, a small, inedible fish, than feeding people. A court order cut off water deliveries for seven months out of the year to the Central Valley at the same time a drought hit, and the combination turned a once-fertile breadbasket to the world into a Dust Bowl — or as Investors Business Daily suggests, a government-initiated agricultural disaster on the same order as Zimbabwe today or Ukraine in the 1930s. Monica Showalter reports that the region that once fed the world now faces widespread hunger as a result:

Local newspapers and Fresno County officials are trying to rally Facebook users to vote for Fresno in a corporate contest sponsored by Wal-Mart for $1 million in charity food donations for the hungry. Fresno, a city of 505,000, has taken the national lead because 24.1% of Fresno’s families are going hungry.

Civic spirit is good, but something big is wrong here. Fresno is the agricultural capital of America. More food per acre in more variety can be grown in the fertile Central Valley surrounding this community than on any other land in America — perhaps in the world.

Yet far from being a paradise, Fresno is starting to resemble Zimbabwe or 1930s Ukraine, a victim of a famine machine that is entirely man-made, not by red communists this time, but by greens.

State and federal officials, driven by the agenda of environmental extremists, have made it extremely difficult for the valley’s farms, introducing costly environmental regulations and cutting off critical water supplies to save the Delta smelt, a bait fish. It’s all driving the economy to collapse.

In the southwest part of the Central Valley, water allotments as low as 10% of normal have created a visible dust bowl. The knock-on effect can be seen in cities like Fresno, where November’s unemployment among the packers, cannery workers and professional fields that make agriculture productive stands at 16.9%.

It isn’t just Fresno, although it appears to have taken the worst of the crisis. Besides Fresno, four other Central Valley cities got listed in the bottom ten of MarketWatch’s 2010 survey on the worst places to do business in the US. Fresno came in dead last at 102 on the list.

The collapse has another element to it for Californians as well. The state has a huge budget shortfall, currently estimated around $26 billion, and cannot afford to expand safety-net programs to help the Central Valley. One reason the budget hole is so large is because of the lack of revenue from normally-robust agricultural production in that region. Instead of being a net revenue producer, the Central Valley threatens to become a sinkhole of welfare spending that will hasten the bankruptcy of the nation’s largest state, and an economy that would normally rank among the top 10 in the world if considered as a nation unto itself.

This is entirely the result of federal government intervention in agriculture, which might be understandable if it was intended to help agriculture. Instead, it comes as a hostile act to both the people of the region and Americans as a whole. Thanks to the collapse of the Central Valley, food prices will increase as we have to import more from countries with much less strict environmental controls, which is merely an inconvenience. The starvation that has begun is more than an inconvenience — it is a national embarrassment, and a moral outrage.

2010-12-28T08:04:00.001-08:00

2010-12-21T19:25:00.001-08:00

2010-12-11T19:02:00.001-08:00

Christmas crap shoot...

2010-12-09T18:45:00.000-08:00

Understanding Assange

Mike Walker, Colonel USMC, retired

Julian Assange is typically presented as either brilliant devil or hero. The closer truth is that he is a very clever and spoiled adolescent who never grew up. He is much more a mentally unstable lost soul than an evil ogre or shining messiah.

Unfortunately, cleverness has allowed his childish conspiracy visions to overcome the rational behavior required of a responsible member of any society. Julian the child throws tantrums and acts out. He is the eternal enfant terrible hidden behind a well-tailored suit, a disarmingly juvenile smile, and an adult vocabulary.

Julian is the boy-man for whom the rules do not apply. Everyone who gets in his way is the enemy. In fact, everyone who gets in his way is not only the enemy, they are, without exception, connected to the giant cabal aimed directly at Julian Assange. So is it any wonder he is now likely to go to jail for sexually driven crimes in sexually liberal Sweden? No rules apply to Julian other than Julian’s, evidently to include his physicals needs. He is in constant rebellion against a paranoid perception of unfairness caused by societal authority in any form.

Therefore Julian is doomed and a passing phenomenon. He has and will continue to get his Andy Warhol moments of fame, but in the great scheme of things, his successes are unsustainable in the face of his self-destructive egoism. For Julian Assange, the world does revolve around him. Julian is endlessly needy making it hard to believe he is Australian. He should be more the object of pity than anger and we should all feel a bit indebted to him.

We should be grateful that the tool that laid bare a great weakness in our 21st century information systems was such a deeply flawed individual. Think of the future damage that could have been wrought by a truly sinister force if Julian Assange had not forced the adults to divert their attention and clean up a mess that this child as much found as created.

Semper Fi,

Mike

2010-12-09T06:01:00.000-08:00

Blue State Corruption

Red state/Blue state maps after November 2

Even the NY Times sees that "Blue States" are on the edge of a cliff, that many will see horrendous economic hardship in the very near future, states like California, Illinois, and New York. Debt derived from "compassionate" spending is a very real threat and there is a time to pay the piper.

Everyone knows individuals who do not handle their resources wisely. They will spend like there is no tomorrow and help forestall the inevitable by refinancing repeatedly. At some point there is no more wiggle room and bankruptcy/foreclosure comes home to roost. That is where the "Blue states" are. They have bought into the idea that you can spend your way out of reversals and that huge bond obligations can be put off indefinitely. With lower than expected income and huge growing debt they'll have no other way out than to declare insolvency... yikes! Didn't all those spend liberals geniuses in Sacramento see this coming? The hardest hit are the bluest of states, states with a majority of brilliant liberal financial planners assembled as their form of government.

Most "Blue state" elected officials view the events that surrounded the Wall Street collapses and bail outs as criminal activity by unscrupulous bond traders, CEOs and investors. Their question, "How could financial professionals not see the obvious unless they are inherently criminal?" My question, "How could state financial professionals not see the obvious unless they are inherently corrupt?'

Bobzhuman...

2010-12-02T16:18:00.000-08:00

Julian Assange... Ah, to be the toast of the town! What an honor. "Hey, Julian, I loved the way that you poked a stick in Uncle Sam's eye!"

You notice that he has no interest in leaking info about Russia's adventures in Georgia or China's in Taiwan. He would immediately be executed in some covert way... The US is a safe place to make your mark...

A word from Mike Walker, retired USMC Colonel in intelligence...

Secretary of State Clinton Should Resign? What a laugh!

It isn’t every morning that I get to wake up, turn on the news and end up with a good chuckle and a smile on my face. But I have to thank Julian “Mr. Wikileaks” Assange for that early Holiday gift.

Now I do not know if dear Julian is just plain stupid, a world-class hypocrite, thinks the rest of us are simpletons, or some combination of the three but one thing is for sure, he is a public fool.

Newsflash to Julian:

There are more international spies per square foot in United Nations Headquarters in New York City than anyplace in world. That piece of real estate will beat out the CIA Headquarters in Langley , MSS HQ in Peking , or SVR HQ in Moscow for sheer concentration of spies. Heck, some of the national delegations at the UN not only have their entire delegation engaged in intelligence collection but have the full staff of their state-run TV, radio, and print organizations busy at espionage work as well.

So Julian, you can bash the United States and Secretary of State Clinton to your heart’s content but this former intelligence officer ain’t buying your “Hate America ” line of bunk.

But good luck in Sweden , Mate!

2010-11-28T08:11:00.001-08:00

2010-11-26T15:51:00.000-08:00

Joseph Stalin the murderer of the best and brightest of Poland at Katyn...

Hard to believe that it would take so long to admit something that everyone knew already. Every Pole knows this for a fact, not as an urban legion but the horror of having so many of your loved ones massacred on a frozen lake. Read the article from the AP....

MOSCOW – The World War II Katyn massacres were committed on the direct order of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, Russia's lower house of parliament said Friday — a statement hailed by Polish officials.

The 1940 massacre of around 20,000 Polish officers and other prominent citizens in western Russia by Soviet secret police has long soured relations between the two countries. President Dmitry Medvedev will visit Poland in early December.

Soviet propaganda for decades blamed the killings on the Nazis, but post-Soviet Russia previously acknowledged they were carried out by the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD — Stalin's much feared secret police.

The statement passed by the State Duma appears aimed as a step toward Russia definitively breaking with its Soviet legacy.

Some observers have expressed alarm in recent years that Russia may be quietly rehabilitating Stalin. Last year, a quote praising Stalin was restored to the decoration of one of Moscow's busiest subway stations; this year, Moscow's mayor proposed allowing posters depicting Stalin as part of the annual celebrations of the defeat of Nazi Germany.

"This historic document is important not only for Russian-Polish relations — much more it is important for us ourselves," said Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Duma's foreign relations committee, according to the news agency ITAR-Tass.

Russia has turned over scores of volumes of documents this year about Katyn to the Polish government.

"Published materials, held in secret archives for many years, not only reveal the scale of this awful tragedy but show that the Katyn crime was committed on the direct order of Stalin and other Soviet leaders," says the statement, which also expresses "deep sympathy for the victims of this unjustified repression."

Communist legislators tried to amend the statement to remove the naming of Stalin, but were defeated.

"The falsification of history that we are fighting against in other countries is also taking place in our country, and today we could see it with our own eyes," Kosachev said of the amendment attempt. Russian officials frequently use the term "falsification of history" to attack perceived attempts to underplay the importance of the Red Army in the fight against Nazi Germany.

The head of the Polish parliament's foreign affairs committee, Andrzej Halicki, said he considered the Duma's statement to be a breakthrough.

"I am happy that such a process of reconciliation and truth is taking place," he said. "It is the first such act that proves that our relations and discussions are sincere."

However, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, head of the conservative opposition Law and Justice party, said he still wants Russia to offer a full apology and compensation.

A U.S. historian who wrote a book about Katyn, hailed the Duma decision.

"I think this is part of a long process in which ultimately the Russian people will have to come to grips with their past," Allen Paul, who authored "Katyn: Stalin's Massacre and the Triumph of Truth," told The Associated Press.

___

Associated Press writer Vanessa Gera in Warsaw contributed to this report.

2010-11-25T11:48:00.000-08:00

Two takes on North Korea....

Charles Krauthammer on NKorea...

Last night I predicted that the administration would do exactly the wrong thing and call ... for a return to the Six-Party talks. Well sure enough, our envoy to North Korea, who's now in Beijing, last night called for, yes, a return to the talks.

This is after he had a meeting with the Chinese and he announced that it was extremely successful, that we and the Chinese had agreed ... on the need for -- strong measures? Retaliation? Sanctions? No. On the need for multilateralism. ...

To return to the talks is exactly the wrong thing because it's exactly why -- if there's any logic at all to what's happened -- that's why Pyongyang has been doing this: (a) the attack with the artillery, and (b) the revelation earlier this last week of this vast, advanced facility for uranium enrichment.

The point is this is a regime in transition, a regime in a succession crisis, that is in economic disaster. The people are starving. It needs [outside] aid because we and the South Koreans and the Japanese have correctly cut it off years ago, and this is the way it [North Korea] beckons us into negotiations where, again, it will offer a phony agreement on some kind of halting of perhaps the uranium or plutonium program, and we will once again subsidize them. ...

I think everybody understands that the only outcome of this eventually that will be considered a success is if the regime eventually implodes and collapses of its own inefficiency and irrationality -- in fact lunacy in the way it governs itself.

And one way to do that is not to continue what we have been doing for 16 years -- [which] is negotiating and periodically caving in to threats like this, or attacks like this, with carrots, meaning keeping the economy of that state, which is really teetering on the edge of collapse, keeping it going...

___________________________________________________________________________________

Mike Walker on China and NKorea...

All,

Here is a report from the AP:

BEIJING – When North Korea tested a nuclear device last year, China issued bland criticism and urged Pyongyang to resume diplomacy. After a South Korean navy ship was sunk, most likely by a NorthKorean torpedo, Beijing sent its sympathies but called the evidence inconclusive.

Now that North Korea has unleashed an artillery barrage on a South Korean island that killed four people — including two civilians — and raised tensions in the heavily armed region, Beijing again appears unwilling to rein in its neighbor.

For all China's growing international might, its tolerance of North Korea's wayward behavior shows how differently Beijing sees the world — or at least its corner of it.

"There is zero chance of China, either in open or in private, putting major substantive pressure on North Korea," said Shi Yinhong, professor of international relations at Beijing's Renmin University.

If major damage is inflicted on South Korea from the irrational and deadly actions of North Korea, either literally or economically, the long-term damage will ultimately fall on China.

North Korea only exists state because China makes it so.

While most of the world is working to build a better future, such as the emerging powers in India and Brazil, China looks foolishly backwards. Its relationship to North Korea is neither progressive nor enlightened, it is a throw back to a failed "kowtow" relationship going back to the days of decadent Chinese emperors and ever subservient Korean kings.

What China seems incapable of seeing is that it cannot sponsor, however covertly, a horrific war in East Asia without severe consequences any more than the Japanese militarist could exploit their power a century ago. Both courses were and are doomed to tragic failure.

China is at a crossroad. It either advances the world forward in peace or helps to plunge it once more in to darkness and relentless warfare. The sad reality is that China is an immature power. It has no history of treating other nations as equals and is struggling, too often unsuccessfully, with the concept of equality of nations and races in East Asia. To paraphrase Churchill, it seems that if you live in East Asia then the Chinese must either be at your feet or at your throat.

It does not have to be that way but only the Chinese can make that choice.

Mike

2010-11-21T08:41:00.000-08:00

Smallness... and very scary. This was the third person in line for four years to govern the US in case something were to happen the President and Vice President! She has always thrown these type of "playground" comments out. Remember her references to violence against gays when anyone opposed same sex marriages or her describing Tea Party activitists with Nazi symbols, etc.

John Boehner, caught up in historic election results that propelled his party into a dominate position in Congress and himself as the Majority Speaker was caught up in a moment of emotions...

Pelosi's response? Not so empathetic.

“You know what? He is known to cry. He cries sometimes when we’re having a debate on bills,” Pelosi said.

“If I cry, it’s about the personal loss of a friend or something like that. But when it comes to politics – no, I don’t cry,” she added. “I would never think of crying about any loss of an office, because that’s always a possibility, and if you’re professional, then you deal with it professionally."

Why would she need to say anything? Where are the adults? I guess this her definition of professionalism...

2010-11-18T22:24:00.000-08:00

Victor Davis Hanson

The George W. Bush Fixation

Obama’s fixation on his predecessor could consume his presidency.

B Obama remains fixated on George W. Bush. For nearly two years, President Obama and his team have prefaced their explanations for the tough economy, the tough finances, and the tough situation abroad with a “Bush did it” chorus. Apparently, they believed that most of our problems, here and abroad, either started with George W. Bush, or at least would not transcend him.

At first, it was an easy enough habit to fall into. Things were not in great shape in January 2009 when Obama took over. More important, Obama started out with a nearly 70 percent approval rating. By contrast, Bush, like the punching bag Harry Truman, left office with an approval rating in the low 30s.

Obama’s serial fixation on his predecessor made little sense when he first took office — and it has now become a disastrous misreading of political realities.

Recent polls reflect that Bush and Obama are now just about even in popularity. Obama’s supporters in the House have suffered the worst shellacking since 1938. The president got out of Washington on a foreign tour immediately after the election — only to be cold-shouldered by fair-weather foreign leaders who sensed weakness. Bush, meanwhile, is basking in endless media exposure as he expounds on his best-selling memoir — appearing above the partisan fray, past and present.

Voters two years ago elected Obama for a variety of reasons — from unhappiness with Bush and Iraq to the landmark novelty of seeing our first black president. The financial meltdown of September 2008 ended for good John McCain’s small lead in the polls. That panic also reminded voters of their unease with the Bush deficits and his expansion of government.

Unfortunately, Obama misread all that, and ended up trumping many of the things that Bush did to alienate voters.

Deficits of $500 billion soared to $1.4 trillion. Vast but unfunded Bush programs like Medicare prescription-drug benefits and No Child Left Behind soon were overshadowed by even bigger ones like Obamacare. An initial Bush bailout evolved into a gargantuan stimulus and serial government takeovers.

The result, fair or not, was that Bush’s financial felonies began to look like misdemeanors in comparison. Tea Party voters saw the Obama medicine as worse than the original Bush disease.

There was the same obsession with — and misreading of — Bush in foreign affairs. The public was turned off by the violence and costs in Iraq — but otherwise not especially concerned about Bush’s largely traditional foreign policy or his anti-terrorism protocols. Too bad a Bush-obsessed Obama was again blind to that simple fact. So when Iraq became largely quiet as Obama entered office, the entire “Bush did it” refrain was rendered obsolete and should have been dropped.

The anti-war Obama had campaigned on closing Guantanamo, ending tribunals and renditions, and critiquing the Patriot Act and Predator-drone attacks. But once Iraq was taken out of the equation, Obama quickly discovered that these old bogeymen Bush policies were both useful and relatively popular. So he was forced to keep or expand them. Obama’s flip-flop only confused Americans: Why, in hypocritical fashion, was he now embracing the Bush legacy that he used to demonize constantly?

When Obama tried to chart a new and much-heralded “reset-button” foreign policy in loud opposition to Bush’s, the irony continued. Most Americans did not want to try the accused architect of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in a civilian court replete with legal gymnastics. They did not think that announcing artificial deadlines for troop withdrawals in wartime was an especially bright idea.

They also did not expect that the much-heralded antidote to Bush’s swagger and “Dead or Alive” Texanisms would include bowing to Saudi princes and Chinese dictators, apologizing abroad for America’s purported sins, or spreading mythologies about the Islamic world’s contribution to the Western Renaissance and Enlightenment.

Just because Bush turned off Europe over Iraq did not mean that an “I’m not Bush” Obama could not turn it off even more by printing billions of dollars, urging European countries to borrow more in reckless American style, and downplaying old alliances with everyone from Britain to Poland.

So here is a polite suggestion for President Obama: After nearly two years of governance, free up your policies to either succeed or fail on their own merits without chaining them to the Bush past. In a word: Let go of a now-smiling and relatively rehabilitated Bush — before such a fixation consumes you and your presidency.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. © 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

2010-11-18T07:45:00.000-08:00

RealClearPolitics - Video - Krauthammer: Ghailani Verdict "Huge Embarrassment" For Obama Admin

2010-11-15T11:24:00.001-08:00

2010-11-07T07:37:00.000-08:00

Tolerance, Intolerance, al Qaeda, and Moral Cowardice

Mike Walker, Colonel USMC (retired)

All,

In the coming days, please compare the outcry in the "enlightened" West as well as the Islamic world and so-called "Muslim Street" over the "proposed threat" to burn a Quran in the United States that never happened vice the wholesale slaughter of an Arab Christian congregation celebrating Mass in Baghdad last week or the mass murder of Sunni Muslims as they worshipped God in their mosques in Pehsawar District, Pakistan this week. Both attacks were claimed by an erstwhile Islamic group called al Qaeda.

This follows the brutal killings of Sufi Muslims in July in Karachi and Ahmadi Muslims in May in Lehore. Sufi's follow and existential path to God and their followers have written, over the centuries, some the greatest poetry the Islamic world has ever seen. The Ahmadi are an eccentric Islamic sect but are also the only Muslim group that are pacifists in the Quaker Christian sense.

All these barbaric acts were made allegedly in the name of God by supposed followers of God who call themselves member of al Qaeda. This is a lie. These are not just acts in the eyes of God. They are great sins. Al Qaeda likes to use the word "Satan" in labeling its enemies. If any group in the world today deserves the label "The Great Stan" it is al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is an abomination before God, the Almighty.

If the world's Islamic leaders are not willing to say once and for all that al Qaeda and its supporters are both evil and bad Muslims, there is little hope for the future. The leaders of the Islamic world must openly say that the members of al Qaeda are fasiq, and that their teachings, such as preaching the killing Muslims and Christians in their places of worship, are bid'ah, damnable innovations and a perversion of Islam.

The members of al Qaeda should be sentenced to death as apostates just as the Quran commands. The supporters of al Qaeda should be publicly excoriated as violators of the Quran, the word of God, and as fajir, sinners before Allah.

Further, the non-Muslim world along with the Muslim world can no longer sit quietly as these horrors take place. They must speak out clearly and forcefully against this form of religious extremism. This is a moment when people of good conscience, regardless of their belief or non-belief, must make a stand and speak out.

Speaking out in one unified voice is worth more than dozen battalions on the battlefield. If we are not willing to exert the moral courage to prove the pen mightier than the sword then the sword is all we will have left to wield.

As Edmund Burke well said on different occasions:

"I take toleration to be a part of religion. I do not know which I would sacrifice; I would keep them both: it is not necessary that I should sacrifice either."

"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

The good must now associate for anything less is intolerance in its ugliest form and can only lead to ever greater deaths of innocents.

Semper Fi,

Mike

2010-11-06T08:51:00.000-07:00

2010-11-02T20:05:00.001-07:00

2010-11-02T04:53:00.001-07:00

2010-10-31T18:29:00.001-07:00