There's My Two Cents

Israel Update...And The End

2010-06-10T23:59:00.001-05:00

As I pondered what to do for my last post, I decided that it really should be the thing I considered the single most important issue going on in the world today. Environmentalism, illegal immigration, overspending, expansion of government...most of the many political hot buttons floating around now are basically just different slices of the pie of liberalism. The basic tenets of the founding of our nation are fundamentally different from that liberalism, and that fundamental difference is what causes so many conflicts in this nation. It is a question that must be resolved if America is to remain free and prosperous. While there are many issues that are more than worthy of your consideration, however, I believe there is none more critical than that of Israel and the Middle East. First, let's check in on the latest events. (h/t to Melekiop for several of these links - thanks!)

Iran is now sending some ships to Gaza this week with 'relief'. Right. This kind of 'relief' would be like the relief your mouth would get from eating glass. In reality, this is probably just the next step in the radical Islamists' efforts to provoke Israel into international isolation (made all the more possible by Obama's lack of support for Israel after Turkey's flotilla). Watch for more problems and conflict to come.

Someone really needs to clue in our Secretary of State, who clearly hasn't followed these events over the past few days, and thinks that Iran might try something fishy. Way to be on top of it, Hil.

Of course, someone in Israel has not only a sharp sense of political awareness, but also a sense of humorous irony:

Student Union chairman Boaz Torporovsky, who has been leading the reverse flotilla charge, told The Jerusalem Post on Monday, “Hundreds of people have volunteered for the flotilla, and many more are contacting us all the time for ways they can help.

“Our plan is to deliver much-needed humanitarian assistance to the Kurds of Turkey, who by the way outnumber Israelis and Palestinians combined,” he said…

Another sea-bound venture is being organized in an effort to draw attention to Turkey’s own controversial policies – this time to Cyprus, to “call for an end to the Turkish occupation” of the island’s northern half – and is being organized by Meretz activist Pinchas Har-Zahav, and his son Haim, who has also signed on for the voyage…

Har-Zahav added that the ship’s passengers were not looking for a violent confrontation and if told to turn back, they would.

“But we feel that it’s important for us to show and remind the world that Turkey is not a righteous country, but a near-rogue state, and that we, the Israeli people, are not suckers.”

Sweet! Well played!

Still, perhaps the most unfortunate thing about this series of events is that Barack Obama is using them to revise American policy on Israel, and not in a way that will improve relations or Israeli security.

Kyle-Anne Shiver offers some words of encouragement with which I heartily agree:

I must now ask whether Barack Obama is signaling to the entire Muslim world that Israel is theirs for the taking, that America will stand aside and twiddle our collective thumbs while Iran and her Muslim neighbors finally get to carry out Holocaust II.
...
The only thing I can add is that I now declare myself, a devout Catholic, Jewish too. And it would seem the only moral thing any of us can do is to proclaim this as loudly and as furiously as we can.

Amen! Regardless of the official position, you and I can boldly proclaim support and love for Israel, and do our small parts to stand with them. On that note...

The bottom line is that we need to understand the dangers from radical Islam. The pope apparently does, which is a very good thing. Unfortunately, the Obama administration does not. Politically speaking, the Middle East is a powder keg that is likely to explode due to the simple fact of diametrically opposed ideologies. For example, Hamas' official charter explicitly professes the extermination of Israel and the Jewish people as its reason for existence; much of the radical Islamic world agrees. There's simply no negotiation possible with that mindset. As long as the Middle East exists, there will be conflict, and as long as the U.S. is a major world leader, the politics of the Middle East will affect us, if nothing else but for the simple demographics of it.

But I believe there's even more to it than that.

Even more critical is to understand the role of Israel in the world. Let me recap a bit on my understanding of things. Based on my Christian beliefs, I obviously hold Israel in a special place in my heart, and I believe that it is God's chosen land for His chosen people. The Bible is mostly a story about Israel and the Jewish people, and the rest of the world is only brought into their blessings and inheritance after Jesus Christ graced this world. Make no mistake: we are all included, if we accept His gift of salvation. But, Israel and the Jewish people are the primetime, and I believe there is a reason that the Middle East is flush with critical natural resources...to guarantee that that part of the world remains prominent, and becomes more so as our time on this planet comes to an end.

Thanks to the theology of smart people like Joel C. Rosenberg and Dr. David Jeremiah (and their study of the events written about in Ezekiel 38-39), I believe that we're careening toward another world war, called the War of Gog and Magog; on one side will be a coalition of Russia, Iran, and a bunch of Arab nations, and on the other side will be Israel. Of more concern to us, perhaps, is the fact that there is absolutely no mention in the Biblical record of a powerful nation to the West (us) helping Israel once this war is fully joined...they will be completely on their own. The Bible is silent on exactly why the U.S. is a non-player, but it's not too much of a stretch to see any number of scenarios that might play into current events:

1. the U.S. chooses not to participate --- given the Obama administration's pullback from our long-time ally, this is certainly plausible
2. the U.S. is unable to participate because...
...a collapsed economy destroys our ability to do anything
...a devastating terrorist attack renders us unable to do anything
...some combination of those, or some unknown circumstance

For whatever reason, we don't help Israel. But God does, and Israel wins a decisive victory that triggers the sprint to the end of the world as we know it and the return of Christ.

For a vastly more comprehensive set of details on this whole thing, check out the Rosenberg and Jeremiah links above. The nuts and bolts of the situation is that while we don't know the exact timing of these events, the Bible does give us a series of general road signs that we will pass leading up to this climax. While the exact timing and precision of details are subjects for much debate, it seems plain to me that we are seeing a whole lot of those general road signs nowadays, so it would be wise if every one of us investigated these prophecies and takes them seriously.

Why do I bring this up? To scare you? To predict gloom and doom? To get all preachy on you?

No, that is not my intent. My intent is to encourage you to think. You know I've always been a proponent of looking at the evidence and making up your own mind on things, and that hasn't changed with this subject. If you're familiar with these topics and have come to your own conclusions on them (and thus, how you should live your life in relation to those conclusions), I applaud you. If not, then now's a great time to start. Don't dismiss this as mere religious hocus-pocus...I think that if you'll take but a small amount of time to objectively examine the facts first, then the prophetic clues, suggestions, and predictions made by the likes of Rosenberg and Jeremiah suddenly become immeasurably more plausible and worthy of serious consideration that could have major ramifications for your life.

As Christians, we are called to understand our faith, to live it out, to be in prayer for Israel, and to rest confidently in the anticipation of Christ's ultimate victory over all evil in the world. In reality, the exact unfolding of the end times -- both the ways and the timing -- is irrelevant, because if we do what we're supposed to do, then we're standing with God's people, and with God Himself. And really, if you're on God's side, what else matters?

It's time to bring it to a close. No matter how dark the days get, remember who ultimately wins this battle. Always strive to conduct yourself as if you represent God...because you do. When you're bone-weary of the struggle and you wonder why you should bother to keep going, just remember the words of Galations 6:9:

"And let us not get tired of well-doing; for at the right time we will get in the grain, if we do not give way to weariness."

In closing, I wanted to post something that really captured this message, both in an overarching sense and in the sense of how we in the West need to recover our roots. I could think of none better than this clip of one of my favorite movie franchises, from a moment when the heroes are surrounded and outnumbered, and facing obliteration at the hands of their enemies:

It's just a movie, but that spirit is very real, and one that we should live with each day.

It's been a tremendous journey...thank you for making it with me.

There's my two cents.

Ireland Vs. Greece (And Obama's America)

2010-06-10T20:00:00.000-05:00

This is an excellent observation at Politico:

...if the Obama economic team really believes budget deficits provide “fiscal stimulus” to an economy, why aren’t they advising Greece to run bigger budget deficits?

Though Greek deficits and debts have dominated the news lately, Ireland’s fiscal crisis was widely considered at least as dangerous to the euro late last year. Ireland is in the worst trouble of all the eurozone countries, the International Monetary Fund then reported. Ireland’s budget deficit was as large as that of Greece in 2008, and the Irish economy had shrunk 9 percent in 2009.

But we don’t hear much about Ireland today. Why not? Because that country successfully repeated what it had done so boldly in the late 1980s — slash spending on payrolls and benefits, subsidies and transfer payments.

Here's how they did it:

Ireland’s public service salaries, for example, were reduced last year by 5 percent to 15 percent. Unlike Portugal, Ireland did not adopt damaging tax increases. Unlike Greece, which is getting ever deeper in debt to its neighbors by begging for a bailout, Ireland is now lending 1.3 billion euros to Greece.

On the other hand...

The Greek national debt amounts to 125 percent of the economy’s annual gross domestic product, compared with 60 percent for U.S. debt.

Were spending to keep rising as it has during the Bush-Obama years, however, the U.S. debt could easily exceed 90 percent of GDP by 2020. At that level, the idea of the U.S. facing a crisis of Greek proportions is no joke.

So, how do we follow in the footsteps of Ireland? It's simple, really (emphasis mine):

That requires making the correct choices sooner rather than later. From the experience of other countries — including Ireland — we know that means getting spending under control, not raising tax rates.

In a study for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Harvard economists Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna examined how 21 leading economies addressed government spending and taxes from 1970 to 2007. When it came to cutting budget deficits, they found that “fiscal adjustments, those based upon spending cuts and no tax increases, are more likely to reduce deficits and debt over GDP ratios than those based upon tax increases. In addition, adjustments on the spending side rather than on the tax side are less likely to create recessions.”
Successful deficit reduction plans — ones that cut the deficit without hurting economic growth — are “completely based on spending cuts accompanied by modest tax cuts,” the authors found. Spending was cut by about 2 percent of GDP, with entitlement reductions accounting for half that.
Ireland, for example, first became a “Celtic tiger” by slashing government spending 6.9 percent from 1987 to 1989. Those spending cuts facilitated the celebrated 12.5 percent tax on corporate profits, plus substantial cuts in rates for personal income taxes, payroll taxes and consumption taxes.

The Irish economy suddenly switched from a 0.2 percent rate of economic growth in the early 1980s to annual real GDP growth of 7.2 percent from 1989 to 2001. It slowed only slightly, to 5.3 percent, from 2002 to 2007. With GDP nearly doubling each decade, the ratio of Ireland’s government debt to GDP dropped from 125 percent of to 25 percent by 2007.

If that's not a roaring economy, I don't know what is!

But what happened in 2008 when the global economy tanked? They hung fast to what brought them out of the hole:

In 2008-09, however, Ireland suffered one of the world’s worst housing and banking crises. But the government nonetheless avoided “fiscal stimulus” schemes. Instead, it cut spending by more than 6 percent.

One important result was to preserve the government’s credit rating. The European Central Bank reports that the yield on 10-year Irish government bonds was 4.76 percent in April, compared with yields for Greece of 7.83 percent — and close to 15 percent at times.

Unlike Greece, the Irish economy is showing encouraging signs of recovery. Manufacturing increased strongly in March and April, and consumer confidence and retail sales are also up.

Bottom line: the Irish formula of spending cuts and tax cuts worked. Every time. Even in the toughest of situations. Unlike everyone else, who spent so much that drunken sailors got envious, and who are still trying to limp their way to anything resembling a genuine recovery. Ireland has the correct answer figured out, and it has nothing to do with their famed luck...just intelligence guided by experience, and willpower to stick to it when it really counts.

Do we?

Not while Barack Obama and the spending-addicts in Congress remain in charge.

There's my two cents.

Recommendation: The 5,000 Year Leap - The Miracle That Changed The World By W. Cleon Skousen

2010-06-10T16:00:00.001-05:00

If you want to learn the real story behind the founding of America, I can't imagine a better book than "The 5,000 Year Leap: The Miracle That Changed The World". I cannot recommend this highly enough to you, and every day you do not read this is another day you live in obliviousness under the woefully inadequate incompetence of the American educational system.

Skousen's purpose was to pull together the essence of the Founders' intentions, their struggles, and their motivations as they did something no one else in human history had done before them: create a government of the people, by the people, and for the people specifically designed to value individual liberty above all else.

As you read through this book, you'll come to realize just how much of a miracle our nation truly is. I can't help but think what a fortuitous circumstance -- one might even say divinely directed -- it was that so many truly brilliant political, legal, and moral minds came together in one time and place to institute a government based on individual liberties and freedom, and do it in a way that still maintained stability.

Skousen starts by explaining the two basic positions that the Founders had to balance: tyranny and anarchy. Think of it as a spectrum, with one extremity being tyranny (what they called Ruler's Law, like complete control by a single monarch) and the other extremity being no rule of law at all (what they called No Law). They strove to create and keep America in the middle of that spectrum, and their genius system of checks and balances is concrete evidence of their painstaking attempts to maintain that middle in all possible circumstances. They reasoned that the single best way to maintain this middle was to allow the people of the nation to guide the nation's ultimate course. Their wisdom has been borne out over the past 230+ years.

The Founders then based our government on 28 core principles. These are things upon which they all agreed, and which can be found inextricably woven through the entire fabric of our government. A few of these include:

- The Genius of Natural Law
- Virtuous and Moral Leaders
- The Role of Religion and the Creator
- Equal Rights, Not Equal Things
- Free-market Economics
- The Separation of Powers
- Majority Rule, Minority Rights
- Peace Through Strength
- Manifest Destiny

This is the red meat of the book. Skousen goes into detail on each of these 28 principles, explaining how the Founders debated the various sides of the issue, including some of the best quotes that I've ever read explaining what they truly believed about the issues. If only we would have been taught this stuff in school, our nation would be an entirely different place!

I'll just summarize a couple of sections to give you a sample of the goodness here.

1st Principle: The Genius of Natural Law
As I understand it, Natural Law is the concept that there is a universal set of 'right and wrong' laid down by a Creator, and that humanity is capable of moral and rational thought sufficient to discover that set of rules and live according to it. By extension, man's laws should rightfully mirror the Creator's laws, and be subject to them. The Left would have us believe that the Founders were indifferent to religion, or perhaps even atheist, but that is simply not true. These men were extremely well-read and well-versed on political theory, theology, and philosophy, and the concept of Natural Law was one to which they all adhered. The 2nd Principle expounded upon this one: a free people cannot survive unless they remain virtuous and morally strong. The primary purpose in the Founders' desire to create a public education system was to raise young Americans who had mastered 'reading, writing, ciphering, history, geography, and Bible study'. The Founders went out of their way to write explicitly and repeatedly how integral God and religion were to be in the fabric of American society. All in all, many of these founding principles are based at least in part on the very same religious concepts that the Left viciously rejects today.

7th Principle: Equal Rights, Not Equal Things
The Founders recognized that true equality should be measured on the basis of opportunity rather than outcome. Every person is different, comes from different circumstances, and has different talents and resources available to him or her. Thus, the only way to truly ensure equality was to ensure an equal opportunity to succeed, and leave the actual results up to the individual. This bears out in the fact that true 'rights' can be guaranteed to any given citizen without taking something from any other given citizen. Free speech, a speedy trial, voting, and so on...all of those can be guaranteed for all citizens without penalizing any others. On the other hand, for example, a 'right' to free health care can only be provided by taking resources from one citizen (doctors, taxpayers, etc.) and giving them to other citizens (those receiving the 'free' health care). The Founders considered such actions to be 'legal crimes', and took great pains to prevent them.

This is but a sampling; this book is a treasure trove on how our government was set up, why it was set up that way, and the thought behind all of it. I was particularly interested in the chapters on separation of powers, the burden of debt (which the Founders considered to be a grave moral evil), property rights, and free market economics. Mind-blowing stuff for the typical American in 2010.

If you want to understand the Founders, their motivations, their intentions, and their struggles as they formed what has been proven to be a miracle that changed the world, this book is like no other I've seen.

I'll finish this recommendation with a few of my favorite quotes:
Ben Franklin: The very fame of our strength and readiness would be a means of discouraging our enemies; for 'tis a wise and true saying, that "One sword often keeps another in the scabbard." The way to secure peace is to be prepared for war. They that are on their guard, and appear ready to receive their adversaries, are in much less danger of being attacked than the supine, secure and negligent.

Samuel Adams: "Religion and good morals are the only solid foundation of public liberty and happiness."

James Madison: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."
George Washington: "To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace."

Thomas Jefferson: "I, however, place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared."

James Madison: "Happily for America, happily we trust for the whole human race, they pursued a new and more noble course. They accomplished a revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society. They reared the fabrics of governments which have no model on the face of the globe. They formed the design of a great Confederacy, which it is incumbent on their successors to improve and perpetuate."

Samuel Adams: "But neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt."

George Washington: "Government is not reason, it is not eloquence - it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

Alexander Hamilton: "This balance between the national and state governments ought to be dwelt on with peculiar attention, as it is of the utmost importance. It forms a double security to the people. If one encroaches on their rights, they wil find a powerful protection in the other. Indeed, they will both be prevented from overpassing their constitutional limits, by certain rivalship which will ever subsist between them."

James Madison: "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite."

John Adams: "Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."

James Madison: "The belief in a God All Powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the world and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different characters and capacities impressed with it."

Thomas Jefferson: "I had always hoped that the younger generation receiving their early impressions after the flame of liberty had been kindled in every breast... would have sympathized with oppression wherever found, and proved their love of liberty beyond their own share of it."

Thomas Jefferson: "Cherish, therefore, the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, Judges, and Governors, shall all become wolves."

John Adams said it was his aspiration "to see rising in America an empire of liberty, and the prospect of two or three hundred millions of freemen, without one noble or one king among them."

The Final Linkage

2010-06-10T12:00:00.004-05:00

So it's packed...

Four common sense alternatives to DemCare
Federal spending by the numbers (outstanding video here)
Obama appointee advocated human cloning for research purposes
Is Obama biting off more than he can politically chew by flipping off the military?
Video proof of census boondoggle
Show me the offers!
58% think anchor baby policy should be ended
If feminists want to become relevant again, they desperately need to welcome into their ranks...***GASP***...Sarah Palin
Illegal Immigration corner

Yet another reconquista photo album you'll never see in the MSM
Mexico opens office in California...to provide ID to illegals!
Dems stop efforts to beef up border security (naturally)

Is Hungary the second domino to fall in Europe?
Debunking the Obamanomics jobs numbers
Peekabo! I see you...acting unconstitutionally!
Obama admonishes students not to follow in his footsteps
VP Biden: Brussels is the freedom capital of the world!
Funny...you never hear accusations of 'birthers' when liberals are the ones demanding to see birth certificates...
Whoa! Hollywood is turning on unions?!
A very interesting take on Don't Ask Don't Tell
The Taliban is apparently redefining chemical warfare...
Stigall: racism lives in the liberal Left
Religion of Peace executes 7-year old for being a spy
Lead, follow, or get out of the way!
This is no time to go wobbly: follow the new Iron Ladies into battle!
How very Presidential: Obama wants to know whose ass at BP he can kick for the oil spill
FEAR NOT, AMERICA: It's Captain Kick-Ass!!!

Cap-N-Trade Tax Update UPDATE

2010-06-10T08:00:00.001-05:00

So, the last of the pillars of the radical Leftist takeover -- the energy sector -- is now under assault, with a vote coming in the Senate before too long. We'll get to that in a moment. First, let's recap some of the most wonderful tenets of the enviro-wacko movement that is pushing this energy takeover.

These lovable folks are the very same ones who endorse the enforcement of limits to the number of children any family can have, too. What happens if you accidentally get pregnant with more? Well, don't think too hard about that.

Naturally, Green High Priest Al Gore is so concerned about the rising waters due to the melting ice caps due to *ahem* man-made global warming that he just dropped $9 million on a new vacation home...overlooking the ocean, of course. Never mind the fact that only 1/3 of U.S. meteorologists actually believe that humanity is the cause of global warming. You're also supposed to ignore the fact that this planet is not, in fact, running out of oil, which provides cheap, reliable, and safe energy to everyone. But for those of us who lack a personal fortune with 7 or more digits, the costs of energy legislation like this will be crippling.

Interestingly, one of the primary alternatives to this horrible use of oil is wind power. Aside from the rather obvious fact that the wind doesn't always blow everywhere, people live close to windmills always seem to find them objectionable. Shucks, that's too bad.

The bottom line is that the environmentalist movement has been exposed as a bunch of suckers who've been taken in by a hoax and a lie, and simply refuse to acknowledge reality in their quest to serve their self-appointed cause. In fact, it won't be long until they declare food to be hazardous to your health. Oh wait...they've already done that.

But let's address the current legislation, whether the latest cap-n-tax bill or the EPA regulations being kicked around (they both do essentially the same thing in the end). As with everything these radical Leftists are doing, beware...all is not as it seems. It's a full-blown legislative Trojan horse, in fact:

The basis of the EPA’s regulatory efforts is the agency’s finding that carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” that supposedly “endangers” us by causing global warming. Once the EPA made this unprecedented and unsupported endangerment finding under the Clean Air Act, it put the enormous regulatory machinery of the federal government in gear to generate rules regulating CO2, rules that will damage every aspect of the U.S. economy. Thankfully, substantive legal challenges to the endangerment finding and the rules the EPA is generating have been filed.

One rule the agency has already issued, something known as the tailoring rule, seems, at first glance, different than its economy-stifling kin. The tailoring rule was supposedly designed to exempt smaller CO2 emitters from the new regulations until 2016. While the Clean Air Act itself states that pollutant emissions of 250 tons or more must be regulated, EPA’s tailoring regulation simply contradicts the law, stating that for now the agency will only regulate CO2 sources emitting 50,000 tons or more.

How, you may ask, can a federal agency just overturn a law by regulation? Good question. The reality is that the EPA is well aware that the tailoring regulation contradicts black-letter law; consequently, it knows legal challenges have high prospects for success. So why would an agency like the EPA that has no trouble flexing its regulatory muscles exempt tens of thousands of potential regulatory targets with such a rule? Quite simply, in addition to recognizing the regulation’s tenuous legal grounds, the EPA realizes that as the number of individuals aware of the pending regulatory burden grows, the stronger the backlash against its CO2 rules will be. Crafty bureaucrats also know that the biggest hurdle they now face is beginning the process of regulating CO2 — striking out against our national economy from the regulatory beachhead of the EPA’s very questionable endangerment finding.

The reality is that with or without the tailoring exemption, the Clean Air Act is already festooned with complex and expansive regulatory mechanisms. The EPA’s extension of its grip to CO2 will be another unparalleled regulatory bonanza for this government agency. Once done — like virtually every other federal regulatory effort — the scope of the agency’s CO2 powers will only continue to expand. While a small business, family farm, or ranch might escape the EPA’s direct regulatory burden and a particular permitting process with the tailoring rule (perhaps only temporarily), they will still suffer from this unlawful aggregation of power by a federal agency. At the end of the day, the enormous economic costs of job losses, reduced GDP, and dramatically higher energy prices from the impact of the EPA’s rules will punish all of us.

In fact, if you look objectively at the numbers, it's not only going to drastically increase costs of just about every good or service in the country, it's a proven job-killer. And, amazingly enough, as with all of these massive, unread, undebated, constructed-in-secret, freedom-destroying bills we've seen in the past year and a half, it's also a thinly disguised payoff to liberal Democrat special interests.

Another way to put it would be that it's an egregious power grab, but there's a chance to stop it:

The Senate will vote Thursday on Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski's S.J. Res. 26, which would forestall the EPA's efforts to give itself authority to impose sweeping new regulations on greenhouse gases. U.S. code lays out Congress's power to review new rules promulgated by federal agencies to enforce existing laws. Congress can overturn these rules by issuing a "joint resolution of disapproval."

In the Senate, such resolutions are privileged and thus not subject to filibuster. S.J. Res. 26 already has 41 cosponsors, including three Democrats. A fourth, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W.V.) is heavily leaning toward supporting the measure. But even if the resolution gathers enough additional Democratic votes to pass and makes it to the president's desk, the Obama administration announced today that it will likely face a veto.

This latest wrinkle adds a level of boldness to the Executive's blatant attempt to circumvent separation of powers and legislate from the White House. Even if administration can't goad enough Democrats in Congress to yield their constitutional authority to the EPA; even if they cannot pass a version of Kerry-Lieberman, the White House will have its cap-and-trade. One way or another.

Of course, even if that resolution succeeds, the battle is not completely over:

We also shouldn't forget that the Democrats don't need Kerry-Lieberman to get the grab-bag of green subsidies and the new conservation mandates they want. The editors make the case today that the Democrats really don't need Kerry-Lieberman at all: They can pass the Bingaman bill — which contains all the new subsidies and mandates, but lacks cap-and-trade — and just let the EPA do the dirty work of rationing carbon. This is looking increasingly like their default strategy.

And things will be miserable along the way...by design. Remember:

And, keeping in mind the fact that well over half of our nation's energy comes from coal:

The bottom line is that the radical Leftists in charge of the government right now will stop at nothing to gain control over every possible aspect of the nation in order to control as many people as possible. They don't care how badly they damage this nation, how much havoc they wreak, or how miserable they make life for peons like you and me during their greedy quest for power.

The only thing that will truly stop them is to force them out of the positions of authority that will allow them to dictate policy this way. Start by placing a call to your Senators today.

There's my two cents.

Related Reading:
Stopping the EPA's CO2 regulations
Window dressing cap-and-trade won't make the costs go away
Subsidized green jobs still destroy jobs elsewhere

***UPDATE***
The Senate voted Murkowski's bill down, 53-47. Some analysis to keep in mind:

Don’t cry too hard over the vote. For one thing, there was zero chance of it passing the House (although watching purple-district Democrats agonize over whether to vote for it would have been fun) and The One would have vetoed it even if it had. For another thing, consider this a trial run on the viability of cap-and-trade. If Reid can’t get 60 to agree that, yes indeed, carbon is very dangerous, he’s not getting 60 for a much broader regulatory regime like C&T. Nor, given the latest polling from Nevada, will he want to even try. Exit quotation from Dan Foster: “I don’t want to hear a liberal bemoan executive supremacy ever again. This is Congress abdicating its own authority because the Democrats know they can’t get the votes to pass cap-and-trade.”

Unfortunately, this allows the EPA to declare things like dirt and air to be deadly to your existence. Good luck with the coming cost increases...

Documented Proof That The Left Is A Bunch Of Economic Dunces

2010-06-09T19:29:00.001-05:00

Veronique de Rugy reports and comments on a WSJ column by Dan Klein:

Which Political Party Understands Economics Best?
That's the question asked by George Mason University's Dan Klein in the Wall Street Journal this morning.

Who is better informed about the policy choices facing the country — liberals, conservatives or libertarians? According to a Zogby International survey that I write about in the May issue of Econ Journal Watch, the answer is unequivocal: The left flunks Econ 101.

Klein's results come from a survey of 4,835 respondents (all American adults) in which he asked them to answer eight survey questions about basic economics and then asked about their political leanings: progressive/very liberal; liberal; moderate; conservative; very conservative; and libertarian.

Read the details here. It's quite amazing. Notice that libertarians rocked this test:

The survey also asked about party affiliation. Those responding Democratic averaged 4.59 incorrect answers. Republicans averaged 1.61 incorrect, and Libertarians 1.26 incorrect.

The WSJ piece is based on research that Klein did a few months ago with his co-author, Columbia University psychologist Zeljka Buturovic. Among other things, they show that thinking like an economist is not correlated to going to college. They also find that it is the highest among those self-identifying as "conservative" and "libertarian," and descends through "moderate," "liberal," and "progressive." Other variables include party affiliation, religious participation, union membership, NASCAR fandom, and Walmart patronage. Their results were originally published here.
I reported on some of Klein's research here and here.

This doesn't really do anything but put concrete numbers to what we already anecdotally knew: liberals suck at economics. Just look at history every time liberal run the show. They've expanded government (thus taking away individual freedoms) in monstrous leaps, hammered the private sector, penalized success and prosperity through high taxation, and pulled just about every poor economic rabbit that exists out of their hat.

I don't think it's any coincidence, either, that it is liberals who tend to take sides on issues based purely on feelings rather than how things work in the world. It's why I think they suck at just about every other policy area, too. Illegal immigration? They want to feel good about giving illegals a better life (never mind all the horrendous expenses, crime, health risks, or security problems). Welfare? They want to ease people's suffering and difficulty (never mind how much taxpayer money it costs, and how self-destructive a permanent entitlement mindset is). War on Terror? They think we just need to understand why those poor Muslims from those hot and dirty desert countries are so mad at us (never mind the fact that Islam itself repeatedly demands they kill or subjugate all non-Muslims). Universal health care? They want everyone to have everything they could ever wish for because anything less is unfair (never mind the realities of cost, supply and demand, research and development, or just how unfair their notion of 'fairness' is).

See how it works? For liberals, it's never about the real world, but rather about how they feel about the real world. It never ceases to amaze me how liberals never seem to think forward to their professed utopia. What if they actually get what they want? Will they actually be thrilled if America digresses into a pseudo-European nation that is only marginally prosperous, has a smothering level of taxation, little growth or innovation, no military to speak of, and a stagnant job market? Those are the end results of the policies they're advocating (we can see most of them real-time in present day Europe), so is that what they genuinely want? But no, they don't think that far ahead. For liberals, there is nothing other than the feelings of the moment, and that means politically correct 'fairness', warm fuzzies, puppies, rainbows, and unicorns.

And now we have the numbers to prove it.

There's my two cents.

Who's Got Clout Again?

2010-06-09T16:30:00.001-05:00

Remember how Barack Obama has endorsed four major state or national candidates (governorships in New Jersey and Virginia, Senatorial races in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania) over the past few months, thus dooming them to defeat? In fact, it's gotten so bad that numerous other politicians have started *ahem* declining the President's endorsement and visits. Well, I just thought you should know:

Some of Sarah Palin's riskiest endorsements scored major victories Tuesday for the former Alaska governor, showing off her power in Republican primaries.

Palin had four primary endorsements in play – Carly Fiorina, Nikki Haley, Terry Branstad and Cecile Bledsoe – and three won or moved on to a runoff.

Mm-hmmm...

There's my two cents.

Seriously, You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

2010-06-09T14:33:00.000-05:00

It just writes itself:

President Obama continues to take political cynicism to new heights, or new lows, with his now-habitual use of student graduation ceremonies to preach political pieties that he casually ignores.

A month ago, the president told University of Michigan graduates to embrace "a basic level of civility in our public debate." This from a president who is a master of division, as he demonstrated that very same week when he sleazed Republican senator Mitch McConnell as "cynical and deceptive" for claiming the administration's financial-regulation bill would allow more bailouts "when he knows that it would do just the opposite."

Yesterday, Obama was at it again at another southeast Michigan school. In a speech to Kalamazoo High School graduates, the president advised the Class of '10 not to "make excuses. Take responsibility not just for your successes, but for your failures as well. When you screw up…it's the easiest thing in the world to start looking around for someone to blame. We see it every day out in Washington, with folks calling each other names and making all sorts of accusations on TV."

The Senate GOP agreed, helpfully pointing out a few applicable headlines from recent months:

ON AMERICA'S CHALLENGES

PRESIDENT OBAMA: "When I Showed Up After Inauguration, They Had Left A Big Mess On The Floor. So I Got A Mop, And I Started Cleaning Up Their Mess." (President Obama, Remarks, Norfolk, VA, 10/27/09)
ON THE ECONOMY
PRESIDENT OBAMA: "By Any Measure, My Administration Inherited A Fiscal Disaster." (President Obama, Remarks, 3/4/09)
ON DEFICITS
PRESIDENT OBAMA: "Now, If We Had Taken Office In Ordinary Times, I Would Have Liked Nothing More Than To Start Bringing Down The Deficit. But We Took Office Amid A Crisis." (President Obama, State Of The Union Address, 1/27/10)
ON THE ADMINISTRATION'S BUDGET
PRESIDENT OBAMA: "My Budget Does Not Attempt To Solve Every Problem Or Address Every Issue. It Reflects The Stark Reality Of What We've Inherited – A Trillion Dollar Deficit, A Financial Crisis, And A Costly Recession." (President Obama, Remarks To A Joint Session Of Congress, 2/24/09)
ON DEMOCRAT ELECTORAL LOSSES
PRESIDENT OBAMA: "Here's My Assessment Of Not Just The Vote In Massachusetts, But The Mood Around The Country… People Are Angry And They Are Frustrated. Not Just Because Of What's Happened In The Last Year Or Two Years, But What's Happened Over The Last Eight Years." ("Exclusive: President Obama Says Voter Anger, Frustration Key to Republican Victory in Massachusetts Senate," ABC News, 1/20/10)

ON THE OIL SPILL
PRESIDENT OBAMA: "When Interior Secretary Ken Salazar Took Office, For Example, He Found A Minerals And Management Services Agency That Had Been Plagued By Corruption For Years ..." (President Obama, Remarks, 6/1/10)
OBAMA: "The Habit [At MMS], Predating My Administration, Was You Just Automatically Gave The Environmental Waiver." (President Obama, Remarks, 5/27/10)
ON HIS ADMINISTRATION'S ECONOMIC ACTIONS
PRESIDENT OBAMA: "We Had To Act Fast. And Unfortunately We Didn't Have All The Tools That We Needed To Act Fast Because You Had A Previous Congress And A Previous Administration That Had Left A $1.3 Trillion Deficit Wrapped Up In A Bow That Turned Surpluses Into Deficits As A Consequence Of A Whole Host Of Irresponsible Policies." (President Obama, Remarks, 5/26/10)
ON AMERICA'S STANDING ABROAD
PRESIDENT OBAMA: "Well, First Of All, During The Campaign I Did Not Say That Some Of That Loss Of Authority Was Inevitable. I Said It Was Traced To Very Specific Decisions That The Previous Administration Had Made That I Believed Had Lowered Our Standing In The World. And That Wasn't Simply My Opinion; That Was, It Turns Out, The Opinion Of Many People Around The World. I would like to think that with my election and the early decisions that we've made, that you're starting to see some restoration of America's standing in the world. And although, as you know, I always mistrust polls, international polls seem to indicate that you're seeing people more hopeful about America's leadership." (President Obama, Press Conference, 4/2/09)
ON AMERICAN HEALTH CARE ABUSES
PRESIDENT OBAMA: "And By The Way, I Don't Recall Any Of These Republicans Trying To Do Anything About Insurance Companies' Abuses During All The Years They Were In Charge." (President Obama, Remarks At St. Charles High School, St. Charles, MO, 3/10/10)
ON GUANTANAMO
PRESIDENT OBAMA: "The Problem Of What To Do With Guantanamo Detainees Was Not Caused By My Decision To Close The Facility; The Problem Exists Because Of The Decision To Open Guantanamo In The First Place." (President Obama, Remarks On National Security, National Archives, Washington, D.C., 5/21/09)

Hot Air posts some video here if you want to see it, along with this commentary:

Stirring words, my friends, from a guy who, by Charles Krauthammer's account, had already blamed Bush by October last year for "the economy, global warming, the credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism abroad — everything but swine flu." In fact, it was only three weeks ago that Politico reported the Democrats' midterm campaign macro-strategy will be to run against — ta da — George Bush.

Ah yes, sometimes it just writes itself...

There's my two cents.

The Ultra-Competent Obama Administration Continues Showcasing Itself

2010-06-09T12:00:00.000-05:00

Sometimes the competence just oozes off the page:

More fun from this morning’s exercise in ass-kicking on “Today”. Skip ahead to 2:36 for the key bit. The One’s logic, such as it is, is that it’s not worth talking to Tony Hayward because he’ll only end up giving him the runaround — a curious position coming from a guy who campaigned on the virtues of “dialogue” and who’s been locked in halting negotiations with Iran for fully 16 months. Even Lauer is openly incredulous. Captain Kickass has nothing to say to a guy who potentially holds the fate of his presidency in his hands? Even after yesterday’s hair-raising Times piece claiming that BP’s effort to cut the leaking riser may have actually increased the flow of oil many times over? I thought this was supposed to be the new, improved, “engaged” Hopenchange.

That’s the second half of the clip. I gave you an extra two minutes up front so that you can watch O once again throw himself a pity party over the “24-hour news cycle” (TV critic David Zurawik is pounding him for that today) before insisting that none of his critics seem to have any suggestions for what he should have done differently in the early days of the spill. Don’t they, though? Byron York highlights this bit from a recent NYT piece:

For example, it took the Department of Homeland Security more than a week to classify the spill as an event calling for the highest level of federal action. And when state officials in Louisiana tried over and over to win federal permission to build sand barriers to protect fragile coastal wetlands from the oil, they got nowhere. “For three weeks, as the giant slick crept closer to shore,” the Times reports, “officials from the White House, Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Environmental Protection Agency debated the best approach.”

And here’s something hot off the presses from ABC:

A leading scientist following the BP oil spill said Monday that if the company or the government had made realistic estimates about the amounts flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, they could have had sufficient tanker space ready on the surface to hold the crude being pumped up through a make-shift collection device…

In an extensive interview with ABC News chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross, [oceanographer Ian] MacDonald examined underwater video from the early days of the disaster and concluded that BP had been underestimating the scope of the spill, with little objection from the U.S Coast Guard or other federal agencies…

Coast Guard officials told ABC News that BP refused to allow them to release the more startling images, arguing they were proprietary. But at the time, the agency was doing little to convey to the world what the images were showing. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry was sticking with estimates, calculated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which put the spill’s size at about 5,000 barrels a day for several weeks.
Don’t forget either that Bobby Jindal’s request for hard booms on May 2 was still woefully undermet three weeks later.

Video at the link above (I can't stand watching it, so I'm not going to post it here).

Moe Lane at RedState adds some supplementary information that really puts the flies on the turd:

Let me tell you a story (via Instapundit).

Once upon a time there was a owner of a packaging material factory in Maine who found out one day that there was a major oil leak disaster going on in the Gulf of Mexico. It turns out that a useful item for oil leak containment - known as ‘floating oil containment boom,’ or just ‘boom’ - was something that the owner’s factory could make; and since business was horrible anyway the owner decided to bring in extra workers and make all the boom that he could. The Governor of Louisiana was yelling for lots and lots of boom, and surely both British Petroleum and the federal government would be downright eager to buy up the boom as fast as the factory could make it.

Surely.So, what happened? Well, British Petroleum did… well, this:

Two weeks ago BP sent a quality control person to Maine, looked at the factory, and was impressed by what he saw. Packgen was feeling confident. That confidence has now turned to frustration. Packgen says BP controls who the boom suppliers are going to be — and they have yet to approve Packgen’s design.

And the federal government did… well, this:

…and the boom piles up in the warehouse.

Moe Lane

PS: That’s it. That’s the end. Boom in Maine; oil in Gulf; ping-bong balls in government beer.

Elections have consequences.

Oh yes, the showcase of competence is on.

There's my two cents.

Update On 2/3 Of The Radical Leftist's Roadmap To Taking Over America

2010-06-09T08:00:00.001-05:00

First up is even more good news about DemCare:

Come September, a feature of the ACA will kick in that could spell the end of affordable "mini-med" coverage plans for low-income workers. Such plans typically provide access to a limited number of health-care providers and cap annual benefits payouts, but a provision in Obamacare bans insurance companies from doing the latter. That could spur massive spikes in premiums that put the mini-med plans beyond the reach of the very consumers for which they are designed.

And remember, the up to 1 million workers who will be affected by the provision won't have exchanges or subsidies to fall back on for years, thanks to the tax-and-regulate now, pay later structure of Obamacare.

Or, put another way:

Democrats will get their wish — but the employees won’t get their coverage. The law imposes the penalties for mini-med plans in three months, but the exchanges won’t start until 2014. That means more than three years of having no insurance at all for low-income workers who previously had it, even if Obama and Pelosi sniffed at the worth of the plans.

So why did they do it this way? Good question:

This was part of the “front-load” strategy of the Democrats, who wanted to implement what they thought would be the most popular components of ObamaCare immediately, in order to build support for its continuance. Instead, the mandates will mean that mini-med plans will either cost so much that the employees can’t afford it, or more likely, the insurers will drop the plans as money-losers. It’s a big indicator that the people who drafted the law had very little understanding of the insurance industry, or of the private sector.

NO...! I'm shocked SHOCKED that the Obama administration doesn't understand the private sector.

Hot Air points out that the massive unintended consequence here is that up to 1 million people could be kicked out of their health insurance by DemCare just a few weeks before the election. I'm pretty sure that's not going to do any favors for any Democrat on any ballot.

RedState thinks that not even the brainwashed, sycophantic media can cover over this one...but they'll give it another shot, anyway:

Why sell it when it does not go into effect for a few more years and it has already passed Congress? To improve Democrats’ chances in November, of course. Duh.

Let’s take a walk down memory lane and remember that past performance is the best indication of future success. So you liberals shouldn’t expect this time will be any more successful than all the other times.

June 7, 2010: “Tomorrow, Democrats and the White House will hold more than 100 simultaneous events nationwide as President Obama plunges back into health reform, selling the historic plan all over again…” (Politico Playbook) “White House Mounts PR Blitz for Health Care Reform” (AOL News)

May 18, 2010: “White House seeks missing health bounce. The White House is aggressively touting the new healthcare law after failing to see an immediate bounce in polls from congressional approval of the legislation.” (The Hill)

May 11, 2010: “White House health-care campaign begins. The Obama administration’s campaign to sell the new health-care law to a skeptical public is beginning to take shape…” (The Washington Post)

May 8, 2010: “President Barack Obama on Saturday touted the benefits of his healthcare overhaul, renewing a bid to counter Republican criticism and ease public doubts more than a month after he signed reform into law.” (Reuters)

April 22, 2010: “Stephanie Cutter, the Democratic communications strategist who spearheaded the White House effort last year to win Senate confirmation of Justice Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, is returning to the Obama administration to help sell the newly passed health care bill.” (The New York Times)

March 24, 2010: “Clearly, inside the White House there is acknowledgement that Republicans outmaneuvered Democrats in the weeks after the stimulus bill passed and did a better job of defining for the public what was in that bill. … The White House is determined to learn from that experience. ‘Obama and the Democrats won’t make the same mistake,’ said Thomas Mann, who studies Congress for the Brookings Institution.” (CongressDaily)

And those are just the efforts to sell it after it was passed into law! Hit the link for many, many more.

Related:
The federal government is a bunch of radicalized, hippy slackers
DemCare starts squeezing the private sector

Now, on to the economy in general...

This morning White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and budget director Peter Orszag will release a memo directing all federal agency heads “to develop plans” to cut at least 5 percent from their budgets by “identifying programs that do little to advance their missions or President Obama’s agenda.” This spasm of fiscal responsibility can mean only one thing: the Obama administration is about to go on another wild spending binge. And sure enough Politico reports that while Blue Dogs in the House managed to whittle what was a $200 billion “jobs” bill down to $146 billion last month, the Senate is now larding it back up again with a $24 billion Medicaid bailout and a $23 billion teachers union bailout.
This spend-now/cut-later act has become a staple for the Obama administration.

It just doesn't work very well when you go overboard with the 'spend-now' part and never get around to the 'cut-later' part, which is exactly what Obama has done.

Of course, to be fair, overspending isn't solely an Obama problem. Washington in general has an overspending addiction that needs to be stopped immediately. Of course, you and I both know that the way to fix that problem is to STOP THE SPENDING, but the geniuses in Washington haven't quite figured that out yet.

Case in point:

On May 13, 2010, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) introduced H.R. 5297, TARP III. The bill is being promoted as necessary to increase the availability of credit for small businesses. TARP III would create a $30 billion lending fund and authorize the Treasury Secretary to make capital investments in banks with less than $10 billion in assets.

Another TARP?! What happened to the previous ones?? They failed, that's what. They did little to stimulate the economy, nor generate jobs or anything useful; all they did was to prop up some favored liberal constituent groups and lobbies. Now that the money is running out, the bribes must continue, so they're back to the spigot for more. The GOP points out several of the inconvenient problems with TARP 3:

Taxpayers Can't Afford Another Bailout: The original bailout bill, TARP I, was $700 billion. In 2009, the Democrats enacted a $1.138 trillion "stimulus" plan, including the cost of interest, a $410 billion FY09 omnibus appropriations bill and a $3.6 trillion FY2010 budget. The Democrats increased the debt ceiling by $1.9 trillion, and the national debt now stands above $13 trillion. The taxpayers lost $145 billion by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, and the CBO expects the cost to approach $400 billion. Recently, the EU and the IMF pledged $145 billion to bail out the bankrupt nation of Greece. America's taxpayers are on the hook for $6.8 billion in loan guarantees from the IMF. The EU and IMF also announced a $1 trillion bailout plan that could put America's taxpayers on the hook for $50 billion in additional loan guarantees to bail out other financially irresponsible members of the EU. Yet, the Democrats continue to spend the nation into a financial abyss.
Creates Unnecessary Programs: Under the original TARP, Treasury created several programs to generate lending to small businesses. In addition, the federal government instituted federal guarantee programs through the FDIC and the Small Business Administration. The creation of a $32 billion TARP III program to do what the $700 billion TARP and other federal programs were intended to do is simply unnecessary. In fact, according to a recent survey by the National Federation of Independent Business, 8 percent of the small businesses surveyed cited a lack of credit as an immediate problem, but more than 50 percent cited a lack of sales as an immediate problem. In other words, small businesses are suffering due to a lack of jobs for consumers.
Lacks Proper Oversight: The TARP III program would not be subject to the effective oversight of the Special Inspector General for TARP. SIGTARP's Neil Barofsky, on February 19, 2010, sent a letter to Treasury's assistant secretary for financial stability, Herb Allison. In the letter, Barofsky, expressed concern regarding Treasury's decision to remove TARP III from SIGTARP's oversight and warned that such a move would be "terribly wasteful" and "could lead to significant exposure to waste, fraud and abuse."
Creates More Uncertainty: Like the original TARP program, the federal government will once again, at it discretion, be able to reach into the boardrooms and pocket-books of private sector firms and employees. The use of the original TARP by some banks begot the use of the Obama administration's pay czar and auto task force (which closed thousands of dealerships). Also, the use of the original TARP inspired the Democrats to pursue a "responsibility fee," another tax on financial firms. Through TARP III, many small and mid-size banks may soon find the federal government as their new senior partner.

Whether they like it or not. And remember, the pay czar will stick his nose in there, and many Dems actually believe that the government should set wages of everyone in every company in the country!

How are you liking the hope-n-change? Just wait...it'll get lots better, I'm sure.

There's my two cents.

Oil Spill Wisdom

2010-06-08T20:25:00.000-05:00

http://townhall.com/cartoons/cartoonist/MichaelRamirez

Democrat Or Communist? I Can't Tell...

2010-06-08T17:24:00.001-05:00

I'm so glad The Daily Caller put this out before I wrap up this blog, because it's pretty much the bottom line on the current state of the Democrat party:

Comrades flocked to New York City two weeks ago for the 29th national convention of the Communist Party USA. While reviewing materials from the event, we had a sudden sense of déjà vu: the feeling that we had heard these talking points before. Maybe you have as well — they're espoused, in near identical form, by the president and his fellow Democrats. Take the quiz below, and try to determine which quotes were uttered by Democratic leadership, and which are excerpts from the communists' recent convention.
The point isn't that Obama's a communist (though it's amusing to watch Sam Webb, chairman of the CPUSA, deny such a charge while arguing with Glenn Beck about the redistribution of marshmallow peeps). It's useful, though, to compare the substance of Democratic and communist rhetoric, which differs mainly in degree. You may conclude — especially if you lean left — that the Communist Party USA is more moderate and mainstream than you thought. Or something.
———————————–
TAKE THE QUIZ — Which quotes come from Democrats, and which from CPUSA?
(scroll down for answers)
1. "This is the moment when we must build on the wealth that open markets have created, and share its benefits more equitably. Trade has been a cornerstone of our growth and global development. But we will not be able to sustain this growth if it favors the few, and not the many."
2. "Rebuilding the social infrastructure will generate 11 million jobs. At least 3 million could be at work within 6 months — if the funds were available from Congress."
3. "Moving toward a productive green economy must be based on federal financing and a national industrial policy."
4. "Only government can break the vicious cycles that are crippling our economy — where a lack of spending leads to lost jobs which leads to even less spending."
5. "For nearly half a century the nation's working people embraced and took comfort in the American dream — a dream whose promissory note read that if you work hard and do the right things, a good and secure life is attainable. I wouldn't say that dream is dead, but more and more people have less and less hope that it is within reach. Forces beyond their control have snatched it from them."
6. "While some have prospered beyond imagination in this global economy, middle-class Americans — as well as those working hard to become middle class — are seeing the American dream slip further and further away."
7. "Recent victories in Congress such as passage of Health Care Reform legislation with not a single Republican yes vote exposes the Republicans as the 'Party of NO.'"
8. "Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. Because thinking only about yourself, fulfilling your immediate wants and needs, betrays a poverty of ambition. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential and discover the role that you'll play in writing the next great chapter in the American story."
9. "The Tea Party was birthed by media extremists and racist elements to break up the unity of 2008. They were able to change the debate and peel off some Democratic votes, but they were not able to stop the legislation."
10. "I think the American people have to make a judgment about the obstructionism of the Republican senators."
11. "Only majority movements can skin the rightwing cat, the neoliberal dog, and the globalizing rat."

Before presenting the answers, I think it's worth a moment's reflection on the fact that, as someone who has followed politics closely on a daily basis for several years, I can't tell which of these statements were made by genuine Commies and which were made by Democrats. Can you? I knew only one and guessed correctly on three others.

Answers:

1. Obama said this during a speech in Berlin on July 24, 2008. Presumably, Europe's democratic socialists responded with a hearty, "Jawohl!"
2. Excerpted from the Communist Party USA's "21st Century Jobs Program," which aims to create 22 million jobs through direct government spending of $1 trillion per year on public services, including a five-year plan for rebuilding infrastructure. Communists advocating a five-year plan — what could possibly go wrong?
3. Excerpted from the Communist Party USA's "21st Century Jobs Program," although with Obama's focus on government subsidy for green jobs and weatherization, we don't blame you if you got this one wrong.
4. Obama said this on Jan. 8, 2009 while advocating for what would eventually become the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the stimulus, or the Democrats' belated Valentine's Day gift to themselves.

5. Excerpted from remarks made by CPUSA Chairman Sam Webb at the recent national convention. Mr. Webb would have us know that while the American dream is fading, the Soviet dream remains as strong as ever.
6. Candidate Obama said this in November, 2008. Who could have known then that the biggest group prospering "beyond imagination" in 2010 would be government workers, who accounted for 95 percent of the job growth in May.
7. Excerpted from the resolution "All hands on deck for the 2010 midterm elections," adopted at the recent CPUSA convention. It's unclear how many hands the party has to call, but it does have over 3,000 Facebook fans.
8. Candidate Obama said this in a 2008 commencement address to Wesleyan University. No doubt the college's economics faculty appreciated hearing the self-interest of Adam Smith's invisible hand described as a "poverty of ambition."
9. Joelle Fishman, chair of the CPUSA's Political Action Commission, made this remark during a speech titled "2010 elections — unity can win" at the recent national convention. The biggest question we have for Ms. Fishman is whether stumping for Democrats makes her a CINO — Communist In Name Only.
10. Pelosi said this in an interview with Rachel Maddow. It's easy to yell "obstructionism" when you're in power, but it requires more cajones to accuse concerned citizens of carrying swastikas. Pelosi did that too.
11. Democratic leaders (cough Joe Biden cough) have said some pretty absurd things, but nothing quite this bizarre. This quote is excerpted from remarks made by CPUSA Chairman Sam Webb at the recent national convention.

Isn't the plain fact that there is so little difference the big story here? This is really all that needs to be said about today's Democrat party. For all you Democrat voters out there, is this the kind of leadership you want? Your party leadership is what it is, whether you understand who they are or not, and it's up to you to either accept it or clean house. Just as the Rep base has the choice of re-electing big government, compromise-neutered hypocrites or a new batch of stalwart conservatives this November, you have the option of choosing who your leaders should be.

I heard someone on the radio the other day talking about the big difference between the Obama administration and the Clinton administration. He said that while they believed largely the same things on an ideological level, the Clinton gang was merely a group of liberal Democrats. They still acknowledged realities like tax cuts and balanced budgets being good for the economy, and they still followed along with what voters largely demanded of them. The Obama gang, however, has a completely different make-up. They're not liberal Democrats, they're radical Leftists with a hardcore agenda of anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism. That's why they've plunged headlong into measure after measure that the American people have thoroughly rejected. They're betting the farm -- and the Democrat party itself, in a way -- on the fact that they get enough of their agenda implemented in the first two years of Obama's first term that, even if they lose the next several elections, they'll have entrenched so much anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism that the nation will be permanently altered.

The question is: will the American people, and the representatives they elect (regardless of party) allow that to happen? A small slice of the answer rests with you.

There's my two cents.

On Executive Experience

2010-06-08T14:59:00.001-05:00

Byron York has a really interesting piece at the Washington Examiner on Barack Obama's utter lack of experience, and how that lack has translated into outright failure in office. Excerpt:

In mid-February 2008, fresh from winning a bunch of Super Tuesday primaries, Barack Obama granted an interview to "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Croft. "When you sit down and you look at [your] resume," Croft said to Obama, "there's no executive experience, and in fact, correct if I'm wrong, the only thing that you've actually run was the Harvard Law Review."
"Well, I've run my Senate office, and I've run this campaign," Obama said.
Seven months later, after receiving the Democratic presidential nomination, Obama talked with CNN's Anderson Cooper. At the time, the news was dominated by Hurricane Gustav, which was headed toward New Orleans and threatening to become a Katrina-like disaster. "Some of your Republican critics have said you don't have the experience to handle a situation like this," Cooper said to Obama. "They in fact have said that Governor Palin has more executive experience. ..."
"Governor Palin's town of Wasilla has, I think, 50 employees," Obama answered. "We have got 2,500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe $12 million a year. You know, we have a budget of about three times that just for the month. So, I think that our ability to manage large systems and to execute, I think, has been made clear over the last couple of years."
Obama ignored Palin's experience as governor of Alaska, which was considerably bigger than the Obama campaign. But his point was clear: If you're worried about my lack of my executive experience, look at my campaign. Running a first-rate campaign, Obama and his supporters argued, showed that Obama could run the federal government, even at its most testing moments. He could set goals, demand accountability, and, perhaps most importantly, bend the sprawling federal bureaucracy to his will.
Fast forward to 2010. The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is gushing out of control. The Obama administration is at first slow to see the seriousness of the accident. Then, as the crisis becomes clear, the federal bureaucracy becomes entangled in itself trying to deal with the problem. "At least a dozen federal agencies have taken part in the spill response," the New York Times reports, "making decision-making slow, conflicted and confused, as they sought to apply numerous federal statutes."

In short, the bureaucracy hasn't played nice with Obama at all, and he has yet to take a decisive leadership role in anything (besides undermining the foundations of America). York suggests that future candidates will probably think twice about citing their campaigns as quality experience.

On an oddly related note, Hot Air pokes fun at Obama for one of his latest verbal stumbles, which I think really helps illustrate another way in which Obama's inexperience has manifested itself:

On June 6, 2010, most of the media commemorated the 66th anniversary of D-Day, the largest amphibious military in operation that began the liberation of a continent … well, half a continent, anyway; the Eastern bloc would have to wait another 45 years for BW-Day (Berlin Wall Day). Jim Hoft notes that President Obama didn't bother joining the rest of the country in remembering the massive sacrifice on Omaha Beach, among others, not even with a White House blog post, choosing instead to attend a splashy party instead that will get aired on ABC over the July 4th weekend.
But it took this classless moment from Bishop [Desmond] Tutu to make it a perfect OOTD entry:
"Security is not something that comes from the barrel of a gun."
The thousands of Allied casualties on D-Day can attest that sometimes it takes the barrel of a gun to end tyranny and provide security for free people. Maybe if Obama had bothered to involve himself in his nation's history, he could have reminded Tutu of that fact.

But nah, he's good to go with that stellar community organizing and campaign experience.

There's my two cents.

No, Really, You'll Love It Once You Get To Know It...

2010-06-08T11:55:00.000-05:00

Remember how we suffered through months and months of accusations of being Nazis, mobsters, racists, and all kinds of other niceties simply because we didn't want the federal government controlling our most intimate and critical health care decisions? Remember how the liberal Dems in Congress fled from their constituents, who knew more about the various versions of the unread, multiple-thousand-page bills that were released just days before critical votes? Remember how they finally passed DemCare on a Sunday evening in late March with the promise that we'll love it once we get to know it?

Moe Lane helps illustrate how that promise was exactly like all the others the Dems used to try to make up political cover for themselves (meaning, it was a total load of crap):

March 24, 2010

Rich with symbolism and ceremony, the White House event provided clues about how the administration plans to sell the measure to a skeptical public: as a moral necessity of historic proportion. Obama told his audience of allies that “we are not a nation that scales back its aspirations.” But his central challenge remains convincing an anxious nation that it can afford to help all, even at a time of rising debt, high unemployment and two distant wars.
April 22, 2010

White House ramps up health care messaging

Washington (CNN) - The White House announced Thursday that veteran Democratic strategist Stephanie Cutter will lead communications and outreach strategy efforts for the implementation of the new health care reform law.
May 11, 2010.
White House health-care campaign begins

The Obama administration’s campaign to sell the new health-care law to a skeptical public is beginning to take shape, with a focus on short-term changes that kick in before the November midterm elections.
June 6, 2010.

White House and Allies Set to Build Up Health Law

WASHINGTON — President Obama and his allies, concerned about deep skepticism over his landmark health care overhaul, are orchestrating an elaborate campaign to sell the public on the law, including a new tax-exempt group that will spend millions of dollars on advertising to beat back attacks on the measure and Democrats who voted for it.

And yet, strangely, DemCare is even more unpopular now that it was before it passed.

Moe offers the following rhetorical question:

Apparently, the President’s plan involves saying the exact same thing over and over and over again and hoping that he’ll get a different result this time.

I trust that I don’t need to elaborate that further?

I would add the same thing conservatives were saying when Obama launched the first effort to persuade America that the crap they just rammed down our throat really was chocolate: if you have to sell it to us after the fact, then you've clearly done something wrong.

The American people agree, and repeal is in the air. Let's hope it stays.

There's my two cents.

Related Reading:
DemCare closes insurance companies (already)
You have a duty to die, cheaper
94% of businesses believe DemCare will increase their costs
Competence on display: DemCare milestones are already being missed

That's Quite A Lot Of Skin Ya' Got There...

2010-06-08T08:00:00.000-05:00

In the game, that is (courtesy of Gateway Pundit):

Back in January 2009, Barack Obama told Americans that,
“Everyone must sacrifice… Everyone must have some skin in the game.”

Well… Everyone but Barack and Michelle Obama.

Canada Free Press reported, via FOX Nation:
The same hypocrite who says our energy costs must “necessarily skyrocket” to fund his political ambition, is giving Marie Antoinette a run for her money when it comes to spending national treasure on personal luxuries.

While much of the country is struggling to pay their bills, the President and First Lady are partying like rock royalty. The collection of talent that has made the pilgrimage to the White House to entertain Obama and friends is nothing less than amazing: Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennet, Paul Simon, Marc Anthony, Herbie Hancock, Martina McBride, Queen Latifah, The Foo Fighters, Faith Hill, and recently foot-in-mouth Paul McCartney to name a few.

This has the makings to be the greatest ongoing concert series ever to be seen on this Earth just to entertain one man … all paid for by the American taxpayer.

…The executive branch does not provide detailed information regarding entertainment expenses, however, it has been estimated the Obamas spent at least $10 million on “drunken White House parties” in 2009 alone.

Remember the liberal modus operandi: two sets of rules, one for them and one for the rest of us. And geez, if you think there should only be one set of rules for everyone, well then you must be racist or something.

There's my two cents.

Playing Politics With Oil Damage?

2010-06-07T20:45:00.000-05:00

Seems awfully suspicious, anyway:

Glenn Reynolds reminds me of this paragraph by Allahpundit in response to the news that the President has been aware of the true magnitude of the BP spill all along:

The real disgrace here is why, if he really did know right away that this was the oil equivalent of an asteroid strike, he didn’t scramble some sort of all-hands-on-deck emergency operation to protect the coastline. Remember, Jindal reportedly requested five million feet of hard boom back on May 2, long after Obama (according to Wolffe) knew about the magnitude of the disaster. By May 24, not even 800,000 feet had arrived. What happened?

So, seeing as it’s been clear all along to the White House that we had an ecological disaster on our hands: why did the President not act in a timely fashion to try to keep the oil off of the beaches in the five Gulf of Mexico states?

State Governor Party Election Year? Note

Alabama Bob Riley Republican Yes Open race

Florida Charlie Crist Independent Yes Former GOP

Louisiana Bobby Jindal Republican No GOP leader

Mississippi Haley Barbour Republican No RGA head

Texas Rick Perry Republican Yes Re-election

Gee, I don’t have the slightest idea.

But hey, Barack Obama really cares about those states, and about the environment.

There's my two cents.

Dems Make Good Use Of Recess To Meet With Hide From Constituents

2010-06-07T18:04:00.001-05:00

You would think that they would, you know, want to understand the thoughts and feelings of the people they represent so that they could, you know, represent them. Right? Wrong:

When opposition to ObamaCare reached a fever pitch last summer, a number of Democrats in Congress went home to angry constituents — or at least those who had enough guts to hold town-hall events. Many Democrats simply chose not to hold them at all, or to hold staged "virtual" town halls in conference calls. Now with ObamaCare behind them and a tough midterm election approaching, one might expect these incumbents to reconnect with their constituents, but the New York Times reports that even more of them have gone into hiding:
The sentiment that fueled the rage during those Congressional forums is still alive in the electorate. But the opportunities for voters to openly express their displeasure, or angrily vent as video cameras roll, have been harder to come by in this election year.

If the time-honored tradition of the political meeting is not quite dead, it seems to be teetering closer to extinction. Of the 255 Democrats who make up the majority in the House, only a handful held town-hall-style forums as legislators spent last week at home in their districts.

It was no scheduling accident.

With images of overheated, finger-waving crowds still seared into their minds from the discontent of last August, many Democrats heeded the advice of party leaders and tried to avoid unscripted question-and-answer sessions. The recommendations were clear: hold events in controlled settings — a bank or credit union, for example — or tour local businesses or participate in community service projects.

And to reach thousands of constituents at a time, without the worry of being snared in an angry confrontation with voters, more lawmakers are also taking part in a fast-growing trend: the telephone town meeting, where chances are remote that a testy exchange will wind up on YouTube.
Nancy Pelosi assured America that we would love ObamaCare as soon as it became law. Why then are Democrats putting themselves on milk cartons in their districts during recesses? If ObamaCare is such a great deal, wouldn't these supporters be rushing to hold open forums to accept the love and gratitude of their constituents?

I find Hot Air's conclusion very interesting:

For a bunch of class warriors, the majority party sure seems intent on setting themselves up as an American nobility. They want to exercise their power without having to account for themselves to the people they rule who send them to represent their interests, as if mixing with commoners has become somehow beneath them. The "commoners" need to send them a big reminder in November about who works for whom in the American political system...

Distributed monarchy, anyone?

Seriously, though, it's just more proof (as if we needed more) that these Dems know they've been voting and governing contrary to the will of their constituents. Therefore, they know that those constituents are seethingly angry at them. The icing on the cake is that, more often than not, those constituents were actually far more knowledgeable on the bills and issues than the elected representatives, so not only do these Dems have to endure all this anger, but they end up looking like total idiots to boot. Is it any wonder they'd rather just avoid these situations?

Still, the danger here is one of precedent - are we going to allow our elected leaders to escape responsibility for misbehavior and misrepresentation? If so, then all this angst will have been worth it. It's up to you, me, and 310 million of our closest friends to vote them into retirement to prove that theory wrong.

One last note - did you catch how the Democrat leadership actually recommended they avoid their constituencies? The radical Leftists in charge are deliberately trying to separate the pesky obligations of actual representation from their ability to wield political power in whatever way they choose. Is anyone else disturbed by this?

There's my two cents.

Do Liberals Even Stop To Listen To Themselves?

2010-06-07T15:10:00.001-05:00

Three stories to illustrate the heading...

Story #1: Johnson County Community College tries to find way to send illegal immigrants to conference

Johnson County Community College's president said Friday that officials were looking for a way to send seven students — including two illegal immigrants — to the National Council of La Raza conference in San Antonio.
"We're open to any solutions they may want to bring forward as far as discussing them," said Terry Calaway.
The original plan called for the students — members of Latinos United Now and Always, or LUNA — to fly to the July conference. But the students rejected that idea by the college because two of them were undocumented and might not be able to get through security.
So the students wanted to drive. But that would violate a college policy that prohibits sanctioned trips by car for students, faculty or college officials if the destination is more than 500 miles away. Calaway said this is a policy imposed on everyone, including college trustees.
When they were told they could not drive, the group issued a news release accusing the college of discrimination against the two students "based on lack of documentation and on national origin."

Okay, so what we have here are some students that have admitted they're here illegally, and instead of carting them off to their home country as the law dictates, this community college is working overtime to figure out how they can still send them to a conference held by a rabid anti-American open borders activist group! One can perhaps understand how these students feel so entitled, given that this college allowed them to enroll despite their illegal status (with in-state tuition, no less).

Story #2: Nashunal speling b protestd bi iddee-uts

It's hard to imagine why anyone would protest a spelling bee, but the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington DC was indeed targeted by protesters who advocate the simplification of American spelling. One of the signs carried by a picketer wearing a black and yellow bee costume said "enough is enuf".

Hm, a spelling bee that is too hard because hard words have to be spelled correctly? STOP THE PRESSES!!! Women and minorities hardest hit! It's George W. Bush's fault! Halliburton!

Good lord.

Story #3: How dare they 'lawyer up' when we sue them!

What happens when a former, self-professed Constitutional scholar wants to sound tough? They tend to forget about the Constitution. Barack Obama recently had the Department of Justice announce a criminal investigation into BP's activities in the Deepwater Horizon. When the subject of the criminal investigation took the prudent step of ensuring legal representation, the former lecturer on Constitutional law publicly scolded BP for "lawyering up":
According to the pool report, BP and Coast Guard officials whose job it is to handle claims "are stationed with each parish president in Louisiana, and [Obama] wants the same arrangement for county governments in all the affected states."

At that point, the pool report says Obama "lit into BP" because he wants to — Obama's words — "make sure that BP is not lawyering up essentially."

Just two days ago, Attorney General Eric Holder traveled to Louisiana to announce that the Justice Department has begun criminal and civil investigations into the oil spill. As a result of that investigation, BP and other companies could be charged with violating a variety of environmental laws, as well as other crimes. Holder pledged to prosecute any offenders "to the fullest extent of the law." The prosecution could result in enormous penalties and losses for BP beyond what has already occurred because of the spill. And now the president himself goes after BP for "lawyering up." The company certainly has huge obligations as a result of its actions in this matter. But surely the constitutional-law-professor-in-chief would concede their right to a legal defense.
Well, only if the Constitutional-Lecturer-in-Chief knew what he was talking about then. This is one of the reasons that people questioned the timing of the announcement by Holder and the DoJ. There is plenty of room later for criminal probes, but right now the US needs BP focused on stopping the spill. We don't need BP "lawyering up," but that was the completely predictable result of Obama's attempt to deflect criticism of his handling of the oil spill.

So, do liberals bother to stop and listen to themselves on things like this? I'm not sure if I like 'yes' or 'no' better as an answer. Either way, it's obvious that these people are hysterically funny to watch...unless they're actually running things that matter. You know, like the country...

There's my two cents.

Insane, Offensive, American Insanity

2010-06-07T12:00:00.001-05:00

In New York:

Founder of Ground Zero mosque part of group that helped fund Gaza flotilla

More specifically, he’s part of a group that’s funding another group that helped organize the flotilla. Too far removed for culpability? Let’s see.

The imam behind a proposed mosque near Ground Zero is a prominent member of a group that helped sponsor the pro-Palestinian activists who clashed violently with Israeli commandos at sea this week.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf is a key figure in Malaysian-based Perdana Global Peace Organization, according to its Website.

Perdana is the single biggest donor ($366,000) so far to the Free Gaza Movement, a key organizer of the six-ship flotilla that tried to break Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip Monday.
Here’s Rauf’s bio at the Perdana website. Reuters confirmed with the Free Gaza Movement — whose supporters include William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, natch — that its biggest donation did indeed come from Perdana.

Not only is it an abomination to have any mosque at Ground Zero, but to have a mosque funded by the same organization that is currently funding active terrorist operations is the absolute height of offensive insanity!

But yes, by all means, let's let these people build a temple to their violent and murderous religion on the very patch of ground representing their most successful attack on our soil. What could possibly be wrong with that?

On a related note, some dedicated Leftists are openly calling for another holocaust.

There's my two cents.

British Preview Of Lethal DemCare

2010-06-07T08:00:00.000-05:00

Well, this report from the U.K. is just awesome:

Millions of patients face losing NHS care as bosses prepare to axe treatments to make £20billion of savings by 2014, a top doctor has warned.

Among procedures being targeted by health trusts are hernias, joint replacements, ear and nose procedures, varicose veins and cataract surgery.

Dr Mark Porter, chairman of the British Medical Association’s consultants committee, warned NHS bosses wanted ‘wholesale reductions in budgets’.

He said primary care trusts – which commission care – are already compiling lists of ‘low value’ operations that would no longer be provided.

These include hip replacements for obese patients and some operations for hernias and gallstones. Procedures for varicose veins, ear and nose problems including grommets in children are also not funded in some areas.

Dr Porter said it was wrong to impose blanket bans on such procedures when some patients might benefit.

Seniors will be killed off first, but eventually we'll get to anyone deemed undesirable. Funny thing, though, how the U.K. is using the very same death panels that the liberal Left promised wouldn't be used here.

In other DemCare news, doctors still aren't happy about DemCare. That might be at least partly because they know ERs will be overrun and waiting lines will be excessive. Businesses hate DemCare because, well, it'll put them out of business. And no, the insurance companies aren't gouging all of us for excessive profits.

But hey, let's go ahead and believe the Left, which has been lying or wrong about every single aspect of DemCare thus far.

There's my two cents.

Related Reading:
Most Americans still favor repeal of DemCare
AAP decides genital 'nicking' is okay, thus illustrating how dangerous moral relativism can be
Repeal is possible
Repeal by reconciliation?
Tax = mandate

Ah, Football!

2010-06-04T23:59:00.000-05:00

I know, I know, it's in the dead of non-football season. That's precisely why these are so awesome right now! Feast your deprived eyes on these trick plays and incredible feats of footballishness:

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Only a couple more months to go...

Have a great weekend!

A Tale Of Two Budgets

2010-06-04T23:15:00.001-05:00

We don't have to drown under insurmountable debt:

Last week, Congressman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Tom Price (R-GA) introduced the Republican Study Committee (RSC) FY2011 budget. This is a welcome fiscal blueprint that would restore fiscal discipline to the nation and avert a Grecian formula meltdown. It also does an excellent job of drawing a sharp distinction between a conservative fiscal plan and the liberal proposal presented by President Obama’s budget. Comparing President Obama’s own budget projections to the RSC’s tells the story of two very different futures for the United States. While the focus is primarily spending and revenue targets, there are sound policy recommendations in the RSC blueprint. One budget sees a nation sinking deeper and deeper into debt while another envisions a significant reduction in spending growth and a return to balanced budgets within the decade.
The numbers paint a striking picture:
Deficits
Obama: The 2019 deficit is projected to reach $908 billion, and in 2020 would climb to more than $1 trillion. Over ten years the Obama budget runs $8.5 trillion in deficits.

RSC: Balances the budget within ten years and achieves surpluses in 2019 and 2020. Over ten years the RSC budget runs $2.5 trillion in deficits.
DIFFERENCE: In a ten year window the RSC budget will run $6 trillion fewer deficits than the Obama budget.
Debt
Obama: The President’s budget will send debt held by the public to $18.6 trillion in 2020, up $11 trillion from the 2009 level of $7.5 trillion.

RSC: Debt held by the public under the RSC plan will reach $12.9 trillion in 2020.
DIFFERENCE: In 2020, the RSC budget projects debt held by the public $5.6 trillion under the President’s projection.
Discretionary Spending
Obama: Under the President’s plan discretionary spending is held relatively constant at approximately the FY2010 levels of $1.4 trillion. Over ten years the Obama budget expects to spend $13.6 trillion.

RSC: Returns discretionary spending to FY2008 levels and freezes it until 2019. By 2016 discretionary spending levels will dip back below $1 trillion for the first time since 2005. The RSC accomplishes this goal by limiting spending and adopting sound policies including:
Repealing the Davis-Bacon Act, a law that forces the federal government to pay above market wages for federally funded construction. This reform could save $11.4 billion in 2010.
Eliminating Intercity and High Speed Rail Grants, saving $1.6 billion annually.
Enacting an earmark moratorium, saving approximately $15.9 billion per year.
DIFFERENCE: Over ten years the RSC budget will spend $3.2 trillion less in discretionary spending than under the President’s budget.

There are no quick exits from our current debt hole...but there are sound exits. The RSC plan gives us a logical, reasonable, attainable pathway to a full recovery in just a few years.

James Carafano adds one major (and legitimate, I think) beef:

Unfortunately, the RSC budget also gets a critical component of the budget wrong. It misses the mark on Washington’s #1 job; its Constitutional responsibility to provide for the common defense. At the heart of the RSC budget is a commitment to bring federal discretionary spending, of which defense is a component, back to FY 2008 levels. It implies that the defense portion of that broader category of spending will essentially be at the levels recommended by the Obama Administration by end of the decade. Thus, the RSC budget carries essentially the same risks for national security as the Obama budget. Our military desperately needs to recapitalize after years of fighting the Long War.
The Defense Department also needs to reign in runaway spending on manpower programs and improve the efficiency of its business and buying operations. But even with those savings, however, the Pentagon is going to need a higher top line to help keep us safe, free, and prosperous in the future.
Otherwise, we will be sending our men and women into harm’s way without the tools they need to protect us.

I'd be perfectly happy to reign in spending on everything but the defense budget. Carafano is right that this is one of the few things explicitly stated by the Constitution as a responsibility of the federal government, and our technology and military advantage has allowed us to stare down or defeat every regime we've faced for decades. It should not be withered. Along with that, I'd also add some extra provisions for veterans...after all, it doesn't matter how good your hardware is if you don't have the honorable and brave people to use it, and their service should be remembered and appreciated long after they're out of active duty status.

But back to the core of the post - the two budgets. Remember, much of our economy runs on simple perception - it's not so much what's going on that counts as what people think about what's going on. Even putting us on this road will have a dramatic effect on consumer confidence, levels of spending, and foreign confidence, all of which will have an aggregate positive effect, too.

Other aspects of the RSC plan that are noted differences from Barack Obama's plan:

Entitlement Spending
Obama: Spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security alone will reach $2.6 trillion by 2020. Bear in mind just five years ago, in 2005, total outlays were $2.5 trillion. This includes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and all domestic spending. While the Obama budget does note that his fiscal commission will examine the long-term fiscal outlook, it does nothing to restrain entitlement spending this year and the recently passed health package makes things even worse.

RSC: Under the RSC budget spending on these three programs still increases, but at a slower rate. Though Social Security spending remains untouched, Medicare would grow at a rate equivalent to economic growth, and Medicaid would increase with inflation. The budget would also repeal the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which could save taxpayers up to $36 billion, and completely repeals the government takeover of health care (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act). ...
DIFFERENCE: Over ten years the RSC budget spends approximately $3 trillion dollars less on the major entitlements than the Obama budget.

Taxes
Obama: As Heritage budget expert Brian Riedl outlined in his backgrounder, the Obama budget would, “raise taxes on all Americans by nearly $3 trillion, and raise taxes for 3.2 million small businesses and upper-income taxpayers by an average of $300,000 over the next decade.”

RSC: The RSC budget makes all the 2001 and 2003 tax relief, and the Alternative Minimum Tax “patch” permanent. In addition, the budget would fix the Congressional Budget Office baseline to assume current policy and put revenue and spending on equal footing. Under current CBO rules, tax hikes are assumed and must be “paid for” to simply continue the status quo.

DIFFERENCE: The RSC budget would extend tax relief for all American families and businesses by $1.7 trillion in the first five years, and keep taxes around their historical levels.

It can be done, but only with the right economic philosophy and the will to enact it. Will it be easy? No. But the path that Barack Obama and the radical leftist Democrats have set for this country is a guarantee of self-destruction. Why would we do that when we have a way out just sitting there in front of us?

There's my two cents.

Related Reading:
Obama's racked up debt three times faster than Bush

Obama Continues To Mislead On Energy Policy

2010-06-04T20:20:00.000-05:00

Are we really that surprised? This is nothing new, but the fact that he's still misleading means we need to go over it again:

President Obama keeps trying to make our electric bills skyrocket. Now he’s seized on the BP fiasco as an excuse to do it. According to Obama, the Gulf of Mexico gusher proves we need billions more to subsidize green energy. That was the President’s claim in his big Pittsburgh speech.
He didn’t tell the audience about his previous admission that electric bills will “skyrocket” under his plan. Or that our government continues to block access to immense onshore oil and gas reserves that don’t require the risks of deep-sea drilling.
Obama’s exact words in 2008 were, “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket”. Converting fossil fuel plants, he said, “will cost money; they will pass that money on to consumers.”
If we were rapidly running out of oil, scarcity would drive up its price and make alternatives affordable without needing subsidies. But Obama left out the facts about our abundant untapped onshore reserves. As Heritage Foundation energy expert David Kreutzer notes,
He also could have noted that billions of barrels of “easily accessible” oil have been turned into “impossible to access” oil by federal regulations and moratoria that block any access. There is still a lot of non-deep sea oil available off the coast of California that can be accessed from onshore. And, don’t forget, there are the 10 billion barrels in ANWR. All of this oil has been placed completely off limits by federal regulations.
Instead, Obama’s speech simultaneously condemned overspending and denounced subsidies to big oil even as he proposed spending billions more to in new subsidies for the competitors of oil and gas.
Obama wants to eliminate tax deductions that, according to his own budget plan, “distort markets by encouraging more investment in fossil fuel production than would occur under a neutral system.” Yet he intends to distort markets even further by expanding subsidies and tax preferences for alternative energy. Those would heavily favor wind and solar as preferred by environmentalists who overstate the potential and affordability of those.
Nuclear power, however, has far more abundant potential and needs only the lifting of government barriers rather than subsidies. As noted by Heritage’s nuclear expert, Jack Spencer, “the monthly cost of producing electricity from uranium-based fuel remains slightly less than coal and substantially less than natural gas or oil” because, “Nuclear power is the least expensive form of electricity produced in the United States.”
But nuclear power is not politically correct. So another proposal is a backdoor subsidy that does not give government money directly toward alternative energy but instead dictates that utilities must generate certain levels of our electricity from sources like wind and solar (but not nuclear)—a so-called RES “renewable energy standard.”
The wind and sun are free, but the expensive equipment to harness them makes these among the costliest ways to generate electricity. RES forces utilities to use this higher-priced power and pass along the rising costs to customers. One study projects that home electric bills would rise by a third and business bills by 60 percent under proposed RES plans.
But for anyone who believes we can power America solely through windmills (even though it is costlier), dream on. This would require 55,000 square miles densely packed with nothing but windmills. That’s like emptying the entire state of Wisconsin and making it all windmills all the time. But our lights would still go dark when the wind wasn’t blowing.
Solar power is even trickier than wind power, requiring rare elements to build solar cells, plus daylight and large surface area.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, when subsidies are allocated according to how much electricity is generated, it costs $.44 per megawatt for coal, $.25 per megawatt for oil and gas, $1.59 for nuclear, $23.37 for wind and $24.34 for solar. (This leaves out the heftiest subsidy—ethanol—because it’s not used to generate electricity.) Since DoE made that study in 2007, the non-fossil fuel subsidies have been increased; now Obama wants to raise them again.
Like them or not, fossil fuels have provided great quantities of affordable energy. Higher subsidies for alternatives will cost a lot more, but still not meet our needs.

As predicted, he's following the same template: never let a crisis go to waste. In his case, that means use every possible incident that you can spin as a crisis -- whether it is or not -- to expand government and gain more control.

Unfortunately, the truth is not on his side, nor are the American people.

Not that that stops him, of course. The only thing that will stop him is if the ability to implement his agenda is forced out of his hands.

There's my two cents.

Related Reading:
Obama halts all new oil drilling in Gulf
BP leak may last until Christmas

Speaking Of Radical Islam: Anti-Civilization

2010-06-04T18:15:00.001-05:00

Whoever he is, this Dr. Zero guy keeps hitting home runs:

Look at the world through the eyes of Hamas and its apologists, and ask yourself: what’s the point of sending a couple of boats full of terror “activists” to run the Gaza blockade?

The short-term benefit is obvious. Israel is placed in another no-win situation. If the Israeli military had allowed the Terror Flotilla to cruise on its way, they would have displayed a dangerously provocative weakness. Enforcing the blockade brought the Israelis into contact with armed and determined terrorist agents. When the IDF commandos defended themselves, a credulous global media was ready to write stories of “peace activists” being “massacred,” as Hamas desired. Within twenty four hours, regimes noted for the regular murder of their captive subjects were at the podium of the United Nations, denouncing a democracy for defending its borders. I have yet to see a major media figure ask how many of the countries denouncing Israel would respond to an invading flotilla by sending in a squad of guys with paintball guns.

The long-term strategy behind the Terror Flotilla is more troubling, because the pieces in that game are moved by the skeleton hand of anti-civilization… and it is winning.

The central flaw in Western liberal foreign policy is the naïve belief they can construct a civilization without enemies. No amount of multicultural babble, foreign-aid payoffs, or servile bows before foreign leaders can accomplish that task. Every society has both rivals and enemies. Rivals have plans which extend beyond victory in any given contest or campaign. The conquerors of old were looking to assemble empires, and the most successful of them made efforts to incorporate the people and cultures they overwhelmed. Not even the rowdiest English king planned to exterminate the French.

Anti-civilization is different. It destroys without assimilation. It learns nothing from its enemies, studying them only to find weaknesses it can exploit. In ancient times, it took the form of barbarian reavers, who looked upon graceful cities full of art and music and felt nothing but hunger and contempt. The industrial age refined anti-civilization into a powerful black oil, fueling massive engines of murder. It learned to wear crisp uniforms, and build concentration camps. It orchestrated decades of mechanized slaughter, with an atomic finale. By the end of the twentieth century, it had learned to manufacture terror, and transform the wonders of the civilization it hates into firebombs that could level mighty skyscrapers.

Anti-civilization stands opposed to the crucial idea that animates civilization: the belief that human life has value. It took a long time for both Western and Asian civilizations to fully understand this concept, but even in their infancy, they were dimly aware of its power. Mankind tended a garden of thought that grew for thousands of years, nourished by growing concepts of limited rule and transcendent rights, until it finally produced the most succulent fruit of the Enlightenment, the United States Constitution. Civilization begins with respect for the lives of others… the recognition that other people cannot be casually butchered for the slightest of reasons. Focusing this understanding to the elegant modern respect for individual dignity is the work of centuries, but the very concept of law is rooted in the most primitive incarnation of that respect.

It is this core value of respect for life that anti-civilization rejects. It dreams of Final Solutions and drowning its enemies in blood. It’s not just carless of civilian casualties… it deliberately inflicts them, as a matter of policy. It is ravenous for innocent blood, because it knows it can only defeat the superior intellectual and physical power of civilized nations through atrocities. It defeats mighty nations by murdering their children, and mutates its own children into bombs to achieve that purpose.

Anti-civilization can only succeed with the assistance of traitors from within the ranks of its civilized enemies… and it never has trouble finding them. Every society breeds people who refuse to see anti-civilization for what it is, rendering it invisible because it exists beyond the limits of their imaginations. There are also those who grow weary of the constant challenge to defend the society they have built, weakly accepting the comfort of a quiet grave for their civilization. Worst of all, every civilization produces those who eagerly cooperate in the task of burning them to the ground, with plans for rebuilding from the ashes tucked into their back pockets. The barbarians can always be defeated, if their allies within the city walls can be kept from opening the gates.

Industrial technology allowed the creation of Israel, a tiny democracy floating in a sea of barbarism, able to defeat all of its hostile neighbors in an incredibly short war. That same technology produced the media apparatus that anti-civilization relies upon, to commune with its allies and dupes around the world. In a very short time, atomic technology will put genocide back on the table in the Middle East… and our civilization will face a challenge that certain elements are already preparing themselves to lose.

The long-term significance of the Terror Flotilla is that it gives the worldwide Left one more dose of sedative to deal with the possibility of a coming horror in Israel. They’ve long since grown weary of dealing with the problems that tiny nation creates, and begun telling themselves it might just be better for everyone if it ceased to exist. Look how quickly the Left agrees with the Palestinian narrative that every problem in the Middle East is caused by the Jewish state… with the implied conclusion that all those problems would disappear if Israel does.

Anti-civilization wishes to convince the elite of the civilized world that its crimes are understandable, and the victim had it coming anyway. It’s already delighted to know the democracies of the world are less than enthusiastic about standing beside the little democracy it plans to drown. What we’re seeing now is part of the long prologue to something the global Left is slowly, quietly convincing itself will be the tragic but inevitable end to a complicated story. In truth, it will only be the beginning. Anti-civilization is both merciless, and relentless.

Given the strictly dogmatic, violent, and yes, even evil nature of anti-civilization, I believe there's no proverbial Switzerland in this battle, and no one will be able to remain neutral. You're either with the forces of anti-civilization, or not. I choose not.

Sadly, those who are quietly, inevitably enabling anti-civilization will be destroyed just as surely as those of us who plan to go down fighting. They may be destroyed last, but they will still be destroyed. Unfortunately, it will be too late to change their minds at that point.

There's my two cents.

Decline Into Madness

2010-06-04T15:45:00.002-05:00

Scary stuff:

Over at the Wall Street Journal, Robert Pollock has an important piece about Turkey’s “national decline into madness.” Demonic images of the United States, Israel, and the Jews, are the daily fare of the Turkish press. Turkey’s leaders are both captives of this propaganda and its perpetuators. Their behavior in the flotilla fiasco, which according to Pollock includes instigating the provocation, is leading the region to disaster. Concludes Pollock:

Good leaders work to defuse tensions in situations like this, not to escalate them. No American should be deceived as to the true motives of these men: They are demagogues appealing to the worst elements in their own country and the broader Middle East.

And of course, Turkey is among the more moderate of the countries of the Muslim world, its demagogic leaders among the most reasonable. Elsewhere, across the great arc from the Maghreb through the Middle East to Pakistan, the delusions and the viciousness are far more entrenched among both the populace and the elites. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Iran, where Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has issued yet another call for Israel’s annihilation on the same day that the UN reports that Iran has amassed enough uranium to make, with further enrichment, two nuclear bombs.

The reaction of the democratic world to the Gaza flotilla debacle suggests that the barbarians are making impressive headway. The outpouring of condemnation from Europe—so outsized, so hypocritical, so ready to ignore the plain truths evident in the videos of the incident, so ready to pounce on embattled Israel—truly does reveal a world gone mad—the headline of a Jennifer Rubin post over at Contentions. One hopes that we are not yet in 1939. But we are unquestionably somewhere in the 1930s, a decade in which few and lonely voices were willing even to recognize the looming catastrophe.

Scary stuff, though not at all unexpected, if you understand the reality of the conflict. Unfortunately, the White House's cautious reproach of Israel from a few days ago has now blossomed into what appears to be hardening opposition:

“There is no question that we need a new approach to Gaza,” said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the policy shift is still in the early stages. He was reflecting a broadly held view in the upper reaches of the administration…

[W]orld powers have grown increasingly disillusioned with the blockade, saying that it has created far too much suffering in Gaza and serves as a symbol not only of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians but of how the West is seen in relation to the Palestinians.

“Gaza has become the symbol in the Arab world of the Israeli treatment of Palestinians, and we have to change that,” the senior American official said. “We need to remove the impulse for the flotillas. The Israelis also realize this is not sustainable.”

Hot Air points out the obvious:

You’ll never remove the “impulse for the flotillas.” The real impulse is, as it has been for 60 years, Islamic regimes wanting to incite and exploit their populations’ sense of grievance over the Palestinians to further their own regional ambitions. If the blockade lifts and Iranian weapons start to flow and, inevitably, a new war erupts between Israel and Hamas (and likely Hezbollah too), then that’ll be the next thing to exploit, replete with Erdogan pandering for even more votes by screeching about how Israel’s betrayed Turkey’s “friendship” or whatever.

And, ultimately, it all boils down to the core conflict: radical Islam's primary purpose is to see the eradication of the Jews. In fact, Hamas, the likely intended recipient of the ~~weapons~~ aid contained on this flotilla, actually states in its formal charter that they don't believe Israel has the right to exist. Simply put, there is no possible peace here unless one side or the other is wiped out.

I should take this opportunity to once again point out that things appear to be headed toward another war in the region. As you know, I'm a big fan of Joel C. Rosenberg, and I put a lot of stock in his writings about Biblical prophecy. Here's his latest take on these events:

A pastor friend of mine who is helping us set up the 2010 Epicenter Conference in Philadelphia later this month just sent me an urgent text message with this headline from Israel National News: Rabbis: Flotilla Clash Similar to Gog and Magog Prophecy. As you might expect, it caught my attention right away. Excerpts:

“The Rabbinical Council of Judea and Samaria issued a statement Thursday in which it said that the results of the incident in which Israel intercepted a flotilla trying to break the naval blockade of Gaza seem like the Biblical description of “the beginning of the Gog and Magog process where the world is against us, but which ends with the third and final redemption….
“The Council was formed by Rabbi Zalman Melamed of Beit El and includes leading religious Zionist rabbis who are the spiritual leaders of communities in Judea and Samaria….
“‘Gog and Magog’ is a reference is to chapters 38 and 39 in the book of Ezekiel, a part of which is read on the intermediate Sabbath of Sukkot (Tabernacles). These chapters describe a vision of a war where the world is united against Israel that will precede the final redemption of Israel and the world. The prophecy’s symbolism involves a prince called Gog of Magog, leader of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal, who leads a coalition that includes Persia (Iran), Cush, Phut, Gomer, and Beit Togarmah against Israel. There are various opinions regarding the modern identity of these nations.
“As a sampling of passages from Ezekiel 39 shows, the prophesy predicts that the coalition will be defeated by Israel, at a time following Israel’s gathering from its exile….”
Meanwhile, an intriguing new article on the Jerusalem Post website today that also feels ripped from the Ezekiel prophecies: “ISRAEL SET TO BECOME GAS EXPORTER.”
FRIDAY UPDATE: Israel says doesn’t want clash with ‘Rachel Corrie’ – Foreign Ministry calls out to last flotilla ship en route to Gaza, asking it to sail directly to Ashdod. ‘We have no interest in boarding ship,’ statement says. ‘If cargo contains no weapons we will convey it to Gaza’
Tensions rachet up as Hamas fires 4 rockets at Israel from Gaza
Prime Minister Netanyahu makes first formal remarks on the Gaza crisis
President Obama calls Israeli raid on aid flotilla was ‘tragic,’ unnecessary
Israel risks losing ‘sole friend’ in Mideast, says Turkish PM Erdogan
FRIDAY UPDATE: Turkey mulls cutting Israel ties to ‘minimum’ over Gaza flotilla
Turkish protestors: We’re all soldiers of Hamas
Videos of the Gaza flotilla incident
Al-Qaida Orders Abduction of Christians, Saudi Royals
Must-read column by Charles Krauthammer: Those Troublesome Jews — excerpt: “The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.”
FRIDAY UPDATE: “Guns may have been thrown overboard”: Gun-sights, cartridges and coded plans found on ‘Marmara.’
FRIDAY UPDATE: Israel Navy: 3 commandos nearly taken hostage in Gaza flotilla raid — According to preliminary navy investigation, some passengers on the Mavi Marmara boat dragged three unconscious commandos into one of the passenger halls below deck.
FRIDAY UPDATE: Israel obeyed international law: Legally, the Gaza flotilla conflict is an open-and-shut case, writes Alan Dershowitz
Wall Street Journal editorial: Turkey’s Radical Drift
There is growing interest in the Ezekiel prophecies and whether they could play out in our lifetime. I believe it is still too early to say anything definitively. But I agree that current events are strikingly consistent with the prophecies and I believe it is possible that we could see these events unfold soon. The mention of “Gomer” in Ezekiel, for example, refers to the modern-day State of Turkey which will be an enemy of Israel and part of a Russian-Iranian alliance against the Jewish state. I’m not saying the prophecy will necessarily come to pass soon, but I can’t rule out that possibility. We’ve never seen a convergence of geopolitical and spiritual events so consistent with Ezekiel 38-39 in history like we are seeing today. We need to be prayerful, sober, alert and prepared.

Are you?

There's my two cents.

Related Reading:
Religion of peace activists
Israel, right and long
The Muslim Brotherhood's flotilla
Essential Krauthammer on Israel

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