Human Events sends out an email on this theme each day, and each one has the number of the day of the year it represents.
Some of them are very good, and I've selected a few to share.
No. 301 - Pick a fight with a liberal on: IMPERIALISM.
Liberals hate imperialism because in their mind it's all about the big bad West holding its big bad sway over the rest of the world. Liberals are much more comfortable with Western retreat and "multiculturalism" than with Western dominance and triumphalism. But America, Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, India, and Australia did pretty well out of imperialism, didn't they, inheriting the ideas of English liberty and law, free market economics, representative government, the English language, etc.? And if you think some people wouldn't welcome a return of imperialism, you might take a trip to Zimbabwe and see what the starving folks there have to say.
No. 298 - Blame the BP oil spill on the green movement.
Because BP spent all those millions re-branding itself as "Beyond Petroleum" and trying to "greenwash" its image by buying into renewable energy, it forgot how to run its core business—drilling for the sticky black stuff the world needs far more than it needs solar power or bird-chomping wind farms.
Teach a liberal a little science: the sea is full of microorganisms that eat petroleum (which is leaking from the seabed all the time).
The BP oil spill in the Gulf, which was supposed to have despoiled the region for decades, will likely have little long-term effect on the fishing industry or the ecological health of the region. Yes, the oil spill was a "disaster," but the idea that we would never again be eating Gulf shrimp or oysters or be able to enjoy the region's beaches was pure eco-hysteria and fear-mongering. Liberals, like little bratty children, are very good at screaming and pointing fingers and passing blame ("It's his fault!") or issuing threats (like Obama's joke of an Interior Secretary Ken Salazar saying he was going to keep his boot on the neck of BP—that really helped)—or Obama haplessly asking whose ass he should kick—(ditto); but it's conservatives who generally keep their heads and get on with the job of fixing the problem. All the liberal hypocrites did was cripple the tourist industry along the Gulf Coast—in typical liberal fashion making a "disaster" worse.
No. 295 of 365 - Quote P. J. O'Rourke:
"The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich.
No. 284 - Conservative history:
Never let liberals forget that the sub-prime mortgage disaster was Bill Clinton's fault. In 1995 President Clinton's changes to the Community Reinvestment Act enabled ACORN to run a politically correct extortion campaign against mortgage lenders, compelling them by force of law to make unsound (sub-prime) loans to poor minorities who never stood a hope of repaying them.
No. 276 - Quote Thomas Sowell:
"Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it."
No. 267 - Start a rumor:
President Obama is indeed a Manchurian Candidate—but not in the way you might think. In June 1999, a shadowy cabal of right-wing business interests found themselves feeling so utterly nauseated by the Clinton regime that they devised a plan to ensure that by 2012, no Democrat candidate would ever be elected president again. First they needed a Manchurian Candidate: someone so hatefully leftwing and disgracefully incompetent that he would bring the American economy to its knees, while rendering it an international laughing stock. In this way "liberal values" would be tarnished forever in the eyes of American voters. So far, the plan is working brilliantly.
No 258 - Tell a joke.
Q. What's the difference between Obamacare and a car battery?
A. The car battery has a positive side.
No. 256 - Define multiculturalism:
State-sanctioned grievance industry that stokes division and resentment, while always under the delusion that it is doing something positive called "celebrating diversity."
No. 253 - Conservative party game:
Liberals always like to consider themselves bastions of tolerance. So push the boundaries with this little game, as personally tested with enormous success by your author. Buy your kids a pack of those realistic fake cigarettes which puff out dust at the end so it looks like your kid is really smoking. Tell them not to be too obvious about it, but next time you find yourself at a social engagement where kids mix with grown ups, get them to wander around "smoking" nonchalantly as if it's something they do all the time. For maximum impact, you could even have them come up to you and say, "Dad/Mom. You got a cigarette?" "Sure son," you can reply, retrieving a fake cigarette from a real pack and "lighting" it for them. The important thing is to make absolutely no comment and act as if this is all the most normal behavior in the world. Relish the liberals' tension and discomfort as they agonize over how best to confront you over your disgracefully lax parenting. It really is about as fun as fun gets.
No. 247 - Quote Ludwig von Mises:
"Whoever prefers life to death, happiness to suffering, well-being to misery must defend without compromise private ownership in the means of production."
No. 245 - Affect puzzlement at the curious fact that the 2002 Beltway sniper murders were initially blamed by investigators on an "angry white man."
Then wonder why, after the perpetrators were discovered to be inconveniently black and Muslim, the liberal media persistently referred to killer John Muhammad by his pre-conversion name John Williams; and why authorities chose to play down the possibility that the cold blooded assassination of ten Americans by two Islamic converts rambling about jihad had anything to do with terrorism or the "Religion of Peace."
No. 239 - Pick a fight with a liberal on: SOCIAL STIGMA.
Liberals are forever congratulating themselves on having all but eliminated the "stifling" codes of disapproval by which the pre-1960s generations dictated socially acceptable norms. But "stigma" was good. While stigma existed, poor people were too proud to beg or rely on welfare; girls were too ashamed to be thought "loose" or to seek single motherhood as a lifestyle choice; men were more chivalrous because there was a stigma against treating women without deference and special consideration; and people were more polite and even dressed properly as a sign of respect for others and themselves. "Stigma" was the means by which free citizens could agree on a mutually satisfactory code of behavior, without the agents of the state having to poke their noses into anyone's private business. Liberals, however, utterly reverse the equation—they're all for obliterating taboos, knocking down stigmas, shocking the middle class, and preaching tolerance for the most anti-social behavior; and then they turn around and act as the biggest advocates of the government dictating private behavior with the nanny state. The consequences? Greater government intrusion; much worse behavior.
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This is an excellent video, by Bill WhittlePlease leave a comment
By now nearly every American who pays attention to the news has heard about the enormous national debt and the annual $1.5 trillion budget deficits, and realizes that the US has a serious spending and debt problem. We owe $14 trillion and routinely spend 40 percent more each year than we take in, which increases the debt even more. To sensible people, that signals a strong need to make substantial changes.
But not Washington Democrats. They see the solution to our unsustainable national spending addiction as essentially maintaining the current level of spending, with maybe a little trimming here and there, then increasing taxes on the rich. They don’t want to reduce support payments or services to their constituents and risk losing votes, and they believe that increasing government revenue through tax increases on the wealthiest Americans is the way to fix the problem without reducing government handouts.
This supposed solution is based in fantasy, and is not what sensible people that find themselves in a similar situation would do. Smart folks would realize they had created a financial crisis through foolish spending practices and they would reduce spending to cover just the necessities; try to find ways to increase income, perhaps through working an additional job or trying to get a better-paying job; or sell some things they don’t really need. In short, they would make the necessary sacrifices and endure the pain until things smoothed out.If they weren’t smart, they would probably just keep spending too much and tell their employers they need more money, which parallels what the Democrats want to do. Those folks would soon declare bankruptcy.
And so, instead of spurring private sector expansion to broaden the tax base and increase tax revenue, and paring down spending to match income, the president and congressional Democrats prefer to simply make the rich pay more by increasing their tax rate by 13 percent.
What does that mean to a person at this income level? A married person, earning $1,000,000, with two deductions, and taxable income of $986,800 pays almost $323,000 just in federal income taxes. If President Obama succeeds in raising the top tax rate of 35% to the pre-Bush tax cut level of 39.6 percent, this person will pay an additional $45,000 in income taxes each year.
Democrats reason that folks in this income range have more money than they need, and won’t notice a few tens of thousands of dollars more in tax payments. But that analysis defies common sense. People routinely use the money they have available, regardless of how much that might be. Perhaps the wealthy are like everyone else in that regard.
So, what would the person who earns a million bucks do with that $45,000 if the government didn’t take it? Would they stuff it in their mattress, bury it in the yard, or hide it in their freezer? No, they would invest it in business, or securities. They would donate some or all of it to charity, or purchase things they want and need, like household goods, a car, a boat, or a house. They would put it to some productive economic use, which is far more beneficial than having Uncle Sam confiscate that $45,000, and much of it be used to pay bureaucrats to disburse it through government spending, which is highly inefficient and often wasteful.
The tax hike so cherished by the president and fellow Democrats is a response to the impulse to punish the wealthy for being successful. But doing away with the Bush tax rates for high income earners would produce only $500 - $600 billion over 10 years, a meaningless sum when compared to budgetary spending of more than $3 trillion a year.
Even if the government confiscated every cent millionaires and billionaires made this year – about $685 billion – it would be less than half this year’s budget deficit, and just one-fifth of annual spending.
Furthermore, says economist Thomas Sowell, “history has shown repeatedly, under administrations of both political parties, that there is no automatic correlation between tax rates and tax revenues. When the tax rate on the highest incomes was 73 percent in 1921, that brought in less tax revenue than after the tax rate was cut to 24 percent in 1925. Why?”
And here is the part of Dr. Sowell’s statement that people need to pay attention to: “Because high tax rates that people don't actually pay do not bring in as much hard cash as lower tax rates that they do pay. That's not rocket science.”
Raising their tax rate will encourage the wealthy to look for ways to shelter that money from taxation. This obvious reality escapes those on the left, who do not understand the capitalist system, but think they know how to change it to make it better. Their past efforts to improve capitalism are responsible for all of our current problems.
But just because raising taxes on the rich makes no sense economically doesn’t mean it has no value at all. Which is why President Obama is busy trying to foster envy of the wealthy among those who aren’t wealthy: it pays off at the ballot box.
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Commentary by CKA in Redstate USA
I want to scream.
To me, Cain and Paul Ryan are the only two real leaders who have surfaced in the past year. They have the intelligence and apparent genuine desire to solve our country’s fiscal problems.
But what do we get from others?
From Obama and the Demobocrat/progressive/liberal/leftist Party and their shills in the pimpstream media: mockery, nit-picking, patronizing, dismissal, scorn, more.
From what seems to be most of the so-called conservative news media: same as from Obama and the DPLLs.
From the current gaggle of wannabe Republican/conservative presidential hopefuls: same as from Obama and the DPLLs.
I find all of their behavior petty, execrable and despicable.
Waiting for Cain or some conservative pundit to throw down this gauntlet: “So where’s your detailed plan so that we can analyze and comment on it?”
And given that Obama’s almost three years into having nothing more than hot air on his purported plan, where is the cry from anyone that he produce such plan—and do it now?
What I see occurring—and this really annoys me—is that just like Ryan, Cain is being used by his lessers who apparently are afraid to, not capable of, will not produce a plan that can be discussed publicly.
But, oh, how they pull out their smugness and mud-slinging.
More and more, I find that Cain is the most authentic and deserving potential candidate for any non-Demobocrat ticket.
Shoot, Cain-Gingrich would be hard to beat, I believe.
But more and more, just by what I read about Romney, I am repulsed by this very clearly Democrat who calls himself a Republican.
Perry and Bachman seem lost and, already this early, shrill, as well as caricatures of themselves.
I also see how very much the Republican establishment, including their shills in the so-called conservative news media, pitches for Romney and dismisses, almost literally, Cain and others.
I have this gut feeling that Romney will be only marginally better than Obama, should Romney be anointed to run.
I think all this pre-election election will do is further alienate voters who could and would rally behind a sane, clear, conservative voice.
And I think that the Republicans are allowing the Demobocrats and the pimpstream media to help set Romney as the contender for the throne.
As for the behavior of the so-called conservative media, I’ve reassessed how I consider them to be hindrance or facilitator of a genuine candidate. I’m not enthusiastic or thrilled by what I see.Please leave a comment
The U.S. Census Bureau’s annual poverty report states that 46.2 million persons, or roughly one of seven Americans, were poor in 2010. That’s a shocking statistic.
Currently, poverty earnings levels in the contiguous 48 states are $10,890 for individuals, $14,710 for couples and $22,350 for a family of four. The thresholds are higher for residents of Hawaii and Alaska.
Obviously, those annual earnings figures are pretty low, and people living at those income levels certainly face challenges. But understand that meeting a poverty threshold makes you eligible for federal and state assistance, like welfare, Medicaid, Aid to Dependent Children, food stamps, housing subsidies, student loans, etc., that help those who are classified as poor. In all, there are 71 federal means-tested welfare programs.
Unfortunately, poverty has political implications. For example, if you raise or lower those thresholds, you immediately change the number of poor in America. That is not to suggest that those thresholds are too low, only that you can create or eliminate a lot of poverty simply by changing the poverty thresholds. And there are political advantages to increased numbers of people in poverty.
When you look beneath the surface of the poverty issue it becomes quickly evident that some of those classified as poor – emphasis on “some” – aren’t as bad off as we might think.
Yes, some, perhaps many, Americans truly are poor, and they need help. But it is a piece of conventional wisdom that America’s poor are substantially better off than the poor of other countries, who frequently are homeless and starving. That conventional wisdom is borne out by what the Census Bureau tells us about Americans living in poverty:
• 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning
• Nearly three-fourths have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks
• Nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite television, one-third have a wide-screen plasma or LCD television, one-fourth have a digital video recorder system, and two-thirds have at least one DVD player
• Half have a personal computer, one in seven have two or more computers, and 43 percent have Internet access
• More than half of poor families with children have a video game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation
You can make a persuasive argument that at least some of those classified as poor, those who fall into the categories listed above, aren’t really poor in the true sense of the word.
This is the state of poverty in America 47 years after President Lyndon Johnson declared war on it. In a message to Congress on March 16, 1964, Mr. Johnson declared: “Because it is right, because it is wise, and because, for the first time in our history, it is possible to conquer poverty, I submit, for the consideration of the Congress and the country, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.
“The Act does not merely expand old programs or improve what is already being done. It charts a new course. It strikes at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty. It can be a milestone in our one-hundred eighty year search for a better life for our people.”
No doubt President Johnson and those who supported the War on Poverty believed this action would eliminate poverty. But despite spending almost $16 trillion since declaring war on poverty – which is more than the National Debt that has accumulated throughout our 235 year history – welfare programs have failed to reduce poverty.
And spending for these programs is projected to cost taxpayers $10.3 trillion over the next decade. President Barack Obama’s FY 2011 budget request, for example, increased total welfare spending to $953 billion, a 42 percent increase over welfare spending in FY 2008.
Even if welfare programs were working, given the current budget and debt crises, this kind of spending cannot be sustained; it will drive the United States into bankruptcy if allowed to continue unreformed. A lesson we never seem to learn is that throwing money at a problem rarely fixes it. Think stimulus 2009. President Obama’s advisers told us that if we passed the $767 billion stimulus bill, that ultimately cost taxpayers $862 billion, unemployment would not exceed 8 percent and the economy would get a big boost. Guess what?
Throwing $16 trillion at poverty has not ended poverty; in fact, poverty has grown. And evidence strongly suggests that efforts to end it have actually hurt many of the people it was intended to help. A recent report by the Heritage Foundation notes that “poverty in America is overwhelmingly linked to the absence of fathers and a lack of work, but welfare payments have had the destructive effects of eroding marriage and the work ethic in low-income communities. … When the War on Poverty began, 7 percent of children were born out of wedlock; today, the figure is over 40 percent.”
Poverty will never be completely eliminated, but we can reduce it substantially if we stop punishing marriage, foster job creation and stop rewarding people for not working. Continuing to throw money at it will not solve the problem. Please leave a comment
So, the government interferes in efforts to drill for our own oil and natural gas, and reverses permits on coal mining projects that have already been approved, sacrificing billions in federal tax and lease revenue, and millions of jobs. And then it throws billions of our tax dollars away trying to make non-viable “green” energy companies successful. Note to President Obama: Billions of tax dollars cannot make a failing industry viable. It’s time to abandon that strategy and let the market decide. * * * * *
Agents of the federal government sent thousands of firearms over the Mexican border directly into the hands of criminals, without telling the Mexican government. Allegedly, this foolhardy international escapade was to track down, prosecute, disarm and break the drug cartels. As a result, approximately 200 people died, including an American Border Patrol Agent, and the Attorney General of the United States says he did not know anything about it. Seriously? What other similar adventures is the Justice Department involved in that the AG does not know about?
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The U.S. Census Bureau’s annual poverty report states that 46.2 million persons, or roughly one in seven Americans, were poor in 2010. For a family of four, poverty means earning up to $22,350 in the contiguous 48 states, and up to $27,940 in Hawaii. What the Census Bureau didn’t report is what it is really like to be poor in America.
Some Americans truly are poor, but it is a piece of conventional wisdom that America’s poor are substantially better off than the poor of other countries, who frequently are homeless and starving.
That wisdom is borne out by what the Census Bureau tells us about those Americans living in poverty:
• 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning
• Nearly three-fourths have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks
• Nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite television, one-third have a wide-screen plasma or LCD television, one-fourth have a digital video recorder system, and two-thirds have at least one DVD player
• Half have a personal computer, one in seven have two or more computers, and 43 percent have Internet access
• More than half of poor families with children have a video game system, such as an Xbox or PlayStation.
* * * * *
The Obama job plan failed to get the votes necessary in the Senate to move the bill forward, and the president and the Democrats tried desperately to blame Republicans for it. The president’s bill didn’t even get the support of all 51 of Senate Democrats. Even though he said the words “pass the bill” forty-thousand times, Mr. Obama never expected the badly flawed bill that would raise taxes and costs on job creators to pass; it was merely a political tactic to get people all fired up against Republicans.
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Liberals, particularly black liberals, are busy trying to convince themselves and everyone else that Republican Herman Cain isn’t a “real” candidate for the presidential nomination. One of them even suggested, with a straight face, that Republicans are just trying to cover up their racism by supporting Mr. Cain. Another said that Mr. Cain is a pawn, and that Republicans would never nominate a black man. But that ignores the fact that Republicans have often supported blacks. Remember Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas; UN Ambassador and presidential hopeful Allan Keyes; Secretary of State Colin Powell; and National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice? Mr. Cain has committed the ultimate liberal sin: he’s an accomplished, successful, conservative black man. That isn’t allowed, and it scares them to death.
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The media focuses on irrelevancies to distract from President Obama’s poor performance. First, it was a Texas Baptist minister who introduced Texas Republican Rick Perry to a Texas audience. After making the introduction, as the minister exited the stage, a member of the media asked him a religious question on Mormanism, and he gave a religious, not a political, answer. The resulting firestorm was totally out of proportion. What that minister thinks about Mormanism isn’t relevant to anything having to do with Rick Perry, since the minister is not connected to Rick Perry, was not invited by Mr. Perry to introduce him, and doesn’t speak for Mr. Perry. What was the point of asking that question?
Then, country singer Hank Williams, Jr., appearing on a Fox News program, commented that when House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama played golf together, and also when Vice President Joe Biden and Ohio Governor John Kasich played golf together, these events were as unlikely to produce something positive as Adolph Hitler playing golf with Benjamin Netanyahu. Immediately, Mr. Williams was accused of equating Obama with Hitler. But if you actually listen to what he said and how he said it, he didn’t equate any of the four people with Hitler. But distractions seem to work, so we should expect more of them. What will the media not do to protect their president?Please leave a comment
The protest movement known as Occupy Wall Street is in its fourth week and has spread from its original site in New York to other cities. This movement is terribly confused and without focus, but the occupywallst.org Website says this about the purpose of the protest: “Occupy Wall Street is a leaderless resistance movement with people of many colors, genders and political persuasions. The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.”
Some reports tell us that some protesters had cited serious issues and that some express their ideas clearly and effectively. But while they identify some real problems that need correcting, like the money connection between politicians and special interests that produces inequities, they recognize only the connection between corporations and politicians, and ignore the connection between labor unions and politicians. Both are equally inappropriate and harmful.
According to the Christian Science Monitor, protesters and sympathizers say that “it’s Wall Street bankers who should be arrested for their role in the country’s economic difficulties. ‘The world's economy has been wrecked by these rapacious traders,’ author Salman Rushdie [of “Satanic Verses” fame] tweeted. ‘Yet it is the protesters who are jailed.’”
If you look back to 1977 and examine what the government did relative to banking, you’ll see that “Wall Street banks” are only one factor in the financial crisis, and much of what those banks did was what government over-regulation forced or allowed them to do.
The Monitor’s story continued: “On the ‘Wall Street Campout’ Facebook page, the protest is described as ‘an ongoing nonviolent demonstration opposing what participants view as negative corporate influence over US politics.’”
It isn’t difficult to find cracks in this logic, like, for example, the assumption that 99 percent of the people in the United States are philosophically bound together against the other one percent, and that the one percent indulges in greed and corruption and is the cause of all discomfort. But the real weakness of the movement is the gross logical fallacy in its method of identifying demons, and the sheer absurdity of the demands the movement thinks will fix things.
On the Occupy Wall Street Website, a proposed list of demands includes:
• Immediate debt forgiveness for all
• Free college education • Elimination of free trade
• A $20-an-hour minimum wage
• Guaranteed “living wage” regardless of income
• Open borders
• $1 trillion government spending on infrastructure
• $1 trillion government spending on ecological restoration
• A racial and gender equal rights amendment and
• Easier unionization voting procedures
If that left you scratching your head, it gets worse: The Website asserts that “these demands will create so many jobs it will be completely impossible to fill them without an open borders policy.”
Watching video interviews of some of the protesters, it is clear that the movement is comprised of people who have no idea what economics is all about. One young male protester gave a spirited and well-expressed, but logically incoherent, criticism of the capitalist economic system, which he said needs to be replaced. But when asked what he would replace capitalism with, he just stood there, as if he’d never thought about that.
The philosophy, such as it is, behind this movement is a classic example of what economist Dr. Thomas Sowell calls “stage one thinking,” which is failing to look beyond the immediate result of an action. To them, “if capitalism is the problem, getting rid of capitalism is the solution. That’s all we need to know, now let’s protest.”
Another young man gave this moving testimony: “I was born to be here right now. The Founding Fathers have been passing down the torch to this generation to make our country great again.” Clearly, this fellow has no idea what made the country great, but he’s ready to fix it, nonetheless.
Our capitalistic system is so distorted by over-regulation, political favoritism and other government interference that it doesn’t work like it is supposed to, so the protesters blame this distorted version of capitalism for their discontent and want to replace it with “something else.” This position is based on ignorance, and if they had any idea what free markets are and how a capitalistic economy is supposed to work … but, like they say, “If a frog had wings …”
Right now this movement is an exercise of only the passionate expression of discontent and lacks a coherent and compelling message. It will not be taken seriously until it becomes organized and focuses on identifying specific problems and making sensible suggestions for fixing them. Simply saying “we need to get rid of capitalism and punish greedy bankers and corporate managers. And then give us a free college education, a $20-an-hour minimum wage, wipe out all our debts, open the borders so that anyone who wants to can come in, spend money we don’t have on infrastructure and ecological restoration, abolish free trade, and let government make all of our decisions for us” doesn’t make the grade. Please leave a comment
It seems as though anyone can sue anyone else for virtually any reason, anytime they please. The list of idiotic lawsuits that actually got into the system is long and defies common sense. In 2002, for example, a man sued the hospital where he worked for negligence because it did not prevent him from raping one of its patients.
A woman sued Universal Studios for $15,000, claiming to have suffered mental anguish and emotional distress after voluntarily visiting the park’s haunted house.
Judge Roy Pearson, Jr. – a judge! – tried to bully a family-owned dry cleaning shop by suing the owners for $54 million after they lost his pants.
All of these are real cases, and though most such cases are dismissed, what does it say about our system that such foolish cases are ever filed?
This kind of abuse of the legal system creates doubts that our court system truly dispenses justice. The courts should be a place where legitimate wrongs are adjudicated, not a lottery where people think they can file dumb lawsuits and have a chance of winning.
On the other side, cases raising significant questions sometimes can’t get a hearing, despite the important issues that are at stake.
One such example concerns the effort of a State Department employee to challenge the qualifications of Hillary Clinton to serve as Secretary of State, due to that position receiving a pay increase while Ms. Clinton served in the U.S. Senate. The U.S. Constitution, Article I, section 6, clause 2, provides: "No senator or representative shall, during the time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil office under the authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the emoluments whereof shall have been [increased] during such time."
Given that, it appears the employee had a legitimate claim. However, the suit was dismissed by a special three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia not because the claim was without merit, but because the judges said he lacked legal standing to assert the claim.
Legal Standing involves being qualified to assert legal rights in a judicial forum because one has a sufficient and protectable interest in the outcome of a legal issue. In the first three examples involving absurd claims, legal standing was apparently not a factor, while in the case of the citizen challenging Ms. Clinton’s qualifications, it thwarts getting a ruling on what appears to be a legitimate legal question.
Who, after all, has a better reason to be certain that a government official with authority over them is qualified for the office than the employees who work for that public official?
There are other examples involving legal standing that have far more serious implications, such as the matter of the healthcare reform law. Who has a more legitimate interest in challenging the federal government over a legislative act or an administrative edict than the 50 states that will be forced to live with it?
A challenge by the Commonwealth of Virginia to the health care overhaul affectionately known as “Obamacare” was dismissed by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, not because the Court determined that Virginia’s assertion that the healthcare law conflicts with Virginia law is without merit, but because the Commonwealth and its citizens lack legal standing to challenge the federal government on this question.
If the individual states, who under the system of federalism established by the U.S. Constitution have a substantial amount of sovereignty, don’t have standing to challenge in the federal courts a breathtakingly overt effort by the federal government to tread on and nullify that sovereignty, who does?
“The Founding Fathers fully intended that the states would serve as a check on federal power,” Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli said in a news release. “When the 4th Circuit ruled that Virginia lacked standing to defend a duly enacted state law from federal preemption, it took away much of the states’ ability to serve that function.”
In such cases as the challenge to the qualifications of the Secretary of State and the government’s health care take-over, legal standing serves as a tool for protecting the federal government and government officials from being accountable to the people they serve.
The healthcare reform law is the most unpopular legislative misadventure in decades, or perhaps in history, so unpopular and so over-reaching that 30 states have challenged the take-over through court cases or referendums.
The fact that such action would be proposed by the president, and that it would be created in secret and passed without having been read or debated by the Congress says quite a lot about the shocking lack of understanding, or the outright abandoning of the founding principles our forebears fought and died for.
The question of constitutionality of healthcare reform will go to the U.S. Supreme Court this session. If the highest court in the land ignores the Constitution’s protections against unbridled, runaway government power – as the president, the Congress and some of the lower courts have done – the hard work and sacrifices of our forebears two hundred fifty years ago will have been for naught.
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This video is an interview by a Boston television station of Barack Obama's aunt, who is in the Unites States illegally.Leave a comment
So breathtaking is the failure of some in Washington to understand and embrace simple economic principles that it defies rational explanation. For some of them it isn’t so much a matter of not understanding economics as it is subscribing to the principles of a different economic system, a non-capitalist economic system.
Elizabeth Warren is the former Obama administration consumer advocate who came to Washington from teaching bankruptcy at Harvard Law School to help the federal government create bankruptcy for private businesses. Ms. Warren was tabbed for formal nomination to that new position, which required Senate approval. Her ideas were so toxic with Wall Street, Republicans, and moderate Democrats, and drew such strong opposition from them, however, that President Obama instead appointed her as an adviser rather than submit her name in nomination. Ms. Warren has moved on from the administration and is now a Democrat candidate for the Massachusetts Senate seat won by Republican Scott Brown last year.
At a campaign event in Massachusetts in August, Ms. Warren attempted to refute the GOP charge that raising taxes on the wealthy amounts to "class warfare." "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody," she declared, which really has nothing to do with refuting charges of class warfare, but is typical of the far left; wanting credit for something they had nothing to do with.
"You built a factory out there? Good for you," she said. "But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did."
“Good for you,” she says, condescendingly, of the people who make the economy work, as she implies that paying income taxes that are used to build roads, fund police and fire protection, and educate kids is equal to building a factory and putting people to work. Furthermore, it isn’t as though the folks that built the factory didn’t also pay taxes to build roads, hire firemen and police officers and educate the young, and, by the way, pay taxes at a higher rate than whose ire Ms. Warren was so deliberately trying to arouse.
It doesn’t occur to her that by creating jobs in that factory the employer enabled the employees to feed their own family, buy clothes, cars, a house, take vacations and pay their own income taxes, if they happen to be in the half of the population that actually pays income taxes. She rejects the very real mechanics of our economic system, hoping to supplant it with a different one.
The Bush tax cuts that so disgust those who think like Ms. Warren cut tax rates for everyone, putting the lie to the “tax cuts for the rich” inanity that the left robotically spews. The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 lowered tax rates for all income levels, doubled the child tax credit from $500 to $1,000 per child, and eliminated the marriage penalty by giving a married couple filing jointly a standard deduction twice that of a single filer.
What she and others want to do, however, is to return only the highest tax brackets to pre-Bush tax cut levels, and that plainly does not treat everyone the same, as the Bush cuts did. That clearly targets one group of citizens for a special penalty, ergo: class warfare.
Of course, they can’t admit that they want to single out one group, so they simply deny the truth. But even the mainstream media is beginning to get wise to the “rich don’t their pay fair share” rhetoric.
The Associated Press: “On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.”
ABC News: “For the most part, the wealthy pay a significantly higher percentage of their income in taxes than middle-income workers.”
The Wall Street Journal: “But nearly all millionaires still paid a rate that is more than twice the 8.9% average rate paid by those earning between $50,000 and $100,000, and more than three times the 7.2% average rate paid by those earning less than $50,000.”
So, it is obvious that the “rich” actually do pay their fair share, or more, and it is clear that the fringe left truly is guilty of class warfare.
Imposing non-capitalist economic principles onto a capitalist economy has already caused serious problems, as in the mortgage banking collapse. The Marxist philosophy Ms. Warren prefers won’t work – can’t work – without a totalitarian government, like the former USSR, Communist China, North Korea or Cuba.
Freedom-loving people will tell Ms. Warren and her buddies firmly, “No.”
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There is no shortage of economic troubles in America today: high unemployment, high corporate taxes, high fuel prices, rising home foreclosures, rising wholesale prices … the list is long.
Sometimes government’s role in these problems is obvious, like with taxation, because taxation is a direct action of government. Most of the time, however, government’s harmful role is less obvious. However, government tinkering is a common theme in the nation’s economic problems, whether it is through efforts of central planning or government picking winners and losers.
One way that government gums things up is through subsidies. A subsidy is defined as monetary assistance given to a person, group or entity in support of an enterprise regarded by government as being in the public interest.
For example, because government thinks that we should use much less oil for fuel to reduce pollution from burning oil products and to help reduce our dependence on foreign oil sources, it decided to dilute gasoline with ethanol made from corn. Slate online magazine, among others, sees problems with this: “Ethanol won't significantly reduce our oil imports; adding more ethanol to our gas tanks adds further complexity to our motor-fuel supply chain, which will lead to further price hikes at the pump; and, most important (and most astonishing), it may take more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol than it actually contains.”
Some of the results of this government-knows-best policy are: 1) forty percent of U.S. corn goes to ethanol production instead of the food supply, raising food prices, and 2) putting ethanol in gasoline creates a fuel that is less efficient than pure gasoline, requiring more gasohol to get the same result as pure gasoline.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that when government is willing to pay people to do certain things, people are perfectly willing to do whatever will get them the money: when something is subsidized, you get more of it.
Subsidies given out by the government come in many forms, including housing loans, student loans, money or tax breaks to businesses and various types of support payments to individuals.
With the best of intentions, we subsidize not working through welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, etc. Helping people in trouble is a good thing, although it is inappropriate for government to do so, but if people can get free food, free health care, a free place to live, why work? Someone who has lost their job may be less motivated to take a less-than-perfect new job if they know they can get unemployment payments for 99 weeks. These subsidies often remove or substantially dull the incentive for people to have a job. In such cases the safety net becomes a hammock.
Neither should government subsidize so-called “green” energy. It is not within the federal government’s purview to decide what energy sources the country uses, or to give taxpayer money to preferred businesses.
Green energy sources like solar and wind are overly expensive and notoriously inefficient, so when President Obama went to California to announce a $535 million government loan to a solar energy company as part of his ill-conceived stimulus package, he unwittingly created what commentator Charles Krauthammer called “the most expensive photo op in history.”
Government inefficiency and poor judgment virtually guarantee that subsidies will fail to meet their goals, and not infrequently create horrible unintended consequences, like Mr. Obama’s glorious misadventure did. Solar panel maker Solyndra received the loan from the Obama administration in 2009, in part to hire 1,100 workers, and just last month the company shut its doors and announced its intent to file for bankruptcy. Those 1,100 taxpayer-financed jobs are gone, and worse, taxpayers have been placed in line behind other creditors to get their money back.
The company blamed current business conditions and a glut of solar panels for driving down the price of its product. If there is a glut of solar panels, that means the industry has produced more than it can sell. Maybe solar panels are not cost effective, or maybe they don’t do a good job of replacing conventional energy, and people see no advantage to investing in solar energy, despite the Obama administration’s best efforts to prop the industry up. It would be bitter irony, but perhaps subsidizing solar energy producers caused the glut of solar panels that brought down Solyndra.
So, in an effort to help a company that couldn’t survive on its own in an unproven and immature industry, the Obama administration sped up the loan process and granted the loan – a process that the Bush administration had suspended earlier in the year because the company was deemed unstable. Since Solyndra executives donated to the president’s campaign and repeatedly visited the White House, the Obama administration has a long list of questions to answer.
Whereas most government programs and subsidies are wasteful failures, this effort by President Obama to impose his ideological energy preference on the country is a colossal error. Investigations are looking into possible criminal and other improper activity.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that this boondoggle or the history of failure of government subsidies will discourage continuation of this flawed process.
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“I am sending this Congress a plan that you should pass right away,” President Barack Obama declared last week in his address to Congress. “It's called the American Jobs Act. There should be nothing controversial about this piece of legislation. Everything in here is the kind of proposal that's been supported by both Democrats and Republicans – including many who sit here tonight. And everything in this bill will be paid for. Everything.”
His speech contained a list of proposals with broad appeal for the public and Congressional Democrats. But the bill he told Congress to pass umpteen times in the course of the address was nowhere to be seen, and may not even have been written. However, even the general concepts he set forth had glaring problems.
While Mr. Obama wants to fund things that are needed and useful, like transportation projects and infrastructure upgrades, these things provide short-term employment. The economy desperately needs to create long-term jobs, jobs that will be around many years hence, not jobs that last only several months. A bunch of short-term construction jobs, funded by government with money it doesn’t have, is a terrible plan.
“Pass this jobs bill,” he said, “and companies will get a $4,000 tax credit if they hire anyone who has spent more than six months looking for a job.” Sounds good, doesn’t it? But if a new job is going to last, it has to be in response to operations-related need, not government gimmickry. The average wage in the United States is about $50,000 a year, plus benefits. How many businesses of any size are going to take on that expense just to get a $4,000 tax credit?
The president seems not to understand that businesses do things for reasons related to their operation, and if something doesn’t make sense based on business factors, smart business people won’t do it.
He wants to extend the payroll tax holiday and keep the tax at 4.2 percent, rather than the normal 6.2 percent. “Pass this jobs bill, and the typical working family will get a $1,500 tax cut next year; $1,500 that would have been taken out of your pocket will go into your pocket,” he declared.
While this puts money back in the hands of the people who earned it – a good thing, to be sure – it is a temporary fix, and something everyone knows will end soon. It therefore has limited potential to make a substantive difference. But that isn’t the biggest downside. This proposal steals more revenue from Social Security and Medicare, two programs that are already drastically underfunded. Where will the money come from to offset this revenue loss?
Mr. Obama’s typically broad statements sound appealing, like this one: “By eliminating pages of loopholes and deductions, we can lower one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world.” Or this one: “We need a tax code where everyone gets a fair shake and everybody pays their fair share.” The concepts have great appeal, but the details create strong disagreement.
Taxing corporations at any rate forces higher prices that punish consumers, not the corporate bigwigs for which Mr. Obama has such disdain. But if he is serious he would fix the tax code so that it doesn’t encourage US companies to move jobs overseas, and keeps them from bringing corporate profits back home.
And where personal income tax fairness is concerned, the top 5 percent of taxpayers contribute 60 percent of government revenue, the top 10 percent contribute 75 percent of revenue, while half the U.S. population is now exempt from paying tax. Mr. Obama thinks that isn’t fair, and he’s right about that. But his solution is getting the wealthy to pay even more, to at last pay their “fair share.”
“Now it's time to clear the way for a series of trade agreements,” he said, that will make it easier for American companies to sell their products in Panama, Colombia, and South Korea. That’s true, but these three agreements were signed in 2007. Why wait until now to get Congressional action?
He also mentioned clearing out red tape in the regulatory process. Mr. Obama did right thing recently telling the Environmental Protection Agency to back down from new ozone standards it has been pushing.
That was reason to hope that at last he has realized that his ideological policies aren’t working and he now wants to try something different. Does this mean speeding up permits to drill our own oil and gas from the Gulf of Mexico, offshore, and onshore, and provide thousands of jobs and millions in government revenue?
By asking to address a joint session of Congress the president set the stage for something big. Mr. Obama really, really likes dramatic backdrops for his speeches. But using this setting to talk about a jobs plan raises expectations, and the substance of this speech fell well short of the hype.
He passed up a grand opportunity to announce changing course and removing government obstacles to economic recovery, and instead only offered more big government solutions like those that haven’t worked, and gave us a typical Obama campaign speech.
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A Gallup poll in March reflected that Americans believe the nation should prioritize the development of energy supplies over protecting the environment when the two goals are at odds by a 50 to 41 percent margin. The survey included 1,021 adults 18 and older chosen by random-digital-dial sampling, with a 95-percent confidence level.
Most polls are just a snapshot in time, but this one reflects a four-year trend of attitude reversal.
In 2007, the segment that preferred protecting the environment even if it meant limiting energy production measured 58 percent of the sample, against 34 percent, and that percentage has been falling ever since, to 50 percent in 2008, then 47 percent, then 43 percent and now 41 percent.
Their strong preference for conservation of energy supplies over increased production has likewise fallen, from 64 percent pro-conservation and 26 percent pro-production, to 48 percent pro-conservation and 41 percent pro-production. However, the poll also showed a 66 to 26 percent preference for development of alternative energy over increased fossil fuel production over the longer term.
Boiling all of that down, it shows that Americans who participated in these polls over the last four years are pretty sensible people. They understand that current economic circumstances –stubbornly high unemployment, with no relief in sight, and GDP that is languishing at 0.4 percent in the first quarter of 2011, rising to 1.0 percent in the second quarter – require that the country stay with proven energy sources and increase domestic production at least until the economy recovers.
They realize that the country badly needs to create jobs and they understand that increasing domestic energy production will serve that purpose. Currently, there are substantial oil and gas resources that are off-limits, and the American Petroleum Institute believes that opening up access to them would increase both jobs and tax revenues, and has a study by Wood Mackenzie that backs that up. The study shows that 530,000 jobs and $150 billion in revenues would result by 2025 from loosening the restrictions on producing domestic energy. There is no impetus in the Obama administration to follow this course, however, and in fact it prefers heavy regulation, drilling bans and foot-dragging bureaucracy that have the opposite effect.
Most everyone understands that if we can meet our energy needs by burning less fossil fuel, we certainly should do so, a point reflected in the Gallup polling. However, for it to make any sense at all to change the balance between conventional and alternative sources, alternative energy must be economical and as effective as the fossil fuels it replaces. And that is where the problem with “green” energy lies.
That point is underscored by what happened in Texas during this summer’s heat wave, where the state’s wind turbines failed to perform adequately to combat the extreme heat. As explained by Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writing for National Review Online, “Texas has 10,135 megawatts of installed wind-generation capacity, which is nearly three times as much as any other state. And yet, on [August 24], all of the state’s wind turbines mustered just 880 megawatts of power when electricity was needed the most. Put another way, even though wind turbines account for about 10 percent of Texas’s 103,000 megawatts of summer electricity-generation capacity, wind energy was able to provide just 1.3 percent of the juice the state needed … to keep the lights on and the air conditioners humming.” Climate reality: When the temperature rises, the wind slows down.
However, there is a good bit of positive news around right now, such as The Wall Street Journal’s report that “the U.S. Geological Survey said that Cook Inlet [Alaska] likely holds about 19 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, technically recoverable natural gas—nearly nine times more than the last estimates, made in 1995—as well as 600 million barrels of oil.” Since natural gas burns cleaner than coal or oil, this discovery makes it possible to reduce the use of dirtier-burning fuels.
And the British Broadcasting Company reports that scientists say that there was a mysterious decline in the growth of methane in the atmosphere in the last decades of the 20th Century, and that human activities are a factor in the positive change in the levels of what is regarded as one of the most potent greenhouse gases.
“Researchers writing in the journal Nature have come up with two widely differing theories as to the cause,” the BBC reported. “One suggests the decline was caused by greater commercial use of natural gas, the other that increased use in Asia of artificial fertilizer was responsible.” At a time when science, sometimes corrupt science, tells us mankind is killing the climate, here’s science telling us we have actually helped it.
The Gallup poll shows Americans believe we need to focus on developing alternative energy to replace fossil fuels, but they also believe that in the current economic situation we need to increase development of domestic energy supplies to lower prices, increase energy independence, and to put thousands of oil and gas workers back to work. If only the politicians could figure this out.
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Back in the George W. Bush era Mr. Bush got blamed for everything, problems real and imagined, and even though he’s been out of office for 31 months, he is still getting blamed. The troubles of today are his fault, they say, and he will likely be blamed for stuff for the next few years.
Mr. Bush certainly made mistakes during his presidency. He presided over increased federal spending and budget deficits, and failed to seal the southern border and address illegal immigration. Critics even blame Mr. Bush for the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction issue and the financial collapse. Believing the latter two requires one to be either fact-challenged or be someone who plays fast and loose with the facts.
The far left always needs a villain, but realizes this “blame Bush” strategy is losing steam, and needs a new villain to shift responsibility to for their policy failures and has changed its focus.
Enter the Tea Party, which really is a philosophy more than a party, and in fact consists of several separate organizations with “Tea Party” in their name, as well as individuals not associated with any organization who identify with Tea Party principles and favor restoring the United States of America as it was originally configured by the Founding Fathers. It seeks to return the government to its limited and Constitutional boundaries, and also supports fiscal responsibility, low taxation, border security, and personal freedom.
No wonder the far left wants to demonize the Tea Party. The principles it advocates are poison to everything these folks believe. If the movement is successful, the country will thrive and the far left is out of business, and they clearly cannot allow that to happen.
The desperate reaction to the Tea Party movement manifests itself in comments that are well beneath the high level of tolerance the left demands from the right. Here is an example, via Tom Friedman of the New York Times, who wrote: “If sane Republicans do not stand up to this Hezbollah faction in their midst, the Tea Party will take the G.O.P. on a suicide mission.” So, Mr. Friedman believes Tea Party folks are not sane and their ideals compare to those of Islamic terrorists.
Following along on that theme, Nicholas Kristof, also in the New York Times, commented: “Wake up to the national security threat. Only it’s not coming from abroad, but from our own domestic extremists....The blunt truth is that the biggest threat to America’s national security this summer doesn’t come from China, Iran or any other foreign power. It comes from budget machinations, and budget maniacs, at home.”
The hallowed halls of academia are not immune to these wild-eyed reactions: William Yeomans, Fellow in Law and Government at American University in Washington wrote this on the Politico Web site: “It has become commonplace to call the tea party faction in the House ‘hostage takers.’ But they have now become full-blown terrorists.” Iran is not a threat, al Qaeda is not a threat, our out-of-control spending is not a threat, but the Tea Party idealists are a threat.
Before the moderate left called Tea Party advocates “terrorists” it called them “racists,” like this example from the Keith Olberman show on MSNBC, where “actor and activist” Janeane Garofalo said that “they have no idea what the Boston tea party was about. … This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.” Democrat Representatives Maxine Waters and Charles Rangel appeared on the Fox News channel, both also saying racism was at the core of the Tea Party.
So, the Tea Party is a bunch of racists because they want a government that stays within its dictated boundaries and behaves sensibly with regard to taxes and spending, and personal freedom?
But while you likely have heard comments like the previous ones, chances are you haven’t heard about Tea Party advocate Lloyd Marcus, who writes, “I am a black performer/activist traveling on my third national Tea Party Express tour,” and he told of the “numerous white patriots [who] shook my hand with tears in their eyes thanked me for what I was doing for our country.” “These are the decent hard working great Americans Waters, Rangel and the left continuously attempt to portray as racist,” Mr. Marcus wrote.
A lot of folks believe the racist, terrorist bilge because it is being spread by folks they trust, lending credence to the maxim, “tell a lie often enough and people will begin to believe it.” Others suffer along under the same confusion as those who mischaracterize and demonize the Tea Party folks, apparently believing Tea Party principles are “radical,” and still others simply hate people that disagree with them, and resort to name-calling.
Everyone who regards limited and Constitutional government, fiscal responsibility, low taxation, border security, and personal freedom as “radical” ideas are grossly out of touch with everything the United States of America stands for. They are the ones who pose a great threat to the United States, and it is they, not the Tea Party folks, we should be concerned about.
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