Last week’s State of the Union address was a sad and pathetic affair, full of transparent rhetoric and demagoguery, brimming with incandescent hypocrisies, variegated with an expansive assortment of half-truths and lies, palled by a mediocrity that almost seemed intentional, detached from reality like an unmoored hot-air balloon that slowly ascends to the heavens, stuffed with dense and infuriating arrogance, and draped over our nation like a several-sizes-too-small coat with promises and ideas rendered diminutive in the shadow of the historical moment.

All this was clear last Tuesday night. And yet somehow over the past week, the address actually grew worse.

The president’s speech was less a factual information session about the current American condition than it was a mawkish parade of political images and symbols, meant to make us identify with the president’s vision and feel at safe harbor with his leadership. It was less a speech than a play, lavish with props and masquerading actors tasked with immersing the audience in an alternate version of reality. But over the past week, key scenes of the drama have fallen apart. The president now looks less like a seasoned political actor than like Quince at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, farcically fumbling his lines.

One of the supporting thespians was the Indiana-based electric car battery-maker Ener1, whose subsidiary EnerDel received a $118.5 million grant under the stimulus bill. EnerDel was also showered with more than $4 million in federal gifts under the Bush Administration. The scrappy little green boutique was meant to symbolize the flowering benefits of the sort of business-government handshaking that the rest of the civilized world calls “crony capitalism.” “In three years, our partnership with the private sector has already positioned America to be the world’s leading manufacturer of high-tech batteries,” Obama declared last Tuesday.

Precisely two days later, Ener1 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company had been an encore actor in the president’s campaign theatrics. Almost one year ago, Vice President Joe Biden visited the Ener1 facilities, effervescent about the administration’s promise to airlift 1 million electric cars onto the road by 2015. That pledge has since crashed on the shoals of reality and the cardboard prop that is Ener1 has blown over.

Watching Ener1 fold, it’s hard not to recall that last great monument to the progress of the green revolution: Solyndra. President Obama lauded that company in his 2010 State of the Union and it promptly imploded last year. One imagines executives at Pepsi placing urgent phone calls to the White House, encouraging the president to mention Coca-Cola in next year’s address. If you’re employed by a business receiving checks from the Department of Energy, you may want to dash off a few copies of your résumé this afternoon.

But the star of the State of the Union show, the leading lady, was Warren Buffett’s Secretary. “Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary,” Obama declared. “Do we want to keep these tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans? Or do we want to keep our investments in everything else — like education and medical research; a strong military and care for our veterans?” So central was Warren Buffett’s Secretary to the performance, she attended as the special guest of the president and belle of the ball, standing in the audience as a quiet testament to the grinding, Dickensian class divide that darkens the backstreets and alleys of modern America.

Warren Buffett’s Secretary was played by Debbie Bosanek, who is Warren Buffett’s actual secretary, and who makes between $200,000 and $500,000 per year, according to the calculations of Paul Roderick Gregory over at Forbes. It was a brilliant dramatic portrayal. While Bosanek herself is a creature of the upper classes, she effortlessly slipped into the part of Warren Buffett’s Secretary, a downtrodden proletarian exploited by the tax code, reminiscent of Peggy Olson in Mad Men.

This, by the way, presents a knotty conundrum for progressives. If Gregory’s deductions are correct, then Bosanek is likely a member of that charter club known as the “wealthiest 2%,” a coven of blackhearted plunderers and blue-blooded aristocrats that looted the country for all it was worth in 2008. Progressives have demanded higher taxes on the wealthiest 2%, yet hailed Bosanek as an overtaxed hero. They’ve blamed the wealthiest 2% for all the nation’s ills, but hoisted up this secretary as an emblem of justice in the class wars. Well, which is it? Should we add her image to theTwo Minutes Hate tape, or no? And should we raise her taxes? Lower them? Maybe we should just raise everyone’s taxes.

The overarching themes pervading the president’s State of the Union drama were America’s greatness and stifling inequality. America was great when it allowed for the president’s accomplishments, like killing Osama bin Laden. But when it came to the president’s failures, most notably three years of a doldrums job market, it was all the fault of that yawning canyon of economic class. Wealthy Americans — for whom Debbie Bosanek’s membership application is still pending — were cast as the villains, cackling all the way to their banks with insufficiently punitive Treasury receipts.

The only solution was to sock it to them, specifically with a 30% net tax on millionaires. This (along with solar batteries) was the Big Idea, the great glowing light bulb of the president’s address. And according to an analysis by the Fiscal Times, it would raise $30 billion in revenue — and that’s assuming that the sledgehammer of adding yet another tax didn’t further stall the economy. Of course, $30 billion isn’t immaterial, but the Tea Party Caucus could cut that much from the federal budget during a bad hangover. Meanwhile, the national debt is $15.2 trillion.

And Democrats have already booby-trapped the tax code for the wealthiest Americans. With current tax rates set to expire at the beginning of 2013, taxes on capital gains will shoot up from 15% to 20%. And thanks to a pernicious little slice of the Obamacare legislation, taxes on capital gains will further increase to almost 24% in 2013. All this will happen unless the federal government takes action to prevent it. It’s piquantly fitting, isn’t it? If the president wants to see tax rates tighten for millionaires, his easiest course is simply to get reelected.

But I regret that I’ve disposed of two paragraphs trying to refute the president’s numbers when the numbers are nugatory here. Obama is fully aware that his tax increase would do little to arrest the deficit and less to catalyze the economy. His purpose is to blacken the wealthy into villains and portray himself as the eminently reasonable hero; to siphon all the laws and details of politics and economics into a simple, dramatic dichotomy and cast himself on the side of good. He is, with total self-awareness, jousting with phantoms and trying to bring the rest of us along for the ride. It may make for a spectacular show, but at the end of the day, that’s all it is: cheap lines and theatrics cluttering the stage floor.

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An administrative law judge in Georgia could decide as early as this week whether voters in the state convinced him Barack Obama’s name should be removed from the 2012 presidential ballot because he is not qualified to hold the office.

But win, lose or draw, the fight isn’t going to be over, as other cases are erupting across the nation, with challenges being raised anew even in Obama’s own adopted political network in Illinois.

The Georgia hearing was before Judge Michael Malihi, and while none of the lawyers who appeared in the proceedings was willing to predict what the decision will be, several did confirm that Malihi had considered simply granting them a default victory, because Obama and his lawyers expressly stated they would not participate in a hearing to provide evidence that he is qualified to be on the ballot.

A default presumably would have meant a recommendation from the judge that Obama’s name be stricken from the ballot, a decision which would head for review immediately by Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp.

He, however, was the one who warned Obama of the “peril” of not participating in the hearing when Obama and his attorney had asked that the event be canceled.

Whatever the outcome in Georgia, the issue is gaining traction in other states, too, including Alabama, Tennessee, Arizona, New Hampshire, and even Illinois, Obama’s home political base.

There, in a complaint recently filed by Stephen F. Boulton of McCarthy Duffy LLP and Gary Kreep of the United States Justice Foundation, their client is asking for a change in state law to allow the vetting of political candidates.

Obama isn’t even mentioned by name, but don’t think for a minute that the requested change wouldn’t include his candidacy.

The plaintiff is Sharon Meroni, who long has fought inside the system for a way to challenge the candidacies there. In her new case, filed in the Circuit Court of Cook County, she is petitioning for a judicial review of the state’s election procedures as they exist now.

Targeted are the state Board of Elections, members of the board, several county clerks and others, including candidates Dan Duffy and Amanda Howland.

Meroni, a registered voter in the 27th Legislative District in the state, said her concern is that “only candidates qualified for office under the Illinois and United States Constitutions appear on the ballot.”

The state’s primary is in March.

The case alleges the candidates did not provide sufficient proof that they are U.S. citizens as required to hold the office being sought “as is required by the Illinois Constitution of 1970.”

State officials refused to remove the names from the ballots, so Meroni has gone to court. Granting ballot access, she said in the complaint, “is contrary to law, against the manifest weight of the evidence, arbitrary and capricious, and a denial of the rights of the petitioner.”

Kreep told WND the way the system is established in Illinois it essentially allows political parties to determine who runs for office, and unless voters find out about a filing and can assemble a formal objection within five days, their concerns are dismissed.

And the system has no procedure for verifying the eligibility of candidates, he said.

That particular issue has been in the headlines for the past four years, since before Obama’s 2008 election victory, because of the questions that remain over his eligibility. The U.S. Constitution demands a “natural born citizen” be president and the Founders probably thought that to be the offspring of two citizen parents when they wrote the term.

But Obama’s father never was a citizen. There also are those who contend he was not even born in the United States.

Kreep said the Illinois procedures make it virtually impossible for candidates to be challenged for their eligibility.

He said there likely will be raised in other states concerns similar to those in Illinois, where “barriers now in existence … bar voters from reasonable investigation of the citizenship of a candidate.”

That’s simply a deprivation of the constitutional right to due process, he said. The case seeks a declaration that the political maneuvers are unconstitutional.

There also have been assembled campaigns specifically to encourage voters to file eligibility complaints about candidates with states. One such effort is the Obama Ballot Challenge, which lists contacts for state elections offices across the country.

It is, of course, the states that actually run elections; a national election is just the compilation of the results from the 50 states.

“A candidate that is not legally qualified to be on the ballot, such as Barack Obama, steals votes from other candidates who are legally on the ballot,” the site advises.

WND previously reported that cases already have been begun in New Hampshire, where state officials rejected the claims; Alabama, Tennessee and Arizona.

The newest round of court actions do not try to have a judge determine Obama is not qualified for the Oval Office and remove him from it, they simply challenge his eligibility for the 2012 election.

Many of the cases cite Minor v. Happersett, a U.S. Supreme Court opinion from 1875 that said a “natural born citizen” would be a person whose parents both were citizens.

“This complaint does not request any injunction against any state or federal government official. Instead this complaint asserts that the private entity, Defendant Democratic Party, intends to act negligently or fraudulently in a manner that will cause irreparable harm to the plaintiffs, to the states, and to the citizens of the United States,” said one of the filings.

It continued, “Because Mr. Obama has admitted that his father was not a U.S. citizen, and because this fact has been confirmed by the U.S. State Department, any reasonable person with knowledge of these facts would doubt Mr. Obama’s constitutional qualifications. Therefore, any representation by the Democratic Party certifying said qualifications would be negligent, absent further evidence verifying Mr. Obama’s natural-born status.

“Plaintiffs further request an injunction prohibiting the Democratic Party from making any representation to any state official asserting, implying, or assuming that Mr. Obama is qualified to hold the office of president, absent a showing by the party sufficient to prove that said representation is not negligent.”

Van Irion, lead counsel for Liberty Legal Foundation, also is working on several of the issues, and has brought the question in court in Arizona.

“We picked the Arizona court for several reasons, but the main one being that it is part of the 9th Circuit. The 9th Circuit has indicated in dicta that an FEC-registered presidential candidate would have standing for this type of suit,” he said. The organization is working with John Dummett, a Liberty Legal Foundation member who is a candidate for the office of president in the 2012 election.

Irion said the other lawsuit was filed in state court in Tennessee.

“The focus of the state-court suit is to prevent certification to the Tennessee Secretary of State. This suit puts greater emphasis on the negligent misrepresentation/fraud aspects of a certification from the DNC. It includes more facts regarding Obama’s Indonesian dual citizenship and fraudulent Social Security Number,” he said.

He said if the cases succeed, the Democrats would not be able to list Obama as their candidate for 2012.

“Neither lawsuit discusses Obama’s place of birth or his birth certificate. These issues are completely irrelevant to the argument. LLF’s lawsuit simply points out that the Supreme Court has defined ‘natural-born citizen’ as a person born to two parents who were both U.S. citizens at the time of the natural-born citizen’s birth. Obama’s father was never a U.S. citizen. Therefore, Obama can never be a natural-born citizen. His place of birth is irrelevant,” Van Irion’s group said.

WND also has reported that Maricopa, Ariz., County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has launched a formal law enforcement investigation into concerns Obama may submit fraudulent documentation to be put on the state’s election ballot in 2012.

Other attorneys involved in the Georgia case are J. Mark Hatfield and Orly Taitz.

Hatfield has told WND that the goal is for a court determination on the definition of “natural born citizen,” which then could be applied directly to Obama’s candidacy.

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When Pliny the Younger was a provincial governor in the Roman Empire, he wrote a letter to Emperor Trajan asking whether he should execute Christians who refused to burn incense in worship of the emperor. Pliny, in keeping with the customs of the empire, did not care about forcing Christians to believe that the emperor was a god. But in public they had to behave as if they did. Thus, the Christians were in the dock not so much because of their faith in a risen Christ as over their willful refusal to declare themselves part of the reigning social order.

I thought of Pliny when I read that the Obama administration, in creating specific rules to implement Obamacare, will require all employers (with a very narrow exemption discussed below) to offer their employees health insurance that provides FDA-approved contraception, female sterilization, and other “reproductive” services free of charge — even if the employer is a religious organization and doing so violates its doctrine. I also recalled the times that President Obama and other members of his administration have supported “freedom of worship.” However, as in Pliny’s time, “freedom of worship” is not the same thing as “freedom of religion.” The former means that one may believe whatever one wants and worship privately without interference, whereas the latter allows one freedom to live in the world at large consistent with one’s faith tenets, even if they are not endorsed by the state.

Because the administration is knowingly forcing (primarily Catholic) religious organizations to pay for medical services to which they are theologically opposed, the new rules represent a frontal assault on freedom of religion at an institutional level. This is no small matter. To date, public controversies over “conscience” in health care have mostly involved individuals — e.g., doctors, nurses, pharmacists — whose personal morality or religious convictions conflicted with the provision of certain medical procedures or substances. For example, pharmacies in Washington State and Illinois have litigated over the right of owners to refuse to dispense contraception on religious grounds. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the pharmacies and in favor of a state regulation (since withdrawn for reconsideration) requiring them to dispense legally prescribed medications. An Illinois state court took the opposite view in a similar case.

But the free-birth-control rule goes much further than creating a potential conflict between the general law and individual religious beliefs. Rather, the rule targets the right of religious organizations to conduct their public activities consistently with their religious dogma and moral values — except within the narrow confines of an actual church, synagogue, mosque, temple, or monastery.

This isn’t an accident. The preliminary rule, which will remain unchanged in the final version, created a very narrowly tailored religious exemption (page 46,623 of the Federal Register). To qualify for exemption as a “religious employer,” an organization must meet four criteria:

1. The “inculcation of religious values” is “its purpose.”

2. It “primarily employs persons who share its religious tenets.”

3. “It primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets.”

4. It is a non-profit organization under sections of the code that “refer to churches, their integrated auxiliaries, and conventions or associations, as well as to the exclusively religious activities of any religious order.”

Lest there be any doubt of the limited nature of the exemption, the proposed rule states, “Specifically, the Departments seek to provide for a religious accommodation that respects the unique relationship between a house of worship and its employees in ministerial positions.”

Thus, the group health insurance covering nuns in a Catholic religious order would probably not have to cover contraception. But insurance provided by the same order’s elementary school probably would. Ditto a hospital established by the nuns.

Even more telling: Despite much screaming from opponents, the Department of Health and Human Services has refused to broaden the religious exemption in the final rule — forcing religiously founded organizations to violate their parent church’s teachings, a frontal assault on the freedom of faiths to operate institutional outreach organizations consistent with their beliefs. If this rule stands, it won’t end there. If Catholic organizations can be compelled by federal diktat to violate their religious tenets, so can other religious organizations in different contexts.

Some have argued that a recent 9–0 Supreme Court ruling allowing a Lutheran church to fire a minister who in a secular organization would have been protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act provides shelter against the free-birth-control rule. I think not. That case was not about “freedom of religion,” as I have defined it here, but “freedom of worship” — the Court ruled that churches are free to decide on the criteria for appointing and releasing their own ministers and individual leaders without interference. But the free-birth-control rule isn’t about the “ministerial exception.” Rather, it imposes a legal duty on faith organizations to comply with the values of the state whenever they engage in public action or charitable enterprise among the general society.

In fact, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declared that the Obama administration intends not only to force churches to do what the state directs, but even to speak as the state directs. From Sebelius’s official statement about the promulgation of the new rule:

We intend to require employers that do not offer coverage of contraceptive services to provide notice to employees, which will also state that contraceptive services are available at sites such as community health centers, public clinics, and hospitals with income-based support.

Thus, the Obama administration is attacking even freedom of worship by forcing exempt organizations to tell their employees where and how they can violate church teaching.

The birth-control rule is the latest and most egregious example of government forcing religious organizations to conform their operations to reigning secular moral values. In this sense, faith organizations are being compelled to participate in a metaphorical Caesar worship. As in the Roman Empire, the government will allow religious organizations general freedom of worship, but, increasingly, not freedom of religion. Pliny would approve.

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SITTING in the Oval Office on October 31st, Barack Obama tried to look like a man in charge. “We can’t wait for action on the Hill,” he declared. “We’ve got to go ahead and move forward.” The president then signed his latest executive order. With Congress frozen and an election looming, Mr Obama has been trying to exert power on his own. “We can’t wait” is his new slogan.The new executive order tries to alleviate a dire scarcity of drugs. This year has seen a shortage of 232 medicines, up from 70 in 2006, according to the University of Utah, which keeps the country’s most comprehensive list. These are mostly injected medicines, such as generic chemotherapy drugs. Many patients have had to delay treatment. A grey market has flourished, with middlemen hoarding drugs and selling them at a premium.Fixing this problem has been difficult, in part because its causes are so complex. Concentration among generic drugmakers may be to blame. The top three makers of generic injectables control 71% of the market by volume. When one drugmaker has a manufacturing problem, others rarely step in. It takes time to begin or ramp up…

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There they go again.

The American left, caught in the act of brandishing their
electronic rope for yet another conservative black man, is busy
dodging their long and horrendous history of racism.

Mother Jones
tries to turn attention from the left’s abysmal record on
lynchings — high tech or with a rope — by re-visiting my
criticism of ex-Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod. My point back
then, of course, was that Ms. Sherrod cited a Supreme Court case in
which she claimed the Court said her relative was lynched. I read
the case. The words “lynch” or “lynching” appeared exactly nowhere
in the case. Ms. Sherrod, surprise, finally emerged as just another
standard left-winger who, sadly, employs race and state to push a
progressive agenda. That was my criticism and it stands.

But the Sherrod incident highlights exactly why leftist
publications are so wildly excitable on the subject of lynching, as
Media Matters is here
as it foams about (the list is long) Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity,
Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, Monica Crowley, Peter Johnson Jr., Greg
Gutfeld, Brent Bozell, Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit and
yours truly. All of us having in our individual fashion called them
out on their wretched history. (Note to Media Matters: You missed
Mark Levin. Get on the stick over there.)

The American left has a brutal and vivid centuries-long
history on race, as we have previously detailed at length
here and
here. This is a political faith that has historically exhibited
a mind-bending addiction to judging their fellow Americans by skin
color. The point the left didn’t want to go anywhere near in the
Sherrod case is that Sherrod’s relative was beaten to death –
brutally — by the local sheriff, and in 1940s Georgia sheriffs
were part of the Democratic political machinery. And the Supreme
Court case was judged by a lifetime Klan member — Justice Hugo
Black. So whether it was the sheriff on the bottom rung of justice
or the Supreme Court at the top rung, the long hand of the
progressive/racism tie was operating. That tie literally beat a
black man to death — and then sat favorably in judgment of his
killers. Progressives are well on record as having supported
slavery, segregation, lynching, the Ku Klux Klan (which actually
ran the 1924 Democratic Convention known to history as the “Klan
Bake”) and every race-based approach to life right on down to
today’s belief in racial quotas and refusing to prosecute the Black
Panther voting rights case in Philadelphia for racial reasons. (See
J. Christian Adams book
Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice
Department.)

To cite one of a gazillion examples, here is the
Republican view of lynching as expressed all the way back in 1924
in its platform of that year:

We urge the Congress to enact at the earliest possible date a
federal anti-lynching law so that the full influence of the federal
government may be wielded to exterminate this hideous crime.

And the Democrats? How did they stand on the lynching issue?

We condemn the efforts of the Republican Party to nationalize
the functions and duties of the states.

Get that? This was the left’s response to the GOP on lynching.
In other words: buzz off. We’re busy lynching black men,
particularly if we catch them associating with white women. Take
your anti-lynching law platform and stuff it.

And, but of course, this anti-anti-lynching plank was
seamlessly tied together with every progressive nostrum of the day,
right down to assailing the GOP for taking campaign funds from
“predatory interests.” The same blather promoted by today’s
progressives in the Citizens United case.

In short?

This is what the left does. Today with Herman Cain,
yesterday with Clarence Thomas, long yesterdays ago with a 1924
platform that essentially issued a coded endorsement of their right
to lynch the uppity black men of their day. And with Shirley
Sherrod’s relative Bobby Hall — who, by the way, was a black man
from Georgia just like Herman Cain.

Nothing has changed this tie between progressives and
racism. The latter is used to drive the policies of the
former.

It was true in 1924. It was true in the 1940s’ Bobby Hall
case. It is true today.

And all you have to do to see the modern version of this
at work is keep your eye on the double-standard being used with the
black Herman Cain and that used to ferociously defend the white
liberal Bill Clinton, the latter accused by three women
successively of rape (Juanita Broaddrick), groping (Kathleen
Willey), and dropping his pants with a request to “kiss it” (Paula
Jones).

What’s unfolding here is a dramatic stripping bare of the
progressive double standard on race and sex. Why? Precisely because
conservatives are fed up with letting these people get away with
the double game. The spotlight is now on.

Make my day: read Mother Jones and Media
Matters.

Where the 21st century version of the sentiments of 1924
progressive/racism ties are carefully updated and skillfully
presented for all to see.

Herman Cain may be President of the United States. He may
never be President of the United States.

But he damn well isn’t going to be lynched for trying to
be President of the United States.

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At the Heritage Foundation last week, House Budget Committee
Chairman Paul Ryan demonstrated why he doesn’t need to be running
for President to be framing the debate for 2012. He delivered there
on October 26 a breathtakingly beautiful speech on Saving the
American Idea, which defines the Spirit of 2012.

He began, “The mission of the Heritage Foundation is to
promote the principles of free enterprise, limited government,
individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong
national defense. These are the principles that define the American
idea. And this mission has never been timelier, because these
principles are very much under threat from policies here in
Washington.”

Ryan, a disciple of and former staffer for the late Jack
Kemp, then explained, “What makes America exceptional — what gives
life to the American Idea — is our dedication to the self-evident
truth that we are all created equal, giving us equal rights to
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that means
opportunity.”

Since the early 1700s, America has been the land of
opportunity, offering world leading prosperity, stemming from world
leading freedom. And millions and millions of the dispossessed, the
homeless tempest tossed, and their progeny now totaling hundreds of
millions altogether, have voted for that American Dream with their
feet, crossing oceans, deserts, rivers, and mountain ranges to get
here. As I discuss in my recent book, America’s Ticking
Bankruptcy Bomb:

Which leaves the question, why did they come? And why do they
still come?…. Well, it’s not for the Food Stamps, or the public
housing, or even Social Security and Medicare. America’s world
leading prosperity dates all the way back to the early
18th century. The roots of that prosperity can be seen in the
Declaration of Independence, which recognizes the God-given right
of each man and woman to the pursuit of happiness. That is why
they came. They came because America has always been the land of
freedom and prosperity and opportunity. They came because of the
American Dream, that in this nation every man and woman enjoys the
freedom and opportunity to rise to achieve their dreams, regardless
of family background, class, race, or religion.

Ryan frames the question now facing us in 2012: “Have
those periods of unprecedented prosperity in America’s past been
the product of our Founding principles? Or, as some would argue,
have we made it this far only in spite of our outdated values? Are
we still an exceptional nation? Should we even seek to be unique?
Or should we become more like the rest of the world — more
bureaucratic, less hopeful, and less free?”

Or as I write in my book regarding America’s heritage of
world leading prosperity:

Is that over now? Is America just another nation now, like
Greece, as President Obama has suggested? In fact, just like
Greece? Is the American Dream done? Is that what is meant by the
“New Normal”? Or is that just a phrase to provide political cover
for the realities of a new socialism, where everyone as Churchill
explained shares equally in the curses of misery, rather than
unequally in the blessings of capitalism?

Ryan then discussed at Heritage how Obama is answering these
questions for 2012:

To my great disappointment, it appears that the politics of
division are making a big comeback. Many Americans share my
disappointment — especially those who were filled with great hope
a few years ago, when then Senator Obama announced his
candidacy….Do you remember what he said? He said that what’s
stopped us from meeting our greatest challenges is, “the failure of
leadership, the smallness of our politics — the ease with which we
are distracted by the petty and the trivial, our chronic avoidance
of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political
points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working
consensus to tackle big problems.

Imagine if Obama had been true to his political rhetoric
from 2008. Suppose he had been true to his promise that his
economic program would involve a “net spending cut,” several
trillion dollars of wasted unnecessary spending ago. Suppose he had
truly been a non-partisan President working with both parties to
enact a truly effective economic recovery program, like Reagan,
lifting up the poorest of Americans with booming economic
prosperity. Suppose like Ryan, Obama had adopted the inclusive,
pro-growth, prosperity vision of Jack Kemp.

Contrary to the abusive rhetoric of left-wing-extremist
know nothings in media and entertainment, some of them literally
clowns, Obama would be so universally beloved that we would be
clearing space for him on Mt. Rushmore right now. Instead Obama
played us with rhetoric promising prosperity and recovery, when all
along he planned to deliver dependency on his political machine
instead.

Ryan explained his disappointment with Obama in
devastating detail:

Nearly three years into his presidency, look at where we
are now:

Petty and trivial? Just last week, the President told a
crowd in North Carolina that Republicans are in favor of quote
‘dirtier air, dirtier water, and less people with health
insurance.’ Can you think of a pettier way to describe sincere
disagreements between the two parties on regulation and health
care?

Chronic avoidance of tough decisions? The President still
has not put forward a credible plan to tackle the threat of
ever-rising spending and debt, and it’s been over 900 days since
his party passed a budget in the Senate.

A preference for scoring cheap political points instead of
consensus-building? This is the same President who is currently
campaigning against a do-nothing Congress, when in fact, the House
of Representatives has passed over a dozen bills to help get the
economy moving and deal with the debt, only to see the President’s
party kill those bills in the do-nothing Senate.

Note that you never saw President Reagan attacking his opponents
this way. He engineered a truly revolutionary rollback of decades
of runaway liberalism on a bipartisan basis with the House of
Representatives controlled by liberal Democrat majorities for his
entire Presidency.

Obama is so divorced from the reality of America and his
own policies, that he calls essential relief from the regulatory
tsunami he has unleashed on America being for “dirtier air, dirtier
water, and fewer Americans with health insurance.” Do you see yet
why booming economic recovery is now two years overdue, and nowhere
in sight?

The President, indeed, is now denouncing what he calls
“the Republican Congress.” Maybe it is true his Democrat base is so
out of the loop they don’t know that the Democrats have continued
to control the U.S. Senate for going on six years now. But the
President is going to be sorely schooled on Election Day to find
that the great majority of the American people are, in fact, not
that stupid, and cannot be so easily misled by rhetoric that is so
dishonest that it can only be described as dishonorable.

Ryan noted that the House already not only proposed but
passed a 2012 budget this year that would have put the budget on a
path to balance and the economy on the path to prosperity. “But
instead of working together where we agree, the President has opted
for divisive rhetoric and the broken politics of the past. He is
going from town to town, impugning the motives of Republicans,
setting up straw men and scapegoats, and engaging in intellectually
lazy arguments, as he tries to build support for punitive tax hikes
on job creators.”

Exhibit A: between Republicans and moderate Democrats,
there are strong majorities in both houses of Congress for
individual and corporate tax reform exactly as proposed in Ryan’s
House budget. That involves a top 25 percent income tax rate for
families earning over $100,000 a year, with a 10 percent rate below
that, and generous personal exemptions of $10,000 per family
member. And it involves an internationally competitive corporate
tax rate of 25 percent, closer to the rates in Communist China, the
European Union and our neighbor to the north, Canada. These
policies would provide the tax framework for booming economic
growth.

But Obama has done nothing to work on that, even though
his own Simpson-Bowles Commission proposed quite similar reforms.
That Commission was another sham for Obama to pose as a deficit and
spending cutter, when his intentions all along have been just the
opposite. That was yet another example of what I have called
Obama’s calculated deception, taking advantage of what he is sure a
majority at least doesn’t know and won’t find out.

Instead, “The tax increases proposed by Senate Democrats
and endorsed by the President — when combined with the new taxes
in the health care law, and the President’s other tax preferences
– would push the top federal tax rate to roughly 50 percent in
just 14 months, while doing nothing to promote job creation. This
tax increase on so-called millionaires and billionaires would
actually constitute a huge tax hike on the nation’s most successful
small businesses.”

Ryan finally cuts to the heart of the President’s economic
fallacies in saying:

The President has talked a lot about math lately. He’s been
saying that, ‘If we’re not willing to ask those who’ve done
extraordinarily well to help America close the deficit…the math
says…we’ve got to put the entire burden on the middle class and the
poor.’ This is really a stunning assertion from the President. When
you look at the actual math, you quickly realize that the way out
of this mess is to combine economic growth with reasonable spending
restraint. Yet neither of these things factors into the President’s
zero-sum logic.

Ryan here is actually counterproductively polite. In 2007,
before Obama was even elected President, after nearly 40 years of
Reagan Republican tax policy, the top 1 percent of income earners
paid more in federal income taxes than the bottom 95 percent of
income earners combined. The bottom 40 percent of income
earners as a group on net paid exactly zero percent of federal
income taxes. Yet President Obama is running around the country
telling us that Republicans want to put the entire tax burden on
the middle class and the poor.

This rhetoric is far worse than just wrong, or in error.
It is dishonorable calculated deception. It is so divorced from
reality that no other conclusion can be drawn.

Paul Ryan didn’t say the following, but I will. What
understanding Ryan’s speech reveals is that while Barack Obama was
born in Hawaii half a century ago, he is not culturally an
American. Raised during his formative years in the Indonesian
public schools, where he learned to appreciate the beauty of the
Islamic call to prayer, he was kept isolated from mainstream
America the rest of his life. That is why he doesn’t understand the
meaning and beauty of traditional American prosperity, and has no
clue as to how to restore it.

Worse, his model for political machine domination of
America is based not on restoring prosperity, but on fostering
dependency on government. That is why he is not and never has been
on track to restoring booming economic growth, which on the
historical record of America is now long, long overdue. Rush
Limbaugh has been right all along.

Worse still, traditional American prosperity is actually
morally embarrassing to Obama. These are the reasons why it is not
coming back until he and his co-conspirators are removed from
power.

That alienation you feel is because America is under
foreign occupation right now, by the hopelessly outdated
intellectual forces of Marxism rooted in the Eastern Europe of over
100 years ago. America doesn’t need to be transformed. America
needs to be restored. This is a Paul Revere moment, and every one
of you needs to be deputized to bring the word to everyone you
know, so that 2012 may be the year of the Rebirth of
America.

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One of the largest landslide elections in the history of the United States took place one year ago today. Free-market Republicans, riding a wave of public anger at bailouts, stimulus, and big-government programs, swept into power, capturing 63 seats and control of the U.S. House of Representatives, not to mention six U.S. Senate seats and over 675 state-legislative seats all over the country — with control of 21 state legislative chambers shifting to GOP hands. It was a truly historic landslide that the American people rightly expected would put an end to the Obama agenda that had been fundamentally transforming America before our eyes. Politicians and pundits alike looked on in awe. But one man was unconvinced: Barack Obama.

The day after the election, Obama held a press conference to spin the meaning of the historic landslide. He explained: “I think we’d be misreading the election if we thought that the American people want to see us for the next two years relitigate arguments that we had over the last two years.”

Keep reading this post . . .

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SOMETIMES the best stimulus is not the biggest, but the one that’s possible. While Barack Obama has been haranguing Congress, without success, to pass his $447 billion stimulus plan, a more modest effort paid off on October 24th when the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two big mortgage-finance companies, made it easier for borrowers to lower the rates they pay on their mortgages.

Mortgage rates are the lowest in a generation, triggering a rush by homeowners to retire higher-rate loans and take out new ones (see chart). But roughly a quarter of homeowners cannot refinance because their mortgages exceed the value of their homes. In early 2009 the administration introduced its Home Affordable Refinance Programme (HARP), allowing refinancing for “underwater borrowers” with no history of delinquency. Although Fannie and Freddie were taken over by the federal government in 2008, HARP would not expose the taxpayer to any more loss, since refinancing did not make the loan riskier.The programme has been a disappointment. Up to the end of August only 894,000…

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Obama visits Michigan to tout his “jobs plan” and his auto
bailout. (NYT)

Republicans are holding a House committee hearing on Solyndra;
Steven Chu is not testifying. (The
Hill)

A clash is ahead for Occupy Wall Street and the city of New York
after Mayor Bloomberg said they’re going to clean up the park the
protesters are camped out in. (CNBC)

The iPhone 4S hits shelves. (WSJ)

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi faces a confidence
vote. (AFP)

Secretary of State Clinton will give a speech outlining major
points of the Obama Administration’s policy towards Asia. (Yahoo!
News)

How did Obama know about Fast and Furious before Eric
Holder?

On the main site:

AARP Is Killing Entitlement Reform, by Ross Kaminsky: Behind
AARP’s new ad to pressure the Super Committee to leave Medicare and
Social Security untouched.

The Left’s Mormon Problem, by Thirsty McWormwood: Who is afraid
of Mormonism? It’s not just evangelicals.

Without Visuals, a Different Impression, by Quin Hillyer: Some
belated, sobering thoughts about Tuesday’s debate.

We
Built This City!, by Daniel J. Flynn: Hippies-turned-yuppies
hate to be reminded they sold out.

The
Emperor Returns, by George H. Wittman: Tsar Vladimir has big
plans for himself, his country, and its neighbors.

View source page.

I’m not a number. I’m not a line item on a budget. And
I’m definitely not a pushover. But I am a voter. So, Washington,
before you even think about cutting my Medicare and Social Security
benefits, here’s a number you should remember: 50 million. We are
50 million seniors who earned our benefits, and you will be hearing
from us — today and on Election Day.

So blusters the retirement-aged gentleman in the AARP’s
new TV
ad.

AARP is not just taking a partisan gamble with this brazen
threat against reformers, most of whom are Republicans; they’re
threatening our whole nation’s financial future. The organization
makes an enormous amount of money from selling insurance policies
that are desirable to its members precisely because the current
system is as it is. Thus, the AARP has a multi-billion dollar
financial interest that is separate from, and arguably contrary to,
the interests of its members.

Indeed, earlier this year the House Ways and Means Health
Subcommittee held a
hearing on whether the overlap between AARP’s
insurance business and its lobbying and advocacy efforts is
appropriate: “there is good reason to question whether AARP is
primarily looking out for seniors or just its own bottom line.” A
report by Republican congressmen Wally Herger (CA) and Dave
Reichert (WA) entitled “Behind
the Veil: The AARP America Doesn’t Know” is a damning
indictment of the organization’s inherent conflicts of interest,
including:

• “AARP is in fact a large, complex and sophisticated
organization with over $2.2 billion in total assets and had
revenues in excess of $1.4 billion in 2009 alone.”

• “AARP is one of the nation’s largest insurance companies
and by far the largest provider of Medicare plans to
seniors.”

• “AARP is also one of the most powerful and active
lobbying groups (in terms of dollars spent) in the
country.”

• “The missions of AARP’s subsidiaries appear in direct
conflict with one another and, as such, it is very difficult to
determine which interests are being represented — those of the
‘non-profit’ or the ‘for-profit’ arm of AARP.”

• “The Democrats’ health care law, which AARP strongly
endorsed, could result in a windfall for AARP that exceeds over $1
billion during the next 10 years.”

It’s not the first time the AARP has run such an ad.
A similar one, with the same
actor, came out in July also emphasizing the group’s 50 million
members as an unveiled threat against members of
Congress.

AARP spokesperson Tiffany Lundquist spent some time
discussing the issue with me, including saying that the ad “was
designed to bring attention to the discussions now taking place in
Washington on proposals which may include cuts to Social Security
and Medicare benefits.”

When asked whether the release of this ad was timed to
influence the discussions of the “Super Committee” that is
attempting to negotiate deficit- and debt-reduction policies to
bring before Congress, Ms. Lundquist responded
“definitely.”

I suggested to Ms. Lundquist that I was unaware of any
plan that would cut benefits for current retirees or even
near-retirees, to which she replied that the AARP has members as
young as fifty and that the organization “works for the interests
of our younger members as well.” Further, she named a particular
idea that the AARP is against: a change in the formula to calculate
Social Security’s annual cost of living adjustment
(“COLA”).

In particular, there has been discussion for many years of
changing which version of the Consumer Price Index is used to
calculate annual benefit increases. It has been suggested that
changing to a “chained
CPI” which
more accurately reflects how people actually spend
money, in part by assuming that people will substitute out of items
which are increasing in price if they can, will slow the growth of
entitlements’ cost.

Going back many years, some of the most credible
economists in America have argued that the current CPI calculations
overstate inflation and thus increase Social Security payments more
than they should, putting tremendous pressure on the federal budget
– not least because each over-generous increase is compounded by
the next. In 1997, Federal Reserve Chairman
Alan Greenspan stated that “We know with near
certainty that the current CPI is off. There’s a very high
probability that the bias ranges from half a percentage point to 1
1/2 percentage points per year.” And Alice Rivlin, a Democrat and
then Vice Chairwoman of the Fed, said that “The way we measure
inflation, the way we measure productivity are flawed,” repeating
in a
2004 book that “Research has shown that the consumer price
index overstates inflation somewhat.”

THE AARP’s POSITION mirrors those of redistributionists
everywhere who argue that slowing the growth of a government
program is the same as cutting it. If your employer gave you a
three percent pay raise this year and then a two percent pay raise
next year, the AARP and almost every Democrat on Capitol Hill would
argue that you got a pay cut in that second year because you were
expecting a bigger raise. At least they should argue that to be
consistent with their sky-is-falling claims about controlling the
growth of entitlement spending.

Ms. Lundquist also repeated the ad’s rhetoric that AARP
members have “earned” their benefits. But what exactly have they
earned? Is any current or future recipient of entitlement payments
due a particular COLA formula? At least two courts have recently
said “no.” In June, judges in Denver and St. Paul, Minnesota, ruled
that beneficiaries of public pensions do not have a right to a
particular cost of living calculation.

In the
Minnesota case, the plaintiffs (beneficiaries of
various Minnesota public retirement systems) claimed that the
state’s move to adjust the formula for post-retirement benefit
calculations were an unconstitutional taking of property. In his
ruling, Judge Gregg Johnson stated that a claimed “expectation that
future adjustments would be made pursuant to a particular formula…
has neither a contractual basis, nor a reasonable basis enforceable
by estoppel principles.”

And in a similar Colorado
case, plaintiffs sued after the state capped COLA
increases (as well as increasing retirement age and other
qualifying requirements) for PERA, the state’s public employee
pension plan, arguing that the changes violated “Contract, Takings,
and Substantive Due Process Clauses of the United States
Constitution.” In his opinion, District Court Judge Robert Hyatt
concluded that “there is no contract right to a specific COLA
formula frozen at retirement for life.” Furthermore, both judges
agreed, as Judge Hyatt put it, that there is a “legitimate
governmental interest of… preserving the solvency of
PERA.”

Responding for this article, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said,
“There is no plan I have seen or supported that would cut benefits
for current retirees. But, the reality is that without reforming
our entitlement programs for future beneficiaries our economy will
collapse. We have an obligation to prevent that from happening.”
Senator Lee, along with Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Lindsey
Graham (R-SC) have introduced legislation
to begin to deal with the cost of Social Security benefits — but
they explicitly exclude those of or fewer than five years from
retirement age from any impact of the changes, and they phase in
those changes for those more than five years from Social Security
eligibility. The trio explained their rationale in a press conference
in April.

Indeed we do have a responsibility to keep from
bankrupting the nation. But the AARP sees no such responsibility as
part of its mission, at least not if it means its current or
future members giving up even one cent of entitlement
increases based on the way those increases are calculated
today.

Ms. Lundquist says that the AARP “wants to see the
entitlement-related budget issues addressed now or later.” But
when asked if the AARP would support plugging our gaping budget
hole in part by reductions in benefit growth for future
retirees, her answer was a resounding no: “Don’t cut
benefits.”

Of course, this came mere moments after she professed the
organization’s desire to see Social Security “strengthened.” When I
suggested that a refusal to accept any benefit cuts (including
slower growth in benefits) ever means that the group can
only be supporting tax increases, the AARP’s spokeswoman responded
coyly, “We haven’t said that.”

And she was equally adamant against Social Security reform
that would include personal accounts, making the usual anti-liberty
econo-nonsense claim that “recent stock market volatility shows
that’s the wrong way to go.”

A cursory look at major mutual fund companies’ offerings
shows a range of funds investing in a range from government bonds
to corporate bonds to blends of bonds and stocks that despite the
wild volatility in the last few months and years have long-term
returns at least double that which Social Security will provide. At
least as importantly, many of them have a “beta” (correlation to a
stock market average, a common measure of risk) much less than one,
meaning an investor in such funds doesn’t have to lie awake at
night worrying about what the market will do tomorrow.

Furthermore, the large fund companies have products
specifically tailored to a person’s expected retirement age, moving
the asset allocation gradually out of stocks and into bonds as a
person nears retirement. Almost any of these funds would be better
than Social Security if your goal is actually to retire with a nest
egg.

Helping create solid nest eggs and self-reliant
retirements for its members is apparently not on the AARP’s “to do”
list.

So what is the AARP afraid of? They’re afraid, as all
liberal interest groups are, of several things:

• Less money flowing through the sticky hands of
government, reducing the ability of government to create programs
which benefit the AARP’s bottom line.

• More personal responsibility being taken by individuals
for their own retirements, reducing the need for retirees to be
dependent on AARP for advice, financial services, or
lobbying.

• More Americans having incentive to be economically
well-educated and to care about the impact of government policy,
including taxation and spending, on the value of their retirement
savings, and most of all they’re afraid of.

• Better financial results for their members, reducing the
need for the members to buy AARP-branded insurance
policies.

MAY 1, 2011 REPRESENTED the 30th anniversary of reforms of
Chile’s Social Security-like system that turned it from a defined
benefit plan with a defined contribution system. A National Center
for Policy Analysis study from
last year lays out the tremendous benefits of the reforms on labor
participation, by its removing the incentive from people to retire
in their early 60s when they would still have many productive years
ahead of them, should they choose to work. People contribute more
and begin withdrawing later, an obvious recipe for retirement plan
success.

The Chilean system isn’t perfect, but has been gradually
made better over time. As a report by our own Social
Security Agency notes, “The International Monetary Fund
supports these changes because they strive to retain the basic
features of the individual account system and, at the same time,
address its major shortcomings…. Since the 1990s, 10 other Latin
American countries have adopted some form of an individual account
system either to replace or supplement their PAYG
systems.”

It’s not just Social Security, either, which in economic
terms is small in comparison with the problems we face with
Medicare. If the nation were to try to fix Medicare’s fiscal woes
without slowing the growth in costs… well, it simply cannot be
done.

The leading Republican voice for Medicare reform — one of
the few men with the courage to take on the issue — is House
Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), who contributed a few
thoughts for this article:

We can no longer let politicians in Washington deny the
danger to Medicare — the danger is all too real, and the health of
our nation’s seniors is far too important. We have to save Medicare
to avoid disruptions in benefits for current seniors and to
preserve the program for future generations. House Republicans
showed in the Path to Prosperity that we can fix this program for
future generations while making no changes for those who are in and
near retirement.

The facts are this: the President’s healthcare law takes
half a trillion dollars from Medicare and puts it towards a new
health care entitlement; then charges the Independent Payment
Advisory Board (IPAB) with putting price controls on Medicare,
limiting care for current seniors. House Republicans passed a
budget this spring which stands in stark contrast to this approach.
We stop the raid on Medicare, we repeal the President’s board, and
we preserve the Medicare benefit keeping it intact for everyone
above the age of 55 and reforming the program for future
generations.

But the AARP will have none of Paul Ryan’s reforms, nor anybody
else’s, if it means reducing the growth in health care expenditures
(even if that growth would be accompanied by productivity gains
which would give better health care overall for fewer dollars).

After all, with the AARP, it’s not really about better
results for the nation or even for its members, most of whom I
assume care deeply about the future of our nation. It’s about
selling insurance. And that means working to perpetuate a system in
which America’s future senior citizens will not have either the
wherewithal or the economic education to be responsible for their
own autumn years’ finances and health.

The AARP poses the situation as if the status quo in terms
of entitlement spending is somehow an option. A Republican
congressional aide put it to me this way: “From my view, it’s fine
for AARP to say, ‘We’ll be watching and remembering your votes on
entitlements because we’re senior/retirees and we have been
promised these benefits.’ It’s quite another for them to be
completely silent about the fact that their members will be facing
drastic across the board cuts to Medicare (in 2021) and Social
Security (in 2037) unless reforms occur. The Democrats plan is to
bleed these entitlements dry until they’re insolvent while
Republicans are offering what AARP constituencies should want: NO
CHANGES for anyone over 55 with respect to Medicare, while
acknowledging that reforms must be made for future
generations.”

The Republican House budget — the only budget that has
passed either chamber of Congress in a couple of years –
strengthened the solvency of our entitlements without making
changes for those in or near retirement. Unfortunately, AARP’s
entitlement reform plan is the same as President Obama’s. What is
that plan, you ask? Again, the House aide: “The answer can be found
both in the President’s health care law and in his budget (no
reforms of Social Security and Medicare, literally it’s status
quo). Pretending a problem doesn’t exist, doesn’t mean you’ve
solved it — and in the case of entitlements, with 10,000 baby
boomers retiring each day with fewer workers to replace them,
you’re simply exacerbating the problem and leaving us less
preferable options.”

The AARP’s dual loyalties — to its members and to its own
bottom line — make it a difficult organization to trust. The
Herger-Reichert report notes that “Since 2002, income generated
from AARP membership dues has increased 32%, or $60 million.
However, during this same period, income derived from AARP’s
business relationships, primarily with insurance companies, nearly
tripled, increasing by $417 million. Royalty payments from
for-profit companies comprised nearly 46% of AARP’s revenue in
2009, while membership dues totaled just 17% of total revenues.”
With insurance revenues roughly triple the level of dues revenues,
it is hard to see the members’ interests — not to mention the
nation’s interests — winning out should they come in conflict with
the AARP’s bottom line.

Yet that is precisely the conflict we face today with
yawning budget deficits threatening to swallow our financial future
but the AARP screaming “we want every penny, even if it bankrupts
our members’ grandchildren.” The AARP’s ad explicitly threatens
politicians who do anything other than raise taxes to address
entitlement programs’ financial woes.

It’s time to fight back. It’s time for the rest of the
nation to say to the AARP that “We’re not pushovers, either. We’re
three hundred million people whose futures you are risking so you
can collect insurance premiums. And we’re going to stand up for
every politician who calls you out for what you are.”

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