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All the President’s Props

Admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:07:00 +0000

From The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog:

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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Obama’s Seizure and Truman’s

Admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:00:59 +0000

From NRO Articles:

n November 14, 2011, the Supreme Court agreed to review the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care act. The central question is, What limits does the Constitution — specifically, the Commerce Clause — impose upon the federal government’s exercise of power? This health-care act is the defining legislation of the president’s term, and the issue of limited government is at the very heart of the debate between Obama and his opponents. The political, economic, and constitutional stakes are very high. These arguments before the Court will provide a dramatic — and perhaps even decisive — backdrop for the 2012 election.

Constitutional crises of this magnitude are not without precedent. Indeed, the seeds of this case can be found in the court battles of the 1930s and 1940s, as Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation challenged traditional constitutional bounds. Supported by record congressional majorities, FDR and his fellow Democrats passed a blizzard of programs designed to alleviate the economic hardship of the Great Depression — and to alter the very fabric of the U.S. capitalistic system.

The 1932 Democratic platform, largely written by the party’s 1924 nominee, John W. Davis, was a clear statement of conservative, Jeffersonian principles, but FDR abandoned this platform during his first hundred days in office. So radical were the changes that by 1935, conservatives — Democrats and Republicans alike — agreed with Davis when he wrote, “If the structure of this Government is to be preserved, the courts must do it.”

As conservatives looked in desperation to the judiciary for relief, Davis was their logical leader. A highly esteemed former solicitor general under President Wilson, former ambassador to Great Britain, former president of the American Bar Association, and senior partner at one of New York’s premier law firms, Davis commanded respect from all quarters of the political and legal spectrum. As a founder of the bipartisan, anti–New Deal Liberty League in 1934, Davis repeatedly wrote to his supporters, “I believe in the Constitution of the United States; I believe in the division of powers that it makes. I believe in the right of private property, the sanctity and binding power of contracts; the duty of self-help. I am opposed to confiscatory taxation, wasteful expenditure, socialized industry, and a planned economy controlled and directed by government functionaries. I believe these things to be inimical to human liberty and destructive of American ideals.”

Sensing the gravity of the crisis, Davis seized every opportunity and expertly wielded every legal weapon at his disposal to thwart the New Deal. Publicly labeling the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) “a bribe to farmers,” he signed the amicus curiaebrief and successfully led the fight that ultimately resulted in the court’s 6–3 ruling that the AAA was unconstitutional. He successfully opposed the Public Utility Holding Act in the lower courts and led the fight against it within the American Bar Association. Davis personally argued the unconstitutionality of the Frazier-Lemke Bankruptcy Act and the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act before the Supreme Court.

When Roosevelt responded to these courtroom defeats by setting forth his infamous court-packing scheme in 1937, it was Davis who advised the New Deal’s congressional opponents in defeating the measure. By the late 1930s, he had earned the New Dealers’ enduring enmity, and he wore with pride their sobriquet, “Public Enemy Number One.”

During the course of these battles, Davis repeatedly warned that “paternalism fastens its grasp upon the country, and, little by little, the practice of local self-government fades away. Baptize a scheme, even the most fantastic, with a high-sounding and attractive title, and it will elicit the public support.” Of the failure to limit government, he admonished, “Nothing but mischief, to my way of thinking, can come from any government attempting tasks which lie beyond its power to accomplish.” Ever clear about the indivisibility of property rights from human rights, Davis contended, “The two are not antagonistic. History furnishes no instance where the right of man to acquire and hold property has been taken away without the complete destruction of liberty in all its forms.”

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This Week in Washington – January 30, 2012

Admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 05:30:00 +0000

From RedState:

Cheers for Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) for standing up to President Obama on his unconstitutional recess appointments.

Cained to the Ground

Admin — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:09:00 +0000

From The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog:

Liberals had a dim view of Herman Cain’s character long
before this week. They automatically ascribed bad motives to him
and to his GOP supporters. His political views couldn’t possibly be
sincere, they pronounced. He is clearly pandering to racists.
Democratic strategist Karen Finney summed this attitude up by
saying: “One of the things about Herman Cain is, I think that he
makes that white Republican base of the party feel okay, feel like
they are not racist because they can like this guy. I think he is
giving that base a free pass. And I think they like him because
they think he’s a black man who knows his place.”

This is a rich charge, given that putting black
conservatives in their place is one of the chief preoccupations of
liberals. Holding black conservatives to a higher standard than
others in public life is a form of discrimination liberals have
perfected. They consider it very enlightened to ridicule black
conservatives, call them vicious names, even wish for their speedy
death. “I hope his wife feeds him lots of eggs and butter and he
dies early like many black men do of heart disease,” pundit
Julianne Malveaux said about Clarence Thomas in the 1990s. “He is
an absolutely reprehensible person.” Liberals didn’t expel Malveaux
from polite society for this comment that might have even given
David Duke pause. Instead, they feted her in academia. These days
she is a college president at Bennett.

Regulating the blackness of black conservatives is the
divine right of liberals. And so almost anything Cain says or does
is fair game. A white liberal like MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell
feels so empowered by this divine right that he can question the
quality of Cain’s participation in the Civil Rights movement. Why,
he badgered Cain a few weeks back, didn’t you do more to promote
Civil Rights?

The exceedingly smug O’Donnell, however, couldn’t quite
bring himself to demean Cain as “minstrelsy” and musical.
For that task, he needed a black liberal and found one this week in
the single-name fraud Touré, a peddler of quasi-intellectual mumbo
jumbo and cheap shots that he regards as cutting-edge cultural
criticism. Using the pretentious patter of a Henry Louis
Gates, Touré unburdened himself of the deep

insight that “I think that Cain, interestingly, does not exist
without Obama preceding him.” Mortified by having to live under a
smart black man like Obama, conservatives needed to “right the
scales” with the elevation of a “lightweight” like Cain, said
Touré.

Unable to contain his brilliance, Touré continued that
there “is this constant minstrelsy aspect that he keeps bringing
up. This is not something that we’re just making up out of whole
cloth. He is the one who says he wants the Secret Service to call
him Corn Bread. He is the one who says things like ‘oh, shucky
ducky’ when he starts. This is deep black slang that he is using,
that we have not seen on a national public stage before.” This
sounds like a potential doctoral dissertation for Touré under Henry
Gates — the troubling implications of “shucky ducky” in American
politics.

Cain isn’t the first black man to run for the GOP
nomination, though one might think so listening to this nonsense.
In 2000, the Plato-quoting Alan Keyes ran for the GOP nomination.
Where does he fit into Touré’s analysis? Toure didn’t mention him
in his list of “serious intellectuals” who have run for president
even as he numbered Colin Powell, who didn’t run for president, as
one of them: “…Colin Powell, Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama, the
blacks who are running for president have presented themselves as
serious intellectuals…” Notice, by the way, that
he includes Jesse Jackson on the list. Apparently Cain
lacks the dignity, thoughtfulness, and moral probity of that former
aspirant.

Black conservatives just can’t win. Whether they are
“entertainers” like Cain or philosophers like Keyes, they are
marked down as “wacky,” as Maureen Dowd
described the two this week.

The left’s excitement over the sex harassment charges
dogging Cain can’t be explained by moral philosophy, unless
liberals plan to recant eight years of Clintonian apologetics. The
same people who still whine about the “prurient” Ken Starr are now
clamoring for the release of confidential files from twelve years
back. The less actual sex involved in a scandal, the more
interested liberals become in it, particularly if it taints a
conservative and even better if it taints a black one. Clinton’s
cavortings, fumblings, and passes in the Oval Office itself didn’t
interest them. Those were a “private matter.” But the Cain charges
have the potential to be disqualifying, they say.

Even if one were to put the worst possible construction on
the charges, they would constitute a relatively moral day for
Clinton. Nevertheless, Clinton’s boosters eagerly await the
appearance of Cain’s accusers. They want their Anita Hill. They say
that Cain is besmirching the good names of these women even though
the public doesn’t know their names yet. The press is working hard
to correct this injustice so that the names can be known and
properly besmirched.

Perhaps Cain is lying and he did speak improperly to these
women, though that would still fall well short of the Clinton
standard. Remember, “competence” alone qualifies one for the
presidency; crummy character doesn’t matter. Also, Clinton taught
the nation that “lying ” about sex and alleged sexual harassment
(Paula Jones) is no big deal. The press knew Clinton sexually
harassed his way through Arkansas and didn’t care. A few female
reporters, so grateful to him for protecting their right to
abortion, indicated they wished to be harassed too.

Cain enjoys no such ideological immunity. He is an odious
black conservative who threatens the left’s monopolistic hold on
blacks. Also, he is some kind of pro-lifer, which means he is
anti-woman from the start. Political figures are to be judged by
the content of their ideology, decrees the left. The seriousness of
a charge is determined by the rightness of a public figure’s
political views. A Ted Kennedy was entitled to a mulligan or two
after an unwelcome advance since he had done so much to help women
already.

Not so with Cain. The left can’t rest until black
conservatives are put in their place.

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Who Are These Fat-Cat Few at the Top?

Admin — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 11:00:01 +0000

From NRO Articles:

First lady Michelle Obama the other day railed at “the few at the top,” who do all sorts of bad things. A few months ago, we began hearing of the “1 percent” who are responsible for the current economic mess. “They” apparently make all their money at the expense of the other 99 percent. Are they the same as last year’s villains, who had not paid “their fair share” while making over $200,000 in annual income?

Do they include the greedy doctors, who, the president once asserted, recklessly lop off limbs and yank tonsils for profits? Is my urologist a dreaded one-percenter? He found out what was causing my kidney stones but probably makes good money. Was a nearby farmer one, too? I bet he makes over $200,000 but, like many other growers in this area, has found a way to produce beef and cotton more cheaply and efficiently than farmers in almost any other part of the world, thereby enriching his county, state, and nation.

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Iowa Cain Accuser Deace Has Anti-Cain Agenda

Admin — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 08:03:00 +0000

From The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog:

Well.

“Conservative” Iowa radio host Steve Deace is in the news
cycle accusing Herman Cain of sexual harassment — specifically
saying,
according to Politico, that Cain had
said “awkward/inappropriate things… to two females on
my staff.” Deace also said he was concerned about “the fact the
guy’s wife is never around.”

The American Spectator contacted
Deace directly tonight to ask two questions:

1. What did Herman Cain say to the woman or women on
Deace’s staff?

2. Was Deace present when Cain did whatever
“awkward/inappropriate things” Deace is accusing him of?

This evening Steve Deace responded as follows, his
response printed in its entirety:

No one affiliated with our radio program has anything else
to say about Herman Cain’s awkward and inappropriate
comments made to our staff referenced in a recent
Politico story beyond what we have already said.

Sadly, those comments are no more inappropriate and
awkward than Mr. Cain’s multiple positions on the
sanctity of human life, his support of the TARP, his
not knowing China already has nuclear weapons, and his
refusal to defend marriage. The fact that someone so
uninformed and morally inconsistent has made it this
far in a crucial Republican presidential primary, only
to finally be vetted by his personal life, is an
example of why so many Americans have lost faith in the system.
Instead of debating issues we debate cults of
personality. This sort of personality-driven politics
helped Obama get elected four years ago, and look how
well that turned out.

Steve Deace

The response has also now hastily gone up on the Deace website.

One doesn’t have to support Herman Cain or anyone else in
this race for the GOP nomination to realize quickly that Mr. Deace
seems to have a political axe to grind against Herman
Cain.

To make the accusation — and then go silent to let people
imagine the worst (is Herman Cain, like Bill Clinton, running
around America leaving a trail made up of a woman accusing rape,
another saying he groped her in the Oval Office, a third saying he
dropped his pants and asked her to “kiss it” — is the height of
moral irresponsibility. Mr. Cain may or may not have the experience
to sit in the Oval office. He may or may not have good positions
from a conservative point of view on any number of
issues.

But whether he’s president or not, this is spectacularly
unfair.

And Mr. Dease, now having walked himself and his Christian
beliefs all the way out on a limb, perhaps needs to have another
look at the 9th Commandment.

That would be the one about bearing false
witness.

Mr. Deace somehow believes this statement of his, also on
his website, will be ignored. It reads:

If you have courage and convictions, your new soul mate
will be Steve Deace. He delivers.

What Steve Deace apparently delivers is Establishment
make-believe decidedly without the courage of his convictions. If
Herman Cain sexually harassed the Deace staff in Deace’s presence
– or otherwise — step up. Who, when, where, what was said.
Otherwise, it’s fair to ask of Deace:

What would Jesus do?

Not this.

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Mother Jones, Media Matters Dodge on Lynching

Admin — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 22:49:00 +0000

From The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog:

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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Ryan Schools Obama on America

Admin — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 17:08:00 +0000

From The American Spectator and The Spectacle Blog:

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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Washington Dems: Clueless on Jobs

Admin — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:00:00 +0000

From NRO Articles:

Washington Democrats are not just out to lunch on jobs. They have devoured the entire buffet table.

“It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine,” Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) declared on October 19, while debating Pres. Barack Obama’s American Jobs Act. “It’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about.”

Keep reading this post . . .

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Robert Reich Thinks NPR Is Perfect With Frum and No Irrational Conservatives

Admin — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 00:56:58 +0000

From NewsBusters.org blogs:

At The Huffington Post on Friday, liberal professor and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich lamented “The Triumph of Dogma” at National Public Radio, apparently represented by David Frum’s decision to resign his right half of commentaries on the business-ish show Marketplace. “I respect David’s decision but I disagree with his understanding of his job on Marketplace. And I find his decision to leave a sad commentary (no pun intended) on what’s happening to public discourse in America.”

When liberals lament the tone of “public discourse,” what they often mean is: Why must we allow a polite liberal-to-centrist statism consensus to be ruined by the unpleasantness of those annoying conservatives in their Tea Party tri-corner hats? Reich explicitly asked: “Why exactly was it necessary for David Frum to ‘represent’ the views of conservative Republicans?” He finds they’re too extreme to have a place on taxpayer-funded radio.

Reich claimed he’s non-doctrinaire like Frum:

I don’t feel any obligation to represent liberal Democrats. Over the years I’ve argued, for example, in favor of getting rid of the corporate income tax, creating school vouchers inversely related to family incomes, and extending free-trade agreements — positions not exactly favored by liberal Democrats.

The American public doesn’t want or need to hear “representatives” from the so-called right or left. It wants insight into what’s best for America.

Yet over and over again — on the radio, on TV, in print, in the blogosphere, and all over Washington — political ideology is substituting for thought.

It’s mighty rich when liberals go around lamenting that conservatives substitute “ideology for thought.” Liberals, as a species, are so non-doctrinaire? Reich is talking about NPR, the network that fired Juan Williams for daring to be non-doctrinaire and confess traditionally-dressed Muslims on planes make him nervous. Fired! I don’t remember the Reich editorial lamenting that “triumph of dogma.” On to Reich on how you cannot represent the right wing, since it’s just irrational these days:

Meanwhile, the Republican Party has become so extreme that it’s more and more difficult for anyone to rationally “represent” its views. As Frum put in in a post on his website, FrumForum, “Under the pressure of the current crisis — intoxicated by anti-Obama feelings and incited by talk radio and Fox — Republicans have staked out an extreme position on the role of government.”

What if conservative Republicans believe the sun revolves around the earth? Would someone in David Frum’s position who disagrees feel compelled to stop offering “conservative” commentaries about the celestial bodies? And would a major media outlet then be obliged to find a replacement who agrees with conservative dogma? (This isn’t such a far-fetched example when you consider what leading Republicans say about evolution or climate change.)

Liberals are so thoroughly convinced of the dire ending of the planet just weeks ahead due to “climate change” that they would think it’s not “far-fetched” to paint themselves as Copernicus, and the conservatives are a benighted pack of Ptolemaic holdouts.

Reich approvingly noted how Frum has joined his consensus in this era of trillion-dollar deficits, as Frum told NPR:

This is not a moment for government to be cutting back. … Right now we’re watching state governments try to balance all of their budgets at the same time in the middle of this crisis. We’ve seen half a million public sector jobs disappear. Now, if these were good times, I would applaud that. We need to see a thinner public sector — especially at the state and local level. But we’re seeing what happens when you do that as an anti-recession measure and you make the recession worse.

Reich says this consensus of sweet reason should not be rebutted:

It so happens the vast majority of economists and economic policy experts agree with David on this – even though you wouldn’t know it if you watched or listened to broadcast debates between a so-called “liberal” and “conservative” economists.

No wonder Americans are so confused.

Liberals call Americans “confused” when they have an opportunity to assess a choice in major debates about the size of government — a choice, and not just a liberal echo represents a ruined political discourse. Reich thoroughly represents the dogma that defines NPR.

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