Chuck Colson

During the seemingly endless build-up to the Iowa caucuses, there was one consistent refrain repeated over and over. It’s like the big lie — the more you keep repeating it, the more people are going to believe it, but it remains a lie.

The lie was simply this: that the political parties have to choose between social issues and economic issues. This year, the media and the party machines are telling us ad nauseam that the only issue that matters is the economy.

So any candidate who wants to win the White House should just shut up about things like marriage, the sanctity of life, religious liberty, and those other annoying issues that distract us from focusing on jobs and the economy.

But that’s crazy! Doesn’t anybody get the connection between the social issues and economics issues

One candidate who does, Rick Santorum had the courage to link the two in a recent Iowa town hall meeting. (And before I go on, please, folks, I’m not endorsing him or anyone. I never do.)

Here’s what Senator Santorum said:

“Yes, [the election is] about growth and the economy, [but] it’s also about what is at the core of our country . . . faith and family. You can’t have a strong economy, you can’t have limited government if the family is breaking down and we don’t live good, moral, and decent lives.”

Precisely right. And what does he get for his remarks? Backhanded compliments for his showing in Iowa and a stern warning from, among others, the conservative National Review:

Here’s what the National Review wrote online: “In a general election…where the focus is almost certainly going to be on economic issues, it is questionable whether Santorum’s relentless focus on social issues will play well with independent voters, especially in the crucial suburbs.”

Hogwash. If the nation’s current economic crisis has taught us anything, it’s that a healthy economy cannot thrive in the midst of moral breakdown. Ethical failures on Wall Street, Main Street, and Capitol Hill put us into this mess we’re in today, as I’ve said many times before.

But how about some facts? I’ll have the citations for you at BreakPoint.org: Take incarceration rates: something Santorum has alluded to and I’ve seen with my own eyes: “Young men who grow up in homes without fathers are twice as likely to end up in jail as those who come from traditional two-parent families.” And “70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes.”

How about education? 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. And children from low-income, two-parent families outperform students from high-income, single-parent homes.

I could go on and on.

Do you think that crime rates, incarceration, low educational achievement, out of wedlock births, affect the economy and government spending? Of course they do, and the statistics prove this!

If you want a healthy, thriving economy you’ve got to have a strong moral societal foundation. And any so-called “conservatives” who think otherwise are simply deluding themselves; the two issues simply can’t be separated.
As Christians, we can’t buy into the lie that we can separate economic prosperity from moral behavior. And we can’t be afraid to hold the candidates’ feet to the fire on this, either.

HT: Break Point (read full article)

Conservatism is the natural political outgrowth from the real life experience. Humans are naturally flawed, greedy, and untrustworthy. Conservatives recognize that fact and promote the market system and divided government in order to pit one greedy person against another.

Conversely, the left continually denies and fights against human nature (inevitably losing to it). For leftists, it’s always a matter of finding the right human to rule — the disinterested regulator, the consumer-protecting bureaucrat, the messianic president, etc. That is the nature of the OWS protests: to replace one group of self-interested people on Wall Street with another group of magically not self-interested people in government. But because government isn’t magic, utopias never quite work out in real life — not even in Zuccotti Park. In one news story after another, Thatcher’s “facts of life” are on display. Let’s look at four examples.

Conservative Fact of Life: Give a man a fish, and he’ll stick around for another.
Providing for folks in need is a good thing, but handouts are dangerous tools. At any point in the giver-receiver relationship, there’s a risk of doing more harm than good. If the recipient becomes dependent or feels entitled to his benefits, his initiative atrophies like an unused muscle. Too often the receiver is left less prepared and less likely to succeed in the future. Thus long-term well-being is sacrificed in the name of short-term “help.”

The negative effects of welfare can appear quickly, as OWS recently learned. Zuccotti Park has become a hotspot for vagrants in search of free food. Protestor Lauren Digioia recently explained to reporters that OWS has “compassion toward everyone,” but that “there are rules and guidelines.” Specifically, “[i]f you’re going to come here and get our food, bedding and clothing, have books and medical supplies for no charge, they need to give back.” Digioia added, “There’s a lot of takers here and they feel entitled.”

Conservative Fact of Life: Everybody is wealthier than somebody, but that doesn’t give anyone the right to take from others.
Protestor Nan Terrie allegedly came to Zuccotti Park with a $5,500 Mac laptop (near the top 1% of portable computers, perhaps). One night after Terrie succumbed to fatigue after a long day as a kitchen volunteer, preparing meals for fellow protestors, a thief made off with the high-end computer.

“Stealing is our biggest problem at the moment,” Terrie told reporters. A problem indeed. Suddenly it didn’t matter that the computer was $2,000 more than even the most tricked out MacBook Pro available in the Apple online store. Or that scores of laptops exist at a fraction of the price (the computer I’m using to write this article was 1/10 the price of the Terrie’s stolen Mac). No, the only thing that mattered was that taking something that someone else earned was wrong. That fact holds for a college student’s electronic devices as well as a hedge fund manager’s compensation.

Conservative Fact of Life: Rugged individualism is the only sensible approach to life.
America was built by people who refused to wait around for someone else to make them a living. From the frontiersman who left everything to chase his dreams in the American West to the entrepreneurs of the Forbes 400 list, Americans who make their own way are the most successful.

It didn’t take long for protestor Peter Hogness to learn whom he could trust. Angry about empty promises regarding the protestor status in Zuccotti Park, Hogness stumbled upon true wisdom. “One thing we have learned from this is that we need to rely on ourselves and not on promises from elected officials,” Hogness told reporters.

Conservative Fact of Life: Though she’s a seductive mistress, Utopia never quite works out as a wife.
Conservative author and columnist Dr. Thomas Sowell once said that he would love to live in the kind of world envisioned by the left. In such a world we would have few inequalities, few wants, and men would act as angels, working for the common good. The problem for the left is that their vision is based on a premise that does not exist in the real world.

The longer the OWS protests last, the more they confront the real world. As money has begun to roll in from supporters (reportedly $500,000), life has only become more complicated. “F**k Finance,” said Bryan Smith when he couldn’t get access to the funds he wanted. “I hope Mayor Bloomberg gets an injunction and demands to see the movement’s books.”

When Elija Moses requested $8,000 to replace his vandalized drum set, he was turned down. “We don’t have the power for [purchases that large],” explained Finance Committeeman Pete Dutro. “They have to go to the General Assembly.”

Moses put it best when he simply said, “I’m really frustrated.” Yes, Utopia can be quite frustrating for anyone who believes it can exist. Alas, an earthly Eden does not exist, and its mortal imitations are no more than an unwieldy collection of committees, assemblies, and frustrated citizens.

It’s unlikely that these experiences will change minds among the Occupiers. (But there’s always hope — even Sowell was once a committed Marxist.) Unfortunately, once Occupy Wall Street has picketed its final bank, sung its last rendition of Cumbayá and gone home, it will take just one sentence to define the movement: “The truths of conservatism stared them in the face; sadly, they failed to notice.”

HT: American Thinker

The growth for the fourth quarter of 2010 was also reduced to 2.3%, meaning that for the last nine months the economy has grown a minimal 1.5%, barely treading water as the weekend Wall Street Journal described it. For comparison purposes, economic growth during the first seven quarters of the Reagan recovery in the 1980s boomed at an average of 7.1%. Economic growth during the first seven quarters of the Obama non-recovery has now been reduced to an average of 2.6%, barely a third as much.

Historically, as the Journal also reiterated, “the deeper the recession, the more robust the recovery.” So the idea that the recovery is so bad because the recession was so bad doesn’t wash. Based on the historical pattern, we should be in the second year of a booming recovery by now. President Obama? instead is mired in three and a half years of stagnation with worse to come.

Keynesian Economics, RIP
This catastrophic failure for America’s working people has resulted from President Obama doggedly following exactly the opposite of Reaganomics in every detail. In particular, Obama came into office with his Rip Van Winkle attitude pretending not to notice that anything has happened since 1981, and returning to the failed Keynesian economics of the 1970s with a vengeance.

As the Journal explained it this weekend, President Obama “deployed the entire arsenal of neo-Keynesian policies to lift domestic demand,” including “nearly a $1 trillion in stimulus, plus a battalion of temporary and targeted programs: cash for clunkers, cash for caulkers, tax credits for homebuyers, 99 weeks of jobless benefits, ‘clean energy’ grants, subsidies to states, and so much more.”

Keynesian economics is the doctrine that economic growth and revival is caused by increased government spending and deficits. The increased spending and deficits are supposed to increase aggregate demand for goods and services, which supposedly causes producers to produce more. If you listen to President Obama carefully, he is always saying that economic growth and prosperity comes from increased government spending.

If the idea that increased government spending and deficits create prosperity doesn’t seem to make sense, that’s because it doesn’t. Keynesian economics has never worked, not when it was born in the 1930s and not when it finally crashed and burned in the 1970s with double-digit inflation, roaring unemployment, and deep recession all at the same time. That is supposed to be impossible under Keynesian economics, because you can’t have both too little aggregate demand (the supposed cause of recession and unemployment) and too much aggregate demand (the supposed cause of inflation) at the same time.

The central fallacy behind Keynesian economics is that the money for the increased government spending and deficits has to come from somewhere. If the government borrows a trillion dollars out of the private sector to spend a trillion back into the private sector, it hasn’t done anything to increase the economy on net. If it seizes a trillion dollars in taxes out of the private sector to finance the trillion of increased spending, the result is worse. The economy has not been expanded on net, and the increased taxes reduce the incentives for production, resulting in a net loss to the economy.

Keynesian economics survives not as a matter of logic, but because it provides cover for what the politicians want to do: increase spending and deficits to buy votes for their political machines. For a Chicago machine politician like Barack Obama, that is catnip.

The Failure of President Obama
What drives economic growth and prosperity, however, is not government spending and deficits, but incentives for production. That was the insight behind Reaganomics, and the reason why it was so successful.

Lower tax rates increase the incentives for production by allowing producers to keep more of what they produce. Deregulation increases incentives for production by reducing the costs of production, increasing the resulting reward. Restrained, anti-inflation monetary policy expands the incentives for investment to increase production because investors know the value of their investment will not be depreciated by inflation and a declining dollar. Reduced government spending and deficits reduce the government drain on private-sector investment funds.

Moreover, these are not policies suited for a particular time and its policy challenges. These are timeless free-market economic policies enduring for all time. As I argue in my new book, America’s Ticking Bankruptcy Bomb, if we would only restore these planks of Reaganomics, within a year the economy would take off on a new, generation-long economic boom. As the Journal again said this weekend, “The only way out of this mess is to return to the growth policies that nurtured the boom of the 1980s.”

The disgrace of Obamanomics is that its rigid, unreconstructed Keynesian economics was discredited in both theory and practice over 30 years ago. The historic success of Reaganomics was a demonstrated fact for all the world to see (and subsequently imitate) over 20 years ago. But President Rip Van Winkle, playacting dumb, takes us back to the future of the 1970s, reflecting the devout prep-school Marxism of his youth.

He is not the only one. Witness the spectacle of the equally self-absorbed Ezra Klein , who in his uninformed blog for the Washington Post just last month ridiculed the Republican Cut, Cap and Balance Plan for failing the test of Keynesian economics. He writes:

The only way to prevent massive layoffs, the only way to give the unemployed some help and the underpaid some relief, is for the federal government to spend. And yet we want to write into the Constitution a requirement that spending remain at 18 percent of the previous year’s GDP? That is to say, a requirement that the federal government needs to make recessions worse rather than drawing on its unique capacity to make them better? Are we mad?

Klein is blissfully unaware that there is even any dispute over Keynesian economics, let alone that it was thoroughly discredited 30 years ago, and replaced by an historical success proven over 20 years ago. Indeed, he is so behind the curve in recognizing the economic policy debate that he indicates that anyone who doesn’t genuflect to the 1930s wisdom of Keynesian economics must be “mad.” That only raises, and answers, the question of whether Klein can helpfully comment on today’s politics and public policy in America when he is not even following, let alone understanding, a central, decades-old, fundamental economic policy debate.

That is apparently not a problem for the Washington Post, which institutionally presents an open question of whether it is so behind the curve of what is happening in America today that it can even cover and report on current politics adequately for its readers. Certainly no one relying on that paper for political coverage in 2010 would have had any idea of the New Deal-sized political earthquake coming in November. That little item was first predicted in this space, by contrast, in 2009.

But arguably even worse: the New York Times, whose resident economics scholar, Paul Krugman, argues that the only thing wrong with the Keynesianism of Obamanomics is that the spending stimulus wasn’t several times bigger. He offers as his model the spending of World War II. Federal spending in 1943 was 43.6% of GDP, with the federal deficit at 30.3% of GDP. In today’s equivalent terms, that would mean a federal budget of $6.54 trillion, or over 70% higher than today, and a federal deficit of $4.55 trillion, almost 3 times higher than today.

Talk about mad. The runaway Keynesian spending spree we have already suffered has driven the nation to the edge of bankruptcy. Do we have to drive America over the bankruptcy cliff before Krugman acknowledges the proven failure of Keynesian economics? The answer is no, because his devotion to the doctrine is religious, not intellectual, and so it can’t be falsified.

Professor Richard Rumelt of the UCLA Anderson School of Management timely reviews the economics of World War II spending and other policies in the weekend Journal. He explains that it wasn’t Keynesian-increased consumption from all that World War II spending that ended the Depression, writing:

Government policy didn’t stimulate personal consumption, as Keynesian policy makers aim to do today. During World War II, there was no investment in civilian infrastructure and the government placed severe restrictions on consumption.… Thrift restored personal balance sheets, ultimately setting the stage for the postwar boom.

Rumelt adds that contrary to Keynesian economics:

During the 1941-1945 war years, over 22% of disposable income was saved. This high savings rate was driven by fiat. Thanks to wartime rationing, Americans were only allowed to purchase small amounts of sugar, butter, meat, gasoline, tires, shoes, bicycles, processed foods and other goods. Plus, there was virtually no production of new cars, radios, home appliances, or housing. In fact, when inflation and increased working hours are taken into account, consumption per hour worked actually declined for the bulk of civilians during the war. Civilian living standards stayed at Depression-era levels.

Rumelt explains that it was actually after World War II, when government spending was reduced by nearly two-thirds as a percent of GDP, and the deficit was nearly wiped out, that the economy boomed. The foundation for that boom was not the Keynesian consumption spending of the World War II years, but the increased personal savings and debt repayment of those years. So Krugman completely misinterprets the government spending effects of the war years.

The more sophisticated (I would argue sophistic) defense of the tragic failure of Obamanomics states that recoveries that follow financial panics are supposedly slower. But that has not been the experience of the American economy. Over the last 70 years, recessions in America have previously lasted only 10 months on average, with the longest previously being 16 months. Moreover, again, the deeper the downturn, the stronger the recovery. Yet, we are three and a half years beyond the last recession’s starting date, and there has been no effective recovery.

It was only the Great Depression itself, prolonged with Keynesian economics, where the human suffering dragged on for over a decade. Historically, recessions or downturns have often been accompanied by financial panics, a classic feature of the business cycle. The sophistry of this argument is just an attempt to devise a political excuse for the failure of President Obama and his outdated, benighted economic policies.

HT: American Spectator

The boy, Frankie Girard, had drawn the picture in art class but then found that his teacher didn’t share his patriotism. Says his father, John, “He was denied hanging the flag up. And he asked if he could just even hang it on his desk, and he was told no. He could take the picture that he drew and take it home and be proud of it there.”

I guess patriotism has joined piety as a “private matter.” (Leftists tend to confuse closets with shelves. Everything that should be in the former, they display; everything that should be on the latter, they hide.)

There is a bit of a back story here, too. It is claimed that this incident followed an altercation in which the offended one struck Frankie after Frankie asked him why he didn’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

As for the accusation leveled against the teacher, it’s denied by the school superintendent, Dr. Paul Burnim. He refused to go on camera, but, reports WWLP.com’s Matt Caron, he “told 22News over the phone that nobody ever told Franklin the drawing was offensive, and said the only reason it wasn’t hung was because Franklin was supposed to be doing other work; [sic] not drawing a picture.”

Nose growing much, doctor?

The reason why I don’t believe this man for a second is this: What eleven-year-old is going to concoct a story that his teacher said his flag drawing was “offensive”? Oh, I understand that kids can lie almost as well as educators, but such a fabrication would require a level of cultural knowledge and sophistication beyond the grammar-school set. No, what we have here is a guilty teacher and a superintendent doing damage control and hiding under his desk.

As to this, Frankie’s father, John — who has contacted the ACLU (which makes me wonder about his cultural knowledge) and gotten a lot of press — said that Dr. Burnim asked him if this would “go away” if his son were allowed to hang the flag now. Obviously, this educator is worried about being hanged himself. Doctor, the time for that is past.

And you are a coward.

If you were any kind of man, you would have been offended that a teacher would look askance upon the flag. If you were any kind of a man, you would have leapt into action without hesitation. If you were any kind of man, you would have defended our culture. But you’re something other than a man.

It’s called a leftist.

And this is typical of leftists. They persecute traditionalist students in thousands of schools and universities nationwide (see Campus-Watch.org), and, when they are occasionally caught with their hands in the commie jar, they don’t even have the guts to come on camera and defend their “beliefs.”

This is because they operate based on popularity, not principle. They are pack animals, fawners over the fashionable. In 1936 Germany, they would have been doing the goosestep, and in 1917 Russia, they would have sported the hammer and sickle. This malleability isn’t surprising, either. “Left,” like “right,” is a relative term. Left of what? In the case of these folks, the only constant is that they’re left of sanity.

Now, in the comments section under Caron’s article, someone in the community accused Frankie of being a bully. But this is irrelevant. It would be a mistake to conflate a defense of the flag with a defense of a flag-waver. If the boy misbehaved, punish him, but you don’t prohibit the flag’s display because it’s “offensive.” You hang the flag — and then “hang” the child if necessary.

Speaking of which, was the little offended offender punished for striking Frankie? Or is that allowed now when someone has the temerity to express patriotic sentiments?

And who is offended by the flag, anyway? Is this classmate a budding al-Qaeda member? A La Raza Reconquista type? Is his last name Chavez? (Actually, Frankie’s sister claims he’s a Jehovah’s Witness.) Whatever the case, if the American flag offends him, I suggest that he’s in the wrong country.

The thing I find most irritating about this story is the ridiculous idea that “offensiveness” should be a guide for anything. And it not only shouldn’t be…

…but it cannot be.

This is because offensiveness is completely relative and subjective: most everything offends someone and most everyone is offended by something. Yet we won’t prohibit everything. Would we kowtow to a child who was offended by sitting next to a black classmate? In short, we have to discriminate among people’s feelings. And what will be the yardstick that we use to judge? Unless it is the “feelings” of the given authority figure — in which case the judgments are completely arbitrary — the standard of right and wrong must be applied.

Once you recognize this, the offensiveness argument goes out the window. It passes muster only in a relativistic universe in which, without a conception of Truth as a yardstick for making decisions, people use the only thing they have left: emotion. Yet this reduces society to the law of the jungle: we fight, using fists, votes, or words (maybe lies), and those who prevail see their will done. And that higher one, and civilization, are casualties.

The truth is that when people take offense, it’s usually just a ploy. They’re not really offended.

They just don’t happen to like what you’re saying.

But if they were honest and said just that, they’d seem intolerant. So they try to seize the moral high ground by putting the onus on you and claiming you’re “offensive.” Yet they usually have neither the high ground nor anything moral. If they had the latter, they’d likely be able to mount an argument as to why you’re wrong in a real, absolute sense. Instead, all they’re saying, properly translated, is that they don’t like how you taste. If they looked to Truth, however, they might find that the problem actually lies with their palate.

Something else that can exist only in a relativistic universe is the spiritual disease that today wears the label “liberalism.” Get people to believe in Truth, and this disease will die as surely as will a fungus exposed to the light.

HT: American Thinker

Every price increase of just a dime per gallon of gasoline at the pump extracts approximately $5 billion from the pockets of U.S. consumers over the course of a year.

On top of killing family budgets, with a dollar per gallon jump at the pumps picking our pockets of $50 billion per year, there is on the macro level an inverse relationship between the price of oil and the overall health of the economy — oil price hikes deliver less job growth, less demand for labor, more unemployment, more poverty, more inequality, more inflation, lower real income increases, and smaller advances in the standard of living.

Additionally, higher oil prices directly cause greater amounts of U.S. capital to be exported, both to pay the higher prices and to pay for the growing levels of imported oil.

In 1985, the U.S. imported 25 percent of its oil usage. Today, it’s 61 percent. And still we are placing restrictions on increases in domestic production, both for oil and other sources of energy.

A few days back, President Obama, rather than sticking around a couple hours to explain to the American people or to the U.S. Congress why we were going to war in Libya, flew off to Brazil to hand out a permit to allow deep sea oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico to Brazil’s state-run oil company, Petrobras. Capitalist companies in America need not apply.

This particular foreign deal was an especially snug and nostalgic fit for Obama. Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff is somewhat of a Latin form of Obama’s old Weather Underground chum Bernardine Dohrn.

In earlier days, Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla, was charged with running with a gang of redistributionists who accumulated revolutionary capital by way of kidnapping foreign diplomats for ransom.

A top priority for Rousseff today mirrors the “spread the wealth around” objective that Obama stated to Joe the plumber.

Dohrn, just home from a trip to Cuba in 1969 where she hoped to pick up some pointers on how to impose a “classless” society on the U.S., displayed her true psychopathic colors in a speech she made to the Weathermen’s “War Council.”

Speaking elatedly of the murders by the Charlie Manson gang of actress Sharon Tate, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and three other people, Dohrn proclaimed, “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into the victims’ stomachs! Wild!”

That’s the fully hateful Bernardine on public display, seeing herself as a new George Washington, a revolutionary fighter for a new nation. It’s the same role, except this founding mother was in serious need of a super-sized bottle of antipsychotic drugs and a super-tight straightjacket.

Of all the places for candidate Obama to kick off his political career in 1995 in his first run for the Illinois State Senate, he picked the living room of Bernardine Dohrn and husband Bill Ayers, co-founder of the Weather Underground and, more recently, the national vice president for curriculum studies at the American Educational Research Association.

I’d have kept up my guard when Bernardine sashayed out of the kitchen and began circulating around with the hors d’oeuvres and metal forks.

In any case, it’s no surprise that things are coming apart, especially on energy. “If somebody wants to build a coal-fired plant, they can,” pronounced Obama during the presidential campaign. “It’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.”

What’s the end game? “Suicide Mission Accomplished”?

HT: American Spectator

The nauseating comments by the leftists overlords of NPR about the Tea Party show how much these leftists hate and fear us. The indecent firing of Juan Williams was more evidence of the willingness of the intolerant left to fight without scruple against anyone who does not slavishly follow the party line — even those who still sincerely believe some bits and pieces of leftist mythology. The scurrying Democrats from the Wisconsin Senate show contempt not just for Republicans, but also for the voters who elect them. The thuggish behavior of Wisconsin schoolteachers shows that we cannot assume that these hirelings are honorable.

Do we really need more evidence of just how bad the left is? The blatant appeal to hatred, the naked pursuit of power, the wholly unsavory smell of deceit — the absence of the tiniest fig leaf of respectability — are apparent in everything the left does these days. Its bullying can be met only two ways: with surrender or with resistance. The wise course, resistance, cannot be done halfheartedly. All those who stand in the way of leftists face the same gallows in the end. President Reagan, noting the foolishness of timidity in fighting the left, put it well: “What are they going to do? Hang us from a higher tree?” (Recall that this same great American summed up his Cold War strategy thus: “How about this? We win. They lose.”)

This is the long heritage of defiant courage in the face of oppression. It is William Wallace at Stirling Bridge reminding Scots that they will die but that they need not die as slaves. It is Patrick Henry in the House of Burgesses telling his fellow Virginians that “[t]he gentlemen cry ‘Peace, peace,’ but there is no peace: the war has already begun.” It is Churchill’s pugnacity after France fell, telling Hitler and Britons that “[w]e shall never surrender.” It is Solzhenitsyn, alone and threatened in the maw of Marxist tyranny, using his pen to embolden the world against the Evil Empire.

Those who lie, those who lust for power, and those with whom no honorable compromise is possible — these enemies of liberty — must simply be defeated. What does Rush tell his listeners every day? “My goal is to defeat liberalism.” His defiance is like General Jackson in the Civil War at Manassas: fleeing Confederates stopped, looked, and turned around. One of them, famously, told us why: “There stands Jackson like a stone wall.” Courage in war — and we are very much in a war — is contagious (and so is cowardice). There is no substitute for victory in our war. Those lions who stand up in the face of wickedness inspire others, while those mice who try to do business with the hopelessly corrupt fall within the malign spell of the left or end up, as Reagan reminds us, hung from a lower branch.

What does this mean in practice today? Republicans should push “right to work” everywhere as hard as their political muscle will let them. Labor unions, as much a dinosaur as Marxism, are the enemy of the working man, the enemy of government economy, the enemy of jobs, and the mortal enemy of every Republican. Fight also that horror called “public education,” which is a slave to leftist dogma and a vast hole in every state budget: privatize the instruction of our future. Tackle entitlements not meekly with an eye to the latest poll data, but as if these interconnected Ponzi schemes — public employee pensions, Medicare, Social Security, and the rest — are vast frauds which will leave us all poor and afraid. The stench of corruption in ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and sibling monsters must be recorded, exposed, and pressed relentlessly.

Each apology for doing what is right is simple surrender. All vain efforts to peel off “moderate” Democrats blur those distinctions which we want to be crystal-clear. Every poll-driven statement by Republican leaders to capture the imaginary center shows that these Republicans are in fact not “leaders,” but dupes. If our ends are honorable and good, then sheepishness about pursuing those ends is not just immoral, but vastly unwise. We are fighting for our country, for all the good that it is and that it can be, and for all the heroes before us who gave us this land. Like them, we must be bold.

HT: American Thinker

Amid all the turmoil, he discusses an apparently world historical issue of school bullying; honors the 2009-10 Stanley Cup Champion Chicago Blackhawks; delivers a radio address on another all-important subject, “Women’s History Month;” attends a fund-raiser; goes golfing (that darned weather: it was just too nice for the President to resist the temptation of hitting the links — for the 61st time in his two plus years in office); yuks it up with the Washington press corps (pronounced “k-o-r”, not “k-o-r-p-s,” try to remember this, Mr. President) at the annual Gridiron Dinner. And to top it all off, the crowning event in Barack Obama’s busy schedule — drum roll, please! — videotaping his NCAA tournament bracket picks. (Think about it: Obama discusses basketball with authority, which means that he must be spending a lot of time watching the games and listening to sports commentators. Exactly what he was elected for, wasn’t he?) While Rome burned, Nero fiddled. While the world burns, Obama ponders the outcome of a college basketball tournament.

Faced with this blatant display of indolence and indomitable refusal to fulfill the duties of his office, Obama’s supporters are puzzled: What happened to the giant who bestrode the world during the election campaign? Where have all the flowers gone? Something is definitely amiss. But what? Muses NYT putative conservative David Brooks, he of the creased pant leg fame, “All in all, President Obama is an astoundingly complicated person. During the 2008 presidential campaign, and during the first two years of his term, I would have said that his troubling flaw was hubris — his attempts to do everything at once. But he seems to have an amazing capacity to self-observe and adjust. Now I’d say his worrying flaw is passivity.” Maybe he is saving his extraordinary talents for a really monumental task deserving his undivided attention — perhaps making bracket picks come NBA playoff time?

The multiverse theory that postulates the existence of numerous parallel universes, each governed by its own laws of nature, is currently gaining traction in scientific circles. I have no idea if the theory is true in cosmogony, but in the socio-political realm the elites definitely exist in a universe separate from the rest of country, divorced from the unwashed masses and common sense. It is ruled by its own peculiar laws which its denizens are required to obey unquestioningly on pain of being cast into the outer darkness of fly-over America. In that universe, a reduction in the rate of growth of social spending, say, from nine to seven percent, is a “devastating cut”; a budget reduction of about five-thousandths of one percent is tantamount to the Apocalypse; increasing spending is a sure-fire way of shrinking the budget deficit; raising taxes is a recipe for prosperity; Sarah Palin is an idiot; Michelle Obama is the most beautiful woman with the most exquisite taste in clothes since Helen of Troy; and — the ultimate eternal verity — Barack Obama is a colossus of superhuman intellectual gifts and powers.

The smart set living in an echo-chamber that reinforces their conventional wisdom have eagerly embraced this article of faith because in their world to question Obama’s ability is to commit the deadly sin of racism. And don’t think they are cynics who merely parrot the party line and go along to get along. So deeply are they invested in the Obama myth that they summon all their intellectual resources to its defense. Utterly terrified of committing thought crime, they have internalized their beliefs and with religious fervor keep faith with their creed. To let any doubt creep into their minds is tantamount to aligning themselves with the “Obama-haters” — all those “yahoos” and “knuckle-draggers” of the far right. Their greatest fear is to break ranks with the true believers and invite ostracism — a prospect too horrible to behold.

And so they explain to one another that Obama’s defiant detachment must have some reason too complex for mere mortals to discern; his powerful mind is too intricate and resourceful for anyone to understand or pass judgment on his actions (or inaction, as the case may be). Thus one of the theories gaining favor in their circles: Obama is focused on lofty objectives way beyond the capacity of our meager intelligence to grasp; he sees the deeper truth; he soars to such heights that our earth-bound concerns dwindle into total insignificance.

Once upon a time there lived an emperor. One day two crafty weavers turned up at the palace and offered to make a new suit of clothes for the ruler — clothes so marvelous that they would be invisible to those unfit for their positions, stupid or incompetent. And so when the emperor stepped out to show off his brand-new attire, the courtiers, fearful of being found out and ridiculed, would not admit to themselves the truth of what their eyes were telling them. Until an innocent child in the crowd of onlookers cried out, “He isn’t wearing anything at all!”, and the spell was broken.

Hans Christian Andersen did not indicate whether the weavers’ names were David Axelrod and David Plouffe, but the similarity is striking. The two Davids brilliantly succeeded in packaging and selling to the country an unknown tyro from Chicago without a past or any visible qualifications other than imposing looks, a resonant voice and an ability to use the teleprompter. Like the weavers in the great Danish writer’s fairy-tale, the Obama handlers insulated their candidate against criticism by preemptively warning that any doubt as to his fitness for office was proof positive of mean-spiritedness and racism. And the liberal crowd swallowed the bait hook, line and sinker.

The famous Occam’s razor principle states that the simplest explanation is the most plausible one. Applying it to dispel the fog of propaganda, it becomes glaringly obvious that Obama is an accidental president, a lazy and indecisive incompetent devoid of any ability or desire to perform the job to which he was elected by a gullible majority, who loves the perks but hates the duties of his office; who loves to play but hates to work. Have a good look at the man occupying the White House: what you see is what you get. The Emperor has no clothes.

HT: American Thinker

Meanwhile, for the Chinese and other fast-growing economies, it’s full speed ahead on new energy projects. Chinese oil companies are pursuing new oil and gas exploration on a global scale, even in the mainland U.S. They are buying up oil and gas leases in Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and North America, including just offshore Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico.

But China is not limiting its options to petroleum. It is acquiring vast reserve of coal, importing U.S. coal that environmentalists have put off-limits to electric utilities in the United States and securing ownership of coal mines in Australia, Asia, and Latin America. The purchase of Felix Resources by China’s Yanzhou Coal in December 2009 was the largest coal acquisition in Australian history, but it was by no means the last. Asian buyers are now competing for another big prize: Whitehaven Coal. Soon, even if American policymakers were to wake up to the threat we face, there will be no more major coal properties available for purchase.

The situation with uranium supplies is equally dire. At present the U.S. is the largest nuclear energy producer in the world, but China is out to change that. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, China plans to build 60 large nuclear reactors by the end of this decade, and it is acquiring the uranium necessary to fuel these facilities along with its existing plants. Chinese state-owned companies are bidding on uranium-rich companies around the world, including Kalahari Minerals, owner of large uranium deposits in Namibia.

In response, the Obama administration has not approved a single one among the pending 21 applications for new nuclear facilities in the U.S. With no action on the part of regulators, American companies are loath to acquire rights to new supplies of uranium. They have been largely absent from bidding for the world’s remaining supplies.

This review is not intended as a criticism of China, which is simply pursuing the kind of coherent, long-range energy policy that is lacking at present in the U.S. China is acting in the rational self-interest of its people, and its people will reap the reward of this effort in the decades ahead.

Obama’s policy, on the other hand, is simply “none of the above.” America will also reap the rewards of its energy policy under Obama and Energy Secretary Chu. With no additional nuclear facilities under development, with the withering away of domestic coal-power production, and with no access to major new Alaskan and offshore oil supplies, America faces a future energy shock of unprecedented proportions. Once the effects of Obama’s restrictions on drilling begin to be felt, today’s gas prices are going to seem like a blue-light special.

The question is, why does Obama want to forestall access to so many of our energy resources just at the moment when gas prices are hitting $4 a gallon and experts are predicting they will go higher? Either the President is out of his mind, or he is intent on wrecking our future. Since spiraling gas prices are also going to hinder Obama’s re-election, it is a difficult question to answer. The truth may be that he just hasn’t thought about it. He’s too busy shooting hoops and hosting rappers like Jay-Z in the White House Situation Room.

Unless reversed by a conservative president and Congress following 2012, Obama’s failed energy policy will have devastating consequences. Americans will pay much higher prices for energy in the future, as high as $12 a gallon for gas and four times the current price of about 15 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity. More important yet, high energy prices will sap economic growth, and slower growth will result in structurally high unemployment, declining living standards, and a weakening of our national defense. Maybe this is what Obama wants — I believe that it is — but it is not what most Americans hope to see.

Slow growth and a weakened military may not seem like such an awful fate to the fashionable idiots on the left. It is, in fact, exactly what they are seeking: an America brought to its knees, one weak little nation among many, no more powerful or influential than Bolivia or Peru. A nation that sits happily on the sidelines of history, content to consume its “fair share” of the earth’s resources and live at the average level of the world’s economy, somewhere between Nigeria and Moldova.

That is the happy future that Obama has in mind for your grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A pair of plastic sandals and a government-issued bike for transport, a bowl of rice for supper, a three-month wait for a visit to the physician’s assistant, and a hundred-square-foot apartment with a wall screen permanently tuned to MSNBC.

There are some Americans who are born communists — those who fancy the Mao suit, the masochistic fall-into-line mentality, the fondness for self-abasement and diminishment. These natural-born comrades, eager to hand over their liberties to some vicious and inscrutable dictator, must like what they see in Obama. The rest of us will continue fighting to preserve our liberties.

HT: American Thinker

After months of refusing to cut any spending, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) finally came out with a Democratic offer to cut spending for this current fiscal year by a mere $4.7 billion. The budget deficit for the current fiscal year is projected to be $1.6 trillion. So, the Senate Democrats’ spending cuts would lower the federal deficit by a mere .004%.

“At a time when Washington is borrowing about $4 billion a day, Democratic leaders want to cut about four and a half billion in government spending for the rest of the fiscal year and then call it a day,” said Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.).

When the Democrats’ spending proposal came to the floor for a vote last week, Reid could not even keep his own Democrats on board because the spending cuts were so insignificant. When the Democratic alternative spending bill came to a vote in the Senate, 11 Democrats voted against it. The final vote was 42-58.

In contrast, the Republican House-passed Continuing Resolution (CR) which cuts government spending this year by $61 billion got more votes (44-56), but did not meet the 60-vote threshold needed to pass. McConnell held together all his Republicans for the CR (H.R. 1), except three who wanted even deeper cuts, Jim DeMint (S.C.) and freshmen Mike Lee (Utah) and Rand Paul (Ky.). So all of the Republicans in the Senate and 11 of the Democrats want to cut government spending this year, while Reid and other Democratic leaders fight to keep almost all the taxpayers’ money in Washington.

The Democratic House and Senate last year did not pass a budget or any of the appropriations bills. To keep the government from shutting down, McConnell and Obama negotiated a three-month CR in December. On February 19, the House Republicans passed a CR (H.R. 1) that cut $61 billion in government spending for the current fiscal year, which goes through September 30.

Reid at first refused to take up the House CR, calling the cuts “draconian,” and Obama said that he would veto the bill if it passed the Senate. So to keep the government funded after March 4, Congress had to pass a short-term CR. However, Boehner said that any short-term CR to keep the government funded while budget negotiations continued would have to include cuts in spending. Thus, the House passed a two-week CR last week that cuts spending by $4 billion and expires March 18.

While the Senate Democrats blocked the House CR, the House Democrats were claiming that they had already compromised on spending cuts. Pelosi said last week that the House Democrats “have, I repeat, have cut $41 billion from President Obama’s budget already.”

“We’ve come up more than halfway to meet the Republican proposals, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D.-Md.) told reporters this week.

But, the Democratic leaders’ saying that they had already cut spending is merely a reference to the December CR which was $41 billion less than Obama’s proposed budget, which was never enacted. So the House Democrats are not willing to cut a single penny from current spending, but claiming that they have already come “halfway”.

To be fair, the Democrats learned how to claim bigger spending-cut numbers from the example set by the House Republicans. When Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) first announced the CR in early February, he said that it met the Republicans’ “Pledge To America” by cutting spending back to 2008 levels and saving $100 billion from the President’s budget. But when the actual numbers were released, it was clear that Ryan’s CR did not bring spending back to 2008 levels and cut only $32 billion from current 2010 levels.

The House Republican leadership spent days trying to spin reporters by saying that the Pledge to cut $100 billion was always in reference to Obama’s proposed budget and was for a calendar year. But it was the backlash from the freshmen and the conservative wing that forced Speaker of the House John Boehner (R.-Ohio) to ask the Appropriations Committee to cut more discretionary spending. By the time the CR came to the floor for a vote, the Republicans had cut another $29 billion from this year’s spending.

So, the Democrats’ claim that their $41 billion is halfway to $100 billion means that both sides are citing non-existent cuts to hypothetical spending levels. Bottom line: Both sides are cooking the books to make their political points and improve their image with the public.

While the Senate debated the House spending bill last week, President Obama put out his second veto threat. The White House said that Obama would veto H.R. 1 if it passed the Senate because “the unbalanced bill would undermine the nation’s economic recovery and its ability to succeed in a complex global environment.”

Obama has now put out two veto threats, but has not participated at all in the negotiations with Congress on the budget.
“Where is the President?” asked an outraged Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R.-Va.). “We continue to hear from him and the White House that, ‘We are going to meet you halfway.’ Well, where is the President?”

Instead, Obama named Vice President Joe Biden as his “chief negotiator” with congressional leaders on the CR. But, Biden left the country before the Senate vote to travel to went to Finland, Russia and Moldova.

“The Vice President is the main negotiator; the Vice President is not even in the country today. We have less than a week and a half to go. You ask the press secretary at the White House, ‘Well who’s the lead negotiator with the Vice President gone?’ ‘Can’t tell you that.”” said Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R.-Calif.) last Wednesday.

Biden’s only involvement with the CR was to make phone calls to Boehner and McConnell. He tried calling Reid but they did not connect (There is more than one phone line on Air Force 2. I know; I’ve flown on it many times.)

So what are the next steps?

The House will vote on Tuesday on a three-week CR that will cut an additional $6 billion in spending. The House Republicans are putting the CR out a week earlier than the deadline in order to disarm the Democrats from making accusations of shutting down the government. The Senate and President are expected to go along with the new CR.

For the negotiations on the long-term CR to occur, Republicans insist that the Democrats have to come up with real spending cuts in order for them to negotiate down from the $61 billion level. But so far, the only offer on the table is the $61 billion from the House CR, which failed to pass the Senate last week.

“Where is the Senate Democrat plan? I’m not going to sit up here and negotiate with myself!” an indignant Boehner said last Thursday.

The negotiations between the House Republicans and Senate Democrats will have to resume, but the resolution and the final level of spending cuts is still unpredictable.

HT: Human Events

With a bold political announcement, President Barack Obama has completed the trifecta — de facto coups which bring into his White House the powers and functions of the other two branches, as outlined in our Constitution.

That document assigns the legislative function to Congress, but the Executive Branch blithely and routinely co-opts that power by run-arounds and choosing to enforce or not enforce duly passed laws of the Legislature.

Notable examples in the scant couple of years The One has been in office include: refusal to enforce voting laws against intimidation at the polls in Chicago, efforts to use the regulatory functions of the EPA to circumvent the specific legislation of Congress to ban cap-and-trade, refusal to enforce immigration laws, and attempts by the FCC to regulate matters banned from its jurisdiction by law.

We need not even mention the undemocratic parliamentary tactics and outright bribery used by Obama and his allies to ram through the unpopular and clearly unconstitutional ObamaCare bill — without it even having been read by most Congress members.

On the judiciary side, we witness the executive ignoring a Federal Court ruling on ObamaCare’s unconstitutionality, the refusal — to the point where an order of compliance had to be issued from the bench — to refrain from imposing an illegal moratorium on oil drilling; and, now the clearest and most blatant power grab of all. Obama has arrogated to himself, in the matter of DOMA, the power to declare that law unconstitutional and order his Justice Department not to contest lawsuits challenging it.

In the meantime, while usurping and/or undercutting the legitimate powers and functions of the other two branches, in the three areas for which the Executive does have power and responsibility — faithfully executing the laws, conducting foreign policy, and commanding the armed forces — this megalomaniacal narcissist has proven a spectacular failure.

What have we allowed to happen to the American concept of separation of powers? Are we abandoning this unique and hallowed concept for a tinpot dictatorship dressed up in a fancy suit and fancy oratory? Where and how do we stop this train to ruination?

HT: American Thinker

Faced with stifling debt, bloated pensions and intractable government unions, liberal Midwestern legislators have fled those states — paralyzing Republican fiscal reform efforts. Like Monty Python’s Brave Sir Robin and his band of quivering knights, these elected officials have only one plan when confronted with political hardship or economic peril: Run away, run away, run away.

Scores of Fleebagger Democrats are now in hiding in neighboring Illinois, the nation’s sanctuary for political crooks and corruptocrats. Soon, area hotels will be announcing a special discount rate for card-carrying FleePAC winter convention registrants. Question: Will the White House count the economic stimulus from the mass Democratic exodus to Illinois as jobs “saved” or “created”? More important question: How much are taxpayers being charged for these obstructionist vacations?

Voters have spoken: In Wisconsin, Indiana, Ohio and across the heartland, they put Republican adults in charge of cleaning up profligate Democrat-engineered messes. Instead of defending their same old tax-hiking, union-protecting, spending-addicted ways, Democrats are crossing their state borders into big government sanctuary zones — screaming “la, la, la, we can’t hear you” all the way.

Wisconsin Democrats warned that their delinquent members — evading state troopers and literally phoning it in — could be gone “for weeks” to prevent a quorum on GOP Gov. Scott Walker’s modest plan to increase public union workers’ health insurance and pension contributions, end the compulsory union dues racket and rein in collective bargaining powers run amok.

Big Labor insists its intransigence isn’t about money, but about “rights.” But the dispute is about nothing but money and power — the union’s power to dictate and limit its members’ health insurance choices to a lucrative union-run plan, for example, which adds nearly $70 million in unnecessary taxpayer costs.

On Tuesday, only three of 40 House Democrats in Indiana showed up for legislative debate on a similar bill to end forced unionism and join 22 other “right to work” states. Hoosier media reported that some of the fugitive pols may be headed to Kentucky in addition to President Obama’s old political stomping grounds.

The White House and Beltway Democrats have paved the way for subverting deliberative democracy, of course. If only Republicans in Wisconsin and Indiana had followed the Obama/Pelosi/Reid model and rammed their behind-closed-doors-crafted legislative agenda through in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend, the Fleebaggers wouldn’t be on the lam today. But GOP legislators just don’t roll that way. It’s Democrats who cut and run — abroad in wartime and at home in crisis.

Almost eight years ago, more than 50 Texas Democratic state lawmakers holed up in Oklahoma and New Mexico for weeks to stymie a vote on Republican-sponsored redistricting plans they opposed. Over the past week, it was thousands of public school teachers in Wisconsin who faked illness and boycotted their classrooms. And it’s union henchmen calling out loud for statewide strikes to bring Republican reformers to their knees.

The Party of Truancy has become a laughingstock — and Americans aren’t waiting for left-wing late-night comedians to bring down the hammer of well-earned mockery. The Internet has lit up over the past week with “Wanted” posters and all-points-bulletin alerts for missing Democrats.

Blogger John Hayward of the conservative Human Events newspaper joked that “the next issue of National Geographic will track the migratory patterns of fugitive Democrats across the great plains.” Seton Motley of the Washington, D.C.-based Media Research Center weighed in: “First, Wisconsin. Now, Indiana. When we said ‘runaway government,’ it was a complaint — not a suggestion.” Comedian Stephen Kruiser snickered that OFA — the Democrats’ political organizing arm, Organizing for America — now stands for “Organizing Fleeing Americans.”

Note: Many of the loudest Washington and Hollywood critics of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s decision to resign from office in 2009 are themselves now AWOL on the Wisconsin and Indiana AWOL-ians. Who’s all for mocking “quitters” now? Anyone?

One mortified Wisconsin taxpayer speaks for many. “As the daughter of former Wisconsin Senate Minority Floor Leader William R. Moser (D-Milwaukee, Dist. 6),” Mary Magdalen Moser told me, she’s humiliated by the “flee-bagging” politicians. “I am ashamed of the actions taken by the minority party to subvert our system of government by boycotting its legitimate processes. Anarchy is undemocratic, and I know that my Dad is spinning in his grave right now. … I do not support refusing to participate, because that will not solve any of the issues facing our state.”

Remember the 2008 Democratic Party chant: “Fired up! Ready to go!” Well, there’s a new Democratic Party motto in town: “Ready to go? OK, then, let’s blow this pop stand!” It’s difficult to see how Obama and his absconder allies can “win the future” when they’re stampeding over each other to escape the present.

HT: Townhall.com

How delicious is irony, how fickle fate?

Just a little more than two years ago, liberals were ecstatic about Barack Obama’s election and Democrats’ control of Congress. Liberal pundits were all atwitter about the brand new Democratic Era that voters had ushered in. America would finally become what America should have been years ago: a European-style social democracy.

Boy, did Democrats misread their mandate! With very little hindsight needed, it’s apparent to all but ideologically-blinkered liberals that the Democrats’ gross overreach isn’t what voters wanted or expected. Voters wanted a redo of the Clinton years. Instead, in the person of Barack Obama, voters got an amalgam of FDR and LBJ with a dash of Neville Chamberlin thrown in.

But here’s the real kicker. Two years of Obama-Reid-Pelosi overreach and excesses may have been the table-setter for the real revolution now unfolding. Voters and taxpayers first needed to see the irresponsibility and recklessness of unalloyed liberalism to appreciate that conservative government is far superior. Thank you, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid.

Of course, the real revolution began last year with the 2010 midterm elections. Yes, the GOP made the largest gains in U.S. House seats since 1948. But the underappreciated story is that the GOP racked up huge gains in state legislative contests, and further down ballot, Republicans swept plenty of local offices. State legislatures control congressional redistricting. Republicans now dominate enough key statehouses to lock-in GOP congressional electoral advantages for a decade.

Had voters limited their ballots to throwing out the rascals in Congress, a fair argument could be made that 2010 was just a protest vote — an attempt by voters to shake up the Democrats. But when voters drill down to change party control of legislatures, city halls, and county commissions, you can bet that they’re thoroughly repudiating the party in power. The 2010 repudiation of Democrats was a clear expression of what voters did and didn’t want from government.

Move now to the present time. Republicans are on the march in Congress. Late last week, House Republicans passed a budget bill containing $61 billion in cuts. It’s not the $100 billion that conservatives aimed for, but it’s substantial and can be considered a down payment. The House Republican proposal now goes to the Senate. The budget process wrangling is just in its first phase. Moving forward, the GOP will have multiple opportunities to push more cuts.

And look what else House Republicans are doing. They’re using the budget process to hamstring Obamacare by denying it funding. Shutting down and then nixing ObamaCare would be an historic victory in the fight to end liberalism’s nearly hundred-year dominance; it would be one of those critical turning points in history — like Vicksburg and Gettysburg — a momentum shifter that leads to other key victories, such as entitlements reform.

Also, Indiana Republican Mike Pence offered and passed an amendment cutting funding for the odious abortion mill called Planned Parenthood. Another amendment, offered by Oregon Republican Greg Walden, that passed, chokes off funds for the Federal Communications Commission’s net-neutrality gambit. Net -neutrality would concentrate more power in the FCC’s hands and stymie free speech across the internet. Net-neutrality could well have been made in China.

Of course, the revolution just beginning isn’t confined to the Halls of Congress. Chris Christie, New Jersey’s intrepid Republican governor, fired the first shots last year in the burgeoning struggle to bring sanity back to state affairs. Christie’s efforts aren’t limited to balancing state budgets and reining in taxes, important as those things are. Christie is working to limit government and expand the playing field for the private sector. As we’re seeing, government without proper limits is a ruinous beast. California is a prime example.

Now newly elected Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is making headlines because he dares to say that his state is broke and that the public employees’ gravy train needs to end. Governor Walker wants to end collective bargaining for public employees, excepting police and firefighters, on the simple, common sense premise that employees shouldn’t be negotiating the hours they work, among other things.

In Ohio, Governor John Kasich is gearing up to slash budgets, rollback taxes, cut regulations, and confront the Buckeye State’s public employee unions. There’ll be fireworks aplenty in Columbus.

Thomas Jefferson is being proven right again. The states are the laboratories of democracy. Christie, Kasich, and Walker are seeking to demonstrate that limited, financially responsible government is best for economic and societal health. If successful — and we should all have high confidence that these governors will succeed — the lessons will not be lost on voters and politicians in other states. Revolutions are like that; it takes just a few courageous leaders to embolden others and for revolutions to spread.

A marvelous, if unintended, consequence of this burgeoning conservative revolution is what it’s doing to liberalism. The budding conservative revolution is starting to place strains on liberalism; beginning to make liberals and their allies fight defensive battles in multiple — and multiplying — places. Call this a modified Cloward-Piven — or Cloward-Piven turned on its masters.

Challenging liberal governance, and pressing limited government reforms, will help bring down liberalism across the nation. And that should be an indisputable aim of the new conservative revolution. Liberalism became a pox on the nation years ago. Marginalizing liberalism would be an incomparable service to generations to come — and to those kids being lied to now by too many Wisconsin teachers.

“Change We Can Believe In.” Mr. Obama’s slogan always had a nice ring to it, but it was misapplied and a little ahead of its time. With the conservative revolution, change we can really believe in has arrived. How’s that for rich irony?

HT: American Thinker

President Obama has been speaking lately of what he views as an upswing in the economy. “The economy is growing again,” he declared in the State of the Union address. Not surprisingly, he failed to mention that for 104 consecutive weeks, larger and larger numbers of Americans have become dependent on welfare. Or that within those families receiving welfare, fathers have become more and more irrelevant, and youth crime has increased.

But, then, those are not facts that one expects to hear from the President in a State of the Union address, or anywhere else. What we hear, again and again, is the fantasy that government creates jobs, government drives the economy, government feeds kids and sends them to bed happy. The facts are just the opposite.

In fact, the Department of Agriculture has just reported that 43.6 million Americans are now receiving food stamps.

Significantly, in 2006, near the height of the historic Bush economic expansion, the number of Americans receiving food stamps was just over 20 million. Since then, the number of recipients has more than doubled, with nearly all of the increase coming under the presidency of Barack Obama. In fact, one of the under-reported stories of the past two years is that the number of Americans receiving food stamps has increased every single month under the Obama administration. Even with the recent decline of the unemployment rate from 10% to 9.4%, the number receiving food stamps has continued to increase.

That increase is not good for the taxpayer or for the welfare recipient. The increase in federal welfare spending is one of the main reasons for annual budget deficits now totaling $1.5 trillion. In the 2011 budget that Obama has submitted to Congress, over $1.43 trillion is to be spent on Medicare and Medicaid, with Medicaid the fasting growing component. Next to defense, health and human services is the largest component of discretionary spending in the Obama budget, coming in at $83.5 billion. But housing is not that far behind, with $41.6 billion. And other major redistribution programs, such as the Earned Income Credit, do not even appear in the budget.

The annual cost to the taxpayer of the Earned Income Credit program, which provides a maximum of $5,666 per family, is $59 billion. This is a high cost to pay, especially since as many as 30% of those claiming the credit are not entitled to it.

Clearly, Obama’s redistributionist politics are not good for the taxpayer. But welfare is not good for welfare recipients, either.

The impact of food stamps, Section 8 housing subsidies, Medicaid, and other support programs has been to create a permanent welfare class which, in terms of skills and attitudes, is poorly equipped to return to work. Not only that, the children of welfare moms are nurtured in a mentality that perpetuates dependency from generation to generation. And liberal politicians are in no hurry to end this dependency since the system of welfare patronage serves their interests.

The destructiveness of welfare goes beyond political dependency. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan documented long ago in The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, the welfare system contributes greatly to the breakdown of the family. What Moynihan wrote in the 1960s holds true today. The more welfare that families receive from government, the less necessary fathers are for their support. Lacking the role model of a responsible father, children grow up to believe that dependency is a natural condition of life.

Furthermore, a great deal of evidence points to a close relationship between crime and welfare. It is by no means an urban myth to suggest that housing projects are dangerous locales. Statistical mapping reveals that murder sites in urban areas are clustered around public housing locations.

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1994, Michael Tanner documented the relationship between welfare and crime. Pointing to the ill effects of high rates of out-of-wedlock birth and fatherless families among welfare recipients, Tanner concluded that “the welfare system is a significant cause of juvenile crime and violence.” Clearly, welfare entails a cost to society that goes beyond its effect on the federal and state budgets.

As to why so many Americans are receiving food stamps and other welfare benefits, one reason is that so many have dropped out of the workforce altogether. The January 2011 jobs report confirmed that Obama’s economic policies are not creating jobs. In fact, there were only 36,000 jobs created at a point in the economic cycle when one would expect a quarter million or more. The “good news” is that the unemployment rate fell to 9%, but only because so many more decided that welfare beats work. Expect the big increases in food stamp numbers to continue.

Maybe Obama is pleased with the jobless recovery we are in. America now has the lowest labor force participation rate in a quarter century. As of November 2010, the rate had sunk to 64.5%. That number includes not only those persons of working age who are employed but also those who are unemployed but looking for work — currently 16% of the workforce. In other words, 35.5% of working age adults have simply given up on finding a job.

US Labor Force Participation, Lowest in 25 Years

One would think these numbers would be alarming to a President who has already kicked off his re-election campaign with a partisan State of the Union address and numerous appearances in swing states. But Obama was schooled in the Chicago patronage system which equates dependency with votes. For a politician like Obama, a vigorous private sector expansion just means fewer votes. Maybe that’s why he has done so much to prevent it from happening.

Democrats have a vested interest in expanding the numbers of Americans who have simply given up looking for work. Why should Obama wish to create more jobs when it is welfare recipients who are his greatest fans?

HT: American Thinker

As I pondered the direction our government had taken over the previous year, I looked at the definition of socialism by typing “define: socialism” into Google. The first definition presented was from Princeton’s wordnet and read as follows: “a political theory advocating state ownership of industry.” The definition feels woefully lacking.

Ownership denotes control, and the state is certainly getting into the business of controlling industry. Our government has exerted control over enterprise via legislative fiat more over the last year than at any other time since FDR’s power-grab during the Great Depression. From the thousands of pages of ObamaCare to the thousands of pages of the Dodd-Frank “financial reform” bill, government power is firmly entrenched in business, and it is expanding. The more regulations the state adds, the more control it exerts.

Can a business be considered a free enterprise when there are thousands of pages of rules that dictate its every move, from how much it can pay employees to how much profit it can make? Is a business free when the rule of law is not honored and the state can summarily declare that some contracts are valid and will be honored while others are and will not? Can stockholders or owners say that they run a company when the state makes such important decisions and keeps most of the profits?

Since the Gulf oil spill was voted the top story of 2010, let’s take a look at the petroleum industry. Several left-wing pundits opined that it was a lack of regulation that caused the disaster. That seems odd considering the amount of government red tape involved in the process of getting oil out of the ground and to market.

Big oil has long been the favorite whipping boy of grandstanding, self-righteous politicians. The petroleum industry can’t drill, refine, or sell without the government deeply involved in every aspect of the business. A petroleum company’s pain begins with the search and acquisition of raw crude oil. If a company wants to drill, it has to get permits from the government. This has become a painful process. After the recent Gulf oil spill, it has become longer and even more arduous. The Gulf of Mexico, one of the few places left to drill legally, has been essentially made off-limits via the permitting process. Where to drill isn’t dictated by science, economics, or even common sense. Drilling in the United States is dictated by the state.

If a company is lucky enough to get the oil out of the ground, it then runs into the next problem: refining. Thanks to lawsuits and over-regulation, the last new refinery built in the United States was built in Garyville, Louisiana, when Carter was president. At that time, the United States used 6,978,000 barrels of gasoline per day. By 2007 the U.S. was consuming 9,286,000 barrels per day. In that same period of time, gasoline has gone from a fairly standardized product used in all states to a very complex product that requires very precise reformulations to meet the ever-expanding set of government rules. This patchwork of state and federal regulation is so varied that some call the process of creating gasoline “creating boutique fuels.”

So while demand for refining capacity has continuously increased, our production capacity has barely been able to grow enough to meet demand. Most refineries are running at nearly 100 percent capacity around the clock. This is why small disruptions cause massive price swings.

Leftists continue to make spurious claims that neither regulation nor lawsuits have prevented the building of a single refinery. Such groups like to point to the Arizona Clean Fuels refinery that the EPA permitted in 2004 after years of work. Ironically, no shovel has moved a single piece of earth in the building of the refinery, which was supposed to be online in 2010. The legal and regulatory battle has brought us more than six years into the future without any danger of a new refinery being built.

Once a company has cleared all of the hurdles of getting the oil out of the ground and turning it into a product for market, the tax man comes. For every gallon of gasoline, the government collects between 30 to 50 cents in taxes (18 to the feds, on average 22 to the states, and, quite often, 2 to 5 cents to a local municipality). In 2007, Exxon made $40 billion in profit, but it paid $100 billion in taxes and royalties. In other words, government made 2.5 times more from Exxon’s oil production than Exxon and its shareholders did.

Who needs state ownership when the government can make 2.5 times more profit from an enterprise than the enterprise makes itself? Since the company is allowed to make a profit, it doesn’t fit the strict definition of socialism. Instead, we have a system of over-regulation that gives a large amount of control over and profit from a business to the state, while allowing the company to keep some share of profit for itself. I call this system regulationism. People who believe in over-regulation and state control of businesses are regulationists.

Regulationism often brings disastrous results. In some cases, monopolies are granted by the state; in others, competitors aren’t allowed to compete. The costs of air travel and phone service, for example, were once astronomical. Thankfully the Reagan revolution helped tear down the regulationism in place. If the regulations from the ’70s were still in place, we wouldn’t have cheap air travel, ubiquitous cell phones, or a host of other advances that a competitive marketplace offers.

The goals of regulationism and socialism are the same: control over a company or business. The end result of regulationism and socialism is also the same: a lifeless economy filled with uncompetitive businesses. November’s election wasn’t just a rejection of a political party or a fight over personal taxes; it was also the rejection of regulationism.

In the next election, President Obama should have two labels to avoid: socialist and regulationist. Being in either camp is equally poisonous in American politics.

HT: American Thinker

Dennis Prager

To be admired by the women they love
12/19/2010 – Dennis Prager -

It is said that the one question about men and women that even the great Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, could not answer was: What do women want?

Whether or not Freud actually admitted his ignorance on this question is irrelevant. The very popularity of the anecdote testifies to one incontrovertible fact: A lot of men don’t know the answer.

It is probably fair to say that a lot of women also don’t know the answer. If they did, all they would have to do is tell men. That would solve the riddle — and make most men and women very happy.

So, to the extent that this is a great riddle, it is so because most members of both sexes seem not to know the answer.

Adding support to the widespread belief that what women want is close to unknowable is the underlying presumption that just about everybody knows what men want.

The number of Internet jokes that portray women’s wants as complex and men’s as simple is a testament to how widespread these assumptions about the two sexes are. Three examples illustrate this:

The first example is the one that begins: “HOW TO IMPRESS A WOMAN.” Listed beneath that heading is this: “Compliment her, respect her, honor her, cuddle her, kiss her, caress her, love her, stroke her, tease her, comfort her, protect her, hug her, hold her, spend money on her, wine and dine her, buy things for her, listen to her, care for her, stand by her, support her, hold her, go to the ends of the Earth for her.”

That long list is followed by: “HOW TO IMPRESS A MAN.” And listed beneath is this: “Show up naked. Bring food.”

The second Internet example: “Q: What is the difference between men and women? A: A woman wants one man to satisfy her every need. A man wants every woman to satisfy his one need.”

And a third Internet example shows a box divided into two parts. Under the part labeled “Women” are 40 dials and knobs. Under the part labeled “Men” is one switch, marked “On-Off.”

As with most generalizations, there is much truth to these. Nevertheless, I take issue with both presumptions: that what women want is a riddle that would stump the Sphinx and that what men want is so easy it could be written on the back of a postage stamp.

In fact, I believe that both are relatively simple to answer (though neither is simple to achieve).

What does a man most want? Answer: He most wants to be admired by the woman he loves.

One proof is that the most devastating thing a woman can do to her man is to hold him in contempt. That is so devastating to a marriage that, over time, it is often more toxic than an affair. I am fairly certain that more marriages survive an affair, as difficult as that is, than contempt. Of course, this goes in both directions, but when a woman shows contempt toward her man, his very manhood is called into question.

My father and mother were married 69 years. As my brother and I have heard countless times, “She put me on a pedestal” was the quality my father most often cited in describing what a wonderful wife my mother was. She admired him, and to him that was everything. On the other hand, in describing her love for my father over all those years, my mother never once said, “He put me on a pedestal” (despite the fact that he constantly praised her). Rather, she always spoke of what a “great man” he was, how “brilliant,” etc. Of course, this is just one example, but I think it applies to the majority of men and women.

The obvious upshot of this thesis is that in order to gain a woman’s love a man must make — and keep — himself admirable.

Boys know this instinctively. Studies that have observed boys and young men reveal how much harder they work at anything — sports come immediately to mind — when they know girls are watching them.

That is why many single men in our society (often erroneously but understandably) place so much emphasis on what car they drive: They want to impress women. Yet, men couldn’t care less what car a woman drives. In fact, for most men a woman arriving on a first date in a relatively inexpensive car renders her more desirable than if she showed up in an expensive luxury car — unless the man is looking to be supported by a woman. But few women are attracted to a man they know in advance they will have to support.

So, although the Internet jokes are right about men wanting sex, it isn’t sex men most want from their woman. They want to be admired — and sex is one manifestation of a woman’s admiration for her man. When a man is regularly denied sex, in his eyes that means that his wife does not hold him in high esteem. Worse, he actually feels humiliated as a man. That, not the sex per se, is why regular denial devastates a man.

So, then, if what a man most wants is to be admired by his woman, what is it that a woman most wants?

That is the subject of the next column.

But here’s a hint. If we begin with the assumption that men and women are made to bond with one another, what she most wants must be in some way related to what he most wants.

As we shall see, it is.

HT: NRO