Republicans want you to die, part 5

Senator Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.:

The Republicans "have attached a poison pill -- literally, colleagues -- because it will kill 8,100 more people more than would have otherwise been killed from pollution," Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Cali.) said on the Senate floor today about Republicans trying to roll back a Clean Air Act provision.

Republicans included a measure to kill an EPA regulation in their payroll tax cut proposal.

"So have that for a Christmas gift," Boxer said after she scared people with the 8,100 number.

Video at the link.

Where is the ACLU when you need it?

Officially promoted by the Obama administration!

Heritage's blog, The Foundry: "Obama Couldn’t Wait: His New Christmas Tree Tax"

President Obama’s Agriculture Department today announced that it will impose a new 15-cent charge on all fresh Christmas trees—the Christmas Tree Tax—to support a new Federal program to improve the image and marketing of Christmas trees.

In the Federal Register of November 8, 2011, Acting Administrator of Agricultural Marketing David R. Shipman announced that the Secretary of Agriculture will appoint a Christmas Tree Promotion Board. The purpose of the Board is to run a “program of promotion, research, evaluation, and information designed to strengthen the Christmas tree industry’s position in the marketplace; maintain and expend existing markets for Christmas trees; and to carry out programs, plans, and projects designed to provide maximum benefits to the Christmas tree industry” (7 CFR 1214.46(n)). And the program of “information” is to include efforts to “enhance the image of Christmas trees and the Christmas tree industry in the United States” (7 CFR 1214.10).

To pay for the new Federal Christmas tree image improvement and marketing program, the Department of Agriculture imposed a 15-cent fee on all sales of fresh Christmas trees by sellers of more than 500 trees per year (7 CFR 1214.52). And, of course, the Christmas tree sellers are free to pass along the 15-cent Federal fee to consumers who buy their Christmas trees

But wait! It's not actually a tax, you see:

Acting Administrator Shipman had the temerity to say the 15-cent mandatory Christmas tree fee “is not a tax nor does it yield revenue for the Federal government” (76 CFR 69102).

The 15 cents, you see, goes to a board, established by the SecAg, that promotes Christmas trees by "carrying out the program established by" the SecAg. No wonder OTB headlines it, "A Christmas Tree Tax? No, Just Good Old Crony Capitalism."

The problem here isn’t that the Federal Government is imposing a “tax” on Christmas trees, but that it’s doing so to finance a program that it shouldn’t be implementing to begin with. The reason that the Christmas Tree growers want a program like this is because natural trees have been steadily losing market share to artificial trees in recent years. ... It’s a choice consumers are making in increasing numbers apparently, and the natural tree industry obviously doesn’t like it.So, they decided to get the government involved in “promoting” natural Christmas trees. ...

Why, then, do we need a government program to promote their sale?

We don’t, of course, and in reality the government shouldn’t be involved in product promotion of any kind. That’s not their job, it’s the job of the industry itself. If tree growers want to create a promotional campaign, then they can do so through their trade association. This simply isn’t something that the government should be doing, especially for a product that is sold primarily in a domestic market. Instead of doing that, though, they lobbied the government to create a program to do it for them.

What we’ve got here, then, is another example of crony capitalism, with the government putting its finger on the scale to benefit the natural tree industry at the presumed expense of the artificial tree industry and, most likely, the taxpayers (that 15 cent a tree fee is unlikely to be enough to fund the program completely). That’s crony capitalism, folks.

This administration hardly originated crony capitalism but Obama et. al. have perfected it to a high art.

However, clearly this program is unconstitutional because it violates the First Amendment! As we all know, the government with its partner, the ACLU, has been waging a War on Christmas Trees.

Okay, snark off. Actually, there are all manner of industries that use the government to promote their businesses and this sort of fee is by far from uncommon - as even DefendChristmas.com reports, "Akin to similar programs that promote milk, beef and cotton, the new Christmas tree program will impose on U.S. domestic producers and importers an initial fee of 15 cents per tree." However, it is still accurate to describe the fee as a tax because it is remission of revenue to the federal government by force of law, spent for purposes that are spelled out in law and regulation, carried out by an executive department.

The ACLU's web site is not terribly informative about its stance on Christmas trees per se. It does say that the government must not be in the business of promoting one religion over another or of promoting religion at all.

I hardly think that a program to strengthen the natural-tree growers is an endorsement of Christianity itself.  So no Constitutional line has been crossed. That doesn't mean that the program is wise or desirable. That no one in the government had a second thought about implementing it only shows how deeply rooted these back-scratching programs are in our polity. That's the problem, not 15 cents.

My flirtation with Obamaism

Remember when then-candidate Barack Obama told Joe "the Plumber" that he wanted "to spread the wealth around?"

No. Really. You're kidding me. Barack Obama actually told that Joe the Plumber guy that he wants to "spread the wealth around." What, did Obama just get done reading the Wikipedia entry on Huey "Share the Wealth" Long or something? Was he somehow channeling that left-wing populist from the Depression? Talk about playing into the most extreme stereotype of your party, that it is infested with socialists.

And that quote is from USNews, which supported Obama in 2008 (today, not so much).

On Monday I had my own flirtation with Obamaism and did not even realize what I had done until later in the day. That day my wife and daughter and I ate lunch at a Chinese buffet that we had never dined at before. The chow was fine and the young lady attending our table did a great job.

Now, here's the rub. I almost never under-tip. For me to leave less than the full tip (runs 15 percent or so around these part) happens maybe twice per year, and then for only truly terrible table service. I over-tip if the service is above average. This lady's service was.

So I go to the counter to pay the bill and ask for and receive a discount for being retired military, not an uncommon thing around here. Feeling generous, I added the discounted amount to the tip.

Then later in the afternoon it hit me: that was Obamaism in action. I basically took money from the restaurant's owner when I asked for the discount and gave it to one of his employees. So in fact, I sacrificed nothing and walked out feeling good about my generosity. But I was generous with OPM - and that is exactly what the entire political class of our country is doing to you and me.

I have learned a lesson here. But our government never does.

Endnote: Us Congressman Davy Crockett had something to say about this.

And here is the video with Joe the Plumber.



And just for the heck of it, here are the top 10 true facts about Davy Crockett. He makes Chuck Norris look like a pansy.

Nice work if you can get it

Federal campaign records reveal a self-dealing relationship between a senior Democratic Connecticut congresswoman and her husband’s political consulting firm.

In the last four congressional election cycles, the campaign committee for Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro, Friends of Rosa DeLauro​, transferred $1.2 million to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which in the same period paid $1.9 million to Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for polling and other services, according to Federal Election Commission​ (FEC) filings. Stanley B. Greenberg, founding partner of GQRR, is DeLauro’s husband of 33 years.

And this is neither illegal nor uncommon in Washington politics. More here.

No one got murdered in Watergate

The circles are tightening around the Obama administration over Operation Fast and Furious, the misbegotten and abortive program to smuggle weapons to know Mexican drug lords, presumably to track where the weapons went.

Now,

Republicans are calling for his resignation in the wake of Fast and Furious, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives operation that may have inadvertently contributed to the death of at least one federal agent.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee has called for an independent investigation of Holder, and the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee wants to have Holder testify again before Congress. ...

The torrent of scrutiny comes after a series of internal Justice Department memos were released this week and show that Holder was informed about the existence of Operation Fast and Furious last year.

Holder testified in May before the House Judiciary Committee that he did not learn about the operation until earlier this year. Officials with the DOJ say Holder was referring to when he learned about the controversial tactics, known as “walking” guns into the hands of known and suspected criminals, that were employed by the operation.

Elsewhere, a majority of sheriffs of the Arizona Sheriffs Association voted to call upon the president to appoint an independent counsel to investigate Fast and Furious.

At a Phoenix news conference, Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu said the sting operation, which allowed an estimated 2,000 firearms to reach narcotics cartels in Mexico, was a betrayal that should lead to the removal of Attorney General Eric Holder and possible criminal charges against those responsible.

“I believe that this is a much larger scandal than what took place in Watergate,” said Babeu, who is president of the Arizona Sheriff’s Association.

And nobody got killed in Watergate. But as for F&F:

ATF whistleblowers first exposed the practice after U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in a December shootout with banditos near Nogales, Ariz., involving a pair of semi-automatic rifles that traced back to Operation Fast and Furious.

Attorney General Holder has furiously defended his truthfulness in letters to members of Congress, reaffirming his earlier testimony that he was unaware of F&F until this year.

An independent counsel is basically the same as a special prosecutor. The difference is that the former is authorized under different statutes than the latter. GovInfo has an excellent summary.

HT: Wintery Knight

Update: "Fast and Furious weapons were found in Mexico cartel enforcer's home."

High-powered assault weapons illegally purchased under the ATF's Fast and Furious program in Phoenix ended up in a home belonging to the purported top Sinaloa cartel enforcer in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, whose organization was terrorizing that city with the worst violence in the Mexican drug wars.

In all, 100 assault weapons acquired under Fast and Furious were transported 350 miles from Phoenix to El Paso, making that West Texas city a central hub for gun traffickers. Forty of the weapons made it across the border and into the arsenal of Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, a feared cartel leader in Ciudad Juarez, according to federal court records and trace documents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Obama's Jobs for Lawyers Bill

President Obama’s Jobs Bill Would Make It Illegal To Refuse To Hire The Unemployed

Yes, the headline means exactly what it says. It will officially be made illegal to refuse to hire someone because s/he is unemployed. Businesses may not state in any way that unemployed persons will not be considered for hiring. And as the post's author, Doug Mataconis, points out,

It’s not hard to see how employers might respond to something like this. They’ll be more selective in setting forth job critera in an effort to discourage people from applying. They’ll be rethink how much they’re willing to pay employees given the possibility of increased legal expenses down the road. And, in some cases, they’ll be less willing to hire new employees if it isn’t worth the risk of exposing themselves to harassment by attorneys with dollars signs in their eyes. The only profession that this part of the bill is a “jobs bill” for, then, is the legal profession, which also happens to be one of the Obama campaigns biggest supporters.

Doug is a lawyer, by the way. He continues:

Employers who aren’t hiring the long-term unemployed right now are doing so because they can afford to by choosy in a glutted labor market, and because there are often legitimate concerns about whether someone’s skill set has deteriorated over the course of their unemployment. Who are we to say that employers are wrong to think this way and that they should be forbidden from making this decision?

Well, Doug, "we" are not the ones saying it. It is the statist Imperium saying it. It is the self-anointed elitist, political class that long ago decided it knows what's best for us lumpen proles. After all, this president is of the very same party that thinks what this US Representative said aloud: Dem Congresswoman: "You Don't Deserve To Keep All" Of Your Money:



But wait! Perhaps there is good news: Harry Reid: No Rush On President Obama’s Jobs Bill

That doesn’t exactly sound like the fierce urgency of now:

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, has said he will put the bill on the legislative calendar but has declined to say when. He almost certainly will push the bill — which Mr. Obama urged Congress to pass “right now!” — until after his chamber’s recess at the end of the month; Mr. Reid has set votes on disaster aid, extensions for the Federal Aviation Administration and a short-term spending plan ahead of the jobs bill.

Okay, so Reid doesn't want this monkey on his back. But wait: just yesterday the president said, "I'd like to work my way around Congress."

I have to wonder, though: if Obama wants to make it illegal to refuse to hire the unemployed, would he also agree to make it illegal for any unemployed person to refuse to accept the first job s/he is offered? If not, why not? (And I am not suggesting that be done, just wondering whether the president would agree to both sides of a coin. I'm guessing no.)

Obama: Oh, did I step on your debates? So reschedule!

President Obama has decided to address a joint session of the Congress on the evening of Sept. 7. That is the same night as the next televised debate of Republican candidates for president. But don't worry - it's just a coincidence! Even so, the White house says the debaters can just get stuffed, anyway.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said that the president did not choose the timing of the speech because of the Republican debate. "No. Of course not. There were a lot of considerations," Carney said when asked if the date was an intentional attempt to upstage the debate. "One debate of many that's on one channel of many was not enough reason not to have the speech at the time that we decided to have it." He added that the debate organizers were free to change the time if they wanted.

Sure, no problem! However, Speaker of the House John Boehner has advised the president that he is free to change the night of the address.



The White House responded by saying that it had "cleared" the Sept. 7 date and time with the Republicans. To which Speaker Boehner's spokesman office responded:

"No one in the Speaker's office - not the Speaker, not any staff - signed off on the date the White House announced today. Unfortunately we weren’t even asked if that date worked for the House. Shortly before it arrived this morning, we were simply informed that a letter was coming. It’s unfortunate the White House ignored decades - if not centuries - of the protocol of working out a mutually agreeable date and time before making any public announcement.”

There is no cheap political trick that this president will not attempt. This is nothing compared to what will come over the next 15 months.

Update: Obama caved, as is his custom:

Here is a statement from White House Press Secretary Jay Carney:

“Today, the President asked to address the Congress about the need for urgent action on the economic situation facing the American people as soon as Congress returned from recess. Both Houses will be back in session after their August recess on Wednesday, September 7th, so that was the date that was requested. We consulted with the Speaker about that date before the letter was released, but he determined Thursday would work better. The President is focused on the urgent need to create jobs and grow our economy, so he welcomes the opportunity to address a Joint Session of Congress on Thursday, September 8th and challenge our nation’s leaders to start focusing 100% of their attention on doing whatever they can to help the American people.”

Heh: "And instead of going up against a Republican debate, the President's speech will have to fight for viewers with the opening game of the NFL season."

And let the backtracking begin!

"Cleared" [with the Republicans] officially downgraded to "consulted." So someone at WH anonymously passed along inaccurate information to several journos. Nice.

Update: Even the Washington Post isn't buying it:

There are no coincidences in presidential politics.

Strategists spend hours poring over every word a president utters, every policy position he takes and every state he visits, a level of attention to detail that makes happenstance virtually nonexistent.

And so, when the White House announced today that President Obama would deliver his much-anticipated jobs speech on Sept. 7 at 8 pm — the exact same day and time that the 2012 Republican candidates are scheduled to debate in California — the idea that the timing was purely coincidental was, well, far-fetched.

Far fetched? An enormous understatement.

Poli-Sci Prof. Steven Taylor puts it succinctly: "Obama got Punk’d."

Pirates Are a Better Bargain Than Congress

Information Dissemination: Pirates vs. Congress: How Pirates Are a Better Bargain

Pirates are hardly a financial blip of the
total costs of maritime shipping. 

What entity costs the maritime shipping industries more money - pirates or the US Congress? You know the answer just from the way the question is phrased.

Stephen M. Carmel, Senior Vice President of Maersk Line, Ltd., given August 3rd, 2011 at the Commander Second Fleet Intelligence Symposium of the US Navy. This is a long but must-read speech to anyone who wants to understand the relative risks that shipping has to calculate. And the very tiptop risk of all is what draconian, expensive regulations will be laid atop the industry by the US Congress.

In fact, the Congress costs shipping so much money that piracy costs are barely a blip. Read the whole thing. Some excerpts:

First let me say right out of the gate I am no fan of pirates. Do not like them at all in fact, contrary to what many may perceive from my remarks on the topic. Pirates do impose a cost on our business that we would rather not bear if possible so it is something I worry about. But, while worrying about pirates I also worry about the effect of MARPOL Annex VI and the cost of complying with increasingly harsh emissions control requirements, something that will cost our industry roughly $6 Billion a year to comply with now and that figure will go up as tighter standards kick in in the 2014 time frame. I worry about the requirement to cold iron in LA [use commercial power while at dock], something that is very expensive and disruptive. And since while common for Navy ships to go on shore power, commercial ships never do it and are not fitted with a system to do so, a modification is required that will cost the equivalent of one ransom for each ship it is done on. ...

I worry about bad policy such as the requirement for 100% scanning of containers imposed by congress in the “Implementing the requirements of the 9/11 commission Act”, a requirement which the European Commission estimates will cost the global economy 150 billion Euros or about 215 billion dollars per year were it to be implemented by all our trading partners. With that single act congress potentially does 20 times more damage to the global economy than pirates do by even the most ridiculous estimates of the cost of piracy, and in the process actually degrades maritime security rather than improves it. ...

I worry a heck allot more about bad policy than I do bad guys, bad policy being easier to inflict and harder, and expensive, to recover from once it happens. And speaking of bad policy specifically as relates to pirates, there can be no better example than the Executive order which most believe heads us down the slope towards making ransoms illegal, which in my view is breathtaking in its shortsightedness. That would remove the only tool that is available to us that has proven effective at resolving a piracy incident. Making ransoms illegal is unenforceable, will increase the violence against the crew, will criminalize the victims, and will do nothing to deter pirates. Hostages are a commodity to pirates and they will always find a buyer. [Carmel goes on to explain that if companies can't pay ransom, pirates will simply sell captives into "the very active slavery market."] ...

I assume everyone here knows the basic statistics – piracy is a very rare event considering the volume of traffic that moves through the area. The probability of any specific ship being attacked is remote, and for the types of ships that actually move the majority of international trade even more so, approaching zero. Attack success rates have fallen into the 14% range. But we’ll not belabor the obvious at this point and instead dwell a little on the issues that hide behind the numbers – the rest of the story as Paul Harvey would say.

From the US perspective it is difficult to see how piracy affects our economy or international trade in any significant way.

There is lots more, very compelling stuff from a man who knows firsthand what he's talking about.

I covered a lot of related issues in 2009. One thing I pointed out, that Mr. Carmel confirms, is that piracy off Somalia is not a matter of national security of the United States (link).

Piracy there doesn't even rate a blip on the screen of international maritime commerce. Barely more than one-half of one percent of ships transiting the waters concerned were even threatened with attack last year, much less actually hijacked. The "piracy tax," or the increased costs to shippers of the piracy, is virtually nil as a percentage of total operating costs. Besides which, what little financial end-costs there are are borne mostly by Europeans, not Americans. Only one kidnapped crewman has died in captivity, and he under circumstances not clear (which does not absolve his captors of culpability, it just means that he might not have been murdered).

This means that combating piracy should not displace, either in urgency or in budget, truly critical security issues such as fighting al Qaeda, stabilizing Iraq, winning in Afghanistan or continuing to discover and shut down nascent networks seeking to bring death and destruction to American citizens or possessions.

At best, anti-piracy has to remain an economy-of-force action.

But when it comes to "economy," the US Congress is clueless about what it is costing consumers because of all the layers of suffocating regulations it adds every session.

Shut them up, he explained

John Kerry: Media Has "Responsibility" To "Not Give Equal Time" To Tea Party | RealClearPolitics

John Kerry seems to think that not even MSNBC is living up to its presumed responsibility to be the official propaganda organ of the Democrat party.

SEN. JOHN KERRY: "And I have to tell you, I say this to you politely. The media in America has a bigger responsibility than it's exercising today. The media has got to begin to not give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion just because somebody asserts it or simply because somebody says something which everybody knows is not factual."

Well, since the administration's efforts to Alinsky Fox News Channel didn't work, a new tack, I suppose. Just get the media to ignore everyone who doesn't toe the party line.

We've gone from "Shut up he explained" (Ring Lardner, The Young Immigrants, 1920) to "'Shut them up,' he explained" (John Kerry, 2011).

Well, Senator Kerry, I promise to do my part for your call to action. I will not invite someone to post here who "says something which everybody knows is not factual." Sorry, no invitation to you.

BOHICA!

Back in Army days, we had an expression to warn ourselves that we were about to get shafted again: BOHICA!

Bend Over, Here It Comes Again.

With the imminent debt deal vote in the US Senate today, that's my counsel.

It may well be that this deal is the best that we could realistically have hoped for, whether "we" are Democrat or Republican. Yet, apart from avoiding default, I have a hard time finding much to like, which apparently makes me part of a vast crowd.

Bond trader Bill Gross sees little to like, too: This Deal Does Nothing, And We Still Have An "Unfathomable" $66 Trillion In Liabilities To Deal With



IMO, it is not possible to regain financial solvency, much less financial health, by trimming spending from most or all lines of the budget. We must eliminate lines in the budget altogether. Federal agencies must be closed and federal programs must be terminated.

But for a Member to stand on the chamber floor to say this is to be immediately ostracized by other Members of both parties. Neither the Democrats nor Republicans have the slightest interest in actually reducing the size of the government and actually reducing the federal budget. They are alike worried with budget deficits (and not all are worried about that) without real regard for the size of the budget to begin with.

He wants your wallet

Richard Fernandez explains why:

It seems fair to observe that in some quarters, the show must go on. Whether it the “moderate” wing of the Republican Party or the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, the greatest harm possible is to stop the music. As Yeomans put it “a strong America has always stood firm in the face of terrorism. That tradition is in jeopardy, as Congress and President Barack careen toward an uncertain outcome in the tea party- manufactured debt crisis.”

And that terrorism has now adopted the guise of the innocent looking family down the street, who behind their white picket fences and seemingly mild-mannered exterior are secretly plotting to destroy truth, justice and the New Deal. And while one may or may not agree with the substance of those accusations, the vitriol is apparently real. The one thing worse than getting between the Nazgul and his prey is getting between a politician and public money.

I'll close with a summary of the advance copy of the president's remarks scheduled for today at noon:

Raising taxes creates jobs!

At least that is the clear implication of what Democrat Rep. Bill Pascrell (D.-NJ) said in an interview in the last half hour. Interviewed live on FNC, the Congressman rather harshly criticized the Republicans for proposing only spending cuts as a factor in raising the debt ceiling ("a term that most people outside of Washington have probably never heard of before," remember).

Spending cuts alone, he insisted, will kill jobs, while - track this carefully now - spending cuts plus "revenue enhancements" (read: new taxes) will protect jobs.

Yes, he actually said that.

Now, for discussion's sake, I will stipulate that federal spending cuts might somehow raise unemployment. Certainly, if the cuts led to layoffs of federal employees those people would be unemployed, as 4,000 FAA employees found themselves just a few days ago. But I'll further stipulate that reductions in federal contracting with private companies could lead to layoffs there, too, and so on. With almost 20 percent of Americans receiving federal welfare payments and almost 30 percent altogether receiving federal money for at least part of the income, it's hard to see how deep spending cuts could not affect employment somehow.

But even if Rep. Pascrell is correct on the one hand, it is simply a non sequitur that he is correct on the other. Spending cuts will remove money from the economy and this, presumably, is why Pascrell says cuts will cost jobs. But does he not understand that raising taxes also removes money from the economy? Apparently not - for to his party, only "the wealthy" are tax worthy, and they have so much money that they simply spend it frivolously and uselessly. That's why the president rants against corporate jet deductions, oblivious to the fact that non-commercial aviation is a huge part of the national economy and creates jobs where airline hubs cannot, as Doug Mataconis pointed out in, "The Misplaced Attack on Private Jets," where commenter SteveP explained why:

I was a rigger on luxury yachts when the yacht tax was implemented. The wealthy people who were the supposed targets of the tax simply put off buying new toys. Those of us who built and maintained the yachts lost our homes. Even those that didn’t lose their homes paid a high price for the Democrats’ class warfare. That’s always the way it is. The leftist’s targets aren’t the ones who get hurt. It’s the middle class working people who provide services to the wealthy that get screwed.

Laying all that side, though, there is another fallacy in Rep. Pascrell's argument. Even ifr we stipulate (laying all reason and empirical data aside as well) that spending cuts cost jobs while tax rises save them, not any Democrat in either house has proposed revenue enhancements raising taxes more than the amount of the spending cuts, meaning that whether taxes are raised or not, there will still be net spending cuts.

So how can cutting spending by, say, $4 trillion over 10 years with no new taxes be catastrophic for workers, but offsetting those cuts by $1.4 trillion in new taxes - so that the net cut is $2.6 trillion - be the promised land?

Fact is, though, that not even Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid is insisting on new taxes anymore, although he does want to include $1 trillion already slated to be cut as part of his proposed $2.7 trillion cut, which Sen. Mitch McConnell accurately called a gimmick since that $1 trillion is already in the baseline.

Richard A. Epstein pointedly observes,

Distressingly, neither the president nor the Democrats offer any rigorous account of the optimal level of tax progressivity. Rather, the president seems to think that no matter how high the current marginal tax rates, the correct social policy is to move them upward.

For Pascrell and almost all his party, the rule is always so very simple: spending cuts bad, tax increases good, and that's that. It's all part and parcel of the progressivists' religion of our day.

President Obama promises ‘massive job killing taxes’ if re-elected

What he said today:



Video: President Obama promises ‘massive job killing taxes’ if re-elected.

“So, when you hear folks saying ‘Well, the president shouldn’t want massive job killing tax increases when the economy is this weak.’ Nobody’s looking to raise taxes right now. We’re talking about potentially 2013 and the out years.” (emphasis added)

Re-elect me to get massive job killing tax hikes when I’m a lame duck and you can’t do a thing about it. That right there is a sure-fire winner of a message. If you want to morph into Walter Mondale circa 1984.

In 1984, running against incumbent President Ronald Reagan, newly-nominated Democrat presidential candidate Walter Mondale stood before the Democrat convention. There, on nomination night, he lost the election:



Wikipedia explains the "Mondale Moment."

"... Mr. Reagan will raise taxes, and so will I. He won't tell you. I just did." While this was meant to show that Mondale would be honest with voters, it was largely interpreted as a campaign pledge to raise taxes, which was unappealing to many voters.

Don't you love that last - "a campaign pledge to raise taxes ... was unappealing to many voters." Yeah, like those of the 49 states that Mondale lost!

That aside, it seems somewhat other worldly now to hear a Democrat presidential nominee say of increasing federal deficits, "We are living on borrowed money and borrowed time. These deficits hike interest rates, clobber exports, stunt investment, kill jobs, undermine growth, cheat our kids and shrink our future." Won't be hearing anything like that from the Dems nowadays, nossir.

But the fact is that deficits, hence the federal debt, did balloon under Reagan and no amount of right wing hagiography of Reagan can hide that fact. Except for World War II, the United States ran negligible to no federal deficits for all the 20th century until 1970, when Republican Richard Nixon was president and both houses were controlled by Democrats.

For some reason, a Republican president and a Democrat-controlled Congress has proven lethal to fiscal sanity in this country. Beginning in 1986, the deficit really rocketed upward but after 1995, with Democrat Bill Clinton in the White House and Republicans controlling Congress, deficits fell sharply until 2000.

Then George W. Bush happened. My longtime readers know I am no fan of GWB, even denouncing his 2004 reelection bid the year before. But the fact is - and no amount of Obama hagiography by the left wing can hide this fact - that beginning with the Democrat-controlled Congress in 2007 and accelerating at warp speed since Obama's inauguration, the federal deficit has shot to heretofore unbelievable levels (click for larger view, link):

But today there is no one - and I mean no one - in the Democrat party who has the courage or even the basic conviction to say with Walter Mondale, "We are living on borrowed money and borrowed time. These deficits hike interest rates, clobber exports, stunt investment, kill jobs, undermine growth, cheat our kids and shrink our future."

T-Shirt of the Day

Is GOP setting us up for 1937 replay?

The Great Depression began in 1929 and continued through most of 1941. By 1937, production, profits and wages had returned to 1929 levels, but unemployment remained high at more than 14 percent, though this was a considerable improvement over the 25 percent level seen in 1933.

In mid-1937, things went seriously south. From then through most of 1938, production declined sharply and unemployment rocketed to 19 percent. Wikipedia says,

The Recession of 1937–1938 was a temporary reversal of the pre-war 1933 to 1941 economic recovery from the Great Depression in the United States. Economists disagree about the causes of this downturn. Keynesian economists tend to assign blame to cuts in Federal spending and increases in taxes at the insistence of the US Treasury, while monetarists, most notably Milton Friedman tended to assign blame to the Federal Reserve's tightening of the money supply in 1936 and 1937.

Comes now one Cullen Roche of "Pragmatic Capitalism," who says that the GOP's economic recovery plan will lead to a repeat of 1937. See what you think.



Who is right? I am reminded of Harry Truman's desire to meet a one-armed economist who could never say, "On the other hand . . ."

Let there be - conspiracy theories!

Ding, dong, Osama's dead - or is he, really?

Via American Digest, I find this post by Cobb, "Because he's not dead yet:"

C'mon. You don't get your mitts on Bin Laden just to kill him, and you don't have 40 SEALs who are too slow to tackle the dude. There's is no picture because he's not dead yet. They're twisting him on a spit and slow roasting him until he's so tender the secrets just drip of the bones. They've got him simmering in pentathol. ...

He's certainly not free or missing, that's for sure. He's never going to see the light of day. But is he dead at this very moment? You will never know.

Which makes me wonder about the bogus death photos that got shown to some members of Congress.

A day after the White House said it will not release the official photo of Usama bin Laden’s body, many are wondering how a handful of lawmakers were duped into believing they saw it. ...

The announcement came after at least three U.S. lawmakers claimed to have seen what they believed was an authentic photograph of Bin Laden, shot in the face and chest during a CIA-led Navy SEALs operation Sunday at a secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
But those photos appear to have been doctored images sent by an undisclosed source or sources to members of Congress, including Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., who admitted Wednesday he’d been fooled into thinking the picture was real.
After telling reporters he had seen an image that confirmed Usama is "definitely dead," Brown later said "the photo that I saw and that a lot of other people saw is not authentic.

Let us take Cobb's conspiracy theory to its logical limit! I can conspiracy conspire with the best of 'em:

Q: Why did the White house dither so long on whether to release photos of bin Laden's corpse and then announce there would be no release?
A: There are no photos of bin Laden's corpse because bin Laden is not a corpse. He was snatched, not killed. The bogus photos that some Members received came from the CIA. They were trial balloons of deliberately faked photos. The "leak" was actually a test of the photos' credibility. It was only after they had been quickly debunked that the White House pulled the plug on using them as "official" photos.

Q: What about the burial at sea?
A: There was no burial at sea off USS Carl Vinson, some of whose officers and crew, including the captain, are part of the conspiracy. As for the SEALs and crews of the Army's 160th SOAR who flew the mission, they won't even tell you what they had for breakfast this morning, much less the respiratory status of a body brought out of a mission objective.

Q: So why the elaborate cover story that OBL was killed?
A: We don't want his successors in al Qaeda to know that OBL, having been waterboarded before 24 hours passed, has spilled his guts just as fully as 9/11's mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did after he was captured.

Q: Wait! Bin Laden was water boarded? I thought that Obama outlawed that!
A: Yeah, right. Remember, there's an election coming up in only, what 550 days or so. You think that not water boarding OBL is going to stand in the way of a second term? Just wait until the three months before November when we are incrementally fed through a thoroughly compliant media story after story of terrorist plots stopped by analyzing the intel info grabbed during the raid.

And stipulating that all Cobb proposes is true ... does the president know? Or does he really think that OBL is chatting it up right now with Luca Brazzi?

Think it couldn't happen? Remember that naval intelligence actually removed FDR from the distribution list of intercepted, decoded Japanese signals in the months before Pearl Harbor.

The problem with all this, of course, is that "three may keep a secret if two of them are dead." As Chuck Colson, who did prison time for being part of the Watergate coverup, put it, a conspiracy always gets blown, and the more people there are in it, the quicker.

This is exactly why I still insist that proof of OBLs' death must be made public. Not only will it dampen some (not all) of the conspiracy theories already abounding in Muslim lands, failure to do so will make it more likely that similar conpsiracy theories will start to gain credibility here. This must not happen.

For the record: I believe that the SOF operators went into the compound knowing that there was a high likelihood that OBL was there - but that killing or capturing him was not the highest priority of the mission, though high indeed it was. To repeat myself,

The real value of this raid is less the death of bin Laden, as emotionally satisfying as Americans find it, than the trove of materials gathered. ... What the raid did was retrieve enormously important al Qaeda hard drives and documents from Osama bin Laden's house, incidentally killing bin Laden as they did so.

Even if bin Laden had not been there, the raid would have been a smashing success because of the intelligence goldmine, the capture of which was surely of no lower priority than confronting bin Laden. But OBL was there. The SEALs killed him. Could they have captured him instead? We'll never know. But dead he is at the close-up hands of the US military. And what's even better, the US Congress authorized it.

Code-Name Geronimo to be subject of hearings

ABCNews The Note:

The Senate Indian Affairs committee will hold a hearing Thursday on racist Native American stereotypes, a hearing that will now also address the Osama bin Laden mission and the code-name Geronimo.

While the hearing was scheduled before the mission, a committee aide today said the linking of the name Geronimo with the world’s most wanted man is “inappropriate” and can have a “devastating” impact on kids.

“The hearing was scheduled well before the Osama bin Laden operation became news, but the concerns over the linking of the name of Geronimo, one of the greatest Native American heroes, with the most hated enemies of the United States is an example of the kinds of issues we intended to address at Thursday's hearing,” Loretta Tuell, the committee's chief counsel, said in a statement.

American Power: Code-Name Geronimo: "Not the brightest idea for a code name. Good thing they didn't take out Osama with a Tomahawk missile."

What could have been a better code name? Let's see:

Not Osama bin Laden. Not even close.

Pancho Villa? No, for obvious reasons.

Yamamoto? Nope, Japan is our friend now. (And American Indians are, well, Americans.)

John Brown? Not appropriate because John Brown's body lies a moulderin' in the grave. Osama ain't got no grave and chum doesn't really "moulder."

They could have code named Osama something like Eichmann or Himmler, which at least have the virtue of being names of men who hated Jews as much as OBL did. But why give him an actual name at all? They could just as well have coded him as Target Alpha One or Fizziwig. But even I, who am not very inclined toward political correctness, think that Geronimo wasn't too smart (although it will of course be blown far out of proportion to its actual demerits). After all, the real Geronimo was a standup guy compared to OBL. Calling him Geronimo is far too complimentary for him.

Yeah, "Dirtbag One" would have done the trick nicely.

Addicted to the dole

Victor Davis Hanson, "Patient Obama:"

The electorate is not as it was when it finally sickened of Jimmy Carter in August 1980. Far more are on public assistance, unemployment, Social Security, food stamps, etc., or work for thousands of new state and federal bureaus. There are millions more illegal aliens that have become citizens since the late 1970s. And the voting rolls have expanded exponentially among “nontraditional” voters. Thus, the political calculus about which pundits and talking-heads debate is not always what half the electorate worries about. The national debt, the annual deficit, the problems with ObamaCare, the tax code — all that matters very little. The key question for millions of voters in 2012 will be simply who ensures that my check arrives unchanged or augmented, and who either stops or reduces it.

And so my question again: do the American people actually have the spine to support making the cuts that have to be made to save the country from collapse?

There is no shortage of voters who say they want the federal budget cut and the size of government reduced. What they (okay, we) really mean is, "I want the federal programs and agencies that benefit me to stay intact and the ones that benefit someone else to be slashed like it's Halloween night in a horror movie."

The reason is, I think, that we voters ideologically approve cutting the budget but operationally don't want it done on our own backs. My parents are in their 80s. Do I really want Medicare to be cut? Baby boomers, of whom I am one, are just starting to retire in large numbers. Guess what's going to happen to Social Security spending? Do we really want those payouts slashed just as we're starting to draw them?

Including government employees, more than 88 million Americans are personally dependent to some degree on government payouts. That's 29 percent of us. Do you really think it is politically possible for even a veto-proof Republican Congress to slash those programs, jobs or benefits enough to make a meaningful dent in the trillion-dollar-plus deficit?

The answer is no. Just.Plain.No.

WSJ and NBC found in a survey that nobody wants to touch Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.

Hysterically, even Tea Partiers oppose cutting Social Security by a 2-1 margin.

There is some support for increasing the retirement age to 69... by the year 2075.

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are what is breaking the federal bank, all by themselves. And they are exactly what Americans won't support cutting as substantially as necessary, once individualk Americans find out what it means to them, personally.

Update: "Americans Oppose Entitlement Cuts, Support Raising Taxes On 'The Rich'"

WASHINGTON — Alarmed by rising national debt and increasingly downbeat about their country’s course, Americans are clear about how they want to attack the government’s runway budget deficits: raise taxes on the wealthy and keep hands off of Medicare and Medicaid.

At the same time, they say that the government should not raise the legal debt ceiling, which the government must do soon to borrow more money, despite warnings that failing to do so would force the government into default, credit markets into turmoil and the economy into a tailspin.

Lieberman: We should start another war

Senator Joe Lieberman, who was Al Gore's running mate in 2000 and is today independent of either party, says we should attack Syria.



My gosh, what is it with liberals these days? We need to start a fourth war now? Did someone slip some compound into the water system in D.C.?

Rube that I am, I thought we were finished with wars of choice, especially since the administration now admits that our military could still be working Libya for months to come.

Well, Hillary Clinton has already quashed the notion of getting involved in Syria but did a soft shoe about how long we'll be in Libya.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S. is not planning to get involved in the recent political turmoil in Syria and evaded questions about the long-term outlook for the military intervention in Libya Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation."

"Evaded questions" - so much for the transparency we were promised. But then, we already knew that the president's promise of unprecedented transparency in government was just a gimmick that wouldn't last.

President Obama has abolished the position in his White House dedicated to transparency and shunted those duties into the portfolio of a partisan ex-lobbyist who is openly antagonistic to the notion of disclosure by government and politicians.

That was last August.

Democrat Lawmakers: Impeach Obama over Libya

I noted in my reading (but not blogging) American Thinker's essay, "Libya and the Left's Sickening Hypocrisy on the Use of Military Force," by Michael Filozof.

President Obama has just committed American forces to engage in acts of war against Moammar Qaddafi. Where are the protesters? Where are the accusations that Obama is a liar and a Nazi? Where are the groups of "artists" wishing death upon the "warmonger" Obama? Where are the cries for Obama's impeachment? There aren't any, and there won't be any, either.

Werll, Michael is wrong. There are some leftists true to their principles (even if I think they have lousy principles): "Liberal Democrats in uproar over Libya action."

A hard-core group of liberal House Democrats is questioning the constitutionality of U.S. missile strikes against Libya, with one lawmaker raising the prospect of impeachment during a Democratic Caucus conference call on Saturday.

Reps. Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), Donna Edwards (Md.), Mike Capuano (Mass.), Dennis Kucinich (Ohio), Maxine Waters (Calif.), Rob Andrews (N.J.), Sheila Jackson Lee (Texas), Barbara Lee (Calif.) and Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D.C.) “all strongly raised objections to the constitutionality of the president’s actions” during that call, said two Democratic lawmakers who took part.

Kucinich, who wanted to bring impeachment articles against both former President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney over Iraq — only to be blocked by his own leadership — asked why the U.S. missile strikes aren’t impeachable offenses. ...

“They consulted the Arab League. They consulted the United Nations. They did not consult the United States Congress,” one Democrat lawmaker said of the White House.

It's an excellent point. My first post after UNSCR 1973 was that for President Obama to attack Libya would be an illegal war.

By any reasonable historical standard, in theory and in practice, any nation that carries out military actions in accordance with UNSCR 1973 is waging war upon Libya, or minimally against the Qaddafi-led part of Libya. ...

The United Nations has no authority to authorize any kind of use of United States forces. As a matter of legality, this resolution is worth less than the paper it is printed on. At best, it offers political cover only. But the UNSCR has no legal authority regarding employment of US forces.

What I want to know is this: Where is the United States Congress on waging war against Libya?

Only the Congress has the authority to declare [or authorize] war by the United States against Libya.

But doesn't the War Powers Act of 1973 grant the president the authority to conduct military operations for up to 60 days without prior Congressional approval? Yes, but the circumstances are very limited. The Act requires that the operations must be to respond to an actual attack by a foreign power or a serious, imminent threat. Otherwise, no can do. Libya meets neither test.

Since 1973, presidents of both parties have honored the War Powers Act only in the breach, following it in intent though not in letter. Serious Constitutional questions about the Act were raised by scholars and historians almost as soon as it became law, although there has never been a challenge in court.

Clearly though, Congress's intention in the Act is clear: non-emergency employment of the US military requires prior Congressional authorization - and the emergency concerned must directly be of US lives and territory. But as I explained earlier, Libya is a war "bereft of actual US national strategic interests."

Should President Obama be impeached over his usurpation of powers? Rep. Kucinich garnered no support for his inquiry, so it's not going to happen. Nor do I think that articles of impeachment should be drawn by the House. As I wrote before, the increasingly imperial executive is a trend that far predates Obama's inauguration.

Nonetheless, it is past time for the Congress to man up. Democrats and Republicans should jointly sponsor and pass, by veto-proof margin, legislationUthat writes into law at least the following:

1. No resolution by the united Nations or any other extra-national or foreign entity is of legal force superior to the US Constitution. Such an entity may not authorize the employment of US military combat power. Only the US Congress may authorize combat operations of US forces absent actual or imminent attack against American lives or territory.

2. Regarding Libya, the law should require explicitly that the president actually report to the Congress as a whole the justification for attacking Libya and actually request the Congress to authorize the attacks. If both of these are not accomplished by (insert deadline), then by law combat actions must cease by the expiration of that same deadline.

I am drawing a distinction between actually attacking Libya and supporting allied countries that are also doing so. I don't care what their internal procedures are for making war against Libya. I care about the requirements of the American republic. I see no Constitutional problem with the president ordering our military to provide logistics and other kinds of non-combat support.

I have not changed my position that the Libya war is one the United States should not be fighting in the first place. If the Congress decides to grow a spine then I think the wisdom of the war would have to be debated. That is exactly what no one is doing now.

Libya: You say you got a resolution ...

... well, you know, we'd all love to see the plan.

A rebel fighter shot down near Benghazi

French fighter jets are already flying over Libya.

Tripoli, Libya (CNN) -- French fighter jets soared over Libya on Saturday to counter Moammar Gadhafi's military forces who were intent on destroying the opposition as they pushed into the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.

"Our air force will oppose any aggression by Colonel Gadhafi against the population of Benghazi," said French President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking after an international, top-level meeting in Paris over the Libyan crisis.

"As of now, our aircraft are preventing planes from attacking the town," he said. "As of now, our aircraft are prepared to intervene against tanks."

I am perfectly content to let France and the other Euros take the lead here. I'd be more than happy if the US role never included actual, direct military action and was limited to logistic, intelligence and transportation support. It's the Euros who've been propping Qaddafi up all these many years, France in particular. So they can have it.

A FoxNews crew near Benghazi took this video of a rebel jet shot down by mistake by rebel ground fire:



Meanwhile, back in Washington,

After two weeks of playing down the prospect of military intervention in Libya, the Obama administration is on the brink of inserting itself into a third war in a Muslim nation — something the president, who has spent the first half of his term mending America’s relationship with Islam, had hoped to avoid.

The administration’s shift from skepticism to support for military intervention in Libya occurred over a frenetic week of war and diplomacy in Washington and Paris, at the United Nations and inside Libya, where facts on the ground changed swiftly.

However, we have not been told from the administration whether the president's "support for military intervention" includes direct action by US forces.

Having already addressed the fact that any direct-combat employment of US forces against Qaddafi woiuld be illegal absent Congressional authorization, I will here stipulate that the president will go forward with military intervention, approved by Congress or not. And my question for today is simply this: What's the plan?

I don't mean the military operations plan. I mean a comprehensive statement of national strategic objectives and rationale for the intervention, presented to the American people, that explains just what we are trying to do and why.

I frankly don't think that anyone in the administration, from the president on down, has the slightest idea what that could be in any more detail than, "Stop Qaddafi from killing the revolutionaries." But that's not a plan. It's not even a decent objective.

ABC News reported yesterday that in 2007 (while opposing President Bush's "surge" in Iraq), then-Senator Obama said,

"The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

Before a single US plane flies over Libya, the president must explain to the American people the following at a minimum:

1. What is Qaddafi's "actual or imminent threat" to America that justifies combat deployment of US forces on presidential order alone?

2. Absent such threat, what is his legal authority to send US forces into combat without prior Congressional approval? (Congressional approval, or not, may yet be forthcoming.)

3. What is the primary strategic objective that the United States will achieve through military forces that cannot be obtained otherwise?

4. What is the moral imperative that justifies killing and being killed?

5. Apart from opposing Qaddafi, what exactly makes the Libyan revolutionaries worth the expenditure of American lives and treasure?

6. The president is on record as saying that Qaddafi must not remain in power. Does that mean that regime change is a US objective and if so, will US military power be used to achieve it?

7. If not, will a partition of Libya into territories controlled by Qaddafi and the revolutionaries be acceptable, and if so, why?

8. What influence do you expect to have over the political nature of a potential revolutionary government?

9. What are the conditions of success in Libya? What must happen before American combat forces are withdrawn? In other words, how will you know when you've won?

About the moral imperative for war. If no one in the administration can explain what America is trying to do within the context of Just War Theory, which demands specifically to delineate the just cause of war, the just conduct of war and the just ending of war, then there is no justification at all.

If there is a moral imperative to intervene in Libya, presumably to stop Qaddafi's attacks against Libyan civilians, then inquiring minds want to know why this imperatives rules for Libya here when President Obama specifically rejected the very same imperative in warring against Iraq in 2003.

My position hasn't changed. To paraphrase what Bismarck said about the Balkans in 1888, "The whole of Libya is not worth the bones of a single American pilot." It is a war that only a liberal could love, one bereft of actual US national strategic interests.

Update: An obscure report that so far, the president will not send US forces into direct combat except for launching cruise missiles from offshore vessels: "... the US contribution will be logistics and support, including refueling and intelligence, but not represent the pointed end of the spear."

If this is so and remains so, then the president should be commended. But this administration's public communications are the worst in decades, and we the people deserve to know whether this report is true. Why are we still waiting?

Update: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, answering questions in Paris:

Is the goal to protect civilians or to remove Qaddafi from power? Clinton adamantly says it is to protect civilians.

Could Qadadfi remain in power? "Those are all questions that standing here are difficult to answer."

She did rule out use of American ground troops.

Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy - the makings of a quagmire.

Related:

Libya intervention will justify Iraq war

Cameron: shut down Libya's air force

The Illegal Libya War