http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2013/03/10/fox-news-rand-pauls-payoff/
Monday, March 11, 2013
Fox News: Rand Paul’s Payoff;
http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2013/03/10/fox-news-rand-pauls-payoff/
How to Weaken an Economy: take your pick of successfully ruined economies — the Venezuelan, the Cuban, the North Korean, the Greek, the Italian, the Portuguese, or pretty much any from Mediterranean Africa to the Cape of Good Hope
t is not easy to ruin the American economy; doing nothing usually means it repairs itself and soon is healthier than before a recession.
But don’t despair: there are plenty of ways to slow down even an
inherently strong economy. History offers plenty of examples. But as
more contemporary models, take your pick of successfully ruined
economies — the Venezuelan, the Cuban, the North Korean, the Greek, the
Italian, the Portuguese, or pretty much any from Mediterranean Africa to
the Cape of Good Hope. There are certain commonalities about why and
how they fail. Let’s review some of them
Government
The state can never be too big. Ensure that it is unaccountable and intrusive, in constant need of more money and more targets to regulate. The more government, the more people are shielded from the capital-creating, free-market system. Think the DMV or TSA, not Apple. The point is for an employee to spend each labor hour with less oversight, while regulating or hampering profit-making, rather than competing with like kind to create material wealth. Regulatory bodies are a two-fer: the more federal, union employees, the more regulations to hamper the private sector. The more federal mandates, like new health-care requirements and financial reporting, the less employers profit and the fewer employees they can hire. Washington should be a growth city, absolutely immune from the downturn elsewhere, a sort of huge and growing octopus head with decaying tentacles. State jobs should be redefined as something partisan — whose expansion is noble and helps the helpless, and whose contraction is evil and the design of a bitter and aging white private-sector class.
On the other end of the equation, ensuring 50 million on food stamps, putting over 80,000 a month on Social Security disability insurance, and extending unemployment insurance to tens of millions all remind the jobless that life is not too bad (thanks to the government), and certainly a lot better than working at a “low-paid” job that equates to giving up federal support. To paraphrase Paul Krugman, the more and the longer the jobless receive, the less likely they are to take chances looking for a job. That too might be again a good thing if you wish to slow down the economy. In general, even Arnold Toynbee, a man of the Left, acknowledged that the greedy drive of the scrambling private sector was not as pernicious to civilizations as the collective ennui produced by vast cadres of lethargic and unaccountable public “servants” doing supposedly noble work.
The Law
To ensure capriciousness and unpredictability for both suspect employers and investors, make the law malleable, even unpredictable from day to day, in the style of an Argentina or Venezuela. Redefine the law as what is deemed socially useful. For federally subsidized bankrupt auto companies, creditors should be paid back on the basis not of contractual law, but of nobility — why borrow to give a rich man a return on his superfluous investment, when a retired auto worker might have to pay a higher health care premium? Boeing wants to open a non-union plant in South Carolina? Have the NLRB try to stop it (and illegally staff the NLRB with recess appointments). Illegal aliens? They are neither illegal nor aliens, as federal immigration law is itself a capricious construct. Does the Senate really have to present a budget? Do presidents need to meet budget deadlines? Who said there is a Defense of Marriage Act?
What law says that gays cannot serve overtly in the military or women cannot fight at the front — some reactionary construct? The point is to restore a simulacrum of popular sovereignty: the law is what 51% of the people are perceived by technocrats to want on any given day. I would hammer away at legal fictions like the very idea of borrowing and paying back loans and debts. Soon the popular culture would respond in kind, and run ads constantly on radio, TV, and the Internet in a way rare just a generation ago: how to renegotiate IRS debt, how to renegotiate mortgages, how to renegotiate credit card debt, and how to renegotiate student loan debt.
The man who owes $50,000 has been taken advantage of; the man who is owed $50,000 already has enough without being paid back. The aim is to create a general climate where when one borrows, one does not necessarily have to the pay back the full sum for a variety of legitimate considerations. The more bubbles — housing, student loan, credit card — the more avenues for government intervention and relief. Do all that and perhaps lending itself might slow down, again not a bad thing for our purposes. The debtor, not the lender, is the true American success, as our collective debt underscores.
Cynicism
Don’t forget the value of cynicism in weakening an economy. It is a critical tool in sowing distrust and fatalism, as in “Why try, when it doesn’t matter anyway?” or “Why should I follow the rules, when they don’t?” Greece, for example, is a cynical country to the core and one can see where such endemic distrust got them: a successfully ruined economy.
I would lecture about the evils of federal bailouts to Wall Street fat cats who then take million-dollar bonuses for mediocre performance — and then appoint a Treasury secretary who did just that. I would trash offshore accounts as something amoral and unpatriotic — and then appoint a Treasury secretary who did just that. I would lecture about paying your fair share and hiking taxes — and then appoint a Treasury secretary who avoided paying the income taxes he owed. I would sermonize on the evils of the revolving door — and then appoint as my top financial officials those who for a lifetime have gone into the White House, out to Wall Street, and back into the White House. Again, if “they” do that, why then do “we” need to pay our taxes or follow ethical behavior? The cynical mindset is a valuable tool in recreating a Greece or Italy. Indeed, almost any cynicism is a good thing: so why not praise federal financing of campaigns and then be the first to refuse it, or campaign on the evils of the Bush anti-terrorism protocol and then embrace or expand almost all of it?
Top Down, Not Bottom Up
Leveling must go in one direction, not two. To ensure equality, the public schools should lower standards so that all are the same. The more who need remediation upon entering college, the more likely the curriculum will have to adjust to level the playing field, and the less skilled will emerge the average graduate. The more that those with “Cadillac” insurance plans can have procedures rationed, the more others will see their own options expanded.
The world is a finite system, a pie with only so many slices. There is no middle class, just rich and poor. For each F student, an A student stole the former’s resources. I would invest not in honor students, but in remedial ones. Grades and test scores should count little for college admission; life “experiences” and community service far better would ensure the presence of mediocre students. The aim again is not to turn out graduates with expertise or knowledge who build a strong economy, but to graduate students, brand them with degrees, and ensure they are invested in a similar ideology of redistribution. If California — of Caltech and Stanford repute — can dumb down its public schools to rank 48th or 49th in the nation in math or English testing, then there is hope for the country at large.
The War of Words
Prosperity is always relative, never absolute. A car, a house, or a job is not to be judged on its own merits, but in comparison to someone else who has one better. If today’s Kias are better than a Mercedes of 20 years ago, it matters little: they are not as nice as someone else’s Mercedes of today. Britain in the postwar 1940s discovered the power of envy and what it can do to slow down ill-won prosperity.
From Plato to Marx to Tocqueville, philosophical minds, for both good and bad reasons, have always appreciated that human nature is attracted to the idea of enforced equality, to such a degree that most would rather be poor and the same, than better off with some far better off. Let’s give them that chance!
I would try to redefine the entire capitalist notion of profit, getting ahead, and being rich or successful as something arbitrary. Better yet, it should be analogous to cheating, proof of unfairness, or incurring general shame. The point is to make profit-making synonymous with failure; and poverty something inherently noble. Compensation should be seen as capricious, never based on logical requisites like education, knowledge, experience, level of responsibility, hard work, personal comportment, or even the less predictable such as health, luck, fate, and chance. Redefine rich and poor to emphasize the fact that one making $20,000 a year and another $200,000 is unfair, period — and to be corrected by a fair, all-knowing, and compassionate government. I would talk always of poverty and hunger, never of the epidemic of obesity or the nation’s collective youth glued to iPhones.
Sometimes, sloppy language is critical: jumble together “millionaires” with those worth 1,000 times more, and you earn the force-multiplying evil “millionaires and billionaires.” The word “fair” is critical: as in “pay your fair share.” But “patriotic” is even better, as in “unpatriotic” past presidents who run up debt, and “patriotic” present egalitarians who borrow in four years what used to take eight.
I would also redefine entire professions in negative terms: bankers are “fat cats”; the rich “junket” to Las Vegas; CEOs are “corporate jet owners”; doctors lop off limbs and yank out tonsils to pile up profits. Material wealth alone defines us. Mitt Romney is a man with lots of money, a big house with an elevator, a wife with horses. Who cares what he did with the Olympics or as governor?
I could continue, but you get the picture: the point is to slow down the capitalists by making them look over their shoulders, to hamper the grasping small businesses by prepping a psychological battlefield in which the rich deserve higher taxes and regulations to atone for their sins. If lots of those who once made $400,000 a year no longer do, is that not progress? Did they not at last realize that they had made enough money and that it was no longer the time to profit? My goal would be to convince the pizza-parlor owner that after 12 hours on the job, he was taking away money from his noble customers and had a duty to pay more in taxes and cut his profits for those more noble who could not afford his crust. But there would be one exception: fat cats can buy exemption by loudly supporting the president, serving on his jobs council, or investing in green energy. In other words, send the message that getting rich building a Solyndra is noble in a way Exxon is not. A Warren Buffett or George Soros is not a “billionaire” but a “philanthropist,” whose profits are channeled in the right direction. That’s an important message to send if one wants to warp an economy — suggesting that the rich can pay proper homage and thereby win exemption from being culpably rich.
Everywhere a War
The rich/poor dichotomy is valuable, but perhaps not enough in itself to harm the economy. Political stasis is also critical. Think the blues and greens in the hippodrome, fighting over everything from religion and civil service to class, ethnicity, and sports. And what better way to seed acrimony and to ensure constant bickering than unleashing a series of domestic wars? The camouflaged assault-weapon killers who hide behind the 2nd Amendment are at war with millions of innocent children. Even female celebrities and lawyers are under attack by misogynists and chauvinists, who won’t pay for their birth control. Latinos are targeted by nativists. The latter even hunt them down at ice-cream parlors. Blacks are back to near slavery as racist conservatives want to put them back in chains. Greens battle nobly against the polluters, gays against the homophobes. Muslims are demonized as terrorists by racists and bigots.
The point would be to introduce so many divisive fault lines that no one can much agree on anything — other than a common enemy. Worry over unemployment, slow or nonexistent growth, and massive debt gives way to more pressing issues like gay marriage and banning semi-automatic assault weapons. Distraction is valuable: who cares that the real unemployment rate is way over 10% if the Keystone pipeline will destroy the Nebraska aquifer or Jim Crow is back on election day? A “jobless recovery” and the “misery index” can become artifacts of a distant era.
Deficits
I would borrow as much money as possible, to the point of making the word “trillion” synonymous with the old “billion,” and “billion” now not more than a mere “million.” On its coins, a fading Rome pressed bronze over a thin silver core; we have done better with the Fed. Think of all the ways in which deficits are good: they spread the wealth through greater entitlements; they eventually require higher taxes from the wealthy; they usually lead to inflation that erodes wrongly accumulated wealth. For every trillion borrowed, there is a greater likelihood that the deserving will receive more federal largess and the undeserving will have to pay for it — and the country itself will slow down and smell the roses. Is it not far preferable for the government to print money than the cumbersome private sector to create it?
Interest
Zero interest is as important as sky-high interest. Thus, 1% on passbook accounts can be as valuable in stalling the economy as 15%. If there is no gain in stored wealth, why seek to store it? If owing is better than being owed, why work to create capital? A good way to ensure inflation is to ensure zero interest. The many who have no money deserve the use of free money and the few who have it have no need to profit from it. Again, if the state employee’s pension pays out more in annual revenue than the multi-millionaire’s passbook account, is not that a distortion worth institutionalizing? The point would be to guide the retiree into real estate, precious metals, or the stock market, anywhere with real risk to beat his .5% passbook return. Or better yet, do away with the idea of the retiree altogether, as the poor fool keeps working to earn what his savings won’t — thereby providing an added benefit of keeping his would-be younger replacements jobless.
Energy
I would try to find a way to discourage private gas and oil production through more regulation and cancellation of projects like the Keystone pipeline: keep the country paying steep import fees and keep it vulnerable to Persian Gulf oil. New technologies like fracking and horizontal drilling are to be declared de facto synonymous with pollution and destroying the environment. How can energy “skyrocket” or gas reach “European levels” — that alone will ensure a cooler planet or government- and union-run mass transit — if freelancers can find hoards of natural gas on land the government can’t touch? I would also borrow billions to subsidize wind and solar power. The more costly the kilowatt, the more expensive energy might slow
down human activity and finally stop the rat race.
Success is Failure
Finally, I would double down. The more higher taxes, class warfare, bigger government, borrowing, zero interest, and political stasis began to slow down the economy, the more I would demand more of them all, and declare that the economy is expanding and growing. Again, the key to fine tuning a properly moribund economy is to stay the course — and learn to redefine failure as success.
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/how-to-weaken-an-economy/?singlepage=true
Government
The state can never be too big. Ensure that it is unaccountable and intrusive, in constant need of more money and more targets to regulate. The more government, the more people are shielded from the capital-creating, free-market system. Think the DMV or TSA, not Apple. The point is for an employee to spend each labor hour with less oversight, while regulating or hampering profit-making, rather than competing with like kind to create material wealth. Regulatory bodies are a two-fer: the more federal, union employees, the more regulations to hamper the private sector. The more federal mandates, like new health-care requirements and financial reporting, the less employers profit and the fewer employees they can hire. Washington should be a growth city, absolutely immune from the downturn elsewhere, a sort of huge and growing octopus head with decaying tentacles. State jobs should be redefined as something partisan — whose expansion is noble and helps the helpless, and whose contraction is evil and the design of a bitter and aging white private-sector class.
On the other end of the equation, ensuring 50 million on food stamps, putting over 80,000 a month on Social Security disability insurance, and extending unemployment insurance to tens of millions all remind the jobless that life is not too bad (thanks to the government), and certainly a lot better than working at a “low-paid” job that equates to giving up federal support. To paraphrase Paul Krugman, the more and the longer the jobless receive, the less likely they are to take chances looking for a job. That too might be again a good thing if you wish to slow down the economy. In general, even Arnold Toynbee, a man of the Left, acknowledged that the greedy drive of the scrambling private sector was not as pernicious to civilizations as the collective ennui produced by vast cadres of lethargic and unaccountable public “servants” doing supposedly noble work.
The Law
To ensure capriciousness and unpredictability for both suspect employers and investors, make the law malleable, even unpredictable from day to day, in the style of an Argentina or Venezuela. Redefine the law as what is deemed socially useful. For federally subsidized bankrupt auto companies, creditors should be paid back on the basis not of contractual law, but of nobility — why borrow to give a rich man a return on his superfluous investment, when a retired auto worker might have to pay a higher health care premium? Boeing wants to open a non-union plant in South Carolina? Have the NLRB try to stop it (and illegally staff the NLRB with recess appointments). Illegal aliens? They are neither illegal nor aliens, as federal immigration law is itself a capricious construct. Does the Senate really have to present a budget? Do presidents need to meet budget deadlines? Who said there is a Defense of Marriage Act?
What law says that gays cannot serve overtly in the military or women cannot fight at the front — some reactionary construct? The point is to restore a simulacrum of popular sovereignty: the law is what 51% of the people are perceived by technocrats to want on any given day. I would hammer away at legal fictions like the very idea of borrowing and paying back loans and debts. Soon the popular culture would respond in kind, and run ads constantly on radio, TV, and the Internet in a way rare just a generation ago: how to renegotiate IRS debt, how to renegotiate mortgages, how to renegotiate credit card debt, and how to renegotiate student loan debt.
The man who owes $50,000 has been taken advantage of; the man who is owed $50,000 already has enough without being paid back. The aim is to create a general climate where when one borrows, one does not necessarily have to the pay back the full sum for a variety of legitimate considerations. The more bubbles — housing, student loan, credit card — the more avenues for government intervention and relief. Do all that and perhaps lending itself might slow down, again not a bad thing for our purposes. The debtor, not the lender, is the true American success, as our collective debt underscores.
Cynicism
Don’t forget the value of cynicism in weakening an economy. It is a critical tool in sowing distrust and fatalism, as in “Why try, when it doesn’t matter anyway?” or “Why should I follow the rules, when they don’t?” Greece, for example, is a cynical country to the core and one can see where such endemic distrust got them: a successfully ruined economy.
I would lecture about the evils of federal bailouts to Wall Street fat cats who then take million-dollar bonuses for mediocre performance — and then appoint a Treasury secretary who did just that. I would trash offshore accounts as something amoral and unpatriotic — and then appoint a Treasury secretary who did just that. I would lecture about paying your fair share and hiking taxes — and then appoint a Treasury secretary who avoided paying the income taxes he owed. I would sermonize on the evils of the revolving door — and then appoint as my top financial officials those who for a lifetime have gone into the White House, out to Wall Street, and back into the White House. Again, if “they” do that, why then do “we” need to pay our taxes or follow ethical behavior? The cynical mindset is a valuable tool in recreating a Greece or Italy. Indeed, almost any cynicism is a good thing: so why not praise federal financing of campaigns and then be the first to refuse it, or campaign on the evils of the Bush anti-terrorism protocol and then embrace or expand almost all of it?
Top Down, Not Bottom Up
Leveling must go in one direction, not two. To ensure equality, the public schools should lower standards so that all are the same. The more who need remediation upon entering college, the more likely the curriculum will have to adjust to level the playing field, and the less skilled will emerge the average graduate. The more that those with “Cadillac” insurance plans can have procedures rationed, the more others will see their own options expanded.
The world is a finite system, a pie with only so many slices. There is no middle class, just rich and poor. For each F student, an A student stole the former’s resources. I would invest not in honor students, but in remedial ones. Grades and test scores should count little for college admission; life “experiences” and community service far better would ensure the presence of mediocre students. The aim again is not to turn out graduates with expertise or knowledge who build a strong economy, but to graduate students, brand them with degrees, and ensure they are invested in a similar ideology of redistribution. If California — of Caltech and Stanford repute — can dumb down its public schools to rank 48th or 49th in the nation in math or English testing, then there is hope for the country at large.
The War of Words
Prosperity is always relative, never absolute. A car, a house, or a job is not to be judged on its own merits, but in comparison to someone else who has one better. If today’s Kias are better than a Mercedes of 20 years ago, it matters little: they are not as nice as someone else’s Mercedes of today. Britain in the postwar 1940s discovered the power of envy and what it can do to slow down ill-won prosperity.
From Plato to Marx to Tocqueville, philosophical minds, for both good and bad reasons, have always appreciated that human nature is attracted to the idea of enforced equality, to such a degree that most would rather be poor and the same, than better off with some far better off. Let’s give them that chance!
I would try to redefine the entire capitalist notion of profit, getting ahead, and being rich or successful as something arbitrary. Better yet, it should be analogous to cheating, proof of unfairness, or incurring general shame. The point is to make profit-making synonymous with failure; and poverty something inherently noble. Compensation should be seen as capricious, never based on logical requisites like education, knowledge, experience, level of responsibility, hard work, personal comportment, or even the less predictable such as health, luck, fate, and chance. Redefine rich and poor to emphasize the fact that one making $20,000 a year and another $200,000 is unfair, period — and to be corrected by a fair, all-knowing, and compassionate government. I would talk always of poverty and hunger, never of the epidemic of obesity or the nation’s collective youth glued to iPhones.
Sometimes, sloppy language is critical: jumble together “millionaires” with those worth 1,000 times more, and you earn the force-multiplying evil “millionaires and billionaires.” The word “fair” is critical: as in “pay your fair share.” But “patriotic” is even better, as in “unpatriotic” past presidents who run up debt, and “patriotic” present egalitarians who borrow in four years what used to take eight.
I would also redefine entire professions in negative terms: bankers are “fat cats”; the rich “junket” to Las Vegas; CEOs are “corporate jet owners”; doctors lop off limbs and yank out tonsils to pile up profits. Material wealth alone defines us. Mitt Romney is a man with lots of money, a big house with an elevator, a wife with horses. Who cares what he did with the Olympics or as governor?
I could continue, but you get the picture: the point is to slow down the capitalists by making them look over their shoulders, to hamper the grasping small businesses by prepping a psychological battlefield in which the rich deserve higher taxes and regulations to atone for their sins. If lots of those who once made $400,000 a year no longer do, is that not progress? Did they not at last realize that they had made enough money and that it was no longer the time to profit? My goal would be to convince the pizza-parlor owner that after 12 hours on the job, he was taking away money from his noble customers and had a duty to pay more in taxes and cut his profits for those more noble who could not afford his crust. But there would be one exception: fat cats can buy exemption by loudly supporting the president, serving on his jobs council, or investing in green energy. In other words, send the message that getting rich building a Solyndra is noble in a way Exxon is not. A Warren Buffett or George Soros is not a “billionaire” but a “philanthropist,” whose profits are channeled in the right direction. That’s an important message to send if one wants to warp an economy — suggesting that the rich can pay proper homage and thereby win exemption from being culpably rich.
Everywhere a War
The rich/poor dichotomy is valuable, but perhaps not enough in itself to harm the economy. Political stasis is also critical. Think the blues and greens in the hippodrome, fighting over everything from religion and civil service to class, ethnicity, and sports. And what better way to seed acrimony and to ensure constant bickering than unleashing a series of domestic wars? The camouflaged assault-weapon killers who hide behind the 2nd Amendment are at war with millions of innocent children. Even female celebrities and lawyers are under attack by misogynists and chauvinists, who won’t pay for their birth control. Latinos are targeted by nativists. The latter even hunt them down at ice-cream parlors. Blacks are back to near slavery as racist conservatives want to put them back in chains. Greens battle nobly against the polluters, gays against the homophobes. Muslims are demonized as terrorists by racists and bigots.
The point would be to introduce so many divisive fault lines that no one can much agree on anything — other than a common enemy. Worry over unemployment, slow or nonexistent growth, and massive debt gives way to more pressing issues like gay marriage and banning semi-automatic assault weapons. Distraction is valuable: who cares that the real unemployment rate is way over 10% if the Keystone pipeline will destroy the Nebraska aquifer or Jim Crow is back on election day? A “jobless recovery” and the “misery index” can become artifacts of a distant era.
Deficits
I would borrow as much money as possible, to the point of making the word “trillion” synonymous with the old “billion,” and “billion” now not more than a mere “million.” On its coins, a fading Rome pressed bronze over a thin silver core; we have done better with the Fed. Think of all the ways in which deficits are good: they spread the wealth through greater entitlements; they eventually require higher taxes from the wealthy; they usually lead to inflation that erodes wrongly accumulated wealth. For every trillion borrowed, there is a greater likelihood that the deserving will receive more federal largess and the undeserving will have to pay for it — and the country itself will slow down and smell the roses. Is it not far preferable for the government to print money than the cumbersome private sector to create it?
Interest
Zero interest is as important as sky-high interest. Thus, 1% on passbook accounts can be as valuable in stalling the economy as 15%. If there is no gain in stored wealth, why seek to store it? If owing is better than being owed, why work to create capital? A good way to ensure inflation is to ensure zero interest. The many who have no money deserve the use of free money and the few who have it have no need to profit from it. Again, if the state employee’s pension pays out more in annual revenue than the multi-millionaire’s passbook account, is not that a distortion worth institutionalizing? The point would be to guide the retiree into real estate, precious metals, or the stock market, anywhere with real risk to beat his .5% passbook return. Or better yet, do away with the idea of the retiree altogether, as the poor fool keeps working to earn what his savings won’t — thereby providing an added benefit of keeping his would-be younger replacements jobless.
Energy
I would try to find a way to discourage private gas and oil production through more regulation and cancellation of projects like the Keystone pipeline: keep the country paying steep import fees and keep it vulnerable to Persian Gulf oil. New technologies like fracking and horizontal drilling are to be declared de facto synonymous with pollution and destroying the environment. How can energy “skyrocket” or gas reach “European levels” — that alone will ensure a cooler planet or government- and union-run mass transit — if freelancers can find hoards of natural gas on land the government can’t touch? I would also borrow billions to subsidize wind and solar power. The more costly the kilowatt, the more expensive energy might slow
down human activity and finally stop the rat race.
Success is Failure
Finally, I would double down. The more higher taxes, class warfare, bigger government, borrowing, zero interest, and political stasis began to slow down the economy, the more I would demand more of them all, and declare that the economy is expanding and growing. Again, the key to fine tuning a properly moribund economy is to stay the course — and learn to redefine failure as success.
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/how-to-weaken-an-economy/?singlepage=true
Politico: Say, remember when Obama was popular?
Actually, it didn’t seem all that long ago. After the election gave
him a second term, the media talked about Barack Obama’s mandate for a
progressive second-term agenda. When he got tax hikes in the New Year’s
Day budget showdown, the media and his fellow Democrats considered him
unstoppable. The big question was whether House Republicans would
self-immolate by attempting to be an opposition party to Obama the
Great.
Suddenly, we’re now seeing stories like this from Politico that paint Obama as an obstacle for Democrats, not Republicans:
Second, the fallout from the Nightmare on Sequester Street pratfall must have Democrats worried plenty. After promising that the world would come to an end if the rate of increased federal spending was reduced by 2.3%, the lack of any real consequences — combined with plenty of examples of foolish government spending — has destroyed Democrats’ credibility in this budget fight. No one’s going to buy these Chicken Little scenarios now in response to Republican budget cuts, and Democrats want to get ahead of the curve now. If Obama wants to follow, fine, but they are not concerned at the moment with whether Obama is on board with this strategy or not.
Perhaps the eulogies for the Republican Party were a bit … premature.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/03/11/politico-say-remember-when-obama-was-popular/
Suddenly, we’re now seeing stories like this from Politico that paint Obama as an obstacle for Democrats, not Republicans:
President Barack Obama says he’s ready to do whatever it takes to help Democrats win the House next year — a feat that could make the difference between limping to the end of his presidency and going out with a bang.It’s not just the House where Democrats have begun to worry about Obama’s overreach on a progressive agenda. In another article today, Politico also reports that the first Senate budget in four years will offer little support for that agenda in a chamber controlled by his own party:
But some Democratic candidates and operatives in the districts on which control of the House will hinge said in interviews with POLITICO that the message and issues Obama has emphasized since the election are creating a difficult political headwind for them.
Obama’s political choices, they say, reflect a tone-deafness to the challenges they face competing for moderate and conservative-leaning seats.
Paying a price for his indifference, President Barack Obama is expected to get little or none of the extra money for health care and Wall Street reforms that the administration has been seeking in a six-month stopgap spending bill coming to the Senate floor this week.Two issues are probably at work, neither of them good for Democrats or Obama. First, there has been a real sense that Obama overreached on tax hikes and partisan warfare to get them. That’s not unlike the first two years of Obama’s presidency, when he tried to marginalize and humiliate the already-marginalized Republicans by allowing Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to lock them out of the deliberations for the stimulus package, and to a lesser extent ObamaCare later. That resulted in a huge voter backlash in the 2010 midterms, which Reid at least seems to remember.
Bipartisan Senate talks continued through the weekend in hopes of filing final legislation late Monday afternoon. Action by Congress is needed before March 27 to avert a government shutdown and the measure stands to greatly influence how agencies operate in the wake of the across-the-board cuts ordered under sequestration.
The White House had wanted $949 million added within the Department of Health and Human Services to help lay the groundwork for setting up state health-care exchanges to begin enrollment next fall. Smaller plus-ups were also proposed for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission, both affected by the recent cuts.House Republicans refused to include any of these requests in their version of the stopgap bill adopted last week. Senate Democrats are now taking the same path given the weakness of Obama’s response and their need to pick up Republican votes.
Indeed, a statement of administration policy last week on the House bill said only that the White House was “deeply concerned” with the House bill and never even hinted of using the president’s veto leverage. This ceded effective control to Republicans and led Democrats to turn their focus more to protecting long-standing priorities such as investments in transportation or programs like Head Start for low-income children.
Second, the fallout from the Nightmare on Sequester Street pratfall must have Democrats worried plenty. After promising that the world would come to an end if the rate of increased federal spending was reduced by 2.3%, the lack of any real consequences — combined with plenty of examples of foolish government spending — has destroyed Democrats’ credibility in this budget fight. No one’s going to buy these Chicken Little scenarios now in response to Republican budget cuts, and Democrats want to get ahead of the curve now. If Obama wants to follow, fine, but they are not concerned at the moment with whether Obama is on board with this strategy or not.
Perhaps the eulogies for the Republican Party were a bit … premature.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/03/11/politico-say-remember-when-obama-was-popular/
Friday, March 8, 2013
Report: Oil production on federal lands falls, again
America’s domestic oil-and-gas production is going bananas, and it’s largely thanks to advances in technology and expanded drilling on private and state-owned lands.
President Obama, however, is pretty fond of implying that the credit for the oil-and-gas industry going gangbusters belongs mostly to his policies. For much of 2012, he deliberately misused statistics that made it sound like “oil production is the highest it’s been in eight years” and “we’re importing less and less oil” was all him, and as recently as his last State of the Union he was insisting that “my administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits… In fact, much of our newfound energy is drawn from lands and waters that we, the public, own together.”
No. A thousand times, no.
Via the Daily Caller:
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/03/07/report-oil-production-on-federal-lands-falls-again/
President Obama, however, is pretty fond of implying that the credit for the oil-and-gas industry going gangbusters belongs mostly to his policies. For much of 2012, he deliberately misused statistics that made it sound like “oil production is the highest it’s been in eight years” and “we’re importing less and less oil” was all him, and as recently as his last State of the Union he was insisting that “my administration will keep cutting red tape and speeding up new oil and gas permits… In fact, much of our newfound energy is drawn from lands and waters that we, the public, own together.”
No. A thousand times, no.
Via the Daily Caller:
A report by the Congressional Research Service shows that oil production on federal lands took another dip in 2012, while overall U.S. oil production has exploded due to increased production on private and state lands.It was a good effort to spin the facts, but you just got called out. Tough break.
“All of the increased production from FY2007 to FY2012 took place on non-federal lands, causing the federal share of total U.S. crude oil production to fall by about seven percentage points,” according to the report. “Overall, U.S. natural gas production rose by four trillion cubic feet (tcf) or 20% since 2007, while production on federal lands (onshore and offshore) fell by about 33% and production on non-federal lands grew by 40%.”
Since President Obama took office, oil and natural gas production on private and state lands has increased. In 2009, non-federal lands produced 3,487,800 barrels of oil per day which grew to 4,580,800 barrels per day last year. Non-federal lands produced 16,233 billion cubic feet of natural gas in 2009 and expanded to 20,242 billion cubic feet in 2012.
“Where the states have been in charge, we have seen energy development boom in a safe and responsible way, but under federal control we have seen a sharp decline in production. A web of red tape and a backlog of delayed permits are blocking important energy production opportunities on federal lands,” Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power, said in a Tuesday statement.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/03/07/report-oil-production-on-federal-lands-falls-again/
The importance of promoting self-reliance and a better future through work Welfare Reform Is Back
Last summer, the Obama Administration gutted the successful 1996 welfare
reform law by offering to waive its work requirements. Now the debate
is back, as several Members of Congress are trying to restore the
reforms that helped so many out of poverty.
Last summer, the Obama Administration gutted the successful 1996 welfare reform law by offering to waive its work requirements. Now the debate is back, as several Members of Congress are trying to restore the reforms that helped so many out of poverty.
The work requirements were the heart and soul of the historic welfare reform signed by President Bill Clinton. As a result of “workfare,” welfare rolls declined by half within five years, and employment rates among low-income individuals increased.
Some of the biggest winners from workfare were children. Millions of children were lifted out of poverty. In 2003, the nation had the lowest level of poverty among black children in its history.
The Obama Administration’s undoing of this program threatens to set back America’s children and families. Conservative Members of Congress introduced legislation last week that would overturn the Administration’s plans to allow states to waive work requirements from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. At a hearing last Thursday, Representative Dave Reichert (R-WA) said:
12 programs providing food aid;
12 programs funding social services;
12 educational assistance programs;
11 housing assistance programs;
10 programs providing cash assistance;
9 vocational training programs;
7 medical assistance programs;
3 energy and utility assistance programs; and,
3 child care and child development programs.
How many of the government’s 80-plus welfare programs include a work requirement? Just two.
While Americans are a compassionate people who want to help our neighbors truly in need, the overwhelming majority also understand the importance of promoting self-reliance and a better future through work. Regardless of political affiliation, more than 90 percent of individuals say that able-bodied adults should work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving cash, food, housing or medical care from the government.
Work requirements should not only be restored to the TANF program but should also be expanded to other government welfare programs, such as food stamps, one of the largest and fastest-growing welfare programs.
At a hearing last month, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) highlighted the critical need to reform the nation’s massive welfare system. He noted:
http://blog.heritage.org/2013/03/08/welfare-reform-is-back/?roi=echo3-14808918998-11738096-21e788bfd88406b02c2b5289931b6236&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
Last summer, the Obama Administration gutted the successful 1996 welfare reform law by offering to waive its work requirements. Now the debate is back, as several Members of Congress are trying to restore the reforms that helped so many out of poverty.
The work requirements were the heart and soul of the historic welfare reform signed by President Bill Clinton. As a result of “workfare,” welfare rolls declined by half within five years, and employment rates among low-income individuals increased.
Some of the biggest winners from workfare were children. Millions of children were lifted out of poverty. In 2003, the nation had the lowest level of poverty among black children in its history.
The Obama Administration’s undoing of this program threatens to set back America’s children and families. Conservative Members of Congress introduced legislation last week that would overturn the Administration’s plans to allow states to waive work requirements from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. At a hearing last Thursday, Representative Dave Reichert (R-WA) said:
It is critical for us to review the damaging effects of waiving TANF work requirements, which could result in less work and earnings, and more poverty and government dependence.The reforms need to be restored and strengthened. However, TANF is just one of several welfare programs operated by the federal government to provide cash, food, housing, and health care assistance to poor and low-income Americans. Today, taxpayers fund roughly 80 different programs at a cost of nearly $1 trillion a year for these purposes. These include:
12 programs providing food aid;
12 programs funding social services;
12 educational assistance programs;
11 housing assistance programs;
10 programs providing cash assistance;
9 vocational training programs;
7 medical assistance programs;
3 energy and utility assistance programs; and,
3 child care and child development programs.
How many of the government’s 80-plus welfare programs include a work requirement? Just two.
While Americans are a compassionate people who want to help our neighbors truly in need, the overwhelming majority also understand the importance of promoting self-reliance and a better future through work. Regardless of political affiliation, more than 90 percent of individuals say that able-bodied adults should work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving cash, food, housing or medical care from the government.
Work requirements should not only be restored to the TANF program but should also be expanded to other government welfare programs, such as food stamps, one of the largest and fastest-growing welfare programs.
At a hearing last month, Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) highlighted the critical need to reform the nation’s massive welfare system. He noted:
It is time to return to the moral principles of the 1996 welfare reform. That reform was guided by the principle that, over time, unmonitored welfare programs were damaging not merely to the Treasury but to the recipient.Thanks to the 1996 welfare reform, people’s lives were changed for the better. Americans were lifted out of poverty. We need to expand these ideas, applying principles that help reduce dependence and allow more Americans to pursue the path of upward mobility to other government assistance programs.
http://blog.heritage.org/2013/03/08/welfare-reform-is-back/?roi=echo3-14808918998-11738096-21e788bfd88406b02c2b5289931b6236&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
Fact Checking Obama: Day, Another False White House Sequester Claim
Once again we find Glenn Kessler doing the honorable, bipartisan work of holding a White House responsible for what they say and do. And once again, the White House has been caught lying regarding a sequester scare tactic, this time with respect to a claim about the effect a measly 2% budget cut might have on vaccinations.
Yet, in raising the alarm about
the sequester, the administration has highlighted the decline in
vaccinations that it claims would result from sequestration. The White
House Web site displays an interactive map, which when you click on
Maryland, it declares: “2,050 fewer children will get vaccines for
diseases like measles and whopping cough.” It’s even worse for
Virginia: 3,530 children would supposedly be affected.
That bit of nonsense earned the White House two of those bad-boy Pinocchios.
While I'm thrilled some individual
journalists are doing what they're supposed to do -- hold the White
House accountable -- now that Obama has been caught in over at least a
half-dozen lies, when does the president's beclowning of his own
credibility become The Narrative in the full media?
That was a rhetorical question.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/03/08/WaPo-Another-False-Sequester-Claim
Record 89,304,000 Americans 'Not in Labor Force' -- And Obama dose not care. 296,000 Fewer Employed Since January
(CNSNews.com) - The number of Americans designated as "not in the labor force" in February was 89,304,000, a record high, up from 89,008,000 in January, according to the Department of Labor. This means that the number of Americans not in the labor force increased 296,000 between January and February.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) labels people who are unemployed and no longer looking for work as “not in the labor force,” including people who have retired on schedule, taken early retirement, or simply given up looking for work.
The increase marks the second month in a row, after rising in January from 88.8 million in December. Those not in the labor force had declined in December from 88.9 million in November.
The nation's unemployment rate decreased to 7.7 percent in February, down from 7.9 percent in January. Overall unemployment “has shown little movement, on net, since September 2012,” the Labor Department said.
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 236,000 in February, according to the report.
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/record-89304000-americans-not-labor-force-296000-fewer-employed-january
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Obama's Drops His Family Friendly Mask. But that was then. Last week, President Obama dropped the family friendly mask. He sent his Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli up the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court with a simple message: Dump Dads. Lose Moms.
Just four years ago, candidate Barack Obama said he believed that
marriage was between a man and a woman. "And God is in the mix." Who
moved?
Say what you will about President Barack Obama's policies, millions of Americans voted for the man in no small part because his family represents a much yearned-for ideal. How much happier Americans would be if all our children lived in a stable, loving, married family with a mom and a dad--like the Obama family. Many writers expressed the hope that having these real-life Huxtables in the White House would turn around many devastating pathologies in America's cities--and in our rural areas, too.
But that was then. Last week, President Obama dropped the family friendly mask. He sent his Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli up the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court with a simple message:
Dump Dads. Lose Moms.
That's because the Solicitor General speaks for the president. In the most august and formal way, it is this officer who carries the president's deepest convictions to lay them before the nation's High Court. What the Solicitor General actually said was this:
“As an initial matter, no sound basis exists for concluding that same-sex couples who have committed to marriage are anything other than fully capable of responsible parenting and child-rearing. To the contrary, many leading medical, psychological, and social-welfare organizations have issued policy statements opposing restrictions on gay and lesbian parenting based on their conclusion, supported by numerous scientific studies, that children raised by gay and lesbian parents are as likely to be well adjusted as children raised by heterosexual parents.”
“The weight of the scientific literature strongly supports the view that same-sex parents are just as capable as opposite-sex parents.”
Actually, the weight of scientific evidence proves no such thing. All the work of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute (www.marri.org) shows that children do best in a family where mother and dad are married and where the family worships regularly.
As for children raised by two adults of the same sex, the most extensive study ever done was that of Dr. Mark Regnerus. Dr. Regnerus of the University of Texas conducted the largest, most rigorously controlled study in history. Here's what the U.T. study found:
The results of the NFSS [National Family Structures Study]research revealed that the “no differences” claim—the claim that children raised by parents in gay or lesbian relationships fared no worse and in some cases better than children raised by intact biological parents—was not true. On the contrary, the children of these households, on average, did worse than children raised by their biological, still-married parents.
The weight of scientific evidence--as opposed to Donald Verrilli's politically correct posturing--shows that his statements before the High Court are "not true.” Remember, we are talking about the well-being of the children, not whether the adults in these relationships are well-satisfied with their domestic arrangements.
People around the world are amazed at the casual way some Americans are ready to dispense with mothers and fathers. In France, for example, a young pro-marriage spokesman joined the nearly 800,000 impassioned defenders of marriage who turned out in Paris on Jan. 13th. This young spokesman--Xavier Bongibault--said "everyone needs a mother and a father. It's only natural." It is natural. And this young demonstrator is gay.
He understands what the Obama administration refuses to acknowledge: Children need their mothers and fathers. It is their natural right. We can go as far back as 1790 and Edmund Burke and the French Revolution to see confirmation of this. The Rights of Man, wrote the great Irish philosopher and parliamentary leader, include the right to "the inheritance of our parents and the consolations of religion."
The Obama administration is casting all that away. President Obama promised to "fundamentally transform America." Few then realized he meant it. Abolishing marriage is what he is doing. Not changing. Not expanding. More than re-defining marriage, he is abolishing it.
Pat Moynihan was a liberal, but a sensible liberal. His was a voice crying in the wilderness when he expressed his alarm for the black family when the out-of-wedlock birthrate rose to 24%. That was 1965. Now, the out-of-wedlock birthrate for the entire country is 42%. Moynihan was right.
"What's the use of being Irish," Pat Moynihan said when President Kennedy was killed, "if you don't know the world will break your heart." Now, we are all Irish. The world is breaking our hearts. And President Obama is breaking our hearths
http://townhall.com/columnists/kenblackwell/2013/03/06/president-obamas-drops-his-family-friendly-mask-n1526709/page/full/
Say what you will about President Barack Obama's policies, millions of Americans voted for the man in no small part because his family represents a much yearned-for ideal. How much happier Americans would be if all our children lived in a stable, loving, married family with a mom and a dad--like the Obama family. Many writers expressed the hope that having these real-life Huxtables in the White House would turn around many devastating pathologies in America's cities--and in our rural areas, too.
But that was then. Last week, President Obama dropped the family friendly mask. He sent his Solicitor General, Donald Verrilli up the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court with a simple message:
Dump Dads. Lose Moms.
That's because the Solicitor General speaks for the president. In the most august and formal way, it is this officer who carries the president's deepest convictions to lay them before the nation's High Court. What the Solicitor General actually said was this:
“As an initial matter, no sound basis exists for concluding that same-sex couples who have committed to marriage are anything other than fully capable of responsible parenting and child-rearing. To the contrary, many leading medical, psychological, and social-welfare organizations have issued policy statements opposing restrictions on gay and lesbian parenting based on their conclusion, supported by numerous scientific studies, that children raised by gay and lesbian parents are as likely to be well adjusted as children raised by heterosexual parents.”
“The weight of the scientific literature strongly supports the view that same-sex parents are just as capable as opposite-sex parents.”
Actually, the weight of scientific evidence proves no such thing. All the work of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute (www.marri.org) shows that children do best in a family where mother and dad are married and where the family worships regularly.
As for children raised by two adults of the same sex, the most extensive study ever done was that of Dr. Mark Regnerus. Dr. Regnerus of the University of Texas conducted the largest, most rigorously controlled study in history. Here's what the U.T. study found:
The results of the NFSS [National Family Structures Study]research revealed that the “no differences” claim—the claim that children raised by parents in gay or lesbian relationships fared no worse and in some cases better than children raised by intact biological parents—was not true. On the contrary, the children of these households, on average, did worse than children raised by their biological, still-married parents.
The weight of scientific evidence--as opposed to Donald Verrilli's politically correct posturing--shows that his statements before the High Court are "not true.” Remember, we are talking about the well-being of the children, not whether the adults in these relationships are well-satisfied with their domestic arrangements.
People around the world are amazed at the casual way some Americans are ready to dispense with mothers and fathers. In France, for example, a young pro-marriage spokesman joined the nearly 800,000 impassioned defenders of marriage who turned out in Paris on Jan. 13th. This young spokesman--Xavier Bongibault--said "everyone needs a mother and a father. It's only natural." It is natural. And this young demonstrator is gay.
He understands what the Obama administration refuses to acknowledge: Children need their mothers and fathers. It is their natural right. We can go as far back as 1790 and Edmund Burke and the French Revolution to see confirmation of this. The Rights of Man, wrote the great Irish philosopher and parliamentary leader, include the right to "the inheritance of our parents and the consolations of religion."
The Obama administration is casting all that away. President Obama promised to "fundamentally transform America." Few then realized he meant it. Abolishing marriage is what he is doing. Not changing. Not expanding. More than re-defining marriage, he is abolishing it.
Pat Moynihan was a liberal, but a sensible liberal. His was a voice crying in the wilderness when he expressed his alarm for the black family when the out-of-wedlock birthrate rose to 24%. That was 1965. Now, the out-of-wedlock birthrate for the entire country is 42%. Moynihan was right.
"What's the use of being Irish," Pat Moynihan said when President Kennedy was killed, "if you don't know the world will break your heart." Now, we are all Irish. The world is breaking our hearts. And President Obama is breaking our hearths
http://townhall.com/columnists/kenblackwell/2013/03/06/president-obamas-drops-his-family-friendly-mask-n1526709/page/full/
Obama Admin Wants to Deport Christian Homeschoolers.
The Romeike family fled their German homeland in 2008 seeking
political asylum in the United States – where they hoped to home school
their children. Instead, the Obama administration wants the evangelical
Christian family deported.
The fate of Uwe and Hannelore Romeikie – along with their six children – now rests with the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals – after the Dept. of Homeland Security said they don’t deserve asylum.
Neither the Justice Dept. nor the Dept. of Homeland Security returned calls seeking comment.
“The Obama administration is basically saying there is no right to home school anywhere,” said Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association. “It’s an utter repudiation of parental liberty and religious liberty.”
The Justice Dept. is arguing that German law banning home schooling does not violate the family’s human rights.
“They are trying to send a family back to Germany where they would certainly lose custody of their children,” Farris told Fox News. “Our government is siding with Germany.”
Farris said the Germans ban home schools because “they don’t want to have religious and philosophical minorities in their country.”
“That means they don’t want to have significant numbers of people who think differently than what the government thinks,” he said. “It’s an incredibly dangerous assertion that people can’t think in a way that the government doesn’t approve of.”
He said the Justice Dept. is backing that kind of thinking and arguing "it is not a human rights violation.”
Farris said he finds great irony that the Obama administration is releasing thousands of illegal aliens – yet wants to send a family seeking political asylum back to Germany.
“Eleven million people are going to be allowed to stay freely – but this one family is going to be shipped back to Germany to be persecuted,” he said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
The fear of persecution is why an immigration judge granted the family political asylum in 2010.
German authorities demanded the family stop home schooling. They faced thousands of dollars in fines and they initially took away their children in a police van.
German state constitutions require children attend public schools. Parents who don’t comply face punishment ranging from fines to prison time. The nation’s highest appellate court ruled in 2007 that in some cases children could be removed from their parents’ care.
“Families that want to have an alternative education can’t get it in Germany,” Farris said. “Even the private schools have to teach public school curriculum.”
After authorities threatened to remove permanent custody from the Christian couple – they decided to move to the United States.
Uwe, a classically-trained pianist, relocated their brood to a small farm in the shadow of the Smokey Mountains in eastern Tennessee.
“We are very happy here to be able to freely follow our conscience and to home school our children,” he told Fox News. “Where we live in Tennessee is very much like where we lived in Germany.”
Uwe said he was extremely disappointed that their petition to seek asylum was appealed by the Obama administration.
“If we go back to Germany we know that we would be prosecuted and it is very likely the Social Services authorities would take our children from us,” he said.
Uwe said German schools were teaching children to disrespect authority figures and used graphic words to describe sexual relations. He said the state believed children must be “socialized.”
“The German schools teach against our Christian values,” he said. “Our children know that we home school following our convictions and that we are in God’s hands. They understand that we are doing this for their best – and they love the life we are living in America on our small farm.”
Farris said Americans should be outraged over the way the Obama administration has treated the Romeike family – and warned it could have repercussions for families that home school in this nation.
“The right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children has been at the pinnacle of human rights,” he said. “But not in this country.”
http://townhall.com/columnists/toddstarnes/2013/03/05/obama-admin-wants-to-deport-christian-homeschoolers-n1526500/page/full/
The fate of Uwe and Hannelore Romeikie – along with their six children – now rests with the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals – after the Dept. of Homeland Security said they don’t deserve asylum.
Neither the Justice Dept. nor the Dept. of Homeland Security returned calls seeking comment.
“The Obama administration is basically saying there is no right to home school anywhere,” said Michael Farris, founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association. “It’s an utter repudiation of parental liberty and religious liberty.”
The Justice Dept. is arguing that German law banning home schooling does not violate the family’s human rights.
“They are trying to send a family back to Germany where they would certainly lose custody of their children,” Farris told Fox News. “Our government is siding with Germany.”
Farris said the Germans ban home schools because “they don’t want to have religious and philosophical minorities in their country.”
“That means they don’t want to have significant numbers of people who think differently than what the government thinks,” he said. “It’s an incredibly dangerous assertion that people can’t think in a way that the government doesn’t approve of.”
He said the Justice Dept. is backing that kind of thinking and arguing "it is not a human rights violation.”
Farris said he finds great irony that the Obama administration is releasing thousands of illegal aliens – yet wants to send a family seeking political asylum back to Germany.
“Eleven million people are going to be allowed to stay freely – but this one family is going to be shipped back to Germany to be persecuted,” he said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
The fear of persecution is why an immigration judge granted the family political asylum in 2010.
German authorities demanded the family stop home schooling. They faced thousands of dollars in fines and they initially took away their children in a police van.
German state constitutions require children attend public schools. Parents who don’t comply face punishment ranging from fines to prison time. The nation’s highest appellate court ruled in 2007 that in some cases children could be removed from their parents’ care.
“Families that want to have an alternative education can’t get it in Germany,” Farris said. “Even the private schools have to teach public school curriculum.”
After authorities threatened to remove permanent custody from the Christian couple – they decided to move to the United States.
Uwe, a classically-trained pianist, relocated their brood to a small farm in the shadow of the Smokey Mountains in eastern Tennessee.
“We are very happy here to be able to freely follow our conscience and to home school our children,” he told Fox News. “Where we live in Tennessee is very much like where we lived in Germany.”
Uwe said he was extremely disappointed that their petition to seek asylum was appealed by the Obama administration.
“If we go back to Germany we know that we would be prosecuted and it is very likely the Social Services authorities would take our children from us,” he said.
Uwe said German schools were teaching children to disrespect authority figures and used graphic words to describe sexual relations. He said the state believed children must be “socialized.”
“The German schools teach against our Christian values,” he said. “Our children know that we home school following our convictions and that we are in God’s hands. They understand that we are doing this for their best – and they love the life we are living in America on our small farm.”
Farris said Americans should be outraged over the way the Obama administration has treated the Romeike family – and warned it could have repercussions for families that home school in this nation.
“The right of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children has been at the pinnacle of human rights,” he said. “But not in this country.”
http://townhall.com/columnists/toddstarnes/2013/03/05/obama-admin-wants-to-deport-christian-homeschoolers-n1526500/page/full/
From Stalin to Sequestration
Allow me to begin by apologizing for having been absent from these pages for a while. My up-coming book Disinformation, which I have co-written with Professor Ronald Rychlak, became the subject of a documentary movie to be released in June, and that has monopolized my time.
On March 6, 2013, we celebrate 60 years since the death of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, whose nom de guerre was Stalin — meaning man of steel. I deliberately use the word “celebrate,” because Stalin’s death allowed the first ray of light to penetrate into one of the darkest and bloodiest disinformation operations in history: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics itself. Soon after Stalin died, the curtain shielding his “workers’ paradise” from public view was ripped apart, and the rest of the world got its first glimpse of the gulag empire that the Soviet Union really was. According to recent revelations, some 94 million people were killed during the lifetime of the Soviet empire[i] so as to uphold the heretical system of socialism, a creed that deprived mankind of the very motivational forces needed to keep mankind going: private property, competition, and individual incentive.
In theory, socialism is an idyllic dream. In reality, it is a phony nightmare, modeled after Karl Marx’s infamous dictum “Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Bedürfnissen” (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need), a social theory that has destroyed the economy of every country where it has been applied. To put it into plain English, the socialist redistribution of wealth is theft, and stealing became a national policy on the day the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was born. Immediately after the revolution of November 1917, Russia’s new socialist government confiscated the imperial family’s wealth, seized the land owned by the rich Russians, nationalized Russian industry and banking, and killed most of the property owners. In 1929, the Kremlin turned its covetous eyes toward the poorest elements in the country; by forcing the peasants into collective farms, it stole away their land, along with their animals and agricultural tools. Within a few years, virtually the entire Soviet economy was running on stolen property.
In the mid 1930s, the Communist Party itself became a target for theft. Following a brief period of collective leadership exercised by the Central Committee and later by its elite, the Politburo, Stalin personally stole all the top-level positions in the country and pinned them onto his own chest like war decorations, thereby establishing a dismal new feudalism in the middle of the 20th century. That is exactly what occurred later throughout Eastern Europe, when the Soviet socialists took over after World War II. By the time I said goodbye forever to Socialist Romania in 1978, the list of official positions and titles accumulated by Ceausescu and his wife could have easily filled a whole page.
The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Empire
signaled a stern warning that in the long run stealing does not pay,
even when committed by the government of a huge country. All socialists
who have ever risen to lead a country have ended up in hell — all, from
Lenin to Stalin, Tito to Zhivkov, Enver Hoxha to Mátyás Rakosi, Sékou
Touré to Nyeree. All had their days of temporary glory, but all ended in
eternal disgrace. A few remnants, like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez,
are still hanging on, but they certainly have a place in hell reserved
for them. (Update: Chavez has died since the writing of this post.) In this year that Marx’s Manifesto
turns 164 years old and should have long been discredited, there are
still some foolish countries like Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Cyprus,
Italy, and Spain that are being devastated by a misplaced trust in its
advocacy of “to each according to his need” and its consequential
redistribution of the country’s wealth.
There are myriad reasons why socialism can never succeed. One is the
irrational socialist attitude toward money. Marx’s socialists always
depicted money as an odious instrument of capitalist exploitation, and
they always preached the gospel that in the utopian socialist society
there would be no money, no prices, no wages. Until that day, however,
they admitted that money was unfortunately a necessary evil that had to
be retained during the transition period from capitalism to socialism —
because the socialist leaders were unable to offer anything to replace
it. Nevertheless, in the socialist Soviet empire, money lost its
economic regulatory function as well as its status as a measure of
wealth, becoming merely an instrument for expressing domestic wages and
prices. Irrational, unpredictable and chaotic, the socialist attitude
toward money brought nothing but economic anarchy. I saw that with my
own eyes during the 20 years I was involved with Romania’s financial
system, as I went from being deputy chief of the country’s trade mission
in West Germany to economic advisor to the Romanian president.Thirty-four years ago, when I broke away from my life in the top circles of the Soviet empire, I paid with two death sentences from my native Romania for helping her people to stop thinking of government as a boon bestowed from on high, and to free themselves from the clutches of socialism. Alas, now I see the socialist plague of “to each according to his need” beginning to infect my adoptive country, the United States. On Feb. 7, 2009, the cover of Newsweek magazine proclaimed: “We Are All Socialists Now.”[ii] That was just what the official Romanian newspaper Scînteia proclaimed when my former boss, Nicolae Ceausescu, began changing Romania into a monument to himself. Two years after seizing power, the socialist nomenklatura of the U.S. Democratic Party produced the same results as Romania’s socialist nomenklatura did — on a U.S. scale. Over fourteen million Americans lost their jobs, and 41.8 million people went on government food stamps. The GDP dipped from 3.4% to 1.6%. The national debt rose to an unprecedented $13 trillion, and it is projected to reach $18 trillion by 2019.
Scînteia went bankrupt, and Newsweek was sold for one dollar. But a member of the Democratic nomenklatura representing the economically ruined state of California in the U.S. Congress — who is incidentally a stout admirer of and visitor to Fidel Castro’s Cuba — is preaching that the future of the U.S. oil industry is “all about socializing,” all about “the government taking over and running all our oil companies.”
http://pjmedia.com/mihaipacepa/2013/03/06/from-stalin-to-sequestration/
Monday, March 4, 2013
Tactic of appeasing the Arab Street has proven futile The Arab Street Is Still AngryWhen Mubarak was in power, the “Arab Street” of Islamists and Egyptian leftists was angry at America for supporting him. Now the “Arab Street” of Egyptian leftists, Mubarak supporters and some Anti-Brotherhood Islamists is angry at America for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.
Much like Festivus, American diplomacy to the Middle East usually begins with an airing of grievances. These are not the American
grievances over decades of terrorism and acts of violent hatred. These
are the grievances that are supposedly infuriating the Arab Street. The
list begins with Israel, continues on to the “Arab Dictators” supported
by America and concludes with warnings to respect Mohammed by not making
any cartoons or movies about him.
During his first term, Obama kept his distance from Israel, locked up a Christian who made a movie about Mohammed and withdrew his support from the Arab Dictators. The street should have been happy, but now it’s angrier than ever. And much of that anger is directed at America.
Mohamed El Baradei, once the administration’s choice to take over Egypt, has refused to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry. Joining him in this boycott is much of Egypt’s liberal opposition.
:
The American foreign policy error was to assume that the political grievances of the Arab Street could be appeased with democracy. They can’t be. The various factions are not truly interested in open elections. What they want is for America to elevate their faction and only their faction to power. When that doesn’t happen, they denounce the government as an American puppet and warn of the great and terrible anger of the Arab Street if America doesn’t make them its puppet instead.
Democracy is no solution, because none of the factions really wanted democracy for its own sake. They wanted it only as a tool to help them win. Now that the tool has failed most of them, they don’t care for it anymore. And the Islamists who benefited from democracy have no enduring commitment to it. Like all the other factions, they see it as a tool. A means, not an end.
While the West views democracy as an end, the East sees it as only a means. The West believes in a system of populist power rotation. The East however is caught between a variety of totalitarian ideologies, including Islamists and local flavors of the left, who have no interest in power rotation except as a temporary strategy for total victory.
The only way to disprove that accusation is for the winning side to demonstrate its hostility to the United States. Accordingly even governments that are in theory friendly to the United States must demonstrate their unfriendliness as a defense against accusations that they are puppets of the infidels. And as a result, no matter whom the United States supports, all the factions, including those we support, will continue to engage in ritual displays of hostility against us.
Trying to appease the fictional construct of an Arab Street that has clear and simple demands is a hopeless scenario. It’s a Catch 22 mess where every move is ultimately a losing move, no matter how promising it initially appears to be.
There is no Arab Street. The real Arab Street is the overcrowded cities full of angry men with no jobs and lots of bigotry. Their hostility to the United States has nothing to do with the sordid politics that experts insist on bringing up to prove that the Muslim world hates us with good reason. Even if this history did not exist, the United States would be just as hated. The best evidence of that is that most of the accusations that enjoy popularity on the Arab Street are entirely imaginary.
Demagogues can lead the street from bread riots to toppling governments, but what they cannot do is fix the underlying problems, let alone change the bigotry of people who blame all their problems on the foreigners, rather than on themselves. Each faction promises that the anger will subsidize and stability will return when it comes to power, but the anger will never go away because it’s too convenient to blame America for everything. As long as America is around, no one in the Muslim world ever has to take responsibility for anything.
The United States has supported different factions in the Muslim world for the sake of stability. The latest of these is the Muslim Brotherhood. With terrorism from the religion whose name none dare speak running rampant across the world, the Muslim Brotherhood was supposed to pacify the violence by showing that Islamists could come to power without flying planes into buildings.
While Washington was culpable in supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian opposition was far more culpable for forming an alliance with the Brotherhood to overthrow Mubarak. The same Egyptian leftists who are warring with the Brotherhood now were assuring us two years ago that the Brotherhood would never come to power. They gave American policymakers and diplomats those same assurances and now they are condemning them for taking them at their word.
El Baradei was entirely willing to ride the Muslim Brotherhood’s numbers to the presidency. Instead the Muslim Brotherhood rode him and then rode over him. Now El Baradei, who applied eagerly for the job of being America’s puppet, is denouncing America for supporting a puppet government. America is, if anything, more the puppet of the Muslim Brotherhood than the other way around, but accusations of evil puppetry are as common a theme in the politics of the Middle East as giant puppet displays are at leftist protests in America.
Every faction in the game understands that America’s goal is to achieve regional stability while ending the anger and hatred directed at it. Stating a vulnerable goal in the region is a piece of tactical clumsiness that leads the opposition to promote instability and spread anger toward America because they know that is what it fears. And so the very act of defining a “love and peace” goal not only makes attaining it completely and utterly impossible, but actually leads to the very opposite result.
Much as respecting human shields actually promotes the use of that tactic by terrorists, aiming for stability leads to instability. And so every American diplomatic initiative ends with an angry Arab Street and no peace in sight. Every American diplomatic visit leads to a choice that is bound to make America unpopular with everyone no matter what choice it makes.
The United States withdrew its support from Mubarak because it did not want to support a leader whom the proverbial Arab Street hated, but now it is stuck supporting another leader whom the Street hates. After all that effort and the sacrifice of national interests, the United States finds itself right back where it started in terms of the angry Arab Street, even while its strategic interests have taken a beating.
Washington should never have withdrawn its support from Mubarak and now that the tactic of appeasing the Arab Street has proven futile, it should stop supporting the Muslim Brotherhood out of some misplaced commitment to Muslim democracy, a mythical creature that no one in the Muslim world actually believes in, and the even more misplaced notion that the Muslim Brotherhood can restore stability to the region.
As the past year has shown us, the Muslim Brotherhood is not capable of bringing stability to Egypt, let alone the region. It is a violent sectarian organization incapable of running the country without resorting to violence. And while that alone does not distinguish it, its inherent Islamist tendencies do. Refusing to support the Muslim Brotherhood should not however lead to any further fallacies about freedom and democracy. These two attributes are not about to arrive in Egypt in any enduring form.
A chaotic Egypt will likely drift into one kind of tyranny or another. The United States should stay out of the process, providing no support to any of the factions, until a stable non-Islamist government that is willing to cooperate with the United States on security issues arises. That should be the only American criteria with respect to who rules or misrules Egypt.
The Arab Street is not America’s problem. It is the problem of those who wish to rule it. If the Egyptian people truly wish democracy, then they will fight for it and obtain it without our support. If they do not, that is also their business.
America’s interests in Egypt do not involve waging a democracy crusade, but keeping heavy firepower, a large population and nuclear technology out of the hands of our enemies.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/53514?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=9365df7237-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email
During his first term, Obama kept his distance from Israel, locked up a Christian who made a movie about Mohammed and withdrew his support from the Arab Dictators. The street should have been happy, but now it’s angrier than ever. And much of that anger is directed at America.
Mohamed El Baradei, once the administration’s choice to take over Egypt, has refused to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry. Joining him in this boycott is much of Egypt’s liberal opposition.
:
The American foreign policy error was to assume that the political grievances of the Arab Street could be appeased with democracy. They can’t be. The various factions are not truly interested in open elections. What they want is for America to elevate their faction and only their faction to power. When that doesn’t happen, they denounce the government as an American puppet and warn of the great and terrible anger of the Arab Street if America doesn’t make them its puppet instead.
Democracy is no solution, because none of the factions really wanted democracy for its own sake. They wanted it only as a tool to help them win. Now that the tool has failed most of them, they don’t care for it anymore. And the Islamists who benefited from democracy have no enduring commitment to it. Like all the other factions, they see it as a tool. A means, not an end.
While the West views democracy as an end, the East sees it as only a means. The West believes in a system of populist power rotation. The East however is caught between a variety of totalitarian ideologies, including Islamists and local flavors of the left, who have no interest in power rotation except as a temporary strategy for total victory.
There is no actual solution to the Arab Street that will please all sides and keep their hatred of America down to a dull roar
There is no actual solution to the Arab Street that will please all sides and keep their hatred of America down to a dull roar. Whichever side the United States of America backs will leave the others full of fury. If the United States doesn’t back a side but maintains good relations with the government, it will still be accused of backing that government.The only way to disprove that accusation is for the winning side to demonstrate its hostility to the United States. Accordingly even governments that are in theory friendly to the United States must demonstrate their unfriendliness as a defense against accusations that they are puppets of the infidels. And as a result, no matter whom the United States supports, all the factions, including those we support, will continue to engage in ritual displays of hostility against us.
Trying to appease the fictional construct of an Arab Street that has clear and simple demands is a hopeless scenario. It’s a Catch 22 mess where every move is ultimately a losing move, no matter how promising it initially appears to be.
There is no Arab Street. The real Arab Street is the overcrowded cities full of angry men with no jobs and lots of bigotry. Their hostility to the United States has nothing to do with the sordid politics that experts insist on bringing up to prove that the Muslim world hates us with good reason. Even if this history did not exist, the United States would be just as hated. The best evidence of that is that most of the accusations that enjoy popularity on the Arab Street are entirely imaginary.
Demagogues can lead the street from bread riots to toppling governments, but what they cannot do is fix the underlying problems, let alone change the bigotry of people who blame all their problems on the foreigners, rather than on themselves. Each faction promises that the anger will subsidize and stability will return when it comes to power, but the anger will never go away because it’s too convenient to blame America for everything. As long as America is around, no one in the Muslim world ever has to take responsibility for anything.
The United States has supported different factions in the Muslim world for the sake of stability. The latest of these is the Muslim Brotherhood. With terrorism from the religion whose name none dare speak running rampant across the world, the Muslim Brotherhood was supposed to pacify the violence by showing that Islamists could come to power without flying planes into buildings.
While Washington was culpable in supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian opposition was far more culpable for forming an alliance with the Brotherhood to overthrow Mubarak. The same Egyptian leftists who are warring with the Brotherhood now were assuring us two years ago that the Brotherhood would never come to power. They gave American policymakers and diplomats those same assurances and now they are condemning them for taking them at their word.
El Baradei was entirely willing to ride the Muslim Brotherhood’s numbers to the presidency. Instead the Muslim Brotherhood rode him and then rode over him. Now El Baradei, who applied eagerly for the job of being America’s puppet, is denouncing America for supporting a puppet government. America is, if anything, more the puppet of the Muslim Brotherhood than the other way around, but accusations of evil puppetry are as common a theme in the politics of the Middle East as giant puppet displays are at leftist protests in America.
Every faction in the game understands that America’s goal is to achieve regional stability while ending the anger and hatred directed at it. Stating a vulnerable goal in the region is a piece of tactical clumsiness that leads the opposition to promote instability and spread anger toward America because they know that is what it fears. And so the very act of defining a “love and peace” goal not only makes attaining it completely and utterly impossible, but actually leads to the very opposite result.
Much as respecting human shields actually promotes the use of that tactic by terrorists, aiming for stability leads to instability. And so every American diplomatic initiative ends with an angry Arab Street and no peace in sight. Every American diplomatic visit leads to a choice that is bound to make America unpopular with everyone no matter what choice it makes.
The United States withdrew its support from Mubarak because it did not want to support a leader whom the proverbial Arab Street hated, but now it is stuck supporting another leader whom the Street hates. After all that effort and the sacrifice of national interests, the United States finds itself right back where it started in terms of the angry Arab Street, even while its strategic interests have taken a beating.
Washington should never have withdrawn its support from Mubarak and now that the tactic of appeasing the Arab Street has proven futile, it should stop supporting the Muslim Brotherhood out of some misplaced commitment to Muslim democracy, a mythical creature that no one in the Muslim world actually believes in, and the even more misplaced notion that the Muslim Brotherhood can restore stability to the region.
As the past year has shown us, the Muslim Brotherhood is not capable of bringing stability to Egypt, let alone the region. It is a violent sectarian organization incapable of running the country without resorting to violence. And while that alone does not distinguish it, its inherent Islamist tendencies do. Refusing to support the Muslim Brotherhood should not however lead to any further fallacies about freedom and democracy. These two attributes are not about to arrive in Egypt in any enduring form.
A chaotic Egypt will likely drift into one kind of tyranny or another. The United States should stay out of the process, providing no support to any of the factions, until a stable non-Islamist government that is willing to cooperate with the United States on security issues arises. That should be the only American criteria with respect to who rules or misrules Egypt.
The Arab Street is not America’s problem. It is the problem of those who wish to rule it. If the Egyptian people truly wish democracy, then they will fight for it and obtain it without our support. If they do not, that is also their business.
America’s interests in Egypt do not involve waging a democracy crusade, but keeping heavy firepower, a large population and nuclear technology out of the hands of our enemies.
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/53514?utm_source=CFP+Mailout&utm_campaign=9365df7237-Call_to_Champions&utm_medium=email
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