Repost from http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/obamas_deficit_the_devil_made.htmlOctober 02, 2009

Obama’s Deficit: The Devil Made Me Do It

By Jon N. Hall

Ever since his inauguration, President Obama has said that he “inherited” the federal budget deficit from his predecessor. But immediately upon taking office, Obama signed two new bills, the $787B stimulus and the $410B omnibus, that together about equal the $1.2T deficit he “inherited.”

Now that the fiscal year has ended, we see that the feds ran a $1.58T deficit for FY 2009, the all-time record and the first deficit over a trillion bucks. This deficit is 3.4 times the $459B deficit of 2008, and 10 times the $160B deficit of 2007, which began when Republicans were still in control of Congress.

In his speech to the Joint Session of Congress on September 9, Obama said:

Now, part of the reason I faced a trillion-dollar deficit when I walked in the door of the White House is because too many initiatives over the last decade were not paid for — from the Iraq war to tax breaks for the wealthy. (Applause.)

The fact that things “were not paid for” would seem to be a pretty good reason for a deficit. But the part about “tax breaks for the wealthy” is pure nonsense.

The “tax breaks for the wealthy” were tax rate cuts that totaled 4.6 percent. For the sake of illustration, let’s round that up to 5 percent and apply it to an annual federal revenue total of $3T (which is more than the federal government has ever taken in). That works out to $150B, a long ways from the 2009 deficit.

The “tax breaks for the wealthy” weren’t for all federal revenue, just revenue from the Individual Income Tax. The largest portion of total federal revenue taken up by the personal income tax in recent years was 50 percent in FY 2000 (at the height of the dot-com bubble). So, if applied against revenue from personal income taxes only, the Bush rate cuts would have meant $75B in lost revenue. But wait, Obama promised that only the top 5 percent of personal income taxpayers would see a rate hike. The most that the top 5 percent has paid recently is about 60 percent of the personal income tax. So the Bush tax rate cuts would mean at most a $45B loss of revenue, or … less than 3 percent of the 2009 deficit.

The point of the above exercise is to show, with just a few well-known figures, that the president is mistaken. And I’ve used inflated figures throughout the example. Using more precise figures would yield an even smaller loss of revenue due to tax rate cuts. Clearly, the Obama administration doesn’t think we are very smart.

The problem with this exercise is that it uses “static scoring;” it doesn’t take into account the effect of the tax rate cuts on economic behavior, and therefore tax revenue. Indeed, the economy did pick up under the Bush tax rate cuts, and America enjoyed her 5 highest years of total revenues ever, one of which was more than 25 percent higher than the previous record set in FY 2000. If my analysis were to use “dynamic scoring,” there might not have been any loss of revenue due to the evil Bush tax rate cuts.

And another thing: Why are only these “initiatives” running up the deficit? Why is the Iraq war running up the deficit but not the National Endowment for the Arts? All such line items are part of the “discretionary” spending that Congress votes on each year, and the money for them all comes out of the same pot: the Treasury’s general fund.

The subtext of Obama’s message is: Except for “initiatives,” nothing can be done about federal spending; the rest of the budget can’t be touched; no spending cuts will be forthcoming; budgets can be balanced only by increasing revenue (higher taxes).

The reason Obama is so keen on laying blame for the deficit on Bush is that he’s caught in the Democrats’ old lie: The president is responsible for the budget. The Democrats are aided and abetted in this lie by the establishment media.

It is Congress that is responsible for budgets and budget deficits. Appropriations and budgets are set by the legislature not the president. And Congress has been controlled by Democrats for nearly 3 years now, during which time they’ve set the two highest deficits in history, this year’s record being almost four times the Republican record of 2004.

A survey the OMB’s Historical Tables (page 21) going back to the inception of the income tax in 1913, shows that no matter how we look at it, a Republican Congress does better at balancing the budget than does a Democrat Congress. Republican Congresses have produced the most recent surpluses, the largest surpluses, the most back-to-back surpluses, the most surpluses under a president of either party, etc. This is why the Democrats and their media lapdogs lay the responsibility for budgets and deficits on the president.

According to the OMB’s Mid-Session Review (page 26) from August 25, total revenue for FY 2009 was down by $450 billion from FY 2008, yet the deficit was up by more than $1.1 trillion. So the problem is spending, not revenue. And in the middle of this massive shortfall, Congress is trying to saddle America with even more debt, with “initiatives” like healthcare reform, cap-and-trade, and “green” ventures. The latest OMB projections predict huge deficits for the next decade. These projections do not take into account Congress’ spending spree in legislation that is still under consideration.

Now, one could point out that the economy was doing just fine until Democrats took over Congress. But that would be so simplistic. It’s undeniable, however, that Barack Hussein Obama voted for the $700B TARP bill last October when he was the junior senator from Illinois in the U.S. Congress. He didn’t vote “present;” he took responsibility.

So President Obama “inherited” the deficit from himself … and the rest of Congress.

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it.”

Frederic Bastiat

Seriously though, he’s pretty much my hero.  In all my study of economics on the way to my degree he was the individual who influenced me the most.

The fact that he OWNS socialist moonbat Donahue is just icing on the cake.

Phil using the word “Maldistribution” gives his position away immediately.

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A quote from LBJ:

‘You do not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered.’

- Lyndon Johnson

Not that I see any benefits to single payer, rationed health care run by a government that cannot deliver mail without running the post office in the red.

The next thing that Obama will supposedly “need” to do is implement a middle/upper-middle class tax increase or VAT.  Mark my words, he will try to implement one or both.

You idiots who voted for this knucklehead socialist need to hit yourselves in the face with a rather large blunt instrument.  Hopefully you will either be unconscious or come to your senses when the next election rolls around.

Manly

The things you don’t read about Barack Obama
Sat. May 2 – 5:46 AM
Will Rogers famously pleaded that all he knew was what he read in the papers. If all a person knew of Barack Obama’s first 100 days as president was what they read of them in this newspaper, it would seem to be a very charmed young presidency.

The Chronicle Herald recently made space for an urgent Associated Press dispatch from Washington informing readers the Obamas had chosen a Portuguese water dog. Not original reporting, of course, but an AP rephrasing of a White House-arranged scoop in the Washington Post online.

That was followed by a crack Canadian Press report, drawn from such gumshoe news-gathering as reading the Huffington Post, on the “hillbilly” Republican governor of Alaska: her “family and political theatrics that would do Jerry Springer proud,” like “the arrest and indictment of her sister-in-law on break-and-enter charges” and “the sordid revelations of her daughter’s ex-boyfriend.”

The Portuguese water dog and Alaskan “hillbillies” news beats apparently leave little time for anything remotely skeptical of the president of the United States. And they wonder why folks aren’t buying the papers like they used to.

So here is a small selection of news on the most powerful man on Earth which has been deemed unfit to print:

•Obama’s first two major bills alone, the “stimulus” and “omnibus,” cost nearly twice as much as was spent on Iraq over six years – $1.2 trillion vs. $650 billion.

•Obama abandoned his campaign promise of “a net spending cut,” his first annual deficit – not counting bailouts – being three times the worst deficit under President George W. Bush.

•Obama’s objective in his first G20 summit – commitments to spend our way to prosperity with massive stimulus boondoggles across the G20 – was rejected out of hand.

•Obama’s objective in his first NATO summit – commitments to combat troops for Afghanistan from “our European allies,” which Obama and his party imagined were ready and willing to fight if only someone “enlightened” like him were running things – was predictably refused, with some more European non-combat contingents offered as a token.

•Obama’s Defence Department announced cuts of $1.4 billion to missile defence, the day after North Korea test-fired its long-range, multi-stage ballistic missile.

•Obama’s economics were criticized by Warren Buffet, whose endorsement had been candidate Obama’s highest economic credential.

•Obama reversed the free trade Bush policy that had allowed about 100 Mexican tractor-trailers into the United States, which the Mexican government immediately used as an excuse to levy tariffs on 90 American goods amounting to $2.4 billion in U.S. exports.

•Obama’s “tax cuts for 95 per cent” turned out to mean $13 a week from June to December, to be clawed back to $8 a week in January – as compared with President Bush’s 2008 tax rebates of $600 to $1,200 plus $300 per child, which were notably scoffed at during the election campaign by Michelle Obama.

•Obama’s campaign promise of a $3,000-per-employee tax credit for businesses that hired new workers – repeated ad nauseam for weeks before the election – was discreetly retired even before inauguration day.

•Obama abandoned his campaign promise that “lobbyists won’t work in my White House,” waiving his no-lobbyist executive order or conveniently re-

defining his appointees’ past lobbying work to allow 30 lobbyists into his administration.

•Obama abandoned his campaign promise to reform earmarks, signing the omnibus bill which contained 8,816 of them.

•Obama took more money from AIG than any other politician in 2008 – over $100,000 – and signed into law the provision guaranteeing the AIG bonuses which later had him in front of the cameras “shaking with outrage” and siccing the pitchfork crowd on law-abiding citizens who had fulfilled their end of a contract and had their payment upheld by Obama’s own legislation.

Why should these points, and many more like them, have to be made by some obscure contributor to The Chronicle Herald’s opinion pages?

Fox News Channel is the butt of jokes and the target of attacks like no other media outlet in the English-speaking world, not least by people who fancy themselves the guardians of a free press. But Fox News is today the lone television news service in the English-speaking world capable of serious skepticism and scrutiny of the sitting president and the Congress of the United States.

Fox News is also the second most-watched channel in all American cable television. It long ago became by far the most-watched cable news channel; more Americans watched Fox News than CNN and MSNBC combined in every time slot from 6 a.m. to midnight in April. Now, while The New York Times is $1.3 billion in debt, Fox has expanded its operations with a business channel and a juggernaut Internet presence.

There’s a lesson there, though Fox News will be just as well pleased if the impeccably “mainstream” news business remains clueless about it.

The people need a Fourth Estate, not yet another adulator of Barack Obama, yet another smearer of Sarah Palin, yet another patrician editor to keep out anything disagreeable to progressive sensibilities, yet another laptop-and-latte journalism-schooler to spit on everything pre-dating 1968. And they wonder why the news business has come on hard times.

Andrew W. Smith, from Cape Sable Island, N.S., writes and resides in Tulsa, Okla

Couldn’t have said it better myself.  I don’t agree with everything but the general principle that goverment is here to secure our rights and stay out of our way is dead on.

Manly

From Tcoverride.

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

That’s why we have a government in DC.

As to what I want them to do, that is outlined in the specific, enumerated powers of the US constitution.

The most important thing the framers established in the constitution was the idea that rights were not granted to the people, rather rights belonged to the people, and could not be taken away by the government, either by force or legislation.

They even went further, to say that any right not specifically enumerated in the constitution was left to the states, and if the states didn’t cover it in their constitution, then it was left to the people.

How amazing is that? Anything they or the states didn’t think of, is your right to do! Gay Marriage? is it illegal on the books? Then go for it! That was the idea the framers had. The government that governs least is best, we should be left alone to live our lives at our peril. We should be responsible for our own actions, and our own choices, and however good or bad those choices are, it should be left up to our communities, through charity, to help us should we fail.

The framers thought the idea of a federal tax on the people directly should be abhorrent, as even a 1% tax could some day, some how, be raised to 2%! What would they do if they saw our current tax rates? Their idea was that the fed was funded by the states. The states elect the president, not the citizens. It wa sup to the states to decide how their votes were cast, either through popular vote, fiat, or whatever means that individual state’s citizens chose.

Having said all that, what do I want my government to do?
I want them to stop social security and all other social welfare programs. Let local charities do that. Let people be responsible for their own lives.
I want the government to get out of the classrooms. I want schools to teach the ethics of the community.
A note on morality. All morality is wedded to religious beliefs. Government should never talk to morals, only ethics. Same goes for schools. Kids need to learn morals at home and at church.

I don’t want the federal government ever considering “bailouts.” What right does the government have to give my tax money to a private company? It’s why we have bankruptcy laws.

Moreover, I want a government that realizes they have no place in the economy beyond printing the currency. The free market is the surest path to success, as it is the only path that leads to constant innovation and growth.

I want a government that is accountable to its citizens other than during campaigns. I want politicians who are humbled by the responsibility of public service. I want federal politicians think “how is this best for the country” before they think “how will this get me reelected?”

I don’t want a government that tells me what I can or can’t put into my body, I want a government that ensures I have the means to know what I am putting into my body and lets me decide on whether or not to do it. (This applies to drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and Twinkies.) I want a government that knows it has no business in a woman’s uterus. I want a government that doesn’t care what you do in the bedroom, as long as all parties consent to it, and it stays in the bed room.

I want a government that defends our borders and national interests, that works to establish favorable trade with other nations, that encourages trade between the states, and places the needs of our nation before the needs of any other.

I want a government that doesn’t shy away from enforcing its own laws because the task is too hard. I want a government that realizes that NASA was a great idea, but the government has no business reaching out to the stars. Sputnik worried us because it meant the reds could range us with MIRVs. We can do likewise. Everything after that (including manned space flight) should be in the hands of private industry. How many times has the government just shrugged and gone back to the drawing boards when a multi-billion dollar craft carrying multimillion dollar satellites just goes up in smoke, or crashes because someone forgot to convert meters to feet?

How many times would that happen if the project was being run by a private company? (Good luck finding investors after posting a multibillion dollar loss. It generally teaches us to be very, very demanding and exacting in our results.)

I want the government to protect all of our rights. When is the last time a politician supported speech control?

Mostly, I want a government that is afraid of its citizens. A government that knows if they so much as try to impede on our rights, we will either imprison them or hang them.

I want a government of, by, and FOR the people. Not a government that exists for itself.

“My definition of social justice: those who refuse to work deserve to go hungry.”

Manly

It pretty much sums up my feelings on the current trend of entitlement and wealth envy.

Manly

“You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the
wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working
for, another person must work for without receiving. The
government cannot give to anybody anything that the government
does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people
get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half
is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the
idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going
to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end
of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it.”

~~~ The late Dr. Adrian Rogers , 1931 to 2005 ~~~

The post below is lifted from the Wall Street Journal. If you don’t understand how windfall profit taxes work (especially when used on oil companies) you should give this one a read.

This has to be in the top 10 of worst ideas ever. There is an oil supply problem, not a profit problem (by the way, the oil companies only make 8-10 cents profit on every dollar of revenue).

The most effective method of relieving a supply shortage is to increase production (opening Alaska, restricted areas off the east and west coast, etc).

Politicians proposing windfall profit taxes for oil companies are simply pandering to the anger of the masses. If the masses had a clue as to the cause of high oil prices they would be hanging the politicians from the lampposts (yes, it’s their fault).

Manly

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120977019142563957.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

Windfall Profits for Dummies
May 3, 2008; Page A10

This is one strange debate the candidates are having on energy policy. With gas prices close to $4 a gallon, Hillary Clinton and John McCain say they’ll bring relief with a moratorium on the 18.4-cent federal gas tax. Barack Obama opposes that but prefers a 1970s-style windfall profits tax (as does Mrs. Clinton).

Mr. Obama is right to oppose the gas-tax gimmick, but his idea is even worse. Neither proposal addresses the problem of energy supply, especially the lack of domestic oil and gas thanks to decades of Congressional restrictions on U.S. production. Mr. Obama supports most of those “no drilling” rules, but that hasn’t stopped him from denouncing high gas prices on the campaign trail. He is running TV ads in North Carolina that show him walking through a gas station and declaring that he’ll slap a tax on the $40 billion in “excess profits” of Exxon Mobil.
[Barack Obama]

The idea is catching on. Last week Pennsylvania Congressman Paul Kanjorski introduced a windfall profits tax as part of what he called the “Consumer Reasonable Energy Price Protection Act of 2008.” So now we have Congress threatening to help itself to business profits even though Washington already takes 35% right off the top with the corporate income tax.

You may also be wondering how a higher tax on energy will lower gas prices. Normally, when you tax something, you get less of it, but Mr. Obama seems to think he can repeal the laws of economics. We tried this windfall profits scheme in 1980. It backfired. The Congressional Research Service found in a 1990 analysis that the tax reduced domestic oil production by 3% to 6% and increased oil imports from OPEC by 8% to 16%. Mr. Obama nonetheless pledges to lessen our dependence on foreign oil, which he says “costs America $800 million a day.” Someone should tell him that oil imports would soar if his tax plan becomes law. The biggest beneficiaries would be OPEC oil ministers.

There’s another policy contradiction here. Exxon is now under attack for buying back $2 billion of its own stock rather than adding to the more than $21 billion it is likely to invest in energy research and exploration this year. But hold on. If oil companies believe their earnings from exploring for new oil will be expropriated by government – and an excise tax on profits is pure expropriation – they will surely invest less, not more. A profits tax is a sure formula to keep the future price of gas higher.

Exxon’s profits are soaring with the recent oil price spike, but the energy industry’s earnings aren’t as outsized as the politicians seem to think. Thomson Financial calculates that profits from the oil and natural gas industry over the past year were 8.3% of investment, while the all-industry average is 7.8%. And this was a boom year for oil. An analysis by the Cato Institute’s Jerry Taylor finds that between 1970 and 2003 (which includes peak and valley years for earnings) the oil and gas business was “less profitable than the rest of the U.S. economy.” These are hardly robber barons.

This tiff over gas and oil taxes only highlights the intellectual policy confusion – or perhaps we should say cynicism – of our politicians. They want lower prices but don’t want more production to increase supply. They want oil “independence” but they’ve declared off limits most of the big sources of domestic oil that could replace foreign imports. They want Americans to use less oil to reduce greenhouse gases but they protest higher oil prices that reduce demand. They want more oil company investment but they want to confiscate the profits from that investment. And these folks want to be President?

Late this week, a group of Senate Republicans led by Pete Domenici of New Mexico introduced the “American Energy Production Act of 2008″ to expand oil production off the U.S. coasts and in Alaska. It has the potential to increase domestic production enough to keep America running for five years with no foreign imports. With the world price of oil at $116 a barrel, if not now, when? No word yet if Senators Clinton and Obama will take time off from denouncing oil profits to vote for that.

I found this interesting.

The quote below is from a book titled “The Bad Boy of Baltimore” which is a biography of H.L. Mencken by Marion Rodgers.
Page 409 reads:

By the mid-1930’s, thanks to the New Deal, all that self-reliance had changed, prompting Mencken to declare: ‘There is no genuine justice in any scheme of feeding and coddling the loafer whose only ponderable energies are devoted wholly to reproduction. Nine-tenths of the rights he bellows for are really privileges and he does nothing to deserve them.’ Despite the billions spent on an individual, ‘he can be lifted transiently but always slips back again.’ Thus, the New Deal had been ‘the most stupendous digenetic enterprise ever undertaken by man…. We not only acquired a vast population of morons, we have inculcated all morons, old or young, with the doctrine that the decent and industrious people of the country are bound to support them for all time. The effects of that doctrine are bound to be disastrous soon or late.’

When someone asked, “And what, Mr. Mencken, would you do about the unemployed?” He looked up with a bland expression. “We could start by taking away their vote,” he said, deadpan. Mencken was not surprised when the majority disagreed. “There can be nothing even remotely approaching a rational solution of the fundamental national problems until we face them in a realistic spirit,” he later reflected, and that was impossible so long as educated Americans remained responsive “to the Roosevelt buncombe.”

Wherein “buncombe” means nonsense.

How completely relevant to the election happening this year, in which every Democrat has nothing to say about self-reliance or freedom but only talks of their new entitlement schemes.

History is definitely repeating itself here.

Manly

From the WSJ:

Note the section regarding changing the terms of existing mortgage contracts. Thank God this will end up in court immediately (as well it should). I have faith that the Supreme Court would strike this down quickly.

The top three Democratic candidates have called for various measures that move beyond the current administration’s effort to get lenders to voluntarily modify troubled loans. The Democratic plans share elements, including the creation of a federal fund to help homeowners refinance onerous mortgages, legal protections for lenders to free them to alter individual mortgage terms, and tighter regulation of lenders to prevent future crises.

But the plans from Democrats contain some differences, which could become accentuated in Nevada, and later, in big states such as California. Both Mrs. Clinton and John Edwards have said that if the mortgage industry doesn’t voluntarily agree to enlarge and lengthen the terms of a plan backed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and agree to a foreclosure moratorium, they would force the lenders to do so through legislation.

Barack Obama opposes making laws to force such moves. An Obama adviser says that a mandatory moratorium and rate freeze — which could force lenders to hold loan interest rates below market levels — could deter them from re-entering the market and would delay the return of liquidity.

There could also be legal issues, the adviser says. “There would certainly be some serious constitutional issues to consider from the government trying to directly change the terms of millions of mortgage contracts after the fact,” the adviser says. Mr. Obama thinks the industry should make these changes voluntarily.

And then we have the Republicans (not much better, IMO). At least they aren’t all talking about the government getting into the mortgage modification business:

Republicans for the most part support President Bush’s approach on the issue, to get lenders and mortgage-bond investors to agree voluntarily to modify some troubled loans. They haven’t unveiled separate plans like the Democrats, but two candidates, Mitt Romney and John McCain, have indicated that more might need to be done should the situation worsen, a view echoed by Mr. Paulson earlier this week…

“There’s clearly an additional need to consider other measures,” Mr. McCain said Wednesday. “I will know within a very short period of time whether these policies are succeeding or not,” he said of Mr. Paulson’s plan to persuade lenders voluntarily to modify some troubled mortgages. Mr. Romney has called for the creation of a business cooperative that would pool the bad loans in one entity that would then be able to handle individual solutions with homeowners. Romney’s aides also say he favors increased funding for a government chartered housing-services agency called NeighborWorks America.

Mr. Huckabee mentions the housing market in his new ad. But he hasn’t proposed government intervention. He said in Iowa that he fully supports the administration’s voluntary plan.

Messrs. Obama and Edwards support a bill currently in the Senate to amend bankruptcy law to allow judges to alter the terms of a mortgage.

It really pisses me off that I will end up bailing people out who made bad decisions about their mortgage. People will never learn to make sound decisions unless we stop this government nanny trend where those who don’t screw up end up bailing out those that do.

Manly

Follow the link below for the story.

Click Here

I can’t even fathom how someone could question the legitimacy of evolution these days. The evidence is simply overwhelming.

The quote that blows me away is:

Huckabee: “I just can’t believe creation is an accident”

The strength of the natural system is precisely these “accidents”. I.E. random mutations cause selections to occur which in turn enable organisms to evolve. DUH.

Maher: “If someone believes that the earth is 6,000 years old and every scientist in the world is saying that it is billions of years old, why shouldn’t I take that into account when I am assessing the rationality of someone I am going to put into the highest office in the land?”

AMEN, BROTHER.

Not sure I can vote for a guy who is this clueless about scientific fact.

I may declare myself a Republican but this is one of the things that I CAN’T STAND about the religious right. The truth of Evolution and Christian faith are not mutually exclusive.

The clip below is from Bill Maher’s show. For once I agree with him about something.

Maher did make the classic mistake of describing evolution as “we came from the monkeys”. This is a common mistake for novices to make. We did not “come from monkeys” but simply have a common ancestor (this common ancestor was NOT a monkey). His statement implies that we evolved from monkeys that inhabit the planet today, which is not true.

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Huckabee needs to take a look at the following article:

Scientific American

Below is a re-post of an article that appeared in the Stanford Review and was written by Grant Everett Starrett.
It sums up a lot of how I feel about the war and partisanship in general. While our reasoning for being in Iraq can be questioned or debated, in no way should we debate the support of the troops and our patriotism. The fact that politics takes precedence over patriotism for many congressmen/women is disgusting.

Recently, a friend of mine intimated that it is a bad thing if you are overly patriotic. I almost fell out of my chair in disbelief. Perhaps my feelings on patriotism can be traced to my military service (I feel that I earned the right to be as patriotic as I choose to be).

It makes me sad to think that you can be chastised for loving your country. What is wrong with people these days.

Here is a link to the original article

I have a fairly simple question, though few people seem to want to ask it the way I do. I do not want to know how “George W. Bush’s war is failing” or “how poor the President’s mismanagement” was. I do not want to know, in the words of the Democrat Majority Leader last spring, that the “war is lost” without realizing by whom. I do not even want to know how “the Americans” are doing or how “the British” or “the Japanese” or “the Australians” or any of the other coalition powers are doing. I just want to know how we are doing.

We live in a republic, not a single party dictatorship. We elect a President and a Congress and consent to live under the government that they run, even when they do so poorly. Few sane Americans are talking about revolution or assassination (exempting certain commentators from the likes of the DailyKos, though I guess I did specify ‘sane’). The President, as the executive, certainly made the case for war, but it is not as if Republicans supported it in bloc and Democrats opposed similarly. Both Democrats and Republicans voted for the war; both Democrats and Republicans voted against the war. Some voted for the war before they voted against the war. One of these legislators lost the popular vote and the White House to President George W. Bush in 2004 – a dramatic reaffirmation of the mandate of the people.

But most of this is irrelevant. We as Americans are fighting this war, and we should start acting like it. Recently, Katie Couric was quoted by Peter Wehner as saying: “The whole culture of wearing flags on our lapel and saying ‘we’ when referring to the United States and, even the ‘shock and awe’ of the initial stages, it was just too jubilant and just a little uncomfortable.” Why is Katie Couric uncomfortable? Her audience is primarily American. She is American. What is wrong with desiring success for our country?

We live in a new age of extraordinary media freedom. Had the American media covered the Battle of the Bulge in World War II like they covered the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the Western Allies might have been forced into peace talks by dwindling public support for the conflict at home and the Soviet Union might have conquered all of Nazi Germany, ensuring millions more would suffer under a Communist regime – that is, if the USSR was even able to do so without a second front. Despite the fact that both battles resulted in American strategic victories against determined counter-offensives by the enemy—who, in both cases, lost more men—the press covered them extremely differently. The first was a victory for us. The latter was a loss for the Americans.

Obviously, the media holds enormous influence in shaping the public perception of a war. In a free republic, an independent media plays an even more significant role in shaping debate about policy.

When we began to liberate Europe on D-Day, the newspapers were purposefully given the wrong plans so as to mislead the enemy. Coverage of the only enemy-inflicted deaths on the American Continent was censored by a government fearful that the Japanese might have learned of the limited success of one of their projects. In earlier wars as well, the press was hardly given a free hand: Abraham Lincoln notoriously censored and jailed reporters, finding it not such a disagreeable notion given the enormous reliance of the Confederacy on Union papers for intelligence (and vice versa). Today, the government does not resort to censorship, but perhaps media should perform some of it on its own, rather than revealing sensitive terror-fighting programs; or it should at least take a more pro-American stance. These days, it is not exactly clear that the authors of The New York Times editorial page read their paper’s own news section.

Perhaps our political partisanship has gotten the better of us. In 2006, MoveOn.org ran out of town on a rail a decent man who is liberal on practically every issue, and more significantly, was the Democratic Party’s Vice Presidential nominee only six years prior: Joe Lieberman, whose courageous stance on the war doomed him to be held in disgust by his fellow Democrats. A recent poll indicated that 1 out of every 5 Democrats thinks that the world would be better off if we lost the war, compared to 1 in 20 Republicans. The number three Democrat in the House of Representatives, Jim Clyburn, indicated during the summer that if General Petraeus gave a quality report of progress in Iraq in September (which he did) “there would be enough support [among conservative Democrats] to want to stay the course and if the Republicans were to stay united as they have been, then it would be a problem for us.” When one of the leaders of a political party says that success for America is a “problem” for his party, America has a problem.

There can be little doubt now that mismanagement has occurred on some level in Iraq in the past, and that we should have adopted counterinsurgency tactics earlier. But as Prussian Field-Marshal Helmuth von Moltke famously said, “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” This is war, not a series of maneuvers. The fact of the matter is that the surge is demonstrating a reasonable degree of success – but that seems hardly relevant to Democrats so wed to leftist netroots’ dollars that they reject both the message and its messenger: decorated four star General David Petraeus – who literally wrote the book on counterinsurgency for the US Army, not to mention his stellar education at West Point, Princeton, and the battlefields of Iraq. So perhaps there is a better question: How are we doing in America?

What happened to men like Senator Arthur Vandenburg (R-MI) or Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA)? Both were respected men within their own parties; but both supported the President of a different political party and, more importantly, the country, when it mattered most. Vandenberg is famous for saying “Politics should stop at the water’s edge” while Scoop Jackson is known likewise for remarking “In matters of national security, the best politics is no politics.”

Our noble effort in Iraq is not exactly popular these days, though it is heartening to see that the American people do trust General Petraeus. While the war is difficult, we are fighting it effectively, and we must not lose a shooting war overseas in a war of words here at home. Unfortunately, because so many refuse to ask ‘how we are doing’ or truly support our troops, we risk doing poorly. Perhaps this kind of self-fulfilling prophecy is intended, but I hope not. Too many somehow associate Americans’ dissatisfaction regarding the current conflict with a population resisting the imperative to fight for others’ freedom and our own security. But we as Americans do not dislike fighting wars. We dislike losing wars.

And lose this war we will if certain political and media figures do not start acting like the Americans that they are. Success on the ground only can mean so much when persons of importance are blind to its existence, much less its significance.

Don’t get me wrong, I am all for conservation of natural resources and reductions in our fossil fuel use (If anything, only to reduce our dependence on foreign oil).
I would love to be able to drive a car that emits NOTHING (other than maybe pure water). However, at this time this is not economically feasible and won’t happen any time soon (without a government mandate).

The whole debate over Global Warming and the role of CO2 in this process makes me a little crazy.

When you apply real science to the question you get a very different answer than the one that most CO2 “crazies” present.
In my opinion working to educate the public about the environment is an admirable use of your time, provided you aren’t out there slinging junk science and using scare tactics to get your message across. This is why most people laugh at Greenpeace because their methods are far too extreme to have any significant effect.
Educating the public using REAL scientific fact, not sensationalism and working for change in government is the way to go (increasing the government fuel economy mandate, working for lower overall emissions standards).

See the video below for some more information about this debate (CO2 and its role in climate change).

Source: http://www.demanddebate.com

Manly

See below for a repost of a commentary by Neal Boortz. Original link HERE.

If you vote for her I will officially label you an idiot and possibly no longer on my list of people who have brain matter inside their cranial cavity.

YET ANOTHER HILLARY ENTITLEMENT PROGRAM.

Hillary says that she is tossing the idea of a $5,000 baby bonus. Golly, I wonder why that would be? Truth is, she drove that wreck into the electoral parking lot and it dented far too many fenders.

So … when one income redistribution plan fails, just roll in another. See if this one will do better.

So … here is Hillary Rodham’s latest great idea for a new entitlement program. American Retirement Accounts. Hillary proposes that every citizen have a 401(k)-type retirement account. You can put up to $1,000 annually in the account and the government will match 100% of it (if you make less than $60,000).

How will she pay for this? Taxes!! The $20 to $25 billion cost of this entitlement program would be paid for by death taxes levied on estates of more than $7 million per couple. She says that this will help “narrow the gap” between the evil rich and the “unfortunate” people who don’t have enough savings for retirement.

OK .. rather than going through a long narrative on Hillary’s latest tax-and-spend plan, let me just give you some bullet points.

For every dollar families earning less than $60,000 a year put into their account the federal government will match that dollar – up to $1000. This will be called a “refundable tax credit.”

Refundable tax credits are a scam.

In the mid 1970s I purchased my first home. Builders were having a tough time selling homes back then, so the government instituted a $2000 tax credit for anyone purchasing a newly-built home. This meant that I could take when I filled out my tax return I would subtract whatever I owed the government by $2000, and pay the difference. If my tax liability minus $2000 equaled zero or less, then I simply didn’t pay any federal income taxes, and that was the end of the story.

That is not the way “refundable” tax credits work. With the modern invention of the “refundable” tax credit you once again subtract the credit from the taxes you owe the federal government. BUT … if the tax credit is more than the taxes you owe, the government pays you the difference! In other words, the government uses its police power to seize the difference between the amount of taxes you owed and the amount of your credit from some other individual, and then hands that money over to you.

Income redistribution … pure and simple.

Hillary’s little savings scheme isn’t going to cost the “government,” as she say, $20 to $25 billion. Much of that money is simply seized by the government and handed over.

Now .. if Hillary gets her little entitlement plan passed, let me tell you what the future holds in store. In campaign after campaign Democrats will tell the voters “Vote for me and we’ll increase the contribution limit for your American Retirement Account. Vote for that evil Republican running against me and he will take your money away!

By the way … you don’t have to work to get this handout. Of course if you don’t work, you don’t have income. If you don’t have income you don’t owe income taxes. That would mean that every single non-working person in this country would just have to find $1000 somewhere to put into this account and the government would rush forward to match it with someone else’s money.

Illegal aliens? I don’t know. She hasn’t said yet. Maybe someone will ask this dangerous woman if she plans to set up these accounts for illegals. The answer should be interesting.

Something else interesting: Hillary says that less than half the families in the U.S. have retirement savings accounts. Another lie. Ever heard of Social Security? Now instead of creating this new entitlement program, why not just establish private accounts for each and every poor sap paying into Social Security right now? Oh wait, I forgot. The politicians need those Social Security taxes to fund their vote-buying programs.

Watch this woman. All she seems to be doing lately is coming up with ideas for government entitlement programs … and government entitlement programs are nothing more than wealth redistribution programs. Check your scorecard we have:

Nationalized Health Care.
The Baby Bonus
American Retirement Accounts
Hillary’s idea of government involvement in our children’s education even before kindergarten!
In the meantime … have you heard one single idea from Hillary that would increase your personal freedom? Have you heard one single idea that would decrease the intrusiveness or the power of the Imperial Federal Government? How about one idea that would promote competition in the free market?

You’re right … you haven’t.

You haven’t because Hillary Clinton worships the God of Government. This is a woman who feels that there are only a select few in this country who are capable of ordering and living their own lives without guidance from those smarter and more capable than they. This is a woman who believes to the depth of her soul that you can’t exist without embrace of government guiding your every step and picking you up every time you stumble.

To Hillary Rodham Clinton, self sufficiency is a vice.

What’s next? Stay tuned, it should only take a day or two to figure that out.

Manly