op ed review 12/9
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
The federal government borrowed 46 cents of every dollar it
has spent so far in fiscal year 2013, which began Oct. 1, according to the
latest CBO data.
Treasury Secretary Geithner´s opening bid to Speaker John
Boehner, a demand for $1.6 trillion in new taxes, was not meant as a serious
offer. It was an ultimatum couched in an insult. Translation: "We won the
election. We have the whip hand. Not only are you going to sign on to higher
tax rates and higher tax revenues, we are going to rub your Tea Party noses in
your coming capitulation”
President Obama wants a new stimulus package to fight the
drag on the economy that his tax increases on the wealthy will create.
“Unemployment Plunges to 3.8% for Government Workers;
Government Adds 35,000 Jobs in November, 544,000 Since July.”
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who shocked Washington on Thursday with the announcement
that he would resign his Senate seat in January to become president of the
Heritage Foundation, sent a parting shot at Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) over
the “fiscal cliff” negotiations. “I’m not with Boehner…This government doesn’t
need any more money, this country needs less government…..Speaker Boehner’s
$800 billion tax hike will destroy American jobs and allow politicians in
Washington to spend even more, while not reducing our $16 trillion debt by a
single penny,”
House Speaker John Boehner is under fierce attack from
conservatives in the blogosphere and on Twitter over his “purge” of several
conservatives from top congressional committees, as well as for his offer to
fend off the fiscal cliff.
With President Obama´s final election behind him,
gun-control advocates said they expect the White House to begin pushing through
an assortment of gun restrictions in coming months.
Imagine spending your life savings to design your dream
home, only to discover your blueprint was too small to fit all your furniture
and family. That's essentially what the Energy Department's National Nuclear
Security Administration did, leaving taxpayers with a jaw-dropping bill and
nothing to show for it yet. “For spending a half billion dollars designing a
building that turned out too small for its needs, the NNSA wins this week's
Golden Hammer.”
“Your federal tax dollars are being used to prepare for the
zombie apocalypse”
In an audacious flex of political muscle, Republicans
in a single day reached the brink of a goal that for years has seemed an
all-but-impossible dream: making the labor bastion of Michigan a right-to-work state. The GOP
majority used its superior numbers and backing from Gov. Rick Snyder to ramrod
legislation through the House and Senate on Thursday, brushing aside denunciations
and walkouts by helpless Democrats and cries of outrage from union activists
who swarmed the state Capitol hallways and grounds. At one point, police used
pepper spray to subdue demonstrators who tried to rush the Senate chamber.
The bill would prohibit making payment of union fees a condition of employment.
A victory in Michigan, a cradle of organized labor, would give the
right-to-work movement its strongest foothold yet in the Rust Belt, where the
2010 election and tea party movement produced assertive Republican majorities
that have dealt unions one body blow after another.
The House voted Friday to cancel the annual diversity visa
lottery and give those immigration visas to high-tech foreign-born who earn
advanced degrees from American universities, as Republicans powered through
their chamber the first major immigration bill since the election.
A United Nations human rights treaty that drew broad ire
from conservative groups was rejected by a slender margin on the Senate floor
Tuesday afternoon. The vote was 61 for to 31 against, six “aye” votes shy of
the two-thirds majority necessary to pass a treaty.
Businesses and Senate Republicans forced a courtroom
showdown with President Obama on Wednesday, asking a federal appeals court to
invalidate his surprise appointments to a labor board in January.
Final results from a battleground state this week are the
latest evidence, if any more were needed, of the important role that early
voting played in President Obama’s re-election victory. The official numbers
from Iowa
show that Republican nominee Mitt Romney “won” election day, by taking a
majority of the votes cast there that day. But Obama carried the state. That’s
because, in the weeks leading up to the election, Obama had banked a big
cushion of early votes, a total of 137,000 more than Romney got. (Union ‘knock
and drag’ efforts paid off)
In a story that’s been largely buried by the media for years
upon years, the New York Times is now reporting that US-approved arms that were
supposed to go to Libya rebels went to Islamist terrorists. Even more
importantly, the Obama administration knew about it before, during, and after
the Benghazi
attacks.
The vast majority of faculty and staff members from the
nation’s top Catholic universities donated to President Obama’s campaign over
Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s this cycle, according to a new report.
Ninety-one percent of the employees at 23 different Catholic schools gave to
Obama, according to FEC data.
President Obama’s latest round of appointments includes the
head of a nonprofit that gave tens of thousands of dollars to a group run by a
convicted domestic terrorist.
With a fawning press, Benghazi
didn’t hurt Hillary Clinton a bit: “Fifty-seven
percent in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll say they’d back a run by Clinton to succeed Barack
Obama, vs. 37 percent opposed.”
This is not good: A
Pew Research post-election poll found that a majority of young voters 18-29
years of age preferred bigger government. According to the survey, 59% of young
voters said “government should do more to solve problems” while only 37% felt
“government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.”
Naturally, as a result of these views, young voters not only were more likely
to back President Obama, they were also more likely to identify themselves as
“Democrats” and “liberals” than older voters
Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, two potential 2016 presidential
candidates, laid out policy prescriptions on Tuesday night for their Republican
party, nudging a party still smarting from Mitt Romney´s loss to President
Barack Obama to reach out to a broader audience.
_____________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED
COLUMN
Peter Ferrera, The American Spectator, 12/5
Stop that cringing! I can already see the light at
the end of the tunnel. And it's not pretty for today's neo-Marxist Democrat
party.
The man you see before you as your President today
bears a striking resemblance to the main character in a Greek tragedy. He so
reeks of hubris. Every word that drops from his lips speaks a haughty derision
of the lesser beings not benighted to be a cog in his political machine. All
witness Obama the Magnificent, the conqueror of America, which was the world hyperpower,
but is now the Sick Man of the 21st Century, en route to terminal illness.
Middle class beware. Did you not hear four years ago
Obama the Magnificent bewail that America with 4 percent of the
world's population consumes 25 percent of the world's resources? So unfair,
you know, the magic incantation of the Obama Regime. He told us that "we
just can't keep driving our SUVs, eating whatever we want, keeping our homes at
72 degrees at all times regardless of whether we live in the tundra or the
desert, and keep consuming 25% of the world's resources with just 4% of the
world's population, and expect the rest of the world to say you just go ahead
we'll be fine." The sloppiness in El Primo's thinking there is revealed by
the phrase "the world's resources." But America in
reality never consumed any of the world's production. It always only
consumed 100% of America's
production (including what it traded some of that production for).
That is why previous American Presidents would
have said, you got a problem with the American standard of living, you just
address your complaint to the Seventh Fleet. But under Obama, America
does not even have a Seventh Fleet anymore. We barely even have a First Fleet,
and that is doomed to the sequester budget guillotine, on the same road as America's
formerly dominant nuclear deterrent. So much for America's former morally
embarrassing global military dominance. And Obama has the same solution for America's
former morally embarrassing overconsumption. Reduce America with 4 percent of the
world's population to consuming just 4 percent of the world's resources, a
decline of 84 percent from its former standard of living. That would be fair,
in Obama's eyes. Richard Trumka, call your office.
Conservatives who want to fight back should start
with Obama's Second Inaugural Address and his 2013 State of the Union. These will be grand pronouncements of neo-Marxist
principle and strategy. Books should be written unwinding them. They will be
monuments to the Obama tactic of Calculated Deception, i.e., taking advantage
of what he is sure a majority of Americans do not know, and what he calculates
the Democrat party-controlled media won't tell them.
But in his hubris, and self-deception, Obama will
plant the seeds of his own demise in the words of those addresses. Every paean
to the middle class should and will be written in stone and compared to
subsequent performance. Every promise to the poor and working people will be
stored for future reference as the impact of Obamanomics on the poor and
working people unfolds.
At about the same time, the first shoe will drop --
the 2014 Obama Budget proposal. This will outline what America's socialist
future will look like under the Grand Vision of the Great Marxist, as the
numbers crunchers effectively force Obama to confess that he wants higher taxes
to pay for higher spending, which is what the budget will show. Check out in
particular CBO's long-term projections of federal spending, and the national
debt. They will show Obama is proposing the so-called Swedish socialism of the
government taking and spending more than half of the entire GDP. (Even the
Swedes have grown past Swedish socialism.)
Since the end of World War II, two-thirds of a
century ago, federal spending has been remarkably stable at around 20 percent
of GDP. But in his budget, Obama will propose doubling and even tripling that
over the long run, as CBO's long-term projections will show. His budget will
also propose national debt spiraling well beyond even what has trashed and
ruined Greece,
as CBO's projections will also show. In other words, Obama's hubris will lead
to worse than a Greek tragedy.
These will be simple indicators of the socialism that
has taken over the modern Democrat party. But if you want a simple indicator of
why Obama is indeed a Marxist, you can find that in what he repeatedly says
about his own tax policies. In a world where, according to official IRS data,
the top 1 percent of income earners pay 39 percent of all federal income taxes,
three times their 13 percent share of income, and where the middle class, the
middle 20 percent of income earners, pays less than 3 percent of all federal
income taxes, while earning 15 percent of income, Obama wants to raise all
income tax rates on "the rich," so that they will pay what he sees as
their fair share.
To a normal person, the fair share of federal income
taxes for a top 1 percent earning 13 percent of income is 13 percent of the
taxes. For a Marxist, the top 1 percent earning 13 percent of the income while
paying only 39 percent of the income taxes is unfair because it is only
fair for the top 1 percent to pay most of the income taxes by themselves. A
normal person would see that policy as social theft. But a born and bred
Marxist would see that as social justice, because it is unfair for the
top 1 percent of income earners to even exist. Their income and wealth is not
earned in the Marxist view, but stolen from The People. So it is only fair that
the people steal it back……..The more Obama raises tax rates on the rich, the
more will flee to Buffett's tax shelter, which protects investors from
precisely the capital gains taxes, and taxes on dividends, that Obama is
raising the most. Buffett is laughing all the way to the bank, but if you are
middle class, or poor, the joke is on you, as we will see…..
And that is what
next year will bring with renewed, double-dip, recession. Unemployment will
soar back into double digits, above even the prior post-Depression peak of 10.8
percent. The deficit will break new world records, soaring past $2 trillion.
The national debt will spiral further out of control, bringing the lifestyle of
Greece to America.
Poverty will set new post-Depression records. Wages and incomes for the middle
class and working people will plummet further.
Where will it all
end? The same place it ended last time. Reagan gave us Peace Through Strength.
Obama will give us what his idol Roosevelt
gave us, War Through Weakness. America
won World War II by driving up the national debt to an all time American record
of 109 percent of GDP. But Obama in his second term will have run up the
national debt beyond that, even without any war, while he unilaterally disarms
our nuclear deterrent, which the American people have now empowered him to do
as our Commander in Chief.
I am consequently
predicting that America's
foreign enemies, seeing America
has trashed its defenses, and cannot even finance a war to defend itself, will
be tempted beyond resistance to attack the American homeland. The result will
make 9/11 look like a mere skirmish. The Great Marxist will then politically
have turned into The Great Pumpkin. Thank you, "Progressives." You
will then really have transformed America.
Edited from a longer column, read the whole thing
here:
More important reads
this week:
Ann Coulter explains the “tipping point”
theory:: “With blacks, Asians and
Hispanics voting 93 percent, 73 percent and 71 percent for Obama, Republicans
have to do more than just win the white vote. They have to run the table. Romney
got a larger percentage of the white vote than Reagan did in 1980. That’s just
not enough anymore. Ironically, Romney was the first Republican presidential
candidate in a long time not conspiring with the elites to make America
a dumping ground for the world’s welfare cases. Conservatives who denounced
Romney as a “RINO” were the ones doing the bidding of the real establishment:
business, which wants cheap labor and couldn’t care less if America ceases to
be the land of opportunity that everyone wanted to immigrate to in the first
place.”
Star Parker
12/2 “Although Mitt Romney took flak
for his statement that he lost the election because President Obama bestowed
"gifts" on key parts of the electorate, what he said is basically
true. We're stuck in a deadly spiral where economic growth is retarded because
the economy is larded with enormous and ever increasing government spending and
debt. Yet, more and more Americans want the lard. President Obama got
re-elected by promising to continue to serve it up. Romney's failure,
and the failure of the Republican Party, is not that Obama is pulling this off
but that they can't get their act together to explain the problem to enough
Americans to stop it.
_____________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
"I have several pet peeves, and one of them is
the idea that when Americans get to keep their own money, it somehow 'costs'
the government."
-John J. Miller
"[T]he message coming out of Washington, especially from our leftist
politicians and the news media, is that we solve our budget problems by raising
taxes on the rich. If Americans were more informed, such a message would be
insulting to our intelligence. There are not enough rich people to satisfy Congress'
appetite."
-Walter E. Williams
“When Obama took office, federal, state and local government
jobs were 33 percent of all employment. Government jobs now constitute 39
percent of all employment, and Obama wants to grow that number to more than 50
percent with additional "stimulus spending," irrevocably socializing
the American economy…”
-Mark Alexander
"With a chip on
his shoulder larger than his margin of victory, Barack Obama is approaching his
second term by replicating the mistake of his first. Then his overreaching
involved health care -- expanding the entitlement state at the expense of
economic growth. Now he seeks another surge of statism, enlarging the portion
of gross domestic product grasped by government and dispensed by politics. The
occasion is the misnamed 'fiscal cliff,' the proper name for which is: the
Democratic Party's agenda."
-George Will
"[T]he most
frightening aspect of the White House proposal is that it wasn't an error.
Perhaps the proposal was thoroughly calculated. This suggests a president who
doesn't care about the outcome of the cliff negotiations -- who thinks that he
wins politically no matter what. He's betting that either the GOP will be far
more responsible than he is and do anything to avert a crisis, or that the
cliff gives him the tax hikes his partisans are demanding."
-Kimberly Strassel
"House
Republicans [need to] get a grip. They are the majority. They're not the
minority. They don't need to cave in to Obama; they don't need to form a
'Surrender Caucus.' So my number one bit of advice to the congressional
Republicans is simple: Back out of all of this negotiating with Obama. The
president is overwhelmingly dominant in the news media. [If] you start setting
up the definition of success [as] finding an agreement with Obama, you just
gave Obama the ability to say to you, 'Not good enough.'"
-Newt Gingrich
"We do not require government control or benefits in
order to prosper. Nor do we need guaranteed health care or even abundant leisure
time. Instead, we need the freedom to pursue our aspirations; to own property
and to act on our initiative and profit from it; to have access to markets,
capital, and resources; to live by the rule of law that is fairly and
consistently applied; and to enjoy physical security in our persons and homes….Liberty
is indispensable for a good and prosperous life. But freedom is never
free."
-Kim Holmes, Ph.D.
______________________________________________________________________________
BOOKS, FILM
Gerald Molen, the Oscar-winning producer of Schindler’s
List, notes that the documentary movie he produced this year isn't up for an
Oscar, even though that film, 2016: Obama’s America, made more money at
the box office than the combined earning of the 15 films the Academy deemed eligible.
_____________________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
Khaira Arby, one of Africa’s most celebrated musicians, has
performed all over the world, but there is one place she cannot visit: her
native city of Timbuktu,
a place steeped in history and culture but now ruled by Islamic extremists. One
day, they broke into Arby’s house and destroyed her instruments. Her voice was
a threat to Islam, they said, even though one of her most popular songs praised
Allah. “They told my neighbors that if they ever caught me, they would cut my
tongue out,” said Arby, sadness etched on her broad face.
____________________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
“President Barack Obama met with several MSNBC hosts this
afternoon at the White House to discuss tax rates, according to Huffington
Post reporter Jennifer Bendery. The reporter wondered if an "MSNBC
love fest" was going on at the White House.”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-consults-msnbc-hosts-sharpton-maddow-tax-rates_665036.html
A progressive foundation and a labor union have combined to
pour millions of dollars into a “racial justice” group that was hostile to
voter ID laws during the 2012 campaign season.
Rep. Corrine Brown (D- Fla.) says that entitlement programs
prevent the United States
from being a third world country.
California Teachers Union Video Features
´Rich ´Urinating On ´Poor´
___________________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
The UK
Environment Minister warns that “if we don’t
pay for windmills in Africa we’ll end up in more wars”
Former Thatcher advisor Lord Monckton was evicted from UN
climate summit after challenging global warming -- 'Escorted from the hall and
security officers stripped him of his UN credentials'
___________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
As a potentially toxic combination of steep tax hikes and
deep spending cuts draws nearer Republicans are consistently being
outmaneuvered by President Obama. Disillusioned Democratic pollster Patrick
Caddell counsels that this wonkish back-and-forth over the finer points of
marginal tax rates is not the hill that Republicans should die on. The GOP
doesn’t even grasp the underlying political dynamics now in play, he says.
Nationally, Obama won the popular vote by 4,452,910 -- but
because 4,516,701 of those came from California and New York, Romney and the
GOP can reasonably argue that he won the rest of the country by just about
64,000 votes…..What's going on is that big numbers from a relative handful of
precincts can swing statewide totals to democratic presidential and senatorial
candidates despite widespread popular support for GOP policies in congressional
and other district races. Overall, Romney won about two thirds of the
county-level contests in the country, but he lost state wide counts to high
turnouts and virtual unanimity in precincts where decades of redistricting have
combined with the Democrat tendency toward self-ghettoization to create
conservative no-go zones.
After two major national election failures, it’s time for
some diversity and change in the Republican Party, says former congressman J.C.
Watts. It may be time for a run at the RNC (Chairmanship), he tells Lloyd
Grove. “I think by any fair and reasonable standard, given the money that we as
Republicans have spent, it’s the worst return on investment in any election
cycle in the history of the United States of
America,” says the former congressman from Oklahoma.
The First Lady: “Talking
Like Mme Defarge, Living like Marie
Antoinette”
GOP rising
star Sen. Ayotte offers an influential new voice
“The Fantasy of a 91% Top Income Tax Rate. A liberal article of faith that confiscatory
taxes fed the postwar boom turns out to be an Edsel of an economic idea.”
Mark Steyn: “Obama aims to finish the work of FDR and LBJ to
create ‘a big Sweden’.
According to a Gallup
poll conducted November 18-19, more than half of Democrats (53%) approve of
socialism, which isn’t surprising, but almost one-quarter of Republicans (23%)
also do. What the poll reveals is that there is a significant difference
between the reality of what voters approve and their reactions to terms that
represent those realities. For example, Democrats favor the “federal
government” over “capitalism” by 20 percentage points, yet they approve of
“small business” almost unanimously, at a 94% level. When asked about big
business, Democrats approval rate drops all the way to 44%.
The FBI records the
emails of nearly all US
citizens, including members of congress, according to NSA whistleblower William
Binney. In an interview with RT, he warned that the government can use this
information against anyone.
__________________________________________________________________________
CHRISTMAS UNDER ATTACK
Residents in a California
senior apartment complex are protesting an order from management to remove
their beloved Christmas tree from the community room because, they were told, “it's
a religious symbol.”
Illinois: The village of Alsip
stopped displaying a cross on its water tower, something they've been doing
every Christmas for some forty years.
California: After sixty years of
displaying a Nativity scene in one of its public parks, the city of Santa Monica has been
forced to discontinue this blameless custom. Surprisingly, the atheists did not
sue to have the word "Santa" removed from the city's name.
Michigan: The village of Warren
had a Nativity scene since 1945, but they don't have it anymore. That's right,
another atheist lawsuit.
Virginia: Attempting to compromise, Loudon County
supervisors have decided to allow both Christians and atheists to set up
seasonal displays this year on the courthouse lawn. Atheist displays in the
recent past have included a skeleton in a Santa Claus suit, nailed to a cross.
Florida: Cottondale Elementary
School replaced a Nativity scene with Frosty the
Snowman.
Rhode Island: Gov. Lincoln Chafee has replaced the state's "Christmas" tree
with a "holiday" tree.
Hawaii: Mitch Kahle, founder of the
Hawaii Citizens for the Separation of State and Church threatened a lawsuit against
the Moanalua High School orchestra for performing in
a church. In response, the school canceled its planned Christmas concert
altogether.
“Our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom and Liberty Counsel stand ready to offer legal representation to communities
and schools against anti-religious zealots who wish to destroy all public
displays of Christmas. Keep these numbers handy and be ready to contact”
Alliance Defending Freedom, 15100 N. 90th Street,
Scottsdale, AZ
85260, 1-800-835-5233
Liberty Counsel, PO Box 540774,
Orlando, FL 32854, 1- 800-671-1776
________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
New 3D blue-red map:
“Many Republicans seem ready to agree to Obama´s demands for tax
increases -- after all, elections have consequences, and he won, right? Maybe,
but before agreeing to anything, the GOP should probably look a little more
carefully at just who elected Obama.”
The cities that never sleep: NASA's stunning images of the
world at night highlight our 24-hour existence
_______________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"Christmas is a state of mind. It is found throughout
the year whenever faith overcomes doubt, hope conquers despair, and love
triumphs over hate. It is present when men of any creed bring love and
understanding to the hearts of their fellow man. ... Let us resolve to honor
this spirit of Christmas and strive to keep it throughout the year."
-Ronald
Reagan
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage
to continue that counts.”
-Winston Churchill
"The
multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and
entailment of a public debt, are indications soliciting the employment of the
pruning knife."
-Thomas Jefferson
posted by gary at
8:52 AM
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