op ed review 3/3
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
President Obama signed an order Friday night to begin
automatic budget cuts across most federal departments., blaming the crisis on
Republican lawmakers.
Last week, President
Obama raced around the nation attempting to frighten Americans into opposing
the modest cuts to the federal budget due through the sequester process. Never mind that the sequester was President
Obama´s idea. Never mind that these cuts amount to just 2 cents on every dollar
of the federal budget. And, never mind that his Administration has made
history, in a bad way, by running four straight trillion dollar plus deficits.
President Obama has gone all-in trying to get Republicans to
blink and serve up another round of tax increases in lieu of the looming
spending sequester. Eschewing talks with Congress or any pretense of
leadership, he is instead flying around the country burning $180,000 an hour on
Air Force One laying out a parade of horribles that will descend upon us if the
growth of federal spending were reduced by one iota. Why is he doing this? Because
the mainstream media are lapping it up. Poisoned meat coming to grocery shelves
near you! Air traffic grinds to a screeching halt! Fires, murder, and mayhem in
the streets as first responders are laid off! No visits to the Washington Monument!
Here´s a pretty good sign that President Obama is losing the
sequester fight: Even his best friends in the press are starting to chafe at
the desperate and deceptive warnings coming from him and his administration.
Speaking to American governors, President Obama insisted
that spending money wasn’t the federal government’s biggest problem. “improving
our infrastructure” should be the highest priority.
“Obama's Golf Weekend With Tiger Cost As Much As 341 Federal Workers
Furloughed”
Secret energy lab spawns million dollar government
employees.
The new head of NARAL Pro-Choice America is ready to
redefine “choice.” It’s the right to end a pregnancy — and the right to start
one, including access to pricey fertility treatment. And once a baby is born,
parents must have paid family leave to take care of them.
Concerns about the environment have reached a two-decade low
since the start of the financial crisis, a global survey has revealed. Fewer
people now consider pollution, species loss and fresh water shortages to be
´very serious´ problems than at any time since tracking began 20 years ago.
“Obama's
surveillance program, codenamed RAGTIME, bigger than Bush's...”
The Washington Post's Bob Woodward ripped into President
Barack Obama, saying he's exhibiting a "kind of madness I haven't seen in
a long time" for a decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf because of budget concerns. "Can you
imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying, 'Oh, by the way, I can't do
this because of some budget document?'" Woodward said.
Woodward gets threatened by the White House: “A 'Very
Senior' White House Person Warned Me I'd 'Regret' What I'm Doing”
Cash for Access.
Large contributors to President Obama’s dark money group, Organizing for
Action, get to meet quarterly with him.
Even the New York Times calls it “disturbing.”
“Republicans supporting a massive legalization program as
part of immigration “reform” must have blinders on. They must not see the
perverted way the Obama administration simply refuses to enforce existing
immigration laws — damning any promised “get tough” enforcement policy included
in any immigration deal. The Republican advocates of immigration reform argue
that America
should secure the border, legalize at least 11 million illegal immigrants, and
vigorously enforce the immigration laws in the future.
The Department of Homeland Security no longer uses control
of the actual border as a measure of how well the Border Patrol is doing its
job……”with 56 percent of the border not under “operation control,” DHS simply
stopped using “operational control” as a measure of the Border Patrol’s
performance.”
The liberal media have their knives out for Sen. Ted Cruz
(R-TX) after his textbook cross-examination of Secretary of Defense nominee
Chuck Hagel at the latter’s confirmation hearing Jan. 31.
Add Texas Gov. Rick Perry to the list of potential 2016
presidential hopefuls set to speak at a major gathering for conservatives next
month.
Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. has released a
new public service announcement, suggesting residents can arm themselves to
protect themselves against crime. “The
Great Equalizer”
The Harvard Crimson published an editorial urging
conservatives not to apply to Harvard if they intend to criticize the
university for being liberal. The editorial, titled “Warning: Do Not Enroll,”
denigrates famous conservatives who graduated from Harvard and later sharply —
and perhaps hypocritically — complained about the university’s liberal
ideology, including former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Texas Republican
Sen. Ted Cruz, and Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly. “If we could have spoken
to these three men, we would have told them never to come to Cambridge,” wrote the staff of the Crimson.
It’s starting…..
Florida
doesn't have enough doctors for Medicaid expansion, lobby group says
_____________________________________________________________________________
THIS WEEK’S FEATURED COLUMN
Charles Krauthammer
2/28
“The worst-case scenario for us,” a leading anti-budget-cuts
lobbyist told The Post, “is the sequester hits and nothing bad really happens.”
Think about that. Worst case? That a
government drowning in debt should cut back by 2.2 percent — and the country survives. That a
government now borrowing 35
cents of every dollar it spends reduces that borrowing by two cents “and
nothing bad really happens.” Oh, the humanity!
A normal citizen might think
this a good thing. For reactionary liberalism, however, whatever sum our
ever-inflating government happens to spend today (now double what Bill Clinton
spent in his last year) is the Platonic ideal — the reduction of which, however
minuscule, is a national calamity. Or damn well should be. Otherwise, people
might get the idea that we can shrink government and live on. Hence the
president’s message. If the
“sequestration” — automatic spending cuts — goes into effect, the skies will
fall. Plane travel jeopardized, carrier groups beached, teachers furloughed.
And a shortage of junk-touching TSA agents.
The Obama administration has
every incentive to make the sky fall, lest we suffer that terrible calamity —
cuts the nation survives. Are they threatening to pare back consultants,
conferences, travel and other nonessential fluff? Hardly. It shall be
air-traffic control. Meat inspection. Weather forecasting.
A 2011 Government Accountability Office report gave a
sampling of the vastness of what could be cut, consolidated and rationalized in
Washington:
44 overlapping job training programs, 18 for nutrition assistance, 82 (!) on
teacher quality, 56 dealing with financial literacy, more than 20 for
homelessness, etc. Total annual cost: $100 billion-$200 billion, about two to
five times the entire domestic sequester. Are these on the chopping block? No
sir. It’s firemen first. That’s the phrase coined in 1976 by legendary
Washington Monthly editor Charlie Peters to describe the way government
functionaries beat back budget cuts. Dare suggest a nick in the city budget,
and the mayor immediately shuts down the firehouse. The DMV back office,
stacked with nepotistic incompetents, remains intact. Shrink it and no one
would notice. Sell the firetruck — the people scream and the city council falls
silent about any future cuts.
After all, the sequester is just one-half of 1 percent of
GDP. It amounts to 1.4 cents
on the dollar of nondefense spending, 2 cents overall. Because of this year’s
payroll tax increase, millions of American workers have had to tighten their
belts by precisely 2 percent.
They found a way. Washington,
spending $3.8 trillion,
cannot? If so, we might as well declare bankruptcy now and save the attorneys’
fees.
The problem with sequestration, of course, is that the cuts
are across the board and do not allow money to move between accounts. It’s dumb
because it doesn’t discriminate. Fine. Then
change the law. That’s why we have a Congress. Discriminate. Prioritize. That’s
why we have budgets. Except that the Democratic Senate hasn’t passed one in
four years. And the White House, which proposed the sequester in the first
place, had 18 months
to establish rational priorities among accounts — and did nothing.
When the GOP House passed an alternative that cut where the
real money is — entitlement spending — President Obama threatened a veto.
Meaning, he would have insisted that the sequester go into effect — the very
same sequester he now tells us will bring on Armageddon.
Good grief. The entire sequester would have reduced last
year’s deficit from $1.33 trillion
to $1.24 trillion.
A fraction of a fraction. Nonetheless, insists Obama, such a cut is
intolerable. It has to be “balanced” — i.e., largely replaced — by yet more
taxes. Which demonstrates that, for Obama, this is not about deficit reduction,
which interests him not at all. The purpose is purely political: to complete
his Election Day victory by breaking the Republican opposition.
At the fiscal cliff, Obama broke — and split — the
Republicans on taxes. With the sequester, he intends to break them on spending.
Make the cuts as painful as possible, and watch the Republicans come crawling
for a “balanced” (i.e., tax-hiking) deal.
In the past two years, House Republicans stopped cold
Obama’s left-liberal agenda. Break them now, and the road is open to resume
enactment of the expansive, entitlement-state liberalism that Obama proclaimed
in his second inaugural address. But he cannot win if “nothing bad really
happens.” Indeed, he’d look both foolish and cynical for having cried wolf. Obama’s incentive to deliberately make the
most painful and socially disruptive cuts possible (say, oh, releasing illegal
immigrants from prison) is enormous. And alarming.
Hail Armageddon.
_____________________________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
"Obama cannot enact his second-term agenda without
significant help from outside groups. Those outside groups can channel
resources through Obama's old presidential re-election apparatus, which has now
been rechristened 'Organizing for America,' an IRS 501(c)4 tax-exempt
'social welfare' organization. The sole purpose of OFA will be to advance
Obama's policy agenda, and to that end, Obama will meet personally with OFA's
national advisory board in the White House at least four times a year. And,
here is the money part: You too can become a member of the national advisory
board for the bargain basement price of just $500,000. ... If that isn't
selling access, then we don't know what is. And it's also a clear case of
hypocrisy -- of Obama doing precisely the thing for which he harshly criticized
others, and with which he formed the very core of his political identity as a
candidate of 'change.'"
-The
Washington
Examiner
"Here are some things that will result from the
sequestration cuts: All prisons will be shut down and prisoners released. Even
the most violent of criminals. ... Medicare will be replaced with a hammer
given to old people to kill themselves with. ... Our military will be armed
with nothing but bayonets. All traffic lights will be turned off. No more money
for cowboy poetry festivals, the only thing keeping cowboys from violence and
thus the only thing keeping the wild west from breaking out again. ... No more
postage for strongly-worded letters sent to Iran
and North Korea
telling them to stop having nuclear weapons. Obama will only get five golf
outings a month."
-Frank J. Fleming
__________________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
William Ayers, the co-founder of
the violent 1960s-era Weather Underground and who later befriended Barack Obama
at the University of Chicago, has been named a "visiting scholar" at
Minnesota State University, continuing his transformation from radical activist
to establishment leader. Once the head of a group linked to bombings of buildings
tied to the Vietnam war, including the Pentagon and Capitol, he has been
invited to play a role in the school´s efforts to include “social justice” in
class courses.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-pal-radical-ayers-wins-scholar-status-minn-state/article/2522577
House Democrats led by Rep. Barbara
Lee (D-Calif.) have introduced legislation that would create a federal
Department of Peacebuilding, which would be tasked with everything from finding
ways to scale back U.S.
military actions to ending bullying at schools.
“Obama’s new political group to lure unlimited donations” In close consultation with President Obama,
two of his top political strategists are designing an ambitious new
organization funded by donations from wealthy individuals and corporations
aimed at making political and legislative gains at the federal and state
levels.
Obama’s Organizing for Action starting out with millions of
donations and the single biggest voter database in the history of American politics.
It’s tied in with the U.N., climate
change, gun control, healthcare, taxation, global taxation, currency,
education, poverty, hunger, they got every big name item involved.
They pine to hear tales of horror from the citizenry,
perhaps. Organizing for Action is now seeking “sequester stories” from loyal
Democrats and progressives.
Cher leaned heavily on her
Twitter page in the waning months of the 2012 presidential race to blast
anything associated with Mitt Romney. Now, she´s focusing her GOP hate on the
party´s rising star, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Cruz, whose aggressive approach has
made him the target of mainstream news outlets which ignore similar tactics by
liberals, is now Cher´s favorite outlet for her social media vitriol.
____________________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Republicans throw in
the towel on gay marriage?: More than
six dozen prominent Republicans have signed a legal brief to be submitted to
the Supreme Court voicing support for gay marriage, the New York Times reported
Tuesday
Four Tiers of Failure: How the LGBT Lobby Dominates. There
are four levels that have failed in the United States, and we must take
these four tiers very seriously. It is time for a quick postmortem of
what went wrong with the traditional marriage movement, so we can do better for
the next round of battles, and perhaps win the war in a few decades.
The head of the influential Conservative Political Action
Committee said there´s a reason Chris Christie wasn´t invited to the group´s
annual conference next month: The New Jersey governor didn´t have "an
all-star year."
“Is the United
States about to become a laughing-stock to
the rest of the world? It seems to have accrued a Defence Secretary who is the
toast of Iran,
and a Secretary of State who is a blithering idiot.”
Birmingham,
Alabama is considered by many to
be the birthplace of the civil rights movement. Today, African-Americans in Birmingham benefit from a
numerical majority in the population, corresponding majorities in government
jobs, and political control of the city. But civil rights won´t address what
ails the city now. Birmingham
is recognized as one of the most violent and poorly-run cities in the nation.
The city runs a massive deficit, and is county seat of Jefferson
County, which recently cut a deal with
a European bank as part of the largest government bankruptcy in U.S.
history.
“….what I find most
puzzling is the incongruity of the poor black supporters of President Obama who
still identify with him because he's black. He has absolutely nothing in common
with their black experience because he has never had one. He was raised by
leftwing whites as a child of privilege and had the best education possible. None of Obama's policies have improved the
black community and in fact they have assured its continual dependency on a
government check. He and Michele are 1% millionaires who travel around the globe
in grandeur enjoying an unbelievably opulent lifestyle the poor will never
know. Oh wait. Perhaps, President Obama
and Michele do have something in common with the poor voters. They both owe
their lifestyles to the hapless taxpayers…”
___________________________________________________________________________
CONSERVATIVE STRATEGY
Why Obama Wins: Democrats Purge
Moderates, Republicans Purge
Conservatives
The big mistake of
the last election was assuming that public dissatisfaction with Obama would be
enough to remove him. Reagan’s defeat of Carter was frequently invoked without
understanding that Reagan’s victory lay in his ability to communicate to the
public why they were worse off now and why they would be better off with a
change of government, not in some abstract national sense, but in a way that
would directly impact their wallets. Reagan focused on inflation. What did
Romney focus on? Believing in historical inevitability is usually a leftist
fallacy, but this time around it was the Republicans who approached an election
from the standpoint of historical inevitability. While Romney talked about the
big national issues, Obama turned his entire campaign into a targeted voter
turnout operation. The messiah of 2008 morphed back into the community
organizer in 2012. Obama’s worldview did not win. Not in 2008 or 2012. His
tactics did. The Republican Party does not have to evolve or devolve into the
Democratic Party. What it must do is learn to connect with voters.
“What in the hell was
Karl Rove thinking? This has been the question on the minds of many political
observers since the Republican super-strategist opened up a nasty new front in
the ongoing civil war between his party’s purists and its pragmatists.” “…..why Rove had chosen to kick
the hornet’s nest……This is all about the donors…..”
_________________________________________________________________________
NOTEWORTHY WEBSITES
Must see. When women follow Joe Biden’s advice about
shotguns:
Secretary of State John Kerry shows off his French speaking skills.
_______________________________________________________________________
LATE NITE
Leno: Researchers in Germany now say
that human longevity has improved so rapidly over the past century that 72 is
the new 30. That is bad news for parents. You'll never get the kids out of the
house now. "Dad, I'm only 50. That's, like, 17."
______________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
"The freedom now desired by many is not freedom to do
and dare but freedom from care and worry."
-James Truslow Adams
posted by gary at
7:47 AM
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