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Troop withdrawal helping the Taliban

2010-08-24T07:05:00Z

The top U.S. Marine general said President Barack Obama's announced July 2011 deadline to start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan had given "sustenance" to the Taliban.

"We know the president was talking to several audiences at the same time when he made his comments on July 2011," Gen. James Conway told reporters on Tuesday. "In some ways, we think right now it's probably giving our enemy sustenance....In fact, we've intercepted communications that say, 'Hey, you know, we only have to hold out for so long.'"

Conway, who recently returned from a trip to the region, said he expected Marines to remain on the ground in southern Afghanistan, the traditional stronghold for the Taliban, well after July 2011, though he himself is set to retire in the fall.

The Marines form only one part of the 78,000-strong U.S. troop contingent, which is in turn part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, which includes some 120,000 troops from 47 nations. Marine operations are focused primarily on the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand Provinces, in Afghanistan's Pashtun heartland.

Conway said the Marines would continue to go after the Taliban, regardless of the 2011 deadline. "If you accept what I offered earlier as true, that Marines will be there ... after the middle of 2011, what's the enemy going to say then, you know?" he said.

For the whole story click here.

By Nathan Hodge - Wall Street Journal

The 9/11 Hard Hat Pledge

2010-08-20T07:05:00Z

Take a look at the pledge some New York construction workers are taking against build the Ground Zero Mosque.

Here are the names of union and non-union tradesman who refuse to work the site of the proposed Ground Zero Mosque. We feel we have been betrayed by our civic leaders and elected officials as they allow the Cordoba Initiative Group build their Mega-Mosque on top of the ashes of the 3,000 innocents who were slaughtered on 911.

Across the world and even in our own neighborhoods Muslims celebrated in the streets as the nation grieved like never before. The Imam Feisal Rauff leader of the Cordoba Initiative days after the attacks on 60 minutes called the United States an accessory to the crime and for all intents and purposes Osama Bin Laden was made in the U.S.A. This is the man responsible for the project to build this Mosque of tolerance and peace. He has refused to condemn Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations and will not reveal the massive funding he needs to complete the project these facts cast a dark shadow over the Imam's true intentions.
My fellow Americans stand together and pledge not to work this hurtful insensitive project. Without us this sacrilege cannot be built. Let us show the younger generation what it is to be a proud American and defend those brave souls who now lie in a pit at Ground Zero unable to speak because their light was snuffed out by the worst attack in our nation's history. Together we will achieve this.

People of Islam show us your love and tolerance and peaceful nature and in the spirit of bridge-building relocate this Mosque. Do this and we will applaud you and build you a Mosque all could be proud of. All we ask is you do not put it on the gravesite of our loved ones.

Click here to read the whole pledge and for more information.

Which side of the fence?

2010-08-10T07:05:00Z

If you ever wondered which side of the fence you sit on, this is a great test!

If a Republican doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one.
If a Democrat doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.

If a Republican is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat.
If a Democrat is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone.

If a Republican is homosexual, he quietly leads his life.
If a Democrat is homosexual, he demands legislated respect.

If a Republican is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.
A Democrat wonders who is going to take care of him.

If a Republican doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels.
Democrats demand that those they don't like be shut down.

If a Republican is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church.
A Democrat non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced.

If a Republican decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it.
A Democrat demands that the rest of us pay for his.

If a Republican reads this, he'll forward it so his friends can have a good laugh.
A Democrat will delete it because he's "offended".

The latest excuse from ICE:

2010-08-09T07:05:00Z

In a telling piece from the Washington Times, ICE is now saying they have a lack of resources to apprehend all illegal immigrants that come into the country. Take a look at some of the highlights of this hard hitting piece:

- New guidance telling U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to focus on apprehending terrorists and criminals has many of ICE's rank-and-file agents wondering who then is responsible for tracking down and detaining the millions of other illegal border-crossers and fugitive aliens now in the country.

- The new guidelines are outlined in a June 29 memo from Assistant Secretary John Morton, who heads the agency, to all ICE employees regarding the apprehension, detention and removal of illegal immigrants, noting that the agency "only has resources to remove approximately 400,000 aliens per year, less than 4 percent of the estimated illegal-alien population in the United States."

- Mr. Morton said ICE needed to focus wisely on the limited resources Congress had provided the agency and would "prioritize the apprehension and removal of aliens who only pose a threat to national security and/or public safety, such as criminals and terrorists."

- "With this prioritization, we will ensure that our work has the greatest possible impact and most effectively advances our mission," Mr. Morton said, adding that the new guidelines were necessary "in light of the large number of administrative violations the agency is charged with addressing and the limited enforcement resources the agency has available."

- Under the directive, ICE officials are authorized under a three-level priority system to use enforcement personnel, detention space and removal resources if they are assured that any deportations that do occur "promote ICE's highest enforcement priorities; namely, national security, public safety and border security."

- Listed as the agency's top priority, according to the memo, are illegal immigrants who pose a danger to national security or a risk to public safety; those convicted of violent crimes, both felons and repeat offenders; those older than 16 who participated in organized criminal gangs; and those with outstanding criminal warrants.

- Described in the memo as lesser priorities are foreign nationals caught crossing the border illegally or using phony immigration documents to gain entry, and those identified as fugitives after failing to show up for immigration or deportation hearings.

To see the whole piece click here

Smoking Gun: Amnesty Memo Exists

2010-07-30T07:05:00Z

Here's the proof: There exists a memo from US Citizenship and Immigration Services, obtained by the National Review, that lays out the plan to bypass Congress and grant amnesty to millions illegal immigrants.

We've heard the rumors for weeks, and Lou's discussed those rumors for weeks. But now we have proof. The National Review uncovered a memo from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services describing how the agency is considering ways in which it could enact "meaningful immigration reform absent legislative action." What does that mean? It means this administration might disregard its Constitutional responsibilities and grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants without the consent of the American people through a vote in Congress. Does that surprise you at all?!

Robert VerBruggen in the National Review brings this to light: "'This memorandum offers administrative relief options to . . . reduce the threat of removal for certain individuals present in the United States without authorization,' [the memo] reads.

"Also: 'In the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, USCIS can extend benefits and/or protections to many individuals and groups by issuing new guidance and regulations, exercising discretion with regard to parole-in-place, deferred action and the issuance of Notices to Appear (NTA), and adopting significant process improvements.'

"In recent weeks, Sen. Chuck Grassley and others in Congress have been pressing the administration to disavow rumors that a de facto amnesty is in the works, including in a letter to Department of Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano. 'Since the senators first wrote to the president more than a month ago, we have not been reassured that the plans are just rumors, and we have every reason to believe that the memo is legitimate,' a Grassley spokesman tells NR."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE U.S.C.I.S. MEMO AND SEE HOW THIS ADMINISTRATION WILL FAIL TO ACT IN THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE UNITED STATES.

AZ: Read Judge Bolton's Ruling Here

2010-07-30T07:04:00Z

We've been discussing Judge Susan Bolton's ruling on Wednesday that gutted Arizona's anti-illegal immigration law of its teeth. Lou wants you to take a look at her ruling and see for yourself what ideologues look like.

The ruling by Judge Bolton has some real downsides for those of us who believe in the rule of law in this country: She granted the injunction that would block police from determining someone's immigration status. It doesn't mean they cannot do so, but Bolton says it cannot be required of police officers in Arizona. The judge also put on hold a part of the law that required immigrants to carry their papers at all times, and she struck down the provision that made it illegal for so-called undocumented workers to solicit employment in public places.

Judge Susan Bolton ruled: "Requiring Arizona law enforcement officials and agencies to determine the immigration status of every person who is arrested burdens lawfully-present aliens because their liberty will be restricted while their status is checked." She also said: "There is a substantial likelihood that officers will wrongfully arrest legal resident aliens under the new (law)...By enforcing this statute, Arizona would impose a 'distinct, unusual and extraordinary' burden on legal resident aliens that only the federal government has the authority to impose."

Judge Bolton wrote in her stay that "preserving the status quo through a preliminary injunction is less harmful than allowing state laws that are likely preempted by federal law to be enforced." She adds in her 36-page ruling "There is a substantial likelihood that officers will wrongfully arrest legal resident aliens." She concludes that "By enforcing this statue, Arizona would impose a 'distinct, unusual and extraordinary' burden on legal resident aliens that only the federal government

CLICK HERE TO READ ALL OF JUDGE BOLTON'S RULING.

Differences Between 1959 and NOW

2010-07-29T07:05:00Z

A friend of Lou's passed along a funny read about the differences in society between 1959 and now. My my, how things have changed over the past half-century. Make sure to read this and pass it along.

Scenario 1:

Jack goes quail hunting before school and then pulls into the school parking lot with his shotgun in his truck's gun rack.

1959 - Vice Principal comes over, looks at Jack's shotgun, goes to his car and gets his shotgun to show Jack.

NOW - School goes into lock down, FBI called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors called in for traumatized students and teachers.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Scenario 2:

Johnny and Mark get into a fist fight after school.

1959 - Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up buddies.

NOW - Police called and SWAT team arrives -- they arrest both Johnny and Mark.. They are both charged with assault and both expelled even though Johnny started it.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Scenario 3:

Jeffrey will not be still in class, he disrupts other students.

1959 - Jeffrey sent to the Principal's office and given a good paddling by the Principal. He then returns to class, sits still and does not disrupt class again..

NOW - Jeffrey is given huge doses of Ritalin. He becomes a zombie.
He is then tested for ADD. The school gets extra money from the state because Jeffrey has a disability.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Scenario 4:

Billy breaks a window in his neighbor's car and his Dad gives him a whipping with his belt.

1959 - Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college and becomes a successful businessman.

NOW - Billy's dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy is removed to foster care and joins a gang. The state psychologist is told by Billy's sister that she remembers being abused herself and their dad goes to prison. Billy's mom has an affair with the psychologist.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Scenario 5:

Mark gets a headache and takes some aspirin to school.

1959 - Mark shares his aspirin with the Principal out on the smoking dock.

NOW - The police are called and Mark is expelled from school for drug violations. His car is then searched for drugs and weapons.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Scenario 6:

Pedro fails high school English.

1959 - Pedro goes to summer school, passes English and goes to college.

NOW - Pedro's cause is taken up by state. Newspaper articles appear nationally explaining that teaching English as a requirement for graduation is racist ACLU files class action lawsuit against the state school system and Pedro's English teacher. English is then banned from core curriculum. Pedro is given his diploma anyway but ends up mowing lawns for a living because he cannot speak English..

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Scenario 7:

Johnny takes apart leftover firecrackers from the Fourth of July, puts them in a model airplane paint bottle and blows up a red ant bed..

1959 - Ants die.

NOW - ATF, Homeland Security and the FBI are all called. Johnny is charged with domestic terrorism. The FBI investigates his parents -- and all siblings are removed from their home and all computers are confiscated.. Johnny's dad is placed on a terror watch list and is never allowed to fly again..

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Scenario 8:

Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Mary. Mary hugs him to comfort him.

1959 - In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing..

NOW - Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job.
She faces 3 years in State Prison. Johnny undergoes 5 years of therapy.

Dem Pollsters: Our Divisive President

2010-07-28T07:07:00Z

Democratic pollsters Patrick Caddell and Doug Schoen are exceedingly unhappy with the fact that President Obama promised to be post-partisan and post-racial and has shown us he's anything but.

The centrist Democratic pollsters took to the Wall Street Journal op-ed page to lay out their case for why President Obama has divided America on the basis of race and class at a time when we were promised a united republic. The pair begins:

"During the election campaign, Barack Obama sought to appeal to the best instincts of the electorate, to a post-partisan sentiment that he said would reinvigorate our democracy. He ran on a platform of reconciliation-of getting beyond 'old labels' of right and left, red and blue states, and forging compromises based on shared values.

"President Obama's Inaugural was a hopeful day, with an estimated 1.8 million people on the National Mall celebrating the election of America's first African-American president. The level of enthusiasm, the anticipation and the promise of something better could not have been more palpable.

"And yet, it has not been realized. Not at all.

"Rather than being a unifier, Mr. Obama has divided America on the basis of race, class and partisanship. Moreover, his cynical approach to governance has encouraged his allies to pursue a similar strategy of racially divisive politics on his behalf.

"We have seen the divisive approach under Republican presidents as well-particularly the administrations of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. It was wrong then, and it is wrong now. By dividing America, Mr. Obama has brought our government to the brink of a crisis of legitimacy, compromising our ability to address our most important policy issues."

CLICK HERE TO READ CADDELL AND SCHOEN'S FULL OP-ED IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

"Tough" Questions for Obama on The View

2010-07-28T07:06:00Z

The American people don't exactly expect the ladies of The View to ask tough questions of Our Celebrity-in-Chief. So they took to Twitter and predicted what these "tough" questions would be from The View.

The list is ongoing, and if you're so inclined, you can find them on Twitter under the #PredictedToughViewQuestions hashtag. Here are some of our early favorites:

Mattphilbin: Is it hard governing a country you don't much like?

Root_Enoch: Exactly how hard is it to be the smartest, most compassionate, hardest-working, most handsome best pres evah?

johntandlich: Your administration has run up the greatest deficits in American history. Why is Fox News racist?

johntandlich: MSNBC continues to languish in the ratings. Are you planning a bailout to stimulate their viewers?

VeganPatriot: Do you think racism played a role in Bush's decision to fire Shirley Sherrod?

jmwooten: Mr. President, is missing the Boy Scout's Jamboree to come here Bush's fault as well?

GreatGoogleOfOz: Does your status as deity violate the separation clause?

GreatGoogleOfOz: When you were thinking of running for President, did you ever imagine you would be this awesome?

MattDycus: So would you rather be a mediocre six-term President or a really good four-term President?

esqcapades: Which private industry will you close to celebrate Labor Day?

habledash: How's Andy Stern & the bunk bed you got him for the Oval Office?

mikem2006: What's your favorite blog, The Daily Kos or the Huffington Post?

ToddABailey: Why did you not get a nobel prize for math by saving 3000% on health care costs?

SamValley: Do you think Jimmy Carter sleeps easier know that youre president?

ThePowersThatBe: Do you think the oil leak was as bad as that time the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

palwalrus: Which was the bigger ecological disaster, the Deepwater Horizon or Joe Biden's mouth?

RachelLBurnett: Will you be asking Paul the octopus to aid in any major policy decisions

vanakatherock: How fast did the Constitution burn?

mikem2006: Are we supposed to kiss your ring or your ass?

Sen. Webb: End Affirmative Action

2010-07-27T07:06:00Z

In a fantastic WSJ op-ed from Jim Webb, the Democratic Senator talks about diversity the myth of white privilege and how the time has come to end affirmative action programs that have strayed from their goals.

As race has exploded since the ascent of the nation's first black president, Senator Webb in this piece reiterated his opposition to some affirmative action programs and suggested that white Americans are being "marginalized" by current government policies. It's a well-reasoned argument, and it echoes much of what Lou has been saying on this broadcast for a long time now.

Webb writes: "Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.

"I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America's economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

"In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived."

Later he writes: "The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed. But the extrapolation of this logic to all 'people of color'-especially since 1965, when new immigration laws dramatically altered the demographic makeup of the U.S.-moved affirmative action away from remediation and toward discrimination, this time against whites. It has also lessened the focus on assisting African-Americans, who despite a veneer of successful people at the very top still experience high rates of poverty, drug abuse, incarceration and family breakup."

CLICK HERE TO READ SENATOR WEBB'S FULL OP-ED IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Shirley Sherrod and Racial Politics

2010-07-26T07:05:00Z

President Obama declared himself to be the post-racial president. Sad, though, that we've seen more racial politics in the past year and a half than any point in recent history. We've lost our focus, says Brad Jackson.

In a post at newledger.com, former Capitol Hill staffer and campaign manager Brad Jackson says we need to focus on fixing the real problems we are facing: our economy, putting people back to work, balancing the budget and more.

Jackson writes: "All these passionate accusations of racism are particularly sad because this was supposed to be a 'post-racial' presidency - an administration that would bridge the gap of white and black to heal any wounds still left over from the pre-Civil Rights era. Instead, the environment in Washington, D.C., and to some extent across the country, has become even more racially charged. There is absolutely no need for that. No need to use race as the immediate means of attacking those who disagree with you, on either side of the aisle.

"The left wants to use this Sherrod story, and a blatantly misguided perception of the Tea Party movement, to say that anyone not on their side is a racist. Fox News, Andrew Breitbart, Tea Party activists, none of these people are racist for disagreeing with this administration. As I'll remind the left, during the Bush years (particularly during the war in Iraq), they said that 'dissent was the highest form of patriotism.' To be against the policies or actions of the Bush administration was lauded and cheered. Today those who dissent from those in power are called, 'the mob', 'Nazis', or racists. Are there still individuals in this country that are racist, absolutely, and we would hope that those folks, what ever race they are prejudiced against, realize there is no need for that in America.

"Instead of focusing on black and white, Democrats, Republicans and the media should focus on the pressing issues of the day - reviving this sagging economy, balancing the budget, and truly fixing our nation's health insurance system. It's okay to disagree, in fact debate is central to our democracy, but debate about the issues, debate about ways to turn this country around. Don't needlessly sling racially charged comments at those who disagree with you - it's unproductive and counter to the dreams of those who have sought to make this country a beacon of democracy, and a home for everyone seeking a free and prosperous life."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL BLOG POST BY BRAD JACKSON ON RACIAL POLITICS.

Afghan Mess: Wikileaks' Document Dump

2010-07-26T07:04:00Z

Game-changer: Wikileaks.org released more than 90,000 secret military documents that reveal ugly truths about the nation's longest war. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange called its the true nature of the war.

The NY Times reports: "A trove of military documents made public on Sunday by an organization called WikiLeaks reflects deep suspicions among American officials that Pakistan's military spy service has for years guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants.

"Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan's military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday. The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.

"Taken together, the reports indicate that American soldiers on the ground are inundated with accounts of a network of Pakistani assets and collaborators that runs from the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, through southern Afghanistan, and all the way to the capital, Kabul. Much of the information - raw intelligence and threat assessments gathered from the field in Afghanistan- cannot be verified and likely comes from sources aligned with Afghan intelligence, which considers Pakistan an enemy, and paid informants. Some describe plots for attacks that do not appear to have taken place. But many of the reports rely on sources that the military rated as reliable.

CLICK HERE TO TAKE A LOOK AT THE DOCUMENTS AND READ THE NY TIMES' ANALYSIS.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH WIKILEAKS FOUNDER JULIAN ASSANGE EXPLAIN WHY HE RELEASED THE AFGHANISTAN WAR LOGS.

Sherrod's Unfortunate Remark about Fox

2010-07-22T07:06:00Z

Lou defended Shirley Sherrod immediately, calling for further context before rushing to judgment like the Obama administration, the media and the NAACP. But her latest comment is, well, unfortunate.

Shirley Sherrod is surely a victim. A victim of the Obama administration, of the NAACP, of most of the national media. But in her rush to the microphones and cameras, she told Joe Strupp of Media Matters that Fox News wants to return to the pre-civil rights era.

She said Fox showed no professionalism in continuing to bother her for an interview, but failing to correct their coverage. "I think they should but they won't. They intended exactly what they did. "They were looking for the result they got yesterday," she said of Fox. "I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person."

CLICK HERE TO READ SHERROD'S FULL INTERVIEW WITH JOE STRUPP OF MEDIA MATTERS.

DeLong: The Real Problem with JournoList

2010-07-22T07:05:00Z

Liberals clucking together isn't new. But left-wing journalists actively plotting how best to use their employers and organizations as a tool to promote their beliefs is a major issue, argues James DeLong.

Lou's been railing against the concept of the JournoList for about two years now. In fact, in the broadcast studio we keep a list of names of those associated with this left-wing propaganda tool. So we've been following closely how The Daily Caller's revealed e-mails showing these liberal "journalists" plotting to kill unfavorable stories to Barack Obama, celebrating his presidential victory, calling conservatives Nazis, trying to shut down Fox News and conspiring against Sarah Palin.

As James DeLong writes for The American, the Journal of the American Enterprise Institute, here's the real problem with the JournoList:

"The real problem with JournoList is that much of it consisted of exchanges among people who worked for institutions about how to best hijack their employers for the cause of Progressivism. Thus, the J-List discussion revealed yesterday in the Daily Caller was about how the group could get their media organizations to play down the Reverend Wright affair and help elect Barack Obama.

"Were I an editor of one of these institutions, I would instantly fire any employee who participated in this gross violation of his/her duty. For example, the J-List included Washington Post reporters, and the idea that the paper has been turned into a propaganda organ is a big reason it is bleeding readers and influence.

"Of course, it is possible that the Post's editors were on the list, since the membership is not known, in which case the corporate executives should fire the editors, or the board should fire the executives, or the stockholders should fire the board. (If Director Warren Buffet was on J-List, I give up.)

"So here, JournoList is composed not of reporters who happen to be 'Progressives,' but of Progressives who boast about how to perfect and use their capture of their employers. This is in itself institutional rot, but the more serious rot is the failure of the managers of those institutions to react to the problem. And if you search the WaPo over the past couple of days, there is nothing on the Daily Caller stories, so either management does not care or it does not read anything out of its comfort zone, such as the Daily Caller, and has not been informed by its subordinates, the former members of J-List (surprise!).

"As for the academics on the list, were I a university president or trustee, I would be bothered by the idea that my "scholars" are so willing to hijack the institutional name and resources for political advocacy, but academia may be too far beyond redemption for its managers to grasp the concept that intellectual integrity is a brand value."

CLICK HERE TO READ DELONG'S ENTIRE BLOG POST AT THE AMERICAN.

Why ObamaCare Tax is Unconstitutional

2010-07-22T07:04:00Z

Ken Blackwell and Kenneth Klukowski argue that the federal power to tax is not unlimited, as the Supreme Court recognized when it struck down the first national income tax. ObamaCare will suffer the same fate.

The pair argue in the Wall Street Journal editorial pages: "The Justice Department announced last week that it would defend the new federal health-insurance mandate as an exercise of Congress's "power to lay and collect taxes," even though Barack Obama had insisted before the bill's passage that it was "absolutely not a tax increase." The truth is the mandate is not a tax-and if it were it would be unconstitutional.

"A tax is when the government takes money from individuals, puts it in the Treasury, and plans to spend it. With the health-insurance mandate, the government is not taking money from private individuals; rather, it is commanding them to give their money to another private entity, not to the Treasury. If individuals don't obey the mandate, they pay a penalty to the Treasury. But penalties aren't taxes. The mandate is legally separate from the penalty.

"Even if the Justice Department were to get the mandate considered a tax, it would be an unconstitutional one. Unlike states, the federal government has limited jurisdiction. Under the 10th Amendment, the federal government has only those powers enumerated by the Constitution, and all other powers are reserved to the people or the states. Every federal action must be authorized by a constitutional provision. If there is no such provision, then the action is unconstitutional. No provision of the Constitution authorizes the federal government to command people to buy insurance.

"The Taxing and Spending Clause in Article I of the Constitution gives the federal government broad power to tax the American people. But that power is not unlimited."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL OP-ED IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Washington Post's Intelligence Exposé

2010-07-21T07:04:00Z

Every once in a while the liberal newspaper business gets it right. In this instance, the Washington Post ran a fantastic exposé about this country's intelligence gathering, and it will shock you.

The Washington Post conducted a thorough two-year investigation "that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine."

"The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space."

But what follows is something every American should read. Click here to read the in-depth report.

JournoList Tried To Kill Wright Story

2010-07-20T07:05:00Z

Lou's been warning you about the left-wing media's collusion on a number of issues. In this great piece by the Daily Caller, we see how the far-left JournoList tried to kill the Rev. Wright story for Obama.

The JournoList is the now-defunct e-mail listserv made up of hundreds of liberal commentators and journalists practicing their talking points and collaborating on how best to advance the left-wing agenda through the national media. E-mail archives already took down Dave Weigel from his position at the Washington Post, and hopefully more heads will roll after this report.

The Daily Caller writes this about the left's efforts to kill the Rev. Wright story: "According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

"In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama's relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama's conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, 'Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares - and call them racists.'

"Thomas Schaller, a columnist for the Baltimore Sun as well as a political science professor, upped the ante from there. In a post with the subject header, 'why don't we use the power of this list to do something about the debate?' Schaller proposed coordinating a 'smart statement expressing disgust' at the questions Gibson and Stephanopoulos had posed to Obama.

"'It would create quite a stir, I bet, and be a warning against future behavior of the sort,' Schaller wrote.

"Chris Hayes of the Nation posted on April 29, 2008, urging his colleagues to ignore Wright. Hayes directed his message to 'particularly those in the ostensible mainstream media' who were members of the list.

"The Wright controversy, Hayes argued, was not about Wright at all.
Instead, 'It has everything to do with the attempts of the right to maintain control of the country.'

"Hayes castigated his fellow liberals for criticizing Wright. All this hand wringing about just how awful and odious Rev. Wright remarks are just keeps the hustle going.'

"'Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians - men, women, children, the infirmed - on its hands. You'll forgive me if I just can't quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama's pastor,'
Hayes wrote.

"Hayes urged his colleagues - especially the straight news reporters who were charged with covering the campaign in a neutral way - to bury the Wright scandal."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL INVESTIGATIVE STORY IN THE DAILY CALLER.

Newsweek Cover: Out of Afghanistan

2010-07-20T07:03:00Z

Lou's been saying for some time that it's time to get the heck out of Afghanistan. And while everyone piled on Michael Steele for his comments, everyone missed the fact that what he said was right.

Everyone except Lou, and Richard Haass writing for Newsweek. Haass begins: "The war being waged by the United States in Afghanistan today is fundamentally different and more ambitious than anything carried out by the Bush administration. Afghanistan is very much Barack Obama's war of choice, a point that the president underscored recently by picking Gen. David Petraeus to lead an intensified counterinsurgency effort there. After nearly nine years of war, however, continued or increased U.S. involvement in Afghanistan isn't likely to yield lasting improvements that would be commensurate in any way with the investment of American blood and treasure. It is time to scale down our ambitions there and both reduce and redirect what we do.

"The first thing we need to recognize is that fighting this kind of war is in fact a choice, not a necessity. The United States went to war in October 2001 to oust the Taliban government, which had allowed Al Qaeda to operate freely out of Afghanistan and mount the 9/11 attacks. The Taliban were routed; members of Al Qaeda were captured or killed, or escaped to Pakistan. But that was a very different war, a necessary one carried out in self-defense. It was essential that Afghanistan not continue to be a sanctuary for terrorists who could again attack the American homeland or U.S. interests around the world."

...

"So what should the president decide? The best way to answer this question is to return to what the United States seeks to accomplish in Afghanistan and why. The two main American goals are to prevent Al Qaeda from reestablishing a safe haven and to make sure that Afghanistan does not undermine the stability of Pakistan.

"We are closer to accomplishing both goals than most people realize. CIA Director Leon Panetta recently estimated the number of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to be '60 to 100, maybe less.' It makes no sense to maintain 100,000 troops to go after so small an adversary, especially when Al Qaeda operates on this scale in a number of countries. Such situations call for more modest and focused policies of counterterrorism along the lines of those being applied in Yemen and Somalia, rather than a full-fledged counterinsurgency effort.

"Pakistan is much more important than Afghanistan given its nuclear arsenal, its much larger population, the many terrorists on its soil, and its history of wars with India. But Pakistan's future will be determined far more by events within its borders than those to its west. The good news is that the Army shows some signs of understanding that Pakistan's own Taliban are a danger to the country's future, and has begun to take them on."

CLICK HERE TO READ HAASS' FULL COVER STORY IN NEWSWEEK.

Washington Post: What Took Us So Long?

2010-07-19T07:06:00Z

In a stunning and rare act of self-awareness, the Washington Post ombudsman this weekend acknowledge that his liberal paper hadn't touched the New Black Panther Party story..and asked why not.

We've been talking quite a bit about the story of why Eric Holder's highly politicized Justice Department dismissed criminal charges against the New Black Panther Party. One former Justice Department employee says it's clear this case was dropped for racial and political reasons, and he swears that if other Justice lawyers were called to testify they'd confirm his account. It's worth at least a mention in some of the biggest newspapers in the country, right?

The Washington Post would disagree. They've ignored the story, like many of its colleagues in the national liberal, lazy lamestream media. But a funny thing happened. Over the weekend, Andrew Alexander, the ombudsman at the Washington Post asked why his paper hadn't covered it. WOW!

Alexander writes: "Thursday's Post reported about a growing controversy over the Justice Department's decision to scale down a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party. The story succinctly summarized the issues but left many readers with a question: What took you so long?

"For months, readers have contacted the ombudsman wondering why The Post hasn't been covering the case. The calls increased recently after competitors such as the New York Times and the Associated Press wrote stories. Fox News and right-wing bloggers have been pumping the story.
Liberal bloggers have countered, accusing them of trying to manufacture a scandal.

"But The Post has been virtually silent."

He continues later: "The Post didn't cover it. Indeed, until Thursday's story, The Post had written no news stories about the controversy this year. In 2009, there were passing references to it in only three stories.

"That's prompted many readers to accuse The Post of a double standard. Royal S. Dellinger of Olney said that if the controversy had involved Bush administration Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, 'Lord, there'd have been editorials and stories, and it would go on for months.'"

CLICK HERE TO READ THE OMBUDSMAN'S FULL ARTICLE IN THE WASHINGTON POST.

Payne: He Came, He Saw, He Spent

2010-07-16T07:06:00Z

We all have our complaints about President Obama's policies, and some articulate them better than others. We're awarding Henry Payne of The Michigan View the Best Opening Paragraphs Award.

Payne writes: "In the latest stop on his 'Recovery Summer' tour, rock star President Barack Obama landed in Holland, Michigan Thursday, insulted its congressman, handed American stimulus dollars to a Korean corporation, and proclaimed Obamanomics a success even as Michigan has lost 94,000 jobs since his Recovery Act was enacted.

"All in all, another day in the life of an increasingly unpopular president who seems to be living in an alternative universe.

"That universe insists that government is the source of jobs, and so Obama was in Western Michigan to declare another victory in Washington's mission to create a new green economy.

"But the green economy looks like a lot of green for the well-connected. The president handed $150 million in stimulus money over to Korean CEO Peter Bahnsuk Kim of LG Chem. LG Chem is an $11 billion Korean conglomerate that hardly seems a candidate for the American Recovery Act. No wonder the program is so unpopular."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM HENRY PAYNE IN THE MICHIGAN VIEW.

Forming a House Tea Party Caucus

2010-07-16T07:05:00Z

Congresswoman Michele Bachmann knows what the American people want. They want us to get serious about our debt, to adhere to the Constitution and to limit the size and scope of government.

Bachmann issued this release today: Today, U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann filed paperwork to start a House Tea Party Caucus to promote Americans' call for fiscal responsibility, adherence to the Constitution, and limited government.

"The American people are speaking out loud and clear. They have had enough of the spending, the bureaucracy, and the government knows best mentality running rampant today throughout the halls of Congress. This caucus will espouse the timeless principles of our founding, principles that all Members of Congress have sworn to uphold,"
Bachmann stated. "The American people are doing their part and making their voices heard and this caucus will prove that there are some here in Washington willing to listen."

This letter was sent earlier today to Representative Robert Brady, Chairman of the Committee on House Administration to register the House Tea Party Caucus as a Congressional Member Organization for the 111th Congress.

WSJ: Feds Get More Power, Responsibility

2010-07-16T07:04:00Z

The Democrats are claiming victory following passage of the financial so-called reform bill. But the real winner is the Federal Reserve and the federal government. More power, coming their way. Just what we need!

As Lou said this on the July 15th broadcast, right after the bill passed: "We have taken a step today, and with the signature of the president, towards absolute socialism. And this is not regulation, folks, this is state sponsorship, this is pure statism. And it is not about a market, it is not about regulation, it is about defining the transactions that can take place within an economy that is now managed by the state. This is a disaster, and the disaster will be clear in the weeks and the months ahead as we watch the regulators take over from here."

The Wall Street Journal expands on this: "After fending off most challenges to its independence and winning new powers to oversee big financial firms, the Federal Reserve has emerged from a bruising debate on the overhaul of U.S. financial rules as perhaps the pre-eminent regulator in the sector. But that could only bring it added blame if things go wrong again.

"Just a few months ago, amid populist anger at the Fed for failing to prevent the financial crisis of 2008 and bailing out Wall Street, Congress was talking of stripping the central bank of its supervisory oversight of banks or forcing it to submit to congressional audit of its interest-rate decisions.

"Instead, the new law gives the Fed more power and a better tool box to help prevent financial crises. It will become the primary regulator for large, complex financial firms of all kinds, such as American International Group, the insurer which built a massive derivatives portfolio that regulators didn't see until it was too late.

"This isn't the first time Congress has expanded the Fed's role. After the Great Depression, it passed the Employment Act in 1946, charging the Fed with averting the huge unemployment seen in the 1930s. After the double-digit inflation of the 1970s, the Fed was formally given a dual mandate of promoting both price stability and maximum sustainable employment. In the wake of the latest financial crisis, the Fed is effectively being told to add the maintenance of financial stability to its responsibilities."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Investigating DoJ on New Black Panthers

2010-07-15T07:05:00Z

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is now turning its focus on Eric Holder's highly politicized and partisan Justice Department with regards to the now-dismissed New Black Panther Party case.

According to Jennifer Rubin at the Weekly Standard, "As the New Black Panthers scandal begins to unfold, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights today launched an attack at the DOJ stonewallers. The letter below to the assistant attorney general for civil rights Thomas Perez follows the eye-opening testimony from former Justice trial attorney Christian Adams, who for the first time in public gave us the blow by blow story of the dismissal of the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party and two individual defendants (and a severe roll back in the injunction sought against another defendant). The letter recites Adams testimony that this was part of a pattern of hostility within the Justice Department to bringing cases that didn't follow the "traditional" civil rights pattern ( i.e. white defendants, minority victims) and deputy assistant general Julie Fernandes's statements that Justice wouldn't be pursuing cases against black defendants. The letter reminds Perez that he testified under oath that he was unaware of this sentiment. The Commission also recites Adams's testimony that the Obama Justice Department was not going to enforce Section 8 of the Civil Rights Act which requires states to clean up their voting rolls to prevent fraud.

"The letter is interesting not only for the explosiveness of the charges but the level of detail the Commission has now obtained to subsstantiate the allegation that Obama's Justice Department isn't applying the civil rights laws fairly and equally. To top things off, the Commission now demands that the former trial team leader in the New Black Panthers case, Chris Coates, be allowed to testify. What will Perez and his boss Eric Holder do? I suspect nothing until election day. In January they may have no choice if Congress flips control."

GAR to TP_07-14-10-1

FT: Obama's Growing Credibility Crisis

2010-07-14T07:05:00Z

There's no denying it: A clear majority of Americans has lost all confidence in Our Supreme Leader to make the right decisions for the country. But things could be getting much worse for Obama.

The Financial Times breaks down how this may be just the beginning for the Democrats: "Robert Gibbs, Barack Obama's chief spokesman, got into hot water this week for daring to speak the truth - that the Democrats could lose control of the House of Representatives in November. But it could be even worse than that.

"Contrary to pretty much every projection until now, Democratic control of the Senate is also starting to coming into question. While Mr Obama's approval ratings have continued to fall, and now hover at dangerously close to 40 per cent according an ABC-Washington Post poll published on Tuesday, the fate of his former colleagues in the Senate looks even worse.

"In the past few days polls have shown Republican challengers taking the lead over previously safe Democratic incumbents, such as Barbara Boxer in California and Russ Feingold in Wisconsin. Indeed, given the uniformly negative direction in the numbers, it is now quite possible the Republicans could win the Senate seats formerly held by both President Obama in Illinois, and Joe Biden, vice-president, in Delaware.

"Add to that the continuing woes of Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic majority leader, in Nevada, where the Republican party's recent nomination of Sharron Angle, a far-right and highly eccentric Tea Party supporter, appear to have had no positive effect on Mr Reid's prospects, and the Grand Old party has a good shot at taking control of both houses of Congress. Worse for Mr Obama, political scientists say that at this stage in the calendar, there is almost nothing he can do about it.

"'If you ask me where the silver lining is for President Obama, I have to say I cannot see one,' says Bill Galston, a former Clinton official, who has been predicting for months the Democrats could lose the House. 'Just as BP's failure to cap the well has been so damaging, Obama's failure to cap unemployment will be his undoing. There is nothing he can do to affect the jobless rate before November.'"

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES.

Page Six: Another Doomed King?

2010-07-14T07:04:00Z

Ouch. Since taking over for Lou at 7 pm on CNN, John King's lost more than half of Lou's audience. According to insiders, that's leading CNN executives to consider dropping King from its nightly lineup.

According to New York Post's Page Six, "The next head to roll at CNN will be John King's, insiders say. 'Since King replaced Lou Dobbs, he's lost more than half his audience,' one source told us. 'If it were a fight, it would be stopped on a TKO because of the bleeding.'

"In April, Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales quoted a producer as saying King's show was attracting 'only friends and relatives.' An insider said CNN brass are fretting because King's anemic lead-in doomed the 8 p.m. show of Campbell Brown, who's leaving at the end of the month and will be replaced after Labor Day by Eliot Spitzer and Kathleen Parker. King is said to have a high opinion of himself, and 'the high-fives are rattling the windows on Capitol Hill,' laughed a source. A CNN rep said of King's possible ouster, 'Not true.' Wolf Blitzer will add King's 7 p.m. hour, a source predicted. No replacement for Larry King at 9 p.m. has been named, but we've reported it will be Piers Morgan."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ITEM IN PAGE SIX.

Fund: Lame-Duck Agenda Coming

2010-07-13T07:05:00Z

Democrats have all but conceded at least one house of Congress come November, says WSJ columnist John Fund. And now it's full speed ahead on their far-left agenda, like Card Check, Cap & Trade and the rest.

Fund writes: "Democratic House members are so worried about the fall elections they're leaving Washington on July 30, a full week earlier than normal-and they won't return until mid-September. Members gulped when National Journal's Charlie Cook, the Beltway's leading political handicapper, predicted last month "the House is gone," meaning a GOP takeover. He thinks Democrats will hold the Senate, but with a significantly reduced majority.

"The rush to recess gives Democrats little time to pass any major laws. That's why there have been signs in recent weeks that party leaders are planning an ambitious, lame-duck session to muscle through bills in December they don't want to defend before November. Retiring or defeated members of Congress would then be able to vote for sweeping legislation without any fear of voter retaliation.

"'I've got lots of things I want to do' in a lame duck, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W. Va.) told reporters in mid June. North Dakota's Kent Conrad, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, wants a lame-duck session to act on the recommendations of President Obama's deficit commission, which is due to report on Dec. 1. 'It could be a huge deal,' he told Roll Call last month. 'We could get the country on a sound long-term fiscal path.' By which he undoubtedly means new taxes in exchange for extending some, but not all, of the Bush-era tax reductions that will expire at the end of the year.

"In the House, Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters last month that for bills like 'card check'-the measure to curb secret-ballot union elections-'the lame duck would be the last chance, quite honestly, for the foreseeable future.'

"Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, chair of the Senate committee overseeing labor issues, told the Bill Press radio show in June that 'to those who think [card check] is dead, I say think again.' He told Mr. Press "we're still trying to maneuver" a way to pass some parts of the bill before the next Congress is sworn in.

"Other lame-duck possibilities? Senate ratification of the New Start nuclear treaty, a federally mandated universal voter registration system to override state laws, and a budget resolution to lock in increased agency spending."

CLICK HERE TO READ JOHN FUND'S FULL COLUMN IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

50 Easy Ways to Cut the Budget

2010-07-12T07:05:00Z

Sounds like a Paul Simon tune, maybe, but it's no joking matter. Our national debt is unsustainable, and Business Insider rounded up 50 easy ways to cut the budget and return to fiscal sanity.

This weekend the heads of Our Supreme Leader's national debt commission painted a gloomy picture ahead if we fail to get our spending under control. According to the AP, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles "told a meeting of the National Governors Association that everything needs to be considered - including curtailing popular tax breaks, such as the home mortgage deduction, and instituting a financial trigger mechanism for gaining Medicare coverage." It's time to get serious.

In this great piece by the Business Insider, here are 50 Dead-Simple Ways For The US To Cut Its Budget.

Since that's a slideshow, we'll list some of the simply ways on its list here:

Lawmakers diverted $13 million from Hurricane Katrina relief spending to build a museum celebrating the Army Corps of Engineers-the agency partially responsible for the failed levees that flooded New Orleans.

Washington will spend $2.6 million training Chinese prostitutes to drink more responsibly on the job.

The Legal Services Corporation, which is supposed to provide legal services to the poor, has repeatedly ignored warnings to stop spending its money on alcohol.

The stimulus set aside $350 million for a national broadband coverage map-even though one private firm stated it could create one for $3.5 million.

Washington spends $25 billion annually maintaining unused or vacant federal properties.

During a recent three-day conference, NASA spent $62,611 on "light refreshments" for its 317 attendees-$66 per day per person. NASA officials said such expensive snacks were needed to keep its officials from wandering away from the conference.

Federal agencies are delinquent on nearly 20 percent of employee travel charge cards, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Over half of all farm subsidies go to commercial farms, which report average household incomes of $200,000.

The refusal of many federal employees to fly coach costs taxpayers
$146 million annually in flight upgrades.

Washington spends $60,000 per hour shooting Air Force One photo-ops in front of national landmarks.

The state of Washington sent $1 food stamp checks to 250,000 households in order to raise state caseload figures and trigger $43 million in additional federal funds.

The Advanced Technology Program spends $150 million annually subsidizing private businesses; 40 percent of this funding goes to Fortune 500 companies.

The Conservation Reserve program pays farmers $2 billion annually not to farm their land.

Gerald Fox: Fighting for Freedom

2010-07-07T07:04:00Z

In the wake of the Supreme Court's McDonald decision that guaranteed our Second Amendment rights once and for all, Jackson County WI DA Gerald Fox issued a freedom-loving proclamation you have to read.

DISTRICT ATTORNEY GERALD FOX'S STATEMENT ON THE U. S. SUPREME COURT'S DECISION IN MCDONALD v. CITY OF CHICAGO

Yesterday, in a resounding victory for all freedom-loving Americans, the United States Supreme Court confirmed that the Second Amendment's protection of our right to keep and bear arms applies everywhere in America, and serves as a rampart against state infringement of this fundamental individual liberty. In its ruling, the Court declared that the right to keep and bear arms is a fundamental right, and that self-defense is at the core of the freedoms protected by the amendment.

This Supreme Court ruling is binding on all states and local governments, and immediately renders some of Wisconsin's current laws unconstitutional. Therefore, in keeping with my oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, I hereby declare that this office will no longer accept law enforcement referrals for violations of the following statutes:

Section 167.31, prohibiting uncased or loaded firearms in vehicles; Section 941.23, prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons, including firearms; Section 941.235, prohibiting the possession of firearms in public buildings; Section 941.237, prohibiting the possession of firearms in establishments where alcohol may be sold or served; and, Section 941.24, prohibiting the possession of knives that open with a button, or by gravity, or thrust, or movement.

All of these statutes constitute unjustifiable infringements on the fundamental right of every law-abiding American to arm themselves for self-defense and the defense of their loved ones, co-workers, homes and communities. This change also invalidates Jackson County Ordinance Sections 9.01 (firearms in public buildings) and 9.29 (CCW).
Prior to this historic ruling, our state Supreme Court placed the state's interests first, and would only create an exception to these laws when the individual's need for protection outweighed the state's interest. In the area of concealed carry, only
2 cases have approved concealed carry, one at home, and the other one at the defendant's personally- owned place of business. Well, as the United States Supreme Court held yesterday, that view was exactly backward.

As with the other fundamental rights, such as the freedom of speech, of religion, of association, or of security in our homes, persons, and effects, government limitations on fundamental rights are lawful only in the rare case that the state can show a compelling governmental need that can be accomplished only by enacting a narrowly-tailored restriction, in terms of time, place and manner. Clearly, a blanket prohibition against carrying your loaded firearm in your personal vehicle does not pass that test.

CLICK HERE TO READ DISTRICT ATTORNEY FOX'S ENTIRE LETTER.

Justice Dep't Lawsuit Against AZ

2010-07-06T07:05:00Z

You knew it was coming, and now it's here: The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit against the state of Arizona to prevent implementation of its anti-illegal immigration law. Read it for yourself.

Plaintiff, the United States of America, by its undersigned attorneys, brings this civil action for declaratory and injunctive relief, and alleges as follows:

INTRODUCTION

1. In this action, the United States seeks to declare invalid and preliminarily and permanently enjoin the enforcement of S.B. 1070, as amended and enacted by the State of Arizona, because S.B. 1070 is preempted by federal law and therefore violates the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution.

2. In our constitutional system, the federal government has preeminent authority to regulate immigration matters. This authority derives from the United States Constitution and numerous acts of Congress. The nation's immigration laws reflect a careful and considered balance of national law enforcement, foreign relations, and humanitarian interests. Congress has assigned to the United States Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, and Department of State, along with other federal agencies, the task of enforcing and administering these immigration-related laws. In administering these laws, the federal agencies balance the complex - and often competing - objectives that animate federal immigration law and policy. Although states may exercise their police power in a manner that has an incidental or indirect effect on aliens, a state may not establish its own immigration policy or enforce state laws in a manner that interferes with the federal immigration laws. The Constitution and the federal immigration laws do not permit the development of a patchwork of state and local immigration policies throughout the country.

3. Despite the preeminent federal authority and responsibility over immigration, the State of Arizona recently enacted S.B. 1070, a sweeping set of provisions that are designed to "work together to discourage and deter the unlawful entry and presence of aliens" by making "attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state and local government agencies in Arizona." See S.B. 1070 (as amended by H.B. 2162). S.B. 1070's provisions, working in concert and separately, seek to deter and punish unlawful entry and presence by requiring, whenever practicable, the determination of immigration status during any lawful stop by the police where there is "reasonable suspicion" that an individual is unlawfully present, and by establishing new state criminal sanctions against unlawfully present aliens. The mandate to enforce S.B. 1070 to the fullest extent possible is reinforced by a provision allowing for any legal resident of Arizona to collect money damages by showing that "any official or agency . . . [has] adopt[ed] or implement[ed] a policy" that "limits or restricts the enforcement of federal immigration laws . . . to less than the full extent permitted by federal law."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE ANTI-ARIZONA LAWSUIT IN FULL.

Public Employees: The Big Gov't Bonus

2010-07-06T07:04:00Z

Did you know that private employees work 13 and a half months to earn what federal workers earn in 12 months? In fact, total compensation for federal workers may easily exceed $14,000 per year more than a private employee.

We've been discussing this on the broadcast for a long time now. And every piece of data that emerges proves the same larger point: It pays to be on the federal government's payroll and work for a public-sector union. It's no wonder why at the beginning of 2010, federal workers were only about one-third as likely to leave their jobs. Of course!

Andrew C. Biggs and Jason Richwine tackle the issue in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. Here's what they say: "Government employees may also receive more generous health and pension benefits than Americans working for private enterprise. So are federal employees overpaid? Data from the March Current Population Survey (CPS) suggest they are.

"Conducted for the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the CPS is a long-running survey that couples earnings and employment information with detailed demographic characteristics of the survey population. At first glance, the CPS data show that the average hourly wage for a federal worker is about 48% higher than a private worker's. Yet because federal employees tend to be more educated and experienced than their private counterparts, as Mr. Orszag noted, one has to control for these skill differences. This reduces the public-private salary gap-but it does not eliminate it. The federal wage premium for workers who have the same education and experience stands at 24%, still a windfall for public employees.

"Even using all the standard controls-including race and gender, full- or part-time work, firm size, marital status, region, residence in a city or suburb, and more-the federal wage premium does not disappear. It stubbornly hovers around 12%, meaning private employees must work 13½ months to earn what comparable federal workers make in 12.

"Most academic studies dating back to the 1970s have found similar pay differences. In addition to the wage premium, federal workers enjoy more generous fringe benefits than do private workers. For instance, federal workers receive a defined benefit pension with benefit levels comparable to those from private 401(k) plans, except that federal workers contribute only 0.8% of pay and are not subject to any market risk. They also receive employer matches to the defined contribution Thrift Savings Plan that significantly exceed the typical private employer match.

"If the overall generosity of federal benefits matches that of federal salaries (which seems quite likely), total compensation for federal workers may easily exceed $14,000 per year more than an otherwise similar private employee."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ON THE GOVERNMENT PAY BONUS.

Obama's Oil Spill To-Do List

2010-07-01T07:05:00Z

The Obama admini's awful handling of the oil spill has been well-documented. So the Heritage Foundation compiled this great list of 10 quick actions President Obama can take to help solve the crisis.

So what can be done? Many things, all simple and easy, they say. "The Heritage Foundation has offered a great deal of research and analysis related to the current crisis...Starting today, we will also highlight the top actions the federal government must take immediately to assist the citizens of the Gulf as they cope with this tragedy. As the government responds or acts on these actions, we will directly update this post online to reflect the news and add new actions as we deem appropriate."

Some examples:

2. Accept International Assistance: At least thirty countries and international organizations have offered equipment and experts so far. According to reports this week, the White House has finally decided to accept help from twelve of these nations. The Obama administration should make clear why they are refusing the other eighteen-plus offers. In a statement, the State Department said it is still working out the particulars of the assistance it has accepted. This should be done swiftly as months have already been wasted.

3. Lift the Moratorium: The Obama administration's over-expansive ban on offshore energy development is killing jobs when they are needed most. A panel of engineering experts told The New Orleans Times-Picayune that they only supported a six-month ban on new drilling in waters deeper than 1,000 feet. Those same experts were consulted by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar before he issued his May 27 report recommending a six-month moratorium on all ongoing drilling in waters deeper than 500 feet.

4. Release the S.S. A-Whale: The S.S. A-Whale skimmer is a converted oil tanker capable of cleaning 500,000 barrels of oil a day from the Gulf waters. Currently, the largest skimmer being used in the clean-up efforts can handle 4,000 barrels a day, and the entire fleet our government has authorized for BP has only gathered 600,000 barrels, total in the 70 days since the Deepwater Horizon explosion. The ship embarked from Norfolk, VA, this week toward the Gulf, hoping to get federal approval to begin assisting the clean-up, but is facing bureaucratic resistance.

6. Allow Sand Berm Dredging: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has recently prevented the state of Louisiana from dredging to build protective sand berms. Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser immediately sent a letter to President Obama requesting that the work continue.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL LIST ON THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION'S WEBSITE.

Donatelli: We're Looking Like France

2010-07-01T07:04:00Z

Are we on the path to a European socialized state? Many of us would say we're almost all the way there. GOPAC Chairman Frank Donatelli makes the case that we're looking a lot like France right now.

Donatelli argues this in a Politico column: "President Barack Obama's Democrats have set out to alter fundamentally the nature of the U.S. political system. The changes they've wrought will not be easily undone.

"Obama has sought to remake America into a social democracy - like Germany or France - with a larger public sector, expanded entitlements, stronger labor unions and a changed political structure. He's doing quite well so far.

"Size of government. Are we really still a government of limited powers at the federal level? It's hard to make that case.

"The feds are running auto companies. They fired the General Motors board of directors and forced Chrysler bondholders into a settlement far less attractive than that given the United Auto Workers, strong allies of Obama."

Later he argues:

"Each of these goals is well on its way to being accomplished.
Government is bigger and more intimidating, more Americans are beholden to government, labor unions are more powerful, and private business is under siege.

"We're looking more like France every day.

"There's another way we resemble nations of the European Union: high unemployment. Obama's allies are selling the nonsense that 10 percent unemployment is the best we can do in this economy. It's the best he can do if he follows European statist policies.

"Free-market principles, dominant since the Reagan years, kept U.S.
unemployment at about half that in Europe for three decades. That's the GOP's secret weapon."

CLICK HERE TO READ FRANK DONATELLI'S FULL COLUMN ON POLITICO.COM.

Tea Party Convention Now in October

2010-06-28T07:05:00Z

Lou's scheduled to headline the National Tea Party Unity Convention in Las Vegas. Find out why the organizers moved the event from mid-July to October. Hint: November's coming, incumbents!

Organizers announced that the National Tea Party Unity convention that was scheduled to be held in Las Vegas in July will now take place in October. Judson Phillips said in a statement: "We concluded it would more advantageous to hold the convention in the middle of October just prior to the November elections."

Here's the full statement from the event organizers:

DECISION TO DELAY THE CONVENTION UNTIL OCTOBER

Hello everyone -

This week, there were several meetings of the Executive Planning Committee for the convention. We concluded it would more advantageous to hold the convention in the middle of October just prior to the November elections.

We had to have a deep and serious discussion for three days as we delved into every aspect of this matter before pushing it back and catering to the wishes of so many who wanted to attend.

Like most of you, we are new to this and are not professional event planners. Unlike many other national organizations involved in this movement, we don't have huge budgets for PR and Marketing departments.
Everyone associated with the organizing of the first convention and this convention are just ordinary people like you trying to save our country in any way we can.

As stated before, we are new and are trying to include as many people as possible for this Unity convention. After all, it is for the people! This time for the West Coast...giving attendees facts, education, opportunities to meet people they would never be able to meet otherwise and most importantly feeding the hunger these people need to be around like-minded people.

This was not a spur of the moment decision contrary to anyone's opinion or thoughts. It was agonizing going over the facts and figures of why we must do this change and still do an amazing service to our members and future members.

Those who wish to be a part of this endeavor, we welcome you with open arms. Those who are not going to wish us well and only want to cause division or strife, are not a part of the solution. That is a message in itself. Our intent is to gain the greatest momentum and the
greatest delivery to the greatest amount of patriots. Nothing more,
nothing less.

The National groups in this country must come to our aid and to the aid of the country with the acknowledgment our country is in a mess and listen to the people as the Congress and President obviously are not. We have an obligation we have undertaken to partner in the reestablishment of the rule over these circumstances and situations the economy and the government has put us in. We are doing our best as stewards of these duties and our capacities are dictated by the people and the economy.

We were so excited about the tremendous success of the first convention, we jumped into this second convention without considering the timing. The heat in Las Vegas in July is keeping many who would like to participate from attending. We have also received numerous emails from people who were forced to decide between family vacations and attending the convention.

We have also gained valuable access to new Tea Party Groups in the United States who have contacted us and we have contacted others, therefore, the time delay will allow them the valuable and necessary time they need to be a part of this amazing event. The timing was wrong on our part in the July dates. The nay-sayers will always ridicule or tear down others, the true patriots -- like our military, help the fallen up by extending a hand. Those patriots are the backbone of this country...who carry the American Flag proudly we might add.

We too, are a result of the present situation the government has put us in as a residue of what the entire country is feeling. Therefore, because of TPN being in the exact same grouping as the rest of the nation, we feel we better communicate and understand the hardships and the struggles the people of our great nation are feeling.

In the center of this grand anthem of acknowledgment the towering truth is...we will be in one of the hardest hit cities in America to help bolster their esteem, and economy in October!

Thank you again for your understanding and support. The momentum we gain from holding the convention in October heading into the elections we feel will be worth all of the sacrifices and inconveniences.

Some Help from Sen. Kyl to Peggy West

2010-06-25T07:05:00Z

As you've seen in our Lou's Radar section, Milwaukee WI county supervisor Peggy West pushed a boycott of Arizona while saying the state didn't share a border with Mexico. Oops! Senator Jon Kyl tries to help West.

Here's the text of a letter Senator Kyl sent Peggy West in response to her unbelievable statement:

Thanks for the help, Senator Kyl. She needs it!

Wash. Times: The Case Against Kagan

2010-06-25T07:04:00Z

Paging Elena Kagan to the front! Supreme Court confirmation hearings begin on Monday, and the case against confirming Kagan is pretty clear, according to this editorial in the Washington Times.

The Times writes: "Solicitor General Elena Kagan is too political, too leftist, too inexperienced and too disrespectful towards existing law to be confirmed for the U.S. Supreme Court. As Ms. Kagan's nomination hearings begin on Monday, what we now know about her should disturb fair-minded Americans, and should embolden moderate senators of both parties to avoid rubber-stamping her for a lifetime appointment. The pressure should be most intense not on Republicans, but on Democrats who claim moderation and yet try to explain away Ms. Kagan's history of leftist proselytizing."

The editorial fleshes out each one of these bullet points, but here are the top headlines in the case against Kagan:

We know she is remarkably lacking in courtroom experience.
We know she deliberately ignored the law while at Harvard, and unfairly besmirched our military in time of war.
We know she cut corners in order to preserve partial-birth abortions.
We know she is willing to undercut First Amendment free speech for political purposes.
We know Ms. Kagan is hostile to gun rights.
We know she believes foreign law is highly relevant to U.S. law.
We know she believes judges should automatically favor certain classes of people and impose their own values to reach desired outcomes.
And we know lots of other things about Ms. Kagan.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL EDITORIAL IN THE WASHINGTON TIMES.

Stanley McChrystal: The Runaway General

2010-06-25T07:03:00Z

Obama's top commander in Afghanistan never takes his eye off real enemy.

Even though he had voted for President Obama, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, right, and his new commander in chief failed from the outset to connect.

"How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris. He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies - to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States. Opposition to the war has already toppled the Dutch government, forced the resignation of Germany's president and sparked both Canada and the Netherlands to announce the withdrawal of their 4,500 troops. McChrystal is in Paris to keep the French, who have lost more than 40 soldiers in Afghanistan, from going all wobbly on him.

"The dinner comes with the position, sir," says his chief of staff, Col. Charlie Flynn.

CLICK HERE TO THE FULL COLUMN FROM ROLLING STONE.

Petraeus In: Obama's Power Play

2010-06-24T07:05:00Z

You voted in our poll that Gen. David Petraeus received a demotion. But as Tunku Varadarajan points out in the Daily Beast, President Obama's move was a masterstroke that takes Petraeus out of the 2012 field.

We've all seen President Obama's poll numbers justifiably decline. But can any of the Republican challengers take out a sitting president. Speculation has been ramping up that General David Petraeus can be that challenger. But after President Obama replaced Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Petraeus on Wednesday, Varadarajan argues that Obama made a brilliant political calculation that knocks Petraeus out of contention to run against him.

He writes: "Barack Obama, who has in recent days turned haplessness into an art form, played a masterstroke today, making perhaps the canniest, wiliest, even wisest decision of his generally rudderless presidency. I refer, of course, to his appointment of David Petraeus to the Afghan war command, in place of the Rolling-Stoned Stanley McChrystal. In doing so, Obama has, at a stroke, taken Petraeus out of the 2012 presidential race.

"Keep your friends close-and the competition closer. There has been a buzz about Petraeus and the presidency since about the fall of last year, and to many in the Republican Party-a party bereft of ideas and credible leaders-the general has increasingly taken on the aspect of a possible messiah. His impeccable military credentials, his undoubted intelligence, his mastery of personal and professional politics (you wouldn't catch him talking to Rolling Stone in a million years), plus his undoubted (if carefully tailored) conservatism have led many to see in him a man who can take on Obama in 2012, and beat him. He is even the sort of guy who'd allow the GOP to broaden its tent, drawing in 'undecideds' and independents.

This can no longer happen. And Obama's brilliant move also preserves his own Afghan war strategy (which is effectively a Petraeus-McChrystal strategy). So, in throwing out the 'McChrystal bathwater,' he has been careful not to jettison the 'policy baby.'"

CLICK HERE TO READ VARADARAJAN'S FULL COLUMN IN THE DAILY BEAST.

Obama in the Eyes of the World

2010-06-21T07:05:00Z

He captivated the world with empty Hope & Change rhetoric as he campaigned overseas. But now the world sees President Obama as incompetent and amateurish, says Mort Zuckerman.

Zuckerman writes the following in U.S. News & World Report: "President Obama came into office as the heir to a great foreign policy legacy enjoyed by every recent U.S. president. Why? Because the United States stands on top of the power ladder, not necessarily as the dominant power, but certainly as the leading one. As such we are the sole nation capable of exercising global leadership on a whole range of international issues from security, trade, and climate to counterterrorism. We also benefit from the fact that most countries distrust the United States far less than they distrust one another, so we uniquely have the power to build coalitions. As a result, most of the world still looks to Washington for help in their region and protection against potential regional threats.

"Yet, the Iraq war lingers; Afghanistan continues to be immersed in an endless cycle of tribalism, corruption, and Islamist resurgence; Guantánamo remains open; Iran sees how North Korea toys with Obama and continues its programs to develop nuclear weapons and missiles; Cuba spurns America's offers of a greater opening; and the Palestinians and Israelis find that it is U.S. policy positions that defer serious negotiations, the direct opposite of what the Obama administration hoped for.

"The reviews of Obama's performance have been disappointing. He has seemed uncomfortable in the role of leading other nations, and often seems to suggest there is nothing special about America's role in the world. The global community was puzzled over the pictures of Obama bowing to some of the world's leaders and surprised by his gratuitous criticisms of and apologies for America's foreign policy under the previous administration of George W. Bush. One Middle East authority, Fouad Ajami, pointed out that Obama seems unaware that it is bad form and even a great moral lapse to speak ill of one's own tribe while in the lands of others."

After listing most of his political disasters and perceptions, Zuckerman concludes with the following:

"The end result is that a critical mass of influential people in world affairs who once held high hopes for the president have begun to wonder whether they misjudged the man. They are no longer dazzled by his rock star personality and there is a sense that there is something amateurish and even incompetent about how Obama is managing U.S. power."

CLICK HERE TO READ ZUCKERMAN'S FULL COLUMN IN U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT.

No Help: Obama's Ineffective Thuggery

2010-06-21T07:04:00Z

It's the Chicago Way, but thuggery from the Windy City White House hasn't resulted in very many positives for the American people. And as Michael Barone writes, it certainly hasn't plugged the damn leak.

Washington Examiner's Michael Barone writes: "Thuggery is unattractive. Ineffective thuggery even more so. Which may be one reason so many Americans have been reacting negatively to the response of Barack Obama and his administration to BP's Gulf oil spill.

"Take Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's remark that he would keep his 'boot on the neck' of BP, which brings to mind George Orwell's definition of totalitarianism as 'a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.' Except that Salazar's boot hasn't gotten much in the way of results yet.

"Or consider Obama's undoubtedly carefully considered statement to Matt Lauer that he was consulting with experts 'so I know whose ass to kick.' Attacking others is a standard campaign tactic when you're in political trouble, and certainly BP, which appears to have taken unwise shortcuts in the Gulf, is an attractive target.

"But you don't always win arguments that way."

CLICK HERE TO READ MICHAEL BARONE'S FULL COLUMN IN THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER.

Obama's Vision Deficit on Display

2010-06-17T07:05:00Z

We talk often about our nation's deficit. But one of our biggest problems is the leadership deficit in Washington. And in the White House, Nick Gillespie says, there's a "vision deficit" on full display.

This is not a new concept: Lou has been talking about this problem for as long as we can remember. Not many of our elites in Washington have vision or leadership, but in the White House, the problem is bigger than ever. Reason's Nick Gillespie addresses the issue in his AOL News column:

"What can only be called President Barack Obama's vision deficit first came into undeniable, turn-your-head-and-cough, full-monty view fewer than 100 days into his presidency, when he started yammering on April 15, 2009, about making sure that the wealthy pay their 'fair share' in taxes. Then there was his bold plan to free the nation's cities from traffic jams with a high-speed rail system that pulled not one smoke-belching car off clogged city streets anywhere on the planet.

"When it came time to unveil his bold 21st-century stimulus package, it turned out all he was talking about was cash for clunkers, cash for caulkers, and cash for laying asphalt and paying state and local workers for another year or two.

"Even his most ardent admirers had to admit that the guy wasn't exactly dazzling in his approach to the issues of the day. From his approach to foreign wars and civil liberties to his belief that massive government bailouts and housing subsidies will jump-start the economy, he's been more like the third term of George W. Bush than something new and different. Little wonder, then, that Obama's approval ratings have been positively Dubyaesque.

"Fast-forward to Obama's first-ever Oval Office speech, talking about the BP-caused oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. His message could have been delivered mere minutes after the crude first started bubbling to the surface."

CLICK HERE TO READ NICK GILLESPIE'S FULL COLUMN ON AOL NEWS.

Goodwin: Obama's Crude Power Grab

2010-06-16T07:05:00Z

Rahm Emanuel famously said we should never let a good crisis go to waste. The White House is not: They're now shamefully exploiting the tragedy to push for a left-wing Cap & Trade system that will hurt the economy, says columnist Michael Goodwin.

President Obama will take every opportunity he can to grow our government instead of our economy. And he's taking advantage of this Gulf oil crisis to push for another piece of his left-wing agenda. NY Post columnist Michael Goodwin writes:

"Once again, President Obama channels Oscar Wilde, who famously said the only thing he couldn't resist was temptation. So it is with Obama's attempt to turn the Gulf oil debacle into a reason why America should embrace his cap-and-tax energy policy. No matter the crisis, Obama can't resist the temptation to exploit it in his quest to grow the government.

"He did it during the financial meltdown, arguing the economic crisis proved America suddenly needed an idea he'd pushed all along, universal health care. It didn't, and still doesn't. Yet Obama showed last night he is ready for The Sequel. Rolling out the military metaphors--'battle plan' and 'siege' and 'fight'-- he again embraced the philosophy of his resident thinker, Rahm Emanuel, that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

"It was an unpersuasive performance. It lacked the essential energy and mastery of detail that would show the president focused like a laser on the crisis. Instead, it caught him looking starry-eyed into the wild blue yonder. Earth to president: Come on down. He's been hammered relentlessly for not being engaged, but he's still not into the details of the prevention and cleanup. He's got a czar, a commission and a dream, therefore he is. And, oh, he's got BP to kick around and milk like a fat cow."

CLICK HERE TO READ MICHAEL GOODWIN'S FULL OP-ED IN THE NY POST.

Pearlstein: The Barack & Tony Show

2010-06-16T07:05:00Z

Several weeks ago Lou asked why President Obama refused to meet with BP executives, including CEO Tony Hayward. Now that it's happened, many of us are wondering: What took them so long?

Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein has that very same thought. Instead of anger, how about they all try to solve it together. Because if they don't, it'll be their jobs. Pearlstein
writes: "The big question about President Obama's sit-down Wednesday with BP's Tony Hayward is, 'Why didn't this happen six weeks ago?'

"You'll pardon my breaking from the media pack on this one, but I really don't give a damn how much anger Barack Obama can muster about the BP spill, or how empathetic he might be on the plight of gulf fishermen.

"What matters to us -- and what will matter on Election Day 2012 -- is how effective the government is in getting that hole plugged and the oil cleaned up. And there's no way for the government to achieve those goals without collaborating and coordinating with the one company that has the resources, the know-how and the money to do it.

"From the moment when it became clear that the blowout preventer had failed and a major spill was inevitable, it should have been clear to both Obama and Hayward that they were in this mess together. Rather than calling for Hayward's removal, the president's attitude should have been, 'Your guys screwed up, my guys screwed up, so we better both roll up our sleeves and fix this thing before we're both out of a job.'"

If President Obama keeps this up, he'll be out of a job much quicker than he'd like. The American people are waiting.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF STEVEN PEARLSTEIN'S COLUMN IN THE WASHINGTON POST.

Turley: Do Laws Even Matter Today?

2010-06-15T07:05:00Z

Are we not a nation guided by the Rule of Law? Then why, Professor Jonathan Turley asks, is there the perception that our laws say one thing but actually means different things for different people.

The hyperbolic reaction coming from the left concerning the anti-illegal immigration law in Arizona has told us more about what the left thinks about laws than what the rest of us think about illegal immigrants. We can all agree that we're a nation of immigrants, but we're first a nation of laws. And when our government refuses to enforce the laws, or suggests a blanket amnesty for people who broke our laws, the fabric of society breaks down.

Professor Turley examines this in his latest op-ed for USA Today: "As soon as Arizona passed its recent immigration law, some reporters and commentators were quick to cast the story with the usual actors: 'Tea Partiers,' race activists, conservatives and liberals. Like our politics, much of our news media coverage has become a clash of caricatures - easily categorized groups with one-dimensional motives for mass consumption. Some commentary even suggested that supporters of the law are either open or closeted racists. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., recently called the law both 'fascist' and 'racist.'

"Though I am a critic of the Arizona law, I do not view its supporters in such one-dimensional terms. Indeed, I do not view the public response in purely immigration terms. Whether it is illegal immigration or the mortgage crisis or corporate bailouts, there seems to be a growing sense among many citizens that they are expected to play by the rules while others are exempt.

"With polls showing about 60% of people supporting the Arizona law and almost half supporting similar laws in their states, it is implausible to suggest that all these people are racists or extremists - let alone fascists. Notably, a majority of Americans also opposed the bank bailouts and mortgage forgiveness. In each of these controversies, there is a sense that the government was stepping in to protect people from the consequences of their actions."

Turley concludes: "A legal system cannot demand the faith and fealty of the governed when rules are seen as arbitrary and deceptive. Our leaders have led us not to an economic crisis or an immigration crisis or an environmental crisis or a civil liberties crisis. They have led us to a crisis of faith where citizens no longer believe that laws have any determinant meaning. It is politics, not the law, that appears to drive outcomes - a self-destructive trend for a nation supposedly defined by the rule of law."

CLICK HERE TO READ PROFESSOR TURLEY'S FULL OP-ED IN USA TODAY.

Where Did the Public Unions Go Wrong?

2010-06-14T07:05:00Z

One of the fiercest debates on our broadcast centers around public employees. Gov. Mitch Daniels called them the "new privileged class," about which many of you took umbrage. How did we get here?

In this great op-ed by Peter Scheer, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, a California nonprofit dedicated to government transparency and political accountability, we see exactly where the public employees unions went wrong over the years. Instead of working on behalf of the people, these unions have morphed into special interest groups that dump money onto candidates instead of fighting for change.

An excerpt from Scheer's op-ed: "In California, government-sector unions, once among the most entrenched and powerful labor groups in the country, mainly have themselves to blame. For most of the postwar period, they were a force for progressive change, prospering by winning over public support for their agenda.

"In the 1970s and '80s they backed laws like the Public Records Act and Brown Act to make state and local government more transparent.
Because unions enjoyed broad-based political support, efforts to enhance government accountability and responsiveness to voters were seen - correctly - as benefiting the unions and their members. The public interest and public employees' interests were aligned.

"But the unions switched strategies. Although the change was gradual, by the 1990s, California's government unions had decided that, rather than cultivate voter support for their objectives, they could exert more influence in the Legislature, and in the political process generally, by lavishing campaign contributions on lawmakers. Adopting the tactics of other special-interest groups, government unions paid lip service to democratic principles while excelling at the fundamentally anti-democratic strategy of writing checks to legislators, their election committees and political action committees.

"While not illegal (in fact, such contributions are constitutionally protected), the unions' aggressive spending on candidates put them on the same moral low ground as casino-owning tribes, insurance companies and other special interests that have concluded that the best way to influence the legislative process is to, well, buy it.

"Public unions' distrust of voters, and abandonment of government transparency as a union objective, could be seen in their successful push, in the mid-1990s, for a change to the Brown Act, California's open-meeting law. The new provision ensured that the public would have no access to collective-bargaining agreements negotiated by cities and counties - often representing 70 percent or more of their total operating budgets - until after the agreements were signed.

"What happens when voters and the press have no opportunity to question elected officials about how they propose to pay for a lower retirement age, better health benefits for retirees' dependents, richer pension formulas and the like? The officials make contractual promises that are unaffordable, unsustainable and, in general, don't come due until after those elected officials have left office. In the case of Vallejo, this veil of secrecy and the symbiotic relationship it fosters led to municipal bankruptcy.

"The biggest blow to unions' public support has come from revelations about jaw-dropping compensation and pension benefits. Police have received unwelcome attention for budget-busting overtime and the manipulation of eligibility rules for 'disability pensions,' which provide higher benefits and tax advantages. Other government employees, particularly managers, have been called out for 'pension
spiking': using vacation time, sick pay and the like to boost income in the last years of employment, which are the basis for calculating retirement benefits."

CLICK HERE TO READ PETER SCHEER'S FULL OP-ED IN THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE.

School Takes Trip to Protest AZ Law

2010-06-12T07:05:00Z

Arizona's Illegal immigration law is sparking harsh comparisons and reaction among parents, teachers and students of the Los Angeles Unified School District. So much so that a group opposing the law took a field trip to protest Arizona's controversial illegal immigration law. But as it turns out, there are may be some other deep seeded motivations behind their protest.

The FOX NATION is all over this story: Here are just a couple of the best nuggets:

A video posted on YouTube shows LA social studies teacher Jose Lara interviewing teachers and students on May 28 at the headquarters of an organization calling for a Mexican revolution on U.S. soil. Soon after he shot the video, many in the group left for an overnight "freedom ride" to Phoenix to protest what Lara tells the camera is a "racist and outrageous" law.

In the video shot before the trip to Arizona, students, teachers and others are seen gathered at the Union Del Barrio meeting hall and cultural center in Los Angeles, called Centro Cultural Francisco Villa - a nod to one of the leaders of the Mexican Revolution - where wall murals picture revolutionary leaders - including Ho Chi Minh - holding machine guns.

"I'm getting on the bus because, I think, that the laws are such a threat to all of us," she says. "I'm getting on the bus for all the people that can't get on the bus - for my students and parents of my students ... I'm here with them in solidarity.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL STORY ON THEFOXNATION.COM

Is the 'Drudge Tax' Coming?

2010-06-11T07:05:00Z

The Federal Trade Commission is trying desperately to save the national liberal lamestream media. And now they're trying to distance themselves from their own controversial proposals to reinvent the media.

The Washington Times has been all over the story from the very beginning. The controversy stems from proposals published in a May 24th working paper on "reinventing" the media. The report outlines a number of ways how the government could step in and supposedly rescue journalism, most notably by imposing taxes. Of course, it's up to the government to rescue journalism, not the free market!!

The Times writes: "A fee could be levied on websites such as the Drudge Report that link to the best news of the day, or a tax could be imposed on consumer electronics such as iPads, laptops and Kindles.
Funds collected would be redistributed to traditional media outlets.

"Passing the buck is a classic bureaucratic dodge. The FTC claims that the well-developed proposals released last month were simply an enumeration of options suggested in 'public comments.' In fact, the agency's Federal Register announcement for the proceeding questioned the propriety of news-aggregator websites that 'do not pay for content' - this document was filed long before public hearings were held.

"The report's views also happen to match positions Mr. Leibowitz has held in the past. Before joining the FTC, he was vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America, an organization that defends an extreme view of copyright law in order to prop up Hollywood's increasingly obsolete business model. At a December workshop, Mr. Leibowitz complained that online news readers get a 'free ride instead of paying the full value - or in fact paying anything - for what they're consuming.'

"Despite the retreat on the electronics tax, it appears Mr. Leibowitz and his staff have not abandoned the opinion that the problems facing journalism can and should be solved by government - even if the exact form this control would take is open to negotiation. As the Obama administration has demonstrated its willingness to ignore negative public opinion in order to expand government involvement in areas such as health care, it is important for Congress to step in and deflate the FTC's latest trial balloon. Government subsidies will destroy, not save, journalism."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE WASHINGTON TIMES' EDITORIAL IN FULL.

Kuhn: Is Obama at a Tipping Point?

2010-06-10T07:05:00Z

Many Americans are openly questioning President Obama's leadership and handling of the Gulf oil spill. Given that presidencies are often judged by responses to big events, is Obama at a tipping point?

So that begs the question, which Kuhn attempts to answer: "Hurricane Katrina. Hostage crisis. Tet Offensive. Is Barack Obama's presidency at a similar tipping point?

"The relevance of the question exemplifies the gravity of Obama's crisis. Obama is learning the lesson of presidents before him. ''Poor Ike,' Harry Truman said of the incoming president, 'it won't be a bit like the Army. He'll sit here and he'll say, 'Do this, do that,' and nothing will happen.''

"Presidents are hostage to events, goes the old political axiom. But that's a half-truth. Presidencies rise and fall far more by their response to great events than to the event itself."

But it's not just the handling of this oil spill crisis that has many Americans souring on the president.

Kuhn continues: "Obama's leadership problem did not begin with BP. There was the coolness to Wall Street malfeasance. The sure victory of financial reform sidelined. The new New Deal that never was. The healthcare bill that came instead and in time, took hold of his presidency. The president seemingly aligned with all the big boogiemen of the day -- big business and big government.

"The change agent personified the establishment. The post-partisan went to the mat for a hyper-partisan issue. The candidate who won his majority with the recession, focused his mandate elsewhere. The man who promised new politics partook in the ugly politics of old, from healthcare's Cornhusker kickback to the Joe Sestak incident. And now, the competent candidate haunted by perceptions of incompetent presidential leadership."

CLICK HERE TO READ DAVID PAUL KUHN'S FULL COLUMN FOR REALCLEARPOLITICS.COM.

Spill Reveals Obama's Lack of Experience

2010-06-08T07:05:00Z

Our Supreme Leader is now looking for an "ass to kick," as President Obama told Matt Lauer. But should it be his own? Byron York argues that the oil leak reveals Obama's utter lack of executive experience.

Many of us during the campaign worried about then-candidate Obama's lack of hands-on executive experience. But the national liberal lamestream media carried Obama's water and helped convince many Americans that there was nothing to worry about. Now 50 days into the oil leak down in the Gulf, we're getting a first-hand look at why we needed someone with more experience.

Byron York says the president may have good intentions, but with oil gushing into the Gulf and no signs of stoppage, that's just not good enough. York writes:

"In mid-February 2008, fresh from winning a bunch of Super Tuesday primaries, Barack Obama granted an interview to '60 Minutes' correspondent Steve Croft. 'When you sit down and you look at [your] resume,' Croft said to Obama, 'there's no executive experience, and in fact, correct if I'm wrong, the only thing that you've actually run was the Harvard Law Review.'

"'Well, I've run my Senate office, and I've run this campaign,' Obama said."

That was an interesting statement. Now York says fast forward to 2010.

"The oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico is gushing out of control. The Obama administration is at first slow to see the seriousness of the accident. Then, as the crisis becomes clear, the federal bureaucracy becomes entangled in itself trying to deal with the problem. 'At least a dozen federal agencies have taken part in the spill response,' the New York Times reports, 'making decision-making slow, conflicted and confused, as they sought to apply numerous federal statutes.'

"For example, it took the Department of Homeland Security more than a week to classify the spill as an event calling for the highest level of federal action. And when state officials in Louisiana tried over and over to win federal permission to build sand barriers to protect fragile coastal wetlands from the oil, they got nowhere. 'For three weeks, as the giant slick crept closer to shore,' the Times reports, 'officials from the White House, Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Environmental Protection Agency debated the best approach.'

"The bureaucracy wasn't bending to anyone's will. The direction from the top was not clear. And accountability? So far, the only head that has rolled during the Gulf crisis has been that of Minerals Management Service chief Elizabeth Birnbaum. But during a May 27 news conference, Obama admitted he didn't even know whether she had resigned or been fired. 'I found out about it this morning, so I don't yet know the circumstances,' the president said. 'And [Interior Secretary] Ken Salazar's been in testimony on the Hill.' Obama's answer revealed that he hadn't fired Birnbaum, and he couldn't reach a member of his Cabinet who was a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue.

"Given all that, perhaps candidates in future presidential races will think twice before arguing that running their campaign counts as executive experience."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF BYRON YORK'S OP-ED IN THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER.

Town Hall of Shame Redux: Dems Missing

2010-06-08T07:04:00Z

Last summer we featured the Town Hall of Shame, naming names of those gutless legislators who didn't have the courage to directly face the American people. Guess what? Get the milk cartons ready: The Democrats have gone missing again.

The left-wing New York Times, of all places, highlighted just how many of these 255 scared Democrats won't face their increasingly informed constituents:

"If the time-honored tradition of the political meeting is not quite dead, it seems to be teetering closer to extinction. Of the 255 Democrats who make up the majority in the House, only a handful held town-hall-style forums as legislators spent last week at home in their districts. It was no scheduling accident. With images of overheated, finger-waving crowds still seared into their minds from the discontent of last August, many Democrats heeded the advice of party leaders and tried to avoid unscripted question-and-answer sessions. The recommendations were clear: hold events in controlled settings - a bank or credit union, for example - or tour local businesses or participate in community service projects. And to reach thousands of constituents at a time, without the worry of being snared in an angry confrontation with voters, more lawmakers are also taking part in a fast-growing trend: the telephone town meeting, where chances are remote that a testy exchange will wind up on YouTube."

The Times lists a few examples for us: "In New Hampshire, where open political meetings are deeply ingrained in the state's traditions, Representative Carol Shea-Porter's campaign Web site had this message for visitors: 'No upcoming events scheduled. Please visit us again soon!' Ms. Shea-Porter, a Democrat, attended a state convention of letter carriers on Saturday, but she did not hold a town-hall-style meeting during the Congressional recess. In 2006, when she was an underdog candidate for the House, she often showed up at the meetings of her Republican rival, Representative Jeb Bradley, to question him about Iraq.

"In Iowa, where voters also are accustomed to coming face to face with elected officials, Representative Leonard L. Boswell, a Democrat, provided few opportunities for voters to see him last week. His itinerary included a groundbreaking for a new law enforcement center and a renaming ceremony for a Des Moines post office.

"In Maryland, where Mr. Kratovil endured considerable heckling last year over the health care legislation, which he ultimately opposed, he did not hold any large gatherings with voters. After returning from a visit to Afghanistan, he held two events with veterans before arriving at an evening discussion here at the credit union in Bel Air, north of Baltimore. "It's dramatically different this break than it was in August of last year," Mr. Kratovil said in an interview after he finished speaking about financial regulatory legislation. "At town halls, there was a group of people who were there to disrupt, purely politically driven, not there because they wanted to get answers or discuss the issues.'"

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON DEMOCRATS AVOIDING THEIR CONSTITUENTS IN THE NEW YORK TIMES.

No Payoff: Where are the Jobs?

2010-06-08T07:03:00Z

The Obama administration promised us that the so-called stimulus would lead to private-sector job creation. But as we digest the latest employment report, one obvious question stands out: Where are the jobs? We'd ask the president, but he doesn't exactly do questions!

More government spending is likely on the way. But what happened to the promises that Obama and the Democrats made the last time we spent nearly a trillion dollars to spur job creation?

Rich Lowry in the New York Post writes: "[T]he administration has added $2.4 trillion in debt in 500 days. This boom in government spending was supposed to produce a boom in the private economy. So far, we're one boom short. The May jobs report is a perfect distillation of Obamanomics, with its emphasis on short-term help to the economy -- the stimulus package, the cash-for-clunkers program, etc. -- that is as sustainable as a sugar high.

"The headline jobs number of 431,000 looked good, but 411,000 were temporary census jobs. They will soon disappear, unless we want to employ Americans in the counting of one another in perpetuity. The 41,000 new private-sector jobs were about 60,000 short of what it takes just to absorb the natural growth of the labor force.

"The driving force in the private economy has been companies pulling back on the liquidation of their inventories, a natural effect that would've occurred even absent President Obama's various stimuli. The reaction of the Democrats to the failure of all the stimulus is to support yet more stimulus."

Finally, Lowry concludes: "Late in the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt's treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, told Congress, 'We are spending more than we have ever spent before, and it does not work.' Democrats have made Morgenthau's plaint their governing ethic. In so doing, they are demonstrating their political and intellectual bankruptcy even faster than they are bankrupting the country."

CLICK HERE TO READ RICH LOWRY'S FULL OP-ED IN THE NEW YORK POST.

Dobbs Drops Anchor in Tea Party Waters

2010-06-04T07:05:00Z

The Financial Times dropped by the studio to profile Lou and discuss the importance of the Tea Parties, the greatest expression of popular will in this country. They talked about how Lou will headline the Tea Party convention in July.

Andrew Edgecliff Johnson of the Financial Times writes: "Mr Dobbs will headline next month's Tea Party national convention, and is clearly aligning himself with the anti-establishment movement.

"'The Tea Party I think is a very important expression of the popular will in this country at a time when that popular will is being both marginalised and in some cases altogether frozen out in Washington DC,' he says.

"The 64-year-old says he does not see himself as a potential leader of the Tea Party, saying such talk misunderstands the movement's nature, but argues that the party is the best vehicle for his ambitions.

"'Where else would you go right now to hear what the American people are thinking? I go to talk radio, I go into the community and I go to the Tea Party,' he say, describing his politics as traditionalist, independent and 'all about America'.

"Independent candidates without large party machines behind them have often crumbled in elections where spending continues to set records but he claims money barriers are surmountable, describing the internet as the new 'machine' of political funding.

"'In my fantasies I think of a candidate occasionally who could run on the energy and the interest of the people rather than the media.

"'It is the media that costs, not the support of the people, and if the media is all it takes to get the support of the people, then all is lost,' he says."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL PROFILE OF LOU IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES.

Obama: Heed Your Own Campaign Rhetoric

2010-06-04T07:04:00Z

Jay Ambrose notes that the American people are increasingly disenchanted with President Obama these days. Ambrose's suggestion to the president: Heed your campaign rhetoric. He explains what he means.

Ambrose begins: "The self-contradictions are catching up with the Obama administration. We will be transparent, they said. Only they aren't. We will be accountable. Anything but. You will find us nonpartisan and above politics as usual, they insisted. Hardly.

"The job offer to keep Rep. Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania out of a Senate primary is instructive on this score.

"While it may be more a mouse's squeak than a lion's roar as scandals go, the administration dodged questions about it for months and then finally put out a memo so vaguely worded as to arouse still more suspicion. That's a far cry from transparency, and about the only excuse for the approach to Sestak -- which seems pretty clearly illegal -- is that everyone does it and always has.

"True enough and reason enough for Republicans to back off calls for a special prosecutor. But at least a few citizens may be trying to recall which of President Obama's campaign speeches promised that his White House would get the job done when it came to tawdriness typical of D.C. politicians."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL-OPED ON OBAMA'S CAMPAIGN RHETORIC FROM JAY AMBROSE.

Morris: Obama Doesn't Have a Clue

2010-06-02T07:04:00Z

The thrill is gone (from Chris Matthews' leg). Even the left-wing NY Times is going hard after Our Supreme Leader. And as Dick Morris writes, it's not about the president's policies, it's about his incompetence.

Morris, writing for The Hill, begins: "Conservatives are so enraged at Obama's socialism and radicalism that they are increasingly surprised to learn that he is incompetent as well. The sight of his blithering and blustering while the most massive oil spill in history moves closer to America's beaches not only reminds one of Bush's terrible performance during Katrina, but calls to mind Jimmy Carter's incompetence in the face of the hostage crisis.

"America is watching the president alternate between wringing his hands in helplessness and pointing his finger in blame when he should be solving the most pressing environmental problem America has faced in the past 50 years. We are watching generations of environmental protection swept away as marshes, fisheries, vacation spots, recreational beaches, wetlands, hatcheries and sanctuaries fall prey to the oil spill invasion. And, all the while, the president acts like a spectator, interrupting his basketball games only to excoriate BP for its failure to contain the spill.

"The political fallout from the oil spill will, indeed, spill across party and ideological lines. The environmentalists of America cannot take heart from a president so obviously ignorant about how to protect our shores and so obstinately arrogant that he refuses to inform himself and take any responsibility.

"All of this explains why the oil spill is seeping into his ratings among Democrats, dragging him down to levels we have not seen since Bush during the pit of the Iraq war. Conservatives may dislike Obama because he is a leftist. But liberals are coming to dislike him because he is not a competent progressive."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL OP-ED BY DICK MORRIS ON THEHILL.COM.

Noonan on Obama's Incompetence

2010-05-28T07:05:00Z

Once again, Peggy Noonan nails it. In her op-ed "He Was Supposed To Be Competent," Noonan makes the case that this oil spill in the Gulf is a disaster for the president and his political philosophy. Can Obama survive it?

Noonan wonders whether the president even knows what a disaster this is not only for him but for his political assumptions. Every one of his policies beg for the public's trust, but when that trust is put to the test, this administration failed. Massively. Noonan begins:

"I don't see how the president's position and popularity can survive the oil spill. This is his third political disaster in his first 18 months in office. And they were all, as they say, unforced errors, meaning they were shaped by the president's political judgment and instincts.

"There was the tearing and unnecessary war over his health-care proposal and its cost. There was his day-to-day indifference to the views and hopes of the majority of voters regarding illegal immigration. And now the past almost 40 days of dodging and dithering in the face of an environmental calamity. I don't see how you politically survive this.

"The president, in my view, continues to govern in a way that suggests he is chronically detached from the central and immediate concerns of his countrymen. This is a terrible thing to see in a political figure, and a startling thing in one who won so handily and shrewdly in 2008.
But he has not, almost from the day he was inaugurated, been in sync with the center. The heart of the country is thinking each day about A, B and C, and he is thinking about X, Y and Z. They're in one reality, he's in another.

"The American people have spent at least two years worrying that high government spending would, in the end, undo the republic. They saw the dollars gushing night and day, and worried that while everything looked the same on the surface, our position was eroding. They have worried about a border that is in some places functionally and of course illegally open, that it too is gushing night and day with problems that states, cities and towns there cannot solve.

"And now we have a videotape metaphor for all the public's fears: that clip we see every day, on every news show, of the well gushing black oil into the Gulf of Mexico and toward our shore. You actually don't get deadlier as a metaphor for the moment than that, the monster that lives deep beneath the sea."

CLICK HERE TO READ PEGGY NOONAN'S FULL OP-ED ON WSJ.COM.

NOLA Paper to Obama: Show You're Boss

2010-05-26T07:05:00Z

The Obama administration's molasses-like response to the Gulf oil leak has many Americans wondering: What the heck are they doing? The local Times-Picayune says it's time for Obama to show he's the boss.

The staff of The Times-Picayune writes: "Americans are growing impatient with the Obama administration's inability to elicit a more urgent response to the BP oil spill and to better protect and cleanup the coast.

"That has federal officials on the defensive, and the nation is demanding that President Obama assume a more forceful role in commanding BP to stop the gushing oil and clean up this mess.

"The administration argues that federal law limits its ability to take over cleanup efforts from the company. Officials also note that the industry, not the government, has the expertise and equipment needed to stop the leak.

"But the federal government, which is supposed to ensure that BP assumes responsibility for this disaster, has often acted timidly during the crisis. President Obama has the bully pulpit to come down hard on BP and its executives, and he should use it. Most Americans are ready for the president to light a fire under the company and under the bureaucracy overseeing the disaster response."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL TIMES-PICAYUNE EDITORIAL URGING OBAMA TO SHOW HE'S BOSS.

Mosque Unbecoming: Not at Ground Zero

2010-05-26T07:04:00Z

A NYC board has now approved a plan to build a mosque at the Ground Zero site. An American Muslim and former Navy lieutenant commander explains why this is a very bad idea.

Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser is the president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy and a former US Navy lieutenant commander. And he took to the op-ed page of the New York Post to explain why the building of a mosque near the Ground Zero site is a misguided idea.

Dr. Jasser writes: "This is not about the building of a mosque or a religious facility. It is not about religious freedom. This is about a deep, soulful understanding of what happened to our country on 9/11.

"When Americans are attacked, they come together as one, under one flag, under one law against a common enemy that we are not afraid to identify. Religious freedom is central to our nation - and that is why the location of this project is so misguided. Ground Zero is purely about being American. It can never be about being Muslim.

"The World Trade Center site represents Ground Zero in America's war against radical Islamists who seek to destroy the American way of life. It is not ground zero of a cultural exchange.

"We American Muslims cannot merely passively avoid Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots. We need to ask ourselves: Are we Americans who happen to be Muslim or Muslims blindly demanding to be American?

"American Muslims will be better served if this project is built further away from Ground Zero and focuses on leading a reform effort. If we help build anything at the WTC site itself, it should be timeless memorials to all those who lost their lives on 9/11 -- memorials blind to faith, race, creed or national origin.

"On Sept. 12, 2001, I was first an American. When those planes hit the World Trade Center, they hit at the core of my being as an American. The attack on my faith by the terrorists was secondary to their attack on my homeland.

"We need to focus our efforts more transparently on teaching Muslim youth that the American concepts of liberty and freedom are preferable to sharia and the Islamic state. American Muslims represent the best opportunity to fight Islamist radicalization not because we understand Islam but because we have experienced and understood what American liberty provides to the Muslim experience."

CLICK HERE TO READ DR. JASSER'S FULL OP-ED IN THE NEW YORK POST.

North Korea's Willing Accomplices

2010-05-25T07:05:00Z

North Korea has now threatened military action against South Korea. Why wasn't there a bigger response from the international community after the North allegedly torpedoed a South Korean ship? Christopher Hitchens has an answer.

Hitchens has seen the Korean DMZ from both sides of the dividing line, and he concludes that the international community appeases Kim Jong-Il because he's a madman who can re-start the Korean War at any moment. Right now there's an armistice, but that may be short-lived. Hitchens writes:

"So volatile and unpredictable and hysterical has the North Korean regime become that it was believed in some quarters that even the finding might trigger a fresh escalation-an escalation that might pass the nuclear threshold before anyone could draw breath. Richard Nixon used to ask his sick and compliant operative Henry Kissinger to imply to the Russians and Chinese that he might be such a touchy president that he was capable of anything-this loopy strategy became known in policy circles as 'the madman theory of war.' In the case of Kim Jong-il, nobody has any difficulty believing that he is delusional and worse, so the blackmail keeps on working.

"North Korea is thought to have enough purely conventional weapons to destroy South Korea's capital, Seoul, which is located very close to the cease-fire line or 'border.' It has also built a series of dams, which, if opened or blown, could flood and drown a good part of South Korea. (A recent apparently accidental such flood, on a smallish scale, at least served to remind the South Koreans what the stakes were.) So this is the way we live now: conditioned by the awareness that no North Korean provocation, however egregious, can be confronted, lest it furnish the occasion or pretext for something truly barbarous and insane."

Let us not imagine what kind of war that can spark. Hitchens concludes:

"The dirty secret here is that no neighboring power really wants the North Korean population released from its awful misery. Here are millions of stunted and unemployable people, traumatized and deformed by decades of pointless labor on the plantations of a mad despot. The South Koreans do not really want these hopeless cases on the soil of their flourishing consumer society. The Chinese, who have a Korean-speaking province that borders North Korea, are likewise unwilling to suffer the influx of desperate people that is in our future. I can't see the United States accepting them in its present mood. Kim Jong-il's junta knows this, as it knows that we are not prepared to fight him. So the deliberate mass starvation and the nuclear blackmail are two aspects of the same depraved system. (Incidentally, if that system doesn't deserve to be called evil, I don't know what does.)

"The evil and the irrationality of the system are also directly related. American intelligence has apparently reported to President Barack Obama that the murder of 46 South Korean sailors was a premeditated action on the part of Kim Jong-il himself, in order to gratify the morale of his military elite and to advance the cause of one of his sons as his impending dynastic replacement. It seems that in April the Dear Leader personally visited and congratulated the naval unit that carried out the torpedo attack. This kind of lethal irresponsibility may seem demented, but I don't know of anyone who studies North Korea professionally who doesn't regard it as at least a plausible explanation. And it seems that the provisional response from Washington has been to urge restraint on the elected government in Seoul, which indeed has little choice but to confine itself to diplomatic initiatives and the dropping of such economic incentives for good behavior as Seoul can still claim to exert. This may well serve to fend off the latest crisis and prevent it from ballooning into full-out madness, but it doesn't excuse us from the realization that we become accomplices in evil every time we seek to soothe the unslakable appetites of the crime family that sits in Pyongyang."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF HITCHENS' ARTICLE ON KIM JONG-IL'S ACCOMPLICES ON SLATE.COM.

So when Hillary Clinton talks about "consequences," is she really ready to get real on North Korea? Or is she another one of Kim Jong-Il's accomplices?

Free Enterprise vs. Government Control

2010-05-24T07:04:00Z

There's a new front in American's culture war, says Arthur Brooks: Those who value limited government and free enterprise versus government control of a managed economy. Who will win?

It's a subject we've been dealing with on this broadcast since its inception, but most notably since Barack Obama was sworn in as the President of the United States. Do we favor entrepreneurship and market forces, or do we value a European-style system with an expanded bureaucracy?

Brooks authored a terrific piece in the Washington Post that tackles this very issue. In discussing America's new culture war, he writes: "This is not the culture war of the 1990s. It is not a fight over guns, gays or abortion. Those old battles have been eclipsed by a new struggle between two competing visions of the country's future. In one, America will continue to be an exceptional nation organized around the principles of free enterprise -- limited government, a reliance on entrepreneurship and rewards determined by market forces. In the other, America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, a managed economy and large-scale income redistribution. These visions are not reconcilable. We must choose.

"It is not at all clear which side will prevail. The forces of big government are entrenched and enjoy the full arsenal of the administration's money and influence. Our leaders in Washington, aided by the unprecedented economic crisis of recent years and the panic it induced, have seized the moment to introduce breathtaking expansions of state power in huge swaths of the economy, from the health-care takeover to the financial regulatory bill that the Senate approved Thursday. If these forces continue to prevail, America will cease to be a free enterprise nation.

"I call this a culture war because free enterprise has been integral to American culture from the beginning, and it still lies at the core of our history and character. 'A wise and frugal government,' Thomas Jefferson declared in his first inaugural address in 1801, 'which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.' He later warned: 'To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.' In other words, beware government's economic control, and woe betide the redistributors."

CLICK HERE TO READ BROOK'S EXCELLENT OP-ED IN THE WASHINGTON POST.

Revolting Against Government Spending

2010-05-24T07:03:00Z

As Americans see what's happening in Europe, they've grown increasing frustrated by a Congress and a White House that continues to spend. And there's now a growing revolt against government spending.

The American people are serious about controlling our massive government deficits and debt. The past few decades of spending have left us in a precarious position, and the American people have awoken to the reality that our economy will come crashing down again if something isn't done. Yet the Democrats and this Obama administration haven't been listening to our call. That is, until several high-profile incumbents have faced the wrath of these voters. Maybe now Washington will get the message.

Barone writes: "It has long been a maxim of political scientists that American voters are ideologically conservative and operationally liberal. That is another way of saying that they tend to oppose government spending in the abstract but tend to favor spending on particular programs. It's another explanation of why the culture of appropriators continued to thrive after the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and during the eight years of George W. Bush's presidency.

"In the past rebellions against fiscal policy have concentrated on taxes rather than spending. In the 1970s, when inflation was pushing voters into higher tax brackets, tax revolts broke out in California and spread east. Ronald Reagan's tax cuts were popular, but spending cuts did not follow. Bill Clinton's tax increases led to the Republican takeover and to tax cuts at both the federal and state levels but spending boomed under George W. Bush.

"The rebellion against the fiscal policies of the Obama Democrats, in contrast, is concentrated on spending. The Tea Party movement began with Rick Santelli's rant in February 2009, long before the scheduled expiration of the Bush tax cuts in January 2011.

"What we are seeing is a spontaneous rush of previously inactive citizens into political activity, a movement symbolized but not limited to the Tea Party movement, in response to the vast increases in federal spending that began with the Troubled Asset Relief Program legislation in fall 2008 and accelerated with the Obama Democrats' stimulus package, budget and health care bills.

"The Tea Party folk are focusing on something real. Federal spending is rising from about 21 percent to about 25 percent of gross domestic product -- a huge increase in historic terms -- and the national debt is on a trajectory to double as a percentage of GDP within a decade. That is a bigger increase than anything since World War II."

CLICK HERE TO READ MICHAEL BARONE'S FULL COLUMN IN THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER.

AZ Firing Back at LA Boycott

2010-05-21T07:06:00Z

UPDATE: Gary Pierce joined Lou on Thursday's broadcast -- you can stream it here.

An Arizona utility commissioner's firing back at the Los Angeles City Council's boycott of his state over the new illegal immigration law. Gary Pierce says he'll turn out California's lights.

The Los Angeles City Council voted to boycott Arizona after the state adopted a new illegal immigration enforcement law. But instead of cowering, Arizona Utility Commissioner Gary Pierce fired right back. Pierce notes that Los Angeles gets about 25 percent of its power from Arizona producers, and he'd be glad to renegotiate the power contracts if the City Council truly wants to boycott his state. Here's a portion of the letter to LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa:

"You explained your support of the boycott as follows: 'While we recognize that as neighbors, we share resources and ties with the State of Arizona that may be difficult to sever, our goal is not to hurt the local economy of Los Angeles, but to impact the economy of Arizona. Our intent is to use our dollars - or the withholding of our dollars - to send a message.'

"I received your message; please receive mine. As a state-wide elected member of the Arizona Corporation Commission overseeing Arizona's electric and water utilities, I too am keenly aware of the 'resources and ties' we share with the City of Los Angeles. In fact, approximately twenty-five percent of the electricity consumed in Los Angeles is generated by power plants in Arizona.

"If an economic boycott is truly what you desire, I will be happy to encourage Arizona utilities to renegotiate your power agreements so Los Angeles no longer receives any power from Arizona-based generation. I am confident that Arizona's utilities would be happy to take those electrons off your hands. If, however, you find that the City Council lacks the strength of its convictions to turn off the lights in Los Angeles and boycott Arizona power, please reconsider the wisdom of attempting to harm Arizona's economy."

Wow, that's firing back! If you'd like to read the letter in full, the Hot Air blog is hosting it on their site.

Barnes: Anti-Incumbent? No, Anti-Obama!

2010-05-20T07:04:00Z

The liberal lamestream media has bought the anti-incumbent message. But as Fred Barnes argues in the Wall Street Journal, it's more anti-Obama and the Democrats than anti-incumbent. Here's why...

According to Barnes, "What demolishes the notion of anti-incumbency as a scourge on both parties are the calculations of credible political analysts-Democrats and Republicans from Charles Cook to Jay Cost to Nathan Silver to James Carville-about the outcome of November's general election. They believe dozens of congressional Democrats either trail Republican challengers or face toss-up races, while fewer than a handful of Republicans are in serious re-election trouble.

"Even Gallup, hardly known for its bold analysis of polling data, doesn't appear to regard anti-incumbency as a problem for Republicans. Its current surveys indicate Republicans are likely to trounce Democrats in November.

'Republicans have had a significant turnout advantage in midterm elections,' Gallup said. 'This means . . . Republican candidates would most likely receive a higher percentage of the actual votes cast [and] would also be virtually guaranteed major seat gains, possibly putting them in range of recapturing majority control of the U.S. House.'"

So what does this all mean? Well, it could mean a Republican majority come January 2011. Barnes continues:

"If there's a Republican wave in November, Republicans will capture the Senate seats in Kentucky and Arkansas and probably in Pennsylvania as well. The most important political event of the week may have been the revelation that the Democratic Senate candidate in Connecticut, the state's Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, had falsely claimed to be a Vietnam veteran. That gives a Republican a chance to win in Connecticut, too-and maybe even a Senate majority."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL BARNES COLUMN ON WALL STREET JOURNAL.COM.

Look Who's Headlining In Las Vegas!

2010-05-19T07:05:00Z

Wayne Newton, Danny Gans, Siegfriend & Roy, Elvis, Sinatra...Dobbs! This summer Lou will headline the Tea Party Convention in Las Vegas, and we know you're wondering whether he'll be outfitted in a sequin jumpsuit.

WorldNetDaily's Chelsea Schilling previews the convention and explains why it's great that Lou will be headlining yet another fantastic Tea Party event. Schilling writes:

"Now he's a headlining speaker at the second tea-party convention in July in Las Vegas, an event geared toward unifying the tea-party movement in the run-up to the fall congressional elections.

"Lou Dobbs will rally tea partiers at the National Tea Party Unity Convention, July 15-17, at the Palazzo Las Vegas Resort in Nevada. The Tea Party Nation, along with ResistNet, Leadership Tea Party, the Tea Party Leadership Coalition and other groups, is organizing the event.

"'Lou Dobbs is just an amazing guy,' Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips told WND. 'He stood up to the powers that be at CNN. He had a very high-rated show there, and he could have kept toeing the party line and doing what they wanted him to do. But he spoke up for America.'

"In 2009, Dobbs was voted to the top 10 list of the most important radio talk-show hosts in America by Talkers Magazine. He graduated from Harvard University with a degree in economics."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THIS PIECE ON LOU FROM WORLDNETDAILY.

Calderon: Listen, Don't Just Lecture

2010-05-19T07:03:00Z

Mexican President Felipe Calderon criticized the new Arizona illegal immigration enforcement law as soon as he arrived here for a State Dinner. But as TIME's Tim Padgett says, he needs to listen when he's finished lecturing us.

Lou's been reporting on Mexico's problems for nearly a decade: a raging drug war that's left more than 20,000 dead, unabashed poverty, a lack of jobs, military and police corruption, not to mention outrageous political corruption. And yet the last few Mexican presidents have felt it necessary to comment on the state of political affairs in this country?! As Tim Padgett writes for TIME, Calderon needs to listen as much as he lectures:

"Once Calderon has had his say, however, let's hope Obama and congressional leaders give him a little piece of their minds, too, before they toast him at tonight's White House state dinner. After all, blaming the U.S. for Mexico's flaws is a time-honored Mexican presidential tradition, even for Calderon. He suggested to Reuters last week that criticism of his handling of Mexico's crises was simply a result of flawed public 'perception.' But on the two biggest issues facing U.S.-Mexico relations, drugs and immigration, Calderon's failings are as much reality as America's are.

"Calderon must know that many in Washington have begun to question his reliance on Mexico's military to fight the powerful drug cartels - and that enthusiasm for the U.S.'s $1.5 billion in anti-narcotics aid to Mexico under the Merida Initiative has faded somewhat, too. He's thrown some 40,000 troops at the narcos, and admittedly had some successes. But from terrorized northern border cities like Juarez, where two U.S. citizens with ties to the American consulate were brutally murdered by gunmen on March 13, to southern tourist resorts like Acapulco, the carnage (often including beheadings) has only worsened. Calderon's government has significantly raised its estimate of gangland killings in Mexico since December 2006, when he took office, to almost 23,000."

"What's still missing is a real sense that Calderon takes seriously enough the only real long-term solution to Mexico's drug war: police reform. 'Calderon has taken some positive steps to improve federal police,' says Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, director of the U.S.-Mexico Studies Center at the University of California-San Diego. 'But Mexico still doesn't have real investigative police forces.'And in Mexico, where most cops moonlight for the cartels, the narcos seem more spooked by the prospect of more professional police than by the presence of more soldiers. Last month I interviewed the police director of Calderon's home state of Michoacan, who had just announced stricter recruitment criteria for cops. A week later her SUV was attacked by narco-hitmen with assault rifles and grenades. Miraculously, she survived, but her two bodyguards - who had watched the door during our interview - were killed.

"Calderon also needs to prioritize another longer-lasting weapon: anti-poverty programs that give younger and poorer Mexicans economic opportunities beyond joining drug gangs. Mexicans in hard hit areas like Juarez are giving him an earful in that regard these days, and so should the U.S. - not just because it might blunt narco-recruiting, but because more social development efforts south of the border also mean fewer indocumentados crossing north of it. Immigration is as much foreign policy as it is domestic policy, and the U.S. has got to push both itself and Mexico's political class to do more to stanch the flow of illegals at the source, inside Mexico, instead of only at the border."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF PADGETT'S COLUMN ON TIME.COM.

Irony Alert: Press Freedom Act?

2010-05-18T07:04:00Z

Our Supreme Leader signed the Press Freedom Act on Monday. But in a case of rich irony, President Obama then refused to take questions from the press. Fun fact: His last press conference? July 22, 2009.

From CBS Reporter Chip Reid "President Obama signed the Press Freedom Act, and then promptly refused to take any questions. The new law expands the State Department's annual human rights reports to include a description of press freedoms in each country. It seemed a good opportunity to showcase press freedom in this country. Recall that last Friday the president refused to take any questions after delivering his angry statement on the oil spill in the Rose Garden. And he has not held a prime-time White House news conference in many months, despite much pleading from pundits and members of the media. So after he signed the bill, and as the press "wranglers" began aggressively herding us out of the room, I asked if he still has confidence in BP. He ignored the question so I tried this: "In the interest of press freedom, would you take a couple questions on BP?" That did elicit a smile, and he told me I was free to ask questions. Someone else shouted, "Will you answer them?" He said he's not holding a press conference today as we were escorted out the door."

Watch it here:

Does that strike you as the openness and transparency you'd been hoping for?

ObamaCare: Curse Worse Than Disease?

2010-05-17T07:04:00Z

They jammed it through, against our better judgment. In assessing the early results of ObamaCare, Reason's Peter Suderman determines that one month after its passage, ObamaCare is already failing. Who knew?!

We tried to slow down the unfathomably quick process by which the Democrats wrote a health-care bill and forced it down the throats of Americans. Any bill will do, true reform be damned. Was there proper debate, discussion or analysis? Of course not. That didn't matter to Our Supreme Leader, Speaker Pelosi, Majority Leader Reid and the rest of the Democratic rank and file. And now we're left with a bill that will raise taxes, overburden our emergency rooms, and lead to a decline in quality of care.

And as Reason's Peter Suderman points out, it's already having a particularly negative effect on our big and small businesses:

"Since the law's passage, the news about it has been been unrelentingly bad. With each passing it day, it looks more likely that costs will go up, businesses will face new bureaucratic burdens, and many individuals will lose their current health care plans-just as the law's critics predicted before its passage.

"Already, businesses small and large are warning of the ill effects of the law's changes to the tax code. In order to generate the nearly $1 trillion necessary to pay for the law, its authors scoured the tax code looking to squeeze out more money whereever possible. And sure enough, within a few days of its passage, a handful of big companies took tax write downs in response to changes in the tax treatment of an existing drug subsidy. An estimate by Credit Suisse puts the total damage across the economy at around $4.5 billion-with $1 billion coming from AT&T alone.

"The change involved the tax treatment of a subsidy that never should have existed, but it suggests the extent to which America's health care system is already reliant on government meddling, and how costly expanding the government's role in the system can be. And, perhaps more importantly, a planned investigation into the write-downs revealed that many big corporations are considering dropping their health care coverage and dumping employees onto the public dole."

Suderman continues later:

"At the same time, cost projections continue to spiral upwards. The Congressional Budget Office now reports that the law will require an additional $115 billion in previously unreported (and yet unpaid-for) discretionary spending. Medicare's actuary has reported that total medical spending in the U.S. will actually go up and that crucial cuts to Medicare-cuts being used to pay for the law's new entitlement spending-aren't likely to happen, but that Medicare benefits are likely to be reduced. And in Massachusetts, the state whose 2006 health care overhaul served as the model for ObamaCare, insurers have gone to war with the governor, and the state treasurer is warning that the program could drive the state into bankruptcy.

"Thanks to the pace of modern medical progress, it's no longer true that, as Jean Baptiste Moliere quipped in 1673, 'nearly all men die of their medicines, not their diseases.' But when it comes to health care, it may be that governments die of their reforms."

CLICK HERE TO READ PETER SUDERMAN'S FULL ARTICLE ON REASON.COM.

New AZ Law: Something Had To Be Done

2010-05-05T07:05:00Z

Newsweek isn't exactly about fair-minded journalism anymore, but columnist Eve Conant wrote this great piece about how if you spend some time in Arizona, and you will see why so many Arizonans want this new law.

We've been reporting since the start that Arizonans overwhelmingly support this new immigration enforcement law. In a Rasmussen poll, 70 percent said they support the bill. Nationally, Gallup reports the American people support the new law by a 51-39 percent margin, and a new poll from Bellweather Research puts that spread at 61-29 percent. But it's Arizona that counts, and outside of the liberal lamestream media's spin, the people really do want this law.

So Newsweek's Eve Conant decided to see for herself, and she says that it's obvious to see why many Arizonans want this new law. Conant writes:

"It's terrifying to live next door to homes filled with human traffickers, drug smugglers, AK-47s, pit bulls, and desperate laborers stuffed 30 to a room, shoes removed to hinder escape. During a month's reporting with police and other law-enforcement agents in Arizona last year, I met many scared people. One man who lived next to a 'drop house' for Mexican workers slept with two guns under his bed, his children not allowed to play in the backyard. The sound of gunshots was not uncommon. 'Four years ago this neighborhood was poodles and old ladies,' he said, too frightened to give his name. 'Now it's absolutely insane.' That morning, authorities had raided the drop house. When the neighbor told me how his kids had been evacuated behind riot shields, he began to cry. Others, too, were unhappy: the undocumented workers taken from the house were exhausted, sweaty, and dead quiet as they sat on a curb with their hands cuffed, waiting to be taken away.

"Within 24 hours I witnessed another bust, this one prompted by a tip from Tennessee authorities. They reported a threat to kill a kidnap victim, and a ransom demand for $3,500. Sheriff's deputies went to a pleasant house with a two-car garage. Inside, they found dozens of immigrants crammed into unfurnished bedrooms, the windows boarded from the inside, shoes and belts piled up in the closet. The search also turned up a Taser-like device, a sawed-off shotgun, and two pistols. Another day, I watched the Phoenix police break up a 'stash house' filled with guns and hundreds of pounds of marijuana. An hour later they raided a McMansion adorned with hunting trophies and Scarface posters; a white SUV jammed with 300 pounds of marijuana was parked out front. (Sixty percent of all the marijuana that reaches the U.S. transits Arizona.) Again, the house was in a high-end development, nowhere near the border."

She confesses that personally she doesn't necessarily think the law is a good idea. But something has to be done: "The overwhelming majority of Mexicans who come here are not criminals. Most are just desperate for honest work. But clearly something needs to be done about the traffickers who bring them to the U.S."

CLICK HERE TO READ EVE CONANT'S FULL COLUMN ON WHY ARIZONANS SUPPORT THE NEW LAW.

Show Your Papers? So What!

2010-05-05T07:04:00Z

Another voice of reason weighs in on the new Arizona law. Travel writer Paul Theroux writes in the Daily Beast that asking for proper identification is commonplace in most countries. So why not here?

Sometimes it takes a travel writer with experience outside the United States to put this all in perspective for us. Theroux begins his column:

"These people who are protesting being asked for identification by Arizona cops-have they been anywhere lately, like out of the country? Like Mexico, or Canada, or India, or Italy, or Tanzania, or Singapore, or Britain-places where people in uniforms have routinely demanded my papers? Chicago White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen is offended ("as a Latin American") by the Arizona law and recently claimed that all illegal immigrants are 'workaholics.' Has he been back to the land of his birth lately, Venezuela, and expected not to be asked for his papers? Ozzie, tell the police in Ocumare del Tuy, 'I'm a Latin American,' and see if that will end the interrogation. And spare a thought for the policeman two days ago who was gunned down in the desert by a workaholic drug dealer.

"The request for papers is not just a line in Casablanca. I have been hearing the question my whole traveling life. I had an Alien Registration Card in Britain and got occasional visits from the police at my home, to make sure I was behaving myself. Seventeen years in Britain as an alien: papers. Six years in Africa: 'Where are your papers, bwana?' Three years in Singapore: another alien identity card and immense red tape in that fussy, litigious bureaucracy.

"As for the U.S., it is annoying, but understandable, especially in a country with 12 million illegal immigrants using the public services. 'Who are you?' is a routine question: The necessity to identify yourself to authority is something that happens every day. You present a credit card at the supermarket and they want to see your license to make sure you're not a grafter. All over the place, renting a car, at the bank: 'I'll need to see two forms of ID.'"

Later, he continues: "As for this Arizona law (which is understandable until the federal government takes a stand), I am delighted to be reassured that there will be no racial profiling. The illegals in Arizona are not just Hispanics. Those of you who have read Dark Star Safari, my book about traveling through Africa, might remember how, in the Sudan, I met a Sudanese man (on vacation in Khartoum from New York) who explained very carefully how he had entered the United States illegally, the best way: Go to Mexico, pay someone some money, and then hide in a fish truck or a vegetable van and hop the border. Sudanese, Nigerians, Pakistanis, Chinese, Indians, Bangladeshis, Brazilians. Illegal aliens come from all over the world to converge on the Arizona, California, and New Mexico borders. The Hispanics are right to be a little indignant, but just a little. It is much easier to sneak into the U.S. than to apply for a residence permit."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL COLUMN FROM PAUL THEROUX ON WHY THIS ISN'T A BIG DEAL.

Brooks: The Limits of Policy

2010-05-04T07:05:00Z

Many of us believe the policies of our federal government determine our outcomes in life. But as NY Times columnist David Brooks suggests, there are limits to public policy and politics.

It's entirely counter-intuitive, but as Brooks points out, the "influence of politics and policy is usually swamped by the influence of culture, ethnicity, psychology and a dozen other factors." And he lays out the case for why we should all calm down when it comes to politics and policy. Brooks begins:

"Roughly a century ago, many Swedes immigrated to America. They've done very well here. Only about 6.7 percent of Swedish-Americans live in poverty. Also a century ago, many Swedes decided to remain in Sweden. They've done well there, too. When two economists calculated Swedish poverty rates according to the American standard, they found that 6.7 percent of the Swedes in Sweden were living in poverty.

"In other words, you had two groups with similar historical backgrounds living in entirely different political systems, and the poverty outcomes were the same.

"A similar pattern applies to health care. In 1950, Swedes lived an average of 2.6 years longer than Americans. Over the next half-century, Sweden and the U.S. diverged politically. Sweden built a large welfare state with a national health service, while the U.S. did not. The result? There was basically no change in the life expectancy gap. Swedes now live 2.7 years longer.

"Again, huge policy differences. Not huge outcome differences.

"This is not to say that policy choices are meaningless. But we should be realistic about them."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF BROOKS' COLUMN ON THE LIMITS OF POLICY.

WSJ: Lou Wooing 'Tough' Audience

2010-04-30T07:05:00Z

The Wall Street Journal followed Lou to a speech at a high school in New York's Washington Heights and watched him speak reminisce about working with illegal immigrants in the hot Idaho sun as a boy.

The WSJ profile begins: "Manhattan Christian Academy, tucked in a Dominican neighborhood in upper Washington Heights, has nurtured generations of poor, immigrant children, turning out many high-school graduates and career professionals. So on a recent evening, parents looked quizzically at the guest speaker who stood in the school's assembly room.

"Lou Dobbs, the former CNN anchor who channeled anger at illegal immigration into a national following, was reminiscing about picking potatoes alongside illegal workers in the hot Idaho sun as a young boy.

"'The work ethic of those people in those back-breaking conditions is something that teaches you a lifelong respect,' said the 64-year-old in gray pinstripes, recalling immigrant children 'busting their tails' while he was 'puking my guts out.'

"Mr. Dobbs, who left CNN in November, made the school an early stop on an intriguing reinvention tour. He's pondering the future-perhaps a run in 2012 for U.S. Senate in his home state of New Jersey, maybe even the presidency. But smoothing the pointed edges of his profile is no easy task."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL WSJ PROFILE OF LOU IN THE APRIL 30TH EDITION.

Lou's a GQ Kind of Man

2010-04-27T07:05:00Z

GQ's Jeanne Marie Laskas meets the man the national liberal media refuses to take time to understand. Find out why she says the leftist media's been wrong about Lou on, well, just about everything.

"According to Lou Dobbs, we've been completely wrong about him. Wrong about his stance on illegal immigrants. Wrong about his reasons for quitting CNN after twenty-seven years. And wrong about his newfound political aspirations. Well, we might actually be right about that last thing. Jeanne Marie Laskas meets the man we thought we knew..."

Here's an excerpt from Jeanne Marie Laskas' fascinating profile of Lou Dobbs:

I can't say exactly how it is I've taken on the role of nagging wife over the past few days I've spent with Lou. It is not the only persona he calls out in me. Mother, campaign manager, shrink, cohort, brat. The thing about Lou is, there's a lot to him. And you can say anything to him. In fact, the more you take him on, the more Lou you get. It is an oddly fascinating sport. Hanging out with Lou Dobbs is like reluctantly going over to the nerdy smart kid's house (because your mother made you) and he turns out to have the keys to an entire amusement park.

I have spent a good deal of my time with Lou trying to fix Lou, urging him to become more, well, normal. (Really, you can say anything to him.) I have frankly told him that I would like him to stop being the guy with the wacko political views and join the sane crowd. "I am going to get right on that-" he has said, and I have told him how much I appreciate that, because I am having a hard time reconciling the Lou in my mind-a big, bouncy head on CNN going on and on about illegal immigration in ways I rarely could stand to listen to, or, more accurately, didn't see a reason to bother listening to-with...this Lou.

This Lou is solicitous. Vastly intelligent. A fun guy to debate, because he believes so passionately in what he's arguing about-whether it's adverbs or border security or mashed potatoes. People where I come from would enjoy this Lou. I wonder why he's allowed himself to say foolish things (illegal immigrants spread leprosy; Obama should produce his birth certificate) that welcome others to so easily turn him into a cartoon.

Say "Lou Dobbs" in a room full of the left-of-center crowd and you're likely to hear ugly words. Racist. Xenophobe. "Populist madman," said Fortune recently. "Blithering idiot," said Times columnist Thomas Friedman. "Hysteria and jingoism" were the words The Nation picked.

There's little doubt that Lou is often just...reckless. Spouts without fully considering the implications, then finds himself stuck defending something even he thinks is ridiculous. Get Lou talking and you find he's so much more nuanced than any of his ill-conceived sound bites. The real Lou has potential. Here is a public figure who has seemingly little control over his own image. I suppose it's that flaw that leaves me sitting here, next to Lou, thinking: This guy's a fixer-upper.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL PROFILE OF LOU DOBBS IN GQ

George Will on New AZ Law

2010-04-27T07:05:00Z

As usual, the Washington Post columnist presents a rational and reasonable take on why this is a law the state of Arizona can live with, and that this is a great experiment with federalism.

Will begins his column: "'Misguided and irresponsible' is how Arizona's new law pertaining to illegal immigration is characterized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She represents San Francisco, which calls itself a 'sanctuary city,' an exercise in exhibitionism that means it will be essentially uncooperative regarding enforcement of immigration laws. Yet as many states go to court to challenge the constitutionality of the federal mandate to buy health insurance, scandalized liberals invoke 19th-century specters of 'nullification' and 'interposition,' anarchy and disunion. Strange.

"It is passing strange for federal officials, including the president, to accuse Arizona of irresponsibility while the federal government is refusing to fulfill its responsibility to control the nation's borders. Such control is an essential attribute of national sovereignty. America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government's refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists 'comprehensive' immigration reform.

"Arizona's law makes what is already a federal offense -- being in the country illegally -- a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona's right to assert concurrent jurisdiction. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund attacks Gov. Jan Brewer's character and motives, saying she 'caved to the radical fringe.' This poses a semantic puzzle: Can the large majority of Arizonans who support the law be a 'fringe' of their state?

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF GEORGE WILL'S EXCELLENT COLUMN ON ARIZONA'S NEW LAW.

Buchanan: Whose Country Is This?

2010-04-27T07:04:00Z

There's a border security and illegal immigration crisis, and Washington has failed to act. So why did President Obama call efforts to enforce our laws "misguided?" That led Pat Buchanan to ask that great question above.

Buchanan lays out what should seem like a slam-dunk argument about why we need more leadership in Washington on this issue and why the states must act in their own interests in the face of such federal inaction. But it's nearly impossible for the left wing and ethnocentric special interest groups to acknowledge even the basic truths about illegal immigration and border security in this country.

Buchanan writes: "With the support of 70 percent of its citizens, Arizona has ordered sheriffs and police to secure the border and remove illegal aliens, half a million of whom now reside there. Arizona acted because the U.S. government has abdicated its constitutional duty to protect the states from invasion and refuses to enforce America's immigration laws.

"'We in Arizona have been more than patient waiting for Washington to act," said Gov. Jan Brewer. "But decades of inaction and misguided policy have created an unacceptable situation.'

"We have a crisis in Arizona because we have a failed state in Washington. What is the response of Barack Obama, who took an oath to see to it that federal laws are faithfully executed? He is siding with the law-breakers. He is pandering to the ethnic lobbies. He is not berating a Mexican regime that aids and abets this invasion of the country of which he is commander in chief. Instead, he attacks the government of Arizona for trying to fill a gaping hole in law enforcement left by his own dereliction of duty. He has denounced Arizona as "misguided." He has called on the Justice Department to ensure that Arizona's sheriffs and police do not violate anyone's civil rights. But he has said nothing about the rights of the people of Arizona who must deal with the costs of having hundreds of thousands of lawbreakers in their midst.

How's that for Andrew Jackson-style leadership?"

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF BUCHANAN'S COLUMN ON WORLDNETDAILY.

Lind: In Need of a Radical Center

2010-04-26T07:04:00Z

Lou's been at the forefront of the "radical centrist movement." Now more than ever we need a radical center to deal with bipartisan failures, says Michael Lind, who authored a 2001 book way ahead of its time.

The extremes of both parties and the demagoguery of what Lind and Ted Halstead call the "mushy middle" have for far too long dominated the national conversation, to the detriment of the nation. And it's about time we counter the extremes and the mushy middle. And in "The Radical Center," Lind and Halstead "proposed a neo-New Deal combination of economic egalitarianism, color-blind civil rights, opposition to wage-lowering, union-weakening unskilled immigration, and enthusiasm for innovation-driven economic growth. To provide a sophisticated, non-demagogic articulation of the views of vast numbers of non-elite voters was the purpose both of 'The Radical Center' and of the New America Foundation."

In his great Salon.com piece, Lind writes: "The mushy middle represents the class interests of the college-educated professional/managerial overclass, a group that makes up at most 10 or 20 percent of the U.S. population. That 10 or 20 percent, however, accounts for nearly 100 percent of the personnel in corporate management, news media and the universities. As a result, the only 'center' that is ever represented in mainstream political discourse is the mushy middle, whose spokesmen include David Gergen and David Broder. Deprived of credentialed advocates in positions of power and influence, radical centrist voters are forced to find their tribunes among anti-system politicians or journalists, like Ross Perot and Lou Dobbs, whose theatrical styles and appeals to (sometimes justified) resentments allow the establishment spokesmen of the mushy middle to dismiss them as primitive Neanderthals and pitchfork-wielding populists."

Lind continues later: "In spite of the lack of a radical centrist wing of one of the two national parties, America is still a democracy, however flawed, and politicians respond, however reluctantly, to the voters. To the distress of economic conservatives and social liberals, in the decade since we wrote "The Radical Center," popular pressure has moved the center of gravity of American politics to the left in economics and to the right in the politics of identity. During the Bush years, Congress passed the Medicare drug benefit, which, for all its flaws, was the greatest expansion of the Medicare system since its origin. And public opinion ensured that Bush's plan for partial privatization of Social Security died without serious consideration in a Republican-majority Congress. Anger on Main Street is forcing Wall Street-funded Democrats to take a tougher line on financial reform than many no doubt would prefer. Meanwhile, voter initiatives and judicial rulings have rolled back the more divisive forms of race-based affirmative action. Today progressive politicians who support earned citizenship for most illegal immigrants, a policy that I favor, are compelled to acknowledge the need for effective immigration law enforcement. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a leader of immigration reform efforts in the U.S. Senate, uses the term 'illegal immigrant' instead of the politically correct euphemism 'undocumented worker,' and President Obama has said: 'We are a nation of laws and we are a nation of immigrants.'

"Our ideas about tax reform, too, proved to be well ahead of the curve. In 2001, we baffled liberals and conservatives alike with our call for cutting the corporate income tax and adopting a national consumption tax. A decade later, the idea of using a value-added tax to address the deficit and lower corporate tax rates has moved to the center of public debate."

CLICK HERE TO READ MICHAEL LIND'S FULL ARTICLE IN SALON.COM AND JOIN US RIGHT HERE IN THE RADICAL CENTER...WE'RE WAITING.

Thin-Skinned Liberals Smear Critics

2010-04-26T07:03:00Z

Left-wing hypocrisy looms large in the national liberal media. And columnist Jack Kelly echoes Lou's remarks that whereas dissent was patriotic from 2001 to 2008, liberal attitudes have surely changed.

In his Pittsburgh Post-Gazette column, Kelly begins: "What a difference an election can make! Dissent is the highest form of patriotism, we were told by leading liberal pundits and Democratic politicians from Jan. 20, 2001 to Jan. 19, 2009. According to these worthies, there were few more noble ways to express dissent than protest demonstrations, which were frequent during the Bush administration. Their attitudes have changed since Jan. 20, 2009. Today, some criticism of the president is "borderline sedition," said Time columnist Joe Klein. It could lead to another Oklahoma City bombing, warned former President Bill Clinton. Mr. Klein was upset because radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh had used the word "regime" to describe the Obama administration. But how many liberals called it seditious when critics referred to the Bush administration as the "Bush regime," which, according to Google, happened at least 6,500 times."

We've talked about that extensively on the broadcast. What was once celebrated by the left as "patriotic" is now demonized and marginalized at every opportunity. And what was once declared necessary and important by the national liberal media is now labeled seditious and dangerous. How can they not see their own hypocrisy? Why does it take people like Lou and Kelly and those "fear-mongers" in talk radio to point this out?

Kelly concludes: "It's understandable why Democrats fear the tea party movement. On March 27, a tea party rally in the desert outside of tiny Searchlight, Nev., home town of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, drew a crowd estimated by the Las Vegas Review Journal at 8,000 and by other news organizations at up to 20,000. A few days later, Mr. Reid kicked off his re-election campaign in Searchlight, "cheered on by more than 100 close supporters," said the Review-Journal. What really terrifies Democrats is not just the number or size of tea party rallies, but that they are occurring at all. For more than a century, the protest demonstration has been almost exclusively a left-wing thing. Conservatives just don't demonstrate. The tea party indicates a level of street activism on the right unprecedented in our history. An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Dec. 16 indicated the tea party was more popular than either Democrats or Republicans. Respondents approved of the tea party, 41 percent to 23 percent. More disapproved of both the Republican Party (28-43) and the Democratic Party (35-45) than approved of them. So the tea party must be smeared, lest it gain even more adherents."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF JACK KELLY'S COLUMN ON THIN-SKINNED LIBERALS SMEARING THEIR CRITICS.

Samuelson: Why VAT Won't Work

2010-04-19T07:03:00Z

You've heard President Obama say he won't raise your income taxes. But is he preparing the nation for a European-style value-added tax? Robert Samuelson explains why it won't work here.

Lou's long said that the only way to derail the economic recovery in this country is to raise taxes on the American middle class. A value-added tax would raise taxes on everybody, from producers to the consumers alike. It's a terrible idea, and as columnist Robert Samuelson points out, it wouldn't even work here:

"The basic budget problem is simple. For decades, the expansion of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- programs mostly for the elderly -- was financed mainly by shrinking defense spending. In 1970, defense accounted for 42 percent of the federal budget; Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid were 20 percent. By 2008, the shares were reversed: defense, 21 percent; the big retirement programs, 43 percent. But defense stopped falling after Sept. 11, 2001, while aging baby boomers and uncontrolled health costs keep retirement spending rising.

"Left alone, government would grow larger. From 1970 to 2009, federal spending averaged 20.7 percent of the economy (gross domestic product). By 2020, it could reach 25.2 percent of GDP and would still be expanding, reckons the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of President Obama's budgets. In 2020, the deficit (assuming a healthy economy with 5 percent unemployment) would be 5.6 percent of GDP. To cover that, taxes would have to rise almost 30 percent.

"A VAT could not painlessly fill this void. Applied to all consumption spending -- about 70 percent of GDP -- the required VAT rate would equal about 8 percent. But the actual increase might be closer to 16 percent because there would be huge pressures to exempt groceries, rent and housing, health care, education and charitable groups. Together, they account for nearly half of $10 trillion of consumer spending. There would also be other upward (and more technical) pressures on the VAT rate.

"Does anyone believe that Americans wouldn't notice 16 percent price increases for cars, televisions, airfares, gasoline -- and much more -- even if phased in? As for a VAT's claimed benefits (simplicity, promotion of investment), these depend mainly on a VAT replacing the present complex income tax that discriminates against investment. That's unlikely because it would require implausibly steep VAT rates. Chances are we'd pay both the income tax and the VAT, making the overall tax system more complicated."

CLICK HERE TO READ ROBERT SAMUELSON'S FULL COLUMN ON WHY A VAT IS A BAD IDEA.

Liberal Columnist Attends Tea Party

2010-04-19T07:02:00Z

Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney attended a Tea Party on Tax Day, and what did he find out about how violent and extreme they are? The answer: Not very! I doubt we'll see him on MSNBC.

Maybe if more liberal columnists and pundits attended rallies for themselves they'd stop perpetuating the myth that the Tea Party is about violence and hatred and bigotry. Until they see it for themselves, they'll continue to put this nonsense out there.

But McCartney deserves great credit for doing what Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews and Bill Maher and President Obama and the Democrats refuse to do. The leftists are convinced that belittling the Tea Parties will make them go away. Instead, these liberals should come out and see for themselves like McCartney:

"I went to the 'tea party' rally at the Washington Monument on Thursday to check out just how reactionary and potentially violent the movement truly was. Answer: Not very. Based on what I saw and heard, tea party members are not seething, ready-to-explode racists, as some liberal commentators have caricatured them.

"...[T]hey struck me as passionate conservatives dedicated to working within the system rather than dangerous militia types or a revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Although shrinking government is their primary goal, many conceded that the country should keep Medicare and even Social Security. None was clamoring for civil disobedience, much less armed revolt.

How does that square up with all the smears we've seen in the national liberal media thus far? It sure doesn't. McCartney continued, saying he even shares the biggest concern he heard at the rally:

"I found that I agreed heartily with the tea partiers on what is perhaps their single biggest concern: that America's swelling government debt seriously threatens our long-term prosperity."

And as for those comments from places where news goes to die (and be tortured first) about how all of these fine Americans are racist? Well, McCartney sees it differently:

"Commentators on MSNBC and elsewhere have called the movement racist and likened it to the Klan. Such criticisms gained strength after two African American congressmen said demonstrators shouted racial epithets at them at the Capitol a month ago. A New York Times poll found that 52 percent of tea party supporters believed that too much has been made of blacks' problems. Perhaps people were concealing their true views, but I didn't see evidence of racism at Thursday's rally. A sign read: 'Not prejudiced. Not racist. Not violent. Not disenfranchised. Not silent anymore.'"

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF MCCARTNEY'S PIECE ON THE TEA PARTIES

Obama's Disregard for the Media

2010-04-14T07:03:00Z

Whatever happened to that openness and transparency? Even the national liberal media's now begging for it. Dana Milbank in the Washington Post says Obama's nuclear summit could have taken place in Soviet-era Moscow.

Of course, this sentiment is nothing new to those of us in talk radio and around the Internet. But even now the national liberal media is beginning to wonder whether this administration will ever deliver on the media transparency we were promised leading up to the 2008 election.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank openly admits that President Obama, the so-called leader of the free world, was "putting on a clinic for some of the world's greatest dictators in how to circumvent a free press" at the nuclear summit this week.

Milbank continued: "The only part of the summit, other than a post-meeting news conference, that was visible to the public was Obama's eight-minute opening statement, which ended with the words: 'I'm going to ask that we take a few moments to allow the press to exit before our first session.'

"Reporters for foreign outlets, admitted for the first time to the White House press pool, got the impression that the vaunted American freedoms are not all they're cracked up to be.

"Yasmeen Alamiri from the Saudi Press Agency got this lesson in press freedom when trying to cover Obama's opening remarks as part of that limited pool: 'The foreign reporters/cameramen were escorted out in under two minutes, just as the leaders were about to begin, and Obama was going to make remarks. . . . Sorry, it is what it is.'

"Alamiri's counterparts from around the world wrote of similar experiences in their pool reports. Arabic-language MBC TV's Nadia Bilbassy had this to say of Obama's meeting with the Jordanian king: 'We were there for around 30 seconds, not enough even to notice the color of tie of both presidents. I think blue for the king.'

"The Press Trust of India, at Obama's meeting with the Pakistani prime minister, reported, 'In less than a minute, the pool was asked to leave.' The Yomiuri Shimbun correspondent found that she was 'ushered out about 30 seconds' after arriving for Obama's meeting with the Malaysian prime minister. A reporter with Turkey's TRT-Turk went to Obama's meeting with the president of Armenia, but "we had to leave the room again after less than 40 seconds.'

"Even the Chinese president, Hu Jintao, was more talkative with the press than Obama. Michelle Jamrisko, with Japan's Kyodo News, noted in her pool report that Hu, at his session with Obama, spoke to the Chinese media in Chinese, while Obama limited himself mostly to 'say hello to the cameras' and 'thank you everybody.'

"Obama's official schedule for Tuesday would have pleased China's Central Committee. Excerpts: 'The President will attend the Heads of Delegation working lunch. This lunch is closed press. . . . The President will meet with Prime Minster Erdogan of Turkey. This meeting is closed press. . . . The President will attend Plenary Session II of the Nuclear Security Summit. This session is closed press.'

"Reporters, even those on the White House beat for two decades, said these were the most restricted such meetings they had ever seen. They complained to both the administration and White House Correspondents' Association, which will discuss the matter Thursday with White House press secretary Robert Gibbs."

CLICK HERE TO READ DANA MILBANK'S COLUMN ON OBAMA'S CIRCUMVENTING A FREE PRESS.

Is this the Change you can believe in? Call Lou: 877-55-DOBBS with your thoughts.

Tea Parties v. Hard-Left Protests

2010-04-14T07:02:00Z

Perhaps nothing shows the ingrained bias of the national liberal media quite like the Tea Parties: first ignored, then decried, then vilified. So Brent Bozell compared the coverage of the Tea Parties to the hard-left protests the media loved.

The Media Research Center has been one of the few brave organizations point out the bias and hypocrisy of the national liberal media. And its president Brent Bozell wrote this great column on the differences in the way the Tea Parties have been portrayed versus how other hard-left protests have been covered. The results, if you've been listening to this broadcast, will not exactly shock you:

Bozell writes: "The movement was launched in February 2009 when CNBC's Rick Santelli suggested throwing a "tea party" to protest government takeovers. A new study by Rich Noyes of the Media Research Center found only 19 news stories on the Tea Party movement for the entire year on ABC, CBS, and NBC. The Obama family dog received more attention.

"How anemic is this? Compare those 19 stories in all of 2009 with 41 stories the networks gave the "Million Mom March" against gun rights in 2000 -- and all before the math-challenged protest even happened. Consider racist and anti-Semitic Rev. Louis Farrakhan's "Million Man March." On October 16, 1995, ABC, CBS, and NBC together aired 21 stories just on one night.

"The difference in tone was just as dramatic. Amazingly, the Tea Parties were assumed to be racist, but Farrakhan's event was not. ABC anchor Peter Jennings devoted all but 75 seconds of his newscast to promotional goo for the Nation of Islam. Jennings sanitized the gathering. 'For most of the hundreds of thousands who came here today, the event far overshadowed the man who organized it,' Jennings claimed. He concluded the show on Farrakhan's behalf, that 'it would be a terrible mistake not to recognize that here today he inspired many people, and in a broader sense, as one participant here after another has reaffirmed, this day, at this time and at this place, really did mean unity over division.'

"Jennings defied logic, and his own ears. The event meant 'unity over division' even as speakers angrily attacked whites for 'rolling toxic waste' into black communities, and screamed about the 'growing racism and incipient fascism of white America.' A young poet called blacks 'God's divine race.'

"Compare that to the Tea Party stories. The victory of Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts spurred heavier network TV attention, another 42 stories in 2010. But now that they had to cover the Tea Party, the tone turned negative: overall, 27 of 61 stories (44 percent) openly suggested the movement was fringy or extremist."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF BOZELL'S COLUMN ON THE NATIONAL LIBERAL MEDIA'S BIAS AGAINST THE TEA PARTIES.

ObamaCare's Ticking Timebombs

2010-04-12T07:03:00Z

President Obama & the Democrats passed a bill without any concern for what the costs will be to the country, nor to our citizens. And as Fortune's Shawn Tully points out, health-care premiums may explode.

Any government that proposes to restore the U.S. economy has to answer five basic questions: What are they trying to do, how are they going to do it, why is it going to work, where are they going to get the money, and how much is it going to cost? Yet we've just watched our Congress and our president sign into law ObamaCare legislation purporting to take over a sixth of the economy, and they didn't answer a single one of those questions. Not a single one.

And that might come back to haunt us. As Fortune's Shawn Tully suggests in his latest piece, "the success or failure of ObamaCare depends on how much premiums rise for the young and healthy under the new rules. Be warned: They could explode."

As Tully right points out, here's the problem with Obamacare: "It's staking its entire success on a complex web of subsidies and penalties designed to pull young and healthy Americans into the insurance system, even as their policies get more expensive. As we'll see, that's an extremely risky wager."

TO PUT THIS ALL IN CONTEXT AND BREAK IT DOWN WITH SPECIFICS, CLICK HERE

The Descent of Liberalism

2010-04-12T07:02:00Z

In a great new piece for National Review, Michael Knox Beran lays out for us the descent of liberalism and the ascendancy of individual liberty. It's a must-read piece from a critical thinker.

Knox Beran begins: "In his 1950 book The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling said that 'in the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.' Liberalism was no less the dominant political tradition; a coherent conservative opposition had yet to emerge. Over the next 60 years, however, the liberal imagination lost its hold on the American mind. In October 2009 Gallup found that just 20 percent of Americans described themselves as liberals; twice as many called themselves conservatives.

"What happened? Part of the answer lies in liberalism's loss of an element that was essential both to its intellectual vitality and to its popular appeal. Liberalism in the middle of the 20th century maintained an equilibrium between the antagonistic principles within it. The classical liberalism that descended from Jefferson and Jackson survived in the movement; the social liberalism that derived from the theories of 19th-century social philosophers, though it was steadily gaining ground, had not yet obtained a complete ascendancy. Liberalism today has lost this equipoise; the progress of the social imagination, with its faith in the power of social science to improve people's lives, has forced liberals to relinquish the principles and even the language of the classical conception of liberty.

"The two philosophies that animated liberalism in its prime were widely different in both origin and aspiration. Classical liberty is founded on the belief that all men are created equal; that they should be treated equally under the law; and that they should be permitted the widest liberty of action consistent with public tranquility and the safety of the state. The classical vision traces its pedigree to Protestant dissenters who in the 17th century struggled to obtain freedom of conscience. Their critique of religious favoritism was later expanded into a critique of state-sponsored privilege in general.

The American patriots who took up arms against George III thought it wrong that some Englishmen were represented in Parliament while others were not. This sort of privilege, in the Old Whig language of liberty from which classical liberalism descends, was known as 'corruption.' The revolutionary patriots, it is true, countenanced their own forms of corruption; when they came to write a Constitution for their new republic, the charter tacitly recognized slavery and other forms of discrimination. The country, in Lincoln's words, was 'conceived in liberty,' but not until it experienced various 'new' births of freedom was the promise of its founding ideal extended to all of its citizens."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF MICHAEL KNOX BERAN'S PIECE ON THE DESCENT OF LIBERALISM

Oreos, Traitors & Uncle Toms

2010-04-07T07:03:00Z

Make sure you read this Associated Press article about the treatment of black members of the Tea Parties. They're taking heat for having the audacity to oppose the policies of the nation's first black president.

Opponents of the Tea Parties do their best to paint these fine Americans as racist and bigots. That couldn't be further from the truth. Gallup, by the way, did a new survey in which it found that Tea Party supporters demographically are generally representative of the public at large. They may skew right politically, the survey found, but as far as demographics are concerned, the Tea Parties look very much like America. Somehow you might have missed that survey in the state-run national liberal media - they're too busy trying to slur the Tea Parties, to paint them as race-based.

The Associated Press takes it one step further, writing a great and disturbing article about the treatment of minorities in the Tea Parties:

"I've been told I hate myself. I've been called an Uncle Tom. I've been told I'm a spook at the door," said Timothy F. Johnson, chairman of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, a group of black conservatives who support free market principles and limited government. "Black Republicans find themselves always having to prove who they are. Because the assumption is the Republican Party is for whites and the Democratic Party is for blacks," he said.

Johnson and other black conservatives say they were drawn to the tea party movement because of what they consider its commonsense fiscal values of controlled spending, less taxes and smaller government. The fact that they're black-or that most tea partyers are white-should have nothing to do with it, they say.

"You have to be honest and true to yourself. What am I supposed to do, vote Democratic just to be popular? Just to fit in?" asked Clifton Bazar, a 45-year-old New Jersey freelance photographer and conservative blogger.

Opponents have branded the tea party as a group of racists hiding behind economic concerns-and reports that some tea partyers were lobbing racist slurs at black congressmen during last month's heated health care vote give them ammunition.

But these black conservatives don't consider racism representative of the movement as a whole-or race a reason to support it.

Click here to read the rest of the Associated Press piece on black Tea Party members taking heat for opposing the president's policies.

Mine Disaster: A History of Violations

2010-04-06T07:03:00Z

The operators of the Upper Big Branch coal mine have a long history of safety violations that at times were five times more extensive than the national average. Could this disaster have been avoided?

According to the Pittsburg Post-Gazette, "The mine in Raleigh County, near Beckley, W.Va., was cited for 458 safety violations last year, with 50 of them listed as unwarrantable failures to comply -- citations reserved under federal mining regulations for instances of willful or gross negligence. Nationwide, an average of 2 percent of safety violations are unwarrantable failures. Slightly more than 10 percent of Upper Big Branch mine's violations last year were unwarrantable failures.

"At the time of Monday's explosion, Upper Big Branch mine was facing more than $150,000 in fines for pending safety violations, after routine scheduled inspections resulted in more than 100 citations three times in a 12-month period. Since July 2008, seven regularly scheduled safety inspections -- inspections planned ahead of time and not the surprise or 'spot' inspections also carried out by federal inspectors -- turned up 614 safety violations, according to records of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration. In the past year, the mine has been cited multiple times for an accumulation of potentially volatile coal dust, poor pre-shift inspections and problems with its ventilation and escape route plans. As recently as March, the company had been cited for inadequate escapeway plans for its miners and accumulations of coal dust. In January, the mine amassed nearly $150,000 in proposed fines from MSHA after safety inspectors cited them for failure to maintain adequate air ventilation or escape route maps, allowing too much coal dust to accumulate and failure to provide adequate and clearly marked escape routes in the event of emergencies."

And according to ABC News "The West Virginia coal mine where an explosion killed 25 workers and left another four unaccounted for in the worst mining disaster since 1984 had amassed scores of citations from mining safety officials, including 57 infractions just last month for violations that included repeatedly failing to develop and follow a ventilation plan.

"The federal records catalog the problems at the Upper Big Branch mine, operated by the Performance Coal Company. They show the company was fighting many of the steepest fines, or simply refusing to pay them. Performance is a subsidiary of Massey Energy. Another Massey subsidiary agreed to pay $4.2 million in criminal and civil fines last year and admitted to willfully violating mandatory safety standards that led to the deaths of two miners.

"The nation's sixth biggest mining company by production, Massey Energy took in $24 million in net income in the fourth quarter of 2009. The company paid what was then the largest financial settlement in the history of the coal industry for the 2006 fire at the Aracoma mine, also in West Virginia. The fire trapped 12 miners. Two suffocated as they looked for a way to escape. Aracoma later admitted in a plea agreement that two permanent ventilation controls had been removed in 2005 and not replaced, according to published reports."

Could this tragedy have been avoided? Sure sounds like it. Let Lou know how you feel: 877-55-DOBBS.

What 1946 Can Tell Us About 2010

2010-04-06T07:02:00Z

Are the Democrats about to repeat a history they'd rather not re-live? Michael Barone, in a great piece about expanding the size and scope of government, explains whether the Republicans are poised for their biggest gains since 1946.

The American people have made it very clear on this broadcast: They do not want to expand the size and scope of government. Never before have we seen a government expand this quickly, and this sharply. But the Democrats have not received that message, and after ObamaCare passed, they made it clear they will continue to increase the role of government in your lives. But Michael Barone argues the last time this happened, in 1946, the Republicans made some of their biggest gains ever. Will the same situation shake out in 2010?

As Barone writes: "Recent polls tell me that the Democratic Party is in the worst shape I have seen during my 50 years of following politics closely. So I thought it would be interesting to look back at the biggest Republican victory of the last 80 years, the off-year election of 1946. Republicans in that election gained 13 seats in the Senate and emerged with a 51-45 majority there, the largest majority that they enjoyed between 1930 and 1980. And they gained 55 seats in the House, giving them a 246-188 majority in that body, the largest majority they have held since 1930. The popular vote for the House was 53% Republican and 44% Democratic, a bigger margin than Republicans have won ever since. And that's even more impressive when you consider that in 1946 Republicans did not seriously contest most seats in the South. In the 11 states that had been part of the Confederacy, Democrats won 103 of 105 seats and Republicans won only 2 seats in east Tennessee. In the 37 non-Confederate states, in contrast, Republicans won 246 of 330 seats, compared to only 85 for Democrats. There are some intriguing similarities between the political situation in 1946 and the political situation today."

Click here to read Barone's full article for the American Enterprise Institute, and see the similarities and the differences between the situation then and now.

Barone concludes: "The parallels between the political situation in 1946 and 2010 are limited but instructive. Americans once again are faced with proposals that would vastly expand the size and scope of government. And they are faced by proposals to increase the power of labor unions. Public opinion polls show that in 2010, as in 1946, most Americans reject such policies. Republicans in 1946 were prepared to advance policies that turned America away from such policies. The question is whether Republicans in 2010, with the prospect but not the assurance, of winning a majority in the House and perhaps a majority in the Senate, are similarly prepared."

Do you believe the Republicans are prepared to take the reins from the Democrats? Call Lou with your thoughts: 877-55-DOBBS.

Independent Voters Flee Obama

2010-04-01T07:03:00Z

It's a big year for independent voters, and we know a thing or two about the independent movement! In this Washington Times piece, Jennifer Haberkorn breaks down why Democrats need to re-capture the independents that are abandoning them.

As Haberkorn writes: "President Obama and congressional Democrats face an uphill climb to reclaim the support of independent voters who vaulted them to the White House and huge majorities in Congress in 2008. At the end of the bitter, intensely partisan battle to pass Mr. Obama's health care overhaul plan, independent voters, once captivated by hopeful campaign promises, are feeling burned and appear eager to oust Democrats in November's midterm elections."

She continues: "In 2008, Mr. Obama's hope and change messages seemed to win over independents, and he captured about 52 percent of the independent vote in the election that year. Self-identified independents continued to back Mr. Obama through June, with about 60 percent saying they approved of his job performance. But as the year wore on and the health care battle gained steam, their approval of the president plummeted and hardened in the low 40s, according to Quinnipiac University polls."

Click here to read more about why independent voters will be the key to the midterm elections.

Kuhn: It's Not About Race, Liberals

2010-03-31T07:03:00Z

From MSNBC to the New York Times to Jimmy Carter, the left continues to push the idea that race is driving opposition to the president's policies. But David Paul Kuhn writes this note to liberals: It's not about race.

On this broadcast we've documented the overwhelming number of liberals lining up to claim that opposition to the president's far-left agenda is steeped in race. Franck Rich, Maureen Dowd and Charles Blow at the New York Times invoke race in nearly every political column. Carlos Watson on MSNBC claimed that "Socialism" is the new code word for a racial epithet that shall not be named. The left is absolutely obsessed with the idea of race, as if anyone could possibly be opposed to the biggest expansion of government we've ever seen.

As David Paul Kuhn writes for Real Clear Politics, it's not about race. He says, "Disregard centuries of furious debate over the role of government. Disregard the Great Recession, historic economic anxiety, this hyper-partisan era, or the comparable vitriol Bill Clinton knew. Disregard white working class skepticism of liberalism since the Great Society, when liberal policy became less concerned with them. Disregard the average man today who sees rich guys and poor guys getting the big breaks from big government. No, Rich explains, it's all about whites who want to 'take our country back' from a black president.

"What then shall we make of Howard Dean? Over and over, fiery Dean railed during the 2004 campaign, 'It's time to take our country back!'

"This is the argument that suffices for logic. Rich tosses out the most loaded charge in American life, racism, without evidence. All he has are anecdotes of angry white activists. So he stereotypes. It's like a white person who watches a black criminal on the local news and draws racist generalizations."

Where are the national liberal media's articles about Dean's claim that it's time to take our country back? Nowhere to be found, of course. The left-wing echo chamber is remarkably silent.

Kuhn concludes, "Fringe activists are often a story of fringe activists. Democrats have exponentially larger problems. They have not won a majority of white men or white women since 1964. Obama's gains with white men in 2008 are gone, and getting worse. The sooner many liberals seriously consider why Democrats are struggling with whites, all over again, the sooner they will win some back. Until then, calling them racist won't help."

Click here to read more of David Paul Kuhn's message to race-centric liberals.

Why We Need Border Security Now

2010-03-30T07:03:00Z

Lou's building bridges and bringing people together to solve our nation's illegal immigration crisis. But the murder of an Arizona rancher proves his point that immigration reform is not a substitute for border security.

Authorities are still investigating the death of 58-year-old southeast Arizona rancher Robert Krentz, but all signs point to an illegal immigrant drug smuggler heading south to Mexico. According to Fox News, "At a news conference Monday, Cochise County Sheriff Larry Dever said Krentz was out checking water line and fencing on the land Krentz's family has ranched since 1907. Krentz had weapons with him in his all-terrain vehicle but didn't use them, according to Dever. Investigators said Krentz apparently came upon one person when he was shot. Krentz was heard telling his brother 'illegal alien' on the radio earlier Saturday, and the area of the killing is a known smuggling corridor, according to authorities.

"While Krentz was still in his vehicle, mortally wounded, he managed to drive the ATV away from the scene at a high rate of speed before becoming unconscious. The ATV still had its lights on and the engine running when authorities found it. Foot tracks were identified and followed approximately 20 miles south to the Mexico border by sheriff's deputies, U.S. Border Patrol trackers and Department of Corrections dog chase teams, authorities said.

"Dever told a Tucson newspaper that while investigators don't have a motive yet, retaliation has been raised as a possibility. The day before the shooting, the victim's brother, Phil Krentz, reported drug smuggling activity on the ranch to the Border Patrol. Agents found 290 pounds of marijuana on the ranch and followed tracks to where they found and arrested eight illegal immigrants. All were still in custody when the shooting occurred, the Arizona Daily Star reported."

Click here to read more about this story and why we need border security first.

ObamaCare: The Myths vs. The Facts

2010-03-26T07:03:00Z

Nancy Pelosi said we had to pass ObamaCare to see what's in it. But many of us still don't know what's in this mess. The liberal FireDogLake blog did an excellent job of breaking down a bill it says falls short of reform.

The good liberals wanted universal health-care, but instead they settled for bill that falls short on many levels, and as they put it, "hurts many people more than it helps." As part of the potentially unconstitutional mandate, "A middle class family of four making $66,370 will be forced to pay $5,243 per year for insurance. After basic necessities, this leaves them with $8,307 in discretionary income out of which they would have to cover clothing, credit card and other debt, child care and education costs, in addition to $5,882 in annual out-of-pocket medical expenses for which families will be responsible. Many families who are already struggling to get by would be better off saving the $5,243 in insurance costs and paying their medical expenses directly, rather than being forced to by coverage they can't afford the co-pays on."

So take a look at Myth vs. Facts, as seen through the eyes of FireDogLake:

Forbes: Chavez-Style Media Crackdown

2010-03-26T07:02:00Z

As Hugo Chavez continues to crack down on media dissent in Venezuela, Steve Forbes warns that we could be witnessing a similar media crackdown coming as part of President Obama's hard-left agenda.

Forbes, in his latest editorial on FoxNews.com, asks the key question after discussing the "media reform" movement in this country: "Once the federal government starts subsidizing our own free press, how long until the feds start revoking broadcast licenses of government opponents and bringing pesky reporters up on charges of say, 'corruption' or 'subversion'?"

He argues that "[m]any of Chavez¹s most ardent supporters here in the U.S. come out of the 'media reform' movement, which believes that our corporate media has been thoroughly co-opted by capitalists bent on destroying the benevolent leadership of the likes of Chavez. They think that our capitalist-plagued media world is in dire need of reform. The chief proponent of this thinking which amounts to an unprecedented government intrusion into our own country's media -- is Professor Robert McChesney, founder of the Orwellian-named Free Press, one of the most influential organizations in the growing 'media reform' movement on the far-left."

CLICK HERE TO READ ALL ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF A COMING CRACKDOWN OF THE MEDIA IN THIS COUNTRY AND THE RETURN OF THE FAIRNESS DOCTRINE.

Uh Oh: ObamaCare on Day One

2010-03-25T07:04:00Z

President Obama promised that his health-care plan would be good for families and for businesses. But the Wall Street Journal breaks down why companies are already warning about higher health-care costs for their employees. The message from some companies is very clear: "Expect changes for the worse to your health benefits as the direct result of this bill, and maybe as soon as this year."

From this great piece on the WSJ editorial page, it's clear that ObamaCare's effects are already being seen in American corporations. Caterpillar has already said this "reform" bill would cost the company at least $100 million more in the first year alone. Then medical device maker Medtronic warned that new taxes on its products could force it to lay off a thousand workers. And now Verizon joins the roll of businesses staring at adverse consequences.

From the WSJ: "When Congress created the Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003, it included a modest tax subsidy to encourage employers to keep drug plans for retirees, rather than dumping them on the government. The Employee Benefit Research Institute says this exclusion
"In a $5.4 billion revenue grab, Democrats decided that this $665 fillip should be subject to the ordinary corporate income tax of 35%. Most consulting firms and independent analysts say the higher costs will induce some companies to drop drug coverage, which could affect about five million retirees and 3,500 businesses. Verizon and other large corporations warned about this outcome.

"U.S. accounting laws also require businesses to immediately restate their earnings in light of the higher tax burden on their long-term retiree health liabilities. This will have a big effect on their 2010 earnings.

"While the drug tax subsidy is for retirees, companies consider their benefit costs as a total package. The new bill might cause some to drop retiree coverage altogether. Others may be bound by labor contracts to retirees, but then they will find other ways to cut costs. This means raising costs or reducing coverage for other employees. So much for Mr. Obama's claim that if you like your coverage, you can keep it
"In its employee note, Verizon also warned about the 40% tax on high-end health plans, though that won't take effect until 2018. "Many of the plans that Verizon offers to employees and retirees are projected to have costs above the threshold in the legislation and will be subject to the 40 percent excise tax." These costs will start to show up soon, and, as we repeatedly argued, the tax is unlikely to drive down costs. The tax burden will simply be spread to all workers the result of the White House's too-clever decision to tax insurers, rather than individuals."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF THIS WSJ EDITORIAL ON OBAMACARE'S EFFECTS ALREADY BEING SEEN ON DAY ONE...

Are Your Medical Records Secure?

2010-03-24T07:04:00Z

Now that ObamaCare is the law of the land, the founder of Patient Privacy Rights says that eletronic medical records could undermine good care if people are afraid to confide in their doctors.

There are so many problems with ObamaCare, and Lou's discussed them every single day on the broadcast: an unconstitutional individual mandate, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of taxes on the middle class, the potential decline in the speed and quality of care, to name a few.

But one of the less-discussed factors is whether your medical records will be secure now that they will be moved online. As Deborah C. Peel, a psychiatrist in private practice, founder of Patient Privacy Rights and leader of the bipartisan Coalition for Patient Privacy, writes in the Wall Street Journal, the president says electronic systems will reduce costs and improve quality, but they could undermine good care if people are afraid to confide in their doctors.

"A patient's sensitive information should not be shared without his consent. But this is not the case now, as the country moves toward a system of electronic medical records.

"In 2002, under President George W. Bush, the right of a patient to control his most sensitive personal data from prescriptions to DNA was eliminated by federal regulators implementing the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act. Those privacy notices you sign in doctors' offices do not actually give you any control over your personal data; they merely describe how the data will be used and disclosed.

"In a January 2009 speech, President Barack Obama said that his administration wants every American to have an electronic health record by 2014, and last year's stimulus bill allocated over $36 billion to build electronic record systems. Meanwhile, the Senate health-care bill just approved by the House of Representatives on Sunday requires certain kinds of research and reporting to be done using electronic health records. Electronic records, Mr. Obama said in his 2009 speech, 'will cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests [and] save lives by reducing the deadly but preventable medical errors that pervade our health-care system.'

"But electronic medical records won't accomplish any of these goals if patients fear sharing information with doctors because they know it isn't private. When patients realize they can't control who sees their electronic health records, they will be far less likely to tell their doctors about drinking problems, feelings of depression, sexual problems, or exposure to sexually transmitted diseases. In 2005, a California Healthcare Foundation poll found that one in eight Americans avoided seeing a regular doctor, asked a doctor to alter a diagnosis, paid privately for a test, or avoided tests altogether due to privacy concerns."

CLICK HERE TO SEE MORE OF DEBORAH PEEL'S MUST-READ COLUMN IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

ObamaCare Will Spread the Wealth

2010-03-22T07:04:00Z

President Obama said on the campaign trail in October 2008 that he wanted to spread the wealth around. And now, thanks to ObamaCare, the president will get his wish. That's exactly what this bill does.

Roberton Williams, an economist at the Tax Policy Center, puts it as clear as can be: "It's very clear that taxes are levied on the wealthy and the benefits will spread across the entire income distribution, with a lot going to expanded Medicaid distribution and expanding health insurance...One couldn't claim he didn¹t keep that promise" to "spread the wealth around."

As Ryan J. Donmoyer writes for Bloomberg News, "In all, the bill would generate $409.2 billion in additional taxes by 2019, according to an analysis by the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan agency. The bill also imposes about $69 billion more in penalties for individuals and businesses who don¹t meet mandates to buy insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office, another nonpartisan agency.

"Most of the revenue would come from higher Medicare taxes on about 1 million individuals earning more than $200,000 and about 4 million couples filing jointly who make more than $250,000.

"The legislation would for the first time apply Medicare taxes to investment income received by these households beginning in 2013. The 3.8 percent rate would apply to unearned income such as realized capital gains, dividends, interest, rents, and royalties. It wouldn¹t apply to other income subject to income taxes, including interest from municipal bonds and retirement accounts such as 401(k) plans until funds are withdrawn.

"Obama's budget proposes to allow the existing 15 percent tax rate on dividends and capital gains to rise to 20 percent in 2011 for the same high-earners. Layering a 3.8 percent Medicare tax on top of that would mean a new top rate on dividends and capital gains of 23.8 percent. The top tax rates on interest and rental income would rise to as high as about 44 percent, assuming other Obama tax increases on high-earners are enacted.

"The bill also increases the individual's share of Medicare tax currently imposed on salaries starting at $200,000 for individuals and $250,000 for couples to 2.35 percent, from 1.45 percent currently."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF DONMOYER'S COLUMN THAT SHOWS EXACTLY HOW THIS BILL SPREADS THE WEALTH.

Goodwin: Fear Bam Big Government

2010-03-22T07:03:00Z

NY Post columnist Michael Goodwin says either you believe America should play a unique role in expanding individual liberty, or you believe we should trim our freedoms to fit international norms. It's clear where Obama stands.

Goodwin, one of the best columnists working today and frequent guest of this broadcast, breaks down the mother of all culture wars in his latest piece:

"One of these days, God willing, we won't have health care to kick around any more. But hold the champagne. No matter the out come in Congress, the final vote won't be the end of the raging national conflict.

"In fact, get ready for the sequel. And Part III and probably Part IV as well.

"That's because the battle over health care is merely a front in a larger war. Thanks to President Obama's statist agenda, America's new civil war is, at heart, the mother of all culture wars.

"It's the showdown between Americans who want bigger government and those who want smaller government. And it won't be over anytime soon.

"Not only does it encompass and include other wedge issues, such as abortion, taxing and spending, but the war over the size of government goes to the heart of the concept of American exceptionalism.

"Either you believe America is different and should play a unique role in expanding individual liberty, or you believe we should trim our freedoms to fit international norms, as embodied by centralized authorities and global organizations like the United Nations.

"It's clear where Obama stands."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF GOODWIN'S EXCELLENT COLUMN ON THE MOTHER OF ALL CULTURE WARS...

Let the Health-Care Wars Begin

2010-03-18T07:04:00Z

Think Sunday's vote spells the end of this health-care debate? Think again. Fred Barnes, writing for the Wall Street Journal, says it's just the opposite: The health-care wars are only beginning. Buckle up.

As Barnes writes, "On Dec. 7, 1941, an announcement was made during the football game between the hometown Washington Redskins and the Philadelphia Eagles. All the generals and admirals at Griffith Stadium were instructed to report to their duty stations. Little did they know their lives would be changed forever and America would be at war, or on war footing, for the next half-century. Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

"America will be in a constant health-care war if ObamaCare is enacted. Passage wouldn't end the health-care debate. Rather, it would perpetuate ObamaCare as the dominant issue for decades to come, reshape politics, create an annual funding crisis in Congress, and generate a spate of angry lawsuits. Yet few in Washington seem aware of what lies ahead.

"We only have to look at Great Britain to get a glimpse of the future. The National Health Service socialized medicine was created in 1946 and touted as the envy of the world. It's been a contentious issue ever since. Its cost and coverage are perennial subjects of debate. The press, especially England's most popular newspaper, The Daily Mail, feasts on reports of long waiting periods, dirty hospitals, botched care and denied access to treatments. A Conservative member of the European Parliament, Daniel Hannan, last year in an interview on Fox News denounced the NHS as a '60-year mistake,' declaring he 'wouldn't wish it on anybody.'

"As prime minister, Margaret Thatcher bravely cut NHS spending in the 1980s, but current Tory leaders regard criticism of the NHS as too risky. 'The Conservative Party stands four square behind the NHS,' its leader, David Cameron, said in response to Mr. Hannan. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi believes ObamaCare would have a more congenial fate that it will become as popular as Social Security and Medicare with voters. She's kidding herself. Social Security and Medicare were popular from the start and passed with bipartisan support. ObamaCare is unpopular and partisan. It's extremely controversial. Its passage is far more likely to spark a political explosion than a wave of acceptance. Democratic leaders believe the public doesn't focus on the process of how legislation is enacted. But in this case they're wrong.

"I've been amazed at how many people understand 'reconciliation' -- a process that allows budget and spending bills to pass in the Senate with only 51 votes, instead of 60. Many voters are also now studying the details of the 'Slaughter solution,' which would allow the House to 'deem' the Senate health-care bill to have passed without actually voting on it and then to vote through changes to the Senate bill. These legislative shortcuts are already infuriating ObamaCare's opponents."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF BARNES' OP-ED IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

The Slaughter Solution: Constitutional?

2010-03-17T07:04:00Z

It's time for dirty tricks: The Democrats are trying to pass the Senate version of ObamaCare without actually voting on it. But is the Slaughter Solution even constitutional? A former federal appellate judge says no way.

Michael W. McConnell, a former federal appellate court judge, director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, says the Slaughter solution simply cannot be squared with Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution.

In a great op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, McConnell argues that this is unconstitutional because no bill can become law unless the exact same text is approved by a majority of both houses of Congress. He writes:

"Enter the Slaughter solution. It may be clever, but it is not constitutional. To become law hence eligible for amendment via reconciliation the Senate health-care bill must actually be signed into law. The Constitution speaks directly to how that is done. According to Article I, Section 7, in order for a "Bill" to "become a Law," it "shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate" and be "presented to the President of the United States" for signature or veto. Unless a bill actually has "passed" both Houses, it cannot be presented to the president and cannot become a law.

To be sure, each House of Congress has power to "determine the Rules of its Proceedings." Each house can thus determine how much debate to permit, whether to allow amendments from the floor, and even to require supermajority votes for some types of proceeding. But House and Senate rules cannot dispense with the bare-bones requirements of the Constitution. Under Article I, Section 7, passage of one bill cannot be deemed to be enactment of another.

The Slaughter solution attempts to allow the House to pass the Senate bill, plus a bill amending it, with a single vote. The senators would then vote only on the amendatory bill. But this means that no single bill will have passed both houses in the same form. As the Supreme Court wrote in Clinton v. City of New York (1998), a bill containing the "exact text" must be approved by one house; the other house must approve "precisely the same text."

These constitutional rules set forth in Article I are not mere exercises in formalism. They ensure the democratic accountability of our representatives. Under Section 7, no bill can become law unless it is put up for public vote by both houses of Congress, and under Section 5 "the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House on any question . . . shall be entered on the Journal." These requirements enable the people to evaluate whether their representatives are promoting their interests and the public good. Democratic leaders have not announced whether they will pursue the Slaughter solution. But the very purpose of it is to enable members of the House to vote for something without appearing to do so. The Constitution was drafted to prevent that."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF MCCONNELL'S WALL STREET JOURNAL OP-ED.

Pull the Plug, Mr. President

2010-03-15T07:04:00Z

It's a big week for the future of ObamaCare. And the editorial board of the New York Daily News says it's time for Our Supreme Leader to ditch his top legislative initiative because the people don't want it.

In this great editorial, the Daily News staff summarizes so many of the arguments Lou has been making day after day in his effort to persuade the Democrats and this White House to focus on jobs and drop this detour.

"Health reform: Down the stretch it comes. President Obama has gone so far as to postpone an overseas trip in a last-ditch push to get a comprehensive reform bill to his desk.

He shouldn't waste his energy.

Not with unemployment justifiably the nation's top concern and the possibility of a double-dip recession still looming. Remember how Obama said, in his State of the Union reboot, "Jobs must be our No. 1 focus in 2010"? Well, apparently he doesn't.

Not with the American people abandoning the President's prescription in huge numbers. Just one in four voters supports the reform bill as written; half want Congress to start over. Compare that with the popular support other major pieces of social legislation enjoyed before passage, like welfare reform (68%), Medicare (63%) and civil rights (60%).

Not with health care costs having risen 73% over the last decade - with Medicaid growing at 21% a year - and showing no signs of coming down to Earth. Controlling costs is the absolute, unconditional, a-blind-man-could-see-it prerequisite for expanding coverage.

Not with American health care quality actually quite impressive in many respects, including world-leading rates for patients surviving cancer and among the shortest wait times for hard-to-find treatments and surgeries.

Not with a half-dozen accounting gimmicks built into the legislation - including the fact that federal budget projections are based on 10 years worth of tax collections and just six years of spending increases.

Not with the Senate, lacking even a single Republican vote, having to resort to reconciliation, a little-used parliamentary maneuver, to get it through.
Sure, it's been used before - but not on anything that has such limited public support.

Not after all the cynical back room deals - deals Obama has committed to removing - having frayed the public trust. With legislation of this magnitude, that is not a renewable resource."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE OF THE NY DAILY NEWS' EDITORIAL.

Wash. Times: Obama's Sick Obsession

2010-03-15T07:03:00Z

The Democrats are trying their best to re-insert government-run health care into the ObamaCare bill. In fact, as the Washington Times writes, it's Obama's sick obsession to pass nationalized health care.

The Washington Times editorial begins: "Nationalized health care is the progressives' Golden Fleece. It is their obsession, the ultimate prize that was denied to previous administrations but is closer than it ever has been.
As the ability of government to take over the health care system draws tantalizingly near, the president and leaders of the majority party have become infected with a kind of mania. President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders seem determined to ram through a severely flawed piece of legislation by any means necessary, heedless of the desires of the American people or the negative impact on the system they mistakenly say needs to be saved.

"A large majority of Americans are satisfied with their current health care plans, though most also think the system could be improved. Yet proponents of the Democrats' radical health care overhaul brazenly claim the system is irretrievably broken and only radical surgery will save it. According to the latest Gallup poll numbers, less than a fifth of even those who favor health reform agree with that position. The majority of Americans are divided between those who want a scaled-back health care measure and those who want the current project dropped entirely. If any system is broken, it is the legislative process."

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST OF THE WASHINGTON TIMES' EDITORIAL

Dem Pollsters See Midterm Disaster

2010-03-12T08:04:00Z

Lou's been saying it for many months, and two prominent Democratic pollsters agree. They warn that if the Democrats ignore the health-care polls, the November midterms will be costly for the party.

Writing in the Washington Post, Patrick H. Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen say that the Democrats' "blind persistence in the face of reality threatens to turn this political march of folly into an electoral rout in November. In the wake of the stinging loss in Massachusetts, there was a moment when the president and the Democratic leadership seemed to realize the reality of the health-care situation. Yet like some seductive siren of Greek mythology, the lure of health-care reform has arisen again. As pollsters to the past two Democratic presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, respectively, we feel compelled to challenge the myths that seem to be prevailing in the political discourse and to once again urge a change in course before it is too late.
At stake is the kind of mainstream, common-sense Democratic Party that we believe is crucial to the success of the American enterprise."

Click here to read the full column from these two Democratic pollsters for their full reasons why passing ObamaCare will lead to a midterm disaster.

'Twisting Arms' to Pass ObamaCare

2010-03-10T08:04:00Z

NY Post columnist Michael Tanner says "President Obama's attempts to ram health- care reform through an increasingly reluctant Congress are starting to resemble a really eventful episode of The Sopranos."

We've been reporting on these Chicago-style strong-arm tactics for quite some time, but Michael Tanner's great column lays out the case clearly: The president and his staff will twist as many arms as it takes to ram ObamaCare through, whether you like it or not.

Tanner writes: "Whether or not you believe former Rep. Eric Massa's bizarre accusations of locker-room confrontations and conspiracies to drive him from office, there is no doubt that the Obama administration and its congressional allies are willing to use every trick in the book to get this bill passed.

"They've already bought votes with pork and special deals -- the 'Louisiana purchase' ($300 million to bolster that state's Medicaid program, which swayed Sen. Mary Landrieu); the 'Cornhusker kickback' ($100 million to Medicaid there, sweetening the pot for Sen. Ben Nelson), and Florida's 'Gator Aid' (a Medicare deal potentially worth $5 billion, a hefty price for Sen. Bill Nelson's vote). Plus the millions for Connecticut hospitals, Montana asbestos abatement and so on.

"Nor were the Obamans willing to let a little thing like election laws stand in the way. They rewrote Massachusetts law to allow for an appointed senator to hold office for several months, hoping to get the bill through before the special election that Scott Brown ultimately won. Their plans spoiled, they even considered holding up Brown's seating to let the appointed senator continue to vote on health care -- until public outrage forced them to back down.

"And, of course, there has been an unprecedented willingness to ignore congressional rules -- from the failure to appoint a 'conference committee' to negotiate differences between the House and Senate bills, to their current plans to use the reconciliation process to bypass a Republican filibuster. Expect the tactics to get even dirtier now.

"Those who support the president can expect favors. No sooner had Rep Jim Matheson (D-Utah) suggested that he might be willing to switch his vote and support the latest version of ObamaCare than his brother was nominated for a federal judgeship. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) is also on the undecided list. And, purely by coincidence no doubt, the Justice Department just announced that it is dropping an FBI investigation that has been swirling about the congressman. Gosh, if only Charlie Rangel were one of the undecideds."

Click here for more of Tanner's great column...

End of the Road for Obama?

2010-03-09T08:04:00Z

My, how the mighty have fallen. Just 16 months ago the state-run national liberal media and so many Americans rejoiced at the election of Barack Obama. Now, well, not so much: Is the dream over?

As Simon Heffer writes for the Telegraph (UK) from New York, the United States of America is "mired in unhappiness," and President Obama is not equipped to deliver on the change that he promised in 2008:

"It is a universal political truth that administrations do not begin to fragment when things are going well: it only happens when they go badly, and those who think they know better begin to attack those who manifestly do not. The descent of Barack Obama's regime, characterised now by factionalism in the Democratic Party and talk of his being set to emulate Jimmy Carter as a one-term president, has been swift and precipitate. It was just 16 months ago that weeping men and women celebrated his victory over John McCain in the American presidential election. If they weep now, a year and six weeks into his rule, it is for different reasons."

So how does Heffer describe Obama's stunning rise from one-term senator to president of the greatest nation on earth? The same way Lou has characterized it: "idolatry."

"Mr Obama benefited in his campaign from an idiotic level of idolatry, in which most of the media participated with an astonishing suspension of cynicism. The sound of the squealing of brakes is now audible all over the American press; but the attack is being directed not at the leader himself, but at those around him. There was much unconditional love a year or so ago of Rahm Emanuel, Mr Obama's Chief of Staff; oleaginous profiles of this Chicago political hack, a veteran of that unlovely team that polluted the Clinton White House, appeared in otherwise respectable journals, praising the combination of his religious devotion, his family-man image, his ruthless operating technique and his command of the vocabulary of profanity. Now, supporters of the President are blaming Mr Emanuel for the failure of the Obama project, not least for his inability to construct a deal on health care."

And what about the audacity of hope? Will it alone turn America around?

"There are lessons from the stumbling of Mr Obama for our own country as we approach a general election. Vacuous promises of change are hostages to fortune if they cannot be delivered upon to improve the living conditions of a people. The slickness of campaigning that comes from a combination of heavy funding and public relations expertise does not inevitably translate into an ability to govern. There is no point a nation's having the audacity of hope unless it also has the sophistication and the will to turn it into action. As things stand, Barack Obama and America under his leadership do not."

Click here to read more of Heffer's piece for the Telegraph...

President Obama's $8.6 Trillion Deficits

2010-03-09T08:03:00Z

Liberals have been asking why fiscal conservatives are suddenly concerned about the deficit now when they weren¹t holding tea parties back when Bush was still in office. Kyle Wingfield tells us why.

In a fantastic blog post for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Wingfield breaks down why anyone trying to claim a fiscal equivalence between the Bush era and the Obama era needs to review the latest report from the Congressional Budget Office.

According to Wingfield, here are the numbers to really worry about:

"$9.8 trillion: The cumulative budget deficits from 2010-2020 given Obama¹s plans, according to CBO. In other words, we will average a $1 trillion deficit over the next 10 years, after never breaching $1 trillion a single time before Bush¹s final budget.

$3.8 trillion: The additional budget deficits from 2010-2020 given Obama¹s plans, compared to just leaving the budget on auto-pilot, according to CBO.
90 percent: The public debt as a share of the total economy by 2020 given Obama¹s plans, according to CBO. The current figure is 53 percent.

80 percent: The amount by which the White House has overestimated next year¹s economic growth, according to CBO (4.3 percent GDP growth in 2011 forecast by White House, versus 2.4 percent per CBO). Even if the White House is correct and the economy is about to come roaring back, it is foolish to count on such spectacular growth. (Recall what I¹ve said before about rosy scenarios.)

24.1 percent: The average proportion of GDP that the federal government will spend from 2010-2020 given Obama¹s plans, according to CBO. The 40-year historical average is 20.7 percent. So, we are talking about a federal government in 2020 that is one-sixth larger than it historically has been.

And all of this assumes that there will be no national emergencies over the next 10 years: No terrorist attacks or natural disasters that require extra spending. And it assumes that we will have a decade of uninterrupted economic growth; history suggests that's unlikely."

Anyone else want to claim false equivalence between Presidents Bush and Obama? Do these numbers startle you? Call Lou: 877-55-DOBBS.

In Defense of Rhode Island Firings

2010-03-08T08:04:00Z

Lou defended Central Falls Schools Superintendent Frances Gallo's decision to fire her entire school staff when it became clear that was the only way to educate the students. The Boston Globe agrees.

In an editorial this weekend in the Boston Globe, the editorial board
writes:

Teacher firings in R.I. show resolve to boost poor schools

"THE DECISION to fire the entire staff of Central Falls High School, one of Rhode Island¹s six lowest-performing schools, is an extreme measure, shocking even to some education-reform supporters, but one that symbolizes the iron will required to turn around failing schools. Whether the firings lead to immediate improvements or not, they are a necessary tool to empower superintendents to break the educational logjams that hold back students. By handing such power to superintendents, states are also enabling the public to hold them accountable for the effectiveness of their actions.

"There is little doubt that Central Falls High is the type of long-suffering school that requires serious action. Located in a struggling former mill city of 19,000 people, it manages to graduate only 48 percent of its students in the usual four years; only 7 percent of its 11th graders reach proficiency in math.

Under pressure from the state to make improvements, Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallo asked teachers to devote an extra 90 minutes per week and two weeks over the summer to training; most of the time would be paid, boosting full-scale teachers¹ salaries from $72,000 per year to $75,400. In addition, 25 minutes of instruction would be added to each school day. When the union refused, demanding a three-times higher pay increase, the superintendent shifted to a 'turnaround' strategy and fired all teachers and administrative staff. Clearly, strict action was needed."

Click here to read more from the Boston Globe's editorial...

Sen. Bunning: Why I Took a Stand

2010-03-04T08:04:00Z

Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning single-handedly held up a bill that would extend unemployment benefits for the jobless. In a USA Today op-ed, the senator explains his opposition to the bill's passage.

It's not that Senator Bunning doesn't agree with the benefits extension. But he felt he had to take a stand against passing bills without paying for them. He says: "If the Senate cannot find $10 billion to pay for a measure we all support, we will never pay for anything."

In that op-ed, Bunning writes: "Last week, Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., asked to pass a 30-day extensions bill for unemployment insurance and other federal programs. Earlier in February, those extensions were included in a broader bipartisan bill that was paid for but did not meet Sen. Reid's approval, and he nixed the deal. When I saw the Democrats in Congress were going to vote on the extensions bill without paying for it and not following their own Pay-Go rules, I said enough is enough.

"Many people asked me, 'Why now?' My answer is, 'Why not now?' Why can't a non-controversial measure in the Senate that would help those in need be paid for? If the Senate cannot find $10 billion to pay for a measure we all support, we will never pay for anything.

"America is under a mountain of debt. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in a hearing last month that the United States' debt is unsustainable. We are on the verge of a tipping point where America's debt will bring down our economy, and more people will join the unemployment lines. That is why I used my right as a United States Senator and objected."

Click here to read more of Senator Bunning's op-ed in USA Today about his opposition to a bill he actually supported. What do you make of this? Give Lou a call: 877-55-DOBBS.

How Can the President Be an 'Outsider?'

2010-03-04T08:03:00Z

Is it possible for the ultimate insider to cast himself as a Washington outsider? In this analysis piece from the Associated Press, Ron Fournier breaks down President Obama's strategy for passing his hard-left agenda.

Fournier explains in his analysis why Obama would try casting himself as an outsider and whether this will help him accomplish his goals.

"The throw-the-bums-out mentality is so strong in American politics that even the ultimate insider the president of the United States is running against Washington.

"Casting yourself as an outsider from inside the White House is no easy trick, especially when your party controls both houses of Congress. But that doesn't stop Barack Obama from trying.

"'At stake right now is not just our ability to solve this problem,' Obama said Wednesday, referring to the U.S. health care system, 'but our ability to solve any problem. The American people want to know if it's still possible for Washington to look out for their interests and their future.'

"It may seem like a stretch, but it makes political sense for Obama to run against Washington. Other presidents, including Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, did it for most of their terms. President George W. Bush convinced voters he was a regular Joe rather than the privileged son of a former president George H.W. Bush who served for years in Washington."

Click here to read more of Fournier's analysis and see why he says "as long as he lives in Washington, Obama is likely to run against it."

Hoosiers and Health Savings Accounts

2010-03-03T08:04:00Z

The Democrats aren't looking for new ideas, and the Republicans in Congress don't have many. But in a great Wall Street Journal op-ed, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels provides some free health-care advice.

Instead of jamming ObamaCare through Congress against the will of the American people, shouldn't President Obama continue to look for ideas that Americans can get behind? Nobody is soliciting advice from people like Mitch Daniels, a potential 2012 presidential candidate, but the Indiana Governor offered his advice in a WSJ op-ed anyway.

"When I was elected governor of Indiana five years ago, I asked that a consumer-directed health insurance option, or Health Savings Account (HSA), be added to the conventional plans then available to state employees. I thought this additional choice might work well for at least a few of my co-workers, and in the first year some 4% of us signed up for it.

"In Indiana's HSA, the state deposits $2,750 per year into an account controlled by the employee, out of which he pays all his health bills. Indiana covers the premium for the plan. The intent is that participants will become more cost-conscious and careful about overpayment or overutilization.

"Unused funds in the account to date some $30 million or about $2,000 per employee and growing fast are the worker's permanent property. For the very small number of employees (about 6% last year) who use their entire account balance, the state shares further health costs up to an out-of-pocket maximum of $8,000, after which the employee is completely protected.

"The HSA option has proven highly popular. This year, over 70% of our 30,000 Indiana state workers chose it, by far the highest in public-sector America. Due to the rejection of these plans by government unions, the average use of HSAs in the public sector across the country is just 2%."

Click here to read more from Governor Daniels, and call Lou to tell him what you think of this idea: 877-55-DOBBS.

Lott: The Truth About Handgun Bans

2010-03-03T08:03:00Z

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a landmark case that would allow protect an individual's right to own a gun in his or her home. Author John Lott shows us exactly why handgun bans need to be struck down.

In a terrific piece on FoxNews.com, John Lott shows through facts and statistics why handgun bans do not result in fewer crimes, and why gun crimes fall without such laws. In it, he writes:

"When the Heller case was decided, Washington¹s Mayor Adrian Fenty warned: 'More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence.' Knowing that Chicago's gun laws would soon face a similar legal challenge, Mayor Richard Daley was particularly vocal. The day that the Heller decision was handed down, Daley said that he and other mayors across the country were "outraged" by the decision and he predicted more deaths along with Wild West-style shootouts. Daley warned that people 'are going to take a gun and they are going to end their lives in a family dispute.'

"But Armageddon never arrived. Quite the contrary, murders in Washington plummeted by an astounding 25 percent in 2009, dropping from 186 murders in 2008 to 140. That translates to a murder rate that is now down to 23.5 per 100,000 people, Washinton¹s lowest since 1967. While other cities have also fared well over the last year, D.C.'s drop was several times greater than that for other similar sized cities. According to preliminary estimates by the FBI, nationwide murders fell by a relatively more modest 10 percent last year and by about 8 percent in other similarly sized cities of half a million to one million people (D.C.'s population count is at about 590,000)."

Very clear. And is the opposite true? According to Lott, yes:

"Chicago fared no better after the 7th Circuit Appeals court upheld its ban on new handguns in late 1982. Over the next 19 years following the ban, there were only three years where the murder rate was as low as in 1982. As shown in the forthcoming third edition of my book "More Guns, Less Crime," before the ban, Chicago's murder rate was falling relative to the 9 other largest cities, the 50 largest cities, the five counties that boarder Cook county, as well as the U.S. as a whole. After the ban Chicago's murder rate rose relative to all these other places. For example, comparing murder rates among the 50 most populous cities, the murder rate went from equaling the average for the other cities in 1982, to exceeding their average murder rate by 32 percent in 1992, to exceeding their average by 68 percent in 2002."

For more on this fantastic piece by John Lott, click here.

Lott joins Lou on radio at 4:20 ET on the radio. Tune in and find out the truth.

Reconciliation: An Assault on Democracy

2010-03-03T08:02:00Z

Senator Orrin Hatch, a voice of reason in a sea of irrationality, writes in a great op-ed in today's Washington Post that using reconciliation for ObamaCare would be an assault on democracy itself.

Lou's been saying for months now that the use of reconciliation to pass ObamaCare would an affront to the founders' ideals. Senator Hatch today lays out a great case in his op-ed: Reconciliation on health care would be an assault to the democratic process

"America's Founders gave us a system of governance designed to limit government power and maximize liberty. The legislative branch is different from the executive, and the Senate is different from the House. No single branch has all the power. That can be frustrating for those with ambitious agendas, but everyone benefits by respecting those checks and balances even as we fight over policies.

"While the House is designed for action, the Senate is designed for deliberation. That is why Senate rules and procedures give a minority of senators the power to slow or even stop legislation. Both parties do it when in the minority, and both find it frustrating when they are in the majority. But such checks are central to the nature of the institution and to the Senate's place in our constitutional system. These rules temper majority power and generate strong incentives to develop mainstream legislation that commands broad, bipartisan support.

"To impose the will of some Democrats and to circumvent bipartisan opposition, President Obama seems to be encouraging Congress to use the 'reconciliation' process, an arcane budget procedure, to ram through the Senate a multitrillion-dollar health-care bill that raises taxes, increases costs and cuts Medicare to fund a new entitlement we can't afford. This is attractive to proponents because it sharply limits debate and amendments to a mere 20 hours and would allow passage with only 51 votes (as opposed to the 60 needed to overcome a procedural hurdle). But the Constitution intends the opposite process, especially for a bill that would affect one-sixth of the American economy.

"This use of reconciliation to jam through this legislation, against the will of the American people, would be unprecedented in scope. And the havoc wrought would threaten our system of checks and balances, corrode the legislative process, degrade our system of government and damage the prospects of bipartisanship."

Click here to read the rest of Senator Hatch's great piece.

America's Over-Reliance on Government

2010-03-01T08:03:00Z

We're not becoming a welfare state...we ARE a welfare state. On this broadcast we often talk about how more Americans take more from the government than they pay in. And now some startling new statistics from the Washington Times corroborates that fact.

As noted in the Washington Times, for the first time since the Great Depression, Americans took more aid from the government than they paid in taxes.

"While wages and other job-related income fell by a record $206 billion last year to $7.84 trillion, transfer payments from the government such as unemployment checks and Social Security burgeoned by $231 billion to $2.1 trillion. Meanwhile, the amount of taxes that individual Americans paid plummeted by $325 billion to $2.1 trillion as a result of middle-class tax cuts and because nearly 6 million people were thrown out of work and are no longer paying payroll taxes."

"Commerce economists said last year's unprecedented drop of $256 billion in private wages < the mainstay of consumers in ordinary times < was particularly dramatic, and was more than 40 times larger than the drop in wages during the entire 2001 recession. Equally dramatic, a measure of income that closely tracks the ravages of the recession also plummeted by an unprecedented $384 billion. That measure excludes transfer payments and adjusts for inflation. It has stabilized at $9.1 trillion since the middle of last year, in a sign that the worst of the job and income losses are over."

Read more about this in the Washington Times. Think we're still on our way to becoming a welfare state? No, we're already there. Share your thoughts with Lou: 877-55-DOBBS.

Will the Dems Go Their Own Way?

2010-02-25T08:03:00Z

The bipartisan show summit at Blair House notwithstanding, it's clear the Democrats will proceed with a single-party version of ObamaCare after the meeting with Republicans. That's bipartisanship!

Exclusive: What happens next in health care

By MIKE ALLEN

After a brief period of consultation following the White House health reform summit, congressional Democrats plan to begin making the case next week for a massive, Democrats-only health-care plan, party strategists told POLITICO.

A Democratic official said the six-hour summit was expected to "give a face to gridlock, in the form of House and Senate Republicans."

Democrats plan to begin rhetorical, and perhaps legislative, steps toward the Democrats-only, or reconciliation, process early next week, the strategists said.

After the summit, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid planned to take the temperature of their caucuses.

"The point [of the summit] is to alter the political atmospherics, and it will take a day or two to sense if it succeeded," the official said.

Positive statements by Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) of late "are early signs the environment is already shifting a little in favor of revisiting health care."

Democrats plan to take up the president's comprehensive, $950 billion plan - referred to on the Hill as "the big bill." The alternative would be a smaller - or "skinny" - bill that would provide less coverage and cost less. But that would amount to starting the complex process over.

"It's probably the big bill or nothing," said a top Democratic aide. "If we don't get the big bill, I am sure some will push for a skinny bill."

An e-mail from a House Democratic leadership aide gives a sense of the party's post-summit message.

"The President walked into a room filled with the entire House Republican Conference. There were no preconditions, his only request was that it be open to the press so that the American people could see the exchange," the aide e-mailed. "He answered every question with a thoughtful, comprehensive response. He spoke for over an hour and discussed substantive policy issues.

"The President never once worried about it being a trap. He didn't cry about the room set-up. His conduct reflected someone who was confident in his ideas, respectful of the other side, and not afraid to debate important issues. ... Some Republicans have insulted the summit by calling it a set-up or a taxpayer-funded infomercial. Now we learn they have spent several weeks organizing a rapid-response operation."

A House Republican aide said this would be the party's post-summit message: "Americans want to scrap the Democrats' massive bill and start over with clean sheet of paper to work on step-by-step, common-sense reforms that lower health care costs."

Mr. President: Fire Your Staff

2010-02-25T08:02:00Z

The president needs to learn an important lesson, says historian Sean Wilentz. Sometimes the most loyal staffers are the most destructive to a commander in chief¹s agenda. And Obama needs to fire his staff.

Obama, Fire Your Staff!

by Sean Wilentz

The president needs to learn an important lesson, says historian Sean Wilentz: Sometimes the most loyal staffers are the most destructive to a commander in chief's agenda.

Now that President Obama has confronted some harsh political realities over health-care reform and has seen his public-approval ratings fall down to earth, he can do many things to set his administration on a fresh course. He might begin, though, by heeding some lessons of history. Like too many unsuccessful presidents, he has surrounded himself in the Oval Office with a select coterie of campaign loyalists from Chicago politics and his former Senate office. As Politico editor John Harris reported Jan. 22, this inner circle consists of "romantics" who are enveloped by pettiness, grandiosity, and hero worship left over from the 2008 primaries and general election.

Successful presidents understand cardinal rules about running the White House that unsuccessful presidents do not. It is almost always important for the president to leave behind many from the inner circle.

nable to shift out of campaign mode, Harris writes, the president's confidants are driven by "a basic attitude toward Clinton-style governance [that] is hostile," even though one member of the Cabinet is named Clinton and an array of veterans of the Bill Clinton administration are on Obama's staff-including White House Chief of Staff and former Chicago Rep. Rahm Emanuel, who, according to a recent Financial Times report, "treats Cabinet principals like minions." By seeing their own world starkly, as the stage for a dramatic struggle of world-historic, "transformational" proportions, these would-be saints close to the president have embraced fantasies of transcendence that have yielded to needless factionalism within the Democratic Party and inside Obama's administration: Blue Dogs versus liberals, idealists versus pragmatists, as well as, evidently, dueling bands of White House insiders.

History, alas, is filled with examples of insular White House palace guards undermining presidents' political survival as they seek to shield him from influences other than themselves. The resulting problems are far more serious than a couple of gatecrashers at a State Dinner. Invariably, true believers fall to fighting among themselves. In an obviously well-sourced column on Feb. 21 in response to The Daily Beast's Leslie H. Gelb, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post defended Emanuel while urging the firing of others. "Arguably, Emanuel is the only person keeping Obama from becoming Jimmy Carter," Milbank wrote. "...Obama's problem is that his other confidants-particularly Valerie Jarrett and Robert Gibbs, and, to a lesser extent, David Axelrod-are part of the Cult of Obama."

Milbank and Gelb are right that change is called for. Successful presidents understand cardinal rules about running the White House that unsuccessful presidents do not. It is almost always important for the president to leave behind many from the inner circle who helped win the election. The group that excelled in the politics of campaigning is usually not well-suited to the politics of governing. Carrying forward grudges, perceived slights, and personal alliances can only hamper the president from consolidating leadership of his party, let alone of the nation. Being surrounded by adoring aides who consider themselves a tough-minded Praetorian Guard for having helped win one campaign inculcates habits of exclusivity and exclusion that lead presidents self-destructively into the bunker when the going gets tough, which it always does. When the initial group of advisers causes strain among the team or has depleted whatever talents or ideas it might have, successful presidents remove it and seek replacements in circles very different from those from which the failed, exhausted, or abrasive advisers came.

Telling examples of these imperatives come from the presidencies of two men whom President Obama has often cited, politics and ideology aside, as models: Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. When Lincoln became president, he freed himself from the Illinois politicos who had paved the way for his nomination and election and instead sought intelligence from a broad array of office holders and military men. He did not forget the men who had elected him-he named his campaign manager, David Davis, to the Supreme Court in 1862-but neither did Lincoln cloister himself within a White House inner circle. Nor was Lincoln afraid to dump appointees. In 1862, he forced the resignation of his politically influential but not very capable secretary of War, Simon Cameron, and replaced him with the unlikely Edwin Stanton, the attorney general in the previous Democratic administration whose contemptuous opinion of Lincoln was well-known. Nevertheless, Lincoln and Stanton forged a superbly effective partnership.

Ronald Reagan named as his first chief of staff James Baker III, the campaign manager of his bitter rival for the Republican nomination in 1980, George H.W. Bush, himself chosen as vice president in what proved a political masterstroke. The pragmatic Baker proved enormously effective, especially in getting much of Reagan's conservative domestic agenda enacted during his first term while curbing Reagan's more conservative political aides and supporters from California. Thereafter, whenever an appointee caused difficulty, regardless of political affinity or personal relationship, Reagan sacked him and looked in a very different direction to find fresh blood, replacing Alexander Haig with George Shultz as secretary of State, Edwin Meese with Richard Thornburgh as attorney general, and Donald Regan with Howard Baker as his third chief of staff.

The presidential exception that proves the rule was John F. Kennedy, whose special bond with his brother, Robert, lasted beyond the 1960 campaign and proved of vital importance after RFK became attorney general. But after the Bay of Pigs, of course, JFK did not fail to remove CIA Director Allen Dulles. More typical was Jimmy Carter, who brought many members of his so-called Georgia Mafia with him to the White House, stuck by them loyally, and in time found himself isolated and confused within his own political bubble. By the time he awoke to his difficulties, Carter reacted by blaming the American people's psychology for the "crisis of confidence" (in his notorious "malaise" speech), and then appeared to panic by immediately demanding letters of resignation from his entire Cabinet, of which he eventually accepted five.

If the president will not shake up his inner circle, he at least ought to start expanding it and talking seriously with a host of people well outside his comfort zone, much as Lincoln and Reagan-as well as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who operated through a constantly changing cast of characters-did before him. Staff changes may not be enough to reverse the looming legislative mess over health-care reform, or even win back the support he has lost among traditional Democratic voters in time for the midterm elections. And timing in these matters is delicate. But only the president is indispensable. If a staff shakeup-an obvious measure employed by all successful presidents-does not prove sufficient, it is certainly necessary, and inevitable sooner rather than later if the president is to achieve much of anything, preventing the unmaking of both his own administration and his party.

"Broken" Government...When Liberals Lose

2010-02-24T08:03:00Z

As Lou's been saying for a while now, and as George Will said this weekend, government is only "broken" when liberals can't enact their hard-left agenda. Brent Bozell expands on this idea...

Bozell Column: 'Broken' Government, When Liberals Lose

By Brent Bozell

When Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana announced last week he wasn't running for re-election, he didn't state what may have seemed obvious. He couldn't say he wanted to avoid the embarrassment of losing, or that he worried he'd never achieve national office if that happened. Instead, he launched into a lecture about what was wrong with everyone else. The government is "dysfunctional" with "brain-dead partisanship."

It's "Groundhog Day." This scenario repeats itself every time the Democrats take control.

Bayh's bleats hardened quickly into the media's conventional wisdom. Why can't the politicians hold hands in a Kumbaya circle and get "something" done? Translation: when Obama and a Democrat-dominated Congress can't nationalize the health-care system and force everyone to drive a Prius, suddenly government is "dysfunctional." When gridlock is holding up the liberals' agenda, Washington should know "the people" sent them to pass massive ultraliberal bills.

These media mathematicians clearly have thrown their polling calculators out the window. When Newsweek recently asked independents if they supported the Democrat health proposals, 26 percent were in favor, and 62 percent were opposed. But the "wisdom" in town says Democrats must pass these health bills or get crushed in November. Now who can't seem to acknowledge, to borrow from Stephen Colbert, that "reality has a conservative bias"?

Reality tells you many Democrats are political toast, thanks to ObamaCare. Hence, bye-bye Bayh. But our journalists put on their choir robes and continue to sing the sad song in unison: Why do we have a "Broken Government"? CNN actually launched an entire series of reports with that title.

Suffice it to say this is not the kind of media mantra we heard during President Bush's second term. Back then, this was the sound of CNN: commentator Jack Cafferty lamenting the alleged lack of partisanship in 2007: "They've already said they won't impeach President Bush. They've already said they won't cut funding for the war.... It's time for the Democrats to walk the walk, and there are some early signs they might be coming down with leg cramps." He asked viewers: "How much faith do you have that the Democrats can stop the war and rein in President Bush?"

We're now mired in Year Two of Barack Obama's quagmire of "health reform," and no one on the left wants withdrawal. What they want is a socialist surge. Compare that to 2005, and the Bush administration's attempt to reform Social Security. It died...about three months after the inauguration. CBS anchor Bob Schieffer repeatedly asked on April 26, 2005: "Is it already dead?"

In a way, you can understand his impatience. He and his colleagues had been trying to kill it from the moment of political conception.

Everything President Bush did was painted as a stunt. After the 2005 State of the Union, when there was an emotional hug between an Iraqi voter and the mother of a Marine killed in Iraq, MSNBC's Chris Matthews just had to politicize it by seeing it as a Social Security ploy: "Do you think President Bush used this to push his numbers on Social Security reform, just to get his general appeal up a bit?"

In March, Matthews joked with Al Sharpton that Bush was piling up a mountain of debt we would owe China and Japan: "Why don't they just start paying people in their Social Security checks with yen, because we're getting money from them to pay the older folks their regular check?" Sharpton said he was going to start using that partisan line.

When Hurricane Katrina unfolded with deadly force, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift found a silver lining: ""If there's an upside to Katrina, it's that the Republican agenda of tax cuts, Social Security privatization and slashing government programs is over."

Today, Clift is raining fire on Republicans for "harming" the country in the short term for their own partisan gain in the fall. Liberals don't have brains expansive enough to imagine that conservatives might think the greater good of the country - politically, financially, morally - rests in fighting the nationalization of our health-care system, as well as the first steps toward government-funded abortions.

Instead, our media parrot the DNC talking points about a "Party of No" who aren't offering "solutions" of their own. This argument ignores (a) the idea of Nancy Pelosi passing a Republican alternative is too ridiculous to consider, and (b) a "no" vote could be a constructive vote on the people's behalf.

These reporters and anchors never hit Pelosi or Harry Reid for having no plan for victory in Iraq. They never dismissed them as the "Party of No" for opposing Social Security reform. But when liberalism is on the national menu, the snobby waiters of our "news" media don't really want to take the people's order. They want to force-feed the American people what they "need.

Obama's New Idea: Outlaw Reality

2010-02-23T08:03:00Z

The president wants to go it alone on health care. Find out why columnist Charles Hurt says the latest version of ObamaCare "is one of the more astonishing admissions of political deception in recent memory."

Prez's newest idea: Simply outlaw reality

Charles Hurt

WASHINGTON -- In cluded in President Oba ma's latest stab at health-care reform released yesterday is one of the more astonishing admissions of political deception in recent memory.

After months of swearing that his health legislation would lower the skyrocketing costs of insurance premiums, Obama finally acknowledged that actually it would not.

So, instead, he has included a new provision that can simply outlaw premium increases his administration deems "unreasonable and unjustified."

This, in lieu of literally years of promises and proclamations about transforming the American hospital-industrial complex in a way that would drastically lower the cost of medicine in this country and leave insurance companies scrambling to lower the premiums they charge customers.

During his campaign, Obama flatly promised to lower families' health-insurance premiums by $2,500 every year.

Then, after he ascended to the throne, Obama repeatedly insisted without any reservations that all the health-care alchemy inspired by him would magically lower those premiums.

Even in the face of congressional accountants who repeatedly raised doubts about those promises, Obama insisted.

Now the comes the truth.

Of course, having so easily slid into the sordid ways of Washington, Obama does not admit this in so many words. In fact, the White House continues to broadly insist that the latest proposal lowers premiums.

So, why, then, create a whole new federal law to cap premium hikes?

There is only one reason: Even this White House can no longer keep up the charade.

Perhaps even more disturbing than Obama's back-door admission here is his plan for fixing it.

The Democratic health-care bill -- which deserves a cameo in the next "Night of the Living Dead" movie for its unkillable quality -- actually causes insurance premiums to rise?

Well, then, we'll just pass a law! Let's pass a law to outlaw reality!

This sort of thinking is nothing new. This is the oldest trick in the Democratic playbook that gauzy-eyed liberals have been trying for generations. Remember President Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty"?

What a great society that gave us.

While he's at it, Obama should go right ahead and outlaw unemployment. Then he could make foreclosures illegal. That would fix all our problems.

Heck, if any problems remain in health care after he has jammed his bill through Congress before his co-conspirators get run out of town, Obama could just make sickness illegal.

Maybe he could outlaw death. Then we can all just sit around in our rocking chairs feeling great and enjoying our Great, Great Society -- the greatest since, well, Lyndon Johnson was president.

Man, those were good times.

Conflict of Interest at Justice Dep't?

2010-02-23T08:02:00Z

Another controversy involving Attorney General Eric Holder: Nine Obama appointees in the Justice Department have represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the government. Is this a conflict of interest?

Holder admits nine Obama Dept. of Justice officials worked for terrorist detainees, offers no details
By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
02/19/10 3:52 PM EST

Attorney General Eric Holder says nine Obama appointees in the Justice Department have represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the Justice Department. But he does not reveal any names beyond the two officials whose work has already been publicly reported. And all the lawyers, according to Holder, are eligible to work on general detainee matters, even if there are specific parts of some cases they cannot be involved in.

Holder's admission comes in the form of an answer to a question posed last November by Republican Sen. Charles Grassley. Noting that one Obama appointee, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, formerly represented Osama bin Laden's driver, and another appointee, Jennifer Daskal, previously advocated for detainees at Human Rights Watch, Grassley asked Holder to give the Senate Judiciary Committee "the names of political appointees in your department who represent detainees or who work for organizations advocating on their behalf...the cases or projects that these appointees work with respect to detainee prior to joining the Justice Department...and the cases or projects relating to detainees that have worked on since joining the Justice Department."

In his response, Holder has given Grassley almost nothing. He says nine Obama political appointees at the Justice Department have advocated on behalf of detainees, but did not identify any of the nine other than the two, Katyal and Daskal, whose names Grassley already knew. "To the best of our knowledge," Holder writes,

during their employment prior to joining the government, only five of the lawyers who serve as political appointees in those components represented detainees, and four others either contributed to amicus briefs in detainee-related cases or were otherwise involved in advocacy on behalf of detainees.

Holder says other Obama appointees, like Holder himself, came from law firms which represented detainees but did no work on behalf of the terrorist prisoners. But other than Katyal and Daskal, Holder does not reveal any names of any Obama appointees, nor does he mention the cases they worked on.

And what are they recused from, anyway? Very little. Holder writes that Katyal has not worked on any Guantanamo detainee matters but has participated in litigation involving detainees who continue to be detained at Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan and in litigation involving [Ali Saleh Kahlah] al-Marri, who was detained on U.S. soil." As for Daskal, "she has generally worked on policy issues related to detainees," Holder writes. "Her detainee-related work has been fully consistent with advice she received from career department officials regarding her obligations."

As for everyone else, Holder lists no names and no cases, but in a paragraph filled with modifiers, he makes it clear that all the lawyers who had advocated for detainees are free to work on general detainee matters.

The senior Department officials referenced above, like other political appointees who are similarly situated, have recused from particular matters regarding specific detainees in which their former firms represent the detainee or another party and from decisions relating specifically to the dispositions of particular detainees represented by their former firms. These recusals pertain to decisions relating to particular matters involving specific parties who are or have been represented by their former law firms within the relevant time period. However, as noted above, these senior officials have been authorized to participate in policy and legal decisions regarding detainee matters, in particular matters regarding specific detainees whom their prior employer did not represent, and in decisions relating to the disposition of such detainees. [emphasis added]

Finally, it is possible that there are more than nine political appointees who worked for detainees. Holder tells Grassley that he did not survey the Justice Department as a whole but instead canvassed several large offices within the organization.

Bottom line: Holder revealed no names beyond the two already publicly known. He revealed no cases from which Justice political appointees recused themselves. The letter, which will likely be interpreted on Capitol Hill as a thumb-your-nose statement, is sure to anger Republican senators more than satisfy them.

Rep. Ryan: Don't Patronize Americans

2010-02-22T08:03:00Z

In his detailed plan to save America from drowning in our unsustainable debt, Congressman Paul Ryan says Congress needs to stop treating Americans like they're children. Just give it to us straight!

Red Alert
As Obama's national-debt panel prepares for deliberations, one congressman proposes how to get back in the black.

By Paul Ryan

Imagine your family's finances if you spent and borrowed like Washington: you'd owe $60 in credit-card loans for every $100 of income. Every month you'd pay back a little but borrow even more. In 10 years, you'd owe $87 for every $100 you made. At some point you'd hand off the debt to your kids. If they worked until 2035, they'd owe more than $180 for every $100 they earned. In 2050, your grandkids would owe more than $320. By 2080 they'd owe seven times their earnings. Of course, lenders would cut them off well before then, and your family would be ruined. But this is the path your government is on right now.

Today, our country faces a fiscal meltdown-and Washington's continued cowardice is a big part of the problem. The social-insurance strategies of the 20th century-Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security-are driving our federal government and economy to collapse. It's long been obvious that we're ill prepared for the retirement of the baby boomers. Now, the recession and Washington's recent spending spree have accelerated the day of reckoning.

Consider just one program: Medicare. Today, this program is short $38 trillion of what it promises to provide your parents, you, and your kids. In five years, the hole will grow to $52 trillion. Your family's share: $458,000. Medicaid will add trillions more in state and federal debt.

Social Security's surplus is already gone, and its debt is mounting. Without shoring up its finances, the government will be forced to cut benefits nearly 25 percent or raise payroll taxes more than 30 percent.

Both Republicans and Democrats share the blame for failing to be candid about the difficult choices we face and for continuing to make promises that cannot be kept. Some apparently have no sense of shame about shaking a tin cup at China and Japan.

I've put forward a specific solution to meet this challenge, a plan the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says can achieve its goals of paying off government debt in the long run-while securing the social safety net and making possible future economic growth. I call it "A Roadmap for America's Future." If followed, this is what will happen:

HEALTH CARE
You, not your government or your boss, should own your health plan. The Roadmap replaces a tax break that benefits only those with job-based health insurance with tax credits that benefit every American. It addresses the key drivers of rising health-care costs, securing universal access to quality, affordable health coverage.

MEDICARE
Everyone 55 and over will remain in the current program. For those now under 55, the Roadmap turns Medicare into a health-care program like the one enjoyed by members of Congress. Future seniors will receive a voucher and will be able to choose from a list of Medicare-certified insurance plans that best suit their needs. The government subsidy will provide additional support for those with lower incomes and higher health costs.

SOCIAL SECURITY
Everyone 55 and older will remain in the existing program with no change. My plan offers those now under 55 a choice: continue to take part in traditional Social Security or join a retirement system like Congress's own plan. Future seniors will be able to invest more than a third of their payroll taxes in savings accounts they will own. These accounts will be guaranteed and managed by the federal government-not by a private investment firm. For both Social Security and Medicare, eligibility ages will gradually increase.

PRO-GROWTH TAX REFORM
To get the economy going again, the Roadmap offers the option of a simple, low-rate, two-tier personal income tax, eliminating loopholes and the double taxation of savings and investment. Corporate income taxes will be replaced by a simple 8.5 percent business consumption tax. (For specifics on these and other reforms, go to americanroadmap.org.)

Critics say that any attempt to cut entitlements is tantamount to political suicide. Nonsense. Most Americans see such reforms as common sense. It makes sense to gradually increase the eligibility ages for Social Security and Medicare-Americans are living decades longer than when these programs were first enacted. It also makes sense to tie benefits to income so that those with fewer resources receive more support. Arguing in favor of "means testing" Medicare premiums, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, the respected Maryland Democrat, put it well late last year: "We have to buck up our courage and say that if we try to take care of everybody, we won't be able to take care of those who need us most."

One frequent charge against these reforms is, however, correct: the Roadmap does shift power to individuals at the expense of government control. It rejects the merits and sustainability of a cradle-to-grave welfare state, which drains individuals of their self-reliance. The plan unapologetically applies our nation's founding principles-individual liberty, limited government, and free enterprise-to the challenges of today. And the Roadmap does this in a way that honors our historic commitment to strengthening the social safety net for those who need it most.

I welcome the debate on how to tackle our fiscal crisis-and the larger debate on the proper role of government. But I'd encourage those taking aim at the Roadmap to arm yourselves with a specific alternative. My dad used to say, "Son, you are either part of the solution or part of the problem." (That was usually when I was being part of the problem.) Now we must make the same demand of politicians in Washington: Don't patronize the American people as if they were children-deferring difficult decisions and promising fiscal fantasies. Tell the American people the truth and offer them a choice, and they will do what's right.

Ryan of Wisconsin is the ranking member of the House Budget Committee.

Dems Worried About Obama Track Record

2010-02-22T08:02:00Z

As our nation's governors meet in Washington, Democratic governors are worried that President Obama isn't connecting enough with the voters. Hey, maybe they just don't like his hard-left agenda!

Democrats worried about Obama track record

By LIZ SIDOTI and RON FOURNIER

WASHINGTON (AP) - Democratic governors said Sunday they worry about President Barack Obama's track record on fighting Republican political attacks and urged him to better connect with anxious voters. Some allies pleaded for a new election-year strategy focused on the economy.

"It's got to be better thought out," Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said. "It's got to be more proactive." And, he said, Democrats must hit back just as hard as they are hit by Republicans.

Eight months before the first midterm elections of Obama's presidency, most Americans are frustrated with - even angered by - persistent unemployment and gridlock in Washington. Democrats fear voters will punish the party in power.

The titular head of his party, Obama has watched his own popularity drop over the past year. He will bear at least some responsibility for the outcome in November, and Democrats are looking to him for political fixes.

In interviews at the National Governors Association's weekend meeting, several Democratic governors faulted the White House for losing the communications war against Republicans over what Obama has accomplished in his first year.

"We fought back only sporadically and pretty ineffectively," Rendell said, adding that "right out of the box, we lost the spin war" on the $787 billion economic stimulus bill passed in 2009.

Several Democratic colleagues agreed, and lamented that voters thought Obama focused too much on overhauling the U.S. health care system. Others fretted that Obama may appear to be out of touch with the concerns of Americans.

"I think he's got more work to do on that," said Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, an Obama friend and ally.

Even as they raised concerns, Democratic governors insisted that the White House has started turning things around. "The stars are aligning," said Delaware Gov. Jack Markell.

Gov. Mike Beebe of Arkansas urged Obama to focus more on the economy and limit his actions on the health care system to changes that would bring down the cost of medical treatment in the United States.

He called Obama's poll numbers "terrible" in Arkansas because voters don't think he's focused on their top priority, the economy. "People are unhappy," he said. "Now, in fairness, he didn't create this problem, but they want to see him fix it."

While praising the White House's communication's efforts, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson offered this advice to Obama: "Rapidly decide what we're doing on health care and then move to jobs and the economy."

"We need a national economic strategy," he added.

Among the most vulnerable Democratic incumbents, Patrick said he and Obama faced the same vexing political issue in 2009: They were so busy dealing with an economic crisis that it was hard to stay in touch with voters.

"If you don't know what happens at the point where policy touches people, you've got a problem," the Massachusetts governor said.

Patrick said he will connect better with voters on the campaign trail, making sure they know that he understands their plight. He suspects Obama will do the same while campaigning for Democrats.

Obama has other challenges.

Patrick said Obama must walk a fine line between pushing back on Republican criticism and not looking overly partisan. "If you don't hit the bully back, you're just going to keep getting hit," Patrick said. "On the other hand, people don't want that tit for tat."

He said he hasn't been in touch with the White House communications team but noted, "I'm sure they're struggling with that."

Markell said Republican lawmakers have effectively put Obama on his heels by blocking Democratic initiatives.

"The challenge has been to get through the clutter of 'No,'" he said.

Rendell told ABC, "They just need to take a deep breath, look at what happened and revamp their strategy." Easy for him to say. Later, the Associated Press asked Rendell what, specifically, Obama should do to right his political ship.

"I don't know," he said.

Gov. Bill Ritter of Colorado suggested that the White House set too high expectations of how quickly the stimulus plan would create jobs.

"If there was a communications issue," he said, "it was, perhaps, over the pace at which jobs would come back."

Krauthammer on Obama's Excuses

2010-02-19T08:03:00Z

It's become fashionable for Democrats and the White House to whine about how Washington's broken. But Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton found a way to lead this country. Obama would rather make excuses.

Excuses for Obama's Failure to Lead
By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON -- In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president's own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable.

Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared.

The tyranny of entitlements? Reagan collaborated with Tip O'Neill, the legendary Democratic House speaker, to establish the Alan Greenspan commission that kept Social Security solvent for a quarter-century.

A corrupted system of taxation? Reagan worked with liberal Democrat Bill Bradley to craft a legislative miracle: tax reform that eliminated dozens of loopholes and slashed rates across the board -- and fueled two decades of economic growth.

Later, a highly skilled Democratic president, Bill Clinton, successfully tackled another supposedly intractable problem: the culture of intergenerational dependency. He collaborated with another House speaker, Newt Gingrich, to produce the single most successful social reform of our time, the abolition of welfare as an entitlement.

It turned out that the country's problems were not problems of structure but of leadership. Reagan and Clinton had it. Carter didn't. Under a president with extensive executive experience, good political skills and an ideological compass in tune with the public, the country was indeed governable.

It's 2010 and the first-year agenda of a popular and promising young president has gone down in flames. Barack Obama's two signature initiatives -- cap-and-trade and health care reform -- lie in ruins.

Desperate to explain away this scandalous state of affairs, liberal apologists haul out the old reliable from the Carter years: "America the Ungovernable." So declared Newsweek. "Is America Ungovernable?" coyly asked The New Republic. Guess the answer.

The rage at the machine has produced the usual litany of systemic explanations. Special interests are too powerful. The Senate filibuster stymies social progress. A burdensome constitutional order prevents innovation. If only we could be more like China, pines Tom Friedman, waxing poetic about the efficiency of the Chinese authoritarian model, while America flails about under its "two parties ... with their duel-to-the-death paralysis." The better thinkers, bewildered and furious that their president has not gotten his way, have developed a sudden disdain for our inherently incremental constitutional system.

Yet, what's new about any of these supposedly ruinous structural impediments? Special interests blocking policy changes? They have been around since the beginning of the republic -- and since the beginning of the republic, strong presidents, like the two Roosevelts, have rallied the citizenry and overcome them.

And then, of course, there's the filibuster, the newest liberal bete noire. "Don't blame Mr. Obama," writes Paul Krugman of the president's failures. "Blame our political culture instead. ... And blame the filibuster, under which 41 senators can make the country ungovernable."

Ungovernable, once again. Of course, just yesterday the same Paul Krugman was warning about "extremists" trying "to eliminate the filibuster" when Democrats used it systematically to block one Bush (43) judicial nomination after another. Back then, Democrats touted it as an indispensable check on overweening majority power. Well, it still is. Indeed, the Senate with its ponderous procedures and decentralized structure is serving precisely the function the Founders intended: as a brake on the passions of the House and a caution about precipitous transformative change.

Leave it to Mickey Kaus, a principled liberal who supports health care reform, to debunk these structural excuses: "Lots of intellectual effort now seems to be going into explaining Obama's (possible/likely/impending) health care failure as the inevitable product of larger historic and constitutional forces. ... But in this case there's a simpler explanation: Barack Obama's job was to sell a health care reform plan to American voters. He failed."

He failed because the utter implausibility of its central promise -- expanded coverage at lower cost -- led voters to conclude that it would lead ultimately to more government, more taxes and more debt. More broadly, the Democrats failed because, thinking the economic emergency would give them the political mandate and legislative window, they tried to impose a left-wing agenda on a center-right country. The people said no, expressing themselves first in spontaneous demonstrations, then in public opinion polls, then in elections -- Virginia, New Jersey and, most emphatically, Massachusetts.

That's not a structural defect. That's a textbook demonstration of popular will expressing itself -- despite the special interests -- through the existing structures. In other words, the system worked.

Rubio Wows Conservatives at CPAC

2010-02-19T08:02:00Z

Former Florida House speaker Marco Rubio demonstrated at CPAC precisely why he's captured the hearts and minds of so many Florida Republicans in his race for the vacant Senate seat.

Rubio Wows Conservatives

By Larry Thornberry on 2.19.10 @ 6:08AM

In a rousing keynote speech yesterday before the faithful at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, former Florida House speaker Marco Rubio demonstrated to conservatives from around the country why he's captured the hearts and minds of so many Florida Republicans in his race for the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat.

When Rubio announced his intention to run against moderate-to-liberal Florida Governor Charlie Crist, the Republican establishment was amused, and lined up behind the popular Crist. Big Money Men showered Crist with checks.

No one's laughing now as Rubio has surged from 50 points behind to, depending on which current poll you believe, a lead of between three to 14 points. Rubio has the mo, and it's because he has run an aggressive, retail campaign based on the conservative themes he wowed his politically savvy Thursday audience with.

Rubio praised America as the greatest country in the history of the world. He said our greatness, our exceptionalism, comes from our commitment to limited government, personal freedom, and the free enterprise system, all things our predecessors chose, fought and bled for, and that are being attacked now by the current leftist administration and Congress. He said we need to send people to Washington who will offer and fight for a clear alternative to what is nothing less than a threat to America's continued greatness.

"What kind of America do you want your children to inherit," Rubio asked. "We must decide. Do we want to continue to be exceptional? Or do we want to be like everyone else?"

Rubio said our personal freedoms and the material bounty Americans have enjoyed are threatened by a clueless political class, too many of whose members believe the free enterprise system is unfair, who believe that America's enemies exist because of something we did, who believe the answer to everything is more government, and who while they frequently invoke "democracy," are in fact contemptuous of personal freedom.

"People who think this way were elected in 2008," Rubio said. "They're using the downturn as cover, not to fix America but to change America, to fundamentally redefine the role of government in our lives and the role of America in the world."

And the result for most Americans has not been "change we can believe in." In less than a year, Americans have figured out what's going on and are now engaged in what Rubio calls "the single greatest political pushback in American history."

Rubio wants to be part of that pushback and, without mentioning his opponent's name, made it clear he believes Crist isn't up to this challenge.

"America wants leaders to stand up to that agenda, not be co-opted by it," Rubio said. "The U.S. Senate already has one Arlen Specter too many. America already has a Democratic Party. We don't need two Democratic Parties."

This is a clear reference to the fact that Crist whooped-up President Obama's failed "stimulus" slush fund before it was adopted, supported a carbon cap and trade program like the president's, and has frolicked over the past two years with other liberal programs and spending schemes in order to show how "bipartisan" he is.

But mostly Rubio's target was Obama and the liberal Congress rather than Crist. Rubio said at the national level we need to simplify the tax code and lower taxes for everyone, lower corporate income taxes so American companies can be competitive, eliminate "double taxation" such as capital gains taxes and the death tax altogether, and generally get out of the way of the free enterprise system rather than shackling it, or trying to replace it with government command and control, which the Obama bunch is busy doing.

"Jobs aren't created by politicians," Rubio said. "They're created by people who risk money to start a business or to expand an existing one."

Rubio, who has expressed skepticism about the global warming theory and its attendant horrors, said we should "stop big government energy mandates like cap and trade and instead rely on the American innovator to make us energy independent."

Rubio said we need to reduce federal spending and get serious about getting the national debt under control. We should enact "lawsuit abuse reform." He said these issues are so important and so consequential that "2010 is not just a choice between Democrat and Republican, but a referendum on the very identity of our nation."

Rubio was just as tough on Obama's approach in foreign affairs as he was on the Democrats' domestic peccadilloes. Obama may have difficulty understanding that America is in a fight with radical Islam. No so Rubio.

"We will do whatever it takes, for however long it takes, to defeat Islamic terrorism," Rubio said to cheers. "We will punish their allies like Iran. We will stand with our allies like Israel. We will target and we will destroy terrorist cells and the leaders of those cells. The ones that survive, we will capture. We will get useful information from them."

Rubio paused here for more applause before adding, "And then we will bring them to justice in front of a military tribunal in Guantanamo, not a civilian courtroom in Manhattan."

That one brought the house down.

THE SON OF IMMIGRANT PARENTS, Rubio was absolutely lyrical about the greatness and opportunity of America. A greatness that doesn't have to end.

"I was not born to a wealthy or connected family, but I've never felt limited by the circumstances of my birth," said Rubio, whose parents lost their country to a Cuban dictatorship. "I haven't felt limited because I'm a member of the greatest society in history. There's never been a country like the United States of America, where our rights come from God, not from the government."

He asked the 3,000 or so on hand for his speech if there was any other country they would rather be in, or if they had ever heard of "a boatload of Americans arriving on the shores of another country."

Rubio's parents, still living, worked long hours in a procession of blue-collar jobs -- his father mostly a bartender and his mother a hotel maid, stock clerk, and department store clerk -- so that Marco could go to college and take advantage of what America offers.

"It's easy to forget how special America is," Rubio said. "I was raised by exiles, people who lost their country to socialism. They came to America with virtually nothing -- no English, no money, no friends. They know how different America is from the rest of the world."

Rubio said dreams are possible in America because we don't allow government to determine everything. When government makes all the decisions, those who can influence the government get ahead, while everyone else gets the shaft. He said for more than 230 years Americans have chosen individual liberty in a system where government protects our rights rather than granting them.

"Every chance I've ever had, and anything I will ever achieve, I owe to God, to my parents' sacrifices, and to the United States of America," Rubio said. "My parents' hard work opened doors. Their story is the essence of the American miracle."

Rubio says if America faces and overcomes its current challenges, the miracle will continue. But, "If we fail our children will inherit a diminished America."

AFTER RUBIO'S SPEECH, interrupted frequently by applause and ending to a standing ovation, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, who had introduced Rubio, said, "I could use a man like that in the United State Senate."

DeMint may get his wish. In addition to the Rubio-friendly polls, which mostly gage the opinions of a cross-section of registered Republicans, Rubio is doing exceptionally well with grass-roots Republicans, the folks who turn out to vote in primaries.

So far there have been 23 straw polls of Republican organizations such as county Republican executive committees, Republican women's clubs, college Republican groups, and Republican business groups. Rubio has not only won all 23 of them but won them by lopsided margins. The totals in the 23 contests are 1993 for Rubio and 265 for Crist, with a handful of votes going to marginal candidates. Rubio even beat Crist more than two to one in a vote of the Republican executive committee of Crist's home county of Pinellas.

Crist has tried to downplay the butt-whupping Rubio has administered in these votes of people who are the most active in the party, presumably know the most about him, and who are the type of folks who would go through snow (if we had it here), rain, fire, floods, or hurricanes to vote on primary day. These are just a small number of voters and "the only poll that matters is the one on election-day and I can't wait," Crist has said in what has to be one of the purest examples of whistling past the grave-yard on record.

In the eighties, Reba McIntire had a great country hit, the refrain to which is, "How blue, can you make me?" In Florida, the answer seems to be "not-very." The Sunshine State, which went for the little hustler from Chicago by two points in '08, seems to be over its dalliance with leftism. The same polls that show the solidly conservative candidate ahead in the Republican primary race show that Rubio would also comfortably defeat any of the Democrats now running in the general if the election were held now.

But aye, there's the rub. The primary isn't until August, the general in November. Months are lifetimes in politics, and things can always change. But right now there's every indication that the keynote speaker for the 37th annual CPAC will represent Florida in the Senate beginning in 2011. By the way, the keynote speaker for the first CPAC in 1973 was an obscure western governor named Ronald Reagan. And he did OK too.

Larry Thornberry is a writer in Tampa.

Dems Blues: States Reverting To Red

2010-02-17T08:03:00Z

Politico breaks down which states that Obama put in his party's column 15 months ago races with Democratic candidates in grave danger of losing "in what is quickly shaping up to be a toxic election cycle."

Dems' blues: States reverting to red

By JONATHAN MARTIN & BEN SMITH | 2/17/10 4:45 AM EST

The electoral map candidate Barack Obama remade in 2008 appears to be retreating into its familiar patterns.

Obama broke the decisive role Ohio and Florida seemed to play in presidential elections, by moving from trench warfare engagement in the two states to a broader battlefield on which Republicans were placed on the defensive in states they'd once taken for granted. And his victories in places where Democrats had fared poorly in recent elections - Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia, the interior West - seemed to validate his strategists' claims that he had consigned the red state-blue state presidential dichotomy to the bookstore remainders bin.

But now some of the same unlikely states that Obama put in his party's column 15 months ago feature Senate, House and governor's races with Democratic candidates in grave danger of losing in what is quickly shaping up to be a toxic election cycle.

While off-year and down-ballot elections are inherently different than presidential contests, the rapid reversal in Democratic fortunes in the very places where Obama's success brought so much attention suggests that predictions of a lasting realignment were premature.

And it's raising the question of whether the president's 2008 win was the result of a unique set of circumstances that will be difficult for him to replicate again and perhaps downright impossible for other Democrats on the ballot to reprise.

"They had wind at their back," said former Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican and a student of national politics, of Obama's historic victory. "People were hungry for change, and the president was running against a 72-year-old guy who couldn't use a computer."

But, Davis added: "One election doesn't make realignment."

At the very least, it seems that Obama's success proved that those conservative-leaning states must be viewed as highly competitive for both parties - a departure from an electoral past in which they were assumed to be GOP locks.

"They were red, but they're competitive now," said Democratic National Committee Chairman and former Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine.

In Indiana and Virginia, perhaps Obama's most sought-after prizes and two states that had not supported a Democratic presidential nominee since 1964, Republicans are taking aim at a number of junior House Democrats who were either elected or reelected for the first time, in part by riding the Obama wave. Already in Virginia, the GOP swept the three statewide offices in November. And in Indiana, the stunning retirement of well-funded Sen. Evan Bayh has forced Democrats to scramble to find a replacement candidate.

Kaine didn't bother masking his disappointment in Bayh's decision, something that has infuriated top Democrats.

"We weren't happy to hear it," he said. And while the party chairman said he was confident they could find a top-tier Democrat to run for the seat, he allowed that "the best chance we would've had to win that seat was if Sen. Bayh was running for a third term."

Other Democrats close to Obama say 2008 did not represent a realignment but nor was it a one-off, where Democrats flourished because of a perfect political storm.

"These states are now competitive but will tilt one way or another depending on the climate," said Anita Dunn, a Democratic strategist and the president's former communications director. "Now that doesn't mean that we can't elect a Democratic senator in Indiana, but it's going to be tough."

Dunn, though, did make the case that their task would be made easier if former Sen. Dan Coats gets the nomination, noting his lobbyist background and out-of-state residence.

In Virginia, where as many as five House Democrats could face difficult races in November, Kaine noted that the political tectonic plates had been moving toward the Democrats in recent years and described Obama's success there as the capstone of the state's shift.

But he quickly added that the lesson was not that it had suddenly become a Democratic stronghold.

"It's that neither party is going to take Virginia for granted for the next 25 years," Kaine said. "These other states are in a similar spot."

In North Carolina, which hadn't gone for a Democratic president since 1976, hopes that first-term Republican Sen. Richard Burr could be defeated have waned and Gov. Bev Perdue and Sen. Kay Hagan, two Democrats elected on Obama's coattails, have approval ratings hovering around 30 percent.

"There aren't many Obamas," said Gary Pearce, a longtime Tar Heel State Democratic consultant. "He's not on the ballot, and I don't know that [his appeal] transmits. He created an energy and enthusiasm that's really rare in politics."

In Indiana, Virginia and North Carolina, Democrats fret that the absence of Obama on the ticket will ensure that fewer young and black voters will come to the polls - that the very "surge voters" that propelled the president could ensure defeat for the party by staying home this fall.

"Obama is still fairly strong here - a lot better than anybody else in public life," added Pearce. "What's changed is the Democrats are in charge now, and they're getting blamed for the economy being bad."

Democrats may have been the most optimistic about the political shift in the Mountain West, where demographics - a rising Hispanic population and a flood of California transplants - had pushed voters away from the GOP.

But Democrats' 2008 gains are now under siege, and the region is a central battleground this year, from the Senate seat of embattled Majority Leader Harry Reid on down. Three of the most vulnerable House freshmen Democrats are Nevada's Dina Titus, New Mexico's Harry Teague and Colorado's Betsy Markey. Democrats are at risk of losing both the Senate and governor's races in Nevada and Colorado, the latter of which was ground zero for the Rocky Mountain realignment, and a state that Obama had effectively locked up with a massive early-voting-turnout effort.

"I don't think it was ever a massive shift. I think it was an anomaly that came in good part because of the extraordinary financial effort that went into the voter registration," said Sig Rogich, a Republican consultant and veteran observer of Nevada politics who supports Reid.

A dismal economy in Nevada, in particular, which ranks at the top of the nation in home foreclosures and is second in unemployment, has slowed the demographic trend - immigration - behind the Democratic rise.

"We've lost a good number of those who helped to change the numbers - with the job losses and so forth," Rogich said.

The economy has also left local voters, perhaps even more deeply than elsewhere in the country, angry and eager for change.

"Even if you have a job, you're worried about it. Almost everybody knows either family or friends who have lost their jobs and same with people who have lost homes," said D. Taylor, the president of the Culinary Workers Union, which represents casino workers and backed Obama to the hilt in 2008. "It's general angst about no quick answers, which we as Americans aren't used to."

And out West, the same cultural libertarianism and suspicion of authority that helped push big-spending and moralistic Republicans from office is now rebounding against Democrats. The unaffiliated voters who have taken flight from the Democratic Party in the three recent statewide races across the nation are an even larger force in the electorates of states like Colorado.

"The argument that Obama moves too fast, too much, too expensive has been very effective here," said Floyd Ciruli, a Denver-based pollster.

The extent of Republican resurgence in the West won't be clear, however, until November, and Democrats are still competitive in races ranging from Reid's Senate seat to the open contest for the Colorado governorship, for which their candidate is popular Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper.

And there are Democratic bright spots that suggest, Colorado political consultant Mike Stratton said, that the West could resist a national wave. New Mexico Lt. Gov. Diane Denish is a strong candidate for the governorship. Nevada Gov. Jim Gibbons, a Republican, is campaigning for reelection despite profound unpopularity and stiff primary opposition.

Democrats continue to put stock in voter registration numbers that, they hope, Obama changed for good.

"When you look at Washoe County, I don think that's ever going to go back to being Republican," said state Assemblyman Richard Segerblom, a Democrat, referring to the conservative-leaning population center of northern Nevada. "That was Republican for all our lives."

To get those voters out this year, however, will be a challenge, party strategists acknowledge.

"Democrats who are running in 2010 need to give all those new voters a reason to turn out for them; they need to feel like there is something really at stake," said Dunn. "Be clear about what you're doing and why you're doing it and who you're fighting for."

Kaine pointed out, hopefully, that, "Nine months is a long time in politics. If the economy continues to improve - and we've seen signs it is - and we have action on health care, the dynamic is not going to be easy, but we can do quite well."

It's Battle of the Stimulus Day

2010-02-17T08:03:00Z

It's been a year since Obama signed his name to the so-called stimulus bill. And as Byron York says, if the unemployment rate doesn't begin to fall quickly, no annual report will convince Americans things are better.

It's Battle of the Stimulus day
By: Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
02/17/10 8:36 AM EST

One year ago today, Barack Obama signed the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the stimulus. At the time of its passage, the White House claimed the stimulus would keep unemployment from rising above eight percent. By late summer, when joblessness was moving toward 10 percent, a Gallup poll found that 57 percent of those surveyed felt the stimulus had either no effect or was making the economy worse, and slightly more than half felt Congress had spent too much on the recovery bill. At a time when the president was gearing up for a fight over his proposed national health care bill, he found himself on the defensive over the stimulus, as well.

And that is where the administration has been ever since. So today, on the first anniversary of the bill, we're seeing an across-the-board stimulus promotion offensive from the White House and the Democratic Party. Last night, the White House sent out embargoed copies of Vice President Biden's annual report on the stimulus' implementation. In the report, Biden revives the administration's once-common, then-abandoned, and now-revived "created or saved" standard for measuring the stimulus' effects. "One year after the passage of the Act, we can report that approximately 2 million jobs have been created or saved thanks to the Act's impact on hiring in the private sector, by local and state governments and by non-profits," Biden writes.

Meanwhile, the Democratic National Committee has been on the attack against Republican critics of the stimulus, creating a "Recovery Act Hypocrisy Hall of Fame" for GOP lawmakers who Democrats say denounced the stimulus but welcome its funds in their states and districts. The Democratic attacks are being amplified by friendly media figures -- see MSNBC's Rachel Maddow hitting Republican Rep. Aaron Schock on last Sunday's "Meet the Press."

For their part, Republicans are sending out a new statement by a Democrat -- retiring Sen. Evan Bayh -- who said that "If I could create one job in the private sector by helping to grow a business, that would be one more than Congress has created in the last six months."

"That's not exactly a ringing endorsement, and no wonder," writes the Republican Study Committee. "In the last year, the U.S. economy has lost around 3.5 million jobs, according to statistics published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). There are another 6.1 million Americans who want to work but for various reasons aren't counted by the BLS as part of the labor force (and thus don't show up in the generally quoted unemployment rate)."

So the battle will rage all day, and then all year. Bottom line: Obama, Biden, and Democrats on Capitol Hill can talk all they want about the stimulus' supposed benefits, but it won't do them any good until the unemployment rate begins to go down and continues to go down -- not a month or two of declines, but a consistent pattern of decline to a level at which the public feels things are definitely getting better. To that end, the White House is touting a new column by the New York Times' David Leonhardt who confidently reports "the jobless rate is now expected to begin falling consistently by the end of this year." If that happens, the administration will get credit. If it doesn't, no annual report will convince Americans things are better. And even in the best scenario, it's not clear whether any improvement would come quickly enough to help Democrats in November's elections.

The Return of the Public Option

2010-02-17T08:02:00Z

Government-run health care is back. Did you really think it went away? Sixteen liberal Democrats are now urging Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid to pass the public option through reconciliation.

The Bennet Letter on the public option

by Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO), co-signed by Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH)

These Senators showed bold leadership with this letter calling on Majority Leader Harry Reid to pass the public option through reconciliation.

Add your name as a citizen-signer.

LETTER FROM SENATE DEMOCRATS TO LEADER REID

Dear Leader Reid:

We respectfully ask that you bring for a vote before the full Senate a public health insurance option under budget reconciliation rules.

There are four fundamental reasons why we support this approach - its potential for billions of dollars in cost savings; the growing need to increase competition and lower costs for the consumer; the history of using reconciliation for significant pieces of health care legislation; and the continued public support for a public option.

A Public Option Is an Important Tool for Restoring Fiscal Discipline.

As Democrats, we pledged that the Senate health care reform package would address skyrocketing health care costs and relieve overburdened American families and small businesses from annual double-digit health care cost increases. And that it would do so without adding a dime to the national debt.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) determined that the Senate health reform bill is actually better than deficit neutral. It would reduce the deficit by over $130 billion in the first ten years and up to $1 trillion in the first 20 years.

These cost savings are an important start. But a strong public option can be the centerpiece of an even better package of cost saving measures. CBO estimated that various public option proposals in the House save at least $25 billion. Even $1 billion in savings would qualify it for consideration under reconciliation.

Put simply, including a strong public option is one of the best, most fiscally responsible ways to reform our health insurance system.

A Public Option Would Provide Americans with a Low-Cost Alternative and Improve Market Competitiveness.

A strong public option would create better competition in our health insurance markets. Many Americans have no or little real choice of health insurance provider. Far too often, it's "take it or leave it" for families and small businesses. This lack of competition drives up costs and leaves private health insurance companies with little incentive to provide quality customer service.

A recent Health Care for America Now report on private insurance companies found that the largest five for-profit health insurance providers made $12 billion in profits last year, yet they actually dropped 2.7 million people from coverage. Private insurance - by gouging the public even during a severe economic recession - has shown it cannot function in the public's interest without a public alternative. Americans have nowhere to turn. That is not healthy market competition, and it is not good for the public.

If families or individuals like their current coverage through a private insurance company, then they can keep that coverage. And in some markets where consumers have many alternatives, a public option may be less necessary. But many local markets have broken down, with only one or two insurance providers available to consumers. Each and every health insurance market should have real choices for consumers.

There is a history of using reconciliation for significant pieces of health care legislation.

There is substantial Senate precedent for using reconciliation to enact important health care policies. The Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Medicare Advantage, and the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (COBRA), which actually contains the term 'reconciliation' in its title, were all enacted under reconciliation.

The American Enterprise Institute's Norman Ornstein and Brookings' Thomas Mann and Molly Reynolds jointly wrote, "Are Democrats making an egregious power grab by sidestepping the filibuster? Hardly." They continued that the precedent for using reconciliation to enact major policy changes is "much more extensive . . . than Senate Republicans are willing to admit these days."

There is strong public support for a public option, across party lines.

The overwhelming majority of Americans want a public option. The latest New York Times poll on this issue, in December, shows that despite the attacks of recent months Americans support the public option 59% to 29%. Support includes 80% of Democrats, 59% of Independents, and even 33% of Republicans.

Much of the public identifies a public option as the key component of health care reform -- and as the best thing we can do to stand up for regular people against big insurance companies. In fact, overall support for health care reform declined steadily as the public option was removed from reform legislation.

Although we strongly support the important reforms made by the Senate-passed health reform package, including a strong public option would improve both its substance and the public's perception of it. The Senate has an obligation to reform our unworkable health insurance market -- both to reduce costs and to give consumers more choices. A strong public option is the best way to deliver on both of these goals, and we urge its consideration under reconciliation rules.

Respectfully,

Michael Bennet (D-CO), U.S. Senator
Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), U.S. Senator
Jeff Merkley (D-OR), U.S. Senator
Sherrod Brown (D-OH), U.S. Senator

Read the full list...

Obama: King of Other People's Money

2010-02-17T08:02:00Z

President Obama talks about fiscal discipline, but like everything else with him, it's just rhetoric. Obama's on track to spend about 25% more than FDR. He's the new king of spending other people's money, says Terry Jeffrey.

Obama Defeats FDR (in Spending Other People's Money)
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
By Terence P. Jeffrey

After he signed a law last week authorizing the U.S. Treasury to borrow an additional $1.9 trillion, President Barack Obama delivered a characteristically sanctimonious speech. It was about his deep commitment to frugality.

"After a decade of profligacy, the American people are tired of politicians who talk the talk but don't walk the walk when it comes to fiscal responsibility," he said. "It's easy to get up in front of the cameras and rant against exploding deficits. What's hard is actually getting deficits under control. But that's what we must do. Like families across the country, we have to take responsibility for every dollar we spend."

To put Obama's Olympian hypocrisy in perspective, one need only examine the federal budget tables posted on the White House website by Obama's own Office of Management and Budget.

They reveal these startling facts: When calculated by the average annual percentage of the Gross Domestic Product that he will spend during his presidency, Obama is on track to become the biggest-spending president since 1930, the earliest year reported on the OMB's historical chart of spending as a percentage of GDP. When calculated by the average annual percentage of GDP he will borrow during his presidency, Obama is on track to become the greatest debter president since Franklin Roosevelt.

Obama will outspend and out-borrow the admittedly profligate George W. Bush, a man Obama and his lieutenants routinely malign for fiscal recklessness and who, when in office, was often hailed even by his allies as a Big Government Republican. Obama will even outspend-but not quite out-borrow-his fellow welfare-state liberal FDR, who had to contend with both the Depression and World War II.

In determining this was the case, I credited the presidents prior to Obama with the federal spending and borrowing that occurred during the fiscal years that started when they were in office. I credited Obama with the spending and borrowing that his own OMB estimates will occur during the fiscal years from 2010 to 2013, which are the four fiscal years starting during Obama's four-year term. (Before fiscal 1977, fiscal years ran from July 1 to June 30. Since then, they have run from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30.)

FDR was inaugurated in March 1933 and died in April 1945. He is thus responsible for the 12 fiscal years from 1934 to 1945. During those years of depression and world war, according to OMB, federal spending averaged 19.35 percent of GDP. During Obama's four fiscal years, OMB estimates spending will average 24.13 percent of GDP. That is about 25 percent more than under FDR.

In the first eight fiscal years of FDR's presidency, before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, federal spending as a percentage of GDP never exceeded 12 (despite the Depression). During those years, it averaged only 9.85 percent. Under Obama, annual spending as a percentage of GDP will average almost two-and-a-half times that much.

In fiscal 1942, when the U.S. started dramatically ramping up expenditures to fight World War II, federal spending equaled 24.3 percent of GDP. In 2010, the first full fiscal year of the Obama era, spending will reach 25.4 percent of GDP.

Under current estimates, Obama will not beat FDR's overall record for borrowing, although he will nearly double FDR's pre-World War II rate of borrowing. From 1934-41, FDR ran annual deficits that averaged 3.56 percent of GDP. Obama, according to OMB, will run average annual deficits of 7.05 percent GDP. When you include the war years of 1942-45, FDR ran average annual deficits of 9.76 percent of GDP. Even without a world war, Obama's overall prospective borrowing is at least competitive with FDR's.

And Obama and FDR share one historic debt-accumulating distinction. By OMB's calculation, they are the only two presidents since 1930 to run up annual deficits that reached double figures as a percentage of GDP. Obama will run up a deficit this year of 10.6 percent of GDP. The last time the deficit hit double digits as a percentage of GDP was 1945 -- when Germany and Japan surrendered.

The U.S. won the Cold War without ever running a double-digit deficit. President Reagan's highest deficit was 6 percent of GDP in 1983 -- and he bankrupted the Soviet Union not the United States.

So how does Obama compare with the much-maligned George W. Bush? In Bush's eight fiscal years, annual federal spending averaged 20.43 percent of GDP, significantly less than Obama's estimated 24.13 percent of GDP.

Bush ran annual deficits that averaged 3.4 percent of GDP-and that includes fiscal 2009, when the deficit soared to 9.9 percent of GDP and Obama signed a $787 billion stimulus bill (some of which was spent in fiscal 2009) after Bush left office. Obama, according to OMB, will run deficits that average 7.5 percent of GDP-or more than twice the average deficits under Bush.

The bottom line on Obama: He puts our money where his mouth is.

ClimateGate U-Turn: Not Warming Now?

2010-02-15T08:03:00Z

Following the biggest fraud in the history modern science, climate researchers are backtracking on their claims that the planet is warming. Here's the latest on the Great Climate Change Retreat...

World may not be warming, say scientists
Jonathan Leake

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was "unequivocal".

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

"The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change," said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

"The story is the same for each one," he said. "The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development."

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.

The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

"We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC's climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias," he said.

Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate change sceptic.

His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment.

Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a waste incinerator.

Watts has also found examples overseas, such as the weather station at Rome airport, which catches the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing jets.

In Britain, a weather station at Manchester airport was built when the surrounding land was mainly fields but is now surrounded by heat-generating buildings.

Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases. Mills's findings are to be published in Climatic Change, an environmental journal.

"The earth has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last 1,000 years," he said.

Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the chapter of the IPCC report that deals with the observed temperature changes, said he accepted there were problems with the global thermometer record but these had been accounted for in the final report.

"It's not just temperature rises that tell us the world is warming," he said. "We also have physical changes like the fact that sea levels have risen around five inches since 1972, the Arctic icecap has declined by 40% and snow cover in the northern hemisphere has declined."

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has recently issued a new set of global temperature readings covering the past 30 years, with thermometer readings augmented by satellite data.

Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said: "This new set of data confirms the trend towards rising global temperatures and suggest that, if anything, the world is warming even more quickly than we had thought."

Does Obama Want a GOP Victory?

2010-02-15T08:02:00Z

Will a GOP majority spell re-election for Our Supreme Leader? Speculation this weekend that President Obama wants the Republican Party to take back Congress, the first step towards his own re-election in 2012.

White House Hoping For GOP Takeover?
By Sean Higgins
Fri., Feb. 12, '10 3:17 PM ET

Buried in a Politico story today on the growing friction between the House Democrats and the White House is an intriguing bit of news from an unnamed insider: House Democrats are beginning to wonder if the White House is intentionally throwing them under the bus:

One Democratic official ... (said) some Democratic House members actually believe that the White House "wouldn't mind having a foil, and that foil is a Republican (House) majority - that would serve their political purposes going into 2012."

These House Democrats say privately that veterans of Bill Clinton's administration working in Obama's White House may think having a Republican majority in Congress will help Obama win re-election, as it did Clinton in 1996. House Democrats know that Obama will do whatever it takes to win re-election, whether or not it helps members keep their seats this year.

The story goes on to quote White House adviser David Axelrod saying that such theories are "not based in reality."

Nevertheless, political experts have long noted that presidents tend to do best when the opposition party holds Congress and struggle when their parties have the majority. Jimmy Carter struggled despite Democratic domination of Congress, while Ronald Reagan thrived in the same environment. Bill Clinton stumbled when his party controlled Congress but regained his footing after the GOP takeover of 1994. George W. Bush's having a GOP-led Congress for most of his term did not help him pass Social Security or immigration reform, etc.

The problem appears to be that one-party control creates unrealistically high expectations from supporters that anything can be done. In reality, even a small minority can often block action in Congress. The Founding Fathers intended the system to work this way. It also makes the victories by the minority party in stymieing the president's agenda seem like an even bigger deal. To put things in perspective, today's frustrated Democrats were yesterday's proud gridlockers stopping Bush's Social Security reform.

On the other hand, having the opposition party in control of Congress not only gives the president a foil to play against, but it eases the pressure on him to pass anything big for his own base. They know not to expect as much.

So it's not surprising that some Democrats may be wondering if the White House wants to get back to its campaign days, when they were struggling against the odds. That's a lot more fun than its first year actually governing when fans wanted a radical shift in health care, energy, labor and foreign policy.

President Obama's Reality Gap

2010-02-12T08:03:00Z

Is the president trying to campaign his way through the presidency? NY Post columnist Rich Lowry argues that Obama's biggest problem is a reality gap. No longer can he talk his way out of our problems.

The president's reality problem

By RICH LOWRY

Last Updated: 10:44 AM, February 12, 2010

Posted: 12:34 AM, February 12, 2010

It might have been the most revelatory moment of the Obama presidency. In an interview with Time magazine, a chastened President Obama talked of his sputtering Middle East peace initiative.

"This is just really hard," he explained. "This is as intractable a problem as you get."

As an observation, this is as banal as it gets. After all the wars and all the terror attacks against Israel and all the frustrated American diplomatic forays across the last two administrations, no one should be surprised at the intractability of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

But Obama sounded as if it were painful new information that had forced an unwelcome adjustment in his worldview.

This speaks either to an astonishing historical ignorance (did he not know?) or a stupendous self-regard (did he not care because he thought he was so special?), or both.

There is already a debate over what went wrong with the Obama presidency.

Is his team of advisers -- nearly universally considered the best and the brightest until the day before yesterday -- serving him poorly? Has he failed to communicate effectively, even though almost all his speeches have been critically acclaimed? Did he fail to "pivot to jobs" fast enough?

Actually, Obama has a more worrisome problem: a reality gap.

During the campaign, Obama could throw a rhetorical pixie dust over all the difficult choices inherent in governing and the contradictions of his own program, making them fade into a beguiling vision of a sun-lit post-Bush America. This magical realism sustained him until November 2008 -- but couldn't withstand governing.

Consider Obama's most elemental appeal as a candidate: He excited the base of his own party while winning over the center with talk of "post-partisanship." On the stump, he could maintain this balance. In office, he had to choose either partisanship in the form of his powerful Democratic allies on Capitol Hill, or postpartisanship in the form of concessions to Republicans that would anger and disappoint his own side. He chose Nancy Pelosi, and watched independents flee from him.

On fiscal policy, Obama could promise massive new programs at the same time, in one debate, he asserted his approach would mean "a net spending cut." A laughable contradiction, it wasn't fully exposed until Obama had to write a budget. With $1 trillion deficits now stretching off into the horizon, his answer is appointing a commission to study the matter.

Obama is still the same illusionist from the campaign on his signature health-care initiative. The new $1 trillion entitlement will reduce the deficit. It will insure millions more people while bending the cost curve down. The hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare cuts will be utterly painless. There's no trade-off or sacrifice in sight, and -- not surprisingly -- people don't believe it.

Obama came to office under fundamental misapprehensions that hamper him still. It's not true that all that was keeping the Israelis and Palestinians apart was the lack of US engagement, or that the Iranians were amenable to getting talked out of their nuclear program, or that Guantanamo Bay was a pointless contrivance.

Nor is it true that government is a sustainable source of economic growth, or a more efficient allocator of capital than the market. This is why Obama's stimulus program -- inevitably, a dog's breakfast of politically driven priorities -- is such a shambles that his aides never utter the word "stimulus" anymore. It is on to the next program, a nearly $100 billion "jobs" bill that reflects the touching belief that to work as intended a program only has to be named appropriately.

Obama's advisers want him to pull out of his downdraft by getting back to campaign mode. It's governance as performance art. He's hosting a bipartisan health-care summit on Feb. 25. Surely, he'll sound great and spin gorgeous webs of fancy -- as the reality gap yawns beneath him. comments.lowry@ nationalreview.com

AP: Jobs Bill Won't Create Jobs

2010-02-11T08:03:00Z

The Associated Press says the Democrats' so-called jobs bill will help them politically, but it has one major flaw: It won't create many jobs. Find out why this legislation would only work at the margins.

PROMISES, PROMISES: Jobs bill won't add many jobs

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press Writer Stephen Ohlemacher, Associated Press Writer - Wed Feb 10, 6:46 pm ET

WASHINGTON - It's a bipartisan jobs bill that would hand President Barack Obama a badly needed political victory and placate Republicans with tax cuts at the same time. But it has a problem: It won't create many jobs.

Even the Obama administration acknowledges the legislation's centerpiece - a tax cut for businesses that hire unemployed workers - would work only on the margins.

As for the bill's effectiveness, tax experts and business leaders said companies are unlikely to hire workers just to receive a tax break. Before businesses start hiring, they need increased demand for their products, more work for their employees and more revenue to pay those workers.

"We're skeptical that it's going to be a big job creator," said Bill Rys, tax counsel for the National Federation of Independent Business. "There's certainly nothing wrong with giving a tax break to a business that's hired a new worker, especially in these tough times. But in terms of being an incentive to hire a lot of workers, we're skeptical."

Rick Klahsen, a tax expert at the accounting firm RSM McGladrey, said his clients need to see business pick up before they can hire more workers.

"If demand were increased, they are saying it will take care of itself because I will then have the motivation to go out and hire new employees," Klahsen said.

The bipartisan Senate plan would exempt businesses from paying a 6.2 percent Social Security tax on the wages of new employees, as long as the workers have been unemployed at least 60 days. The tax break would run through the end of the year.

A company could save a maximum of $6,621 if it hired an unemployed worker after the bill is enacted and paid that worker at least $106,800 - the maximum amount of wages subject to Social Security taxes - by the end of the year. The company could get an additional $1,000 on its 2011 tax return if it kept the new worker for at least a full year.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office recently concluded that reducing Social Security taxes for companies that add workers would be among the most efficient ways for the government to create jobs. However, in showing how difficult it is to create jobs through tax policy, CBO estimates that such a tax break would generate only eight to 18 full-time jobs per $1 million in tax breaks.

The Senate proposal, which is more narrow than the one analyzed by CBO, is estimated to cost about $10 billion. That would add 80,000 to 180,000 jobs over the course of a year. The U.S. economy, meanwhile, has lost 8.4 million jobs since the start of the recession.

Nonetheless, supporters say it is cheaper, simpler and less vulnerable to abuse than Obama's plan, which would give a $5,000 tax credit for each new worker that employers hire and cost $33 billion.

Either way, Obama and lawmakers in both parties still could claim tangible accomplishments in addressing high joblessness and the inability of Republicans and Democrats to work together to solve problems, both top issues among voters early in 2010 midterm election season.

Democratic leaders had originally hoped to pass the bill this week, before record snowfalls effectively shut down Congress and much of the rest of the federal government in the nation's capital. Final action now may not come until March.

In addition to a tax break for hiring workers, the Senate package would extend unemployment payments for people without jobs for more than six months as well as subsidies to help the jobless continue paying premiums for health insurance they had been getting through their former employers.

It also would extend through 2010 about $33 billion in popular tax breaks that expired at the end of 2009, including an income tax deduction for sales and property taxes and a business tax credit for research and development.

Those tax cuts make Republicans willing participants in the bill, despite skepticism in both parties that it will produce an abundance of jobs.

At a hearing last week, House Democrats peppered Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner with questions about whether a tax break for hiring workers will increase employment. Geithner defended the idea but acknowledged that businesses won't start hiring until demand for their products and services increases.

"I think this will provide a little bit more of a boost, a little more spark to make sure as we grow, we're creating more jobs than we otherwise would," he told the House Ways and Means Committee.

Rys, of the National Federation of Independent Business, said the credit could speed hiring once employers need more workers. But, he said, NFIB members aren't seeing many signs of improvement.

"Right now, business owners just don't have customers," Rys said. "Until you have work for the employee to do, there's really less of a reason to hire a new worker."

FT: Greek Crisis Coming to America

2010-02-11T08:02:00Z

We've been keeping a close watch on the financial crisis in Greece. And Niall Ferguson in the Financial Times writes that the United States is no safe haven and may face a day of reckoning soon.

A Greek crisis is coming to America

By Niall Ferguson

Published: February 10 2010 20:15 | Last updated: February 10 2010 20:15

It began in Athens. It is spreading to Lisbon and Madrid. But it would be a grave mistake to assume that the sovereign debt crisis that is unfolding will remain confined to the weaker eurozone economies. For this is more than just a Mediterranean problem with a farmyard acronym. It is a fiscal crisis of the western world. Its ramifications are far more profound than most investors currently appreciate.

There is of course a distinctive feature to the eurozone crisis. Because of the way the European Monetary Union was designed, there is in fact no mechanism for a bail-out of the Greek government by the European Union, other member states or the European Central Bank (articles 123 and 125 of the Lisbon treaty). True, Article 122 may be invoked by the European Council to assist a member state that is "seriously threatened with severe difficulties caused by natural disasters or exceptional occurrences beyond its control", but at this point nobody wants to pretend that Greece's yawning deficit was an act of God. Nor is there a way for Greece to devalue its currency, as it would have done in the pre-EMU days of the drachma. There is not even a mechanism for Greece to leave the eurozone.

That leaves just three possibilities: one of the most excruciating fiscal squeezes in modern European history - reducing the deficit from 13 per cent to 3 per cent of gross domestic product within just three years; outright default on all or part of the Greek government's debt; or (most likely, as signalled by German officials on Wednesday) some kind of bail-out led by Berlin. Because none of these options is very appealing, and because any decision about Greece will have implications for Portugal, Spain and possibly others, it may take much horse-trading before one can be reached.

Yet the idiosyncrasies of the eurozone should not distract us from the general nature of the fiscal crisis that is now afflicting most western economies. Call it the fractal geometry of debt: the problem is essentially the same from Iceland to Ireland to Britain to the US. It just comes in widely differing sizes.

What we in the western world are about to learn is that there is no such thing as a Keynesian free lunch. Deficits did not "save" us half so much as monetary policy - zero interest rates plus quantitative easing - did. First, the impact of government spending (the hallowed "multiplier") has been much less than the proponents of stimulus hoped. Second, there is a good deal of "leakage" from open economies in a globalised world. Last, crucially, explosions of public debt incur bills that fall due much sooner than we expect

For the world's biggest economy, the US, the day of reckoning still seems reassuringly remote. The worse things get in the eurozone, the more the US dollar rallies as nervous investors park their cash in the "safe haven" of American government debt. This effect may persist for some months, just as the dollar and Treasuries rallied in the depths of the banking panic in late 2008.

Yet even a casual look at the fiscal position of the federal government (not to mention the states) makes a nonsense of the phrase "safe haven". US government debt is a safe haven the way Pearl Harbor was a safe haven in 1941.

Even according to the White House's new budget projections, the gross federal debt in public hands will exceed 100 per cent of GDP in just two years' time. This year, like last year, the federal deficit will be around 10 per cent of GDP. The long-run projections of the Congressional Budget Office suggest that the US will never again run a balanced budget. That's right, never.

The International Monetary Fund recently published estimates of the fiscal adjustments developed economies would need to make to restore fiscal stability over the decade ahead. Worst were Japan and the UK (a fiscal tightening of 13 per cent of GDP). Then came Ireland, Spain and Greece (9 per cent). And in sixth place? Step forward America, which would need to tighten fiscal policy by 8.8 per cent of GDP to satisfy the IMF.

Explosions of public debt hurt economies in the following way, as numerous empirical studies have shown. By raising fears of default and/or currency depreciation ahead of actual inflation, they push up real interest rates. Higher real rates, in turn, act as drag on growth, especially when the private sector is also heavily indebted - as is the case in most western economies, not least the US.

Although the US household savings rate has risen since the Great Recession began, it has not risen enough to absorb a trillion dollars of net Treasury issuance a year. Only two things have thus far stood between the US and higher bond yields: purchases of Treasuries (and mortgage-backed securities, which many sellers essentially swapped for Treasuries) by the Federal Reserve and reserve accumulation by the Chinese monetary authorities.

But now the Fed is phasing out such purchases and is expected to wind up quantitative easing. Meanwhile, the Chinese have sharply reduced their purchases of Treasuries from around 47 per cent of new issuance in 2006 to 20 per cent in 2008 to an estimated 5 per cent last year. Small wonder Morgan Stanley assumes that 10-year yields will rise from around 3.5 per cent to 5.5 per cent this year. On a gross federal debt fast approaching $1,500bn, that implies up to $300bn of extra interest payments - and you get up there pretty quickly with the average maturity of the debt now below 50 months.

The Obama administration's new budget blithely assumes real GDP growth of 3.6 per cent over the next five years, with inflation averaging 1.4 per cent. But with rising real rates, growth might well be lower. Under those circumstances, interest payments could soar as a share of federal revenue - from a tenth to a fifth to a quarter.

Last week Moody's Investors Service warned that the triple A credit rating of the US should not be taken for granted. That warning recalls Larry Summers' killer question (posed before he returned to government): "How long can the world's biggest borrower remain the world's biggest power?"

On reflection, it is appropriate that the fiscal crisis of the west has begun in Greece, the birthplace of western civilization. Soon it will cross the channel to Britain. But the key question is when that crisis will reach the last bastion of western power, on the other side of the Atlantic.

The writer is a contributing editor of the FT and author of 'The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World'

Knoller: What Obama Really Wants

2010-02-10T08:03:00Z

Does President Obama really want a bipartisan summit on health care? No, says CBS' White House Correspondent Mark Knoller. He says the president is really calling for Republican surrender. No mercy!

Obama Says Bipartisanship, But What He Wants Is GOP Surrender

Posted by Mark Knoller

Unannounced, President Obama took to the lectern in the White House briefing room today to give a personal readout of his meeting earlier with congressional leaders of both parties.

"Despite the political posturing that often paralyzes this town, there are many issues upon which we can and should agree, he said.

It was more a plaintive plea than a political observation. His top legislative priorities are going nowhere and he's searching for a way to get them out of lockup.

In this 13th month of his presidency, he's anxious to pass a jobs bill and be seen addressing an unemployment rate that only last week declined from double digits. And his efforts to enact bills on energy, financial regulatory reform and especially health care are stuck in Congress despite the solid majority his party holds in both chambers.

He's appealing for a spirit of bipartisanship - urging Democrats and Republicans alike "to put aside matters of party for the good of the country."

It's a familiar refrain from U.S. presidents who can't get their way in Congress.

"We must put aside our political differences if we're ever to set our economy to rights," said President Reagan in 1982.

"It is time to put aside partisan rivalries and work together for our nation's future," said President Reagan in 1987 in trying to get Congress to enact deficit reduction

"We must put aside partisanship for the sake of our nation," said the first President Bush in 1990 in appealing for congressional cooperation on the budget.

"We must now put aside bitterness and rancor, move beyond partisanship," urged President Clinton in 1993 in trying to get Congress to pass his economic plan.

What these presidential appeals for bipartisanship always mean is: do it my way.

Mr. Obama said he "won't hesitate to embrace a good idea from my friends in the minority party." But he wants his way. He wants his energy policy enacted along with his jobs bill, his financial regulatory reform and his health care plan.

And if the opposition continues to block his objectives, he said he "won't hesitate to condemn what I consider to be obstinacy that's rooted not in substantive disagreement but in political expedience."

When a sitting president calls for bipartisanship by the opposition - he really means surrender. And if they block his proposals, its "obstinacy" and not political views they hold as strongly as he holds his.

Mr. Obama again said the American people are frustrated by the political stalemate in Congress. And he can be counted among the frustrated as well.

He wants to be seen calmly pursuing his legislative goals - and he told reporters today that his meeting with congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle went well. So well, in fact, he joked that the Senate leaders, Democrat Harry Reid and Republican Mitch McConnell had gone out to the South Lawn to make snow angels - together." (Watch Mr. Obama's comment.)

It still leaves them with a chilly relationship.

Silver Star for Brave WWII Vet

2010-02-10T08:02:00Z

Now this column is truly a must-read: Louis Stamatakos, 65 years later, will finally get the Silver Star he earned in a harrowing moment over Nazi Germany. Imagine taking a fire ax to dislodge a hanging bomb...in mid-air!

WWII vet recalls harrowing moment over Nazi Germany

BY JOE SWICKARD
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

Straddling an open bomb bay at 20,000 feet over Germany and swinging a short-handled fire ax to dislodge a live 250-pound, high-explosive bomb -- another heart-stopping day at the office for 19-year-old B17 tail gunner Louis Stamatakos.

Now, 65 years later, Stamatakos, a retired Michigan State University professor of higher education administration, will be awarded a Silver Star, one of the nation's highest military honors for gallantry in combat.

"That's back when I was young and dumb," said Stamatakos of Okemos.

No, it was guts when it counted most, said crewmate Richard Rainoldi. Stamatakos' bravery saved their plane, the Mis-Behavin', and their lives, Rainoldi said.

"If he hadn't done it, it was either bailing out or blowing up," said Rainoldi, a retired Air Force colonel.

The award was a Christmas Eve surprise, thanks to Stamatakos' three sons and Rainoldi.

"My wife and I came home, and there was a letter from the Department of the Army. I wondered what they wanted with me -- I'm 84 years old," Stamatakos said.

But inside was notification that his efforts on Feb. 28, 1945, over Germany were being recognized. The presentation ceremony will be Feb. 17 at the state Capitol in Lansing

Unbeknownst to Stamatakos, his sons Philip, Timothy and Ted had decided to make sure their father was honored after they read his World War II memoirs. They tracked down Rainoldi, the plane's navigator, in California, and he prepared a sworn statement. Then, with the help of U.S. Sen. Carl Levin's office, the Army decided to award the citation.

"I had no idea what they had done," Stamatakos said. "They were very proud of what they did -- and keeping it secret."

Stamatakos grew up in Dayton, Ohio, fascinated by flight and the achievements of the Wright Brothers, who had a bicycle shop there.

He enlisted during World War II and was trained as a tail gunner in the B17 Flying Fortress. He survived 31 missions with the 8th Air Force, flying out of England.

That string almost stopped with his 23rd mission: bombing railroad yards in Kassel, Germany. On the homeward leg, word was passed that two 250-pound bombs had failed to drop. One of them was dangling by a single shackle. The other was still stuck by its two shackles.

"Everyone went crazy when they heard that, and then somebody said, 'Hey, get the Greek, he's been going to armament school,' " Stamatakos said. "I took a look and said, well, maybe I can break them loose."

Taking a fire ax, he started swinging at the shackle to free the dangling bomb.

The rushing air had spun a small propeller on the bomb's nose, arming the device. Solid contact between the bomb nose and the side of the plane -- or the fire ax -- would have blasted the bomber apart.

"Fortunately, it didn't go off, but I was beating the hell out of the side of the plane," Stamatakos said. "God, it was cold. It was like a wind tunnel, and at that altitude it's about 20 below zero."

After several swings, the shackle released the armed bomb. It hit a small island in the middle of a river.

"We couldn't have hit that with a bombsight," he said.

The second, unarmed bomb was soon dispatched.

"I went back to the tail, and I started to settle into my seat and I started shaking -- I couldn't stop," he said. "It's a reaction when you realize what you've just gone through."

His son Philip said he is in awe of his father and the other veterans.

"These guys were so young," he said. "My dad was 19 years old. In the same situation, I wonder if I could do what they did. We owe them all a debt."

The presentation ceremony will take place in the House speaker's library in the state Capitol.

Why Are Liberals So Condescending?

2010-02-08T08:03:00Z

Gerard Alexander's op-ed in the Washington Post asks that very question, which Lou has asked repeatedly. Alexander says Obama and other leading liberals have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.

Gerard Alexander: Why are liberals so condescending?

By Gerard Alexander
Sunday, February 7, 2010

Every political community includes some members who insist that their side has all the answers and that their adversaries are idiots. But American liberals, to a degree far surpassing conservatives, appear committed to the proposition that their views are correct, self-evident, and based on fact and reason, while conservative positions are not just wrong but illegitimate, ideological and unworthy of serious consideration. Indeed, all the appeals to bipartisanship notwithstanding, President Obama and other leading liberal voices have joined in a chorus of intellectual condescension.

It's an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation -- as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a "Bolshevik plot" -- and the country's failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. "We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).

This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government -- and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.

Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." During the 1950s and '60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to "the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind."

This sense of liberal intellectual superiority dropped off during the economic woes of the 1970s and the Reagan boom of the 1980s. (Jimmy Carter's presidency, buffeted by economic and national security challenges, generated perhaps the clearest episode of liberal self-doubt.) But these days, liberal confidence and its companion disdain for conservative thinking are back with a vengeance, finding energetic expression in politicians' speeches, top-selling books, historical works and the blogosphere. This attitude comes in the form of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function.

The first is the "vast right-wing conspiracy," a narrative made famous by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her. This vision maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics. A dense network of professional political strategists such as Karl Rove, think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and industry groups allegedly manipulate information and mislead the public. Democratic strategist Rob Stein crafted a celebrated PowerPoint presentation during George W. Bush's presidency that traced conservative success to such organizational factors.

This liberal vision emphasizes the dissemination of ideologically driven views from sympathetic media such as the Fox News Channel. For example, Chris Mooney's book "The Republican War on Science" argues that policy debates in the scientific arena are distorted by conservatives who disregard evidence and reflect the biases of industry-backed Republican politicians or of evangelicals aimlessly shielding the world from modernity. In this interpretation, conservative arguments are invariably false and deployed only cynically. Evidence of the costs of cap-and-trade carbon rationing is waved away as corporate propaganda; arguments against health-care reform are written off as hype orchestrated by insurance companies.

This worldview was on display in the popular liberal reaction to the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Rather than engage in a discussion about the complexities of free speech in politics, liberals have largely argued that the decision will "open the floodgates for special interests" to influence American elections, as the president warned in his State of the Union address. In other words, it was all part of the conspiracy to support conservative candidates for their nefarious, self-serving ends.

It follows that the thinkers, politicians and citizens who advance conservative ideas must be dupes, quacks or hired guns selling stories they know to be a sham. In this spirit, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman regularly dismisses conservative arguments not simply as incorrect, but as lies. Writing last summer, Krugman pondered the duplicity he found evident in 35 years' worth of Wall Street Journal editorial writers: "What do these people really believe? I mean, they're not stupid -- life would be a lot easier if they were. So they know they're not telling the truth. But they obviously believe that their dishonesty serves a higher truth. . . . The question is, what is that higher truth?"

In Krugman's world, there is no need to take seriously the arguments of "these people" -- only to plumb the depths of their errors and imagine hidden motives.

But, if conservative leaders are crass manipulators, then the rank-and-file Americans who support them must be manipulated at best, or stupid at worst. This is the second variety of liberal condescension, exemplified in Thomas Frank's best-selling 2004 book, "What's the Matter With Kansas?" Frank argued that working-class voters were so distracted by issues such as abortion that they were induced into voting against their own economic interests. Then-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, later chairman of the Democratic National Committee, echoed that theme in his 2004 presidential run, when he said Republicans had succeeded in getting Southern whites to focus on "guns, God and gays" instead of economic redistribution.

And speaking to a roomful of Democratic donors in 2008, then-presidential candidate Obama offered a similar (and infamous) analysis when he suggested that residents of Rust Belt towns "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations" about job losses. When his comments became public, Obama backed away from their tenor but insisted that "I said something that everybody knows is true."

n this view, we should pay attention to conservative voters' underlying problems but disregard the policy demands they voice; these are illusory, devoid of reason or evidence. This form of liberal condescension implies that conservative masses are in the grip of false consciousness. When they express their views at town hall meetings or "tea party" gatherings, it might be politically prudent for liberals to hear them out, but there is no reason to actually listen.

The third version of liberal condescension points to something more sinister. In his 2008 book, "Nixonland," progressive writer Rick Perlstein argued that Richard Nixon created an enduring Republican strategy of mobilizing the ethnic and other resentments of some Americans against others. Similarly, in their 1992 book, "Chain Reaction," Thomas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall argued that Nixon and Reagan talked up crime control, low taxes and welfare reform to cloak racial animus and help make it mainstream. It is now an article of faith among many liberals that Republicans win elections because they tap into white prejudice against blacks and immigrants.

Race doubtless played a significant role in the shift of Deep South whites to the Republican Party during and after the 1960s. But the liberal narrative has gone essentially unchanged since then -- recall former president Carter's recent assertion that opposition to Obama reflects racism -- even though survey research has shown a dramatic decline in prejudiced attitudes among white Americans in the intervening decades. Moreover, the candidates and agendas of both parties demonstrate an unfortunate willingness to play on prejudices, whether based on race, region, class, income, or other factors.

Finally, liberals condescend to the rest of us when they say conservatives are driven purely by emotion and anxiety -- including fear of change -- whereas liberals have the harder task of appealing to evidence and logic. Former vice president Al Gore made this case in his 2007 book, "The Assault on Reason," in which he expressed fear that American politics was under siege from a coalition of religious fundamentalists, foreign policy extremists and industry groups opposed to "any reasoning process that threatens their economic goals." This right-wing politics involves a gradual "abandonment of concern for reason or evidence" and relies on propaganda to maintain public support, he wrote.

Prominent liberal academics also propagate these beliefs. George Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California at Berkeley and a consultant to Democratic candidates, says flatly that liberals, unlike conservatives, "still believe in Enlightenment reason," while Drew Westen, an Emory University psychologist and Democratic consultant, argues that the GOP has done a better job of mastering the emotional side of campaigns because Democrats, alas, are just too intellectual. "They like to read and think," Westen wrote. "They thrive on policy debates, arguments, statistics, and getting the facts right."

Markos Moulitsas, publisher of the influential progressive Web site Daily Kos, commissioned a poll, which he released this month, designed to show how many rank-and-file Republicans hold odd or conspiratorial beliefs -- including 23 percent who purportedly believe that their states should secede from the Union. Moulitsas concluded that Republicans are "divorced from reality" and that the results show why "it is impossible for elected Republicans to work with Democrats to improve our country." His condescension is superlative: Of the respondents who favored secession, he wonders, "Can we cram them all into the Texas Panhandle, create the state of Dumb-[expletive]-istan, and build a wall around them to keep them from coming into America illegally?"

I doubt it would take long to design a survey questionnaire that revealed strange, ill-informed and paranoid beliefs among average Democrats. Or does Moulitsas think Jay Leno talked only to conservatives for his "Jaywalking" interviews?

These four liberal narratives not only justify the dismissal of conservative thinking as biased or irrelevant -- they insist on it. By no means do all liberals adhere to them, but they are mainstream in left-of-center thinking. Indeed, when the president met with House Republicans in Baltimore recently, he assured them that he considers their ideas, but he then rejected their motives in virtually the same breath.

"There may be other ideas that you guys have," Obama said. "I am happy to look at them, and I'm happy to embrace them. . . . But the question I think we're going to have to ask ourselves is, as we move forward, are we going to be examining each of these issues based on what's good for the country, what the evidence tells us, or are we going to be trying to position ourselves so that come November, we're able to say, 'The other party, it's their fault'?"

Of course, plenty of conservatives are hardly above feeling superior. But the closest they come to portraying liberals as systematically mistaken in their worldview is when they try to identify ideological dogmatism in a narrow slice of the left (say, among Ivy League faculty members), in a particular moment (during the health-care debate, for instance) or in specific individuals (such as Obama or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom some conservatives accuse of being stealth ideologues). A few conservative voices may say that all liberals are always wrong, but these tend to be relatively marginal figures or media gadflies such as Glenn Beck.

In contrast, an extraordinary range of liberal writers, commentators and leaders -- from Jon Stewart's "Daily Show" to Obama's White House, with many stops in between -- have developed or articulated narratives that apply to virtually all conservatives at all times.

To many liberals, this worldview may be appealing, but it severely limits our national conversation on critical policy issues. Perhaps most painfully, liberal condescension has distorted debates over American poverty for nearly two generations.

Starting in the 1960s, the original neoconservative critics such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan expressed distress about the breakdown of inner-city families, only to be maligned as racist and ignored for decades -- until appalling statistics forced critics to recognize their views as relevant. Long-standing conservative concerns over the perils of long-term welfare dependency were similarly villainized as insincere and mean-spirited -- until public opinion insisted they be addressed by a Democratic president and a Republican Congress in the 1996 welfare reform law. But in the meantime, welfare policies that discouraged work, marriage and the development of skills remained in place, with devastating effects.

Ignoring conservative cautions and insights is no less costly today. Some observers have decried an anti-intellectual strain in contemporary conservatism, detected in George W. Bush's aw-shucks style, Sarah Palin's college-hopping and the occasional conservative campaigns against egghead intellectuals. But alongside that, the fact is that conservative-leaning scholars, economists, jurists and legal theorists have never produced as much detailed analysis and commentary on American life and policy as they do today.

Perhaps the most important conservative insight being depreciated is the durable warning from free-marketeers that government programs often fail to yield what their architects intend. Democrats have been busy expanding, enacting or proposing major state interventions in financial markets, energy and health care. Supporters of such efforts want to ensure that key decisions will be made in the public interest and be informed, for example, by sound science, the best new medical research or prudent standards of private-sector competition. But public-choice economists have long warned that when decisions are made in large, centralized government programs, political priorities almost always trump other goals.

Even liberals should think twice about the prospect of decisions on innovative surgeries, light bulbs and carbon quotas being directed by legislators grandstanding for the cameras. Of course, thinking twice would be easier if more of them were listening to conservatives at all.

Fewer Elites in Washington, Please!

2010-02-08T08:02:00Z

The Wall Street Journal tackles an issue Lou has proposed for some time: Washington needs fewer career politicians and more Americans who understand what it's like to be middle class in this country.

For GOP, No Experience Is No Problem
Party Drafts Political Newcomers as Candidates in a Bid to Capitalize on Voters' Anti-Incumbent, Anti-Washington Mood

Scott Rigell is best known around Virginia Beach as a car dealer. Come January, he is hoping to be known by another title: congressman.

Seeking to tap into growing anti-establishment discord among voters, the Republican Party is actively seeking candidates who have never before held elected office.

Bruce O'Donoghue owns a company that makes traffic-light systems; he is challenging Florida Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson. Jon Runyan, a former player for the Philadelphia Eagles and San Diego Chargers, is running in southern New Jersey.

"My roots run deep in Tennessee, not politics," reads the banner across the campaign Web site of Stephen Fincher, a Tennessee farmer and gospel singer heavily wooed by Washington Republicans to run this year.

Such Republicans are contesting six of the 20 most competitive House seats currently held by Democrats. At least as many are found in districts that could become more competitive as election season heats up. Filing deadlines to run for Congress are still months away in most states, so it is possible more newcomers could join the fold.

Running political newcomers is a proven strategy when the political tide swings drastically toward one side, and at times when voters have soured on Washington in general. In 1994, when Republicans won a majority of House seats after four decades in the minority, 55% of the party's 73 freshmen lawmakers had never held political office. Similarly in 2006, when Democrats took control, 45% of their new lawmakers had never held office before.

Chris Russell, campaign consultant for Mr. Runyan, called 2010 a good year to be running as an outsider. "I don't want to overstate it, but people hate politicians," he said.

The strategy could help Republicans tap into enthusiasm generated among Tea Party groups and other conservatives. Though these activists have sprung from the right, they remain antagonistic toward the GOP establishment. The movement arose in part as a backlash against the government's intervention in Wall Street and the auto industry, as well as opposition to Democratic initiatives, including a health-care overhaul.

his year, running newcomers is "absolutely the story of Republican recruiting," said David Wasserman, a House race analyst for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Cook currently predicts the GOP will gain between 25 and 35 House seats this fall, and doesn't rule out the more distant possibility of a Republican takeover, which would require a net gain of 40 seats.

Mr. Wasserman predicted a significant number of freshmen GOP lawmakers this November would be political newcomers. Many are running on a platform of fiscal rectitude, a nod to how the economy and role of government are dominating public debate. "We really are at a defining moment," Mr. Rigell said in an interview, during which he echoed a theme of economic uncertainty voiced by other candidates. "I look at the fiscal side of this country and I am alarmed and deeply troubled."

Unlike the 1994 setback, which caught the Democrats by surprise, the party is keenly aware of the political headwinds they face in the midterms, when the president's party typically loses seats.

The House Democrats' campaign operation has a significant cash advantage over its Republican counterpart: $16.6 million to $2.7 million. And incumbents are fund-raising in anticipation of competitive contests. Florida's Mr. Grayson said Wednesday that his $861,000 fourth-quarter haul was more than any other Democratic candidate's.

Many of these newcomers will also have to survive primary elections. Mr. O'Donoghue is favored by party leaders-he expects to be endorsed by Florida's retiring Republican Sen. Mel Martinez this week-but a crowded 12-way primary awaits.

Moreover, voters aren't necessarily ready to embrace Republicans, despite GOP victories in governor's races last year in Virginia and New Jersey and an upset win in last month's Massachusetts U.S. Senate race. Those victories relied on independent voters, not party loyalists.

A January Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed 42% of Americans held a negative view of the Republican Party and 30% held a positive one. "The Republican brand is damaged," Mr. Rigell said. "I have to overcome that."

There are early signals that voters are willing to welcome new blood. In an Illinois Republican primary on Tuesday, pest-management company manager Bob Dold upset the initial party favorite, State Rep. Beth Coulson. Mr. Dold now faces Dan Seals, the Democrats' unsuccessful 2006 and 2008 nominee, in what could be one of the most competitive contests this year.

Several rookie candidates said they hope their bids will capture the enthusiasm of activists, in particular Tea Party voters.

Mike Grimm, a former undercover agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who investigated white-collar crime on Wall Street, is running in the New York district held by Democratic Rep. Mike McMahon. He said the district, in the New York City borough of Staten Island, has one of the most active Tea Party groups in the nation. While the group doesn't endorse candidates, Mr. Grimm seeks counsel from local Tea Party leader Frank Santarpia. "I pick his brain all the time," Mr. Grimm said.

Mr. Santarpia said he likes the idea of newcomers running for Congress. "There's a great deal of appeal to that. It certainly appeals to me," he said.

Don't Know Much About History?

2010-02-08T08:01:00Z

Forget the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Founding Fathers. North Carolina's D.O.E. wants to start high-school students off with Rutherford B. Hayes! Thanks for missing the point of learning.

Listen here to hear what Lou has to say about it:

North Carolina Schools May Cut Chunk Out of U.S. History Lessons

By Molly Henneberg

He may be the president who governed during the Civil War, freeing the slaves, but under a new curriculum proposal for North Carolina high schools, U.S. history would begin years after President Lincoln, with the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877.

State education leaders say this may help students learn about more recent history in greater depth.

"We are certainly not trying to go away from American history," Rebecca Garland, the chief academic officer for North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, told Fox News. "What we are trying to do is figure out a way to teach it where students are connected to it, where they see the big idea, where they are able to make connections and draw relationships between parts of our history and the present day."

As the North Carolina curriculum stands now, ninth-grade students take world history, 10th-graders study civics and economics and 11th-graders take U.S. history going back to the country's founding.

Under the proposed change, the ninth-graders would take a course called global studies, focusing in part on issues such as the environment. The 10th grade still would study civics and economics, but 11th-graders would take U.S. history only from 1877 onward.

Math, science and English classes are also getting an update.

Critics say the state's decade-old high school curriculum may need an update - but not like this.

"The answer isn't to throw out fundamental portions of U.S. history," said Mike Belter, a U.S. history teacher and social studies director. "This is not preparing our kids to have a deep historical perspective that can be used to analyze modern events for themselves."

Educational policy analyst Terry Stoops agrees.

"I'm all for a global outlook, but it should not be at the expense of American history and learning about American institutions and ideas," he told Fox News.

But those considering the proposal say kids will still learn the basics.

"The students are in school for 13 years," said Garland. "They certainly are taught U.S. and North Carolina history in middle school."

Garland says they're making this curriculum revision process very public to get as much feedback as possible.

Lou Talks To Forbes Magazine

2010-02-05T08:03:00Z

Who's to blame for Wall Street's meltdown? Both political parties! Read this interview to see what Lou thinks about the economic recovery, small businesses and the possible return of Glass-Steagall.

Dobbs Wants Glass Steagall
Alexandra Zendrian, 02.05.10, 06:00 AM EST

Radio host Lou Dobbs on why investment banks shouldn't be taking deposits.

Independent-minded Lou Dobbs left his post at CNN last year and is still mulling his future, including a possible run for office. The well-regarded financial journalist turned iconoclast political commentator believes both parties are to blame for Wall Street's troubles and that some common sense regulations can at least insure that something like the financial crisis never happens again.

Forbes: If you had the ear of anyone who is controlling the state of the economy, what would you say is the direction we should be heading in and what should be done to get there?

Lou Dobbs: Obviously we need to do a great deal, and we need to do far more than simply create new government programs. I would say the first order of business is to begin aligning incentives for small business in this country to stimulate their innovation, their entrepreneurialism and their long-term financial success. I think that would involve certainly true leadership from this president, from Congress and the Senate. It would mean that we would have to look at the tax structure for these small businesses in particular. We have to begin looking at ways in which to align small business with the need to manufacture in this country and to begin building our manufacturing base. All of those things need to happen in relatively quick order and we've lost a year because of the administration and the Democratic leadership's devotion to the government's programmatic responses rather than true leadership and creative action to make things happen.

How would you get these incentives to small businesses?

What is interesting is that there's a great affection in Washington for the word "comprehensive" when talking about all sorts of legislative initiatives unless it involves the economy. And then it's as if Wall Street is somehow, in the minds of those in Washington, they have seemingly a view that Wall Street is divorced from Main Street. That somehow the real economy is a separate issue for legislators, rather than to understanding that an economy is a system that requires balance and energy throughout. And I believe that there is no excuse for this Congress' failure to provide oversight when it comes to regulation, there's no excuse for the Federal Reserve and Treasury to fail to understand that they've got to stimulate lending and maintain that opportunity for capital for small business in particular. And, at the same time, realize that we have to have considerable public and private investment in industry, in our communities and across the country. Not simply a devotion to earmarks and special interest projects in the so-called stimulus bill.

What kind of regulations should we be working on?

I think the first and most critically needed advance is the return of Glass-Steagall [The post-Depression era regulation that separated the activities of commercial and investment banks]. I think it was a horrible mistake when the Clinton administration decided to rescind it. I think we need to return to that level because I think nearly every economist, nearly every banker in the country understands, irrespective of their ideology or their partisanship, that much of what happened between 2006 and 2009 occurred because we not only had simply gotten "too big to fail" in many corners, particularly in Wall Street and banking, but we have gotten too big to manage. And had we allowed for a conflation of risk that we understood 70 years ago was a bad idea, why in the world would we ignore those lessons in history I can't imagine save one and that is greed.

I think that would be the single most important thing we could do in the way of regulation. The financial institutions, and chairman Barney Frank's financial institution reform legislation I think is perhaps well-intentioned but certainly it doesn't rise to the level of simply returning us to Glass Steagall.

What do you make of the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the bailouts?

As I said at the time, TARP was a tremendous mistake. It failed in its original purpose which was never carried out. Secondly, I believe it failed in the secondary and its mutated purpose which became public policy. And I believe that frankly eliminating moral hazard despite all of the congestion and paralysis in the credit markets, I believe that the result was hardly worth the cost. I believe it could have been handled in a far more intelligent fashion and a far more responsible fashion.

Among those elements should have been conditions for the money that was extended from the taxpayer's pockets with a sense of first responsibility and one of equity.

Where do you see the state of the economy now and where do you think it's headed?

I was the only one in September and October in the financial media who was saying that all the talk of a depression was so over the top and so hyperbolic as to be absurd. I said that we would be in recovery by the second half of 2009 and I'm proud to say that I was right. We continue to abuse an economy that is extraordinarily resilient, that is vital and is capable as we've demonstrated over the past 60 years of generating unimagined amounts of wealth not only for America but for the world. And I believe that if we can return to fundamental, responsible fiscal policy, monetary policy and business practices, America will be unleashed again in creating wealth and in driving extraordinary productivity as well as growth and job creation.

What do you think we should be doing on the job creation front and are you still concerned about jobs being shipped overseas?

I continue to look at the evidence and the evidence is clear. We've lost millions of jobs in manufacturing, we've lost millions of jobs to outsourcing and I think anyone who is being intellectually honest has to say that's had a deleterious effect on both the middle class and this economy. The results are in. There's no more, to me, for ideological quibbling on this or partisanship. We have at this point created more jobs in government over the past decade than we have in the private sector. We have lost jobs in the private sector over the course of the past decade; we have not created them. Where are the lags that would hold that the absolutely disastrous policies we've pursued in this country for the past 20 years are working despite evidence that is overwhelmingly to the contrary? Where are those lags now and why aren't they trying to, if not apologize, explain what went wrong with this so-called, one-sided free trade experiment. The result has been disastrous for the American worker, for manufacturing and for those of us who believe that the U.S. should be exporting at least almost as much as we are importing. I would love to hear from those people now. Where are those economists?

You've talked in the past about illegal immigration. How would you say the U.S. is doing on that front?

Well, I do think that we are moving in the right direction. We have certainly, in this administration and the previous, talking about unconditional amnesty. If there is any lesson over the past decade it is that this is a warm, welcoming, energetic economy and nation. But we cannot responsibly continue to leave open our borders and our port for the purposes of a responsible immigration policy. I've made it very clear that I'm in favor of higher levels of immigration into this country if indeed the economy and our society requires it and if it is an expression of conscious public policy. That said, why are we not talking about it in terms of the needs of the nation and the needs of the businesses and the economy for labor. And what type of labor we should be bringing in. We don't have those discussions, we don't have that dialogue because so many people have chosen to follow an illegal path to meeting labor needs rather than a legal path. We've got to change that.

Immigration itself ... we bring in more than three million people into this country lawfully. We naturalize more than a million people as citizens in this country every year. No country on earth even approaches our levels of immigration. We should be very proud of that. But instead, we have a distorted and I believe utterly fraudulent public discussion on the part of our elected officials when it comes to illegal immigration, border and port security. And they really need to be intellectually honest and straightforward about it.

What do you see as our needs for illegal immigration and what types of laborers do we need?

I believe absolutely that we have a need for significant levels of immigration. I think that they're about right at this time for an economy that is growing, modestly, but still growing; for a population that continues to demand more labor. So I'm satisfied with current immigration levels.

I believe that illegal immigration, we should make certain we end it and make certain that if we are going to bring in those people, it should be part of our current immigration policy. We should be abiding by our laws and our regulations rather than swamping them.

As someone who has had a front seat to changes in the media, what do you see as the future of the media?

I think we should obviously be terrifically concerned about the media's future. We see so much of the national news media behaving as if it were a pet pink poodle for this president and that's unfortunate. It is also regrettable that the time when the media's facing extraordinary challenges to growth, to profitability and in the case of many their very survival, that the result has been diminished levels of quality journalism. And we need a far more rigorous news media, we need a challenging media, one that is capable of critical judgment and great skepticism when covering Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals. Instead, so much of the national media that is complaining about their financial condition, their loss of circulation and viewership, these are the very same outlets who are frankly being toadies of the left. And I think that's a shame.

Are you looking at stepping into the political arena or another job?

I'm looking at a number of opportunities. I'm still not even close to making a decision here about which path I'll follow. But I'm looking in media, I'm looking at obviously for public policy and politics, and we'll see in the next few weeks or month or two what's best. It's one of the great luxuries to have no time constraints in performing.

Where's Our Stimulus Money Going?

2010-02-05T08:02:00Z

Check out this list of jobs funded by stimulus spending and then tell us whether you believe your taxpayer money is being spent wisely.

Millions in Stimulus Spending Being Doled Out for Questionable Jobs
By William La Jeunesse

Federal agencies are spending stimulus money at the rate of $196 million an hour. And they will do so every hour for the next eight months until a September 30, 2010, deadline.

"When you put that kind of money out the door that fast, there's a possibility of $55 billion dollars of waste, fraud and abuse connected with it," Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said Thursday before a Senate Finance Committee hearing examining the lack of oversight in the $878 billion dollar economic stimulus bill passed a year ago.

Grassley said he fears much of the money is going to some individuals and businesses that don't qualify for it and projects that do not serve taxpayers best interests. Judge for yourself:

-- $233,000 to the University of California at San Diego to study why Africans vote. Jobs created: 12, but seven of those are Africans in Africa.

-- In Nevada, $2 million in stimulus money built a new fire station, but because of budget cuts, the county can't afford to hire firefighters to work there.

-- Penn State University got $1.5 million to study plant fossils in Argentina. Of 5 jobs created, 2 belong to Argentines.

-- Researchers the State University of New York at Buffalo got $389,000 to pay 100 Buffalonians $45 each to record how much malt liquor they drink -- and how much pot smoke each day. Consumption is then reported via an automated phone hotline. Cost per job: almost $200,000.

-- The Obama administration is spending $5 billion to weatherize homes. But one Texas county spent $4 million to weatherize just 47 homes. That's $78,000 per house. Each retrofit is supposed to save homeowners $500 a year in energy costs. That means taxpayers will recoup their investment in 156 years, long after the home is probably torn down.

-- Two Arizona universities got almost $1 million dollars so 3 grad students can study how ants work. That's more than $300,000 per job.

-- Companies that raise tropical fish, shellfish, catfish, alligators and even turtles qualify for $50 million in tax money to buy fish food.

-- North Carolina public schools received $4.4 million to hire math and literacy coaches, not for students, but teachers. That's 64 people paid $70,000 each to teach teachers how to teach reading and math.

"We have to know that people at the Office of Management and Budget and the various agencies that are shoveling this money out the door, that they're on top of it," Grassley told Fox News. "And we need transparency and information on all of this."

Senate sources say privately many inspectors general are understaffed and overwhelmed, and mechanisms to stop fraud and disqualify tax cheats, criminals and others aren't always working.

Take the Napa Valley Wine Train. The county received $54 million to build a railroad bridge, relocate a half-mile of track and build a flood wall to protect a wine train passenger station. The no-bid contract went to a minority-owned business operated by an Eskimo tribe outside Anchorage.

The company then hired a real construction company for a fraction of what they were paid by the government to actually do the work. The tribe's CEO has no construction experience. His last business, a Web site for sailors, went bankrupt after spending $13 million in investor money.

"That wine train is sort of the perfect storm of practically all of the things that is wrong with government contracting," said Danielle Brian, director of the Project on Government Oversight.

Other dubious contracts include:

-- $6 million in stimulus money to a California contractor under federal investigation for overcharging San Diego for cleanup after the 2007 wildfires

-- A Denver developer received $13 million in tax credits to help build a senior housing complex despite being sued as a slumlord for running decrepit, rodent-infested apartment buildings in San Francisco.

-- Kentucky gave $24 million to a contractor on trial on for bribery.

-- An aerospace company received $15 million to monitor water quality in a Ventura County creek it was already fined for polluting.

"What we have is already a broken system. The federal government is just lousy in its contracting. When you add these elements of speed where the contracting officers or the agencies are being pushed to hurry up and get these dollars out and these grants out quickly, all you're doing is making it harder for them to make good choices," said Brian.

Some inspectors general are spending less than one percent of stimulus expenditures on oversight.