The Bully's Pulpit

The Bully's Pulpit
By Jay D. Homnick on 3.30.11 @ 6:08AM

Every so often someone asks me my greatest strength as a columnist. But no one needs to ask me my greatest flaw; I wear it on my sleeve. It is that there is one person in government whom I despise so utterly that mere mention of his name makes me spew all over the page. My poor reasonable readers all scurry for cover in fear of getting acid burns from my invective.

By the same token, he is the reason I felt compelled to enter this field. By a weird quirk of fate, I was present as a sixteen-year-old boy at a local meeting of well-meaning Jews who were gulled into making him State Senator for the neighborhood where I grew up, in Brooklyn, New York. The same boobs later bought his malarkey and promoted him to the United State Congress. I saw the sleaziness, the deception, the insincerity, the manipulation -- and to cap it off, the absolute disdain for the people whose vote he sought.

Now he is ensconced in the United States Senate, beyond the reach of the naïve Orthodox Jews of Brooklyn and Queens to call back the monster they created. He learned early that these people who strive for morality and integrity in their lives are gullible about things taking place in faraway Washington, D.C. So he learned to attend every synagogue dinner and every major bar-mitzvah and wedding. He had a driver zipping him back and forth on Saturday nights from event to event, shaking hands and mouthing a few words in Yiddish or Hebrew. Burning the midnight snake oil: all style, no substance.

Then he took their votes, the votes of people being faithful to their families, people who spend their heart-blood on religious education, on protecting their children from base influences, often living without televisions in their homes, imagining themselves to be conducting lives of holiness -- and he spent their votes on advocacy for every immoral practice imaginable. If you want to promote some corruption, some indecency, some nastiness, you could always count on the vote of good old Charles Schumer.

After all, he was in the safest seat of all, bestowed upon him by all those sweet ingenuous rabbis. Even when he left, he handed it off to his protégé, Anthony Weiner, who does the identical dog-and-pony show at all the synagogues and then hands his vote to Satan as a tribute.

As you may have guessed from my tirade, Schumer is back in form. He was recorded by reporters instructing a quartet of Democrat Senators how to game the budget debate. For once his finagling is exposed: even a snake cannot wriggle away when it is stuck on the tape. He tells his henchmen to hammer away about the "extreme" cuts by the radical Tea Party Republicans. Tell everyone that Democrats want to negotiate but the Republicans are refusing to be reasonable.

I don't suppose this is too much creepier than other political machinations, but I can't help seeing red and black and blue. This man does for Judaism what Harry Reid does for Mormonism: portray it as the province of selfish, grasping, conniving leeches who are willing to bulldoze the moral edifice the Founders built. They do it to advance the cause of a pseudo-progressive remaking of society into a state of moral anarchy.

Please accept my apology. I know I cannot be coherent about this very sore subject. To me he is the Bernie Madoff of moral capital. He got all the Orthodox Jews to invest their moral capital with him and he cleaned them out. My only consolation is that they were sold out but they did not sell out; they got nothing in return. (In fairness, staffers at his neighborhood offices -- including my cousin's cousin -- were always solicitous of the needs of constituents and helped wherever possible.)

Until he leaves public office, I will never be fully able to accept the model of government as a force for good. My dream of seeing Jews in Congress associated with probity and integrity, wisdom and prudence, is all focused on one man right now: Eric Cantor. Somehow I believe against all odds that in the long run the Cantor will lead the congregation in a noble direction. Hey, Schumer, is that extreme enough for ya?
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To read another article on the subject, click here.

Ponzi Schemes

Ponzi Schemes
By John C. Goodman
3/28/2011




Jack Lew is lucky he isn’t in prison. Were he representing a private pension fund and if he made the sort of statements he made in USA Today the other day, he might well be sharing a cell with Bernie Madoff.

So who is Jack Lew? And what did he say?

Lew is the Director of the federal Office of Management and Budget. About Social Security, he wrote: "Taxes are placed in a trust fund dedicated to paying benefits owed to current and future beneficiaries. When more taxes are collected than are needed to pay benefits, funds are converted to Treasury bonds — backed with the full faith and credit of the U.S. government.” As a result of these investments, the Social Security trust fund will be able “to pay full benefits for the next 26 years.” Not only is this preposterous, Charles Krauthammer called it a “breathtaking fraud.”

Before dissecting Lew, let’s consider why Bernie Madoff is in the hoosegow. Madoff told investors he was investing their funds in real assets, when in fact he was not. He secretly used their funds for personal consumption and to pay off other investors. Either figuratively or imaginatively, Madoff wrote IOUs to himself, all backed by the full faith and credit of Bernie Madoff. Maybe in the beginning he fully intended to pay off. But that’s beside the point. Inducing people to give you money with this sort of lie is criminal fraud. It’s against the law.

Like most government-sponsored retirement programs in the world today, our Social Security system is pay-as-you-go. All payroll tax revenues are spent — the very minute, the very hour, the very day they are received by the U.S. Treasury. Most of these revenues are spent on benefits for current retirees. Any additional amount is spent in other ways.

But there is no funding of future benefits. No money is being stashed away in bank vaults. No investments are made in real assets.

Most pay-as-you-go systems do not have trust funds, since there are no investments for the trust funds to make. In the U.S., we have trust funds — but they serve an accounting function, not a financial function. For example, the trust funds do not collect taxes. Nor do they disburse benefits. Every payroll tax check sent to Washington is written to the U.S. Treasury. Every Social Security benefit check is written on the U.S. Treasury.

The trust funds do not buy bonds. That’s because they do not buy anything. But they do create special pieces of paper which are misnamed “government bonds.” They are misnamed because — unlike other bonds — these bonds were never bought or sold. They are literally IOUs the government writes to itself. For Social Security, they are created on a typewriter. For Medicare, they are created electronically.

Technically, the trust fund bonds represent the cumulative surplus (payroll tax collections minus benefit payments). But these bonds are only important for accounting purposes. They are like bookkeeping entries, without any market value. The annual reports of the Social Security trustees list the yields and maturity dates of these bonds. But the special-issue bonds are not the same as the bonds held by the public. They are not part of the official outstanding debt of the U.S. government. They cannot be sold on Wall Street or to any foreign investors. And they cannot be used to pay benefits.

The technical issuer of the bonds (the U.S. Treasury) and the holder of the bonds (the Social Security trust fund) are both agencies of the U.S. government. Moreover every asset of the trust fund is a liability of the Treasury. Summing over both government agencies, the balance is zero.

For Social Security, the trust fund’s special issue bonds are paper certificates held in government filing cabinets in Parkersburg, W.Va. If a fire were to burn down the building tomorrow, or if thieves were to take the filing cabinets away, there would be no harmful consequences for retirees. Similarly, if the trust funds themselves were simply abolished, real economic activity would be unaffected. The government would not be relieved of any of its existing obligations or commitments. Or, as the late economist Robert Eisner suggested — with the stroke of a pen, we could double or even triple the number of IOUs the trust fund holds. Eisner’s idea would allow us to dispense with artificial crises (“trust fund running out of money!!”) and address the real problem: How is the Treasury going to pay the government’s bills?
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To read another article about Social Security, click here.

7 Topics We Can't Have Adult Conversations About in America

7 Topics We Can't Have Adult Conversations About in America
By John Hawkins
3/29/2011

In a world where politics has become all-consuming and there's an interest group looking for an opportunity to exploit every issue, it has become almost impossible to have adult conversations about certain subjects. The moment you try to do so, legions of grievance mongers, ideologues and bottom feeders start belting out scripted responses that have nothing to do with the topic at hand and everything to do with what they imagine your motivations to be and how ugly, stupid, and flawed they think you are as a human being.

What this means is that certain crucial issues never really get discussed in this country. Instead, we just end up with people insulting each other back and forth. That's too bad because these are not small matters. To the contrary, they're rather consequential and they deserve to be seriously discussed instead of treated like partisan footballs.

1) An Overly-Feminized Society: Women have come a long way in the last fifty years, but you'd hardly know it from the feminist rhetoric we hear. Maybe instead of raging against the patriarchy, we should start asking if men are now getting the short end of the stick. Does that sound wacky? Tell that to a dad who's fighting for custody of his child in divorce court. How about when it comes to abortions? We keep hearing that it takes two people to make a baby and that both parties are responsible for raising a child; so how come the father is locked out of the decision-making when it comes to deciding whether there's going to be an abortion? If women are earning 57 percent of the college degrees these days, maybe we should be asking how our education system is failing our young men. Women may feel like they still have it tougher, but percentage-wise, there are probably as many men who feel like our gender is the one getting the raw deal. The difference is that men aren't usually willing to say it out loud.

2) Illegal Immigration: If you try to discuss the problems associated with illegal immigration, the only response is, "You just don't want Hispanics here!" That's really shorthand for, "We don't ever want to have a real discussion about the issue." Here's the simple reality: Because we have so many poor Hispanic countries near our southern border, the majority of illegal immigrants in this country is ALWAYS going to be Hispanic. We can never seem to get past that fact to really talk about all the other issues associated with illegal immigration. For example, are illegal immigrants putting Americans out of work? Are they driving down salaries that American workers are paid? If we allow illegals in the country to have citizenship, won't that just encourage more illegal immigrants to come here? Does it really make sense to allow millions of manual laborers, most of whom are poor and uneducated, to become American citizens who'll be eligible for welfare, food stamps, and Social Security? Wouldn't that just be importing poverty into the country? Are the millions of illegals in this country actually changing our culture for the worse? Should we put an end to birthright citizenship for the children of two illegals? Could it actually be dangerous over the long term to have millions of people here who aren't loyal to the United States and believe they have a right to be here illegally because the southern United States is "stolen land?"

3) Legal Immigration: Despite the attempts to conflate this problem with illegal immigration, it's a very different issue. For one thing, most Americans agree that legal immigration is a good thing -- at least to a certain extent. Still, if we start with the presumption that we do have a right to control who enters our country and that the goal of legal immigration should be to improve life for the people who are already here, there are a lot of important questions that deserve an answer other than, "You hate immigrants." We need to start asking: Should our immigration policy be based on merit instead of family connections? We're the most desirable location in the world; so why not take the best of the best? If we were actually bringing in rocket scientists, engineers, and computer programmers, then maybe it would be time to ask if we should increase the number of people we're allowing to immigrate to our country. Our immigration policies are actually changing the racial make-up of our country. Should we put a stop to that? Should we focus on bringing in more people from Western nations with similar cultures? How about we make immigrants ineligible to receive welfare or food stamps? These are all very relevant questions that we never really have any back-and-forth on. That should change.

4) Our Deficit Spending: A lot of people would argue that we do discuss this issue seriously, but that's not really the case. Many people give lip service to the idea that our spending is "unsustainable" and theoretically agree that we need to do something about it, but they fiercely resist actually getting down to brass tacks and distract, distract, distract when it's time to talk about real world solutions. Realistically, we cannot get our spending under control without dealing with Social Security and Medicare. Moreover, on the state and local level, union pensions have to be dealt with. Then there are taxes. Here's the truth: Taxes must go up at some point and we can't tax the rich enough to fix the problem. What that means is that the middle class must pay more in taxes, not for better services, but to pay for what we've already spent. If you disagree with what conservatives like Paul Ryan and Rand Paul have come up with, that's fine and dandy. Just present your own numbers that explain how we're going to pay off a 1.5 trillion dollar deficit, a 14 trillion dollar debt, and 100 trillion dollars in unfunded Medicare/Social Security liabilities without cutting NPR, PBS, cowboy poetry or anything else liberals think is essential.

5)Gay Marriage: Our republic has survived for 200+ years without gay marriage. Up until the last couple of decades, even gay activists weren't seriously trying to redefine marriage. So now, suddenly, anyone who opposes it is a homophobe? How about we discuss the fact that being pro-gay marriage is incompatible with being a Christian? Isn't forcing Christian churches to have gay marriages a violation of their First Amendment rights? Isn't it entirely possible that gay marriage could cheapen and demean heterosexual marriage leading to less marriages, which would harm society? Should we be doing something that helps mainstream an extremely unhealthy lifestyle? Why do we need a religious ceremony for gays when civil unions could supply the same legal rights without being nearly as controversial?

6)Racism: At what point can we all stop pretending that America hasn't done a 180 degree turn-around on race issues since the sixties? People yell “racism" so much these days that you'd think Democrats like Bull Connor and George Wallace are still around persecuting black Americans. Could we start by perhaps acknowledging that affirmative action is immoral government-sponsored racism against white Americans that undermines the achievements of all African Americans? Is it worth discussing the possibility that the sky-high illegitimacy rate in black America is ten times more of a factor in their problems than racism? How many black Americans fail simply because they've been told their entire lives that they're victims and that the deck is stacked against them? How about black racism? Louis Farrakhan, who's well liked in black America, is as much of a scumbag as a KKK leader and everyone knows black Americans supported Obama over Clinton purely because of his skin color. We rightfully condemn racism and race hatred amongst whites; so why do blacks get a pass on the same issue? Can we also admit that being black is often a huge advantage in pursuing scholarships, getting promotions, and avoiding getting fired? When the president of the United States is black, isn't that a pretty good indication that racism has become a very minor factor in American life?

7) Radical Islam: There's plenty of talk about radical Islam, but few genuine conversations about the subject because there are so many difficult questions to answer. How do we define a moderate Muslim? How do we tell the difference between the moderate Muslims and the radicals? Shariah law is barbarism that's incompatible with Western civilization. How do we stop it from spreading here? Should the unique problems associated with Islam affect our immigration policy? Why aren't more moderate Muslims speaking out against radical Islam? There are already Americans who've been intimidated by the violent threats of radical Islamists. What's the best way to keep those threats from inhibiting free speech? These are not bigoted questions; they're questions being asked by Americans all across the country. Unfortunately, instead of talking it over, some people would rather play the victim and scream "Islamophobia." It's not Islamophobia to question why parts of Islam have become so intertwined with murderous violence and why more Muslims aren't renouncing that violence the way people from other religions have in similar circumstances.
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To read another article by John Hawkins, click here.

Yon: Rolling Stone’s report on “kill teams” is BS

Yon: Rolling Stone’s report on “kill teams” is BS
posted at 2:15 pm on March 29, 2011 by Ed Morrissey

Michael Yon gets as frank as possible in this detailed pushback to Rolling Stone’s article on allegations of systemic abuse in Afghanistan. Having served with the larger unit in question, Yon accuses RS of conflating legitimate action against the enemy with the isolated incidents of alleged murder in order to make the entire unit and chain of command look bad, and that it left out important context as well:

The online edition of the Rolling Stone story contains a section with a video called “Motorcycle Kill,” which includes our Soldiers gunning down Taliban who were speeding on a motorcycle toward our guys. These Soldiers were also with 5/2 SBCT, far away from the “Kill Team” later accused of the murders. Rolling Stone commits a literary “crime” by deceptively entwining this normal combat video with the Kill Team story. The Taliban on the motorcycle were killed during an intense operation in the Arghandab near Kandahar City. People who have been to the Arghandab realize the extreme danger there. The Soviets got beaten horribly in the Arghandab, despite throwing everything including the Soviet kitchen sink into the battle that lasted over a month. Others fared little better. To my knowledge, 5/2 and supporting units were the first ever to take Arghandab, and these two dead Taliban were part of that process.

The killing of the armed Taliban on the motorcycle was legal and within the rules of engagement. Law and ROE are related but separate matters. In any case, the killing was well within both the law and ROE. The Taliban on the back of the motorcycle raised his rifle to fire at our Soldiers but the rifle did not fire. I talked at length with several of the Soldiers who were there and they gave me the video. There was nothing to hide. I didn’t even know about the story until they told me. It can be good for Soldiers to shoot and share videos because it provides instant replay and lessons learned. When they gave me the video and further explained what happened, I found the combat so normal that I didn’t even bother publishing it, though I should have because that little shooting of the two Taliban was the least of the accomplishments of these Soldiers, and it rid the Arghandab of two Taliban.

Some people commented that our Soldiers used excessive force by firing too many bullets. Hogwash. And besides, they were trying to kill each other. Anyone who has seen much combat with our weak M-4 rifles realizes that one shot is generally not enough, and the Taliban were speeding at them on a motorbike, which very often are prepared as suicide bombs. If that motorcycle had been a bomb, as they often are, and got inside the group of Soldiers and exploded, they could all have been killed. Just yesterday, in Paktika, three suicide attackers came in, guns blazing, and detonated a huge truck bomb. Depending on which reports you read, about twenty workers were killed and about another fifty wounded.

I hadn’t heard the “too many bullets” argument, but it’s of a piece with the notion that the use of force in war should be measured and reciprocal, which is hogwash of another sort. When an enemy speeds at your position on a motorcycle while brandishing an automatic rifle in the context of war, you are not under any sort of obligation to only match the attack bullet for bullet. To do so would be to give up the advantages of both numbers and firepower. It’s a great way to get more American and NATO soldiers killed.

That kind of concept doesn’t even apply to police work here in the US, let alone in war abroad. When criminals threaten police or civilians with knives, the police here are under no obligation to holster their sidearms and whip out switchblades. Police (and civilians, for that matter) have the right to use lethal force when their lives are reasonably under threat.

The crimes alleged by the Army in the case of the handful of soldiers in this unit should be thoroughly investigated and prosecuted if substantiated. That’s no reason to impugn the other members of this unit, especially by somehow linking the alleged murder of unarmed civilians to legitimate actions against the enemy.

Dean says he’s rooting for a government shutdown

Dean says he’s rooting for a government shutdown
posted at 2:55 pm on March 29, 2011 by Ed Morrissey

Howard Dean may love big government, but he’d apparently love it to go away for a few days. In a panel discussion this morning sponsored by National Journal, Dean says that Democrats should be “quietly rooting” for a budget impasse to bring the federal government to a halt, because he’s certain who will get the blame:

Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, sees an upside to a looming government shutdown – at least politically.

“If I was head of DNC, I would be quietly rooting for it,” said Dean, speaking on a National Journal Insider’s Conference panel Tuesday morning. “I know who’s going to get blamed – we’ve been down this road before.”

The former Vermont governor and presidential candidate was alluding to 1995 and 1996, when two government shutdowns under a Republican Congress helped improve President Clinton’s reelection chances. The scenario could repeat this year as budget negotiations continue to falter, and Dean said he thinks the public will blame Republicans again.

Well, it’s certainly possible that Republicans will get blamed if the budget impasse results in another government shutdown, but Dean shouldn’t be so certain.

In 1995, Republicans played chicken with Bill Clinton over their own budget, not a budget that Democrats refused to create while they held the majority. If the government comes to a halt because Congress can’t agree on a budget that Democrats could and should have passed seven months ago, it’s no sure bet that Republicans will end up owning that failure.

Besides, the environment has changed dramatically since 1995. Republicans took control of Congress over a series of scandals and a sense that Congress had grown too detached from the people they regulated and not so much on spending or economic issues. Unemployment was relatively low and dropping, and deficits were a concern but not a crisis. That is very different from today’s environment. Even if the shutdown took place over the FY2012 budget in the fall rather than the rump FY2011 budget, the crisis stage of the deficit and national debt will make Democratic suggestions of merely a few billion in cuts look ridiculous to an electorate that just tossed them out the House majority over budgetary and economic issues in the midterm elections last year.

If that’s the ground on which Democrats want to play chicken, then they should dig their heels in on spending like drunken sailors and hope voters believe that nothing’s wrong at all with running trillion-dollar-plus annual deficits. Let them follow Dean’s war cry and see if takes them any farther than it took Dean in 2004.

Voting with Their Feet

Voting with Their Feet
By Thomas Sowell
3/29/2011

The latest published data from the 2010 census show how people are moving from place to place within the United States. In general, people are voting with their feet against places where the liberal, welfare-state policies favored by the intelligentsia are most deeply entrenched.

When you break it down by race and ethnicity, it is all too painfully clear what is happening. Both whites and blacks are leaving California, the poster state for the liberal, welfare-state and nanny-state philosophy.

Whites are also fleeing the big northeastern liberal, welfare states like Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, as well as the same kinds of states in the midwest, such as Michigan, Ohio and Illinois.

Although California has long been a prime destination of Asian immigrants and the homes of their descendants, the 2010 census shows a striking increase in the Asian American population of Nevada, more so than any other state. Nevada is adjacent to California but has no income tax nor the hostile climate for business that California maintains.

The movement of the black population-- especially educated young blacks-- is the most striking of all.

In the past, the massive movements of millions of blacks out of the South in the early 20th century was one of the epic migrations of a people-- comparable in size with the millions of the Irish who fled the famine in Ireland in the 1840s or the millions of Jews who fled persecution in Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In more recent decades, blacks have been moving back to the South, however. While the overall black population of the northeastern and midwestern states has not declined in the past ten years, except in Michigan and Illinois, the net increase of the black population nationwide has increasingly been in the South. About half of the national growth of the black population took place in the South in the 1970s, two-thirds in the 1990s and three-quarters in the past 10 years.

While the mass migrations of blacks out of the South in the early 20th century was to places where there were already established black communities, such as New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, much of the current movement of blacks is away from existing concentrations of black populations.

Blacks are moving to suburbs, and even to cities like Minneapolis. Overall, the racial residential segregation patterns are declining in the great majority of the largest major metropolitan areas.

Among blacks who moved, the proportions who were in their prime -- from 20 to 40 years of age-- were greater than in the black population at large, and college degrees were more common among them than in the black population at large. In short, with blacks, as with other racial or ethnic groups, those with better prospects are leaving the states that are repelling their most productive citizens in general with liberal policies.

Detroit is perhaps the most striking example of a once thriving city ruined by years of liberal social policies. Before the ghetto riot of 1967, Detroit's black population had the highest rate of home-ownership of any black urban population in the country, and their unemployment rate was just 3.4 percent.

It was not despair that fueled the riot. It was the riot which marked the beginning of the decline of Detroit to its current state of despair. Detroit's population today is only half of what it once was, and its most productive people have been the ones who fled.

Treating businesses and affluent people as prey, rather than assets, often pays off politically in the short run-- and elections are held in the short run. Killing the goose that lays the golden egg is a viable political strategy.

As whites were the first to start leaving Detroit, its then mayor Coleman Young saw this only as an exodus of people who were likely to vote against him, enhancing his re-election prospects.

But what was good for Mayor Young was disastrous for Detroit.

There is a lesson here somewhere, but it is very doubtful if either the intelligentsia or the politicians will learn it.
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To read another article by Thomas Sowell, click here.

Durbin Launches the 'Anti-Pete King' Hearing

Durbin Launches the 'Anti-Pete King' Hearing
By Frank Gaffney
3/29/2011

How curious. At the very moment that the threat posed to U.S. interests by the toxic Islamist organization known as the Muslim Brotherhood is becoming ever more palpable, a top Senate Democrat seems determined to suppress Americans' understanding of that menace.

Even the New York Times is now acknowledging the obvious: the principal beneficiary of the forced departure of an Egyptian dictator, Hosni Mubarak - a double-dealing leader who nonetheless passed, in the hall of mirrors that is Mideast politics, for a reliable U.S. ally - will likely be the Muslim Brotherhood (MB or Ikhwan in Arabic). That means an organization explicitly committed to waging jihad to achieve the worldwide imposition of the Islamic politico-military-legal program its adherents call shariah will soon: run the most populous Arab Muslim nation; control the strategic Suez Canal, through which 5% of the world's oil passes every day; and be armed with a vast, American-supplied arsenal of sophisticated and modern weapons.

Unfortunately, a similar outcome may be in store for Libya, whose so-called "rebels" and "freedom fighters" appear actually to be drawn from the ranks of the Brotherhood, its spin-off known as al Qaeda or other Islamist factions. Some of those to whom we are now providing with air cover and perhaps soon armaments are said to have returned home from Iraq where they were, until recently, trying to kill U.S. forces. Variations on the basic theme of MB fomenting and exploiting "Arab Springs" may also play out shortly across the Mideast, from Tunisia to Saudi Arabia, from Syria to Yemen.

It would seem that, under these ominous circumstances, it would behoove the Congress to maximize public exposure to the true nature and intensifying threat posed by the Ikhwan and its associates not only elsewhere, but in the United States, as well. Instead, Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Democrat in the U.S. Senate, will be holding a hearing Tuesday [today] that appears calculated to obscure, rather than illuminate, this problem.

In an interview Monday on Secure Freedom Radio, Steven Emerson, executive director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism and one of the country's top counter-terrorism experts, described this event as "the anti-King hearing." Whereas Rep. Peter King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee sought to assess the problem of extremism emanating from the Muslim American community, Sen. Durbin evidently hopes to promote the line touted by the Muslim Brotherhood and its myriad front groups, associates and apologists: Congressman King and others like him are the problem, not jihadist Muslims. Instead, it is the "racism," "bigotry" and "Islamophobia" to which followers of Islam are subjected that is the real danger.

In fact, an analysis of FBI "hate crimes" data just published by the Center for Security Policy clearly refutes the notion that Muslims are being victimized in America because of their faith. Jews are eight times more likely to be victims of such crimes.

Mr. Emerson explained that this perverse role is the rule rather than the exception with Sen. Durbin:

"He has been in bed with radical Islam for the last eight years.... He has aligned himself with the [Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas front] Council on American Islamic Relations, sent them letters of congratulations, agreed to speak to their banquets, fundraised for them, and most recently paid a visit to the Bridgeview Mosque, which... is... one of the largest mosques in the United States.... It is considered the senior center of Hamas activity in the United States, led by Imam Jamal Said. [He] was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case... against the fundraisers for Hamas, all of whom were convicted.

"In [a] picture [taken at the mosque], which was printed in the Bridgeview Mosque newsletter online, it shows [Sen. Durbin] with eight people, six of whom are actually allied with Hamas. Five of whom have been listed as unindicted co-conspirators [in the Holy Land trial]. And four of whom have made statements calling for the killing of Jews."

Scarcely less troubling are Senator Durbin's choice of witnesses. They include "civil rights activist" Farhana Khera, who Mr. Emerson recounts has discouraged Muslims from cooperating with law enforcement, and retired Cardinal Theodore McCarrick who is a prominent participant in "interfaith dialogues" manipulated by the largest Muslim Brotherhood front in the United States, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).

Unfortunately, the narrative Sen. Durbin is advancing has been taken up by some in government who should know better. For example, Mr. Emerson told me in his interview that Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, raised serious questions about his fitness to serve in that front-line capacity by announcing recently at a closed, $4 million conference that "al-Jazeera was his favorite television station, radical Islam was only a nuisance, a tiny problem, and that Islamophobia was the biggest problem we faced."

Were the Congress and the nation more generally to adopt this narrative - to the effect that the greatest danger facing the nation emanates from efforts of those seeking to inform our countrymen about the threat posed by the Muslim Brotherhood and other adherents to shariah, it would hand the Ikhwan perhaps its greatest bloodless victory to date: acquiescence to the sort of shariah blasphemy laws that forbid any expression that offends Islam.

This act of submission will greatly compound the willful blindness that is facilitating the Brotherhood's stealth jihad here at home, even as it and its allies make immense strides abroad. Will Senator Durbin's colleagues sit idly by as he contributes to such a wholly unacceptable outcome? Will the rest of us?

The ObamaCare Anniversary Cake Makes Younger Americans Gag

The ObamaCare Anniversary Cake Makes Younger Americans Gag
By Romina Boccia
3/29/2011

Rhode Island state officials celebrated last week's one year anniversary of the new health care law with a birthday cake that read “Happy 1st Birthday Affordable Care Act.”

But really, what is there to celebrate?

During the past year, Americans have learned the many ways that this law is backfiring on those it was supposed to benefit.

Take young adults. Millennials are supposed to celebrate that they can now “choose” to remain on their parents’ health care plans until they turn 26. Sure, that seems like good news for some unemployed twenty-somethings, but this benefit comes with a significant cost.

Research shows that this provision alone has increased premium rates by one percent for families everywhere. One percent may not sound like much, but this is just one of many mandates that will push premiums higher.

And while select young Americans will benefit from this mandate, there are numerous others that will do little for them other than make insurance more expensive. In fact, young adults' insurance premiums are expected to increase up to 95 percent, thanks to ObamaCare. These rising costs will make the individual mandate particularly onerous for young people. Not only are the young and healthy forced to buy insurance, they have to buy insurance that's considered “adequate” by government bureaucrats. Government officials have yet to rule on exactly what procedures are essential for all Americans, but young people can safely assume that they will be forced to pay for benefits they neither need nor want at this stage in life.

Millennials forced into this new health care system will be double frustrated, since access to health insurance hasn't even been their greatest concern. Eighteen to twenty-nine year olds are much more worried about their job prospects than about health care. Harvard’s Institute of Politics revealed that 84% of current university students fear post graduate unemployment, and half of recent graduates currently employed worry that they’ll lose their job. When asked what national issue concerns them most, nearly a majority cited the economy (45 percent), with healthcare trailing far behind at only 17 percent.

These numbers don’t come as a surprise, given an official unemployment rate in February of 22.4 percent for eighteen to nineteen year olds, and 16.1 percent for twenty to twenty-four year olds. These numbers understate the extent of the employment problems faced by Millennials, since they don’t include those recent graduates who decided to pursue further education because of their bleak employment prospects.

The winner of a video contest marking the occasion of ObamaCare's anniversary epitomized many Millennials’ attitudes about the new health care law. The young adults literally plead with the President: “President Obama, don’t take jobs away from us. I’m 25 years old, I shouldn’t have to be on my parent’s health insurance. I’d rather be able to afford my own. I don’t need your health care law. I need a job.”

Sadly, Obama isn’t listening to these pleas. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Doug Elmendorf recently testified in front of Congress that ObamaCare is expected to reduce the number of jobs by an estimated 800,000. Millennials with little work experience will be hit hardest by this job loss.

Millennials should also be concerned about how the new health care law adds to America’s already mushrooming federal debt. This debt threatens to be a constant anchor pulling down the U.S. economy for decades to come. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) ObamaCare would increase the national debt by $341 billion by the end of 2019. Millennials will not only be responsible for paying back their own tuition debts, they are also asked to shoulder the debt burden of the national economy.

Cheerleaders for ObamaCare like to pick and choose small provisions of the law that benefit a slice of the population, while ignoring the many other provisions and high costs that Americans also have to swallow. As the law's many mandates are put in force, Americans—particularly young Americans—are likely to find that, rather than enjoying the benefits of this law, they are choking on it.

There Is a Method to Obama's Libya Madness

There Is a Method to Obama's Libya Madness
By David Limbaugh
3/29/2011

President Obama's decision to bomb Libya is not even so multilateral as President George W. Bush's decision to attack Iraq. Nor is it ultimately driven by humanitarian concerns -- and certainly not by any vital U.S. national interest.

Despite Obama's vilification of Bush for his alleged unilateralism, "Obama's 'coalition of the willing,'" according to foreign policy reporter Josh Rogin, "is smaller than any major multilateral operation since the end of the Cold War." Obama's Libyan intervention is more unilateral than Dubya's in another respect, as well: Obama has brazenly refused even to consult Congress, much less seek its blessing.

As I argued in my most recent column, this is just the foreign policy outworking of Obama's campaign to fundamentally transform America. Notice the common thread. He is using domestic policies to effectuate "economic justice" at home, trying to cut "wealthy" Americans down to size. Now he is using foreign policy to diminish America's role and stature in the international community to cut wealthy, imperialistic America down to size.

I don't want to get bogged down here in a discussion of whether his motive is thus to sabotage America. In my view, that's the effect of his policies, but I suppose that in his view, America will be a better nation if it uses government coercion to come closer to equalizing everyone's share of the pie -- even if it results in the pie's shrinking -- and if America operates less in its own self-interest in foreign affairs. It's a bizarre mindset and one that most Americans probably don't understand -- so bizarre that they don't believe it despite the proof in front of their faces.

Think about it. Obama's secretary of defense, Robert Gates, admitted on national television Sunday that Libya poses no actual or imminent threat to the United States and that it is not a vital national security interest. This was no gaffe. Surely, Obama's team is not so incompetent and undisciplined that it didn't anticipate this question and carefully prepare the answer.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton damaged the administration's credibility even more by opining that as long as international bodies approved of America's kinetic military action, the president didn't even need to pick up the phone to call Congress. Consider what that reveals concerning the administration's mindset about America's sovereignty and prerogatives.

In terms of philosophy, ideology and motivations, the administration's approach to foreign policy can further be understood by Obama's position from the outset. He has been adamant that America is seen as imperialistic by foreign nations, especially Arab and Muslim nations, and must radically reset its image to ingratiate itself to the world community. He believes terrorism is in large part fomented by the world's negative perception of the United States -- a perception he shares to some extent and one he is obsessed with changing.

That's why he went on his world apology tour, threatened (recklessly and unrealistically) to dismantle multiple components of Bush's anti-terror policies (later reneging) and promised to negotiate with dictators on even terms -- "engagement." If you doubt this, then explain Gates' assertions that America's chief interest in Libya is "the engagement of Arabs, the engagement of the Europeans" and, he threw in, "the general humanitarian question."

There's more. In trying to distinguish between the Libyan and Syrian situations, Clinton said the Syrian situation isn't as severe yet. Then she got to the crux of it: "But in Libya, when a leader says 'spare nothing, show no mercy' and calls out air force attacks on his own people, that crosses a line that people in the world had decided they could not tolerate."

As liberal writer William Saletan points out, "the key phrase isn't no mercy or air force. It's they could not tolerate. Not we, but they. We're outsourcing our standards for intervention." But Saletan noted it is "worse than outsourcing." Outsourcing is hiring someone to do your bidding, but in Libya, "we're hiring ourselves out to do what somebody abroad wants." Indeed, one might consider our military the new mercenaries for foreign governments.

If you understand Obama's thinking, it all makes sense. He obviously believes it is in our interests to act in ways that don't fit the conventional definition of national self-interest. In his worldview, our conventional self-interest is selfish and imperialistic. For too long, America has looked out for its own interests and has exploited the world, its people and its resources. With these unrelenting overtures denying our self-interest, Obama hopes to show the world that the new America -- Obama's America -- is different and moral.

In the meantime, we may very well be propping up coalitions of jihadists in both Egypt and Libya and who knows where else, but that's OK because Obama and his fellow liberals have "good intentions."
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To read another article by David Limbaugh, click here.

Education Spending Won't Create Jobs

Education Spending Won't Create Jobs
By Phyllis Schlafly
3/29/2011

Contrary to President Obama's political rhetoric, more taxpayer spending to send more students to college will not reduce unemployment or improve the economy. It's just Obama's way of finagling the unemployment statistics by listing young people as students instead of as unemployed.

A report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland confirmed that when it comes to long-term unemployment, the length of unemployment is unrelated to education level. Although employment is higher for people with more years of education, the duration of unemployment is the same for all education levels.

A new phrase is now commonly included in job ads for all kinds of positions: "must be currently employed." Charts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show remarkably parallel lines for the duration of unemployment of Americans age 25 and older who have less than a high school diploma, only a high school diploma, some college or a college degree.

The Obama administration continues to propagate the falsehood that solving the unemployment problem requires "more investments in education." Investment is a favorite liberal code word for more spending and higher taxes.

As globalization spread and was touted by the elites as the wave of the future, conventional wisdom was that only blue-collar manufacturing jobs would be sent overseas, while college grads were safe. That assumption is now obsolete, as computers and telecommunications have made it possible to offshore the jobs of college-educated employees.

I thought it was a tossup as to which was the greatest education scandal: the $2 trillion taxpayers poured into public schools that failed the twin goals of improving student achievement and closing the gap between higher-income and lower-income students OR the colossal debt students accumulate to pay exorbitant college tuition prices. But the Chronicle of Higher Education reported a third scandal under the headline, "The Great College-Degree Scam."

The Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) found that approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 now work in relatively low-skilled jobs that need only a high school diploma or less. The actual count is 17.4 million college grads working in occupations that the Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies as not requiring college, such as cashier, waiter, waitress or bartender.

Facts do not deter the Obama administration from playing the false tune that more federal education spending is the key to more jobs. White House domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes reprised this myth with a stream of buzzwords: Education is the "key to winning the future," we need to "improve educational outcomes" so we can "win in the global marketplace," and we must "out-educate the world" and put "greater emphasis on critical thinking and collaborative problem-solving," and grab "our generation's 'Sputnik moment.'"

Vice President Joe Biden joined in this campaign by launching his "College Completion Tool Kit" -- a bunch of expensive suggestions to increase the number of college graduates by 50 percent. He wants to shift the focus from high school completion to college completion and, of course, do more to subsidize the latter.

Biden was the lead speaker at "The First Annual Building a Grad Nation Summit" held in Washington in March, to be followed by a similar summit held by each governor. The plan sets forth vague goals such as developing an action plan, using data to drive decision-making, accelerating learning and re-labeling "remedial" courses in college as "developmental."

Of course, Biden's plan calls for extravagant taxpayer handouts such as the First in the World initiative to support "innovative practices" and College Completion Incentive Grants to reward states for undertaking "reforms." That's on top of money already committed by the Obama administration, such as $40 billion more in Pell grants, a 90 percent increase in tax incentives through the American Opportunity Tax Credit, making it easier for students to get grants and loans, and forgiving the college debt of students who promise 10 years of public service.

Why should taxpayers be forced to continue unaffordable deficit spending to send more kids to college when the evidence shows that our economy is not offering enough jobs for college graduates now?

The biggest issue today is the need to rebuild an economy that offers the three-fourths of Americans without a college degree jobs that pay enough to buy a home and support a wife raising their own children. Somehow we lost that kind of a society through a combination of feminism, unilateral divorce, illegal and legal immigration, and the steady drumbeat of free-trade elitists telling us that globalism makes it our duty to compete with foreigners willing to work for as little as 30 cents an hour with no benefits.

The party that has the best solution to the jobs issue will win in 2012. More years of taxpayer-funded schooling are not the answer.
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Education Spending Has a Simple Solution
By Phyllis Schlafly
3/22/2011

As the new Republican House majority wrestles with ways to cut our unsustainable budget deficit, Barack Obama threw down the gauntlet. On March 14, he said, "We cannot cut education."

But why not? If we are going to cut programs that are proven to have failed to achieve their goals, federal spending on education should be at the top of the list.

Federal spending on public schools (which is only a small percentage of their school budgets) was given specific goals in the 2002 law called "No Child Left Behind," the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It required states to set targets to have all students proficient in reading and math by 2014, to meet an annual benchmark of progress toward this goal and in particular to demonstrate a closing or narrowing of the gap between higher-income and minority students.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan threw a cannonball into the education debate this month by admitting that 82 percent of public schools could be labeled "failing" under No Child Left Behind specifications. His solution is to stop calling them "failing," extend the target date for student proficiency to 2020 and, of course, to appropriate more money to failed programs.

For years, education spokesmen have opined that kids should be able to read by the fourth grade. Good for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who is now calling for the reading goal to be third grade -- and this goal is also being advocated by the Indiana and New Mexico governors.

Obama wants to put more money into the notoriously useless program called Head Start, and he increased its annual funding in 2009 by nearly $3 billion. U.S. taxpayers have given Head Start $166 billion of taxpayers' money since 1965 despite many studies proving that it was mostly wasted, did not give poor kids a head start and any gains made while kids were in Head Start disappeared within a couple of years.

Since conservatives famously lost the battle to prevent federal spending on local public schools (which they view as unconstitutional) a half century ago, Congress has year after year increased appropriations. In recent years, Congress identified two primary purposes: to raise student achievement and to narrow the gap between high- and low-income students and between minority and white students.

We the federal taxpayers have spent roughly $2 trillion on these efforts since 1965. It's reasonable to ask, did we get our money's worth?

If we look at the class that graduated from the public schools in 2009, we find that we spent over $151,000 per student to bring him from the first to the 12th grade. That's nearly three times as much as we spent on the graduating class of 1970.

Despite that massive spending, overall achievement has stagnated or declined. The gaps between minority and white students are unchanged in science and only slightly narrowed in reading and math.

We have precious little to show for the $2 trillion in federal education spending over the past half-century, and Andrew J. Coulson of CATO has the charts to prove it. It now costs three times as much to provide essentially the same education as we provided in 1970.

Even this bad news fails to give the big picture because, as productivity was falling in public schools, it was rising everywhere else. Nearly all the products and services most of us buy have gotten better, more affordable or both over the past two generations.

The fact that there is no education improvement even while spending has skyrocketed is a disaster unparalleled in any other field. In addition to the waste, this gigantic spending slowed our economic growth by taxing trillions of dollars out of the productive sector of the economy and squandering it on worthless programs.

Knowing that learning to read is fundamental to education, the public-school lobby is yelping about proposed cuts in grants for literacy programs. Yes, literacy should be job number one, but after all these years why do we have to go to the unnecessary expense of passing out money to find a good reading program?

Children should be taught to read in the first grade by an authentic phonics system in which they learn the sounds and syllables of the English language and how to put them together to read words of more than one syllable. There is nothing expensive or mysterious about this basic task.

Instead of wasting more federal money on grant-writers and grant-readers, tell local districts to award a bonus to first-grade teachers based on how many kids they actually teach to read. Let the teacher select the phonics system she thinks will help her win the bonus.
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To read another article by Phyllis Schlafly, click here.

A Gift for the Obvious

A Gift for the Obvious
By Cal Thomas
3/29/2011

If there were an award for stating the obvious when it comes to the Middle East, it would go to The New York Times. On its front page last Friday, the newspaper ran a story headlined, "Muslim Group is Rising Force in New Egypt."

What group would that be? Why, the Muslim Brotherhood, of course. We have been repeatedly assured by certain pundits and members of the Obama administration that the Brotherhood are a small minority with no major influence in Egypt and that those Cairo protesters clamoring for "democracy" that led to the downfall of President Hosni Mubarak would be the ones to chart the country's future. Each time another myth is busted, the deniers of what is happening throughout the region simply create a new myth, one they desperately cling to against all evidence to the contrary.

It would be well for the willfully blind to memorize the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood: "Allah is our objective, the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." Got that?

The London Daily Telegraph interviewed Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, leader of the rebellion in Libya. He admitted some of the rebels have ties to al-Qaida, but not to worry. Hasidi claimed that even members of al-Qaida "are patriots and good Muslims, not terrorists." Sure they are. We should take them at their word, even though they have been known to lie. At what point do we begin to wake up to this nonsense? Is anyone at the State Department paying attention? How about the White House?

President Obama has been forced by growing criticism to better explain his non-policy in Libya and his reasoning behind bombing the country without deposing Moammar Gadhafi. The president went to the United Nations Security Council for a resolution, not Congress, for constitutional approval to launch air strikes on Libya. Perhaps this is an extension of his stated belief that America is no more exceptional than any other country. "While regime change in Libya is the U.S. policy," reports ABC News, "Gadhafi's removal is not the goal of the operation." No, President Obama tells us the U.S. is in Libya "to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe." Huh?

What about Syria where security forces are shooting civilians in the streets on the apparent orders of President Bashar al-Assad? Under the new "humanitarian" rules of engagement, shouldn't president Obama send bombers to Syria? Will the U.S. seek authorization from the U.N. for military air strikes there? And then there is Bahrain where thousands of protesters spilled into the streets last week after Friday prayers and were confronted by security forces firing tear gas and pellets. Can live ammunition be far behind?

If humanitarianism is the new standard for U.S. military intervention, what about bombing North Korea, liberating Tibet, strafing The Congo, Darfur and scores of other countries where authoritarian regimes deny basic human rights to their people?

In last Saturday's Wall Street Journal, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) wrote that what is taking place in the Middle East "could be the most important geostrategic shift since the fall of the Berlin Wall." That's the wrong analogy. When the Berlin Wall fell, people were liberated. What is happening in the Middle East could be the most important geostrategic shift since communists came to power in Russia and China, oppressing and killing millions.

This is just the beginning. Saudi Arabia is next and already the fault lines in that creaking monarchy are visible. The hand of Iran is behind much of this turmoil and behind Iran is al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden's vision for the toppling of every regime in the region, each to be replaced by the most religiously fundamentalist and politically repressive of leaders.

While President Obama fiddles, the Middle East burns.

At a private dinner last week in Washington, attended by a group of conservative journalists, someone said if a Democrat must be president, he would rather it be Hillary Clinton than Barack Obama. There was general head nodding. Mine was among them.
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To read another article by Cal Thomas, click here.

Schumer Accidentally Reveals Democratic Spin on Conference Call

Oops: Schumer Accidentally Reveals Democratic Spin on Conference Call
By Guy Benson
3/29/2011

Remember when Harry Reid was bellyaching about the Tea Party's "extreme" demands poisoning budget negotiations yesterday? We now know he was just reading from a script. Memo to Senator Schumer: When you're discussing sensitive intra-party strategy on a conference call with reporters, it would behoove you to acquaint yourself with the mute function. Oops:

Moments before a conference call with reporters was scheduled to get underway on Tuesday morning, apparently unaware that many of the reporters were already on the line, Charles Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, began to instruct fellow senators on how to talk to reporters about the contentious budget process.

After thanking his colleagues — Barbara Boxer of California, Ben Cardin of Maryland, Tom Carper of Delaware and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut — for doing the budget bidding for the Senate Democrats, who are facing off against the House Republicans over how spending for the rest of the fiscal year, Mr. Schumer told them to portray John Boehner of Ohio, the Speaker of the House, as painted into a box by the Tea Party, and to decry the spending cuts that he wants as extreme. “I always use the word extreme,” Mr. Schumer said, “That is what the caucus instructed me to use this week.”

A minute or two into the talking-points tutorial, though, someone apparently figured out that reporters were listening, and silence fell.

Their hand inadvertently tipped, how did the assembled Democrats choose to proceed? As if the faux pas had never even happened, natch. Instruct, and you shall receive; talking points all the way, baby:

Then the conference call began in earnest, with the Democrats right on message.

“We are urging Mr. Boehner to abandon the extreme right wing,” said Ms. Boxer, urging the House to compromise on the scale of spending cuts and to drop proposed amendments that would deny federal financing for Planned Parenthood and for government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency.

Mr. Carper continued with the theme, referring to some House Republicans’ “right-wing extremist friends.” Mr. Cardin decried Mr. Boehner giving into “extremes of his party.” Mr. Blumenthal closed by speaking of the “relatively small extreme group of ideologues” who are “an anchor” dragging down the budget negotiation process.

They certainly follow marching orders well, don't they?

Ham-fisted message coordination aside, it's worth (once again) noting that the House-passed CR is anything but extreme. Placed in proper context, the GOP-backed cuts are virtually microscopic:

The "extreme demands" Reid is denouncing amount to a $61 Billion cut from a $1.6 Trillion 2011 budget deficit. That's four percent of this year's deficit. That's roughly 1/4 of our federal budget shortfall in February.

Red Ink Rumble

Red Ink Rumble
By W. James Antle, III on 3.29.11 @ 6:09AM

A government shutdown looming, the budget talks between congressional Republicans and Democrats on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue appear to have stalled. Reports are circulating that Republican leaders are poised to reject the White House's latest budget offer. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is already pointing the finger of blame.

"The infighting between the Tea Party and the rest of the Republican party, including the Republican leadership in Congress, is keeping our negotiating partner [from] the negotiating table," Reid told reporters Monday. "It's pretty hard to negotiate without someone on the other side of the table to talk to." A deal must be reached by April 8 to keep some parts of the government from temporarily shutting down.

Reid later issued a statement recounting "weeks of productive negotiations with Speaker Boehner" and demanding, "For the sake of our economy, it's time for mainstream Republicans to stand up to the Tea Party and rejoin Democrats at the table to negotiate a responsible solution that cuts spending while protecting jobs."

The political calculus behind all this is clear: Republicans won the midterm elections because enthusiastic conservatives, rallied by the Tea Party, joined with wary independents in rejecting Democratic candidates. Splitting this coalition by forcing Republicans to disappoint either Tea Party conservatives or moderate swing voters is a prerequisite for any Democratic recovery next year.

But there is another conflict at work here: the tension between the budgetary math and the political math. The former clearly suggests drastic action on federal spending is needed. The national debt has zoomed past $14 trillion and Washington borrows nearly 40 cents of every dollar it spends. The cost of servicing that debt is rising, and the picture looks bleaker when the total unfunded liabilities of the major entitlement programs are factored in.

Left unreformed, Social Security and Medicare will soak up the entire budget -- crowding out such necessities as national defense -- and ultimately subsume the country's whole GDP. The tipping point for that crisis remains far off from the perspective of politicians' and voters' short time horizons, but reform sooner will avoid painful benefit cuts to retirees already dependent on those programs later.

Praising his party as "honest with ourselves and the country," Reid declared, "We readily recognize that in the end, we won't get everything that we want." But we are in this fiscal mess precisely because the political class has been getting everything it wants. As the Heritage Foundation's Brian Riedl reported last year, discretionary spending has grown 79 percent faster than inflation since 2000. Over that period, anti-poverty programs increased 89 percent faster than inflation, education 219 percent, veterans spending 107 percent, and Medicare 81 percent.

Also over that time period, the federal government has created two new health care entitlements (both unfunded), launched three wars (all unfunded), bailed out multiple industries, passed a massive stimulus bill, enacted bloated farm, energy, and transportation bills, and approved over 9,000 earmarks just last year alone. "Simply put," writes Reidl, "all parts of government are growing."

The president likes to talk about "false choices," but his colleagues on Capitol Hill have avoided making any hard choices. It took until 1987 to approve the first $1 trillion federal budget. It would now take substantial and almost unprecedented spending reductions to run just a $1 trillion annual deficit.

In that sense, it is the Tea Party that has been most honest with themselves and the country. Fresh from introducing a plan to cut $500 billion from the federal budget in a single year, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has offered a five-year balanced budget proposal. It's not certain all the specific numbers will add up once scored by entities like the Congressional Budget Office -- though sometimes that's the fault of the scorers, who assume that repealing Obamacare will cost more money than it saves, for example -- but it is bolder than anything seen from the leadership of either party.

Here is where the political math intrudes: nothing can pass without significant Democratic buy-in, in addition to the votes of wobbly Republicans. Democrats appear to be balking at $61 billion in spending cuts over the next six months. How many of them would vote for stronger stuff?

Then there is the question of whether the next six months is really the most important timeframe. House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) is getting ready to release the fiscal 2012 budget, which will deal with entitlements as a part of a longer-term, 10-year spending plan. It remains to be seen whether even his budget will pass Tea Party muster. "Paul Ryan is the moderate on the House Budget Committee now," Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-KS) jokes. But Ryan has been thinking longer and harder about the debt crisis than just about anyone in the leadership.

Arguments can be made for both a more and less aggressive Republican approach to the current budget standoff. Some point out that the Republicans were ultimately, if unfairly, blamed for the Clinton-era government shutdown and lost their momentum on spending afterward. Others would counter that the Republicans recovered from the shutdown sufficiently to not just maintain control of Congress but actually negotiate a balanced budget. GOP fiscal discipline didn't really collapse until 1998, which might tell in favor of striking while the iron is hot.

It is by no means clear that even this Congress is ready to grapple with a fiscal catastrophe precipitated by the failure to make hard choices and set meaningful budget priorities. The coming weeks will show how determined Washington remains to delay the inevitable.

Mission Unaccomplished

Mission Unaccomplished
By Ross Kaminsky on 3.29.11 @ 6:09AM

Before President Obama's Monday evening Libya speech, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell posed four questions he hoped the president would answer. Obama gave partial and unconvincing answers to two and left the other two unaddressed.

Instead, the president spent nearly half an hour trying -- and failing -- to make a cogent argument for U.S. military action for humanitarian purposes and presenting the Obama Doctrine justifying risking American blood and treasure "when our safety is not directly threatened."

McConnell's questions were ones which many, not least many members of Congress in both political parties, want answers to:

• Will America's commitment end in days, not weeks, as the president promised?

• What will be the duration of the non-combat operation, and what will be the cost?

• What national security interest of the United States justified the risk of American life?

• What is the role of our country in Libya's ongoing civil war?

Regarding U.S. involvement in military operations, the president offered only a rehashing of his prior statements and re-emphasizing his desire to turn America from leader to equal-at-best participant in most ongoing combat:

I said that America's role would be limited and that we would not put ground troops into Libya. That we would focus our unique capabilities on the front end of the operation. And that we would transfer responsibility to our allies and partners. Tonight we are fulfilling that pledge.

NATO has taken command of the enforcement of the arms embargo and the no-fly zone. Last night, NATO decided to take on the additional responsibility of protecting civilians. This transfer from the United States to NATO will take place on Wednesday.

UPDATE: In a sign of NATO's view of Obama's vaunted leadership, a NATO diplomat announced on Tuesday morning that the alliance's takeover of Libyan operations would be delayed until Thursday, in part so allies might modify their levels of participation based on a Tuesday conference about Libya.

Obama said that the U.S. will "play a supporting role" in ongoing operations and that the "risk and cost of this operation to our military and taxpayers will be reduced significantly." He neglected to explain, however, how this transfer furthers the military mission, focusing instead on "international partners," "a broad coalition," and an "international mandate," as if ensuring that a few diplomats getting along for an extra week is more important than secondary considerations such as winning.

In other words, America's commitment remains undefined in both time and cost despite Obama's hiding behind NATO's skirt.

The answer to a question of the length and cost of non-combat operations was even more evasive: "While our military mission is narrowly focused on saving lives, we continue to pursue the broader goal of a Libya which belongs not to a dictator but to its people." Obama explained what he expects the U.S. to do following combat operations:

We will deny the regime arms, cut off its supplies of cash, assist the opposition, and work with other nations to hasten the day when Gaddafi leaves power. It may not happen overnight as a badly weakened Gaddafi tries desperately to cling on to power…history is not on Gaddafi's side.

This answered McConnell's last question of our likely role, but not the critical question of duration and cost.

And again, he emphasized the value he puts on "work[ing] with allies and partners so they bear their share of the burden and pay their share of the costs."

On one hand, it is a welcome change to hear the president show some concern for cost to taxpayers, not least because the Pentagon said on Monday that the U.S. has spent at least $600 million on Libyan operations so far, of which about $270 million was for 191 Tomahawk missiles and about $60 million to replace an F-15E fighter that last week crashed near Benghazi after a reported malfunction.

On the other hand, why is the president only concerned about saving money when it comes to military action, whereas the cost to taxpayers was irrelevant during his historic piling up of deficits and debt during his first two years in office? Obama noted that Iraq has cost us "nearly a trillion dollars" and "that is not something we can afford to repeat in Libya." It's too bad he thinks we can afford to repeat it in D.C., Detroit, and every place he wants to put a high-speed rail station.

The issue of America's national security interest that would justify our involvement in Libya brought out the true internationalist in President Obama. Rather than give an honest answer, "oil," which he probably doesn't actually understand or believe, the president gave three basic answers to why America had to get involved in Libya: The "international community" wanted us to, civilians were at risk, and we didn't want to see Libyan refugees "strain[ing] the peaceful yet fragile transitions in Egypt and Tunisia."

The president said, trying to justify the use of the American military by a theoretical and emotional plea, "as president I refuse to wait for images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action." He tried to Americanize the story by saying that Benghazi, the city against whose residents Gaddafi had threatened "no mercy," was "nearly the size of Charlotte." Oh, now I understand why we spent half a billion dollars in a week.

Obama also suggested that our not stopping Gaddafi's assault on his own people would mean that "the democratic impulses that are dawning across the region would be eclipsed by the darkest form of dictatorship as repressive leaders concluded that violence is the best strategy to cling to power." One has to wonder what other conclusion those leaders will reach due to our involvement in Libya. Perhaps it's "If we're going to attack our own people, we'd better do it faster than old Moammar did."

His final justification for U.S. action was perhaps the most disturbing: Without us, "the writ of the United Nations Security Council would have been shown to be little more than empty words, crippling that institution's future credibility to uphold global peace and security." At least I think it was his final justification; I missed his next sentence because I was laughing so hard.

None of these, even with the president's repeated crowing that our "leadership" in Libya has "see[n] that the principles of justice and human dignity are upheld by all" would meet the standard of our national strategic interest as defined by any serious thinker, much less any serious thinker at the National Defense University from which Obama gave his speech. One would have thought he'd have learned more while at that fine institution.

As if all that weren't bad enough, the last minutes of Obama's address were what will likely be termed the "Obama Doctrine," basically saying that he is willing to use our military "when our safety is not directly threatened, but our interests and our values are." Unfortunately, it is very difficult to define "interests" outside of safety, particularly in the Middle East for a president who has a pathological dislike of oil. And going to war over "values," well that should trouble even those Americans who believe they share Obama's values.

Beyond his evasiveness regarding basic questions to which the country wants straight answers, Obama's speech showed a continuing incoherence regarding the mission in Iraq:

While Obama argued for "a Libya which belongs not to a dictator but to its people," he then pushed back against those who argue for an explicit mission to remove Gaddafi: "Of course there is no question that Libya and the world would be better off with Gaddafi out of power. I along with many other world leaders have embraced that goal and will actively pursue it through non-military means."

It's no wonder that the president can't and won't give a prediction on when our involvement will end or how much it will cost. His refusal to understand the only possible definition of success in Libya, namely the removal, dead or alive, of Gaddafi from that country, all but ensures a bloody, chaotic quagmire unless a Canadian NATO general does what Obama won't. (Wagers, anyone?) Furthermore, such a quagmire will be even less tolerated by our allies' voting publics, meaning that one ally -- and when we're talking about the UAE and Turkey, we have to use that term very loosely -- after another will likely drop out, leaving the U.S. having to take back a larger leadership role in a mission without end.

And then there was Obama, the permanent campaigner. Before suggesting that his approach to Libya is not aiming at regime change because "To be blunt, we went down that road in Iraq," the president was at his indignant best: "For those who doubted our capacity to carry out this operation, I want to be clear, the United States of America has done what we said we would do."

But no serious argument was made against our involvement based on a potential inability "to carry out this operation," at least as far as the early military action was involved. Instead the arguments were about an unclear mission with an unknown definition of success risking American prestige (which is strategically important, and not just for Americans' collective ego) by aggressively giving up leadership to such courageous forces as the French and the Arab League.

Fortunately for those of us who analyze Barack Obama's words on a regular basis, our job was made much easier by his inclusion of the phrase "I want to be clear." In Obama-speak, that phrase always precedes a statement which is either a misdirection or a lie, as the president somehow believes that making his worst arguments clearer will somehow make them better.

If Barack Obama went after Gaddafi with the fury with which he slew straw men in his speech, maybe we really could end America's involvement in Libya in days rather than weeks.

Despite Senator McConnell's excellent cues for Barack Obama to follow, the president's Monday speech on Libya left as much confusion, both about today and about the future, as it resolved. One thing we learned with certainty, however, is that for this president having an international consensus is more important than having a true strategic interest.

Patricia Harrison and the 2012 Republican Divide

Patricia Harrison and the 2012 Republican Divide
By Jeffrey Lord on 3.29.11 @ 6:09AM

"They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time…. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.… It is the same spirit that says, 'You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.' No matter in what shape it comes… it is the same tyrannical principle….[This is] where the struggle really is… [and we must] get rid of the fog which obscures the real question."
-- Abraham Lincoln in the Seventh Lincoln-Douglas Debate, October 15, 1858, Alton, Illinois

Let's talk about Republicans and 2012.

What does the NPR kerfuffle really mean in terms of the 2012 battle for the GOP presidential nomination?

Who is Patricia de Stacy Harrison? And what does her support of NPR really have to do with that 2012 fight?

Say what? Beyond the minor Shakespearean skirmish over National Public Radio ("to fund or not to fund, that is the question") what in the world does NPR have to do with the looming fight for the GOP presidential nomination? And what does it have to do with a GOP victory -- whether in 2012, 2016 or for that matter, anytime?

A lot.

First, Ms. Harrison.

Patricia de Stacy Harrison is the president of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the "parent" of the public TV and radio siblings PBS and NPR. NPR, as the world knows, has been hard upon troubled times lately. First because of the firing of commentator Juan Williams. Then the mishandling of the firing of Juan Williams. This was followed in short order by the James O'Keefe Muslim-fundraising videotape and the abrupt departures of the un-related but seemingly identical thinking NPR Schillers, Ron and Vivian. As a result, the very liberal NPR has found itself targeted by conservatives for an end to its federal funding.

Enter Ms. Harrison, who has come quickly to NPR's defense.

Issuing a formal statement in her role as CPB president and CEO on the day the GOP-controlled House cut off NPR's funding, Harrison said in part that NPR decidedly was in need of "federal support" and that "rather than penalize public broadcasting, the debate should focus on strengthening and supporting this valuable national asset." At the end of her statement was an apparently standard description of CPB that said in its first sentence the organization is the "steward of the federal government's investment in public broadcasting."

Now.

What makes this important is not that Harrison is the CPB President and CEO. No, what makes this plea for federal funding significant is that she is a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee and a Bush appointee to head the CPB.

In other words, as we head into the fight for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Patricia Harrison's stance on NPR signals that this is exactly the right time to begin understanding the very real philosophical differences among those in the Republican presidential field. Discerning -- not to put too fine a point on it -- who among these would-be Republican presidents really and truly understand in their bones what the party of Lincoln (not to mention Reagan!!) is all about. Do they get what Republican Party founder Abraham Lincoln was talking about in, say, his famous debates with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858? When he said, for example, that the "real question" in politics was all too frequently obscured by "fog." That principle, cherished if almost never openly acknowledged by the left is, again according to Lincoln: "You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it."

In Liberty and Tyranny our friend Mark Levin took the very title of his considerable bestseller from Lincoln saying this again years later -- in 1864 -- as president. Then, Lincoln summed up the point by saying that the difference between each man doing "as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor" -- or not -- is "called by two different and incompatible names -- liberty and tyranny." Levin revitalizes an old and accurate term for those who would take the results of someone else's work and toil to satisfy what Levin calls their "endless rationalizations for seizing ever more governmental authority" in service of the "supremacy of the state."

The term: Statists. Or, if you prefer, "neo-Statists." The latter Levin's Lincoln-like designation of "some who claim the mantle of conservatism but are, in truth, neo-Statists, who would have the Conservative abandon the high ground of the founding principles for the quicksand of a soft tyranny."

As Ms. Harrison's statement on NPR -- indeed her very presence at CPB itself -- makes clear, those who believe in the supremacy of the state are not just running the Statist Obama Administration or plotting Statist strategy with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. They are inside the gates of the GOP itself.

Ms. Harrison is doubtless a good person. This is not a personal criticism. It is, rather an opportunity to take note of her approach as a Republican to the central issue of the role of government. A role, which, in her case, she sees as Congress taking your tax dollars to give to her and her colleagues so they can run a government media company. (A snapshot of how this game works comes from South Carolina Senator Jim De Mint's recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: "According to CPB's 2009 tax forms, President and CEO Patricia de Stacy Harrison received $298,884 in reportable compensation and another $70,630 in other compensation from the organization and related organizations that year.")

Harrison, with her various compensations and vigorous defense of NPR -- and for that matter the very existence of CPB, PBS, and NPR as tax-funded institutions -- is the very embodiment of Lincoln's succinct summation of the attitude of elites towards working Americans in the private sector: "You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it." It is the Americanized version of what Lincoln scorned as those choosing the "divine right of kings" over "the common right of humanity."

This battle against Statism -- played out against the backdrop of a dramatic, nation-threatening $14 trillion debt -- is at the very heart of the 2012 battle that is now being fought inside the GOP.

WHERE HAS THIS Conservative-Statist fight already shown itself with recent struggles inside the Republican Party? A party where everybody swears up and down so help them God, cross their hearts and hope to die -- they believe in the idea of "limited government." Really. Honest.

• Energy: Republican support for Statism was at work when President Bush 43 signed the "Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007," which will ban 100 watt bulbs beginning in January of 2012 (among a whole list of government-mandated changes to the way you choose to light your own home).

• Budget: Massachusetts GOP Senator Scott Brown brushed aside Lincoln's principle by voting to give your tax dollars to Planned Parenthood. In wonderfully Statist language Brown, replete with the neo-Statist qualifier (emphasis supplied), said this: "Given our severe budget problems, I don't believe any area of the budget is completely immune from cuts. However, the proposal to eliminate all funding for family planning goes too far." The King speaks.

• Jobs: Statists have multiplied their ranks in the federal government with a 7% increase in federal jobs in the Obama era (that's 144,000 more jobs). And the Republican Statists? Yup. That would be an increase of 11.7% -- a stunning 230,000 jobs since the beginning of the 2007 recession. In the Republican Bush era.

• Same-Sex Marriage: Statism versus Conservatism was on display when longtime conservative Theodore Olson, the Bush Solicitor General and a potential Attorney General in a GOP administration, suddenly insisted it's not the American people (in this case the people of California) who will decide state law on same-sex marriage but rather un-elected liberal federal judges. In essence, Olson suddenly revealed his Statist streak when he took the modern version of the Statist belief Lincoln challenged when discussing the infamous Statist Supreme Court Dred Scott decision in his "House Divided" speech. Lincoln made clear that his party opposed the idea that "the government will not prohibit slavery within them [the U.S. territories of the day], nor allow the people to prohibit" slavery. The Statists of Lincoln's day insisted on the age-old Statist remedy. That the government -- "the divine right of kings" -- would decide the issue of where slaves would and would not be allowed. Period.

• Health Care: Already Massachusetts' ex-governor Mitt Romney is stumbling badly as he tries to explain his decidedly Statist mandate of health care in his term as governor. Romney is to this moment unable or unwilling to simply admit he was either wrong on principle or is in fact the believer in Statist doctrine his "Romneycare" solution indicates that he is.

• Environment: News accounts have former Utah Republican Governor Jon Huntsman gearing up to join the 2012 presidential race. Startlingly, Huntsman, freshly returned from a stint as the Statist Obama Administration's Ambassador to China, is apparently set to make his presidential campaign as a full-fledged Statist. Among other things, he has been a staunch supporter of the Statist global warming approach. Huntsman's Statist attractions were made plain in this story from Time magazine when he was quoted thusly:

Indeed, Huntsman was a vocal booster of the Western Climate Initiative, which promoted the possibility of a carbon cap-and-trade program. "Until we put a value on carbon, we are never going to be able to get serious about dealing with Climate Change long term," Huntsman said back in 2008. "Now putting a value on carbon either suggests you get a carbon tax or you get a cap-and-trade system underway."

This is, of course, decidedly Statist language. Who exactly is the "we" who will "put a value" or a "carbon tax"…yada yada yada? Why, a Statist government, of course. And Huntsman, amazingly enough, is apparently prepared to take his Statist views to GOP presidential primary voters -- with former John McCain adviser John Weaver guiding the way. Weaver, of course, played a role over the years in reinforcing McCain's own Statist inclinations (can you say "McCain-Feingold"?) as a sure-fire way not only to govern but to win the presidency. Weaver, in fact, is a wonderful example of the Statist mindset at work in the world of Republican political consultants. Here's this story from Politico back in February of 2008 when McCain was fighting for the GOP nomination, with this key paragraph that describes the Weaver mindset:

In early 2002, Weaver left the GOP and registered as a Democrat in Manhattan. By May, he was consulting for the House Democrats' campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, plotting strategies to defeat Republicans. The DCCC's then-executive director was Howard Wolfson, now chief spokesman for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

At some point Weaver decided to bring his Statist ideals back to the GOP. In a disagreement with a client GOP candidate in Massachusetts Weaver said "we're in this business because we care about governing." No doubt. There's little question John Weaver is an honorable guy -- who truly believes in governing with Statist principles.

And campaigning on them too. Here is Weaver's view (as reported in 2009 by Byron York over at the Washington Examiner) in which he insists that the GOP must stick with Statism or neo-Statism because if "our party is defined by Palin and Limbaugh and Cheney, then we're headed for a blowout…. That's just the truth." In other words, Limbaugh is a Reaganite and unless Republicans stop listening to him and start campaigning on the Statist principles that elected Presidents Dewey, Ford, Dole and McCain and re-elected President Bush 41 in 1992 the GOP is headed to certain defeat.

Thus… Jon Huntsman, Statist GOP candidate selects the perfect Statist consultant.

• Internal Party Nomination Fights: The Conservative-Statist fight in 2010 dominated the news when the Delaware Republican Party and its Statist candidate for the Senate, Congressman Mike Castle, battled against the Conservative Christine O'Donnell. Versions of the same battle were seen in Senate GOP primary races in Kentucky, Nevada, Utah, Alaska, and Florida. Frequently choosing the Statist side of the argument was the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee and its chair, Senator John Cornyn of Texas. Opposing it -- and raising money to oppose Statist GOP candidates -- was South Carolina Senator Jim De Mint.

And so on. And on.

Limited government? From Patricia Harrison to President Bush 43 to Senator John McCain to Senator Scott Brown to Governor Romney and Governor Huntsman and ex-Bush Solicitor General Ted Olson and political consultant John Weaver…all are believers in it. Sort of. Kind of. Unless, of course, we're talking about the government's right to decide the wattage of your light bulbs, take your tax money and give it to a favored special interest group (Planned Parenthood in this case), insist that more tax money be used to fund NPR, remove your ability under the law to decide the definition of marriage, mandate that if you live in Massachusetts you must buy health insurance, or believe that the government should be taxing you for the latest global warming fad.

Again, these aren't bad people. Surely to the contrary. But they simply cannot find it in themselves to sign on with the seriously real idea of what "limited government" really entails. Which is precisely why there are so many Republican fingerprints on that telltale $14 trillion deficit some 8 decades in the making.

SO WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN for Republicans and conservatives in 2012?

Let's assume what is most probably the case, based on past history. There will be another Republican in the White House. At a certain point, simple incumbency problems overtake the Ins, and that's before one's name becomes synonymous with being a political disaster as president -- Hoover or a Carter or, conservatives would argue today, Obama. Whether a he or she manages this Republican victory in 2012 -- or later -- happen it will. And when it does, then what?

Is the new president a GOP Statist or neo-Statist prepared to fill his or her administration with appointees like Patricia Harrison -- appointees always on the lookout for ways to expand the role of the federal government and the funding that goes along with it? Will he or she take advice from Statists like John Weaver and just shrug as did President Bush when signing on to the newest version of McCain-Feingold or banning of 100-watt light bulbs?

The other day an attorney named Kent Masterson Brown had a remarkable piece in the New York Post that illustrates the problem. It seems Brown was the lead plaintiff attorney in a case that had a federal judge allowing Social Security Administration bureaucrats to institute "three internal rules …that make receipt of Social Security retirement benefits contingent upon enrollment in Medicare. Plus, a person who withdraws from Medicare would not only have to give up Social Security benefits, but repay all benefits previously received." (Emphasis added.) The latter would be, of course, the benefit program that you have already paid into for the duration of your working life.

Now what happens if a Statist Republican sits in the White House when this issue comes to a head? What would be the response here? And what kind of federal judges would that president be appointing?

Upon learning of Mr. Brown's revelation, would he or she demand, say, the firing of the Social Security Administrator? Issue stiff instructions to the Republican Secretary of Health and Human Services to eliminate these rules post-haste?

Based on the Statist views on display with Republicans from Patricia Harrison to Ted Olson to Scott Brown to Mitt Romney to Jon Huntsman to John Weaver -- unlikely. Case in point?

Who is it that appointed the federal judge Mr. Brown is writing about here? The federal judge whom Mr. Brown describes as allowing "unelected bureaucrats to make up their own laws" by issuing a ruling that "would allow the 'health reform' law to become even more Orwellian than it already is, without any action from Congress"?

That's right.

This Statist decision came from Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, who was appointed to the federal bench by -- President George W. Bush in 2003.

Were a Statist Republican elected in 2012 or anywhere else down the road, Americans outraged about this case would presumably find themselves dealing with a President, Secretary of HHS, and Social Security Administrator who, in the fashion of GOP Statists or neo-Statists, would utter some soothing words and make some cosmetic changes for the sake of PR -- then let the rules stand except perhaps just a little less so. And as the outrage subsided and people looked the other way, the Statist GOP president and his Statist Justice Department would keep on appointing Statist Republican judges like Judge Collyer to the bench.

A potential President Romney has already defended his use of a Statist mandate in health care -- defending his actions still. And a would-be President Huntsman has worked to further the Statist agenda for global warming Statism. Hit the right issue -- same-sex marriage -- and a potential Attorney General Ted Olson would be defending the Statist side in court. And Senator Brown would be shrugging at the notion of defunding the whole thing because, of course, he supports fiscal restraint…however. Etc. Etc. Etc.

The problem for Statists?

After eighty-plus years of doing it their way, Statist chickens, to borrow from the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, are coming home to roost: $14 trillion worth of them. And through a fluke -- the firing of Juan Williams at NPR, which in turn launched a serious NPR defunding effort -- Patricia Harrison has become the perfect symbol of the power Statists have quietly accrued within the Republican Party itself.

This is the real battle in 2012.

It is decidedly not Obama versus The Republican Nominee.

No, the real battle will be very, very simple. And every bit as important. In Lincoln's simple formulation of this battle it is over this proposition:

You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.

Will the next Republican President of the United States be a Statist?

Or a Conservative?

The time is here to hold certain feet to that fire.