Tag: politics

Even the editors at NRO can’t stomach the ludicrous no-cuts deal that Boehner is attempting to strike with the Senate and White House:

We initially supported the deal House Speaker John Boehner cut with the White House to cut $38.5 billion from the rest of the fiscal year 2011 budget. It was only a pittance in the context of all of Washington’s red ink, but it seemed an acceptable start, even if we assumed it would be imperfect in its details. What we didn’t assume was that the agreement would be shot through with gimmicks and one-time savings. What had looked in its broad outlines like a modest success now looks like a sodden disappointment….

As they push a bargain that is still not fully understood, Boehner and the leadership have put their members in an awful fix with another deadline to keep the government open fast approaching. We’d vote “no,” even if we understand the impulse to move on to more important matters and to avoid a leap into the dark that might include a politically damaging shutdown. At the very least, freshmen and other conservatives should be frank about the deal’s shortcomings, refusing to exaggerate its merits as their leadership often has. The episode is strike one against the speakership of John Boehner.

I think it was fairly obvious from the start that Boehner was a fraud, his tears and odes to the Tea Party notwithstanding. I have very little confidence that he will stand up and refuse to raise the debt ceiling next month either, which would explain Treasury Secretary Geithner’s apparent confidence that he will soon have more money to spend.

The problem with the NRO perspective is that the advertised $38.5 billion deal wasn’t any more financially serious than its $300 million revised version, it merely provided better window dressing for the House Republicans. But as Republican cheerleaders, the NRO editors have real cause to be concerned because Boehner’s actions are all but guaranteeing some sort of third party challenge to the Republicans in 2012 and 2014.

How else can you explain their opposition to state laws requiring presidential candidates to prove their eligibility?

The Arizona Senate has approved a revised bill requiring presidential candidates to prove they are U.S. citizens eligible to run for the office. The bill approved Wednesday gives candidates additional ways to prove they meet the constitutional requirements to be president. It was prompted by the ongoing claim by some that there is no proof President Barack Obama was born in the United States and is therefore ineligible to be president.

Democrats argued the bill exceeds the state’s authority and say state officials are not fully qualified to determine the validity of a candidate’s documents.

Logic dictates that if Democrats really believed Obama was fully eligible for the office of president, they wouldn’t object to laws like this Arizona law. The fact that they are so vehemently opposed to such laws is a strong indication that they harbor the same doubts about him that the so-called birthers do, they’re just afraid to admit to them.

Obama’s half-hearted announcement of his purported attempt to win a second term as president tends to support my suspicions that he has no intention of being the Democratic nominee next year. I think he’s looking for an excuse not to run, just as the Democratic elders are looking for an excuse to run someone else.

Not only were the $38 billion in spending cuts merely an insignificant fraction of the $1.5 trillion deficit, which is $330 billion larger than the previously estimated $1.17 trillion estimate, but at least some of that $38 billion doesn’t actually represent a cut in spending:

A close look at the government shutdown-dodging agreement to cut federal spending by $38 billion reveals that lawmakers significantly eased the fiscal pain by pruning money left over from previous years, using accounting sleight of hand and going after programs President Barack Obama had targeted anyway.

Such moves permitted Obama to save favorite programs — Pell grants for poor college students, health research and “Race to the Top” aid for public schools, among others — from Republican knives. And big holes in foreign aid and Environmental Protection Agency accounts were patched in large part. Republicans also gave up politically treacherous cuts to the Agriculture Department’s food inspection program.

The full details of Friday’s agreement weren’t being released until overnight as it was officially submitted to the House. But the picture already emerging is of legislation financed with a lot of one-time savings and cuts that officially “score” as savings to pay for spending elsewhere, but that often have little to no actual impact on the deficit.

In other words, they “cut” money that had already had not been spent as planned, while committing to new expenses. It’s just more of the usual accounting smoke and mirrors; the bi-factional ruling party plays its game to keep the media and public entertained as the Fed continues attempting to put out the fire by pouring more gasoline on it.

UPDATE – Apparently the cuts are even more modest than anyone had imagined: A comparison prepared by the CBO shows that the omnibus spending bill, advertised as containing some $38.5 billion in cuts, will only reduce federal outlays by $352 million below 2010 spending rates. The nonpartisan budget agency also projects that total outlays are actually some $3.3 billion more than in 2010, if emergency spending is included in the total.

The RINOs have cast Mitt Romney to play the conventional Dole/McCain role:

Mr Romney, a former Governor of Massachusetts, declared “it is time we put America back on a course of greatness”, as he launched an exploratory committee for a presidential run. The 64-year-old Mormon father of five was defeated by John McCain in the party’s primary in 2008. But he has emerged as the favourite in a thin Republican field for 2012.

Setting aside the problem of whether Captain Underoos is capable of commanding the loyalty of a party largely comprised of people who view Mormonism as an aberrant cult, Romney’s more serious weakness is that his single biggest political triumph is the passage of Obamacare before it was called Obamacare in Massachusetts. Romney’s nomination simply cannot be logically squared with the Tea Party-fueled electoral victory of 2010, which is why I conclude that he won’t be playing the Dole/McCain role for which he has been selected, he’ll be playing the Giuliani role instead.

Furthermore, in a nation increasingly riven by ethnic and religious differences, it is less and less acceptable to attempt representing people from one geographic place and religion with an individual from a different geographic place and religion. A party with its roots in the South and Midwest will have little interest in being represented by a former governor of Massachusetts, no matter how good his hair happens to be.

Frankly, even the corpse of Ron Paul would make for a far better president than Mitt Romney.

He nobly turns it down, then wonders why he still hasn’t lost any weight. Congress and the White House salute themselves for striking a “historic” spending cut:

Working late into the evening Friday, congressional and White House negotiators struck an agreement to pay for government operations through the end of September while trimming $38.5 billion in spending. Lawmakers then approved a days-long stopgap measure to keep the government running while the details of the new spending plan were written into legislation.

Of course, since the federal government ran a $189 billion deficit in March alone, this means that in order to stop digging the debt hole deeper, they only have to cut $150 billion more… every month this year.

The OC summarized it thusly: “Obama hailed the deal as “a ridiculously insignificant drop in the bucket.” House Speaker John Boehner said that over the next decade he would repeatedly ask the Tea Party faction to “kiss my hairy orange ass.”

“This is historic, what we’ve done,” agreed Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., the third man involved in negotiations that ratified a new era of divided government. “The Republicans folded like cheap aluminum lawn chairs.”

Limbaugh appears to be surprised that many Republicans blame him and other Republican leaders for failing to investigate Obama’s birth certificate scandal. But why shouldn’t they be blamed? Not a single one of them had the balls to do what Joseph Farah and now Donald Trump have done in pointing out that the president has no birth certificate.

Caller: “The fact of the matter is that his citizenship has been a suspicious issue from the very beginning, and not one high Republican or you has ever really tried to nail him on this issue, and if it does turn out that he is not a true citizen, then I think all of you should hang your heads in shame because of all the destruction our country has had to suffer ever since he was elected, in spite of being the fraud that we know he probably really is.”

Limbaugh: “So you’re mad at me?”

Caller: “I am furious. I wanted you and anybody else to go after him on this issue before he was elected. It would have been the easiest way to have stopped him. It would have been a no-brainer. But nobody would. And so he was elected and everything was just hidden under the rug. And now look what we have had ever since. … If it does turn out that he’s not a citizen, I think you should hang your head in shame, because our country has suffered so much….”

Rush: “OK, if you want to focus, Angela, on what should have happened before the election, we can do that, and I can focus on the stupidity of half the country that voted for the guy, and I can talk about all the stupid things the media said and all the tricks that were played to convince people that he’s not who he was. But today it’s 2011 and those days are over and we are living in the midst of this guy destroying the economy and going back and talking about a birth certificate right now is not the most effective way of stopping this guy. I would love nothing more than for this guy to be proven a fraud. I would love nothing more than for all of this to have been a giant trick. I would love nothing more than for him to get nabbed at this, but there isn’t any evidence of it yet. I would love nothing more to see what happens when it’s proven, if it could be, that he’s not a citizen. What happens with legislation when everything he’s done is unqualified, everything he’s done is illegal. Everything he’s done has gotta be wiped clean. Can you imagine that battle? I would love to see that.

You’ve got me pegged wrong here. But I deal with what is. I don’t deal with what-ifs. “If” is for children. And we’ve got certain things that are the reality of the day that have to be dealt with, pure and simple, and that’s where I am on this. No more and no less. There’s no magic wand that can get Obama unelected. You can hope and you can dream but you are locked in a fantasy if that’s what you’re waiting for. That isn’t gonna happen. The focus needs to be on making sure he’s not reelected. But there is no way to unelect the guy. It isn’t going to happen.”

Limbaugh has somehow managed to miss the point in his attempt to defend his past and present failures to show up on the issue here. No one is talking about getting Obama “unelected” by belatedly unearthing the facts about his probable ineligibility for the elected office he presently holds. First and foremost, they just want the truth. Everyone with even half a brain smells a rat, but smelling one is not tantamount to conclusively identifying one. Perhaps it’s just a mouse, perhaps it’s nothing. No one truly knows except Obama and possibly some of his innermost circle. Second, it should be obvious that if Limbaugh is really serious about how the focus needs to be on making sure Obama is not reelected, then the most realistic and effective way to do that is for him to actively support the proposed presidential eligibility laws in the 13 states that are presently considering them. The unexpected poll strength shown by Donald Trump proves that focusing on the birth certificate is not only an effective approach in legally cutting out the legs from under Obama, it may be a vote-winner as well because most Americans aren’t drinking the Hope and Change-flavored Kool-Aid anymore.

Rush and the conservative media were afraid to look out of the mainstream in 2008. What they haven’t realized yet is that doubts about Obama’s legitimacy are now the mainstream position, which is why Jerome Corsi’s new book on the subject is all but guaranteed to become a #1 New York Times bestseller when it is released this month.

So, Limbaugh’s caller was correct to be furious with him. Like McCain and Palin, Rush simply refused to do what many of his fans perceived to be his duty in 2008 and he’s not doing it now. Instead, he’s left it to the likes of Trump to call Obama to account, who despite being more of a reality TV candidate than a real one, would almost certainly make for a less disastrous Republican president than anyone but Ron Paul.

A woman explains why liberals can’t defend their opinions on Salon:

When you live, say, on a coast or in a very blue state, you grow accustomed to being surrounded by people who believe like you do. You get to thinking that the only people who would dare contradict you are ignoramuses. Meanwhile, I began directing all my anger toward the Republican Party at Janet. On the day that Congress voted to defund Planned Parenthood, I found myself furious at Janet, just Janet, as the face of all that was bad in the world….

I don’t speak for Janet, but I think there’s something deeper at play. Janet’s willingness to associate with so many liberal friends — though I know she seeks refuge in chat rooms and magazines that share her beliefs — makes her a better and more interesting person. She has her beliefs challenged constantly. She is more well-read and educated in her politics than most of the liberals I know. Too many liberals I know are lazy, they have a belief system that consists of making fun of Glenn Beck and watching “The Daily Show.”

It is a massive disadvantage to have no understanding of the other side’s reasoning – such as it is – or ideology. Because it is, for the most part, avowedly anti-intellectual, the Left regularly puts itself at a complete disadvantage by refusing to pay attention to anything but its own dogma. I have seen this again and again in both the journalistic and the academic world, which heavily relies on credentialism rather than knowledge.

It is not an accident that TIA unmasked the limited range of knowledge possessed by biology and philosophy PhDs and RGD exposed the strict limits of the mainstream economics PhDs. I have long known that the petty intellectual emperors wear no clothes outside their own little disciplines, as autodidacts, dilettantes, and renaissance men seldom go in for academics these days. The Dread Ilk will recall how a look at the curriculum for a biology major showed that the graduate would not possess a conventional broad-spectrum liberal arts education, which is why calling an academic on his assertions outside of his area of expertise will reliably expose him as an intellectual bluffer.

What is true of the liberal credentialentsia is doubly true of your average run of the mill liberal. Whereas the liberal academic only possesses a narrow range of knowledge, the average liberal possesses virtually none at all. His education consists of having been told about things, so he thinks in terms of reference points rather than actual facts. And, because he willfully cringes away from any perspective that might challenge his opinions – or more accurately – expose his ignorance – his intellectual development is halted at the level of an elementary school child parroting back the assertions of his teacher.

But conservatives should not be too proud. They are guilty of a similar, albeit lesser sin, as they tend to avoid studying the intellectual roots of their own ideology as well as those of competing ideologies. One reason I respect conservatives like Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Beck even when I disagree with their advocated policies is that they make a point of encouraging conservatives to read more deeply in the conservative tradition. When Hayek as at the top of the economic bestseller lists, this is strong testimony concerning the intellectual development among conservatives. Needless to say, one never sees liberal media figures encouraging liberals to read Dewey, Sanger, or any of the historical progressives whose influence still dominates modern American liberalism.