Here is his latest pretty chart and the introduction thereof.

That’s Austin Frakt’s graph, which uses the Congressional Budget Office’s September numbers, and it shows what happens if we do … nothing. The answer, as you can see, is that the budget comes roughly into balance. Our problems are solved!

But nothing is hard to do. This nothing, for instance, includes three crucial elements: (1) All the Bush tax cuts expire, as they’re currently scheduled to do; (2) The Medicare doc fix is either implemented or its repeal is paid for over the next 70 years; and (3) the Affordable Care Act is implemented, and all of its spending targets are met and all of its taxes are collected.

Klein’s notion, borrowed from the CBO’s June 2010 budget outlook, is that we pony up several trillion more dollars in the “doc fix”, jack up taxes, and implement Obamacare, and all will be well. See how the dotten line meets up nicely with that rising mountain of spending on the right side of the chart? That’s utopia right there — the magic land where revenue rises to 30 percent of GDP and covers all the spending and taxes on the rich that the progressives really want. Philip Klein (no relation) calls it the “Do Nothing” plan, for that’s truly what the younger Klein claims we should do to reach the promised land.

Except there’s a problem. Actually, there are three problems, one for each point in Klein’s plan, but we don’t need to go past the first one. Let’s start with how the CBO describes that dotted line marked “Revenues”.

Under this scenario, the expiration of most of the tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003, the growing reach of the alternative minimum tax, and the way in which the tax system interacts with economic growth would result in steadily higher average tax rates. Those rising rates, combined with the tax provisions of the recent health care legislation, would push total revenues to 23 percent of GDP by 2035–much higher than has typically been seen in recent decades–and to larger percentages thereafter.

There’s a bit of an understatement in there that blows a rather gaping hole in the entire plan. When the CBO says that a revenue figure of 23 percent of GDP would be “much higher than has typically been seen in recent decades” it fails to note that we have never seen a revenue figure larger than 20.9 percent of GDP. Furthermore, even when the top marginal tax rate was over 90 percent, we still didn’t crack a 60-year average of 19.5 percent of GDP. In other words, the CBO’s alternative plan on which Klein pins his hopes assumes that the government will take in at least 3 percent more of all the goods and services we create in a year than we’ve ever taken and that we’ll keep taking at least that much for the next 80 years. Oh, and if you’re wondering how revenues have been looking lately, what with all the new taxes and fees rolled out by the Democrats over the last two years, you can find that here in Table 2.3. We took in 14.9 percent of GDP in 2009 and 2010, down over 2.5 percent from the year before. In fact, we haven’t hit that 19.5 percent average since 2001.

I can’t find a single reason to expect that we’ll take in even 19 percent over the next few years (the President’s budget projections notwithstanding) much less 23 percent or more. Neither can I find a reason to believe that consumers won’t react to the far higher levels of taxation that Klein’s idea will require with much less economic activity. That will drive the GDP down (and it’s not doing particularly well right now), which will also drive down the amount of money our government gets, which will push that magic dotted line way down into the light blue morass of big government and relentlessly-growing entitlements. So much for Klein’s utopia.

In the end, the political battle over the 2012 budget will pit utopians like Klein, who believe sheer fantasy will save us all, against grown ups who can do math and understand how human beings work. Kevin Williamson, who may well be psychic, anticipated Klein’s “let it ride” budget idea and pointed out the very clear battle lines for the coming debate.

Ryan and the Republicans will accept the strongest deficit deal they can get; Obama and the Democrats will accept the strongest deficit deal they are forced to: That’s the basic dynamic that shapes this debate between now and November 2012. They have no credible budget plan — they didn’t even pass a budget last time around. Welcome to the Party of No, Mr. President; Mrs. Pelosi will show you the secret handshake.

The Democrats want 2012 to be about anything other than deficit-reduction.

The left will do everything they can to keep things just the way they are. They will — and you can bet your paycheck on this — throw every conceivable issue at Republicans over the next few months to distract them from what must be done. Klein’s nonsensical notion is only the beginning. Expect the arguments to move away from the budget entirely and into hot-button issues that have nothing to do with money at all.

We can’t let ourselves get distracted and we can’t let arguments like Klein’s go without dispensing a harsh dose of reality. Like it or not, we’re in a desperate place right now, and we’re going to need a real solution. Klein could help if he wanted to. It seems, though, that his only real interest is in trudging relentlessly toward the cloud cuckoo land of progressive fantasy.

Jimmie runs The Sundries Shack and has his own very entertaining podcast called “The Delivery”. He is also an amateur musician, an aspiring composer, an unrepentant geek and an avid fan of Twitter. This article is cross-posted there.

Facing questions from both parties in the Congress, the Obama Administration has now revealed how it has spent over $1.7 billion on part of the Obama health law, known as the Early Retiree Reinsurance Program.

This plan is intended to help companies pay the cost of health care for their early retirees, but lawmakers say it is wrongly benefiting companies like AT&T and General Electric, who have billions in profits on their bottom lines.

The list that follows is like a Who’s Who of big campaign donors, unions, and public employee groups. Six of the top ten recipients are pension systems for public employees. The United Auto Workers, already $3.4 richer from the auto bailout, topped the list with an award of almost $207 million. General Electric, which paid no taxes at all in 2010 and whose CEO is a darling of the White House, received $36.6 million, good for 11th place on the list.

AT&T, which placed second on the list, spent slightly under $15.4 million on lobbying efforts in 2010 and will rake in over $140 million from just this portion of Obamacare. Verizon, third on the list, will make $91.9 million on its $16.75 million 2010 lobbying investment.

Melissa Clouthier has the right of it. This has to stop. Let us set aside the obvious fact that we simply can’t afford Obamacare and focus on the message the ERRP sends. Companies now have a crystal-clear example that if they pony up a few million dollars to Washington politicians, they can expect to see their money returned to them multiplied many times. Most of us who have watched Washington politics know this has been true for a while but I can’t recall a time when our government was this blatant about paying back its corporate and union supporters. If ever there was a time for the taxpayers to push back hard against the rent-seeking and paybacks, it’s now. If not, well, we deserve everything we get.

Jimmie runs The Sundries Shack and has his own very entertaining podcast called “The Delivery”. He is also an amateur musician, an aspiring composer, an unrepentant geek and an avid fan of Twitter. This article is cross-posted there.

But Nick Gillespie and Veronica de Rugy have a proposal that not only promises to balance the budget in ten years but also does so without raising taxes or actually cutting the budget by one thin dime.

Have they proposed a miracle, the fiscal version of the perpetual motion machine. No. As it turns out, the problem isn’t nearly as large as we think it is. The solution is to peg the budget as near as we can to 19 percent of GDP, which is what the CBO has estimated tax revenues to be for the next decade (assuming the Democrats don’t raise taxes in the next month). Here is their setup to the proposal, called “The 19 Percent Solution”.

A balanced budget based on 19 percent of GDP would mean $1.3 trillion in cuts over the next decade, or about $129 billion annually out of ever-increasing budgets averaging around $4.1 trillion. Note that these are not even absolute cuts, but trims from expected increases in spending.

What that means, essentially, is that Congress would need to pass a budget that’s about 3.6 percent smaller than normal. Notice, by the way, I didn’t say the budget would have to be 3.6 percent smaller than the prior year’s budget. There is a difference. Let me explain.

Based on the numbers here, I calculated the percentage of growth from one budget to the next. Here is the list for the last ten years, including the budget as proposed by President Obama for 2011:

2001 to 2002: 5 percent

2002 to 2003: 4.5 percent

2003 to 2004: 4.3 percent

2004 to 2005: 4.2 percent

2005 to 2006: 11.1 percent

2006 to 2007: 3.6 percent

2007 to 2008: 3.4 percent

2008 to 2009: 6.5 percent

2009 to 2010: 13.9 percent

2010 to 2011: 5.3 percent

Average increase per year from 2001 to 2011: 6.1 percent

For those of you keeping partisan score, the average increase in the Bush years was 5.3 percent and the average increase thus far in the Obama years is 9.6 percent.

But back to the subject. If we adopt The 19 Percent Solution, budgets will, generally, still increase, just not by as much. As you can see, if we cut 3.6 percent from the increase of each budget, we would still have spent more money than the previous year in every budget save two. One of those would have been flat and the other would have been cut by a whopping two-tenths of one percent. Old people would not have had to eat dog food, our military would not have fallen into ruin, and we would not have needed to dump countless puppies and kittens into blenders to make a tasty but inexpensive gruel to feed the teeming millions of starving children. Based on my math, our Federal government would have, on average, gotten a 2.5 percent raise each year for the last ten. I can think of plenty of people who haven’t gotten such a reliable raise by their employers over the same period of time.

In other words, if we adopt this policy, we would not have to actually cut the budget at all. We would spend at least as much money next year as we’re spending now. This is not only possible, but doable right now. Back to the article:

Are our leaders willing and able to identify and cut just $25 billion in waste and excess out of more than $700 billion in non-defense discretionary spending? Is reducing the $714 billion the Department of Defense received in 2010 by a paltry $25 billion impossible? Can Medicare and Medicaid, two programs that are infamous for waste and fraud and cost well over $720 billion in 2010, find $35 billion in efficiencies? The specific cuts should be open to negotiation, but the historical record shows that the available level of government revenue is fixed.

If our leaders can not make these paltry cuts on their own, then we will have to insist. We have a revenue limit we can not exceed. That’s not a conservative principle at work, but cold, hard fact. Tax revenues to Washington sit right around 19 percent, no matter how much the President’s vaunted debt commission wishes that number was much higher. We have to work within reality, and reality says that we can only plan for 19 percent. It is foolhardy and irresponsible to plan for anything else.

Fortunately, getting spending to 19 percent, or ideally even less, would not require any real sacrifice at all, except perhaps to the politicians in Washington who use our money to secure their continued employment and the people whose campaign contributions net them billions of our dollars. But I think those folks could do with a little bit smaller trough, don’t you?

Jimmie runs The Sundries Shack and has his own very entertaining podcast called “The Delivery”. He is also an amateur musician, an aspiring composer, an unrepentant geek and an avid fan of Twitter. This article is cross-posted there.

Joe Biden, on the other hand, is not most of us. When he wanted help with his anger issues, he turned to Keith Olbermann.

Is it fair to describe you as the first left winger to express anger as a television host? Fury used to be the province of right wingers, until that day in 2006 when you delivered a tirade against Donald Rumsfeld.
I once had a conversation with the man who is now the vice president when he was still in the Senate, who asked me for advice about how to turn anger into righteous inspiration.

Joe Biden took you to lunch to ask you for tips on getting angry?
He said, ‘‘I just come across like I’m angry and out of control, and you seem to focus it and make it look useful and expressive.’’

Of course, Olbermann wasn’t the first progressive to bring barely-controlled fury to our televisions. Bill Maher had that gig nailed down fifteen years ago, when Olbermann was busy venting his “righteous inspiration” all over his bosses at ESPN. Then again, he does have a bit of a history for embellishing his resume, which may be another reason Joe Biden sought his counsel.

This should tell you pretty much everything you need to know about Biden’s politics and discernment. Asking Olbermann for anger advice is like asking Fat Albert for weight loss advice or a hoarder about self-control and how not to collect 30,000 Beanie Babies.

(Read this post and more from Jimmie at his blog The Sundries Shack or listen to his weekly political and pop-culture podcast, The Delivery)

This past week, the City Controller released the results of an audit her office conducted and found that with that $111 million, Los Angeles has created a grand total of 54.46 jobs (PDF link). How that is possible can be explained in this quote from the Controller, Wendy Greuel.

“I’m disappointed that we’ve only created or retained 55 jobs after receiving $111 million in ARRA funds. With our local unemployment rate over 12% we need to do a better job cutting the red tape and putting Angelenos back to work,” said City Controller Greuel. “While it doesn’t appear that any of the ARRA funds were misspent, the City needs to do a better job expediting the process and creating jobs…” [Emphasis mine]

What struck me about this report is that, even though each job her city allegedly created (or saved, whatever the heck that means) cost us well over 2 million dollars, Controller Greuel doesn’t see any particular reason for alarm. She doesn’t appear to believe that her government has failed miserably, nor that there’s anything at all wrong that a few tweaks here or there to speed up the spending process. Nope, her response is to say that she she can make her government work quickly and efficiently.

And there’s your problem. This is always the response from the Democrats. Every single time government wastes another few truckloads of our money, Democrats tell us that they’ll get it right the next time for sure. And, for reasons I can not for the life of me understand, we believe them, even though their pet economic theories have never worked. Well, I have a few questions for Ms. Greuel. Who will she fire for wasting so much of our money? Which regulation will she remove to speed up the flow of money? What byzantine and corrupt contracting process will she waive to get some of that $2 million a job free from the grasping hands of bureaucrats who don’t want to let that money go? Which budget will she cut to free up even more money for job creation?

I’m no fool. I know I won’t get an answer to any of those questions, but if enough of us ask them, and keep on asking them at every opportunity, we will be impossible to ignore.

So far as I’m concerned, Ms. Greuel and the city of Los Angeles have lost the privilege of spending my money. The people who gave them that money, the Democrats in Congress and the President of the United States, have also forfeited the right to raise taxes at all on anyone until they can prove they won’t chuck the trillions they have already taken from us into a favor-buying, corrupt-as-hell bureaucratic wood chipper. It’s long past time we put their failed “spend and spend and spend some more” plans in the garbage where history says they should be.

What’s happening here is that Blanche Lincoln is a heavily-beleaguered Democratic Senator who was severely wounded in her primary, and is now facing almost certain doom in the general. But if 1.5 billion can save her, it can save her. In contrast, the members of the CBC enjoy the twin advantages of being ensconced in districts gerrymandered for their convenience via federal statute, and being the (eager) beneficiaries of forty years of Democratic agitprop dedicated to painting the GOP as veritable demons from Hell when it comes to race relations. In other words, they’re not going anywhere and their constituents will overwhelmingly vote for the President in 2012: so why is the CBC raising a fuss? And why should the administration care if they do?

Because, really, what does the AA community plan to do about being put-upon like this? Vote Republican?

For those of you searching for the hopeychangeyness in this exercise in rank political power, let me know if you catch a glimpse, would you? I’ve looked, but all I see is the same corrupt backroom vote-trading I’ve seen from Washington almost all my life.

*Yes, I realize that segment is considerable, but there is no doubt that not every black voter in this country has swallowed the progressive Kool-Aid. Perhaps this will help a few more realize that they’re not being fed sweet, sweet drink but a pretty noxious swill.

(Read this post and more from Jimmie at his blog The Sundries Shack or listen to his weekly political and pop-culture podcast, The Delivery)

WEEKLY ADDRESS: President Obama Vows to Continue Standing Up to the Special Interests on Behalf of the American People

And here’s his vow:

A hundred years ago, one of the great Republican Presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, fought to limit special interest spending and influence over American political campaigns and warned of the impact of unbridled, corporate spending. His message rings as true as ever today, in this age of mass communications, when the decks are too often stacked against ordinary Americans. And as long as I’m your President, I’ll never stop fighting to make sure that the most powerful voice in Washington belongs to you.

So how’s that whole “standing up to special interest” venture of his coming along? Are our voices “the most powerful” yet? Are special interests not getting their way? Let’s ask Timothy Carney, who has done a little digging into what those dastardly “special interests” have wanted from Washington and what they’ve gotten.

General Electric once again spent more money on lobbying than any other company — $8.3 million last quarter (Pacific Gas & Electric reported $18.2 million in quarterly spending, but almost all of that was dedicated to opposing a state-level ballot measure in California). GE is also one of the two companies, together with Google, that is most in sync with the Obama administration.

Just after Obama’s inauguration, GE CEO Jeff Immelt wrote that “the government will be a regulator; and also an industry policy champion, a financier, and a key partner.” Immelt told shareholders, “GE’s broad technical portfolio positions us as a natural partner as the role of government increases in the current crisis.”

True to his word, Immelt has positioned GE to benefit from all sorts of Obama initiatives — and of course, GE’s league-leading lobbying squad has worked Capitol Hill to support and craft these initiatives.

Of course, General Electric’s lobbying interests don’t include the advocacy work of the news and opinion departments of both NBC and MS-NBC, who remain steadfast allies of the administration.

But that’s just one company working, largely, in one sector. I mean, sure, ConocoPhillips and Shell, the two biggest oil company lobbying companies are also shoulder to shoulder with the administration on “cap and trade”, but maybe that’s all an aberration. Maybe the administration is just behind in this sector because it’s been ever so busy doing battle with the devious hordes of special interest lobbyists on other fronts, like health care and key Senate races.

Or not.

The top three trade lobbies — lobbying groups that represent single industries — are all health-sector lobbies that vocally and repeatedly supported Obama’s health care overhaul.

The American Medical Association was first among single-industry lobbies last quarter, followed by the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) and the American Hospital Association.

Not only did these groups help push Obamacare across the finish line, they have also rallied behind Obama’s controversial Medicare chief Donald Berwick. PhRMA has run campaign ads supporting Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and the group’s new president was an Obama donor.

Oh. Oh, dear. And we can also toss in the AARP, which dished out over $4 million to get Obamacare passed and its CEO, who maxed out his personal contributions to the President.

Perhaps I’m confused on this, though. It’s possible that the President considers these incredibly wealthy, very influential corporations just another bunch of “average Americans” whose voice he wants to hear. Certainly, groups of people who come together to do business have as much right to be heard in the political arena as individuals. That’s what the First Amendment is all about, after all. But if that’s true, if the President really sees the corporations who pour tens of millions of dollars into his campaign coffers as the strong voices in need of his protection, then who does that leave to suffer under the coercive power of his administration?

(Read this post and more from Jimmie at his blog The Sundries Shack or listen to his weekly political and pop-culture podcast, The Delivery)

President Barack Obama says Senate Republicans are playing politics with bills that would extend benefits to the unemployed and increase lending to small businesses.

Striking a deeply partisan tone in his weekly radio and online address, Obama said the GOP leadership has chosen to “filibuster our recovery and obstruct our progress” by blocking votes on agenda items the president says would breath life into the economic recovery.

“These steps aren’t just the right thing to do for those hardest hit by the recession,” Obama said. “They’re the right thing to do for all of us.”

The Republicans aren’t stopping “progress” (which lately means “stuff I want to do regardless of its effect on the economy”) and they certainly aren’t obstructing anything but the Democrats’ attempt to break a law they passed, a law the President insisted Congress pass not but a few months ago. The law is called PayGo and it used to be a big deal.

Does anyone remember the PayGo law? Let me remind you what the President said about it in February.

It’s pretty simple. It says to Congress, you have to pay as you go. You can’t spend a dollar unless you cut a dollar elsewhere. This is how a responsible family or business manages a budget. And this is how a responsible government manages a budget, as well.

It was this rule that helped lead to balanced budgets in the 1990s, by making clear that we could not increase entitlement spending or cut taxes simply by borrowing more money. And it was the abandonment of this rule that allowed the previous administration and previous congresses to pass massive tax cuts for the wealthy and create an expensive new drug program without paying for any of it. Now in a perfect world, Congress would not have needed a law to act responsibly, to remember that every dollar spent would come from taxpayers today – or our children tomorrow.

But this isn’t a perfect world. This is Washington. And while in theory there is bipartisan agreement on moving on balanced budgets, in practice, this responsibility for the future is often overwhelmed by the politics of the moment. It falls prey to the pressure of special interests, to the pull of local concerns, and to a reality familiar to every single American – the fact that it is a lot easier to spend a dollar than save one.

That is why this rule is necessary. And that is why I am pleased that Congress fulfilled my request to restore it. Last night, I signed the “pay as you go” rule into law. Now, Congress will have to pay for what it spends, just like everybody else.

Pretty big talk isn’t it? I guess it’s okay to talk big about not taking your money frivolously when it’s in his political interests. But when he needs to swipe 34 billion dollars to buy five or six percent in the polls, he’s not all that interested in “responsibility for the future” or recognizing the “reality familiar to every American”, now is he?

Here is the real deal. The President could have his benefit extension tomorrow if Democrats dug into the more than $3 trillion budget and found it. I’m sure there are Mussel Research Programs and Federal office buildings whose construction could be delayed for another year to pay for their endless welfare program. But they won’t because it’s much easier to put the black hat on the Republicans than it is for them to live under the law they themselves passed.

I would suggest the President stop playing stupid political games and abide by the law he wanted so very badly five months ago. If he can’t find the money in his bloated, wasteful, corrupt budget then obviously he doesn’t care very much for the people who are out of work now because of his inept economic bungling.

(Read this post and more from Jimmie at his blog The Sundries Shack or listen to his weekly political and pop-culture podcast, The Delivery)

[Bob Inglis] cited a claim made famous by Palin that the Democratic health care bill would create “death panels” to decide whether elderly or sick people should get care.

“There were no death panels in the bill … and to encourage that kind of fear is just the lowest form of political leadership. It’s not leadership. It’s demagoguery,” said Inglis…

“I think we have a lot of leaders that are following those (television and talk radio) personalities and not leading,” he said. “What it takes to lead is to say, ‘You know, that’s just not right.’”

As it happens that’s exactly what South Carolina voters said to Inglis when they voted more than 2-1 against him last month. Instead of praising them as leaders, though, he whipped out the race cards and whipped them around like he was dealing the world’s fastest poker hand.

Inglis said he was shocked during the health care votes as he watched protesters jeering Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who was beaten as a leading civil rights activist in the 1960s.

Inglis said he was too far away during the jeering incident to hear whether the protesters shouted racial epithets, as Lewis and other black lawmakers have claimed. But Inglis said the behavior was threatening and abusive.

“I caught him at the door and said, ‘John, I guess you’ve been here before,’” Inglis said.

Inglis, 50, who calls himself a Jack Kemp disciple because he has emphasized outreach to minorities as the late Republican congressman did, thinks racism is a part of the vitriol directed at President Barack Obama.

“I love the South. I’m a Southerner. But I can feel it,” he said.

I am about sick to death of these whiny Republicans who, when ejected from office like a tomato from a catapult by voters who have had enough of their spend-happy ways, turn around and cry like a bunch of babies with soggy diapers. Like those soggy-diapered babies (and doesn’t “Soggy-Diaper Republican” have a nice ring to it?), Inglis wants everyone to cater to his whims. In his world, he gets to tell us how it’s going to be and we meekly sit back and take it. That worldview has no place at all in the Republican Party. Heck, it doesn’t have a place in America.

If Inglis really thought that “death panels” was an extreme characterization of what lay inside Obamacare, he could have fought it vigorously in the arena of ideas. He didn’t because he was too busy pushing for his very own bill that, like Obamacare, would have forced you to buy health insurance whether you wanted to or not. Inglis claimed to be “shocked” by the anger that faced at town halls but he conveniently left out the part where he stoked the anger by accusing people who disagree with him as Glenn Beck-watching drones incapable of thinking for themselves.

We’re better off being rid of Bob Inglis and his petty, sniveling sense of entitlement. Maybe he can have a little lie-down in a pastel-colored, daisy-printed room to settle his jangled nerves.

(Read this post and more from Jimmie at his blog The Sundries Shack or listen to his weekly political and pop-culture podcast, The Delivery)

And now, once again, the consensus of the experts has turned out to be a humongous load of codswollop. Almost a year ago, a Scottish judge released Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi to return to his home in Libya. The judge believed, based on the “firm consensus” of medical experts, that Megrahi would soon be dead of cancer and released him on a humanitarian exception. The release set Megrahi free of a life sentence for his part in the murder of 270 people in and over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.

Dr. Karol Sikora, who assessed Megrahi and whose opinion helped inform the judge who released the killer on sympathetic grounds, let the cat out of the bag badly in an interview this weekend. It seems, according to the good doctor, that the consensus was, more or less, a fix.

Cancer specialist Professor Sikora, who assessed the 58-year-old, admitted in comments published yesterday that it was ‘embarrassing’ that Megrahi has lived much longer than expected.

He told the Sunday Times: ‘There was always a chance he could live for ten years, 20 years . . . But it’s very unusual.’

And he admitted: ‘It was clear that three months was what they were aiming for. Three months was the critical point.

‘On the balance of probabilities, I felt I could sort of justify (that).’

He denied he came any under pressure to deliver the diagnosis, but admitted: ‘It is embarrassing that he’s gone on for so long.’

“There was a 50 per cent chance that he would die in three months, but there was also a 50 per cent chance that he would live longer.”

In other words, Megrahi could either die in three months or live a very long time and there was an even chance of either one happening. The good doctor, noting that “they” (presumably the people who built the “firm consensus”) had a specific result they wanted, gave it to them.

That’s not consensus. That’s a scam. And it gulled not only the judge in Scotland, but the British and American governments. Instead of dying in a prison, Megrahi is a national hero and lives comfortably in what the Telegraph calls “a luxury villa” owned by his family.

Why, it’s almost enough to cause a man to lash out in anger, or break into song (with apologies to the fine folks of Anatevka).

When the globe is warming and we are a-frightened
We must gather experts, but what will they say?
The people will not give us more control and money
Unless we use this hockey stick.
Al Gore…Al Gore! Consensus!
The CRU…the CRU! Consensus!

There is oil lapping at the Louisiana shoreline
Birds are keeling over. Baby turtles dead.
There are lots of skimmers just o’er the horizon
Why aren’t they allowed down there?
The EPA…the EPA! Consensus!
Obama…Obama! Consensus!

When humanitarian motives need a reason
To carry out an action that would raise a fuss.
What do we summon like a magic password
To let a sickly terrorist go?
The Doctors — the doctors. Consensus!

(Cross-posted to The Sundries Shack)

It’s important, too, that we look at how to promote broadly-based prosperity. One of the problems in societies around the world today is that too much of the productivity of the economies are going to too few. Too few people, the political and economic elite, are realizing the vast majority of benefits from economic activity.

Now, those of us who get the origin of wealth understand that prosperity only happens when people own the fruits of their labor. The principle that what you produce belongs to you and you have the absolute right to dispose of it as you wish is the cornerstone of all the wealth and wonders created in America for well over 230 years. If you noodle it through, you can easily figure out why this has so. Economic freedom is the first, and most important freedom we have. From it stems all the others (including the freedom of speech, which runs a very close second).

The reason the economic “elite” get the vast majority of benefits is because they produce the largest amount of the wealth. In other words, the man who works hard and builds a business building furniture, who has countless hours of time invested in that business, will realize a greater benefit from his investment than the man he hires to deliver the furniture to customers. That’s the way it is supposed to be. The business owner is withdrawing from the vast account of effort he has built up over the years. Why shouldn’t he benefit from his efforts more than someone who has not invested as much as he?

For most of our country’s history this has been a guiding principle of taxation and government spending. Legislators remembered that when they took your money, they were taking your time and your labor, and they considered each rise in tax and spending carefully. However, in the last 60 years or so the countervailing belief has taken over the Democratic Party and is taking hold in the Republican party as well. Here is that belief in a nutshell:

What you produce is not yours but rather goes into a vast pool of resources that must be apportioned out evenly by a handful of concerned experts, each of whom is compensated lavishly.

Do you see how egregious this belief really is? Do you see the eventual end of such a belief (hint: it ends with benign slavery)? Do you see how the well being of everyone in this country is threatened by such a belief?

Wealth does not simply appear from the thin air. It has to be created by human beings who act out of their own self-interest and have the freedom to create as much as they desire. That’s the only way it works. Without that freedom, wealth dries up and we end up like Zimbabwe.

(Cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)

Mr. Zelaya, once a darling of the Honduran upper classes, fell from favor when he began increasing the minimum wage, reducing the price of fuel and allying himself with President Chávez. His critics say he crossed a line when he defied the Supreme Court and pushed a referendum to change the Constitution so that he could run for another term. The court called in the military

That poor Zelaya, hero of the working class and foe of the rich, huh? Except you and I both know that’s now what really happened. In this case, “his critics” included the entire government of Honduras. Zelaya did not merely defy the Supreme Court; he openly violated the Honduran constitution which is crystal clear on the matter of Presidents serving more than one term and on the penalty for anyone who even attempts to change that provision. Both the Supreme Court (which unanimous decision included members of Zelaya’s own party) and the Honduran legislature decided to remove Zelaya, even though they did not need to do so. Their actions were found appropriate by the Law Library of Congress. I suppose you could call all those people “his critics” but that does cover them under an umbrella of understatement that’s so obscure as to be misleading.

Which does seem to be the point.

It’s also worth noting that “his critics” also included every printing business in Honduras (none of which would print his illegal ballot, which is why he had them printed in Venezuela) and the head of the armed forces, General Romeo Vasquez, who refused to comply with his illegal order.

In other words, “his critics” include the whole of the Honduran government, the head of the Honduran armed forces, all the printers in Honduras, and the Law Library of the Congress of the United States. Biased or dishonest; you tell me.

There is a truth in that paragraph, though, but it is also understated to the point of deception as well. The court did indeed call in the military to enact its will, bit it did so because the military was the appropriate authority to use in that situation according to the constitution. If the court has used any other law enforcement authority, it would have been guilty of violating the constitution just as surely as Zelaya is. The way that little fact reads, though, you’d think that the court brought in the military just like the military came in on every other coup in Central America.

Honduras has worked very hard over the years to pull itself out of decades of being an unstable banana republic where various “Presidents for Life” were toppled by any general with enough soldiers. The country has a constitution that works and a government that is respectful of the rule of law and good order. The Obama administration has discredited itself badly and shown a staggering amount of ignorance by treating Honduras like it was just another banana republic when it clearly is not. I’m sorry the New York Times had to resort to rhetorical chicanery to help prop up the administration’s ignorant and callous treatment of a would-be ally.

The only consolation is that the author has billed her piece as “news analysis”. Hopefully she never gets the chance to flex her puny analytical muscles again.

(cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, has closed because of the “fluid” situation there, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Tuesday.

What Ian Kelley did not say is that the “fluid” situation, which today means near riots in the streets that the government is having to handle with tear gas and water cannons, is something the State Department and the Obama administration caused. Without our attempts to force Honduras to reject its own laws and Constitution, there would be no aborning crisis right now.

Presently, the former President of Honduras, Mel Zelaya is holed up in the Brazilian Embassy in the Honduran capital. His supporters had surrounded the embassy before law enforcement dispersed them. The Honduran authorities have issued an arrest warrant for Zelaya and are asking that Brazil either turn him over to them or grant him asylum. It is very clear that Zelaya’s presence inside the country, after a unanimous Supreme Court decision ordered the military to remove him, is exacerbating the situation and our government has only been heaping the kindling higher each day. Secretary of State Clinton’s claim that putting Zelaya back in office would “get Honduras back to constitutional and democratic rule” ought to stick in the craw of anyone who can read the plain and incontrovertible language of the Honduran constitution. That we will allow a leading member of the wicked Burmese junta to enter our country, but have banned law-abiding members of the Honduran government from doing the same is shameful.

Here is truth. Until the Obama administration, standing alongside Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, tried to force the de jure government of Honduras to ignore its own laws, the country was stable and as peaceful as one could be that was being condemned by petty tyrants and their lickspittle in Washington. Today, it is not and the United States of America is to blame.

These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views — but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at this task for decades.
[Emphasis Mine]

Meanwhile, her union thug allies were putting out the call to battle.

Action: Opponents of reform are organizing counter-demonstrators to speak at this and several congressional town halls on the issue to defend the status quo. It is critical that our members with real, personal stories about the need for access to quality, affordable care come out in strong numbers to drown out their voices.
[Emphasis Mine]

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

I need a moment here. Seriously, MKH’s post is one of the funniest things I’ve read in ages. It’s like Pelosi set a trap for those wascally wight wingers, giggled a smug little giggle at her cleverness, turned to walk away, and stepped right into her own snare. If this were a cartoon, she would have been flung toward the horizon, her petulant cry of “I hate those wight wiiiiiiiiiingeeeeeeeeers!” fading into the distance until it was cut off by a muffled thump.

What more is there to say, really? Obviously, Pelosi doesn’t believe her paid goons are un-American any more than she believes that she should resign for her unconscionable and ridiculous rhetoric. However, she’s in a corner now and I, for one, am not inclined to let her skitter out of it.

So here’s my question for the Speaker. Given that the SEIU has expressly called for its members to do the very thing you unequivocally condemned, do you believe the union is un-American?

Jimmie runs The Sundries Shack and is a contributing writer to the American Issues Project. He is also an amateur musician, an aspiring composer, an unrepentant geek and would love you to pay his blog a visit. This post is cross-posted there.

There is one thing you should know, yea two things that should make your decision: One, we simply cannot afford government-run health care. Period. That idea should be the foundation of any plan you see. If a plan involves the government disbursing even one penny, know it is a plan that is unworkable because the Fed already lacks funds. Two, doctors and patients already hate government-run health care. Think VA, Medicaid and Medicare. They are in debt. The care sucks. Patients wait for doctors, if they can find one. Necessary care is not covered. Doctors get paid jack and are about to get paid less if Congress and the Prez have their way, which will result in more doctors quitting as providers causing more misery for patients.

I ran into a gang of government health care aficionados on Twitter last night, and I asked them two questions. The first was, “Do you think you have enough control over your own health care?”. The second was like unto the first, “Do you think that the government will truly give you more control over your health care?”

The truth of the matter is that we have surprisingly little choice over what health care we get and when. Most people, I dare say up over 90 percent, have no idea what a routine doctor’s visit actually costs or what their policy really costs. We get the care we are allowed to have by their doctor and health insurance company (or, worse, by the government).

More importantly, the policies our government have put into place ensure that your health insurance company doesn’t see you as a customer but as an expense.
This article on employer-provided insurance is a good place to start, so at least skim it before you go on.

After you’ve gone over that article, ask yourself if you bought you health insurance plan. If you have insurance through your employer, the answer will be no. You didn’t buy your plan and you have little to no power to influence the price of your plan of what it does and does not cover. Until that changes, health care will continue to be expensive, no matter how much the government controls. The truth of the matter is that, thanks to government intrusion, we have little choice or control over our own health care and Barack Obama isn’t going to make that any better, no matter what he says. Only when the government gets itself out of the health insurance business will you get back the power you need to bring costs down and get better quality care. Nothing else is going to do it.

(Cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)

A few years ago, I heard a highly educated and successful author maintain that living without cigarettes and copious alcohol was a life not worth living. There exists no warning label, no bone-chilling study, no crafty public service announcement that is going to separate me from my sour-cream-and- cheese-infested burrito.

At this point, anyone who doesn’t comprehend that French fries aren’t a suitable vegetable substitute will not be aided by preventive health care — unless it includes the cost of a cerebral transplant.

There are also potential consequences to “prevention” policy. For instance, you can “convince” people to care by coercing them. Increasingly, elected officials are warming to the idea.

Back in the 90s, there was a cartoon called “Tiny Toons Adventures”. One of the recurring characters was a little girl named Elmyra, who loves animals. And when I say “loves”, I mean as in “to death”. She is absolutely sure she knows what’s best for all the animals and showers them with care and affection. There are a couple problems. First, she doesn’t know a darned thing about animals. She puts bunny rabbits in the same cage as a hungry cat, sticks cats and dogs in the same kennel, and drops mice into the pen with a boa constrictor. No animal is safe from her overwhelming and clumsy love, not even fierce jungle cats. The mere sound of her voice causes animals for miles to flee in terror.

The Democrats really, really want to take care of us. They’re convinced that if we’d just slip into this pretty cage, they’ll love us and pet us and make us feel all better, just like Elmyra. And we’ll end up just as abused and enslaved her pets.

I vaguely remember someone once saying that there is no tyrant so terrible as the one who believes he knows what’s best for you. It’s one thing to have to fight mobs of truncheon-bearing goons but quite another to avoid being hugged into slavery.

(cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)

It seems to me that detaining highly-radicalized trained terrorists, fattening them up on halal victuals and giving them top-shelf health care, then turning them loose on the helpless and angry citizenry of an island paradise would make for one hell of an al-Qaeda recruiting pitch.

The Obama decision strikes me as a triumph of politics over national security and common sense. By bashing Guantanamo Bay as hard as he did during the campaign, the President painted himself into a corner. He can’t keep Gitmo open right now (though reneging on his word later still remains a viable option, since the vociferous left has a very short and selective memory) and he’s been forced to maintain his hard line in public speeches. On the other hand, he’s learned that Gitmo is, by far, the best option for keeping potentially dangerous killers from killing again and that it’s far from the Chamber of Horrors the anti-war crowd made it out to be.

What’s a career politician to do? Well, in the President’s case, he figured that farming the detainees out to a bunch of other countries would solve his problems. He didn’t exactly expect the ringing laughter from about 100 countries when he sent his diplomats forth to pitch the idea. It gives me hope to know that most of the world thinks that importing a ready-made terror cell is not the smartest idea in the world.

So, having been turned down by nearly the entire world, the President found Palau. Now, thirteen Islamists doesn’t sound like a lot, but Palau isn’t just any country. It has a smaller population that you find in most major league ballparks. Last night’s Stanley Cup Game Seven drew almost as many people as live on Palau. Adding 13 Uighur terrorists to a nation with a population of about 21,000 would be the equivalent of the United States accepting 188,227 Islamists. That’s more than the population of Salt Lake City (UT), Knoxville (TN), Little Rock (AR), or Fort Lauderdale (FL) and a little less than Mobile (AL) or Augusta (GA).

I’m thinking that al-Qaeda could quit sending out terrorists altogether. The President seems to be willing to take that job over himself.

(Cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)

Thursday was supposed to be the highlight of the year for more than 100 kindergarteners from Stafford County, Va. They got up early and took a chartered bus to the White House for a school field trip. But when they arrived, all the 5-year-olds got was a lesson in disappointment.

The buses from Conway Elementary arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a little later than planned, and they were locked out.

“We were going to the White House, but we couldn’t get in so I felt sad,” 5-year-old Cameron Stine said.

Parents say they were just 10 minutes late for their scheduled tour. School officials say White House staff said they needed to get ready for the president’s event with the Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers, so they couldn’t come in.

“I was angry cause they were disappointed,” parent and chaperone Paty Stine said.

The White House explained itself thusly: “A spokesperson said the group was actually supposed to be there at 9:30, but they held the gates for the group until 10:30, 15 minutes longer than they told the group, but when they still hadn’t arrived, they had to draw the line.”

That has to be the worst explanation I’ve ever seen. Heck, it’s not so much an explanation as a pushback. It would have been an easy matter for the spokesman to say that there had been some confusion between the staff and the school about the time of the tour and, due to the tour’s late arrival due to unforseen circumstances, the tour had to be cancelled because of another prearranged event.

What you would never want to do in that situation is call the parents and chaperones a bunch of liars, but that’s exactly what the White House did. This admininstration has the inerring instinct for treating the average American like a mud-pounding peasant and it only gets worse if that hapless American should do anything to make the President look like anything but the glittering paragon of Presidential studliness we’re told he is. This time, though, it could blow up in the President’s face. As Moe Lane points out, no politician will ever win an argument against a bus load of crying schoolchildren.

Moe also has some suggestions for how the President should take charge of this and make it right. I couldn’t agree with him more. I’m a football fan, but there’s no way in the world that a bunch of millionaires who could have been feted anytime in the past four months couldn’t have been pushed back an hour. What, they’re going to gripe that they had to give way to a bunch of kids? I bet if the White House had asked them, they would have been more than happy to shake a few little kids’ hands while they were there, don’t you?

Better yet, why not make a great photo op out of it? The President actually put the Steelers to work filling care packages for our soldiers in Afghanistan and that other place he barely recognizes exists these days. How much do you want to bet that some of those little kids have parents who are over there right now? The White House missed a golden opportunity for the kind of press that doesn’t come around every day. Imagine the videos on the cable news channels tonight — the Friday of Memorial Day weekend for goodness sake! — of the president surrounded by the Super Bowl Champions and a bunch of smiling happy schoolchildren waving American flags over the care packages they helped put together for their mommies and daddies oveseas?

But no. The kids went home crying and the White House couldn’t do any more than issue a haughty statement attacking their school.

I can’t help but wonder what the heck Rahm Emanuel was doing this morning while his staff was turning away a kindergarten class and calling their parents and teachers a bunch of liars. A competent Chief of Staff would have been able to fix things to everyone’s satisfaction. As I’ve pointed out before, though, Emanuel has been letting the President down very badly.

Oh, and as an obligatory note about media bias, let me all that had happened a year ago, you know the all-day topic on CNN and MS-NBC would be “The President Who Made Children Cry”. My guess is that you won’t hear much about this story outside of the local DC media outlets or a few blogs.

(cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)

The Democrats defeated it on a nearly party-line vote. Not one Democrat voted to investigate the Speaker’s allegation.

The vote means one of two things: 1) The Democrats in the House do not care to investigate whether the CIA committed at least one felony in the middle of a war; or 2) they believe that Pelosi’s allegations are baseless but aren’t willing to hold her accountable for slandering hundreds of innocent CIA employees.

It doesn’t matter whether the resolution was a political ploy by Republicans or not. The allegation was serious. That it came from the Seaker of the House made it even more serious. Let’s not forget the left’s favorite whipping boy in the 80s and early 90s, Lt. Col. Oliver North here who very nearly faced jail time and a stiff fine for the lies he told Congress. Democrats were hot to investigate his few lies while they’re unanimously opposed to investigate lying that happened, according the Pelosi “all the time”.

Of course, the North investigations helped the Democratic Party. These allegations, which are most likely horse manure, would hurt them very badly. So to heck with truth, law, and the good names of the people who work for the CIA; the Democrats have political points to score.

(cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)

Here’s the story in a nutshell. The University of Notre Dame, the most iconic Catholic college in the country, has invited President Obama to its commencement ceremony where he will give the commencement speech and receive an honorary degree. It is the degree which has caused the problem and those who are protesting the honor have taken great pains to note. Joseph Bottum has a longer, but far better, summation of what has happened thus far at First Things.

To read the news coverage, though, you’d be hard-pressed to know the school was going to give an award at all. You would, however, learn that the protesters didn’t like that the President was going to give the commencement speech. In fact, you’d probably get the idea that was the whole reason for the protest. Time magazine reported it that way. So did the New York Times, Bloomberg, bloggers at the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and liberal reporter Johanna Neuman at the Los Angeles Times. The Associated Press got it right once, then got it wrong for the rest of their story. Chris Cilizza waxed disingenuous with his “explanation” of the controversy.

After reading those articles, I’m having a hard time deciding whether the MSM is being lazy or malicious. I think you could make a pretty good argument either way. On one hand, it’s easy to write an article based on what you think you know and what you’ve read elsewhere or seen on television. Given that the majority of reporters read progressive blogs it’s a mortal lock that they’re not going to get much beyond “crazy Christers” from their daily reading. On the other hand, the approximately 20,000 protesters who will likely be in South Bend this weekend have not been particularly reticent or vague. Finding the basic facts about the story isn’t exactly like questing for the Ark of the Covenant and I’d bet it takes a certain amount of purposeful blindness not to see them.

Here is the real meat of the controversy. The Catholic Church considers abortion an “intrinsic evil” which means, simply, that it is always and everywhere wrong. There is no wavering in the Church’s position on the matter. It is impossible to be a Catholic in good standing and advance the cause of abortion rights just as it would be if you were to deny the virgin birth of Jesus Christ. To give the President, an open supporter of abortion who once blocked legislation that would have prevented infanticide, would be an honor that could reasonably be seen as supportive of that “intrinsic evil”. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops ruled such an honor well out of bounds back in 2004.

This isn’t brain surgery, folks, and, so far as the Church is concerned, the dispute over the degree award don’t exist in one of those legendary “grey areas” that moral prevaricators love to inhabit. Like I said at the beginning, I’m not a Catholic. But you don’t have to be a Catholic to learn all that (and, I hasten to note, most of the core facts about elementary Catholic doctrine have been in the news prominently since the 2004 election).

So why focus on the speech and not the degree? Well, that’s where you start to see some grey creeping into things. I suppose some could call the speech invitation an honor but, let’s face it, it’s nothing compared to the honor of, well, an honorary degree. A speech is just a speech, but that degree carries a serious amount of cachet. Also, we can’t forget that Notre Dame is not merely a Catholic institution an educational institution as well. Having a diversity of speakers is not only desirable but required.

Of course, it makes for a more consistent piece of the “Oh, those intolerant right-wing zealot Christians” picture to paint the protesters as opposing the speech and not the award. It’s a lot easier to write a story that dismisses serious Catholics as a bunch of Obama-hating wackjobs than it is to wade just a little bit into Catholic teaching to find out what the real disagreement is about.

(Read more from Jimmie at The Sundries Shack and the American Issues Project)

Once upon a time, I considered Lewis Black one of the three funniest comedians I’d ever heard. His routine about an overheard conversation at IHOP is hilarious. That was before George Bush was elected. For the past few years, all Black can seem to do is tell insult jokes about Republicans that just aren’t all that funny unless you’re already inclined to laugh. That’s not comedy, though; it’s pandering.

Admittedly, pandering does bring in the cash and being a raving leftist seems a sure way to get a show on Comedy Central. There won’t always be a wide audience for that sort of nasty, partisan hackery, though. The gravy train won’t go on forever and, especially in politics, what’s in today is way, way out tomorrow. I would hope that the more talented of the left-wing comedians (Black is one. Sykes is not) realized that before they become bitter D-listers begging to work for drinks at some crappy dive.

(Cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)

You’d be wrong. Anytime Joy Behar is shown to be the braying jackass she is, we’re all winners.

It was a mere four years ago that the Republican Party governed — and I assure you I employ the word “govern” reluctantly — every level of federal government. Few experts construed this to mean that the Democratic Party was forever irrelevant or a rotting cadaver.

What were the future apparatchiks up to as Republicans were busy breaking every promise, crime and piggy bank they could get their paws on?

Well, they did what any enlightened individual should do: They found themselves. They started blogging. Getting angry. Raising money. Marching. Caring. They began purging imposters and crafting catchy platitudes that the non-ideological voter could digest.

Today, a comparable, spontaneous grassroots effort has materialized. This one celebrates free-market principles rather than statism. Not surprisingly, there is also a sudden shift in perception. The once-glorified citizen activist is now nothing more than a radical, slack- jawed, proletariat yokel.

The Tea Parties are ridiculed, their participants demeaned and falsely portrayed as venomous radicals. As we all know by now, deniers of hope and change, by definition, are extremists.

The confidence level of the left is almost tangible. They feel so comfortable that they can let their misogynist flags fly without so much as an aggrieved belch from NOW or anyone else in the She Womyn Man-Haters Club. They can crane their necks upwards at the President’s onrushing tsunami of debt and shrug it off as nothing but a ripple. The left swaggers down the street with our language in one hip pocket and the entire Federal government in the other believing with all their hearts that they have all the power.

But they are very, very wrong.

See, there’s something progressives have forgotten and it’s a very important thing. They have forgotten that America’s voice is not the voice of the self-appointed Keepers of the Almighty Narrative nor does America’s power emanate from the puffed-up panjandrums in Washington.

It is the everyday, average American – the soccer Mom who challenged the powerful pols in her state and won, the beauty pageant contestant who politely and plainly spoke her mind, the plumber who asked a simple question, and the hundreds of thousands of your neighbors and friends – who really control the destiny of our nation. The truth is, until the tanks roll down Main Street and jackbooted thugs start rounding them up into reeducation camps, the real power of our nation still belongs to the very people the left insults, dismisses, and ridicules every single day.

And those people are getting pissed off.

The thing is, the left hears the distant rumble of America’s real muscle and they are worried. You can see it, if you brave the shrill bloviations and glib japes and get close enough to look in their eyes. They feel the real change coming and they know. That’s why they’ve gotten louder and more shrill and are taking shots at anything that moves. The gnawing feeling in their guts is telling them, more and more, that they don’t have the stranglehold on us they think they do.

So take heart, folks. The battle is far from over. In fact, to quote the great Paul Williams, “We’ve only just begun”.

(Cross-posted at The Sundries Shack)