KILL THE BILL: Petition to Speaker Boehner

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN IMMIGRATION

KILL THE BILL

National Review has put together a petition to Speaker Boehner expressing opposition to the Senate immigration reform bill.

From “that’s not going to cut it” to mush from the wimp

The New York Times claims that, for the Obama administration, the current crisis in Egypt is “a replay” of the crisis of early 2011 when protesters demanded the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. According to the Times:

The IRS and Obama’s Enemies List

The IRS has admitted, and apologized for, targeting conservative political groups for audits:

ACCOUNTABILITY, CLINTON STYLE

MAY 13, 2013 

It’s difficult to find humor in anything related to the murder of our ambassador to Libya and his colleagues in Benghazi, but the Accountability Review Board convened by Hillary Clinton has seeds of of comedy in it. As scandal management, the Accountability Review Board (report here) amounted to something like performance art.

The Week in Pictures:

Special BowSmack Edition

 

 

 

So what should be our theme of the week?  Maybe how the White House is still passing Benghazi all the time?  Or how the media is still (fill in the blank)?  Or perhaps the story about the heroism of apparently the first-ever person to come out publicly as gay?
Why don’t we start with the unintentionally revealing photo that the Wall Street Journal ran yesterday about the annual shareholder meeting of UBS, where a protestor wore a shirt that reads “Always Give 100% at Work.”  But blow up the picture and notice the subtitles on the shirt: “12% Monday, 32% Tuesday,” etc, adding up to 100 percent by the end of the week.  That really does express the effectual truth of the Occupy mentality doesn’t it?

Read More ...>>

Annals of Government Medicine

in Annals of Government Medicine

In his press conference the other day, President Obama spoke disapprovingly of the government intruding between a woman and her doctor. This was trademark Obama hypocrisy, since under Obamacare, the government will be involved in virtually every health care decision, with the possible exception of abortion. If that counts as health care. Fortunately (for us, not them) the British system serves as a warning about the realities of government medicine.

The Weekly Winston: Far East Edition

The Weekly Winston: Far East Edition

Churchill, writing in 1951 about the idea of invading China to win the Korean War: That would be the greatest folly.  It would be like flies invading fly-paper. When asked in the House of Commons one day where North Korea was procuring its arms, Churchill answered: Although there are movements ever being made in aerial locomotion, it would be premature to suppose that they came from the moon. And about » MORE

Is the U.S. becoming a sham democracy?

Eliana Johnson reports that four Republican members of the Senate Judiciary — Jeff Sessions, Chuck Grassley, Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz — are calling for transparency from their GOP colleagues in the “Gang of Eight” that is drafting immigration reform legislation. In a letter to John McCain, Lindsey

If Politicians Are Stupid and Corrupt, Why Should We Let Them Run Our Lives?

New York State is in the midst of a corruption scandal, which caused Mayor Michael Bloomberg to tee off on the political class yesterday:

Are the good times really over?

Like Elvis Presley and Ray Charles, Merle Haggard is a singer in whose voice one can hear all the strands of American popular music. Today is his birthday and we want to salute him while he is still around to win fans and influence people.

Obama’s Living Declaration

I think it would be a serious mistake to ignore or fail to attend closely to President Obama’s second inaugural address. It speaks to his ambition, his assault on the founding principles, and his attempt to realign the electorate on a misreading or misinterpretation or misrepresentation of the meaning of the founding principles. Attention must be paid. See, e.g., Yuval Levin’s “Obama’s second inaugural.”
As R.J. Pestritto has demonstrated, the intellectual roots of modern American liberalism lie in Woodrow Wilson’s assault on the ideas of natural rights and limited government. They eventuate in an administrative state and rule by supposed experts. Obamacare represents something like the full flowering of modern liberalism.
Wilson’s expressions of disapproval are the precursor to Barack Obama’s disdain for the Constitution and the Warren Court. Obama perfectly reflected Wilson’s views in his 2001 comments on the civil rights movement and the Supreme Court. In the course of the famous radio interview Obama gave to WBEZ in Chicago, Obama observed that the Warren Court had not broken “free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.” To achieve “redistributive change,” the limitations of the Constitution would have to be overcome by the Court or by Congress.
Franklin Roosevelt touted welfare state liberalism in the “second Bill of Rights” that he set forth to Congress in his 1944 State of the Union Address. “Necessitous men are not free men,” Roosevelt asserted, and enumerated a new set of rights, among which were the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation, the right of every family to a decent home, and the right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
Implicitly arguing that the teaching of the Declaration had become obsolete, Roosevelt asserted: “In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.”
Now comes Obama to give us progressivism and welfare state liberalism falsely staked on the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Elsewhere Obama has frankly rejected the concept of “absolute truth” as inconsistent with democracy. In his second inaugural address, however, Obama places the Declaration’s “self-evident truths” up front and seems to place his stamp of approval on them, so long as one is not paying too much attention.
In Obama’s telling, “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” have dropped out. Before you know it, devotion to the founding principles serves up the welfare state, the campaign against global warming (evolved into “climate change”), gay marriage, open borders and something to ameliorate long lines to vote. We shall overcome.
While Woodrow Wilson gave us “the living Constitution” — the Constitution unmoored from its ascertainable meaning and constraints — Barack Obama gives us a living Declaration of Independence. Those self-evident truths are an evolving thing. Borrowing from the preamble to the Constitution, Obama rattles off some of the articles of the progressive creed vintage 2013:

We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit. But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future. (Applause.) For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn.
We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few. We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, any one of us at any time may face a job loss, or a sudden illness, or a home swept away in a terrible storm. The commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, these things do not sap our initiative, they strengthen us. (Applause.) They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great. (Applause.)
We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity. We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. (Applause.) Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms.
The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult. But America cannot resist this transition, we must lead it. We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries, we must claim its promise. That’s how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure — our forests and waterways, our crop lands and snow-capped peaks. That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God. That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared….

And so on. Obama later hints at the postmodern nature of his treatment of the issues:

Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life. It does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way or follow the same precise path to happiness. Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-long debates about the role of government for all time, but it does require us to act in our time.

If one takes the right to liberty seriously, it would be important to determine that the required action does not conflict with or undermine it. Obama does not take the founding principles seriously. His devotion to them serves a rhetorical purpose. Almost anticipating Obama’s second inaugural address, Charles Kesler has written:

His understanding of the past…pays lip service to such things as self-evident truths, original intent, and first principles but quickly changes the subject to values, visions, dreams, ideals, myths, and narratives. This is a postmodern “move.” We can’t know or share truth, postmodernists assert, because there is no truth “out there,” but we can share stories and thus construct a community of shared meaning. It’s these ideas that mark his furthest departure from old-fashioned liberalism.
More and less radical, more and less nihilist—Obama comes in on the “less” side, but then a little bit of nihilism goes a long way. “Implicit…in the very idea of ordered liberty,” he writes in The Audacity of Hope, is “a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or ‘ism,’ any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course, or drive both majorities and minorities into the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad.” There is no absolute truth—and that’s the absolute truth, he argues. Such feeble, self-contradictory reasoning is at the heart of Obama’s very private and yet very public struggle with himself to determine whether there is anything anywhere that can truly be known, or even that is rational to have faith in. Anyone who believes, really believes, in absolute truth, he asserts, is a fanatic or in imminent danger of becoming a fanatic; absolute truth is the mother of extremism everywhere.

Obama’s living Declaration stands in conflict with the real Declaration, the Declaration of our history. We recall that Abraham Lincoln’s argument with Stephen Douglas also came down to a disagreement over the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln articulated this disagreement with special gusto in his critique of Douglas on July 10, 1858.
According to Douglas, the teaching of the Declaration had no general applicability beyond the immediate situation that confronted the Founding Fathers. Restating Douglas’s argument, Lincoln asked “in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form.” This is certainly one of the questions that is raised in acute form by the doctrine of welfare state liberalism.
The economic “rights” asserted by Roosevelt in his second Bill of Rights and by Obama in his appropriation of the principles of the Declaration differ and conflict with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness asserted in the Declaration. They are claims on the liberty of others. If I have a right to medical care, you must have a corresponding duty to supply it. If I have a right to a decent home, you must have a duty to provide it.
The argument for the welfare state belongs in the same family as “the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden.” That’s Lincoln again.
Lincoln memorably derided the underlying principle as “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.” It is also the principle that underlies Obama’s living Declaration.

 by Scott Johnson

Long time gone

Phil Everly — the younger of the Everly Brothers — turns 74 today; older brother Don Everly will turn 76 next month. In the Cosmic American Music the Everly Brothers have a constellation all to themselves. They brought the close harmony singing of traditional country music into the mainstream of American popular music. More than a few great musicians learned harmony singing by listening to their records. In his multimedia show that returns to the Dakota Jazz Club and Restaurant later this month, Peter Asher recalls how he and Gordon Waller taught themselves harmony singing by imitating the Everly Brothers. Paul McCartney acknowledged his debt to the Everlys in “Let ‘Em In” and wrote “On the Wings of a Nightingale” for their first post-reunion recording in 1984.
After tearing through a succession of memorable pop songs written for them by Felice and Boudleaux Bryant at the end of the 1950′s, they struck out on their own with Warner Brothers in 1960. Some of their most brilliant work followed, including their 1960 Warner Brothers hit “Cathy’s Clown.” Even as their audience in the United States deserted them in the wake of the British Invasion, they continued deepening and updating their work on albums such as The Everly Brothers Sing and Roots.
Their British fans never really left them. After performing together with their faces a few inches apart from each other for 20 years, the brothers famously broke up in public onstage at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park, California, in 1973. When they reunited ten years later, they repaid their debt to their British fans by debuting the reunion in a concert at the Royal Albert Hall. (Rhino Records has now released a two-disc recording of that concert.)

 

The video above captures Don and Phil in a beautiful performance of “Take a Message To Mary/Maybe Tomorrow” at the Christmas 1983 BBC concert following their reunion concert that fall. It’s a medley that goes back to their Cadence recordings of the 1950′s and brings their career full circle. “Take a Message to Mary” was written by the Bryants, “Maybe Tomorrow” by the Everlys.
We saw the Everly Brothers at the University of Minnesota when their reunion tour took them through Minneapolis in June 1984, and again in the fall of 2003 when Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel — two of their most diligent students — brought them to St. Paul as part of their own version of a reunion tour. Seeing them all together gave me the occasion to meditate on the emotional pull of the brothers’ close harmony singing in “The deep meaning of Simon and Garfunkel.”

Depredations of the Fed

I want to draw your attention to Judy Shelton’s article “Money in bad faith,” in the new issue of the Weekly Standard out this morning. The Fed’s QE-Infinity project cannot end well. In my opinion, it should remain near the top of the reasonable man’s list of worries. Shelton writes:

If we want to preserve the morality of a free-market system, we cannot permit our central bank to carry out monetary policy in ways that play favorites. It’s especially egregious that the Fed has become complicit in drawing off capital into the abyss of deficit financing; clearly, our central bank is catering to the political class, bailing out Washington itself through massive purchases of government debt obligations. Monetary policy today delivers the biggest benefits to the world’s largest borrower​—​our federal government.
If we continue to allow the Fed to underwrite deficit spending and inflict the resulting monetary distortions on the people who actually contribute real value to the economy, who live and work in the belief that saving is a virtue, we will witness the steady demoralization of democratic capitalism.

Shelton’s article is not long and is worth reading in its entirety.

by Scott Johnson

Why Is the Debt Limit Important?

Can’t the government, at the end of the day, just print money, with the unfortunate downside being inflation? It turns out that it isn’t actually that simple, because the framers of our financial system were pretty farsighted. And that, in turn, sheds light on why the debt ceiling is non-trivial. The Grumpy Economist, John Cochrane of the University of Chicago and the Hoover Institution, explains:

First, just to be clear, let me clarify the playlist:
* Debt: US government bonds, issued by the Treasury. Promises to pay for your healthcare is not “debt,” and if the government reneges on that promise it’s not a “default.”
* Cash: Bills and coins.
* Reserves: Essentially checking accounts at the Fed. Banks may freely obtain cash in return for reserves and vice versa.We often say “the Fed prints money” when in fact what it does is to create reserves.
In the first debt-limit debate, I was initially puzzled that it was a problem at all. The “debt limit” does not include currency or reserves, though both are functionally US government debt. That seems like an unfortunate oversight: Why can’t the government just pay its bills by printing money, i.e. creating reserves? Sure, you might worry about inflation sooner or later, but this is a legal question. The government can print money to pay its bills, no?
Well, no, which is really interesting.
For the Fed to “print money,” meaning to create reserves, it has to buy some other asset. Though the Fed can manufacture money costlessly, it legally can only do so by buying assets. The Fed cannot engage in fiscal policy, and printing up checks and sending them to taxpayers — or even dropping cash from helicopters — is fiscal, not monetary policy.

And the debt limit applies to all Federal debt outstanding, including debt held by the Fed. So, as long as the Fed buys only Treasury bills, the debt limit does, in fact, stop the government as a whole from “printing money” (creating reserves) to pay bills. To do so, the Treasury has to issue debt, borrowing the money, pay its bills, and then get the Fed to buy the debt, so that in the end there is more money outstanding. But a debt limit stops this operation.

Well, the Treasury has the actual printing presses that make good old fashioned cash. Why can’t the Treasury just print up money and use it to pay bills? (Or, deposit the cash at the Fed, thereby get reserves, and transfer the reserves by writing checks.) No, that’s illegal too. The Treasury prints the bills, but they can only be issued by the Fed, and in return for already-created reserves.

So the architects of our monetary system and debt limit weren’t so dumb after all. Though we have a fiat money system, and, drawing a circle around the whole government, it should be able just to print money and give it to people (social security) or buy tanks and stuff with the printed money, the debt limit does pretty well constrain the government budget.

To emphasize, this isn’t about a fight between Treasury and Fed. They can agree they want to print money to evade the debt limit. But they still can’t do it. It’s a limit on what the government as a whole can do.

There is much more, including a discussion of why scare talk about “default” is wrong–a point we have made repeatedly–and why Paul Krugman is, to use “a polite word again…misleading.”

 

 by John Hinderaker

Morsi explains

In the annals of context offered allegedly to explain controversial or offensive remarks, this may take the cake:

A congressional delegation led by McCain met with Mohammed Morsi a day after the White House strongly denounced his remarks as “deeply offensive.” Morsi made the comments in a 2010 speech, as a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood before he became president, but they resurfaced recently when aired on an Egyptian TV show.
In the video, Morsi refers to “Zionists” as “bloodsuckers who attack Palestinians” as well as “the descendants of apes and pigs.” He also called U.S. President Barack Obama a liar.
Presidential spokesman Yasser Ali said Morsi told the delegation Wednesday that the remarks were taken out of context, aimed at criticizing Israeli policies, and not Jews. Morsi told them distinction must be made between criticism of what he called the “racist” policies of the Israelis against the Palestinians and insults against the Jewish faith.
Morsi told them the remarks were part of a speech against Israeli aggression in Gaza and “assured them of his respect for monotheistic religions, freedom of belief and the practice of religions.”

They must think we’re really, really stupid, a belief I am sure they come by honestly. For those who would like a quick refresher, let’s go to the tape, courtesy of the invaluable MEMRI and the related background here.

Read More

by Scott Johnson
 

Kesler explains

My 2012 book of the year is Charles Kesler’s I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism (along with Jean Yarbrough’s Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition). Kesler is professor of government at Claremont-McKenna College and editor of the Claremont Review of Books, the flagship publication of the Claremont Institute.
Kathryn Lopez has an excellent interview with Professor Kesler posted at NRO. I recommend the whole thing, but wanted to bring these thoughts especially to your attention:

Obama thinks he has saved liberalism because he’s put it on the winning side again, and in a big way. He takes pride in showing that the era of big government is not over, that in fact the future belongs to much higher taxes and to much more activist government. I think he’s profoundly wrong about that. Before suggesting why, may I say something briefly about how differently conservatives think, or ought to think, about the relation between principles and politics?
For us, to put it simply, principles are rooted in what our fathers called the laws of nature and of nature’s God. These are timeless, that is, they call to us in every age. Some ages live up to the minimal demands of moral decency and the maximum demands of political excellence better than others; no age lives up to them perfectly. That’s why conservatives are inherently moderate in their demands and expectations of politics, recognizing that neither political defeat nor victory affects the inherent authority and goodness of first principles. Our losses in 2012 are therefore not cause for despair. Like everything in politics they are temporary. We shouldn’t run around like liberals, afraid that the times are against us and that we need to exchange old principles for new ones that allegedly fit the times better. Our calling is, so far as possible, to keep the times in tune with our principles, not to adjust our principles to match the times. As Churchill put it, it isn’t possible to guarantee success in politics or war; it’s possible only to deserve it. By contrast, progressives believe in happy endings, in the inevitability of progress. They cannot separate might from right, success from legitimacy, and so don’t have the consolation of believing in principles in the conservative sense. They insist that the good guys must always or at least eventually win, a standard which elides easily into the deeply immoral belief that, in the end, whoever wins must be right.
 

by Scott Johnson
 

 

Ramirez on the Case

 

Michael Ramirez nails it as usual

Optimism and pessimism

by Paul Mirengoff


Everyone who engages in politics, or who thinks about public policy, wants to believe that history is on their side. For leftists, such a belief comes with the territory. They retain the view of Marx, lifted in part from Hegel, that history is steadily progressing on a predetermined path towards their vision of the future. That’s why, when the outcome of an election suggests otherwise, left-liberals tend to lash out at both the opposition and the electorate (“What’s the matter with Kansas?”) with more than a little hysteria.
By contrast, conservatives traditionally are pessimistic. To be sure, Ronald Reagan provided the movement with a needed coat of optimism. But when elections turn out badly, that coat tends to wash away for a while, leaving some conservatives with a sense that, as much as they wish it were otherwise, history may very well not be on our side. Because this sense is hardly alien to most conservatives — as it is to most leftists — the prevailing mood among some, at least in the short term, is sorrow, not anger.

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Romney Hits the Air Waves

Until now, President Obama has been vastly outspending Mitt Romney on television ads in the swing states. Those of us who were cheered by Romney’s excellent fundraising–he can’t possibly equal, but has actually approached the totals achieved by the Obama money machine–have been waiting impatiently to see that money spent in a visible way. With 30 days to go in the campaign, Romney is hitting the air waves in a big way. This ad, titled “Facts Are Clear,” is great. It focuses on the debt, and the key line–Obama’s not just wasting money, he’s borrowing money, then wasting it–is memorable:  MORE

 

 

 

Obama’s arrogance is no substitute for competent leadership

Four years ago, when Barack Obama stood in front of fake Greek columns before a massive outdoor crowd in Denver to accept his party’s nomination for the office of president, millions of Americans expected him to deliver hope, change, and a brilliant presidency that would solve the nation’s ills. Tonight, when he speaks to a much smaller indoor gathering in Charlotte, most of these people would settle for a competent presidency.

They haven’t received that presidency so far, a point that Bob Woodward reportedly drives home in his new book “The Price of Politics.” The book describes the 2011 showdown over the federal debt ceiling that nearly led to a default by the United States on its debt.
According to Woodward, Obama vastly overestimated his ability to out-bargain John Boehner, the new Speaker of the House. He told top aides that Boehner was “just like a Republican state Senator,” the type he had successfully dealt with in Illinois. “He’s a golf-playing, cigar smoking, country club Republican, who’s there to make deals,” Obama arrogantly assured his staff.

Due, perhaps, to this overconfidence, Obama tried to roll Boehner. After negotiating $800 billion in revenue-raising concessions from the Speaker, Obama called for $400 billion more, late in the day. In response to Obama’s bad faith, Boehner stopped taking the president’s calls and then pulled out of the negotiations. When Boehner notified Obama of this, the president was furious. Apparently, only

Democrats played hardball in Obama’s Illinois.
Joe Biden, who if nothing else at least has some idea of how things operate in Washington, took a dim view of Obama’s approach to the debt ceiling negotiations. He told Eric Cantor, “You know, if I were doing this, I’d do it totally different.”
Different doesn’t mean better, especially in Biden’s case. Yet, according to Woodward, it was Biden’s work with Sen. McConnell that brought about the legislation deal that, though it only kicks the can down the road in an odd and dangerous way, staved off default. Maybe Clint Eastwood had it right: Joe Biden is “the intellect of the Democratic Party.”

Obama’s lack of leadership wasn’t confined to dealing with Republicans. According to Woodward, Democratic leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Chris Van Hollen all found fault with Obama during the process of enacting the 2009 stimulus legislation. He recounts an episode early in his presidency when then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid were hammering out final details of the stimulus bill. Obama phoned in to deliver a “high-minded message,” but Obama went on so long that Pelosi “reached over and pressed the mute button on her phone,” so they could continue to work without the president hearing that they weren’t paying attention.

As debt negotiations progressed, Democrats complained of not knowing where the White House stood on major points. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, is described as having a “growing feeling of incredulity” as negotiations meandered.
“The administration didn’t seem to have a strategy. It was unbelievable. There didn’t seem to be any core principles,” Woodward writes in describing Van Hollen’s opinion. Actually, Obama doesn’t lack core principles. But they are too radical and ambitious to guide him on workaday questions about stimulus legislation.
Boehner’s assessment of the president lines up well with Van Hollen’s:

They never had their act together. The president, I think, was ill-served by his team. Nobody in charge, no process. I just don’t know how the place works. To this day, I can’t tell you how the place works. There’s no process for making a decision in this White House. There’s nobody in charge.

Nobody except the man who considers himself a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, more knowledgeable about policy than his policy directors, and a better political director than his political director.

By Paul Mirengoff