Saturday, September 11, 2010

Weekend Links, Links, Links (some good articles)

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/damned_by_success_AOcrx67rshnYt9aTtBcaCP#ixzz0zFCnK4g8

John Podhoretz: The electoral crisis faced by Obama and the Democrats isn’t solvable between now and Nov. 2, and will be difficult even to mitigate.

The problem is that Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress have done what they wanted to do. They wanted a gigantic fiscal stimulus and they got it. They wanted health-care reform and they got it.

As their supporters among the chattering classes argue incessantly, Obama has had a historic first 18 months with an astonishing record of achievement. They should be proud, no? Usually, successful people don’t want to hide from their successes.Except when they are catastrophic successes. And these were.In arguing for the enactment of these very dramatic policies, Obama and his people made claims they clearly now regret, as when his chief economic adviser said the unemployment rate would fall to 8 percent as a result of the stimulus.

……. http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/why_we_miss_bush_9o63exgvXPSRHG0LYe9bSK http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/bam_in_the_bunker_wq02ywZxJFUza5mICzBQVK"still pitching ideas voters hate"

And also:

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/their_feast_our_famine_l4AlbMStL0ZEfdONzdUVdJ

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/mta_free_pass_for_labor_3k0cEmL5vdi7AWbYeKWgUN

9 Years Ago


Remember ... Never Again


Friday, September 10, 2010

B. Hoover Obama

so says Jonah Goldberg

Jonah Goldberg argues that Obama’s not the next FDR — he’s the next Hoover.

The Failure of Obamanomics

A few words come to mind:

Radical. Clueless. Partisan. Scary.



No Place for Entrepreneurship in Obama’s Economy

September 9, 2010
By Samuel R. Staley

President Obama did a great service to the public on Wednesday when he outlined his vision for economic policy before a friendly audience in Parma, Ohio (near Cleveland). He mixed populist rhetoric stoking the middle class with empty overtures to entrepreneurs and, in the process, demonstrated a complete lack of understanding about how market economies operate.
He started out with the inclusive rhetoric that sucked many moderates and Blue Dogs into his presidential campaign in 2008:

You know, in the fall of 2008, one of the last rallies of my presidential campaign was right here in the Cleveland area. (Applause.) It was a hopeful time, just two days before the election. And we knew that if we pulled it off, we’d finally have the chance to tackle some big and difficult challenges that had been facing this country for a very long time.

We also hoped for a chance to get beyond some of the old political divides — between Democrats and Republicans, red states and blue states — that had prevented us from making progress. Because although we are proud to be Democrats, we are prouder to be Americans — (applause) — and we believed then and we believe now that no single party has a monopoly on wisdom.

We have now learned, two years into his presidency, that the inclusiveness was really about evangelical conversion to progressive views on politics and the economy. Private businesses and entrepreneurs are fine as long as their investments, time, commitment and resources are directed toward social ends (as defined by progressive politicos). This becomes clear when Obama says:

But in the words of the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, I also believe that government should do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves. (Applause.) And that means making the long-term investments in this country’s future that individuals and corporations can’t make on their own: investments in education and clean energy, in basic research and technology and infrastructure. (Applause.)

So, government is responsible for directing the economy. John Kenneth Galbraith would be pleased, as a key implication of this view is that government must be elevated to a senior position in a rough partnership between the private sector and organized labor. It’s not much of a step, then, for the president to take this to the next level, making quite clear that private business should not be focused on creating value (through the pursuit of profits) but on pursuing non-economic objectives and redistributing wealth. He continues:

That means making sure corporations live up to their responsibilities to treat consumers fairly and play by the same rules as everyone else. (Applause.) Their responsibility is to look out for their workers, as well as their shareholders, and create jobs here at home.

And that means providing a hand-up for middle-class families — so that if they work hard and meet their responsibilities, they can afford to raise their children, and send them to college, see a doctor when they get sick, retire with dignity and respect. (Applause.)

Indeed, Obama believes fundamentally that the middle class owes its existence to the government, not to wealth-creating entrepreneurs or businesses. Without skipping a beat, the president fails to recognize (let alone acknowledge) the difference between a truly free market, where individuals decide how to invest their resources, and a government-directed one that sets collective priorities which require individuals to tow the line for specific policy objectives implicitly defined by the political class:

That’s what we Democrats believe in — a vibrant free market, but one that works for everybody. (Applause.) That’s our vision. That’s our vision for a stronger economy and a growing middle class. And that’s the difference between what we and Republicans in Congress are offering the American people right now.

Missing in most of the popular analysis of Obama’s economic policy perspective is the way his personal experience has fundamentally framed the way he looks at the world. He provided a convenient glimpse into this in Parma:

You see, Michelle and I are where we are today because even though our families didn’t have much, they worked tirelessly — without complaint — so that we might have a better life. My grandfather marched off to Europe in World War II, while my grandmother worked in factories on the home front. I had a single mom who put herself through school, and would wake before dawn to make sure I got a decent education. Michelle can still remember her father heading out to his job as a city worker long after multiple sclerosis had made it impossible for him to walk without crutches. He always got to work; he just had to get up a little earlier.

Yes, our families believed in the American values of self-reliance and individual responsibility, and they instilled those values in their children. But they also believed in a country that rewards responsibility; a country that rewards hard work; a country built on the promise of opportunity and upward mobility.

They believed in an America that gave my grandfather the chance to go to college because of the GI Bill; an America that gave my grandparents the chance to buy a home because of the Federal Housing Authority; an America that gave their children and grandchildren the chance to fulfill our dreams thanks to college loans and college scholarships.

It’s hard to ignore that all the “rewards” explicitly identified by Obama are directly tied to government programs, not entrepreneurial investment that creates new wealth. For Obama, economic policy — and the economy more generally — is about redistribution . . . and spending.
What’s also startling is the degree to which this president’s economic literacy reaches little further than the superficial (and incorrect) numbers the mandarins in the White House spit out uncritically from their econometric models. (For a more thorough critique of this process, see my article “Naive Statistics” in National Review, November 2, 2009.)

Entrepreneurship really doesn’t exist in the economic lingo (or policy) of this presidency. In Obama’s world, businesses and entrepreneurs are merely variables to be manipulated by the political class.

— Samuel R. Staley is Robert W. Galvin Fellow and director of Urban & Land Use Policy at the Reason Foundation.

Nine Years Since 9/11

Remember.

and Read Clifford May.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/245985/nine-years-9-11-clifford-d-may?page=1

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Links, Links, Links (to some good articles)

at least worth reading !

WSJ Editors: The Obama economy.

Barnes: The ‘Recovery Summer’ that wasn’t.

Byron York: New evidence undermines feds’ case against Arizona.

Alan Reynolds: ‘Stimulus’ snake oil.

Richard Cohen: Obama’s shrinking presidency.

Peter Orszag: Extend the Bush tax cuts until 2013, then get rid of them.

USA Today Editors: Paul Ryan’s plan in Congress highlights tough choices,

William McGurn: Education reform starts with pension reform.

Roger Cohen: President Obama the post-Atlanticist has European leaders shaking their heads.

Kevin Sack: Health care wastefulness is detailed in studies.

NY Post Editors: Mideast peace mirage: Obama's two-state two-step.

Michael Ramirez: ‘Weekend with the Summer Recovery.’

The Buck Stops Here (Unless it's Bush's fault !)

Great piece by Thomas Sowell ...


September 7, 2010

Inherited from Whom? Setting the record straight on “the policies that created this mess in the first place.”

Thomas Sowell


Pres. Barack Obama boldly proclaims, “The buck stops here!” But whenever his policies are criticized, he acts as if the buck stopped with George W. Bush.The party line that we are likely to be hearing from now until the November elections is that Obama “inherited” the big federal budget deficits and that he has to “clean up the mess” left in the economy by the Republicans. This may convince those who want to be convinced, but it will not stand up under scrutiny.

No president of the United States can create either a budget deficit or a budget surplus. All spending bills originate in the House of Representatives and all taxes are voted into law by Congress.

Democrats controlled both houses of Congress before Barack Obama became president. The deficit he inherited was created by the congressional Democrats, including Sen. Barack Obama, who did absolutely nothing to oppose the runaway spending. He was one of the biggest of the big spenders.

The last time the federal government had a budget surplus, Bill Clinton was president, so it was called “the Clinton surplus.” But Republicans controlled the House of Representatives, where all spending bills originate, for the first time in 40 years. It was also the first budget surplus in more than a quarter of a century.

The only direct power that any president has that can affect deficits and surpluses is the power to veto spending bills. President Bush did not veto enough spending bills, but Senator Obama and his fellow Democrats in control of Congress were the ones who passed the spending bills.

Today, with Barack Obama in the White House, allied with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in charge in Congress, the national debt is a bigger fraction of the annual national output than it has been in more than half a century. And that fraction is projected to continue going up for years to come, becoming larger than national output in 2012.

Having created this scary situation, President Obama now says, “Don’t give in to fear. Let’s reach for hope.” The voters reached for hope when they elected Obama. The fear comes from what he has done since taking office.

“The worst thing we could do is to go back to the very same policies that created this mess in the first place,” he said recently. “In November, you’re going to have that choice.”

Another political fable is that the current economic downturn is due to not enough government regulation of the housing and financial markets. But it was precisely the government regulators, under pressure from politicians, who forced banks and other lending institutions to lower their standards for making mortgage loans.

These risky loans, and the defaults that followed, were what set off a chain reaction of massive financial losses that brought down the whole economy.

Was this due to George W. Bush and the Republicans? Only partly. Most of those who pushed the lowering of mortgage-lending standards were Democrats — notably Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Christopher Dodd — though too many Republicans went along.

At the heart of these policies were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which bought huge amounts of risky mortgages, passing the risk on from the banks that lent the money (and made the profits) to the taxpayers that were not even aware that they would end up paying in the end.

When President Bush said in 2004 that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be reined in, 76 members of the House of Representatives issued a statement to the contrary. These included Barney Frank, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Charles Rangel.

If we are going to talk about “the policies that created this mess in the first place,” let’s at least get the facts straight and the names right.

The current policies of the Obama administration are a continuation of the same reckless policies that brought on the current economic problems — all in the name of “change.” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still sacred cows in Washington, even though they have already required the biggest bailouts of all.

Why? Because they allow politicians to direct vast sums of money where it will do politicians the most good, either personally or in terms of buying votes in the next election.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Is the Justice Dept. tacitly encouraging Voter Fraud ?

Sure seems like it ...

There Really Is Something Rotten in the Justice Department
September 7, 2010

By Hans A. von Spakovsky

The Washington Times lead editorial today is about the Justice Department enabling voter fraud — just in time for the November elections. This is due to the Department’s refusal to enforce the part of Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act that requires states to remove ineligible voters from their registration rolls — people who have died or moved away, and felons who have not yet had their voting rights restored. The longer such names remain on a registration list, the greater the chances that a fraudulent vote will be cast in their names.

I reported in 2009 that the Obama administration had dismissed without explanation a lawsuit filed against Missouri Democratic secretary of state Robin Carnahan during the Bush
administration over her failure to comply with this provision of the NVRA. This happened only a month after Carnahan announced she was running for the Senate. Besides the obvious political motivations, I know from sources inside the Civil Rights Division that the Obama political appointees have no intention of enforcing this provision. Former Voting Section lawyer Christian Adams confirmed this when he testified this summer before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission that Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Julie Fernandes told Voting Section staffers that the administration had “no interest in enforcing this provision of the law.”

Now that he is back in private practice, Adams has sent a series of warning letters to 16 states in obvious violation of the law. Justice should be suing them, but since they will not, Adams is taking advantage of the fact that there is a private right of action under the NVRA.

Adams’s letters are based in part on a report filed with Congress by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission in June 2009 on the impact of the NVRA. It includes voter-registration statistics from the states for 2006–2008. This data shows some amazing results. For example, Adams says, there must be a fountain of youth in states such as Maryland, Arkansas, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Tennessee: None of them removed a single dead voter during that two-year reporting period. Many counties in states such as Alabama and Rhode Island also show a similar miracle — no voters were removed from their voter rolls for having died. If you have any ailing family members, these are obviously the states they should move to quickly. There are also several states — South Dakota, Mississippi, Texas, Kentucky, and Indiana among them — with more registered voters than (according to the Census) people of voting age.

When I was in the Civil Rights Division, we actually investigated this problem and filed lawsuits against several states to enforce this provision of the NVRA For trying to enforce federal law, we were labeled as “vote suppressors.” No, we just wanted to fairly enforce the law that Congress had passed, something the Clinton administration had failed to do. It did not file a single lawsuit in eight years to enforce this provision.

Hopefully, Adams will succeed in forcing these states to comply with federal law. It’s too bad that a private citizen has to carry out the responsibility of the Justice Department because it has failed to do so and, in fact, refuses to do so for ideological and political reasons that have nothing to do with the impartial administration of justice.