Recently in Public Policy Category

I couldn't resist posting just one more item about Governor Christie. Or in this case another video of him explaining to a media pinhead about his "confrontational tone" with the entrenched interests infesting the Garden State.


'Nuff said.

Could New Jersey governor Chris Christie be the next Ronald Reagan? It certainly seems like he's channeling the Gipper, and to good effect.

Probably one of his most Reaganesque moments took place during a town hall meeting.

One of Christie's most popular YouTube moments is a confrontation with an angry teacher, who upbraids him for not paying her enough. When Christie replies that if she doesn't like the pay package "then you don't have to do it," the crowd cheers like the Giants just scored a touchdown.

Listening to the teacher's complaints makes it quite clear she believes she's entitled to more pay, that it's owed to her. It turns out her salary at the time of the video was $86,389 per year, not including benefits. I don't know about you, but $86K per year is nothing to sneeze at. Christie was right to give her the answer he did. It also reminds us of another of Christie's Reaganesque moments.

Christie's cuts to school funding have earned him the enmity of the state teachers' union, with 200,000 members. The governor asked teachers to agree to a one-year salary freeze and to kick in 1.5 percent of their pay to help fund their health care insurance -- most of the state's teachers don't contribute to their plans.

Teachers in many school districts refused. As he had threatened during discussions with the unions, Christie called on constituents to vote down local school board budgets that didn't conform to his requests. Christie won the public fight. A surprising 58 percent of proposed budgets were defeated, making it the largest number of rejections on state record.

Just as Reagan did in 1981, when he faced off with the air traffic controllers union, Christie called the bluff and seems to have won.

How many times did Reagan go to the airwaves to ask the American public to contact their congressional representatives in order to get something he firmly believed was needed to fix the problems plaguing America through Congress? And how many times did they respond, giving the Gipper what he needed? It looks like Christie is following the same path and getting similar results.

The present governor of New Jersey bears watching as he goes over, under, around, and through the entrenched bureaucracies, union constituencies, and 'gimmee' special interest groups to put New Jersey's fiscal house in order.

As the various state primaries are held and incumbents from both parties are finding themselves being seriously challenged by newcomers, the question we must ask ourselves is will the voters back tough steps to reduce the deficits? So far the answer appears to be yes.

Despite the disdain that many in Congress feel for the American electorate, more of them are feeling the heat back home. Some have already lost their primary bids to run for re-election, becoming victims of hubris after they decided it was just a dandy idea to spend the nation into debt to a level never seen before with little hope of ever being able to pay it off. And should the Republicans manage to take back one or both houses of Congress, there's another question all of us have to ask them, that being do they "have the stones" to take the measures necessary to bring our government's fiscal house into order?

Reading comments to the two posts linked above it appears that a substantial number of people on the left cannot conceive of the actual size of the deficit or what it will take to fix it. More than one of those commenting wrote something along the lines of "All we need to do is slash defense spending and we'll have enough to pay for everything." All that phrase did was prove to me and others commenting that they really have no idea how much money we're talking about. As one commenter put it in response to the clueless:

If we cut defense spending to zero, we'd still have almost a trillion dollar deficit to deal with every year. Better to cut things that really do nothing more than suck up tax dollars with little, if anything to show for it.

This same commenter also brought up the point that defense is one of the duties of our federal government as defined in the Constitution. ObamaCare, Cap and Trade, corporate bailouts, union bribery, and government departments like the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, and a number of others are not. Yet we waste billions on them with little return for that 'investment' of our tax dollars except more needless regulation, more costs associated with complying with those needless regulations, and tighter restrictions on our economy's ability to function. How does any of this help anyone...except those in Washington wishing to exercise more power over our lives?

I have a feeling those in power are in for a rude awakening come this November and November 2012. A lot of them will be hitting the unemployment lines.

As the old saying goes, "If you tax something, you get less of it. If you subsidize something, you get more of it."

In this case "it" is unemployment, something the Obama Administration has done everything it can to foster more of, Obama's claims not withstanding.

Of course all the other disincentives for getting another job, or worse, creating them, keep getting bigger. After all, why should Congress or the White House actually pay attention to the employers who actually create the jobs?

Why should anyone in business today want to take the chance of adding employees when they don't know what the Obama Administration and Congress has in store for them? Both seem to be on an anti-business bender, blaming business big and small for the troubles we've all been experiencing. Never mind that it was a Democrat controlled Congress that started spending money like there was no tomorrow. (During the last 2 years of the Bush Administration the budget deficits were bigger than the previous six years combined. It was during the last 2 year of the Bush Administration the big spending Republicans in Congress were replaced by the even bigger spending Democrats.) Never mind it was Democrats in Congress who thwarted President Bush's efforts to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Why should Obama, Pelosi, or Reid let facts get in the way of their socialist agenda?

Despite all it's promises to the contrary, the Obama Administration has failed to stimulate the housing market in any meaningful way. While the attempt made with the home buyer tax credits did boost home sales a bit, home sales tanked after the tax credit ended.

Last month mortgage applications for new homes and refinancing hit a 13-year low despite record low interest rates (see below). It's also expected the number of foreclosures this year will be greater than last year despite the Obama Administration's attempts to "bully and wheedle banks into stopping foreclosures", an effort that's failed for the most part.

Remember when the Obama administration announced its plan to spend billions of dollars to prevent foreclosures? The White House threatened banks that attempted to seize defaulted property and tried to get judges to reset the principal of the loans in court. None of that has helped stop the wave of foreclosures; it has only delayed and strung out the pain, ironically cresting just as voters go to the midterm polls.

The housing market won't recover until the economy actually starts creating more jobs. Without jobs, nothing Obama does is going to fix the worst housing market we've seen in decades.

None of the stimuli and the rescue plans worked, because none of them addressed the core problem: joblessness. Without jobs, people lose their homes no matter how much the government intervenes to stop it.

Until we get people back to work, these programs are simply futile. A homebuyer tax break doesn't help someone without a job qualify as a buyer, and restructuring plans for existing mortgages can't help an unemployed person make a mortgage payment.

Obama has put the cart before the horse, trying to bolster one part of the economy (housing) without making sure another part has the means to sustain it (jobs). Maybe he's expecting the housing market to lead the way to recovery. If so he has made a major faux pas as the housing market tends to be a lagging indicator of economic recovery. It's a leading indicator only if the economy starts heading down into recession.

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I took a look at today's finance rates from our local bank which shows a fixed 30-year mortgage at 4.375% and a 20-year fixed at 4.25%! That's the lowest I've seen, ever.

I ran the numbers for our present 30-year mortgage (at 5.75%) through their calculator and found we'd save $70 per month on our mortgage payment if we took out a 20-year mortgage for refinance. That means we'd take years off our remaining mortgage and still pay less than we're paying now.

Needless to say, we made the call and have started the ball rolling.

I don't know if you've noticed it, but I have. So has John Stossel.

What am I talking about?

A host of ever growing laws and rules that make it more difficult to be a law abiding citizen.

Something's happened to America, and it isn't good. It's become easier to get into trouble. We've become a nation of a million rules. Not the kind of bottom-up rules that people generate through voluntary associations. Those are fine. I mean imposed, top-down rules formed in the brains of meddling bureaucrats who think they know better than we how to manage our lives.

Cross them, and we are in trouble.

This problem is getting worse all the time. We hear stories about some poor sap ending up being fired or expelled or arrested for breaking some nonsensical and totally useless rule or law that no one in their right mind would ever think were necessary or desirable.

One of my pet peeves when it comes to this kind of nonsense? Zero tolerance policies.

I've written more than once how such policies are crutches for the weak willed pencil-pushers and bureaucrats too damn afraid or too lazy to apply a little common sense and make a judgment call.

Stossel also provides a few examples of zero tolerance laws that do nothing more than make the local policymakers look like imbeciles. My favorite is this one:

Ansche Hedgepeth, 12, committed this heinous crime: She left school in Washington, D.C., entered a Metrorail station to head home and ate a French fry. (Emphasis added) An undercover officer arrested her, confiscating her jacket, backpack and shoelaces. She was handcuffed and taken to the Juvenile Processing Center. Only after three hours in custody was the 12-year-old released into her mother's custody. The chief of Metro Transit Police said: "We really do believe in zero-tolerance. Anyone taken into custody has to be handcuffed for officer safety." She was sentenced to community service and now carries an arrest record. Washington's Metro has since rescinded its zero-tolerance policy.

Examples of that kind of stupidity and sloth abound. Yet Congress and the federal government continue to crank out new laws that criminalize the most trivial behavior, or in some cases non-behavior in an effort to control every aspect of our lives. And it's not just the feds, but state and local governments and institutions that have fallen into the same mindset.

How do we solve this increasingly monstrous trend?

I can think of a few remedies, including a constitutional amendment that requires that for every new law passed, an old one must be repealed. And not just any old law, but one of equal import and scope. If not for that condition we'd be seeing all kinds of new laws passed that end up being balanced by repealing trivial laws that have outlawed things like spitting on the sidewalk.

Another tactic is to file a class action suit against every trivial, wasteful, and mind-numbing piece of legislation or regulation that comes out of government at every level. Bury them in endless litigation, making it difficult, if not impossible to enforce.

One of the tactics I like best? Ridicule. Make it known far and wide the abject stupidity of any law, rule, or regulation that defies common sense and has a profound negative effect on the citizens and relieves the bureaucrats from actually having to make any decisions about anything. Let the people know of the unintended consequences of imposing such laws, rules, or regulations and let them know who it is that created them. Show them for the lazy dunces they are.

A follow up to this last tactic: Vote them out of office or fire them. People this stupid or lazy shouldn't be holding positions of authority over any of us.

What is occurring in California, where a quarter of the children HAVE NEVER BEEN TO THE DENTIST, notwithstanding the availability of free or subsidized health care indicates that the Russian proverb is true.


The racial differences are noteworthy. Whites and Asian parents seem to realize that going to the dentist is something that shouldn't be avoided. Hispanics and esp. blacks? Not so much.

Offering a panoply of health services at public expense to parents of below-normal intelligence means you need an army of social workers guiding them through the process, which can be cumbersome and confusing even to an MIT-trained engineer. All very expense and Rube Goldbergesque, too. I want to say un-American.

And the thing is self-defeating. As taxes go up while crime rates and educational performance deteriorate, middle class flight is accelerated as community organizers call for the whole thing to be ratcheted up.

It reminds me that infant mortality is not so much a function of income level but of the mother's intelligence, which helps guide her behavior. I think I learned from the great Thomas Sowell (or Walter Williams) that blacks have a higher infant mortality in California than recent Mexican immigrants, who are lower on the economic ladder.

It's largely behavior-based. And in a republic the gubmit isn't supposed to be paternalistic like Cass Sunstein, an Obama friend and official advisor, wants it. We're supposed to take care of ourselves.  But people are running away from freedom into security, which is a false fire.

At least when one looks at the results.

It was 80 years ago yesterday, June 17th, that President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act into law, which instantly turned the Great Recession into the Great Depression. It was an act of trade protectionism that had exactly the opposite effect from the one intended. Call it an example of the Law of Unintended Consequences writ large.

Hoover and his congressional allies thought that reducing imports would strengthen the economy. Instead, it contributed to a collapse in world trade and the spread of protectionism around the globe. The lessons from this policy mistake are unfortunately all too relevant today.

The Smoot-Hawley tariff, conceived as a Republican ploy to gain the farm vote in the 1928 election, was a bad idea from the start.

It was one of the biggest mistakes the Republican Party ever got involved with.

It seems modern day Democrats are now looking to make the same mistake as the Republicans did in Hoover's day and for the same reasons. Should they pull it off, the unintended consequences won't be the same as those back in 1930. Instead, they'll be far worse.

Perhaps it's time for Congress and the President to stop punishing American businesses for succeeding here. Who knows, maybe new jobs will be created here as a result.

Is it any wonder 'green' jobs haven't been created here?

With the US government spending far too much time trying to kill off traditional energy sources, they really haven't spent nearly as much time trying to promote production of green energy sources as they should. Could that be why a lot of potential American energy jobs have been heading to China instead?

It seems any time there are alternative energy projects that actually look like they may actually work as advertised, the government wants nothing to do with it, or worse, works to kill them. But they'll sink tons of money into questionable projects with little chance of return on investment, or that will require endless government subsidies to survive.

Despite the ABC report above that the government of China controls the economy from top to bottom, meaning they can make offers others can't, the reality is quite different.

According to report from Cornell University, China's free enterprise economy works from the bottom up.

Entrepreneurship is taking off in China and with little input from the government, reports a new Cornell study. It is the capitalism of the private sector -- not government -- that is powering China's huge economy, say the researchers, making the rise of capitalism in China very similar to the West's.

"The surprising finding is how little government actually is needed to enable entrepreneurial activities," said Victor Nee, Goldwin Smith professor of sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Economy and Society at Cornell, who led the study. "Where markets rule, profit opportunities naturally draw in new entrepreneurs, no matter how adverse the institutional environment may be initially. Once a critical mass of private firms operates in specific niches, social norms and networks fulfill many of the functions that textbook economics assigns to government and legal institutions."

So ABC says one thing, and a study from Cornell says just the opposite. Who am I willing to believe?

Cornell, of course.

Chinese entrepreneurship is echoing that of the US long ago. Entrepreneurship is an endangered species here in America, seeing that the government doesn't appear interested in keeping US innovation, ideas, and inventions here where they can create new jobs, if not entirely new industries. We are indeed becoming far too much like Europe, where the government has taken control of many aspects of the economy. They stifle innovation, either by making financing new ventures more difficult or less profitable, or burying them under an avalanche of regulations that all but prohibit new economic activity unless the government can exercise control over every aspect of it.

Is it any wonder US companies are finding China far more receptive to new ideas and new technologies than the US?

I was going to do a post about the Nanny State, which looks to be growing by leaps and bounds. David Harsanyi wrote a book about it last year or so. Yesterday David Limbaugh published a disturbing op-ed on the latest development, where a brand-new pernicious agency is being formed at the federal Dept. of Health and Human Services to engage in "behavior modification."

But then I went on Harsanyi's blog and he has an entertaining entry on different photos of people's offices. Mine is being constructed in the basement. After living at my present location in a "tiny town in central NH" (Washington Post's words when Mitt Romney came to town) for nearly nine years, I'm finally going to get one. The floor was put in last Saturday, and a buddy who does post and beam and can't find work is doing the construction.

I guess when it's done I'll have to show you a picture.

One thing that has always bothered me about the folks in Congress is their incredible ignorance and arrogance when it comes to technology and science. Very few members of Congress have the background or expertise to make law or policy on science and technology matters. Far too often they get it wrong, meaning the nation and the economy suffer for it. After all, what do they know?

The answer, in a word, is obvious: they know pretty much nothing. What's worse is that they don't feel that ignorance should preclude them from talking until there is an initial technical investigation, done by some technically qualified people (from various reputable organizations). (We saw this same rush to judgment by the know-nothings after the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986.)

To me, all this is just another manifestation of the sad, ironic reality that engineers have made the incredibly difficult look way too easy. Everyone thinks it's all no big deal and not very hard, so it's easy to be an expert. It's happened in nearly all engineering and scientific disciplines.

People in general have little or no understanding of the technology they use every day, but at least they know they don't understand it and are willing to admit they don't understand it. All they know is that they can use it. Unfortunately Congress doesn't know that they don't know, and that's the problem. This false belief means they will, more often than not, come to the wrong conclusions about some scientific or technological issue. It also means that the rest of us will pay the price for their decisions, one way or another.

I'm not saying that Congress shouldn't get involved with such issues. But they should be more willing to take the time to learn about them well before deciding anything. There are very few science or technology issues that require immediate action by Congress. Unfortunately Congress doesn't realize this, or worse, they don't care. It's all about posturing and politics and power and not about the actual issues.

This letter to the editor appeared in Monday's Laconia Daily Sun. The author, one E. Scott Cracraft managed to use every single discredited and bigoted cliché in the book in his effort to paint the TEA party and its activists and supporters as the next Nazi Party. Originally I thought to just post it and my reply and leave it at that. But after rereading Mister Cracraft's diatribe, I realized what it really deserved was a complete fisking to show what a clueless and unthinking "useful idiot" he has become.

In spite of the efforts by the Tea Partiers (and the corporate media) to make the "Tea Party" movement appear "mainstream," the movement's "core" is far from mainstream. This movement includes people who arm themselves to overthrow a legally elected government. In some states, they have advocated succession from the Union. Some anti-Obama activists have even gone as far as calling for a military coup against the Obama administration.

This guy has tried to tie just about every fringe group he can think of to the TEA party movement. I'm surprised he hasn't tried to include the Weather Underground. Oh. Wait. It's President Obama who has ties to members of that domestic terrorist organization!

Cracraft's accusations ring hollow if for no other reason that there's been absolutely no evidence tying any of the militia groups to the movement. The "core' as he calls it has no desire to overthrow the government except by the same means the present government came to power - the ballot box. But there will be one difference: we won't need to stuff ballot boxes or commit massive voter fraud in order to throw the bums out.

The Tea Partiers also include religious conservatives who have forgotten that the U.S. Constitution does not make the American Republic a "Christian Country" but rather separates church and state while providing the most religious freedom possible. Others want to ban a woman's right to reproductive freedom. Interestingly, these same people who cry out against abortion also judge "welfare moms" for having too many babies! And yes, in spite of the movement's public rejection of racism, there are some racists in that movement These people cannot accept the fact that the American people (and the Electoral College) elected an African-American President with a "foreign" sounding name. Many of these are "Birthers," who even question President Obama's right to be president even though he won the election fairly and legally. No mainstream politician of either party has supported this lie but this urban legend persists, largely due to some of whom are in the Tea Party movement or who support it.

This country was first settled by religious refugees seeking to be free to practice their religion without interference from either their rulers or the established churches. Cracraft seems to forgotten this as well as the Constitution states there is a freedom of religion, not just freedom from religion. Over the past 50 years or so too many in this country have done their best to drive free expression of religious belief underground as if it were a dirty little secret to be hidden away from prying eyes. They have used the courts to redefine the meaning of the First Amendment in such a way as to ban almost all public displays of belief. Being a person of faith is not a disqualifier for holding public office, despite what Mr. Cracraft would apparently like to believe.

He also seems to believe that only the TEA party has racists. I hate to disillusion him, but there are far more racists within the Democratic Party than the TEA parties. He also ignores the fact that quite a few TEA party supporters voted for Obama and have since come to see him for the disingenuous big-government socialist he is. That isn't racism. That's regret. The only similarity between the two is that they both begin with the letter 'r'.

Then too, the anti-immigrant sentiment on the part of many Tea Partiers can be construed as racist. I rarely hear those opposed to immigration reform talking about white, European immigrants. It is usually about Asians, people from the Middle East, and Hispanics. Racist or not, there does seem to be and element of the "politics of meanness" among the Tea Partiers.

We aren't anti-immigrant. Many of us are immigrants or children of immigrants. We are anti-illegal immigrant. There's a big difference between the two. It's possible Cracraft is incapable of telling the difference because to him all the illegal immigrants are future Democrat supporters...once they can figure out a way to grant them amnesty and a short ride to citizenship. Never mind the legal immigrants such a move will screw over.

Conservatives have frequently criticized liberal presidents in the past, including President Clinton, but no conservative has gone so far as to question their qualifications to serve. "Red-baiting" has become common on Tea Party signs and at Tea Party gatherings. No liberal candidate has been called a "communist" or a "traitor" to his or her country in a long time. This includes people that are more liberal than Obama. The Constitution, in order to protect our political freedom, narrowly defines what "treason" is and I fail to see how our current president fits this definition. Thus, I cannot help but believe that there is a strong racist element in the movement against President Obama.

As the old saying goes, "You shall know them by the company they keep." It is Obama who has consorted with known and self-avowed anti-American terrorists (Bill Ayer and Bernadine Dohrn, just to name two). It is Obama who, for almost 20 years, attended an unabashedly racist church with a pastor who spouted bigoted, racist rhetoric and called upon God to damn America, much like any radical Muslim cleric.

Of all our previous Presidents, only Obama has worked so hard to conceal his past, the details of his upbringing, his scholarship, and his vital statistics. Every other President's life was an open book. But not Obama's. We know nothing of his academic achievements. We know nothing of any articles or papers he might have authored while editor of the Harvard Law Review. And what we do know of his time at HLR is not flattering, with more than one colleague of his from his time there saying he was basically a do-nothing editor-in-name-only, deigning to grace the others working there with his presence from time to time and not much more.

The Tea Partiers are not engaging in "mainstream" talk. They have an extreme reactionary agenda which should be a concern of every American. They are using violent language, arming themselves, and even calling themselves "right wing terrorists." I have to laugh when a self-commissioned militia "colonel" spoke of defending themselves against leftists at a recent Tea Party in Washington. In case you have not heard, armed left-wing groups in the United States pretty much died out with the Weather Underground in the 1970s. It is not the liberals or progressives who are dressing up in camouflage and conducting field maneuvers utilizing automatic weapons (I think the Second Amendment calls for a "well regulated militia" with a chain of command subordinate to the elected civilian authorities and not a bunch of grown boys playing army in the woods). Nor is it the liberals and progressives who are making death threats to members of Congress with whom they disagree.

There he goes again, painting a picture of the TEA party supporters as fringe militant wackos. Well guess what? All these guys are are fringe element wackos, but they aren't TEA party folks. They have as much to do with the core of the TEA party movement as you do, which means none.

If all he knows of the TEA party is what he's seen on TV or from the New York Times, Washington Post, the Huffington Post, or the Daily Kos, then Cracraft is so mis- and un-informed as to be laughable. Not one of these 'sources' is reliable, unbiased, or without a political agenda that does not have the good of the American people as their focus. Like any media source, left or right, they can't be trusted. The fact that he appears to do so shows he's become incapable of thinking for himself and can only parrot what these sources have programmed him to say.

Some Tea Partiers, in their literature and websites, even call for employers to fire liberal employees simply because they are liberal. It does not matter what the employee's work performance is like. They also want to remove liberal teachers from our schools whether or not they are good teachers. They even encourage their followers to break off social relations with liberals and to totally marginalize them. And they accuse liberals of "intolerance?"

I've heard this claim, but I haven't seen a shred of evidence. He's made the claim. It's up to him to prove it.

I know I don't want the good teachers to be fired. But what I don't want are educators that aren't teaching what they're supposed to be teaching and are instead indoctrinating our children, teaching them what to think, not how to think, how to reason things out on their own. These days far too many of our kids are coming out of school totally unprepared to make it in the real world. They haven't been taught the critical thinking skills that will allow them to succeed away from the indoctrination centers we call schools. All they've been taught is how to allow others to think for them and to not question what they've been told.

As far as tolerance is concerned. The most intolerant people I have come across in my life have all been liberals. For them, tolerance is something other people must have, not them.

The Tea Partiers and their ilk protest and claim that as a "grass roots" movement, they are not responsible if there are some "wackos" in their ranks. But, while urging the American people not to "paint them with the same brush," the Tea Partiers seem to paint all liberals and progressives as Marxists, communists or terrorists, if not worse. And, I am not sure that they are even using these terms accurately. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that many of their opponents tend to paint them as "racists" and "fascists."

When a large majority of the liberals/progressives in power spout Marxist/Communist ideals and support leftist/fascist dictators over democratically elected governments, then yes we'll call them Marxists and Communists and fascists.

When our President insults our staunchest allies and embraces our enemies with open arms, then yes, we will paint him with the same broad brush. To quote yet another old saying, "By their actions you shall know them." So far our President's "smart diplomacy" has done more damage to America's foreign relations in a little over a year than eight years of Dubya's presidency.

One also has to be cynical about the "grassroots" label: the Tea Partiers and their Tea Parties are being funded by some very wealthy conservative interests. Some of these interests do not want banking reform. Others have a personal stake in seeing that meaningful health care reform is eventually defeated. How else could Sarah Palin pull down $100,000 per speech? Also, one look at a typical Tea Party website shows the movement's close association with extreme right-wing national movements and organizations.

Oh, really?Just who is financing the TEA party movement? I notice he didn't name names. He made the claim, it's up to him to prove it.

On the other hand, the Democrats, and particularly the extreme left-wing of the party, has been heavily financed by multi-billionaire George Soros, an unabashed socialist (his claim, not mine) and someone who is not a friend of the American people. Like most on the Left, he believes we aren't capable of making our own decisions and he's willing to spend his billions to make sure our ability to do so will be stripped from us, one step, one right at a time. Also, much of the Hollywood elite are willing to support political causes most Americans find repugnant. They pour millions into the Democrat party to help elect candidates that are more than willing to dismantle the Constitution because we're too stupid to understand that we need the morally bankrupt progressives to tell us what we need.

As to Sarah Palin's $100,000 speaking fee: So what? When she speaks at TEA party functions she has given that money to help fund the movement on more than one occasion. Bill Clinton pulls down that much for the same thing, but Cracraft hasn't asked who's financing his speaking engagements, has he? It's a specious point. Get over it.

I have no doubt that there are well-meaning members of the "silent majority" in the Tea Party movement who are simply afraid of government and who came blame them? The Federal Government can be scary to all of us! After eight years of George Bush, who turned a federal budget surplus into a deficit through his wars and giving tax breaks to rich Americans, who would not be suspicious of the federal government and its motives? The well-meaning Tea Partiers should consider who their real "enemy" is: the "Military/Industrial Complex" (a term, incidentally, coined by a Republican, not a liberal Democrat) which has received more taxpayer money than every "welfare cheat" combined.

First, a good part of Clinton's budget surplus was funded by borrowing money from the Social Security Trust Fund, which has not been paid back and never will be.

Second, Bush didn't give tax breaks just to the rich. He gave them to every tax payer...unless Cracraft's definition of 'rich' is the same as that of the Democrats in Congress - Anyone with a job.

Third, at least one of those wars was not started by us, not by George Bush. It was started by Osama Bib Laden after his follower committed an act of war against the United States, one that was greater than the attack on Pearl Harbor back on December 7, 1941.

Fourth, the other war was started by Saddam Hussein in 1990. We merely got around to finishing it.

Initially, this anti-government movement included a large number of libertarians. While not always agreeing with them, I have always respected the libertarians more than the Republicans who seek to hijack their movement. The libertarians oppose government intrusion into any aspect of our lives. While they are against taxation and "big government," at least they are consistent. They may oppose taxation but they also are champions of personal liberty and oppose government interference in what one smokes or who one sleeps with.

I have to agree that the GOP has been trying to hijack the TEA party, trying to 'bring it into the fold', as it were. But we're too pissed off at the GOP, and particularly those within the party that we call RINOS, - Republicans In Name Only. The GOP betrayed its libertarian roots and became a somewhat less liberal version of the Democrat Party with the same spendthrift tendencies.

As we have seen, the RINOS had no problem spending money the American people didn't have. But that's no excuse for the Democrats to double down and create a deficit in one year that was bigger than Bush's deficit over eight years. (And we must remember these two things: the Democrats controlled Congress during the last two years of the Bush Administration - a time during which the two biggest budget deficits occurred - and that all spending starts in the House of Representatives.)

Mainstream America is sick and tired of being ignored by our employees, who spend without our leave, impose programs upon us we neither want or can afford to pay for, and forget that they work for us, not the other way around.

Unfortunately, the Tea Party Movement seems to have been taken over by extreme GOP conservative hypocrites who are committed to protecting corporate interests. While they whine about government interference in terms of regulating business, they seem to have no problem with regulating a person's personal lifestyle choices. While the Tea Partiers oppose government getting involved in health care, they seem to have no issue with banning same-sex marriage or medical marijuana. I hope the "well-meaning" Tea Partiers eventually realize which side they are really on.

Oh, and the Democrats haven't been doing just that, and rather blatantly while they're at it? They haven't passed legislation that created 'regulations' and 'rules' and laws whose sole aim is to cripple competition and lock out the small guy. They aren't pandering to those same corporate interests?

Cracraft has attributed far too many motivations to the a vast majority of TEA party supporters and activists. Mostly, we want to be left alone by government, want government to get its financial house in order, want the government to start following the Constitution, want the government to stop spending money it doesn't have and won't have in the future. Abortion, gay marriage, and a host of other social issues aren't even a blip on our agenda. The resistance to health care has nothing to do with denying people health care, but does have to do with its unsustainable cost, its intrusive nature, and its destruction of one of the best health care systems in the world all in the name the overused and purposely misdefined term 'fairness'. My question is, fair to who?

'Nuff said.

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

Source: American Thinker
HT: Leonidas

Brilliant article by a smart man. Thanks, Herbert London. He's president of the Hudson Institute, where people work who are too smart for the Cato Institute. I hope you all recognize the reference to Freidrich Hayek's best-selling book. (The Russell Roberts' rap video is awesome on the contest between Hayek and Keynes.)

The road to serfdom is paved with rights and benefits. People want more of whatever for which someone else will pay. The casualty in this assessment is personal responsibility and liberty.

My goodness, listening this morning (approx. one third of the way through the 41-minute podcast) to the invaluable BBC NewsPod, I came across recent debate of this story of the proposed implementation of teaching clinical sex ed to all students, regardless whether the school is private or religious.

Scary stuff. When people consider health more important than freedom, this is what happen. Gesundheit uber alles.

I, however, did enjoy listening to the British pronunciation of condom.

Makes me greatly appreciate the First Amendment we have in this country.

I have to say the opening statements of the President's State of the Union address were on target, talking about the problems that we, as a nation and as individuals, are facing. But once he started addressing the main issue we face - the economy - he lost me.

He talked about tax cuts, but only the temporary tax cuts. The somewhat more long term cuts, the Bush tax cuts, expire next year, meaning everyone will see a tax increase once they're gone.

On the stimulus bill - blah blah blah blah blah blah. (At least that's what I heard.)

As much as I agree that jobs are an issue, I have to disagree with the president that somehow it's up to the government to stimulate them with our money. Better that government get the heck out of the way. We don't need it to take $30 billion of the repaid TARP funds and spend it again.

I agree with Obama that we need to upgrade our infrastructure to help American businesses compete in the global marketplace. But what do high-speed trains have to do with that? Better that electrical systems and broadband communications networks be built, which will do far more to support American businesses than trains.

And while the president says he "won't accept second place for America", he's been doing what he can to make sure that's where we'll end up, if not third or fourth place.

After that I started nodding off as he started mouthing the same old platitudes but in different wrappers. (Make energy less expensive by taxing the hell out of it. Punish all the banks for the actions of a few. Spend billions more on education even though study after study after study shows more money doesn't equate to better education. Destroy our health care system in order to save it. And so on and so on.)

I. GOT. BORED.

ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzz........

UPDATE 1/28/10: Going back and watching the address again, I saw that as time passed he shifted more and more blame for all our troubles on to others. He laid all the blame for the failure of health care reform and cap-and-tax squarely on the Republicans, saying they now owned the blame. Senator John Kyl rebutted that allegation today on NPR, stating the Senate Republicans were following the will of their constituents, blocking bad legislation that would do little more than cost the American people untold hundreds of billions of dollars with nothing to show for it.

It has become quite apparent that our so-called representatives in both chambers of Congress have ceased to represent us and instead have gone off in a radical direction that will, in the end, cripple America with crushing debt, destroy an imperfect but working health care system that rivals that of any place else on the planet, erode even more of our rights, and create economic roadblocks that will do nothing but further weaken our ability to compete in the world's marketplace. It is the nightmare of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged come to life. With all of this in mind, is it any surprise a large majority of Americans are so angry with Congress and their Leftist Overlord?

We're trying in every way legally and officially possible to make clear that we don't want the radical meal we're being forced to eat. We fervently do not want to "fundamentally transform" America. But there is such a huge disconnect from our world to our representatives'. It's as if we are ghosts whom they can't see or hear! When someone refuses to listen, going so far as to ignore you, don't you shout louder? Doesn't it anger you? When you're attacked and belittled because you have to shout to be heard and you're still ignored, doesn't that infuriate you? These people miss that we passionately don't want what they want. The more they refuse to hear us, the more we try to make them. We are not going away.

We're justly and increasingly angry because our reps not only refuse to hear us, but they also chastise us for wanting to be heard. How else would they expect us to react when we feel so helpless and hopeless? No matter what we want, say, or do, our government is going to force us to eat a meal we never ordered. In addition, we keep saying, "no, we don't want this," but they keep putting affirmations in our mouths and proceeding with their radical agenda anyway. We are not enjoying the governmental rape of our country. We said "no," and "no" means "no" in every language. Why doesn't this matter? Every poll reflects the president's rapidly declining approval rating -- for good reason. And still, Robert Gibbs flippantly dismisses it. How are "we the people" supposed to feel? Certainly we do not feel happy, or even just mildly upset, about being disregarded. Far-left ideologues who supposedly espouse "compassionate" causes have no compassion for how we feel, nor do they have a clue that we are an angry mob of their own creation.

I certainly feel angry, particularly with my Congressional Representative, Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH1), who has shown a penchant for dismissing any of her 'constituents' who do not ascribe to her particular political beliefs. On more than one occasion she is alleged to have referred to those of us non-Democrats living in her Congressional District as not being her constituents. That's funny as I thought everyone living in her district was her constituent, whether we agreed with her politics or not. So much for being our representative. Instead she represents only her own points of view and the hell with the rest of us. (I have a feeling Ms. Shea-Porter will have a very rude awakening come next November when she's booted, bag and baggage, from her seat.)

Obama's falling poll numbers certainly indicate a lot of our anger, particularly when his approval rating after a little over 11 months in office is worse than George W. Bush's after eight years.

Yet there's another twist that might make we angry Americans even angrier: Pelosi and Reid's move to short-circuit the normal conference process, where differences between House and Senate versions of a given bill are hammered out. Instead, reconciling the differences between the two health care reform bills will likely be done behind closed doors, out of the public eye, with little input from members of either house. In other words, the fix will be in.

When Democrats took over Congress in 2007, they increasingly did not send bills through the regular conference process. "We have to defer to the bigger picture," explained Rep. Henry Waxman of California. So the children's health insurance bill passed by the House that year was largely dumped in favor of the Senate's version. House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel and other Democrats complained the House had been "cut off at the knees" but ultimately supported the bill. Legislation on lobbying reform and the 2007 energy bill were handled the same way -- without appointing an actual conference.

Rather than appoint members to a public conference committee, those measures were "ping-ponged" -- i.e. changes to reconcile the two versions were transmitted by messenger between the two houses as the final product was crafted behind closed doors solely by the leadership. Many Democrats grumbled at the secrecy. "We need to get back to the point where we use conference committees . . . and have serious dialogue," said Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama at the time.

But serious dialogue isn't what Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid are interested in right now. Look for the traditional conference committee to be replaced by a "ping-pong" game in which health care is finalized behind closed doors with little public scrutiny before the bill is rushed to the floor of each chamber for a final vote.

Is there any wonder why things like the TEA party movement have been growing? Is there any wonder why confrontations between members of Congress and the public have been becoming more heated and less polite? Why are the Democrats so surprised when far too many of them have been ignoring their constituents back home, ignoring their wishes, ignoring their phone calls, letters, and e-mails, and following the lead of Pelosi and Reid, neither of whom has the best interests of the American people at heart. Instead they have their own Leftist Utopia-driven agenda that has nothing to do with what the American people want or need.

And the anger grows.....

Do you want to see the future of the US under the policies Obama, Pelosi, and Reid are trying to impose upon us? Then check out this video, courtesy of PJTV.

After 50 years of leftist policies and politics, Detroit has gone from the peak to the valley, having shrunk in population by 50%. Is that's what in store for us under leftist leadership for the rest of the country?

It's good to know that it's not only white people who are the cancer of the planet, as Susan Sontag is infamously remembered for having sputtered. We're all at fault if we breath out that poisonous gas carbon dioxide that's a "threat" to the public safety.

Silly me for thinking that that gas was good for plants in their production of oxygen and sugars. That's at least what my grandfather, a Ph.D. in biology, constantly taught me when we went down to visit him in Naples, Florida. Photosynthesis, no?

Obviously I should be sent to a re-education camp for siring more than two or three children. (I have four.) All that poisonous carbon dioxide!

Wait. I'm a gun-toting, Bible reading, weekly church attending, conservative. I think there are moral absolutes, truth, and Haydn is better than Lady Ga Ga. They won't even bother wasting time on me. I'm hopelessly reactionary.

I think not; it's about time. Now when will John Brendan McCormick, the bishop of the Diocese of Manchester, do the same to ultra abortion rights Catholic Protestant Jeanne Shaheen?

Maybe a stronger moral stand like Bishop Tobin's will cause confused and imprudent Catholics to lean more heavily to Republicans in states where they have large numbers. Notwithstanding this, however, some have swung to the Democratic side. I'm thinking of Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Massachusetts is a lost cause.

HT: Lucianne. Some of the comments, which will only be available for several days, are very interesting. Here's one that I particularly like:

Reply 33 - Posted by: muggy, 11/22/2009 8:26:29 AM    
I love this from the AP:

"The decision by the outspoken prelate..."

I guess it's "outspoken" these days for any institution to stick to its values and mores.