Tag Archives: Barack Obama

NRO: Reassessing Warren G. Harding

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This article from National Review about one of the most derided presidents in American history seems particularly pertinent in the age of Obama. A “return to normalcy” and end to socialist experimentation is exactly what is needed today:

Reassessing Warren G. Harding
And a call for normalcy.

By Ryan Cole & Amity Shlaes

Change isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. That’s what most of us have come to realize in recent years, whether the change proposed came from Pres. Barack Obama or the Tea Party movement. Still, most haven’t quite reached the point where we oppose change and fight for stability.

Maybe we ought to: Maybe sometimes it is the time for no change. That, at least, was the position of Warren Harding. Warren who? On the presidential roster, Harding is POTUS 43. No, that doesn’t mean he’s replaced George W. Bush: Harding’s “43” is his aggregate rank among presidents. Since there’s a tie somewhere in there, this means Harding is the worst-ranked president in the history of our land.

Still, the most despised chief exec had something to say about the issue that’s preoccupying the country. Nowhere did Harding put the case against change, and the case for realism, better than in his inaugural address, delivered 90 years ago today.

When Harding sat down to plan that address, he was confronting a nation suffering the kind of uncertainty that is familiar to us today. After the war, unemployment hit 14 percent. Inflation raged. The economy contracted severely, and the stock market followed suit. Restless veterans and angry workers thought they might imitate the revolutions taking place overseas.

In his 1920 campaign, Harding ran as the anti-revolutionary: He sought “a return to normalcy.” His choice of Calvin Coolidge as his running mate underscored his commitment to that concept. Coolidge stood for caution and for drawing the line at extremism. It was Coolidge who had pulled a pre-PATCO and, Reaganesque, fired the Boston police force for leaving the city to looters when they went out on strike in 1919.

One of our problems today is that politicians are unwilling to concede certain truths about the economy. One is that housing prices may fall more. Another is that government intervention will inevitably force upon us a period of inflation. Yet another is that wages may not go as high as we like until the economy sorts itself out. Instead of skirting those issues, Harding spelled them all out, trusting voters to accept the truth.

While government would do all it could, there were imbalances it could not rectify, Harding allowed. “Perhaps,” he said, “we never shall know the old level of wages again.” To assume that life might be instantly reordered was also to overreach: “There is no instant step from disorder to order. We must face a condition of a grim reality, charge off our losses and start afresh.”

Next Harding turned to the topic of change. “Any wild experiment,” the new president said, “will only add to the confusion.” He went on: “Our supreme task is the resumption of our onward, normal way. Reconstruction, readjustment, restoration, all these must follow. I would like to hasten them.”

Harding went on to lay out what he thought normalcy should be like: “I speak for administrative efficiency, for lightened tax burdens, for sound commercial practices, for adequate credit facilities . . . for the omission of unnecessary interference of Government with business, for an end to Government’s experiment in business, and for more efficient business in Government administration.”

If Americans could accept all these realities, the new president argued, “We can reduce the abnormal expenditures, and we will. We can strike at war taxation, and we must.”

Harding was right. The decade began with a recession. But soon enough, and while Harding was still living, those other things he predicted did follow. After Harding’s Teapot Dome Scandal in 1923, and his death that summer, the new president, Coolidge, sought to clear his own administration of scandal. But Coolidge was careful not to abandon Harding’s theme of normalcy. Normalcy for both presidents meant keeping government out of the way, reducing what the scholar Robert Higgs today calls “regime uncertainty.” Harding and Coolidge after him honored Harding’s inaugural-speech promise to drop the nation’s high tax rates. Harding promised to create a Bureau of the Budget, and did. New presidential authority from the law he signed in 1921 aided both him and his successors in their effort to trim spending.

Normalcy gave the United States a Wunder-decade of strong growth, low unemployment, and little inflation. Americans got cars and electricity for the first time. They got healthier. The federal budget moved into surplus and stayed there. The 1920s also saw strong productivity gains, so strong that Americans began to accomplish in five days what they used to in six.

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Strictly Right Radio with David Limbaugh

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On this Strictly Right, Andrew and Ari take a look at the racism of the Left, Obama’s libelling of the Tea Party, a great interview with David Limbaugh and much more.

Follow @AndrewLawton and @AriMFine on Twitter for the latest updates.

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IBD: A Free Iraq Prevented Nuclear Libya

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From Investors Business Daily:

Leadership: For years, Barack Obama called Iraq “a dumb war.” But considering how that conflict undeniably scared Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi into ending his WMD program, the 2003 invasion has never looked smarter.

‘I don’t oppose all wars,” future President Barack Obama told Chicagoans Against War in Iraq during a 2002 rally. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war … a rash war … the cynical attempt by … armchair, weekend warriors in this (Bush) administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”

Obama called the plan to liberate Iraq an “attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us.” And he warned that it “will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida.”

Goading the then-commander in chief, Obama said: “You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure that the U.N. (nuclear) inspectors can do their work … let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people.”

Today, after two years of President Obama, our “so-called allies” like Egypt are destabilized, or threatened, and in danger of becoming enemies — nothing “so-called” about it.

Turns out that if it hadn’t been for those “armchair warriors” and their “dumb war” in Iraq, Libya might well be a nuclear weapons power today. All the U.N. inspectors in the world wouldn’t be able to stop Gadhafi from using atomic and chemical weapons to slaughter tens or even hundreds of thousands of his own people to keep himself in power, instead of just conventional weapons to kill a fraction of that number.

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George Will: Why Liberals Love Trains

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From Newsweek:

High Speed to Insolvency
Why liberals love trains.

By George Will

Generations hence, when the river of time has worn this presidency’s importance to a small, smooth pebble in the stream of history, people will still marvel that its defining trait was a mania for high-speed rail projects. This disorder illuminates the progressive mind.

Remarkably widespread derision has greeted the Obama administration’s damn-the-arithmetic-full-speed-ahead proposal to spend $53 billion more (after the $8 billion in stimulus money and $2.4 billion in enticements to 23 states) in the next six years pursuant to the president’s loopy goal of giving “80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail.” “Access” and “high-speed” to be defined later.

Criticism of this optional and irrational spending—meaning: borrowing —during a deficit crisis has been withering. Only an administration blinkered by ideology would persist.

Florida’s new Republican governor, Rick Scott, has joined Ohio’s (John Kasich) and Wisconsin’s (Scott Walker) in rejecting federal incentives—more than $2 billion in Florida’s case—to begin a high-speed rail project. Florida’s 84-mile line, which would have run parallel to Interstate 4, would have connected Tampa and Orlando. One preposterous projection was that it would attract 3 million passengers a year—almost as many as ride Amtrak’s Acela in the densely populated Boston–New York–Washington corridor.

The three governors want to spare their states from paying the much larger sums likely to be required for construction-cost overruns and operating subsidies when ridership projections prove to be delusional. Kasich and Walker, who were elected promising to stop the nonsense, asked Washington for permission to use the high-speed-rail money for more pressing transportation needs than a train running along Interstate 71 between Cleveland and Cincinnati, or a train parallel to Interstate 94 between Milwaukee and Madison. Washington, disdaining the decisions of Ohio and Wisconsin voters, replied that it will find states that will waste the money.

California will. Although prostrate from its own profligacy, it will sink tens of billions of its own taxpayers’ money in the 616-mile San Francisco–to–San Diego line. Supposedly 39 million people will eagerly pay much more than an airfare in order to travel slower. Between 2008 and 2009, the projected cost increased from $33 billion to $42.6 billion.

Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute notes that high-speed rail connects big-city downtowns, where only 7 percent of Americans work and 1 percent live. “The average intercity auto trip today uses less energy per passenger mile than the average Amtrak train.” And high speed will not displace enough cars to measurably reduce congestion. The Washington Post says China’s fast trains are priced beyond ordinary workers’ budgets, and that France, like Japan, has only one profitable line.

So why is America’s “win the future” administration so fixated on railroads, a technology that was the future two centuries ago? Because progressivism’s aim is the modification of (other people’s) behavior.

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Out of Wisconsin, a lesson in leadership for Obama

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From the Washington Post:

By George F. Will

Hitherto, when this university town and seat of state government applauded itself as “the Athens of the Midwest,” the sobriquet suggested kinship with the cultural glories of ancient Greece. Now, however, Madison resembles contemporary Athens.

This capital has been convulsed by government employees sowing disorder in order to repeal an election. A minority of the minority of Wisconsin residents who work for government (300,000 of them) are resisting changes to benefits that most of Wisconsin’s 5.6 million residents resent financing.

Serene at the center of this storm sits Republican Scott Walker, 43, in the governor’s mansion library, beneath a portrait of Ronald Reagan. Walker has seen this movie before.

As Milwaukee County executive, he had similar dust-ups with government workers’ unions, and when the dust settled, he was resoundingly reelected, twice. If his desire to limit collective bargaining by such unions to salary issues makes him the “Midwest Mussolini” – some protesters did not get the memo about the new civility – other supposed offenses include wanting state employees to contribute 5.8 percent of their pay to their pension plans (most pay less than 1 percent), which would still be less than the average in the private sector. He also wants them to pay 12.6 percent of the cost of their health care premiums – up from about 6 percent but still much less than the private-sector average.

He campaigned on this. Union fliers distributed during the campaign attacked his “5 and 12″ plan. He says his brother, a hotel banquet manager, and his sister-in-law, who works at Sears, “would love to have” what he is offering the unions.

For some of Madison’s graying baby boomers, these protests are a jolly stroll down memory lane. Tune up the guitars! “This is,” Walker says, “very much a ’60s mentality.”

He does, however, think there is sincerity unleavened by information: Many protesters do not realize that most worker protections – merit hiring; just cause for discipline and termination – are the result not of collective bargaining but of Wisconsin’s uniquely strong and century-old civil service law.

“I am convinced,” he says, “this is about money – but not the employees’ money.” It concerns union dues, which he wants the state to stop collecting for the unions, just as he wants annual votes by state employees on re-certifying the unions. He says many employees pay $500 to $600 annually in union dues – teachers pay up to $1,000. Given a choice, many might prefer to apply this money to health care premiums or retirement plans. And he thinks “eventually” most will say about the dues collectors, “What do we need this for?”

Such unions are government organized as an interest group to lobby itself to do what it always wants to do anyway – grow. These unions use dues extracted from members to elect their members’ employers. And governments, not disciplined by the need to make a profit, extract government employees’ salaries from taxpayers. Government sits on both sides of the table in cozy “negotiations” with unions.

A few days after President Obama submitted a budget that would increase the federal deficit, he tried to sabotage Wisconsin’s progress toward solvency. The Washington Post: “The president’s political machine worked in close coordination . . . with state and national union officials to mobilize thousands of protesters to gather in Madison and to plan similar demonstrations in other state capitals.” Walker notes that in the 1990s, Wisconsin was a trendsetter regarding school choice and welfare reform. Obama, he thinks, may be worried that Wisconsin might again be a harbinger.

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Reckless Spending

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From National Review:

Reckless Spending
Barack Obama isn’t stupid. High-speed rail is.

By Thomas Sowell

Nothing more clearly illustrates the utter irresponsibility of Barack Obama than his advocacy of “high-speed rail.” The man is not stupid. He knows how to use words that will sound wonderful to people who do not bother to stop and think.

High-speed rail may be feasible in parts of Europe or Japan, where the population density is much higher than in the United States. But, without enough people packed into a given space, there will never be enough riders to repay the high cost of building and maintaining a high-speed rail system.

Building a high-speed-rail system between Los Angeles and San Francisco may sound great to people who don’t give it any serious thought. But we are a more spread-out country than England, France, or Japan. The distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco is greater than the distance from London to Paris — by more than 100 miles.

In Japan, the distance between Tokyo and Osaka is comparable to the distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco. But the population of Osaka alone is larger than the combined populations of Los Angeles and San Francisco — and Tokyo has millions more people than Osaka. That is why it can make sense to have a “bullet train” running between Osaka and Tokyo, but makes no sense to build one between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

However little President Obama knows or cares about economics, he knows a lot about politics — and especially political rhetoric. “High-speed rail” is simply another set of lofty words used to justify continued expansion of government spending. So are words like “investment in education” or “investment” in any number of other things, which serve the same political purpose.

Who cares what the realities are behind these nice-sounding words? Obama can leave that to the economists, the statisticians, and the historians. His point is to win the votes of people who know little or nothing about economics, history, or statistics. That includes a lot of people with expensive Ivy League degrees.

To talk glibly about spending more money on “high-speed rail” when the national debt has just passed a milestone by exceeding the total value of our annual output, for the first time in more than half a century, is world-class chutzpa. The last time the U.S. national debt exceeded the value of our entire annual output, it was due to the cost of fighting World War II.

When World War II ended, in less than four years of American participation, we began paying down the national debt. But our current national debt has been expanding by leaps and bounds in relatively peaceful times — and with no sign of an end in sight for the next decade.

Since more than 40 percent of our national debt is owed to foreigners, this means that goods and services produced by Americans, equal in value to more than 40 percent of our current output, will have to be sent overseas, free of charge, by either this generation or the generations that follow.

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WSJ: So Much for a ‘More Civil’ Public Discourse

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From the Wall Street Journal:

By STEPHEN HAYES

When President Obama spoke last month at the memorial service for victims of the shooting in Tucson, his speech called on Americans to live up to their ideals. He encouraged the nation to see the shooting through the eyes of 9-year-old Christina Taylor-Green, “who was just becoming aware of our democracy, just beginning to understand the obligations of citizenship.”

Christina, he said, “saw public service as something exciting and hopeful. She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important and might be a role model. She saw all this through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often just take for granted.” Her aspirations, he said, must be ours. “I want us to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as Christina imagined it.”

The Tucson address was the best of Mr. Obama’s presidency. It was a profoundly patriotic call for Americans to give their best to the country. Looking forward, the president insisted that the post-Tucson political debate not be conducted “on the usual plane of politics and point-scoring and pettiness that drifts away in the next news cycle.”

On Feb. 13, just the other side of the news cycle, a post on “Organizing for America,” the website for the president’s campaign arm, urged progressives to protest a proposal from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to reform public-employee benefits and limit collective-bargaining rights. The message, from Organizing for America’s regional director for Wisconsin, began this way: “We’ve got a fight on our hands and it’s personal.”

The next day dozens of angry protesters marched in front of the home of Republican state Sen. Van Wanggaard, a Walker supporter. The head of the local teachers union said this: “We want him to know we have our eyes on him.” In neighboring Kenosha, Joe Kiriaki, the executive director of the Kenosha Education Association, joined protesters at the home of state Rep. Samantha Kerkman and confronted her parents when they drove down the street. Mr. Kiriaki noted that Ms. Kerkman lives in a 3,300 square-foot house worth more than $400,000. “I don’t think she’s feeling too much pain,” he quipped.

Last Tuesday, hundreds of protesters shut down the road in front of Gov. Walker’s family home in Wauwatosa, Wis. Across the state in Madison, a crowd of 20,000—many of them teachers skipping school—gathered at the Capitol. Signs compared Mr. Walker to Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, Joseph Stalin and Benito Mussolini. Still others accused him of “terrorism” and “rape.” One sign had a photo of the governor in crosshairs: “Don’t Retreat, Reload.”

Elected officials joined the protests—and the slurs. In a television interview on the sidelines of the demonstration, state Sen. Lena Taylor compared Mr. Walker to Adolf Hitler.

If Ms. Taylor and the other protestors seem surprised by Mr. Walker’s proposals, they shouldn’t be. Last fall, the Wisconsin chapter of the American Federation of Teachers distributed an anti-Walker flyer to its members with clips from the media. Among them, a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel report that “Walker said he intends . . . to void parts of labor contracts.” Another promises pay cuts for government workers and a reworking of benefits. Another included an on-the-record quote from a Walker campaign adviser saying, “We would take the choice out of the collective bargaining process.”

Many Wisconsin voters cast ballots for Mr. Walker and his fellow Republicans in November despite these promises—or, more accurately, because of them. Republicans have a 60-38 majority (with one independent) in the state assembly and a 19-14 majority in the state senate. Republicans need 20 senators present for a quorum in order to vote on and pass Mr. Walker’s proposal. So Ms. Taylor and her colleagues fled the state. It is hard to imagine a more antidemocratic move—attempting to thwart the will of voters by simply not showing up.

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An Immigrant American’s Honest Assessment of Obama

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Video from Gabriella Hoffman:

My dad and “spiritual adviser” Boris Hoffman gave a rousing speech at the Eagle Forum of San Diego’s February meeting. An immigrant from Lithuania (a country formerly occupied by the now defunct USSR), my father is disappointed with the direction America is going. He draws parallels of Soviet communism to Obama’s Marxist-Leninism currently plaguing America. He talks about the need for young people to wake up, for Americans to stop taking their country for granted, and for people to stop downplaying American Exceptionalism. Like any immigrant oppressed by communism, my father recalls the limitations he faced there. If you let America continue down this wrong path, we will be the next USSR. Obama, his agenda, and his cronies are not a joke.

Ann Coulter: Democrats: Emboldening America’s Enemies & Terrifying Her Allies Since 1976

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From Human Events:

Democrats: Emboldening America’s Enemies & Terrifying Her Allies Since 1976

By Ann Coulter

The Middle East is on fire again, and crazy Muslims with funny names aren’t helping things — Mahmoud, ElBaradei, al-Banna, Barack…

The major new development is that NOW liberals want to get rid of a dictator in the Middle East! Where were they when we were taking out the guy with the rape rooms?

Remember? The one who had gassed his own people, invaded his neighbors and was desperately seeking weapons of mass destruction? The guy who emerged from a spider hole looking like Charlie Sheen after a three-day bender?
Liberals couldn’t have been less interested in removing Saddam Hussein and building a democracy in Iraq. So it’s really adorable seeing them get all choked up about democracy now. Say, as long as liberals are all gung-ho about getting rid of out-of-touch, overbearing dictators, how about we start with Janet Napolitano?

Why did they want to keep Saddam Hussein in power again? Yes, that’s right — because he didn’t have stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Their big argument was that Saddam was five long years away from developing them.

By my calculations, that means as of March 2008, Israel would have been gone and Saddam would have been in total control of the Middle East.

Thanks, liberals!
But they were shocked by Mubarak. Liberals angrily cited the high unemployment rate in Egypt as a proof that Mubarak was a beast who must step down. Did they, by any chance, see the January employment numbers for the United States? The only employment sectors showing any growth at all are medical marijuana cashiers, Hollywood sober-living coaches and “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” understudies filling in for maimed cast members.

Are we one jobs report away from liberals rioting in the street?

Mubarak supported U.S. policy, used his military to fight Muslim extremists and recognized Israel’s right to exist. Or as the left calls it, three strikes and you’re out.

Obama was so rough on the Egyptian leader, the Saudis reportedly had to ask him not to humiliate Mubarak. (You know, like Chinese President Hu did to Obama.) In fact, Mubarak may be the only despot Obama didn’t bow to.

You’d think Mubarak and Obama would be natural allies. Mubarak lives in Egypt; Obama created a pyramid scheme known as ObamaCare. To win Obama’s support, maybe Mubarak should have dropped the whole “president” thing and called himself “czar.” Obama seems to like czars.

Or he should have announced that Egypt was going to blow $500 billion on a high-speed bullet train nobody wanted.

You know another country where Obama wasn’t interested in democracy? (I mean, besides the U.S. when it comes to health care reform?) That’s right — Iran.

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