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Or is this better?

Liberals in Congress and the media are worried that the GOP actually plans on fighting the Democrat socialist agenda.

Jennifer Steinhauer and Robert Pear lamented in the New York Times:

The health care law, entitlement programs, new limits on emissions of greenhouse gases from oil refineries and power plants, and other legislation that Republicans say cannot be justified by a strict interpretation of the Constitution — a document the new leaders plan to read on the House floor on Thursday — are all in the cross hairs.

While President Obama and Republicans were able to work together during last month’s lame-duck session — to the vocal consternation of the most partisan ends of each party’s base — to pass a tax package and a variety of last-minute legislation, including the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and the ratification of the anti-nuclear proliferation treaty with Russia, such bipartisan consensus seems unlikely at the outset of the new House session.

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, who is in line to succeed Ms. Pelosi, has said that this time around he would lead efforts to revive the private sector by reducing the size of government — cutting federal regulation, taxes and spending, including the budget of Congress itself.

Mr. Boehner also said Republicans would alter House rules to make it easier to curb government spending and to require more public disclosure about the work of the House.

House Republicans plan on passing a full repeal of Obamacare as a symbolic act, acknowledging that it will be stopped in the Senate, or vetoed by the President. However, after setting the tone, the GOP plans on defunding and dismantling Obamacare piece by piece. Additionally, with Paul Ryan’s Road Map the GOP is finally starting to talk about realistic entitlement reforms.

Fueled by a reverence for the Constitution and an acknowledgment of reality, Republicans won in 2010 by representing the alternative to Obamunism. If the Grand Old Party wishes to remain in power surrender is not an option.

Mitch McConnell stated that his foremost political priority is ensuring that Barack Obama is a one-term president. Republicans are openly stating that they plan on using Obamacare as an albatross to hang around Democrats in 2012. The only way to fix the economy, and the country, is to get government out of the way. The only way to get government out of the way is to defeat Democrats. The GOP, at long last, is ready to play hardball.

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats believe that a renewed debate over Obamacare will actually help them. The Left believes that the only problem with Obama’s government takeover of healthcare is the branding. If only the American people really understood how great Obamacare is, they’d support the monstrosity.The fights over Obamacare, and liberty, are fights the GOP should welcome, and decisively win.

The legislative plan for the GOP is quite simple; Barry Goldwater spelled it out in 1960:

I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is `needed’ before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents “interests,” I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.

For a modern interpretation “Undo It” works:

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Follow @AriMFine, @AndrewLawton and @RyanWRuppert on Twitter to stay up-to-date on any and all important news.

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Psalms 116:1-2: “I love the Lord, because He has heard my voice and my supplications; because He has inclined His ear to me, therefore I will call upon Him as long as I live.”

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National Review: America’s First Christmas
By: Rich Lowry

en. George Washington’s army retreated from New York in ignominy in November 1776. As it moved through New Jersey, Lt. James Monroe, the future president, stood by the road and counted the troops: 3,000 left from an original force of 30,000.

In December 1776, the future of America hung on the fate of a bedraggled army barely a step ahead of annihilation.

The Americans confronted about two-thirds of the strength of the British army, and half of its navy, not to mention thousands of German mercenaries. Ron Chernow recounts in his new book, Washington: A Life, that when the British fleet showed up off New York, an American soldier marveled that it was as if “all London was afloat.”

The defense of New York was barely worthy of the name. When British troops crossed into Manhattan at Kips Bay, the Americans ran. Washington reportedly exclaimed in despair, “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?”

Later, from the New Jersey Palisades, he watched as the British took Fort Washington across the Hudson, held by 3,000 American troops, and put surrendering Americans to the sword. According to one account, Washington turned away and wept “with the tenderness of a child.”

British strategy depended on shattering American faith in the Continental Army and reconciling the rebellious colonies to the Crown. As the Americans fled to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, the British occupied New Jersey and offered an amnesty to anyone declaring his loyalty. They had thousands of takers, including one signer of the Declaration of Independence.

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USA Today: It’s time to get tough with Iran
By: Sarah Palin

Iran continues to defy the international community in its drive to acquire nuclear weapons. Arab leaders in the region rightly fear a nuclear-armed Iran. We suspected this before, but now we know for sure because of leaked diplomatic cables. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia “frequently exhorted the U.S. to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons program,” according to these communications. Officials from Jordan said the Iranian nuclear program should be stopped by any means necessary. Officials from the United Arab Emirates and Egypt saw Iran as evil, an “existential threat” and a sponsor of terrorism. If Iran isn’t stopped from obtaining nuclear weapons, it could trigger a regional nuclear arms race in which these countries would seek their own nuclear weapons to protect themselves.

That wouldn’t be the only catastrophic consequence for American interests in the Middle East. Our credibility and reputation would suffer a serious blow if Iran succeeds in producing its own nuclear weapons after we’ve been claiming for years that such an event could not and would not be tolerated. A nuclear-armed and violently anti-American Iran would be an enormous threat to us and to our allies. Israel in particular would face the gravest threat to its existence since its creation. Iran’s leaders have repeatedly called for Israel’s destruction, and Iran already possesses missiles that can reach Israel. Once these missiles are armed with nuclear warheads, nothing could stop the mullahs from launching a second Holocaust. It’s only a matter of time before Iran develops missiles that could reach U.S. territory.

Even without nuclear weapons, Iran has provided arms used to kill American soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Iran is also the biggest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. It has shielded al-Qaeda leaders, including one of Osama bin Laden’s sons. Imagine how much worse it would be for us if this regime acquired nuclear weapons.

Toughen up

President Obama once said a nuclear-armed Iran would be “unacceptable.” Yet, Iran’s nuclear progress still continues unchecked. Russia continues to support Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactors. It also continues to sell arms to Iran — despite the Obama administration’s much-touted “reset” policy with Russia. The administration trumpets the United Nations sanctions passed earlier this year, but those sanctions are not the “crippling” ones we were promised. Much more can be done, such as banning insurance for shipments to Iran, banning all military sales to Iran, ending all trade credits, banning all financial dealings with Iranian banks, limiting Iran’s access to international capital markets and banking services, closing air space and waters to Iran’s national air and shipping lines, and, especially, ending Iran’s ability to import refined petroleum. These would be truly “crippling” sanctions. They would work if implemented.

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National Review: Why This Orthodox Jew Loves Christmas Music
By: Michael Rosen

For me, an Orthodox Jew in 21st-century America, December truly is the most wonderful time of the year.

Yes, there’s Hanukkah and the family and community celebration it entails. And, sure, there’s winter vacation, the week or so between Christmas and New Year’s when the kids are home from school and my wife and I take time off from work.

But I really love December because it’s around then that my cable provider revives its “Sounds of the Seasons” music channel, which airs round-the-clock Christmas music through early January. Yes, I admit it: My name is Michael Rosen, and I love Christmas music.

Let me be clear: I am deeply proud of my faith, which I practice rigorously. While I genuinely respect the tenets of other creeds, I abhor religious syncretism of all sorts, and I have no desire to observe Christian holidays; the 20-plus yearly holidays on the Jewish calendar are plenty, thank you very much. And I profoundly loathe aggressive proselytizers of all stripes, especially those, like Jews for Jesus, that train their fire on me and my people.

I’ve also enjoyed the recent boomlet in neo-Chanukah music, including the amusing (Adam Sandler’s iconic “Hanukkah Song” and its sequels, and Tom Lehrer’s hilarious “Hanukkah in Santa Monica”), the catchy (the sweet-natured, harmonious “Eight Days of Hanukkah” by the unlikely interfaith duo of Sen. Orrin Hatch and Jeffrey Goldberg), and the viral (“Candlelight” by the Maccabeats of Yeshiva University).

Yet Christmas music exerts a strong emotional and intellectual influence over me every December, for three distinct reasons, in increasing order of importance: its musical beauty; its deep-seated American-ness; and, most importantly, its powerful message of religious tolerance.

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Washington Examiner: Voters elected Republicans to end Obamaism, not expand it

It has probably escaped the attention of all but the few who make it their business to pay attention to such things, so we note here that a subtle but dangerous piece of revisionism about the meaning of the November election crept into the national political conversation this week.

Nowhere was that revisionism more evident than in President Obama’s comments late Wednesday in lauding the just-ended 111th Congress, and in particular its lame-duck conclusion: “A lot of folks in this town predicted that after the midterm elections, Washington would be headed for more partisanship and more gridlock. And instead, this has been a season of progress for the American people. That progress … is a reflection of the message that voters sent in November, a message that said it’s time to find common ground on challenges facing our country.” A few paragraphs later, it became clear that Obama wants us to believe that voters meant for congressional Democrats and Republicans to find that common ground so they can do more of what made the 111th Congress “the most productive two years that we’ve had in generations.”

No, Mr. President, voters in 2010 did not demand bipartisan cooperation in 2011 to advance Obamacare, increase out-of-control federal spending that drove the national debt to $13.4 trillion and the annual deficit to $1.4 trillion, add thousands of bureaucrats to the government payroll even as private-sector unemployment remains near 10 percent, create hundreds more wasteful, duplicative federal programs that mainly benefit Democratic-favorite special interests like Big Labor, impose thousands more growth-killing environmental regulations, or erect multitudes of additional obstacles to achieving energy independence here at home.

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National Review: Random Thoughts
By: Thomas Sowell

Random thoughts on the passing scene:

Let’s face it: Most of us are not half as smart as we may sometimes think we are — and for intellectuals, not one-tenth as smart.

One of the biggest obstacles to economic recovery is that politicians and the media are both focused on how government can make the economy recover, rather than on how it can let the economy recover. One of the biggest deterrents to investments — and the jobs they could create — is uncertainty over what new bright ideas will come out of Washington to change the rules in midstream.

Is there some reason that football helmets have to be hard? Wouldn’t a thick rubber helmet provide protection without being itself an injury-producing weapon?

The History Channel has some very good programs when it sticks to history. But it keeps going off on tangents with all kinds of contemporary activities and even weird speculations that are not history.

One of the telling signs carried in a Tea Party demonstration said: “Spread my work ethic, not my wealth.” It may be better to teach people how to fish, rather than to give them fish, but too many politicians give them fish, in order to get their votes.

Among the things that have come out of the WikiLeaks documents is that the king of Saudi Arabia has a more realistic understanding of the enormous dangers of an Iranian nuclear bomb than the president of the United States does.

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Apollo 8 Christmas

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Washington Post: Dave Camp’s plan: Taxes made simple
By George F. Will

Many parents have heard FICA Screams. Indignant children, holding in trembling hands their first paychecks, demand to know what FICA is and why it is feasting on their pay.

FICA (the Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax) is government compassion, expressed numerically: It is the welfare state; it funds Social Security and Medicare. Sometimes it makes young people into conservatives.

Dave Camp was 14, working for his father’s garage in central Michigan, when he made the acquaintance of FICA. Now 57 and about to begin his 11th term in Congress, he will chair the House Ways and Means Committee, where he will try to implement the implications of his complaint that “the tax code is 10 times longer than the Bible, without the good news.”

His aim is “fundamental” tax reform, understood the usual way – broadening the base (eliminating loopholes) to make lower rates possible. He would like a top rate of 25 percent – three points lower than Ronald Reagan achieved in 1986, with what proved to be perishable simplification.

In George W. Bush’s 2004 speech to the Republican convention, he denounced the tax code as “a complicated mess” that annually requires “6 billion hours of paperwork” – now estimated at 7.6 billion. He vowed to “simplify” it. The audience cheered. Then he promised new complexities. There would be “opportunity zones” – tax relief for depressed areas – and a tax credit to encourage businesses to establish health savings accounts. The audience cheered.

This is perennial mischief – using the tax code not simply to raise revenue efficiently (with minimal distortion of economic behavior) but to pamper pet causes, appease muscular interests and make social policy. Since 1986, the tax code has acquired more than 15,000 complications.

“Targeted” tax cuts are popular complexities because they serve a bossy government’s agenda of behavior modification: You can keep more of your money if you do what Washington wants. The tax code, says Camp, “should not be a tool of industrial policy” or of “crony capitalism”: “Politicians should not pick the industry of the day.”

One of Camp’s objections to the health-care law is its obvious design to cripple health savings accounts.

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Human Events: Woody, Haley & The Klan
By: Patrick J. Buchanan

“In May 1866, a little group of young men in the Tennessee village of Pulaski, finding their time hang heavily on their hands after the excitement of the field, so lately abandoned, formed a secret club for the mere pleasure of association, for private amusement — for anything that might break the monotony of the too quiet place, as their wits might work upon the matter, and one of their number suggested that they call themselves the Kuklos, the Circle.”

This prettified depiction of the founding of the Ku Klux Klan is from “A History of the American People” by Princeton professor and future President Woodrow Wilson.

The main activities of the Klan, wrote Wilson, were “pranks,” “mischief” and “frolicking.” Occasionally they did prey upon blacks, Wilson conceded, but black fears of the Klan were “comic.”

In “Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past,” Bruce Bartlett relates countless such anecdotes to show that while the Republican Party is endlessly smeared as racist, at its worst, it could not hold a candle to the party of Wilson and FDR.

What brings this history up is the media assault on Gov. Haley Barbour for his answer to an interviewer’s question as to why his hometown, Yazoo City, avoided the violence that attended the desegregation of other cities in the Mississippi of his youth. Haley’s reply:

“You heard of the Citizens’ Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City, they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their a– run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.”

No one has contradicted the facts as stated by Haley, that the Citizens’ Council of Yazoo City consisted of “town leaders” who did not want any Klan violence ripping their town apart.

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Town Hall: Actually, Huck, It’s Palin Who Gets It
By: David Harsanyi

Two names frequently bandied about as potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates engaged in a minor but revealing squabble this week.

During what I assume was an action-packed episode of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” on TLC, the former vice presidential candidate poked some gentle fun at first lady Michelle Obama’s ubiquitous children’s health crusade.

And this wasn’t the first time Palin had disparaged the campaign and the school nutrition food bill that comes attached to it.

As you would expect, duty beckoned enlightened Americans everywhere to run to their keyboards and ridicule Palin. The few rational Republicans left in the country were called to action and gently explained to this crazy woman that children are the future — which, evolutionarily speaking, is indisputable.

“With all due respect to my colleague and friend Sarah Palin, I think she’s misunderstood what Michelle Obama is trying to do,” retorted the once generously proportioned Mike Huckabee on a New York radio show. Obama, explained the former Arkansas governor, is “not trying to tell people what to eat or not trying to force the government’s desires on people. She’s stating the obvious, that we do have an obesity problem in this country.”

(More like overstating the obvious, but that’s another story.)

In this case, Huckabee is either confused or, judging from his prior work, the kind of guy who dismisses the distinction between convincing someone and coercing someone. Especially in those historical moments when “something needs to be done,” which, as you know, can be often.

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Thomas Sowell – Diversity

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The Chronicle: The Great College-Degree Scam
By: Richard Vedder

With the help of a small army of researchers and associates (most importantly, Chris Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe, and Chris Denhart) and starting with help from Douglas Himes of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) has unearthed what I think is the single most scandalous statistic in higher education. It reveals many current problems and ones that will grow enormously as policymakers mindlessly push enrollment expansion amidst what must become greater public-sector resource limits.

Here it is: approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled—occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our nation’s stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a bachelor’s degree or more. (We are working to integrate some earlier Edwin Rubenstein data on this topic to give us a more complete picture of this trend).

How did my crew of Whiz Kids arrive at this statistic? We found some obscure but highly useful BLS data for 1992 that provides occupational/educational attainment data for the entire labor force, and similar data for 2008 (reported, to much commentary, in this space and by CCAP earlier). We then took the ratio of the change in college graduates filling these less skilled jobs to the total increase in the number of college graduates. Note I use the word “increase.” Enrollment expansion/increased access policy relates to the margin—to changes in enrollments/college graduates over time.

To be sure, there are some issues of measurement, judgment, and data comparability. With this in mind, I had my associates calculate the incremental unskilled job to college graduate ratio using different assumptions about the data. Even with alternative assumptions, a majority of the increased college graduate population is doing jobs that historically have been filled by persons with lesser education.

The exact numbers in the initial calculation are broken down as follows: In 1992 the BLS reports that total college graduate employment was 28.9 million, of whom 5.1 million were in occupations which the BLS classified as “noncollege level jobs” while in 2008 the BLS data indicate that total college graduate employment was 49.35 million, with 17.4 million in occupations classified as requiring less than a bachelor’s degree.

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New York Post: Shut the Fockers up
By: Kyle Smith

“Little Fockers” may not be the worst, most vulgar, most pathetic and least funny picture of the year. But it’s a strong contender for second place behind the picture Brett Favre allegedly sent over his cellphone.

According to the third film in the Ben Stiller-Robert De Niro “Focker” series, the worst so far, comedy means slapping up some situation that would never happen, having someone else stumble in to misread things and, when lost, getting everyone to repeat bits from the earlier movies or simply say “Focker.” A lot.

Even when it makes no sense: Visiting his son-in-law Gaylord/Greg Focker (Stiller) for an inexplicably lengthy two weeks before the grandchildren’s birthday party, Jack Byrnes (De Niro) worries about mortality and wants to tap the next family leader. So he solemnly asks Greg, “Are you prepared to be . . . the Godfocker?” (Cue “Godfather” music.) Is it likely that this could be a nickname for the head of the Byrnes clan? Which, naturally, Jack would want to be led by someone who is not a blood relative whom he doesn’t like.

Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand, as the senior Fockers, turn up to address their son as “Gay” or to talk loudly about their sex habits. Jessica Alba — her pharmaceutical-sales rep is supposed to get laughs because she is named “Andi Garcia” — shows up at male nurse Focker’s hospital, inexplicably signs him up to give speeches on her erectile-dysfunction drug, then strips down to her undies and jumps him — while Jack is spying on poor Gaylord.

I’m not even sure the real Ben Stiller, the funny one with the nine-figure net worth, could get Jessica Alba. But Gaylord the married, harried he-nurse, the man who spends his days wielding an enema tube — Gaylord the woebegone thousandaire? And even if she did want you, and was blind to all of the rich surgeons all around, would she have to undress and hurl herself on you? Has Jessica Alba ever had to put that much effort into anything?

Out of nowhere, Stiller and De Niro do a parody of the subway chase from “The French Connection.” (They sure picked the wrong audience for that gag — “CSI” jokes would have been better.)

Without much cause, a now sadly middle-aged Owen Wilson hangs around again as the golden best friend to flirt with Greg’s wife again (accidentally, he got a giant back tattoo of her).

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The sad fact is that Senate Republicans have been complicit in allowing awful legislation to pass. Lindsey Graham, yes, that Lindsey Graham, actually excoriated his own party for caving in to the Democrats unnecessarily:

“When it’s all going to be said and done, Harry Reid has eaten our lunch,” Graham said on Fox News radio. “This has been a capitulation in two weeks of dramatic proportions of policies that wouldn’t have passed in the new Congress.”

Republican senators have broken with the party’s leaders on several key votes in order to advance some of President Obama’s top policies during the lame-duck. GOP members defected to pass a repeal of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and have done likewise to secure likely ratification for the START Treaty. Some Republicans might allow a health bill for 9/11 first responders to move forward, while three Republicans voted to end debate on the DREAM Act, an ultimately unsuccessful immigration bill…

“I can understand the Democrats being afraid of the new Republicans; I can’t understand Republicans being afraid of the new Republicans,” Graham lamented on WTMA radio. “They’re not opportunities to take everything you couldn’t do for two years and jam it. It’s literally what they’re doing, across the board. And after a while, I stop blaming them, and I blame us.”

When Lindsey Graham is faulting the GOP for caving in to the Democrats…

The fact that the Democrats have completely ignored the will of the people and pursued their radical agenda is to be expected. That Republicans have repeatedly capitulated is unacceptable.

Unfortunately, there are still too many Republicans who want to go along to get along. They have no real belief in reform. In fact, some Republicans actually fear and disdain the reform movement. The elitists within the party still look down on the ‘uncouth’ Tea Party.

Because President Obama pursued such a radical agenda in his first two years in office, the GOP wilderness years were cut short. While it was of the utmost importance to block the Democrats, the Republicans quick return to power has allowed some of the deadwood to stay in place.

In 2010 the Tea Party movement stayed within the Republican Party. The energy that they provided launched the GOP to victory. If the Grand Old Party wants to keep the movement together, elected officials better realize that the time for compromises, in which Republicans acquiesce to Democrats is over. Now is the time for bold, conservative leadership.

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Follow @AriMFine, @AndrewLawton and @RyanWRuppert on Twitter to stay up-to-date on any and all important news.

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Wall Street Journal: Liberalism: An Autopsy
By: R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

In the tumultuous history of postwar American liberalism, there has been a slow but steady decline of which liberals have been steadfastly oblivious. The heirs of the New Deal are down to around 20% of the electorate, according to recent Gallup polls. Conservatives account for 42% of the vote, and in the recent election the independents, the second most numerous group at 29% of the electorate, broke the conservatives’ way. They were alarmed by the deficit. They will be alarmed for a long time.

Liberalism’s decline might appear, at first glance, to have begun with the 1961 inauguration of President John F. Kennedy—when historians noted the first glimmerings of what was to become liberalism’s distinctive trait, overreach. Kennedy’s soaring oratory was infectious and admirable and even impressed a later generation of conservatives. But it was a bit dishonest. There never was a missile gap with the Soviet Union, as he claimed, or any other cause for histrionics. On the domestic side, the oratory set in motion President Lyndon Johnson’s catastrophic War on Poverty.

JFK’s stirring language represented a break with the Burkean understanding of President Dwight Eisenhower. Ike, whether he articulated it or not, wanted to put the Great Depression and the dangerous confrontations of the early Cold War period behind us. He wanted to return to normalcy. Yet Kennedy’s inaugural put America on a different path, one that led to the Cuban missile crisis and ultimately to Vietnam. It fixed America’s stance in the world, and with that stance we were on the road to Iraq and Afghanistan. Domestically it set us on the path to a behemoth big government.

Still, in tracing liberalism’s decline, one cannot ignore an earlier event: the civil war that broke out in the aftermath of World War II. The conflict pitted what we might call the radicals led by Henry Wallace against the advocates of what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. would call in his book, “The Vital Center,” more practical liberals like Hubert Humphrey, Joseph L. Rauh and Walter Reuther. They were hard-headed and patriotic, and their desiderata were reasonable by comparison with the radicals’ utopian ideas about the Soviet Union.

The practical liberals won in the late 1940s, but in 1972 civil war broke out anew. This time the radicals won. In the meantime, LBJ’s Great Society caused even some liberals to warn against the “unintended consequences” of government programs. These were to be the first new recruits to modern conservatism. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol and, for a time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were in Kristol’s words liberals “who were mugged by reality.” The radicals were seeking refuge from reality in a self-regarding fantasy. Only a crisis in the leadership of President Richard Nixon, Watergate, allowed them to hide from the American electorate their fantastic delusions.

Conservatives have had Edmund Burke and the Founding Fathers as their cynosures. Sometimes they have provided discipline; sometimes conservatives have followed their own star. The problem for liberals is they have been denied a cynosure. Some had looked to the British Fabian Socialists and some to Karl Marx, but since the late 1940s liberals became coy about their intellectual mentors.

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National Review: Can Republicans Talk?
By: Thomas Sowell

The biggest battle in the lame-duck session of Congress may well be over whether or not to extend the Bush administration’s tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire in January. The fact that this decision has been left until late in the eleventh hour, even though the expiration date has been known for years, tells us a lot about the utter irresponsibility of Congress.

Neither businesses nor individuals nor the Internal Revenue Service will know what to do until this issue is resolved. In a stalled economy, we do not need this prolonged uncertainty that can paralyze both consumer spending and investment spending.

Republicans want the current tax rates to continue, and Democrats want only the current tax rates for people earning less than “the rich”– variously defined — to continue, with everyone making more than some specified income to have their tax rates rise next year.

What makes predicting the outcome of this battle very difficult is that Republicans won a big majority in the House of Representatives in the recent election, but the tax cuts are scheduled to expire before the new members of Congress are sworn in — and the Democrats have a big majority in both houses of Congress in the lame-duck session, where this issue will be decided.

Theoretically, the Democrats could win, hands down, since they have the votes. But Congressional Democrats are well aware of how they lost big in the recent election, and some Democrats don’t want to gamble their own jobs in the next election by going the class-warfare route.

Neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can afford to have all the tax rates go up in January because they couldn’t get together and pass a bill to prevent that from happening. But the nature of that bill matters, not just for politicians but — far more important — for the economy.

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Americans for Prosperity: Obama: Miles Away from Reality

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Weekly Standard: Quantitative easing won’t solve our deeper problem.
By: Lawrence B. Lindsey

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke concedes that, while necessary, a new large purchase of government bonds by the Fed to help cover the deficit will not completely solve our problem of slow growth. Many in the markets and around the world express the same sentiment in a more negative way—saying this latest round of “quantitative easing” won’t work. Only time will tell, and our best guess is that, because it is only modestly effective by itself, quantitative easing will probably be part of Fed policy for quite some time. One reason we must hope that quantitative easing is not too successful is that its near term success would mean a catastrophe for government finances.

By the Fed’s reckoning, a successful quantitative easing policy will return us to a more normal economic environment with fairly low but stable inflation, similar to the inflation environment of the last two decades. But a normalization of inflation will also mean a normalization of interest rates. And normalized interest rates will mean much higher interest payments, especially by the world’s biggest debtor: the government of the United States.

Consider the math. This year the government will pay $200 billion in interest on debt held by the public (i.e., non-U.S.-government institutions) of $9 trillion. The average interest rate paid on the debt is 2.2 percent.

To simulate what will happen going forward, assume for the sake of argument some moderate reductions in future deficits from ending higher-end tax cuts, limiting the growth in discretionary spending to the rate of GDP growth, and cutting defense. Under these assumptions, the debt held by the public will rise to $13.1 trillion by 2015 and $16.7 trillion by 2019.

But if interest rates remain at current levels, interest payments will still be relatively manageable: $290 billion in 2015 and $355 billion in 2019.

Now suppose quantitative easing is “successful” in the way the Fed intends, taking inflation close to the average 2.4 percent rate of the last two decades and government borrowing costs back to their two-decade average of 5.7 percent. To get an idea of what happens to the budget, assume this transition happens over three years, so that by 2013 interest rates are back to “normal.” This “return to normal” will mean the government’s interest costs will rise to $847 billion by 2015 and $1.15 trillion by 2019.

The increase in annual interest costs in 2015 alone—$557 billion—is nearly six times the additional revenue that is supposed to be collected by letting the higher end of the Bush tax cuts expire, the centerpiece of the current fiscal policy debate in Washington. The increase in interest costs in 2019—$795 billion—is two-and-a-half times the value of all the Bush income tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 that are due to expire. On the spending side, just the extra interest cost from a quantitative easing “success” would swamp, say, the entire defense budget for the rest of the decade. No plausible increase in taxes or reduction in spending could fill a gap of that magnitude.

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Washington Post: The case for engaged justices
By George F. Will

“The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the Constitution is written.”

- Marbury v. Madison (1803)

Debates about judicial review concern the propriety and scope of judicial supervision of democracy and involve the countermajoritarian dilemma: How to square the principle of popular sovereignty with the practice of allowing appointed judges, accountable to no contemporary constituency, to overturn laws enacted by elected legislators?

A case destined for the Supreme Court concerns the health-care law. The Constitution establishes a government of limited and enumerated powers. Which one empowers Congress to force individuals to purchase health insurance and to punish those who do not?

Supporters of the mandate answer: the power to regulate interstate commerce. Opponents reply: Unless that power is infinitely elastic, it does not authorize Congress to forbid the inactivity of not purchasing a product from a private company. If the power is infinitely elastic, Congress can do anything – eat your broccoli, or else – and America no longer has a limited government.

Fortunately, a Texas judge recently wrote an opinion that provides pertinent clarity about the tension between judging and majoritarianism. The Texas Supreme Court, on which Don Willett sits, struck down a law for violating the Texas Constitution’s prohibition of retroactive laws. The law immunized one company from a pending lawsuit by a man dying of asbestos exposure. The question was: Should the court blindly defer to the Legislature’s judgment that its police power – its general authority to protect the public welfare – trumped the constitutional ban on retroactive legislation?

The court said no. What Willett said in his concurring opinion is pertinent to the health insurance mandate.

Has the U.S. Supreme Court construed the commerce clause so permissively that Congress has seized, by increments, a sweeping police power that enables it to do virtually anything it wants? Willett’s words, applied to the Obamacare mandate debate, highlight this question: When does judicial deference to legislative majorities become dereliction of the judicial duty to discern limits to what majorities are lawfully permitted to do?

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We The People:

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Human Events: The Fiscal Commission And Conservative Tax Policy
By: Michael Avari

When asked about the Bush tax cuts, Milton Friedman, in characteristic piercing style, remarked, “I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it’s possible. … [T]he big problem is not taxes, the big problem is spending. … The only effective way I think to hold it down, is to hold down the amount of income the government has. The way to do that is to cut taxes.”

While many have preemptively dismissed the Fiscal Commission draft report, the influence of conservative members on the commission—Sen. Tom Coburn, Sen. Judd Gregg, and Rep. Paul Ryan—is evident on taxes, where, as Friedman suggested, things should begin.

Friedman is perhaps best known on fiscal policy for proposing that a single flat-rate tax on personal income replace all taxes, deductions, and loopholes. Disarming the government of tax manipulation as a tool to guide economic behavior would unleash the creative spirit that drives capitalism.

Coming tantalizingly close to Friedman, the Commission’s report recommends abolishing the alternative minimum tax (AMT), eliminating most exemptions and deductions, and consolidating personal tax rates into three lower brackets.

The report offers some useful purposes. First, it ventilates all that is wrong with our current tax system: a complexity that breeds uncertainty and that discourages entrepreneurship and investment. Details about exemptions and deductions should not obscure the fundamental principle that what is to one man a deduction is to another man a subsidy.

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Orange County Register: Jay Ambrose: Good motives can produce bad results
By: Jay Ambrose

Good intentions will get you if you don’t watch out. That’s true of the invasion of the body scanners, of minimum-wage laws, of some welfare programs and – please don’t forget it – a supposedly altruistic push by federal agencies and politicians to put low-income families in their own homes.

Again and again, the government throws us lifesavers that aren’t lifesavers at all, but weighty, entangling devices that ensnare us, sink us, drown us.

Because body scanners won’t detect bombs in body cavities, they’ll do no good even as they humiliate airline ticket-holders on a scale only a world power could devise.

As literally dozens of studies have proven, minimum-wage laws invariably cost workers jobs because employers cannot afford the new standards.

And those mortgages the government insisted banks bestow on those who could not afford to pay them? All they did was contribute mightily to a rash of foreclosures, the worst financial crisis in decades and a recession wrecking the lives of millions of people.

To learn the real lowdown on how good motives can produce bad results, it helps to heed the writings and speeches of Jay Richards, a Princeton philosophy-theology Ph.D., author of “Money, Greed, and God,” and someone whose thoughts I recently took in at a speech at Colorado Christian University.

“Piety is no substitute for technique,” he said, quoting the Christian philosopher Etienne Gilson and adding this by way of explanation in the book: “What he meant is that having the right intentions, being oriented in the right way, doesn’t take the place of doing things right.”

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National Review: Let the States Go Bankrupt
By: Michael Barone

We won’t be able to say we weren’t warned. Continued huge federal budget deficits will eventually mean huge increases in government-borrowing costs, Erskine Bowles, co-chairman of Barack Obama’s deficit-reduction commission, predicted this month. “The markets will come. They will be swift, and they will be severe, and this country will never be the same.”

Bowles is talking about what the business press calls bond-market vigilantes. People with capital are currently willing to loan money to the federal government, by buying U.S. bonds at low interest rates. That’s because interest rates are generally low and because Treasury bonds are regarded as the safest investment in the world.

But what if they aren’t? What if investors suddenly perceive a higher risk and demand a higher return? That’s what Bowles is talking about, and there are signs it may be starting to happen. The Federal Reserve’s second round of quantitative easing — QE2 — was intended to lower the interest rate on long-term bonds. Instead, the rate has been going up.

The federal government still seems a long way from the disaster Bowles envisions. But some state governments aren’t.

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Sen. Tom Coburn on Returning to the Values of the Founders:

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National Post: Beyond Cancun, a fossil-fuel world
By: Terence Corcoran

The UN climate-change war machine, on the brink of self-destruction in Cancun, Mexico, keeps cranking out scenarios, reports, research and propaganda on the evils of a carbon-based economy. No stat or concept is too trivial to be manipulated and hyped into a news item or factoid of alleged proof of past or coming disaster. “Britain’s salmon at risk from ocean acidification,” “2010 on track to be warmest year for Canada,” “Climate change to worsen food security, UN talks told.”

That’s just some of Friday’s offerings. Never mind the other headlines (Deep freeze kills 30 in Poland; Britains up to knees in snow). It’s all part of a never-ending stream of material that is intended, presumably, to galvanize nations and negotiators meeting in Cancun into signing a replacement for the absurdly impractical Kyoto Protocol carbon-emission targets. The Cancun meetings still have a few days to go, which means the next week will consume increasing amounts of media attention and produce volumes of overheated rhetoric about the need to slash fossil-fuel use and dramatically reduce global carbon emissions by some impossible target date.

Meanwhile, back in the real economy, the world is moving in the other direction. Global availability of and demand for fossil fuels — oil, gas and coal — continues to climb and there isn’t a realistic outlook for future energy use that shows any signs that carbon-based energy sources are about to decline. At the same time, as Lawrence Solomon summarizes elsewhere on this page, the green energy bubble is bursting in Europe as nations slash their subsidies to solar and wind projects, the alleged alternatives to fossil fuels.

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Human Events: Cutting Obama’s Monster Deficits Down To Size
By: Donald Lambro

There’s something for everyone to hate in the deficit-cutting plan by the co-chaimen of the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, but there’s also a lot to like, too.

Whether or not the plan receives the supermajority 14 votes from President Obama’s 18-member commission may be irrelevant in the end. It contains the seeds of some much-needed tax cut proposals to grow the economy, suggestions to slow down the growth of Social Security and other entitlements, and a way forward to place a “tight” cap on the growth of domestic discretionary spending and eliminate 200,000 workers from the federal payroll.

While the national news media’s focus has been on the panel’s mission to come up with spending cuts, one of its strongest deficit-fighting proposals takes a page out of Ronald Reagan’s supply-side book to cut the top marginal income tax rate to between 23 percent and 29 percent — and the 35 percent corporate tax rate down to 28 percent — by eliminating corporate welfare and other tax breaks.

Not only would the commission’s plan sharply cut the corporate tax (the second highest corporate rate in the industrialized world), it would stop taxing overseas profits of U.S-based global companies.

These tax reforms, as U.S. economic history has shown, would unlock a tsunami of capital investment, business expansion, jobs and higher incomes that will significantly boost tax revenues which will reduce borrowing and help to shrink and eventually eliminate the deficits.

House Republican Leader John Boehner, who is in line to become the House speaker, and other GOP conservatives, have embraced the idea of closing loopholes in the tax code to bring down the tax rates and simplify the monstrously complex tax system.

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National Review: Rumblings of Discontent — on Palin
By Mike Potemra

When I see the fervor of Sarah Palin’s fans — and by no means just those who swell the adoring crowds who go to her public appearances — I am convinced that the question is not, “How can she win the GOP nomination?” but “How can she not win it?” When you have anywhere between five and fifteen GOP candidates, all expressing basically the same conservative views, how can anyone other than the only one with the passionate fan base possibly win? And yet: Reading between the lines of what conservative-movement people are saying and writing, there is a great deal of worry about the prospect of a Palin nomination. I would summarize the GOP political writers’ consensus as follows: She must never be criticized, and she must never be nominated.

The most basic underpinning for this view is the notion that she can’t beat Obama, and I think this is a profoundly mistaken assumption. It is based on a too-abstract understanding of the qualifications for the presidency: It holds Palin up against an ideal presidential résumé, and finds her inadequate — which is true enough, but neither fair nor quite relevant. It’s important to remember that in a 2012 general election, she would be confronting not an ideal presidential profile, but an all-too-human flesh-and-blood opponent. The choice between Palin and Obama, phrased in the least flattering (to Palin) possible way, is a choice between a woman who may turn out to be seriously inadequate to the job and, therefore, become a failed president; and a man who has already convincingly demonstrated that he is seriously inadequate to the job and, therefore, already is a failed president. This rather changes the “electability” issue, doesn’t it?

I talked to a savvy GOP politico early this evening, who told me that he believed the Palinmania of her backers — which, as I said above, I consider the gamebreaker for the primaries — will peter out once she goes to Iowa or New Hampshire for the umpteenth time. At that point, he said, she will be seen as just another candidate, and therefore judged on a more even playing field.

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National Review: The U.N.: Symptom of Global Chaos
By: Conrad Black (Strictly Right interview with Conrad Black)

The conduct of the United Nations seems to be becoming more and not less bizarre and outrageous. The human-rights performance of both the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly has confirmed that, more than ever, the U.N. is a ludicrous playpen for the failed states and most odious despotisms of the planet. They gleefully and churlishly revile the serious powers, as if in doing so they somehow reversed the balance of strength, moral stature, and civic merit. A numerous U.S. delegation arrived to participate in the Council’s deliberations, ending a long boycott, and each American speaker earnestly proclaimed it an honor to be present. There followed a piling on of the world’s most disreputable regimes, accusing the U.S. of massive civil-rights violations.

The American delegates sat like mute defendants in a show trial while their country was arraigned by the delegates of Cuba, China, Libya, North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and many others — including Egypt, a dependent of U.S. aid that has just declined to admit American inspectors to observe its current farcical elections. Unfortunately, they all had a legitimate argument, as they mentioned the failings of American criminal procedure, the racial imbalances and inhumane conditions in the prison system, and various other more or less well-founded complaints. But it does not lie in the mouths of spokesmen for such infamous regimes to condemn the shortcomings of American legal and social justice.

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The move to rush through the DREAM ACT illustrates that the Democrats understand that it was their agenda that was rejected by the voters this year. The Democrats are aware of the fact that most Americans reject their socialist vision. Instead of trying to convince the American people that socialism works, the Democrats want to legalize millions of new Democrat voters.

The Democratic Party is at war with the American way of life. They reject and want to disown the legacy and style of government drawn up by the Founders. In place of the Constitution, the Left wants to move in the direction of Western European socialism. In fact, that it exactly what Howard Dean said in his post-election analysis.

While the Democrats have done their best to “fundamentally transform” the United States, they have reached the limit. This November, voters put up a wall. The voting public saw the direction the Democrats were marching in and said a resounding ‘NO!’ to socialism. Democrats are many things, but politically incapable they are not. They see the writing on the wall. They were routed in the midterms, President Obama’s approval rating is stuck in the 40s, 26% of voters think the President will be reelected, and only 38% think Obama should be reelected. Not too much to be optimistic about for Democrats in 2012.

What if the Democrats could add a few million voters to the rolls in time for the election? That is what amnesty is about. It is a pure political calculation by the Democrats. The Democrats believe that the newly legalized voters will be another exploitable constituency. That is why the Democrats are champing at the bit to rush through amnesty, an immensely unpopular policy, in a Congress that has already lost the confidence of the American people.

I am no fan of Senator Murkowski – I had hoped that Joe Miller would win. Alas, he did not. I am not about to support an Al Franken style theft from Alaskan citizens. They voted – she won. Republicans should not try to reverse a clear win through the courts.

What’s done is done. The result sucks – but we have to stick with it. That’s how the system’s supposed to work.

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Strictly Right Radio episode 70

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]]> http://strictlyright.com/2010/11/strictly-right-radio-episode-70/feed/ 2 http://strictlyright.com/2010/11/rand-paul-sets-the-conservative-tone/ http://strictlyright.com/2010/11/rand-paul-sets-the-conservative-tone/#comments Tue, 09 Nov 2010 11:32:03 +0000 Strictly Right http://strictlyright.com/?p=3008 Of all the fantastic news from last week, near the top is the fact that Rand Paul will be in the United States Senate come January.

In his brilliant acceptance speech, Senator-elect Paul detailed the inexorable link between freedom and capitalism. Paul pointed out that the United States that is the freest and most developed nation in human history. Furthermore, Paul explained that the wealth and freedom that the United States enjoys is nothing to apologize for, a message lost on President Obama. In that vein, Paul excoriated the President for traveling abroad and denigrating his own country, and the its free market system. Unlike President Obama, Rand Paul has a firm belief in American Exceptionalism.

Additionally, Paul detailed why it is harmful to bailout broke institutions, be they socialist countries, or insolvent banks. Rand Paul actually understands that the country is out of money. His willingness to stand-up for fiscal sanity is a much needed addition to the United States Congress.

Rand Paul’s embrace of the Tea Party ensures that there will be another movement conservative in the Senate. Moreover, it is highly unlikely that anyone related to Ron Paul (love him or hate him) will be co-opted by the GOP establishment. Look for Senator Paul to be a bare-knuckles brawler for common sense, Constitutional conservatism for many years to come.