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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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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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That being said, many conservatives have felt tentative at best about a Romney presidency. In the following clip, Governor Romney explains why he “loved” serving as governor (skip to 0:33):

“Being governor is probably the best job you can think of because you have a real impact on the lives of people you care about… you approve schools, you get healthcare for folks…”

It is important to take note of unguarded statements made by politicians. When they go off script, even for a few brief sentences, it lets you know what they really think. Governor Romney’s professed “love” of serving in government so he can do things for people is troubling. It is reminiscent ‘the great engineer’ – Herbert Hoover.

The progressive wing of the Republican party is always looking for ways the government can be used to implement ‘conservative’ policies. The most recent terminology used was a call for an ‘energetic’ government. Of course, the notion that a gargantuan government can be used to implement conservatism is noxious and contradictory. Conservatives believe that the government that governs least, governs best.

Governors and presidents are not supposed to be “getting people healthcare.” The best thing the government can do is get out of the way and let people purchase whatever medical insurance they want. The GOP experiment with “kinder, gentler” and “compassionate” conservatism has been disastrous. Republicans should not be New Deal lite. The GOP has to offer a choice, not an echo. The Democrats are the party of big government. The GOP is the liberty party. Republicans should be about giving people the right to chose how to run their own lives, without interference from faceless and nameless bureaucrats. Romney’s “love” of government is worrisome. His desire to use the government to “do things for people” is a red flag.

As pointed out yesterday, George H. W. Bush was the establishment’s strongest candidate against Ronald Reagan in the 1980 primary. Bush criticized Reagan on tax cuts, his pro-life stance, and the defense buildup. Bush famously called Reaganomics “voodoo economics” during the primary campaign. Bush also repeatedly took cheap shots at his opponent’s age.

In 1988, George H.W. Bush ran as a “kinder, gentler” conservative. President Bush’s record proved you can take the Republican out of the establishment, but you can’t take the establishment out of the Republican.

It should come as no surprise that George H. W. Bush still does not understand the conservative movement. Perhaps he’s just waiting for the next candidate who runs on “big Mo.”

In the aforementioned Larry King interview, King asked Bush what he made of the Tea party:

President Bush has no idea what the Tea party is all about. Unfortunately, the Bush family has had a propensity for belittling the conservative movement. The above answer is why people still do not trust the GOP. Many conservatives worry that if they place their trust in the Gran Old Party they will once again be spurned.

The establishment neither understands or likes movement conservatives. Elites see the Tea Party, social conservatives, and other regular people as below them. Ronald Reagan’s brilliant 1977 CPAC speech, which was sighted in yesterday’s article on the establishment vs. Sarah Palin, was premised upon reorganizing the Republican Party. Reagan did not want the GOP to be the party of the establishment, of the country-club bluebloods. Instead, Reagan reformed the party around the organizing principle of freedom. The American people warmly embraced that message.

This organizing principle of freedom is important to remember. Once the GOP dropped that principle they were thrust into the wilderness. No one wants to vote for the party of big government lite. President Bush’s disregard of the Tea Party is illustrative of how the party elites view the Tea Party, and the organizing principle of freedom. They do not understand it, and have no interest in embracing the message.

This Congress, and the 2012 primaries will be a battle for the heart and soul of the GOP. Republicans will have to chose between the conservative, pro-freedom message of Ronald Reagan, and the anti-liberal, non-philosophical Republicanism of the establishment. One approach can change the country, the other will just slow the onslaught of liberalism.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Yes, he made one bad speech. That should not rule him out as a potential 2012 candidate. Governor Jindal is an articulate conservative governor, who has done a great job clearing out the deadwood in what was one of the most corrupt states in the Union. His demonstrated understanding of the issues, compounded with strong record and experience, should make him a force within the GOP – hopefully in 2012.

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Sarah Palin is the only serious presidential candidate taking the Federal reserve to task. Restoring integrity to the dollar and combating inflation was a key tenet of President Reagan’s. Reagan called inflation “as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man.” Inflation is a backdoor tax on Americans.

In their quixotic quest to jump-start the economy through monetary policy, the Federal Reserve has been printing trillions of new dollars, the latest manifestation being the QE2 (quantitative easing) policy. The problem is, due to the uncertain environment created by Obama’s vacillation on tax rates, in conjunction with the Democrats’ anti-business rhetoric and policies, and excessive government spending, businesses and investors do not know what to expect.

In an uncertain environment it is not possible to plan for the future. Not being able to plan for the future prevents businesses from expanding and creating new jobs. In uncertain times people or institutions with money hold onto their capital, waiting for the storm to pass. The measurement for the rate at which money is circulated is known as the velocity of money/circulation. The current velocity is lower than it has been in half a century. Simply put, that means money is not moving – goods and services are not being exchanged. With this low velocity the Fed can print all this money and no one notice it in their day-to-day transactions. The new money is not put into circulation due to the uncertain environment. However, once more predictable times come, there will be trillions of new dollars introduced into the stabilized economy. The rapid increase in the velocity of money will create too many dollars chasing to few goods – inflation. The net result will be substantial devaluation of cash savings that people have accumulated.

It is imperative that the next President restore integrity to the dollar and fight off inflation. Once again, remember, the devaluation of the greenback is a covert way for the government to essentially raise taxes. When inflation strikes the value of saving decline while the prices of goods increase. Inflationary policies have the same effect on you that a tax increase would – you have less spending power (of course, inflation causes many other problems).

On another note, Palin’s admonition that the government does not have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem is Reaganesque The argument that tax cuts cost the government money displays a total lack of respect for property rights. Besides the fact that tax cuts raise government revenues, income is the property of the earner, not the government. Taxes represent the amount of personal property that the government seizes. ‘Lost revenue’ to the government assumes that capital belongs to the government and they decide how much you are allowed to keep. this notion is the basis of the elitist mentality that plagues both parties. Governor Plain’s statement, almost a throwaway line, demonstrates a different understanding of the role of government. Plain’s instinctual reflex is that earners, not the government, are the rightful owners of the fruits of their labor. This is sadly a rarity in government.

All in all, this was a very encouraging interview from the woman that will lead the GOP to the White House in 2012.

(H/T to TRS on the video)

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.

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Charlie Crist is a Detestable & Pathetic Human Being

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Wall Street Journal: Stop Bashing Business, Mr. President: If we tried to start The Home Depot today, it’s a stone cold certainty that it would never have gotten off the ground.

By: Ken Langone

Although I was glad that you answered a question of mine at the Sept. 20 town-hall meeting you hosted in Washington, D.C., Mr. President, I must say that the event seemed more like a lecture than a dialogue. For more than two years the country has listened to your sharp rhetoric about how American businesses are short-changing workers, fleecing customers, cheating borrowers, and generally “driving the economy into a ditch,” to borrow your oft-repeated phrase.

My question to you was why, during a time when investment and dynamism are so critical to our country, was it necessary to vilify the very people who deliver that growth? Instead of offering a straight answer, you informed me that I was part of a “reckless” group that had made “bad decisions” and now required your guidance, if only I’d stop “resisting” it.

I’m sure that kind of argument draws cheers from the partisan faithful. But to my ears it sounded patronizing. Of course, one of the chief conceits of centralized economic planning is that the planners know better than everybody else.

But there’s a much deeper problem than whether I am personally irked or not. Your insistence that your policies are necessary and beneficial to business is utterly at odds with what you and your administration are saying elsewhere. You pick a fight with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, accusing it of using foreign money to influence congressional elections, something the chamber adamantly denies. Your U.S. attorney in New York, Preet Bahrara, compares investment firms to Mexican drug cartels and says he wants the power to wiretap Wall Street when he sees fit. And you drew guffaws of approving laughter with your car-wreck metaphor, recently telling a crowd that those who differ with your approach are “standing up on the road, sipping a Slurpee” while you are “shoving” and “sweating” to fix the broken-down jalopy of state.

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Politico: Daniels open to VAT, oil Tax Hike
Alternate Headline: Mitch Daniels Presidential Ambitions, RIP

By: James Hohmann

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels opened the door Thursday to supporting both a value added tax and a tariff on imported oil, bold proposals that could cause trouble for him with conservatives as he flirts with a long-shot bid for the presidency.

The Republican, staying mum about his 2012 plans, was the guest of honor at a dinner sponsored by the conservative Hudson Institute. He received an award named for Herman Kahn, the legendary nuclear theorist who founded the respected institute 49 years ago and helped inspire the character “Dr. Strangelove” in the movie by the same name.

Daniels, once the Hudson Institute’s chief executive, described himself as an acolyte of Kahn’s and marveled at the creative thinking evident in his 1982 book, “The Coming Boom.”

Daniels recited from Kahn’s book: “It would be most useful to redesign the tax system to discourage consumption and encourage savings and investment. One obvious possibility is a value added tax and flat income tax, with the only exception being a lower standard deduction.”

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LA Times: Obama’s outsized ego

By: Jonah Goldberg

“That’s all right, all of you know who I am,” President Obama joked last week when the presidential seal fell off his podium during a speech in Pittsburgh.

Even though the incident made headlines for no discernible journalistic reason, it was noteworthy as a succinct example of Obama’s arrogance problem. Rather than make a self-deprecating joke, he opted instead to make a self-inflating one, as if to say that the title mattered less than the man.

The good news is that it’s apparently not racist to call Obama arrogant anymore. Not long ago, Keith Olbermann and other gargoyles on the parapets of establishment liberalism insisted that if you were to call attention to the fact that Obama ostentatiously holds himself in very high regard, you were really calling him “uppity,” if you know what I mean.

Now what was once taboo has become undeniable. Even the New Yorker’s David Remnick, author of a loving biography of Obama, tells Der Spiegel, “Obama has a considerable ego.”

And here’s Time’s Mark Halperin: “With the exception of core Obama administration loyalists, most politically engaged elites have reached the same conclusion: The White House is in over its head, isolated, insular, arrogant and clueless about how to get along with or persuade members of Congress, the media, the business community or working-class voters.”

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Newsmax: Interview With The Next president of the United States (My headline)

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American Spectator: Is It Time for a Convention?

By Philip Klein

In August, Missouri became the latest state to rebel against the new national health care law when 71 percent of voters supported a ballot initiative rejecting the legislation’s requirement that individuals purchase government-approved insurance. Several other states will consider similar measures on the ballot this November.

However satisfying this backlash against ObamaCare may be to opponents of the law, these state-based efforts could all be for naught if the U.S. Supreme Court sides with Congress and rules that the legislation’s individual mandate is constitutional.

Such a decision would have far-reaching consequences, giving broad new power to the federal government over individuals and states. It would mean that the interstate Commerce Clause would have been interpreted so broadly as to allow the federal government to regulate the activities of people who choose not to engage in commerce, and within a health insurance market where businesses aren’t even allowed to sell their products across state lines. It would represent the culmination of decades in erosion of the concept of the separation of powers between federal and state governments, and the boldest example of congressional over-reach in the age of Obama.

In that scenario, short of repeal, the only remaining way to fight the law would be to amend the Constitution. Given how polarized the modern U.S. Senate is, it’s highly unlikely that a proposed amendment would garner the necessary 67 votes needed to amend the Constitution in the traditional manner. Yet the Founding Fathers left the states one last check on federal power.

Under Article V of the Constitution, “Congress… on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which… shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States.”

The Constitution has never been amended through a convention of the states, and this route remains controversial, with many conservatives fearing that the meeting would turn into a circus in the modern media age, and open the door to a wholesale rewriting of the nation’s founding document. Yet a new body of research suggests that these fears are unwarranted, and that there are enough checks built into the system to prevent what scholars refer to as a “runaway convention.” With state legislators and grassroots activists searching for ways to limit the abuses of Congress, the possibility has begun to generate more chatter.

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