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“Ron [P. Reagan] was an embarrassment to his father when he was alive and today he became an embarrassment to his mother.”

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Washington Post:The charlatans’ response to the Tucson tragedy
By: George F. Will

It would be merciful if, when tragedies such as Tucson’s occur, there were a moratorium on sociology. But respites from half-baked explanations, often serving political opportunism, are impossible because of a timeless human craving and a characteristic of many modern minds.

The craving is for banishing randomness and the inexplicable from human experience. Time was, the gods were useful. What is thunder? The gods are angry. Polytheism was explanatory. People postulated causations.

And still do. Hence: The Tucson shooter was (pick your verb) provoked, triggered, unhinged by today’s (pick your noun) rhetoric, vitriol, extremism, “climate of hate.”

Demystification of the world opened the way for real science, including the social sciences. And for a modern characteristic. And for charlatans.

A characteristic of many contemporary minds is susceptibility to the superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment. From which flows a political doctrine: Given clever social engineering, society and people can be perfected. This supposedly is the path to progress. It actually is the crux of progressivism. And it is why there is a reflex to blame conservatives first.

Instead, imagine a continuum from the rampages at Columbine and Virginia Tech – the results of individuals’ insanities – to the assassinations of Lincoln and the Kennedy brothers, which were clearly connected to the politics of John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, respectively. The two other presidential assassinations also had political colorations.

On July 2, 1881, after four months in office, President James Garfield, who had survived the Civil War battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga, needed a vacation. He was vexed by warring Republican factions – the Stalwarts, who waved the bloody shirt of Civil War memories, and the Half-Breeds, who stressed the emerging issues of industrialization. Walking to Washington’s train station, Garfield by chance encountered a disappointed job-seeker. Charles Guiteau drew a pistol, fired two shots and shouted, “I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be president!” On Sept. 19, Garfield died, making Vice President Chester Arthur president. Guiteau was executed, not explained.

On Sept. 6, 1901, President William McKinley, who had survived the battle of Antietam, was shaking hands at a Buffalo exposition when Leon Czolgosz approached, a handkerchief wrapped around his right hand, concealing a gun. Czolgosz, an anarchist, fired two shots. Czolgosz (“I killed the president because he was the enemy of the good people – the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.”) was executed, not explained.

Now we have explainers. They came into vogue with the murder of President Kennedy. They explained why the “real” culprit was not a self-described Marxist who had moved to Moscow, then returned to support Castro. No, the culprit was a “climate of hate” in conservative Dallas, the “paranoid style” of American (conservative) politics or some other national sickness resulting from insufficient liberalism.

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Wall Street Journal: The Constitution: Not Just for Courts
By: Neomi Rao

The recent attempt by House Republicans to bring constitutional deliberation to Congress has been roundly mocked—by Democrats, law professors and pundits. “When I went to law school they said the law’s what a judge says it is,” California Rep. Henry Waxman recently explained. Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts termed it an “air kiss” to the tea party. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne labeled the Constitution an “abstraction” preoccupying the GOP.

Leave the Constitution to the courts, their argument goes. Yet many liberals don’t want the courts involved in constitutional issues either—at least not in any robust way. As challenges to ObamaCare work their way through the courts, we hear lamentations that such attempts represent judicial activism and are undemocratic. This leaves the president to protect the Constitution. But when George W. Bush asserted his own interpretation of the Constitution, liberals raised the specter of an “imperial presidency.”

So who, precisely, is supposed to protect the Constitution? Article VI provides that all of our elected and appointed officials in both federal and state government “shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution.” The president takes a special oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. These oaths reaffirm the constitutional language and structure that require each branch to take seriously the constraints of the Constitution.

Contrary to popular belief, and the beliefs of some lawyer-congressmen, the Supreme Court does not maintain a monopoly on constitutional interpretation. The court has an important role to play in reviewing the constitutionality of legislation and executive branch action, of course. But it cannot and should not exercise this power alone.

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A Republican Showdown?
By: Thomas Sowell

hey say that, in politics, “overnight is a lifetime.” In other words, the journey from triumphant hero to discredited scapegoat can be very brief.

In the wake of the Republicans’ triumphs in last November’s elections, great hopes are being held out that Republican control of the House of Representatives can slam the brakes on Barack Obama’s march toward a completely government-controlled economy and ruinous deficit spending.

The first big step toward that goal could be forcing the Obama administration to cut back on spending, as the price of raising the national debt ceiling, which will be necessary early on in this new Congress, if the federal government is not going to be forced to shut down for lack of money.

Much of the runaway spending in Washington has been a spending of money that the government doesn’t have in the till, by borrowing money through the sale of government bonds– in other words, running up a record high national debt.

Because there is a legal limit on how much national debt the government can create, the spending has to be cut back or the debt ceiling increased by Congress. Otherwise, the government is going to have to shut down many of its operations for lack of money.

Some people see this as a golden opportunity for the new Republican majority to gain concessions from the Obama administration, as the price for going along with an increase in the national debt. It sounds logical. But logic is not always the dominant factor in politics.

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New York Times (shocking, I know): The Tucson Witch Hunt
By Charles M. Blow

Tragedy in Tucson. Six Dead. Democratic congresswoman shot in the head at rally.

Immediately after the news broke, the air became thick with conjecture, speculation and innuendo. There was a giddy, almost punch-drunk excitement on the left. The prophecy had been fulfilled: “words have consequences.” And now, the right’s rhetorical chickens had finally come home to roost.

The dots were too close and the temptation to connect them too strong. The target was a Democratic congresswoman. There was the map of her district in the cross hairs. There were her own prescient worries about overheated rhetoric.

Within hours of the shooting, there was a full-fledged witch hunt to link the shooter to the right.

“I saw Goody Proctor with the devil! Oh, I mean Jared Lee Loughner! Yes him. With the devil!”

The only problem is that there was no evidence then, and even now, that overheated rhetoric from the right had anything to do with the shooting. (In fact, a couple of people who said they knew him have described him as either apolitical or “quite liberal.”) The picture emerging is of a sad and lonely soul slowly, and publicly, slipping into insanity.

I have written about violent rhetoric before, and I’m convinced that it’s poisonous to our politics, that the preponderance of it comes from the right, and that it has the potential to manifest in massacres like the one in Tucson.

But I also know that potential, possibility and even plausibility are not proof.

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A Tale of Two Matthews: How MSNBC’s Host Handled Tucson Shooting vs. Ft. Hood Shooting

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Wall Street Journal: If You Can’t Stand the Heat . . .
By: john Steele Gordon

Harry Truman would have had little patience for the notion that caustic political rhetoric causes murder.

All the evidence currently available indicates that the gunman responsible for Saturday’s tragedy in Tucson, Ariz., was driven solely by internal demons. That fact hasn’t stopped commentators, overwhelmingly on the left, from suggesting that today’s “heated political rhetoric” is at least partly to blame.

Pundits have frequently cited Sarah Palin’s “crosshairs map,” which uses the riflery image to mark the congressional districts of vulnerable Democrats, as inspiration for the killer. But there is a total lack of evidence that the shooter ever saw that map or that “being in the crosshairs,” which has been a common political metaphor for decades, has suddenly taken on a sinister meaning. And yet the New York Times’s Paul Krugman writes in his latest column (titled “Climate of Hate”): “It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate.”

Really? Has the nation’s political climate actually gotten worse in the last two years, when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House? Of course not.

Human beings have a natural tendency to edit memories, tending to cut out the unpleasant ones. We prefer to remember the sunny days, not the stormy ones. (Hence the constant refrain of “Today’s blizzard is the worst—ever.”) That’s just as true of politics as anything else.

The truth is that American political rhetoric has always been vigorous and often vituperative.

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Financial Times:America: Paydown problems
By: James Politi

It was the most startling of warnings. If the US does not get its finances in order “we will have a European situation on our hands, and possibly worse”, claimed Paul Ryan, the new Republican chairman of the House of Representatives budget committee.

The consequences of not tackling the country’s mounting debt burden would be dire, he last week told an audience of leading budget experts and economists at a gathering in Washington. “We will have the riots in the streets, we will have the defaults, we will have all of those ugliness problems,” he said, referring to “French kids lobbing Molotov cocktails at cars, burning down schools because the retirement age will be moved from 60 to 62”.

As it stands today, the US borrows about 40 cents of every dollar it spends. Curbing the budget deficit has been the stated mission of Mr Ryan, a rising Republican star, for several years. But such calls for action have multiplied in Washington in recent months, igniting what some say is the fiercest debate over fiscal and budgetary policy in decades.

The risks are big. If the government rushes into austerity, cutting too much and too quickly, it could stunt economic recovery. But if the political system cannot forge some kind of consensus on steps to restore US deficits to sustainable levels, the danger is potentially even greater: a sovereign debt crisis in the world’s largest economy.

“It’s a weak period for the economy, so I don’t think you want to do serious deficit reduction anyway, but we are playing a dangerous game and we will start to pay a price for fiscal irresponsibility,” says Ethan Harris at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

The big fear is that if no action is taken, investors might eventually punish the US for its fiscal laxity.

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Globe & Mail: Go forth, multiply and fill the provinces
By: Neil Reynolds

When biological anthropologist Helen Fisher appeared on The Joy Behar Show in November to help celebrate women who choose not to have more than one or two children, she tossed out a provocative term to describe women who do: littering. (“We have too many people on this planet,” she said.) It’s fashionable to go childless these days – as birth rates in wealthy countries attest. But surely it isn’t necessary to demean women who choose to have more children than the national average. From a purely evolutionary perspective, giving birth remains an important mammalian responsibility.

By tradition, we still welcome the New Year metaphorically: as a child – a male child, for some reason, in top hat and sash. But the old vaudevillian razzle-dazzle doesn’t suffice any more. With its national birth rate in decline and with its persistent aversion to procreation, Canada urgently needs babies. The country’s biological instincts were healthy enough in 1921 (30 births per 1,000 population). Now (10 births per 1,000 population), they are not. This is important: Baby shortages age countries and weaken them. By some analysis, half of the public debt of OECD countries has arisen from the premature aging of European societies.

Of all the reasons women don’t “litter,” one is utterly untenable: the Malthusian myth that there are too many people on the planet. In a country such as Canada, with 3.3 people per square kilometre, this delusion is absurd.

Canada is one of the least densely populated places on Earth. Check out the vast emptiness of this country: Nunavut, Northwest Territories and Yukon are statistically empty: 0.0 people per square kilometre. British Columbia has 4.4 people per square kilometre. Alberta has 5.1, Saskatchewan 1.6 and Manitoba 2.1. Ontario has more, of course: 13.4. Quebec has 5.6, Newfoundland and Labrador 1.4. And, finally, we reach Canada’s most densely populated provinces: New Brunswick (with 10.2 people per square kilometre), Nova Scotia (with 17.3) and Prince Edward Island (the most densely populated province, with 23.9).

The fact is, most of our provinces and territories don’t have enough people to populate a decent-sized city. New Brunswick, which could easily accommodate millions of people, has a population of 750,000.

For that matter, though, it was once said – most famously, back in the 1970s – that the world’s population could fit comfortably into Texas. As it happens, this apparently idiotic assertion has been fact-checked once again. Here (from the Simply Shrug website) is the methodology and the math.

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National Post: The link between Jared Loughner and Lee Harvey Oswald
By: Jonathan Kay

An American politician takes a bullet to the head in broad daylight. Three days later, under the headline “The spiral of hate,” The New York Times editorial board has this to say about it: “None of us can escape a share of the fault for the spiral of unreason and violence that has now found expression in [gunfire].” In the same spirit, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court blames the act on “the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots.” A leading Christian leader adds that the shooting stemmed from a “sin in the hearts of man not only in this country, but the world over. That is, the sin of prejudice.”

Unreason. Hatred. Bitterness. Prejudice. This more or less summarizes the liberal chorus heard in the days after the Tucson shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. But all of the words quoted in the paragraph above were spoken or printed in 1963, in the days immediately following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Then, just as now, the American intelligentsia felt a reflexive certainty that what they’d witnessed was not an act perpetrated by just one man, but rather a mere symptom of a great body of societal evil.

Just as initial media commentaries about Jared Lee Loughner’s crazed act focused on right-wing opposition to health-care reform and immigration, many 1963-era journalists assumed that Lee Harvey Oswald’s act of murder was, in some vague way, connected to the Civil Rights Act. The day after JFK’s death, the Times printed an article entitled “Why America Weeps: Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought To Curb In Nation,” promoting the idea that JFK’s killer somehow stood in moral solidarity with “those who wanted to be more violent in the racial war.” Playing on this notion, President Lyndon Johnson would tell Congress, two days after JFK’s funeral, “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honour President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill.”

All of this was nonsense.

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The Haney Project: Rush Limbaugh – Episode 2 Sneak Peek

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Washington Post:A half-century of political dirty tricks
By: Mark Feldstein

Fifty years ago next week, Richard Nixon stood uncomfortably on the Capitol’s inaugural platform and watched his rival John F. Kennedy being sworn in as president. “We won” the election, Nixon fumed, “but they stole it from us.”

Indeed, the dirty tricks that helped defeat Nixon were more devious than merely the ballot-stuffing of political lore. In one of the least-known chapters of 20th-century political history, Kennedy operatives secretly paid off an informant and set in motion a Watergate-like burglary that sabotaged Nixon’s campaign on the eve of the election.

It began in the fall of 1960, when the Kennedy campaign spread word that Vice President Nixon had secretly pocketed money from billionaire Howard Hughes, whose far-flung business empire was heavily dependent on government contracts and connections. Reporters for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Time magazine corroborated the allegations, but their editors feared publishing such explosive information in the last days of the tightly fought campaign.

So the Kennedys turned to two crusading liberal columnists, Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who had been attacking Nixon for the past decade. It was “a journalistic atrocity” to conspire with “the Kennedy hawkshaws to help us get the goods on their opponent,” Anderson admitted, but scoring a scoop to destroy Nixon was simply too tempting to pass up.

Anderson dropped by the Washington office of Kennedy lawyer James McInerney. With “a pride that only the diligent investigator can know,” Anderson recalled, the Kennedy operative pulled out “a neatly arranged packet which I devoured unceremoniously.”

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National Review: Blame Righty: A Condensed History
By: Michelle Malkin

I agree with President Obama. When it comes to politicizing random violence, he and his supporters have been “far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than” they do. Recognition is the first step toward reconciliation. It’s time to recognize the poisonous pervasiveness of the Blame Righty meme.

For the past two years, Democratic officials, liberal activists, and journalists have jumped to libelous conclusions about individual shooting sprees committed by mentally unstable loners with incoherent delusions all over the ideological map. The White House now pledges to swear off “pointing fingers or assigning blame.” Alas, the Obama administration’s political and media foot soldiers have proved themselves incapable of such restraint.

In April 2009, a disgruntled, unemployed loser shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers in a horrifying bloodbath. The gunman, Richard Poplawski, was a dropout from the Marines who threw a food tray at a drill sergeant and had beaten his girlfriend. Was this deranged man who pulled the trigger to blame? Nope. Despite evidence that Poplawski’s homicidal, racist tendencies manifested themselves years before Obama took office, lefty publications asserted that the real culprit of the spree was the “heated, apocalyptic rhetoric of the anti-Obama forces” (according to mainstream liberal Atlantic Monthly pundit Andrew Sullivan), along with Fox News and Glenn Beck (according to mainstream liberal journalist Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly online).

That same month, a sick, evil man named Jiverly Voong ambushed an immigration center in Binghamton, N.Y. Recently fired from his job, Voong murdered 13 people, critically wounded four others, and then committed suicide. The instant psychologists of the Left knew nothing about the disgruntled man of Vietnamese descent and undetermined political affiliation. But within hours of the shooting, commenters at liberal mega-website Huffington Post had overwhelmingly convicted GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the National Rifle Association, Fox News, Lou Dobbs, and yours truly. Liberal radio host Alan Colmes pointed his finger at the “huge anti-immigrant backlash in this country” — never mind that tens of millions of legal immigrants and naturalized citizens have coped with hardship, overcome racism, and embraced assimilation without going bloody bonkers.

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UK Telegraph: US defense cuts are not about saving money – they are about changing America’s strategic role
By: James Corum

President Barack Obama has made it very clear that he is not in the least interested in getting American government spending under control. A month ago he urged Congress to pass a $1.2 trillion spending bill larded with tens of billions of dollars for projects for Democratic Party core constituencies. Luckily, Senate Republicans found enough backbone to stop Obama’s latest binge spending programme as Mr Obama criticized the Republicans for their rare exercise of spending discipline.

Now we have a new budget proposal by the President. He wants $78 billion in cuts in US military spending, with large cuts to current troop strength – 27,000 men for the Army and as many as 20,000 for the US Marine Corps. These cuts, along with the cuts Mr Obama has already made to the US Navy and Air Force – cuts in aircraft and ship strength – mean significantly less military capability for the United States and the Western world.

Mr Obama is framing the argument for cutting defence capability as part of the overall need to control US government spending. Given his insatiable appetite for social welfare spending and his recent attempt to throw billions to the Democratic Party’s loyalists, his new-found concern for fiscal discipline comes across as blatantly dishonest.

Before Obama’s presidency, defence spending was justified in terms of the threats to American and Western security. At the end of the Cold War, huge cuts were made and these were seen as reasonable because of the reduced conventional threat. But the threats in 2011 are not diminishing – they are increasing. Iran is arming rapidly and will soon have nuclear weapons. An array of potentially hostile dictatorships are rapidly expanding their armed forces. China is developing major power projection capabilities. Russia is modernising its nuclear arsenal. Venezuela is acquiring a vast new arsenal of weapons and is continuing to support the FARC terrorists in destabilising Colombia. Most seriously, the US is still fighting a major war in Afghanistan.

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Pajamas Media: Reaganomics vs. Obamanomics: It’s Reagan in a Rout
By: Tom Blumer

Much of the economic news immediately after the New Year was decent, even hopeful. The Institute for Supply Management’s Manufacturing and Non Manufacturing indices moved more solidly into expansion. Payroll and benefits giant ADP told us that the economy added 297,000 seasonally adjusted private-sector jobs in December, that report’s best monthly number in years.

Then came Friday’s Employment Situation Summary from Uncle Sam’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

At first glance, that news also seemed acceptable. Seasonally adjusted, the national unemployment rate dropped from 9.8% to 9.4% in December, while employers added 103,000 jobs. The latter number trailed both expectations and ADP’s earlier report, but given the vagaries involved in seasonal adjustments, maybe it wasn’t all that bad.

Unfortunately, it was pretty bad. December’s BLS report capped off a year during which the post-recession consequences of Obama administration policies became all too clear. Two and a half years in, what I have been calling the POR (Pelosi-Obama-Reid) economy since the middle of 2008 has created a workforce which is disengaged and underemployed at levels not seen since the 1930s — which, not coincidentally, is the last time a Democratic administration’s supposedly stimulative policies created a long-term, high-unemployment economy.

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President Reagan Tells Soviet Jokes:

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American Spectator: More Evidence Liberalism Is Dead
By: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.

WASHINGTON — The evidence mounts that Liberalism is dead.

The Liberal wizards, working their wonders at the New York Times and its clearing houses in the major networks, cannot even dupe the American people with an absurd conspiracy theory anymore. In Dallas back in 1963 Lee Harvey Oswald, a pious communist awash in the Marxist-Leninist bilge, shot President John F. Kennedy. In no time the Liberals had the nation focused on the “dangerous right-wing atmosphere” supposedly pervading Dallas. Soon all the talk was of “the paranoid style” of American politics. Oswald was almost forgotten. Doubtless, today there are fervent Liberals living in haunts in Massachusetts and in Berkeley, California, who believe in their heart of hearts that the president was felled by Texas Republicans.

This time around an obvious lunatic shoots 19 people in Tucson, killing 6 (one of whom is a Republican judge) and wounding 13 (one of whom is a Democratic Congresswoman), and the Liberals try again. With artifice and craft they try to focus the nation’s attention on the “heated rhetoric” of the right. Sarah Palin is trotted out. The Tea Partiers are cited. The venerable Times editorializes, “… it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger [remember the Times' cosseting of the Angry Left back in 2008?] that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge.” Today, however, the average American has had enough of this Liberal garbagespiel, and so in a CBS poll nearly six in ten Americans deny that the “country’s heated rhetoric” had anything to do with the shooting. Liberalism has come to the end of the line. It is a bore.

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Human Events: A Justice And His Enemies
By: Daniel J. Flynn

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has offended the cultural guardians again. In an interview with California Lawyer, Scalia denies that the 14th Amendment forbids discrimination against women and homosexuals.

“Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex,”replied the justice to a query on the subject. “The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey, we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws.”

Stern lectures by MSNBC’s Ed Schultz and Salon.com’s Joan Walsh inevitably followed. “Scalia might need to take a refresher course on the Constitution he’s sworn to uphold,” inveighed Schultz. “It’s ridiculous,” Walsh told Schultz. “He’s writing more than half of the country out of this protection.” She continued, “This is a minority crackpot position. I’m sorry. He is said to be respected on the bench. He’s an ideologue and he’s a bully. This will not stand.”

But the conservative jurist isn’t the only one to have held this opinion on the 14th Amendment. Many of Joan Walsh’s presumed heroes did, too.

“The suffragists disagreed among themselves as to how they ought to view the 14th Amendment, which inserted the word male into the United States Constitution for the first time,” historian Aileen Kraditor explained in “The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement.” “Some of them, including [Susan B.] Anthony and [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton, thought it would be better if the amendment were defeated, while others, including [Lucy] Stone, argued that if women could not win their political freedom, it was well that Negro men could win theirs.”

It’s crucial that no 19th-century feminists took Joan Walsh’s position that the 14th Amendment banned sex discrimination. Some were grateful that black men had won political rights; others condemned the amendment for excluding women. But there wasn’t a third contingent telling other feminists that they had gotten it all wrong, that abolitionist women hadn’t been betrayed, that the amendment had really addressed women’s political rights. Put another way, the feminists’ cotemporaneous interpretation of the 14th Amendment is identical to Justice Scalia’s interpretation nearly 150 years later.

Is Joan Walsh ready to call them crackpots, too?

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Obama Countdown Clock Update:

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Two men, an American and a Russian were arguing. One said, in my country I can go to the White House walk to the president’s office and pound the desk and say “Mr. President! I don’t like how you’re running things in this country!”
The Russian said “I can do that too!”
“Really?”
“Yes! I can go to the Kremlin, walk into the General Secretary’s office and pound the desk and say, Mr. Secretary, I don’t like how Reagan is running his country!”

-Ronald Reagan

In 1921 Lincoln Steffens, a revered lion of the liberal media establishment, visited the Soviet Union. Following his visit, Steffens commented “I have seen the future, and it works.” Steffens was taken on a Potmekin Village tour, and he saw the future in totalitarian communism.

The Pyongyang Project, an ‘educational program,’ launched by American university students, which seeks to “counteract the ‘one-sided’ coverage of North Korea in the international media,” is a worthy heir to Steffens’ unprecedented level of naiveté.

Organizers of the venture claim that “the US and North Korea don’t have established relations, and talks are indirect at best. And what we believe is that there is a need for a grassroots level of engagement that we haven’t seen yet between citizens.”Furthermore, people brought to North Korea will “experience the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for themselves and try to see a different side of a country that’s a lot more dynamic than they may have anticipated.”

On tours of the worker’s paradise, visitors had the opportunity to visit the beautiful beaches of Wonsan. There, Pyongyang Project participants interacted with denizens of North Korea who just happened to be at the beach at the same time. One fellow traveler noted that although the people seemed malnourished, they were happy.

Of course, no trip to North Korea would be complete without attending the Airing Festival, where 100,000 North Koreans preform dances and gymnastics dedicated to Supreme Leader, Kim Il-sung.

The Pyongyang Project even visited the renowned Kim Il-sung University, which will now be offering a two month study abroad program, through the Pyongyang Project. At the university one American visitor did notice a few minor red flags:

At one point during a tour through a computer lab at Kim Il-sung University, students stared blank-faced into machines that were turned off, she said, adding that some rooms in the university even felt unused and smelled of fresh wood and paint.

But don’t look behind the curtain.

Of recent attacks on South Korea, the Pyongyang Project says:

There is a heightened level of political tension that exists, and one cannot rule out the possibility of additional actions that could lead to further tensions – but I don’t see it, honestly. It was an event that occurred that has proven to be isolated.

Besides, members of the Pyongyang Project were to busy last month, preparing a protest outside President Bush’s home because he’s a warmonger!

A hint to the Pyongyang Project organizers: the people on the beach just might have not have been there by chance. North Korea is a police state. The people were there because they were told to be there. They were happy because they were told to be happy. If they were not at the designated place at the designated time, or if they were unhappy, they would not have returned home.

North Korea’s GDP per capita is $1,800. $1,800 ranks North Korea 193rd in the world, just ahead of Chad, and right behind Gambia. Sudan is 6 spots ahead of North Korea.

North Koreans are taught that Kim Jong Il had a supernatural birth, invented the hamburger and is a fashion trendsetter. Additionally, in 1994 Dear Leader played his first and only round of golf and shot 38 under par on a regulation 18 hole course, replete with 5 hole in ones. His lone round of golf is 25 strokes better than any round in history.

O, and there is this picture:

which shows the thriving South’s electrical usage, compared to the desolate North’s. At least the NorKs are doing there part in the fight against anthropogenic global warming!

It is telling that liberals constantly lavish praise on totalitarian states. Liberals look to basket cases  like the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea and California and see the future.

The reason most people have a “one-sided” view of North Korea is because the place is hell on earth. People live in abject destitution and die of starvation. Meanwhile, the certifiably insane rulers of the country live like Pharaohs. Promotion of the ‘successes’ of the totalitarian ruling claque is an asinine concept, even for university students.

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Happy New Year!

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Political End Runs
By Thomas Sowell
The Constitution of the United States begins with the words “We the people.” But neither the Constitution nor “we the people” will mean anything if politicians and judges can continue to do end runs around both.

Bills passed too fast for anyone to read them are blatant examples of these end runs. But last week, another of these end runs appeared in a different institution when the medical “end of life consultations” rejected by Congress were quietly enacted through bureaucratic fiat by administrators of Medicare.

Although Congressman Earl Blumenauer and Senator Jay Rockefeller had led an effort by a group of fellow Democrats in Congress to pass Section 1233 of pending Medicare legislation, which would have paid doctors to include “end of life” counselling in their patients’ physical checkups, the Congress as a whole voted to delete that provision.

Republican Congressman John Boehner, soon to become Speaker of the House, objected to this provision in 2009, saying: “This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia.”

Whatever the merits or demerits of the proposed provision in Medicare legislation, the Constitution of the United States makes the elected representatives of “we the people” the ones authorized to make such decisions. But when proposals explicitly rejected by a vote in Congress are resurrected and stealthily made the law of the land by bureaucratic fiat, there has been an end run around both the people and the Constitution.

Congressman Blumenauer’s office praised the Medicare bureaucracy’s action but warned: “While we are very happy with the result, we won’t be shouting it from the rooftops because we are not out of the woods yet.”

In other words, don’t let the masses know about it.

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Washington Post: A Remedy for Beggar States
By George F. Will

The nation’s menu of crises caused by governmental malpractice may soon include states coming to Congress as mendicants, seeking relief from the consequences of their choices. Congress should forestall this by passing a bill with a bland title but explosive potential.

Principal author of the Public Employee Pension Transparency Act is Rep. Devin Nunes, a Republican from California, where about 80 cents of every government dollar goes for government employees’ pay and benefits. His bill would define the scale of the problem of underfunded state and local government pensions and would notify states not to approach Congress like Oliver Twists, holding out porridge bowls and asking for more.

Corporate pension funds are heavily regulated, including pre-funding requirements. A federal agency, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., copes with insolvent ones. By requiring transparency, the government gave the private sector an incentive to move to defined contributions from defined-benefit plans, which are now primarily luxuries enjoyed by public employees.

Less candor, realism and pre-funding are required of state and municipal governments regarding their pension plans. Nunes’s bill would require them to disclose the size of their pension liabilities – and the often-dreamy assumptions behind the calculations. Noncompliant governments would be ineligible for issuing bonds exempt from federal taxation. Furthermore, the bill would stipulate that state and local governments are entirely responsible for their pension obligations and the federal government will provide no bailouts.

Nunes’s bill would not traduce any state’s sovereignty: Each would retain the right not to comply, choosing to forfeit access to the federally subsidized borrowing that facilitated their slide into trouble.

Those troubles are big. A study by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management calculates the combined underfunding of pensions in the all municipalities at $574 billion. States have an estimated $3.3 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities.

Nunes says that 10 states will exhaust their pension money by 2020, and all but eight states will by 2030.

States’ troubles are becoming bigger. Hitherto, local governments have acquired infusions of funds from federal budget earmarks, which are now forbidden. Furthermore, states are suffering “ARRA hangover” – withdrawal from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a.k.a. the 2009 stimulus. With about $150 billion for state and local governments, it raised the federal portion of state budgets from about a quarter to a third. Also, in 2009 and 2010, states and localities borrowed almost $200 billion through the ARRA’s Build America Bonds program, under which Washington pays 35 percent of the interest costs. Republicans, in another victory over the president in negotiations on extending the Bush tax rates, extinguished that program, which they say primarily produced more public-sector employees.

There are legal provisions for municipalities to declare bankruptcy. Some have done so. As many as 200 are expected to default on debt next year. There are, however, no bankruptcy provisions for states. Some who favor providing such provisions say states are “too big to fail,” and under bankruptcy, judges could rewrite union contracts or give states powers to do so, thereby reducing existing pension obligations. Unfortunately, government-administered bankruptcy of governments might be even more unseemly than Washington’s political twisting of the bankruptcy process on behalf of General Motors and Chrysler, including the use of TARP funds supposedly restricted for “financial institutions.”

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Liberal: That Constitution Thing is Just so Darn Complicated

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Wall Street Journal: Days of Auld Lang What?
By: Peggy Noonan

You know exactly when you’ll hear it, and you probably won’t hear it again for a year. The big clock will hit 11:59:50, the countdown will begin—10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4—and the sounds will rise: the party horns, fireworks and shouts of “Happy New Year!”

And then they’ll play that song: “Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and days of auld lang syne?”

It is a poem in Scots dialect, set to a Scots folk tune, and an unscientific survey says that a lot of us don’t think much about the words, or even know them. The great film director Mike Nichols came to America from Germany as a child, when his family fled Hitler. He had to learn a lot of English quickly and never got around to “Auld Lang Syne”: “I was too busy with words like ‘emergency exit’ on the school bus,” he told me. “As a result, I find myself weeping at gibberish on New Year’s Eve. I enjoy that.”

The screen and television writer Aaron Sorkin, who this year, with “The Social Network,” gives Paddy Chayefsky a run for his money, says that every year he means to learn the words. “Then someone tells me that’s not a good enough New Year’s resolution and I really need to quit smoking.”

“Auld Lang Syne”—the phrase can be translated as “long, long ago,” or “old long since,” but I like “old times past”—is a song that asks a question, a tender little question that has to do with the nature of being alive, of being a person on a journey in the world. It not only asks, it gives an answer.

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UK Telegraph: Forget the liberal hype about a comeback: 2010 was a stunningly bad year for Barack Obama, and 2011 could be even worse
By: Nile Gardiner

Ignore the revisionist hype in sections of the liberal media about President Obama staging a (mythical) political comeback – this is a presidency with an approval rating of 45 percent (according to the RealClear Politics poll of polls), that presides over a nation where just 27 percent of voters think the country is moving in the right direction, and which just 29 percent of Americans think will be returned to power in 2012. The White House may be claiming a couple of political wins in the dying embers of the lame duck Congress after expending a great deal of political capital in the Senate over the reckless ratification of the Moscow-friendly START Treaty and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, but these are issues barely on the radar screens of most American voters in the lead-up to 2012, an election which will be dominated by the economy and health care reform.

The political landscape still looks strikingly bleak for the “transformational president” as he goes into 2011. 2010 was a stunningly bad year for Barack Obama, no matter how much the likes of The New York Times or The Washington Post might try to sugar coat it. Here are four key reasons why it was a year Obama will want to forget:

1. The midterm elections were a defeat of epic proportions for the Obama Presidency

When Barack Obama spoke of a “shellacking” at the midterms, it was a huge understatement. The Republicans scored a significantly bigger win than they did in 1994, with their biggest gain in the House of Representatives in 62 years – since 1948. Fortunately for the Democrats, just 37 Senate seats were up for election, preventing what would have been an almost certain handover of power in the upper house too. Republicans also made huge gains at the gubernatorial level, with the GOP now holding 29 governorships to the Democrats’ 20. Republicans also picked up 680 seats in state legislatures, the highest figure in the modern era.

2. Conservatism grew increasingly dominant in America

The midterms were certainly no flash in the pan, but part of a broader conservative revolution that swept America in 2010. As a recent Gallup survey showed, 48 percent of Americans now describe themselves as “conservative”, compared to 32 percent who call themselves “moderate”, and just 20 percent who call themselves “liberal”. Conservatives now outnumber liberals by nearly 2.5 to 1, a ratio that is likely to increase in 2011. The percentage of Americans who are conservative has risen six points since 2006 and eight points since 1994. Barack Obama, the most liberal US president of the modern era, has a natural liberal constituency comprised of just one in five Americans, which certainly does not bode well for 2012.

3. The Left lost ground and engaged in a brutal civil war

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New York Post: Big Labor’s Snowmageddon Snit Fit
By: Michelle Malkin

Diligent English farmers of old once shared a motto about the blessings of work: “Industry produces wealth, God speed the plow.” Indolent New York City union officials who oversee snow removal apparently live by a different creed: Sloth enhances political power, Da Boss slow the plow.

Come rain or shine, wind, sleet or blizzard, Big Labor leaders always demonstrate perfect power-grabby timing when it comes to shafting taxpayers. Public-sector unions are all-weather vultures ready, willing and able to put special interest politics above the citizenry’s health, wealth and safety. Confirming rumors that have fired up the frozen metropolis, the New York Post reported Thursday that government sanitation and transportation workers were ordered by union supervisors to oversee a deliberate slowdown of its cleanup program — and to boost their overtime paychecks.

Why such vindictiveness? It’s a cold-blooded temper tantrum against the city’s long-overdue efforts to trim layers of union fat and move toward a more efficient, cost-effective privatized workforce.

Welcome to the Great Snowmageddon Snit Fit of 2010.

New York City Councilman Dan Halloran, R-Queens, told the Post that several brave whistleblowers confessed to him that they “were told (by supervisors) to take off routes (and) not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file.”

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Wall Street journal: The Liberal Reckoning of 2010

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent out a press release last week headlined “111th Congress Accomplishments.” It quoted a couple of Democratic Party cheerleaders calling this the greatest Congress since 1965-66 (Norm Ornstein) or even the New Deal (David Leonhardt), and listed in capital letters no fewer than 30 legislative triumphs: Health Care Reform, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a Jobs Package (HIRE Act), the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, Food Safety, the Travel Promotion Act, Student Loan Reform, Hate Crimes Prevention, and so much more.

What the release did not mention is the loss of 63 House and six Senate seats, and a mid-December Gallup poll approval rating of 13%. Never has a Congress done so much and been so despised for it.

While this may appear to be a contradiction, it is no accident or even much of a surprise. The liberal wing of the Democratic Party had been waiting since the 1960s for its next great political opening, as we warned in an October 17, 2008 editorial, “A Liberal Supermajority.” Critics and some of our readers scored us at the time for exaggerating, but in retrospect we understated the willful nature of that majority.

Democrats achieved 60 Senate votes by an historical accident of prosecutorial abuse (Ted Stevens), a stolen election (Al Franken) and a betrayal (Arlen Specter). They then attempted to do nearly everything we expected, regardless of public opinion, and they only stopped because the clock ran out.

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R. Lee Ermey, appearing on behalf of Toys 4 Tots & USO unloads on President Obama

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Weekly Standard: Gitmo Is Not Al Qaeda’s ‘Number One Recruitment Tool’
By: Thomas Joscelyn

During a press conference on December 22, President Obama was asked about the difficulties his administration has encountered in trying to close Guantanamo. The president explained (emphasis added):

Obviously, we haven’t gotten it closed. And let me just step back and explain that the reason for wanting to close Guantanamo was because my number one priority is keeping the American people safe. One of the most powerful tools we have to keep the American people safe is not providing al Qaeda and jihadists recruiting tools for fledgling terrorists.

And Guantanamo is probably the number one recruitment tool that is used by these jihadist organizations. And we see it in the websites that they put up. We see it in the messages that they’re delivering.

President Obama and his surrogates have made this argument before, but they have provided no real evidence that it is true. In fact, al Qaeda’s top leaders rarely mention Guantanamo in their messages to the West, Muslims and the world at large.

No journalist in attendance had the opportunity to challenge President Obama’s assertion. The president should have been asked: If Guantanamo is such a valuable recruiting tool, then why do al Qaeda’s leaders rarely mention it?

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has reviewed translations of 34 messages and interviews delivered by top al Qaeda leaders operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan (“Al Qaeda Central”), including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, since January 2009. The translations were published online by the NEFA Foundation. Guantanamo is mentioned in only 3 of the 34 messages. The other 31 messages contain no reference to Guantanamo. And even in the three messages in which al Qaeda mentions the detention facility it is not a prominent theme.

Instead, al Qaeda’s leaders repeatedly focus on a narrative that has dominated their propaganda for the better part of two decades. According to bin Laden, Zawahiri, and other al Qaeda chieftains, there is a Zionist-Crusader conspiracy against Muslims. Relying on this deeply paranoid and conspiratorial worldview, al Qaeda routinely calls upon Muslims to take up arms against Jews and Christians, as well as any Muslims rulers who refuse to fight this imaginary coalition.

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Human Events: Is The Bond Crisis Inevitable?
By: Patrick J. Buchanan

With Christmas shoppers out in force and the stock market surging to a two-year high, talk is spreading that the long-awaited recovery is at hand.

Perhaps.

But gleaning the news from Europe and Asia as U.S. cities, states and the federal government sink into debt, it is difficult to believe a worldwide financial crisis that hammers governments, banks and bondholders alike can be long averted. Consider.

Fitch and Moody’s have just downgraded the debt of Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Hungary. In Budapest, the politicians talk of default. Spain has been warned its debt and banks could be downgraded.

The European Central Bank is buying up this paper to prevent panic selling by investors. There is talk of forcing bondholders to take a haircut. They would trade their suspect bonds for new euro bonds whose face value would be appreciably less.

In the Latin American debt crisis, the United States bailed out its banks holding the bad paper by giving them U.S.-backed bonds, while forcing them to take a loss on their Latin bonds. Courtesy of Uncle Sam, Latin America walked away from a huge slice of its debt.

The Japanese national debt is slated to pass 200 percent of gross domestic product this year, highest of any major economy on earth. Half of Japan’s spending is now financed by bonds. Tax revenues do not even cover 50 percent.

Nor is America out of the woods.

Financial analyst Meredith Whitney told “60 minutes” we can expect 50 to 100 cities and counties to default on their municipal bonds. Though derided as an alarmist, Whitney was among the few who warned that U.S. banks were in treacherous waters before 2008.

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Promises and Riots
By: Thomas Sowell

Economists are the real “party of No.” They keep saying that there is no such thing as a free lunch— and politicians keep on getting elected by promising free lunches.

Such promises may seem to be kept, for a while. There are ways the government can juggle money around to make everything look OK, but it is only a matter of time before that money runs out and the ultimate reality hits, that there is no free lunch.

We are currently seeing what happens, in fierce riots raging in various countries in Europe, when the money runs out and the brutal truth is finally revealed, that there is no free lunch.

You cannot have generous welfare state laws that allow people to retire on government pensions while they are in their 50s, in an era when most people live decades longer.

In the United States, that kind of generosity exists mostly for members of state government employees’ unions— which is why some states are running out of money, and why the Obama administration is bailing them out, in the name of “stimulus.”

Once you buy the idea that the government should be a sort of year-around Santa Claus, you have bought the kinds of consequences that follow.

The results are not pretty, as we can see on TV, in pictures of rioters in the streets, smashing and burning the property of innocent people, who had nothing to do with giving them unrealistic hopes of living off somebody else, or with the inevitable disappointing of those hopes with cutbacks on the giveaways.
Nothing is easier for politicians than to play Santa Claus by promising benefits, without mentioning the costs— or lying about the costs and leaving it to future governments to figure out what to do when the money runs out.

In the United States, the biggest and longest-running scam of this sort is Social Security. Fulfilling all the promises that were made, as commitments in the law, would cost more money than Social Security has ever had.

This particular scam has kept going for generations by the fact that the first generation— a small generation— that paid into Social Security had its pensions paid by the money that the second and much bigger “baby boom” generation paid in.

What the first generation got back in benefits was far greater than what they themselves had paid in. It was something for nothing— apparently.

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Human Events: Government By Regulation…Shh!
by Charles Krauthammer

Most people don’t remember Obamacare’s notorious Section 1233, mandating government payments for end-of-life counseling. It aroused so much anxiety as a possible first slippery step on the road to state-mandated late-life rationing that the Senate never included it in the final health care law.

Well, it’s back — by administrative fiat. A month ago, Medicare issued a regulation providing for end-of-life counseling during annual “wellness” visits. It was all nicely buried amid the simultaneous release of hundreds of new Medicare rules.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., author of Section 1233, was delighted. “Mr. Blumenauer’s office celebrated ‘a quiet victory,’ but urged supporters not to crow about it,” reports The New York Times. Deathly quiet. In early November, his office sent an e-mail plea to supporters: “We would ask that you not broadcast this accomplishment out to any of your lists … e-mails can too easily be forwarded.” They had been lucky that “thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it. … The longer this (regulation) goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it.”

So much for Democratic transparency — and for their repeated claim that the more people learn what is in the health care law, the more they will like it. Turns out ignorance is the Democrats’ best hope.

And regulation is their perfect vehicle — so much quieter than legislation. Consider two other regulatory usurpations in just the last few days:

On Dec. 23, the Interior Department issued Secretarial Order 3310 reversing a 2003 decision and giving itself the authority to designate public lands as “Wild Lands.” A clever twofer: (1) a bureaucratic power grab — for seven years up through Dec. 22, wilderness designation had been the exclusive province of Congress, and (2) a leftward lurch — more land to be “protected” from such nefarious uses as domestic oil exploration in a country disastrously dependent on foreign sources.

The very same day, the president’s Environmental Protection Agency declared that in 2011 it would begin drawing up anti-carbon regulations on oil refineries and power plants, another power grab effectively enacting what Congress had firmly rejected when presented as cap-and-trade legislation.

For an Obama bureaucrat, however, the will of Congress is a mere speed bump. Hence this regulatory trifecta, each one moving smartly left — and nicely clarifying what the spirit of bipartisan compromise that President Obama heralded in his post-lame-duck Dec. 22 news conference was really about: a shift to the center for public consumption and political appearance only.

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‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ has been repealed. ROTC still shouldn’t be on campus.
By Colman McCarthy

Now that asking and telling has ceased to be problematic in military circles, ROTC has resurfaced as a national issue: Will universities such as Harvard, Yale and other Ivy League schools be opened to Reserve Officers’ Training Corps since colleges can no longer can argue that the military is biased against gays and therefore not welcome?

The debate reminds me of an interview I conducted over parents’ weekend at the University of Notre Dame in 1989. I sat down with Theodore Hesburgh, the priest who had retired two years earlier after serving 35 years as the university’s president. Graciously, he invited me to lunch at the campus inn. During our discussion, he took modest pride at having raised more than a billion dollars for Notre Dame, and expressed similar feelings about the university’s ROTC program. More than 700 student-cadets were in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. Few universities, public or private, had a larger percentage of students in uniform then. The school could have been renamed Fort Hesburgh.

When I suggested that Notre Dame’s hosting of ROTC was a large negative among the school’s many positives, Hesburgh disagreed. Notre Dame was a model of patriotism, he said, by training future officers who were churchgoers, who had taken courses in ethics, and who loved God and country. Notre Dame’s ROTC program was a way to “Christianize the military,” he stated firmly.

I asked if he actually believed there could be a Christian method of slaughtering people in combat, or a Christian way of firebombing cities, or a way to kill civilians in the name of Jesus. Did he think that if enough Notre Dame graduates became soldiers that the military would eventually embrace Christ’s teaching of loving one’s enemies?

…It should not be forgotten that schools have legitimate and moral reasons for keeping the military at bay, regardless of the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” They can stand with those who for reasons of conscience reject military solutions to conflicts.

They can stand with Martin Luther King Jr. and his view of America’s penchant for war-making: “This madness must cease,” he said from a pulpit in April 1967. Even well short of the pacifist positions, they can argue the impracticality of maintaining a military that has helped drive this country into record depths of debt. The defense budget has more than doubled since 2000, to over $700 billion. They can align themselves with colleges such as Hobart, Earlham, Goshen, Guilford, Hampshire, George Fox and a long list of others that teach alternatives to violence. Serve your country after college, these schools say, but consider the Peace Corps as well as the Marine Corps.

Will the Ivies have the courage for such stands? I’m doubtful. Only one of the eight Ivy League schools – Cornell – offers a degree in peace studies. Their pride in running programs in women’s studies, black studies, and gay and lesbian studies is well-founded, but schools have small claims to greatness so long as the study of peace is not equal to the other departments when it comes to size and funding.

At Notre Dame, on that 1989 visit and several following, I learned that the ROTC academics were laughably weak. They were softie courses. The many students I interviewed were candid about their reasons for signing up: free tuition and monthly stipends, plus the guarantee of a job in the military after college. With some exceptions, they were mainly from families that couldn’t afford ever-rising college tabs.

To oppose ROTC, as I have since my college days in the 1960s, when my school enticed too many of my classmates into joining, is not to be anti-soldier. I admire those who join armies, whether America’s or the Taliban’s: for their discipline, for their loyalty to their buddies and to their principles, for their sacrifices to be away from home. In recent years, I’ve had several Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans in my college classes. If only the peace movement were as populated by people of such resolve and daring.

ROTC and its warrior ethic taint the intellectual purity of a school, if by purity we mean trying to rise above the foul idea that nations can kill and destroy their way to peace. If a school such as Harvard does sell out to the military, let it at least be honest and add a sign at its Cambridge front portal: Harvard, a Pentagon Annex.

Not surprising that a liberal feels nothing but disdain for the heroic men and women of the United States Armed Forces. Because of people greater than McCarthy, liberals are free to publish drivel like the above article.

Krugman wrote:

Hey, has anyone noticed that “A Christmas Carol” is a dangerous leftist tract?

I mean, consider the scene, early in the book, where Ebenezer Scrooge rightly refuses to contribute to a poverty relief fund. “I’m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing,” he declares. Oh, wait. That wasn’t Scrooge. That was Newt Gingrich — last week. What Scrooge actually says is, “Are there no prisons?” But it’s pretty much the same thing.

Anyway, instead of praising Scrooge for his principled stand against the welfare state, Charles Dickens makes him out to be some kind of bad guy. How leftist is that?

As you can see, the fundamental issues of public policy haven’t changed since Victorian times. Still, some things are different.

…So in this holiday season, let’s remember the wisdom of Ebenezer Scrooge. Not the bit about denying food and medical care to those who need them: America’s failure to take care of its own less-fortunate citizens is a national disgrace.

How original. Not exactly the first time Newt Gingrich has been called Scrooge:

On the other hand, Ann Coulter titled her weekly column “Scrooge Was a Liberal.”  Coulter’s argument is that while liberals have a monopoly on “caring” it is religious conservatives who put their money where their mouths are:

Religious conservatives, the largest group at about 20 percent of the population, gave the most to charity — $2,367 per year, compared with $1,347 for the country at large.

Conversely, secular liberals are particularly stingy:

secular liberals give to charity at a rate of 9 percent less than all Americans and 19 percent less than religious conservatives. They were also “significantly less likely than the population average to return excess change mistakenly given to them by a cashier.”

However, Newt did say “I’m opposed to giving people money for doing nothing,” and that settles who the real Scrooge is, right?

What Newt was saying in the 90s and a week ago is that government funding of bad behavior only reinforces bad behavior. If you pay able bodied people not to work, they will remain wards of the state.

But this isn’t about good policy, it’s about which ideological camp Scrooge really falls into; an easily answered question.

Near the beginning of A Christmas Carol Scrooge is solicited for a donation to provide food and shelter for the poor over Christmas. Scrooge refuses to part with so much as one sent. His explanation? Scrooge claims that he pays enough for the poor in taxes, and that they should seek food and shelter in local prisons, poorhouses and workhouses.

Ebenezer Scrooge’s position and justification are a doctrinaire liberalism. Scrooge’s belief that government programs are there to care for the downtrodden in lieu of charities is a fundamental tenet of modern liberalism.

By the end of A Christmas Carol Scrooge becomes a conservative. Reversing his miserly attitude, Scrooge discovers that the best way to help the indigent, and everyone else, is with private charity. Instead of sending people to government-run poorhouses, Scrooge decides that he knows how to help his neighbors better than anonymous government bureaucrats. Could there be a more conservative message?

On MSNBC‘s Andrea Mitchell Reports Mrs. Mitchell grilled Senator Judd Gregg on his support of extending of the Bush tax cuts – in other words, Senator Gregg’s opposition to one of the largest nominal tax hikes in history:

The economic argument made by Mitchell is pure sophistry. ‘Tax cuts’ can be a misleading term. Tax rate reductions do not necessarily mean tax revenue reductions. The static modeling used by many economists is premised upon “ceteris paribus” – with all other things being equal. In reality, all other things are never equal.

In a dynamic economy nothing happens in a vacuum. Tax rate reductions leaves more money in the supply side, which results in businesses big and small having the needed capital to expand. A growing economy results in higher earnings and the creation of jobs. More earners means more taxpayers, the result being increased government revenues. Government revenues increased when presidents: Harding, Coolidge, Kennedy, Reagan and Bush cut taxes. This stubborn set of facts has been presented ad nauseam, and yet the Left continues to deny reality.

However, there is more to the debate surrounding taxes than just what will result in higher government revenues. In the segment above, if you disregard Mitchell’s painful economic ignorance, her point that not raising taxes costs the government money is illustrative of how Democrats think.

The Left believes that all capital belongs to the government. Furthermore, the benevolent ruling class should decide how much capital you, the citizen, is allowed to keep, in the Left’s view. Using that logic, liberals view tax cuts as a reduction in the government’s money.

The aforementioned view is diametrically opposed to the fundamental precepts of private property rights. On one side, there are those whom believe that people are entitled to the fruits of their labor – their property. On the other side is the modern Left, which believes that all property belongs to the government, and should be disbursed among “the masses” by altruistic planners.

Senator Gregg’s simple response, “it’s their money,” reflects a sound understanding and belief in private property rights.

The government does not have the moral authority to seize your wealth and distribute it as they see fit. That type of broad and arbitrary power, the very type the Democrats have pursued at least since Franklin Roosevelt, is exactly what the Constitution sets to limit.

While it is well and good that lower tax rates result in larger government revenues, it is of secondary importance. The primary issue is that when you work, you are entitled to the fruits of your labor. Tax rate reductions are not about the government losing money, they are about taxpayers keeping what is rightfully theirs.

(H/T Hot Air)

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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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You can listen to this episode online here or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.

And Glenn Beck’s sentimental look at election returns::

(H/T TRS)