Those who see hope in the Middle East uprisings seem to assume that they will lead in the direction of freedom or democracy. There is already talk about the “liberation” of Egypt, even though the biggest change there has been that a one-man dictatorship has been replaced by a military dictatorship that has suspended the constitution.

Perhaps the military dictatorship will be temporary, as its leaders say, but we have heard that song before. What we have also heard, too many times before, is the assumption that getting rid of an undemocratic government means that it will be replaced by a freer and better government.

History says otherwise. After Russia’s czars were replaced by the Communists, the government executed more people in a day than the czars had executed in half a century. It was much the same story in Cuba, when the Batista regime was replaced by Castro and in Iran when the Shah was replaced by the Ayatollahs.

It is not inevitable that bad regimes are replaced by worse regimes. But it has happened too often for us to blithely assume that overthrowing a dictator means a movement toward freedom and democracy.

The fact that Egyptians or others in the Middle East and elsewhere want freedom does not mean that they are ready for freedom. Everyone wants freedom for himself. Even the Nazis wanted to be free to be Nazis. They just didn’t want anybody else to be free.

There is very little sign of tolerance in the Middle East, even among fellow Muslims with different political or religious views, and all too many signs of gross intolerance toward people who are not Muslims.

Freedom and democracy cannot be simply conferred on anyone. Both have preconditions, and even nations that are free and democratic today took centuries to get there.

If there was ever a time when people in Western democracies might be excused for thinking that Western institutions could simply be exported to other nations to create new free democracies, that time has long passed.

It is easy to export the outward symbols of democracy– constitutions, elections, parliaments and the like– but you cannot export the centuries of experience and development that made those institutions work. All too often, exported democratic institutions have meant “one man, one vote– one time.”

We should not assume that our own freedom and democratic form of government can be taken for granted. Those who created this country did not.

As the Constitution of the United States was being written, a lady asked Benjamin Franklin what he and the other writers were creating. He replied, “A republic, madam– if you can keep it.” Generations later, Abraham Lincoln also posed it as a question whether “government of the people, by the people and for the people” is one that “can long endure.”

Just as there are nations who have not yet developed the preconditions for freedom and democracy, so there are some people within a nation who have not. The advance toward universal suffrage took place slowly and in stages.

Too many people, looking back today, see that as just being biased against some people.

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

By Thomas Sowell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toughen up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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National Review: Random Thoughts
By: Thomas Sowell

Random thoughts on the passing scene:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Apollo 8 Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Thomas Sowell – Diversity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The moral argument for lower taxes is quite simple: people are entitled to retain their private property. Taxes should be used to fund the defined roles of government and nothing else. Social engineering and wealth redistribution to favored constituencies are not what taxes are supposed to be used for.

The economic argument has been proven throughout the course of history. To a point, lower tax rates result in larger revenues for the federal government. Thomas Sowell recently wrote a great article on this topic:

…High tax rates do not necessarily result in high tax revenues to the government. “It is time to face the facts,” he said. Merely having high tax rates on large incomes will not bring in more tax revenues to the treasury, because of “the flight of capital away from taxable investments.”

This was all said in 1924, in Mellon’s book, “Taxation: The People’s Business.” Yet here we are, more than 80 years later, still not facing those facts.

It is not just a question of what Andrew Mellon said. It is a question of hard facts, easily checked in official documents available to all– and ignored all these years.

Internal Revenue Service data show that there were 206 people who reported annual incomes of one million dollars or more in 1916. But, as the tax rate on high incomes skyrocketed under the Woodrow Wilson administration, that number plummeted to just 21 people reporting a million dollars a year in income five years later…

Right after Congress enacted the cuts in tax rates that Mellon had been urging, there were suddenly 207 people reporting taxable incomes of a million dollars or more in 1925. As Casey Stengel used to say, “You could look it up.” It is on page 21 of an Internal Revenue publication titled “Statistics of Income from Returns of Net Income for 1925.”

Where had all the income of those millionaires been hiding? In tax-exempt securities like state and local bonds, among other places. Mellon had urged Congress to end tax exemptions for such securities, even before he got them to cut tax rates. But he succeeded only with the latter, and only after a political struggle with those who made the same kinds of arguments that are still being made today by those who cry out against “tax cuts for the rich.”

…The government, which collected less than $50 million in taxes on capital gains in 1924, suddenly collected well over $100 million in capital gains taxes in 1925. At lower tax rates, it no longer made sense to keep so much invested in tax-exempt securities, when more money could be made by investing in the economy.

As for “the rich”– who really were rich in those days, when $100,000 was worth more than a million dollars is worth today– those in the highest income brackets paid 30 percent of all taxes in 1920 and 65 percent of all taxes by 1929, after “tax cuts for the rich.”

How can that be? Because high tax rates on paper, that many people avoid, often does not bring in as much tax revenue as lower tax rates that more people actually pay, after it is safe to come out of tax shelters and earn higher rates of taxable income.

The investors do this because it makes them better off, on net balance, even after they pay more money in taxes on incomes that have gone up. More important, the economy benefits when there is more investment in things that create more jobs and rising output…

As John Adams said, “facts are stubborn things.” In this case, the facts support lower taxes.

Since 2000, Democrats have railed against the ‘Bush tax cuts for the rich.’ Now Democrats claim that the extension of the Bush tax rates, by a Democrat controlled Congress, and a Democrat president, is a great victory for Obama and his party.

Preventing one of the largest tax rate hikes in history is a victory for the American people and conservative ideas. In no way can an acquiescence by the Left of this magnitude truly be seen as a victory for the Left.

However, reality never seems to get in the way of the political class. In all likelihood, by 2012 President Obama will be touting the success of the ‘Obama tax cuts.’ In 1996 Bill Clinton won reelection by running on all the successes of the Contract with America – the very same document Clinton had called the “Contract on America,” likening conservative ideas to a hit man’s contract. Just like Clinton, Obama will try to claim responsibility for the successes of Republican ideas, which he will fight bitterly against.

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

Click HERE  for information about Mark Steyn’s appearance in London THIS MONDAY.

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Click HERE to keep track of the GOP tsunami in the House and HERE for the Senate.

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RGA: Remember November: The Final Act

Remember November: The Final Act from Republican Governors Association on Vimeo.

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A Crossroads Election
By Thomas Sowell

Most elections are about particular policies, particular scandals or particular personalities. But these issues don’t mean as much this year– not because they are not important, but because this election is a crossroads election, one that can decide what path this country will take for many years to come.

Runaway “stimulus” spending, high unemployment and ObamaCare are all legitimate and important issues. It is just that freedom and survival are more important.

For all its sweeping and scary provisions, ObamaCare is not nearly as important as the way it was passed. If legislation can become laws passed without either the public or the Congress knowing what is in those laws, then the fundamental principle of a free, self-governing people is completely undermined.

Some members of Congress who voted for ObamaCare, and who are now telling us that they realize this legislation has flaws which they intend to correct, are missing the point.

The very reason for holding hearings on pending legislation, listening to witnesses on all sides of the issue, and having Congressional debates that will be reported and commented on in the media, is so that problems can be explored and alternatives considered before the legislation is voted into law.

Rushing ObamaCare into law too fast for anyone to have read it served no other purpose than to prevent this very process from taking place. The rush to pass this law that would not take effect until after the next two elections simply cut the voters out of the loop– and that is painfully close to ruling by decree.

Other actions and proposals by this administration likewise represent moves in the direction of arbitrary rule, worthy of a banana republic, with only a mocking facade of freedom.

These include threats against people who simply choose to express opinions counter to administration policy, such as a warning to an insurance company that there would be “zero tolerance” for “misinformation” when the insurance company said that ObamaCare would create costs that force up premiums.

Zero tolerance for the right of free speech guaranteed by the Constitution?

This warning comes from an administration with arbitrary powers that can impose ruinous costs on a given business.

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National Review: How Big a Wave? Ask Cook and Rothenberg
By Henry Olsen

As we enter the final week of the election, everyone wants to know how big the House GOP wave will be. No one has a precise answer yet, but if past performance is any guide, the gold-standard psephologists when it comes to political fortune-telling are Charlie Cook and Stu Rothenberg — and yesterday, both of Cook and Rothenberg showed a massive shift to the GOP. If we use the accuracy of their 2006 and 2008 predications as an indicator, we will be able get a good idea of exactly how large the wave will be from their final House-race ratings, to be released on Monday.

Both men use similar categories: Some races are “Likely” (Cook) or “Favored” (Rothenberg) to go for one party or another; slightly tougher races to call are labeled as “Leaning” toward a party; those hardest to call are rated as toss-ups, which Rothenberg breaks down into three categories (pure, tilting Democratic, and tilting Republican).

For 2006 and 2008, both men have 100 percent records in their “Likely” or “Favored” categories for the winning party (in both years, the Democrats). Their records in the races they rate as “Leaning” toward the winning party are nearly as good: combined, only two seats in two years. Thus, any Democrat whose opponent is said to be “likely” or “favored” to win come Monday will almost surely go down to defeat.

What about the toss-ups? They break only slightly toward the winning party. In 2008, Cook rated 35 races as toss-ups; Democrats won 19 of them, or 54 percent. In 2006, he rated 39 races as toss-ups; Democrats won 22 of them, or 56 percent.

Rothenberg’s ratings are more complicated, but obtain nearly similar results. In 2008, he said 14 races were pure toss-ups; Democrats won seven of them. Democrats won nine of the 13 races labeled as tilting Democratic, and Republicans won all of toss-ups tilting their way. All together, Democrats won exactly half of the 32 toss-ups. In 2006, Democrats won ten of the 19 pure toss-ups, all of the races that were tilting Democratic, and one of the ten tilting Republican. Combine all the toss-ups and Democrats won 21 of 40, or 52.5 percent.

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Hot Air: Kendrick Meek: Charlie of Orange (Crist) offered me his sister’s cross to get me to drop out

Mr. Crist, the Florida governor, had called Mr. Meek, a Miami congressman, earlier that morning, about 4:50 a.m., leaving a voice mail asking if they could meet up at the AIPAC gathering. “I’ll call you later this morning and see if we can work out a time to get together just you and me,” Mr. Crist said in the voice mail, which was played for Washington Wire by Mr. Meek. “Take care, buddy.”

Mr. Meek was scheduled to speak at AIPAC about 8:30 and Mr. Crist at 10, but the governor showed up an hour early in hopes of catching the congressman.

Mr. Meek said he tried to avoid Mr. Crist, but as he left the stage, “there he was, right in front of me.”

“He said, ‘If you were to drop out and work with me and help me we together can beat Marco Rubio,’” Mr. Meek recalled. “I said, ‘Governor, that’s a non-starter.’

“Then he dug down into his pocket and pulled a small cross out,” Mr. Meek continued. “He said his sister gave it to him and he wanted to give it to me so I would think about it.”

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Call Me Senator – From David Zucker

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The Next President (Sarah Palin): Lisa, are you going to shut down my Facebook page for writing this?

Yesterday, Lisa Murkowski’s hired guns threatened radio host Dan Fagan, and more importantly, the station that airs Fagan’s show, with legal action for allegedly illegal “electioneering.” The station, unlike Murkowski, who is flush with millions of dollars from vested corporate interests, does not have a budget for a legal defense. So it did what any small market station would do when threatened by Beltway lawyers charging $500 to $1000 an hour – they pulled Dan Fagan off the air.

Does all this sound heavy handed? It is. It is an interference with Dan Fagan’s constitutional right to free speech. It is also a shocking indictment against Lisa Murkowski. How low will she go to hold onto power? First, she gets the Division of Elections to change its write-in process – a process that Judge Pfiffner correctly determined had been in place without change for 50 years. She is accepting financial support from federal contractors, an act that is highly questionable and now pending before the FEC. And today, she played her last card. She made it clear that if you disagree with her and encourage others to exercise their civic rights, she’ll take you off the air.

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Us News: W 48% Obama 43%
By Paul Bedard

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, rapped by the White House for pledging to make Barack Obama a one-term president, seems to have the support of a majority of Americans. A new poll provided to Whispers says that 56 percent of likely voters want the president fired.

According to pollster Doug Schoen, whose new poll shows vast support for the Tea Party movement among voters, the president is still liked by about half the nation. In fact, more like him personally than like his policies. Some 48 percent think he’s a nice guy, while just 42 percent approve of his job performance.

But that personal favorability doesn’t translate into re-election support when voters are asked if Obama deserves a second term. Says Schoen: “Despite voters feelings toward Obama personally, 56 percent say he does not deserve to be re-elected, while 38 percent say he does deserve to be re-elected president.” Worse, Schoen adds, “43 percent say that Barack Obama has been a better president than George W. Bush, while 48 percent say Bush was a better president than Obama has been.”

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Discovery: What We All Knew – Liberalism is a Mental Disorder
Analysis by Liz Day

Is political ideology derived from a person’s social environment or is it a result of genetic predisposition?

It’s an interaction of both, according to a recent study on our political leanings that boosts both sides of the nature versus nurture debate.

Scientists at the University of California San Diego and Harvard University determined that people who carry a variant of the DRD4 gene are more likely to be liberals as adults, depending on the number of friendships they had during high school. They published their study in a recent issue of The Journal of Politics.

Data was analyzed from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (the same source for a recent study that found intelligent children drink more alcohol as adults).

The four authors, including UCSD’s James Fowler, wanted to explore if politics were heritable by identifying a specific gene variant associated with political leaning. They hypothesized that individuals with a genetic predisposition toward seeking out new experiences would tend to be more liberal.

The 7R variant of DRD4, a dopamine receptor gene, had previously been associated with novelty seeking. The researchers theorized novelty seeking would be related to openness, a psychological trait that has been associated with political liberalism.

However, social environment was critical. The more friends gene carriers have in high school, the more likely they are to be liberals as adults. The authors write, “Ten friends can move a person with two copies of 7R allele almost halfway from being a conservative to moderate or from being moderate to liberal.”

They theorize a larger social network may bring more diverse viewpoints, which could be an influence on the liberal development.

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Financial Times: A presidency heading for a fiscal train wreck
By Nouriel Roubini

What has been the fiscal performance of President Barack Obama? He inherited the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, as well as a budget deficit that – after much needed bail-outs and a series of reckless tax cuts – was already close to $1,000bn. His stimulus package, together with a backstop of the financial system, low rates and quantitative easing from the Federal Reserve, prevented another depression. Mr Obama also deserves credit that the US, alone among advanced economies, currently supports a “growth now”, rather than an “austerity now” path.

But this is but one half of the picture; we must also judge his first two years on his ability to anticipate what the economy will need tomorrow. Here the picture is much less positive. Given the likely path of fiscal policy after next Tuesday’s election – with the expiration of existing stimulus and transfer payments, and even with most of the 2001-03 tax cuts being kept – the US economy will soon experience serious fiscal drag just when it needs a further boost. Problematically, the administration’s failures leave it relying on the Fed, which is bent on further QE, likely to be announced next Wednesday. But studies show this will have little effect on US growth in 2011, so fiscal policy should be doing some of the lifting to prevent a double dip recession.

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Newsweek: Rush Limbaugh: Always Right
by Zev Chafets

Rush Limbaugh wants Republicans in Congress to send the president a “repeal bill every week.”

People sometimes ask Rush Limbaugh if he has plans to run for public office, and his answer is always the same—he can’t afford the pay cut.

This is a rare understatement by El Rushbo. His annual income is greater than the combined salary of the entire U.S. Senate (and you can toss in a few dozen congressmen and cabinet secretaries for good measure). “I certainly don’t derive my living by what goes on in Washington, and I’m not dependent on what happens there,” he boasted to his radio audience in September. “The further away that city is from my life, the more prosperous I am.”

Limbaugh, who lives like a pasha in an oceanside estate in Palm Beach, Fla., doesn’t need to go to Washington to be heard there. His voice carries to the nation’s capital and beyond, to every state and congressional district in the country. The Rush Limbaugh Show is on the air three hours a day, five days a week, carried by some 650 radio stations. Industry estimates put his weekly audience somewhere between 15 million and 20 million. Talkers Magazine recently named him the most important radio host of all time.

Limbaugh has wielded political influence since his show first went national 22 years ago. In 1994 he was so important to the Republican congressional landslide that the GOP House freshman class made him an honorary member. But never before in his long career has Limbaugh had the degree of political influence he currently enjoys. It is not an exaggeration to say, as former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel did, that Limbaugh is “the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party.” He intends to use that force and energy to shape the Republican side of the next Congress.

In a recent e-mail exchange, Limbaugh laid out his to-do list, which includes repeal of the health-care law and the financial-regulatory-reform bill; ending the ban on offshore drilling; the reprivatization of General Motors, Chrysler, and the student-loan program; a spike in the heart of cap-and-trade legislation (he regards global warming as a hoax); the elimination of the capital-gains tax; a reduction of the corporate tax rate to 20 percent; and replacement of the progressive income-tax code with a flat or “fair” tax.

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National Review: Why isn’t Julian Assange dead?
By: Jonah Goldberg (a recent guest on Strictly Right Radio)

I’d like to ask a simple question: Why isn’t Julian Assange dead?

In case you didn’t know, Assange is the Australian computer programmer behind WikiLeaks, a massive — and massively successful — effort to disclose secret or classified information. In a series of recent dumps, he unveiled thousands upon thousands of classified documents from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Military and other government officials insist that WikiLeaks is doing serious damage to American national security and is going to get people killed, including brave Iraqis and Afghans who’ve risked their lives and the lives of their families to help us.

Even Assange agrees. He told the New Yorker earlier this year that he fully understands innocent people might die as a result of the “collateral damage” of his work and that WikiLeaks may have “blood on our hands.” WikiLeaks is easily among the most significant and well-publicized breaches of American national security since the Rosenbergs gave the Soviets the bomb.

So again, I ask: Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?

It’s a serious question.

In almost every corner of the popular culture, there are people who assume incredible competence on the part of our intelligence agencies. We take it as a given that spooks can, in the immortal words of Elvis, take care of business in a flash. In the Jason Bourne movies, say the wrong word into your cell phone, and assassins will find you at the train station in minutes. In AMC’s Rubicon, if you pay too close attention to crossword puzzles, your train will be “accidentally” derailed. In Three Days of the Condor, if you ask your bosses the wrong question, a postman with an ice-bullet-shooting machine gun will pay you a visit.

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Wall Street Journal: Revolt of the Accountants

By: Peggy Noonan

If you write a column, you get a lot of email. Sometimes, especially in a political season, it’s possible to discern from it certain emerging themes—the comeback of old convictions, for instance, or the rise of new concerns. Let me tell you something I’m hearing, in different ways and different words. The coming rebellion in the voting booth is not only about the economic impact of spending, debt and deficits on America’s future. It’s also to some degree about the feared impact of all those things on the character of the American people. There is a real fear that government, with all its layers, its growth, its size, its imperviousness, is changing, or has changed, who we are. And that if we lose who we are, as Americans, we lose everything.

This is part of what’s driving the sense of political urgency this year, especially within precincts of the tea party.

The most vivid illustration of the fear comes, actually, from another country, Greece, and is brilliantly limned by Michael Lewis in October’s Vanity Fair. In “Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds,” he outlines Greece’s economic catastrophe. It is a bankrupt nation, its debt, or rather the amount of debt that has so far been unearthed and revealed, coming to “more than a quarter-million dollars for every working Greek.” Over decades the Greeks turned their government “into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums” and gave “as many citizens as possible a whack at it.” The average government job pays almost three times as much as the average private-sector job. The retirement age for “arduous” jobs, including hairdressers, radio announcers and musicians, is 55 for men and 50 for women. After that, a generous pension. The tax system has disintegrated. It is a welfare state with a cash economy.

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RGA: Remember November

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National Review: The Tea-Party Tradition

By: Daniel Hannan

Viewed from abroad, the existence of a vibrant conservative alliance is one of the most distinctive features of the American political scene. The rise of such a movement, beginning in the middle years of the 20th century, accompanied and facilitated the rise of the Republican party.

The first element in this conservative coalition was the think tank. Free-market institutes are now so ingrained into the conservative coalition that it is hard to imagine life without them. But, not so long ago, the Left, entrenched as it was in universities, dominated the intellectual sphere.

Until the 1950s, conservatives lacked a philosophy. They had instincts, beliefs, policies, but nothing that could properly be called an ideology. This changed as think tanks began to play the role on the right that universities were playing on the left. Think-tankers didn’t just write the script, or at least parts of the script; many of their scriptwriters become producers and directors when the Republicans took office and looked to fill their administrations.

It is hard to overstate the impact that small-government institutes have had on American politics. I am not just talking of the great foundations in D.C.: Heritage, Cato, the American Enterprise Institute, and the like. Every state in the union now has at least one significant conservative think tank, many of them — the NCPA in Texas, Hoover in California — with as much national influence as the Washington titans. Wherever there is a legislature, there is a free-market think tank applying the doctrines of Hayek and Rothbard to local conditions.

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Some Humor at a Terrorist’s Expense:

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Washington Post: November election results will vindicate or undercut Obama

By:George F. Will

Promoting his new book, Jimmy Carter, whose version of Christianity allows ample scope for what some Christians consider the sin of pride, has been doing something at which he has had long practice — praising himself. He is, he says, “probably superior” to all other ex-presidents, and would have enacted comprehensive health care if a selfish Ted Kennedy had not sabotaged his plan.

Actually, one reason Carter, who promised to deliver government “as good as the American people,” lost 44 states in his 1980 reelection bid was that voters believed he considered himself too good for them. And they thought he did not know them — that he was disconnected from the way most people thought and felt.

Eight years later, another Democratic presidential candidate had a comparable problem. Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis had vetoed a bill that would have required public schoolteachers to lead their classes in the Pledge of Allegiance. Perhaps the bill was constitutionally problematic. But a presidential campaign is not a law seminar. Dukakis’s incomprehension of American political culture outside of Massachusetts was apparent when, responding to Republican insinuations about his patriotism, he said dismissively that “every first-year law student” studies flag-salute cases that vindicate his position.

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Human Events: Red Herring Politics

By: Thomas Sowell

In an election year, this is the time for an “October surprise”– some sensational, and usually irrelevant, revelation to distract the voters from serious issues. This year, there are October surprises from coast to coast. There are a lot of incumbents who don’t want to discuss serious issues– especially their own track records.

This year’s October surprise that is getting the biggest play in the media is the revelation that California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman once employed a housekeeper– at $23 an hour — who turned out to be an illegal immigrant. It is great political theater, with activist lawyer Gloria Allred putting her arm protectively around the unhappy-looking woman.

But why anyone should be unhappy at getting $23 an hour for housekeeping is by no means clear. Maybe she is unhappy because Meg Whitman fired her when she learned that her housekeeper was an illegal immigrant, despite false documents that indicated she was legal when she was hired.

What is Meg Whitman supposed to be guilty of? Not being able to tell false documents from real ones? Is that what voters are supposed to use to determine who to vote for as governor of California? A far more important question is whether voters can tell false issues from real ones.

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Ideas in Action: Thomas Sowell: A Conversation With One of America’s Leading Conservatives

With: Jim Glassman

A Non-Prediction

By Thomas Sowell

When people learn that you are an economist, they often want you to predict which way the economy is going. There seem to be more than the usual number of calls for such predictions lately. But an economist should be more aware than others are of how hazardous such predictions can be.

One reason is that what happens in the economy is affected by what politicians do in Washington— and who can predict what politicians will do?

However, let me go out on a limb, and try to predict what politicians will not do.

What would probably get the economy recovering fastest and most completely would be for the President of the United States and Congressional leaders to shut up and stop meddling with the economy. But it is virtually impossible that they will do that.

Think about telling all the millions of people who have lost their jobs, their homes or their businesses: “I really messed you up but, hey, nobody’s perfect. So I’m going to leave things alone now.” In fact, that would be hard even to tell yourself.

If the stimulus isn’t working, the true believers have to believe that it is only because it hasn’t been tried long enough, or with enough money being spent.

There are always calls for the government to “do something” when things are going bad. Those who make such calls have almost never bothered to check out what actually happens when the government does something, as compared to what happens when the government does nothing.

It is not just free market economists who think the government can make a mess bigger with its interventions. It was none other than Karl Marx who wrote to his colleague Engels that “crackbrained meddling by the authorities” can “aggravate an existing crisis.”

The history of the United States is full of evidence on the negative effects of government intervention. For the first 150 years of this country’s existence, the federal government did not think it was its business to intervene when the economy turned down.

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Democrats Disillusioned

The president’s cynicism on racial issues is beginning to bother members of his own party.

You expect Republican politicians to criticize Democratic administrations and vice versa. But when Democrats start criticizing Democratic administrations, that is news. Someone once said that the headline “Dog bites man” is not news, but “Man bites dog” is. We are now starting to get “Democrat bites Democrat” news.

Longtime Democratic pollsters Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen last week took on one of Pres. Barack Obama’s most bitter betrayals of his campaign rhetoric and the high hopes of people who voted for him.

Their op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal dealt with race, and it pulled no punches: “Rather than being a unifier, Mr. Obama has divided America on the basis of race, class and partisanship. Moreover, his cynical approach to governance has encouraged his allies to pursue a similar strategy of racially divisive politics on his behalf.”

Cynical? This man with the lofty rhetoric and sermonizing style? Only if you follow his deeds instead of merely his words.

Part of the polarization that Barack Obama has caused among the American public has been due to the fact that some people do not look behind rhetoric and symbolism. Such people are prime candidates to become part of the Obama cult. Those who look only at deeds tend to become critics. But those who closely follow both his words and his deeds are the most outraged of all, because of the gross contradictions between those words and those deeds.

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This one is also great:

The Obama Administration’s Real Bottom Line

It’s political, not budgetary, and the CBO is calling them on it.

Rumors of congressional Democrats privately expressing disapproval of the Obama administration’s actions and policies have been given more credence by such things as Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s public criticism of White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. But when two longtime Democratic pollsters, Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, called President Obama “cynical” and “racially divisive,” that was a dramatic statement. It was like saying that the emperor has no clothes.

A much more rhetorically subdued but nevertheless devastating implicit criticism of current government spending policies came from an even more unlikely source: the Congressional Budget Office, whose director is a Democrat.

Without naming names or making political charges, the Congressional Budget Office last week issued a report titled “Federal Debt and the Risk of a Fiscal Crisis.” The report’s dry, measured words paint a painfully bleak picture of the long-run dangers from current runaway government deficits.

The CBO report points out that the national debt, which was 36 percent of GDP three years ago, is now projected to be 62 percent of GDP at the end of fiscal year 2010 — and to rise in future years.

Tracing the history of the national debt back to the beginning of the country, the CBO finds that the national debt did not exceed 50 percent of GDP even when the country was fighting the Civil War, World War I, or any other war except World War II. Moreover, a graph in the CBO report shows the national debt going down sharply after World War II as the nation began paying off its wartime debt when the war was over.

By contrast, our current national debt is still going up and may end up in “unfamiliar territory,” according to the CBO, reaching “unsustainable levels.” They spell out the economic consequences — and it is not a pretty picture.

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One of the most ominous developments of our time has been the multicultural dogma that all cultures are equal. It is one of the many unsubstantiated assertions that have become fashionable among self-congratulatory elites, with hard evidence being neither asked for nor offered.

But, however much such assertions minister to the egos of the intelligentsia and the careers of politicians and race hustlers, the multicultural dogma is a huge barrier to the advancement of groups who are lagging economically, educationally, and otherwise.

Once you have said that the various economic, educational, and other “gaps” and “disparities” of lagging groups are not due to either genes or cultures, what is left but the sins of other people?

Sins are never hard to find among any group of human beings. But whether that actually helps those who are lagging or just leads them into the blind alley of resentment is another question.

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