Unable to reach a compromise on a tax cut package, Democrats decided to wait until after the 2010 midterm elections to vote on how many Americans will get a tax increase before the Bush tax cuts expire this December. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said, “Democrats believe we must permanently extend tax cuts for the middle-class before the end of the year, and we will.” (Emphasis mine.)
So now there is at least one to-do item on the Democrats’ lame duck session list. What are the odds a few more will be added before the calendar turns to January?
The difference between a ‘moderate’ politician and a political ‘maverick’ is that the latter takes more joy out of angering his party’s base. For Republican mavericks like Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that usually means signing onto to Progressive-themed legislation on climate change, amnesty, etc. They get in trouble for what they’re for.
Feingold opposed Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement and normalization of trade with China; he opposed George W. Bush’s Central American Free Trade Agreement; now he is challenging attempts by the Obama administration to advance trade policies that do too much for multinational corporations and too little for workers and farmers here and abroad. Feingold was the leading Senate critic of Clinton’s failure to abide by the War Powers Act; he opposed Bush’s rush to war in Iraq and was the first senator to call for a timeline to bring the troops home; now he complains that the Obama administration is not moving fast enough to wind that war down. Feingold noisily challenged constitutional abuses during the Clinton and Obama years, and as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Constitution subcommittee, he is pressing the Obama administration to get serious about civil liberties. Feingold opposed Clinton’s proposal to loosen bank rules, arguing that doing so could threaten financial stability; he opposed Bush’s bank bailout; and he was the sole Democrat to object that the reforms Obama backed did not go far enough because they did not do away with “too big to fail” banks and did not adequately protect consumers or taxpayers.
While there’s something about Feingold’s proclivity to vote ‘No’ that a limited government conservative can (sort of) appreciate, it’s a testament to his lack of legislative accomplishment (other than his free speech-destroying efforts at ‘campaign finance reform’) that Wisconsin voters are thinking seriously about firing him after three terms.
For all his opposition over the years, Feingold loses every battle he fights. Ideas are great. Ideas with results are better.
Hell hath no fury like a career politician scorned. Nine-time congressman and two-time governor Mike Castle (R-DE) will conduct a poll to gauge his chances as a write-in candidate for Delaware’s Senate seat. If he chooses to challenge the Republican Party’s nominee, Christine O’Donnell, Castle will join Lisa Murkowski(I-AK) and Charlie Crist (I-FL) as moderate GOP statewide elected officials who decided to quit their party rather than their hold on power.
Prediction: If Castle follows through with a write-in candidacy Christine O’Donnell will gain ground in the polls. Like other Tea Party candidates she’ll be able to attack Democrat Chris Coons for supporting President Barack Obama’s agenda, and charge that Castle is nothing more than a self-aggrandizing career politician.
In this climate, the truth of both of those charges could be enough to give O’Donnelll a Senate seat for six years.
Pulling out a scribble of notes from his tickler file, columnist E.J. Dionne thinks the Tea Party is “one of the most successful scams in American political history”. Why? Because the “so-called” liberal media is giving an obscure, ideologically-driven set of voices a microphone big enough to capture the nation’s attention. To Dionne’s dismay, few of his fellow gatekeepers “recognize that the tea party (note the intentional lower case lettering) constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its members.”
I don’t think Hillary Clinton could give a better summary of the media’s unyielding adulation for Barack Obama. Like Clinton, Obama was a one-term senator with nary a public achievement to his credit, but somehow his lack of a record was billed as “fresh” and “exciting.”
News flash to Dionne: the media likes a good story, and the TEA PARTY is the most compelling political drama this year. Hate it if you must, but don’t call it a scam. That’s a project for bloated institutions and the candidates who support them; not sporadically organizing coalitions of free people.
Conservatives can be forgiven for thinking that every member of the liberal establishment has read and memorized Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. The subject of Hillary Clinton’s college senior thesis and the inspiration for a young Barack Obama’s zeal for community organizing, the Rules stand alongside Chairman Mao’s little red book in the Leftist’s canon. But time and again, the liberals running the Democratic Party into the ground seem to be as clueless about the rules as they are about the laws of economic gravity.
Consider Rule #12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative. On some level, liberals knew this when they spent the better part of a year castigating Republicans as ‘The Party of No’. They knew that the public wouldn’t accept the GOP as a credible governing party until it produced a constructive alternative. (Though worthy of support, Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) Roadmap for America’s Future has yet to gain widespread acceptance in the GOP caucus.) With this week’s ‘Pledge to America’ the GOP is now a party with a constructive alternative.
The field is open, liberals. And time is dwindling.
Interesting reading from MSNBC.com explains that 46 states, plus the District of Columbia, already have internet sales taxes on the books. However, most businesses with an online presence either don’t know or don’t pay. In many circumstances the sales tax (as it’s called when the seller collects and reports the tax) is turned into a use tax (i.e. shifting collection and reporting to the buyer.)
The State of Alabama is apparently sending out notices for residents to pay up – for purchases over the last three years.
Here’s a list of states considering more direct legislation in order to recoup the estimated $8.6 billion in lost “revenue.”
‘Amazon laws’
States that are currently considering requiring out-of-state retailers to collect sales taxes on online transactions:
• California
• Connecticut
• Illinois
• Iowa
• Maryland
• Minnesota
• New Mexico
• South Carolina
• Tennessee
• Vermont
• Virginia
• Wisconsin
Where’s the party unity? Florida’s Charlie Crist morphed into an Independent when it became clear Marco Rubio would be the Republican Senate nominee. To date, Delaware’s Mike Castle hasn’t called to pledge his support to GOP nominee Christine O’Donnell. (Though he did find time to take phone calls from both President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.)
And today, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski announced she would reject the judgment of her fellow Republicans and run as a write-in candidate after losing her reelection primary to Joe Miller.
Here we go again. While the conservatives always fall in line, it’s the Republican Party’s moderates that are refusing to put their own political interests at the service of party unity.
File Susan Estrich’s column calling for the ouster of all unqualified candidates from political office in the “Now, She Tells Us” folder. Writing in a tone that betrays not only her antipathy for grassroots conservatives, but also a strong disrespect for basic moral sentiments, Estrich implies that the Constitution’s qualifications for federal office aren’t sufficient anymore:
In the long run, a healthy democracy needs qualified and able people of every party to function effectively. The tea party movement’s failure to support candidates who meet that standard may help Democrats avert disaster, but it’s hardly a recipe for a strong political system.
Maybe it’s time to put a “strong political system” on the back burner in favor of “a healthy fiscal system;” especially if a strong political system translates into a fondness for complexity, nuance and compromises that maintain the status quo.
Though I doubt Estrich would have voted for the urbane, highly educated William F. Buckley for any public office, it’s worth remembering that the most famous phrase he ever penned wasn’t a penetrating insight into technocratic policy. It was a description of National Review as a conservative publication “standing athwart history, yelling STOP…”
See if you can spot the missing detail in Washington Post columnist David Ignatius’s profile of former congressman Lee Hamilton (D-IN).
Lee Hamilton remembers that when he came to Washington 45 years ago as a freshman Democrat from Indiana, he made a dumb parliamentary error that would have scuttled the bill he was advocating. The House Republican leader at the time, Gerald Ford, sent over one of his colleagues to help Hamilton fix the mistake.
The story sounds almost unbelievable in today’s bitterly partisan climate, and Hamilton smiles and shakes his head as he tells it. Was there really a time like that, when party interests were subordinate to making the country work? And how could the America of 2010, a nation with an increasingly dysfunctional political system, ever get back to that Arcadia?
If you’re wondering which bill Hamilton gaffed, you’re on the right track. Ignatius conveniently glosses over the fact that a freshman in Congress is more likely than any other member to get a pass – or in Hamilton’s case, an assist – when he botches procedure. Why? Because a freshman member of Congress won’t be within a 100 miles of steering important legislation.
Hamilton’s vignette shouldn’t be the jumping off point that it is for reeling Democrats like Ignatius to pine for the days when people got the benefit of the doubt, so long as they’re trying to “make the country work.” If that’s really Ignatius’s position, then I look forward to his next profile of any of the U.S. Senate Tea Party candidates who are trying to “make the country work” by getting the federal budget balanced and reducing taxes.
With California losing citizens and jobs to other states in record numbers, why not allow cities like L.A. to give $1 million to any business that promises to move into city limits and employ a domestic workforce? Better yet, give 111 businesses $1 million in tax breaks to set up shop and revive the local economy.
American taxpayers can’t afford to spend millions of dollars for dozens of jobs. (And government jobs at that!) Since we need a much higher return on investment to get the economy growing again, why not direct money and incentives to businesses? After all, they – unlike bureaucracies – can create jobs without perpetual government handouts.
We saw your new logo and we were flattered. Honestly touched.
But we also felt bad. We couldn’t help thinking about you guys, probably all sitting around in black tees and cool sneaks, sweating to come up with a new logo that lives up to the whole “change” concept you’ve been pedaling.
Aack, it makes our stomachs hurt just to imagine.
Then someone over there must have had the good sense to use that old cure for creative block – copy stuff…and hope no one notices.
Next time guys, just call. Our sneaks aren’t as cool, but we got the logo thing down.
For conservatives on the ground, it has often felt as if Democrats (and moderate Republicans) were always saying, “We should spend a trillion dollars,” and the Republican Party would respond, “No, too costly. How about $700 billion?” Conservatives on the ground are thinking, “How about nothing? How about we don’t spend more money but finally start cutting.”
That laser-like focus, to Noonan, is what connects all Tea Party-backed candidates this election cycle:
That is the context. Local tea parties seem—so far—not to be falling in love with the particular talents or background of their candidates. It’s more detached than that. They don’t say their candidates will be reflective, skilled in negotiations, a great senator, a Paul Douglas or Pat Moynihan or a sturdy Scoop Jackson. These qualities are not what they think are urgently needed. What they want is someone who will walk in, put her foot on the conservative end of the yardstick, and make everything slip down in that direction.
A vast swath of the American people understand the danger our country’s finances – and by extension, our experiment in self-rule – face. The Tea Party movement is an important element in righting the ship of state before it’s too late. Hopefully, congressional members owing the movement their election victories will display the fortitude necessary to say no to more spending.
But that doesn’t mean it’s changed its position. Escalating the war on words that began by replacing ‘Global War on Terror’ with ‘Overseas Contingency Operation’ and ‘acts of terror’ with ‘man-made disasters,’ President Barack Obama’s advisors are once again going Orwellian. Now, instead of ‘Global Warming’ or ‘Climate Change’ the president’s top climate czar John Holdren wants Americans to start saying ‘Global Climate Disruption.’
Not everyone is convinced the re-branding scheme will work:
“They’re trying to come up with more politically palatable ways to sell some of this stuff,” said Republican pollster Adam Geller, noting that Democrats also rolled out a new logo and now refer to the Bush tax cuts as “middle-class tax cuts.”
He said the climate change change-up likely derives from flagging public support for their bill to regulate emissions. He said the term “global warming” makes the cause easy to ridicule whenever there’s a snowstorm.
“Every time we’re digging our cars out — what global warming?” he said. “(Global climate disruption is) more of a sort of generic blanket term, I guess, that can apply in all weather conditions.”
Ostensibly, the name change is designed to make people take climate change more seriously. More likely, it’ll have the opposite effect.
National Review’s Jonah Goldberg makes a good case that the real analogue to President Barack Obama’s increasingly inept tenure in office is Herbert Hoover. As political scientist Gordon Lloyd makes clear in his anthology, The Two Faces of Liberalism, Hoover was not the ‘market fundamentalist’ FDR and other liberals like to claim. He, like Obama, meddled relentlessly in the market causing it to stagnate. When FDR’s frenetic policymaking was mistaken for good economics, Hoover got the blame while his successor got the credit.
Goldberg sees a similarity in the offing:
For reasons fair and unfair, the Great Depression discredited laissez-faire economics for a generation or more. Hoover, who was hardly the “market fundamentalist” FDR made him out to be, suffered largely from the (bad) luck of the draw, giving Democrats a chance to argue for a new deal of the cards. For reasons fair and unfair, Obama, who inherited a bad recession and made it worse, every day looks more like a modern-day Hoover, whining about his problems, rather than an FDR cheerily getting things done. Inadequate to the task, Obama is discrediting the statism he was elected to restore.
The punch line? When the economy finally rebounds, it might be just in time for Obama’s replacement to get all the credit.
In a Wednesday night interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf engaged in the following exchange:
Asked if it’s really a good idea to go ahead with his plans to build a mosque and Islamic center at an address so close to Ground Zero that it has become a flash point, Rauf gave a reply that boils down to a threat. Rauf said that if his Cordoba House does not get built on his chosen site near Ground Zero, “The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack.”
Citing Muslim attacks on Danish embassies during the riots in 2006 over Mohamed cartoons Rauf went on to say that the result of this current “crisis” could be that “anger will explode in the Muslim world.” That, he said, could lead to “something which could really become very, very, very dangerous indeed.”
Forbes columnist Claudia Rosett rightfully argues that Rauf’s position amounts to blackmail: either let me build my $100 million mosque at Ground Zero or risk other attacks.
A lot of hand wringing has been indulged making this decision primarily one about prudence instead of law. That’s silly. The Ground Zero mosque isn’t about the First Amendment; it’s about national security. Rauf just admitted as much with his threat of violence.
The U.S. Constitution requires the U.S. government to protect citizens from enemies; both foreign and domestic. It’s time to stop acting like the Constitution handcuffs America into ceding our land to a man fronting a group – Cordoba House – whose name recalls the farthest Islamic expansion in European territory.
Here’s another proof that the most insightful thinking on the Right usually comes from those outside the political establishment. Fr. James Schall, a political science professor at Georgetown University, draws out an important lesson from a familiar story in the Gospel of Matthew. Known as “The Workers in the Vineyard,” this narrative of Jesus’s shows the owner of the vineyard paying the same daily wage to laborers who worked different amounts of hours. When the workers who had labored the longest complained to the owner – a symbol of God – he asks the grumblers why they think he shouldn’t be generous. Per Schall:
Modern theories of society hesitate to allow room for generosity. The owner’s property does not belong to him; it belongs to the community. Here, everyone gets only what is just. No room for generosity is allowed. All ownership that would allow for generosity is unjust. The early workers were deprived of what was rightfully theirs, even if they agreed on a set wage for the day.
In a state built on “rights” and “justice,” we find little room for generosity and abundance. Everything is controlled by the state. No one receives more than others. Envy rules. The capitalist parable, as I call it, when spelled out, deals with God’s ways with us. We can save our souls to the very end, even the worst of us. What is it to me, who have borne the heat of the day? In the divine owner’s contract with us, we must accept one condition, namely, His generosity. Many a just man refuses it. He will work forever only on his own terms.
Conservatives often intone the superior virtue of the private sector in healing the ills of society. How refreshing to read an interpretation of Scripture that evidences the claim’s truth.
Television star Kelsey Grammer is headlining a new entertainment project. For those looking for a witty, assertive voice to propel the conservative movement into the 21st century, Right Network is worth a watch:
It isn’t often that we in America get reminded about the importance of reasonably enforcing tax laws. Thanks to the Greek experiment in systematic tax evasion that undergirded that country’s financial collapse, we can all rest assured that a sustained culture of lying leads to the death of civil society.
The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting. Once you saw how it worked you could understand a phenomenon which otherwise made no sense at all: the difficulty Greek people have saying a kind word about one another. Individual Greeks are delightful: funny, warm, smart, and good company. I left two dozen interviews saying to myself, “What great people!” They do not share the sentiment about one another: the hardest thing to do in Greece is to get one Greek to compliment another behind his back. No success of any kind is regarded without suspicion. Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on his taxes, or bribing politicians, or taking bribes, or lying about the value of his real estate. And this total absence of faith in one another is self-reinforcing. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing makes any sort of civic life impossible; the collapse of civic life only encourages more lying, cheating, and stealing. Lacking faith in one another, they fall back on themselves and their families.
To read more about the fantastical confluence of events that bankrupted Greece, read Michael Lewis’s Vanity Fair article here.
Best-selling author Dinesh D’Souza has an eye-popping theory that tries to explain President Barack Obama’s approaches to domestic and foreign policy. In short, Obama appropriated a dream from his father that America – and the business leaders that make it prosperous – are to blame for the world’s problems. And thus, they should be brought down a peg (or ten) to equalize the global ledger.
It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.
For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rejected Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s talk about an “historic compromise” and said there would be no compromises on core issues such as Jerusalem and borders.
Abbas also reiterated his rejection of Netanyahu’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. “We’re not talking about a Jewish state and we won’t talk about one,” Abbas said in an interview with the semi-official Al-Quds newspaper. “For us, there is the state of Israel and we won’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state.”
Regular news watchers in any of the last four decades will recognize this pattern. Israel offers to negotiate a peace deal; Palestine refuses to negotiate any of the “core issues.” You know; like borders, how to share – or not – Jersusalem, and perhaps the most important: whether one of the state parties to a “two-state” solution will be recognized as a state by the other.
The Palestinian Authority’s (PA) refusal to recognize Israel seems grossly hypocritical when the biggest concession Palestinians demand is Israel’s recognition of Palestine as a state.
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