Libertarian Leanings

Obama's Principle of Faith

When Obama weighed in on the Ground Zero Mosque, he said Muslims have the right to build their mosque wherever the like.

"As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country," Obama said. "That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances."

Unfortunately, not everybody has that right, as Caroline Glick explains.

But for Obama, there are some groups who must be denied the same civil rights he upholds as absolute in his defense of the plan to build a mosque at Ground Zero. As Obama has made clear since his first days in office, he believes that Jews should be denied the right to their property in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria simply because they are Jews.

OBAMA IS so firm in his belief that Jews should be denied civil rights in Israel's capital and in the heartland of Jewish history that he has provoked multiple crises in his relations with Israel to advance this bigoted view. Almost from his first day in office Obama has struck out a radical position in which he has insisted that Jews must be prohibited from building anything - synagogues, homes, nurseries, schools - in Judea, Jerusalem and Samaria on land they own. Jews - Israeli and non-Israeli - should be barred from exercising their property rights even if their construction plans have already been approved "in accordance with local laws and ordinances."

Meanwhile,

In a briefing with the Egyptian media last week Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas told reporters that no Jews will be allowed to live in a future Palestinian state. He also said that while he would agree to allow NATO forces to deploy in the future Palestinian state, he would not permit any Jewish soldiers to serve in the NATO units stationed on the territory of such a state. As he put it, "I will not agree that there will be Jews among NATO forces and I will not allow even one Israeli to live amongst us on the Palestinian soil."

The notion that an inherently anti-Semitic Palestinian state, predicated on Jew hatred that strong, could possibly live at peace with Israel is simply ridiculous. But tellingly, in all the American pressure that has been placed on Abbas to begin direct negotiations with Israel, at no time has the administration been reported to have insisted that Abbas abandon his anti-Semitism.

This, of course, is the true nature of progressive enlightenment.

Bush vs. Obama

The rehabilitation of the George W. Bush presidency is moving along at a fair clip, spurred on by the dismal performance of his successor, Barack Obama.

On his worst day, the economic decisions by Obama’s predecessor were better, more responsible, and more enlightened that anything President Obama has done.

Read the whole thing.

Progressive Elites And What They Must Do

From Thomas Sowell:

It is no coincidence that those who imagine themselves so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us should be in the forefront of those who seek to erode Constitutional restrictions on the arbitrary powers of government. How can our betters impose their superior wisdom and virtue on us, when the Constitution gets in the way at every turn, with all its provisions to safeguard a system based on a self-governing people?

To get their way, the elites must erode or dismantle the Constitution, bit by bit, in one way or another. What that means is that they must dismantle America. This has been going on piecemeal over the years but now we have an administration in Washington that circumvents the Constitution wholesale, with its laws passed so fast that the public cannot know what is in them, its appointment of "czars" wielding greater power than Cabinet members, without having to be exposed to pubic scrutiny by going through the confirmation process prescribed by the Constitution for Cabinet members.

The Generic Ballot

Rasmussen has distressing news for Democrats today.  The Rasmussen Generic Congressional Ballot has Republicans up by 12 points over Democrats among likely voters.

Republican candidates have jumped out to a record-setting 12-point lead over Democrats on the Generic Congressional Ballot for the week ending Sunday, August 15, 2010. This is the biggest lead the GOP has held in over a decade of Rasmussen Reports surveying.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 48% of Likely Voters would vote for their district's Republican congressional candidate, while 36% would opt for his or her Democratic opponent.  Support for Republicans is up two points from the previous week, while support for Democrats dropped three points.Republicans have led on the Generic Congressional Ballot since June of last year, and their lead hasn’t fallen below five points since the beginning of December.  Three times this year, they've posted a 10-point lead. Prior to this survey, GOP support since June 2009 has ranged from 41% to 47%. Support for Democrats in the same period has run from 35% to 40%.

It's not hard to see why when you look at how progressives frame the paramount issues.  On the subject of Social Security, which is predicted to go broke in 2037, New York Times opinion writer Paul Krugman weighs in with his analysis of its problems

Conservatives hate Social Security for ideological reasons: its success undermines their claim that government is always the problem, never the solution.

Translation:  There is only one solution for government programs that are bankrupting the country – raise taxes.  Disagree and you are a demon. 

In the same vein, here is what Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo adds to the discussion of the 13-story mosque planned for lower Manhattan, two blocks from the hole where the World Trade Center towers once stood :

The institutional Republican party has fully (though with some notable and honorable exceptions) hoisted its sail to xenophobia and religious hatred.

Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post takes a similar view.

WASHINGTON -- Lies, distortions, jingoism, xenophobia -- another day, another campaign issue that Republicans can use to bash President Obama and the Democrats.

I think you get the drift.  Progressives believe the world is made up of two kinds of people.  There are good people and then there are conservatives, and as is readily evident, progressives are not bashful about saying so.  They have one teensy, weensy problem. 

The US is a conservative country and moving in a more conservative direction.  Conservatives rarely find progressive arguments persuasive, but this line of reasoning, all too common among progressives, has no chance of winning over conservative hearts and minds.  Wouldn't you think they'd be bright enough to see that.

Shaping Up To Be A Fascinating November

Jonah Goldberg is not one to lament the demise of the "race card" strategy.

‘The race card is maxed out.”

That was the punch line for a recent hilarious exchange on The Daily Show in which Larry Wilmore, the faux news program’s “senior black correspondent,” reported that the race card is not only over its credit limit but is in fact “void during a black presidency.” This discovery came in the wake of Maxine Waters’s allegation that her political problems stem from a racially biased congressional ethics investigation.

Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters are both subject to congressional ethics investigation, and both for very good reasons, none of which have anything to do with race.  Waters used her influence to secure $12 million in TARP funds for a bank in which her husband was invested to the tune of $350,000.  Rangel, while chairman of the tax writing committee, failed to report the true extent of his income in order to avoid paying taxes on it.

But as Goldberg points out, the ethics investigations are not racially motivated.  His theory is that the blatant corruption of Waters and Rangel is the inevitable result of racial gerrymandering that had handed both congressional Democrats the cushiest lifetime jobs imaginable if they could just manage not to screw up. 

They couldn't.  But they both plan to go down fighting, and their weapon of choice is... you guessed it – the race card!

Both are demanding an immediate trial, before the November elections, which would hammer even more nails into the Democratic coffin. In effect, they’re saying, “Let us off the hook or we’ll take you all down with us in a racial spectacle.”

Oh, it's going to be a fascinating November.

With Democrats In Firm Control...

An overwhelmingly majority of voters now believe that most members of Congress have been bought with cash or campaign contributions.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 70% of U.S. voters believe most members of Congress are willing to sell their vote for cash or a campaign contribution. That’s a 14-point increase from three years ago.

Only 13% don’t think this is true, but another 17% aren’t sure.

Fifty-six percent (56%) say it’s likely that their own representative in Congress has sold his or her vote for either cash or a campaign contribution. Half as many (28%) think it’s unlikely.

It's really a beautiful arrangement.  With stimulus bills and TARP, congressman divert taxpayer dollars to their own pet special interests who, in gratitude, funnel it back in the form of campaign contributions.  Such a deal.  It's actually the Obama master plan, exemplified by the rescue of UAW (nominally GM and Chrysler).  Is there any doubt where the United Auto Workers Union is going to spend its political action money?

Global Warming -- Where's The Consensus?

Wichita's scorching summer is making history.

The summer of 2010 is beginning to rival some of the hottest summers in Wichita history – including the infamous summer of 1936, during the Dust Bowl.

Record-breaking Columbus heat? Not quite yet.

Yes, it's been a hot summer in the city.

But Columbus aside, the summer of 2010 is shaping up to fall short of sweltering-hot across all of central Ohio.

Temperatures continue well below average in Southern California.

The average temperature in July was 79 degrees, five degrees below normal, and the first eight days of this month also have been five to six degrees below normal, weather experts said.

That could put Southern California on track for a near-record-low summer, but it's still too early to say, according to weather experts. The Los Angeles area, in fact, has had below-normal temperatures every month since April.

[...]

"The fruits and vegetables, the tomatoes and a lot of the citrus and things like raspberries are not ripening up because it's not getting hot long enough," she said, adding that some fruit could taste less sweet because less sun means less sugar content.

It's What They Do

Congressman Paul Ryan responded yesterday to opinion writer Paul Krugman's attack on his Roadmap to Solvency calling Krugman "intellectually lazy." 

Krugman wrote on his blog on Saturday that "Ryan could have gotten JCT to do a 10-year estimate; it just wouldn’t go beyond that. And he chose not to get that 10-year estimate." Ryan says that's not true. “We asked Joint Tax to do it," Ryan told me. "They said they couldn’t. They don’t do them long-term outside the 10 year window. They couldn’t do it in the first 10 years because of just how busy they were.” Ryan says Krugman could have cleared this confusion up with a simple phone call.

It's more than Krugman's aversion toward picking up the phone that has Ryan puzzled.

“The Roadmap is designed to maintain a limited government in the 21st century, and it is the antithesis of the progressivist vision which [Krugman] subscribes to. That’s fine. I understand it violates his vision for a progressivist society,” Ryan continued. "What I think is rather bizarre is his strange personal attack and ad hominem attacks based upon his confusion surrounding the scoring process, which could have been easily clarified with a simple phone call or email."

Nothing bizarre about the personal attacks.  It's what progressives do.  Just ask Sarah Palin. 

Krugmanian Dreamworld

Astonishing.  In his relentless campaign against allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, Nobel economist extraordinaire Paul Krugman has come up with the dumbest excuse yet. 

But isn’t keeping taxes for the affluent low also a form of stimulus? Not so you’d notice. When we save a schoolteacher’s job, that unambiguously aids employment; when we give millionaires more money instead, there’s a good chance that most of that money will just sit idle.

So the Nobel Prize winning economist thinks that millionaires aren't smart enough to invest their money?  Is there anyplace, besides under your mattress, where money will sit idle?  Idiot.

Well maybe there's a bright side.  By adhering to Krugmanian principles, Democrats might adequately demonstrate their cluelessness with regard to managing the economy.  Enough so, that in November large numbers of them will be retired?  On the other hand, look for the legacy media to feature elaborate stories about a wonderful October recovery, no matter what the economy is doing by then.

ObamaCare's True Costs

In a companion analysis to the annual Medicare trustees' report, Chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster repudiates claims that ObamaCare is ever going to reduce health care costs. 

Mr. Foster has been Medicare's chief actuary for 15 years, and as such he is required to evaluate the law as written. But as he notes in his appendix, the law as written bears little if any relation to the real world—and thus, he says, the trustee estimates "do not represent a reasonable expectation for actual program operations in either the short range . . . or the long range." In an unprecedented move, he directs readers to a separate "alternative scenario" that his office drew up using more realistic assumptions.

Mr. Foster shows that the Medicare "cuts" that Democrats wrote into ObamaCare exist only on paper and were written so they could pretend to reduce the deficit and perform the miracles the trustees dutifully outlined. With the exception of cuts in Medicare Advantage, those reductions will never happen in practice.

[...]

In other words, under ObamaCare the "cost curve" will not be bent as the White House has advertised.

Nice to know that there is somebody in Washington who is willing to say what we've known all along.  If ObamaCare doesn't break the bank, it will virtually destroy our health care system.  Most likely it will do both.