Ya gotta love Archie’s unsophisticated view of things. It reminds us that the more things change, the more they remain the same! Even ‘ole Archie had it figured out. Of course his son in law – Meat Head never did. Even today Rob Reiner is a fat, bald headed liberal.
December 18, 2011
KKK Democrats Lynching Killing Black & White ‘Radical Republicans’
The Klu Klux Klan was founded as a Democrat proxy group. Many black Americans served in the U.S. Government in the 1800′s and beyond as part of the “Radical Republican” party. In 1912 the ‘Progressive’ Democrat, President Woodrow Wilson instituted racial segregation into the Federal Government.
Examining Black Loyalty to Democrats
Remember this guy? I posted a video of him talking about black crime. Here’s another one. Black conservatives are coming out, but will it help? Look what happened to Herman Cain. Anyway, enjoy:
Job Creation Is No Mystery
By Tom McClintock from the December/January issue
Time to put freedom back to work.
The government’s continuing failure to address our nation’s gut-wrenching unemployment stems from a fundamental disagreement over how jobs are created in the first place.
We are now in the third year of policies predicated on the assumption that government spending creates jobs.
We have squandered three years and trillions of dollars of the nation’s wealth on such policies, and they have not worked because they cannot work.
Government cannot inject a single dollar into the economy until it has first taken that same dollar out of the economy.
True, we can see the job that is saved or created when the government puts that dollar back into the economy. What we can’t see as clearly are the jobs that are destroyed or prevented from forming because government has first taken that dollar out of the economy. We see those millions of lost jobs in a chronic unemployment rate and a stagnating economy.
Government can transfer jobs from the productive sector to the government sector by taking money from one and giving it to the other. That’s at the heart of the president’s plan to spend billions of dollars to hire more teachers and firefighters and police officers. But these temporary government jobs come at a steep price: every dollar spent sustaining one of these jobs is a dollar taken from the same capital pool that would otherwise have been available to productive businesses to invest in creating permanent jobs.
Government can also transfer jobs from one business to another by taking capital from one and giving it to the other.
That’s how we got Solyndra. We put a half-billion dollars at risk to create 1,100 jobs (that’s $450,000 per job) at the alternative energy company. Now those half-billion dollars are gone, and so are the jobs.
What government can do very effectively is to create the conditions in which jobs either flourish and expand, or whither and disappear.
When we place additional taxes on productivity, jobs disappear. The president says he wants to tax only millionaires and billionaires, but the tax increases in his so-called jobs plan actually hammer more than 75 percent of net small business income—at a time when we’re counting on those small businesses to create two-thirds of the new jobs that our people desperately need. That is insane.
When we place additional regulations on productivity, jobs disappear. That’s what we’re watching in real time: thousands of pages of new regulations from Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank regulation bill, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
House Republicans have laid out a comprehensive plan to revive the economy through the same policies that worked under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, John F. Kennedy in the early ’60s, Harry Truman in the mid-’40s, and Warren Harding in the early ’20s.
Reduce the tax and regulatory burdens, and jobs flourish.
For example, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that Obamacare by itself will cost the economy a net loss of 800,000 jobs. In October, the Natural Resources Committee received testimony that just by getting government out of the way and opening up American energy resources to development, the economy could generate 700,000 jobs and $660 billion of direct revenues to the national and state treasuries.
Repeal Obamacare and open up American energy resources — there’s 1.5 million jobs right there — at no cost to taxpayers.
Imagine doing that across all sectors of the economy. That’s what Republicans are proposing to do. The fact that the president doesn’t recognize this as a jobs plan leads me to conclude that he simply doesn’t understand basic economics.
When Ronald Reagan inherited an even worse economy from Jimmy Carter, he reduced the tax and regulatory burdens that were crushing the economy — just as Republicans propose to do today.
Indeed, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, if the economy under Obama had tracked the Reagan recovery, 15.7 million more Americans would be working today, and per capita income would be $4,000 higher than it is today. It’s time we put freedom back to work.
About the Author
Tom McClintock is a Republican U.S. representative from California.
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/12/13/job-creation-is-no-mystery
What Obama Left Behind in Iraq
There’s no need to fear the deference of Iraq’s Shiites toward Iran.
By FOUAD AJAMI
‘The tide of war is receding, and the soul of Baghdad remains, the soul of Iraq remains,” Vice President Joe Biden said at Camp Victory, by the Baghdad airport, earlier this month, in the countdown to the official end of the Iraq war. In truth, the receding tide Mr. Biden glimpsed was that of American power and influence in Iraq and in the Greater Middle East.
This wasn’t something the people of that region pined for. These are lands that crave the protection of a dominant foreign power as they feign outrage at its exercise. Nor was it decreed by the objective facts of American power, for this country still possesses all the ingredients of influence and prestige. It was, rather, a decision made in the course of the Obama presidency—the ebb of our power has become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
America was never meant to stay in Iraq indefinitely. In all fairness to President Obama, he had ridden the disappointment with Iraq from the state legislature in Illinois to the White House. He was not a pacifist, he let it be known. He did not oppose all wars. It was only “dumb” wars he was against. In every way he could, he kept Iraq at arm’s length. He never partook of the view that we had secured strategic gains in that country worth preserving. It was thus awkward to watch the president on Monday, with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki by his side, explaining as we exit that “We think a successful, democratic Iraq can be a model for the entire region.” The words rang hollow.
A president who understood the stakes would have had no difficulty justifying a residual American presence in Iraq. But not this president. At the core of Mr. Obama’s worldview lies a pessimism about America and the power of its ideals and reach in the world.
Getty ImagesIraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki meets this week with President Obama.
The one exception to this strategic timidity is the pride Mr. Obama takes in prosecuting the war against terrorists. In a moment evocative of George W. Bush, Mr. Obama last week swatted away the charge that he had been appeasing America’s enemies abroad: “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 out of 30 top Al Qaeda leaders who’ve been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement.” Fair enough. But the world demands more than that, it begs for a larger strategic reading of things.
We shall never know with certainty what was possible and open to us in Iraq. On the face of it, the Iraqis wanted us out, and Mr. Maliki and his coalition had been unwilling to give our troops legal immunity from prosecution. But how we got there is less understood. The U.S. commanders on the ground thought that a residual presence of 20,000 soldiers would suffice to keep the order in Iraq and give the United States an anchor in that country. The White House had proposed a much lower figure, somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000. That force level would have been unsustainable, a target for the disgruntled and the conspirators.
No Iraqi government would run the gauntlet of a divided country, and a feisty parliament, for that sort of deal. Mr. Maliki may not be fully tutored in the ways of American democracy, but he is shrewd enough to recognize that this American leader was not invested in Iraq’s affairs.
Six years ago, when this war was still young and its harvest uncertain, a brilliant Iraqi diplomat and writer, Hassan al-Alawi, wrote a provocative book titled “al-Iraq al-Amriki” (“American Iraq”). It was proper, he observed, to speak of an American Iraq as one does of a Sumerian, a Babylonian, an Abbasid, an Ottoman, then a British Iraq. He didn’t think that America would stick around long in Iraq, but he thought the American impact would be monumental. Whereas British Iraq empowered the Sunnis, the Americans would tip the scales in favor of the Shiites.
All three principal communities in Iraq had a vested interest in American protection. The Kurds, the most pro-American population in the region, were desperate to have America remain—a balance to the power of Turkey, a buffer between their autonomous zone in the north and the Baghdad government. The Sunnis, the erstwhile masters of the country, had come around: An American presence with enough authority would be their shield against a sectarian, Shiite regime that would cut them out of the spoils.
Ironically, the Shiite majority, the followers of the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr aside, had a vested interest in an American deterrent on the ground. For all their edge in the politics of Baghdad, the Shiites are still given to a healthy measure of paranoia about the world around them. The Iraq midwifed by U.S. power had been delivered into a hostile neighborhood. The Sunni Arabs had yet to accept and make their peace with the rise of a Shiite-led government in Baghdad. And the rebellion in Syria added to the uncertainty, feeding the anxiety of Mr. Maliki and the Shiite political class over a Syrian regime to their west ruled by the Sunni majority. There is also Turkey, large and now with economic means and a view of itself as a protector of the Sunnis of the region.
And there remained Iran, to the east, with the traffic of commerce and pilgrimage, with the religious entanglements born of a common Shiite faith. For the Sunni Arabs—and for Americans who had opposed this war—Iraq is destined to slip, nay it has already slipped, into the orbit of the Persian theocracy. The American war, with all its sacrifices, had simply created a “sister republic” of the Persian state, it is said.
Those who love to organize an untidy world have spoken of a “Shiite crescent” that stretches from Iran, through Iraq, all the way to the Mediterranean and Syria and Lebanon. But the image is false. Iraq is a big and proud country, with a strong sense of nationalism, and oil wealth of its own. An Iraqi political class, with its vast oil reserves, has no interest in ceding its authority to the Iranians.
The Shiism that straddles the boundaries of the two countries divides them as well. The sacred lands of Shiism are in Iraq, and the Shiism of the Iraqis is Arab through and through. The pride of Najaf is great, I can’t see it deferring to the religious authority of strangers.
One of our ablest diplomats, Ryan Crocker, then ambassador to Baghdad, now our envoy in Kabul, once pronounced the definitive judgment on these contested Iraqi matters: “In the end, what we leave behind and how we leave will be more important than how we came.” It so happened that when it truly mattered, the president who called the shots on Iraq had his gaze fixated on the past and its disputations.
Mr. Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and co-chair of Hoover’s Working Group on Islamism and the International Order.
Space: The Next Business Frontier
By next Christmas the airline mogul could be ferrying paying customers outside the atmosphere—and, later, to the bottom of the ocean.
By MARY KISSEL
New York
‘I wanted to create a spaceship where myself and my children could go into space, and our friends could go into space,” exclaims billionaire CEO Richard Branson with his trademark toothy grin. Coming from someone else, this kind of talk might be considered mildly delusional. But in Mr. Branson’s telling it’s hard not to believe in the creativity of capitalism to better the world in ways you might not expect. Mr. Branson is in the Steve Jobs category of entrepreneurs—he believes that if he builds it, they will come.
I’m sitting with Mr. Branson in his Virgin Group’s hip Bleecker Street offices, adorned with a big London Tube mural and modern art, ostensibly to talk about his new book, “Screw Business as Usual.” Fine. After a long exposition from one of the world’s best-known entrepreneurs on why it’s okay to spend shareholder money on “the seemingly intractable problems in the world,” I steer him into talking about his extreme tourism companies, Virgin Galactic and Virgin Oceanic.
![[2winterkissel12]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-RB032_2winte_DV_20111216214302.jpg)
Ken Fallin“The best ideas come from people just wanting to create, like [Google co-founder] Larry Page in his garage just wanted to create a product that he could play with, and then you go and try to make sure that you can pay the bills at the end of the month,” Mr. Branson says. He’s flanked by Jean Oelwang, CEO of his empire’s charitable arm, Virgin Unite, who doesn’t seem pleased that I’m not interested in “high-impact social investment.” But Mr. Branson is on a roll. “If I’d gone to the accountants and said, could you please work out the profit and loss of starting a spaceship company—especially when we didn’t even have a spaceship—they would’ve laughed at me.”
And for good reason. Governments have long dominated space, starting with the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik 1. The U.S. soon followed. “If they’d used just a small fraction of that money as prize money and given it to the best commercial companies, that money would’ve been far better spent,” Mr. Branson muses. “The $10 million [Ansari] X Prize very much sparked our move into space travel,” he notes, referring to the competition organized by entrepreneur Peter Diamandis and launched in 1996.
Mr. Branson had dreamed of exploring the final frontier for decades. “I think it just simply goes back to watching the moon landing on blurry black-and-white television when I was a teenager and thinking, one day I would go to the moon—and then realizing that governments are not interested in us individuals and creating products that enable us to go into space,” he says. In 1995, after making billions of dollars in the music and airline businesses, Mr. Branson registered a new company, Virgin Galactic (the name “sounded good”), at London’s Companies House. Then the company started searching for rocket scientists and the right technology.
Several years later, in July 2002, Virgin’s team traveled to California to check on American aerospace designer Burt Rutan’s progress on the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer, a plane built “to circumnavigate the globe non-stop on a single tank of fuel,” according to Virgin’s website. Virgin discovered that Mr. Rutan intended to compete for the X Prize with SpaceShip One, the world’s first privately developed spacecraft, financed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
Mr. Branson quickly struck a deal: Virgin would license Mr. Rutan’s SpaceShip One technology from Mr. Allen if he won the competition. In 2004, Mr. Rutan did just that, and Virgin Galactic was off to the races.
Fast forward to this October, when Mr. Branson and his children Sam and Holly christened Spaceport America, which advertises itself as “the world’s first purpose built commercial spaceport” and is located about 55 miles north of Las Cruces, New Mexico. In typical outsize Branson fashion, the 61-year-old rappelled from the ceiling of the hangar—now called the “Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space”—and, while dangling in midair, chugged from a bottle of champagne in front of a large crowd to celebrate.
Mr. Branson is still radiating enthusiasm. “We’ve got just short of 500 people now signed up to go, which is actually more people than have been up to space in the history of space travel, and we hope to put those up in our first year of operation,” he says, predicting the first commercial flight by “about next Christmas,” although he acknowledges that there have been many delays.
He hopes “to get the price down so that hundreds of thousands of people out there will have the chance to become astronauts; not just, you know, a very, very few wealthy people.” Tickets today cost $200,000, with deposits starting at $20,000. The Virgin Galactic website enjoins interested parties to “contact one of our Accredited Space Agents around the world.”
What’s so important about an expensive, suborbital joy ride, I ask? “If it was just about the joy ride, that would be exciting enough in itself,” Mr. Branson says, leaning forward in his chair. “But the fascinating thing about adventures like that” is that when people “push the limits” and see “what they’re capable of, other byproducts come that they hadn’t even thought of at the time.” He proceeds to tick off an impressive list.
“We can put satellites into space at a fraction of the price that it currently costs,” he says—and Virgin is working with a “tiny little” company (the name of which hasn’t yet been publicly disclosed) to do just that. “Whereby, for instance, [on] Google, you can see what’s going on six months ago, these satellites will be able to see what’s going on right now.”
Mr. Branson, a longtime environmentalist, envisions using the satellites as a kind of celestial Earth-protector to monitor tree cutting in the Amazon, catch and identify ships illegally fishing, and test whether “global warming is a reality or not.” (Mr. Branson is a believer in climate change, even if the U.S. still has “skeptics”—like “The Wall Street Journal,” he quips.)
The scientific applications are huge. NASA has already purchased a ticket for a flight, with the intention of conducting experiments in suborbit—and why not? Unlike the old Shuttle program, which had launches a few times a year, scientists could use SpaceShip Two to conduct several experiments a week. NASA is turning itself “into a body to contract out to private companies, and that makes sense,” Mr. Branson says, “but it’s obviously a great pity from the American taxpayer’s point of view that they didn’t do that 50 years ago.”
Mr. Branson is excited about the potential for faster transportation, too. “In future years, we hope that we can turn our technology into very fast intercontinental airline travel,” he says. “I can’t promise that we’re going to pull it off, but we’re definitely going to give it a try. And from suborbital we’ll definitely be going orbital.” Analysts tell me that Virgin Galactic’s mother-ship plane, WhiteKnight Two—which ferries SpaceShip Two aloft and drops it into the atmosphere—is made of light carbon and could have military applications, too.
Mr. Branson isn’t the only businessman exploring private spaceflight. California’s XCOR Aerospace, for instance, is building the Lynx rocket plane, which will also carry passengers and payloads. Test flights are scheduled for late 2012. Unlike SpaceShip Two, the Lynx takes off from a runway and doesn’t depend on a carrier ship, so it has lower operating costs. Tickets start at $95,000 and the company may even beat Mr. Branson into suborbital space, if Virgin Galactic continues to have delays.
Could government regulation put a damper on these private space ventures? “You’ve got some very innovative thinking, I think, in government in America,” Mr. Branson says, with officials “realizing that to start a whole new spaceship industry, they need some flexibility and they don’t need to strangle an industry at birth by overregulating.” He points to laws that limit liability in case of an accident, giving kudos to the Obama administration for supporting such efforts.
Space isn’t the only frontier Mr. Branson is exploring. Virgin Oceanic plans to launch a one-person submarine in 2012 to “journey to the deepest part of each of Earth’s five oceans.” And “we hope to be going 10,000 foot further down than Everest is high. So it’s going to be quite an eerie, six- to seven-hour trip heading down. But scientists are frothing at the mouth with the possibilities of what we could discover,” Mr. Branson says. “In the history of mankind,” only two people have ever been below 18,000 feet and the ocean is “twice as deep” as that.
After the first solo pilot tests the sub, Mr. Branson himself will pilot it to the bottom of the Puerto Rico Trench, near his private island of Necker in the British Virgin Islands. “It’s going to be ridiculously exciting and absolutely terrifying as well,” he exclaims. Someday he wants to build a business like Virgin Galactic, only taking paying customers—so called “aquanauts”—into the ocean’s depths, but that’s still some way off.
So what advice does Mr. Branson have for aspiring entrepreneurs? “Think of what frustrates you—and if you’re frustrated by something and you feel ‘Dammit, if only people could do this better,’ then go try to do it better yourself. It can start off in a really small way . . . and you’ll be surprised: If you’re doing it better yourself, in whatever field it is, you’ll be filling a gap and you suddenly might start creating a business.”
Who knows? You might even end up in space.
Ms. Kissel is a member of the Journal’s editorial board.
The Chicago Expulsion Act of 2011
Windy City pols are bankrupting Illinois with bailouts for their hometown. Now downstate legislators are fighting back.
By ALLYSIA FINLEY
‘Why would anyone want to live in Illinois?” So muses Curt Wooters, who works for the state and helps his dad run the family’s sporting-goods store in Findlay, 200 miles south of Chicago. Imagine California without the sunshine, New York without the cultural elan, New Jersey without Chris Christie. That’s Illinois.
Mr. Wooters has another five years before he can retire, but he’s advising his kids to leave the state after college. He’s also talked with his dad about closing their shop because it costs too much to run a business in Illinois these days. Plus, “the customers are leaving town.”
Now two downstate Republican lawmakers think that they’ve found a solution for Mr. Wooters and other disgruntled Illinoisans who want to escape but can’t: Cut off the pesky tail that’s wagging the dog—separate Chicago from the rest of the state.
That’s the legislative initiative of State Reps. Adam Brown and Bill Mitchell, who think politicians from the Windy City have blown the state too far left. “At every town-hall meeting I hear, ‘Can’t we separate from Chicago?’” says Mr. Mitchell.
Associated PressFormer Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, the latest symbol of Chicago corruption
Chicago pols control almost all seats of power in Illinois. Gov. Pat Quinn, House Speaker Mike Madigan, Senate President John Cullerton, Attorney General Lisa Madigan and Secretary of State Jesse White are all Democrats from Chicago. So was former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who this month was sentenced to 14 years in prison for corruption, including trying to sell President Obama’s vacated seat in the U.S. Senate. Consequently, as Mr. Wooters says, a lot “of the money that we have down here goes up there to bail out Chicago.”
In 2008, lawmakers in Springfield cobbled together a $530 million rescue package for Chicago’s transit system, which was on the brink of collapse because of sky-high labor and legacy costs. Just this week they pushed through $300 million of tax credits for the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago Board Options Exchange and Sears to prevent the businesses from fleeing to lower-tax climes. Both Indiana and Ohio have been aggressively poaching Illinois businesses, especially since January, when lawmakers raised the state income tax to a flat 5% from 3% and the corporate tax to 9.5% from 7.3%.
The special carve-outs may stop Sears and the financial exchanges from flying the coop, but the income-tax hikes will still prove job-killers. While the jobless rate in other Midwest states has stayed relatively flat over the past year, Illinois’s unemployment rate has risen to 10.1% from 9%. Most of the lost jobs are in information technology and financial services, which are some of the easiest to move.
Mr. Wooters knows several people who are leaving the state. His neighbors are moving to Kentucky, his best friend to Tennessee. Another friend, who owns a chain of agricultural-supply stores, has moved to Florida and is expanding operations in other states. Most of the state’s business class appears bearish about their own future. In a Chicago Tribune survey of 45 chief executives of large, publicly held Illinois businesses, only two said they expected the state’s economic condition to improve in the next year.
Little wonder why. The state’s bond debt has soared to $30 billion from $9.2 billion in 2002, when Democrats seized control of both the governorship and statehouse. Lawmakers have borrowed $10 billion just to fund the state’s pension system, which is running a $210 billion unfunded liability. In fact, all of the $7 billion raised by this year’s income and corporate tax hikes is going toward funding pensions.
Lawmakers tinkered with pension reform last year, raising the retirement age to 67 for new employees, but Democrats don’t see an urgent need to make more significant changes. This week, after catching flak from unions, Democrats sought to take back their support for proposed legislation that would curb egregious pension abuses by labor leaders.
Meanwhile, Republicans, who occupy about 40% of legislative seats, aren’t exactly holding the Democrats’ feet to the fire. As Speaker Madigan’s spokesman Steve Brown told me, “95% of things that get done in Illinois are a result of compromise.”
“Republicans who held power in the 1980s and ’90s were not ideological. They supported tax increases,” says John Tillman of the Illinois Policy Institute. More recently, most Republicans supported the Democrats’ crony-capitalist tax credits for Chicago businesses, rather than insisting that the legislature roll back the corporate and income tax hikes.
But is booting Chicago from the state a feasible answer? It might win GOP lawmakers some points with conservative constituents, but it’s no more likely to happen than the dream of some Californians to partition the Golden State in two. The division would require the approval of the state legislature, Congress and the people of Chicago.
Illinois Republicans would be better off spending their time devising a strategy to win the statehouse and governorship. The first step would be to educate the public about the state’s problems and about how Republicans and Democrats differ in their proposed solutions. And while Chicago might be a lost cause for them, Republicans would do well to target their message at the Cook County suburbs, where most statewide elections are won and lost.
A few years ago it seemed unlikely that Republicans could seize control of legislatures and governorships in Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan, all heavily unionized states. But it’s happened in all three. That’s the difference that budgetary chaos, a strong party organization and the right message can make.
Ms. Finley is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com.
December 16, 2011
The Real Sleeping Giant
By Ross Kaminsky on 12.16.11 @ 6:08AM
A new Gallup poll suggests Obama’s class warfare is becoming a big loser for the left. (Updated.)
During the heady days of the 2009 protests against the “Porkulus” bill, Obamacare, and big government in general, many people spoke of the rise of the Tea Party movement as the result of Presidents Obama and Bush having “woken the sleeping giant” of pro-liberty America.
But that giant may turn out to be a pygmy when compared to what Barack Obama, Harry Reid, and Occupy Wall Street have awoken with their incessant and intensifying class warfare.
Americans who consider themselves Tea Partiers are a minority of the country, even if a significant and motivated one. The real majority, one which Democrats are foolishly antagonizing, are those of us who refuse to accept the left’s claims that Americans of one economic class are the enemy of those in another economic class.
A recent poll by Gallup shows that the efforts of Obama and the Occupiers may be backfiring against the beggar-thy-neighbor Alinskyite left.
To be clear, while the poll shows that “Americans’ views of their own position as ‘haves’ or ‘have nots’ have been remarkably stable,” the percentage of Americans who believe that the nation is divided along those lines has plunged since the last similar poll, done just prior to President Obama’s election in 2008.
During the Bush years, people were beginning to think that lower-income Americans were in a form of conflict with the elite, now called “the 1 percent,” or were perhaps even their victims. Those views became particularly intense during the depth of the 2008 financial crisis when politicians of both parties, parroted by media everywhere, blamed the real estate crash and ensuing stock market plunge on Wall Street bankers who fooled unsuspecting borrowers into buying houses they couldn’t afford and then securitized “toxic” derivatives and sold them to unsuspecting investors.
The mess was far more a failure of government than of markets, something which one might think would be difficult for the American people to learn, especially since politicians of both parties have a lot to answer for when it comes to pushing “affordable housing” aka “vote buying” on the nation.
But Barack Obama has given the nation a tremendous object lesson by posing the federal government as the solution to all problems — and then proving that it isn’t. When the president said that spending a trillion dollars of our children’s future earnings would keep unemployment below 8 percent only to see us spend the last two and a half years with only three months below 9 percent unemployment — and none below 8.5 percent — the public begins to see the economic emperor as wearing no clothes.
Even if the voters don’t think about it explicitly, if the Obama administration’s claims about government fixing the economy are so obviously false, then just perhaps the other charges made about evil capitalists being the source of all evil may also be false. At least, they’re worth skepticism.
And thus the public has become skeptical.
The Occupy Wall Street movement has likewise had the opposite effect of what its anarcho-socialist hygiene-challenged spoiled middle-class kids intended. When you see “protesters” defecating on a police car or an American flag, instigating violence, and generally being incoherent, the ordinary American is likely to see those people as a greater threat than a bunch of villainized bankers could ever be. Again, when the messenger is so utterly without credibility, the internalized message among the public is likely to be the opposite of what the preachers of radicalism offer.
Among those 19 groups for which Gallup broke out the “haves” versus “have nots” responses, only one, those earning less than $30,000 per year, had a majority who put themselves in the latter category. Even the unemployed, non-whites, those without a college degree, and Democrats all have a majority who self-identify as “haves.”
While a majority of Americans believe that the nation is not divided along these lines, a majority of Democrats do buy into the class warfare rhetoric, with 58 percent saying we are split between “haves” and “have-nots.” However, even that is down three percent from 2008. Independent voters reject the class warfare concept with only 37 percent believing we’re divided, a stunning drop of 11 points from three years ago. Similarly, self-identified moderates are at 38 percent, down 13 percent. Not surprisingly, barely one quarter of Republicans (26 percent) and conservatives (27 percent) see class warfare as real.
Interestingly, while the numbers for Independents and moderates were nearly identical, as were Republicans and conservatives, there is a significant gap between Democrats and liberals, with the latter group showing a 66 percent majority believing in the “haves” versus “have-nots” divide, eight percent more than Democrats. While this might mean that there are liberal Independents adding to the number, a bigger take-away is likely that there is a fair number of slightly conservative Democrats, those we used to call Reagan Democrats, who might drift away from their party’s presidential nominee.
As if to reemphasize the point, another Gallup poll released Friday shows that “More Americans say it is important that the federal government enact policies that grow the economy and increase equality of opportunity than say the same about reducing the income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor.” Only 46 percent of poll respondents thought that government efforts to reduce income or wealth gaps between rich and poor were “extremely important” or “very important.” However, when it comes to increasing equality of opportunity, the number is 70 percent, and for “grow and expand the economy” the number jumps to 82 percent. Somewhere Thomas Jefferson is smiling; Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky not so much.
We are all Americans, all endowed with an unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness, and most of us with aspirations to the American Dream of upward economic mobility. When you hate your neighbor because of his success, you shred our national fabric. Barack Obama may want to go down that road, but most of the rest of the nation properly finds his intentional attempts to divide us somewhere between dubious and abhorrent.
As Gallup notes, “Americans as a whole are no more likely to see the country as divided into haves and have nots than at any time in the past two decades.” This is bad news for Barack Obama and other Democrats running for reelection in 2012. Their siren song of divide-and-conquer is falling flat on the ears of the majority of Americans. But the annoying political tinnitus is awakening the real sleeping giant — those Americans who recognize that our nation did not become great by thinking like V.I. Lenin, Che Guevara, or Chairman Mao.
About the Author
Ross Kaminsky is a self-employed trader and investor and is a fellow of the Heartland Institute. He blogs at Rossputin.com and is the host of Backbone Radio on Sunday evenings.
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/12/16/the-real-sleeping-giant
The Obama Administration and Child Sex
By James M. Thunder on 12.15.11 @ 6:08AM
The Plan B contretemps reveal an appalling lack of common — and moral and legal — sense.
The nation was rightfully outraged at the failure of Pennsylvania State University officials to protect young children from rape (assuming the charges against former Coach Sandusky are true). Those were, however, the actions of a few men acting in their private capacity affecting a dozen (?) children-victims. So much worse is the Obama Administration in its consideration of policies that would facilitate child sex.
Let’s remember why Plan B is called Plan B. It is, in the first instance, a brand name of a particular emergency contraceptive (just as Kleenex™ is for facial tissue or Xerox™ for photocopier). Another brand name for an emergency contraceptive is Next Choice™. In normal parlance, a “plan B” is a plan of action in the event the first plan should fail. So, the drug manufacturer chose “Plan B” as a name for its emergency contraceptive drug because a customer’s (or patient’s) first plan did not work. What first plan? Either not using a contraceptive or using one that failed.
Before last week Plan B had been approved by the FDA as safe and effective. Girls under the age of 17 could obtain it only by prescription. Girls and women 17 and older could obtain it without prescription but, because of the age restriction, had to purchase it from a pharmacist. The narrow issue before the FDA last week was whether girls under the age of 17 could understand and follow the drug’s label, including instructions concerning side effects. If they could, the prescription requirement would drop for them, letting all girls and women of any age purchase the drug off the shelf (or, over the counter). While the issue was narrow, we should expect our elected and appointed officials to place the issue in a larger context. The very purpose of emergency contraception was never addressed in the statements made last week by the Obama Administration.
First up was Food and Drug (FDA) Administrator (and medical doctor) Margaret Hamburg who announced her approval of the use of Plan B by girls under the age of 17 without prescription. Within a day, Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled that decision. On the next day, December 8, President Obama expressed his support of Sebelius at a press conference. (Obama denied inserting himself into Sebelius’ decision, but newspapers had reported on December 5 that the FDA decision was imminent and the next day, December 6, Sebelius flew with Obama on his flight to Osawatomie.)
Hamburg asserted, both before and after Sebelius’ ruling, that the scientific evidence was that “all females of child-bearing potential” could follow the label, based on “scientific findings, input from external scientific advisory committees, and data contained in the application [made by Teva Women's Health, Inc., a subsidiary of Teva Pharmaceuticals Industries] that included studies designed specifically to address the regulatory standards for nonprescription drugs.…[E]xperts, include[ed] obstetrician/gynecologists and pediatricians.”
Teva, for its part, stated the study it submitted with its application showed that “nearly 90%” of girls ages 11 to 17 could understand and follow it. (Wall Street Journal, Dec. 8, 2011.) In overruling Hamburg on December 7, Sebelius stated her concern that girls as young as 11.1 years of age could not understand and follow the label:
The average age of the onset of menstruation for girls in the United States is 12.4 years. However, about ten percent of girls are physically capable of bearing children by 11.1 years of age. It is common knowledge that there are significant cognitive and behavioral differences between older adolescent girls and the youngest girls of reproductive age. If the application were approved, the product would be available, without prescription, for all girls of reproductive age.
Obama declared in his December 8 press conference that he agreed with Sebelius and that it was important to apply “common sense” to over-the-counter medications.
Criticism from the left has focused on whether the Obama Administration was more concerned about the politics of the issue than the science (contrary to his March 9, 2009, executive order on the subject), how the pro-abortion Sebelius must have yielded to the President’s political ambition for re-election, how Obama has forsaken his pro-abortion base, how outraged so-called women’s health groups are. (Note: While this is about girls’ health, not women’s, because users of the drug must be 17 or older, women 17 and older must show pharmacists proof of age and of course this is limited to times when pharmacies are open. This is a small price to pay by women to protect those under age 17, as I shall point out.)
The right has continued to raise the issue that Plan B serves to prevent implantation of a fertilized egg and is thus an abortifacient. The right also raises issues of whether use of the drug by minors without prescription would promote promiscuity, eliminate an opportunity for girls to discuss STDs with parents or a doctor, deprive parents of the right to raise their daughters, and allow men and boys to prey on girls. It is this last point that is my focus.
The statements by Obama and his Administration’s officials, and the criticism from the left, miss the forest for the trees (in a way not meant by Jessica Arons, Center for American Progress, when she criticized Obama’s politics for missing the forest). The forest is this: No girl under the age of 17 can lawfully consent to sexual intercourse (with some exceptions in some states). If a girl believes that an emergency contraceptive may be useful to her, it can only be that she has engaged in sexual intercourse. If a girl wants an emergency contraceptive — the label of which warns that it is a one-time contraceptive not intended to replace routine birth control pills (that are available only by prescription) and must be taken within 72 hours of intercourse to be effective, she is not trying to regulate her menstrual cycle. Rather, she has engaged in sexual intercourse. Bells and whistles must go off. It is an emergency. The emergency is not only that she may be pregnant; the emergency is also that she has engaged in sexual intercourse. That is an emergency because the law of some states may allow a 16 year old to consent to sex with a 19 year old, but not with a 25 year old. And then there are the 8 and 9 and 10 year olds who can never consent under the law. Even without such laws, there are some parents who would perceive it to be an emergency.
The FDA rule as proposed by Hamburg may still go into effect. For one, Teva still has an interest in obtaining a larger market for its product. We can expect that Teva will submit additional studies to address Sebelius’s concerns. For another, a federal judge in Brooklyn is presiding over a lawsuit on the subject and could order the FDA and Sebelius to issue the rule. Look at the effect of such a rule:
• As Sebelius pointed out, fully 10% of all girls experience the onset of menstruation (technically “menarche”) before age 11.1. What she did not say is that the age of the onset of menarche continues to drop, so younger and younger girls would be able to buy emergency contraception. One cause of the drop in age is living without a father. (Michele K. Surbey, “Family Composition, Stress, and the Timing of Human Menarche,” in Socioendocrinology of Primate Reproduction,pp. 11 — 32 (1990); R. Quinlan, “Father Absence, Parental Care, and Female Reproductive Development,” Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 24, no. 6, p. 376 (2003).
The number and percentage of girls living without their father continues to grow. According to a 2011 report by the Census Bureau, in 2009 it had climbed to 24% of all children, 50% of African American children.. Another cause of the drop in age is obesity. (D.H. Morris, et al., “Determinants of Age at Menarche in the UK: Analyses from the Breakthrough Generations Study”, British Journal of Cancer, vol. 103, no. 11, pp. 1760 — 4 (2010).) And it is well known that the number of such children continues to climb.
• If a girl, age 10, were to present the emergency contraceptive for purchase to a drug store sales clerk, the sales clerk would be under no legal obligation to report it to a pharmacist, doctor or police. Pharmacists, by contrast, may be required by law to report evidence of sexual abuse of minors.
• There would be nothing to prohibit a boy or a man from buying an emergency contraceptive off the shelf and giving it to a girl. In fact, the boy or man may buy it ahead of time since the label for Plan B states that its effectiveness increases the closer in time it is used after the act of intercourse.
• Although Plan B was approved by FDA as effective, and has been approved for use by girls under 17 by prescription because it is effective, the label for Plan B describes precisely how ineffective it is: It will fail in 1 out of 8 cases. Girls reading the label’s description of the failure rate, as well as the portion of the label that says there is no problem from overdosing, may well be tempted to think that a double dose will be more effective. In any case, the label concedes that one girl in eight will need a Plan C.
• While emergency contraception is not supposed to be used as a routine contraception (which requires a prescription), there would be no legal obstacle to doing so. And, if it is true that the side effects may only be menstrual bleeding, menstrual cramps, headache, vomiting, and nausea, then a girl might use it with some frequency.
• A November 2011 report by the Census Bureau stated that 15.75 million children are living in poverty. How would a poor girl come up with $50 to purchase emergency contraception in a drugstore? Maybe the girl would obtain it free or at a discount from Planned Parenthood, a school nurse, a camp counselor. There may be no obstacle to Planned Parenthood, school nurses, camp counselors, and others from stocking up on the drug and providing it to minors — without parental knowledge much less consent.
• Finally, there is the effect of an FDA rule on the prerogative of the states. Our states define incest, rape, statutory rape, sexual abuse, and child abuse and neglect, and the states mandate that certain categories of people must report evidence of these offenses to the authorities. State law also defines the responsibilities of parents. Federal agencies that would affect state prerogatives such as these ought to, at a minimum, explicitly consider and discuss them. Every federal agency should appoint an advisory committee consisting of representatives of state government to ensure that this occurs.
President Obama stated that the FDA rule as adopted by Hamburg did not satisfy the test of common sense. Implicitly he stated that his FDA Administrator lacked common sense. Should he retain an official in his Administration who lacks common sense?
It is bad enough for our federal government to facilitate child sex. But it is even worse that this occurs in an environment where, as noted, so many of our girls are living without fathers who could help protect them from men and boys. And an equal number of boys are living without fathers who could model for them, and instruct them on, how to treat girls.
President Obama delivered a speech on December 6 in Osawatamie, Kansas. He selected the town in imitation of President Teddy Roosevelt who delivered a speech there in 1910. TR liked popping his p‘s when he spoke. Let me pop them as I say: Put a stop to public policies that don’t protect our pubescent children.
About the Author
James M. Thunder is a Washington, D.C. attorney, the father of three daughters, and former county prosecutor of child abuse and neglect.
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/12/15/the-obama-administration-and-c
A doctrine ‘most false and unfounded’
By Vin Suprynowicz
America’ s great national holiday is July 4, the celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But how long did that confederation of sovereign states, founded to fight the Revolution, really last?
Only the brightest of today’ s young scholars are likely to recall that it passed away after only a dozen years, on June 21, 1788, when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify the new Constitution.
With Thomas Jefferson safely off in Paris, Alexander Hamilton and the gang moved heaven and earth to convince a skeptical public that the stronger new central government they proposed would never grow powerful enough to take away any of their hard-won freedoms.
(Kids are taught in school the Articles of Confederation weren’ t working because, among other indignities, seaboard states were charging extortionate duties on goods transshipped to landlocked states. But the first landlocked state, Vermont, wasn’ t admitted till 1791.) No, no, the new central government’ s powers would be sharply limited to those expressly spelled out in the new founding document — funding a Navy, granting patents and copyrights, coining metal money. Not much more.
Fast-forward 220 years. As a recipe for limited government, this Constitution now matches the creature it’ s supposed to describe about as well as a Chihuahua carrier would fit a loping Irish wolfhound.
The prima facie proof of this failure now stares at us from every acre of the former marshland north of the Potomac, a granite necropolis and memorial park to our deceased freedoms at least a hundred times larger in manpower and frenzied ambition to control our lives than Jefferson could ever have imagined. Is there any remaining hope, today, for our fragile liberties?
What hope remains is thanks to the fact that Rhode Island and North Carolina (bless them) outright refused to ratify the new Constitution until a Bill of Rights was added — while Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia and New York all ratified only on the condition that some such set of amendments be quickly appended.
And so, on the day we should probably celebrate as our second great national holiday, on Dec. 15, 1791, Virginia became the 11th state to ratify those solemnly promised first 10 amendments, James Madison’ s Bill of Rights (though a better name might be a “Bill of Prohibitions” on government conduct).
On Thursday, the anniversary again passed largely unnoticed. But the Bill of Rights is still important, not only because it’ s still in force as the highest law of the land, but because it reminds us that ours was and is supposed to be a government of sharply limited powers.
In fact, the main concern of those drafting the first eight amendments was that someone, someday, might take these to be our only rights guaranteed against government trespass.
That’ s why — in an attempt to placate such vociferous anti-federalists as Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee — Madison and friends dutifully added the brief but vital Ninth and 10th amendments, specifying that, “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people,” and, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Anything our ancestors were free to do in 1788 — without seeking any government license or permit — we’re supposed to remain free to do today.
Now, modern fans of totalitarianism, coached by the slyest of lawyers and unionized youth-camp schoolmarms, will argue that the preamble to the Constitution advises us the purpose of the document is to “promote the general welfare,” whereupon they will contend this plainly means Congress is allowed to enact any law and do any thing which a temporary majority of the two houses shall determine tends to “promote the general welfare.”
But that’ s not true. If it were true — if the Constitution means “Congress can do anything that a majority thinks is for the general welfare,” then why doesn’t the document just end there? Why does the Constitution go on for page after page, itemizing the specific, limited powers of the central government?
One of the best and most authoritative answers to this cynical justification for unlimited, Bonapartist tyranny was provided in the final year of his life by no less a figure than Thomas Jefferson himself, in the “Declaration and Protest of Virginia, 1825.”
“We … disavow and declare to be most false and unfounded, the doctrine that the compact, in authorizing its federal branch to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States, has given them thereby a power to do whatever they may think or pretend would promote the general welfare, which construction would make that, of itself, a complete government, without limitation of powers; but that the plain sense and obvious meaning were, that they might levy the taxes necessary to provide for the general welfare by the various acts of power therein specified and delegated to them, and by no others.”
It’ s not really that hard to read, even for someone handicapped by a modern government-school education.
If you can’ t find written down in the Constitution any specific, articulated power — whether it relates to the size of your toilet tank, the type of light bulb you prefer or the power to clear your land of weeds and bugs — then the central government has no such powers.
When the founders wrote the Constitution to limit allocations to raise an army for war to no more than two years, did they really envision leaving troops in Korea or Germany for 60 years, with Congress simply re-upping the authorization 30 times in a row, over two generations?
No. They clearly meant to require intense biennial debate and real “zerobased budgeting” intended to prevent the establishment of any permanent militaryindustrial complex, knowing full well any such permanent institution would be constantly looking for new places to use up their stockpiles. (If we have to attack Iran because they’re supposedly trying to build a nuke, when do we get around to France, South Africa, Israel and the Ukraine?) When the founders said my house could be searched only upon presentation of a warrant signed by a judge who had received an affidavit sworn under oath, did they envision cops showing a warrant only after they break down the door and shoot the surprised occupants? That cops who make misrepresentations about “probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation” should never be prosecuted for that offense, meaning they can pretty much be as careless as they like?
These provisions are all still there in our Constitution, as amended by the integral Bill of Rights, which Barack Obama and every member of Congress have sworn to “preserve and protect.”
I believe it was the late columnist Joe Sobran who once said that a government under the U.S. Constitution would not be ideal — it would just be a whole lot better than what we’ve got now.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the daily Las Vegas Review-Journal and author of the books “The Ballad of Carl Drega,” and “The Black Arrow.”A version of this column first appeared in this space in 2002. See www.vinsuprynowicz.com.