The Intransigent Conservative: Benghazi

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Sunday, February 17, 2013

Weekend Potpourri - Part 2

View the story "Weekend Potpourri - Part 2 (2/16/13-2/17/13)" on StorifyWeekend Potpourri - Part 2 (2/16/13-2/17/13)http://theintransigentconservative.blogspot.comStorified by Brian Empric· Sun, Feb 17 2013 18:33:47James Huffman writes that rural and small-town Americans are losing the right to govern themselves and their own communities in each passing election, starting with an ill-conceived 8-1 decision by the Supreme Court in 1964 that struck down state senate inequality.

The county by county map of the 2012 presidential election reveals, “that portraying states as either blue or red obscures much of what we might want to know about the states” and their voting inhabitants, and “clearly portrays the irony and unfairness of a nation of predominantly red communities governed by a blue, urban, national majority.”

“On this map, we see that most of the blue states are in fact mostly red. The reality of vast expanses of red in some of the bluest of states should concern us if we truly care about self-governance.”

“[T]he erosion of self-governance in rural America is also the result of a generally well intentioned but simplistic understanding of democracy and the associated elimination of institutional protections of local democratic governance.”

“Notwithstanding the sometimes wildly fluctuating views of the electorate, as evidenced by pre- and post-election polls, elections have increasingly come to justify claims of total victory for the winner. The winner sees no need for compromise, making it the loser’s role to obstruct such triumphalism in every way possible, and hope to prevail in the next election.”

“The designers of America’s democratic republic well understood the shortcomings of direct democracy, notably the risk of majoritarian tyranny. Among their constitutional protections against the tyranny of the majority was the creation of a federal system that recognized multiple majorities as legitimate law makers, majorities that would also moderate the selection of the president and the enactment of laws by Congress.”

“Prior to the 1964 United States Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. Sims, most state legislatures included one house apportioned on the basis of population and a second chamber apportioned on the basis of counties or other geographical regions. Many of the former had not been reapportioned for decades, leaving growing urban areas with less representation per capita than rural regions. On the basis of the principle of one person/one vote, the Court found that the failure of most states to regularly reapportion their lower houses put them in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment.”

“Of course, reapportionment of the upper houses of state legislatures on the basis of population did not eliminate county and town governments, but as state legislatures became increasingly homogenous and urban-centric, states gradually intervened in more and more matters that were once of purely local concern. Inexorably, the values and ambitions of urban America have been imposed on small town and rural communities. Despite the often broad agreement among their citizens, the rural communities of red county America have gradually lost control of their own destinies at the hands of statewide majorities marching to a different drummer… because of their minority status in statewide population terms and their lack of representation as communities, rural Americans are denied full self-governance. They have become the objects of what might be called the soft tyranny of others desires and expectations.”

“Democratic government at its best must be about more than the arithmetic of nose counting. Communities require representation if they are to survive in an ever more centralized world. Not the political interest groups we now call communities, but the real communities in which people raise their children, pursue their livelihoods, and nourish their friendships. These are the communities people call home, and they are slowly decaying with the loss of control over their own destinies.”The Disenfranchisement of Rural America: Many Americans are losing the right to self-govern, By James Huffman http://ow.ly/hFRPi #tcotHoover Institution2012 County results mapBrian_EmpricPeter J. Wallison, former general counsel of the Treasury and White House counsel in the Reagan administration, poses a great confirmation hearing question for the senators to ask of Obama’s Treasury secretary nominee, Jack Lew.

Namely, will Lew tell Obama that a serious review of Dodd-Frank, the harshest regulatory law ever imposed on any industry, is necessary to get this economy growing?

“Mr. Lew, after the recession ended in June 2009, the U.S. gross domestic product grew at an annual rate of 2.5 percent until July 2010, when the president signed the Dodd-Frank Act into law. Since then, the annual rate of G.D.P. growth has been 2 percent or less. The reasons for this are not hard to find.”

“To be operational, (Dodd-Frank) requires almost 400 new regulations. Of these, fewer than half have been finalized in the two years since the law’s enactment. The most important regulations, like the Volcker rule and the regulations that will govern the mortgage market, have generated so much conflict among the regulatory agencies that these rules have not been promulgated in final form.”

“The president sees this as a major success of his first term. But in light of its adverse effects on the economy, shouldn’t you be prepared to tell the president that a serious review of Dodd-Frank is necessary?”Mr. Lew, what will you do about Dodd-Frank? http://ow.ly/1SegmCAEISuzy Khimm reports that eleven states and three private groups (Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, State National Bank of Big Spring, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and 60 Plus Association) have “signed onto a lawsuit claiming that broad swaths of Dodd-Frank are illegal” and unconstitutional.

“The suit claims that major parts of Dodd-Frank violate the Constitution’s separation of powers, including the new Consumer Finance Protection Bureau; a new council with the discretion to determine which non-bank financial firms are ‘too big to fail’ and subject to additional regulation; and the government’s new ‘Orderly Liquidation Authority’ to force failing financial companies to dissolve ‘with little or no advance warning,’ according to the lawsuit.”

“[The] attorneys general argue that the OLA, in particular, violates states’ property rights because of the investments that states have made in financial firms that could be dissolved by the federal government.”

“However, even those who believe there are major constitutional problems with Dodd-Frank believe the lawsuit is premature and say it’s unlikely to move through the courts until the government actually uses its new authority to force a failing financial institution to dissolve.”Could Dodd-Frank be unconstitutional? I talk to a few legal scholars who think so. http://wapo.st/15igSVcSuzy KhimmCurrent AGsBrian_EmpricClifford D. May, president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, asks, “Why shouldn’t the American public get to read Obama’s classified targeted-killing memos, and find out their government’s legal reasoning?”

“Let me waste no time in putting my drone cards on the table: Al-Qaeda and other self-described jihadist groups have declared war on America, and are waging war against America. Congress has passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force that gives the president the power to capture and kill members of AQ and allied groups. He should do so aggressively and unapologetically.”

“Enemy belligerents, including those who hold American passports, should not be mistaken for criminal defendants. Judges should not be confused with generals.

“I do think there ought to be congressional review and oversight of drone operations and ‘kill lists.’ And members of Congress — and the public, too, I believe — should be allowed to consider the process the administration has in place for targeted killings, not least those involving American citizens.”

“President Bush tasked his Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to study relevant domestic and international laws to determine which coercive interrogation techniques were permissible and which were not… ‘Waterboarding’ was used on exactly three individuals: Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM), the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks, and two other senior al-Qaeda commanders (Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri). All had information vital to America’s national security. None was giving it up easily.”

“When you bring in someone like KSM, you don’t want him to know how far you can go. The more fearful he is of what awaits him, the more likely he’ll talk without the need for any harsh methods… KSM was smart enough to figure out that the there was a time limit on waterboarding. ‘Pretty quickly, he recognized that within 10 seconds we would stop pouring water,’ said Jose Rodriguez, who ran the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. ‘He started to count with his fingers, up to 10, just to let us know that the time was up.’”

“Obama has used drones to kill terrorists with a frequency I doubt his predecessor ever imagined — more than 2,500 individuals eliminated in Pakistan and Yemen according to Bill Roggio, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who carefully tracks drone operations.”

“In response to a demand from senators of both parties, the White House last week announced that it will release the targeted-killing memos to the House and Senate Intelligence committees… Obama’s lawyers believe that lethal force can be used only if a terrorist attack is ‘imminent’ and if capture of the targeted individual is ‘infeasible.’”

“[H]as it really been infeasible to capture any of the terrorists Obama has used drones to kill? The president has made clear that he does not want to add to the detainee population at Guantanamo. Could that disinclination be playing a role in his kill-vs.-capture decisions? If so, would that mean that the administration, based on its own reading of the law, is killing people illegally — not to mention losing the opportunity for obtaining intelligence that could be used to defend American lives and property?”Check out my latest in @NRO on why the public should be able to read the "Targeted-Killing" Memos http://bit.ly/XF4GKK @followFDD #dronesClifford D. MayJohn Yoo, who served in the Office of Legal Counsel in President George W. Bush's Justice Department and helped draft memos concerning the legality of CIA interrogation of terrorist detainees, writes that the Obama administration has “replaced the clarity of the rules of war with the vague legal balancing tests that govern policemen on the beat.”

“According to the Justice Department white paper obtained by NBC News, the U.S. can kill a citizen who is ‘continually planning attacks’ for al Qaeda when an ‘informed, high-ranking’ official decides that the target ‘poses an imminent threat’ and capture is ‘infeasible.’”

“Those of us in the Bush administration who worked on the response to 9/11 understood that the country was involved in a new kind of war, one that demanded the covert use of force abroad, detention of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay without criminal trials, tough interrogations, and broad electronic surveillance. But Mr. Obama and many of those who would become his advisers never fully accepted—or credited—the Bush administration's difficult decision to consider 9/11 an act of war.”

“U.S. citizenship doesn't create a legal force field around Americans who treasonously join the enemy… But instead of relying on the traditional authority to kill the enemy, the leaked memo reveals how a legal fog threatens to envelop U.S. soldiers and agents on the front lines.”

“The legal system doesn't generally allow the government to stop the potentially dangerous before they commit crimes… The military's mission is quite the opposite. U.S. armed forces and intelligence agencies exist to pre-empt enemy attacks, not to apprehend the guilty afterward.”

“While suggesting that al Qaeda terrorists have constitutional rights, the memo makes no room for judicial review of a strike, as would be required for any actual government deprivation of due process. All we have are scarcely believable accounts that Mr. Obama selects targets from CIA lists with the guidance of St. Thomas Aquinas's writings on what constitutes a just war… By including terrorists among those afforded constitutional protections, the president's policy risks stretching those protections a mile wide and an inch deep—weakening them for all Americans.”

“Rather than capture terrorists—which produces the most valuable intelligence on al Qaeda—Mr. Obama has relied almost exclusively on drone attacks, and he has thereby been able to dodge difficult questions over detention. But those deaths from the sky violate personal liberty far more than the waterboarding of three al Qaeda leaders ever did.”John Yoo: The Real Problem With Obama's Drone Memo http://on.wsj.com/Ye93JwOpinion & CommentaryMeenal Vamburkar reports on the tough questioning that Obama faced this week during a Google+ “fireside hangout.” Specifically, conservative blogger Kira Ayn Davis (@kiradavis422) was able to ask him to reconcile his campaign promises of transparency with the recent issues of drone strikes and Benghazi. Amazingly, Obama seemed to rationalize a lack of transparency on Benghazi as merely “campaign stuff.”

“With more details about President Obama‘s drone program emerging, many have criticized what they perceive to be a double standard — in terms of transparency and accountability. Under George W. Bush, goes the argument, such a program would have faced more scrutiny.”

“’You ran on a platform of really trying to become one of the most transparent administrations in American history. However, with recent leaked guidelines regarding drone strikes on American citizens and Benghazi and closed door hearings on the budget and deficit, it just feels a lot less transparent than I think we all hoped it would be,’ Davis remarked, asking: ‘How has the reality of the presidency changed that promise? And what can we do moving forward to kind of get back to that promise?’

“Obama replied that the administration is indeed the ‘most transparent’ in history — be it in terms of White House visitors or information about legislation. Benghazi, however, ‘is not a good example’ because it ‘was largely driven by campaign stuff.’ Congress is ‘sort of running out of things to ask,’ he added.”Obama Faces Toughest Grilling About Drones, Not From The Media, But In A Google+ Hangout (VIDEO) http://bit.ly/12pY6faMediaiteLt. Col. Joel Rayburn, a US Army strategic intelligence officer with twenty years’ experience in national security and political-military affairs (focusing on the greater Middle East), imagines a Shia-Sunni sectarian conflagration, fueled by Al Qaeda, raging across the Fertile Crescent.

“In the days of the Ottoman Empire, British diplomats referred to the Arabic-speaking territories of the empire as ‘Turkish Arabia.’ It was these Arabic-speaking lands that Britain and France, in the aftermath of the First World War, divided into the modern Arab states we know today: Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon. Those arbitrary colonial boundaries have endured for the better part of a century, but the people within them have never fully acknowledged the legitimacy of the lines that British and French officials drew for them.”

“The revolt that began in Syria in early 2011—itself inspired by events elsewhere in the Arab world—is on the verge of becoming a sectarian war spanning the entirety of Turkish Arabia. The most powerful of the Syrian revolutionary forces, the Nusrah Front, has been formed around a core of what we have previously known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, the insurgent and terrorist organization once led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.”

“For Al Qaeda in Iraq, then, the Iraqi and Syrian conflicts are one theater of war, where Al Qaeda and its allies seek a common objective of beating back the forces of what its leaders consider an Iranian-led coalition of Shia sectarian parties from Iraq, the Assad regime, and Lebanese Hizballah.”

“We can envision, then, a sectarian war raging across the whole of the Fertile Crescent, drawing in all the former territories of Turkish Arabia. The prospect will be a frightening one for the region’s major powers. Both Turkey and Saudi Arabia could one day find chaos rather than functioning states on their permeable borders. If Al Qaeda/Nusrah can establish a base in Jordan, Saudi Arabia will find itself threatened by Al Qaeda franchises on both north and south that will be well-positioned to resume the pursuit of Al Qaeda’s core goal of toppling the Saudi monarchy and ‘liberating’ the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.”

“The rulers of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran are surely not blind to this nightmare scenario. As the situation in Turkish Arabia continues to unravel, those regional powers will be compelled to become ever deeper involved in an attempt to keep the tide of war from breaking on their own lands. This conflict could very well touch us all, perhaps becoming an engine of jihad that spews forth attackers bent on bombing western embassies and cities or disrupting Persian Gulf oil markets long before the fire burns out.”The Coming War in the Middle East: Imagine a sectarian conflagration, fueled by Al Qaeda, raging across the region http://ow.ly/hsY8SHoover Institution

Friday, February 15, 2013

Friday's Florilegium

Chris Weyant

View the story "Friday’s Florilegium (2/15/13)" on Storify Friday’s Florilegium (2/15/13) http://theintransigentconservative.blogspot.com Storified by Brian Empric· Fri, Feb 15 2013 17:55:40 William Kristol (editor of The Weekly Standard) and Peter Wehner (@Peter_Wehner, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center) write that Leon Panetta and Martin Dempsey told Barack Obama that Americans in Benghazi were under attack.

In response: nothing; no meetings in the Situation Room, no calls to his Defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not even “a single presidential finger was lifted to help Americans under attack,” highlighting a disconcerting and shameful showing of complete negligence and apathy.

“If Americans are under attack, presidential attention must be paid. Due diligence must be demonstrated. A president must take care that his administration does everything it can do. On Sept. 11, 2012, as Americans were under attack in Benghazi, Libya, President Obama failed in his basic responsibility as president and commander in chief. In a crisis, the president went AWOL.”

“Secretary Panetta said the president left operational details, including determination of what resources were available to help the Americans under siege, ‘up to us.’ We also learned that President Obama did not communicate in any way with Mr. Panetta or Gen. Dempsey the rest of that evening or that night. Indeed, Mr. Panetta and Gen. Dempsey testified they had no further contact at all with anyone in the White House that evening—or, for that matter, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”

“And we learned one other thing: Messrs. Panetta and Dempsey both knew on the night of the assault that it was a terrorist attack. This didn't prevent President Obama, Secretary Clinton and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice from peddling a false version of events in the days and even weeks that followed, as the administration called the incident spontaneous, said there was no evidence of a coordinated terrorist attack and blamed the violence on an anti-Muslim video. So the White House, having failed to ensure that anything was done during the attack, went on to mislead the nation afterward.”

“Why the deception? Presumably for two reasons. The first is that the true account of events undercut the president's claim during the campaign that al Qaeda was severely weakened in the aftermath of the killing of Osama bin Laden. The second is that a true account of what happened in Benghazi that night would have revealed that the president and his top national-security advisers did not treat a lethal attack by Islamic terrorists on Americans as a crisis.” Kristol and Wehner: The Absentee Commander in Chief http://on.wsj.com/154pI9dOpinion & Commentary Gary Bauer (president of American Values) writes that liberal politicians, activists, and news outlets need to be mindful of the unsolicited advice they give to conservatives, and recognize that there are real consequences, including provoked violence (like Floyd Lee Corkins’ attack at the headquarters of the Family Research Council), to their divisiveness and inflammatory rhetoric.

“One of the least-reported but most important political developments over the last couple years has been the left’s increasing willingness to marginalize conservatives by portraying their views as so far outside the mainstream that they can only be informed by hatred and bigotry… The left’s nasty divisiveness increases the prospects that unstable people will act out violently against those it tries to marginalize.”

“Like the SPLC (Southern Poverty Law Center), the Obama administration has been more than willing to demonize conservatives in the worst possible terms. In 2009, a Department of Homeland Security report labeled as terrorists ‘groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.’ Such groups, the report stated, ‘are the most dangerous domestic terrorism threat in the United States.’

“The president himself is especially willing to depict his opponents as worthy of our contempt. He referred to congressional Republicans as ‘hostage takers’ for demanding tax cuts in 2010. He has accused Republicans of placing the interests of millionaires and billionaires against children with autism and Down syndrome.

“Obama routinely alleges that Republicans don’t care about people with disabilities and the elderly, and that if Republicans get their way, those groups would be left to ‘fend for themselves.’ Obama stokes class envy and hatred of the wealthy and depicts the Republican fiscal plan as ‘you’re on your own economics.’” Liberals need to take the advice they give to conservatives: there are consequences to divisive rhetoric http://bit.ly/VSZV2f #tcot #tlotGary L Bauer Jeffrey Bell, the director of policy of the American Principles Project, explains why the Democratic ascendancy happened. “In an era marked by frequency of religious observance as the single most important factor in determining Republican/conservative allegiance, the rise of the ‘seculars’ has added several percentage points to the share of self-described liberals in the composition of voter turnout, though by no means bringing them close to parity with conservatives.”

“In the six presidential elections between 1992 and 2012, the Democratic party has regained the solid popular vote majority it enjoyed during the New Deal/Great Society era (1932-64) but relinquished in the six elections between 1968 and 1988.”

“In the midst of these recent losses, Republican analysts (including me) became adept at finding one off, ‘special’ circumstances to account for supposedly anomalous Democratic wins… But Obama’s reelection makes the GOP’s minority status in presidential politics impossible to analyze away.”

“In the last two decades of Democratic dominance, 18 states and the District of Columbia have voted Democratic six out of six times. These currently have 242 electoral votes, which is quite close to the 270 needed to win the presidency. There are 13 states that have voted Republican in every election since 1992, but they total just 102 electoral votes. This means that to win, a Republican nominee must either break a generation long Democratic winning streak in one or more states, or carry 168 of 194 electoral votes among the ‘purple’ states that have gone both ways since 1992. Not for nothing have political insiders taken to calling the GOP path to an Electoral College majority the equivalent of drawing to an inside straight.”

“Things began to change in the last decade and a half with the rise on the Democratic left of what came to be called the ‘Netroots’… when Howard Dean saw his presidential fundraising go through the roof in 2003, it was clear something much deeper was happening in the Democratic party. By 2008, all three Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination—Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards—were running to the left of earlier primary candidates and (in the case of Clinton and Edwards) well to the left of where their own Senate voting records had been just a few years earlier.”

“The Democrats’ sharp move to the left since 1998 is the most recent leap forward in polarization, which has been the underlying trend of American politics since the 1960s. What few could foresee is how well the Democrats’ decision to embrace the left would work politically.”

“Barack Obama, of course, openly models himself not on Reagan’s Republican successors or on his own pragmatic Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton, but on Reagan, whom he has recognized as transformational. In the context of his first term, his reelection campaign, and (especially) the weeks since, Obama is proving effective in pushing an ideologically comprehensive, consistent, and unapologetic left agenda. By its nature, this involves polarization.”

“Since the 1960s, two social trends have laid the groundwork for the revitalization of the American left. The earlier and more significant one is the left’s reorientation toward social and sexual liberation, rather than government ownership of business, as its center of gravity… The second is the steady increase as a share of the electorate—about 1 percent per year for the last 10 years or so, as measured by surveys of the Pew Charitable Trust, among others—of voters who list ‘none’ as their religious affiliation.”

“So why is the left winning, and in particular why did it prevail in 2012? In the words of Christopher Caldwell’s postelection article in these pages (‘Values Voters Prevail Again,’ November 19, 2012): ‘[S]tructurally the outcome was the same one that we have seen decade after decade. Where two candidates argue over values, the public may prefer one to the other. But where only one candidate has values, he wins, whatever those values happen to be.’” Losing StreakIn the six presidential elections between 1992 and 2012, the Democratic party has regained the solid popular vote majority it enjoyed dur... Yuval Levin’s reaction to this week’s State of the Union address “ends with a sense that the Democrats’ political fortunes in the coming years may not be so rosy as many on the Left would like to think.”

“By the end of the speech, I was feeling sorry for the White House policy staff. It’s perfectly clear looking over the text that they have just been through a months-long budget policy process that must have ended in total failure.”

“The president didn’t even mention his forthcoming budget—again, that’s usually a big part of what this speech is for. And he didn’t make any significant proposal for reforming any government program, for launching any new one, ending any old one, or doing much of anything in particular that he hasn’t been pushing unsuccessfully for years.”

“From my point of view, this is basically a good thing. Of course, it would have been nice if the president had offered some proposals to address our looming fiscal crisis—and what he had to say about entitlement reform and tax reform amounted to essentially nothing new—or to actually spur economic growth… He ran for reelection without a governing agenda, and it now seems he will preside without one too.”

Why is it that Obama “offered a tonally progressive speech” that “just didn’t add up to anything substantive”? Levin thinks there are three reasons:

“First is the exhaustion of liberalism in our time. It might be odd to speak of exhaustion when liberals feel so ascendant now, but that’s when exhaustion happens, and the fact is that the progressive ideal laid out so clearly in Obama’s second inaugural is an exhausted ideology… From here on, the Left has mostly to play a defensive game of retrenchment and reaction, and this is an exhausting game, especially for liberals.”

“Second is the smallness of this particular president at this particular time… I think we are entering a period, at least for the next two years, of congressional supremacy in which something closer to regular order resumes in Congress and the interaction of the Republican House and the Democratic Senate will be what determines the policy agenda. The President will sign anything that passes both houses, and meaningful legislation will only be likely to pass if he is mostly kept at arm’s length from it… It looks like he’s in the process of becoming a very weak president.”

“But the third reason may be the most significant in the next few years. It becomes evident in contrasting Obama’s speech with Rubio’s response. Simply put, the foremost problem to which the country now wants a solution from Washington is the problem of slow economic growth, and the Democrats are in a very bad position to advance solutions to that problem.”

The Democrats have a dilemma when it comes to inducing greater efficiency in health care, reducing federal entitlement spending, improving the quality of our labor force via education and immigration, reducing the needless economic drag by inefficient tax policy, and making fossil fuels cheaper: “They are prevented by the politics of their electoral coalition from seriously advancing most of these ideas.”

“The real progressives are staunchly opposed to entitlement reform and unhappy with tax reform that doesn’t raise rates (as an efficiency-oriented reform would not), the environmentalists are allergic to fossil-fuel exploration, the teachers’ unions won’t hear of real K–12 reform while the professoriate (which is remarkably important to the party) will resist a genuine transformation of the university business model. That leaves only immigration reform, which is certainly the least economically significant of the elements of Rubio’s growth agenda, and is also the only element of that agenda that wouldn’t directly reduce the cost of living of the middle class.”

“This suggests a huge opening for Republicans—an opportunity to advance a prosperity agenda with direct benefits for middle-class families and which the Democrats could not really match… And if Republicans move to capitalize on the opportunity (which is still a big ‘if’), Democrats could find themselves in serious political trouble relatively quickly.” The State of the Democrats: My reaction to last night’s State of the Union address begins from compassion for ... http://bit.ly/WmyVoDNational Review Following the State of the Union address, Fred Barnes blogs that it was “unusually pedestrian, packed to the gills with clichés, promises, gimmicks, and endless talk of partnerships, goals, challenges, and commissions for which Washington is famous.”

“House speaker John Boehner had a weary look on his face as he sat through the speech, as if he’d heard it all from Obama before. And indeed he has.”

“Obama, though, was on-message, just as he was in his inaugural address three weeks ago. He wants to spend more. He wants the government to do more (except overseas). And he isn’t much worried about the possibility of a debt crisis. He leaves it to Republicans to worry about things like the debt-to-GDP ratio.”

“For all the spending he proposed, Obama maintained that none of it would cause the deficit to rise. Maybe so. But it sure won’t cause the deficit to shrink either. The Congressional Budget Office projects a decade of big deficits from 2013, increasing the national debt by $7 trillion. Obama didn’t mention this.” There He Goes Again http://goo.gl/gyh3YFred Barnes Pew Research Center provides a roundup of their findings across ten of the biggest public policy issues. Some of the highlight statistics:

•   The Economy: Americans took a dim view of the fiscal cliff deal, saying it would hurt: the economy (46%), people like themselves (52%), efforts to curb the deficit (44%).
•   Debt and Deficit: 72% of Americans now say reducing the deficit is a top priority, up from 53% in Jan. 2009, including 84% of Republicans, 67% of Democrats and 71% of independents.
•   The Middle Class: 85% of those in the middle class say it is more difficult today than a decade ago to maintain their standard of living.
•   Gun Control: There are large partisan divides on creating a federal database to track gun sales (35-point gap, Democrats favor), implementing a ban on assault-style weapons (25-point gap, Democrats favor) or having more teachers and school officials with guns in schools (33-point gap, Republicans favor).
•   U.S. Foreign Policy: 83% of Americans say that “we should pay less attention to problems overseas and concentrate on problems here at home,” up 10 points since 2002.
•   U.S.-China Relations: Americans now favor getting tougher with China (49%) over strengthening relations (42%) when it comes to economic policy.
•   U.S.-Middle East Relations: 50% of the public sympathizes more with Israel, 10% sympathize more with the Palestinians, 13% say neither side and 4% say both.
•   Immigration: 39% of Americans say “dealing with illegal immigration” should be a top priority, ranking the issue 17th out of 21 issues.
•   Climate Change: 28% of Americans say global warming is a top priority, ranking the issue last on this year’s list of 21 policy priorities.
•   Gay Marriage: 48% of Americans favor gay marriage and 43% oppose it. See our primer on public opinion & other data on issues raised in #SOTU address #IGASOTU http:// http://pewrsr.ch/14YmZ11Pew Research Center Based on a speech he recently gave to The Ronald W. Reagan Society at Eureka College, Fred Barnes writes that The Great Communicator had a gift of political persuasion that today’s politicians (like Mitt Romney) do not, with the ability to define “economic terms and concepts in easily understandable language.”

“Reagan didn’t assume voters understand economic jargon. Do they know why the debt-to-GDP ratio matters? Do they have a clue about the damage a ‘debt crisis’ would cause? Can they visualize what today’s national debt of $16 trillion looks like? Not likely. Reagan would have tutored them so they could.”

“His role as the Great Explainer was only one aspect of Reagan that separates him from 21st-century Republican candidates and national leaders and from Democrats like President Obama as well. As much as they yearn to be like Reagan, they cannot. He had skills and strengths they lack.”

“In his speeches, Reagan emphasized the lives of individual Americans, believing audiences would be interested, even mesmerized. He talked far more about others than himself… Reagan also had a ‘narrative’ before that term had become fashionable—a story or a few sentences that told what motivated him.”

“As a presidential candidate, Romney touted himself as a ‘full-spectrum conservative.’ He wasn’t, but Reagan really was, and knew exactly why. Romney’s campaign was fixated on one issue, the economy. Reagan believed economic and social conservatism could be combined in one ‘politically effective whole’… Reagan spawned a conservative era based on what his former aide Jeffrey Bell calls ‘integrated conservatism.’ Romney jettisoned the social conservative side, and lost. ‘Subtraction rather than addition from your core philosophy is not how you prevail in an age of polarization,’ Bell says.” The Complete PackageIn February 1981, President Reagan was searching for ways to win support for spending cuts. He'd been president less than a month. The na... Sheila Weber, the executive director of National Marriage Week USA, writes that America needs “a campaign to improve the public’s thinking and actions about the benefits to our country of encouraging healthy marriage.”

She lists five reasons why we need to start a movement to re-value and strengthen marriage, where we seek out relationship education and marriage enrichment classes, because “there is one aspect about marriage that both the left and the right can find to agree on. Marriage is a valuable anti-poverty program.”

1. The decline of marriage hurts the working and lower class
“We can’t ignore the overwhelming research that shows marriage brings greater financial stability to families, and single motherhood is the leading cause of poverty for both women and children.”

2. Loss of marital skills for the next generation
“We are now raising a generation which does not know what healthy marriage looks and feels like, and thereby cannot model it.”

3. Celebrity modeling sends the wrong message
“[D]evaluing the importance of marriage has created a new cultural norm that childbearing prior to or without marriage is eminently socially acceptable, even heroic.”

4. We can do better
“While there should be no tolerance for abuse, it turns out that a husband who was just ‘good enough’ was better, for any child, than going through childhood without a permanent and committed male role model (as opposed to a boyfriend or partner).”

5. Our leaders know the truth, but don’t say it
“If you graduate from high school, work full time, and postpone marriage and childbearing until after the age of 21, your chances of being in poverty are only 2 percent. If you don’t do all of those three things, your chances of poverty rise to 77 percent.” Here's a secret -- marriage is America's most effective anti-poverty programIn spite of other disagreements, there is one aspect about marriage that both the left and the right can find to agree on. Marriage is a ...

Monday, February 11, 2013

Monday's Menagerie

Michael Ramirez

Lisa Benson

View the story "Monday's Menagerie (2/11/13)" on Storify Monday's Menagerie (2/11/13) http://theintransigentconservative.blogspot.com Storified by Brian Empric· Mon, Feb 11 2013 18:02:56 Daniel Henninger writes that Obama’s laws are so big there are parts of them no one has ever seen.

“Who wouldn't want to live in Washington? It's a wonderful world, a place where every problem of life can be reduced to just two words. Gun control. Immigration reform. Climate control. The deficit, which of course can be solved in two words: a ‘balanced approach.’ Things so hard haven't been so simple since Tinker Bell taught children to fly in ‘Peter Pan,’ also with two words—pixie dust.”

“Congress has 535 members who work inside the Capitol Building, which you may notice is shaped like a bubble. The rest of the United States consists of 313.9 million individuals spread across a 50-state land mass of more than 9.6 million square miles… No matter. Mr. Obama's Washington will try to write a gun law that applies in the same way everywhere for each of the nearly 314 million Americans.”

“Legislative grandiosity predates the Obama presidency. But it has achieved its apotheosis in the past four years. Barack Obama's politics aren't just large. They're colossal.”

“Conservatives predictably object to all this, but one has to ask: How did liberals, especially on the left and without exception, become such mute footmen for Barack Obama's faceless conglomerate politics?”

“This is politics, ergo the goal is to acquire and exercise colossal power, at least for the pros at the top of the Democratic food chain. Still, the evidence piles up daily that what Barack Obama is producing with his countrywide ‘investments’ is a blob, a morass, a mess.” Henninger: Obama's Colossal Politics http://on.wsj.com/VF057MOpinion & Commentary Wall Street Journal Review & Outlook writes that Washington “is in a fit of collective terror over the sequester,” but fear not, because most of the hysteria is baseless. In reality, the sequester “will help the economy by leaving more capital for private investment.”

“The sequester that nobody seems to love would cut an estimated $85 billion from the budget this fiscal year starting in March. Half of the savings would come from defense and half from domestic discretionary programs. Medicare providers would take a 2% cut.”

“Republicans have rightly concluded after two years of being sucker-punched that the sequester is the main negotiating leverage they have and may be the only way to restrain spending. So now Democrats and a gaggle of interest groups are denouncing Mr. Obama's fiscal brainchild because the programs they cherish—from job training to education, to the EPA and energy subsidies, to money for Planned Parenthood—are about to get chopped too.”

“More troublesome are the cuts in defense, but for security not economic reasons. The sequester cuts the Pentagon budget by 7%... But at least high priorities such as troop deployments are exempt from the cuts. And there is waste in the Pentagon: Start with the billions spent on ‘green energy’ programs at DOD, bases that are no longer needed, and runaway health-care costs. Mr. Obama could work with Congress to pass those reforms so as not to cut weapons and muscle, but he has refused.”

“The most disingenuous White House claim is that the sequester will hurt the economy. Reality check: The cuts amount to about 0.5% of GDP. The theory that any and all government spending is ‘stimulus’ has been put to the test over the last five years, and the result has been the weakest recovery in 75 years and trillion-dollar annual deficits.”

“The bad news for Congressional Democrats and their spending interests is that the noose only tightens after this year. Mr. Obama's sequester mandates roughly $1.2 trillion of discretionary cuts over the next decade. But if Democrats really want to avoid a sequester, they should stop insisting on higher taxes and start getting serious about modernizing the entitlements like Medicare and Medicaid that comprise the other 60% of government. If they won't, then sequester away.” The Unscary Sequester http://on.wsj.com/11N2VijOpinion & Commentary Major Garrett reports that congressional Republicans are working to prove that they are tough enough to take the sequester. Obama wants to replace the sequester with different spending cuts and, of course, tax increases.

“Far more fascinating and revealing is how House and Senate Republicans who once denounced the sequester and regarded it as dangerous now consider it the best—albeit imperfect—mechanism to reduce the deficit. I can remember the day the Budget Control Act (which set the sequester in motion) was on the House floor and Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon, R-Calif., said GOP leaders from Speaker John Boehner on down assured him—practically in blood-oath fashion—that Pentagon spending would never face the sequester buzz saw (half the annual discretionary cuts come from defense).

“Now, the saw is at full throttle, and congressional Republicans are guiding defense spending blade-ward as if they were Ernie at Jason’s meat emporium, carving up Sunday rib eyes.”

“Republicans, especially in the House, have become operationally gloomy about negotiating any new budget deal with Obama. They are a defeated force and only keep the appearance of poking and prodding for more deficit reduction. Whether they lost the tax debate or not during the fiscal-cliff negotiations, Republicans believe they did. They know they lost the 2011 payroll-tax debate. They rolled over on the debt ceiling before even raising a paw in protest. Republicans haven’t turned into complete lapdogs on deficit reduction, but they have become territorial on the sequester, the only actual cuts in federal spending they’ve achieved and the only ones they imagine themselves achieving in the near future. Futility had led to fixation.”

“Tea-party-inspired conservatives now say the only thing worse than defense cuts is no cuts at all. Increasingly, GOP rank and file are nodding in agreement. And GOP leaders now see sequester as the only point of leverage and accountability for Obama. If he wants to replace spending cuts with higher taxes, Republicans will fight that battle—and prefer it to clashes over default or a government shutdown. Obama owns the sequester as much as Republicans, and enforcing what is (spending cuts in law) beats fighting over what might be (default or shutdown).” How Congressional Republicans came to love automatic spending cuts: http://njour.nl/TOS6IX (via @MajorCBS)National Journal Halimah Abdullah writes that the voters are partly to blame for political partisanship, as we self-sort into neighborhoods and cities with likeminded people, which trickles up to our representatives and the policies they support.

“Increasingly, people live in communities that are carefully crafted political echo chambers.”

Keith Poole, a political science professor at the University of Georgia, found that the 112th House “was roughly 50% more polarized in terms of makeup than that of the 102nd, which convened from 1991 to 1993”, and the 112th Senate “was more polarized than the 46th Senate, which was in office from 1879-1881, just after the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War.”

“The dirty little secret is that redistricting only explains part of polarization,” said David Wasserman, House of Representatives editor at the Cook Political Report. “Congressional districts are polarized partly because Americans have polarized with their feet. It makes it easier for partisan line drawers to draw those lines.”

“We don't think people move to be around others who vote like themselves. They are moving to be around people who are like themselves in every other sort of way,” said author Bill Bishop. “This is polarization based on choice and self-selection. Being an adult is accepting lots of different ways of being. We are so unsure of our own identities that we are not as accepting as we could be of people of different identities. In a sense we are getting what we demand from government. We demand our tribe wins. So that's the fight. It becomes a fight of tribal differences.” It's your fault: How our 'tribes' help create gridlock in Congress - http://wp.me/p4HKM-18SOCNN Political Ticker Investigative reporter Luke Rosiak apprises that the “federal program subsidizing phones for the poor increased from 6.8 million to 18 million recipients from 2008 — the year it was expanded to include cell phones — to May 2012.”

“And fraud and abuse from the expansion have been far more extensive than expected, to the extent that tougher enforcement of long-existing rules is projected to bring in enough money to finance the expansion of the program to provide low-income users with free Internet service, according to the Federal Communications Commission report released last week. Up to 15 percent of subscribers in the program are ineligible, the FCC found.”

“The phones are intended for use in job searches and medical care. Receiving other government support, such as food stamps, subsidized housing and cash welfare makes a person eligible for the free phone service.”

“Rep. Tim Griffin, Arkansas Republican, has reintroduced a bill to combat what he calls ‘Uncle Sam’s Unlimited Plan,’ and restore it to landlines only. Mr. Griffin’s attention was attracted to the program when his own wife received an application, and when constituents reported receiving unrequested phones mailed to deceased relatives. The program doesn’t meet the efficacy threshold that would warrant the government requiring consumers to fund the program, and the FCC has done the ‘bare minimum’ to rein in abuse, he said.” 'Lifeline" program subsidizing phones for the poor increased from 6.8M to 18M recipients from 2008 to May 2012. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/5/fraud-and-abuse-grow-after-subsidized-telephone-pr/#ixzz2K9elRCLrLuke Rosiak Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, released a statement last week noting that the Obama Administration had shown some movement on the HHS mandate related to ObamaCare, but still falls short of addressing the bishops’ concerns. Dolan listed three key areas of remaining concern:
1.   the narrow understanding of a religious ministry
2.   compelling church ministries to fund and facilitate services such as contraceptives, including abortion-inducing drugs, and sterilization that violate Catholic teaching
3.   disregard of the conscience rights of for-profit business owners

“(The Administration's proposal) appears to offer second-class status to our first-class institutions in Catholic health care, Catholic education and Catholic charities. HHS offers what it calls an 'accommodation' rather than accepting the fact that these ministries are integral to our church and worthy of the same exemption as our Catholic churches.”

“In obedience to our Judeo-Christian heritage, we have consistently taught our people to live their lives during the week to reflect the same beliefs that they proclaim on the Sabbath. We cannot now abandon them to be forced to violate their morally well-informed consciences.”

“Throughout the past year, we have been assured by the Administration that we will not have to refer, pay for, or negotiate for the mandated coverage. We remain eager for the Administration to fulfill that pledge and to find acceptable solutions—we will affirm any genuine progress that is made, and we will redouble our efforts to overcome obstacles or setbacks. Thus, we welcome and will take seriously the Administration's invitation to submit our concerns through formal comments, and we will do so in the hope that an acceptable solution can be found that respects the consciences of all. At the same time, we will continue to stand united with brother bishops, religious institutions, and individual citizens who seek redress in the courts for as long as this is necessary.” HHS Proposal Falls Short In Meeting Church Concerns; Bishops Look Forward To Addressing Issues With Administration http://ow.ly/hw9XvUSCCB Peter Wehner writes that Obama originally campaigned on a theme, to “act in ways that respect international law and human rights and remove the stain (of enhanced interrogation techniques) from America’s reputation.” Now, his Administration has concluded that we can kill American citizens “if they are believed to be ‘senior operational leaders’ of al-Qaida or ‘an associated force’ even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.”

“You can be excused if you’ve (a) missed Mr. Obama’s much-heralded due process element in all of this and (b) have a hard time reconciling Mr. Obama’s presidents-should-not-have-blanket-authority-to-do-whatever-they-wish-lectures… with his Justice Department’s expansive executive powers memo.”

“Let me suggest as well that a man who feels wholly at ease with drone strikes that have killed American citizens suspected of engaging in terrorist activities without the benefit of a trial and which have, in the process, killed hundreds of innocent people should be a tad bit more careful when it comes to lecturing about the immorality of enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs).”

“To put things in a slightly different way: During the 2008 campaign and much of the early part of his presidency, Barack Obama obsessively argued that waterboarding all of three individuals–September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and senior al-Qaeda leaders Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri–was a violation of human rights and a grave moral offense. Here’s the thing, though: unlike Mr. Obama’s drone strikes, no American citizens, no terrorists and no innocent children have died due to waterboarding. Yet the president’s press spokesman is defending Mr. Obama’s policies as ‘legal,’ ‘ethical,’ and ‘wise.’”

“…it is true that there is a serious argument to be made that during wartime targeting terrorists, including Americans, with drones is justified. But that justification probably best not come from someone who has spent much of the last half-dozen years or so sermonizing against waterboarding, accusing those who approved such policies of trashing American ideals and shredding our civil liberties, and portraying himself as pure as the new-driven snow.” Drone Strikes, Waterboarding, and Moral Preening http://ow.ly/htt1cPeter Wehner Oren Dorell reports that even after Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey testified last week to the Senate Armed Services Committee, there are many questions remaining about the attack on our Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

According to the timeline released in January by the Pentagon, the assault on the Consulate started at 3:42 PM (Washington, D.C. time), and after they were notified of the attack (50 minutes after it started), Panetta and Dempsey met for a previously scheduled meeting with Obama at the White House at 5:00 PM. The assault on the separate safe house in Benghazi started at 11:15 PM.

One important question remains unanswered: What was the President doing between 5:30 and 11:15 PM on the night of the Benghazi attacks? "Obviously, the president didn't view this as a priority that required him to stay in touch with his secdef (secretary of Defense) or the chairman of his joint chiefs," said Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

At 4:00 AM, the bodies of the four Americans killed during the attacks, including the first ambassador killed in the line of duty in 33 years, were flown from Benghazi to Tripoli. Just 10 hours later, Obama departed the White House to head to Las Vegas for a campaign rally.

“The testimony by Pentagon leaders answered some questions about the Sept. 11 attack, but not all. One answer -- concerning President Obama's role during the attack -- seems certain to generate controversy… Panetta testified Thursday that he was up all night monitoring the situation and never heard from Obama, nor the president from him.”

“Panetta and Dempsey also said they did not confer directly with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was in charge of the embassy and responsible for the staff's safety.”

“People armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades attacked the consulate in Benghazi and a safe house nearby. Video was provided in real time by a drone dispatched to the scene.”

“According to a State Department report and others, diplomatic security personnel made repeated requests for air support, and requests for unmanned drones to suppress the attackers, but none arrived.”

Recall that Obama was pressed twice by Denver news anchor Kyle Clark on October 26th to clarify whether the embattled Americans were denied requests for help during the attack. Evading the questions, Obama responded: “Well, we are finding out exactly what happened. I can tell you, as I've said over the last couple of months since this happened, the minute I found out what was happening, I gave three very clear directives. Number one, make sure that we are securing our personnel and doing whatever we need to. Number two, we're going to investigate exactly what happened so that it doesn't happen again. Number three, find out who did this so we can bring them to justice.”

Therefore, to summarize, Obama says that he gave a clear directive to make sure that we were doing whatever was needed to secure our personnel, yet no manned or unmanned air support arrived, and no military assets were ever deployed. So either his appointees ignored his orders, or he lied to Clark and never gave such orders. It is clear that the Administration has worked hard to cover up Obama’s lack of action on the night of the Benghazi attacks. #Pentagon 's Leon Panetta & @Martin_Dempsey face tough questions on #Benghazi @USATODAY http://usat.ly/YWemTSOren Dorell

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Weekend Potpourri

View the story "Weekend Potpourri (1/26/13-1/27/13)" on Storify Weekend Potpourri (1/26/13-1/27/13) http://theintransigentconservative.blogspot.com Storified by Brian Empric· Sun, Jan 27 2013 13:54:45 Conservatives Underperform Our Issues http://amsp.ec/1Rq9JKQuin Hillyer Exclusive, via @mikeallen: here's what Priebus will tell Republicans at a meeting Friday about the future of the party http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/exclusive-reince-priebus-plan-for-renewal-86662.html#.UQFCZoiixBI.twitterKatie Glueck Read My Latest Commentary: Politicians Need to Catch Up When It Comes to the People's Money... http://tinyurl.com/amrr5xgScott Rasmussen Defense of abortion built on a foundation of lies. My column >> http://washingtonexaminer.com/tim-carney-defense-of-abortion-built-on-a-foundation-of-lies/article/2519509#.UQCGZonjlEATimothy P Carney

Friday, January 25, 2013

Friday’s Florilegium

@AUG_RickMcKee

View the story "Friday’s Florilegium (1/25/13)" on Storify Friday’s Florilegium (1/25/13) http://theintransigentconservative.blogspot.com Storified by Brian Empric· Fri, Jan 25 2013 20:44:45 Yesterday, the Senate approved a deal that will keep the 60-vote threshold for halting a filibuster but will streamline some of the more cumbersome procedures. These changes, crafted in part by John McCain, will effectively “thwart the power of a small band of conservatives who have used the Senate’s complicated rules to their advantage.”

Sean Trende (@SeanTrende) writes that a statistical analysis of future presidential, House and Senate races suggests that Democrats should be wary of wishing for filibuster reforms. Trende’s analysis shows that Republican trifectas (control of the presidency, House, and Senate) are much more likely than Democratic trifectas in the near future, by a 20% to 3% margin.

“Even if (Harry) Reid were to lower the number of votes needed to move legislation through the Senate to 20 votes, it still wouldn’t significantly advance the Democratic cause in Congress, because the Republican House acts as an effective filibuster.”

Trende writes that Democrats may have a short term structural demographic edge over Republicans in the race for the presidency, but in the long run each party has won the popular vote twenty times. For control of the House, he notes that given the current district configurations and tightly packed geographic Democratic constituencies, it is difficult for Democrats to retake the House (except in wave years).

Trende assumes that Democrats will win two-thirds of the presidential elections in the short-to-medium term, and will win the House 20% of the time.

“Take 2012 as an example. With an electorate that featured one of the most favorable demographic tilts toward Democrats in recent memory, with a president winning by a decent margin, and with Democrats even winning the popular vote for the House by a point, Republicans won the third-largest number of seats they have enjoyed after an election since the 1920s.”

Almost half of Trende’s column is devoted to a rigorous statistical analysis of the Senate, using Monte Carlo simulations to quantify the Republicans natural advantage in future Senate races. He estimates the percentage of the vote that each state will cast for each party, using the past five presidential elections as a base line with a few statistical corrections.

“The Senate is a natural GOP gerrymander. Consider: Mitt Romney lost by 3.8 points, but still carried 24 states. John McCain lost by 7.3 points, but carried 22 states. On the other hand, when John Kerry lost by only 2.5 points, he carried just 19 states. Twenty-seven states currently have Republican PVIs, meaning that in a completely neutral environment, we’d expect them to vote for a Republican.”

“…running our simulation 2,000 times, we find Republicans winning control of the Senate 74 percent of the time, with 51 seats on average… And even if this is a touch too optimistic for Republicans, our House and presidential estimates are probably a touch too optimistic for Democrats.”

“Already we can see the problem for the Democrats -- control of just the Senate is very difficult for them to maintain over the long haul. At the same time, Republicans should never achieve a filibuster-proof majority; the best they do in our simulation is 59 seats, once every 1,000 elections.”

Since we know that Democrats have almost no understanding of basic math, it comes as no surprise that they also have no understanding of how unlikely it is that they will control the White House and all of Congress.

“Weakening the filibuster was a perfectly sensible goal for liberals back in the 1970s, when Democrats arguably had natural Senate and House majorities, and their main goal was to diminish the ability of Southern Democrats to cross the liberal leadership. But it makes much less sense today.”

“There’s no immediate benefit for Democrats, little short- or medium-term benefit, and some potentially catastrophic downsides for them during that time frame.” Why filibuster reform is problematic for Democrats. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/01/24/why_democrats_should_fear_filibuster_reform.htmlSean Trendē Jonathan S. Tobin (@TobinCommentary) answers Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s infamous question, “What difference does it make?”:

“An administration that sought, for political purposes, to give the American people the idea that al-Qaeda had been ‘decimated’ and was effectively out of commission had a clear motive during a presidential campaign to mislead the public about Benghazi. The fact that questions are still unanswered about this crime and that Clinton and President Obama seem more interested in burying this story along with the four Americans that died is an outrage that won’t be forgotten.”

“The problem here is not just what she considers an irrelevant question from Johnson or a mere ‘difference of opinion’–as she characterized Senator John McCain’s scathing attack on her record on the issue–but a belief that four dead Americans in Benghazi was really not such an earth-shaking event.”

“‘What difference does it make’ is an answer that ought to hang over Hillary Clinton for the rest of her public career. It is just one more indication that what happened after Benghazi in the State Department was akin to a cover up. Should Clinton run for president in 2016, this is a story that won’t go away. Nor should it.” Hillary's "What difference does it make?" answer about admin Benghazi lies will haunt her in 2016. http://goo.gl/EFl89Jonathan S. Tobin Robert J. Samuelson writes that there was a “make-believe quality” to Obama’s second inaugural address. There are, in fact, daunting realities to the problems of paying for the retirement of the baby boom and climate change, which cannot be solved solely with rousing rhetoric and political grit.

“Excluding (Social Security, Medicare & Medicaid) programs from even modest budget cuts — as Obama seems inclined to do — imposes huge costs on the young. Their taxes will rise, big deficits will persist or spending cuts will be concentrated on other programs more important to the working population (for starters, grants to state and local governments). There’s no honest way around these conflicts, but Obama pretended they don’t exist.”

“On climate change, the difficulty is greater. Environmentalists argue that emissions from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) need to be cut 50 percent to 80 percent by mid-century to avoid a ruinous warming. The problem is that there’s simply no plausible way to get from here to there without, in effect, shutting down the world economy… The politics of climate change are excruciatingly difficult. Do we make heroic efforts (involving more regulations, subsidies or energy taxes) to curb emissions when any U.S. decreases would have only a tiny global effect?”

“Why are Americans so disillusioned with politics? One reason is that our leaders — and this applies to both parties — often create narratives that seem uplifting and convincing only because they are completely detached from underlying realities. These fantasies transcend routine rhetorical flourishes and self-serving exaggerations and simplifications. But sooner or later, the realities assert themselves. People grasp that they’ve been misled. They feel betrayed; there’s a backlash.” President Make-BelieveOn the baby boom, Obama said: "We reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country an... Nicholas Eberstadt, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, writes that Obama may be tired of listening to entitlement program critics, who are alarmed about the mounting evidence of increasing state dependency, but this debate is far from over, “because the country's social-welfare spending is generating severe and mounting hazards for the nation. These hazards are not only fiscal but moral.”

“Over the 50-plus years since 1960, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, entitlement transfers—government payments of cash, goods and services to citizens—have been growing twice as fast as overall personal income.”

“According to the BEA, America's myriad social-welfare programs (the federal bureaucracy apparently cannot determine exactly how many of these there are) currently dispense entitlement benefits of more than $2.3 trillion annually.”

“In 1960, according to the Office of Management and Budget, social-welfare programs accounted for less than a third of all federal spending. Today, entitlement programs account for nearly two-thirds of federal spending.”

“According to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly half (49%) of Americans today live in homes receiving one or more government transfer benefits. That percentage is up almost 20 points from the early 1980s.”

“At this writing, about 35% of Americans (well over 100 million people) are accepting money, goods or services from ‘means-tested’ government programs. This percentage is twice as high as in the early 1980s.”

“As entitlement outlays have risen, there has been flight of men from the work force… Arithmetically speaking, the recent American flight from work has largely been a flight to government disability programs… On the current trajectory, the Social Security disability fund is projected to run out of money during Mr. Obama's second term.”

“The moral hazard embedded in the explosion of social-welfare programs is plain. Transfers funded by other people's money tend to foster a pernicious ‘something for nothing’ mentality—especially when those transfers seem to be progressively and relentlessly growing, year by year. This ‘taker’ mentality can only weaken civil society—even as it places ever-heavier burdens on taxpayers.” Nicholas Eberstadt: Yes, Mr. President, We Are a Nation of TakersIn President Obama's second inaugural address, he not only outlined an ambitious agenda for his second term but also seemed intent on shu... Paul Kengor wonders if we are at the end of the Reagan era, now that a self-described conservative, Reagan-loving electorate has twice voted for Obama. Kengor accurately lays the blame squarely on this ignorant, senseless, and self-contradictory electorate.

“Alas, with Obama’s re-coronation, liberals are glorying in an altogether new epoch, one of supreme significance to their ideological resurgence: the end of the Reagan era… Sadly, I must admit, as a Reagan scholar and admirer, that they are largely correct. Obama’s reelection does, to a notable degree, end the Reagan era.”

“…Barack Obama is indeed in the process of undoing the Reagan era. He has done so courtesy of a hopelessly oblivious American public, one that exhibits mindlessly schizophrenic voting behavior.”

“…when you break down the data, and ask voters questions like whether they prefer more taxes and more government, well, they generally don’t — even when they vote that way. They favor the conservative vision. It appeals to them. And though your television may have convinced you that half of America is gay, well, it’s far and away not — and the vast majority don’t support gay marriage either (not yet), or taxpayer-funding of abortion. No, but they vote for candidates who do.”

“The deeper truth, however, is that the American voter cannot be trusted; the American voter cannot be depended upon to vote rationally. Other elements, far more decisive, influence their voting behavior, such as (among others) the personalities and personas and public images of presidential candidates, the campaigns run by the candidates and their advisers (the David Axelrod factor), and, most critically of all, the liberal mainstream media that serves as a 24/7 full-time partisan/propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.” The End of the Reagan Era?Barack Obama's re-christening has arrived. It commenced with a small private ceremony January 20, Sunday - God's day. The actual festivit... Frank Newport, Gallup's Editor in Chief, concludes with their polling that Obama faces obvious challenges ahead since “less than four in 10 Americans rate the nation's current situation on the positive end of a zero to 10 scale and that slightly less than half project that the state of the nation will be positive in five years.”

“The 48% who give a six to 10 ranking when asked to project the status of the U.S. five years from now is tied with the 1979 measure as the lowest in Gallup's history of asking the question. Additionally, the 40% who give a negative rating (zero to four) when asked to look ahead is lower than at any point in history. These negative ratings include 10% who say the situation of the country in five years will be zero, the worst they can imagine.”

“In short, Republicans overwhelmingly say that the best times are behind the country, while Democrats look ahead and say the best times are ahead… The 60-percentage-point (15% versus 75%) partisan difference in optimism about the state of the nation in five years is particularly noteworthy. Democrats are overwhelmingly positive about the state the nation will find itself in in five years, while Republicans are just as markedly negative.” Americans Downbeat on State of U.S., Prospects for FuturePRINCETON, NJ -- U.S. President Barack Obama begins his second term at a time when Americans are as negative about the state of the count... Bryan R. Lawrence, founder of investment firm Oakcliff Capital, writes that the Treasury Department’s annual financial report highlights that our finances are unsustainable unless GDP growth rates increase and health care is delivered with better results and lower costs.

“The 2012 annual report for the federal government, released last week, continues to use dubious accounting standards to avoid putting the cost of government retirement promises into the headline deficit of $1.1 trillion… One example is the cost, in today’s dollars, to make Social Security and Medicare solvent for the next 75 years. This grew to $38.6 trillion, an increase of $4.7 trillion over the prior year.”

“Every year of slow growth decreases the amount brought in from payroll taxes. This hits younger Americans twice, with a smaller economy and higher personal income tax rates to pay for baby-boomer retirements.”

“Without the 3 percent growth that the U.S. economy has historically delivered, the promises we have made ourselves will be even more unaffordable. Why aren’t we focused on boosting growth?”

“…if the pilot programs (in ObamaCare) fail, personal income taxes on all Americans would have to increase to unprecedented levels. Taxes that high will crush growth, making health-care promises even less affordable.” Health care threatens to crush U.S. growthThe 2012 annual report for the federal government, released last week, continues to use dubious accounting standards to avoid putting the...