How To Stop Mass Shootings? Report on the heroes instead of the villains...

Taxpayers billed for posh government bathroom ($222,000)

The bathroom in the private office of the secretary of the Interior Department is 100 square feet and more expensive than many American homes.A $222,000 renovation in 2007 was expensive enough to prompt an internal investigation.

The Cox Washington bureau exclusively obtained the results of the review using the Freedom of Information Act. It includes a work order showing wall panels costing more than $1,500. The posh bathroom also now has a refrigerator, installed for $3,500. It also sports $26,000 worth of custom cabinetry surrounding a $689 faucet and a $65 vintage tissue holder.

"A number of the items incorporated into the renovation project call into question the need for luxurious materials," government auditors wrote in their 2009 report.

David Williams is the president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. He said the Interior Department, then under the direction of former Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, should have settled for a more humble office bathroom.

"First and foremost the country is broke," Williams said. "We can't afford, as taxpayers, the remodeling of bathrooms or any rooms that don't need to be remodeled."

The Interior Department said the renovations were needed because of water leaks in the old bath.

The renovations were approved and contracted by the General Services Administration, the government's official landlord.

A GSA spokesman says the work happened before the current administration took over and that more oversight is in place now to protect against wasteful renovations in the future.

http://www.kirotv.com/news/news/national-govt-politics/taxpayers-billed-posh-government-bathroom/nTxmd/

The president needs to get serious and stop the campaign speeches

President Obama put on quite a show on Wednesday. He even included some cute little kids in the act, a pathetic reminder that it's always about promoting a political agenda with this crowd in the White House.

What did President Obama propose? Nothing consequential. Don't expect the Senate Democrats to put any of this to a vote. And it's worse at the GOP House.

President Obama wants to enforce gun laws. My question is simple: Why weren't we enforcing these laws before?

As the father of three 20-something sons, let me say this: It ain't about guns! Guns don't cause kids to go crazy and kill other kids.

I am a lot more concerned about the filth and trash that these kids watch in movies and video games:

"NRA Executive Vice President and CEO Wayne LaPierre said after the shooting. "A child growing up in America witnesses 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence by the time he or she reaches the ripe old age of 18." (WashingtonTimes)

Let me repeat: As a father of boys, I was always a lot more concerned about the stuff that my kids were watching than the guns at home or elsewhere.

We can't continue to overlook the filth and violence in movies and games. I would also add that aborting 1 million babies does not communicate "a respect for life" to our kids either.

Yes, everyone was appalled by the Newtown tragedy. We do not want a repeat of that terrible incident.

Just as important, we also want a president who is serious and wants to have a complete discussion not just deliver another campaign speech.

On school violence, and every other issue, someone needs to remind President Obama that he won the election and it's time to govern and get serious.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/01/the_president_needs_to_get_serious_and_stop_the_campaign_speeches.html

They're Coming to Take Our Guns Away, Ha-Haaa!

You may recall the 1966 cult-classic by Napoleon XIV titled, "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa." The lyrics of that song describe an individual who is out of his mind and who is being taken "to the funny farm" and to "the loony bin" so he can be attended to by "those nice young men in their clean white coats."

The subject of the song is simply considered a danger to society, a menace if you will, crazy, and unable to make rational decisions on his own. He's unreasonable and refuses to conform to the society around him.
Enter today's debate over guns. Obama, Biden, and the rest of the political left are using similar language and characterizations in their description of gun owners. Theirs is a coordinated effort to paint American gun owners as crazed, government-hating lunatics, whose guns, used for sport, recreation, and defense are somehow a great danger to our society, potential Adam Lanzas or Jared Loughners.

Of course, this should come as no surprise. Recall Barack Obama's description of middle-class voters and the challenge he faced in getting their votes way back in 2008, "It's not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Today's push by the leftist media has managed to raise the insult level even higher recently. Take Carol Costello of CNN for example. On December 27^th, in questioning NRA President David Keene, she shared this comment from her Facebook page, "Why is the NRA crazy? Why are they, like, out of touch with reality?"

Costello paints a picture of gun owners as out of step with society, yet recent polling is hardly indicative of such. A Gallup poll conducted earlier this month found that only 38% of Americans are dissatisfied with current gun laws, while 43% are either satisfied or believe the laws should be loosened.

Other polls have found only a slight majority of Americans believe there should be any increase in gun control legislation. Yet, we the legal gun owners of America are somehow considered out of touch and crazy? According to the liberals, legal gun owners who want to sustain their ability to defend themselves against those who wish to do them harm is some type of right-wing, extremist idea...an idea that they lament is found in our Constitution in the Second Amendment.

Oh, but there is plenty more insulting characterizations of legal gun owners from other prominent liberals and the White House.

Take former Pennsylvania Governor, Ed Rendell. Appearing on that bastion of balanced reporting, MSNBC, Rendell characterized gun owners as "looney, nuts, off their rocker."

Note that Rendell isn't just saying we legal gun owners of America are wrong, but that we're lunatics and far out of the norm of society. Don't you think if Rendell had the power to somehow confiscate every gun in America he would jump at the chance?

Also, consider President Obama's comments Monday regarding those who oppose the heavy gun control proposals he's to announce Wednesday, "As far as people lining up and purchasing more guns, I think that we've seen for some time now that those who oppose any common sense gun control or gun safety measures have a pretty effective way of ginning up fear on the part of gun owners that somehow, the federal government's about to take all your guns away."

So, it's the 2^nd Amendment crowd, the National Rifle Association, and conservative talkers and writers who are, in the words of Obama, "ginning up fear." Really? This is the man, remember, who characterized middle-class voters as people who "cling to their guns."

Obama also, back in 1996 when he was running for the Illinois Senate, filled out a questionnaire for a community group in Chicago in which he answered "yes" to a question that included whether the State should ban the manufacture, sale, and possession of handguns.

And yesterday, President Obama took advantage of all the spadework, using his signing session for 23 executive actions to medicalize gun ownership under Obamacare, making it "clear that his health law, known as the Affordable Care Act, allows doctors to ask patients whether they have guns in their homes, and will tell them they are able to report any threats of violence they hear to police"

Indeed, how silly of us, legal gun owners to think that our President would ever seek to take away our guns. Just ignore the fact that he's from Chicago, which has some of the most stringent gun controls in America, and that he mocks those who cling to their guns, and that he filled out a questionnaire for a liberal community group in which he agreed that guns need to be out of the possession of Illinoisans.

And, we're the crazy ones?

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/theyre_coming_to_take_our_guns_away_ha-haaa.html

Disincentives to Work Have Slowed U.S. Economic Growth

The 21st century has not been kind to the U.S. economy: the annual rate of GDP growth for the past 12 years, once all the data are available, probably will prove to be about half the 3.5 percent annual rate the country enjoyed from its founding to the late 20th century.

One key factor behind this trend—at least in recent years—is the shrinking percentage of workers in the U.S. economy, according to economist Richard Vedder. A senior fellow at the Independent Institute, Vedder makes his case in an op-ed that appears in today’s Wall Street Journal.

In 2000, there were eight more workers for every 100 working-age Americans than there were in 1960, but since 2000, more than two-thirds of that increase has been erased. If the proportion of workers hadn’t fallen, the U.S. economy would have been growing probably at least 2.2 percent each year this century instead of 1.81 percent.

Vedder attributes the main cause of the trend to public policies that have reduced the incentive to work—especially changes in four particular federal programs:

A sharp rise in food stamps. From 2000 to 2007, the number of Americans getting food stamps grew from 17.1 million to 26.3 million. Although the unemployment rate fell from 2010 to October 2012 (the latest month for which food-stamp data are available), the number of food-stamp recipients rose by 7,223,000—about 10,000 a day.

A steady increase in Social Security disability payments. The number of Americans who received work-related disability checks from Social Security was about 3 million in 1990. It was about 5 million in 2000, 6.5 million in 2005, and is 8.6 million today.

A significant boost in Pell Grant recipients. In 2000, fewer than 3.9 million young Americans were awarded Pell Grants to attend college. That number rose by nearly 6 million by 2011. This increase is hard to justify on economic grounds, according to Vedder, because “nearly half of four-year college graduates today work in jobs that the Labor Department has determined do not require a college degree,” he writes.

Extended unemployment benefits. Unemployment benefits traditionally lasted up to 26 weeks, but that period has been increased over the past four years. Some recipients have received unemployment benefits for more than a year, which has weakened the incentive of the unemployed to take jobs outside of their comfort zone.

Vedder, who co-authored the award-winning book Out of Work: Unemployment and Government Policy in Twentieth-Century America, hastens to add that other factors have also dampened U.S. economic growth. He also notes that policymakers could adopt a variety of productive measures to increase employment—such as adopting a more worker-oriented immigration policy and cutting taxes on work-related income.

“Most American recognize the need to reduce government spending to rein in the national debt,” Vedder writes. “But there is another reason to cut government spending for specific programs: If more people have less incentive to stay out of the work force, they might seek jobs and help spur economic growth.”

http://www.mygovcost.org/2013/01/16/disincentives-to-work-have-slowed-u-s-economic-growth/

PK'S NOTE: This has got a lot of numbers and charts but it really worth reading and paying attention to:

The Obama Hat Trick: Three Hockey Sticks

While the solution to cutting spending is going to be tough, our spending problem is not hard to understand. Chart I shows federal spending as a percent of GDP from the Eisenhower administration through estimated numbers for fiscal 2012, which ended in September. The Eisenhower administration is a good starting point for post-war budgets because it is the first period of budgetary normality following World War II, demobilization, and the Korean War. Spending as a percent of GDP gives a crisp number which is comparable over long periods of time.

Average spending for the federal budget as a percent of GDP from Eisenhower through Bush was 20.0%. In its first year, the Obama administration blew out the budget to 25% of GDP. That was when the Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress. In order to lock in the 2009 level of spending, which included the allegedly temporary stimulus, the Senate has not passed a budget since April 2009, even though the Budget Act of 1974 requires it to do so every year (making Harry Reid a scofflaw).

The government has been funded with continuing resolutions, which means that the current services budget is approved for the next year. The current services budget does not mean that the same money will be spent next year as this year, but rather that the same level of services will be maintained, including increased claimants for entitlements, pay increases, inflation adjustments, and, for many programs, built-in increments based on population growth. Expenditures for fiscal 2012, which ended September 30, 2012, came down to an estimated 23.1% of GDP, but it is not clear that that is a trend. We will have to see when we get estimates for spending in the current fiscal year and for the GDP over the same period.

Obama did not run in the last election as "the 25% man." He certainly did not run on restructuring spending, instead qualitatively expanding the relative size of the federal government from its post-war baseline and commensurately reducing the relative contribution of the private sector in the composition of GDP even though it is the private sector that must carry the load of government.

Want to see something that will curl your hair? Chart II shows federal borrowing as a percentage of the federal tax revenues, meaning how much borrowing we are doing each year as compared to how much revenue we are raising from taxes.

What Chart II shows is that we borrowed over 40% over taxes raised in fiscal 2012! This means that taxes would have had to be 40% higher than they were last year to balance the budget. And remember, we are not at war in the sense of World War II, nor are we building a stairway to heaven -- meaning investing in some great national enterprise. This is just the day-to-day spending of the government -- just a day at the office.

What does the Obama administration plan to do about it? Denounce the Republicans for wanting to get it under control and increase the pay of the federal workforce, which Obama just announced.

Want to see the effect of all this spending? Chart III shows the increase in gross federal debt (there is another calculation for federal debt, netting out the Social Security Trust Fund, which the government calls "debt held by the public," but we are not using that here).

As Will Hunting says in the movie Good Will Hunting, "you like apples? How 'bout them apples?"

What will become of us? Nothing good if this continues. The mechanism of financial ruin will be a collapse in the value of the dollar, perhaps occasioned by a return of the rate of interest the government pays on its debt to a normal level. Currently, due to the unique circumstances of the slow growth world economy, the continued safe haven status of the U.S., and the Fed's quantitative easing, interest rates are at the abnormally low level of about 1.8% on the total federal debt. Every 1% increase in the interest rate the federal government pays on its debt would add $125 billion to the budget. An increase of 500 basis points, which would be large but not unprecedented, would add about $600 billion to federal expenditures simply to service the debt. That could push the deficit to $2 trillion a year.

It will not happen right away, because we are not in extremis -- yet -- and the world has no good alternative to the reserve and transaction status of the dollar -- yet. But if that terrible day should ever come, it will come suddenly, and then Humpty-Dumpty will not be able to be put together again -- meaning the currency, not the U.S. of A, which would stumble along in some form, but not the one we know now. The government would issue a new currency, effectively default on these debts, and the game would start over, but with tumbleweeds blowing through a lot of streets. Also by that time we would have finished dismantling our military, a project which the administration is embarking on now in order to grab all federal spending for welfare programs in their various forms -- i.e., abandoning its one true constitutional duty to chase the socialist mirage that destroyed so many countries in the last century and saved none.

The question with the Obama administration is always (1) does it know what it is doing or (2) doesn't it? And then wondering which answer is worse. The effect is the same.

But let's not fool ourselves. A lot of people in the country have come to depend on this spending. Cutting it back will not be pretty, nor can it be done all at once. In round numbers, spending needs to be brought back to 20% of GDP, which is historically what the tax base has supported through both the high tax rates of the Eisenhower era and the much lower tax rates of the Reagan era.

The "easiest" way to bring the country's finances under control is to hold the absolute dollar spending -- not the "current services budget" with its built-in increases, but actual dollar spending -- flat for eight years. With reasonable economic growth, that would more or less balance the budget. The only problem with that program is that 10,000 baby-boomers are retiring a day, with their claims on Social Security and Medicare plus the increasing cost of medical care itself.

Getting spending under control would mean at the least means-testing those programs. That would be only a down-payment, perhaps solving 30% of the problem. The rest would have to be done with a sharp pencil. The right mental image is that the administration clears out at least one floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next-door to the White House, turns it into cubicles, and brings in an army of accountants to go over every item in the budget.

There are three major battles over the next two months on the financial future of the country: (1) the debt ceiling, (2) the second round on the sequester, and (3) the continuing resolution to keep funding the government, given that the Senate won't pass a budget. Since the administration refuses to concede that we have a spending problem, the debt ceiling is really the only tool the Republicans have to get its attention -- the proverbial club to hit the mule on the head. The Dem strategy is to pretend that there is no problem and denounce the Republicans for bringing it up.

This budget battle is a turning point for republican government as significant as Caesar crossing the Rubicon and ending the Roman Republic. Or, as Lincoln put it, determining whether "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/01/the_obama_hat_trick_three_hockey_sticks.html

Second-Term Reckonings

A rule of the modern age: all confident, reelected presidents trip up in the second term. LBJ was sunk by Vietnam. Reagan faced Iran-Contra. Bill Clinton had his comeuppance with Monica. George W. Bush was overwhelmed with the Iraqi insurgency and Katrina. And Obama will have his as well, obsequious media or not.

Supposedly fundamental partisan swings of an era usually prove transitory: LBJ’s landside led to Nixon four years later, whose landslide then led to Carter in 1980, whose supposed new politics of humility and apology led to Reagan, whose small government-paradigm shift nonetheless by 1992 gave us Clinton, whose “middle way” after only eight years gave us Bush, whose “compassionate conservative realignment” ended with Obama. And so on until the end of the republic
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Why these second-term reckonings? Partly, presidential hubris leads to a natural correction, as Nemesis kicks in; partly, one can dodge mishaps for four years, but the odds catch up after eight; and partly, the media and voters grow tired of a monotonous presidential voice, appearance, and manner, and want change for the sake of change. To the degree a president walks softly, understands his second-term dilemma, and reaches out, he is less vulnerable.

But Obama either has misread his reelection as a mandate (e.g., Republicans maintained control of the House and the majority of state governorships and legislatures; Obama, unlike most second-term presidents, received fewer votes than in 2008, fewer in fact then John McCain received), or he believes that his progressive legacy lies in ramming through change by any means necessary to obtain results that are neither possible through legislative compromise nor supported by majorities of the American people.

Consider the reckoning Obama will soon have in the following areas:

Guns

Americans are as outraged over the Newtown shootings as they are baffled by how to stop such mass murders — given the difficulty of legislating away human evil. They have a vague sense both that someone should not be able to fire off 30 rounds in seconds, and yet that prior assault-weapons bans and comprehensive gun control have not done anything to curtail the incidents of gun violence. The more the Obama legions try to push curtailments of the Second Amendment, the more pushback they will encounter. Voters sense rightly that ultimately Obama is angry not so much at the “clingers” and their guns, but at the Second Amendment itself.

And yet they sense that Obama himself — and most celebrities — quite rightly count on the guns of their security guards to protect them from evil.

James Madison did not write that amendment just as a protection for hunters or to ensure home defense, but rather as a warning to an all-powerful federal government not to abuse its mandate, given that the citizenry would be armed and enjoy some parity in weaponry with federal authorities. That is why a militia is expressly mentioned, and why the Third Amendment follows, emphasizing further checks on the ability of the federal government to quarter troops in private homes (made more difficult when, thanks to the Second Amendment, they are armed).

For Obama to win over public opinion following Newtown, he would have to make arguments that strict gun control leads to decreased shootings in places like Chicago, or that a prior assault weapon ban stopped Columbine, or that Connecticut’s strict gun control mitigated the effects of Newtown. The president would also have to explain, if he were to go ahead with executive orders curbing gun access, why not equally so with knives — which are used in more killings than assault weapons — or ammonium nitrate fertilizer that can lead to something like Oklahoma City. And he must demonstrate that playing a sick video game for hours in a basement, or being part of a pathological culture that produces schlock like Natural Born Killers, or expanding the First Amendment to such lengths that the violently insane cannot be forcibly hospitalized are minor considerations in comparison to the availability of semi-automatic weapons.

In lieu of all that, for now Obama is fueling liberal outrage over Newtown, locating it against a demonized gun-owning class, and hoping to start another us/them war (in the fashion of the 2012 wars of feminists versus sexists, greens versus polluters, gays versus bigots, Latinos versus nativists, blacks versus racists, unions versus capitalist parasites, and the young needy versus the older greedy) of the educated and civilized against the supposed rednecks in camouflage.

Jack up outrage, identify the “enemy,” demonize him, and then lead the mob to a new law. But most Americans value the right to buy guns; they are not convinced that new laws will abate violence; and they will resent any effort to prune the Second Amendment by executive order. If I am wrong, then we will see purple- and red-state Democratic senators and representatives, up for reelection in 2014, jump onto the Obama-Biden-Feinstein-Pelosi-Reid restrictionist bandwagon.

Obamacare

In 2013, there will be new taxes levied, from charges on medical devices to Medicare tax hikes on the culpable who make more than the dreaded $250,000. Already insurance premiums are rising in anticipation of Obamacare implementation in 2014, when health care exchanges begin, and employers and the uninsured will be forced to either buy health insurance or to pay a fine — the details of which are unclear even to the architects of the law. If Obamacare were car insurance, you could buy it retroactively after a major collision, and could not be charged too much due to your prior driving record — facts that will make premiums for others soar.

So far, Obamacare has been just a rhetorical topos. In 2013 it will cost people real money, and in 2014 it will change the way millions of Americans deal with and pay for their doctors. Those who will like the new entitlement are natural Obama supporters; those who will not like it may have been in 2012 but might not be in 2014.

Taxes

Americans want as many government freebies as possible as long as the distant fat cats pay for them. But there are two problems with Obama’s cynical attempts to created an even greater constituency of dependents, reliant on the taxes from a demonized upper wealthy class. First, there are not enough rich to squeeze out sufficient funds to pay for the vast increases in federal spending. We saw that with the 2013 payroll tax hikes on the middle class and the president’s willingness to go over the cliff, which would have raised taxes on everyone.

Obama’s war has never, as he claimed, been between the 1% and 99%, but rather is an existential struggle of the 47% who do not pay federal income tax and receive lots from the government against the 53% who dread April 15 and receive less. That divide will become clearer as the economy sputters along, the debts mount, and the government searches for revenue.

Second, while the majority of those who make above $250,000 probably voted for Obama, they did so on the premise that the super-wealthy (e.g., those who make more than $1 million a year), not themselves, were in Obama’s crosshairs. In 2013 they will come to learn that new Obamacare taxes, a new loss in deductions, new blue-state income tax hikes, and changes in Medicare taxation are aimed at themselves — and that Obama prefers a Bill Gates, Jeffrey Immelt, or Warren Buffett to a middle-level executive, doctor, or lawyer making $200,000. It is one thing to blast the Koch brothers and claim that news coverage of Obamaphones is a racist trope; quite another to pay another 10% of your income for others to have free things that are superfluous — and be derided in the process.

Debt

Jack Lew can insist that borrowing $1 trillion a year is not adding to the deficit. Paul Krugman can demand that we borrow even more to achieve the proper Keynesian stimulus. Obama can maintain that spending is not the problem. But $16 trillion is $16 trillion, and the trajectories of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, food stamps, disability, and unemployment insurance suggest that there is no end to the borrowing in sight.

The economy is not growing much; unemployment has been higher in every month of the Obama administration than in any one month of his predecessor’s eight years. Not even slashing defense and upping federal and state income taxes on the fat cats will bring the solution, since it is mathematical and not political. Even Obama cannot issue an executive order outlawing the laws of physics.

The public very soon will see that there is to be less free stuff and lots more taxes — and yet that will still not be enough, as the new regulations, higher taxes, and constant demonizing of the private sector hamstring the economy.

Honesty

There is still only a vague appreciation that Obama has contradicted much of what he said in the past — to a degree more manifest than what was normal for a Reagan or Clinton. He no longer thinks deficits are unpatriotic as they were under Bush, and he most surely never planned to cut them in half by the end of his first term. He voted against raising the debt ceiling in 2006 when the debt was much smaller than it is now, and he now claims that for others to do what he did is little short of subversive. Obama once loudly and in detail warned against doing away with the filibuster that his lieutenants now seek to stop — and he once warned in the process about the sort of partisan abuse behind such an effort that he now embraces. He derided recess appointments that he now employs, and railed against the abuse of the executive order that he now has used to avoid legislative opposition on immigration, environmental regulations, and perhaps soon the Second Amendment.

Obama has praised public financing of presidential campaigns, and yet was the first candidate in the history of the law to renounce it. Renditions, tribunals, the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, and preventative detention at one time or another were all demagogued by Obama as either useless or illegal — and all embraced or expanded by him without either a nod of thanks to Bush or a small admission that he had reversed course. He has blasted big-money fat cats on Wall Street for both taking federal bailouts and receiving huge bonuses for their incompetence, and yet nominated the very emblem of that hypocrisy — Citigroup’s Jack Lew — as his new Treasury secretary. An act analogous to lecturing about the need for the well-off to pay “their fair share” while appointing a tax-dodger as the prior Treasury secretary.

Obama’s past sermons about transparency, the revolving door, and the abuse of big money in campaign donations are now at odds with his practice. He blasted the waterboarding of three confessed terrorists, and then had nearly 3,000 suspected terrorists vaporized by Predator drones, apparently on the rationale that an OK from former Yale Law Dean Harold Koh and reading Augustine and Aquinas while selecting the hit list made it all liberal and thus correct.

All of the above is mostly unknown to the average voter and ignored by the media. But the untruths and hypocrisy hover in the partisan atmosphere and incrementally and insidiously undermine each new assertion that we hear from the president — some of them perhaps necessary and logical. Indeed, the more emphatically he adds “make no mistake about it,” “let me be perfectly clear,” “I’m not kidding,” or the ubiquitous “me,” “my,” and “I” to each new assertion, the more a growing number of people will come to know from the past that what follows simply is not true. Does this matter? Yes, because when the reckoning comes, it will be seen as logical rather than aberrant — and long overdue.

Abroad

Most Americans are tired of Afghanistan, as they were of Iraq, as they were of Vietnam — the cost in lives and money, the lack of clear victory, the endlessness of the commitment, the ingratitude of our allies, and the barbarity of our enemies. But as in the case of the withdrawal from Vietnam, with time comes reflection that after a huge investment of blood and treasure Americans had won the peace in Iraq, and could have ensured it with a small watchdog force, and the same might have been true of Afghanistan.

Obama will be credited with ending both wars that George Bush started (though the violence in Iraq was mostly over when Obama assumed power), but the ultimate fate of both countries will be in his hands — and they may not be pretty when the Taliban starts taking reprisals on female doctors, gays, and any who are seen as Westernized. (Vietnam at least had a coast for the boat people; Afghanistan is landlocked). Expect serial interventions of the sort we now see with the French in Somalia, when Afghanistan returns to an Islamist state that harbors al-Qaeda, hangs women in its soccer stadium, and begins murdering thousands who were tainted by the West.

For now we talk of the hyper-sensitive “Jewish” or “Israeli” lobby that “went after” Chuck Hagel. We are assured that the new distance from Israel is just a neocon talking point. But soon we shall see the multiplying effect of Obama/Kerry/Hagel/Brennan upon our strategic relationship with Israel, and it may well be during a war rather than mere talking points about settlements at a time of peace. The Arab Spring was sold as one thing; but should Syria and Egypt, along with Libya, end up as Sunni versions of Iran, then Americans will begin to ask why and how. (Who “lost” not just North Africa, but the entire Middle East?)

In short, this is the time when a careful Obama should be calling for bipartisan implementation of the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles commission, redoing a Gingrich-Clinton compromise, seeking non-polarizing appointments of the Panetta/Gates sort, and cooling his presidential partisan rhetoric.

Unfortunately, he had done the opposite, and so a reckoning is on the near horizon. Let us pray it does not take us all down with his administration.

http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/second-term-reckonings/?singlepage=true

Also Reads:

The Real Problem with Healthcare

"To my knowledge, no legislation has been proposed to revamp our healthcare infrastructure and tackle these issues. Obamacare has been approved and is slowly being implemented, but it is merely a shell game that does nothing to solve the issue of revamping the system. It will shift money around, raising some taxes, lowering some reimbursement rates, increasing government dependence, and essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul. You can expand health insurance to the uninsured (though even under Obamacare the CBO estimates 30 million will still be uninsured in 2022), but it doesn't fix the mindset, habits, and reality of our healthcare system and those that abuse it."