Revamped American Flag Shows Up in D.C. Yesterday…

A new Old Glory, as seen during the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington Saturday, via Twitchy.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/08/24/revamped-american-flag-shows-up-in-d-c-today/

33 Shocking Facts Which Show How Badly The Economy Has Tanked Under Obama

Barack Obama has been running around the country taking credit for an "economic recovery", but the truth is that things have not gotten better under Obama. Compared to when he first took office, a smaller percentage of the working age population is employed, the quality of our jobs has declined substantially and the middle class has been absolutely shredded. If we are really in the middle of an "economic recovery", why is the homeownership rate the lowest that it has been in 18 years? Why has the number of Americans on food stamps increased by nearly 50 percent while Obama has been in the White House? Why has the national debt gotten more than 6 trillion dollars larger during the Obama era? Obama should not be "taking credit" for anything when it comes to the economy. In fact, he should be deeply apologizing to the American people.

And of course Obama is being delusional if he thinks that he is actually "running the economy". The Federal Reserve has far more power over the U.S. economy and the U.S. financial system than he does. But the mainstream media loves to fixate on the presidency, so presidents always get far too much credit or far too much blame for economic conditions.

But if you do want to focus on "the change" that has taken place since Barack Obama entered the White House, there is no way in the world that you can claim that things have actually gotten better during that time frame. The cold, hard reality of the matter is that the U.S. economy has been steadily declining for over a decade, and this decline has continued while Obama has been living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

It is getting very tiring listening to Obama supporters try to claim that Obama has improved the economy. That is a false claim that is not even remotely close to reality. The following are 33 shocking facts which show how badly the U.S. economy has tanked since Obama became president...

#1 When Barack Obama entered the White House, 60.6 percent of working age Americans had a job. Today, only 58.7 percent of working age Americans have a job.
#2 Since Obama has been president, seven out of every eight jobs that have been "created" in the U.S. economy have been part-time jobs.
#3 The number of full-time workers in the United States is still nearly 6 million below the old record that was set back in 2007.
#4 It is hard to believe, but an astounding 53 percent of all American workers now make less than $30,000 a year.
#5 40 percent of all workers in the United States actually make less than what a full-time minimum wage worker made back in 1968.
#6 When the Obama era began, the average duration of unemployment in this country was 19.8 weeks. Today, it is 36.6 weeks.
#7 During the first four years of Obama, the number of Americans "not in the labor force" soared by an astounding 8,332,000. That far exceeds any previous four year total.
#8 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the middle class is taking home a smaller share of the overall income pie than has ever been recorded before.
#9 When Obama was elected, the homeownership rate in the United States was 67.5 percent. Today, it is 65.0 percent. That is the lowest that it has been in 18 years.
#10 When Obama entered the White House, the mortgage delinquency rate was 7.85 percent. Today, it is 9.72 percent.
#11 In 2008, the U.S. trade deficit with China was 268 billion dollars. Last year, it was 315 billion dollars.
#12 When Obama first became president, 12.5 million Americans had manufacturing jobs. Today, only 11.9 million Americans have manufacturing jobs.
#13 Median household income in America has fallen for four consecutive years. Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.
#14 The poverty rate has shot up to 16.1 percent. That is actually higher than when the War on Poverty began in 1965.
#15 During Obama's first term, the number of Americans on food stamps increased by an average of about 11,000 per day.
#16 When Barack Obama entered the White House, there were about 32 million Americans on food stamps. Today, there are more than 47 million Americans on food stamps.
#17 At this point, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. This is the first time that has ever happened in our history. That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.
#18 When Barack Obama took office, the average price of a gallon of regular gasoline was $1.85. Today, it is $3.53.
#19 Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.
#20 Health insurance costs have risen by 29 percent since Barack Obama became president, and Obamacare is going to make things far worse.
#21 The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.
#22 According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the number of startup jobs per 1000 Americans breaks down by presidential administration...
Bush Sr.: 11.3
Clinton: 11.2
Bush Jr.: 10.8
Obama: 7.8
#23 In 2008, that total amount of student loan debt in this country was 440 billion dollars. At this point, it has shot up to about a trillion dollars.
#24 According to one recent survey, 76 percent of all Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.
#25 During Obama's first term, the number of Americans collecting federal disability insurance rose by more than 18 percent.
#26 The total amount of money that the federal government gives directly to the American people has grown by 32 percent since Barack Obama became president.
#27 According to the Survey of Income and Program Participation conducted by the U.S. Census, well over 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government.
#28 As I wrote about the other day, American households are now receiving more money directly from the federal government than they are paying to the government in taxes.
#29 Under Barack Obama, the velocity of money (a very important indicator of economic health) has plunged to a post-World War II low.
#30 At the end of 2008, the Federal Reserve held $475.9 billion worth of U.S. Treasury bonds. Today, Fed holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds have skyrocketed past the 2 trillion dollar mark.
#31 When Barack Obama was first elected, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio was under 70 percent. Today, it is up to 101 percent.
#32 During Obama's first term, the federal government accumulated more new debt than it did under the first 42 U.S presidents combined.
#33 When you break it down, the amount of new debt accumulated by the U.S. government during Obama's first term comes to approximately $50,521 for every single household in the United States. Are you able to pay your share?

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-08-21/33-shocking-facts-which-show-how-badly-economy-has-tanked-under-obama

Obamanomics Fail: American Incomes Fell By Twice As Much During Obama 'Recovery' Than During 'Recession'

he Weekly Standard Blog reports on another failure of the Obama economic policy. According to new research, Obama’s attempt to staunch the “income gap” has caused the average income Americans to fall at a much greater rate during his “recovery” than what he constantly touts as, “the greatest recession since the Great Depression.”

New estimates derived from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey by Sentier Research indicate that the real (inflation-adjusted) median annual household income in America has fallen by 4.4 percent during the “recovery,” after having fallen by 1.8 during the recession. During the recession, the median American household income fell by $1,002 (from $55,480 to $54,478). During the recovery—that is, from the officially defined end of the recession (in June 2009) to the most recent month for which figures are available (June 2013)—the median American household income has fallen by $2,380 (from $54,478 to $52,098). So the typical American household is making almost $2,400 less per year (in constant 2013 dollars) than it was four years ago, when the Obama “recovery” began.

Actually, the disparity is more than twice as much, approaching two and a half times as much.

Let’s take the liberal assumption that income inequality is a measure that should be considered as a measure of success of governance, and that the government should be concerned with lessening it, even at the expense of average income growth.

How did Obama do there? Awful:

Research by University of California economist Emmanuel Saez shows that since the Obama recovery started in June 2009, the average income of the top 1% grew 11.2% in real terms through 2011.

The bottom 99%, in contrast, saw their incomes shrink by 0.4%.

As a result, 121% of the gains in real income during Obama’s recovery have gone to the top 1%. By comparison, the top 1% captured 65% of income gains during the Bush expansion of 2002-07, and 45% of the gains under Clinton’s expansion in the 1990s.

So if the “recovery” fails by the conservative standard of simply raising wealth and prosperity, and it fails by the liberal measure of redistribution of income from the top to the bottom, what is left to credit Obama with?
Nothing – which is exactly why he spends all his time blaming Congress for his failures.

http://www.ijreview.com/2013/08/74867-obamanomics-fail-americans-incomes-fell-by-twice-as-much-during-recovery-than-during-recession/

Obamacare’s Hierarchy of Privilege

No one who favors the law wants to be bound by it.

By Mark Steyn
On his radio show the other day, Hugh Hewitt caught me by surprise and asked me about running for the United States Senate from New Hampshire. My various consultants, pollsters, PACs, and exploratory committees haven’t fine-tuned every detail of my platform just yet, but I can say this without a doubt: I will not vote for any “comprehensive” bill, whether on immigration, health care, or anything else.

“Comprehensive” today is a euphemism for interminably long, poorly drafted, and entirely unread — not just by the people’s representatives but by our robed rulers, too (how many of those Supreme Court justices actually plowed through every page of Obamacare when its “constitutionality” came before them?). The 1862 Homestead Act, which is genuinely comprehensive, is two handwritten pages in clear English. “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” is 500 times as long, is not about patients or care, and neither protects the former nor makes the latter affordable.

So what is it about? On Wednesday, the Nevada AFL-CIO passed a resolution declaring that “the unintended consequences of the ACA will lead to the destruction of the 40-hour work week.” That’s quite an accomplishment for a “health” “care” “reform” law. But the poor old union heavies who so supported Obamacare are now reduced to bleating that they should be entitled to the same opt-outs secured by big business and congressional staffers. It’s a very strange law whose only defining characteristic is that no one who favors it wants to be bound by it.

Meanwhile, on the very same day as the AFL-CIO was predicting the death of the 40-hour week, the University of Virginia announced plans to boot working spouses off its health plan beginning January 1 because the Affordable Care Act has made it unaffordable: It’s projected to add $7.3 million dollars to the university’s bill in 2014 alone.

As Nancy Pelosi famously said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” But the problem with “comprehensive” legislation is that, when everything’s in it, nothing’s in it. The Affordable Care Act means whatever President Obama says it means on any particular day of the week. Whether it applies to you this year, next year, or not at all depends on the whim of the sovereign, and whether your CEO golfs with him on Martha’s Vineyard. A few weeks back, the president unilaterally suspended the law’s employer mandate. Under the U.S. Constitution, he doesn’t have the power to do this, but judging from the American people’s massive shrug of indifference he might as well unilaterally suspend the Constitution, too. Obamacare is not a law, in the sense that all persons are equal before it, but a hierarchy of privilege; for example, senators value their emir-sized entourages and don’t want them to quit, so it is necessary to provide the flunkies who negotiated and drafted the Affordable Care Act an exemption from the legislation they imposed on the citizenry. Once again, the opt-out is not legal. As the Wall Street Journal trenchantly observed, “OPM has no authority to pay for insurance plans that lack FEHBP contracts, nor does the Affordable Care Act permit either exchange contributions or a unilateral bump in Congressional pay in return for less overall compensation.”

OPM has no authority to pay for plans that lack FEHBP? Who knew?

Despite being the presumptive next senator from New Hampshire, I am in fact an immigrant, and, although I do my best to assimilate, I never feel more foreign than when discussing “health” “care” “reform.” Across the planet, my readers from Tajikistan to Tuvalu are wondering: Is an OPM a new kind of procedure? Is it the latest high-tech stent or prosthetic? But, no. Nothing in the health-care debate is anything to do with medicine or surgery, only with OPMs and FEHBP and the death of full-time employment.

What does your employer or (for the discarded husbands of the University of Virginia’s Women’s Studies Department) your spouse’s employer have to do with health care? For most of modern history, your health care was a matter between you and your doctor. Since World War II, in much of the developed world, it’s been between you, your doctor, and your government. In America, it’s now between you, your doctor, your government, your insurer, your employer, your insurer’s outsourced health-care-administration-services company . . . Anybody else? Oh, let’s not forget Lois Lerner’s IRS, which, in the biggest expansion of the agency in the post-war era, has hired 16,500 new agents to determine whether your hernia merits an audit.

All third-party systems are crappy and inefficient. But socialized health care has at least the great clarifying simplicity of equality of crappiness: liberté, égalité, merde. It requires a perverse genius to construct a “health” “care” “reform” that destroys everything from religious liberty to full-time employment, while requiring multitudes of new tax collectors and other bureaucrats and ever fewer doctors and nurses. The parallel public/private systems of Continental Europe cost about 10 percent of GDP. The Obamacare monstrosity blends all the worst aspects of a private system (bureaucracy, restricted access, co-pays) with all the worst aspects of a government system (bureaucracy, restricted access, IRS agents) and sucks up twice as much GDP, ever less of which is spent on “health care” and ever more on the intervening layers of third, fourth, fifth, and sixth parties.

But, as the AFL-CIO’s resolution emphasizes, that hardly begins to state the distorting effects of Obamacare. In my part of the world, a common employment profile is for the husband to have his own one-man business, doing construction all summer and snowplowing all winter, while the missus does an administrative job with the school district or some other government or quasi-government racket in order to get health coverage. In my experience, most of the people who do the latter don’t terribly enjoy it: They take the job mostly for the health care. So it’s un-American, in the sense that it requires them to sacrifice the pursuit of happiness for the certainty of low-deductible plans.

But it also has a broader destabilizing effect: As I noted a couple of weeks ago, at the low end, about 40 percent of Americans now do minimal-skilled service jobs — the ones that, in the wake of Obamacare, are becoming neither full-time nor part-time but kinda-sorta two-thirds-time in order not to impose health-insurance obligations on the employer. In the middle, a similar number of Americans are diverted into those paper-shuffling jobs that do provide health benefits — say, in the “human resources” department of the bureaucracy; the kind of job in which you pass the time calling someone in Idaho to say you need them to fill in a W-9 before you can send them a 1099, or vice versa. And, at the top end, privileged Americans spend six-figure sums acquiring college degrees that admit them to an homogenized elite that tells itself Obamacare makes perfect sense for everyone except them. The U.S. economy can never recover until more of its real “human resources” are engaged in genuine wealth creation. Yet Obamacare instead incentivizes the diversion of more and more manpower into the Republic of Paperwork.

The cynical among us have always assumed Obamacare was set up to be so unworkable a grateful populace would embrace any 2016 Democrat promising single-payer health care. The way things are going the entire system may collapse first. If any Republicans are trying to devise a health system that doesn’t involve employers, the IRS, and paperwork without end, they’re keeping awfully quiet about it.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/356634/obamacares-hierarchy-privilege-mark-steyn/page/0/1

Defense Department Education Materials Warn of ‘Extremists’ That Speak of ‘Individual Liberties, States’ Rights, and How to Make the World a Better Place’

U.S. Department of Defense education materials obtained by Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, warn of “extremists” that will “talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place.” Judicial Watch and other conservative media outlets claim the disclosure indicates the department is teaching that conservative views are “extremist” in nature.

The guide is reportedly authored by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, a Defense Department-funded diversity training center. Further, the documents cite the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) when identifying “hate groups.”

Judicial Watch proves the “highlights” from the documents:

• The document defines extremists as “a person who advocates the use of force or violence; advocates supremacist causes based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or national origin; or otherwise engages to illegally deprive individuals or groups of their civil rights.”

• A statement that “Nowadays, instead of dressing in sheets or publically espousing hate messages, many extremists will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place.”

• “[W]hile not all extremist groups are hate groups, all hate groups are extremist groups.”

• Under a section labeled “Extremist Ideologies” the document states, “In U.S. history, there are many examples of extremist ideologies and movements. The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule and the Confederate states who sought to secede from the Northern states are just two examples.”

• In this same section, the document lists the 9/11 attack under a category of “Historical events.”

• “[A]ctive participation…with regard to extremist organizations is incompatible with military service and, is therefore prohibited.” [Emphasis in original]

• The document details the “seven stages of hate” and sixteen “extremists’ traits.”

• The SPLC is listed as a resource for information on hate groups and referenced several times throughout the guide.

• Of the five organizations besides the SPLC listed as resources, one is an SPLC project (Teaching Tolerance) and one considers any politically or socially conservative movement to be a potential hate group (Political Research Associates).

• Other than a mention of 9/11 and the Sudan, there is no discussion of Islamic extremism.

Judicial Watch obtained 133 pages of lesson plans and PowerPoint slides in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) filed on April 8, 2013. The group asked for “any and all records concerning, regarding, or related to the preparation and presentation of training materials on hate groups or hate crimes distributed or used by the Air Force.”

However, the document says it is “for training purposes only” and “do not use on the job.” The document released was provided by the Air Force, but Judicial Watch claims it originated in a Defense Department office and is “thought likely to be used in other agency components.”

In coordination with the document release, Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said the “Obama administration has a nasty habit of equating basic conservative values with terrorism.”

“And now, in a document full of claptrap, its Defense Department suggests that the Founding Fathers, and many conservative Americans, would not be welcome in today’s military,” he added. “And it is striking that some the language in this new document echoes the IRS targeting language of conservative and Tea Party investigations. After reviewing this document, one can’t help but worry for the future and morale of our nation’s armed forces.”

Read the DOD documents here.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/08/23/department-of-defense-education-materials-warn-of-extremists-that-speak-of-individual-liberties-states-rights-and-how-to-make-the-world-a-better-place/

The history erasers wrap things up in Benghazi

In response to Team tracking Benghazi suspects pulling out Despite Obama's Vow To Get Them:

Imagine if Mitt Romney had accurately predicted this during the 2012 campaign. "Obama has made such an unholy disaster of Libya, and his Administration is so preoccupied with covering up its failures, that not only will he fail to bring any of the people who murdered our Ambassador and his brave defenders to justice, but the investigators will have to flee the country because it's too dangerous for them to remain!"

News anchors would have experienced multiple heart failures, Obama's campaign team would have fanned out across the airwaves to call Romney a madman, and Candy Crowley would have lunged for his throat instead of merely lying to save Obama during the debate.

There's no further reason to keep the investigators in a country Obama lost to terrorists and militias. There won't be any arrests, because the Administration doesn't want the perps testifying about the attack in court. They don't want to admit that the Benghazi area is too unstable to risk taking action. Obama can't afford a street battle with al-Qaeda and its allies in Libya while he's got Egypt and Syria blowing up in his face. He's not far from having to explain why the Taliban is back in control of Afghanistan, and Iran got nuclear weapons despite all his promises that they wouldn't. And they're confident they've buried those "bumps in the road" nice and deep, convincing a critical mass of Low Information Voters that Benghazi is just an obsession of fringe Obama-haters.

Even the four scapegoats sent on paid vacation - er, excuse me, placed on "administrative leave" - to make it look like someone was being held accountable for Benghazi have been returned to duty. Obama got through the election, with a lot of help from his dear friends in the mainstream media, so he'll never pay any real price for what he did before, during, and after the Benghazi attack. Hillary Clinton's not Secretary of State any more, and it remains to be seen if her presidential bid will be thwarted by her disastrous reign at State.

History has been erased.

http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2013/08/24/The-history-erasers-wrap-things-up-in-Benghazi?utm_content=buffere70b4&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=Buffer

PK'S NOTE: Remember, "neoconservative" means big government.

(B)Rand Recognition

Is the Republican Party bent on defining itself out of existence?

Recent squabbles between the neoconservative Old Guard (Chris Christie, Peter King) and the scions (political as well as biological) of Ron Paul suggest this.

The Republican Party exists as an alliance of several distinct ideological groups: social conservatives, libertarianish fiscal conservatives, and the neocons.

The neoconservative movement, the most successful ideological force for big government within the party — as expressed not only in military power overseas but also in terms of enthusiasm for the War on Drugs and a general indifference towards spending growth and debt — has dominated the party’s presidential candidate selections for some time, especially with the back room maneuvering for John McCain and Mitt Romney.
But Americans repudiated the GOP largely because of the failures of the neocon wing during the Bush years (remember that two Nixon operatives, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, almost defined the Bush Administration, and were themselves almost defining of the neocon-in-politics). And the spectacular lack of success of the McCain and the Romney presidential runs has shown the lack of resonance that Americans feel with neocon policies and personalities.

Repeated thwackings at the polls are enough to give any power-obsessed group palpitations. And now with the rise in popularity and respect of Rand Paul, Justin Amash, Ted Cruz and other limited government crusaders, actual pain is being expressed, no mere fluttering of valves.

The recent bout of invective began with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. He famously expressed alarm at the Rand Paul wing who he thinks undermines national security; he ominously conjured up the images of the two towers falling on 9/11/2001 to bolster his position on a strong defense. The fact that his statements did not in any way defend any specific foreign policy position, or deal directly with any criticism of neoconservative policy, somehow did not make the news. What made the news was the “insider” fight, whether the Republican Party should be a big tent or small one.

The next week, Representative Peter King (R-NY) stated that “someone like Rand Paul has set the Republican Party back 50 years.” King confessed to a hankering for a 2016 run at the Top Banana Spot. He says, to win.

But, if I’ve guessed the tides of opinion right, he’ll run to lose . . . and perhaps set the GOP back much further than 50 years.

You see, big government flows naturally along with big military and repeated (constant) military adventuring. Limited government fits with skepticism about imperial over-reach. As long as the Republicans cling to the rhetoric of “limited government” in one sphere, but huge, intrusive government in another, they’ll continue to lose support.

But whether Paul, Amash, or Cruz can persuasively restate the critique of expansive military and foreign policy in ways that bring in moderate and independent voters, as well as convince social conservatives and Main Streeters of their practicality, remains to be seen. Strategic disengagement from the Middle East — and the Old World entirely? — makes a lot of sense. The sheer incompetence of past efforts, the continuing gales of blowback, and the great drain on the American taxpayer, are three reasons enough.

The great trend in partisan politics in my lifetime has been that of ideological re-alignment. When I was young — the putative “good ol’ days” that old hacks at the major dinosaurs, uh, newspapers whine about — the two parties each contained “liberal” and “moderate” and “conservative” wings. Nowadays the “conservatives” have moved behind the “R” brand, while the “liberals” and “progressives” have moved to “D.”

Hence the very different relationship between the parties today, compared to yesteryear.

Interestingly, says political scientist Morris Fiorina, the percentage of folks in America who are “liberal” or whatever haven’t changed much. It’s the parties that have changed.

But it’s also the case that support for increasing the size and scope of government has tended to be directed into two distinct streams. Republicans like to talk about diminishing the role of government . . . except when it comes to the wielding of naked power. Conservatives have long chafed at constitutional constraints on police power, have been the most enthusiastic proponents of the War on Drugs, and tend to be the ones who bring up patriotism when it comes to questions of foreign wars. Liberal-progressives, on the other hand, have long chafed at constitutional constraints on regulatory and redistributive power, have been enthusiastic proponents of the War on Poverty, and tend to be the ones who bring up humanitarian concerns when discussing military actions.

The great story of our time has been the mounting evidence against the policies of big government, whether supported by Rs or Ds. The War on Drugs has been a disaster. The War on Poverty even more so. Americans are generally protected from witnessing foreign policy disasters, so the extent of the horrors — and the futility of most efforts — is lost on an uneducated public. And the spectacle of “the land of the free” with the largest prison population (both in real numbers and per capita) should be a disgrace, but still registers barely as a blip in the cultural dialogue.

Interestingly, as the evidence for big government’s failure mounts, both parties have indulged a tendency to double down. Republicans, uniting both houses of Congress and the Executive Branch in the 2000s, proved unable to constrain spending in toto, and actively increased the size of the welfare state as well as of the warfare state’s scope of action. (Multiple land wars in Asia — what could go wrong?) Democrats, leveraging Americans rejection of Bush Era nonsense, elected the peace candidate over Hillary Clinton and then celebrated by pushing through a cockamamie medical industry reform bill whose unworkability might prove either their undoing or their ultimate hope, in that it will have to be reformed to morph into the thing they want most, a national, socialized health care system.

And meanwhile, as Chris Christie rightly remarked, Obama the peace candidate turned Nobel Peace Prize-winning oval-office occupant has carried over the bulk of the Bush Administration’s foreign and spy policies, as well as a sorry record on civil liberties.

The truth is that the transformation of the parties is incomplete. The Democratic Party nurtures an entelechy towards becoming the All-Around-Big-Gov advocacy group. The Republican Party has speechified about Limited Government for years, but almost always honored the notion in the breach.

At some point, could the two parties (if both survive — a big if) become completely coherent and completely ideological? Will Democrats embrace Big Government, red in tooth and claw, and all its ways and byways, butter and guns? Will Republicans finally extend the logic of their limited government rhetoric beyond July Fourth grandstands and actually apply it consistently, and to the benefit of all mankind?
I don’t know. I hesitate to express my “hope” for “change.”

What we are stuck with, now, are neoconservatives in the GOP, pretending that the best defense is eternal offense (and debt) along with a certain looseness concerning civil liberties, and liberals in the Democratic Party, pretending that the Constitution is only what they say it is.

Meanwhile, around the country, GOP insiders continue to run roughshod over serious Tea Party activists. In Maine, recently, a prominent limited government activist elected to the Republican National Committee and his friends formally resigned their positions in the Republican Party, because the party had betrayed them . . . on the issue of natural, raw milk. It’s still illegal in Maine to buy raw milk from farmers.

Agriculture is agribiz, to political insiders, and allowing one niche of freedom to those few folks who want to drink whole, raw milk, or churn their own butter, is unthinkable.

As long as such libertarian (or, as Chris Christie might put it, “dangerous”) thought remains unthinkable to high-placed Republicans, success — real success, real constraints on out-of-control government — will remain elusive.

So goes Maine? So goes the country. And the Republican brand.

http://townhall.com/columnists/pauljacob/2013/08/25/brand-recognition-n1672804/page/full

Progressives fulminating over impeachment talk

Progressives are having conniption fits, sputtering with indignation over growing talk about impeachment as the constitutional remedy for President Obama's flouting of the law, most prominently in declaring that he will not enforce certain aspects of Obamacare out of his own political convenience. The founders clearly understood the need for a political remedy when an executive behaved outside the bounds of the law.

The talk is both local: (hat tip: Nice Deb)

And among pundits. Andrew McCarthy writes at NRO:

The Framers did not believe free people needed lawyers to figure out how to govern themselves. The standard they gave us for removal from high public office is so simple that obstetricians and even wind-bags should have no trouble grasping it.

All public officials, including presidents, are sure to err, but comparatively few will prove utterly unfit for high office. Thus impeachment was designed to be neither over- nor under-inclusive. The Framers considered limiting grounds for removal to "treason, bribery and corruption," but that would fail to account for severe derelictions of duty that could fatally compromise our constitutional order. "Maladministration," on the other hand, was rejected because it would empower Congress to impeach based on trifling irregularities.

The Framers settled on "high crimes and misdemeanors," a standard that had been used by the British parliament for centuries. The concept is not rooted in statutory offenses fit for criminal court proceedings. Instead, it involves damage done to the public order by persons in whom great public trust has been reposed.

In Federalist No. 65, Hamilton described impeachable offenses as those

which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominatedpolitical, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.

A useful article published by the Constitutional Rights Foundation is more concrete about the Framers' understanding:

Officials accused of "high crimes and misdemeanors" were accused of offenses as varied as misappropriating government funds, appointing unfit subordinates, not prosecuting cases, not spending money allocated by Parliament, promoting themselves ahead of more deserving candidates, threatening a grand jury, disobeying an order from Parliament, arresting a man to keep him from running for Parliament, losing a ship by neglecting to moor it, helping "suppress petitions to the King to call a Parliament," granting warrants without cause, and bribery. Some of these charges were crimes. Others were not. The one common denominator in all these accusations was that the official had somehow abused the power of his office and was unfit to serve.

Enough talk about impeachment that the Washington Post published a piece by Ed Rogers about "the impeachment talk that won't go away."

[T]he president is stoking through his willful flaunting of the law can't be denied. Perhaps the former constitutional law professor has overreached and decided that the Constitution is more flexible than he once thought. His misdeeds are increasingly being detailed by commentators, even those who are not marginalized conservatives. No less than Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) - who is particularly bright and well-regarded - has broached the issue and is raising the notion that impeachment is conceivable. This drew a sharp rebuke - rather than a laugh - from David Axelrod, suggesting that perhaps Senator Coburn hit a nerve.

The bothersome reality is that President Obama is inventing new laws, selectively choosing to enforce laws he likes and ignoring or amending the ones he doesn't. Many writers, from George Will to Jeffrey Anderson to Charles Krauthammer have written about the president's increasing lawlessness. What is the penalty for this? How is it supposed to be investigated? We are close to uncharted constitutional territory.

The most pathetic response came from Joan Walsh of Salon who supplied only invective, no evidence or argument at all making the case that impeachment is unrrealistic. "Tom Coburn, Ted Cruz and other crackpots can't stand up to their base and face reality. Can this party ever change?" is as deep as she gets.

While there is absolutely no prospect that the current Senate would convict the nation's first black president, and every prospect that an actual impeachment resolution would spark not just cries of racism but outright violence, it is still useful to discuss impeachment. For one thing, Obama's abuse of executive authority must be stopped. It is a slippery slope to tyranny when a president ignores laws he doesn't like, or changes them. For another, the low information voters need to have their consciousness raised, and the more exposure they have to the meme of impeachment, the more they will get information on Obama's abuses.

The progressives are correct to get hysterical over impeachment talk. It screws up their plans, piercing the media veil of silence over Obama's terrible performance in office. Most establishment Republicans run away from the issue as fast as they can, fearful of the r-word, and convinced that it will harm electoral prospects in 2014. Look how it worked out for Clinton and the GOP, they caution.

I think it is OK to have two different currents of thought among Republicans. Let the lo-fo's watch and maybe start to learn something.

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/08/progressives_fulminating_over_impeachment_talk.html#ixzz2d0KxNtPt

John Kerry: Freedom Makes It Hard to Govern

Speaking before a group of State Department workers last week, Secretary of State John Kerry gave voice to the frustration authoritarians experience because of the easy access to information on the internet. Secretary Kerry told the audience that the world had been "complicated" by "... this little thing called the internet and the ability of people everywhere to communicate instantaneously and to have more information coming at them in one day than most people can process in months or a year."

This pesky internet, Kerry says, "makes it much harder to govern, makes it much harder to organize people, much harder to find the common interest." This is a great source of aggravation for our political masters, who, for nearly all of the 20^th century, were able to limit and control the information available to their subjects. This is why government efforts to control the internet are on the rise and will continue to increase in intensity and frequency; an informed public is just too darned hard to "organize" and to dictate a "common interest" to.

Authoritarians like Kerry don't even realize how revealing such comments are. They actually believe in their personal infallibility and the inherent goodness of the monstrous governmental beast they have created in Washington and state capitols across the country. They know with absolute certitude that if they only had, as Congressman Barney Frank asked for in 2010, "more authority and more ability," they could fix everything.

What Kerry and the rest of the reigning Republicrat authoritarians fail to realize -- or simply reject outright -- is that the only "common interest" of Americans should be freedom. Not health care, global warming, food stamps, Social Security, student loans, or perpetual war. It's hard to maintain control over every facet of citizens' lives when the internet allows exposure of crimes like the NSA's domestic spying or the spread of ideas about human liberty. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie recently referred to such ideas about freedom as "dangerous thought" -- these being the same ideas espoused by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington that King George III sent an army to crush two centuries ago.

The ruling Republicrat cartel has fully embraced the poisonous sentiment, first popularized by Woodrow Wilson, that government is the "indispensible and beneficent organ of society." Every progressive who has followed Wilson expressly rejects the truth, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, that governments are but a necessary evil, established among men to safeguard their God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As far back as 1837, Daniel Webster recognized the character of such men when he said:

There are men, in all ages, who mean to exercise power usefully; but they mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters. They think there need be but little restraint upon themselves. Their notion of the public interest is apt to be quite closely connected with their own exercise of authority. They may not, indeed, always understand their own motives. The love of power may sink too deep in their own hearts even for their own scrutiny, and may pass with themselves for mere patriotism and benevolence.

It is the arrogance and naiveté of these authoritarian Republicrats that has resulted in the undoing of the American Revolution and led us into this downward spiral of debt, unemployment, and tyranny. The internet does indeed make it hard to govern the way they want -- that is why it is severely restricted in places like North Korea, China, and Saudi Arabia. The entire Constitution was written to make it hard for authoritarians to govern; it contains rules and separates power among three different branches, as well as the Bill of Rights, meant to protect Americans from Kerry and his ilk, who would prefer that freedom didn't get in the way of their plans for a better world.

Two centuries ago, Patrick Henry told his fellow Virginians, "You are not to inquire how your trade may be increased, nor how you are to become a great and powerful people, but how your liberties can be secured; for liberty ought to be the direct end of your government." Our political overseers have already successfully swept the constitution aside, and largely convinced the public to reject the American Revolution and embrace the Wilsonian notion of an "indispensible and beneficent" (and all-powerful) government. Let us hope that the internet and the free flow of ideas about freedom continue to hamper the planners and world-savers who intend to remake the world in their image and reduce us all under absolute tyranny.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/john_kerry_freedom_makes_it_hard_to_govern.html#ixzz2d0LIb5dm

DOJ Sues to Keep Louisiana Kids in Failing Schools

To understand the failure of public education in this country, one must first understand that the entire system is designed for the benefit of the adults who work in it. Union dues from people working in the system are funneled into lobbying and campaign contributions to the very legislators setting the rules of the system. As a result, the entire political system is biased against reform of public education.

Sometimes, however, the need for reform is so manifest that even these local obstacles can be overcome. Under the Obama Administration, however, opponents of reform have the ultimate "trump card." The Feds. Late this week, the Department of Justice filed a federal suit against Louisiana's school choice law. Eric Holder's office argues that allowing kids in failing public schools to attend better-performing private schools would work against its "goal" of achieving the proper racial balance in schools.

Your education may suck, in other words, but at least you are in a school with the "right" racial balance.
Louisiana passed a modest school choice, or voucher, law, a couple years ago. If a child was low-income and attended a school that graded a C or less, the student could attend a private school, with a portion of the tuition covered by the taxpayer-funded education subsidy. The state's program isn't as expansive as those in place in Holland and Sweden, but it begins to establish that the public's commitment was to educating a child, not to a particular system.

Last year, around 600 kids benefited from this program, although that number was likely to increase dramatically this year.

Unions, of course, hate the idea of giving parents a choice in how they educate their children. While education is largely still a function of state and local government, Eric Holder managed to look into his bag of legal tricks and find a way to block Louisiana's reforms.

A number of parishes (read counties) in Louisiana are under federal directive to make their public school systems more racially balanced. DOJ is concerned that giving low-income parents an opportunity to escape failing schools might alter the racial balance of the schools negatively.

Maybe it will. But, the reform the DOJ is trying to block would also give some number of kids a better chance at opportunity. The left often argues for silly laws with the rhetorical trick that if we can save "one life" shouldn't we endorse it. Fine. Why not, however, save some few hundreds of kids from a failing education system?

To fully appreciate the challenges we face, you must understand one thing. The left is only about power. Everything else they say is just rhetoric.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/24/DOJ-Sues-to-Keep-Louisiana-Kids-in-Failing-Schools

Private Lobbyists Get Public Pensions in 20 States

As a lobbyist in New York's statehouse, Stephen Acquario is doing pretty well. He pulls down $204,000 a year, more than the governor makes, gets a Ford Explorer as his company car and is afforded another special perk:

Even though he's not a government employee, he is entitled to a full state pension.
He's among hundreds of lobbyists in at least 20 states who get public pensions because they represent associations of counties, cities and school boards, an Associated Press review found. Legislatures granted them access decades ago on the premise that they serve governments and the public. In many cases, such access also includes state health care benefits.
But several states have started to question whether these organizations should qualify for such benefits, since they are private entities in most respects: They face no public oversight of their activities, can pay their top executives private-sector salaries and sometimes lobby for positions in conflict with taxpayers. New Jersey and Illinois are among the states considering legislation that would end their inclusion.
"It's a question of, `Why are we providing government pensions to these private organizations?'" said Illinois Democratic Rep. Elaine Nekritz.
Acquario, executive director and general counsel of the New York State Association of Counties, argues that his group gives local government a voice in the statehouse, and the perk of a state pension makes it easier to hire people with government expertise.
"We want the people that work in local governments to continue to be part of the solution," he said. "We represent the same taxpayers."
The debate is more about principle than big money, since the staffs of such organizations are relatively small and make barely a ripple in huge state retirement systems. The eight New York associations, for example, have fewer than 120 total employees out of 633,100 current workers in the state's $158.7 billion pension system.
Still, the issue raises a public policy question as many states and taxpayers struggle to fund their pension obligations required by law.
"There is liability for taxpayers," said Keith Brainard, research director of the National Association of State Retirement Administrators. "Providing a pension benefit involves some amount of risk for the state and when you provide access to employees of entities that are not in control of the state."
Unlike state government, for example, these groups aren't bound by salary restrictions _ significant salary increases would result in increasing pension benefits.
New York Conference of Mayors Executive Director Peter Baynes, who makes $196,000 a year and gets a 2012 Jeep Grand Cherokee, argues that his and other associations have been at the fore of pushing to reduce taxpayers' costs, including reducing the costs of the pension system they share.
New York lawmakers recently acted to reduce benefits for future government hires and are proposing 401(k) savings programs for employees instead of traditional pensions.
But such cuts won't affect Baynes. Under the New York Constitution and that of most states, the benefits of those already in the pension system are protected from future cuts.
"It's clear that there's a big problem with hypocrisy when these lobbyists have been pushing austerity and benefit cuts for other government workers while they themselves enjoy solid state pensions," said Michael Kink of the progressive group Strong Economy for All Coalition. "`Do as I say, not as I do' seems to be their approach on retirement cuts."
"Workers who have faced cuts in pay and pensioners have a right to be angry _ as do voters," Kink said.
In many states, lobbying groups for states and counties take positions that could conflict with taxpayer interests, such as advocating to weaken caps on property tax increases and boosting state school aid.
But associations of cities, counties and school boards argue that a plausible case can be made for allowing them to get state pensions. These quasi-government organizations operate mostly or solely on dues from their members _ local governments or school boards typically _ which are paid out of taxpayer-funded budgets. They argue they pool their resources to give a voice to government entities that serve taxpayers.
"It's a technical truism that lobbying groups are not supposed to be in the system," said Richard Brodsky, a former New York assemblyman. "But what they are doing is carrying out missions assigned to them by public officials in the public interest as they understand it."
Which groups get the pension benefit vary widely across the nation.
In Colorado, the list includes the Colorado High School Activities Associations, which runs state sports tournaments. Alabama gives it to the state affiliate of the National Education Association teachers' union. Washington state includes the Washington Apple Commission, which operates like a trade group. North Carolina's state Athletic Coaches Association is included, as is Tennessee's private Industry Council.
New York lawmakers decided years ago to bar any more lobbying and nonprofit groups in the pension system, grandfathering in eight groups.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who supports legislation to cut future hires from such groups out of his state's pension, issued an executive order this month creating a Pension Fraud and Abuse Unit. Among its mandates is to look at "claims of improper participation in the retirement systems."

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/08/25/Private-lobbyists-get-public-pensions-in-20-states