Potemkin Parliament

Washington’s governing systems are in a bad way.

By Mark Steyn
...By Wednesday, however, it was business as usual. Which is to say the usual last-minute deal just ahead of the usual make-or-break deadline to resume spending as usual. There was nothing surprising about this. Everyone knew the Republicans were going to fold. Folding is what Republicans do. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are so good at folding Obama should hire them as White House valets. So the only real question was when to fold. They could at least have left it for a day or two after the midnight chimes of October 17 had come and gone. It would have been useful to demonstrate that just as the sequester did not cause the sky to fall and the shutdown had zero impact on the life of the country so this latest phoney-baloney do-or-die date would not have led to the end of the world as we know it. If you’re going to place another trillion dollars of debt (or more than the entire national debts of Canada and Australia combined) on the backs of the American people in one grubby late-night deal, you might as well get a teachable moment out of it.
...That’s the problem. Either you think those numbers above are serious or you don’t. And, if you do think they’re serious and you’re a “lawmaker” (as the New York Times quaintly insists on calling our rubber-stampers), when are you going to get serious? Next month? Next year? Or shall we all sportingly agree to leave it till 2015 after the bipartisan deal on a $20 trillion debt ceiling?

America’s Fundamental Transformation Under Obama

By Monica Crowley
...The objective was always to move America away from a nation built on individual liberty and economic freedom and toward a government welfare and dependency state. Socialism, communism, statism, leftism — in the end it doesn’t matter what you call it, because what matters is what’s being carried out…and its consequences.

Radical wealth redistribution, class warfare, socialized medicine, the atomization of American society, divisive identity politics, the war on success, the loss of our Triple A credit rating, the retrenchment of U.S. power abroad, the gutting of our military, the erosion of our international credibility.

After five years of evidence, people are still wondering aloud why Obama doesn’t negotiate, why he doesn’t compromise, why he doesn’t handle things the way, say, Bill Clinton did.

Wake the BLEEP up!

It’s all being done deliberately by Obama and the left in order to “fundamentally transform” this country into just another crippled dependency state.

......And, well, we’re losing. Not just the fights over the CR and the debt ceiling and Obamacare, but the future of the country. That doesn’t mean that we should stop fighting. We must fight with every breath and ounce of energy we’ve got. But we need to understand what we’re up against, how far down the road of “transformation” we already are, and how our own leadership is failing us.

It’s time to regroup and re-energize and maybe even re-brand the Tea Party. It’s time to find and recruit real conservatives to run for office, from the bottom up. It’s time to support folks who are doing that, from Heritage to FreedomWorks.

It’s time for our own “fundamental transformation.” Let’s go.

Congress on Red Alert for 60 Minutes Exposé of D.C. Corruption

Members of Congress and their staffs are on red alert tonight for a CBS 60 Minutes investigation by veteran CBS reporter Steve Kroft and Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer exposing how lawmakers convert campaign donations into lavish lifestyle upgrades for themselves and their family members.
Sources say top CBS executives thought the report was so explosive that they made it the show’s lead story and delayed airing it for another week in order to capture tonight’s much larger NFL-viewing audience. The report features selected revelations from Schweizer’s forthcoming book, Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets.
...According to the publisher’s description, the new book “reveals vast new areas of corruption in our political system” and contains “eye-opening revelations on every page,” while opening “a whole new battlefield in the great war to fix what’s wrong with our government.”

Stanley Druckenmiller: How Washington Really Redistributes Income

The renowned money manager goes back to school to explain how entitlements are helping the Baby Boomers rip off future generations.

By James Freeman
...Drawing on research by Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, it shows the generational wealth transfer that benefits oldsters at the expense of the young.
While many seniors believe they are simply drawing out the "savings" they were forced to deposit into Social Security and Medicare, they are actually drawing out much more, especially relative to later generations. That's because politicians have voted to award the seniors ever more generous benefits. As a result, while today's 65-year-olds will receive on average net lifetime benefits of $327,400, children born now will suffer net lifetime losses of $420,600 as they struggle to pay the bills of aging Americans.
One of the great ironies of the Obama presidency is that it has been a disaster for the young people who form the core of his political coalition. High unemployment is paired with exploding debt that they will have to finance whenever they eventually find jobs.
Are the kids finally figuring out that the Obama economy is a lousy deal for them? "No, I don't sense that," says Mr. Druckenmiller, who is a registered independent. "But one of my points is neither party should own your vote. And once they know they own your vote, you're not going to get any action on this particular issue."
When the former money manager visited Stanford University, the audience included older folks as well as students. Some of the oldsters questioned why many of his dire forecasts assume that federal tax collections will stay at their traditional 18.5% of GDP. They asked why taxes should not rise to fulfill the promises already made.
Mr. Druckenmiller's response: "Oh, so you've paid 18.5% for your 40 years and now you want the next generation of workers to pay 30% to finance your largess?" He added that if 18.5% was "so immoral, why don't you give back some of your ill-gotten gains of the last 40 years?"
He has a similar argument for those on the left who say entitlements can be fixed with an eventual increase in payroll taxes. "Oh, I see," he says. "So I get to pay a 12% payroll tax now until I'm 65 and then I don't pay. But the next generation—instead of me paying 15% or having my benefits slightly reduced—they're going to pay 17% in 2033. That's why we're waiting—so we can shift even more to the future than to now?"
He also rejects the "rat through the python theory," which holds that the fiscal disaster will only be temporary while the baby-boom generation moves through the benefit pipeline and then entitlement costs will become bearable. By then, he says, "you have so much debt on the books that it's too late."
...He says the current tax code represents "another intergenerational transfer, because 60-year-olds are worth five times what 30-year-olds are."
And 65-year-olds are "much wealthier than the working-age population. So the guy who's out there working—the plumber, the stockbroker, whatever he is—he's paying the 40% rate and the coupon clippers who are not working anymore are paying a 20% rate."

Sebelius on the Run

The HHS Secretary refuses to testify about ObamaCare's rollout.

The Affordable Care Act's botched rollout has stunned its media cheering section, and it even seems to have surprised the law's architects. The problems run much deeper than even critics expected, and whatever federal officials, White House aides and outside contractors are doing to fix them isn't working. But who knows? Omerta is the word of the day as the Obama Administration withholds information from the public.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is even refusing to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in a hearing this coming Thursday. HHS claims she has scheduling conflicts, but we hope she isn't in the White House catacomb under interrogation by Valerie Jarrett about her department's incompetence.
The department is also refusing to make available lower-level officials who might detail the source or sources of this debacle. Ducking an investigation with spin is one thing. Responding with a wall of silence to the invitation of a duly elected congressional body probing the use of more than half a billion taxpayer dollars is another. This Obama crowd is something else.
...Eventually Mrs. Sebelius will have to make a real accounting of this government failure to someone other than the TV comic Jon Stewart, and perhaps she can also explain why the people who can't build a working website also deserve the power to reorganize one-sixth of the U.S. economy. For now, the Administration that styles itself as the most transparent in history won't reveal the truth—perhaps because it is afraid of what the public will find.

Does Obama Know? Does Obama Care?

America needs an accounting of the health-care debacle.

By James Taranto
...Yesterday Obama delivered remarks at the White House, in which he made only an oblique reference to ObamaCare: "You don't like a particular policy or a particular president, then argue for your position. Go out there and win an election. Push to change it. But don't break it. Don't break what our predecessors spent over two centuries building. That's not being faithful to what this country is about."
This is galling for multiple reasons. For one, he was lecturing members of Congress, every one of whom (with the exception of three appointed senators) holds his office by virtue of having won his most recent election. Granted, Obama won his too, but with the help of an abusive IRS. And the country now faces a crisis because in 2009 and 2010, when it came to health care, Obama and his fellow Democrats failed to act in accord with the advice he now dishes out: "Don't break it."
How serious a crisis? As Megan McArdle has warned, "if the exchanges don't get fixed soon, they could destroy Obamacare--and possibly, the rest of the private insurance market."
...The Hill reports that "White House press secretary Jay Carney said Thursday that President Obama was seeking 'accountability' from federal employees working to fix glitches with the ObamaCare website." Carney added that "the president was 'not happy' with how the rollout had gone."
But it is not the job of federal employees to keep Barack Obama happy. It is the job of federal employees including Barack Obama to be accountable to the people. This disastrous law was a product of Obama's willfulness. It is up to him to account for its results, and to devise a plan to minimize the damage. So far there is no indication he is even making an effort.

Brooklyn group of black youths blocks white couple's car, bloody victims in racial attack: cops

A group of 10 black youths — one of them a 12-year-old girl — surrounded a white couple's car in Brooklyn, viciously beating the husband and yanking the wife to the pavement by her hair as they peppered the two with racial slurs, authorities said.

“Get those crackers!” some of them screamed, according to court papers. “Get that white whore!”

The confrontation erupted about 7 p.m. Monday, as the marauding group crossed Avenue U at E. 58th St. near Kings Plaza Shopping Center in Mill Basin.
Ronald Russo, 30, and his wife, Alanna, apparently had the green light and the husband honked at the group to get out of the way. The rowdy kids started kicking the car, according to the criminal complaint. Ronald Russo got out to check on potential damage to his vehicle.
And that’s when all hell broke loose.