An Existential Threat to Liberal Ideology
All of the hysteria and panic
from left-leaning politicians and media commentators over the last
month or so regarding the dire consequences of sequestration have left
me somewhat baffled. How could anyone possibly believe that growing the
federal government's budget by something less than the ridiculous automatic scheduled annual growth rate of 7%
could be catastrophic? In effect, the sequester would return the
federal government to 2012 expenditure levels in 2013. Has inflation
been so severe in the last twelve months that such a decrease in the
increase would bring upon us wildfires, tainted meat, airport lines, and
loss of all medical care? ....
This is a disaster, according to liberal politicians and commentators.
Or
is it? Perhaps the real danger is that sequestration will occur, and
people's lives will go on as normal. The liberal myth that all
government spending is critically important will fade away. People might
actually realize that we can survive and thrive with smaller
government. In actuality, liberals are very concerned that their
fundamental philosophy -- that prosperity is driven by government
spending and government growth -- might be discredited. How can
government justify confiscating and wasting trillions of dollars more
than we take in every year if nobody believes these expenditures matter?
Maybe those dollars will finally be recognized as pork, waste, union
handouts, and paybacks to donors and friends. Maybe we really could cut
the size of government by even more than the woefully inadequate 2% and
we'd all be just fine.
This
is the existential threat to liberalism. It's about the lie being
exposed, not the paltry decrease in the increase. Hence the sound and
the fury.
The White House Court Jesters of Sequester
Traffic alert: There's a massive clown car pileup in the Beltway. And
with the White House court jesters of sequester behind the wheel, no one
is safe. Fiscal sanity, of course, is the ultimate victim.
President
Obama has been warning America that if Congress allows mandatory
spending "cuts" of a piddly-widdly 2 percent to go into effect this
week, the sky will fall. The manufactured crisis of "sequestration" was
Obama's idea in the first place.
But that hasn't stopped the
Chicken Little in Chief from surrounding himself with every last
teacher, senior citizen and emergency responder who will be
catastrophically victimized by hardhearted Republicans. Curses on those
meanie Republicans! How dare they acquiesce to the very plan for "cuts"
-- or rather, negligible reductions in the explosive rate of federal
spending growth -- that Obama himself hatched?
How low will the
kick-the-can Democrats go? Among the ridiculous claims the
administration is making: The National Drug Intelligence Center will
lose $2 million from its $20 million budget. That scary factoid appears
in an ominous Office of Management and Budget report purporting to
calculate the Sequester Disaster. So lock the doors and hide the
children, right?
Wrong. As Reason magazine's Mike Riggs points
out, the NDIC shut down in June 2012, and some of its responsibilities
were absorbed by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Ready for
more reckless, feckless farce? Department of Homeland Security Secretary
Janet Napolitano played Henny Penny during a panicked speech at the
Brookings Institution Tuesday. She warned that her agency's "core
critical mission areas" would be undermined by the sequester. To
cynically underscore the point, "waves" of illegal aliens were released
this week from at least three detention centers in Texas, Florida and
Louisiana, according to the Fort Worth Star Telegram.
U.S.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement confirmed the release of some
illegal immigrants Monday night, but would not say how many or from
which detention centers.
The real punch line, as I've reported
relentlessly, is that the catch and release of criminal illegal aliens
has been bipartisan standard operating procedure for decades. The
persistent deportation and removal abyss allows hundreds of thousands of
illegal aliens -- many of them known repeat criminal offenders -- to
pass through the immigration court system and then disappear into the
ether because we have no determined will to track them down and kick
them all out of the country.
While Napolitano shrieks about
decimation of the DHS workforce, DHS workers tell me that the
double-dipping of retired ICE brass -- who get back on the payroll as
"rehired annuitants" -- is rampant.
While this open-borders White
House phonily gnashes its teeth over the sequester's effect on national
security, its top officials are lobbying for a massive nationwide
amnesty that would foster a tsunami of increased illegal immigration for
generations to come. The shamnesty beneficiaries will be welcomed with
open arms, discounted college tuition, home loans and Obamacare. And as
every outraged rank-and-file border agent will tell you, DHS top
officials have instituted systemic non-enforcement and sabotage of
detention, deportation and removal functions.
In another emetic
performance, Obama parachuted into a Virginia naval shipyard this week
to decry Pentagon cuts that would gut our military. But I repeat: The
reductions in spending are CINO: Cuts In Name Only. If the sequester
goes into effect, Pentagon spending will increase by $121
billion between 2014 and 2023. Fiscal watchdog GOP Sen. Tom Coburn adds
that $70 billion is spent by the Defense Department on "nondefense"
expenditures each year.
Send in the clowns. Wait. Don't bother. They're here.
http://townhall.com/columnists/michellemalkin/2013/02/27/the-white-house-court-jesters-of-sequester-n1521244/page/full/
The Sequester Revelation
Obama has the legal power to avoid spending-cut damage.
And when the Republicans opened the seventh seal of the
sequester, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black and
the stars fell unto the Earth; and our nation's ability to forecast
severe weather, such as drought events, hurricanes and tornados, was
seriously undermined.
Lo, and the children were not vaccinated, and all the beasts starved in the zoos, and the planes were grounded.
Or so President Obama and his Cabinet prophets have been preaching
ahead of the automatic budget cuts due to begin Friday. The bit about
the weather is a real quote from the White House budget director.
But if any of these cataclysms do come
to pass, then they will be mostly Mr. Obama's own creation. The truth is
that the sequester already gives the White House the legal flexibility
to avoid doom, if a 5% cut to programs that have increased more than 17%
on average over the Obama Presidency counts as doom.
According to Mr. Obama and his budget office, the sequester cuts are
indiscriminate and spell out specific percentages that will be
subtracted from federal "projects, programs and activities," or PPAs.
Except for the exemptions in the 2011 budget deal, the White House says
it must now cut across the board regardless of how important a given PPA
is. Food inspectors, say, will be treated the same as subsidies for
millionaire farmers.
Not so fast. Programs, projects and activities are a technical
category of the federal budget, but the sequester actually occurs at the
roughly 1,200 broader units known as budget accounts. Some accounts are
small, but others contain hundreds of PPAs and the larger accounts run
to billions of dollars. For the Pentagon in particular, the distinction
between PPAs and accounts is huge. This means in most cases the
President has the room to protect his "investments" while managing the
fiscal transition over time.
Congress might have intended for the sequester to apply to PPAs, but
they also wrote a sloppy law at the 11th hour. The Budget Control Act of
2011 disinterred the lapsed sequester rules of the Gramm-Rudman Deficit
Control Act of 1985, though without anyone looking at the details.
Gramm-Rudman said the sequester applies to accounts, not PPAs, under a
temporary "part-year" budget. As it happens the government is operating
under just such a continuing resolution now, not a normal
appropriations bill. If Congress returned to regular order in 2014 or
later, the sequester would indeed trickle down to PPAs.
The White House has even more discretion than this. When Gramm-Rudman
led to a 4.3% sequester in 1986, Congress passed a special bill that
created the category of PPAs and spent 1,119 pages defining what they
were for 1986. Congress has never done anything of the sort since, and
thus as the government has grown PPA definitions now vary among Cabinet
departments and sometimes even account to account in the same
department.
Lacking legislation, the White House assigns these amorphous units in
its annual budget. Even if the lawyers insisted the sequester must
apply to "PPAs" per se, the budgeteers could formally construe PPAs in
ways that preserve a work-around.
This White House has never been fussy when a statutory text or even
the Constitution interferes with its political ambitions. (See
ObamaCare, immigration executive orders, recess appointments and much
else.) Could it be that Mr. Obama is exaggerating the legal stringency
of the sequester in a gambit to force Congress to shut it off?
In any case, Republicans in Congress are
prepared to give Mr. Obama still more spending flexibility than he
already has to mitigate any damage, real or imagined. One option is to
lock in spending at post-sequester levels and grant department heads
so-called transfer authority to shift cash between accounts, after
consultation with the committees on the Hill.
Mr. Obama ought to love that, since it is precisely the
administrative state he says he wants—the rule of technocrats who
evaluate budget priorities without political interference. But liberals
are now howling about more liberal executive power because this plan
would also very modestly reduce the size of government.
It would also negate Mr. Obama's days-of-wrath sequester campaign. To wit:
If air traffic control and airport security really are the models of
government efficiency that anyone who has ever traveled knows they are
not, perhaps Homeland Security could begin by targeting some of the
programs identified by Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn this week. These
include necessities such as grants for a security conference in San
Diego that featured "zombie apocalypse training" or funds for towns like
Keene, New Hampshire (pop. 23,000) to purchase armored tank-like
vehicles called Bearcats. Seriously.
Before furloughing park rangers, maybe start with the 10% of the
75,000 Department of the Interior employees who are conserving the
wilderness of Washington, D.C. Before slashing cancer research, stop
funding the $130-million-a-year National Center for Complementary and
Alternative Medicine that studies herbs and yoga. Cut after-school
funding only after consolidating the 105 federal programs meant to
encourage kids to take math and science classes.
Neither the legal details of the sequester nor the practical work of
reforming government are as interesting to the media as Mr. Obama's
invocations of plagues and pestilence. The real revelation is that if
the world does end, it will be Mr. Obama's choice.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323884304578328211144987052.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
PK'S NOTE: And was seen for about two minutes.
One Percent Perks: First Lady's $9K Oscar Dress
First Lady Michelle Obama certainly looked lovely during her
surprise appearance to announce the Best Picture Oscar winner Sunday
night.
That stunning silver dress must have cost a fortune, an odd choice
for a woman whose husband is constantly seeking ways to punish the rich
and once declared, "I do think at a certain point you've made enough money."
In fact, the dress in question had a price tag that would keep
families currently looking for work in Age of Obama afloat for months.
The Washington Free Beacon reports the "silver sparkler was a custom design by Naeem Khan with an estimated price tag of $8,990."
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Hollywood/2013/02/26/one-percent-first-lady-dress-price-tag
Barack Obama Pulls a Move Almost Worthy of Saddam Hussein
Shortly before U.S. troops stormed Iraq to oust its dictator, Saddam Hussein released thousands of prisoners from Iraqi jails.
Some were petty criminals, some were hardcore, some were terrorists.
Hussein unleashed them to build his own popularity and to sow chaos.
Today, Barack H. Obama’s Department of Homeland Security is doing this:
The sequester is officially still three days away, but the Obama administration already is making the first cuts, with officials confirming that the Homeland Security Department has begun to release what it deems low-priority illegal immigrants from detention.
The move is proving controversial. Immigrant-rights groups say it
shows the administration was detaining folks it never should have gone
after in the first place, while Republicans questioned the
decision-making.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
the agency that runs the detention facilities, said in a statement that
the “current fiscal climate” has forced it to do a review of spending,
and part of that is taking a look at who is being detained.
“As a result of this review, a number of detained aliens have been
released around the country and placed on an appropriate, more
cost-effective form of supervised release,” ICE said in a statement.
The cynicism of the move is breathtaking, even for this cynical
administration. The “current fiscal climate” is one in which we are
spending more than a trillion dollars per year than we take in. The 2009
stimulus spending is locked in. The sequestration threatens just $22
billion this year — and the president gets to choose where to cut. If
the sky falls, it’s being brought down on our heads by this unethical
rogue president.
So these releases are his choice. And he’s choosing them for pure
racial politics and demagoguery. He’ll blame it all on Republicans,
while shoring himself up with the amnesty chorus.
More: The president is also threatening to drop our border guard.
In a rational age, these acts would be impeachable. Not too many years
ago Californians recalled a governor for offering drivers licences to
illegal aliens, and here we have a president flagrantly violating his
oath to defend the nation.
http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/02/26/barack-obama-pulls-a-move-almost-worthy-of-saddam-hussein/
It's the Vanishing Ink, Stupid
We
have all tried labeling the things that make the Obama administration
troubling. This president was never sufficiently vetted and many
questions remain unanswered. Everything about him is suspect. If he were
any other president, especially a Republican he would not be in office.
The truth about his birth certificate,
college records, selective service documents, and radical associations
are well hidden. To even raise these legitimate questions, is to be
vilified.
Not
only are their questions about President Obama's past, we wonder about
his integrity in the present. He has voided or modified almost every
confidence he has given the legislature and the American people. He
dishonored his signed agreement on abortion in ObamaCare. He has changed his stance on gay marriage and his claims that he will not take our guns ring hollow. How can he be trusted?
The
Republicans never seem to win the argument or the battle. Maybe it is
because they are tempered to take the president (any president) at his
word. From this point forward they need to heed the words of a Democrat
insider and act accordingly.
Evan
Bayh said it best with his response to Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday
when asked about the president "moving the goal post" in the upcoming
sequester:
EVAN
BAYH, FORMER U.S. SENATOR, D-IND.: Well, he may be, Chris, but, as you
know, in Washington some agreements are written in blood and others are
written in vanishing ink. It is pretty clear this is one of the latter
and, there was an intervening election and the president won and his popularity is very high right now. So it's not unexpected that he'd revisit the agreement and ask for something more to his liking.
We
would do well to remember these words when we challenge this president.
The question should always be asked. Is this one of those deals signed
in vanishing ink?
The Growing Tyranny of the Political Elite
Recently, the White House released a photo
of the president shooting skeet. But where's the snap of him fishing
for bass? Apparently the White House felt compelled to portray Obama as
a marksman in light of the widespread pushback over the
administration's gun control agenda but felt no urgency to defend the
prospect of the EPA's potential regulation of lead in fishing weights.
Yet the agency seriously entertained just such a ban last year. What's
next? The lead in barbells?
For
hundreds of years, human beings have used lead for many purposes, and
life on earth has not exactly come to an end. Now we are told that the
lead used in hunting and fishing is harming animals and fish, and it may
just have to stop. The scary thing is that one individual, an
appointed bureaucrat directing the Environmental Protection Agency, has
the power to impose such a ban.
The
pattern is familiar with this administration. A small cadre of elite
administrators, czars, judges, or politicians -- often just one person
-- thinks it (or he or she) has the right to decide what's best for 320
million Americans. Without adequate information, debate, or cost
analysis, regulations are written and imposed, and no one, not even the
people's representatives in the House of Representatives, has the right
to influence them.
Political
elites have always existed in America, and during the past 100 years
they have gravitated toward the Democratic Party. FDR's "brain trust,"
which included Guy Tugwell and Hugh Johnson, was just one example. But
perhaps no administration in our history has been controlled by elites
to the extent that the Obama presidency has. With academics like Cass
Sunstein and crony capitalists
like those backing green energy projects calling the shots, the elite
have stepped in, determined to rule in place of the public will.
What
is now happening was predicted -- and celebrated -- over forty years
ago by Robert L. Heilbroner, one of the darlings of the New Left. In The Limits of American Capitalism,
Heilbroner laid out a plan by which the innately conservative leanings
of the American people could be quashed and replaced by the centralized
control of a political elite. Heilbroner's book concludes with a
chilling vision of the way forward. What he advocates is, in effect, a
socialist totalitarian state, where the government controls every aspect
of human life. In the name of reform, this statist system would
regulate if not nationalize all major industries -- but it would also go
farther than that.
What
Heilbroner envisaged was the rise of a ruling elite centralized in
government, media, and the universities. This group of decision-makers
would operate "on behalf of" the public and on the basis of "scientific
principles" of social control. As Heilbroner writes, "[n]ot alone
economic affairs ... but the numbers and location of the population, its
genetic quality, the manner of social domestication of children, the
choice of lifework -- even the duration of life itself -- are all apt to
become subjects for scientific investigation and control" (The Limits of American Capitalism, New York, 1966, pp. 129-130).
Heilbroner's
books were bestsellers in the 1960s, widely read and admired by
liberals everywhere. They were, in effect, neo-Keynesian, pro-statist instruction manuals studied by the likes of Bill Ayers and Cass Sunstein, President Obama's tutors in state control and regulation.
Heibroner's
books popularized the liberal premise that the political elite has the
right and obligation to make fundamental decisions on behalf of the mass
of citizens. In doing so, Heilbroner understood, the elite must find
ways to subvert the naturally conservative inclinations of the people --
especially those lumpen-headed businessmen whom Heilbroner so despised.
Decision-making must be shifted from individuals and elected
representatives to bureaucrats and judges appointed by leftist
politicians. Public opinion must be shaped and molded by elitist
academics and journalists. The will of the state must be imposed, by
violence if necessary.
This was the future of America, according to
Robert L. Heilbroner, and it is the vision of America adopted by those
young activists in the 1960s and 1970s who now constitute the leadership
of the Democratic Party.
Heilbroner
believed that it would take hundreds of years to overturn democracy in
America, in part because of the nation's widespread support of
capitalism and the country's pesky tradition of individual rights. He
noted, however, that the process could be speeded up in the event of a
severe economic crisis. Another great national depression or prolonged
recession would make it possible for government to enact a series of
"reforms" that would shift control from the private sector to
government. Government would then control not just major sectors of the
economy, but the personal lives of all citizens. Their incomes, their health care, their educations, their home mortgages,
their communications and entertainment, their access to news and
information would all fall under the control of the political elite. At
that point, Heilbroner believed, utopia would be at hand.
Everything
that Heilbroner predicted is now coming to pass. Attorney General
Holder has waged a virtual war against Arizona's attempt to defend
itself against unchecked immigration. Congress has created an office of
consumer affairs with broad powers to regulate financial
transactions. A European-style bureaucrat has been appointed to direct
the rationing of medical services. And the EPA believes that it has the
authority not just to police hunting and fishing supplies, but to
regulate carbon dioxide, a natural product of the act of breathing.
The
preferred modus operandi, in fact, is to appoint a single individual
with the power to control some large part of American life. So much
power has now been concentrated in the hands of a handful of appointees,
most of them reporting directly to the president, that it is now
doubtful whether America can still be considered a democratic nation.
Government has become the enemy of the people, because it is now in the
hands of left-wing elitists who are opposed to traditional American
values and who have only contempt for the democratic process.
Fortunately,
Americans are becoming more aware of the concentration of power within
the new political elite and more skeptical of the elite's ability to
govern. While the president's job approval rating has for the moment
risen following his election victory, a growing number
of Americans "strongly disapprove" of his performance. An even larger
percentage finds that Congress, with leaders like Democrat Harry Reid in
charge of the Senate, is incapable of governing.
What's
needed is to make 2014 another 2010 and throw the rascals out -- all of
them who support Obama's unconstitutional "recess" appointments and
agency power grabs.
Voting Rights at the Supreme Court Today
To understand
what’s going on in the Supreme Court today, we have to go back in
time.
The year was 1965. Hundreds of people gathered in Selma, Alabama,
to march for black Americans’ right to vote. Some states, especially in the
South, had set up obstacles to voting, such as charging would-be voters money or
making them take a test.
The marchers were beaten back by police with
billy clubs and tear gas in what would become a historic outrage. But just a few
months later, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, making
it illegal for towns to discriminate in any way in their voting
practices.
Johnson said that day:
Millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their
color. This law will ensure them the right to vote. The wrong is one which no
American, in his heart, can justify. The right is one which no American, true to
our principles, can deny.
Congress ensured that states could not
get around the new law by coming up with more changes to local voting rules. For
those areas that had historically discriminated against people, the law required
that they check with the feds before making changes to their voting practices.
This part of the law is called Section 5.
Section 5 was supposed to be
temporary. It was supposed to transition the states into the new law and ensure
that they were all implementing it correctly. As President Johnson said
at the time, “if any county anywhere in this nation does not want federal
intervention, it need only open its polling places to all of its
people.”
The problem is, that federal intervention continues to this day.
And that is what the Supreme Court is considering today—the outdated Section 5,
not the whole Voting Rights Act.
The Voting Rights Act provides “broad
and powerful protection against discrimination,” explains
Heritage’s Hans von Spakovsky, a former Counsel to the Assistant Attorney
General for Civil Rights. Regardless of the Supreme Court’s take on Section 5,
the Voting Rights Act remains in effect to protect all Americans from voter
discrimination.
But Section 5 outlived its purpose decades ago—and the
federal government is still forcing some voting jurisdictions to justify all of
their local rule changes. Von Spakovsky points
out:
[Section 5] effectively presumes that all voting-related actions by
certain states and jurisdictions are discriminatory and therefore requires that
they obtain pre-approval from the federal government for otherwise ordinary and
routine actions, such as moving a polling station from a school that is under
renovation to another one down the street or drawing new redistricting plans.
This is a major and unusual imposition on state
sovereignty.
What was originally intended to safeguard
individual liberty has become a way for the feds to attack state liberty. For
the Department of Justice and many activists, Section 5 merely exists to bully
local authorities.
Von Spakovsky says that if Section 5 were struck down,
“The only change would be to curb the abuses of federal bureaucrats and check
the power and influence of the liberal activist groups that rely on Section 5 to
enforce their agendas.”
Today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in
Shelby County (AL) v. Holder, the case raising the question of Section
5’s constitutionality. The case doesn’t threaten anyone’s right to vote; it
deals with an outdated provision that is no longer necessary—and in fact has
become an unwarranted federal intrusion into local practices.
http://blog.heritage.org/2013/02/27/morning-bell-voting-rights-at-the-supreme-court-today/?roi=echo3-14704930135-11602490-f57dddea048c81b6aa5f92c19de3774c&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell
Krauthammer’s Take: Failure to Act on Sequester is ‘Forfeiting by Congress of its Constitutional Duties’
According to Charles Krauthammer, Democrats have “refused to lift a
finger” to avert the sequester, the disastrous results of which they’ve
been broadcasting all week. “This is sort of a forfeiting by the
Congress of its constitutional duties to actually allocate the money, to
decide where it goes, by giving authority to the president.”
He
emphasized that this is a failure by the Senate, which is controlled by
the Democrats, rather than the House, where Republicans have proposed
legislation that would replace the sequester with alternative spending
cuts.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/341656/krauthammers-take-failure-act-sequester-forfeiting-congress-its-constitutional-duties-
PK'S NOTE: And include that Obama completely walking away from the Benghazi situation....
Who the heck is running this country?!
I don’t mean that in the rhetorical sense. I mean it literally.
First the Obama White House denied knowing anything about the ATF’s
Fast & Furious gunwalking program. Now they are claiming they weren’t at all involved in Immigration & Customs Enforcement’s sudden release of detained illegal immigrants:
The Obama administration had no advance knowledge of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s decision to release several hundred illegal immigrants from jail due to looming federal budget cuts, White House press secretary Jay Carney said.
“This was a decision made by career
officials at ICE without any input from the White House, as a result of
fiscal uncertainty over the continuing resolution, as well as possible
sequestration,” Carney told reporters Wednesday.
The Department of Homeland Security,
which oversees ICE, was also unaware of the decision until it was
announced, a department official told Politico.
Hm… convenient.
Apparently the buck stops with bureaucrats.
http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2013/02/27/who-the-heck-is-running-this-country/
Also Reads:
"But
liberals should have known. They should have known that their
vote-winning entitlements were a fraud that discouraged generations of
Americans from saving for their old age and creating jobs for their
children. They should have known that a time would come when people
would react in outrage to the idea of killing little babies in the womb,
for what are we here on this Earth if not for babies? They should
have known that their welfare politics would lead to a cultural
implosion, with lower-income women abandoning marriage and lower-income
men abandoning work, and both abandoning their children to inner-city
chaos. They should have known that the global warming conspiracy was a
con from the beginning, and that its exposure as a cesspool of crony
capitalism would touch just about every Democrat in high politics. They
should have known that a century of compulsory government education
would lead inevitably to a generation of whining whipped puppies."
"Days before the March 1 deadline, Senate Republicans are circulating a
draft bill that would cancel $85 billion in across-the-board spending
cuts and instead turn over authority to President Barack Obama to
achieve the same level of savings under a plan to be filed by March 8."
No comments:
Post a Comment