Yes, doom and gloomers abound and there are plenty who are working to resist the worst happening but that does not mean we are not in for tougher times, as I believe we are. (See 1 below.)
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I am reading GW's "Decision Points" and thoroughly enjoying it. Only half the way through but readable and something all haters of GW need to read. Probably will not change their minds but will force them to face some realities they prefer to ignore.
His chapter on "Cell Stems" is very enlightening and shows the depths to which he wrestled with both sides of an issue before making a decision many disagreed with and far too many turned into the big lie.
In truth, GW approved and federally funded embryonic stem cell research but not through the destruction of embryonic stem cells for moral reasons. He significantly expanded funding of NIH and never opposed scientific research but simply did not want to disregard moral implications. Democrats responded petulantly and politically to GW's veto by refusing to allow funding of alternative methods of stem cell research because they saw it as a big political win for them.
Subsequently, two researchers altered the scientific process and were able to "...replicate the medical promise of stem cells without moral controversy."
Though The New York Times reported this event, little acclaim supporting GW's argument has altered the opinions of those with their own agenda of perpetuating lies and distorting truth. However, Krauthammer, a doctor by training, who was earlier opposed GW's stem cell thinking wrote: "The verdict is clear: Rarely has a president - so vilified for a moral stance - been so thoroughly vindicated."
And you wonder why Americans have contempt for Congress and politicians.
Time will prove GW a far better president than his detractors would have you think in my opinion.. In fact GW looks better with the passing of each Obama day. He was not an egoist and had a rounded background for the presidency. On pp 121 he writes about the "...highly personal criticism..." and explained how he chose to handle it for the sake of the presidency itself. Perhaps history will prove him right but, I believe, he allowed himself to be defined by the DC wolves with long knives drawn and that seriously wounded him and his ability to govern.
On the chapter entitled "Leading" GW discusses a variety of topics but I will focus on his efforts to bring Social Security under control and improve retirement benefits through allowing participants to invest in vehicles, a professionally managed portfolio of stocks and bonds, that historically has served to produce higher returns than the current paltry ones. Ironically the Social Security System is now deeper in debt because neither Party supported GW's proposal and the system's prospective bankruptcy has accordingly been moved forward.
On the immigration issue, GW made some rational proposals, got support from Sen. Kennedy and others but Sen. Reid refused to keep the Senate in session and upon their return from their July 4th holiday Senate votes evaporated.
GW acknowledged he should have gone after immigration reform first because he had some bi-partisan support and the momentum of this legislation passing might well have helped his proposal on Social Security to also pass.
GW is far more intelligent than most of his detractors, a far better and decent person as well. Yes, he made mistakes, some costly, but I challenge you to show me a perfect president. He continues to stand head and shoulders above the current occupant who, in my opinion, may also prove better than I currently give him credit for being. My main problem with Obama is that he lies and thus, I cannot trust him. My other problem is that we do not share the same vision of American exceptionalism and our economic system which has produced more for more than any other.
Read GW's book - you might learn something. I am.
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Meanwhile, Valerie Jarrett tells us Obama wants to get out among the people once he returns from Hawaii and will campaign by portraying himself as an outsider.
The only outside thing outside about Obama is that he is outside mainstream thinking and as the Americans learn more about Obamascare hopefully they will eventually put him outside the Oval Office.
The best way to defeat a fraud is to allow him/her to be themselves. (See 2 below.)
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I regretfully believe this Administration does not have a clue about the threat we still face from terrorism based on the apparent in fighting among Obama's intelligence gurus.
When Obama's top dog is unaware of what recently happened in England because he was not briefed and his underling, Napolitano reveals 'ones who needed to know did,' something is "Rotten in Denmark."
An intelligence friend of mine believes, as I do, that our Middle East influence is unravelling before our eyes.(See 3 below.)
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Sowell argues that our Constitution has come to be determined by whatever politicians, agency heads and judges had for breakfast. (See 4 below.)
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It might surprise GW detractors that he was a voracious reader and particularly of history whereas, Obama does not need to understand history because the world revolves around him. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)Sen. Coburn: Middle Class Will Be Destroyed
By Julie Crawshaw
U.S. Senator Tom Coburn warned Americans this Sunday of an apocalyptic economic future, with Great Depression levels of unemployment and a destruction of the country's middle class.
The Oklahoma Republican told Fox News that unless Washington cuts spending and reduces the national debt, unemployment in the United States could rise dramatically from less than 10 percent today to 18 percent or more.
At the same time, Coburn says the nation's economic output could drop calamitously --by 9 percent. Once that happens he predicts the middle class could be destroyed.
“I think you’ll see the middle class just destroyed if we don’t do this,” Coburn told Fox News, adding that he hopes President Barack Obama and Congress can work together next year to cut $100 billion to $200 billion as a “down payment” on debt reduction.
Coburn says the other alternative to the debt crisis is equally gloomy: hyperinflation.
"And the people that it will harm the most will be the poorest of the poor, because we'll print money to try to debase our currency and get out of it and what you will see is hyperinflation," Coburn said.
"If we didn't take some pain now, we're going to experience apocalyptic pain, and it's going to be out of our control. The idea should be that we control it," he told Fox.
Coburn, a member of the White House debt-reduction panel who voted in favor of its plan to cut $4 trillion in debt, says the United States must begin practicing austerity within the next three to four years in order to retain international confidence in its economy and currency.
Some conservatives are uncomfortable with the plan, which includes ways to increase both tax revenues and spending cuts.
Coburn disagrees with those economists who believe cutting spending in a weak economy is incorrect.
“My hope is that [Obama] gets out, holds hands with us, and we make some significant cuts,” he said. “There doesn’t have to be a standoff.”
“What there has to be is real leadership and recognizing the serious nature and the urgency of our problem.”
ABC News reports that budgetary measures are part of the reason why economists polled by Reuters think the eurozone economy will slow to a 1.5 percent rate next year, down slightly from 2010's already sluggish 1.7 percent pace.
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2)The Missing Link in the Evolution of Barack Obama
By Selwyn Duke
One of the problems with the idea of "American exceptionalism" is that it exacerbates a kind of complacency common to man. This is the phenomenon whereby people often view themselves as exceptions -- saying, after some tragedy, for instance, something such as "I never thought it could happen to me."
On a national level -- and this especially plagues great nations -- this manifests itself in the notion that "it" could never happen here. Oh, the "it" could be descent into tyranny, domination by a foreign power, or dissolution. Or maybe it could be the election of a leader who is a Manchurian candidate, a traitor within, someone bent on destroying the nation that gave him everything. That..."it"...couldn't happen here. In fact, the idea is so preposterous to many Americans that if such a threat loomed, they would never see it coming. And they would call a person who warned of it a nut.
So I want to present you with a hypothetical. Let's say a leader were elected who had, during his childhood, been mentored by an avowed Nazi. Let us further say that his guardians had chosen this mentor for him, indicating that they were likely sympathetic to the man's beliefs. Now, let us say that upon reaching college, this future leader gravitated toward Nazi professors. Moreover, we then find out that a man who knew the leader as an undergraduate and was, at the time, a Nazi himself, said that the leader was "in 100-percent total agreement" with his Nazi professors and was a flat-out Nazi who believed in old-style Brownshirt tactics.
Okay, we're almost done. After graduating, the leader-to-be spends twenty years sitting in a white-power church, has an alliance with a self-proclaimed Nazi and ex-terrorist, and, apparently, becomes a member of a National Socialist party for a while. And then, upon being elected, he appoints an avowed Nazi to his administration and also a woman who cites Adolf Hitler as one of her two favorite philosophers. Now here's the million-depreciated-dollar question:
What would be nuttier: to claim that this man was a Nazi or to claim that such an assertion is out-of-bounds?
Furthermore, if people appeared unconcerned about the leader's radical past, what would be the most likely explanation?
A. They're sympathetic to Nazism.
B. They're ignorant of his personal history.
C. They're rationalizing away a frightening reality.
D. Some combination of the above.
Let's now transition to the actual. Here is a fact: If you took the above description of my hypothetical leader and replaced "Nazi" with "communist," "flat-out Nazi" with "flat-out Marxist-Leninist," "Brownshirt tactics" with "communist revolution," "white-power" with "black-power," "National Socialist" with "socialist," and "Adolf Hitler" "with Mao Tse-tung," you would have an accurate description of a leader in power today.
His name is Barack Obama.
We'll start from the top. Obama's childhood mentor was chosen by his guardians, his grandparents, and was avowed communist Frank Marshall Davis. Obama did in fact gravitate toward communist professors in college; moreover, we now know about ex-communist John Drew, a contemporary of Obama's at Occidental College who verifies that Obama was "in 100-percent total agreement" with his communist professors and was a flat-out "Marxist-Leninist" who believed in old-style communist revolution.
We also know that upon graduating, Obama spent twenty years in a black-power church, Trinity United of Reverend Jeremiah Wright fame, and had an alliance with self-proclaimed communist and ex-terrorist Bill Ayers. It also appears -- and I have yet to see anyone address and disprove this association -- that Obama was a member of the socialist New Party in Chicago in the 1990s. Then, upon being elected, Obama appointed avowed communist Van Jones to his administration and also Anita Dunn, who cited mass-murderer Mao Tse-tung as one of her two favorite philosophers. There's more, too, but greater detail is hardly necessary.
It also shouldn't be necessary to ask the question, but I will:
What is nuttier: to claim that this man is a communist or to claim that such an assertion is out-of-bounds?
What is the obvious conclusion?
Now, some may say that a person can change markedly over a thirty-year period. This is true. Yet not only do we have the recent evidence of Obama's radical communist appointments, but there's something else as well. It hit me just the other night.
Just as we would demand that our leaders completely reject Nazi ideas, all good Americans should agree that complete rejection of communist ideas is a moral imperative. Losing a little youthful zeal or adding a dose of pragmatism just isn't enough. A pragmatic communist, in fact, could be more dangerous than an old-guard type.
Yet a transition from flat-out "Marxist-Leninist" to someone who rejects the red menace is a pretty big change, don't you think? In fact, wouldn't such a personal evolution -- some might say revolution -- be a kind of conversion? I think so.
Now, many people do experience conversions. I think here of erstwhile radical-leftist David Horowitz; ex-liberals Michael Savage and Robin of Berkeley; and President George W. Bush, who accepted Christ as an adult. And then there's me: I was never a liberal, but I did transition from being a scoffer at religion and an agnostic to a devout Catholic.
There's an interesting thing, however, about conversions.
You hear about them.
You see, a conversion is a sea change, a rebirth, a turning point in your existence. You may become, as Christians say, a new creation, and you're at least a reformed old one. And you reflect your new state of being and often want to voice it.
And those around you will know about it.
As for this writer, everyone who knows me would say that my religious conversion was a seminal point in my life. Horowitz has spoken of his rejection of the "loony left," Bush's conversion is well known, Savage has talked about his on the radio, and Robin of Berkeley can't stop talking about hers. A conversion becomes part of your life narrative.
Now consider something. Barack Obama is one of the most famous, most discussed individuals on the planet.
But we have not heard about any soul-changing conversion in his life.
Not a whisper.
Nothing.
Nothing that could reconcile the flat-out Marxist-Leninist Obama was in his college days with the man he supposedly is today. There's no one who says, "Yeah, he was a radical guy in his youth, and I just couldn't believe how he became disenchanted with his old ideas." There are no stories about a great epiphany, an overseas trip that opened his eyes, or a personal tragedy that inspired growth. There's nothing to explain how a radical Marxist became a reasonable politician. And if there is such an explanation, it's the most elusive of missing links.
So could "it" happen here? And is it really nutty to ask if, just maybe, it already has.
2a) Feed Me, Obama, Feed Me: The Plan for Food Dependency
By John Griffing
What does any would-be tyrant need in order to gain control over the lives of citizens? Three things come to mind: martial law, socialized medicine, and food dependency.
In at least two of these categories, President Obama has already succeeded.
Martial Law
By way of executive proclamation, President Obama has secured for himself the power to declare martial law in the event of a national "emergency," real or contrived, and without the accountability typically required by the Posse Comitatus Act and the Nation Emergencies Act of 1976.
This is the legacy of the "conservative" Bush administration. National emergencies have now been transformed into power-grabbing devices thanks to the virtually unnoticed National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 51.
NSPD 51 empowers the president to co-opt all state and local government authority in the event that he declares a national emergency. This is a self-declared power not subjugated to the National Emergencies Act of 1976 as in previous directives.
President Obama quickly went beyond NSPD 51, signing an order creating a "Council of Governors" who would be put in charge of declaring martial law. The directive is in direct violation of Posse Comitatus and the Insurrection Act. This "Council of Governors" answers only to President Obama.
In October of last year, President Obama declared a national emergency in the midst of the much-hyped swine flu crisis. This declaration was largely overlooked. By combining his October declaration with the provisions of NSPD 51, President Obama can now be considered virtually uninhibited by Congress and free to flip the switch at any moment.
Socialized Medicine
Whether or not Republicans achieve repeal, a precedent has been set. It is unlikely that the full damage of ObamaCare can be completely undone without Republican control of the White House. The U.S. government can now dictate the coverage and benefits of most Americans -- i.e., those on Medicaid, Medicare, and SCHIP, which together account for thirty percent of the population. In addition, government can punish Americans without insurance with unconstitutional fees and fine employers who refuse to provide every single employee with premium health benefits, making economic recovery unlikely.
In previous articles, I have explained the deadly dimension to ObamaCare as currently construed, demonstrating the serious potential for the mass destruction of human life on the basis of erroneous factors like "hospital readmission." Who will challenge federal officials with health care at stake? Who would seriously suggest that health care will not be used as a political weapon? When the government has all power and no accountability, it has very little reason to use that power responsibly. Accountability is what makes the American model work. But accountability is removed with ObamaCare.
The one area where elites have been so far reluctant to venture is food. Food is the stuff of life. Control over food would mean direct control over the political decisions of average Americans. The elites have slipped the slope, passing legislation that will give federal bureaucrats jurisdiction over food "production" -- i.e., who produces food, what kinds of food are produced, and in what quantities. However, this is not a debate about food regulation or food inspection. What is taking place is in fact a coup d'état, with dinner tables as the strategic weapons.
Food Dependency
The greatest tyrants in history have used food as a method of control. To state the obvious, people must eat to live. By controlling the flow of food to people who side with the political intelligentsia, rule is established. People may challenge tyranny when they have meat on the table. But who in their right mind would bite the hands of their benefactors (so called)?
Meet the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), a new legislative proposal designed to centralize control over food stocks to protect Americans from "terror."
The motive may indeed be to protect the food supply from the actions of terrorists, but what about acts of government terror? Can centralized control by the government protect the people against the whims of human nature? This question is not being asked by those so in favor of surrendering control of food to an entity that cannot even manage a budget, much less an oil spill or other natural disaster. Now we are to believe that this same inefficient, broken entity can guarantee the safety of our food? Something stinks, and it smells like government cheese. Usually when people ask for power, it is because they want power, regardless of the stated motive.
What good, for example, can be gained from removing the right of Americans to grow their own food, as several of the provisions of the Food Safety Modernization Act do? The Ninth Amendment arguably guarantees this and other unenumerated rights. The Ninth Amendment reads:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
To clarify, how can the rights to life, liberty, and property enshrined in the Constitution exist without the ability of citizens to attend to bodily needs -- i.e., sustenance?
The FSMA doesn't merely wrest control of the food supply from citizens. Dangerously, the FSMA proceeds to transfer U.S. food sovereignty to the WTO, with one provision reading, "Nothing in this Act shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization or any other treaty or international agreement to which the U.S. is a party." This provision is significant, since the WTO draws all its food safety standards from the controversial Codex Alimentarius, which is thought by some to be a vast postwar scheme to control the world's population by means of food. The bottom line vis-à-vis food is that Americans lose control, and foreign bureaucrats gain control.
Even if the alleged motive were legitimate, the FDA already inspects food imports, albeit quite poorly. The federal government already possesses the necessary power to thwart terrorist contamination of the food supply. This proposal, then, is not really about protecting food, but instead about controlling food -- and by extension, controlling Americans. We must resist while the fruits of the field are still here for the picking.
President Obama is willing to shut off the water in a small town in the heart of America's agricultural center. Might he be willing to stop shipments of food to politically opposed states?
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3)Al Qaeda sends Palestinian terrorists from Lebanon to strikes in Europe
The 12 Al Qaeda terrorists, whose movements have put European security authorities on high New Year alert, set out from Ain Hilweh, Lebanon, and belong to three al Qaeda-linked Palestinian groups, the Syrian Jund al-Sham, the Lebanese Army of Islam (which also operates in the Gaza Strip) and Fatah al-Islam, debkafile's counter-terror sources disclose. All its members are richly experienced in urban terror in various Middle East arenas.
Al Qaeda has taken of late to using Iraq, Lebanon and Somalia as starting points for its terrorist plots to baffle the Western agencies keeping an eye on terrorist bases in Pakistan, North Africa and Yemen.
The last bombing attempt in Europe, which took place in Stockholm on December 11, was the work of an Iraqi Arab dispatched and later claimed by Iraqi Al Qaeda. Two other groups came from Somalia: the nine men charged at Westminster Court, London, Monday, Dec. 26, with conspiracy to carry out bombing attacks on the US embassy, the London Stock Exchange and political and religious figures (12 were rounded up at four locations on Dec. 20 and three released.) and the twelve men picked up in Rotterdam for plotting Christmas attacks in Holland.
It is now the turn of Lebanon. There, an elaborate smoke and mirrors exercise was staged to conceal the next Al Qaeda assault.
On Dec. 25, Christmas day, Ghandi Sahmarani, the leader of the Syrian Palestinian Jund Al Sham's Lebanese branch, was reported found dead in a back alley of the Palestinian refugee camp of Ain Hilweh in South Lebanon with the bullet wound in the back of his neck and his hands tied with barbed wire.
The dead man had never lived in this camp which is the fiefdom of the Fatah strongman, Mounir Al-Maqda. It was therefore assumed he had been dragged to Ain Hilweh by abductors and then put to death. Later that day, journalists were invited to the Sidon hospital morgue to view his body.
However, according to intelligence and counter-terror sources, Sahmarani is still alive. The body exhibited was that of a man who resembled him. The real Sahmarani eluded his watchers last week on the very day that 12 Palestinian terrorists went missing from Ain Hilweh. It is now believed that he was put in command of the terrorist operations scheduled to take place in Europe and the Middle East on or around the New Year and that he and the group's members are already on their way to their targets.
European sources have traced the group travelling from Lebanon to Syria and thence to Turkey, where they have split up into small sub-groups of two to three men each. Part is heading for the Balkans to infiltrate Western Europe; part is still in Turkey and may stay there or make for another Middle East destination for a multi-casualty attack.
The three Palestinian groups involved often overlap operationally and are expert at laying false trails to conceal the movements of their leaders and operatives.
In 2007, during the four-month battle Fatah Al Islam and the Army of Islam waged against the Lebanese army for control of Nahr- Al-Bared, the big Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli in northern Lebanon, stories were put out about the death of their leader Shaker al-Abssi. Then, too, reporters were shown his remains. However Abssi has proved to have more than one life; although he was reported dead more than once, he is still alive and fully active from a base in Iraq.
After of the charade at the Sidon morgue on Saturday, the Ain Hilweh chief Mounir Al Maqda confirmed that a "group of fighters" belonging to Jund a-Sham, the Army of Islam and Fatah al Islam, were no longer in the camp. Certain Middle East intelligence watchers, aware of Al-Maqda's close ties with the three Palestinian organizations and al Qaeda cells in Lebanon, don't exactly believe him. They suspect he was part of the conspiracy to conceal Sahmarani's departure on a mission of terror by faking his death.
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4)Political End Runs
By Thomas Sowell
The Constitution of the United States begins with the words "We the people." But neither the Constitution nor "we the people" will mean anything if politicians and judges can continue to do end runs around both.
Bills passed too fast for anyone to read them are blatant examples of these end runs. But last week, another of these end runs appeared in a different institution when the medical "end of life consultations" rejected by Congress were quietly enacted through bureaucratic fiat by administrators of Medicare.
Although Congressman Earl Blumenauer and Senator Jay Rockefeller had led an effort by a group of fellow Democrats in Congress to pass Section 1233 of pending Medicare legislation, which would have paid doctors to include "end of life" counselling in their patients' physical checkups, the Congress as a whole voted to delete that provision.
Republican Congressman John Boehner, soon to become Speaker of the House, objected to this provision in 2009, saying: "This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia."
Whatever the merits or demerits of the proposed provision in Medicare legislation, the Constitution of the United States makes the elected representatives of "we the people" the ones authorized to make such decisions. But when proposals explicitly rejected by a vote in Congress are resurrected and stealthily made the law of the land by bureaucratic fiat, there has been an end run around both the people and the Constitution.
Congressman Blumenauer's office praised the Medicare bureaucracy's action but warned: "While we are very happy with the result, we won't be shouting it from the rooftops because we are not out of the woods yet."
In other words, don't let the masses know about it.
It is not only members of Congress or the administration who treat "we the people" and the Constitution as nuisances to do an end run around. Judges, including Justices of the Supreme Court, have been doing this increasingly over the past hundred years.
During the Progressive era of the early 20th century, the denigration of the Constitution began, led by such luminaries as Princeton scholar and future President of the United States Woodrow Wilson, future Harvard Law School Dean Roscoe Pound and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.
As a Professor at Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson wrote condescendingly of "the simple days of 1787" when the Constitution was written and how, in our presumably more complex times, "each generation of statesmen looks to the Supreme Court to supply the interpretation which will serve the needs of the day."
This kind of argument would be repeated for generations, with no more evidence that 1787 was any less complicated than later years than Woodrow Wilson presented-- which was none-- and with no more reasons why the need for "change" meant that unelected judges should be the ones making those changes, as if there were no elected representatives of the people.
Professor Roscoe Pound likewise referred to the need for "a living constitution by judicial interpretation," in order to "respond to the vital needs of present-day life." He rejected the idea of law as "a body of rules."
But if law is not a body of rules, what is it? A set of arbitrary fiats by judges, imposing their own vision of "the needs of the times"? Or a set of arbitrary regulations stealthily emerging from within the bowels of a bureaucracy?
Louis Brandeis was another leader of this Progressive era chorus of demands for moving beyond law as rules. He cited "newly arisen social needs" and "a shifting of our longing from legal justice to social justice."
In other words, judges were encouraged to do an end run around rules, such as those set forth in the Constitution, and around the elected representatives of "we the people." As Roscoe Pound put it, law should be "in the hands of a progressive and enlightened caste whose conceptions are in advance of the public."
That is still the vision of the left a hundred years later. The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution, by voting out those who promote end runs around it.
4a)How Congress Can Stop the EPA's Power Grab
Courts have yet to decide if the agency's proposed controls on carbon emissions are even legal
By FRED UPTON AND TIM PHILLIPS
On Jan. 2, the Environmental Protection Agency will officially begin regulating the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. This move represents an unconstitutional power grab that will kill millions of jobs—unless Congress steps in.
This mess began in April 2007, with the Supreme Court's decision in Massachusetts v. EPA. The court instructed the agency to determine whether greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide pose (or potentially pose) a danger to human health and safety under the Clean Air Act. In December 2009 the agency determined they were a danger—and gave itself the green light to issue rules cutting CO2 emissions on a wide range of enterprises from coal plants to paper mills to foundries.
In response, states including Texas and Virginia, as well as dozens of companies and business associations, are challenging the EPA's endangerment finding and proposed rules in court. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is currently considering a partial stay of the EPA's rules and is expected to begin issuing decisions sometime in 2012.
The EPA, of course, is in a hurry to move ahead. It wants to begin regulating the largest emitters first. But it has the authority under its endangerment finding to regulate emissions by hospitals, small businesses, schools, churches and perhaps even single-family homes. As companies wait for definitive court rulings, the country could face a de facto construction moratorium on industrial facilities that could provide badly needed jobs. Moreover, the EPA has never completed an analysis of how many jobs might be lost in the process—although Section 321 of the Clean Air Act demands that it do so.
The best solution is for Congress to overturn the EPA's proposed greenhouse gas regulations outright. If Democrats refuse to join Republicans in doing so, then they should at least join a sensible bipartisan compromise to mandate that the EPA delay its regulations until the courts complete their examination of the agency's endangerment finding and proposed rules.
Like the plaintiffs, we have significant doubt that EPA regulations can survive judicial scrutiny. And the worst of all possible outcomes would be the EPA initiating a regulatory regime that is then struck down by the courts.
For the last year or so, some in Congress have considered mandating that the EPA delay its greenhouse-gas regulations by two years. But that delay is arbitrary—it was selected because a handful of Democrats needed political cover. There is no way to know whether two years will be sufficient time for the courts to complete their work.
Moreover, the principal argument for a two-year delay is that it will allow Congress time to create its own plan for regulating carbon. This presumes that carbon is a problem in need of regulation. We are not convinced.
Thus the minimally responsible approach—the one that will reduce the potential for confusion, uncertainty and regulatory mayhem—is to delay EPA action until the courts have had time to rule. This approach would ensure that small businesses, states and even the EPA itself have the certainty needed to proceed.
The day after the recent midterm elections, President Obama was asked about the voters' repudiation of cap and trade. He responded: "Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way. It was a means, not an end."
Cuts in carbon emissions would mean significantly higher electricity prices. We think the American consumer would prefer not to be skinned by Obama's EPA.
Mr. Upton, a Republican from Michigan, is chairman-designate of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Mr. Phillips is president of Americans for Prosperity.
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5)Obama's Presidency Joins the Fray
Americans prefer a leader who does not stand aloof from the weight and the lessons of our history.
By FOUAD AJAMI
In May of this year, President Obama brought together a group of presidential historians for what was supposed to be the first of many meetings. By available accounts, he was curious about the rise of the tea party, curious as to whether there had been precedents for this sort of backlash against the established order. He listened to these experts of the American presidency, but was prickly and didn't give anything away.
We shouldn't be surprised. What most engaged Mr. Obama before his rise to the highest office in the land was his own biography. He had stood aloof from the weight and the lessons of American history; where so many of his predecessors had sought comfort and guidance in the ordeal of presidents past, there was no great deference in him to the burdens those 43 men carried. He didn't look like those other presidents on the dollar bills, he said early on in his political odyssey.
"Ghosts," he said in one meeting with his national security advisers when the late Richard Holbrooke, his representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, tried to draw parallels between Lyndon Johnson's dilemmas in Vietnam and the current American engagement in Afghanistan. Vietnam was not particularly relevant to him, he told Bob Woodward in "Obama's Wars." He was 13 in 1975, he said, when South Vietnam fell: "So I grew up with none of the baggage that arose out of the dispute of the Vietnam war. I also had a lot of confidence."
In truth, his dilemma in Afghanistan was remarkably similar to that of Johnson. It was a "bitch of a war," Johnson dubbed the Vietnam dilemma, a war he prosecuted without ever taking to it. By all appearances, there is an echo of all that in Mr. Obama's view of Afghanistan.
Now and then Mr. Obama's devotees nodded to American history with evocations of FDR's New Deal and superficial parallels to JFK—the good looks, the glamour, the young children. But Kennedy had seen combat, was a Cold Warrior, and believed in the burdens of American power. Yes, he charmed Parisians and Berliners—but as the standard-bearer of an American empire of liberty. He never journeyed abroad to apologize on behalf of his country.
A president steeped in history would have never pushed ObamaCare on so thin a reed of public approval. In the great movement of American history, Americans haven't worshipped at the altar of charismatic leadership. They have been the most skeptical of peoples. They may have trusted several of their presidents through wars and economic downturns, but they have insisted on the wisdom of the public and on the ability of this republic of laws and institutions—and precedent—to see its way out of great dangers.
Americans have given big mandates to presidents only to send them packing when they lost the contingent mandate given by the electorate. Woodrow Wilson led the country through the Great War, only to be rebuffed, and to die later a broken man when he tried to impose the League of Nations on a country and a Senate dubious of it. Wilson was an absolutist, which doomed his cause. Of "the League fight" he would say, "Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?" But the opponents of the League were not intimidated.
In recent times, Lyndon Johnson in 1964, and Richard Nixon in 1972, won huge popular mandates only to be shunted aside when the consensus around them cracked. Ronald Reagan lost only one state in 1984—Walter Mondale's home state of Minnesota, and only because his grace decreed that he not campaign on his opponent's turf—but Reagan was forever courting House Speaker and liberal Democrat Tip O'Neill.
We have never wanted our presidents to be above the political fray. The prerogatives of an "imperial presidency" may have grown, but the expectation of political argument and disputation and compromise has deeper resonance in the American tradition.
"As a student of history"—such is the way Mr. Obama described himself in his 2009 Cairo speech—our president would have known that a command economy is alien to the American temperament, that unfettered government spending was bound to arouse the antagonism of the American people. We were not all Keynesians after all, and the American people—to liberals' wonderment—cared about budget deficits.
To be sure, there was panic in the midst of the recession of 2008. That anxiety helped carry Mr. Obama to office; it bridged the gap between Mr. Obama and the white working class in the rust belt states. But it did not last. In their infinite wisdom, ordinary Americans caught in the grip of a terrible economic malady still cared about the direction of the country and the debt burden their children would come to carry.
Mr. Obama had demonized the Bush tax cuts. They were, in the full length of his campaign, emblematic of the politics of greed and heartlessness. But he came around. There was no need to love or embrace them: It was enough that the president came down from on high to accept the logic of things and to step aside in the face of the popular revolt against big government and higher taxes.
The era of charisma, which began when Barack Obama was swept into office by delirium and enthusiasm, has drawn to a close. With the resounding repudiation of the midterm elections, the tax legislation, the ratification of a strategic arms pact with Russia and the end of "don't ask, don't tell" thanks to the support of Republican senators, the Obama presidency has just begun.
Mr. Ajami is director of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
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