Obama lives in his own cocoon dream world.
Where there is no will there will be no progress and the prospects of an unwanted ending simply increases. (See 1 below.)
Sowell also believes Liberals live in la la land. (See 1a below.)
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I put in my time, tried my best, was not always successful in accomplishing my goals and doing for others what I hoped I could but I feel no guilt for now enjoying life and the fruits of my labor.
Seems the current generation is full of wonderful young people but there is an element who believe they are entitled and that is understandable because our society has gone soft. If this sickness spreads and engulfs more of our populace then America's future is less bright. I hope and pray this is not the case but in order to right the ship of state some serious decisions must be made that will bring pain as we retrench and pay the piper,
Will the 2012 election prove we are up to doing what is necessary and will Republicans offer a candidate sufficiently compelling to overcome the media and press bias and inertia which always favors incumbents regardless of their record?
By any objective measurement Obama has failed to measure up to his own hyped campaign rhetoric and promises (not that promises from a politician should enjoy much shelf life.)
The fact that Obama inherited problems is not an excuse though he works it for all he can. All presidents inherit problems because we have been unwilling to live within our means for almost an entire century and the cumulative effect simply built and finally caught up with us.
Admittedly I am partisan but only because I believe many of my arguments and expressed concerns have proven to have merit. I do not believe you spend your way out of a spending problem. Neither, do I believe you can drink your way out of a drinking problem. I do not believe you encumber the productive with insane rules and regulations and then expect them to invest capital and take risks. Finally, raising income to cover uncontrolled spending through taxation is avoiding the problem, is counterproductive and is intelectually dishonest.
I am glad the bi-partisan committee stood their ground thereby, revealing the philosophical chasm that exists between Liberals and Conservatives.
Let the voters decide whether they want to bite the bullet because our Republic is worth saving or go down the road of bankrupt Socialism because they believe in the myth of free lunches.
It's all black (Robinson) and white (Hensarling!) (See 2 and 2a below.)
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TheHappiest and Best of Thanksgiving.
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Dick
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1)Iran Policy: The Problem Is Obama
By Ed Lasky
Iran is well on its way to developing nuclear weapons. Years of sanctions have not stopped them, and now President Obama will not use his most effective tool short of acts of war.
The administration opposes new sanctions on Iran's Central Bank, despite the overwhelming support that measure (spearheaded by Illinois Republican Senator Mark Kirk) enjoys on both sides of the aisle in Congress. The administration says such a measure would lead to a spike in oil prices and harm the world economy. That is speculation.
What is not speculation is that sanctions on the Central Bank would impose crippling costs on a weak Iranian economy and be an effective measure to help dissuade Iran to end its nuclear weapons program. Iran's Central Bank plays a crucial role in Iran's economy. Sanctioning the Central Bank makes it difficult for companies to pay for oil purchases -- and oil sales represent 50-75 percent of the government budget.
Many Iranians are disgusted with the economic stewardship shown by the theocrats and terrorists running the nation. Any additional sanctions that are actually enforced would exacerbate the tensions within Iran and widen the schisms between merchants and mullahs.
Not only does the Obama team oppose this type of sanction, but they have inverted, twisted, and perverted the logic of its proponents.
In the past few days, a Treasury official, Adam Szubin, testified before Congress that sanctions on Iran's Central Bank would actually help Iran and therefore should not be passed. Huh? His reasoning is that it may lead to a spike in oil prices.
A milder version of an amendment promoted by Senator Robert Menendez (Democrat-New Jersey) would give Barack Obama broad waiver authority to give a pass to central banks of other nations that continue to do business with Iran's Central Bank.
This is a classic "national security" loophole that often allows presidents to blithely ignore the legislation Congress has passed. Of course, Barack Obama is wont to do this anyway, but the loophole allows him a fig leaf of legality. The stronger Kirk Amendment does not contain this broad waiver authority and would make it far tougher for President Obama to evade the intent of the law.
If the measure does pass with a national security waiver, no one can rest assured that the waiver will be used. The Obama team clearly did not want to cut off American money to UNESCO in the wake of its admission of the Palestinians as a member. However, the legislation governing this issue was passed years ago without the waiver loophole, so the administration was forced to stop funding UNESCO (it has subsequently tried to enlist businesses in trying to get Congress to eliminate the waiver, an effort that is dead on arrival).
Where is the logic, then, of the administration periodically trotting out the statement that "all options are on the table"? This is a codephrase for a military option. It is also used to try to garner support among supporters of Israel in America. It is a campaign slogan and political strategy; it is not a real threat, and the Iranians know this fact. Why some Americans are gullible enough to believe Obama's latest campaign slogan is the topic of another column.
If the White House will not impose legal sanctions on the Central Bank because of putative economic concerns, how likely is a military strike against nuclear installations? It has a zero likelihood of happening.
That is a certainty. The Iranians know this logic, know Obama will do nothing, and know they can act with impunity -- as they have for years, murdering our soldiers in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan. Most recently, they have stepped up their game and tried to bring terrorism to our nation's capital (plotting to murder the Saudi and Israel ambassadors and any innocent Americans who happened to be near them).
The Iranians can see the Obama administration's clear resistance to more potent sanctions. They can reasonably assume that stronger actions -- such as a military strike -- are definitely off the table. In fact, they were never on the table.
If Obama won't impose sanctions on Iran's Central Bank, he certainly won't order military strikes on nuclear installations.
Furthermore, President Obama said he wants a "common response" to Iran's nuclear program with Russia and China. Since Russia has dismissed the IAEA report as "biased and unprofessional," that common response would be the "lowest common denominator" response -- meaning little or no response. The best that can be hoped for is the steady drip, drip, drip of individual small companies or individuals being named as subject to sanctions. In other words, more of the same weak measures that have failed to work in the past and will fail to work now and in the future.
We periodically hear that President Obama signed the strongest Iran sanctions legislation of any U.S. president. Of course, the passage of that legislation took quite a long time to pass through Congress -- as it met resistance from certain quarters allied with Barack Obama.
Furthermore, legislation is merely a scrap of paper if the sanctions are not enforced by the Executive Branch. The Obama administration has been all but feckless in enforcing the existing sanctions on Iran. There are reasons why so many members on both sides of the aisle signed onto the Kyl-Menendez letter calling on the administration to actually enforce the legislation Congress already passed. A House letter (spearheaded by Illinois Congressman Dan Lipinski) also called on the Executive Branch to enforce the sanctions on Iran.
We have a president overseeing a policy that is bankrupt, feckless, weak, and immoral.
Meanwhile, the centrifuges are not the only things spinning these days...so is the Obama administration when it comes to Iran. Richard Grenell writes in the Wall Street Journal of "Obama's Failing Diplomacy":
On Nov. 13, President Obama made some remarkable statements. "When I came into office," he said at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Honolulu, "the world was divided and Iran was unified around its nuclear program." Now, he said, "the world is united and Iran is isolated. And because of our diplomacy and our efforts, we have, by far, the strongest sanctions on Iran that we've ever seen." Mr. Obama added, "China and Russia were critical to making that happen. Had they not been willing to support those efforts in the United Nations, we would not be able to see the kind of progress that we've made."
This was pure spin. The United Nations Security Council actually began instituting resolutions and sanctions in 2006, agreed to and voted on by all 15 members, that called upon Iran to stop enriching uranium.
In its nearly three years in office, the Obama administration has helped pass just one of those resolutions -- in June 2009. Only 12 of the 15 members of the Security Council voted in favor of it. Brazil, Turkey and Lebanon did not.
The simple fact is that the world is less unified on Iran now than it was under President George W. Bush. True enough, Mr. Obama may hear fewer complaints about hard-charging U.S. foreign policies than his predecessor. But silence is not cooperation.
The Bush administration got five Security Council resolutions passed on Iran starting in 2006. Three were sanctions resolutions. The Security Council was unanimous on two of the votes and lost only one country's support (Indonesia) in the third vote in 2008. In total, the Bush team lost the support of one country in its three sanctions resolutions while the Obama team lost the support of three countries in one resolution.
Ultimately, President Bush got five Security Council resolutions passed on Iran, and Obama has had one. Granted, Bush's were done over a two-term period, but the threat is even more critical now, and certainly more actions at the Security Council could have been taken had there been the will in the White House.
Lest we forget, the mullahs loathe America as much as they hate Israel and have boasted of their desire to destroy the United States. They are possessed of an apocalyptic vision that nuclear war will bring about the return of the "Twelfth Imam" and millennial bliss (for those few left).
The problem is that there is no will to stop them. The problem is Obama.
1a)Alice in Liberal Land
By Thomas Sowell
"Alice in Wonderland" was written by a professor who also wrote a book on symbolic logic. So it is not surprising that Alice encountered not only strange behavior in Wonderland, but also strange and illogical reasoning -- of a sort too often found in the real world, and which a logician would be very much aware of.
If Alice could visit the world of liberal rhetoric and assumptions today, she might find similarly illogical and bizarre thinking. But people suffering in the current economy might not find it nearly as entertaining as "Alice in Wonderland."
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the world envisioned by today's liberals is that it is a world where other people just passively accept whatever "change" liberals impose. In the world of Liberal Land, you can just take for granted all the benefits of the existing society, and then simply tack on your new, wonderful ideas that will make things better.
For example, if the economy is going along well and you happen to take a notion that there ought to be more home ownership, especially among the poor and minorities, then you simply have the government decree that lenders have to lend to more low-income people and minorities who want mortgages, ending finicky mortgage standards about down payments, income and credit histories.
That sounds like a fine idea in the world of Liberal Land. Unfortunately, in the ugly world of reality, it turned out to be a financial disaster, from which the economy has still not yet recovered. Nor have the poor and minorities.
Apparently you cannot just tack on your pet notions to whatever already exists, without repercussions spreading throughout the whole economy. That's what happens in the ugly world of reality, as distinguished from the beautiful world of Liberal Land.
The strange and bizarre characters found in "Alice in Wonderland" have counterparts in the political vision of Liberal Land today. Among the most interesting of these characters are those elites who are convinced that they are so much smarter than the rest of us that they feel both a right and a duty to take all sorts of decisions out of our incompetent hands -- for our own good.
In San Francisco, which is Liberal Land personified, there have been attempts to ban the circumcision of newborn baby boys. Fortunately, that was nipped in the bud. But it shows how widely the self-anointed saviors of Liberal Land feel entitled to take decisions out of the hands of mere ordinary citizens.
Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner says, "We're facing a very consequential debate about some fundamental choices as a country." People talk that way in Liberal Land. Moreover, such statements pass muster with those who simply take in the words, decide whether they sound nice to them, and then move on.
But, if you take words seriously, the more fundamental question is whether individuals are to remain free to make their own choices, as distinguished from having collectivized choices, "as a country" -- which is to say, having choices made by government officials and imposed on the rest of us.
The history of the 20th century is a painful lesson on what happens when collective choices replace individual choices. Even leaving aside the chilling history of totalitarianism in the 20th century, the history of economic central planning shows it to have been such a widely recognized disaster that even communist and socialist governments were abandoning it as the century ended.
Making choices "as a country" cannot be avoided in some cases, such as elections or referenda. But that is very different from saying that decisions in general should be made "as a country" -- which boils down to having people like Timothy Geithner taking more and more decisions out of our own hands and imposing their will on the rest of us. That way lies madness exceeding anything done by the Mad Hatter in "Alice in Wonderland."
That way lie unfunded mandates, nanny state interventions in people's lives, such as banning circumcision -- and the ultimate nanny state monstrosity, ObamaCare.
The world of reality has its problems, so it is understandable that some people want to escape to a different world, where you can talk lofty talk and forget about ugly realities like costs and repercussions. The world of reality is not nearly as lovely as the world of Liberal Land. No wonder so many people want to go there.
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2)Why the Super Committee Failed
Democrats were unwilling to agree to anything less than $1 trillion in tax hikes, and unwilling to offer meaningful reforms for health-care entitlement spending..
By JEB HENSARLING
All now know that the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction has failed to reach an agreement. While there will still be $1.2 trillion of spending cuts as guaranteed under the Budget Control Act, we regrettably missed a historic opportunity to lift the burden of debt and help spur economic growth and job creation. Americans deserve an explanation.
President Obama summed up our debt crisis best when he told Republican members of the House in January 2010 that "The major driver of our long-term liabilities . . . is Medicare and Medicaid and our health-care spending." A few months later, however, Mr. Obama and his party's leaders in Congress added trillions of dollars in new health-care spending to the government's balance sheet.
Democrats on the committee made it clear that the new spending called for in the president's health law was off the table. Still, committee Republicans offered to negotiate a plan on the other two health-care entitlements—Medicare and Medicaid—based upon the reforms included in the budget the House passed earlier this year.
The Medicare reforms would make no changes for those in or near retirement. Beginning in 2022, beneficiaries would be guaranteed a choice of Medicare-approved private health coverage options and guaranteed a premium-support payment to help pay for the plan they choose.
Democrats rejected this approach but assured us on numerous occasions they would offer a "structural" or "architectural" Medicare reform plan of their own. While I do not question their good faith effort to do so, they never did.
Republicans on the committee also offered to negotiate a plan based on the bipartisan "Protect Medicare Act" authored by Alice Rivlin, one of President Bill Clinton's budget directors, and Pete Domenici, a former Republican senator from New Mexico. Rivlin-Domenici offered financial support to seniors to purchase quality, affordable health coverage in Medicare-approved plans. These seniors would be able to choose from a list of Medicare-guaranteed coverage options, similar to the House budget's approach—except that Rivlin-Domenici would continue to include a traditional Medicare fee-for-service plan among the options.
This approach was also rejected by committee Democrats.
The Congressional Budget Office, the Medicare trustees, and the Government Accountability Office have each repeatedly said that our health-care entitlements are unsustainable. Committee Democrats offered modest adjustments to these programs, but they were far from sufficient to meet the challenge. And even their modest changes were made contingent upon a minimum of $1 trillion in higher taxes—a move sure to stifle job creation during the worst economy in recent memory.
Even if Republicans agreed to every tax increase desired by the president, our national debt would continue to grow uncontrollably. Controlling spending is therefore a crucial challenge. The other is economic growth and job creation, which would produce the necessary revenue to fund our priorities.
In the midst of persistent 9% unemployment, the committee could have enacted fundamental tax reform to simplify the tax code, help create jobs, and bring in over time the higher revenues that come with economic growth. Republicans put such a plan on the table—and even agreed to $250 billion in new revenue by eliminating or limiting most of the deductions, credits, loopholes and tax expenditures mainly enjoyed by higher-income Americans. We offered this to avoid the even larger tax increases already written into current law that will intensify the pain Americans are feeling during these difficult economic times.
Republicans were willing to agree to additional tax revenue, but only in the context of fundamental pro-growth tax reform that would broaden the base, lower rates, and maintain current levels of progressivity. This is the approach to tax reform used by recent bipartisan deficit reduction efforts such as the Bowles-Simpson fiscal commission and the Rivlin-Domenici plan.
The Democrats said no. They were unwilling to agree to anything less than $1 trillion in tax hikes—and unwilling to offer any structural reforms to put our health-care entitlements on a permanently sustainable basis.
Unfortunately, the committee's challenge was made more difficult by President Obama. Since the committee was formed, he has demanded more stimulus spending and issued a veto threat against any proposed committee solution to the spending problem that was not coupled with a massive tax increase.
Despite the president's disappointing lack of leadership, I believe my co-chair, Sen. Patty Murray, and every Democrat acted with honor and integrity and negotiated in good faith to the end. It was, of course, difficult to negotiate with six Democrats who, as Democratic committee member Jim Clyburn said on Nov. 13, "never coalesced around a plan" themselves. But I believe this failure was not due to lack of effort or commitment.
Ultimately, the committee did not succeed because we could not bridge the gap between two dramatically competing visions of the role government should play in a free society, the proper purpose and design of the social safety net, and the fundamentals of job creation and economic growth.
A great opportunity has been missed, but America's fate will not be sealed by the failure of a temporary congressional committee. Spending cuts will begin anyway in 2013, but in a manner many of us, including our secretary of defense, believe could fundamentally harm our national security. I am committed to ensuring that full deficit reduction is realized, but Congress must work to achieve these savings in a more sensible manner that does not make us less safe.
As Winston Churchill said, "Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted." Despite my disappointment with the committee's setback, I remain confident that we will yet again prove Churchill right.
Mr. Hensarling, a white Republican congressman from Texas, was co-chair of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.
2a)GOP Obstinacy Doomed Supercommittee
By Eugene Robinson
No, the sun didn't rise in the west this morning. No, Republicans on the congressional supercommittee didn't offer meaningful concessions on raising new tax revenue. And no, "both sides" are not equally responsible for the failure to compromise.
As usual, the two parties began with vastly different ideas of what it means to negotiate. Democrats envisioned meeting somewhere in the middle, while Republicans anticipated not moving an inch. This isn't just my spin, it's a matter of public record: Before the 12-member supercommittee ever met, House Speaker John Boehner warned that it had better not agree to any new tax revenue.
Think about this for a minute. The whole point of the subcommittee exercise was to begin reducing the ballooning national debt, now more than $15 trillion. Closing such a big gap with spending cuts is possible only in the parallel universe inhabited by GOP ideologues, a place where the laws of arithmetic do not apply.
Here in the real world -- where tax receipts as a percentage of gross domestic product are lower than they've been since 1950 -- it's ridiculous to think of solving the long-term debt problem without substantial new revenue. Yet the position taken by Republicans in Congress is that tax rates can only go down, never up. To uphold this absolutist principle, they have gone so far as to threaten to send the U.S. Treasury into default.
That is basically where the subcommittee talks stood -- Democrats ready to give and take, Republicans willing only to take -- until the eleventh hour, when Sen. Patrick Toomey, R-Pa., presented to his supercolleagues a proposal for tax reform that some commentators hailed as a breakthrough. It was, in fact, nothing of the sort.
Toomey's plan would actually cut tax rates, including for the wealthy, with a promise to raise them again if that's what is needed to boost tax revenue by $250 billion over the next decade.
Puh-leeze.
While $250 billion sounds like a lot, it's much less impressive when compared to the supercommittee's overall goal of reducing the debt by $1.2 trillion. This would still mean four dollars in spending cuts for every one dollar of new revenue.
And Toomey's number is a drop in the bucket when you look at the $15 trillion total debt -- or even the $4 trillion in debt reduction that most analysts believe would really make a difference. With so little new revenue, we would need to make draconian cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security that would radically alter the social contract in this country.
Toomey's proposal on taxes is a breakthrough only if we're grading on a curve -- giving Republicans extra credit for moving an inch, simply because they've been so adamant about not moving at all. Democrats, meanwhile, get accused of being intransigent for drawing a line after having moved many, many miles.
It's useful to remember that not all Republicans are so stubborn. Many realize that a balanced approach of spending cuts and tax increases will be needed to address the debt problem -- and that these adjustments shouldn't be made too abruptly, given the fragility of the economic recovery. But anyone who speaks these truths out loud is branded a heretic in Republican circles, where tax cuts are not a matter of policy but of faith.
The deal that established the supercommittee specified that if the superlegislators failed to reach agreement, $1.2 trillion in budget cuts would automatically take place at the beginning of 2013. Is this really better, from the progressive point of view, than some sort of lopsided "compromise" incorporating the Toomey revenue, which would reduce the dollar amount of budget-slashing needed to attain the $1.2 trillion goal?
Yes, no deal is almost certainly better than a bad deal. The automatic cuts will be painful, but they don't touch entitlements -- and thus don't pre-empt the serious discussion we need to have about making sure that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are sustainable.
Instead, the Pentagon bears the brunt of the sword-of-Damocles cuts. Already, Republicans are beginning to howl that we need to find some way to avoid damaging our national security. The solution is clear: If we want a military that projects American power around the globe, we need to pay for it.
Maybe Republicans will acknowledge that American greatness doesn't come free. That's the breakthrough we need.
Eugene Robinson is a black editorial writer for The Washington Post.
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