Observable Ways

Bottomed Out
The president restated his bottom line for the negotiations with Congress to avert a fiscal crisis in January: “What I’m going to need, what the country needs, what the business community needs in order to get to where we need to be, is an acknowledgment that folks like me can afford to pay a little bit higher rate.” (NYT, 12/4/2012)

What strikes us time and time again is the failure of Liberals to make an honest intellectual case for their positions and, similarly, to defend these positions when confronted by conservative arguments. Case in point is the never-ending demand by Obama for higher taxes on the rich. Conservatives say the following: 1) many of those defined as 'rich' are small business owners who would scale back their businesses and lay off workers if taxes go up; 2) raising taxes on the rich to the levels that Obama and the Dems want would be rounding error in the effort to balance the budget/pay down the debt, etc. and 3) the wealthy in this country already pay a majority of all taxes collected. 

What do Obama and the Dems offer in return? What is their intellectual rebuttal? There is none. Just calls for "fairness."


Redux
The stimulus measures in the White House’s debt proposal stem from President Obama’s long-since-scuttled American Jobs Act proposal, and include a continuation of emergency support for long-term unemployed workers, an extension of the payroll tax cut, billions in infrastructure investment and a mortgage refinancing proposal. (NYT, 12/4/2012)

If this all sounds familiar to you, it should. Devoid of new ideas, Obama recycles from his not-even-yet-completed first term.


What Junior Is Up To
In recent weeks, college students on dozens of campuses have demanded that university endowment funds rid themselves of coal, oil and gas stocks. The students see it as a tactic that could force climate change, barely discussed in the presidential campaign, back onto the national political agenda. (NYT, 12/4/2012)

As a sign of their serious commitment, the students pledged to give up their personal cars and ride public transportation or bicycles instead. Just kidding!

Or how about this?

Realizing that the divestiture of energy stocks from their schools' endowment funds would mean lower investment returns and that these lower returns would translate to increased costs and less financial aid, students pledged to ask their parents to make up the difference by paying higher tuition. Just kidding!


Fashionable
A former adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom, told Rucker that Romney will “be involved in some fashion” in public service. And nobody can begrudge Romney some downtime. But his failure to engage now, at a time when he could have the most clout, reinforces the impression that his candidacy was less about principle and patriotism than about him. (Dana Milbank, Washington Post, 12/4/2012)

So Milbank wants Mitt Romney - who Liberals like Milbank told us was a corrupt and incompetent man - to jump in and help Obama and the country with this pesky fiscal problem. The same Obama who Liberals tell us won both the election and a mandate.  

See, here's the thing about Republicans. They have infinite more grace after losing or retiring. Compare Reagan, Bush I or Bush II with Carter and Clinton. The latter two just will not go away. Usually much to the dismay of their Democrat successors!


Messy
We are asked to believe that a multimillionaire African-American woman, who boasts that those who “mess” with her end up badly, is a victim of racism for not being welcomed as a nominee for secretary of state — a position that has not been held by a white male in 15 years — after she went on five television shows the Sunday after the Benghazi attack in an effort to convince Americans of the absurd myth that their ambassador had been killed in the course of a demonstration gone bad, rather than being murdered in a preplanned al-Qaedist hit. (Victor David Hanson, Nationalreview.com, 12/4/2012)

Great article by Hanson, which paired with a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal, paint a rather unflattering picture of Susan Rice. We'll suggest that the Republican opposition to Rice is also payback to Dems for John Bolton.