Witch Hunt

Habemus Liberals

• ....a theological conservative of Italian ancestry who vigorously backs Vatican positions on abortion, gay marriage....
• Cardinal Bergoglio has clashed with the Argentine government, particularly former President Néstor Kirchner and his successor and widow, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, about issues like gay marriage, abortion and the adoption of children by gay couples.
• But Francis shares Benedict’s core doctrinal positions and is not considered likely to push changes in positions like the church’s ban on the ordination of women as priests or its strict opposition to abortion and gay marriage.
• In Latin America, the church is confronting many of the same cultural and political battles as it is in Europe and the United States: a rise in acceptance of gay relationships, abortion and birth control...
• Francis holds traditional and conservative views, opposing liberation theology, abortion, gay marriage and the ordination of women.

From numerous articles in today's New York Times. See if you can discern a common theme. 

(Yes, Liberals want the new pope to get busy and embrace abortion and gay marriage!)


Touching
A frenzy of lobbying has been touched off by President Obama’s order to slice spending this year by $85 billion, divided equally between military and civilian programs. The cuts have created new alliances and strange bedfellows. (NYT, 3/13/2013)

If someone awoke from a coma this morning and read this that individual would think that President Obama was the responsible guy with the green eyeshade cutting wasteful spending in Washington. Rather - as we know - he's the guy who conceived the sequester never believing that Republicans would go along. He's also the guy who said that the country doesn't have a spending problem, it has a health care problem. Oh, and also the guy who added trillions to the national debt. 


Tolerance
To implement affordable housing in the Clinton years, the Department of Housing and Urban Development lowered capital standards for Fannie and Freddie and encouraged them to be very tolerant in their mortgage purchases. Soon fast-buck artists were generating substandard paper and palming it off on Fannie and Freddie, who later would show that they too were no strangers to corruption. (George Melloan, WSJ, 3/14/2013)

A(nother) reminder of (some of) the real culprits in the mortgage meltdown. 

You thought it was George Bush, didn't you?

900 Posts!

Gains and Losses
Bolstered by a healthier private sector, the United States economy gained 236,000 jobs in February, well above what had been expected, while the unemployment rate fell to 7.7 percent, its lowest level since December 2008.
...
While many economists were encouraged by the report, some noted that the size of the labor force contracted by 130,000. Some of that was because of retirements, but some was also a result of discouraged workers giving up the search for jobs. As a result, the labor participation rate sank to 63.5 percent, a low for the current economic cycle.
...
The unemployment fell from 7.9 percent in January. (NYT, 3/7/2013)

Unemployment at Four-year Low as U.S. Hiring Gains Steam screams the New York Times headline. We don't have to read very far to learn that labor participation rate is at a low and that the unemployment rate shrank a whopping 0.02%. 

Stock headline had a Republican been president? 

Unemployment Remains Stubbornly High, Millions Abandon Job Search.


All Over Again
Mr. Obama is making the same mistake he made four years ago. We are in a jobs crisis and he does not see it. He thinks he's in a wrestling match about taxing and spending, he thinks he's in a game with those dread Republicans. But the real question is whether the American people will be able to have jobs. (Peggy Noonan, WSJ, 3/8/2013)

While we agree with Noonan, we also point out that Obama's first term mistakes cost him very little. Will it be different in his second term? It is hard to say, but consider this. If Obama leaves office with an unemployment rate of - let's say 5.5% - can anyone say that his was a successful presidency?


Drip Drip
The government gave a $3,700 grant to build a miniature street in West Virginia—out of Legos. It shelled out $500,000 to support specialty shampoo products for cats and dogs. A San Diego outfit got $10,000 for trolley dancing. The feds last year held 894 conferences that each cost more than $100,000—$340 million altogether. But Mr. Obama is too broke to let American kids look around the White House. (Kimberley A. Strassel, WSJ, 3/7/2013)

We wrote about this yesterday and note again that Republicans are winning the battle for the hearts and minds on the sequester. Given the way that Washington wastes our tax dollars, they have righteousness on their side. The sooner that Obama gets the White House tours up and running again the better for his approval ratings. 


Fall in to the Gap
...Medicare's long-term "unfunded liability"—the gap between promised benefits and the program's ability to fund them—is roughly $42.7 trillion. When Republicans say they want to reform Medicare, they mean they want to make durable changes to the program's structure and operations so that this gap narrows over time while achieving the same or better results. They don't want to cut for the sake of cutting or "austerity." They want to solve Medicare's problems. (WSJ, 3/7/2013)

Remember this brief and articulate snippet the next time that Colonel Bernie Sanders starts lying about how Republicans want to destroy entitlement programs. 


The Best Defense
Former President Bill Clinton, who signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 barring federal recognition of same-sex weddings, called on the Supreme Court on Thursday to overturn the law.

Just weeks before the court takes up a case challenging the law, Mr. Clinton said he had come to believe that the law is unconstitutional and contravenes the quintessential American values of “freedom, equality and justice above all.” In doing so, he joined President Obama in arguing that the law be overturned.

“As the president who signed the act into law, I have come to believe that DOMA is contrary to those principles and, in fact, incompatible with our Constitution,” Mr. Clinton wrote in an op-ed article posted on the Web site of The Washington Post on Thursday evening. (NYT, 3/7/2013)

Another Democrat flip-flops.....er, evolves! Bill Clinton is a bigot and a homophobe no more.

And the New York Times finally comes clean and admits that it was the Big Dog, Bill Clinton, who signed DOMA in the first place.

The Emperor's Morale

College Daze
Oberlin College, known as much for ardent liberalism as for academic excellence, canceled classes on Monday and convened a “day of solidarity” after the latest in a monthlong string of what it called hate-related incidents and vandalism. (NYT, 3/4/2013)

Another college president takes the bait. 

We owe a huge debt to Ann Coulter for (among many other things) educating us about how these "college hate crimes" play out. Here's how it goes: somebody spots racist graffiti on campus; the college president shuts classes down and declares this a 'teaching moment'; the national press picks the story up and laments that America is still a racist country; some time later the whole thing is found out to be a hoax, but the media has moved on by that point. 

Let's say at Oberlin, however, that an underclassman or two or three really were responsible. So Oberlin's president thinks it is a good idea to lock 2800 students out of class because of three knuckleheads? It is the classic example of "the terrorists win."


Intangibles
“I don’t see how ‘I’m fine with the sequester’ differs from ‘I’m fine with slower growth and continued high unemployment, or longer delays at airports, fewer Head Start slots, furloughs among civilian D.O.D. folks’ and so on,” said Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., referring to the Department of Defense. Mr. Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group, said that as the cuts became real, they would “deeply discredit” those who foster the idea that government spending is inherently wasteful and that there is no tangible cost to reducing it. (NYT, 3/3/2013)

This nonsense about how the sequester (Obama's idea) is going to cause "longer delays at airports", gut national defense or make the streets unsafe is maddening. It is a pure Democrat partisan scare tactic. If Dems don't like the cuts as mandated, change them. Scale back the holiday party at the State Department, reduce the travel and conference budget of the GSA and don't replace retiring federal workers. Another problem solved by RedStateVT.


Hard Time
America keeps too many secrets, and much more that government does should be transparent and declassified. But that is not a decision for a Private First Class to make. He faces a sentence of 20 years on the charges to which he pleaded guilty, and the military is planning more serious charges such as aiding the enemy. He is not a hero, despite the attempts by the anti-antiterror left to make him one. He will learn that the hard way in prison. (WSJ, 3/3/2013)

A Wall Street Journal editorial on traitor Bradley Manning echoes RedStateVT!


Comeback Kids
Congressional Republicans have had quite a comeback. In January, the GOP was forced to vote for a major tax hike with zero spending cuts. Now it is President Obama who has been forced to accept spending cuts with no tax hike. Who says divided government doesn’t work? (Marc A. Thiessen, Washington Post, 3/4/2013)

The New York Times and MSNBC (among others) have been crowing about 'deep divisions' among Republicans, 'a party that has lost its way' and other predictions of the end of the Republican Party. (Democrats, by contrast, are apparently fully unified on every conceivable issue.) Helpfully, these and other representatives of the Legitimate Media offer useful prescriptions for curing Republicans of their malaise. All of which involves them acting more like ...Democrats. Anyway, Thiessen makes a good point above. Don't count the Republican Party out yet.

Set Sail

Conclusion
"As everybody here knows, last year upon a long period of reflection, I concluded that we cannot discriminate against same-sex couples when it comes to marriage," Obama said at a Friday press conference at the White House. "The basic principle that America is founded on -- the idea that we're all created equal -- applies to everybody, regardless of sexual orientation, as well as race or gender or religion or ethnicity." (Huffington Post, 3/1/2013)

A bigot and a homophobe no more!


Problematic
The problem with sequestration, of course, is that the cuts are across the board and do not allow money to move between accounts. It’s dumb because it doesn’t discriminate. Fine. Then change the law. That’s why we have a Congress. Discriminate. Prioritize. That’s why we have budgets. Except that the Democratic Senate hasn’t passed one in four years. And the White House, which proposed the sequester in the first place, had 18 months to establish rational priorities among accounts — and did nothing. (Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, 2/28/2013)

RedStateVT believes that Obama is angling to blame the continuing economic malaise of his second term on the sequester and Republicans. He may have miscalculated this time. Republicans have had some success in getting the word out that 1) sequester was Obama's invention, 2) the cuts are in the range of single digits, 3) if he was serious, Obama could prioritize the reductions (Krauthammer's point), and 4) the world did not end on March 1st. 


Business Like
Some business owners and people facing furloughs said the cutbacks were manageable, even a good thing. Moe Jafari, whose company Human Touch in McLean does technology work for the military, said he saw a new cost-consciousness in the government that pleased him.

“They’re looking at budgets that are not unlimited,” said Mr. Jafari, whose contracting includes work for the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in Charleston, S.C. “We see the government for the first time having discussions with us in ways we never thought. They’re looking at saving money. They’re starting to act like businesses.” (NYT, 3/2/2013)

Politicians should start managing the government like a business that has shareholders to whom they are accountable. The current practice of the political class is to treat constituents as a bottomless source of funding. 


Virtual
It does not add up to the “grand bargain” that the two parties had been seeking, because it leaves virtually untouched the entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — that are responsible for projections of an unsustainably rising federal debt in coming decades. 
.....
“I still believe we can and must replace these cuts with a balanced approach — one that combines smart spending cuts with entitlement reform and changes to our tax code that make it more fair for families and businesses without raising anyone’s tax rates,” Mr. Obama said. (NYT, 3/2/2013)

Even the New York Times admits that entitlement reform is necessary?!?! 

What is galling is Obama's obfuscation on the issue. He has NEVER embraced entitlement reform and even recently took off the table any raise in the eligibility age for Medicare. And changes to the tax code? Proposed by Republicans, rejected by Obama. 

Road Trip

Lewie Lewie
President Obama’s nominee to lead the Treasury Department, Jacob J. Lew, got a $685,000 severance payment when he left a top post at New York University in 2006 to take a job at Citigroup.

The payment, which a university official acknowledged on Monday, is considered unusual by outside experts in benefits and raises questions about why a tax-exempt university would give a large exit bonus to an executive who was departing voluntarily. (NYT, 2/25/2013)

On the eve of the vote for his confirmation, the New York Times writes about funny money paid to nominee Lew, a story which was already old news having been previously reported by others. Of course it was too late to derail Lew - now confirmed - but it does give the Times the ability to check the box that shows that Lew was fully vetted by the Legitimate Media.

So the new Obama administration Treasury Secretary arrives mired in scandal replacing the previous Obama administration Treasury Secretary who - surprise! - also arrived mired in scandal. 

And a bonus from the Lew confirmation?:

Investment accounts in the Cayman Islands are no longer evil tax havens. Now they are a form of prudent investor diversification. (WSJ, 2/27/2013)


Sharp Instruments
Obama wants Americans to blame the GOP for this litany of disasters, but Republicans can solve that problem with one simple stroke: Pass a bill giving the president complete authority to allocate the automatic spending cuts as he sees fit. Replace the “meat cleaver” with a scalpel, put it Obama’s hands and tell him: Mr. President, you can’t decide if to cut, but you can decide where and how to cut.

If Obama chooses to cut funding for first-responders and our military while protecting his administration’s corrupt green-energy programs, that will be his choice — and Americans will know it. (Marc A. Thiessen, Washington Post, 2/25/2013)

Good point from Thiessen. There's nothing we can cut from the budget BEFORE we lay off cops?


Obsessed
So why this obsession with deficits and debt? There are many factors, but central to it is a widespread elite consensus that this crisis provides a unique opportunity to “fix” — exact benefit cuts from — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, despite the opposition of broad majorities across the political spectrum. (Katrina vanden Heuvel, Washington Post, 2/27/2013)

Dingbat vanden Heuvel rolls out a classic Liberal tactic in analyzing the sequester: make stuff up. Apparently there are "broad majorities across the political spectrum" who do NOT believe that we need entitlement reform. News to us. And who is pushing entitlement reform? Unnamed "elitists." 

Less Is Less
Liberals don't become more reasonable in their demands for spending increases when Republicans give them more revenues. They become much less so. (Stephen Moore, WSJ, 2/28/2013)

Timely reminder. 

On The Fence

Sensible
Having first proposed and demanded the sequester, it would make sense that the president lead the effort to replace it. Unfortunately, he has put forth no detailed plan that can pass Congress, and the Senate—controlled by his Democratic allies—hasn't even voted on a solution, let alone passed one. By contrast, House Republicans have twice passed plans to replace the sequester with common-sense cuts and reforms that protect national security. (John Boehner, WSJ, 2/19/2013)

There is a part of us that wonders if sensible Democrats feel the same way about Nancy Pelosi that sensible Republicans feel about John Boehner. Namely, both might prefer a different spokesperson. Boehner is at times awkward and inarticulate and has let Obama get the best of him. Nonetheless, we were thrilled to read his Wall Street Journal piece. No doubt pushed by RedStateVT which has been insistently recycling Charles Krauthammer's reminder that the sequester was Obama's creation, Boehner finally makes this very point. It cannot be said enough as sequester nears.


Scofflaw
Voters should scoff at the idea that a $3.6 trillion government can't save one nickel of every dollar that agencies spend. The $85 billion in savings is a mere 2.3% of total spending. The agencies that the White House says can't save 5% received an average increase in their budgets of 17% in the previous five years—not counting their $276 billion stimulus bonus. (WSJ, 2/19/2013)

Truth in numbers.


Prison Time
The shift to tougher penal policies three decades ago was originally credited with helping people in poor neighborhoods by reducing crime. But now that America’s incarceration rate has risen to be the world’s highest, many social scientists find the social benefits to be far outweighed by the costs to those communities.

“Prison has become the new poverty trap,” said Bruce Western, a Harvard sociologist. “It has become a routine event for poor African-American men and their families, creating an enduring disadvantage at the very bottom of American society.” (NYT, 2/18/2013)

Loved this one from the Times. Long prison sentences are a major contributor to poverty. We don't even know where to begin. 


Argumentative
Indeed, the same logic that argues for setting a minimum wage also argues for the government setting wage standards more generally. The government could require businesses above a certain size to increase employees’ wages in line with the economy’s productivity increases, for example, exempting those companies that experienced losses the previous year.

That will never happen, of course (and might be a bureaucratic nightmare if it did). But what are more plausible scenarios for jump-starting Americans’ earnings? A better-educated workforce might command more income, but incomes in most professions have been stagnating as well.

If wages are to rise, the only alternative to giving the government wage-setting authority is giving employees the power to bargain. Today, that power has just about vanished. With union membership down to just 6.6 percent of the private-sector workforce, the overwhelming majority of U.S. workers have no power to bargain for their share of company revenue, and those few who do have a weak hand. Reforming labor laws so that workers could join unions or workers’ associations without fear of firing might ultimately compel chief executives to invest some of that $1.7 trillion on hand to training and rewarding their workers, even if it means they can’t buy back as many of their own shares. (Harold Meyerson, Washington Post, 2/19/2013)

Meyerson hops around the Liberal playbook in this column from which we quote extensively. See if you can follow:

--We really need to raise the minimum wage.

--Actually that is such a great idea that the government should be able to force businesses to raise non-minimum wage workers' pay.

--OK, that probably couldn't happen. (But it would be great if it could.)

--Well then workers should at least be able to join unions. (Apparently that is not possible currently.)

Where to begin?