Favorites: Thomas Sowell, Mark Steyn, Victor Davis Hanson, Tony Blankley, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Barone, Jonah Goldberg, Dan Henninger, Kim Strassel, John Hawkins, Shelby Steele, Brian Lamb, Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, FA Hayak
The next time you hear Obama, or some Democrat blaming our huge deficit on George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, quote this excellent post by Bruce McQuain:
Democrats are particularly fond of that meme because it provides them the opportunity to again shift the blame for something on their arch enemy, George Bush. It is also a convenient way to claim they’re blameless for all of these trillions of dollars in deficit spending that has taken place over the years.
It would be nice to see this chart in the New York Times.
How many times have we heard about the trillions of dollars spent (as if a vast majority of the Congress didn’t approve the war).
According to the CBO’s numbers, the Iraq war has cost $709 billion. Not the wild estimates by some on the left (to include the absurd claims by James Carville and others that the war cost $3 trillion). And look carefully at the added cost of the war on top of the federal deficit spending shown in red.
Notice anything? Now think back – who was in charge of Congress from 2003 – 2007? And what was the trend in overall deficit spending – including the cost of the Iraq war – through 2007. Any impartial observer would point out the trend was downward. The party in charge of Congress at the time was the GOP.
Oh, by the way, via Gateway Pundit.: 71% of Americans Believe Iraq Is Better Today and Give Bush the Credit
I just bought Sowell’s latest book. He looks pretty good for an 80 year old, and thankfully, his mind is as fertile as ever.
Thomas Sowell has studied and taught economics, intellectual history, and social policy at institutions that include Cornell University, UCLA, and Amherst College. Now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Sowell has published more than a dozen books, the latest of which is Dismantling America.
In introducing his new book, Sowell asserts that the Obama administration “is the embodiment, the personification, and the culmination of dangerous trends that began decades ago,” trends that are “dismantling America.” Sowell sees this in the dismantling of marriage, of culture, and of self-government.
Perhaps Obama will have the grace to admit this when the occasion presents itself next week. If he does, it will reflect well on the current Commander in Chief. If not, Boehner’s video makes the truth obvious anyway.
Below is the text of one of those emails we all get from friends. I had no way of knowing if it was true. After I forwarded it to 2 family members I got curious as to why I had never heard about this visit, so I did a little digging.
Here’s the original email:
The doctor had his TV on in his office when the news of the military base shootings at Ft. Hood , TX came on. The husband of one of his employees was stationed there.
He called her into his office and as he told her what had happened, she got a text message from her husband saying, “I am okay.” Her cell phone rang right after she read the message. It was an ER nurse,” I’m the one who just sent you a text, not your husband. I thought it would be comforting but I was mistaken in doing so. I am sorry to tell you this, but your husband has been shot 4 times and he is in surgery.”
The soldier’s wife left Southern Clinic in Dothan , AL and drove all night to Ft.Hood. When she arrived, she found out her husband was out of surgery and would be OK. She rushed to his room and found that he already had visitors there to comfort him. He was just waking up and found his wife and the visitors by his side. The nurse took this picture.
What? No news crews and cameras? This is how people with class respond and pay respect to those in uniform. I sent my cousin in Fayetteville , N.C. (Retired from Special Forces) that picture of George W. visiting the wounded at Ft. Hood . I got this reply:
What is even better is the fact George W. Bush heard about Fort Hood, got in his car without any escort, apparently they did not have time to react, and drove to Fort Hood. He was stopped at the gate and the guard could not believe who he had just stopped. Bush only asks for directions to the hospital then drove on. The gate guard called that “The President is on Fort Hood and driving to the hospital.”
The base went bananas looking for Obama. When they found it was Bush, they immediately offered escort. Bush simply told them to shut up and let him visit the wounded and the dependents of the dead.
He stayed at Fort Hood for over six hours, and was finally asked to leave by a message from the White House.
Obama flew in days later and held a “photo” session in a gym, and did not even go to the hospital.
I Googled “george w bush Ft Hood visit” and then went to FactCheck.org. Here’s the short answer:
Q: Did President George W. Bush drop everything to visit Ft. Hood victims? Was he ordered away by the Obama administration?
A: Bush did visit the wounded at Ft. Hood, but a Bush spokesman says that his visit was coordinated with base officials and that he was not asked to leave by the White House.
Here’s the Full Answer:
The e-mail contains a grain of truth. President George W. Bush did visit the wounded at Ft. Hood only a day after the tragic Nov. 5 shooting spree on the base, as was reported publicly at the time by a number of news outlets. But since then, we’ve had a steady stream of queries about this chain e-mail’s description of the visit, in which the author embellishes the facts considerably. Army officials would not comment, so we spoke to Bush spokesman David Sherzer, who was happy to set the record straight.
It’s a great sign that this kind of information is being printed in the MSM media USA Today.
At a time when workers’ pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees’ average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade.
Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are the latest available. The federal compensation advantage has grown from $30,415 in 2000 to $61,998 last year.
I underlined one of the key phrases to point out how the Republican Congress, under George W. Bush, was quite guilty starting this process. It’s why so people identify with the so-called “Tea Party.” They blame Republicans as well as Democrats (although Democrats have tripled what the Republicans did).
Who’d have thought that John Edwards’ “Two America’s” would turn out to be the public sector vs. the private sector?
One might say the public has changed its opinion of Obama, but it seems more likely that the public is beginning to see Obama as it finally did Bush. The hard Right always felt about Obama as the hard Left did about Bush, but now independents seem simply to have rechanneled their Bush anger to Obama anger — something that has bewildered Team Obama, who cannot gain any traction by blaming the current malaise on the Bush legacy. Voters apparently don’t see the corrective to Bush’s deficit budgeting in Obama’s yet higher spending and larger government.
Lampoons Obama-Pelosi Socialist Agenda. A lot of good points here.
I Want Your Money trailer…Set against the backdrop of today’s headline – 67% of Americans don’t approve of Obama’s economic policies, the film takes a provocative look at our deeply depressed economy using the words and actions of Presidents Reagan and Obama and shows the marked contrast between Reaganomics and Obamanomics. The film contrasts two views of the role that the federal government should play in our daily lives using the words and actions of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. Two versions of the American dream now stand in sharp contrast. One views the money you earned as yours and best allocated by you; the other believes that the elite in Washington know how to best allocate your wealth. One champions the traditional American dream, which has played out millions of times through generations of Americans, of improving one’s lot in life and even daring to dream and build big. The other holds that there is no end to the “good” the government can do by taking and spending other peoples’ money in an ever-burgeoning list of programs. The documentary film I Want Your Money exposes the high cost in lost freedom and in lost opportunity to support a Leviathan-like bureaucratic state.
What a great original song – “Parasite (code name: POTUS)” – by JoeDanMedia.com
Echoing the sentiments of the American people, who have grown weary of the Community Organizer in Chief, the teleprompter and the combination of BS that ensues.
Michael Barone is clearly one of the best columnists to read for a very broad perspective.
Here’s a 2700 word essay that offers more insight into over 200 years of American Political History.
A few short quotes:
We live now in a moment where it is clear that some of these policies went too far. Policies to increase homeownership helped produce the housing-price crash of 2007. Poorly understood innovations in finance led to the financial crisis of 2008. The resulting recession is painful and is, I believe, being prolonged by the economic policies of the Obama Democrats.
But the fact is that we are once again, as in the days of the early republic and not in the heyday of the Progressives and the New Dealers, a republic of property owners. Most Americans have accumulated—or will, during the course of their working years, accumulate— significant amounts of wealth. And that is why, I believe, American voters seem to be rejecting the policies of the Obama Democrats. Those policies, rooted in the Progressive and New Deal tradition, are designed to encourage a culture of dependence. It is the “soft despotism” of which Tocqueville warned us 175 years ago. The American people, the property-owning majority, even in this time of economic distress, seem to be embracing instead a culture of independence, a culture as old as the republic itself.
The major political development of the last 17 months has been an inrush of hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans into political activity, an inrush symbolized by but not limited to the tea party movement. It is fascinating to me that the tea partiers have adopted the language and in some cases even the costumes of the Founders. While the Progressives’ descriptions of a “horse and buggy” Constitution and their sense that giant auto factories and steel mills were the harbinger of the future seem tinny and out of date, the language of the Founders continues to resonate with the clear timbre of a silver spoon tapping a crystal glass. The majority of the American people seem to firmly agree with the Founders’ insistence that no one should be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. And so we can take satisfaction that most of our fellow citizens in our freeholders’ republic still hold these truths to be self-evident.
Every year we are going to see more and more of stories just like this one. We’re headed for the same kind of rationing that is so prevalent in England, most of Europe and Canada.
It’s finally happening. CNN is actually not covering up for the Obama Administration. Of course, the only thing that can make that happen is that the media is itself being restricted.
New York State is somewhat behind California in debt and is hoping, along with many States, that Obama and the Democratic Congress will bale them out … again. Actually, always and forever.
Dick Morris has a good column giving this more definition. 2011, or 2013, may be when this is resolved, one way or the other:
Many say that the situation in Greece is a harbinger of what is coming to the United States. They are right. But first it will come to states like New York, California and Michigan that are stretched way beyond their means and deeply in debt.
Victor Davis Hanson continues to explain, with great clarity, how bad things are becoming under this president’s rule. If you have the stomach for it, read the whole article here:
“Change you can believe in” is working out in practice to mean: If you don’t like the Constitution’s separation of powers — ignore it.
Here are just two paragraphs for some flavor:
We saw something like this before from the Obama administration, when it bailed out the bankrupt Chrysler Corporation and by executive order overturned the legally determined order of creditors. “Senior” creditors were to have been, by contract, the first paid, while junior creditors waited in line. But the latter group included union workers. So Obama derided the senior lenders as “speculators” and simply put his own constituents and campaign donors in front of them. The first sign of a debauched society is that it does not honor contracts, but reinterprets them according to perceived political advantage.
and
What do all these ends-justify-the-means examples portend? Mostly, they reflect an effort by a technocratic class to implement social change through extralegal means if it finds that its agenda does not meet with public approval. In some sense, the Obamians have lost all faith that our democracy shares their vision, and so they seek to impose their exalted will by proclamation — as if they are the new Jacobins and America is revolutionary France throwing off the old order.
