Don't Like Ocare - Then You're a Dummy

Democrats: Americans Who Dislike ObamaCare Are Stupid

Posted 02/24/2012 06:58 PM ET

Health Care: Democrats used to say the more people knew about ObamaCare, the more they'd like it. Well, the public has had almost two full years to soak it in, and more want it repealed than ever.

A Quinnipiac University poll last week found 52% of Americans want ObamaCare scrapped. That's up from 44% last May. Meanwhile, just 39% want to keep it, down from 45%. Even one in five Democrats now says Congress should repeal the law.

That hasn't kept liberals from calling ObamaCare foes idiots, which is what Democratic party head Debbie Wasserman Schultz did when asked about the poll.

'Americans only oppose ObamaCare because they "didn't know" about its many benefits. "The pieces of health care reform, when you ask Americans about them, they overwhelmingly support them," she said.

Democrats have fed a credulous media that line since they shoved the law down our throats in 2010.

Obama pollster Joel Benenson promised "once reform passes, the tangible benefits Americans will realize will trump the fear-mongering rhetoric opponents are stoking today."

David Axelrod said that "health care, over time, is going to become more popular."

And, of course, who can forget Nancy Pelosi's declaration that "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy."

 

Turns out, the more Americans know about ObamaCare, the less they like it. And for good reason.

They now know that ObamaCare will, for the first time ever, force Americans to buy a government-approved product merely because they have a pulse.

They know ObamaCare means the stark politicization of health care — as witnessed most recently by Obama's brazen attempt to use the law to force the Catholic Church to pay for "free" contraception.
They know it will mean endless benefit mandates, driving up insurance premiums for everyone.
They know that once ObamaCare takes effect in 2014, their employers will likely dump them into government-run "exchanges" to avoid those higher premiums.

Most of all, they know the meager benefits ObamaCare provides will be crushed under the weight of higher costs, worse quality, a massive expansion in government dependence, and bureaucratic bloat.

What Americans may not know, however, is that there is no chance ObamaCare will ever be repealed unless they vote Obama out of office in November.

Human Right's - A Pretext

'Human Rights' Have Become A Pretext For, Not Limit On, State Power

By MARK STEYN
Posted 02/24/2012 05:50 PM ET



CNN's John King did his best the other night, producing a question from one of his viewers:

"Since birth control is the latest hot topic, which candidate believes in birth control, and if not, why?"

To their credit, no Republican candidates were inclined to accept the premise of the question. King might have done better to put the issue to Danica Patrick. For some reason, Michelle Fields of The Daily Caller sought the views of the NASCAR driver and Sports Illustrated swimwear model about "the Obama administration's dictate that religious employers provide health care plans that cover contraceptives."
Miss Patrick, a practicing Catholic, gave the perfect citizen's response for the Age of Obama:

"I leave it up to the government to make good decisions for Americans."

That's the real "hot topic" here — whether a majority of citizens, in America as elsewhere in the West, is willing to "leave it up to the government" to make decisions on everything that matters.

On the face of it, the choice between the Obama administration and the Catholic Church should not be a tough one. On the one hand, we have the plain language of the First Amendment as stated in the U.S. Constitution since 1791:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

On the other, we have a regulation invented by executive order under the vast powers given to Kathleen Sebelius under a 2,500-page catalogue of statist enforcement passed into law by a government party that didn't even bother to read it.

Commissar Sebelius says that she is trying to "strike the appropriate balance." But these two things — a core, bedrock, constitutional principle, and Section 47(e)viii of Micro-Regulation Four Bazillion And One issued by Leviathan's Bureau of Compliance — are not equal, and you can only "balance" them by massively increasing state power and massively diminishing the citizen's.

Or, to put it more benignly, by "leaving it up to the government to make good decisions."
Some of us have been here before. For most of the last five years, I've been battling Canada's so-called "human rights" commissions, and similar thought police in Britain, Europe and elsewhere. As I write this, I'm in Australia, to talk up the cause of free speech, which is, alas, endangered even in that great land.

In that sense, the "latest hot topic" — the clash between Obama and American Catholics — is, in fact, a perfect distillation of the broader struggle in the West today. When it comes to human rights, I go back to 1215 and Magna Carta — or, to give it its full name, Magna Carta Libertatum. My italics: I don't think they had them back in 1215. But they understood that "libertatum" is the word that matters.
Back then, "human rights" were rights of humans, of individuals — and restraints upon the king: They're the rights that matter: limitations upon kingly power.

Eight centuries later, we have entirely inverted the principle: "Rights" are now gifts that a benign king graciously showers upon his subjects — the right to "free" health care, to affordable housing, the "right of access to a free placement service" (to quote the European Constitution's "rights" for workers).

The Democratic National Committee understands the new school of rights very well: In its recent video, Obama's bureaucratic edict is upgraded into the "right to contraception coverage at no additional cost." And, up against a "human right" as basic as that, how can such peripheral rights as freedom of conscience possibly compete?

The transformation of "human rights" from restraints upon state power into a pretext for state power is nicely encapsulated in the language of Article 14 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which states that everyone has the right "to receive free compulsory education." Got that? You have the human right to be forced to do something by the government.

Commissar Sebelius isn't the only one interested in "striking the appropriate balance" between individual liberty and state compulsion. Everyone talks like that these days.

For Canada's Chief Censor, Jennifer Lynch, freedom of expression is just one menu item in the great all-you-can-eat salad bar of rights, so don't be surprised if we're occasionally out of stock. Instead, why not try one of our tasty nutritious rights du jour? Like the human right to a transsexual labiaplasty, or the human right of McDonald's employees not to have to wash their hands after visiting the bathroom.

Commissar Lynch puts it this way:
"The modern conception of rights is that of a matrix with different rights and freedoms mutually reinforcing each other to build a strong and durable human rights system."

That would be a matrix as in some sort of intricate biological sequencing very few people can understand? Or a Matrix as in the illusory world created to maintain a supine citizenry by all-controlling government officials?

The point is, with so many pseudo-"rights" bouncing around, you need a bigger and bigger state: Individual rights are less important than a "rights system" — i.e., a government bureaucracy.
This perversion of rights is killing the western world.

First, unlike real rights — to freedom of speech and freedom of religion — these new freedoms come with quite a price tag. All the free stuff is free in the sense of those offers that begin "You pay nothing now!"

But you will eventually. No nation is rich enough to give you all this "free" stuff year in, year out. Spain's government debt works out to $18,000 per person, France's to $33,000, Greece's to $39,000.

Thank God we're not Greece, huh? Er, in fact, according to the Senate Budget Committee, U.S. government debt is currently $44,215 per person. Going by the official Obama budget numbers, it will rise over the next ten years to $75,000. As I say, that's per person: 75 grand in debt for every man, woman and child, not to mention every one of the ever swelling ranks of retirees and disabled Social Security recipients — or about $200,000 per household.

So maybe you're not interested in philosophical notions of liberty vs. statism — like Danica Patrick, tens of millions of people are happy to "leave it up to the government to make good decisions." Maybe you're relatively relaxed about the less theoretical encroachments of Big Government — the diversion of so much American energy into "professional services," all the lawyering and bookkeeping and paperwork shuffling necessary to keep you and your economic activity in full compliance with the Bureau of Compliance.

But at some point no matter how painless the seductions of statism, you run up against the hard math: As those debt per capita numbers make plain, all this "free" stuff is doing is mortgaging your liberty and lining up a future of serfdom.

I used to think that the U.S. Constitution would prove more resilient than the less absolutist liberties of other western nations. But the president has calculated that, with ObamaCare, the First Amendment and much else will crumble before his will. And, given trends in U.S. jurisprudence, who's to say he won't get his way?

That's the point about all this "free" stuff: Ultimately, it's not about your rights, but about his.
© Mark Steyn, 2012

Today's Reckless Spenders

Today's Reckless Spenders Enslave Future Generations

Posted 02/24/2012 06:58 PM ET

Bleak Future: A fresh report says the new federal debt ceiling of $16.4 trillion will likely be reached just after Election Day. Those driving it up will be relatively unaffected. They'll just deliver the bill to our children.

The Bipartisan Policy Center has set the next DC-Day for late November, after just a few weeks earlier saying it would hit in the spring of 2013. Pundits will no doubt wonder how the earlier date will affect the election.

And for good reason: Yet another debate over raising the debt ceiling will swing some voters.

But largely lost in the endless analyses, high-speed spin and roaring rhetoric is one fact that reflects poorly on today's political class: The debt burden will fall hardest on those who have no vote and no say in this country's public policy.

Liable for the biggest chunk of the debt are children being born today. According to the Senate Budget Committee, each member of this group, which employs no lobbyists, already owes $1.53 million in federal debt.

Those with the next highest burden — today's high school students — will owe only about half that of today's babies: about $870,000. College students are third, inheriting $681,000 in debt.

Those who ran up the indebtedness get off lightly. Baby Boomers are on hook for only $157,000 each.
These are, of course, averages among age groups.

More specific totals depend on birth date. President Obama, for example, in a mere three years has run up more debt than all the presidents from Washington to Clinton combined. He'll be responsible for only $208,301, according to a debt calculator created by the GOP staff on the Senate Budget Committee.

The president's oldest daughter Malia, will be stuck with $978,849 in debt, while second-born Sasha will have to pay $1.1 million.
Don't forget that this is the father who in an open letter to his children said he ran for president "because of what I want for you and for every child in this nation."

We have to presume that what he wanted was to put them in position to spend their lifetimes paying off an incomprehensibly steep liability that he's helped run up.

We also must infer that his daughters' debt meets his definition of "fairness" — that it is the "hope" and "change" he promised while campaigning.

Of course, it isn't just Obama. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — who owes a mere $71,286 — and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid — $71,927 — have taken part in this inter-generational crime. And, yes, so have many Republicans. This is a bipartisan disaster.

But in 2012, the federal debt will cut hard between the parties. There will be a clear choice between the camp that will continue to irresponsibly crank out more debt, and the other, which will run on a platform of bringing the wild federal beast under control.

If voters make the wrong choices, future generations will be too indebted to have lives of their own.

Santorim's Economic Plan

My Economic Freedom Agenda

We need bold tax reform, but Mitt Romney wants to tinker at the margins.

America's budget process is broken. Our economy and American families are struggling, and the country needs bold reforms and major restructuring, not tinkering at the margins. Obamanomics has left one in six Americans in poverty, and one in four children on food stamps. Millions seek jobs and others have given up.

Meanwhile, my opponent in the Republican primaries, Mitt Romney, had a last-minute conversion. Attempting to distract from his record of tax and fee increases as governor of Massachusetts, poor job creation, and aggressive pursuit of earmarks, he now says he wants to follow my lead and lower individual as well as corporate marginal tax rates.

It's a good start. But it doesn't go nearly far enough. He says his proposed tax cuts would be revenue neutral and, borrowing the language of Occupy Wall Street, promises the top 1% will pay for the cuts. No pro-growth tax policy there, just more Obama-style class warfare.
By contrast, in my first 100 days as president, I'll submit to Congress and work to pass a comprehensive pro-growth and pro-family

Economic Freedom Agenda. Here are 10 of its main initiatives:

• Unleash America's energy. I'll approve the Keystone Pipeline for jobs and energy security, and sign an order on day one unleashing America's domestic energy production, allowing states to choose where they want to explore for oil and natural gas and to set their own regulations for hydrofracking.
• Stop job-killing regulation. All Obama administration regulations that have an economic burden over $100 million will be repealed, including the Environmental Protection Agency rule on CO2 emissions that's already shut down six power plants. I'll review all regulations, making sure they use sound science and cost benefit analysis.
• A pro-growth, pro-family tax policy. I'll submit to Congress comprehensive tax policies to strengthen opportunity in our country, with only two income tax rates of 10% and 28%. To help families, I'll triple the personal deduction for children and eliminate the marriage tax penalty.
• Restore America's competitiveness. The corporate tax rate should be halved, to a flat rate of 17.5%. Corporations should be allowed to expense all business equipment and investment. Taxes on corporate earnings repatriated from overseas should be eliminated to bring home manufacturing. I'll take the lead on tort reform to lower costs to consumers.
• Rein in spending. I'll propose spending cuts of $5 trillion over five years, including cuts for the remainder of fiscal year 2013. I'll propose budgets that spend less money each year than prior years, and I'll reduce the nondefense-related federal work force by at least 10%, without replacing them with private contractors.
• Repeal and replace ObamaCare. I'll submit legislation to repeal ObamaCare, and on day one issue an executive order ending related regulatory obligations on the states. I'll work with Congress to replace ObamaCare with competitive insurance choices to improve quality and limit the costs of health care, while protecting those with uninsurable health conditions. In contrast, Gov. Romney signed into law RomneyCare, which provided the model for ObamaCare. Its best-known feature is its overreaching individual health-care mandate. But it shares over a dozen other similarities with ObamaCare and has given Massachusetts the highest health-care premiums in the nation, and longer waits for health care.
• Balance the budget. I'll submit to Congress a budget that will balance within four years and call on Congress to pass a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution which limits federal spending to 18% of GDP.
• Negotiate and submit free trade agreements. Because many Americans work for companies which export, I'll initiate negotiations in the first 100 days and submit to Congress five free trade agreements during my first year in office to increase exports.
• Reform entitlements. I'll cut means-tested entitlement programs by 10% across the board, freeze them for four years, and block grant them to states—as I did as the author of welfare reform in 1996. I'll reform Medicare and Social Security so they are fiscally sustainable for seniors and young people.
• Revive housing. I'll submit plans to Congress to phase out within several years Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's federal housing role, reform and make transparent the Federal Reserve, and allow families whose mortgages are "underwater" to deduct losses from the sale of their home in order to get a fresh start in difficult economic times.

I'll work with Congress and the American people to once again create an economic environment where hard work is rewarded, equal opportunity exists for all, and families providing for their children can once again be optimistic about their future.

Mr. Santorum, a former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, is a Republican candidate for president.

Dumbing Down the American Dream

The Most That You Can Keep

       Posted By Richard Fernandez On February 21, 2012 @ 10:16 am In Uncategorized | 69 Comments

An opinion piece carried by the Associated Press ^[1] contrasts what Erica Werner calls the new “spare, fundamental” American Dream to the “rhetoric from Obama’s 2008 White House campaign.” The soaring promises have vanished; in its place is the new line that Obama is the best candidate to keep you from losing it all. “With the economy showing no signs of life: no jobs, mortgages they can’t pay, dwindling retirement funds and college savings,” it is hope of a different kind. The residual aspiration is you can actually have a “job, a house, a college education for the kids, health care, money for retirement,” some day anyway.
The article quotes Xavier professor Michael Ford, who explains that the downsized dream is pretty much all anyone can still believe in without laughing out loud: “It’s pretty basic stuff (Obama) talks about and I think as it turns out that’s pretty much where the dream is right now.” But Werner says it’s working, because now Change You Can Believe In is real. Hoping for food on the table is so much more convincing than promising the oceans will fall and the Earth will begin to heal.
And speaking of food, MSNBC ^[2] says a new poll shows Americans really want smaller portions at food outlets:

What if the server at your favorite fast food joint asked if you wanted to downsize your order, instead of asking you to supersize it? That’s a strategy that might make some patrons happier — and a lot thinner, a new study suggests.

Consumers want higher gas prices too. Describing the steps necessary to remove the carbon threat driving global warming, Energy Secretary Steven Chu ^[3] said: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” It was an idea the president opposed — unless it could be done gradually ^[4]:

I think that I would have preferred a gradual adjustment. The fact that this is such a shock to American pocketbooks is not a good thing. But if we take some steps right now to help people make the adjustment, first of all by putting more money into their pockets, but also by encouraging the market to adapt to these new circumstances more quickly, particularly US automakers, then I think ultimately, we can come out of this stronger and have a more efficient energy policy than we do right now.

Then presumably higher prices would be alright. Some on the Democratic Party’s left wing argue that this does not go far enough: a certain amount of poverty — just how much is open to debate — should be an actual policy goal. Greedy Western capitalist consumers already consume too much of the world’s resources, so the thinking goes. Lower levels of resource consumption are actually good for the Earth. Then there is the argument from necessity — that higher levels simply can’t be delivered. Sorry if President Obama campaigned on them — he misspoke.
James Kunstler ^[5] writes that President Obama had better get down to managing expectations. He will need to:

Dear Mr. President, you are presiding over an epochal contraction, not a pause in the growth epic. Your assignment is to manage that contraction in a way that does not lead to world war, civil disorder or both. Among other things, contraction means that all the activities of everyday life need to be downscaled including standards of living, ranges of commerce, and levels of governance. “Consumerism” is dead. Revolving credit is dead — at least at the scale that became normal the last thirty years. The wealth of several future generations has already been spent and there is no equity left there to re-finance.
If contraction and downscaling are indeed the case, then the better question is: why don’t we get started on it right away instead of flogging rescue plans to restart something that is DOA?

Why not get started on downscaling indeed? Why not change the optics on the American Dream? The new watchword should be “keep all that you can keep.” Rhetoric is equally useful when describing the valleys as well as the mountaintops.
When Edward Kennedy eulogized his brother Bobby ^[6], Ted paraphrased his deceased sibling’s catchphrase, itself derived from George Bernard Shaw: “Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?” But that is so Sixties, an age when more seemed better. Today the motto should be: “Some men see things as they are and say why? I say, why not less?”
The Guardian ^[7] calls doing with less “an exciting idea.” In a piece that begins by expressing its disgust at American crowds stampeding through shopping malls on sale days, it paints the picture of a newer, better — and yes, ok, poorer world. Poorer yes, but cooler and trendier too:

Rachel Botsman, a “social innovator” who has presented her ideas at Downing Street and before Microsoft and Google executives, retells the event in her book, What’s Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way We Live. “It’s a sad and chilling metaphor for our culture at large — a crowd of exhausted consumers knocking down the doors and ploughing down people simply to buy more stuff.”
Botsman rails in the book against the excesses, futility and contradictions of mass consumption, but she doesn’t rehash the usual tropes of anti-consumerism. Rather, her book is a cry for us to consume “smarter” by moving away from the outdated concept of outright ownership — and the lust to own — towards one where we share, barter, rent, and swap assets that include not just consumables, but also our “time and space” …
“Cars are 90% under-utilized by their owners,” she tells me from her home in Australia. “And 70% of journeys are solo rides. So we now see car club companies such as Streetcar proving very popular in cities. In Munich, BMW now has a scheme where it lets members pay for a car by the minute rather than by the hour. And websites such as ParkatmyHouse.com are allowing people to make money from unused space outside their properties. A great example is a church in Islington, London, which was facing financial trouble. But it started renting parking space out front and it now makes £70,000 a year from doing so.”

Isn’t that exciting? And even if it ain’t, perhaps we’ve got no choice. Carpooling, smaller portions, vehicles left in the garage for lack of gas and barter. These had a name once: it was called poverty. Today it’s just smart consumption. It’s good for your soul too, as a figure of speech of course, since Heaven does not exist and Hell isn’t as bad as it was cracked up to be, now that it’s here.
Adbusters, which played a role in starting the Occupy Wall Street movement, featured an article by French philosopher Bernard Stiegler ^[8] which argues that rather than attempt to boost production and create more products, policy should focus on “what Aristotle called philia ^[9], and which would then form the basis of a new type of economic investment.” Stiegler ^[8], who “taught himself philosophy while imprisoned for armed robbery,” teaches that we should all groove on our navels, at the exquisite way in which the lint just sits there, poised between the protruding hairs:

[Stiegler] is concerned with the way in which the industrial organization of production and then consumption has had destructive consequences for the modes of life of human beings, in particular with the way in which the loss of savoir-faire and savoir-vivre (that is, the loss of the knowledge of how to do and how to live), has resulted in what Stiegler calls “generalized proletarianization.” In this series Stiegler makes clear his view that, in the light of the present state of the global technical system, it is not a matter of overcoming capitalism but rather of transforming its industrial basis to prevent the loss of spirit from which it increasingly suffers.

Which means, if I understand Stiegler correctly, that we are moving toward a future where we’d all like to buy the world a Coke without actually having the money to afford one, even for ourselves. It’s an exciting future, one which at any rate will surprise many. Though maybe they shouldn’t be astonished. It’s worth remembering that Jonestown ^[10] started out as a project to build a socialist paradise on Earth and ended up with a universal requirement to practice “revolutionary suicide.” The dream became a nightmare, but maybe it was always that under the mask.

Econ 101 for Dummies

The Wall Street Journal has uncovered yet more madness in the President’s tardy budget plan:

Mr. Obama is proposing to raise the dividend tax rate to the higher personal income tax rate of 39.6% that will kick in next year. Add in the planned phase-out of deductions and exemptions, and the rate hits 41%. Then add the 3.8% investment tax surcharge in ObamaCare, and the new dividend tax rate in 2013 would be 44.8%—nearly three times today’s 15% rate.

Keep in mind that dividends are paid to shareholders only after the corporation pays taxes on its profits. So assuming a maximum 35% corporate tax rate and a 44.8% dividend tax, the total tax on corporate earnings passed through as dividends would be 64.1%.

That’s nearly two-thirds going straight into Uncle Sam’s pocket, just for sitting there and promising to maybe “go easy on you” next year. Nice work if you can get it. Way to sock it to those mean old corporations, too, Mr. President. And to which I’d like to add: Herp-derp-derp.

The problem is, corporations don’t pay taxes. Not one red cent. They never have and they never will, even if you jack up the corporate rate to infinity-percent-plus-one.

I got this fantastic notion this morning, when I remembered an Econ 101 lecture given by Prof. Walter Johnson at Mizzou twenty-mumble years ago. He was an institution at the university, and punctuated his lectures with, “Money, money, money — I love it!” in his gravelly voice. See, Johnson was something of a Kennedy Democrat, back when Democrats still honestly cared about a growing economy.

During one class he told us the story of the Columbia, Missouri city council getting the idea that there were all these students in town — and those lazy good-for-nothings weren’t paying any property taxes. Why, true and sturdy full-time residents pay property taxes on their homes, but these meddling kids are here most of the year, and all they do is rent. We’ve got to make them pay!

So Johnson gave the council a good talking to. He told them — and I think this is an exact quote — that, “just because someone doesn’t have a receipt, doesn’t mean they aren’t paying taxes.” And then he gave the council his proof.

Student A rents an apartment from Landlord B. Landlord B pays the property taxes to Council C on his rental unit every year like a good, full-time, property-owning resident of Columbia, MO. Now, let’s say Council C decides to raise property taxes on Landlord B. Does

Landlord B simply eat the increase, or does he pass the cost along to Student A? Well, in higher rent or fewer services, yes, Landlord B will find a way to make Student A pay for the taxes imposed by Council C.

Student A does pay property taxes, even if Council C never issued them a receipt for it.

Similarly, just because someone does have a receipt for taxes paid, doesn’t mean they’re the ones who paid the taxes.

Assume a perfect world — one with no taxes. When you’re done laughing and/or crying, please follow along.

Let’s say Corporation D is smart and lucky enough to show a profit — and in our perfect world, it doesn’t need to form any shelters to dodge any taxes. What does Corp D do with the money? It has several choices, including:

• Hire more workers

• Pay dividends

• Increase pay and/or benefits
• Deposit a rainy day fund
• Invest in expanded production or merger

That’s not a complete list, but you get the idea.
Now, perfect worlds never last, so let’s say some smart laddie gets himself elected President, sees all that money Corporation D made, and says, “Those greedy corporations need to pay their fair share!” And Congress goes along and imposes a 25% tax on profits. What happens next? That tax gets paid, all right.

It gets paid by the new workers who weren’t hired, by the retirees and mutual funds who got smaller dividend checks, by the employees who didn’t get a pay raise, by the banks who got smaller deposits to loan out, by the entrepreneur who couldn’t get a loan, and it’s paid by each and every one of us, in the form of reduced investment and lower economic growth.

Yes, Corporation D holds the receipt for taxes paid. But the money came out of our hides, not “theirs.”

We have met the greedy corporation, and he is us.

WSJ - O's Virtual Economy

Obama's Virtual Economy
It's endless fun, fiddling with the dials on the real world.
   
If you were a president who for three years presided over an economy with more than 13 million unemployed, a growth rate gasping around 2%, an historic credit downgrade and underwater home mortgages drifting like icebergs toward the American Titanic, what would you do?
You'd do what Barack Obama's done: Reboot.
 With his recently announced campaign platform—An Economy Built to Last—President Obama has essentially constructed a virtual economy. Instead of the economy we all live in, he's making one up and inviting us to pretend we are living in it. Welcome to the Sim City Economy.
Sim City, one of the most popular products ever in the imaginary world of video games, lets players bring to life towns of their own devising in great detail. It's endless fun, fiddling with the dials on the real world.
In his State of the Union Address, Mr. Obama described what will be a major claim of his re-election campaign—that he renewed the American dream by bailing out General Motors. About the defensibility of this policy we can argue. But as is his wont, Mr. Obama erected a generalized theory of social betterment atop this one event. "What's happening in Detroit can happen in other industries." Mr. Obama announced. "It can happen in Cleveland and Pittsburgh and Raleigh."
It can?
What's interesting about this claim is that the corridor between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, much of it economically moribund for years, is experiencing a rebirth thanks to real economic forces, not a president who types in the name of another beleaguered city and hits Ctrl-Shift-Enter to solve its problems.
Most of this revival is taking place around the godforsaken city of Youngstown, Ohio, and the formerly dying steel towns west of Pittsburgh, an area better known today as the Marcellus Shale Natural Gas Field. Last summer, a French steel company, Vallourec & Mannesmann Holdings Inc., began construction on a new $650 million plant to make steel tubes for the hydraulic fracking industry. About 400 workers are building it. Nothing Barack Obama has done in three years—not the $800 billion stimulus or anything in his four, $3 trillion-plus budgets—is remotely related to the better times in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
But other than grudging acknowledgment of the private entrepreneurs' natural-gas success, don't expect to hear the carbon-based word "fracking" much in the president's stump speech when he paints in the numbers of the American economy as he imagines it. That pitch will run more toward the ideas in the Presidential Memorandum released this Tuesday, directing the Department of Agriculture to put in motion a program called "Promoting a Bioeconomy."
The Obama Bioeconomy will come to life after the Ag Department "increases the purchase of biobased products" under a program that originated in the 2002 farm bill. After mandating a 50% increase in products designated as biobased, "items like paints, soaps and detergents . . . are developed from farm grown plants, rather than chemicals or petroleum bases." This, the president says, "will drive innovation and economic growth and create jobs at marginal cost to the American public."
You can't make this up. On the other hand, that's the point: You can make this up, and then sell it, or try to sell it, as An Economy Built to Last.
The announcement Tuesday of the impending Bioeconomy was of course overwhelmed that day by the president's White House speech celebrating Congress's one-year extension of his payroll tax cut. This was the biggest economic policy event in Washington the past two months. The president himself announced the payoff for the American people: "It means $40 extra in their paycheck." Sounds real, but barely.
Moments later, he drew attention to an initiative "we passed" that will "create jobs by expanding wireless broadband and ensuring that first responders have access to the latest lifesaving technologies." When Newt makes claims like this, he's nuts; with Barack Obama, it's a vision.
A cynic might argue that none of these pretend ideas for reviving a $15 trillion economy in the second term matters much because the lasting damage was done in the first term, with ObamaCare's redo of the health sector—16% of the economy—and Dodd-Frank, which even the bureaucrats asked to write things like the Volcker Rule admit they can't figure out.
A cynic might say further that much of what Mr. Obama is outputting from his laptop for the next four years are pop-gun ideas or phantom tax policy. The Buffett Rule will never become a real law. On Wednesday Mr. Obama proposed an array of corporate tax changes—some up, some down—but as the reporting noted repeatedly, with virtually "no specifics." Ctrl-Alt-Delete. The scheme to revive manufacturing—taxes overseas that are reprogrammed into domestic hires—would challenge even Sim City's programmers.
Cynical resignation and a president living in a videogame economy aren't what the U.S. needs at this turn in history. The biggest burden on this week's two Republican front-runners, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, will be to describe—in detail—what really happened to the U.S. economy the past three years. Against that reality, Mr. Obama will repeat until November that he wants an economy "where everyone plays by the same set of rules." If he's writing them, it may not compute.
Write to henninger@wsj.com

SL 02-17-2012

February 17, 2012
As Broadcast on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America
By Seth Leibsohn

This week, we saw two things worth talking about this morning:  President Barack Obama’s job approvals ticked upwards and he released his new annual budget.  We’ll get to the job approval in a moment, but first the budget.

In his second month in office, the President promised to cut the deficit in half. Let’s look at what recent budget deficits have been.  The last budget President Bush disseminated in 2008 scheduled a deficit of 482 billion dollars.  President Obama’s first budget, released in 2009, scheduled a deficit of 1.75 trillion dollars.  His next budget, released in 2010 had a 1.26 trillion dollar deficit.  The budget he released last year had a 1.1 trillion dollar projected deficit which we are now told will be 1.3 trillion.  And this past week, his budget for next year contemplates a budget deficit of just over 900 billion dollars—if you think he can keep it there.

I say “if you think he can keep it there” because of three things:  a) Each deficit he projected was lower in the projection than in the actuality; b) he is the only president to have actually submitted three budgets in a row with projected deficits of over one trillion dollars each; and c)  there is no way to cut the deficit in half when you keep breaking the bank with them.  And I say “breaking the bank” because we merely have to look at our national debt to see where this administration has taken our debt after three years of blaming President Bush for fiscal irresponsibility.  Let’s do that now.  When President Obama took office, our national debt was 10.6 trillion dollars.  Today it is 15.3 trillion dollars.  It has risen five trillion dollars under President Obama.  (And, just in case you are wondering, yes, it went up five trillion dollars under President Bush as well, but over the course of eight years and two wars—not three years and the ending of wars).

Now, one small point I want to dispatch with right now, and we will return to it at greater length next week.  The Bush tax cuts.  The next time you hear someone say the Bush tax cuts caused this, all you need know is one and half things:  If we restored the taxes on the top earners in this country that President Bush cut, that would bring in a whopping 80 billion dollars to our treasury.  It wouldn’t amount to even a drop in the bucket of our deficit.  Eighty billion dollars doesn’t even cover the difference between President Obama’s real deficits and his projected deficits.  It doesn’t even cover one tenth of his stimulus program which, to repeat, saw unemployment go up.

So, a promise of fiscal restraint is nowhere in sight, just as a campaign for fiscal restraint in 2008 has nowhere been achieved.  A broken campaign promise, a broken presidential promise.

While we are on this topic, though, let’s take a look at a few items from the new budget that was released this week.  Where does it expand and where does it cut, and you tell me if this look like our priorities are in order.  The Department of Education gets a 3.6% budget increase, the largest increase of all departments outside of State, Veterans Affairs, and Commerce.  What gets cut?  Homeland Security and Defense.  Is our world more safe?  Is our country more safe?  I submit that, from several areas of concern, our world and our country are becoming less safe.

This includes Iraq, which is now falling into the hands of Iran; Iran, which is closer to a nuclear weapon than ever; Egypt, which is now a Muslim Brotherhood stronghold and has, by the way, restored relations with Iran; and Russia, whose appetite we appeased in the START treaty and is growing more aggressive by the day. It could also include Afghanistan, as we are now attempting to negotiate with the Taliban.  It could also include Venezuela, who we have appeased in siding against the anti-Chavez forces in Honduras and in saying it is not a threat.  It could also include China who we appease by sheer appeasement, including the snubbing of the Dalai Lama.

As for what we have achieved with our record deficit spending—it wasn’t lower unemployment.  President Obama came into office with an unemployment rate of 7.8 percent.  He pushed and passed a stimulus package that spent over 800 billion dollars that was meant to keep unemployment from, by his own advisors’ words, going beyond 8 percent.  Well, unemployment went over 10 percent under President Obama and today it is still over 8 percent.  In fact, 1.2 million fewer Americans are working today than when President Obama took office.  So, let’s just summarize his budget and success on his budgets in one phrase:  Higher deficits, less jobs.  If you don’t like that, try this:  More spending, more unemployment.

So let us pause and ask where has his success been, why does he deserve an uptick in approval ratings?

Have our international relations and relationships improved, have they been reset as he said he wanted to do?  Well, on a couple of accounts, yes, they have been reset--backwards.  We are farther and have put more space between ourselves and many of our allies than ever before.  To wit, Israel, Great Britain, the Czech Republic, Poland, Canada, and Egypt.  That’s not a reset to be proud of—indeed, it does not even reach the level of embarrassment, it is, rather, the madness of fools and dangerous.  It has put Israel in greater danger of extinction, it has made other countries more vulnerable.  And, it has breathed new life into both Sunni and Shiite radicalism.

How about his great domestic achievement, health care reform?  Let’s just put a few things together on that.  First, it took legislative tricks to pass the Senate and it didn’t receive one Republican vote there.  It received a total of one Republican vote in the House, and that Republican is gone.  By the way, 34 Democrats voted against it in the House—making the vote against it more bi-partisan than the vote for it.  And, today, the latest polling has Obamacare unfavorability at 44 percent compared to a favorability of 37 percent.  When it passed, 39 percent of Americans supported the law.  So: it passed against the wishes of the American people, and it has become less popular today.  Has this major law, by the way, fixed healthcare in anyway?  Indeed, it has not. The uninsured population has jumped to over 17 percent, up from 14.8 percent in George Bush’s last year in office.  And, as the past three weeks have shown, it is now being used as a sledgehammer against religious freedom. Many of us think the law unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause.  But today, we see the law being used to attack religious freedom.  The First Amendment.  That is the price we are paying for this monumental piece of legislation.  The very freedoms we came here for and founded this country upon.

There is so much I have not addressed here but let us summarize:

Record deficits, an increased national debt, more unemployment, worse relations with our allies, appeasement of our enemies, a new entitlement, less religious freedom.

Let’s do that one more time: Record deficits, an increased national debt, more unemployment, worse relations with our allies, appeasement of our enemies, a new entitlement, less religious freedom.

That, today, is the Obama record.  And we see his numbers go up.  What is my point?  My point is our opposition is not working and we have one chance to try to turn this around.  Chance.  Try.  That is November.  We can do it.  But it’s going to take a lot more vigilance.  A lot more attention. A lot more education. A lot more talking.  And a lot more activism.

Things have been worse in this country and we’ve turned them around.  The question I have is this:  Can we afford to let them get worse yet, and if so, will it be possible to turn it around?  That is the difference between now and then: when we were up against the wall in the past, during the Civil War, during the Great Depression, during the Carter years, we had an ability to turn things around.  To summon ourselves to the better angels of our nature, to roll up our sleeves and go about the work of repairing ourselves.  Four more years—and again, I haven’t even mentioned energy independence or regulations that hamper hiring and investment—four more years and I don’t know if we can do it.  Let’s not find out.

TS - Progressive Legacy Pt III

Editor's Note: This is Part III in a series. Part I can be found here. Part II can be found here.
The same presumptions of superior wisdom and virtue behind the interventionism of Progressive Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the domestic economy also led them to be interventionists in other countries.
Theodore Roosevelt was so determined that the United States should intervene against Spain's suppression of an uprising in Cuba that he quit his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to organize his own private military force -- called "Rough Riders" -- to fight in what became the Spanish-American war.
The spark that set off this war was an explosion that destroyed an American battleship anchored in Havana harbor. There was no proof that Spain had anything to do with it, and a study decades later suggested that the explosion originated inside the ship itself.
But Roosevelt and others were hot for intervention before the explosion, which simply gave them the excuse they needed to go to war against Spain, seizing Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
Although it was a Republican administration that did this, Democrat Woodrow Wilson justified it. Progressive principles of imposing superior wisdom and virtue on others were invoked.
Wilson saw the indigenous peoples brought under American control as beneficiaries of progress. He said, "they are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice."
If that sounds racist, it is perfectly consistent with President Wilson's policies at home. The Wilson administration introduced racial segregation in Washington government agencies where it did not exist when Wilson took office.
Woodrow Wilson also invited various dignitaries to the White House to watch a showing of the film "The Birth of a Nation," which glorified the Ku Klux Klan -- and which Wilson praised.
All of this was consistent with the Progressive era in general, when supposedly "scientific" theories of racial superiority and inferiority were at their zenith. Theodore Roosevelt was the exception, rather than the rule, among Progressives when he did not agree with these theories.
Consistent with President Wilson's belief in racial superiority as a basis for intervening in other countries, he launched military interventions in various Latin American countries, before his intervention in the First World War.
Woodrow Wilson was also a precursor of later Progressives in assuming that the overthrow of an autocratic and despotic government means an advance toward democracy. In 1917, President Wilson spoke of "heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia."
What was "heartening" to Wilson was the overthrow of the czars. What it led to in fact was the rise of a totalitarian tyranny that killed more political prisoners in a year than the czars had killed in more than 90 years.
Although Wilson proclaimed that the First World War was being fought because "The world must be made safe for democracy," in reality the overthrow of autocratic rule in Germany and Italy also led to totalitarian regimes that were far worse. Those today who assume that the overthrow of authoritarian governments in Egypt and Libya is a movement toward democracy are following in Wilson's footsteps.
The ultimate hubris of Woodrow Wilson was in promoting the carving up of whole empires after the First World War, in the name of "the self-determination of peoples." But, in reality, it was not the peoples who did the carving but Wilson, French Premier Georges Clemenceau and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Walter Lippmann saw what a reckless undertaking this was. He said, "We are feeding on maps, talking of populations as if they were abstract lumps." He was struck by the ignorance of those who were reshaping whole nations and the lives of millions of people.
He said of this nation-building effort: "When you consider what a mystery the East Side of New York is to the West Side, the business of arranging the world to the satisfaction of the people in it may be seen in something like its true proportions."

But Progressives, especially intellectuals, are the least likely to suspect that they are in fact ignorant of the things they are intervening in, whether back in the Progressive era or today.

TS - Progressive Legacy Pt II

Editor's note: This is Part II in a series. Part I can be found here.
"Often wrong but never in doubt" is a phrase that summarizes much of what was done by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the two giants of the Progressive era, a century ago.
Their legacy is very much alive today, both in their mindset -- including government picking winners and losers in the economy and interventionism in foreign countries -- as well as specific institutions created during the Progressive era, such as the income tax and the Federal Reserve System.
Like so many Progressives today, Theodore Roosevelt felt no need to study economics before intervening in the economy. He said of "economic issues" that "I am not deeply interested in them, my problems are moral problems." For example, he found it "unfair" that railroads charged different rates to different shippers, reaching the moral conclusion that these rates were discriminatory and should be forbidden "in every shape and form."
It never seemed to occur to TR that there could be valid economic reasons for the railroads to charge the Standard Oil Company lower rates for shipping their oil. At a time when others shipped their oil in barrels, Standard Oil shipped theirs in tank cars -- which required a lot less work by the railroads than loading and unloading the same amount of oil in barrels.
Theodore Roosevelt was also morally offended by the fact that Standard Oil created "enormous fortunes" for its owners "at the expense of business rivals." How a business can offer consumers lower prices without taking customers away from businesses that charge higher prices is a mystery still unsolved to the present day, when the very same arguments are used against Wal-Mart.
The same preoccupation with being "fair" to high-cost producers who were losing customers to low-cost producers has turned anti-trust law on its head, for generations after the Progressive era. Although anti-trust laws and policies have been rationalized as ways of keeping monopolies from raising prices to consumers, the actual thrust of anti-trust activity has more often been against businesses that charged lower prices than their competitors.
Theodore Roosevelt's anti-trust attacks on low-price businesses in his time were echoed in later "fair trade" laws, and in attacks against "unfair" competition by the Federal Trade Commission, another agency spawned in the Progressive era.
Woodrow Wilson's Progressivism was very much in the same mindset. Government intervention in the economy was justified on grounds that "society is the senior partner in all business."
The rhetorical transformation of government into "society" is a verbal sleight-of-hand trick that endures to this day. So is the notion that money earned in the form of profits requires politicians' benediction to be legitimate, while money earned under other names apparently does not.
Thus Woodrow Wilson declared: "If private profits are to be legitimized, private fortunes made honorable, these great forces which play upon the modern field must, both individually and collectively, be accommodated to a common purpose."
And just who will decide what this common purpose is and how it is to be achieved? "Politics," according to Wilson, "has to deal with and harmonize" these various forces.
In other words, the government -- politicians, bureaucrats and judges -- are to intervene, second-guess and pick winners and losers, in a complex economic process of which they are often uninformed, if not misinformed, and a process in which they pay no price for being wrong, regardless of how high a price will be paid by the economy.
If this headstrong, busybody approach seems familiar because it is similar to what is happening today, that is because it is based on fundamentally the same vision, the same presumptions of superior wisdom, and the same kind of lofty rhetoric we hear today about "fairness." Wilson even used the phrase "social justice."
Woodrow Wilson also won a Nobel Prize for peace, like the current president -- and it was just as undeserved. Wilson's "war to end wars" in fact set the stage for an even bigger, bloodier and more devastating Second World War.

But, then as now, those with noble-sounding rhetoric are seldom judged by what consequences actually follow.

TS - Progressive Legacy Pt I

2/14/2012

 

Although Barack Obama is the first black President of the United States, he is by no means unique, except for his complexion. He follows in the footsteps of other presidents with a similar vision, the vision at the heart of the Progressive movement that flourished a hundred years ago.Many of the trends, problems and disasters of our time are a legacy of that era. We can only imagine how many future generations will be paying the price -- and not just in money -- for the bright ideas and clever rhetoric of our current administration.
The two giants of the Progressive era -- Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson -- clashed a century ago, in the three-way election of 1912. With the Republican vote split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt's newly created Progressive Party, Woodrow Wilson was elected president, so that the Democrats' version of Progressivism became dominant for eight years.
What Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had in common, and what attracts some of today's Republicans and Democrats, respectively, who claim to be following in their footsteps, was a vision of an expanded role of the federal government in the economy and a reduced role for the Constitution of the United States.
Like other Progressives, Theodore Roosevelt was a critic and foe of big business. In this he was not inhibited by any knowledge of economics, and his own business ventures lost money.
Rhetoric was TR's strong suit. He denounced "the mighty industrial overlords" and "the tyranny of mere wealth."
Just what specifically this "tyranny" consisted of was not spelled out. This was indeed an era of the rise of businesses to unprecedented size in industry after industry -- and of prices falling rapidly, as a result of economies of scale that cut production costs and allowed larger profits to be made from lower prices that attracted more customers.
It was easy to stir up hysteria over a rapidly changing economic landscape and the rise of new businessmen like John D. Rockefeller to wealth and prominence. They were called "robber barons," but those who put this label on them failed to specify just who they robbed.
Like other Progressives, TR wanted an income tax to siphon off some of the earnings of the rich. Since the Constitution of the United States forbad such a tax, to the Progressives that simply meant that the Constitution should be changed.
After the 16th Amendment was passed, a very low income-tax rate was levied, as an entering wedge for rates that rapidly escalated up to 73 percent on the highest incomes during the Woodrow Wilson administration.
One of the criticisms of the Constitution by the Progressives, and one still heard today, is that the Constitution is so hard to amend that judges have to loosen its restrictions on the power of the federal government by judicial reinterpretations. Judicial activism is one of the enduring legacies of the Progressive era.
In reality, the Constitution was amended four times in eight years during the Progressive era. But facts carried no more weight with crusading Progressives then than they do today.
Theodore Roosevelt interpreted the Constitution to mean that the President of the United States could exercise any powers not explicitly forbidden to him. This stood the 10th Amendment on its head, for that Amendment explicitly gave the federal government only the powers specifically spelled out, and reserved all other powers to the states or to the people.
Woodrow Wilson attacked the Constitution in his writings as an academic before he became president. Once in power, his administration so restricted freedom of speech that this led to landmark Supreme Court decisions restoring that fundamental right.
Whatever the vision or rhetoric of the Progressive era, its practice was a never-ending expansion of the arbitrary powers of the federal government. The problems they created so discredited Progressives that they started calling themselves "liberals" -- and after they discredited themselves again, they went back to calling themselves "Progressives," now that people no longer remembered how Progressives had discredited themselves before.

Barack Obama's rhetoric of "change" is in fact a restoration of discredited ideas that originated a hundred years ago.

WSJ - Baffled by Pipeline Veto

China will get the oil from Canada that could have come to the U.S.

 

By RICK PERRY

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in Beijing recently signing an agreement and touting his country's growing energy partnership with China. It's good news for Canada, which is rightfully looking to grow markets for its sizeable oil reserves. And it's particularly good news for China, which needs to keep tapping into fresh supplies to feed its growing economy and mounting demand for oil.

Unfortunately, it's bad news for Americans, particularly when you consider that one of the main reasons China has become such an attractive market to Canada was President Obama's recent rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline. This cross-border connection would have provided a golden opportunity to partner with our neighbors to the north in producing massive amounts of energy, both for our country and the globe.

It seems unimaginable, yet President Obama refused Trans-Canada's request to run its pipeline across the border from Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. This extensive pipeline holds the potential of moving up to 830,000 barrels of crude oil per day—including oil produced in North Dakota and Montana—to refineries here in Texas. Translated into job numbers, that's up to 20,000 direct jobs and estimates of up to hundreds of thousands of indirect jobs created by this $7 billion project.

Keystone would have provided a shot in the arm for our nation's uncertain economy, and it could have provided economic opportunity for tens of thousands of families, stretching from here in Texas all the way to the Canadian border.

Hoping to appease environmental radicals, President Obama said no, claiming he didn't have time to adequately consider the pipeline.
This is despite the fact the original request was made in September 2008, and Keystone was the subject of dozens of meetings on multiple levels of his own administration, as well as exhaustive environmental impact reviews. Certainly, three-and-half years is more than enough time to make a decision.

His reasoning becomes even more laughable when you put it up against his massive, ill-conceived so-called stimulus bill, which he muscled through Congress and signed within the first month of his presidency.

President Obama wants us to believe he is for jobs, economic opportunity and greater energy security, and his Keystone decision does help meet those goals—for the People's Republic of China. The American people get nothing.

President Obama simply caved to the more radical activist elements of his base who almost immediately decided they would vigorously oppose Keystone, regardless of the U.S. State Department's conclusion that it would be one of the safest pipeline systems in the United States.

President Obama put his personal political interests ahead of improving our country's economic climate.
His decision also relegates the U.S. to continued reliance on oil from volatile nations in the Middle East, where unrest, chaos and Iran's threats to block the oil supply moving through the Strait of Hormuz are driving gas prices ever closer to $4 a gallon.

It's all reflective of a wrong-headed approach that vilifies energy companies, ignores the realities of energy markets, squeezes the pocketbooks of struggling Americans, and doesn't take us one step closer to energy independence.
In Texas, our approach has been steady and consistent, an "all of the above" energy portfolio that cultivates a vibrant energy market that includes traditional sources, as well as wind, solar and biomass.

We're still a long way from doing it all with renewables, and we need to continue finding and utilizing new supplies of traditional energy sources, like oil, natural gas, nuclear and coal, if we're going to keep our economy healthy in the years to come.
That's what Keystone was bringing us. And that's what President Obama rejected.

There are efforts in Congress to find a way around the president's roadblock, led by Texas Sen. John Cornyn, among others.
Unless President Obama changes his mind, or we find an alternate method of getting the pipeline built, all that oil will likely flow to China instead of here, taking with it an all-too-rare economic opportunity.
Mr. Perry, a Republican, is the governor of Texas.

IBD - O Violates More Than Religion

ObamaCare Violates Far More Than Just Catholic Rights

Posted 02/10/2012 06:33 PM ET

Rights: The president's phony contraception compromise might be enough to convince Catholics their rights aren't being trampled. But what about the rest of us, who face more rights violations in the name of ObamaCare?

The "accommodation" for the church was an exercise in misdirection. Instead of forcing Catholic organizations to violate a basic tenet of their faith and pay for contraception coverage directly, Obama will instead require insurance companies to provide the coverage free of charge.

But wait a second. Since insurers can't print money, the only way they'll be able to afford this new "free" benefit will be to raise premiums on their customers, including the Catholic Church. So the church will end up paying for birth control, just not directly.
Still, the sleight of hand was good enough for the Catholic Health Association, which declared itself "very pleased" with the deal. (The U.S. Catholic bishops hadn't weighed in by press time.)

Bad as this has been, it's just a bitter taste of what's to come under ObamaCare.

Keep in mind that the only reason the contraception mandate became an issue at all is because ObamaCare grants the government wide-ranging authority over what must be covered by insurance, how it's paid for and who has to buy it.

Already, Obama has dictated that insurance plans must cover HIV screening, breast-feeding support, mammograms, colonoscopies and so on, without charging patients a dime for the service. The list will only grow longer as health groups mount vigorous and endless lobbying campaigns to get their treatments covered by every insurance plan nationwide for "free."

After all, that's what happened at the state level, where state-imposed benefit mandates exploded 20% in six years and now total more than 2,100. All of which ends up raising the price of insurance.

But don't go complaining about your rights being trampled, because the mandates will all be justified in the name of public health.
Then of course, there's the ultimate rights violation at the center of ObamaCare — the requirement that every adult American with a pulse buy government-approved insurance or face a stiff penalty. If the Supreme Court has any sense left, it will smack that down at its first opportunity.

Until ObamaCare is pulled out root and branch, however, there will be no end to the rights-wrecking mischief out of Washington.

IBD - Washington Still Fails Education

Washington Still Flunks Education After So Many Years

Posted 02/10/2012 06:33 PM ET

Education: Handing out state-by-state waivers from No Child Left Behind is just a half-measure. It's time to ask a fundamental question about the federal role in schools: Why?

Washington has spent much and achieved little in its attempts to improve the nation's public schools. But hope springs eternal. States also
need the federal money, and the feds (logically) want to see the money deliver results.

Such are the underpinnings of the seemingly endless debate over the No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law just over a decade ago by George W. Bush.

Wrangling over how to change NCLB has been going on almost as long as the law has been in effect, and the issues are not likely to be settled during the current election year.

Meantime, the Obama administration has been granting waivers to states that agree to an alternate school-improvement plan. These states — 10 out of 28 that have applied — will not have to meet the NCLB goal of having all students "proficient" in reading and math by 2014.

In return, they have to come up with viable plans to prepare kids for jobs or college, to evaluate teachers and reward schools based on performance.

This is the same old same old, with a touch of realism. It's widely known that the "proficiency" goal is unachievable. Dropping it is just acknowledging a fact.

The waivers also tweak the classification of student groups (by such factors as ethnicity, English-language proficiency and disability). But the degree of federal influence in the classroom will stay pretty much the same.


In other words, the administration isn't close to asking the more basic question about its role in the classroom: "Why are we here at all?"

Some in Congress are bolder. John Kline, R-Minn., who chairs the House Education and Workforce Committee, put forth bills last week that would basically leave it to states to hold schools accountable.

But there's a problem here, too.

States would get federal school money with few strings attached. The money's considerable — $21.4 billion was handed out under NCLB last year.

How could taxpayers know they were getting something in return?

The only way to solve this dilemma once and for all is gradually to wind down most of the federal aid along with the burden of federal rules.

In other words, return Washington and the states to the relationship they had before 1965, the year in which federal aid took its quantum leap with passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Most Democrats would probably recoil in horror at such an idea. Some Republicans would also wonder if it isn't a bit too radical. But the nation has changed since 1965, when one would make a strong case for federal intervention to undo the effects of racial segregation.
The original ESEA was meant to bring equality — at least in terms of money spent, if not outcomes.

Later, especially in the 1980s, the federal mission crept toward a new goal of improving schools for everyone. But equality was never out of the picture.

In fact, it was front and center with NCLB, which had the explicit aim of closing the achievement gap between white and minority students.

That was a laudable goal, but NCLB has shown only mixed progress, and modest at best, toward meeting it. The law has done some good by forcing states to accept the need for frequent testing and high standards. But it has not made the kind of difference that would justify its price tag.

So why not trust the states? Back in 1965, when the Jim Crow era was just winding down, one really could question the good faith of some state governments.

But really, in 2012? Is any state so poor or benighted that it won't be able to give its citizens an equal chance at education? All the evidence says the states are ready to get their old responsibilities back in full, and eventually they should be able to pay the bills as well

IBD - No Fed Budget is ILLEGAL

Democrats Failure To Pass Budget Is Illegal

Posted 02/10/2012 06:33 PM ET

Leadership: Two top Democrats in Congress say the legislature doesn't really need to pass a budget. Excuse us, but passing a budget isn't optional; it's required by law. Is this the future of rule under the Democrats?

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer is tired of passing budgets as the law demands. He thinks Congress can just keep spending money without any sort of budget.

"The fact is, you don't need a budget," he said last Tuesday. "We can adopt appropriations bills. We can adopt authorization policies without a budget. We already have an agreed-upon cap on spending."

Actually, "the fact is," Congress is required under the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 to pass a spending plan and then have it scored by the Congressional Budget Office and signed by the president. That none of this happens suggests a level of disrespect for the law and the people found only among criminals.

As for the "agreed-upon cap on spending" mentioned by Hoyer: How's that model of fiscal restraint working out? Well, a new report out Thursday notes that Congress has already blown right through the spending "cap" put in place just last summer.

According to the Heritage Foundation, "last week's Congressional Budget Office report shows they (Congress) have exceeded their official Budget Control Act limits for the current year by a stunning $156 billion."

Stunning indeed. It's now been 1,020 days, or 2.8 years, since Congress last passed a budget. Rather than an official document, Congress has passed a series of continuing resolutions and spending bills, periodically raising the debt ceiling so it can spend even more.
Hoyer is not only in his dereliction. On Friday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said: "We do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year. It's done, we don't need to do it." In short, laws are for the little people.

 

 As for President Obama, he's set to release his own budget proposal Monday. Is he annoyed that Congress has made his budget a dead-letter before it's even released?

"Well," said Jay Carney, the president's spokesman, "I don't have an opinion to express on how the Senate does its business with regards to this issue."

This is fiscal gangsterism, nothing else. It has nothing to do with the current fiscal crisis, or the slow economy. It has everything to do with Democrats' refusal to admit that their unparalleled spending binge and exploding debt will soon lead to a tidal wave of tax hikes on average Americans.

Daniel Hannan Warns CPAC

Yesterday, I had a chance to interview an honored CPAC guest, Member of the European Parliament Daniel Hannan. Unfortunately for me and for all of us, the audio did not record properly on the video, a problem I only discovered long after CPAC packed up for the day. Since I was the cameraman as well as the interviewer, I took no notes, but I can give you a couple of lasting impressions of the discussion.

Hannan was a friendly and informal interview subject; when I asked him how he preferred to be addressed, he smiled and replied, “How about Daniel?” Daniel told me that I probably wouldn’t believe this, but the British are more informal than Americans when it comes to the protocols of dealing with public officials. (I believe him now, certainly.) We spoke at length about the fiscal crisis facing Greece and the EU, which Daniel explained is a lot more nuanced than we think — and worse. He expressed sympathy for the Greek people resisting the austerity measures being imposed on them, since he feels that the people who created the crisis are precisely the ones who will get bailed out on the backs of the Greek people. The same thing happened in America when we decided that some financial institutions were too big to fail, and the taxpayers ended up holding the bag for their bad investments.

What, then, is the solution? Daniel then pulled a copy of the US Constitution out of his jacket pocket and explained that we needed to return the model of government outlined in “the most brilliant document” ever created for political structure. We discussed the issue of the Fed and the dislocation from the gold standard, as Daniel insisted that governments will manipulate currency rather than make the necessary tough decisions to live within their means until forced to stop doing so. The British, he said, have already devalued their currency by 20% through three rounds of quantitative easing despite a clear lack of positive results from the first two rounds, and we are about to do the same. I asked him about whether he felt any affinity for Ron Paul’s efforts, and while Daniel declined to support Paul overall, he does find it remarkable how Paul’s financial policies were considered “fringe” five years ago, and now Austrian economics and Paul’s views on monetary policy have become a lot more mainstream — due to reality overtaking us on debt and deficits.

I apologize for the technical difficulties that ended up making my interview video with Daniel Hannan a silent movie. In recompense, I offer you the full video of Daniel’s highly entertaining address to CPAC via The Right Scoop (who has much more from CPAC as well), which got rave reviews from Blogger Row. He is clearly a friend to America; in our interview, Daniel emphasized the mutual affection that the people of both countries have for each other, and insisted that the “special relationship” between the governments is a separate matter. But like any friend who sees their closest friend about to walk over the same cliff as they have, Daniel is warning us not to follow in Europe’s footsteps. Hopefully, it is not too late.


http://hotair.com/archives/2012/02/12/video-daniel-hannans-warning-to-cpac-and-america/

CK - Gospel of O

The Gospel according to Obama

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: February 9

At the National Prayer Breakfast last week, seeking theological underpinning for his drive to raise taxes on the rich, President Obama invoked the highest possible authority. His policy, he testified “as a Christian,” “coincides with Jesus’s teaching that ‘for unto whom much is given, much shall be required.’ ”

Now, I’m no theologian, but I’m fairly certain that neither Jesus nor his rabbinic forebears, when speaking of giving, meant some obligation to the state. You tithe the priest, not the tax man.

The Judeo-Christian tradition commands personal generosity as represented, for example, by the biblical injunction against retrieving any sheaf left behind while harvesting one’s own field. That is for the gleaners — “the poor and the alien” (Leviticus 19:10). Like Ruth in the field of Boaz. As far as I can tell, that charitable transaction involved no mediation by the IRS.

But no matter. Let’s assume that Obama has biblical authority for hiking the marginal tax rate exactly 4.6 points for couples making more than $250,000 (depending, of course, on the prevailing shekel-to-dollar exchange rate). Let’s stipulate that Obama’s prayer-breakfast invocation of religion as vindicating his politics was not, God forbid, crass, hypocritical, self-serving electioneering, but a sincere expression of a social-gospel Christianity that sees good works as central to the very concept of religiosity.

Fine. But this Gospel according to Obama has a rival — the newly revealed Gospel according to Sebelius, over which has erupted quite a contretemps. By some peculiar logic, it falls to the health and human services secretary to promulgate the definition of “religious” — for the purposes, for example, of exempting religious institutions from certain regulatory dictates.

Such exemptions are granted in grudging recognition that, whereas the rest of civil society may be broken to the will of the state’s regulators, our quaint Constitution grants special autonomy to religious institutions.

Accordingly, it would be a mockery of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment if, for example, the Catholic Church were required by law to freely provide such “health care services” (in secularist parlance) as contraception, sterilization and pharmacological abortion — to which Catholicism is doctrinally opposed as a grave contravention of its teachings about the sanctity of life.

Ah. But there would be no such Free Exercise violation if the institutions so mandated are deemed, by regulatory fiat, not religious.
And thus, the word came forth from Sebelius decreeing the exact criteria required (a) to meet her definition of “religious” and thus (b) to qualify for a modicum of independence from newly enacted state control of American health care, under which the aforementioned Sebelius and her phalanx of experts determine everything — from who is to be covered, to which treatments are to be guaranteed free of charge.

Criterion 1: A “religious institution” must have “the inculcation of religious values as its purpose.” But that’s not the purpose of Catholic charities; it’s to give succor to the poor. That’s not the purpose of Catholic hospitals; it’s to give succor to the sick. Therefore, they don’t qualify as “religious” — and therefore can be required, among other things, to provide free morning-after abortifacients.

Criterion 2: Any exempt institution must be one that “primarily employs” and “primarily serves persons who share its religious tenets.” Catholic soup kitchens do not demand religious IDs from either the hungry they feed or the custodians they employ. Catholic charities and hospitals — even Catholic schools — do not turn away Hindu or Jew.

Their vocation is universal, precisely the kind of universal love-thy-neighbor vocation that is the very definition of religiosity as celebrated by the Gospel of Obama. Yet according to the Gospel of Sebelius, these very same Catholic institutions are not religious at all — under the secularist assumption that religion is what happens on Sunday under some Gothic spire, while good works are “social services” properly rendered up unto Caesar.
This all would be merely the story of contradictory theologies, except for this: Sebelius is Obama’s appointee. She works for him. These regulations were his call. Obama authored both gospels.

Therefore: To flatter his faith-breakfast guests and justify his tax policies, Obama declares good works to be the essence of religiosity. Yet he turns around and, through Sebelius, tells the faithful who engage in good works that what they’re doing is not religion at all. You want to do religion? Get thee to a nunnery. You want shelter from the power of the state? Get out of your soup kitchen and back to your pews. Outside, Leviathan rules.

The contradiction is glaring, the hypocrisy breathtaking. But that’s not why Obama offered a hasty compromise on Friday. It’s because the firestorm of protest was becoming a threat to his reelection. Sure, health care, good works and religion are important. But reelection is divine.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com

SL 02-10-2012

As Broadcast on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America
February 10, 2012
By Seth Leibsohn

This morning, I am—as I usually am—in Phoenix, Arizona.  But the CPAC conference is taking place in Washington, DC.  And I want to focus a bit on a speech that was given there yesterday.  It’s the kind of talk from a Republican and a conservative we don’t hear enough of, and perhaps few are capable of making it.  Perhaps. But it is the kind of thing Bill Bennett and I have been urging on candidates for as long as I can remember.  Talk about our tax code, yes.  Talk about the importance of a robust defense, yes.  Talk about what binds us all together and makes everything else here possible: the family—of course.

But do not neglect the forest for the trees, do not neglect to talk about what makes this plot of earth—governed by two of the most unique documents in all the world, this shining city on a hill, and what makes its light shine so bright—do not neglect to talk about America.

In fact if you think about it, when candidates talk about the vision of America they win transformative elections.  Think of Ronald Reagan and, yes, think of Barack Obama.  One had the vision right and one had the vision wrong, but they both talked about it.  Or, as Lincoln said something on this in describing those who used to speak of liberty:  One side in Lincoln’s time spoke of the liberty of the individual while the other spoke of the liberty of property in owning individuals.  Lincoln said “We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing.”  That is my point about what the right and the left have to say when they speak of America.  Both declare for the country; but in speaking of the same country they do not all mean the same thing.

The point is America is something very, very special.  We spoke of this last week when I said that it sometimes feels as if we wake up in a country we no longer recognize.  This country, or a large part of it, has been struggling to come to terms with an administration that, last week, told the Catholic Church it could no longer be Catholic.  Was this a surprise?  In part yes, in part no.

It is a truth that when government expands, individual freedom contracts.  What we got from a new rule on the health care legislation that passed by the votes, exclusively of one party, was a new truth: when government power expands into our very own lives and our own healthcare, religious freedom not only contracts, it is actually made illegal.

Our founding, America’s very idea, was based on limiting the means government so that we would not limit the ends of man.  And now we have an administration that has set its course on expanding the means of government so far that it has resulted in limiting not just our economic freedoms but our freedoms of speech and religion.  Our very first freedoms.

My point is this:  We, of course all Americans, but most especially we conservatives, have a duty.  The great conservative scholar, my teacher, Harry Jaffa, put it this way: “The salvation of the West must come, if it is to come, from the United States. The salvation of the United States, if it is to come, must come from the Republican Party. And the salvation of the Republican Party, if it is to come, must come from the conservative movement within it. And the salvation of the conservative movement, if it is to come, must come from the renewal and reaffirmation of the principles of the American Founding, embodied above all in the Declaration of Independence.”
So what is our duty?  It is to, hopefully, save this country so that we may, hopefully, save our world.  We are not on a crusade to save the world through military might—that is not what I am speaking of.  I am speaking of what Marianna and Ethan and others who called in last week spoke of.  I am speaking of what Ronald Reagan spoke of when he said:

Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, "We don't know how lucky we are." And the Cuban stopped and said, "How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to." And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.

Tony Blair recently put it another way, but meant the same thing.  Here is what he wrote in his memoirs:  “When you see other nations, you see power corruptly wielded, a nation held back, people oppressed, and a future denied.  There is no house on the hill that makes the present struggle worthwhile; just a horizon full of deeper despair as far as the eye can see.  For those people in that bleak wilderness, America does stand out; it does shine; it may not be a house in their land they can aspire to, but it is a house they can see in the distance, and in seeing, knowing how they do live is to know it is not how they must live.”

We are losing that.  A report out this week on economic freedom revealed that

the United States has fallen from No. 6 to No. 10 since the end of the George W. Bush administration in 2009.   The U.S. also has dropped rank in the ease of doing business, as measured by the World Bank, and in global competitiveness, as measured by the World Economic Forum.  The United States has dropped from No. 19 to No. 24 in Transparency International's corruption index over the past three years. Reporters Without Borders' index shows an enormous drop in press freedom in the U.S. over the past three years, from a ranking of No. 20 to a dreadful No. 47.

This is on the economic front.  Never mind our defense front for the time being, where we are limiting pay raises for troops, increasing health insurance fees for military retirees, and closing bases in the United States while at the same time we are cutting 500 billion dollars out of defense budgets and reducing the size of the Army and Marines while at the same time the world is becoming not safer, but more dangerous.

So what is it we have forgotten?  We have forgotten the specialness, the dearness, of America and what it means to both the world and us.  But there was a speaker at CPAC yesterday who got it.  And got it right.  U.S. Senator Marco Rubio.  This is what he said:

AUDIO:

“My parents, my father, my grandfather, I think they were better men than I was. And yet they never got to accomplish their dreams. Why? What was the difference between them and me?

“The difference is that I was born with the privilege and the honor of being a citizen of the single greatest nation in all of human history.

“And so, being an American, is a blessing. And it is also a responsibility. A responsibility not just to protect America here at home, but to ensure that by doing the right things here that we are an example for the world.

“My favorite President, someone I think you probably like too, is named Ronald Reagan. I told you! What did you think, Jimmy Carter? He used to talk about a ‘shining city on a hill’. But really, that comes from a biblical reference, where Jesus said that a lamp can’t be hidden, but you show your light to the world so that you can honor and glorify God.

“America is a light. Our light. Your light. What you have done in your lives every single day, the light of everyday Americans who without the government telling them what to do, today will give a ride to their neighbor to the doctor. They don’t wait for the government bus to come do it.  They take it upon themselves. The light of everyday people who have a good idea and will take their life savings in pursuit of that idea and it works.

“The light of everyday people whose names you will never know, whose stories will never be told, whose face will never be on the cover of a magazine, but make a real difference in the real lives of real people. That light.

“The light of a nation who, when it engages around the globe militarily whether you agree with it or not, never does it because we want their land. We don’t want Afghanistan to be another state. We’re not looking to annex Iraq. Whether you agree with it or not, when Americans send their sons, and increasingly their daughters, to die overseas, they do it for other people’s liberty. For other people’s freedoms. And what nation in the world has ever done that?

“This is who we’ve been. This is who we are.

“Being America has changed the world and made it better.

“And now we must decide if we are prepared to continue that or to recede and become just like everybody else. And that is the choice in November.

“That is the choice. It is not a choice between a person we like and a person we don’t. It is not even a choice between a Republican and a Democrat. It is a choice between someone who has failed over the last three years and is asking for four more and a change in direction.

“One that embraces the source of our greatness so that the twenty-first century will be an American Century as well. And the stakes, I can’t imagine them being any higher. For ultimately what we discuss is what the kind of nation and world we leave our children and their children.

“We have a historic opportunity. We should be grateful and thank God every night that he has placed us here in this nation at this time in our history. Because he has given us the chance to do what few people in human history have ever had the chance to do, and that is through our example and the way we lead our lives and run our nation, change the world for the better, forever.

“Thank you very much, may God bless all of you.”

That is how we must think.  That is how we must talk.  Because this is the only way we will continue to be able to live as the freest people on earth with the most to offer not only to others, but in our own well-being and in our own consciences, the most to offer ourselves and our progeny.  Keep the faith as Peggy Noonan reminds us, literally, keep it.

02-10-2012 "The Day The Music Died"

“Our culture has erased the meaning of anybody who tried to issue a warning. Anybody who was on the other side. They’re trying to do it now with the ‘Hobbit’ and the ‘Lord of the Rings’ and they are saying that that has nothing to do with Jesus and Christianity. That was the point. They’re trying tried to do it with ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ and the ‘Adventure of the Chronicles of Narnia’. They try to do this every step of the way and they’ve done it with much of music,” Glenn said on radio this moring

He was specifically referring to songs like “Revolution” by The Beatles, which was clearly suspicious of violent revolution and uprisings, as well as “American Pie” by Don McLean.

Many people think that the song “American Pie” is about the death of Buddy Holly and other musicians in a plane crash, but Glenn presented a reading of the lyrics on radio and showed how it could also be seen as a warning against the danger of violent uprisings like what is happening now with Occupy Wall Street.

“ I’ve never understood I drove the Chevy to the levee, I didn’t know what that was. Let’s just start there on the simple part because Chevy, just think of Chevy and mom and apple pie. He’s making a point here. Chevy, I drove my Chevy to the levee. This actually goes back into the 1950s and a Dinah Shore commercial for Chevy,” Glenn explained.

“So America is the greatest country of all and it was an era that believed in America. I drove my Chevy to the levee. I drove the Chevy. I bought into the idea that America was the greatest.”

“So in the second verse he goes back to his childhood and he goes back to sock hops in the gym and the pickup trucks and… and here he’s talking about the book of love, which was a song by the Monotones in 1957 and he asked her about faith. He asked her about faith and whether she believes, no matter what, if the Bible tells her so. That is the representation of the faith in the Fifties. He then talks about, do you have faith in rock and roll, that music will save your mortal soul.”

“But music is the metaphor for life in America. So the girl moves on to somebody else, leaving him with his truck and the carnation. But it’s not really about the girl. It’s about America. She’s moved on from all of those things just as America began to move on from all of those things that faith would help you, that faith, you would do it through faith. You would do things because the Bible told you so. But now you’re starting to believe that music will save your soul.”
Glenn played more of the song, reaching the part where McLean sings “Now for 10 years we’ve been on our own”.

“For ten years now we’ve been on our own. It’s the decade of the Sixties. Remember in the Fifties you had faith, you had the Bible, you had family, you had all of these things that were there. But now for ten years we’ve been on our own and moss grows fat on a Rolling Stone. This is referring to Bob Dylan who the court jester and his song like a Rolling Stone. Also Dylan wore a coat from James Dean on the cover of his ’63 album Free Wheelin’ and McLean laments all of the change in our values that was occurring in the 1960s when he said that’s not how that’s not the way it used to be.”

“So he’s singing dirges in the dark mourning the loss of America, that America is changing fundamentally. Lenin read a book of Marx. We know that John Lennon was influenced at the time by Karl Marx. Lennon read a book of Marx. The quartet practiced in the park. Could be a reference to the Beatles preparing for their role in the cultural revolution. And as the ultimate icons of the new era. But McLean is saying, but we sang dirges in the dark because we knew what was coming.”

What was coming?

Helter Skelter in a summer swelter
The birds flew off with the fallout shelter
Eight miles high and falling fast It landed foul on the grass
The players tried for a forward pass
With the jester on the sidelines in a cast
Now the halftime air was sweet perfume
While sergeants played a marching tune
We all got up to dance
Oh, but we never got the chance
‘Cause the players tried to take the field,
The marching band refused to yield.
Do you recall what was revealed,
The day the music died?
We started singing

“Helter Skelter in a Summer Swelter, again the Beatles song reference also indicates the chaos and the violence that broke out in the summer of ’68. The Byrds he spells with a Y, flew off to the fallout shelter. Nature, represented by the Byrds, sense the danger, headed for safety in a shelter. But eight miles high is another song reference by the band the Byrds. So they are falling fast, because everything is falling fast. Everybody, the smart people, nature knows, get into a fallout shelter. Then he goes into the youth culture clashing with the government violently, using a football metaphor.”

“You’re at halftime. He said the players youth going for a forward pass. The players going for a forward pass. That’s the youth, going for a forward pass. And the government hitting back. And the jester on the sidelines in a cast. Remember that’s, the jester is Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan had a serious motorcycle accident for a while and he was healing on his own and music flounder everything kind of floundered for a time. Then he gets to halftime.”

“Halftime, he’s seeing the summer of love. This is 1967, a brief respite in ’67 with the flower children. Sergeant’s playing a marching tune. That’s the Beatles and Sergeant Pepper. And the summer of love was an opportunity to get up and dance. But the violence returned
in the summer of ’68. And remember we’re here at ’68, recreate ’68. We never got the chance.”

“We just passed our summer of love. What happened there in the park, that was just love. There were people in the park that were just trying to be loved. We’re now headed for 1968.”

“What happened in the summer of ’68. Do you remember, do you recall what was revealed, the Miss America protest of ’68 when women were burning their bras and everything else. But also Altamont, and this is such a clear, clear message against what is coming and what happened in an event that almost is erased. It’s more important than Woodstock, and it was it’s being erased in history. Here he is warning.”

There we were all in one place
A generation lost in space With no time left to start again
So come on Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Jack Flash sat on a candle stick
‘Cause fire is the devil’s only friend.
As I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No angel born in hell
Could break that satan’s spell
And as flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw satan laughing with delight
the day the music died.

“ Because fire is its only friend. Okay. Gathering all in one place, 300,000 flower children flocked to Altamont in the fall of 1969. It was, it was the followup to Woodstock: Drugs, alcohol, increasing violence. They were a generation lost in space. Remember, the space race was also going on. There was nowhere left to go. Their momentum was fading and the decade was gone. And so was America. Then the rolling stones who had pushed the counterculture envelope with the last couple of albums took the stage as McLean alludes to with,

“Come on, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack sat on the candlestick,” that is the Jumpin’ Jack Flash song by the Rolling Stones. And he’s referring here to Mick Jagger was the Devil who refuses to end the Altamont concert despite the violence and the loss of crowd. Even,
even the Grateful Dead said this is crazy.”

“’No angel born in hell could break that Satan spell.’ The Hells Angels were hired for security. They couldn’t stop the chaos. In fact, they added to it. And Jagger, Satan in the song, continued to hold the audience in his spell.”

“A gun wielding man in the crowd heads for the stage but Hells Angels intercept him and they stab him to death. That’s what happened at Altamont. They stab him to death. The sacrificial rite. Shortly before the stabbing, right before this guy starts going on a rampage, the Stones had performed ‘Sympathy For the Devil’.”

“Could it get any creepier than this? Don McLean was not just writing about this event but the demise of an era. The erosion of your culture. The erosion of our values. Altamont was the final blow to bring about the day the music died.”
Glenn took a break and then returned to discuss the song further.

“We’re just looking at some of the old interviews with Don McLean because he never talks about this song anymore. But at the time he said that he was obsessed with what he called the death of America and so many things. The loss of so many things that he grew up with.”
“ (McLean) said in a sense ‘American Pie’ was a despairing song. In another way it was hopeful. He said Pete Seeger told me that he saw it as a song in which people were saying something, that they had been fooled, they had been hurt and they weren’t going to let it happen again. He said that’s a good way to look at it, a hopeful way. Unfortunately Pete Seeger was a communist and I mean, that’s the way that’s why this happens again.”

“It happened with Mao and it won’t happen this way again. It happened at Altamont but it won’t happen like that again. I mean, it’s the same story over and over and over again.”

“The good news is, is that there was at least somebody that was in this culture at that time that was mourning the loss of America then and we didn’t lose America then. We’re still going. We might despair now and say, ‘Jeez, we’re going to lose America’. That’s not necessarily true unless we allow it.”