BMB YAB - EO#13547 Power Grab

Executive Order 13547: “The Sleeping Power Grab”

posted at 9:29 am on April 21, 2012 by Erika Johnsen

To be fair, President Obama’s executive-order output hasn’t unreasonably outpaced that of his predecessors – his especial willingness to actively circumvent Congress and snatch huge gobs of power for the federal bureaucracy only makes it feel like he has.
In July of 2010, President Obama signed executive order 13547 – “Stewardship of the Ocean, Our Coasts, and the Great Lakes.” There wasn’t much hullabaloo about it, since it was just post-BP oil spill and it was ostensibly designed to allow the federal government to better safeguard – er, you know – ecosystems! And, sustainability! And other such politically-soothing environmental buzzwords. The broad policy afforded the feds the authority to zone and regulate the seas and waterways, and all of the activities that take place on them.
There is a great deal of commercial economic activity that goes down on our oceans, including energy, fishing, travel, and shipping, and then when you move upriver and inland, there’s mining, timber, recreation, agriculture, manufacturing, and other industries that make use of our nation’s aquatic networks. As with any large, complex endeavor with many relevant players and countless moving parts, the federal bureaucracy’s attempt to “oversee,” a.k.a. regulate and centrally plan, that endeavor usually just gums up the works and retards economic growth.
In four separate Congresses, legislation outlining the idea of zoning the oceans has been debated and subsequently dropped. Did President Obama bother to ask whether the current Congress would authorize such a move? Well, that would just be silly, when there’s executive fiat to be had, and several effects of this vaguely-defined order have begun to manifest themselves:

“This one to me could be the sleeping power grab that Americans will wake up to one day and wonder what the heck hit them,” said Rep. Bill Flores (R –Texas). …
The ocean policy has already impacted oil and gas development in the Mid and South Atlantic, where more environmental analysis is now required to determine whether new studies must also be conducted to determine its safety, according to Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar.
Jack Belcher, managing director of the Ocean Policy Coalition that represents numerous industries affected by Obama’s initiative including oil companies, says Salazar’s action is one example of how the administration is already blocking new production “on a policy that hasn’t even been developed yet.”
Still in its draft form, the plan released in January contains vague goals that call for more than 150 milestones to be accomplished by next year that will determine how the ecosystem is managed. …
“But what we are worried about, and already seeing, is it’s being used as a tool to say we’re not going to do something, or delay it,” Belcher said. “It creates another layer of bureaucracy and another opportunity for litigation. We see this as an opportunity to tie things up in complete uncertainty.” …
“This has largely been completely under the radar,” Vitter said. “And that is exactly the way the administration and their environmental allies want to do it—announce the administrative fiat is complete and that we have this new way of life that nobody knew was coming.”

The gist of this executive order is just another environmentalist front for a regulatory power grab, and a major way to expand the government’s authority over oil and gas permitting. No doubt the environmental lobby really does hope to eventually closely regulate all of the ocean’s economic activity, since they’re convinced that the earth (not to be confused with humankind) would be better off if we could rewind our industrial habits back a few thousand years.
Both House and Senate Republicans are starting take note of the disastrous economic impact the Obama administration could exercise with this order, recently asking for oversight hearings and more transparency on “cloaked funding,” and the House Natural  Resources Committee is fighting back.

Buffett Rule - How's That Go????

April 16, 2012, 2:20 pm






Warren Buffett, President Obama’s favorite billionaire, once said that “you only find out who’s swimming naked when the tide goes out.”

Well, it looks like the tide has gone out for Obama when it comes to pushing his Buffett Rule “millionaire’s” tax. There was never much of an economic rationale for the idea. It would only raise about $5 billion a year over the next decade, a span when the U.S. is on track to compile average annual budget deficits of $1 trillion or more.

Wait, actually it would add nearly $800 billion to cumulative deficits because it would replace the Alternative Minimum Tax, according to government bean counters. No, wait some more! The numbers would probably be even worse. Other taxes targeted at the rich, such as President Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax hikes and recent tax increases in the UK, either raised less than forecasted or lost money.

As Bloomberg recently pointed out, affected taxpayers–fewer than 0.5% of Americans with annual incomes exceeding $1 million and tax rates of less than 30 percent–could avoid the tax via tax-free investments such as municipal bonds. They also could time asset sales for maximum tax benefits, engage in transactions that don’t result in taxable income, and make charitable contributions that yield deductions. “Largely, the Buffett rule is going to be manageable,” said David Miller, a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP in New York. “That is, with tax planning, people will be able to avoid it.”

Obama’s strongest argument, really, was his moral one: that having the rich pay a lower tax rate than middle-class voters was just plain unfair from an income inequality perspective. But now he seems to have abandoned that one, as well:

That is not an argument about redistribution. That is an argument about growth,” Obama said in response to a reporter’s question at a news conference in Colombia. “In the history of the United States, we grow best when our growth is broad based. This is not an argument about taking from A to give to B. This is not a redistributionist argument that we’re making. We’re making an argument about how do we grow the economy in a 21st century environment,” Obama said.

Really? If there is an Obama Rule, it is the one he articulated back in 2008 to Joe the Plumber, that we need to raise taxes to “spread the wealth around.” But I guess “spread the wealth” isn’t polling as strongly as Team Obama would like in 2012.

OK, so now Obama is focusing on the economic growth argument, his weakest one. Economic growth is produced by innovation and the acceptance of the creative destruction it brings. Obama would argue that by raising taxes, he could avoid cutting supposedly critical government investment to spur innovation. But is the federal government so lean and mean that the only way to reduce spending is by axing the NIH or the National Nanotechnology Initiative? Or is Obama talking about more Solyndra-style industrial policy? If that, better to keep that $5 billion in the private sector. And time for Obama to float some new economic ideas.

Modern Lynch Mob

Our Modern Lynch Mob

Democracies are in general prone to fits of the mob. Just read the Thucydidean account of the debate of Mytilene. Or watch a 1950s Western as the lynch party heads for the town jail. Fear of democratically sanctioned madness is why the Founders came up not just with classical tripartite government to check and limit power between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches, but also now generally disdained notions of allowing states to impose property qualifications for voting, the Electoral College, two senators guaranteed per state regardless of population, and senators originally selected without direct votes.

They were not concerned that under Athenian-style democracy the proverbial “people” and their populist Rottweilers in government and the press could not check the power of capital and birth, but were worried, as Juvenal later quipped, over who would police the police. So there had to be checks on the mob as well — a fickle and unpredictable force as we saw in the last eight years.

 

2006 Evil Guantanamo/ 2009 Good Guantanamo

Sometime around 2005, the anger of the mob over the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols peaked. Preventative detention, renditions, military tribunals, Guantanamo, Predators, wiretaps, and intercepts were all considered unlawful, unnecessary, and immoral. The Bush-Cheney “terror state” seemed capable of almost anything, as it shredded the Constitution while claiming to “protect” us from non-existent terrorists. Dick Cheney went from a respected and perennial Washington insider, given his due by both liberals and conservatives as a sober and judicious administrator over the past thirty years, to a pernicious Darth Vader.

The Left never really adduced any evidence to support its charges, but such serial attacks went largely unanswered. Candidate Barack Obama both benefited from and whipped up the venom, only as president to embrace or expand all of what he had once so vehemently denounced. He soon became predator-in-chief, increasing targeted assassinations eightfold, as he joked about them being unleashed at any potential suitors of Malia and Sasha.

The Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism policies were quietly reinvented as necessary (given that no post-9/11 plot [and there were many] had succeeded) and continue on today as if no one ever had questioned their utility or legality. The fist-shaking mob apparently decided that what was truly bad before 2009 was mostly good afterwards, or at least not bad enough to question an Obama presidency. So it threw down the torches and drifted on home, wanting the proverbial prisoner in the jail freed and canonized rather than hanged.

Today we are left with either one of two liberal assumptions: the Bush-Cheney protocols are still bad, but to continue to criticize them would now be to weaken the liberal agenda of their present adherent Barack Obama; or, why get riled over politics? —  every out-party attacks the in-party any way it can, so get over it.

Planet Warming on Hold

One of the most venomous lines of attack against George W. Bush was his supposed failure to address climate change. These were the mob days of the anguished Al Gore, still smarting over having won the popular, but not the electoral, vote in 2000, damning Bush as a liar, as he created Gore, Inc. — a near organic-growing merchandising empire of several hundred millions of dollars.

Gorism both hyped a global carbon threat and then offered the consulting and expertise to address it. His carbon footprints and “offsets” followed the medieval model of selling exemptions. In such holy work, there were no such things as conflict of interest, influence peddling, or simple bad manners. Gore rode his Earth in the Balance / Inconvenient Truth express train to a Nobel Prize, a sizable fortune — and a general impression that he had become unhinged, whether in his incarnation as a “crazed sex poodle” or a vein-bursting screaming “he lied!” mental patient.

No matter, Barack Obama came into office on the shoulders of this screaming mob. His team lectured us on the wisdom of withholding oil leases, on the desirability of European-level gas prices, and on why we must soon pay skyrocketing energy prices. Obama-sanctioned cap-and-trade passed the Democratic-held House.

And then?

Snow fell. Ice still formed outside the kitchen window. Chicago, as is its habit, got both really hot and really cold. Volvos still needed gas. People in Malibu still liked central heating. Philology adjusted accordingly. Global warming begat climate change and the latter begat climate chaos: if the planet were not hotter, then snow and ice were symptoms of such heating; and if even that were insufficient proof for us dunces, then tornados, earthquakes, and hurricanes would have to do.
Yet the mob mentality began to fade, as revelations about everything from doctored research, politicized grant-giving, and false conclusions about glaciers, Greenland, and polar bears began appearing in the liberal news — suggesting that if such scandal made even the mainstream media, then the phrenology-like fad was nearing an end.

Obama had done his part in postponing the Keystone pipeline, putting oil on federal lands off-limits, and talking up boondoggles like the Chevy Volt and Solyndra. But the idea of $5 a gallon gas makes even the most liberal Santa Monica Volvo driver edgy, and now the global-warming movement has collapsed. Bush is in Texas, not the White House. Obama now blames Solyndra on Republicans, brags about entrepreneurial wildcatters in the Dakotas, does photo-ops in front of derricks, and promises to allow bits and pieces of the Keystone pipeline.

And the mob? Why hurt the liberal cause by going after Obama? Suddenly, the would-be-lynchers have left the sheriff’s office porch and are in twos and threes heading back home.

Postmodern Ethics

The mob, of course, had once tried to storm the jail to get at Bush over presidential ethics and decorum. It was a valiant effort. “Rovian politics” had polluted the national scene. PACs, the revolving door, lobbying, earmarks, and mega fundraising had ruined American politics. An Enron-insider mentality had warped the White House. “Swift-boating” was Rove-inspired character assassination.

Now? We live in an age of Peter Orszag, the OMB to Citibank monorail, and $1 million sent to the Obama PAC from the misogynist Bill Maher whose “t—t” and “c—t” are the sorts of popular smears against women that Obama does not wish his daughters to experience.

The idea of a Democrat running for president according to the rules of public campaign financing was destroyed four years ago by none other than Barack Obama. His genius lies in demonizing his donors as “fat cats”, “one-percenters,” and “corporate jet owners,” while they fork over cash, again on a medieval principle that the more you lecture the usurer or money-changer, the more he purchases penance for his soul by giving the church a marble block or two for the dome of the cathedral. Or is the shakedown not a shakedown, but rather a simple connivance for the big money guys — Obama is dead even in the polls, so why not keep a stiff upper lip and hedge your bets?

I think it was around January 2009 when ethics in government ceased to be an issue. Insider influence peddling suddenly became the necessary price of getting green energy. Bundling and corporate giving were vital to getting universal health care passed. And $35,000-a-head private dinners were a sort of castor oil, a bad-tasting medicine that led to better air and water for all of us. In those happy days, John Edwards was a populist idol. Jon Corzine put his financial expertise to work for hoi polloi. Steven Chu’s Nobel P

Prize-winning physics mind would be let loose on the pernicious carbon lobby.

Then it was all over. The Obama team of Goolsbee, Orszag, Romer, and Summers headed back to tenured berths or big money or both. “Millionaires and billionaires” meant skipping the insignificant former and concentrating on shaking down the important latter. Today, we just shrug when Obama lectures us at 9 a.m. on paying our fair share, and then does a $40,000-a-plate fundraiser in the Upper West Side or Palm Beach at noon.

The Old Race Card

The same hang-the-suspect hysteria breaks out over race only to dissipate as if it never happened. Before 9/11 it was the reparations movement. Then it was the Bush neglect of the underclass. Then it was the preppie white non-rapists at Duke. Then it was Eric Holder’s lectures about “cowards,” “my people,” and the racists who wanted answers about Fast and Furious.

We went from the beer summit to Trayvon Martin’s resemblance to the boy the president never had. In each case, facts did not matter: Bush increased Great Society spending, and sent $15 billion to save black Africans from the ravages of AIDS. If there were any voting fraud, it came as a result of Acorn, Chicago wards, and the SEIU get-out-the vote machine, not Karl Rove with levers and gears.

The Cambridge police did not act stupidly. And if police do stereotype, it may be because 12% of the population commits almost half the violent crime in the nation. In the case of rare black/white and white/black murdering (94% of murdered African-Americans were killed by other African-Americans), a minority is more likely to commit murder (and rape) against a majority than the majority is against the minority.

As I write, the hysteria (is there any other word for it when Spike Lee twitters the address of George Zimmerman or the New Black Panther Party publishes a wanted poster or the mayor of Philadelphia calls the death an “assassination”?) is beginning to die down, somewhat.

The initial moblike news (in this regard, Fox News’s Shepard Smith was especially culpable in whipping up frenzy when he did not have the evidence to support his allegations) that a white, Germanic-named vigilante ran down and executed a small African-American child (at least Mr. Martin seemed so from his adolescent photos in the press) eating candy while strolling in an exclusive gated community is not quite the entire story. At least it has morphed into an account of an excitable, gun-carrying Hispanic neighborhood-watch volunteer, in a mixed community, prompting (?) a fist fight with an unarmed 17-year-old, 6’2” youth in a hoodie. Mr. Zimmerman apparently lost the struggle, and then pulled out a gun and fired — even as the narrative seemed to change with new information every day. The case is not helped by presidential editorializing that now, after the beer summit and Sandra

 Fluke, seems a gambit to divert attention from $4 a gallon gas and 8% plus unemployment (17% in Fresno County).

The Trayvon Martin tragedy is not over. We do not know all the facts; bad judgment, racism, and ill-intent may well have led to manslaughter or even second-degree murder or, then again, in theory, self-defense, but to speculate about any such charges without evidence is to become mob-like. My own view is that carrying a weapon requires greater forbearance, but I was not there and still have no idea what transpired. As I write this, the account will be out-of-date by tomorrow’s disclosures. What we are left with are no rules of national anguish: When ten African-Americans are murdered by other African-Americans in a single weekend, is it news or not news? When the occasional African-American murders a white person, as in a recent car-jacking, is it a sign of something the nation must note? When an Hispanic shoots an African-American, is it news to the degree he has a European name, but had he been Jorge Martinez with an Anglo mother, it would not have been news?

The role of a president is to rein in the mob, not to unleash it. The latter is what community organizers do; the former is what makes statesmen. Yet on issue after issue — anti-terrorism, global warming, government ethics, and racial relations — a frenzied mob, egged on by the media and demagogues like Barack Obama, have almost stormed the jail, only to dissipate when met by either evidence, or the knowledge that the incarcerated was one of their own — as if they had never screamed and threatened in the first place.

Revisionist History

Strangers in a Stranger LandPosted 

                 By Victor Davis Hanson On April 8, 2012

Trostkyzation

In ancient Rome, when the emperor or an especially distasteful elite died, his image on stone and in bronze was removed. And by decree there arose a damnatio memoriae, a holistic effort to erase away his entire prior existence. When Tiberius got through with the dead Sejanus, few knew that he had ever existed, such were the powers of the Roman state to create alternate realities. Orwell’s Animal Farm ^[1] and 1984 ^[2] explored the communist state’s efforts to airbrush away history. Orwell perhaps was most notably influenced by the removal of Leon Trotsky from the collective Russian memory to the point that he never existed. That force was used in these instances does not mean that something like them could not happen ^[3] through collective volition; indeed, I think we are starting to see dangerous signs that a sort of groupthink is already beginning.

That Was Then, But This Is What . . . ?

In our own time there are certain growing trends, most of them media-induced, that conspire to rework our collective memory, in pursuit of a supposedly noble and just cause. In the fashion of no other recent figure, President Barack Obama has brought those forces of establishing an official truth to the fore. Last week he lectured the media ^[4] that things are not just equal with two sides to a story.

Instead, they have a responsibility not to fall into the trap of equivalence — the subtext being that he is not subject to the same laws of inquiry as are his earthly opponents.

Suddenly, the Supreme Court is a suspicious organization run by unelected politicos that uses capricious judicial fiat to overturn widely popular laws. The president denigrated it in a State of the Union address and now suggests that such “unelected” jurists (as opposed to electing them?) should act responsibly and thus “must” not find a popularly enacted law unconstitutional.

I am confused: I thought we were supposed to welcome such judicial audit. Was not that the charm of the Warren Court? Did not the Obama administration go to federal court to ask justices to set aside the Defense of Marriage Act that it was entrusted to enforce — seeking judicial help not to follow a law that it chose not to seek to overturn in Congress?

I also thought that a younger Barack Obama once had regretted that the Supreme Court had never addressed “redistributive change” ^[5] and, per the U.S. Constitution, had confined itself only to defining negative liberties rather than demanding positive “rights” that legislatures were supposed to ensure — or else. And did ObamaCare really pass with broad majorities? I thought that it received no Republican votes in the House and only squeaked by. And it would have been filibustered in the Senate without the Ted Stevens pseudo-scandal and various sweetheart deals to swing senators. Or is that now inaccurate?

Good Little Citizens?

Is public campaign financing good or bad? I thought Obama in 2008 was the first presidential nominee since the law’s inception to have ignored it. But did anyone so note that? What happened to this once hallowed liberal reform? Was it not aimed at stopping the BPs and Goldman Sachses of the world from warping the election process with huge infusions of cash — as in the $1 billion range?

Are the one-percenters suspect and avoiding their fair share, or are they the most generous donors to the Obama campaign? Sometimes one feels bewildered in this now alternative universe: in the evil Bush year 2007, I remember that recess appointments were always to be seen as illegitimate ^[6], while filibusters were critical checks on abusive Republican legislative majorities. But then by 2011, the former was now a principled mechanism to sidestep reactionary obstructionism and the latter nihilistic ways of halting needed liberal progress.

What happened, or have we lost all ability to remember?

The World Made Anew in 2009

I need to go to a re-education, or perhaps a re-memorization, camp. What happened to “unpatriotic” presidents ^[7] running up $4 trillion in debt in eight years, or is trumping that in three then patriotic? Was the presidentially appointed Simpson-Bowles commission the proper bipartisan way to address deficits, or were its findings coopted by the one-percenters? In December 2010, I thought suddenly raising taxes was supposedly the wrong thing to do in tough times. Was it not by March 2011?

When did the Catholic Church declare war on women, and at what point in history did condoms or birth control pills became oppressive expenses in need of federal subsidies in a way that, say, iPhones were not? Does the crude smear “slut” by media figures threaten the world of our children or help to raise money ^[8] to donate to presidential campaigns? What words, what images, what references are taboo, and what are tolerable — and why? Did the president deprecate the working classes of Pennsylvania and Israeli Prime Minister

Netanyahu, and did he make vague promises to the Russians off mic — or were those just products of our imagination?
At what point did borrowing against our children’s futures become needed “stimulus” and “investments”? Is keeping the federal budget far larger than it was during the Bush years “social Darwinism,” a term that is acceptable political invective in a way “socialism” is not? Where did the adverb “unexpectedly” ^[9] come from, as in almost all economic news now is “unexpectedly” something: “unexpectedly” high unemployment figures or “unexpectedly” sluggish home sales?

Did unemployment ever really go over 8 percent? I thought that it had and is so now. I remember being told that high gas prices analogous to Europe’s, skyrocketing energy costs, and putting federal oil leases off limits (up to the point of risking $10 a gallon gas) were all our common aspirations ^[10] to cool the planet, to cut fossil fuel use, and to transition energy management from the oil companies to the more caring government. But now I am told all that was never so: the private sector is to be praised for producing more gas and oil on private lands than ever before; high gas prices are bad; and we certainly don’t want energy costs to skyrocket. But will the 2012 truth soon revert to that of 2000-2011?

Try Harder . . .

Sometimes we try hard, but cannot quite get straight the party communiqués. Supply and demand are irrelevant to gas pricing, we are told, in this age of energy speculation and rising Middle East tensions that warp the market. But why then do we ask the Saudis to put more oil into the global pot and ponder doing the same from our strategic reserve? Is there something called supply and demand at work, as in increasing global supply to lower prices, or at least to suggest there is more supply coming on line? Is Saudi oil and previously pumped oil of better quality than newly pumped oil?

Wind and solar will create “millions of new green jobs.” But when and how so? Government subsidies to insider green companies like Solyndra are to be deemed good, even if they produce little energy; but normal tax breaks for the oil companies are bad when they fuel the entire country. Are there solar panels on Air Force One? Is there a rule that says Solyndra cannot make what Exxon rakes in?

We are supposed to believe that Republicans in the House have done terrible things in stopping the president’s agenda. But I thought that after 2008 there were Democratic majorities in Congress that could do ^[11] whatever the Democratic president wished? What was not done in 2009 is understandable, but not understandable in 2011?

The masses are told that they will like the new federal takeover of health care. But those who like it the most are to be rewarded for their fealty by being granted exemptions from it? If we write favorably on its behalf, can we too then become exempt from it?

Constitutional Crimes

I still don’t know what Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventative detention, and the Patriot Act are. One day I heard that they were all both unnecessary and unconstitutional, and then I woke up a bit later and discovered that all were both critical and lawful. When did that happen? At the time when Iraq went from the “worst” (fill in the blanks) to the administration’s “greatest” achievement? When did assassinating Predators go from airborne terror to jokes about some day shooing away suitors from the presidential daughters?
I am still trying to figure out what the one-percenters are. I think they are wealthy people — but not the very wealthy people. Or are they the very wealthy people who accept that higher taxes can either be avoided or won’t substantively affect their sizable portfolios, or feel that they provide necessary psychological inoculation for their mostly segregated and elite lifestyles?

Those who run Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, or those who manage Goldman Sachs, or those who make $20 million a year in Hollywood, or those who administer Harvard and Yale or the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations have always paid their fair share, and thus are not to be fairly dubbed corporate jet owners? Or is it that these very rich, but not to be demonized one-percenters, accept that the 50%-plus of their income given in state and federal taxes was not previously enough, and so they now feel that they must up that amount and thus must pay 50% of the nation’s aggregate federal income tax revenue rather than just the paltry present 37%? Is that the truth? In other words, the good one-percenters de facto agree that they have previously in the Bush years cheated the Treasury under the present income tax code, and really did feel guilty that they had not voluntarily contributed more, but now they agree with Obama that they should be forced to pay more taxes?

I am further confused: did Bill Gates’ extravagant mansion rob the rest of us (how many of us paid too much for Microsoft Word to pay for his indulgent investment?). Does Warren Buffett’s jet mean that the rest of us have less jet fuel as we sit cramped back in the tail section? Why does James Cameron get his own submarine to explore the ocean; could he not instead have cut the ticket price ^[12] to his movies? Can we all go to Costa del Sol or Martha’s Vineyard; how many cruise missiles paid for that? What are the criteria that suggest some of the above is corporate jet-setting and some is not, when do pigs walk on four and when on two legs?

But this alternate reality is not just political, but also social. This week I read in local papers of a supposed flight from the San Joaquin Valley by the more affluent, either out of state or to the other California that is the coastal corridor from San Francisco to San Diego. The interior we are told is emptying out, keeping unemployment high and housing prices low. But the wire services also assured us that our net population did not dip, given the role of “international arrivals.” So was there an influx from Switzerland or Kenya into California that I was not aware of? Are we back to “overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters”?’ Did Major Hasan lose it in a workplace rage?

In the tragic Trayvon Martin case almost everything that I saw or read for nearly two weeks seemed to me not quite true. As the days wore on, why did the narrative keep changing? Trayvon was not any longer the slight, preteen in a football uniform as his most widely disseminated photo suggested; that information matters as much or as little as information that George Zimmerman had a prior run-in or two with the authorities. Martin was not outweighed by his shooter by 100 pounds. He was not a model student; and George Zimmerman probably did not run him down in efforts to execute him. Zimmerman probably did not utter a racial epithet. To the extent that he sounded insensitive, it was largely due to a doctored NBC tape (NBC said that it was an inadvertent error ^[13] but why did it err to bolster rather than weaken the media narrative? [fake but accurate?]). Zimmerman really did suffer a head injury. The latter was half-Hispanic; but the original white-on-black crime narrative was nevertheless somewhat salvaged with the new rubric “white Hispanic.” I used to think that the idea of re-arresting someone when probable cause is still in doubt was not a compromise solution to finding out the facts.
Putting a bounty on someone’s head is not a crime? Posting a private address to followers for the intent to foment violence against the residents is not either? Nor is doctoring a tape to inflame racial tensions in a period of unrest a terrible thing to do. For congressional representatives to label someone not charged with a crime an assassin or executioner is not considered bad taste and draws little rebuke.
These are the narratives that for purposes of social justice now become reality, but tomorrow, next week, next month, next year?

Who knows? “Truth,” after all, is not the Socratic absolute, but a socially constructed commodity, defined by power and predicated on race, class, and gender, concerns that can be made to serve the greater good, if adjudicated by — well, again, fill in the blanks.

Seth Leibson 04-13-2012

April 13, 2012

As Broadcast on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America

By Seth Leibsohn



The headline from the Washington Post this morning: “Defiant North Korea fires long-range rocket.”  Now, thank heavens, this rocket failed.  But the question in front of us is what was the US prepared to do if this rocket was successful and, moreover, why did a new leader in North Korea think he could defy our agreement with his country and launch this rocket?  Let me ask this question:  We are going into another round of talks with Iran over their nuclear program this weekend.  Why, this week, did Iran’s President blast the United States as “arrogant” and repeatedly say Iran would not give up its nuclear program?  Why did he think he could do that?  All those sanctions we’ve been told were working against both countries, sanctions matched with offers to talk and negotiate: they’ve led to what?  Fear of us or pushing around of us?



Here is everything you need to know about sanctions against rogue nuclear states and soon-to-be rogue nuclear states: Two quotes from the Washington Post about North Korea:  i) “The country is one of the most heavily sanctioned on earth” and ii) “’We have all the sanction authorities we need under existing U.N. resolutions and executive orders,’” said an Obama administration official, who was not authorized to speak on the record.”



So, the heaviest of sanctions with an admission that we don’t need more stopped North Korea not at all, and puts the fear into the Mullocracy of Iran not at all.  Meanwhile, we get lied to.  Here is Secretary of State Clinton on the upcoming talks with Iran:  “We are receiving signals that (the Iranians) are bringing ideas to the table.”  What signals?  What ideas?  Does she read the speeches of the Iranian President?  And what is Iran beyond its bragging?  It is a nation at war with us.  As Steve Hayes put it in today’s Wall Street Journal:  “Tehran has provided weapons to insurgents directly responsible for killing hundreds of American troops…It has funded, trained and equipped jihadists—Sunnis and Shiites alike—targeting American forces and interests in the Middle East and beyond. And all along the way it has provided safe haven and support to al Qaeda leaders and those closest to them.”  So to this country we talk; we negotiate; and speak about high hopes.



And, if North Korea and Iran were not quite enough for us, let me give you Latin America.  Here’s the latest from Gallup: “U.S. President Barack Obama's job approval rating in Latin America is at a new low ahead of the Sixth Summit of the Americas taking place in Cartagena, Colombia, this week….Many Latin Americans have lost faith in Obama's ability to strengthen ties between Latin America and the U.S.”



Remember when Walter Mondale asked Gary Hart “Where’s the beef?”  One simple question for President Obama on the world stage, on his efforts to reset our foreign relations:  “Where’s the success?”  There is none.  There is failure.  There is weakness.  There is danger.  Remember when Jeane Kirkpatrick said she was tired of the US getting kicked around?  Remember how she and Ronald Reagan changed that?  Well we are getting kicked around again.  And it’s more dangerous now than it was back then.



This is what is happening abroad—and, to us.  Meanwhile, while those fires go on, here is what the President is doing at home—and it is very obviously his campaign theme.  It’s the theme he thinks will take down and take out Mitt Romney.  We cannot let him get away with it.  The President is now going back to arguing for the Buffett rule, the idea that if you earn more than one million dollars a year you need to pay more taxes.  He’s so proud of this point, his speech about it on Wednesday is on the White House Website—and in that speech, not for the first time, he says this:



I’m not the first President to call for this idea that everybody has got to do their fair share.  Some years ago, one of my predecessors traveled across the country pushing for the same concept.  He gave a speech where he talked about a letter he had received from a wealthy executive who paid lower tax rates than his secretary, and wanted to come to Washington and tell Congress why that was wrong.  So this President gave another speech where he said it was “crazy” -- that's a quote -- that certain tax loopholes make it possible for multimillionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary.  That wild-eyed, socialist, tax-hiking class warrior was Ronald Reagan.



President Obama went on to say we might as well call this tax on people earning more than one million dollars the “Reagan rule.”



Now this will have cache in this election if and only if one condition is met: If we are intellectually lazy.  My plea is we not be lazy.  Pericles said the secret of democracy is courage, but I think we need to update that and recognize that the secret of democracy is industry, diligence, and dedication—whatever the opposite of lazy is.



So let’s get to it.  Barack Obama is taking Reagan so far out of context Reagan would not recognize how he’s being quoted.  The speech Reagan gave that Obama is quoting from was at a school in 1985.  And here’s how it went.  First, Reagan spoke of the economic recovery we were then enjoying.  And how did we get there?  Here is what Reagan said in that speech:  “Hope has returned, and America's working again.  Now, you know how all this came about, how we cut tax rates and trimmed Federal spending and got interest rates down. But what's really important is what inspired us to do these things. What's really important is the philosophy that guided us. The whole thing could be boiled down to a few words—freedom, freedom, and more freedom. It's a philosophy that isn't limited to guiding government policy. It's a philosophy you can live by; in fact, I hope you do.”



You simply do not hear Barack Obama talking like that—and you most certainly do not hear him pleading for or celebrating cuts in the tax rates—yes, including cutting the millionaires’ taxes; Reagan cut them 20 percent by the time of his speech 1985 and would cut them again another 22 percent.



So yes, in the summer of 1985 Reagan was pushing his new tax legislation.  But here’s what his legislation called for—the diligent can look it up; I already did.  Yes, closing some tax code loopholes, but if you go back and read what loopholes, they were mostly for entertainment deductions.  Again and again the “three martini lunch” is what the White House said it was talking about and what the press kept talking about.  Entertainment expenses.



How about the rest of Reagan’s tax plan that year?  As I mentioned, he had lowered marginal tax rates from 70 percent to 50 percent and in 1985 he went on a campaign to lower them again, to 35 percent and would ultimately get them to 28 percent.  So when Obama says, as he did this week, that Reagan wanted to raise taxes on millionaires that is not what Reagan was pushing for, Reagan was pushing for lowering them, and in that year he was arguing to lower them to today’s very rate (35 percent) that Obama wants to hike!



Now, let’s look at what else Reagan said in that high school speech.  Let me quote:  “We want the part of your check that shows Federal withholding to have fewer digits on it. And we want the part that shows your salary to have more digits on it. We're trying to take less money from you and less from your parents.”



He also said there “When taxes are lowered, economic growth follows. And economic growth is good for just about everyone, especially the poor.”  That’s what Ronald Reagan’s theme was at that speech.



Reagan’s speech and his plan was about scaling down taxes and scaling down the IRS.  That’s not what Obama’s plan is—it’s the very opposite.  Hold on that thought a moment, because I’m not done with Reagan.  The very day before his speech that Obama quotes, here’s what Reagan said about his tax plan in 1985, quote:  “Some people have labored so long to make government bigger, they've developed a knee-jerk addiction to tax increases," Reagan said. "And every time their knee jerks, we get kicked.”  You don’t hear Obama quote that justification for what Reagan was arguing for in 1985.  And for good reason:  he believes the exact opposite.



So let us disabuse ourselves of this notion that the Buffett rule would receive any warrant, never mind initiation, from Ronald Reagan.  And let us disabuse ourselves from the notion that the Buffett rule means anything substantial beyond crude class electioneering.  If implemented, it would raise revenues by five billion dollars—eight times less than Warren Buffett’s entire net worth.  If Warren Buffett wants to implement his Buffett rule, nobody is stopping him and he could do it for the whole country in one fell swoop if he thinks it such a good idea, and he’d still be worth 35 billion dollars after doing so.



The point is this:  the Gateses and the Zuckerbergs and the Dells, just like the Carnegies and the Mellons and the Vanderbilts before them, have noting to be guilty about:  they make wealth and they create wealth.  They made wealth and they created wealth.



I close with what Abraham Lincoln said about wealth creation:  “Property is the fruit of labor...property is desirable...is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself.”  That is how you talk about fairness.  No, that is how you create fairness.  And wealth.  And prosperity.  And growth.  Not with the political theater of the absurd we’ve been treated to this week and will be treated with for weeks to come.



Let’s get on with this election—and let us do it with one goal in mind: Holding this President accountable.  Accountable for the increased debt; the irresponsible, deficit-laden budgets; increased unemployment; increased weakness on the world stage; increased danger to our own country; but mostly, at the end of the day, mostly let us hold him accountable for treating us as if we were stupid by continuing to offer us theater and absurd theater at that.  Accountability—that’s the other secret of this democracy.

Obama's Only Plan - CLASS WARFARE

In the end, free societies get the governments they deserve. So, if the American people wish to choose their chief executive on the basis of the "war on women," the Republican theocrats' confiscation of your contraceptives or whatever other mangy and emaciated rabbit the Great Magician produces from his threadbare topper, they are free to do so, and they will live with the consequences.

This week's bit of ham-handed misdirection was "the Buffett Rule," a not-so-disguised capital-gains tax hike designed to ensure that Warren Buffett pays as much tax as his secretary.

If the alleged Sage of Omaha is as exercised about this as his public effusions would suggest, I'd be in favor of repealing the prohibition on Bills of Attainder, and the old boy could sleep easy at night.

But instead every other American "millionaire" will be subject to the new rule — because, as President Obama said this week, it "will help us close our deficit."

Wow! Who knew it was that easy?

A-hem. According to the Congressional Budget Office (the same nonpartisan bean-counters who project that on Obama's current spending proposals the entire U.S. economy will cease to exist in 2027) Obama's Buffett Rule will raise — stand well back — $3.2 billion per year. Or what the United States government currently borrows every 17 hours.

So in 514 years it will have raised enough additional revenue to pay off the 2011 federal budget deficit. If you want to mark it on your calendar, 514 years is the year 2526. There's a sporting chance Joe Biden will have retired from public life by then, but other than that I'm not making any bets.

Let's go back to that presidential sound bite: "It will help us close our deficit."

I'm beginning to suspect that the Oval Office teleprompter may be malfunctioning, or that perhaps that NBC News producer who "accidentally" edited George Zimmerman into sounding like a racist has now edited the smartest president of all time into sounding like an idiot. Either way, it appears the last seven words fell off the end of the sentence.

What the president meant to say was: "It will help us close our deficit ... for 2011 ... within a mere half-millennium!" (Pause for deafening cheers and standing ovation.)
Sometimes societies become too stupid to survive. A nation that takes Barack Obama's current rhetorical flourishes seriously is certainly well advanced along that dismal path.

The current federal debt burden works out at about $140,000 per federal taxpayer, and President Obama is proposing to increase both debt and taxes.

Are you one of those taxpayers? How much more do you want added to your $140,000 debt burden? As the Great Magician would say, pick a number, any number. Sorry, you're wrong. Whatever you're willing to bear, he's got more lined up for you.
Even if you're absolved from federal income tax, you too require enough people willing to keep the racket going, and America is already pushing forward into territory the rest of the developed world is steering well clear of.

On April Fools' Day, Japan and the United Kingdom both cut their corporate tax rates, leaving the United States even more of an outlier, with the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world: The top rate of federal corporate tax in the U.S. is 35%. It's 15% in Canada. Which is next door.

Well, who cares about corporations? Only out-of-touch dilettante playboys like Mitt Romney who — hmm, let's see what I can produce from the bottom of the top hat — put his dog on the roof of his car as recently as 1984! That's where your gran'ma will be under the Republicans' plan, while your contraceptiveless teenage daughter is giving birth on the hood.

"Corporations are people, my friend," said Mitt, in what's generally regarded as a damaging sound bite by all the smart people who think Obama's plan to use the Buffett Rule to "close the deficit" this side of the fourth millennium is a stroke of genius.

But Mitt's not wrong. In the end, a corporation doesn't pay tax. The marble atrium of Global MegaCorp's corporate HQ is indifferent to the tax rate; the Articles of Incorporation in the bottom drawer of the chairman's desk couldn't care less.

Every dollar of "corporate" tax has to be fished out the pocket of a real flesh-and-blood human being, whether shareholder, employee or customer.

And that's the problem. For what Obama's spending, there aren't enough of them or us or "the rich" — and there never will be. There is only one Warren Buffett. He is the third wealthiest person on the planet. The first is a Mexican, and beyond the reach of the U.S. Treasury.

Mr. Buffett is worth $44 billion. If he donated the entire lot to the Government of the United States, they would blow through it within 4 1/2 days.

Okay, so who's the fourth richest guy? He's French. And the fifth guy's a Spaniard. No. 6 is Larry Ellison. He's American, but that loser is only worth $36 billion. So he and Buffett between them could keep the United States Government going for a week.


The next richest American is Christy Walton of Wal-Mart, and she's barely a semi-Buffett. So her 25 billion will see you through a couple of days of the second week.

There aren't a lot of other semi-Buffetts, but, if you scrounge around, you can rustle up some hemi-demi-semi-Buffetts: If you confiscate the total wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans it comes to $1.5 trillion, which is just a little less than the Obama budget deficit for year.

But there are a lot of "millionaires," depending on how you define it. Jerry Brown, California's reborn Gov. Moonbeam, defines his "millionaire's tax" as applying to anybody who earns more than $250,000 a year.

"Anybody who makes $250,000 becomes a millionaire very quickly," he explained. "You just need four years."

This may be the simplest wealth-creation advice since Bob Hope was asked to respond back in 1967 to reports that he was worth half-a-billion dollars.

"Anyone can do it," said Hope. "All you have to do is save a million dollars a year for 500 years."
It's that easy, folks! Like President Obama says, all you have to do to pay off his 2011 deficit is save 3.2 billion dollars a year for 500 years.

He thinks you're stupid. Warren Buffett thinks you're stupid. Maybe you are. But not everyone is.
And America's foreign debtors understand that "the Buffett Rule" is just another pathetic sleight-of-hand en route to the collapse of the U.S. dollar, and of American society shortly thereafter.

When he's not talking up his buddy Warren, the Half-Millennium Man has been staggering around demonizing Paul Ryan's plan, which would lead, he says, to the end of the weather service, air traffic control, national parks, law enforcement and drinkable water.
Given what's at stake, you might think then that the president would have an alternative plan. But he has none, save for his proposal to pay off the 2011 federal deficit by the year 2526.

The Obama No-Plan plan means the end of everything. That really ought to be the only slogan the Republicans need this fall:
What's your plan? And all you hear are crickets chirping.

\But don't worry, they're federally funded crickets, chirping at a research facility in North Carolina investigating whether there's any correlation between chirping crickets and the inability of America's political institutions to effect meaningful course correction.

Hey, relax. The Buffett Rule will pick up the tab.
©2012 Mark Steyn

Jack Welch on O (the finger-pointer)

Welch Hits Finger-Pointer In Chief

Leadership: A business icon has ripped the administration's "divide and conquer" strategy, the president's refusal to take responsibility for his policies and for an enemies list that would make a disgraced ex-president proud.

We now have the Obama Principle. It's like the Peter Principle, in which people rise to the level of their incompetence, except as redefined by this administration you refuse to recognize your incompetence and constantly blame others when things go wrong.

Jack Welch, renowned former CEO of General Electric before it became the nontaxpaying sock puppet for the administration's green energy push, has penned an Op-Ed article for Reuters in which he says Obama's "divide-and-conquer" re-election strategy is unworthy of a great leader and chides the president for blaming others for our economic woes.

"Over the past three years," Welch wrote last Wednesday, "Obama has taken a sort of divide-and-conquer approach, amassing a list of enemies that would make Richard Nixon proud — bankers, health care insurance providers, oil companies, wealthy taxpayers, Congress and, most recently, the Supreme Court.

"Gas prices are the fault of oil speculators. The failure of solar power companies is the fault of unfair Chinese competition. The bad economy is one of the many things he inherited, as is the deficit. Operation Fast and Furious was a program begun under the Bush administration that he knew nothing about. The deficit is skyrocketing because the rich aren't paying their 'fair share.'"

On CNBC's "The Kudlow Report" the next day, Welch elaborated: "It was the insurance executives in health care. It was the bankers in the collapse. It was the oil companies as oil prices go up. It was Congress if things didn't go the way he wanted. And recently it's been the Supreme Court."

Indeed, of all the trial-balloon campaign slogans that President Obama has and will be trotting out, "the buck stops here" will not be one of them.

The slogans have ranged from "we can't wait," a slogan that blames a Congress that for two years was a wholly owned subsidiary of his own party, to saying he wanted to build an "America that can last." Which sums up his statement that the system of free-market capitalism, democracy and respect for the Constitution — a system that raised a colonial backwater to the greatest economic and military superpower in history — never worked.

While Obama says he wants an "America that can last," we long for a president who can govern, who sits in the Oval Office in this time of crisis instead of jet-setting from one fundraiser to another. Ronald Reagan worked with Tip O'Neill. Bill Clinton worked with Newt Gingrich. Obama couldn't work with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to produce a budget as deficits soared.

On "The Kudlow Report," Welch argued that in running their companies "great leaders are interested in coalescing." "You don't have one division pitted against the other," he said. "You try to get the whole company to pull together."

The goal of such companies, of course, is to turn profits and provide good returns to investors — concepts foreign to a president more interested in redistributing wealth than creating it. When Obama's creeping socialism and industrial policy of picking winners and losers fails, he seeks scapegoats rather than solutions.

President Obama is the Steve Urkel of presidents, the bumbling sitcom character who, when his ill-conceived plans and blundering actions caused disaster, would look around plaintively and asked, "Did I do that?"At least Urkel knew he had nobody to blame but himself.

Not Obama.