The Supercommittee: A History Lesson

by John Hinderaker in Federal Budget
The Supercommittee is now officially a failure. On balance, I think that is a good thing, in part because the whole approach of trying to solve our country’s deep-seated fiscal problems with a closed-door, back-room deal is fundamentally wrong. Senator Jeff Sessions, ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee, reminds us of the history that gave rise to the present crisis and points the path toward a more sensible, if inherently difficult, approach:

All of us had hoped that the supercommittee would succeed in producing the sound, long-term plan this country desperately needs. But in order to properly understand why they did not, we must recognize the strategic decision made by the president, and Senate Majority Leader Reid, at the beginning of the year.
The budget process began with the submission of the president’s budget plan. Analysis of that plan quickly revealed that the president’s $1.6 trillion tax increase proved totally inadequate to offset the enormous levels of new spending that would occur. Under this plan, over ten years, we would accumulate another $13 trillion in debt, never produce a single deficit less than $748 billion, produce a deficit in the tenth year of $1.2 trillion, and leave entitlement programs like Medicare in grave financial peril.
For this, the president was widely and correctly rebuked.
Next, the newly-elected House Republicans—dispatched by voters to restrain Washington’s big spenders—introduced and passed a budget plan as required by law. It was a detailed, honest, and concrete plan to put our nation on a sound footing.
The Senate Democrat majority then made a decision: Rather than introduce a plan of their own, they chose to ignore the law and craft no budget at all. Majority Leader Reid even said it would be ‘foolish’ to have a budget. After the president’s disastrous budget rollout, Democrat leaders knew their rhetoric would not hold up on paper—that the public would not accept the level of spending, taxing, and borrowing their fiscal vision requires. It was simply easier to avoid accountability.
From that point forward, the president and Senate Democrats did everything possible to avoid having to develop a concrete plan to address this nation’s most dire long-term challenges. The president ignored three consecutive Medicare funding warnings—even though this trigger, by law, requires him to submit a plan to resolve Medicare’s fiscal imbalance within 15 days of submitting his budget. They left the serious policy playing field to fight on the political one, even as America’s balance sheet tipped us closer in the direction of Greece. Should America go down that path, those with the fewest resources, the poorest among us, would be hurt the most; there is nothing compassionate about economic disaster.
A series of secret meetings ensued—meetings of the Gang of Six, talks with the vice president at the Blair House, talks with the president at the White House, and, most recently, the supercommittee. These secret meetings disengaged the congressional process and prevented the serious national and legislative debate we need from taking place. It also allowed Democrats—who still had no real budget plan—to continue avoiding accountability for the fiscal and economic consequences of their political agenda. Indeed, in the first two years of the president’s administration, non-defense discretionary spending surged 24 percent—and by the end of the first three years, gross debt will have increased almost $5 trillion.
Had the president made clear he wanted an agreement, a deal would have been achieved. It seems clear he wanted a campaign issue instead. Rather than confronting the great threat of our time—our $15 trillion debt—the commander-in-chief fled the battlefield. That’s not clever; it’s irresponsible.
Progress must, and will, be achieved. But the kind of deep, systemic, and far-reaching solutions that are ultimately needed won’t be achieved with an 11th hour deal or secret meeting. It will require the full and vigorous participation of the public, the Congress, and the president. It will require a sometimes messy, public, democratic process. And it will require senators and congressmen to cast many public votes and to be held accountable by the American people.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/11/the-supercommittee-a-history-lesson.php

‘Crowdsource’ This: Emails Expose #OccupyWallStreet Conspiracy to ‘Destabalize’ Global Markets, Governments

‘Crowdsource’ This: Emails Expose #OccupyWallStreet Conspiracy to ‘Destabalize’ Global Markets, Governments by Andrew Breitbart

(go to link for screen shots of emails, etc) http://biggovernment.com/abreitbart/2011/10/14/crowdsource-this-social-list-emails-expose-occupywallstreet-conspiracy-to-destablize-global-markets-governments/

We’re in this for the long haul. There are no “solutions” that can be presented quickly to make us go away. And so there will be moments where our presence is no longer an uncomfortable and unknown variable, but rather is normalized and integrated. It’s in those moments that we have to push the envelop [sic], pry open the space of possibility even farther. We go as far as we can to destabalize [sic], but maintain momentum. And when that’s the new “normal” then we go farther. That’s how change happens, how we shift the terrain and the terms of the game.
- Email in “Occupy” archive, “Re: Can OWS be turned into a Democratic Party Movement?”; Wednesday, October 12, 2011

In keeping with the new media notion of crowdsourcing–enthusiastically embraced by the mainstream media when trawling through Sarah Palin’s emails–Big Government will be providing readers later today with links to a document drop consisting of thousands of emails.

The email archive, created by a private cyber security researcher, appears to contain messages shared by the left’s anarcho-socialist activists during the strategic and daily tactical planning of the “Occupy Wall Street” and broader “Occupy” campaign this fall.

Big Government received a tip about the existence of the archive, and we were able to contact the individual who compiled and posted it. He will describe the archive, and how he obtained the emails, later this morning exclusively on Big Government.
Through “crowdsourcing,” the media and the public will then be able to discover the truth behind the “Occupy” movement.

The archive includes emails, for example, from radical anarchist organizer Lisa Fithian, who was profiled earlier this week at Big Government, and who is one of the leading organizers behind the Occupy movement.

In one email, dated October 1, Fithian applauds the launch of “occupations” throughout the country. She also highlights an ACORN-style illegal home occupation in California, linking to a television news story that reveals the involvement of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), which is apparently the reconstituted version of ACORN in California.

Per the 8800+ pages of emails (3900+ emails), the Occupy movement has been in the works for some time. Its leaders apparently intend for it to broaden out and intertwine with the Days of Rage global initiative, which is set to begin on Saturday, October 15th. They also intend the demonstrations to continue indefinitely, as suggested in the following email, dated Monday, October 10:

The true purpose of the Occupy movement appears to be further economic and governmental destabilization, at a time when the world is already facing major financial and political challenges. By embracing the Occupy movement, President Barack Obama, the Democrat Party, and their union allies may be supporting an effort to harm both the domestic and global economies; to create social unrest throughout the democratic world; and to embrace other radical causes, including the anti-Israel movement. Ironically, the emails suggest that the President and the Democrat Party may soon find their friends in the Occupy movement to be a political burden. The email below calls for the Occupy movement to begin “executing higher-risk actions, civil disobedience and arrests,” and suggests: “We must draw a line, disavow the Democrats explicitly, make our messaging a little uncomfortable.”

The email exchanges in the archive begin on September 14th, 2011 and continue through this week.
Later this morning, readers will be able to read the emails for themselves–and the mainstream media will be forced to confront the truth behind the Occupy movement, including its links to socialist, anarchist, and possibly even jihadist organizations.

Brandon Darby, a former left-wing activist, will be following up in the coming days with his own analysis and interpretation of select email exchanges. After Hurricane Katrina, Darby became alienated by his former comrades’ anti-Americanism and propensity for violence, and became an FBI informant. In that role, he was essential to the prevention of a planned Molotov cocktail attack on the 2008 Republican National Convention. Darby is in a unique position to understand the key players and tactics behind the “Occupy” movement, and to help derail the left’s pursuit of broader global destabilization.

Send your thoughts and observations about the email archive to feedback@breitbart.com, or post them in the comment section.

http://biggovernment.com/abreitbart/2011/10/14/crowdsource-this-social-list-emails-expose-occupywallstreet-conspiracy-to-destablize-global-markets-governments/

Indoctrination: What the Occupiers Believe and Why They Believe It

NYPD arrest Occupy Wall Street protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge, Oct. 1

“In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.”– William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (1959)

“We have a class called 21st Century Challenges and Choices. They’re studying the current world. They went on a field trip to see Occupy Denver.”– Dierdre Cryor, principal, St. Mary’s Academy

“We want them to see the democratic process in action.”– Celia Bard, Social Studies Department chair, St. Mary’s Academy

“You’re f–king up our future. . . . What do you think we learn at school? This is what we learned about. . . . We’re the 99 percent.”– 17-year-old student, St. Mary’s Academy

Workers World Party national conference, New York, Oct. 8

“An epic battle is underway for the direction of our country. The Occupy movement is not alone. . . . We stand with the courageous young people who have sparked this movement and join with the occupiers who are putting themselves on the line to transform our nation and achieve a secure and sustainable future. . . . The time has come to put people before profits.”– “Communist Party heralds Occupy Wall Street movement,” Oct. 18, 2011, CPUSA.org

“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”– Ronald Reagan, Sept. 25, 1987

During today’s first anniversary broadcast of Da Tech Guy‘s radio show on WCRN, Jeff Goldstein of Protein Wisdom was discussing his video of Catholic schoolgirls who took part in an Occupy Denver protest against last weekend’s BlogCon:



In discussing the beliefs of the Occupiers, including these 17-year-old girls who attend a private Catholic academy where the tuition is $14,000 a year, Jeff suggested they had been “indoctrinated.” This called to mind Buckley’s description of indoctrination in Up From Liberalism, and made me wonder how these girls were taught that they are “the 99 percent” on whose behalf the Occupiers claim to speak.

Born in 1994, these girls cannot possibly have any useful memory of political events prior to the Bush presidency. They were in first grade during the 2000 election and were 14 when Obama was elected. Therefore whatever “knowledge” they have of history is what they have been taught, and the content of that curriculum undoubtedly accounts for their sympathy with the Occupy movement.

These girls are scarcely alone in that regard. An entire generation of youth has been taught to view the radical protest movements of the Sixties as unquestionably righteous. Young people may never have heard of Mario Savio, Tom Hayden, Stokely Carmichael, Bill Ayers or Abbie Hoffman, but they have been rigorously indoctrinated with the worldview of the 1960s New Left. And so when they behold the spectacle of left-wing protests like the Occupy movement, it touches a chord that resonates, evoking the heroic conception of revolutionary struggle instilled in them by their teachers, by TV and movies, and by the news media.

‘Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out’

Hagiographic treatment of Sixties radicalism convinces young people, who can know nothing of that long-ago era except what they have been taught, that the New Left represented all that was good and right, and that the protest movements of the 1960s were a glorious triumph. One wishes these kids could be de-programmed by exposure to such eyewitness testimony as Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the Sixties by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers by Tom Wolfe, or perhaps even some seminal gonzo journalism:

“In 1965 Berkeley was the axis of what was just beginning to be called the ‘New Left.’ Its lenders were radical, but they were also deeply committed to the society they wanted to change.
“Now, in 1967, there is not much doubt that Berkeley has gone through a revolution of some kind, but the end result is not exactly what the original leaders had in mind. Many one-time activists have forsaken politics entirely and turned to drugs. . . .
“The hippies, who had never really believed they were the wave of the future anyway, saw the [1966] election results as brutal confirmation of the futility of fighting the establishment on its own terms. There had to be a whole new scene, they said, and the only way to do it was to make the big move — either figuratively or literally — from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury, from pragmatism to mysticism, from politics to dope. . . . The thrust is no longer for ‘change’ or ‘progress’ or ‘revolution,’ but merely to escape, to live on the far perimeter of a world that might have been.”– Hunter S. Thompson, “The Hashbury is the Capital of the Hippies,” May 1967, collected in The Great Shark Hunt (1979)

Thompson was always a man of the Left, but harbored no illusions about the Left’s failures. He watched young idealists follow the New Left downward, as the movement splintered and descended into a futile festival of drugged and disorganized (yet ironically herdlike) “non-conformity” that became known as the counter-culture.
Not everyone in the New Left followed Timothy Leary’s advice to “tune in, turn on and drop out,” however. Many of the radicals made the Long March Through the Institutions. This is how Bill Ayers, a terrorist leader who spent years as a fugitive wanted by the FBI, eventually became an influential academic, along with many others who shared his revolutionary vision if not his penchant for revolutionary violence.

“We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men . . . deeply affected by the historic events of our time in the struggle against U.S. imperialism.”– Bill Ayers, et. al., “Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism,” manifesto of the Weather Underground, 1974

In all the 2008 uproar about Ayers’s association with Barack Obama, few seemed to take alarm at the thought that, from 1987 onward, Ayers was a professor of education — a teacher of teachers — at the University of Illinois. Ayers’s acceptance within academia suggests that many other administrators and faculty were sympathetic to his radicalism. And if, for the past quarter-century, admirers of Marxist revolutionaries have been so influential in our nation’s most prestigious educational institutions, are we surprised to find 17-year-olds sympathizing with the Occupy mobs?

Understanding Marx and Lenin

Marxism is a philosophy based on a theory of history, and anyone who does not understand this theory — “dialectical materialism,” as it is usually known — is ill-equipped to discuss what the Left believes, and how their beliefs are now propagated through the education system, through news media and through popular entertainment.

A disciple of the German philosopher Georg Hegel, Karl Marx believed and taught that history develops through a dialectical process: Thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Marx insisted that this process of development leads inevitably to social revolution, as changes in material conditions empower a rising class in their struggle to displace the ruling class, which had attained its dominant position during an earlier era. The supremacy of the ruling class had been made obsolete by new developments, and thus the triumph of the rising class was historically inevitable.

This was how, Marx taught, the era of feudalism had ended with the rise of the bourgeoisie — the capitalistic merchant class, which displaced the hereditary aristocracy in the French Revolution. (It can be said that Marx, like many 19th-century Germans, was afflicted with a bad case of “revolution envy.”) Based on this understanding of history, Marx then prophesied that the very same material conditions that had empowered the bourgeois merchant class – innovations in science and technology, the growth of modern industry, the spread of democratic government — would inevitably lead to another revolution: The rise of the proletariat (industrial workers) to challenge the dominance of the bourgeoisie.

Above and beyond Marx’s specific critique of industrial capitalism as a system whereby the wealthy exploited and oppressed the workers,  it was his belief in class struggle as a permanent fact of human existence and material conditions as a force for revolutionary upheaval that distinguished Marxism from other socialist theories of the 19th century.

Marx boasted that his Communism was “scientific socialism,” which he contrasted to the “idealistic” schemes of others. The famed Communist Manifesto of 1848 advocated specific measures such as the progressive income tax and free public education as part of a party platform, these ideas were not original to Marx and his co-author Friedrich Engels. Rather, the party platform incorporated a list of reform proposals that were broadly popular among socialists of the era. What distinguished Marx and Engels — the basis of their claim to leadership of a proletarian revolution they forecast as the inevitable result of a forthcoming crisis in the bourgeois capitalist system — was their assertion that this was an outcome they had discerned through their scientific understanding of historical development.

The Revolutionary Vanguard

Those who have read Socialism by Ludwig von Mises and A Conservative History of the American Left by Dan Flynn will know that there have been many other varieties of socialism promulgated over the years. Yet it was Marx’s “scientific socialism” that laid the philosophical foundation for the 20th-century revolutions that brought about Communist regimes in Russia, China, Cuba and elsewhere. This was largely due to the work of Vladimir Lenin, which is why revolutionary communism (as contrasted to the slow-motion “reform” methods of democratical socialism, i.e., the European-style Welfare State) is properly known as Marxism-Leninism.

Lenin’s place in the revolutionary pantheon was secured not only by his leadership of the Bolshevik Revolution, but also by his two clever additions to Marxist theory.

 Lenin’s first innovation was the concept that became known as ”democratic centralism.” In a complex argument (elaborated in the 1902 treatise “What Is to Be Done?”), Lenin set forth his principles of leadership, advocating both his own party’s role as the legitimate “vanguard” of the proletarian revolution and the party leadership’s authority to act without internal dissent. Mocking socialist rivals whom he accused of “infantile playing at ‘democratic’ forms,” Lenin demanded “the consolidation of militant Marxism” to make it “the genuine vanguard of the most revolutionary class.” This argument was, in essence, Lenin’s way of issuing himself a license for dictatorship.

The second of Lenin’s innovations was the concept of imperialism. Marx had taught for decades, until his death in 1883, that the crisis of industrial capitalism was both inevitable and imminent. By the early 20th century, however, even Marx’s most devout disciples could see that this crisis had failed to arrive. Capitalism was flourishing and the economic condition of workers were improving. In his 1916 treatise Imperialism, Lenin offered an explanation: Through their colonial empires, the leading industrial nations were parasitically expropriating resources from undeveloped parts of the world. The excess wealth thus gained was what had prevented the crisis prophesied by Marx.

“Imperialism . . . means high monopoly profits for a handful of very rich countries [and] makes it economically possible to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat,” Lenin wrote.

We can view the concept of imperialism two ways: First, as a genuine effort to explain the delayed crisis in capitalism, and second, as a cynical effort by Lenin to undermine socialist support for the World War that was then raging. The two greatest “imperial” powers were England and France, with whom Russia was allied. Russia was also an empire, of course, but was not a major industrial power and did not have overseas colonies like the English and French. By attacking “imperialism,” then, Lenin was accusing the Tsarist regime of helping its allies defend their own empires which, according to his theory, were being parasitically exploited to shore up decadent bourgeois capitalism.

As subversive wartime propaganda, then, “Imperialism” served many purposes, and it is remarkable to note how it is also during wartime that the American Left revives Lenin’s ancient accusations. Bill Ayers and his Weather Underground comrades saw themselves engaged in a “struggle against U.S. imperialism,” and isn’t this what anti-war protesters meant when they accused the Bush administration of fighting a “war for oil” in Iraq?

Marxism by Osmosis

Certainly, the teenage prep-school girls who made that field trip to Occupy Denver never read Marx or Lenin, and they probably wouldn’t know Bill Ayers from Justin Bieber. The same can be said for most of the rest of the ill-informed mobs who have assembled themselves under the “Occupy” banner. They cannot articulate any rational agenda, but are motivated only by a general resentment of “the rich,’ whom the Occupiers vaguely understand to be unfairly exploiting “the 99 percent” in some way.

If the Occupiers are in any sense Marxist, then, they have absorbed their Marxism by some mysterious process of cultural osmosis, because it is impossible to imagine any of those nitwits taking time to work their way through “Imperialism” or “What Is to Be Done?” (And forget about Das Kapital, a book so notoriously unreadable that I doubt even the most devout Communists ever got past the second chapter.) What is important to understand is that Marxism is a belief system, and that a person may be influenced by Marxist ideas without ever realizing the origins of these ideas.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama’s critics often called him a “radical,” a “socialist” or even a “Marxist” and were either dismissed as hysterics or condemned for “McCarthyism.” It was not widely noted that, for those too young to remember America’s Cold War struggle against Soviet tyranny, the accusation of “Marxism” doesn’t carry much weight, while “McCarthyism” is at most something they’ve read about in books. (Stan Evans’s Blacklisted by History probably isn’t on the collegiate reading list.) Voters who were 25 in 2008 were in first grade when the Berlin Wall came down. If they have some idea that the Soviet empire was a bad thing, they have little idea of why it was bad. And this ignorance is no accident.

To explain why the Bolshevik experiment failed so spectacularly would require that students be taught the errors of socialism, which would necessarily require an explanation of the superiority of the market economy to the socialist planned economy. And the left-wing orientation of today’s academic establishment — “Down With Capitalist Education!” to quote a sign in a protest today by Cal State university faculty — pretty much prohibits any such explanation.

Seventeen-year-olds taught that they are “the 99 percent” and that advocates of economic freedom are “f–king up our future” have not been merely miseducated, but have been quite literally indoctrinated. But as Buckley said, they would be “outraged by the sugggestion” that they have not arrived at their beliefs “by independent intellectual exertion.”

These young people have not been taught Marx and Lenin. Rather, they have had their heads stuffed with nebulous ideas about “equality,” “rights” and “social justice” by teachers (and journalists and movie producers) who cherish romantic mythology about the righteous glories of Sixties radical movements.

“We want them to see the democratic process in action,” their teacher said, as if obnoxious trespassers attempting to disrupt a conference are the essence of “the democratic process.”

Jim Hoft asked the teacher whether she’d ever taken her students to a Tea Party rally, and she said no, “This is the first time we’ve done anything like this.” OK, so why now? What was it about Occupy Denver that deserved a field trip, whereas the past two years of Tea Party events never merited study as part of “the democratic process”?

By Reagan’s definition, the Denver teacher and her students are neither Communists nor anti-Communists, having neither read nor understood Marx and Lenin. In the past five decades, however, the New Left’s worldview has been sufficiently diffused throughout our culture that many people readily believe what are essentially Marxist ideas: Greedy capitalists are engaged in exploitation of the downtrodden toiling masses, and mass movements that demand punitive action against the rich are part of “the democratic process” – in a way that Tea Party rallies in defense of economic freedom are not.

We naturally recoil at the thought that a Catholic girls’ school would teach its students to take up the revolutionary banner of class struggle, but this is indeed what we must conclude when we hear a 17-year-old declare, “We’re the 99 percent.”

Somewhere, Bill Ayers must be smiling.

http://theothermccain.com/2011/11/19/indoctrination-what-the-occupiers-believe-and-why-they-believe-it/

Berkeley woman assaulted for NOT joining OWS protest

Berkeley woman assaulted for NOT joining OWS protest

Looks like the “Join us or else!” mentality is growing violent at Occupy Cal in Berkeley, where an (apparent) OWS protester assaulted a female student when she gave the wrong answer about going to the Occupation protest:

Man throws aluminum water bottle at UC Berkeley student’s face

A man threw an aluminum water bottle at a UC Berkeley student Thursday evening on campus, causing minor injuries to the victim’s face.
At about 5:09 p.m., the female student was approached by a man at “the northeast exterior of the Haas Pavilion,” according to a UCPD crime alert. The man asked the suspect if she was going to the protest on Sproul Plaza, and when the victim answered “no,” the suspect yelled at her.
“People like you are the reason that California is in debt,” he said, according to the crime alert.
The suspect then threw a full aluminum water bottle at the victim’s face. The victim then called UCPD and refused medical treatment for the bruise on her cheek. UCPD officers responded to the scene and checked the area, but could not locate the suspect.
The suspect was described as a white or Hispanic male in his early 20s, wearing a brown and green knit cap with earflaps and strings, a black coat and dark pants.

A few additional details not spelled out explicitly in the article:
• Thursday at 5pm was the moment at which the Occupy Cal rally was happening in Sproul Plaza, so the “protest” mentioned in the article was the Occupy protest.
• The incident happened just 200 yards from the site of the protest, within earshot.
• The suspect description matched the appearance of the typical OWS protester.
We can’t say for absolute sure that the assailant was an Occupier since he hasn’t been caught yet, but considering that he was a young white male wearing dark scruffy clothing yelling about debt in the immediate vicinity of the Occupation protest, I think it’d safe to jump to that conclusion.
Add this to the ever-growing rap sheet of crimes associated with the Occupy movement.

Posted at 7:50 am on November 20th, 2011 by

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2011/11/20/berkeley-woman-assaulted-for-not-joining-ows-protest/

Democratic Pollsters: Obama Should Abandon Run for Second Term

Democratic Pollsters: Obama Should Abandon Run for Second Term - Michael Catalini - NationalJournal.com

By Michael Catalini 

President Obama should abandon his run for a second term and turn over the reins of the Democratic Party to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, two one-time Democratic pollsters wrote in Monday's Wall Street Journal, which appeared online Sunday.Patrick H. Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen argued that just as Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson decided not to pursue additional runs though they could have, Obama should do the same.

(RELATED: Romney's Team: Obama's the Real Flip-Flopper)

“He should abandon his candidacy for re-election in favor of a clear alternative, one capable not only of saving the Democratic Party, but more important, of governing effectively and in a way that preserves the most important of the president's accomplishments. He should step aside for the one candidate who would become, by acclamation, the nominee of the Democratic Party: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,”Caddell and Schoen wrote.

Caddell, who worked as a pollster for President Jimmy Carter, and Schoen, who was a pollster for President Bill Clinton, argue that Obama will inevitably have to run a negative campaign in order to win reelection, the negative consequences of which will make it difficult for him to govern effectively.

“One year ago in these pages, we warned that if President Obama continued down his overly partisan road, the nation would be ‘guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it.’ The result has been exactly as we predicted: stalemate in Washington, fights over the debt ceiling, an inability to tackle the debt and deficit, and paralysis exacerbating market turmoil and economic decline,” they write.

Caddell and Schoen say they write as “patriots and Democrats” who are concerned for their country, and they do not expect to play a direct role in any possible Clinton campaign.

This is not the first time Caddell and Schoen have made this argument. They wrote in November 2010 in The Washington Post that they “do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed.”

http://nationaljournal.com/2012-presidential-campaign/democratic-pollsters-obama-should-abandon-run-for-second-term-20111120

Close the supercommittee and let voters choose

Close the supercommittee and let voters choose Hugh Hewitt Columnists Washington Examiner

By: Hugh Hewitt |

They were sent away into closed rooms with the instructions to get serious about spending. The best hope for them was that they could return with serious entitlement reforms for Social Security and Medicaid, and maybe even Medicare.

I, among others, encouraged them to "go big" and throw in immigration reform if that is what it took to get the Democrats to finally deal with the Greece-in-our-future if nothing was done about federal spending.

Even a national sales tax devoted exclusively to debt reduction in combination with sweeping, immediate and enduring entitlement reform would have been possible to swallow.

Instead, two of the supercommittee's GOP members began serious negotiations by offering to carve up the three deductions closest to conservative hearts because those provisions promote home ownership, charitable giving and federalism -- and then expressed surprise that the conservative base is furious.

Some Beltway conservatives pretend that fury doesn't exist, and they cite the Wall Street Journal and various economists to prove that no one really cares about home mortgage interest or their churches, schools and research foundations.

Other defenders of the GOP tax hikes cite the looming "sequestration" of $600 billion from the Department of Defense, an obviously suicidal budget strategy -- a reckless, indeed, insane path to follow.

Let President Obama and the Democrats defend such a madness, and let them try to defend holding America's military hostage to NPR and Green Jobs.

I asked former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney on Friday's radio show if he would campaign against such cuts if he were the nominee.

"Absolutely," he responded. "This is a Faustian choice that the president and his people have put in place. The idea of drastic cuts to our national security at a time when the world is as dangerous as it is and when, frankly, we have men and women in harm's way around the world is a terrible idea.

"Even Secretary Panetta, who works for President Obama, has said these cuts would be draconian," he added.

"I think it was a very bad idea to put our national security on the chopping block, and will, if elected president, reverse those cuts, and reverse the prior cuts that President Obama has made to defense as well," he concluded.

And that ought to be the response of every Republican to the threat of more massive cuts to the military. That sequestration is a nightmare for soft-on-defense Obama and his Congressional allies, not the GOP. The stall over entitlements is their disaster, not the Republicans'.

The only way the GOP loses this crucial battle is if they refuse to fight it, and not just this week and through the end of this year, but every day, week and month of the next year.

"Cut spending, shrink the government, rebuild our military, appoint good judges, build the fence, care for the wounded and the families of the fallen" is the short summary of the Republican platform in 2012.
Two dozen words is all the GOP needs if they mean them, repeat them and defend them.

It has to start this week, and not with convoluted explanations of offers and counter-offers. The Democrats don't want to reform the entitlements that must be reformed. They don't want to cut government; they want to cut the military.

They want to sacrifice the benefits of those who have served, including those who have been wounded and the care for their families and the families of the fallen. They want to protect NPR and Planned Parenthood, unions and EPA.

This is the true situation, and, astonishing as it is to most Americans, it is the reality of vast chasm that separates the two parties.

The supercommittee should dissolve, the campaign should begin and a clear choice should be put to the people.

Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/11/close-supercommittee-and-let-voters-choose#.TsnZnBdbPbE.blogger#ixzz1eLoDgJsh

“CWA Supports the Occupy Movement”

 

Been wondering why the media is so cravenly sympathetic to the violent “Occupy” movement? They’re part of it, that’s why.

While journalists are quick to expose conflicts of interest that could influence political leaders, some often-sympathetic reporters covering the Occupy Wall Street movement might want to look in the mirror.
Those are the journalists belonging to the Newspaper Guild, a national union that represents many journalists in the state, including some at The New York Times.
The Guild is a branch of the CWA, or Communications Workers of America, one of the strongest supporters of the Occupy effort in the nation.
The union’s home page on the Web, for instance, proudly declares, “CWA Supports the Occupy Movement.’’
And it also declares, “CWAers have joined with the Occupy movement across the country to stand up against the destructive power of corporate greed.”

Indeed a look at their home page is filled with links to the OWS movement, as well as one to recall Governor Walker in Wisconsin, so don’t expect any impartial coverage of that story, either.

When you “share” the goals of the deranged occupiers, don’t expect fair and balanced coverage.

“We share the same goal: that it’s time to put our country ahead of personal enrichment. It will take a broad movement of millions of us, standing together, to make sure that our voices are heard,” said CWA President Larry Cohen.
“Removing Occupy demonstrators from Zuccotti Park or from any other city in our country won’t stop the movement that is growing every day, to get money out of politics, to create good jobs in the U.S, and to restore our democracy and the standing of ordinary Americans.”

I think we’ve figured out why nearly every news story on OWS is sure to have the “mostly peaceful” meme within it.

http://www.jammiewf.com/2011/cwa-supports-the-occupy-movement/

Obama ♥ the Big Guys--Big government, big labor, and big business in bed together.

Obama ♥ the Big Guys The Weekly StandardBig government, big labor, and big business in bed together.

 By FRED BARNES

By his own account, President Obama is the champion and protector of the little guy. He said last week he wants no one left “in a second-class status in this United States of America.” He’s “determined” to “make sure that nobody out there is going bankrupt just because somebody in their family is getting sick.” He’s committed to making Washington “responsive to the needs of people, not the needs of special interests [and] not just people who are hurting now, but also responsive to future generations.” Obama identifies himself with the 99 percent.

GARY LOCKE

Yet the winners in the nearly three years of Obama’s presidency are the big guys​—​big business, big labor, and big government. Corporate profits have reached record levels. The influence of the biggest labor unions has surged in Washington, where it matters most. The federal government has grown in size and reach.

Meanwhile, the weak economy has hurt small business, the country’s number one job creator. Temporary tax breaks haven’t helped, and the threat of new taxes and a fresh barrage of regulations have put a crimp in expansion and hiring. Big business isn’t expanding or
hiring much either. A headline in Slate reflected this: “More Profits, Fewer Jobs.”

Labor leaders have entrée at the White House and federal departments and agencies as never before. The most frequent visitor to the White House in Obama’s first year was Andy Stern of the Service Employees International Union. The president delayed trade treaties with South Korea, Panama, and Colombia until they were altered to satisfy labor officials. If Obama understands that higher levels of unionization are associated with greater joblessness, he’s never let on.Big government is a cliché that’s all the more true in the Obama era.

Federal employment grew by 140,800 in Obama’s first two years, and the clout of federal officialdom has increased substantially. The Environmental Protection Agency has mounted a regulatory offensive the business community and Republicans have challenged but failed to halt. Obamacare, scheduled to go fully into effect in 2014, would give Washington control over the way health care is dispensed, financed, and regulated​—​not a takeover, but close to it.

“If you are big in today’s Washington, you lead a charmed life,” Washington consultant David Smick says.

In Obama’s case, there’s more to the gap between what he professes and what his administration has produced than meets the eye. Yes, his hypocrisy is breathtaking. But it represents the way he prefers to govern. Dealing with a few big institutions, even if they are dinosaurs, is easier than consulting more widely. So is relying on government to remedy every national ill, rather than letting markets, private groups, and individuals play pivotal roles.

“What an irony for an administration that claims populist roots,” Smick says. “Policy prescriptions for the most part use the top-down approach. Bring out the GE guy and various big labor bosses to deal with the jobless nightmare when the bulk of the solution involves fostering small business start-ups.”

Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric’s CEO, happens to be chairman of Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. GE is famous for having paid no corporate income taxes in 2009 and 2010 and shipping thousands of jobs overseas. The council’s membership consists of 23 corporate chiefs, two labor leaders, one economist, one biologist, and zero representatives of small business.

For contributions to his reelection campaign, Obama has tapped the segment of big business he’s referred to as “fat cat bankers”: Wall Street. According to the Washington Post, he has raised more from financiers and bankers than all of the Republican presidential candidates combined. He’s raised more at Bain Capital than Mitt Romney, who cofounded the firm.

Wall Street has reason to be grateful. “During Obama’s tenure, Wall Street has roared back, even as the broader economy has struggled,” Zachary Goldfarb of the Washington Post wrote last week. “Wall Street firms .  .  . earned more in the first two and a half years of the Obama administration than they did during the eight years of the George W. Bush administration.”

Smaller community banks haven’t fared as well. Wall Street banks have the manpower to comply with new restrictions endorsed by Obama and passed by Congress. Small banks don’t. Big banks are thriving while interest rates are near zero. The loan business of small banks suffers because of these rates.

At the same time, corporations are sitting on nearly $2 trillion amassed during the Obama era. If invested, the money would surely stir economic growth and job creation. But Obama has refused to remove impediments to investment, chiefly future tax hikes and regulations.

Organized labor is also a big-time funder of Obama’s campaign, as you might expect given the president’s sensitivity to every need of big unions. He’s turned the National Labor Relations Board into a knee-jerk advocate of the most extreme pro-union positions. And his Labor Department no longer requires labor leaders to disclose many specifics of their expenditure of union money. This hamstrings government oversight and leaves union members in the dark.

In Obama’s strengthening of big government, the biggest beneficiaries are unelected bureaucrats. They’re unleashed. The new health care law would create 159 new boards, commissions, or programs, including the Independent Payment Advisory Board with power to decide what Medicare pays for and, by extension, what private insurance companies cover. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created with sweeping authority over how money is loaned to consumers. The bureau is empowered to write its own rules and decide its budget without depending on Congress for funding. The Federal Reserve delivers the money.

Last week, Obama veered from his top priority with unemployment at 9 percent: more jobs. A Canadian company plans to hire as many as 20,000 workers to build an oil pipeline from the province of Alberta to Texas. Its application, pending since 2008, has sparked growing protests by environmental activists. Obama promises to decide personally whether to approve the pipeline. And last week, he took a preliminary step, delaying the decision until after the 2012 election. So for now, the little guy lost. The winner: big green.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/obama-big-guys_608006.html?nopager=1

CBO: Democrats’ “Stimulus” Plan Hurts Long-Term GDP Growth

by John Hinderaker in Economy

If we were to choose three of Barack Obama’s words to sum up his failed presidency, it would be “spending equals stimulus.” Obama naively believes that any government spending–it scarcely matters on what–has a positive impact on our economy. He completely fails to understand (or, at any rate, to acknowledge) that wasteful spending destroys wealth and, in the long run, kills jobs. Thus, even though the Democrats’ $800 billion-plus stimulus bill was an abject failure, they have nothing to offer Americans but more of the same.

On Tuesday, Doug Elmendorf, head of the Congressional Budget Office, testified before the Senate Budget Committee. Ranking Republican Jeff Sessions recalled the CBO’s projection, made around the time the stimulus bill was enacted, that the measure would have a negative long-term impact on economic growth. Elmendorf confirmed that this is still the view of the CBO: (Use link to view video)

If anything, our experience with the stimulus bill, which failed to achieve its stated objective in reducing unemployment, can only have confirmed the CBO’s negative projection.

Whenever they are asked about the Democrats’ “son of stimulus”–i.e., their proposal to waste yet another half-trillion dollars–Republicans need to cite the CBO’s projection as confirmation of what we have seen through experience: wasteful spending does not create wealth or jobs, it destroys them.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/11/cbo-democrats-stimulus-plan-hurts-long-term-gdp-growth.php

Obama’s Job-Destroying Machine Grinds On

by John Hinderaker/Powerlineblog in Economy, Energy Policy, Obama administration

I can’t figure out whether it is due to malice or incompetence; all I know is, if you wanted to hurt America’s economy, you would do pretty much everything the Obama administration does. Energy policy is the absolute worst. First Obama delayed (and perhaps killed) the Keystone pipeline. Michael Ramirez sums up that decision, which can be explained only as an economically irrational attempt to shore up the president’s liberal base in advance of next year’s election:



It seems that every day brings a new Obama administration outrage. Today, it was the USDA’s decision to delay shale drilling in Ohio:

President Obama’s United States Department of Agriculture has delayed shale gas drilling in Ohio for up to six months by cancelling a mineral lease auction for Wayne National Forest (WNF). The move was taken in deference to environmentalists, on the pretext of studying the effects of hydraulic fracturing. …
Speaking of the WNF gas drilling, one environmentalist group spokesman suggested that moving forward with drilling “could turn the Ohio Valley into Ozone Alley,” even though Wayne National Forest already has nearly 1300 oil and gas wells in operation which this study does not affect.

It has been estimated that that drilling in the Utica shale will produce up to 204,500 jobs by 2015. The Obama administration claims that those jobs have only been delayed and are not gone forever. Sure. In the unlikely event that Obama is re-elected, the only constraint on his economically destructive policies will be gone, and we can expect him to do everything possible to kill energy production and destroy job creation.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/11/obamas-job-destroying-machine-grinds-on.php

An Occupy Movement Based On 99% Lies

An Occupy Movement Based On 99% Lies - Latest Headlines - Investors.com

Inequality: As cities rousted Occupiers, liberals claimed the movement has already succeeded by calling attention to income inequality. But all it's really done is give the left an excuse to recycle bogus class-warfare claims.

Soon after Mayor Bloomberg cleared the Occupiers out of New York's Zuccotti Park, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein reassured his fellow liberals. "The movement has already scored some big wins," he wrote, because it has "changed the national conversation." The evidence? The press has written lots of stories about income inequality lately.

Of course, counting news stories proves nothing. The liberal media love the Occupy crowd and what it stands for, and so it generously flooded the zone with adoring coverage, while carefully covering up the movement's violence, depravity and anti-American radicalism.

But then again, almost nothing that's been written or said about the Occupy movement and its main issue has been true.

Case in point is a recent New York Times op-ed by Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs, in which he tries to convince readers that the Occupy movement is the leading edge of a progressive Nirvana. But his piece is rife with falsehoods.

In the very first paragraph, for example, Sachs claims that "we are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1% and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest."

In fact, the average income for the top 1% has dropped about 9% in real terms over the past decade, according to IRS data. Census data show a similar decline for top-income earners. Meanwhile, the Gini Index — a common measure of income inequality — has been almost dead flat since 2000.

And to the extent that inequality has climbed over the past 30 years, it's been in concert with economic growth, rising during the Reagan and Clinton boom years and sagging during economic slumps.

Sachs' claim that Reagan's policies punished the country with crushing unemployment is even more ludicrous. Reagan's tax-cutting, deregulating, fiscal conservative policies propelled the economy to an unprecedented era of sustained growth.

Between 1981 and 2008, unemployment averaged just 6%. Only after Obama started to undo everything Reagan achieved did unemployment spike, averaging 9.3% since he took office.

Sachs goes on to say that "taxes for the rich were slashed," though the share of federal income taxes paid by the top 1% is now 37% — up from 18% in 1980. Meanwhile, a new Congressional Budget Office report finds that when you account for all federal taxes, the income tax code is just as progressive today as it was in 1979.

Even Sachs' argument that the Occupy crowd is changing minds is bogus. The left has peddled the income inequality story for decades. Bill Clinton ran for president claiming the 1980s were a time "of greed and selfishness," when the rich got richer and the poor got poorer.

If anything, the Occupy crowd's efforts have backfired. A new survey by the liberal-leaning Public Policy Polling finds just 33% now support the Occupy movement, down from a month ago and lower than the 42% who say they support the Tea Party. And Gallup finds more identify themselves as conservative today than did so two years ago.

But fear not. Even after the Occupy movement fizzles completely, something else will soon come along that liberals and the press will grab onto as a sign that their much-hoped-for progressive era has arrived.

http://news.investors.com/Article.aspx?id=592051&p=2

Spending’s ascending — with or without a budget sequester

By George F. Will

Born during what is mistakenly called the debt-ceiling “debacle” last summer, the congressional supercommittee may die without agreeing to a 10-year, $1.2 trillion (at least) deficit-reduction plan. This is not properly labeled a failure. Committee Democrats demanded more revenue; Republicans offered $500 billion; Democrats responded with the one-syllable distillation of liberalism: “More!” So the committee’s work has been a clarifying event that presages a larger one — next November’s elections.

The messiness surrounding the debt-ceiling increase was what democracy looks like when belatedly confronting big problems. Remember, Barack Obama demanded, until doing so became politically untenable, a “clean” ceiling increase — no supercommittee or other threat to his spending torrent.

The supercommittee should by now have sent its plan to the Congressional Budget Office for “scoring” — calculation of the fiscal consequences of its proposals. The law establishing the committee requires any proposal to be published in legislative language 48 hours before Nov. 23. Not that law has much to do with fiscal matters: The Democratic-controlled Senate has not produced a budget in more than 930 days. This is just one way existing budget law is ignored.

Regarding the supercommittee, Harry Reid’s and Obama’s interests diverge. Imitation is the sincerest form of politics, and Obama needs congressional failure as he seeks reelection by emulating Harry Truman in 1948, running against a “do-nothing” Congress. Reid, however, wants to remain Senate majority leader. In 2012, Democrats will be defending 23 seats, Republicans only 10. Republicans need to gain just four seats to control the Senate. Reid’s members cannot relish running while Obama is denouncing the “Republican Congress.” As if the Democratic-controlled Senate has been temporarily disassociated from Congress.

Sensible people who remember the last grand budget bargain will be dry-eyed about not having another now. Although only 21 of the 242 Republicans in the House and eight of 47 Republicans in the Senate were on Capitol Hill in 1990, everyone there should remember the results of that year’s budget agreement, wherein President George H.W. Bush jettisoned his “no new taxes” pledge: Taxes increased. So did spending. And the deficit. Economic growth decreased.

Congressional failure to approve a supercommittee proposal supposedly will trigger a $1.2 trillion sequester, half from national security budgets. But the trigger will not be pulled until 2013. No Congress can bind another, and any trigger Congress creates Congress can disable. Obama, who may not be president then, hints that he might veto legislation that alters the sequester. But suppose the sequester occurs. Ignore loose talk about “draconian” spending cuts. Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center has a graph you should see.

It shows two lines. The top one charts spending, 2013-2021, without the sequester; the other shows spending with the sequester. Both lines are ascending. Both show annual spending rising from less than $4 trillion to more than $5 trillion. The space between them is so narrow that it is difficult to see that there are two lines. Without the sequester, spending will increase $1.7 trillion; with the sequester, spending will increase $1.6 trillion. Here are categories of spending:

Ten-year spending increases
	Without	With
Defense	20 percent	18 percent
Nondefense discretionary	14 percent	12 percent
Medicare	62 percent	62 percent
Other mandatory	51 percent	51 percent
Net interest	152 percent	136 percent

The supercommittee’s difficulties are not shocking. This is shocking: Amid a darkening fiscal crisis, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, whose department has become a huge and incompetent venture capital fund, has not resigned as penance for complicity in the administration’s “green graft” and crony capitalism.

Equally incomprehensible: As the supercommittee seems about to leave government’s spending curve unbent, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who should take a high-speed train into retirement, continues his multibillion-dollar mania for California’s San Francisco-to-Anaheim high-speed-rail project. In just three years, the projected price of it has tripled to $98.5 billion, and only ludicrous assumptions about passenger traffic present the project as profitable enough to attract private investors, who are supposed to pay most of the costs.

“The first lesson of economics is scarcity,” writes economist Thomas Sowell. “There is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.” Next November we will learn whether the second lesson of politics is that adhering to the first lesson is eventually dangerous to incumbents.

georgewill@washpost.com

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/spendings-ascending--with-or-without-a-budget-sequester/2011/11/15/gIQALpWXSN_story.html

Ted Rall Wants OWS to Choose the Path of Violence Over Reform

Ted Rall Wants OWS to Choose the Path of Violence Over Reform

John Hinderacker/Powerline

He was a featured speaker at October2011, the DC companion movement to Occupy Wall Street. Now he’s got another op-ed once again pining for blood in the streets:

OWS has become so impressive, so fast, that it’s easy to forget its half-assed origin. No matter. The fact that the French Revolution was partly set off by the drunken ravings of the Marquis de Sade hardly reduces its importance.

It also ended in the Reign of Terror and mass murder as Rall surely knows.

As I saw at STM/Occupy DC, there is an ideological split between revolutionaries and reformists. Typical of the reformists: This week OWSers urged sympathizers to close their accounts with big banks like Citibank and Bank of America and move their savings to credit unions and local savings and loans. If revolutionaries get their way, there will be no banks. Or one, owned by the people.

Guess which side Rall supports.

For most citizens, who have been shut out of politics by the fake two-party democracy and the corporate media, simply talking and being heard is an act of liberation. At some point down the road, however, the movement will come to a big ideological fork: do they try to save the system? Or tear it down?

He’s right. They will face that choice.

Trotsky argued for the issuance of “transitional demands” in order to expose the uncompromising, unjust and oppressive nature of the regime.

Yes and he participated in the mass murdering regime of Stalin which, again, doesn’t seem to trouble Rall at all.

reformism is naïve. The system is plainly broken beyond repair. Trying to push for legislation and working with establishment progressives will inevitably lead to cooption, absorption by big-money Democrats and their liberal allies and irrelevance.

Reform, i.e. working within the system, could also lead to a stable four party Republic as I suggested here.

Revolution means violence in the streets. Reform means failure, and the continued, slow-grinding violence by the corporate state: poverty, repression, injustice.

And there it is. That’s as close to saying he wants violence in the streets as Rall will get. But it’s clear that is what he wants and he hopes OWS will deliver. I don’t think he’s right about that, but that doesn’t mean some violent splinter group–a modern day Weather Underground–won’t arise from this. It very well could or perhaps already has.

http://www.verumserum.com/?p=31141

Leading senators: Kagan may have to recuse herself from health case

Leading senators: Kagan may have to recuse herself from health case - Washington Times

By Stephen Dinan --The Washington Times

Top Republican senators said late Friday the Justice Department has been stonewalling their request for more information on Supreme CourtJustice Elena Kagan, and said her previous work as solicitor general “may satisfy both requirements for recusal” from the upcoming health-care case.

The senators, led by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, are demanding Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. comply with requests for more documents about Justice Kagan’s role in planning the administration’s defense, and said unless he provides the information it could undermine confidence in the court’s eventual ruling on the case.

“President Obama chose to nominate a member of his administration to the Supreme Court knowing it was likely that, if confirmed, she would be in a position to rule on his signature domestic policy achievement,” said the four senators, who also included Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl of Arizona; Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee; and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah.

The Supreme Court announced early this week that it would hear a challenge to the health-care law, which Mr. Obama signed last year. Questions have floated for months over whether Justice Kagan could rule impartially in the case. She was solicitor general at the time the law passed, and acknowledged during her confirmation hearing that she attended at least one meeting where litigation was discussed.

Justice Kagan said at the time her role was not “substantial,” but the senators said that’s irrelevant to the law. They said the law requires recusal if a government official participated in any matter that is the subject of litigation.

The senators also pointed to emails that suggest Justice Kagan was kept in the loop on discussions over how to defend the law. The letter was released to the press late Friday evening. A message left seeking comment from the Justice Department wasn’t immediately returned.

During her confirmation hearing Justice Kagan told senators while she attended a meeting, she had no role in crafting a response to the lawsuits. She declined to commit at the time to recusing herself.
In addition to Justice Kagan, Justice Clarence Thomas ha come under fire from liberal groups who say he should recuse himself from the case because of his wife’s financial ties to groups that oppose the health care law.

“Given these facts, there is a strong conflict between the Thomas household’s financial gain through your spouse’s activities and your role as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court,” dozens of Democrats said in a letter to Justice Thomas earlier this year. “We urge you to recuse yourself from this case.

If the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision is to be viewed as legitimate by the American people, this is the only correct path.”

Each justice participated in the court’s decision Monday to hear the health care case, though that doesn’t rule out a future recusal.

Still, law experts said they doubted either would withdraw from the case, and said from the evidence so far, there is no reason why either should.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/nov/18/leading-senators-kagan-may-have-recuse-herself-hea/#.Tsc2jyD_Bp4.blogger

U.S. boosts estimate of auto bailout losses to $23.6B

David Shepardson/ Detroit News Washington Bureau

The Treasury Department dramatically boosted its estimate of losses from its $85 billion auto industry bailout by more than $9 billion in the face of General Motors Co.'s steep stock decline.

In its monthly report to Congress, the Treasury Department now says it expects to lose $23.6 billion, up from its previous estimate of $14.33 billion.

The Treasury now pegs the cost of the bailout of GM, Chrysler Group LLC and the auto finance companies at $79.6 billion. It no longer includes $5 billion it set aside to guarantee payments to auto suppliers in 2009.

The big increase is a reflection of the sharp decline in the value of GM's share price.

The current estimate of losses is based on GM's Sept. 30 closing price of $20.18, down one-third over the previous quarterly price.

GM's stock closed Monday at $22.99, up 2 percent. The government won't reassess the estimate of the costs until Dec. 30.

The government has recovered $23.2 billion of its $49.5 billion GM bailout, and cut its stake in the company from 61 percent to 26.5 percent. But it has been forced to put on hold the sale of its remaining 500 million shares of stock.

The new estimate also hikes the overall cost of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program costs to taxpayers. TARP is the emergency program approved by Congress in late 2008 at the height of the financial crisis.

In total, the government used $425 billion to bailout banks, insurance companies and automakers, and provided $45 billion in housing program assistance.

The government now expects to lose $57.33 billion, including the full cost of the housing program, up from $36.7 billion. The new estimate means the government doesn't believe it will make an overall profit on its bailouts.

Republican presidential candidates, including former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, have seized on the auto bailout losses estimates, as evidence that the Bush and Obama administrations "wasted" money.

Matt Anderson, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, said, "Both TARP and the auto industry rescue are still on track to cost a fraction of what was originally expected during the dark days of the financial crisis."

In 2009, the government initially forecast it would lose $44 billion on its auto industry bailout. It revised it down to $30 billion, and later to as low as $13.9 billion earlier this year.The administration and President Barack Obama have argued that any losses on the auto bailout were worth the hundreds of thousands of jobs saved.

"The investment paid off. The hundreds of thousands of jobs that have been saved made it worth it," he said at an appearance last month at GM's Orion Assembly plant. "I want to especially thank the people of Detroit for proving that, despite all the work that lies ahead, this is a city where a great American industry is coming back to life and the industries of tomorrow are taking root, and a city where people are dreaming up ways to prove all the skeptics wrong and write the next proud chapter in the Motor City's history."

The new bailout forecast also represents an increase in the government's forecast in its losses from its $17.2 billion bailout of Detroit-based auto and mortgage lender Ally Financial Inc. The government holds a 74 percent stake in Ally, which has been forced to put its planned initial public offering on hold because of market conditions.

dshepardson@detnews.com

From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20111114/AUTO01/111140434/U.S.-boosts-estimate-of-auto-bailout-losses-to-$23.6B#ixzz1e2IW5UXd

http://www.detnews.com/article/20111114/AUTO01/111140434/1361/U.S.-boosts-estimate-of-auto-bailout-losses-to-$23.6B

California — toxic for business

Unless Sacramento moves to improve the business climate, California's reputation as one of the country's most toxic business environments will make it hard for the Golden State to regain its luster.

By Wendell Cox and Steven Malanga

Last year, the medical technology firm Numira Biosciences packed its bags and left Irvine for Salt Lake City. When asked about the firm's departure, its chief executive praised Utah's quality of life but also blamed California's business environment for the move. "The tipping point was when someone from the Orange County tax [assessor] wanted to see our facility to tax every piece of equipment I had," Michael Beeuwsaert told the Orange County Register.

For years, California could rely on its temperate climate and a talented workforce to attract and keep businesses even as taxes and regulations increased. No more. In surveys, executives regularly express the view that California has one of the country's most toxic business environments, and they say it is one of the least likely places they would open or expand a company. Many firms headquartered here say they have forsaken expansion in the state. Meanwhile, California suffers from an unemployment rate some 2 percentage points higher than that of the nation as a whole.

The deep discontent of the business community is just one sign of larger problems in the California economy that predate the 2008 national financial crisis. A study by City Journal using the National Establishment Time Series Database, which has tracked national job creation and migration from 1992 through 2008 (the latest data available), suggests that California's economy started showing signs of sclerosis a decade ago. So even after a national recovery takes place, the Golden State may keep struggling — unless Sacramento moves to improve the business climate.

Economists usually see business start-ups as the most important long-term source of job growth, and California has long had a reputation for nurturing new companies. Indeed, from 1992 to 2000, California added 777,000 more jobs from start-ups than it lost to closures. But this dynamism vanished in the 2000s. Between 2000 and 2008, California lost 262,000 more jobs from closures than it gained from start-ups.

Between 2000 and 2008, some 80,000 more jobs left California for other states than came here from other states. The leading destination of the job migration was Texas, with Oregon and North Carolina running second and third. California managed to add jobs only through the expansion of existing businesses, and even that was at a considerably lower rate than a decade earlier.

Another dark sign has been that economic growth in California's major cities stalled after 2000. Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area had been the engines of California's economic growth for at least a century. But between 2000 and 2008, California's two big metropolitan areas produced fewer than 70,000 new jobs — a nearly 95% drop from the 1990s and a mere 6% of job creation in the state. This was a collapse of historic proportions.

Equally troubling was that California's growth in the 2000s, such as it was, took place disproportionately in sectors that rode the housing bubble. In fact, 35% of the net new jobs in the state were created in construction and real estate. All those jobs have vaporized since 2008, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

While there are many reasons for these troubling trends, the state cannot ignore the role its policies have played in the economic decline. For seven consecutive years, executives polled by Chief Executive magazine have ranked California as having the worst business environment in the country. In a 2011 survey of its members by CalRecovery, a California coalition of businesses and industries based in the state, 84% of about 400 executives and owners who responded said that if they weren't already here, they wouldn't consider starting up in the state, while 64% said that the main reason they stayed in California was that it was tough to relocate their particular kind of business. In a recent op-ed, Andrew Puzder, chief executive of Carpinteria-based CKE Restaurants, which manages 3,000 eateries around the country, called California "the most business-unfriendly state we operate in."

Another troubling sign: California is even losing the battle for green manufacturing jobs. Earlier this year, Bing Energy, a fuel-cell maker, announced that it would relocate from Chino in San Bernardino County to Tallahassee, Fla., where it expected to hire nearly 250 workers. "I just can't imagine any corporation in their right mind would decide to set up in California today," Dean Minardi, Bing's chief financial officer, said.

California's suffocating regulations have a lot to do with this discontent. A 2009 study by two California State University finance professors, Sanjay Varshney and Dennis Tootelian, estimated that regulation cost the state's businesses $493 billion annually, or nearly $135,000 per company.

Additionally, dense and complex land-use regulations have driven up housing construction costs in the state, giving residents a double whammy: a stagnant economy and unaffordable home prices, even since the real estate bubble burst.

Taxes are another burden. According to the Tax Foundation, California imposes the nation's second-heaviest tax burden on businesses, and finance officers of major companies recently rated the state's overall tax environment the worst in the country, according to a poll in CFO magazine.

On top of taxes and regulation, the state can also claim what may be America's most expensive litigation environment for firms. The American Tort Reform Foundation recently named California one of the country's five worst "judicial hellholes," in part because state law allows trial lawyers to sue firms for minor violations of California's complex labor and environmental regulations.

Gov. Jerry Brown has declared that "California always comes back." But history shows that great states can decline. Some, like New York, which was the nation's economic engine before California, never regain their luster. The state's leaders need to acknowledge the message they are hearing from the local business community and consider ways to help the state regain its economic edge.

Wendell Cox is the principal of Demographia, a public policy consulting firm. Steven Malanga is senior editor of City Journal, from whose fall issue this article is adapted.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-cox-malanga-california-business-20111114,0,1011551.story