... by replacing cars with low-emission unicorns powered by the renewable energy of rainbows!

Happy April Fools day from the NRSC.

Pants on Fire

National Review Online graciously calls it the Complete List of Obama Statement Expiration Dates. I'd prefer to invoke a little Rep. Joe Wilson and put it more simply as "President Obama, You Lie!":

HEALTH CARE MANDATES

STATEMENT: “We've got a philosophical difference, which we've debated repeatedly, and that is that Senator Clinton believes the only way to achieve universal health care is to force everybody to purchase it. And my belief is, the reason that people don't have it is not because they don't want it but because they can't afford it.” Barack Obama, speaking at a Democratic presidential debate, February 21, 2008.

EXPIRATION DATE: On March 23, 2010, Obama signed the individual mandate into law.


HEALTH CARE NEGOTIATIONS ON C-SPAN

STATEMENT: “These negotiations will be on C-SPAN, and so the public will be part of the conversation and will see the decisions that are being made.” January 20, 2008, and seven other times.

EXPIRATION DATE: Throughout the summer, fall, and winter of 2009 and 2010; when John McCain asked about it during the health care summit February 26, Obama dismissed the issue by declaring, “the campaign is over, John.”


RAISING TAXES

STATEMENT: “No family making less than $250,000 will see any form of tax increase.” (multiple times on the campaign trail)

EXPIRATION DATE: Broken multiple times, including the raised taxes on tobacco, a new tax on indoor tanning salons, but most prominently on February 11, 2010: “President Barack Obama said he is “agnostic” about raising taxes on households making less than $250,000 as part of a broad effort to rein in the budget deficit.”


RECESS APPOINTMENTS

STATEMENT: Then-Senator Obama declared that a recess appointment is “damaged goods” and has “less credibility” than a normal appointment. August 25, 2005.

EXPIRATION DATE: March 27, 2010: “If, in the interest of scoring political points, Republicans in the Senate refuse to exercise that responsibility, I must act in the interest of the American people and exercise my authority to fill these positions on an interim basis.”


BORDER SECURITY

STATEMENT: “We need tougher border security, and a renewed focus on busting up gangs and traffickers crossing our border. . . . That begins at home, with comprehensive immigration reform. That means securing our border and passing tough employer enforcement laws.” then-candidate Obama, discussing the need for border security, speaking in Miami on May 23, 2008:

EXPIRATION DATE: March 17, 2010: The Obama administration halted new work on a "virtual fence" on the U.S.-Mexican border, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced Tuesday, diverting $50 million in planned economic stimulus funds for the project to other purposes.


GUANTANAMO BAY

STATEMENT: Executive Order stating, "The detention facilities at Guantánamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order." January 22, 2009.

EXPIRATION DATE: November 19, 2009: "Guantánamo, we had a specific deadline that was missed."


MILITARY TRIBUNALS

STATEMENT: “Somebody like Khalid Sheik Mohammad is gonna get basically, a full military trial with all the bells and whistles.” September 27, 2006

EXPIRATION DATE: Ongoing. “President Obama is planning to insert himself into the debate about where to try the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, three administration officials said Thursday, signaling a recognition that the administration had mishandled the process and triggered a political backlash. Obama initially had asked Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to choose the site of the trial in an effort to maintain an independent Justice Department. But the White House has been taken aback by the intense criticism from political opponents and local officials of Holder's decision to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a civilian courtroom in New York.”


RECOVERY.GOV

STATEMENT: “We will launch a sweeping effort to root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government, and every American will be able to see how and where we spend taxpayer dollars by going to a new website called recovery.gov.” – President Obama, January 28, 2009

EXPIRATION DATE: “More than two months after some of the funds were released, [Recovery.gov] offers little detail on where the money is going… The government [spent] $84 million on a website that doesn't have a search function, when its purpose is to ‘root out waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary spending in our government.’” April 2, 2009


Eighteen from his first 100 days:

1. "As President I will recognize the Armenian Genocide."
2. "I will make sure that we renegotiate [NAFTA]."
3. Opposed a Colombian Free Trade Agreement because advocates ignore that "labor leaders have been targeted for assassination on a fairly consistent basis."
4. "Now, what I’ve done throughout this campaign is to propose a net spending cut."
5. "If we see money being misspent, we're going to put a stop to it, and we will call it out and we will publicize it."
6. "Yesterday, Jim, the head of Caterpillar, said that if Congress passes our plan, this company will be able to rehire some of the folks who were just laid off."
7. "I want to go line by line through every item in the Federal budget and eliminate programs that don't work, and make sure that those that do work work better and cheaper."
8. "[My plan] will not help speculators who took risky bets on a rising market and bought homes not to live in but to sell."
9. "Instead of allowing lobbyists to slip big corporate tax breaks into bills during the dead of night, we will make sure every single tax break and earmark is available to every American online."
10."We can no longer accept a process that doles out earmarks based on a member of Congress's seniority, rather than the merit of the project."
11. "If your family earns less than $250,000 a year, you will not see your taxes increased a single dime. I repeat: not one single dime."
12. "Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe the United States has to be frank with the Chinese about such failings and will press them to respect human rights."
13. "We must take out Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants if we have them in our sights."
14. "Lobbyists won’t work in my White House!"
15. "The real gamble in this election is playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expecting a different result."
16. "I'll make oil companies like Exxon pay a tax on their windfall profits, and we'll use the money to help families pay for their skyrocketing energy costs and other bills."
17. "Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days." Obama is 1-for-11 on this promise so far.
18. A special one on the 100th day, "the first thing I'd do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That's the first thing I'd do."

NRO goes on to also list "promises that expired during the campaign," but I'll leave off here.


Granted, if you've been reading this blog, none of this should come as a surprise. Reaching back to the height of the 2008 campaign:

• September 16, 2008: And I hate to say that people are lying, but here's a situation where folks are lying


• October 22, 2008: For the record, Obama has no problem breaking his pledges


• October 22, 2008: For the record, Obama regularly invents false claims

Filibusters and Raaaaacism (the forgotten saga of Trent Lott)

Every day I become more convinced The Left is living in some bizarro world where world history officially begins on January 20, 2009 and nothing prior to that is relevant.

In the outrage du jour you've got the Harry Reid racist comments thing.

If, 8 years ago, a Republican Senator had said something similar, I bet Democrats would have demagogued it for all it's worth. Oh, wait, that's exactly what happened in 2002. Compare and contrast:

Obama, 2002:

The Republican Party itself has to drive out Trent Lott. If they have to stand for something, they have to stand up and say this is not the person we want representing our party.

Obama, 2010:

This is a good man who has always been on the right side of history.

And if I can invoke the suddenly forgotten Trent Lott a second time, let's recall the phrase he introduced in 2005: "Nuclear Option".

Back in 2005, those days of yesteryear which liberals have somehow forgotten, 1 in 5 of Bush's Appellate Court nominees were being filibustered. The Republicans had a majority of votes in the Senate but not the 60 needed to end debate on these nominees. The "Nuclear Option" would have changed the Senate rules so only a majority would be required to end debate.

Fast forward to 2010 and now those 2005-obstructionist-liberals are all howling about how awful the filibuster is.

Two weeks ago blogger Uncle Jimbo did a solid fisking of most of these liberal commentators. And after reading his piece, I thought liberals would get their heads back on straight, but apparently not. Today I stumbled upon a New York Times op-ed by Thomas Geoghegan, "Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution."

I didn't know much about Thomas Geoghegan prior to reading his op-ed. Googling him reveals him to be a lawyer, author, and failed political candidate.

Allow me to add an item to that bio: Moron.

I'm not wild about name calling, but it gets the point across. Here's why: Only a moron makes vast claims about something being unconstitutional without having an inkling of understanding of the Constitution.

Had Geoghegan ever read the Constitution, he would have read Article 1, Section 5, Clause 2:

Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behavior, and, with the Concurrence of two-thirds, expel a Member.

That's as clear cut as it gets. If the Senate wants to have "Rules of its Proceedings" that dictate debate can only be cut off with a 60 (or 80! or 100!) vote super-majority, the Constitution gives that authority to the Senate. Period.


Here's the bottom line. Some of us remember 2001-2009. It really did happen. And the disconnect between then and now shows clearly that The Left doesn't care about racist remarks, they just demagogue them for political gain when it's convenient. And it shows they don't actually care about filibusters, they just want to get rid of whatever could possibly be in their way as they try to jam unpopular bills down the throats of the American people.

Libertarians for Obama

There was a moment during the 2008 campaign when there was this giant push that libertarians should seriously look at supporting Obama.

At the end of 2006, in the middle of what was that nearly three-year-long primary contest, Cato published Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas's "The Case for the Libertarian Democrat" and accompanying Cato Daily podcasts.

In early 2008, Cato drew attention to the comments of Scott Flanders, CEO of libertarian publisher R. C. Hoiles, who "reasoned that Obama is the best candidate to work on four top libertarian reforms: 1) Iraq withdrawal, 2) restoring the separation of church and state; 3) easing off victimless crimes such as drug use; 4) curtailing the Patriot Act."

And not longer after you had stuff happening like the launch of the Libertarians for Obama blog (tagline: Put aside your skepticism and read on.)

By September, you had people like Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution - a blog which I hold in high regard - making the case for Obama and having their case highlighted by The New York Times.


Fast forward to today.

I'm posting this blog post as a reminder for the next time libertarians start thinking "you know, voting for the most liberal member of the Senate is starting to make a lot of sense!"

Here we are, just shy of 8 months into his Presidency. We've seen the largest growth in government in 50-some years - and that's excluding whatever lurch awaits in his attempt to revamp healthcare via yet-more-government.

And, returning to Scott Flanders' laundry list:

1) We are still in Iraq
2) As the Washington Post reports today, Faith-based initiatives: still goin' strong. (And perhaps even stronger.)
3) And, did you really delude yourself that Obama would change drug policy? Puhleeze. Although, there is that whole Andrew Sullivan fiasco.
4) Which brings us to "Curtailing the Patriot Act." Um, not so much. I'll just quote today's AP headline: "Obama Supports Extending Patriot Act Provisions."

Mr. Flanders: You're oh-for-four. Zero. Out. Of. Four.

As Jon Henke rightly put it in July, here's the Obama response to libertarians: Thanks for the votes, now get lost.


Now, I'm something of a hybrid between a conventional conservative and a libertarian. I can appreciate the libertarian case for John McCain was pretty much nilch, and the case against McCain was tremendously strong. I, too, hate McCain-Feingold, and anyone willing to regulate our Free Speech Rights is no friend of our liberty.

However, please learn this lesson: A liberal is a liberal is a liberal as long as the day is long.

No matter how bad the conservative nominee, it can not justify voting - on a libertarian basis - for the liberal one.

And a second lesson: If you elect a liberal president, who has a liberal super-majority in the Congress, the policy they pass will not resemble what you want. Period.

Broken. Promises.

While I detest the fact all sides seem to playing to the populist AIG outrage, the point remains - President Obama has avoided carrying through with anything he promised but would be difficult to accomplish. No leadership for change on earmarks. Keeping exactly the worst parts of the Bush Stimulus Agenda.

At least some people seem to be waking up to the fact that this guy promised the world, but if miserably failing to deliver.

Quote of the Day

From The Economist's "Fireside chat" podcast for March 13:

But Obama has a long history of saying the right things and not necessarily delivering on them.

It's at about the 4:50 mark:

They were talking specifically about Obama's education speech and his remarks in favor of merit pay and getting rid of bad teachers - concepts I strongly favor, but doubt Obama will actually come through on.

This discrepancy between Obama's rhetoric and action is rapidly becoming one of my top annoyances with him. Pass a nearly trillion dollar stimulus package that won't work, then hold a "fiscal discipline" summit. Talk on the campaign trail about cutting wasteful spending in Washington, then stand behind a budget with 9,000 earmarks. Talk about removing "ideology" from science in an embryonic stem cell move that was clearly all about ideology, not science.

I'm glad Obama favors merit pay, the ability for bad teachers to be fired, etc. And I really do hope he'll stand up the NEA teachers union to get these things implemented. (Unlikely, but even better, would be to move education back down to individual states and let states take care of this, but I digress.) But, I have absolutely no confidence he'll do so.

Who Said It?

Genuine bipartisanship assumes an honest process of give-and-take, and that the quality of the compromise is measured by how well it serves some agreed-upon goal, whether better schools or lower deficits. This in turn assumes that the majority will be constrained — by an exacting press corps and ultimately an informed electorate — to negotiate in good faith.

If these conditions do not hold — if nobody outside Washington is really paying attention to the substance of the bill, if the true costs . . . are buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars or so — the majority party can begin every negotiation by asking for 100% of what it wants, go on to concede 10%, and then accuse any member of the minority party who fails to support this 'compromise' of being 'obstructionist.'

No, it's not some bitter Republican congressman after being left out in the cold, unable to actually provide any meaningful input to the "stimulus".

That quote belongs to President Obama. Ironic, no?

Of course the ordeal we've just witness involved so many pages of legislation passed in such a short time, there was no chance we could have really had "an exacting press corps" or "an informed electorate." And it will be no surprise when we realize the "true costs [were] buried in phony accounting and understated by a trillion dollars."

(h/t Mark Hemingway @ NRO's The Corner).

Final Plea Against The Largest Spending Bill In History

With Obama about to sign this thing at an invitation-only event tomorrow, I'm days, if not weeks, late to post this, but here it goes:  Here are my arguments for why H.R 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the "Stimulus" and gaining recognition as the "Generational Theft Act of 2009" is a really bad idea.


1. $787 billion (that's billion with a B!) is a lot of money.

And all that money has to come from somewhere. The government can either raise it by taxing or taking on debt. Or they can print more money. No one (or few people) are talking about the negative effects of these three possibilities. If we print more money, we get inflation. Borrowing more puts our credit rating at risk and leaves future taxpayers to have to cover the principal and the interest. And raising taxes moves capital from the private sector (the sector we are trying to stimulate!).


2. $787 billion is a lot of money.

OK, so, I repeat myself. But I want you to understand how big that number is. It's $787,000,000,000.00. If you had a pile of that much money in one dollar bills and you stacked it, you'd get about a fifth of the way to the moon. (So, it's literally an astronomical number).

If you had one second for each dollar in that sum, you'd have enough seconds to make up about 24,325 years. Humans started writing things down only 6,000 years ago. 24,325 years is a lot of seconds.

Put yet another way, with Obama's $500,000 executive salary cap now in place, using the $787 billion, you could hire 1,574,000 executives. That's a lot of fat cat executives making a cool half million a year.

Finally, the "Stimulus" costs about $5,700 per taxpayer. How many ways can you think of of how you might prefer to spend $5,700?


3. The government has a really poor track record.

Question: How well did the government do at spending vast sums of money on the Iraq War, Katrina recovery, and Boston's Big Dig?

Let's go ahead, and for the sake of argument, propose that by magic the Congress has really out done themselves here and only a mere 1% of this bill is going to get lost to fraud. But wait, 1% would be nearly 8 billion dollars. Add together the Gross Domestic Product of Nicaragua and Belize. You'll come to about 8 billion. More realistically (based on, say, Katrina figures), we'll see fraud and other waste eat up something like 12% of this bill. So, maybe $100 billion. Yes, billion.

Add on top of this the fact that the government wants to spend much of this as quickly as possible, and we're just setting ourselves up for poor oversight and fraud, waste, more fraud, and more waste.


4. The government doesn't have the information it needs.

Let's guess that between members of Congress, their advisors and the President and his advisors we've had 2,200 people work on this bill. Let's further suppose each of these people had equal weight in putting together the bill such that each person allocated the same amount of money within the bill. That means they each had to allocate more than $350 million. Now consider how you would allocate $350 million dollars - more than a third of a billion - to best help our economy. You probably have no idea. Neither, I'm sure, do they. It's just too much money to know how to precisely use it well. There's too much going on in the economy for an individual to know enough to make meaningful macroeconomic decisions like this. (Note: Arnold King expands on this argument better than I do, here.)

By contrast, when we interact with the economy as private citizens, amazing things happen. We all know our individual niche needs and desires and we can use the information we each individually have to produce some amazingly complex, but still largely efficient, systems. In fact, there are even rewards for being more efficient. But, when a relatively small number (say 2,200 instead of 300 million) are calling the shots they lack this information and these rewards for efficiency.

And to make matters worse, this bill was rushed. The bill was debated for less than an hour in the House to limit input from the Republicans. The pre-conference version of the bill was finalized less than 72 hours before the Senate voted on it. (And, if you could read the bill's legalese at a pace of one page per minute, it would take you more than 16 hours just to read the thing.) And if you divide the bill's cost by the number of seconds spent working on it, you come to one million dollars per second. How do you adequately put in safeguards for prudent spending when the rate is $1,000,000.00 / second?!


5. History says it won't work.

Despite (or because of) the massive spending of the New Deal, the Great Depression lasted ten long years. The Pelosi/Reid/Bush "Stimulus Checks" of last year haven't made a dent in this current recision. Neither have the hundreds of billions used under the TARP program.

Or, looking outside the U.S., Japan spent the 1990s trying to revamp their economy by Keynesian style defecit spending on infrastructure. It didn't work.

And finally, if you look at the historical data - government spending does not create jobs.


6. It's not stimulative.

At least not most of it. Most of it is useless pork. (Here are some more examples.)

Most seem to be putting the "stimulative" portions of the "stimulus" at about 20% of the bill. It makes you wonder why we aren't passing this bill instead.

And for the claims (falsehoods?) about how we, absolutely, positively, must pass this NOW and get money moving NOW, almost half the bill's spending doesn't take place until after 20 months.

Bruce McQuain of QandO puts it well when he terms the bill as "Long On Pork And Relief - Short On Stimulus And Jobs".

Notes on the Inauguration

Racist prayer? Check.

Belittling a horrid caricature of your predecessor's policies (while your predecessor is there)? Check.

Classy supporters? Check.

New website that's basically a campaign site, but paid for by the taxpayer? Check. In fact, double check.


If this is the new status quo, I'm hoping for a change.

The Message of King Missed in the Present?

Wasn't Martin Luther King Jr.'s message precisely that we should look past skin color, to the content of an individual's character?

Why then are so many in such a frenzy over our first black president? I have no doubt that in the coverage of the inauguration tomorrow the media will focus squarely on Obama's skin color, rather than look past it.



Wouldn't King's dream be that we not care, at all, what color Obama is?

On the Tube, In the Tank

Tomorrow's inaugural coverage:



Fox, quite reasonably is devoting 2 1/2 hours. PBS seems somewhat even keeled with 3 hours.

It's hard to believe that "hard to stay objective" NBC doesn't have the longest coverage, starting only at 10:30 AM and cutting off at 3:30 PM for a mere 5 hours.

So just how cool is he?", "Does it get any better, or more beautiful, or more spectacular, than this?" CBS comes in next. They're kicking things off at 9:30 AM and running until 3:30 PM for a total of 6 hours.

Finally, ABC, will get to lay claim to it's initials standing for the "Always Barack Channel," with their 7 hour love fest from 9:30 AM to 4:30 PM. I suppose ABC taking the cake is fitting given how they dishonestly made Palin look like a fool to help seal the deal for Obama.



Oh, and it's worth mentioning tomorrow's Prime Time line up as well:

NBC has their 59 minute special, "NBC News Special: The Inauguration of Barack Obama".

PBS (on a sub-channel) will re-air their earlier coverage, and on their main channel present the 1 hour show "Frontline: Dreams of Obama."

CBS has their 61 minute special, "Change and Challenge: The Inauguration of Barack Obama".

And ABC again makes sure to take the cake with a 2 hour "The Neighborhood Ball: An Inauguration Celebration" featuring "an exclusive look inside the Presidential Inauguration Ball, from the President and First Lady's first dance of the night to President Obama's initial speech of the evening, along with appearances by celebrities and musicians." This to be followed by yet another hour of Obamarama in "ABC News Special: A Moment in History: The Inauguration of Barack Obama."

Refreshingly, Fox is leaving Prime Time alone.


Over the next four years, it certainly looks like we are going to need a larger tank.

Big Old Roundup

Items of note from the last couple weeks:

• 5 Myths About an Election of Mythic Proportions: 1. The Republican Party suffered a death blow; 2. A wave of black voters and young people was the key to Obama's victory; 3. Now that they control the White House and Congress, Democrats will usher in a new progressive era; 4. A Republican candidate could have won the presidency this year; 5. McCain made a huge mistake in picking Sarah Palin


• Ex-Lobbyists Have Key Obama Roles. The political hypocrisy continues. Is this the change people were hoping for?


• So far the Big Three bailout has been a no-go, which is a good thing. Some thoughts from Cato. And good arguments against bailing out the Big Three automakers: Here, and here (in the later, David Brooks (temporarily!) remembers he's a conservative).


• Kathleen Parker still hasn't remembered that she's a conservative.
 

• Russel Roberts, brilliant as always, argues the "credit crunch" is due to a lack of certainty, not a lack of liquidity. (Related - last Sunday on 60 minutes, Obama indicated he wanted to take an FDR-like "try things until it works" approach to the economy; that doesn't seem like it's going to help with the uncertainty - and it probably won't help generally.)


• The Washington Post discusses liberal bias. Howard Kurtz appropriately asks aren't media people supposed to resist this kind of hyperventilating?. Deborah Howell, WaPo Ombudsman, admits that "some of the conservatives' complaints about a liberal tilt are valid" and lists a slew of examples. I still don't think she fully gets it though - her article is titled "Remedying the Bias Perception," it should be titled "Remedying the Bias Problem." We're percieving it because it's real, Ms. Howell.


• The best use yet for TARP's 700 billion.


• Clintonite Rahm Emanuel. Clintonite (and lobbyist) Greg Craig. Clintonite John Podesta. Actual-Clinton Hillary Clinton. This "politics of the future" looks a lot like the politics of the past - say 1992 or so. As of 11/14, Politico points out "Thirty-one of the 47 people so far named to transition or staff posts have ties to the Clinton administration." (Smarmily: "Thanks!")


• With the Clinton pick - Some hope I can believe in for actually finishing the job in Iraq. Jonah Goldberg notes: "Obama's signature issue in the primaries was his "good judgment" to oppose the Iraq war. ... [Clinton] may have experience, he'd charge, but she lacked the wisdom to oppose the war. ... So now Barack Obama is going to appoint Hillary Clinton to be the chief architect of his foreign policy. Moreover, he picked Joe Biden to be his running mate and 'partner' in the White House explicitly because of his foreign policy experience and judgment. But wait: Joe Biden, too, supported the war".


• The Left remains extremely hard to parody. Their outrage de jour yesterday was once again Sarah Palin, this time because she had the audacity to do an interview at turkey farm, where turkey-farm-activities actually occur. I guess they never knew where animal-based food comes from? More from John Hinderaker at Powerline.


• The H. in Barack H. Obama continues, for me, to stand for hypocrite:
  "We need to focus on fixing and improving our public schools; not throwing our hands up and walking away from them.”


• For all the talk of The Right being broken, it might also be worth looking at what's happening on The Left.


• Obama the Question Mark Man

Hope, Change, and Rahm Emanuel

One of these three things is not like the others.



John Edwards likes to say there are "two Americas". I'd like to propose there are two Barack Obamas.

One is the "post-partisan" and "new politics" guy full of "hope" and "change."

The other is the partisan, far-left, cut-throat politician seen via his voting record, his policy proposals, and his campaign tactics.


A big question that now presents itself is which of these two he will turn out to be once in the White House.

I think we should all reserve final judgment until after he's sworn in and actually done some things, but the initial signs are troubling.


Obama has tapped Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff.

Emanuel is no post-partisan hope-and-change politician. He's a hyper-partisan, Washington-insider Democrat, famous for his foul-mouthed abrasive style.

For those looking for a new kind of politics, Rahm Emanuel is very much like a Democratic version of Karl Rove or Tom Delay.


Consider some anecdotes:

The best Rahm Emanuel story is not the one about the decomposing two-and-a-half-foot fish he sent to a pollster who displeased him. It is not about the time - the many times - that he hung up on political contributors in a Chicago mayor's race, saying he was embarrassed to accept their $5,000 checks because they were $25,000 kind of guys. No, the definitive Rahm Emanuel story takes place in Little Rock, Ark., in the heady days after Bill Clinton was first elected President.

It was there that Emanuel, then Clinton's chief fund-raiser, repaired with George Stephanopoulos, Mandy Grunwald and other aides to Doe's, the campaign hangout. Revenge was heavy in the air as the group discussed the enemies - Democrats, Republicans, members of the press - who wronged them during the 1992 campaign. Clifford Jackson, the ex-friend of the President and peddler of the Clinton draft-dodging stories, was high on the list. So was William Donald Schaefer, then the Governor of Maryland and a Democrat who endorsed George Bush. Nathan Landow, the fund-raiser who backed the candidacy of Paul Tsongas, made it, too.

Suddenly Emanuel grabbed his steak knife and, as those who were there remember it, shouted out the name of another enemy, lifted the knife, then brought it down with full force into the table.

- Elisabeth Bumiller, in the New York Times, 1997

[Chicago Democrats] captured the state Senate. This despite running a ticket made up of ward bosses' children and in-laws. I remember sitting on my couch in Chicago and thinking, "If the Democrats want to turn it around, they need to take some lessons from the machine around here. Chicago Democrats have no scruples. They treat political offices as feudal inheritances. They shake down contributors like a corrupt pope selling indulgences. They're sleazy, they're arrogant.

That night, on the northwest side, Rahm Emanuel was elected to Congress. A former Clinton whiz kid who'd gotten his start as a fundraiser for Mayor Richard M. Daley, Emanuel was connected -- in the three years after leaving the White House (where he'd helped push through NAFTA), he earned $16 million putting together Wall Street mergers. He was also zealously partisan. He had once owned a consulting business devoted to finding skeletons in Republican closets.

...

As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he raised millions of dollars by browbeating donors and candidates with cellphone calls that invariably ended, "F*** you. I love you." Emanuel was so effective that not only did his party win back Congress, he was able to get a Chicago Tribune reporter to write a book giving him most of the credit. Naftali Bendavid, the Tribune's deputy Washington bureau chief, was given "insider access" to Emanuel's operation, expecting to write a newspaper article. When the Democrats triumphed, he expanded it into "The Thumpin': How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution."

...

Freed from the constraints of his stuffy newspaper, Bendavid is able to ratchet up the parental guidance rating from G to R, which is essential to any well-rounded profile of Emanuel. As they said about Buddy Hackett in Vegas, Emanuel works blue. "F***" is one of the most versatile words in English, but he seems to have discovered new grammatical and linguistic uses for it. Washington is "F***nutsville." A Republican congressman is a "knucklef***."

- Edward McClelland in Salon, May 2008

It's a beautiful Saturday afternoon in October, and, as Republican Representative Chris Shays drives between churches in his affluent Connecticut district, he is talking about the possibility of being knifed. "Rahm Emanuel--if I got a knife, it would be in my belly," he says, referring to the combative head of the Democratic Caucus. "With Nancy," he continues, alluding to the House speaker, "it would be in my back." He then goes on to tell a story about an encounter that took place two years ago at the House gym. At the time, Emanuel was head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which was targeting Shays--a Rockefeller Republican who represents a Democratic district--for defeat. In the gym's locker room, Shays approached Emanuel and said he was "really disappointed" that, with so many races to choose from, the DCCC had chosen to target him. Emanuel, Shays recalls, "put his hands on both shoulders, looked at me square in the eyes, and said, 'Look, with all due respect, from one friend to another, we're going to spend a f*****g three million dollars to defeat you.' That was his words. Verbatim."

- Suzy Khimm, in The New Republic, Nov. 2008

With that in mind, President-elect Obama had a shortlist of one when it came to choosing his White House Chief of Staff; Rahm Emanuel, a politician so ferocious that even his own mother calls him by his nickname of "Rahmbo".

If the Democratic Congressman accepts the job as Mr Obama's enforcer, Mr Emanuel, universally characterised as a foul-mouthed attack dog who can end the career of anyone who stands in his way, will serve as a perfect counterpoint to the sugar-coated Mr Obama.

Mr Emanuel, 48, who served as an aide to President Clinton, has proved in the past that he bows to no-one when it comes to getting the job done, as Tony Blair discovered when he visited the White House at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998.

As he prepared for a public appearance with the president, Mr Blair was warned by Mr Emanuel: "This is important. Don't **** it up."

- The Telegraph, Nov. 2008


What is more, this is a guy who, upon learning about the Mark Foley sex scandal of 2006 "shopped it around" to news outlets for political advantage rather then bring it up with the Ethics committee. [1] Then, when Emanuel learned that Foley's replacement, Tim Mahoney, was having a sex scandal of his own, he "work[ed] with Mahoney to keep the matter from hurting his re-election campaign" [2].

And then we have this from ABC News:

President-elect Barack Obama's newly appointed chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, served on the board of directors of the federal mortgage firm Freddie Mac at a time when scandal was brewing at the troubled agency and the board failed to spot "red flags," according to government reports reviewed by ABCNews.com.

According to a complaint later filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Freddie Mac, known formally as the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, misreported profits by billions of dollars in order to deceive investors between the years 2000 and 2002.

Emanuel was not named in the SEC complaint (click here to read) but the entire board was later accused by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) (click here to read) of having "failed in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention."

Washinton insider. Failed to stop corruption at Freddie Mac. Used one sex scandal for political gain, tried to cover up another. Plays abrasive, strong man, big money politics.

As David Keene puts it: "You might hire Rahm to blow up the bridge. I don't know if you’d hire him to build it."


Rahm Emanuel represents Washington at it's worst. This is not post-partisan. This is not change. This is not hope.

Election Postmortem

Well, at long last, the 2008 election has come and gone. It seemed like it was the campaign that would never end, and it is a bit of a relief to have it now behind us.

Obviously, as a conservative, I'm disappointed with the result of the presidential race. Which ever way it had turned out, it was clear conservatives would need to start the fight not long after the election. The difference was that we'd need to challenge McCain about 30% of the time and Obama about 70% of the time.

We can now, of course, return to our more natural state of criticizing (rather than supporting) Senator McCain.

Most right-leaning blogs have had the common courtesy of congratulating President-Elect Obama. I'm refraining to do so. I will firmly honor him as my President, as he was legitimately elected and I fully honor the office which he will hold. But I withhold my congratulations because I believe he fundamentally ran a less-than-honorable campaign that deserves rebuke, not praise. Congratulations are simply not in order when you unleash your supporters to do a character assassination in an attempt to silence a critic. This is America, we should be above thug-like campaigns.

I do wish our President-Elect the best. I hope is really is able to bring the country together and heal our political divides. I also hope he's granted the wisdom required to navigate our country's significant foreign policy challenges, and I wish him success in keeping our country safe and restoring our economy.

Realistically though, I doubt he'll have success with most of the above because I believe he'll pursue a far-left agenda that will alienate conservatives and fail to meet America's challenges. But I would be glad to be wrong. Perhaps he will govern as a moderate and/or perhaps my ideology is incorrect. I would rather be wrong and see my country prosper than vice-versa.

Finally, to the degree you hear pundits announcing the death of the GOP and conservatism, or speaking about a "mandate" to President-Elect Obama, don't bother listening to them.

Obama received only 2% more of the vote than President Bush in 2004. Bush mistakenly read his results as a "mandate" and tried to spend his "political capital" fixing social security, which promptly failed because 51-53% of the vote does not give you a strong "mandate."

Furthermore, according to exit polls 34% of Americans self identify as "conservative", the same percent as in 2004, and a full 12 points higher than those that self-identify as a "liberal."

Another thing to ignore the pundits ranting about is how this election had "record turn out." In fact, it did. But by a negligible amount. According to CNN right now, with 99% of precincts reporting, (and ignoring the about 1% of votes that went to 3rd parties in both 2004 and 2008), there have been about 122 million votes in 2008. In 2004 there were 121 million votes. I welcome one million new voters, but that's an increase of about 1% which doesn't even keep up with the rate of population growth.


A few final thoughts:

1. The polls - both exit and regular type - were pretty much dead on. This is a huge improvement from 2004.

2. The PUMA (pro-Hillary, anti-Obama) people made a lot of noise, but pretty clearly, didn't make much of an impact in the overall vote.

3. If I hear anyone moan about "why can't we just elect a 'moderate'" during the next four years, I may lose it. America - you had your chance and you made your choice. John McCain has a long history of being a moderate who works across party lines and only won the Republican nomination because of his support from independents. I suspect he will probably be the most centrist presidential candidate most will see in their lifetime. And, America, you decided against him.

4. The "Bradly Effect" is officially dead. We can all be glad about this. There are still pockets of racism in America to be confronted, but they are clearly growing more and more irrelevant.

5. I was quite glad to see the homosexual marriage bans all passed, and the losses in the House and Senate weren't quite as bad as I imagined they'd be.

6. A question: why don't we consider it racist to celebrate the fact Obama is our first black president? Wouldn't it be the actual fulfillment of King's dream to, in fact, ignore his skin color and instead judge solely on the "content of his character"? If McCain had won, we would be condemning anyone who was going around saying "Oh, thank God we elected a white man" and yet millions are saying the exact same, with only the race changed.

7. Finally, if you are a McCain supporting Evangelical in despair, allow me to encourage you. While we are here on Earth, being stewards and ambassadors, elections are important. But - I'm reminded of Michele McGinty's words to Thompson and Huckabee supporters at the end of their primary runs. Our hope comes not from an election, a president, or anything having to do with politics. Our hope is in Christ. Our God is much bigger than any of this, and He remains on the throne! In 1,000 years, we'll be in Heaven and probably laughing at how much we cared about the outcome of an election, if it's even worth our while to think about it at all. For those that believe, the most important "change" has already come!

Final-Moments-Prior Roundup

• Hope for McCain from Rasmussen; Also: the rose-colored view.


• Palin healthy Also: 100% cleared of all ethics charges. (As Glenn Reynolds notes, conveniently late).


• Sorry, But Obama Scares Me too.


• Obama on ... Obama ... are we really going to elect this guy? (Or, perhaps better asked - which version of Obama are the American people going to elect?)
  


• Voting fraud continues.


• Obama's grandmother passes. He has my condolences for this tragedy in his personal life. I appricate Ed Morrissey's admonition to his commenters that they "get classy and stay that way."

Closing Thoughts on the Presidential Election

Tomorrow, Americans will head to the polls and cast their votes for one of two viable candidates: John McCain or Barack Obama.

John McCain is not my ideal candidate, but represents an agenda I think all moderate and conservative voters should be much more interested in.

Barack Obama - by measure of his associations, his voting record, or his proposed policies - would be the most liberal president we've ever had. Some of you may read that and think I'm exaggerating or using hyperbole. I am not. Barack Obama is an excellent politician who has done a tremendous job during the campaign convincing Americans he is moderate and reasonable. But he is not.


On social policy, the issue most important to me is abortion, because literally at stake is life and death. I believe any rational person should be able to discern the scientific case that life begins at conception.

Even if you aren't pro-life, most moderate voters want abortion to at least have some restrictions, like parental notification. But Obama has pledged that "the first thing I would do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act." The FOCA would remove all restrictions on abortion, from parental notification to re-legalizing so called "partial birth abortion" which is much more accurately described as infanticide.

Obama's ultra-liberal dedication to abortion even includes his vote against a bill in the Illinois Senate that would have required doctors to provide medical care for babies that survived botched abortions.


On foreign policy, we are now winning in Iraq thanks to the The Surge, a strategy McCain advocated at great risk to his political career. Had we followed Obama's plan we would have begun a withdrawal of troops prior to even attempting The Surge and Iraq would be in shambles, with Al-Qaeda strengthened. Senator Obama has next to no foreign policy, military, or executive experience. Making him president while engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seems downright dangerous.


On economic policy - the area that seems to be ruling the day, we have Obama proposing a redistributionist tax policy that would literally cut checks to "working families" while ramping up hundreds of billions of dollars of new spending to be paid for exclusively by the top 5% of income earners (or, if you go with this cut off of "$250,000" - the top 1.5% of income earners.) The top 5% of income earners, today, already pay 60% of the personal income tax burden (while making only 20% of the country's income - a disparity of 3:1). Does that seem fair to you?

By contrast, John McCain wants to lower taxes across the board and reduce government spending - starting with reforming earmarks.

Analysis by economists indicates that Obama's policies will actually slow the economy, while McCain's will help it grow. This is probably best demonstrated by the following chart which I'm stealing from here:



From the study from which that chart is generated:

When fully phased in, and all economic adjustments are made, the McCain tax plan would increase the private sector portion of GDP relative to the baseline by about 2.7 percent, and the Obama tax plan would reduce private sector GDP by about 3.5 percent, a significant 6.2 percent difference in output and income between the two plans. (See Chart 1.) The difference in private sector capital accumulation would be 15.8 percent or $4.1 trillion in favor of McCain. Hourly wages before-tax would be up 2.2 percent under McCain, down 2.6 percent under Obama, a 4.8 percent difference. Hours worked would be 0.5 percent higher under McCain, and 1 percent lower under Obama.

I do not want to see this recession continue for four years, do you?

Voter Fraud

Voter fraud has been in the new lately. Largely because of ACORN, and ACORN, and ACORN, and ACORN (and it's not like that's the completion of ACORN fraud reports, but I think I've made my point).

It's something to take seriously.

John Fund has recently released a new book documenting serious cases of voter fraud and their implications. I suggest taking some time and listening to his lecture at the Heritage Foundation about the book. It's fairly depressing, but important to realize.

Something seriously needs to be done to address this.

The Voter Fraud Squad is compiling information about all these voter fraud cases. It's unfortunate this site is able to exist. It's worth keeping an eye on.

Their parent organization provides some steps you should take should you see vote fraud happening.

The McCain Campaign has also launched a "Honest and Open Elections Hotline": 1-866-976-VOTE.

A search for "obama voter fraud hotline" doesn't turn up a similar number for Obama (although it does turn up allegations the Obama campaign has engaged in voter fraud - hopefully untrue, although his record of dirty politics and campaign funding of ACORN makes me hesitant to dismiss it out of hand). If such a number does turn up, it would be great if someone could post it in the comments.

The Worst of All Tax Policies

For decades, voters have had to balance proposed increases in government spending against the necessary increases in taxes they would require. Government growth has been tempered by voters asking "yeah, that sounds nice, but how much will it cost me, the taxpayer?"

There are some who are suggesting Obama's plan to only raise taxes on the top 5% of earners is nothing but a typical empty campaign promise. But let's suppose Obama is telling the truth. That if elected he and the Congress will change the tax laws so that:

No family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase [and] the typical middle class family will receive well over $1,000 in tax relief under the Obama plan.

Such a change would turn the temperance of voters asking themselves "how much will government program X cost me, the taxpayer?" completely on it's head because only 1.5% percent of households (which I'll equate with Obama's use of "family") make more then $250,000.

Apparently, no longer would 98.5% of the population need to worry about increased taxes for the increased spending Obama is pushing for.

This shifting the tax burden for new spending to the top 1.5% reeks of "tyranny of the majority" and ominously brings to mind the Alexis de Tocqueville quote: "The American democratic experiment will succeed until the people realize they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. Then it will collapse."


And all this does call into question exactly how Obama will pay for the $430 billion a year of spending increases he proposes.

In 2006, 43% of the government's $2.4 trillion tax revenues came from individual income taxes. (With 15% from corporate income taxes and the remaining 42% from "other taxes").

Let's assume these percentages remain under a hypothetical Obama administration. That would mean Obama needs to raise individual income taxes by $185 billion - all of which would only be paid by the top 1.5% of income earners.

Now I'll be charitable in my analysis here. In addition to the $250,000 figure, Obama has also thrown around the figure of the "top 5%." So, let's actually be more generous and say this $185 billion will all be paid by the top 5% of income earners, not just the top 1.5%.

For 2006, the top 5% paid more than 60% of all personal income taxes - in dollars (rather than a percent), that's somewhere a bit higher than $625 billion. Adding this $185 billion would pump up the total personal income tax revenues by about 15%, from $1.04 trillion to $1.23 trillion. Adding this $185 billion strictly to the burden of the top 5% of income earners would mean that instead of paying 60% of income taxes, they would pay approximately 66%. That means the top 5% (which would include households making $150,000 and up) would be responsible for two-thirds of personal income tax revenue.

That's right:
5% paying two-thirds.

By contrast, let's look at the bottom 40% of households. Allow me to simply quote a recent Weekly Standard article:

The lowest 40 percent of income earners as a group actually receive net payments from the federal income tax system. (They get 3.8 percent of total federal income tax revenues instead of paying any income taxes.) The middle 20 percent of income earners pay 4.4 percent of federal income taxes. Thus the bottom 60 percent of income earners together, on net, pay less than 1 percent of all federal income taxes. (These workers earn 26 percent of national income.)

The data show that the top 1 percent of income earners now pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes, which is almost double their share of the national income. The top 10 percent pay 71 percent of federal income taxes, though they earn just 39 percent of the nation's pretax income.

At what point do even liberals realize this would be grossly unfair?


When you add in the fact that Obama is going to these lower income families a refundable tax credit (meaning that if the tax credit makes you have a negative tax liability, the government gives you the money for the credit, not just reduces your tax burden to zero), what we are really looking at here is, in fact, redistribution. Or, in Obama's words, sharing the wealth.

As Don Boudreaux clarifies, this isn't pure socialism, but:

This "socialism-lite," however, is as specious as is classic socialism. And its insidious nature makes it even more dangerous. Across Europe, this "mild" form of socialism acts as a parasitic ideology that has slowly drained entrepreneurial energy – and freedoms – from its free-market host.

Could it happen in America? Consider the words of longtime Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Norman Thomas: "The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened." In addition to Medicare, Social Security, and other entitlement programs, the gathering political momentum toward single-payer healthcare – which Obama has proclaimed is his ultimate goal – shows the prescience of Thomas's words.

The fact that each of us depends upon the efforts of millions of others does not mean that some "society" transcending individuals produces our prosperity. Rather, it means that the vast system of voluntary market exchange coordinates remarkably well the efforts of millions of individuals into a productive whole. For Obama to suggest that government interfere in this process more than it already does – to "spread" wealth from Joe to Bill, or vice versa – overlooks not only the voluntary and individual origins of wealth, but the dampening of the incentives for people to contribute energetically to wealth's continued production.

Good News From Iraq

Only 7 combat deaths, only 5 of the 18 provinces remain in need of being turned over to Iraqi control.

As you vote on Tuesday, you may want to consider that if we had followed Barack Obama's judgement on "The Surge", it would have never happened. We would have left Iraq before The Surge was even attempted. We would have been defeated, leaving an unstable country ripe for further instability in the Middle East and Al Qaeda celebrating.

Gladly, President Bush followed the advice of Senator McCain.

Closing Arguments from National Review

From The Choice:

The press has ruled that discussion of [Obama's] extensive association with radicals is outside the bounds of polite society, although his history surely demonstrates at the very least that he has followed a policy of having no enemies to the left — and indicates that he probably shared more of their views than he now lets on.

The platform on which Obama is running is troubling enough. He advocates higher tax rates than any Democratic presidential candidate of the past 20 years has called for. He favors a health-care plan that would move millions of Americans from the private plans they prefer to a government system — and, in the long run, would reduce the quality and raise the cost of health care. He is more hostile to trade liberalization than any presidential nominee of either party within the last 70 years. He supports taxpayer funding of abortion. He seeks judges who “empathize” with liberal causes rather than feel themselves bound by the text of the Constitution. And with a stronger liberal base in Congress than any Democratic president has had in at least 40 years, he would have a good chance to get much of this domestic agenda accomplished.

His chief foreign-policy commitments have been to meet with America’s enemies — one could be forgiven for wondering whether he even thinks in terms of America’s having enemies — and to abandon Iraq. If he had prevailed on Iraq over the last three years, we would have lost a war that we now appear to be winning.

...

McCain has a solid record of opposing economically damaging tax increases. He has always opposed abortion. He has advanced a creative free-market health-care policy, even if he has not done much to defend it against Obama’s dishonest attacks. He is a scourge of wasteful spending and a resolute free trader. He says that he will look for judges who have demonstrated their fidelity to the Constitution as written. We have our differences with McCain, as do most conservatives, on such issues as immigration and stem cells. On each of these issues, however, Obama is at least as mistaken.

We have no doubt that if McCain is president we will find much to criticize. But we will be confident that we have the right commander-in-chief and that liberals do not have a free hand to remake our country. In this election we support Senator McCain and urge all conservatives to do so as well.

And from Top Ten Reasons to Vote for McCain/Palin, A Last Minute Round Up:

If Barack Obama is elected president and Democrats control large majorities in the House and Senate, the Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate will move the country decisively in the direction of dying Europe — low productivity, high joblessness, low birth rates, high taxes, and limp foreign policies. The triumvirate will do this at a time when a vibrant America is more necessary than ever — with Iran seeking nuclear weapons, Pakistan teetering, al-Qaeda regrouping, China and Russia telegraphing hostility, and Iraq just barely emerging into the sunshine. This election has become about far more than John McCain versus Barack Obama; it has become about whether the United States will remain the champion of freedom — economic and political — or whether we will join the queue of formerly great nations now struggling to pay for all the social welfare “benefits” their aging and lazy populations demand.