Politics, Government & Public Policy: January 2010 Archives
This feels apocryphal but may be historically based... I've got no idea. In any event, here is a pointed story about Davy Crockett explaining why Congress cannot spend taxpayer money on charity, no matter how worthy. Obviously we're far past this point now in America.
One day in the House of Representatives a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in its support. The speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose:"Mr. Speaker--I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the suffering of the living, if there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has not the power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member on this floor knows it.
We have the right as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I ever heard that the government was in arrears to him.
"Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week's pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks."
It seems to me that forcibly collecting funds from taxpayers to distribute as charity to favored groups is now the primary occupation of our government.
(HT: RB.)
President Obama thinks that Scott Brown rode his coattails to victory.
"The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office," said Obama. "People are angry, and they're frustrated, not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years but what's happened over the last eight years."Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they're voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts. Boy, I can't wait for that 159th interview.
Presumably, the president isn't stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it's dispiriting to discover he's stupid enough to think we're stupid enough to believe it.
I think I'm going to have to side with Mark Steyn on this one.
Jeffrey Scott Shapiro writes that President Obama has completely vindicated President Bush by adopting nearly all of his predecessor's foreign policy positions.
One year after taking office however, Obama has done a total reversal on his isolationist, non-interventionist foreign policy, and is now pushing President Bush’s neo-conservative philosophy as a justification for starting a new war in Afghanistan. What the Democratic Party once criticized as an over-simplified good vs. evil argument has become the cornerstone of Obama’s reasoning.“Evil does exist in the world,” Obama recently admitted. “A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of man.”
In the wake of this stunning adoption of the Bush foreign policy doctrine, there is little, if any dissent. The same people who crucified Bush for liberating Iraq are hardly criticizing Obama for using force to promote democracy in Afghanistan. ...
As Obama continues to make decisions that mirror the Bush doctrine, it is becoming apparent that the former president was not ignorant or irrational in his foreign policy decisions despite the harsh criticism and disloyalty he endured. He was in fact, ahead of his time, a visionary who understood politics and warfare in the modern age of terrorism.
That is why Obama is now following his lead.
President Bush performed superbly under extremely difficult circumstances, and it is shameful that his political opponents at home took shots at him while secretly agreeing with the actions he took to protect America.
Obama's health care reform plans have been dead for a long time -- Scott Brown's election yesterday was just the autopsy. I'm sure that a lot of Democrat politicians are disappointed at Martha Coakley's loss, but I'm sure that Barney Frank isn't the only one who is secretly pleased that they've now got a good excuse for letting the monstrosity of a health care bill die.
“I have two reactions to the election in Massachusetts. One, I am disappointed. Two, I feel strongly that the Democratic majority in Congress must respect the process and make no effort to bypass the electoral results. If Martha Coakley had won, I believe we could have worked out a reasonable compromise between the House and Senate health care bills. But since Scott Brown has won and the Republicans now have 41 votes in the Senate, that approach is no longer appropriate. I am hopeful that some Republican Senators will be willing to discuss a revised version of health care reform because I do not think that the country would be well-served by the health care status quo. But our respect for democratic procedures must rule out any effort to pass a health care bill as if the Massachusetts election had not happened. Going forward, I hope there will be a serious effort to change the Senate rule which means that 59 votes are not enough to pass major legislation, but those are the rules by which the health care bill was considered, and it would be wrong to change them in the middle of the process.”
Translation: Sorry left-wing wack-jobs/President who have forced us into a corner. We want your votes, labor, and money, so we can't tell you you're crazy to your face, but now we can finally say "no" to your insanity by hiding behind the almighty Process.
Apparently there won't be exit polls after the Massachusetts Senator election today! Very sad. However, you can watch how Scott Brown fares on Intrade if you're really addicted to data... (like me).
Politifact tracks the status President Obama's promises and assigns then varying levels of truthiness. There are a lot of promises, so it's hard for me to get a handle on whether or not I agree with their general scoring system. One feature I'd like to see: a way for readers to rate the "importance" of various promises, so that we could get an idea of whether he keeps the big ones or the small ones.
(HT: MG.)
This piece about Obama's "Colossal Miscalculation On Health Care" by Charlie Cook contains two insightful factoids that I was not previously aware of. First, with regards to unemployment, most people know that the official unemployment numbers do not count people who have given up looking for work. One of the effects of this omission is that the unemployment rate can actually improve without the creation of new jobs if people get so discouraged that they begin giving up in droves. However, I hadn't fully grasped the counterpoint: just because new jobs are created doesn't mean the unemployment rate will go down!
A number of economists expect that unemployment will get worse before it gets better. Even if that prediction is wrong, some analysts estimate that Labor's household employment survey would have to show a net increase of 150,000 jobs a month for 48 straight months for the unemployment rate to drop to just 9 percent. ...Even before December's negative jobs report, economist Robert Reich, who was Labor secretary in the Clinton administration, wrote on talkingpointsmemo.com that "the chances of unemployment being 10 percent next November are overwhelmingly high." The number of newly created jobs will be offset by discouraged workers beginning to once again seek employment, Reich predicted, resulting in little change in the overall unemployment rate.
No wonder the unemployment rate is a trailing indicator of the economy!
Second, presidents never get more popular during their second year in office.
As political analyst and data-cruncher extraordinaire Rhodes Cook noted in the December issue of The Rhodes Cook Letter, no other president in the past half-century has seen his Gallup job-approval rating drop as far as Obama's has in his first year (down 21 points), and no president in that same half-century has seen his approval rating go up, even as much as 1 point, between the end of his first year and the eve of his first midterm election.
I think Obama and the Democrats are in trouble.
