A reminder of how fickle politics can be.

 
"The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.  It is a sign that the US Government cannot pay its own bills.  It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies.  Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally.  Leadership means that, 'the buck stops here.'  Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren.  America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership.  Americans deserve better."

                                     ~ Senator Barack H.  Obama, March 2006

The Defunding Distraction

  

This has been the worst time, politically, for President Barack Obama since he took office. Recent polls reveal that public confidence in both his domestic and foreign policies has been falling amid revelations about their defects and dangers. Even people who once supported and defended him have now turned against him. There have even been rumblings against Barack Obama in the Congressional Black Caucus and among labor unions that were a major factor in helping him get elected and reelected. Two of President Obama’s own former Secretaries of Defense have publicly criticized his gross mishandling of the Syria crisis, which has emboldened America’s enemies and undermined our allies around the world.

As Obamacare continues to go into effect, step by step, its high costs and dire consequences for jobs have become ever more visible — as have the lies that Obama blithely told about its costs and consequences when it was rushed into law too fast for anyone to see that it would become a “train wreck,” as one of its initial Democratic supporters in the Senate has since called it. As more and more revelations have come to light about the cynical and dangerous misuse of the Internal Revenue Service to harass and sabotage conservative political groups, the lies that the Obama administration initially told about this, as part of the cover-up, have also been exposed. So have the lies told about what happened in Benghazi when four Americans were killed last year. Their killers remain at large, though they are known and are even giving media interviews in Libya. With Congressional investigations still going on, and turning up more and more revelations about multiple Obama administration scandals, the political problems of this administration seem to loom ahead as far out as the eye can see.

What could possibly rescue Barack Obama from all these political problems and create a distraction that takes all his scandals off the front page? Only one thing: the Republicans.

By making a futile and foredoomed attempt to defund Obamacare, Congressional Republicans have created the distraction that Obama so much needs. Already media attention has shifted to the possibility of a government shutdown. Politically, it doesn’t matter that the Republicans are not really trying to shut down the government. What matters is that this distraction solves Barack Obama’s political problems that he could not possibly have solved by himself.

Should Obamacare be defunded? Absolutely. It is an economic disaster and will be a medical disaster, as well as destroying the Constitution’s protections of American citizens from the unbridled power of the federal government. For that matter, President Obama deserves to be impeached for arbitrarily waiving laws he doesn’t like, in defiance of his oath of office and the Constitution’s separation of powers. Chief Justice John Roberts also deserves to be impeached for his decision upholding Obamacare, by allowing the government’s taxing power to override all the Constitution’s other provisions protecting American citizens from the arbitrary powers of government. But, for the same reason that it makes no sense to impeach either President Obama or Chief Justice Roberts, it makes no sense to attempt to defund Obamacare. That reason is that it cannot be done. The world is full of things that ought to be done but cannot in fact be done.

The time, effort, and credibility that Republicans are investing in trying to defund Obamacare is a high-risk, low-yield investment. Even if, by some miracle, the Republicans managed to get the Senate to go along with defunding Obamacare, President Obama can simply veto the bill. There is a United States of America today only because George Washington understood that his army was not able to fight the British troops everywhere, but had to choose carefully when and where to fight. Futile symbolic confrontations were a luxury that could not be afforded then and cannot be afforded now.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. © 2013 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Reagan's Rules for Military Engagement

Reagan Rule 1: The United States should not commit its forces to military actions overseas unless the cause is vital to our national interest.

Reagan Rule 2: If the decision is made to commit our forces to combat abroad, it must be done with the clear intent and support to win. It should not be a halfway or tentative commitment, and there must be clearly defined and realistic objectives.

Reagan Rule 3: Before we commit our troops to combat, there must be reasonable assurance that the cause we are fighting for and the actions we take will have the support of the American people and Congress.

Reagan Rule 4: Even after all these other tests are met, our troops should be committed to combat only as a last resort, when no other choice is available.

These rules seem no more than plain common sense.

Why the Left is more successful than the Right

John Adams eloquently stated that our Constitution was "designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other." At the same time, our Declaration of Independence enshrined the concepts of freedom and equality into our nation's DNA. The central objective of conservatism (ideally at least) is to keep our nation within the general bounds of biblical morality, also known as the Judeo-Christian Ethic. This is what the Founder understood as natural law. The conservative philosophy accepts the premise that this boundary is vital to the healthy funstioning of our society. As the Scripture says, "Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people." The Right seeks to conserve this value into the future.

The problem is, there is an inherent contradiction between moral boundaries and freedom, at least in the minds of those who consider freedom to mean "absolute moral freedom." In the first 150 years of our nation, we have been involved in a great quest to extend the genuine attributes of freedom to all of our citizens. As of today we have achieved remarkable results in this area. But the modern liberal philosophy is that for freedom to be true freedom, it must not be constrained by biblical morality. Therefore, while the fundamental spirit of conservatism is to "hold fast," the fundamental spirit of libralism is to "push on." This makes liberalism a more naturally agressive political philosophy than conservatism. The Left seeks to liberate society from traditional moral restraints.

Joseph Farrah provides a good example of how this works in the real world. His issue of choice is same-sex marriage – or, as the left calls it, “marriage equality.” Farrah writes, "A mere decade ago, the very idea of same-sex marriage would have prompted the overwhelming majority of Americans to burst out in laughter. But the left kept pushing it – not only through the political channels and the courts, but, more importantly, through the press and entertainment industry, the schools and universities and all of the powerful cultural institutions they control and dominate. Today, as a result, a notion that seemed preposterous a decade ago is a reality today."

Today, with its political base strengthened by much of the press and entertainment world, liberalism is proving to be a more potent offensive force than the crumbling defensive force of conservatism. This imbalance is not likely to change in the forseeable future, if ever.

The intersection of deviance and treason

Bradley Manning is the most current example of the not infrequent intersection of deviance and treason. As a criminal responsible for the biggest breach of highly sensitive material in American history, Manning is an individual whose actions endangered American lives and national security. He is also deeply sexually disturbed, a fact he did not try to hide from his superiors before all this happened. They ignored the warning signs because, after all, there’s no difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality. There’s no difference between those who accept the gender God gave them and those who maintain they were “born in the wrong sex body.” We are all supposed to cooperate with this fiction and feel comfortable working beside, hiring and trusting such people.

The actions of a Bradley Manning are the predictable outcome of acute internal turmoil, and it’s not normal. It’s also not hate to say so, but an exercise of caution, reality and cultural security.

Comment by Linda Harvey of Mission America

FLASH: Women are NOT from Venus

An amazing report from the BBC:

“Life may have started on Mars before arriving on Earth, a major scientific conference has heard. New research supports an idea that the Red Planet was a better place to kick-start biology billions of years ago than the early Earth was. The evidence is based on how the first molecules necessary for life were assembled. Details of the theory were outlined by Professor Steven Benner at the Goldschmidt Meeting in Florence, Italy.

 

Scientists have long wondered how atoms first came together to make up the three crucial molecular components of living organisms: RNA, DNA and proteins. The molecules that combined to form genetic material are far more complex than the primordial ‘pre-biotic’ soup of organic (carbon-based) chemicals thought to have existed on the Earth more than three billion years ago, and RNA (ribonucleic acid) is thought to have been the first of them to appear. Simply adding energy such as heat or light to the more basic organic molecules in the ‘soup’ does not generate RNA. Instead, it generates tar. RNA needs to be coaxed into shape by ‘templating’ atoms at the crystalline surfaces of minerals. The minerals most effective at templating RNA would have dissolved in the oceans of the early Earth, but would have been more abundant on Mars, according to Professor Benner. This could suggest that life started on the Red Planet before being transported to Earth on meteorites, argues Professor Benner, of the Westheimer Institute of Science and Technology in Gainesville, US.

 

‘The evidence seems to be building that we are actually all Martians; that life started on Mars and came to Earth on a rock,’ he commented. ‘It’s lucky that we ended up here, nevertheless – as certainly Earth has been the better of the two planets for sustaining life. If our hypothetical Martian ancestors had remained on Mars, there may not have been a story to tell.’

 

Home again, home again, jiggity jog!

 

Not Scott

 

August 28, 2013: Absent from the speaker line-up at the Let Freedom Ring event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington was the nation’s only black Senator, Tim Scott (R-SC). African-American leaders who did receive an invitation to speak included Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), Martin Luther King III, MSNBC host Al Sharpton, and movie stars Jamie Foxx, Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker. Hmmm. Wonder why.

4 Problems with Federal College Scrorecards

Yesterday, President Obama announced his plan to make “college more affordable, tackle rising costs, and improve value for students and their families.” But a big part of the President’s plan includes creating a college rating system—a federal scorecard—to evaluate colleges on measures such as graduation rates, the number of low-income students served (i.e., the percentage of Pell Grant recipients), graduate earnings, and affordability.

Scorecards are a seductive idea. But having the federal government issue scorecards to measure college output would be a mistake. Four problems with the President’s plan:

1. Government says what’s best. A monopoly government scorecard would inevitably reflect what bureaucrats—rather than parents, students, and scholarly communities—determine is or is not important in education.

2. Special-interest institutions with more clout could shape the standards. Existing institutions that are comfortable within the cocoon of protectionist accreditation would lobby hard, and no doubt effectively, for output measures that define success in their own terms.

3. Standard-setters would also control college funding. Educational institutions’ lobbying becomes particularly problematic when considering the second part of President Obama’s proposal: to then tie federal student aid to the new rating system by giving larger Pell Grants and lower student loan interest rates to students who enroll in colleges that fare well on the federal scorecard. The logical outcome is a system that has the federal government handing out subsidies based on a rating system designed by the people handing out the funding. What could possibly go wrong?

4. We already have scorecards. A competing range of private outcomes-based scorecards already exists, sponsored by such outlets as U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, ACTA, and Kiplinger’s. Each of these reflects the differing visions of quality held by different Americans, from post-graduation salary to the likelihood of a well-rounded education. A one-size-fits-all federal rating system is unnecessary and will likely trump these independent evaluators that parents and students have long trusted.

If the Obama Administration truly wants to “shake up” higher ed and bring down college costs, it would acknowledge that federal government intervention is the problem, not the solution. Continuing to increase federal subsidies enables universities to raise tuition. Since 1982, the cost of attending college has increased 439 percent—more than four times the rate of inflation. Increases in college costs exceed increases in health care costs, which have risen more than 250 percent over the same time period. (Lindsey Burke on The Foundry)

White House statement on tax hike

This is from a White House press release explaining why Obama favors taxing out-of-state Internet purchases: "Because these out-of-state companies are able to play by a different set of rules, this disparity undermines the ability of cities and States to invest in K-12 education, police and fire protection, access to affordable health care, and funding for roads and bridges." Again: "...this disparity undermines the ability of cities and States to invest in K-12 education, police and fire protection, access to affordable health care, and funding for roads and bridges." Here we have the classic laundry list of public services that can only survive if we raise taxes. And to pretend as though this tax hike is in the name of fairness rather than States collecting more revenue is embarrassingly disingenuous.

Select Firearm Violence Prevention Strategies

A report titled "Summary of Select Firearm Violence Prevention Strategies" was recently released by the National Institute of Justice, a research wing of the Department of Justice. This report states, "The existing stock of assault weapons is large, undercutting the effectiveness of bans with exemptions. Therefore a complete elimination of assault weapons would not have a large impact on gun homicides." This report found no significant link between "assault weapons" and murders, stating, "Since assault weapons are not a major contributor to U.S. gun homicides and the existing stock of guns is large, an assault weapon ban is unlikely to have an impact on gun violence."

The report goes on to state that it sees no epidemic of mass shootings, saying, "Fatalities from mass shootings (those with 4 or more victims in a particular place and time) account on average for 35 fatalities per year. Policies that address the larger firearm homicide issue will have a far greater impact even if they do not address the particular issues of mass shootings."

The study also found a number of reasons why gun buy-backs are ineffective the way they are generally implemented: "1. The buybacks are too small to have an impact. 2. The guns turned in are at low risk of ever being used in a crime. 3. Replacement guns are easily acquired." The report concludes, "Unless these three points are overcome, a gun buyback cannot be effective."

On the issue of reducing the size of magazines, the report says, "In order to have an impact, large capacity magazine regulation needs to sharply curtail their availability to include restrictions on importation, manufacture, sale, and possession. An exemption for previously owned magazines would nearly eliminate any impact. The program would need to be coupled with an extensive buy-back of existing large capacity magazines. With an exemption the impact of the restrictions would only be felt when the magazines degrade or when they no longer are compatible with guns in circulation. This would take decades to realize."

Another interesting point noted in this report is that a 2000 study by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms stated that 47 percent of crime guns are obtained through a straw purchase, and another 26 percent are stolen. According to the report, "These figures indicate informal transfers dominate the crime gun market. A perfect universal background check system can address the gun shows and might deter many unregulated private sellers. However this does not address the largest sources (straw purchase and theft), which would most likely become larger if background checks at gun shows and private sellers were addressed."

This report, published by Eric Holder’s Justice Department, undermines most of the talking points the Obama administration has been using in recent weeks in its pursuit of more limitations on guns, ammo, and accessories.