…and what it means for his political future. Not good things, I think.
Category Archives: Political Commentary
But Other Than That, It’s Great (Part Two)
The president’s tax plan defies economics. Again, how does that distinguish it from any of his other plans?
[Update a few minutes later]
After Obama, I don’t think there will be any more John Kerry or Al Gore sermons about the superior Europe model either. A disarmed, undemocratic, insolvent, shrinking, and increasingly polarized continent is now a model of what the United States should not be. There simply have been too many California as Greece stories for any politicians to advise us with the old admonition: “But In Europe, they….”
Obama thought that he would replicate the EU paradigm. He would bring in properly certified technocrats from academia or government like Chu, Geithner, Goolsbee, Holder, Orszag, Romer, and Summers to oversee massive new regulations and taxes that would dictate from on high how the ignorant masses must be protected from everything from cheap gas to old-style light bulbs. In less than three years, they all proved far more ignorant about what makes America work than the local car dealer, welder, or farmer. After Obama, Americans will not be fooled for a generation or so into thinking that a Harvard PhD or Berkeley professor “really” knows that borrowing is prosperity, that gas should cost as much as it does in Europe, and that the more we pay millions to regulate, the more the vastly fewer who produce make us all prosperous. (And given Obama’s mysterious silence about the undergraduate record at Occidental and Columbia that won him a scholarship to Harvard Law, we won’t take seriously any more the usual liberal critique of supposedly weak-minded conservative candidates who, based on their leaked undergraduate transcripts, could not get As decades ago in college.)
I hope that the current disastrous presidency turns out to be a blessing in disguise, by finally exposing all the mythology of the left, and inoculating us against such insanity for at least a generation.
[Update a few minutes later]
Tax the rich, just not my rich:
Menendez, Lautenberg and Kirsten Gillibrand support eliminating some or all of the Bush tax cuts. Schumer said the $250,000 limit is unacceptable since it will hit the metropolitan area disproportionately because of the high cost of living here.
“$250,000 makes you really rich in Mississippi but it doesn’t make you rich at all in New York and there ought to be some kind of scale based on the cost of living on how much you pay,” Schumer said.
So, Senator, if we should adjust taxation for areas with higher cost of living, why should there be a single federal minimum wage for the whole country?
[Update a few minutes later]
The president’s plan is all tax hikes and no cuts. What a shocker.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Barack Obama, home alone:
Ron Suskind quotes former administration official Larry Summers complaining: “We’re home alone. There’s no adult in charge. Clinton would never have made these mistakes.”
Put aside the misbegotten nostalgia for Bill Clinton, whose new status as an elder statesman wipes from memory his bouts of reckless immaturity. The Summers comment (subsequently denied, of course) stands as the best summation of the current occupant of the White House, who constantly congratulates himself on his high-minded leadership without exercising any.
Wasn’t this the guy who mused that he’d make a pretty good chief of staff? I’m trying to figure out what he’s good at, other than being a con man.
AP Fact Check
No, Obama and Buffett are peddling a myth when they claim that secretaries pay more taxes than their bosses. No surprise — Obama has spent much of his life peddling myths, with great success, to fools.
Kelo
A sad epilogue:
Susette and I were talking in a small circle of people when we were approached by Justice Richard N. Palmer. Tall and imposing, he is one of the four justices who voted with the 4-3 majority against Susette and her neighbors. Facing me, he said: “Had I known all of what you just told us, I would have voted differently.”
I was speechless. So was Susette. One more vote in her favor by the Connecticut Supreme Court would have changed history. The case probably would not have advanced to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Susette and her neighbors might still be in their homes.
Then Justice Palmer turned to Susette, took her hand and offered a heartfelt apology. Tears trickled down her red cheeks. It was the first time in the 12-year saga that anyone had uttered the words “I’m sorry.”
It was really an appalling decision. It greatly enhanced local governments’ capacity for tyranny.
You Don’t Say
Obama deficit plan may miss its targets. Our days of taking this guy seriously should be way past a middle.
AtlasGate
Headline Of The Day
…maybe even of the week, or month: “Anonymous Officials Push Open Government.”
In Which One Of The Rubes
This wasn’t a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I’m a sap for thinking it was possible.
Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around.
What a fool.
[Update a while later]
The Biggest Earmark
…plods on. My thoughts on last week’s SLS announcement, over at PJM. As usual, the comments are chock full of foolishness.
Looking For Snoopy
The search is on:
In a celestial version of finding a needle in a haystack, Howes and his team are about to embark on the seemingly impossible: finding Snoopy!
After consulting members of NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Faulkes Telescope team, who are working with the Space Exploration Engineering Corp and astronomers from the Remanzacco Observatory in Italy as well as schools across the UK, the team are under no illusion of how difficult the task will be as Paul Roche, Director of the Faulkes Telescope Project states: “To paraphrase President Kennedy, we are trying these things ‘not because they are easy but because they are hard’ — this will be a real test for the hardware and the people involved.”
The challenges facing the team are enormous, a fact that isn’t lost on Howes. “The key problem which we are taking on is a lack of solid orbital data since 1969,” he told Discovery News. “We’ve enlisted the help of the Space Exploration Engineering Corp who have calculated orbits for Apollo 13 and working closely with people who were on the Apollo mission team in the era will help us identify search coordinates.”
Here’s an interesting project. Have Paul Allen or someone put up a prize to not just find it, but to retrieve it, and put it on the lunar surface as part of the lunar Apollo historical sites. It’s the kind of thing we’d do if we were really a space-faring nation. And we will never do it with anything like an SLS.