Many of you probably remember how Hillary Clinton crashed and burned trying to get healthcare reform passed back in 94. She burned up a lot of political capital and ended up just looking pathetic.
Bill Clinton knew that healthcare reform was going to be a tar baby, and he wisely kept his distance. He had Hillary take on that battle because if it flopped, he didn’t want to waste his own political capital on it. As things worked out, Bill looked like a genius.
Obama did not pay attention to the history of healthcare reform in America. He wants to do basically the same thing that the Clintons wanted (although he wants to spend more). Obama assumed he has unlimited political capital because of his high polling numbers, but he is going to end up burning all of that capital on this single issue. (more…)
As most of you reading this are no doubt aware, Sarah Palin has resigned the governorship of Alaska, sparking a media firestorm in the process. The questions that remain are what her continuing political aspirations may be, and whether she has effectively taken herself out of the running for the Republican 2012 presidential nomination.
My analysis begins with why she left in the first place. Being a governor can’t be an easy position, much less when you’re targeted with a political ‘scorched earth’ campaign by a party whose political scruples and ethics went out the window with Teddy Kennedy at Chappaquiddick. Her children are the butts of horrifying jokes on syndicated television, her oldest daughter is now an unwed teenage mother herself, and her youngest son has Down’s Syndrome. As governor, the state has spent more than $2 million investigating her for a series of specious ethics violations, another of which drops literally every two weeks, and she’s accumulated $500,000 in legal bills defending herself against these charges.
She is reviled and despised by so many left-leaning groups it’s hard to count them all. (more…)
The Obama fuel efficiency plan may also contribute to a significant increase in highway deaths as vehicles are required to quickly meet the new CAFE standard and will likely become lighter in weight as a result. According to a study completed in 2001 by the National Research Council (NRC), the last major increase in CAFE standards, mandated by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, required about a 50% increase in fuel economy (to 27.5 mpg by model year 1985 from an average of 18 mpg in 1978). The NRC study concluded that the subsequent downsizing and down-weighting of vehicles, “while resulting in significant fuel savings, also resulted in a safety penalty.” Specifically, the NRC estimated that in 1993 there were between 1,300 and 2,600 motor vehicle crash deaths that would not have occurred if cars were as heavy as they were in 1976.
The president now proposes a fuel economy increase of similar magnitude in an even quicker time frame — to 39 mpg by model year 2016 from 27.5 mpg now. Given the time it takes for new technologies to be developed, tested and incorporated into new car models, it is likely that down-weighting of cars will be an important means of meeting the new standard. And one result again could be highway deaths that might otherwise not have occurred.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s cap-and-trade system will require all pollution credits to be auctioned. A 100 percent auction ensures that all large corporate polluters pay for every ton of emissions they release, rather than giving these emission rights away for free to coal and oil companies.
Under the House bill, only 15% of the emission permits will be auctioned initially. The rest of the permits will be given away — 2% to oil refiners, 5% to free-standing “merchant” coal plants, 9% to regulated natural-gas distributors, and so on.
So, Mr President, the bill now being considered in Congress is in direct contradiction to your campaign pledge. Will you now please stand up for principle and issue a veto threat?
The Obama administration and its defenders have dined for quite a while on blaming the Bush administration for the sundry problems plaguing the U.S. and the world. This is not the place to parse each criticism, but I do think things like this report from the National Security Network need better context. They write:
During the eight years of the Bush administration, unnecessary saber-rattling, coupled with a refusal to talk to Iran, did nothing to make America more secure. Indeed, Iran made enormous advances both in nuclear technology and regional prestige.
It’s important to recognize that there is very little chance the Obama administration is going to have any more success at convincing the Iranians to give up their nuclear program than the Bush administration did. That’s not because they’re not approaching the problem more constructively, but because the nature of the problem is such that it may not be amenable to “solving” at a cost that would be acceptable to most Americans.
All Democrats in favor of standing with your president to shout out the evils of Guantanamo, shout aye! “Aye!” All Democrats in favor of doing what would be necessary to close Guantanamo, shout aye! . . . What, nobody?
On day two of his presidency, Barack Obama issued an executive order to shut down, within one year, the Gitmo prison that still houses 241 detainees. Four months later, he may be about to be handed his first defeat of a major campaign promise, and by his own party. Faced with the actual politics of bringing terrorists to U.S. soil, congressional Democrats are running for the exits.
Gov. Charlie Crist, now a U.S. Senate candidate, said Tuesday he would have made the “pragmatic” decision to vote for the $787 billion federal stimulus bill, differentiating himself from fellow-Republican opponent Marco Rubio and the man he is trying to replace – Mel Martinez.
Speaking to a politically mixed crowd in Daytona Beach, Crist emphasized his support for the bill as practical and pragmatic, though it would have meant crossing party lines. Only three Republican senators backed the stimulus bill, and Martinez wasn’t one of them.
Now Florida stands to get about $15 billion over the next two years through different stimulus grants.
“A lot of that $15 billion dollars you sent to Washington, D.C., and my view is we ought to get it back,” Crist told his audience. “Florida deserves her fair share.”
To jump forward to today: if the Republican Congress of the mid-1990s had merely passed a Constitutional amendment requiring a super-majority of Congress in order to increase the national debt, the Obama-Specter stimulus bill would not have passed, at least without first forcing Congress to increase taxes.
If one half of a marriage repeatedly spends money without permission, the marriage will not be a success. And when one gives a limitless credit card to a 15-year-old, it should be no surprise when the privilege is abused.
Long-term, America will fail if 52% of the citizens continue to wildly spend the money owned by the other 48%, and if the cost of federal programs can continue to casually be passed down to future generations. Rather than merely focusing on the individual programs to which we object, I find it more effective to focus on the total size of the purse.
When given a Constitutionally-instructed limit, Congress will be forced to prioritize, and we will begin to see permanent, meaningful reform with regard to the size and scope of the federal government.
Officials said the first public moves could come as soon as next week, perhaps in filings to military judges at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, outlining an administration plan to amend the Bush administration’s system to provide more legal protections for terrorism suspects.
Continuing the military commissions in any form would probably prompt sharp criticism from human rights groups as well as some of Obama’s political allies because the troubled system became an emblem of the effort to use Guantánamo to avoid the American legal system.
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) on President Obama’s business practices: “But something that comes to mind when I see this image, too, is here are two world leaders that have both, within the last month, nationalized huge private-sector companies,” said King. “In the case of President Obama, General Motors and Chrysler, at least in effect if not in actuality, and moved it down that path, when he fired the CEO of General Motors, and when he ordered that Chrysler merge with Fiat.”
“Those two have done the same thing to private business,” King added, “and I think that image also will soak into the minds of investors around the world, and where they want to put their money.”
If necessity is the mother of invention then politics is often the father. Barack Obama has invented a phrase that did not exist on January 20, the day he became president. Anxious to win a war through the treasury rather than the Pentagon, he has discovered something called the “moderate Taliban” in Afghanistan. Joe Biden, his vice president, has found the mathematical coordinates of this oxymoron: only 5% of the Taliban are “extremists”.
Welcome to Obama’s first big mistake.
The war in Afghanistan and Pakistan is not simply against some bearded men and beardless boys who have been turned into suicide missionaries. The critical conflict is against the ideology of a chauvinistic theocracy that seeks to remould the Muslim world into a regressive region from which it can assault every aspect of modernity, whether that be in political space or the social sphere.
Although it doesn’t deal with State Department nominee Harold Koh in particular, John Bolton’s essay “The Coming War on Sovereignty” (in the March 2009 issue of Commentary) provides useful general insights on the transnationalist approach to foreign policy-and on its usurpation of domestic politics. Bolton’s essay reviews a Brookings Institution report, A Plan for Action, that proposes a foreign-policy agenda for the Obama administration. (Koh, incidentally, is on the Brookings board of trustees.)
As Bolton puts it, the report’s transnational blueprint would entail “a sharp, indeed radical, turn away from the principles and practices of representative self-government that have been at the core of the American experiment since the nation’s founding.” The “pivot point” of that turn is a “shifting understanding of American sovereignty” – from the traditional meaning of “our collective right to govern ourselves within our Constitutional framework” to the modern liberal elite’s view of “transnational consensus as the proper model for the United States.”
For Republicans to have any real hope of a comeback in the next presidential election, that will have to change. Over the last few decades, whichever party won California was highly competitive nationally, and the vast majority of the time also won the White House. Meanwhile, whichever party lost California had to struggle hard to cobble together an Electoral College majority that left them little room for error. (more…)
