Category Archives: Current Events

Should Tea Party get blamed for downgrade? Palin says no

August 9, 2011 – 8:43 pm

Palin (Getty Images)

 

Sarah Palin on downgrade: I knew this would happen

by Chris Moody | The Ticket – 10 hrs ago

 

 

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who plans to announce whether she will run for president sometime next month, said Monday night that she predicted the credit rating downgrade long ago. 

Palin delivered her message in a post on her Facebook page that reads at first like a economics explainer and ends like campaign stump speech. The former Republican vice presidential candidate blamed Democrats for resisting  efforts fueled by the tea party to reduce spending on entitlement programs and a Congress that failed to pass a debt reduction deal big enough to avoid the downgrade.

“I’m surprised that so many people seem surprised by S&P’s decision,” Palin wrote in response to Standard & Poor’s announcement that it was downgrading the United States debt for the first time. “Weren’t people paying attention over the last year or so when we were getting warning after warning from various credit rating agencies that this was coming? I’ve been writing and speaking about it myself for quite some time.”

S&P explained late Friday why it chose to downgrade U.S. debt, pointing to the debt reduction plan passed last week, which the company said “falls short.” While there was originally a plan to reduce the debt by $4 trillion over 10 years, Republicans rejected it over proposed tax increases, and Democrats refused to cut Medicare and Social Security spending, leaving the final product about $2 trillion short.

Palin referenced her past speeches and statements where she warned that inaction in Washington could adversely affect the credit agencies’ rating.

“One doesn’t need a Harvard Law degree to figure this out!” she wrote, an obvious dig at the president, who attended law school at Harvard. “By what magical thinking did we figure we could run up perpetual trillion dollar deficits and still somehow avoid the unforgiving mathematics of a downgrade? Nothing is ever ‘too big to fail.’ And there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Didn’t we all learn that in our micro and macro econ classes? I did at the University of Idaho. How could Obama skip through Columbia and Harvard without learning that?”

From the moment that ABC News first reported about rumors of a possible downgrade, both sides jumped into attack mode. Appearing on CBS’s’ “Face the Nation,” Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod called it the “tea party downgrade,” while the Republican National Committee knocked Obama as “The Not So AAA President.” Palin, unsurprisingly, defended the tea party. In her post, she called those who blamed the tea party for the downgrade “shamelessly cynical” and “dishonest.”

“Blaming the Tea Party for our credit downgrade is akin to Nero blaming the Christians for burning Rome,” she said. “Tea Party Americans weren’t the ones ‘fiddling’ while our country’s fiscal house was going up in smoke.”

By Everette Hatcher III | Comments (0)

Tea Party Terrorists? Do Biden and Brummett agree on that?

August 9, 2011 – 2:58 pm

Vice President Biden, I’m not a terrorist. Terrorists target and kill innocent people. I’m a freshman Congressman who was sent to Washington in January to stop President Obama from bankrupting future generations and destroying job creation.

_______________________________

Political Cartoons by Michael Ramirez

 
 
By Michael Ramirez – August 03, 2011
Michael Ramirez was born in Tokyo, Japan. He graduated from the University of California, Irvine, in 1984 with a bachelors degree. He has worked for The Commercial Appeal of Memphis for seven years and then for the Los Angeles Times. In 1994, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. He again won the Pulitzer for editorial cartooning in 2008. He is a three-time winner of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi Award for excellence in journalism in 1995, 1997 and 2007. He has also been awarded the 1996 Mencken Award for Best Editorial Cartoon. He is a regular contributor to USA Today and The Weekly Standard, and his work has a subscription/distribution of over five hundred and fifty newspapers and magazines through Creators Syndicate. He is also the co-editor of the Investor’s Business Daily editorial page.
_________________________________________
 
Is the Tea Party made up of a bunch of terrorists? No! However, the liberals and the members of the Tea Party do have a different vision f0r the future.
 

John Brummett in his article “Why is this culprit smiling?,” Arkansas News Bureau, August 9, 2011, referred to  ” the  tea party-inclined insurgents.” That came after Biden made the headlines by calling them terrorists.

Here is an excellent article on that:

Liberal Rage Won’t Stop the Tea Party’s Rise

by John Samples

John Samples is director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute and the author of The Struggle to Limit Government.

Added to cato.org on August 9, 2011

This article appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer on August 9, 2011

 

The tea-party contingent in Congress drove the Republican leadership to bargain harder than it otherwise would have on last week’s debt-ceiling deal. Liberals have rightly concluded that the tea party is changing political outcomes. Their response has been to equate tea-party members with terrorists.

Vice President Biden recently told House Democrats that tea-party Republicans had “acted like terrorists.” And a New York Times columnist claimed that “Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people.” Many people on the left no doubt take their cues from the vice president and the Times, so we should expect more such venomous rhetoric castigating the movement as an enemy of America.

Ironically, the movement being portrayed this way takes its name from an iconic event in American history. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 helped establish the principle of “no taxation without representation.” And the members of the current tea-party movement clearly believe in the American system of representative government. They worked to change Congress through the election of 2010, and now they expect their efforts to bear fruit in the form of new policies.

Even if their anger is understandable, liberals should be ashamed of their over-the-top anti-tea party rhetoric.

“Tea Party Patriots” — the name of one tea-party organization — is closer to the truth. Far from being enemies of America, these people believe deeply in the nation’s history, promise, and Constitution.

Differing visions
The liberal anger toward the tea party is justified in one sense. The tea-party movement’s vision of America is distinct from the reality of the welfare state the country has built since 1936. So a powerful tea party is understandably disturbing to liberals — even if their recent campaign of vilification against it is reprehensible.

But is the tea-party movement really all that powerful? The budget deal, after all, hardly restrained the growth of spending over the next year, when the government will still run a deficit in excess of $1 trillion. Even with the restraint prescribed by last week’s deal over the long term, the federal government will still be spending $4.25 trillion a year. The deal may lower federal spending, but it clearly will not bring about a substantially smaller government.

The evident rage among liberals, however, may have more to do with the battles to come than it does with the battle they’ve just lost (or won). We stand at the beginning of a long struggle. For the next few years — and maybe many more — our politics will be occupied by the same kind of fights over spending, deficits, and taxes.

These battles will be about more than just money. They reflect two different ideas of what the U.S. government should be. On one side is the tea party’s vision. On the other is the welfare state of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and President Obama, which taxes and spends more and more in pursuit of security and fairness for its citizens.

As recently as 2008, the big-government vision seemed poised to win the day. Then came the tea-party mobilization of 2009, which led to the election outcome of 2010.

Here to stay
That victory was remarkable but, in a way, unconvincing. After all, protest movements have emerged, affected elections, and then disappeared before. The Reform Party of Ross Perot comes to mind. Last year, it was far from certain that the tea party would be more than a memory by the summer of 2011.

John Samples is director of the Center for Representative Government at the Cato Institute and the author of The Struggle to Limit Government.

 

More by John Samples

Even before the election of 2010, tea-party leaders were concerned that electing fiscally responsible members of Congress would not be enough to save the nation from financial ruin. They knew they had to follow up their victory with oversight to ensure that new members would remember who had elected them and why. The recent pressure on House Speaker John Boehner from tea-party representatives reflected that strategic choice.

Political scientists tell us that to bring fundamental change to the nation, political movements must become permanent organizations. The civil rights movement accomplished such a transformation. Will the tea party also become a permanent part of our politics?

It’s too soon to say, of course, but the debt-ceiling deal suggests the answer may be yes. In fact, the Republican Party might be the permanent organization the tea party becomes.

Even if their anger is understandable, liberals should be ashamed of their over-the-top anti-tea party rhetoric. The tea party could become a lasting force in American politics — one that slowly ends the long era that began with the New Deal. Though it’s often criticized as rooted in the past, the tea party may be a harbinger of the future.

 
By Everette Hatcher III | Also posted in spending out of control | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Katherine Schwarzenegger thought about changing last name

August 9, 2011 – 2:37 pm

Photo credit: Nikolai Von Bismarck

posted by Lizbeth Scordo – Tue Aug 9 2011, 7:35 AM PDT

After managing to stay out of the spotlight for most of their lives, the Schwarzenegger kids were suddenly swarmed with media attention during the demise of their parents’ marriage earlier this year, when it was revealed that their dad, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, had fathered a child out of wedlock. A mega scandal ensued.

Read the Full Interview with Katherine

For eldest daughter Katherine, 21, the change was overwhelming. “It was like everything came out of nowhere overnight,” she says in the September issue of Harper’s Bazaar. “I would go out to lunch, and literally 20 people would come and scream at me. And I’m like, ‘This is so inappropriate; you’re trying to provoke me to have an attack and say something crazy.'”

Which Celebs Have an Open Marriage?

In fact, “crazy” was what Katherine had been trying so hard to avoid since her father became governor when she was just 13. Though she admits to doing some partying in high school, she also knew that one slip-up could ruin everything. “It could have ruined my father’s career if I was caught drunk driving or something like that,” Katherine says. “Being the oldest and going from being an actor’s kid to being the governor’s daughter, it’s a totally different amount of pressure put on you to be perfect.”

“It’s something I deal with every day,” Katherine says of having the Schwarzenegger name. Nikolai Von Bismarck/Harper

Lady Gaga Interviews Her Idol

Eventually, when Katherine began attending college a few years ago, she found that having Schwarzenegger for a last name made certain aspects of her life, well, less than perfect. “I thought of changing it because, especially for dating, it’s impossible,” she tells the magazine. “It’s something I deal with every day, and I am hyperconscious about it. When I got to college, people — much more guys than girls because girls don’t give a crap about bodybuilding — were coming up to me, and it would automatically jump to a conversation about my dad and weight lifting or how to do a proper bicep curl. It’s like, ‘Do you want to date my father, or do you want to date me?'”

Smurfette Models Hot Fall Accessories

Despite having the same last name as her dad, it’s her mother, Maria Shriver, with whom she feels more connected. The two talk around six times a day and email constantly. “I’ve always been way closer to my mom,” Katherine admits. “Even when I was little, I was glued to her all the time. I’m close to my dad, but they’re totally different kinds of relationships.”

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Advice to Gene Simmons Part 5, (“Tip Tuesday” Part A) jh15a

August 9, 2011 – 5:50 am

Gene-Simmons-tvae-24.jpg

Gene Simmons Family Jewels

Adrian Rogers – [2/3] How to Cultivate a Marriage

The series I have been doing on “Advice to Gene Simmons” that I am starting what I am calling “Tip Tuesday.” For the next few months we will be looking at the Simmons family.

On July 19th on Gene Simmons Jewels, in a meeting with his marriage counselor, Gene stated, “There is never enough money. Money is the implantation of love.  It begins there and it is only money that provides the walls of your fortress.” Dr. Ann Wexler responds, “Only money? In the pursuit of all this money, in the pursuit of all this fame, aren’t there things that you have missed?”

Gene responded that he missed his daughter’s graduation, but that is life. 

___________________________________________

My advice to Gene Simmons is very simple. Ann Wexler mentioned to him that there is a point where you have enough money and should turn your attention to other important things in his life like relationships. She implies that Gene is being selfish. 

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Many times when a marriage is falling apart there is lots of selfishness that comes out in the open. It may be that a love of money is exposed or it may be a desire to satisfy carnal desires. 

Here are some important points.  First, we are to be married and faithful to one lady. Gene has been having occasional affairs and deep down thinks he deserves the right to do this. However, that is not the plan that God has for us. 

Second, we are to love our wife as Christ loves the church and that means we love her more than anything even money. 

Brandon Barnard in his message “The Battle for Purity” at Fellowship Bible Church on July 24 said there were two paths. The path of impurity and the path of purity. Last time we looked at the path of impurity and today we want to look at the path of purity.

THOSE ON THE PATHWAY TO PURITY WILL PURSUE ALL PLEASURE IN CHRIST AND TAKE GREAT DELIGHT IN THEIR SPOUSE ALONE AND DRINK WATER FROM YOUR OWN CISTERN AND REJOICE IN THE WIFE OF YOUR YOUTH.

Proverbs 5:15-20 states:

15Drink water from your own cistern,
   flowing water from your own well.
16Should your springs be scattered abroad,
   streams of water in the streets?
17 Let them be for yourself alone,
   and not for strangers with you.
18Let your fountain be blessed,
   and rejoice in the wife of your youth,

 19a lovely deer, a graceful doe.
Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight;
   be intoxicated[a] always in her love.
20Why should you be intoxicated, my son, with a forbidden woman
   and embrace the bosom of an adulteress?[b]

Adrian Rogers – [2/3] How to Cultivate a Marriage

By Everette Hatcher III | Also posted in Adrian Rogers | Comments (0)

Kerry and Brummett: Downgrade was Tea Party’s fault

August 9, 2011 – 1:09 am

They denied that there would be a downgrade. Then they denied it meant anything,  and now they are blaming it all on the Tea Party. The truth of the matter is that the Tea Party has been pushing for a balanced budget. So how could they have been responsible for all this overspending which is the true cause of the downgrade?

John Brummett in his article “Why is this culprit smiling?,” Arkansas News Bureau, August 9, 2011, asserted that Republican leaders “caved to the extreme right and sent the issue to the very brink, compelling S&P’s to downgrade the country’s rating, thus adding further uncertainty to the American economy and threatening the beleaguered every-day American with further equity losses and higher borrowing rates.”

Who were these extreme right people responsible for the downgrade? Brummett identifies them as ” the  tea party-inclined insurgents.”

Daniel Doherty in his excellent article, “Congressman Allen West Defends Tea Party Republicans,” 8/8/2011, Townhall, noted:

During an appearance on Fox & Friends this morning, Congressman Allen West (R-FL) slammed Senator John Kerry for his egregious assertion that House Republicans were exclusively to blame for the U.S. credit downgrade. In 2007, as Mr. West explains on the program, the debt ceiling stood at $8.6 trillion when Democrats held both chambers of Congress. Today, after a $787 billion failed stimulus package and a partisan health care law — the federal deficit has risen to $14.5 trillion.

As Katie Pavlich posted earlier, the Cato Institute has proven in unequivocal terms how our ongoing debt problems stem not from a lack of revenue, but from an addiction to spending. Senator Kerry’s argument, then, that Republicans should be blamed for the impasse – especially when Democrats in the senate have yet to propose a budget in over 800 days – is unfounded and an obvious attempt to denigrate his political rivals.

Furthermore, Senator Kerry’s statement conveniently overlooks the intransigence of his own party. As George Will pointed out today on ABC, 95 House Democrats voted against raising the debt ceiling compared to only 66 House Republicans. The notion, therefore, that Republicans were solely responsible for the near calamitous U.S. default is demonstrably false.

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Democrats’ “tea-party downgrade” spin is self-defeating

 

posted at 8:25 pm on August 8, 2011 by Karl
printer-friendly

Various Dems, including but not limited to Pres. Obama’s presidential campaign adviser David Axelrod, Sen. John Kerry, and fmr. DNC Chairman Howard Dean, were busy Sunday blaming S&P’s downgrade of America’s credit rating on the Tea Party. It is bad spin on at least two levels.

First, the spin creates mixed messages. To quote Jim Treacher: “Yesterday, the downgrade was fake. Today, the Tea Party caused it. ‘This isn’t happening… and it’s all your fault!’” In particular, it muddles the Obama administration’s official position, which is that S&P is mistaken. If the administration is trying to stave off similar downgrades from other ratings agencies (even if the impact is more limited than many think), having the president’s campaign flack suggesting a real phenomenon is at work is counter-productive.

Second, the left’s focus on S&P’s comments about GOP opposition to higher taxes (and avoidance of S&P’s comments on entitlement reform) sends a toxic subliminal message to voters. Consider this from the S&P explanation:

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

Of course, S&P may not be entirely accurate on this point: Obama blew up a grand bargain with Speaker Boehner that included $800 billion in revenue. But taken on its own terms, S&P’s explanation necessarily assumes not only that the GOP will continue to oppose raising tax rates, but also that the GOP will succeed in doing so. S&P’s analysis implies: (a) the House GOP is unlikely to suffer serious losses in 2012 from their position on the debt ceiling; (b) Pres. Obama may not win re-election in 2012; (c) if Pres. Obama is re-elected, he will likely be beaten a third time on taxes, despite being a lame duck with nothing to lose. These are the narratives being advanced by Democratic spin about a “Tea Party downgrade.”

As the WSJ’s James Taranto quipped: “So the argument for re-election is going to be ‘Don’t blame Obama, he was no match for the Tea Party’?”

By Everette Hatcher III | Also posted in President Obama, spending out of control | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

US credit rating downgraded

August 7, 2011 – 10:51 pm

U.S. Credit Rating Downgraded: Now They’ve Done It

By J.D. Foster, Ph.D.
August 6, 2011

Late on Friday, August 5, Standard & Poor’s (S&P) downgraded the United States credit rating from AAA, and really best in class, to AA+. In one fell swoop, S&P sent two separate and powerful messages. First, as The Heritage Foundation and many others warned, the spending reductions in the deal negotiated by President Obama to raise the debt ceiling were entirely and woefully inadequate. Second, the global economy, the national economy, and state finances have all in their own ways been delivered a mighty and frightening body blow.

A Lost Standard of Excellence

For decades past memory, United States government debt was deemed the gold standard of credit quality. Textbooks referred to U.S. Treasuries as the “riskless asset” against which all others were compared. Those days have passed, at least for now, because the U.S. government has rapidly piled debt upon debt and ,on its current trajectory, evidences no inclination to stop. Under the circumstances, without a fundamental policy course correction, a repeatedly threatened credit rating downgrade became inevitable, with only the timing at issue.

President Obama and his allies in and out of Congress do not deserve all the blame for the downgrade. Unaffordable entitlement programs were built up Congress after Congress, President after President, and their imposing fiscal dangers for the future were ignored thereafter. To his credit, President George W. Bush tried to reform the lesser problem of Social Security, spending virtually all the political capital acquired in his strong re-election in doing so, yet even many of his allies in Congress wanted no part of it. And so the basic facts regarding the tens of trillions in unfunded obligations in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid remain and are not in dispute.

While not solely to blame, President Obama and his allies are most certainly preeminently to blame. Facing a rapidly growing budget deficit in 2009, President Obama pushed through a massive fiscal stimulus program followed by a succession of lesser efforts. As the anemic state of the economy attests quite clearly, those programs failed miserably—except in raising federal spending and national debt.

Then the President pushed through his disastrous and highly unpopular health care reform. On paper, these reforms give the appearance of improving the fiscal picture modestly. But as the Medicare trustees’ report has reminded us every year after Obamacare’s passage, this happy picture is an illusion. Aside from the damage it has done and will do to health care costs and services, from a fiscal perspective Obamacare ultimately is just yet another unaffordable entitlement piled on top of those already on the books.

A Lost Opportunity

In the recent debt ceiling fight, the President’s initial view was that Congress should pass a “clean” debt ceiling, allow yet more borrowing, and attend to whatever deficit reduction might be possible later. The reaction by S&P demonstrates undeniably how wrong the President was. And the nation knew it. Rarely have the American people been more engaged in and more concerned about a matter of federal fiscal policy. Yet after ignoring his own high-profile if fatally flawed fiscal commission, and after offering a budget in January that was utterly silent on these critical issues, the President told the Congress: Don’t worry, be happy.

In the course of negotiations on the debt ceiling, congressional Republicans tried tirelessly to get the President and Senate Democrats to get serious about cutting spending. All Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV) could do was carp about symbolic tax hikes on the rich, oil companies, and their latest silly affection—corporate jets. To be clear, despite the perilous state of the nation’s finances, the President’s sole objective was ideological and symbolic: Even if Republicans had caved on tax hikes, which they wisely refused to do, the revenue gains would have been inconsequential compared to the spending cuts that are necessary. The President played politics while the nation’s credit rating was set to burn, and now it has.

Whether the congressional Republican leadership should have forced deeper spending cuts before agreeing to raise the debt ceiling is now a settled question. S&P settled it. Whether they could have forced deeper spending cuts in the face of a politics-playing President and Senate dominated by spenders will never be known. But the nation will soon see the consequences.

Failure Has Consequences

Taken in isolation, a credit rating downgrade will eventually mean higher interest rates on U.S. government debt. This may be hard to imagine given the recent drop in Treasury bond rates in response to events overseas. But higher future rates are certain, and that means that even more federal tax dollars must be dedicated to paying the interest on past government excesses. Higher interest rates and interest cost means greater deficit pressures, which can mean more debt, which can lead to higher interest rates. This is why it is termed a debt spiral.

How will the credit rating downgrade of U.S. government debt affect the states and municipal governments’ interest costs? Nobody knows for sure, but it cannot be good. As a practical matter, U.S. government debt is the foundation of the U.S. financial system, as a point of reference if for no other reason. Interest rates paid by state and local government can only go up as a result of the downgrade, unwelcome news indeed to states wrestling with their own massive deficits due in part to the failure of the economy and state revenues to recover.

In today’s global economy, however, the U.S. credit rating downgrade may prove catastrophic. Prior to the credit rating downgrade, Europe was already teetering on the brink. Last week European stock exchanges plunged 10 percent, their worst weekly losses since November 2008. The long-building government debt crisis in Europe, which had been so unsuccessfully papered over just a few weeks ago by its leaders, is reaching the boiling point, threatening to wash over not just the worst offenders like Greece and Portugal but also some of the pillars of the European Union like Spain and Italy.

This is a European government debt problem on top of a European currency problem on top of a European economic growth problem. But the 2007–2009 financial crisis taught an important lesson about the intense interconnectedness of global financial markets—and that a great many of these connections are little known and poorly understood.

What happens in Europe will not stay in Europe. What weaknesses in global finance and financial supervision will this crisis reveal? No one knows, but what a terrible time for the dominant financial actor in the global financial system, the United States government, to suffer an entirely preventable credit rating downgrade. The dangers to the global economy, and specifically to the U.S. economy, have increased markedly as the U.S. credit rating has been marked down.

Perhaps the Last Opportunity That Must Not Be Lost

President Obama and the Congress have the time and opportunity to change the course of fiscal policy. The United States can recover its AAA credit rating and begin to heal the damage, but it must not delay. The debt ceiling deal included the provision for the creation of a joint select committee of Congress to cut at least $1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. Clearly, that figure is much too low. The committee was to report by November 23. Clearly, that is too late. In the eyes of many, the committee was designed to fail. That must not happen.

President Obama must now do things he has been loath to do heretofore. First, he must lead. No more grand speeches, nor more politicking, no more finger-pointing while criticizing those who oppose him. Above all, leading now means corralling his forces to reach across the aisle to Republicans and work together.

Second, he should give up the ideological fight for higher taxes on anyone. For one thing, even suggesting higher taxes when unemployment is so high and economic growth is so low suggests a man more committed to politics than jobs. As The Heritage Foundation suggested at the start of his term,[1]President Obama should suspend his desire for higher taxes at least until the economy has moved far toward full employment. The wisdom (or lack thereof) of higher taxes can be debated when Americans are back to work.

Finally, the President should forego his inclination to use entitlement reforms for political purposes. Scaring seniors about Social Security checks and related “Mediscare” tactics, which are basic elements of the Democratic party playbook, must stop. The problem is too much entitlement spending now and even more so in the near future. Republicans know it. Democrats know it. Conservatives know it. Liberals know it. The nation now knows it.

A number of sound incremental reforms can garner strong bipartisan support and can substantially improve these program’s sustainability and the nation’s finances. The President must lead his party to join hands with Republicans in the joint select committee to embrace these reforms and be ready to enact them, saving far more than $1.2 trillion and far sooner than November 23.

It Can Be Done

The objective for the nation, the President, and the joint select committee is clear: drive down spending—including and especially on entitlement programs—toward a balanced budget while protecting America and without raising taxes. Properly done, this would lead to economic growth, more jobs, less government, and a restoration of the nation’s credit rating. It can be done. The Heritage Foundation has described in detail how to do it in “Saving the American Dream: The Heritage Plan to Fix the Debt, Cut Spending, and Restore Prosperity.”[2]

J. D. Foster, Ph.D., is Norman B. Ture Senior Fellow in the Economics of Fiscal Policy in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.


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Arnold Schwarzenegger inches back after child disclosure

August 7, 2011 – 10:36 pm

Arnold Schwarzenegger inches back after child disclosure

Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks after being honored by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce at the annual convention of the American Chamber of Commerce Executives (ACCE), Thursday in Los Angeles. MARK J. TERRILL/AP Photo

Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks after being honored by the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce at the annual convention of the American Chamber of Commerce Executives (ACCE), Thursday in Los Angeles. MARK J. TERRILL/AP Photo

By MICHAEL R. BLOOD AP Political Writer
Published: 8/5/2011  1:56 PM
Last Modified: 8/5/2011  1:56 PM

LOS ANGELES — Arnold Schwarzenegger is making a comeback.

The former California governor on Thursday made his first speech in the state since confirming in May that he fathered an out-of-wedlock son, the latest sign he’s gradually maneuvering back into the public eye.

Once among the most public of men, Schwarzenegger has appeared in public only sporadically in recent months.

In the days after he split with wife Maria Shriver, he told his talent agency to postpone his movie projects. His Twitter account — once busy with posts and photos from afar — fell out of use. He hired a divorce lawyer, and the former Hollywood star known to crave the spotlight went into a self-imposed exile to sort out his family problems.

That’s been slowly changing.

He started tweeting again in late June when he traveled to his native Austria for an environmental conference, far from his troubles in the U.S. Last month, he announced he will return to acting with a starring role in the Lionsgate film “Last Stand.” Schwarzenegger will play a border-town sheriff who unwittingly finds himself battling a notorious drug kingpin on the run.

He never mentioned his marital problems in his appearance before a business group at a downtown hotel, or his admission of fathering his now-teenage son with the former maid, Mildred Baena. The crowd gave him a standing ovation, and applauded him warmly after he recounted how he teamed with business leaders to reform the state’s workers’ compensation laws.

He gave a glossy recounting of his uneven years in Sacramento, cherry-picking accomplishments such as redistricting reform and never mentioning that the state economy has struggled for years.

Sporting a deep tan, he joked that he was running for president in 2012 — of a bodybuilding association. Speaking for about ten minutes, the moderate Republican warned about the dangers of political gridlock, telling the group that partisan division was choking progress in California and Washington. “We have too many of the legislators that are too far to the right or too far to the left, and therefore nothing gets done,” he said.

The speech comes in the midst of his divorce, which is unfolding largely behind closed doors. Last month he withdrew a request for a judge to terminate Shriver’s right to spousal support, and he clarified that he is willing to pay his estranged wife’s attorney.

Once a popular governor, Schwarzenegger returns to the public stage with his image badly bruised. One poll taken after disclosures about the out-of-wedlock son and his split with Shriver found nine of 10 voters in his home county of Los Angeles didn’t like him.

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Communism catches the attention of the young at heart but it has always brought repression wherever it is tried (“Schaeffer Sundays” Part 1)

August 7, 2011 – 12:09 am
 Communism catches the attention of the young at heart but it has always brought repression wherever it is tried (“Schaeffer Sundays” Part 1)
Francis Schaeffer is a hero of mine and I want to honor him with a series of posts on Sundays called “Schaeffer Sundays” which will include his writings and clips from his film series. I have posted many times in the past using his material.
Communism has never been tried is something I was told just a few months ago by a well meaning young person who was impressed with the ideas of Karl Marx. I responded that there are only 5 communist countries in the world today and they lack political, economic and religious freedom.
Communism has always failed because of its materialist base.  Francis Schaeffer does a great job of showing that in this clip below. Also Schaeffer shows that there were lots of similar things about the basis for both the French and Russia revolutions and he exposes the materialist and humanist basis of both revolutions.

HowShouldWeThenLive Episode 5

_____

HowShouldweThenLive Episode 6

________________

Similarities between French Revolution and Communist Revolution

Schaeffer compares communism with French Revolution and Napoleon.

1. Lenin took charge in Russia much as Napoleon took charge in France – when people get desperate enough, they’ll take a dictator.

Other examples: Hitler, Julius Caesar. It could happen again.

2. Communism is very repressive, stifling political and artistic freedom. Even allies have to be coerced. (Poland).

Communists say repression is temporary until utopia can be reached – yet there is no evidence of progress in that direction. Dictatorship appears to be permanent.

3. No ultimate basis for morality (right and wrong) – materialist base of communism is just as humanistic as French. Only have “arbitrary absolutes” no final basis for right and wrong.

How is Christianity different from both French Revolution and Communism?

Contrast N.T. Christianity – very positive government reform and great strides against injustice. (especially under Wesleyan revival).

Bible gives absolutes – standards of right and wrong. It shows the problems and why they exist (man’s fall and rebellion against God).

Is Christianity at all like Communism?

Sometimes Communism sounds very “Christian” – desirable goals of equality, justice, etc. Schaeffer elsewhere explains by saying Marxism is a Christian heresy – Karl Marx

borrowed some of the ideals of N.T.

Below is a great article. Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

This article was published January 30, 2011 at 2:28 a.m. Here is a portion of that article below:
A final advantage is the mutation of socialism into so many variants over the past century or so. Precisely because Karl Marx was unclear as to how it would work in practice, socialism has always been something of an empty vessel into which would be revolutionaries seeking personal meaning and utopian causes to support can pour pretty much anything.
A desire to increase state power, soak the rich and expand the welfare state is about all that is left of the original vision. Socialism for young lefties these days means “social justice” and compassion for the poor, not the gulag and the NKVD.
In the end, the one argument that will never wash is that communismcan’t be said to have failed because it was never actually tried. This is a transparent intellectual dodge that ignores the fact that “people’s democracies” were established all over the place in the first three decades after World War II.
Such sophistry is resorted to only because communism in all of those places produced hell on earth rather than heaven.
That the attempts to build communism in a remarkable variety of different geographical regions led to only tyranny and mass bloodshed tells us only that it was never feasible in the first place, and that societies built on the socialist principle ironically suffer from the kind of “inner contradictions” that Marx mistakenly predicted would destroy capitalism.
Yes, all economies are mixed in nature, and one could plausibly argue that the socialist impulse took the rough edges off of capitalism by sponsoring the creation of welfare-state programs that command considerable public support.
But the fact remains that no society in history has been able to achieve sustained prosperity without respect for private property and market forces of supply and demand. Nations, therefore, retain their economic dynamism only to the extent that they resist the temptation to travel too far down the socialist road.
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By Everette Hatcher III | Also posted in Francis Schaeffer | Comments (0)

Republican Presidential Candidates react to downgrade of USA credit rating

August 6, 2011 – 3:19 pm

Investors, business leaders, and politicians reacted Friday night to news that Standard & Poor’s had downgraded the United States’ creditworthiness for the first time in its history. But first out of the gate were some GOP presidential hopefuls eager to make campaign hay out of what they see as a failure of the Obama administration.

Here’s what the GOP candidates had to say:

Michele Bachmann

“We were warned by all of the credit agencies that a failure to deal with our debt would lead to a downgrade in our credit rating, but instead he submitted a budget that had a $1.5 trillion deficit and then requested a $2.4 trillion blank check. President Obama is destroying the foundations of the U.S. economy one beam at a time. I call on the President to seek the immediate resignation of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and to submit a plan with a list of cuts to balance the budget this year, turn our economy around and put Americans back to work.”

Mitt Romney

“America’s creditworthiness just became the latest casualty in President Obama’s failed record of leadership on the economy. Standard & Poor’s rating downgrade is a deeply troubling indicator of our country’s decline under President Obama. His failed policies have led to high unemployment, skyrocketing deficits, and now, the unprecedented loss of our nation’s prized AAA credit rating. Today, President Obama promised that ‘things will get better.’ But it has become increasingly clear that the only way things will get better is with new leadership in the White House.”

Jon Huntsman

“Out-of-control spending and a lack of leadership in Washington have resulted in President Obama presiding over the first downgrade of the United States credit rating in our history. For far too long we have let reckless government spending go unchecked and the cancerous debt afflicting our nation has spread. We need new leadership in Washington committed to fiscal responsibility, a balanced budget, and job-friendly policies to get America working again.”

By Everette Hatcher III | Comments (0)

Congress unwilling to cut budget deficit to avoid downgrade in credit rating

August 6, 2011 – 11:49 am

It is a sad day since the US got downgraded in our credit. Evidently Congress did not cut enough out of the bloated budget.

08/05/2011

NEW YORK — There is plenty to dislike about the recently enacted bipartisan deal to cut spending and reduce the national debt. For starters, it neither cuts spending, nor reduces the national debt. After weeks of federal hand-wringing, taxpayers should hope that our masters in Washington become serious about slashing spending. If not, this republic will implode, not eventually on “the children,” but soon atop today’s struggling adults.

“The budget deal doesn’t cut federal spending at all,” Cato Institute analyst Chris Edwards explains. “The ‘cuts’ in the deal are only cuts from the Congressional Budget Office’s ‘baseline,’ which is a Washington construct of ever-rising spending…The federal government will still run a deficit of $1 trillion next year. This deal will ‘cut’ the 2012 budget of $3.6 trillion by just $22 billion, or less than 1 percent.”

Edwards observes that Washington’s “cuts” rarely reduce anything. President Obama​, for instance, proposed boosting the Corporation for Public Broadcasting from $432 million this year to $451 million in FY 2012. However, handing CPB $441 million would constitute a $10 million “cut” In Washington versus a $9 million increase in the real-world.

Thus, as Edwards vividly illustrates at Cato’s downsizinggovernment.org website, these budget “cuts” actually raise federal discretionary spending non-stop for the next 10 years — from $1.04 trillion in Fiscal Year 2012 to $1.23 trillion in FY 2021.

As for red ink, Washington just extended the federal credit card’s limit from $14.3 trillion to $16.7 trillion. In 2021, the national debt is expected to reach $22 trillion — a figure 54 percent above $14.3 trillion. What debt reduction?

Washington refuses to learn what millions of overextended Americans recognize daily: One cannot escape debt by tunneling ever deeper into it.

Fitch, Moody’s, and Standard & Poor’s monitor all of this and are weighing whether or not to scrap America’s sterling AAA credit rating. A debt downgrade would hammer national prestige, hike interest rates, and heap short-term agony on an already achy nation. However, such a startling development may supply the face-down-in-the-gutter moment that Washington’s bipartisan spendaholics desperately need to hit rock bottom, grow up, and enter rehab. Everything else has failed during the Bush-Obama era of the ever-expanding state.

Meanwhile, the Select Committee that will spring from the debt deal may generate some good news amid these shadows. As it seeks at least $1.5 trillion in spending cuts by November 23, it should act boldly to improve America’s fiscal outlook:

•A staggering $703 billion in allocated but unspent revenues languish in federal accounts. Several Republicans have sponsored bills to shift this K2 of cash from dust collection to debt reduction. I have addressed these forgotten funds so often that my computer keyboard hurts. Will the Select Committee finally listen?

•The Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance includes the People’s Garden Grant Program, Appalachian Development Highway System, and 2,182 other federal subsidy programs. Many of these should be terminated rather than trimmed, so they never return to menace taxpayers.

•The Select Committee should padlock entire departments (Agriculture, Education, and Housing, for starters), privatize other agencies (FAA, National Weather Service, NPR), and devolve many more to the states via block grants (Medicaid, Food Stamps).

•The Select Committee should raise and index the Social Security eligibility age from 67 to 68 for those born in the 1960s, 69 for children of the ’70s, etc. Medicare’s age-65 threshold similarly should be modernized for these cohorts. Old-age benefits should reflect life expectancy today, not in the 1930s and ’60s, when they were concocted.

“We are less than three years away from where Greece had its debt crisis as to where they were from debt to GDP,” former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker told CNBC Tuesday. “We are not exempt from a debt crisis,” he added. “We have serious interest rate risk. We have serious currency risk. We have serious inflation risk over time. If it happens, it will be sudden, and it will be very painful.”

Mr. Murdock, a New York-based commentator to HUMAN EVENTS, is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University

By Everette Hatcher III | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)