Obama the isolationist

The always-worth-reading James Kirchick asks a good question about Obama's isolationism: Why stop at Iraq?

Why stop at Iraq? There is no limit to Obama’s admonition. He happened to choose Iraq reconstruction aid as the target of his ire because anything associated with that poor country has become unpopular with the American electorate. Yet the underlying logic of Obama’s statement is that we shouldn’t spend money on projects overseas if that money could likewise be spent here at home. Why not go after the billions of dollars we spend to combat the spread of AIDS in Africa? Why not attack the programs we spend on democracy promotion in some of the world’s darkest tyrannies? Come to think of it, why is the United States offering so much aid to cyclone-ravaged Burma, when those dollars could be spent on flood relief in the Midwest?

Mukasey to Congress: Declare war on Al Qaeda

Congress should explicitly declare a state of armed conflict with al Qaeda to make clear the United States can detain suspected members as long as the war on terrorism lasts, U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said on Monday.

Obama: If I had it to do over again, I’d still oppose the surge; Update: “Clearly there’s been an enormous improvement”

New IRS Data: the Rich paid a larger share of taxes than they had for 40 years. The Bush tax cuts took MORE of their money, not less.

The nearby chart shows that the top 1% of taxpayers, those who earn above $388,806, paid 40% of all income taxes in 2006, the highest share in at least 40 years. The top 10% in income, those earning more than $108,904, paid 71%. Barack Obama says he's going to cut taxes for those at the bottom, but that's also going to be a challenge because Americans with an income below the median paid a record low 2.9% of all income taxes, while the top 50% paid 97.1%. Perhaps he thinks half the country should pay all the taxes to support the other half.

Aha, we are told: The rich paid more taxes because they made a greater share of the money. That is true. The top 1% earned 22% of all reported income. But they also paid a share of taxes not far from double their share of income. In other words, the tax code is already steeply progressive.

We also know from income mobility data that a very large percentage in the top 1% are "new rich," not inheritors of fortunes. There is rapid turnover in the ranks of the highest income earners, so much so that people who started in the top 1% of income in the 1980s and 1990s suffered the largest declines in earnings of any income group over the subsequent decade, according to Treasury Department studies of actual tax returns. It's hard to stay king of the hill in America for long.

"Obama's statements about terrorism are irresponsible. We 'took our eye off the ball'? We didn't pull troops out of Afghanistan to go into Iraq! This guy is a jerk, an arrogant jerk. A jerk messiah."

Howard Kurtz: Media Covering Obama As If He Were Already President

The NY Times published an op-ed by Barack Obama. So John McCain submitted one, and the paper rejected it, but suggested they'd publish it if McCain rewrote the piece to sound more like Obama. This is how it is, folks.

The Drudge Report: NYT Rejects McCain's Editorial; Should "Mirror" Obama

I’d like to offer a few follow-up points on Matt’s excellent post about yesterday’s Washington Post article on what leftist activists want in Obama appointees to the . . . Go

Al Gore’s call to produce all of America’s electricity from “carbon-free sources” by 2018 flouts technological, economic, and political reality.

Obama is hopelessly out of touch with the realities in Iraq. “Mission Accomplished”

At the risk of making Michelle Obama once again un-proud of her country, we consider that — and other similarly aggrieved comments — fair game for analysis and disagreement in a country that welcomes robust and free political debate.“Meet the Grievances”

We might say we could no sooner renounce our practice of criticizing Michelle’s outrageous statements than we could renounce all conservative commentary and the First Amendment. But we’ll spare His Hopefulness the theatrical self-justification. (If only he’d return the favor.) Michelle is a public figure, who has un-burdened herself of astonishing sentiments, the most notorious of which is that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I’m really proud of my country.” At the risk of making her once again un-proud of her country, we consider that — and other similarly aggrieved comments — fair game for analysis and disagreement in a country that welcomes robust and free political debate.

Maliki delivers a body-blow to McCain. “Obama, Maliki, and McCain”

“The difference between John McCain and Barack Obama is that Barack Obama advocates an unconditional withdrawal that ignores the facts on the ground and the advice of our top military commanders,” McCain national-security aide Randy Scheunemann said Saturday. “John McCain believes withdrawal must be based on conditions on the ground. Prime Minister Maliki has repeatedly affirmed the same view, and did so again today. Timing is not as important as whether we leave with victory and honor, which is of no apparent concern to Barack Obama. The fundamental truth remains that Senator McCain was right about the surge and Senator Obama was wrong. We would not be in the position to discuss a responsible withdrawal today if Senator Obama’s views had prevailed.”

Obama, Democrats, and the Surge

This is the week that the Democratic party ran up the white flag when it comes to the surge in Iraq. Leading the surrender was none other than Barack Obama, the Democratic party's presumptive nominee for president and among the most vocal critics of the counterinsurgency plan that has transformed the Iraq war from a potentially catastrophic loss to what may turn out to be a historically significant victory.

On Monday, Obama wrote a New York Times op-ed in which he acknowledged the success of the surge. "In the 18 months since President Bush announced the surge," Obama wrote, "our troops have performed heroically in bringing down the level of violence. New tactics have protected the Iraqi population, and the Sunni tribes have rejected Al Qaeda--greatly weakening its effectiveness." A day later, Obama gave a speech in which he declared for the first time that "true success" and "victory in Iraq" were possible. In addition, the Obama campaign scrubbed its presidential website to remove criticism of the surge.

Obama, in typical fashion, is trying to use the success of the surge he opposed to justify his long-held commitment to withdraw all combat troops from Iraq as quickly as possible. But turning Iraq into a winning political issue won't be nearly as easy as Obama once thought. He has stepped into a trap of his own making.

The trap was set when Obama repeatedly insisted that his superior "judgment" on Iraq is more important than experience in national security affairs. Judgment, according to Obama, is what qualifies him to be commander in chief. So what can we discern about Obama's judgment on the surge, easily the most important national security decision since the Iraq war began in March 2003?

To answer that question, we need to revisit what Obama said about the surge around the time it was announced. In October 2006--three months before the president's new strategy was unveiled--Obama said, "It is clear at this point that we cannot, through putting in more troops or maintaining the presence that we have, expect that somehow the situation is going to improve, and we have to do something significant to break the pattern that we've been in right now."

. . . Democrats, rather than welcoming the progress, grew agitated. They embraced with religious zeal the belief that the Iraq war was lost; they therefore viewed the success of the surge as a terribly inconvenient development, one they sought to deny to the point that they looked silly and out of touch. Worse, Democrats acted as if they had a vested interest in an American defeat.

Rarely has a political party been so uniformly wrong, in such an obvious way, on such an important matter. And when Americans cast their vote on November 4, they should carefully consider how Barack Obama and the entire Democratic party fought ferociously and relentlessly to undermine a policy that has worked extraordinarily well and may yet prove to be among the most successful military plans in modern times.

We Can't Handle the Truth

This is all true. You could look it up: A recession is two consecutive quarters of economic contraction, and the economy didn't contract last quarter. But Gramm was pilloried for his factual statement. Before his interview with the Times, it was assumed (by professional assumers) that Gramm would be offered a high-ranking economic-policymaking job in a McCain administration, maybe even secretary of the Treasury; now assumers are assuming he'll never get such a cool job--especially after he made matters worse by insisting a day later that the fact he had asserted was, in fact, a fact: "Every word I said was true."

To which the general reaction was: So what? Gramm's candidate John McCain said that he "didn't agree" with the fact that Gramm had cited. Clambering down from the high ground of the factual and the objective, McCain slipped himself into the slough of the subjective and the romantic, where politicians and voters now prefer to luxuriate. "I believe that the person here in [the absolutely crucial swing state of] Michigan who just lost his job isn't suffering from a mental recession," McCain said empathically. . . .

In other words: What Gramm said was true, but it didn't matter. He wins on the merits--he said the economy wasn't in a recession, and it wasn't--but he deserves a reprimand anyway. He had stumbled into a zone of politics where you're not supposed to say something true, and where you get punished if you do.

Have you noticed how big this zone is getting? The political landscape is littered with people who have been castigated, fired, or forced to apologize for the gross infraction of saying something true.

True, true, all offensively true: but not as unmentionable as the truths that Geraldine Ferraro let slip. "In 1984," Ferraro said a few months ago, "if my name was Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would not have been chosen as a vice presidential candidate." True! In the same way, Ferraro said, referring to Obama's amazing rise in presidential politics, "If Obama were a white man, he would not be in this position." Double true! Obama called her statement "absurd" and an example of "slice and dice politics"--a charge that would have stung if anyone had known what "slice and dice politics" meant.

Ferraro flailed away in protest at the resulting controversy, growing so desperate that she even agreed to appear with Bill O'Reilly. But she was doomed, and she probably knew it. One voice was raised in defense of her truth telling, though: that of Bob Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television. He's black too.

"Geraldine Ferraro said it right," said Johnson: Obama wouldn't be leading the presidential race if he were a white politician from Illinois with four years' experience in the U.S. Senate.

Then Johnson lamented the quality of talk in the presidential campaign. "It's almost impossible for anybody to say anything."

Surprise: 49% think media will try to help Obama win

The belief that reporters are trying to help Barack Obama win the fall campaign has grown by five percentage points over the past month. The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey found that 49% of voters believe most reporters will try to help Obama with their coverage, up from 44% a month ago.

A separate survey released this morning also found that 50% of voters believe most reporters want to make the economy seem worse than it is. A plurality believes that the media has also tried to make the war in Iraq appear worse that it really is.

A survey conducted earlier this year found that 30% of voters believe having a friendly reporter is more valuable than raising a lot of campaign contributions. Twenty-nine percent (29%) believe contributions are more important and 40% are not sure.

Employer enforcement increases dramatically

In his second term, George Bush has taken employer enforcement on illegal immigration a lot more seriously than during his initial term.  After four years of inconsequential numbers of arrests and prosecutions, ICE reported a 50% increase in 2005, followed by a 500% increase in 2006 over 2004 numbers.  In 2008 so far, the number has almost exceeded all of 2006.  Despite this success, most of these arrests involve only the illegal aliens and not the employers, although that could change

One such tool is e-Verify.  Three states make it mandatory for hiring workers.  A failure of an employer to use e-Verify in those states would almost immediately implicate the executives of a firm rather than just low-level supervisors, and once the firm uses e-Verify, they cannot pretend not to notice the illegal status of its applicants.  The “no-match” letters provide similar grounds by informing employers when new hires may be using fraudulent Social Security numbers, but these have been stalled by federal lawsuits.

We need to get serious about enforcement.  Bush has given ICE a good start, but until executives start believing that they risk jail time for themselves, employers will not end their practices of illegal hiring.

Is Obama a socialist?

I have gone through this before.  Socialism attempts to prmote Marx's theories in the bounds of democracy, which is to ultimately impossible.  It is obsessed with inequalities, and seeks to "remedy" them by punishing society's achievers through taxation and loss of liberty.  Socialists win elections by encouraging resentment of the wealthy, blaming America, exploiting Western guilt, and castigating opponents as mean-spirited bigots too stupid to understand their compassionate brilliance.  [This is from my favorite Newsletter] 

Remember this when you hear a prominent member of the Democratic party say, "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good," Hillary Clinton in a San Francisco speech.   Or "The truth is, in order to get things like Universal Health Care and a revamped education system, then someone is going to have to give up a piece of their pie so that someone else can have more,"   Michelle Obama.