Paul Begala: The real leader of the GOP is a “corpulent drug addict”

Sounds like the wounds from the Clinton years haven’t healed yet. Tame stuff by the normal standards of left-wing commentary on Limbaugh, but still jarring given how seamlessly he transitions from his kind opening words for Michael Steele. Normal people have to build up to a shot this nasty; for Begala, I guess, it’s just background noise in his mind. But then, that’s why CNN pays him.

I missed this Politico piece the other day about Begala’s daily BS session with Rahm Emanuel, Carville, and Stephanopoulos, but some righty site I frequent (can’t remember which) picked it up and made a good point. Imagine, if you will, a Republican version, with on-air commentators at, say, Fox News having regular confidential phone briefings with Karl Rove or Josh Bolten or some other White House insider close to the president. Think Fox would have some ’splaining to do about that?

A 10% cut at the Pentagon?

While the Obama administration tries pushing through its trillion-dollar porkfest of Mall resodding and Medicare expansion, the Pentagon has gotten a much different mission from the White House.  President Obama has demanded a 10% reduction in the defense budget for FY2010, even while we fight a war in Afghanistan and conduct counterterrorist operations around the world:

The Obama administration has asked the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to cut the Pentagon’s budget request for the fiscal year 2010 by more than 10 percent — about $55 billion — a senior U.S. defense official tells FOX News.

Last year’s defense budget was $512 billion. Service chiefs and planners will be spending the weekend “burning the midnight oil” looking at ways to cut the budget — looking especially at weapons programs, the defense official said.

Ah … those would be weapons systems that actually employ people, create jobs, and help defend the nation.  That may not be as sexy, figuratively and literally, as buying billions of condoms, but it means that a significant number of good paying (and likely union) jobs will disappear.

I’m not going to argue that the defense budget doesn’t have fat.  I’ve seen defense contracting from the inside, and it stinks.  However, unlike the Obama stimulus bill that will cost more than twice as much as the 2010 defense budget, it’s not 90% fat.  Director Blue reminds us of a few numbers:

• $83 billion in welfare payments
• $81 billion for Medicaid
• $66 billion on “education”, more than the entire Department of Education required just ten years ago
• $36 billion for expanded unemployment benefits
• $20 billion for food stamps
• $8 billion on “renewable energy” projects, which have a low or negative return
• $7 billion for “modernizing federal buildings and facilities”
• $6 billion on urban transit systems, dominated by unions and which, almost universally, lose money
• $2.4 billion for “carbon-capture demonstration projects”
• $2 billion for child-care subsidies
• $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that’s run in the red for 40 years
• $650 million for “digital TV conversion coupons” (on top of billions already spent)
• $600 million on new cars for government (added to the $3 billion already spent each year)
• $400 million for “global-warming research”
• $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts

Obama’s busy expanding all of the rest of the government except for its primary, Constitutional mission: defending the nation.

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In an appearance with Franken, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid harrumphed: "The race in Minnesota is over with. . . . There's no way the election results are going to change." Not if he can help it.

Despite Sen. Reid's objections, Minnesota law allows Coleman to plead his case before a panel of three state judges. They will decide whether all legally cast ballots indeed have been counted or in some cases double-counted in giving Franken a 225-vote lead out of 2.8 million votes cast.

In 25 Minnesota precincts there were more ballots counted than voters who voted. Election officials had made copies of damaged ballots but then didn't mark them as copies or sequester them from the originals. There's also the issue of 133 missing ballots from a heavily Democratic Minneapolis precinct that were nevertheless included in the recount.

But there are some 11,000 ballots still not included. Minnesota law says a ballot can be rejected if the name and address on the ballot do not match a name and address on the voter rolls, the signature on the envelope doesn't match the voter's signature on file, the voter was not registered when he or she voted, or the voter also voted on Election Day.

Coleman argues that a fair number of such ballots were rejected because of perceived signature mismatches. Matching signatures is not an exact science to the untrained eye of a volunteer election judge. The Democrats say no further review is required — they're in the lead, so game over.

Popularity of stimulus package dropping

Rasmussen has only started polling on this, so that’s the extent of their trending.  The nine-point drop in the gap over a one-week period shows that the electorate has gotten more skeptical about massive government spending.  Republicans have done a good job of getting their message out, and they have succeeded especially among independents.  A week ago, independents had a virtual dead heat on the bill, 37%-36% in favor.  Now independents oppose it 50%-27%.  Democrats really are on their own with this bill.

Republicans also appear to have made gains by offering their tax-cut alternatives.  That approach gets a plurality for support, 43%-39%, and a stronger plurality among independents, 48%-33%.

Democrats rattled some sabers yesterday by threatening to withdraw the tax cuts after getting no Republican votes.  According to Rasmussen, a plan with only government spending gets the worst response of all.  Overall, voters oppose that idea 70%-15%, and it flops in every demographic Rasmussen tracks.  Even Democratic voter oppose it by a solid majority, 57%-23%, as do self-described liberals, 54%-29%.

The Democrats are on thin ice with this package.  It’s not exactly unpopular, but it’s starting to get there.  They need Republicans badly in the Senate, but will they start negotiating and begin to trim off the excessive spending to get them on board?  The House Democrats wouldn’t do it, and it will be interesting to see whether Harry Reid will want to bargain or to give a demonstration of power.  The Gang of 14 effort being spearheaded by Ben Nelson might help, but Republicans need to hold firm and insist that all non-immediate and non-stimulus spending get stripped — which would probably make this a $120 billion bill rather than the $900 billion version sitting in the Senate.

Does President Barack Obama believe that the greatest threat to progress resides in Rush Limbaugh? Earlier this week while trying to sell his [1] Trillion Dollar Debt Plan to Republican leaders, Obama said, “[2] You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done.” Thankfully House Republicans listened to the hundreds of constituents calling their offices asking them to vote against the bill and not the guy who thinks he can buy their votes with a couple of [3] cocktail and [4] Super Bowl parties. Now we find out that Obama’s far left allies are upping the ante. The leftist umbrella organization American Untied for Change is pouring money into radio ads in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Nevada. The ads ask listeners, “[5] Will you side with Obama or Rush Limbaugh?”

Clearly the left believe they can get Republicans to sacrifice their principles by demonizing and isolating Rush Limbaugh. So much for that new era of bipartisanship. But what if all of Obama’s old-school politics of division fails to win him any Republican votes? What is the next arrow in his political quiver?

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell previewed what may be the Left’s next line of attack at a [6] speech to the Media Institute in Washington this Wednesday. McDowell warned that when the left comes to silence Rush and other Obama critics, they will not be dumb enough to try and do it under the label Fairness Doctrine: “That’s just Marketing 101: if your brand is controversial, make a new brand.” Multichannel News reports that McDowell [7] even suggested that a stealth version of the doctrine may already be teed up at the FCC in the form of “Localism” rules which empower community advisory boards to help dictate local programming.

No one should be surprised by this development. Last year the brain trust for the Obama Administration, the Center for American Progress released a report entitled: [8] The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio. Here is what they said about already existing legal authority to implement Fairness Doctrine/Localism-type rules:

First, from a regulatory perspective, the Fairness Doctrine was never formally repealed. … the original Communications Act still requires commercial broadcasters “to operate in the public interest and to afford reasonable opportunity for the discussion of conflicting views of issues of public importance.” … Thus, the public obligations inherent in the Fairness Doctrine are still in existence and operative, at least on paper.

So what new policy recommendations does CAP advise?

The Fairness Doctrine was most effective as part of a regulatory structure that limited license terms to three years, subjected broadcasters to license challenges through comparative hearings, required notice to the local community that licenses were going to expire, and empowered the local community through a process of interviewing a variety of local leaders.
…
We recommend the following steps the FCC should take to ensure local needs are being met:

• Provide a license to radio broadcasters for a term no longer than three years.
• Require radio broadcast licensees to regularly show that they are operating on behalf of the public interest and provide public documentation and viewing of how they are meeting these obligations.

So under the old Fairness Doctrine, free speech on the radio was stifled by an FCC rule that required broadcasters to devote reasonable time to fairly presenting allsides of any controversial issue discussed on the air, with the government deciding the meaning of all the italicized words. Under the CAP Localism rule broadcasters must renew their licenses every three years instead of every eight and when they do so the must “show that they are operating on behalf of the public interest” with public interest being defined as whatever ACORN like community organizers the left can rustle up to help define “community needs.”

Whenever controversial issues come up that President Obama wants to avoid talking about, he calls them “distractions.” And the Fairness Doctrine/Localism Rule issue may be just that. Commissioner McDowell also said, through aides, Obama had signaled to him that he would not re-impose the Fairness Doctrine. If Obama wants to prove his desire to protect the First Amendment is deeper than his desire to silence Rush Limbaugh, then he should go on record and disavow both the Fairness Doctrine and its equally perniciousness cousin, Localism.

Article printed from The Foundry: http://blog.heritage.org

URL to article: http://blog.heritage.org/2009/01/30/morning-bell-the-stealth-plan-to-silence-rush/

McCain: I don’t see any GOP votes for the stimulus in the Senate

I’m sure this is a bluff — the Democrats aren’t going to humiliate Obama with a close vote on his signature legislation — but if they strip enough crap out of the sandwich, the decision to vote against it will be significantly harder for the GOP than it is now. On the other hand, who cares? The bill’s bound to pass anyway, so anything that can be done to de-pork it is all to the good.

Note, by the way, how careful Republicans are being to blame the bill’s failure on the House, on Pelosi, on Rahm Emanuel (“Rahm hates us and lets us know it, and we hate him back”) — anyone but Obama. That’s a testament to The One’s approval ratings, but also evidence of how they’re maneuvering already to run on this in the midterms. Anyway, two clips here, with the stimulus bit in the first; I included the second just because it’s fun hearing Maverick sound constipated in having to defend Rush Limbaugh.

Video: Clyburn scoffs at Iraq withdrawal timetables

Jim Geraghty likes to remind us that all of Barack Obama’s statements come with expiration dates, including his expiration dates. Rep. Jim Clyburn, one of Obama’s key allies in Congress, waltzes away from Obama’s commitment to a 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq:

This doesn’t displease me, of course, except for the rank hypocrisy of Democrats like Clyburn during the campaign. He voted in favor of withdrawal timetables during the Bush administration. Clyburn also made headlines by lamenting the possibility of progress in Iraq, as it would impede his party’s attempts to impose timetables for withdrawal. Now, suddenly, Clyburn (and Obama) care about the recommendations of the generals on the ground and have no use for artificial timetables.

Talk about sunshine patriots! When Bush was in the White House, Clyburn did everything he could to undermine the war effort. Now that his ally has the job, Clyburn suddenly wants to play Wise Old Man. Feh.

By now, many people know that the so-called Employee Free Choice Act — also known as "card check" — would strip workers of the protection of a secret-ballot vote in union organizing elections.

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What most people don't realize is that the card check bill would also give the federal government the power to set wages, benefits and work rules for employers in a wide variety of industries throughout the economy.

Under this bill, once a union is formed, employers would be under a strict deadline to reach an agreement on all of the union's demands. If no agreement is reached after just 120 days, the matter would go to a federal arbitration panel, which would then write and hand down the union contract. That contract would bind both parties for two years with the same force as if it had been agreed to through full and fair negotiations.

For the first time, a federal authority would set private-sector wages, specific work rules and other workplace restrictions, including forcing employees into underfunded and unsustainable pension plans.

The practical result of this radical change would be to incentivize unions to take extreme positions in collective bargaining and then stonewall, expecting the government arbitration panel to at least "split the difference" on their list of demands. Once the government has stepped in, the employer would lose all control of the workplace.

This would also create an opportunity for unions to force provisions into contracts that they could never get at the bargaining table, such as productivity-killing work rules, union approval of restructuring and restrictions on the use of new technologies at the workplace.

It's not labor law reform to permit government arbitrators who don't know the business or the employees or the market to write labor contracts — it's a prescription for disaster.

• House Republicans defeated a bill Wednesday that [21] would have delayed the transition to digital TV by four months.
• The left is considering adding [22] “Buy American” anti-trade provisions to the trillion-dollar debt plan.
• Thanks to [23] strong growth in public sector unions, union membership in the United States rose last year by the largest amount in a quarter-century.
• Japan said Wednesday that it would deploy its Maritime Self-Defense Force to protect Japanese commercial ships [24] off the coast of Somalia.
• According to the [25] New York Times, Obama faces a difficult choice: Is he willing to abandon a campaign promise or risk a rupture with the military? Or can he finesse the difference?

Article printed from The Foundry: http://blog.heritage.org

URL to article: http://blog.heritage.org/2009/01/29/morning-bell-why-obama-failed/

New California pump rules squeeze small station owners out

California says they’re overreacting.  Why, all they need to do is increase the price of gasoline:

“We do calculate the cost of compliance with the regulation as related to emissions,” Stanich said. “These costs could be recovered by raising gasoline prices by an average 0.68 cents per gallon.”

Well … that’s for the large chains.  For the others?

Lower-volume sellers would have to raise prices more to offset costs, he added.

Got that?  The big retailers can afford the required pumps because they only have to raise the cost of gasoline less than a cent a gallon.  However, smaller retailers will have to increase their prices more, making them less competitive and forcing them to lose business.  And what will that gain California?

April’s regulations promise to cut what are known as reactive organic gas emissions by 7 tons per day statewide, but opponents point to the fact that California produces 2,322 tons of such gases per day.

In other words, California will put dozens and perhaps hundreds of smaller retailers in order to reduce 0.0030146425495262704565030146425495 of the daily emissions in California.  Jobs will be lost, tax revenues reduced, and consumer choice restricted, and California thinks that’s worth a 0.3% reduction in organic gas vapor.  (via Instapundit and Autobloggreen)

Last Friday [1] we warned you about some family planning provisions tucked away in [2] the House stimulus bill.  Some conservative lawmakers then took up the issue on the Sunday shows, and the provisions quickly [3] became a symbol of how completely unrelated to “economic stimulus” the House bill really is.  Being the savvy political operator he is, President Barack Obama [4] has now instructed House Democrats to remove that one provision.  But, like much of Obama’s presidency so far, this was a completely symbolic move.  The family planning provisions are just one small loophole inside of a massive new permanent expansion of socialized medicine. Don’t believe us? Here is how the [5] New York Times reports (not editorializes, hard news reports) on the bill:

The stimulus bill working its way through Congress is not just a package of spending increases and tax cuts intended to jolt the nation out of recession. For Democrats, it is also a tool for rewriting the social contract with the poor, the uninsured and the unemployed, in ways they have long yearned to do.
…
As Congress rushes to inject cash into a listless economy, it is setting aside many of the restraints that have checked new domestic spending for more than a decade.
…
The economic stimulus bill prevents states from enforcing a means test. … Republicans said this proposal would take a big step toward federalizing Medicaid. For their part, Democrats said the changes took a major step toward their goal of coverage for all Americans.

This is why long time advocates for socialized medicine, like Ways and Means health subcommittee chair Pete Stark (D-CA), have been [6] telling reporters not to expect any other health care legislation this year. This [7] “stimulus” bill is the left’s major down payment for [8] socialized medicine. By making everyone eligible, the bill makes government health care the default option for the unemployed. Coupled with their SCHIP legislation that makes three-fourths of all American children eligible for Medicaid, [9] this stimulus bill is designed to maximize the pushing of Americans off their current private coverage and into government run health care.

The left’s power grab does not end with health care. As we [10] noted last week, and the [11] New York Times reports today, the bill will “profoundly change the federal government’s role in education, which has traditionally been the responsibility of state and local government.” The NYT continues: “The proposed emergency expenditures on nearly every realm of education … would amount to the largest increase in federal aid since Washington began to spend significantly on education after World War II.”

And we haven’t even got to the Christmas tree like wish list of other long sought after leftist spending priorities, which include: [12] $1 billion for Amtrak, $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for the National Endowment of the Arts; $400 million for global warming research; $2.4 billion for clean coal; $650 million for even more digital TV conversion coupons; $600 million for new government cars; $7 billion for modernizing federal buildings; $150 million for the Smithsonian; and $54 billion for Economic Development Office and Small Business Administration programs that the OMB or GAO have already analyzed to be “ineffective.”

All of this deficit spending has a cost. And the Congressional Budget Office confirmed yesterday that the cost of servicing the mountains of new debt of all this government expansion pushes the total price tag of just the existing House spending plans (before a single cent of Senate waste is added) to over $1 trillion dollars. In a letter to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) CBO director Doug Elmendorf writes: “[13] CBO estimates that the government’s interest costs would increase by $0.7 billion in fiscal year 2009 and by a total of $347 billion over the 2009- 2019 period.” In other words, the Pelosi-Obama-Reid Debt Plan already weighs in at $1.172 trillion.

President Obama reportedly told Republicans yesterday, “I would love to not have to spend this money.” Every American is free to take Obama’s words at face value.  Or you could believe the President’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Commenting on the left’s governing plans this November, he said: “[14] Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.” Exactly.

Article printed from The Foundry: http://blog.heritage.org

URL to article: http://blog.heritage.org/2009/01/28/morning-bell-the-pelosi-obama-reid-trillion-dollar-debt-plan/

Minnesota to expand nanny state to smoking drivers

Nor do they pretend any different:

“I’m a mom. I’m a grandma. There’s no safe level of secondhand smoke for kids, especially in the closed environment of a car,” Pappas said.

Studies have shown that even with a window rolled down, it takes mere seconds of a lit cigarette for the air quality inside a vehicle to vastly exceed the levels deemed too hazardous to breathe by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Pappas may be a mom and a grandma, but she’s not my mom, and neither is the state of Minnesota.  I don’t smoke, and even when I did I rarely smoked in my car because I didn’t like the smell buildup cars get from smoking.  Even so, I grew up with plenty of second-hand smoke from family members — and so did generations of Americans.  Child mortality rates remained very low, and longevity increased significantly during this period.    Before the state imposes its choices over those of free citizens, it had better show a substantial state interest other than an overgrown nosebone.

Oh, wait … Pappas and her allies already have one:

The U.S. Surgeon General has determined there is no safe level of exposure to secondhand smoke. In children, it has been linked to everything from ear infections to sudden infant death syndrome. …

“Ear infections and asthma — we see far too many cases of those,” Sloan said.

It’s the health-cost rationale.  Since the state pays medical bills, it has the right to dictate your choices, which is the danger than universal health care systems present to individual liberty.  And Pappas and the legislature won’t stop at the cars, either.  They’re also drafting legislation to bar foster parents from smoking around their wards regardless of where it occurs.  That would effectively bounce all of the smokers out of the program, even though Minnesota doesn’t have enough qualified foster homes for the demand we already have.  Now the legislature wants to create an artificial shortage on top of that, all because they don’t like smoking.

I don’t like smoking, either.  I think it’s a stupid habit, and I thought it was stupid enough to finally quit when I got married.  If no one can prove that second-hand smoke stunted the longevity of American life over the last several decades — and they can’t — I’m not about to argue that it’s good for anyone, children included.  But government doesn’t exist to determine our personal choices or protect us from our own stupidity, especially by making those choices criminal.

Update: I completely forgot to link back to my radio partner Mitch Berg on this post; be sure to read his take.  As for the hysteric in the comments who called smoking around children “child abuse”, a hell of a lot of us must be past victims of abuse, then.  What else is abuse?  Forcing children to grow up in Los Angeles?  R-rated movies?  Time outs?  Puh-leeeze.

House vote on stimulus imminent; Update: 244-188, all Republicans vote no