Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Want to know how bad things are in DC? Jeff Jacoby says there’s no chance JFK could get nominated by the dems now.
As Democrats begin maneuvering for the 2016 presidential race, there isn’t one who would think of disparaging John F. Kennedy’s stature as a Democratic Party hero. Yet it’s a pretty safe bet that none would dream of running on Kennedy’s approach to government or embrace his political beliefs.
Today’s Democratic Party — the home of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore — wouldn’t give the time of day to a candidate like JFK.
The 35th president was an ardent tax-cutter who championed across-the-board, top-to-bottom reductions in personal and corporate tax rates, slashed tariffs to promote free trade, and even spoke out against the “confiscatory” property taxes being levied in too many cities.
He was anything but a big-spending, welfare-state liberal. “I do not believe that Washington should do for the people what they can do for themselves through local and private effort,” Kennedy bluntly avowed during the 1960 campaign. One of his first acts as president was to institute a pay cut for top White House staffers, and that was only the start of his budgetary austerity. “To the surprise of many of his appointees,” longtime aide Ted Sorensen would later write, he “personally scrutinized every agency request with a cold eye and encouraged his budget director to say ‘no.’ ”
On the other hand, he was a Cold War anticommunist who aggressively increased military spending. He faulted his Republican predecessor for tailoring the nation’s military strategy to fit the budget, rather than the other way around. “We must refuse to accept a cheap, second-best defense,” JFK said during his run for the White House. He made good on that pledge, pushing defense spending to 50 percent of federal expenditures and 9 percent of GDP, both far higher than today’s levels. Speaking in Texas just hours before his death, he proudly took credit for building the US military into “a defense system second to none.” …
Andrew Malcolm reports on our soldiers’ lack of training.
While the president of the United States pitched his crumbling healthcare program like a late-night infomercial barker, the Army’s chief of staff made a shocking admission about national defense.
Gen. Ray Odierno told a Washington conference Monday that the U.S. Army had not conducted any training in the last six months of the fiscal year ending Sept. 30.
And, he said, there currently are only two Army brigades rated combat-ready. That’s a total of between 7,000 to 10,000 troops and less than one-third what the combat veteran regards as necessary for proper national security.
“Right now,” Odierno said, “we have in the Army two brigades that are trained. That’s it. Two.”
Odierno also revealed that troops shipping out to Afghanistan now are prepared only to train and assist Afghan troops, not to conduct combat operations themselves. But, of course, there’s no guarantee the Americans won’t find themselves in combat while accompanying Afghan soldiers.
All this to obey Obama administration orders to drastically cut the Army and military spending and meet cuts under sequestration. Since the Obama Pentagon began the troop draw-down two years ago under the president’s orders, more than 33,000 active duty soldiers have been cut. …
Even though we want to look away, it is time for seeing what’s going on with the healthcare rollout. Megan McArdle starts us off.
Another week has passed, which apparently means that it’s time for another terrifying article from Sharon LaFraniere, Ian Austen and Robert Pear on the federal health-care exchanges.
Federal contractors have identified most of the main problems crippling President Obama’s online health insurance marketplace, but the administration has been slow to issue orders for fixing those flaws, and some contractors worry that the system may be weeks away from operating smoothly, people close to the project say.
Administration officials approached the contractors last week to see if they could perform the necessary repairs and reboot the system by Nov. 1. However, that goal struck many contractors as unrealistic, at least for major components of the system. Some specialists working on the project said the online system required such extensive repairs that it might not operate smoothly until after the Dec. 15 deadline for people to sign up for coverage starting in January, although that view is not universally shared.
Time to panic? No. But it’s time to prepare to panic. It sounds like the earliest anyone is projecting fixes is sometime in the middle of November. That’s the time when it absolutely has to work — and if it doesn’t, we should panic. Maybe not “Get in the shelter, Homer!” panic, but I’d definitely think about rebalancing the 401(k) and maybe voting in some politicians who will treat this with the gravity it deserves, rather than giving Rose Garden speeches saying that everything’s basically A-OK if you don’t look at the parts that don’t work! Because make no mistake: If this piece doesn’t work, then most of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act doesn’t work. …
In 2004 a NY Times columnist said the Katrina problems came from the fact that DC was run by people who hate government. David Bernstein takes that to mean the healthcare failures are the result of an administration filled with secret libertarians. Of course, it might also be proof of Pickerhead’s Iron Rule — Government always f–ks up!
Why is the Obamacare Rollout Failing?
Why, it’s obviously because President Barack Obama and his top aides hate government, and therefore can’t be trusted to run a major government program. When the government is run by political forces committed to the belief that government is always the problem, never the solution, that belief tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Key priorities are neglected; key functions are privatized; and key people, the competent public servants who make government work, either leave or are driven out. What we really need is a government that works, because it’s run by people who understand that sometimes government is the solution, after all.
Doesn’t make any sense to you? It made just as little sense when Paul Krugman made the argument in 2008, imaginatively (to say the least) positing that George W. Bush and John McCain were wild-eyed libertarians, and that the former’s purported libertarianism was the cause of FEMA’s incompetence in dealing with Katrina.
I ridiculed the premise at the time (and again a year later), noting that “After eight years of “no child left behind,” Medicare expansion, aid to Africa for AIDS, drug warring, abstinence education, nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so forth and so on, and more of the same promised by McCain, the better question is, is there any problem that Bush and McCain DON’T think government should solve?”
As I recall, others rejoined that no, Krugman is right, incompetence by the Bush Admnistration is OBVIOUSLY due to Republicans all totally hating government. It must come as a surprise to Krugman and his defenders that government can prove itself to be wildly, disastrously incompetent even when run by people whom even Krugman would have to admit aren’t going to be confused with libertarians any time soon (assuming, of course, that Krugman actually ever believed the nonsense he wrote).
Andrew Malcolm also reminds us our country could have avoided the pain if only Mike Ditka had wanted to run for the senate in 2004. Of course, if he had, the country would have watched Ditka get destroyed.
… It didn’t need to be this way.
We’re reminded this week that, but for the business decision of one famous man, Obama’s once rising star could have been blown out of the sky and the country saved years of anguish by an election defeat in 2004. That’s when the ambitious ex-state legislator Obama sought and got the Democrat nomination for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois.
With 70% of that November’s vote, Obama crushed the Republican Party’s last-minute sacrificial lamb, Alan Keyes, who had portrayed himself as a GOP primary presidential contender back in 2000 but was really just trying to jack his speaking fees with some free TV fame.
That’s what people often remember.
What they often forget is Republicans came close that year to enlisting as their U.S. Senate candidate from Illinois the NFL Hall of Famer and Super Bowl Champion Player and Coach Mike Ditka. After an illustrious career as a belligerent tight end for Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas, Ditka coached as a Cowboys assistant before becoming head coach of the Bears and, later, the New Orleans Saints. …
BBC News reports on something floating on a river in the Czech Republic we need on the Potomac.
As parliamentary polls get under way in the Czech Republic this week, artist David Cerny has floated a huge purple statue of an extended middle finger down the River Vltava in Prague.
The outsized purple hand has been mounted on a barge floating on the river.
It is pointed at PragueCastle, the seat of President Milos Zeman.
Mr Cerny has shocked and mocked politicians and public figures in the past, says the BBC’s Rob Cameron.
This latest piece is clearly his message to the leftist President Zeman and the political party recently set up by his supporters, our correspondent says. …