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Calling attention to his new book Don’t Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards, P. J. O’ Rourke makes a splash. He writes a strongly worded article that Democrats hate everything and everyone except power.
…Democrats hate Democrats most of all. Witness the policies that Democrats have inflicted on their core constituencies, resulting in vile schools, lawless slums, economic stagnation, and social immobility. Democrats will do anything to make sure that Democratic voters stay helpless and hopeless enough to vote for Democrats.
…Power, not politics, is what the Democrats love. Politics is merely a way to power’s heart. …And politics comes with that reliable boost for pathetic egos, a weapon: legal monopoly on force. If persuasion fails to win the day, coercion is always an option.
…Democrats hate success. Success could supply the funds for a power elopement. Fire up the Learjet. Flight plan: Grand Cayman. …
…Democrats hate America being a world power because world power gives power to the nation instead of to Democrats.
And Democrats hate the military, of course. Soldiers set a bad example. Here are men and women who possess what, if they chose, could be complete control over power. Yet they treat power with honor and respect. Members of the armed forces fight not to seize power for themselves but to ensure that power can bestow its favors upon all Americans.
This is not an election on November 2. This is a restraining order. Power has been trapped, abused and exploited by Democrats. Go to the ballot box and put an end to this abusive relationship. And let’s not hear any nonsense about letting the Democrats off if they promise to get counseling.
In the National Journal Blogs – Against the Grain, Josh Kraushaar notes that contrary to Democrat hopes, the Tea Party accurately reflects America’s concern with expanded government power and runaway spending.
…Despite the Democratic portrayal of the tea party as extreme, Americans have soured over the increased scope of government under President Obama and the Democratic Congress — and are looking for a course correction. A newly-released ABC News/Yahoo poll shows that 55 percent of Americans think the tea party can “effectively bring about major changes in the way the government operates.” …
Republican candidates who have openly advocated for conservative principles are, by and large, outperforming GOP colleagues who have run to the center. Businessman Ron Johnson, who has directly taken on Sen. Russell Feingold’s economic liberalism, is over the 50 percent mark in most public polling. That’s all the more impressive, given that Feingold held strong personal approval ratings back home and represents a Democratic-leaning state in Wisconsin.
…All this should put to rest the notion that somehow conservative Republican nominees are making it tougher for the party to hold onto contested Senate and House seats. In fact, the opposite is true.
Moderate Republican candidates are dramatically underachieving in several of the key races where they should hold a comfortable advantage.
In Illinois, where GOP Rep. Mark Kirk’s centrist voting record made him the Republican Senate recruit du jour of this cycle, has struggled to pull ahead of Democrat Alexi Giannoulias, despite the Democrat’s significant baggage. …
The Economist Blogs – Lexington looks at race issues.
…If such voters have now changed their minds, the reason is not that Mr Obama is black—he was black in 2008. And for all its momentous symbolism, his election is not the most recent evidence that America has turned the page on race. In June, in South Carolina of all states, Tim Scott, a black Republican, defeated the son of the segregationist Strom Thurmond in a primary, and is on his way to a seat in the House. Compare that to 1983, when a disgraceful number of Democrats in Chicago voted for the Republican rather than send the black Harold Washington to city hall.
All of that has gone. The electorate may be divided by race, but no longer mainly because of race. Some of Mr Obama’s enemies have tried to harness pockets of bigotry by painting him in various ways as un-American. But outright racism in politics is now beyond the pale and will probably have little to do with the coming rejection of the Democrats by the white working class. A wrecked economy and the feeling that their president is out of touch are reason enough. It has, after all, happened before. In two short years from 1992 to 1994, when Bill Clinton was president, white working-class support for the Republicans soared like a rocket from 47% to 61%. Nobody blamed that on skin colour.
The Economist – Editorial looks at more government baloney about the stimulus: the infrastructure improvements and jobs that weren’t.
DEMOCRATS, Republicans chant, are irresponsible big spenders. But in the run-up to the mid-terms, the Democrats ought to have had one example of spending at its best: investment in infrastructure. When they passed the $787 billion stimulus bill in February 2009, they promised an historic investment in roads, bridges and rail. It would put Americans to work quickly and raise productivity in the long term, a Keynesian kick with benefits for years to come. But this ambitious plan has had middling results. Infrastructure is still in need of investment; unemployment in the construction sector was 17.2% in September. Barack Obama is touting a new $50 billion infrastructure proposal, but as the mid-terms loom, it is probably too late.
The stimulus bill’s spending on infrastructure may have been doomed to mediocrity from the start. First, and most important, a relatively small share of the bill was actually devoted to infrastructure. Mr Obama called the bill “the largest new investment in our nation’s infrastructure since Eisenhower built an interstate highway system in the 1950s.” But even on the broadest definition of the term, infrastructure got $150 billion, under a fifth of the total. Just $64 billion, or 8% of the total, went to roads, public transport, rail, bridges, aviation and wastewater systems. …
Jennifer Rubin comments on NPR’s smooth moves.
Vivian Schiller, NPR’s CEO, who will be remembered for her firing of Juan Williams and her slander of him thereafter, has apologized. Sort of. Not to him, mind you. She has sent a letter that reads somewhat like a Dilbert cartoon — evidencing all the ham-handedness and nastiness you would expect, coupled with a little dollop of obsequiousness. She has written a letter to her “program colleagues,” revealing that Juan Williams had been warned (i.e., issued a verbal discipline) in the past — another inappropriate disclosure…
…She concedes that others could disagree with the decision. (Like every newsperson in America and about 90 percent of the public.) She then vaguely apologizes for the way in which the firing was handled…
…I think she means she’s sorry she didn’t give them talking points, but she’s not ashamed she smeared Williams by suggesting that he talk to his psychiatrist (which he does not have). Not clear whether she also regrets the squirrelly manner of the firing — over the phone (classy, guys). She closes by asking for suggestions.
Here are three. First, fire Schiller, who has brought disgrace (well, more than before) on NPR. She fired a valuable commodity, slandered him, incurred the wrath of the journalistic community, and put her organization’s funding at risk. Forget the morality of it; she’s simply incompetent. …
Debra J. Saunders tells us more about Juan Williams firing and adds her thoughts.
“Political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis, where you don’t address reality,” Juan Williams observed rather prophetically on Bill O’Reilly’s show Monday night, before he made the comments that got him fired from his assignment as senior news analyst for National Public Radio.
…Too late. Williams already had handed ammo to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad called on NPR to investigate Williams Wednesday. In a statement Awad charged, “NPR should address the fact that one of its news analysts seems to believe that all airline passengers who are perceived to be Muslim can legitimately be viewed as security threats.”
CAIR is an identity-politics organization that trolls for opportunities to take offense. Whenever anyone acknowledges the nexus between terrorism and radical Islam – not Islam, but radical Islam – CAIR cries foul. Wednesday afternoon within hours of the CAIR complaint, NPR rewarded CAIR’s campaign of intimidation with a scalp.
…Should the public then assume that NPR’s editorial standards demand that journalists ignore Islamic extremists who declare jihad – even while noting that it’s crazy to lump all Muslims as extremists? Ironically, NPR’s editorial standards comport with what Williams said about political correctness feeding the air of unreality. …
Peter Wehner also weighs in on National Politically intolerant Radio.
On the matter of the firing of Juan Williams by NPR, I wanted to add a few thoughts to what has already been said and written. The first is that this incident will not soon fade from memory; rather, it will be seen, over time, as an important moment that further discredited liberal media institutions. It took well-known but fairly abstract truths — NPR is taxpayer supported and dominated by a liberal political culture — and gave it a name, a context, and a human face. The fact that NPR’s Vivian Schiller turned out to be monumentally inept and mean-spirited may have been known to a few others before NPR cashiered Williams; now that fact is known by millions of others. Consequently, NPR will suffer a serious blow to its reputation and pay a considerable price (hopefully) in terms of funding.
Second, what was unmasked during the last week was the extent to which modern liberalism (at least as embodied by NPR) is antithetical to classical liberalism, which celebrated open-mindedness, a diversity of thought and opinion, and the spirited exchange of ideas. The depth of intolerance at National Public Radio is so deep that even a liberal like Juan Williams was thrown to the curb. His sin is not only that he didn’t parrot the Party Line closely enough; it was also that he didn’t parrot the Party Line at the appropriate Party Outlets.
…Out of this most recent controversy, Juan Williams will come out just fine. NPR, on the other hand, has emerged disgraced. All in all, not a bad outcome.
Jennifer Rubin spots a telling exchange between Karl Rove and Bob Schieffer about the Left’s hypocrisy over 501(c)4 organizations.
Karl Rove gave a feisty interview on Face the Nation to Bob Schieffer — who couldn’t really explain why it was somehow dangerous for conservative 501(c)4 groups to give to Republicans but perfectly fine if Big Labor gives to the Democrats…
…Moreover, the real difference between all these groups and Big Labor is that the latter takes money from union members involuntarily. Schieffer seemed unmoved by the facts. Rove then zeroed in on the massive hypocrisy game being played by the White House and bolstered by much of the mainstream media:
“Bob, I don’t remember you having a program in 2000, when the NAACP spent ten million dollars from one single donor, running ads anonymously contributed, attacking George W. Bush. …everybody is gone spun up about it this year when Republicans have started to follow what the Democrats have been doing and create 501(c)4s, which can use less than half their money for express advocacy. But you have the environment America, feminist majority, humane society… Vote Vets, Human Rights Campaign, Planned Parenthood, League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council, Defenders of Wildlife and a bunch of others which are all liberal groups that have been using 501(c)4s with undisclosed money for years. … And it’s never been an issue until the President of the United States on the day when we have a bad economic jobs report, when we lose ninety-five (thousand) jobs in September, and the unemployment rate is 9.6 percent, the President of the United States goes out and calls conservatives at the Chamber of Commerce and American Crossroads GPS, and says these are threats to democracy because they don’t disclose their donors. I don’t remember him ever saying that all these liberal groups were threats to democracy when they spent money exactly the same way we are.”
Ouch.
And just as quickly as the hue and cry arose in opposition to conservative groups, it will go quiet again as Democrats form their own entities for the 2012 campaign. Then all that outside money will be a sign of the vibrancy of American politics. And so it is — for both sides.
Tony Blankley discusses brilliant ideas to start reigning in the government.
…But the greater part of federal intrusion is generated by the permanent regulatory bureaucracy that burrows away in almost all of our federal agencies. Sometimes they are authorized by Congress to create and enforce regulations (like the incandescent light law). But over the generations, the culture that exists among the regulatory bureaucrats drives them constantly to seek out new targets for regulation and new methods for entangling Americans in their webs.
…Although I don’t believe it has ever been tried, a new Congress could try to use its power of the purse to begin to attrit the regulators. That is to suggest, Congress should order permanent, immediate and massive staff reductions among the regulators. Defund and de-authorize, say, 50 percent of the regulatory staff positions.
It actually takes a long time and a lot of hard work to conceive, write and legally enact a new regulation. If there were only half as many bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for example, they simply wouldn’t have the time to pass as many oppressive regulations as they do.
That would both slow down new regulations and make it harder for the regulators to enforce regulations already on the book. …
The WSJ editors highlight a new study by the Institute for Justice on the overregulation of American businesses.
When most people think of occupations requiring fingerprints and police reports, corner bookshop owners don’t spring to mind. Try telling that to Los Angeles, where many used booksellers are required by law to get a police permit and take a thumbprint from every 40-something trying to offload his collection of French poetry.
That’s one scene from a study to be released this week by the Institute for Justice, which has collected dozens of examples of regulations choking economic growth by taxing and over-licensing small businesses. In a survey of eight major cities, the study found that entrepreneurs routinely face obstacles of bureaucracy and red tape that deter them from otherwise promising opportunities.
…In many cases, the regulations were promoted by existing business owners who want barriers to new competition. In Washington, D.C., an interior designers guild succeeded in lobbying the city to require that all new designers take a 13-hour test and get a special license merely to reorganize your living room. In Newark, New Jersey, would-be barber shop owners must prove they’ve spent three years working in someone else’s hair cuttery before they can start their own. Even then, the city’s laws bar them from serving customers on Sunday and restrict working hours on other days of the week.
…Politicians of all stripes like to celebrate “small business” while running for office, but the reality is that they often strangle entrepreneurs once they get in power. Read the Institute for Justice study and you’ll better understand why the business of America is no longer business. It’s bureaucracy.