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Remember a few days ago we discovered John Kerry worrying about tax cuts providing too much freedom. John Fund gives his thoughts on the matter. John also highlights a particularly egregious eminent domain case in Gulfport, TX.
In the years since the in famous 2003 Kelo case in which the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the right of government to seize property through eminent domain and then transfer it to private interests, abuses have proliferated. But not all merely involve the loss of property; some also threaten the basic right of free speech.
In recent years, lawsuits have been filed in Tennessee, Missouri, Texas and other states seeking to silence critics of private entities that stand to gain from eminent domain actions. The most brazen suit was filed last year by Dallas developer H. Walker Royall, who has worked for years to condemn a generations-old shrimp business owned by the Gore family of Gulfport, Texas, so he can build a marina. The project represented such a vivid clash between personal freedom and private interest that legal journalist Carla Main highlighted it in her book “Bulldozed: “Kelo, Eminent Domain and the American Lust for Land.” Her book was reviewed favorably in many newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal. …
Karl Rove compliments the GOP for their work on the stimulus bill.
Congressional Republicans lack President Barack Obama’s bully pulpit and do not have the majorities that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid enjoy. But they are playing their hand extraordinarily well.
Over the past month, House Republicans have used the stimulus bill to redefine their party, present ideas on how to revive the economy, and force congressional Democrats and the president to take ownership of the spending programs soon to be signed into law.
The first smart move House Republicans made was to raise objections to specific parts of the House stimulus bill. Pointing out that there is money in the bill for condoms, livestock insurance, refurbishing the National Mall, and other outlandish things revealed that it is a massive spending spree, not an economic stimulus.
House Republicans had the wisdom to continue to talk to the Obama White House. This made them look gracious, even as the president edged toward a “my way or the highway” attitude.
Writing in The WSJ, Steve Hayward suggests Obama study what worked for Reagan.
… Reagan and his team didn’t assume that a landslide victory meant they had a mandate to do whatever they wanted. To the contrary, the report’s authors, Richard Wirthlin and David Gergen, wrote: “The election was not a bestowal of political power, but a stewardship opportunity for us to reconsider and restructure the political agenda for the next two decades. The public has sanctioned the search for a new public philosophy to govern America.”
Establishing a new governing philosophy, in other words, would require sustained public argument — something for which Reagan had an abiding instinct. Even in private sessions with Democrats, Reagan relished vigorous arguments about the welfare state. This was much to the annoyance of then House Speaker Tip O’Neill, who just wanted to cut deals.
Reagan never attempted to stifle debate by saying “I won.” The IAP noted that President Jimmy Carter “failed to realize that leadership means more than ‘laying it all out;’ it also means keeping at it.” Like Mr. Carter, Mr. Obama seems peeved that Washington won’t roll over for him. …
Mort Kondracke horrifies himself by agreeing with Rush Limbaugh.
I can’t believe I’m writing this, but Rush Limbaugh actually has (or had) a good idea on the stimulus. Or, at least the germ of one.
On his radio show Jan. 26 and in the Wall Street Journal Jan. 29, America’s arch-polarizer — amazingly enough — proposed the outlines of a reasonable bipartisan stimulus package of both spending and tax cuts.
It may be moot now, given an apparent House-Senate-administration agreement, but Limbaugh’s contribution illustrates how decision-making on the stimulus might have proceeded usefully — and how to think about fighting recessions.
The proposal was couched, of course, in Limbaugh’s customary disdain for government spending (“porkulus”) and disparagement of Democratic Party motives, but it contained a genuinely bipartisan idea.
Which was: President Barack Obama won 53 percent of the two-party vote last year and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) won 46 percent, so Obama would dictate the contents of 53 percent of the stimulus and Republicans — Limbaugh said, “me” — would dictate 46 percent.
Well, it was never going to happen exactly that way, since the election handed control of both political branches of government to the Democrats.
But, if Obama truly wanted to establish a post-partisan atmosphere in Washington, he would have not only met and had cocktails with Republicans, but would have given them a real say in drafting the stimulus. …
Contentions post wonders if the only thing Obama can do is campaign.
As President Obama continues his full-court press for the passage of the so-called stimulus bill, we find that him reverting to type: the tireless campaigner.
It must be remembered that Obama has spent his entire career campaigning for the next office, and has only lost one election. He won the first time he ran for the Illinois State Senate, and then started eying Washington. He was defeated the first time he ran for the House, but two years later won election to the Senate. And he barely had time to warm his seat there before he began running for the presidency.
So Obama has plenty of success in campaigning. How about in governing?
Not so much.
Barack Obama’s fluid ability to turn every political station into a launching pad from which he may reach the next is his defining career achievement. …
Ed Morrissey posts on Obama’s press conference. As an aside, Pickerhead will note the prez started the conference with the normal introductory remarks. What wasn’t normal was his use of the teleprompter while making those remarks.
An oft-repeated aphorism instructs us that we can have our own opinions, but not our own facts — or at least not unless we get to stand behind the podium at the White House. When Barack Obama explained his economic package last night to the American people in a prime-time press conference, he made two flat-out false statements regarding his opposition. He also added a completely incorrect reading of history, one that turns out to be very instructive about his own economic incompetence. …
George Will calls it the “Runaway Stimulus.”
… John McCain probably was eager to return to the Senate as an avatar of bipartisanship, a role he has enjoyed. It is, therefore, a measure of the recklessness of House Democrats that they caused the stimulus debate to revolve around a bill that McCain dismisses as “generational theft.”
The federal government, with its separation of powers and myriad blocking mechanisms, was not made for speed but for safety. This is particularly pertinent today because if $789 billion is spent ineffectively or destructively, government does not get to say “oops” and take a mulligan. Senate Republicans have slowed and altered the course of the “disaster! catastrophe!” stampede. Still, as Anthony Trollope wrote in one of his parliamentary novels, “The best carriage horses are those which can most steadily hold back against the coach as it trundles down the hill.”
Not yet a third of the way through the president’s “first 100 days,” he and we should remember that it was not FDR’s initial burst of activity in 1933 that put the phrase “100 days” into the Western lexicon. It was Napoleon’s frenetic trajectory in 1815 that began with his escape from Elba and ended near the Belgian village of Waterloo.
Absent from these pages for too long, Theodore Dalrymple writes on the persistence of Ideology.
… Who, then, are ideologists? They are people needy of purpose in life, not in a mundane sense (earning enough to eat or to pay the mortgage, for example) but in the sense of transcendence of the personal, of reassurance that there is something more to existence than existence itself. The desire for transcendence does not occur to many people struggling for a livelihood. Avoiding material failure gives quite sufficient meaning to their lives. By contrast, ideologists have few fears about finding their daily bread. Their difficulty with life is less concrete. Their security gives them the leisure, their education the need, and no doubt their temperament the inclination, to find something above and beyond the flux of daily life.
If this is true, then ideology should flourish where education is widespread, and especially where opportunities are limited for the educated to lose themselves in grand projects, or to take leadership roles to which they believe that their education entitles them. The attractions of ideology are not so much to be found in the state of the world—always lamentable, but sometimes improving, at least in certain respects—but in states of mind. And in many parts of the world, the number of educated people has risen far faster than the capacity of economies to reward them with positions they believe commensurate with their attainments. Even in the most advanced economies, one will always find unhappy educated people searching for the reason that they are not as important as they should be. …