Pat Buchanan
Friday, February 12, 2010

No, it is not 1860 again.

But with all the talk of the 10th Amendment, nullification and interposition, states rights and secession -- following Gov. Rick Perry's misstatement that Texas, on entering the Union in 1845, reserved in its constitution a right to secede -- one might think so.

Chalk up another one for those Tea Party activists who exploded in cheers when Sister Sarah brought up the dread word in endorsing Rick Perry in the primary.

Looking back in American history, however, these ideas, these sentiments, decried as insane inside the Beltway, were once as American as "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere."

"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical," wrote Thomas Jefferson to James Madison from Paris in January 1787, about Revolutionary War Capt. Daniel Shay's anti-tax rebellion in Massachusetts.

In the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, both of these founding fathers sanctioned the idea that states could interpose their own sovereignty and nullify acts of Congress. Both were enraged by the Alien and Sedition Acts of John Adams and the Federalists, written into law to combat sedition during the undeclared naval war with France.

On taking office, President Jefferson declared the acts unconstitutional, refused to prosecute those charged and freed the imprisoned writers.

In 1814, Timothy Pickering, another veteran of the revolution and secretary of state to both George Washington and Adams, was a force behind the Hartford Convention, which argued for New England's secession and reuniting with Great Britain. Massachusetts opposed Madison's War of 1812 that had caused the British blockade that destroyed their trade and prosperity.

The war's end and Jackson's victory at New Orleans, however, aborted the Hartford movement and finished off the Federalists forever.

In 1832, it was Vice President John Calhoun who inspired South Carolina to vote to nullify the Tariff of Abomination that was killing the cotton-exporting South and enriching Northern manufacturers. To the chagrin of Madison, Calhoun invoked his and Jefferson's Virginia and Kentucky resolutions in defense of Carolinian defiance.

In 1845, it was Massachusetts again. Ex-President John Quincy Adams declared that admission of Texas to the Union as a slave state might constitute grounds for secession and civil war.

With Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 and Republicans, the Northern party, assuming power, South Carolina, Georgia and the Gulf states seceded.

But not until after Fort Sumter, when Lincoln called for volunteers to march south and crush the rebellion, did Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas secede, rather than remain passive or participate in a war on their kinfolk.

Unlike the issues of yesteryear that tore the Union asunder, Tea Party issues are not sectional but national. Yet, they are rooted in a similar set of beliefs -- that the federal government no longer serves their interests, but the interests of economic and political forces that sustain the party in power.

In 1860, the South saw power passing indefinitely to a new regime, a Republican Party that represented high-tariff industrialists and New England radicals and abolitionists who despised the agrarian South and celebrated the raid on Harper's Ferry by the terrorist John Brown, who had sought to incite a slave uprising, such as had occurred in Santo Domingo.

What called the Tea Party into existence?

Some are angry over unchecked immigration and the failure to control our borders and send the illegals back. Some are angry over the loss of manufacturing jobs. Some are angry over winless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some are angry over ethnic preferences they see as favoring minorities over them.

What they agree upon, however, is that they have been treading water for a decade, working harder and harder with little or no improvement in their family standard of living. They see the government as taking more of their income in taxes, seeking more control over their institutions, creating entitlements for others not them, plunging the nation into unpayable debt, and inviting inflation or a default that can wipe out what they have saved.

And there is nothing they can do about it, for they are politically powerless. By their gatherings, numbers, mockery of elites and militancy, however, they get a sense of the power that they do not have.

Their repeated reappearance on the national stage, in new incarnations, should be a fire bell in the night to the establishment of both parties. For it testifies to their belief and that of millions more that the state they detest is at war with the country they love.

The secession taking place in America is a secession of the heart -- of people who have come to believe the government is them, and not us.

Obama's problem, like the Bushes' in 1992 and 2008, is that one thing these folks are really good at is throwing people out of power.

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Saturday, February 13, 2010

OBAMA WATCH CENTRAL
WorldNetDaily
Rockefeller on Obama:
Prez isn't 'believable'
Message the same as famous
'You lie' by GOP's Joe Wilson

Posted: February 12, 2010
11:00 pm Eastern

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By Bob Unruh

<!-- copyright -->WorldNetDaily
Republican Rep. Joe Wilson created waves that left Washington rocking for weeks by shouting "You lie" to Barack Obama during the president's address to Congress last fall, and now a similar message has been delivered by a member of the president's own party.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., told an audience today the president is "beginning to be not believable to me."
The comment was just the latest evidence of the dissension in the Democratic Party that prevented Obama from passing his health care proposal last year despite having a significant party majority in the U.S. House and a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate.
Rockefeller, a Democrat in a family of lifelong Republicans, was referring to Obama's proposed budget that would cut tax incentives to coal mining companies.
The cut would hit West Virginia's coal industry hard, and Rockefeller's dissatisfaction was evident in the video posted on Real Clear Politics.
Obama's budget proposal would kill $2.3 billion in coal tax breaks, Rockefeller pointed out.
 
"He says 'I'm for clean coal,' and then he says it in his speeches, but he doesn't say it in here. And he doesn't say it in the minds of my own people. And he's beginning to be not believable to me," Rockefeller said.
Get the inside information on how Sarah Palin found the Democrats: Get "Going Rogue: An American Life"
Participants in a Real Clear Politics online forum said, essentially, it's about time:

"You must have a pretty thick skull, Senator Rockefeller, if you're just now starting to notice."


"Too late, the monster is out of the bag."


"I believe BHO is not lying intentionally … He literally cannot tell the difference from the truth and a lie."


"What he is saying, in other words, is 'YOU LIE!'"


"Old Rocky may be an extreme liberal but he can still read the tea leaves and they are telling him that Obama has become toxic even for 'senators for life' like him."

Democrats in Congress have bickered over specific aspects of health care legislation, blamed White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel for the effort's failure and have been unable to reach agreement on legislation even when Republicans were not invited to the discussion, notes The Hill newspaper.
Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., also has blasted Obama's chief political strategist, David Axelrod, over the failure to advance Obama's agenda.
It was last September when Wilson yelled "You lie!" in response to Obama's declaration in a speech before Congress that his plan wouldn't provide tax-paid health care to illegal aliens.
The congressman apologized to the president but refused to apologize to members of the House.
WND columnist and former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo said even though "liberals went nuts," Wilson actually was right.
"Obama conceded as much when two days later the White House issued guidelines to close some of the loopholes that allowed illegal aliens to acquire health insurance in the House bill," Tancredo wrote. "But despite those guidelines, illegal aliens are still eligible for Obamacare under both the House and Senate bills.
"An analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies exposes how easily illegal aliens will be able to exploit our health-care system under Obamacare. The health-care bill contains four provisions that increase government spending. There are two massive government expansions: the much discussed 'public option' and a sharp increase of Medicaid subsidies. In addition, it includes two ostensibly market incentives: the semiprivate 'Health Insurance Exchange' and 'Affordability Credits' that are basically tax credits for low-income households. However, the Exchange will be heavily subsidized by the government, and families eligible for 'Affordability Credits' are not paying taxes, so a 'tax credit' is just another form of welfare," Tancredo explained.
"What this means is that any part of the health-care bill that illegal aliens are eligible for will involve subsidies by the American taxpayers. Illegal aliens are eligible for all of them!"
At the recent Tea Party Nation convention  in Nashville, Judge Roy Moore, a candidate for governor in Alabama, presented a "bill of particulars" against the president.
Moore said:

He has ignored our history and our heritage, arrogantly declaring to the world that we are no longer a Christian nation. He's elevated immorality to a new level, setting aside the entire month of June last to celebrate Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender pride.


He now threatens to change our law, 10 U.S.C. Section 654, to allow homosexuality in our military in direct opposition to the law which says that the attempt to engage in homosexuality will create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability.


He has apologized to the Arab world for our past, subjugated our national sovereignty by bowing down to the king of Saudi Arabia.


He has pursued a socialist agenda by taking control of private companies and pushing a national health-care plan with a public option. Backed by a willing Congress, he has bought off our senators and our representatives with our own money in an effort to mandate this agenda. And when opposed by members of the Senate, he smugly smiled and said, "I won."

Paul Greenberg
Thursday, February 04, 2010

Some things still surprise. Even about politicians. Barney Frank, for example. He's just come out for disbanding Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Yes, that Barney Frank. The very same. The chairman of the House Financial Committee and the moving force -- indeed, the uncontrollable force -- behind Fannie and Freddie, those terrible twins and financial tumors whose bad loans led to the meltdown of the housing market. And then to general panic as banks, insurers and investment firms followed suit.

Now this same Barney Frank has come out for putting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, his old sweethearts, out of their and the taxpayers' misery. Chairman Frank needs to be told that somebody is making perfectly sane policy recommendations in his name. At last.

This isn't at all like the man. Or the rest of the Great Thinkers who for years explained how we could all borrow our way to prosperity regardless of race, color or credit-worthiness.

What a turnaround. It's as if Chris Dodd, the senator from Countrywide Financial, had come out against friendly loans for pols.

It's as if the Hon. Timothy Geithner, secretary of the Treasury and patron of Wall Street in that ascending order, were to come out for everybody paying his taxes on time. Or announce that he favored breaking up the United States of Goldman Sachs.

Secretary Geithner sounds as if he's all for Chairman Frank's one good idea a decade. Naturally he's in no hurry to carry it out. Would he favor disbanding Fannie and Freddie? "We are committed to propose a set of detailed reforms beginning this year." But: "I don't think we're going to be able to legislate that until that process can start until next year, because it's just a complicated thing to get right."

Mr. Geithner seems unable to make a clear decision unless he's in panic mode. And then it may be a bad one. The atrocious this administration can accomplish in a New York minute, the sensible takes a little longer, like forever. With this bunch, anything worth doing is worth delaying.

It's not that this administration lacks good people. It's just so easy to easy to forget that they're there. They tend to disappear from view for long periods of time. The other day, good old Paul Volcker -- Ronald Reagan's old chairman of the Federal Reserve -- suddenly turned up. Usually he's the man who isn't there. Technically, he's an economic adviser to the president. He must be the one in charge of offering good advice that's never taken.

These days Mr. Volcker, a man who learns from the past, perhaps because he was so much a part of it, wants to restrain the kind of speculation by banks-cum-investment houses that led to the financial panic the country has just sweated through. His ideal is the old Glass-Steagall Act of the New Deal, which insured the banks but only if they remained banks -- rather than investment houses, hedge funds, credit-default swappers or casinos by some other name.

Lest we forget, the New Deal was overflowing with ideas -- good and bad, sensible and wacky -- much as this administration is. Its history is a whole Alexandrian library of what worked and what didn't. From federal deposit insurance, which still works well, to the Resettlement Administration, which never did. (Any collectivist dream for American agriculture is doomed from conception, American farmers being American farmers.) The New Deal inaugurated both Social Security, which still works smoothly, and the NRA, a vast wage-and-price fixing scheme that only made a terrible economy worse.

But all these volumes of experience on history's shelves grow dusty -- as unconsulted and unemployed as so many Americans these days. Where is this administration's Works Progress Administration and Civilian Conservation Corps? That is, Where are the jobs? Instead we get phony figures for jobs-created-and-saved, a highly imaginative if not downright fictive category. Plus unprecedented, and ruinous, long-term deficits that buoy the economy about as well as a 10-ton anchor. Let us return, or at least turn, to the past; that would be progress.

It would take some moxie to erect Glass-Steagall's old wall between ordinary commercial banks and huge speculative investment houses like AIG, which dared call itself an insurance firm. Just as it would take some courage to finally kill Fannie and Freddie, both of which turned out to be the evil twin in this story. Just as it took political courage for Ronald Reagan to let Paul Volcker tame inflation in the early 1980s, a painful but necessary undertaking.

But this administration is deeply infected by the most common malady of the age: a presentism that approaches every experience as unprecedented, unique, one-of-a-kind that requires action NOW! That was pretty much Timothy Geithner's excuse for bailing out AIG with billions of our tax dollars. And making the auto companies dependents of the U.S. Treasury.

It's the spirit of a feckless age: Act now, think later -- if at all. A crisis, to quote this president's consigliere, Rahm Emanuel, is a terrible thing to waste.

If this crew consults history at all, it is only to cherry-pick examples that favor the policies it had intended to follow all along. Instead of history guiding it, it manipulates history. As in its Fable No. 1 -- that Barack Obama ended the Second Great Depression in record time.

The alternative explanation for the country's continuing economic doldrums is much too prosaic, like reality itself, to be taken seriously by our intelligentsia: that the Great Obama with his magic wand only aggravated an old-style financial panic, turning an overdue recession into a severe and persistent one. But to consider that possibility would require something alien to the spirit of these times: historical perspective.

In his State of the Union address, careful listeners will have noted that the president did take his share of the blame -- not for his actions so much as for not explaining them as well as he should have to us simpletons out here in the country. Have you noticed? Bad judgment on the part of our intellectuals has a way of being accompanied by lofty condescension.

Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, February 04, 2010

Thousands in Tokyo have been echoing Barack Obama's signature call for "change" -- but as in "Change! Japanese-U.S. relations."

Our military is rushing anti-missile batteries to Iran's Arab neighbors in the Gulf in anticipation of new Iranian military escalation.

As in the case of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami, the U.S. both gives the most aid to a devastated Haiti and still seems to receive the most criticism.

China has just warned us not to supply more armaments to Taiwan.

Our Predator drones continue to be the judge, jury and executioner of suspected terrorists in Pakistan.

What's gone wrong with Obama's dream of multilateral cooperation?

For starters, the world's tensions were not caused by, and remain far larger, than George W. Bush -- and thus cannot be so easily solved by his absence.

Obama also has apparently confused what people say with what nations do.

The world's masses -- most of them young, poor and non-Western -- may applaud a hip, post-racial Barack Obama more than they ever would an old-money Texan like Bush. Obama may give soaring Wilsonian speeches abroad and be crowned with the Noble Peace Prize for his anointed vision of a new global brotherhood.

But, unfortunately, national leaders themselves do not behave like excited concertgoers or European intellectuals. Instead, they have only long-term self-interests -- not temporary emotional crushes -- and so seek to expand their influence whenever they can.

Obama better understand that difference. A world without strong U.S. leadership really would become a far more dangerous place where the strong do as they please and the weak obey as they must.

After World War II, a reluctant America guaranteed a global system of secure trade and encouraged free-market capitalism and democracy. Both communist and fascist tyrants fought those efforts, eager to expand totalitarianism beyond their borders. And envious allies and neutral countries that benefited enormously from the American-enforced system resented the high profile of the United States.

All that responsibility was unpopular and costly for the United States. But the American people felt the activist bad choice was far better than the worse passive alternative of allowing more of the kind of chaos that had wrecked much of civilization in the first half of the 20th century.

And if allies sometimes derided America, privately they were mostly relieved that there was some sort of policeman -- and that it was us and not an authoritarian China, Iran or Russia.

After winning the cold war, the United States continued to keep the peace that allowed a new globalization to lift millions worldwide out of poverty. In bipartisan fashion under Presidents Reagan, Bush I and II and Clinton, America dealt with right-wing and left-wing tyrants alike that threatened regional order, whether a Muammar al-Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Manuel Noriega or the Taliban.

Obama for practical and idealistic reasons may believe that America no longer can afford or should play that pre-eminent role; he may even believe that such prominence was never really needed and was mostly counterproductive.

That diffidence often certainly seems the message from Obama's serial apologies, bowing, attacks on prior American foreign policy, and suggestions that tensions abroad are caused by misunderstandings -- many of them our own -- rather than irreconcilable differences in national character and objectives.

But he should at least admit that in such a vacuum of American power and influence, the natural order of things abroad would be chaotic.

Let us hope that Obama learned that tragic fact when events heated up in 2009. Promising to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay; initially planning to try 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York; broadcasting supposed past American sins; issuing meaningless deadlines to Iran; and snubbing allies like Britain, Israel, Poland and the Czech Republic won't win over enemies or ease world tensions.

Al-Qaida claims the Christmas Day attempt to blow up another American airliner -- and promises more havoc to come. North Korea still demands bribe money to put aside its nukes. Russia is bragging about a new generation of weapons. Hugo Chavez keeps talking about becoming a regional bully with his new oil-supplied arsenal.

Implicit in all this braggadocio is a growing suspicion abroad, rightly or wrongly, that a more naive, more unsteady America is broke, tired and unwilling to confront challenges as in the past.

Right now the world's bad actors confidently see "hope" for a vast "change" in the old world order -- but not the kind Obama once so boldly promised.

Jacob Sullum
Wednesday, February 03, 2010

The day before President Obama delivered his State of the Union Address last week, The New York Times reported that "aides said he would accept responsibility, though not necessarily blame" for failing to deliver on promises he made during his campaign. If you accept responsibility for something bad, aren't you accepting blame by definition? Not if you're Barack Obama, who has a talent for accepting responsibility while minimizing and deflecting it.

"With all the lobbying and horse trading, the process (for producing health care legislation) left most Americans wondering, 'What's in it for me?'" Obama said in his SOTU speech. "I take my share of the blame." For breaking his oft-repeated promise to televise health care negotiations on C-SPAN? For agreeing to provisions that would benefit special interests at the expense of the general public? No. "For not explaining it more clearly to the American people" -- as if the problem could have been solved with a nifty PowerPoint presentation.

At his meeting with House Republicans on Friday, Obama conceded that pointing out his failure to televise health care negotiations was "a legitimate criticism." But he also said coverage would have been hard to arrange because the negotiations occurred in several locations. Anyway, he said, "overwhelmingly the majority of it actually was on C-SPAN, because it was taking place in congressional hearings" -- as if he had promised that C-SPAN would continue its longstanding practice of covering congressional hearings.

The president is even less forthright when it comes to the fiscal responsibility he keeps promising. On Monday, he declared, "We simply cannot continue to spend as if deficits don't have consequences, as if waste doesn't matter, as if the hard-earned tax money of the American people can be treated like Monopoly money."

Yet somehow he manages to do so. Obama's much-ballyhooed spending "freeze" would affect just one-eighth of the budget, would not begin until 2011 and would be accompanied by continued increases in outlays on the president's pet projects.

If you are serious about reducing spending, you don't increase it. Yet Obama's proposed budget for fiscal year 2011 totals $3.8 trillion, compared to the $3.6 he proposed the previous year. The deficit would drop a bit, from a record $1.6 trillion to around $1.3 trillion, only because of increased tax revenue.

Last year, Obama said the deficit, expected to be 11 percent of gross domestic product this year, would fall to a "sustainable" 3 percent by the end of his first term. His new budget projections, even with the benefit of optimistic assumptions, indicate that he will never reach that goal even if he serves two terms and that the deficit will rise above 5 percent of GDP after he leaves office.

On Friday, the president blamed the economy for his fiscal incontinence, saying "most of the increases in this year's budget" were "a consequence of the automatic stabilizers that kick in because of this enormous recession." But as Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., noted, legislation signed by Obama increased domestic discretionary spending by 84 percent.

In addition to the health care transparency and spending restraint he has failed to deliver, Obama has broken promises to reduce the influence of special-interest lobbyists, to refrain from raising taxes on households earning less than $250,000 a year, to cut earmarks to 1994 levels, to take a more modest view of executive power and the "state secrets" privilege, to close Guantanamo by last month, to end medical marijuana raids, to allow five days of public review before signing bills and to recognize the Armenian genocide. PolitiFact.com counts 15 broken promises so far, and its standards are conservative

In his SOTU Address, Obama bemoaned "a deficit of trust -- deep and corrosive doubts about how Washington works that have been growing for years." He blamed the public's "disappointment" and "cynicism" on powerful lobbyists, reckless bankers, highly paid CEOs, superficial TV pundits and mud-slinging politicians. Conspicuously missing from the list: a president who breaks promises while pretending he isn't.