Tax pledge dodge thrall - Commentary - The Washington Times, America's Newspaper

Here’s a no-brainer, brought to you by opinion columnist Donald Lambro.

The winner of the Republican presidential nomination will probably be the candidate who most embodies the core principles and beliefs of Ronald Reagan.

 No kidding!  You mean like lowering tax rates and facing up to the nation’s enemies foreign and domestic?

It turns out that the Republican presidential candidates are a bit slow at signing up for Ronald Reagan’s shining agenda.  They have, at least, agreed to make President Bush’s tax rate cuts permanent.

But the front-runners for their party’s nod — Arizona Sen. John McCain and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani — have sent mixed signals on the centerpiece of Reagan’s domestic agenda: tax-rate cuts to achieve maximum economic growth. While both have said President Bush’s across-the-board income tax cuts should be made permanent before expiring in 2010, neither has signed the pledge signed by every Republican presidential nominee since 1988 promising not to raise the tax rates.

What planet are they on?  The record of John McCain is especially troubling. 

[He] was one of only two Republican senators who voted against the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and who voted against accelerating them in 2003. He abruptly flip-flopped last year, voting to extend some of the tax cuts, when he began actively running for president.

Here’s what he said about the tax rate cuts.

I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief.

Oh really?  But the president’s tax cuts were designed to reduce the taxes of middle-class Americans by a bigger percentage than the taxes of wealthier Americans.  And the result of the president’s tax cuts is that the top 50 percent of income taxpayers pay 96 percent of all income taxes.

How much is enough, Senator McCain?

If Republicans won’t cut taxes, then who will?

Sexualizing Little Girls

Although any rational observer would note that there are a lot of overweight young girls out there, the sexualizing of little girls means that girls as young a 6 or 7 are experiencing eating disorders.

Mona Charen took a look at a Washington Post article on early sexualization and found that things were worse than she thought. 

"When do little girls start wanting to look good for others?" asks the Post, and quotes a sex educator as guessing that whereas it once began at 6 or 7, it now gets started as early as 4.

 Of course, when it is difficult to get anything but “little tart” clothes for girls of any age, then you know that there’s a problem.

You can see why there’s a problem.  On the one hand, big business can sell more clothes if little girls are worried about their appearance.  On the other hand, Hollywood can sell more commercials with their rude, crude output.

Conservatives draw the line at regulating the free enterprise of the fashion industry, and liberals draw the line at censoring the creativity of filmmakers and TV producers. 

But can’t liberals and conservatives get together on this one, Charen asks?

Perhaps we can now arrange a truce in the name of our daughters. Liberals and conservatives can unite to clean up TV, the music industry and popular culture generally. Liberals can do so believing they are thrashing big business, and conservatives can take satisfaction in confirming family values. Truce, anyone?

But maybe it is more important to posture about the other side than to get anything done.

Criticizing Hillary: Deja Vu All Over Again

Remember the good old days of the 1990s?  When anyone that criticized President Clinton was immediately shamed as a Clinton Hater?

Those days are back, according to Dick Morris and Eileen McGann.  And it is not just opponents of the future president who are forbidden to criticize her. 

Not even supporters of Hillary’s opponents are allowed to disparage her. If they do, the wrath of Hillary surfaces and it is not a pretty sight.
The latest sinner is Hollywood superstar David Geffen. Geffen used to be an avid supporter of the Clintons — he raised over $18 million for them in the past. But no more. Now the Dreamworld founder is backing Obama — and he’s not afraid to say so.

Said Geffen to Maureen Dowd:

I don’t think that another incredibly polarizing figure, no matter how smart she is and no matter how ambitious she is -- and God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton? -- can bring the country together.

Sounds fair, don’t you think?  I mean, this is a presidential campaign.  Powerful people get to brief media bigfeet and use them to communicate their rather superficial notions to the world.

But of course the Clinton War Room is outraged.  Hillary sent out Howard Wolfson, and through him

Hillary demanded that Obama dump Geffen and return the $1.3 million that he raised for Obama because of Geffen’s negative comments about the frontrunner and her husband.

Er, what’s that?  You are not allowed to contribute money to Barack Obama and then voice your deeply felt misgivings about the sainted Hillary Clinton?  This is unethical, or something?

Presumably Hillary Clinton’s spokesman is not saying that contibuting and opining is illegal.  And least, not yet.

Well, if this is how the Clinton campaign is operating in the innocent days a year before the primaries, imagine what it is going to be like in the month or two running up to the elections!

But then it it doesn’t take any imagining.  It all sounds so familiar.  We’ve been here before.

What Went Wrong for Republicans?

Where did the Republicans go wrong and what can they do to regain the trust of the voters?  Columnist Bill Steigerwald asked Genevieve Wood of the Heritage Foundation.

Republicans have now been in the majority for over 10 years in the Congress and they’ve ended up holding the White House. It became about holding on to power, unfortunately, instead of putting into practice conservative principles like limiting government and reducing spending.

The result is that the entire Republicans coalition is disillusioned: libertarians, economic conservatives, and social conservatives.

So what do Republicans do to get back the enthusiasm of their base?

They’ve got to go back to the basics and one of the very basics would be we’ve got to rein in entitlements. It is a huge crisis facing the country — Social Security, Medicare, health care systems — and I think conservatism has answers for those things... And you’re not going to get those answers from the other side...
There’s a chance to sharpen ideas again, and, look, they are being created at The Heritage Foundation and a number of places. But they’ve got to get traction from the political pulpits, if you will. Finding the people who are willing to do that is going to be key.

It’s not that hard: “limited government, traditional values, a strong national defense.”  That is what defines the Republican Party.  That is what its base looks for. 

Now what we need are the leaders to articulate that message and make it ring out across the nation. 

Hagiographers Under Every Rock, Says Publishers Weekly

Every one of us has their obsession.  We just like to interpret the world to fit our prejudices.  The problem is when we let things get a little out of hand, as Reagan biographer Paul Kengor complains:

Though one would never know this from reading Publishers Weekly, the fact is that Ronald Reagan is now consistently rated among the most successful presidents in all of American history—even by liberals who comprise academia and media.

 Even those of us conservatives who came late to Reagan, say in mid 1980, realize that there was a lot more there that we realized.  Reagan was an actor, and he let us see what he wanted us to see.  In retrospect that was not much.

Reagan was a man who had done quite a bit of reading.  But he never felt the need to tell us that.  Reagan was a man who had done quite a bit of thinking.  But he never felt the need to impress us with his learning.

Reagan was quite happy for everyone to think him an “amiable dunce,” in Clark Clifford’s immortal phrase.  And because wise man Clifford thought that many liberals thought that too.  And many liberal writers echoed the idea.

Frances Fitzgerald’s blistering, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War, was reviewed glowingly by Publishers Weekly as a “painstakingly detailed study.” The book portrays Reagan as, indeed, way out there in the blue.

Only Reagan wasn’t way out there.  His policies, foreign and domestic, especially after the jumble of Iraq, look astonishingly precise and focused. He did stand fast while the Federal Reserve painfully squeezed inflation out of the economy.  He did lower tax rates and start a 25 year boom.  He did increase defense spending and twirl the Soviet Union into confusion.

This is not way out there in the blue.  This is political genius of a very high order.

It is such a pity that the anonymous reviewers at Publishers Weekly still don’t get it.

If America Won't Buy Quality Newspapers...

Here it comes.  It was inevitable, really.  We can thank Steven Rattner for giving us a heads-up on it, an early warning so we can head it off at the pass.

Rattner takes a look at the delicate state of the newspaper business today.

The Washington Post has lost 14 percent of its circulation since 2000.  And newspapers have lost half of their young readers.

Perhaps most worrisome is the loss of young readers, who have drifted away steadily since the early 1970s, long before there was an Internet, when more than 70% of 18- to 34-year-old Americans read a daily newspaper. Last year that figure stood at 35%.

Guess where the growth in the newspaper is coming from?

Only two newspapers in the top 25—the two New York tabloids—grew circulation during this period, a statement in itself.

Yes.  That really is nasty.  Americans are turning away from quality newspapers, and what are they reading instead?  Tabloids! 

Of course newspaper reading on the Internet is up.  But most people get their news from the big on-line portals,

which means that they are mostly consuming a bland porridge of wire service stories.

Things are getting so bad that the market soon may not support true quality newspapers.  It is time for action.

[W]e can’t expect the objectives of enterprises that were organized around a for-profit interest to necessarily intersect with the societal value of quality journalism. So perhaps it’s time to think about new models for the news business.

 Ah yes.  Why newspapers might be just like the New York subways, a vital service that nobody wants to pay for.

We could create a pool of money (possibly from a license fee similar to how the BBC is funded). News organizations with an expensive but important project in mind could apply for funding, much the way producers in the public television world have for the last 40 years.

Oh innocent, how reasonable it sounds.

Over my cold, dead body.

 “” 

Secular Dem Candidates Off to Church

The Republican Party is the party of the religious, married, with children.  The Democratic Party is the party of the secular, the single, and the childless.  So much we know.

So then why does the Edwards campaign feel it necessary to separate from blogger Amanda Marcotte, whose blog, according to Mary Eberstadt, is full of

scatological Catholic-baiting rants about "theocracy" marked by leering references to the pope and liberal use of the F-word.

What do they expect from a “a bilious feminist with a potty mouth?”

After all, the whole of America left of center is railing about “theocracy” these days.  When trendspotter Kevin Phillips is out with American Theocracy, you know that there is good money to be made selling theocratic scare stories to book-buying liberals.

But then why are the Democratic presidential candidates crowding into church?

Here is Sen. Barack Obama in California’s Saddleback pulpit at the invitation of mega-selling pastor Rick Warren. There is Sen. Hillary Clinton with downcast eyes in Newsweek, praying before the cameras in New York’s Riverside Church. And there preaches John Edwards, also in Riverside Church, weaving his personal faith into everything from AIDS to the minimum wage.

The answer is, of course, that even though the liberal base is militantly and religiously anti-religious, most Americans are religious.  And the politicians know it.

Sophisticates and secularists have always titillated themselves by despising the Bible Belt. But professional Christian-bashers have never been as "embedded" in the liberal mainstream as they are today. And therein lies a problem for Democrats. More Amanda Marcottes are not what the party needs as it scrambles to re-establish its religious bona fides with wary red-staters. No wonder so many Democratic candidates are in church. Now they really have something to pray about.

So the presidential campaigners have become regular churchgoers.  Just don’t expect the liberal media to complain about the separation of church and state.  At least, not until Republican Mormon Mitt Romney decides to visit a temple of the Church of Christ of Latter Day Saints.