Dems Get Tough Questions

Democratic partisans are outraged today after ABC’s Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos asked tough questions at the Dem debate the previous night in Philadelphia.

Tom Shales in the Washington Post.

It was another step downward for network news — in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.

The problem is that they were asking questions about Bittergate and Sixties lefty terrorist William Ayres.

Hugh Hewitt liked the debate.

Senator Obama looked terrible last night —halting and apologetic, constantly on the defensive even though Gibson and Stephanopoulos did not press him beyond a follow-up or two on his most damaging associations with Pastor Wright and William Ayers.

What do you think? Was Hewitt watching the same debate as Shales?

Hewitt has been making a point recently of running audio clips on his show featuring halting ad libs by the Great Unifier. I guess that is what you call “defining” the candidate of the other side.

Of course, the Democrat partisans are right. What does it matter if Obama sat on a board a decade ago with William Ayres? Obama is what he is and you shoudn’t convict him of guilt-by-association.

But we would appreciate a little fair play and consistency.

After all, every Republican officeholder in the land knows that if he accidentally stood next to David Duke at an airport check-in counter 30 years ago, he is automatically a racist. If he did that he’s gone. No complaint about guilt-by-association, no trial in the court of public opinion. No need for that; no time for that. He’s gone.

At NRO, Jim Geraghty has a message for Sen. Obama

Welcome to the big leagues, rookie.

But, dahling, this is all so sophomoric!

McCain: Dem Tax Increase is "Change"

We knuckle-dragging bitter-end conservative Republicans have been worried about John McCain. And for good reason. He opposed just about every sensible economic policy that President Bush put forward. He opposed the recession-fighting tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. Just what planet was he on?

Yes, of course. Beltway, Third Rock from the Sun.

But now that he’s the presumptive Republican nominee for president he’s coming home to the logical, epistemological, and moral reality of being a Republican candidate for president.

The reality of being a Republican candidate is that, if Republicans aren’t for tax cuts, then what’s the point of the Republican Party?

So John McCain in his economic policy speech Monday started out by riffing on “change.”

[M]any in Congress think Americans are under-taxed. They speak as if letting you keep your own earnings were an act of charity, and now they have decided you’ve had enough. By allowing many of the current low tax rates to expire, they would impose — overnight — the single largest tax increase since the Second World War. Among supporters of a tax increase are Senators Obama and Clinton. Both promise big "change." And a trillion dollars in new taxes over the next decade would certainly fit that description.

So he’s going to lower the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent, extend the Bush tax cuts, eliminate the AMT, and he’s signing onto the alternate flat tax concept that’s been floating around.

What we need is a simpler, a flatter, and a fair tax code. As president, I will propose an alternative tax system. When this reform is enacted, all who wish to file under the current system could still do so. And everyone else could choose a vastly less complicated system with two tax rates and a generous standard deduction.

So that’s all right.

But the real long-term job is making a start on dimantling the liberal patronage state. You know what I mean (2008 numbers):

• Pensions: $911.6 billion
  
  
• Health Care: $925.0 billion
  
  
• Education: $848.2 billion
  
  
• Defense: $730.8 billion
  
  
• Welfare: $445.2 billion

Compassion or no compassion, there’s a lot of pure patronage in there and not a lot of money helping people.

But don’t expect John McCain to do much about that.

Theocracy Here We Come!

Liberals have been worrying for six years about the looming theocracy. Well, it’s obvious. Bush is a Christian. Jesus is his favorite philosopher. And he went on a Crusade in Iraq.

Now he’s the first president ever to greet a pope on his landfall in the United States. “Bush Cozies Up to Pope.” That’s the subhead of an ABC News article about the pope’s arrival and Bush’s decision to go out to Andrews Aif Force Base to greet him.

It’s the first time that Bush will leave the White House to greet a foreign dignitary[.]

Two and two makes four. ’Nuff Said.

The point of Pope Benedict is not Bush or theocracy, or even the issue du jour, the Church’s sex abuse scandal.. It is his clear and direct strategy to revive the mission and the spirit of the church. Christianity is the religion of love. That is why the pope’s first encyclical was titled “Deus Caritas Est,” or God is Love. Then there was the second encyclical, “Spe Salvi,” or Saved in Hope.

Now the pope is coming to the United States, the most religious and most Christian modern nation in the world. In fact, religious adherence has increased in the United States in the modern era instead of decreasing, as it has done in Europe, according to Finke and Stark in The Churching of America

Do you think this guy has a Message or something?

Liberals' and Obama's God Problem

A liberal friend confided the other day that Democrats were having a problem communicating with the American people about God.

I replied: Well of course. Liberals champion the Enlightenment. Their political party, the Democratic Party, is the secular party.

That is essentially what Senator Obama confirmed to a group of well-heeled San Francisco liberals when he excused the “bitterness” of working-class voters in Pennsylvania and the rust belt.

It’s not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment. . . .

And it’s not surprising that Obama would say this to a bunch of San Francisco Democrats. That’s what elite liberals believe and what they say to each other in their faculty lounges, in their activist meetings, and in their liberal churches.

In this view of reality, of course, liberals are the enlightened ones that are able to mediate between the cruel world and the helpless bitterness of their victim constituents. Liberals compassionately provide programs to ease the pain.

Against this “conventional wisdom,” to use the words of the most conventional liberal of them all, John Kenneth Galbraith, are the words of a Chinese man, a “Dr. Wu.” His words are retailed by David Aiken in Jesus in Beijing, a study of Christianity in China.

(It is an astonishing story.)

For years, decades, “Dr. Wu” said, the Chinese people have wondered what made the West so powerful. What was it, the magic bullet that had allowed the upstart West to dominate and humiliate China, the Middle Kingdom, most ancient and most glorious of civilizations?

At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful.

Obviously there is a powerful disconnect between “Dr. Wu” and the conventional liberal position, shared by presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), that religion is merely a superstition for frightened and bitter minds.

But that just raises another question. What is it about Christianity that makes it so powerful? And if it so powerful, why are liberals driving it out of the public square?

Politics is Politics, But...

Are you becoming as offended as I am by the Democrats’ unilateralist approach to foreign policy?

I thought that Democrats were all supposed to be noble multilateralists and concerned about America’s good name in the world.

Obviously, Democrats are deeply concerned that the world think well of us when it comes to dealing with global Islamic extremism. But it’s obvious that they don’t give a damn when it comes to trade.

Here’s news item from Joshua Goodman and Mark Drajem at Bloomberg reporting on House action on the free-trade pact with Colombia.

The Democratic-controlled House voted 224-195 yesterday to deny President George W. Bush’s request for a vote on the trade pact within 90 days, likely postponing action until after the November elections. It is the first time Congress has refused a presidential request to pass a trade agreement.

You wonder, of course. Why would the Democrats give a damn about trade? It’s not as if Democrats have any dog in the race. They all work for the government (including government universities) or for non-profit foundations. Why should they care if the last five industrial-union workers lose their jobs in Pennsylvania?

And anyway, the pact is mainly about lowering import tariffs in Colombia, not the US!

It’s not as if the notoriously partisan President Bush hasn’t gone the extra mile adding to the free-trade pact with Colombia stupid labor and environmental provisions that Democrats like in order to appease their labor and environmental base.

It’s a bit late for Democrats to be standing up for hard-pressed workers in Pennsylvania. The cake was baked fifty years ago when the political culture taught union leaders to fight for labor agreements that basically promised billions in future corporate profits to the workers on the rather rash assumption that a corporation that was earning big bucks in 1948 would still be doing so 50 years later.

One thing you can say for Democrats. For one shining moment, back in the 1960s, they led the nation; they stood on high principle. They made the nation deal with its race problem.

But that’s about it. On everything else, it is Republicans that appeal to the better angels of our nature.

On top of that, watch President Obama or Clinton push the pact through Congress anyway on a quiet weekend in 2009.

Earth to Dem voters: Does it bother you that your leaders keep doing this to you?

Is Google Smart or What?

Earlier this week a new website went up. It is usgovernmentrevenue.com. It uses the technology developed for usgovernmentspending.com and applies to it government taxes and revenue.

Announcing usgovernmentrevenue.com!

Now you can go to usgovernmentrevenue.com and get the scoop on government receipts for all governments, federal, state, and local in the United States. Right now the data is complete for 1970 to 2013. Our crack data analysis team is extending the reach of the data by ten years every day. So tonight we should have data back from 1960 online.

And you can get all the graphs and charts you could imagine.

This is the website that could save the planet.

Of course, as soon as we got the domain name propagated across the internet, our crack sitemap team at usgovernmentrevenue.com immediately set up a site map and sent it to Google.

Oh all right. I admit it. That’s not quite true. We tried to set up the site with Google about 8 hours after the usgovernmentrevenue.com domain had been created and ran into a brick wall. The servers at Google said they’d never heard of it. So we had to wait a couple of hours for Google’s domain servers to catch up. Imagine!

Today is a day which will live in history.

Today the first Google Search was recorded on SiteMeter. Amazing, you might say, for a site up only a few days. How did the eager searcher have the patience to dig down through pages and pages of search results to find usgovernmentrevenue.com?

Ah, ye of little faith. Have you no confidence in Google?

Someone did a search for “historical federal revenues graph” and Google put usgovernmentrevenue.com as the #1 search item.

Is Google smart or what? They just know what’s important.

Are We Safe, Mr. President?

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) tells it like it is. Yesterday, he told his colleagues on the Senate floor:

“Is the war in Iraq making America safer? By all accounts, the answer…is ‘no.’”

He’s right, of course, but for the wrong reason. Of course the Iraq War isn’t making us safer, not in the sense that seatbelts make us safer.

But it is pretty certain that a pullout from Iraq, as Gen. Petraeus testified yesterday, would make us less safe.

The war in Iraq is a battle in the great western war of conquest, the war of the modern commercial world of cities and trading against the ancient world of tribe and pillage.

The Middle East is the last holdout against this vast project and so that is where the battle is being joined.

Five hundred years ago when traders from Europe wanted to trade with the fabulously rich country of India they had to wait until they could do ocean navigation, build ships big enough to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean. They had to do that because the rapacious rulers of the Middle East, like robber barons in the mountain passes of the Alps, took too much in tribute from the trade between India and Europe to make it worthwhile.

Yesterday General Petraeus reported on the gradual progress that the United States is making in Iraq. Nobody can know if it will all work out.

So we cannot know if we are safer.

But we do know that the world of cities and freedom and trading and trust, and the world of the western team is our way. And the world of the tribe, of piracy and slavery and plunder, is their way.

Some people say that there is no good reason for the conflict in the Middle East. Maybe there isn’t

But we know that the west has always needed a navy and an army to enforce its regime of trading and trust. So why should things be any different now?