“No president of the United States can create either a budget deficit or a budget surplus. All spending bills originate in the House of Representatives and all taxes are voted into law by Congress.

It seems as though almost everyone is guilty of this misconception at one point or another - and I’d say even this article oversimplifies it a bit. Clinton gets credit for a surplus in the 90’s, Reagan gets credit for the 80’s boom, Bush gets the blame for the 08 crash, etc. These are all very oversimplified narratives pushed by various political forces. One thing to notice is Sowell’s statement regarding the president’s “only direct power” over budgets in a later paragraph. That’s because while presidents don’t have the power of the purse, they do have the power to recommend a budget to Congress. Congress and specifically the House have the most direct spending power but being a body of many fractious voices, the president’s power to recommend is significant. Sowell sort of glazes over this fact.

Nevertheless, slapping either total blame or total credit into the lap of a president for economic conditions is simplistic nonsense. Sowell points out Clinton working with a Republican Congress in the 90’s. Clinton usually gets credit for a surplus while a Republican Congress is too often overlooked. A bigger part of the story though is the massive technology boom thanks to the information revolution. Another Bill (Gates) should get more credit than either Clinton or Congress for this. The economy grew thanks to innovation and dynamic growth in the private sector that had very little to do with government policy. Clinton was smart enough to stay out of the way and take the credit - which almost defines the genius of his entire presidency.

“Another political fable is that the current economic downturn is due to not enough government regulation of the housing and financial markets. But it was precisely the government regulators, under pressure from politicians, who forced banks and other lending institutions to lower their standards for making mortgage loans.”

Another fact that is too often overlooked: Democrats seized massive control of Congress two years before Barack Obama took the oath of office. Obama (and almost every major media outlet) lay almost full blame for the most recent crash on Bush and Republicans even while W was a lame duck president battling insurmountable majorities in Congress, not to mention massive unpopularity with the voters. They also freely promulgate this myth of “deregulation” as the chief cause of the crisis which is also an oversimplified fraction of the full story. That myth is primarily fed by this law, which was sponsored by Republicans and signed by President Clinton. This law undoubtedly played a role but there were other seeds planted long before Bush or the 110th Congress were in power.

One of those seeds is currently running for governor of New York. As head of HUD under President Clinton, Cuomo was one of the chief proponents of what the left affectionately used to call “affordable housing.” By 2009, we saw that this benign and even admirable sounding goal turned out to be a bunch of unwise loans made by banks to people who would never be able to pay them back. This article dismisses Cumo’s culpability as a “well-intentioned” mistake, which is capital absurdity. Cuomo is many things but stupid is certainly not one of them.

The pressure put on banks by Clinton and Cuomo to ease lending restrictions was significant. To make matters worse, predatory brokers and lenders structured the loans to be more attractive than they were and looked the other way as the people they signed on grew riskier and riskier. Obviously the banks knew damn well the risk they were taking, which is why they packaged a lot of those loans up into securities and derivatives and siphoned those risks out into the general marketplace - which created the demand for even more risky loans.

Certainly the banks, Bush and Republicans are not free of blame here. It’s also reflexive - especially for vote hungry politicians - to characterize home buyers (voters) as the victims of evil capitalist forces. While the agencies, banks and brokers often did their worst, home buyers still signed on the dotted line. Most of them should have known better. Also, this little tidbit gets far too little airtime:

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Bush and some Republicans attempted to rein Fannie and Freddie in back in 2003, but Barney Frank was too busy raking in campaign contributions (not to mention sleeping with Herb Moses, a high ranking Fannie Mae executive) to stop the gravy train. Democrats in general chose to look the other way and cling to the myth that “affordable housing” meant helping less fortunate people get into their dream houses - a myth that certainly helped them at the ballot box so long as the bubble lasted.

It didn’t last and now they are desperately trying to pin the fallout on crimes “inherited” from a Republican president. Fortunately, voters aren’t buying it and Republicans are poised for big gains in November. The moral of all this is that government intervention beyond creating and enforcing the rules nearly always winds up with disastrous results. Personally, I’m for gridlock. Since passing legislation that mandates the entire law making portion of the federal government take a 4 year vacation is unrealistic, gridlock is the next best thing. Friedrich Hayek once wrote:

“Hitler did not have to destroy democracy; he merely took advantage of the decay of democracy and at the critical moment obtained the support of many to whom, though they detested Hitler, he yet seemed the only man strong enough to get things done.”

If we’ve learned anything from the latest administration, it’s that the two party system’s greatest virtue is its tendency to curb government action. The president and both houses of Congress are simply too much power for one party to handle. Any circumstance which causes either party to exclaim in frustration that that they just can’t get anything done because of politics should be sweet music to the ears of the electorate. Two more months and hopefully we’ll be there.

“Teamsters Union 988 is holding the grand opening this weekend for its new union hall, which is expected to feature Teamsters President James P. Hoffa. But it has become a sour moment for other labor leaders because the Teamsters didn’t use union construction workers. They were told by the Teamsters that union contractors cost too much.”

Lets us pause on this gorgeous labor day to bask in the warm glow of union hypocrisy in the face of free market reality…

Grrrr

“Mead, who says that he is a skeptic about climate policy rather than climate science…”

This is the best articulation of the position that most of the reasonable skeptics have been trying to articulate since global warming became an issue. It’s not the science that most of us object to, it’s the policy derived from and driving the conclusions to that science.

Meanwhile, as many as a third of Democrats at one point were polled as believing George Bush was in some way behind the 9/11 attacks. In other words they believed a sitting president actively conspired to perpetrate the largest attack on American soil in the history of the republic. Not only did he know about (or even orchestrate) the attacks but he was able to conspire with a vast array of shady characters, broad swaths of the American government, foreign agents in various countries and a whole cast of different people - and he kept them all quiet while thousands of people were murdered on live television. Also, he’s so stupid he can’t spell his last name without cue cards.

Seriously, it’s unbelievable. It’s not just a little off or a little quirky. It’s loony tunes. This is Lex Luthor, super villain, comic book stuff. If it happened in an Arnold movie, you might go “Whoa, hold on now.” And the current president actually appointed a guy to his cabinet who believed in it. Van Jones didn’t just show up randomly at some campaign rally with his hacky sack and a “Bush is Hitler” sign and claim to be a Democrat. He was the Green Jobs Czar (whatever that is). He’s an actual Democrat, not a vagrant at a Glen Beck rally.

People who believe Obama is a Muslim basically are saying he’s lying about his faith. In the grand scheme of things - even if it turned out to be true - it’s a non-issue. Certainly the right would pillory him mercilessly but so what? They already do that. The birth certificate lie would undoubtedly get him impeached but it’s still a comparably petty crime from a moral perspective. People who believe Bush was behind 9/11 are calling him a murderer and a war criminal on a par with Adolph Hitler or Pol Pot. If it’s true, he’s a despicable villain who should be executed.

All the kooks deserve to be called out and exposed. Every president has crazy critics - it goes with the territory. It’s just that it’s very hard to swallow the left wing whining about the unfair treatment Barack Obama is getting while we’re barely 2 years removed from the appalling smear campaign waged against George W Bush. I’m having a hard time feeling sympathy.

Yet it’s one thing not to encourage a rumor and quite another actively to defend Obama. So far, no Republican has offered a full-throated defense of Obama against the Muslim rumors. Republican leaders simply see no political advantage in an issue that may be helping them to undermine Obama and the Democrats ahead of a crucial election. That’s especially the case now, when a significant majority of their base seems driven by intense dislike of the president.

No, it’s not. Left wing journalists are desperate - DESPERATE - to find some angle by which they can fight the Republican headwinds this year. This is ridiculous, stupid, foolish nonsense. It’s not a newsworthy event. In fact, I’m not convinced it’s even an actual event. The newspapers do much more to fuel this sort of idiotic thinking by constantly talking, discussing, evaluating and polling about it than Republicans do by - what was it again? - not bringing the issue up out of the blue to defend the president against irrelevant, random poll data? Come on.

No serious Republican anywhere is arguing that Obama is a Muslim, that he supports terrorists or anything else of the sort. If there are any, they’re fools and likely believe in other crackpot theories such as: the moon landings were a hoax, 9/11 was a scam perpetrated by the government and a race of sentient reptiles lives beneath the earth controlling our thoughts.

There are kooks out there. They believe in stupid things. And, they attend campaign rallies, write blogs, vote and otherwise involve themselves in the democratic process. There’s no need for Republicans to stand up and take responsibility for every nut case out there that the media tries to pin with a right wing label. I don’t seem to remember any “objective” news stories demanding Obama address the “9/11 was orchestrated by Bush” kooks while he was whipping the anti-war crowd into a frenzy during the last campaign season. I’m pretty sure the percentage of Democrats who bought into that bull was similarly high. The Republicans should ignore this BS and focus on important issues - like getting Peolsi out of the Speaker’s chair in November.

“…many Americans also remain convinced that Saddam had WMDs, even though inspectors haven’t found any in the seven years since the invasion. Still, as of 2006, half of Americans believed that, according to Harris. Who knows where they got that idea?”

To explain America’s stupidity, the link points to an article about Dick Cheney implying that it’s all his crazy old fault that Americans still believe in WMD’s. You get the impression that Cheney is obsessed with some lie he and Bush made up as an excuse to convince Americans to allow Bush to invade Iraq and avenge his Daddy while the real enemy was hiding in Afghanistan. Let’s see if you can guess who made the following statements:

“I want to explain why I have decided, with the unanimous recommendation of my national security team, to use force in Iraq; why we have acted now; and what we aim to accomplish.

Other countries possess weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. With Saddam, there is one big difference: He has used them. Not once, but repeatedly. Unleashing chemical weapons against Iranian troops during a decade-long war. Not only against soldiers, but against civilians, firing Scud missiles at the citizens of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Iran. And not only against a foreign enemy, but even against his own people, gassing Kurdish civilians in Northern Iraq.”

Did you guess George W. Bush? Wrong. This was Bill Clinton’s justification for bombing targets in Iraq in 1998. Bush was governor of Texas at the time. Later in this speech, Clinton said this:

“And mark my words, he (Hussein) will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them.”

Following what the left might have called an unprovoked attack on a foreign country if Bush had engineered it, Newsweek’s 1998 Perspectives issue had this to say about WMD’s and Iraq (Here is the Newsweek link but you have to pay or join to read the full article. I have the physical issue on my bookshelf):

“Pacifying Iraq might involve an invasion, followed by an occupation of perhaps 10 years … To rid the world of Saddam will require leadership from a United States administration that can focus on the job at hand; which is supported by a thoughtful Congress, and which can explain unpalatable truths to a public that trusts its leaders to do the right thing. But that’s another movie, and not the one we’re watching now.”

That’s a pretty impressive prediction given what has happened since. Is Newsweek proud of its extraordinary prescience in predicting what success would take in Iraq? No. Instead we find them shamelessly berating Dick Cheney as some crazy old coot who keeps spreading a lie that Newsweek itself promulgated with cavalier certainty in 1998. Bill Clinton, Newsweek argued, was too concerned with popular opinion to do the right thing in Iraq so we had to wait for a president who would “focus on the job at hand.” Guess who that turned out to be?

The current Newsweek also has this to say:

“In a June 2007 NEWSWEEK poll, four years after the invasion of Iraq, 41 percent believed Saddam was involved in 9/11—even though President Bush had said otherwise as early as September 2003.”

Interesting. Here’s what else Newsweek’s 1998 Perspectives issue had to say:

“As an added precaution, the bureau’s New York command center will be manned round the clock by the city’s joint terrorist task force, made up of the FBI, the New York City police and other federal agents. Still, says the bureau official: ‘I don’t think we’re going to see anything too terribly quickly. It takes a lot for them to plan one of these things.’”

This high alert was in response to Clinton’s bombing of Baghdad. The heading of the blurb reads: “Will bin Laden retaliate?” It also mentions that the greater threat from bin Laden was perceived to be overseas. Guess who they were concerned about in New York? Sure, we’ve proven there were no direct links between Hussein and bin Laden regarding 9/11 but the threat from Iraq - crystal clear in this article - became much greater after bin Laden succeeded in knocking down the World Trade Center. Bush’s greatest failure in Iraq was focusing on the WMD angle for justification rather than the obvious threat that a dictator like Hussein posed to America in a post 9/11 world. That angle was conceived long before he was president but don’t ask Newsweek to remember it.

Further, as history is clearly bearing out today, Iraq was never going to be the quagmire that Afghanistan is. There is no stable culture or economy in Afghanistan to sustain a serious republic. Iraq is a different story. Bush, Cheney and their administration correctly recognized this. Much is made of the fact that “Iraq never attacked us.” Neither did Afghanistan. Iraq was strategically the more attractive battleground.

The fact is, the Bush administration deposed a brutal dictator who was the sworn enemy of the United States and made room for a serious ally in a region where radical fundamentalism has a firm foothold. The intelligence about weapons of mass destruction was compiled and advertised by previous administrations, United Nations officials and international allies of the United States. Newsweek in their 1998 article noted that Saddam Hussein had “without question, devoted substantial resources to developing what we now call by the flat phrase weapons of mass destruction.” Now, they’re blaming Dick Cheney for promulgating the lie “dumb” Americans continue to believe.

Last but certainly not least, guess who’s taking credit for the Iraq success? This guy:

Witness:

“…the president is keeping a promise he made on the campaign trail for the respoinsible [sic] withdrawal of US troops (all troops are scheduled to leave by the end of 2011, per the Status Of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government).”

Almost daily, Barack Obama complains about the “mess” of an economy he inherited from George Bush. It’s a problem he’s significantly worsened. Meanwhile, he’s actually managed not to screw up Iraq - even though he vociferously opposed the strategic decisions that ultimately brought us victory. In fact, for all his campaign hysteria, he retained one significant Bush era cabinet member. Since he’s always ready to blame previous administrations for his problems, it will be interesting to see if President Obama remembers to give credit for the success he inherited in Iraq.

“Ultimately, as a matter of principle, it would not make sense for us to have Ann speak to a conference about ‘taking America back’ when she clearly does not recognize that the ideals to be espoused there simply do not include the radical and very ‘unconservative’ agenda represented by GOProud.”

Wrong. I can’t stand these guys. These are people that want to use the power of government to impose their values on the rest of society and there’s nothing conservative about it. The war against pornography, the war against gays, the war for decency, the culture war, whatever. This is all garbage and in the American sense of the word, it has nothing to do with conservatism as a political ideology. It’s certainly not right wing either.

Imagine a slanted line on a piece of paper starting at the top left and moving to the bottom right of your page. At the extreme top left, you have total government power in the hands of a small number of unchecked individuals or a single dictator (Hitler, Stalin, Castro, the Caesars, the Soviets). At the extreme far right you have anarchy (no government at all). Technically, true communism belongs on the right side as well but that happens only after the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the fact is, if true communism were a realistic objective we wouldn’t need communists to make it happen. We would have all been sharing from the start. In real humanity, someone has to force the sharing and obviously, those with the power to enforce such conditions will have the advantage of exploiting those who don’t. But I’m digressing from my digression.

This is why Jonah Goldberg describes Hitler and the Nazis as left wing. They represent a government with total control over the lives of its citizens and as much of that power as possible devolved into the hands of as few people as possible. In German terms, Hitler could perhaps be described as a conservative in the sense that he wanted to destroy the Weimar Republic (he succeeded) and move society back to the glory days of the Kaiser. In America - land of the free - he would certainly bear no resemblance to conservatism in any sense of the word.

Hitler and the Nazis called themselves socialists. Socialists today call them fascists. Whatever you call them, they wanted to force into existence a world of their myopic imagination and use whatever means at their disposal to accomplish it. That’s far removed from the anarchists, the classical liberals, the founders of this country and anyone else on the true right wing of the slanted line described above. America was founded with the central idea of liberty foremost in the mind of its founders. The several branches of government and written Constitution enumerating limited powers were designed to maximize the freedom of America’s citizens.

And here we come back to the folks at WorldNet. I don’t know everything the people who represent that site stand for but this particular incident does not demonstrate anything conservative. Take a look at what else Joseph Farah has to say about it:

“And understand what I am saying here: I do not suggest it is wrong for Christians to associate with homosexuals, as some have charged. In fact, if we love them – or, as Ann Coulter suggests, ‘like’ them – we should engage them. We should bring them the truth. We should share the good news of the Gospel. And that, however uncomfortable it is, means confronting them with their sin – just as we would any other sinner.”

This is what you call attempting to force your own view of morality into the life of someone else. Unless you’re talking about the Puritans, there’s nothing American being conserved here. Joseph Farah’s Constitution is not the one signed by Benjamin Franklin. It’s the one signed by Saint Matthew the Evangelist. Farah is trying to conserve Biblical values, not American values. A little further on, he says this:

“What will happen as a result of her appearance is that a compromise will be made with sin. Sin will be condoned or appeased. A conservative icon will find accommodation with a sin that would undermine the foundations of Western civilization, the Judeo-Christian ethic and the most basic biblical standards of sexual morality.”

Actually, the “foundations of Western civilization” were undermined two thousand years ago by a guy named Jesus Christ. At least that’s how the pagan Greeks and Romans felt about it. But let’s leave aside this man’s total ignorance of history and look at his other foolish sentence: “… a compromise will be made with sin.”

In other words, Ann Coulter is not free to speak to a group of gay Republicans because she will be condoning their personal behavior. Joseph Farah is not just against gay marriage or gay adoption; he’s against being gay. The irony is that he is doing to the gays exactly what radical atheists are doing to the Christians: trying to prevent people from behaving in a way he would prefer they didn’t behave. That’s not conservative. It’s not American. Hell, it’s not even Christian.

“Given that they are such a small minority in this nation, it is odd that so many of our fellow citizens see them as such a threat. Yes, the 9/11 attacks were horrific, but they were more about optics than actual harm. The economy was already taking a hit before the Twin Towers fell. The reaction of the nation to seeing two major buildings in New York fall on T.V. has boosted the attack out of proportion. While the loss of even a single life is to be condemned and the devastation these deaths caused the families of those killed, more than this number of teens are killed every year in car crashes. These are also tragic losses but we do not make the kind of high profile issue of it that the 9/11 attacks are.”

Well, except that car crashes are random, individual events. Except that car crashes are not willfully perpetrated by someone specifically intending to take innocent life. Except that car crashes are the product of free people taking a calculated and understood risk getting into a car - teens or not. Walking to the water cooler to grab a drink between meetings and being blown to smithereens by a lunatic with five o’clock shadow and a box cutter who thinks his god told him to kill Americans and Jews is not remotely similar.

Here’s what the kooks over at the Kos don’t get: “the loss of even a single life” is not always to be condemned. Steve Irwin died from a stingray barb. Tragic and untimely? Of course, but who are we condemning for it? The stingray? Irwin died in the course of living his life as he chose. Nobody took his life from him. Todd Beamer’s life was taken from him by terrorists. They intended to take it. This is in no possible way comparable to a teenager dying in a car accident - even at the hands of a drunk driver. It’s mass murder. Why does this have to be explained?

I find it ironic that in America, it seems we’re constantly ready to declare war on every sort of behavior that might threaten our own life (smoking a cigarette, shooting up heroin, not wearing a seat belt, not wearing a motorcycle helmet, not buying health insurance, eating a cheeseburger) but the minute someone specifically kills someone else, we’re filled with excuses for the behavior. Suddenly we’re lectured not to be so quick about judging others. Shouldn’t this be the other way around? Speaking of stupidity, what does this mean exactly?

“… they were more about optics than actual harm.”

Optics? Were they declaring war on Isaac Newton or something? If he’s trying to say that the intent of the terrorists was more about perception than the actual physical results, so what? Maybe this was a calculated effort to destroy America’s morale by manipulating the executive branch to massively increase law enforcement through a police state thus slowly eroding morale and faith in the American political system. Maybe a bunch of idiots in the desert thought it would be easy to take over an airplane, figured out planes full of fuel made bigger explosion than empty ones and decided to crash them into the biggest targets they could find. I tend to side with the second analysis but it’s an irrelevant discussion, not to mention an extremely ignorant statement. Talk to someone who was in New York City that day and ask them how much “actual harm” they think was perpetrated. Can we convince this blogger to strike up the discussion with a New York City police officer in a dark alley when nobody else is around?

As for the Mosque conversation that spawned this brain dead discussion in the first place, the whole dust up seems ridiculous. It’s obvious that building this thing so close to the scene of 9/11 was meant to stir up controversy. Bloomberg’s hyperbolic outbursts of phony tolerance aside, this is on purpose. It’s meant to make people like Sarah Palin angry. Unfortunately, the right are like a monkey in a cage getting prodded by an idiot trying to impress his girlfriend at the zoo. I can sympathize with the monkey but as long as he reacts to the stupid prank, the dummy with the stick is going to keep poking him. Why can’t we concentrate on more important subjects - like removing Bloombergian imbeciles from office altogether? Perhaps November will be a good start.

“The researchers, led by Dr Amanda Cross of the National Cancer Institute, also found that the biggest carnivores among us were more likely to be non-Hispanic white, current smokers, to have a higher BMI, and to consume more beverages and total energy daily.”

Also they don’t wear seat belts, support the Arizona law, watch Fox news, vote Republican, hate kittens and celebrate Christmas; the white, cow killing jerks.

“When asked by Judge Napolitano why he should not be held responsible for potential deaths caused by the leak, Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, answered that he contacted the White House about the leaks before they were released and asked them to review them.

Someone in this administration has blood on their hands, and Congress must demand a full disclosure of who knew what and when. It is imperative that this scandal is investigated and not covered up.”

Politicizing the President’s role in this seems almost worse than the leak itself. I agree with much the Browns say in this article about Obama’s mismanagement of the war (and I wonder where all the loony left wing war protesters who compared Bush to Hitler are now). What I find unconscionable is the right wing impulse to hang the President out to dry on this matter for precisely the wrong reasons.

Julian Assange is a terrorist. If the administration made a mistake here, it’s that they have so far failed to clarify this fact and bring the man to justice. When a foreign agent seeks attention from the President of the United States via leverage that could risk the lives of American soldiers and citizens, he should be dignified with only one response: “Release the information at your peril. We will find you and bring you to justice.”

Obama apparently chose not to dignify this attempt at blackmail with any response at all. Obviously as President, he has information that the rest of us do not. Provided that he is putting significant effort into capturing Julian Assange and prosecuting him, Americans should stand behind him. Trivializing the President’s difficult response to this matter for political gain is a disservice to the office and the country.