Daily Digest for Monday
February 24, 2014
THE FOUNDATION
"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite." --James Madison, Federalist No. 45, 1788TOP 5 RIGHT HOOKS
UAW Challenges VW Vote
The UAW isn't taking their recent defeat at Volkswagen so well. The union powerhouse, which has seen its membership decline to a quarter of what it once was, needed badly to win the unionization vote at Chattanooga's plant so as to make inroads in the non-union South. Now the sore losers have decided to appeal to the U.S. National Labor Relations Board to void the results and schedule a new vote, citing "interference by politicians and outside special interest groups." And why not? When the feds bailed out Detroit in 2009, it was actually a bailout of the UAW. They're just coming back for seconds.Comment | Share
FCC Media Monitors?
The FCC proposed sending government monitors and researchers into newsrooms with the alleged purpose of studying the news-selection process. After an uproar, however, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler said his agency will shelve the study indefinitely until the whole thing can be redesigned. Such interference would seem to violate the First Amendment, but the relationship between this administration and the Leftmedia is already so tightly woven that their purposes are one and the same. The media's token resistance is rather pitiful.Comment | Share
Evidence of Job Loss
HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius may stubbornly insist that ObamaCare isn't destroying jobs, but the Advanced Medical Technology Association, an industry trade group, says otherwise. Just the medical device tax "has resulted in employment reductions of approximately 14,000 industry workers and forgone hiring of 19,000 workers," the group says. "The total job impact of the tax on industry employment was approximately 33,000." On top of that, the indirect effect of the tax was to eliminate "as many as 165,000 jobs." Jobs are also being sent overseas, while companies cut back on research and development, slow down investment and forego plans for new facilities. But Sebelius says "there is absolutely no evidence" of this, so move along.Comment | Share
Manchin Repeals Call for Repeal
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) last week said "I will vote tomorrow to repeal [the Affordable Care Act], but I want to fix the problems in it." Perhaps he got a phone call from the White House, because he soon repealed his call for repeal. "I have never supported repealing the Affordable Care Act because I came to Washington to find solutions to our country's problems," he said in a self-contradictory statement. Fixing our country's problems demands repeal of ObamaCare. So which is it, Joe?Comment | Share
Minimum Politics
Barack Obama says that raising the minimum wage "is not just good policy; it also happens to be good politics, because the truth of the matter is the overwhelming majority of Americans think that raising the minimum wage is a good idea. That is true for independents, that is true for Democrats, and it's true for Republicans." He does have his finger on the polls on this one. Who doesn't want to make more money? But he's dead wrong on the policy, and those of us who know better should continue to remind voters that the real minimum wage is and always will be $0.Comment | Share
For more, visit Right Hooks.
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RIGHT ANALYSIS
Now That We've Spent Trillions, Let's Spend Some More
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Well, thankfully we're done with all that, according to the reported details of Obama's 2015 budget. We're done with austerity. Wait ... what?
That's the word The Washington Post uses in coverage of the budget, due out March 4: "With the 2015 budget request, Obama will call for an end to the era of austerity that has dogged much of his presidency and to his efforts to find common ground with Republicans." Apparently, the Post thinks "austerity" means the GOP's hard-won but paltry cuts in the spending growth rate known as the sequester. The budget deficit has been "cut in half" over the last few years, though that's a pathetically low bar -- it remains higher than any deficit before Obama's presidency. It's at a historic high both nominally and as a percentage of GDP, and Obama has doubled the marketable debt in just six years.
As Investor's Business Daily writes, "[E]ven with these modest declines [in annual spending], the federal government will still spend $561 billion more this year than it did in 2008. That's a 19% increase at a time when inflation rose just 9%." Austerity? Please.
Evidently Obama, too, thinks he's achieved fiscal responsibility by making deficits nominally lower, meaning he's got more money to spend. Much of his proposed spending spree is on the same old failed areas of education and job training, while his budget contains nothing on entitlement reform. In fact, The Wall Street Journal aptly notes that the proposal "will serve more as a political treatise than a fiscal blueprint." That actually pretty well sums up the Obama presidency.
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No Really: Stand Your Ground
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| Leftist self-defense |
Dionne opens with a very reasonable set of premises: "The law is supposed to solve problems, not create them. Laws should provide as much clarity as possible, not expand the realms of ambiguity and subjectivity. Laws ought to bring about the practical results their promoters claim they'll achieve. And at its best, the law can help us to live together more harmoniously." So far, so good.
But then he attempts to advance beyond these parroted platitudes into an area in which he is apparently utterly unfamiliar, namely, analysis. He begins with his conclusion -- so often the case with leftists, who begin with the endpoint at which they wish to arrive and then proceed backward. Dionne continues, "By all these measures, 'stand your ground' laws are a failure. These statutes make the already difficult task of jurors even harder. They aggravate mistrust across racial lines. They appear to increase, rather than decrease, crime."
But "stand your ground" laws merely enable people faced with deadly force to use a lawfully carried firearm and, if necessary, fire back in self-defense instead of being shot in the back while running away. They are "failures," according to Dionne, however, and confuse stupid jurors (reading between the lines), "aggravate mistrust across racial lines" (translation: make blacks and Hispanics distrust whites), and -- bonus! -- increase (notwithstanding facts mentioned above) crime. Please, E.J., do us a favor and don't offer any similar "thoughtful opinions" on World War II or the Cold War -- we're pretty sure we know where you've pigeonholed the U.S. in the whole "good-guy, bad-guy" spectrum of things. As a helpful aside on using logic, one generally does not use the exception to a rule to "prove" the rule wrong, as Dionne attempted to do with the much-ballyhooed case of George Zimmerman and its heir-apparent, the Michael Dunn case -- a case in which "stand your ground" shouldn't have been in play.
Dionne's central point? "Stand-your-ground laws shift the balance of power on the streets to those who carry weapons." Backwards thinking at its best. "Stand-your-ground" laws do not "shift the balance of power to those who carry weapons." They instead allow potential victims to defend themselves. That right precedes the Second Amendment or any state law. Who does Dionne think should have the power? The thug who has no morals or no scruples other than power? Or the law-abiding gun-owner, who would otherwise be required to run away? As far as we're concerned, the answer -- like Dionne's "analysis" -- is a "no-brainer."
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For more, visit Right Analysis.
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TOP 5 RIGHT OPINION COLUMNS
- Star Parker: Yes, We Should Discuss the Clintons' Past
- Arnold Ahlert: Obama's Fascist Communication Commission
- John C. Goodman: Worse Than Death Panels: Cookbook Medicine
- Ken Blackwell: Before We Leap
- Peggy Noonan: Whose Side Are We On?
OPINION IN BRIEF
Columnist Ken Blackwell: "[W]hen conservatives argued for cutbacks in federal outlays for Medicare, President Obama's Treasury Sec., Tim Geithner, slapped them down. Forty percent of all children born in America today, Geithner said, qualify for Medicare. That would be, of course, the 40% (actually, now 42%) who are born out-of-wedlock. And fully 48% of first births are out-of-wedlock. Those who want to reduce the size of the federal government and think we can overturn marriage are deluding themselves. Ending marriage is the HOV lane to government dependency. President Obama knows this. That's why the White House created 'Julia' in 2012. Julia is their fictional character who goes through her entire life wedded to government programs. No other marriage is mentioned. At 29, Julia 'decides' to have a child. No husband is in this picture. Julia has no father, no brothers, no male friends. The only man in her life is Barack Obama. This is what you get when you abolish marriage."Comment | Share
Columnist Star Parker: "In a recent Gallup poll, 71 percent between 18 and 34 years old said having a child out of wedlock is morally acceptable, 49 percent said pornography is morally acceptable, and 48 percent said teenage sex is morally acceptable. Can anyone really believe that a society with these kinds of values can and will have limited government? We cannot underestimate the influence Bill Clinton, America's first 60's generation president, played in creating this kind of popular culture. Once it was okay that the President of the United States could betray his nation and his wife and fornicate with a young intern in the Oval Office, the door was open to almost anything. We also cannot underestimate the impact on our popular culture and values that the wife of this man -- a woman who now aspires to be our next president -- was willing to tolerate this behavior and rationalize it away. This is not the behavior of a strong, courageous woman but that of a weak, unprincipled woman."
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The Gipper: "Building a more peaceful world requires a sound strategy and the national resolve to back it up. When radical forces threaten our friends, when economic misfortune creates conditions of instability, when strategically vital parts of the world fall under the shadow of Soviet power, our response can make the difference between peaceful change or disorder and violence. ... Our foreign policy must be rooted in realism, not naiveté or self-delusion."
Burt Prelutsky: "Obama, allegedly a Constitutional scholar, has succeeded in convincing himself that the three branches of government are the Executive, the Executive and the Executive."
Comedian Argus Hamilton: "Obama warned Ukraine there will be consequences if democracy is not restored in the nation. Our options are limited. The White House would send its envoy extraordinaire to Kiev to deal with the crisis, but Dennis Rodman can't be in two places at once."
Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!
Nate Jackson for The Patriot Post Editorial Team
Join us in daily prayer for our Patriots in uniform -- Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen -- standing in harm's way in defense of Liberty, and for their families.
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