The Obama administration is considering it. The idea is to have the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) just start handing out green cards to illegals.

USCIS, a part of the Obama administration, outlines the ideas in a draft memo that includes the possibility of issuing green cards to tens of thousands who entered the country illegally. "In the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, CIS can extend benefits and/or protections to many individuals and groups by issuing new guidance and regulations," the memo advises.
Illegal immigration in Arizona

It was prepared by senior aides for CIS Director Alejandro N. Mayorkas and made public by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who last month asked President Obama for assurances that rumors of a reprieve for illegal immigrants were unfounded. "This memo gives credence to our concerns that the administration will go to great lengths to circumvent Congress and unilaterally execute a back-door amnesty plan," Grassley told ProPublica, a non-profit investigative team.

The Obama administration cannot legalize the entire illegal immigrant population this way, much less put them on a path to citizenship. But it is a democratically unaccountable start.

One more thing: Barney Frank's Internet Gambling Regulation and Consumer Protection and Enforcement Act legalizes most online gambling at the federal level but allows states to ban betting within their borders. The Defense of Marriage Act witholds recognition of same-sex marriage at the federal level but allows states to permit it within their borders. Why is the first piece of legislation essential and the second intolerable?

Congressman Barney Frank's (D-MA) bill legalizing online gambling has advanced. Jacob Sullum has more over at Reason. Personally, I see this as the first piece of legislation in this Congress that advances rather than curtails personal freedom. But I'm more interested in Frank's reasoning here.

"Some adults will spend their money foolishly," Frank said, "but it is not the purpose of the federal government to prevent them legally from doing it." But this is the same Barney Frank whose Wall Street financial reform bill that, among many other things, tells people what kind of credit they can and cannot have. Like his anti-gambling colleagues, Frank is all for individual liberty until those liberties might be exercised in activities he deems unwise.

We at the Washington Times today explain why senators are derelict in their duty if they don't do more investigation into troubling questions about Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan's ethics.

Ms. Kagan, the U.S. solicitor general, was directly responsible for altering a key medical report in a way that stacked the deck in favor of keeping the barbaric practice of partial-birth abortion legal. She then gave testimony to the SenateJudiciary Committee that appeared to veer from the actual record.

The ethical questions are threefold. First, was it unethical for her to alter the original medical-report language? Second, was it unethical for her to fail to inform the courts when a series of judges relied explicitly on her altered language in reaching their decisions to keep partial-birth abortion legal for an entire extra decade? Third, did her testimony under oath before the SenateJudiciary Committee veer far enough from the actual record to constitute a major ethical breach?

These are far from the only reasons, of course, to oppose Ms. Kagan's nomination. She believes government "doles" out speech rights at its pleasure. She believes government may prohibit political pamphlets. She openly flouted the law to harm the military in a time of war. She is so hostile to gun rights that the NRA abandoned its usual silence on Supreme Court nominees and openly opposes her. She is a "transnationalist" who would at times subject American courts to foreign law. And she believes judges should overweigh the scales of justice in favor of the downtrodden, rather than being neutral arbiters.

This is bad stuff.

Let me take this opportunity, by the way, to lay a garland on the shoulders of Alabama's U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee. He has done a superb, brave, dignified, firm, polite, respectful, but tough-minded job -- an often lonely job -- at bringing up many of these issues, at exposing Ms. Kagan's record, at explaining principled reasons for dissent without ever getting nasty or unfair or smearing Ms. Kagan's character. He has laid out a compelling case against her, day after day, week after week, without enough public credit from me or anybody else on the right. Look at his web sites (personal and committee) to see the wealth of information he has gathered and the huge amount of work he and his staff have done. Many kudos to the good senator.

In a Wall Street Journal article earlier this week, Jon Hilsenrath quoted the Stanford economist Robert Hall as claiming that there hasn't been much stimulus spending because of state and local government fiscal contraction: 

Robert Hall, a Stanford University professor, says there hasn't actually been that much extra government spending overall, because the increased federal spending has been largely offset by a large contraction in state and local government outlays. By the third quarter of 2009, he notes, federal government spending added $66 billion to economic output, less than 0.5% of total output, offset by a $43.1 billion contraction in state and local government spending, he says. 

This passage gives a misleading impression of the size of the government's response to the crisis, because it omits much of Hall's analysis of the stimulus. In order to assess the impact of fiscal policy, Hall broke up all the government spending in response to the recession into the two parts that would have varying spending multipliers: direct purchases of goods and services (which in Hall's model have a higher multiplier), and increased benefits and tax cuts and rebates (which have a significantly lower multiplier).

Hilsenrath's description only accounts for spending on purchases. He leaves out the stimulus funds that flowed to benefits or tax rebates, which funds accounted for over half of the spending in the third quarter of 2009 (depending on how you count "spending." Tax rebates, for instance, would show up as lost revenue instead of increased expenditure). In his assessment, Hall includes all above-trend government spending, or fiscal expansion, as stimulus, and not just spending included in the 2009 stimulus bill. Hall's measurement of spending, which includes automatic stabilizers, is intended to give a better picture of overall fiscal stimulus.

Here, from a paper Hall sent to me, is a graph showing the the extra government purchases of goods and services, the portion of the stimulus spending that Hilsenrath refers to:

Clearly federal spending on purchases was elevated through the first quarter of 2010, while state and local spending on purchases steadily decreased. 

And here is the rest of the stimulus spending, composed of tax rebates and benefits. Note the larger scale on the left axis:

Eyeballing this second graph, it looks like the government spent about an annualized extra $200 billion on benefits in the third quarter of 2009, far more than the annualized $66 billion portion Hilsenrath mentioned in the WSJ article. 

Given that Hilsenrath has omitted a majority of the stimulus from his discussion of Hall's work, it's unclear why someone would take this passage at face value as an argument that the stimulus "worked," as David Leonhardt of the New York Times did. It's reminiscent of the liberal blogger Ezra Klein arguing that there has been no net stimulus: if you can't tell whether fiscal policy has been expansionary or not, shouldn't that introduce some doubt about whether it was effective?

Today on the Main Site:

Have the Republicans Learned Their Lesson? And do they deserve to win big this November? And if they do win, do they know what to do? Can they ever be trusted again? A pre-election symposium, from our Summer Issue. Contributors include Fred Barnes, David Boaz, Jim Geraghty, Jim DeMint, Grover Norquist, Dick Armey, and Michael Barone.

Sic Transit Tony Hayward: BP's Abused and Fumbling CEO by Andrew B. Wilson: But he committed far fewer gaffes than the august Obama administration.

Arizona Police and Tribal Police by James M. Thunder: Guess who our president prefers dealing with.

Leaving Sandpoint by Ben Stein: So long, small town America.

Lady Manningham-Buller Lets Down the Side by George H. Wittman: There was a time when security service chiefs retired and disappeared into the gentle night -- not anymore.

Contra Fabrizio: A Paean to My Book by Mark Goldblatt: ...and to the future of e-books.

Those '70s Show by Jay D. Homnick: A paternal guide to government at its most incapable.

What to Watch for:

BP's Hayward defends tenure, spill response (WSJ) 

July becomes deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan (AP) 

Rangel trial has Democrats nervous for November (NY)

SEC charges Texas billionaires with strong GOP ties to millions in security fraud (Wash Post) 

AZ governor files appeal to immigration law injunction (CNN) 

Clip of the Day:

Rangel Ethics hearing opening remarks

People who live in glass houses -- and this is a category that includes many reporters, pundits, and leading political figures -- love to throw stones. They especially like it when they are all aiming at the same target and boiling over with righteous indignation -- to mention two of the common attributes of mobs. Tony Hayward, the just deposed CEO at BP, had a legitimate point when he said that he had been publicly "demonized and vilified" over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. That said, through his own fumbling and fragility, Hayward made the perfect fall guy.

"The Most Hated and Clueless Man in America," shouted a headline in the New York Daily News. "What Not to Say When your Company is Ruining the World," Newsweek fulminated in another headline. Newsweek taunted Hayward for "making gaffe after gaffe defending his company's response to the Gulf oil spill." And then there was never-let-a-crisis (or a juicy oil spill)-go-to-waste Rahm Emanuel, who was at his sneering best in an ABC News interview:

Well, to quote Tony Hayward, he's got his life back, as he would say… and I think we can all conclude that Tony Hayward is not going to have a second career in PR consulting. This has just been part of a long line of PR gaffes and mistakes.

President Obama got into the fun when he declared that he would have fired Hayward if he (Obama) were in charge of things at BP. "He wouldn't be working for me after any of those statements," Obama said, speaking of a man he had never met and speaking of a situation (running a large business enterprise) that is far removed from his own knowledge and experience. During the same interview, the president made his famous remark about going down to the Gulf to talk to people, "so I know whose ass to kick."

Apart from holding the top job at BP, what did Hayward say or do to merit all this huffing and puffing? Let us sort through all these terrible "gaffes."

Hayward got off on the wrong foot on May 18, stating that the Gulf is "a very big ocean" and "the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest." This infuriated a lot of people -- beginning with those most inclined to fits of hysteria, which is to say the environmental activists -- and it set the stage for the media to pounce on any comments or actions that they might consider inappropriate, such as daring to appear before the American public in anything other than sackcloth and ashes.

On May 30, Hayward told reporters, "There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I would love my life back." This was whiney, to be sure, and cause for much derision. Then on June 19, Hayward was observed to be taking part in a boat race around the Isle of Wight. Emanuel and other self-appointed critics howled with outrage that BP's CEO was not devoting himself to managing the crisis 24/7.

And that's it -- those are all the "gaffes" committed by Tony Hayward.

Where he really went wrong, I would submit, was to look rattled, and even scared, during the Grand Inquisition that took place over several press conferences and the Congressional hearing during which one screaming and oil-smeared protester called for his imprisonment and had to be wrestled to the ground by half a dozen policemen. Nothing excites would-be attackers so much as the whiff of fear emanating from a potential victim.

BUT IT IS WORTH NOTING the media's bias and selectivity in making sport of Hayward. If BP's CEO was to be pilloried for taking any kind of a break during the midst of the crisis, why not the president? After all, the U.S. commander-in-chief made a big show of declaring himself to be charge of the whole operation and he publicly vowed that he would not rest until the hole had been plugged and damage cleaned up. Yet Obama drew little criticism for playing several rounds of golf and taking no fewer than three mini-vacations in the three months following the Deepwater Horizon explosion on April 20 (i.e., the first to Asheville, N. C., just three days after the event, the next to Chicago over Memorial Day weekend, and the last to Bar Harbor, Maine, on July 17).

If "gaffe" is used in the normal sense of the word -- meaning a clumsy error, faux pas, or foolish blunder -- surely U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar committed a number of gaffes back in May when he repeatedly referred to BP as "British Petroleum" (a name that the company had dropped a dozen years ago) and turned it into a term of opprobrium -- saying that it was his intention to "keep a boot to the neck of British Petroleum."

Salazar made it sound as though the evil Brits had wished this terrible thing upon their American cousins. Obama's demand that BP "pay up" -- big time -- had the same effect. From listening to Obama and Salazar you would not have known that the U.S. citizens and institutions are almost as deeply invested in the company (with a 39% share of BP's ownership) as their British counterparts (40%). Nor would you have known that BP has 24,000 employees in the U.S. compared to just over 10,000 in the U.K. That's right -- more than twice as many as employees in this country.

In macho man style, Salazar, a lawyer and career politician, even threatened to push BP "out of the way" if it didn't move faster. This was too much for Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, overseeing the federal response, who gasped: "Replace them with what?" (In a wonderfully sarcastic editorial on May 26, the Wall Street Journal noted that Salazar "wouldn't know an oil drill from a dental drill.")

Certainly, all the bluster and grandstanding by the president and his interior secretary did nothing to advance the common objective of plugging the hole and cleaning up the damage. It only succeeded in causing unnecessary offense to our British friends and allies. Nor were the American people impressed. In national polls, the great majority of Americans say that the government has done a poor job of responding to the crisis (the Obama administration has received lower scores on the oil spill than the Bush administration did on Hurricane Katrina).

Lo and behold, it now seems possible that Hayward could actually be right in his original prediction that the Gulf spill is likely to be much less of an environmental calamity than many believed.

On July 26 -- the same day that news came out of Hayward's resignation -- ABC News carried a special report saying that oil from the spill was becoming "increasingly hard to find." "At its peak last month," ABC News reported, "the oil slick was the size of Kansas, but it has been rapidly shrinking, now down to the size of New Hampshire.… The numbers don't lie: two weeks ago, skimmers picked up about 25,000 barrels of oily water. Last Thursday, they gathered just 200 barrels." Ed Overton, a professor of environmental studies at Louisiana State University, told ABC: "Mother Nature is doing what she is supposed to be doing and we're losing most of it [the spilt oil] to microbial degradation in the open ocean."

Admiral Allen -- who is still around to provide a sense of adult supervision in the cleanup operation and the final stages of permanently sealing the now-capped gusher -- agrees. The National Incident Commandant (his official title) observed: "It is becoming a very elusive bunch of oil for us to find and do anything about." Hundreds of skimmers have been idled as the size of the oil slick has diminished.

NONE OF THIS IS TO SUGGEST that the environmental damage -- and the damage to marine life -- won't be long-lasting and severe. Scientists worry that patches of oil below the surface could reduce oxygen levels and endanger many species of fish and marine mammals. No one can tell what the final outcome may be.

What is certain is that the blowout in the Gulf will be remembered for a very long time as an extremely traumatic and costly accident. Eleven crew members lost their lives in the ferocious explosion on the night of April 20 and thousands of people living and working along the Gulf coast have suffered real economic hardship. Without a doubt, as I endeavored to show in an earlier article in the Weekly Standard (entitled "Beyond Pathetic: BP's Gulf disaster was no surprise to those who understood the corporate culture," link), this was a preventable accident. This accident involved a whole chain of mistakes and failures of a human or managerial nature. It was human failure rather than technological failure. Was BP's top management (including both Hayward and his predecessor John Browne) at fault? Absolutely, say the insiders cited in my article.

One of the ways that BP began to go wrong almost a decade ago was in short-changing safety and basic engineering excellence in a dash for faster growth and higher profitability through international acquisitions and forging closer ties with political leaders in the United States and elsewhere. BP became more and more of a politicized, rent-seeking company and one that paid a lot of lip service to the easy part of safety (e.g. telling people to hold onto the hand rails and keep the lids fastened on their coffee cups) while slashing maintenance budgets on aging and rusty rigs.

It was under Browne's tenure as CEO that BP became the first major oil company to embrace "the clean energy future" that Obama and other leading Democrats so love to talk about. In fact, BP has been walking that walk and talking that talk for a dozen years already. BP never fails to play up all it is doing to promote solar panels, windmills, and other forms of alternate energy in its annual reports and other publications. Until the blowout, it went about calling itself the "green" petroleum company. The company and its people have been large political contributors. According to Politico, "During his time in the Senate and while running for president, Obama received a total of $77,051 from the oil giant and was the top recipient of BP PAC and individual money over the past ten years."

In today's context, it is funny to see how President Obama and others have seized upon oil gusher as an excuse to revive cap-and-trade (or cap-and-tax). The fact is, with help from Enron, BP invented cap and trade and has been trying to sell it to Congress. Browne brags about it in his memoir published early this year:

In order to know where to reduce carbon emissions, we wanted to develop a simple emissions trading scheme. It would become the first of its kind. And the person instrumental in helping us set this up was Fred Krupp, head of the Environmental Defense Fund, an environment NGO. We had come full circle. This NGO had virtually single-handedly halted the construction of the Trans Alaska Pipeline in the early 1970s.

And now BP has come full circle again. It is back to being regarded as evil incarnate by the left-wing politicians it has spent so much time and money courting over the past decade. As Tony Hayward could tell you, events since April 20 have shown just how ready this government is to throw its corporate benefactors under the bus for reasons of political expediency.

Andrew B. Wilson is a writer and business consultant.

W. James Antle III

Is the Republican party ready to regain power? Probably not -- we have seen that how Republicans behave in the minority, especially under a Democratic president, is no predictor of how they will act in the majority. As steadfast as they have been against President Obama, relatively few Republicans who voted for the TARP bailout, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, or our exercise in Mesopotamian nation-building have repented.

Yet it is a risk conservatives have no choice but to take. Hamstrung Democrats can paradoxically be better at stifling government growth than liberated Republicans, but ineffectual Democratic majorities are like dams: the odds of anything getting through are small, but the result of any breach is catastrophic. The Blue Dogs' sense of self-preservation failed them on the stimulus and health care, both of which cry out for repeal, with cap and trade lurking not far behind.

The Democrats have now done things only Republicans can undo. The question is whether the GOP will be up to the task. They'll have to strike quickly and decisively. Most of the good the last Republican majority did was in 1995-96. By 1998, they were into earmarks and trying to out-spend Bill Clinton, with another flurry of small-ball conservative reforms during the first two years of George W. Bush.

The most important thing is to improve the quality of Republicans in Washington. So far this project has been a mixed bag. On the positive side, there is Pat Toomey over Arlen Specter, Marco Rubio over Charlie Crist, and Rand Paul over Trey Grayson. But Mark Kirk and Michael Castle will give Senate Republicans a slight nudge to the left. Things look better in the House, where there is more new blood.

Politically, Republicans are probably better off winning enough seats to effectively check Obama without giving him a Gingrich figure to demonize in 2012. The GOP excels at this role. Unfortunately, the country needs more than gridlock -- it needs Republicans to make serious in-roads in the opposite direction. 

W. James Antle III is associate editor of  The American Spectator.

Dick Armey

The secret to victory in November for Republicans is simple: act like Republicans. When we act like ourselves, we win.

Republicans won control of Congress in 1994 because we had confidence in our principles and in the American people's willingness to understand and reward a national vision based on lower taxes, less government, and more freedom.

Along the way, however, Republicans lost sight of the reasons the American people put them in charge in the first place. They started acting like Democrats, with all the predictable consequences: explosive spending, Clinton-style "triangulation," and a destructive tendency to cater to interest groups rather than their constituencies. The result was equally predictable: in 2006 and 2008, the American public's patience ran out and it voted for the other party.

By the 2006 elections, Congress had stopped listening to the American people. They lost sight of our country's founding principles, which are Republican principles, and traded the liberty of their constituents for their own job security. Fiscal responsibility was lost in the fog of "compassionate" conservatism, a bureaucratic code word for political inconsistency and the enabling of Washington's spending addiction.
It is difficult to say whether Republican politicians have learned their lesson. It must be noted that congressional Republicans stood strong during the health care battle, calling attention to the problems within the Democrats' health care reform bill and proposing innovative plans of their own.

What is clear is that the American public isn't waiting on Republicans to get their act together. Insofar as the Tea Party movement is a conservative uprising, it is aimed at both parties equally -- as we most recently saw in the primary defeat of Sen. Bob Bennett in Utah. The message to Washington should be clear: having an "R" next to your name doesn't guarantee anything right now.

Never before have I seen such a strong public demand for small-government conservative leaders who are willing to lower taxes, rein in spending, and support private sector growth. Voters across the nation are joining the Tea Party movement to remind politicians of their oaths to defend the Constitution and serve constituents with honesty, integrity, and consistency.

Fortunately, a new generation of conservative leaders has emerged to answer this demand, promising to defeat the culture of corruption in Washington and to take America back in 2010. New Republican candidates like Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, Kentucky Senate nominee Rand Paul, and Utah Senate candidate Mike Lee are strong conservatives who have shown up for the fight and will provide a solid, fiscally responsible bloc of Senate votes. If Republican candidates continue to act boldly and renew our commitment to the principles of our Founding Fathers, we will take back the majority in November.

But we cannot forget that winning elections is just the beginning for the limited-government movement. Our job as citizens and taxpayers continues after the elections with our duty to hold legislators accountable for their actions on the local, state, and federal levels.

At the end of the day, liberty will be preserved by those not only with the courage to enter the fight but also the endurance to sustain it. 

Dick Armey is former House majority leader, chairman of FreedomWorks, and recently co-author of Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto.

Fred Barnes

Republicans have done a good job in opposing the initiatives of President Obama. They've rarely won, but they've turned his supposed triumphs -- the stimulus, health care, spending bills -- into albatrosses around the necks of Democratic members of Congress. This is important. Obama's political clout in Washington consists of one thing: the whopping Democratic majorities in the Senate and House. Take them away and he'll be politically crippled. He can't rely on his own popularity. As measured by presidential job approval, it's set a record for the swiftness of its decline -- again.

Republicans have Democrats right where they want them. But there's something missing. We learned from the Republican defeat in the Pennsylvania special election in May that it's not enough to be anti-Obama or to diss Nancy Pelosi. Many Democratic candidates can deal with that by abandoning Obama and Pelosi, if only rhetorically. Hey, I'm conservative and pro-life and pro-gun, they'll say, and I don't like ObamaCare or cap and trade either. That worked for the Democrat who won the Pennsylvania special. Others will follow.

So Republicans need to go where Democrats can't. They need to put daylight between themselves and their opponents. They need to show how different they really are. How? By acting boldly and being specific. This is what Ronald Reagan and Republican candidates did in 1980. It's what Gingrich-led Republicans did in 1994.

In both cases, Democrats and the mainstream media thought Republicans were crazy to take strong but risky stands. In 1980, it was a 30 percent, across-the-board cut in individual income tax rates. Democrats and the press thought that was a huge loser for Republicans. But Reagan won in a landslide and Republicans captured the Senate. In 1994, Republicans listed in their Contract with America specific goals they wanted to achieve. Once more, Democrats and the media believed this was suicidal for Republicans. They won both houses of Congress.

Republicans have two great issues: health care and reform. They ought to go beyond advocating repeal of ObamaCare, tell voters what they'd replace it with, and explain the benefits. Representative Paul Ryan has created a Roadmap to reform everything Washington runs or touches: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the tax code, health care, and more. Major parts of it can be transformed into a serious (and popular) program. In Obama's America, people are fearful. Republicans shouldn't be. 

Fred Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard.

Michael Barone

For the past year and a half, Americans have been faced, for the first time in almost a half century, with the prospect of a Democratic administration and Congress bent on vastly expanding the size and scope of government. The Obama Democrats have had significant policy successes. They have vastly increased the federal budget, have striven to establish government control or direction over important segments of the private sector -- gangster government, as I have called it -- and have passed significant health care legislation. They have succeeded in their goal of moving America some distance toward the welfare states of Western Europe.

But they have significantly failed to persuade most Americans that this is a good idea. Rather to the contrary: their assumption that economic distress would make Americans more amenable to big-government policies has proven to be unfounded. The Democratic Party is in worse shape with American voters than at any time in the 50 years in which I have been closely following American politics.

Republican officeholders, in Congress and in the states, have wisely opposed the Obama Democrats' policies with rare unanimity. They have had some significant policy successes. The unions' Card Check bill to effectively abolish the secret ballot in unionization elections is dead. Cap and trade legislation to address the supposed evil effects of supposedly inevitable global warming seems moribund. Republicans seem on the brink of substantial gains in the 2010 elections, with a realistic possibility of winning a majority in the House, a near-majority in the Senate, and substantial gains in state governments.

But these successes have not been solely the work of Republican incumbents. They have been the product as well of a spontaneous outpouring of opposition to the Obama Democrats' Europeanizing project symbolized by but not limited to the Tea Party movement. Ronald Reagan came to the presidency in 1980 in a nation determined to reduce taxes and to assert American power in the world. Republicans, if they succeed politically in 2010 and 2012, will do so because the nation is determined to reduce government spending and to fight the Islamist terrorists who seek to wreak maximum damage on America and all decent societies.

Republicans are not yet well prepared to advance policies to achieve these goals, despite some impressive initiatives by individual Republicans in Congress and in the states. They need to think hard about what they can achieve if they win control of the House and what they can do in the states. My instinct is that voters are demanding more radical cuts in spending and in rollbacks of Obama Democratic programs than professional politicians are inclined to believe. The British Conservatives faced something like this challenge and their hesitant response left them short of the majority that seemed within reach. A top adviser to Tony Blair told me that they should have been bolder. I think Republicans would be wise to listen to that advice. 

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and co-author of  The Almanac of American Politics. He received  The American Spectator's Barbara Olson Award in 2006.

Ken Blackwell

Have the Republicans learned their lesson?

I'm tempted to give a flip answer: Just ask Sen. Bob Bennett. Seriously, I think they have learned their lesson. You can see it in the unanimous rejection of the unstimulating stimulus package. You can see it in the unanimous rejection of ObamaCare. This is tangible evidence of a change of direction by congressional Republicans. The conservatives are pressing hard now. The more President Obama lurches to the left, the more pushback he faces from the right.

My co-author, Ken Klukowski, and I have written The Blueprint. This book demonstrates calmly, deliberatively, how Obama is subverting the Constitution and bringing back the Imperial Presidency. You don't learn checks and balances at Harvard Law School or in the Daley machine in Chicago. He thinks he can ride roughshod over 230 years of constitutional governance in this "last best hope of earth." He doesn't believe in American exceptionalism. He's a UN-Firster. President Obama's principles draw upon Europe's failed experiments in democratic socialism.

The only way for Obama to win is for his opponents to fall to fighting among themselves. Dan Quayle was so right to say the Tea Party movement must not spark a Perot-style defection. Too much is at stake this year.

The Tea Party is bringing a refreshing measure of seriousness and principle to politics. Tea Party activists are certainly for lower taxes, limited government, and reduced spending. But they are not only for those good and worthy goals. They gave great rounds of hearty applause to my colleague Tom McClusky. That's when Tom was the only speaker at a Capitol Hill rally to cry out against mandatory taxpayer funding of abortion in ObamaCare.

The Republicans can succeed this year the way they have succeeded in the past -- by bringing together defense, economic, and social conservatives into a powerful coalition. That's the kind of coalition that fueled the Reagan Revolution and the Republican Resurgence of 1994. That year was the first time in American history that a majority of Catholics voted Republican for Congress. It was also the last time. If Republicans are given another chance by the American people, they need stop funding Planned Parenthood, especially its assault on minority communities in this country. Social issues are not "wedge" issues; they're "bridge" issues -- and they'll help strengthen the conservative coalition. Let's pull together to keep America from pulling apart. 

Ken Blackwell is a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and a senior fellow at the Family Research Council.

David Boaz

For decades Republican leaders told their supporters, "Just wait till we get control of the White House, control of Congress, control of the White House and Congress, and then you'll see some government-shrinking." And then in 2000 they got it all. And what did the rest of us get? Not just a failure to cut government, but rather a trillion dollars in new spending, the biggest entitlement expansion since LBJ, federal takeovers of education and marriage, new powers of seizure and surveillance, and two endless wars. No wonder the voters booted them out in 2006 and 2008.

Now it looks like the voters have turned against President Obama and the Democrats even faster, but they're still not exactly keen on the GOP. Even Republican congressmen ask privately, "Do you think we'll do it right this time if we take the House again?" Voters wonder, too.

Pundits talk about the Republicans moving "too far to the right." But that's old-fashioned, left-right, red-blue thinking. The issue is freedom and self-government versus Washington control, outsiders versus insiders. The voters punished the Republicans for being fiscally irresponsible, socially reactionary, and reckless abroad. So their best course is to simultaneously get back to limited government and fiscal restraint, show young voters and moderates that they're moving beyond the scary Schiavo and anti-gay stuff, and find a foreign policy that is both strong and sensible. If they could also remember how Ronald Reagan managed to seem sunny and inclusive while enunciating strong small-government principles, they'll be on the right track.

And then it will be up to the Tea Parties and the people to insist on better performance than we got after 1994 or after 2000. Support for smaller government has been surging since about February 2009, but it's got to be sustained over a long period, and it's got to be serious. You can't have smaller government -- or even fiscal responsibility -- if voters support all the big programs and just want to cut "waste, fraud, and abuse." Voters have to hold the Republicans' feet to the fire and demand real cuts in real programs. 

David Boaz is executive vice president of the Cato Institute and author of Libertarianism: A Primer.

Andrew Cline

The day after Scott Brown drove his green GMC Canyon into the history books, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the highest-ranking elected Republican in the nation, said Brown won because "Americans are electing good Republican candidates who they hope will reverse a yearlong Democrat trend of spending too much, borrowing too much, and taxing too much." Six days later, McConnell released a list of seven "Suggestions for the State of the Union to Reduce Government Spending." Not one of the seven cut a dime from the federal budget. Twelve days after that, McConnell issued a press release attacking Democrats for cutting Medicare.

No wonder the Republican Party is undergoing an identity crisis. When Republicans attack Democrats for deficit spending and bailouts, Democrats respond, "Um, you guys did that, too!" Republicans are left complaining not that Democrats do these bad things, but that Democrats take them to 11. Voters don't know which party to trust.

Republican voters are especially disenchanted. They took one big lesson from the George W. Bush years: Republican politicians will act like Democrats if we let them. Republican primary can-didates are tapping into that better than the leadership is. Many are running as much against their own party's leadership as against the Democrats. It's a big reason why Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, and Rand Paul will be GOP nominees this year, and not Charlie Crist, Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Trey Grayson.

Still, voters fleeing the Obama/Pelosi/Reid agenda this fall will wind up with the GOP by de-fault, not because the GOP has done anything to lure voters back. If the Democrats' overreach brings big GOP victories, it will confirm the Republican establishment view that as long as the Democrats are too radical for the American people, the Republicans can win by offering to spend, regulate, and tax just a little less than the Democrats do.

The GOP base realizes what the establishment doesn't: America's welfare state cannot sur-vive as is. Substantial change is needed, and the party that achieves it will be best positioned to maintain power for years. Thus, the fate of the GOP depends on who controls the party's agenda if Republicans win back some power this fall: the establishment or the reformers. The people don't want Obama's big government, but they do want change. A GOP that doesn't offer it will not stay in power for long. 

Andrew Cline is editorial page editor of the New Hampshire Union Leader.

Jim DeMint

Before Republicans worry about beating Democrats, we must focus on defeating the appropriations system that has put our country in financial peril.

The appropriations committees in the House and Senate are tasked with spending taxpayers' money, and many of those powerful committee members believe it is the job of Congress to direct federal spending to parochial interests and pet projects.

Multiply that mentality by 535 members of Congress and the result is a $13 trillion national debt. That's why every politician bemoans Washington spending on the campaign trail, but actual spending bills are never defeated.

Senior appropriators, Republicans and Democrats, effectively control the House and the Senate using the power of the purse. They buy other members of Congress off with earmarks, which makes it difficult for anyone who accepts earmarks to cut overall spending. It would amount to biting the hand that feeds. Appropriators dominate leadership positions in both parties and are chairman and ranking members of major policy-making committees. They decide how money gets spent, who gets earmarks, how bills get written, and who gets shut out of the closed-door negotiations.

Most importantly, they work in harmony to drive up spending, borrowing, and debt, with no regard to their party label. Shrinking the federal largesse would diminish their power, so they have a built-in incentive to grow government.

That dynamic has caused too many politicians to lose sight of what the voters send them to Washington to do: uphold the Constitution that proscribes a limited federal government. Congress is supposed to focus on national priorities and leave state and local decisions to states and local governments.

Although President Obama's bailouts and takeovers have been useful in uniting Republicans against his liberal agenda, the GOP is still not united in its commitment to cut spending and debt. The appropriations system has too much control and it will take an earthquake election to break its grip over the party.

There's hope. Early tremors of that earthquake election have been heard in Pennsylvania and Utah. Voters in those states refused to nominate long-serving incumbents who supported the bank bailouts and government-run health care and embraced earmarks. It's happening in Kentucky and Florida as well. Primary voters in those states have rewarded candidates who are committed to reducing spending and debt.

An American Awakening is taking place, and voters are demanding a return to constitutional, limited government. They've realized politicians who promise to reduce the deficit while they're working to secure earmarks and pass new programs cannot be trusted.

Republicans should prove we are serious about ending the big spending system by fighting to limit the years someone can serve on the Appropriations Committee. Senators should not be permitted to hold chairmanship of both spending and authorizing committees. And Senate Republicans should follow the House Republicans to enact an earmark moratorium. Doing this would show a good-faith effort toward shutting down the congressional favor factory that's eating away our national treasure.

Voters may be running away from Democrats this election, but they're not yet running to Republicans. The big-spending appropriations system is in the way. To regain touch with Americans who are outraged at government greed Republicans must firmly and publicly oppose those who believe it's their congressional duty to bring home the bacon. Otherwise, the Republican Party will never be able to sincerely represent the conservative principles of fiscal responsibility. 

Jim DeMint is a U.S. senator from South Carolina.

Jim Geraghty

Have Republicans learned their lesson? Many have, or at least they grasp a change in the public's mood since autumn 2008 that the Democrats choose to ignore.

It's funny how controversial TARP was at the time it was enacted, and yet there was little or no immediate political consequence for it. (One could argue it persuaded independents to see if the Democrats could govern better than President Bush had.) Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and plenty of Democrats in Congress in both parties supported it, with little meaningful backlash from their base. A lot of Americans tentatively supported TARP, cautiously heeding the dire warnings of imminent economic Armageddon. Number-crunchers will insist TARP was necessary to stabilize the markets, but after the infamous AIG bonus payments, the record profits of banks once considered endangered, and the program's expansion to help out domestic automakers, many voters concluded TARP had been a giant con. About 20 months later, many Americans' IRAs and 401(k)s are still shrunken, unemployment is still close to 10 percent, and TARP was clearly not a one-time emergency fix, but a herald of a new era of colossal, 12-figure spending bills: the stimulus, health care, giant appropriations bills. The message from Washington is clear: when times are hard, we get to spend more; you get to spend less.

The response from many voters is probably unfit for this magazine's profanity standards. The message to Republican officeholders is pretty simple: stop spending so much money. Traditionally, deficit spending was the topic of a tut-tutting Robert Samuelson column involving a lot of numbers and far-off dates; Washington's movers and shakers furrowed their brows for a moment and then continued as normal. Sometime between 2008 and 2010, government spending became a moral issue; Tea Party protesters often talk about "borrowing from our children" or "stealing from the next generation" or some other criminal act to the adorable moppets they've brought to the rallies. The deficit is no longer abstract and numerical; it's now discussed as an act of economic filicide.

The Democratic Party, essentially a resource-extraction machine in most parts of the country, brought several large states to the brink of Greece-like financial ruin: New Jersey, New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts. They used their one-time stimulus funds to keep operating as before. A lot of millionaires have left the high cost-of-living, high-taxation blue states; a lot of working families with children preceded them. The Democratic model of governance isn't financially sustainable, and that hard fact gets harder to hide by the month.

As one strategist put it to me, "Whoever the Republicans nominate in 2012, he or she had better be good at firing government workers, because that's what the job is going to require starting in 2013." A lot of Republicans -- not all, but a lot -- get this. New Jersey's Chris Christie himself may not be the future of the GOP, but his arguments and his approach are. 

Jim Geraghty, a contributing editor at National Review, writes the Campaign Spot blog.

Quin Hillyer

If the question in a vacuum is whether the national Republican Party is ready again to be a congressional majority, or deserves to be one, the answer would be an emphatic "no." But politics is not conducted in a vacuum. When compared to the only real alternative, which is continued national Democratic control, the Republicans' fitness for office must be deemed rather strong. The national Democratic Party neither recognizes nor abides by any limits to government largesse, scope, or power. Its conception of "propriety" is whatever it can get away with that will serve its ideological or partisan ends. Its devotion to the Constitution is negligible. The congressional Democrats -- every single one of them, as long as they support the current party leadership in congressional organizing -- are anathema and abominations. And an American majority seems to be recognizing this, and willing to act upon it.

The problem is that the Republicans in the three main party committees and in the Senate seem incapable of earning, or deserving, full trust in wielding power. They horribly waste money, both from taxpayers and from political donors. They demonstrate a wholly unmerited arrogance, insisting that Washington knows better than the rubes in the hinterlands. They interfere in party primaries when they ought to stay the hell out. They accept "conventional wisdom" about what is politically feasible, at times handing liberals victories the left has not earned while at other times taking unnecessarily obstinate procedural stances to protect their own prerogatives divorced from real philosophical cause. And their ability to explain matters of principle is often hideously amateurish.

Nevertheless, the Republicans' lack of adequate skill, backbone, or philosophical understanding is far preferable to the national Democrats' determination to move in exactly the wrong directions. For a shipwrecked man struggling to stay afloat and alive, a weak tide toward shore is far better than a strong tide toward the open sea. Plus, it must be admitted that House Republicans at least seem to be becoming more willing to stand on principle, and more effective at doing so. And any gain in numbers, any at all, that might help block the radical Obama agenda is a gain well worth making. Conservatives should devoutly hope for Republican ascendancy this fall not because Republicans can deliver anything approaching nirvana, but because the alternative is intolerable.

Quin Hillyer is a senior editorial writer for the Washington Times and a senior editor for The American Spectator.

Philip Klein

During their time in the wilderness, Republicans have not convincingly demonstrated that they are serious about getting the federal budget under control. Sure, Republicans talk a big game about President Obama's expansion of government and the record deficits being accrued under his watch. But this is mostly political theater. The focus is typically either on opposing spending in vague terms or highlighting earmarks that, while certainly wasteful, do not compose a significant portion of the budget. The only way to get serious about spending is to confront the looming entitlement crisis, which represents $108 trillion in long-term debt, putting our nation on track for a Greek-style financial meltdown. Yet Republicans, despite portraying themselves as champions of limited government, have not demonstrated any more willingness to confront this problem than Democrats. And let us not forget that when Republicans were last in the majority, they used their power to ram through what was at the time the largest expansion of entitlements since the Great Society in the form of the Medicare prescription drug plan.

While Rep. Paul Ryan has unveiled a serious proposal to do something about the problem, the Republican leadership ran away from his Roadmap plan once it came under attack, scrambling to emphasize that it wasn't the official Republican budget. Whenever I've interviewed GOP candidates this election cycle who tell me about the need to get spending under control, I have pressed them on the issue of entitlements, and I have yet to get a satisfactory answer. If candidates are afraid to talk about entitlement reform to a conservative journalist when seeking a Republican nomination, then there's no reason to believe that they'll be willing to take on the issue if they find themselves in the majority. And while there may be some principled exceptions, it's difficult to imagine that they would approach the critical mass needed for real reform

Even worse, during the health care debate, Republicans established themselves as guardians of entitlements, focusing much of their criticism of the new national health care law on its cuts to Medicare. House Minority Leader John Boehner has vowed to restore those cuts if Republicans retake the majority, and many GOP congressional candidates have been using the issue to scare up senior citizen votes. While these tactics may result in short-term political gain for Republicans, they also perpetuate the third rail status of a program that desperately needs to be reformed if we're going to avoid a fiscal collapse. Entitlement spending will burden future generations with more debt, crushing tax rates, a stagnant economy, and runaway inflation.

The GOP has made the war on America's youth a bipartisan affair. The party is not ready to retake the majority. 

Philip Klein is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent.

Jeffrey Lord

"If I were a U.S. senator, I would vote for her [Obama Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor] confirmation, because objective qualifications should matter more than ideology in the judicial confirmation process."

You're thinking Charlie Crist said this, right? Or maybe it was soon-to-be former senator Arlen Specter. Or Arnold. Or, well, others amongst the usual suspects. Sorry.

The writer of the August 4, 2009 op-ed appearing in the Philadelphia Inquirer was...Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. Mr. I'm-Not-Arlen Specter. Mr. I'm-a-Conservative. Displaying a potentially revealing, not to mention surprising, RINO (Republican in Name Only) streak on the issue of judicial nominees, the man who drove Specter from the GOP and is now the party's nominee for the Senate has already abandoned -- before the votes are even counted -- the principle that principles count when approving judicial nominees. This is important if conservatives are thinking a Republican Senate would promptly put the brakes on the headlong leftward lurch the country has endured under President Obama.

Supreme Court nominees are more visible than lower court nominees, but if indeed Toomey sees no problem surrendering to statist judges -- then his prospective presence in the Senate is already a gain for Democrats. Presumably he would be a vote for such left-leaning Obama nominees as Goodwin Liu, the radical Berkeley professor opposed by even the moderate Lindsay Graham.

Like clockwork, Toomey's evolution began winning plaudits from the liberal media. "Toomey clearly has gotten the memo that he needs to moderate his positions," enthused a Politico columnist. Cooed the Washington Post: "It's...a recognition on Toomey's behalf that he must find ways to change the image of himself as an arch conservative."

Has the GOP learned its lesson? Or are we returning to Barry Goldwater's "dime store New Deal" -- liberalism on the cheap. The overwhelming GOP rejection of the stimulus and ObamaCare are hopeful signs. The addiction to earmarks and the apparent acquiescence to Elena Kagan, like that to Sotomayor -- decidedly not. Judging from Toomey's apparent attempt to "moderate," the answer is an unsettling maybe. 

Jeffrey Lord is a former Reagan White House political director, writer and author. He lives in Pennsylvania.

Grover Norquist

Polling from Gallup, Rasmussen, and others suggest that it is increasingly likely that Republicans will recapture control of the House of Representatives in 2010, only four years after losing the Speakership to Nancy Pelosi in 2006.

Republicans are more enthusiastic and engaged. Independents, those non-aligned voters who began to swing against Bush in 2004 and then more strongly against Republicans in 2006 and 2008 largely over the protracted occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, have swung back to the Republicans in reaction to Obama's massive government spending spree.

Republican wins in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts and the massive turnouts at Tea Party rallies over the last year are another sign of building Republican strength.

And finally, we have word from a Democrat who was privy to the Democratic Party's own polling and plans for November. Having seen the battlefield from Obama, Reid, and Pelosi's war room, House Appropriations chairman David Obey decided to abandon ship. The grass does not look greener from the other side.

The question is not so much, will the Republicans win the House, but will they deserve to govern? Will they govern well? Will they govern as Reagan Republicans rather than Bush Republicans, who assume the federal government has a role in everything, that buying campaign contributions with earmarks is clever and that throwing money at a problem is good governance?

Have Republicans decided that federal spending is the problem, not a fundraising tool or a PR gimmick?

There are several reasons to believe that answer is yes.

Up until the last two years Republicans believed that too much spending was not a vote-moving issue. They knew from experience that gun owners, taxpayers, and pro-lifers were organized and would penalize a politician who attacked them. But who had lost an election because he did too many earmarks? Vice President Cheney announced that no one ever lost an election due to overspending. What powerful lobby on K Street punished overspending per se?

The Tea Party movement sprang up in response to Obama's spending. The tax hikes had not yet arrived. Arlen Specter collapsed in the polls not for his various liberal impulses over the years -- but right after he voted for the stimulus spending plan. He had to leave the party. Senate veteran Bob Bennett of Utah bragged of his earmarking prowess and ability to do things (read: steal stuff) for Utah. He lost.

There apparently is a "spend less" constituency and they have identified themselves and are visibly organized through the Tea Party movement.

Politicians, like most mammals, have endoskeletons, a skeletal system inside their bodies. You cannot see them or know their strength. It is not wise to assume that they can withstand the pressure of the spending interest lobbies in Washington or state capitals. The Tea Party movement is an exoskeleton, an external skeleton that clams and lobsters have. It provides protection against pressure.

Those freshmen elected in 2010 will have their first taste of politics in a year when the message to spend less is clear. Incumbents are already trimming their sails to the new wind-watching the slow learners getting crushed in the primaries does wonders pour encourager les autres.

Grover Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform.

Surely there is some irony and hypocrisy in the fact that, on the day after a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against some provisions of the Arizona law that specified the enforcement in the state of certain federal immigration laws, President Obama signed into law yesterday the Tribal Law and Order Act. Why irony? Why hypocrisy?

First let me observe, and correct me if I am wrong, that state officers, including state judges, are sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution and all (all!) federal laws. If this were not clear before the Civil War, it was made clear after the Civil War. It is their duty. They need no grant from the federal government. So, even without a state law in Arizona that commands police within the state to enforce certain federal immigration laws, and details how they must do so, they are obliged by their oaths to do so.

Comes now President Obama, the Chief Executive Officer of the United States, sworn to faithfully execute the federal laws, who instructs Attorney General Holder to march into federal court to seek an injunction against this new Arizona law and to prohibit the enforcement of federal laws (bad enough by itself) and compounds this violation of his oath by restraining police officers from performing their sworn obligations. At the President's request, the federal court has carved out -- from the universe of the laws the police are sworn to uphold -- particular federal immigration laws. This is a reversal of the Civil Rights Era in which the federal government mandated that the states comply with federal law -- and sent federal marshals and troops to ensure that they did so.

The day after the judge's ruling, President Obama signed the Trial Law and Order Act. According to reports, this law "will allow selected tribal police officers to enforce federal laws on Indian lands…" I am not sufficiently versed in Indian Law to know why tribal police officers, unlike state officers, need to be specifically deputized to enforce federal law. And, perhaps a reader can inform us whether this new law defines the federal laws now enforceable by tribal police to include immigration laws. Certainly a positive answer to this question would highlight the contrast that exists now between the authorities of tribal and Arizona police. For, whatever the answer, tribal police have been granted the authority which has been denied Arizona police.

But there is more. The report states that tribal police are empowered to enforce federal laws "whether or not the offender is Indian." If there was any merit to the argument that the Arizona law necessarily entailed racial profiling, is there not a great risk of racial profiling when tribal police enforce the federal laws against non-Indians on Indian Reservations? It is far easier for tribal police to discern who does not belong on the reservations they patrol than for Arizona police to discern who does not belong in the United States.

So, do we not have the prospect of a person of Hispanic ethnicity on a reservation in Arizona being lawfully stopped and questioned by tribal police, while the same person standing outside the reservation cannot be by Arizona police?

Tuesday
Here I am at the Seattle airport. After ten days in Sandpoint, Idaho, it is a mighty big shock. Sandpoint is so up, so cheerful, so friendly, so calm, it's like being in a very happy high school. The people at SEA-TAC all look extremely guarded and defensive. They look like they would punch you if you said, "Hello" to them. They look as if they were late for their Valium. In Sandpoint every single person greets me by name. No one ever seems angry.

But it's more than that. Men and women just look terrified at this airport. Is it the recession? The Iranians? The endless wars? I naturally called my brilliant pal, Barron Thomas, to ask his opinion.

"In times of trouble, people look for a daddy to lead them. They want a strong father figure and that's not Barack Obama. He is many things but not that. So people are scared and there's no father to take care of them. "

Brilliant, as expected. In 1975 I was at a conference at the Aspen Institute. A high ranking shrink from the Harvard Medical School said that people had turned on Nixon because he was a weak but dominant father figure, as opposed to Ike, who was strong and accommodating. Great insight. What is Obama? Maybe a would be-pal. What is he, psychologically? Requires more thought.

Wednesday
Larry King Live today. I was on with two women and a man talking about the Arizona Federal District Court decision enjoining some parts of that state's controversial law about illegal immigration. I was staggered at the sharp edge of the conversation. I was just jolted. At the break, I tried to think why it was such a shock. After all, I have been on hundreds of talk shows -- but not after spending most of the summer in small town Idaho.

I realized that it was because people in Sandpoint do not pick fights. Conversations are about boats and weather and fishing. No one wants to argue and no one does. That is small town America. I think it's the way America still is in many places. But it's not that way on TV except maybe on CBS Sunday Morning, which is an extremely polite show, sort of like a conversation on the perfect, beautiful lake next to Sandpoint. I am probably more suited to life in Hollywood. But Sandpoint is a nice way to go, too.

It is a given these days that former government officials on both sides of the Atlantic soon after their retirement secure book and lecture contracts to discuss all the things that purportedly were highly classified during their professional career. Lady Manningham-Buller, former director general of MI5, Britain's Security Service dedicated to internal intelligence operations, recently has joined these ranks.

According to her official biography, she spent 33 years in that service. She explained how she had gone from teaching after her Oxford years reading (majoring in) English into the Security Service. She stated in a BBC program that she was recruited "at a drinks party" under the guise of pointing her toward employment at the Ministry of Defense. A damned clever ruse, wot?

Nowhere is there any indication that the highly opinionated Lady M-B has had any background in foreign affairs unless one counts her operational desk assignments in London and a short liaison stint in the UK embassy in Washington. Nonetheless, she has now made the theme of her public speaking her earlier assessment that Saddam Hussein was "only likely to order terrorist attacks if he perceives the survival of his regime is threatened." How she arrived at this definitive position without any experience beyond Britain's shores has never been explained.

This statement was contained in a memo by then Dep. Director General M-B to the Home Office in March 2002. She commented on that letter to the Chilcot commission inquiring into Britain's involvement in the Iraq war. The question was posed to determine what intelligence existed on the threat from Iraq to the UK. Her comment was, "We thought it was very limited and containable."

This assessment, taken at face value, is used to justify why Lady Manningham-Buller believes that the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent overthrow of Saddam Hussein actually provided Osama bin Laden with the impetus for broad al Qaeda operations not only in Iraq but in the UK as well. What about OBL being chased out of Afghanistan? Apparently she also lost track of the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, the attack on the USS Cole, and the destruction of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia -- all of which happened before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the later invasion of Iraq.

This testimony before the Chilcot inquiry has London's political establishment quite confused. To begin with, Manningham-Buller seems determined to blacken Tony Blair and the Labour Party that appointed her DG of MI5 in the first place. She stayed in that post for five years and soon afterward joined the House of Lords and was named Baroness Manningham-Buller of Northampton. At that point she led the effort against Labour PM Gordon Brown's attempt to change the detention-without-charge regulations from 28 days to 42.

Although the Conservative Party now considers this new peer a valuable political asset, the anti-U.S. theme of her politics is not consistent with the traditional position of the Tories. Or was she always a Tory mole waiting for the correct moment to undercut the Labour (read Tony Blair) love affair with the Americans? And where does Obama's returning the bust of Winston Churchill come in? Oh, yes, one must not forget that her father, the late Viscount Dilhorne, served in every Conservative government from Churchill to Eden to Macmillan to Douglas-Home. Apparently Tony Blair did.

Having been quite content to double the MI5 budget in order to counter terrorism activities in the UK while she headed that organization, Lady M-B now refers to that occurrence as if somehow she was near totally uninvolved. In reality, the terrorist threat to Britain and the rest of the world had grown immensely during the post-9/11 period for reasons that had little to do with the invasion of Iraq. As any Middle Eastern/South Asian resident of London --Palestinian, Pakistani, Lebanese, Iranian, etc. -- will attest.

Perhaps it's a matter of M-B's convenient memory or simply lack of an in-depth understanding of the growth internationally of Islamic radicalism that explains her current politics. More likely, however, is the fact that there is a ground swell of political reaction against a continued British military participation in Afghanistan. Terror-linked Taliban operations no longer appear to be viewed by the public as a direct threat to British security. Sixty-two year old Baroness M-B sitting in the House of Lords has quickly maneuvered herself into a "senior statesman" role. Apparently from the sinecure of her newly acquired status, Her Ladyship appears to be laying the groundwork for a political life as a titular no-party peer.

There was a time when security service chiefs retired and disappeared into the gentle -- usually English -- countryside. Those were the days when MI-5 officers weren't referred to as "spooks" and caricatured in a television series as painfully conflicted remnants of a bygone era. Back in the day, the term MI5 was as little mentioned as its Foreign Office "friend," MI6. Even David Cornwell, a.k.a. John le Carré, avoided being too clear about Britain's security structure.

Perhaps it's unfair to chastise Lady Manningham-Buller in these days of greater openness regarding Britain's security services. After all the U.S. pretends to have the same approach. Of course, the Yanks cover it up by having so many intelligence organizations no one can keep track of them. Lady M-B appears to be doing something that's "just not done." Noticeably her MI6 counterparts have presented their views solely in camera. The Baroness is trying to enhance her public political stature by bringing attention to herself and her former post.

Many years ago, a sadistic literature professor of mine suggested James Joyce's Finnegans Wake as a book I might want to read over the summer. He based this judgment on the fact that I hadn't been altogether repelled -- as the rest of the class had -- by Samuel Beckett's experimental novel Watt. He saw potential in me, and I knew it, so I went out and bought FW determined not to let him down.

To say that I was in over my head is an understatement. I should've put on a snorkel before I read the first sentence. I'd never felt more stupid… and more taken. In the end, I couldn't get past page thirty. But even after I'd thrown in the towel, I couldn't put the book behind me. Years later, I sat down with an annotated edition and made it through to the end. I still didn't understand a lot of it -- many of the annotations needed annotations. But it was one of the great literary joys of my life.

Cut to the present: When I first came up with the idea for my new novel Sloth, I wanted to write a kind of friendlier, slapshtickier Finnegans Wake -- a book that would be funny page by page but would carry a subtext in which a different and more complicated story unfolded. The whole would make sense if you happened to be fluent in Dostoevsky, Dickens, Sophocles, Dante, Yeats, Nabokov, Philip Roth, Nathaniel West, Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice… as well as Aquinas, Descartes, Martin Buber, Henny Youngman, Mr. Ed and Dr. Seuss. Otherwise, it would just be a strange (but, I hoped, funny) book.

Predictably, Sloth was a nightmare for my agent to sell. Before it was picked up by Greenpoint Press, a six-year-old, not-for-profit press, it was rejected at least twenty-five times. Several editors at commercial houses expressed interest, only to be overruled by colleagues and executive editors. The argument against it was always that the target audience was too narrow to be profitable -- undoubtedly true … if you only take into account the print version.

Perhaps, though, Sloth was a more natural fit as an e-book all along. The idea is strange -- and certain to unnerve devotees of the printed-page like Lisa Fabrizio. The old paradigm of the electronic edition of a book as a mere reproduction of the print version remains dominant for the time being. But the e-book format has the potential to be much more than a reproduction. How would a book like mine tap that potential?

With optional on-screen annotations.

Sloth consists of journal entries by a nameless narrator in which he recounts his quest to win the heart of a TV exercise girl. But midway through, the journal is interrupted by his best friend Zezel -- who breaks into the narrator's apartment, reads the journal on his computer, and inserts a risqué counter-narrative that lampoons and deconstructs the original. If you turn to page 109 of the print edition of the book, you find Zezel's first interruption:

"We're going to die," she said. "The comet Kohoutek, the planets, even the phases of the moon are unequivocal in this regard." Thus, we joined. She with the intensity of doom, and I because I am me, and because I like to relate to women in a full and open manner. The warm tides of the Sargasso engulfed me, those dying generations lost amid the mackerel-crowded C. Ever it was: Her expression distracted, her hair gyred by the wind, her face framed against the constellations, she was fixed upon me, fixed beyond me. She was fixed, and then at last she broke. Her very ponderousness heaped out of my hands. She panted. She moaned. She cooed and bayed: Her mind moved upon silence.

Now suppose you encountered the same passage in an electronic edition, and you scrolled through it with a cursor, rather than merely scanning it with your eyes. The following annotations might pop up:

Kohoutek: dubbed the "comet of the century" before its appearance in 1973, and believed by some to herald the end of the world, it proved a dud, even for astronomers.

Phases of the moon: poem by W. B. Yeats in which he lays out the cyclical nature of history, with each cycle containing in it the seeds of the next -- thus, a world with no end.

Sargasso: Sea in the North Atlantic often represented in literature and popular culture as a place of irresolvable mystery, here associated obscenely with a woman's sexuality.

Those dying generations… mackerel-crowded C: See "Sailing to Byzantium" by Yeats, in which he considers the possibility of human immortality through art.

Gyred by the wind: The gyre was the funnel shape invoked by Yeats to symbolize history's cycles.

Her mind moved upon silence: See "Long Legged Fly" by Yeats which contains the refrain "Like a long-legged fly upon a stream / His mind moves upon silence."

Again, you wouldn't have to read the pop-up annotations -- which, remember, are prompted by cursor movements. You might decide to ignore the cursor and read the e-book as you would a standard paperback. But Sloth is a novel about wordplay and allusion as much as character and plot, a winking tour of the traditional canon of dead white males as well a satire of postmodern notions such as the death of the author, the de-centered self and the destabilized text. (Yeats, for example, was a practitioner of "automatic writing" in which the text doesn't derive from the author's conscious mind; in the case of Sloth, it may be that Zezel's interruptions are only manifestations of the narrator's subconscious. Yet the narrator courts the exercise girl by pretending to be Zezel… who writes newspaper columns under the pen name "Mark Goldblatt.") An electronic version of the book -- currently in production -- that also served, in effect, as an annotated edition would make Sloth more enjoyable, or at least more accessible, to readers who don't happen to be literature professors, graduate students or writers themselves. The electronic edition, in short, opens up the book's target audience from classics junkies to anyone with a fondness for cheap laughs and a passing acquaintance with the Norton Anthology.

Cursor-prompted annotations are one of many changes on the e-book horizon -- and perhaps the least dramatic. These changes will necessarily alter the entire calculus that goes into a book's creation. Consider: We now live in a world in which, for the first time, there are two distinct ways to read: 1) with your eyes alone, and 2) with a cursor. The two ways to read point to two very different reading experiences… and that difference will affect not only how books are acquired and published but also how they are imagined and executed.

 The experiential possibilities of an e-book are not limited to the words on the screen. With inevitable hardware advances, there will eventually be suspense novels, for example, with creepy background music and momentary visual effects. As the heroine steps inside the seemingly deserted house, a bass line will pulse through your headset. As you scroll across the words, "She heard a sudden rustling of wind through the tattered curtains," you'll hear a rustling. Then, as your pulse quickens, when the villain leaps out from behind the curtains, an animated graphic will emerge from behind the words on the screen to menace you for a split second, then recede.

As unsettling as such innovations may seem, they needn't encroach on the experience of traditional readers -- not even those seduced by the siren song of a Nook, Kindle or iPad. The option of sight reading, of scanning down the page line by line, without using the cursor, will always remain. But the range of new possibilities is sure to impact how writers write; many will write with an e-book specifically in mind. They will become orchestrators as well as wordsmiths -- deciding, in the case of Sloth, what to annotate, but, in the future, deciding what to score, what to illustrate and what to animate. The results will be hybrids… not unlike the way today's graphic novels are hybrids of traditional novels and comic books.

The existence of such hybrid forms will, in turn, drastically affect what gets published. Acquisition editors will have to factor into their decisions not only familiar literary criteria -- the words on the page -- but also, in the case of e-books, the totality of the experience created by the writer. As a result, commercial publishing houses will have to hire effects editors as well as text editors. It will be a brave new world for book marketers as well. How many potential book buyers have been siphoned off by movies, television and the Internet over the last half century? Marketing departments will perhaps reclaim a portion of those lost audiences with an enhanced sensory experience.

The power of books has always been their intimacy, the exquisite closeness of a story playing itself out inside your head. But the price of that intimacy is cultural literacy and heightened concentration -- a price fewer and fewer people have been willing or able to pay. That is the reality. But with pop-up annotations, sounds and sights, the price drops precipitously.

More people will become book lovers. They'll just love their books in different ways than book lovers did before.

My Dad turns 79 this weekend, and he is still going strong in a life of scholarship and achievement. He still maintains a small private practice in psychology and the rest of his time is spent in study. No puffing on cigars in leisure for this man.

Although his politics do not line up precisely with mine, a great deal of my attitude towards the capabilities and shortcomings of government was formed through the prism of his experiences. Dad worked for the City of New York for two decades, from 1965 through 1985, first in overseeing remedial education and job training programs, then as an inspector of mental health facilities. He shared with me contemporaneously all the vicissitudes of his tenure. It would be instructive to repeat here a few of the anecdotes from that period, most notably the pre-Reagan '70s.

One mind-boggling story involved the Civil Service examination. In New York City, as in many other local governments, administrative and executive positions were filled from a corps of highly qualified trainees known as the Civil Service. Each year a particular number of positions open within the ranks, usually a few hundred, and thousands of applicants file in to take the exam. If you pass once you are on the list forever, usually guaranteeing you a job within a year or two.

There was an exception whereby a new person could be hired from outside the Civil Service and he could remain on the job for two years pending his certification. If he passed the test during the allotted time, he became a Civil Servant and remained on the job. After a while, this became the preferred method of hiring. Give a person a chance and if their first year is good, have them take the test.

At one point in the mid-'70s it became the liberal orthodoxy to claim that all standardized tests discriminated against minorities, presumably because they made certain cultural assumptions which puzzled all but suburb-dwellers. This contention is arrant nonsense but the courts persisted in giving it credence as a legitimate theory in sociology. So one year, sure enough, the guys who failed the Civil Service test sued to block the city from hiring those who passed.

The case bounced along slowly through the system until the deadline loomed when the previously hired employees had to gain Civil Service status or leave. Since the suit was not resolved in time, the city had to fire all those who passed the test. Having to fill the positions urgently, there was no choice: they hired all the applicants who had failed. The result was truly of a Through-the-Looking-Glass Bizarro-World quality: WHOEVER PASSED WAS FIRED AND WHOEVER FAILED WAS HIRED!

Another episode illustrates the distortion of that time and has implications for the current controversy surround the New Black Panther Party. Because whites were being accused of harboring deep-seated, atavistically recurring, racist impulses, the government sent them to mandatory sensitivity training. Instead of hiring nice universalist types to speak about love for all mankind, they brought it members of the Black Panthers. My father and his colleagues spent entire days in packed auditoriums listening to rants by black-power radicals. In one case the speaker turned around, bent over, and declared that all you whiteys can kiss my black… er, seat. And all these white bureaucrats leaped to their feet and gave him a standing ovation.

One experience my father shared gave me a great deal of insight into the health-care debate that raged prior to the passage of Obamacare. Dad was responsible for conducting site visits at all the mental-health facilities in his territory, which covered part of Queens and Far Rockaway. He practiced an unusually high degree of scrutiny in actual files, seeing how cases were diagnosed and treated. Often he came home crying about individual patients who were being needlessly destroyed by their doctors in his view.

His overall assessment was that the three types of hospital or clinic had significant differences in quality of care. The worst were the government-run facilities where care was distinctly subpar. Then came non-profits, which did a passable job, definitely better than the municipals. Best of all were the private for-profit hospitals which provided a superior standard. Having had that window into reality from the perspective of an inspector who got into the guts of the beast, I could never back a system that eliminates the profit margin in favor of management by bureaucratic fiat.

Happy Birthday, Dad! You have taught me a lot and you are teaching me still, hopefully for many years to come.

MEMO FOR THE MOVEMENT

Congress Should Oppose Labor Union Power Grab Legislation

RE: The misleadingly named "Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act" (originally H.R. 413; S. 1611, 3194). The bill would unconstitutionally abrogate all states' sovereignty, subject state and local public-safety workers to compulsory union "representation," eliminate local government control over the labor relations of their own workers, lead to a rise in labor strife, and further damage fragile state and local government economies by imposing unfunded federal mandates. The House approved the bill in 2007 with the support of 98 Republicans.

ACTION: Congress should reject the so-called "Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act" because the bill unconstitutionally abrogates each state's existing right to determine the labor relations of its own and its local governments' employees. And Congress should do so whether it is considered as a stand alone bill or as an amendment to another piece of legislation.

ISSUE-IN-BRIEF:

The bill claims to be designed to foster public-safety employer-employee cooperation. Nothing could be further from the truth. Actually, the bill's sole aim is to grant union officials monopoly collective-bargaining control over all state and local public-safety workers, including police, firefighters and emergency medical service personnel who refuse to join, or who quit, a union and want to deal with their employer on an individual basis. In short, this bill would deny public-safety workers freedom of contract.

· The bill is important to the Big Labor bosses because increasing membership in public-sector unions is a top priority. Last year-for the first time in history-public sector union membership surpassed that of private sector unions.

· The bill would not foster public-safety employer-employee cooperation, because union bargaining is inherently confrontational, not cooperative. This bill itself recognizes that fact by purporting to prohibit strikes. That prohibition means little. History shows that when unions are granted monopoly bargaining privileges in the public sector, strikes occur whether legal or not.

· Most important, this bill abrogates each state's existing and sovereign right to order the labor relations of its own and its local governments' employees in accordance with its elected officials' judgment as to that state's public interests. Today, each state is free to ban collective bargaining for its public-safety workers. The United States Supreme Court recognized that right in 1979 in Smith v. Arkansas State Highway Employees. A few states have done so.

· Many states have granted public employees only limited collective-bargaining privileges, or only meet-and-confer privileges that do not require binding union contracts, or have not authorized bargaining for all types of public-safety workers. In no state does any federal agency play any part in ordering labor relations for state and local government employees.

· This bill would authorize an unelected federal agency, the Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA), to determine whether each state provides certain federally mandated labor relations provisions for its and its local governments' public-safety workers: exclusive (i.e., monopoly) bargaining representation, mandatory recognition of and so-called "good-faith" bargaining with unions for binding and court-enforceable agreements covering federally specified subjects, and "an interest impasse resolution mechanism."

· Thus, to avoid having an unelected federal agency regulate and oversee their public-safety employees' labor relations, some 26 states would either have to enact entire new labor relations schemes that comply with federal mandates or amend their existing bargaining regimes for public-safety workers.

· The bill clearly constitutes a constitutionally suspect federal abrogation of state sovereignty. As the U.S. Supreme Court said in Printz v. United States (1997), "the Federal Government may not compel the States to implement, by legislation or executive action, federal regulatory programs." That is effectively what this bill would do.

· There also is a serious question as to whether this bill is within the constitutional

authority of Congress under the Commerce Clause.

· "It (the bill) represents an unprecedented federal intrusion into state and local decision making, potentially disrupts our nation's carefully developed emergency response functions and raises serious constitutional questions under the Tenth Amendment" stated Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in a May 2008 letter to Senate leaders.

CONSERVATIVE ACTION PROJECT

William Wilson, President, Americans for Limited Government

Edwin Meese III, former Attorney General

Grover Norquist, President, Americans for Tax Reform

Susan Carleson, Chairman & CEO, American Civil Rights Union

Duane Parde, President, National Taxpayers Union

David N. Bossie, President, Citizens United

Wendy Wright, President, Concerned Women for America

T. Kenneth Cribb, former Counselor to the U.S. Attorney General

Dr. Herbert London, President, Hudson Institute

Mark Mix, President, National Right to Work Committee

David Keene, Chairman, American Conservative Union

Elaine Donnelly, President, Center for Military Readiness

Gary Bauer, President, American Values

David McIntosh, former Member of Congress, Indiana

Karen Kerrigan, President, Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council

Richard Viguerie, Chairman, ConservativeHQ.com

J. Kenneth Blackwell, former Treasurer, State of Ohio

Mathew D. Staver, Founder & Chairman, Liberty Counsel

Alfred Regnery, Publisher, American Spectator

James Martin, Chairman, 60 Plus Association

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute

Brent Bozell, President, Media Research Center

(All organizations listed are for identification purposes only)

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON THE SO-CALLED "Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act" PLEASE VISIT THESE WEBSITES:

National Right to Work Committee Fact Sheet: Police and Fire Monopoly-Bargaining Bill: Bad News For Public Employees, Taxpayers, http://www.nrtwc.org/FactSheets/PSMBFactSheet.pdf

Robert Bluey, The Heritage Foundation: Will Congress Kill Volunteer Fire Departments as Sop to Unions? http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=37738

National Institute for Labor Relations Research Fact Sheet: Governors' Bi-Partisan Message to Congress: Don't Federalize Public-Safety Union Monopoly, http://www.nilrr.org/files/2009-07-15%20Governors%20Bi-Partisan%20Message.pdf

Secretary's Chao, Chertoff and Attorney General Mukasey 2008 letter of opposition to Senate leaders: www.getliberty.org/files/PublicSafetyEmployeesLetter.pdf

James Sherk, Heritage Foundation Senior Policy Analyst in Labor Economics: Another Taxpayer Handout to Organized Labor, http://www.heritage.org/Research/Commentary/2010/07/Another-taxpayer-handout-to-organized-labor

Reihan Salam, National Review Online: On the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act, http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/230021/public-safety-employer-employee-cooperation-act/reihan-salam

James Sherk, Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act: The Heritage Foundation 2009 Labor Boot Camp, http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2009/01/Public-Safety-Employer-Employee-Cooperation-Act-The-Heritage-Foundation-2009-Labor-Boot-Camp

National League of Cities, Reject Mandatory Collective Bargaining, http://www.nlc.org/ASSETS/EA1E4F8C8B5840109B129DFE2F2DC273/2009%20Issue%20Brief%20-%20Collective%20Bargaining%20final.pdf

Joint Letter of National Association of Counties et al. in Opposition to the Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act, http://admin.naco.org/legislation/policies/Documents/Labor%20and%20Employment/CollectiveBargainingOpposition_S3194.pdf

Today's Land Letter just arrived in my in box, with the following lead story:

1. OIL AND GAS: NPR-A could see new protections under pending Interior management plan

The Interior Department is preparing to develop its first comprehensive management plan for the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (NPR-A), a move environmentalists say could permanently remove large sections of the massive reserve from future energy development. The "integrated activity plan" for NPR-A would take a comprehensive look at the 23.5-million-acre reserve with an eye toward identifying areas suitable for oil and natural gas drilling as well as those areas that should remain off-limits, said Pat Pourchot, special assistant to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar for Alaska affairs.

So, we're only producing oil in deep water because we're running out of places to look onshore, are we Barry? As I've said...

After President Obama's repeated (eight times) assurance that Spain proved his "green" central planning was an economic boon was debunked (as was his contemporaneous citation of Germany's supposed success), the White House simply replaced "Spain" with "Denmark" in his stump speech.

That, too, was debunked. So now Obama no longer points to any country as a success. I wonder what that tells us.

Anyway, one (other) thing our apparently not overly worldly Obama White House apparently didn't  realize was that when a US political leader hails a small country it makes the newspapers there. And academics respond to such challenges, despite the flattery.

So it is again today, where we read "Profits of Doom" in, of all places, the Times Higher Education, including the following excerpt:

DENMARK'S WIND TURBINES: A DANGEROUS AMOUNT OF HOT AIR

Denmark is the wind capital of the world - that's one of the reasons why Copenhagen was chosen to host the great climate change conference last year. Between 1985 and 2005, more than 3GW of wind-turbine capacity was installed, of which about 15 per cent was sited offshore.

There are few areas on western Denmark's coast and in its flat or gently rolling countryside that are unaffected. Fortunately, the nation's agricultural community has learned to love the modern intruders - or at least the subsidies.

As the sector expanded, so did the size of the wind turbines. The latest idea is to build 20MW versions as tall as the Eiffel Tower. Each turbine requires an access road, massive concrete foundations and, of course, electricity pylons.

Wind turbines, despite being so very green themselves, are antipathetic to nature. On forested hillsides, they require the clear felling of woodland; on low-lying coastal sites, they necessitate the draining of wetland to facilitate the construction of access roads and enormous concrete foundations.

As independent energy consultant Vic Mason has pointed out, such side-effects could stimulate the oxidation of peat (releasing carbon dioxide) and damage many sensitive habitats essential for particular species of wildlife.

Until recently, the most important subsidy supporting the sector was that the Danish National Grid (and hence consumers) was obliged by law to buy all the electricity produced by wind-power projects - and to do so at prices determined by the government, not the market. That's why Danish householders must pay almost double the UK price for electricity.[NB: that's three times U.S. rates...you can mandate anything, and sometimes it can be done; but at great cost, despite the silly, free-ice-cream economics so fashionable among environmentalists and politicians]. Estimates of the costs of the subsidies differ - the Danish government says it is about DKr4 billion (£443 million) a year - but independent experts put it at about DKr10 billion a year. If the higher estimates are correct, it would mean that Denmark has been spending more on wind turbines each year than on education.

In spite of the cost, wind power generates only about 4 per cent of the electricity used in Denmark: the truth is that almost all of it is wasted.

Specialists believe that it is unrealistic to expect turbines to produce much more than 20 to 25 per cent of their potential annual output, and that has been the experience in Denmark. Sometimes there is too little wind, sometimes there is too much. Sometimes the machines are broken or being serviced and polished.

With wind turbines, a conventional power station must always provide back-up. For the Danes, traditional power stations with capacities equal to 90 per cent of the installed wind-power capacity must be permanently online to guarantee supply at all times. (emphases added)

Just in time Washington is preparing to cram down its Power Grab anyway. But it's nice to see that the mythologizing does not go unchallenged.

If you needed further proof President Obama's economic stimulus package has been all but an utter failure with a few suggestions on to improve it (lest you leave the office sour) check out this piece in Forbes by a small business owner.  He's not impressed with the economic worldview of Mr. Keynes, and advocates investments be allocated to the people, not the government.

Brillant idea.

For all the talk about fiscal stimulus and jobs creation at the federal and state level, almost no one in government is doing anything about reducing the roadblocks to investment. For example, millions of people are newly unemployed, and in past recessions a large number of these folks have eschewed looking for a new corporate job and have started businesses of their own. Unfortunately, such prospective entrepreneurs will face a tangle of registration, regulatory and licensing hurdles, many of which have been backed by established businesses that want to avoid just this kind of new competition.

He then says this statement--which made me chuckle--because it's a necessity that would never happen. I'm sure he is entirely serious (and should be).

No one in government, that I have heard, has even suggested any sort of regulation holiday as a potential economic stimulus program. In fact, most of the legislative moves at the national level have made private investment less attractive.

If you need a review of Keynes' ideas check out the rap I wrote about (and take a listen, too).

Jim Pinkerton wonders if yesterday's federal court ruling will trigger a firestorm like Roe v. Wade did. The people have a funny way of not liking their will trampled on.

At the Washington Times today, we have this jaw-drop-inducing story:

"The politically charged gang led by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is more interested in helping felons vote than in helping the military to vote.... The Justice Department is so unenthusiastic about military voting that its website still lists the old requirement for a shorter 30-day military voting window, rather than the current law mandating 45 days. On the other hand, the Justice Department has no legislative mandate whatsoever to involve itself with helping felons to vote, but its website devotes a large section - 2,314 words - to advising felons how to regain voting privileges."

What the editorial doesn't describe is the content of those 2,314 words. It's amazing. The time and effort required to compile all the information, and the obvious priority the Obamites made it, really show the highly politicized cast of mind of this administration. The section includes a state-by-state list of where felons can call or write in order to try to get their voting privileges back. Yet, I repeat, this should be NO business of the Justice Department. It has no statutory or constitutional role to play in helping felons regain voting privileges. But it DOES have a statutory requirement to help DoD ensure voting rights for the military, yet it can't even be bothered, with an entire year to do it, to post even a simple link to the new law requiring that ballots be mailed to military personnel 45 days before an election.

Along with former DoJ official Eric Eversole, who first broke this story at the Washington Times, J. Christian Adams has been way out front on this military voting issue, with all sorts of interesting information that is damning of the Civil Rights Division at Justice and especially its new Obamite overseers. (His Election Law Center blog is a treasure trove of information about all sorts of voting-related legal issues.) And Adams also is the one who blew the whistle on DoJ for its weird compulsion to help armed robbers and drug pushers and other felons gain voting privileges. The good news is that U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas is fighting back on behalf of military voters.

Felons tend to vote for Democrats, like Barack Obama. The military tends to vote for Republicans. And Eric Holder's Justice Department isn't interested in justice, but in serving as a political arm of the White House and the Democratic Party. Hence the greater interest in helping felons vote than in ensuring that soldiers and sailors risking their lives for our country get a chance to exercise their rights of citizenship.

Today on the Main Site:

The Cure for Political Dejection by Quin Hillyer: The worst of times don't have to last.

Swift Tax Dodgers by Andrew Cline: John Kerry's not alone in dodging Massachusetts taxes.

Bring Back the Duel by Christopher Orlet: Because drive-by shootings ain't what they used to be.

Cameron's Flotilla Folly by Aaron Goldstein: The new British prime minister chooses Turkey and Hamas over Israel.

Amongst the Gibbering Journalists by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.: What's with the wretches and patheticos also known as Journolists?

How the New Beetle Got Old by Eric Peters: So long to the New Beetle and its miserable 12-year run.

A Prescription for Fiscal Discipline by Rep. Paul Broun, MD: It's one medicine Obamacare won't care to cover.

You Have Reached... by Reid Collins: Whenever storms knock power out, Pepco remains in the dark.

What to Watch for:

Judge's ruling on AZ law sets stage for legal fight (Wash Post) 

Obama on the View (ABC News) 

Insurers cheat dead soldiers' families (Bloomberg) 

Americans cut back on visits to doctor (WSJ) 

US Military scrutinizes leaks for risks to Afghans (NY Times) 

Clip of the Day:

Robert Gibbs tells media to "grow some skin thats a little thicker;" full briefing below talking about Obama's "beer picnic"