Progressive Lefties At TNR Recognize Senate Deal Is "Crappy" For Them

So says Tim Noah, here:

"Nevertheless, this is still a crappy deal, and Democrats should still reject it--or be quietly pleased if House Republicans reject it (as they're threatening to do)."

I agree that the deal is crappy for Democrats, really crappy, but the objective of Obama is only political. What's good for the country is meaningless. He's counting on the right in the House to reject the deal, doing for Obama what he cannot do by himself. It is the extremists of both the left and the right which cannot see how Obama is playing them. If the House had any brains they'd take the tax deal, but I don't think they will, unlike how under Pelosi the House progressives swallowed hard and took the Senate healthcare plan instead of opposing it. Better than anyone they know that ObamaCare is not the end game, but the next step to the single payer idea for which they originally stood.

Politically Obama needed to look like a compromiser, and appear reasonable and "balanced", to match his rhetoric played out over a long period, which is now very familiar to everyone. Later he can use the political capital gained thereby to appear like a genuine savior when he swoops in to offer a tax cut to the poor to relieve these unfortunate souls victimized by Republican "intransigence" over spending cuts. Obama has been telegraphing this for what seems like forever. This lousy deal for Democrats gives all the appearance of compromise, but it is intended rather to go to the heart of the split between the more conservative House Republican caucus and the more liberal Senate Republican caucus.

Once those two groups are split publically over a vote on a bill which will wreck the lives of millions, Obama is in the strongest position ever to appear the benefactor of "the middle class", the group he most wants out of his way in his attempt to level American society. In order to really screw them, he's got to get their complete confidence first. To do so he'll throw them a tax cut bone, which the doofusses will be very thankful for and will repay their master for with grateful support when he goes after their real enemy, the rich. You know, the Romneys and Buffetts of the world who look like the guys who fire them from their jobs.

The problem with true believers is that they are true. It blinds them to the way power shifts, which is why they never succeed.

Senate Cliff Deal Settles For TEN TIMES LESS Revenue Than Cliff-Diving

As reported here:

"Before [Obama] spoke, details of the emerging deal emerged. It would raise $600 billion in revenue over the next 10 years [emphasis added] by increasing tax rates for individuals making more than $400,000 and households making above $450,000 annually, officials familiar with the talks said.  ... The Biden-McConnell negotiations appeared to offer the last hope for avoiding the fiscal cliff of $600 billion in tax increases and spending cuts that economists fear could throw the country back into recession."

$600 billion over ten years?

Notice how CNBC leaves out "per year" after "$600 billion" in that second part of the snip after the elipsis. A $600 billion annual hit to the economy would be bad indeed, but only because it would post as a bookkeeping negative. Government spending counts as GDP, and removing $600 billion annually from the pool of funds normally tallied under GDP would "book" a recession before we even got there.

Look, by letting the Bush tax rates expire we were supposed to face a tax increase generating revenues of $500 billion PER YEAR or so, plus $100 billion per year from separately agreed to sequestration cuts to defense and social spending from August 2011's debt-ceiling imbroglio. That's why this fiscal cliff was such a big deal. We were talking $600 billion per year in the case of the Bush tax cuts expiring, not $60 billion per year as the Senate has now agreed. Tax increases on the first $9,000 of income ALONE would have generated $65 billion per year by letting the Bush tax cuts expire on the lowest wage earners for the simple reason that that tax increase affects EVERYONE'S first $9,000 of income. That's how progressive taxation works. Keep going on up the income ladder with all those expiring Bush tax rates reverting to the higher Clinton rates and soon you are talking about $500-$600 billion PER YEAR in revenues. What do you think Obama and Dirty Harry Reid have been greedily eyeing after all? That they are caving to this "deal" just shows how really weak is their position, and how much power the House has in fact, if only they understood it.

Unless of course it is all an elaborate ruse, a trap for the House, which just might be conservative enough to reject the deal for its surrealism at a time when the political consensus in favor of "balance" is rearing its ugly head. In which case the political position of the conservative House will be marginalized more or less indefinitely, and the political power of the Senate enhanced.

The US Senate is clearly the most despicable institution in the federal system, if that were possible, for obscuring all this from the American people, for the way bipartisanship means liberals get to remain liberal while Republicans have to check their conservatism with the coat girl, for continuing to spend through borrowing, and especially for acting as a Super House in doing all this, trying to shove this crap down our throats just as it has already shoved the ObamaCare crap down our throats. Bills are supposed to originate in the House after all, but those which do are routinely ignored by the Senate, which thinks itself superior and possessed of a priority it does not have.

The problem clearly is the US Senate and the way it is elected, how long it serves, and the way it acts. If ever it were time to repeal the 17th Amendment, this is it.

Now Hear This! Obama Finally Gets 51% Of The Popular Vote!

Gee, it only took almost two months, but finally they found a way. Obama now has acheived a clear mandate to do WHATEVER HE WANTS! He's finally got 51.03% of the popular vote, for crying out loud.

Bow down and worship, America! The 47% of you (!) who didn't vote for Obama DON'T COUNT!

Wealthy Ivy League Occupy Wall Street Extremists Captured With Explosives

Now, what would they need explosives for, hm?

Story here:

A detective discovered a plastic container with seven grams of a white chemical powder called HMTD, which is so powerful, cops evacuated several nearby buildings.

Police also found a flare launcher, which is a commercial replica of a grenade launcher; a modified 12 gauge Mossberg 500 shotgun; ammo; and nine high-capacity rifle magazines, the sources said.

Gee, remind you of anyone? You know, Obama's friends?

Peter Morici: Obama Threatens To Shakedown Everybody If The Rich Don't Cough It Up

Once again, Peter Morici of the University of Maryland gets it exactly right, here:

"The president, by being so persistent that it's my way or the highway, no spending cuts, taxes on folks over $250,000 or nothing, has basically put a pistol to the head of the middle class. It's threatened them with financial extortion if he doesn't get his way to satisfy the populist wing of the Democratic Party."

Translation: Obama is a gangster who threatens to take everyone's money if we don't give him rich people's money.

Somebody should call the cops.

The Greatest Economic Boom Of Our Time Coincided With The Cheapest Gasoline

Arguably the greatest economic boom period of the 20th Century, the period between 1986 and 2000, was fueled, quite literally, by the cheapest gasoline prices on an inflation-adjusted basis since the end of The Great War. Real gas prices during those years in today's dollars ran down from $2.00 a gallon in the mid 1980s to $1.50 by the late 1990s and up again.

Chart and discussion, here.

Say what you will about former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's presidential run in 2011-2012, he's the only public figure who has had the vision to understand the imperative of getting the price of gasoline below $2.50 a gallon to gun the economy.

With four more years of a regime which is the enemy of all things fossil fuel, expect little more than idling in the driveway.

Lefty FDLAction Calls Obama Pathological Liar

Took 'em long enough. They're shocked, I tell you. Shocked.

Here.

Get Ready America. Here Are Your New Obama Tax Increases.

These are the tax rates scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2013. The dollar figures shown are the 2001 dollars adjusted for inflation to 2011. Have fun stormin' the castle!

Today's Civilian Employment/Population Ratio Was First Achieved 35 Years Ago!

The ratio of employed to population today is 58.7, a level first achieved way back in December 1977.

Persons not in the labor force, that is, persons not counted as unemployed by the federal government, reached an all-time high recently of 88.9 million. Between 1975 when records started being kept and 1992, this number increased by about 0.7 percentage point per year. Under Clinton this number increased by about 1.04 percentage point per year. Under George W. Bush, 1.7 points per year. Under Obama, 2.7 points per year. 

The trend is not our friend.

Obama's Popular Vote Climbs To 50.96%

Monitor it here.

"Babes Shall Rule Over Them. And The People Shall Be Oppressed."

"And I will give children [to be] their princes, and babes shall rule over them.

"And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour: the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honourable."

-- Isaiah 3:4f.

"Ben Bernanke and other central bankers, like promiscuous parents, compensate and indulge political leaders acting irresponsibly in their stewardship of national economies.

"Sooner or later spoiled children turn out badly, and economies juiced with too much money have their bubbles, inflation and collapse.

"This will all end badly."

-- Peter Morici, Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, here

Obama's Popular Vote Total Reaches 50.93%

They keep working on that tax increase mandate!

I Don't Call Sen. Jim DeMint "Demented" For Nothing

Here he is in all his confused glory:

"I think the new debate in the Republican Party needs to be between conservatives and libertarians. We have a common foundation of individual liberty and constitutionally limited government, and we can rationally debate some of the things we disagree on. I don’t think the government should impose my morals or anyone else’s on someone else, but at the same time I don’t want the government purging morals and religious values from our society. We can find a balance there. It really gets back to decentralization. The tolerance is going to come from decentralization and letting people make their own decisions, but we have to be able to put up with societal stigma of things we don’t like."

No, we don't have a common foundation.

Libertarians believe in freedom as license. Conservatives believe in ordered liberty, that there cannot be true freedom unless we respect the transcendent moral order. In recent times libertarians were easily allied with Democrats on social issues, and finally gave up on that and moved rightward on economic concerns. In doing so they demonstrated their unprincipled shape-shifting for what it is, and that Republicans have been too stupid to reject them. For example, I can't recall a single prominent Republican or so-called conservative descrying the many Republican victories spoiled by libertarians in either of the recent elections in 2010 and 2012. What is more we have idiot conservatives like Sarah Palin telling us we must make room for libertarians in the Republican Party while the Libertarian Party itself is encouraged by the races it has spoiled for Republicans by electing Democrats. This from the woman who vigorously supported John McCain and TARP.

Libertarians are not natural allies of conservatives, but they are of Republicans just as they are of Democrats, because the Republican Party has been liberalized beyond recognition. That a so-called conservative like Jim DeMint is friendly toward libertarianism tells you all you need to know about the state of conservatism in America. Conservatism in America is really and truly dead.

One of the favorite ideas of libertarians illustrates my point. The idea comes by analogy from Adam Smith's invisible hand at work in economics, namely, that the electorate always gets it right (Jude Wanniski). Is there a Republican who voted for Romney saying any such thing anywhere in the country now that Obama is re-elected? I doubt it. But that is the position of John Tamny and his ilk at Forbes Magazine. John Tamny, by the way, would like you to be a completely rootless person, with no house, no wife, no children, paying no property taxes for good schools and contributing no commitment to church and community but owning just two bags and a passport so that his beloved capitalist boss can send you wherever and whenever he needs you.

Good government, as the Scriptures teach, is a terror to bad behavior, not to good. That means there are moral absolutes, against which all libertarians do chafe, now more, now less, starting with "It is not good that the man should be alone."

To Demented Jim there are no such absolutes. He's a moral relativist who doesn't have the courage of his own moral convictions. "My morals" he says, as if they belong only to him and didn't come from the Author of Life. St. Paul, I remind you, ridiculed the Corinthian Christians for such an attitude, saying "What do you have that you did not receive?" Our faults are as ancient as the way of escape.

The Heritage Foundation had become reprehensible enough for having embraced Reagan liberalism, which contributed materially to what became the tyranny of the ObamaCare mandates. Now Heritage is to be headed up by the confused conservative DeMint, if he really isn't just a stealth libertarian. Doesn't that tell you everything you need to know about Heritage, that it remains to this day so intellectually confused about the meaning of conservatism that it welcomes a libertarian sleeper?

Conservatives should revolt against Heritage's choice of Sen. Jim DeMint, but don't count on it. I reckon there are only 500,000 of us in the whole country, and that's being generous. In the end, Sen. DeMint and Heritage will come to nothing, and the Republicans too if they are not careful.

"SAVE YOURSELVES FROM THIS CROOKED GENERATION!"

Why Did We Get Obama In 2008? Because A Republican Bailed.

Why did we get Obama in 2008?

Because a good conservative bailed in 2006.

Namely, conservative Republican Senator Peter Fitzgerald from Illinois, who chose not to run for re-election in order to spend more time with his needy son in his formative years, according to statements he made on Tom Roeser's "Political Shoot-Out" radio program at the time on WLS, Chicago. I know. I was there. I listened in front of my fire.

One wonders, then, why he ran for the Senate in the first place.

In addition to that, Peter Fitzgerald was a real conservative in a state full of Republicans who were not. He famously rubbed them the wrong way. But I honestly don't know what he expected.

At any rate his voluntary departure after one term helped open the way for another Illinois State Senator like he had been, one Barack Obama, to run for the Senate seat in 2006, a seat by the way which Senator Carol Mostly Wrong had once held.

And the rest is history.

Now, Senator Jim DeMint from South Carolina is bailing out to head up the Heritage Foundation, having brought a few so-called conservative people into the Senate.

South Carolina was the state which quoted a Tea Party member as saying during the Republican primary election that she loathed Mitt Romney to the core of her being. The state ended up going big for Speaker Newt Gingrich. So I rather doubt we'll get a similarly dramatic turn in Senate representation, but it still is upsetting that conservatives bail just when we need them the most.

Since DeMint seems happy with the idea that a Republican governor will appoint his successor, isn't that an argument for doing it all the time?

Repeal the 17th Amendment.

ObamaCare Will Separate The Wheat From The Chaff

If this story in the Washington Post is correct and big successful firms in large numbers continue to provide insurance under ObamaCare as before, despite the costs, expect the less competitive, smaller firms who are at comparative disadvantage to suffer the most and possibly disappear as they drop coverage because they must to survive.

The Rats Are Jumping Ship

"Tea Party favorite" Senator Demented Jim is resigning his Senate seat early to head up the Heritage Foundation, whose spawn was RomneyCare, and, you know, ObamaCare, and which has otherwise utterly failed to stop the leftward drift of the country.

The reason, of course, is that Heritage is the standard bearer of Reaganism, which is really a form of liberalism. As such it has furthered the leftward drift of the country as it made Republicanism home for Reagan Democrats who fled the radicalism of the Democrat Party and in their turn liberalized the Republican Party, driving out the conservatives in the process and making the Republican Party safe for the Bush family.

Meanwhile at FreedomWorks Dick Armey has controversially bailed out with a boat load of cash donated to help elect conservatives, which didn't go so well in November. After co-opting the Tea Party, the Republicans have now raped it.

It's interesting how the public face of both organizations has been the Rush Limbaugh Radio Program from noon to 3 daily, where Rush runs paid ads for them. Today, in fact, Rush had Sen. DeMint and Ed Feulner on the show to interview them about the move, no doubt to help preempt the narrative that DeMint is bailing out because of the increasingly hostile environment for conservatism in the Senate, led by squishes like Sen. Mitch McConnell. And right afterwards we got a nice little plug for FreedomWorks.

The glaring problem for the so-called conservatism of the Republican Party is that it is still trying to preserve the excrescences of the progressivism of the early 20th century when what it should be doing is challenging the originalist credentials of figures like Reagan, Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln. The latter did more to ruin the original constitution than any president before or since, which is why no thinking conservative can call himself a Republican.

The only people in the country who used to have the habit of mind necessary for overthrowing foreign accretions to the original faith were Protestants, but any examination of them today demonstrates few instances of the virtues which characterized their forebears, unless the followers of Westboro Baptist Church be accepted. The capitulation of Christianity in America generally to the gay mafia tells you all you need to know about the intimate (can I say that?) connection between contemporary theology and liberalism.

Just ask yourself when was the last time the Heritage Foundation or FreedomWorks got upset that Obama has presided over the sweeping away of the Hyde Amendment, the single bulwark in law erected by conservatism against the radical advances of a dictatorial, blood-thirsty, liberalism? Communion, anyone?

Or did they ever object? None of us can remember.

CNBC Shills For Obama, Ignores Big Spike In Jobless Claims

CNBC obviously wants nothing to stand in the way of Obama and the Democrats solving the fiscal cliff by raising taxes on everybody.

It's amazing how the commie sympathizers blatantly rewrite the headlines in denial of reality.

Initial claims for unemployment spiked up to nearly 500,000 in the latest report, and CNBC says claims fall, focusing only on "seasonally adjusted" numbers from the Dept. of Labor.

Claims in the "not seasonally adjusted" category spiked up nearly 140,000 in the last week, and over the last four weeks have averaged 435,000, far in excess of a number in the low 300,000s consistent with an environment of job creation.

Since CNBC says the "temporary spike caused by Superstorm Sandy has faded" that can only mean the spike up which they ignore had a different cause.

Elections have consequences, and higher taxes and ObamaCare are going to cause more joblessness, as the last four weeks suggest. 

Democrat Senate Wants Your Taxes To Go Up, Won't Vote On Obama's Plan

Story and video here, quoting Mitch McConnell on what the Senate refused to vote on:

"[W]e didn’t just put together a bill that included [Obama's] $2 trillion tax increase – we also added the almost $400 billion in new tax stimulus measures he wanted as well. This bill contained a continuation of the payroll tax holiday, a 10 percent credit for new wages that will go to businesses big and small, and it included a fix to one of the many flawed provisions of Obamacare – an expansion of a tax credit for businesses that no one uses. This proposal reflected exactly what was in the President’s budget and his various submissions to Congress."

Flashback July 2011: Obama Didn't Need Tax Rates To Rise Then

Oh, but now he does. As he was a liar then, so is he now, and ever shall be. Amen.

Video here.

One Month Later, Obama Still Has Less Than 51% Of Popular Vote

One month after the election, Obama still can't crack the 51% level in the popular vote.

With 127.6 million votes counted, he's still at 50.88%, only just slightly better than George W. Bush's 2004 win with 50.73% when 122.3 million voted.

W didn't have a mandate then, and Obama doesn't now.

The truly remarkable thing about the presidential election remains the voters' giant shoulder shrug in the worst economy since WWII. We'll never know how things might have turned out had the Republicans not picked a me-too liberal and run a real conservative instead of Mitt Romney, whose first act after his nomination was formalized was to trot out his wife to assure us all how conservative was her husband. Liberal Democrats aren't the only ones suffering from projection syndrome.

As it was the voters shrugged in comparison to 2008 and 2004 when 43% and 42% of the population voted. This year just 40% did.

As FDR bought election after election during the Great Depression of the 1930s with direct federal assistance programs and interventions in the New Deal and culminating in the Social Security Act of 1935 in the Second New Deal, Obama has similarly blunted the pain of our economic straits with massive expansions of unemployment insurance, food stamps, welfare and disability, cell phones, heating assistance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, culminating in the Supreme Court's validation this summer of ObamaCare.

Whatever else may be said, doling out the goodies worked then, and it has worked again, which speaks volumes about the ineffectual nature of the kind of conservative revolution worked by Ronald Reagan, which was no revolution because it was at heart a compromise with the liberal welfare state, not an overturning of it.

Half of America may still hunger for a real meal of conservatism, but so far, all they've been fed are Twinkies.