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.

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!"

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."

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.

ObamaCare Part-Times 59 Cedar Falls, Iowa, Public Employees

Because ObamaCare has a look-back period of one year for determining who must be offered health insurance, employers all across America are cutting back the hours of every employee they can to 29 per week right now in order to be exempt from the provisions starting in 2014.

The latest employer in the news is Cedar Falls, Iowa, which hopes to save about $850,000 by cutting its 32 hour workers to 29 hours, as reported here:

City attorney Tom Meyer said if every one of those 59 workers were to remain at 30 hours per week and get health insurance, it could cost the city as much as $850,000 per year.

That Light At The End Of The Tunnel?

Better run. Here comes the ObamaCare train.

Was Socialist France The Model For ObamaCare's 50 Worker Rule?

Mike Tanner for The New York Post, here:

Under ObamaCare, employers with 50 or more full-time workers must provide health insurance for all their workers, paying at least 65% of the cost of a family policy or 85% of the cost of an individual plan. Moreover, the insurance must meet the federal government’s requirements in terms of what benefits are included, meaning that many businesses that offer insurance to their workers today will have to change to new, more expensive plans. ...

Under the circumstances, how likely is the company to hire that 50th worker? Or, if a company already has 50 workers, isn’t the company likely to lay off one employee? Or cut hours and make some employees part time, thus getting under the 50 employee cap? Indeed, a study by Mercer found that 18% of companies were likely to do exactly that. It’s worth noting that in France, another country where numerous government regulations kick in at 50 workers, there are 1,500 companies with 48 employees and 1,600 with 49 employees, but just 660 with 50 and only 500 with 51.

Tanner might have emphasized that as companies become 49ers because of ObamaCare, the workers will increasingly become 29ers, part-timers who are exempted from coverage under ObamaCare because they are deliberately kept to 29 hours per week.

After being 99ers for so long, that's about as good as it's going to get.

Community College Cuts Part-Timers' Hours To Avoid ObamaCare Costs

The Cheerleaders Against ObamaCare

The Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania will cut 400 part-timers' hours to less than 30 hours per week to save $6 million in costs mandated by ObamaCare.

Story here.

Companies everywhere are in revolt against ObamaCare, which mandates coverage be offered when full-time workers exceed 49 in number, but full-time now "redefined" as 30 hours worked on average per week instead of 34 or 35. Leftism is nothing if not based on constant redefinition of reality.

So the path is clear if you're an employer: reduce full-time positions to 49 and part-time everyone else to no more than 29 hours per week. The result in America will be fewer and fewer full-time jobs and inadequate part-time jobs for more and more people, many of whom will be unable to afford to buy insurance through one-size-fits-all ObamaCare and will be thrown into state Medicaid programs where they will receive healthcare which you wouldn't wish on Fido or Morris.

ObamaCare is an ugly war on jobs, and is reminiscent of nothing so much as Stalin's war on the Kulaks of Ukraine, whom he starved to death when collectivization failed to produce the "mandated" amount of wheat. People will not begin to appreciate the comparison I suppose until our government decides the size threshold of companies must be lowered to, say, 39 full-time employees from 49 to get ObamaCare to "work", and to, say, 20 hours per week from 29 to mandate "more coverage". But by then business will already be flat on its back and the size of the proletariat will have swelled. Single payer can't be far behind.

They are saying out there that Romney lost because he focused on too many numbers, but Obama is using mandated numbers to slowly crucify you.

UGLY.

Libertarian In UT 4th District Helps Dem. Incumbent Get Re-elected

Libertarians in Utah's 4th Congressional District narrowly helped keep the Democrat the incumbent in 2012. The rest of Utah is a sea of red.

Matheson was a key figure in the arithmetic to passage of ObamaCare in 2010, subsequently got re-elected in November 2010 and again now in 2012, thanks this time to a libertarian who spoiled the chance for the GOP candidate.

Michael Tanner Is So Wrong. ObamaCare Is Emblematic Only Of The Congress.

The House version of healthcare reform, left, and the Senate version, right.

Michael Tanner for National Review, here:

The new health-care law is generally regarded as the signature achievement of the president’s first term. It’s certainly emblematic of Obama’s entire approach to government and what we can expect from his second-term initiatives.

Everything Mr. Tanner says about ObamaCare sounds right. The problem is, Obama played no role in it. The community organizer organized the legislative community under Democrat leadership, and they designed it, not him.

Obama provided zero leadership formulating what we call ObamaCare. He relinquished his leadership role entirely, allowing Pelosi's House and Reid's Senate to draft their versions of it and to hash the thing out, which ended up being an amalgam of the creations of the two chambers of the legislature. Obama contributed zero, zip, nada, nothing, and Michael Tanner misses entirely that ObamaCare turned out to look like the camel it is when it was supposed to look like a horse.

ObamaCare is healthcare disform, because Obama is a president who is largely absent and not up to the task in any case. Without control of both houses of the legislature, the future will provide no more such camels designed to be horses, unless the Republicans permit it.

Gridlock. Embrace it. Love it. Depend on it.

Libertarian Mish Is Happy Republican Mourdock Lost In Indiana

Mish is on the side of the Democrats, plain and simple, here, referencing a story at the Christian Science Monitor:

Yet this is what happens when views are too extreme. I am very pleased to report "'Red' Indiana sends Democrat to US Senate, as women fled Mourdock".

Of course Mish is happy the Democrat won in Indiana. Libertarians ran a spoiler candidate in that race to throw the race to the Democrat. When it comes down to it, social freedom is more important to libertarians than economic freedom. They cry "Freedom" all the while they mean only "License!"

Libertarians are not on the side of conservatives or Republicans. They are on the side of the Democrats, the party of death to the unborn, and soon the party of death to the elderly under ObamaCare, and eventually the party of death to the middle class, which will not long exist because of Obama.

The middle class stands in the way of the Alinskyites' real objective: the rich. Middle class people, after all, would like to be rich some day, too, not poor. So they must go first in order to get at the rich. If the middle class had any brains they'd understand that Obama's invective against the rich is primarily aimed at them because, compared to the poor, the middle class is rich. Unfortunately, they went to public schools. 

One thing at a time, making use of the useful idiots, the libertarians.

Total Votes Cast In Presidential Elections Since 1968

Figures rounded to the nearest million:

1968.....73 million

1972.....78

1976.....81

1980.....87

1984.....93

1988.....92

1992...104

1996.....96

2000...105

2004...122

2008...131

2012...123.

The biggest "shrug" was in 1996 when Republicans ran me-too liberals Bob Dole and Jack Kemp against the real liberals, Billy Clinton and the Div. School Dropout, AlGore.

The second biggest shrug just occurred, when Republicans again ran me-too liberals, tax collectors for the welfare state who promised to preserve Medicare and keep certain parts of ObamaCare, against the real deal in Obama, who just expanded the welfare state with ObamaCare.

Republicans. They don't call them the stupid party for nothing.

If they had at least run conservatives who lost we could say conservatism lost. But they didn't, and we can't.

Republicans Attacked ObamaCare. Hispanics Overwhelmingly Supported It. Any Questions?

The idea that Republicans alienate (can I say that?) Hispanics because Republicans are against amnesty for illegal immigrants is ludicrous. Hispanics love the welfare state and the party which stands for it, especially its newest iteration in ObamaCare:

The poll, which surveyed 887 likely Latino voters, shows that 62 percent of respondents approve of the overall job Obama has done with health care while in office, including his creation of the controversial plan for comprehensive health care reform. The poll was conducted the Sept. 11-13 and the margin of sampling error is +/- three percentage points.

More here.

Heather Mac Donald gets it right, for National Review, here:

"It is not immigration policy that creates the strong bond between Hispanics and the Democratic party, but the core Democratic principles of a more generous safety net, strong government intervention in the economy, and progressive taxation."

Your Congressman Could Be On His Parents' Insurance Under ObamaCare

Guess what?

Your Congressman could theoretically stay on his parents' healthcare insurance under ObamaCare, which allows a child to stay on his parents' plan until the age of 26.

How so?

"No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years." -- Article. I. Section. 1. of The Constitution of the United States of America

So an enterprising young individual could get himself elected to Congress at the age of 25 and still be on his parents' plan.

That's insane!

If ObamaCare's Anything Like Feds' Response To Rockaways, We're In Deep Trouble

From a harrowing tale of narrow escape from Hurricane Sandy and subsequent abandonment of his neighborhood, Brian Kelly, a retired FDNY firefighter, in his own words in the NY Daily News, here:

“Listen, I was a firefighter, I know relief doesn’t happen overnight. But we’re four days out now. I’m staying with relatives in Staten Island. I drive back to Rockaway every day because I’m afraid of my house getting robbed. In that time I haven’t seen any help in Rockaway. There are some city cops. I saw just two city garbage trucks. I saw the National Guard drive by a few times. But I’m still waiting for the guard, FEMA, the Army Corps of Engineers, Red Cross to set up shop in Rockaway and start helping people back to a life. I’m not seeing it.”

Camille Paglia Blames Obama's Libya Mistake On Women, ObamaCare On Stalinism

Both of which we have said.

The material is transcribed by Ann Althouse, here.