Kitzhaber culture of corruption continues 1 year later

Bill Currier, Chairman of the Oregon Republican Party asks, "Do we turn a blind eye to endless dirty government or do we end this culture of corruption and replace it with open, honest and accountable government?" Read more at the Statesman Journal... Read More......

Regulating the Future

(Hat tip: KimR) - Government pretends it's the cause of progress. Then it strangles innovation. We know government understands that new technologies are important. The military invests in robots and traffic cops use radar guns. But when the rest of us use robots or fly drones, government gets eager to put rules in place before things get "out of control." Read more at Townhall.com Read More......

The Good Humor Rapist

(Hat tip: KimR) - One of the biggest viral stories on social media last week was a laughably idiotic Finnish "how to" video that ostensibly demonstrates the proper way for women to defend themselves against rapists. The video, produced by state-run broadcaster Yle, reveals the top three police-certified methods that women should use against an attacker: "No," "Push," and "Handbag." Read more at Taki's Magazine Read More......

The Penny Plan: a simple solution to Washington’s spending Problem

BY JENNY BETH MARTIN
WASHINGTON TIMES
Published Feb. 13, 2016

What do $500,000 worth of melting walls in Afghanistan, a $600,000 public-speaking training course for teenagers in Morocco, and a series of Star Trek-themed spoof videos for IRS employees all have in common? They’re all examples of absurd projects the federal government financed with our tax dollars; they’re a large part of the reason we’ll never bring the federal budget into balance until Washington decides to make serious changes to its spending habits; and they’re exactly the kind of wasteful spending that would come to a stop if Congress would enact a budget based on the Penny Plan.

Each example is a reminder of how unaccountable our government is to us, the taxpayers. Imagine for a moment the consequences in the private sector if someone spent half a million dollars to build a wall made of sand bricks that was, predictably, destroyed within four months by rain. Waste and fraud that would never be tolerated in the private sector have become all too routine and commonplace in Washington.

Late last month, the United States reached an unhappy milestone: for the first time in our nation’s history, the federal debt exceeded $19 trillion. And looking just a short distance in the future, the debt is expected to reach $20 trillion before President Obama leaves office next January. For perspective, the debt was at $10.8 trillion when he was sworn into office back in 2009. The federal government has been on a spending and borrowing binge for decades – made far worse over the last eight years – and the result is that future generations will be saddled with the inescapable burden of a debt they didn’t rack up.

The federal debt and the profligate spending habits behind the debt are emblematic of the entire culture of Washington, D.C. – unaccountable, irresponsible, and excessively wasteful.

Americans are increasingly distrustful of Washington, D.C. and, as a result, the 2016 presidential election is being driven by anti-Washington and anti-establishment sentiments. Watching the Republican nominating process, one is struck by just how intensely GOP voters dislike “business as usual” in Washington, and not surprisingly, they are clamoring to the two most anti-establishment candidates – Donald Trump and Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

Americans understand debt. And we also understand that managing debt requires discipline and restraint. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, 8 in 10 Americans are in debt. Americans tackle their personal debt, most commonly, by reducing spending, avoiding accruing new debt, and living within a budget. Politicians in Washington, however, consistently take the opposite approach. Congress sometimes goes years without passing a budget, and, as it did this past November, regularly suspends the debt-ceiling limit, which allows the federal government to borrow as much money as it wishes.

One of Tea Party Patriots’ three core pillars, in addition to personal freedom and economic freedom, is the pursuit of a debt-free future because we believe we have a responsibility to ensure that future generations will not be enslaved by our debt. As a concrete measure to promote a debt-free future, we are championing the Penny Plan, a simple budget construct that requires the federal government to spend one penny less out of each dollar spent every year for the next five years. It almost sounds too simple, but the Penny Plan would dramatically reduce spending. By some estimates, the Penny Plan would cut spending by more than $7.5 trillion over a 10-year period. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Mike Enzi supports this proposal as the best and easiest way to balance the federal budget within five years. Despite Washington, D.C.’s penchant for overcomplicating everything, budget slashing is one area where simple truly is better.

One of the best aspects of the Penny Plan is that it first targets duplicative or wasteful government programs that abound in the federal budget. So, for example, the sand-brick walls and IRS Star Trek spoof videos could be put on the chopping block and no one would ever miss them.

We’ve conducted extensive polling on solutions and reforms to address our country’s biggest problems, and the Penny Plan appeals to a wide swatch of American voters across party lines. Among all likely voters, it earns 78 percent support; among Republicans, 88 percent support; among Tea Party supporters, it receives 94 percent support.

The United States has a serious spending problem. The Penny Plan is a serious – and surprisingly painless – solution that all Presidential candidates should be discussing.

###

Jenny Beth Martin is president and co-founder of Tea Party Patriots. Read More......

Nearly everyone dislikes CISA, so Congress will make it law

After spending months mired in the Senate, the latest incarnation of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) advanced to the floor this week and could face a vote as early as next week. The move to pass the CISPA rehash -- which the Obama administration has indicated it will sign -- comes despite mounting opposition from technology companies, security experts, and privacy advocates.
Read more at InfoWorld
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Gov’t to creamery: Your milk is entirely too natural to not be labeled “imitation”

Sometimes government’s dishonesty, incompetence, wastefulness, and misguided nannyism combine to make a perfectly ridiculous story. Today’s comes to us from Florida, where the Ocheesee Creamery is being forced to dump gallons upon gallons of good, natural skim milk because the state is requiring the business to label its good, natural skim milk “imitation” because they haven’t added anything to it. --Paul and Mary Lou Wesselhoeft have been fighting this in federal court with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs, which had formerly allowed them to sell their skim milk while calling it skim milk. No one seemed confused by this except the state government, which changed its requirements.

Read more at Hotair.com
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Oyster Farmer: ‘We Are Terrified’ Of The Government

The National Park Service used falsified data to shut down an 80-year-old oyster company in Point Reyes, Calif, its owner claims. ✧ Drakes Bay Oyster Company operated in Point Reyes for decades until National Park Service officials used falsified data to force Kevin Lunny’s family-run oyster farm to shut down. The experience has left its mark on Lunny: “We are terrified,” he told lawmakers during a hearing Thursday. ✧ “Let me be clear, we did not fail as a business,” Lunny said in his prepared testimony. “This was not bad luck. Rather, the Park Service engaged in a taxpayer-funded enterprise of corruption to run our small business out of Point Reyes.”

Read more at the Daily Caller
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Surprise: Government has been wrong about cholesterol for 40 years

The nation’s top nutrition advisory panel has decided to drop its caution about eating cholesterol-laden food, a move that could undo almost 40 years of government warnings about its consumption.

Read more at Hot Air Read More......

Sorry Big Government: The Corporation Gets the Job Done

Our church has had many charitable programs, but when it really wanted to help some families in South America, it didn’t give them stuff – it helped them band together and form a corporation to BUILD SOMETHING. And that something was coffee. It’s interesting that corporations are so vilified, and yet they’re what we turn to when we really need to get something done – when government, charity, and all other forms of organization fail.

It has been said: “Government is simply a word for the things we decide to do together.” This, of course, is nonsense: government dictates what it’s going to do for us – to us – once it gets into power. In reality, corporation is the word we use for things we decide to do together.

Read more at Saving Our Future
(Hat tip: Carolyn) Read More......

Bigger than President Obama

When four out of five citizens think their government is corrupt there is a big problem. When three out of five also think their government is incompetent the problem may be of historic proportions. The very fabric of a free society begins to come apart when so many people deeply distrust their own government. This is the opposite of the “we the people” model the Founding Fathers fought for and established. Newt Gingrich outlines THREE KEY STEPS BACK TOWARD COMPETENCE AND INTEGRITY.

Read more at Gingrich Productions Read More......

IMPRIMIS: The Tea Party, Conservatism, and the Constitution

By Charles R. Kesler
Editor, Claremont Review of Books
January 2014
Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

The Tea Party movement is named, of course, for the famous event in late 1773 when cases of tea were dumped unceremoniously into the Boston harbor. The Boston Tea Party—a carefully orchestrated strike against a commodity that was being taxed and sold by a monopoly provider—was intended as a one-time thing, though it ended up being an important link in the chain of events that led to the American Revolution. Today’s Tea Party, on the other hand, has ambitions to become an ongoing force—maybe even the major force—in American conservatism. And it strives for a revolution of its own, a return to a more limited, more constitutional form of government. If I had to judge its performance so far, I would say that it has been courageous and right in its diagnosis of the problems facing American politics, but somewhat off in its prescriptions.

When I say the Tea Party is correct in its diagnosis, I mean it is correct in its very clear sense that Obamacare is not just another costly, bureaucratic, top-down, regulatory scheme, of which we have, alas, so many. There is something genuinely tyrannical (despite the good intentions of many of its supporters) about Obamacare. It threatens not only to ruin our medical care system, but indirectly and directly—and sooner as well as later—to subvert our form of government and our way of life, fundamentally changing the relation between citizens and government.

Hubris and Nemesis

In a way, you can see how dangerous Obamacare is by noticing how it has brought out the worst in liberals—which is evident in how they have responded to the Tea Party. Liberal impatience with partisanship—that is, with people who oppose their plans—arises from the fact that in contemporary liberalism, there is no publicly acknowledged right of revolution. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but if one looks at some of the political theorists who were most important to modern or statist liberalism—Kant and Hegel in Germany, say, or Woodrow Wilson here in the United States—they are usually quite explicit in rejecting a right of revolution. In their view, a people always has in the long run the government it deserves. So there’s no right of the people to “abolish,” as the Declaration of Independence proclaims, the prevailing form of government and substitute a better one. In particular, there is no conceivable right to overturn contemporary liberalism itself; as liberals today are so fond of saying, there is no turning back the clock. To liberals the Tea Party appears, well, bonkers, precisely because it recalls the American Revolution, and in doing so implies that it might not be such a bad thing to have another revolution—or at least a second installment of the original—in order to roll back the bad government that is damaging both the safety and happiness of the American people.

This is the position, for instance, of Sam Tanenhaus, former editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of The Death of Conservatism. For Tanenhaus, conservatism is good insofar as it consolidates and preserves the liberal order. If conservatism turns revolutionary, i.e., attempts to roll back the liberal order, then it exceeds its commission—it goes off the reservation, so to speak—because liberalism stands for progress and progress is final. President Obama himself made this point a few years ago regarding national health care: “I am not the first president to take up this cause,” he said, “but I am determined to be the last.” But in fact, Obamacare’s strained and narrow victory in 2010 looked not so much inevitable as desperate. It passed by a party line vote, with rampant side deals to buy out the relevant interest groups, and against bitter resistance that has not gone away. Then came its disastrous rollout and its failure to meet any of its own targets for success. All of which suggests overextension and hubris on the part of liberalism, and in the wake of this hubris the Tea Party has confirmed itself as Obama’s, and Obamacare’s, devoted nemesis.

What the Tea Party needs now is a strategy—something it has so far conspicuously lacked—to allow it to achieve its worthy ends. Thinking through a strategy will help clarify those ends: What is it, exactly, that the Tea Party means by limited government? Limited to what? And limited by what? Clearly the Tea Party’s form of conservatism points back to the Constitution as the basis for restoring American government. But how practically to move in that direction?

The Tea Party rightly concluded from the battles over Obamacare that what we are seeing in our politics these days is not two clashing interpretations of the same Constitution, but increasingly two different Constitutions in conflict: the old Constitution of 1787 and a “living” Constitution that is not just a different approach to the original, but an alternative to it. The extraordinary fight the Tea Party was willing to put up arose from this fact—that Obamacare amounted to a colossal battle between two different ways of government. And it was the Tea Party and President Obama who shared a clear understanding of the stakes; mainstream Republican leaders understood them with much less clarity and intensity.

Matching Means to Ends

The failure of the Supreme Court to strike down Obamacare and the individual mandate played into the Tea Party’s suspicions. The Court, after all, had come close to striking down the act. There were five votes to rule it unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause before Chief Justice Roberts changed the subject to the taxing power. When the Court punted on the main question and allowed Obamacare to become law, it suggested to Tea Party leaders in and out of government that the old constitutional mechanisms of judicial review and separation of powers did not seem capable of defending the Constitution against this fundamental challenge, and that the only recourse would be a direct appeal to the American people—to the ultimate source of authority for any constitution. To them, John Roberts’s about-face revealed the failure, maybe even the treachery, of the governing establishment—including the establishment Republicans who had nominated and backed Roberts as chief justice. That judgment might be unfair—at the very least it is not completely true—but in any case, the Tea Party concluded that it was now urgently necessary to raise the consciousness of the American people to this new threat.

At this point we should note the paradoxical character of the Tea Party: It is a populist movement to defend the Constitution, but the Constitution is meant, among other things, to limit populism in our politics—to channel, moderate, and refine popular passion through constitutional forms, such as elections, officeholding, and the rule of law. The point was to ensure, as The Federalist put it, that the reason, not the passion, of the public would control and regulate the government. So it was incumbent on the Tea Party to try to keep its populist means in line with its constitutional ends. And it is in this respect that the Tea Party has sometimes fallen short.

Last fall, the Tea Party seized upon the latest Continuing Resolution to try to bring down Obamacare. Granted, Continuing Resolutions, the multi-thousand page omnibus spending bills that pass for appropriations bills these days, are abdications of Congress’s own budget process and derelictions of its constitutional duty to protect the public purse. Yet bad things can sometimes be used for good purposes. But mainstream Republican leaders warned that the Tea Party senators never had a realistic plan to obtain the votes to defund Obamacare in the Senate, or beyond that to overcome Obama’s veto pen. President Obama needed to fund the government, but he felt, rightly it turned out, that he could hold out longer than the GOP could. The architects of the government shutdown could never answer the question of how victory might be achieved.

Apparently their hope was that an outraged American public—fresh from voting in 2012 to re-elect Obama and to increase the Democratic majority in the Senate by two seats—would rise up and put such pressure on recalcitrant Democrats that they would defund the program that their party had been longing for since Franklin Roosevelt. In relying on such an unlikely outcome, the Tea Party showed its own populist brand of impatience with the separation of powers, bicameralism, and the legislative process that the Constitution prescribes. In imagining that the American public could be persuaded to reconsider the results of an election hardly a year old, the Tea Party surrendered to its own version of the “leadership theory” that liberals have long preferred to legislative-executive politics of the constitutional sort. The implicit argument was that by going over the heads of party leaders and constitutional officeholders to appeal directly to the people, the Tea Party could generate its own mandate to trump the mandate just awarded in the election.

Appealing to the people, of course, is a time-honored tactic: Ronald Reagan was famous for saying that if you can’t make politicians see the light, you can at least make them feel the heat! But Reagan appealed directly to the people from the bully pulpit of the presidency, not from the Senate floor, and he made sure to explain the issue in pellucid and persuasive terms. We learned from Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in the 1990s that it really is impossible to run American government from Congress. So as the Tea Party’s unreasonable hopes faded, it had to settle for less and less: delaying the individual mandate rather than defunding it; verifying the subsidies of policyholders in the insurance exchanges; abolishing the medical devices tax; delaying the medical devices tax; and so on. The Tea Party leaders were pushed back and back and were forced to ask for less and less, until they ended up with virtually nothing.

The Need for Political Thinking

To summarize, the Tea Party has been right about the threat posed to the fabric of constitutional government by Obamacare and by other brazen assaults on the Constitution, such as President Obama’s asserted prerogatives to choose which laws to enforce and to make recess appointments when there was no recess. But the establishment Republicans were right about the outcome of the effort to defund Obamacare by tying it to the Continuing Resolution. One might conclude then that these two groups need each other—not only in the sense that they need each other to get to a majority in the House of Representatives, but also, at least for the time being, in the sense that each supplies the other’s defects. In that light it is neither wise nor moderate for members of either group to lambaste members of the other as political enemies—something of which both sides have been guilty.

The Tea Party could do itself and the country a great service by working out what a return to constitutional government might really mean, and thus the strategy and tactics appropriate to that. What is needed is less populism and more political thinking on its part, or on the part of its trusted advisors. Political thinking and constitutional thinking are not opposed, of course, any more than putting together a political majority and defending the Constitution are opposed. Indeed, these two great duties, properly understood, are implicit in each other. It’s doubtful that the Republican party can succeed without doing both.

After a century of Progressive mining and sapping of the Constitution, the great document we count on to defend us now needs our defense, and the form of government issuing from the Constitution is itself in need of restoration and renewal. Let me end by giving a few examples of how to bring the spirit of the Constitution and the spirit of conservatism closer together.

Tea Party leaders are eloquent on the point that the Constitution does not make the Supreme Court its final arbiter. Let them apply that insight to Obamacare. The problem with Obamacare is not merely that it will ruin health care, but that it undermines the whole notion of rights—natural rights—that come not from government but from our own nature and from God. Yes, it is unfair, unworkable, and unaffordable. But to leave the argument at that leaves the Constitution out of the picture. So when denouncing Obamacare, let’s hear more about its unconstitutional aspects.

The fattest target is the Independent Payments Advisory Board (IPAB), which is unconstitutional on its face. IPAB consists of 15 members who are not elected by the people but appointed by the president. Their job is to make recommendations to limit Medicare’s budget by reducing reimbursements to doctors. Unless both houses of Congress overrule IPAB by passing their own equal or greater cuts to Medicare, IPAB’s proposals automatically become law. What’s worse, Obamacare conspires to make IPAB permanent by mandating that no resolution to repeal it can be introduced before January 1, 2017, or after February 1, 2017. In other words, the Constitution would be operational for one month only—and even then the repeal must pass by August 15, 2017, in order to be valid, and it could not take effect until 2020!

Congress could presumably unravel these restrictions and undo IPAB anytime it wanted. Nonetheless, the spirit and the letter of this kind of regulation suggest just how averse (and adverse) to the Constitution Obamacare really is. To think that Congress couldn’t repeal it, except for one month, and that even then repeal wouldn’t take effect for three years afterwards, is astounding. Why don’t Tea Party leaders talk more about that in condemning Obamacare? I think the American people would be indignant over this attack on their liberty to govern themselves. But they won’t be angry if conservatives don’t inform them about this travesty.

Conservatives should be calling for other kinds of reforms as well, in order to apply the consent of the governed to regulations which form so much of the substance of modern government. Let’s call for a vote by Congress on all regulations costing $100,000,000 or more. That’s one idea already in circulation. Or why not require the Appropriations Committee, or some combination of committees and committee chairmen in Congress, to approve all regulations, approved by any agency, so that there has to be some democratic say-so before any regulations become law? That does not require changing the Constitution, only a change in the law. We should also require Congress to follow its own budget rules. This doesn’t require an amendment either, only vigorous partisanship on the part of Republicans of every variety. We should insist on 13 appropriations bills for the 13 departments, which would give both parties a chance to fight it out, make what cuts we can make, and decide what is more essential and what is less essential. These kinds of reforms, well short of constitutional amendments, would help to reinvigorate congressional accountability and constitutional government.

If conservative officeholders don’t start to correct these structural deformations in our government, and if the Tea Party doesn’t turn its formidable patriotism and energy to enlightening the American people about how we are losing control of our own destiny, then no matter how many good policies we enact, or how low we set tax rates, the body politic will continue to sicken, and self-government will slip through our fingers.

---

The above is adapted from a speech delivered on October 21, 2013, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

HARLES R. KESLER is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and editor of the Claremont Review of Books. He received his A.B., his A.M., and his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. He is editor of the Signet Classic edition of The Federalist Papers; editor of and a contributor to Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and the American Founding; co-editor, with William F. Buckley, Jr., of Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought; and author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Future of Liberalism. Read More......

After Repeal of Obamacare: Moving to Patient-Centered, Market-Based Health Care

HERITAGE FOUNDATION RESEARCH
Abstract: Obamacare moves American health care in the wrong direction by eroding the doctor–patient relationship, centralizing control, and increasing health costs. True health care reform would empower individuals, with their doctors, to make their own health care decisions free from government interference. Therefore, Obamacare should be stopped and fully repealed. Then Congress and the states should enact patient-centered, market-based reforms that better serve Americans.

Read more at Heritage.org

Note: Many of the solutions this Heritage paper presents are solutions Republicans have submitted in various bills since the healthcare debate began. Harry Reid and Senate Democrats have refused to consider free-market solutions, while the president deceitfully claims that Republicans have not offered any solutions for greater coverage and health care reform. --bc Read More......

Conservatives who backed Wisconsin Gov. Walker appear target of secret probe

Dozens of conservative groups that support Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker reportedly have been subpoenaed by a special prosecutor demanding donor lists and other documents pertaining to their backing of Walker's union overhaul and recall fight. ✧ The so-called "John Doe" investigation bars those subpoenaed from talking publicly. ✧ But Eric O'Keefe, director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, told The Wall Street Journal recently that investigators have raided at least three homes and that he "wants the public to know what is going on," despite the personal risk. Read more at Fox News/Politics... Read More......

School Test Teaches Kids: “Commands Of Government Officials Must Be Obeyed By All”

By Steve Watson - A parent of a ten year old was shocked to discover a grammar and writing test paper that their[sic] child brought home from school reads more like [a] document from an authoritarian country such as China. Read more at InfoWars… (Hat tip: Tom) Read More......

Hume: Tea Party pushed budget stand-off because GOP 'utterly failed' to restrain bloated gov't

Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume explained on "Special Report With Bret Baier" Monday night why Tea Party Republicans originally started their confrontation with Democrats over the bid to defund ObamaCare. He argued that they're taking an unconventional approach, because the mainstream GOP has "utterly failed" to stop the growth of government.

Brit Hume [excerpt]:

In conventional terms, it seems inexplicable, but Senator Cruz and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms. They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left. Entitlement spending never stopped growing. The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded. They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew. And they see the Republican Party as having utterly failed to stop the drift toward an unfree nation supervised by an overweening and bloated bureaucracy. They are not interested in Republican policies that merely slow the growth of this leviathan. They want to stop it and reverse it. And they want to show their supporters they'll try anything to bring that about. ✧ And if some of those things turn out to be reckless and doomed, well so be it.

See video and full article at Fox News/Heard on Fox... Read More......

TII: Let’s Privatize the Welfare State

By John C. Goodman
Have you ever given money to the food stamp program? Do you know anyone who has? ✧ Actually, some people do occasionally make gifts to federal entitlement programs. But gifts to the entire federal government were a paltry $241 million in 2010, the last year for which statistics are available. ✧ By contrast, Americans donated almost $300 billion last year to private sector charities in addition to volunteer time valued at $158 billion. ✧ The money we spend on food stamps (technically called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) almost all comes from coercive taxation, rather than charitable contributions. EXCELLENT ARTICLE! Keep reading at the Independent Institute... Read More......

Idaho County commissioner: Shutdown proves state should manage public lands

Idaho County Commissioner Skip Brandt isn’t pointing fingers at Democrats or Republicans in Washington for the fact that national wildlife refuges, Bureau of Land Management campgrounds, boat ramps, visitor centers and other developed recreation sites, national forest developed areas and all national parks are closed. ✧ “Federal employees have decided to make their furloughs as painful as possible for the public,” Brandt wrote in an email. ✧ “So apparently the ‘Federal’ lands/ facilities are not 'true public' lands/ property after all, but rather are the bureaucracy’s property,” Brandt wrote in a email. “Thus if the bureaucrats/ Federal employees do not have a pay check the properties are off limits to the ‘subjects’” ✧ Brandt has a solution: “It is time that the Federal lands become managed/ accountable State lands.” Read more at Idaho Statesman
(Hat tip: Jo Rae Perkins for U.S. Senate) Read More......

Democrats Pay Union Members to Protest WWII Vets

By John Hinderaker @ PowerLine (Hat tip: Ken McCracken, Benton AFP Chair)
It appears that the Obama administration is violating the First Rule of Holes. Yesterday the administration looked awful when it “closed” and barricaded the World War II memorial on the Mall. The memorial is, by its nature, open. There is nothing to close. And the administration knows that every day, tour groups consisting of WWII vets, now mostly in their late 80s or early 90s, come to Washington to visit the memorial. So the administration couldn’t resist closing the WWII memorial by putting up barricades, as part of their effort to dramatize how terrible the government “shutdown” is. Read more at PowerLine... Read More......

Samuelson: Here comes the spoils society

By Robert J. Saluelson (Hat tip: John H. Detweiler)
We are, I fear, slowly moving from “the affluent society” toward a “spoils society.” In 1958, Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith published his bestseller, “The Affluent Society,” which profoundly influenced national thinking for decades. To the Great Depression’s survivors, post-World War II prosperity dazzled. Suburbia offered a quiet alternative to crowded and noisy cities. New technologies impressed — television, frozen foods, automatic washers and dryers. Never, it seemed, had so much been enjoyed by so many.

This explosive abundance, Galbraith argued, meant the country could afford both private wants and public needs. It could devote more to schools, roads, parks and pollution control. Economic growth became the holy grail of government policy. Production was paramount. It muted social conflict.

The “spoils society” reverses this logic. It de-emphasizes production and fuels conflict. Here’s why:

Read more: Washington Post Read More......

House Votes to Delay Obamacare, Repeal Medical Device Tax

Shortly after midnight, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to repeal Obamacare’s tax on medical devices and delay the unpopular law’s implementation by one year. ✧ The two amendments to the Senate-passed continuing resolution would fund the federal government through December 15. The measure returns to the Senate, with the fate of a government shutdown now resting with President Obama and Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV). In the event of a shutdown, the House approved a separate bill that would pay the U.S. military. Read more at Heritage/Foundry... Read More......