Bob Costas Gun Tirade On Sunday Night Football

When celebrities and media personalities attempt to plumb the depths of our social consciousness, the result is rarely pretty. Such was the case Sunday night when NBC sportscaster Bob Costas shamelessly tried to capitalize on the recent and tragic murder-suicide involving the NFL’s Jovan Belcher to score personal political points against law-abiding gun owners.

For anyone who missed it, in his halftime segment during Sunday night's NFL game between the Dallas Cowboy and the Philadelphia Eagles, Costas hit his captive audience of football fans over the head with this absurd rant:

You want some actual perspective on this? Well, a bit of it comes from the Kansas City-based writer Jason Whitlock with whom I do not always agree, but who today said it so well that we may as well just quote or paraphrase from the end of his article...

Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it. In the coming days, Jovan Belcher's actions, and their possible connection to football, will be analyzed. Who knows?

But here, wrote Jason Whitlock, is what I believe. If Jovan Belcher didn't possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.

Only a media elitist, living a cloistered life inside the NBC newsroom, could let loose with such a woefully ignorant, ill-timed and irresponsible statement. Furthermore, the fact that Costas tried to partially hide behind a fellow journalist borders on cowardice.

According to criminologist Gary Kleck, 2.5 million Americans use firearms to defend their lives and the lives of their loved ones each year. The obvious truth is that if Bob Costas and his gun-ban buddies at NBC had their way, many of these innocent men and women would not be alive today.

Seemingly, Costas has absolutely no knowledge of the fact that good men and women — and oftentimes, the physically weakest among us — rely on firearms as the only reasonable means of protecting themselves from would-be murderers, rapists and thugs.

Take the case of the elderly woman in Sarasota, Florida, who, earlier this year, used a handgun to fend off an attacker who broke through her kitchen window. "I was fearful of my life," the grandmother tearfully told a 911 operator after she fired two shots at the intruder, causing him to flee.

Or the case of a young Oklahoma mother, who used a firearm to successfully defend herself and her three-month-old baby this past New Year's Eve from a man armed with a 12-inch hunting knife who kicked in her door and came straight for her and her child.

On the other hand, consider the tragic reality of Bob Costas' and Jason Whitlock's gun-ban utopia.

In 2007, Amanda Collins was a student at the University of Nevada, Reno. Although she possessed a legal permit to carry a handgun, the university prohibited her from doing so on campus property.

Late one night, after taking a mid-term exam, Collins was attacked and brutally raped in a campus parking garage located just 100 yards from a police station. And although she escaped with her life that night, another young woman abducted near the same campus would not be so lucky.

Brianna Denison had been staying with a friend during winter break when she went missing in the middle of the night. After a frantic, four-week search, authorities finally found Brianna’s naked, frozen body, crudely hidden underneath a discarded Christmas tree. She had been kidnapped, raped and strangled to death — savaged by the same monster who attacked Amanda in the parking garage just a few months earlier.

As is often the case with media talking heads, it’s doubtful that Bob Costas has any real understanding of the recklessness of his statements. However, ignorance is never a good excuse, and that’s especially true for someone like Bob Costas, who prides himself on being a responsible journalist.

Bob Costas offended millions of law-abiding, gun-owning football fans with his gun-ban rant. He not only owes every one of us an apology, but also a promise that, in the future, he’ll stick to doing what he’s paid very well to do: talk about sports.

Chris W. Cox is the Executive Director of the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA) and serves as the organization’s chief lobbyist.

Battling Boys of Benghazi

Is America Exceptional?

Norman Podhoretz
Former Editor-in-Chief, Commentary

Is America Exceptional?

NORMAN PODHORETZ served as editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine from 1960-1995. He was a Pulitzer Scholar at Columbia University, earning his bachelor of arts degree in 1950. He also holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Cambridge University, England, where he was a Fulbright Scholar and a Kellett Fellow. In addition, he has a bachelor’s degree in Hebrew Literature from the Jewish Theological Seminary. He has written for most major American periodicals and is the author of twelve books, including My Love Affair With America and Why Are Jews Liberals?

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on September 20, 2012, in Washington, D.C., at Hillsdale College’s third annual Constitution Day Dinner.


ONCE UPON A TIME, hardly anyone dissented from the idea that, for better or worse, the United States of America was different from all other nations. This is not surprising, since the attributes that made it different were vividly evident from the day of its birth. Let me say a few words about three of them in particular.

First of all, unlike all other nations past or present, this one accepted as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. What this meant was that its Founders aimed to create a society in which, for the first time in the history of the world, the individual’s fate would be determined not by who his father was, but by his own freely chosen pursuit of his own ambitions. In other words, America was to be something new under the sun: a society in which hereditary status and class distinctions would be erased, leaving individuals free to act and to be judged on their merits alone. There remained, of course, the two atavistic contradictions of slavery and the position of women; but so intolerable did these contradictions ultimately prove that they had to be resolved—even if, as in the case of the former, it took the bloodiest war the nation has ever fought.

Secondly, in all other countries membership or citizenship was a matter of birth, of blood, of lineage, of rootedness in the soil. Thus, foreigners who were admitted for one reason or another could never become full-fledged members of the society. But America was the incarnation of an idea, and therefore no such factors came into play. To become a full-fledged American, it was only necessary to pledge allegiance to the new Republic and to the principles for which it stood.

Thirdly, in all other nations, the rights, if any, enjoyed by their citizens were conferred by human agencies: kings and princes and occasionally parliaments. As such, these rights amounted to privileges that could be revoked at will by the same human agencies. In America, by contrast, the citizen’s rights were declared from the beginning to have come from God and to be “inalienable”—that is, immune to legitimate revocation.

As time went on, other characteristics that were unique to America gradually manifested themselves. For instance, in the 20th century, social scientists began speculating as to why America was the only country in the developed world where socialism had failed to take root. As it happens, I myself first came upon the term “American exceptionalism” not in Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, where it has mistakenly been thought to have originated, but in a book by the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who used it in connection with the absence in America of a strong socialist party. More recently I have discovered that the term may actually have originated with Joseph Stalin, of all people, who coined the term in the same connection but only in order to dismiss it. Thus, when an American Communist leader informed him that American workers had no intention of playing the role Marx had assigned to the worldwide proletariat as the vanguard of the coming socialist revolution, Stalin reputedly shouted something like, “Away with this heresy of American exceptionalism!” And yet Stalin and his followers were themselves exceptional in denying that America was exceptional in the plainly observable ways I have mentioned. If, however, almost everyone agreed that America was different, there was a great deal of disagreement over whether its exceptionalism made it into a force for good or a force for evil. This too went back to the beginning, when the denigrators outnumbered the enthusiasts.

t first, anti-American passions were understandably fuelled by the dangerous political challenge posed to the monarchies of Europe by the republican ideas of the American Revolution. But the political side of anti-Americanism was soon joined to a cultural indictment that proved to have more staying power. Here is how the brilliant but volatile historian Henry Adams—the descendent of two American presidents—described the cultural indictment as it was framed in the earliest days of the Republic:

In the foreigner’s range of observation, love of money was the most conspicuous and most common trait of the American character . . . . No foreigner of that day—neither poet, painter, or philosopher—could detect in American life anything higher than vulgarity . . . . Englishmen especially indulged in unbounded invective against the sordid character of American society . . . . Contemporary critics could see neither generosity, economy, honor, nor ideas of any kind in the American breast.

In his younger days, Adams defended America against these foreign critics; but in later life, snobbishly recoiling from the changes wrought by rapid industrialization following the Civil War, he would hurl the same charge at the America of the so-called Gilded Age.

We see a similar conflict in Tocqueville. Democracy in America was mainly a defense of the country’s political system and many of its egalitarian habits and mores. But where its cultural and spiritual life was concerned, Tocqueville expressed much the same contempt as the critics cited by Henry Adams. The Americans, he wrote, with “their exclusively commercial habits,” were so fixated “upon purely practical objects” that they neglected “the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts,” and it was only their proximity to Europe that allowed them “to neglect these pursuits without lapsing into barbarism.” Many years later, another Frenchman, Georges Clemenceau, went Tocqueville one better: “America,” he quipped, “is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual interval of civilization.”

The main reason for the enduring power of the cultural critique was its fervent embrace, beginning in the late 19th century, by the vast majority of the writers, artists, and intellectuals who followed Tocqueville. And so it still goes in 2012, when the putative materialism and crassness of American life are harped upon in movies, television shows, novels, volumes of social criticism, and op-ed pieces too numerous to count.

Like Tocqueville and the foreigners cited by Henry Adams, moreover, these more recent works attribute this crassly philistine attitude to the love of money and “the exclusively commercial habits” that went with it—in other words, to the species of freedom that has done more than anything else ever invented to lift masses of people out of poverty and that would later be known as capitalism. America, these critics were declaring, was exceptional all right—exceptionally bad, or even downright evil.

On the other hand, there have always been defenders of American exceptionalism as a vital force for good. Thus, several decades before switching sides, Henry Adams charged America’s foreign critics with blindness to the country’s amazing virtues. Whereas, Adams wrote, European philosophers and poets could see only rapacity and vulgarity here, the poorest European peasants could discern that “the hard, practical money-getting American democrat was in truth living in a world of dream” and was “already guiding Nature with a kinder and wiser hand than had ever yet been felt in human history.” It was this dream, Adams went on to say, that beckoned to the poor of the old world, calling upon them to come and share in the limitless opportunities it offered—opportunities unimaginable anywhere else.

For a long time now, to speak personally, I have taken my stand with the young Adams, to whom America was exceptionally good, against his embittered older self, to whom it had become exceptionally bad. In my own younger days, I was on the Left, and from the utopian vantage point to which leftism invariably transports its adherents, it was the flaws in American society—the radical 1960s trinity of war, racism, and poverty—that stood out most vividly. It rarely occurred to me or my fellow leftists to ask a simple question: Compared to what is America so bad?

From our modern perspective, much more was wrong with Periclean Athens, or the Italy of the Medicis, or England under the first Queen Elizabeth, or 19th-century Russia under the Romanovs. But this has not disqualified them from being universally ranked among the highest points of human civilization and achievement. After more than 40 years of pondering the question “Compared to what?” I have come to believe with all my heart that the United States belongs on that exalted list. It is true that we have not earned a place on it, as the others mainly did, by our contribution to the arts. Yet it is worth pointing out that even in the sphere of the arts, we have not done too badly. To speak only of literature, names like Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Robert Frost, and many others attest that we have, in fact, done far better than might generally have been expected of a nation conceived primarily to achieve other ends. These ends were social, political, and economic, and it is in them that we have indeed excelled the most.

We have excelled by following our Founding Fathers in directing our energies, as our Constitution exhorts us to do, to the preservation of the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, as well as to the pursuit of happiness tacitly understood by the Declaration of Independence to require prosperity as a precondition. (In his original draft of the Declaration, of course, Jefferson used the word “property” instead of “pursuit of happiness.”) By remaining faithful in principle—and to a considerable extent in practice—to the ideas by which the Founders hoped to accomplish these ends, we and our forebears have fashioned a country in which more liberty and more prosperity are more widely shared than among any other people in human history. Yes, even today that holds true, despite policies unfaithful both to the letter and to the spirit of the traditional American system that have resulted in a series of political and economic setbacks.

So far as liberty is concerned, until recently no one but libertarians have been arguing that we were insufficiently free in the United States. If anything, some conservatives, dismayed by such phenomena as the spread of pornography and sexual license, thought that we had too much freedom for our own good. But thanks to modern liberalism’s barely concealed hostility to the free market, not to mention the threat posed by Obamacare to religious and economic freedom, many conservatives are now echoing these libertarian arguments, if in a milder form.

Judging by what they say and the policies they pursue, modern liberals are not all that concerned about liberty. What they really care about, and what they assign a higher value to, is economic equality (as reflected in the now famous phrase, “spread the wealth around”). Yet here is what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote in 1976 about this very issue in connection with the redistributionist ideology then regnant at the United Nations:

And equality . . . what is the record? The record was stated most succinctly by an Israeli socialist who told William F. Buckley, Jr. that those nations which have put liberty ahead of equality have ended up doing better by equality than those with the reverse priority . . . . This is our case. We are of the liberty party, and it might surprise us what energies might be released were we to unfurl those banners.


Four years later, Ronald Reagan came along to unfurl those banners. And just as Moynihan predicted, the result was the release of new political and economic energies that reversed the political and economic decline of the Carter years and that led to our victory in the Cold War.

Of course, the party of liberty Moynihan was talking about was the United States of America and the party of economic equality was the socialist countries of what was then called the Third World. But within America today, an analogous split has opened up, with the Republicans constituting the party of liberty and the Democrats more and more becoming the party of redistribution. Hence the Democrats never stop claiming that the rich are failing to pay their fair share of taxes. Yet after surveying the numbers, the economist Walter Williams of George Mason University asks an excellent question: “What standard of fairness dictates that the top ten percent of income earners pay 71 percent of the federal income tax burden while 47 percent of Americans pay absolutely nothing?” To which an editorial in the Wall Street Journal replies: “There is nothing fair about confiscatory tax policy that reduces growth, denies opportunity, and keeps more people in poverty.”

Then too there is the assumption, blithely accepted by the party of economic equality, that the gap between rich and poor—or even between the rich and the middle class—self-evidently amounts to a violation of social justice. Yet far from being self-evident, this assumption stems from a highly questionable concept of social justice—one that rules out or minimizes the role played by talent, character, ambition, initiative, daring, work, and spirit in producing unequal outcomes in “the pursuit of happiness.”

Furthermore, both the assumption and its correlative concept of social justice run counter to the American grain. As study after study has shown, and as the petering out of the Occupy Wall Street movement has recently confirmed, what Tocqueville observed on this point in the 1830s remains true today: Americans, unlike Europeans, he wrote, “do not hate the higher classes of society” even if “they are not favorably inclined toward them . . . .” Which is to say that most Americans are not prone to the envy of the rich that eats away at their self-appointed spokesmen on the Left.

Nor are most Americans subject to the accompanying passion for economic egalitarianism that made for the spread of socialism in other countries. What explains the absence of that levelling passion is that it has been starved by the opportunities America has afforded millions upon millions to better their lot and the advantage they have been free to take of those opportunities—which in turn explains how unprecedented and unmatched levels of prosperity have been created here and how they have come to be shared more widely here than anywhere else.

Tocqueville also put his finger on a second and related reason for the persistence of this particular feature of American exceptionalism: “The word poor is used here in a relative, not an absolute sense. Poor men in America would often appear rich in comparison with the poor of Europe.” A story I was once told by a Soviet dissident provides an amusing illustration. It seems that the Soviet authorities used to encourage the repeated screening of The Grapes of Wrath, a movie about the Great Depression-era migration of starving farmers from the Dust Bowl to California in their broken-down pickups. But contrary to expectation, what Soviet audiences got from this film was not an impression of how wretched was the plight of the poor in America. Instead they came away marvelling that in America, “even the peasants own trucks.”

Tocqueville further observed that in America, “the poor, instead of forming the immense majority of the nation, as is always the case in aristocratic communities, are comparatively few in number, and the laws do not bind them together by the ties of irremediable and hereditary penury.”

As the great economist and social critic Thomas Sowell has demonstrated time and again, it is still the case that the poor in America “are comparatively few in number.” And except for the black underclass—whose size is generally estimated at somewhere between two and ten percent of the black community and whose plight has thus far resisted every attempt at alleviation over the past 50 years—it is also true that penury in the United States is neither irremediable nor hereditary. As Sowell shows, of those who live on the next rung of the economic ladder, more of whom are white than black, only three percent get stuck in the bottom fifth of the income distribution for more than eight years.

Elaborating on Sowell’s analyses, the economist Mark Perry writes:

In the discussions on income inequality and wage stagnation, we frequently hear about the “top 1%” or the “top 10%” or the “bottom 99%” and the public has started to believe that those groups operate like closed private clubs that contain the exact same people or households every year. But the empirical evidence . . . tells a much different story of dynamic change in the labor market—people and households move up and down the earnings quintiles throughout their careers and lives. Many of today’s low-income households will rise to become tomorrow’s high-income households, and some will even eventually be in the “top 10%” or “top 1%.” And many of today’s “top 1%” or top income quintile members are tomorrow’s middle or lower class households, reflecting the significant upward and downward mobility in the dynamic U.S. labor market.


No such mobility can be found in any of the member countries of the European Union, or anywhere else for that matter. Even in the dismal economic state our nation has fallen into today, it is still exceptional where the degree and the distribution of prosperity are concerned. But to this, modern liberals are willfully blind.

With all exceptions duly noted, I think it is fair to say that what liberals mainly see when they look at America today is injustice and oppression crying out for redress. By sharp contrast, conservatives see a complex of traditions and institutions built upon the principles that animated the American Revolution and that have made it possible—to say yet again what cannot be said too often—for more freedom and more prosperity to be enjoyed by more of its citizens than in any other society in human history. It follows that what liberals—who concentrate their attention on the relatively little that is wrong with America instead of the enormous good embodied within it—seek to change or discard is precisely what conservatives are dedicated to preserving, reinvigorating, and defending.

A similar divide separates liberals and conservatives as to the role America has played in world affairs. Consider the many apologies President Obama has issued for the misdeeds of which he imagines Americans have been guilty in our relations with other countries in general and the Muslim world in particular. Never mind that the United States has spilled blood and treasure to liberate and protect many millions of people from the totalitarian horrors first of Nazism and then of Communism, and that since 9/11 we have spilled yet more blood and treasure fighting against Islamofascism, the totalitarian successor to Nazism. And as to the Muslim world in particular, never mind that, as the columnist Mona Charen puts it, “of the last six wars in which the United States was involved (Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya), four were undertaken to rescue Muslims and the other two (Afghanistan and Iraq) had the side benefit of liberating Muslims —to what end remains an open question.”

In spite of all this, the liberal community seems to think that the rest of the world would be better off without the United States, or at least with it following the policy of “leading from behind.” Admittedly there are paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan and libertarians like Ron Paul who agree on this point, but most conservatives do not believe that a radical diminution of American power and influence would be good for us or for the world.

Shortly before the election of 2008, then-candidate Obama declared that his election would usher in “a fundamental transformation of America.” The desirability of such a transformation—which would entail the wiping away of as many more traces of American exceptionalism as it will take to turn this country into a facsimile of the social-democratic regimes of western Europe—is the issue at the heart of our politics today. And in the long run, I hope and trust, Americans will reject such a transformation, and elect instead to return to the principles that have made this nation so exceptional—yes, exceptional—a force for good both at home and abroad.



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Heratige Experts Analyze Fingal Presidential Debate

(Published October 23, 2012 by morningbell@heritage.org)




Heritage Experts Analyze Final Presidential Debate

Last night’s debate between President Obama and Governor Romney was supposed to focus on foreign policy. It turned into a wide-ranging conversation on everything from the Middle East to American teachers.

Heritage Foundation experts were live blogging analysis throughout the night. Below are some highlights from their reactions. Join us at 10 a.m. ET today for a Google+ hangout with several of our foreign policy experts—you can watch online and submit questions via Twitter using the hashtag #HeritageFan.

A Heavy Focus on the Middle East



Both men agreed that the Middle East was changing quickly, but said little about the new face of terrorism. Governor Romney charged that events in Libya, Syria, and Egypt demonstrated that the Obama Administration’s policies were unraveling and leaving the region without adequate American leadership. President Obama defended his policies but spent more time attacking Romney’s policies, which he criticized as “all over the map.”

O(bama repeatedly plugged the killing of Osama bin Laden and ending the war in Iraq. But he said little about how al-Qaeda has regrouped and grown stronger since those events. The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, particularly special operations forces, greatly reduced the pressure on al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and has allowed it to make a comeback. In July, AQI felt strong enough to publicly threaten an attack on the U.S. homeland.

The al-Qaeda franchise in Yemen also has launched several failed attacks on the homeland. Al-Qaeda also has seized large swaths of northern Mali using some of the weapons that it and its allies seized from Libya after the fall of Muammar Qadhafi. And the September 11 Benghazi terrorist attack, which was perpetrated by al-Qaeda sympathizers, underscored the continuing appeal of al-Qaeda’s extremist ideology.

Although Osama bin Laden is dead, al-Qaeda clearly is very much alive.

See A Counterterrorism Strategy for the “Next Wave”

– James Phillips, Senior Research Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs

Cutting the Defense Budget

During the debate, President Obama asserted that his budget proposal maintains defense at about current levels. This is simply untrue. Here are the numbers from his Office of Management and Budget from this year’s budget request. In fiscal year 2010, defense spending was $721.3 billion in budget authority. Under the President’s proposal, defense spending will fall to $566.3 billion in fiscal year 2014.

This is a 21 percent reduction in just four years. Further, this does not account for the negative effects of inflation on the defense budget. Finally, the President’s budget proposal does not calculate the impact of automatic defense spending reductions in the Budget Control Act of 2011. These automatic spending cuts to defense will amount to more than $500 billion over nine years. While the House of Representatives has adopted a measure to defer these automatic cuts to defense by applying the necessary spending reductions to areas outside defense, President Obama’s White House threatened a veto in response to this measure.

President Obama wants the American people to believe that Governor Romney is proposing to increase the defense budget by $2 trillion. He calculates this by assuming that his defense spending reductions already apply, and therefore serve as the basis for comparisons. In reality, Governor Romney is proposing not to let President Obama’s defense budget reduction proposal to take place.

America’s military is the single most valuable contributor to increasing the likelihood of a peaceful and prosperous world. Large-scale reductions in the defense budget, therefore, put the prospects of a peaceful and prosperous world further out of reach.

– Baker Spring, F.M. Kirby Research Fellow in National Security Policy

The Navy and Number of Ships Needed

President Obama said:

You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.

While the types of ships of today are different from those prior to World War I, there are certain laws of physics that have not changed. And one of those is that, no matter how much cyber capability or space capability may exist, a ship can still be only in one place at any one time. Thus, whether it is battleships or aircraft carriers, whether it is nuclear-powered submarines or biplanes, each system can only be in one place at any given time. And a shortfall of naval vessels, such as now exists, means that there will be times and places where there will be fewer ships than U.S. Navy analysts and officers deem appropriate and necessary.

The idea that better cyber capabilities can substitute for physical capabilities constitutes a fundamental misunderstanding of how military forces operate. Of course, it hasn’t been helped by the dismissive attitude assumed by President Obama’s first Secretary of Defense about how the U.S. had excessive numbers of aircraft carriers, as though the proper state of American security is to have parity with potential foes, rather than clear superiority.

– Dean Cheng, Research Fellow, Asian Studies Center

Defense Readiness Is Key to America’s Role in the World

The weakness of America’s economy is hurting America. The added self-inflicted wound of the cuts directed by the sequestration provision of the Budget Control Act will damage the readiness of the nation even further. When America’s allies see the leader of the free world as receding and leading from behind, they worry and pull back from operations that support U.S. interests.

When both candidates agree that America has a responsibility to lead, the conditions to ensure that leadership must be set and protected. To do that, sequestration must be turned off and the assault on readiness ended. The so-called $2 trillion that Obama says is “not asked for by the generals” is exactly what nearly every expert says America needs to have solid defense (4 percent of GDP). America’s leadership in foreign affairs must be reinvigorated, and we must provide all the tools needed by diplomats and intelligence professionals.

The argument that the present defense budgetary situation is based on strategy and exactly what the uniformed leaders have asked for is a little disingenuous. The cuts made in the last four years have been dollars-based, with the defense officials like Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta claiming further “cuts will be a disaster.” This must be changed.

– Steven Bucci, PhD, Senior Research Fellow for Defense and Homeland Security

Jobs on the Home Front

Obama talked of turning our attention to home, including bringing our veterans home. But there are no jobs for them at home, with unemployment hovering stubbornly around 8 percent and job creation well below what is needed to grow the economy. Building up our roads and bridges won’t create new jobs. America’s workers need more than the same failed stimulus policies to grow the economy. Rather, the President needs to make sure Taxmageddon does not occur and get control of the budget.

– Alison Fraser, Director, Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies

 Federal Pay for Education Employees Won’t Create Jobs

President Obama accused Governor Romney of believing that class size “doesn’t make a difference” and that hiring teachers won’t create jobs.

Actually, class size, within reasonable bounds, does not impact student achievement. The National Center for Education Statistics, for example, has tracked the national student-teacher ratio over time. Today, nationally, the student-teacher ratio is just 15.2: 1. The student-teacher ratio has declined 29 percent since 1970 and by more than 40 percent since 1950. But despite these declines, academic achievement has seen little to no improvement, graduation rates have been stagnant, and achievement gaps persist.

Second, spending more taxpayer dollars on federal programs to hire education employees (President Obama proposes $25 billion to do just that) won’t create jobs. It will simply represent another large transfer of wealth from taxpayers to public education employees, half of whom are not teachers.

While enrollment in America’s public schools has not quite doubled since 1950, staff positions (both instructional and administrative) increased by 377 percent between 1950 and 2010 (a nearly five-fold increase). From 1970 to 2010, enrollment in the nation’s public schools increased just 7.8 percent; over the same time period, education staff increased 84 percent.

Again, such increases have failed to move the needle on student achievement. The only beneficiaries of new federal programs and spending have been the education unions.

– Lindsey Burke, Will Skillman Fellow in Education

The U.S. Place in the World

The discussion of the U.S.’s place in the world in last night’s debate was unsatisfactory. To the extent that it focused directly on that subject, both Obama and Romney sought to reduce it to a question of defense spending, which the President was eager to cut. That is the wrong approach; much better is to assess what the U.S. needs to carry out its responsibilities and budget accordingly. But both men largely fought shy of presenting any larger vision of the U.S.’s role in the world, and sought to focus their remarks on domestic policy. Governor Romney led off with the U.S. need to defend freedom, promote the principles on which it was founded, and to support its allies, but after that the discussion diverged into job creation, a half-hearted defense by the President of his renewable energy policies, and a lengthy wrangle about education policy.

It is perfectly fair to argue that the U.S. cannot be strong abroad unless it is strong at home. In fact, this is one of the subjects that we hoped this debate would focus on. But economic strength needs to be coupled to a broader understanding of the U.S.’s vital national interests in the world, to an understanding of the merits and limits of diplomacy, and—ultimately—to a vision, informed by the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, of the purpose and processes of U.S. foreign policy. After Governor Romney’s opening, these vital subjects disappeared from the debate. That reflects, perhaps, the sentiment of both sides that the election will not be won on foreign policy.

– Ted R. Bromund, PhD, Senior Research Fellow in Anglo-American Relations

OV Harvest Brings Olive Oil And Vinegar To New Philadelphia

Kimberly Adams likes to cook, likes olive oil and vinegar, and likes to do things right. So when it comes to olive oil, Kimberly Adams is the one to seek out.

If you haven’t been to OV Harvest, you haven’t been introduced to gourmet olive oils and vinegars. This store, the newest in the family of downtown New Philadelphia stores, opened September 22. While olive oils, and vinegars, are common place to those who cook, Kimberly provides quality olive oils not available anywhere else.

“What I wanted to do,” Kim told me, “was to find a source of olive oil where I could know it was fresh. If you are cooking with it or just using olive oil for salads, if it isn’t fresh you can tell by the way it tastes and the way it smells. I started over a year ago to learn about olive oil, and its companion balsamic vinegar, and my research led me to start a search for really fresh oils and vinegar.”

When on vacation in North Carolina earlier this year, she stopped in Pinehurst where she came across a store which sold premium olive oils and vinegars. While her husband played golf one afternoon, she spent her afternoon at a specialty store in Pinehurst which sold, you guessed it, olive oil and vinegar. She was amazed.

A gourmet cook, she had been seeking various types of olive oils, and vinegars, and suddenly she had found them. More amazingly the store actually encouraged tasting of the different blends of oil and vinegar. She knew she had found something she for which she had been looking for years.. “It was,” Kim said, “like a candy store for adults.”

She knew not only had she found the olive oils she had been seeking, but a calling to bring their unparalleled flavor to the Tuscarawas Valley.

A conversation with her husband that evening clinched the deal and OV Harvest was born. On September 22, the store’s doors were opened on the southwest corner of West High and Second Street, SW, in New Philadelphia, Ohio.

The store is unique in that the olive oils and vinegars are truly fresh. Her stock comes from Veronica Foods, a distributor in California, which buys its oil from around the world. The best olive oil is the freshest, and to get it her supplier buys from both the northern and southern hemispheres.

The reason is simple. The prime harvesting season in the northern hemisphere is in October, November, and December. Olive producers in California, Italy, Portugal, and other northern hemisphere growers, therefore, harvest and press their crop in the fall months. On the other hand, southern hemisphere producers, countries such as Chile, Spain, Portugal, and Australia, have because a prime growing season in March, April, and May, which we consider to be the spring months of the year.

Because of the different growing and harvesting seasons, Kim’s current stock of oils are primarily from the southern hemisphere, and this writing being in the month of October, are the freshest oils available. The oil is shipped to Veronica foods from the grower in sealed, air tight containers, which preserves the freshness of taste as well as the quality of the oil itself. Veronica Foods then blends various herbs into the virgin oil to give it the distinctive taste which creates the olive oil’s special character. Once blended, the oils are shipped to OV Harvest in air tight containers which preserves the taste and quality by protecting them from oxidation during shipment and storage.

“This is important,” Kim says, “because olives are fruits like tomatoes and the fresher the oil, the better it is. Like tomatoes, olives picked and processed soon after, are tastier, juicier, and more succulent than those purchased from a grocery store. Oils stored for long periods of time not only lose their flavor, but over time their smoking point, the temperature at which oils will lose their ability to be used at high cooking temperatures, decreases with age.

To assure her customers of the freshness, the history of the oils are prominently displayed, including the type of olive used to produce the oil, where the olives were grown and pressed, the date of pressing, nutrition facts, and a listing of added herbs and spices, all natural, which make each oil distinctive.

The olive oils available include a myriad of blends. From a unflavored premium Extra Virgin olive oil, the best quality rating available for olive oil, the selection includes exotic mixtures including garlic, mushroom, and other blends of natural fruit and herbs. Best of all, all the olive oil offerings are available for taste testing on the spot.

Another offering of OV Harvest is balsamic vinegar which is imported from Modona, Italy. The vinegar is made by use of the Solera method of processing which consists of putting the grape juice over large fires to start the grape musk fermenting. It is then put into large barrels to ferment, and as it does the musk is transferred to smaller barrels until the desired fermentation is reached, a process which can take as long as 18 or more years.

When the vinegar has reached its peak, natural flavors are added to give it distinctive tastes which will enhance any meal. As with the olive oil freshness is the secret. While the long processing time would appear to destroy the fresh quality of the vinegar, the barrels in which it is aged prevent oxidation and preserves the unique flavors of the vinegars. There are no artificial additives put into to the Modona balsamic vinegar, no colors or sweeteners. The flavor comes from aging in barrels which date back earlier times, sometimes centuries. The resulting vinegar blends surpass any available balsamic vinegar through conventional sources.

OV Harvest is a unique gourmand find. For the cook looking that special taste which only the highest quality olive oil and balsamic vinegars can bring to food, a visit to Kim’s OV Harvest is a must.

Hours are Monday through Friday are 10:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., and Saturday 10: 00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. The address is 106 2nd Street, SW, New Philadelphia, OH 44663, the phone 330-365-9458.

Obama's Plan to Assume Dictitorial Powers in the US

Obama's Second Term Transformation Plans

The 2012 election has often been described as the most pivotal since 1860. This statement is not hyperbole. If Barack Obama is re-elected the United States will never be the same, nor will it be able to recapture its once lofty status as the most dominant nation in the history of mankind.

The overwhelming majority of Americans do not understand that Obama's first term was dedicated to putting in place executive power to enable him and the administration to fulfill the campaign promise of "transforming America " in his second term regardless of which political party controls Congress. That is why his re-election team is virtually ignoring the plight of incumbent or prospective Democratic Party office holders.

The most significant accomplishment of Obama's first term is to make Congress irrelevant. Under the myopic and blindly loyal leadership of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats have succeeded in creating an imperial and, in a second term, a potential dictatorial presidency.

During the first two years of the Obama administration when the Democrats overwhelming controlled both Houses of Congress and the media was in an Obama worshipping stupor, a myriad of laws were passed and actions taken which transferred virtually unlimited power to the executive branch.

The birth of multi-thousand page laws was not an aberration. This tactic was adopted so the bureaucracy controlled by Obama appointees would have sole discretion in interpreting vaguely written laws and enforcing thousands of pages of regulations they and not Congress would subsequently write.

For example, in the 2700 pages of ObamaCare there are more than 2500 references to the Secretary of Health and Human Services. There are more than 700 instances when he or she is instructed that they "shall" do something and more than 200 times when they "may" take at their sole discretion some form of regulatory action. On 139 occasions, the law mentions that the "Secretary determines." In essence one person, appointed by and reporting to the president, will be in charge of the health care of 310 million Americans once ObamaCare is fully operational in 2014.

The same is true in the 2319 pages of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act which confers nearly unlimited power on various agencies to control by fiat the nation's financial, banking and investment sectors. The bill also creates new agencies, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, not subject to any oversight by Congress. This overall process was repeated numerous times with other legislation all with the intent of granting unfettered power to the executive branch controlled Barack Obama and his radical associates.

Additionally, the Obama administration has, through its unilaterally determined rule making and regulatory powers, created laws out of whole cloth. The Environmental Protection Agency on a near daily basis issues new regulations clearly out of their purview in order to modify and change environmental laws previously passed and to impose a radical green agenda never approved by Congress. The same is true of the Energy and Interior Departments among many others.

None of these extra-constitutional actions have been challenged by Congress. The left in America knows this usurpation of power is nearly impossible to reverse unless stopped in its early stages.

It is clearly the mindset of this administration and its appointees that Congress is merely a nuisance and can be ignored after they were able to take full advantage of the useful idiots in the Democrat controlled House and Senate in 2009-2010 and the Democrat Senate in the current Congress.

Additionally, Barack Obama knows after his re-election a Republican controlled House and Senate will not be able to enact any legislation to roll back the power previously granted to the Executive Branch or usurped by them. His veto will not be overridden as there will always be at least 145 Democratic members of the House or 34 in the Senate in agreement with or intimidated by an administration more than willing to use Chicago style political tactics.

The stalemate between the Executive and Legislative Branches will inure to the benefit of Barack Obama and his fellow leftists.

The most significant power Congress has is the control of the purse-strings as all spending must be approved by them. However, once re-elected, Barack Obama, as confirmed by his willingness to do or say anything and his unscrupulous re-election tactics, would not only threaten government shutdowns but would deliberately withhold payments to those dependent on government support as a means of intimidating and forcing a Republican controlled Congress to surrender to his demands, thus neutering their ability to control the administration through spending constraints.

Further, this administration has shown contempt for the courts by ignoring various court orders, e.g. the Gulf of Mexico oil drilling moratorium, as well as stonewalling subpoenas and requests issued by Congress. The Eric Holder Justice Department has become the epitome of corruption as part of the most dishonest and deceitful administration in American history. In a second term the arrogance of Barack Obama and his minions will become more blatant as he will not have to be concerned with re-election.

Who will be there to enforce the rule of law, a Supreme Court ruling or the Constitution? No one. Barack Obama and his fellow-travelers will be unchallenged as they run roughshod over the American people.

Many Republicans and conservatives dissatisfied with the prospect of Mitt Romney as the nominee for president are instead focused on re-taking the House and Senate. That goal, while worthy and necessary, is meaningless unless Barack Obama is defeated. The nation is not dealing with a person of character and integrity but someone of single-minded purpose and overwhelming narcissism. Judging by his actions, words and deeds during his first term, he does not intend to work with Congress either Republican or Democrat in his second term but rather to force his radical agenda on the American peoplethrough the power he has usurped or been granted.

The governmental structure of the United States was set up by the founders in the hope that over the years only those people of high moral character and integrity would assume the reins of power. However, knowing that was not always possible, they dispersed power over three distinct and independent branches as a check on each other.

What they could not imagine is the surrender and abdication of its constitutional duty by the preeminent governmental branch, the Congress, to a chief executive devoid of any character or integrity coupled with a judiciary essentially powerless to enforce the law when the chief executive ignores them

Conservatives, Libertarians, the Republican Party and Mitt Romney must come to grips with this moment in time and their historical role in denying Barack Obama and his minions their ultimate goal. All resources must be directed at that end-game and not merely controlling Congress and the various committee chairmanships.

May 12, 2012

I would add but 6 words to those above mentioned, Conservatives, Libertarians, the Republican Party and Mitt Romney, to say "and we the American people also", must come to grips with this moment in time and our role in denying Barack Obama his lifelong goal of "transforming" us into his slaves working on his government plantation. Come together. Right now.

VOTE OBAMA OUT.



The Administration's Messy Story on Libya Attack

(First posted on Morningbell@heritage.org)

Washington is notorious for dropping news it doesn’t want scrutinized too closely on the last day of the work week. So last Friday was a convenient time for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to release a statement about the Obama Administration’s conflicting accounts of the attack that killed the U.S. Ambassador to Libya.

The ODNI statement appears intentionally vague on exactly what it knew when and who was told. It does little to address concerns that the President’s senior supporters seemed more concerned about minimizing criticism of the White House than addressing the threat of transnational terrorism.

The question remains: Why did senior officials issue contradictory and wrong accounts of what happened during the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi?

It took the intelligence community more than a week to get out the clarifying statement—and its “explanation” came only after the Administration started taking heat for initially downplaying the involvement of terrorists in the Benghazi attack. This raises concerns that the ODNI statement is more about providing political cover for the White House than answering serious questions about the misstatement from the President’s spokespersons.

From the outset, there was more than a little confusion about what government officials knew when. As Heritage’s Helle Dale noted on Thursday:

Reportedly, U.S. intelligence sources knew within the first 24 hours of the attack that not only was al-Qaeda involved, but also which members and even where one of them lived. And yet, Administration officials toed the line unfailingly that the murders were provoked by the YouTube trailer for Innocence of Muslims.

The Administration’s official line on embassy attacks was already shaky, after Twitter posts, press statements, and other official pronouncements related to the attack on the U.S. embassy in Cairo were pulled from State Department websites.

But the worst was Ambassador Susan Rice’s defense of the Administration on television last weekend. Rice vigorously asserted that the attack in Benghazi was not “premeditated,” even as she must have known top Libyan officials were already declaring that the attacks were planned.

The Administration’s response to Benghazi drew even more scrutiny in the following days, as the President delivered a muddled speech to the U.N. General Assembly that appeared more focused on placating anti-American sentiment than expressing outrage over a terrorist attack on American citizens.

By the end of the week, it was clear that the White House was taking more heat for its handling of the aftermath of the Benghazi attack than it wanted. And that was when the ODNI statement suddenly appeared, stating that it had initially informed senior officials that “in the immediate aftermath, there was information that led us to assess that the attack began spontaneously.” Only later, the statement adds, did it receive additional evidence pointing to a deliberate attack.

Clearly, acknowledging that terrorism is alive and well looks bad for the Obama Administration’s rhetoric, which has portrayed Obama as having vanquished Osama bin Laden and thus ending the “war on terrorism.” The chaotic handling of the Libya attack points to one of two culprits: incompetence or dishonesty. The American people deserve the truth, whatever that may be.

Obama and John Adams on the Debt

"There are two ways to conquer & enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt." - John Adams 1826

The Quote of the Decade:
"The fact that we are here today to debate raising America 's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government cannot pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government's reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America 's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that, "the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better." ~ Senator Barack H. Obama, March 2006

Romney-Obama Debates

(The following article was published on September 25, 2012 by morningbell@heritage.com.)

"60 Minutes" Contrast Between Romney, Obama on Entitlements

The official, head-to-head debates begin next week, but Sunday’s “60 Minutes” appearances by President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney (R-MA) provided a contrast in the ideas offered on the nation’s entitlements and spending crisis.

For his part, the President punted on a serious question about the nation’s concern over spending—blaming everything on President George W. Bush. Instead of addressing the spending question, he waited for the next question about the national debt, which has increased more than 50 percent since he took office. Then came the familiar refrain of why he’s not responsible for Washington’s overspending or the country’s abysmal fiscal situation:

When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history. And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90 percent of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren’t paid for, as a consequence of tax cuts that weren’t paid for, a prescription drug plan that was not paid for, and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

These continued excuses ignore the massive increases since the President took office. According to Heritage expert Emily Goff: By fiscal year 2008, the deficit had reached $458.6 billion. The deficit was increasing as Obama came into office, mainly driven by the recession and the first wave of TARP bailouts. But his Administration’s massive stimulus bill sent spending into overdrive and led to a record $1.4 trillion deficit for fiscal year 2009. Deficits have stayed at more than $1 trillion each year since then.

America’s entitlement programs are the major driver of out-of-control spending. Without reform, they would push federal spending to nearly 36 percent of the economy within a generation. Debt held by the public would explode to nearly 200 percent. Serious structural reforms are inevitable—it is merely a question of how we change what we are doing.

In his “60 Minutes” interview, Obama glossed over Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare and the resulting costs for seniors.

Romney, when asked how he would change Social Security, first made clear there should be no changes to benefits for those in or near retirement.

But he went on:

What I’d do with Social Security is say this: that again, people with higher incomes won’t get the same high growth rate in their benefits as people with lower incomes. People who rely on Social Security should see the same kind of growth rate they’ve had in the past. But higher income folks would receive a little less.

As Heritage expert Alison Fraser explains, Social Security is already income-adjusted today. This is called means testing. Benefits are capped for high-income earners, and the calculation of initial benefits a new retiree receives is based on his or her past income. Upper-income retirees pay a much higher tax than those with lower incomes. Romney proposes to extend this income adjusting so that upper-income retirees receive a bit less than they do now.

While many politicians claim that the only way to address entitlements is to raise taxes or cut benefits, expanding means testing is a serious and sound way to pursue reform.

These kinds of solutions can be found in Saving the American Dream, Heritage’s blueprint for solving our spending and debt crises. Saving the American Dream lays out solutions like slowly moving to a flat Social Security benefit that keeps seniors out of poverty, means testing Social Security so that very affluent seniors have a reduced benefit, and moving to a more robust means-tested premium support mechanism for Medicare that offers seniors choice and control over their health dollars and better health outcomes.

Without reforms, entitlement programs will push spending to untenable levels and put undue pressure on vital areas of government such as national defense. The Obama Administration’s comments about reform, like "now is not the time" for fixing Social Security and the need for a "balanced approach," have been proven hollow by its push for tax hikes on job creators. We have a spending problem, not a revenue problem, and the longer Washington wastes time, the harsher the changes will have to be.

This debate is vital. To save the American economy and sustain the safety net for those who need it, spending must be reined in and entitlement programs must be reformed.

Obama and Pharaoh Share Same Slavery Plan

RECENT VIRGINIA CHURCH SERVICE SERMON…


I’d love to give the Pastor of this predominantly black church in Virginia three cheers. This guy is obviously a leader. Perhaps we should each decide who our real leader is... It is amazing to see that very little has changed in 4,000 years.


"Good morning, brothers and sisters; it's always a delight to see the pews crowded on Sunday morning, and so eager to get into God's Word. Turn with me in your Bibles, if you will, to the 47th chapter of Genesis. We'll begin our reading at verse 13, and go through verse 27.

Brother Ray, would you stand and read that great passage for us?

... (reading) ...

Thank you for that fine reading, Brother Ray.

So we see that economic hard times fell upon Egypt, and the people turned to the government of Pharaoh to deal with this for them. And Pharaoh nationalized the grain harvest, and placed the grain in great storehouses that he had built. So the people brought their money to Pharaoh, like a great tax increase, and gave it all to him willingly in return for grain. And this went on until their money ran out, and they were hungry again.

So when they went to Pharaoh after that, they brought their livestock - their cattle, their horses, their sheep, and their donkey - to barter for grain, and verse 17 says that only took them through the end of that year. But the famine wasn't over, was it? So the next year, the people came before Pharaoh and admitted they had nothing left, except their land and their own lives. "There is nothing left in the sight of my lord but our bodies and our land. Why should we die before your eyes, both we and our land? Buy us and our land for food, and we with our land will be servants to Pharaoh.

So they surrendered their homes, their land, and their real estate to Pharaoh's government, and then sold themselves into slavery to him, in return for grain.

What can we learn from this, brothers and sisters? That turning to the government instead of to God to be our provider in hard times only leads to slavery.

Yes...

That the only reason government wants to be our provider is to also become our master? Yes.

But look how that passage ends, brothers and sisters!

Thus Israel settled in the land of Egypt, in the land of Goshen. And they gained possessions in it, and were fruitful and multiplied greatly." God provided for His people, just as He always has! They didn't end up giving all their possessions to government, no, it says they gained possessions! But I also tell you a great truth today, and an ominous one.

We see the same thing happening today - the government today wants to "share the wealth" once again, to take it from us and redistribute it back to us. It wants to take control of healthcare, just as it has taken control of education, and ration it back to us, and when government rations it, then government decides who gets it, and how much, and what kind. And if we go along with it, and do it willingly, then we will wind up no differently than the people of Egypt did four thousand years ago - as slaves to the government, and as slaves to our leaders.

What Mr. Obama's government is doing now is no different from what Pharaoh's government did then, and it will end the same.

And a lot of people like to call Mr. Obama a "Messiah," don't they? Is he a Messiah? A savior? Didn't the Egyptians say, after Pharaoh made them his slaves, "You have saved our lives; may it please my lord, we will be servants to Pharaoh"?

Well, I’ll tell you this - I know the Messiah; the Messiah is a friend of mine; and Mr. OBAMA IS NO MESSIAH! No, brothers and sisters, if Mr. Obama is a character from the Bible, then he is Pharaoh.

Bow with me in prayer, if you will...

Lord, You alone are worthy to be served, and we rely on You, and You alone. We confess that the government is not our deliverer, and never rightly will be. We read in the eighth chapter of 1 Samuel, when Samuel warned the people of what a ruler would do, where it says "And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day..."

And Lord, we acknowledge that day has come. We cry out to you because of the ruler that we have chosen for ourselves as a nation. Lord, we pray for this nation. We pray for revival, and we pray for deliverance from those who would be our masters. Give us hearts to seek You and hands to serve You, and protect Your people from the atrocities of Pharaoh's government. In God We Trust... "

Has Obama's Economic Policy Created Any Job?

Congress has headed off for its long vacation-and-campaign season, fleeing Washington as the unemployment rate rises. According to the Labor Department's July jobs report, the unemployment rate ticked up to 8.3 percent, 12.8 million Americans are out of work, and 5.2 million have been out of work for at least a half a year.

According to one survey, the country added a surprising 163,000 jobs in July, while according to a second Labor Department survey, employment fell by 195,000—raising questions about whether the more positive figure is all that reliable, given that the economy slowed significantly to a 1.5 percent annualized growth rate in the second quarter and appears to be slowing further.

The question isn't what has slowed the economy—it's really what Obama Administration policy hasn't slowed the economy? The policies of the last few years has been unequivocal job killers.

The Administration's foot-dragging on free trade agreements has killed job creation. The extended moratorium on oil drilling, followed by new regulations, killed job creation. President Obama's refusal to build the Keystone XL pipeline killed jobs. Ever-expanding Environmental Protection Agency regulations kill jobs. Extending unemployment insurance—part of the failed "stimulus"—was a humanitarian gesture, but it killed jobs. Even increasing deficit spending has a job-killing effect, the opposite of what Obama espouses.

And then there's Obamacare, which if it goes into full effect will be one of the biggest job killers of modern times.

To all of this, President Obama said, "We tried our plan—and it worked."

And they're not done yet. The Democrat-led Senate just tried again last week to raise taxes on small businesses. The Republican-led House stopped that plan and passed a bill to extend the 2001 and 2003 tax policies for next year and thus defer part of Taxmageddon, the biggest job killer we now face. But will Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV) even allow a vote on it?

Reid is a major driver of these tax increases and job-killing policies. He has abused his authority as majority leader to block the minority party from the opportunity to offer amendments more than 60 times, more than all of his predecessors combined.

And Reid denies the connection between the Administration's policies and a lack of jobs. He has claimed that "only a tiny fraction of layoffs have anything at all to do with tighter regulation." But he again misses the point by assuming that job losses are the problem, rather than a lack of job creation.

Having fiddled since January, Congressional liberals have now left town without doing anything to help Americans looking for work. Meanwhile, the largest tax increase in American history is looming for January 1, set to further devastate the economy by hitting families with an average tax hike of more than $4,100 each.

Heritage's J.D. Foster warns:

While these tax hikes will not take effect until January of next year, they are already sapping the economy because businesses are forward-looking. Not knowing what their own tax burdens will be, businesses are highly reluctant to hire workers or invest for the future. And with waning faith Congress will prevent Taxmageddon, warnings and fears of a sharp recession are rising rapidly—fears that further discourage any thoughts of hiring or investing.

The regulatory and legal mess created by years of policies cannot be undone overnight. The growing threats from Europe's travails cannot be ignored, nor can the developing recessions throughout Asia. There is nothing the United States can do to defuse these threats, but we can prepare for them. Preventing Taxmageddon is something Congress should do immediately. It is not enough to pass bills and vamoose to campaign while the economy slides even further. The President must lead, and Congress must act now, to prevent Taxmageddon now.

The unemployment rate has now been at or above 8 percent for 42 months. It threatens to rise higher as the economy slows further. President Obama and his congressional allies should set aside their ideological fencing for the good of the economy: Extend the 2001 and 2003 tax policies for at least a year to strengthen the nation's economic security. Prevent the jump in the payroll tax rate. Prevent the implementation of the new Obamacare tax hikes. Prevent the mandated budget cuts known as "sequestration" that threaten national security.

The "plan" has not worked. It's time for a new plan based on the basics, not gimmicks.

***************
First published by morningbell@heritage.org 8/3/12



Business Owners Battle Obamacare for Religious Freedom

(Originally published by morningbell@haritage.com on 7/30/2012)

Two days from now, employers across America will become vulnerable to crushing government penalties for exercising their religious freedom. This isn't exactly what lawmakers advertised when they pushed Obamacare, but it is part of the Obama Administration's agenda—forcing nearly all employers to pay for abortion-inducing drugs, contraception, and sterilization services.

Beginning August 1, employers must amend their health insurance offerings to include these drugs and services. And if they don't? How about a fine of $100 per employee per day for non-compliance. This outrageous policy makes it impossible for employers to afford the fine—meaning they must change their insurance policies or stop offering health coverage to their workers.

But for many employers, offering the types of services required under the HHS mandate violates their consciences. It conflicts with their deeply held religious beliefs. And the government is telling them that doesn't matter—what's more, it's telling them that their beliefs are inconsequential, and they must pay.

Just last Friday, a judge in Colorado gave one business's owners the first glimmer of hope that their religious freedom may survive this attack. Heritage's John Malcolm and Dominique Ludvigson explained:

U.S. District Court Judge John Kane, a Carter appointee, granted a preliminary injunction on behalf of Hercules Industries, halting the government's ability to enforce its anti-conscience mandate against the company while the lawsuit challenging the mandate continues in court…The case is in its early stages and will proceed to a trial on the merits.

Hercules is a family-owned, for-profit company with a self-insured health plan for its 265 employees. Its owners see the Obama Administration's message as "either comply and desert our faith, or resist and be punished," said William Newland, one of the owners.

"We have a President, I think, that doesn't know much about building up a business, but he certainly has good ideas on how to tear one down," Newland said.

Judge Kane concluded that the harm to the government from not enforcing the mandate "pales in comparison to the possible infringement upon Plaintiffs' constitutional and statutory rights" to operate their business consistent with their convictions. Judge Kane concluded that the government's interests in enforcing the mandate were undercut by the numerous exceptions to the mandate that the Administration has already created for other entities. "These interests are countered, and indeed, outweighed, by the public interest in the free exercise of religion," he stated.

According to the Obama Administration, however, the free exercise of religion is something done only one day a week in a house of worship. It argued that the "Plaintiffs' free exercise claim fails at the outset because for-profit, secular employers generally do not engage in any exercise of religion protected by the First Amendment."

Operating on this belief, Obamacare brings nothing but punishment for business owners who believe otherwise. Heritage's Jennifer Marshall and Dominique Ludvigson break down the monetary cost:

With 265 employees, Hercules' fine would have amounted to $800,000 per month—almost $10 million per year. If Hercules were to take the more likely action of dropping health care coverage to avoid facilitating the mandate, thereby forcing its employees into government-run exchanges, it would face a fine on faith of approximately $2,000 per employee per year, for a total of $530,000 per year.

Those would be the monetary costs, but the cost to freedom would be much greater. Marshall and Ludvigson note:

While the court order is limited to Hercules and does not relieve other family businesses or the many religious non-profits with moral objections from having to comply with the mandate's burden, Judge Kane's analysis offers hope that their pleas for the restoration of their religious liberty will get a fair hearing.

How did it come to this? During the legislative battle over Obamacare, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) famously said that Congress would need to pass the law to see what was in it. She was right about one thing: Obamacare as it passed was not fully formed. The law gave unprecedented new powers to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to fill in countless details, directing the ways Obamacare would affect all Americans. With this law, Congress handed over immeasurable authority to HHS. And Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been hard at work trying to convince Americans that this is all in their best interest.

There is no reason to believe it will end here, which is why it is vital to halt this attack on religious freedom as quickly as possible. As Ludvigson explains, this first HHS mandate "raises significant questions about what more Obamacare will require on other matters of deeply personal religious and moral significance, such as prenatal care, end-of-life issues, and parental authority for minors' health decisions."

More than 50 plaintiffs—for-profit and non-profit alike—have gone to court against the HHS mandate. In winning an injunction that prevents the mandate's enforcement on its business while the case goes to trial, Hercules has demonstrated the strength of the religious liberty challenge to Obamacare.



The End Of Welfare Reform

The Obama Administration made yet another end run around Congress last week—this time, to gut the successful welfare reform law of 1996. If this is allowed to stand, it will mean rewinding years of progress that lifted millions out of poverty.

Before the 1996 reform, welfare was a one-way handout: Government mailed checks to recipients who did nothing in return. The new program the reform law established, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), changed all that. It required able-bodied welfare recipients to work, prepare for work, or at least look for work as a condition of receiving aid. Welfare reform turned "welfare" into "workfare."

At the time, liberals denounced the new law and predicted dire consequences for America's needy. They said the reform would do "serious injury to American children" and "substantially increase poverty and destitution."

There was "absolutely no evidence that this radical idea has even the slightest chance of success," they said, crying that "No piece of legislation in U.S. history has increased the severity of poverty so sharply."

In reality, the exact opposite turned out to be true.

After reform, the welfare caseload promptly dropped by 50 percent. As the caseload plummeted, employment and earnings among recipients experienced an unprecedented surge upward. As Heritage's Robert Rector reported:

As welfare dependence fell and employment increased, child poverty among the affected groups fell dramatically. For a quarter-century before the reform, poverty among black children and single mothers had remained frozen at high levels. Immediately after the reform, poverty for both groups experienced dramatic and unprecedented drops, quickly reaching all-time lows.

Still, the left fought the work requirements. But after legislative attempts to do away with them failed over the years, the Obama Administration decided to rescind the reforms without Congressional approval. This Administration has had no problem acting in an imperial way, rewriting law on its own, whether its new dictates are legal or not. In fact, Heritage legal scholars have determined this latest move is indeed illegal.

What did they hate so much? The reform simply reflected Americans' willingness to help their neighbors in need, on the condition that welfare recipients do what they can to help themselves as well.

Under the law, some 40 percent of adult TANF recipients in a state were required to engage in "work activities," defined as unsubsidized employment, subsidized employment, on-the-job training, attending high school or a GED program, vocational education, community service work, job search, or job readiness training. Participation was part-time, 20 hours per week for mothers with children under six and 30 hours for mothers with older children.

In the past, state welfare bureaucrats have attempted to define "personal care activities," "massage," "motivational reading," "journaling," attending Weight Watchers, and "helping a friend or relative with household tasks" as work activities. Expect far more of this in the future as no-strings-attached handouts again displace workfare.

Instead of helping people get back on their feet—from job training to obtaining employment—welfare will now go back to locking them in a cycle of dependence on the government.

President Obama has made no secret about his plans to expand the welfare state permanently. He has increased spending on federal means-tested welfare ("means-tested" benefits are doled out according to the recipients' income levels) by a third since taking office. And he plans to increase this even further after the current recession ends, calling for a permanent increase in annual means-tested spending from 4.5 percent to 6 percent of gross domestic product. Overall, President Obama plans to spend $12.7 trillion on means-tested welfare over the next decade.

The welfare-to-work provisions of the TANF law were a real bipartisan success story—which is rare in a federal government with more than 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care, and social services to poor and low-income people.

At the beginning of last week, only two of these programs had active work requirements. With Obama's latest order, the list is now down to one.


(Originally published July 18,2012 by morningbell@heritage.org)



Five Reasons to Repeal Obamacare

The House is scheduled to vote today on full repeal of Obamacare. Although many reports are circulating that Congress has already voted on this numerous times, this is only the second time the House will have voted to fully repeal the law.

Heritage has laid out the impacts of Obamacare on the American people—and according to a poll released this week, a majority of Americans agree that Obamacare should be repealed. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius took to the pages of The Washington Post this week to re-argue the Administration's positions, claiming basically the opposite of the havoc Obamacare is wreaking on the U.S. economy and health care system.

As Congress takes up the issue, we present the Top 5 Reasons to Repeal Obamacare:

5. To stop adding to the U.S. deficit and debt.

Medicare and Medicaid is pushing the federal budget to the breaking point. Obamacare makes the problem much worse by adding to the entitlement crisis in the form of a massive Medicaid expansion and a new entitlement subsidy for households with incomes up to 400 percent of the federal poverty level. These two spending entitlement programs will add at least 35 million Americans to the government rolls at an expense of more than $200 billion annually by the end of the decade.

4. To help stop Taxmageddon.

In addition to being a massive federal power grab, Obamacare contains a massive tax increase on the American economy—at a time when job growth should be the nation's number one priority. In total, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the Obamacare tax hikes would raise about $800 billion in new revenue over a decade. Taxmageddon—the unprecedented, $494 billion tax hike scheduled to hit Americans on January 1, 2013 —includes just five of Obamacare's 18 new taxes.

3. To preserve freedom, including religious freedom, for all Americans.

Obamacare tramples on individual freedom and religious liberty. One of the first examples is the especially controversial provision of the HHS preventive services mandate that takes effect in a few short weeks on August 1. After that, as employers renew their health plans in the coming year, they will have to comply with the HHS mandate's coercive requirement to cover abortion-related drugs, contraception and sterilization—regardless of religious or moral objections. This is one of the first chilling examples in Obamacare that shows how Americans will lose their individual liberties.

2. To keep health care decisions where they belong—with patients and their doctors.

Obamacare is a massive intrusion in the doctor-patient relationship, micromanaging how health care should be delivered to patients. When the government is given this much authority and discretion, it does not result in higher-quality care for patients. Rather, it leads to price controls and one-size-fits-all regulations that misallocate resources and will lead to headaches for doctors and problems for patients trying to access health care.

1. To make way for real, patient-centered, market-based health care reform.

Health care reform that preserves American liberty is possible and is direly needed. The Heritage Foundation's Saving the American Dream provides such a plan and would put us on a course toward a truly consumer-based health care system. A starting point should be setting commonsense insurance rules for those who buy their own insurance—individuals and small businesses outside the large group market. Congress should combine sensible individual health insurance market reforms with appropriate tax and Medicaid reforms for a fair and fiscally sound strategy to expand coverage to the currently uninsured.

Is Repeal Possible?

As research by Heritage's Bob Moffit concludes, "Based on Washington's record of health policymaking, ending or rolling back Obamacare is hardly implausible." Moffit points to examples from history: the repeal of the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988 and President Bill Clinton's failed attempts at reform in 1994. Moffit notes that the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988 was originally enacted with bipartisan support in both the House and Senate, but repealed one year later. The reason? Plain and simple: it was the disapproval of the American people that drove the law's removal.

The failure of Obamacare is not only a matter of the public's continued opposition to it; the law is also a major policy failure. It is based on the false premise that more government, more regulations, and more mandates are the right solution to America's health care problems. Obamacare falls short of genuine reform because its alleged benefits increase not only government spending, but also the cost of private health insurance—on the backs of taxpayers.

To achieve a health care system where patients come first, Congress must not embrace the flawed and failed policies in Obamacare. Instead, Congress must use this opportunity to offer an alternative vision for the future of health care—a future where individuals get better care at lower cost without government controlling the dollars and decisions.

(First puiblished by morningbell@heritage.org)

US To Use China Bankrupt Railroad Plan For US Trains

China's attempt at a high-speed rail network is fraught with corrupt officials, impossible costs, and deadly safety failures. But U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood wishes America would follow it as a model.

LaHood told The Cable last week: "The Chinese are more successful [in building infrastructure] because in their country, only three people make the decision. In our country, 3,000 people do, 3 million. In a country where only three people make the decision, they can decide where to put their rail line, get the money, and do it. We don't do it that way in America."

His comments are stunning. Yes, that's how Communists do it: A few people make decisions for the country and control the money, land, resources, and workers. And how has that worked out?

"Rather than demonstrating the advantages of centrally planned long-term investment, as its foreign admirers sometimes suggested, China's bullet-train experience shows what can go wrong when an unelected elite, influenced by corrupt opportunists, gives orders that all must follow — without the robust public discussion we would have in the states." That sounds like a direct rebuttal to LaHood, but Washington Post editorial writer Charles Lane wrote that back in April 2011.

The Telegraph (U.K.) reported in February that 70 percent of China's railway projects had been suspended, as its railways ministry attempted to continue deficit financing while facing slow ticket sales. Last year, a deadly train crash brought safety concerns and corruption at the highest levels of the railway to light.

The bottom line is that high-speed rail is like pouring money down a hole. China's official institutions aren't known for transparency, but according to the Voice of America, "Even the [Chinese] national research institution, the Academy of Science, reported last year that at current investment and estimated passenger numbers, the trains will never collect enough in fares to repay construction loans."

LaHood—and President Obama—advocate high-speed rail in America by evoking the image of thousands of workers on the project. It's part of their stimulus-funded plan to get America back to work. But once again, China's experience demonstrates that government spending on infrastructure has not helped the Chinese economy.

The Obama Administration has an ally in California Governor Jerry Brown (D), however. On Friday, Democrats in the California state Senate narrowly approved funding for the first stage of a high-speed rail line there. They faced a deadline for getting $3.3 billion in federal stimulus money, which drove the timing of the vote. The state is now authorized to start selling $4.5 billion in bonds. The key is that this first stage is barely a beginning, as CBS Sacramento columnist Aaron McLear explained:

The plan sold to voters cost $46 billion; now the state says it will cost $68 billion, hoping that the federal government and private investors make up the bulk of the cost. But as the non-partisan research group California Common Sense pointed out this week, when one factors in typical large infrastructure project overruns, the cost is closer to $99 billion, with $82 billion of that funding unsecured. If the Feds don't pick up half the tab the cost soars to $203 billion.

That's a pretty big "if"—"if" the funding comes in. One Democratic state senator who voted against the project exposed this reasoning: "Is there additional commitment of federal funds? There is not. Is there additional commitment of private funding? There is not. Is there a dedicated funding source that we can look to in the coming years? There is not."

Basically, California lawmakers are just hoping it works out. And they're ready to tax Californians—and the rest of America—to make that happen. Californians are wise to their situation, and they're not too keen on diverting endless amounts of money into this hole. Polls show public support for the rail plan has dropped below 40 percent.

Despite public opinion, LaHood declares that the opposite is true, like a character out of Orwell: "There's no turning back on this. We're not going to turn back. And you know why? Because that's what the people want. That's why... there's no stopping high speed rail."

But as the suspension of Chinese railway projects shows, there is stopping it when bullet trains collide with fiscal reality. The states of Florida, Wisconsin, and Ohio actually turned down federal money for similar projects, declining to tie their state budgets to the money pit of high-speed rail. They realize that their taxpayers would be on the hook subsidizing the rail line long after the initial infusion of federal cash.

We need less centralized control of transportation, not more. Congress should give states more control over the transportation dollars their drivers already pay in federal gas taxes. States can identify their transportation problems and priorities much better than Washington. Secretary LaHood could not be more wrong.


(Origionally published on July 9, 2012, by morningbell@heritage.org)