“
This meant that both faced the same post-election choice. Did they want to take their newfound eminence seriously? Or did they want to cash in on their celebrity?
For Palin, the serious path required at least serving out her term as governor before returning to the national stage. For Huckabee, it could have involved anything from starting a think tank to running for the Senate in 2010. For both, it would have meant wedding their political identity to ideas as well as attitudes.
So far, they’ve chosen celebrity instead. Huckabee spent the last year hamming it up on a weekly talk show, and the last month hawking a book of inspirational Christmas stories. As for Palin — well, you probably know what she’s been up to lately.
Nobody should begrudge them their choices. Think tanks are a snooze; Senate races are a grind. Signing autographs for your adoring fans is more fun than rounding up budget votes in Juneau.
But they were the wrong moves if either wanted to become president someday.
” — Op-Ed Columnist - They Chose Celebrity - NYTimes.com
NewsBusters.org captured a fascinating exchange about so-called health-care reform on “Inside Washington.” The panelists were columnist Charles Krauthammer, Newsweek’s assistant managing editor Evan Thomas and National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg:
Krauthammer: The fraudulence of these numbers is absolutely staggering, and I’ll explain to you why. The benefits kick in in 2015, so outlays are only for half of that decade. The taxes and the cuts, the presumed spending cuts, all kick in at the beginning. You’ve got 10 years of money in and five years of outlay, so of course it will produce a deficit—I mean, a surplus. If you start of 2015 and go until the end of time, the amount of deficit added every decade is going to be about half a trillion. So once you start—when the program starts, it will be annually—it will cause a huge deficit annually. That is an absolutely phony number that [Sen. Harry] Reid gave us.
Thomas: Charles is right. This bill is a fiscal fraud. I’d still vote for it, because I think it’s a good thing to extend benefits and start down the road to universal and—because of the health insurance. But we have to be—if we were honest about it, we would say that we have not dealt with the money piece of it, with the cost thing, that we’re going to have to deal with. We’re going to kick that down the road and have to deal with it later.
Krauthammer: How do you do that?
Totenberg: The thing about the health care bill, though, is that—the Senate bill—is that it actually tries to do something about costs. It its starts down that road.
Thomas: It doesn’t! It doesn’t, it’s as fake as a $2 bill [sic]. You don’t get serious about costs.
Totenberg: Unlike the House bill, it tries to do things about cost. I am not saying it’s ideal. But we have to start this. But if we don’t get a health care bill this time, it is probably the last chance.
So here we have an editor of what used to be a newsmagazine endorsing what he himself calls “a fiscal fraud,” and an NPR reporter referring in the first person to partisan advocates of a controversial piece of legislation.
- via Best of the Web Today
[Emphasis mine]
Just makes you fell all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn’t it?
“Once the government creates an insurance company or plan, the government or the taxpayers are liable for any deficit that government plan runs, really without limit,” [Lieberman] says. “With our debt heading over $21 trillion within the next 10 years…we’ve got to start saying no to some things like this.” — Lieberman Digs In on Public Option - WSJ.com
Obama Says He Intends to ‘Finish the Job’ in Afghanistan - NYTimes.com -
Good for him.
This Antarctic Leopard Seal was very aggressive and threatening—almost certainly a territorial instinct. After a 90-minute battle of wills, during which time the seal delivered a wide variety of escalating threats, this seal eventually bit the photographer, David Barr.
(via)
That’s not a seal. It’s a shrieking eel.
Tell the FCC to Say "No" to the Cable Kill Switch | Public Knowledge -
So Hollywood supposedly wants the FCC to give movie studios the ability to remotely shut down video outputs on your home theater system when you are watching movies on cable (to prevent pirating, I would assume.)
Doubt it? Hey, I heard it from Adam Savage (yes, the guy from Mythbusters.)
un:
(via lenxo:apsies:mikehudack:artistspaid:newspeedwayboogie)
“This morning, with her, having coffee.”
-Johnny Cash, when asked for his definition of paradise.
“
What sets the politicians of 2009 apart from the ones of 1787 is the pervasive modern denial that human nature is something we can understand and a basis on which we can found a political order. The Americans who wrote and ratified the Constitution believed in certain truths about human nature. These included our fundamental equality, the securing of our inalienable rights as the government’s raison d’être, and the need to channel the natural selfishness that engenders factionalism through a constitutional mechanism that protects individual rights and promotes the public good.
The modern belief, instead, is that what matters is human history, not human nature, our evolution rather than our essence. As the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1948, “[No] man who is as well abreast of modern science as the [Founding] Fathers were of eighteenth-century science believes any longer in unchanging human nature.” Having discarded the concept of human nature as a fixed star by which to navigate, modern political actors and thinkers can only fall back on “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society,” as the Supreme Court said in 1958.
” — Incharacter.org“
President Barack Obama took office promising to lead from the center and solve big problems. He has exerted enormous political energy attempting to reform the nation’s health-care system. But the biggest economic problem facing the nation is not health care. It’s the deficit. Recently, the White House signaled that it will get serious about reducing the deficit next year—after it locks into place massive new health-care entitlements. This is a recipe for disaster, as it will create a new appetite for increased spending and yet another powerful interest group to oppose deficit-reduction measures.
Our fiscal situation has deteriorated rapidly in just the past few years. The federal government ran a 2009 deficit of $1.4 trillion—the highest since World War II—as spending reached nearly 25% of GDP and total revenues fell below 15% of GDP. Shortfalls like these have not been seen in more than 50 years.
Going forward, there is no relief in sight, as spending far outpaces revenues and the federal budget is projected to be in enormous deficit every year. Our national debt is projected to stand at $17.1 trillion 10 years from now, or over $50,000 per American. By 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analysis of the president’s budget, the budget deficit will still be roughly $1 trillion, even though the economic situation will have improved and revenues will be above historical norms.
[…]
What to do? The best option would be for the president to halt Congress’s rush to fiscal suicide, and refocus on slowing the dangerous growth in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He should call on Congress to pass a comprehensive reform of our income and payroll tax systems that would generate revenue sufficient to fund its spending desires in a pro-growth and fair fashion.
Reducing entitlement spending and closing tax loopholes to create a fairer tax system with more balanced revenues is politically difficult and requires sacrifice. But we will avert a potentially devastating credit crisis, increase national savings, drive productivity and wage growth, and enhance our international competitiveness.
The time to worry about the deficit is not next year, but now. There is no time to waste.
” —The Coming Deficit Disaster - WSJ.com
Mr. Holtz-Eakin is former director of the Congressional Budget Office and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This is adapted from testimony he gave before the Senate Committee on the Budget on Nov. 10.
I’m glad to see someone is telling them.
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.” — T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia