Does either party have any plan to cut federal spending from today’s near 28 percent of GDP to the more traditional 21 percent?
George W. Bush didn’t even try, and Obama is making that Great Society Republican president look like Ron Paul.
When a democracy reaches a point where the politicians cannot say no to the people, and both parties are competing for votes by promising even more spending or even lower taxes, or both, the experiment is about over.
“Remember,” said John Adams, “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
Tag: Quote of the Day
Quote of the Day
Your tweets are bizarre and unoriginal. – Source
This is what he said… click here.
Here’s proof that he said it. It was a direct message…. click on thumbnail to make it bigger:
Quote of the Day
“The new Evangelical Left, like the old Social Gospel Religious Left of decades ago, always materialistically equates Big Government and centralized control with the Kingdom of God. They learned no lessons from the 20th century, when Big Government again and again wreaked destruction and was often the antithesis of Christian teachings. For the Religious Left, Obamacare is just one more opportunity for coercion and eradication of private initiative.
“Revealingly, the Religious Left seems uninterested in lowering doctors’ expenses by limiting lawsuit abuse or providing tax credits towards private coverage. Such proposals distract from the larger agenda of expanding state power.
“Why do Religious Left activists always worship at the altar of the Big Government? More traditional religious believers, understanding human nature, look to other altars.”
Quote of the Day
So my first question is, would North Korea have condemned these reporters to such an outrageous sentence if they knew they weren’t going to get anything out of it? Might they, with different expectations of how the U.S. would respond, just have deported the women? In other words, how much complicity do we have in creating this entire situation?
And my second question: If I get arrested in some axis-of-evil type country, is Bill Clinton going to come rescue me?
Quote of the Day
Show me a half-dozen Republican senators attending a birther movie premiere, and I’ll pretend to believe that Olbermann went to the Ivy League Cornell.
Quote of the Day
Where Democrats have President Obama, principles, and a new argument about consumer protections, Republicans have an enthusiastic, self-contained base that is ready to work to defeat Obama’s signature initiative. (On some level, this isn’t _really_ about health care: it’s about anxiety and anger at government, and at the Obama administration.) Democratic members are left to sell a series of principles that are popular, but which have been obscured by the focus on Washington sausage making.
[….]
The president, the vice president and the Cabinet will be out in force to make arguments, some of them good arguments, in favor of the need for health insurance reform. The goal of the opposition — of Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity — isn’t to change minds; their activists know what they believe already: it’s to make noise. Making noise scares members of Congress. And Democrats are vulnerable to panics.
That said, if the only people who show up at the constituent meetings are angry, talking-point-spewing ideological opponents of the president, then maybe the maybe the effect of the meetings will attenuate.
Quote of the Day
I have to admit I love to beat up on Goldman; I do it for The Daily Beast and on CNBC every chance I get. I also have to admit cheering Matt Taibbi on when I first read his Rolling Stone article.
But in the end it does no one any good to travel in conspiracy theories. Is Goldman too powerful? Maybe. Was it too big to fail back in September? Given the size of its balance sheet, Goldman’s demise would have made Lehman’s look insignificant. (And while we’re at it, conspiracy theorists, let’s put to rest once and for all that Lehman was allowed to die to remove one of Goldman’s main competitors. Yes, Lehman was competitive with Goldman in the bond market, but the only reason to bail it out was to keep the systematic risk from infecting Goldman. In letting Lehman go under, the government actually put Blankfein and company in greater peril.)
A bigger issue lost in all the back-and-forth about the firm’s connections, trading habits, and where Lloyd Blankfein was the night of September 15, 2008 when Lehman went bust, is that the American taxpayer is right this very moment subsidizing Goldman’s risk taking. That’s a scandal no one seems to want to talk about.
Quote of the Day
Israelis have learned the hard way that reality cannot be ignored and that ideology offers no protection from danger. Four wars and a constant battle against terrorism sobered them up, and made them far less susceptible than most audiences to the Obama speeches that charmed Americans, Europeans, and many Muslim nations. A policy based in realism would help the Palestinians prepare for an eventual state while we turn our energies toward the real challenge confronting the entire region: what is to be done about Iran as it faces its first internal crisis since the regime came to power in 1979.
Mrs. Clinton recently decried “rigid ideologies and old formulas,” but the tension with Israel shows the administration is—up to now—following the old script that attributes every problem in the region to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while all who live there can see that developments in Iran are in fact the linchpin of the region’s future. The Obama administration’s “old formulas” have produced the current tensions with Israel. They will diminish only if the administration adopts a more realistic view of what progress is possible, and what dangers lurk, in the Middle East.
Picture and Quote of the Day
I saw this picture over at HotAir. Which I think they meant as humor. That was until I saw one of the comments. That is when I got the lump in my throat.
Here’s the picture:
Related Sound Clip:
Quote:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”
Many people forget; that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Registered Republican; according to one of his nieces.
My friends; the dream is being realized.
Update: The American Thinker has a great piece on this subject.
Others: NO QUARTER, Moonbattery, alicublog, Jules Crittenden, Riehl World View, Conservatives4Palin.com, Atlas Shrugs, Stop The ACLU, Wake up America, Pajamas Media, Fausta’s Blog and The washington times Blogs
Quote of the Day
There is no evidence Iran has built the cascade to raise LEU to highly enriched weapons-grade uranium, or that the facilities even exist to do this. The Iranian regime has declared it has no intention of building nuclear weapons, indeed, that their possession would be a violation of Koranic law.
And the United States has not rescinded its own National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 that Iran, in 2003, abandoned its weapons program.
Israel has been saying for years an Iranian bomb is months away.
Where is the proof? Where is the evidence to justify a new U.S. war in the Middle East to destroy weapons of mass destruction that may not exist in Iran, as they did not exist in Iraq?
Iran may wish to have a nuclear deterrent, considering what happened to neighbor Iraq, which did not. But the idea that the regime, having built a nuclear weapon, would launch it on Tel Aviv and bring massive retaliation by scores of Israeli nukes on Teheran and other cities, killing millions of Iranians and all the leaders and their families of all factions of this disputatious people, seems like total madness.
For Israel to launch a war on such reasoning would seem to meet Bismarck’s definition of preemptive war as “committing suicide out of fear of death.”
America lived for decades under a threat of nuclear annihilation. We relied on a policy of containment and deterrence, outlasted the Soviet regime in a 40-year Cold War, and are now at peace with Russia.
Ahmadinejad is not so tough a customer as Stalin, Khrushchev or Mao, who talked of accepting 300 million dead in a nuclear exchange. Moreover, Ahmadinejad has no nukes, no authority to take Iran to war, and is looking like a very lame duck before his second term has begun.
And when one looks to U.S. and Iranian interests, they coincide as much as they conflict. Iran detested the Taliban before we took them down, and no more wants them back than do we. Iran is even more pleased with the Shia regime we brought to power in Baghdad than we are.
Iran needs technology to restore its depleted oil and gas fields, and an end to sanctions to restore an economy whose disintegration helped put the regime in crisis and lose it the support of its young.
Obama should tell the Israelis, “Cool the jets!” literally.
