Above Democracy, And The Rule Of Law

This post shows how important it is that Barack Obama be defeated. Since the 2010 "shellacking" he has been using Regulatory Overreach to implement what he knows he can no longer jam through Congress.

The author discusses a new book: Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America – and How to Stop Him (BenBella Books, October 2011).

I intend to buy this book and perhaps get involved in implementing its ideas.

The book discusses the shameful abuses and overreach that Obama has engaged in to implement his ideas. Browner's rewrite of expert's advice on offshore drilling moratorium, then used by Obama to justify the job-killing moratorium,  is one example of what the reviewer calls Obama's "calculated deception'.

Kerpen has written the best book available on Obama Administration regulatory abuse and excess. It is a must-read for every informed voter.

Despite the 2010 mid-term election in which voters gave Democrats a "shellacking" in order " to stop the emergent Obama agenda, not to cooperate in its advancement", Obama has shifted tactics and is implementing his ideas by just ignoring courts and Congress. The result is we now have "regulators writing and executing their own laws".  No wonder the economic recovery has not happened.

But President Barack Obama refused to heed the people and change course. The election results only changed the means by which he has pursued the most left wing policies of any President in U.S. history. Recognizing that he could no longer advance his agenda through Congress, Obama pivoted to maximizing the vast regulatory powers of the Executive Branch. 

For example, since cap and trade legislation obviously no longer had any prayer of getting through Congress (even the overwhelmingly Democrat Congress of 2009-2010 wouldn’t pass it), Obama said after the election, “Cap and trade was just one way of skinning the cat; it was not the only way. It was a means, not an end.” Sometimes this pivot has involved ignoring legal rulings, breaking agreements with Congress, and exceeding statutory authority.

Several examples of Obama overreach are given and then the book suggests a remedy:

Kerpen’s book continues to discuss Obama Administration regulatory abuses and counterproductive misjudgments in full detail.  Such overregulation and its costs is one of the reasons America has suffered no recovery after the last recession on the historical time scale for the American economy.

But Kerpen doesn’t just complain.  He offers good, long overdue solutions, leading with the REINS Act (Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny).  As Kerpen explains, that legislation proposed by Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) “cuts to the heart of abuse of regulatory power by requiring any major regulatory action to receive the approval of the House and Senate as well as the signature of the president before it can take effect.”

That would restore the Constitution to control over regulation, which states in Article I, Section I, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.”  Kerpen adds, “In Federalist 47, James Madison explained that the U.S. Constitution was written to avoid the danger of legislative and executive power being fused by prohibiting the executive from making laws…Yet we now have precisely the situation that Madison and the other framers wanted to avoid.  We have regulators who are effectively writing and executing their own laws.”

Bruce Krasting: Solyndra – Moving forward to what?

Bruce Krasting: Solyndra – Moving forward to what?: George Kaiser. Step up and fix this problem.

Yet another answer to Jonathan Alter's Challenge

Mickey Kaus offers yet another good response to Obama apologist Jonathan Alter's bizarre challenge to say what should have been done differently. I have now seen dozens of reponses to Alter. Can we stipulate Alter's challenge has been met and exceeded? How myopic must you be not to learn from your mistakes? What compels Alter to keep defending the indefensible?

1. Not subcontracted out the details of the 2009 stimulus to interest-group-addled Congressional Democrats. 

2. Sold his health care reform as a valuable benefit for voters that would give them security (they’d be covered) and freedom (they could leave their jobs without losing insurance) rather than as an eat-your-peas plan that would not only “bend the cost curve” 

3. Made the UAW take a pay cut. 

4. Pivoted to jobs

5. Not pursued a zombie agenda of “card check” and “comprehensive immigration reform”

6. Dispelled legitimate fears of “corporatism“

7.  going vigorously after Wall Street.

8. Not appointed pro-union innovators to NLRB who try to hamstring our biggest remaining industrial exporter 

9. Faced with Republican demands for leaner government, embraced them! 

10. Defend the core of Medicare, a popular universal program that works and (according to Orszag) is cutting costs, rather than proposing to  shrink Medicare by raising the eligibility age from 65 to 67. 

Have an iPhone? Countdown to Freedom from Obama!

Check out this App from the iTunes Store

All it needs is additional counters for Michelle's taxpayer funded vacation tab, the tons of carbon emitted by endless AirForce One campaign fundraising flights, the number of rounds of golf played in current Fiscal year and the number of hearings put on C-Span. And, oh yeah, the number of days since the Senate last proposed a budget.

An Obama-made becalming of the economic waters

A spot-on analysis by Hugh Hewitt . Does Obama have the smarts and the guts to change for the good of the country?

This is an Obama-made becalming of the economic waters, an inevitability when Obamacare, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms, an out-of-control federal regulatory blob consisting of the Environmental Protection Agency, Consumer Product Safety Commission, Department of Interior and more, combined with massive deficits to create the perfect storm for the private sector.

Amity Shlaes described in her magnificent "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" how President Franklin Roosevelt and his group of political operatives and academic theorists prolonged the terrible times brought on by the Crash of 1929 by endless "innovation."

The uncertainty that resulted drove capital and the entrepreneurs who might have deployed it underground. Unpredictable government was a menace to private-sector planning and investment, but this fundamental truth eluded Roosevelt.

Sadly, Obama, wearing his Alinskyite blinders and advised by his Chicago gang, either didn't read or failed to understand Shlaes' arguments. Every promise he made about every policy and program he proposed has turned to ash, and the national headache is profound and debilitating.

Don't expect "hope and change" to be the defining brand of the president's bid for re-election. But do expect a "hair of the dog" set of proposals when the president unveils the specifics of his latest "hard pivot" to jobs.

Could the president really trust his mainstream media allies so much that he would dare propose a second stimulus? It would require an almost Mount Everest amount of self-regard and economic ignorance to believe that more federal spending is the ticket out of our near zero-growth economy.

Obama Won't Escape Blame for Credit Downgrade

Phillip Klein is 100% correct in this assessment.

This timeline gives the clear impression of a weak non-leader whose presidency was highjacked by ideologues who kept Obama working on their pet liberal dream issues rather than the issues important to the country. He never quite got around to pivoting back to jobs and the economy. Rather he spent like a drunken Liberal sailor..

This is Obama's downgrade...

Standard and Poor’s explanation for why it downgraded U.S. debt is written in such a way that it can be seized upon by all ideological stripes. The statement cites the unwillingness of Republicans to raise taxes and of Democrats to agree to entitlement cuts. And the rating agency’s discourse about the political dysfunction will provide column fodder for Washington pundits who long for the days when both parties would work together to reach compromises. But make no mistake, when all the dust settles, it will be difficult for President Obama to escape blame for this.

Defenders of Obama will attempt to pin the blame on his predecessor, President Bush, and on intransigent Tea Party radicals in the current Congress. But that would leave out the part in between. For his first two years in office, Obama’s party controlled both chambers of Congress – for part of that period, he had a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. During that time period, he and his fellow Democrats could have passed his supposedly ideal, long-term, deficit-reduction package -- one that represented a “balanced approach” between spending cuts and tax increases. It also could have delayed the deficit reduction for several years, so it wouldn’t have affected the current weak economy or the “investments” he considers crucial. Forget about actually accomplishing serious deficit reduction -- he didn’t even attempt it.

When Obama came into office, he argued that we needed deficit spending to boost the economy, so he passed a $800 billion stimulus package. Then, in one of his first supposed pivots to the deficit, he convened a ‘fiscal responsibility summit’ in February 2009. But that actually turned out to be part of a different pivot altogether. It was during that summit that then White House Budget Director Peter Orszag declared, “health care reform is entitlement reform.”

And so, for the next 13 months, Obama spent all of his energies trying to get health care legislation across the finish line. The end product was a plan that, according to both the Congressional Budget Office and actuary for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, did not bend the health care cost curve down.  Let’s even set aside the argument over the accounting gimmicks that were employed to obtain a CBO score that showed modest deficit reduction. The reality is this: the law used money raised through tax hikes and Medicare cuts that otherwise would have been available for deficit reduction, to instead expand Medicaid by 18 million beneficiaries and create a massive new health care entitlement.

Of course, there’s more. After health care passed last March, Obama punted on the debt for the rest of the year as he awaited a report from his fiscal commission. He then ignored its recommendations and released a budget so ludicrous that within two months, it failed 0 to 97 in the Senate and he himself rejected it. He instead delivered a speech about his deficit reduction vision, which didn’t have enough details for the CBO to score. And then he spent the last few months arguing that he was prepared to offer Republicans a “grand bargain,” but to this day he hasn’t released details of this supposedly awesome deal that Republicans refused, beyond calculated leaks to favored reporters.

But there’s another reason why Obama won’t escape blame for this. Obama was elected president at a time when Americans felt the nation was in decline, and his central job was restore their faith that our best days were ahead of us, as President Reagan did after the Carter era. Whether you think he was dealt a poor hand or not, the bottom line is that the sense of decline has only deepened during the Obama presidency, and the first-ever downgrade of U.S. credit, whatever its ultimate financial implications, is yet another symbol of that decline.

You Can't Lead From Behind

Governor Christie on National Debt Talks: The Need for Bipartisan Compromise

President Obama should watch this video and learn.

"There is no substitute for Executive Leadership and that means taking risks"

"I only believe it happened because I took the risk first... I put a plan out there in writing"

"But you can't 'lead from behind'"

"I will put up our record of bipartisan accomplishment in divided government with bipartisan work together over the last 18 months against anyone's in the country. I think we'll do really well"

WOLF: GOP’s unfounded Obama fear: President’s credibility on economy lies in tatters

Good article on why the Obama halo disappeared 2 years ago and nobody should be afraid to call his bluff.

Life is full of mysteries. Why did kamikaze pilots wear helmets? Why are there no B size batteries? Who would pay good money to see a Michael Moore movie? More mysterious still, why should Republicans be scared to call Barack Obama’s bluff?

Republicans hold the winning cards in the debt debate, but too often in their recent past, they have surrendered quicker than a French battalion. Wait, that’s not quite fair to the French. Too often, Republicans have surrendered more spectacularly than Steven Slater - you remember, the JetBlue flight attendant who set a new standard in quitting when he escaped down the plane’s emergency chute onto the tarmac, leaving behind a plane full of befuddled passengers.

Am I understating the amount of calcium in the GOP’s spine? Consider the continuing-resolution debacle from earlier this year. Republicans campaigned in the 2010 elections on $100 billion in spending cuts and had just delivered President Obama the largest midterm “shellacking” in 72 years. Resounding Republican victories spread like wildfire from statehouses to dogcatchers. The $100 billion spending-cut mandate was compromised almost immediately down to $60 billion before the final $38 billion, which, after the accounting gimmicks were discovered, amounted to a minuscule $350 million, and still the Republicans patted themselves on the back and declared victory. If anything, I may be overstating the GOP’s backbone. At least Steven Slater had the guts to tell everybody off before he caved.

 The time has long passed to defer to Obama:

The president has nothing to offer but fear itself. His predictions du jour of economic Armageddon sound eerily similar to his dubious 2009 claims that led to his failed stimulus package. So desperate is the president that he has issued a thinly veiled threat to cut off Social Security benefits for grandma if he doesn’t get his way. Let him try. It’s time to call his bluff.

What in the world are the Republicans scared of? If they can’t muster the courage for this fight, when will they ever? Of course, the Obama cheerleader media will go into hyperdrive GOP attack mode. That’s a given. Brace for it. But it hasn’t helped them so far. In fact, the public opinion trends are moving in the Republicans’ favor.

Visualize the Nation's Obligations

Here is a way to visualize our Nation's debts. Stop the spending!

Barack Obama’s pants on fire

President Obama's cousin Dr Milton R Wolf's article  describes a few of the Shovel Ready whoppers Obama told to gain sympathy for his health plan:

“Thus he wrote in ‘Dreams from My Father’ that he lamented seeing his mother ‘suffering because of a broken [American] health care system.’ But he ignores the fact that in her hour of need, Stanley Ann, an intelligent, highly educated woman then living in Indonesia, chose America’s health care system above all others. And it wasn’t the system that failed her. In fact, she was quite fortunate to receive the best of care at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York (and later the Straub Clinic in Hawaii).”  

And despite Obama's stories to the contrary:

Recent revelations by author Janny Scott in “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother” (Riverhead Hardcover, 2011), show that Stanley Ann Dunham, the president’s mother, was in fact well-insured and, what’s more, her health insurance company - those evil corporatists - never attempted to deny payment for her health care.Stanley Ann’s out-of-pocket expenses amounted to “several hundred dollars a month.” A year after her cancer diagnosis, Stanley Ann applied for disability insurance, for which she was understandably denied. Again, it was disability insurance, not health insurance.

Wolf shows it is a pattern

"The president’s mother wasn’t the only poor soul who was reduced to an emotional blackmail pawn used in the dismantling of America’s health care system. Journalist Michelle Malkin brilliantly cataloged similar phony sympathetic stories peddled by Mr. Obama and his Obamacare proponents, including Otto Raddatz, Robin Beaton, John Brodniak, Natoma Canfield and Tiffany Owens (whose young son, Marcelas, stood beside Mr. Obama at his health care signing ceremony). Each of these poor soul’s heartbreaking stories of a failed system were just that - stories - fabricated by Team Obama and his co-conspirators in their zeal to nationalize our health care system at any cost.

Dishonoring the dead with deception, as pathetic as that is, barely scratches the surface of the Obamacare falsehoods. You can keep your current doctor: Lie. You can keep your current insurance: Lie. Hearings will be made public: Lie. The deficit will be reduced: Lie. Four hundred thousand jobs will be created immediately: Lie. There are no death panels: Lie. Taxes won’t be increased on families earning less than $250,000 a year: Lie. And all of this comes before the first Obamacare waivers exempted the White House’s best friends from the rules that you must follow."

And what is the Purpose of these Obama lies?

"This degree of dishonesty is not merely taking a mulligan on the back nine or fudging a couple of pounds on your driver’s license. There’s something far more sinister at work here. America is being “fundamentally transformed” by deception, and the explanation is simple: demographics. In America, self-proclaimed conservatives outnumber liberals by a ratio of 2-to-1, according to Gallup, or, more recently, almost 3-to-1, according to Rasmussen. How else is a power-hungry ruling class to pry ever-more liberty from the people, other than to prey on Americans’ higher angels of compassion with the demon of deception?

Health care is, of course, but a single - albeit critical - front in the deceptive battle for your liberty. The Earth hasn’t warmed in nearly 15 years, yet global warmists demand you surrender even more energy freedom to them with the “cap-and-trade” scheme. Government, not Wall Street, spawned the subprime mortgage implosion of our economy, yet regulators demand you surrender even more financial freedom to them with the Dodd-Frank Act.

Now America is in slow-motion death throes because of an unfathomable $14.5 trillion federal debt, plus another $62 trillion in unfunded federal liabilities. Your individual share? $245,000. That’s not a typo. Unless you can cough up a cool quarter-million, you might consider supporting the Republicans’ “cut, cap and balance” proposal. Or, if you believe him, the president - who previously claimed that “raising America’s debt limit is a sign of [presidential] leadership failure,” whose own mother’s death is not too sacred for use in his wanton deception - has now found a more suitably sympathetic, emotional hostage: your grandma. If the debt ceiling is not increased, if the president is not allowed to continue his wild orgy of spending, then he claims he cannot guarantee Social Security checks will go out on time. That is, if you choose to believe him."

Shovel ready!