Category: Budget

Democrats in Disarray and Denial as Schumer Shutdown Exposes Weakness

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Rich Lowry analyzes Sen. Schumer’s miscalculations:

The press wasn’t hostile to the Democrats over the shutdown, but it wasn’t uniformly compliant, either. The Left objected to a headline on a New York Times news alert right after the shutdown vote on Friday night: “Senate Democrats blocked passage of a stopgap spending bill to keep the government open.” It’s not clear how a remotely honest news writer could have described it any other way.
If the media couldn’t be counted on to be on board, neither could everyone in the party. In what is a persistent temptation for Democrats, Schumer forgot that the rest of the country doesn’t regard Trump with the deep disdain and abiding alarm of the coasts and the major metropolitan areas. The party still has senators in red states that the president won handily who can’t afford to indulge in anti-Trump flights of fancy. Five of them defected on the initial shutdown vote and more would have broken with Schumer if the shutdown had endured.

(Via Hot Air; hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Democrats are so accustomed to “uniformly compliant” media coverage that they don’t realize how little support they have outside the deep-blue zones of “deep disdain” for President Trump. As a result of Schumer’s disastrous miscalculation, conservatives now have “momentum” on immigration, and the Democrats’ failed shutdown strategy may have paved the way for the enactment of Trump’s “get-tough” border agenda.

Remember just a couple of weeks ago, a Yale University “expert” was claiming Trump was suffering from dementia, but who is really demented, Trump or the left-wing kooks who obsessively hate him? Trump has repeatedly outwitted his Democrat opponents, defeating Hillary despite all the “experts” who said he couldn’t win, producing an enormous surge in the economy (the exact opposite of what Paul Krugman predicted), pushing through tax cuts (from which more than 70% of Americans will see lower federal taxes) and now humiliating Senate Democrats over the DACA shutdown. Predictably, the losers are playing the blame game, further proving how out of touch they are:

The shutdown is over, and the consensus is emerging. The Democrats lost. They capitulated after getting little more than carefully worded promises from Mitch McConnell. The progressive blame game is under way, complete with accusations of cowardice that read very much like the recriminations following the GOP’s last shutdown in 2013. But there’s one explanation I’d like to discuss — not because it’s necessarily the consensus view but because it echoes sentiments I hear all the time. Believe it or not, there are those on the left who tell themselves that they lose because they’re just too darn nice. . . .
Progressives see themselves as tolerant, open-minded, and eager to engage with critics. . . .
Yet this is precisely the opposite of the way conservatives experience and perceive progressive culture. Yes, of course there are progressives who “yearn for inclusion, civility, and dialogue,” but there are also progressives who despise conservatives, attempt to silence conservative voices, and systematically exclude conservatives from the “dialogue” they allegedly crave. . . .
No, Democrats aren’t losing because they’re “too nice” or because they yearn for dialogue. The better explanation is that they’re losing in part because their own incivility and rage drive millions of Americans to the polls to vote in perceived self-defense. Their own incivility and rage falsely escalate too many political disputes to matters of life and death. What’s the argument after claiming that Republicans are intentionally killing people? Is there a rhetorical step beyond that?

Democrats don’t want “dialogue.” Democrats want power. They will tell any lie necessary to obtain that power, and their constant demonization of their scapegoated enemies — “sexist! racist! homophobe!” — is just partisan propaganda. The Democrat Party’s rhetoric of deranged hatred deceives their ignorant followers, but they eventually alienate everyone honest enough to look at the actual facts, and intelligent enough to perceive the likely result of Democrat policies. Americans do not want their country to become an impoverished socialist nightmare like Venezuela. Americans can see how the Democrats have wrecked California by providing sanctuary to millions of illegal aliens. Everyone can see what Democrats want to do to the rest of America, which is why Donald Trump won by standing up to tell the Democrats, “No.”

 

 

This is what the Left cannot bring itself to admit, that they have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Their friends in the media are trying desperately to conceal this failure, to distract Americans from the reality of (and reasons for) the Democrats’ shutdown debacle. But dishonesty is not good policy, and denial is not wise strategy.



 

You’re #WhyTrumpWon, Nancy Pelosi

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She’s a 76-year-old white woman whose father was the boss of the corrupt Democrat machine in Baltimore during the segregation era, and being married to a multimillionaire California real-estate investor, she’s one of the top 10 richest members of Congress. Democrats in Congress couldn’t have picked a more out-of-touch leader if they had tried. The geriatric liberal, whose political beliefs are like a fossil of the 1988 Dukakis campaign, apparently cannot understand why Democrats keep losing.

In 2010, Pelosi insisted on ramming ObamaCare through Congress: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Eight months later, in the 2010 midterm elections, Republicans scored their biggest congressional gains since 1938. Four years later, Democrats lost the Senate, and their losses have been even worse at the state level.

“Republicans are now in control of a record 67 (68 percent) of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers in the nation,” as Barbara Hollingsworth reported. “In 24 of the 32 states with Republican-controlled legislatures, voters have also elected Republican governors.”

Pelosi can’t seem to grasp why her party has become so unpopular, and instead resorts to scapegoating rationalizations:

While giving a press briefing to reporters, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called the GOP’s push to defund the taxpayer funded Planned Parenthood a “manhood thing.”
During her press briefing, Pelosi fielding questions about Republican plans to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and remove taxpayer funding for abortion provider Planned Parenthood.
At the end of her remarks, Pelosi said, “Let me end on this note. Of all the things that they could be doing in a reconciliation bill — job creation, deficit reduction — no, forget that. What are they doing in this bill? Overturning the Affordable Care Act, undermining the health security and financial stability of America’s working families, and defunding Planned Parenthood. That’s their — that’s their manhood thing,” Pelosi said while shaking her hands.
“You know, defunding Planned Parenthood. How can they establish that as a priority unless they’re coming at all of this from a very ideological stand-point?” she asked.

Here, Ms. Pelosi, let me explain briefly: Planned Parenthood is America’s largest abortion provider. Many millions of Americans (who, not coincidentally, are eligible to vote) believe that abortion is morally wrong and should be illegal. However, even if you aren’t in favor of outlawing abortion, you may not think that giving federal taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood is a good idea. To repeat something that I keep saying, but which no Democrat seems capable of understanding: The national debt is now approaching $20 trillion — that’s trillion with a “T,” meaning $20,000,000,000,000 — and interest payments on the national debt cost $223 billion, or 6 percent of the federal budget, in 2015. So for every dollar the IRS collects from taxpayers, only 94 cents is available for current needs, and the annual budget deficit in fiscal year 2015 was $439 billion out of $3.7 trillion.

When you have a budget deficit of more than $400 billion, why spend half a billion dollars annually to fund Planned Parenthood, an organization whose business is about killing future taxpayers? Also, Planned Parenthood is a major donor to the Democrat Party, and why should Republicans in Congress give money to their worst enemies?

Despite the spectacular failure of ObamaCare, which has driven up health insurance premiums everywhere, Nancy Pelosi still can’t understand why anyone would want to repeal ObamaCare, and her propaganda phrase, “America’s working families,” is the exact opposite of reality. “Working families” — married people with jobs — generally had health insurance before ObamaCare was enacted, and have found themselves paying higher premiums because of the mandates imposed by ObamaCare.

ObamaCare wasn’t about “working families,” it was about mandating and subsidizing coverage for the kind of people who don’t have jobs or don’t have families, i.e., the typical Democrat voter. Republicans officials may not be rude enough to actually say this, but the people who vote Republican are not so stupid they can’t figure it out. What were Democrats really talking about when they invoked “pre-existing conditions” as an urgent cause to change our healthcare system? AIDS? Hepatitis? Cocaine addiction? “Gender dysphoria”?

During the first four years of the Obama administration, the government added nearly 6 million new recipients of federal SSI disability payments, more than doubling the number on the disability lists, while workforce participation rates fell to the lowest in American history. Democrats see nothing wrong with this, because moochers and malingerers tend to vote Democrat, whereas taxpayers with jobs tend to vote Republican.

Like I said, voters aren’t nearly as stupid as Nancy Pelosi assume them to be, and Democrats being the Baby-Killing Welfare Moocher Party is the fundamental cause of Donald Trump’s election. Yet the failure of the Democrat agenda, both as policy and as politics, is not something that the party’s elderly liberal leadership can admit, and therefore Pelosi is compelled by her partisanship to offer scapegoating rationalizations and counterfactual explanations, including blaming George W. Bush (who left the White House eight years ago) for the federal deficit under Obama.

You have failed, Ms. Pelosi. You have lost. You are personally responsible for the Democrat Party’s decline into political irrelevance.

You are #WhyTrumpWon. Congratulations.



 

 

The Farce of Sequester

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Alas, the cruel imposition of draconian right-wing austerity!

At the core of the dysfunction in Washington is this dilemma: Government must approve spending cuts, yet government has no interest in approving spending cuts. Federal employees are quite content with their lifestyles — 46 percent more in retirement benefits than the private sector, cozy job security — and don’t want to see them trimmed. Thus even spending reductions that make it through Congress rarely make a difference.
Look at what happened with the sequester.
By now just reading the word “sequester” should render the average reader cowering under his desk while “Flight of the Valkyries” thunders in his mind. Sequestration, after all, was supposed to hack apart the social order as we knew it. Chris Matthews called it a “doomsday machine.” President Obama warned that “people are going to be hurt.” The Congressional Budget Office predicted 750,000 jobs could be lost. Sequestration, as the trendy metaphor went, was a meat cleaver when what we really needed was a scalpel.
It now seems the cleaver had a rather dull edge. A recent Government Accountability Office found that the sequester resulted in exactly one government layoff. One. . . .
When Congress agreed to cut $37.8 billion in 2011, it was called “the largest annual spending cut in our history” by President Obama, and lethal austerity by many liberal economists. The bureaucracy responded with shell games and chicanery. The Census Bureau cut $6 billion by agreeing not to run the 2010 Census again in 2011. Congress killed $14.6 million for construction of the Capitol Visitor Center, which was finished in 2008. Not a single federal employee was laid off.
According to the Washington Post‘s David Fahrenthold, many conservatives embraced the sequester out of frustration with the 2011 non-cuts. Now we know that the sequester didn’t have a meaningful impact either. . . .

(Via Memeorandum; more at Hot Air.)

 

Sen. McCain And Intellectual Integrity: Let His Carcass Caucus With Democrats

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by Smitty

Breitbart has the video of a certain grumpy old man, far past his sell-by date, pretending to lecture others about “intellectual integrity”. Enough. The old duffer has been in office for decades, while the integrity of the American government itself has spiraled down like an A-4 Skyhawk hit by Commies over enemy territory arriving at the Healthcare.gov crash.

And yet this Ryan-Murray budget debacle funds ObamaCare, while backstabbing the veterans that have been the backbone of Republican Party support:

Ahead of the final vote, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., tried unsuccessfully to use a parliamentary tactic to force a vote on the amendment, which he wrote to undo the cuts for military retirees.
A provision in the already House-passed bill would cut retirement benefits for military retirees by $6 billion over 10 years.
Sessions wanted to instead eliminate an estimated $4.2 billion in annual spending by reining in an IRS credit that illegal immigrants have claimed.
He and fellow senators argued the bill unfairly sticks veterans and other military retirees with the cost of new spending.

Precisely whom do you think you’re fooling, Senator McCain? Fox echoes your point on the Senate floor in the Breitbart clip about avoiding another shutdown:

The Republican-led House passed the bill last week in an effort to avoid another stalemate leading to a potential government shutdown, like the one in October that polls showed was largely unpopular with voters.

The unpopularity has very much to do with the perception that Congress, as a whole, is just a pack of liars.

The GOP is supposed to be the adults in the room, John Sidney, but this budget deal increases spending for the next two years. That’s like vowing to quit cheating on your wife in the future, and referring to your new commitment as “fidelity”, while on your way to the strip club. “To really do what we want, we’re going to have to win elections,” said Rep. Paul Ryan.

What would also help the GOP win elections would be to purge the deadwood, e.g. YOU, Senator McCain, to clear the way for some conservative candidates.  An actual reform platform, articulated by fresh, uncompromising faces of integrity: that would have voters saying “Maybe the Republicans aren’t a lying pack of swine, after all.”  The indifferent majority, too disgusted with the spectacle of you selling out time and again (Amnesty? Do we hear amnesty?), might be motivated to show up at the ballot box and return the GOP to power.

So either snuggle up with Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer and the boys, or just retire, but please relieve stop torturing the Republican Party with your presence. And take your fatuous daughter with you.

Shorter Ryan: I’m Gonna Kick Tomorrow

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by Smitty

It maybe be that Paul Ryan sincerely believes that Congress is EVER going to reduce spending of its own volition. In the same vein, Obama has stated that he believes his own BS. Gently as it can be put, Paul, CONSERVATIVES DO NOT. We don’t believe Obama. While some might be swayed by you confident tones, the last time a Congress successfully bound a subsequent Congress was when the follow-on Congress borrowed more money, not when that future Congress actually cut spending. All I can say is that, sometimes, you need to step away from the problem to gain some perspective.
Erick Erickson calls this budget deal the BOHICA Act of 2013.

I am old enough to remember when the GOP said not to worry about it caving on Obamacare funding because, by God, it would hold the line on sequestration.
Hell, that was a month ago.
Amazing how much can change in a month. Congressman Paul Ryan and Senator Patty Murray have decided to give up the last thing the GOP was fighting for — spending restraint. “Don’t worry,” Paul Ryan says with his boyish charm designed to induce sweats and heart palpitations among conservatives, “it’s only a little less restrained.”
The budget deal puts discretionary spending over $1 trillion, which is higher than the sequestration deal of 2011, which was at $967. This is, in fact, a spending increase.
It funds Obamacare.

It gets worse as you read RedState from there.
New rule: all talk of future spending cuts is rejected, in advance, as pure hooey. Don’t bother with it, Paul. No amount of poker face, boyish good looks, and irresistible masculine charm can sell something we know is fundamentally not gonna happen. Peddle those wares to a more gullible audience.
Going with this Jane’s Addiction cut, since “Been Caught Stealing” is probably too pejorative, if also more accurate.

Ryan Almost Blows The Reform Trumpet On The Budget

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by Smitty

Former GOP VP candidate and all-around Centrist got out the Kazoo of Compromise in attempting to sell his budget deal with Senator Patty Murray:

“In divided government, you don’t always get what you want,” he said. “We eliminate waste. We stop sending checks to criminals. We cut corporate welfare. We start making real changes to these autopilot programs that are the real drivers of our debt.” Twice, he was asked how he would defend the plan to Republicans in the House and to conservative groups.
Answer one: “As a conservative, I think this is a step in the right direction. The deficit will go down more if we pass this than if we did nothing.”
Answer two: “As a conservative, I deal with the situation as it exists. I deal with the way things are, not the way I may want them to be. I’m not going to go a mile in the direction I want to go, but I’ll take a few steps.”

And later:

The condemnations would roll in from the various good-government groups that had been demanding entitlement cuts, and from the conservatives who had attacked the idea of a budget that broke the spending caps. But first, Murray and Ryan shook hands.

For example, Senator Rubio:

“We need a government with less debt and an economy with more good paying jobs, and this budget fails to accomplish both goals, making it harder for more Americans to achieve the American Dream. Instead, this budget continues Washington’s irresponsible budgeting decisions by spending more money than the government takes in and placing additional financial burdens on everyday Americans.
“In the short run, this budget also cancels earlier spending reductions, instead of making some tough decisions about how to tackle our long-term fiscal challenges caused by runaway Washington spending. I voted against sequestration because of its effect on key programs, including the defense budget, but higher spending and more revenue are not the appropriate ways to address that problem.
“The American people should not be asked to choose between a strong military and responsible budgets that encourage job creation and reduce debt. They deserve better than this.”

Maybe Ryan just needs to study some Zappa, and get some of that tenor saxophone in his system, for better justice:
Here is the link to a summary of the deal:

FEDERAL CIVILIAN AND MILITARY RETIREMENT

Federal Retirement

These sections increase federal-employee contributions to their retirement programs by 1.3
percentage points. The proposal affects new employees hired after December 31, 2013 with
less than five years of service.

Annual adjustment of retired pay and retainer pay amounts for retired members of the
Armed Forces under age 62

This provision modifies the annual cost-of-living adjustment for working-age military retirees by
making the adjustments equal to inflation minus one percent. This change would be gradually 3

phased in, with no change for the current year, a 0.25 percent decrease in December 2014, and
a 0.5 percent decrease in December 2015. This would not affect service members who retired
because of disability or injury. Service members would never see a reduction in benefits from
one year to the next.

Awesome. The military reserve retirement I haven’t got yet will gradually evaporate, even as I sneak up on it. Glad I’m not actually including that pension in my retirement planning.

Update: Ryan has an actual interview with Mark Levin on the topic.

Mark Levin Threatens March on D.C.

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The Obama administration’s disgraceful stunt, putting up barricades around the World War II Memorial and having its SEIU goons hire protesters at $15 an hour to harass veterans, has inflamed sentiment against the Democrat propaganda campaign. (The mainstream media are endeavoring to ignore the facts, being too busy promoting Democrat propaganda to report the news.) Ace of Spades is livid:

Hey Barack Obama — you didn’t f–king build that. Someone else did, and someone else is paying for its upkeep.

Also livid with rage, Mark Levin:

I want to say this loud and clear to the people on Capitol Hill who are listening, to this administration. You lay one damn hand on one of those World War II vets at that memorial and I’ll bring half a million people to that damn memorial! You got that?!”

Audio via The Right Scoop:

The permitting process would, I suspect, require at least a month.

OK, so how about Monday, November 11?

UPDATE: This sentiment was pretty popular:

 


Andrew Sullivan’s Psychiatric Evaluation

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Ann Althouse calls attention to the latest scientific research by that eminent British physician, Dr. Andrew Sullivan, OB-GYN:

“I regard this development as one of the more insidious and anti-constitutional acts of racist vandalism against the American republic in my adult lifetime. Those who keep talking as if there are two sides to this, when there are not, are as much a part of the vandalism as Ted Cruz.”

Evidently, having finished his investigation of the Alaskan Republican uterus scandal, now Dr. Sullivan has decided to explore new frontiers in the emerging field of Texas Republican racial psychiatry.