Category: Budget

Ted Cruz Goes All Night; Vendors of Conventional Wisdom Say This Is Bad

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Readers may have noticed that I have been ignoring the ObamaCare “Don’t Fund It” dramatics, along with the “government shutdown” threat and the punditry gabfest that have accompanied it. Depending on who you listen to, either Ted Cruz is the future of the Republican Party or else Ted Cruz is the harbinger of the final collapse of the GOP.

I hate ObamaCare and like Ted Cruz, but the reason I’ve ignored all the “Don’t Fund It” drama is because it’s a legislative process story.

And I hate legislative process stories.

For an entire decade, my job at the Washington Times required me to edit legislative process stories, including the interminable debates over budget bills during the Clinton and Bush presidencies. Day after day, our Capitol Hill reporters would file their stories about the latest developments in the process — the hearings, the debate, the amendments, etc. — and I had to pay close attention to every detail of this stuff, even though it was as boring as watching paint dry.

The glamour! The excitement! The journalistic thrill of formatting another roll-call graphic on a Senate cloture vote.

The Politics of Gesture is also something with which I’m familiar, having watched Congress and President Bush enact federal law to keep Terry Schiavo alive, which turned out to be futile symbolism.

So I’m pro-Cruz and anti-ObamaCare, and therefore supportive of Cruz and the “Don’t Fund It” movement, but I simply haven’t been able to bring myself to submerge into the day-by-day coverage that would have us believe this is anything other than a legislative process story and an exercise in the Politics of Gesture.

Spare me the “What It Means” punditry. Spare me the GOP Establishment denunciations of Cruz, and also spare me Tea Party denunciations of Republicans who don’t support Cruz. Most of all, spare me those “Republican Divided” chyrons on MSNBC, and spare me the umpteenth network Sunday show roundtable discussion.

Via Memeorandum, here is your “Don’t Fund It” headline stack:

Cruz Quotes ‘Duck Dynasty,’ Toby Keith
in Night-Long Attack on Obamacare 
— ABC News

How Ted Cruz’s Anti-Obamacare Filibuster
Could Cost Him Millions<
— BuzzFeed

Reid’s office: Cruz filibuster is fake 
— The Hill

Democrats see GOP shutdown threat
as opening for 2014 election gains
—  Washington Post

So, is this a “win” for Republicans? Or is this a public-relations nightmare that will help Democrats? I don’t know, and neither do any of the pundits who are claiming to know What It Means.

The significance of such things is never apparent except in hindsight, because the future is unpredictable. Many of the pundits who are blabbering away on cable TV news are engaged in “wishcasting,” predicting the future as a way of trying to influence the future.

Far be it from me to suppose that my influence is such that anything I say about this will make the slightest bit of difference either way.

Next week, there will be another LOOMING CRISIS we’re all supposed to care about, and everyone will have forgotten this week’s crisis.

UPDATE: TC Lynch at Leather Penguin:

Listening to the timbre of his voice, he doesn’t sound gassed. And his wingman, Utah’s Mike Lee, is still there, able to give him an occasional breather by “asking a question.” He’ll probably still be going strong when Mika and Scarborough — who has hammered Cruz at every opportunity — fire up “Morning Joe.” That alone is enough reason for me to maybe tune in to that trainwreck for the first time in years. (UPDATE-6:00AM: Took a look; still a trainwreck (see Geraghty).

Speaking of Joe Scarborough, do you realize he’s like 6-foot-4?

When I met him at the National Review Institute event earlier this year, I realized that being The Big Guy is part of Scarborough’s problem. There is such a thing as “Short Man’s Syndrome” — the pipsqueak who feels a need to overcompensate — and there is also such a thing as “Big Man’s Syndrome,” the guy whose sheer size habituates him to domineering behavior. Bill Clinton and Lyndon Johnson, both of whom were tall guys, had this tendency, and I think Joe Scarborough’s arrogant domineering attitude has similar origins.

 

Chicago School System’s $1 Billion Deficit Forces Layoffs for 850 Teachers, Staff

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Is this the Hope or the Change?

The worst fears of Chicago Public School teachers and staffers were confirmed Friday when district officials announced it was laying off some 850 employees.
“Given the historic financial crisis facing our District, next year’s budget will not come without painful decisions, which is why we are making tough choices at central office in order to minimize impacts to our classrooms,” said CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett in a statement Friday. “We will continue this work over the next several weeks to further identify reductions to central office spending to help close the District’s $1 billion deficit and make sure that every dollar helps protect precious classroom funding.”
Affected employees are those in the 55 schools closing at the end of the current school year as well as those slated for “turnaround”, WBEZ reports. CPS said a portion of those losing their jobs were either probationary teachers or teachers with unsatisfactory performance reviews.

(Insert “recovery summer” joke here.)

 

President Finally Unites Americans: Everybody Hates Obama’s Budget

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Let’s start with the most obvious signal of unity: If President Obama has lost a liberal like Taylor Marsh . . .

President Obama is daring the right to blow this chance [to reach a deficit[-reduction deal]. Unfortunately, the game of chicken the President is playing with people’s only avenue to stay out of poverty in advanced age, which hurts women more than any other group, is actually what he believes should be done.
It’s certain that progressives and their allies will never forget that Barack Obama was the first Democratic president to suggest carving away F.D.R.’s New Deal. That chained CPI cuts are a shadow war on women, from none other than the first African American president in history, who certainly should know what this means.

He’s also lost a would-be Democrat superstar:

“Not only does President Obama’s plan fail to put our finances back in order, it would cut benefits for our seniors, which is wrong,” said Elizabeth Colbert-Busch, who faces former Republican Gov. Mark Sanford in a May 7 election to fill the 1st District House seat vacated by Tim Scott’s appointment to the Senate.
“The fact is, we have to balance our budget, cut our spending and lower taxes for small businesses to create jobs,”  Colbert-Busch, sister of cable-TV comedian Stephen Colbert, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this budget takes the opposite approach; it raises taxes, doesn’t balance and doesn’t cut enough – when we should be laser-focused on slashing wasteful and duplicative spending.”

The budget hatred is all across the board today: Liberals hate the president’s first baby-steps toward entitlement reform, while Republicans hate the tax increases and say Obama really isn’t doing a damned thing to fix the budget deficit:

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio slammed President Obama’s $3.8-trillion budget plan Wednesday as filled with “recycled liberal ideas,” saying the proposal is “useless” because it was delivered two months late.
“President Obama’s budget is a blueprint for a recession,” said Rubio, who is widely viewed as a leading hopeful for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. “Filled to the brim with middle class tax hikes and debt spending, the recycled liberal ideas in his budget have failed time and again to create real vibrant economic growth for the American people. Our nation needs a plan that reflects the principles of limited government, free enterprise and a strong national defense.”

Ed Morrissey’s verdict: “Obama wants Republicans to agree to tax hikes today for down-the-road cost savings in entitlement programs that are necessary whether we hike taxes or not.  In exchange, he wants to increase spending in most or all other categories.”

For those who prefer to get their presidential bullshit unfiltered, you can read Obama’s Rose Garden speech at WhiteHouse.gov, including his attempt to blame Republicans for his own idea, the sequester cuts:

My budget also replaces the foolish across-the-board spending cuts that are already hurting our economy. And I have to point out that many of the same members of Congress who supported deep cuts are now the ones complaining about them the loudest as they hit their own communities. Of course, the people I feel for are the people who are directly feeling the pain of these cuts — the people who can least afford it. They’re hurting military communities that have already sacrificed enough. They’re hurting middle-class families. There are children who have had to enter a lottery to determine which of them get to stay in their Head Start program with their friends. There are seniors who depend on programs like Meals on Wheels so they can live independently, but who are seeing their services cut.
That’s what this so-called sequester means. Some people may not have been impacted, but there are a lot of folks who are being increasingly impacted all across this country. And that’s why my budget replaces these cuts with smarter ones, making long-term reforms, eliminating actual waste and programs we don’t need anymore.

Also, the president knows you need some “fairness” talk:

Over the past two years, I’ve signed legislation that will reduce our deficits by more than $2.5 trillion — more than two-thirds of it through spending cuts and the rest through asking the wealthiest Americans to begin paying their fair share. . . .
But if we’re serious about deficit reduction, then these reforms have to go hand-in-hand with reforming our tax code to make it more simple and more fair, so that the wealthiest individuals and biggest corporations cannot keep taking advantage of loopholes and deductions that most Americans don’t get. That’s the bottom line.

Just in case you haven’t yet smashed your computer in a frothing rage, here’s video of today’s Obama speech:

Don’t blame me. I’m just reporting this crap.

 

VIDEO: Dana Loesch on Sequestration

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Dana Loesch was a guest on Sean Hannity’s show last night, engaging in the dangerous practice of telling the truth about Obama:

“The House was discussing a proposal to give the Presidet the power of the purse, so to speak, and the he could decide where he wanted to cut, if he really did want to avoid his plan of sequestration — which he came up with a couple of years ago and Democrats supported and passed. If he really wanted to avoid these sequestration cuts, ‘Here, then, you decide what to keep and what you don’t want to keep. What do you want to spend money on? What do you think is wasteful?’ And he said he’d veto it.”

The federal government can’t afford to cut anything from the budget, because it’s important for Yale University to study duck penises.

Follow Dana Loesch on Twitter. It doesn’t cost taxpayers anything.

 


Lying by Euphemism: ‘New Revenues’

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Journalism is supposed to be about truth. Jackie Calmes and Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times are engaged in deception:

With Republican leaders in Congress forswearing budget negotiations over new revenues, President Obama has begun reaching around them to Republican lawmakers with a history of willingness to cut bipartisan deals.

“New revenues” = INCREASING TAXE RATES.

President Obama wants to RAISE TAXES, which Republicans oppose, but these lying bastards at the New York Times — dishonest partisan propagandists, endeavoring to assist their fellow Democrat — realize that the president’s proposal might be less popular if they described it truthfully, and so they begin with this 11-word dependent clause that hides the truth and shifts the blame:

With Republican leaders in Congress forswearing budget negotiations over new revenues . . .

In other words, if you buy what Calmes and Weisman are selling, you believe that the problem in Washington is that Republicans won’t negotiate, and that the ideal way to solve the budget problem is with “new revenues,” which could be had easily if weren’t for those Republicans “foreswearing negotiations.” As far as concerns the economic error in the underlying fallacy of their hidden premise, Ronald Reagan once explained that in a single sentence:

“We don’t have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven’t taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.”

Oh, to be back to the good old days, when the debt was only a trillion dollars! But of course, we can’t cut spending — President Scaremonger won’t let that happen — and therefore the question is how to raise taxes. Never mind that the government could actually collect “news revenues” if it would just stop strangling economic growth with its vicious policies.

No, in the fanatical brains of Democrats, it is necessary as a matter of “social justice” that the rich (however you define that term) be forced to “pay their fair share” (however you define that term). Words have actual meanings, except when Democrats are talking, and then you always have to ask yourself, “What do they really mean when they use words like ‘rich’ and ‘fair’?”

Once you know that someone is attempting to deceive you — and Calmes and Weisman have advertised their deceptive purpose in the first sentence of their article — then all you need to wonder is why they’re lying. Perhaps sinister motives inspire them:

“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

 That Orwell fellow was onto something.

 

Narrative Control: Woodward Gets a Warning from Gene Sperling

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“Woodward, I think, leans to the left, but he is unafraid to call out the President of the United States when he’s lied to.”
— Stephen Dethrage, University of Alabama

Obama has been lying about the sequester, and when famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward blew the whistle, this made Woodward the demonized enemy. Anyone who disputes the Obama-approved narrative must be discredited, by any means necessary. Ben Smith at BuzzFeed reports:

The White House official whom Bob Woodward charged had crosssed a line by saying he would “regret” printing his version of a set of Washington negotiations was Gene Sperling, the director of the White House Economic Council, a source familiar with the exchange told BuzzFeed Wednesday.
The email from Sperling to Woodward, which Woodward read to Politico Wednesday, has transfixed Washington, with Republicans and some in the press charging that it embodies a White House lording it over a cowed press corps.
Woodward, Politico reported, called the top official — identified to BuzzFeed as Sperling — to tell him that he would question Obama’s account of negotiations leading to the “sequester” — automatic cuts set to take effect next month.
The aide “yelled at me for about a half hour,” Woodward said, and then sent a follow-up email that read, in part: “You’re focusing on a few specific trees that give a very wrong impression of the forest. But perhaps we will just not see eye to eye here. … I think you will regret staking out that claim.”

Instead of defending Woodward, other journalists are volunteering their assistance in attempting to discredit him, as Aleister at American Glob shows the shrieking reaction from Obama’s media sycophants.  This is shameful, and we should not be surprised that this beatdown on Woodward appears to have been orchestrated by Media Matters chief bully, Eric Boehlert:

Boehlert’s tactics are obvious. He wants to marginalize Woodward and his reporting out of the fear that Obama might actually be held responsible for a law he proposed, got passed, and signed into law.

Boehlert and his fellow thugs don’t care about truth. They care about partisan conformity and subservience. Becca J. Lower noticed that at least one young journalist still prefers the old-fashioned truth.

Preach It, Sessions

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by Smitty

What should Republicans be saying, more or less daily? Things like this:

During my remarks today I have exhaustively documented the case against the confirmation of Mr. Lew. I have detailed his disastrous budget plans, rebuked by editorial boards across the country and unanimously rejected by Congress.
I have discussed his repeated, knowing, and deliberately false statements about those budget plans–most notoriously his claim that “Our budget will get us, over the next several years, to the point where we can look the American people in the eye and say we’re not adding to the debt anymore; we’re spending money that we have each year, and then we can work on bringing down our national debt.”
As I close my remarks, I would appeal to my colleagues to oppose Mr. Lew. Continue reading Preach It, Sessions →

ObamaPhone Boondoggle Update

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In October 2008, I was one of the first conservative writers to call attention to the government program to provide free cell phones to the poor.  This existed before Obama became president, but has since become known as the “O-Phone” program, because recipients mistakenly believe that this is a benefit provided to them by Obama. And now Spencer Ante of the Wall Street Journal reports that it’s a shoddy boondoggle:

The U.S. government spent about $2.2 billion last year to provide phones to low-income Americans, but a Wall Street Journal review of the program shows that a large number of those who received the phones haven’t proved they are eligible to receive them.

Remember, it’s RAAAAACIST to criticize this program, or to laugh at this video of an Obama voter excited about her free phone: