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Newsweek.com

 

The president needs to tell the truth on taxes, entitlements, and how to really reform health care—before it's too late.

 

It has long been an unwritten rule of political professionals: Thou Shalt Not Demand Sacrifice of the Voters. Do not propose to raise taxes (remember what happened to Walter Mondale in 1984, when he won just one state and the District of Columbia against Ronald Reagan). Never sound gloomy about the future (remember Jimmy Carter and malaise). Always be upbeat (remember Ronald Reagan, again). And never, ever propose to cut the big entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare. Those senior citizens turn out to vote!

 

The pros—the advisers and well-paid political consultants—might permit their clients to say a few words about "hard choices" in their uplifting speeches about the greatness of the people. And when it comes time to propose a budget, the president's handlers will tolerate—or imagine—projected savings and revenues from unspecified sources. But that's all for the "out" years, as the lawmakers call them—a time of truly hard choices and real sacrifice that never seems to come.

 

But what happens when the time really does come? Read article.

 

David Hogberg, Investors.com

 

Democrats and liberal pundits still insist ObamaCare isn’t completely dead, but the obits are already being written.

 

So it’s worth pondering why Democrats, with huge congressional majorities, were unable to carry the day.

 

Fundamentally, polls showed that the public didn’t like the health care plans, with tea partyers and other opponents far more passionate than supporters.

 

But Democrats allowed the opposition to develop with their drawn-out legislative process. And that was due in large part to two liberal lions of Congress with a knack for deal-making being sidelined.

 

The late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s brain cancer, first announced in 2008, was a major blow to ObamaCare. And not because Kennedy’s passing last year led to the election of Republican Scott Brown in January. It mattered because there was probably no senator both more committed to a national health care plan and as skilled at cutting bipartisan deals. But the cancer sidelined him until his death.

 

Had he been part of the process, odds are that Kennedy would have worked on a deal that at least a few Senate Republicans could have supported. That would have given Democrats at least a veneer of bipartisanship, blunting GOP attacks. And it would have reduced the time Majority Leader Harry Reid had to spend coaxing the likes of Sens. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Ben Nelson, D-Neb., to get on board. Christmas might have come much earlier for Senate Democrats.

 

The second major blow occurred Nov. 20, 2008, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi succeeded in deposing Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee in favor of Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. The panel was one of several with health care jurisdiction. Dingell had a history of cutting deals with the moderate (Blue Dog) and liberal wings of the Democratic Party. Waxman too has had a reputation as a deal maker. But on health care he was a fierce partisan, resulting in a Blue Dog revolt. Read article.

 

Frank Miele, Daily Interlake.com

 

The week before he was elected president, President Obama made the bold statement that, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

 

No doubt, at the time, most of us would have written this off as the usual overblown rhetoric of a politician pumped up on his own favorable poll numbers. Instead, it turned out to be a warning.

 

We don’t have time or space here to recap all of the “changes” brought about in the first year of the Obama administration, but among the biggies were the federal government takeover of major components of finance and industry (also known as socialization), the appointment of communist sympathizers to major posts in the administration, and the dismantling of national security policies that had kept us mostly safe for the eight years since Sept. 11. 2001.

 

What has become abundantly clear in the last year is that the president not only has a goal of “fundamentally transforming” the country, he also has a plan for how to do so. Read article.

 

Arnold Ahlert, JWR.com

 

When it comes to economic policy, there's stupid, breathtakingly stupid — and liberalism. Thursday, in another mind-numbing display of ideology-driven stupidity, Senate Democrats passed new budget rules only a liberal could believe will make it harder to run up the deficit: they will make it as difficult as possible to extend the current tax cuts, or enact new ones.

 

This is precisely what happens to people suffused with an ideologically-inflamed sense of superiority. They truly believe that both common sense — and historical evidence — are irrelevant considerations with respect to economics.

 

For example, it doesn't matter one iota that there have been three major tax cuts initiated by three different presidents since the 1960s — and every one of them resulted in increased revenue flowing into federal coffers. It doesn't even matter that the largest one was passed, not by a Republican president, but by Democrat John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

 

Here's what one of the American left's most cherished icons had to say about the subject:

 

 

Anyone seriously believe that JFK wouldn't be drummed out of the current Democrat party for spouting such "heresy?" Read article.

 

Wesley Pruden, Washington Times.com

 

The White House has to be tuning up Barack Obama's teleprompter, which the president regards as America's Maginot Line. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is once more talking some big talk. Blabbermouth or not, he has to be taken semi-seriously.

 

Mr. Ahmadinejad and America's considerable enemies in Arabia can read the newspapers as well as the diplomatic cables, and they see how reluctant Mr. Obama is to recognize what's at stake in the Middle East. He boasts that terrorists can expect a warm welcome once captured, with no harsh questioning and with the full menu of defendant rights and trial privileges. When the president directed that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other al Qaeda plotters of Sept. 11 be tried in a civilian court in Manhattan, those considerable enemies knew they had the president's number for once and all. Now, with even stalwarts in his own party denouncing a civilian trial in Manhattan as the nut-ball idea of the year, he's looking for a smart solution, a way to look tough in retreat.

 

He should take the trial to San Francisco, where the flame that warms the cult burns brightest, and where surely no one would object. Read article.

 

Andrew McCarthy, NRO.com

 

Michael Hayden, the former CIA director, penned a superb op-ed in the Washington Post on Sunday. Succinctly, he tallies the wages of having Attorney General Eric Holder make national-security decisions. Unlike the attorney general, Hayden is a real general, and very much worth heeding. He shows that these decisions have been premised on left-wing political calculations that always shortchange intelligence collection and the pursuit of American interests. Holder’s judgments are not based on what America’s safety requires or on what the law maximally permits U.S. intelligence to do in wartime.

 

As Hayden points out, the policy decisions that President Obama has allowed Holder to make are significant — not only taken one by one, but in their cumulative effect on the ethos of our intelligence agencies. “Intelligence officers,” he writes, “need to know that someone has their back.” After Holder forced the release in April of classified memos prepared by Bush Justice Department lawyers, laying out interrogation tactics and the legal rationale for permitting them, “CIA officers began to ask whether the people doing things that were currently authorized would be dragged through this kind of public knothole in five years. No one could guarantee that they would not.”

 

The paralysis wrought by this decision transcends the narrow subject of interrogations. All intelligence collection is infected. If you can’t/don’t collect intelligence in a war against a secretive, transnational Jihadist network, you stand to lose — and a lot of Americans stand to die. Thus, Hayden concludes, “Some may celebrate that the current Justice Department’s perspective on the war on terrorism has become markedly more dominant in the past year. We should probably understand the implications of that before we break out the champagne.” Read article.