My home is not a place, it is people.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Lew for Treasury Secretary? Thumbs DOWN!
White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew has engaged in misleading nonsense putting lipstick on the pig of gross overspending by this administration:
Sessions was referring to a bitter Senate hearing from February 2011, when Lew attempted to defend statements he and Obama had made claiming their budget blueprint would get the country to a point where "we're not adding to the debt anymore."
Those statements, at best, stretched the truth. The White House budget plan at the time showed the public debt (which isn't the entire debt) soaring from $11 trillion that year to nearly $19 trillion by 2021, driven by year-after-year deficits.
Yet Lew, appearing at a Senate hearing, tried to justify the claim that the government was not adding to the debt. He said the administration was merely referring to "primary balance" -- or federal spending that does not count interest payments.Lew is being pushed for his OMB experience in both this Administration and the second Clinton term, which had everything to do with the GOP-controlled Congress (and unsustainable capital gains tax revenue during the Internet bubble). I certainly don't consider Lew's recent OMB experience under the most spendthrift government in world history reassuring, and there have been no trade agreements since Bush negotiated ones Obama finally pushed relatively recently. I'm also not impressed by the nature and extent of his experience; I think we need more of an outsider critic in that role, someone whom is willing to jawbone and defend the purchasing power of dollar, say, one of the Fed inflation hawks.
Notice also the person I wanted most out of this Administration, Eric Holder, is one of those staying on...
In Response to Progressive Demagoguery
Over the Newtown Tragedy
I want to make a more general point than Gillespie here: the media's obsession with certain tragedies--9/11, Newtown, and others has led to disproportionate anti-liberty overreaction on both the Left and the Right. It wasn't just the Patriot Act and the Bush Administration's expansionary Gulf Region interventionist policy, but the massive super-bureaucracy DHS and the absurdly invasive TSA, where misguided law-and-order citizens are manipulated by fear-mongering statist politician advocates into throwing their fellow citizens' liberty under the bus. I mourn the murders of 3000 people on 9/11: was that worth losing 6000 American lives in Iraq and Afghanistan (never mind the severely injured with permanent disabilities) and adding $1T or more to the national debt?
Let's face the facts of life: there are workarounds to almost anything you want to prohibit. Take for instance Bloomberg's attempt to limit sugary soft drink sizes: you can buy multiple drinks, bring your own, repurchase relevant drinks from others, etc., and/or purchase candy to fill one's sweet tooth. But let me rephrase the point: suppose the young man and/or a friend had access to the school (say, as a custodian) and devised a different scheme (e.g., a homemade bomb, perish the thought). Evil exists; it will adapt to circumstances and exploit vulnerabilities.
First of all, there will be an attempt to politically exploit the tragedy of murdered little angels, but it's misguided. Remember, we are a nation of 310 million. Whereas gun control advocates will try to stitch every anomalous overpublicized event together, in the context of thousands of schools and millions of students, these don't amount to a significant trend. Someone the other day noted a lot of these incidents have taken place at PUBLIC schools and state universities; their response was to spotlight government safety failures and suggest the more reasonable solution of abolishing public education. Notice almost all attention has been focused on controlling weapons, not on what went wrong with government safety; if you do nor have the right policies in place, you still have the same vulnerability, e.g., someone steals a weapon or procures it in the underground economy.
On the politics, there is no way the House is going to pass what it sees as an unreasonable infringement on Second Amendment rights, even worse, would have done little to prevent the massacre in question. I warned some time ago Obama would abuse his authority, once again, to issue an executive order. From a political standpoint, there are a couple of ways to overcome an executive order--through the legislature or the courts. The former is tough when you control one chamber of Congress. Notice the President did nothing from his own bipartisan deficit reduction commission which had overwhelming bipartisan support, but I bet he will try to do something from the Biden commission on the gun issue. Conservatives and libertarians need to be ready to sue the Administration.
Nurse Mary and the Power of
Non-Enabler Private Sector Charity
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Carpenters, "Make believe it's your first time". A remake of Bobby Vinton's last major charting hit, Karen also recorded it for a solo album, released posthumously in the mid-90s. The first single released after Karen's passing, it was also their last top 10 adult contemporary hit. It's also interesting to hear her lustrous voice in a simpler, stripped down arrangement. A life done too soon!
