MADDOG10's Blog

 Written By : Walter Williams

In Europe, especially in Germany, hoisting a swastika-emblazoned Nazi flag is a crime. For decades after World War II, people have hunted down and sought punishment for Nazi murderers, who were responsible for the deaths of more than 20 million people.

Here’s my question: Why are the horrors of Nazism so well-known and widely condemned but not those of socialism and communism? What goes untaught — and possibly is covered up — is that socialist and communist ideas have produced the greatest evil in mankind’s history. You say, “Williams, what in the world are you talking about? Socialists, communists and their fellow travelers, such as the Wall Street occupiers supported by our president, care about the little guy in his struggle for a fair shake! They’re trying to promote social justice.” Let’s look at some of the history of socialism and communism.

What’s not appreciated is that Nazism is a form of socialism. In fact, the term Nazi stands for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. The unspeakable acts of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis pale in comparison with the horrors committed by the communists in the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People’s Republic of China. Between 1917 and 1987, Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and their successors murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 62 million of their own people. Between 1949 and 1987, China’s communists, led by Mao Zedong and his successors, murdered and were otherwise responsible for the deaths of 76 million Chinese. The most authoritative tally of history’s most murderous regimes is documented on University of Hawaii Professor Rudolph J. Rummel’s website, at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills, and in his book “Death by Government.”

How much hunting down and punishment have there been for these communist murderers? To the contrary, it’s acceptable both in Europe and in the U.S. to hoist and march under the former USSR’s red flag emblazoned with a hammer and sickle. Mao Zedong has been long admired by academics and leftists across our country, as they often marched around singing the praises of Mao and waving his little red book, “Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung.” President Barack Obama’s communications director, Anita Dunn, in her June 2009 commencement address to St. Andrews Episcopal High School at Washington National Cathedral, said Mao was one of her heroes.

Whether it’s the academic community, the media elite, stalwarts of the Democratic Party or organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children’s Defense Fund, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism — a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined.

Today’s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. One does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one has to believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.

The unspeakable horrors of Nazism didn’t happen overnight. They were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for “social justice.” It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans — who would have cringed at the thought of genocide — who created the Trojan horse for Hitler’s ascendancy. Today’s Americans are similarly accepting the massive consolidation of power in Washington in the name of social justice.

If you don’t believe it, just ask yourself: Which way are we headed tiny steps at a time — toward greater liberty or toward more government control over our lives?

Perhaps we think that we are better human beings than the German people who created the conditions that brought Hitler to power. I say, don’t count on it.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

 Written By : Michelle Malkin

Chutzpah overload in full effect: President Obama’s sleazy super-PAC, run by his former White House spokesman Bill Burton, just released an ad accusing GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney of causing the cancer death of a steelworker’s wife.

It’s not just a slanderous and false attack. It’s a foolish attempt to camouflage the administration’s massive jobs death toll, politicized pension plundering and Big Labor bailout cronyism. And it will backfire big time because the thousands and thousands of true victims of Obama’s economic wreckage are speaking up and fighting back.

Let’s dispense with the “Romney = murderer” meme first. The warped Priorities USA ad features the claims of one Joe Soptic, a former employee at the Kansas City-based GST Steel plant. The plant went bankrupt years after Bain Capital acquired it. Soptic blames Romney for the loss of his job and health insurance — and for the subsequent death of his wife a “short time after” the plant’s closure.

But Romney stopped working for Bain in 1999. The plant closed in 2001. And Soptic’s wife died in 2006. Oh, and Soptic admitted to CNN on Tuesday afternoon that the family in fact had health insurance at the time of Soptic’s wife’s death. But it’s still all-powerful, time-traveling, omnipresent Darth Romney’s fault.

Obama flack turned super-PAC slime-master Burton shrugged off the facts and doubled down on the campaign’s class-warfare bloviation. “Families and individuals had to find new jobs, new sources of health insurance and a way to make up for the pensions they lost,” he told Politico. “Mitt Romney has had an enduring impact on the lives of thousands of men and women, and for many of them, that impact has been devastating.”

Yet, the Soptic story is the best they could scrape together? Stamp this one “EPIC FAIL.”

While Team Obama promotes fables to indict Romney, the incontrovertible stories of the current administration’s economic malpractice are finally getting out. In 2010, I first reported on how Obama’s UAW bailout threw tens of thousands of nonunion autoworkers under the bus. It’s the ongoing horror story of some 20,000 white-collar workers at Delphi, a leading auto parts company spun off from GM a decade ago.

As Washington rushed to nationalize the U.S. auto industry with $80 billion in taxpayer “rescue” funds and avoid contested court termination proceedings, the White House auto team and the Treasury Department schemed with Big Labor bosses to preserve UAW members’ costly pension funds by shafting their nonunion counterparts.

In addition, the nonunion pensioners lost all of their health and life insurance benefits. The abused workers — most from hard-hit northeast Ohio, Michigan and neighboring states — had devoted decades of their lives as secretaries, technicians, engineers and sales employees at Delphi/GM. Some workers have watched up to 70 percent of their pensions vanish.

“I worked for 34 years at GM/Delphi Corp. When Delphi went bankrupt, we lost everything,” Dana Strickland of Michigan wrote me. “Because I was salaried (middle management), we lost our pension and health insurance. I did not belong to the union, so GM/Delphi could have cared less. I have never felt so betrayed. We never hear this brought to the public’s attention. People need to know how we were screwed, while the Obama administration kissed up to the union.”

“I’m one of the Delphi Salaried Retirees that lost the health care, life insurance and 67 percent of the pension I was promised in retirement after working hard for 40 years,” Charles Stone of Michigan e-mailed. “Words cannot describe the frustration and let down these events have thrust on my family’s lives, and to have GM’s rescue all sugar-coated in the current political environment is like putting lipstick on a pig. … We will continue to fight to right this grievous wrong.”

Tom Rose of Ohio added: “I am one of the 20,000 salaried retirees that lost all of my health care and — in my case — a 40 percent pension cut. So I am now paying increased health care costs with fewer pension dollars and contributing what is left to our lawsuit to correct this injustice. Meanwhile, the politically connected union has their full pension and 90-plus percent of their health care. You have hit upon the key question: How can our own federal government pick winners and losers amongst its own citizens?”

Through two costly years of litigation and investigation, the Delphi workers have exposed how the stacked White House Auto Task Force schemed with union bosses to “cherry pick” (one Obama official’s own words) which financial obligations the new Government Motors company would assume and which they would abandon based on their political expedience. Obama’s own former auto czar Steve Rattner admitted in his recent memoir that “attacking the union’s sacred cow” could “jeopardize” the auto bailout deal.

In June, 20 months after a federal judge first ordered the government to cooperate, the Delphi Salaried Retirees Association broke through the administration’s information stonewall and dislodged 62,000 pages of documents in their lawsuit to right the administration’s wrongs. As The Daily Caller reported on Tuesday, the documents included “internal government emails (that contradicted) sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts … and that administration figures violated federal law.”

Meanwhile, the Delphi workers who got shafted are getting in the faces of the administration and the public with a new web ad produced by conservative advocacy group Let Freedom Ring. They are asking, “Why, Mr. President? Why?” They — and America — deserve answers and justice, not more Bizarro World smears and fantastical bedtime stories.

Mitt and Ann Romney in a 1973 yearbook at Harvard; he earned a joint law and business degree.

• FACEBOOK
• TWITTER
• GOOGLE+
• E-MAIL
• SHARE
• PRINT
• REPRINTS
• 

President Obama has a Harvard law degree. Former President George W. Bush has a Harvard M.B.A. Will the next president have both?

One of the most exclusive clubs in academe is a Harvard University dual-degree program allowing graduate students to attend its law and business schools simultaneously, cramming five years of education into four. On average, about 12 people per year have completed the program — the overachievers of the overachievers — including a striking number of big names in finance, industry, law and government.

The program is so small that it has drawn little attention outside rarefied circles, but that may change as its most famous graduate, Mitt Romney, campaigns for the White House, subjecting every phase of his life to scrutiny.

When Harvard started its so-called J.D.-M.B.A. program in 1969, there were just a handful like it. Others have cropped up since, but Harvard’s has what may be the most successful alumni roster, particularly in finance.

In addition to Mr. Romney, founder of Bain Capital, the roughly 500 graduates include Bruce Wasserstein, who led the investment bank Lazard until he died in 2009; leaders of multibillion-dollar hedge fund and private equity firms like Canyon Capital Advisors, Silver Lake Partners and Crestview Partners; high-ranking executives at banks like Citigroup and Credit Suisse; C. James Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Company; and Theodore V. Wells Jr., one of the nation’s top trial lawyers.

The young Mr. Romney wanted to go to business school, while his father, George W. Romney, a cabinet secretary and former Michigan governor, urged him to go to law school. So the younger Mr. Romney did both, studying at Harvard from 1971 to 1975.

“What was special about these people was that they had bandwidth,” said Malcolm S. Salter, an emeritus business professor who helped create the program. “They had to be driven, hard-working and organized to a degree that was unusual even for Harvard business or law grad students.”

Guhan Subramanian, who graduated from the program in 1998 and now is its faculty chairman, said the students could be viewed as “résumé builders who haven’t figured out what to do with their lives and are just checking off all the boxes.” But he said they are genuinely interested in mastering both fields.

Students must be admitted separately to the business and law schools before applying for the program. That is a feat in itself, because the two student bodies are quite different.

The law school takes younger students, often straight out of college, putting more emphasis on academic credentials, while the business school usually wants work and leadership experience. Business students are often described as being more gregarious and at ease with numbers, law students as more intellectual and facile with words.

And then there are politics.

“I was among the most conservative people at the law school and one of the most liberal people at the business school,” said Peter Halasz, a partner at the law firm Schulte Roth & Zabel, who completed the program in the early 1980s. “Studying at both exposes you to many different kinds of people and various sides of an argument.”

The political gap was wider in Mr. Romney’s era, scarred by Vietnam and Watergate, when law students wore T-shirts and business students wore ties to class. “The law school was very swept up in the politics of the time, but the business school pretty much ignored them,” said Detlev Vagts, a law professor who ran the program for more than 30 years.

Charles E. Haldeman Jr., former head of Putnam Investments and Freddie Mac, was a year ahead of Mr. Romney in the program. “Back then, people were trying to save the world,” Mr. Haldeman said. “Because I was interested in business, and doing well economically mattered to me, and I didn’t think the country was controlled by evil people, the law school students did think of me as a little different.”

Both schools were overwhelmingly male in those days. And far more graduates have gone into business than law; many, like Mr. Wasserstein, switch to business.

Lawrence Golub, chief executive of the Golub Capital investment firm, said that the vast majority of graduates end up in business rather than law because of the earnings potential and the quality of life. “One learns that the life of associate at a big corporate law firm is demanding, unpleasant and not as lucrative as what you can do on the business side,” said Mr. Golub, who graduated from the program in 1984 and founded its alumni society.

For many graduates, Mr. Golub said, the toughest lesson after a lifetime of uninterrupted success is “that failing won’t kill you.”

In the 1970s, many graduates went into management consulting, as Mr. Romney did, but for most of the program’s history, finance has dominated, which some people connected to the program find mildly disappointing. Professor Salter said he had hoped the program would produce more public servants.

But former students and professors say it makes sense that a group of overachievers would be drawn to financial markets, a hypercompetitive field with the promise of immense riches.

Adebayo O. Ogunlesi, a program graduate, said, “I wanted to be a business or commercial lawyer and thought I could meet prospective clients at H.B.S.”

But Mr. Ogunlesi, whose law classmates included Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., practiced law only briefly. He became head of investment banking at Credit Suisse, then chairman of Global Infrastructure Partners.

“When you’re negotiating as a banker, it helps to throw in a few choice legal terms to suggest that you could help them think through how the deal can get done from a legal point of view,” he said.

Students start by taking the first year of one program, and then the first year of the other. In their third and fourth years, they take courses from both.

Those who start with the first year of law school — often regarded as the hardest — as Mr. Romney did are more likely to complete both degrees.

But in another sense, Mr. Romney is atypical. He is one of only two alumni to have a high-profile career in politics, along with Christopher Cox, a former congressman and Securities and Exchange Commission chairman. 

As long as politics remains a relatively low-paying, fickle career, graduates do not expect to see many students taking the political path. All the more reason that other dual-degree graduates, whether or not they support Mr. Romney, admit to being intrigued by the prospect that one of theirs might become president.

“Who knows,” Mr. Golub said, “maybe we’ll be holding our next reunion at the White House.”

Some 800,000 additional Texans than expected went to the polls today to cast ballots in what might normally have been a sleepy cakewalk for the ho-hum Establishment Flabby Middle.

Yep. Another Kay Baily Hutchison, another Bob Krueger, that’s all folks in Texas reallywanted, right, Mr. Dewhurst? Someone with french-cuff shirts and collar stays, someone that enjoys the Silent Auction at the Country Club to benefit the United Fund, who speaks in smooth and dulcet tones, and never, ever threatens to actually read the Constitution –let alone abide by it.

Well, gee whiz, guess what happened on the way to the Lowell Wiecker Memorial Big Tent?

The American People happened, that’s what.

And Ted Cruz absolutely crushed David Dewhurst, by nearly 12 percentage points. Ted didn’t merely eke out a victory, or fall over the finish line by a whisper. No. He filleted the Lieutenant Governor, basted him with a spicy sauce of righteous American anger at our current political class, and served him up with a bow to all the establishment types –who, by the way, will now poo-poo the notion they weren’t with Cruz from the get-go.

Does anyone these days queue up hours in advance to listen to a speech by Charlie Crist? Anybody? Bob Bennet?

The truly remarkable thing about Mr. Cruz’s victory is the massive, massive fortune that his opponent sank into the race, and how slathering all the money around by Dewhurst had the exact opposite effect of it’s intent: People are sick of the relentless personal, bizarre, irrelevant attacks in concert with the complete absence of philosophical and political substance. Personal attacks are fine, as far as they go: But, they must be paired with solid, substantive, strongly articulated debate. Ted Cruz offered this in spades.

And in this election, Mr. Obama can see the future, if he cares to look into the glass:

It is a grim and brutish future for the man who is President for the next 159 days, electorally speaking. Just as in Texas, the otherwise somnolent folks that tend to eschew politics in this nation will have been stirred to wrath –fury!– by a President and a political class that is utterly, utterly disconnected from, and uninterested in, them.

How in the name of a loving God could a President so obnoxiously rule against the known, (-and knowable) will of the American People for four years expect anything other than a good, old-fashioned drubbing? All Barack has done for four years is attack his opponents with the most adolescent blather, accuse them of being lazy, racist, good-for-nothings that don’t appreciate his genius– and then sign into law bill upon bill that the American People manifestly despise and reject? How? Has Mr. Obama ever actually acted Presidential for more than a couple of speechifying afternoons? Has he ever been the President of the entire nation –rather than the chief antagonist for the Democrat Party?

The American People are fed up. They are tired of being ignored, tormented, and ripped off. We are a kind and loving people. We are tolerant to a fault.

But, Mr. Obama, pace Admiral Yamamoto: You have awakened a sleeping giant.

Just ask David Dewhurst.

Only in a world of lowered, New Normal expectations was the July jobs report anything less than another disaster for U.S. workers. Nonfarm payrolls rose 163,000 last month as the unemployment rate rose to 8.3%. In addition, employment for May and June was revised by 6,000 jobs.

– Not only is the 8.3% unemployment rate way above the 5.6% unemployment rate that Team Obama predicted for July 2012 if Congress passed the $800 billion stimulus plan. It’s way above the 6.0% unemployment rate they predicted if no stimulus was passed.

– Job growth, as measured by nonfarm payrolls, has average about 75,000 jobs a month during the Obama recovery for a total of 2.7 million jobs. Context: During the first three years of the Reagan Recovery, job growth averaged 273,000 a month for a total of 9.8 million. If you adjust for the larger U.S. population today, the Reagan Recovery averaged 360,000 jobs a month for a three-year total of 13 million jobs.

– This continues to be the longest stretch of 8% or higher unemployment since the Great Depression, 42 straight months.

– If the labor force participation rate was the same as when Obama took office in January 2009, the unemployment rate would be 11.0%.

– Even if you take into account that the LFP should be declining as America ages, the unemployment rate would be 10.6%.

– If labor force participation rate hadn’t declined since just last month, unemployment rate would have risen to 8.4%.

– The broader U-6 unemployment rate, which includes “all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons,” ticked up to 15.0%.

– Two years ago, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner wrote his now-infamous “Welcome to the Recovery” op-ed for the New York Times. During those two years, the economy has added an average of just 137,000 jobs a month.

– Not only is the 8.3% unemployment rate way above the 5.6% unemployment rate that Team Obama predicted for July 2012 if Congress passed the $800 billion stimulus plan. It’s way above the 6.0% unemployment rate they predicted if no stimulus was passed.

– Good point on the report from IHS Global Insight:

In the household survey, which produces the unemployment rate, both the employment-to-population ratio and the labor force participation rate dropped, not signs of a healthy labor market. The report will alleviate fears that the US might be tipping back into recession. But uncertainties over the strength of global growth, the Eurozone crisis, the fiscal cliff and the November elections are giving plenty of reasons for caution. We expect subdued monthly job creation in the 100,000-150,000 region in the second half of the year

– And Citgroup’s take:

To keep us all guessing, today’s data included a particularly weak reading on employment from the household survey, which showed a 195,000 drop in employment and 150,000 drop in the labor force. The unemployment rate rose to 8.3% from 8.2%. While trend employment gains are not progressing at a particularly robust rate, we would not view a 0.1 percentage point move in a singlemonth reading as particularly significant. Also showing that the underlying trend is not very robust, the work week was unchanged and average hourly earnings rose just 0.1%, suggesting a much smaller gain in real income than reported in June (which also argues for smoothing). Aggregate hours worked rose a modest 0.1%.

Written By : Ann Coulter

Mitt Romney presents one enormous problem for Barack Obama’s campaign: No divorce records. That’s why the media are so hot to get their hands on Romney’s tax records for the past 25 years. They need something to “pick through, distort and lie about” — as the Republican candidate says.

Obama’s usual campaign method, used in 100 percent of his races, has been to pry into the private records of his opponents.

Democrats aren’t going to find any personal dirt on the clean-cut Mormon, so they need complicated tax filings going back decades in order to create the illusion of scandal out of boring financial records.

Romney has already released his 2010 tax return and is about to release his 2011 return. After all the huffing and puffing by the media demanding those returns, the follow-up story vanished remarkably quickly when the only thing the return showed was that Romney pays millions of dollars in taxes and gives a lot of money to charity.

Let’s take a romp down memory lane and review the typical Obama campaign strategy. Obama became a U.S. senator only by virtue of David Axelrod’s former employer, the Chicago Tribune, ripping open the sealed divorce records of Obama’s two principal opponents.

One month before the 2004 Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, Obama was down in the polls, about to lose to Blair Hull, a multimillionaire securities trader. But then the Chicago Tribune leaked the claim that Hull’s second ex-wife, Brenda Sexton, had sought an order of protection against him during their 1998 divorce proceedings.

Those records were under seal, but as The New York Times noted: “The Tribune reporter who wrote the original piece later acknowledged in print that the Obama camp had ‘worked aggressively behind the scenes’ to push the story.” Many people said Axelrod had “an even more significant role — that he leaked the initial story.”

Both Hull and his ex-wife opposed releasing their sealed divorce records, but they finally relented in response to the media’s hysteria — 18 days before the primary. Hull was forced to spend four minutes of a debate detailing the abuse allegation in his divorce papers, explaining that his ex-wife “kicked me in the leg and I hit her shin to try to get her to not continue to kick me.”

After having held a substantial lead just a month before the primary, Hull’s campaign collapsed with the chatter about his divorce. Obama sailed to the front of the pack and won the primary. Hull finished third with 10 percent of the vote.

As luck would have it, Obama’s opponent in the general election had also been divorced! Jack Ryan was tall, handsome, Catholic — and shared a name with one of Harrison Ford’s most popular onscreen characters! He went to Dartmouth, Harvard Law and Harvard Business School, made hundreds of millions of dollars as a partner at Goldman Sachs, and then, in his early 40s, left investment banking to teach at an inner city school on the South Side of Chicago.

Ryan would have walloped Obama in the Senate race. But at the request of — again — the Chicago Tribune, California Judge Robert Schnider unsealed the custody papers in Ryan’s divorce five years earlier from Hollywood starlet Jeri Lynn Ryan, the bombshell Borg on “Star Trek: Voyager.”

Jack Ryan had released his tax records. He had released his divorce records. But both he and his ex-wife sought to keep the custody records under seal to protect their son.

Amid the 400 pages of filings from the custody case, Jack Ryan claimed that his wife had had an affair, and she counterclaimed with the allegation that he had taken her to “sex clubs” in Paris, New York and New Orleans, which drove her to fall in love with another man.

(Republicans: If you plan a career in public office, please avoid marrying a wacko.)

Ryan had vehemently denied her allegations at the time, but it didn’t matter. The sex club allegations aired on “Entertainment Tonight,” “NBC Nightly News,” ABC’s “Good Morning America,” “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” and NBC’s “Today” show. CNN covered the story like it was the first moon landing.

(Interestingly, international papers also were ablaze with the story — the same newspapers that were supposed to be so bored with American sexual mores during Bill Clinton’s sex scandal.)

Four days after Judge Schnider unsealed the custody records, Ryan dropped out of the race for the horror of (allegedly) propositioning his own wife and then taking “no” for an answer.

Alan Keyes stepped in as a last-minute Republican candidate.

And that’s how Obama became a U.S. senator. He destroyed both his Democratic primary opponent and his Republican general election opponent with salacious allegations about their personal lives taken from “sealed” court records.

Obama’s team delved into Sarah Palin’s marriage and spread rumors of John McCain’s alleged affair in 2008 and they smeared Herman Cain in 2011 with hazy sexual harassment allegations all emanating from David Axelrod’s pals in Chicago.

It’s almost like a serial killer’s signature. Unsealed personal records have been released to the press. Obama must be running for office!

So you can see what a pickle the Obama campaign is in having to run against a Dudley Do-Right, non-drinking, non-smoking, God-fearing, happily married Mormon.

They’ve got to get their hands on thousands of pages of Romney’s tax filings so that the media can — as Romney says — lie about them. It will be interesting to see if Obama can pick the lock of the famously guarded IRS. 

In January 2011, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) declared that Social Security is in fine shape. A few days past 18 months later, and with disturbing new information about the truly bleak future of Social Security, Reid has not publicly adjusted his statement, nor do I expect he plans to. This is not the only area where Reid has been complicit in an abdication of duty, however – on Tuesday National Journal  reported that the nation’s top Senator is going to kick the can down the road again when it comes to his duty to pass a budget.

Reid’s stated reason for not passing a budget is that the House Republicans want to spend $19 billion less than the Budget Control Act dictated could happen in Fiscal Year 2013. However, since Reid has not passed a budget through the Senate in nearly 1,200 days – including one year when Democrats had a nearly filibuster-proof margin of votes in the Senate and a complicit Pelosi-led House – this reason is suspect at best.

There at least three other reasons Reid’s statement should be taken with a grain of salt. First, disagreements between the chambers are normal. Typically, the Senate passes legislation that is different than House legislation. Then a conference committee is put together, and differences are hashed out. A compromise bill then comes back to both chambers for an up-or-down vote. This just happened with the transportation/student loan/flood insurance law, for example.

Second, Reid could easily pass legislation through the Senate and put political pressure on House Republicans to raise their spending cap. It only takes 51 votes in the Senate to pass a budget, after all, and we all know much of the media would use the Senate’s bill as an opportunity to hammer Republicans as intransigent. Clearly, Reid has decided inaction will lose Democrats fewer seats in the fall than pro-active action – in other words, doing his job would entail more political risk, so he is going to abdicate his responsibilities. (This strategy worked so well for Reid in 2010, didn’t it?)

Third, $19 billion just isn’t very much money in the grand scheme of things. It’s one-half of one-percent of the 2012 budget, for example. It’s less than 1.5% of this year’s expected deficit. Essentially, it’s a rounding error, a drop in the bucket, whatever you want to call it, as compared to our massive national debt – about one-eighth of one percent. And yet Reid is willing to force another embarrassing debate over whether we want this year’s deficit to be gigantic and unsustainable or merely gigantic and unsustainable.

Last year, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) said Congress should be in jail for not passing a budget within the time constraints of the law. While that is unlikely to take place, the fact is Senator Reid is purposely flouting public law, laws that he is supposed to uphold, especially since they specifically apply to his chamber. It is disappointing to see he is really going to go through with this irresponsible method of funding the federal government of the United States.

GOP Angry Over Reid Claim That Romney ‘Paid No Taxes for 10 Years’

• 6
  inShare

• inShare6

Republicans Blast Obama After Anemic Economic Report: Keep Bush Tax Cuts

• 1
  inShare

• inShare1