A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Mark Steyn: Fiscal Responsibility Is So “18th Century”

Columnist of the world, Mark Steyn, sees problems with the "fuzzy" math our president employs to promote his progressive economic agenda:

Douglas Elmendorf, director of the Congressional Budget Office, described current deficits as "unsustainable." So let's make them even more so. The president tells us, with a straight face, that his grossly irresponsible profligate wastrel of a predecessor took the federal budget on an eight-year joyride, so the only way his sober, fiscally prudent successor can get things under control is to grab the throttle and crank it up to what Mel Brooks in "Spaceballs" (which seems the appropriate comparison) called "Ludicrous Speed."

Steyn continues:

Obama's spending proposes to take the average Bush deficit for the years 2001-08, and double it, all the way to 2020. To get out of the Bush hole, we need to dig a hole twice as deep for one-and-a-half times as long. And that's according to the official projections of his Economics Czar, Ms. Rose Colored-Glasses. By 2015, the actual hole may be so deep that even if you toss every Obama speech down it on double-spaced paper you still won't be able to fill it up. In the spendthrift Bush days, federal spending as a proportion of GDP averaged 19.6 percent. Obama proposes to crank it up to 25 percent as a permanent feature of life.

You really must understand something: Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank deeply believe in top-down socialism.  Barack Obama isn't a bad guy; he's just flat-out wrong when it comes to economic policy.

Steyn later quotes from an Associated Press news story that does its best to defend that same counter-intuitive policy the president insists on employing:

"WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama sent Congress a $3.83 trillion budget on Monday that would pour more money into the fight against high unemployment, boost taxes on the wealthy and freeze spending for a wide swath of government programs."

What language is that written in? How can a $3.83 trillion budget "freeze spending"? And where's the president getting all this money to "pour" into his "fight" against high unemployment? Would it perchance be from the same small businesses that might be hiring new workers if the president didn't need so much money to "pour" away?

Bingo, Mark.  Bingo.

CNN reporter not a big hit at Tea Party

When you ignore people like the Tea Party protesters as long as CNN has, don't expect to be welcomed with open arms when you do finally show up.

Kathleen Sebelius teaches us how to cough (and laugh)

You can't make this stuff up...

From the Associated Press:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius demonstrates how to cough while making remarks before President Barack Obama's national broadcast address to students, at Thurgood Marshall Elementary School in Philadelphia, Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2009.

Afghanistan is important

Bret Stehpens of the Wall Street Journal reminds us all the stakes involved for the United States in Afghanistan:

Withdrawal from Afghanistan, and a Taliban takeover in Kandahar and perhaps Kabul, would plunge Afghanistan into another civil war infinitely bloodier than what we have now. Withdrawal would force Islamabad to abandon its war on terror and again come to terms with its own militants, as it did in the 1990s. Only this time, it wouldn't be clear who is patron and who is client. Withdrawal would give Pakistan's jihadists the freedom to shift fronts to India, with all the nightmare scenarios that entails. Withdrawal would invite the al Qaeda remnant in Iraq—already on an upswing—to redouble its efforts, and do so with the confidence that the U.S. has permanently soured on Middle Eastern interventions.

This is a partial list. The alternative is a winding and bloody struggle to defend and improve a hapless and often corrupt government in a godforsaken land of often (though by no means pervasively) ungrateful people. This is not the noblest fight, and no sane nation would wage it by choice. But we did not choose it and, if we keep our nerve, we can win it. Otherwise, the consequence will be ashes flying again in our own streets, something to remember on the eve of another 9/11 anniversary.

Read the full article here.

Obama’s litany of bad ideas are catching up with him

Mark Steyn filled in for Rush Limbaugh two different days this week, and for my money, it was the best six hours of radio since the last two Michael Jordan-led Bulls Championship games in 1998.

Now Mr. Steyn has followed that performance up with a fantastic column on the problem President Obama keeps running in to: himself.

The president’s strategy on January 20 was to hurl all the vast transformative spaghetti at the wall — stimulus, auto nationalization, cap’n’trade, health care — and make it stick through the sheer charisma of his personality. Unfortunately, the American people aren’t finding it quite so charismatic, and they’re beginning to spot the yawning gulf between the post-partisan hopeychangey rhetoric and the budget-busting prosperity-throttling future-beggaring big-government policies.

No wonder the poor chap’s running out of material. At the time of writing, one of his exercises for America’s schoolchildren is to suggest what you’d like him to do in his next speech. Here’s mine: Call in sick, sir. You’ll be doing your presidency a favor.

The president is not our ruler but our representative, a citizen-executive drawn from the people. It is unbecoming to a self-governing republic to require schoolchildren to (to cite another test question) select the three most important words in the president’s speech.

Here's a perfect example of the spectacular work Steyn does when filling in for El Rushbo:

Van Jones: What is this dude talking about?

Don't worry...he's only one of the privileged few who are allowed access to our president.

Let's see what Mr. Charles Krauthammer thinks of Van Jones, the "Green Czar".

Catherine Bragg at Marin County, CA town hall: the lady speaks for herself

Where do I find a single woman like this?

Despite her perhaps over-zealous delivery, this woman just made one of the strongest cases for the kind of common sense, free market solutions most Americans inherently recognize as being...well...American.

Honduran Update

In July I wrote a piece on the plight of people in Honduras who have had the world community almost entirely turn their backs on them for doing little more than ousting their power-hungry president who tried to circumvent the law and set himself as ruler for life.

Today Sec of State Hillary Clinton made the official announcement that the United States is cutting aid to a country we should be doing literally everything in our power to support.  This is a sad day for freedom-lovers everywhere.  Make no mistake about it: the administration is dead-wrong on this one.

Texas men survive 8 days at sea

Three friends from Texas went fishing August 22nd in the Gulf of Mexico.  Their boat cap-sized, and for 8 days the men survived on crackers, beer, and water from the tank on their boat reserved for cleaning fish slime.  They were surrounded by sharks (my personal biggest fear in life) and 130 miles from land.

"Phillips said the roughest time was during the heat of the day, when they would try to endure the sun's rays and keep up their spirits. The men also started seeing things.

"About the fourth or fifth day we started hallucinating about people dropping off food and water," Phillips said. "And we were talking to them, but they weren't there," Phillips said.

One thing the men saw that wasn't a hallucination was sharks.

"We had a bunch of black-tipped sharks schooling up under the boat," Phillips said. "One of them jumped across the back of the boat."

My hats off to you, gents.  Not all news is bad news these days.

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