Scott Spiegel

You’re on your own, Trump.  Now get lost and stop embarrassing the right.

According to a recent survey by the Associated Press, none of the major potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates or Congressional leaders put any stock in the antiquated, Democrat-devised conspiracy theory known as birtherism, besides Donald Trump.

As quoted in the article, “John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor… say they are satisfied that Obama was born in Hawaii…  Mitt Romney and former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania have been the most direct in rejecting the birthers’ claims…  Haley Barbour accepts the president’s word…  Tim Pawlenty told an Iowa audience, ‘I’m not one to question the authenticity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate…’  Michele Bachmann… said: ‘I take the president at his word…’  Sarah Palin… [said], ‘I think that he was born in Hawaii…’  Mike Huckabee has dismissed claims that Obama is foreign-born…”

Other than that, GOP luminaries are unanimous: Obama was born in Kenya!

In addition, we’ve had the following adamant denunciations of the Obama-is-foreign-born theory from prominent right-wingers:

Senator Lindsey Graham: “Birthers are ‘crazy.’”

Glenn Beck: “The birther theory is ‘the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.’”

Senator Ron Paul: “From my viewpoint, obviously [there's nothing to it], because I never bring it up.”

Bill O’Reilly: “I don’t think that’s the case [that Obama was born abroad].”

Ann Coulter: “It’s just a few cranks out there.”

Mark Levin: “It’s a non-issue.”

As reported ad nauseam, different states issue different forms of birth confirmation.  Obama has supplied the media with the one Hawaii supplies to the public.  The Hawaii Department of Health does not issue proof of birth in any form other than the one they’ve already supplied.  The original long-form birth certificate is a confidential document that may be viewed in person only by Obama or Department of Health officials, the latter of whom have volunteered that they have seen the document and that it confirms Obama’s birth in Hawaii.

Several conservative publications investigated the birth certificate issue and found nothing to the claims.  Most everyday conservatives are sick to death of the birther meme and want to move on.

Trump is about several years late on the matter, but he’s so far behind he thinks he’s first.

In fact, it’s leftist broadcasters and bloggers who keep bringing the issue up, because it lets a few nuts make the right look crazy and keeps liberals from having to defend Obama’s record.

Democrats felt a thrill up their legs when Trump inexplicably resurrected the issue several weeks ago.  As AP noted, “Democrats are watching.  They hope the debate will fire up their liberal base and perhaps tie the eventual GOP nominee to fringe beliefs that swing voters will reject.”

The left, who would love to keep birther talk alive right on up through November 6, 2012, proudly cite polls showing that a plurality of self-identified Republican voters are open to the possibility that Obama was born abroad.

It’s true: The right is more willing than the left to admit to a pollster that they have faint suspicions about Obama’s origins (but note: AP reports that half of all independents and 20% of all Democrats also think he was foreign-born or are not sure).  This may have something to do with the fact that Obama doesn’t seem to like America very much, doesn’t seem to have any friends who like America very much, doesn’t seem to have much affinity for America’s traditions, and spends a good deal of his time traveling the world giving speeches in which he denigrates America as nothing special.

But birtherism is not something that keeps Republican voters awake at night.  There are about 8,000 things Obama has been doing to this country that have the right more concerned than where he was born.

Perhaps if someone slipped truth serum to, say, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, he would be revealed to have slightly more skepticism about Obama’s birth setting than Sheila Jackson Lee.  But one reason Ryan isn’t pursuing the birther chimera—in addition to the fact that he’s sane and levelheaded—is that he’s been too busy coming up with a brave, detailed, clearheaded budget resolution (which Trump opposes) to address entitlement reform and keep the country from going over a cliff.

Some on the right insist Trump would be a great candidate because he “tells it like it is” and isn’t afraid to stand up to his opponents.  But I notice New Jersey Governor Chris Christie also “tells it like it is” and isn’t afraid to stand up to his opponents, only in his case he tells it like it is about fixing his state’s budget crisis, and isn’t afraid to stand up to opponents like teachers’ unions that have a chokehold on the state’s Democratic Party.  Somehow the birther issue hasn’t made it onto the list of the top tasks the busy governor is dealing with.

If Trump took 1/10 of the time he wastes blathering about researching Obama’s birth certificate and spent it proposing useful ideas to help the economy recover, reasonable people might consider him a serious candidate.

And no, words of wisdom from cheeseball bestsellers like “How to Get Rich” and “Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life” don’t constitute grounds for an earnest budget proposal.

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• Trump Doubles Down on Birther Claim (outsidethebeltway.com)
• Obama ‘Absolutely’ Born in Hawaii: CNN (newser.com)
• AC360 Investigation: Obama ‘birther’ claims have no merit (ac360.blogs.cnn.com)
• Trump Tells A Baffled Anderson Cooper He Has Evidence Obama’s Birth Certificate Is ‘Missing’ (mediaite.com)
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In honor of Tax Day 2011 and Democrats’ impeccably timed renewed push to raise taxes on high income earners, behold the following lessons we’ve learned about economics from liberals in recent times:

•    The most innovative and wealth-generating company in the history of the world, Apple Inc., destroys jobs.  So sayeth Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr., an admitted iPad owner, who blamed Steve Jobs’ latest invention for taking away employment from textbook manufacturers and paper mills.  In other news, a Democratic Representative from West Virginia excoriated the “automobile” for killing off the horse-and-buggy industry.

•    Cutting $352 million from a proposed $3.7 trillion budget is “the functional equivalent of bombing innocent civilians.”  This according to D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, who was fuming over the possibility of a government shutdown two weeks ago.  Given liberals’ complaints about the size of the military industrial complex and the expense of war, this is quite a bargain.  How can we harness this technology of “Miniscule Republican Budget Cuts” to defeat Moammar Kaddafi’s forces in Libya?

•    Not constraining teachers’ unions’ ability to award themselves extravagant pensions and health care packages no one in the private sector has, thereby continuing to bankrupt states by keeping entitlement spending astronomically high, is good for union members.  In contrast, making slight cuts to bloated benefits programs in order to prevent massive layoffs hurts the little guy.  This bit of wisdom comes courtesy of the delusional, demonic mobs who swarmed outside the Wisconsin State Capitol trying to undermine Governor Scott Walker’s implementation of his nefarious campaign promise to balance the state budget.

•    Raising tax rates on job creators and wealth investors leads them to selflessly continue to create jobs and invest wealth at the same rate as before.  This directly contradicts liberals’ caricature of the rich as selfish bastards who hoard profits and refuse to help the economy recover, but try pointing that out to a liberal.  This also contradicts the evidence that every time marginal tax rates have been lowered—under Reagan, Clinton, Bush—tax revenues have increased, and every time they’ve been raised, tax revenues have decreased.

•    Spreading the wealth around is preferable to increasing the wealth for everybody, if the latter means that the gap between high- and low-income earners widens.  See, for example, Senator Barack Obama’s response to Charlie Gibson during a primary debate with Hillary Clinton, in which he responded to irrefutable evidence that cutting capital gains taxes boosts federal revenue with the argument that companies should nonetheless be forced to pay more “for purposes of fairness.”

•    The U.S. doesn’t have a spending problem—it has a revenue problem.  Hat tip to Michael Moore, who recently bellowed that “America is not broke…  The country is awash in wealth and cash…  It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the über-rich.”  Double hat tip to conservative site Iowa Hawk, which deftly and devastatingly refuted Moore’s ludicrous claim.

•    Paying taxes is the highest form of patriotism.  See Clinton-era hack Paul Begala’s editorial explaining why April 15 should be considered “Patriot’s Day.”  Note that the first credential liberals always cite as evidence of their patriotism is not “I vote” or “I support the military” but: “I pay taxes!”  For liberals, there is no greater moral obligation than federally funding cowboy poetry festivals.

•    The amount of federal income taxes Americans pay is “about right.”  This according to a recent Gallup survey in which 43% of Americans approved of current tax rates and 50% thought they were too high—i.e., 43% were left-leaning and 50% were right-leaning.  Much of that 43% no doubt overlapped with the 47% of Americans who pay no federal income tax.

•    The work required to earn a high GPA is completely, utterly different from the work required to earn a high salary.  One… doesn’t involve money, and the other does, or something.  In the above video, the next generation of potential industry titans informs us that forcibly redistributing grade points among university students by taking from those with “excessive GPAs” and giving to the disadvantaged who have to work harder and hold down extra jobs is a terrible idea, but forcibly redistributing dollars among citizens and giving to the disadvantaged who have to work harder and hold down extra jobs is… a wonderful idea!

•    When Democrats cut spending and refuse to raise taxes, as New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has—i.e., when they abandon their party’s core philosophy and govern like conservatives—they enjoy skyrocketing popularity ratings and set their constituents on a path to financial solvency.

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The deal Congressional Republicans made with Democrats last week to cut the federal budget and avoid a government shutdown is the scam of the decade.

Mainstream media, conservative commentators, and Republican politicians call it a grand victory for the GOP, showing as it does Speaker of the House John Boehner’s suave negotiating skills, the GOP’s ability to nudge Democrats from their opening position, and Republicans’ luck in getting $6 billion more in cuts than Boehner had asked for.

FOX News’ Carl Cameron crowed, “Who Won the Shutdown Showdown?  It Wasn’t Even Close…  Democrats claimed they met Republicans halfway after the $10 billion in cuts that already passed this year were approved.  They settled late Friday night at three and a half times more.  Boehner came in $8.5 billion higher than the halfway point between his high offer of $61 billion in cuts and the Democrats opening bid of zero cuts.”

All of these numbers are meaningless, constituting as they do microscopic slivers of the federal deficit.

To put the cuts in perspective, CNS News reported that the federal debt jumped $54 billion in the eight days before Congress approved the $38.5 billion in cuts.  The cuts leave the 2011 budget $773 billion greater than the 2008 budget, higher by about the same amount as the Democrats’ 2009 stimulus bill.

Congress is negotiating over grains of sand while a dune is about to collapse on us.

Also riding the self-congratulatory bandwagon was the CATO Institute’s Chris Edwards, who declared, “It is a victory for freshman conservative Republicans.  The real question is whether this is the beginning of a sustained movement, or a one-shot deal?  I’m an optimist, so I think it is the first of many spending-cut actions…”  I’ve seen wily Democrats and spineless Republicans in action, and I’m a pessimist.

Edwards: “Also, if the baseline is down $38 billion this year and that is sustained or built upon, it’s down $380 billion or more over 10 years.”  The operative word here is ‘and.’

The other operative word is ‘if.’  Not only do the alleged $38.5 billion in cuts constitute just 1% of Obama’s proposed budget, they consist of: things that had no chance of being funded, unused funds from prior years, funds that hadn’t been specified for projects, non-renewals of things meant to be one-off expenses, one-time cuts that will be reversed next year, and salaries for czars who have already resigned.

Half the cuts involve, as The Associated Press put it, “simply mopping up pools of unused money spread across the budget” and using them “to shore up day-to-day agency budgets and other programs like health research.”  In other words, half the cuts don’t involve actual cuts.

But the Heritage Foundation’s Ron Utt gushed, “Without examining the numbers in any detail I consider it an important win for our side, and a momentum boost for the bigger issue to come: the FY 2012 budget battle.”  Without examining Lindsay Lohan’s parole record in any detail, I declare her fully rehabilitated and fit for polite society.

There’s also the nature of the cuts to consider.  Here are a few things Republicans cut: $2 billion from Defense, $1 billion from Homeland Security, $600 million from the Army Corps of Engineers, and $5 billion from a crime victim compensation fund.

Here are a few things Republicans didn’t cut: ObamaCare, the Agriculture Department, NPR, PBS.  Republicans also left out resolutions blocking the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing global warming restrictions and preventing implementation of new Wall Street regulations.

Republicans’ defense—they had to compromise on the 2011 budget so Democrats would work with them on the debt ceiling and the 2012 budget—is as fallacious as they come.  If Republicans can’t stand up to Democrats on pennies, what chance is there they’ll stand up on dollars?

Why should we believe Boehner will side with us tomorrow?  Boehner concluded a recent op-ed in USA Today saying, “[W]e are committed to using our limited power to maximum effect in the effort to end the uncertainty facing job creators and put our economy back on a path to job creation and prosperity.”  That’s not a strategy for fighting Marxist Democrats, it’s a campaign slogan.

Even Paul Ryan, bless his Path to Prosperity proposal to cut $5.8 trillion from spending over the next decade, fell for the trap.

If Republicans do anything to prevent the $14 trillion debt ceiling from being raised and make meaningful cuts to entitlement spending, it will be in spite of the first step they gutlessly refused to take on the 2011 budget.



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• Did We Say $38 Billion in Cuts? How Does $14 Billion Sound? (reason.com)
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Image by tj.blackwell via Flickr

On Saturday President Obama magnanimously announced that he was willing to support cutting $33 billion from 2010 federal spending levels for 2011—which, for the mathematically challenged, is about 1% of infinity.

Congressional Democrats screamed that these cuts were way too large.  Republicans countered that the cuts didn’t go far enough and should be extended to $61 billion, which amounts to about 2% of infinity.

With current spending set to run out this week, the federal government faces a shutdown on Friday night unless Congress can agree on which of these piddly sums to cut from the budget.

Tea party supporters have been rightly insulted by these farcical negotiating positions, arguing that hundreds of billions could be saved just by, for example, eliminating redundant programs.

As Rasmussen reports, a majority of Americans haven’t been snookered into thinking these microscopic doses of fiscal austerity will do a thing to address our long-term budget crisis.

Meanwhile, the only Congressman clear-eyed enough to appreciate the extent of the crisis, knowledgeable enough to propose a plan to resolve it, and brave enough to stand up for his proposal in the face of Republican wishy-washiness—namely, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan—and also not crazily isolationist on foreign policy (Ron and Rand Paul) has offered a blueprint called “A Path to Prosperity,” modeled after his 2008 “Roadmap for America’s Future.”

Ryan’s plan proposes phasing out Medicare by replacing it with vouchers and turning it over to the states, making major changes to Medicaid, and taking similar action with Social Security after these two behemoths have been wrestled to the ground.

The central irony of Ryan’s stance is that, as he claims, his is the only proposal that will help “save” these programs, whereas current entitlement obligations will, if continued at their present levels, lead to eventual insolvency.

While Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security are unsustainable, unconstitutional Ponzi schemes, and while our country somehow managed to survive 189 and 159 years respectively without them, I suppose we need to start somewhere.  I guess a Budget Chairman who wants to drastically reform these albatrosses in order to save them is as good a start as we’re going to get nowadays from a political standpoint.

Ryan’s plan proposes cutting $5 trillion from the national debt over the next decade, and eventually eliminating the national debt, all without raising taxes.

On Tuesday, Obama rejected a third stopgap offer from House Majority Leader John Boehner to keep the government open another week while budget negotiations continue.

Obama’s right—we shouldn’t settle for on-the-fly, seat-of-our-pants, week-by-week spending plans.  Republicans should hold their ground and not be afraid to shut the government down on Friday.

Some who claim to favor entitlement reform have counseled House Republicans to compromise with Democrats on this week’s negotiations, so that Democrats will work with them later on more substantial cuts like Ryan’s.  The Chicago Tribune counsels, “Better to declare victory at $33 billion, or whatever more Republicans can wrest from Democrats, and move on to the bigger picture.  Because sanity in federal spending isn’t going to be restored by dealing in billions.  It’s going to be restored by dealing in trillions…  A deal today on discretionary spending could lay the foundation for bipartisan agreement on the far more impactful issue of entitlements.”

So giving in to Democrats will create goodwill and set the stage for larger-scale cuts, whereas shutting down the government will cause Democrats to dig in further and resist compromise later on.

One question: Since when did Democrats respond to Republican compromise with magnanimous, reciprocal behavior?

Sensing that they’re about to win on the shutdown, dyed-in-the-wool leftists like E. J. Dionne are already crying, “The Ryan budget’s central purpose will not be deficit reduction but the gradual dismantling of key parts of government…  Americans are about to learn… how radical the new conservatives in Washington are, and the extent to which some politicians would transfer even more resources from the have-nots and have-a-littles to the have-a-lots.”  Ezra Klein whines that Ryan’s plan will mean “leaving the old and the poor without health care.”  These are the people who are going to be placated by giving in on minute cuts now into accepting huge cuts several months from now?

Republicans’ negotiation strategy, from Bush I to Bush II to Boehner, has always been: The other side asks for an inch; Republicans give a mile.  Democrats’ strategy is: The other side asks for an inch; Democrats take a mile.  See how fair and evenhanded things are!

To take just one recent example, Congressional Republicans begged Democrats to consider including medical malpractice tort reform, legalizing health insurance sales across state lines, and offering greater tax deductions for health care costs in their ObamaCare bill.  Democrats responded by ignoring all these ideas and muscling through their bill inappropriately using the budget reconciliation procedure after the enraged residents of Massachusetts denied them their 60th Senate vote.

Battling Democrats legislatively is like fighting terrorists militarily—you don’t show them how weak and spineless you are; you show them how ruthless and merciless you can be.  They don’t respond to anything else.



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