Jerry Brown slurs Whitman -- earns NOW's endorsement

The timing couldn't be more profound: just one day after California gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown is caught on tape as a campaign aide calls Meg Whitman a "whore", the National Organization for Women announces -- you guessed it -- that it is supporting Jerry Brown for Governor. Proving that liberal orthodoxy trumps gender every time, NOW not only is endorsing a man over a woman in California, but it is apparently not concerned with Brown's acceptance of sexist, demeaning language being used against his opponent. In NOW's view, Whitman -- who is pro-life -- apparently doesn't warrant the kind of protection from mysogynist attacks that the group's charter is supposed to provide all women. But as it has proven time and time again, female conservatives are the wrong kind of women. Not that NOW can't be enraged by a politician's words -- just not those of Democrat politicians. Posted prominently on the NOW website, the group is vehemently denouncing Senator Jim DeMint's "dangerous comments" on gays and sexually active single women "being unfit to teach". According to NOW, DeMint's comments to a "conservative church group" make him a "sexist bigot" who is "ignorant, homophobic" and unfit to serve in the U.S. Congress. DeMint actually made these comments six years ago, and was only recently reflecting on the impact they had in the media in a speech he gave last week to the Greater Freedom Rally in Spartanburg, South Carolina. And he actually said that "gays and unmarried pregnant women" should not be public school teachers -- a statement that NOW extrapolated to mean "sexually active single women" -- as if every sexually active single woman gets pregnant. Leaving aside the wisdom of DeMint's views on these issues, is putting forward a value statement on public education really worse than calling a woman a "whore"?

For NOW -- which has never met a conservative woman it can support, a man who uses a sexist slur is still better than a self-made woman who embodies the very feminist values of hard work and female mobility that the group is supposed to stand for.

Shameful.

Hiroshima, absent history

August 6^th marked the 65^th anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.  For the first time since the end of World War II, an American representative attended the official commemoration ceremony of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.  President Obama sent U.S. Ambassador John Roos to “express respect for all the victims of World War II” – a benign sounding olive branch that was designed to convey empathy to the Japanese.  This is consistent with Obama’s desire to “reset” American diplomacy by showing the world that America is not the global bully of the past. Unfortunately, compassion in the absence of context can be meaningful -- in unintended ways.   Sending the U.S. Ambassador to the Hiroshima ceremony as an act of “respect” provides fuel to the revisionist case that the U.S. was wrong to drop the atomic bomb on Japan on August 6, 1945, and plays into the hands of those who now increasingly believe that America was the aggressor in the Pacific War.  Even actor Tom Hanks – the Executive Producer of the HBO mini-series “The Pacific”, referred in a recent interview to the war against Japan as one of “racism and terror” on both sides, and that the U.S. wanted to annihilate the Japanese simply because “they were different”.

Hanks comments essentially reflect what is fast becoming a lost history among newer generations – particularly as taught by left-wing academics and reported by the left-leaning media.   The reality is that the Japanese war machine was ferocious, fanatical and fought to the death in every major naval and land engagement of the Pacific war.  At the battle for Okinawa in 1945 – the last major land battle of the war when the Japanese empire knew that defeat was inevitable – some 12,000 American soldiers and marines were killed in brutal cave-to-cave fighting that left over 100,000 Japanese soldiers dead.  Only 7,000 soldiers surrendered to U.S. forces.   At sea in Iron Bottom Sound, Okinawa saw the deaths of almost 5,000 navy personnel and the sinking of more than 30 American ships – many at the hands of over 1,500 Japanese suicide “Kamikaze” attacks.  Even more disturbing, the Japanese military actively encouraged the Okinawa civilian population to commit mass suicide rather than be captured by U.S. forces.  Over 100,000 Okinawan civilians are believed to have died during the two month battle.

It was this experience that colored the thinking of President Truman and the American military as they approached the events of August 1945.  The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki avoided tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of casualties that were virtually certain in an invasion of the Japanese home islands.

The presence of Ambassador Roos at Hiroshima neglects a very important context which the left tends to routinely ignore: Japan was an expansionist imperial power that brutally invaded China and South Asia and attacked the U.S. at Pearl Harbor without provocation.  By offering respect for “all victims”, Roos gives rise to a moral equivalency of responsibility which only further removes history from the discussion, and will in time lead to more strident requests for a formal U.S. apology – something this administration may be quite predisposed to do.

This anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing was a missed opportunity for one of Barack Obama’s “teachable moments”; but rather than being something for America to apologize for, it should provide the basis for an honest discussion of Japan’s actions during the Second World War.  Doing so would put the U.S. decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan in its proper light: as a wise and prudent choice that spared innocent lives on both sides.

Pass the hemlock, please

Though the Tea Party movement is not a cohesive entity, its component parts this year have been grappling with a central existential question: To be, or not be, a third party?  Thus far, Tea Party leadership from across the country has made a concerted effort to keep its powerful, grass roots movement within the Republican Party.  As one of Colorado’s Tea Party leaders, Lesley Hollywood, told me recently, “We had to work at convincing people that the right approach was to work within the Republican Party – to restore its conservative principles and to keep it honest.”  The thinking is that third party candidates are relegated to the role of spoiler, and even in the rare occasion when they are well financed, have little chance of actually winning.  Principle is important, but power is essential to changing the way government works.   The Tea Party has learned to work the system, and the system has begun to work for them. Or so they thought.  Late on Monday, former GOP Congressman Tom Tancredo announced that he was entering the race for Colorado Governor as the candidate of the tiny American Constitution Party.    Even for those who know this mercurial politician well, Tancredo’s move represented a dramatic about face.  In December of 2009, Tancredo sent an open letter to Colorado’s Tea Party patriots, imploring them to get behind the Republican Party and not make the “suicidal” mistake of backing a third-party candidate from a small fringe party:

Some patriots are tempted to launch a third political party or back one of the existing small parties that never attract more than one or two percent of the vote in state races. I strongly believe that such a course is suicidal and would only result in splitting the conservative vote and guaranteeing the re-election of liberals and socialists.

I believe the Republican Party is the natural home of conservatives and that the road back to constitutional government lies in taking control of the Republican Party from top to bottom, from county committee to the statehouse and all the way to Washington, D.C.

According to the Denver Post, the ACP has 2,000 voters registered with the Colorado Secretary of State, and is the kind of fringe party that Tancredo rightly says never attracts more than a point or two of the vote.  But with a high-profile candidate in Tancredo, who has a dedicated core of state-wide support and a proven capacity to raise money, there is a very real fear that the American Conservative Party will split the Republican vote sufficiently to ensure that Democrat John Hickenlooper is elected in November.  As Colorado GOP Chair Dick Wadhams told the Wall Street Journal, “He wants to destroy Republican chances”.

Not that Republicans haven’t done a good job themselves of messing up the Governor’s race – the Republican front runner, Scott McInnis, has been embroiled in a high-profile plagiarism scandal, and  Tancredo’s stated rationale for joining the race is McInnis can no longer win.   But in the end, this move by Tancredo likely has less to do with politics and more to do with personality.  “Tancredo has an unquenchable thirst for national media attention, at any cost”, Wadhams told the Wall Street Journal.  Tancredo has gained a national following for his strident position on illegal immigration.  When Tancredo ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, he ran an ad that was reminiscent of the “daisy girl” spot that LBJ ran against Barry Goldwater in 1964 – depicting a bomb being planted by illegal immigrants exploding in a mall and the slogan “Tancredo – before it’s too late”.

This kind of sensationalism from a Tancredo run is likely to suck the air out of the Colorado campaign season – at all levels.  In fact, conservatives worry that beyond splitting the conservative vote in the Governor’s race, Tancredo’s presence on the ballot will affect other races as well.  This includes the race in the critical 4^th CD, where Republican Cory Gardner is running a hotly contested race against Democrat Incumbent Betsy Markey.  If Tancredo’s presence at the top of the ticket helps the ACP”s 4^th CD candidate Doug Aden siphons away votes from Gardner, it could mean the difference in the race.

All of which is salt in the wound to Colorado Tea Party activists – especially in Northern Colorado, where Cory Gardner is from.  In an open letter to Tancredo the day before he made his decision to enter the race, Lu Busse, Chairwoman of the Colorado 9-12 Project Coalition wrote:

We clearly demonstrated at the precinct caucuses and state assembly (that the)Tea Party and other pro-liberty grassroots individuals have worked tirelessly for more than a year championing our principles, becoming engaged and informed, learning the political process, vetting candidates at all levels, and also reshaping the Colorado Republican Party as you advised.

For Tancredo, it’s do as I say, not as I do.  “He’s making a mockery of himself and the entire election process”, Lesley Hollywood told the Wall Street Journal.  “It seems like an enormous power grab”.

Or publicity grab, anyway.

RNC's Steele: right or wrong on Afghanistan?

RNC Chair Michael Steele’s recent comments on Afghanistan – which he derisively called “Obama’s war” while questioning the potential for victory – found pockets of support across the political spectrum.  On the left, those who oppose the war on ideological grounds agreed with Steele’s conclusions (if not his logic) that this is not a war we should be fighting.  On the more libertarian right, many who believe that America’s foreign policy is “extraconstitutional” -- overly aggressive, idealistic and beyond what the Founder’s intended -- view the Afghan campaign as a case study in federal government overreach.   If it is true that politics make strange bedfellows, Steel’s unscripted comments found a nexus of agreement from elements on the left and the right: This is a war poorly conceived, without legitimacy, and with little chance of success. I disagree with this.  While I recognize fully the difficulty of the mission, and understand that Afghanistan has been the “graveyard of empires” for a millennium or more, I also believe that Barack Obama was correct in 2008 when he called Afghanistan a war “of necessity”.  Afghanistan was the birthplace of the 9/11 attacks; the Taliban regime provided sanctuary and material support to Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and its global network of Jihadists. The initial invasion of Afghanistan in 2001-2002 was a critical blow to this network, and provided the United States with both a measure of revenge and security after 9/11.  It also replaced the Taliban, a brutal fundamentalist Islamic regime that demanded strict fealty to Islamic law with a secular, Western-facing government.  To be sure, the government of Hamid Karzai is no model of Jeffersonian democracy.  But let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good in this case – and Karzai is quite good when compared to the rule of his predecessor, the Taliban’s Mullah Omar.

More importantly, I reject the position taken by many libertarian-oriented conservatives that the war in Afghanistan is an example of government overreach and an unconstitutional exercise of executive power.  To be sure, there are ample grounds for a substantive debate on presidential war powers and the Constitution – a debate that has heated up significantly since 9/11.   Those who take a “strict constructionist” view see Congress’ power to declare war in Article I, Section 8 as a clear limit on the use of force: without a formal declaration of war against a defined enemy, the commitment of the U.S. military to combat is essentially proscribed.  However, the case for this is not as clear as it may seem.  During the debate on this topic at the Constitutional Convention, the Founders clearly intended for the executive as Commander in Chief to have the power to “repel sudden attacks” and, in the process of providing for the “common defense”, would be able to act swiftly and decisively in the case of a national emergency.  The Founders instinctively understood that while a check on the president’s ability to unilaterally wage war was desirable, it should not prohibit decisive action when the nation’s security was under threat.

It is my belief that not only does the executive have the power to wage war in Afghanistan without a formal declaration of war, he has the constitutional responsibility to do so.  The most important aspect of the president’s job description as found in Article II of the Constitution is in Section 2:  his role as the Commander in Chief of the armed forces.  As such, he is principally responsible for ensuring the nation’s security, and enjoys wide latitude in utilizing the military in the prosecution of U.S. foreign policy.  This has been particularly true in the latter half of the 20^th century, where the U.S. has waged full-scale war in Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf without a formal declaration of war.  Today, the rise of transnational terror networks and so-called “asymmetrical” warfare which targets civilians without warning has made traditional forms of extended debate on foreign policy increasingly impractical.  Terrorism and global Jihad has made traditional declarations of war truly a relic of an earlier age.

Because of this new reality, the nature of Congressional consent to military action has changed. While presidents are waging war without formal declarations, they do so also with the consent (and political cover) of Congressional approval.  Recall that on September 14, 2001 – just days after the attacks on 9/11 – the Congress passed S.J. Res. 23, which authorized the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001”.   Later, in 2002, the Congress passed the Iraq War Resolution, which gave Congressional approval for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.  While short of formal declarations of war, both of these resolutions provide ample authority for the president to wage war in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Contrary to the opinion of Michael Steele, this is not Obama’s war.  It is America’s war.  And the stakes could not be higher.  The elimination of a sanctuary for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan is a central national security issue for our future.  One of the few correct decisions that President Obama has made since taking office is recommitting the nation to the war in Afghanistan.  His recent appointment of General David Petraeus to take command is a good step in the right direction.  Now he must renounce any time tables for withdrawal and allow the U.S. military to destroy Al Qaeda and the Taliban once and for all.

The Constitution requires the federal government to provide for the common defense of the nation and its interests – principally the protection of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.  It is hard to imagine pursuing much happiness in the aftermath of a nuclear or biological attack in Times Square carried out by radical Islamists from a base in Afghanistan.

The VAT: coming to America

I know I've been on an ObamaCare kick for the past few months, and I wouldn't blame you if you are tired of it by now.  I wish I could abandon it for some other topic -- any other topic, in fact.  But, alas, I cannot.  Why? Because I see this new law as the greatest single threat to our continued prosperity in my lifetime.

Those on the left think that conservatives are exaggerating the potential impact of this law.  Paul Krugman, no doubt the dumbest Nobel Prize winner in history, was on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday and talked of the the health care reform law as "a minor change", and is certain that it will both be cost and care effective in improving the nation's medical system.  Indeed, this is the talking point for the Democrats, who want to focus on all the "good" things in the law and act as if the economic sleight-of-hand implicit in the law's assumptions are trivial.  Of course, it's all trivial when you are saving the lives of women, children and the infirm (well, most children, anyhow -- we won't mention the baby killing public abortion funding in the law -- I know the left doesn't like to talk about that part).

And herein lies the problem: the left is touting the benefits, while hiding the costs.  And the costs are a killer -- a path to insolvency for this country.  Why?  Because the numbers just don't add up.  As Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute points out in today's Wall Street Journal, Obama's plan is to tax "the rich" to pay for all this entitlement spending:

President Barack Obama's new health-care legislation aims to raise $210 billion over 10 years to pay for the extensive new entitlements. How? By slapping a 3.8% "Medicare tax" on interest and rental income, dividends and capital gains of couples earning more than $250,000, or singles with more than $200,000.

The president also hopes to raise $364 billion over 10 years from the same taxpayers by raising the top two tax rates to 36%-39.6% from 33%-35%, plus another $105 billion by raising the tax on dividends and capital gains to 20% from 15%, and another $500 billion by capping and phasing out exemptions and deductions.

Add it up and the government is counting on squeezing an extra $1.2 trillion over 10 years from a tiny sliver of taxpayers who already pay more than half of all individual taxes.

It won't work. It never works.

How do we know it won't work?  Because we've tried it before -- in California, in fact.  A burgeoning entitlement and public employee pension system paid for by a tiny percentage of tax payers.  I've written about it before here and here.  California has relied on its top earners to the point where too much of the budget relies on too few tax payers.  And now it has squeezed them to the point that there is no more blood in the rock.  There just isn't any more marginal revenue to gain from raising taxes further, and the "brain drain" to other states has only made the situation worse.

We are now about to embark on a similar experience nationally -- and the numbers won't work any differently there than they have in California.  As Reynolds makes clear, higher marginal tax rates will ultimately lead to LESS revenue, not more.  It's the same lesson that Regan taught us -- that the left refuses to learn: incentives matter:

In short, the belief that higher tax rates on the rich could eventually raise significant sums over the next decade is a dangerous delusion, because it means the already horrific estimates of long-term deficits are seriously understated. The cost of new health-insurance subsidies and Medicaid enrollees are projected to grow by at least 7% a year, which means the cost doubles every decade—to $432 billion a year by 2029, $864 billion by 2039, and more than $1.72 trillion by 2049.

If anyone thinks taxing the rich will cover any significant portion of such expenses, think again.

The federal government has embarked on an unprecedented spending spree, granting new entitlements in the guise of refundable tax credits while drawing false comfort from phantom revenue projections that will never materialize.

At the end of this train comes Nancy Pelosi's big dream: the Value Added Tax (VAT).  The VAT is a tax on goods at every stage of production -- hence the "value added" after each stage (production, assembly, packaging, distribution, etc.)  It's a stealth tax because they don't add it at the cash register -- it's already baked in.  And it's high -- in the UK, for example, that VAT is 17.5%.  And it is in addition to the income, property, capital gains and local sales taxes you pay.

Remember this fact: every nation with a nationalized health care system has at VAT.  It is the only way that the high costs of national health care can be paid for.  Nancy Pelosi is on record as favoring a VAT; she told Charlie Rose in October, 2009:

"Somewhere along the way, a value-added tax plays into this," she said. "Of course, we want to take down the health-care cost, that's one part of it. But in the scheme of things, I think it's fair to look at a value-added tax as well."

The Wall Street Journal has outlined the desires of Pelosi and other Democrats for a VAT on numerous occasions as well:

Mrs. Pelosi is the second prominent Democrat to call for a VAT in recent weeks. John Podesta, an adviser to President Obama and president of the very liberal Center for American Progress, called in September for a "small and more progressive" VAT. Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Podesta argue a new tax is necessary to address the nation's exploding financial liabilities, as if those liabilities exploded on their own. Of course, VATs always start "small" and get bigger. The bills for the Democratic spending blowout are coming due even sooner than advertised, and the middle class will pay, whatever Mr. Obama's campaign promises. 

So, here's the dirty little secret of ObamaCare: the left knows the numbers are wrong and that the program will lead to massive deficits.  They know it will happen and it is by design: the only way to fully re-make America in Europe's vision is to have a VAT that will support the welfare state.

It is a key part of the leftist game plan.

You heard it here first:  The VAT is coming to America, and sooner than you think.