Newt Gingrich’s surge to the top of the Republican presidential field has some conservatives imagining the former house speaker as the anti-Romney. Gingrich is encouraging such a view with his claim that he is “certainly more conservative” than the former Massachusetts governor.
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Leaders of the Service Employees International Union last week officially endorsed President Barack Obama for re-election in 2012. Endorsing a presidential candidate 11 months before the general election may seem a bit premature, but it’s not even the record for the earliest endorsements so far in this cycle.
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To no one’s surprise, members of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, aka the supercommittee, announced Monday that they had failed to agree on a $1.2 trillion debt reduction plan. As a result, no additional spending cuts or tax hikes will go into effect this year. True, there are $1.2 trillion in mandated spending sequestrations that will begin to take effect in 2012, but these are almost guaranteed to be repealed by a future Congress.
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It has not been a good week for those whose livelihoods depend on either having access to the power brokers and decision-makers of the Washington federal establishment, or being one of them. Like the great and mighty Wizard of Oz, who was exposed as all too human when Dorothy’s little dog Toto pulled back the curtain, the public’s business in Washington, D.C., was shown to be conducted for private gain.
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People can debate all day whether government should be in the business of picking winners and losers in the marketplace by selectively awarding loan guarantees. What’s beyond dispute is that any official decision that results in the loss of half-a-billion tax dollars should elicit an apology from somebody in government.
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Has somebody dumped gallons of hallucinogens into the drinking water on Capitol Hill? How else can we explain why Congress is slashing the operational budget of its most effective weapon against wasteful federal spending? That weapon, of course, is the Government Accountability Office, the green-eyeshade agency that for decades has been the bane of every wasteful bureaucrat in Washington.
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President Barack Obama faced a tough political decision this week on the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada to Texas. He could order the State Department to approve it, thus alienating his environmental activist supporters, or he could kill the pipeline, thus angering his union allies.
Obama chose to do what he had done 130 times while he was in the Illinois state Senate. He voted present.
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“If you die,” Crito pleaded with the imprisoned Socrates, “people who do not know you and me will believe that I might have saved you if I had been willing to give money, but that I did not care.” Socrates replied: “But why, my dear Crito, should we care about the opinion of the many?” With that reply, Socrates signaled his refusal to be released from jail through bribery and thence to flee Athens.
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U.S. Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Thomas J. Donohue is not known for mincing his words, so it’s no surprise to find some rather pointed suggestions in his recent letter to President Barack Obama and Congress concerning the urgent need to create new jobs: “Americans aren’t interested in empty promises or temporary, artificial government jobs that won’t last, but will add to the deficit.
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It was Feb. 19, 2009, when President Barack Obama proclaimed in Mesa, Ariz., that “through this plan, we will help between 7 [million] and 9 million families restructure or refinance their mortgages so they can avoid foreclosure. By making these investments in foreclosure prevention today, we will save ourselves the costs of foreclosure tomorrow.”
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