HALF-FULL REPORT 02/18/11

Published February 18, 2011 | By Jack Kelly

The glass could be filled to the brim this week, or nearly drained, depending on how events in Wisconsin play out.

Because as Wisconsin goes, so goes the nation. Neither the blatant hypocrisy nor the low comedy should divert our attention from the high stakes. If Governor Scott Walker and the Republican majority in the legislature hold firm, public employee unions will suffer a major blow, and the chief funding mechanism for the Democrat party will be disrupted. If they cave, all hopes of fiscal responsibility with collapse with them.

Thanks to a lousy economy and Walker’s free spending Democrat predecessors, Wisconsin has a $137 million budget shortfall in the current fiscal year, and a projected $3.6 billion deficit for the next two fiscal years (Wisconsin budgets biennially).

As in most states, most of the deficit can be attributed to overgenerous compensation for public employees. To partly close that gap, Walker has proposed that state employees contribute 5.8 percent of their wages toward their pensions (from basically zero), and pay 12.6 percent of their health care premiums. That’s roughly double what they’re paying now, but is still, notes Patrick McIlheran of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, more than $100 less a month than the average schmoe.

On average, the pay and benefits for a public school teacher in Wisconsin is $77, 857. Median income in the Badger state is a hair above $50,000.

Walker also would restrict public employee unions to bargaining for wages only. It would be up to elected officials alone to set the parameters for health and pension benefits. Walker wants this provision because of his experience as Milwaukee County executive, which he was before being elected governor last fall. When he wanted to make fiscal reforms, he found his hands were tied by union contracts. The only option he had was to lay people off.

If the Legislature takes the 5% and 12% and doesn’t reform collective bargaining, the 5% and 12% soon will be won back by unions, McIlheran notes. Any further savings are out the window. Walker talks of moving to consumer-driven benefits, as many companies have done, to restrain medical costs. That’s anathema to unions, who will resist it contract by contract. Without bargaining reform, government costs will have taken only a pause in their ascent.

Walker’s plan has sparked massive protests from state employees, many of them Madison schoolteachers who illegally took time off from work, forcing schools to close. The protests are organized by the unions, but are receiving assistance from the Democratic National Committee and Organizing for America, Zero’s perpetual campaign committee.

The protests have featured the ugly rhetoric journalists have searched in vain to find at Tea Party rallies. Walker’s been compared to Hitler and to recently deposed Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.

The protesters trashed the Capitol grounds .

Some of the protesters have been violent.

A mob marched on Walker’s home.

Republican legislators have been threatened with violence.

Quin Hillyer of the American Spectator thinks Zero wants the disruption and intimidation.

These are dangerous times. The Obama left will not go quietly into that good night. And they will not let their targets sleep quietly at night. They want their targets — in the Wisconsin legislature, and at Speaker Boehner’s house, and, watch, in other places as well — to feel fear of the mob.

Despite this, the Joint Budget Committee approved the Walker plan, 9-4. But a vote in the state senate had to be postponed because all Democrat state senators fled the state, denying a quorum. The lawmakers on the lam were spotted at a resort in Illinois, but chased away by an angry Tea Partier with a camera.

That’s the low comedy. But Democrats have shown a willingness to shut down a state government if they don’t get their way. We should keep this in mind if there is a federal government shutdown over the Obama budget.

So far, Walker and his Merry Men are standing firm.

And the governor had some words of advice for President Obama.

I think we’re focused on balancing our budget. It would be wise for the president and others in Washington to focus on balancing their budget, which they’re a long ways from doing.

That’s good, because, said Katrina Trinko of National Review:

What happens in Wisconsin could easily have a ripple effect across the nation. If the unions win, watch for them to challenge other governors just as aggressively. If they don’t win, that could embolden state legislators to vote for legislation unions oppose.

Already there are union protest demonstrations in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana.

There’ll be a pro Scott Walker demonstration in Madison tomorrow.

If you’re in the area, you should consider joining it. Steven Hayward of National Review said:

If ever there was a time for the Tea Party movement to take to the streets, it’s now in Ground Zero in Madison, Wisconsin — and other state capitals, from the sound of the news that the unions want to organize rallies in Ohio and Indiana as well. Just winning a big election isn’t enough.

President Obama has presented his budget for the 2012 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.

Rep. Paul Ryan doesn’t think much of it:

“Americans expect their presidents to lead, they expect their presidents to take on the country’s biggest challenges, and arguably the biggest domestic challenge perhaps in the history of this country is this crushing burden of debt that is coming our way,” he said. “The president punted on the budget and he punted on the deficit. That’s not leadership.”

Neither does the Wall Street Journal.

This $3.73 trillion budget does a Cee Lo Green ("Forget You," as cleaned up for the Grammys) to the voter mandate in November to control spending. It leaves every hard decision to the new House Republican majority. And it ignores almost entirely the recommendations of Mr. Obama’s own deficit commission.

Ho hum. Their opposition was expected. But the Obama budget also drew criticism from normally friendly quarters.

THE PRESIDENT PUNTED, said the Washington Post. Having been given the chance, the cover and the push by the fiscal commission he created to take bold steps to raise revenue and curb entitlement spending, President Obama, in his fiscal 2012 budget proposal , chose instead to duck. To duck, and to mask some of the ducking with the sort of budgetary gimmicks he once derided. "The fiscal realities we face require hard choices," the president said in his budget message. "A decade of deficits, compounded by the effects of the recession and the steps we had to take to break it, as well as the chronic failure to confront difficult decisions, has put us on an unsustainable course." His budget would keep the country on that course….

Guess which Obama –adoring blogger said this: click this link

This president is too weak, too cautious, too beholden to politics over policy to lead. In this budget, in his refusal to do anything concrete to tackle the looming entitlement debt, in his failure to address the generational injustice, in his blithe indifference to the increasing danger of default, he has betrayed those of us who took him to be a serious president prepared to put the good of the country before his short term political interests. Like his State of the Union, this budget is good short term politics but such a massive pile of fiscal bullshit it makes it perfectly clear that Obama is kicking this vital issue down the road.

If you guessed Andrew Sullivan, you’re right. Mr. Sullivan later described the budget as a deeply unserious proposal. It’s like proposing a new paint for the living room, while the ceiling is slowly falling in, and the roof has a leak that won’t quit.

The whole exercize in mendacity and delusion is so sad.

Perhaps stung by criticism from allies as well as enemies, Zero held a press conference Tuesday to defend his budget. And though he lied like a rug (he says we aren’t going to be "running up the credit card" but his own budget adds $7.2 trillion to the debt over 10 years), even he basically admitted his budget is more symbolic than substantive.

It was an unconvincing and uninspired performance because he has a message that isn’t defensible, said Jennifer Rubin, conservative blogger at the Washington Post. You see, he really isn’t serious about real fiscal discipline.

Obama and his advisers seem to have convinced themselves that most problems are a matter of "messaging" or "communication." But when Obama communicates a flawed message or misrepresents facts, he compounds his own difficulties, making it that much more difficult for his allies to defend him and all the more easy for opponents to demonstrate that he’s not leading on the crucial issues of the day.

President Barack Obama’s claim Tuesday that his proposed budget would stop adding to the national debt is wrong — and is proved wrong in his own budget, wrote Steven Thomma of the (very liberal) McClatchy Newspapers.

But Stanley Kurtz of National Review, who wrote a book well worth reading about Zero’s radicalism, thinks: click this link

Obama’s clever budget proposal has won him the advantage in the coming political showdown. Democratic grousing over limited cuts to discretionary spending will be used to paint the president as a fiscally responsible moderate. The Republican plan will be demonized as a heartless assault on the poor and elderly. Obama will do everything short of sending out an engraved invitation to provoke a GOP-led government shutdown. Whether or not the confrontation goes nuclear, Obama will enjoy the sort of upper hand Clinton had over Gingrich fifteen years ago.

Obama gains immensely by fudging or simply keeping silent about his ideological commitments and long-term plans. (The imaginary ten-year out projections in the current budget, of course, are a cover for next year’s expansion of government and do not represent the president’s actual long-term plans.) Obama’s every tactical feint to the center frightens a left which will not desert him, but whose criticism makes him seem moderate.

It will not do to chastise Obama’s budget proposal as a simple “refusal to lead,” a “punt,” or a “cynical political maneuver.” Obama isn’t failing to lead. He is very cleverly leading us toward an irreversible expansion of the welfare state. If Obama is reelected and in control when the entitlement crisis finally does hit, he will manage the country toward Euro-style taxes and Euro-style socialism.

Zero plainly is expecting a reprise of Bill Clinton’s 1995 showdown with the Republican Congress, because (1) it worked pretty well then, and (2) he doesn’t have a great deal of imagination.

On Monday when he presented his budget the president conspicuously avoided addressing entitlements, despite citing them as the country’s major fiscal problem, said Politico.

For Hill Democrats — so often at odds with Obama for the past two years — this omission was no sin. It was a gift, in their view, the setting of a political trap for a Republican Party divided between conservatives pushing for major changes to Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and a GOP leadership wary of the political peril of tinkering with Americans’ retirement security.

They are suckers,” said one senior Democratic congressional aide of the House GOP plans to release the first detailed proposals to reduce entitlement spending. “They have painted themselves into a corner.”

The fiscal emergency is much worse now than it was 15 years ago, which has had an effect on public opinion. Polls indicate substantial majorities do not want the debt ceiling to be raised. But the polls also indicate the only portion of the budget for which a majority supports cuts is for foreign aid, a trivial part of the budget.

Republicans must be very careful about how they approach this, and conservatives must not be impatient with them if they take political considerations into account.

The Republican presidential field for 2012 is the weakest that anybody has seen in our lifetime, thinks John Heilemann of New York magazine.

That’s standard liberal snark from a snarky liberal. But Nate Silver of the New York Times says the early evidence suggests that this year’s Republican field may in fact be quite weak by the standards of recent election cycles.

And Jennifer Rubin, the conservative blogger at the Washington Post, said: click this link

If you talk to Republicans in D.C. — or in Israel, for that matter — the overwhelming sentiment about the 2012 contenders is a mix of un-enthusiasm and nervousness. Republicans genuinely believe that the economy and Obama’s failure to exert leadership on our fiscal crisis provide an opening for Republicans to do the unusual — defeat an incumbent president. But Republicans have become a savvy lot after the disappointment of 2008 and the loss of some Tea Party favorites in 2010. In short, you can’t beat Democrats with uninspiring or flaky candidates.

I’m not too worried. Just because we haven’t heard much about a prospective candidate doesn’t mean that he or she is “weak.” This is February of 2011. The presidential election is in November of 2012. There is plenty of time for us and the nation to get acquainted with whoever will be the Republican nominee.

But we must be aware of two things.

First, it is vitally important we win the presidential election in 2012. It’s true that in 2016, when Chris Christie in New Jersey, Bobby Jindal in Louisiana and Bob McDonnell in Virginia, and newly elected Govs. John Kasich in Ohio, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, and Susana Martinez in New Mexico have more experience, the GOP field will resemble the 1927 Yankees. But if Barack Obama is re-elected, there might not be an America we recognize in 2016.

The second is that whoever we nominate will have some flaws. All mortals – including the sainted Reagan – did and do. We should neither overlook those flaws, nor obsess about them.

NBC and the Politico Webzine want to sponsor a GOP debate at the Reagan library in a few months. I share Hugh Hewitt’s dudgeon both at beginning debates so early, and at having biased liberals ask the questions.

Jay Cost, who I think is the best psephologist out there, thinks the nominee will be someone who gets into the race late.

Cost noted that four years ago

In rode Fred Dalton Thompson, who didn’t announce his candidacy until September. How controversial! Back then, I thought the strategy of entering late was really brilliant (the problem was the execution). My argument was that Thompson was basically avoiding the drudergy of the "perpetual campaign," breaking the rules of the "media arbiters" about what presidential candidates are supposed to do, which is run around the country for two years, giving speeches to every town council and citizens group, commenting on any little item in the news, and putting their positions on the record at an endless series of media debates. Thompson avoided all of that by announcing in September — and, in doing so, he capitalized on a lot of free publicity.

But with so many of the potential candidates so little known, I see some advantage to the party in an early start to the debates.

Herman Cain has virtually no chance of being nominated. But it could be good to have an articulate black man standing up for conservative principles.

John Bolton also has virtually no chance to be nominated. He would run only to interject foreign policy concerns into the debate, and few can do it better than he.

Of the rest of the field, my heart is with Sarah Palin, but my head is skeptical. I think she’d be a terrific president, but when polls show Palin trailing Obama in South Dakota and Tennessee you know the MSM has done a thoroughly effective job of blackening her reputation.

David Solway demurs: click this link

The more Sarah Palin seems unelectable, the more electable she may actually be. The media blitzkrieg launched against Palin may be interpreted not as a sign of her unfitness for office but precisely as a measure of her eligibility. As I’ve written elsewhere , “Palin’s electability can be reckoned as an inverse function of the virulent campaign intent on her delegitimation. … The greater the fury … she is met with, the greater the likelihood that she poses a genuine threat. One does not raise a mallet to crush an ant.”

But Solway is a Canadian who can’t vote here. I think the only way Sarah could win is if things really go to Hell in the next year, get so bad the Obama cheerleaders in the media lose all credibility, so bad people rethink their prejudices and world view.

I think Mike Huckabee is less likely to run than Sarah is. He’s got a good gig with Fox News and needs the money. And he’s smart enough to know a slim lead in the polls the year before the election year starts doesn’t mean much. (Rudy Giuliani led in polls throughout 2007, but his campaign collapsed as soon as voting began.)

If neither Sarah nor Huckabee run, Mitt Romney would start out as the front runner, though I think his current standing in the polls, like Giuliani’s four years ago, is mostly a product of name recognition which will dissipate as other candidates become better known.

Romney has impressive business credentials, deep pockets, and he says the right things on most issues. But John Podhoretz of Commentary thinks he has a fatal flaw:

Mitt Romney cannot be the Republican nominee for president and he cannot be president. He is the author, in his Massachusetts health-care program, of the individual mandate that is the heart and soul of ObamaCare.

If he runs, and he will, his origination of this policy will give his opponents in the primaries a stick so large to beat him with that no amount of clever one-liners purchased from high-paid freelance political speechwriters and joke writers will be able to mitigate the damage. And that’s to say nothing of Obama talking throughout 2012 about how he doesn’t understand what the Republicans are complaining about — one of their lead candidates agrees with him!

This isn’t an albatross. It’s a two-ton weight chained to his torso, and he’s not Houdini.

I agree.
Romney and most of the other potential contenders spoke at CPAC. Here’s Romney’s speech:

Beltway conservatives were most impressed by Mitch Daniels’ speech. You can watch it here: click this link

According to the Cato Institute, Tim Pawlenty was an even better governor in Minnesota than Daniels has been in Indiana. And Pawlenty offers no truces on social issues, or on defense and foreign policy.

Robert Costa of National Review wrote a profile of Pawlenty last month that’s worth a read.

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey told National Review he thinks Pawlenty will be the nominee .

“He has a leg up on the others,” Armey reasons. “He’s a new face so he can define himself.” What of the criticism that Pawlenty is too vanilla for people’s tastes? “People have charisma fatigue,” Armey says. “They want someone who can produce.”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie made a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Wednesday.

A lot of people came to hear him.

AEI, which sometimes has to fill speeches with employees and interns, says the response to Christie has been so phenomenal that room reached its capacity of 300 less than a week after his speech was announced. Reporters and others are now being referred to a livestream on the Web, reported Mike Allen of the Politico.

You can listen to the speech here.

A transcript of it is here.

I think you should watch it or read it. He made it without a prepared text, unlike a famous politician we’re all familiar with. I liked it very much.

I’m not alone .

Both Jack Wheeler and I have described Christie as “the fat Reagan.” Though their oratorical styles are different, Christie is the most persuasive conservative public speaker since the Gipper.

What Christie is showing us is that conservative principles — when presented effectively — will win the day, said Edmund Wright of the American Thinker. Ronald Reagan showed us that in 1980 and 84. And another thing Christie is showing us is that style matters, but the only iron clad rules are be bold and be yourself. Authenticity, boldness and conservative common sense combined is a powerful mixture indeed. All too often Republicans have lacked one or the other, if not all three. Reagan was Reagan. People saw that. It resonated. It gave power to his message and his ideas.

He can make the medicine taste good.

In New Jersey the support for his tough medicine was unusually broad,” Allen said.: 56 percent favored layoffs for state workers, 65 percent backed furloughs for state workers, 77 percent supported wage freezes for state workers, and 66 percent were for reducing pensions for new state workers.

John McCormack of the Weekly Standard thinks the amount of interest in Christie is amazing, since according to a recent Fox News poll.

34 percent of Republicans, 37 percent of independents, and 39 percent of Democrats have never heard of him.

These two data points–Christie’s popularity among Republicans who know him and his relatively low name-ID among Republicans in general–suggest that Christie could easily vault to first place if he were to jump into the race, McCormack said.

Many conservatives are rightly worried about whether Christie is tough enough about Islamic extremism.

Kevin Mooney, writing in the American Spectator, offers a little publicized reason why conservatives should like him. He’s taking on judicial activism.

Since the mid-20th century, the progressive impulses that have held sway in New Jersey have given cover to judicial activism. But in response to the state’s deteriorating financial position, the political climate has shifted in a manner that favors reform.

A critical turning point came last April when Gov. Christie turned the school budget elections into a referendum in favor of fiscal conservatism and against judicial overreach…

Throughout his campaign, Christie was particularly critical of the judiciary and of decisions like Abbott v. Burke that allowed the Supreme Court to impose its political preferences on the public.

"Many of these decisions have been results in search of a rationale," Christie has observed. "And that’s not the way to appropriately interpret the laws and interpret the constitution. And there have been any number of examples of that over time."

Gov. Christie denied again Wednesday any interest in running for president in 2012. But he continues to flirt with the conservative base.

When Jack Wheeler finally got an internet connection, he told me he would have nominated British Prime Minister David Cameron for hero of the week last week for the speech he made denouncing multiculturalism at the Wehrkunde conference in Munich Feb 5.

It’s a real breakthrough, and now Sarkozy is getting on board. Maybe there really is hope for Europe, Jack said.

Here’s some of what Cameron said:

Islam is a religion, observed peacefully and devoutly by over a billion people. Islamist extremism is a political ideology, supported by a minority.

At the furthest end are those who back terrorism to promote their ultimate goal: an entire Islamist realm, governed by an interpretation of sharia.

Move along the spectrum, and you find people who may reject violence, but who accept various parts of the extremist world-view including real hostility towards western democracy and liberal values.

It’s vital we make this distinction between the religion and the political ideology.

And here’s what French President Nicolas Sarkozy said during a television program Feb. 12: click this link

It’s a failure. The truth is that in all our democracies, we’ve been too concerned about the identity of the new arrivals and not enough about the identity of the country receiving them. This raises the issue of Islam and our Muslim compatriots.

Our Muslim compatriots should be able to live and practise their religion like anyone else . . . but it can only be a French Islam and not just an Islam in France.

I wish Cameron and Sark would give Zero a clue.

My hero of the week – Hell, my hero of the year – is Scott Walker, assuming he stands firm.

Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC is, alas, typical of television journalists today – a nincompoop who imagines herself to be among the best and the brightest. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson took her to school about Obama’s handling of the crisis in Egypt. Enjoy:

Marc Thiessen wrote in the Washington Post about how Zero lost the Egyptian people.

When the protests first erupted, ordinary Egyptians appeared to hope – almost to expect – that once they rose up to demand their freedom, America could not help but stand with them. Instead, they heard President Obama’s handpicked envoy, Frank Wisner, declare that Hosni Mubarak "must stay in office" to oversee the changes he had ordered. They heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declare the United States backed "the transition process announced by the Egyptian government" (which then consisted of Mubarak staying in power until September). And they waited in vain for Obama himself to speak out clearly and align America with the democratic revolution they had set in motion. Soon their hopes gave way to disappointment and eventually anger. Demonstrators began carrying signs that declared "Shame on you Obama!" and showed Mubarak depicted as Obama in his iconic "hope" image – with a caption that read "No You Can’t."

And here’s a hilarious description of the desperate search by CNN’s Nic Robertson for a protester who will say something nice about Zero.

Current events can make a guy pessimistic about the future. Fortunately, I’m not as worried as Johan Huibers.

It’s chiefly fear of death that makes “progressives” believe what they believe, and act the way they act, thinks “Robin of Berkeley,” a psychotherapist who became a conservative late in life.

While most people experience some level of denial, we all know that we will someday die. People may be drawn to the left to create meaning in their lives while they are still alive.

They have no other way to organize this overwhelming existence, to create order out of apparent chaos. By espousing leftist ideals and worshiping false idols, many progressives have discovered their own unique way to conquer death. Even if leftists profess to be staunch atheists, doubt may lurk; therefore, their activism offers the prospect of redemption.

For many, progressivism meets a basic, human longing to matter, to make a difference in this world before it all passes away.

The knowledge of our finiteness lurks right under the surface, until, one day, tragedy shatters our illusions.

But the difference is that most conservatives have a well-worn path to liberation, with an ancient blueprint and a Savior to guide them. No so with those leftists who have rejected ultimate truth.

It’s no wonder then that they embrace the Gospel of Liberalism. What other means do they have to still the voice of disquietude and to shine a faint light onto the darkness?

I wonder what Joel Wade thinks of this thesis.

I apologize for the length of the HFR. Lotta stuff happening.