George Rebane

Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots sent a National Journal article ‘Group Think’ by Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institute that describes the TPP and its (dis)organization.  It is an excellent description of the state of this vast and growing movement by someone from a left-of-center policy analysis organization.  Well written yet not wordy or too long.  It also compares and contrasts the nationwide TPP with the leftwing moveon.org funded by George Soros, although the role of that perennial sage of the left is never mentioned.  Well worth the read if you really want to find out what’s going on in this historical happening on the American political/cultural scene.  Download Rauch_TeaPartyPatriots_11Sept2010

Kind of interesting to see that Candidate Obama is again trying to play his strong suit by going on the campaign trail trying to sell a horse that’s pretty much dead.  This time he’s using some cards from the conservative hand and hoping that no one notices.  He’s actually abandoning (but just for a moment) Keynesian policies and attempting to peddle capitalistic incentives in the form of directed temporary tax cuts to small businesses along with some TBD regulatory relaxing.  He needs to show some gains in the economy before November, and none of his socialist nostrums seem to have worked for anyone except those who count angels on pin heads and saved jobs.  The people are not buying it.  (more here)

Don’t you wonder that if more taxes and regulations are so good for our economy, why is it that when the socialists get in trouble, they always go back to the Austrian school of economics for a little incentive tonic to fix things up?  Why not just double down on taxes and regulations if they’re so good?  But not to worry, their true colors prevail because they always screw up their stab at economic incentives.

Stimulus has become a bad word, so now all of these incentives are being passed through as blaring tax cuts with the ‘temporary’ modifier spoken quietly and seldom by the man behind his teleprompters.  (I’m still tickled by the use of teleprompters at his press conference, all so he could appear  to know some of the numbers and look as if he knew what he was talking about to the people in TV land?)

The Dems running for re-election across the land are saying ‘Stimulus, who me?  I was against it from the start.  Obamacare, I never voted for it and promise not to do it again.’  When you’re down, you’re down, but the CCO will never say die.  If he flies around the country enough times making speeches in union halls, he’s bound to bump into a fellow Dem and have his picture taken with a real candidate who couldn’t get away in time.

In a recent and excellent speech on the floor of the House, our Tom McClintock cited the First Law of Holes – if you’re in a hole, stop digging.  He was asking his colleagues why they were in Washington for a special session of the House to pass $26B in additional spending so that ‘teachers and policemen and …’ wouldn’t have to be fired.  This in spite of the fact that more that $250B remained unspent in ARRA, the 2009 stimulus that was explicitly supposed to save teachers’ and first responders’ jobs in addition to curing ingrown toenails and preventing the heartbreak of psoriasis.  Nope, they had to spend even more and continue blaming it on Bush.  So to this I humbly offer the Second Law of Holes – if you can’t stop digging, at least throw the dirt on your critics.

Finally, I was happy to see an article ‘Questions for Imam Rauf from an American Muslim’ that gives a glimmer of hope for the existence of an unabashedly pro-American population that condemns radical Islam.  Author M. Zuhdi Jasser, medical doctor and former Navy officer states unequivocally “In relation to Ground Zero, I am an American first, a Muslim second, just as I would be at Concord, Gettysburg, Normandy Beach, Pearl Harbor or any other battlefield where my fellow countrymen lost their lives.”  He goes on to accuse the Cordoba House Imam Rauf –

You willfully ignore what American Muslims most need – an open call for reformation that unravels the bigoted and shoddy framework of political Islam and separates mosque and state.

Dr Jasser clearly recognizes what you have seen argued on these pages, namely that “Islamists in “moderate” disguise are still Islamists.  In their own more subtle ways, the WTC mosque organizers end up serving the same aims of separatist and supremacist wings of political Islam.”

And to conclude, this Friday’s ARRA chart below is becoming more irrelevant and more of a bother to rehash.  Perhaps this should become a monthly tedium instead.