Andy McCarthy makes the case that John McCain’s oversight on the funding of a Rashid Khalidi-founded organization is appreciably more benign than Barack Obama’s involvement with Khalidi:
In effect, McCain’s Lefty-light has made beating Obama much more difficult because his many maverick forays make it hard for us to get traction on subjects like ACORN, Khalidi, speech-suppression, immigration, enhanced due-process for terrorists, etc. A real conservative could have made a much more compelling fight on the issues than McCain has.
But that’s water under the bridge now, and none of it changes the obvious: Whatever typically infurating dalliances McCain may have had with Khalidi and ACORN, they don’t compare to the depth of relationship that Obama had with Khalidi and ACORN – and like-minded Leftists. It’s not even close.
McCarthy is right. If the Obama camp could convince voters that all their candidate did was okay $448k to go to Khalidi’s Center for Palestine Reasearch and Studies, they’d jump at the chance. If the LA Times had a video of Obama signing that check, no one would even watch it.
McCain’s token gesture was a political quickie aimed at pacifying a noisy party that you’d never really want to get personally involved with. Obama’s intimate history with the likes of Khalidi is of an entirely different order. Groups like the CPRS are specifically designed to cloak radical players in the robes of academic respectability. That McCain obliged–like every other American politician these days–is one kind of concern. That people like Khalidi don’t even need to take the backdoor when approaching Obama is quite another. By his own admission, Obama said talks with Khalidi have served as “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.” Khalidi’s front organization may have elicited a check from John McCain, but Khalidi himself has corrected Obama’s thinking. While the candidates are “not even close” on this issue, it’s a messy argument for McCain to make–and it leaves him looking irresponsible.
“It’s one thing to run up the tab and pronounce that a trillion dollar deficit is no immediate danger to us.”
I’m optimistic. Look at Germany & Japan in 1945,the lowest of the low, a few decades later,they kicking a–. The advantage they had,ironically,is that their old economic structures were destroyed with their armies which allowed new structures which developed rapidly. We are all mired down in a failed worldwide economic system that is exhausted;we need to start over from scratch and let the new free market work the way it’s supposed to. The rules were written by Smith and Von mises;all we need to do is to take those guys seriously.For Now,We have seriously passed the financial point of no return for our current set-up. It doesn’t matter how much money we spend from now on because it’s not going to ever be paid back.
Well, it only took the WaPo until the second paragraph to provide a diagnosis–but look at it: it’s not about spending too much (on the heels of a $787 BILLION appropriations blow-out!), it’s about tax revenues as too low:
“revising a tax code that generates too little money to cover the cost of government”
If you can’t cover your costs, maybe you should cut them? No, don’t you see that is too simplistic–it’s about a chronic imbalance, more hocus-pocus required…
“disappointing some lawmakers and other participants who had hoped the summit might produce greater momentum to fix the chronic imbalance between government spending and tax collections that is driving the national debt to dangerous levels”
Genius, I tell you that guy Obama must be the smartest guy in the room. It’s about tax collections…
Has the WaPo just invented new language for disguising the biggest spending President ever? Look at the evidence: biggest appropriations bill ever, biggest deficit (as %) since WW II, biggest deficit ($) ever, TRILLION dollar deficits for as far as the eye can see…
“Couldn’t we have shrunk it a lot more than that without Nancy Pelosi’s trillion dollar pork-a-thon?” Ms. Rubin
If your understanding of economics is so limited, maybe you should let somebody else at Commentary do the heavy lifting.
Deficits are bad, but the critical issue facing our economy is recession and deflation. It doesn’t make any sense to put a patient on a diet while she is bleeding to death.
Stimulus is necessary, according to virtually every economist liberal and conservative, to jump start the economy and arrest its slide. Even if the stimulus were tilted more toward tax cuts, as Republicans wanted, it would have added to the deficit. Tax cuts funded by debt are no different than spending funded by debt.
Unless you can increase economic activity, the deficits will only grow bigger.
Yes, Pat, and if you spend hundreds of billions on pork that will not stimulate economic recovery, as Obama has promised to do,the deficits will mount to the sky, as they now will.
Of course, if you are a Chicago pol who is confident in his ability to sell iceboxes to Eskimos, you promptly call an “economic summit” to tell everyone that you are really a fiscal conservative who will fix the deficit right away. You just don’t say how you’re going to do this. And you forget to mention that the mountain of deficit you are promising to fix is the mountain you just created out of whole cloth.
The deficit was over a trillion before Obama got near the white house!
You don’t seem to note that anywhere.
You are something else!
And he promptly set out to double it, while simultaneously pursuing economic policies that have so thoroughly destroyed economic expectations that the market is trashed.
That is something else!
How long before people realize that the plan to “save” social security and medicare is to reduce life expectancy via government control of health care benefits? Sounds whacko? Wait two decades and see. We are the frog slowly boiling to death – will we be smart enough to hop out of the water before it’s too late?
There is a clear pattern emerging in the Obama administration that has been candidly described by Rahm Emmanuel (about not letting a good crisis go to waste): First say there is a crisis (e.g. health care costs, an impending great depression), then use the crisis as an excuse to do something that is unrealted to the cirsis, but which you want to do for other reasons (e.g., Pelosi’s liberal porkathon “stimulus” bill, creation of a universal health care system under the guise of controlling costs). The discouraging thing is that according to the polls, lying and bait-and-switch are actually working with the public.
Everything you need to know about the ‘genius’ of Obama is in the time line of his programs. Over 50% of the stimulus bill will not be spent until after 2010. The deficit will be reduced in the final year (hopefully) of his administration in 2012. This does not count his 9% appropriations increase, future bailouts, healthcare remakes, and entitlement reforms.
What we are seeing is banana (racist warning) republic economics. The markets recognize this. Buy gold now.
For Pat, the fact that Obama held the fiscal responsibility summit is proof that Obama will cut the deficit. The action of actually doing it would be extra gravy.
Bush never even attempted to cut the deficit. Never said a word about it. Fired his Treasury secretary for daring to question deficit spending (during a boom!)
Never heard a word about deficits here either
I’m a lot happier with what we have now.
#11 pretends to care about the deficit after Obama spends $1 trillion in the span of three weeks.
And you heard the same mantra from Bush that the Obama and Dems are using now, “Deficits don’t matter.”
I’m glad you’re happy, though.
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“Couldn’t we have shrunk it a lot more than that without Nancy Pelosi’s trillion dollar pork-a-thon?” Ms. Rubin
If your understanding of economics is so limited, maybe you should let somebody else at Commentary do the heavy lifting.
Deficits are bad, but the critical issue facing our economy is recession and deflation. It doesn’t make any sense to put a patient on a diet while she is bleeding to death.
Stimulus is necessary, according to virtually every economist liberal and conservative, to jump start the economy and arrest its slide. Even if the stimulus were tilted more toward tax cuts, as Republicans wanted, it would have added to the deficit. Tax cuts funded by debt are no different than spending funded by debt.
Unless you can increase economic activity, the deficits will only grow bigger.
**********
You’re saying that inflation, or perhaps hyperinflation, is preferable to deflation? Why? And when you say “virtually every economist”, you are either misinformed or mendacious as there are a considerable number of well-respected economists that are skeptical or opposed to “stimulus”. And, of course, there is no requirement that tax cuts be “funded” by debt.
I’ve been watching our elegant* President on TV for a few weeks now. Truth be told, he’s been a hard man to avoid, and while, like Mr. Penn, I do appreciate his elegance, it’s another characteristic that has left me in awe (the shock emanates from his actual policies). Not since Joanne Woodward unspooled such disparate splintered selves in “The Three Faces of Eve” have I witnessed such a dazzling display of multiple personalities, each individually wrapped in its own independent world. Everyone does this to a degree; but our Dear Leader seems to have seized upon or been seized of this mechanism as a primary mode of functioning. There are probably technical terms, and good old cognitive dissonance would surely be tediously trotted out amongst them for a brisk curtsey, but who cares, it’s far more interesting to watch the multiplicity of different Presidents spill out in a seemingly infinite parade, each fleet of foot, and each doing his own separate little dance.
One day our President can’t shovel the bucks out the door fast enough. Shovel and bail, shovel and bail. The Great Porkulator (oops, sorry, Economic Stimulator) at work.
Then, the next day a separate and totally different personality emerges, President Obama, The Deficit Exterminator, who will cut the deficit, the one that Nancy & Harry & President Porkulator Obama doubled the day before, in half by the end of his first term (this personality is clearly the dreamer of the group).
Today is Tuesday, so it’s Big Time Barry, the Budget Buster who has popped out for our edification and entertainment. And we can’t say he doesn’t know how to put on a whopper of a show. First he has Nancy spring the “omnibus” spending bill, an amuse-geule of only $410 Billion to cover the seven months from March until the end of September, 2009, only a little more than $58.5 Billion per month, just sundries. Then tonight, our President B.T. Barry Boom-Boom Obama himself will show a little leg and headline a teaser show of his 2010 Budget for our sterling House and Senate worthies before its complete unveiling on Thursday. Even now, I can hear our Hogarthian senator, Chris Dodd, stomping his feet and shouting, “More, Boom-Boom, we want More!!!!” What a high time will be had in our Congress tonight!
In these uncertain times, I feel sure of at least two things. First, Sen. Dodd will get his wish — there will be MORE!, lots more. It’s Porkarama time in the USA, and Boom-Boom and his merry best-and-brightest boys and girls will not disappoint. Second, we can count on a veritable Swiss Army Champ XLT President. Each day will bring us another fresh incarnation of our multi-purpose/multi-culti/multi-personality, all-in-one leader. And each new version will be entirely unencumbered by the ones that went before, and those that will come after. Just remember, it’s all about Change. The Hope part was always expendable. Expedient is as expedient does, and life is just a box of…… forget it, I hated that movie…..
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* As per Sean Penn, during his acceptance speech for his Best Actor Academy Award.
It’s just a box of rain.