Tag Archives: ethics

Two Thoughts on Government

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This video is what the Democratic Party used to open its convention in Charlotte, NC last week:

The Government Is The Only Thing We All Belong To

Here, on the other hand, is the Preamble to our Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

So.  Do we work for government, or does government work for us?  Do we belong to government, or does government belong to us?

Ronald Reagan answered this in his inaugural address in January 1981:

We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around.

We’ll take a step toward deciding this—again—in November.

Obama, Israel, and Iran

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The Blaze reported on a meeting in Israel several days ago that involved Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro, and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R, MI) wherein this apparently happened [emphasis mine]:

At the start of the meeting, [Netanyahu] opened with a sharp attack on the Obama administration which according to him has not done enough on the Iranian issue.  “Instead of effectively pressuring Iran, Obama and his people are pressuring us not to attack the nuclear facilities,” he said, and then moved on to a harsh criticism of the administration’s pronouncements indicating there is still room for diplomacy.  “The time has run out,” he said resolutely.

At one point, an anomalous thing occurred in the office, which is very unacceptable in diplomatic code.  Shapiro who was appointed by President Obama and for years was among his closest advisers decided he’d had enough.  Enough is enough.  He spoke and answered Netanyahu politely but in a manner that left no room for doubt.

The ambassador in fact accused Netanyahu of distorting Obama’s position.  He quoted the president, who promised he would not allow a nuclear Iran and said that all options – including a military strike – are on the table […]

It’s dismaying—and frightening, because it’s so dangerous—that all Shapiro could do was quote Obama’s words—he could cite only Obamatalk.  Shapiro could name no actual deeds as Iran, which has sworn to wipe Israel from the map, moves at an accelerating pace to achieve a nuclear bomb.

In fact, Obama actively is refusing to take concrete action, despite the “promises” of his Obamatalk.  He said, through his Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey (who finds it “not useful” for ex-military to express their opinions when those opinions run counter to Party dogma), while speaking to reporters in London,

I don’t want to be complicit if they [Israel] choose to do it [execute their own military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities].

“Complicit?”  You’re “complicit” when you go along with illegal activities….

Obama also pretended, through Dempsey, not to know Iran’s intentions.  The Guardian cited Dempsey as making this claim in those same remarks.  Apparently, the Iranian leadership with whom Obama is so desperate to engage is not to be taken at its word when those words are inconvenient:

Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury.
–Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Our dear Imam [Ayatollah Khomeini] said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement.
–Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

 

I regard supporting the plan for independence of Israel and its recognition a tragedy for the Muslims and an explosion for the Islamic governments.
–Ayatollah Khomeini

Israel must be eradicated from the page of history.
–Ayatollah Khomeini

And the routine invocation during Friday prayers in Tehran:

Death to Israel

 

h/t Power Line

Four More Years of This?

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Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama’s Deputy Campaign Manager, Stephanie Cutter, had some…interesting…things to say recently.

Well, I think that worker probably has a good understanding of what’s happened over the past four years in terms of the president coming in and seeing 800,000 jobs lost on the day that the president was being sworn in, and seeing the president moving pretty quickly to stem the losses, to turn the economy around.  And over the past, you know, 27 months we’ve created 4.5 million private-sector jobs. That’s more jobs than in the Bush recovery (or) in the Reagan recovery.

Hmm….

The Investor’s Business Daily editorialist had a few things to say about her claim.

She starts counting private-sector job growth under Obama in February 2010 and, sure enough, in the 29 months since then (not 27 as Cutter says), there have been 4.5 million private-sector jobs created, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

February 2010 was fully eight months into the economic recovery.  So Cutter has simply picked the worst month under Obama as her starting point….  In the aftermath of the 1981-82 recession, private-sector jobs bottomed out in December 1982, the month after that recession ended.  Twenty-nine months later, the private sector under Reagan had created 8 million jobs—nearly twice as many as under Obama.  How about Bush?  …if you use the Cutter method, the private sector created 4.7 million jobs in the 29 months after July 2003, when the job market bottomed.  In other words, Bush beat Obama by his own preferred measuring technique by 200,000 jobs.

What’s more, after 29 months of allegedly stellar job growth under Obama, the jobless rate is still 8.3%.  By this point in the Reagan and Bush jobs recoveries, the unemployment rate was 7.2% and 4.9%, respectively.

It’s important to note, too, that Obama continues to offer not least minim of evidence that these created jobs have resulted from his policies in particular, and not from the normal economic business recovery that follows any recession—only now with the recovery rate suppressed by his policies.

And there’s this tidbit that bears on Cutter’s claim.

In January 2009, the month President Obama entered the Oval Office and shortly before he signed his stimulus spending bill, median household income was $54,983.  By June 2012, it had tumbled to $50,964, adjusted for inflation. … That’s $4,019 in lost real income, a little less than a month’s income every year.

[E]ven if you start the analysis when the recession ended in June 2009, the numbers are dismal.  Three years after the economy hit its trough, median household income is down $2,544, or nearly 5%.

Some jobs he’s “created.”

Now, isn’t Cutter the one who spoke Obama’s lie about his Republican opponent being a felon?  Isn’t she the one who carried Obama’s denial of all knowledge of his SuperPAC’s ad accusing his opponent of killing a woman with his practices at Bain?  Why, yes.  Yes, she is.  Can anyone take seriously anything her mouth talks about?

A larger question: can we afford four more years of an administration so plainly out of contact with the reality of our current economic strait?

 

h/t Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club

Some Immigration Musings

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Former Governor, Ambassador, and Republican Presidential Candidate Jon Huntsman had some thoughts on immigration in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed.  His heart is in the right place, but his thoughts are incomplete and naïve.

Huntsman rightly points out the importance of immigrants to our nation’s economy and to our freshness of thought.  He also rightly reviews past mistakes we’ve made vis-à-vis immigration—the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1907 Gentleman’s Agreement, the 1924 Immigration Act, among others.

But he offers nothing concrete in the way of a solution beyond the usual “need to improve our visa system” and “need to recruit immigrants.”  But he does add this:

Such initiatives won’t only bring talent here—they will allow us to deny it to our competitors.

Sure.  Immigrants are pieces of meat, or tools to be used to our advantage and against other nations in a zero sum game.

Cue Bill the Cat.  This drivel is of a piece with the Progressive claptrap that says all blacks must be Democrats or they’re traitors to their race, that gays must be Liberals, or they’re self-hating…whatever.

No.  We should be welcoming immigrants because they’re human beings who want to make something better of their lives and their families’ lives and they have something to offer our nation—not because they have something to offer.

Note, though, that the visa games Huntsman rightly decries do need to stop; this is an important component to real immigration reform.  But there’s far more to this than just putting paid to some visa quota nonsense.  We need to make it much easier for folks who want to come here to do so easily.  The delays in getting visas need to be eliminated.  The visa system needs to be simplified: there really only needs to be three kinds of visas: residency, visitor, and business.  And I’m not convinced three categories really are necessary.  All categories should offer a path to citizenship, but that decision should be take-able by the immigrant (or resident alien, if he just wants to live here) at any time, or never, without impacting his visa.

It needs to be far easier physically to cross our borders, too.  Entry stations should be far more closely spaced, and not at all limited to urban areas.  This, just incidentally, will severely hamper human trafficking as the mules (and worse) will find their services needed far less.

But legal entry into our country is only one leg of the stool of immigration reform.  Sitting opposite that easy entry is a need to tightly secure our borders.  There really are folks who want to enter under the radar because their hearts are not pure and their goals are nefarious: drug traffickers and terrorists come to mind.  Accordingly, it ought to be hard to enter without a visa and at any place other than a check point.  This will require improvements and expansion in border patrols, surveillance equipment, and so on—and not just at the borders, but in depth.

And the third leg.  What do we do about the illegal aliens that are present?  Justice—to Americans, to aliens who have entered legally (maybe especially to them, since they’ve grunted through our Byzantine entry mazes and still got in legally), to existing immigrants—demands that the illegal aliens not be given a pass.  Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D, IL) and Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) both have partial solutions that are worth building on in this area.

Most importantly, and making reform harder to do, all three legs of this reform must be done together.  No one of these is sufficient, and if less than all are done, the imbalance will just blow up the effort.