The Foundation

“No government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable.” –Federalist No. 62

Culture

“The U.S. Census Bureau … squander[ed] $2.5 million on a half-minute Super Bowl ad starring D-list celebrity Ed Begley Jr., plus two pre-game blurbs and 12-second ‘vignettes’ featuring Super Bowl anchor James Brown. It’s a drop in the census boondoggle bucket (otherwise known as the tax-subsidized National Democratic Future Voter Outreach Drive). The Obama White House has allocated a total of $340 million toward an ‘unprecedented’ promotional blitz for the 2010 census. That’s on top of $1 billion in stimulus money siphoned off for increased census ‘public outreach’ and staffing. In all, the census will triple its total 2000 budget to $15 billion. Ads pimping the census have already appeared during the Golden Globe awards and will broadcast during the Daytona 500 and NCAA Final Four championships. Some $80 million will be poured into multilingual ads in 28 languages from Arabic to Yiddish. Racial and ethnic groups have been squabbling over their share of the pie. The U.S. census is a decennial census mandated by our Constitution. Should Americans know about it? Sure. Should the P.R. budget become a bottomless slush fund in recessionary times? Surely not.” –columnist Michelle Malkin

Government

“Last month, Obama announced a new set of tax credits for so-called green companies. One window company was on the list: Serious Materials. This must be one very special company. But wait, it gets even more interesting. On my Fox Business Network show on ‘crony capitalism’, I displayed a picture of administration officials and so-called ‘energy leaders’ taken at the U.S. Department of Energy. Standing front and center was Cathy Zoi, who oversees $16.8 billion in stimulus funds, much of it for weatherization programs that benefit Serious. The interesting twist is that Zoi happens to be the wife of Robin Roy, who happens to be vice president of ‘policy’ at Serious Windows. Of all the window companies in America, maybe it’s a coincidence that the one which gets presidential and vice presidential attention and a special tax credit is one whose company executives give thousands of dollars to the Obama campaign and where the policy officer spends nights at home with the Energy Department’s weatherization boss. Or maybe not. … On its website, Serious Materials says it did not get a taxpayer subsidy. But that’s just playing with terms. What it got was a tax credit, an opportunity that its competitors did not get: to keep money it would have paid in taxes. Let’s not be misled. Government is as manipulative with selective tax credits as it is with cash subsidies. It would be more efficient to cut taxes across the board. Why should there be favoritism? Because politicians like it. Big, complicated government gives them opportunities to do favors for their friends.” –columnist John Stossel

The Gipper

“The American dream is not that every man must be level with every other man. The American dream is that every man must be free to become whatever God intends he should become.” –Ronald Reagan

Opinion in Brief

“‘I am not an ideologue,’ President Obama insisted at his truly refreshing confab with the Republican caucus in Baltimore [recently]. When he heard some incredulous murmurs and chuckles from the audience in response to the idea that the most sincerely ideological president in a generation is no ideologue, he added a somewhat plaintive, ‘I’m not.’ The president’s defensiveness isn’t surprising. He holds his self-definition as a pragmatist dear, and not just because it polls well. It’s clear from interviews that he is fond of the notion that he is above ideological squabbles and is a clear-eyed appraiser of facts and adjudicator of political disagreements. He’s described himself as a ‘pragmatist,’ even a ‘ruthless pragmatist,’ countless times. The evidence offered that Obama is no ideologue rests almost entirely on two contentions: He has annoyed some members of his ideological base, and because he says so. … Every president annoys his base. Are we therefore to believe that no president has ever been an ideologue? And how has Obama angered his base? Not by tacking to the center but by not going fast enough in pursuit of their shared goals. As for Obama’s personal testimony, so what? Is this the one instance in American history when a politician’s self-serving statements are to be taken at face value? … Of course Obama is an ideologue. The important question is whether he is sufficiently self-aware to recognize the truth.” –National Review editor Jonah Goldberg

Re: The Left

“President Obama’s State of the Union address was the greatest American rhetorical embrace of fascist trope since the days of Woodrow Wilson. I am not suggesting Obama is a Nazi; he isn’t. I am not suggesting that he is a jackbooted thug; he isn’t (even if we could be forgiven for mistaking Rahm Emanuel for one). President Obama is, however, a man who embodies all the personal characteristics of a fascist leader, right down to the arrogant chin-up head tilt he utilizes when waiting for applause. He sees democracy as a filthy process that can be cured only by the centralized power of bureaucrats. He sees his presidency as a Hegelian synthesis marking the end of political conflict. He sees himself as embodiment of the collective will. No president should speak in these terms – not in a representative republic. Obama does it habitually.” –columnist Ben Shapiro

Political Futures

“Barack Obama is probably the most union-friendly president since Lyndon Johnson. He has obviously been unable to stop the decline of private-sector unionism. But he is doing his best to increase the power – and dues income – of public-sector unions. One-third of last year’s $787 billion stimulus package was aid to state and local governments – an obvious attempt to bolster public-sector unions. And it was a successful one: While the private sector has lost 7 million jobs, the number of public-sector jobs has risen. The number of federal government jobs has been increasing by 10,000 a month, and the percentage of federal employees earning over $100,000 has jumped to 19 percent during the recession. Obama and his party are acting in collusion with unions that contributed something like $400,000,000 to Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle. Public-sector unionism tends to be a self-perpetuating machine that extracts money from taxpayers and then puts it on a conveyor belt to the Democratic Party. But it may not turn out to be a perpetual-motion machine. Public-sector employees are still heavily outnumbered by those who depend on the private sector for their livelihoods. The next Congress may not be as willing as this one has been to bail out state governments dominated by public-sector unions. Voters may bridle at the higher taxes needed to pay for $100,000-plus pensions for public employees who retire in their 50s. … Obama’s Democrats have used the financial crisis to expand the public sector and the public-sector unions. But voters seem to be saying, ‘Enough.’” –political analyst Michael Barone

For the Record

“[T]he Obama administration’s new budget will propose to zero out funding for Nevada’s Yucca Mountain nuclear repository – in effect, killing it. Instead, the Energy Department has announced the formation of a ‘blue ribbon’ commission ‘to provide recommendations for developing a safe, long-term solution to managing the nation’s used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste.’ … And why are we forming yet another blue ribbon commission to study a matter that has already been studied to death? The commission is empowered to study ‘all options’ except the one that has already been chosen by the United States government. So much for the previous blue ribbon commission that had settled on the Yucca Mountain site. American taxpayers have already invested more than $13 billion over 30 years to build the facility and make it redundantly safe. … There is nothing dishonorable about opposing nuclear energy – though the greenies who claim that global warming is their chief worry have some explaining to do if they reject nuclear power – but there is something dishonest about claiming to favor nuclear power while simultaneously short-circuiting the most viable solution to the problem of long-term waste storage.” –columnist Mona Charen

Reader Comments

“How ironic that the Commander-in-Chief can’t pronounce ‘corpsman.’ His Black Liberation Theology religious mentor (Jeremiah Wright) just happened to be a Navy Hospital Corpsman at Bethesda. Maybe he never heard Wright talk about his background like he didn’t hear his hate filled rhetoric over the twenty years he sat in the pews.” –Tommy

“Next up for Obama: The Marine Corpse and the Army Corpse of Engineers. Imagine the uproar if Bush had said this or used a teleprompter while talking to 6th Graders. Give him some credit – he’s got that nose in the sky pose down pat.” –KN

“What do you expect when you’ve got a guy who can’t do anything but read a TelePrompter eloquently. Maybe they need to project the stuff to him phonetically.”

“It is good to see Mark Alexander point to the downfall of the economic programs Ronald Reagan wanted. To only submit tax cuts without a corresponding reduction in government programs spells challenges for success and skews the data to a spin doctor’s delight. Today many point to Reagan’s failed policy yet it was not his failure, it was the failure of those surrounding his valiant efforts to reduce federal government, restore state level controls, and repair the damage of an out of control general growth begun and embraced in earnest under Roosevelt, Johnson, and Carter. When we hear people slam Reaganomics as failed this is the part of the historical facts they either do not know or will not accept. His programs were stopped from full implementation, government was not reduced as he so dearly wanted it to be.” –Gary

“Thank you for compiling so much information from so many sources! I’m a homeschooling mom with seven children (yes, I’m sure I’m on the homeland terrorist watch list). I can spend a few minutes reading the Brief in between grading math problems or grammar and have a good understanding of many of the important talking points for the week. Thank you for making me more efficient!” –Anne

The Last Word

“I can’t recall the wheels coming off the bus of any expert-driven hysteria as fast or as completely as they are now coming off the global-warming scare. … News of the manipulations, distortions and frauds perpetrated to advance and preserve the environmentalists’ cause celebre are so numerous and coming so fast, it’s hard to keep up. First, of course, there were the e-mails and computer files leaked from Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) – one of a handful of climate-research centres around the world that are the pillars of the United Nations’ claims about impending climate doom. … Then a couple of weeks ago came the news that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s climate-change arm, had based its most recent findings on Himalayan glacier melt on an old study that had never been peer-reviewed or even published and which was based entirely on the speculation (not research) of a single Indian scientist who now works at the environmental think-tank run by the head of the IPCC, economist Rajendra Pachauri. This by itself wouldn’t be devastating, except that the scientist in charge of the glacier chapter of the IPCC’s latest assessment report (AR4) admitted he had known the melt estimate was wrong but had included it anyway because ‘we thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.’ That’s not climate science, it’s environmental activism, pure and simple…. Another revelation of malfeasance this week was the discovery that the chapter on Amazon rainforests in the IPCC’s AR4, the one that included the often-repeated claim that 40 per cent of the forest is under imminent threat from climate change, was written not by climate scientists but by an policy analyst who works for environmental groups and a freelance environmental author. … In all, so far, at least 16 major claims made in AR4 (the report for which the IPCC won a Nobel Prize) have been shown to have originated with environmental groups rather than scientists…. Does all this prove global warming is a hoax? I believe it does. But at the least, it shows the science is far from settled.” –Edmonton Journal columnist Lorne Gunter