Progressive-Marxist Ezra Klein Claims Dems Were Robbed In DC War

2011 is not 1995

By Ezra Klein

(Susan Walsh – AP) The substance of this deal is bad. But the way Democrats are selling it makes it much, much worse.

The final compromise was $38.5 billion below 2010’s funding levels. That’s $78.5 billion below President Obama’s original budget proposal, which would’ve added $40 billion to 2010’s funding levels, and $6.5 billion below John Boehner’s original counteroffer, which would’ve subtracted $32 billion from 2010’s budget totals. In the end, the real negotiation was not between the Republicans and the Democrats, or even the Republicans and the White House. It was between John Boehner and the conservative wing of his party. And once that became clear, it turned out that Boehner’s original offer wasn’t even in the middle. It was slightly center-left.

But you would’ve never known it from President Obama’s encomium to the agreement. Obama bragged about “making the largest annual spending cut in our history.” Harry Reid joined him, repeatedly calling the cuts “historic.” It fell to Boehner to give a clipped, businesslike statement on the deal. If you were just tuning in, you might’ve thought Boehner had been arguing for moderation, while both Obama and Reid sought to cut deeper. You would never have known that Democrats had spent months resisting these “historic” cuts, warning that they’d cost jobs and slow the recovery.

Boehner, of course, could afford to speak plainly. He’d not just won the negotiation but had proven himself in his first major test as speaker of the House. He managed to get more from the Democrats than anyone had expected, sell his members on voting for a deal that wasn’t what many of them wanted and avert a shutdown. There is good reason to think that Boehner will be a much more formidable opponent for Obama than Gingrich was for Clinton.

So why were Reid and Obama so eager to celebrate Boehner’s compromise with his conservative members? The Democrats believe it’s good to look like a winner, even if you’ve lost. But they’re sacrificing more than they let on. By celebrating spending cuts, they’ve opened the door to further austerity measures at a moment when the recovery remains fragile. Claiming political victory now opens the door to further policy defeats later.

And policy defeats are what will matter. The Obama White House is looking toward the Clinton model. After all, Clinton also suffered a major setback in his first midterm, Clinton also faced down a hardline Republican Congress, Clinton also suffered major policy defeats, and yet Clinton, as the story goes, managed to co-opt the conservative agenda and remake himself into a successful centrist. The Obama administration has even hired many of Clinton’s top aides to help them recapture that late-90s magic.

That story misses something important: Clinton’s success was a function of a roaring economy. The late ‘90s were a boom time like few others — and not just in America. The unemployment rate was less than 6 percent in 1995, and fell to under 5 percent in 1996. Cutting deficits was the right thing to do at that time. Deficits should be low to nonexistent when the economy is strong, and larger when it is weak. The Obama administration’s economists know that full well. They are, after all, the very people who worked to balance the budget in the 1990s, and who fought to expand the deficit in response to the recession.

Right now, the economy is weak. Giving into austerity will weaken it further, or at least delay recovery for longer. And if Obama does not get a recovery, then he will not be a successful president, no matter how hard he works to claim Boehner’s successes as his own. Clinton’s speeches were persuasive because the labor market did a lot of his talking for him. But when unemployment is stuck at eight percent, there’s no such thing as a great communicator.

By Ezra Klein  |  01:12 AM ET, 04/09/2011

Littany and Tears, Tyranny and Smears from the Hysterical Left

Daily Kos writes the following tale of suffering caused by Simon Legree Republicans striving to lead the nation away from impending bankruptcy.    We will be hearing alot of this brand of racism  from the Obama, Reid, Pelosi, New York Times, Washington Post, Charlie Schumer, Dick Durbin, etcetera crowd until the Wednesday after the second Tuesday, November, 2012.

Daily Kos ‘reports:’    A beat-up van pulls to a stop just up the road.  A creaky screen door opens from the apartment at the end of the building.  A young African-American girl runs out toward the van, barely hanging onto a gym bag that was obviously not meant for such a pint-sized carrier.  The driver of the van, a middle-aged white man with glasses and a beard, throws the passenger door to the van open and the little girl tosses the bag onto the floor before climbing in.  The apartment door, which had banged shut in the meantime, creaks open again as the girl’s mother waves goodbye.

“Be good.  Have fun,” she tells her daughter.

“I’ll have her back by eight,” the driver replies as the little girl shuts the van door and waves goodbye to her mom.

As the van pulls away and disappears around a turn up the street, the girl’s mother allows herself to slump against the door frame for just a moment.  She lets go of a long sigh that betrays just how tired she is.  She almost doesn’t notice me as I approach her door to introduce myself.

 

I ask her how she’s doing.  I tell her I’m out in the community tonight to gather support for public education in Pennsylvania.  Even if you don’t live here, you probably know the story.  New Republican governor and legislature.  Big budget cuts.  Plans to slash a billion dollars from education.  Tuition increases at state universities of up to 40%.  A voucher plan that will further gut public schools.  I don’t have to tell this young mother.

“I know,” she says.  She glances in the direction of the van’s departure.  ”My daughter does gymnastics after school.  Loves it.  They told us they’ll probably have to cut back next year.”  She pauses a moment, perhaps considering just what that means.  ”I can’t afford to send her to a private dance studio.  What’s she going to think when I tell her she just has to quit?  What are any of our kids going to do after school when they cut all these programs?”

There’s not a lot I can say.  I mostly listen.  I can tell there’s another question she’s probably too proud to ask, which is, “What am I going to do when there’s no more gymnastics class?”  She works all day.  She obviously came home and made sure her daughter had dinner and did her homework and had everything ready for gym.  The long sigh as the van pulled away and the moment she allowed herself to rest against the door frame both pointed to this being the first moment she’d had to herself all day.  I feel bad for interrupting it.

But she is more than eager to help.  She signs up to become a member of our fight for Pennsylvania’s public schools.  She writes out a letter by hand telling her state senator what she had just finished telling me.  She asks him what she’s supposed to tell her daughter when she can’t send her to gymnastics anymore.

And then she thanks me.  Wishes me luck.  I can only thank her and tell her we’ll be doing all we can to make sure that’s a question she never has to answer.

As I walk away, I wonder if “all we can” will be enough and if it will be in time for this proud, tired woman and her energetic, hopeful little girl.

This is just one story that I have to share from my first week in training to be a field organizer for Working America.  If all goes well next week, I will be an official staff member after next Friday.  The office is an hour’s drive from where I’m currently living and I’ll probably have to move for the second time in a year to keep at it.  But the people I’ve met and the stories I’ve heard in just my first week of training have convinced me that it’s the absolute right decision.  I’ve spent too much time reading from books and pondering the possibilities.  It’s time to get on the ground and join in the fight.  And it’s a fight we absolutely have to win.

One street over from the mother and her little girl, I pass by building after building of empty apartments.  Many have huge padlocks on doors decorated with the faded, tattered remains once brightly-colored utility shut off warnings and notices.  Some of the windows are boarded up, but through the broken ones you can see the evidence of a place long abandoned.  Paint peeling off the walls.  Piles of trash on the floor.  A broken stair.  But this place was abandoned long before the apartments were empty.

I am surprised as the first door in a long time actually opens.  A middle-aged white woman tells me her story.

She’s about to lose her job.  Not because she’s lazy or incompetent or because she’s unwilling to work.  She’s about to loser her job because she can no longer get to work.  It’s not just education that’s being cut here.  They already cut back on mass transit.  This small, previously middle-class community no longer has bus service.

“I don’t have a car,” she says.  ”Always took the bus to work.”  She’s done things “the right way.”  She never asked for a government handout.  She worked at a low-wage job to support herself.  It was enough for a small apartment and to pay the bills, but it wasn’t enough to buy a car yet alone afford the state mandated insurance payments on one on top of it.  She’s been getting rides from friends or family when she can now, but she’s already missed work several times.  Now her boss is saying she’s “unreliable.”  She confesses she probably doesn’t have much time before she joins the ranks of the unemployed.

She, too, is very helpful.  She signs onto our fight for education and good jobs and quality healthcare, even though she says she doesn’t believe it will change anything.  She, too, writes a letter to her state senator.  She, too, thanks me before I can thank her.  

I’m touched as I walk away.  I know this is a battle we have to fight even if we lose.  I shudder at the thought of walking down this same street a month or a year from now and seeing a padlock on this woman’s door.

All night I walked up and down these streets that mark the front lines of the class war that America’s super-rich are waging against everyone else.  And these streets weren’t in some deep, dark inner city or a blighted urban area that’s been crumbling for decades.  These apartments weren’t government owned projects for people on government assistance.  This had been a community of mostly working people toward the lower end of the middle class.  You can tell that the apartments were nice once.  There’s a nice view of the Ohio River valley from many of the backyards.  These streets were nestled in the hilly terrain of the suburban community of Moon Township, Pennsylvania, seventeen miles outside of the city of Pittsburgh.

The Great Recession of 2007, caused by Wall Street greed and incompetence, devastated this one small section of Moon Township.  The GOP class war of 2011, with its gutting of public services and programs in order to pay for unending tax cuts for the rich, seems likely to finish it off.  And the forces of the plutocracy will push the battle lines into those parts of this suburban community that still seem solidly middle class.  In fact, they’re already there.  

A few nights later, in a neighborhood that consisted of streets lined with small suburban houses with well kept front yards and even tiny little back yards where neighbors still gather together on front porches or out on their lawns, one could see the planted battle flags of the plutocracy in the “for sale” and “foreclosure” signs stamped into the yards of houses that are now empty.  Fewer padlocks here, of course, and more spread out.  Perhaps I should have done an accurate statistical tally.  One in fifteen houses, maybe?  Perhaps on the way to one in ten?  After all, I talked with several people who had been laid off and were nearing the end of their unemployment benefits.  No new jobs to be found.  At least not jobs that could keep up with a house payment.  And no, we’re not talking about people who went out and bought McMansions with loans they could never have paid back.  We’re talking about very modest middle-class homes affordable on modest middle-class incomes.  We’re talking the stuff of the old American Dream.

These people in the middle are waking up.  Sure, there are some in those neighborhoods that have bought into the Fox News propaganda and seem intent on punishing themselves and their neighbors with brutal budget cuts that they feel they deserve for their laziness, all while worshiping the idle rich who dance across their television screens.  

But most people in these middle-class neighborhoods realize they are getting screwed by the big corporations and by, quite frankly, both political parties, even if the Republicans are worse.  They know for a fact that they’re not lazy, that they’ve worked hard, that they’ve done all the things that our capitalist system tells people they’re “supposed” to do.  And yet many are just barely hanging on for dear life.  Many are in danger of sliding down into those boarded up, vacant apartments just a mile or two away.  And they voiced their support for those of us going door to door fighting for a quality public  education for every Pennsylvanian.  Their own kids and grandkids will be the ones who suffer if we lose it.

Just a little further west, out in the hills, live the people who have fled these suburban, middle-class ghettos.  In isolated communities with names like “Whispering Woods” you find winding streets lined with huge cookie-cutter mansions.  It’s just a few miles from that neighborhood of abandoned apartments where you could film a post-apocalyptic movie without having to do much to dress the set.  But it’s an entirely different world.

People with BMW’s parked in their driveways and huge plasma TV’s complain that government spends too much money.  We all have to tighten our belts, they say.  My kids go to private school.  Why should I have to pay for public education?  The unions have too much power.  Teachers are overpaid.  One person even went so far as to say, “Close the public schools.  They’re worthless.  The sooner we shut ‘em all down the better.”  We don’t sign things.  We’re Republicans.  We’re for budget cuts and lower taxes.  The government takes so much money from me that I can only afford three BMW’s instead of four.

Okay, I added that last one myself.

Not everyone who lives in a McMansion is a bad person, mind you.  Even here, people with a heart and a conscience still believe in the American creed that all people are created equal and deserve every opportunity to pursue life, liberty and happiness.  Even here, you find people laid off from high-wage, high-tech jobs who see the writing on the wall–how long will it be until the foreclosure notices and padlocks come to this neighborhood as well?  People with a heart and a conscience and a broader view of the world realize how fortunate they are to be in such a position and will still reach out a hand to those struggling to get by.

But what of those others?  If I could take one of them by the hand and walk up and down Juniper Street and Delaware Avenue where I began this diary, would they see?  Would they care?  Would they still be able to live it up off the wealth that has been raided and plundered from such places?  Would they really still demand tens of thousands of dollars more in tax cuts if they were the ones who had to tell a little girl she had to give up gymnastics?  Would they still demand drastic budget cuts if they had to tell that quickly aging single woman to walk five or ten miles to work alone?

I do not believe that all wealthy Americans are so callous or so cold.  While some of them blame the poor for their own plight by labeling them “lazy” or “stupid,” I would never make the claim that all of America’s rich are “evil” or “cruel.”  Certainly there are some who fit into those categories, and sadly, they are the ones who are leading the class war assault on the middle and working classes.  But they can only succeed so long as they mislead others into their cause.

And here I think the real problem is that the rich and the poor live in different worlds.  Even within one suburban community like Moon Township, this is the case. There’s only one road leading out to the world of abandoned, padlocked apartments.  There are only two leading into Whispering Woods.  And now there are no bus stops in either.  When will these people ever see each other face to face?

It’s our job to make the introductions.  It’s our job to stand up and fight.  It’s our job to head to the front lines and build support.  It’s our job to bring communities back together again.  It’s our job to take up a pen as a sword and a clipboard as a shield and to hold the line.

It’s our job to tell a little girl she can still take gymnastics.”

RACISM AND CLASS WARFARE ‘CANONS’ FOR THE PAST HALF CENTURY ARE THE WEAPONS OF POLICAL WAR THE AMERICAN LEFT HAS EXCUSIVELY WAGED AGAINST ALL OF AMERICAN SOCIETY.    DEMOCRATIC PARTY INTERFERENCE IN THE HOUSING MARKET WAS THE HOME BASE REASON GREED IN WASHINGTON WENT OUT OF CONTROL WHEN THE LEFTIES THREATENED CIVIL RIGHTS LEGAL ACTION AGAINST BANKS DEMANDING  THEY GIVE BLACKS MORTGAGES FOR HOMES REGARDLESS OF THEIR INABILITIY TO PAY BACK THE LOANS.

LYING IS A MARXIST’S WAY OF LIFE ON THE ROAD TO GAIN ABSOLUTE POWER.   TRUTH IS ONLY A MATTER OF OPINION……MORTGAGE LAWS ARE WHITE MAN’S LAWS…..SO SAYS THE RACIST LEFT.   BLACKS SHOULD HAVE TO PAY BACK LOANS.

 

Another View on The Washington War Winner

Who won the budget fight?

 by Ed Morrissey     at HotAir

“As everyone knows by now, the Great Government Shutdown of 2011 has been called off … or at least postponed.  Republicans finished what the Democrats wouldn’t by clinching a budget deal late last night, finishing up the FY2011 budget with a total reduction in spending of $49 billion:

Under the terms of the agreement, the six-month bill will slash $38.5 billion from current spending levels, which is $23 billion less than the reductions Republicans originally demanded but $30 billion more than what Democrats had initially offered to cut.

President Obama praised the budget compromise and the prevention of a shutdown. He warned the cuts would affect services and infrastructure work, even as he acknowledged the need for spending reductions. “I would not have made these cuts in better circumstances,” Obama said.

The bill does not include a Republican provision to de-fund Planned Parenthood, which provides health care services for women, including abortion. The Planned Parenthood provision was one of the main sticking points during the negotiations, with the GOP insisting it remain in the bill.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, agreed to remove the Planned Parenthood provision in exchange for an agreement that would allow Congress to take up the funding issue separately.The Republicans also won inclusion of a provision that will require the Senate to vote on a bill to de-fund the health care reform law.

Another provision won by Republicans would prohibit the District of Columbia from spending local or federal funds on abortion services.

This looks less like a victory for either side and more of a five-month truce.  The fight to cut just a tiny slice of the overall budget took months to resolve, and all of these issue will arise again in September when Congress has to pass the FY2012 budget.  Don’t expect the fight to get any easier, at least not on discretionary spending.

But that’s not the big problem anyway.  The big problem in the budget is entitlement spending, which will require months to review for reform.  The only proposal on the table for that at the moment is Ryan’s plan.  The other option would be to consider the Bowles-Simpson plan, but since Bowles and Simpson both gave at least praise for Ryan’s proposal, Ryan has the momentum.  Now, with FY2011 off the table, the House can move forward on serious entitlement reform that will give an actual opportunity to get significant reductions to the deficit and start us on the path of fiscal sanity.

We’ll see who won in September, but Republicans have achieved one major accomplishment.  Not only did they force the first actual reductions in government spending in ages, but they have changed the political paradigm from whether to cut to how much and where to cut.  That’s a pretty impressive victory for a party that only controls one chamber of Congress.

Update: One last point along these lines.  Democrats have spent the last four months arguing that Republicans were too radical to govern and wanted to destroy government.  Instead, Republicans fashioned a deal on their own terms and passed a budget deal — something Democrats couldn’t or wouldn’t do when they had all the power in DC.  This gives the GOP a lot of credibility on leadership and governance, and all of it at the expense of Harry Reid and Barack Obama.”

Who Won the Washington DC WAR?

John Hinderaker of PowerLine gives us his views of the conclusion of last night’s final powwow of Obama and Reid against John Boehner.   I haven’t had a chance to get a good listing of the warring parties’  claims.   But I begin depressed because I have heard NPR is still on the govenment dole.

I used to teach Senior High School “Modern Problems” classes and have not forgotten a primary requirement toward the success of any democratic society to remain democratic……COMPROMISE.

COMPROMISE  has become a dirty word among conservatives, especially from the Tea Party folks.  

From a conservative viewpoint there is good reason…..Republicans never hold up their part of the compromise bargain……always playing to some degree the lovey-touchy games of tootsie with the Marxist oriented, university and press controlling, Progressives, but not quite yet, Marxists  of the Democrat Party post Vietnam War. 

Marxists such as Obama, Bill Ayers, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Dick Durbin, Charlie Schumer, Gerry Nadler, and so on, and the Marxist Judges, Sotomayor, Ginsberg, and Kagan would never have come out of their closets if Republicans had educated the voting public of the true battle between Left and Right in America:  Marxism against Free Exp;ression and Enterprise. 

They say John Boehner did well.   Here’s an example from PowerLine:

“I think Politico has it about right: John Boehner and the Republicans did well to negotiate the deal they finally agreed to:

His colleagues stood and cheered at his announcement of a deal, knowing Boehner secured more than $38.5 billion in cuts, a far higher figure than many of them expected just days before. …

In a larger sense, Boehner has achieved more than just a short-term budget victory — in his first three months as speaker, he’s helped turn the entire Washington dialogue into a debate about the size and scope of government. He started the year by getting rid of earmarks, he’s pushing through some of the deepest spending cuts in American history, and he’ll now try to get most of the GOP Conference on board with Rep. Paul Ryan’s fiscal 2012 budget — one of the most audacious long-term spending plans in recent memory. …

Controversial policy riders covering Planned Parenthood and EPA climate change regulations had threatened to sink the whole, multi-tiered agreement, but Boehner was able to shift that battle over to the Senate. Planned Parenthood funding will be debated and voted on in the Senate, as will the repeal of the massive 2010 health care reform package passed by Reid and then Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

In addition, “numerous studies” of the health care bill will be ordered, the results of which could provide the GOP with juicy political ammo heading into next year’s elections. The District of Columbia will be blocked from using federal funds to pay for abortions, while the IRS will be barred from hiring additional agents. Yearly audits will be conducted by the Government Accountability Office and private industry on the impact of last year’s financial services reform package as well, a major plus for Wall Street and the banking industry.

Boehner even took care of a pet project of his own — federal funding for vouchers for D.C. public school students. …

In the end, Boehner got far more than he gave up, and far more than Obama, Reid and the Democrats were initially willing to offer. It sets the stage for a stronger hand for Boehner as he enters politically perilous fights to raise the debt ceiling and pass 2012 spending bills.

I think that is correct. The fight over FY 2011 spending was really an afterthought, driven by the fact that the Democrats never got around to passing a budget last year. The real battles will come this summer, first over legislation to raise the debt ceiling, which can’t be avoided; then, perhaps, over the FY 2012 budget, although the Democrats might try to dodge that fight by, once again, refusing to adopt a budget at all.

Michael Ramirez is right, of course, that the cuts just agreed upon are only a small down payment on what needs to be done:

But entitlements, where the real battleground lies, were not on the table in the continuing resolution. That battle remains to be fought, and it will begin with Republicans enjoying significant momentum from their success last night.”

---

Mark Steyn: Ending America As We Know It…..National Review Online

Ending America as We Know It
The Democrats’ solution to the problem is to deny there is one.

Hey, it’s the weekend, and everyone’s singing the same maddeningly catchy refrain! Rebecca Black’s “Friday”? Nah, that was last week’s moronic singalong. This week’s is even perkier! “Paul Ryan proposes to end Medicare as we know it,” sings former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta. “It would end Medicare as we know it,” sings Sen. Max Baucus of Montana. “It’s going to end Medicare as we know it,” sings Nadeam Elshami, communications director for Nancy Pelosi. “It does end Medicare as we know it,” sings Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa. I drove all night to watch Paul Ryan e-e-end Me-edi-ica-a-are as we-e kno-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-w it, sing all 24 semi-finalists on the Céline Dion round of “American Idol.”

Sadly, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, incoming chair of the Democratic National Committee, lost the sheet music and was forced to improvise. “This plan would literally be a death trap for seniors,” she ululated. Close enough!

Ending Medicare as we know it? Say it ain’t so! Medicare, we hardly knew ye! It’s an open question whether Americans will fall for one more chorus of the same old song from Baucus, Harkin, Podesta, and the other members of America’s wrinkliest boy band. But, if this is the level on which the feckless patronizing spendaholics of the permanent governing class want to conduct the debate, bring it on: 

Paul Ryan’s plan would “end Medicare as we know it.”

The Democrats’ “plan” — business as usual — will end America as we know it.

Literally, as Representative Wasserman-Schultz would say. One way or another, Medicare as we know it is going to end. So, if you think an unsustainable 1960s welfare program is as permanent a feature as the earth and sky, you’re in for a shock. It’s just a question of whether, after the shock, what’s left looks like Japan or looks like Haiti.

My comrade Jonah Goldberg compares America’s present situation to that of a plane with one engine out belching smoke. But, if anything, he understates the crisis. Air America doesn’t need a busted engine, because it’s pre-programmed to crash. Our biggest problem is Medicare and other “entitlements”: They’re the automatic pilot of Big Government. Whoever’s in the captain’s seat makes no difference: The flight is pre-programmed to hit the iceberg, if you’ll forgive me switching mass-transit metaphors in mid-stream.

For some reason, Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Harkin, & Co. don’t seem to mind this. If you recall the smile on the face of Airplane!’s “automatic pilot” as he’s being inflated, that’s pretty much the Democrats’ attitude to binge spending as a permanent fact of life.

For a sense of Democrat insouciance to American decline, let us turn to the president himself. The other day, Barack Obama was in the oddly apt town of Fairless Hills, Pa., at what the White House billed as one of those ersatz “town hall” discussions into which republican government has degenerated. He was asked a question by a citizen of the United States. The cost of a gallon of gas has doubled on Obama’s watch, and this gentleman asked, “Is there a chance of the price being lowered again?”

As the Associated Press reported it, the president responded “laughingly”: “I know some of these big guys, they’re all still driving their big SUVs. You know, they got their big monster trucks and everything. . . . If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting eight miles a gallon — (laughter) . . . ”

That’s how the official White House transcript reported it: Laughter. Big yuks. “So, like I said, if you’re getting eight miles a gallon you may want to think about a trade-in. You can get a great deal.”

Hey, thanks! You’ve been a great audience. I’ll be here all year. Don’t forget to tip your Democrat hat-check girl on the way out: At four bucks a gallon, it’s getting harder for volunteers to drive elderly voters from the cemetery to the polling station. Relax, I’m just jerking your crank, buddy! And it’s not four bucks per, it’s only three-ninety-eight. That’s change you can believe in!

Message: It’s your fault. The same day as the president was doing his moribund-economy shtick, my hairdresser told me that she’d bought her mid-size sedan second-hand in 2004. She’d also like to ask the president if there’s a chance of gas prices being lowered again. But he’d have the same answer: Buy a hybrid. Wait till the high-speed rail-link is built between Dead Skunk Junction and Hickburg Falls. Climb into the fishnets and the come-hither smile and hitch.

America, 2011: A man gets driven in a motorcade to sneer at a man who has to drive himself to work. A guy who has never generated a dime of wealth, never had to make payroll, never worked at any job other than his own tireless self-promotion literally cannot comprehend that out there beyond the far fringes of the motorcade outriders are people who drive a long distance to jobs whose economic viability is greatly diminished when getting there costs twice as much as the buck-eighty-per-gallon it cost back at the dawn of the Hopeychangey Era.

So what? Your fault. Should have gone to Columbia and Harvard and become a community organizer.

Another ten years of this, and large tracts of America will be Third World. Not Somalia-scale Third World, but certainly the more decrepit parts of Latin America. There will still be men with motorcades, but they’ll have heavier security and the compounds they shuttle between will be more heavily protected. For them and their cronies, the guys plugged in, the guys who still know who to call to figure out a workaround through the bureaucratic sclerosis, life will be manageable, and they’ll still be wondering why you loser schlubs are forever whining about gas prices, and electricity prices, and food prices. 

What’s about to hit America is not a “shock.” It’s not an earthquake, it’s not a tsunami, it’s what Paul Ryan calls “the most predictable crisis in the history of our country.” It has one cause: spending. The spending of the class that laughs at the class that drives to work to maintain President Obama, Senator Reid, Senator Baucus, Senator Harkin, and Minority Leader Pelosi’s “communications director” in their comforts and complacency.

The Democrats’ solution to the problem is to deny there is one. Unsustainable binge spending is, as the computer wallahs say, not a bug but a feature: We’ll stimulate the economy with a stimulus grant for a Stimulus Grant-Writing Community Outreach Permit Coordinator regulated by the Federal Department of Community-Organizer Grant Applications. What’s to worry about?

I said the Democrats’ plan is to “end America as we know it,” but even that has been outsourced to others. The choice is between letting Paul Ryan end Medicare as we know it, or letting our foreign lenders determine the moment to end America as we know it. I would not presume to know Chinese or Russian or Saudi or even European inclinations in this respect, although certain shifts in the ratio between short-term and long-term debt holdings suggest foreign governments give more thought to the implications of U.S. government spending than the U.S. government does. But I do know their interests are not ours, and that there will come a day when Beijing and others, in the words of King Barack to his lowly subject, “may want to think about a trade-in.”

Now there’s a slogan for 2012.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist.

A List of Obama Accomplishments

California friend, Lisa Rich, sent me the following list of accomplishments of Barack Hussein Obama when compared to Number 43:

As the Presidential campaign season begins, it is important to reflect on President Obama accomplishments after his first two years. Rather than rehash all his achievements and failures, a simple chart can be more effective in telling the story.

Compared to President Bush, President Obama’s annual budget deficit is 7.5 percentage points worse on average. Under Obama, average monthly unemployment is 4.1 percentage points higher than unemployment under President Bush. Average monthly housing starts are 66% lower under Obama. Average annual food stamp participation has increased 63% from 22.7 million to 37.0 million. In January 2001, when President Bush took office, the monthly participation rate was 17.2 million. By January 2011, food stamp particpation reached a high of 44.2 million under President Obama.

President Obama, the first American President to win a Nobel Peace Prize for “hope” rather than any substantive accomplishments, also added another conflict to the two he inherited from his predecessor.

Under President Obama, daily crude oil prices have been 41% higher on average and the average weekly retail gasoline price has been 25% higher than prices during the Bush administration.