Real Warnings and Revelations on Obama's "Phony" Scandal

On Thursday, CNN reported that nearly three dozen CIA agents were on the ground during the attacks at the Benghazi consulate on September 11, 2012. Additionally, the Obama administration is subjecting many of these individuals to very frequent polygraph tests (and changing Benghazi survivors' names). These revelations beg two questions. One--why is the Obama administration subjecting agents to what Jake Tapper's source is calling an "unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency's Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out" if this is simply a phony scandal? Of course, that is a rhetorical question. Second--why were so many CIA agents in Benghazi at the time?

On Thursday night, Virginia Congressman Frank Wolf indicated that the CIA was moving guns in Benghazi, per Breitbart News:

 “We’re getting calls from people who are close to people who were [in Benghazi at the time] that they were moving guns. So where are the guns?” asked Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), a sub-committee chairman of the Appropriations Committee. Wolf also wonders what Ambassador Chris Stevens was actually doing in Benghazi on that night. Stevens and three others were killed over the course of the attacks. 

“Are they in a warehouse somewhere? Some people say they moved on to Turkey and then from Turkey to Syria," Wolf told Breitbart News on Thursday. "Did they fall into the hands of some of the Jihadis?" 

"Nobody knows, so I think there are so many questions from the failure to respond to where the guns went,” he stated. 

Wolf is currently attempting to create a Select Committee to investigate the Benghazi attack by launching a discharge petition from committee. He needs 218 signatures to take the issue to a vote on the floor.

In January, Senator Rand Paul asked then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton if guns were being run to Turkey from Libya, which she did not answer, but deferred to the CIA (see the 2:17 mark):

 

 About that same time, the CIA denied that guns were being run from Libya through Turkey to Syria.

To look at this more completely, we must take a step back. It was an absolute failure of security to not have more protection at a consulate in an Islamist country on a date with such significance as September 11th, especially with the threats and violence that had already occurred in Libya in the previous months. Remember too that in August 2011, Gaddafi was overthrown. A dictator was defeated, and a country in a volatile region of the world was even more unstable. When that happened, Governor Palin warned (emphasis added):

Finally, we must make sure that terrorist groups don’t try to co-opt the revolution, as Al Qaeda is trying to do in Syria. We should continue to use our intelligence assets to monitor the situation in Libya to ensure that potentially dangerous weapons are secured, and that terrorist organizations such as Al Qaeda don’t gain a foothold in Libya.

What ultimately has happened? Essentially the very thing Governor Palin warned against. While Governor Palin was likely referring to securing Gaddafi's stockpiles of weapons, arms still ultimately transferred to dangerous hands.  Al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks on Benghazi consulate, and weapons were being run (and continue to be transferred through other countries), likely to Syria, to arm Al Qaeda linked rebels.

The President has often touted that bin Laden is dead and that al Qaeda is decimated.  He has cheered the death of Gaddafi. While these three things help rid the world of evil, only two of them are true. Al Qaeda seems to still be very much active. On Friday, the State Department issued worldwide travel warnings for the entire month of August because of al Qaeda threats. US Embassies are closed this Sunday (President Obama's birthday) throughout the world including places like Iraq and Egypt.If a terror network was truly decimated, there would be no need to take caution over their threats.

It is phony reasoning to suggest that the death of two evil men means the death of an entire network of evil. It is phony leadership to not heed real warnings of the potential for evil and to intimidate those who were survivors of such evil by subjecting them to polygraph tests in an attempt to silence them. The only ones who should be subjected to such tests are those who claim the death of four brave Americans is solely a "phony scandal".

 Crossposted here and here.

State of the Union: Incestuous Business Partnerships and Forced State Partnerships

Following President Obama's State of the Union address earlier this week, Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Rand Paul gave Republican and Tea Party rebuttals respectively. Both of them spoke on important points like outrageous spending, high taxes, and the need for choice in education. Senator Paul rightly highlighted both the GOP's complicity in big spending and the President's wrong stances on civil liberties and foreign policy while Senator Rubio barely touched these issues. However,there were two very big issues that the two Senators either insufficiently discussed or did not discuss at all--corporatism and federalism.

True to form, during his State of the Union address, President Obama railed against corporate tax loopholes and deductions for the well connected, proving later in his speech that this was only talk. As Veronique de Rugy noted at the National Review, President Obama later called for special incentives and tax breaks for certain industries and sectors of his own choosing--manufacturing, clean energy, infrastructure and construction, housing, science and innovation, and education suppliers among others. Sadly, as Tim Carney at the Washington Examiner notes, neither Senator challenged the President on this sufficiently nor offered alternative solutions:

But Rubio didn't make a full-throated case for free-market populism. Like Obama, he relied on his party's well-thumbed playbook: He pinned the housing bubble on government, and took another shot at the failed green-energy subsidy-suckler, Solyndra. Then he called vaguely for shrinking government. 

Rubio could have, instead, offered some real free-market populist ideas. To cut the deficit, for instance, he could have proposed ending specific corporate-welfare programs. He could have made it clear he wants to cut subsidies to both Big Oil and Big Green. And why not offer something tangible to the average family, like cutting the payroll tax? 

Rand Paul, giving the Tea Party response, hit the right notes a bit stronger. Paul tapped into the near-universal understanding that politics is a rigged game when he assailed "backroom deals in which everyone up here wins, but every taxpayer loses." 

Paul said, "We must continue to object when Congress sticks special interest riders on bills in the dead of night." 

Again, Paul's economic proposals were typical GOP fare: a balanced-budget, for instance. He never gave bolder proposals -- say, breaking up big banks to protect taxpayers from bailouts.

Perhaps one of those two Senators could have said something like this:

[W]e can and we will make America the most attractive country on earth to do business in. Here’s how we’re going to do this. Right now, we have the highest federal corporate income tax rate in the industrialized world. Did you know our rates are higher than China and communist Cuba? This doesn’t generate as much revenue as you would think, though, because many big corporations skirt federal taxes because they have the friends in D.C. who right the rules for the rest of us. This makes us less competitive and restrains our engine of prosperity. Heck, some businesses spend more time trying to figure out how to hide their profits than they do in generating more profits so that they can expand and hire more of us. So, to make America the most attractive and competitive place to do business, to set up shop here and hire people here, to attract capital from all over the globe that will lead to an explosion of growth, instead of chasing industry offshore, I propose to eliminate all federal corporate income tax. And hear me out on this. This is how we create millions of high-paying jobs. This is how we increase opportunity and prosperity for all. 

But here’s the best part: To balance out any loss of federal revenue from this tax cut, we eliminate corporate welfare and all the loopholes and we eliminate bailouts. This is how we break the back of crony capitalism because it feeds off corporate welfare, which is just socialism for the very rich. We can change all of that. The message then to job-creating corporations is: We’ll unshackle you from the world’s highest federal corporate income tax rate, but you will stand or fall on your own, just like all the rest of us out on main street.

This idea, proposed by Governor Sarah Palin in September of 2011, would prevent the selection of winners and losers and the "private-public partnership" touted by President Obama that only puts business in bed with government. Since this proposal eliminates corporate taxes, it would also provide push back to the President's continual false claim that tax breaks are given to companies who ship jobs overseas. This is claim President Obama made in his 2011 and 2012 State of the Union addresses, and it is false. As I wrote nearly a year ago :

 What President Obama calls a “tax break for outsourcing” is really no tax break at all. America has the highest corporate tax in the world. America's corporate tax rate is nearly three times that of the financially flailing Greece. Companies are not given a tax credit or subsidy specifically for outsourcing, but by outsourcing, their costs become lower as often the regulatory burden is smaller as are other costs. Additionally, American companies who have foreign subsidiaries pay taxes both to that foreign country and the US, and these companies pay taxes if those profits are repatriated.  

 As the Cato Institute notes “corporate income taxes are the most distortive, and hence the most harmful for economic growth.” Making America’s corporate tax rates competitive with the rest of the world will help drive jobs back to America, but the Obama administration has it backwards by suggesting the corporate tax reduction should follow companies “insourcing” jobs. Even in spite of the fact that President Obama’s deficit reduction commission proposed corporate tax reductions and that he himself discussed reductions in his 2011 State of the Union address, he has not made any concerted effort to reduce the corporate tax. In fact, his administration has even recently spoken of levying a “global minimum tax” to prevent American companies from “escaping doing their fair share” by outsourcing.

President Obama likes to play good cop to Big Business's bad cop--criticizing them in speeches only to give them special tax incentives and tax breaks. From a policy perspective, eliminating special tax breaks and at least lowering corporate taxes will allow businesses to create jobs and protect taxpayers from paying for special breaks to the President's cronies. From a political perspective, it means that the alternative concrete solutions are being offered, not just criticism of the opposing party.

In addition to discussing "private-public" partnerships, President Obama focused on state-federal "partnerships". In particular, states with the best "clean energy" proposal will get federal support and the federal government will work with states on providing Pre-K education. Senator Rubio mentioned briefly that states should have a role in Medicare, but neither Senator pushed back against the President's plans to push a federal government plan that would likely be an unfunded mandate for states. Maybe that is because it takes a governor to truly understand how the federal government stomps on federalism. Following the President's speech, Governor Sarah Palin tweeted:

Most things Obama talked about are handled better on the individual, local & state level. Growing our bankrupt fed govt is NOT the answer.
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) February 13, 2013

She would know. In 2009, President Obama signed into law the "stimulus" package, which Governor Palin fought against by vetoing large portions of the stimulus funding allocated to Alaska. She noted that such a plan didn't have strings attached to it--it had "debt-building, binding, controlling ropes" attached to it. Governors today are seeing the same thing with Obamacare. Many Republican governors have rejected state run Obamacare exchanges in part because, although federal dollars are allocated to setup the exchanges, states are required to fund the exchange beginning in 2015. Accepting the exchange turns into an unfunded mandate.

This is not to say that the federal government has no relationship to state government. One of the main reasons the Constitution succeeded where the Articles of Confederation failed in our nation's founding was because the federal government's role was ill-defined and weak in the Articles. However, the federal government needs to realize its minimal role at the state level.

Suffice it say, while these two Senators effectively hit on several important issues, they did not appropriately hit on the federal government's improper entanglement with both business (corporatism) and state governments (lack of federalism). The State of the Union is one of incestuous business partnerships between connected cronies and the federal government and the forced partnership between the federal government and the states and the federal government with the taxpayers paying the dowry.

Crossposted here and here.

New Year's Resolutions for the Permanent Political Class

Every year at this time, many of us make resolutions for the upcoming new year. We resolve to lose weight, quit smoking, exercise more, spend money more wisely, spend more time with our families etc. The common thread in all of these resolutions is that we are resolving to reform something about ourselves personally.  Meanwhile,when government sets out to reform something, it is very rarely a resolution to change something about themselves as elected officials. More often than not, their reforms are aimed about changing something about us "ordinary folks", our relationship to government, or how government spends our money. The word--reform--is generally just a euphemism for government expanding, liberty shrinking legislation. We hear of health reform, immigration reform, tax reform, entitlement reform and all kinds of other reforms, all aimed at changing us as individuals, as taxpayers, and/or as business owners. In essence, these reforms are all variations of "constituent reform". To be sure, much of this reform is needed, but most of the time, this is largely because of government mismanagement, (e.g. entitlement reform). Very rarely will government officials resolve to reform anything about themselves as a matter of policy or legislation.

We only need to look to the news of this past week to see the lack of personal reform and the overwhelming projection of "constituent reform" in our governmental officials. Senator Diane Feinstein proposed a gun control bill that would ban many types of guns, including handguns while she works in a building protected by armed security. In other words, her legislation would enable her to remain protected while us "ordinary folks" would be limited in our methods of protection. In the midst of "fiscal cliff" discussions where President Obama urged Congress to act like "ordinary folks" who do their jobs and meet deadlines,  he issued an executive order that gave pay increases to Vice President Biden, Congress, and some federal workers. "Ordinary folks" don't give or receive even small pay increases during times tough fiscal times, but that was what President Obama did for politicians who are not doing their jobs. (Ironically, the details of this pay raise are found on a government website--www.opm.gov--OPM--other people's money) This kind of behavior is commonplace is government. Politicians create a different set of rules for themselves than they do for "ordinary folks"--be it in the right bear arms to protect one's family or in increases in their salaries while simultaneously discussing confiscating more money from our paychecks.

Very rarely are there politicians who seek to engage in political reform and promote a form of populism that views government largess and political privilege as the villain rather than business or the free market. Sarah Palin took a pay cut as mayor, rejected a pay raise as governor, passed ethics reform aimed at the legislature, executive branch and lobbying among a myriad of other policy reforms and personal populist decisions. Retiring Illinois Congressman  Tim Johnson was one of the first sponsors of the STOCK Act in 2006 aimed at making insider trading by Congress illegal, years before the practice was put under the spotlight by writer Peter Schweizer. Senator Rand Paul once returned half a million dollars in unspent funds (taxpayer money) budgeted for his office. These are a few examples and are all important steps indicating a broader vision about government's relationship to its constituents.

As part of that larger vision of government, I'd like to propose a few new year's resolutions for our government. First, reform yourselves. Don't require your constituents to live under regulations that you are exempt from or give yourselves special privileges that your constituents cannot access. Do your "fair share" (as much as I loathe that phrase) by refusing to accept a pay increase while inflation, tax increases, and regulation shrink the incomes of your constituents. Don't propose legislation without competitive bidding that only provides an avenue for cronyism, waste, and bloated contracts.  Stop giving subsidies, loans, grants, and special deals to your political donors. These are the kinds of political practice that have led to 5 of the 10 wealthiest counties being in the Washington DC metropolitan area.  Government can also take a cue from the resolutions set by us "ordinary folks"--lose weight. Our government is fiscally obese. Most proposed spending cuts are not actual cuts. When legislators propose slowing government spending rather than legitimately cutting it, it's essentially the same as if an "ordinary folk" resolved to gain less weight than last year, rather than resolving to actually losing weight. So, politicians, cut the crap, cut the fat, and sing Auld Lang Syne, just like us "ordinary folk" resolving to reform yourselves, not project reform on your constituents.

Crossposted here and here.

Subjects or Citizens-Revisited

Two years ago I wrote a post about an interesting revision Thomas Jefferson made when writing the Declaration of Independence:

A recent discovery by preservationists at the Library of Congress has shown an interesting piece of history within the one of the pivotal documents of America's founding. When Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence, it was organized into 5 parts:"the introduction, the preamble, the indictment of George III, the denunciation of the British people, and the conclusion." In the section indicting King George, Jefferson delineated a list of grievances that many colonists had against the King. One such indictment was of "treasonable insurrections". In the Declaration itself, here is how that section reads (note: original spelling is used):

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation. 

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. (emphasis mine)

However, as the preservationists have recently discovered through use of high tech devices, Jefferson had changed one word in that section in the transcription of this document that was truly indicative of how the Founders viewed the tyranny of King George. The workers at the Library of Congress discovered that although the document refers to "our fellow citizens" in the aforementioned section, Thomas Jefferson modified this section which originally referred to our fellow subjects. The Founders and early American patriots did not wish to be viewed as subjects to a King whom they had a long list of grievances against. They wished to be seen as citizens who had liberty, not subjects who were under tyranny. 

When we simply look at what distinguishes "subjects" from "citizens", we can see what a declaration of independence truly means. A citizen is one who is under the protection of a governing body, while a subject is one under the control of a governing body. Jefferson and the other Founders saw that, because of they had become subject to tyranny, forced to fight against their fellow citizens, obstructing justice, imposing taxes, and a whole slew of other injustices and constraints to liberty, they had been relegated to subjects, and that in order to seen as they truly were, citizens, Jefferson and the other signers of the document needed to declare their independence.

As we draw closer to Independence Day 2012, a lot of parallels can be seen between what the colonists faced and what we face today. This is not verbal histrionics; it is the truth. We may not have a king, but we have a government that seems to ignore the very freedoms protected in the Constitution that they swore an oath to uphold.  Furthermore, this government so frequently ignores the limits to their power clearly outlined in the Constitution. Two major examples of this have occurred just last month when the both the executive and judicial branches legislating from outside of the legislature. President Obama issued an executive order which would prevent deportation of illegal immigrants under the age of 30, circumventing both houses of Congress. The Supreme Court declared the individual mandate in Obamacare a tax, essential rewriting the law.

With last week's disheartening and unprincipled decision by the Supreme Court upholding Obamacare, Senator Rand Paul wrote an excellent piece at the National Review noting the dissenting opinion's reference to the Stamp Act--the Act King George III levied against the colonists that taxed every piece of paper used The Stamp Act was seen as the first direct tax on the colonists. Senator Paul goes on to note the who is most affected by the mandate/tax in Obamacare:

Obamacare has caused up to 20 million Americans to lose their health-insurance policies. And, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the health-care-reform law will destroy 800,000 jobs. An analysis from the Joint Committee on Taxation from November 2009 shows that in 2016, three-quarters of the tax imposed by the individual mandate will fall on those making less than $120,000 of income for a family of four or $59,000 for an individual. Families of four making $72,000 or less and individuals making $35,400 or less will bear nearly half of the mandate tax.

Despite Obama's promise in 2008 to not raise taxes on those who make less than $250,000, with this legislation continues another broken promise. In fact, the first tax increase President Obama implemented was an increase in cigarette taxes, which are seen as a mostly regressive tax. Suffice it to say, taxes have increased under the president, and not just for the rich.

Whether or not it is the aforementioned tax increases, impinging upon religious freedoms, or hypocrisy on healthy eating or fossil fuel use, President Obama is in many ways behaving as if the American people are his subjects and he is a king. Our battle today is not one of bayonets and cannons, as it was when the colonist revolted against King George III, but our battle is one of ballot boxes and conversation. With the upcoming elections, there is much to do--replacing President Obama is of course important, but that's only one piece of the reform puzzle. It is important that the majority in the House is not only maintained, but that those re-elected and first elected are serious about repeal. Additionally, winning the Senate is imperative as well. With the desire for repeal of Obamacare, the Senate plays a key role, as with the Supreme Court ruling of the law as a tax, it requires only a simple majority in the reconciliation process for the law to be repealed. The beauty of our Constitutional Republic is that we have the opportunity to vote if we will be controlled as subjects or protected as citizens. Let's not take that freedom for granted.

Crossposted here and here.