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U.S. More Conservative Than Obama's 2008 Win Suggests
Tweet Share on Facebook August 18, 2009 Comment (4)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Liberal glee over Barack Obama's election was accompanied in some quarters by smart people who claim to know something about U.S. politics engaged in a smug, even triumphal dance of joy over the defeat of American conservatism.
Gary Kamiya, the executive editor of Salon.com, equated the voters to "dogs" and conservative policy proscriptions to "dog food" when he wrote in a post-election essay that "The painful truth for conservatives is that the dogs aren't eating their dog food—and every national trend indicates that they will never eat it again."
Explaining that the ouster of conservatives from Washington "has been a long time coming," Kamiya opined that the road ahead for the Republicans presented "a wrenching choice: remain true to its increasingly irrelevant and rejected ideology and fade into political insignificance, or remake itself as essentially a more moderate version of the Democratic Party."
What a difference six months make.
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Poll Finds Voters Against Obamacare, as Trust in Democrats Drops
Tweet Share on Facebook August 14, 2009 Comment (28)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
The summer congressional recess brings with it a bit of good news for the GOP. Pollster Scott Rasmussen reports that, "for the first time in over two years of polling, voters trust Republicans slightly more than Democrats on the handling of the issue of healthcare," 44 percent to 41 percent.
For a party that was considered in many quarters to be irrelevant after the November 2008 election, and given the full court press in which the White House and its allies are currently engaged, the shift is nothing less than amazing.
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Score One for Sarah Palin on the Healthcare Reform Death Panels
Tweet Share on Facebook August 13, 2009 Comment (158)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
In what can fairly be described as an admission that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin knew what she was talking about, the Senate Finance Committee Thursday dropped language from its bipartisan healthcare reform package that Palin and others had suggested would eventually lead to mandated end-of-life counseling sessions for seniors.
Supporters of Obamacare, including President Barack Obama, had accused Palin and others of being dishonest in suggesting the counseling sessions would somehow lead to the government encouraging euthanasia as a cost-cutting measure as part of rationed care.
"The rumor that's been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for death panels that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we've decided that we don't, it's too expensive to let her live anymore," Obama said recently.
"It turns out that I guess this arose out of a provision in one of the House bills that allowed Medicare to reimburse people for consultations about end-of-life care, setting up living wills, the availability of hospice, etc.," he said, adding, "The intention of the members of Congress was to give people more information so that they could handle issues of end-of-life care when they're ready on their own terms. It wasn't forcing anybody to do anything."
The move to drop the end-of-life counseling provisions, as reported by The Hill, suggests otherwise.
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Burden of Big Government Taxes and Regulation Skyrockets in 2009
Tweet Share on Facebook August 13, 2009 Comment (6)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
No one really knows how much the government in the United States really costs. Politicians and activists alike have a lot to say about taxation and spending, about how much things cost and, as currently the case in the debate over the Obama administration's effort to put more government in the healthcare system, about how much more expensive they are likely to get. But that is only part of the equation.
The truth is that no one really knows how much the level of government we have in the United States, in precise, absolute terms, costs the American taxpayers each day or even each year.
One effort to get to inside the ballpark when it comes to fixing government's cost is produced by the Center for Fiscal Responsibility and the pro-taxpayer Americans for Tax Reform Foundation, which each year calculate what they call "Cost of Government Day"—Cost of Government Day is the date of the calendar year on which the average American worker has earned enough in gross income to pay off his or her share of the spending and regulatory burden imposed by government at the federal, state, and local levels.
This year, in 2009, Cost of Government Day fell on August 12, 26 days later than in 2008, when it fell on July 16 and came later in the year than at anytime going back to 1977, the first year for which the date is calculated.
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'Nancy Pelosi's Air Force' Grounded by Fellow House Democrats
Tweet Share on Facebook August 12, 2009 Comment (11)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
It looks like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is going to have to fly commercial for a little while longer.
According to various news reports appearing throughout the day on Tuesday, House Democratic leaders have reversed themselves and will no longer seek to purchase three Gulfstream luxury business class passenger jets to be available for use by congressional lawmakers, including Speaker Pelosi, who has famously battled with the air force in previous years over aircraft made available to her.
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Democrats Flip Focus of Healthcare Debate, But It's Too Little, Too Late
Tweet Share on Facebook August 11, 2009 Comment (21)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
President Barack Obama got some much needed good news this week when the U.S. Department of Labor reported unemployment was down for the first time in more than a year.
The spike in joblessness had been in stark contrast in the vaunted rhetoric surrounding the stimulus package, which the White House promised would end the recession and put America back to work. If July 2009 unemployment figures are the beginning of a trend, then the stimulus may finally be working—albeit after a recession that lasted almost three times as long as the postwar average before the recovery started.
The president's popularity, which has plummeted from the unsustainable levels it reached as he came into office, remains near 50 percent—but his agenda is far less popular. Which is probably why, as part of the healthcare reboot triggered by the August congressional recess, the White House began taking about government-backed healthcare reform and the public option as an improvement over the service many Americans receive from their private insurance companies, which are about as popular as the IRS. By talking about something people don't like—having to deal with private insurance bureaucracies—rather than something they do like—like the healthcare their receive from their doctor and at their local hospital—the president's advisers are hoping to change the tone and focus of the debate.
It's a subtle shift, noticeable in the tone of the opening paragraph of an E-mail sent on "White House" letterhead by presidential adviser David Axelrod Sunday that began, "Anyone that's watched the news in the past few days knows that health insurance reform is a hot topic—and that rumors and scare tactics have only increased as more people engage with the issue. Given a lot of the outrageous claims floating around, it's time to make sure everyone knows the facts about the security and stability you get with health insurance reform."
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Surprise, Surprise … Ex-Lobbyist to Get Key Obama Administration Post
Tweet Share on Facebook August 10, 2009 Comment (9)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
Back when he was just a candidate for president, and before he knew how difficult running the country actually was, Barack Obama sought to distance himself from George W. Bush and John McCain by promising that America would not see any lobbyists working in his White House.
As talked about on the campaign trail by Obama, by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, and other leading Democrats, "lobbyist" was used as a code word for corruptor of innocent politicians, a person who perverts the democratic ideal and all around bad guy (or gal, as the case may be). And, having firmly established a connection between lobbyists, graft, and sundry political corruption, they were happy to beat the GOP about the head and neck on the subject for days and weeks at a time.
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Pelosi's Imperial Speakership: Gulfstream Jets for Her Congressional Air Force
Tweet Share on Facebook August 6, 2009 Comment (36)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California is letting her position go to her head. As the head of "the people's house," she is second in the line of presidential succession, behind only the vice president, in the event an unexpected vacancy opens up, midterm, inside the Oval Office. That no House Speaker has ascended to the presidency since James K. Polk did it in 1844 (having first been governor of Tennessee and then actually running for and winning the presidency in a national election) has apparently not escaped Pelosi's notice because she is creating around her all the trappings of an "imperial speakership."
By fiat, her minions are regulating—or at least attempting to regulate—what the opposition party may do, may say, and may communicate to their constituents. She has presided over the construction of a monumental edifice—the underground Capitol Visitor's Center, which—while admittedly started under the leadership of the GOP—ballooned into an over-budget, overdue, and overdone palace whose net effect is to keep the people separate from the legislators who put them in office.
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Government Study Shows Cap-and-Trade Will Raise Energy Prices
Tweet Share on Facebook August 5, 2009 Comment (10)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
U.S. Reps. Henry Waxman of California and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, two of the leading Democratic co-sponsors of H.R. 2454—the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, better known as the cap-and-trade bill—asked the United States Energy Information Administration to analyze their bill's impact on energy prices and the U.S. economy.
According to a draft of the report released Tuesday night that has already found its way into the media and is circulating through Washington, Waxman and Markey may now wish they hadn't.
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Obama Cannot Remain Silent About Pakistan Outrage
Tweet Share on Facebook August 4, 2009 Comment (15)By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog
It was something more than horrific to read in Monday's Times of London that paramilitary troops were on patrol in the streets of a town in eastern Pakistan after "Muslim radicals burnt to death eight members of a Christian family."
The Times' account of what happened reads like something one would hope would only have happened in an earlier time.
"Hundreds of armed supporters of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, an outlawed Islamic militant group, set alight dozens of Christian homes in Gojra town at the weekend after allegations that a copy of the Koran had been defiled," the paper said.
Peter Roff
Peter Roff is a contributing editor at U.S. News & World Report. Formerly a senior political writer for United Press International, he’s now affiliated with several public policy organizations including Let Freedom Ring, and Frontiers of Freedom. His writing has appeared in National Review, Fox News’ opinion section, The Daily Caller, Politico and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter @PeterRoff.
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