The politics of True Grit

One of the biggest issues of the day is what eye Rooster Cogburn covers up in True Grit. John Wayne covered his left eye in the original version, and Jeff Bridges in the remake covers his right eye. LOL.

AP: Baby boomers, who will be qualified for Medicare on January 1, worry that they will outlive Medicare. It is a very real worry. From the AP report:

"Here's the math: when the last of the boomers reaches age 65 in about two decades, Medicare will be covering more than 80 million people. At the same time, the ratio of workers paying taxes to support the program will have plunged from 3.5 for each person receiving benefits currently, to 2.3."

At that point in 2028, there is no way that Medicare can be like it is today. 

Culture wars truce

Michael Barone: "Even as economics is overshadowing all else, we seem to have reached a truce in the culture wars because important issues have been settled as a practical matter."

Tony Blankley has a good review of the lame-duck session and questions the popular view that it was an Obama win.

1. Obama capitulated to the Reagan view that tax cuts will stimulate the economy. That is supply-side economics.

2. The trillion-dollar spending bill with 6,000 earmarks was defeated.

3. The DREAM Act was defeated.

4. DADT repeal passed, but it is not an unqualified win for the President.

5. The Start Treaty passed but the major nuclear threats today are not Russia but Iran and North Korea.

More bad news for baby boomers: They haven't saved for their retirement. And starting in January more than 10,000 a day will turn 65, and that will continue for the next 19 years.

BlogProf: 60 percent of Americans want Obamacare repealed.

Robert Samuelson ponders the dilemma between the baby boomer generation, whose leading edge is now reaching retirement age, and the costs of Social Security, Medicare, etc.

TaxProf: Some states are taxing themselves to death. This is another way of summing up the recent census results. The states that lost seats had an average tax burden of $2,267 per capita, and the states that gained seats had an average tax burden of $1,788. 

New York Daily News: Working class white families are unraveling. This is Middle America we are talking about.

Looks like we're going to have death panels after all.

Michael Barone looks at Obama's chances in 2012 and finds them ok.

Commentary offers a good analysis of the history of Obamacare. Here is the conclusion:

Many Democrats are sure to keep telling themselves, as President Obama has, that “the outcome was a good one.” That conviction should comfort them as they continue to deal with the consequences arising from the intensity of the electorate’s rejection. The Pyrrhic victory Democrats secured for themselves in March 2010 may prove not to have been a victory at all but rather an ever-roiling, ongoing, and recurring act of political and ideological self-destruction.

In an article entitled "Taxes and the Top Percentile Myth," Alan Reynolds, indicates that taxes are more "progressively distributed" in the U.S. than in Sweden or France.

Taxation is a topic that becomes irrational when discussed by left-wing politicians and sociologists.

Brett Arends explains why he doesn't want an iPad for Christmas. And he's right.

Rasmussen: "The Tea Party movement was one of the biggest political stories during the 2010 election season. From an electoral standpoint, the grassroots movement had it first impact by forcing long-time Senator Arlen Specter out of the Republican Party (and eventually out of the U.S. Senate). By the end of the season, several Tea Party candidates such as Florida’s Marco Rubio and Kentucky’s Rand Paul were elected to the U.S. Senate."

Michael Barone: The recent census shows that states without an income tax have had the fastest growth.

Not surprising, but these states extract their tax coin some way or another. 

Dennis Prager tells us what men want. It didn't turn out to be so difficult after all.

Population changes

To me, the most interesting news lately has come from the census bureau. Our population is moving south and west. This is not news really, but the long-term trend is definitely unchanged. People are also moving to states with lower taxes and less government spending. They are voting with their feet. They are also moving to states that are more likely to have "Right to Work" laws. See here.

Talk Business: According to the new 2010 census Arkansas has almost 3 million people -- or 2,926,229. This is an increase of 9.1 percent from 2000. The U.S. population is over 300 million.

The political implications are enormous. The states that are set to gain representation tend to lean Republican. The states that will lose Congressional seats are typically Democrat. 

Christian Science Monitor: Why is crime down? There's nothing left worth stealing.

Rasmussen: "For the first time since Democrats in Congress passed the health care bill in March, a majority of U.S. voters believe the measure is likely to be repealed."

AP: Population shifts from Rust Belt states, which lean Democratic, to Sun Belt states, which tend to favor Republicans, will hurt Obama's chance for re-election.

Bruce Walker has a scathing article about Academia, as he calls it. I never liked the term, but I was out of sync with it when I was part of it. He has a lot of good quotes:

History departments for the last twenty years have been in utter denial regarding the Cold War (John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr have written an entire book about this subject). Soviet infiltration of America was worse than almost anyone had believed in the 1950s. The redundant, corroborating, incontestable evidence from Venona, KGB files, GRU files, and other sources is simply overwhelming. Yet academia still pretends that rogue anti-Communists during the 1950s savaged many innocent lives.

I recall clearly the left-leaning professors I took classes with. When I left that environment, I like others taught my students what I'd been taught. It takes a while to get you head clear and get out of that trap.

Since getting an iPhone about 6 months ago, I've been playing with apps. Why not? Here's one called Word Lens. The link says, "We know smartphones are becoming ubiquitous, and that they've already changed the world in small ways (pub quizzes, for one, just aren't the same any more), but Word Lens is one strong hint that the world as we know it is really, really changing. In the future, you may never again stare in confusion at a sign, menu or parking ticket in a foreign language. Our multi-lingual world just got the app it deserves"

Spanish is available.

Michael Barone on the consequences of the November 2010 elections:

It is a source of continuing fascination for me to watch the interaction between public opinion, as measured in polls and election results, and the actions of members of Congress, elected in one political environment and looking in most cases to be re-elected in one that may be quite different.
Eleven months ago, after the Massachusetts Senate election, I was convinced that Democrats could not jam their health care bill through because voters had so clearly demanded they not do so. But Pelosi proved more determined and resourceful than I had imagined, and found enough House Democrats who were willing to risk electoral defeat to achieve what Democrats proclaimed was an historic accomplishment.
Pelosi and Obama predicted that Obamacare would become more popular as voters learned more about it. Those predictions were based on the theory that in times of economic distress Americans would be more supportive of or amenable to big government policies.
That theory has been disproved about as conclusively as any theory can be in the real world, and most of the Democrats who provided the key votes for Obamacare were defeated on Election Day.
Democratic congressional leaders did take note of the unpopularity of their policies when they chose not to pass budget resolutions last spring. Presumably they did so because they would have had a hard time rounding up the votes for the high spending and large deficits that would have ensued.
But had the House and Senate passed a budget resolution, Democrats might have been able to pass their preferred tax policy, raising taxes on high earners, under the budget reconciliation process. So the House vote Thursday night was a delayed consequence of the public's long-apparent rejection of their policies.
Candidate Obama told Joe the Plumber that he wanted to "spread the wealth around." November's vote, presaged by more than a year of polls, was, as political scientist James Ceasar has written, "the Great Repudiation" of that policy.
Republicans, having succeeded in holding down tax rates, clearly have a mandate to hack away at spending and to defund and derail Obamacare, which is at or near new lows in the ABC/Washington Post and Rasmussen polls. And there does seem an opening, as Clinton White House staffer William Galston argues, for a 1986-style tax reform that eliminates tax preferences and cuts tax rates.
How effectively the 112th Congress will respond is unclear. But the outgoing 111th Congress, despite its big Democratic majorities, responded pretty clearly Thursday night.

The Economist: Why getting a PhD is often a waste of time.

This island could be where Amelia Earhart died.

Larry Kudlow on the tea party movement and Reaganomics.

Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor has voted against the Dream Act.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride" was published 150 years ago today. 

John J. Miller gives the poem's background.

NY Post: What derailed the Democrats? Obamacare.

FDIC seized First Southern Bank of Batesville, Arkansas.
So far 157 banks around the country closed this year because of the economy and bad loans.

What does the new tax law mean for you?

An ancient Roman statue has been uncovered by a storm on the coast of Israel.

ABC: A loaded Glock handgun slipped through TSA screeners. Should make you feel better.

Breitbart: Harry Reid pulls the $1.3T spending bill full of earmarks. The GOP finally stood up against the spending that it has been complicit in.

The Congress sent the tax compromise legislation to the White House.

Happy Anniversary to the Tea Party, 1773.

Krauthammer warns that a government shutdown would hurt Republicans.

Michael Vick wants to get another dog. What could go wrong with that?

See Ann Althouse's readers' comments.

According to the Gallup Poll, Congress has an approval rating of only 13 percent, the lowest since Gallup starting collecting this data in 1974. Congress' disapproval rating is a whopping 83 percent. Why don't they just go home?!

AP: IRS has increased its auditing budget and put it to work, jumping audits by 11 percent. Look out if you are wealthy or a big business.

Popular Mechanics reviews the 2011 Ford Explorer. They like it. Ford has come through with some hits lately. Today I saw a Ford Edge on the highway. Looked nice.

"Fixing" Obamacare

Merrill Matthews on the constitutional challenge to Obamacare:

While we don’t know where this will all end up, here’s a pretty good bet: Most or all of ObamaCare will be neutered, (1) by judges or the Supreme Court, or (2) by states that refuse to accept the law or try to bypass it, or (3) by members of Congress who are listening to the public.
The president would do himself and the country a great favor if he took a lesson from his new-found willingness to work with Republicans on the Bush tax cuts: Negotiate a bipartisan solution to our health insurance challenges and end the ObamaCare madness.

What can't the govt force you to do?

Megan McArdle: "On a reading of the commerce clause that allows the government to force you to buy [health] insurance from a private company, what can't the government force you to do?

This doesn't seem to be a question that interests progressives; they just aren't very excited about economic liberty beyond maybe the freedom to operate a food truck.  And so they seem genuinely bewildered by a reading of the commerce clause that narrows its scope, or an attempt to overturn the mandate even though this might lead us into a single payer system.  If you view this solely as tactical maneuvering, perhaps it really is preposterous."

Support for Obamacare has fallen again, hitting a new low.
Sixty percent favor repealing it, according to Rasmussen. 

The individual right to choose

AP: A federal judge has rule that the central provision of Obamacare is unconstitutional. The requirement for all Americans to carry health-care insurance goes well beyond Congress' power under the Commerce Clause.

The WSJ says:

In a 42-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson said the law's requirement that most Americans carry insurance or pay a penalty "exceeds the constitutional boundaries of congressional power."
The individual mandate "would invite unbridled exercise of federal police powers," wrote Judge Hudson, of the Eastern District of Virginia. "At its core, this dispute is not simply about regulating the business of insurance—or crafting a scheme of universal health insurance coverage—it's about an individual's right to choose to participate."

The Hill: House Democrats are absolutely fed up with Obama.

Michael Barone is as usual very perceptive.

The whole thrust of [Obama's] first two years -- the stimulus package, the health care legislation, the vast increases in government spending -- has been to put programs in place that have done little or nothing to stimulate economic growth.
That's not accidental. The template for the Obama Democrats' policies, the New Deal of the 1930s, was not designed to stimulate economic growth, but to freeze in place a tolerable but not dynamic status quo.
The New Deal's father, Franklin Roosevelt, believed that the era of economic growth was over, just as many contemporaries believed that technological progress was at an end (how far could you go beyond the radio and the refrigerator?). FDR, like his cousin Theodore, was an affluent heir who had contempt for men who built businesses and made money. They were "economic royalists" and "malefactors of great wealth" -- sentiments echoed by Obama last week.
The initial New Deal program, the National Recovery Act, set up 700-plus industry codes to hold up wages and prices. That made some sense in a time of deflationary downward spiral, but proved unsustainable over a longer term.
Later New Deal programs strengthened labor unions, in an attempt to protect current workers and freeze work rules in place -- which tended to block the flexible management practices that eventually gave a competitive edge to later foreign-based auto companies. New Deal transportation policy protected existing trucking firms from competition -- a policy overturned by the likes of Ralph Nader and Edward Kennedy in the 1970s.
High tax rates on high earners and continued uncertainty over increased regulation and unionization led to what economists called a capital strike. Job creation was dismal as the 1930s went on, and unemployment hovered over 10 percent until wartime mobilization began in the 1940s.

We have headed down the same dead end-path. I like Barone's point that the New Deal was not intended to expand the economy but to maintain the status quo. The view in the 30s was that we had maxed ourselves out, the frontier had closed, we had no where to go. Technology was the same way: we could never get beyond radios and refrigerators, lol.

16 Unexpected health and beauty benefits of sex.

Beltway Confidential cites a Rasmussen poll that shows that Washington insiders and Middle America are 180 degrees apart on what to do about the economy and the deficit.

Ann Althouse on Bill Clinton's upstaging of Obama. Bill Clinton is now president again! There is just no way to explain why either Clinton or Obama let this happen. See video.

Peggy Noonan: "We have not in our lifetimes seen a president in this position. He spent his first year losing the center, which elected him, and his second losing his base, which is supposed to provide his troops. There isn't much left to lose!"

Noonan was an Obama supporter in 2008. I don't understand why. 

Who will see patients in the Obamacare world? Forty percent of physicians plan to retire by 2014, and the other 60 percent will restrict the patients they will see in certain categories, like Medicare patients.

Physicians are not happy about Obamacare.

FoxNews: The hard drive may be on the way out. I'm surprised it has not already gone the way of 8-tracks. The future belongs to solid state drives. Or perhaps to cloud computing. But I just don't want to trust somebody else to keep my really important documents.

Joe Wilson said "You lie." Now a Dem says "Fuck the president." The speaker is not named but doesn't he deserve the same treatment as Joe got. See also here.

Mail: "'Off with their heads': How Charles and Camilla's car was surrounded by a baying mob calling for their execution." Pictures included.

John Stossel: Why do poor people remain poor? I used to hear this question discussed. It was colonialism, of course, left-wingers said. No, it's property rights. Private property!

Urban Meyer has resigned as head coach at Florida.

Sam "Bam" Cunningham recalls the game between USC and the last all-white Alabama team in 1970 at Birmingham. He ran for 135 years and two TDs on 12 carries. USC won 42-21.

According to this story, the legend about the locker room meeting after the game is not true. Bear Bryant supposedly introduced Cunningham to his team and said, "This is what a football player looks like." Bryant was planning to bring in black players and wanted to make a point to those who would oppose the move.

I think the story is so good it has to be true, lol.

Michael Barone on the tax cut controversy.

Obama had to abandon his goal of raising taxes on high earners not because Republicans opposed it but because not enough Democrats supported it. Pelosi couldn't summon up a majority on the issue back in September, and Harry Reid could get only 53 of the needed 60 votes this month.
Democrats, not Republicans, are responsible for extension of all the "Bush tax cuts."

This performance of the hallelujah chorus in a mall food court is inspiring and has been viewed over 13,250,000 times on youtube.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is giving up on the Obama presidency.

RealClearPolitics has this on the tax compromise: "It's the liberal version of George H.W. Bush reneging on his "read my lips" tax pledge. Candidate Obama excoriated the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. But Monday evening, President Obama tentatively agreed to extend those same tax cuts."

Taxprof has a roundup on the tax deal.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, on the tax deal. It's a tremendous Republican victory.

Today is Pearl Harbor Day, and the Pearl Harbor Survivor's Association is still in business. Hang in there, guys!

A deal on the tax cut has been worked out, but Democrats are as mad as hell. National Review has this comment.

"Dandy" Don Meredith has died at age 72.

Jennifer Rubin on what caused the tea party:

We make a mistake by labeling this a purely "economic agenda," however. What started the Tea Party? A CNBC host ranting that a responsible homeowner shouldn't pay his irresponsible neighbor's mortgage. In other words, underlying the Tea Party movement is a set of values -- thrift, delayed gratification, personal responsibility, etc. Those are not what we have come to identify as "social" issues, but these are not simply matters of dollars and cents.

The Dems and the GOP are talking about a deal to extend the Bush tax cuts for everyone temporarily and extend jobless benefits as well. That's good, but at some point we will have to face up to spending cuts for face disaster.

I hear more and more about the college education bubble. No doubt that much of what the critics of higher ed say is true. It seems like a lot of the critics are law school graduates.

Tiger Woods ends 2010 without a victory.

Here are some terrific images of storms photographed in Montana.

AP: "Obama has signaled that he will bow to Republican demands for extending tax cuts at all income levels, and his remarks capped a day that lurched between political conflict and talk of compromise on an issue that played a leading role in last month's elections."

My, my, imagine that. 

Popular Mechanics's 15 favorite MythBusters car myths. Fun stuff.

You've seen those Medicare ads with Andy Griffith? Here's the real story behind them. One quote:

“Would the sheriff of Mayberry mislead you about Medicare? Alas, yes. In a new TV spot from the Obama administration, actor Andy Griffith, famous for his 1960s portrayal of the top law enforcement official in the fictional town of Mayberry, N.C., touts benefits of the new health care law. Griffith tells his fellow senior citizens, ‘like always, we’ll have our guaranteed [Medicare] benefits.’ But the truth is that the new [Obamacare] law is guaranteed to result in benefit cuts for one class of Medicare beneficiaries — those in private Medicare Advantage plans.”

Mark Tapscott: Why is the economy not growing?

On every front, the federal government is creating more investment-killing tax uncertainty, issuing endless pages of new bureaucratic regulations on the economy, and preventing firms from taking actions that could create hundreds of thousands of new positions and kick-start a muscular recovery with real legs.

Popular Mechanics tells you how to beat customer service phone support. Information we need!

Mercatus Center: "In recent years, spending, not revenues, has deviated from its historical path; spending must be addressed to rectify the budget."
Exactly correct. The recent discussions of raising taxes are wrong. We have to reduce government spending before we do anything else. 

NCAA: Cam Newton is eligible to play for Auburn in the SEC title game despite his father's rules violation. But he may be declared ineligible at a later point, this article predicts.