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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sandintoes who wrote (39103)	11/29/2009 11:19:14 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

No doubt. ACORN is a criminal conspiracy.

To: sandintoes who wrote (39103)	12/4/2009 1:05:11 PM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

The Welfare State and Military Power Europe-style entitlements mean Europe-sized defenses. DECEMBER 4, 2009. For our money, one of the better parts of President Obama's speech at West Point this week was his connection between a healthy economy and U.S. national security. To quote: "Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy." We only wish Mr. Obama understood the link between the larger welfare state he is trying to build at home and the economic weakness that will undermine our military power. The proof is right before his eyes in the U.S. struggle to get Europe to contribute more forces to Afghanistan. Mr. Obama has called on NATO to buttress the U.S. surge of 30,000 in Afghanistan with 5,000 or more European troops. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in Brussels today to round up promissory notes. But except for the usual stalwarts—Britain and Poland—the allies are having trouble meeting even this modest goal. Germany and France are reluctant to contribute anything more to defeat the Taliban. This is by now a familiar story, and a big part of the problem is the relative lack of military spending. Among the Western Europeans, only France and the U.K. spend more than 2% of GDP on defense, supposedly the NATO-mandated minimum. Nearly everyone else is below that. Germany, the continent's largest economy, stands at 1.3%. U.S. defense spending has been above 4% of GDP since 2004, having fallen to 3% after the Cold War ended. No amount of pleading and shaming has worked on the continentals. NATO launched the "Defense Capabilities Initiative" in 1999, only to abandon it a few years later. Various attempts to stand up European "rapid reaction" forces have floundered. Most European countries also commit more than half of what little they do spend on defense to soldier salaries and benefits. Equipment and training are shortchanged. Belgium devotes 74% to personnel; the U.S. 30.6%. Europeans lack cargo planes and helicopters to enable troops to get to, and move within, far-off conflict zones. In 2007, the U.S. deployed 14% of its troops in overseas operations, Europe 4%. Such relative strategic weakness has made the Europeans more dependent on the American security umbrella, even as they resent it. But it also makes Europeans more disposed to avoid confrontation with adversaries like Saddam Hussein or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As Henry Kissinger has put it, European leaders are no longer able to ask their people to make major sacrifices. The overlooked culprit here is the rise of the modern welfare state. Since World War II and especially from the 1960s, Europe has built elaborate domestic income-maintenance programs, with government-run health care, pensions and jobless benefits. These are hugely expensive, requiring high taxes and government spending that is a huge proportion of GDP. The nearby table compares the so-called tax wedge across nations, which is one measure of the relative burdens to finance cradle-to-grave entitlements. One consequence has been slower growth in Europe, relative to the U.S. and China, with less tax revenue to spend on everything. Another result is that welfare spending has crowded out defense spending. The political imperative of health care and pensions always trumps defense spending, save perhaps in a hot war. Europe may never again be able to muster public support for a defense buildup of the kind the U.S. undertook to end the Cold War in the 1980s, or even the smaller surge after 9/11. The tragic irony of this year is that Democrats are rushing the U.S. down this same primrose entitlement path. With ObamaCare certain to eat up several more percentage points of GDP as it inevitably expands, we will take a giant step toward European social priorities. For many Democrats, this is precisely the goal. Many Europeans, such as those at the Financial Times, will also welcome America's relative decline. But we doubt the American people fully understand what such a gilded entitlement cage means for our national vitality, or for our ability to defend U.S. interests at home and abroad. The chart nearby shows the change in the share of U.S. federal spending on defense and domestic programs across recent decades. The upward blips in defense outlays occurred during Vietnam, the Reagan buildup and post-9/11. But the overall trend has been to spend less of the budget on defense. Add the stimulus, ObamaCare, a new entitlement for college and other Democratic plans, and the defense squeeze will only tighten. Higher taxes and borrowing may allow guns and butter to co-exist for a while. But over time, the welfare state will defeat the Pentagon here, as it has in Europe. President Obama's domestic agenda may well mean that his successors lack the option to deploy 100,000 troops to Afghanistan, or to some other future trouble spot. This is the way superpowers lose their superiority. Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A24 online.wsj.com

To: sandintoes who wrote (39103)	12/13/2009 9:08:07 AM
From: Peter Dierks	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Top 10 Books Every College Student Should Read by Harry W. Crocker III 09/15/2009 1. The Bible You can’t be considered a literate person without having read the most important book in the history of Western Civilization. 2. Caesar’s Commentaries I think it was Will Durant who said that Western Civilization is Caesar and Christ. So, as with the Bible, you might as well go to the source. 3. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy (or Montesquieu’s harder to find Considerations on the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline) As we all know, empires and republics can decline and fall. Machiavelli wanted to learn from the history of Rome how to preserve a republic -- and so should we. 4. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Not a conservative book (though Gibbon was something of a conservative Whig) but a great one: History is the most important subject. 5. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France All conservatives pay lip-service to this classic, not enough have actually read it. That’s a shame because it is memorably, beautifully written and provides a necessary check on the unreflecting populism of some conservatives. 6. James Boswell, The Life of Johnson Dr. Johnson reminds us that the first Whig (liberal) was the devil and that a truly conservative approach to politics is anti-ideological, anti-statist, and anti-political: “How small of all that human hearts endure that part which laws or kings can cause or cure.” 7. Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind College students who declare themselves conservatives should read Kirk so they’ll know something of what they’re declaring. 8. Shakespeare, Henry V All college students are potential leaders; here’s Shakespeare on leadership. 9. Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston Part of the impoverishment of the conservative mind these days is that it has no idea what it wants to conserve (or restore) in large part because so many conservatives don’t bother to cultivate a conservative imagination by reading novels. Sassoon didn’t become a political conservative (and a Catholic convert) until later life, but this brilliant, evocative, gentlemanly book shows a conservative society (which he loved) that produced a generation of heroes, like the author himself, a veteran of the Great War. 10. George Orwell, Collected Journalism Orwell was another professed Socialist who was in many ways conservative. For a college student, he’s a great tutor on how to write and how to recognize (and avoid) the politicization of language, an area where many political conservatives seem utterly tone deaf as “gender” replaces “sex,” “abstinence” replaces “chastity,” and “perception” becomes relative rather than acute. All of this is freighted with politics, which the left understands but our own folks don’t. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mr. Crocker is the author most recently of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- humanevents.com

To: sandintoes who wrote (39103)	12/16/2009 10:30:47 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

A Bomb Goes Off in Florida Posted by Erick Erickson (Profile) Wednesday, December 16th at 7:30AM EST 33 Comments Last night in Washington, close to one hundred leaders of the conservative movement gathered in a townhouse just down from the United States Capitol to hear Senator Jim DeMint and Florida Speaker Marco Rubio at a Senate Conservatives Fund fundraiser for Marco Rubio. The people in the room for Rubio were the same people who blew up NY-23, helping Doug Hoffman and crushing the chances of a far left Republican, Dede Scozzafava. Just prior to the start of the fundraiser, a bomb went off in Florida. According to Rasmussen, the Florida Senate primary is now tied between Rubio and Crist. For perspective, only about six months ago, Rubio was in the single digits with Crist safely over 50%. Jim DeMint told the crowd that Rubio is one of a handful of “new Republicans” running to take back our country. And the new poll shows it is working. Charlie Crist is the only candidate the National Republican Senatorial Committee will admit to endorsing. The actually used the word “endorse.” Since their endorsement, Crist has seen a top fundraiser indicted for a ponzi scheme, taken every position possible on the Obama stimulus plan, replaced his campaign team, and gone from over fifty percent in the polling to tied with Marco Rubio. Rubio will win. The Establishment will be defeated. Conservatives will advance and with them freedom. Jim DeMint told the crowd that attended if they were there, they were no longer part of the establishment. The leaders of the conservative movement were there and they and their checkbooks are going to throw the GOP establishment under Barack Obama’s bus. redstate.com