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

To: Little Joe who wrote (45835)	9/13/2010 10:53:11 AM
From: sandintoes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71588

You're right...except here in GA, the tea party endorced a woman who was not as conservative as Deal and the people knew it and voted in Deal. .Tight Race Set to Follow Rough Runoff in Georgia ATLANTA — Republican politicians in Georgia tried on Wednesday to rally voters behind their party’s nominee for governor, former Representative Nathan Deal, after he narrowly won a divisive runoff election. .Mr. Deal, 67, a nine-term congressman, defeated Karen Handel, a former secretary of state, by less than 1 percent of the vote Tuesday. With 99 percent of votes counted, Mr. Deal led by about 2,500 votes out of nearly 600,000 cast. Even though provisional ballots and military and overseas ballots were still being counted, Ms. Handel conceded defeat Wednesday morning and endorsed Mr. Deal against the Democratic nominee, former Gov. Roy Barnes. “The best thing for our party is to rally around Congressman Deal as our nominee in the fight against Roy Barnes,” she wrote in an e-mail to supporters. “I spoke with Nathan this morning and let him know that I endorse his candidacy and look forward to the fight against Barnes.” Polls before the primary predicted a close race in the general election between Mr. Barnes and either Mr. Deal or Ms. Handel. Political experts believe Mr. Deal has a slight advantage in the solidly conservative Southern state, especially in an election year that is expected to be tough for Democrats. The Republican runoff was contentious, with Mr. Deal’s campaign accusing Ms. Handel of being insufficiently conservative on same-sex marriage and abortion and Ms. Handel calling Mr. Deal a “corrupt relic of Washington” and chiding him to “put on his big-boy pants.” The race drew endorsements from several possible 2012 presidential candidates, with Sarah Palin campaigning for Ms. Handel and Mr. Deal receiving endorsements from Mike Huckabee, the former presidential candidate and Arkansas governor, and Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House. The impact of Ms. Palin’s endorsement was unclear. While her support has lifted the campaigns of other conservative women — including Nikki Haley, who is running for governor in South Carolina, and Sharron Angle, running for the Senate in Nevada — it did not provide the same assistance to Ms. Handel. “This certainly takes some of the luster out of the Palin endorsements generally,” said Charles S. Bullock III, a political scientist at the University of Georgia. Republican leaders rallied behind Mr. Deal on Wednesday. “Our Republican family has nominated an outstanding candidate for governor,” said Gov. Sonny Perdue, who is blocked by term limits from seeking re-election. Mr. Deal faces continued scrutiny over an Office of Congressional Ethics report in March that he had supported a Georgia program that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars for his family’s auto salvage business.

To: Little Joe who wrote (45835)	9/14/2010 8:21:54 AM
From: Peter Dierks	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

Obama’s Delusions of Competence The president overestimates the government's ability to solve problems. September 14, 2010 12:00 A.M. ‘Washington: We Have a Problem” proclaims Vanity Fair magazine. In an eerie echo of the verdicts passed during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, namely that the presidency was “too big for one man,” Vanity Fair now declares “The evidence that Washington cannot function — that it’s ‘broken,’ as Vice President Joe Biden has said — is all around.” The Vanity Fair piece is a long apologia for President Obama’s perceived ineffectiveness, and reflects — no surprise here — the Obama interpretation of events. “The G.O.P.,” writes Todd Purdum, “has spent most of the period since the inauguration in near lockstep refusal to give the president votes for any of his major initiatives, from the economic-stimulus bill to health-care reform.” This is President Obama’s constant plaint — though it rings hollow coming from someone who took office with comfortable majorities in both houses of Congress. But in the course of documenting the difficulty of governing, Vanity Fair does make a conservative point. Government is too big. Purdum quotes from just one day’s Federal Register: The edition for this ordinary Wednesday comes in at 350 pages of dense, dark type. It is unimaginably varied: you’ll find rules for the importation of Chinese honey; proposed conservation standards for home furnaces; permitting procedures for the experimental use of pesticides; announcements concerning the awarding of new radio and TV licenses; and hundreds of other items. The president himself doesn’t at all concede that government is attempting to do too much (and failing at most of it). On the contrary, his vanity (and it is a common one for left-wingers) is that he believes his particular ideas on business investment, medical procedures, housing, and thousands of other matters are the solutions to our woes, but “politics” keeps getting in the way. We’ve seen President Obama’s delusions of expertise on display before. Without any trial period, demonstration project, or peer-reviewed study, the federal government dictated that medical records be digitalized and extracted $19 billion from taxpayers to fund the transition. The new systems, the president insisted, would prevent errors, reduce costs, and improve patient care. But as the Wall Street Journal reported, “a 2009 study in the American Journal of Medicine found that hospitals with more-advanced electronic systems fared no better than other hospitals on measures of administrative costs. . . . Meanwhile, many doctors and nurses say they’re frustrated with the technology. While some say electronic records have improved the way they practice medicine, many others say the systems are time-consuming distractions that take away from patient care.” Digitalized medical records would certainly have evolved with time — just as paper books and newspapers are rapidly losing ground to their electronic competitors. But without government intrusion, the programs would have developed organically, adjusting to user feedback and actual experience — and costing the taxpayers nothing. At his September 10 press conference, the president announced another “common sense” idea: We must stop “giving tax breaks to companies that are shipping jobs overseas.” A familiar trope from the 2008 campaign, this “idea” is really another tax increase. The president’s refrain notwithstanding, there is no section of the U.S. tax code that rewards U.S. companies for outsourcing American jobs. American firms pay taxes on their worldwide income. Our effective corporate tax rate, the highest in the OECD according to a Cato Institute study, puts our companies at a competitive disadvantage abroad. The tax code accordingly does permit U.S. multinationals to “defer” taxes on income earned abroad that is reinvested abroad. They pay taxes on that income only when they repatriate the earnings to the United States. But eliminating the “deferral” would simply increase corporate rates still further, undercutting the profitability of American companies with overseas operations. As Cato’s Daniel Griswold explains, “There is no evidence that expanding employment at U.S.- owned affiliates comes at the expense of overall employment by parent companies back home in the United States. In fact, the evidence and experience of U.S. multinational companies points in the opposite direction: foreign and domestic operations tend to complement each other and expand together. . . . More activity and sales abroad often require the hiring of more managers, accountants, lawyers, engineers, and production workers at the parent company.” Reducing the rate of corporate taxation would make U.S. companies more competitive overseas while also attracting more foreign investment here. But reducing taxes, like reducing regulation, or permitting the market to shape digital medical records, offends President Obama’s preference for top-down decision-making. He isn’t deciding, Carter-like, who should use the White House tennis courts, but he is attempting to do pretty much everything else, with similar results. — Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. nationalreview.com

To: Little Joe who wrote (45835)	11/11/2010 1:17:54 AM
From: Peter Dierks	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

New Republicans show respect for electorate with term-limit pledges By ALEX ISENSTADT \| 11/10/10 5:26 AM EST Updated: 11/10/10 11:21 AM EST When the massive Republican class of 2010 is sworn into office and officially delivers the House majority to the GOP, Democrats can take consolation in this fact: Roughly half of the new freshmen say they won’t remain in Washington for long. In what appears to be a breath of life for the moribund term limits movement, roughly half of the 80-plus Republican House freshmen — and a handful of the newly elected GOP senators — have promised to limit their congressional tenures, with some even promising support for new term limits legislation. The self-imposed limits typically range from six to 12 years. Mike Fitzpatrick, who won back the suburban Philadelphia seat he lost in 2006, has said he plans to serve a maximum of three terms. Allen West of south Florida has pledged to serve a maximum of four terms. Rep.-elect David Schweikert of Arizona said he would serve no more than six terms. “By term limiting myself to eight years, I can focus on doing what it takes to solve the nation’s problems, instead of doing what it takes to further my political ambitions,” read a press release issued by Rep.-elect Jon Runyan of New Jersey after his primary victory. While there’s no consensus on what an appropriate length of time in Washington might be, the GOP freshmen have nevertheless revived a once-white-hot issue that had gone cold in recent years. “I think it’s very simple: You have a freshman class in which reform is a very significant motivation,” Schweikert told POLITICO. “Term limits went away for a while, but now it’s back.” The decline of the term limits movement can be traced to the experience of the last sizable group of Republican freshmen, the class of 1994, which swept into Washington on a platform that included term limits as a prominent feature. But the Supreme Court dealt a severe blow to term limits in 1995, ruling that states could not limit the amount of time federal lawmakers spent in office and that the only way for Congress to enact term limits legislation was through a constitutional amendment — a steep hill to climb. That year, the House brought up a term limits amendment but fell short of the 290 votes needed for passage. The movement was further crippled by the class of 1994 itself, as members began to renege on their self-imposed limits when their time was up. This year, however, anti-incumbent sentiment has led to a term limits renaissance as tea party activists and others have embraced the concept. To many of the new members, term limits are a key component of their reform-oriented approach to Congress. “The issue of reform is a broad one and a powerful one,” said Arkansas Rep.-elect Tim Griffin, who is limiting himself to six terms. “The general issue of reform was a big part of my campaign and a big part of the campaigns of a lot of the folks who are headed to Washington.” Griffin said 12 years in the House is “plenty of time, and I had no intention of staying beyond that.” “It definitely is very popular right now,” said Philip Blumel, a conservative activist who heads U.S. Term Limits. “It fits with the image of being reform-minded.” Term limits fever isn’t limited to the House. Newly elected GOP Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky have also voiced their support for legislation limiting congressional terms, with the tea-party-backed Paul declaring on his campaign website: “I hope you will help both the term limits movement and the country by supporting my campaign for the U.S. Senate.” Not everyone is sold on the idea that term limits are making a comeback, a skepticism rooted in the experience of the class of 1994, many of whom were much less enamored of the idea once they actually held office. Bruce Cain, who directs the University of California Washington Center and who has written about term limits, predicted that many of the incoming lawmakers will soon find the prospect of attaining seniority and powerful chairmanships much more attractive than they did as candidates. “It’s an easy thing to say, but the people who [announced self-imposed term limits] last time figured out that it wasn’t right,” said Cain. “This time, there are going to be people who figure out that it’s not right — and it’s not because they like Washington. It’s because it wasn’t a good idea.” It’s already clear that term limits don’t rank high among the priorities of the new House majority. While term limits served as a key plank of the “Contract With America” in 1994, the House Republican 2010 "Pledge to America" has no mention of the issue at all. “You see seniority as an obstacle to your own ambitions,” said John Pitney, a Claremont McKenna College political scientist. “It’s a natural attraction that fades over time. The longer the member stays, the more the sentiment fades.” Still, the infusion of sympathetic new members has revitalized activists who support the legislation. U.S. Term Limits, a grass-roots organization that promotes limiting tenures for state and federal officials, has posted the names of close to 10 incoming lawmakers who have said they would support a term limits bill. As proof of momentum, Blumel pointed to term limits referendums in 34 jurisdictions that passed in last week’s elections. In New York City, voters approved legislation that would restrict elected officials to two consecutive four-year terms. “For the first time since the early 1990s, we would have a bill in the House and Senate for term limits,” said Blumel. “It just seems like the perfect time to try again. If not now, when?” politico.com