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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: i-node who wrote (712754)	5/1/2013 10:48:18 PM
From: bentway	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1578127

George Bush’s True Legacy? A Republican Party in Denial By Ramesh Ponnuru - Apr 29, 2013 George W. Bush, who united almost all Republicans during most of his time in national politics, now divides them. Most Republicans view his presidency favorably, and cheer his recent rise in the public’s esteem. A vocal group of conservatives, though, thinks of the Bush presidency as a wrong turn -- a turn toward big government that the party needs to repudiate. The dedication of Bush’s presidential library last week reheated this long-simmering debate, which the party is no closer to settling than it was when Bush left office in January 2009. Veterans of the Bush administration shouldn’t get carried away celebrating his recovery in the polls. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has been asking people for years which party they trust most to handle various issues. It shows that voters trust Republicans less on taxes, the economy, controlling spending and reducing the deficit than they did before Bush became the leader of the Republican Party. The only issue on which Republicans do better than they did in the late 1990s is health care, and that improvement is entirely the result of the post-Bush debate over President Barack Obama’s health-care plan. Bush’s critics forget something, too: The Republican Party was already in poor shape when he took control. It had lost two presidential elections in a row to Bill Clinton. Republicans had taken Congress in 1994 because the public didn’t want unified Democratic control of the government. But the defeat of Congress’s attempts, under House Speaker Newt Gingrich, to restrain Medicare spending and shut down Cabinet departments had left the party without any clear direction. Democrats outnumbered Republicans by almost as much as they do now. Broader Agenda To be competitive in 2000, Bush had to distance himself from the Gingrich image. He adopted a softer tone than other Republicans, made clear that he was no enemy of the government programs that voters like, and broadened the party’s agenda to include revitalizing charity rather than just railing against federal spending. He also joined the rest of his party in supporting a new prescription-drug benefit for senior citizens. So it isn’t surprising that the federal government expanded on Bush’s watch. Bush clearly hoped, though, that his presidency would turn the country more conservative. The people would reward Republicans for governing successfully, he thought. Americans would become more free-market-oriented as a restructured Social Security made them more self-reliant. An influx of Hispanics would join the conservative coalition after he reformed immigration. And so on. By midway through Bush’s second term, it was clear that this strategy was a dead end. The U.S. military was losing in Iraq, and Republicans weren’t willing to admit it, let alone change policy. (Eventually, Bush did change course, with the surge, but by then the public had made up its mind.) The economy wasn’t delivering rising wages for most people. The government wasn’t demonstrating competence in responding to disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. Congressional Republicans were more concerned with staying in power -- and covering up their colleagues’ scandals -- than in reforms to address any of these issues. No wonder they got the boot in the 2006 elections. When a recession and then a financial crisis hit before the 2008 elections, voters punished the Republicans a second time. Seeking Purity The failure of the Bush project led many conservatives to think that what Republicans needed, above all, was to purify their resistance to big government. The events of 2008-2010 -- bailouts, huge deficits, Obama’s health-care overhaul -- reinforced this idea. In the 2010 elections, the new tack seemed to work: The public reacted against unchecked Democratic power in Washington by giving the House back to Republicans. Yet the political circumstances that moved Bush to adopt his strategy hadn’t fundamentally changed. Voters were willing to give Republicans the ability to act as a check on big government in 2010 as they had been in 1994. But in 2012, as in 1996, voters wanted Republicans to stand for more than hostility to government before they would trust the party with a governing majority. They were especially suspicious of granting such power to Republicans, given their dismal record in office under Bush. The public doesn’t primarily see Bush’s failure the way conservatives do: as a matter of overspending. Republicans turned on Bush’s spending but never reckoned with the Iraq debacle or the middle-class stagnation of the past decade. They didn’t even do much to offer an alternative to the Democratic narrative about the origin of the economic crisis. Conservatives rejected Bushism without demonstrating any understanding of why it was adopted in the first place, or why it was rejected. That’s George W. Bush’s political legacy: a weakened Republican Party unable to face its flaws. ( Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor at National Review. The opinions expressed are his own.) To contact the writer of this article: Ramesh Ponnuru at rponnuru@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this article: Timothy Lavin at tlavin1@bloomberg.net

To: i-node who wrote (712754)	5/1/2013 10:51:37 PM
From: bentway	1 Recommendation Respond to of 1578127

The Stupid Party Strikes Again by Steven Hayward It’s not enough that Washington Republicans seem bent on signing onto any immigration deal that supposedly helps them with their “image” problem, but why do so many of them want to bash one of Obama’s better ideas in his budget: privatizing the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)? Let’s see: Barry Goldwater was for this before it was cool, and Ronald Reagan broached the idea in 1981, and was beaten back. Now Obama has grabbed hold of it. Start selling federal assets, and pretty soon the deficit might start to come down. It is understandable that Tennessee senators Corker and Alexander would oppose the idea for the usual home team reasons, but why aren’t other Republicans jumping on board and upping the ante? (Probably for the usual deference/log-rolling reasons; they’ll want Corker and Alexander to support their home state pet projects down the line.) I recommend that Republicans suggest adding the Bonneville Power Administration in the Pacific Northwest, and watch the Democratic senators from Oregon and Washington object. That’s probably why Obama didn’t include Bonneville along with TVA. Memo to GOP: Go big with this idea. The Washington Post notes in an editorial: The political irony is delicious: A Democrat plays against ideological type, at the short-term expense of red states that didn’t vote for him anyway; ostensibly free-market Republicans scramble to explain why this particular behemoth should stay in Uncle Sam’s portfolio. . . It’s worse than hypocritical for Republicans to stand in the way. I like this comment from one observer: “The odd thing is that a bunch of Rs are defending the most liberal, collectivist, state-managed thing ever undertaken in the United States,” said [Mike] McKenna, [a Republican energy lobbyist] whose clients include the Atlanta-based utility Southern Co. (NSC) that could benefit from a sale of the TVA, in an e-mail. “TVA was the brainchild of the near-communists in the Roosevelt administration. McKenna’s got a point. The TVA’s old logo is perfect New Deal beaux arts fascist:

To: i-node who wrote (712754)	5/2/2013 6:00:02 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 1578127

Hi i-node; Re; "I think this patent structure needs to be revised to provide incentives to drug companies to achieve desirable [from a public policy perspective] objectives." I agree that the patent system is all messed up but we would probably disagree over the details of changing it. The changes that have already been made have been to extend the lifetimes of patents. Even though technology moves far faster now than it did 200 years ago, our patents now have longer lifetimes. That's bassackwords. The obvious way to motivate the drug companies more would be to increase the lifetimes of their patents. I disagree with that. The way the system is set up now, they bank good coin for the first years and then the drugs go generic and become cheap. That's the way the system ought to work. The rich subsidize the development of new drugs (because the only way you can get them is to be rich). Then after some time, the drugs become cheaper for everyone else. What I'm saying here is that the system we have has steadily improved drugs for a long time. Making politically motivated changes to it in the hope that it's going to make it better is another sad case of politicians promising things they can't provide to gullible people who believe them. The basic problem is that drug companies have a lot of expenses. Increasing those expenses is not a way of getting the drug companies to produce more benefits for the rest of us. That's how you make drug companies shrink and produce fewer drugs. The left is ignorant. They seem to willfully ignore simple economics. Typical lefty solution, taken to its extreme: "Here's how to get the drug companies to make more drugs. We pass a law that says that if they don't make as many drugs as we want at cheap prices, we execute their children!" Later, when the result of their law is that people get out of the drug business and no new drugs are developed, they blame it on "greedy Republicans". No, it's because lefties are morons and do not understand the profit motive. The US auto industry was destroyed by greedy unions, not greedy Republicans. So far they haven't destroyed the drug industry because it's largely not yet unionized. -- Carl P.S. My understanding of the eyelash lengthening drug is that it came about as an unintended side effect. So it wasn't deliberately developed as such. They happened upon a drug that did this, saw a market, and so they made money giving the public what the public wanted to pay for. I assume that they noticed that people who want to lengthen their eyelashes aren't as likely to sue and that made the drug cheaper for them. The legal system is a big expense for the drug companies; it's a constant risk of doing business. If it were possible to mint money by being a kinder gentler drug company that marches in unison towards a socialist harmony of free health care, well, anyone who wants to do that is welcome to start the company and help the world. The fact that the lefties don't do it is pretty good evidence that it can't be done. You have to motivate all those people who work at drug companies. That includes everyone from the CEO down to the janitors. And the best way to do that is to let the drug companies run their business without a lot of interference.