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Michael Meyers

 

Dear Friends,

I would like to give our support and call attention to The New York Civil Rights Coalition, and Mr. Michael Meyers, the organizations Executive Director.

Mrs. Figgins

 

 “The New York Civil Rights Coalition (NYCRC) is an organization of people concerned with kindling in Americans a spirit of unity and commitment in achieving a truly open and just society, where the individual enjoys the blessings of liberty free of racial prejudice, stigma, caste or discrimination. In this regard, NYCRC works purposefully to encourage people and institutions to take affirmative steps to achieve an integrated society—inclusive neighborhoods; strong, diverse, and interracial educational systems, both public and private; equal opportunity in employment and voting rights; and unfettered participation in the civic affairs of our democracy. 

 The organization is committed to integration as a strategy as well as a philosophy for accomplishing equal opportunities and believes that in the field of race “separate is inherently unequal.” There is much evidence that a racially-fractionalized society perpetuates inequalities and imperils the unity of the nation. Moreover, a racially-polarized society reinforces stereotypes, and fosters intergroup suspicion, hostility and rivalry. NYCRC, therefore objects to all forms of segregation and schemes that in purpose or effect separate people on the flimsy basis of their skin color. Thus, NYCRC works to promote and strengthen racial harmony and understanding through the realization of the uniqueness of the individual, and by convincing “tomorrow’s people” that there is only one race to which we all belong, and that our humanity is the bond of our diversity and commonality. 

The New York Civil Rights Coalition (NYCRC) exists to speak out knowledgeably and intelligently about racial incidents and to protest acts of hatred. NYCRC mobilizes organizations and individuals to purposeful, non-violent action, to respond to all forms and outbreaks of bigotry, including anti-black behavior, anti-Asian violence, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism. NYCRC, Inc. analyzes historic and current events related to racial prejudice and problems of discrimination, and seeks, through research, fact-finding, and publication to counteract myths and reckless rumors. NYCRC, Inc. also serves as a watchdog of government, assessing the equitable delivery of essential governmental services related to human resource development and human relations concerns. NYCRC, Inc. prepares youth to assume and to demonstrate their civic and leadership responsibilities, through internships and volunteerism in school programs and through community service. NYCRC involves youth and adults of all colors, ethnic backgrounds, nationalities and religions. 

NYCRC operates in accordance with a philosophy that enforced racial segregation is an unwarranted restriction on human liberty. Thus, pressures to separate people on the flimsy basis of their skin color are to be combatted, because such pressures stifle individuality, lock people out of places, and deprive them of meaningful social intercourse and contacts that are essential to the eradication of the conventions of racial prejudice. 

No other civil rights organization like NYCRC exists in New York or the nation. NYCRC has a central office of core staff, headed by an expert in civil rights who was trained by the venerable Roy Wilkins (the NAACP’s Executive Director for 22 years) and the eminent scholar and psychologist, Dr. Kenneth B. Clark. The grassroots structure of NYCRC consists of over thirty city-wide and community-based organizations, each of which reserves the right of self-governance while agreeing to work cooperatively on specific campaigns to advance public education and understanding about the crisis in race relations. And unlike single-purpose rights and “ethnic” organizations, NYCRC allies itself with all victims and targets of discrimination and hate. For example, NYCRC stood with Jews and Italians against the racist rhetoric of Professor Leonard Jeffries. And NYCRC stood with Asians against those chanting such vicious epithets as “yellow dogs” on Church Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn. NYCRC co-sponsored a memorial service on Staten Island for a man who fell victim to anti-gay violence. And NYCRC sponsored marches through Canarsie and Bensonhurst in response to anti-black violence. Unfashionable, and sometimes unpopular, NYCRC is always principled and attentive to its mandate to oppose all acts of bias and incitements to racial discrimination and divisiveness. Moreover, NYCRC has provided quality analysis of current events and developments in the field of human relations, upon which the public at large, constituent groups, and the media rely for an honest perspective and rigorous assessment. 

NYCRC is an organizational success, notwithstanding its controversial stances. NYCRC’s refusal to be intimidated into silence, its steadfast commitment to principle, its tireless work on behalf of a truly open society, and to equal opportunity and fair play for poor and powerless people in an increasingly competitive and racially-divided society, has won support from individuals, public interest organizations and foundations. Since 1986, when NYCRC was founded, the Coalition has been funded by public donations, corporate and foundation grants. As a matter of policy, it does not accept governmental funding. 

Mr. Meyers is President and Executive Director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition (NYCRC), which he co-founded in 1986. 

 Meyers assumed the post of NYCRC Executive Director in 1991 from his senior staff position in the New Jersey Department of Higher Education, where he had served as Special Assistant to the Chancellor of Higher Education, T. Edward Hollander. Meyers took his B.A. from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, OH and his J.D. from Rutgers University School of Law. He has spent his entire professional career working in the fields of civil rights, civil liberties, law and education, and urban affairs, and, as such, is regarded as an expert on civil rights matters and race relations. Born in Harlem, Michael Meyers knows first-hand the ghetto experience which, as he puts it, “contributes to the defeat of the human spirit; the only way to end the ghetto is to get out of it.” 

A long-time associate and protégé of the noted educator and psychologist Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, Michael Meyers was from high school through law school Dr. Clark’s intern, fellow and principal assistant while Dr. Clark headed the Metropolitan Applied Research Center (MARC), from 1967 to 1975. In 1975, Meyers joined the national staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as Assistant Director. For more than nine years he was on the staff of the NAACP as aide to another of his mentors, the venerable Roy Wilkins, the NAACP’s long-time Executive Director, and to Wilkins’ successor, Benjamin L. Hooks. Meyers shares Dr. Kenneth Clark’s and Roy Wilkins’ philosophical outlook on civil rights and equal justice. Indeed, Michael Meyers has emerged in the New York and national dialogue about race as a strong advocate of civil rights, racial integration, and racial reconciliation. 

Michael Meyers, as a columnist for THE NEW YORK POST, has published extensively on issues of race relations, urban affairs, education, housing, police abuse, civil liberties and civil rights. His articles have also appeared in law reviews, scholarly journals, periodicals and newspapers, including PARTISAN REVIEW, ACADEMIC QUESTIONS, YOUTH AND SOCIETY JOURNAL, CRISIS, CHANGE, INTEGRATED EDUCATION, THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE WASHINGTON POST, THE WASHINGTON TIMES, CHICAGO TRIBUNE, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, NEWSDAY and NEW YORK NEWSDAY, and CIVIL LIBERTIES. He helped research and assisted with the editorial preparation and writing of the explosive book SEARCH AND DESTROY, by Roy Wilkins and Ramsey Clark, and with Morris Milgram’s book, GOOD NEIGHBORHOOD. 

A frequently invited speaker, Michael Meyers has addressed many forums and conferences and keynoted several conventions; he has spoken at many colleges, universities, and law schools, including Bryn Mawr, Brown, Case Western Reserve University Law School, City College, City University of New York, Columbia College, and Teachers College at Columbia University, Lehman College, City University of New York, Stanford, U.S. Army War College, Westpoint Military Academy, Wilberforce University, Williams College, and Villanova Law School. He has also been a guest panelist on numerous radio and television programs, including, “Good Morning America,” “David Susskind,” “Positively Black,” “Like It Is,” “Oprah Winfrey,” “McLaughlin,” “Sunday Edition,” “News Forum,” “Live Wire,” “Currents,” “Caucus: New Jersey,” “Charlie Rose,” “MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour,” and “America’s Black Forum.” 

Meyers’ past committee and board memberships include the American Bar Association’s Special Committee on Housing and Urban Development; executive committee/board of directors of Sponsors of Open Housing Investment, Inc.; and National Child Labor Committee, Inc.; board member of National Alliance for Safer Cities; Center for the Advancement of Integrated Education; and the New York Association of Scholars. Michael Meyers served on the Board of Directors of the New York Civil Liberties Union (with perfect attendance) for a quarter of a century (between 1976 and 2001), and on the National Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties (also with perfect attendance) for 24 years (between 1981 and 2005). He was a longtime member of the ACLU’s Executive Committee and served on many other ACLU committees, including its Affirmative Action Committee; Academic Freedom Committee; Free Speech and Association Committee; Equality Committee; and several Biennial Conference Committees. In 1999, he Chaired the ACLU’s Biennial Conference Committee and its Convention in San Diego, CA. 

His other board service has included membership on the Advisory Board of the then Washington, D.C.-based Center for Equal Opportunity; the Philadelphia, PA-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE); and The City Club of New York. In addition, Michael Meyers has also served on the Board of Directors of the America-Israel Friendship League, and on several of its committees, including its board’s executive committee.”                

 

 

 

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Advice & opinion on everyday issues by Mrs Figgins with common sense & good old-fashioned-values!

Opinion & Politics,advice

Dear Mrs. Figgins,

What is a blood libel?

Jessie, Westlake California

 

Dear Jessie, ,

Although it has been days since Sara Palin’s much talked about video, you and many others have written regarding the term “blood libel”.   The term came under much scrutiny after Governor Sara Palin’s use of the words. 

In a statement to biggovernment.com on 12 January, Alan Dershowitz defended Mrs. Palin’s use of the term “Blood Libel”

 “The term “blood libel” has taken on a broad metaphorical meaning in public discourse. Although its historical origins were in theologically based false accusations against the Jews and the Jewish People, its current usage is far broader. I myself have used it to describe false accusations against the State of Israel by the Goldstone Report. There is nothing improper and certainly nothing anti-Semitic in Sarah Palin using the term to characterize what she reasonably believes are false accusations that her words or images may have caused a mentally disturbed individual to kill and maim. The fact that two of the victims are Jewish is utterly irrelevant to the propriety of using this widely used term.”

You can see Mrs. Palin’s video “America’s Enduring Strength”    http://vimeo.com/18698532

Here’s the text: 

“Like millions of Americans I learned of the tragic events in Arizona on Saturday, and my heart broke for the innocent victims. No words can fill the hole left by the death of an innocent, but we do mourn for the victims’ families as we express our sympathy. 

 I agree with the sentiments shared yesterday at the beautiful Catholic mass held in honor of the victims. The mass will hopefully help begin a healing process for the families touched by this tragedy and for our country.

 Our exceptional nation, so vibrant with ideas and the passionate exchange and debate of ideas, is a light to the rest of the world. Congresswoman Giffords and her constituents were exercising their right to exchange ideas that day, to celebrate our Republic’s core values and peacefully assemble to petition our government. It’s inexcusable and incomprehensible why a single evil man took the lives of peaceful citizens that day. 

There is a bittersweet irony that the strength of the American spirit shines brightest in times of tragedy. We saw that in Arizona. We saw the tenacity of those clinging to life, the compassion of those who kept the victims alive, and the heroism of those who overpowered a deranged gunman.

Like many, I’ve spent the past few days reflecting on what happened and praying for guidance. After this shocking tragedy, I listened at first puzzled, then with concern, and now with sadness, to the irresponsible statements from people attempting to apportion blame for this terrible event.

President Reagan said, “We must reject the idea that every time a law’s broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.” Acts of monstrous criminality stand on their own. They begin and end with the criminals who commit them, not collectively with all the citizens of a state, not with those who listen to talk radio, not with maps of swing districts used by both sides of the aisle, not with law-abiding citizens who respectfully exercise their First Amendment rights at campaign rallies, not with those who proudly voted in the last election.

The last election was all about taking responsibility for our country’s future. President Obama and I may not agree on everything, but I know he would join me in affirming the health of our democratic process. Two years ago his party was victorious. Last November, the other party won. In both elections the will of the American people was heard, and the peaceful transition of power proved yet again the enduring strength of our Republic.

Vigorous and spirited public debates during elections are among our most cherished traditions.  And after the election, we shake hands and get back to work, and often both sides find common ground back in D.C. and elsewhere. If you don’t like a person’s vision for the country, you’re free to debate that vision. If you don’t like their ideas, you’re free to propose better ideas. But, especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

There are those who claim political rhetoric is to blame for the despicable act of this deranged, apparently apolitical criminal. And they claim political debate has somehow gotten more heated just recently. But when was it less heated? Back in those “calm days” when political figures literally settled their differences with dueling pistols? In an ideal world all discourse would be civil and all disagreements cordial. But our Founding Fathers knew they weren’t designing a system for perfect men and women. If men and women were angels, there would be no need for government. Our Founders’ genius was to design a system that helped settle the inevitable conflicts caused by our imperfect passions in civil ways. So, we must condemn violence if our Republic is to endure.

As I said while campaigning for others last March in Arizona during a very heated primary race, “We know violence isn’t the answer. When we ‘take up our arms’, we’re talking about our vote.” Yes, our debates are full of passion, but we settle our political differences respectfully at the ballot box – as we did just two months ago, and as our Republic enables us to do again in the next election, and the next. That’s who we are as Americans and how we were meant to be. Public discourse and debate isn’t a sign of crisis, but of our enduring strength. It is part of why America is exceptional. 

No one should be deterred from speaking up and speaking out in peaceful dissent, and we certainly must not be deterred by those who embrace evil and call it good. And we will not be stopped from celebrating the greatness of our country and our foundational freedoms by those who mock its greatness by being intolerant of differing opinion and seeking to muzzle dissent with shrill cries of imagined insults.

Just days before she was shot, Congresswoman Giffords read the First Amendment on the floor of the House. It was a beautiful moment and more than simply “symbolic,” as some claim, to have the Constitution read by our Congress. I am confident she knew that reading our sacred charter of liberty was more than just “symbolic.” But less than a week after Congresswoman Giffords reaffirmed our protected freedoms, another member of Congress announced that he would propose a law that would criminalize speech he found offensive.

It is in the hour when our values are challenged that we must remain resolved to protect those values. Recall how the events of 9-11 challenged our values and we had to fight the tendency to trade our freedoms for perceived security. And so it is today.

Let us honor those precious lives cut short in Tucson by praying for them and their families and by cherishing their memories. Let us pray for the full recovery of the wounded. And let us pray for our country. In times like this we need God’s guidance and the peace He provides. We need strength to not let the random acts of a criminal turn us against ourselves, or weaken our solid foundation, or provide a pretext to stifle debate.

America must be stronger than the evil we saw displayed last week. We are better than the mindless finger-pointing we endured in the wake of the tragedy. We will come out of this stronger and more united in our desire to peacefully engage in the great debates of our time, to respectfully embrace our differences in a positive manner, and to unite in the knowledge that, though our ideas may be different, we must all strive for a better future for our country. May God bless America.” 

Mrs. Figgins 

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Advice & opinion on everyday issues by Mrs Figgins with common sense & good old-fashioned-values!

Opinion & Politics,advice

Pelosi & Reid

 

Dear Friends,

 My goodness, talk about hutzpah!  

At her final press conference as House Speaker, Nancy Polosi said, “Deficit reduction has been a high priority for us.  It is our mantra, pay-as-you-go.”   

Take a look at the CNSNews.com article below by Terence P. Jeffrey. 

It is an eye opener on the freewheeling spending during Mrs. Pelosi’s reign. 

Mrs. Figgins 

 

 Final Tab for Pelosi’s Speakership: $5.34 Trillion in New Debt—Or $3.66 Billion Per Day 

 “ In the 1,461 days that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) served as speaker of the House, the national debt increased by a total of $5.343 trillion ($5,343,452,800,321.37) or $3.66 billion per day ($3.657,394,113.84), according to official debt numbers published by the U.S. Treasury.

Pelosi was the 52nd speaker of the House. During her tenure, she amassed more debt than the first 49 speakers combined.

The total national debt did not climb above $5.343 trillion (the amount amassed during Pelosi’s four years as speaker) until Feb. 26, 1997, when Rep. Newt Gingrich (R.-Ga.) was serving as the nation’s 50th House speaker.

When Pelosi was sworn in on Jan. 4, 2007, the national debt stood at $8,670,596,242,973.04. At the close of business on Jan. 4, 2011, her last full day in the speakership, it stood at 14,014,049,043,294.41–an increase of $5,343,452,800,321.37.

Pelosi served as speaker for four full years, including one leap year, making her time in that office 1,461 days. On average, the federal government added $3.66 billion ($3,657,394,113.84) in new debt for each of those days.

Pelosi not only outstripped her predecessors in the total volume of debt added to the national debt during her tenure as speaker, but also in the rate at which new debt was added. In fact, Pelosi added debt at a rate more than three times faster than her nearest competitor.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R.-Ill.), who served from Jan. 6, 1999 to Jan. 3, 2007, saw $3.06 trillion ($3,061,785,703,851.74) in new debt added during his tenure, which is more than during any other speakership other than Pelosi’s. But Hastert’s tenure lasted 2,920 days, with the national debt increasing by an average of $1.05 billion ($1,048,556,747.89) for each of those days.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich added $812.4 billion ($812,423,595,162.98) in new debt during a speakership of 1,461 days. The national debt accumulated during Gingrich’s tenure at an average rate of $556 million per day ($556,073,644.88).

When Pelosi became speaker in  January 2007 she was emphatic that there would be no new deficit spending.

“After years of historic deficits, this 110th Congress will commit itself to a higher standard: Pay as you go, no new deficit spending,” she said in her inaugural address from the speaker’s podium. “Our new America will provide unlimited opportunity for future generations, not burden them with mountains of debt.”

Here are the national debt figures for the speakership terms of Rep. Nancy Pelosi and her two immediate predecessors:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi

Jan. 4, 2007               $8,670,596,242,973.04

Jan. 4, 2011              $14,014,049,043,294.41 

New debt added:        $5,343,452,800,321.37

Total days served:      1,461 days

Debt added per day:   $3,657,394,113.84 

Speaker Dennis Hastert

Jan. 6, 1999                 5,615,428,551,461.33

Jan. 3, 2007                 8,677,214,255,313.07

New debt added:         3,061,785,703,851.74

Total days served:      2,920

Debt added per day:   1,048,556,747.89

Speaker Newt Gingrich

Jan. 4, 1995                 4,801,793,426,032.89

Jan. 3, 1999                 5,614,217,021,195.87

New debt added:           812,423,595,162.98

Total days served:      1,461

Debt added per day:    556,073,644.88 

 

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Advice & opinion on everyday issues by Mrs Figgins with common sense & good old-fashioned-values!

Opinion & Politics,advice

Dear Friends,

Now that the 112th Congress has been sworn in, the big question is will Obamacare be repealed?  The American people are demanding its collapse.

It is possible that in the near future close to half the number of states in the nation will join Florida saying that a requirement that all individuals buy medical insurance oversteps constitutional limits on federal authority.

“Never before has the federal government required an individual to either buy government-approved insurance or pay a penalty.  And nowhere does the Constitution authorize Congress to regulate in this manner,” said Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen in a statement about joining the lawsuit.

It’s the beginning of a long, yearlong process and the conservatives can win!   A sincere Thanks You to the Heritage Foundation for the following article on the possibility of repealing Obamacare!

Mrs Figgins

 

REPEAL!

 

Is Repeal Possible?

“The unchecked expansion of congressional power to the limits suggested by the Minimum Essential Coverage Provision would invite unbridled exercise of federal police powers. 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. So wrote Judge Henry Hudson of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia yesterday in striking down Obamacares individual mandate. Specifically, Judge Hudson found that Section 1501 of the act, which forces all Americans to buy government approved health insurance policies, exceeds the Commerce Clause powers vested in Congress under Article 1.

The White House and their leftist allies were quick to try and minimize this body blow to Obamacare, arguing that 14 previous court challenges have been dismissed by the courts. This desperate spin doesn’t even pass the laugh test. The 42-page decision is the first by a federal court this far along the litigation process and the first brought by a state (the case was filed by Virginia Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli). And soon Judge Roger Vinson of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida is expected to rule on an even larger challenge to Obamacare brought by 16 state attorneys general, four governors, two private citizens, and the National Federation of Independent Business.

In an early stage of that litigation, Judge Vinson wrote: The individual mandate applies across the board. People have no choice and there is no way to avoid it. Those who fall under the individual mandate either comply with it, or they are penalized. It is not based on an activity that they make the choice to undertake. Rather, it is based solely on citizenship and on being alive.

Judge Hudson used very similar reasoning in rejecting the Obama Administrations claim that since every individual in the United States will require health care at some point in their lifetime the federal government has the power to force Americans to buy health insurance now. Hudson writes: Of course, the same reasoning could apply to transportation, housing, or nutritional decisions. This broad definition of the economic activity subject to congressional regulation lacks logical limitation and is unsupported by Commerce Clause jurisprudence.

Judge Hudson then moved on to the Obama Administrations claim that the individual mandate was actually a tax that would therefore make it constitutional under the General Welfare Clause. Hudson wrote: This Courts analysis begins with the unequivocal denials by the Executive and Legislative branches that the [individual mandate] was a tax. It was only when the Administration found itself before a judge, not in front of voters, that the White House conveniently shifted its rationale. Judge Hudson saw through this deception, identified the individual mandate as the penalty it is, and rejected the Obama Administrations mandate-as-tax claim.

It was not a total victory for Cuccinelli, however. Judge Hudson rejected Virginias request to strike down the entire law. Despite claims by the President himself, and authors of the legislation like Senator Max Baucus (DMT), Judge Hudson found that the Section 1501 was severable from the rest of the law and voided only that section and directly-dependent provisions which make specific reference to 1501. Judge Vinson, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court will all be free to revisit this issue.

But whether or not courts will invalidate just Obamacares individual mandate is rapidly becoming irrelevant. Obamacare simply may not survive that long. It is already collapsing under its own financial and bureaucratic weight. Just last week, Congress voted to stop reductions in Medicare payments to doctors by raiding future revenues from Obamacares insurance subsidy program. Administration has to grant from Obamacares unworkable regulations grows each day.  Doctors are telling pollsters they will leave the medical profession in droves if Obamacare is implemented as planned by 2014. 

 And according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll Obamacare is now more unpopular than ever, with only 43 percent approving the law and 52 percent opposed.

Obamacare will be repealed. It is only a question of when.”

 

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Advice & opinion on everyday issues by Mrs Figgins with common sense & good old-fashioned-values!

How To,Opinion & Politics,advice

 

Barack Obama

 

Dear Friends,

I was reading through some of the articles in the Weekly Standard and came across a most interesting piece I would like to share with you. 

The article is written by Jonathan V. Last, senior writer at The Weekly Standard.   Mr. Last covered the Obama campaign in 2008.

Mrs. Figgins

 

 

American Narcissus

The Vanity of Barack Obama     Nov 22, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 10

“Why has Barack Obama failed so spectacularly? Is he too dogmatically liberal or too pragmatic? Is he a socialist, or an anticolonialist, or a philosopher-president? Or is it possible that Obama’s failures stem from something simpler: vanity. Politicians as a class are particularly susceptible to mirror-gazing. But Obama’s vanity is overwhelming. It defines him, his politics, and his presidency.

It’s revealed in lots of little stories. There was the time he bragged about how one of his campaign volunteers, who had tragically died of breast cancer, “insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama T-shirt.” There was the Nobel acceptance speech where he conceded, “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war” (the emphasis is mine). There was the moment during the 2008 campaign when Obama appeared with a seal that was a mash-up of the Great Seal of the United States and his own campaign logo (with its motto Vero Possumus, “Yes we Can” in Latin). Just a few weeks ago, Obama was giving a speech when the actual presidential seal fell from the rostrum. “That’s all right,” he quipped. “All of you know who I am.” Oh yes, Mr. President, we certainly do.

My favorite is this line from page 160 of The Audacity of Hope:

I find comfort in the fact that the longer I’m in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience.

So popularity and fame once nourished him, but now his ambition is richer and he’s answerable not, like some presidents, to the Almighty, but to the gaze of his personal conscience. Which is steady. The fact that this sentence appears in the second memoir of a man not yet 50 years old—and who had been in national politics for all of two years—is merely icing.

People have been noticing Obama’s vanity for a long time. In 2008, one of his Harvard Law classmates, the entertainment lawyer Jackie Fuchs, explained what Obama was like during his school days: “One of our classmates once famously noted that you could judge just how pretentious someone’s remarks in class were by how high they ranked on the ‘Obamanometer,’ a term that lasted far longer than our time at law school. Obama didn’t just share in class—he pontificated. He knew better than everyone else in the room, including the teachers. ”

The story of Obama’s writing career is an object lesson in how our president’s view of himself shapes his interactions with the world around him. In 1990, Obama was wrapping up his second year at Harvard Law when the New York Times ran a profile of him on the occasion of his becoming the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. A book agent in New York named Jane Dystel read the story and called up the young man, asking if he’d be interested in writing a book. Like any 29-year-old, he wasn’t about to turn down money. He promptly accepted a deal with Simon & Schuster’s Poseidon imprint—reportedly in the low six-figures—to write a book about race relations.

Obama missed his deadline. No matter. His agent quickly secured him another contract, this time with Times Books. And a $40,000 advance. Not bad for an unknown author who had already blown one deal, writing about a noncommercial subject.

By this point Obama had left law school, and academia was courting him. The University of Chicago Law School approached him; although they didn’t have any specific needs, they wanted to be in the Barack Obama business. As Douglas Baird, the head of Chicago’s appointments committee, would later explain, “You look at his background—Harvard Law Review president, magna cum laude, and he’s African American. This is a no-brainer hiring decision at the entry level of any law school in the country.” Chicago invited Obama to come in and teach just about anything he wanted. But Obama wasn’t interested in a professor’s life. Instead, he told them that he was writing a book—about voting rights. The university made him a fellow, giving him an office and a paycheck to keep him going while he worked on this important project.

In case you’re keeping score at home, there was some confusion as to what book young Obama was writing. His publisher thought he was writing about race relations. His employer thought he was writing about voting rights law. But Obama seems to have never seriously considered either subject. Instead, he decided that his subject would be himself. The 32-year-old was writing a memoir.

Obama came clean to the university first. He waited until his fellowship was halfway over—perhaps he was concerned that his employers might not like the bait-and-switch. He needn’t have worried. Baird still hoped that Obama would eventually join the university’s faculty (he had already begun teaching a small classload as a “senior lecturer”). “It was a good deal for us,” Baird explained, “because he was a good teaching prospect and we wanted him around.”

And it all worked out in the end. The book Obama eventually finished was Dreams from My Father. It didn’t do well initially, but nine years later, after his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention made him a star, it sold like gangbusters. Obama got rich. And famous. The book became the springboard for his career in national politics.

Only it didn’t quite work out for everybody. Obama left the University of Chicago, never succumbing to their offers of a permanent position in their hallowed halls. Simon & Schuster, which had taken a chance on an unproven young writer, got burned for a few thousand bucks. And Jane Dystel, who’d plucked him out of the pages of the New York Times and got him the deal to write the book that sped his political rise? As soon as Obama was ready to negotiate the contract for his second book—the big-money payday—he dumped her and replaced her with super-agent Robert Barnett.

We risk reading too much into these vignettes—after all, our president is a mansion with many rooms and it would be foolish to reduce him to pure ego. Yet the vignettes are so numerous. For instance, a few years ago Obama’s high school basketball coach told ABC News how, as a teenager, Obama always badgered him for more playing time, even though he wasn’t the best player on the team—or even as good as he thought he was. Everyone who has ever played team sports has encountered the kid with an inflated sense of self. That’s common. What’s rare is the kid who feels entitled enough to nag the coach about his minutes. Obama was that kid. His enthusiasm about his abilities and his playing time extended into his political life. In 2004, Obama explained to author David Mendell how he saw his future as a national political figure: “I’m LeBron, baby. I can play on this level. I got some game.” After just a couple of months in the Senate, Obama jumped the Democratic line and started asking voters to make him president.

Yet you don’t have to delve deep into armchair psychology to see how Obama’s vanity has shaped his presidency. In January 2009 he met with congressional leaders to discuss the stimulus package. The meeting was supposed to foster bipartisanship. Senator Jon Kyl questioned the plan’s mixture of spending and tax cuts. Obama’s response to him was, “I won.” A year later Obama held another meeting to foster bipartisanship for his health care reform plan. There was some technical back-and-forth about Republicans not having the chance to properly respond within the constraints of the format because President Obama had done some pontificating, as is his wont. Obama explained, “There was an imbalance on the opening statements because”—here he paused, self-satisfiedly—“I’m the president. And so I made, uh, I don’t count my time in terms of dividing it evenly.”

There are lots of times when you get the sense that Obama views the powers of the presidency as little more than a shadow of his own person. When he journeyed to Copenhagen in October 2009 to pitch Chicago’s bid for the Olympics, his speech to the IOC was about—you guessed it: “Nearly one year ago, on a clear November night,” he told the committee, “people from every corner of the world gathered in the city of Chicago or in front of their televisions to watch the results of .  .  . ” and away he went. A short while later he was back in Copenhagen for the climate change summit. When things looked darkest, he personally commandeered the meeting to broker a “deal.” Which turned out to be worthless. In January 2010, Obama met with nervous Democratic congressmen to assure them that he wasn’t driving the party off a cliff. Confronted with worries that 2010 could be a worse off-year election than 1994, Obama explained to the professional politicians, “Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.”

In the midst of the BP oil spill last summer, Obama explained, “My job right now is just to make sure that everybody in the Gulf understands this is what I wake up to in the morning and this is what I go to bed at night thinking about: the spill.” Read that again: The president thinks that the job of the president is to make certain the citizens correctly understand what’s on the president’s mind.

Obama’s vanity is even more jarring when paraded in the foreign arena. In April, Poland suffered a national tragedy when its president, first lady, and a good portion of the government were killed in a plane crash. Obama decided not to go to the funeral. He played golf instead. Though maybe it’s best that he didn’t make the trip. When he journeyed to Great Britain to meet with the queen he gave her an amazing gift: an iPod loaded with recordings of his speeches and pictures from his inauguration.

On November 9, 2009, Europe celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was kind of a big deal. They may not mention the Cold War in schools much these days, but it pitted the Western liberal order against a totalitarian ideology in a global struggle. In this the United States was the guarantor of liberty and peace for the West; had we faltered, no corner of the world would have been safe from Soviet domination. 

President Obama has a somewhat different reading. He explains: “The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.” Pretty magnanimous of the Soviets to let the long twilight struggle end peacefully like that, especially after all we did to provoke them.

So Obama doesn’t know much about the Cold War. Which is probably why he didn’t think the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was all that important. When the leaders of Europe got together to commemorate it, he decided not to go to that, either. But he did find time to record a video message, which he graciously allowed the Europeans to air during the ceremony.

In his video, Obama ruminated for a few minutes on the grand events of the 20th century, the Cold War itself, and the great lesson we all should take from this historic passing: “Few would have foreseen .  .  . that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make of it.” The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and the freedom of all humanity—it’s great stuff. Right up there with the election of Barack Obama. 

All presidents are hostage to self-confidence. But not since Babe Ruth grabbed a bat and wagged his fat finger at Wrigley’s center-field wall has an American politician called his shot like Barack Obama. He announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, on the steps where Abraham Lincoln gave his “house divided” speech. He mentioned Lincoln continually during the 2008 campaign. After he vanquished John McCain he passed out copies of Team of Rivals, a book about Lincoln’s cabinet, to his senior staff. At his inauguration, he chose to be sworn into office using Lincoln’s Bible. At the inaugural luncheon following the ceremony, he requested that the food—each dish of which was selected as a “tribute” to Lincoln—be served on replicas of Lincoln’s china. At some point in January 2009 you wanted to grab Obama by the lapels and tell him—We get it! You’re the Rail Splitter! If we promise to play along, will you keep the log cabin out of the Rose Garden? 

It’s troubling that a fellow whose electoral rationale was that he edited the Harvard Law Review and wrote a couple of memoirs was comparing himself to the man who saved the Union. But it tells you all you need to know about what Obama thinks of his political gifts and why he’s unperturbed about having led his party into political disaster in the midterms. He assumes that he’ll be able to reverse the political tide once he becomes the issue, in the presidential race in 2012. As he said to Harry Reid after the majority leader congratulated him on one particularly fine oration, “I have a gift, Harry.”

But Obama’s faith in his abilities extends beyond mere vote-getting. Buried in a 2008 New Yorker piece by Ryan Lizza about the Obama campaign was this gob-smacking passage:

Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” After Obama’s first debate with McCain, on September 26th, [campaign political director Patrick] Gaspard sent him an e-mail. “You are more clutch than Michael Jordan,” he wrote. Obama replied, “Just give me the ball.”

In fairness to Obama, maybe he is a better speechwriter than his speechwriters. After all, his speechwriter was a 27-year-old, and the most affecting part of Obama’s big 2008 stump speech was recycled from Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, with whom he shared a campaign strategist. But it’s instructive that Obama thinks he knows “more about policies on any particular issue” than his policy directors. The rate of growth of the mohair subsidy? The replacement schedule for servers at the NORAD command center? The relationship between annual rainfall in northeast Nevada and water prices in Las Vegas?

What Scott Fitzgerald once said about Hollywood is true of the American government: It can be understood only dimly and in flashes; there are no more than a handful of men who have ever been able to keep the entire equation in their heads. Barack Obama had worked in the federal government for all of four years. He was not one of those men. More important, however, is that as president he shouldn’t be the chief wonk, speechwriter, and political director.

David Remnick delivers a number of insights about Obama in his book The Bridge. For instance, Valerie Jarrett—think of her as the president’s Karen Hughes—tells Remnick that Obama is often bored with the world around him. “I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually,” Jarrett says. “So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that they had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy.” Jarrett concludes, “He’s been bored to death his whole life.”

With one or two possible exceptions, that is. Remnick reports that “Jarrett was quite sure that one of the few things that truly engaged him fully before going to the White House was writing Dreams from My Father.” So the only job Barack Obama ever had that didn’t bore him was writing about Barack Obama. But wait, there’s more.

David Axelrod—he’s Obama’s Karl Rove—told Remnick that “Barack hated being a senator.” Remnick went on:

Washington was a grander stage than Springfield, but the frustrations of being a rookie in a minority party were familiar. Obama could barely conceal his frustration with the torpid pace of the Senate. His aides could sense his frustration and so could his colleagues. “He was so bored being a senator,” one Senate aide said.

Obama’s friend and law firm colleague Judd Miner agreed. “The reality,” Miner told Remnick, “was that during his first two years in the U.S. Senate, I think, he was struggling; it wasn’t nearly as stimulating as he expected.” But even during his long, desolate exile as a senator, Obama was able to find a task that satisfied him. Here’s Remnick again: “The one project that did engage Obama fully was work on The Audacity of Hope. He procrastinated for a long time and then, facing his deadline, wrote nearly a chapter a week.” Your tax dollars at work.

Looking at this American Narcissus, it’s easy to be hammered into a stupor by the accumulated acts of vanity. Oh look, we think to ourselves, there’s our new president accepting his Nobel Peace Prize. There’s the president likening his election to the West’s victory in the Cold War. There’s the commander in chief bragging about his March Madness picks. 

Yet it’s important to remember that our presidents aren’t always this way. When he accepted command of the Revolutionary forces, George Washington said, 

I feel great distress, from a consciousness that my abilities and military experience may not be equal to the extensive and important Trust. .  .  . I beg it may be remembered, by every Gentleman in the room, that I, this day, declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the Command I am honored with.

Accepting the presidency, Washington was even more reticent. Being chosen to be president, he said, “could not but overwhelm with despondence one who, inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration, ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.”

In his biography of John Quincy Adams, Robert Remini noted that Adams was not an especially popular fellow. Yet on one of the rare occasions when he was met with adoring fans, “he told crowds that gathered to see and hear him to go home and attend to their private duties.”

And Obama? In light of the present state of his presidency, let’s look back at his most famous oration:

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. This was the moment—this was the time—when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.

The speech was given on June 3, 2008, and the epoch-making historical event to which “this moment” refers throughout is Barack Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries.” 

 

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Opinion & Politics,advice

Lame Duck!

 

Dear Friends,

Will Rogers said ”this country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.”

The lame duck session did not create one new job.  However, it did find the time to spend another $1 trillion.  Same old tricks by the predictable democrat regime.  

But take heart, the calvary is almost here!  I would like to share the 29 December 2010 commentary written by Tony Blankley regarding Obama’s unsuccessful lame duck session.   It is well worth reading.

Mr. Blankley is the executive vice president of Edelman public relations in Washington.

Mrs Figgins

 

No Comeback for New Comeback Kid

“Don’t believe all the Washington talk that President Obama had a great lame duck session and goes into the new year and the new 112th congress with the whip hand. Utter nonsense.

Let’s review the lame duck session as it happened — not as it has been instantly revised by the ever-obliging Washington press corps.

In the first week or so, the president capitulated to Ronald Reagan’s supply side theory that tax cuts expand the economy, and tax increases contract it. The central policy was to not let expire the Bush tax cuts, not only because it would be tough on middle-class taxpayers, but also, the White House argued,because keeping tax rates down would be good for the economy.

Even the great triangulator, Bill Clinton, never conceded this point. In 1993, he raised taxes by about $400 billion to manage the deficit. And, while the economy slowed down briefly to a mere 1.9 percent GDP growth, the new dot-com technology business brought us the great economic expansion of the later 1990s — so Clinton never conceded to supply side theory.

And don’t think Obama merely took a week of embarrassment for that concession in December. We economic conservatives are still cheerfully reminding the public half a century later that President John Kennedy endorsed supply side marginal tax cuts. You can bet that Republicans will be reminding the public decades from now that “even Barack Obama” agreed to supply side tax-cut theory “way back in 2010.”

This is a historical intellectual capitulation of the first order by the Democratic Party president.

After that political defeat, the president had to endure another weak week when his party leaders in the Senate tried to jam through a trillion-dollar spending bill with more than 6,000 earmarks. Republican leader Sen. Mitch McConnell held firm, tea partiers across the country began to roar and the president’s allies quickly capitulated, with the White House agreeing to a short-term extension of spending — importantly leaving most of the 2011 spending in the hands of the incoming 112th Congress, not the infamous spendthrift 111th.

This was a second defeat for the president and his party — which, please remember, continued to hold its huge majorities in both the House and the Senate.

The final week of the lame duck is the thin reed on which the president’s alleged lame duck success is constructed. He lost on his goal of passing the Dream Act — which was designed to appeal to Hispanic votes. He passed — on a bipartisan basis — “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the confirmation of the Start Treaty.

The DADT passage was a legislative victory. But if — as most of our non-politicized senior military officers and about 60 percent of our combat troop rank and file believe — this new policy will reduce recruitment at a time when combat troop shortages are already hampering field success, there may be a long-term price for this short-term legislative success.

If, on the other hand, no serious problems emerge, I don’t believe the DADT passage gives the president any special political advantage in the out years.

Finally, the Start Treaty was confirmed in the Senate with most Democratic senators and a large handful of Republicans. This is hardly a partisan triumph. Almost the entire Republican foreign policy establishment supported it. Even the Republican Senators who opposed its December passage were only holding out for some minor amendments on nuclear modernization and missile defense authorization.

They got a promise from the president of $80 billion for nuclear modernization — which six months ago would have been called a GOP triumph — and still is.

And they got a letter from the White House that the treaty does not conflict with our right to develop missile defense — another triumph for the GOP from a White House that has shown little enthusiasm for our defensive technologies. 

Only because the Republican Senate leaders unshrewdly did not take yes for an answer — and continued to oppose Start — did the president get the appearance of a victory. 

In fact, despite the president believing it is historically consequential, the confirmation of the Start Treaty is a minor foreign policy matter today (30 years ago, during the Cold War, it would have been a central accomplishment). The real nuclear threats today are from Iran and North Korea — on both fronts of which President Obama is an utter failure, as was his predecessor President George W. Bush. 

Despite the sobriquet “The Comeback Kid” given to Obama by the brilliant, normally politically spot-on conservative gentleman and columnist Charles Krauthammer, Obama has not come back. 

Clinton gave himself that compliment after he came in second in the New Hampshire Democratic Party presidential primary just days after he and Hillary had appeared on “60 Minutes” to admit — in the face of the Gennifer Flowers illicit sex scandal — that their marriage had been rocky, but would survive (which it famously has). In Clinton’s case, he had come back politically. 

In Obama’s case, he enters 2011 facing more than 80 new Republican congressmen and senators, most of whom would make Barry Goldwater look soft on limited government and deficit spending. 

On those central issues of 2011, the president either capitulates or storms in defiance and gridlock. He has not come back from political crisis; he has only inflamed his formidable opposition across the country.”

 

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Opinion & Politics,Relationships

Dear Friends,

Below is an interesting article which I’d like to share with you.   It was published in 2003.

The tenets of lower tax rate hold ever strong.

 Many Thanks to the Heritage Foundation for allowing us to share the text below.  

Mrs Figgins

 

 

Leadership

The Historical Lessons of Lower Tax Rates

Published on August 13, 2003 by Daniel Mitchell, Ph.D.

There is a distinct pattern throughout American history: When tax rates are reduced, the economy’s growth rate improves and living standards increase. Good tax policy has a number of interesting side effects. For instance, history tells us that tax revenues grow and “rich” taxpayers pay more tax when marginal tax rates are slashed. This means lower income citizens bear a lower share of the tax burden – a consequence that should lead class-warfare politicians to support lower tax rates.

Conversely, periods of higher tax rates are associated with sub par economic performance and stagnant tax revenues. In other words, when politicians attempt to “soak the rich,” the rest of us take a bath. Examining the three major United States episodes of tax rate reductions can prove useful lessons.

1) Lower tax rates do not mean less tax revenue.

The tax cuts of the 1920s
Tax rates were slashed dramatically during the 1920s, dropping from over 70 percent to less than 25 percent. What happened? Personal income tax revenues increased substantially during the 1920s, despite the reduction in rates. Revenues rose from $719 million in 1921 to $1164 million in 1928, an increase of more than 61 percent.

According to then-Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon:

The history of taxation shows that taxes which are inherently excessive are not paid. The high rates inevitably put pressure upon the taxpayer to withdraw his capital from productive business and invest it in tax-exempt securities or to find other lawful methods of avoiding the realization of taxable income. The result is that the sources of taxation are drying up; wealth is failing to carry its share of the tax burden; and capital is being diverted into channels which yield neither revenue to the Government nor profit to the people.

The Kennedy tax cuts
President Hoover dramatically increased tax rates in the 1930s and President Roosevelt compounded the damage by pushing marginal tax rates to more than 90 percent. Recognizing that high tax rates were hindering the economy, President Kennedy proposed across-the-board tax rate reductions that reduced the top tax rate from more than 90 percent down to 70 percent. What happened? Tax revenues climbed from $94 billion in 1961 to $153 billion in 1968, an increase of 62 percent (33 percent after adjusting for inflation).

According to President John F. Kennedy:

Our true choice is not between tax reduction, on the one hand, and the avoidance of large Federal deficits on the other. It is increasingly clear that no matter what party is in power, so long as our national security needs keep rising, an economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits… In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.

The Reagan tax cuts
Thanks to “bracket creep,” the inflation of the 1970s pushed millions of taxpayers into higher tax brackets even though their inflation-adjusted incomes were not rising. To help offset this tax increase and also to improve incentives to work, save, and invest, President Reagan proposed sweeping tax rate reductions during the 1980s. What happened? Total tax revenues climbed by 99.4 percent during the 1980s, and the results are even more impressive when looking at what happened to personal income tax revenues. Once the economy received an unambiguous tax cut in January 1983, income tax revenues climbed dramatically, increasing by more than 54 percent by 1989 (28 percent after adjusting for inflation).

According to then-U.S. Representative Jack Kemp (R-NY), one of the chief architects of the Reagan tax cuts:

At some point, additional taxes so discourage the activity being taxed, such as working or investing, that they yield less revenue rather than more. There are, after all, two rates that yield the same amount of revenue: high tax rates on low production, or low rates on high production.

2) The rich pay more when incentives to hide income are reduced.

The tax cuts of the 1920s
The share of the tax burden paid by the rich rose dramatically as tax rates were reduced. The share of the tax burden borne by the rich (those making $50,000 and up in those days) climbed from 44.2 percent in 1921 to 78.4 percent in 1928.

The Kennedy tax cuts
Just as happened in the 1920s, the share of the income tax burden borne by the rich increased following the tax cuts. Tax collections from those making over $50,000 per year climbed by 57 percent between 1963 and 1966, while tax collections from those earning below $50,000 rose 11 percent. As a result, the rich saw their portion of the income tax burden climb from 11.6 percent to 15.1 percent.

The Reagan tax cuts
The share of income taxes paid by the top 10 percent of earners jumped significantly, climbing from 48.0 percent in 1981 to 57.2 percent in 1988. The top 1 percent saw their share of the income tax bill climb even more dramatically, from 17.6 percent in 1981 to 27.5 percent in 1988.

Harmful Spending & Complexity
Lower tax rates are important, but they are not the only critical issue. Both the level of government spending and where that money goes are very important. And even when looking only at tax policy, tax rates are just one piece of the puzzle. If certain types of income are subject to multiple layers of tax, as occurs in the current system, that problem cannot be solved by low rates. Similarly, a tax system with needless levels of complexity will impose heavy costs on the productive sector of the economy.

This WebMemo is excerpted from the author’s, Daniel J. Mitchell’s, Backgrounder, The Historical Lessons of Lower Tax Rates, published JulWebMemo #327y 19, 1996. 

 

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How To,Opinion & Politics,advice

Dear Friends,

I would like to share an exceptional article written by Mr. Charles Krauthammer, which appeared today 10 December 2010. 

Mr. Krauthammer was the recipient of the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary.   He writes an internationally syndicated column for The Washington Post Writers Group, and was named by the Financial Times as America’s most influential commentator.

Mr. Krauthammer began writing the weekly column for The Washington Post in January 1985, which now appears in more than 180 newspapers.

Mrs. Figgins

 

Mr. Krauthammer

 

Swindle of the Year

By Charles Krauthammer · Friday, December 10, 2010

WASHINGTON — Barack Obama won the great tax-cut showdown of 2010 — and House Democrats don’t have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negotiated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the U.S. economy over the next two years — which just happen to be the two years of the run-up to the next presidential election. This is a defeat?

If Obama had asked for a second stimulus directly, he would have been laughed out of town. Stimulus I was so reviled that the Democrats banished the word from their lexicon throughout the 2010 campaign. And yet, despite a very weak post-election hand, Obama got the Republicans to offer to increase spending and cut taxes by $990 billion over two years — $630 billion of it above and beyond extension of the Bush tax cuts.

No mean achievement. After all, these are the same Republicans who spent 2010 running on limited government and reducing debt. And this budget busting occurs less than a week after the president’s deficit commission had supposedly signaled a new national consensus of austerity and frugality.

Some Republicans are crowing that Stimulus II is the Republican way — mostly tax cuts — rather than the Democrats’ spending orgy of Stimulus I. That’s consolation? This just means that Republicans are two years too late. Stimulus II will still blow another near-$1 trillion hole in the budget.

At great cost that will have to be paid after this newest free lunch, the package will add as much as 1 percent to GDP and lower the unemployment rate by about 1.5 percentage points. That could easily be the difference between victory and defeat in 2012.

Obama is no fool. While getting Republicans to boost his own re-election chances, he gets them to make a mockery of their newfound, second-chance, post-Bush, tea-party, this-time-we’re-serious persona of debt-averse fiscal responsibility.

And he gets all this in return for what? For a mere two-year postponement of a mere 4.6-point increase in marginal tax rates for upper incomes. And an estate tax rate of 35 percent — it jumps insanely from zero to 55 percent on Jan. 1 — that is somewhat lower than what the Democrats wanted.

No, cries the left: Obama violated a sacred principle. A 39.6 percent tax rate versus 35 percent is a principle? “This is the public option debate all over again,” said Obama at his Tuesday news conference. He is right. The left never understood that to nationalize health care there is no need for a public option because Obamacare turns the private insurers into public utilities. The left is similarly clueless on the tax cut deal: In exchange for temporarily forgoing a small rise in upper-income rates, Obama pulled out of a hat a massive new stimulus — what the left has been begging for since the failure of Stimulus I, but was heretofore politically unattainable.

Obama’s public exasperation with this infantile leftism is both perfectly understandable and politically adept. It is his way back to at least the appearance of centrist moderation. The only way he will get a second look from the independents who elected him in 2008 — and abandoned the Democrats in 2010 — is by changing the prevailing (and correct) perception that he is a man of the left.

Hence that news-conference attack on what the administration calls the “professional left” for its combination of sanctimony and myopia. It was Obama’s Sister Souljah moment. It had a prickly, irritated sincerity — their ideological stupidity and inability to see the “long game” really do get under Obama’s skin — but a decidedly calculated quality, too. Where, after all, does the left go? Stay home on Election Day 2012? Vote Republican?

No, says the current buzz, the left will instead challenge Obama for the Democratic nomination. Really now? For decades, African-Americans have been this party’s most loyal constituency. They vote 9-1 Democratic through hell and high water, through impeachment and recession, through everything. After four centuries of enduring much, African-Americans finally see one of their own achieve the presidency. And their own party is going to deny him a shot at his own re-election?

Not even Democrats are that stupid. The remaining question is whether they are just stupid enough to not understand — and therefore vote down — the swindle of the year just pulled off by their own president.

 

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Opinion & Politics,advice

A Time For Choosing

 

On occasion, Mr. Figgins shares her opinions and thoughts beyond the daily advice column. 

A proponent of free enterprise, restraining government, and providing maximum ability for all to create and achieve, Mrs. Figgins believes, it is indeed “a time for choosing”. 

 

“A Time for Choosing” (October 27, 1964)

Ronald Wilson Reagan

In a speech supporting the Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, Reagan speaks of big government, high taxation, and the “war on poverty.” He addresses foreign policy issues including the risk of appeasement, “peace through strength,” and the Vietnam War. The speech establishes Reagan as an important figure in the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

The transcript below contains the published text of the speech, not the actual words spoken. There may be some differences between the transcript and the audio/video content.

 

“Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you and good evening. The sponsor has been identified, but unlike most television programs, the performer hasn’t been provided with a script. As a matter of fact, I have been permitted to choose my own words and discuss my own ideas regarding the choice that we face in the next few weeks.   

I have spent most of my life as a Democrat. I recently have seen fit to follow another course. I believe that the issues confronting us cross party lines. Now, one side in this campaign has been telling us that the issues of this election are the maintenance of peace and prosperity. The line has been used, “We’ve never had it so good.” 

But I have an uncomfortable feeling that this prosperity isn’t something on which we can base our hopes for the future. No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income. Today, 37 cents out of every dollar earned in this country is the tax collector’s share, and yet our government continues to spend 17 million dollars a day more than the government takes in. We haven’t balanced our budget 28 out of the last 34 years. We’ve raised our debt limit three times in the last twelve months, and now our national debt is one and a half times bigger than all the combined debts of all the nations of the world. We have 15 billion dollars in gold in our treasury; we don’t own an ounce. Foreign dollar claims are 27.3 billion dollars. And we’ve just had announced that the dollar of 1939 will now purchase 45 cents in its total value.  

As for the peace that we would preserve, I wonder who among us would like to approach the wife or mother whose husband or son has died in South Vietnam and ask them if they think this is a peace that should be maintained indefinitely. Do they mean peace, or do they mean we just want to be left in peace? There can be no real peace while one American is dying some place in the world for the rest of us. We’re at war with the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars, and it’s been said if we lose that war, and in so doing lose this way of freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening. Well I think it’s time we ask ourselves if we still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.  

Not too long ago, two friends of mine were talking to a Cuban refugee, a businessman who had escaped from Castro, and in the midst of his story one of my friends turned to the other and said, “We don’t know how lucky we are.” And the Cuban stopped and said, “How lucky you are? I had someplace to escape to.” And in that sentence he told us the entire story. If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.  

And this idea that government is beholden to the people, that it has no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest and the most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man. 
  

This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves.   

You and I are told increasingly we have to choose between a left or right. Well I’d like to suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There’s only an up or down—[up] man’s old—old-aged dream, the ultimate in individual freedom consistent with law and order, or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. And regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course.   

In this vote-harvesting time, they use terms like the “Great Society,” or as we were told a few days ago by the President, we must accept a greater government activity in the affairs of the people. But they’ve been a little more explicit in the past and among themselves; and all of the things I now will quote have appeared in print. These are not Republican accusations. For example, they have voices that say, “The cold war will end through our acceptance of a not undemocratic socialism.” Another voice says, “The profit motive has become outmoded. It must be replaced by the incentives of the welfare state.” Or, “Our traditional system of individual freedom is incapable of solving the complex problems of the 20th century.” Senator Fullbright has said at Stanford University that the Constitution is outmoded. He referred to the President as “our moral teacher and our leader,” and he says he is “hobbled in his task by the restrictions of power imposed on him by this antiquated document.” He must “be freed,” so that he “can do for us” what he knows “is best.” And Senator Clark of Pennsylvania, another articulate spokesman, defines liberalism as “meeting the material needs of the masses through the full power of centralized government.”   

Well, I, for one, resent it when a representative of the people refers to you and me, the free men and women of this country, as “the masses.” This is a term we haven’t applied to ourselves in America. But beyond that, “the full power of centralized government”—this was the very thing the Founding Fathers sought to minimize. They knew that governments don’t control things. A government can’t control the economy without controlling people. And they know when a government sets out to do that, it must use force and coercion to achieve its purpose. They also knew, those Founding Fathers, that outside of its legitimate functions, government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy.   

Now, we have no better example of this than government’s involvement in the farm economy over the last 30 years. Since 1955, the cost of this program has nearly doubled. One-fourth of farming in America is responsible for 85 percent of the farm surplus. Three-fourths of farming is out on the free market and has known a 21 percent increase in the per capita consumption of all its produce. You see, that one-fourth of farming—that’s regulated and controlled by the federal government. In the last three years we’ve spent 43 dollars in the feed grain program for every dollar bushel of corn we don’t grow.   

Senator Humphrey last week charged that Barry Goldwater, as President, would seek to eliminate farmers. He should do his homework a little better, because he’ll find out that we’ve had a decline of 5 million in the farm population under these government programs. He’ll also find that the Democratic administration has sought to get from Congress [an] extension of the farm program to include that three-fourths that is now free. He’ll find that they’ve also asked for the right to imprison farmers who wouldn’t keep books as prescribed by the federal government. The Secretary of Agriculture asked for the right to seize farms through condemnation and resell them to other individuals. And contained in that same program was a provision that would have allowed the federal government to remove 2 million farmers from the soil.   

At the same time, there’s been an increase in the Department of Agriculture employees. There’s now one for every 30 farms in the United States, and still they can’t tell us how 66 shiploads of grain headed for Austria disappeared without a trace and Billie Sol Estes never left shore.   

Every responsible farmer and farm organization has repeatedly asked the government to free the farm economy, but how—who are farmers to know what’s best for them? The wheat farmers voted against a wheat program. The government passed it anyway. Now the price of bread goes up; the price of wheat to the farmer goes down.   

Meanwhile, back in the city, under urban renewal the assault on freedom carries on. Private property rights [are] so diluted that public interest is almost anything a few government planners decide it should be. In a program that takes from the needy and gives to the greedy, we see such spectacles as in Cleveland, Ohio, a million-and-a-half-dollar building completed only three years ago must be destroyed to make way for what government officials call a “more compatible use of the land.” The President tells us he’s now going to start building public housing units in the thousands, where heretofore we’ve only built them in the hundreds. But FHA [Federal Housing Authority] and the Veterans Administration tell us they have 120,000 housing units they’ve taken back through mortgage foreclosure. For three decades, we’ve sought to solve the problems of unemployment through government planning, and the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan. The latest is the Area Redevelopment Agency.   

They’ve just declared Rice County, Kansas, a depressed area. Rice County, Kansas, has two hundred oil wells, and the 14,000 people there have over 30 million dollars on deposit in personal savings in their banks. And when the government tells you you’re depressed, lie down and be depressed.  

We have so many people who can’t see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one. So they’re going to solve all the problems of human misery through government and government planning. Well, now, if government planning and welfare had the answer—and they’ve had almost 30 years of it—shouldn’t we expect government to read the score to us once in a while? Shouldn’t they be telling us about the decline each year in the number of people needing help? The reduction in the need for public housing?   

But the reverse is true. Each year the need grows greater; the program grows greater. We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well that was probably true. They were all on a diet. But now we’re told that 9.3 million families in this country are poverty-stricken on the basis of earning less than 3,000 dollars a year. Welfare spending [is] 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We’re spending 45 billion dollars on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you’ll find that if we divided the 45 billion dollars up equally among those 9 million poor families, we’d be able to give each family 4,600 dollars a year. And this added to their present income should eliminate poverty. Direct aid to the poor, however, is only running only about 600 dollars per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.  

Now—so now we declare “war on poverty,” or “You, too, can be a Bobby Baker.” Now do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add 1 billion dollars to the 45 billion we’re spending, one more program to the 30-odd we have—and remember, this new program doesn’t replace any, it just duplicates existing programs—do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic? Well, in all fairness I should explain there is one part of the new program that isn’t duplicated. This is the youth feature. We’re now going to solve the dropout problem, juvenile delinquency, by reinstituting something like the old CCC camps [Civilian Conservation Corps], and we’re going to put our young people in these camps. But again we do some arithmetic, and we find that we’re going to spend each year just on room and board for each young person we help 4,700 dollars a year. We can send them to Harvard for 2,700! Course, don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting Harvard is the answer to juvenile delinquency.   

But seriously, what are we doing to those we seek to help? Not too long ago, a judge called me here in Los Angeles. He told me of a young woman who’d come before him for a divorce. She had six children, was pregnant with her seventh. Under his questioning, she revealed her husband was a laborer earning 250 dollars a month. She wanted a divorce to get an 80 dollar raise. She’s eligible for 330 dollars a month in the Aid to Dependent Children Program. She got the idea from two women in her neighborhood who’d already done that very thing.  

Yet anytime you and I question the schemes of the do-gooders, we’re denounced as being against their humanitarian goals. They say we’re always “against” things—we’re never “for” anything.   

Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.   

Now—we’re for a provision that destitution should not follow unemployment by reason of old age, and to that end we’ve accepted Social Security as a step toward meeting the problem.   

But we’re against those entrusted with this program when they practice deception regarding its fiscal shortcomings, when they charge that any criticism of the program means that we want to end payments to those people who depend on them for a livelihood. They’ve called it “insurance” to us in a hundred million pieces of literature. But then they appeared before the Supreme Court and they testified it was a welfare program. They only use the term “insurance” to sell it to the people. And they said Social Security dues are a tax for the general use of the government, and the government has used that tax. There is no fund, because Robert Byers, the actuarial head, appeared before a congressional committee and admitted that Social Security as of this moment is 298 billion dollars in the hole. But he said there should be no cause for worry because as long as they have the power to tax, they could always take away from the people whatever they needed to bail them out of trouble. And they’re doing just that.   

A young man, 21 years of age, working at an average salary—his Social Security contribution would, in the open market, buy him an insurance policy that would guarantee 220 dollars a month at age 65. The government promises 127. He could live it up until he’s 31 and then take out a policy that would pay more than Social Security. Now are we so lacking in business sense that we can’t put this program on a sound basis, so that people who do require those payments will find they can get them when they’re due—that the cupboard isn’t bare?  

Barry Goldwater thinks we can.    

 
At the same time, can’t we introduce voluntary features that would permit a citizen who can do better on his own to be excused upon presentation of evidence that he had made provision for the non-earning years? Should we not allow a widow with children to work, and not lose the benefits supposedly paid for by her deceased husband? Shouldn’t you and I be allowed to declare who our beneficiaries will be under this program, which we cannot do? I think we’re for telling our senior citizens that no one in this country should be denied medical care because of a lack of funds. But I think we’re against forcing all citizens, regardless of need, into a compulsory government program, especially when we have such examples, as was announced last week, when France admitted that their Medicare program is now bankrupt. They’ve come to the end of the road.   

In addition, was Barry Goldwater so irresponsible when he suggested that our government give up its program of deliberate, planned inflation, so that when you do get your Social Security pension, a dollar will buy a dollar’s worth, and not 45 cents worth?  

I think we’re for an international organization, where the nations of the world can seek peace. But I think we’re against subordinating American interests to an organization that has become so structurally unsound that today you can muster a two-thirds vote on the floor of the General Assembly among nations that represent less than 10 percent of the world’s population. I think we’re against the hypocrisy of assailing our allies because here and there they cling to a colony, while we engage in a conspiracy of silence and never open our mouths about the millions of people enslaved in the Soviet colonies in the satellite nations.  

I think we’re for aiding our allies by sharing of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we’re against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We’re helping 107. We’ve spent 146 billion dollars. With that money, we bought a 2 million dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya[n] government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity. In the last six years, 52 nations have bought 7 billion dollars worth of our gold, and all 52 are receiving foreign aid from this country.   

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. So governments’ programs, once launched, never disappear.   

Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.   

Federal employees—federal employees number two and a half million; and federal, state, and local, one out of six of the nation’s work force employed by government. These proliferating bureaus with their thousands of regulations have cost us many of our constitutional safeguards. How many of us realize that today federal agents can invade a man’s property without a warrant? They can impose a fine without a formal hearing, let alone a trial by jury? And they can seize and sell his property at auction to enforce the payment of that fine. In Chico County, Arkansas, James Wier over-planted his rice allotment. The government obtained a 17,000 dollar judgment. And a U.S. marshal sold his 960-acre farm at auction. The government said it was necessary as a warning to others to make the system work.   

Last February 19th at the University of Minnesota, Norman Thomas, six-times candidate for President on the Socialist Party ticket, said, “If Barry Goldwater became President, he would stop the advance of socialism in the United States.” I think that’s exactly what he will do.  

But as a former Democrat, I can tell you Norman Thomas isn’t the only man who has drawn this parallel to socialism with the present administration, because back in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before the American people and charged that the leadership of his Party was taking the Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. And he walked away from his Party, and he never returned til the day he died—because to this day, the leadership of that Party has been taking that Party, that honorable Party, down the road in the image of the labor Socialist Party of England.   

Now it doesn’t require expropriation or confiscation of private property or business to impose socialism on a people. What does it mean whether you hold the deed to the—or the title to your business or property if the government holds the power of life and death over that business or property? And such machinery already exists. The government can find some charge to bring against any concern it chooses to prosecute. Every businessman has his own tale of harassment. Somewhere a perversion has taken place. Our natural, unalienable rights are now considered to be a dispensation of government, and freedom has never been so fragile, so close to slipping from our grasp as it is at this moment.   

Our Democratic opponents seem unwilling to debate these issues. They want to make you and I believe that this is a contest between two men—that we’re to choose just between two personalities.Well what of this man that they would destroy—and in destroying, they would destroy that which he represents, the ideas that you and I hold dear? Is he the brash and shallow and trigger-happy man they say he is? Well I’ve been privileged to know him “when.” I knew him long before he ever dreamed of trying for high office, and I can tell you personally I’ve never known a man in my life I believed so incapable of doing a dishonest or dishonorable thing.

 

This is a man who, in his own business before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan before unions had ever thought of it. He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees. He sent monthly checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn’t work. He provides nursing care for the children of mothers who work in the stores. When Mexico was ravaged by the floods in the Rio Grande, he climbed in his airplane and flew medicine and supplies down there.

An ex-GI told me how he met him. It was the week before Christmas during the Korean War, and he was at the Los Angeles airport trying to get a ride home to Arizona for Christmas. And he said that [there were] a lot of servicemen there and no seats available on the planes. And then a voice came over the loudspeaker and said, “Any men in uniform wanting a ride to Arizona, go to runway such-and-such,” and they went down there, and there was a fellow named Barry Goldwater sitting in his plane. Every day in those weeks before Christmas, all day long, he’d load up the plane, fly it to Arizona, fly them to their homes, fly back over to get another load.  

During the hectic split-second timing of a campaign, this is a man who took time out to sit beside an old friend who was dying of cancer. His campaign managers were understandably impatient, but he said, “There aren’t many left who care what happens to her. I’d like her to know I care.” This is a man who said to his 19-year-old son, “There is no foundation like the rock of honesty and fairness, and when you begin to build your life on that rock, with the cement of the faith in God that you have, then you have a real start.” This is not a man who could carelessly send other people’s sons to war. And that is the issue of this campaign that makes all the other problems I’ve discussed academic, unless we realize we’re in a war that must be won.  

Those who would trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state have told us they have a utopian solution of peace without victory. They call their policy “accommodation.” And they say if we’ll only avoid any direct confrontation with the enemy, he’ll forget his evil ways and learn to love us. All who oppose them are indicted as warmongers. They say we offer simple answers to complex problems. Well, perhaps there is a simple answer—not an easy answer—but simple: If you and I have the courage to tell our elected officials that we want our national policy based on what we know in our hearts is morally right.  

We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender.  

Admittedly, there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face—that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand—the ultimatum. And what then—when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we’re retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he’s heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he’d rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us.   

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all.  

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this—this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits—not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”  

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.  

We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.   

We will keep in mind and remember that Barry Goldwater has faith in us. He has faith that you and I have the ability and the dignity and the right to make our own decisions and determine our own destiny.  

Thank you very much.”  

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We Hold These Truths

 

Heritage Foundation Editorial Review:

How can we get America back on course?

By returning to the timeless principles and practical wisdom that have been the source of America’s monumental success. 

By knowing and believing in ten core principles that define us as a nation and inspire us as a people—liberty and equality, natural rights and the consent of the governed, private property and religious freedom, the rule of law and constitutionalism, all culminating in self-government at home and independence in the world.  

Welcome to We Still Hold These Truths.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matthew Spalding is the director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies at The Heritage Foundation. An expert on political history, constitutionalism, and religious liberty in America, he is the executive editor of the bestselling book The Heritage Guide to the Constitution and the author or editor of three other works. Spalding, who holds a Ph.D. in government from the Claremont Graduate School, lives with his family in northern Virginia.

 

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