THE GOOTW SOLUTION
The Obama administration estimated July 23 that the budget deficit this year will be a whopping $1.47 trillion. Unless spending is cut and more revenues found, catastrophe will ensue, CBO has warned. Popular programs will have to be trimmed if disaster is to be averted. And because the deficit is so huge, we must proceed with caution with tax cuts, the tried and true method of getting out of recessions past. So we must do all we can to spur economic activity and increase government revenues without increasing spending or cutting taxes. How can we do this? With what could be called the GOOTW Solution.
THE TRAGIC TREASON OF WIKILEAKS
If we needed yet another example of Washington's self-absorption, we sure got it with the WikiLeaks dump of classified data on AfPak. Government officials promptly freaked about the political consequences. The rush to insist that "there's nothing new here" and that the leaks "really don't change anything" was dishonest even by DC standards. Lies, lies, lies, lies, lies! The victims of this tragic event aren't punch-drunk White House staffers or members of Congress up for re-election. They're not the wed-to-Pakistan wonks at State or even the Pentagon's hide-the-bad-news generals. The forgotten victims are our troops on the ground. And the Afghans who've risked everything to help them. And what troubles Washington? The administration, which blithely assured voters it knew how to fix Afghanistan, is worried about eroding poll numbers. Congressional Democrats tied to the president's AfPak policies to prove their toughness on national security are panicked about voter backlash. The troops come last to them.
WHY ARE DEMOCRATS ALWAYS SURPRISED BY THEIR IGNORANCE?
Do you think more government spending helps economic growth or harms it? Last Friday (7/23), the White House again increased its federal budget deficit forecast and reduced its economic growth forecast for 2011. It is abundantly clear that the economic program the Democrat Administration and Democrat Congress instituted 18 months ago - primarily massive increases in government spending - is not working as advertised. Surprise, surprise. Isn't it interesting how Democrats are always surprised by their ignorance?
HALF-FULL REPORT 07/30/10
Growing up as a teenage California surfer in the late 50s/early 60s, my favorite music was Surf Rock. The record we all loved the most then is the one that keeps reverberating in my head now with little more than 90 days to go until November 2nd. In 1962, five kids from Glendora High School (Jim Fuller, Bob Berryhill, Ron Wilson, Jim Pash, and Pat Connolly) called themselves The Surfaris, and talked the owner of a small recording studio in Cucamonga, Dale Smallin, into recording a song of theirs called Surfer Joe. Needing something for the throw-away "B-side" of the 45 record, Ron Wilson started blasting away on the drums while Jim Fuller went wild with surf guitar riffs. Dale Smallin decided for a gag to start it off with his crazy Witch Laugh cackle. They named it after what happens to a surfer when a giant wave crashes on his head. Here it is now, the greatest surf music ever played - and it should be the theme song for what's going to happen to Democrats this fall:
THE SPEECH EVERY AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL SHOULD GIVE
To the students and faculty of our high school as we begin a new academic year this September of 2010: I am your new principal, and honored to be so. There is no greater calling than to teach young people. I would like to apprise you of some important changes coming to our school. I am making these changes because I am convinced that most of the ideas that have dominated public education in America have worked against you, against your teachers and against your country. First, this school will no longer honor race or ethnicity. I could not care less if your racial makeup is black, brown, red, yellow or white. I could not care less if your origins are African, Latin American, Asian or European, or if your ancestors arrived here on the Mayflower or on slave ships. The only identity I care about, the only one this school will recognize, is your individual identity -- your character, your scholarship, your humanity. And the only national identity this school will care about is American.
WHO IS GIVING WAR A CHANCE?
Hear them? The war drums, pounding louder and louder. In response to them, the Persian Midget, Mahmoud Ahmadinutjob announced on Iranian Press TV that the US has "hatched a plot" with Israel to attack Iran "within the next three months." Hmmm... three months. That would be, like... October. How convenient. A lot of TTPers are convinced that Zero's October Surprise is an Arab-Israeli attack on Iran for which he can claim credit for allowing or winking at. We should all wish him well in this endeavor. If there is to be an October Surprise, let's hope this is it. Just why Zero will think it will help the electoral chances of Congressional Dems in November is not clear. It will outrage the Moonbat Left, who will just not show up at the voting booth, while all the Pubs and Indies will cheer an attack on Iran and then pull the GOP lever anyway. Now if Zero thinks that giving war a chance is the way to give his Dems a chance, all we can say is, cool - go for it. Wiping out the terrorist mullahs and Moslem crazies of Iran would be the best possible October Surprise. But... how could an anti-military metrosexual pantywaist like Zero come up with this idea? Because it's not his idea, and the person whose idea it is talked him into it. Who could that be? Let's go to Seoul, South Korea to find out.
WIKILEAKS IS NO SURPRISE TO TTPERS
Over this past weekend, the Web organization WikiLeaks made available to selected news organizations copies of nearly 92,000 classified documents about the war in Afghanistan. The vast majority, according to the accounts published Monday (7/26) in the New York Times, the British newspaper the Guardian, and the German magazine Der Spiegel (the Mirror), are reports, classified at the relatively low level of "Secret," from American junior officers and non-commissioned officers. The chief "revelation" is that Pakistan's CIA, the Inter-Service Intelligence agency, has been providing massive assistance to the Taliban. "The one good thing to come out of this latest leak...is that it could spell the end of Pakistan's repulsive double game," said former Wall Street Journal editor Tunku Varadarajan. "This is a game in which that country takes billions of dollars of our aid money...and then blithely, devilishly, mendaciously stabs us in the back by arming, protecting, financing, hiding and advising the same forces against whom this country is at war. We pay them money so they can help our enemies kill us." For readers of To the Point, this is not news, for you learned about this long ago.
HALF-FULL REPORT 07/23/10
Psalms 23:5. That's what comes to mind this week. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. There will be weeks when our cup is bone dry. This week is not one of them, for truly, our cup is running over the top. We start with the death of the Great New Cause of the Left, its substitute for Marxism as a rationale for control of everyone's life, Warmism. Its insufferably sanctimonious champion had the final nail driven into his reputation's coffin Wednesday (7/21), as two more women came forward with rape-abuse charges. Algore is belly up. That came on the heels of one of the liberal media's most prominent mouthpieces, Newsweek, declaring (7/12) The Green Retreat - that Warmism is over as a major political force. Confirmation came yesterday (7/22), with Reid and Kerry throwing in the Cap and Trade towel. As the Wall Street Journal reported: "Senate Democratic leaders Thursday shelved their effort to cap greenhouse-gas emissions as part of a broad energy bill, putting aside indefinitely a centerpiece of President Barack Obama's ambitious effort to transform the way Americans produce and consume energy." That should make any freedom-lover's week. But there's so much more.
WHO COULD BE SURPRISED AT OBAMA’S RACIAL MESS?
In 2008, liberal journalists discussed using false charges of racism to discourage news coverage of Barack Obama's long time association with his hate-spewing pastor, Jeremiah Wright. "If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose," Spencer Ackerman, now of Wired magazine, said in an email to colleagues on Journolist. "Instead, take one of them -- Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares -- and call them racists." Journolist was a list-serve created by the Washington Post's Ezra Klein. He shut it down this week after conservative journalists Tucker Carlson and Andrew Breitbart obtained emails members sent to each other. But when the race card is played clumsily, it can backfire, as the National Association of Colored People and the Obama administration learned also this week. It is, as Drudge calls it, a "Racial Mess." Who could possibly be surprised?
RATIONAL OPTIMISM
As "The Oasis for Rational Conservatives," To The Point espouses a world-view that could be called rational optimism. It is encapsulated every week in (and in the very title of) The Half-Full Report. Smart-aleck cynics claim the term "rational optimism" is an oxy-moron. We can thank them for sharing, and suggest they learn a little history - such as about the most successful presidency of modern times, that of Ronald Reagan whose success was due in large part to his cheerful - and rational - optimism. Sober cynics, however, who have studied history, claim that any optimism expressed today as America's freedom and prosperity are being maliciously destroyed by the Fascist Left is like the devil-may-care insouciance expressed in the movie Cabaret. The scene is Berlin in 1931 as Weimar Germany is facing the emerging Nazi threat. Germans wishing to ignore the threat are welcomed to the Kit Kat Club with the movie's theme song: No use permitting some prophet of doom To wipe every smile away. Come hear the music play. Life is a Cabaret, old chum, Come to the Cabaret! But this is irrational optimism, stupid, adolescent, and cowardly. Rational optimism is based on brains and gonads focused on optimizing the vulnerabilities of the evil with which you are confronted. It is also based on as wide a context as possible. So we're going to start 500,000 years ago, and work our way right down to upcoming state legislature races. Buckle your seat belts.