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Jewish World Review
Oct.29, 2012/ 13 Mar-Cheshvan, 5773
When the 'kooks' and 'racists' turn out to be your ideological allies
By
Jay Ambrose
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Erskine Bowles is not some right-wing, know-nothing extremist. He is in fact left of center, a former university president who served as White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton and as Democratic co-chair of President Barack Obama's bipartisan debt commission. It is in that latter position that he slammed Obama's irresponsible budgetary behavior while praising Paul Ryan to the skies. Some Obama supporters try to pretend over and over again that it's mainly kooks -- many of them racists -- who have been sharply critical of Obama's handling of major issues. But knowledgeable, balanced sources like Bowles have repeatedly confirmed how Obama has run lickety-split from a potentially ruinous debt threat, doing more to flatten perfectly sound proposals from the other side than to come up with anything credible of his own. The evidence in fact surrounds us that Obama is pushing us closer and closer to the tipping point on any number of crucial matters affecting our economy, our freedoms, rule of law and social cohesion. Give him another four years to do his sometimes amateurish, politically sneaky, ideologically overreaching thing, and our deliverance possibilities could be vastly reduced. Let's start a brief review of some of these issues, with emphasis on the obese $16 trillion debt. Our president, who cheerfully overfed it with trillion-dollar deficits, then had the temerity to attack Republican challenger Mitt Romney in a debate for wanting to keep our defense strong. The defense budget is around 20 percent of the total budget, and that's including wars that cost little more during all the Bush years than Obama's stimulus measures. The core of the peril is entitlements such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid that in their entirety are getting ever closer to two-thirds of the budget and could eventually pass that mark because of an aging population. Well before he became the Republican vice presidential candidate, Rep. Ryan of Wisconsin put forth a well-considered restructuring plan to salvage Medicare. That proposal and his other budgetary ideas were denounced by Obama even though he was making his own Medicare cuts that would not save a single budgetary dollar. They were meant to help finance Obamacare, a brand-new entitlement worsening our financial burdens while also piling up 13,000 pages of new regulations, just for starters. This conglomeration comes on top of an already existing regulatory mishmash that inconveniences us, occasionally handcuffs our liberties, thwarts prosperity and sometimes even shoves us in fatal directions. Here is another tipping-point issue summed up by the egregious excess of the U.S. code's 356,000 pages of laws and regulations that leave fewer and fewer aspects of our lives untouched. Obviously, some of these regulations are good and needed, but many are a terrible bother and worse. Reductions are needed, but what Obama is giving us instead is more, including some in Obamacare already scaring businesses out of hiring more people for fear of unaffordable costs. Obama's regulatory enthusiasms hardly end there, as we see in the way the Environmental Protection Agency is slapping energy industries around. This bullying to no good end and conceivably disastrous ones is in no small measure the consequence of still another tipping point issue: radical environmentalism that is forever winning its way. Most of us are pro-environment, of course, but at some point some parts of the environmental movement degenerated into a fanatical, theocratically minded religion that Obama seems to embrace. No single example is clearer than his nixing a vitally important Canadian-Texas oil pipeline as not safe when dozens of scientists had spent three years and filled eight volumes with details proving it was. Actions of this sort could demolish the prospect of an economy-resuscitating energy boom that otherwise seems to be in the offing. That's hardly the end of the tipping-point story. There is also the risk to rule of law that comes from Obama's disregard of constitutional restraints and there are still other worries that could be lessened with a voter-induced turnover in management, starting at the top.
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Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado.
Previously:
• 10/24/12: The pettiness refuge
• 10/18/12: An interruption that tells a bigger tale
• 10/17/12: A recovery that wasn't
• 10/12/12: Big Bird squabble points to something real
• 10/11/12: The 'war' you don't hear about --- the one on average Americans
• 08/22/12: Obama leadership: Romney's returns trump road to recovery
• 08/15/12: Saving Medicare the Ryan way
• 08/01/12: Combatting free speech
• 07/25/12: Good and bad reactions to Colorado horror
• 07/18/12: Apology time for Obama
• 07/16/12: Free markets solve climate change threats
• 07/11/12: Humans and particles and those who would order them
• 07/06/12: Why we'll miss Andy Griffith
• 07/05/12: All will feel Affordable Care Act's bite
• 07/02/12: A social solution --- homes with dads
• 06/27/12: Being a 'nation of immigrants' is not an excuse
• 06/20/12: Barack Obama the autocrat
• 06/18/12: Bradbury's lessons for today
• 06/13/12: Should this leaking administration sink?
• 06/11/12: Simpson bashes back on reform
• 06/05/12: Legalize sugary drinks, ban dangerous drugs
• 06/04/12: Keep America from going Greek
• 06/01/12: Don't believe in Obama's fairy tales
• 05/30/12: Writing a book? Beats prison
• 05/23/12: Student loans fail students
• 05/21/12: Europeanizing America into crisis
• 05/16/12: Obama a bully, too
• 05/15/12: Walker recall vote could swing national pension policy
• 05/07/12: Bumbling, fumbling, benighted, old Washington near tipping point where freedom is done for
• 05/02/12: The Communists cannot be happy
• 04/30/12: There's no objective truth, least of all concerning behavior
• 04/25/12: Forgive the extremist?
• 04/23/12: Educational excellence is a game
• 04/18/12: Obama's interventions help a few by the most autocratic, complicated, ineffective means possible, yet hurt many more
• 04/16/12: Overregulation strikes again: The nanny state threatens to turn us into children
• 04/11/12: Obama is not bonkers
• 04/04/12: Will America vote against authoritarianism?
• 04/02/12: 'Tipping point' on federal restraint approaches
• 03/28/12: Obama truth from an open mike
• 03/21/12: The progressive campaign for voter fraud
• 03/19/12: Public pensions will get us if we don't watch out
• 03/14/12: Politics needs reporting, not speculation
• 03/12/12: Home of the free, the brave, the endangered
• 03/07/12: Obama used Limbaugh as scapegoat
• 03/05/12: Campaign substance lost in media melodrama
• 03/01/12: When Big Brother drowns
• 02/24/12: Obama goes gaseous on gas
• 02/22/12: Political tears for trust in personal empowerment --- except in the bedroom
• 02/17/12: Of cut-off ears and silenced mouths
• 02/15/12: Obama is a joke whose antics aren't funny
• 02/10/12: An energy boom looms, despite Obama
• 02/08/12: Obama's assault on faith
• 02/03/12: Can Romney get serious?
• 01/27/12: Obama is like an Italian ship captain
• 01/25/12: Newt Gingrich's first 100 days
• 01/20/12: Obama's Keystone pipeline lies
• 01/18/12: Critics worse than urinating Marines
• 01/13/12: Ron Paul is a cartoonish character
• 01/11/12: Newt Gingrich upset by Mitt Romney's brilliance
• 01/09/12: How about regulating presidents, too?
• 01/04/12: How America smothers itself
• 12/30/11: A tax break that helps break the nation
• 12/28/11: Watch out for the banana peel, Newt
• 12/21/11: A tale of two men
• 12/16/11: Strange happenings in Russia
• 12/14/11: Tim Tebow is a man of character
• 12/09/11: A populist, envy-mongering fraud divisively exacerbating resentment among different groups of Americans
• 12/07/11: Tax games threaten nation
• 12/05/11: Why Wal-Mart serves us better than Barney Frank
• 11/30/11: Not writing off Newt
• 11/28/11: Answers to the Iranian threat
• 11/23/11: Failure of the incumbency investment
• 11/18/11: Occupiers: Chop off their heads!
• 11/16/11: Obama asks jobless to sacrifice
• 11/09/11: Michael Moore's insufferable occupation
• 11/04/11: Political tipping point is coming
• 11/02/11: Idealogues versus 7 billion
• 10/28/11: Obama games on student loans
• 10/26/11: Wit and quick moves v. humanity and thoroughgoing honesty? It's no contest - or at least shouldn't be
• 10/07/11: Baptists, bootleggers and Wall Street protesters
• 10/05/11: Federal law will get you even if you watch out
• 09/28/11: Leftist bugbears on the march
• 09/23/11: Still hope for coal to help us
• 09/21/11: Obama's Madoff ploy
• 09/19/11: U.S. can't afford to wait until it happens
• 09/14/11: Defending -- and strengthening -- gung ho collectivism
• 09/12/11: A pipeline to better times
• 09/08/11: Obama just keeps destroying jobs
• 09/06/11: Ultra-feminists thwarting justice
• 08/31/11: Corporations are people? Yes, Count the ways
• 08/26/11: What an earthquake tells us about debt
• 08/25/11: The tyranny of scientific consensus
• 08/23/11: Fracking hardly a public health threat
• 08/17/11: Why Obamacare won't control births
• 08/15/11: Balanced budget amendment unbalanced idea
• 08/10/11: Kerry's war on citizen speech
• 08/05/11: Upside to the compromise leaving the door open for obnoxious maneuvers
• 08/03/11: The people who may save America
• 07/29/11: On making deals, Obama is no LBJ
• 07/27/11: The threat behind the debt
• 07/23/11: Mean opposition to means-testing
• 07/20/11: Leftist babble makes debt crisis even worse
• 07/18/11: Time to raise demagoguery ceiling
• 07/13/11: Obama treating treaties badly
• 07/08/11: Is decline of U.S. exaggerated?
• 07/05/11: Not math deficiency, but demagoguery
© 2011, SCRIPPS HOWARD NEWS SERVICE
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