Robert Reich's Last Ditch Anti-Tea Party Scare Tactic

In last Friday's Wall Street Journal, former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich wrote a fear-mongering editorial entitled Why Business Should Fear the Tea Party.

Worried about the Tea Party's potential effect in today's elections, Reich wrote of how the movement has "shaken the GOP to its core" by defeating RINOs in Senate.

He then moved to his main topic, i.e., Rand Paul's call to abolish the Fed. Reich provides poll numbers showing more Tea Partiers want the Fed gone than does the general public, so it must be bad for Tea Party-backed candidates to win elections. Next, Reich cites Jim DeMint's focus on eliminating the IRS.

By mid-editorial, Reich shifts to basically admitting that Wonderboy has not been good for the economy, but, surely, Tea Party victors in Congress will only increase uncertainty, causing even more economic damage.

In the final paragraphs of his piece, Reich excoriates Michelle Bachmann for sensibly worrying that the current administration is trying to use the G-20 to advance the cause of 'world government. He quotes Bachmann as saying,

"I don't want the U.S. to be in a global economy where our economic future is bound to that of Zimbabwe,"

as if that's not a sensible sentiment.

Reich then reprises Wonderboy's 'cling to their guns and religion' theme, claiming that the Tea Party aims would not be gaining traction if there weren't a recession. He concludes by calling on business to "stand[ing] up to this dangerous idiocy, while actively supporting policies to relieve the economic stresses that fuel it."

In short, Reich is all for business as usual, with no change in the intrusive Progressive policies which, since 1932, have gradually but inevitably brought the US to its current profligate condition.

In Bob Reich's world, that's okay. Don't worry about overwhelming public debt, China's ownership of so much of it, slow economic growth or a weak dollar. And you certainly don't want to do anything too radical to reverse any of those phenomena.

Now They Tell Us! Brian Baird Comes Clean About Pelosi

This past weekend's Wall Street Journal in-depth interview, by John Fund, was with retiring Washington state Democratic Representative Brian Baird. He alleges that he's retiring "because the brutal congressional commute makes it impossible for him to see his twin five-year-old boys grow up." Fair enough. As a 12-year veteran, he's not running out just because he'll be in the minority come January.

I find Baird's comments totally disingenuous. Consider these passages from the interview,

""It's been an authoritarian, closed leadership. That style plus a general groupthink mentality didn't work when Tom DeLay called the shots," Mr. Baird says. "We've made some of the same damn mistakes, and we were supposed to be better. That's the heartbreak."



Mr. Baird, 54, is a loyal Democrat who voted for all of Speaker Nancy Pelosi's legislative priorities, including the stimulus bill, cap and trade and ObamaCare. But he admits all three have serious flaws."

So for all his sanctimony in the interview, remember, Baird was a party-line Pelosi soldier. He is one of those morons who believes that passing bad legislation on which people must rely, and must obey, is okay. Then serially fixing said flawed legislation, creating even more uncertainty- well, that's okay too.


"Democrats also watered down efforts to practice fiscal responsibility. "We initially had numbers a bit more honest than the Republicans—we at least included war costs in the budget," he says. "Now we're authorizing programs for three years instead of five in an attempt to pretend we're saving money."



When President Obama was elected in 2008, Mr. Baird was again optimistic that Democrats could bring real reform. But fierce Republican partisanship and the White House decision not to focus on job creation as its "number one, two and three" priority dashed that hope.


"Obama decided we weren't going to have a highway transportation bill because it might have required a gas tax increase," he recalls. After passing a misdirected stimulus bill, Mr. Obama made the fatal error of pushing forward with other priorities: cap and trade, financial services reform, ObamaCare. Each became compromised quickly.


For some of the shortcomings of financial regulatory reform, Mr. Baird blames the disillusioning battle over ObamaCare. "When the House had to pass the Senate version of health care unchanged, some members asked why should they invest the mental effort in mastering the details" of financial reform. Mr. Baird found parts of the bill mind-numbing.



Although he voted for it, he says he was troubled that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the entities at the heart of the housing meltdown, weren't addressed. They have clearly exercised undue influence on Capitol Hill, he notes. "When I was first elected I was puzzled why they were holding events in my honor as a mere freshman. I asked myself, why is a federal entity so involved in political activity?" "

I find these statements, again, disingenuous. So Baird had all these insights about and issues with various legislative proposals. But where was he on CNBC, Fox News, CNN, etc., complaining about them? Did he do so, and I missed those interviews? The last comment is hilarious, except it indicates how stupid Baird must be. Only "troubled" that Barney Frank's magical bill omitted Freddie and Fannie? C'mon, is anyone really this dense? They started the housing meltdown, led by Frank's directives from Congress. Was, and is, Baird so naive about the GSEs that he really 'asked' why they held an event for a freshman Rep?


"Regarding health care, his specialty, Mr. Baird gave House Democrats real heartburn. He voted against the first version of ObamaCare in November 2009, because the Congressional Budget Office and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services hadn't yet analyzed the bill's impact on insurance premiums and medical costs.
"What the hell were we doing voting on this? I had labor groups come to me and insist the bill was so important we couldn't wait to know what was in it," he recalls. "I asked them if they were handed a new union contract and told it was so important they had to agree to it without reading it, would they go along?" They continued to insist he vote for the bill and threatened him with a primary challenger.


Mr. Baird had developed his own health-care proposal that drew on his 23 years of experience as a licensed clinical psychologist treating patients with cancer and brain injuries. His plan would have provided universal health care but held down costs through vouchers for the poor, medical savings accounts for the middle class, and reform of malpractice insurance.



He admits to being frustrated that ideas like his never got a fair hearing in a Congress dominated by inertia and interest groups. "Our problems are now so grave we can't afford petty partisanship and closed thinking," he tells me."

All well and good, but, again, why was Baird silent? So long as these back-benchers remain silent, the parties will both continue to behave badly. Baird was elected by people in Washington, not Pelosi, Hoyer, Frank, et.al. Whose interests was he really serving with his silence?


"Mr. Baird stands by his vote for ObamaCare, noting that something had to be done for those denied insurance due to pre-existing conditions. But he acknowledges that the bill carried within it the seeds of its unpopularity. These include the nightmare mandate that all companies report to the IRS all of their business-to-business transactions over $600, so the government can capture unreported business income. At a recent forum with small business owners in his district, Mr. Baird was stunned at the complexity of the rules they now must follow.



"I warned my fellow Democrats that the insurance companies they were whacking could increase premiums just before the midterm election and blame them for it," he sighs. "I pointed out that the major benefits wouldn't kick in till 2014, but the costs were up front. I asked them, where was the political win? There was no real answer.""

Again, nice sentiments....now. Where was he nine months ago with this stuff in public? It's great to be brave now. How about when it mattered and might have affected legislative results? Sorry, Brian, you get no credit here for after-action honesty and 'courage.'


"In his new book, "Character, Politics and Responsibility," Mr. Baird argues that in order to afford caring for the needy, liberals will have to challenge "unsustainable entitlements." "I would eliminate the concept of entitlements and move to needs-based social insurance," he says. "The key is to both promote personal responsibility while lowering expenditures by not promising or giving money or other benefits to those who don't need it.""

Nice. Why wasn't this published online as an alternative view, rather than silently voting for Pelosi's bill?



"I ask Mr. Baird what he would tell the incoming class of freshmen Republicans if given the chance to address them before the new Congress convenes. He summarized his bottom line:


"Governing isn't as easy as you think. Many of you have taken pledges that are contradictory—to balance the budget and cut taxes, for example. You must be honest about the numbers, since our annual deficit now exceeds all discretionary spending combined. If you set as your goal to roll back the size of government, you have an obligation to answer the tough questions and show real courage, not just appeal to ideology. Treat the voters like adults." "


Not as easy as you think? I don't know about that. That pledge is feasible. The fact that Baird believes it is not means he is in the camp of believing people work harder as you raise tax rates. What an idiot!

Sure, honesty about numbers is important. So is treating voters as adults. But, as his former colleagues will likely see tomorrow/Wednesday morning, that's probably going to be the rule now, no longer an exception. And it will go for Republican in two more years, as well.

A different kind of tipping point, politically, may now have been reached.

Frisco Nan & Funding Sources

It's pretty rich that House Speaker Frisco Nan claims that 'everything was fine, then all this unidentified money came into GOP coffers,' or words to that effect.

Several significant red herrings have been tossed out by leading Democrats, e.g., the Chamber of Commerce allegedly spending foreign donations in political campaigns, various private, soft dollar conservative organizations spending on behalf of GOP candidates, and more teeth gnashing over the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision.

However, Karl Rove displayed an informative piece of paper a few days ago on Neil Cavuto's Fox News program. On it, he sketched out the total spending for both parties from various sources, showing that friendly union campaign spending on behalf of the Democrats brought that party to something like $300-400MM more in contributions than that spent for Republicans.

It's so typical that Nan & Co. raise specters of possible campaign funding rules violations and bemoan Citizens United, while their union buddies take full advantage of that decision to actually borrow money that their members dues' must repay, in order to spend it on Democratic candidates.

Wouldn't it all be simpler if McCain-Feingold and other, earlier complicated campaign funding laws were repealed, in favor of simply forcing the immediate publication of donors, while dispensing with all the other rules?

Like it or not, campaign donations and sympathetic communications constitute a form of free speech. I don't trust any Congressional attempts to limit that, because those attempts are inherently biased in favor of the sitting members who pass such legislation.

The NAACP vs Tea Parties

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial by Jason Riley, a member of its editorial board, took the NAACP to task for worrying about tangential issues like the Tea Parties, while ignoring issues you'd think would be more central to its mission.

Riley provided several examples of how the NAACP has wasted its time and money alleging, incorrectly, that the Tea Party movement is racist, while young blacks experience a 41% unemployment rate, dismal educational performance, and a continuing curse from single-parent households.

He closes his convincing piece with this passage,

"It's hard to understand how an organization that says it's devoted to "end[ing] racial disparities" finds the time to rail against tea-party populism until you grasp that the NAACP is, first and foremost, a Democratic Party organ. The NAACP is pretending that the tea party threatens the interests of blacks because the tea party in fact threatens the interests of the Democratic left. The civil rights leadership wants to discredit the movement for political reasons. And unfortunately, this partisan agenda takes priority over the many issues of consequence that confront blacks today."

Strong, but true words. And an important reminder in an era where NPR fronts for George Soros, and much of the current election cycle's spending has come through left-leaning unions and various privately-organized entities backing both parties' agendas.

The Juan Williams-NPR Flap

I realize I'm about a week late to this story. That should give you some idea of how trivial I think it is.

Basically, NPR canned liberal Juan Williams because he stated his feelings of anxiety when seeing people dressed in burkas on airplanes, when on a Fox News program.

The firestorm which erupted cast NPR in a bad light because it chose some innocuous little rule on which to base its firing of Williams. Critics trotted out Nina Totenberg's decade-old clip wishing Jessie Helms' grandchildren an unpleasant death from AIDS as proof that the network was playing favorites.

Okay. News flash- NPR is really liberal. Williams isn't the most liberal guy there. So they found a very public instance of his behavior that they felt they could attack and used it to fire him.

Now, for Christ sake, you'd think Williams was dead, gone to heaven, then rose from the dead and is a canonized Saint.

Honestly, this guy is nothing special. Like most liberals, he's not too bright. If he were, well, he'd be conservative, wouldn't he?

Like most liberals, he has no sense of how real people behave in society. He, too, seemed to be missing in action the day God handed out the common sense about people's economic and general social motivating behaviors.

Some liberals are just plain stupid. That would be, say, Alan Combs. Others are smart, but missing that ability to understand how most real people behave. That would be Williams.

If you've seen Williams on Fox, he typically gives a knee-jerk defense of any liberal elected official, like Wonderboy or Frisco Nan, in response to reasonable, informed remarks by people like Steven Hayes or Charles Krauthammer. No matter how inane he looks, he always comes to the defense of his ideological kin.

When I hear people like O'Reilly and Krauthammer say what a great guy Williams is, and how they are friends, I wonder what they are smoking. Maybe they're just spouting a Fox News line to keep Williams on board.

After all, let's face it, Williams is a two-for. Not simply liberal, but a black liberal. Even Colmes isn't that valuable.

And how much richer can it get than for Fox to rush to Williams' defense, then give him a new contract as the networks official token in residence, at NPR's expense?

Sure, let's defund NPR. It's way past time. And, yes, NPR is now basically on Soros' payroll. Williams' firing at an inopportune time, right before the mid-term elections, probably won't help Democrats, either.

But c'mon. Let's not go overboard. Juan Williams is hardly God's gift to journalism or cable news and opinion programs. What he is is a tolerable liberal who serves a purpose of providing Fox with more balance than their rivals.

Ted Kaufman- Instant Senate Mossback

Delaware's appointed Democratic Senator Ted Kaufman was on CNBC again this morning, blowing hot air as hard as usual.

There are several things about Kaufman which astound me. First, he tries to come off as an outsider appointed to fill Biden's last two years. But as his bio reveals, Kaufman has been an aide to Biden for nearly two decades, first working for him as a volunteer in the latter's first Senate campaign.

Recently, though not an attorney, Kaufman has been teaching a course concerning "The Congress" at his undergraduate alma mater, Duke's law school. From this, Kaufman seems to have acquired a patina of academic and non-partisan nature. Neither of which is true.

But Kaufman is not leaving politics after next January. Instead, he's been tapped by the current Democratic Senate leadership to replace financial-scold-in-chief, Elizabeth Warren, as head of the TARP oversight committee. Other than his anti-Wall Street disposition, Kaufman has no particular background whatsoever for this position.

In fact, to the contrary, Kaufman is completely naive and wrong-headed about the sector. He blabbered about how there was no regulation in 2008. That's simply untrue. In prior posts of mine, and elsewhere in business literature. many have noted that we had more than enough regulators and regulations. What we didn't have was effective people doing their jobs when already sufficiently empowered to do so.

So much for enlightened leadership from the new TARP oversight comittee head. He's an idiot who has no understanding of what he's about to oversee.

This is all of interest to me because, in the many appearances Kaufman has made on CNBC's morning program, he is introduced as a novice appointed Senator and academic. Clearly gross misrepresentation. In fact, Kaufman is a Delaware Democratic political hack who has served Biden since his first election to the Senate.

Thus, Kaufman's raging anti-business comments are positioned by the on-air staff as those of moderate near-non-partisan Senator.

This morning, for example, they bemoaned his leaving the Senate, grouping him with Evan Bayh and a few other retiring Democrats as the moderates who would be necessary to forge compromise in the new Senate.

Nevermind that there's been two years of take-no-prisoners, uncompromising legislative stiff-arming by the Democrats.

Kaufman went on to savage Republicans and laugh about how they are leaderless, when asked to handicap the prospects of various potential presidential candidates in the GOP.

For what it's worth, the GOP has a history of nominating candidates from among a large field, who have frequently gone on to the White House. This was certainly true of George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan. Even Nixon, for that matter.

Anyway, I began the post thinking that Kaufman was some outsider from Delaware who became a cynical, hacked-up mossback in just 20+ months. Now, however, I realize he's had nearly two decades of training on Senate staffs and in political election fights.

He did become a Senate mossback instantly. But after reviewing his past, it's understandable, because he is precisely the sort of Senator most Americans no longer want in office, i.e., a man who's been a professional political aide for nearly two decades. Feeding at the public trough while adding nothing of any particular or notable value.

Andrew Cuomo's Forgotten Past

I'm simply amazed that New York Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo has been able to distance himself from the damage he personally caused as Bill Clinton's HUD secretary.

Perhaps only Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad bear as much personal responsibility for the recent housing finance crisis and the financial meltdown it triggered.

Cuomo's ineptitude was reinforced by a recent article in the Wall Street Journal entitled Audit Faulted Cuomo's HUD Overhaul.

Within the piece, details inform us that,

"The Inspector General's audit report also claimed that senior officials under Mr. Cuomo sought to impede investigators examining the program and took the unusual step of asking the Inspector General's office for the names of HUD employees who spoke with auditors.

Several HUD employees "feared reprisal" and urged investigators to keep their communications confidential, according to the audit report."

Further on in the article, Cuomo's attempts to get these names, and the excuses offered by his minions, are provided. It makes for incredibly transparent and disturbng reading,

"Saul Ramirez, a deputy secretary under Mr. Cuomo, said the requeset for the names was "standard procedure" and intended to help headquarters  organize the schedules of field staffers involved in the auditing process."

It's a non-answer answer, isn't it?

But, moving back to the big picture, it's simply incredible to me that Cuomo has so successfully danced away from his culpability for the housing mess. And now wants to run an entire state.

It's probably a mark of the inadequacy of political opposition in New York that none of Cuomo's opponents seems to have bothered to connect the dots and hang this liability around the son of a former governor of the state.

Which I guess demonstrates that New York has a bad habit of selling its Senate seats to carpetbaggers and allowing for way too much plutocracy and cronyism in important elected state positions.