7thriv

Cutting Crew: Obama & GOP Extend Bush Tax Rates

Late word has it that Obama and the GOP have agreed to a compromise to extend the present tax rates as set by George W Bush in exchange for an extension in unemployment benefits. After two years of life under the political heel of smug progressives, it feels good to know how much it is killing all of the leftists who thought Hope and Change meant a fundamental redistribution of wealth in the United States:

President Obama and congressional Republicans agreed Monday to a tentative deal that would extend for two years all the Bush-era income tax breaks set to expire on Dec. 31, continue unemployment benefits for an additional 13 months and cut payroll taxes for workers to encourage employers to start hiring.
The deal has been in the works for more than a week and represents a concession by Obama to political reality: Democrats don't have the votes in Congress to extend only the expiring income tax breaks that benefit the middle class. The White House estimates that the proposed agreement would prevent typical families from facing annual tax increases of about $3,000, starting Jan. 1.
Obama was able to extract an agreement from GOP leaders to support an additional 13 months of jobless benefits, a 2 percent employee payroll tax cut and extensions of several tax credits aimed at working families that were included in the stimulus bill.
The deal also would revive the estate tax, but it would exempt inheritances of up to $5 million for individuals and $10 million for couples. Democrats on Capitol Hill are strongly opposed to setting the cap at that high a level and to the 35 percent rate discussed by Obama and Republicans that would apply to the taxable portion of estates.

I've been reading Radical In Chief by Stanley Kurtz, which lays out in detail Pres. Obama's roots in the world of American socialists and social democrats. If he really is a socialist at heart, this has to be a painful day. Certainly the progressives who were his most ardent supporters believed he was "one of them" and would stand firm on raising taxes on "millionaires and billionaires." They are right to feel betrayed. Then again, these wild promises to primary Obama are a bit much. He only delivered health care reform and a trillion dollar stimulus.

Of course, if you do not live within the left wing bubble, this was (finally!) the sort of thing Obama promised to do during the campaign: work with the opposition to pass common sense, bi-partisan reforms. Acting to stop a massive tax increase - one which everybody knew had a seven-year head deadline - fits that bill. Because, you see, this is one area where liberals are wrong and conservatives are right. Raising taxes only works if you are trying to redistribute wealth or hobble the economy. But, if you are worried about jobs jobs jobs, then a tax increase is not the way to go. All the Krugman columns in the world won't change that.

Hugh Hewitt and others have already declared themselves to be dispirited by the supposed failure to combine the tax deal with some spending cuts. I would be dispirited too...if this deal were reached after January 2011 when all of the Tea Party candidates take office. But, right now, we still have the 42 seat Senate and 189 seat House minorities we've been stuck with for the last two years. That the GOP could extract a concession of this level is close to a miracle.

One thing I would remind people feeling "dispirited:" this rhetorical idea that the Bush "tax cuts" should be "made permanent" does nothing to make the GOP look rational or serious. For one thing, we were never talking about tax cuts, only about maintaining the same tax rates that have been in place since 2002/3. No one is getting a tax cut now. Second, why the emphasis on making the cuts "permanent?" Tax rates are never permanent, only the fact that a tax must be paid at some point by somebody. This talk of permanent tax cuts frankly makes no rational sense, even if it does make political sense.

What happened today was all we could hope for from the 111th Congress. It's up to the 112th to begin the process of shrinking the government and reigning in spending. If they fail at that, they will have failed to keep a fundamental promise, as much as Obama has failed to keep the promises he made to his base.

Google Earth: China's War On Google

I don't approve of Wiki-Leaks, or of the NY Times, and I certainly don't like their on-going marriage of convenience, but I have to say their joint report today on China's attacks on Google (and the Internet) was ... damned interesting:

As China ratcheted up the pressure on Google to censor its Internet searches last year, the American Embassy sent a secret cable to Washington detailing one reason top Chinese leaders had become so obsessed with the Internet search company: they were Googling themselves
The May 18, 2009, cable, titled “Google China Paying Price for Resisting Censorship,” quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine atgoogle.com, he found “results critical of him.”
That cable from American diplomats was one of many made public by WikiLeaks that portray China’s leadership as nearly obsessed with the threat posed by the Internet to their grip on power — and, the reverse, by the opportunities it offered them, through hacking, to obtain secrets stored in computers of its rivals, especially the United States.
Extensive hacking operations suspected of originating in China, including one leveled at Google, are a central theme in the cables. The operations began earlier and were aimed at a wider array of American government and military data than generally known, including on the computers of United States diplomats involved in climate change talks with China.

China's government says the hacking is being done by freelance "patriotic hackers" whom I have discussed/made fun of before. But, let's get real. Of course the Red Chinese government is behind this. Only diplomatic niceties prevent us from saying otherwise.

As with the other Wiki-leaks State Department docs, I don't like that Julian Asssssange has taken upon himself to put this stuff on the Web. But, the Google story, like many others, is one that really ought to have been told much more extensively than it already has. For many American elites (best represented by Thomas Friedman) China has become an object of desire and envy, as they are awe-struck by that country's rapid modernization, and secretly jealous of the central government's ability to override property rights and individual liberty in pursuit of its policies. Stories like this, even in the context of an outrageous attack on America's national security, are a necessary reality check.

The Wages of Fear: Closing the Washington Monument

Great column from security guru Bruce Schneier on how DHS and the Park Service should go about securing the Washington Monument. He says, close the damn thing until we're ready to admit that security theater doesn't work, and only helps to assuage our fears (h/t Marginal Revolution).

Securing the Washington Monument from terrorism has turned out to be a surprisingly difficult job. The concrete fence around the building protects it from attacking vehicles, but there's no visually appealing way to house the airport-level security mechanisms the National Park Service has decided are a must for visitors. It is considering several options, but I think we should close the monument entirely. Let it stand, empty and inaccessible, as a monument to our fears.
An empty Washington Monument would serve as a constant reminder to those on Capitol Hill that they are afraid of the terrorists and what they could do. They're afraid that by speaking honestly about the impossibility of attaining absolute security or the inevitability of terrorism -- or that some American ideals are worth maintaining even in the face of adversity -- they will be branded as "soft on terror." And they're afraid that Americans would vote them out of office if another attack occurred. Perhaps they're right, but what has happened to leaders who aren't afraid? What has happened to "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"?
An empty Washington Monument would symbolize our lawmakers' inability to take that kind of stand -- and their inability to truly lead.
...
The empty monument would symbolize our war on the unexpected, -- our overreaction to anything different or unusual -- our harassment of photographers, and our probing of airline passengers. It would symbolize our "show me your papers" society, rife with ID checks and security cameras. As long as we're willing to sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety, we should keep the Washington Monument empty

No one remembers this, but back in the Eighties, some nut drove a panel van up to the Monument and announced that he had placed a bomb in it. (I don't remember if he had any demands ,but do remember that he was a middle aged white guy). After a several hours long televised stand-off, the nut was shot dead. When authorities opened up the truck they found...nothing. No bomb. No danger. A perfect example of how terrorism attacks the mind and the soul more than it targets people and things.

Counter-terrorism as practiced in the US treats everybody in the country as a potential terrorist. This despite the fact that virtually none of the people being "investigated" through pat-downs and purse-searches are terrorists. The joke is that we all know who the terrorists are, and can probably agree on five characteristics that would identify 90+ percent of all terrorists...but the security professionals assure us that the one thing they cannot do is rely on that sort of thing because it's "profiling." How convenient that they can just turn off their brains and do mass searches of the innocent public, rather than actually use their heads and do some actual counter-terrorism. (and how reminiscent of Viet Nam-era metrics of success like body counts).

Security pros always have a ready retort: hey, if there's another big attack, it'll be our heads because the public will be furious that we didn't connect the dots. But, dots don't connect because you put tourists through magnetometers. They get connected by police work and intelligence, but these are fatally hampered by a legal environment that practically guarantees the present dysfunctions. Pre-9/11, you couldn't connect the dots because the legal left had convinced the government that the FBI and CIA could not communicate with each other, among many other things. Post-9/11, that same legal left has been resisting any and all attempts to rationalize the collection of useful intelligence, or use the dread profiling, to combat terrorists both at home and abroad. All we are left with are pat-down at airports and tourist destinations, which at least have the virtue of simplicity. (and don't tell me the practitioners of punitive liberalism don't secretly thrill to the sight of middle class Americans having to choose between porno scanners or a genital grope).

The fact is that the only way to combat terrorism is to go out and find them and either kill them or take them to GITMO. America's expensive and disruptive security theater has nothing to do with this, and indeed is everyday becoming a substitute.

Party of No

Here's a transcript from a Hugh Hewitt interview of Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) about the prospects for passing big-ticket liberal initiatives during the lame duck session of the expiring 111th Congress:

HH: Senator Kyl, the Democrats are trying to throw some smoke in the air on this by saying let’s let the tax hikes go through for people making more than a million a year. Is that on the table in the eyes of anyone in the Republican caucus, that so-called compromise?
JK: No.
HH: All right. In terms of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, will that happen in this Congress?
JK: No.
HH: Will the DREAM Act pass in this Congress?
JK: No.

Who says the people's business can't be handled with brevity and dispatch?

The Idiot's Progress: How Has Wiki-leaks Damaged US Interests?

I've joined with everyone else in railing against Julian Asssssange and Wiki-leaks. Michael Ledeen writes that many of the revelations from the State Dept. cables were actually "good" leaks, in that the true state of affairs in the world have been laid out in a way that benefits realists and to the detriment of diplomats and internationalists. Could it be that Asssssange is the rare useful idiot who is actually useful?

Even though some of the reported remarks of foreign leaders were undoubtedly given to Americans in order to deceive us or manipulate us, still and all I find the cables I’ve read so far to be very helpful to anyone trying to understand the world.
It will no doubt annoy the Israel haters no end to discover that Arab leaders seem to be even more concerned about Iran than the crowd in Jerusalem, for example. And it’s very helpful for everyone to see that the “Axis of Evil” was real–the strategic cooperation on missiles and nukes between Iran and North Korea (with Chinese complicity) was intense.
No surprise that the cables have been denounced as “mischief” by Ahmadinejad, since they document the fraudulent electoral “results” that gave him a second term, and present the ghastly details of Iran’s use of the Muslim version of the Red Cross for espionage and murder in Iraq. Indeed, if I wanted to invent evidence to document the case against Iran that I have been making for twenty years or more, I could not have done better than the State Department cables just released.
Two thoughts:
First, it would save the world a lot of time and trouble if most of this stuff were published, rather than classified.
Second, the leakers should be punished violently. It has to be possible for our leaders to talk privately, both among themselves and with foreigners. If it’s all going to be leaked, candor will vanish and we will be locked into a wilderness of mirrors.

As Ledeen says, some of the Wiki-leaks info was useful information...but the leakers should still be "violently punished." I think that's a good balance. The revelations Ledeen cites above are not "new" - they are the sort of things widely discussed in the blogosphere and even in the foreign press. But, they are not the sort of things discussed much either by our government or by our MSM, both of whom seem to live in fear of an American public roused into action by the thought of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons via North Korea and China, among other things.

Asssssange is wrong for taking upon himself the task of deciding what secrets America should have. But America is wrong for tolerating some of the secrets it keeps from itself.

Busy Work: Financial Reform Targets Conflict Minerals

We heard all last summer (and after) that "we" needed to pass the financial reform act to restore balance to the financial markets, to reign in out of control bankers, and to protect consumers. So, why are Target and Wal-Mart having to report whether they are using tungsten mined in the Congo?

Top U.S. retailers including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp. are battling to limit a new federal law that could force them to report whether their store-brand goods contain minerals from war-torn Central Africa.
The requirement, part of the Dodd-Frank financial law passed in July, aims to pressure companies to spurn so-called conflict minerals—tin, tantalum, tungsten or gold from parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo or neighboring countries.
Income from those minerals is blamed for fueling violence that has claimed millions of lives in eastern Congo, which a senior United Nations official recently branded the world's rape capital.
Under the new law, public companies using any of the four minerals from Central Africa must report what steps they have taken to verify the minerals weren't taxed or controlled by rebel groups. Products that don't contain minerals that benefited such groups can bear the label "DRC conflict free." Companies that fail to verify their sources can still sell their products, but could face embarrassment.
A broad array of U.S. companies, including makers of medical devices, cellphones, airplanes and machine tools, will be affected by the requirement because the minerals are in the products they manufacture.
Less clear is the status of retailers, such as Wal-Mart and Target, who carry private-label goods. The Securities and Exchange Commission has the power to decide who is considered a manufacturer under the law, and so must comply with it.

Granted I am conservative which means I'm dumm and support "deregulation" but what the hell do conflict minerals have to do with financial reform? The answer, I believe, is nothing. But, we had yet another 1,000+ page "I haven't read the bill" piece of legislation passed by meddling liberals who would believe every NGO with a fax machine and a modem before they believe multi-billion dollar American retailers. Also, how is this not yet another chain around American manufacturing? Are there other countries out there passing this sort of legislation? No. They are buying the natural resources they need to innovate and grow their economies. When I see this sort of thing, it gives the lie to the Dems' claims that they are "pro-business."