United Liberty

On this weekend’s Chris Matthews show, Joel Klein said that the anti-government rhetoric coming out of the Tea Party Movement comes close to constituting sedition:

“I did a little bit of research just before this show – it’s on this little napkin here. I looked up the definition of sedition which is conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state. And a lot of these statements, especially the ones coming from people like Glenn Beck and to a certain extent Sarah Palin, rub right up close to being seditious.”

(…)

“And Joe’s right and I’ll name another person, I’ll name Rush Limbaugh who uses this phrase constantly and talks about the Obama administration as a regime,” Heilemann said. “That phrase which has connotations of tyranny. And what’s so interesting about it to me, to get to Norah’s point – what is the focus, what is the cause of this? You think back to 1994, there was Ruby Ridge. There was Waco. There were triggering incidents. There’s been nothing like that. The only thing that’s changed in the last 15 months is the election of Barack Obama. And as far as I can see, in terms of the policies that Obama has implemented, there’s nothing.”

In his latest column at the Washington Post, George Will explains the problems with a value added tax:

Although the nation’s welfare often varies inversely with that of the political class, a VAT would ameliorate a real problem: Americans consume too much and save too little. Furthermore, today’s baroque tax code drives economic distortions and enables corruptions.

Corporations do not pay taxes; they collect them, passing the burden to consumers as a cost of production. And corporate taxation is a feast of rent-seeking — a cornucopia of credits, exemptions and other subsidies conferred by the political class on favored, and grateful, corporations. Because the income tax is not broadly based, it radiates moral hazard: Its incentives are for perverse behavior. The top 1 percent of earners provide 40 percent of that tax’s receipts; the top 5 percent provide 61 percent; the bottom 50 percent provide 3 percent. So the tax makes a substantial majority complacent about government’s growth.
[…]
And wait until the political class’s most imperious masters, the elderly, are heard from. When they worked they paid taxes on their incomes; retired, they will resent — they are virtuosos of resentment — being taxed when they spend their savings.

A new Pew Research poll shows that the distrust of our government is continuing to grow and at a steady pace:

The in-depth poll found Americans not only rejecting the idea of an activist government, but a growing number urging that its power be curtailed. The findings reinforce the anti-big government message of tea party rallies and suggest anew that incumbents, particularly Democrats, face a strong headwind in this fall’s elections for control of Congress.

“By almost every conceivable measure, Americans are less positive and more critical of government these days,” said the report from the non-partisan Pew Research Center.

The center said its new survey found “a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government - a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.”

A key finding: Americans oppose greater government control over the economy by a margin of 51-40 percent.

That’s a reversal from just a year ago, when they supported greater government control by a margin of 54-37 percent.

Unfortunately, Washington is oblivious to the reasons why.

“Then I say, the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and incumbrances of the first, the third of the second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation. Then, no generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.” - Thomas Jefferson to James Madison (1789)

A friend sent me along a passage from A Concise History of the Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes. The passage describes the time after the Bolsheviks seized power. The Bolsheviks were trying to restructure the entire economy between 1918 and 1921, making it centrally controlled and directed by trying to create a money-less economy based solely on barter. The passage, found on page 200, says:

All inhabitants of a given area were required to join “consumer communes” which upon the presentation of ration cards would provide them with food and other necessities. These cards came in several categories, the most generous of which were issued to workers in heavy industry; members of the “bourgeoisie” received at best one-quarter of a workers’ ration and often nothing.

Consider that passage, let’s substitute a few words, consider the Obama Administration deference to labor unions and more government involvement, and here is a what we get:

All inhabitants of a state were required to join government-sponsored insurance pools which upon the presentation of cards would provide them with medical care. These cards came in several categories, the most generous of which were issued to unionized employees; members of the middle class received at best one-quarter of a union workers benefits and often nothing.

I’m not implying that Barack Obama is a communist, I do believe he is a statist. I just wanted to make you think.

Sarah Palin:

LOUISVILLE, KY. (AP) – Sarah Palin spoke to a crowd of about 16,000 attending an evangelical Christian women’s conference in Louisville Friday night.

The Courier-Journal reports the 2008 Republican candidate for vice president mixed stories of personal struggles and calls for women to be good mothers and good citizens with criticism of President Barack Obama – although she did not mention him by name.

Palin asked the women to provide a “prayer shield” to strengthen her against what she said was “deception” in the media.

She asserted that America needs to get back to its Christian roots and rejected any notion that “God should be separated from the state.”

Ummm, Sarah:

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,-and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

— Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America
and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli of Barbary. Signed November 4, 1796

By President John Adams, no less.

Charlie Cook, a brilliant political analyst, sees Democrats losing at least 30 seats in November, and also says that control of the House may well be up for grabs:

Combining its own race-by-race calculations with the results of national polls, The Cook Political Report officially projects a Republican gain of 30 to 40 seats. I suspect that the GOP will do even better if the trend over the past seven months continues.

Cook also points out that this may boost Obama:

Despite all of this disagreement over whether the House will flip, there is pretty much of a consensus in the political community that President Obama’s chances of getting re-elected will rise if his party loses the House or Senate. (In my book, the latter is quite unlikely.)

There are two arguments supporting the notion that the president might benefit from divided government. First, a GOP-controlled House would provide Obama with a foil. Republicans would have some governing responsibility; Democrats wouldn’t “own” Washington and automatically get the blame for everything that does or doesn’t happen. A strong case can be made that President Clinton would not have been re-elected in 1996 had Democrats not lost control of Congress in 1994.

The second contention is that losing control of the House would allow (or force) Obama to take a more centrist approach, to replicate the “triangulation” that worked well for Clinton in 1995 and 1996. Positioning himself and his administration as less liberal than congressional Democrats and less conservative than congressional Republicans, Clinton became the moderate honest broker in policy, riding that course to victory over Republican Bob Dole.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal and Mason-Dixon have come out with a new poll testing general election a match-up between Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) and Sue Lowden, the Republican frontrunner. The poll also includes several third party candidates, including Scott Ashijan, the Tea Party candidate that has come under fire recently.

Nevada Senate General Election

• Lowden: 47%
• Reid: 37%
• Fasano: 3%
• Ashjian: 2%
• Other: 3%
• Undecided: 8%

A huge red flag for Reid in this poll is that he is losing in Clark County (Las Vegas) 44% to 38% and Washoe County (Reno) 45% to 41%, which is his base of support.

If Lowden can hold that lead in Clark County, it’s game over for Reid.

Mitt Romney has been one of the many Republicans criticizing ObamaCare, however, his own health care reform plan, passed by Massachusetts in 2006, is a lot like health care reform passed at the national level.

In this new video from the Cato Institute, David Boaz and Michael Cannon (who we did a podcast with last month) explain why Romney is probably not someone conservatives and Republicans want leading the charge to repeal ObamaCare.