One of the hallmarks of two of the greatest male screen stars of all times, Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood is their reticence. Nearly all the characters they play on film define themselves by their deeds and not their words. To paraphrase an expression of Theodore Roosevelt, they speak little, but, when necessary, wield their weapons deliberately — and decisively.

Contrasting House Speaker John Boehner this past week with his primary sparring partner (in the budget negotiations) and the last Republican speaker to succeed a Democratic one, I could not be notice his similarity to those great stars of the silver screen. He may shed a few more tears than either of those men, but unlike them, didn’t shower the public with as many words.  John Boehner didn’t lay his cards on the table until it was time to play them.

By contrast, the president and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich seem to find their strength not in holding their tongue, but in wielding it regularly and loudly. Each man delights in his ability to express himself — and the response he often gets from such expression. But while each man has often made intelligent observations, both have also frequently repeated numerous banalities and occasionally made embarrassing gaffes. (Fortunately for the president, the media do not delight in highlighting his as they do those of Mr. Gingrich.)

Some conservatives may despair that we did not get the amount of cuts we would have liked, but they did trim more than $75 billion off the budget the president proposed for a fiscal year for which his party had been elected to set the nation’s fiscal course.  And unlike the last tense budget negotiations between a charismatic Democratic president and a newly elected Republican House majority, without the Republican speaker being defined like a villain.

This is perhaps because the incumbent speaker is far more judicious in his public statements than was Gingrich.

Echoing the commentary of many conservatives, Bryan Preston calls that the president’s advice to a man concerned by high gas prices that he buy a new car “indicative of this president’s arrogant and out-of-touch mindset“.

Praising Glenn Reynolds for the “great job” he did “highlighting how the AP news organization appears to be in the can for Obama by changing a news item and taking out his inane reply to a question concerning fuel prices”, Sonicfrog asks if the news organization’s ““corrections policy” consists of  ”[c]overing for the political party of their choice!”  Read the whole thing!

For the better part of this week, when it has gotten too chilly in my apartment, I have been wearing a black sweatshirt I got as a thank-you gift for volunteering at Outfest in 2005. It’s not the fanciest of clothing and is indeed not nearly as thick as most other such garments. But is the perfect weight to keep me comfortable and cozy.

I probably hadn’t worn the thing since I first received it now nearly six years ago, only finding it when cleaning out my closet.   During that cleaning process, I found the three most expensive shirts I had ever purchased — and realized they were among those I wore the least often.  Indeed, I had probably worn my new “favorite” sweatshirt more frequently that I had worn those three shirts combined.

Just fun to note the total absence of correlation because the cost of an item and the frequency of its use. (more…)

Many  – on both sides of the political aisle — faulted then-President George W. Bush and his administration for failing to anticipate the “insurgency” which followed our speedy liberation of Iraq in 2003.  The same criticisms could be leveled against the incumbent and his team for failing to anticipate the difficulty of ousting Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi.  On Friday, blogger  Robert Stacy McCain asked if we were losing in Libya:

Scarcely three weeks after the U.S. military launched Operation Odyssey Dawn, the war in Libya is beginning to look like President Obama’s worst failure to date. While official Washington and the political press have been focused on budget negotiations and the prospect of a federal government shutdown, a foreign-policy disaster has been slowly unfolding in the deserts of the North African nation that Col. Moammar Gaddafi has ruled for more than four decades.

Read the whole thing.

Offering criticisms similar to those this other McCain delineates, George Will wonders at the administration’s “mission meander” in North Africa, “At about this point in foreign policy misadventures, the usual question is: What is Plan B? Today’s question is: What was Plan A?”

It seems almost as  if the president believed he didn’t need a plan, but could lead by his presence alone.

“The president,” White House senior adviser David Plouffe said today n NBC’s Meet the Press, “will be laying out his approach to long-term deficit reduction later this week“.   It’s about time.  Whereas he released a budget earlier this year forecasting a deficit well over one-and-one-half trillion dollars, House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan released a budget last week which made the tough choices the Democrat dodged, a budget that many of Mr. Obama’s political allies have derided and demogogued.

Yet, as Jennifer Rubin notes, the mere “fact that the president is now racing to catch up with the spending cutters and that the right is more united than ever tells you how large the impact of the 2010 midterms is.”  Perhaps, the concern, articulated through Tea Party protests, has finally reached the ears of the administration.  Last month, I asked if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was even aware of the magnitude of the federal debt. Today, one of the president’s top political advisors promises a deficit reduction plan “later this week.”

Until we see the plan, we won’t know if the president gets the real magnitude of our nation’s fiscal crisis.  Will he eschew the idea of federal spending as a necessary economic “stimulus”?  As Mark Steyn puts it:

What’s about to hit America is not a “shock.” It’s not an earthquake, it’s not a tsunami, it’s what Paul Ryan calls “the most predictable crisis in the history of our country.” It has one cause: spending. The spending of the class that laughs at the class that drives to work to maintain President Obama, Senator Reid, Senator Baucus, Senator Harkin, and Minority Leader Pelosi’s “communications director” in their comforts and complacency.

The Democrats’ solution to the problem is to deny there is one. Unsustainable binge spending is, as the computer wallahs say, not a bug but a feature: We’ll stimulate the economy with a stimulus grant for a Stimulus Grant-Writing Community Outreach Permit Coordinator regulated by the Federal Department of Community-Organizer Grant Applications. What’s to worry about?

Those liberals “disheartened” by the recent deal are living in denial.  They seem to believe that the solution to every problem is increased federal spending. (more…)

Glenn Reynolds linked something this morning, to which some of our blog readers had also alerted me, but something struck me today when I actually watched the transcript.  Take a gander at who laughs when Bill Maher makes a statement which would have earned him opprobrium if he were conservative:

The Blogprof who posted the video quips, Maher “will not get called out on his anti-Semitism“.  I mean, well, a Muslim Congressman didn’t castigate him when the one-time funny man called the lawmaker’s sacred text a “hate-filled holy book.“

Most mainstream conservatives, including many Tea Party leaders are, as Jonathan Weisman and Jennifer Levitz of the Wall Street Journal put it when writing about the latter group “generally giving House Speaker John Boehner high marks for his leadership in the spending showdown, even though the agreement eventually reached Friday night fell short of the cuts the tea party once demanded.”

Given the circumstances, leading only one-half of one-third of the federal government, Boehner accomplished a good deal. No, the cuts weren’t deep enough, but this wasn’t yet the big battle, just a skirmish in anticipation of a bigger fight to come. As John Hinderaker put it:

The fight over FY 2011 spending was really an afterthought, driven by the fact that the Democrats never got around to passing a budget last year. The real battles will come this summer, first over legislation to raise the debt ceiling, which can’t be avoided; then, perhaps, over the FY 2012 budget, although the Democrats might try to dodge that fight by, once again, refusing to adopt a budget at all.

And while we conservatives wish we had seen bigger cuts, this budget deal, in the words of Politico, “leaves liberals disheartened“. They feel the cuts are too great and believe that we shouldn’t cut spending while the economy remains “fragile.”

If they’re angry, they should point the finger at their own party, not just its leaders who agreed to the deal this week, but its legislators who failed to pass a budget last year. Perhaps, they’re upset because the deal — and the negotiations leading up to it show just how much the debate as changed. As John Bresnahan and Jake Sherman write in Politico:

In a larger sense, Boehner has achieved more than just a short-term budget victory — in his first three months as speaker, he’s helped turn the entire Washington dialogue into a debate about the size and scope of government. (more…)

Three years ago, Hillary Clinton was one of the most polarizing figures in the United States.  Today, she is perhaps the least polarizing prominent figure in the Obama Administration.

According to the Hill, in this morning’s wee hours:

President Obama and Democratic and Republican congressional leaders reached a last-minute deal Friday to avoid a government shutdown.

The agreement, which came after days of partisan sparring and rhetorical drama, would fund the government through the end of September and cut $78.5 billion compared to Obama’s proposed but never enacted fiscal 2011 budget.

Not sure if this counts as the “net spending cut” Obama promised in the 2008 campaign, but at least as Kristen Soltis (via Glenn Reynolds) put it while negotiations were still ongoing,  ”the big takeaway from all of this: We are currently debating how much to cut rather than debating whether or not to cut.”

Philip Klein thinks the deal is one “conservatives should be happy about“:

To be sure, conservatives didn’t get much of what they wanted. They didn’t get $100 billion in cuts, or even $61 billion. Planned Parenthood won’t be defunded, neither will ObamaCare. And the EPA won’t be stripped of funding to regulate carbon emissions. But let’s get real. There’s a liberal president and a liberal Senate — House Majority Leader John Boehner cannot impose his will on the rest of the government.

But he did use what leverage he had to get a lot more out of Democrats than they wanted to give up. Democrats didn’t want any spending cuts, and President Obama’s original budget proposed spending that was $78.5 billion higher than what was agreed upon tonight. (The House and Senate are passing a six-day stopgap measure that will cut the first $2 billion and give lawmakers more time to craft a final draft of the bill.) The deal includes a provision that would deny federal funds to pay for abortions in Washington, DC and would allow for Senate votes on the Planned Parenthood funding ban and repeal of ObamaCare — both of which will force vulnerable Democrats into tough votes. (more…)

In a post on Pajamas Media’s main page in October 2008, Tom Blumer provided a chart which helps us understand why we’re in the fiscal situation we are today:

Federal outlays already increasing at a rapid pace with Republican Congresses increased at an even more rapid pace when Nancy Pelosi took over as House Speaker and Harry Reid, thanks to a new crop of Democratic Senators, elected with the help of then-chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Charles Schumer, became Senate majority leader.

Now that very same Mr. Schumer is whining that conservatives are to blame for an imminent government shutdown:

“What we have here is a flea, wagging a tail, wagging a dog,” said Schumer, chairman of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee.

“The flea are the minority of House Republicans who are hard right, the tail is the House Republican caucus, and the dog is the government,” Schumer explained. “That flea is influencing what the dog does … and it is sad.”

Schumer for more than a week has been arguing that Tea Party conservatives will be to blame if there is a shutdown.

(Via Ann Althouse.)  Sorry, Charlie, the reason Tea Party conservatives have such clout is because their outrage at the increasing size of the federal government has resonated with the American people, leading to the election of Republican legislators (and at least one Senate Democrat) who want to hold the line on spending.

If Americans had the facts, they won’t blame House Speaker John Boehner, but instead hold Democrats to account for the shutdown.  Nick Gillespie reminds us why Congress is still voting on their FY2011 budget — six full months after that fiscal year began:  Democrats “utterly failed to pass a fricking budget last year even though they controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives.”  (Via Instapundit.) (more…)

If you want to know what I call Washington Post blogress the “Jewish Athena,” all you need do is check her piece today on the departure of Glenn Beck from Fox News:

It is entirely fitting that he should leave this week. This week belonged to the grownups in the conservative movement. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) emerged as the most serious lawmaker on the national stage and as a symbol of an innovative, brainy conservative resurgence. He put out a budget that was, unlike hysterical critics, principled and serious.

This was also House Speaker John Boehner’s week. He consolidated his caucus, came up with an unassailable short-term budget-extension proposal, kept his powder dry when President Obama fumbled (by issuing a veto threat with no backup plan) and outfoxed Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid. He will emerge with a substantive win for his party and the respect of his caucus.

Read the whole thing!

She also commends Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for showing some leadership.  With Ryan and Boehner, we see two of the types of leadership we need in order to advance conservative ideas and shrink the size of government.  Ryan, the wonk, the thinker, puts a sensible reforms and Boehner, the process guy, shows he knows how to push such reforms through the “system.”

Much as Ronald Reagan needed a diverse array of advisors, James A. Baker who knew how to work the levers of Washington institutions, Ed Meese who understood conservative ideas and Mike Deaver who knew how to present his man and his ideas to a sometimes-skeptical public, so too do conservatives today need a variety of leaders to push our agenda.

Looks like we have three in Ryan, Boehner and Rubio!

Welcome Instapundit Readers!!

WIth the Waukesha County Clerk, Democrat** Kathy Nickolaus reporting on Thursday “that she failed to save in her computer and then report 14,315 votes in the city of Brookfield, omitting them entirely in an unofficial tally released after Tuesday’s election,” Republican David Prosser surged to an almost insurmountable lead in the race for chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

As I blogged* yesterday, I had expected a loss in this race.  Democrats and their allies on the left seemed more organized and energized.  They were hoping to use any means necessary to undo Governor Walker’s reforms.  They wanted Republicans to pay a cost for pushing conservative reforms.  A victory for JoAnne Kloppenburg would remind Republicans that they still hadn’t convinced the people, at least in Wisconsin, of the merits of their ideas — and that they need to constantly be playing offense because politics is a livelihood for many on the left, particularly those whose livelihood depends on taxpayer largesse.

But, even with Democrats fired up and their union allies digging dip into their coffers to elect Kloppenburg, the Republican pulled out a modest victory in this light blue state.  It seems that the 2010 elections were not an aberration, but perhaps part of a trend.

That said, Michael Barone contends, “This result was closer than it should be.”  Republican shouldn’t rest on their laurels and must realize that we need be better organized if we’re going avoid such close calls in the future as we build upon our gains and elect candidates serious about cutting the size of government and reducing its scope. (more…)

Just about a year ago this time, I was intensely working on my dissertation, re-reading (and re-re-re-reading) several key passages in the Iliad and the Odyssey, even delighting in some of the scholarly work on these epics.  As I read about Achilles, Telemachus and Odysseus, I often thought I was reading about people I know, in some cases, I felt I was reading about myself.

I saw in the way Athene manipulated her father in the first book of the Odyssey techniques my sisters used to manipulate our father — and my teenage nieces to manipulate theirs.  These stories may have been set in the Bronze Age where supernatural beings intervened on a regular basis in the lives of mortal men and women, but they addressed themes and related experiences similar to those we face today in a world where we’ve banished deities and developed technology that the ancients couldn’t even conceive.

And just as the Olympians have been banished from our stories, all too often those who wield power in academia seek to banish the works once called the “Great Books.”  They replace stories put to paper by dead white males with current accounts by more contemporary authors who address themes these scholars believe more “relevant” in a world of rapid technological progress and instant communication.

In reality, however, students assigned such “relevant” stories find themselves bored and sometimes even cheated, as David Clemens relates:

My former student Joshua, now ambivalently quartered at UC Santa Cruz . . . has an article in Literary Matters about cheating.  Not students cheating; students who feel cheated.  He’s found a couple of excellent literature classes (Cervantes) but most just use books as a vector for stone-cold political ideology.

When he was at Monterey Peninsula College, Josh was the midwife who helped deliver a great books program to a college that had been out to axe all its literature courses.  In my Intro. to Lit., class he heard me refer to Robert Hutchins’s metaphor for Western literature as a “Great Conversation,” and in Literary Matters he writes

“Within weeks other members of the class and I were meeting on our own time to discuss the Great Books. We read Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. We read Sappho. We felt and spoke as if we had rediscovered some long-forgotten treasure abandoned by the generation before [my emphasis].” (more…)

A few days before last fall’s election, I knew that despite her high unfavorable ratings, California’s junior Senator Barbara “Ma’am” Boxer was likely to win re-election. While doing cardio at the gym, I looked up to see the career politician rallying union employees at a very professional phone bank.

Each paid staffer sported telephone headsets, while working at a computer in separate cubicles.  By contrast, I had just come from spending the afternoon phone banking with other volunteers for the Republican tickets. We used cheap cell phones, lacked headsets, had no computer monitors and worked off printouts.

Thanks to the unions (many with funding directly from the state’s coffers), California Democrats had a more professional Get Out the Vote (GOTV) effort than did Republicans. And in a state where that party has a decided registration edge, such efforts tend to reap rewards come Election Day.

Given unions’ determination to oust Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice David Prosser–and the resources they were pouring into their effort–I was all but certain they would succeed. Those defending the relatively conservative justice were not nearly as fired up as were his opponents. They weren’t pouring the resources into his defense. And they didn’t have, as the unions did, a organization already in place. As Ed Morrissey put it:

Given the usual lack of turnout for April elections in off years, the organizing power of the unions should have been overwhelming, and Prosser should have been toast even in less-progressive areas of the state.  Instead, Wisconsin voters thundered to the polls to support Prosser, and Kloppenburg turned out to do poorly outside of Dane and Milwaukee counties — and even in Milwaukee, Kloppenburg led by just a 57/43 margin.

What should have been a slam-dunk if Walker’s proposal was really as extreme and disaffecting as unions claim turned out to be an even split.  Given their power and the investment of time and money by the unions, this is an eye-opening stumble.

The latest returns show Prosser with a 40-vote lead.  For “all that it invested in this contest,” F. Vincent Vernuccio writes, “big labor was unable to secure a decisive win.” (more…)

Earlier this week, the president launched his 2012 campaign. A number of things struck me, first, how early this announcement comes and second, the debut ad, not just its vapidity, but the near absence of a certain word, indeed the defining word of Barack Obama’s successful 2008 bid for the White House:

Maybe I missed it, but I watched the ad a few times, but I only caught one of Democrat’s supporters using the word “change”.  And this one, Katherine from Colorado, merely said, “I think it needs to reflect the changes that we’ve seen in the last two and a half years.”  The only change she identifies is that the guy who was once an underdog candidate for the White House is now President of the United States.

Barack Obama may be absent from video, but it’s still about him as a personality and not about the principles he’s advocated and will continue to fight for.

No one else talked about the changes their guy wrought while in the White House nor did they identify any of the particular reforms the incumbent is fighting for.  Contrast the vapidity of Obama’s approach with the tough choices Paul Ryan made in crafting the Republican budget.  As Michael Barone puts it:

This is not an approach recommended by campaign consultants. Their conventional wisdom says that you never, ever recommend any changes in programs like Medicare.

Such advice has been heeded by the former community organizer now in the White House. “Hope and change” was a nice theme for an out-party candidate in 2008. But protecting the status quo and fear mongering seem to be the approach of the in-party candidate who on Sunday announced the beginning of his 2012 re-election campaign.

Seems that Paul Ryan is proposing a real change from the politics as usual while Obama plans to seek reelection as the candidate of the status quo.

Comparing the president to Marie Antoinette, Ed Morrissey quips, “Obama fills the role of clueless aristocrat by telling a man who explains that he can’t afford to fill his gas tank at current prices that he should instead buy a new car.”

Um, uh, Mr. President, don’t you realize that someone having trouble paying for the increased cost of gasoline might also lack the resources to buy a new automobile.  The price tag on such vehicles tends to run higher than it is to fill up one’s tank  – even to fill it up regularly over the course of five, six or even seven years.

In case you hadn’t heard of the out-of-touch president’s latest “gaffe”, here’s Ed’s summary:

While speaking to a crowd in Pennsylvania, Obama scoffed at the notion of high gas prices and told the peasants voters that if gas prices were too high, then maybe they should eat cake instead buy new cars instead:

Obama needled one questioner who asked about gas prices, now averaging close to $3.70 a gallon nationwide, and suggested that the gentleman consider getting rid of his gas-guzzling vehicle.

“If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting 8 miles a gallon, you know,” Obama said laughingly. “You might want to think about a trade-in.”

Ed notes further that if, “the press reported it, the retort would prove rather embarrassing — which may be why the Associated Press scrubbed it from their coverage of the event.

(H/t:  Instapundit.)

A number of pundits on the left and in the center have showered praise on Paul Ryan’s proposed budget, with Slate’s Jacob Weisberg saying the Wisconsin Republican “has made a serious attempt to grapple with the long-term fiscal issue the country faces. He has a largely coherent, workable set of answers. If you don’t like them, now you need to come up with something better.”

Others have resorted to diatribe, with the Washington Post‘s Harold Meyerson calling the plan “a prescription for diminishing prosperity and security, a road map, in fact, for national decline“:

Ryan’s budget would also reduce projected spending on discretionary domestic programs — education, transportation, food safety and the like — to well below levels of inflation. That not only ensures that high-speed rail won’t be built but also means that potholes won’t be filled.

Does Mr. Meyerson realize that government has been growing well above the rate of inflation at least since Democrats took charge of Congress in January 2007, allowing budget deficits to soar?  And does he really believe his hyperbole about potholes?  If so, he should direct his ire at state and local governments, traditionally responsible for street repair.  And what is his plan for deficit reduction?

It seems national Democrats are following not the sober evaluation of Weisberg, but instead the hyperbolic outburst of Meyerson.  They think they can score political points by labeling Republicans as mean-spirited tightwads who want to give tax breaks to the rich and take food from the mouths of babes.  ”House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi,” for example, “said the Republican budget” would “force seniors into starvation.”

Meanwhile, her Democrats still haven’t come up with a plan.  And yet, as Greg Sargent reports in the Post‘s Plum Line, they’re hoping “hoping to use the Ryan proposal against numerous” candidates.  Via David Freddoso who asks if Democrats can turn Paul Ryan into the next bogey-man? (more…)

Over at Gateway Pundit, Jim Hoft likes to post this graph showing just how much deficits increased since the inauguration of President Obama in 2009.  Given how frequently our liberal friends criticize the immediate past president, a Mr. G. W. Bush, for his spending habits, I circled the budget deficits for the four fiscal years prior to the Democrats’ regaining their congressional majority:

Let’s take a closer look at the chart:

Do you see how for three consecutive years, budget deficits were declining.  Do you know what distinguishes those three years from all but one year on the chart?  Yup, you got it.  In those three years, Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress.  Recall that in the first two Bush years, the houses were divided when Vermont’s Jim Jeffords, to much media acclaim, abandoned the GOP.

To be sure, we did see a slight increase in the deficit for the first Fiscal Year that W governed alongside a Republican Congress, but after that until Democrats won Congress in 2006, deficits were declining.  Seems that Republicans were already learning the lesson that they needed to do a better job holding the line on spending. Only with a Democratic Congress in 2007 did spending increase dramatically and deficits considerably.  (more…)

Earlier today, Jim Geraghty reported that yesterday the president said “the need for a budget deal to avoid a” government shutdown, “We are prepared to put whatever resources are required in terms of time and energy to get this done. But that’s what the American people expect.”

So, one wonders why the Democrat skipped town this morning to discuss “green energy” in Philadelphia and “deliver remarks at the National Action Network’s Keepers of the Dream Awards Gala, hosted by Reverend Al Sharpton and the National Action Network” in New York.  Not quite sure how attending those events will give him the opportunity to devote those resources to hammering out a budget agreement with congressional leaders.

We may see a partial government shutdown if the president and Congress do not agree on a plan because, as Mark Tapscott put it, “under the previous Democratic majority when for the first time ever, House leaders decided not to follow the law and enact a 2011 budget.”  Tapscott then provides a timeline provided by Don Seymour, a senior aide to House Speaker John Boehner on the failure of the 111th Congress (AKA the Pelosi-Reid Congress) to pass a budget.

The president has asked Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. “to join him at the White House for an evening meeting.”  He could have accomplished a lot more if he spent the day in Washington trying to forge an agreement.  Or, if he spent more time than just “three minutes” on the phone with the Speaker.

At least Boehner has a plan, announcing today that House Republicans will vote tomorrow “on a stopgap spending bill to keep the government running for another week while cutting $12 billion from the budget“.  If the Senate fails to act and if we do see a government shutdown, the blame will not lie with the Republican House, but with the president for not staying in Washington to work out a deal and with former Speaker Pelosi and Reid for failing to pass a budget in the last Congress, as the law required. (more…)