About a year ago, USA Today reported that federal workers are earning twice what their private sector counterparts take in:

At a time when workers’ pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees’ average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade.

So, given that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sought a Sense of the Senate resolution on Shared Sacrifice (which, Ed Morrissey reports, fell “to defeat on a procedural vote“), how about asking federal workers who draw their salary from taxpayer funds to share in the sacrifice?

I mean, if a private company suffers a revenue shortfall, it often cuts costs by reducing the salaries of its employees.  Our federal government has such a shortfall and federal workers have been seeing pay and benefit increases even as the company, er, government, operates in deficit.

So, here’s a suggestion.  According to Wikipedia (citing 2005 census figures), the median gross income of all persons working full time is $39.509.  We’ll take $42,500, a number a little higher than that (to be generous to our government employees), as our baseline.

We wouldn’t ask federal employees to sacrifice any of that $42,500, but every dime they earn over that and less than $85,000 (twice $42,500) will be cut by 10%, every dime over $85,000 and less than $170,000 (twice $85,000) will be cut by 20% and everything over $170,000 will be cut by 30%. (more…)

Whenever one of the TV monitors at my gym has been turned to CNN this past week, I’ve caught the various pundits, anchors and reporters breathless with schadenfreude at the phone hacking scandal related to Rupert Murdoch’s recently defunct News of the World.

Unable to rival Murdoch’s FoxNews int the quality of their product or the size of their audience, CNN’s various personalities have pulled a page from the Democratic playbook:  when you can’t win on ideas, accuse them of scandal.  And while CNN devotes hours upon hours to the coverage of their rival, they have all but ignored potentially scandalous activity in the Obama administration.

They seem to think it’s more important to look into the activities of a rival journalist than investigate the Justice Department’s involvement in a plan to facilitate the sale of guns to Mexican drug cartels (and possibly even Honduran gangsters).  Or the withholding of documents in a congressional investigation of a “a $335 million federal loan guarantee given to a politically correct clean energy firm.”

Now, we’ve got a trio of septua- and octogenarian Democratic Senators writing “Attorney General Eric Holder asking Holder to look into concerns that News Corp. — the parent company of Fox News — violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, known as the FCPA.”  Although Mr. Rockefeller is certain **CERTAIN** they’ll “find some criminal stuff”, his certainty is based less on actual evidence of wrongdoing than prejudice against FoxNews.   Ever since Watergate, Democrats have always been convinced that their ideological adversaries (real and perceived) are guilty of criminal activity.

And so too it seems are the media.  I mean, why else would they have been so interested in the Bush Justice Department doing its job in firing a handful of U.S. Attorneys and so incurious about the Obama Justice Department involvement in a plan to sell guns to gangs who murder U.S Border Patrol agents?

“America needs you/Harry Truman,” sang the band Chicago in 1974.”  They added later that the straight-talking Missourian knew “what to do.”‘

Over at Powerline, Steven Hayward paraphrases “Those Were the Days,” the theme song to the 1970s hit sit-com, “All in the Family,” so suggest that given Herbert Hoover’s predilection for government solutions to the Great Depression, we could instead use a man like Warren Harding again.  Hoover, he reminded up, citing Dan Mitchell and others

. . . increased government spending 47 percent in his one term, raised taxes, and signed off on the disastrous Smoot-Hawley tariff, which first caused Franklin Roosevelt to run against Hoover’s profligacy, but later caused Rex Tugwell to say later that “practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover started.”

Turns out that to confront the recession he “inherited” (to borrow a word) from his predecessor, the Ohio Republican

. . . cut government spending sharply and rapidly (by almost 50 percent), began cutting tax rates across the board, and allowed asset values and wages to adjust freely as fast as possible.  Harding’s administration, Paul Johnson observed, “was the last time a major industrial power treated a recession by classic laissez-fairemethods, allowing wages to fall to their natural level . . .  By July 1921 it was all over and the economy was booming again.”  (more…)

From January 20, 2009 until January 3, 2011, a period of more than 700 days, Democrats controlled the White House and held overwhelming majorities in both houses of Congress.  And for the past six months, with increasing vitriol and ever elevated volume, they have been criticizing Republicans for their attempts to finish the work Democrats left undone, like not passing a budget for FY 2011.

If the president thought raising the debt ceiling was so important, why then didn’t he schedule a vote to do so when his party controlled Congress?  Obama, John Hinderaker writes,

. . . is now fixated on the “deadline” of August 2, 2011, but where was he in 2009? Or 2010? Or prior to last week? It has been over two years since the federal government has had a budget. For Obama to adopt a sanctimonious “eat your peas” approach to the federal budget is so disingenuous that it is not surprising that Republicans find him infuriating to negotiate with.

When Democrats were in power, they ran up the tab, acting as if they would never be no consequences to their spendthrift policies.  And now they’ve left the Republicans to clean up the mess they left behind and is now faulting them for not doing it the way the Democrats (claim they) would have done it when they had the chance.  They had the chance but didn’t take it.

Instead of criticizing the Republicans, why doesn’t the president’s party acknowledge its own responsibility for the current impasse?

Three days ago, Ed Morrissey joined Time’s Jay Newton-Small in asking if the House Speaker responsible for the greatest accumulation of debt in U.S. History had been marginalized:

Despite losing the midterm elections on the issue of spending and deficits, Pelosi wondered aloud in a White House strategy meeting why debt-ceiling negotiations had to involve spending cuts at all, surprising everyone else in the room . . . .

As the leader of a House caucus in a clear minority, Pelosi has already become largely irrelevant, especially after losing the midterms in such spectacular fashion.  Now Newton-Small says that Barack Obama might make her even more obsolete by directly dealing with her lieutenant, Steny Hoyer, to get the moderate Democrats on board any deal . . .

Do wonder if Mrs. Pelosi has taken a gander at the figures and charts showing an explosion in deficit spending under her watch.  The resourceful Jim Hoft has the charts, one of which I reproduce to show that the deficit decreasing under the Republican Congresses of the middle George W. Bush years, skyrocketed when Mrs. Pelosi took the gavel in the House of Representatives in 2007:

The arrow points to the deficit of the first budget passed by a House helmed by the San Francisco Democrat.

Has she been that removed from the politics of the last two-and-and-half years to remain so clueless about growing public concerns about excessive government spending?

Just received word from Amazon that my copy George R. R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Five (that I pre-ordered when I finished its mediocre “prequel” A Feast for Crows) has shipped.  And while my enthusiasm for his saga has somewhat lessened since I first blogged about Martin’s books, I expect to spend the better part of my free time in the coming week reading Dance.

In that earlier post, I noted that while I found much wisdom in Martin’s “tale, particularly in how the individual characters face their particular challenges,” I wondered if his story “was wise as is Tolkien’s trilogy, Tolstoy’s novels and Homer’s epics.”  After four books, we still don’t know and may not know even after reading the latest installment.  We may well have to wait until the last book comes out.

Martin’s wisdom lies, by and large, in how he portrays many of his many characters, particularly in showing the strength of the “outsiders,” characters who find themselves on the periphery of his imagined society similar to the chivalric world of the High Middle Ages.  We see how Jon Snow, the bastard brother in the family at the core of the saga, comes into his own, how Brienne, the woman with the strength, skills and values of the men of her society, faces her challenges and fulfills her duties, how Sandor Clegane, despite his burned face and gruff manor embodies the code of the knights whose honors (and title) he rejects, how the obese Samwell Tarly, who stumbles when he attempts to fulfill the obligations of his sex, shows unusual pluck when it’s most needed. To give put a few examples.

In just the first book (the subject of a recent HBO miniseries) A Game of Thrones, we see early on that Martin has crafted characters fare more complex than those we usually find in fantasy fiction.  When the aforementioned Jon Snow walks out of a banquet held at his father’s seat, feeling out of place because his bastard birth prevents him for enjoying the same honors as his siblings, he encounters the deformed dwarf Tyrion Lannister who has spent his life overcoming the disadvantages of his deformity in a family known for the beauty of its members. (more…)

Jonathan Rauch may be one of the few gay marriage advocates who can make a compelling case for gay marriage without demonizing supporters of the traditional definition of the ancient institution, but when it comes to blogging, well, he adopts a condescending attitude toward the new medium which sounds a lot like the outrage many in Catholic hierarchy once expressed about Mr. Gutenberg’s (then-*)new-fangled contraption.

He, Megan McArdle reports, is making “fun of the entire medium” (of blogging), whining that “the past decade and more” the blogosphere has produced little “of distinction or durability.”  As if mainstream journalism had produced much of distinction or durability in the same time frame.  (H/t:  Glenn Reynolds.)

And then, as my pal Sonicfrog reports, Rauch, borrowing a left-wing talking point (and counter to all available evidence), laments that while the nation stands on the brink of defaulting on the national debt, Republicans are debating gays.  Sonic shows that, well, this just isn’t so:

Because, you know, Republican candidates have NOT been talking about the poor economy and their solution for this whole time! Even non-candidates have had plenty to say!

Jonathan, Google is your friend. Learn to use it!

Now, you may firmly, thoroughly, with no hesitation, with every fiber in your being, absolutely disagree with Republicans on the solutions they offer concerning jobs growth, but it’s a little disingenuous to try and push the meme that they haven’t been talking about it!

Read the whole thing.  Do think Jonathan needs pay a little more attention to discourse in Republican circles since the advent of Mr. Obama.  Republicans have been talking a lot about federal spending, the national debt and budget deficits.  Just try reading about the Tea Party.

* (more…)

“It is hard,” the president said in his press conference today, “to persuade people to do hard stuff that includes trimming benefits and increasing revenues. . . . Reason we have a problem now is people keep avoiding hard things.”  (Via Gateway Pundit.)

• Pass a federal budget.  The Senate, run by Democrats has not done so in over 800 days.
• Presenting a federal budget that can muster at least one vote in the United States Senate.  No Senators voted for the only detailed budget the president has released this year.
• Presented a plan to ensure Medicare’s solvency.  (If you look “at the numbers,” the president said today, “Medicare in particular will run out of money, and we will not be able to sustain that program no matter how much taxes go up. I mean, it’s not an option for us to just sit by and do nothing.”  (Via Jennifer Rubin.))  Neither President Obama nor the Democratic leadership of either House has presented such a plan.

Do hope that those in the MSM practicing “accountability journalism” will be asking Democrats about their plans to undertake these “hard” tasks.

“Small businesses,” the president said last September, “produce most of the new jobs in this country. They are the anchors of our Main Streets. They are part of the promise of America, the idea that if you’ve got a dream and you’re willing to work hard, you can succeed.”

Unfortunately, as Jim Hoft reported earlier today, approximately 80% of those Main Street job creators aren’t hiring:

Almost two-thirds—64%—of small-business executives surveyed said they weren’t expecting to add to their payrolls in the next year and another 12% planned to cut jobs, according to a U.S. Chamber of Commerce report to be released Monday. Just 19% said they would expand their work forces.

. . . .

The Small Business Administration says small businesses, defined as companies with fewer than 500 workers, employ about half of the workers in the private sector. In the Chamber’s survey of 1,409 executives, conducted by Harris Interactive, small businesses were defined as firms with revenue of $25 million or less.

More than half of the small-business executives in the June 27-30 survey cited economic uncertainty as the main reason for holding back on hiring. About a third blamed lack of sales, while just 7% pointed to problems getting credit.

Emphasis added.  Economic uncertainty?  Sounds like something law professor Stephen L. Carter learned when chatting with  a businessman on a recent flight.  Instead of faulting Republicans for refusing to agree to a new stimulus, the president would do well to ask his agency heads to develop a friendlier attitude toward those he has identified as job creators and a less capricious attitude toward regulations on their activity.

Thanks to Governor Scott Walker, gay men and lesbians will be able to sleep a little more securely come November in the Badger State thanks to legislation he signed giving our fellows there the resources to better protect themselves against bashers.  That good man, Ed Morissey reports

. . .  signed a bill that made Wisconsin the 49th state to allow law-abiding citizens to carry firearms. Walker had tried to get the bill passed for years while a state legislator, but his Democratic predecessor, Jim Doyle, and Democrats in the legislature had stymied those efforts. This time the bill passed with bipartisan support and allows Wisconsin residents to get permits on a must-issue basis — meaning that the state cannot deny a permit application without justifiable cause, such as a felony record

The law takes effect November 1.  Most states, Morrissey notes have seen “a decrease in crimeafter the enactment of such legislation”.  If anti-gay thugs knows that gay people could be packing, they’ll be less likely to attack.

Legislation which allows all people to defend themselves allows gay people to protect themselves.  The more free we are, the more rights we have.

(Via Instapundit.)

FROM THE COMMENTS:  MikeSilver writes:

No need to limit the bill’s positive benefit to Gays. It benefits minorities, Jews, poor, disabled, seniors, just about everyone except criminals.

Check out this report from GeorgiaCarry.Org which uses FBI Uniform Crime Report data to prove that more people carrying guns reduces crime:

http://www.georgiacarry.com/research/GCO_-_Guns_Good_Bans_Bad.pdf

Good point.  A bill need not be gay-specific to advance gay rights.

In a post on Saturday, Victor Davis Hanson echoes something our reader Leah said two-and-one-half years ago when she quipped that “Obama worship is the flip side of Bush hatred“.  That sage scholar and pundit observes that soon after Barack Obama launched his bid for the White House, those who spent half-a-decade hating George W. Bush soon became enamored with Barack H. Obama:

Then the mad hatred turned to the mad worship. Do we remember the great campaign of 2008? The madness now metamorphosized, as an obscure, heretofore unremarkable rookie senator became the Great Savior who would deliver us from Bush. Newsweek declared him a god; almost nightly we heard of leg tingles and speeches comparable to the Gettysburg Address. To doubt was racist, to really doubt was un-American. But now there was no shrieking, shrill Hillary Clinton to scream that such dissent was not really un-American.

Via Instapundit.  Read the whole thing.

Bush-hatred, Obama adoration, two sides of the same coin.

In its role (since it bought out the Huffington Post) as the leading internet service company flacking for the Obama campaign and the Democratic Party, AOL led its home page early this morning blaming House Speaker John Boehner for the breakdown in budget talks in negotiations over the debt limit; “John Boehner,” Ryan Grim grimly informs us, “Rejects Obama’s Grand Bargain On Debt Ceiling.”

What Ryan Grim didn’t tell us was whether the president offered details of the specific cuts in his supposed “grand bargain.”  Recall the Democrat’s ballyhooed April 13 speech on the budget where he also proposed cutting federal spending.

He, however, offered no plan which would make those noble sentiments a reality.  So devoid was the plan of detail that the Democrat-appointed head of the Congressional Budget Office couldn’t score it.  ”We don’t estimate speeches,” Doug Elmendorf said,  ”We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech for us to do our analysis.”

Grim, in the text of his article seemed to be right on message, offering a nice summary of the Democratic talking points in his article presented as news, “It’s no small irony that the party’s dogmatic opposition to tax increases is costing the GOP its best opportunity to roll back social programs it has long targeted.” In the update, he featured quotes from the White House Communications Director, the Senate Democratic leader and a Democratic Senator from New York.   (Save from a quote from Boehner and a “Republican official” in the article, he offered no further quotes from Republicans.)

As the people in the Republic of South Sudan celebrate their newly-won independence, they’re thanking the immediate past President of the United States:

Christian groups had been championing the southern Sudanese since the 19th century. And their efforts paid off in 2000 when George W. Bush was elected president of the United States. He elevated Sudan to near the top of his foreign policy agenda, and in 2005, the American government pushed the southern rebels and the central government — both war weary and locked in a military stalemate — to sign a comprehensive peace agreement that guaranteed the southerners the right to secede.

On Saturday, one man held up a sign that said “Thank You George Bush.”

As the new nation’s independence became official, its “president, Salva Kiir, wearing his signature black cowboy hat given to him by Mr. Bush, signed the interim Constitution.”

Nice to see the New York Times acknowledging another foreign policy triumph of Mr. Bush.

When I was a boy, long before I became interested in politics, First Lady Betty Ford left a strong personal impression on me. Her frankness, honesty, bravery and fortitude were traits that I couldn’t explain as a young boy — but they were attributes that sprung from the TV news every time she was interviewed.

No, she wouldn’t have been my first choice as a candidate based on her politics. But there is no doubt she created in my (and my fellow Gen X’ers) the standard by which future First Ladies would be held. She was a strong independent woman who nonetheless made you feel like everything was going to be okay even if the whole country was going to hell in a handbasket.

More importantly, there is probably no other human being alive that had as much positive impact on how the world views breast cancer and drug/alcohol addiction as Betty Ford. She put a human face and experience to two major illnesses that at the time where hushed into the background. One might have whispered “cancer” in the 1970s, but until Betty Ford’s courage — no one even uttered breast cancer or prescription drug addiction among “civilized crowds”.

Before there was Nancy Reagan — there was Betty Ford; defining what it meant to be the First Lady of the United States for a generation of kids like myself. She was a true inspirtation to men and women alike and her impact on the world will probably never be truly understood. But that’s okay. Those who call themselves breast cancer survivors and those who have come back from the brink of drug or alcohol addiction know how important her legacy is.

God bless you Betty Ford. The world weeps at your passing.

-Bruce (GayPatriot)

When I learned as a young man that I had been born on Betty Ford’s birthday, I saw it is a good sign.  I always admired the class with which she handled her role as the nation’s first lady, taking over the very year she expected her husband would retire from politics.  And she set an example by her public battles, first with breast cancer, then later, after her husband left politics, with her addiction to alcohol and pain killers.

And she used what she learned in her own struggle to help others, helping found in 1982 in the Betty Ford Center, a Alcohol Addiction and Drug Addiction Treatment in Rancho Mirage, California.  That accomplished woman died on Friday Eisenhower Medical Center in Rancho Mirage.

Former President George H. W. Bush called her “a wonderful wife and mother; a great friend; and a courageous First Lady. . . . No one confronted life’s struggles with more fortitude or honesty, and as a result, we all learned from the challenges she faced.”

And she always spoke her mind.  Yet, her class, along with her husband’s Midwestern decency, helped the nation recover from Watergate.  As first lady, she seemed to rise above politics.  People may have attacked her husband, but they admired her, her simple elegance, her pleasant demeanor.

Deeply saddened by the news, the newly nonagenarian Nancy Reagan reminded us that her fellow first lady “was Jerry Ford’s strength through some very difficult days in our country’s history“.  Indeed, the woman born Elizabeth Bloomer may well have been the only first lady to have delivered her husband’s concession speech.  That good man had lost his voice, barnstorming the country in the final days of the 1976 campaign.

They were married for 58 years until the 38th president’s death in December 2006

She will be missed, but her example will inspire all of us.

It has been nine months now since Tyler Clementi’s suicide dominated the news.  And I fear many of have forgotten that sensitive young man’s difficult transition to college life.

While it has become easier to come out America today (than it was twenty years ag0), it will always be difficult to be different, even if we do achieve the “full equality” to which many gay activists aspire.  To be sure, young gay people currently have a plethora of places to go for guidance and support.  Through the “It Gets Better” videos and other social (as well as traditional) media, they have testimony and images of older gay people who are open about and comfortable with their sexuality.

They still, however, face the challenge of being different at a period in life when many aspire to conform to their peers.

One concern I’ve had with those videos, the most enduring legacy of the suicide, is that they lack the personal contact that many young people need at difficult moments as they take their first steps on their path of adulthood.  They have just a face and voice on a screen and not a hand on their shoulder or a kind word directed to them personally.

It’s important that we always remember that for as much good as those videos may accomplish, we must also always pay attention to the personal.  We may feel good about recording our experiences for such a video, but we do better when we take the time to listen and respond to a young person in need.

If my experience as an uncle has taught me anything, it’s that an older adult’s encouragement of and interest in a child, adolescent or young adult can help give them the strength to weather life’s storms.  And this applies most particularly to those who differ from the social norm.

RELATED: On Tyler Clementi & the Importance of Mentors

“New Jersey Senate President Stephen Sweeney isn’t sorry for saying that he would like to punch New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in the face.”

For, the record, Mr. Sweeney is a Democrat, Mr. Christie, a Republican.

RELATED:  Don Surber links Ed Driscoll’s “Why does the MSM Downplay the Violence at Left-Wing Protests?“

“Today’s shocking jobs report,” write Senate Budget Committee Ranking Member Jeff Sessions and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, “represents a modern record of 29 straight months with unemployment above 8 percent, and falls on the 800th day since congressional Democrats have passed a budget.”  (Emphasis added.)  (Via Instapundit.)

Congressional Democrats may not yet have had the fortitude to pass a budget, but, well, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid did have the chutzpah to stage an act of political theater earlier this week, putting forward a “Sense of the Senate” on “shared sacrifice” holding that “any agreement to reduce the budget deficit should require that those earning $1,000,000 or more per year make a more meaningful contribution to the deficit reduction effort.”

So, the Nevada Democrat is trying to get Republicans on record as voting against a tax hike on the wealthiest Americans while failing to pass a budget funding the federal government?   What kind of leadership is that?

He and his fellow partisans demagogue Republicans for details in their plan to cut spending and make Medicare solvent, yet haven’t come up with a plan of their own.  Seems one party is serious about confronting the nation’s fiscal challenges while the other is more interested in confronting its partisan adversaries.

From Zachary Roth at Yahoo! News, we learn:

In the wake of Friday’s woeful jobs numbers, President Obama acknowledged that “we still have a long way to go and a lot of work to do” before the economy is working for Americans again.

“The economy as a whole just isn’t producing nearly enough jobs for everybody who’s looking,” Obama said in prepared comments in the White House Rose Garden. He cited “tough headwinds” that are exerting a drag on the economy, including natural disasters, high gas prices, economic turmoil in Europe, and state and local government budget cuts.

And to those headwinds, I’d add a few generated by the administration’s giant “wind machine”, all those new executive orders and federal regulations putting an increased burden on the small businesses doing most of the hiring.

In case you hadn’t heard the news, here’s the report from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged in June (+18,000), and the unemployment rate was little changed at 9.2 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Employment in most major private-sector industries changed little over the month. Government employment continued to trend down . . . .

Following gains averaging 215,000 per month from February through April, employment has been essentially flat for the past 2 months. Employment in most major private-sector industries changed little in June, while government employment continued to trend down.

Well, with government employment trending down, there will be fewer bureaucrats enforcing regulations stifling job creation. This downward trend represents a reversal of the upward tick that followed the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2007.

The president has had almost two-and-one-half years to implement economic policies. At this point in Ronald Reagan’s tenure, the economy was growing at an almost explosive rate, with jobs created at a rapid pace. Looks like it’s time for a change and time to turn to ideas which work.

*nearly twenty-four of them with an overwhelmingly Democratic Party

Charles Koch has launched a brilliant video on his YouTube channel and is soon to kick off EconomicFreedom.org. Check out this video and pass it along:

Hat tip to Erick at RedState.

-Nick (ColoradoPatriot, from HQ)

UPDATE: While the Democrats and their ardent supporters take such perverse joy in demonizing the Koch Bros., it turns out DSCC Chair Senator Patty Murray had no problem asking them for a substantial campaign donation…

Senator Patty Murray, Chair
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee

Dear Senator Murray:

For many months now, your colleagues in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee leadership have engaged in a series of disparagements and ad hominem attacks about us, apparently as part of a concerted political and fundraising strategy. Just recently, Senator Reid wrote in a DSCC fundraising letter that Republicans are trying to “force through their extreme agenda faster than you can say ‘Koch Brothers.’”

So you can imagine my chagrin when I got a letter from you on June 17 asking us to make five-figure contributions to the DSCC. You followed that up with a voicemail* indicating that, if we contributed heavily enough, we would garner an invitation to join you and other Democratic leaders at a retreat in Kiawah Island this September.

I’m hoping you can help me understand the intent of your request because it’s hard not to conclude that DSCC politics have become so cynical that you actually expect people whom you routinely denounce to give DSCC money. (more…)