The ABCNews article on the national debt hitting $15 billion focused on Democratic claims of Republican intransigence in debt negotiations, and all but ignored the government’s appetite for spending, an appetite which has grown significantly, first, under the Democratic Congress during the last two years of George W. Bush’s second term and then, at an even greater pace when Democrat Barack Obama became president.

While ABC dwelt on the failure of the supercommittee to reach a consensus on reducing the deficits, Republicans meanwhile have focused on the superspending since Democrats gained power. Quoting from a “handy guide” that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office sent out, Jennifer Rubin notes some debt milestones:

• $8.67 trillion: Democrats take control of Congress, January 2007
• $10.62 trillion: President Obama’s Inaugural, January 20, 2009
• $10.789 trillion: Stimulus bill signed into law, February 17, 2009
• $12.351 trillion: President’s weekly address on the merits of “pay as you go,” February 13, 2010
• $14.305 trillion: President’s weekly address where he said “I believe we can live within our means,” April 16, 2011

She also provides a video that the fetching chairman of the House Budget Committee prepared:

RELATED (also from Jennifer Rubin):

Supercommittee member Rep. Jeb Hensarling or member Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.):“I’m still waiting for a new offer to be put on the table.. . . Should that offer come, I am more than happy to negotiate around that offer.”

Even though Republicans control only one chamber of our bicameral federal legislature, Democrats have been blaming the “Republican Congress” for all manner of ills, including the failure to slow the rise of the oceans.  Problem is is that while the Republican House passed a budget in its first 102 days, it has been 932 days since the Democratic Senate has passed a similar spending plan.

And although some Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media accuse Republicans alternatively of trying to sabotage the recovery or engaging in economic vandalism, the Republican House has passed several measures to spur job growth that the Democratic Senate has yet to take up–not to mention the numerous bills that Republicans in each chambers have introduced.

The latest Republican to so act has teamed up with a Democrat in hopes of winning support from that latter’s party leadership, you know, the guys who run the Senate, as Ed Morrissey reports:

On its face, the bill crafted by Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Chris Coons (D-DE) looks modest enough.  The aptly-named AGREE (American Growth, Recovery, Empowerment, and Entrepreneurship) Act takes parts of job-growth proposals from both sides of the aisle with wide bipartisan support and rolls them into one proposal.  The two eliminated those components that create controversy, so that this Congress can act at least incrementally to improve the economic climate for job creators while larger reform efforts collide on Capitol Hill.

“Rubio and Coons,” Morrissey observes, “have basically challenged Harry Reid to get something accomplished — and that runs headlong into Barack Obama’s election strategy.”  In his “column for The Fiscal Times,” the CPAC blogger of 2010 writes “that the entire notion of a do-nothing Congress is Obama’s best re-election argument”: (more…)

Even though I voted against Proposition 8 in 2008 and believe that voters should overturn it, I think the state Supreme Court got this one right:

The sponsors of ballot propositions can step in to defend their initiatives from legal challenges if the governor and attorney general refuse to do so, California’s highest court said Thursday in a precedent-setting ruling that could prove pivotal to the future of the state’s same-sex marriage ban and its notoriously vigorous citizens’ initiative process.

Responding to a question from a federal appeals court that is considering the constitutionality of the state’s voter-approved gay marriage ban, the California Supreme Court said the lawmaking power granted to citizens under the state constitution doesn’t end once propositions have been approved or rejected by voters.

. . . .

In the 61-page opinion, the seven justices said denying ballot proposition backers a seat at the table would effectively grant the governor and attorney general veto power over initiatives with which they disagreed, a situation the justices said would undermine the law-making powers California gave voters in 1911.

Emphasis added.  Look, I think the California initiative process has been way overused over the years, but the law is on the books.  And a governor’s refusal to defend a law should not prevent supporters of a popular initiative from defending it on constitutional grounds.  This notion also holds for a domestic partnership law passed by the Wisconsin legislature.

“Although” Maura Dolan reports in the LA Times, “the 9th Circuit is not bound by Thursday’s ruling, the decision makes it less likely that the appeals court would decide Proposition 8’s future on narrow, standing grounds.”

More on this anon (as time allows–other things I want to blog on and working on a non-blog related tedious time-consuming project.

So, Republicans who oppose President Obama’s high-cost “Jobs Bill” are guilty of economic sabotage or pace the New York Times, “economic vandalism.”

Now once again, as Sonicfrog reports, some folks on the left are taking to calling conservatives “dumb”:

This isn’t the first time I’ve come across this silliness.   I’ve also seen the same applied to Victor Davis Hanson, and to Freeman Dyson.  Why are they “dumb“? Because they have differing opinions on issues than liberals do, such as Hanson’s views on immigration and Dyson’s refusal to march lock-step with the sky-is-falling global warming crowd.

Note to the smug liberal crowd  -  Just because someone has differing views than you do, that doesn’t mean they are dumb! You simply have differing views on things.  Period.

Emphasis added.  You know, they’ve been doing this at least since the 1950s.  It does seem that in order to spare themselves the difficulty of answering conservative challenges or intellectual rigor of addressing conservative ideas, they just label conservatives dumb so they can have done with it.

Wonder if this attitude comes from the paucity of conservatives on the faculties of our nation’s leading colleges and universities.

On Facebook, a liberal friend (in both the Facebook and real sense of the word) linked this video where U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-CA), imagining conversations with Republican friends, repeated the Democratic talking point that Republicans are deliberating sabotaging the economy in order to hurt the Democratic president.

Note how Miss Sanchez refused to identify a single Republican who has said that he wants to sabotage the economy.

Her contention reeks of both dishonesty and laziness.   “To suggest,” as I commented to my friend’s post, “that because another political party has another means to address the nation’s problems, they are therefore deliberately hurting Americans” shows an incredible failure to appreciate opposing arguments.

“It’s one thing,” I added, “to say she doesn’t believe Republican policies will work; quite another to say they’re deliberately hurting people. Her remarks define narrow-minded. If we had an even-handed media, editorialists would be taking folks like her to task for this narrow, this nonsensical, talking point.”  Instead, we have the one-time paper of record echoing Democratic demagoguery.

Why are Democrats like Mr. Obama and Miss Sanchez and editorialists like those at the New York Times so unwilling to acknowledge the sincerity of Republican opposition to Democratic policies, particularly in the light of the cost of the latter and the emptiness of federal coffers?  Not to mention the failure of a plan similar to the president’s jobs bill (though slightly larger) enacted shortly after Mr. Obama took office to achieve its objectives.

Simply put, Republicans don’t believe the plan would work.  And if Republicans were trying to sabotage the economy, why did they insist on extending the tax rates set during the Bush administration (AKA the Bush tax cuts) and support “three free-trade agreements that the president also backed“.

Lately, we’ve experienced many examples of media bias, the discrepancy in the cover of #OWS and the Tea Parties, the focus on allegations against a Republican presidential candidate while downplaying scandalous activity of a Democratic president’s administration, an absence of scrutiny of Democrats’ conflicts of interest.

And here’s yet another example, a man known for his mean-spirited attacks on Republicans secures an invitation to a morning show on one of the “big three” networks.  Wonder if his one-time Democratic associates  helped persuade former Clinton advisor (now co-anchor for ABC’s Good Morning America) George Stephanopolous to include Mr. Maher in his program.

And that former funnyman damned Mitt Romney with faint praise by saying that in contrast to his fellow Republicans, the immediate past Massachusetts governor “is all that stands between us and the rise of the apes.”

Interesting the longtime Democratic operative did not follow up on Maher’s characterization of the GOP, never even challenging the guy on his critiques of Republicans.  It’s just a good-natured exchange with a man otherwise quite mean-spirited and most uncivil.  Why did they even invite him on to do political commentary?  Would Stephanopolous have shown similar deference to a conservative commentator who regularly hurled slurs at Democrats?

Given this exchange, it should come as no surprise that a Media Resarch Center study found the network morning shows shilling for the incumbent president (while trashing the opposition):

As might be expected, given the lack of a contest for the Democratic nomination, most of the segments were about the Republican nomination process. Yet of the approximately 60 percent of items that mainly focused on just one candidate, there were more than three times as many segments about President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign (129) than about any individual Republican candidates. (This tally only includes stories that discuss Obama as a candidate, excluding items that dealt with him strictly as President.) (more…)