The Two Edged Sword - Senate Democrats Craft A Budget

The good news - the Democrat controlled Senate is finally going to publish a budget. The bad news - the Democrat controlled Senate is finally going to publish a budget chock full of all the crap you would expect from the far left - tax more, spend more, and prevaricate about the deficit.

We haven't seen it yet, but Politico tells us that the expected budget will look like. The Senate Democrates would do away with the sequester spending limits, They would add an additional trillion dollars in new taxes based on an overhaul of the tax code, with the new revenue going to spending, not a reduction of the tax rates. And there will be a trillion dollars in spending reductions - mostly based on smoke and mirrors:

[C]ritics are certain to jump on what they believe are gimmicks in the Democratic budget plan. As part of the $975 billion in spending cuts, Democrats will count $240 billion in savings by reduced war spending from drawing down military personnel from overseas. And it counts $242 billion that would be saved in reduced interest payments under the proposal.

For the Democrats to put this out in a budget proposal, at this point, with our economy in trouble and our nation hurdling towards fiscal insolvency, is just criminal. It also highlights another systemic problem in government - our budgeting and accounting processes. Both are full of gimmicks and would land the purveyors in jail if they tried them in the private sector. This is yet another area that we must reform if our nation is to survive in the form envisioned by our founders.

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The Coming Calamitous Catastrophic Sequester (Updated)

Cartoonist Michael Ramierez does a superb job of putting not merely the out of control increase in federal spending in perspective, but the sequester. Allowed to go forward, this 2.4% reduction in growth of government spending (not cuts) over the next decade is being hyped by Obama as the penultimate threat to our economy and, indeed, our way of life. The scenarios he and his administration have painted are cataclysmic and utterly ridiculous:

Emergency responders like the ones who are here today — their ability to help communities respond to and recover from disasters will be degraded. Border Patrol agents will see their hours reduced. FBI agents will be furloughed. Federal prosecutors will have to close cases and let criminals go. Air traffic controllers and airport security will see cutbacks, which means more delays at airports across the country. Thousands of teachers and educators will be laid off. … Hundreds of thousands of Americans will lose access to primary care and preventive care like flu vaccinations and cancer screenings.

You know, we just survived the Mayan apocalypse three months ago fairly well. I am pretty sure we will make it through this next one okay. What is really going on here is Obama doing everything possible to prevent these cuts becoming part of the baseline budget before next month, when Congress should be crafting the budget. The worthless s.o.b. is willing to do or say anything in order to borrow and spend us into his version of the new America. It would be pathetic were it not so existential in its possible end result.

Update: From one of the top contestants for dumbest person sitting in Congress, race hustler Maxine Waters, speaking yesterday: "We don’t need to be having something like sequestration that’s going to cause these jobs losses, over 170 million jobs that could be lost."

And from Krauthammer:

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IRS: No Need For Employer To Provide Affordable Family Insurance Under The Affordable Care Act

We really are so screwed . . .

Just One Minute has a post up on the latest IRS regs on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and their foreseeable consequences - a disaster for married couples, at least until the Obama camp announces massive new unplanned expenses for Obamacare. First this from the NYT:

In a long-awaited interpretation of the new health care law, the Obama administration said Monday that employers must offer health insurance to employees and their children, but will not be subject to any penalties if family coverage is unaffordable to workers. . . .

As the NYT points out, this could lead to a situation where an employee is covered, but his spouse and children can neither afford to be brought under family coverage, nor might they be eligible for government subsidies to buy their own insurance. It creates the worst of all worlds - and an incredibly strong incentive for divorcing or simply staying unmarried.

As Tom Maguire at Just One Minute explains:

The gist is that employers are not obliged to weigh a worker's family status in deciding his total compensation, which makes sense - because the family insurance can cost an extra $10,000 per year, an employer would have a strong incentive to avoid family guys and gals when hiring for lower paying jobs. . . .

Well, we see through this game - Team Obama will eventually announce an interpretation of the rules such that families are eligible for the federal subsidies even if the employed partner is being offered affordable individual insurance. Delaying the announcement of that "unexpected" expense as long as possible is just part of the current budget imbroglio.

Remember - we had to pass the bill to see what was in it.

NO TIME LIKE THE FUTURE FOR BAD NEWS:

From Via Meadia:

So: will the new law bust government budgets, crush business under unaffordable costs or make health insurance prohibitively expensive for millions of working families? The wording of the law seems unclear on this point, and the Obama administration doesn’t want to give an answer. The new regulations seem to suggest that the administration realizes that business can’t pay these costs; at a time of fiscal cliff negotiations and massive public anxiety about deficits it doesn’t want to point to the potential new costs its cherished health care law could impose on the government. It is therefore waiting until a more opportune moment to take on the question of how the American health insurance system is going to work.

We still don’t know what kind of a health care system Congress created back in 2010. We still don’t know whether it will work or how much it will cost — and who will pay how much of the bill. The Affordable Care Act is not a solution to America’s health care problems.

On a final note, let me just add that every time I remember Obama's assault on our private health care system because of the evil of "profits," I just shiver. I am taking care of my mother, who is suffering from Alzheimers. She has Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maryland, and Medicare. I can assure you, I have had far less issues with Blue Cross than Medicare.

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Social Darwinism?

Before President Obama called Rep. Paul Ryan's budget "thinly-veiled social Darwinism" last week, I must confess, I had never heard of "social" Darwinism. Jonah Goldberg has stepped into the breech to explain the history of the term. Apparently, it is part of the lexicon used by the left to tar the "robber barons":

. . . Merle Curti in The Growth of American Thought argued that Social Darwinism “admirably suited the needs of the great captains of industry, who were crushing the little fellows when these vainly tried to compete with them.” Henry Steel Commager wrote in The American Mind that “Darwin and Spencer exercised such sovereignty over America as George III had never enjoyed.” And of course Robert Reich has said that Social Darwinism “offered a perfect moral justification for America’s Gilded Age, when robber barons controlled much of American industry, the gap between the rich and poor turned into a chasm, urban slums festered, and politicians were bought off by the wealthy. .  .  . The modern Conservative Movement has embraced Social Darwinism with no less fervor than it has condemned Darwinism.”

The only problem: None of this is true either. Yes, Andrew Carnegie was a follower of Herbert Spencer and lots of people referenced “natural law” (though rarely as a reference to Darwinian evolution). But for the most part the captains of industry couldn’t care less about this stuff. As Robert Bannister and Irwin Wylie (and more recently Princeton intellectual historian Thomas Leonard) have painstakingly documented, the captains of industry in the 19th century were not particularly influenced by, or even aware of, Darwin and Spencer. This shouldn’t surprise anybody. “Gilded Age businessmen were not sufficiently bookish, or sufficiently well educated, to keep up with the changing world of ideas,” writes Wylie. “As late as 1900, 84 percent of the businessmen listed in Who’s Who in America had not been educated beyond high school.”

Overwhelmingly, businessmen of the period were influenced by Christianity first, classical economics second, self-help inspirational nostrums a distant third, and egghead notions about biology almost not at all. Cornelius Vanderbilt read one book in his entire life. It was Pilgrim’s Progress. And he didn’t get to it until he was past the age of 70. “If I had learned education,” Vanderbilt famously quipped, “I would not have had time to learn anything else.”

Also, it’s worth noting that the so-called red-in-tooth-and-claw Gilded Age was a time of massive, historic economic growth. It was when America overtook Britain as the economic powerhouse of the globe. That’s one reason the left has always hated it. When Europe was boldly embracing socialism, America was proving that capitalism was better at generating wealth and lifting people out of poverty. Moreover, as anybody who’s been in a library, hospital, university, or concert hall bearing the name of Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, et al, can attest, the “Robber Barons” didn’t remotely believe in letting the little guy fend for himself or that wealth was a reflection of either moral superiority or evolutionary “fitness.” Even the one real Spencerist in the bunch, Andrew Carnegie, believed that “the amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry—no idol more debasing than the worship of money.” He believed that the man who “dies rich dies disgraced” and himself died one of the most famously generous philanthropists in the world.

One reason the term “Social Darwinism” caught on with progressives was that it served to divert attention from the sins of “reform Darwinism”—i.e., the progressive passion for eugenics. The progressives advocated aggressive statist intervention to improve the genetic stock of the country, while the alleged Social Darwinists championed laissez-faire and private charity and—gasp—reproductive freedom. Moreover, the term Social Darwinism, which in Europe was used to justify nationalist and racist theories of the Hitlerian variety, was the perfect label for playing guilt-by-association in America. Ever since Hofstadter’s book, liberals have used the term to accuse conservatives of desperately wanting to return to a past that never was.

On April 4, Mitt Romney had his turn in front of the newspapermen. “The president came here yesterday and railed against arguments no one is making—and criticized policies no one is proposing. It’s one of his favorite strategies—setting up straw men to distract from his record.”

One suspects that even Romney had no idea how right he was.

And for a bit more clarity, here is the great economist, Milton Friedman, discussing the place of the "robber barons" in our economic history:

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Obama's Budget Fails Unanimously In The House

The House just held a vote on Obama's budget, the one that adds major new taxes and trillions in new debt. It failed, 414-0. Let's say that again. Obama's budget did not garner a single Democratic vote in the House, failing 414-0.

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The President's "Reckless" FY 2013 Budget

I have held off blogging on the President's most recently proposed budget, waiting for Rep. Paul Ryan to do the heavy lifting.  And of course he has.  This from Rep. Ryan's site:

“President Obama’s irresponsible budget is a recipe for a debt crisis and the decline of America. His refusal to honestly confront our nation’s most pressing challenges does real harm to the economic security of millions of American families. The $1.9 trillion tax increase proposed in his budget will make it harder for businesses to create jobs and for workers to spur economic growth.

This budget does nothing to prevent the bankruptcy of critical programs, threatening the health and retirement security of current and future seniors. Worse, it continues the President’s policy of letting an unaccountable board of bureaucrats cut Medicare in ways that will lead to denied care for seniors. The broken promises and recycled gimmicks contained in this budget have dramatically widened this President’s growing credibility deficit.

Our families, seniors, children and grandchildren deserve better than this reckless budget and this dismal failure of leadership. As Chairman of the House Budget Committee, I will continue to work with my colleagues – from both parties where possible – to advance bold solutions that lift our crushing burden of debt and ensure a future of opportunity, growth and prosperity.”

---

Key facts from the President’s budget:

Spends Too Much:

• $47 trillion of government spending over the next decade 
• Proposes a net increase over current spending projections

Taxes Too Much:

• $1.9 trillion in new taxes 
• Raises taxes, not to pay down the debt, but to fuel more government spending

Borrows Too Much:

• Four straight years of trillion-dollar-plus deficits; no plan to reduce the debt 
• Gross debt at the end of FY22: $25.9 trillion

Budget Gimmicks & Broken Promises

• Overstates new deficit reduction by taking credit for savings already enacted 
• Exploits discredited budget gimmick by “not spending” nearly $1 trillion that was never going to be spent

And the following is Rep. Ryan's opening statement today, courtesy of Powerline, during the House Budget Committee hearing on the President's FY 2013 budget:

Welcome all, to this important hearing.

I’d like to thank our witness today, Mr. Zients, for coming to us under difficult circumstances.

With the departure of Mr. Lew from OMB just last month, we understand that you are testifying on short notice, and we recognize the difficulty of that.

And unfortunately, your job is even more difficult than usual – you are in the position of having to defend a budget that essentially dodges the most difficult challenges our country faces.

The New York Times has reported that this budget is, quote, “more a platform for the president’s re-election campaign than a legislative proposal.” After a careful review, it’s hard to disagree.

The Associated Press has reported – accurately in my view – that this budget, quote, “[takes] a pass on reining in government growth.”

Instead, it leaves the drivers of our debt – namely, the unsustainable growth of entitlement spending – quote, “largely unchecked.”  It takes a pass on real reform, even though the looming bankruptcy of these programs threatens to end the guarantee of security they provide for our nation’s seniors.

And it breaks the President’s promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his term. As ABC News reported, this budget “does not come close.”  We’ve heard a lot of excuses from this administration for why the President broke his promise. But what we haven’t heard is any semblance of accountability.  To the best of my knowledge, no one in the White House has taken responsibility for this failure.  Instead, we’ve gotten a blame game that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Jack Lew, your former boss, claimed that the reason Senate Democrats haven’t passed a budget in over 1,000 days is that the Republicans have threatened to filibuster.  This is simply false. As Mr. Lew surely knows, budget resolutions cannot be filibustered. They can be passed with a simple majority.

The real source of dysfunction in the Senate comes from members of the President’s own party, who have been unwilling – for almost three years now – to go on record in support of his budgets, or to pass budgets of their own.  More to the point, it wasn’t so long ago that the President’s party held total control of the White House and both branches of Congress – during which time his agenda was enacted in near totality:

* massive new spending and taxes
* the creation of new, open-ended entitlements
* a regulatory onslaught that hurt the economy
* and trillions of dollars in new debt.

Even after all this, the new House Majority provided him with an opportunity to make good on his promise – to put aside the “chronic avoidance of tough decisions” that he once lamented.  We were – and we remain – eager to work with the President to stop spending money we don’t have… to reform government programs that aren’t delivering on their promises… and to enact pro-growth policies that raise revenue by getting our economy moving again.

Yet, instead of working with us, the President has demonized our ideas to save and strengthen health and retirement security programs. He fought to keep his reckless spending spree going.  And he continues to insist on taking more money from hardworking Americans – not to reduce the debt, but to fuel his ever-higher spending.

The President’s ongoing refusal to advance serious solutions to our nation’s fiscal challenges represents a stunning dereliction of duty.  But I haven’t given up hope. I remain committed to working with my colleagues of both parties wherever common ground can be reached.  There is a growing bipartisan consensus for the reforms that are needed. But this consensus cannot succeed as long as the President of the United States remains on the outside looking in.

Unfortunately, that’s where he stands today. And my hope is that this hearing can shed some light on why. Mr. Zients, we look forward to your testimony, but we do not envy your predicament. This unserious budget raises some very serious questions, and the American people deserve answers.

Unfortunately, while Paul Ryan can pontificate with complete accuracy that this budget is a disaster in as much as what it is supposed to be - a serious, governing document, that is not what Obama meant it to be. It should have been stamped Obama Reelection Campaign, 2013. God help us.

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California Broke-n

The poster child for the ills of progressivism and public sector unions, California, has yet to pass a state budget for the upcoming fiscal year, with the legislature apparently in full denial mode as to any need to cut spending. The state comptroller announced today that, without an approved budget, it will begin issuing IOU's at the end of this month.

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Congress: Stop Us Before We Steal Again

A bit of catch up blogging. Talk about your admission against interest - not that it was anything we didn't know already.



In one sense, this is a bipartisan message. Certainly our cast of Republicans in Congress spent our money like drunken sailors when they controlled the purse strings, and its why their base let them hang in 2006. But they aren't even in the same league as Democrats, who make any analogy to drunken sailors grossly inaccurate in as much as it does not begin to capture their capacity for profligacy.

It is also a full and complete explanation of how Obama and the left could pass Obamacare in the face of a massive fiscal crisis and a national debt that threatens the stability of our nation. They simply choose to ignore it and keep rooting at the trough.

This also means that there is a fundamental and systemic failure in our body politic that, if not fixed, bodes an ill wind indeed for the future of our country.

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An Update To The Pledge Of Alleigance

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Red Ink Rising

Is is time to hit the panic button yet?

The White House announced that they were adjusting upwards by $89 billion dollars the size of the debt. We are in truly uncharted territory with a bill due equal to the highest debt load our nation has ever previously carried times a factor of 4. On top of that, we have ridiculously optimistic economic predictions from the One, and a budget that, even under his predictions, is going to face huge upward pressure from social security and medicare in a decade.

This from McClatchy:

The White House on Monday projected 2009 and 2010 federal budget deficits far higher than it forecast just two and a half months ago, even as it continued to defy most experts and predict that the economy is headed for a strong comeback starting late this year.

Economists scoffed at the latest administration predictions.

"If they keep playing this game, they're going to have real credibility problems," predicted Brian Bethune, the chief U.S. financial economist at IHS Global Insight, an economic research firm.

The new administration budget said that the fiscal 2009 deficit would reach $1.84 trillion, or $89 billion more than forecast in February, while the 2010 figure now is estimated at $1.26 trillion, or $87 billion above the previous number. The fiscal 2008 deficit was $459 billion.

. . . Budget Director Peter Orszag, writing on his blog, explained that the latest changes, which are the final pieces of Obama's rollout of his $3.6 trillion fiscal 2010 budget, reflect "upward technical revisions" caused largely by lower-than-expected revenues and higher-than-anticipated costs for rescuing financial institutions.

As it has done since it took office in January, however, the administration tried to stay upbeat. Monday it offered new plans for cutting health care costs and in the new budget still maintained its February economic assumptions, which are rosier than nearly any other economists foresee.

The White House still is projecting that the nation's economy will shrink by 1.2 percent this year and increase by 3.2 percent next year. In addition, it projects that "by the end of this year," the economy will be growing at a 3.5 percent annual rate.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts a gross domestic product decline of 3 percent this year, but 2.9 percent growth next year, while the April consensus of 50 blue-chip private economists sees a 2.6 percent decline in 2009 and only 1.8 percent growth next year.

The administration's assumptions, Orszag said, will be revisited this summer, "the traditional point" when an administration makes such revisions.

The biggest discrepancy involves unemployment, which reached 8.9 percent last month. The White House sees the number declining to an average of 7.9 percent next year, well below the CBO's 9 percent estimate and the blue chip 9.5 percent.

"The (Obama) unemployment number is crazy," said Roberton Williams, senior fellow at the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center.

. . . Even with its more optimistic economic scenario, the administration projects record deficits for years to come. The annual deficit would drop to $512 billion by 2013, but then would begin to go up again, reaching $779 billion by 2019, as the costs of Social Security and government health care programs soar, the administration projects.

It's a grim picture, analysts said.

"Even using their . . . economic assumptions — which now appear to be out of date and overly optimistic — the administration never puts us on a stable path," said Marc Goldwein, the policy director of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. . . .

Read the entire article. I just don't see how we can possibly overcome this without some severe constraints for many years into the future. All of this mass of spending was not on things that will create permanent jobs. It was money wasted at a time when we could ill afford to waste it. Its gone to pet projects and feeding states that have grossly mismanaged their spending for years. Add cap and trade and socialized medicine on the top of all of this and we will soon be a third world country - albeit one worthy of the third world dictator we seem to have elected.

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Defenseless - The Obama Budget

Obama sent a record budget to Congress, proposing billions in funding for every left wing cause imaginable, then claimed yesterday that he is fiscally responsible for asking for cuts amounting to 1/2 of 1% of his total budget. It is shameless to the point of parody. But scratch the surface of the budget and the savings and you quickly go from parody to ominous.

The bulk of Obama's proposed savings are coming from our Defense budget, the one place where significant increases in funding are necessary. And to make matters worse, among those handful of billions Obama intends to save, a goodly part of it comes from deep cuts in our missile defense program. This in a world that is getting more, not less, dangerous, and with our military desperately in need of expansion and refit. Obama is ignoring the exponential growth of the nuclear threat and he is reordering our defense spending priorities in the same manner that France did prior to 1939.

You can read at Hot Air the story of the Obama budget and Obama's mind-numbingly ridiculous assertion of fiscal responsibility for his proposing of $17 billion in budget cuts. And Bizzyblog points out that even the $17 billion in cuts is all smoke and mirrors. I will not add to that. My concern is with the defense side of the coin - and a small coin it has become.

Our military is in dire straights in terms of size and equipment. The following is from an article by MG Robert Scales discussing our military readiness posture in April, 2007. It was, at the time, critical, and there is nothing that I have seen since to suggest a significant change to that posture.

We have learned from painful experience in Iraq and Afghanistan that tomorrow's ground forces must be re-equipped with many more fighting vehicles that are light, mobile, easily transported and capable of keeping more soldiers protected for longer periods. Properly equipping the Army to win the long war will be very expensive. But we have fought 12 wars in the last 30 years and all but one has been decided on the ground. We will fight another one sooner than any of us would like. If we are to break the cycle of underfunding followed by rapid re-funding that has caused so much human tragedy, we must start now and must build a new Army for tomorrow rather than put yesterday's Army back on the shelf.

- MG Robert Scales, discussing the degraded state of Army readiness as of April, 2007. Indeed, as he points out, but for the Reagan era, our military had suffered significant underfunding for decades - under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

You will recall that a central argument of Obama and the left for bringing the Iraq War to an immediate surrender was because our military was undersized and the Iraq war was taking a tremendous toll on our equipment. The fact of a degraded military was certainly true, though the answer to that was not to surrender in Iraq, it was to make a big increase in defense spending. Bush and the Republican administration through 2006 attempted to fight two wars without increasing the defense budget to realistically account for equipment degradation and shortfalls. This remained true when the left took over Congress in 2006.

Now that the left has the reins of power, the one thing that Obama is not doing is making any increases in defense spending. Indeed, instead of rearming the military so it is prepared for the most difficult of confrontations - a conventional war - Obama is making huge cuts in expensive weapons systems that we will need for such confrontations in the future. He is instead, through Sec. of Def. Gates, reordering priorities in order to fight the much less costly "last war." You can read the itemization of cuts here. Secretary of Defense Gates seems fully complicit in this - and if his performance at Senate Hearings the other day are any indication, then he is both acting as the front man for specific Obama policy he is willing to be less then honest in furtherance of that policy. I am very surprised by that.

But that is an aside. The long and short of it all is that, instead of keeping us on a track so that we maintain superiority on the conventional battlefield, Obama is ordering our military to focus on unconventional warfare - i.e., the "last war." While it gives Obama the luxury of not having to sink billions into defense, the "last war" theory of military preparedness has ever been a trap for nations. For example, one need only to look to France in the late 1930's. They prepared for the next war expecting a replay of the last one - and thus, they based their defense around fixed fortifications of the Maginot Line. The line was breached by a new form of warfare - blitzkrieg - using superior weapons. France fell in days.

And it is not as if we face a paucity of conventional war threats. China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran are the four most obvious of those threats at the moment, but who knows where the next threat will come from. Indeed, Iraq was a conventional threat in 2002. But our conventional warfare capabilities then were so superior that they quickly folded - as indeed, they had near a decade earlier. Moreover, we now know that the Soviet Union considered attacking the West in the 1980's. Kim Il Sung put North Korea on a war footing about a year or so prior to that. Both pulled back. Why they did so is simple to assess - they had a very realistic respect for our capabilities to fight a conventional war. To paraphrase - it was "peace through superior firepower." But take away the perception of that superiority and, as surely as night follows day, the enemies of the West will not feel so constrained.

If we remain fully prepared for a conventional war, we can still also be prepared for unconventional conflicts. The reverse is not true. And thus, if we give away our conventional warfare superiority, we do so at great cost. Nor will it be something that can be at all easily resurrected. Combat systems today take years to develop and then years to ramp up production. The decisions made today will be with us for decades to come.

Compounding this situation by orders of magnitude is Obama's unfathomable decision to cut spending for missile defense. One of the cuts about which Obama so spuriously crowed yesterday was almost a 15% cut - 1.2 billion dollars - in the budget for the Missile Defense Agency. Can there be any possible justification for this? This is a system that grows more critical by the day. Pakistan is on the edge of takeover by the Taliban. North Korea wants to sell its technology to the highest bidders. Iran is continuing with their nuclear program and it has kick started proliferation throughout the Middle East. With that in mind, nothing could be more important to the defense of our nation and the free (for the moment) world than a robust missile defense.

Obama's cuts in defense are not rationale. ACORN is set to receive vast amounts of funding, while our military capabilities are to degraded. It leads one to wonder whether Obama is simply cynical and opportunistic, or is he really as naive and unrealistic as his budget priorities make him appear? Or is it a toxic mix of all four?

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A Mayoral Mess - The Land Under The Wasilla Sports Complex

Two of the Democratic talking points going around conern Gov. Sarah Palin's time as Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. The first is that she raised taxes. Not quite true. There was a referendum on whether to increase the sales tax by .5%. The people of the city raised their own taxes by approving the increase in a democratic vote. The second talking point is that Mayor Palin came into office with the city having no long term debt, she left with the city owing $20 million. That number is overly high, but regardless, what the dems in their talking points don't do is explain the cause of the debt. It has nothing to do with Mayor Palin's incompetent handling of the local budget. The people agreed to the sales tax rise in order to fund a capital improvement - a $14+ million dollar sports complex for the residents to exercise during the long, cold Alaskan winters.

The talking points are bull - as to be expected really, given the Palin Derangement Syndrome (PDS) going around the left like it was the 1918 Spanish Flu. That said, the left is missing the one real issue in all this that has some bearing on Mayor Palin's fitness. It appears that Mayor Palin gave the go ahead to break ground on the sports complex before the City had clear title to the land on which it was to be built. I've been waiting to hear the whole story - whether she ignored the advice of her city attorney or whether the city attorney screwed this one. The WSJ weighs in with more information today.
______________________________________________________

This from the WSJ:

The biggest project that Sarah Palin undertook as mayor of this small town was an indoor sports complex, where locals played hockey, soccer, and basketball, especially during the long, dark Alaskan winters.

The only catch was that the city began building roads and installing utilities for the project before it had unchallenged title to the land. The misstep led to years of litigation and at least $1.3 million in extra costs for a small municipality with a small budget. What was to be Ms. Palin's legacy has turned into a financial mess that continues to plague Wasilla.

. . . Litigation resulting from the dispute over Ms. Palin's sports-complex project is still in the courts, with the land's former owner seeking hundreds of thousands of additional dollars from the city.

Hockey is much loved in Wasilla, and Ms. Palin, whose son was a star player, wanted to build an indoor rink, with a track, basketball courts and soccer field. In the late 1990s, the city sought a 145-acre parcel owned by the Nature Conservancy, which wanted to sell the land to buy more environmentally sensitive property elsewhere. City officials negotiated a price of $126,000. Months passed without the city's securing a signed purchase agreement, according to the city's attorney, Tom Klinkner of Birch, Horton, Bittner & Cherot.

At the same time, Gary Lundgren, a Fairbanks real-estate investor, was in talks with the Nature Conservancy to buy a larger adjacent property. As discussions between the environmental group and the city dragged on, Mr. Lundgren said, he purchased the entire site for about $1 million.

The city sued Mr. Lundgren and the Nature Conservancy, arguing that Wasilla had had a deal. In 2001, a federal district court judge ruled in Wasilla's favor. Mr. Lundgren appealed, but the city believed it would prevail, according to Mr. Klinkner.

Ms. Palin marched ahead, making the public case for a sales-tax increase and $14.7 million bond issue to pay for the sports center, which was to feature a running track, basketball courts and a hockey rink. At the time, the city's annual budget was about $20 million. In a March 2002 referendum, residents approved the mayor's plan by a 20-vote margin, 306 to 286. The city cleared roads, installed utilities and made preparations to build.

Later that year, Ms. Palin's final one as mayor, the federal judge reversed his own decision and ruled that the property rightfully belonged to Mr. Lundgren. Wasilla had never signed the proper papers, the court ruled.

Mr. Lundgren said he had offered to give smaller parcels to the city free of charge, but the city held out for a larger tract. The former chief of the city finance department, Ted Leonard, says he doesn't recall such an offer.

After Ms. Palin left office, the city decided to take 80 acres of Mr. Lundgren's property through eminent domain. An Alaska court confirmed the city's right to do so and ordered that an arbitrator determine the appropriate price.

Last year, the arbitrator ordered the city to pay $836,378 for the 80-acre parcel, far more than the $126,000 Wasilla originally thought it would pay for a piece of land 65 acres larger. The arbitrator also determined that the city owed Mr. Lundgren $336,000 in interest. Wasilla's legal bill since the eminent domain action has come to roughly $250,000 so far, according to Mr. Klinkner, the city attorney.

Mr. Lundgren has appealed the decision, arguing that the arbitrator should have awarded him more interest. "It has been 10 years; it's just insane," said Mr. Lundgren, who now lives in Panama. "All [Ms. Palin] had to do was close the transaction."

The McCain-Palin campaign referred questions about the sports complex to Mr. Leonard, the former city finance chief. He blamed the Nature Conservancy for dealing with two different potential buyers at one time. "That's what caused the confusion," he said.

"At the time, with the information she had, [Ms. Palin] made the right decision," Mr. Leonard said. "But you know what? Litigation happens."

The sports facility is finished, set against forest and mountain ranges. Inside, locals kick soccer balls and skate laps on the rink. Last year, it hosted a statewide wrestling tournament.

"All I can say about the sports complex is that it was done on time and under budget," said Donald Moore, a Palin ally who managed the construction. "It was done legally, and for someone else to say it could have been done differently in a better way, that's strictly their opinion."

Ms. Palin cited her mayoral duties as partial evidence of her executive experience. Dianne Woodruff, a Wasilla city councilwoman and critic of Ms. Palin's performance, agreed.

"If people are going to be voting on her based on her experience as Wasilla's mayor, then they should know how she did in the job," Ms. Woodruff said, "the good, the bad and the ugly."

Read the entire article. Palin may well have to explain this one in more depth. It is not clear why the city did not resort to eminent domain in the first instance. That was a mistake compounded by the decision to break ground before title was quieted. Perhaps she can justify her decisions. Or perhaps she just owns the screw-ups and leaves it for us to decide their importance. It seems worthy of note, but hardly an indicator of unfitness.

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Iraq Fact Check

There is a new resource out that perhaps our Dem duo ought to be checking. Think military expenditures for Iraq are what's breaking our bank? To the contrary, "today’s U.S. defense budget accounts for just over four percent of the economy, less than the U.S. commitment at any point during the four decades of the Cold War. During the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, the U.S. defense budget rose as high as 13 percent of the total economy. Even during the Reagan Administration, when the economy expanded significantly, the defense budget accounted for approximately six percent of GDP." And that just one of the topics "fact checked" in a recent document put out by the White House Office of Public Liason and posted at Iraq Status Report.

This from the White House Office of Public Liason:

1. MYTH: The American people are footing the bill for Iraq’s security and reconstruction while Iraqis sit on large windfall oil profits.

FACT: The Iraqi government is taking over the funding of reconstruction. In 2008, Iraq’s budget for large-scale reconstruction projects exceeds that proposed by the U.S. by more than 10 to 1, and the U.S. military expects that Iraq will soon cover 100 percent of such expenses.

FACT: Iraq's security ministries are now spending more on their security forces than the U.S., and Iraq’s 2008 budget provides for more than 75% of the total annual cost for Iraq’s military and police.

FACT: The government of Iraq has committed to footing approximately half the bill for the “Sons of Iraq” community watch program—which was originally 100% U.S.-funded.

FACT: Iraq’s Ambassador to the U.S. Samir Sumaida'ie says that Iraq still has to import gasoline, and argues that “some people are going a little bit too far looking at the Iraqi surplus and the gigantic American deficit and putting two and two together … The windfall from the oil will not cover a fraction of what we need to provide clean water, electricity and the most rudimentary services for our people.” . . .


3. MYTH: The Iraqi government has not taken advantage of reduced violence by making political progress.

FACT: Since September 2007, Iraq's parliament has passed significant legislation dealing with reconciliation and nation building, including:

o A pension law

o De-Ba’athification reform

o An amnesty law

o A provincial powers law . . .

o A 2008 budget that includes record amounts for capital and security expenditures

FACT: Recently passed legislation is already having an effect. For example, the amnesty law passed in February has already led to the release of Iraqis who were under detention for non-serious crimes.

FACT: The national government is sharing oil revenues with provinces despite the lack of a framework hydrocarbons and revenue-sharing law.


4. MYTH: The U.S. is negotiating a back-door treaty with Iraq’s government that will tie the hands of future Presidents.

FACT: The United Nations authorization under which U.S. military and civilian personnel in Iraq are legally serving will expire on December 31, 2008. U.S. and Iraqi officials are therefore seeking a “strategic framework” that would provide legal protections and establish a long-term relationship between the two countries after that date.

FACT: In 2007, Iraq’s leaders asked the U.S. to move to a more normalized bilateral relationship, instead of the special case managed by the U.N.

FACT: The framework U.S. and Iraqi officials are now discussing would in no way limit or affect the military and diplomatic options the next President will have under the U.S. Constitution.

FACT: Any strategic framework would be similar to the agreement the U.S. now has with Afghanistan and much like the conventional peacetime agreements the U.S. has with dozens of other countries.

FACT: It is unclear what would happen to more than 20,000 detainees now under U.S. custody if the U.N. authorization expired on December 31 with no strategic framework in place.

FACT: The United States does not seek and will not seek permanent bases in Iraq, and any framework would affirm this principle.


5. MYTH: Iraqis are not defending their country.

FACT: As General David Petraeus testified in April, Iraqis are increasingly in the fight, recently incurring losses three times the level of Coalition losses.

FACT: Iraqi soldiers, police, and volunteers are securing their nation in increasing numbers. According to General Petraeus, more than 540,000 individuals serve in Iraq’s Security Forces, with more than 133,000 soldiers and police added over the past 16 months.

FACT: The military reports that there are now more than 91,000 Sons of Iraq—Shia as well as Sunni—under contract to help Coalition and Iraqi Forces protect neighborhoods and secure infrastructure.

FACT: More than 21,000 Sons of Iraq have already been accepted into Police, Army, or government jobs. . . .

Read the entire document.

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