Consider the outrage from the left at such a notion.

“That’s the thinking that got us into this mess in the first place,” the President and his lock-step liberal legions will rush to remind us.

Well, no, it isn’t.  The Bush Administration’s general lack of interest in proper regulation, the somnambulistic SEC’s furlough from responsibility during the Bush years and the federal bank examiners refusal to really examine the banks for which they were accountable while a succession of administrations, both Republican and Democrat, committed to the fantasy that credit history didn’t really matter when assessing mortgage risk are not examples of government getting out of the way of a private, market-driven, economy.  These are simply examples of a gross absence of leadership, common sense and the failure to enforce the longstanding oversight rules already in place.

Just as abandoning highway speed and safety laws would cause carnage on our highways as irresponsible and reckless risk takers took to the roads, so did government’s failure to enforce its own rules and regulations attract irresponsible and reckless risk takers into the marketplace.  Had the rules and regulations that were in place been properly enforced, and had the House and Senate financial oversight committees taken their jobs seriously, and had the business and financial press (with a few noteworthy exceptions) earned their subscribers’ fees, the mess we’ve been exposed to for the last three years would (not could…would) have been avoided.

Economists will debate ad nauseam for many years (and never reach a consensus) whether the Obama stimulus stimulated anything other than massive debt.  We have strong doubts about the efficacy of incurring a trillion dollar debt to improve the economy along with a plethora of new policies and regulations that will add tens of thousands of new bureaucrats (literally) and thousands of new regulations (and the massive taxes needed to fund this circus) on to the backs of businesses and all other taxpayers in the cause of stimulating growth.  Individuals and businesses in the marketplace are what stimulate growth, and, by any measure, the marketplace is ready to grow if government would just allow it properly to operate.

Many American businessmen are, today, at the controls of well-oiled and well-fueled industrial machines, but they don’t know whether to, metaphorically, depress the brake or the accelerator of those machines. And who can blame them. Everything the government is doing portends uncertainty and, indeed, danger ahead.  Bare teeth determination to raise taxes on capital, on dividends on high-quality corporate insurance programs on corporations deemed too successful (that would be all small businesses earning over $250,000) and on the most productive income earners in our society is the order of the day emanating from the White House.  This, while the greatest feeding frenzy of new regulatory rule making has been simultaneously unleashed in Washington. And our new ruling class cluelessly laments the hesitancy that permeates our economy.

The tragedy is that the economy is poised to accelerate.  Consumer confidence is abysmally low because the consumer is focused on government that it sees as amateurish, increasingly radical, and outrageously disingenuous.  After dubbing this the Recovery Summer, and all but celebrating how the stimulus is working miracles creating (or, as they like to say, “saving”) millions of jobs, economic data is released that tell us things have gotten worse not better, that GDP has fallen not risen, that jobless claims have increased not decreased and that housing sales dropped to the lowest levels in fifteen years.  And what does the White House then say?  “Oh, that’s just what we were expecting.”

“Recovery Summer” was the Obama Administration’s absurd stab at “Mission Accomplished.”  Bush was simply mistaken with his foray into the Mission Accomplished imbroglio of 2003.  Obama, however, has been deceitful. He is using the financial meltdown as an excuse to reweave the fabric of American society.  To “transform America” as he put it in the final run up to his election. The result has been a nation with sinking confidence in both the leadership and the future of the country and a business community with a very understandable reluctance to invest the enormous reserve of capital it has accumulated by running lean and replenishing the slowly diminishing inventories of retailers, wholesalers and distributors throughout the country.

It is reliably estimated that American corporations are holding about $2 trillion in cash; the lion’s share of which would ordinarily be earmarked for investment (that is how a business funds its growth), or dividend distribution to millions of shareholders.  The fuel for growth (retained earnings) is available and at record levels. Businesses racked up an unprecedented $1.2 trillion in profits in just the second quarter of the year.  Companies have no reason to just sit on those funds.  Their shareholders don’t want them to do that, their suppliers don’t want them to do that, the marketplace doesn’t want them to do that, and, because low investment will translate to low growth, their employees don’t want them to do that. The raison d’être of any business is to grow by increasing the market for its services.  A government, sitting in Washington, salivating at the opportunity that this crisis has created to raise taxes, write new regulations, and create new agencies is exactly what the economy doesn’t need right now…unless, of course, the government wants to be that economy.  It is no coincidence that so many of the tea party gatherings all over the country consist of middle income, small businessmen and women.  They get it.  It is their elected representatives in Washington and their President who don’t.

The biggest stumbling block to growth is, sadly, government.  The economy would be picking up steam more briskly if government wasn’t looming in the background busily concocting new taxes and volumes of new regulations.  Government should be encouraging dividend distributions, especially by more mature companies, but, instead, the Administration intends to levy new taxes on dividends, nearly tripling the tax rate on dividends for some taxpayers.

Then there is the proposed Obama tax on capital gains, dampening economic activity and most certainly, thereby, reducing tax revenues that would otherwise flow from those transactions that involve the sale of appreciated assets.

Every indication is that the economy wants to grow.  Businesses and households aren’t looking over their proverbial shoulders to see what the Wall Street bogeymen are about to do to them.  They are looking over their shoulders to see what their government is going to do to them.

So far, they don’t like what they see. A trillion dollars spent so far from which few people in the private sector have benefited. The wasted razzle-dazzle of billions spent on cash for clunkers, temporary tax credits for home purchases (which ultimately produced the largest decline in home purchases in fifteen years once the government interference (Washington called it stimulus) was lifted, money shoveled into all those shovel-ready projects most of which were not shovel ready and the no-strings attached largess that flowed to bloated local and state governments who were able to kick the day of reckoning down the road far enough for our children to pay the tab, and what do we have to show for all of this is, mostly, massive new indebtedness to the Chinese and heaven only knows who else.

So, what to do?  The answer is, in our opinion, not all that complicated. Government should just let the private sector operate with some sense of certainty. Government officials should stop berating the business sector with claims that business people are motivated merely by greed, which was the president’s outrageous claim when GM bondholders wanted simply to maintain the priority, ahead of unsecured creditors (e.g. organized labor) to which they are entitled by law.

Government should listen, for a change, to what the country is telling it. The people can’t wait until November to send a message the only way they can in a republic such as ours.  The government should recognize that now is the time to leave as much of the nation’s capital and financial resources with the people and stop moving to vacuum those same resources into federal coffers for redistribution as they see fit.  That means easing up on marginal tax rates for all enterprises engaging in productive commerce, and on all incomes whether individual, C-corporations, S-corporations or investors willing to take risks on American business. As Kevin Hassert, director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute and AEI resident scholar Alan Viard wrote in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal (September 3, 2010), “according to IRS data, fully 48% of the net income of sole proprietorships, partnerships and S corporations reported on tax returns went to households with incomes above $200,000 in 2007. This is the real impact of the Obama tax plan on small business, not the disingenuous 3% to which the administration dismissively refers.

Perhaps as the Journal points out, Tony Blair provides the greatest clarity on the subject in the final chapter of his recently released book, “A Journey.”  Blair writes, “First, the market did not fail.  One part of one sector did.”  He goes on to write,” Government also failed.  Regulators failed. Politicians failed. Monetary policy failed. Debt became way too cheap…the failure was one of understanding.  We didn’t spot it…it wasn’t that we were powerless to prevent it even if we had seen it coming; it wasn’t a failure of regulation in the sense that we lacked the power to intervene.  Had regulators said to the leaders that a huge crisis was about to break we wouldn’t have said” There’s nothing we can do about it until we get more regulation through.  We would have acted.” And so the message for America really seems to be to just enforce the sound and healthy regulations that have been there all along to assure a fair and even playing field and then just plain get out of the way.

The President and the Congress have a very short time left to do something that makes sense to virtually everyone except those that are committed to centralized planning and control of the economy.  President Obama, it seems, wants to be remembered as a sort of knight in shining armor, who rescued a people that didn’t need rescuing.  Instead, it would appear that he will be remembered more as the knight of the woeful countenance, a Don Quixote of American politics.

Consider the outrage from the left at such a notion.

“That’s the thinking that got us into this mess in the first place,” the President and his lock-step liberal legions will rush to remind us.

Well, no, it isn’t.  The Bush Administration’s general lack of interest in proper regulation, the somnambulistic SEC’s furlough from responsibility during the Bush years and the federal bank examiners refusal to really examine the banks for which they were accountable while a succession of administrations, both Republican and Democrat, committed to the fantasy that credit history didn’t really matter when assessing mortgage risk are not examples of government getting out of the way of a private, market-driven, economy.  These are simply examples of a gross absence of leadership, common sense and the failure to enforce the longstanding oversight rules already in place.

Just as abandoning highway speed and safety laws would cause carnage on our highways as irresponsible and reckless risk takers took to the roads, so did government’s failure to enforce its own rules and regulations attract irresponsible and reckless risk takers into the marketplace.  Had the rules and regulations that were in place been properly enforced, and had the House and Senate financial oversight committees taken their jobs seriously, and had the business and financial press (with a few noteworthy exceptions) earned their subscribers’ fees, the mess we’ve been exposed to for the last three years would (not could…would) have been avoided.

Economists will debate ad nauseam for many years (and never reach a consensus) whether the Obama stimulus stimulated anything other than massive debt.  We have strong doubts about the efficacy of incurring a trillion dollar debt to improve the economy along with a plethora of new policies and regulations that will add tens of thousands of new bureaucrats (literally) and thousands of new regulations (and the massive taxes needed to fund this circus) on to the backs of businesses and all other taxpayers in the cause of stimulating growth.  Individuals and businesses in the marketplace are what stimulate growth, and, by any measure, the marketplace is ready to grow if government would just allow it properly to operate.

Many American businessmen are, today, at the controls of well-oiled and well-fueled industrial machines, but they don’t know whether to, metaphorically, depress the brake or the accelerator of those machines. And who can blame them. Everything the government is doing portends uncertainty and, indeed, danger ahead.  Bare teeth determination to raise taxes on capital, on dividends on high-quality corporate insurance programs on corporations deemed too successful (that would be all small businesses earning over $250,000) and on the most productive income earners in our society is the order of the day emanating from the White House.  This, while the greatest feeding frenzy of new regulatory rule making has been simultaneously unleashed in Washington. And our new ruling class cluelessly laments the hesitancy that permeates our economy.

The tragedy is that the economy is poised to accelerate.  Consumer confidence is abysmally low because the consumer is focused on government that it sees as amateurish, increasingly radical, and outrageously disingenuous.  After dubbing this the Recovery Summer, and all but celebrating how the stimulus is working miracles creating (or, as they like to say, “saving”) millions of jobs, economic data is released that tell us things have gotten worse not better, that GDP has fallen not risen, that jobless claims have increased not decreased and that housing sales dropped to the lowest levels in fifteen years.  And what does the White House then say?  “Oh, that’s just what we were expecting.”

“Recovery Summer” was the Obama Administration’s absurd stab at “Mission Accomplished.”  Bush was simply mistaken with his foray into the Mission Accomplished imbroglio of 2003.  Obama, however, has been deceitful. He is using the financial meltdown as an excuse to reweave the fabric of American society.  To “transform America” as he put it in the final run up to his election. The result has been a nation with sinking confidence in both the leadership and the future of the country and a business community with a very understandable reluctance to invest the enormous reserve of capital it has accumulated by running lean and replenishing the slowly diminishing inventories of retailers, wholesalers and distributors throughout the country.

It is reliably estimated that American corporations are holding about $2 trillion in cash; the lion’s share of which would ordinarily be earmarked for investment (that is how a business funds its growth), or dividend distribution to millions of shareholders.  The fuel for growth (retained earnings) is available and at record levels. Businesses racked up an unprecedented $1.2 trillion in profits in just the second quarter of the year.  Companies have no reason to just sit on those funds.  Their shareholders don’t want them to do that, their suppliers don’t want them to do that, the marketplace doesn’t want them to do that, and, because low investment will translate to low growth, their employees don’t want them to do that. The raison d’être of any business is to grow by increasing the market for its services.  A government, sitting in Washington, salivating at the opportunity that this crisis has created to raise taxes, write new regulations, create new agencies is exactly what the economy doesn’t need right now…unless, of course, the government wants to be that economy.  It is no coincidence that so many of the tea party gatherings all over the country consist of middle income, small businessmen and women.  They get it.  It is their elected representatives in Washington and their President who don’t.

The biggest stumbling block to growth is, sadly, government.  The economy would be picking up steam more briskly if government wasn’t looming in the background busily concocting new taxes and volumes of new regulations.  Government should be encouraging dividend distributions, especially by more mature companies, but, instead, the Administration intends to levy new taxes on dividends, nearly tripling the tax rate on dividends for some taxpayers.

Then there is the proposed Obama tax on capital gains, dampening economic activity and most certainly, thereby, reducing tax revenues that would otherwise flow from those transactions that involve the sale of appreciated assets.

Every indication is that the economy wants to grow.  Businesses and households aren’t looking over their proverbial shoulders to see what the Wall Street bogeymen are about to do to them.  They are looking over their shoulders to see what their government is going to do to them.

So far, they don’t like what they see. A trillion dollars spent so far from which few people in the private sector have benefited. The wasted razzle-dazzle of billions spent on cash for clunkers, temporary tax credits for home purchases (which ultimately produced the largest decline in home purchases in fifteen years once the government interference (Washington called it stimulus) was lifted, money shoveled into all those shovel-ready projects most of which were not shovel ready and the no-strings attached largess that flowed to bloated local and state governments who were able to kick the day of reckoning down the road far enough for our children to pay the tab, and what do we have to show for all of this is, mostly, massive new indebtedness to the Chinese and heaven only knows who else.

So, what to do?  The answer is, in our opinion, not all that complicated. Government should just let the private sector operate with some sense of certainty. Government officials should stop berating the business sector with claims that business people are motivated merely by greed, which was the president’s outrageous claim when GM bondholders wanted simply to maintain the priority, ahead of unsecured creditors (e.g. organized labor) to which they are entitled by law.

Government should listen, for a change, to what the country is telling it. The people can’t wait until November to send a message the only way they can in a republic such as ours.  The government should recognize that now is the time to leave as much of the nation’s capital and financial resources with the people and stop moving to vacuum those same resources into federal coffers for redistribution as they see fit.  That means easing up on marginal tax rates for all enterprises engaging in productive commerce, and on all incomes whether individual, C-corporations, S-corporations or investors willing to take risks on American business. As Kevin Hassert, director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute and AEI resident scholar Alan Viard wrote in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal (September 3, 2010), “according to IRS data, fully 48% of the net income of sole proprietorships, partnerships and S corporations reported on tax returns went to households with incomes above $200,000 in 2007. This is the real impact of the Obama tax plan on small business, not the disingenuous 3% to which the administration dismissively refers.

Perhaps as the Journal points out, Tony Blair provides the greatest clarity on the subject in the final chapter of his recently released book, “A Journey.”  Blair writes, “First, the market did not fail.  One part of one sector did.”  He goes on to write,” Government also failed.  Regulators failed. Politicians failed. Monetary policy failed. Debt became way too cheap…the failure was one of understanding.  We didn’t spot it…it wasn’t that we were powerless to prevent it even if we had seen it coming; it wasn’t a failure of regulation in the sense that we lacked the power to intervene.  Had regulators said to the leaders that a huge crisis was about to break we wouldn’t have said” There’s nothing we can do about it until we get more regulation through.  We would have acted.” And so the message for America really seems to be to just enforce the sound and healthy regulations that have been there all along to assure a fair and even playing field and then just plain get out of the way.

The President and the Congress have a very short time left to do something that makes sense to virtually everyone except those that are committed to centralized planning and control of the economy.  President Obama, it seems, wants to be remembered as a sort of knight in shining armor, who rescued a people that didn’t need rescuing.  Instead, it would appear that he will be remembered more as the knight of the woeful countenance, a Don Quixote of American politics.

Our nation is in trouble and it goes far deeper than the current economic crisis of the past few years.  Nor, despite all the rancor and the loud shouting back and forth, is the problem attributable to any single controversial issue . . . albeit the important issues that are dividing us are clearly a symptom of our woes.

Since we are a nation of immigrants, there have always been tensions within our vibrant democracy from divisions along obvious fault lines:  race, religion, class, geography, national origin and even age.  But what has, from the beginning, distinguished our collective ethnic citizenry and made America wonderfully unique among the nations of the world was that, unlike virtually all of the countries from which we came, once we attained citizenship we were accepted, truly accepted, as Americans.   We have overcome many crises because, with the obvious exception of the stain of slavery, our constitutional system of division of power between the states and the federal government and the separation of federal authority among these distinct branches of government, has depended on, indeed even demanded, political compromise to advance policies with any semblance of shared goals.  But over the last two decades the notion of shared goals and the ability to fashion compromises have all but disappeared, widening the fault lines and leaving the nation polarized and government often paralyzed.

There is irony in this increased polarization given our preoccupation, sometimes to the point of absurdity, with political correctness.  Either we have become unbelievably thin-skinned as a people or our preoccupation with political correctness has led to a process of balkanization as each ethnic group sees the “national pie” as a zero sum game:  “we win, you lose.” This comes at the expense of putting America first.  The price has been high.

When our president feels that apologies are necessary to improve our relationships with long- time allies and to reset our relationships with others, including those who have, for many years, been hostile to the United States; when an American ambassador, by his mere presence, implies an American apology for the awful devastation visited upon the victims at Hiroshima, without any acknowledgement by the Japanese government, after more than 60 years, that it was an imperialist Japanese government that was responsible for bringing war to the Pacific with their unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, we diminish the noble cause for which over one-half million Americans gave their lives. The Japanese are certainly entitled to convene in memory of those who lost their lives at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it is their national day of remembrance. Our presence was neither called for nor appropriate. They and we have gotten past that dark and deadly time.  We are, today close allies and trade partners.  The last war-related joint ceremony in which we participated with the Japanese was in 1945 on the deck of the US Missouri in Tokyo Bay.   We should have left it there.

Now, in place of the heroes of that and other devastating wars, and the citizenry who lived during that era and its immediate aftermath, we have a whole new generation who are not only unaware of, but eschew the concept of American exceptionalism.  This leads to our inability to consider the need for national consensus and the concomitant politicization of almost every political subject.  Instead of invoking the memories of those past heroes, and warning Americans of new threats to our very national existence, our president steadfastly clings to the absurdity of banishing from his Administration’s vocabulary the reality of the greatest danger facing us:  fanatical Islamic terrorism.

The President who, using his bully pulpit to roll back executive compensation he considered excessive, or to squeeze funds from a company like BP beyond its legal responsibility has decided to use that same bully pulpit to support an Islamic organization’s plans to, of all things, build an Islamic center very close to ground zero. His rationale is that one of the pillars of our democracy is religious freedom; as though religious freedom has anything to do with the national exasperation over this ill-advised project. No one is questioning the right or the religious freedom Americans have to build such a facility. This isn’t about rights.  It is about the abysmal judgment and insensitivity of its sponsors to select this spot to build an Islamic cultural center and Mosque so near to the site of the mass murder of nearly 3000 Americans at the hands of Islamic extremists.

Instead of reminding the American people about the sheer decency and compassion of our own country and the sacrifices we have made for the good of the world, the president seems consumed by the need to convince the world that we are a good and decent people.  If the “rest of the world” doesn’t know that by now, his apologies for saving the European continent from despotism three times in the 20^th century are totally irrelevant and an insult to the memories of those who sacrificed, and precisely the wrong message to send to today’s generation who think freedom comes without cost.

Similarly, on substantive political issues, the current Administration has virtually ignored the value — indeed the imperative — of finding commonality of purpose, which, in a democracy, requires both compromise and consensus.  The Obama Administration, has confused a large Congressional majority for a license to cram down our collective throats, legislation that a substantial majority of the people do not want . . . and, when the White House can’t get its programs passed notwithstanding their bloated majorities, they have resorted to government by fiat, causing an unprecedented loss of respect for the federal government, and forcing individual states to attempt to enact their own policies on what are assuredly national issues.  This is a prescription for serious trouble and the further fraying of the ties that bind us as a people.

Item:  Senate Majority Leader Reid recently pulled from the floor the Cap and Tax legislation regulating carbon emissions.  He knew there was neither a majority nor even a semblance of consensus, for this bill, which would likely cause a major dislocation of the American economy.  So what did the Administration do?  It used the EPA to issue a finding that carbon emissions threaten human health, and thereby arrogated to an unelected administrative agency, a huge expansion of authority without the kind of democratic consensus necessary to support such a profound change to our economy.

Item:  The president and his acolytes in Congress used deception and political bribery to pass health care legislation, which a majority of the American people opposed, and which will bring about the most profound and expensive change to the delivery of health care in America since Medicare.  Moreover this massive piece of legislation is grounded in an unprecedented expansive interpretation of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which is now being challenged in the courts by the attorneys general of 20 states.

Item:  Notwithstanding that BP might well have deserved it, the President, without even a scintilla of legal authority, strong-armed BP to create a $20 billion escrow fund, even though existing law (wrongly) sets a much lower liability limit. There is little doubt in our minds that BP would have, more than likely, agreed to such a request or that such an escrow requirement could have sailed through Congress, but the President made a show in his oval-office speech of demanding the $20 billion escrow fund hours before the meeting with BP.  We certainly have no tears to shed for BP, but nor do we have any cheers for this oval office theater.

Item:  In the bailout of General Motors, the Administration used raw federal power to subordinate the priority rights of bondholders (those who loaned money to GM) in order to give a huge equity stake to the United Auto Workers.  “Greedy bondholders” the president called them.  What this might portend for the capital markets and the trust they have in making investments in our economy is not yet known, but it is hard to distinguish this confiscatory action from those taken by the likes of the governments of Venezuela and Argentina.  We carry no brief to bail out creditors who made loans to a failing enterprise since that was the risk they voluntarily took, but those creditors were uniformly denied their priority rights in what amounted to a total corruption of the nation’s bankruptcy laws. Perhaps many feel that the ends justified the means, but we either are, or are not, a nation of laws.

To be sure, when the Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress, they did, essentially, nothing to promote compromise and consensus.

It is time to consider the obvious:  democratic government is more than mere number counting.  Often, when it involves transformative policies, it requires more than a simple majority, something more akin to a national consensus is called for.  This requires honest and open debate and the practice of persuasion, not legislative bullying, trickery, deceit and backroom deals.  A president needs to be in touch with the feelings of the people if he is to govern effectively.  He needs more than intelligence, charm and a gift of gab.  He needs to be intuitive, to have a fingertip feel for the sentiments of the body politic; kind of like political Braille.

We are witnessing a usurpation of power, an unlawful exercise of power, by the executive branch, of those powers clearly delegated by the Constitution to Congress or the states.  This, over time, can become the proverbial death of a thousand cuts to the Federalism created by the founders. How different in result is this from the heavy handed actions of the thugocracies we deplore when democratic values are sliced away like salami to the point where the will of the people is reduced to irrelevance.  As the November elections approach, early indications are that the American public is in revolt (thankfully peacefully) at the excessive intrusion by government in our lives. There is a fear that a Pied Piper is leading us into financial extremis, and a general, but ever-growing concern that the current Administration is abdicating its most important job, keeping us safe so they can “reset” relations with those who wish us ill. Tyranny or authoritarianism doesn’t necessarily have to arrive by violent Soviet-style revolution  or mimic Mubarak’s Egypt, Castro’s Cuba or Chavez’s Venezuela.  At the end of the day, if democracy is eroded away does it matter whether we lose it through a coup or the accumulation of self inflicted wounds?

We will not be wriiting our weekly essay the next 2 weeks and will return on September 7.

Sound familiar? Most everyone has heard it time and time again. It’s the way many TV sales pitches end after seeming to give the viewing audience something for nothing.  It’s a sucker’s pitch. It usually works like this: you are offered the gadget of the moment for the bargain price (typically) of $19.95, and you get an additional gadget for free.  Then comes the addendum (very quickly and often in a whisper) “just pay separate processing and handling.” The fee is never disclosed, but it’s always there (typically $9.95 for each gadget, or another $19.90 for both which brings the total to $39.85 exclusive of shipping charges) proving there are no free lunches.  This deceitful advertising used by television pitchman works so well that its equivalent has become the new Obama-Pelosi-Reid pitch to disguise the true cost of their programs.

And while this may not be a precise analogy for the way things are done in Washington, it’s close enough.  “Just pay processing and handling” is our metaphor for the entire panoply of Washington speak that produces programs, the costs of which are often orders of magnitude more than originally represented.  We are, almost daily it seems, pitched free lunches or  “benefits” by our government.  And while the seemingly irreversible debt we are currently piling on our children and grandchildren is truly unprecedented in American history, this administration did not invent the government “free lunch” shell game; they’ve simply refined and extended it with complete abandon.  As Ronald Reagan so aptly warned, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

Let’s count a few of the ways American consumers and taxpayers have been sold a bill of goods whereby the bill for the goods is, or will be, much higher than the assurance given in the Obama-Pelosi-Reid sales pitch.

Everyone can recall the “deficit neutral” healthcare reform bill.  It wasn’t going to add a dime to the deficit “now or in the future.”  Then, no sooner than you could transfer a bill into an Act (a law) the essential quarter-of-a-trillion dollar “doc fix,” which had been yanked from the original healthcare reform bill to make it “deficit neutral,” was, a short time later, enacted separately blowing the deficit neutral promise to smithereens — just pay separate processing and handling.

The Pelosi-Reid-led Congress established new high-risk pools in the new legislation and allocated $5 billion to take care of the chronically ill and uninsured until the government-controlled insurance exchanges, which are to be set up under the new law, are up and running in 2014.  But no sooner, it seems, was the legislation signed into law than the Chief Actuary for Medicare estimated that the tax-payer funded high-risk pools would run dry in 2011 or 2012, “resulting in substantial premium increases to sustain the program” — another new, hidden and unexpected cost compliments of Obamacare.  Just pay separate processing and handling.

Then, while throwing around a few billion here and a few billion there, your Congress established another $5 billion fund to offset health-care expenses for early retirees.  While at first blush the fund would seem to subsidize both public sector and private sector early-retirement plans, in reality, relatively few private firms offer early retirement plans, while such lush benefit programs are common in the public sector, compliments of the taxes paid by American private-sector wage earners. This has all of the makings of the biggest boondoggle in the legislation because it could eventually morph into a massive backdoor bailout for cash-strapped states, much like the job-saving bill for which Speaker Pelosi has recalled congress to subsidize state and local governments so that they can continue to avoid facing their bloated payrolls.  This temporary fund is also set to expire in 2014, but the same Medicare actuary has warned that this $5billion fund will also run dry before then.  We find it hard to imagine that the public employee unions will stand by and let the temporary subsidy lapse for lack of funding.

Many state and local governments are going broke (or have gone broke) paying for such lavish promises they’ve made to, or, more accurately, they’ve had squeezed out of them by, public-employee unions.  Less than a year ago the Government Accounting Office estimated that states and localities had more than $530 billion in unfunded liabilities for “post-employment” benefits, primarily for retiree health care. One can bet that states like New York and California will leap at the chance to offload their early retiree costs onto the feds, and that public-employee unions will push hard to expand funding for the early retirement subsidy and to make it permanent. No matter that this federal subsidy was simply supposed to tide these bloated plans over until 2014 when the government controlled insurance exchanges are to become effective.   Congress naively expects individual union retirees to transfer into the exchanges in 2014, but it’s hard to imagine unions surrendering their gold-plated plans when the rest of the country is picking up the tab.

So while Obamacare is barely six months old, the nation is quickly discovering what opponents of the legislation (which none of the legislators voting in favor bothered to read) argued all along: that it will cost taxpayers far more than expected and send health-care spending into the stratosphere.  The immense federal bureaucracy that is being cobbled together, i.e., rule writers, regulatory enforcers, thousands of new IRS agents (to monitor compliance in order to tax those who they find not in compliance) will cost hundreds of billions of new incremental dollars.  Just pay separate processing and handling.

The Congressional Budget Office, shortly after the President signed the Obama-Pelosi-Reid health-care reform legislation into law, reported (a bit late, we think) that the new level of deficit spending and the attendant debt that it imposes on the country is, to use their words, unsustainable. This is, of course, a concern we have voiced in these essays on numerous occasions during the past year.  Our concern is not merely the unbridled government spending which drives the deficit and the debt but, even more critically, that the indebtedness the government shows on its books doesn’t begin to tell the story of the mess we’re in. That’s because almost every government entity, federal, state, county and local has gotten into the very bad habit of utilizing multiple “sets of books” to account for debt, deficits, and unfunded liabilities. These include how they account for welfare programs and the costs of their own employee benefits. In some cases, most notably concerning health insurance continuation coverage, there is virtually no unfunded liability disclosed to taxpayers. But trust us, it’s there. It’s just almost impossible to find.  For example, the federal government does not include the unfunded liabilities of Medicare, Social Security, or its own retirement programs as part of the official US debt.  That’s because it is not considered public debt.  It’s money the government owes internally and, theoretically, the government can renege or reschedule these obligations.  To make matters worse, virtually all federal and most non-federal public sector entities now also pay higher salaries and offer better benefits to their employees than can be provided in the private sector (which, incidentally, provides the largess sloshing around in the public trough).  Small wonder public sector employment has been growing along with public sector union membership.

The massive cost of early retirement for public sector employees, which is often available 10-25 years earlier than is allowed by Social Security, together with free or highly subsidized health insurance during the early retirement years, is generally hidden from taxpayers. There are huge, absolutely unsustainable, understated and underfunded liabilities that are largely hidden from the taxpayers who pay the tab. Misleading or incomplete actuarial and accounting methods that the government would consider criminal in the private sector has become a common ruse employed by public-sector agencies. A report prepared by Andrew Biggs, a scholar from the American Enterprise Institute, states that the disclosed “debt” of non-federal public entities is approximately $2.2 trillion (the sum total of all state and municipal bonds), and that the additional “off balance sheet” unfunded liability for non-federal public sector pension plans is currently stated to be around $400 billion.  According to Biggs, the actual unfunded liability for these public sector pension plans would be $3.5 trillion if more realistic and conservative interest rate assumptions were utilized.   Admittedly, the precise level of these real but mercurial obligations is very difficult to pin down.  What is certain, however, is that the bill, when it is quantified will be far greater than the public imagines, and these chickens will come home to roost.

The true federal debt (including unfunded obligations) would, according to many experts, including the President of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank, exceed $107 trillion, if one, integrated balance sheet were used — not the $13.0 trillion currently stated as “debt”. The result is that the total federal and non-federal government debt (if unfunded liabilities are included) is an estimated $112+ trillion, or SEVEN TIMES higher than the total $15 trillion currently disclosed to taxpayers.

We could go on and on (and probably will in future essays) writing about the gathering storm building as a result of our profligate elected officials.  They are almost all very outspoken about what they have, are and will do for us and, simultaneously, very soft spoken about what it is all really costing us.  They seem to believe we’ll walk down the primrose path over and over again and just pay separate processing and handing.

Last week the North Korean government (officially, the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, a misuse of the word “democratic” if ever there was one), threatened a massive nuclear strike if the United States and South Korea carried out their annual “war games” in international waters.  This set of war games is being conducted to demonstrate that both South Korea and the U.S. maintain considerable, well-coordinated military strength in the region, and that the action of North Korea, in sinking a South Korean ship, the Cheonan, was intolerable and that it would not be permitted to pass unnoticed.

This somewhat more muscular response follows another feckless resolution from the United Nations, which condemned the attack on the ship but not the attacker.  Why the fear of offending this bankrupt nation that cannot feed its own people, all of whom live in a virtual prison camp?  The answer is obvious; – it is estimated that North Korea has a nuclear arsenal of up to 10 nuclear bombs They also have a missile delivery system, and so the world must wait with bated breath to see what the stroke-ridden dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong Il, known to his people as Dear Leader, will do in response to the war games.

We bring up North Korea to emphasize the outsize influence a rogue state can have if it possesses nuclear weapon capability.  The immediate relevance relates to Iran’s nuclear program on which there appears to be a consensus that weapons grade plutonium is being developed, and that a bomb will be manufactured shortly thereafter.  Whether the world is months or years away from Iran’s demonstration of its nuclear capability, we do not know.  Recently, CIA Director, Leon E. Panetta, stated that Iran already has material for two atomic bombs.  As we know, one nuclear bomb going off could spoil your whole day.

President Obama has spent a little more than a year reaching out to the Iranian regime to no avail.  No serious negotiations commenced.  Although the Iranians deny that their nuclear program is for other than peaceful uses, it will not permit international inspectors to verify that claim.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, in a report this spring on Iran’s nuclear program, suggested that Tehran has produced 2400 kilograms of low enriched uranium, which is apparently enough to build two atomic weapons after the material is further enriched.  Iran has made clear its intention to further enrich its uranium, and, tellingly, has agreed to ship, for storage, only 1200 kilograms (or half) of its stockpile to Brazil and Turkey under the much heralded fig-leaf pact it entered into with those two nations last May.   Accordingly, the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States recently imposed further economic sanctions on Iran in hopes that this set of sanctions will convince the Iranians to abandon their nuclear efforts.  We think that is very unlikely.  The Iranian regime is motivated by a radical ideology, a desire to be the leading power in its neighborhood, and what they obviously see as the need to develop “an Islamic bomb.” They, of course, insist that their nuclear development program is intended only for peaceful purposes (why else would this religion of peace be running thousands of advanced centrifuges around the clock at recently discovered secret facilities?).  Thus, we are faced with a stark choice:  (i) do we take military action to stop the development by Iran of nuclear weapons or, (ii) having failed to stop them from becoming a nuclear power do we simply try to manage the consequences?  Our readers will recall that Mr. Obama as a presidential candidate, referred to an Iranian nuclear bomb as “a game changer.”  Does that not suggest that the Western world needs to take strong and effective action to prevent the “game” from “changing”… to its detriment?

There is some precedent for taking military action.  In October 1962, the United States discovered that the Soviet Union was placing nuclear tipped missiles in Cuba.  Obviously, during the cold war the U.S. and the USSR were the world’s only superpowers, and both were armed to the nuclear teeth.  A confrontation with the Soviets threatened a nuclear exchange in which our very survival was at stake.  Many people counseled President Kennedy that mutual deterrence on which both the U.S. and USSR had relied to prevent either one from attacking the other (so‑called “mutual assured destruction”) would still be an effective policy even if Soviet missiles were 90 miles from our shore.  Mr. Kennedy was not of that view.  In a speech to the nation, he announced what amounted to a blockade of Cuba in which every ship heading to Cuba would be stopped and searched.  After extremely tense days in Washington and around the globe, there was a denouement.  The Soviets agreed not to place missiles in Cuba and in exchange, the U.S. pledged not to invade that island nation.  A number of years later, we learned that the U.S. also agreed not to keep nuclear‑tipped missiles in Turkey.

Other potential threats also have been met with a show of force.  In 1982, Israel attacked and destroyed a nuclear reactor in Osirak, Iraq.  And shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Libyan leader, Moummar Qhaddafi, announced to the world that his nation was abandoning its nuclear program.  It appears quite likely that Mr. Qhaddafi feared severe military consequences if he continued with the development of his nascent nuclear program.  On September 6, 2007 in what remains a mysterious and bizarre action, Israel bombed a site in Syria where the Israelis claimed a nuclear facility was being built.  Western sources claimed that North Korea had shipped nuclear materials to Syria.  Neither Israel nor Syria, oddly enough, has ever confirmed this military strike.

What we have in common here, except for Cuba, are efforts by Islamic states to develop what they often refer to as an Islamic bomb.  Pakistani scientist, A. Q. Khan, who might well be the greatest criminal of all time, has aided them in that effort. In exchange for substantial compensation, he has illegally trafficked in nuclear technology.

The presence of enriched uranium in the hands of unreliable, undemocratic, despotic nation states threatens the entire world.  The Islamic terrorists who sent fanatics to blow up the World Trade Center, killing nearly 3,000 people, would have no compunction about using a nuclear bomb in some future attack.  So far, we have been lucky.  Numerous additional efforts at large scale terrorist attacks have been avoided by good intelligence and insofar as we know nuclear materials are not yet in the hands of terrorists.  But it would take only one failure of intelligence for a nuclear-armed terrorist group to slip through our defenses.  No intelligence is foolproof.

So let’s return to Iran and presume that the Iranians will not stand down from their nuclear quest as a result of economic sanctions.  With the United States engaged in military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, can we undertake yet another major military action?  Would the world, including our allies, support us?  Is it the obligation of the United States to keep the world safe from nuclear war?  Do we expect to outsource to Israel the responsibility for taking military action against Iran, whose lunatic leader has repeated, over and over, that Israel should be wiped off the map?  Will the American people countenance yet another military adventure by the United States?

Unfortunately, the answer to all of those questions might well be that the United States should not take unilateral military action, and that instead we should plan to manage the threat of an Iranian nuclear arsenal through diplomatic means once that arsenal becomes a reality.  We fear that it cannot be managed and that the development of the bomb by Iran will only lead to more and more proliferation, both in the Middle East and in our own hemisphere.  Just imagine Hugo Chavez with a nuclear bomb in his back pocket.  If diplomacy failed before Iran got the bomb, can we realistically believe it will work once they are a true nuclear power?

Perhaps now is the time for President Kennedy’s approach:  a full naval blockade of Iran.  Agreed, it would be an act of war, but perhaps it is the most bloodless act of war that we might have in our arsenal to prevent the cataclysmic event that Iran’s nuclear capability would foreshadow.

No atomic bombs have been exploded in anger since the bombing of Nagasaki (a demi bomb by today’s standards), in which approximately 35,000 died in one day (another 35,000 in the months that followed) ending World War II.  Perhaps, the nuclear restraint in the years since the end of World War II has been the result of nuclear weaponry being in the hands of relatively stable governments and generally rational leadership (with the exception of Pakistan), but we now must face the reality that rogue and failed states, together with neighborhood bullies, are likely to possess nuclear weaponry.  We cannot continue to rely on luck or the ineptitude of would-be mass murderers to prevent the catastrophe of a nuclear device being set off either on our soil or any other place in the world.

Our apologies for the liberties we are taking with the old Virginia Reel square dance call in this week’s essay.  Those of us who had to square dance in grade school remember the caller commanding us to do the dos-a-do which was a spin move in one direction and then another.  That spin, however, doesn’t compare with the Obama Administration’s version of that dance move, in which the American people are told one thing, and then with dizzying speed, find out something else . . . the truth. Fortunately, most Americans are beginning to focus on the complete disconnect between the absurdity of the claims made by the Administration’s spinmeisters and the people’s own sense of reality.

The most breathtaking flight of fancy from Washington this past week was the full- court press by the President, Vice President, Chairperson of the White House Council of Economic Advisors and a whole host of Obama acolytes to proclaim that the Stimulus is working, that we’re “ahead of schedule” on job creation and that we’ve created  (or saved) millions of jobs.  The job saving claim is, in a strange way, irrefutable…sort of like a witch doctor saying if he hadn’t done his rain dance, the drought would have been worse.  As Democratic Senator Max Baucus complained to the White House “you created a situation where you cannot be wrong.  If 2,500,000 jobs are lost, you claim that without your stimulus program, 3,500,000 jobs would have been lost.  Taken to its logical conclusion, if everyone except one person were laid off, the Administration could claim that without its stimulus program, that person would have lost his job.”

There is, of course, a reason for this disciplined chorus of downright silly spin.  The Administration knew that data were about to be released from a variety of reliable sources revealing a further decline in manufacturing and retail activity, a further pull back in private sector hiring plans and industry investment plans, unemployment stubbornly stuck at just under ten percent and a further sinking of consumer confidence.  What’s a “fella” to do with elections coming and millions of jobs lost?  Dance the old dos-a-do and around you go, and claim the stimulus saved jobs.

This further sinking of consumer confidence is particularly significant and vexing to the Administration.  Consumer confidence is a consequence of the consumers’ sensitivity to what they see, hear and feel all around them.  It is reality. It can’t be manufactured, successfully manipulated (for very long), divined from the White House or spoon fed from a teleprompter.

The big problem the White House faces is its dogged determination to transform America into a left leaning, statist nation consistent with the President’s vision of what’s good for America, when Americans don’t want to be transformed into that vision.  Americans understand the difference between needed reforming and radical transforming.

Dos-a-Do and Around You Go has been like an anthem within this White House. Remember the Obama healthcare reform bill that wasn’t going to add “one dime to the deficit” and the president’s mantra that he wouldn’t sign a bill that added one dime to the deficit “ now or in the future.” We now know, because the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has told us, and, as the president surely knew when he made that promise, that his healthcare reform bill would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit.

And when George Stephanopoulos suggested that the fine for not purchasing insurance under the Obama healthcare plan was clearly a tax on the middle class, the President replied that it wasn’t a tax at all. This rather astounding presidential response quickly had Stephanopoulos reaching for the nearest dictionary (which, conveniently, was resting at his elbow). After reading aloud the definition of a tax, which fit the fine or penalty in Obamacare like a glove, the President, with a straight face, lectured that the fact that Stephanopoulos had to use the dictionary proved he (the president) was right all along.  Dos-a-Do and Around You Go.

To add insult to injury, the Justice Department in responding to lawsuits brought by several state attorneys general who claim the Congress has exceeded its constitutional authority in the health care legislation by mandating fines on individuals who do not purchase health insurance, is now making the argument that the fine is really just . . . you guessed it . . . a tax which is, of course, within the power of Congress.  Quite amazing isn’t it?  It isn’t a tax, it’s a fine except when it’s a tax.  Mr. Obama has created a new dance step:  the double dos-a-do.  Then there was the White House assurance that the Administration’s spending (they call it investment) was going to decrease the deficit.  The CBO, ever so belatedly, blew the whistle on that outlandish claim with the warning that the mounting deficits were now deemed to be unsustainable.

Another refrain of Dos-a-Do and Around You Go was the Administration’s attempt to harmonize the American Latino community with the President’s promise of comprehensive immigration reform legislation during his first year in office.  Eighteen months later, and counting, and there hasn’t been a scintilla of effort to propose or advance such reform.  Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and the state’s legislature called the President’s hand on this one when they passed Senate bill 1070 which goes into effect this week unless derailed by an injunction asked for in the recent suit filed by the federal government against the state (that is, the people) of Arizona. SB 1070 does nothing more than require the state’s law enforcement officers to assist the federal government in enforcing its own laws. The President’s claim that SB 1070 would result in police “confronting a mom and her kids at an ice-cream parlor” with demands they show proof of citizenship was pure demagoguery.  It was Dos-a-Do and Around You Go writ large and sung off key.

And just this month, the president, employing his power to make recess appointments, named Donald Berwick to head the Office of Medicare & Medicaid Services.  Mr. Obama, citing Republican obstructionism, said speed was needed to fill a position that has been vacant for a number of years.  If that is so, why did it take him eighteen months to make the appointment?  Amazing isn’t it coming from a man who as a senator was outraged over President Bush’s recess appointment of John Bolton to be the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

Then there was the effort from day one of this Administration to convince the American public that there was no such thing as a war on terror, that terrorism didn’t exist and we could change the reality of terror with a mere change in vocabulary.  Administration officials were forbidden to use the words Islamic and terror in the same sentence.  The Obama cabinet began dissembling with new ways to describe what every American recognizes as the paramount existential threat of the 21^st century. Suddenly, the President’s cabinet members were, with straight faces, trying to convince the people that “man caused disasters,” and not terrorism, caused the first and second World Trade Center attacks, and the attack on the USS Cole, and the bombing of the Embassies in Africa, and the London subway and bus bombings and the Christmas-day near mid-air disaster and the Fort Hood massacre and the Time’s Square attempted car bomb attack, and the carnage at Mumbai.  We are not fighting Islamic terrorism on a global scale they tell us.  We’re, instead, engaging in “overseas contingency operations.” This is well beyond the typical Dos a Do and Around You Go that routinely emanates from every misstep of this Administration. It is even beyond implausible. The President simply shouldn’t tolerate this sort of semantic gobbledygook, much less be responsible for it. This is our national security with which these political neophytes are toying.  It boggles the mind.

And to prove there was no war on terror the Attorney General of the United States declared that the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks would be tried in civilian courts rather than by the military tribunal to which Khalid Sheik Mohammad had already announced his intention to plead guilty.  Almost comically, Attorney General Eric Holder, testifying at a recent Senate hearing, displayed breathtaking linguistic gymnastics by resisting every effort by the panel to coax him into acknowledging that there was even the remotest connection between Islamic extremism and attacks on innocent civilians.

Then, of course, there is also the new 2300-hundred-page financial reform law that calls for 243 new regulations to protect Main Street from Wall Street.  America got a lot of Dos-a-Do and Around You Go by the President about how the people were going to be protected with this new law even though there isn’t a word in the Act dealing with the malfeasances of those government sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were, perhaps, among the most responsible culprits in the entire financial meltdown.  So far, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are untouched, unmentioned and unregulated by Obama’s financial regulatory reform.  We doubt, however, that they will remain unscathed once the public begins to focus on the fact that Representative Barney Frank, Senator Chris Dodd and (former Senator) Barrack Obama were the largest recipients of Fannie Mae’s political slush fund.

We could go on, as the Presidential encores of Dos-a-Do and Around You Go seem endless.  But things do have a way of changing and, perhaps, the President will soon learn that, just like the original Virginia Reel, fewer and fewer people are dancing to this tune.

The near collapse of our financial institutions and the overall economy and the misguided notion that a few trillion dollars of additional federal spending would return us to prosperity moved us in early 2009 to suggest an alternate approach.  We proposed in an essay published in The American, the on-line journal of the American Enterprise Institute, a fifty percent tax credit up to a fixed limit for every taxpayer who purchased any consumer goods anywhere in the United States.

Our theory was that a robust economic recovery would be fueled by increased retail purchases, and that every dollar of cost to the treasury represented a prior retail purchase within the American economy. This, by definition, would have produced an immediate increase in revenues to our struggling business and manufacturing sectors.  That essay and the positive feedback it engendered provided the impetus for the establishment of the Of Thee I Sing 1776 website, the goal of which has been to produce weekly, timely, and hopefully, thought provoking essays.

This week we return to the subject of economic stimulus as more and more politicians from both sides of the aisle and columnists from left to right have pronounced the stimulus a disappointment, at best, and a disaster at worst.  More likely, given the nation’s accumulated debt, the latter may be the more apt description.

So is there a Plan B, so to speak, in the works?  The answer so far, based on bills recently considered and rejected by members of both parties in Congress, is that Mr. Obama would prefer to double down on the discredited Keynesian approach which didn’t work during the great depression and which failed miserably through the recently “ended” (at least by common definition) great recession.  Tell the 9.5% of the workforce who are still unemployed that the recession is over.  Tell that to those who have watched the average time the unemployed are out-of-work grow from six weeks to 12 weeks, to 25 weeks to 35 weeks.

The number of unemployed is essentially the same percentage of people who were unemployed before the Administration and the huge Democratic majority in Congress, in the name of “job creation”, started shoveling our tax money out the door (or as some might say burning it in a bonfire).  And just why won’t President Obama, Majority Leader Reid and Speaker Pelosi wake up and smell the fire that continues to burn?  The answer can be found in two very telling and, now, very familiar utterances of the president and his senior staff in the early days of the new Administration.  The president said he wanted to “fundamentally change America” and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, when economic disaster was around the corner, famously said, “Never waste a crisis.”

Because not enough people dug below the surface to question what it means, “to fundamentally change America,” President Obama and his acolytes in the Congress set about “not wasting a crisis.”  To be sure we were, indeed, in the midst of a major crisis calling for meaningful governmental action.  To prevent a complete meltdown of the world’s financial system and a seizing up of all interbank credit, Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, during the last weeks of the Bush Administration, pumped liquidity into the financial markets using tools the Fed had never before utilized.  In that effort they, joined later by Timothy Geithner following President Obama’s assuming office, did do a remarkable job and stabilized the banks and the financial markets. Fortunately, Geithner, as President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank under Bush and a key member of the TARP One planning process, was able to “hit the ground running” when he was tapped by Obama to become Secretary of the Treasury.

The stimulus package(s), however, is another story.  While strong action was needed to jump-start an economic recovery, having Congress appropriate an unprecedented amount of money essentially to be spent without guidelines was the opportunity of a lifetime for the political left.  Claiming they would produce or save millions of jobs, they swiftly assumed control of vast swaths of the private economy, something they had long coveted.  So where are those jobs?  Why hasn’t the private sector recalled millions of employees now that trillions of stimulus dollars have been pumped into the economy?  They don’t exist because the various, highly inefficient stimulus plans have stimulated no net consumer spending.

The unprecedented federal spending didn’t work and, in fact, simply burdened the nation with increased debt.  Even the Business Roundtable, which supported Mr. Obama’s initiatives, (we believe more out of a patriotic instinct during a crisis than out of common sense) has issued a fifty-four-page report to Peter Orszag, the outgoing director of OMB detailing the Administration’s job creating initiatives.Roundtable President John Castellani stated:  “We stuck with that [Congressional] majority ‘through trying circumstances,’ even ‘alienating many of our traditional colleagues,’ and what did we get?  They keep “vilifying” the private sector!  And taxing it, and empowering unions, and ignoring trade.  ‘The time has come for a new course,’” declared Mr. Castellani, a mere 18 months after Democrats announced plans to tax companies, empower unions and ignore trade.

All of this, together with near government ownership of the auto industry, the student loan business, health care legislation that, despite promises that everyone can keep their own insurance if they so desire, (how kind of them to permit us to keep our own insurance) is inevitably on a track toward the single payer system long preferred by President Obama and the left wing of the Democratic Party.

The government takeover or control of so much of industry creates an atmosphere of uncertainty, which, in turn, inhibits companies and individuals from returning to the risk-taking investments and new initiatives, which really do create jobs.

Why not try another approach?  The left is ever scornful of, and resolutely opposed to, Republican tax-cutting proposals, notwithstanding compelling evidence that such tax policy invariably results in explosive economic growth (think the Reagan tax cuts of 1981 and the Bush tax reductions in 2001).  The “rich” must “pay their fair share” they cry even though the upper five percent of taxpayers pay approximately sixty-one percent of the federal income taxes collected, and the bottom 50% contribute only three percent of all income tax collected, and 43% pay no income tax at all.  The answer lies in what Mr. Obama really means about fundamentally changing America.  His vision is nearer to the socialist dream of transferring wealth from the most productive members of society to those less fortunate on the wealth scale … and the tax system is the left’s best weapon to achieve that result.

Thus, the so-called stimulus approach of flooding the economy with federal spending, the creation of tens of thousands of pages of new regulations which will stifle growth, the continued failure to legislate meaningful tort reform (frivolous litigation being a method to force major corporations to make what amounts to extortion payments to avoid the costs of litigation), all combine to accomplish the twin results of wealth transfers and the inhibition of economic growth.

At a time when the country desperately needs the purchasing power of its people to energize a hesitant and insecure economy, the Obama Administration is swiftly moving to vacuum from that economy trillions of dollars to redistribute according to its transformative priorities.

Prominent economist Arthur Laffer, whose writings inspired the Reagan tax cuts, in an op-ed piece in the July 8, 2009 edition of the Wall Street Journal, posited the following:

“Since late 2007 the federal government has spent somewhere around $3.6 trillion to stimulate the economy.  That is a lot of money.  My suggestion would have been to take all $3.6 trillion and declare a federal tax holiday for 18 months.  No income tax, no corporate profits tax, no capital gains tax, no estate tax, no payroll tax (FICA) either employee or employer, no Medicare or Medicaid taxes, no federal excise taxes, no tariffs, no federal taxes at all, which would have reduced federal revenues by $2.4 trillion annually.  Can you imagine where employment would be today?  How does 2.5% sound?”

To the contrary, in 2011, taxes are scheduled to increase with the expiration of the Bush tax cuts.  The top income tax rate will increase to 39.5 percent from 35 percent, with a 43 percent top rate, a product of the healthcare legislation, due in 2013.  The top rate on capital gains and dividends are scheduled to grow from 15 percent to 39.5 percent.  And the estate tax is scheduled to kick back from zero in 2010 to 55 percent, with a $1 million exclusion in 2011 unless Congress acts as they had been expected to do starting last year.  Their failure to do so, leaving many Americans, particularly the elderly, in a complete state of confusion about how they or their estates will be taxed is nothing less than a dereliction of duty by Congress.

With fall elections looming, we had better keep our eyes open until Congress adjourns in July.  And although Will Rogers said “no man’s property is safe when Congress is in session,” concerned Americans better hold on to their wallets and pay attention even after the Congress adjourns later this month. The real danger may come following the fall elections. Many Democrats, whether they win or lose in November, envision a lame-duck session as the potential final opportunity, for many years, to finish Mr. Obama’s transformation of America from an engine of economic growth to a statist nation where the government has its finger in every pot and its thumb on every scale.

Far-left ideologues and self-styled intellectual illuminati have, for years, labored overtime to highjack the notion of American Exceptionalism by equating it with their own notion of American arrogance.  Let us put an end to this calumny. Let us recall and, indeed, praise the American Exceptionalism at which Alexis de Tocqueville marveled when, during his travels through the young country in 1831, he coined the term in his treatise, “Democracy in America.”

De Tocqueville was writing for the European reader, especially for his fellow Frenchmen far more than he was writing for the new and vibrant American marketplace.  Whereas revolution had produced chaos and anarchy and hatred of almost anything that smacked of religion in France, de Tocqueville was quick to observe that something quite the contrary had emerged in America.  Here he saw the budding fruits of freedom, individual liberty, equality of opportunity and a people absolutely free to practice religion however they chose or not to practice any religion at all.   What he saw, first hand, was the world’s first functioning meritocracy, and what he described so eloquently was the fantastic differentiation of America from Europe.  He called it American Exceptionalism. It was, and has been, that exceptionalism that produced the most industrious nation the world has ever known.

That is something we should celebrate each and every day…that which made us different, that which made us great, and that which, thankfully, a rapidly growing number of Americans are determined to reestablish as the great American paradigm.  And while American Exceptionalism shouldn’t merely be about what was, but rather about what is, it is worth remembering that twenty-five thousand Americans died during the War of Independence to establish the great American experiment.  Relative to population that first American war was the second costliest in human treasure, exceeded only by the Civil War.   During the course of the 235 years since the shot at Concord that was heard around the world, more than 1.3 million Americans have died defending freedom and liberty.

We should also remember that independence wasn’t the end game of that first great historical American struggle. It was but the starting point of the American Exceptionalism that Alexis de Tocqueville described.  Our founding fathers, who may have disagreed about many things, were of one mind when it came to our raison d’être, what would be our very reason for being…life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. “Liberty” is clearly the operative word, for without liberty “life”, they clearly believed, was not worth living, and “the pursuit of happiness” would be but a contradiction.

It is easy to forget that a mere 235 years ago, no nation existed with a bedrock principle that all of its citizens had a birthright to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  It was the most radical of ideas.  And to punctuate how serious that principle was, the founders went on to enshrine in the Constitution a few years later that America would only be governed with the consent of the governed.  These were the principles that differentiated America from Europe and the rest of the world.

What the people gave their consent to when, state-by-state, they ratified the new American Constitution was the establishment of a government with very specifically enumerated powers. Clearly, what was fought for and established 235 years ago was a national government that never could ride roughshod over the rights of the several states or, more important, over the rights of the individual citizen.  That’s what we celebrate, or should have been celebrating on Independence Day last week.

America has, of course, evolved greatly during the years since its founding and that was expected. We have amended our Constitution many times and we have even repealed, on one occasion, that which we had previously amended.  Generation after generation of Americans have prospered and continuously improved their quality of life because of the exceptionalism that de Tocqueville spotted in the fabric of the new nation so long ago.  Citizens in every generation knew that their children would do even better than they had done.

As the twentieth century progressed the role of government evolved in response to the changing social and economic landscape. America was becoming more complex and new laws, rules and regulations were instituted as one might expect in a rapidly changing society.  But soon the growth in laws, rules and regulations began to far outstrip what a healthy and growing society required.  Soon the very principle of non-intrusive government began to rapidly erode and recede into distant memory.  The commitment to equality of opportunity soon began to transform into a commitment, simply, to equality.

And, in short order, the worthy goal of social equality began to morph into the demand for economic equality requiring massive public subsidies to equalize the benefits and advantages earned by the more productive members of society with those of their less productive countrymen.  By definition economic equality, or parity, as national policy is predicated on either directly siphoning wealth from the more productive for redistribution to the less productive or indirectly siphoning phantom wealth by incurring massive public debt as much of Europe has been doing for the better part of the last two generations.

We don’t have to theorize where such economic statism leads.  We watched the utter collapse of the Soviet Union.  We watched as every socialist country under the Soviet yoke, once freed, fled and immediately recalibrated their economies more to the once classic American model.  And now we are watching as most of debt-ridden Europe begins to recalibrate as well.  Political leaders in Great Britain, France, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Iceland are now all fighting to reverse their decades-long flirtation with egalitarian economies by reigning in their unsustainable spending and debt…amazingly, to the consternation of their American counterparts.

We can now make two undisputable observations about such statist governance. First, it is not sustainable and, second, it requires a degree of government central planning and control that is the antithesis of what the founders created as well as the antithesis of what de Tocqueville observed when he coined the term, American Exceptionalism. Unchecked, America’s drift toward unbridled statism and the ever-mounting and unsustainable public debt that is its hallmark will produce future generations that will have to rely on the sacrifices of their children to sustain the burden of their own profligacy.

The individual liberty and the equality of opportunity that American Exceptionalism introduced to the world 235 years ago, while imperfect and subject to occasional abuse as we so recently experienced, is still, by far, the most successful, the most promising and the most equitable governing model.  America is still one of the few places on earth where every citizen can realistically aspire to the height of his or her own capability. Hopefully, most Americans understand that.

Three Cheers for American Exceptionalism.  Pass it on.

Once again, this weekend, Americans will gather with their families to “celebrate” the 4^th of July.  What are we celebrating? What stirs us on this day? How much time will be spent reflecting upon its relevance to our way of life? Is it, as it should be, a celebration of the founding of this Republic, and its independence as a nation? Will many Americans talk with one another or with their children about the impossible dream made true by a handful of remarkable men?  Will many of our fellow Americans even think about the new concept of government they created for us, one based upon the adoption of a Constitution, which established the principles of self-government and the limitations on the powers granted to that government?

Unfortunately we fear that the answer to the rhetorical questions posed above, increasingly, is “no”.  If somehow our national government were to set aside that day as “National Take a Day Off from Work Day” little would change.  Families would gather for a mid‑summer day of hot dogs, hamburgers, barbecue and good old fun.  Yes, the 4^th of July features flags and parades but they often seem divorced from what it is we are all celebrating. They provide a sort of faux patriotic pageantry with an abundance of food, sparkle and noise.

Actually the 4^th of July, by its correct name, is Independence Day.  It signifies the true meaning of what was declared on July 2, 1776 and affirmed by the Continental Congress on July 4:  the document known as the Declaration of Independence.  This simple document lays out the fundamental meaning of America and it touched off a bloody revolution and several years of war to establish that all our citizens have the right to an independent life, to the liberty that allows for the freedom to exercise one’s own judgment and to the right to pursue one’s own path, career, associates, friends, etc., e.g. the pursuit of happiness.

John Adams, in a letter to his wife Abigail, correctly predicted that the day (he referred to the actions of July 2 not July 4) would be celebrated for as long as the American experiment in government continued.

“The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.  I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.  It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty.  It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.  You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not.  I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration and support and defend these States.  Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory.  I can see the End is more than worth all the Means.  And that Posterity will tryump in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.”

How Adams’ fervor has been eroded by time. What Adams did not and could not know is how, and what, future generations would learn about the meaning of Independence Day.  Adams, we suspect, would be heartbroken given the woeful performance by grade school and high school students on standardized American history tests, and the current minimization of demonstrations of patriotism by elitist intellectuals and their near embarrassment to exalt American Exceptionalism.

What, in fact, we are celebrating is not just the meaning of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness embodied in the Declaration.  Equally as important is the form of government that was established and then enshrined in the Constitution adopted in 1787 as the foundation and source of legal authority for the United States.  What was provided to us by the Founders is captured by an exchange (perhaps apocryphal) between a bystander and Benjamin Franklin.  At the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia a woman awaiting some announcement of the results that had been produced asked Franklin:  “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy” to which he responded, “a republic, if you can keep it.”

It is important to note that he did not answer “a democracy or a democratic form of government.”  The distinction between the two is important and worth considering, particularly this year.  In a “democracy,” majority rules with no protections against absolute and unlimited power.  It was “tyranny by majority” that the framers feared could run roughshod over the inalienable rights of the individual envisioned in the Declaration.  Jefferson, in particular, feared the excesses to which a mere majority could go.  He said, “an elective despotism was not the government we fought for.”

A Republic, on the other hand, embodies a different form of representative government.  Of course it is the people in democratic elections that choose their representatives (although initially, prior to the Sixteenth Amendment, the members of the Senate were chosen by the legislatures of the several states).  In a Republic, the rights and liberties of the individual are protected by a written Constitution and in our Republic there is a division of power between the three branches of government.  The overarching theme of our Constitution is limited government possessing only “just powers.”  James Madison, who is rightfully considered the father of our Constitution, feared the concentration of too much power in a national government and did not sign it. He thought it granted too much power to the federal government, but nevertheless saw enough good qualities in human nature to justify some confidence, and he summed up his position in Federalist 55 by stating, “Republican government presupposes these [good] qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”

A Republic attempts to safeguard the rights of the individual and the minority from the actions of a runaway majority, whereas in a pure democracy free elections at regularly scheduled periods render majority rule sacrosanct.  Both systems obviously incorporate a popular form of government but in a pure Democracy there are no safeguards against abuse of ordered liberty by whatever majority is in power.

This year in particular we can see what a large enough majority can do.  We need not repeat here all of the mandates and impositions included in health care reform, but we must, at least, mention the requirement in the law that every American must purchase health insurance or be subject to a penalty.  This new federal requirement is predicated upon the Constitutional provision that gives to Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce.   The political left, always seeking to impose more and more government control over our lives, is once again attempting to stretch the meaning of interstate commerce beyond what the framers could possibly have imagined and clearly beyond what they had intended.  The Constitution grants only certain limited powers to the Congress and then reinforces that limitation in the one-sentence-long Tenth Amendment (the last amendment in the Bill of Rights), which states “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

As we have seen, this is a far cry from the views of today’s Congress.  Virtually everything in our daily lives seems to be subject to the interference of, or regulation by, the federal government.  George Will, in his column published in the Washington Post on June 27 which discusses the forthcoming confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan, the president’s Supreme Court nominee, proposes that the Senate panel ask Ms. Kagan a series of questions designed to elicit her view of whether there are any limits on Congressional powers in our Republic.  He proposes, among others that the Senate panel ask the following questions:

• If Congress decides that interstate commerce is substantially affected by the costs of obesity, may Congress require obese people to purchase participation in programs such as Weight Watchers?  If not, why not?
• The government having decided that Chrysler’s survival is an urgent national necessity, could it decide that “Cash for Clunkers” is too indirect a subsidy and instead mandate that people buy Chrysler products?
• If Congress concludes that ignorance has a substantial impact on interstate commerce, can it constitutionally require students to do three hours of homework nightly?   If not, why not?
• Can you name [any] human endeavor that Congress cannot regulate on the pretense that the endeavor affects interstate commerce?

These questions and the concept of American Exceptionalism, as first described by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831, are the kinds of things Americans should be pondering in addition to watching fireworks and enjoying the company of friends and family this July 4^th.  This is a Republic we have been given, “if” as Franklin is reported to have said, “we can keep it.”  Keeping it means knowing what it is to be fortunate enough to live in a republic such as that bequeathed to us by the founders, and how important that is to maintaining both our freedom from the oppressive government our founders feared and the liberty necessary to pursue our individual dreams.

The president’s recent disappointing oval-office speech elicited a chorus of criticism from across the political spectrum.  For some reason the speech seems to have put a spotlight on the president as a leader, whereas other misjudgments in which he was directly involved in making policy had not.  The oil spill, which was certainly no fault of Mr. Obama, seems to have finally caused the public and many of his cheerleaders among the pundits to focus on the president’s substance and not his style.  That has been the unspoken, elephant-in- the-room, concern throughout his presidency, his aptitude for leadership.  We are reminded of the lead-in lyrics to the signature song Ethel Merman belts out in Gypsy… “Curtain up…light the lights…you either got it…or you ain’t.”

President Obama seems to have the curtain up, light the lights part down pat.  The dramatic campaign and convention stage sets, his world photo-op tours, his big oval-office backdrop to his little oval-office speech, and his ever-masterful use of the teleprompter have all produced a “strike-up-the-band” expectation whenever and wherever he appears. It’s the “you either got it, or you ain’t” part that seems finally to have focused the public on the president’s aptitude for leadership.

The befouling glob that threatens hundreds of miles of coast or, as Peggy Noonan put it recently so aptly in the Wall Street Journal, “the monster from under the sea,” seems to be a metaphor for the president’s inability to shape the world as he wants it to be.  Speeches are not a substitute for coherent policy.  The president, with the entire world watching his prime time speech, essentially punted.  He pulled from the presidential duck-and-cover arsenal the time-tested, yawn producer of presidents bereft of solutions to all manner of problems…the formation of a new blue-ribbon commission.  This was the cornerstone of his “battle plan” to face down the “siege” of big oil’s attack on our Gulf coast.

There is nothing more to be said about the quality of Mr. Obama’s oval-office speech debut.  It seems as if all the commentators from Chris Mathews, Keith Olberman and Jon Stewart on the left, to Mark Steyn, Charles Krauthammer and Karl Rove on the right have already done that.  Besides, there is something much more revealing that is apparent here.  It isn’t about the delivery by the man who gave the speech; it is, rather, about the man who delivered the speech.  The disappointing oval-office moment was more than just a lack of writing skill by some wordsmith presidential speechwriter; it focused the attention of the American people on the man himself and on what they hoped just wasn’t so; an apparent lack of the leadership aptitude which a president must possess if he or she is to succeed.

The evidence of weak leadership skills was there before but it became shrouded in the president’s rock star image. The fact is that there was very little about Barack Obama’s pre-presidential career that suggested any real aptitude for leadership.  There was always plenty of “curtain up, light the lights” but the demonstration of leadership part was always a bit like a clock striking thirteen. That is to say, not quite reassuring.

His career as a legislator in Illinois, while always well hyped, was less than impressive.  His biggest legislative achievement in Illinois seems to be the nearly 130 times he chose to vote “present” rather than “yea” or “nay” on major bills.  And yes, we’ve heard or read the standard excuse for this apparent ambivalence.  “It’s the way things are often done in the Illinois Senate,” we’re told.  But since when has doing things the way they are done in Illinois met the definition of leadership anywhere outside of that state.

Besides, some of the “present” votes then state-Senator Obama chose to cast while in the Illinois legislature are quite revealing, if not troubling.  For example, in 1999 he was faced with a difficult vote, to support a bill that would let some juveniles be tried as adults. Understandably, many African-Americans were opposed to the bill.  On the other hand, Mr. Obama was trying to hone an image of a tough-on crime candidate. It was a difficult political call for him; so, he voted “present.”

According to the New York Times, on at least 36 occasions state-Senator Obama was either the only state senator to vote “present” or was part of a group of six or fewer to vote that way.  Politically, the option to vote “present” provides a certain amount of cover. It is a way for the faint of heart, in effect, to say, “I don’t particularly like this bill, but I don’t want to take the political risk of taking a stand.”

The juvenile crime bill was to allow offenders as young as 15 to be prosecuted as adults if charged with committing a crime with a firearm on, or near, schools. Both houses passed the measure handily. State-Senator Obama justified his “present” vote by opining there was no proof that increasing penalties for young offenders reduced crime. Mr. Obama’s aides said he was more concerned about whether the bill would be effective rather than with its political consequences.  They did not explain, however, why he did not just vote “no”.

There were other “present” votes, in which part-time law-lecturer Obama, according to the New York Times, said he had concerns about the constitutionality or effectiveness of some provisions. Among those, Mr. Obama did not vote “yea” or “nay” on a bill that would allow certain victims of sex crimes to petition judges to seal court records relating to their cases. He also voted “present” on a bill to impose stricter standards for evidence a judge is permitted to consider in imposing a criminal sentence.

On the sex crime bill, Mr. Obama cast the lone “present” vote in a 58-to-0 vote.  When it appeared that this vote might become an issue in the presidential race Mr. Obama’s campaign said he believed that the bill violated the First Amendment. The bill had passed 112-0-0 in the Illinois House and 58-0-1 in the state Senate.  Again, why didn’t he just vote, “no”?

In 2000, Mr. Obama was one of two senators who voted “present” on a bill on whether facts not presented to a jury could later be the basis for increasing an offender’s sentence beyond the ordinary maximum. The bill sailed through both chambers. Out of 174 votes cast in the House and Senate, two were against and two were “present”, including Mr. Obama’s.  Mr. Obama’s campaign said he voted “present” to register his dissatisfaction with how the bill was put together. He believed (hold on to your hat) the bill was rushed to the floor and that lawmakers were deprived of time to consider it.  Oddly, this hasn’t been a problem for the president with bills passed in the House and Senate of the United States.

The Times also reported that Mr. Obama was the sole “present” vote on a bill that easily passed the Illinois Senate that would require teaching respect for others in schools. He also voted “present” on a measure to prohibit sex-related shops from opening near schools or places of worship, which ultimately did not pass the Illinois Senate.  In both of those cases, his campaign said (hold on to your hat again) he was trying to avoid mandates on local authorities.  This from, now, President Obama, who has gone on, arguably, to impose the greatest funded and unfunded mandates on local authorities in the nation’s history.

But enough of ancient history.  Fast forward to the centerpiece of his first year in office, health-care reform.  Many on the left, and even some on the right, suggest that this massive legislative “achievement” is proof that President Obama is a formidable leader. We beg to differ.  It may, indeed, prove that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority leader Harry Reid can effectively lead their party’s foot soldiers over any cliff they choose, but it really doesn’t say much about President Obama’s leadership aptitude.  Quite the opposite.   Apparently misreading the lessons of President Clinton’s terribly misdirected attempt at health-care reform, President Obama delegated the entire effort to Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid.  He sat by as they cobbled together (in his name) the horrific 2700-page health-care reform legislation that a substantial majority of the people consistently said they did not want and consistently continue to say they now want repealed and which a third of the states are now fighting to stop in federal court. Real leadership of the type he promised, but apparently cannot deliver, would have brought both sides together instead of putting the nation through some of the worst acrimony we can ever remember.

The curtains up…light the lights first-day-in-office announcement that the prison housing terrorists at Guantanamo Bay would be closed within a year, was an early lesson that Ruffles and Flourishes without leadership aptitude is, well, just music.  The world apology tour for American foreign policy under the Bush Administration, the Cairo speech, the presidential outstretched hand to our adversaries and the long-lapsed ultimatum for a reciprocal handshake in return, the puzzling back of the hand treatment to Britain, our closest friend since the end of World War II, the insulting treatment of our friends such as South Korea, Columbia, Honduras, and Israel, and the skyrocketing spending and the attendant ever-mounting deficits all call into question the aptitude for leadership that prevails (or is absent) at the White House.

Les Gelb wrote of Obama, “He is so self-confident that he believes he can make decisions on the most complicated of issues after only hours of discussion.  Strategic decisions go well beyond being smart, which Obama certainly is.  They must be based on experience that discerns what works, what doesn’t — and why.  This requires experienced staffing, which Obama and his top appointees simply do not seem to have.”  Mr. Obama is beginning to look to more and more of the people who were dazzled by his meteoric rise and who were looking for the political equivalent of a messiah, as a growing disappointment.  It turns out that Mr. Obama cannot by his charm, his gift-of-gab, his oratorical skills and his considerable intelligence will into reality policies that the people won’t accept and that many across the political spectrum here and abroad seriously question.  

Which brings us full circle back to where we began… the growing fiasco that continues to assault the gulf coast.  “What could the President have done to avoid the blowout at the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform?” the Administration’s defenders indignantly ask.  Nothing.  But that is the wrong question.  The more telling question would be “what could the President have done to mitigate the damage?”  And the answer to that seems to be, “plenty.”

He had the authority to waive the ridiculous and long-outdated, protectionist Jones Act that would have allowed significant expertise and siphoning capacity to be on location in the Gulf weeks ago mitigating the damage that now seems unstoppable.  But, so as not to offend labor unions or domestic shipping interests, he turned down the offers.  He could have immediately authorized Governor Bobby Jindal to begin deploying barriers parallel to the gulf coast as the governor was begging for permission to do (and for which he was still begging last week).  He could, and should, have immediately designated the most operationally competent person he could find to take charge of containment operations and to report progress to him on a daily basis.

Instead, seven weeks into this debacle, when discussing why safety precautions were not in place, Mr. Obama assured the American people “that he wants to know why.”  Of course, the answer he will soon provide is quite predictable since we have heard it many times before.  The problem, we will be told, rests with the previous Administration.  Blaming Bush, or industry or political opposition seems to be his answer for every problem.  “I inherited this mess,” he often tells us. In short, the President is not providing the leadership one would expect from a chief executive running the country.  Instead, he has responded as one would expect from a chief executive running a think tank.

Enough curtain up…light the lights. The curtain has been up and lights have been lighted since January 20, 2009.  Show us you got it, Mr. President. Not that you ain’t.