The Sestak Scandal

How the Sestak job offer became a big deal - Chris Cillizza

The unfolding of events since Sestak told a local television host -- albeit obliquely -- in February that he had received a job offer from the White House speaks to one of the oldest political adages about the presidency: stonewalling almost never works. (The full White House report on the matter is here.)

Why did the White House contact Joe Sestak’s brother? - Michelle Malkin

Kurt Bardella, Spokesperson, House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, responds: “If the White House is coordinating it’s response with the Sestak campaign, as Congressman Sestak has reported, it certainly explains why the President, when given the opportunity at a nationally broadcasted press conference, abdicated the opportunity to address the issue candidly and definitively. Instead, it appears as if the White House is taking time to circle the wagons and coordinating their message. This revelation that the White House initiated a dialogue with Sestak at the same time they are preparing their public response certainly leaves the impression that there is a coordinated effort going on. Of course, if everyone just did the right thing and told the truth, the need to speculate about motive and impartiality wouldn’t be necessary.”

Bill Clinton and the Sestak Scandal - Ira Stoll

The White House chooses the Friday afternoon before Memorial Day weekend to unload the news -- in the form of a memo from the White House counsel, so that anyone he talked to about it is covered by both lawyer-client privilege and executive privilege -- that "The White House Chief of Staff enlisted the support of former President Clinton who agreed to raise with Congressman Sestak options of service on a Presidential or other Senior Executive Branch Advisory Board." There's no explanation of why Mr. Clinton was enlisted for this task. If it would have been legal or appropriate for a White House official to do it directly, why bother getting Mr. Clinton involved? And if it would have been illegal or inappropriate for a White House official to do it directly, does the use of a cut-out, even if it comports with the letter of the law, match the spirit of the law or the administration's stated intention to set a high ethical bar?

Sestak was ineligible for job Clinton offered - Byron York

Why would the White House — normally pretty careful in such matters — offer Sestak a job he couldn’t take? Were there in fact other offers made to Sestak? So far, there has been little discussion of the fact that the Bauer statement said “options for executive branch service were raised with [Sestak].” The plural “options” certainly suggests that more than one job was presented to Sestak, but Sestak himself says his conversation with Clinton was very brief — less than one minute.

Obamacare - May 2010

Obamacare’s Cooked Books and the ‘Doc Fix’ - James C. Capretta

The truth is the president and his allies in Congress worked overtime to pull together every Medicare cut they could find — nearly $500 billion in all over ten years — and put them into the health law to pay for the massive entitlement expansion they so coveted. They could have used those cuts to pay for the “doc fix” if they had wanted to, as well as for a slightly less expansive health program. But that’s not what they did. That wasn’t their priority. They chose instead to break their agenda into multiple bills, and “pay for” the massive health entitlement (on paper) while claiming they shouldn’t have to find offsets for the “doc fix.” But it doesn’t matter to taxpayers if they enact their agenda in one, two, or ten pieces of legislation. The total cost is still the same. All of the supposed deficit reduction now claimed from the health-care law is more than wiped out by the Democrats’ insistent march to borrow and spend for Medicare physician fees.

Silent Cal

In Honor of a President Few Remember - Alan Snyder

In a free republic a great government is the product of a great people. They will look to themselves rather than government for success. The destiny, the greatness of America lies around the hearthstone. If thrift and industry are taught there, and the example of self-sacrifice oft appears, if honor abide there, and high ideals, if there the building of fortune be subordinate to the building of character, America will live in security, rejoicing in an abundant prosperity and good government at home and in peace, respect, and confidence abroad. If these virtues be absent there is no power that can supply these blessings. Look well then to the hearthstone, therein all hope for America lies.

Calvin Coolidge

Financial Meltdown

US budget deficit wider-than-expected in April

The US government suffered a wider-than-expected budget deficit of 82.69 billion dollars in April, the Treasury Department said Wednesday.

It was nearly four times the deficit chalked up a year earlier and the largest ever recorded in April.

Most analysts had expected the April deficit, the 19th consecutive month of federal red ink, to be about 52 billion dollars.

The latest data brought the deficit for the first seven months of the 2010 fiscal year ending September 30 to 799.68 billion dollars, slightly lower than 802.9 billion dollars during the same period last year.

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The White House had warned that the deficit for the 2010 fiscal year could swell to 1.555 trillion dollars, eclipsing the prior year's record of 1.415 trillion dollars due to massive spending to stimulate recovery from the worst recession in decades.

U.S. posts 19th straight monthly budget deficit

The U.S. full-year deficit this year is projected at $1.5 trillion on top of a $1.4 trillion shortfall last year.

White House budget director Peter Orszag told Reuters Insider in an interview on Wednesday that the United States must tackle its deficits quickly to avoid the kind of debt crisis that hit Greece.

State Budget Deficits

How States Fail (Fiscally) - Brian Doherty

It is full of tales of hungry unions, hapless governors, short-term accounting tricks, and in general governments whose long-term stability depends on keeping spending under control--even as federal policy discourages them from doing so.

Debt capitals - Edward Lee Pitts, Alisa Harris, Megan Basham, William McCleery

Nearly every state has had big budget shortfalls, and they're dealing with them in different ways. In some cases, even culturally similar neighbors are taking sharply divergent paths.

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However, there is one thing Brewer, Martin, and the Goldwater Institute agree on: One of the biggest obstacles Arizona (and by extension every cash-strapped state) faces in solving budget problems is the federal government.

Though the federal healthcare bill was not signed until after Arizona's 2010-2011 budget was finalized, the new regulations it imposes will strip the state of federal healthcare funding if it attempts to carry out the Medicaid cuts outlined in the new budget. This requirement, known as "maintenance of effort," has prompted Brewer to push for Arizona to join other states in bringing a lawsuit against the federal healthcare overhaul. Martin says that the new federal legislation may make many of the state-level debates on how to cover the shortfall moot: "The healthcare mandate blows a billion-dollar hole in our budget."

Similar federal regulations are in place to deprive states of matching funds if they try to cut spending on education. The fact that the two areas covered by maintenance of effort—education and healthcare spending—also happen to be every state budget's biggest expenditures puts states even more squarely between rocks and hard places. But soon, Schlomach warns, it may not matter what the administration mandates: "Quite frankly, we're at a point where we can't afford to spend enough to get the federal money."

Failed States - Michael Flynn & Adam B. Summers

In 2002 the National Governors Association issued a press release saying the “states face the most dire fiscal situation since World War II.” In 1990 The New York Times reported that states and cities faced a “fiscal calamity.” Fire up Google, pick almost any year, and you’ll find plenty of stories about a “fiscal crisis” around the nation.

For decades statehouses have followed a predictable schedule. In good economic times, they collect a lot more tax revenue than they really need. But instead of giving the money back to taxpayers or putting it in a rainy day fund, they pretend the good times will never end. When the good times do inevitably come to a close, governors plead poverty and either ask the federal government for help or raise taxes on their beleaguered citizens. Eventually, the economy rebounds and the vicious cycle starts again.

Bankruptcy talk spreads among Calif. muni officials

Street expects more talk of municipal bankruptcy across California because local government finances are in such dire shape -- a situation underscored on Wednesday when a top finance officer for Sacramento County projected a worse-than-expected shortfall for the county of $181 million, which could force more than 1,000 layoffs from the county's payroll.

The Right to be a Sponge

Expropriate the Expropriators! - John Hinderaker

In Marxist theory, the Communist Party represented the interests of productive workers, the value of whose labor is expropriated by others. That was wrong, but at least it had a certain coherence. Greek Communists (and more generally, 21st century socialists) stand for something quite different: the "right" to be supported by the labor of others (in the Greek case, Germans); the "right" to be a sponge, forever; the "right" to be an exploiter. It would be hard to think of a less attractive political program.

May Day, 2010

Victims of Communism Day - Ilya Somin

May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their regimes. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes’ millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined.

May Day: The Conspiracy of Silence Around the Romance of Evil

If killing human beings “served to destroy the old exploiting society” then killing human beings was regarded as moral. The subsequent actions of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other Marxist leaders made it perfectly clear that the idealistic goal of building up a “new, communist society” led to the justification of mass murder. Ideas have consequences.

Marxist communism was based on an intellectual system that openly justified dishonesty, violence, and murder in countless public writings that were debated as respectable intellectual material in universities around the world throughout the 20th century. More than a hundred million people died as a result, and easily a billion more are unnecessarily poor today. Thousands of years of cultural capital – trust, work ethics, craftsmanship, traditions, civility, and morality itself – were cheerfully obliterated in an unbelievably stupid, sadistic, and ineffective system. We will never know the full human cost of Marxist communism.

May Day 2010: A Day of Remembrance - Jonathan Wilde

As is our tradition, today, we remember the all those who have died at the hands of communism. Their story is sometimes overlooked, usually brushed aside if acknowledged at all, and often denied outright. They deserve their day of remembrance.

The Red Plague - R.J. Rummel

As you can see, the total mid-estimate is about 110,286,000, an incredible total. It is around 65 percent of all democide over the same period, and is about three times greater than all the international and domestic war deaths, including the two world wars, Vietnam, Korea, and the Iran-Iraq War, to mention the bloodiest. This is the Red Plague driven by ideological fervor. The Black Plague, carried by fleas from rats and not by ideology, killed a quarter of the number the communists murdered.

A Hidden History of Evil - Claire Berlinski

In the world’s collective consciousness, the word “Nazi” is synonymous with evil. It is widely understood that the Nazis’ ideology—nationalism, anti-Semitism, the autarkic ethnic state, the Führer principle—led directly to the furnaces of Auschwitz. It is not nearly as well understood that Communism led just as inexorably, everywhere on the globe where it was applied, to starvation, torture, and slave-labor camps. Nor is it widely acknowledged that Communism was responsible for the deaths of some 150 million human beings during the twentieth century. The world remains inexplicably indifferent and uncurious about the deadliest ideology in history.