Brent Bozell on Smaller Government

Brent Bozell not only offers keen insight to liberal off the cliff path, he also offers hope that the leftist's are losing the fight and the confidence of the American People.

Brent Bozell on TownHall.com

Who's Burning D.C. Down?


Political prognosticator Charlie Cook appeared on National Public Radio on July 11 and summarized perfectly the media narrative on the debt-limit battle. Speaker John Boehner, Cook said, "is not a burn-the-barn-down, break-the-china kind of guy, (and) he does not necessarily reflect the views of a majority ... of the House Republican Conference, who are of the burn-the-barn-down, break-the-china mold."

Hold on here. Why is it destructive to insist on a limited government? Why is fiscal sanity equated with pyromania? Cook was brought on as a "nonpartisan" analyst, but there's nothing either civil or accurate in casting conservatives as barnburners.

This is the "nonpartisan" Washington narrative of the budget talks: Reasonable Obama vs. Dangerously Unhinged Republicans. The establishment is imbibing deeply of the David Plouffe spin that somehow, a reckless, unsupervised Congress spent all the money and Barack Obama was too busy golfing to notice, as if he didn't sign every spending bill. It's as if he didn't aggressively shovel Obamacare and almost a trillion dollars of "stimulus" on top of the deficit mountain.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen got the ball rolling on July 4 by describing the GOP as the "Grand Old Cult" that needs a "mental health professional," and its presidential field was "a virtual political Jonestown."

On July 5, MSNBC star Chris Matthews started "Hardball" by comparing conservative Republicans to foreign Islamic militants: "Well, the GOP has become the Wahabis of American government, willing to risk bringing down the whole country in the service of their anti-tax ideology." They were "willing to risk economic Armageddon in the name of religion -- that is, the religion of no taxes." By the next morning, Newsweek editor-in-chief Tina Brown upped the ante and called the Republicans "suicide bombers."

So who, exactly, is unhinged in this debate?

On NBC, White House "reporter" Chuck Todd pointed fingers: The problem was that new "tea party caucus" that can't back "anything that remotely looks like a tax hike on anybody." Ever heard of liberal Democrats who can't back "anything that remotely looks like you spent less than last year"?

That so-called "conservative" David Brooks -- please, please stop this "conservative" silliness! -- also wrote a column on July 4 for The New York Times trashing tea party types for wanting to file a "psychological protest" instead of governing. They have "no sense of moral decency" about debt.

How ridiculous and perverse it is for Brooks to insist they don't care about debt -- and Obama does! Did Brooks spend the past two years in a cocoon of hermetically sealed ignorance?

Brooks claimed that Obama is desperate to campaign in 2012 as a "moderate" and would love to make a sweet deal for the Republicans that would provide, we are told, "a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession." The biggest, most reckless spender in the history of the republic, by far, and he's a "moderate." What would it take to label this man a liberal?

For conservatives who remember the budget negotiations of 1990, this whole routine is nauseatingly familiar. The media are playing the exact same role today that they did then. They all encouraged Bush One to be a savvy dealmaker and forget that troublesome "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge. We were all told that deal would be two dollars in spending cuts for every dollar in tax hikes. Ditto with Reagan and Tip O'Neill in 1982.

The media want complete amnesia about what happens next. In both cases, spending (and the deficit) surged upward, which is what happens when the Democrats make big "compromises." Bush lost in 1992, due in part to angry conservative voters who believed his campaign promises.

Here's what our media could be asking, but they won't, since it constitutes a serious question. If Obama really believed in a "balanced" menu of tax hikes and spending cuts, why didn't he pass all these tax hikes he's now touting when Democrats were solidly in control in 2009 and 2010? Obama never made any plans to "pay for" his "stimulus" with new taxes, and he even claimed Obamacare would reduce the deficit, which was a cruel farce. And isn't he now touting tax hikes on taxpayers making less than $250,000 -- another broken promise? Does no reporter care to notice that would violate his "no new taxes except on the super-rich" promises of 2008?

Instead, Obama is allowed to hold press conferences and lecture the Republicans about how they're not serious about deficit reduction. Obama is allowed to paint himself as the troubled centrist who's been cursed with an opposing party stuffed with extremists.

This time, I'm not sure anyone's buying what the left-wing press is selling.

A Quote from an Anonymous American

From an Anonymous American,....

"Fathom the hypocrisy of a Government that requires every citizen to prove they are insured...but not everyone must prove they are a citizen."

More Gun Restrictions for Citizens

Coming on the heels of the incredibly stupid Eric Holder Justice Department "Operation Fast and Furious" where the U.S. Government facilitated arming of Mexican Drug Cartels,....the Administration now decides to shift the blames to Americans and further restrict gun rights through the regulatory process of the executive office - in fact, powers not articulated by the Constitution.

New York Times by Charles Savage
Published: July 11, 2011

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration on Monday approved a new regulation requiring firearms dealers along the Southwest border to report multiple sales of certain semiautomatic rifles, a rule intended to make it harder for Mexican drug cartels to obtain and smuggle weapons from the United States.

Under the rule, dealers in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas will be required to inform the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives if someone buys — within a five-day period — more than one semiautomatic rifle that accepts a detachable magazine and uses ammunition greater than .22 caliber. Such weapons include AK-47s.

Dealers nationwide are already required to report bulk sales of handguns, and the A.T.F. applied to impose such a regulation late last year to help detect bulk “straw buyers” — people who say they are buying weapons for themselves but then transfer them to criminals.

In a statement, the deputy attorney general, James Cole, said the regulation was justified by the need to help the A.T.F. “detect and disrupt the illegal weapons trafficking networks responsible for diverting firearms from lawful commerce to criminals” and in particular to “help confront the problem of illegal gun trafficking into Mexico.”

“The international expansion and increased violence of transnational criminal networks pose a significant threat to the United States,” Mr. Cole said, adding that rifles covered by the new regulation “are highly sought after by dangerous drug-trafficking organizations and frequently recovered at violent crime scenes near the Southwest border.”

The proposal has been hotly contested by gun-control advocates, and Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president for the National Rifle Association, said his organization was preparing to sue the government once it tried to begin enforcing the regulation.

Mr. LaPierre contended that it should take an act of Congress to impose such a requirement, not a regulation developed by the executive branch alone. He noted that the similar rule requiring dealers to report multiple handgun sales was part of the Gun Control Act of 1968.

“We view it as a blatant attempt by the Obama administration to pursue their gun-control agenda through backdoor rule making, and the N.R.A. will fight them every step of the way,” he said. “There are three branches of government and separation of powers, and we believe they do not have the authority to do this.”

An A.T.F. spokesman cited a federal statute governing the licensing of firearms dealers as the source of the agency’s legal authority to enact a regulation allowing it to collect the information about bulk sales of semiautomatic rifles.

The A.T.F. unveiled its proposal for the new rule in December, and originally sought permission to impose it more quickly under emergency procedures. But in February, the White House’s Office of Management and Budget rejected that request, saying that gunrunning to Mexico was a continuing problem — not the kind of fast-moving situation that justifies making an exception to the normal process for reviewing new regulations.

The approval for the regulation comes at a time when the A.T.F.’s efforts to combat straw purchasing and gunrunning along the border is under intense Congressional scrutiny because of a botched investigation called Operation Fast and Furious.

In that operation, federal agents, wanting to trace the flow of guns from straw buyers to drug cartels, monitored the purchase of several thousand guns but did not intervene before some were smuggled into Mexico . The bureau then lost track of many of them, and two later turned up at the scene of a shootout in Arizona where an American Border Patrol agent was killed.