Thuggery in Wisconsin

"We will hunt you down. We will slit your throats. We will drink your blood. I will have your decapitated head on a pike in the Madison town square. This is your last warning.”

No, this is not from the Mafia, al-Qaeda, or an excerpt from a vampire tale. It is an email sent to Wisconsin State Senator Dan Kapanke, after he voted for Governor Scott Walker’s budget and budget repair bill, which was devoted to getting the state’s fiscal house in order after the largesse of previous Democrat administrations. Taxpayers got tired of getting the shaft. That is why they threw out the Democrats en masse in Wisconsin last fall and replaced them with Republican majorities in the Governor’s Mansion, the State Senate and State Assembly (i.e. the lower chamber).

Republicans have been receiving threats of death and violence that go beyond political hate mail; they constitute the making of a threat which, by the way, can be a felony. Despite the fact that last January when Jared Lee Loughner went on a killing spree in Arizona with no warning, the mainstream media and the political left have been conspicuously silent as constitutionally elected legislators are threatened, their property is damaged and destroyed, and their phone numbers and addresses have been made public.

I saw your remarks in todays (sic) paper about the people who appose (sic) the Walker Plan – you sorry piece of sh_t – you won’t have your cushy job very much longer – as soon as we get your boss the faggot Fitzgerald [Republican Speaker of the State Assembly] recalled – the sorry fu_king parasite on the taxpayer of Wisconsin – every damn one of you should be exterminated.

The attempted murder of US Representative Gabrielle Giffords stirred curmudgeons of the mainstream media to rise in high dudgeon and lecture the less high-minded among us about the dangers of incivility in political discourse that leads to the violence. Where are the same calls for civility today?

This week is the first anniversary of the atrocious legislation that spawned ObamaCare. When opponents complained that it was an unprecedented display of federal power to seize control of the private healthcare system and dictate the behavior of 300 million in using it, Obama’s response was, “we won.” When Republicans objected to the bribery used to win Democrat votes, the strong-arm tactics used by the Democrat leadership to keep its caucus in line in passing a law no one had read, and the unorthodox procedures used to reconcile the House and Senate bills, Reid and Pelosi simply said, “elections have consequences.”

Yet when Republican majorities were elected in the Wisconsin Senate and House, as well as the governor, which worked to pass a budget bill curtailing the collective bargaining power of state unions and compelling them to pay more of their retirement and healthcare, the 14 Democrats in the Senate fled to Illinois to prevent a quorum – essentially shutting down the democratic process Wisconsin voters had elected their government to enact. No chest thumping Republican cried “we won” or “elections have consequences.” Unable to stop the passage of legislation with constitutional procedures, the “flee-baggers” attempted to negotiate a compromise from the motel in Illinois rather than the Senate chamber, assured (so they thought) that the Republican majority would be forced to negotiate without a quorum to pass any legislation.

"April 4 (is) the day on which Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life for the cause of public collective bargaining," Richard Trumka, the head of the AFL-CIO said in a speech in Washington. "Join us to make April 4, 2011, a day to stand in solidarity with working people in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and dozens of other states where well-funded, right-wing corporate politicians are trying to take away the rights Dr. King gave his life for," appealed the official blog of the labor union.

The call served to import into Madison members of the AFL-CIO, the SEIU and other big public worker unions, Democrat party organizations, and activist groups like MoveOn.org. Obama spoke on behalf of the Wisconsin public unions. Apparently advised to back off by his reelection campaign staff, Obama’s Labor Secretary – whose salary is paid by the US taxpayers – inserted herself into an organized effort to interfere in the government of a sovereign state of this nation. "I am so inspired and proud of all of you, especially those who went down to Wisconsin and also around the country," Labor Secretary Solis proclaimed. Her remarks made it obvious that she will use a government agency (the US Labor Department) against the Governor, State Assembly, and Senate elected by the voters of Wisconsin. She referred to herself as pro-union and anti-Walker. "I say let's keep fighting," Solis said, "let's stand up for all workers, and let's mobilize and do what we do best,” she said.

“Do what we do best …” You mean like violence? Historically unions have done a good job of that. Remember Jimmy Hoffa?

Milwaukee radio host Charlie Sykes reported that Wisconsin businessmen were getting letters recommending that the business owner oppose Governor Walker’s efforts to disconnect the IV line making taxpayers permanent blood donors to the state’s public unions. Read this not-so-subtle invitation:

The undersigned groups would like your company to publicly oppose Governor Walker's efforts to virtually eliminate collective bargaining for public employees in Wisconsin. While we appreciate that you may need some time to consider this request, we ask for your response by March 17. In the event that you do not respond to this request by that date, we will assume that you stand with Governor Walker and against the teachers, nurses, police officers, fire fighters, and other dedicated public employees who serve our communities.

In the event that you cannot support this effort to save collective bargaining, please be advised that the undersigned will publicly and formally boycott the goods and services provided by your company. However, if you join us, we will do everything in our power to publicly celebrate your partnership in the fight to preserve the right of public employees to be heard at the bargaining table. Wisconsin's public employee unions serve to protect and promote equality and fairness in the workplace. We hope you will stand with us and publicly share that ideal.

In the event you would like to discuss this matter further, please contact the executive Director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, Jim Palmer, at [phone number redacted].

The police? You mean Guido the knee-cracker wears the badge of a police officer sworn to uphold the law? Way to go, Secretary Solis! The goons you confess such pride in are now doing what you say they do best – corrupting the bedrock of a community and threatening people who refuse to help them gain their aims. Way to go!

Oh, but it threatens only an economic boycott. Yeah, sure. That’s why the contact person is the head of the police union, which incidentally, is specifically exempt from Walker’s bill along with firemen and other emergency personnel. I’m sure the Director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association was totally unaware that being a shill for the public workers and teachers unions infers that citizens may not be able to rely on police protection for their safety. Could a business owner receiving one of these letters expect a prompt response if he or she is the victim of a personal or property crime in retaliation for not supporting "the dedicated public employees who serve our communities"?

Radio host Sykes spins it this way: "That's a nice business you got there. Pity if anything was to happen to it if, say, you didn't toe the line and denounce Governor Walker like we're asking nice-like." Sounds like “organized" law enforcement could bear a disturbing resemblance to “organized” crime. Wasn’t Al Capone the one who said, "You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone"?

Plan B of the Wisconsin thuggery campaign is a recall election targeting eight Republican State Senators. A Washington DC labor website called for recruits to go to Wisconsin and serve as “field organizers” for the recall campaigns. Local and national labor unions are pouring money into the state to pay for the manpower needed to collect the signatures. Wisconsin Republicans are trying to respond in kind by mounting the recall of eight of the 14 “flee-baggers” but the head of the state party admits that taxpayer groups and volunteer organization have less money and are more loosely organized than their union counterparts and Democrat machines.

Wisconsin law says that recalls can only apply to incumbents who have served at least a year. That eliminates Governor Walker and newly elected Senators. It also requires that after filing a recall petition, thousands of signatures of registered voters must be collected in each district within 60 days. The number of signatures varies by district but ranges from 15,000 to 22,000.

The organizing strength of the AFL-CIO and its unions, coupled with Democratic allies (even Hollywood actors have joined in) gives the advantage to the Democrats over the Republicans. The union also understands that Wisconsin is a battleground state which cannot afford to lose this contest of political will if it hopes to discourage other states with fiscal problems from following Wisconsin’s lead. The Republicans don’t have the same passion for recalling Democrat senators that the Democrats do in their recall effort, which could be problematic.

Plan C of the Wisconsin thuggery campaign involves Dane County Circuit Judge Maryann Sumi, the latest hero in the left’s effort to subvert the people’s government. Last Friday, before leaving on vacation, she issued a temporary restraining order blocking the publication of the so-called Budget Repair Bill in the Wisconsin Statutes and Annotations. Publication of new laws is the job of the Secretary of State, Doug LaFollette, a Democrat, who decided to delay publishing the law after it was enacted until March 25, the latest date allowed by statute.

While lawsuits alleging grounds that justify judicial review are often filed to delay or prevent implementation of a law by those opposed to it, Judge Sumi’s participation in this case is an egregious perversion of justice. Her son, Jake Sinderbrand, is a political operative, formerly an AFL-CIO lead field manager and data manager for the SEIU Wisconsin State Council. The union members affected by the new law are members of the SEIU and the AFL-CIO. Here is what Sinderbrand’s Facebook page says:

RIP middle class – Wisconsin has officially become the Tea Party's laboratory for plutocracy. This is the beginning of the end unless we can get these fu_kers out of office. 299 days to recall; please do what you can to fight this travesty.

Judge Sumi’s husband, Carl Sinderbrand, donated to the campaigns of three of the “Badger 14? – Dave Hansen, Jim Holperin and Robert Wirch – who shirked their senatorial jobs and ran away to Illinois hoping to shut down the legislative process. Additionally Sinderbrand donated to Tom Barrett in his fight against Scott Walker for the governorship.

In 2007 Sumi gave a speech at the Temple Beth El for the Jewish Federation of Madison (WI) entitled “Judicial Decision Making: Activism or Accountability?”

Maryann Sumi is hardly an unbiased judge in this case. Any self-respecting arbiter of the law would have recused herself from hearing the case. Judge Sumi didn’t. That speaks volumes about her liberal activist view of the judiciary’s role in government.

The Associated Press reported that the reason LaFollette delayed publishing the new law was to give local governments as much time as possible to reach agreements locking in generous contract terms. In other words, he used the limits of the publication statute to benefit a favored Democratic constituency that will cost the taxpayers more money – a delay that was legal but hardly public-spirited. And it had the happy consequence of giving Dane County District Attorney Ismael R. Ozanne, also a Democrat, sufficient time to file the lawsuit in Sumi’s court alleging that the way in which the measure was passed violated the state's open meeting law, which normally requires notice of 24 hours before a vote.

Sumi said that the Legislature had the right to reconvene and reenact the Budget Repair Bill – a guarantee for further delay, mass demonstrations, and possible violence. If the Legislature did that, Sumi said, it would give her one less thing to worry about when she returns from spring break. Well, we sure don’t want Sumi’s court calendar interfering with the euphoria of her vacation, do we?

Republicans, who hold the majority in both the State Assembly and State Senate, refute the allegations of the suit before Judge Sumi because the official Rules of the Senate and Assembly waive that notice requirement during special sessions of the legislature, like the one in which the budget repair bill was considered. Either Judge Sumi is aware of these procedures and still issued a TRO because of her ideological sympathies with the unions – making her just another political hack, not a judge – or she is unaware of legislative procedures and therefore unqualified to serve on the bench.

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen wasted no time last Friday in announcing the Department of Justice will appeal Sumi’s TRO. Van Hollen said:

The Legislature and the Governor, not a single Dane County Circuit Court Judge, are responsible for the enactment of laws. Decisions of the Supreme Court have made it clear that judges may not enjoin the Secretary of State from publishing an Act.

To add to the opéra bouffe taking place in Wisconsin, there is a state Supreme Court election coming up on April 5. Assistant Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg, a liberal, is trying to unseat conservative incumbent David Prosser. If she wins, she could shift the balance of power on the court that might ultimately hear the appeal of Sumi’s order and undo Walker’s bill.

Is there an end to this? For weeks we’ve seen television images of malcontents camped out at the state capitol interfering with the legislative process and sometimes threatening the legislators. Signs and the mob chanted, “This is how democracy works.”

No, that’s not how democracy works.

Government employees are subject to the will of the people. That’s how democracy works. Unions are not a fourth branch of government with the power to veto the will of the people, embodied in their representatives, by forcing those elected representatives to sit down with unions as equals.

This is why federal employees have no collective bargaining rights with Congress. Congress represents the will of the people. It is not compelled, after negotiating among its members, to further negotiate its decisions with a union. If government workers feel they are being exploited, they should take their case to the people. And they should participate in the political process themselves – lawfully. That’s how democracy works.

To demand collective bargaining rights for public employees, as Wisconsin is doing, is to demand powers above democracy – to demand that after the democratic process has produced its outcome, that outcome must be ratified or renegotiated with a union representative. If that be the case, power in state government would reside only in one person – an unelected union official.

That is not how democracy works.

Media Meltdown

On April 26, 1986 Reactor 4 in the Ukrainian atomic energy plant Chernobyl exploded, destroying its concrete roof, polluting the surrounding territory and ultimately all of Europe with radioactive particles, and intensifying the debate about the pros and cons of atomic power and whether this kind of disaster would occur again. Yet for all of the rants and ravings of anti-nuclear proponents, it was not the technology of the Chernobyl power plant – whether it was more or less sophisticated than necessary – that caused this accident. It was human failure.

What happened at Chernobyl? Without going into a technical description of a nuclear power generator, suffice it to say that reactivity is controlled by core rods that are inserted into or backed out of the reactor core. The core produces tremendous heat, which is cooled by water that absorbs the heat to produce the steam that drives the turbines which generate electric power. In order to prevent radiation contamination from escaping, a reactor is a closed system. So after steam leaves the turbines, it cools, returning it to water, and the process starts all over again. If the heat isn’t managed correctly, the core overheats and explodes or produces a runaway meltdown.

Just prior to the accident the Chernobyl reactor was scheduled to undergo annual maintenance, which required taking it off of the power grid for a few hours. But before its operators were able to start the maintenance procedures, engineers from Moscow phoned to say they wanted the operators to conduct an experiment that required the reactor to be cut back to 25% of capacity. As the reactor wound down, the operators “disconnected” the emergency cooling system to prevent it from kicking in during the experiment. Then they got another unexpected call from Kiev requesting that the reactor remain on the grid due to an unexpected surge in electricity demand. Seven hours passed before the reactor was off the grid, putting the experiment behind schedule.

For whatever reason, in the wind-down the operators had shut off the automatic capacity control system and tried to hit the 25% capacity level using manual controls. They missed. A reactor acts like an over-damped system. This means it doesn’t respond immediately to intervention; it’s like the thermostats on the walls of our homes when the temperature is reset. Multiple inputs and over-damping cause us to think a current temperature is the result of an input we just punched in, when in fact it is the result of an input punched in sometime in the past. This likely explains why manual control caused the reactor to fall to 1% of capacity – a very dangerous unstable situation. The operators were able to coax the reactor back to 7% – still in the zone of instability – and then decided to continue the experiment. This was probably their gravest error.

The experiment required the operators to turn on all water pumps. What Moscow and the Ukrainian operators failed to anticipate (or notice) was that at reduced capacity there is less heat. More water therefore caused more cooling. This caused the reactor to automatically take off its own “brakes” – something the operators apparently didn’t notice either or, under pressure to complete the experiment in the remaining time, paid no heed to. Steam levels therefore dropped, to which the operators responded by pumping more water to make steam. This cooling dropped steam levels even more. So the operators tried to increase heat by removing more rods from the core. This appeared to do the trick in steam production but it reduced the number of core rods below the safety standard. Nevertheless, the operators decided to continue the experiment, now operating a reactor without brakes. Unknown to the operators, they were now in a “graveyard” spiral from which there could be no recovery.

Minutes later, the steam line to one of the turbines was closed, as the experiment required, which caused the steam pressure in the system to increase – an unanticipated event that hadn’t happened in previous capacity reductions. Absent the automatic steam brakes, the operators attempted a kind of emergency braking – they seemed finally to have noticed things were going wrong. In an effort to reduce heat, they tried to shove the control rods back into the reactor but that was no longer possible, because the heat that had developed in the reactor core had bent the tubes into which the rods slid. At that point there were two explosions. The rest is common knowledge.

Why did the operators violate the safety rules? They had violated them before and gotten away with it. They were an experienced team who had just won an award for keeping their reactor on the grid for long periods of uninterrupted service. The considerable self-confidence of this team was doubtless a contributing factor in the accident. Most of the time they operated the reactors intuitively not analytically, which experts tend to do. They thought they knew what they were dealing with, and they probably also thought themselves beyond the “ridiculous” safety rules devised for operators, but not for a team of experienced professionals like themselves.

Let’s contrast this with what happened at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in northern Japan last weekend.

Shortly after Japan was hit with a magnitude 8.9 earthquake, it was slammed by the follow up tsunami in a classic one-two punch. The quake caused 11 of Japan's nuclear reactors to shut down – automatically, I might add – including three at the Fukushima power plant. Now, not only was the Japanese government dealing with the twin catastrophes of a quake and tsunami, it had to further deal with what could (not necessarily would) become a catastrophe if the nuclear reactors were damaged and their failover systems didn’t perform.

When the quake shut down Fukushima, it also kicked it off of the power grid. This deprived the plant operators of electricity, requiring them to switch on emergency diesel generators in order to maintain core cooling. Then the tsunami hit and wiped out the generators. Now the operators were forced to switch over to battery power to operate critical instrumentation and equipment. The batteries were designed as one of the backups to the backups, to provide power for cooling the core for 8 hours. And they did. Eight hours was enough time to truck in mobile generators to replace those destroyed by the tsunami.

Were they making this stuff up as they went along? No. However unlikely, multiple failures had been anticipated in designing the emergency procedures and they had been practiced repeatedly. Nevertheless, at the end of the day on Friday, Prime Minister Naoto Kan wisely decided to protect the public and declare a “nuclear emergency” which called for evacuating 200,000 people in the area encompassed by a 20 kilometer radius of the plant.

However, the mobile generators couldn’t be connected to the plant due to interface problems. So after the battery power was exhausted, and the residual heat could not be carried away, the plant operators had to begin thinking of the possibility of a core meltdown, which meant executing “loss of cooling event” procedures.

I was once a partner/investor in a software business that produced simulated nuclear power plant failure scenarios and calculated the radiation contamination levels that would exist at specified locations depending upon the type of failure. These were used to train the plant operators in every combination of malfunctions, including the destruction of the containment dome over the plant. Part of the simulated drill was the release of a contamination plume to the external environment so that a “dose assessment” of the surrounding landscape would be required in the training. For the record, a Boeing 727 at full throttle could fly into the external containment dome without damaging it enough to permit an external release, and there are three concentric containment domes over nuclear reactors – except some in Russia, which might as well have been covered with a tent.

Following procedures and their training, the Fukushima operators prepared for core meltdown. Steam builds up inside of an interior containment dome as it does in a pressure cooker. A household pressure cooker has a vent to release steam when it reaches a certain pressure to keep it from exploding. Likewise, the plant operators released steam Saturday, which was so hot that it caused an explosion. At that point sea water mixed with boric acid was pumped into the reactor, destroying the cores at a cost of billions of dollars. The only person known to have been killed in connection with the Fukushima power plant failure was hit by a crane. No one has died from radiation exposure.

Tens of thousands of Japanese have been killed by the earthquake, a subsequent tsunami, and the potential outbreak of disease. But what do the American anti-nuclear media focus on? The damage to a nuclear power plant whose operators, despite a succession of improbable events, responded in the disciplined professional manner consistent with their training.

Almost from the moment it was known that the Fukushima station was damaged, however, the hyper-hysterical press began painting an apocalypse in the making. CNN reporting headlined its news as “countdown to meltdown.” Has a nice ring, don’t you think?

The always biased, loose with the facts New York Times reported “Operators fear that if they cannot establish control, despite increasingly desperate measures to do so, the reactors could experience full meltdowns, which would release catastrophic amounts of radiation.” False. Assuming the interior containment dome was somehow destroyed, the middle containment dome is four-inch thick steel and the external containment dome is a steel-reinforced concrete and graphite envelope. In the unlikely event that the middle dome is breached, the molten reactor core would drop to the floor of the third dome, spread, and terminate reaction. Then it would cool down.

In at least one article about the reactor crisis, the accompanying photos were of burning refinery and natural gas storage tanks. The implication apparently intended was that these were reactors blazing away. This is either journalistic stupidity – not knowing the difference in the appearance of a tank farm and a nuclear reactor station – or it is journalistic dishonesty.

The anti-nuke mainstream media has devoted more column inches to speculative “what might happen” scenarios than reporting accurate up-to-the-minute status. Sure, containment domes could collapse, radiation plumes could drift on the jet stream, millions could die, and mutant babies could be born resembling American Idol’s Steven Tyler and rocker Mick Jagger. So far, none of that has happened.

Then we have the politicians sounding off as if they had a clue what they were talking about. Representative Ed Markey, a renowned opponent of nuclear power, exploited the Fukushima crisis as “another Chernobyl” and predicted “the same thing could happen here.” He called for suspension of licensing for third generation reactors that don’t use pumps to circulate cooling water but rather use convection to circulate it. The Fukushima reactors were 40 years old – and ironically two weeks away from being decommissioned when the quake and tsunami hit – but if they had the technology Markey wants to halt, we wouldn’t be reading about them.

Senator Joe Lieberman, who periodically has an affliction in which thoughts drop directly out of his brain and on his tongue, told Face the Nation last Sunday that this country should put the brakes on developing nuclear power plants. "I think we've got to kind of quietly and quickly put the brakes on until we can absorb what has happened in Japan as a result of the earthquake and the tsunami and then see what more, if anything, we can demand of the new power plants that are coming online," said Lieberman. What’s to absorb? Fukushima got hit with back to back disasters that exceeded the design specs ten-fold and still held together. The Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says plants constructed by today's standards are 1,600 times safer than the Fukushima plant.

Is Lieberman unaware that the U.S. Navy has had nuclear-powered ships since 1953? In those 5,800 reactor years, during which the ships steamed over 136 million miles, there have been no accidents, man-made or otherwise, and no radioactive releases.

The production of energy in large quantities will always pose risks. Refineries catch fire, coal mines collapse, sea drill rigs explode, and dams break. We learn from these failures and avoid repeating them. If environmentalists and politicians around the world use the Fukushima incident as an excuse to back away from developing nuclear energy, they will make the world even more dependent on fossil fuels, which is more dangerous than nuclear energy. Chernobyl killed 31 people. By comparison, the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland calculated that in the 30 year period prior to 2000, more than 20,000 people died in severe accidents in the oil supply chain. More than 15,000 people died in severe accidents in the coal supply chain – 11,000 in China alone. The rate of direct fatalities per unit of energy production is 18 times worse for oil than it is for nuclear power.

The only nuclear power incident to occur in this country happened in 1979 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Station. Not one person was killed. But the nuclear power industry was killed. Of the 129 stations planned when that non-event occurred, only 53 were completed because of over-regulation, anti-nuclear activists, and compliance costs. Nuclear power now supplies only 20% of the growing US energy demand. If we had built all the nuclear power plants planned in 1979, today we would be very nearly energy independent and Kyoto-compliant.

Absorb that.

Playing “Chicken” with the White House

Last month – February, the shortest month of the year – the federal government spent $223 billion more than it took in as tax revenues. That’s right; billion with a “B”.

It’s the largest monthly deficit in history, and it is the 29th straight month that the federal government has operated in the red. Not a record the Obama Administration will likely beat its breast over. Team Obama is on track to spend $3.8 trillion this year and will run a cumulative deficit for the year of $1.6 trillion in doing so.

Yet when the Republican-controlled House of Representatives proposed to cut $61 billion – i.e. 1.6% of spending – Senate Democrat leader Harry Reid howled, accusing Republicans of using a meat axe instead of the scalpel cuts he and the White House want. Their proposal? Somewhere between $6 billion and $10 billion. That’s the most they can find in $3.8 trillion of spending!

Federal spending has increased 24% over the last four years pushing the national debt over $14 trillion. The Republicans propose cutting a penny and a half out of every dollar spent during this fiscal year and all the Democrats can cut is decimal dust?

Obama said he would veto a bill if it has cuts of $61 billion, which the House Republicans want to pass. And unless John Boehner and his 87 freshman Republicans are willing to renege on the pledge they made to cut $100 billion – the pledge they believe got them elected – the government will shut down.

The game of chicken is on.

Recall that the cowardly Democrat-controlled House of Nancy Pelosi’s 111th Congress failed to pass a budget for the fiscal year ending this September. The Republicans, even though they were the minority, kept insisting on deep cuts and so were some swing state Democrats who realized they were in deep trouble with the voters. After ObamaCare, many Democrats weren’t willing to drink Kool Aid again. So Pelosi punted. No budget.

Absent a budget, the government has been kept running with continuing resolutions – the appropriation chicanery that gives the House an escape exit when it fails to perform one of its most important duties – to produce a budget. When the Republicans took control of the House and it became their turn to play the continuing resolution game, they changed the rules. No CR without a cut in spending, and the targeted $100 billion in cuts was the equivalent of $2 billion per week. Prorated for the months remaining in the fiscal year, the Republicans target became $61 billion. The Dems could only agree on $4 billion in spending cuts, so that bought two weeks – kicking the CR can down the road from March 4 to March 18.

This process will get harder and harder. It was relatively easy to come up with enough low hanging fruit to cut $4 billion this time. It will be harder to find the next round of cuts. Sooner or later Congress will run out of “planned” spending and pork earmarks that can be cut and will have to face hard choices in cutting real ongoing spending. Then what?

Reid and Obama can sit on their hands and make no further spending cut concessions, forcing Republicans to fold or fight. If they fight and the CR deadline expires, the government “shuts down.” The Democrats think they can make hay with that, and it makes a lot of Republicans nervous. Both sides remember the last government shutdown in 1995 and think Bill Clinton took them to the woodshed. But did he?

Clinton was reelected – true – but Republicans lost only nine House seats in 1996 and still held their majority. Not bad since they had picked up 54 in 1994 in the Contract with America election. And Republicans gained two Senate seats, pushing their majority from 53 seats to 55.

Moreover, the Republicans were able to force through budget restraints that held spending growth to less than 3% during all of Clinton’s first term, which turned a $164 billion deficit in 1995 – the year of the shutdown – into a $126 billion surplus in Clinton’s last year in office. And the Republicans got a big tax cut through in 1997. The idea that “Clinton won” the 1995 government shutdown battle simply isn’t borne out by the facts.

This year, things are considerably different than they were in 1995. Then there was no alternative media – no Internet, no Fox News, no conservative talk radio, no tweets and blogs – that competed for the hearts and minds of listeners in the political debate. The news in 1995 was the Democrat-speak of CBS, CNN, the Washington Post and New York Times, and public broadcasting, that paragon of objectivity.

In 1995 Clinton was deeply engaged in the budget negotiations. There were many meetings at the White House. Today, in contrast, Obama is not engaged in the process. He is characteristically aloof and has delegated the negotiations to Harry Reid, just as he delegated ObamaCare to Reid and Pelosi. It’s unlikely that Obama will have to veto a bill because no bill will get out of the Democrat-controlled Senate. It’s unlikely a bill will even make it to the Senate floor for a vote.

Today’s news is a stream of fiscal horror stories – federal, state, local, and international debts, deficits, and crises. Unlike 1995 when the economy was growing and voters didn’t understand the need for spending cuts, now voters are in a cutting mood. And they want to see big cuts, not decimal dust.

People want to see the government operate like they have to operate. They are cutting back their spending and doing without. Why can’t government do the same? Since the recession began in 2008, the private sector lost eight million jobs; yet the federal government added almost 600,000 jobs. Clinton’s deficit for the entire year in 1995 was $164 billion. Obama’s deficit in one month was $223 billion. Under Clinton federal spending grew less than 3%. Under Obama it has grown 24%.

Spending is out of control. Period! If deficit spending is ever to be brought under control the government must stop trying to solve every problem. It must stop trying to “stimulate” the economy – hundreds of billions of dollars have been wasted to prove that government stimulation is a fool’s errand.

If the Democrats can only find $10 billion dollars to cut out of $3.8 trillion in spending, how can they ever expect to find the spending cuts in Obama’s jaw-dropping 2012 budget? How can they expect to slow down the ever-increasing national debt, not to mention begin reducing it? Obama’s Simpson-Bowles deficit commission recommended that discretionary spending cuts of more than $1 trillion were needed over the next ten years to put this country’s fiscal house in order. So far, no serious consideration has been given to those recommendations. It’s apparent that the deficit commission was a hood ornament in Obama’s publicity campaign for restoring fiscal discipline.

The Democrats and Republicans are now working on their proposed spending cuts in order to extend the continuing resolution when the current one expires on March 18. If they can’t reach an agreement, the government technically runs out of money and parts of it begin shuttering. In the political world of sub-optimal second-best and third-best choices, that may not be a bad thing to let happen. Running the government’s spending programs in multi-week extensions by CR is an insane way to do government. So the deficit hawks have to have the spines to take negotiations over the brink if the Democrats refuse to get serious about cost cutting. If they do, it will set the tone for future budget battles – the 2012 budget this spring, the debt ceiling battle this summer, and the appropriations fight this fall. If the Republicans cave on March 18 it will make these fights much harder and less likely to be successful. The average American – not the politicians – will be the losers.

A new Rasmussen Reports national survey finds that only one-third of Likely Voters would rather have Congress avoid a government shutdown by authorizing spending at the same levels as last year. Almost two-thirds (58%) says it’s better to have a partial shutdown until Democrats and Republicans can agree on what spending to cut.

There were 15 government shutdowns in the 18 years from 1977 to 1995, the year of the last shutdown. Most lasted just a few days, but some dragged on for up to two and a half weeks. None were the horrible disruption that the term “government shutdown” implies. The government, in fact, doesn’t shut down. The mail gets delivered, Social security checks still go out, air traffic controllers remain on the job, the Border Patrol continues to patrol. Certain essential services are required to continue operating even if there is no Congressional authorization to pay for them. That means 90% of Americans will never know the government is “shut down.”

So what is shut down? Non-essential services and employees. Interesting term. If it’s non-essential, why does it exist at all? But non-essential services include national parks, monuments, and passport processing. In other words, your vacation may be spoiled.

The few Americans inconvenienced by a shutdown will blame Washington, of course. Will that blame fall on the right side of the aisle or the left? Both sides equally, say the pollsters in surveys over the past two weeks. Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm, says 41% would blame Republicans and 39% would blame Obama. Gallup says that 42% say Republicans are doing a better job of reaching a budget agreement, while 39% say Democrats are. The Hill says 29% would blame Democrats for a shutdown and 23% would blame Republicans. The Washington Post says 36% would blame Republicans and 35% the Democrats.

Notwithstanding the blame game, the Middle East is being roiled and oil prices are causing pump pain for most Americans. The economic recovery, if there is in fact one going on, is at a fragile stage. Unemployment remains high at 9.5%. There is an election next year. Democrats got hosed at the polls last year and the handicappers say it isn’t over yet. That news isn’t lost on the 23 Democrat Senators in tight 2012 races and Obama is by no means a shoo-in if Republicans can find someone who can fog a mirror.

Does Reid really want to risk a government shutdown over $57 billion – the difference between the Republican goal of $61 billion in spending cuts and the $4 billion already agreed to when the CR was extended to March 18? Does he really want to send a signal to an already nervous business community that bloodier fights are down the road when the debt ceiling, 2012 budget, and fall appropriations are fought out – delaying whatever hiring plans business has in the works?

Clint Eastwood’s character Harry Callahan (Dirty Harry) told the wounded bank robber reaching for a gun to ask himself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” That’s the question Reid ought to ask himself before forcing a highly symbolic shutdown.

The problem is what John Boehner and the Republicans do. They seem terrified by the prospect of a government shutdown. If only they had the spine to look Reid in the eye and like Harry Callahan say, “Go ahead. Make my day.”

The game of chicken is won by the person who keeps his foot on the gas pedal last. My guess is that the Republicans will cave. If they do, the voters ought to replace them and Boehner next year and keep replacing them until we get better government – and less of it.

The Second Coming of Jimmy Carter

After a 23-year dictatorship, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali fled Tunisia on January 14 for asylum in Saudi Arabia when his country exploded in demonstrations against government theft and corruption. After 30 years in power, Egyptians decided they’d had enough Hosni Mubarak to last a lifetime, and when that country exploded, Mubarak fled Cairo on February 11 for his Red Sea resort in Sharm el Sheik.

Invigorated Arabs around the Middle East asked themselves if change could happen in Tunisia and Egypt, why not here, so unrest spread to Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain, Syria, and Libya. After 42 years in power as the leader of Libya, Muammar al-Gaddafi is still in power, although barely hanging on as the public uprising, which broke out on February 15, ebbs and flows in the fight to control the country and force regime change.

Gaddafi, untroubled by using his army to kill civilian dissidents, which the armies of Tunisia and Egypt refused to do, unleashed hell on his countrymen. As demonstrators filled the streets militia, regime-hired mercenaries, and even Libyan jets shot and strafed those who wouldn’t disperse.

The situation continued to build until the morning of February 21, when Saif al-Islam Muammar al-Gaddafi, one of Gaddafi’s litter of sons, took to the airwaves of Libyan TV to deliver a marginally coherent speech warning that “We will fight to the last minute, until the last bullet.” It would have to be assumed that “we” in this case meant the Gaddafi family rather than the Libyan people, who were fighting with no bullets and thus dying in large numbers. Saif al-Gaddafi, allegedly the sanest of the brothers, although that is a low bar when referring to this family, went on to speak of “rivers of blood” in the streets if demonstrators refused to return to the tranquility of their serfdom.

Always on the ready, the US State Department whose crack intelligence monitors had failed to predict the domino effect in the Middle East, not to mention its genesis in Tunisia, assured the international community that they were now alert to the unrest in the most dangerous part of the world. “We are analyzing the speech of Saif al-Islam Qaddafi to see what possibilities it contains for meaningful reform,” a senior State Department official said on February 21.

Undoubtedly that came as great comfort to the 600 Americans working and living in Libya – along with several hundred citizens of the UK, Germany, and other countries – who were trapped in the warzone Libya had become.

On February 21, in a carefully worded non-statement directed to nobody, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton denounced “this unacceptable bloodshed …” as if some level of bloodshed was acceptable, and went on to lament, “… Our thoughts and prayers are with those whose lives have been lost and with their loved ones.” I hesitate to judge whether State Department officials actually pray about things like this or just reflexively throw the word into government-speak about tragic events, but conspicuously absent from their prayer list were the 600 Americans stuck in Libya.

On February 22, Defense Secretary Robert Gates allowed himself to be interviewed in his office by four reporters. Asked if NATO and the US would make a show of force off the coast of Libya, Gates said they weren’t able to do that because “things were happening so fast.” Apparently our military is only able to react when things don’t happen so fast.

“What’s in the bag? What do you have, what do we have that could speed there?” one of the reporters asked.

“We don’t have – I don’t think we have a carrier in the [Mediterranean Sea] right now. The Enterprise is down off of Somalia. We’ve had the [USS] Kearsarge in the Red Sea, but mainly if some kind of an evacuation were needed from Egypt. But nothing that we would be able to do right away.”

That’s the problem with these 4 ½ acre flattops – they’re so easy to misplace.

Reminiscent of his glacial handling of the Gulf oil crisis, Obama had little to say and nothing in motion to extract the stranded Americans or to give comfort and support to the heroic Libyans fighting to topple one of the Middle East’s chief exporters of terror. The President had stiffed the Iranian protestors when it would have counted and acted like a deer caught in headlights when the Tunisian and Egyptian protests cried out for the US to take a stand. It’s increasingly evident that the community organizer from Illinois should have stayed in training wheels longer before applying for the job that must contend with these kinds of problems.

Unafflicted with the weak-kneed lethargy that consumed Obama, the British air force launched a secret mission to rescue its citizens. Three Royal Air Force planes, disregarded diplomatic red tape and Libyan territorial and airspace integrity, swooped into the eastern desert with commandos and grabbed 150 of their people – primarily oil refinery workers. They were safely delivered to Malta last Saturday, the British Defense Ministry reported.

Likewise, Germany announced that its air force had carried out a secret mission to rescue 132 of its citizens from the Libyan desert Saturday.

Team Obama’s response? Hire a commercial ferry boat from Malta to schlep over to Tripoli, pick up 600 passengers, and bring them back to Malta. Of course, that would require navigating 220 miles of open sea – twice – with 600 passengers aboard for the return trip – something the craft wasn’t designed to do. When the ferry arrived in Tripoli harbor, it had to remain there, tied up for three days, fully loaded with passengers, because the sea was too choppy for a ferry boat to sail on it. A blue water naval vessel would have had no difficulty, but all of ours were apparently tied up, and our allies wouldn’t lend us any of theirs. Meanwhile, with the ferry tied up in Tripoli harbor, Libyan jets were flying above the city busily killing citizens and subjecting the “rescued” Americans to an accidental, if not intentional, attack. If it wasn’t so pathetic, Obama’s response, especially compared to that of the British and Germans, was laughable.

The voyage ended safely for the Americans and they landed in Malta on Saturday, thanks more to good luck than the Obama Administration’s ability to handle a crisis. Team Obama excused its fecklessness as concern over the safety of the stranded Americans. Apparently Germany and Britain didn’t have the same concern.

The ludicrous image of that ferry boat bobbing helplessly in the hostile waters off Tripoli reflects the impotence of the Obama presidency. Like his undistinguished career as a state senator and brief tenure as a US Senator, during which he voted “present” rather than take a stand which compelled an up or down vote, Obama more and more looks like the second coming of Jimmy Carter – weak, inept, confused by the moral and ethical demands of the situations that confront him.

In his acceptance lecture for the undeserved 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, Obama asserted that “Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later. That's why all responsible nations must embrace the role that militaries with a clear mandate can play to keep the peace.” Yet, those aren’t Obama’s convictions; they are simply fine-sounding words. No modern president has been as diffident as he in using the might of the American military to keep the peace.

“Walk softly and carry an armored tank division, I always say,” Jack Nicholson’s character, Colonel Jessep, boasted in the movie A Few Good Men. It is a stance not held by Obama. He acts as if the impact of the US in the world is equivalent to that of Albania. He carefully parses the words of a lunatic’s speech for hidden meanings as if “rivers of blood” and “fight to the last bullet” were not patently obvious. He waits, he talks, he sends envoys – he does everything but act.

When missile bases were discovered in Cuba, Obama’s hero, John Kennedy, threw a cordon of warships around the island and dared Soviet warships to cross it. Obama’s high-minded Nobel rhetoric that inaction leads to “more costly intervention later” is more oratory than a philosophy he practices. His ambivalence to saber rattle is making the world a more dangerous place.

Early in his presidency, Obama apologized to Iran for this country’s past meddling in its affairs and promised it would happen no more. The mullahs promptly stole the next election and killed and imprisoned those who protested it. True to his word, Obama did nothing and said nothing.

When the Tunisia uprising broke out, Obama could not find his voice. When the Egyptian uprising broke out Obama couldn’t find his footing. First he said Mubarak was not a dictator. Then he was a dictator. To avoid a power vacuum, Mubarak should stay. Then he should leave. He should leave in the fall. Then he should leave now. Soon. Sometime.

Now comes Libya and once again the Obama team is confused, unable to decide on a policy position and communicate it coherently to the world in general, and Gaddafi in particular. Obama seems unaware that of all the Middle Eastern despots, this guy is the most dangerous. He has killed hundreds of Americans and Westerners. He is connected with the Lockerbie bombing which killed 270, the 1986 Berlin discotheque bombing, the 1989 explosion aboard a French airliner causing it to crash and kill 156, and other acts of violence around the world.

Ronald Reagan rightly called Gaddafi the “mad dog of the Middle East.” Unlike Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Egypt’s Mubarak, and the other tyrants in the region, who are ruthless but probably in possession of their faculties, Gaddafi is at least a nut case, if not a drug abuser and possibly insane. Who but Gaddafi could convincingly say with a straight face that “women are female and men are male … according to gynecologists women, unlike men, menstruate each month.”

Gaddafi characterized HIV as "a peaceful virus, not an aggressive virus. If you are straight,” he declared, “you have nothing to fear from AIDS". He believes the wage system in a modern economy should be abolished, because wages enslave earners to those who hire them. Perhaps that belief explains why Libya is among the poorest nations in the world.

“Obeying your parents is more important than doing what your parents say”

“If it were not for electricity, we would have to watch television in the dark.”

“A woman has a right to run for election whether she is male or female.”

A man with a mind like this and an army at his beckoning could easily provoke a moral and humanitarian catastrophe that would make Rwanda pale in comparison. Because then-President Clinton chose not to intervene in that conflict, 800,000 people were slaughtered. Gaddafi is obviously capable of violence on this scale. He has already killed hundreds of his citizens – far more than the citizens killed in all of the recent protests throughout the Middle East.

What will Obama do? Will he use the US military to prevent a slaughter as he said in his Nobel lecture? Apparently not. He has instead called for a “coordinated” diplomatic initiative with our allies. He has carefully detailed the obstacles to military intervention or assistance. His Defense Department has cautioned that the US military might not be equal to the challenge of the Libyan air force!

In his 2009 Cairo speech, Obama promised his personal outreach to the Muslim masses. As those masses yearned to be free in Cairo and Tunisia, Obama said nothing. As those masses are being slaughtered in Libya, Obama does nothing. Throughout the explosion of the Middle East, he has missed the opportunity to expand American influence and advance the case for democracy there.

Most past presidents have entered the office predictably clueless of its demands. Yet in varying degrees they grow into the Presidency as the demands of that office take their toll on their judgment and temperament. Obama is the first president, at least in modern times, who has failed to grow in the office. He is too risk averse, too political to benefit from the experiences that have confronted him. He is still the senator voting “present” who can only see the liabilities to his presidency, his legacy, and his reelection chances, but he is blind to the challenges to American power and prestige in the world, which under his watch are eroding.

Obama was not ready for prime time in 2008, and he will not be ready for prime time in 2012. Like the Trace Adkins song, he is all hat and no cattle.

All hat and no cattle, that boy just ain't real

All boots and no saddle, don't know how to make a cowgirl feel

Think I'm gonna tell him to pack up his act

And go back where he came from'

Cause all hat and no cattle ain't gonna get it done