Charles Krauthammer tonight praised John Boehner and Paul Ryan for supporting the fiscal cliff deal, arguing that they had no other choice. “I would actually commend Boehner and Paul Ryan, who in the end voted ‘yes’ for a bad deal – but they had to do it – for some courage, knowing it was a deal that was really awful, but there was no alternative, and being in the leadership, taking a hit rather than letting somebody in the back benches have to do it for them.”

“But they have to be united from now on,” he added. “Once they split, as happened right now, all power will devolve to the president and the Senate and Pelosi…”

It is Saturday. And I don’t know where there’s a Hobby Lobby in the Northeast Corridor, but that’s okay, because they are online. They’re good people, trying to be good people, trying to have integrity and fighting for freedom. A lot of us could learn a lot from them. And maybe wake up about the threats inherent in the narrowing of religious liberty in the U.S. today. 

I was just reading some of the comments . . . maybe it’s a generational thing. If you or your kids grew up singing a song about a bill on the Capitol steps, it seems like it would be hard not to recognize that building you see when you walk out of Union Station . . .

There have been a few very good opinion pieces about the large amount of special-interest goodies in the fiscal-cliff bill. This morning the Wall Street Journal, for instance, had a piece in its Review and Outlook section titled “Crony Capitalist Blowout,” which gave a good summary of all the crony tax credits in the already infamous deal:

In praising Congress’s huge new tax increase, President Obama said Tuesday that “millionaires and billionaires” will finally “pay their fair share.” That is, unless you are a Nascar track owner, a wind-energy company or the owners of StarKist Tuna, among many others who managed to get their taxes reduced in Congress’s New Year celebration.

There’s plenty to lament about the capital and income tax hikes, but the bill’s seedier underside is the $40 billion or so in tax payoffs to every crony capitalist and special pleader with a lobbyist worth his million-dollar salary. Congress and the White House want everyone to ignore this corporate-welfare blowout, so allow us to shine a light on the merriment.

Here is a list of some of the tax credits:

• $78 million to retain an accelerated tax write-off for owners of NASCAR tracks
• $62 million tax credit for companies operating in American Samoa
• $222 million tax rebate for rum distillers
• $222 million in accelerated depreciation for businesses located on Indian reservations 
• $430 million over two years in tax breaks for film and television producers who incur production costs incurred in the United States, with a special bonus if the costs are incurred in economically depressed areas in the United States
• $59 million in tax credits for cellulosic biofuels
• $2.2 billion in tax credits for biodiesel and “renewable diesel”
• $7 million in consumer tax credits for buying plug-in motorcycles
• $154 million for the manufacturers of energy-efficient appliances
• $650 million in tax credits for builders of energy-efficient homes
• $12 billion in wind-energy-production tax credits

If you haven’t read it yet, take a look at this great piece by the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney  that explains how these tax credits came to be included in the fiscal-cliff bill. This is particularly depressing when you consider how all these subsidies distort markets, make us poorer, and serve no other purposes than to enriching a few well-connected firms. 

Keep reading this post . . .

Former senator Chuck Hagel, said to be on the short list to succeed Leon Panetta as secretary of defense, reportedly tried to shut down a USO port in the Israeli city of Haifa when he served as CEO of the USO. The Washington Free Beacon reports: 

“He said to me, ‘Let the Jews pay for it’,” said Marsha Halteman, director for military and law enforcement programs at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which led the battle to keep USO Haifa operational.

Hagel’s campaign to close the storied USO port struck many observers, including the U.S. Navy and congressional leaders, as misguided. Those same critics argue today that Hagel’s animosity toward the Jewish state leaves him unsuited to be the nation’s next defense secretary.

“He essentially told us that if we wanted to keep the USO [in Haifa] open—and when I say ‘we’, he meant ‘the Jews’—he said the Jews could pay for it,” said Halteman, who recalled being taken aback by the comment.

“I told him at the time that I found his comments to be anti-Semitic,” she said. “He was playing into that dual loyalty thing.”

Hagel has been accused of anti-Semitism for charging that lawmakers on Capitol Hill are intimidated by the”Jewish lobby,” and of homophobia for remarks he made in a 1998 confirmation hearing, for which he has since apologized. Outgoing representative Barney Frank, as well as senators Tom Coburn and John Cornyn have publicly expressed their opposition to his nomination. 

Thank you for your kind donations to our legal defense fund against a nuisance suit from self-endowed Nobel laureate Michael Mann. We can always use a little more — we’re in court in D.C. later this month, and the framed copy of my online legal diploma (valid most jurisdictions except the Northern Mariana Islands and Abkhazia) from a website in Tajikistan has apparently been delayed in the Christmas mail.

But here’s the thing. South of the border, National Review is being sued for defamation for publishing a piece by me. North of the border, they’ve gone to the next stage: one of Canada’s top bloggers is being sued for defamation merely for linking to me – or, as the plaintiff puts it, to “far-right website SteynOnline“. He’s seeking half-a-million bucks in damages, which even in Canada seems a high price for an Internet link to lil’ ol’ me.

This is what you might call a bit of mopping-up after my free-speech battles in Canada. We won, and we got the law in question, Section 13, repealed last summer. But along the way we pointed out that the plaintiff on all but one of those Section 13 “hate speech” cases since the turn of the century had been the same man — a civil servant called Richard Warman, who appointed himself Canada’s Hatefinder-General and brought highly lucrative “hate” complaints against anyone who crossed him. Since the repeal of his own personal revenge law, he can’t file “hate” complaints anymore, so instead he’s filing nuisance law suits against the bloggers who exposed him.

Arnie Lemaire of the Blazing Cat Fur website is one of those bloggers, a man who breaks a lot of news the cowed politically correct ninnies at the big dailies won’t go anywhere near until he’s made them too big to ignore — like the Toronto middle-school “Mosqueteria” story, in which he exposed a Canadian public school that converts its cafeteria into a mosque every Friday and segregates its girls according to whether they’re menstruating or not.

I’ve been involved in cases like these from Copenhagen to Melbourne, and I’m mighty sick of people who find it easier to sue you into silence than argue their case on the merits. Free speech is beleaguered in Britain, Australia, Europe — and also the United States, where, to his discredit, the president recently lent credence to the notion hitherto unknown to American law that it’s possible to “slander” a bloke who died in the 7th century. So I’d like to keep Blazing Cat Fur in business. Instapundit and other American bloggers agree. He’s having a big fundraiser in Toronto on Monday. If you don’t fancy the scenic drive from Buffalo up the Queen Elizabeth Way, I hope you’ll consider helping out in other ways.

That’s the number of people killed the Syrian civil war from when the conflict began in the spring of 2011 through November 30, according to a new study, highlighted in a statement yesterday by the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay. She explained, “Given there has been no let-up in the conflict since the end of November, we can assume that more than 60,000 people have been killed by the beginning of 2013. The number of casualties is much higher than we expected, and is truly shocking.”

Prior informal U.N. estimates had pegged the deaths at about 40,000 total, and rebel groups had suggested the number might be 45 or 50,000, but this is much more detailed survey which identifies the number of actual documented deaths, and seems unlikely to be a large overestimate. It’s not a statistical sample or estimate; rather, the authors of the report combined seven databases of recorded deaths from the various human-rights groups that have been monitoring the conflict, and then used computer software to eliminate duplicates and narrow down the list to only unique examples. Only “identifiable victims” were used, meaning those which “include the victim’s name, plus date and location of death.” There were a total of 147,349 such records, which was narrowed down to 59,648 reported unique deaths — it’s possible duplicates remain in the database, but it’s unlikely to be many.

Armin Rosen at The Atlantic has more on the study — among other things, he explains:

The age of up to three-fourths of recorded victims is missing. Yet a heavy proportion of victims for which age could be determined were between 20 and 30 years old. Meanwhile, only 7.5 percent of the identified victims were female; all of the more than 2,500 dead reported by the Syrian government are men. The dataset tends heavily towards males of traditional fighting age. Either this means that a large percentage of the people killed in the Syria conflict are combatants, or that the current documentation actually under-counts the number of civilian dead.

The PDF of the report is here, for those interested.

It’s also important to note, as Rosen does, that this number represented documented deaths as a result of the violent conflict, and isn’t “excess mortality,” a number which is often used to describe the human costs of civil conflict, and includes the deaths attributed to starvation, exposure, disease, etc. (the oft-cited number of deaths for the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 4 or 5 million, is such a number). It’s unclear what that number would look like for Syria, but getting humanitarian aid to internally displaced persons in the country and to refugees in Jordan and Turkey has been a huge problem, and not one that’s received much attention from Western powers — a variety of proposals for “humanitarian corridors” have been put forth to no avail, and the U.S. has stuck to relatively insignificant commitments of humanitarian aid via the U.N.’s World Food Program.

Regarding the new study, a reporter asked the following at the State Department’s daily press briefing yesterday: “The 60,000 people number just released this morning, we know that you have a redline for chemical weapons. Do you have any redline for this number of casualties, whether hundred thousand, 500,000, million?” The press secretary responded, “You know where we are on Syria. We’ve talked about this at length. We are all watching this bloodshed, which is now into its second year, with revulsion and loathing. And it is the Assad regime that bears responsibility. They could end it and stop it at a moment’s notice and spare their own people. They bear responsibility.”

I think we all knew that. This is, one might note, the administration which tapped a variety of diplomatic figures known for their support for humanitarian interventionism, and which actually bothered to create an Atrocities Prevention Board.

Following the swearing in of North Dakota senator Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Biden instructed her husband, with his characteristic grin, “Spread your legs, you’re gonna be frisked.” Adopting what sounds like an accent, he also offered a family member of South Carolina senator Tim Scott some workout advice. 

The claim by James Surowiecki in his recent Financial Page column in The New Yorker that Social Security and Medicare were “designed to be self supporting” overstates the intent (and ability) of their designers. (See “In Funds We Trust?,” December 24, 2012)

True, they are different from most federal programs, which are funded out of general revenues. While Social Security and Medicare’s Hospital Insurance program (Medicare Part A) have a dedicated revenue stream via payroll taxes imposed on workers, mere earmarking of revenues does not ensure that the programs would be self-supporting. The original intent was that if population growth continued as projected before the baby-boom — which began in 1946 and lasted through 1964 — there would generally be more workers than retirees to pay into the programs’ trust funds. And with generally positive productivity growth, retirees would receive a small but positive rate of return on their past payroll taxes. 

As the article mentions, payroll taxes have increased sharply over the years. But those tax increases were implemented by politicians in the past to fund the very generous benefit increases granted during the 1960s and 1970s, mainly to pander to retiree voters. In particular, Social Security benefits were protected against inflation during the 1970s, securing their real value and growth over time. Those benefit increases meant earlier participants in the programs received handsome returns on their payroll taxes — more than they would have received on average had they invested the income lost to payroll taxes in stocks or bonds. The cost of these windfall awards to earlier generations falls on future generations of workers and retirees, who will have to pay for them with some combination of tax increases and benefit cuts.

Keep reading this post . . .

I only caught a few minutes of Joe Biden swearing in senators. He was talking about his pecs when I did. It may call for a “Did he really say that?” highlight reel. Including his TSA moment.

Here’s the video of John Boehner opening the 113th Congress. For the transcript, check out Kathryn’s post from earlier today.

Speaking of being awestruck on the Hill: I think I would like to take a week this spring and be a Washington, D.C., tour guide. Because walking down the streets when in town, standing in a Union Station cab line, I keep hearing the exact same conversation from twentysomethings who sound like they were probably educated in American schools: Oh look, there’s the White House. It’s always the Capitol dome they are pointing to, when I overhear it. I can only imagine that tour guides who know their stuff have stories to tell and possibly a very dim view of education in the United States. 

At the very least, I need to know if these people vote … 

I’m so glad Ed Whelan highlighted my friend Melissa Moschella’s excellent Public Discourse piece on the HHS mandate and the courts today over on Bench Memos.

(Both Ed and Melissa are great gifts to America and are both doing their part to help educate and move mountains on religious liberty, in their different parts of the world. This new year, do give some thanks for Ed, Bench Memos, and the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Treasures, all. )

In her piece, Melissa highlights the dangerous precedent being danced around by some judges in cases where plaintiffs are seeking HHS Mandate relief from the federal government: 

In effect, Judges Jackson and Heaton are telling the Greens and Frank O’Brien—and by extension the 108 other plaintiffs challenging the mandate as well—that they, and the religious authorities who support them, simply have their theology wrong.

These decisions set a dangerous precedent by arrogating to government officials the authority to make determinations about what a religion does, and does not, require its followers to do or refrain from doing. If we continue down this path, soon judges will be telling Jews that their religion does not require male circumcision, devout Muslims that wearing the hijab is merely optional, or Catholic doctors and nurses that their religion permits them to perform or assist in abortions. To put such power in the hands of the government is to eradicate the separation of church and state and to deal a death blow to the free exercise of religion. If we are to preserve our First Amendment rights, Judge Heaton’s ruling must be overturned. More generally, as these HHS mandate cases make their way through the appeals process and eventually reach the Supreme Court, judges must scrupulously avoid deciding them based on theological claims.

Bob Costa was counting every last vote over on Twitter — he’s doing what reporters do and you’ll hear more from him shortly.

John Boehner continues in what might be the most thankless job in Washington, D.C. In his speech opening the 113th Congress, he literally showed members who are not in Congress for the right reasons the door. The full remarks, as prepared:

Leader Pelosi, members of the House and Senate, dear family and friends, fellow countrymen:

We meet again at democracy’s great port of call.  Every two years, at this hour, the Constitution brings a new order to this House.  It is an interlude for reflection, a glimpse of old truths.

To our new members and their families, welcome.  You are likely feeling awestruck right about now. History runs through here.  And now you are among a select few to share in this privilege.

For those who are returning, who have walked these aisles before, maybe it’s time we feel awestruck again.

The way our founders envisioned it, the republic would be led by citizens who recognize that the blessing of governing ourselves requires that we give something of ourselves.  Everything depended on this.  So they made each other – and their successors – swear an oath of allegiance.

In a few moments, I will take this oath for the twelfth time as representative of the Eighth District of Ohio. It is word for word the same oath we all take.

Note that it makes no mention of party, faction, or title . . . contains no reference to agendas or platforms – only to the Constitution

The one addition we dare to make, as George Washington did at the first inaugural, is to invoke the assistance of our Heavenly Father.

This covenant makes us servants of posterity.  It calls us to refuse the pull of passing interests and follow the fixed star of a more perfect union.

Put simply, we are sent here not to be something, but to do something – to do the right thing.

It’s a big job, and it comes with big challenges.

Our government has built up too much debt.  Our economy is not producing enough jobs.  These are not separate problems.

At $16 trillion and rising, our national debt is draining free enterprise and weakening the ship of state.

The American Dream is in peril so long as its namesake is weighed down by this anchor of debt. Break its hold, and we begin to set our economy free.  Jobs will come home.  Confidence will come back.

We do this not just to boost GDP or reduce unemployment, but to secure for our children a future of freedom and opportunity.  Nothing is more important.

As Washington wrote in his farewell address, we should not ‘throw upon posterity the burden which we ourselves ought to bear.’

Well, the burden is ours and so is the opportunity.

There is no substitute for the wisdom of the people.  We are their servants.  As Speaker, I pledge to listen and do all I can to help you carry out the oath you are about to take.

Because in our hearts, we know it is wrong to pass on this debt to our kids and grandkids.  Now we have to be willing – truly willing – to make this right.

Public service was never meant to be an easy living. Extraordinary challenges demand extraordinary leadership.

So if you have come here to see your name in lights or to pass off political victory as accomplishment, you have come to the wrong place.  The door is behind you.

If you have come here humbled by the opportunity to serve; if you have come here to be the determined voice of the people; if you have come here to carry the standard of leadership demanded not just by our constituents but by the times, then you have come to the right place.

There is a time for every purpose under Heaven. For the 113th Congress, it is a time to rise. When the day is over, and the verdict is read, may it be said that we well and faithfully did our duty to ensure freedom will endure and prevail.

So help us God.

You might recall that last time around, John Boehner gave a sackcloth and ashes speech, talking about Ash Wednesday, as he took the gavel of Speaker. It’s as if this time, we’ve made it through Lent without noticing the suffering and injustices, and he’s saying: Damn it, people, we are going to answer for our time here. As we should. 

At the very beginning, he ad-libbed a line about his daughters thankfully being at work and therefore not in attendance. Some took it as a laugh line. It sounded more like a focus on the crosses of too many Americans, crosses that Congress sometimes could help with. And yet . . .

The speech sounded like a man looking at his own cross and pleading with his colleagues to take up theirs as well. 

“So help us God.”

2nd and C Street, S.E. — “I want to officially welcome you home,” Fr. William Byrne, pastor of St. Peter’s Catholic Church, said to members of Congress and their staff at an ecumenical, bipartisan prayer service this morning. “Whether you realize it or not, you are at the parish of Saint Peter’s when you are at your desk” on the Hill, he said, welcoming all.

The parish, whose motto is “To be a tangible manifestation of Christ in the community,” is just steps away from the Capitol. When the House is in session, congressmen join those worshiping at daily morning and afternoon weekday Masses. 

It was a truly ecumenical gathering: Not only were John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi — both Catholics — there, but Eric Cantor, who is Jewish, and Keith Ellison, who is Muslim, both read during the prayer service, as well as a host of Protestants, from James Clyburn to James Lankford (Okla.).

Congress struck a humble note this morning as Representative Clyburn prayed that “we walk by faith and not by sight,” asking God to “order our steps and clothe our thoughts.”

The service posed all sorts of challenges, as readings and reflections focused on the call to serve. Fr. Patrick J. Conroy, a Jesuit priest, who serves as chaplain of the House reflected in particular on a reading from Genesis, where Abraham bathes and feeds three strangers who show up at his door, to drive home that they are in Congress as servants.

Keep reading this post . . .

A source familiar with the negotiations between Al Gore’s Current TV and Glenn Beck’s The Blaze TV tells National Review Online that, while talks between the two companies were congenial, the immediate feedback was that “Al Gore cannot sell to Glenn Beck.” “They wanted to sell to somebody they are ideologically in line with,” he said. 

In a statement on the sale, Gore said that Al Jazeera and Current TV are similar in the sense that both were founded “to give voice to those who are not typically heard; to speak truth to power; to provide independent and diverse points of view; and to tell the stories that no one else is telling.”

In the course of a 17-minute monologue on his radio show earlier today, Beck said of Gore, “He didn’t sell to the highest bidder. We were not allowed to the table.” He added, “I am proud to say that Al Gore finds my principles reprehensible but aligns his principles with Al-Jazeera.”

The complete monologue is below: 

Today, a new Congress is being sworn in. Sometimes, though, one wonders what is the point of it all. Per the Santa Cruz Sentinel:

A new immigration policy will make it easier for hundreds of Central Coast families to stay together while spouses and children work to obtain green cards.

The policy, announced Wednesday by the Obama administration and effective March 4, allows immigrants who entered the country illegally to remain in the United States during a waiver process that typically takes up to a year to complete.

…

The policy shift is the latest in a series of executive changes made by the Obama administration as it seeks broader immigration reforms in the coming year, including a path to citizenship for nearly all the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants.

On Dec. 21, the president directed officials to stop detaining undocumented immigrants arrested for minor crimes or infractions.

In August, he eased rules for young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. Since then, more than 300,000 have applied for green cards nationwide. Keegan said his office has submitted applications for the 300 to 400 youths from Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito counties.

If these ever-changing immigration rules are indeed a legitimate use of executive discretion, then perhaps the president might tell us what would not be? Along with most of the American public — not to mention Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution — I was under the distinct impression that immigration law was a federal responsibility and that its provisions were to be determined by the U.S. Congress, and not by the executive branch. If there is scope for the White House to make law after all, then the president might be so good as to delineate clearly what is within his purview and what is not.

Perhaps, he could start by reviewing his notes from the summer of 2011:

President Obama told Hispanics today he is with them on overhauling the nation’s immigration laws — but he won’t use executive orders to alter the law on things such as deportations.

“Now, I know some people want me to bypass Congress and change the laws on my own,” Obama told members of a National Council of La Raza conference who shouted back, “Yes, you can! Yes, you can!”

“That’s not how our democracy functions,” Obama responded. “That’s not how our Constitution is written.”

Obama, locked in a fight with Congress over the federal debt ceiling, joked, “Believe me, the idea of doing things on my own is very tempting, I promise you. Not just on immigration reform.”

“But that’s not how,” the president said. “That’s not how our system works.”

No, Mr. President. It’s damn well not.

Twenty-two years after economist Julian Simon won his historic bet with enviro-doomsayer Paul Ehrlich over whether the price of five scarce metals would rise or fall — Simon won because, as he had forecast, prices fell substantially (because known reserves increased) over the period 1980 to 1990 — Nigel Lawson, one of Margaret Thatcher’s two great finance ministers, won a similar bet over the Kyoto Treaty with Cameron Cabinet Minister Oliver Letwin.

The bet was made in the course of a debate between the two men, both leading Tory intellectuals, over Kyoto and global warming in the July 2008 issue of Standpoint. Benny Peiser takes up the story:

Oliver Letwin: Nigel can’t know whether there is going to be a successor to Kyoto.

Nigel Lawson: Well, look, there’ll be an international agreement in the sense that there will be platitudes. The acid test is: will there be an agreement to have binding cutbacks for all participants on their carbon emissions? Instead of arguing about it, we could have a wager on it.

Oliver Lewtin: I’d be very happy to have a wager, and I offer you a £100 bet that before either of us is dead, whichever is the first — our estates can pay — we will see a very substantial agreement on carbon reduction.

Nigel Lawson: But I don’t think I want the bet to be “in my lifetime” because I’d like to get the £100. I’m sorry it’s such a modest amount you’re prepared to wager — it shows how unconfident you are — but I would like to be able to collect before I die. So I think we should say “by the time Kyoto runs out”, because there is meant to be no hiatus; there is meant to be a successor to Kyoto. So “by 2012 we will have the agreement” — maybe I’ll die before then, of course —but 2012 is the acid test.

2012 ran out two days ago, as did the original Kyoto agreement. No new international agreement on CO2 emissions has replaced it. Meanwhile Canada, Russia, and New Zealand have officially left Kyoto while Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan threaten to do so as well. Oliver Letwin, like the gentleman he is, has now conceded that Lawson has won the bet. So this story ends well.

Lawson’s bet always looked a good one because it reflected economic realities. But how many bets do realists such as Simon and Lawson have to win before the world listens to them rather than to romantic intellectual doomsayers?   

A Louisville woman was arrested after allegedly attempting to buy iPads with food stamps. When that didn’t work, she allegedly took the devices and ran out of the store, assaulting a store clerk in the process. She was arrested while trying to pull the same thing off at another store. Perhaps she can convince the federal government to expand the federal government’s free cell phone program. I know one person who would be thrilled by that. 

Via Hot Air. 

Since President Obama’s election in 2008, gun sales have been brisk. Actually, that’s an understatement; they have been phenomenal. In jest, a number of gun stores have referred to the president as “Salesman of the Year” — for multiple years now.

Since the tragedy in Newtown, however, gun sales and specifically high-capacity magazine sales have taken a giant leap upward from what was already a rapid sales rate. A representative of one of the online sellers of high-capacity magazines recently stated they had sold in 72 hours as much product as they usually expect to sell in three and a half years. 

You might expect that being a supporter of gun rights, that I would be thrilled by this news. I actually have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I am gratified to see that a large chunk of the American public can distinguish the actions of a madman from the device that he used. The core problem is the madness; the weapon is merely one method of expressing that evil. I would also like to think that most of the people engaging in these panic-buying sprees are going to be contacting their members of Congress and saying, “Wait a minute — a gun ban is the wrong strategy to pursue.” (I would like to think that, but I also know that there are many gun owners who would rather wait in line at a gun store for 30 minutes and plunk down $500 rather than take five minutes to e-mail their congresscritters.)

But another side of this panic buying concerns me. Many of the people making these panic purchases have grown up around guns and are knowledgeable about them. But there are others who are not.

Keep reading this post . . .

TBM over at HistoryofEngland.com puts the present discontents in useful perspective:

No ordinary misfortune, no ordinary misgovernment, will do so much to make a nation wretched, as the constant progress of physical knowledge and the constant effort of every man to better himself will do to make a nation prosperous. It has often been found that profuse expenditure, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundations, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it. It can easily be proved that, in our own land, the national wealth has, during at least six centuries, been almost uninterruptedly increasing; that it was greater under the Tudors than under the Plantagenets; that it was greater under the Stuarts than under the Tudors; that, in spite of battles, sieges, and confiscations, it was greater on the day of the Restoration than on the day when the Long Parliament met; that, in spite of maladministration, of extravagance, of public bankruptcy, of two costly and unsuccessful wars, of the pestilence and of the fire, it was greater on the day of the death of Charles the Second than on the day of his Restoration. This progress, having continued during many ages, became at length, about the middle of the eighteenth century, portentously rapid, and has proceeded, during the nineteenth, with accelerated velocity. 

Macaulay (could he see it) would undoubtedly deplore the profuse expenditure, heavy taxation, and absurd commercial restrictions under which we now suffer. But his Whig or classical liberal faith offers an antidote to despair:

In every experimental science there is a tendency towards perfection. In every human being there is a wish to ameliorate his own condition. These two principles have often sufficed, even when counteracted by great public calamities and by bad institutions, to carry civilisation rapidly forward.

True, Macaulay was less sensitive than the Coleridge-Wordsworth-Arnold-Ruskin crowd of the moral and spiritual costs of progress, and like many classical liberals he failed to reckon with the way the great expansion of commerce and industry, valuable as it has been, overwhelmed older forms of order in the West, particularly those associated with community and common institutions.

That said, the modern liberal attempt to portray new forms of government intervention in the lives of private individuals as an effort to revive “community” and recover the world we have lost is wholly spurious. True community, the most intimate and local of civic forms, can never be created by something as clumsy as the administrative machinery of an immense nation-state. What one gets instead are laughable programs such as those of the British Tories under David Cameron, with their proposals for “a powerful Office for Civil Society to fight for the interests of charities and community groups,” to be staffed by the usual social-scientific experts battening on the largesse of Whitehall. Memo to liberals: Rethink your complacent theories about the ability of government to foster desirable forms of community.

Peter Orzag, President Obama’s former budget director said on CNBC this morning that, “I think the White House in this second-best world won that round, but by not insisting that the debt limit be tied to that package it’s entirely possible they’re going to win the week and lose the quarter. You can’t know yet until you see how February and March play out, and I think there’s no doubt they have somewhat less leverage than they did in the round that just completed.”

Planned Parenthood’s stock talking point against every effort made to disentangle taxpayer dollars from its abortion business is that lawmakers are “playing politics” with “women’s health.” However, as the situation surrounding the new Texas Women’s Health Program underscores, Planned Parenthood subordinates concern for women’s health to its increasingly radical pro-abortion agenda.

On New Year’s Eve, a Texas court ruled that the taxpayer-funded Women’s Health Program can go into effect without including abortion providers and their affiliates, denying Planned Parenthood’s request for a temporary restraining order to force its inclusion in the program. Over at the Huffington Post, it was reported that Ken Lambrecht, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas found it “shocking” that, as he describes, “Texas officials are letting politics jeopardize health care access for women.” But a look at the facts shows that, as usual, it is Planned Parenthood and its friends in the Obama administration, not Texas officials, who have been willing to jeopardize women’s health and access to care.

Early in 2012, after the Texas legislature voted (in 2011) to provide a meaningful separation between the abortion industry and taxpayer dollars, the Obama administration threatened to remove all federal funding from the Women’s Health Program. If the abortion industry was excluded, nobody was getting that money. The Obama administration’s bullying tactics (which it similarly employed when the state of Indiana passed a law to prevent taxpayer subsidization of abortion providers) demonstrated that its chief concern is the abortion industry’s bottom line, not the women served by the health-care program.

Perhaps to the surprise of Planned Parenthood and its White House friends, Texas did not cave to the pressure. But unlike the Obama administration, Texas refused to use the lower-income women who utilize the Women’s Health Program as political hostages. Instead, Texas has created a new Women’s Health Program funded entirely by state dollars.

Significantly, as Texas launches its new Women’s Health Program, free of abortion providers, Planned Parenthood is ringing in the New Year by disassociating itself from any affiliates unwilling to provide abortions.

In its legal complaint filed against the State of Texas, Planned Parenthood confirmed that the “marching orders” for its affiliates are that they must be abortion providers to be part of Planned Parenthood. “[Planned Parenthood Federation of America] does not provide abortion care itself, but its member affiliates offer that service throughout the United States and as of January 2013, all member-affiliates will be required to do so.”

Keep reading this post . . .

Turns out that even the urgent nature of passing the fiscal cliff legislation didn’t prevent legislators from cramming in some goodies. Senator John McCain issues a statement deploring the extras in the fiscal cliff bill:

·         $430 million in tax breaks for Hollywood film and TV producers

·         $70 million in tax incentives for NASCAR track builders

·         $59 million in tax credits for algae growers

·         $15 million in subsidies for asparagus growers

·         $7 million for buyers of 2- or 3-wheel electric scooters

“It’s hard to think,” McCain said, “of anything that could feed the cynicism of the American people more than larding up must-pass emergency legislation with giveaways to special interests and campaign contributors.”

Fox News correspondent Justin Fishel covers the State Department and the Pentagon and, in that capacity, he asked State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland the following question in a December 17 briefing: 

Toria, can you expand on why Secretary Clinton can’t testify on Thursday about this? It seems that she has not been available to testify on the Benghazi situation on some very key dates, including the Sunday after 9/11 and now this Thursday.

He received a straightforward response: 

Well, first of all, Justin, let me say again, the Secretary had anticipated testifying; she had committed to do so with the two committee chairs. As we put out on Saturday, she is still under the weather. She was diagnosed as having suffered a concussion, and her doctors have urged her to stay home this week. So it’s on that basis that she’s asked for the committees’ understanding, and the two committees have been very understanding to have her two deputies come up this week to testify in open session as they will on Thursday. But it was her intention to be there. If she had not been ill, she would be there. And she’s also committed, including in a letter today to the committee chairmen, that she looks forward to having an ongoing conversation with them herself.

Yet, following the briefing, Clinton adviser and spokesman Philippe Reines, who has developed a reputation for his attitude and who apparently found Fishel’s question untoward, fired off the following missive. According to the Washington Post, Reines also got Fox’s D.C. bureau chief Bryan Boughton in on the action:  

Justin –

We owe you an apology. And I’m adding Bryan so he’s aware of how badly we erred. I’m almost embarrassed to even admit this – but somehow your question at today’s Daily Press Briefing was somehow completely mauled and transcribed in the release below this way:

“Toria, can you expand on why Secretary Clinton can’t testify on Thursday about this? It seems that she has not been available to testify on the Benghazi situation on some very key dates, including the Sunday after 9/11 and now this Thursday.”

I just called them and read them the riot act for putting such misleading, accusatory, and absolutely asinine words in your mouth. Because after what we and her doctors explained over the weekend regarding her health, you couldn’t possibly have been insinuating the ulterior motives that question implies. No way. No credible journalist would do that without any basis whatsoever. But even more so, I really went to bat for you with folks here and told them that while I know the media can often be incredibly self-involved, there is no way you, an informed reporter, would equate one’s testifying before the United States Congress – made up of duly elected Senators and Representatives empowered by Article I of our Constitution – with going on tv. I don’t know Chris Wallace all that well, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t place his television show on par with one of the three branches of our government. And therefore, saying that this has happened on multiple ‘key dates’ is simply a blatant lie and grossly misleading to the public.

Anyway, our sincere apologies. If you send us what you really said, I’ll make sure it’s properly reflected.

Best,

Philippe

The State Department announced on December 15 Secretary Clinton had fainted and suffered a concussion; two days later, there was rampant speculation about her condition it in the media, and in particular on Fox News. This incident occurred before Clinton was admitted to a New York City hospital after suffering from a blood clot in her brain. 

Reines last made headlines back in October, when he responded to Buzzfeed reporter Michael Hastings’s inquiries about the Benghazi attack — which themselves weren’t a model of diplomacy – by telling him to “f*** off.”