Monday Morning Catch-up: The Alinsky President and the Fiscal Cliff

Small Craft Advisory: The Fiscal Cliff And The Alinsky President:

When one strictly adheres to the principles of Saul Alinsky, you don’t negotiate, you intimidate. You don’t take a stand, but make the other guy take a stand and then you demonize it. You create so much static with class warfare rhetoric that it drowns out reason and fact. A good case in point is the President’s insistence that the wealthy do not pay their fair share. He has been saying this for so long, it is almost an accepted fact by some. The real truth is that the top one percent of wage earners have gone from paying 20% of the total tax burden in the 1980s to 40% today. The percentage of the total income they earn is around 25%. If one extrapolates out the tax burden to include the top 10% of wage earners, the total share of the tax burden paid by that group is 70%. Their total percentage of the income earned is around 38%. These facts come straight from current IRS data.

No fair-minded person could conclude from the empirical evidence laid out in the previous paragraph, that the wealthy in this country are not paying their fair share. And yet, the President spews out this categorically false narrative and a certain percentage of the population laps it up like kittens lapping milk from a bowl. This is also what followers of Saul Alinsky practice, repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth in the minds of the masses.

The Alinsky President wouldn’t have gotten away it without his enablers in the Democrat party and the MSM (but I repeat myself) – it seems that the entire Democrat party have become students of Saul Alinsky – and they’re playing games rather than tell the American people the truth.

Big Government: Obama’s Fiscal Cliff and the Chicago Way:

A friend from Chicago, involved in Illinois politics who has known Obama since his early days in the Illinois State Senate, told me that two things that trump everything else in Obama’s mind: redistributing the wealth and empowering labor unions.  Look at everything the President does, my friend says, and you will find one or the other lurking in the background.

My friend’s analysis may explain a lot about the current state of affairs concerning the standoff over the so-called fiscal cliff and Obama’s refusal to abandon the idea that he must raise taxes on the rich. The President and his henchmen certainly understand that raising taxes on the richest 2% of taxpayers (in reality these people are not the richest but those with the highest incomes) makes little economic sense – doing so would reduce the deficit for 2012 from $1.10 trillion to $1.02 trillion or, in these numbers, really not at all. So something else is going on.

There is no question that there is plenty of politics going on, for one thing.  Obama didn’t learn how to play politics in Chicago for nothing, and he didn’t come out of his second successful presidential campaign without realizing how to hoodwink the voters while putting Republicans over a barrel.  As squishy Republicans begin to agree with him that maybe, just maybe, we could raise taxes just a little bit Obama understands that if he wins on this one, he’ll be able to push Congressional Republicans around for the rest of the Congress.

Daily Caller: Top Michigan Democrat urged Obama to cut state funding in order to kill right-to-work bill:

A top Michigan Democratic lawmaker urged President Obama to withhold federal funds for major state infrastructure projects in order to force Republican Governor Rick Snyder to veto the state’s controversial right-to-work bill.

Obama is travelling to Michigan Monday to deliver a speech on the budget at the Daimler Detroit Diesel plant in Redford, Michigan. The White House announced Obama’s visit last Thursday, the same day it released a statement opposing the Michigan right-to-work bill, which has passed both houses of the state legislature and which Snyder is expected to sign into law Tuesday.

The bill would free workers from requirements to pay dues to unions they do not belong to. The bill, which critics call a union-busting measure, would make Michigan the twenty-fourth “right-to-work” state.

Insiders believe Obama will address the right-to-work issue in his speech Monday, presumably as a ceremonial gesture for the auto unions that provided funding for his re-election campaign.

Red Alert Politics: Coburn to Democrats: “You can’t continue to lie to the American people” about fiscal cliff:

Sen. Tom Coburn is demanding that Democrats stop “playing the game” and cease lying to the American people about the proposed tax increase being the only solution to the fiscal cliff problem.

“As long as we continue to lie to the American people — that you can solve this problem without adjusting and working on [entitlement] programs — it is dishonest and beneath anybody in Washington,” he said on Sunday.

The Republican Senator from Oklahoma was part of a fiscal cliff roundtable on ABC‘s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,“ along with Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas).

During the roundtable, Coburn said he would be open to a tax increase if entitlement programs were also part of the deal. He said significant reform for those programs is necessary and cutting back on cost is the main way to do that. He called the President’s suggested tax increase a solution to only 7 percent of the problem, but said Congress needs to focus on the other 93 percent.

“What we have done is spend ourselves into a hole, and we’re not going to raise taxes and borrow money and get out of it,” he said.

But never fear, a solution to all of our debt problems has been found…

Big Journalism: Obama Could Mint $1 Trillion Platinum Coins to Avoid Debt Ceiling:

With American set to hit the debt ceiling again thanks to out-of-control government spending, the Washington Post has suggested a solution for President Obama: mint two platinum coins valued at $1 trillion each. What would this do? According to the Post:

 Thanks to an odd loophole in current law, the U.S. Treasury is technically allowed to mint as many coins made of platinum as it wants and can assign them whatever value it pleases.

Under this scenario, the U.S. Mint would produce (say) a pair of trillion-dollar platinum coins. The president orders the coins to be deposited at the Federal Reserve. The Fed then moves this money into Treasury’s accounts. And just like that, Treasury suddenly has an extra $2 trillion to pay off its obligations for the next two years — without needing to issue new debt. The ceiling is no longer an issue.

Wouldn’t those have to be really huge coins?

Ben Shapiro of Big Journalism notes that WaPofloated this idea shortly after meeting with Obama at the White House, along with MSNBC  hosts and members of Daily Kos.

Possibly another brilliant idea from that brain-storming session via Hot Air: MSNBC host: Energy is just too darn cheap:

This is a bit long, but worth the time. (Emphasis mine.)

Chris Hayes: We’re talking about the massive, extractive energy boom happening in America right now and how it’s transforming our politics and how that can be made to work with a sane climate policy, which is really the difficult question. Before the break I left the question on the table about the price of energy being too low right now. Basically we see this massive amount of supply has come onto the grid thanks largely to natural gas. The price has come down, and I think we generally think, “Oh, lower prices are better.” But it seems to me there’s a lot of problematic stuff about the price coming down sharply as it is right now in terms of incentives for efficiency and et cetera.

Dan Dicker:You would want the prices to go up a lot because it would drive the next stage towards renewables, and make that at least cost-effective. Algae fuel, we talk a lot about that…

C.H.: Some people talk about that.

D.D.: Yeah. The cost is about eight and a half to nine dollars a gallon compared to gasoline as it is now. You want the prices to go up to make these a little more cost effective. Drive the technology into them. Unfortunately it’s actually going quite the opposite. You talk about increased supply here in the United States. In fact, overseas demand is dropping. We are still in the midst of an economic problem in Europe. Chinese growth is going down. Indian growth seems to be going down. In this country we’ve done better in terms of efficiencies and our demands are starting to drop, so in terms of what economically you can expect, you will expect the opposite, or at least I do over the next several years, that oil prices will in fact go lower. Natural gas you can – because we have a futures market, we look forward to the future and see what people are betting the price is going to be. That doesn’t go over 5$ an MCF until 2020 according to the futures markets. So although you might want… we have to drive the renewable argument some other way, because price doesn’t look like it’s going to do it.

Frances Beinecke: Look, the only thing that’s going to change that is if we finally put a price on carbon.

C.H.: Right.

F.B.: The externals of all the fossil fuel development are not incorporated in the current price, so the environmental effects, the health effects, the consequences to communities, none of that is factored in. We have to change that, get a price on carbon, drive it up so we can promote renewables and efficiencies first and foremost.

Granted, these are the guests on the show talking here, but the nodding of heads around the table and the continued discussion demonstrates the unanimous attitude of the panel, including the host. So why would I make you sit through this? Because it’s important. And it’s important because it’s real, and we wind up having to be out there fighting against this tide every single day.

Video at Link…

Weasel Zippers: Shocker: Still No “Islamic Culture Center” At Ground Zero Mosque, Only A Mosque…

Via NY Post:

It’s all pray and no play.

The Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero that opened with great fanfare a year ago is now an empty space with no community programs.

And while the developers behind Park51 insisted for two years that the project was more than a mosque, it now appears to be just that. Dozens of worshipers gather at the site on Park Place Friday for prayer services — but that’s the only activity in the building.

Andrew McCarthy, NRO: Egypt’s Predictable Unraveling: The Brothers are playing for keeps.

As Egypt under the heel of Mohamed Morsi unravels, here’s the late-breaking news: The Muslim Brotherhood is the enemy of democracy.

This has always been obvious to anyone who took the time to look into it. Nevertheless, it has not been an easy point to make lo these many years. Even as the Justice Department proved beyond any doubt in court that the Brotherhood’s major goal in America and Europe — its self-professed “grand jihad” — is “eliminating and destroying Western civilization,” to have the temerity to point this out is to be smeared as an “Islamophobe.” That’s the Islamophilic Left’s code for “racist.”

Nor is it just the Left. Like the transnational progressives who hold sway in Democratic circles, many of the neoconservative thinkers who have captured Republican foreign-policy making encourage “outreach” to “moderate Islamists” — a ludicrously self-contradictory term. The idea is to collaborate in the construction of “Islamic democracies.” That’s another nonsensical term — to borrow Michael Rubin’s quote of a moderate Muslim academic piqued by the encroachments of Turkey’s ruling Islamists, “We are a democracy. Islam has nothing to do with it.” That is clearly right. Yet, to argue the chimerical folly of the sharia-democracy experiment is to be demagogued as an “isolationist.” It is as if the Right can no longer fathom an engaged foreign policy that concentrates solely on vital U.S. interests and treats America’s enemies as, well, enemies.

Doug Powers of Michelle Malkin: Ag Department: Those ‘exciting changes’ to school lunches aren’t working out so well:

I have two kids in high school and one in junior high, and though they take their own lunches on most days, I’ve heard stories from their friends about the quantity and quality of the new menu (the biggest complaint being that the new pizza with the whole wheat crust isn’t served with an antiemetic on the side). As it turned out, there was a national backlash over the new lunch menu.

The complaints have reverberated all the way back to Washington, and now the Ag Department is beating a quick retreat:

The Agriculture Department is responding to criticism over new school lunch rules by allowing more grains and meat in kids’ meals.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told members of Congress in a letter Friday that the department will do away with daily and weekly limits of meats and grains. Several lawmakers wrote the department after the new rules went into effect in September saying kids aren’t getting enough to eat.

School administrators also complained, saying set maximums on grains and meats are too limiting as they try to plan daily meals.