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Jay Ambrose
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Jay Ambrose: Elmendorf is telling Congress, Obama some tough truths
Published: Jul 22, 2009
Douglas Elmendorf is hardly a household name. He’s just a smart, honest, non-partisan public servant currently telling unpleasant truths that could save the nation if enough people listen and take his message to heart.
Truth number one coming from this director of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is that the “federal budget is on an unsustainable path “ – debt is going to grow faster than the economy and the only answer is to cut spending, to do it dramatically, and to focus on the areas causing most of the problem: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Deficits won’t rescue us. Tax increases won’t rescue us. The two in combination...
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People for the Gutter Way and New Haven firefighters
Published: Jul 15, 2009
There’s a left-wing outfit in the country that calls itself People for the American Way, a name that amounts to a lie. Or at least let’s hope it’s a lie. Let’s hope it is not now the American way to attack a citizen’s reputation just because he stood up for his rights in a case reflecting poorly on a Supreme Court nominee.
The citizen is Frank Ricci, a New Haven, Conn., fireman. He is ambitious – he wanted a promotion – but he is also dyslexic, meaning that it’s hard for him to learn through reading. That’s why he had to rely on audio tapes to master material that would appear on a test, listening for countless hours everyday for...
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Socialism won't work for Obama, either
Published: Jun 02, 2009
In 1991, only days after the failed Soviet coup, a bunch of journalists, academics and others met with some gleeful Russians in Aspen. Not only had unrepentant Communist hardliners failed to oust Mikhail Gorbachev from power, but it was clear the whole Soviet system was failing apart. The visitors saw themselves as free at last.
They had capitalist aspirations – some were followers of Milton Friedman – and their hopes were as bright and optimistic as they were dull and pessimistic the very next year in a follow-up meeting.
Things had not worked out well because continued government underwriting of faltering enterprises had not produced any better results in a non-Marxist...
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Pork politics all that's needed to keep farm subsidies growing
Published: Apr 28, 2009
President Obama has been saying let’s go for it, let’s spend, spend, spend, but lately had a money-saving thought – to cut back by billions on farm subsidies. No sirree, Bob, said some congressional Democrats, quickly bringing that flirtation with fiscal responsibility to an end.
To be fair to the farm-state Democrats who stood tall for corporate welfare, it should be said that Obama officials were a bit too cute in their framing of the issue. They said we’ll continue to shovel funds to the little guy, while drawing the generosity line at those whose gross income is $500,000 and above. That makes it sound like you’re going exclusively after the rich, a...
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It was not torture, but it saved lives
Published: Apr 21, 2009
CIA agents once played rough with possibly 30 terrorists, and maybe they shouldn’t have, but they saved American lives that way. And if you say no, no, a thousand times no to playing rough in the future, you may be saying yes to thousands of deaths.
Admit that, at least, says Michael Hayden, a former CIA director whose voice on the subject is one of the clearest, most reasonable and knowledgeable you’re likely to hear. If you are against harsh, coercive interrogation techniques under any and all circumstances, that may be an honorable, courageous stance, he says, but only if you concede there could be a cost in American fatalities.
In releasing previously classified...
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Obama is being tested, as Biden predicted
Published: Apr 08, 2009
Don’t count them out yet, even though the North Koreans so far look like fools in attempting to show how they can fling nuclear doom all the way to the United States.
A communications satellite intended for the atmosphere instead went kerplunk in the deep, blue sea while they insisted that, no, it was up there, an orbiting jukebox broadcasting patriotic hymns to their sick, bed-ridden “dear leader,” Kim Jong Il.
You halfway expect Kim – also know as supreme leader, and, as far as I know, master of the universe and big daddy – to rise from that bed like some kind of mega-villain in a James Bond movie and slay the incompetents surrounding him.
But then again,...
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U.S. is sleep-walking to socialism
Published: Mar 31, 2009
President Barack Obama has just fired the chairman of General Motors, and if that doesn’t give you pause, here are some other interesting items.
The administration is trying to figure out how to seize troubled companies and the House threw a hissy fit aimed at undoing perfectly legal private contracts
“We own AIG,” said Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, speaking on behalf of the federal government as he tried to justify some sort of renewed, murderously angry French Revolution, this one in our country and aimed at executives receiving bonuses.
Unusual for him, Frank spoke some truth – the government is acting as if it owns much of the private economy. The most...
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Congress' treatment of AIG's Liddy was shameful
Published: Mar 24, 2009
What we need in Washington is someone as honest and brave as one of those sheriffs in Western movies who stands up to a lynch mob, making it clear he will put his own life on the line if necessary to prevent the unjust hanging of a prisoner.
Instead, when faced by public outrage over bonuses paid to employees of a company receiving billions in taxpayer bailouts, demagogic, cowardly, lying members of Congress have feigned outrage themselves, are leading the mob with a retroactive, authoritarian, unconstitutional demands, are utterly disgracing the institution they represent and are making our whole democratic system look like a farce.
It was an utterly despicable display when a House...
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Too many jobs going to illegal immigrants
Published: Mar 17, 2009
A janitor’s job opened up at an elementary school in Ohio, and within a week there were 839 applications. If that doesn’t tell our policy makers anything about a way to address the nation’s unemployment problems, I’ll help them out.
Hundreds of thousands of people are desperate for work at the moment. Many will do almost anything honest. Though this job paid $15 an hour, they’ll work for less than that if they have to.
But if menial positions don’t scare them away, something else sideswipes their hopes – illegal aliens who have already stolen work they’d like to have, who keep wages lower than they would otherwise be and who are...
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Obama's policies kill economic growth when it's needed most
Published: Mar 03, 2009
On top of everything else, President Barack Obama’s proposed $3.6 trillion, France-emulating, welfare-state, anti-individualist, redistributionist, future-threatening budget is based on erroneous understandings of all kinds.
For starters, its soak-the-rich tax proposals clearly assume that the rich aren’t paying their fair share, that the Bush tax cuts gave a mighty push to income inequality, that “trickle-down” economics stands revealed as a cruel farce and that revenue shortfalls resulted from this foolishness, increasing the size of the deficits.
In fact, many in the middle class received bigger rate cuts than higher income Americans. The top 1 percent...
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Liberals' debate quiver missing rational arguments
Published: Feb 17, 2009
Rush, rush, rush, spend, spend, spend, accomplish this thing. Undo years of work leading to successful welfare reform, jeopardize the future, claim there was no other choice. And then let President Barack Obama take off for a three-day vacation before affixing his signature to the document.
That document, of course, would be the stimulus package that just had to be done in such a hurry that there would be no time for anyone to learn what it contained, despite Obama’s promises of “transparency.”
Without blurring speed, we were told by the later lollygagging president, there would be a “catastrophe,” and, he intoned, the Republicans were offering up no...
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Now comes the hard part for Obama
Published: Jan 20, 2009
There’s the preview, then the movie. There’s the courtship, then the marriage. There’s the political campaign that excites the imagination, that awakens all sorts of expectations, that makes the voter halfway suppose all that’s wrong can be righted by this candidate, and then there’s the actual job being done.
This much can always be said – the campaign and holding the office are not the same. Some believers will feel betrayed no matter what paths are chosen, and then come all the other inevitabilities, such as chance intervening with noble purpose or the limitations of human intellect. And I hereby make a prediction: President Barack Obama’s 80...
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Never Give Up On The Best In America
Published: Dec 31, 2008
Think back to the end of 1999. We were looking ahead not just to the beginning of a new year, but to a new century and millennium. There was loudly voiced concern about something called Y2K and endless debate about when this new thousand years of history would actually begin, in 2000 or 2001.
Wise heads said it would be 2001, but that it was no big thing if people wanted to celebrate early. They noted that calendars do not dictate events despite various predictions and jokes about the coming of Armageddon, while adding that calendar-demarcated centuries do tend to take on special, even irrevocable identities as world-changing events occur.
A disastrous Y2K computer foul-up did not...
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New York Times, Meet The New York Times
Published: Dec 24, 2008
The paper really ought to know what its past stories have said before it tries again to paint George W. Bush as the worst president in this country’s experience, if not the worst leader in world history.
A recent effort climbed over all sorts of difficult obstacles in making it seem that a chief factor causing the current financial mess – housing mortgagers extended to bad risks – was Bush’s fault. The story offered various qualifications, telling us at one point that there “were plenty of culprits” besides Bush, but there is no getting around its prosecutorial tone.
For starters, it was showcased with a three-column color photo, above the fold on the...
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