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http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/340499

COOLEST CAL
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Coolidge by Amity Shlaes (Feb 12, 2013)

‘Even when small, the boy saw politics firsthand,” Amity Shlaes writes of Calvin Coolidge. “At town meetings, it was his father who worked or spoke; Calvin sold apples and popcorn at the meetings, as his father had before him. The villagers noticed early that Calvin was always quiet; when someone played the violin, he would not dance, but was always observant.” Good thing he discovered early on that “politics somehow afforded distraction from loneliness,” because that diligence would serve the 30th president of the United States well. Shlaes, author of the new book Coolidge, talks to National Review Online about Coolidge and what we might learn from him.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: What’s so cool about Coolidge?

AMITY SHLAES: Today we care about budgets more than anything. Our American future hangs on the ability of government to cut budget.

Coolidge cut the budget, and even better, cut it during peace and prosperity. He left a federal budget lower than the one that greeted him when he arrived in office. He managed to freeze or cut the budget over more than five years in office. If you look at charts of presidents — Nixon, Ike, and Reagan — you see them failing on this score.

What else is cool? Coolidge was a pragmatist. He didn’t start out with a tax theory. But he observed over time that lower tax rates sometimes brought in extra revenue. The success of his and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon’s experiment with rate cuts has been obscured by our modern history books. But that success was real, and it was fun to get close to it. A book to read after Coolidge? Taxation: The People’s Business, by Mellon.

LOPEZ: What drew you to him?

SHLAES: First: Coolidge is the forgotten president, and this book is the prequel to my book on the 1930s, The Forgotten Man. If Coolidge were a stock, he’d be a buy. The experts have historically ranked Coolidge in the bottom quartile or bottom half of all presidents. But his economic performance and his statesmanship suggest Coolidge belongs in the top quarter of presidents. The disparity between the Coolidge price and Coolidge value is huge. So revision is warranted.

Second: The economics. We know that the economic theory of those days was different. Then, bankers, business people, teachers, journalists, and, yes, even some farmers believed that money must be stable, and that the individual mattered more than the aggregate. Macroeconomic theory didn’t really exist, and if people like Calvin Coolidge had heard about it, they would have been suspicious. Their theories yielded some pretty good results: There was strong growth under the gold standard, as studies at the Bank of England have shown. But making the case for pre-Keynesian economics would be dry work. So instead I tried to convey what they knew through someone from their time, a president. Coolidge is an economic bildungsroman — “The Education of Calvin Coolidge.”

Third: Coolidge was the pre-incarnation of Robert L. Bartley, the late editorial-page editor of the Wall Street Journal. Both had that combination of political wisdom, city wisdom, and farmer wisdom. Coolidge was from Vermont; Bartley from Ames, Iowa. Both rationed their words. But both had a wonderful sense of humor: As far as I can tell, Coolidge even cackled like Bartley. Since I worked for Bartley for 17 years, meeting Coolidge on paper or video was a shock. Here was a man I already knew.

While writing Coolidge, I discovered that Clarence Barron, one of the founders of the WSJ, backed Coolidge strongly, even cheering him up when he worried over unions. “Wall Street doesn’t care about the coal strike,” Barron told Coolidge. The WSJ’s obit for Coolidge is stunning. And Barron led the fund drive for Coolidge’s favorite non-profit post presidency, his wife’s charity, the Clarke School for the Deaf.

LOPEZ: Is Calvin Coolidge a political model for our day?

SHLAES: Yes. In a way, he’s better than Reagan. His tax rates were lower, and he cut budgets.

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/340481 A Speech Worthy of Booker T. Washington Benjamin Carson’s and Barack Obama’s differences are about more than policy. In an earlier era, Benjamin Carson’s speech before the National Prayer Breakfast last week would have been a really big deal rather than mere fodder for a brief squall on Twitter and cable news. Born in […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323696404578300680529770600.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
The President’s Plans
Obama offers an agenda aimed at electing a Pelosi House.

The big question of President Obama’s second term is whether he wants to forge bipartisan compromises in the next two years, or whether he wants to spend these years campaigning against Republicans to regain Democratic control of the House in 2014 and then finish his Presidency with another liberal crescendo. Judging by his inaugural address and Tuesday night’s State of the Union, we’re guessing he’s going for Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Mr. Obama’s second inaugural was a clarion call to “collective action,” as he put it, and Tuesday’s speech showed what he thinks that should mean in practice. “The American people don’t expect government to solve every problem,” he said, while proceeding to offer a new government program to solve every problem.

Not enough job creation? Have the feds set up 15 new “manufacturing hubs” where business can get government advice.

Decaying public works? How about a “Fix-It-First” plan to pay the unemployed to repair roads and bridges? Thus do the “shovel-ready” stimulus projects of the first term become the “most urgent repairs” of the second.

Lousy K-12 results? Have the feds finance pre-school for “every child in America.” A government study only recently found that any benefits from the current pre-school program, Head Start, wear off by third grade. But he’d still make it a universal entitlement.

Not enough money to subsidize electric cars or more Solyndras? Create a new Energy Security Trust, funded by taxing oil and gas companies.

Not all women earn as much money on average as men? Pass the Paycheck Fairness Act so government can unleash the trial lawyers to enforce equal pay.

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/

I HAVE USED THIS PRODUCT AND IT IS TASTY WAY TO SUPPORT ISRAEL…WITH A LITTLE FIZZ…..RSK
Cutting Through The BDS Lies: The Truth About SodaStream (video)
The fiends of the BDS movement and their leftwing NGO abettors have this Israeli company squarely in their sights. Judge for yourself whether it deserves to be demonised.
SEE: SODA STREAM….BUILDING BRIDGES NOT WALLS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl85AL1l0H0&feature=player_embedded

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Sitting in the CNN studio today, with an earpiece jammed in one ear and a microphone clipped to my jacket, the disembodied voice of some CNN guest urgently proposing that the government take advantage of historically low borrowing rates to invest in infrastructure howled in my ear. Without a monitor, the voice had no body belonging to it. It was the muse of liberalism. The idiot angel standing on the shoulder of Uncle Sam crying out, “Spend, spend, spend.”

In 1 Time Warner Circle, all the elevators play the CNN feed in small monitors. On the floor, there is more of the same. There’s no escaping CNN in the tower of the corporate parent of CNN. Like some cheap production of 1984, it’s everywhere and nowhere, one long commercial break for the country’s least popular news network, whose most famous figure is doing his talk show on Hulu, still in his trademark suspenders while his third-rate British replacement shrieks nightly about gun violence.

CNN is irrelevant, but in the ugly Time Warner Center, part shopping mall, part unfinished pile of construction equipment arranged to look like two skyscrapers, defacing the view outside Central Park, it’s all that matters. In the CNN bubble, it’s still vitally important and incredibly influential, even if its most influential moment in the last ten years consisted of two shameless doughy buffoons screaming at each other about gun control.

If America ever goes the way of CNN, then it too will be reduced to some badly designed urban skyscrapers full of important people talking importantly about issues while outside the world has moved on. The disembodied voice in the backlit wilderness cries out that we must invest more in infrastructure. “America built the Panama Canal. They said it couldn’t be done and it revolutionized commerce.”

But where exactly is our Panama Canal? For that matter, where after years of insane deficit spending is our anything? What infrastructure achievement has the shovel-ready administration managed to achieve? What has it done besides rename a few areas after politically correct figures and set up some monuments to the destructive energies of the left?

In December we learned that the National Park Service had spent $1.5 million to restore the graffiti on an Alcatraz water tower put there by leftist American Indian activists in the 70s. Their manifesto read, “We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for $24 in glass beads and red cloth.” But 24 bucks in tourist junk would be a bargain compared to $1.5 million spent during a recession to preserve the sort of leftist idiocy that trolls today leave in comments sections.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/al-gore-al-jazeera-and-the-gray-lady The New York Times isn’t called The Gray Lady for nothing. It has entered its 162ndyear of publication. Despite its falling daily circulation that hovers tenuously around one million, it is still regarded as the nation’s “newspaper of record.” It boasts a monthly tally of thirty million “visitors” to its online version. “Visitors,” however, […]

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/02/12/Gallup-Americans-Disapprove-of-Obama-on-Nearly-Every-Issue

According to a Gallup poll, 42% of Americans approve of Obama’s gun policies while 54% disapprove.

On taxes, 41% approve and 57% disapprove. On the economy, 39% approve and 60% disapprove. On “the situation in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” 36% approve and 55% disapprove.

And on the federal budget deficit, 31% approve and 65% disapprove.

The only area in which Obama gains the support of a majority is on “national defense” issues, but the poll was conducted before North Korea reportedly tested a nuclear weapon on Monday as Obama seeks to diminish America’s nuclear arsenal.

Gallup conducted its poll from Feb. 7-10.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2013/02/12/SOTU-Chris-Stevens-Was-Not-Even-Remembered In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama failed to mention the late Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the three other Americans who died on Sep. 11, 2012 in the terror attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. He mentioned the victims of the massacre in Newtown, CT in December, and invited the […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2692/_women_cause_rape_upon_themselves_says_egyptian_human_rights_committee Egypt’s Shura Council is blaming women and ‘Western values’ for an increasing number of rapes within protests in Tahrir Square gypt’s ‘Shura Council Human Rights Committee’ today addressed the recent wave of sexual harassment proliferating during mass protests, calling for specific places of protest for females in a move that is being interpreted as […]

http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2699/local_row_breaks_out_over_uk_council_twinning_with_palestinian_town

Officials and locals in the borough of Pendle, UK, have expressed concern over the twinning of the town with Beit Lid in the West Bank

Accusations of ‘Islamophobia’ and the wasting of resources have been levelled across partisan divides in the northern borough of Pendle in the United Kingdom, following a local government decision to utilise taxpayer resources to twin the town ‘in solidarity’ with the Palestinians of Beit Lid.

While twinning is a common part of establishing cross-border links, the contentious message being advocated by members of the Labour, Lib Dem and Green parties in Pendle is that the borough should twin with the Palestinian area because it has “had a hard time of it”.

Conservative councillors argued that the Israel-Palestine issue was one the council should not involve itself in. The advocates of the motion to twin called for the signing of an agreement as well as a motion to welcome the “observer status” of Palestine, granted by the UN. The motion also called for the council to condemn Israeli government plans to build settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

Heated discussions have involved the public intervention of residents and councillors, including one British National Party member stating, “I do not wish to see my area forever associated with a regime inseparably linked to terrorism”. This statement has been widely seen as unhelpful, as it has been interpreted as accusing ordinary Palestinians of being terrorists.

But the Pendle-Beit Leed group, represented politically as the Pendle for Palestine Twinning group, also has some explaining to do regarding its links in the UK. On January 28th 2012, the group announced a partnership with the Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association (CADFA), a group led by a man who has expressed support for Khader Adnan – a jailed terrorist leader from the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). The PIJ is a banned terrorist organisation under UK law, whose car and suicide bombings have murdered hundreds of Israeli Jews and Arabs.

CADFA stands accused of propagandising for the eradication of the Jewish State, with one screenshot of their presentations showing ‘Palestine’ as the entirety of Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Munir Nusseibeh, CADFA’s Chairman, has also led the group in supporting Hana Shalabi, whom they describe as a “political prisoner”. Shalabi is also a member of Palestinian Islamic Jihad.