RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/brenner-brief/2013/oct/1/government-shutdown-and-assigning-blame-claims-ver/

The Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and President Barack Obama, are saying that the government shutdown is the fault of the Republicans. The mainstream media is regurgitating this talking point, particularly taking aim at the Tea Party.

However, the facts about this government shutdown tell a different story than the claims being made in chorus by the Democrats on Capitol Hill, the leftist pundits and the mainstream media.

CLAIM: The Democrats want a budget.

In Sept. 2012, Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) said that the Democrats had not passed a budget in three years. During the 2012 races, especially in the fall, Republican candidates repeated that statement while Democrat candidates said the claim was false. However, the often left-leaning PolitiFact Tennessee said that Corker’s claim was “true,” the highest ranking available on their truth-o-meter.

According to PolitiFact Tennessee:

“The U.S. House passed seven of the 12 annual appropriations bills this year [2012] and sent them to the Senate for consideration, according to the status report by Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee. The Senate Appropriations Committee also approved 11 of the 12 spending bills and sent them to the full Senate for consideration. An independent search by PolitiFact via the Library of Congress’ Thomas bill-tracking website confirmed the figures cited in the GOP report. But none of the bills approved by the House or the Senate Appropriations Committee were ever brought to the Senate floor for a vote.”

The Majority Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid (D-NV) in this case, decides whether to bring bills to the floor for consideration.

In March 2013, the Senate voted 50-49 to pass a budget that hikes taxes by nearly $1 trillion. Even The New York Times acknowledged that this was its first budget in four years. As The New York Times explained, the Democrat-created budget in the Senate left the government with a “$566 billion annual deficit in 10 years, and $5.2 trillion in additional debt over that window.” By contrast, the Republican-led budget in the House balanced the budget by 2023. This could have been an opportunity for negotiations.

The GOP leadership in the House has passed a budget every year, as required.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/2/harper-uns-latest-climate-report-buries-inconvenie/ Some inconvenient truths have emerged recently for those who argue man is to blame for excessive global warming, but most of the media tended to shrug at these and other facts. For example, temperatures throughout the world have remained relatively constant over the past 15 years. Also, the population of polar bears — the […]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/oct/2/editorial-a-needle-for-obama/ Samuel Johnson’s celebrated observation that nothing concentrates the mind like the prospect of hanging applies to nations, too. Benjamin Netanyahu reminded the delegates to the United Nations this week that Israel, surrounded by threats to its survival, pays close attention to both enemies and friends, particularly to friends of suspect reliability in the clutch. […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/are-americans-stupid?f=puball On the conservative side of the political spectrum, we frequently refer to liberals as “low information voters”, a nice way of saying they are stupid. From their point of view, however, we are the stupid ones. And not merely stupid, but evil. The divide between conservatives and liberals can be seen in the outcomes […]

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/my-national-schizophrenia I admit to being a national schizophrenic, an affliction I share with many others. As I look out of my living room window I can see the Statue of Liberty standing with a welcoming torch to this land of liberty. Nearby is Ellis Island, the place where my grandparents began their romance with America. […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/360227/print In a shocking case of “grotesque” misconduct by federal prosecutors, a federal judge in Louisiana has ordered a new trial for five New Orleans police officers convicted for a shooting on the Danziger Bridge on September 4, 2005 — in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — and for a subsequent cover-up. This is another […]

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/10/bibi-the-bad-cop/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=f9b8fcc282-Mosaic_2013_10_3&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-f9b8fcc282-41165129 ELLIOTT ABRAMS is Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser. Most of the world is applauding the thaw between the United States and Iran. Then there are the Arabs and Israelis. Their reaction is dread, and with good reason: neither trusts […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/360228/print

In a Bench Memos post, my friend Matt Franck objects to the contention in my column for last weekend that the Constitution’s Origination Clause (Art. I, Sec. 7) gives the House of Representatives primacy over spending as well as taxing. Matt claims that my interpretation is bereft of historical support, a defect I’m said to camouflage by an extravagant reading of an “at best . . . ambiguous” passage in Madison’s Federalist No. 58.

It is Matt’s history, though, that is incomplete. As Mark Steyn observes, there is a rich Anglo-American tradition of vesting authority over not merely taxing but also spending in the legislative body closest to the people. This tradition, stretching back nearly to the Magna Carta, inspired the Origination Clause. It also informed Madison, whose ruminations, besides being far from ambiguous on the House’s power of the purse, are entitled to great weight — not only because he was among the Constitution’s chief architects but also because his explication of the Framers’ design helped induce skeptics of centralized government and its tyrannical proclivities to adopt the Constitution.

Plainly, Matt is correct that the Origination Clause refers to “bills for raising revenue.” From the time it was debated at the Philadelphia convention, however, the concept at issue clearly referred to more than tax bills. It was about reposing in the people, through their most immediately accountable representatives, the power of the purse. Indeed, the term persistently used throughout the Framers’ debates was “money bills” — the phrase used by Elbridge Gerry, perhaps the principal advocate of the Origination Clause, when (as the debate records recount) he “moved to restrain the Senatorial branch from originating money bills. The other branch [i.e., the House] was more immediately the representatives of the people, and it was a maxim that the people ought to hold the purse-strings.”

Matt portrays my position as eccentric. Nevertheless, the belief that the Origination Clause conveys the House’s holding of the purse strings — i.e., that it refers to the output as well as the intake of government revenue — is hardly unique to me. The Heritage Foundation’s Guide to the Constitution, for example, notes that the clause was meant to be “consistent with the English requirement that money bills must commence in the House of Commons.” Traditionally, that requirement aggregated taxing with spending — the “power over the purse” — which the Framers sought to repose “with the legislative body closer to the people.”

Don’t Let the Unions Call the Tune
IATSE/Local One’s action has temporarily shuttered New York’s famed concert hall

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304176904579111810975642206.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5

Within hours of when its season-opening concert by The Philadelphia Orchestra was set to begin, Carnegie Hall was forced to cancel that performance Wednesday after its stagehands, represented by IATSE/Local One, went on strike. The unprecedented walkout follows a week of terrible news for classical music in the U.S., in which the music director of the Minnesota Orchestra resigned over its musicians’ contract disputes, and New York City Opera announced it was filing for bankruptcy, ending its 70-year run as “the People’s Opera.” The Philadelphia Orchestra, locked out of Carnegie and still recovering from its own bankruptcy, announced that it would instead present a free concert at its home in downtown Philadelphia.

The dispute at Carnegie Hall follows a year of negotiations that have centered on the expansion of Local One’s control from the Carnegie stage into the hall’s new education wing, set to open in fall 2014. “Carnegie Hall Corporation has spent or will spend $230 million on its ongoing studio tower renovation, but they have chosen not to appropriately employ our members as we are similarly employed throughout the rest of Carnegie Hall,” writes James J. Claffey Jr., president of Local One, in a statement to the press issued on the union’s website. “Carnegie Hall Corporation continued for 13 months to fail to acknowledge the traditional and historic work that we perform and after no significant progress, we found it absolutely necessary to take action to protect the members that we represent.”

In response, Carnegie says that the union’s demands would compromise the hall’s mission by diverting significant funds away from education into stagehand fees. “In opting to strike, the stagehands have rejected a proposed new agreement that includes annual wage and benefit increases and continued jurisdiction throughout Carnegie Hall’s concert venues.” Calling the demand “unprecedented,” Clive Gillinson, the executive and artistic director of Carnegie Hall, adds that “the stagehands have one of the most lucrative contracts in the industry,” and the planned activities for the education spaces “have nothing to do with the performance-related work they do in the concert halls.”

Mr. Gillinson’s reply only scratches the surface of frustration shared by arts organizations around the country in the grips of union control. For over a century, Local One has been collective-bargaining the life out of New York’s performing arts. Just how much does this union of carpenters, electricians and prop masters bleed from city arts organizations? Carnegie Hall’s tax returns for its 2010 season, its most recent publicly available records, suggest an answer. Non-profits are required to itemize the top compensation for its officers, directors, trustees, independent contractors and employees. At Carnegie, five of the top 10 earners are stagehands.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304176904579111331134686614.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop For people who claim that defaulting on U.S. debt is unthinkable, President Obama and Harry Reid are sure behaving as if they can’t wait for that day to arrive. Why else are they refusing to take up the multiple Republican offers to guarantee that the U.S. will never default? Treasury Secretary Jack Lew now […]