The signs are all around us. Even as Barack Obama and the Democrats lower their heads and prepare to bulldoze a huge new entitlement through Congress, the results of profligate government spending are everywhere apparent. It requires a prodigious degree of ideological blindness to miss this. In Greece, decades of lavish spending on public employees and social programs have led to national bankruptcy. Greece's budget deficit last year was 12.7 percent of GDP. Want to know what an economic dead end looks like? It looks like this: A socialist government is forced to try to adopt austerity...

Karl Marx insisted that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. It seems that at least some of California's teachers are determined to prove him right. Last week, teachers in the San Francisco area planned to take their students out of school in order to attend a protest about proposed cuts in education spending. According to a piece in the SF Public Press, children as young as five years old were slated to attend under the auspices of their schools, until the superintendent quashed the idea because of safety concerns. Aside from the disturbing specter of children...

Greece this past weekend saw the worst rioting since the debt crisis began. After Athens had announced new tax hikes and budget cuts to reduce a deficit of 13 percent of gross domestic product, mobs drove guards from Greece's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and attacked police. In our own country, students, teachers and administrators at UC-Berkeley held a "Strike and Day of Action to Defend Education" to demand more money from taxpayers -- for themselves. How badly are they suffering? According to Peter Robinson of Hoover Institution, California spends $13,000 per student in the...

Abraham Lincoln once asked an audience how many legs a dog has, if you called the tail a leg? When the audience said "five," Lincoln corrected them, saying that the answer was four. "The fact that you call a tail a leg does not make it a leg." That same principle applies today. The fact that politicians call something a "stimulus" does not make it a stimulus. The fact that they call something a "jobs bill" does not mean there will be more jobs. What have been the actual consequences of all the hundreds of billions of dollars that the government has...

A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears. She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide -- a fancy chemical name for water. A couple of comedians were behind this ploy. But there is nothing funny about its implications. It is one of the grim and dangerous signs of our times. This little episode revealed how conditioned we have become, responding like Pavlov's dog when we hear a...

As reported by The Washington Post, "President Obama's proposed budget would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, congressional budget analysts said Friday." CNN adds, "Of that amount, an estimated $5.6 trillion will be in interest alone." The Post continues: "The CBO (Congressional Budget Office) and the White House (are) ... both predicting a deficit of about $1.5 trillion this year -- a post-World War II record at 10.3 percent of the overall economy. But the CBO is considerably less optimistic about future years, predicting...

The biggest problem with last week's March 4 Day of Action to Defend Education, which was organized to protest cuts in California's education spending: The event showed how little educators and students value education. After all, if teachers believed that class time is sacrosanct, they would have scheduled the protests for a Saturday, not a school day. Of course, on a Saturday, educrats in schools like Oceana High in Pacifica, Calif., or San Francisco's Commodore Sloat Elementary could not have used other people's children as props for their politics. Fewer students would...

Googling to my heart's content on a recent eve, I decided to match "health care" with "ram" to see what would happen. What I got was about 9.8 million hits, some of them right on the nose and reflecting the current conservative meme that after more than a year, several votes, countless presidential speeches and having to look upon the face of Harry Reid some 10,000 times, the health care bill is being "rammed" through Congress -- an absurdity that now has currency through sheer repetition. It is not exactly the renowned vaunted Big Lie, just a miserable...

WASHINGTON -- The word "McCarthyism" is overused, but in this case it's mild. Liz Cheney, the former vice president's ambitious daughter, has in her hand a list of nine Justice Department lawyers whose "values" she has the gall to question. She ought to spend the time examining her own principles, if she can find them. A group that Cheney co-chairs, called Keep America Safe, has spent the past two weeks scurrilously attacking the Justice Department officials because they "represented or advocated for terrorist detainees" before joining the...

A big chunk of rock went missing from Mount Rushmore when Paul Volcker broke away in 2008 to stand stony-faced behind candidate Barack Obama. The former Federal Reserve chairman served as a reassuring presence from an older, more orderly financial era that had been sacrificed on the altar of deregulation. Volcker has since written the "Volcker rule," a formula for preventing another near-collapse of our financial system and accompanying government bailout. Not that Republicans and some "moderate" Democrats profess to see it that way. Flush with ever bigger piles of cash,...

"Stop messing with Texas!" That was the message Gov. Rick Perry bellowed on election night as he celebrated his victory over Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison in the Republican primary for governor. In his reference to Texas' anti-littering slogan, Perry was making a point applicable to national as well as Texas politics and addressed to Democratic politicians as well as Republicans. His point was that the big government policies of the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders are resented and fiercely opposed not just because of their dire fiscal effects but also as...

Pick your applicable New York cliché. Its politicians fall faster than a New York minute. Bad apples spoil the Big Apple. It's called Babylon for a reason. The phrase "scandal fatigue" is now floating around New York. What's that about a governor who might resign? Done that. What's that about the corrupted Harlem political kingpin? Old news. Sex scandal! Which one? New Yorkers pride themselves on having seen it all before. But even they were taken aback by the past week in state politics. Gov. David Paterson was forced to give up his reelection bid and...

The idea of jamming major legislation through Congress usually crops up whenever there's serious popular desire for change, and equally serious Congressional resistance. In the past, reconciliation has typically only ever made it to the table when one factor of Congress -- at the behest of special interests -- has set themselves squarely in the path of popular legislation, threatening its passage with delays, obfuscation, and parliamentary maneuvers. This has been true of just about every major fight I can recall, from gun safety measures to mandatory gas mileage requirements. In every...

WASHINGTON -- The "generation gap" endures as a staple of American political and social analysis. The notion that the special circumstances and experiences of each succeeding cohort imbue it with different perceptions, beliefs and values seems intuitively reasonable and appealing. It's also flattering. In a mass-market culture, belonging to a distinct subgroup, even if it numbers many millions, contributes to a sense of identity. In a 1969 Gallup poll, 74 percent of Americans believed in the generation gap. A poll last year found that 79 percent now do. Between then and now, of...

WASHINGTON -- In a city where the phrase "bipartisan initiative" is becoming an oxymoron, the urgency of containing the damage the Supreme Court could do to our electoral system creates an opportunity for a rare convergence of interest and principle. At issue is the court's astonishingly naive decision in January that allows unlimited corporate spending to influence elections. Its 5-4 ruling in the Citizens United case was a shocking instance of judicial overreach and reflected an utter indifference to how politics actually works. Liberals and Democrats are already mobilizing...

Does freedom matter? The short answer to that question, when I have asked various acquaintances of what I would call a "mildly liberal," or middle-of-the-road disposition, is: "Yes, but ..." This "but" may correspond to any of many suggested qualifications, and that is the first instructive thing. At best it is freedom versus order, or freedom versus equality, or freedom versus social security. Seldom has the position been thought through. Nor is the need for thought acknowledged. Under cross-examination, most appear to be seeking some kind of balance between...

Perhaps the surest sign an administration is in trouble comes when members of the president's political party start saying in public the president must shake up his staff. The Obama administration has accomplished the remarkable feat of alienating both most moderates and many left wingers. The moderates see what he's trying to do, and are frightened and angry. The moonbats note that he hasn't yet been able to do it, and are frustrated and angry. The head liberals would most like to see roll is that of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who, they think, is too willing to...

A year ago, President Barack Obama peered into our economic future and saw foam sealant and weatherstripping. In the midst of a punishing recession, Obama would wield that incomparable jobs-creating tool, the caulk gun. What the Works Progress Administration was to Franklin Roosevelt, the government-funded weatherization of homes would be to Obama. "If you allocate money to weatherize homes," Obama effused to an audience in Elkhart, Ind., "the homeowner gets the benefit of lower energy bills. You right away put people back to work, many of whom in the construction industry and...

WASHINGTON -- It is said, more frequently than precisely, that the reasons the Supreme Court gives for doing whatever it does are as important as what it does. Actually, the court's reasons are what it does. Hence, the interest in the case the Supreme Court considered last week. It probably will result in a routine ruling that extends a 2008 decision and renders dubious many state and local gun control laws. What could -- but, judging from the justices' remarks during oral argument, probably will not -- make the ruling momentous would be the court deciding that the two ordinances at...

WASHINGTON -- The cynical (and usually correct) critique of economic sanctions was summed up this way by a retired U.S. diplomat named Douglas Paal: "Sanctions always accomplish their principal objective, which is to make those who impose them feel good." The Obama administration is now struggling to craft a new round of U.N. sanctions against Iran that achieves more than this feel-good impact. The ambitious goal is "to cut off the revenues that fund Iran's nuclear and missile programs," says a senior administration official. "We are going to put as tight a...