House GOP Blinks: Will Lift Debt and Reopen Government (+video)

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Photo Credit: Reuters House Republicans have sent the White House a revised proposal to lift the debt ceiling for six weeks, as well as reopen government through December 15th, which was their original spending proposal before the partial shutdown. The revised GOP plan reflects the demands Obama made in a meeting with House GOP Leaders on Thursday. It also reflects the unwillingness of the DC GOP to face a fiscal showdown with Democrats.

Aside from reopening the government and agreeing to raise America’s debt over the current $16.7 trillion limit, the Republicans made several other concession to President Obama and the Democrats. One such example is that Obamacare would receive funding. The Republicans would get to take out a portion of the president’s signature legislation, but the law would substantially remain intact. The AP reports:

Under a proposal she and other GOP senators have been developing, a medical device tax that helps finance the health care law would be repealed, and millions of individuals eligible for subsidies to purchase health insurance under the program would be subject to stronger income verification.

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Tavis Smiley: ‘Black People Will Have Lost Ground in Every Single Economic Indicator’ Under Obama (+video)

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Photo Credit: Fox Screenshot PBS’s Tavis Smiley made a comment Thursday that every African-American as well as liberal media member should sit up and take notice.

Appearing on Fox News’s Hannity, Smiley said, “The data is going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category” (video follows with transcript and commentary):

HANNITY: Are black Americans better off five years into the Obama presidency?

SMILEY: Let me answer your question very forthrightly. No, they are not. The data is going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category. On that regard, the president ought to be held responsible.

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Rand Paul Warns of War on Christianity (+video)

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By Garth Kant.

“You won’t hear much about it on the evening news,” warned Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., “but there is a worldwide war on Christianity.”

The senator chose to highlight the danger of radical Islam in his speech before the Values Voter Summit Friday morning.

Paul explained the war on Christianity is not making the headlines it should because the “narrative is not convenient” to the establishment media.

“The president tries to gloss over who’s attacking and killing Christians. The media describes the killings as ‘sectarian.’”

But the truth, said the senator, is war is being waged on Christians “by a fanatical element of Islam.”

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Photo Credit: Daily CallerRand Paul shames media for ignoring ‘worldwide war on Christianity’

By Alex Pappas.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul spent Friday morning telling stories to conservatives about the persecution of Christians across the world.

“Today I want to tell you about a war the mainstream media is ignoring,” the Republican lawmaker said Friday during the Values Voter Summit in Washington. “From Boston to Zanzibar, there is a worldwide war on Christianity.”…

Examples referenced by Paul:

Referencing an incident in Syria, Paul spoke of Islamic rebels storming into town and demanding everyone convert to Islam or die. “Sarkis el Zakhm stood up and answered them, ‘I am a Christian and if you want to kill me because I am a Christian, do it.’ Those were Sarkis last words.”

“Elsewhere in Syria, Islamic rebels have filmed beheadings of their captives and celebrated by eating the heart of an enemy soldier,” Paul said. “Two Christian bishops have been kidnapped and one priest recently killed.”

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More Conservative, Less Republican

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Photo Credit: National Review The conservative project has two main parts: first, winning the argument, and, second, winning elections. The first is a job for what we call the conservative movement, meaning everything from magazines such as National Review to think tanks, advocacy groups, talk radio, and book publishers; the second is mainly the job of the Republican party and organizations such as the Club for Growth, which helps to ensure that victories for Republicans are victories for conservatives. There’s always a great deal of tension between those two goals, as we can see in everything from the current intramural fight over shutdown tactics to the ongoing debate over how much weight we should give to philosophical rigor versus “electability” when it comes to the nomination of candidates. NR’s principle of supporting the most conservative viable candidate is a way to try to balance those priorities, but the best way of proceeding under that guideline is not always self-evident.

That conundrum is worth thinking about right now in light of this astonishing fact: When it comes to the policy opinions of American voters, there have been three peak years for conservatism: 1952, 1980, and . . . right now, according to Professor James A. Stimson, whose decades-long “policy mood” project tracks the changing opinions of the U.S. electorate. Americans have grown more conservative on the whole, but the even more remarkable fact is that the electorate has grown more conservative in every state. As Larry Bartels points out in the Washington Post, the paradoxical fact is that Barack Obama was first elected in a year in which the American policy mood already was unusually conservative, and he was reelected in a year in which it had grown more conservative still. And so the question: Why did an increasingly conservative electorate elect and reelect one of the most left-wing administrations, if not the most left-wing, in American history?

That seeming paradox may be explained in part by the fact that the American public’s increasingly conservative views are not associated with an increased sense of identification with the Republican party. In late January 2004, Gallup found a Republican/Democrat split of 31 percent to 33 percent in the Democrats’ favor, with more identifying as independent (35 percent) than as a member of either party. In September of this year, those numbers were 22/31/45. Add in the “leaners” — those who do not strictly identify with one party but generally are inclined toward its views — and the GOP was at a 44/51 disadvantage in 2004, and today is at a 41/47 disadvantage. Which is to say, the Republicans lost 3 percent who didn’t move to the Democrats, and the Democrats lost 4 percent who didn’t move to the Republicans. Independents jumped from 35 percent to 45 percent during that period.

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MSNBC President Wants ‘Investigation’ Into Fox News’ ‘Impossible’ Ratings Gain

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Photo Credit: Frederick M. Brown/Getty ImagesMegyn Kelly blew out Rachel Maddow in the key demo on Tuesday after losing to her the night before. “I have never seen it in all my years of cable,” says Phil Griffin.

Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC, says there’s something fishy about Tuesday’s ratings for the Fox News Channel, which were up significantly from a day earlier when Fox News debuted its new schedule. And he wants an investigation.

“Monday we had a really good day in the key demographic. On the night that Fox News debuted their three shows, we either tied or beat them in those hours,” Griffin said at a briefing, according to TVNewser.

“Tuesday — you guys should be doing some investigations; I have never seen it in all my years of cable — same overnight, same everything. And they doubled their ratings in a day? It is impossible.” Griffin continued, “I have never seen it. They did election-night numbers in the demo Tuesday.”

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Park Service Paramilitaries

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Photo Credit: National Review If a government shuts down in the forest and nobody hears it, that’s the sound of liberty dying. The so-called shutdown is, as noted last week, mostly baloney: Eighty-three percent of the supposedly defunded government is carrying on as usual, impervious to whatever restraints the people’s representatives might wish to impose, and the 800,000 soi-disant “non-essential” workers have been assured that, as soon as the government is once again lawfully funded, they will be paid in full for all the days they’ve had at home.

But the one place where a full-scale shutdown is being enforced is in America’s alleged “National Park Service,” a term of art that covers everything from canyons and glaciers to war memorials and historic taverns. The NPS has spent the last two weeks behaving as the paramilitary wing of the DNC, expending more resources in trying to close down open-air, unfenced areas than it would normally do in keeping them open. It began with the war memorials on the National Mall — that’s to say, stone monuments on pieces of grass under blue sky. It’s the equivalent of my New Hampshire town government shutting down and deciding therefore to ring the Civil War statue on the village common with yellow police tape and barricades.

Still, the NPS could at least argue that these monuments were within their jurisdiction — although they shouldn’t be. Not content with that, the NPS shock troops then moved on to insisting that privately run sites such as the Claude Moore Colonial Farm and privately owned sites such as Mount Vernon were also required to shut. When the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway declined to comply with the government’s order to close (an entirely illegal order, by the way), the “shut down” Park Service sent armed agents and vehicles to blockade the hotel’s driveway.

Even then, the problem with a lot of America’s scenic wonders is that, although they sit on National Park Service land, they’re visible from some distance. So, in South Dakota, having closed Mount Rushmore the NPS storm troopers additionally attempted to close the view of Mount Rushmore — that’s to say a stretch of the highway, where the shoulder widens and you can pull over and admire the stony visages of America’s presidents. Maybe it’s time to blow up Washington, Jefferson & Co. and replace them with a giant, granite sign rising into the heavens bearing the chiseled inscription “DON’T EVEN THINK OF PARKING DOWN THERE.”

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California Gov. Vetoes Semi-Automatic Rifle Ban

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Photo Credit: Townhall Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill Friday that would have imposed the nation’s toughest gun ownership restrictions on Californians, saying it was too far-reaching.

The legislation would have banned future sales of most semi-automatic rifles that accept detachable magazines, part of a firearms package approved by state lawmakers in response to mass shootings in other states.

It was lawmakers’ latest attempt to close loopholes that have allowed manufacturers to work around previous assault weapon bans. Gun rights groups had threatened to sue if the semi-automatic weapons ban became law.

“I don’t believe that this bill’s blanket ban on semi-automatic rifles would reduce criminal activity or enhance public safety enough to warrant this infringement on gun owners’ rights,” the Democratic governor wrote in his veto message.

He also noted that California already has some of the nation’s strictest gun and ammunition laws.

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Senior Pakistan Taliban Commander Captured in Afghanistan

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Photo Credit: APThe State Department has confirmed that U.S. troops have captured a senior Pakistani Taliban commander in Afghanistan.

Deputy spokesperson Marie Harf told reporters Friday that U.S. forces nabbed Taliban terrorist leader Latif Mehsud in a recent military operation. Harf said Mehsud served as a senior deputy and trusted confidant of Pakistan Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud.

The Islamic extremist group claimed responsibility for the attempted bombing in New York’s Times Square in 2010 and has vowed to attack the U.S. again, according to Harf. She went on to say the group has also attacked U.S. diplomats and “countless” civilians in Pakistan.

The capture could be a significant blow to the Pakistani Taliban, which has waged a decade-long insurgency against Islamabad from sanctuaries along the Afghan border. They have also helped the Afghan Taliban in its war against U.S-led NATO troops in Afghanistan.

Latif Mehsud was arrested by American forces as he was driving along a main highway in eastern Logar province’s district of Mohammad Agha, said the Logar governor, Arsallah Jamal. The road links the province with the Afghan capital, Kabul.

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The Morning After America’s Debt Binge

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Photo Credit: Frugal Cafe/Reason.comPresident Barack Obama is adamant that he will not be held “hostage” by the Republicans in the House of Representatives, who are threatening not to raise the U.S. debt ceiling without some concessions on future spending and Obamacare. If the debt limit is not raised, allowing the Treasury Department to borrow more money, the federal government will default on some of the bills it owes in the next couple of weeks. Lots of commentators believe that such a default would have significant, if not devastating, downside economic effects.

Maybe so. But we should also want to consider the ways a relentlessly rising level of debt could damage our economic prospects. The debt ceiling for the United States is currently set at $16.7 trillion. In 2000, the U.S. national debt stood at $5.7 trillion. The amount of the U.S. national debt is now roughly the same size as the annual output of the economy. Is this a problem?

Yes, suggests recent research by numerous macroeconomists. Specifically, they find that a big public debt “overhang” likely slows down future economic growth for more than two decades. In other words, excessive national debt racked up now will make future Americans considerably poorer than they would have been otherwise.

Let’s start with a 2012 study in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, conducted by the Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff and Morgan Stanley chief economist Vincent Reinhart. In that study, which looked at 22 advanced countries, the researchers identify in the years between 1800 and 2011 some 26 episodes lasting more than five years in which public debt to GDP ratios exceeded 90 percent. They argued that if the public debt-to-GDP ratio is greater than 90 percent for five or more years, then, on average, economic growth rates fall from an average of 3.5 percent to 2.3 percent annually, a drop of 1.2 percent. Even the fierce critics who pointed out a major error in the earlier work of Rogoff and Reinhart find that when the debt-to-GDP ratio is greater than 90 percent that subsequent economic growth averages 2.2 percent annually, falling from 4.2 percent when the ratio is below 30 percent.

Similarly, a 2010 working paper by the International Monetary Fund economists Manmohan Kumar and Jaejoon Woo looked at the effect that high public-debt-to-GDP ratios had on the economic growth of 38 advanced and emerging economies between 1970 and 2007. The study found evidence that surpassing a debt-to-GDP threshold of 90 percent has a significant negative effect on growth. The researchers also reported that a 10 percent increase in the debt-to-GDP ratio is associated with a 0.2 percent slowdown in annual real per capita GDP growth. As it happens, America’s debt-to-GDP ratio climbed from around 60 percent in 2003 to a projected 108 percent this year. If the IMF’s findings are accurate, that implies that future economic growth rates will be about one percent lower than they would otherwise have been. Kumar and Woo concluded that the chief cause for depressed economic growth is less investment in capital goods, which in turn produces a slowdown in labor productivity.

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‘Gravity’ Strong with Nearly $40 Million in Second Orbit

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Despite the bow of Tom Hanks’ well-reviewed “Captain Phillips,” Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity” continues to breathe heavily at the domestic box office.

According to early ticket sales, Sandra Bullock 3D space drama was off just 34% Friday afternoon and rising to nearly $40 million this weekend for its second consecutive No. 1.

The Warner Bros. hit has already generated over $100 million worldwide and marks the best start of both Bullock and co-star George Clooney’s careers.

Online ticket site Fandango indicates that “Gravity” is outselling all second weekend performers in 2013 aside from Disney/Marvel’s “Iron Man 3,” which earned a monster $72 million in its sophomore frame. 3D and Imax premium prices are only boosting “Gravity” sales.

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