Senator JimDemint on the Daily Show

Senator Jim DeMint speaking in Iowa. DeMint image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Cross-posted at the Left Coast Rebel

Over at Memeorandum, Think Progress thinks they have a juicy a-ha moment concerning Senator Jim DeMint. DeMint was on Jon Stewart's Daily Show and countered Stewart's argument for the goodness and federal-wonderfulness that is the fed education program Head Start.

Why doth the Think Progress troll protest so much against this:

The problem we have is from the federal level, it’s very hard to do things well. I mean, you don’t find too many federal programs that are working…When we politically manage the programs, the money is not distributed well and there’s no evidence — I mean we spent trillions trying to help poverty in America. But we don’t cure poverty, we subsidize it when we make people dependent on the government and make it harder for them to get up the ladder.

The clincher here -- and the truth -- is that the War on Poverty actually makes it harder for poor and lower-income Americans to move up the economic ladder. It takes away their drive, their spirit and eventually their life-meaning and humanity. How is that liberal? And, how is that compassionate, conservatives republicans?

Here's video of DeMint on the Daily Show:



LBJ's Great Society and "War on Poverty" are anything but over 40 years later. Always be eternally weary of politicians preaching a "war" on anything; as a rule anything the government declares war against -- the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Poverty" being the two biggest examples -- actually exacerbate, accelerate and increase the problem they were created to solve. Government is not eloquence; it is forcing of unintended consequences.

For anyone that doubts this assertion, please read this report at the Cato Institute: "Nine Trillion Didn't End Poverty, What to do?"

Pass this along, too, from Dan Mitchell at Cato:



"My argument is simple: in the real world, social welfare programs create a perverse incentive structure and leave out the most important aspect of getting out of poverty which is economic freedom and opportunity."

More at Cato on the failure that is Head Start here and here.

Figures that lib Jon Stewart didn't get the memo that his example of Head Start as the crown jewel of the effectiveness of the Leviathan federal government -- the same government that federal supremacy folks like Stewart think that we (but not them) must all swear allegiance and eternal subservience to -- is an out-and-out failure.

Updated: Even that loathsome Joel Klein agrees with me. I guess even a busted clock is right twice a day:

According to the Head Start Impact Study, which was quite comprehensive, the positive effects of the program were minimal and vanished by the end of first grade. Head Start graduates performed about the same as students of similar income and social status who were not part of the program. These results were so shocking that the HHS team sat on them for several years, according to Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution, who said, "I guess they were trying to rerun the data to see if they could come up with anything positive. They couldn't."

I wish we as tax-paying Americans could rerun the data (and turn back the clock) with our mulit-generational, multi-trillion experiment with the welfare state. If the entitlement-welfare state had never been created, we wouldn't be facing this down and we wouldn't have enslaved and broken the spirit of millions across this nation.

Aside from the mountains of debt created, the human toll is the most tragic unintended consequence of the welfare state.

*Related thought (via RK): The perversion of the implicit marginal tax rate is a cruel trap for lower-income Americans.

Update x2 (via LCR): Just found this gem at Liberty Unbound, "Hurting the Poor, Helping the Rich."

Excerpt:

Statism helps wealthy corporations in many ways — not by giving them tax breaks as the modern liberals complain, but by giving them rent-seeking handouts such as farm subsidies and defense contracts. Ending all subsidies and all pork barrel spending would be a huge loss for rich people with political connections, yet the modern liberals have bamboozled the poor into thinking that statism actually helps the poor and hurts the rich. On Wall Street, the SEC’s maze of rules makes legal compliance so difficult that it is virtually impossible for newcomers to compete with the old established investment banks. Established businessmen use taxes and regulations to stifle competition from start-up entrepreneurs and up-and-coming small businessmen who can’t afford to hire compliance lawyers and tax consultants, as their old money rivals can. Yet small business is precisely the engine of opportunity for hard-working ambitious people from poor backgrounds.

Read the rest.

Dems Got Run Over by The Omnibus

The Dems' $1.1 trillion omnibus pork bill is dead...

This from Jim DeMint:

Harry Reid finally admitted he didn't have the votes to pass the pork-filled omnibus. Too embarrassed to read their own bill, Democrats agreed to a short-term [continuing resolution], funding government at current levels without earmarks.

Uberconservative Jim DeMint deserves a lot of credit for this.

Stay tuned for updates....

Updated per LCR, Fox News reports:

A visibly frustrated and angry Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, lashed out, saying that he had nine GOP senators supporting the measure, but that suddenly the support evaporated.

"This action taken by my friends on other side of aisle going to cause people to lose their job," Reid predicted.

"There's only one reason why cloture is not being filed...He doesn't have the votes.," McConnell chided, as he referred to the term for the process to shut down a filibuster. "And the reason he doesn't have the votes is because members on this side of the aisle increasingly felt concerned about the way we do business."

A McConnell aide said the leader "worked the phones" for days, pressing his members to quash the bill which contains $8 billion in earmarks (1% of the overall bill), several that belonged to the leader, himself, before he agreed to a pork moratorium.

Elections have consequences. Also, we won.

Updated again per LCR: Video of the fate of the Omnibus (I couldn't find a bus crash scene that didn't involve people dying so a video game had to do):

Update III: Unfortunately, this is entirely believable:

Reid says nine Republican senators approached him today to tell him that while they would like to see the bill passed, they could not vote for it. He did not reveal the names of the nine. A top Senate source tells National Review Online that “it looks like Harry Reid buckled under the threat of Republicans reading [the bill] aloud.”

[emphasis added]

There's still a bunch of GOP porcophiles in the Senate. Via Cubachi, here's a list of some Republicans who wanted to use Omnibus earmarks to buy votes with your tax dollars (along with the number of earmarks that they each placed in this spending bill):

Cochran (R-MS) 230

Wicker (R-MS) 199

Grassley (R-IA) 86

Bond (R-MO) 78

Bennett (R-UT) 76 (Defeated by Tea Party in 2010)

Voinovich (R-OH) 68 (Retiring)

Hutchison (R-TX) 63

Collins (R-ME) 57

Murkowski (R-AK) 55 (Queen of the RINO Turncoats)

Vitter (R-LA) 48

Cornyn (R-TX) 45 (RINO lover)

Chambliss (R-GA) 42

Crapo (R-ID) 41

Risch (R-ID) 41

Brownback (R-KS) 39

Burr (R-NC) 38

McConnell (R-KY) 35 (On very thin ice. Be careful, buddy.)

Roberts (R-KS) 35

Shelby (R-AL) 32

Inhofe (R-OK) 32

Alexander (R-TN) 30 (Watch out for the Tea Party, dude.)

Lugar (R-IN) 29

Graham (R-SC) 27

Thune (R-SD) 26

Isakson (R-GA) 24

Sessions (R-AL) 21

Bunning (R-KY) 21

Ensign (R-NV) 20

Gregg (R-NH) 13 (retiring)

Any guess as to which Republicans were among Dingy Harry's nefarious nine? Hold all of these porkers' feet to the fire and get ready for the 2012 primaries!

And lets give credit where credit is due: These are the earmark-free Republicans.

Johanns (R-NE) 0

LeMieux (R-FL) 0

Hatch (R-UT) 0 (Frightened by Tea Party)

McCain (R-AZ) 0

Kyl (R-AZ) 0

DeMint (R-SC) 0

Kirk (R-IL) 0 (He's on a short leash)

Coburn (R-OK) 0

Update IV: Nice Deb cautions against excessive jubilation over the death of OmniPork...

I hope some deal wasn’t struck with Republicans. I’m sorry I have a suspicious mind, but I do…

Update V: Tea Party power!

Republicans - caught with their hands in the cookie jar — deserted the measure in an effort to square themselves with tea party activists and conservatives in the party.

X-posted at LCR

Discussion: Memeorandum

13 States in 8 Days

Fourteen states will hold primary elections in June. The first two Tuesdays of the month will be the busiest; Alabama, Mississippi and New Mexico hold elections on June 1; California, Iowa, Maine, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Virgina hold primaries on June 8. Utah wraps up the month on the 22nd.

Here's a little sample of what's cooking...

As HotAir has chronicled, ads for Alabama primaries have set the internets on fire:

There was the Tim James “speak English” spot, the attack on Bradley Byrne for kinda sorta supporting evolution, the Young Boozer clip, the instantly immortal Dale Peterson “man on a horse” homage, and now this.

Check this out: the angry Tea Partier ad might be most intense one of them all.

Last but not least from the Yellowhammer state, National Review Online serves up some red meat from my friend from Twitter, Les Phillip (AL-5).

Over in California, conservatives are hoping for a victory for Chuck DeVore on June 8th. If DeVore can beat billionaire Carly "Demon Sheep" Fiorina and establishment RINO Tom Campbell, he'll go on to face Ma'am Boxer in the general election. How's DeVore doing? Depends on who you ask.

South Carolina might have been a snoozer had it not been for week's sexual "revelation" from a sleazy blogger. Does everyone close to Jenny Sanford get caught up in a tawdry scandal? Y'all know I'm with Jenny and Sarah...vote for and support Nikki Haley.

On June 22, Tea Party favorite Mike Lee hopes to become the man to replace RINO Bob Bennett. Mike Lee had earned Jim DeMint's endorsement, so it should be no surprise that he's earned the RightKlik seal of approval as well.

June promises to be a fascinating month for Conservative Tea Party politics. Stay tuned. And please support your favorite conservative candidates.

Contract FROM America

Have you been following this? I first heard about the Contract from America from Glenn Reynolds:

Though the name may remind some of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, this is something very different.

It's a set of ideas developed via an interactive Web site, where voting determines which elements are most important. And it's not a top-down contract consisting of promises made by leaders to the voters -- it's more in the nature of a contract of employment from the voters, which politicians may choose to accept, or look for alternative employment.

This is basically a crowd-sourced party platform, with the smoke-filled rooms and convention logrolling taken out of the picture. More dis-intermediation. I'm guessing that the political class won't like it much, either.

TheContract.org is no longer accepting new proposals, but you can help narrow the list and draft the final version of the Contract from America. Click here to vote on your priorities. You can vote for 10 of the 21 proposals. The final document will be unveiled on Thursday, April 15, 2010

Here are some of my favorite proposals:

• Commit To Real Government Transparency: Every bill, in its final form, will be made public seven days before any vote can be taken and all government expenditures authorized by any bill will be easily accessible on the Internet before the money is spent.

• Let Us Watch: Broadcast all non-security meetings and votes on C-SPAN and the Internet.

• Pass An “all Of The Above” Energy Policy: Authorize the exploration of proven energy reserves to reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources from unstable countries and reduce regulatory barriers to all other forms of energy creation, lowering prices and creating competition.

• Protect Freedom Of The Press: Prohibit the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from using funds to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine in any form, including requiring “localism” or “diversity” quotas.

• No More Bailouts: The federal government should not bail out private companies and should immediately begin divesting itself of its stake in the private companies it owns from recent bailouts.

More

RINOs will go after conservatives more than they will ever go after any liberal...

We need more leaders who can communicate like this: Governor Christie's Budget Deficit Speech

If our leaders cannot agree to the Mount Vernon Statement, they are part of the problem and should be replaced. Via Jim DeMint.

Left Coast Rebel: The Mount Vernon Statement Vs. The Contract From America

DeVore gains momentum.

Want to get kicked out of the Democrat party? Say something that makes sense.

Poll: Who should replace Evan Bayh?

Is John Kerry Extorting Another Senator?

Is John Kerry extorting another senator?

Before we get to that, here's the background on the important story that has been developing in Honduras, via Neal Boortz:

• Mel Zelaya was the President of Honduras.
• Zelaya has close ties with Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez.
• Zelaya emulated his buddy Hugo by attempting to change the Honduran constitution to allow him to hold office indefinitely.
• Zelaya's outrageous and brazen attempt to change the constitution by calling for a referendum was unconstitutional, but with some material support from Chavez, Zaleya was able to create a political crisis.
• In accordance with the rule of law, and with the overwhelming support of the Honduran people, the Honduran Supreme Court ruled Zaleya's efforts illegal and unconstitutional.
• The court issued an order to the Honduran military telling them not to do the logistical work associated with Zelaya's phony referendum.
• Zaleya and his cronies distributed phony ballots to the masses.
• Based on the Supreme Court's ruling, the Honduran attorney general said that the proposed referendum was illegal and said that he would arrest anyone attempting to carry out the election.
• Zelaya was arrested by the military and was escorted out of the country.

Here's a good rhetorical question: Does this sound like a military coup to you? Of course not.

You'd think the President of the United States of America would applaud the Honduran government for upholding the rule of law. You'd think Obama would shun Mel Zaleya. You'd think Obama would at least take a neutral position and refrain from "meddling" — as he did with Iran. But you would be wrong.

Obama levied sanctions on the impoverished nation in order to force the rightful government from power, and he revoked the visas of all the high Honduran officials to keep them from attending the recent UN summit...cutting them off from the international community. Leading Honduran businessmen have lost their American visas as well. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has met with Zaleya, and the Obama administration has given Zaleya every indication that they will continue to help him back to power.

Obama has justified his actions thusly:

“America supports now the restoration of the democratically-elected President of Honduras, even though he has strongly opposed American policies,” the president told graduate students at the commencement ceremony of Moscow’s New Economic School. “We do so not because we agree with him. We do so because we respect the universal principle that people should choose their own leaders, whether they are leaders we agree with or not. "

Baffling.

To investigate the situation in Honduras, Senator Jim DeMint, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, planned a congressional delegation trip to Honduras today (Friday).

At the last minute (on Thursday), John Kerry and Obama’s State Department blocked Senator DeMint’s planned fact-finding trip to Honduras.

Lefty bloggers are delighted:

"[DeMint] invoked Senate rules that allow a single Senator to “block” a vote on confirming various of President Obama’s diplomatic nominees, including those for US Ambassador to the Organization of American States, US Ambassador to Brazil and Undersecretary of State for the Western Hemisphere, because he doesn’t like the White House position against the Honduras coup. ...Good for Kerry for knocking DeMint on his ass with such a timely, karma-packed punch."

DeMint has issued the following statement:

“These bullying tactics by the Obama administration and Senator Kerry must stop, and we must be allowed to get to the truth in Honduras. Not a single U.S. Senator has traveled to Honduras to learn the facts on the ground. And the Obama administration won’t allow Honduran officials or even businessmen to come to the U.S., either. While this administration has failed to act decisively in Afghanistan, it is has no problem cracking down on a democratic ally and one of the poorest nations in Latin America.”

“Meanwhile, a thorough report from the Congressional Research Service directly contradicts President Obama’s snap decision about the legality of then-President Zelaya’s removal from office in June. Now, President Obama and Democrats’ blind support for this would-be dictator and friend of Hugo Chavez will prevent members of Congress from learning the truth first hand.”

Confirming the suspicions the lefty blogger quoted above, DeMint has indicated that Kerry's actions do indeed amount to retribution and extortion:

“They’re telling me if I will just let a couple of their nominations go through without debate or a vote, then they will let me go on the trip,” said Senator DeMint, speaking on the Mark Levin Show.

Interim Honduran President Micheletti once said he does not fear sanctions and that Honduras can get by without international aid. Let's hope he continues to stand firm.

h/t: memeorandum

Update I: Please see my related story on American Thinker.

Update II: A commenter took exception to the original title of my post: "Is John Kerry Blackmailing Another Senator?" There was some confusion about the definition of "blackmail."

I know liberal Democrats don't trust dictionaries, but here's how Merriam-Webster defines the word:

black·mail: extortion or coercion by threats

Remember what DeMint said?

“They’re telling me if I will just let a couple of their nominations go through without debate or a vote, then they will let me go on the trip”

That sounds a lot like "extortion or coercion by threats" to me. But perhaps it would be a bit more accurate to describe this as a bribe, or extortion. Fine. Title changed.

...

Living in denial about definitions:

Update III: Kerry confirmed the extortion on Thursday, stating that when DeMint complies with Kerry's demands, "the Committee will approve his travel to Honduras."

Update IV: The rest of the story

More

LA Times: Honduras' non-coup

Under the country's Constitution, the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya was legal.

Congressional Research Service: The legal basis under the Honduran Constitution for President José Manuel Zelaya Rosales’s removal from office.

Obama imposes sanctions on impoverished nation of Honduras, despite loss of legal basis for doing so.

Please hang on Honduras. It's not just about you anymore.

John Kerry trying to hide truth to protect Zelaya, blocking our fact-finding trip to Honduras

Honduras Is Following Its Law and Constitution.

"I'm a U.S. and Honduran citizen and I'm appalled by President Barack Obama's position on the Honduran crisis."