The liars won the big prize

One has to wonder how long it takes before all the lies of the Obama crowd and their enablers catch up with them and the country. It can be argued the the lie exposed in Brent Bozel's piece here, although far from the first, was easily the most consequential and egregious one.  It can also be argued that this lie won the election for Obama.  Bozel's article was published  just three weeks before the election and yet he foresaw its consequence.  In the final analysis the lie allowed Obama to perpetuate the false narrative the he had the terrorists on the run and that the WOT was winding down, a narrative that presented him as a successful and strong leader of the free world and America.  As we know he is none of that then and he is none of that now.  But the lie got him elected.

Candy Crowley Self-Destructs

Just how badly did CNN's Candy Crowley destroy her first (and hopefully last) attempt as a presidential debate moderator? More than 65 million people saw that she is to debate moderation as CNN is to "news."

Barack Obama made a fatal mistake when he lied, claiming he'd labeled the Libya attack as an act of terrorism. The look on Romney's face said it all: Mr. President, here comes checkmate.

Then Crowley leapt to Obama's defense, declared a lie a truth, changed the subject, and Obama was free.

It was a travesty.

Let's get beyond the perennial partisan toe-taggers Rachel Maddow (touting Romney's "political disaster") and Ed Schultz ("The president destroyed Mitt Romney on foreign policy"), who credited Obama. Look at those who gave the bouquet to Crowley for saving Obama.

That night on PBS, John Heilemann of New York Magazine insisted the subject of Libya would have been disastrous for Obama. "The worst hand that the administration and President Obama have to play in this debate was on Benghazi, and because particularly of Candy Crowley's follow-up on that question, it allowed Barack Obama to win an exchange that I didn't necessarily think it was possible for him to win."

Obama shouldn't have won, but Crowley saved him.

The next morning, Current TV host Eliot Spitzer told Current TV host Bill Press that Crowley caused the "emotional highlight of the night" by declaring Romney was wrong. "I think that really deflated what otherwise should have been on the Benghazi issue a moment when Romney could have hit it out of the park. But instead he took the step too far. Crowley came in as sort of the voice of neutrality and took the victory away from Romney."

Crowley crushed Romney. Even Spitzer wouldn't defend Crowley as staying within a moderator's role.

Crowley knew exactly what she'd done: validate a lie. Time for damage control. Within minutes of leaving the journalistic crime scene, Crowley was back on CNN admitting that Romney was right "in the main" -- whatever that means -- but he chose "the wrong word" by focusing on Obama's cursory use of the term "these acts of terror." If Romney was correct, why not just say it?

Again, Crowley rallied behind Obama -- even repeating her verdict when the president egged her on to "say it a little louder."

So let's say it a little louder: Team Obama engaged in a massive cover-up, hiding and denying what it knew about this deadly terrorist attack for weeks. Even Heilemann and Spitzer admit that this scandal (SET ITAL) should (END ITAL) be a "homerun" for Romney. Journalists know that the White House lied horribly day after day, and -- with a few exceptions -- have enabled that badly disguised cover-up. Obama claimed nobody cares about finding the facts more than he does. It's lie after lie at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Crowley knows full well that it's Team Obama that needs to be held accountable here, not the challenger. Back on September 30, Crowley herself pinned down Obama spinner David Axelrod on this point: "Why did it take them until Friday [September 28], after a September 11 attack in Libya, to come to the conclusion that it was premeditated and that there was terrorists involved? John McCain said it doesn't pass the smell test, or it's willful ignorance to think that they didn't know before this what was going on." Of course, Axelrod shot back that Obama in the Rose Garden called it an "act of terror."

How does Crowley square her October 16 performance with her September 30 performance? Try this theory: after liberals savaged Jim Lehrer as "useless" for somehow allowing Obama's first-debate fiasco, they've successfully worked the refs, both Crowley and Martha Raddatz, to push back at the "lies" of the Republicans.

Journalists now know Obama lied repeatedly about protests outside the consulate in Benghazi. In a September 20 interview with Univision, Obama said of Libya, "I don't want to speak to something until we have all the information.

What we do know is that the natural protests that arose because of the outrage over the video were used as an excuse by extremists to see if they can also directly harm U.S. interests.

There were no "natural protests." The story line had changed the day before when Matthew Olsen of the National Counterterrorism Center cracked under congressional questioning and said, "the facts that we have now indicate that this was an opportunistic attack." On the 20th, Obama spokesman Jay Carney suddenly jerked his knee and declared, "It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack."

"Self-evident?" If so, then Team Obama is guilty, period.

Instead, so many in the shameless media are still trying to pin the tail on Romney. They'll do anything to reelect Obama. Just ask Candy Crowley.

Rand Paul is in over his head

Andrew McCarthy prosecuted the blind Sheik and he knows the Constitution and the threats to this country from the radial Islamists.  In this article he deconstructs doctor Rand Paul's interpretation of the 4th amendment and the NSA data mining practices.  Paul should stick to economics where his libertarian notions have more relevance than in this matter of the security interests of the rest of us.

Rand Paul’s ‘Here’s to Crime’ Act | National Review Online

Besides its other demerits, Paul’s proposal is an exercise in naked partisanship. Indications are that the collection of telecom metadata began during the Bush administration. Yet, Senator Paul’s bill states: “Media reports indicate that President Barack Obama’s Administration has been collecting information about millions of citizens within the borders of the United States and other countries.” Republicans are quite right to point out that the Obama administration has abused its powers in several contexts; they are equally right to complain that President Obama’s default position when something goes wrong (as it often does with his administration) is to blame President Bush. It is sheer hypocrisy, though, to pretend, as Paul’s bill does, that telephone-metadata collection is an Obama innovation. It started as a Bush program, rooted in the PATRIOT Act’s business-records provision, which was strongly and appropriately supported by Republicans.

Moreover, it is equally wrong to imply, as Paul’s bill does, that the metadata collection is of a piece with other scandals involving Obama’s abuses of power. As Senator Paul well knows, the IRS scandal, spying on the media, Benghazi, Fast & Furious, etc., involve unilateral executive-branch lawlessness, stonewalling, and/or overreach. In contrast, the ongoing phone-record collection is the lawful, statutory retention component of a program with extensive civil-liberties protections. Significantly, these protections prohibit the government from inspecting the retained records without judicial approval based on a demonstration of reasonable suspicion of terrorist activity.

Perhaps the worst aspect of Paul’s irresponsible proposal is how it would cripple law enforcement.

In its précis, the bill professes its objective “to stop the National Security Agency from spying on citizens of the United States.” That in itself is ridiculous — the NSA is not “spying” on Americans; again, it is lawfully retaining records that it is not permitted to sift through absent court approval — in a program that also includes an exacting regimen of legislative oversight. But that’s not the half of it. After Paul gets through bloviating about natural rights and botching the Fourth Amendment, his bill gets down to brass tacks. The target is not merely the NSA but the entire government. The proposed law states: “The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution shall not be construed to allow any agency of the United States Government to search phone records of Americans without a warrant based on probable cause” (emphasis added).

Hate to break this to you boys and girls, but “any agency of the United States Government” includes the FBI, the DEA, and every other agency performing everyday law enforcement — the police work that provides law and order, without which there can be no liberty. I do not know what, if any, familiarity Dr. Paul has with how law enforcement works, but it would be next to impossible for police to make cases against organized-crime groups, drug cartels, and other large-scale criminal enterprises if they had to have probable cause of crime before they could obtain phone records.

Records of telephone usage are not constitutionally protected under any credible construction of the Fourth Amendment — not the original Fourth Amendment described and applied by the Supreme Court in the aforementioned Jones case, not the Fourth Amendment as enlarged by the “reasonable expectation of privacy” jurisprudence beginning in the mid 20th century. As a result, criminal investigators and grand juries routinely obtain telephone-usage records by issuing subpoenas and applying for “pen registers” — devices applied to phone lines that enable investigators to learn the time, duration, and subscriber numbers involved in telephone calls. This information, coupled with physical surveillance of suspects, is typically how police build probable cause that crimes are being committed. They need to meet that threshold because the Fourth Amendment has always protected a person’s property, and our jurisprudence (along with federal statutes) extends this protection to the content of telephone conversations and other electronic communications. Consequently, to search property or monitor conversations, police must obtain search or eavesdropping warrants.

If, as Senator Paul proposes, law-enforcement agencies had to have probable cause before they could get telephone-usage records and pen registers, there would be far fewer search and eavesdropping warrants. Were that to happen, the most culpable, most insulated members of criminal organizations could no longer be penetrated by investigative techniques that police have been using, lawfully and with great public support, for decades — for as long as there have been phone records. The most efficient, most threatening criminal organizations would operate with impunity.

Perhaps he does not realize the ramifications, but Senator Paul’s proposal will not protect Americans. Our prosperity hinges on effective law enforcement. We have thus derived great benefit, and suffered little discernible harm, from the fact that police have long been permitted to acquire third-party phone records without a warrant. The Paul proposal is, instead, a boon for lawbreakers. That it should be proposed under the guise of a “Fourth Amendment Restoration” is perverse.

Here’s to crime!

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy.

What's actually happening to Europe's economy

Is “Austerity” Responsible for the Crisis in Europe?

Most European economies have been in recession, or close to it, since the beginning of 2012. Unemployment rates are reaching record highs. Meanwhile, a debate has been raging about the deleterious effects of “austerity” measures. Various heads of government, finance ministers, and European Union officials have declared that austerity has gone too far and is preventing a recovery.
Keynesian economists like Paul Krugman are seeing this as unassailable proof that stimulus policies adopted when the financial crisis started in 2008-09 should never have been reversed and replaced by austerity measures, notwithstanding the explosion of public debt that they entailed.
In the Keynesian view, when idle resources are left unused by the private sector, governments should put them to work. They should stop worrying about budget deficits and start spending again.
Whereas Keynesians and the rest of the economics profession see downturns as unexpected and disastrous events to be prevented, Austrian School economists explain them as the inevitable result of an earlier unsustainable boom provoked by excessive credit expansion and interventionist government policies.
For Austrians, the recession is actually a cure to get rid of distortions that have accumulated during the boom. Resources being wasted in unproductive uses have to be freed and moved to sectors where there is real and sustainable demand. Unfortunately, this takes time, and some resources will have to remain idle until entrepreneurs have found the best way to use them. This means temporarily higher unemployment, plants used at half capacity or closed until they are retooled, and financial resources parked in short-term assets instead of invested in long-term projects.
Governments should not try to prevent this reallocation process. Keynesian-style stimulus programs and bailouts simply prolong the unsustainable economic processes of the boom and delay the recovery. They also create a climate of uncertainty regarding debt burdens and taxes, deterring private investment. In short, unlike Keynesians, who believe government should intervene and spend more in times of crisis, Austrians advocate a withdrawal of government and a reduction in spending and taxation.
Given this theoretical background, how should we view the situation in Europe? Is austerity responsible for the crisis, as Keynesians believe? Or is it part of a necessary cure, as Austrians think? As we shall see, these alternatives do not accurately capture what is happening in Europe because of the ambiguous meaning of the word “austerity.”

The Meaning of Austerity

The debate on austerity in Europe has focused exclusively on government budget deficits and public debt as a percentage of GDP. The Maastricht Treaty requires that countries joining the European Union should have budget deficits no higher than 3 percent of GDP and debt levels no higher than 60 percent. These are also goalposts for member countries. Most of them (with the exception of Germany, among the larger countries) fail to meet these criteria. One facet of the current debate is whether some countries should obtain additional time to meet these goals, as France has just succeeded in doing.
In all these discussions, the only numbers presented as evidence that austerity measures have been implemented consist of statistics indicating that deficits have gone down. Indeed, they have, as the most recent Eurostat numbers show (Figure 1).[1] The average level of deficit as a percentage of GDP in EU countries in 2012 is much lower (4 percent) than it was in 2009 (6.9 percent).
Figure 1
General government deficit as a percentage of GDP

Source: Eurostat, Government deficit/surplus, debt and associated data.
It should be obvious that there is no direct relationship between reducing the size of the deficit and reducing the size of government, the latter being a key factor to consider if we want to compare Keynesian and Austrian solutions to the crisis. A budget deficit can be reduced either by cutting spending or by increasing revenue. It can also be reduced if spending is cut a lot but taxes are cut only a little. It can be reduced even as spending increases if revenues increase even faster.
In practice, “austerity” can thus cover all kinds of situations with differing economic impacts. The term can apply just as well to growth as to reduction in the size of government. It seems to be universally taken for granted in this debate that austerity measures adopted in Europe have meant drastic spending cuts, coupled with some tax increases, the net effect being a downsizing of government. But is this really the case?

Governments Keep Growing

As Figure 2 shows, there has only been a slight decrease of 1.7 percentage points in government spending as a proportion of GDP in the Union as a whole over the past three years. Moreover, the proportion is still 4 percentage points higher in 2012 than before the crisis started, 49.4 percent compared to 45.6 percent in 2007. Among the major countries included in this figure, only in Poland have expenditures gone back to where they were in 2007.
Figure 2
Total general government expenditure as a percentage of GDP

Source: Eurostat, Government revenue, expenditure and main aggregates.
However, there is reason to wonder if these numbers have been distorted by the periods of negative economic growth that have hit the continent. Expenditures may have come down in absolute terms, but they would still be higher as a proportion of GDP if the economy had contracted even more. So, let’s look at expenditures in nominal terms.
Figure 3
Total general government revenue and expenditure in billions of euros — European Union (27 countries)

Source: Eurostat, Government revenue, expenditure and main aggregates.
Figure 4
Total general government expenditure in billions of euros

Source: Eurostat, Government revenue, expenditure and main aggregates.
As we can see, government spending has never stopped rising in the Union as a whole since the beginning of the financial crisis, except in 2011 when it remained constant (Figure 3). Spending grew by 6.3 percent in the last three years, in other words during the period when “austerity” policies were supposed to have been applied.
Thus, whenever finance ministers announced budget cuts, they were actually referring not to absolute reductions in total spending but simply to spending increases that were lower than what was previously planned or to cuts that were offset by more spending elsewhere.
There are only a handful of countries where nominal expenditures really fell between 2009 and 2012, including Greece and Portugal (Figure 4)[2]. It should be noted, however, that both in nominal terms and in proportion to GDP, the governments of these two countries spent more in 2012 than in 2007.
With no net decrease in spending, the deficit reductions observed in most countries must have occurred because tax revenues went up faster than spending. And that is precisely what the Eurostat data show, with revenues up 12.9 percent from 2009 to 2012, double the pace of increase in public spending (Figure 3).
Governments have not been borrowing as much—although they still borrow heavily, and public debt keeps increasing. Instead, they tax their citizens more to fund their growing expenditures (Figures 5). And this is the case even in countries such as France where “austerity” has been most strongly criticized. France leads the pack both among countries where spending has risen the most and among those where taxes have climbed most sharply.
Figure 5
Total general government revenue in billions of euros

Source: Eurostat, Government revenue, expenditure and main aggregates.

Conclusion

Governments in almost all European Union countries are therefore as large as they were when the crisis started in 2007 or even larger today.
If we define austerity as the measures taken to reduce budget deficits, then in that sense austerity is indeed responsible for the crisis. If, however, we define it more properly as policies bringing about a reduction in the size of government, then these policies cannot be held responsible for the crisis in Europe because they were never applied.
Unfortunately, confusion over the meaning of austerity impedes a better understanding of the situation and precludes a more relevant debate over the causes of the crisis.
Keynesians will, of course, regret that there haven’t been even larger spending increases, greater borrowing and expanded deficits in the past few years to stimulate the economy. But, from an Austrian perspective, bloated governments, and higher taxes certainly help explain why European economies are still in the doldrums, several years after the financial crisis.
What Europe needs is smaller governments, not just in terms of public spending but also as regards deregulation of the job market and other structural reforms to encourage entrepreneurship, private investment, and job creation. There will be sustained growth in Europe only when governments, and not citizens or businesses, finally bear the brunt of austerity.

Martin Masse is an associate researcher at the Institut économique Molinari in Paris (www.institutmolinari.org) and publisher of the libertarian webzine Le Québécois Libre (www.quebecoislibre.org). See Martin Masse's article archives.