Tag Archives: obama

Why haven’t Republicans indicted Obama (or done anything else)?

“He pulls a knife, you pull a gun, he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.” – Officer Jim Malone, The Untouchables

CNN gleefully reports, “Trump is just days from his first criminal trial after latest legal gambit fails.” According to the “analysis” piece, Trump being the first president to be brought to criminal trial would mark him with a “historic stigma.” If convicted of a felony, it could also render Trump ineligible to hold public office, even if he were elected president in a landslide.

Whether or not the Democrats would risk overturning an election in such a way is anyone’s guess. Odds are they would. Either way, they have nothing to lose in moving forward with these indictments because, as usual, Republicans are putting up no resistance whatsoever. Yes, they’re crying about it, calling the persecution of Trump “lawfare” and wringing their hands about the precedents being set.

No one cares. No one ever cares when Republicans complain about Democratic enormities. Republicans complain (and fund raise) and Democrats continue to act. This cycle needs to be broken.

The Republicans must indict Barack Obama and arrest him. And they have to make it look worse than Trump’s arrest. Issue a warrant and film him, cuffed, being put into the back of a police car, with the cop helpfully pushing his head down as is their custom for the suspect’s safety.

He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue, figuratively speaking.

It’s not as if this is some Herculean task. Every president commits indictable crimes while in office. They all use the IRS to go after political opponents. Obama did. Republicans screamed about it. Indict him for it. Find a right-wing court in a red state and bring the charges. As the Democrats have shown, they don’t even have be legit. “Trumped up” charges will do just fine, pun intended. Let Biden know he’s next, the minute he leaves office.

The Republicans could even bring legitimate charges, like violating the War Powers Act while in office, which Obama did on hundreds of occasions. He bombed Syria not only without Congressional approval but after Congress refused to grant his request for authorization. Who cares if Trump and Biden did it, too? This isn’t about fairness or consistency or proving some academic point. It’s war. You either fight, surrender, or die.

I can already hear the sanctimonious objections from conservatives who “don’t want to live in a country where the sacred trust of enforcing the law is abused in this manner.” Newsflash: you already do. The only question is whether you’re going to do something about it other than cry.

But cry about it is all Republicans ever do. When in power, the Democrats act; the Republicans talk (and fund raise). Consider a sports analogy.

Back in the early 1990s, the Buffalo Bills had one of the most explosive offenses in NFL history. They scored so many points so fast that Jim Kelly’s and Thurman Thomas’ statistics were actually muted in some seasons because they were taken out of the game so early. The Bills blew out teams that badly (and then lost the Super Bowl four straight times).

During a playoff game in Buffalo against Kansas City, analyst and former coach Bill Walsh remarked that the Chiefs’ strategy of “dive right, dive left” for three yards and a cloud of dust was never going to work while the Bills were busy gobbling up yards throwing the ball downfield.

He was right. The Bills were up 17-0 by halftime and never looked back.

This Republicans have been the 1992 Chiefs for the past one hundred years. When the Democrats have power, they make one great leap forward after another in expanding the reach of government. Republicans kick and scream while they’re doing it but when handed the reins of power they do nothing. Once the Democrats are back in, another great leap forward. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Read the rest at Tom’s Substack…

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Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupidand Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Which Presidents Increased Spending the Fastest?

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“Can you believe this spending with a REPUBLICAN in the White House????”

I’ve heard it my entire adult life, starting during the Reagan years. I’m not sure how many times Republicans have to increase spending twice as fast as their Democratic predecessors before people get used to the idea that this is what Republican presidents do, regardless of which party controls Congress.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. The Republican Party was born out of the ashes of the Whigs, whose stated goal was to expand the range of things the federal government spent money on. Before the Civil War, most roads were privately owned. Not just privately built; privately owned. Taxpayers didn’t contribute a cent towards them.

Not only did the Republican Party Sovietize the road system, they did the same with railroads and all sorts of other areas of life. Before FDR, it was Republicans who established most new federal departments.

Today, the government has Sovietized the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines and other treatments, a precedent established under the last Republican president.

When you consider the actual records of Republican presidents from Lincoln through Trump, it turns out that Harding and Coolidge were the real “RINOs.”

In the post-WWII era, spending almost always goes up (not counting the obvious decrease right after the war – which led to an economic boom, btw). But I decided to take a look at how fast it went up during the various presidential administrations starting with JFK/LBJ. I used the following methodology:

Measure the increase in yearly federal spending for each president as a percentage of the spending in the last year of his predecessor. For example, spending was $590 billion in the last year of the Carter Administration. It was $1.06 trillion in the last year of the Reagan administration, an increase of $473.4 billion or 80.1%. That comes in at just over 10% per year on average.

You’ll never guess who grew spending at the slowest rate since 1951. Certainly not the Gipper. Nor was it either Bush. No, as a percentage of spending during his predecessor’s last year in office, the president who grew the budget at the slowest rate was Barack Obama.

I broke it all down on Episode 85 of Tom Mullen Talks Freedom. I provide documentation of the outlays and receipts on the show notes page. A summary table is provide below.

Source: https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables/

A few notes:

All spending increases are aggregated for the full term of the presidency and then averaged. Example: to calculate President Obama’s spending increases, 2008 spending is subtracted from the spending during the last year of his presidency (2016) to arrive at an increase of $870 billion over eight years. That total is divided by 2008 spending of $2.9 trillion to arrive at the 29.2% aggregate spending increase. Spending increases for each presidency is calculated in similar fashion.

I combined the presidencies of Kennedy/Johnson and Nixon/Ford as Kennedy and Nixon both served partial terms which were completed by members of their own parties.

Calculations are made for the Trump years 2017-2020 and 2017-2019.

Spending is not adjusted for inflation. All spending is in billions

Of course, regardless of how quickly or slowly it increases, federal spending is always destructive. It’s important to remember the government has failed at every major spending initiative it has undertaken in my lifetime, whether it is military or domestic policy. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Department of Education, the War on Drugs, Covid – it’s always all pain and no gain when it comes to the government. And the price just keeps going up.

Still, it is remarkable that spending goes up so much faster when a Republican is in the White House. The excuse is often made for Reagan that he had a Democratic Congress. But the Republicans controlled the Senate for 6 of Reagan’s 8 years in office, so that claim isn’t even true. The Democrats did have both houses of Congress during George H.W. Bush’s 4 years, but spending didn’t go up as fast during those years. Oops.

The other excuse often brought up in defense of profligate Republican presidents is that Congress “has the purse strings.” This is technically true, but when one looks at the spending proposed by the presidents in question and compares it to what Congress eventually appropriated, there is never much difference.

When an opposition party controls Congress, there is always some demagoguing over financially inconsequential components of the president’s proposal. See “funding Big Bird.” But in general, the executive branch proposes the spending and Congress rubber stamps it. And let’s not forget, no spending can occur without the president’s signature.

There is also some evidence that the combination of a Democratic president and Republican Congress may slow spending increases the most, but comparing spending increases during the first two years Presidents Clinton and Obama were in office (with Democratic Congresses) to spending increases over the remainder of their terms hardly provides conclusive proof.

The record does show that spending seems to grow relatively slowly with a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. And since gridlock in Washington is always good, to the extent we get it, for all sorts of non-fiscal reasons, let’s hope for a Republican landslide in this year’s midterms.

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

McConnell and Obama Both Wrong on Scalia Replacement

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One of the dumber debates in recent history has broken out in the wake of Justice Antonin Scalia’s passing. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has suggested that President Obama shouldn’t nominate a replacement for Justice Scalia because Obama is in the last year of his final term.

Opponents, including the president himself, have responded that the Senate has a constitutional duty to bring Obama’s appointments to a vote and to confirm one, if qualified.

Both sides are completely wrong. The President has the legitimate authority to nominate a successor on every day of his presidency, up to and including the very last day. That precedent was set by no less than the second president of the United States. As Elizabeth Warren astutely observed,

Article II Section 2 of the Constitution says the President of the United States nominates justices to the Supreme Court, with the advice and consent of the Senate. I can’t find a clause that says “…except when there’s a year left in the term of a Democratic President.

But neither can be found the words “shall bring to an up or down vote” or anything to the effect that the Senate is required to take action on the President’s nominees. The Constitution was deliberately constructed so that inaction would be the starting point in all matters. The reason for the separation of powers was to ensure that things didn’t get done efficiently within the federal government, because efficient government is a threat to liberty.

Read the rest on The Huffington Post…

Tom Mullen is the author of Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness? Part One and A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

We Need to Really Gut the Military

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U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter told the Harvard Kennedy School Tuesday that Americans will be grappling with violent extremism for generations to come. If that feels like déjà vu, you’re not imagining things. Air Force Brig. Gen. Mark O. Schisslersaid the same thing – in 2006.

Schissler was expressing concern at the time over wavering public support for a war that had already lasted longer than WWII. His concern was warranted. The Republican Party had just suffered a shellacking in the mid-term elections, largely due to public dissatisfaction with “neoconservative” foreign policy. They would lose the White House two years later for largely the same reasons.

American voters may have believed they “threw the bums out,” as Carroll Quigley might put it, but the foreign policy never changed. The Obama administration may have used different tactics, but it’s been even more interventionist than Bush’s. It’s certainly intervened in more countries.

Bush and the 2000s Republicans were called neoconservatives, but they weren’t. Their way of seeing the world is classic conservatism, straight out of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes not only saw all individuals, but all nations, in a de facto state of war with each other, in the absence of some overwhelming external force “keeping them in awe.”

This was the inspiration for the British Empire, which sought to “civilize” the world by force of arms. It eventually bled itself dry, its biggest failures occurring on precisely the same ground the United States is bleeding on now.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post…

Cop Killings Are Way Down During Obama Presidency

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obama Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke told Fox News yesterday, “President Obama has breathed life into this ugly movement,” meaning Black Lives Matter and the “war on cops” Clarke says the president is at least partly responsible for.

This is part of a larger narrative in right-wing media that cop killings are increasing due to Obama’s tacit support for anti-cop activist groups and failure to condemn those who attack or kill police officers.

There’s only one problem with the narrative: Cop killings are way down during Obama’s presidency and on pace this year for the lowest annual total this century.

Read the rest at The Huffington Post…

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

Earth to Bill Maher: Edward Snowden isn’t the crazy one

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TAMPA, January 21, 2014 – Bill Maher interviewed journalist Glenn Greenwald following President Obama’s speech on Friday in which the president discussed his proposals to reform the NSA. Greenwald is the journalist who first reported on the information released by Edward Snowden on the government’s domestic surveillance activities.

While Maher was respectful of Greenwald and, to some extent, Snowden, he went out of his way to smear some of Snowden’s claims about the government’s activities as “completely nuts.” He also found it necessary to take a shot at Ron Paul, who wasn’t even involved in the issue at hand.

For Maher and too many likeminded people, anyone who doesn’t view the government as a benevolent force for good is a tinfoil-hat-wearing kook who believes all civilian life is the target of a massive conspiracy involving the government, secret societies, aliens, etc. Thus Maher’s retort, “Everyone in the government isn’t out to get you.”

That’s what’s known as “framing the debate.” You’re either with Bill Maher and President Obama or you’re with the kooks. You may also be somewhere in the middle, where Maher apparently places Snowden. It completely ignores the many other perspectives one might have, including that of most libertarians.

Libertarians don’t believe that the people who work for the government are evil. It’s the institution of government itself, a monopoly on the use of force that can martial the resources of the entire nation. That kind of power is dangerous even when used by good people with good intentions.

Read the rest of the article at The Huffington Post…

Obama’s proposed NSA reforms prove he doesn’t understand checks and balances

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President Obama delivered a speech on Friday outlining his plans to address the widespread outrage over the domestic surveillance activities of the National Security Agency. However well-intentioned, the president’s proposals indicate he just doesn’t get the constitutional notion of delegated powers.

Implicit in the Fourth Amendment is the principle that the government should remain powerless unless and until an individual is reasonably suspected of having committed a crime. It isn’t even allowed to search one’s person or papers (viz. phone records, emails) to collect the proof it needs until it persuades a judge that it has probable cause.

The only reason the Fourth Amendment offers any protection is it prescribes an adversarial process. The judicial branch is predisposed to refuse to issue a warrant until the executive branch provides sufficient evidence of probable cause.

Read the rest of the article at the Daily Caller…

Obama’s NSA speech proves government can’t prevent terrorism in a free society

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TAMPA, January 18, 2014 – President Obama outlined his proposed reforms of the NSA’s domestic surveillance activities in a speech on Friday. The speech was at times eloquent and the president’s intentions appear genuine, but his recommendations for reform are inadequate. As long as the government is trying to prevent crime or terrorism in the future, it’s going to trample liberty in the present.

The president stated the crux of the problem during his speech:

“So we demanded [after 9/11] that our intelligence community improve its capabilities and that law enforcement change practices to focus more on preventing attacks before they happen than prosecuting terrorists after an attack.”

Freedom requires that the government not attempt to prevent anything. All powers granted to the government relate to crimes committed in the past.

The Bill of Rights rests upon this assumption. Rooted in what is now called the “libertarian” principle of non-aggression, the Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from using force against an individual until it has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the individual has committed a crime in the past.

The Fourth Amendment goes even farther, prohibiting the government from even searching an individual or his papers (e.g., phone records, e-mails, etc.) without probable cause that the individual has committed a crime in the past.

The entire Bill of Rights supposes that you are beyond the reach of government until you have actually committed a crime. That logically excludes the possibility of the government preventing anything, because the government must employ force against the innocent to do so.

Read the rest of the article at Communities Digital News…

$1.1 trillion budget deal doesn’t change fiscal cliff

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Photo: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

TAMPA, January 15, 2014 – The Associated Press reported today that Republicans and Democrats are ready to support a $1.1 trillion spending bill that would fund the federal government through its current fiscal year, which ends September 30, 2014. Citing a perceived mandate from voters to put aside their differences, Congress largely abandoned the superficial cuts remaining from sequestration.

Those widely reported “cuts” weren’t really decreases in spending. They were merely promises to increase spending less than planned.

Out in the real world, when an employee making $18.00 per hour gets a 5% pay cut, his new hourly wage is $17.10. That’s not how it works in Washington, D.C. When a federal program funded at $3 billion in 2013 is “cut,” it’s funded for $3.1 billion in 2014 instead of $3.2 billion.

What have been called “draconian cuts” and “gutting the military” by hysterical politicians and media are, for the most part, increases in spending that beneficiaries deem inadequate. Now, even that infinitesimal restraint is gone.

Depending upon which poll one cites and the wording of the questions in it, there is some evidence that the public was unhappy with last autumn’s government shutdown and desires more “bipartisanship” in Congress. Representatives on both sides of the aisle were eager to comply in an election year.

“There’s a desire to show people we can do our job,” said Rep. Mike Simpson, R-Idaho.

However, no poll attempts to separate net taxpayers from net tax collectors. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the latter group would be unhappy with any interruption in government spending. A poll exclusively querying the former group may have yielded far different results.

Regardless of how any part of the public feels about federal spending, it is going to be cut dramatically. The fiscal realities that prompted sequestration and the shutdown have not gone away. Playing nice in Congress hasn’t changed that.

The federal government can only service its $16 trillion debt while its interest rate remains artificially low. The Federal Reserve has attempted to keep it near zero since 2008. It has only been successful because other buyers of federal debt have continued to buy while the Fed has pumped liquidity into the economy with its own purchases.

Should China, the Fed or any other buyer of federal debt cease or even significantly decrease its purchases, interest rates will begin to rise.

When interest rates rise on home mortgages, it hurts. When interest rates rise on $16 trillion, chaos ensues.

According to the White House’s fiscal year 2014 Budget proposal, interest in fiscal year 2013 was $220 billion or 6.2% of all federal spending. That was with interest rates below one half of one percent. It doesn’t take a Nobel Laureate to imagine what happens if the rate begins creeping up to the modest 3-6% levels of the last decade, much less the double digit rates accompanying the crises of the late 1970’s and early 80’s. Annual interest due on federal debt would increase hundreds of millions of dollars.

That would amount to de facto cuts in federal spending on everything else. We’re not talking about make believe “cuts” where spending is still more than the year before. We’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars less available to spend than the year before. We’re talking about cuts.

Increasing tax revenues isn’t the answer because taxes revenues are already maxed out. The only real debate left on tax rates is whether the top rate on the wealthiest should be 33% or 39%, which is inconsequential to the debt problem. If tax rates are raised significantly overall, revenues go down. That’s already been proven.

So, the federal government tiptoes forward on a fiscal tightrope, dependent upon a set of artificially-created conditions that could change at any time. An overpriced stock market could crash on its own. China could decide to cease or decrease its debt purchases. A natural disaster could occur. Any of these could start the dominoes falling towards higher interest rates, recession for the economy and an unserviceable federal debt.

Even if none of the above occur, the end is inevitable. If printing money to buy your own debt were sustainable, the government could legalize counterfeiting and everyone would be rich. Sooner or later, economic reality will assert itself and the United States will be forced to consume less than it produces. The only question on federal spending is whether it will decrease due to a deliberate act of Congress or the way Greece’s did.

The current budget deal may provide an answer.

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.

The War on Terror has not made us freer or safer

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TAMPA, December 5, 2013 — There has been predictable bluster about President Obama signing a deal with five other nations to begin the process of lifting sanctions on Iran in exchange for commitments by Iran not to develop nuclear weapons. Neoconservatives have howled that it abandons U.S. ally Israel and endangers the entire planet.

Regardless, it is a harbinger of things to come. Economic reality is forcing the United States to change its interventionist foreign policy. Normalizing relations with Iran is just one part of that puzzle. Without a realistic political solution to crushing entitlement liabilities, the only place to make meaningful cuts is in military spending.

As the U.S. government comes to grips with the inevitable, Americans should expect to hear quite a bit about the end of a decade of war and of the sacrifices so many have made to “accomplish the mission.”

There’s no doubt about the sacrifice, both in blood and treasure. It’s the accomplishments that should be evaluated with a high degree of skepticism.

A good percentage of the public seems to regard the Iraq War as a colossal mistake. President Bush took the fall for that, as did the Republican Party in two straight elections. President Obama campaigned successfully on the argument that Iraq was “the wrong war.” The United States should be concentrating on Afghanistan, he argued, from whence the 9/11 attacks and other terrorism supposedly originated.

Americans seem to accept this premise implicitly, but it is far-fetched justification for a decade of war and $5 trillion in additional debt.

Despite most of the 9/11 attackers being Saudi Arabian, Americans were told that Afghanistan must be invaded because Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda army enjoyed a safe haven there, where they “radicalized” new Islamic terrorists in a network of paramilitary training camps. By invading Afghanistian, Americans were told, the U.S. government could break up the camps and greatly diminish the threat of terrorism.

It all makes good sound bites, but almost none of it has any connection to reality. There is credible evidence that the 9/11 attacks were planned in Hamburg, Germany, not in Afghanistan. Whether that’s true or not, minimal critical thinking skills are required to arrive at the conclusion that an attack like 9/11 could be planned anywhere.

The Tsarnaev brothers proved that last April. Immediately following the attacks, there were several reports of authorities trying to establish that the elder Tsarnaev had traveled to Dagestan to “become radicalized.” This was a desperate attempt to keep the narrative going. Terrorists like Tsarnaev have to go somewhere in order to become fully committed to crimes like the Boston bombing.

Otherwise, the U.S. government really wasn’t accomplishing anything by invading and occupying Middle Eastern countries.

Ultimately, authorities concluded that Tsarnaev had changed his mind about joining a militant group in Dagestan and had been radicalized right here in the USA.

Whoops.

For the second time in two generations, America has spent over a decade at war in third world countries thousands of miles away. With the Taliban officially part of negotiations and likely to be a major force in post-war Afghanistan, if they don’t return to power altogether, Americans should face some harsh realities.

The first is that twelve years of war in the Middle East has accomplished absolutely nothing. There is no cause and effect relationship between the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the risk of new terrorist attacks in the United States. There never really was. It just sounded good when passions were high and the government felt it had to “do something.”

It hasn’t made Americans freer at home, either. On the contrary, the past decade has seen American society adopt a national security state footing that bears far too much resemblance to 1930’s Germany. There might not be concentration camps or mass murders, but Americans certainly live in a “Papers, please” culture, complete with surveillance cameras on every corner and drones flying overhead.

It’s important to face these facts and learn from history if American doesn’t want to remain doomed to repeat it. America should mourn the dead, take care of the wounded and try to put its finances in order. But don’t let the government put a smiley face on this debacle.

Otherwise, our children may find themselves fighting the next unnecessary war. They already have to pay for this one.

Tom Mullen is the author of A Return to Common Sense: Reawakening Liberty in the Inhabitants of America.