Another of the videos from Power-line’s contest. This one has rapidly attracted over 35,000 views.

The American left is actually kind of lucky that Barack Obama has not been equally ideologically consistent and reliable on foreign policy… (link)

Michael Goodwin appraises the president’s current situation: his policies haven’t worked, he seems incapable of learning from his mistakes, the country is giving up on him, and there is another election next year.

That was fast. Mounting his shrinking soapbox soon after the Senate passed the debt-ceiling bill, President Obama took less than a minute to lapse into his class-warfare shtick.

It’s always us-against-them with him, but yesterday was especially off-key. For all its drama and histrionics, the vote in Congress was a rare note of bipartisanship he could have embraced as a model.

The nation avoided the dreaded default and did it with lopsided support in both houses. A majority of both parties in the Senate backed the deal, while in the House, Republicans backed it by more than 2-1 while Dems split evenly for and against.

This isn’t dysfunction. This is a successful democracy taking action. It was messy and flawed and nobody loves it. But the deal proves compromise still can work in a divided country.

Yet the result doesn’t suit our president, who has an itch for punishing wealth and more spending. To scratch it, he turns reflexively to scapegoating. The man who promised to unite the nation instead relishes dividing it at every opportunity.

So we heard again that the evil “oil companies” and “billionaires” and the “wealthy” and “big corporations” need to “pay their fair share.” Doesn’t he ever get tired of saying the same things?

I don’t know which is worse: That he really believes such drivel will help America, or that he’s cynically throwing red meat to the Bubbas of his far-left base. Either way, he needs new material.

But the debt debate made it clear that Obama’s idea shop is running on fumes. Like a broken record, he’s stuck on the same song — bigger government, higher taxes. No matter the circumstance, he repeats the mantra.

For such a smart guy, he’s proving to be a slow learner about what works, and doesn’t. He, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid had their unfettered way for two years, and they blew a giant hole in the budget without getting much bang for taxpayers’ bucks.

Unemployment is a staggering 9.2 percent and rising, and most economists believe the economy is in serious danger of a double-dip recession. Obama’s answer: Let’s do it all again.

He gives lip service to the pain of the unemployed and underemployed, then trots out the old ideas. Usually he doesn’t even bother to repackage them.

Maybe he hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care, but the country is giving up on him. The shellacking his party and policies took in the 2010 midterms would be repeated if there were an election today. He’s sinking, and his approval is now a woeful 40 percent — that’s Jimmy Carter territory.

Winner of a Power-Line contest.

The Westley Richards scalloped boxlock action was particularly handsome.

If you were an American millionaire, a belted earl, or an Indian maharajah, you’d go to London and buy sidelock best guns from the likes of Olympian gunmakers like Purdy, Boss, Churchill, or Woodward. The ordinary American or English gentleman of limited means would buy excellently well-made, but far less expensive, boxlocks produced by the workshops of down-to-earth makers like Greener or W.C. Scott in Birmingham.

The Birmingham gun trade armed the British Army for the victory at Waterloo. It produced the Brown Bess and the Baker, Snider, and Enfield rifles that won the Empire, and the Martini-Henry that stopped the Zulu charges at Rorke’s Drift. It armed the Confederate Army in the War for Southern Independence. It produced the rifles, pistols, bayonets, machine guns, and artillery that determined the fate of Europe in two world wars.

The Gun Quarter of Birmingham; like Gardone, Italy; Oberndorf, Germany; Tula, Russia; or Springfield, Massachusetts; is one of the world’s great historic arms-making centers, boasting a leading role in gun manufacture for more than three centuries.

But a pusillanimous group of British politicians has recently announced that Birmingham’s historic Gun Quarter is going to be renamed, specifically in order to renounce its association with the arms trade.

The Birmingham Post reports:

It’s been a symbol of Birmingham’s manufacturing excellence for 250 years, but the city’s Gun Quarter has lost its biggest battle of all.

One of Britain’s oldest industrial areas has been renamed after council leaders claimed local people no longer wanted to be associated with the weapons of war.

The streets where highly skilled tradesmen produced two million muskets to fight Napoleon are to be known in future as St George and St Chad in recognition of a church and Birmingham’s Roman Catholic cathedral.

Opponents of the name change say the Gun Quarter has been sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.

St. George, a soldier saint renowned for killing a dragon, would probably have no personal aversion to the arms trade. St. Chad (who turns out to be completely personally unconnected to the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida) was an abbot and bishop of Mercia, the patron saint of medicinal springs, and must have had a personal interest in agriculture, as traditionally his feast day (March 2) is particularly propitious for the planting of broad beans. His views on weapons are unknown.

Of Birmingham today, a city willing to spurn the memory and achievements of Westley Richards, William Powell, Greener, Webley, and W. C. Scott, one can inclined to say with John Betjeman:

“Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now”

From the equally outraged Steve Bodio.

A small businessman tells the DC political class where to get off.

From Bird Dog.

Paul Krugman is bummed.

Conan the Barbarian opined that it was “to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.”

Republicans have not really crushed the democrats, and we may not exactly be seeing them driven before us, but they are certainly currently in retreat and disarray, and we do get to listen to the lamentations of their Krugman.

A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong.

For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status. …

[T]he reported terms of the deal… amount to an abject surrender on the part of the president. First, there will be big spending cuts, with no increase in revenue. Then a panel will make recommendations for further deficit reduction — and if these recommendations aren’t accepted, there will be more spending cuts.

Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.

It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.

In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question.

Heh!

Wait until you see whom they compared to Keith Richards. link

Fighting hobbits

“Tea party Republicans may be a noisy and effective protest movement, but they’re unfit to govern,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said at a news conference on Friday.

Speaker John Boehner’s task in working out a deal with Barack Obama and the democrat leadership of the Senate to avert a default crisis was made more difficult by 22 fiscally-irredentist Tea Party Republicans who refused to support his compromise solution.

John McCain made headlines by labeling the conservative extremists as “hobbits.”

I think “the hobbits” were wrong tactically and philosophically on insisting on trying to pass a balanced budget amendment. The democrats could never accept a balanced budget amendment. Their base and constituencies would never tolerate it. But, even more importantly, a balanced budget amendment is an unworkable idea which is constitutionally highly problematic.

Publius Huldah is quite right: a balanced budget amendment would strike directly at the concept of enumerated powers and it would effectively transfer decision-making authority from Congress to the courts.

The hobbits were wrong about the balanced budget amendment, but I think their hearts were in the right place and I still think they served a highly useful purpose in holding the GOP leaderships’ feet to the fire and restricting their ability to compromise too far elsewhere.

Mr. Boehner was enabled by their existence to go to Barack Obama and Harry Reid and say, “You know, guys, I’d like to compromise further and let you throw in some class-warfare taxes on the rich, but those crazy hobbits are fierce and fanatical. They’d never put up with any tax increases at all. I’d like to settle for more modest spending reductions, but Bandobras “Bullroarer” Took (R-VA) is insisting on blood.” It’s useful in negotiations to have a “Mr. Jones” you have to answer to, who is completely unreasonable and who is making maximalist demands.

Marc A. Thiessen contends that, in the end, in fact, the Tea Party hobbits did win.

The reported debt-limit deal appears to be a victory for the Tea Party. It includes around $1 trillion in spending cuts and creates a special committee of Congress to recommend cuts of $1.2 trillion more. If Congress does not approve those additional cuts by year’s end, automatic spending cuts go into effect. The package sets an important new precedent that debt-limit increases must be “paid for” with commensurate cuts in spending. According to Sen. Rob Portman, a former White House budget director, if we cut a dollar of spending for every dollar we raise the debt limit, we will balance the budget in 10 years — something that even the Paul Ryan budget would not achieve. And all this is accomplished with no tax increases. …

The Tea Party is also winning the battle of ideas. Last week, Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod crowed that the debt-limit battle was shaping up as a “definitional fight” in which voters would see Obama as defending the reasonable center against Republicans who are “pandering to the extremes.” Well, if Axelrod is so confident that Obama is winning this “definitional fight,” why was the White House so adamant about ducking a second round next year? The president said that “the only bottom line that I have is that we extend this debt ceiling through the next election.” If he were winning the argument, he would have been eager to have this fight again just before the next election.

And Glenn Reynolds notes complacently: Well, you know the hobbits won in the original story too.

The fact that the Conservative Movement is large and diverse enough to have its own more extreme fringe is really a positive sign. Political coalitions large enough to win are never tidy, compact, perfectly ideologically pure, all neat and discreet. A successful political movement inevitably even attracts people you would just as soon not have on your own side along with all the opportunists who can tell which way the wind is blowing.

Charles Krauthammer, reflecting on the debt ceiling compromise, tells Fox News that the Tea Party Movement has done what it set out to do. It has changed the topic of America’s political debate.

Not so very long ago, at the time of his State of the Union address in January, Barack Obama was talking about more stimulus, “investment” in non-existent and uneconomic technologies, and the United States was firmly on the path to becoming another European-style welfare state. Looking back, Obama seems to be living in a different era. We are now in the period in which Americans recognize that government expansion and spending has gone too far, entitlements need to be rolled back, and the purposes and abilities of government re-evaluated. Obama has become a relic of the past, a fossil, and the Tea Party has been responsible.

Krauthammer, I think perfectly correctly views the still-pending-enactment debt bargain as a limited victory, but also as a turning point.

See the non-embeddable 2:01 video at Right Scoop.

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The same Charles Krauthammer had warned last Thursday:

I have every sympathy with the conservative counterrevolutionaries. Their containment of the Obama experiment has been remarkable. But reversal — rollback, in Cold War parlance — is simply not achievable until conservatives receive a mandate to govern from the White House.

Lincoln is reputed to have said: I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky. I don’t know whether conservatives have God on their side (I keep getting sent to His voice mail), but I do know that they don’t have Kentucky — they don’t have the Senate, they don’t have the White House. And under our constitutional system, you cannot govern from one house alone. Today’s resurgent conservatism, with its fidelity to constitutionalism, should be particularly attuned to this constraint, imposed as it is by a system of deliberately separated — and mutually limiting — powers.

Given this reality, trying to force the issue — turn a blocking minority into a governing authority — is not just counter-constitutional in spirit but self-destructive in practice. …

November 2012 constitutes the new conservatism’s one chance to restructure government and change the ideological course of the country. Why risk forfeiting that outcome by offering to share ownership of Obama’s wreckage?