What a culture of entitlement leads to

We should keep an eye on the protests in France to let us know what could well happen to us if we keep on the road we are on. Those protests are close to paralyzing the nation as the people are going on strike and protesting in the streets over a rather mild proposal to raise the age of retirement from 60 to 62.

Scattered fuel shortages rattled drivers, and officials at France's main airport warned that some flights must arrive with enough fuel to get back home as hundreds of thousands of people marched Saturday for the fifth time in a month to protest President Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to raise the retirement age to 62.

Frequent strikes in the past few weeks have hobbled French trains and airports, closed schools and docks, and left garbage piling up in the southern port of Marseille.

And now the airline industry is getting worried, after all of France's 12 fuel-producing refineries went on strike, forcing police to be called in Friday to reopen three main depots. The Civil Aviation Authority sent out an advisory Friday night to airlines requiring short- and medium-haul flights to Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport - one of Europe's key hubs - to arrive with enough fuel to get home, spokesman Eric Heraud said.

"They must come with a maximum capacity in their fuel tanks," he said. "Obviously, these instructions apply only to short- and medium-haul flights" of less than four or five hours because transatlantic flights cannot "double carry" fuel....

Countries across Europe are cutting spending and raising taxes to bring down deficits and debts after the 2008 financial crisis resulted in the worst recession in 70 years. Labor leaders, students and civil servants are fighting back.

These protests are "an attempt to say stop abusing the workers and citizens," Christian Coste, head of the CGT Union at Total's La Mede refinery, told Associated Press Television News on Saturday. "We are not here to bring France to its knees and create a shortage. We are here to make ourselves heard."

Workers have been striking for five days straight at the La Mede refinery in southern France.

Sarkozy's pension overhaul - especially raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 - are seen by unions as an attack on their near-sacred social protections. Yet the government says it is the only way to save the money-draining pension system and insists French workers must work longer because they are living longer.

Even at 62, France would have one of the lowest retirement ages in Europe.

This is what happens when you treat the populace as children who must be provided for by the government. They won't understand that the gravy train can't run indefinitely - the money isn't there, yet they don't care. What will happen when such changes have to be made in places like California or New York? We haven't had such a paralyzing general strike here in the U.S. in decades. Do you think that our politicians have the nerve to deal with hundreds of thousands of striking protesters in the streets demanding that they get the generous pension benefits that they have been promised? We'll see if Sarkozy has the guts to continue in the face of these waves of protests and strikes. He has Greece's example to give steel to his spine.

And we have both examples to steel ours.

David Brooks acknowledges that Obama has been lying to us for a year

Ed Morrissey and Michelle Malkin call David Brooks out on his admission that Obama told him a year ago that there was no such thing as shovel-ready jobs.

Ignoring the question of whether a journalist should report on something the President said to him once it became clear that the President is saying something differently in public than he said in private, let's just look on what this tells us about Obama. It means that he has been pretending to us that his stimulus boondoggle was actually funding such shovel-ready projects. Morrissey quotes from Obama speeches proudly claiming that he was concerned to make sure that "shovel ready actually means shovel ready." Morrissey also links to the White House claims about shovel-ready projects that the stimulus has funded.

So the President is willing to admit in an off-the-record bull session with David Brooks that the projects that he has been claiming to have funded weren't really what he was telling us that they were. I guess we're just such rubes that we don't rate honesty from the President about the billions of our money that he is spending.

Threading the racial needle

The New York Times explains the Democrats' strategy for the election - appeal to blacks without letting white voters know that that is their plan.

A flood of black voters in North Carolina’s Eighth Congressional District two years ago helped Barack Obama become the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry this state since Jimmy Carter and lifted the party’s Congressional challenger, Larry Kissell, to victory.

Without Mr. Obama atop the ticket this year, Mr. Kissell and a number of other vulnerable Democrats, mostly in the rural South, face the challenge of reviving the spirit of 2008 for black voters without alienating right-leaning white majorities in their districts.

That's the problem with coalition politics - you may have groups within the coalition who are not natural allies. However, it might also be the time for black voters to realize that the Democratic Party has not delivered for them. They've had control of Congress for four years and complete control of the government for almost two years. And black voters may well be asking themselves if any of the programs instituted in that time have truly helped them. With unemployment in the black community at 16.1% is close to double that of whites. And has support for Democrats for over forty years truly helped black children stuck in terrible schools? Which politicians are the ones opposing reforms that are improving those schools?

While the Democrats like to divide the electorate into various ethnic groups and appeal to them individually. Maybe it's time to appeal to groups all together and not try to thread the racial needle to appeal to blacks in one group while hoping that whites won't mind.

Please stop psychoanalyzing us, Mr. President

Maybe it's the professor in him, but Barack Obama seems to like to psychoanalyze the public and come up with his own assessment of why we lowly beings who might oppose his policies think the way we do. And he lapses into special arrogance when he's talking to Democratic contributors. Remember his conclusion that people in small towns supporting Hillary Clinton rather than him were just scared of losing their jobs and so "they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Well, he's returned the public to the couch once again to try to explain why people might oppose him today.

President Barack Obama said Americans' "fear and frustration" is to blame for an intense midterm election cycle that threatens to derail the Democratic agenda.

"Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared,” Obama said Saturday evening in remarks at a small Democratic fundraiser Saturday evening. “And the country's scared.”

Obama told the several dozen donors that he was offering them his “view from the Oval Office.” He faulted the economic downturn for Americans’ inability to “think clearly” and said the burden is on Democrats “to break through the fear and the frustration people are feeling.”

Got that? Only scared people who aren't thinking clearly would oppose him and other Democrats. Does it even occur to him that many people have very logical reasons why we oppose his policies? Please. He is so arrogantly dismissive of his opponents that he doesn't even acknowledge their arguments. We've seen this over and over when he throws out his strawman arguments that the Republicans haven't put forward any of their own proposals for how to improve the economy or reform health care. Instead, anyone opposing him is just being irrationally biased by fears in this difficult economy.

He misses the logical connection between being worried, even scared, about our economic situation and realizing that his policies are exacerbating our nation's problems. Maybe if he'd take a peek out of his ivory tower, he'd realize that many people are using logic, not fear, to oppose Democrats this year.

Cruising the Web

If you haven't read Daniel Henninger's column on how capitalism saved the Chilean miners, go do so now.

Peggy Noonan puts to words why everyone watching was so moved by the rescue of the Chilean miners.

Then go read IBD's editorial contrasting Chilean president Sebastian Pinero's leadership in the crisis with President Obama's leadership in the BP oil spill. The contrast is telling.

If they take over the House, the Republicans plan to go after the creation of all the new White House czars. It's about time that we have it clarified where exactly the limitations are in our checks and balances system on the Executive branch taking action, creating offices, and writing regulations without any role for Congress.

Pat Caddell unloads on the President's tactics.

Oh, this is a cruel cut. Politico says that Barack Obama has become the John McCain of 2010.

This is too sublime. After a career in politics of bashing the rich, Barney Frank has to explain away taking rides on the plane of a billionaire who got $200 million in the federal bailout. And staying at the guy's mansion in the Virgin Islands. His defense: “They’re friends. Are you not supposed to have friends if they’re wealthy?” The Wall Street Journal weighs in describing the slipperiness of Frank's application for an ethics waiver to fly on the jet.

With that in mind, here's a chilling headline, "After mortgage meltdown, Barney Frank gets another chance to remake housing finance." It runs a shiver through you, doesn't it?

Only one single person in Jim Oberstar's district has contributed to his campaign? The guy has been in D.C. for close to 50 years and only one of his constituents is supporting him financially? That's telling.

Is this the profile of anyone who should be a chief adviser to the President?

Imagine hiring a former lobbyist for Enron to be the chief adviser to the president. That is the equivalent of having Fannie Mae's chief lobbyist promoted to top security adviser to President Obama.

Years before Fannie Mae foundered amid a massive accounting scandal, President Obama's choice for national security adviser oversaw an office inside the mortgage giant that orchestrated a negative publicity blitz to fight attempts by Congress to increase government oversight, records show.

Thomas E. Donilon, who won the job as national security adviser this month, worked as a registered lobbyist for Fannie Mae from 1999 to 2005 at a time the company's officials insisted finances were sound. He also earned more than $1.8 million in bonuses before the government took over the troubled company in the wake of an accounting scandal.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Mr. Obama, who railed against lobbyists on the campaign trail, hailed Mr. Donilon's appointment last week, but made no mention of his time as a registered lobbyist.

Mr. Donilon's work came under scrutiny in a 2006 report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), which found that Fannie Mae lobbyists - working in an office overseen by Mr. Donilon - parlayed their ties to members of Congress to try to discredit federal regulators looking into the finances of the company.

"Thus, Fannie Mae succeeded in creating a large volume of negative publicity about the OFHEO examination report, in an effort to distract attention from its multibillion-dollar accounting errors," the OFHEO report concluded.

In addition, the report noted that the publicity campaign, which included leaking nonpublic information, was conceived and executed by Fannie Mae's government and industry relations department, but was still "well known" to Mr. Donilon and other senior executives.

Somehow, that just doesn't seem the background of a penetrating national security adviser. How does being a lobbyist for an entity that has cost taxpayers billions of dollars qualify someone as a national security adviser?

Obama believes that we're almost as dumb as he is about government

This New York Times story on President Obama's assessment of his first two years in office is just too funny. Or it would be funny, if our country's fate wasn't so affected by his mistakes. He says he's learned that his stimulus was mistakenly designed.

During our hour together, Obama told me he had no regrets about the broad direction of his presidency. But he did identify what he called “tactical lessons.” He let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat.” He realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” when it comes to public works. Perhaps he should not have proposed tax breaks as part of his stimulus and instead “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” so it could be seen as a bipartisan compromise.

Most of all, he has learned that, for all his anti-Washington rhetoric, he has to play by Washington rules if he wants to win in Washington. It is not enough to be supremely sure that he is right if no one else agrees with him. “Given how much stuff was coming at us,” Obama told me, “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”

He didn't know that there was no such thing as a shovel-ready project? Well, duh! It wasn't as if people weren't trying to get that message across while the stimulus was being discussed. The CBO tried to get that point across back in January, 2009. Also in January, Lawrence Lindsey and Alice Rivlin tried to get the Democrats to recognize this. Obama's own economic adviser, Larry Summers, had warned that a stimulus should be timely, targeted, and temporary. Everyone of sense understood that there was no such thing as a shovel-ready project, but the Democrats pretended that they were going to get money out there fast and put people back to work quickly. Hah! Mostly they were just funding Democratic wish-list items that had little to do with helping the economy to grow.

And Obama thinks that his problem was that he didn't explain himself well enough to the American people. We're just too stupid to have gotten the message from his dozens and dozens of speeches in the past 22 months. You can hardly turn on your tv without seeing and hearing him. He's there at the basketball games. He's there on MTV and he's giving messages to school children at the start of school. He's given speech after speech, but somehow he thinks the problem is the politics, not the policy. If only he'd just had the right message, the American people would have ignored the lack of success and embraced the Democrats' bungling of the economy. He thinks that, if he'd just been more political, everyone would understand how wonderful his failed economic policies are.

That’s a refrain heard inside the White House as well: it’s a communication problem. The first refuge of any politician in trouble is that it’s a communication problem, not a policy problem. If only I explained what I was doing better, the people would be more supportive. Which roughly translates to If only you people paid attention, you wouldn’t be kicking me upside the head.

If his policies were so successful, how come Democratic politicians are running as fast as possible away from Obama and his stimulus and health care policies? They're pretending that they're not allies who have supported Pelosi, Reid, and Obama down the line. I guess it's all because the people are just too dumb to fully appreciate how wonderfully he's been governing us through these economic times.

And then Obama has a "Who are you going to believe - me or your lying eyes" moment when he says that "he let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat.”

I think I'll believe my lying eyes.

Teachers putting themselves ahead of their students

In Wrentham Massachusetts the teachers and the school board have not been able to reach an agreement on salary disputes. The teachers are demanding a 28% increase over the next three years. No community can afford that sort of jump in payroll even in the best of times. The teachers union hasn't called a strike because that would be illegal and they'd be liable for fines. But they have decided to take what actions they can in order to put pressure on the school board. They're refusing to work with students on independent study classes that they'd previously agreed to. They're not entering grades into a system that allows parents to check on their children's grades. But most unforgivable of all, teachers are refusing to write recommendations for seniors applying to college.

"Seniors were told by teachers they can't write personal recommendations to colleges. That is especially worrisome to those kids who want to apply for early admission," [School Board Chairwoman] Robeson said. "Students are told by colleges they don't really want form letters teachers said they would fill out. Colleges will frown on a form letter." Another issue brought up that also involves the middle school is teachers are not using a computerized grading system that allows parents to check on their children's progress, Robeson said.

This is deeply odious. Teachers unions like to pretend that they're all about the children, but no teacher who truly cared about young people would use the future of students as a weapon in a salary dispute. Here students are at a critical point in their lives as they apply to college and they need help from their teachers to get into college. And colleges look at those recommendations as this "Note to Applicants" from the dean of admissions at Connecticut College makes clear.

At the school where I teach, I usually write about 15 to 20 recommendations a year out of graduating class of around 140 students. We take recommendations very seriously at our school. If one teacher or college adviser doesn't know enough about a student to write an informative letter, we'll email around to see if some other teacher has some insight or interesting anecdote to help us give colleges a good picture of who these individual students are. I take it as one of my important responsibilities to help students achieve their dreams. Since we're a small school, we get to know students pretty well and I often have students in two or three classes plus in extra curricular activities I sponsor. If I can write something that helps college admissions officers get a more complete picture of an individual student's strengths and abilities then that is a wonderful opportunity for me. I can't imagine any true teacher holding that responsibility to students hostage in order to gain leverage in contract negotiations. That is truly shameful. The parents are angry and rightfully so.

I've heard from friends who have taught in school districts with powerful unions and what happens there is amazing to me. I've heard of union leaders who warn teachers not to meet to tutor students outside the hours of work agreed upon by the unions and not to sponsor student clubs outside of those hours. Can you imagine any teacher being told not to give help to students who don't understand the material? And then the unions like to talk about how they deserve raises in the name of the children.

The school board is petitioning the state to determine if the teachers' actions constitute a strike. If the answer is yes, they can petition for a cease and desist letter or impose a fine on the union. While the adults argue, the calendar is moving forward. Students who want to apply early admission have a deadline of November 1. Teachers have played their game with these students' futures. They have proven that they are not worth any pay increase at all. No teacher who truly cared about children would punish students over a salary dispute. These teachers should be wearing a badge of shame.

I've heard of quite a few of our former students who have graduated in the past year and want to teach but can't find jobs in North Carolina because of employment freezes around the state. They should head up to Wrentham and replace those teachers who are trading away students' futures in the middle of college application season.

Continuing to ignore the main issue

The Democrats seem to be specializing in cluelessness. They're continuing to attack supposed foreign money fueling anti-Democratic ads despite having been called on it by right-wing sources such as the New York Times and Bob Schieffer. Even some Democrats, some of whom who get support by the Chamber of Congress, are questioning these tactics.

It's just silly. With demoralizing unemployment continuing for almost two years now, do people want to hear the President demonizing business and raising the unsubstantiated specter of foreign money seeping into our campaigns. As Lawrence Kudlow writes,

Believe it or not, with jobs falling for four consecutive months and unemployment stubbornly high near 10 percent, President Obama is out on the campaign trail bashing businesses and promoting class warfare. Huh? Oh my gosh is he off message.

He’s slamming the Chamber of Commerce for allegedly using foreign money in campaign ads, even though there’s not one shred of evidence of this. Huh (again)? Is the Chamber really a big election-year issue? Is it causing high unemployment?

Of course, Obama never mentions the unions, including the SEIU and AFL-CIO, and all their foreign money from their big international affiliates. Instead, he extends his own cast of villains, attacking special interests, Wall Street banks, corporations, the oil industry, the insurance industry, credit-card companies, AIG, and ExxonMobil. ExxonMobil? What did they do? Oh, they’re an oil company.

Phew. Kind of anti-business, wouldn’t you say?

Obama then blasts millionaires and billionaires, waging war on capital and investors, too. Next he talks about getting young people, African Americans, and union members to the polls. Even more division. Even more class warfare.

All this, of course, from the “post-partisan” president who was going to bring us all together for change.

But what’s truly incredible about Obama’s pre-election performance is how it totally misses the mark on the issues that really matter, like high unemployment, low growth, big-government spending, Obamacare, and tax hikes. That’s the stuff people are really talking about.

The ironies abound. As Robert Gibbs tries to stir fears of hidden contributors funneling nefarious money into independent groups, The Daily Caller reports that Gibbs used to work for such a group that attacked Howard Dean back before the 2004 Iowa caucuses.

And the American Spectator says that the GOP are quite willing to open up investigations once they gain control of the House, but their focus would be on money going to support Democrats.

"Given that we know that President Obama's presidential election campaign received millions of dollars and possibly tens of millions of dollars in foreign donations, and that a number of union-funded organizations received foreign contributions during the 2008 and 2010 election cycles, and that MoveOn.org has perhaps received millions in foreign contributions, not to mention the possibility that the Center for American Progress has foreign donors, we can see where the American people might be concerned that these entities not have the opportunity in the 2012 election cycle to tap into such resources," says a Senate Republican staffer with ties to the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's Permanent Committee on Investigations. "And since our Democratic colleagues chose to ignore all of this, then perhaps we should revisit them."

Is this really what Americans are interested in? Focus on the economy. Keep on the message. Just because the Democrats are desperate and flailing about with baseless accusations, the Republicans should keep their focus on the main issues. It's the economy, stupid.

There won't be a doctor in the house

Just when we're increasing the demand for doctors, we're facing a shortage of doctors. And a lot of the problem is government influence.

This disease can be traced back to 1997, when Congress, anticipating a doctor surplus, included a section in its budget-balancing law that froze the number of Medicare-sponsored residency positions.

But instead of a surplus, a shortage soon developed, and has worsened over the years, now reaching epidemic proportions. The Association of American Medical Colleges Center for Workforce Studies just reported an anticipated shortage of 90,000 doctors of all kinds over the next decade, with half of them being primary care physicians and the other half surgeons and specialists.

Ah, the joys of government interfering in the market.

Just when we have increasing numbers of aging Americans, more government actions are decreasing our numbers of doctors.

According to a recent national survey, less than half of the nation's doctors are seeing new Medicaid patients. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission recently reported that 28% of patients seeking a new Medicare provider were unable to find one. This problem will only get worse as the new Independent Medicare Advisory Panel decides which services are beneficial and which aren't, tying the treating hands of doctors who are still trying to work with Medicare.

We're going to need more and more doctors, people who have had the specialist training to deal with all the modern medical technology and treatments being developed, yet government actions are adding to a looming shortage, just when ObamaCare's provisions will increase the demand for medical care. And the market won't be able to right itself because the government has done too much to interfere with the normal movement of the marketplace.

What national health care in Greece has led to

Here's a terrifying story about what the largest Greek health service has decided.

This Saturday, one of Greece’s most respected newspapers, To Vima, reported that the nation’s largest government health insurance provider would no longer pay for special footwear for diabetes patients. Amputation is cheaper, says the Benefits Division of the state insurance provider.

What next will they decide they can't afford? If only our government would learn from the bad example of Greece?

Ya think this might be a problem?

It's starting to dawn on everyone that politicians have promised public employees such generous retirement benefits that the governments don't have the money to pay for. Do you think that this might be a problem?

The cities, counties and authorities of New York have promised more than $200 billion worth of health benefits to their retirees while setting aside almost nothing, putting the public work force on a collision course with the taxpayers who are expected to foot the bill.

The total cost appears in a report to be issued on Wednesday by the Empire Center for New York State Policy, a research organization that studies fiscal policy.

It does not suggest that New York must somehow come up with $200 billion right away.

But the report casts serious doubt over whether medical benefits for New York’s retirees will be sustainable, given the sputtering economy and today’s climate of hostility toward new taxes and taxpayer bailouts.

I can answer that one. These benefits won't be sustainable. Period. David Brooks puts it in basic terms when he answers the question about why a state like New Jersey can't afford to go forward with a new tunnel to New York.

New Jersey can’t afford to build its tunnel, but benefits packages for the state’s employees are 41 percent more expensive than those offered by the average Fortune 500 company. These benefits costs are rising by 16 percent a year.

New York City has to strain to finance its schools but must support 10,000 former cops who have retired before age 50.

California can’t afford new water projects, but state cops often receive 90 percent of their salaries when they retire at 50. The average corrections officer there makes $70,000 a year in base salary and $100,000 with overtime (California spends more on its prison system than on its schools).

States across the nation will be paralyzed for the rest of our lives because they face unfunded pension obligations that, if counted accurately, amount to $2 trillion — or $87,000 per plan participant.

All in all, governments can’t promote future prosperity because they are strangling on their own self-indulgence.

This is the scandal of our generation. And, as Brooks points out, this is a Democratic scandal - it's their epic failure. They sold their soul to the public employees unions and we'll all be paying for it and our children will reap this whirlwind. And the politicians will be long gone while the havoc they've unleashed upon their states destroys any prospect for growth or even plain sustainability.