The Sanchez Report

The Media's Silence In Pittsburgh Is Deafening

From Accuracy In Media:

For months, the liberal media have been warning America that "right-wing extremists" and "tea partiers" are whipping the country into an anti-government frenzy that inevitably will result in violence, but their at best irrational and at worst manufactured fears have not been warranted.

Hundreds of thousands of government critics marched on Washington on Sept. 12 and caused not one bit of trouble. Rest assured that any incidents would have been plastered all over the media if they had occurred.

Contrast that with what happened Thursday at the G20 meeting of economic leaders in Pittsburgh. Police had to fire pepper spray and smoke at left-wing anarchists who haven't a clue how to conduct a peaceful protest, but the trouble has barely made the news. The Huffington Post celebrated the protests with a vote-on-your-favorite photo contest that included shots of the street thugs.

Read entire post here

How's That $780 Billion Stimulus Package Working Out?

From PowerLine:

Another month has gone by, so it's time to check up on how the "stimulus" bill is doing. Innocent Bystanders has updated its invaluable chart, which shows the actual unemployment rate compared with the rates projected by the Obama administration, with and without passage of the "stimulus" bill; click to enlarge:

On Thursday, Joe Biden announced that the stimulus bill is working even better than had been expected. Biden's dissociation from reality is nearly complete, but one wonders: aren't there any journalists who are capable of looking up the administration's predictions and asking Biden fact-based questions? Or is that considered too much work?

California: Plenty Of Blame To Go Around

In case you've been wondering who is to blame for the mess in California, I found this article that pretty much sums it up. One caveat, the article does not go far enough to place blame on those who have controlled the Assembly and Senate for much of the past forty years, namely the Democrats. After all, they're the ones who are responsible for spending and have grown the annual budget from roughly $70 billion twelve years ago to nearly $150 billion today. The entire article can be found on Forbes.com:

The findings:

1. Arnold Schwarzenegger

The Terminator came to power with the support of much of the middle class and business community. But since taking office, he's resembled not the single-minded character for which he's famous but rather someone with multiple personalities.

2. The Public Sector

Who needs an economy when you have fat pensions and almost unlimited political power? That's the mentality of California's 356,000 workers and their unions, who make up the best-organized, best-funded and most powerful interest group in the state.State government continued to expand in size even when anyone with a room-temperature IQ knew California was headed for a massive financial meltdown. Scattered layoffs and the short-term salary givebacks now being considered won't cure the core problem: an overgenerous retirement system. The unfunded liabilities for these employees' generous pensions are now estimated at over $200 billion.

3. The Environment

In California today, everyone who makes a buck in the private sector--from developers and manufacturers to energy producers and farmers--cringes in fear of draconian regulations in the name of protecting the environment. The activists don't much care, since they get their money from trust-funders and their nonprofits. The losers are California's middle and working classes, the people who drive trucks, who work in factories and warehouses or who have white-collar jobs tied to these industries.

4. The Business Community

This insanity has been enabled by a lack of strong opposition to it. One potential source--California's business leadership--has become progressively more feeble over the past generation. Some members of the business elite, like those who work in Hollywood and Silicon Valley, tend to be too self-referential and complacent to care about the bigger issues. Others have either given up or are afraid to oppose the dominant forces of the environmental activists and the public sector.

Theoretically, according to business consultant Larry Kosmont, business should be able to make a strong case, particularly with the growing Latino caucus in the legislature. "You have all these job losses in Latino districts represented by Latino legislators who don't realize what they are doing to their own people," he says. "They have forgotten there's an economy to think about."

5. Californians

The last hope lies with those of us still enamored with California. We have allowed ourselves to be ruled by a motley alliance of self-righteous zealots, fools and cowards; now we must do something. Some think the solution is reining in citizens' power by using the jury pool to staff a state convention, as proposed by the Bay Area Council, or finding ways to undermine the initiative system, which would remove critical checks on legislative power.

Obamanomics Is Moving Us In The Wrong Direction

The great Larry Kudlow once again articulates why the Obama economic plan is leading us down the road to economic demoralization.

From Townhall.com:

There’s no question that current government policies for taxes, spending, and regulation are causing the U.S. to lose competitiveness in the global race for capital, prosperity, and growth.

Of course, China has been moving in the direction of free-market capitalism for years. To some extent, this shows the positive benefits of America’s free-trade policies and its open-mindedness in helping nurture not only China growth, but also middle-class prosperity worldwide.

But what’s particularly galling about Obamanomics is that we may well be losing our competitive edge with Europe. While Europe is ever so slightly moving toward Reagan and Thatcher, the U.S. is shifting toward an overtaxed and overregulated model that smacks of François Mitterrand. That’s something no one should want to tolerate.

Heavy government controls at home, along with an income-leveling social policy couched in economic-recovery terms, is no way to run a railroad. At the simple stroke of a computer key, world investment flows to its most hospitable destination. That includes a reliable currency. But in President Bush’s last year and President Obama’s first, the U.S. has become a less-hospitable destination for global capital. That should worry everybody.

Read entire post here

The Case Against Obama's Healthcare Takeover

From Kudlow's Money & Politics:

It looks like President Obama’s big-bang health-care reform is going down to defeat. This is good. But my question is why do we need it at all? According to a recent ABC News/USA Today/Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 89 percent of Americans are satisfied with their health care. That could mean up to 250 million people are happy. So why is it that we need Obama’s big-bang health-care overhaul in the first place?

There’s more. According the U.S. Census Bureau, we don’t have 47 million folks who are truly uninsured. When you take college kids plus those earning $75,000 or more who chose not to sign up, that removes roughly 20 million people. Then take out about 10 million more who are not U.S. citizens, and 11 million who are eligible for SCHIP and Medicaid but have not signed up for some reason.

So that really leaves only 10 million to 15 million people who are truly long-term uninsured.

Yes, they need help. And yes, I would like to give it to them. But not with mandatory coverage, or new government-backed insurance plans, or massive tax increases. And certainly not with the Canadian-European-style nationalization that has always been the true goal of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats.

Instead, we can give the truly uninsured vouchers or debit cards that will allow for choice and coverage, and even health savings accounts for retirement wealth. According to expert Betsy McCaughey, instead of several trillion dollars and socialized medicine, this voucher approach would cost only about $25 billion a year.

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The Terrorists Will Soon Be Hiring Lawyers

From the Powerline Blog:

Our friend Steve Hayes blows the whistle on a real scandal (as opposed to a faux "scandal" like waterboarding): on orders of the Obama administration, terrorists captured in Afghanistan are now being given Miranda warnings:

[T]he Obama Justice Department has quietly ordered FBI agents to read Miranda rights to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, according a senior Republican on the House Intelligence Committee. "The administration has decided to change the focus to law enforcement. Here's the problem. You have foreign fighters who are targeting US troops today -- foreign fighters who go to another country to kill Americans. We capture them and they're reading them their rights -- Mirandizing these foreign fighters," says Representative Mike Rogers, who recently met with military, intelligence and law enforcement officials on a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan.

Rogers, a former FBI special agent and U.S. Army officer, says the Obama administration has not briefed Congress on the new policy.

Think back to the days after September 11, 2001, and imagine how pretty much anyone would have reacted to the suggestion that terrorists captured overseas should be "arrested" and read their "rights." Those days, obviously, are long gone.

You may wonder what on earth the point is. Evidently, the idea is that we may want to prosecute these terrorists someday in American courts. If you have wondered, like me, why we are talking about criminal prosecutions in the U.S. when a terrorist tries to blow up American soldiers in Afghanistan, it turns out that Congress has passed anti-terrorism statutes that purport to reach overseas, so that someone who commits a terrorist act against an American soldier can, indeed, be brought back to the U.S. and prosecuted.

Of course, if the terrorists are under the jurisdiction of American courts with criminal prosecution as the aim, their rights do not stop with Miranda warnings. On the contrary: among other things, they are entitled to the assistance of counsel. So I suppose we should start shipping planeloads of criminal defense lawyers to Afghanistan to make sure that the terrorists' "rights" are fully protected.

But why would we even consider criminal prosecution for captured terrorists? In what war have we ever brought enemy combatants--legitimate ones, let alone terrorists--back to America to be criminally prosecuted? None, obviously.

All of this is emblematic of the Obama administration's return to a law enforcement model for fighting terrorism--the same model that failed so spectacularly in the years leading up to September 11. The best we can all do, for now, is hope that history does not repeat itself.

Newsweek's Evan Thomas: "Obama Is Sort Of GOD"

This is just another piece of evidence that the so-called "mainstream media" is out of control. When is the media going to put aside their love affair with President Obama and start providing some checks in the system? The American people need their leaders to be held accountable by the media and so far we've had nothing but a slobbering love affair reminiscent of childhood crushes. From Big Hollywood:

The 10 Most Liberal and Conservative Cities In California

The Sacramento Bee released a report that lists the ten most liberal and conservative cities in California. Their staff completed a data crunch using the latest voter registration numbers provided by the California Secretary of State. For you quants out there, you'll probably take this data and try to draw some correlations. If you come up with anything interesting, please let me know. The only surprise was that San Francisco ended up as the tenth most liberal city in the state. I thought it would place higher.

Conservative Places
10. Temecula (Riverside)
9. Palos Verdes Estates (Los Angeles)
8. Ridgecrest (Kern)
7. Coronado (San Diego)
6. Rancho Santa Margarita (Orange)
5. San Clemente (Orange)
4. Yorba Linda (Orange)
3. San Marino (Los Angeles)
2. Newport Beach (Orange)
1. Canyon Lake (Riverside)

Liberal Places
10. San Francisco
9. Compton (Los Angeles)
8. San Pablo (CoCo)
7. Fairfax (Marin)
6. Richmond (Contra Costa)
5. Albany (Alameda)
4. Inglewood (Los Angeles)
3. Emeryville (Alameda)
2. Oakland (Alameda)
1. Berkeley (Alameda)

The Far Left Is Beginning To Sour On Obama

It looks like the honeymoon is officially over between the far left and President Obama. On issue after issue, Obama has validated the Bush administration and the left is not happy. This disappointment has been kept under wraps for most of the past hundred days, but now they're beginning to voice their displeasure openly. These strains are not gaining much attention with the media, but this development could make it easier for the GOP to pick up seats in the 2010 elections. The President will need to excite his base in order to build upon their majorities in Congress next year, but with each tack to the center, he runs the risk of dampening that same energy that propelled him into the White House.

From Politico.com:

Barely four months into his presidency, Obama is confronting growing dissatisfaction among members of his liberal base, who feel spurned by a series of his early decisions on issues ranging from guns to torture to immigration

to gay rights.

The list got longer last week as Obama reversed his earlier decision to release photos of detaineesmilitary

A few, like MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, have even hurled the left’s ultimate epithet – suggesting that Obama’s turning into George W. Bush.

The building anger comes at a critical moment – just as Obama’s about to announce his choice for the Supreme Court. Fulfill their dreams of a “liberal Scalia,” a firebrand from the left, and much would be forgiven.

But if Obama opts instead for a decidedly centrist nominee aimed at winning a large number of Republican votes in the Senate, the growing concern could develop into something more politically dangerous.

Deficits Soar Even With Rosy Assumptions In New Obama Budget

I predict that at some point during the next two quarters, we will see some signs of positive GDP growth. The pundits and politicians will indeed declare that President Obama is the greatest president of all time. This will happen even though the President's policies and stimulus spending will not actually kick in for several more quarters. The pundits and most Americans for that matter don't fully understand economics and the capital markets, and those signs of life will only represent the calm before the storm. We will see inflation surge at an unprecedented rate and it will suffocate any growth that we may see this year. Just today, the White House announced that the projected deficits will be larger than initially expected despite their rosier assumptions.

From the McClatchy Newspapers:

The White House on Monday projected 2009 and 2010 federal budget deficits far higher than it forecast just two and a half months ago, even as it continued to defy most experts and predict that the economy is headed for a strong comeback starting late this year.

Economists scoffed at the latest administration predictions.

"If they keep playing this game, they're going to have real credibility problems," predicted Brian Bethune, the chief U.S. financial economist at IHS Global Insight, an economic research firm.

The new administration budget said that the fiscal 2009 deficit would reach $1.84 trillion, or $89 billion more than forecast in February, while the 2010 figure now is estimated at $1.26 trillion, or $87 billion above the previous number. The fiscal 2008 deficit was $459 billion.