I share Eugene Robinson’s disdain for “apocalyptic rhetoric”, amongst other speech, that comes from GOP presidential candidates Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum on the issue of war with Iran (“A Field of Hawks” March 9). While I share his concern about the beating of war drums, I question why Eugene Robinson is not using equal space to question President Obama’s actions of increasing war around the world.

Has Mr. Robinson forgotten that Obama has escalated the number of troops in Afghanistan? Has Mr. Robinson not noticed the drone war raging wild on the Aghan-Pakistan border under Obama’s watch? Did Mr. Robinson notice that President Obama authroized the U.S. military to get involved in the civil war in Libya? Has Mr. Robinson not paid any attention to the Obama administration’s actions that seem to indicate the growing possibility of war with Iran?

When Americans head to the ballot box in November and are faced with the choice between one of the three GOP candidates not named Ron Paul against Barack Obama, voters will only face a choice for war and not for peace. Obama has already proven that he is quite willing to wage war.

Sincerely,

Adam Bitely

Alexandria, VA

Oddly, the popular speakers at this conference are primarily politicians–politicians that are usually in direct violation of the purpose of the convention. But that goes right over the heads of most CPAC attendees. They stand and applaud the politicians as they file through the convention saying to each other that the cause of limiting government will be successful if we just get more of these folks elected…

These conferences sicken me. The hero worship of people that are doing absolutely nothing other than collecting a paycheck from the taxpayer while deciding where to spend other people’s money is disgusting.

An interesting speaker at CPAC would ask the crowd if they know how much government has shrunk or how government has been specifically limited since the conference began over 30 years ago. I’m assuming there would either be crickets or the crowd would boo the person that poses that question.

As I sarcastically posted on Twitter earlier today, “Thank God for CPAC. If not for this yearly meeting, government would be growing like crazy, and government spending would be out of control!”

For some time now, Republican hawks like Sen. John McCain and Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon have been saying that our military budget is inadequate for the threats we face. They like to gripe that President Barack Obama is orchestrating the decline of American power.

Some of this is pure partisanship. Republicans criticize Democrats just as Democrats criticized President George W. Bush. The hawks, though, have a special devotion to the military budget. In their view, some military spending is good; more is even better. But if overspending on the military and promoting the United States as global policeman are benchmarks of approval, they should have little to complain about with our current president.

Contrary to his rhetoric of change, the president sounded like a neoconservative when he declared during his recent State of the Union address that the United States was, and would remain, the world’s “indispensable nation.” Obama’s proposed Pentagon budget, released last week, affirmed his intention to retain most of the U.S. military’s current missions, even when they aren’t needed to safeguard the United States’ vital security interests.

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And remember when Obama promised he would stop torture and close down Guantanamo Bay? Remember when he was against troop surges? Well, that too was propaganda peddled by Democrats to trick you into supporting the supposed “peace” candidate Obama. Of course, that wasn’t true. He surged the number of troops in Afghanistan, he escalated the drone war in Pakistan, he has kept the power on at Guantanamo Bay, and went to war with Libya. That doesn’t sound like a President who is anti-war now does it?

It is completely true that Republicans typically favor big government when it comes to the foreign policy realm. There can never be enough government action when it comes to the military and dealing with other nations according to most conservatives, Republicans and all neocons. Same goes for Democrats. The only difference is that each side likes to belittle the other side so that they look stronger to voters on foreign policy issues.

Check out this great article from Steve Chapman over at Reason:

Reality, however, has a way of trumping delusions. Calling Obama an appeaser is like calling Eli Manning a klutz. The only thing odder than saying it is expecting anyone to believe it.

But the appeasement line is a treasured and durable GOP theme. Republicans used it successfully in the 1970s against George McGovern and Jimmy Carter.

They revived it to pummel Democrats who opposed aid to the Nicaraguan rebels in the 1980s, the first war with Iraq in 1991 and the second war with Iraq in 2003. Whenever Democrats resisted military action favored by Republicans, they got painted bright yellow.

The Republicans tried it again in 2008, accusing Obama of pathetic naivete in offering to talk with North Korea and Iran without preconditions. But the tactic didn’t have its intended effect.

Obama was the guy who said he would go into Pakistan if necessary to get bin Laden — while GOP nominee John McCain was preaching the need to get along with Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf.

It’s a mystery why they expect this claim to work in 2012. In his approach to foreign policy and national security, Obama has done many things that, if President McCain had done them, would evoke thunderous ovations at this year’s Republican convention.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. policy under Obama is not much, if any, different from what we would have expected had Bush stayed for a third term. Even when Obama has diverged from previous policy on other issues, the change cannot be detected without a microscope.

Keep reading.

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Economics — unlike chemistry, electrical engineering and almost any other subject matter you can name — is a discipline that people routinely opine on even if they have zero formal exposure to it. No taxi driver or movie star offers, for example, his opinion on the molecular structure of radium or the process by which the magnetron led to the development of microwave ovens. On such matters, that person defers to trained chemists and engineers.

But that same cabbie or movie star is often eager to give his opinion on matters such as the causes and consequences of expanded international trade, the effect of minimum-wage legislation and the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the salaries of professional sports stars.

I’m embarrassed to confess that I often get annoyed at non-economists making pronouncements on economics. After all, I’ve devoted my entire adult life — 35 years so far — to studying, pondering and researching economics. Most economics is, I admit, “common sense applied consistently” (as I like to describe it). But some of it is actually pretty complex, requiring for its mastery deep reflection, extensive reading and intellectual discipline.

And handling even that large portion of economics that is “common sense applied consistently” requires practice. To apply common sense consistently to economics demands more than listening to your favorite TV pundits and reading more than just newspaper columns. (Yes, that goes even for my column.)

Read more: An economist’s lament – Pittsburgh Tribune-Review http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/columnists/boudreaux/s_780447.html#ixzz1lvHVfaIV

As a student of economics myself at GMU, I am always amazed by the sheer number of self-proclaimed economic geniuses I seem to always run in to. When I inquire as to what their depth of knowledge on economics is it is usually minimal at best. If I’m lucky, the person may have taken a 100 level Econ course at one point in time. To say the least, it does annoy me when these people make broad and sweeping policy proposals based on absolutely zero knowledge of what they are discussing.

This is also the case with most politicians–thus leading to many of the problems we see with government routinely.

I’ve always wondered why so many people focus their disdain on earmarks more than the larger and more conventional forms of spending.  However, I do believe that a healthy skepticism of how Congress manages the money they take from the people is a good thing, no matter if it’s just focusing on the smallest form of Congressional spending.

Congress, convincing people once more that they are possibly the worst managers of other people’s money outside of Obama’s Department of Energy, has now found itself in the public ire once more after a new series of reports from the Washington Post.  The Post revealed that the earmarking going on inside of Congress wasn’t necessarily done to benefit the greater good of the congressional district but rather to benefit the members of Congress and those connected to them such as the institutions and companies that employ friends and family of the Members of Congress themselves.

And get a load of this — Congress writes their own ethics code so in essence, if the code said that they could hand out earmarks to benefit friends and family it would completely above board.

Last year, Congress imposed a two year ban on earmarks after it became one of the central issues in the 2010 midterm elections in regards to Washington getting its spending habits under control. According to the Washington Post, “In 2010, the number of earmarks hit a new high: 11,320 worth $32 billion.” That’s no small amount of money.

Getting the earmark ban in place was merely a symbolic move by members of Congress who begrudgingly hinted that they might have a spending addiction. The national debt, which at the time of this writing is $15.34 trillion, is still rising along with the rate of spending in Congress, and far faster than the economy is.

But what should be most troubling to Americans is that the earmarking process appears to have benefited family members of Congressman and women on numerous occasions. This is not a practice that should be punished with a two year moratorium, but a practice that should be permanently banned.

According to the Washington Post report, “Some members of Congress send tax dollars to companies, colleges and community groups where their spouses, children and parents work as salaried employees, lobbyists or board members… A U.S. senator from South Dakota helped add millions to a Pentagon program his wife evaluated as a contract employee. A Washington congressman boosted the budget of an environmental group that his son ran as executive director. A Texas congresswoman guided millions to a university where her husband served as a vice president.”

As George Mason University professor of economics Russ Roberts wrote at his blog CafeHayek.com, “If what is legal becomes the norm rather than what is moral, we are all going to be very poor. The names of these people should be on the front page of the Washington Post every day until election day and their constituents should vote them out of office regardless of what they have ‘accomplished’ with other people’s money.”

Using your political office to direct other people’s money for the gain of your own family is exactly what is wrong with Congress. This mentality is not new, and it is not going away no matter how many temporary bans are put in place. This is how the system is designed, and how it has worked for all of our lives. Perhaps, these reports from the Washington Post will lead to Americans replacing members of Congress who could care less about wasting other people’s money for their own gain while bemoaning cuts to spending on other parts of the federal budget.

Click here to see a full list of the Congressmen that have frivolously wasted your money for their own private gain for the gain of those close to them.

This column was originally posted at NetRightDaily.com.

The U.S. defense budget is about 43 percent of the world’s total military spending — more than the combined defense spending of the next 17 nations, many of which are U.S. allies. Are Republicans really going to warn voters that America will be imperiled if the defense budget is cut 8 percent from projections over the next decade? In 2017, defense spending would still be more than that of the next 10 countries combined.

…

Romney says: “It is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” that if he is elected, Iran will not get such a weapon, and if Obama is reelected, it will. He also says that Obama “has made it very clear that he’s not willing to do those things necessary to get Iran to be dissuaded from” its nuclear ambitions.” Romney may, however, be premature in assuming the futility of new sanctions the Obama administration is orchestrating, and Panetta says Iran acquiring nuclear weapons is “unacceptable” and “a red line for us” and if “we get intelligence that they are proceeding with developing a nuclear weapon, then we will take whatever steps necessary to stop it.” What, then, is the difference between Romney and Obama regarding Iran?

Osama bin Laden and many other “high-value targets” are dead, the drone war is being waged more vigorously than ever, and Guantanamo is still open, so Republicans can hardly say that Obama has implemented dramatic and dangerous discontinuities regarding counterterrorism. Obama says that, even with his proposed cuts, the defense budget would increase at about the rate of inflation through the next decade. Republicans who think America is being endangered by “appeasement” and military parsimony have worked that pedal on their organ quite enough.

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