On a morning when Mitt Romney should be celebrating his big win yesterday’s Florida primary, his campaign is instead trying spin remarks he made in an interview CNN’s Soledad O’Brien:

I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor, we have a safety net there. If it needs repair I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they are doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90-95 percent of Americans who are struggling.

Ouch, talk about squandering your victory lap.

Even taken in context Gov. Romney’s remarks are cringe inducing, his reasoning plays directly into the Democratic Party’s ‘Republicans don’t care about the poor’ narrative. Not that the context even matters, the only thing people are to take away from that interview, the only thing people are going to remember is Mitt Romney saying “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”

The campaign ads practically write themselves.

Frankly, Jonah Goldberg is right:

“… the under-emphasized dynamic in this race isn’t that Romney isn’t conservative enough (though that’s obviously a real concern out there) it’s that he’s simply not a good enough politician. He may be the most electable on paper. He’s certainly a nice guy, decent father, smart, successful etc. But, every time he seems to get into his groove and pull away he says things that make people think he doesn’t know how to play the game.”

And that more than anything else is why I think he’s the wrong candidate, for all his strengths, he has the uncanny ability to look and sound like a frighteningly bad caricature of a disconnected, elitist country club Republican.

Overall, this gaffe probably isn’t fatal, but it’s worrisome — make no mistake this gaffe is going to come back haunt him. This is still Romney’s campaign to lose, he’s going to have to sharpen his focus and make sure he doesn’t fall into the class-warfare trap. This election is about the economy, the focus should be on fixing the economy so that everyone benefits not pitting one group of Americans against another, the way Barack Obama has.

I can’t say it any better than Tina Korbe:

No matter what measure you use, government spending has increased since 1965. Total government spending has more than doubled. Federal spending per household has increased from $11,431 in 1965 to $29,401 in 2010, for an increase of nearly 162 percent. That would all be fine if revenues had kept pace — if, in the same time period, the United States hadn’t also acquired more than $15 trillion in debt.

Under the Obama administration, the deficit and debt has only increased — and, to make matters worse, for all three years of Barack Obama’s presidency, the federal government has indulged in high levels of spending without an official budget. What could possibly be the result of such directionless spending other than unprecedented deficits and increased debt?

The Democrat-controlled Senate is directly to blame for the lack of a budget. Even when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, the Congress didn’t bother to pass a plan. Now that Republicans control the House, the House has passed a comprehensive budget plan — but the Senate has still done nothing. The Senate is the true do-nothing chamber, but the president will almost assuredly blame the House as the inactive chamber.

I’m honestly at loss for words here, as Ms. Korbe points out Pres. Obama and Senate Democrats will undoubtedly try blame House Republicans for the lack of a budget, but the reality is they did their job and passed a comprehensive budget plan last April.

It’s Harry Reid, and Senate Democrats who have failed to fulfill one of their most basic responsibilities and it’s they who should be held to account.

Ms. Miller decided to buy a gun after she was the victim of a home invasion while dog and house sitting for friends in 2010:

I want a gun. I don’t feel safe living in Washington, D.C. and want to protect myself. I’m starting today by going down to City Hall to find the gun permit office to tell them, “I want a gun.” This series will follow me as I navigate the city bureaucracy and outdated rules in order to legally buy a firearm.

My desire for a gun started when I had to face down over a dozen criminals on an empty cul de sac in Washington, D.C., armed only with a Blackberry.

It was New Year’s Day 2010, and I’d been staying in the house to dog sit for friends who were on vacation. I’d returned from walking the dog when I saw a man coming from the house. “What are you doing?” I asked, sensing something was off with the situation. The Golden Retriever just stood next to me with a slack leash.

“We’re here to clean the pool,” the man said. He looked nervous and his eyes were blood-shot.

I was pretty sure my friends hadn’t called in a swimming pool emergency during the middle of winter. “No, we didn’t call for you,” I said.

“Oh, then it must be the house next door,” he said, smiling nervously. He turned and walked away quickly.

I’d left the front door unlocked since I was walking the dog for less than ten minutes. (I know, lesson learned.) After the man left, I was still suspicious so I went inside, grabbed my Blackberry and clicked on the icon for the camera. I walked down the street, and as I turned the corner, I saw about 15 scruffy young men standing around two pickup trucks. We were at the end of a woody, dead-end road.

I nervously held up my Blackberry to take a quick photo of them and the license plates. Suddenly, the blood-shot-eyed guy darted out, blocking the shot. “What are you doing?” he asked. I looked around at all the men staring at me and was suddenly scared. “Nothing, I’m um, just going now,” I said as I put my Blackberry down instead of taking the picture around him and went home.

To me the single most striking thing about Ms. Miller’s experience, is that the process just buy a pistol in our nation’s capitol is virtually identical to the process for obtaining concealed carry permit in most other jurisdictions. There’s simply no logical reason for making that difficult just to legally purchase a firearm.

I’m all for reasonable restrictions like background checks, waiting periods, but forcing someone to go through a complex multi-step process, that takes months to complete and is virtually identical to the one for obtaining a concealed carry permit almost anywhere else is insane. The reason for it to discourage law-abiding citizens from exercising their Constitutionally protected rights… And let me clear about this, this isn’t simply a second amendment issue, everyone one of us has a God-given right to feel safe in our own home and to protect ourselves, our families and our property from those who would do us harm. There’s an old cliché to says when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

It’s true if you live in densely populated urban area the average response time to a 911 call around 7 minutes… But rural areas it can often take 20 minutes or more for police to arrive.

Anyway, Ms. Miller recently reached something of milestone in quest to legal obtain a handgun: She put done her money and ordered a Sig Sauer P229 in 9mm. Now all she has to do is a few more hoops before she can legally take possession of her pistol:

And, that is the “but” in this story. Although I have paid and ordered the gun, I can’t take possession of it until it is transferred to Mr. Sykes, and I get an approved registration certificate.

In order to get this certificate, I still have to do the following: take a written test on the city’s firearm laws; get Mr. Sykes to fill out the application form; have the eligibility form notarized; get two passport photos and prove that my eyesight is better or equal to the driver’s license requirement (20/70 in best eye and field of vision of at least 140 degrees).

Next, I have to take all the forms to the registry office; pay $60 in fees; wait five days for the application to be approved; wait an additional five days for Mr. Sykes to be able to release my gun; and take the gun to the police for a ballistics test.

Finally, if I pass all of these steps, I should be able to take possession of the gun that I already bought.

The sad truth is, Washington D.C. is one of  America’s most violent cities. The district’s arcane, restrictive gun laws haven’t made anyone safer, in fact one could argue that all the district’s decades old de facto gun ban has accomplished is to insure that criminals have largely defenseless population to prey upon.

From CNN:

Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, a 16-term Democrat, will announce Monday he does not intend to seek re-election in 2012, according to a statement from Frank’s office.

Good riddance, don’t let the door hit you on the way out Congressman.

H/T: Weasel Zippers.

Update: Matt Mackowiak tweets:

With Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) retiring, next in line on the Dem side of the House Financial Services Committee is Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA).

Ouch, would it be wrong of me to say I hope Rep. Frank reconsiders?

Oh this is rich, Former House Speaker Nancy “We have to pass the health care bill so that you can find out what is in it” Pelosi, the woman who shut the American people out of the debate over health care reform is now calling for transparency?

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Wednesday that Supreme Court arguments over President Obama’s healthcare law should be televised.

“When the Affordable Care Act is placed before the highest court in our country, all Americans will have a stake in the debate; therefore, all Americans should have access to it,” Pelosi said in a news release.

Right, will all due respect to Rep. Pelosi, it would have been nice if she had included the American people in the debate in the first place. Instead what we got were closed door meetings and an op-ed column calling protests against Obamacare “un-American”.

Call me suspicious, but I suspect the only reason she’s backing C-Span’s request to televise the hearings is because she think Democrats will be able to use portions of the video as a weapon against Republicans during the 2012 elections.

H/T: Doug Powers.

From CNSNews.com:

House Republicans are set to vote later this week on a balanced budget amendment (BBA) that would not cap federal spending as a percentage of GDP or require a supermajority to raise taxes.

Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said the vote would probably take place this Friday.

Cantor said that this version of a BBA, H.J. Res 2 — rather than one that would cap federal spending, H.J. Res 1 — was the version “overwhelmingly” favored by House Republicans.

What is it with the Republican leadership and self-defeating Kabuki theater?  This bill is a spectacularly bad idea for several reasons… First, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer is actively whipping against the bill, so it’s an open question whether this turd will even pass in the House. But if buy some miracle it does, the odds of getting the 67 votes needed to pass in Harry Reid’s Senate are about the same as the Miami Dolphins winning the Super Bowl this season.

Second it gives political cover to vulnerable Democrats, who can claim they voted for a Balanced Budget Amendment even though know it has no chance of passing.

Third it paints House and Senate Republicans who favor a tougher version of the amendment, H.J. Res 1, into a political corner. Democrats and their willing allies in the media will trumpet the fact that Republicans have come around to a “reasonable” compromise on the balanced-budget amendment that would have passed save for the objects of few radical extremists.

Finally, and most importantly, under Speaker Boehner’s amendment, federal spending could easily rise to 25% or more of GDP as long as the budget is balanced. This is a recipe for disaster that will ultimately lead higher taxes… We’ve seen this game played out time and again in states that have balanced budget amendments without spending caps — politicians keep spending and raise taxes to pay for it because their state constitution say they have to balanced the budget.

This is how Republicans lose elections, they were winning the debate on fiscal policy, but then they lost their focus and started putting political symbolism over substance. They badly misjudged President Obama’s willingness to cut spending and allowed budget debate to move to secret supercommittee where Democrats will almost certainly torpedo negotiations in and effort to gain a re-election advantage. And now they put forth a hollow balanced budget amendment that Democrats will gladly feign support for, but that has no chance of actually reducing spending or preventing future tax increases… Instead it virtually assures them.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has already suspended indefinitely implementation of the CLASS act — Obamacare’s Long-Term-Care Entitlement because it was financially unsustainable.

And as Jonathan Adler and Michael Cannon explain in today’s Wall Street Journal Obamacare has yet another major flaw that threatens its basic functioning:

Even if ObamaCare survives Supreme Court scrutiny next spring, its trials will be far from over. That’s because the law has a major glitch that threatens its basic functioning. It’s so problematic, in fact, that the Obama administration is now brazenly trying to rewrite the law without involving Congress.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act offers “premium assistance”—tax credits and subsidies—to households purchasing coverage through new health-insurance exchanges. This assistance was designed to hide a portion of the law’s cost to individuals by reducing the premium hikes that individuals will face after ObamaCare goes into effect in 2014. (If consumers face the law’s full cost, support for repeal will grow.)

The law encourages states to create health-insurance exchanges, but it permits Washington to create them if states decline. So far, only 17 states have passed legislation to create an exchange.

This is where the glitch comes in: ObamaCare authorizes premium assistance in state-run exchanges (Section 1311) but not federal ones (Section 1321). In other words, states that refuse to create an exchange can block much of ObamaCare’s spending and practically force Congress to reopen the law for revisions.

The Obama administration wants to avoid that legislative debacle, so this summer it proposed an IRS rule to offer premium assistance in all exchanges “whether established under section 1311 or 1321.” On Nov. 17 the IRS will hold a public hearing on that proposal. According to a Treasury Department spokeswoman, the administration is “confident” that offering premium assistance where Congress has not authorized it “is consistent with the intent of the law and our ability to interpret and implement it.”

Mr. Adler and Mr. Cannon rightly point out the law’s proponents confidence is misplaced… Federal agencies can create rules — but they cannot amend or ignore statutes and the text of the law is perfectly clear, it does not allow premium assistance in federal exchanges.

Simply put without congressional authorization, the IRS lacks the authority to dispense tax credits or spend money… Not that has ever stopped Washington’s regulators from ignoring the will of Congress – just look at Avenal Power Center, L.L.C. v. EPA.

Anyway, the odds that a Republican controlled House will fix a fatal flaw in Obamacare are somewhere around slim and none… the odds aren’t much in the Senate either where many Democrats are facing tough reelection fights and aren’t going to want to go anywhere near one of the most unpopular and polarizing pieces of legislation in recent memory — especially after the trouncing they took in the mid-terms.

Bottom line, the Obama Administration will undoubtedly try to push through their regulatory fix for this flaw only to see it almost instantaneously tossed out in a court challenge.

Related:

• More Americans than not want health law repeal: poll – Reuters

The world has done surprisingly well since the Great Recession began at not making things worse with trade protectionism. But that may soon change thanks to the U.S. Senate, which is expected to vote as early as this week on the most dangerous trade legislation in many years, the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act. This is when an American President would normally step in and defend the U.S. and world economies, but Barack Obama is bobbing and weaving for his own narrow political ends. This is risky business.

Senators Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham have pushed since 2005 to impose punitive tariffs on China if the value of the yuan doesn’t rise faster. The legislation is now coming to the floor because Senate Democrats want protectionist political cover against unions in return for voting on the free-trade pacts with Colombia, Panama and Korea that President Obama finally sent to Congress yesterday. But what is cynical posturing in Washington may look more threatening to the rest of the world, and once trade wars start they can be hard to stop.

The senators speak during a news conference on Sept. 22, to discuss unfair currency manipulation.

Unlike America’s last great trade blunder, the Tariff Act of 1930 (aka Smoot-Hawley), the China bill wouldn’t raise tariffs across the board, but would instead allow companies to seek countervailing duties by treating a “misaligned” currency as a subsidy. This would nonetheless open the floodgates to applications from American companies, and the resulting tariffs would violate World Trade Organization rules. China would undoubtedly retaliate, meaning companies and consumers in both countries would lose.

If other countries follow suit, there would be knock-on effects throughout the global economy. As the erstwhile leader of the world’s trading system as well as one of its main beneficiaries, the U.S. bears a special responsibility to avoid this outcome.

It’s fun and easy for politicians like Sen. Schumer and Sen. Graham to blame China’s monetary policy or “free trade” for the loss of American manufacturing jobs… It’s a much more difficult thing for politicians to admit that the tax and regulatory policies they and their colleagues have saddled American industry with are at least partly to blame for the job losses.

In short Senators Schumer and Graham and their ilk should spend less time worrying about the international economy and more time worrying about our national economy. They should be focusing on comprehensive, common sense tax and regulatory reforms that make it more lucrative for American manufacturers to produce quality, affordable goods here rather than overseas. Instead they’re focused on pushing foolish protectionist trade policies that could set off a global trade war.

One has to wonder what would happen if Washington’s policy makers reduced corporate tax rates, ended the punitive double taxation of repatriated profits from foreign subsidiaries, and reduced regulatory burdens? Call me crazy, but I suspect we’d see a boom in American industry.

Ron Paul said Monday that President Barack Obama’s targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki might be an impeachable offense.

Asked at a Manchester, N.H. town hall meeting about last week’s killing of the American-born Al Qaeda leader, the Texas congressman said impeachment would be “possible,” but that he wants to know more about how the administration “flouted the law.”

Paul called the killing a movement toward “tyranny.”

“I put responsibility on the president because this is obviously a step in the wrong direction,” Paul said. “We have just totally disrespected the Constitution.”

The comments once again put Paul at odds with his Republican rivals over foreign policy and the war on terror in the latest indication of how his foreign policy views stray far from Republican orthodoxy even in a GOP that’s taken on an increasingly isolationist bent. Candidates like Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney — who included the president in a list of people he commended in a statement released Friday — have generally been supportive of the killing. No one else in the field has spoken out against it.

But Paul’s stuck with the civil libertarians who’ve criticized the targeted killing of an American citizen without public due process.

With all due respect to Congressman Paul… I for one am not going to shed any tears over the killing of a two-bit terrorist thug like Anwar Al-Awlaki.

Mr. Al-Awlaki made a  choice, he chose to travel to a foreign country, and he chose to take up arms against the United States of America. As far as I’m concerned he was a traitor who renounced his citizenship and waived his right to due process the moment he made that choice… and he paid the price for it. Congressman Paul is, of course, entitled to his opinion, I doubt he’ll find much support for it outside the fever swamps inhabited by his most ardent supporters though.

H/T: Weasel Zippers.

Democrats want tax hikes to be the first item negotiated in “super committee” deficit-reduction talks, trying to force Republicans to confront an issue at the heart of this year’s budget fights, sources told Reuters.

The tough stance by Democratic members of the powerful 12-member congressional panel reflects the party’s wariness that Republicans might try to sideline the issue of revenue increases in the negotiations.

“They’ve raised the idea of doing taxes first,” a Republican aide involved in the discussions said on Friday on condition of anonymity.

Heh, when I first read this on Saturday afternoon, I couldn’t help but laugh… Democrats are as predictable as sunrise, they’ve spent the last several years demonizing “the rich” and trying to divide us along racial, cultural, socioeconomic lines. The numbers however tell a different story:

In 2007, 390,000 tax filers reported adjusted gross income of $1 million or more and paid $309 billion in taxes. In 2009, there were only 237,000 such filers, a decline of 39%. Almost four of 10 millionaires vanished in two years, and the total taxes they paid in 2009 declined to $178 billion, a drop of 42%.

Those with $10 million or more in reported income fell to 8,274 from 18,394 in 2007, a 55% drop. As a result, their tax payments tanked by 51%. These disappearing millionaires go a long way toward explaining why federal tax revenues have sunk to 15% of GDP in recent years. The loss of millionaires accounts for at least $130 billion of the higher federal budget deficit in 2009. If Warren Buffett wants to reduce the deficit, he should encourage policies to create more millionaires, not campaign to tax them more.

The millionaires who are left still pay a mountain of tax. Those who make $1 million accounted for about 0.2% of all tax returns but paid 20.4% of income taxes in 2009. Those with adjusted gross income above $200,000 a year were just under 3% of tax filers but paid 50.1% of the $866 billion in total personal income taxes. This means the top 3% paid more than the bottom 97%. Yet the 3% are the people that President Obama claims don’t pay their fair share. Before the recession, the $200,000 income group paid 54.5% of the income tax.

The “rich” as defined by President Obama and Democrats in congress are a very small majority of tax filers who already pay a disproportionate share of the total federal income tax bill. The notion that we solve our budget problems by raising taxes on that small majority is nuts.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t look at the revenue side, what I am saying have to do it in a comprehensive way that a) broadens the tax base and b) flattens tax rates… There just aren’t a enough “rich” people that can be taxed at a high enough rate to make a significant difference on difference on the revenue side.

The government has to cut spending and make comprehensive reforms to the tax… in short we need more people paying taxes, simply shifting more and more of the burden onto a small minority of taxpayers isn’t going to solve our budget problems.

Related

• Recession Is the Outlook, Despite Manufacturing Report – Larry Kudlow, The New York Sun