TheDC Morning – 12/8/10

1.) DeMint threatens to shut it all down — Sen. Jim DeMint does not care what anybody thinks, he cannot get behind a deal that extends the tax cuts for only two years and does not require Godless Democrats to reduce spending. On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show yesterday, Sen. Jim DeMint laid out his objections. “Most of us who ran this election said we were not going to vote for anything that increased the deficit. This does. It raises taxes, it raises the death tax…I don’t think we need to extend unemployment any further without paying for it, and without making some modifications such as turning it into a loan at some point…I mean, and frankly, the biggest problem I have, Hugh, is we don’t need a temporary economy, which means we don’t need a temporary tax rate.” Sen. Jim DeMint is joined in opposing the deal by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Club for Growth, the Heritage Foundation, and former Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, who last night told an audience in Virginia, “Tragedy comes in threes: Pearl Harbor, Elizabeth Edwards’s passing and Barack Obama’s announcement of extending the tax cuts, which is good, but also extending the unemployment benefits.”
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2.) Days after abandoning Democratic Party, Obama still catching flack from liberals — Pres. Obama’s exodus from the warm embrace of the Democratic Party has left a few people sore. Sen. Harry Reid, for instance, paid the president a back-handed complinsult thingy after suffering through a guffaw-peppered lecture from VP Joe Biden. “While this is not an arrangement many in the caucus would have made,” Reid told reporters, “we understand the president is negotiating with congressional Republicans who are willing to risk everything in order to secure tax cuts for the wealthiest of all Americans.” In other words: I, Harry Reid, have more spine than Barry O. Who else piled on the president for extending the Bush tax cuts? None other than serial pants-crapper and Holocaust-denier-supporter Keith Olbermann: “For this President, apparently no compromise is disaster,” Keith bellowed last night during a special comment. A group of New York liberals got in on the action yesterday as well by shutting down Valerie Jarrett’s phone lines with their prank dialing. What did this accomplish, exactly? According to Agenda Project founder Erica Payne, “We believe some fights are worth taking to the bitter end. Fighting the right battles makes you stronger, helps you identify the people who will fight with you — and identify the people who were never with you in the first place.” So, there’s that!
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3.) L.A. mayor joins NJ Gov. Chris Christie in telling teachers unions to get with the program — Antonio Villaraigosa, mayor of Los Angeles, is no conservative. He’s also not ignorant of the correlation between poor rankings and powerful teachers unions. “Today, our schools rank in the bottom third among all states, we are out-spent by $2,400 per pupil, and we fail to graduate a full quarter of our students,” Villaraigosa writes in the Huffington Post. “What happened?” That’s a good question, especially in a state with an economy that is the world’s 8th largest. Surely it can afford to treat its pupils better? Why, yes it can! The only thing keeping it from doing so, says Villaraigosa, is “one, unwavering roadblock to reform: teacher union leadership.” Again, Villaraigosa is no Christie. He “started out as an organizer for UTLA (United Teachers Los Angeles), and [he doesn’t] have an anti-union bone in [his] body.” And while he tempered his editorial by saying that “teachers unions aren’t the biggest or the only problem facing our schools, but for many years now,” Villaraigosa–along with many other state and local leaders–believes these unions “have been the most consistent, most powerful defenders of the unacceptable status quo.”
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4.) New Yorkers on the hook for $120 billion in unfunded public pensions — Happy holidays, New Yorkers! You’re about to get robbed! “New York state’s public pension funds are underfunded by a staggering $120 billion — and taxpayers will have to shell out an additional $8.5 billion a year by 2015 to keep them in the black,” reports the New York Post. According to an analysis by the Manhattan Institute, “taxpayers’ contributions to the state Teachers Retirement System could more than quadruple to $4.5 billion in 2015 from $900 million this year.” GO TEACHERS!
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5.) American students still relatively stupid — “One of the most successful college-level Tea Party groups isn’t found at Bob Jones University or Glenn Beck Internet School, but at the University of Pennsylvania–an Ivy League school. “In October, the University of Pennsylvania group sponsored a talk by Robert Mansfield, a Tea Party conservative who last month lost a bid for Pennsylvania governor,” reports Inside Higher Ed. “The Penn Tea Partiers have also screened ‘Tea Party,’ a documentary celebrating the movement, and this week held a debate with the university’s Democratic Socialist organization.” Where else have Tea Party campus groups popped up? Why, at such respected institutions of higher learnin’ as Brandeis, George Mason U., Hampden-Sydney College, and SUNY Stony Brook.
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6.) Quit pathologizing fatness, says doctor — “In his latest book, former FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler argues that modern food is addictive. In it, he recounts how he was once helpless to stop himself from eating a cookie,” writes physician David Gratzer in the LA Times. Such nonsense, says Gratzer, is the evidence of “McVictim syndrome”–named for the supposedly irresistible food served by McDonald’s and embraced by public health experts across the country. Such thinking “spins a convenient — and unhealthy — narrative on America’s emerging preventable disease crisis. McVictimization teaches Americans to think that obesity is someone else’s fault — and therefore, someone else’s problem to solve.”