The President’s serial apologies, bowing and pandering to various unsavory international leaders has gained the most notoriety for his policy approach – giving rise to this column’s characterization of the “Obama Doctrine” as: “Emboldening our enemies; undermining our friends; and diminishing our country.”

More worrisome are myriad other steps largely being taken out of the public eye.  Particularly when such actions are taken together, they will have the effect of institutionalizing the core notion behind Mr. Obama’s brand of what his top international lawyer (and prospective future Supreme Court nominee), State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh, calls “transnationalism”:  A new world order in which the United States is simply one nation among many, subject to a higher – if utterly unaccountable -  authority.

Many of these changes involve the secular strain of this phenomenon and its holy of holies, the United Nations.  Team Obama has made a point of building up the UN at American expense by: legitimating the organization at every turn; deferring to one lowest-common-denominator consensus after another – no matter how inconsistent they might be with U.S. positions and interests; and joining discredited entities like UNESCO and the Human Rights Council.

For example, as the indispensable investigative reporter Claudia Rosett noted in her Forbes.com column last week, the Obama administration has seen fit to submit “its own special selection of domestic policies and laws for review by the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose 47 members include such tyrannies as Saudi Arabia, Libya, Cuba and China.”

Under the quintessential “transie” rubric of creating “a more perfect union” in “a more perfect world,” this 29-page report is meant to demonstrate the United States’ exemplary role in building transnationalism.  Specifically, Mr. Obama’s team evidently hopes the virulently anti-American UN council will weigh in during its scheduled November 5 review of the American human rights record on an internal constitutional matter: Whether the State of Arizona violated such rights by trying to enforce federal immigration law – a step the report notes with barely implied criticism has “generated significant attention and debate at home and around the world.”

As Ms. Rosett points out, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer wrote Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a sharply worded rebuke, correctly declaring that:  ”The idea of our own American government submitting the duly enacted laws of a State of the United States to ‘review’ by the United Nations is internationalism run amok and unconstitutional.”

Actually, Gov. Brewer, it is quintessential transnationalism.  As a UN official once put it in connection with the need to regulate small arms – another transie agenda item now endorsed by Team Obama – “Americans are citizens of the world just like everybody else,” adding that they better get used to it by getting with the program.

There is another strain of transnationalism that is, if anything, even more worrisome than the secular brand so fancied by the UN bureaucrats and their admirers: the global supremacist program cloaked as a religion and known as shariah.  Its adherents have in mind a new world order, too, only theirs will be ruled not by liberal elites and their institutional handmaidens in such garden spots as Turtle Bay, Geneva, Vienna, Brussels and The Hague.  Rather, their goal is a Caliphate, which will govern according to shariah, the law of Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Particularly insidious is the conjoining of these two forces against their common foe: sovereign, free nations led by the United States.  Under the growing influence of the shariah team’s voting power and corrupting wealth wielded by the 56-nation (plus the Palestinian Authority) Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the Human Rights Council last September voted in favor of an OIC-drafted resolution calling on all UN members to prohibit and criminalize speech that would offend Muslims.

The Obama administration co-sponsored that OIC resolution – putting transnationalism squarely ahead of the constitutional protections of the First Amendment.

We can anticipate that the assorted transnationalists will be even more aggressively working to subject our human rights to the caprice and dictates of their agenda now that 80-year-old George Soros has announced that he is going to “endow organizations I really believe in,” starting with a $100 million challenge grant to Human Rights Watch.  In an interview on Tuesday with National Public Radio, Soros was at pains to emphasize the anti-American thrust of his largesse as he repeatedly declared that the United States had “lost the moral high ground” as a result of “the many human rights violations committed by Americans.”

Claudia Rosett called to mind in her column the sage words of one of this country’s most formidable UN ambassadors, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who understood that, “At the best of times, the U.N. is ‘a dangerous place.’”  Today, it and the world are being made considerably more so for freedom-loving peoples by transnationalists of various kinds and their fellow “citizens of the world,” like Barack Hussein Obama.

The Gallup Poll has the generic party ballot in double-digits favoring the GOP, double the margin in 1994, the year the Republicans swept into power via the Contract for America.

If you are a conservative Midwesterner like me, you might prefer to under-promise and over-deliver, not the reverse. But it is hard to ignore the political sea change in progress. Dozens of House races are targets for recovery by the Republicans. Senate seats in Missouri, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, even Wisconsin may be shifting to the “R” column. The President’s job approval numbers are below 50 percent, and Americans tell pollsters that the GOP can do better in every issue category except the environment. All this with record low approval ratings for the party of Lincoln notwithstanding.

Even in my own congressional district, Virginia’s 11th, the very heart of the northern suburbs outside of Washington, D.C., a district in which President Obama handily defeated Senator McCain in 2008 and set the stage for his historic victory in the Commonwealth, the Republican tide is rising again. Exactly how high is, as yet, unknown.

Keith Fimian, a handsome, successful businessman, former athlete and battle-hardened campaigner is running against Gerald Connolly, an incumbent and a career politician who voted consistently with Speaker Pelosi during his first term in office. I say that Fimian is “battle-hardened” because he was beaten by Connolly during the Obama blowout of McCain.

Fimian recently defeated a Republican county official in a heated primary in which more establishmentarian Republicans lined up against Fimian, who is a strong supply-sider and pro-life.

Fimian points to his own polling, which shows him beating Connolly, a former chairman of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors. At this point there are no public polls tracking the race. Still, the fact that Fimian, who has a knack for fundraising — and no fear of going negative when necessary — is even competitive is really amazing.

Keep in mind that this area of Virginia is more like a New Jersey suburb and is populated by tens of thousands of government employees or employees of firms who work for the government. It has the highest median income of any congressional district in the country and is one of the wealthiest areas in the country. However, its wealth is grounded in the workings of government and the political process rather than the market place.

Virginia’s 11th was once held by moderate Republican Congressman Tom Davis, who spends an inordinate amount of time complaining about the GOP’s lack of inclusiveness. Yet Virginia’s new Republican Governor Bob McDonnell was able to win in northern Virginia last year, a feat that two previous Republican gubernatorial candidates failed to accomplish. So things are looking up in this part of the Commonwealth.

I hope to revisit this race from time to time in the coming weeks, not just because it is my district and convenient for me to follow, but it is an indicator of how big a tidal wave may or may not be coming in November. If Keith Fimian wins the 11th, the GOP will far exceed their electoral success of 1994. You can follow the Fimian campaign itself at KeithFimian.com.

The Labor Day sprint to November has begun. The game is afoot.

This man,  James Lee, was eventually shot by police after talking with him for several hours. He took three hostages, although 1,900 people, including children in a day-care center, were evacuated.

Good thing for the kids in the day-care center. Evidently, Lee had posted a manifesto on a website registered in his name, making several demands of the Discovery Channel. He demanded that the channel broadcast a commitment “to save the planet” and air shows promoting curbs on population growth, solutions to global warming and the dismantling of “the dangerous US world economy,” as reported by Dan Morse, Christian Davenport and John Kelly of the Washington Post. It seems that Lee used a Canadian post office box address.

But what caught this father and environmental consultant’s eye was that part of Lee’s statement which demanded that Discover Health programs quit encouraging “the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions.” The statement also makes reference to “Malthusian science” and “disgusting human babies.”

The authorities believe the hostage taker is the same person who operated a site at http://www.SavethePlanetProtest.com.

Besides calling for the end of war, the site excoriates “immigrant pollution and the anchor baby filth that follows that.” Indeed, “nothing is more important” than saving animals.

“The planet does not need humans.” You get the point.

Thankfully, no one was hurt other than Lee himself.

Let’s stipulate that Lee was a man with mental problems. He had been in court for causing problems at this same building. But it is interesting, possibly revealing, that a diseased mind such as his would latch on to such misanthropic ideas, in the context of the environment, which views human beings as antithetical to it rather than an active part of it.

Lee’s attitude, at least the one expressed on his website, displays a distorted view of humanity’s place in the world, one in which men and women only consume but do not create, only destroy but do not restore, only bring death rather than life.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated worldview in Western society, although it is one that, mercifully, does not often express itself in such violent ways. It is all very sad.

They just don’t seem to get it in Washington.

Fortunately, the U.S. Marines may, once again, be leading the way back to sanity.

I love the Marines, their expeditionary culture, their sound views on unconventional warfare, their bravery, and their Toys for Tots program. (Donations accepted here.) I visit the Iwo Jima Memorial and still get goose bumps.

But do the Marines really need to spend $12 billion on upgrading an amphibious Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) when, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, the Marines have not had to undertake a major landing since the Korean War?

Following the prudent and wise leadership of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on budgetary matters, retiring Marine Corps Commandant James Conway, generally considered an advocate for the EFV, recently announced a review of the affordability of purchasing 573 of the vehicles from General Dynamics. The Marines have already spent $2.8 billion on this project, relying on a “requirements document” that is 20 years old, according to Dakota Wood, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

True, the EFV is a drop in that monstrous bucket which is the federal budget; and defense spending, as a percentage of GDP is low in historic terms. Nevertheless, Secretary Gates, in commencing a review of the entire budget of the Department of Defense, and Commandant Conway should be applauded for taking the lead in light of the country’s current budget crisis. After all, our military strength is predicated on our economic strength, not the other way around. And the level of spending, deficits, and national debt represent a mortal threat to our strength in both areas. Now we need to see similar movement at HHS, HUD, Commerce, and, most notably, the Department of Agriculture. The more the merrier.

“If ever there was a time when ‘we can’t afford it’ actually means something, this is that time,” says syndicated columnist Cal Thomas.

“Our massive debt has produced an unease that America may be at greater risk from economic collapse than from terrorists,” warns Thomas. “Excessive debt is terror by other means.”

Exhibit A in Thomas’s case is a recent report by the indispensable Brian Riedl, an astute budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

Charles de Gaulle may have said that the graveyards are full of indispensable men, but we should all pray for long life for Riedl who is always instructive on the mysteries and outrages of the federal budget process.

Basically, Riedl challenges the already disturbing budget projections of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) because they are based on unrealistic assumptions foisted on it by Congress. For instance, CBO must assume that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, and other temporary tax cuts will expire; the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will not be adjusted, annually, for inflation; and non-war discretionary spending will grow no faster than inflation through 2020.

Riedl, on the other hand, assumes that Congress will extend certain tax cuts and the AMT will be annually adjusted for inflation as it always has. Moreover, the Medicare “doc fix” will be enacted annually, thereby preventing a cut in physicians’ payments.

Using these assumptions, “the annual budget deficit never drops below $1 trillion,” writes Riedl. “Rather, it ends at $1.3 trillion in 2010, drops to $1.0 trillion by 2014, and rises back to $1.9 trillion by 2020.”

Thus, the national debt held by the public is set to surpass 100 percent of GDP by 2020, and half of all income tax revenues will go toward paying interest on a $23 trillion national debt.

“These spending and deficit trends are completely unsustainable,” opines Riedl.

The last word goes to Cal Thomas who asks: “How many other Republicans, besides Paul Ryan and too few of his colleagues, will tell us what we need to hear?”

“For the first time in a very long time, the public may be ready for some strong medicine.”

“Two years ago Americans worked until July 16 to pay for the cost of government,” says Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATF). “That government was too expensive and wasteful. Two years later, we work until August 19 for the same bloated government. We lost an additional full month of our income to pay the cost of government in just the last two years.”

ATF and its Center for Fiscal Accountability (CFA), which are the inspiration for COGD, held a press conference at the National Press Club to commemorate the event. A panel of experts elaborated on all the costs, taxes, regulations and policies that have resulted in or will contribute to the unprecedented cumulative burden on American taxpayers.

In a dreary coincidence, just a few hours before the ATF and CFA press conference on the COGD, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its annual summer update of the budget and economic outlook.

That report opens with a chirpy observation that the federal deficit for 2010 will exceed $1.3 trillion — $71 billion below last year’s total and $27 billion under the amount CBO predicted in March 2010. Still, relative to the size of the economy, “this year’s deficit is expected to be the second largest shortfall in 65 years.” At 9.1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), “it is exceeded only by last year’s deficit of 9.9 percent of GDP.”

As Mr. Norquist said at the COGD press conference, it can be “depressing,” but the important question is “What to do about it?”

Talk about depressing, Veronique de Rugy, a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center, expressed her dismay that, having left her native France several years ago to escape overbearing government, she sees the United States moving in a decidedly Gallic direction on regulation. She noted that the new financial regulatory reform bill will set off a chain reaction of regulatory activity, the cost of which are undeterminable but unavoidably costly. This will inevitably create uncertainty, which will create even more risk aversion in the economy. Fortunately, de Rugy did not express any present intention of abandoning these shores for the time being at least.

Despite the current angst over the possible repeal of the Bush tax cuts, panelist James Capretta observed that we have already experienced hundreds of billions in new taxes in the form of ObamaCare. Capretta was an Associate Director at the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), overseeing health care, Social Security, and welfare. He is a fellow with the Ethics and Public Policy Center and will manage ObamaCareWatch.org, a website dedicating to monitoring the new legislation’s implementation and/or ultimate repeal. Just as disturbing, Capretta walked through the mechanics of the new health care bill, which will, literally, add tens of millions of new beneficiaries to a system that is already a financial mess.

Another participant in the press conference, David Kreutzer, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, provided a warning of further costs to be imposed by the federal government if Congress mandates a nationwide Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) which, while excluding hydropower and nuclear, will privilege solar and wind power and thereby require costly installations and transmission mechanisms.

Disputing various government studies, Kreutzer argues that RES will raise electricity prices by 36 percent for households and 60 percent for industry. It will add more than $10,000 to a family of four’s share of the national debt by 2035.

Norquist used the press conference to expand on his 14 proposals to reduce government spending, which were originally outlined in his June 30 testimony to the President’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. He was adamant that entertaining any talk of any kind of tax increase simply undercuts the drive to control spending. He cited both President Ronald Reagan and the senior Bush as having been taken in by various proposals to raise taxes in return for promised cuts in spending, which never, ever materialized.

Two of my favorite suggestions involve term limits on a member of Congress’s time on the Appropriation Committee and a ban on naming any federal building or monument after a sitting congressman or senator.

But a much bigger idea is Norquist’s call for a freeze on federal discretionary spending at 2007 levels. He claims this would bring the budget into balance by 2013 “even assuming that Congress extends the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and indexes the Alternative Minimum Tax for inflation.”

What is striking about Grover Norquist’s 14 points, if I may use that phrase, is that they are actually quite moderate in the sense of being politically and economically feasible or well within the realm of the possible.

For instance, he calls for resurrecting the “Byrd Committee,” an idea he has previously described in TAS. It was the bipartisan, bicameral Joint Committee on Reduction of Nonessential Federal Expenditures, which was first proposed in 1941 to focus on rescissions in federal spending. Named after the late Senator Harry F. Byrd (D-VA), it was a serious legislative committee with real subpoena powers. Its proposals resulted in $38 billion (in 2010 dollars) in savings.

Norquist argues that any recommendations from a newly constituted Byrd Committee should be privileged and require an up-or-down vote on the floor. At Thursday’s press conference, he said he would actually support two such committees, one for the House and one for the Senate, to encourage greater efforts (competition?) from both chambers. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) has already introduced legislation on the subject.

The 14 points do not specifically address the looming Death Star of runaway entitlement spending, but we already have Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI) on that case. And congressmen, just like other people, need to walk before they can run. Norquist’s recommendations will help them limber up a bit. Once they get into the swing of cutting the budget, who knows what they might achieve.

More remarkable is the recent defense of the Wisconsin Congressman by folks such as Megan McCardle of the Atlantic against the ad hominem attacks of Paul Krugman of the New York Times that Ryan was some kind of “Flimflam Man.” McCardle has doubts about the “Roadmap,” but they go to political feasibility, not its internal consistency and economic soundness.

Krugman’s rant also generated another defense from Joseph Rosenberg of the Tax Policy Center at the liberal, very establishmentarian, Urban Institute and Brookings Institute.

This is encouraging. Paul Ryan will need all the friends he can make.

The amount of flack being directed at Ryan and his “Roadmap” has been rapidly increasing. Former White House budget director Peter Orszag, who should know better, trashed the Ryan plan in his farewell lecture at Brookings. This from the man who, as noted by the Wall Street Journal, “presided over record deficits of $1.4 trillion in 2009-or 9.9% of GDP-and an expected $1.5 trillion in 2010.” Cheeky fellow.

Jon Ward of the Daily Caller observed that this high-profile critique of Ryan “shows the seriousness with which Obama and his top advisers take Ryan’s alternative vision for the country’s future, as well as the vehemence with which they disagree.” Ward mentioned that the Orszag attack was the same day the Democratic National Committee attacked the “Roadmap.”

The Wall Street Journal also highlighted the recent attack by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee directed at “NINE REPUBLICAN SENATE CANDIDATES WHO WANT TO END MEDICARE AS WE KNOW IT.” The basis of this charge was “lukewarm-to-friendly comments these heretics had at one time or another made about Mr. Ryan.”

Americans United for Change, formerly Americans United to Protect Social Security, one of the “progressive” outfits who led opposition to any reform of Social Security several years ago, has recently announced a “Major Mobilization” against what it calls a “Roadmap to Ruin.” It has staffed up in 10 battleground states as part of an effort with 65 other organizations, all which are OK with America’s eventual economic collapse.

A glance at the Americans United website, reveals that they are already beating up on at least one Republican congressman and four GOP senatorial candidates for supporting the Ryan plan. While that was distressing, I found myself pleasantly surprised that there were actually Republican candidates on board for the “Roadmap.”

In other words, other than the 12 co-sponsors of Paul Ryan’s legislation, and a few senatorial candidates, most of the Congressman’s support comes from columnists, pundits, and assorted right-of-center commentators. That, at least, has been my impression. In fact, most of the discussion about budgets and deficits, even from Republicans, does not focus on the looming Death Star of entitlements, especially Medicare, as I have been wont to call the crisis now upon us.

You can live with enemies in politics, but you can’t survive without friends. Ryan needs more than intellectual or moral support from conservative intellectuals, commentators, and even honest liberals, as important as they are. He and his “Roadmap” need the heartfelt support of his party, its leaders and its candidates across the country who must take the argument to the people in this watershed election year.

The stakes are too high for the Republicans to simply stand by, quietly, hoping the Democrats will self-immolate. The GOP needs to embrace a big, visionary idea, something like Ryan’s “Roadmap,” which addresses the most important political challenge of the age: the runaway costs of entitlements which were irresponsibly put on autopilot under both Democratic and Republican governments.

Ideas, good or bad, have consequences. If there is to be regime change in Washington, the new one better have prepared the ground with a clear articulation of its plans, no matter how politically daunting the prospect, thereby creating legitimacy for those plans through electoral victory. The nation can afford nothing less. Otherwise, it will amount to just “Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss.”

This is not to say that the GOP needs to accept every jot or tittle of the “Roadmap.” But it very much needs to engage, substantively, the same issues as Paul Ryan has, heroically in my opinion, in terms of the long-run sustainability of America’s fiscal and economic condition. The “Roadmap” should be the Republicans’ point of departure for what must be a serious conversation with the American people.

“Put simply, Medicare is on course to collapse,” wrote Congressman Ryan last week in the Washington Post. “Medicare and interest on the national debt will soon overwhelm the federal budget, crowding out all other national priorities.”

“We do not have a choice as to whether Medicare will change from its current structure,” says Paul Ryan. “It is being driven to insolvency.”

This was a drop of 17 percent from last year.

There is, of course, great irony in these numbers, representing a collective, negative judgment on the institution as a whole, despite the fact that incumbents are overwhelmingly re-elected year after year after year. Presumably, Americans feel about their congressmen and women the way they do about lawyers. They hate them all, except for their own.

The reasons for this negative assessment are harder to discern. No doubt, some hate Congress for doing too much. Others hate it for doing too little. So the collective judgment is a pastiche of mutually exclusive views about the role of government, spending, taxation and regulation.

Congress becomes a kind of Rorschach inkblot onto which citizens project their own visions of what they think the nation should or should not be.

Or at least that is what I used to think. Now I am not so sure. I have lived in Washington for almost nine years. During that time, I have observed legion of supplicants coming to town, many of them friends and colleagues, who have one mission and one mission only. That is, they want to lobby their congressperson for money for, fill in the blank, their school, their wastewater plant, their roads, their welfare program, their entitlements, their own precious little earmarks for this or that favored project.

It almost makes you appreciate even the pro-choice and anti-gun lobbies since they are at least focused on matters of principle, no matter how mistaken they may be.

Personally, I share the view that an ever-expanding federal government — bigger, fatter, spending at an atrocious rate — leads, inevitably to alienation. Expectations are sky-high as to what it can actually accomplish in a manner which can remotely be termed cost-effective. Disappointment is inevitable.

So there is a kind of cognitive dissonance in play.

Citizens get the government they want in a democracy, especially one that is even more detached from the republican constraints originally put in place by the founders. Egalitarianism combined with a redistributionist mania leads to disenchantment, Big Time, as Vice President Cheney might say.

The other night I had dinner with a friend who is writing a book on the dysfunction of Congress. He seemed to take the view that the problem was driven, primarily, by the insular, self-seeking political culture at the federal level. I argued that the general societal culture drives politics, and there may be something more fundamentally wrong with the body politic itself. My friend agreed this might be true; and we agreed that the two things could interact, synergistically, with each other. He promised to re-read his Tocqueville and consider the matter further.

Last week Anne Applebaum, a columnist for the Washington Post and an intelligent commentator on foreign policy matters, wrote an article entitled, “A government of the people’s every wish?”

While launching a couple of snarky shots at the Tea Party movement and Governor Sarah, Applebaum, expressed her concern that Americans really are different than what she has experienced around the world, but not in a good way:

If you don’t live in this country all of the time, and I don’t, here is what you notice when you come home: Americans — with their lawsuit culture, their safety obsession and, above all, their addiction to government spending programs — demand more from their government than just about anybody else in the world.

Applebaum claims Americans “want the government to ensure that every accident and every piece of bad luck is prevented, or that they are fully compensated in the event something goes wrong.”

“And if the price of their house drops, they will hold the government responsible for that, too,” says the columnist. “And precisely because this is a democracy, Congress and the president respond, pass a law, build a building.”

Yet, “we rant and rave against vast bureaucracies we have created — democratically, constitutionally, openly” to deliver the “ludicrous levels of personal and political safety.”

Now, one can legitimately reply, “What about the Greeks, the French and the Scandinavians?” True, but that’s no excuse. What about America? What have we become? Pogo, call your office.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Who remembers that famous day and year.

Other than recalling a fragment of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wonderful, if historically inaccurate poem, many Americans, myself included, do not know much more about Paul Revere, the man, and his ride through Middlesex county to alert the countryside on the movement, in force, of British Regulars in the direction of Lexington.

The British aimed to snatch John Hancock and Sam Adams before moving on to Concord to seize a large cache of munitions on that consequential night in April 1775.

John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Paul Revere, circa 1771, presents a picture of a confident, accomplished artisan or “mechanic” as silversmiths and other craftsmen were called in that era. In this image, Revere is 35 years old, confident, casual and prosperous, with his tools about him, holding a silver teapot.

David Hackett Fischer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author of the indispensable book, Paul Revere’s Ride (1994), describes Copley’s Revere: “His shirt is plain and simple, but it is handsomely cut from fine linen.” He is “of middling height, neither tall nor short. He is strong and stocky, with broad shoulders, a thick neck, muscular arms and powerful wrists…His eyes are deep chestnut brown, and their high-arched brows give the face a permanently quizzical expression.”

“The gaze is clear and very direct.” It is “the steady look of an independent man,” writes Fischer.

The coming of the Fourth of July, 2010, seemed like an appropriate occasion to rectify my ignorance of Revere, given his iconic status in the founding of our country.

I had once taken a brief stroll on a section of the Freedom Trail in Boston during a hurried business trip but was unable to take one of the fine guided tours offered by the National Park Service which runs the Boston National Historical Park.

The Freedom Trail is a 2.5 mile red-brick walking path through 16 historic sites, including the Old North Church and Paul Revere House. In 1951 public-spirited citizens in Boston were able to convince city leaders to formally establish the Trail. In 1964 the Freedom Trail Foundation was established to market and preserve it. By 1974 the National Park Service also came into the picture. As many as 3 to 4 million visitors come every year.

Paul Revere was the son of Apollos Rivoire, a Huguenot or French Calvinist who fled religious persecution to come to New England as an apprentice to an elderly silversmith. Paul, however, did not speak a word of French.

Paul Revere, as described by Fischer, was a successful artisan and businessman, connected to all the various revolutionary cells active in the Massachusetts of 1775. In fact, he belonged to more groups and knew more operatives and political leaders than almost anyone, certainly in Boston. Moreover, he developed a significant intelligence and communications network for which he was one of the central nodes.

Fischer observes that “Paul Revere’s primary mission was not to alarm the countryside. His specific purpose was to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were thought to be the objects of the expedition.” The military stores at Concord were of secondary concern. Still, by morning thousands of fully-armed militia had arrived on the field at both Lexington and Concord ready for closed formation fighting.

“Paul Revere and the other messengers did not spread the alarm merely by knocking on individual farmhouse doors,” says David Hackett Fischer. “They also awakened the institutions of New England. The midnight riders went systematically about the task of engaging town leaders and militia commanders of their region. They enlisted its churches and ministers, its physicians and lawyers, its family networks and voluntary associations.…They knew from long experience that successful efforts requires sustained planning and careful organization.”

A hurry of hoofs in a village street
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.

By the way, Fischer notes that Paul Revere did not say, “The British are coming.” New Englanders all considered themselves to be British. This is why they were so outraged at the loss of what they considered to be their traditional rights as such. Revere and his countryman would have called the advancing forces Regulars, Redcoats, the King’s men or “Ministerial Troops.” The split in national identity had not yet happened.

Notwithstanding the greatness of Longfellow’s poem, it seems to have made quite a hash of the historical record, poetic license seemingly run riot. According to Fischer New England historians have been laboring to correct these errors for years.

They demonstrated exhaustively that Paul Revere did not receive the lantern signals from the Old North Church, but helped to send them. They documented abundantly the fact that he did not row alone across the Charles River, but was transported by others. They proved conclusively that Paul Revere did not reach Concord, and that another messenger succeeded where he had failed [due to Revere's capture by the Regulars].

This short article can hardly recount all of Paul Revere’s exploits which are significant. These include not just his acts of individual heroism, but also his careful preparations, collaborative enterprises and, brace yourself, Yankee ingenuity.

Twice during the war that followed the Midnight Ride, Revere went on active service, including an ill-fated expedition against a British fort at Penobscott Bay, maybe the one failure in his life, says Fischer.

After the war Revere was part of the rapid industrialization of America. He learned to cast bell-metal and opened a foundry. He became one of the first American manufacturers to roll copper sheets at scale.

In politics, fearing disorders, he pushed for a federal constitution. Fischer claims he was “a Federalist of the old school, strongly opposed to the growth of Jeffersonian democracy.”

“My friend, you know I always was a warm Republican. I always deprecated Democracy as much as I did Aristocracy,” said Paul Revere, patriot.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,–
A cry of defiance and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo forevermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beat of that steed,
And the midnight-message of Paul Revere.

Happy Independence Day!

In a June 15 story, NPR political correspondent and Fox News Channel contributor, Mara Liasson, said the new poll is “grim news for Democrats.” In a curious syntactical formulation, she reported that it “shows just how difficult it will be for Democrats to avoid big losses in the House this November.”

How grim is grim? According to Greenberg, “In a year where voters want change and in which Democrats are seen to be in power, this is a tough poll — about as tough as you get.”

“If Massachusetts was the first wake-up call [for Democrats], this is the snooze alarm going off,” said Bolger.

The Greenberg-Bolger poll focused on “battleground” races in 70 House districts that are viewed by most “experts” or pundits as likely to throw out incumbents in the upcoming election. The races also included open seats that are inclined to switch party control.

Sixty of the them are currently held by Democrats, “many of whom won these seats even when voters in the same district preferred Republican John McCain for president in 2008.” Ten seats are held by Republicans in districts that went for Barack Obama.

“In this battleground, voters are choosing Republicans over Democrats 49 to 41 percent,” says Liasson.

One thousand two hundred likely voters were interviewed in total for this poll. Details on the poll can be found here. It is the first of a series to be conducted for NPR.

NPR’s pollsters believe that Democratic House losses “could well exceed 30 seats.”

Bolger pointed out that President Obama’s approval ratings are much lower in these competitive districts than they are nationally: 54 percent of the likely battleground voters disapproved of Obama’s performance; 40 percent approved.

“When you look at history, when the president is below 50 percent nationally, his party tends to lose more than 40 seats,” claims Bolger.

By 57 to 37 percent, voters in the 60 Democratic seats believe that President Obama’s economic policies have produced record deficits while failing to slow job losses, avert a crisis or lay a foundation for future growth.

If party energy or intensity is a key variable to election success, Republicans appear to have a clear advantage. Sixty-two percent of Republicans in Democratic districts describe themselves as very enthusiastic about the upcoming election. Only 37 percent of Democrats in these same districts feel the same way.

In Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Douglas E. Schoen and Patrick H. Caddell, pollsters for Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, respectively, noted June polling results from the Washington Post/ABC News survey that show only 29 percent of Americans inclined to support their House representative in November.

“That’s an even lower percentage than in October 1994 (34%), on the eve of the Republican takeover of Congress when voters swept the Democrats out of power in that chamber after 40 years in the majority,” recalled Schoen and Caddell.

Moreover, these same pollsters also cite a recent Gallup poll in which voters, by a wide margin of nearly two-to-one (60%-32%), “said they would rather vote for a candidate for Congress with no experience whatsoever than for a candidate who has been in Congress.”

Five months out from the election, any given poll must be treated as a snapshot of a particular moment in time. You still have to show up and play the game. However, data such as those revealed in the NPR and other polls provide invaluable fodder for GOP fundraising, volunteer recruitment and the maintenance of grassroots enthusiasm. On the other hand, the trap of rising expectations and overconfidence could cause the Republicans to play it safe in the face of what will most certainly be a vigorous effort by the party in power to do “whatever it takes” to hold on to its turf.

Schoen and Caddell believe that the Republicans are winning support “because they are not Democrats.” The polling data reveal strong opposition to President Obama and Democratic policies. However, less than a third (31%) of voters queried in a May Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll said they support the GOP and its candidates.

“Indeed, voters are no more confident with the Republican leadership’s agenda than with the Democrats’, and disapproval and disaffection with the GOP are just as high, if not higher,” opined Schoen and Caddell. A June 8 Washington Post/ABC News poll, 6 in 10 respondents said they had a negative view of policies put forth by congressional Republicans and only one-third trust Republicans over Democrats to handle the nation’s problems.

Yet, Democrats face a daunting challenge, given the anemic rate of job creation, a chaotic stock market, budgetary and fiscal meltdown, widespread fear of the new health care legislation, and stiff resistance to carbon cap-and-trade legislation. Oh yes, taxes are going up, too.

To seize the present opportunity, claim Schoen and Caddell, Republicans will have to offer “a clear set of core principles, if not a comprehensive set of bold ideas. If they do not, their hopes of winning both houses of Congress come November — a goal that is well within reach — could be dashed.”

The game is afoot.

The U.S. Senate voted, overwhelmingly (85-13), for a resolution offered by John McCain (R-AZ) which stated that “It is the sense of the Senate that the Value Added Tax is a massive tax increase that will cripple families on fixed income and only further push back America’s economic recovery.”

The VAT is a national sales tax imposed at various stages from production to final consumer purchase.

VAT’s next? Higher taxes on income and productivity? Or massive cuts in spending and entitlement benefits? Both? Neither? Maybe it will be a fiscal meltdown of Grecian, that is to say hellish, proportions.

The full range of responses to our crisis, with or without VAT, can be seen in recent proposals, such as those offered by Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), a conservative, and Steven Pearlstein, of the Washington Post.

In his “Roadmap for America’s Future,” discussed in TAS by Philip Klein and elsewhere, Ryan does not propose VAT or any other kinds of new taxes. On the contrary, he aims to balance the federal budget by 2063 and reduce Medicare’s share of the economy from a projected 14.3 percent in 2080 to 4 percent. He would use vouchers to empower individuals over Medicare bureaucracy and drive down spending.

As an orthodox and optimistic supply-sider, Ryan would simplify the tax code and replace corporate income taxes with an 8 percent business consumption tax.

As Klein notes, Ryan’s proposal is intended to change the tax code in a direction that would promote more economic growth, by creating an optional, flatter tax system with just two individual rates (10 percent and 25 percent) and without any deductions other than a tax credit for health insurance. He gets rid of double taxation on interest, capital gains, and dividends.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has certified that Ryan’s plan will do what he says it will.

Steven Pearlstein, a left-of-center business columnist for the Washington Post, proposed a nine-bullet plan to address the current fiscal and entitlement crisis which featured “a new broad-based value-added tax of 6 percent, with rebates to low-income households.” He also argues for holding spending on Medicare and Medicaid to GDP growth plus 1 percentage point a year, less than the GDP plus 2.5 percent which has been the norm.

Pearlstein also wants to raise the eligibility age of Social Security and Medicare by one month for each two-month increase in the average life expectancy while reducing the cost-of-living increases for wealthy seniors and raising premiums. He would limit discretionary spending (including defense) to the rate of inflation except in wartime, natural disasters, and recessions. He wants to reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 to 25 percent, limit its applicability only to profits in the U.S. and “close enough loopholes to increase corporate tax revenues by 5 percent.”

For individual income taxes, Pearlstein proposes to increase the standard deduction and personal exemptions so that no tax is paid by a family of four with income under $50,000. Beyond that, wages, salaries and short-term capital gains taxes would be set at three rates: 17 percent for income from $50,000 to $150,000; 27 percent for income between $150,000 and $250,000; and 37 percent for income over $250,000. However, he would tax interest, dividends and long-term capital gains at 20 percent, up from the current 15 percent.

Back to the VAT, Bruce Bartlett, a former Jack Kemp staffer and supply-sider, has argued that taxes are going up and a VAT is better than, say, raising marginal income tax rates or the capital gains tax. However, he remains an outlier on the right side of the political spectrum.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman, Paul Volcker, is another. He has raised the possibility of both VAT and energy taxes as part of any solution to the nation’s fiscal imbalances.

George F. Will, conceding that a VAT would address the problem that “Americans consume too much and save too little,” nevertheless put a hex on liberal advocates of the VAT. The conservative response should be: “Taxing consumption has merits, so we will consider it-after the 16th amendment is repealed.”

“A VAT will be rationalized as a necessary to restore fiscal equilibrium,” said Will. “But without ending the income tax, a VAT would be just a gargantuan instrument for further subjugating Americans to government.”

Will cautions that a VAT would most likely be piled high on top of ever-rising income taxes as born out by the European experience.

The Wall Street Journal has observed that “the VAT has rarely replaced the income tax, or even resulted in a lower income-tax rate.” The top individual income tax rate remains “very high” in Europe, despite the VAT, averaging about 46 percent among nations on the continent.

The centrist economics columnist, Robert J. Samuelson, points out that “Europe’s widespread VATs aren’t models of simplicity.” There are many preferential rates and exemptions. The Irish tax food at three different rates. Just imagine the bumper crop of VAT lobbyists seeking various carve-outs and breaks for an infinite number of clients which would accompany any such tax in the U.S.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, the fiscal situation continues to deteriorate, promising a financial suffering across generations. Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, has opined that “we are about to embark on the most massive transfer of wealth from the younger taxpayers to older ones in American history.”

“It will be not just unprecedented but unfair: Our children will have to pay for the decisions we make today.” Or, I might add, fail to make.

This past week the Treasury Department reported that the U.S. posted an $82.69 billion deficit in April, nearly four times the $20.91 billion shortfall last year. This was more than double the $40 billion deficit forecasted by a posse of Wall Street journalists surveyed by Reuters.

David M. Walker, former U.S. Comptroller General and presently president and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, penned an op-ed in USA Today, entitled, “We’re not yet Greece, but are we still America?”

“Over the past 40 years, the U.S. government spending has grown by almost 300% net of inflation, and our revenues haven’t kept place,” wrote Walker. “The result is that our current deficits, when adjusted for inflation, are the highest percentage of our economy since World War II.”

“In this respect, we sure look a lot like Greece, or at least we will in the near future,” warns the former Comptroller General, hoping that he is not a modern-day Cassandra from Greek mythology but a modern-day Paul Revere. Sure, our economy is bigger and the U.S. dollar is still 60 percent of the world’s reserve currency. Still, already total U.S. federal, state and local public debt exceeds levels in Spain and are comparable to Ireland and Great Britain.

“We will reach Portugal’s levels within two years and Greece’s levels within 10 years on our present course,” notes Walker.

As I say, VAT’s next?

Ryan and de Rugy want America to go cold turkey, make the cuts, reforms and adjustments without tax increases. “We need to reform entitlement spending, put both military and domestic spending on the chopping block, and start selling off federal assets,” argues de Rugy. “Better to do it now than during a fire sale later.”

Democrats do not want to cut spending (excepting defense), reform entitlements or impose a VAT for that matter. They seem to have an infinite number of ideas for more, not less, federal spending and debt. They have shown limitless ingenuity for raising a myriad of taxes, fees and other revenue-enhancers in their recent health care legislation, no matter the economic illogic of the levies. They would love to impose new tariffs, using carbon reduction as an excuse.

Republicans are for cutting discretionary spending (excepting defense) but are still mum on reforming the Great Beast of entitlements, having already supported the gigantic senior drug benefit, the largest expansion of entitlements in a generation, when they were in power.

Congressman Ryan’s plan for reforming entitlements and reducing marginal tax rates is praised by policy wonks, even President Obama in a feint at bipartisan bonhomie. Although Ryan has recruited a dozen co-sponsors on his proposal, few other sitting Republicans have spoken up in favor of it.

GOP congressional Members generally oppose a VAT, income and corporate taxes, user fees, gas taxes, carbon taxes, revenue-neutral or otherwise, and reductions in farm and ethanol subsidies or corporate tax breaks. Where they will come down on entitlement reform is something of a mystery.

We are witnessing what must be the greatest game of chicken ever played in the history of the world, fiscally speaking that is.

VAT’s next?