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Former Congressman David Stockman also headed Reagan's Office of Management and Budget. Not of the Reagan White House Office, but the Office of the entire United States. Here's what he said about the failed budget negotiations:
"Fiscal governance in Washington is totally kaput. They never pass an annual budget resolution and enforcement plan, which was taken as a sacred duty back in the day; and there are never even annual appropriations bills for the mere 25% of the budget still subject to the Congressional “power of the purse”.
Instead, what occurs is a perennial string of short-term Continuing Resolutions (CRs) followed by an 11th hour, 3000 page pork-ridden “Omnibus Appropriations” bill that no one has read and which gives log-rolling (i.e. more domestic for more defense) a new definition.
In short, the debt ceiling was the only fiscal control mechanism left. And even that has been neutered time after time in the last decade by the hideous, flat-out lie that if the Treasury on any given day is one dollar short of being able to cover all of its due bills it must default on each and every one of them including interest payments, thereby destroying the credit of the United States. Yada, yada.
Finally, that lie was being put to the test and would have been eviscerated sometime next week. Yet after a lifetime on the public teat, Kevin McCarthy like his two GOP predecessors surrendered to the Doomsday Machine because he works for the GOP wing of the Swamp, not the voters, current and future.
And he did so while expectorating the most risible of lies: Republicans are changing the culture and trajectory of Washington—and we’re just getting started.
Not close. Not in the ballpark or even the catcher’s box behind home plate.
The deal does absolutely nothing to change the current “trajectory” toward fiscal disaster because it reduces nary a dime of built-in spending for defense, entitlements/mandatories, veterans and net interest, while those items account for 89% of the $80 trillion of built-in spending over the next decade."
Of all the evils to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops every other. War is the patent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. And armies, and debts, and taxes, are the known instruments for bringing the many under the dominion of the few.
In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people!
No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
-James Madison, Political Observations, 1795
We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
-President Dwight Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 1961
We don’t know. Are plans being made for a magnificent sarcophagus? Something like the huge, elaborate one he imagined for Charlie Kirk? Not that I know of. When will be the day of his death? I don’t know, but his Creator has already appointed the day and the hour.
Will his funeral be meaningful, theologically? With Christian theology? I don’t know that either.
But I have been impressed with the funeral of one great nobleman who died 25 years ago at age 99, buried in Austria. His final resting place was not elaborate, but significant. It was in the crypt of a Capuchin church, the place where his royal ancestors, monarchs of a vast, 600-year-old empire, had been entombed for centuries. The crypt was locked and guarded by Capuchin friars.
Prince Otto von Habsburg, born in 1912, would have been the next in line as king of that empire, but Hitler invaded Austria and ordered the arrest and murder of the prince, who escaped into Europe and played a leading role in world affairs for ...
