When official Washington wasn’t trying to figure out who said what to whom about what Herman Cain might or might not have said or done while he was running the National Restaurant Association…

SIDEBAR
In addition to its other problems, the National Restaurant Association’s acronym is “NRA.” You may remember there is another organization which has those same initials: The National Rifle Association. All week people here have been talking about the NRA and having to add “That’s the Restaurant people, not the Gun folks.”
END SIDEBAR

… there was a minor issue over the House voting to re-affirm the national motto as “In God We Trust” not, as President Obama thought E pluribus unum “Out of Many, One.” The House vote was, according to the aptly named Christian Science Monitor “396-9, with 2 abstentions.”

The phrase “In God We Trust” first appeared on U.S. currency on the two-cent coin in 1864 after the Congress passed legislation allowing in in April of that year. Since 1938 “In God We Trust” has appeared on the obverse (the tails side) of every American coin.

As to “In God We Trust” becoming the official national motto; that didn’t happen until 1956 when the President signed a Joint Resolution making it so. According to the U.S. Treasury, “In God We Trust” was first used on paper money in 1957, when it appeared on the one-dollar silver certificate. “E Pluribus Unum” was accepted as a legend on the Great Seal of the United States when the design was finally approved in 1782 and was inscribed on the scroll carried in the beak of the American bald eagle which, according to GreatSeal.com “carries the power of peace & war in its talons.”

It is interesting to note that the first suggestions for the Great Seal were submitted by and to a committee of the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776. Even back then it took six years for the Congress to come to a conclusion on the final design.

The first iteration of the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance was, according to About.com “written in September of 1892 by Francis Bellamy for ‘The Youth’s Companion’ magazine in Boston. That version pledged allegiance to “my flag.” The wording was changed to the current “to the flag of the United States of America” in 1923. Again from About.com.

Congress officially recognized the Pledge of Allegiance in 1942, but in 1943, the Supreme Court ruled that public school students could not be forced to recite it. In 1943 the United States was totally immersed in World War II so that was a pretty gutsy call by the SCOTUS.

The Pledge, until 1954 read “… and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” In that year the words “under God” were added at the urging of President Eisenhower who said, “In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource in peace and war.”

Eisenhower, not noted as having worn his religion on his sleeve, was still President in 1956 when the official motto was determined to be “In God We Trust.” As the media wrings its hands over the intrusion of religion in politics and government, it is useful to remember that in America, it has always been thus.

You know the ad we are talking about. The one where the burly-looking senior looks in the camera like John Wayne and intones something to this effect:

‘You mess with our Social Security and Medicare benefits…and we are gonna kick your butt!’

How is that for ‘thoughtful, rational civil discourse’ in America today, huh? We wouldn’t want to face that guy in a showdown death match on the golf course or the shuffleboard court.

But here is the problem, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Medicare never has and never will be 100% ‘paid for’ completely individually by any senior citizen for his/her coverage. Not during his or her working career. And most assuredly not from the monthly premiums they pay for the right to have Medicare Part B physician services.

Take a magnifying glass out and take a good long solid look at the chart above. In it, you will notice that, lo and behold!, in 1970, a mere 5 years after Medicare was passed, the program cost was virtually all covered by payroll taxes on then-working Americans (not the retirees themselves) and premiums imposed on the retirees themselves.

So far, so good as of 1970, right? Almost all paid for by the smaller payroll taxes on workers back then plus premiums paid for by the seniors who were on Medicare at the time.

But look at what happened to those two trend lines over the past 41 years since then. The payroll taxes on current workers, (again, not the retirees because they have already ‘retired’) has grown to account for about 1.25% of GDP. That is ‘GDP’ as in ‘the size of our national economy’. Not percentage of overall health care costs or something ’small’ like that.

Premiums on retired seniors have also grown, to an astounding 0.5%+ of GDP as well.

Since inception, Congress has added on taxation of retirement entitlement benefits on more wealthy seniors plus added certain state transfer funds and associated drug fees. Add up all of those fees coming from payroll taxes paid by workers and premiums paid by seniors and they account for around 1.75% of GDP.

In a national economy that is still over $14 trillion despite this ridiculously long, lingering ‘Second Contraction’ as Harvard Professor Kenneth Rogoff calls it, 1.75% of GDP is a lot of money. $245 billion per year right now to be more exact.

Wouldn’t you think that would be more than enough to pay for the medical needs of our less able and unhealthy senior citizens of America?

Not by a long shot. You, the American taxpayer, plus the still-willing (for some reason) lenders from China and other sovereign nations such as Saudi Arabia, foot the bill for over 50% of the cost of Medicare each year. The taxpayer subsidy part of Medicare is almost 1.5% of GDP today or another $210 billion per year.

Those are simply astounding numbers, aren’t they?

And guess what? The Medicare Part A Hospital Insurance (HI) program is fundamentally broke today (that is what the {HI Deficit} brackets mean at the top of the chart)

This means that payroll taxes imposed on current workers are not even covering the cost of taking care of the elderly who need hospital care today much less setting aside anything for when the Boomers start to retire in full force this year and next.

And that all means that absent any substantive reform in Medicare this year beginning with the Super Committee’s recommendations in November, your payroll taxes plus those of your children now entering the workforce are probably going to go way up to cover the shortfall.

Can you afford it? Can your sons or daughters readily find work in this troubled economy and then be able to pay a much higher payroll tax to support this already crumbling system?

Our suggestion to the ‘Burly Man’ in the AARP commercial is to send someone from the AARP with some diplomatic skills and appreciation for the dire straits our nation is now in financially to Congress and sit down with both sides and admit the following:
1. The system is broke.
2. We can’t afford this system any more.
3. Fundamental reform must take place now.
4. Change Medicare so that it is 100% available for those seniors who can not afford health care at all on their own.
5. Scale down any subsidy from the taxpayer to wealthier seniors as you go up the income scale.
6. Warren Buffett and his mega-billionaire friends do not need Medicare and probably don’t use it anyway since it limits their choice of finding the very best doctors and surgeons in the world to treat them when they fall ill. So cut them off of the entitlement rolls. We can’t afford to subsidize poor people AND the super wealthy any more.
7. Start a transition period whereby over the next 20 years, Medicare will become an income-support program based on income and household wealth when seniors will be able to use taxpayer subsidized funds to buy their own health insurance.

There are probably another 1000 things that can be done to fundamentally reform Medicare, much of which we have written about before but don’t have room to do so today.

But this ‘Burly-Man’ AARP ad. It makes us want to burn up our AARP card because of the damage the AARP is costing our children and our children’s children in terms of kicking the can down the road once again. Just like they have always advocated.

If we had an AARP card to begin with. Which we don’t. You should burn yours up today as well. In silent but peaceful protest of their intransigence and inability to the see the forest fire out there for the trees.

I’ve tried to give President Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt. He’s young and inexperienced. He’s never run a government before, but he’s smart, personable and has a nice family.

The problem is he keeps making mistakes that are so sophomoric the doubt just continues to grow like Pinocchio’s nose and the benefit of the doubt looks more and more like a very bad investment.

Take the speech he gave before a Joint Session of Congress on job creation the other night.

His first mistake was giving it.  Speeches before a Joint Session are very special. They are a privilege the Congress affords the President and they come with extremely high expectations. It requires that the President be, well, Presidential. President Obama had little hope of meeting those expectations. He had to issue a clarion call for consensus on a bold new economic agenda replete with innovative new ideas and a roadmap for getting us from here to there.

There was none of that. His speech did not merit a Joint Session. There was a call for consensus, but it was couched in a take-it-or-leave-it, carnival-barker pitch for a patchwork of tax incentives, and more spending on roads, schools, and unemployment insurance. He said seventeen times, according to press reports, that Congress should pass his plan immediately, no if’s and’s or but’s. He didn’t say how he was going to pay for it, although he brought up taxing the rich again.

The President grossly exaggerated the bipartisan agreement he said existed on every plank in his plan. For example, he advocated the ratification of trade agreements that he has had bottled up for years, but he said he would not compromise on the trade adjustment assistance for displaced workers that has caused the trade agreement gridlock for all of those years.

His manner was more arrogant than conciliatory. His message was pure, undiluted, unsaturated snake oil. The language he used to deliver the message was not discernable from campaign rhetoric, and instead of ratcheting down the rhetoric, the next day, he took to the stump in Richmond, VA like the candidate he was in 2008. He said the country spent the summer “fussing” about the deficit. Fussing?

No benefit of the doubt.  Just doubt.

The problem is the same as it was after his last speech to Congress and the one before that and the one before that. What do we do now? Where do we go from here? What does the President do to achieve the consensus he talks about? When do the glittering generalities translate into real governing? It doesn’t matter whether he is pounding the podium in the well of the House of Representatives or in Richmond, Virginia or in Columbus, Ohio. The problem remains the same:  What now?

That is where Obama the Orator fails the test of leadership.

What now?

Reprinted from the feeherytheory.com

As anybody who ever watched Schoolhouse Rock in the 1970’s knows (“I am just a bill, I am only a bill and I am sitting here on Capitol Hill, but I hope to be a law one day, oh, yes I know that I will, but today I am still just a bill”), it is awfully hard to make a law in this country.

You need to get a bill introduced in House Committee, have it considered on the House floor, have it introduced to a Senate Committee, pass the Senate, reconcile the two versions between the two bodies, have both versions pass both bodies again, and then send it to the President for his signature. If the President doesn’t like it, the bill goes back to the Congress, where the House and Senate can override the veto with a two-thirds vote or they can start the process over again.

This complicated process was designed to make it hard to make new laws. Despite the will of the founders, though, the Congress makes plenty of laws. Some of these laws are good ones. Many, though, are really bad.

The sad thing is that it is even harder to repeal bad laws than it is to make new ones. This is true for a couple of reasons.

First, there is the ego factor. Members of Congress don’t like to be embarrassed. And repealing a bad law that has your name on it is very embarrassing. To avoid embarrassment, the members would rather have a bad law continue on the books than to have the embarrassment of having your law repealed by the Congress.

Second is schedule. The Congress only has a certain amount of time to get its work done. They would rather spend their time passing new laws than repealing old ones. It is better for the next election.

Third is bureaucracy. Once a law is passed, a bureaucracy is created to implement the law. The regulatory process commences, people are hired, advocates are created, and a dynamic evolves where the people who want the law to stay in place are more passionate than the folks who want it repealed.

This process ought to change. We should put in place a system where it is far easier to get rid of laws than it is to put them into law in the first place.

I contend that each law should come with an expiration date. If a law proves to be successful and popular, then it should have no problem getting reauthorized. If a law proves to problematic or stupid, it should be allowed to expire.

Because Congress would never willfully put an expiration date on a piece of legislation, the Constitution should be amended to require an expiration date on all new laws (and all old laws, for that matter).

Only with an expiration date can the American people be certain that the legal code reflects common-sense and reason. And plus, if we had an expiration date, I guarantee we would have a lot less wasteful, stupid and expensive government. That could be the first step to a balanced budget.

Editor’s note:  John Feehery worked for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other Republicans in Congress. He is president of Feehery Group, a Washington-based advocacy.

Reprinted from the feeherytheory.com

It is easy to be fairly nonchalant about the current budget battle that has consumed the Congress.

Pundits (myself included) have pointed out that the tens of billions of dollars being discussed is chump change, especially if you consider the trillions of dollars that we owe to the Chinese.

And that may be true.

But that doesn’t mean that these cuts being considered by both the House and Senate are not significant. Because they are. And it doesn’t mean that they won’t be painful. Because for many folks, they will be.

In fact, should the House and the Senate cut $36 billion from the rest of this year’s budget, it will be the largest one year spending cut in our nation’s history. By far.

That is historically significant. Kind of like when Tiger Woods won the U.S. Open a few years ago by a dozen strokes (or whatever the final number was). It is a big deal.

And if you consider that this $36 billion dollar number applies for only slightly more than a half year of the budget, that spending cut is astounding.

And if you take these spending cuts and extrapolate them over ten years, the usual budget window, you get a pretty impressive number by budget standards.

Let’s say, for example, that you roughly double the $36 billon to take into account the rest of the year. That brings you to $78 billion or so, if you include the spending cuts that Boehner and his team have already got in the bank.

And then let’s say, you keep that spending off the books for each year for the next ten years. If you add in a percentage of growth that each program would have had, if the programs stayed in place, pretty soon, you are getting close to a trillion dollars in cuts over ten years.

Now, that is predicated on a couple of assumptions.

The first assumption is that the Congress stays committed to the idea of a smaller and smarter government; which leads to the second assumption, that the House stays Republican for a decade; which leads to a third assumption, that the Tea Party decides not to start attacking the Republican Speaker and rather turns its attention to the folks who truly want to expand the size of the government and the power of organized labor:  Which would be the Democrats.

Now, if none of those assumptions turn out to be accurate, then none of these budget cuts mean a thing in two years, because, what will happen is the same thing that happened two years ago, when David Obey and Nancy Pelosi went on a spending spree, all in the name of stimulus.

Predicting the future is a tough business. It is doubly tough when you are trying to predict the future of the federal budget. But that doesn’t mean that making the largest spending cuts in discretionary spending in our nation’s history has no value. It does have great value, especially in the “out” years, as budget geeks like to say.

 Editor’s note:  John Feehery worked for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other Republicans in Congress. He is president of Feehery Group, a Washington-based advocacy.

Reprinted from the Washington Times

In 1427, a ship captain sailing for his Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator, discovered the Azores Islands. If the question of the significance of this event had been posed at the time to Sultan Murad Khan, the leader of the Ottoman Empire, to Itzcoatl and Nezahualcoyotl, the co-rulers of the Aztecs, or to Rao Kanha, one of the princes of Jodhpur in India – it is unlikely that any of them would have responded that it was an early indication of an historic explosion of cultural energy in Europe that would lead to European exploration and conquest of most of the known world. Nor would they have foreseen a renaissance of European thought that would give rise to scientific, industrial and scholarly dominance of the planet by European culture for at least a half a millennium.

Today, no European or American leaders with whom I am familiar have tied together the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the various Islamist bombings around the world, the push for Shariah law in the West, and the current disturbances in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Syria and Bahrain as symptoms of one larger phenomenon.

The Islamist attacks in the West and elsewhere are characterized as the actions of a politically radicalized group of Muslims driven by poverty, political suppression and cultural deprivation, a group that represents a tiny fraction of Islam.

The current disturbances in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, etc. are separately explained – both by many conservatives and liberals as evidence of a sudden Muslim thirst for democracy – as driven by poverty, political suppression and cultural deprivation.

Well, maybe. But I suspect that such interpretations trivialize the magnitude and causes of these events. After all, those sadly familiar factors of poverty, political suppression and cultural deprivation have existed in most Muslim lands for many centuries. Why are they suddenly triggers to mass action? Six years ago, in my book, “The West’s Last Chance,” I theorized, “The mortal threat we face comes not merely from Osama bin Laden and a few thousand terrorists. Rather, we are confronted with the Islamic world – a fifth of mankind – in turmoil, and insurgent as it has not been in at least five hundred years, if not fifteen hundred years. The magnitude of this cultural upheaval cannot yet be measured. …

“Today we face a force of human passion that may well match a similar expansion that burst out of Renaissance Christian Europe and came to be known in the West as the Age of Discovery – but was known everywhere else as the age of conquest, imperialism and colonialism. And let it be noted, the quality of the human stock that surged out of fifteenth century Europe was in no way superior to that which today peoples the Islamic world.”

Of course, just as the advance of European civilization to its many triumphs was neither inevitable nor perhaps even probable (certainly not predicted or understood in its earlier stages) – so too, the current explosion of energy among the Islamic peoples may peter out, be directed down blind alleys or meet more powerful resistance than met the European expansion.

But as our government – and its Republican critics – flounder around trying to respond to and explain each new current Islamic event, we should all be vastly more modest in our confidence that we really understand what forces are unfolding.

At such a moment of major historic discontinuity, it is dangerous to assume the trends and conceptions of world events with which we have been living (and thriving) for generations still apply.

If we are facing an emerging flood of civilizational energy from Islam, how might we think about a response? When a literal flood comes, people either run from it, build walls to resist it, or try to channel and divert it. It would be unusual for the first thought to be to jump into the arriving flood.

After Sept. 11, with what we thought we knew then, our government reasonably tried the second method – resist it – both at home and abroad. Certainly, we should persist with that strategy regarding the direct threat from the terrorists.

But as at least some of us think we see these larger forces emerging, it would make sense to, where feasible, get out of its way. Now might be a very good time not to get further engaged in the Middle East – which may well see decades of violence as this Islamic energy works its way through its peoples and nations.

Of course, the feasibility of removing ourselves from the region is limited by our reliance on Middle East oil. We must surely, if it comes to it, defend the Saudi and other gulf oil fields, the Bahrain pipelines, and the Suez Canal. But intervention should be limited only to our most vital national security requirements.

Beyond that, the first policy imperative that should come from these events is for a Manhattan Project sense of urgency to massively and quickly increase our domestic and other politically safe oil production, while the humans for which our government should provide humanitarian relief and nation-building services should be limited to Americans.

 Editor’s Note:  Tony Blankley is a TV pundit, nationally syndicated columnist, Executive Vice President  of Edelman Public Relations worldwide,a New York  Times best-selling author,  former press secretary to Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Reagan Speechwriter, former California Deputy Attorney General.

Reprinted from mullings.com

 I need someone to explain to me what in the world we are doing bombing convoys in Libya.

On the very first day of the anti-Gaddhafi attacks we launched a reported 110 Tomahawk missiles into Libya at a cost of about $600,000 per. The very first day of President Barack Obama’s very first war cost $66 million not including the cost of fuel, manpower, tax, title and dealer prep.

Since then we have also lost an F-15 Strike Eagle which go for about $31 million apiece. It is too early to have an accounting for all the other ordinance which has been expended, but there has been no public estimate of how much will be needed to win, nor any clear definition of what “win” means.

The legal justification for this war is based on the vote for a UN Security Council resolution which was something less than overwhelming: Ten nations voted for starting the war against Gaddhafi and five nations abstained.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton convinced President Obama that the Arab League was fully behind attacking Libya, but about 20 minutes after the missile hit their targets Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said that the Western bombing campaign “differs from the goal of imposing a no-fly zone,”

Qatar was the first Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nation to send actual aircraft to enforce the “no-fly zone.” Al Jazeera is owned by Qatar. Al Jazeera is credited with inciting the continued violence in the region – for better or for worse – and there are those who believe that Qatar is sending military assets to atone for al Jazeera’s purported role in fomenting some of these problems.

The United Arab Emirates said it had planned to send two squadrons of fighter, 24 planes, to help with the no-fly deal but after the United States tsk-tsked the GCC’s decision to send forces to put down the insurrection in Bahrain, the UAE decided to stand its planes down.

The UAE has since indicated it will provide military assistance.

Bahrain’s neighbors believe Iran is behind the Shi’ia/Sunni clashes in Bahrain. Many in the region don’t understand Hillary Clinton’s inability to grasp the depth of the threat which Iran presents in the region.

No one in the region, apparently, has any problem understanding President Obama’s inability to grasp what’s going on.

As recently as yesterday, CNN was reporting that there is “mounting tension between [NATO] allies about who should command the mission.” It is unclear which, if any, NATO members want to take the point on this effort.

Germany (one of the abstainers of the UN resolution) has chosen not to participate in the war in Libya at all. Italy, on the other hand, has threatened “to take back complete control of Italian airbases if NATO did not take the reins of the mission.”

According to CNN, NATO member Turkey “also voiced its opposition to a political role for the alliance and has forcefully suggested that the mission so far has already gone beyond the intention of the U.N. resolution to protect civilians.”

So, where is the coalition? It’s not among the Arabs. It’s not among NATO. That 10-5 vote shows it’s not among members of the UN Security Council.

Where is it?

According to the Washington Post, four days of attacks have not altered the center of gravity in Libya, “There was little evidence that the attacks had stopped regime forces from killing civilians or shifted the balance of power in favor of the rebels.”

Speaking of the “rebels,” it would be interesting to know who makes up the Libyan opposition. One day they were protesters; next day they were rebels.

What if they turn out to be as bad or worse than Gaddhafi and his thugs? What if they are aligned, at least some of them, with al-Qaida and are looking for a new country to set up band camp for terrorist training?

Western intelligence missed Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya. I’m not at all certain we have the human intelligence resources to be comfortable that we’re helping the right guys.

Every mistake we have made in every military adventure in the past 100+ years appears to have been made in our involvement in Libya. No clarity of mission. No clarity of command. No clarity of when we know if we’ve won or lost.

The fog of Libya hangs heavy on the conscience of the West.

New Topic:

Headline in the LA Times:

Exercising or having sex periodically may increase the risk for a cardiac event, but overall risk is low

Just to be on the safe side I’m giving up the periodic exercise.

Editor’s Note:  Rich Galen publishes at mullings.com to which you can subscribe.  He is a former aide to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a long-time public affairs and political professional who has had several tours of duty in Iraq working with the U.S. military’s public affairs operations.

Reprinted from thefeeherytheory.com

During the Eddie Murphy years, Saturday Night Live had an iconic skit  that can best be called “Who Shot Buckwheat.” In a spoof of the media  culture that glorifies murderers and assassins, it examined why John  David Stutts shot Buckwheat.

The question was put to an acquaintance of Stutts if he could believe that Stutts shot Buckwheat. The friend said, “oh yes, that is all he ever talked about. He told me once that ‘I am going to grow up and shoot Buckwheat’. And he did.”

In the mid-nineties, when Republicans took control of the Congress,  they had their John David Stutts moment. All they ever talked about was about how they were going to shut the government down. From the  leadership of Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay all the way down to the newest revolutionaries, including Steve Largent and Lindsey Graham, they promised that they were going to shut the government down in order to achieve a balanced budget.

And when the government shut down in a budget dispute in 1995 stretching into 1996, they were blamed for it. Even though Bill Clinton actually vetoed a Continuing Resolution to keep the government  open, it was Newt Gingrich who got the blame.

A story in The Hill yesterday warned about how the chances for a shutdown are looming larger. But it wasn’t Republicans who were promising a shutdown. It was the Democrats.

There are a lot of Democrats who were around in the mid-nineties who are still around today who are hoping upon hope that Republicans will once again get blamed for shutting the government down. They believe that this is their best chance to regain the upper hand in budget  negotiations.

But John Boehner is no Newt Gingrich and Eric Cantor is no Tom DeLay. These guys are savvy enough to not get pinned for the blame should a CR not get to the President’s desk.

That doesn’t mean that the House GOP isn’t pushing hard to get a handle on spending. Quite obviously, they are pushing very hard to cut  spending first. But just because they want to close down many  government programs doesn’t mean that they want to close down the  entire government.

President Obama has punted when it comes to his budget plans. It is far easier to play defense when it comes to making painful choices than it is to go on offense. It is far easier to be a follower than a leader. And the President has chosen to be a follower.

The big question remains: Do we have a fiscal crisis or don’t we? Are we going broke, both long-term and short-term, or aren’t we? The  President seems to think that we can continue to bump along with the 
status quo, and nothing bad will happen.

All evidence points otherwise. Moody’s has already said that they are going to downgrade our debt by 2015 if we don’t make some spending adjustments. That means that it will be more expensive to borrow money, meaning that we will have less money to pay for defense and for national security.

The Democrats are hoping that the government shuts down so that they can blame Republicans and in the process, keep a status quo budget.

I don’t think that will work this time. I think the voters will give the Republicans the credit for trying to restore fiscal sanity to Washington and they will blame the President for not leading and for not keeping the government open.

Editor’s note:  John Feehery worked for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other Republicans in Congress. He is president of Feehery Group, a Washington-based advocacy.

Reprinted from feeherytheory.com

Revolution swept Europe in 1848.

Stoked by nationalism and poverty, France, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, Ireland and the vast reaches of the Habsburg Empire all convulsed in tumult.

The bourgeoisie and peasant classes, angered by the ruling classes that seemed to care more for their own personal well being than the well-being of their peoples, rose up and said enough is enough.

Most of the revolutions didn’t succeed.  The Irish rebels were crushed.  The Parisian rebels were stopped.  The Italians and the Germans idealists were thwarted (many of them ended up fleeing to America).

Europe in the mid-nineteenth century was going through a great transition.  The monarchies that had long ruled had lost touch with the people.  Intermarriage had made many of the Kings and Queens loony and weak. The Industrial Revolution had presented its own challenges, as many of the peasant class migrated to the cities to find better pay and work.  The new industrialists and financiers had more wealth than the landowners, and they demanded more power.  New technologies made communications and travel easier and faster everywhere but in Russia, which significantly didn’t face a revolution in 1848.

And though the revolutions didn’t succeed, they did send a wake-up call to the Monarchists that change was inevitable.  Many adapted and changed their ways, and eventually, control shifted to democracies.

Revolution, like the flu, can be contagious.

In 1968, the American civil rights movement inspired similar movements in Ireland, in Paris and across the globe.

We are seeing such a movement in the Middle East.

Of course, it started in Iran last year, where it was suppressed violently by the ruling elite.

But at the beginning of this year, Tunisian democrats — perhaps inspired by the American Tea Party, perhaps inspired by the failed Iranian revolution – said in no uncertain terms:  This is bullshit.

They kicked the autocrat out of the country, and they took control of their government.  It wasn’t a peaceful revolution, but it wasn’t particularly violent either. (For example, this was no French Revolution.)

The Tunisian Tea Party seems to have inspired the Egyptians, who have long chafed under the autocracy of the Mubarak regime.  Like many revolutions, the Egyptians are especially angry that the price of bread might go up.  It is amazing how many revolutions start with the rising price of bread.

This in turn, is making the rulers in Jordan and Saudi Arabia very, very nervous, as their people start agitating for more power, more control and more of a say-so over their daily lives.

America has conflicting goals here.  It was nice that the Tunisians kicked out their autocrat, and it would be nice if democracy could come to Iran, and while we sure would love Egypt and Jordan to become more democratic, we sure don’t want Muslim extremists to be running those countries.

Still, it is hard for us to speak out of both sides of our mouths.  In the long-term, freedom should lead to more free enterprise, more democracy, more trading capabilities and closer relations with our government.  In the short-term, this could get pretty ugly.

Technology, poverty, and anger at the ruling class are conspiring to create revolution in 2011, much like it did in 1848.

Revolution is in the air, and it can be very contagious.

Editor’s note:  John Feehery worked for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other Republicans in Congress. He is president of Feehery Group, a Washington-based advocacy.

Reprinted from mullings.com

 On December 17, 2010 a 26 year-old fruit vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest at his treatment by the local authorities in the Tunisian city of Sidi Bouzid.

That act led to massive demonstrations which led to the government of Tunisia being toppled which led to even more massive demonstrations in Egypt which led to President Hosni Mubarak firing his cabinet and may well end up with Mubarak, himself, having to pull up stakes and head for Switzerland or wherever he has stashed his money.

The troubles in Egypt are serious troubles for everyone.

If the demonstrators – or just plain bad guys – disable the Suez Canal it will mean huge problems. Egypt straddles the Suez Canal which connects the Red and Mediterranean Seas. Without the Suez Canal oil tankers (and every other ship) will have to travel an additional 10,000 miles around Africa to get to Europe.

About 50 ships per day travel through the Suez Canal according to

Egypt has a population of 80.5 million. Israel has a population of just over 7 million. The only thing separating Egypt from Israel is an imaginary line in the Sinai/Negev Desert. Different, but still imaginary, lines in the sand separate Israel from Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan to which this civil unrest could easily spread like an outbreak of political Ebola.

Southwest of Egypt is Nigeria. If the riots spread there (and to Angola and Algeria) disruption of oil production would have a massive impact on the U.S. economy. Why? Because we import about 1.5 million barrels of oil per day from those three countries.

And, if the riots spread east to the Gulf States of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that could disrupt another 1.3 million barrels per day.

Together those five countries provide 2.8 million of the 10 million barrels of oil we import every day. Cut oil imports by 28 percent and it will make the $4.00 per gallon price spike of 2008 look like the good old days.

We know from painful experience how fragile civilization is in Iraq and we would prefer not to have to militarily re-litigate that situation.

Countries like Bahrain, Qatar, the U.A.E. and Oman (whose border with Yemen is a blurry line in the desert) might be targets for Iranian agents provocateurs to use the underlying Shi’ite/Sunni unpleasantness to destabilize those governments as well.

It is true that this could spread to Iran which has seen public unrest all on its own in recent years, but regime change in Iran at the cost of instability in every other country in the region might be too high a price to pay.

It is not likely that any new government will be composed of Western-facing officials. Over the weekend protesters in Egypt began chanting against the U.S. and Israel. No surprise to anyone.

The U.S. provides about $1.5 billion per year in direct assistance to Egypt. According to Forbes magazine about $1.3 billion is for “peace and security” meaning you and I are paying for those tanks which rolled out in Cairo Friday afternoon.

President Obama’s remarks on Friday evening were so weak they made dishwater in your grandma’s sink seem like battery acid.

The Administration sent Hillary Clinton out to try and make its position clear, but according to the Washington Post’s analysis of the Secretary of State’s world tour of Sunday shows yesterday:

The Administration has sought to adapt to the rapidly shifting landscape, at times offering contradictory messages.

Vice President Joe Biden last week said he did not believe Mubarak should step down, while Clinton described the Egyptian government as stable. On Sunday, Clinton declined to reiterate either position.

No one can tell where this will all end, but it is already clear that President Obama, who was so eager to re-set America’s relationships with the rest of the world is finding out that (a) it is tougher to be President than to run for President and (b) Bush’s policies made more sense than Obama thought they did.

It would be better if, when the history of Africa and the Middle East is written 100 years from now, Mohammed Bouazizi is not the functional equivalent of the Archduke Ferdinand.

Editor’s Note:  Rich Galen publishes at mullings.com to which you can subscribe.  He is a former aide to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a long-time public affairs and political professional who has had several tours of duty in Iraq working with the U.S. military’s public affairs operations.