Memo to GOP: It's big government, stupid!

By MICHAEL D. TANNER
Cato Institute

Riding a record of unprecedented government spending, rising debt, a government takeover of the health-care system, high unemployment, and proposals to tax everything they stumble across, Democrats have put themselves in position for an epic electoral defeat that will rival the Republican debacles of 2006 and 2008.

Given this record of Democratic ineptitude and the voters' reaction to it, one would think that Republicans would be talking about these issues every day. Instead, Republicans and conservatives have spent recent weeks talking about such distracting side-issues as immigration, the 14th Amendment, gay marriage, and when and where mosques should be built.

No doubt these are important issues to various constituencies. But, the merits of the issues aside, if Republicans believe that the key to victory this year is to refight the culture wars, they are mistaken.

Achievements of Ted Stevens and the statehood giants can’t be repeated

By TOM BRENNAN

This has been a tough year for the giants of Alaska statehood. First we lost Wally Hickel, then the largest of them all — and the last — Ted Stevens.

These were two of the outsize characters, the northern equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers, those who created Alaska and laid the groundwork to make it successful. What they accomplished in building Alaska while fighting for statehood was akin to building a spaceship while traveling through space itself.

People are asking whether we’ll see their like again, and the answer is No. Great Alaskans will surely rise from our ranks — and some may come from elsewhere — but this state’s founders’ place in history is secure.

Planet Food: Coffee Land Café and Bakery

510 L Street (Peterson Towers)
243-0301
coffeelandak.com

By SCOTT BANKS

On a walk downtown I wandered into the lobby of the Peterson Tower and voila, there was the Coffee Land Café and Bakery with it’s neat LP album cover collage on one wall, and the work of a local photographer on the other. Stacked on the counter along the front window were an eclectic collection of magazines such as Rolling Stone, People and obscure architectural reviews. I didn’t have time then, but it looked like a good place to escape work and dig into some soup and a sandwich.

The next week I walked over and sampled the corn and crab chowder with a slice of sourdough bread and took it to go. You know how you start to eat something and it’s too hot, but you can’t stop because it’s too good? I burned my mouth that day on a smooth chowder with corn for crunch and the silky crab for flavor. It was clear the chef used a good fish stock because the seafood flavor wasn’t fishy, and didn’t overwhelm the overall flavor.

The big spender's armada to Spain

By WESLEY PRUDEN

Presidents, as F. Scott Fitzgeral might say, are not like you and me, and neither are their families. A president stepping out to Starbucks for a decaf mocha or even to the bathroom can't go there without his shadow from the Secret Service.

This is nice when he's in a hurry and the crosstown traffic is a bear, though if it weren't for the honor of it a president on those occasions would just as soon walk alone. George Bush the elder once told me that he figured beating traffic lights by having the cops hold up everyone else could cost 50,000 votes even in a small town.

John F. Kennedy used to give the slip to his Secret Service bodyguards, pull on his hat and a coat with a turned-up collar and duck out late in an evening to hike up Pennsylvania Avenue to the old Biograph Theater at the edge of Georgetown to watch a second-run movie.

What handouts to cut

By WALTER E. WILLIAMS

Because of failure to heed the limitations of the U.S. Constitution, which has produced runaway federal spending, our nation sits on the precipice of disaster.

Former Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming and Erskine Bowles, White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton, co-chairmen of President Obama's debt and deficit commission, in a Washington Post article "Obama's Debt Commission Warns of Fiscal 'Cancer'" (July 12, 2010) said that "(A)t present, federal revenue is fully consumed by three programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans - the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed by China and other countries."

The commission added the current budget trend is a disaster "that will destroy the country from within" unless checked by tough action in Washington. The tough action required is spending cuts in programs, including the so-called nondiscretionary, eating most of the federal revenues.