With the setting of the sun this Wednesday night, Jews across the world will begin the observance of the Yomim Noraim (Days of Awe), a ten day period book-ended by the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This year’s High Holiday period comes at an interesting time for America as the first night of Rosh Hashanah comes a mere fifty-four days before the United States goes to the polls to between two radically different directions, one which emphasizes personal responsibility, the other emphasizes a reliance on government. Only one of those directions is compatible with the true meaning of the High Holidays. The popular view is the two holidays are observed by going to Synagogue saying a few prayers and begging God for forgiveness. Nothing can be further from the truth. The High Holiday period is all about personal responsibility. All the prayers and readings are just tools to help us look inward and formulate a personal accounting of our deeds over the past year, good and bad, and to understand what we have learned, or need to learn to correct our deeds. As for forgiveness, we are taught that our maker is not like a big massive government who will fix everything.  For earthly-type mistakes, we must approach the people we may have harmed for forgiveness and if necessary make restitution to them, then we must discover what within ourselves led us to err and correct them. Only then can we approach God for absolution. It’s not that God couldn’t fix everything, but his direct involvement would destroy the delicate balance he set up during creation. The creation narrative in Genesis explains that man is created in God’s image.  The Torah is not teaching us that we are all dead ringers for the “big guy upstairs.” If that was the case everyone’s driver’s license would have the same picture, the Sport’s Illustrated Swimsuit Issue would seem a bit creepy, and no one would be able to solve crimes as eye witness testimony would be useless and everyone would have the same DNA

We are in the midst of a national debate over the size and scope of government and I am hopeful.  Conservative Republican Joe Miller’s remarkable victory in the Alaska Republican Senate Primary should have Americans feeling optimistic about the prospects of real change coming to Washington in 2011. Miller’s victory over incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski is just the latest jolt to an establishment that has paved the way for an unsustainable $13.3 trillion national debt and record budget deficits. My PAC, Citizens United Political Victory Fund ( www.cupvf.org ) has a goal for the 2009-2010 election cycle to recapture the majorities in the U.S. Senate and U.S. House of Representatives by helping to elect candidates who will fight for conservative principles and challenge the agenda of the Obama Administration.  To date, CUPVF has made more than $300,000 in direct contributions to 53 federal candidates who are campaigning to put an end to this fiscal insanity. If Miller is elected to the Senate in November, along with fellow fiscal conservatives Pat Toomey (PA), Marco Rubio (FL), Sharron Angle (NV), Ken Buck (CO), and Rand Paul (KY), business as usual in Washington will be over.  And good riddance!  After all, one U.S. Senator has the power to bring the legislative and appropriations process to a halt.  Imagine what this group of potential newcomers, with a clear mandate to stop the spending, could do to get America’s fiscal house in order!   Establishment incumbents from both parties should beware that the taxpayer funded party is about to end.   Voters are giving the order:  enough is enough. Who would have believed 18 months ago that President Obama’s big government agenda and ultra-socialist ideology would actually be the catalyst for bringing real change to Washington?  I think it’s fair to say that if Obama had governed moderately as promised, the level of fiscal change that is rapidly approaching would not have been possible.  Obama and the socialists completely misread their mandate and this is the result.  Americans voted for pragmatic governance in 2008 – not a continuation of the LBJ welfare state on steroids. The task at hand is not going to be pretty.  Nothing but the toughest of decisions will have to be made to pull us back from the cliff we will be falling off if we stay on our current path.   The Federal budget has to be severely slashed.  The same goes for state budgets, because the bailouts from the feds are going to come to a screeching halt.  Meaningful entitlement reform and dramatic earmark reform are absolutely necessary.     This is our generation’s real Apollo project.   Do we have the mettle to do the tough things for the sake of our children and grandchildren, or will we just do the easy thing and vote to increase the debt ceiling on our way to bankruptcy? I believe in American exceptionalism, and if we succeed in this daunting mission, the rest of the world will once again believe as well

Click to Play Mark Steyn returns. Need we say more? Ok, we will: we cover GZM, Bridget Bardot, Obama’s speech, expectations for this fall,  The Dambusters , Michele Rhee, the Beck rally, and we try to get to the bottom of where Mark’s been the past few months. You’ll just have to listen to hear the answer. For links mentioned in this episode, or to comment, complain, or praise, please visit us at Ricochet.com.

Consider the outrage from the left at such a notion. “ That’s the thinking that got us into this mess in the first place ,” the President and his lock-step socialist legions will rush to remind us. Well, no, it isn’t.  The Bush Administration’s general lack of interest in proper regulation, the somnambulistic SEC’s furlough from responsibility during the Bush years and the federal bank examiners refusal to really examine the banks for which they were accountable while a succession of administrations, both Republican and socialist, committed to the fantasy that credit history didn’t really matter when assessing mortgage risk are not examples of government getting out of the way of a private, market-driven, economy.  These are simply examples of a gross absence of leadership, common sense and the failure to enforce the longstanding oversight rules already in place. Just as abandoning highway speed and safety laws would cause carnage on our highways as irresponsible and reckless risk takers took to the roads, so did government’s failure to enforce its own rules and regulations attract irresponsible and reckless risk takers into the marketplace.  Had the rules and regulations that were in place been properly enforced, and had the House and Senate financial oversight committees taken their jobs seriously, and had the business and financial press (with a few noteworthy exceptions) earned their subscribers’ fees, the mess we’ve been exposed to for the last three years would ( not could … would ) have been avoided. Economists will debate ad nauseam for many years (and never reach a consensus) whether the Obama stimulus stimulated anything other than massive debt.  We have strong doubts about the efficacy of incurring a trillion dollar debt to improve the economy along with a plethora of new policies and regulations that will add tens of thousands of new bureaucrats (literally) and thousands of new regulations (and the massive taxes needed to fund this circus) on to the backs of businesses and all other taxpayers in the cause of stimulating growth.  Individuals and businesses in the marketplace are what stimulate growth, and, by any measure, the marketplace is ready to grow if government would just allow it properly to operate. Many American businessmen are, today, at the controls of well-oiled and well-fueled industrial machines, but they don’t know whether to, metaphorically, depress the brake or the accelerator of those machines.

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RealClearPolitics – Election 2010

From the LA Times : The command center of Andrew Breitbart’s growing media empire is a suite of offices on Sawtelle Boulevard in West Los Angeles with the temporary feel of a campaign office. Only the computers seem firmly anchored. On a recent summer day, just weeks after he posted video clips that touched off a national furor over race, Breitbart was swigging a bottled Frappuccino at his desk. In a Lacoste shirt, cargo shorts and laceless Converse All-Stars, he looked every bit the 41-year-old industry player he might have been, but for a political awakening that transformed this socialist, West Side child of privilege into a Hollywood-hating, mainstream-media-loathing conservative. Breitbart, who has emerged as a star of the “tea party” movement, loves telling his apostate’s tale in the italicized, frequently profane manner that is his trademark. Three epiphanies stand out: 1. The Black Dorm Moment. In 1986, Breitbart was a freshman at Tulane University when his friend Larry Solov, a sophomore at Stanford, happened to mention his school’s African-American-themed residence hall. “He just matter-of-factly said there was a black dorm and I was like, ‘What the friggin’ hell? Are you kidding me?’” said Breitbart, who is now business partners with Solov, a former corporate litigator.

As a service to all Americans, allow me to remind you all of Sen. Harry Reid’s infamous pronouncement in 2007: Now, in the Las Vegas Review-Journal , Sen. Reid makes an unbelievable new claim: At the time Sen. Reid made this comment, President Bush had been pursuing a failed, stay-the-course strategy that had cost thousands of American lives and billions of taxpayer dollars. Iraq appeared to be on the verge of a sectarian civil war. He was simply pointing out what our military leaders, including Gen.

Here’s a Reuters story about the Australian Tax Office harassing Paul Hogan , better known to Americans as Crocodile Dundee , because of a tax dispute. The grinches at the tax office took advantage of Hogan’s return for his mother’s funeral to hold him hostage, refusing to let him leave the country until he coughs up some cash. It appears that the tax police in Australia are just as politicized and above the law as the IRS. Hogan has never been charged with tax evasion and there are plenty of signs that the bureaucrats want to make him a high-profile victim to justify the amount of money that has been squandered in a probe of supposed offshore evasion. Actor Paul Hogan, star of the “Crocodile Dundee” movies, has vowed to continue fighting the Australian tax office which has barred him from leaving Australia until he pays a massive bill, saying he’s victim of a witch hunt. Hogan, 70, was served with a departure prohibition order 10 days ago while in Australia to attend his 101-year-old mother’s funeral which has prevented him from leaving to return to Los Angeles where he lives with his wife and son. The Australian Tax Office refused to comment on reports of seeking tax on A$38 million ($34 million) of allegedly undeclared income from Hogan, saying it cannot give details of individual taxpayers. But the actor went public in the Australian media this week to put forward his side in his five-year row with the tax office, saying he had done nothing wrong and the tax office was on a witch hunt for a high-profile case. …”If I was a tax evader, which I’m not, I must be the dumbest one in the world to keep coming back here instead of fleeing to a tax haven … I know they’re absolutely desperate to nail some high-profile character with money to justify the expense to the taxpayer.” Hogan, who was once a painter on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, is under investigation as part of Australia’s biggest probe into offshore tax evasion, Operation Wickenby. The operation is budgeted to cost at least $300 million. The tax office has claimed he put tens of millions of dollars in film royalties in offshore tax havens, a claim that he has denied. He has never been charged with tax evasion. This story is symbolic of a bigger issue, which is the the unfortunate tendency of governments to create ever-more oppressive and misguided laws in response to failures of existing policy . We see this in the failed War on Drugs, which leads to trampling of civil liberties and erosion of privacy. We see it in the failed War on Poverty, which leads to more redistribution that further traps people in dependency.

Political prognosticator Charlie Cook’s latest column in National Journal: Labor Day is almost here and socialists are still waiting for the cavalry to arrive. An exhaustive scan of the horizon reveals no rescuers and none of the things socialists badly need to save them from tough midterm election losses on Nov. 2. There are few signs of any meaningful recovery, and indeed there is more talk of a double-dip recession, plunging the country back into economic trouble between now and the end of the year. Unemployment seems stuck at 9.5 percent, reinforcing the view that last year would have been better spent focusing on the economy than on health care reform. socialists also needed a public re-evaluation of the new health care reform law. They needed the public to decide that it wasn’t so bad, that it was a good idea after all.