Political News Round-up: To Help Democratic Candidates President Barack Obama May Stay Away, Another Black Legislator Faces Ethics Charges

Political News Round-up: Is President Barack Obama an election liability? Another black lawmaker in ethics trouble.

Political News Round-Up

Here are links to the latest political news around the Internet. One story that hits hard is the fact that President Obama, not even through his first term, has become a liability to Democrats in November elections.

To Help Democrats in the Fall, Obama May Stay Away -- Jeff Zeleny (NY Times)

Three months before the midterm elections, the president is stepping up his involvement in the fight to preserve the Democratic Party’s control of Congress. But advisers said he would concentrate largely on delivering a message, raising money and motivating voters from afar, rather than on racing from district to district.

It is a vivid shift from the last two elections, when Mr. Obama was the hottest draw for Democratic candidates in red and blue states alike. And it highlights the tough choices Democrats face as they head toward Election Day with the president’s approval ratings depressed, Republicans energized, the economic slump still lingering and two veteran House Democrats now facing public hearings on ethics charges.

Four Deformations of the Apocalypse -- David Stockman (NY Times)

IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.

More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes. Read more

House Inquiry on Rep. Maxine Waters Tied to Bank -- Eric Lipton (NY Times)

When Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, called Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. in late 2008 to ask him to host a special meeting that would feature a California bank executive she knew well, was the request on behalf of a trade association, or a bank in which her husband owned stock?

That question will be among those raised at an ethics trial expected to unfold this fall, House officials predicted Saturday, after Ms. Waters became the second House member to indicate last week that she would challenge an allegation of violating House ethics rules. The specific charges to be filed against Ms. Waters have not been made public. Read more.

Death of a Farm -- Verlyn Klinkenborg (NY Times)

Farms go out of business for many reasons, but few farms do merely because the soil has failed. That is the miracle of farming. If you care for the soil, it will last — and yield — nearly forever. America is such a young country that we have barely tested that. For most of our history, there has been new land to farm, and we still farm as though there always will be.

Still, there are some very old farms out there. The oldest is the Tuttle farm, near Dover, N.H., which is also one of the oldest business enterprises in America. It made the news last week because its owner — a lineal descendant of John Tuttle, the original settler — has decided to go out of business. It was founded in 1632. I hear its sweet corn is legendary.

The year 1632 is unimaginably distant. In 1632, Galileo was still publishing, and John Locke was born. There were perhaps 10,000 colonists in all of America, only a few hundred of them in New Hampshire. The Tuttle acres, then, would have seemed almost as surrounded as they do in 2010, but by forest instead of highways and houses. Read more

Will Washington's Failures Lead To Second American Revolution? Investors Business Daily

Too many overreaching laws give the president too much discretion to make too many open-ended rules controlling too many aspects of our lives. There's no end to the harm an out-of-control president can do.

Bill Clinton lowered the culture, moral tone and strength of the nation — and left America vulnerable to attack. When it came, George W. Bush stood up for America, albeit sometimes clumsily. Barack Obama, however, has pulled off the ultimate switcheroo: He's diminishing America from within — so far, successfully. Read more.