Conservative Insights

Where There's Smoke.....

2011-11-30T15:04:00.000-04:00

When I first heard reports of the latest woman to accuse Herman Cain of having a sexual relationship, it seemed to long and involved to be true. The woman alleged a 13-year liaison, including sexual encounters.

Then, only hours later, on a Fox News program, it was disclosed that, although the woman was said to have money problems, she did have text messages from Cain, and a copy of one of his books inscribed by him to her personally. Cain admitted knowing the woman for that time period, but categorically insisted there was no 'relationship.'

I thought perhaps he mentored her platonically, and she took a different view of his kindnesses.

Then I heard that she had some 61 text messages from Cain, coming, to cite Sean Hannity, either 'at all hours' or 'at early hours in the morning,' suggesting a clandestine, inappropriate involvement.

Stepping back, you have to wonder by now just what is it about Herman Cain that draws these allegations from multiple women?

In a field of 7-8 other candidates, nobody else has had these issues. We all know about Gingrich's infidelities, so that's different. And you'd think, if Newt had stepped out on his latest wife, we'd have heard about that muy pronto.

Guys like Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman would seem likely candidates for similar allegations, but nothing has surfaced. Not a peep. Nothing for Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann, either.

So just going by the statistics, you have to wonder why only one candidate out of a group of 8 or so has received all the public allegations of prior marital infidelities?

It may seem unfair, but it does give one pause. And make you reconsider Cain as a candidate. His fumbling of the initial accusations, for which he had over a week to consider his response, was unimpressive.

But, now, this 13-year thing, with saved text messages, just seems so odd. It's like he attracts this sort of thing, or has exercised poor judgement in the past in his associations with women.

Whichever it is, whether fair or not, it's almost certainly derailed his candidacy.

Barney Frank Announces Retirement!

2011-11-29T00:01:00.012-04:00

It was a red letter day yesterday. Longtime liberal Democratic Representative Barney Frank, a major co-architect of the financial crisis of 2007-08, announced his retirement from Congress.

It's an event that should bring joy to conservatives and, for that matter, all taxpayers, since the latter are who have paid for Barney's corruption and demands that Fannie and Freddie guarantee more housing loans to those too poor to actually afford the mortgages they received.

Then there was the abominable Dodd-Frank law, which will continue to burden all Americans with passed-through costs of excessive, largely-pointless over-regulation of the financial sector.

To be sure, all America will be better off with this liberal idiot gone from Congress.

Why do you think he chose this term as his last? Do you think he actually feared a loss of his seat next year? Or perhaps, having enjoyed four years in the majority recently, couldn't stomach continued service as a minority party Representative?

Whichever, let's all rejoice for a tiny step forward for better government as Barney Frank leaves Congress next year.

Fred Siegel on Public Sector Unions Displacing Old-Style Democrait Machines

2011-11-28T13:00:00.000-04:00

Here are some key passages from the Wall Street Journal's weekend edition interview. Matthew Kaminski sat down with Fred Siegel, producing the following insights.

Excerpts from the Interview

A former editor of the left-leaning Dissent magazine, Mr. Siegel has written several well-received books on New York, including the 1997 "The Future Once Happened Here." He calls his hometown "the model for cross subsidies" in America. "Wall Street makes money off the bonds that have to be floated to pay the public sector workers in New York."

Born in 1945 and raised in the Bronx, Mr. Siegel got his first political education by listening to feverish debates at home about Bundists and Bolsheviks. His grandfather, a militantly anti-Communist socialist, was vice president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and a strong influence on him. In 1972, Mr. Siegel worked on the McGovern campaign—"you shouldn't print that!"—and calls his discussions with the Democratic candidate "enormously consequential" in shifting his world view. "I like to say I was center left before I became center right," he says.

Thanks to union clout, he notes, salaries and benefits for teachers, bus drivers and city secretaries have outgained the private sector during this sluggish economy. "Spending is never ratcheted down. It's unconnected to productivity. That can only be sustained by a boom or these extraordinary subsidies we're getting now from the Federal Reserve. But that's gonna stop at some point. And then what happens?"

And the ground may already be moving. Many American localities are already at the crisis point. Rhode Island's legislature last week sharply cut retirement benefits for current and retired public workers. "A 300% Democratic state!" marvels Mr. Siegel, who was one of the first to sound the warning on the public pensions crisis.

In Mr. Siegel's estimation, only Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has tried the needed fix after last year's elections. "Part of the reason Walker has become such a lightning rod" is that he pushed "straight up, unambiguous structural reform." His move to restrict collective bargaining for state employees isn't as important, says Mr. Siegel, as ending the requirement that state workers pay union dues. On his first day in the governor's mansion in 2005, Indiana's Mitch Daniels also stopped deducting dues automatically; most workers chose not to pay. "The union has a guaranteed flow of income, which they then use to lobby the government," says Mr. Siegel. This reform, he adds, "evens the playing field."

Dues money is the coin of political influence for organized labor. So not surprisingly, it is bankrolling the pushback. Mr. Walker faces a recall campaign. Ohio voters this month overturned Gov. John Kasich's legislation to limit collective bargaining for state workers. Mr. Kasich should have eliminated the dues "check off" instead, according to Mr. Siegel, and worked harder to connect with voters. "Too many Republicans treat workers as if they are their employees," he says. "The virtue of Ronald Reagan is he talked to workers as one of them."

It is often forgotten how many New Deal Democrats were skeptical about public-sector unions. Franklin Delano Roosevelt called the idea of strikes by government workers "unthinkable and intolerable." New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia said, "I do not want any of the pinochle club atmosphere to take hold among city workers." But union organizers would eventually tap into the language of the civil rights movement to present collective bargaining as another overdue "right."

New York Mayor Robert Wagner extended collective-bargaining rights to government employees in 1958. He saw early that, says Mr. Siegel, "public sector unions are displacing political machines as the turnout mechanism for the Democratic Party. They are the new Tammany Hall." Coming off a nail biter of an election, President John F. Kennedy saw this future as well. In 1962, he signed Executive Order 10988 to give federal workers the right to unionize, though not to collectively bargain. By 1980, half of all delegates to the Democratic convention worked for the government. Government-employee rolls kept growing through the Reagan years. During the presidency of George W. Bush, the number of government workers who belong to a union surpassed the number of unionized private workers.

Mr. Siegel observes that public-sector unions have "become a vanguard movement within liberalism. And the reason for that is it's the public sector that comes closest to the statist ideals of McGovern and post-McGovern liberals. And that is, there's no connection between effort and reward. You're guaranteed your job. You're guaranteed your salary increase. There's a kind of bureaucratic equality."

In turn, he continues, "this vanguard becomes in the eyes of many liberals the model for the middle class. Public-sector unions are what all workers should be like. Their benefits are the kind of benefits everyone should get."

Government workers make up a growing share of the middle class. And perversely, says Mr. Siegel, unions can justifiably claim to defend the interests of the middle-class worker. "That's because the costs that they've imposed have driven out the private-sector middle class. They are the disease of which they proclaim themselves the cure."

I've highlighted in red what I consider to be among the most essential comments by Siegel, among others which are also valuable to understand.

Don't you find it chilling to hear, from a former leftist, the straight scoop on just who did what, when, and to whom in this sordid mess?

MF Global's Corzine Continues To Get A Pass From Liberal Media

2011-11-25T00:50:00.012-04:00

The tab for missing, improperly applied customer funds at MF Global has now risen to $1.2B, twice what was reported during the first week after the firm declared bankruptcy.

Yet, as Fox News' Charles Krauthammer observed, the liberal media continues to turn a blind eye to the potentially-criminal actions of former Goldman Sachs co-head, US Senator and New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine.

Even CFTC chairman Gary Gensler, who recused himself on the case, has stated publicly that it looks very likely that Corzine committed criminal acts.

Yet the liberal Democrat, former Senator and Governor, is largely ignored by the New York Times, CNN and MSNBC.

Had Corzine been a Republican, you can bet he'd have been roasted, pilloried and tried in the media constantly as a criminal 1%-er.

There's your media double standard. Only, because the liberals are silent on this one, it's harder to see it for what it is.

"No Off Ramps" for Congress, eh??!!

2011-11-23T00:28:00.017-04:00

You have to laugh.

After spending the year impeding any sort of adult activity in Congress to cut spending, Wonderboy was rejoicing over the failure of the so-called SuperCommittee to deliver $1.5T+ spending cut deal.

The other day, he solemnly intoned, like some harsh school teacher, that he would veto any attempt by Congress to set aside the sequesters on spending in the wake of the failure of the special 12-member panel.

'There will be no off ramp' the First Rookie exclaimed.

Really? Sounds kind of like a dictator, doesn't he?

In reality, all Congress needs to do is decide, by veto-proof majorities, to simply repeal those provisions of the debt limit increase bill which created the SuperCommittee.

And, by the way, even if Congress doesn't, it's unclear that Wonderboy will even have the job would allow him to block any changes. It's quite likely that by January of 2013, the year in which the sequesters occur, Republicans will hold the House, the Oval Office, and perhaps the Senate. Or have enough clout to co-opt sufficient Democratic Senators to simply tear up the debt-ceiling increase bill and start over with a much tougher-minded GOP President at the helm.

Wonderboy's blowing smoke up everyone's ass on this one. He doesn't have a leg to stand on, and he knows it. He's just trying to energize every liberal, youth and minority he thinks will vote for him next year.

Rick Perry's Part-Time Congress Concept

2011-11-22T08:59:00.000-04:00

I find Rick Perry's 'part-time Congress' idea to be a little too goofy to take seriously.

Texas isn't the United States, doesn't have a standing army, navy or air force, or embassies abroad. Back in the early 1800s, before the US was a world power, and communications were poor, a part-time legislature, both at the state and federal levels, was basically just reality.

But once America came into the 1900s, and the government, post-Civil War, had, for good or bad, Constitutionally or not, swollen in size and responsibility, it became unrealistic for Congress to only serve part of every year or term.

But one idea Perry has echoes my own- cut Congressional staffs. I don't know what details he proposed- probably none, knowing Perry.

If I'm not mistaken, I think it was even one of my 10 things I'd do to reform government.

But I believe I advocated only two aides per Representative or Senator. And no compensating budget to hire temps or consultants.

I want members of Congress themselves writing bills- not their hired, degree-heavy, detail-crazy, bribable staffs.

That's what I want...a lean Congress without staffs and coddlers, full of members who actually do all the work themselves.

Then, as the subheading of this blog suggests, we'll be a bit safer because those 435 elected members simply won't have the time and ability to write so much intrusive legislation that affects the rest of us and gives them such ongoing power.

Predicting From An Aberration

2011-11-21T09:43:00.001-04:00

The Lexington column in the November 12th issue of The Economist opined on a political analyst's theory that the 2008 US presidential election is a harbinger of an unstoppable Democratic-friendly demographic.

The crux of the piece is a contention by Ruy Teixiera that minorities including blacks and Latinos will comprise 54% of the American electorate by 2050 so, QED, they'll just elect Democrats as president til the cows come home.

Teixiera evidently provided many two-way analyses of the 2008 vote, cited in the Lexington column, to cement his conclusions. For good measure, a Pew Research Center report is cited supporting the prior contentions of Democratic sweeps of the newly-emerging majority of voters.

To provide a cautionary view, though, the piece cites Brookings Institute's Bill Galston, a former Clinton aide, believes that Obama's campaign team is making a serious mistake in relying on newly-Democratic states like Colorado, while running away from Ohio, Indiana and Michigan.

What I find almost laughable is that nowhere in the column does the editor's voice observe that the 2008 presidential election was singular for having an electable black candidate. And a voluble debater, at that. There's a half-hearted comment that 'Obamanania is over.'

But it's much, much worse than that.

Perhaps only an external-to-the-US editorial board or reporter could fail to understand how many whites voted for Wonderboy out of misplaced guilt over prior racial discrimination which occurred prior to their even being born. It's amazing that the popular vote spread was only about 6 percentage points.

Add to that one-off victory Obama's choice of failed New Deal-style liberal spending and business-bashing tactics and programs, and you have a sure-fire loss of votes in 2012.

The bottom line is that you'd have to be a complete idiot to base any long term voting pattern changes on the 2008 presidential election which featured the first viable black candidate from either party.

Regarding Newt Gingrich's Freddie Mac Consulting

2011-11-18T09:57:00.001-04:00

I caught Newt on Greta Van Sustern's Fox News program last night defending his consulting firm's $1.6MM from Freddie Mac. According to Gingrich, he didn't lobby members of Congress. Rather, he and his firm allegedly 'provided ideas and solutions' to problems posed by Freddie's management. Elsewhere, I believe in the Wall Street Journal, it was reported that one of those 'problems' was how to posture Fannie to conservatives in order to curry favor with them and avoid constraints, if not wholesale destruction.

My problem with Newt's consulting in this matter was that it's inconceivable that he would have needed all the billable hours required to amount to $1.6MM to tell Freddie's management they were pissing up a rope, and that there was no way of doing what they envisioned.

That conservatives would never see a benefit from a poorly-regulated, vote- and protection-buying bonus machine which crowded out saner, more explicitly risk-priced alternatives for securitizing US residential mortgages.

Sadly, in response to Greta, Newt began to place great emphasis on the pricing levels of his consultancy work, insisting they were below-average to average among other competitors.

But that's hardly the point. The point is a conservative of Gingrich's stripe should never have had that much to offer Freddie. And Newt should have had the good sense, as a former Speaker of the House, to understand how it would look, in retrospect, when someone discovered how much his firm earned from essentially consorting with the enemy.

This is more about a serious lapse in political judgement, which seems to be Newt's salient liability as a candidate.

Destroying Jobs One Energy Sector At A Time

2011-11-17T10:52:00.001-04:00

You have to wonder if the First Rookie really is schizophrenic. Or perhaps his campaign manager and staff simply have such a low opinion of the American electorate that they don't believe anyone has noticed how anti-growth, anti-jobs Wonderboy truly is.

The Keystone XL pipeline is the latest example. Using the excuse that the State Department thinks there are irregularities in some of the permit applications already accepted, and that the Nebraska sandhills and aquifer are at risk, although existing pipelines seem fine, is completely transparent.

The result? About 20,000 lost high-value, truly skilled construction jobs. Alienating Canada's PM Harper and handing the Chinese a nice new energy supply for nothing.

How can a president speak out of one side of his mouth about needing to reduce reliance on overseas oil supplies, then shut down our own offshore oil production and stop a heaven-sent pipeline from Canada?

Isn't that the sort of extreme liberal shift that created the Reagan Democrats of 1980, in the wake of the Democrats' shift leftward with McGovern's campaign and Carter's governance?

No matter what David Plouffle may believe, these moves, in addition to the 'lazy companies' remark, are going to be featured video clips in the GOP presidential campaign come late next year.

Lazy, Soft US Companies

2011-11-16T10:19:00.000-04:00

You can't make this stuff up.

Wonderboy has recently castigated US companies for being 'soft' and 'lazy' in competing for global trade. See the first few minutes of this video for the footage.

This from a guy with absolutely no business experience whatsoever.

Does he even realize how the EPA is purposely working to raise the price of electricity by forcing the shuttering of coal-fired power plants? That his administration has said 'no' to our own offshore drilling, while welcoming Brazil and other countries to do it, instead?

That his nearly trillion dollar stimulus crowded out private investment, while his crony capitalism of rescuing GM and giving a large chunk of it to his UAW backers prevented capital from flowing to new businesses?

His constant demonizing of banks, bankers and large corporations hardly seems of a piece with the remarks in the first minutes of that video, does it?

I don't think Wonderboy actually understands how schizophrenic and scatterbrained he appears with these various messages.

One thing is sure. He had no sense whatsoever that over-regulation and government intrusion into business retards investment, which leads to slower job growth.

The Supreme Court's Review of ObamaCare

2011-11-15T09:50:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's unsurprising announcement that the Supreme Court will review ObamaCare next June brought out a tidal wave of punditry.

I heard everything from predictions that the law, or at least the mandatory health insurance purchase component, will be rejected on a 5-4 vote, to Uwe Reinhardt, Princeton's health care so-called expert, claiming that it won't even matter what happens to the mandate. Reinhardt's comments were especially odd, since so much effort was expended by Democrats to use the mandate to fulfill Congressional attempts, amid a lot of outright falsehoods, to have the CBO score the bill, which will add 30 million people to the insured roles, as actually reducing US health care expenses.

On a general note, it feels as if one is living through a court decision like Dred Scott, Brown, Roe, or Marbury. One thing on which everyone can agree is that this is likely the acid, final test for our nation of the unfortunately vaguely-worded commerce clause.

It was disappointing to read Appellate Judge Silber's naive statement that the courts have to presume that Congress passes only Constitutional laws.

Is that not a basis for term limits on the federal bench, all by itself?

On Bret Baier's Fox News program, conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer described the four parts on which the Supreme Court will rule on the law:

- the Constitutionality of the mandate under the Commerce clause
- severability of the mandate from the remainder of the law
- standing of those bringing suit a priori to paying the tax for failing to purchase coverage
- Medicare funding related to the bill

Thus, several combinations of outcomes could occur from rulings on the various elements under consideration.

Justice Kagan is not recusing herself, although it is clear she was involved in support of the law as Solicitor General for the administration. However, one has to pragmatically ask if it would really do any good to have a 4-4 tie on these components. Or if the arm-wrestling over who would be a replacement ninth Justice would do the nation any good, either.

I'm a big proponent of things happening for a reason, and people receiving the justice they deserve. On that basis, if Kagan's participation results in the key rulings of the Commerce clause/mandate being upheld, and the it being severable anyway, so be it. Americans will reap what they sowed by electing the president and Congress that passed this monstrosity.

But, back to summer of 2012.

Some hold that if the mandate fails, and it isn't severable, so the law is unconstitutional, then Wonderboy can run away from the whole issue and claim no harm was done.

That's ridiculous on its face. As Krauthammer noted on Baier's program last night, Obama did nothing else of import for the past three years but pass ObamaCare and waste nearly a trillion dollars on useless 'stimulus' spending. Nobody's going to forget he spent so much time and capital on this law.

Will he, if so defeated by the court, then turn to run against the GOP House and the Supreme Court? Perhaps, but I don't think that will cut any ice with the independents who elected him.

The more interesting question is how a Supreme Court affirmation of the first two points will affect the November election. I suspect it will galvanize support for the COP presidential candidate and its Senate candidates, in hopes of overturning the whole mess.

The second-order issue then becomes how this plays out if Romney, the original architect of the ObamaCare approach in Massachusetts, is nominated by the GOP? Won't he appear hypocritical for railing against the Court and a plan he basically signed into law as a state governor?

However those mechanics play out, I think it's more instructive to see this as perhaps the final test of the Commerce clause as capable of completely gutting the Constitution which our Founders intended. If the Supreme Court greenlights this last firewall against Congress essentially being given the right to pass any law as Constitutional because the Commerce clause is omnipotent, we will wake up the next day to a different America. And the only way the prior one will be restored will be via a Constitutional amendment specifically altering the Commerce clause to remove its elasticity and overturn decades of bad law underpinning its misuse.

It could well be that we have to endure more liberal attacks on the Constitution, and perhaps another four or more years, in order to build sufficient support for a broadscale, Constitutionally-based roll back of what has been a 110 year battle to undermine the deliberately-minimal federal powers originally provided in the Constitution.

However, at this particular point in our nation's history, our economic position won't sustain the ramifications of a liberal Democratic victory on ObamaCare by the Supreme Court.

Why The SuperCommittee May Not Matter

2011-11-14T00:01:00.025-04:00

Despite the hand wringing of many media pundits and members of Congress concerning the fate of the work delegated to the 12-member Congressional supercommittee, there could be considerably less to the situation than they believe.

As we learned from FDR's NRA and much of Ronald Reagan's accomplishments, what one Congress does, a subsequent one may undo. Especially when one party controls both Houses and the White House.

When you read the presumed impacts of failure of the supercommittee to make the requisite cuts in the federal budget, they sound dire. Draconian cuts in defense and entitlements are mandated.

Yet, those cuts, while alleged to hit earlier than a successful supercommittee deal- which tells you something already about how effective such a plan would be- it still isn't until 2013.

Between then and now, of course, is next November's election. If the Republicans hold the House, regain control of the Senate, and, for good measure, the White House, all bets are off concerning the entire supercommittee deal. A new Congress and President could repeal the entire original deal which created the supercommittee and its attendant rules consequences as early as the afternoon of January 21st, 2013.

If such electoral results don't occur, the subsequent ongoing political gridlock will make the mandated cuts look minor by comparison with the fiscal problems which will likely be visited upon the US. And if the Democrats keep what they control now and somehow retake the House, well, the US will take its place behind Italy as the next large OECD economy to face a fiscal disaster.

Peggy Noonan Comes Around To My Way of Thinking

2011-11-12T14:58:00.000-04:00

Peggy Noonan's weekend Wall Street Journal editorial is largely about the Wednesday evening CNBC GOP candidates' event. I wrote my initial reactions about the event here.

Noonan begins with a humorous send up of manic, maniacal Jim Cramer's performance, as well as Maria Bartiromo's. On these we agree. She then meanders through the rest of her half-page piece to arrive at two succinct paragraphs,

"Republicans should sober up. They should be thinking not about what the Republican at the local GOP meeting is thinking, but what the independent across the street is thinking. He's catching the Cain story on TV and thinking: "This guy may have a problem. I want more evidence, but if it's true, then man, we don't need to go there again."

That independent is a pretty important guy. The GOP better start doing a better job of considering how he sees things. He doesn't live in Republo-world, but he's right across the street, and he votes. He's going to pick the next president."

Which is exactly what I've been contending for many months. Only I would go, and have gone, further. I think the GOP should be making sure, if among the publicly-available polls, none does this, of providing timely poll numbers, before each major primary event for the major candidates, for independents' preferences among the GOP candidates.

That's all that will matter, so there's really no point being concerned about who registered Republicans favor. With only about 25% of the voting public registered with a major party, that leaves the 50-60% of independents as far more important than the registered Republicans will be in electing a president next year.

I endorsed Cain prior the recent sexual harassment allegations. But the truth is, no matter who I'd like to see nominated by the GOP, I'll vote for the candidate on the ballot who has the highest poll numbers among independents, assuming I can learn who that is by the day of my state's primary election.

If by referring to "the GOP better start doing a better job of considering how he (independents) see things," Noonan means party officials, she's being opaque. She should explicitly counsel the RNC to publicize the GOP candidates' poll numbers among independents and make a better case to GOP voters about this important strategy for nominating a winning candidate next year.

If she means GOP voters, she's probably right. I don't know if enough Republicans realize what I have long held, and Noonan has now belatedly also come to see.

But it is critical. I tell every Republican I know about this approach to voting for a nominee. It's the only way the party will retake the White House next year.

Fighting Crony Capitalism In Residential Housing Brokerage

2011-11-11T11:54:00.000-04:00

Wednesday's Wall Street Journal carried an editorial excoriating Ron Phipps, president of the National Association of Realtors, for his misleading and largely false letter to the editor in the same edition of the paper.

Here's Phipps' letter in its entirety:

The Wall Street Journal would have people believe that hard-working, middle-class families are not affected by lower conforming loan limits, when nothing could be further from the truth ("More McMansion Subsidies," Review & Outlook, Nov. 1). The representatives in Congress who support higher loan limits understand that this is not a partisan issue, as you are trying to make it out to be.

The majority of markets impacted by the loan-limit decline are not high-cost areas. For example, more than 100 counties throughout the Midwest and more than 200 counties in the South have seen loan limits decline by more than $64,000.

And despite how your editorial tries to position the issue, the loan limits are not the same as reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Allowing the mortgage loan limits to expire in October was an arbitrary decision. Creating more market disruptions before reforming mortgage markets will only hurt our recovery.

The Senate measure to reinstate the limits is temporary—restoring the higher limits while the housing and mortgage markets stabilize. Recently, economist Mark Zandi said policy makers could shore up the housing market by "extending the current higher conforming loan limits that are set to decline in a few weeks." Borrowers, not taxpayers, will bear the entire cost of the higher loan-limits provision.

As people across the country are trying to gain a foothold in these trying times, we need to give them the resources to do so. The National Association of Realtors applauds the members of Congress who are standing up for America's families rather than turning their backs on them.

Ron Phipps
President
National Assn. of Realtors
Washington

Here's the related staff editorial referring to Phipps' letter:

To understand why 90% of U.S. mortgages are still underwritten by taxpayers, look no further than the nearby letter from Ron Phipps of the Realtors lobby. He makes clear that the Realtors, like the rest of the housing-subsidy crowd, are working hard to get Congress to reinstate a $729,750 loan-limit for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guarantees.

Notice how Mr. Phipps doesn't mention that dollar figure, perhaps because it makes a howler of his claim that the loan-limit reduction in October to $625,500 is somehow a blow to the "middle class." As House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus and several colleagues note in a November 7 letter to GOP appropriations conferees, "the lower loan limits only affect a very small slice of wealthier homeowners in high cost areas." Only 1.3% of all loans done by Fannie, Freddie and the Federal Housing Administration would be affected by the change.

Another lobby classic is Mr. Phipps's claim that letting the loan-limit fall in October was "arbitrary" and that the Realtors only want a "temporary" extension. But any temporary program has to end sometime, and Congress first raised the loan limit on a temporary basis in 2008. It has since extended the higher loan-limit three times, and if it were extended again the Realtors would no doubt plead for another "temporary" extension the next time it expires, ad infinitum.

Reducing the loan limit is a modest attempt to restore some private competition to the mortgage market, at least at the high end. Mr. Phipps says this issue shouldn't be "partisan," by which he seems to mean that both parties should remain wholly owned Realtor subsidiaries. For Republicans who run the House, this is not a test of their partisanship. It is a test of their alleged free-market, tea-party principles.

The Realtor letter is at least educational, a reminder that one reason the U.S. economy is so burdened with government is that many alleged capitalists want government to guarantee their business. That's known as crony capitalism.

I wrote in this recent post concerning a Paul Ryan speech vilifying this sort of crony capitalism. It's helpful to see it up close in Phipps' letter. This is what my Congressman, Leonard Lance, is supporting, as I explained in this recent post.

John Boehner's House GOP will continue to be vulnerable so long as morons like Lance consent to be used by crony capitalists like Phipps to mindlessly feather the nests of the nation's realtors while those house brokers lie about the real situation.

Mark Zandi is a liberal, neo-Keynesian, hacked-up economist who believes in more government in business and more government spending for everything. He's a Democratic patsy.

Realtors don't want housing prices to fall to market-clearing levels because they'll share the pain of falling prices, not to mention that their business is fighting off competition from cheaper, online-based sales channels for housing.

It's also very clear now, in the wake of a decade of disastrous federal housing policies, primarily driven by wrongheaded Congressional mandating of stupid GSE mortgage-backed bond guarantees for low-income housing, that housing isn't and shouldn't be a major drive of the US economy.

Housing isn't a good bet as an investment for most Americans. It retards labor mobility and exposes owners to bad local and state fiscal policies which result in higher property taxes and lower housing values.

It's time we put an end to this particular variant of crony capitalism. John Boehner and Paul Ryan would be well-advised to muzzle the GOP House members who are supporting Phipps and his association in trying to prolong higher lending limits for GSEs and, instead, speed exit of the GSEs from the market, then kill them.

Last Night's CNBC GOP Candidate Event

2011-11-10T17:56:00.000-04:00

Here's a link to the post I wrote on my companion business blog today about last night's latest faux-debate travesty.

Because the event was ostensibly concerning economics, I thought it appropriate to post there, and cross-post here.

Dorothy Rabinowitz Makes The Case For Newt Gingrich's Nomination

2011-11-10T00:17:00.002-04:00

Some weeks ago, I wrote a post endorsing Herman Cain for the GOP presidential nomination. It was triggered by the Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger's editorial in support of Cain.

The past two weeks have seen Cain engulfed in a flurry of sexual harassment charges, mostly by anonymous women. Frankly, the lateness of the charges- some 14 years or so after the alleged fact- and the anonymity of several of the women, make them less credible, in my opinion. And most people with business experience understand that there is a sort of cottage industry in people getting small- to medium-sized settlements for making unsubstantiated allegations go away, rather than cost an organization much more in legal fees.

If Cain becomes severely wounded by these allegations, e.g., even one becomes a confirmed instance, in direct contradiction to Cain's assertions last night, he's finished.

Who would I then like to see as the GOP nominee?

In prior posts, I have written of how I believe Newt Gingrich is the most intelligent GOP candidate, probably the most appropriately experienced, and, to paraphrase a Fox News Contributor, in a debate he'd 'make Obama wish he'd never left Chicago.'

But conservative friends of my age share my concerns over Newt's ego, ethical issues, and multiple marriages, with infidelities apparently leading from one to the next. Character does matter, and Newt's continues to be in question.

Never the less, here's Wall Street Journal columnist and editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz discussing why she believes Newt may yet be the GOP nominee for 2012.

If Newt's numbers among independents were in the same range as Romney's, then I'd clearly support Gingrich.

Regarding Public School Teachers' Compensation

2011-11-09T00:15:00.052-04:00

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal published this an important editorial entitled Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid. Written by Andrew G. Biggs, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Jason Richwine, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. It is drawn from a new paper, "Assessing the Compensation of Public School Teachers" (aei.org/paper/100259).

The Journal piece carried the rather shocking subheadline,
"Our research suggests that on average—counting salaries, benefits and job security—teachers receive about 52% more than they could in private business."

Because I feel so strongly about this issue and this article, I'm going to simply repost it in its entirety.

Public School Teachers Aren't Underpaid
A common story line in American education policy is that public school teachers are underpaid—"desperately underpaid," according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a recent speech. As former first lady Laura Bush put it: "Salaries are too low. We all know that. We need to figure out a way to pay teachers more."

Good teachers are crucial to a strong economy and a healthy civil society, and they should be paid at a level commensurate with their skills. But the evidence shows that public school teachers' total compensation amounts to roughly $1.50 for every $1 that their skills could garner in a private sector job.

How could that be? First, consider salaries. Public school teachers do receive salaries 19.3% lower than similarly-educated private workers, according to our analysis of Census Bureau data. However, a majority of public school teachers were education majors in college, and more than two in three received their highest degree (typically a master's) in an education-related field. A salary comparison that controls only for years spent in school makes no distinction between degrees in education and those in biology, mathematics, history or other demanding fields.

Education is widely regarded by researchers and college students alike as one of the easiest fields of study, and one that features substantially higher average grades than most other college majors. On objective tests of cognitive ability such as the SAT, ACT, GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and Armed Forces Qualification Test, teachers score only around the 40th percentile of college graduates. If we compare teachers and non-teachers with similar AFQT scores, the teacher salary penalty disappears.

While salaries are about even, fringe benefits push teacher compensation well ahead of comparable employees in the private economy. The trouble is that many of these benefits are hidden, meaning that lawmakers, taxpayers and even teachers themselves are sometimes unaware of them.

Data on employee benefits from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), for example, do not include retiree health coverage, which for teachers is worth about an additional 10% of their salaries. Because of differing accounting rules between the public and private sectors, BLS data also make teachers' defined-benefit pensions appear only slightly more generous than the typical 401(k) plan found in the private sector.

In reality, a teacher who retired after 30 years of service with an annual salary of $40,000 might receive guaranteed annual pension benefits of about $20,330. Under a typical private 401(k) plan, a guaranteed annual benefit might be only around $4,450 (assuming the money is invested in U.S. Treasuries and the employee buys an annuity).

BLS data on paid leave for teachers count vacation days only during the school year, omitting summer and long holiday breaks. A valid pay comparison should include this extra time off, in which teachers can enjoy longer vacations or earn additional income.

Properly counted, a typical public school teacher with a salary of $51,000 would receive another $51,480 in present or future fringe benefits. A worker in private business with the same salary would receive around $22,185 in fringe benefits.

Finally, despite recent layoffs, teachers still have greater job security than workers in private businesses. While employment in education declined by 2.9% between September 2008 and July 2011, according to BLS data, overall private-sector employment declined by 4.4%. Moreover, from 2005 through 2010 the unemployment rate for public school teachers averaged 2.1%, versus 4.1% for private school teachers and 3.8% for occupations that some consider comparable, such as computer programmers and insurance underwriters.

Job security protects against the loss of compensation suffered by the unemployed, and it also protects a position in which total wages and benefits are on average above market levels. This job security is surely valuable.

Consider that one-fifth of the highest-performing public school teachers in Washington, D.C., recently declined to give up even part of their job security in exchange for base salary increases of up to $20,000. According to our model—which factors in the probability of becoming unemployed, the average duration of unemployment, the level of unemployment insurance benefits, and the risk aversion of public employees—job security is worth about an estimated extra 9% of compensation.

One important caveat: Our research is in terms of averages. The best public school teachers—especially those teaching difficult subjects such as math and science—may well be underpaid compared to counterparts in the private sector.

Nevertheless, most public school teachers would not earn more in private employment. According to our analysis of the Census Bureau's Survey of Income and Program Participation, the average person who moves into teaching receives a pay increase of almost 9%, while the average teacher who leaves for the private economy must take a pay cut of over 3%.

This is the opposite of what we would expect if teachers were underpaid. It also helps explain why more people seek teaching jobs—as measured through the number of teaching graduates and applications for teaching positions—than can possibly find them.

In short, combining salaries, fringe benefits and job security, we have calculated that public school teachers receive around 52% more in average compensation than they could earn in the private sector.

The compensation premium is especially relevant today, as states and localities struggle with budget deficits. Restraining the growth of teacher compensation—in particular, pension and retiree health benefits that outstrip what comparable private-sector workers receive—could help balance budgets and perhaps restore school resources lost to rising labor costs. Broader pay reform should give school administrators greater flexibility to reward the best or most-needed teachers with high salaries and benefits, while encouraging the least effective ones to improve or to leave the profession.

Effective reform, however, requires knowing all the facts about teacher pay. Policy makers and the public should not accept at face value that the typical teacher earns far less than he or she would in the private sector. The evidence points to a very different conclusion. (End of editorial)

I sent this editorial via the Journal's email link to a public school teacher friend. She replied that she would now feel better knowing she was being paid above-average compensation for being an above-average teacher. I replied by quoting the passage below and lamenting that she obviously doesn't "get it,"

"However, a majority of public school teachers were education majors in college, and more than two in three received their highest degree (typically a master's) in an education-related field. A salary comparison that controls only for years spent in school makes no distinction between degrees in education and those in biology, mathematics, history or other demanding fields.

Education is widely regarded by researchers and college students alike as one of the easiest fields of study, and one that features substantially higher average grades than most other college majors. On objective tests of cognitive ability such as the SAT, ACT, GRE (Graduate Record Examination) and Armed Forces Qualification Test, teachers score only around the 40th percentile of college graduates. If we compare teachers and non-teachers with similar AFQT scores, the teacher salary penalty disappears."

I am sure my readers do get the point. As it happens, my friend is a walking textbook case of the editorial's point. She has only education-related degrees. Science and math are mysteries to her. If you told her she received her degrees in "one of the easiest fields of study," she'd lash out angrily. But, really, is anyone going to believe that teaching reading requires anything remotely like the education it takes to teach mathematics or science?

By the way, in the school which my daughters attended, it was predominantly math and science teachers who left, frequently in mid-year, either for better teaching positions or more money in private industry. Never, to my knowledge, reading teachers or most run-of-the-mill primary or middle school teachers.

This is the dirty secret I think most thinking citizens understand. The teachers they know are rarely among the most intelligent or best-educated in their social circle. But they wear this 'I'm teaching your kids so back off, buddy' Teflon mantle. As if merely doing this thankless task entitles them to compensation far above parity for their actual skills or educational accomplishments.

The friend to whom I sent this article frequently contends that she is underpaid as a teacher, and should be making much more, because she would have in the private sector. The research cited, of course, shows her belief to be false.

But it's truly shocking to learn that, on average, her kind are paid more than 50% above the compensation they'd receive in the private sector.

Faux Populism from Wonderboy

2011-11-08T00:11:00.006-04:00

George Melloan, a former Wall Street Journal senior staffer, wrote a good editorial in the paper's Friday edition drawing attention to Wonderboy's attempt to run on a populist platform, while economically damaging the very base to whom he is trying to appeal with that approach.

Melloan ticks off a litany of bad economic data, including declining median personal income, exploding federal debt and money supply, and rising food commodity prices.

The First Rookie's rhetoric may make some liberal lower income voters feel better temporarily. But when they return home to buy more expensive food with fewer real income dollars, the truth will out.

Liberal Democrats, Occupy Wall Street, & The Oakland Riots

2011-11-07T10:00:00.000-04:00

Frisco Nan praises Occupy movements. Especially their 'spontaneity.'

Wonderboy endorses Occupy movements, rather liberally interpreting their motivations and inserting his own agenda. Somehow, I don't think the movement's members are as deeply contemplative as is Wonderboy, spinning this surreal narrative concerning the protestors' thinking.

Then we have the recent Occupy Oakland riots. Despite Democrats' attempts to equate OWS with the Tea Party movement, the latter never engaged in, nor spawned riots in its wake. Here we see Oakland, ironically in Frisco Nan's backyard, exploding in violence. The Occupy Oaklanders claim it wasn't them, but this is the point. These movements have been infiltrated and hijacked by others with a much more violent, anti-establishment message and motivations.

The Tea Party sought to work within the existing governmental frameworks, and helped elect one of the largest classes of new House members. OWS, like its 1960s student protester ancestral movements, seeks to abrogate existing governmental structures and simply demand and take what they want.

I just searched YouTube this morning for these clips. Let's hope dozens of GOP candidates will do a more thorough job pinning the OWS mayhem to Democratic opponents who have been foolish enough to ally themselves with the movement.

Paul Ryan On Crony Capitalism

2011-11-04T11:39:00.000-04:00

At the end of a predictably dull and meandering column in last weekend's edition of the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan launched into an attack on crony capitalism.

She began by fingering Franklin Raines and James Johnson for having taken advantage of Fannie's and Freddie's GSE status to reap outsized bonuses while wrecking the companies and leaving them to be seized by the government at a cost to taxpayers of some $140B.

Next, Noonan mentions Paul Ryan as having the good sense to identify, in a speech at the Heritage Foundation, such crony capitalism as what occurred at the GSEs.

He railed against 'corporate welfare,' which is an accurate charge.

Perhaps his most concise line, as recounted by Noonan, was this one,

"The 'true sources of inequity in this country are the corporate welfare that enriches the powerful, and empty promises that betray the powerless. The real class warfare that threatens us is 'a class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society.' "

Noonan concluded her piece opining,

"If more Republicans thought- and spoke- like this, the party would flourish. People would be less fearful for the future. And Mr. Obama wouldn't be seeing his numbers go up."

She's right. Thus my anger at recent news concerning my own Congressman, Leonard Lance's involvement in another bid to give more power to Fannie.

Ryan's remarks explain why those who consider themselves of common interest with the Tea Party, like me, grow disgusted with even elected Republicans. In my state, the GOP is far more liberal than it is further west. My own Representative clearly embodies that against which Paul Ryan rails.

I wonder if Ryan even acknowledges Lance and, if so, what he thinks of my Congressman.

Ryan's clear speaking and thinking suggest he could, if he has the stomach for it, eventually occupy the Oval Office. He has the sensibilities and intellect to get there. But the rest of what is required to be elected, including the sort of character assassination being visited upon Herman Cain this week by anonymous parties, could be too much for the Wisconsin Representative.

Big Brother Lance Is Watching

2011-11-03T09:43:00.000-04:00

Sitemeter is wonderful. It gives so much information about my readers.

For example, as expected, my post yesterday concerning my hacked-up pol of a Representative, Leonard Lance, R-NJ, drew the expected visits from the US House's Information Systems. I have an IP address, but it's the same one for four different visits on my post about Lance, from computers using four different operating systems.

Two visits were touch n' go's, but the last two were for over two minutes, and one viewed two pages. I'm guessing perhaps yesterday's post, and the prior one about Lance.

Just so you know, though, a little political blog like mine publishes one post critical of a sitting US Representative and- WHAM!- the House or Senate webcrawlers are all over it.

In a way, it's a good thing. Maybe one of Lance's staffers who is smarter than he is- not too hard to imagine- will explain to the idiot that he shouldn't be favoring his crony capitalist housing campaign contributors when he will be exposed for it.

Regardless of what you think of him, Jefferson was right. Newspapers and their modern technological descendants shine bright lights on suspect, stupid behavior of our elected representatives.

In this case, perhaps Lance, dim-witted as he is, will realize his mistake and retract his signature on and support of this dumb idea of further empowering the two money-losing GSEs.

Why I Despise My Congressman- Leonard Lance

2011-11-02T12:12:00.000-04:00

I don't respect my Congressman. Don't like him, either. He's one of those hacked-up former state pols who slithered into a largely red district, but was never ready for prime time on the Hill.

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal named him- Leonard Lance, R-NJ, as a signatory to a letter from Bill Posey, R-FL, asking to raise Fannie's and Freddie's maximum loan limits again.

This is the sort of boneheaded crony capitalism about which Paul Ryan spoke in a speech referenced in Peggy Noonan's weekend column in the Journal. About which more later this week.

I wish I could have voted for someone more conservative and less, well, hacked-up than Lance in 2010. He's an embarrassment to the GOP. His 'finest' moment had to be when he had question time in front of Ben Bernanke, and all he could manage was to stumble through the script written by his aides, which contained no questions, but, rather, video/sound bites for Lance's next campaign.

Disgusting.

So is Lance's empty-headed agreement to give two GSEs which have cost taxpayers $142B in losses more lending authority. I liked the Journal's comparison of Posey's claim that the amendment won't cost taxpayers "one dime," so reminiscent of Bubba Clinton's promise, in 1995, that doing the same back then wouldn't "cost the taxpayers on extra cent?"

Yeah. Right.

Political Bad Lip Reading

2011-10-31T22:18:00.000-04:00

Due to connectivity issues arising from the recent October snowstorm, I haven't really composed deep thoughts on the past few days' political goings on.

So I'm presenting two politically-oriented Bad Lip Reading clips.

Obviously, I find this first one more humorous. It's Wonderboy.

The second one is of Rick Perry. Not as funny, in my opinion.

OWS's Embarrassing $500,000 Problem

2011-10-28T00:13:00.017-04:00

I read with amusement that the OccupyWallStreet group has now received some $500K of cash donations, and must begin to, well, organize in order to use it.

A Wall Street Journal piece revealed that the group currently is operating under another non-profit's tax ID and umbrella, thus making that group, the name of which escapes me, technically capable of vetting all spending decisions.

The article explained that the OWS protesters don't want to divulge their names, which some would have been were they have filed as a legal non-profit with the IRS.

Truly, this is becoming more and more a Tom Wolfe story. The rich ironies of a bunch of kids from well-off families pretending to behave like the homeless, eschewing all forms of conventional power and authority, find themselves with half a million dollars and no way to spend it without adopting- horrors!- conventional power structures such as governing committees, officers, and such.

How long before we learn of some financial malfeasance? Some embezzlement, drug dealing or other embarrassing use of the money by one of the more-equal-than-others OWS member?

As it is, local homeless people are showing up at OWS to feed themselves from the apparently bounteous spreads. Other stories report theft of computers and problems maintaining security from night time burglary.

The decision-making process is allegedly a daily all-members meeting which grinds slowly and exhibits the incredible inefficiency and cumbersomeness of non-representative attempts at democracy.

With cold weather nearly here, disease and infections beginning to appear among OWSers, how long before New York City shows some spine and finally clears out the squatters? Perhaps quite soon. After all, Oakland showed itself capable of that earlier this week. And then the protesters revealed their true, latent violent tendencies.

Rick Perry's Tax Plan & Tax Reform Scoring

2011-10-27T00:16:00.027-04:00

GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry unveiled his tax reform plan earlier this week to mixed reviews.

Conservatives and Republicans appreciate that, regardless of how Perry's plan differs from Herman Cain's, two candidates are now "all in" on promising to send rather substantial tax code reform plans to Congress, should they defeat Wonderboy next November.

Perry's plan, unsurprisingly, is far more timid than Cain's. First, Perry would allow filers to choose which of two approaches- his new postcard-style tax form, or the current 1040, to use. This will not reduce IRS staff and taxpayer effort but, rather, increase it. Much like filing joint or separate, giving taxpayers a choice typically means they must calculate their tax liabilities under both methods. I don't know whether Perry's plan allows the choice each year, or whether, once in the new system, they can't return- pun intended- to the old approach.

Beyond that, the plan lowers tax rates, removes some preference items, but leaves others intact.

It's more complicated than Cain's plan, but at least it's a nod in the direction of doing something more than tinker with only rates.

Of course pundits immediately jumped all over Perry for the 'cost' of the plan. That is, observers are quick to cite one or another of several little-known, presumably-independent think tanks which have ostensibly estimated how much tax revenue the proposal will generate, versus existing revenue collections.

There's a problem with that, however. And a recent Wall Street Journal editorial by Martin Feldstein highlighted it. Depending upon the baseline data used, and assumptions generated from them, new tax rate plans have significantly different impacts on revenue collection.

Feldstein noted how his own analysis of post-1986 tax reform returns demonstrated real behavior change by taxpayers. And, thus how vital it is that dynamic scoring be used for analyzing new tax reform plans. Such scoring, of course, is subject to assumptions regarding how taxpayer behavior will change in response to rate and other changes, i.e., the coefficients which govern how much more money may be earned, and taxed, when rates decline, and vice-versa.

Do any of my readers know which think tanks scored Cain's or Perry's plan? I don't as I sit writing this post. Even if I did, I can't say I'm familiar with the specific methods any of them employ. Do they use dynamic scoring?

Since the CBO, unbelievably, still won't use dynamic scoring, it's unlikely any of the think tanks do, either.

Which is why I basically ignore their claims, and the claims of the candidates based upon the think tank evaluations. Unless, of course, the candidate or the think tank come forward with specific details on the scoring of the tax reform plan.

But here's another angle on these GOP tax reform plans.

Why don't the candidates emphasize that their reforms are what they would propose, but they understand that Congress must actually pass the final legislation. Therefore, they expect Congress to change their plan, and, thus, the scoring will change, too. So there's really little point in getting all excited about the revenue-neutrality scoring of any reform plan that is destined to be changed anyway.

For example, Cain's 9-9-9 plan would almost certainly have an income-level exemption for its sales tax. Who knows what would be done to Perry's more complicated plan?

So why don't these candidates wise up and just acknowledge that their proposals indicate their intentions, but they don't honestly expect the plans to pass Congress unchanged.

That's Incredible! Harry Reid's Attempt To Defend Wonderboy's Jobs Act

2011-10-26T00:12:00.002-04:00

"It's very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it's the public-sector jobs where we've lost huge numbers, and that's what this legislation is all about."

Just incredible.That's Harry Reid's defense of Wonderboy's public sector union-hiring proposals, according to a recent Wall Street Journal staff editorial.

The piece noted that 111.8MM Americans were employed in the private sector at the end of 2008. As of last month, the number was 109.3MM, a loss of roughly 2.5MM private-sector jobs, and a 2% decline. At the federal level, government employed 1.9MM FTE in late 2008, which increased to 2.1MM at the end of last year, for a 11% gain.

State and local government employment numbers in the editorial don't go back to 2008. Instead, the Journal reports that local governments cut just 210,000 by last month out of 14.28MM a year earlier. For state governments, the numbers were 49,000 and 5.14MM. That's only a quarter of a million state and local government employees cut out of some 19MM, or just a 1.3% decline. Even so, these numbers are polluted by the first stimulus having paid for some of those workers in prior years. That also would make comparisons from the end of 2008 problematic.

What's clear, however, is that the private sector has taken the most pain in terms of job losses.

You would like to think the Senate Majority Leader would at least be able to understand that fact.

On Challenging RomneyCare

2011-10-25T12:58:00.000-04:00

Last Thursday, the Wall Street Journal's lead staff editorial discussed the need for Mitt Romney to reconcile various statements and actions of his regarding Massachusetts' RomneyCare, ObamaCare, and what he would do if elected president.

Specifically, the editorial observed,

"Mr. Romney has every right to cling to theories that were flawed in conception and have proven false in practice, though the rest of the GOP field has the responsibility to challenge his canned answers. The mental contortions that his health-care record requires need to be dissected- the way Mr. Obama will do if Mr. Romney is the nominee- to give GOP voters a chance to weigh the political liabilities that his candidacy might pose in 2012.

Or, if he is the nominee and if he is elected, to drive him to reject the Romney-Care model in favor of patient-centered, market-driven health-care reform. Mr. Romney laid out such a plan in Ann Arbor in May, even as he now evinces an unaffordable faith that government must pay to reduce the uninsured rate."

A few lines on, the piece waggishly notes that Romney supports a market-based health-care system "everywhere except Massachusetts."

All joking or sarcasm aside, I'm pleased that a major media outlet has finally, explicitly noted Romney's tortured, conflicted positions on this topic over the past decade and calls for him to make a clarifying explanation of his current beliefs. As well as the reasons why he's changed his mind, if so, or, if not, why not.

But I disagree with the Journal editorial staff that other GOP candidates should be challenging "his canned answers."

Isn't that what the media are for? To hold candidates accountable for their positions- past or, if now different, present?

I'd prefer other GOP candidates to stick to their own campaigns and positions. If they want to highlight their differences with Romney's ideas- if they can figure out what those are- and why theirs are better, fine.

But it seems a breach of Reagan's 11th Commandment for other candidates to just open fire on Mitt. This is precisely the sort of thing about which Brett Baier should be grilling Mitt in his "Center Seat" segment.

If the major media, either in interviews, so-called debates or other formats, can't do this, for what are they any good in this campaign season?

Peggy Noonan Commenting On GOP Presidential Events

2011-10-24T09:46:00.000-04:00

I was a bit horrified to read Peggy Noonan's weekend Wall Street Journal piece extolling the combative faux-debates in which GOP presidential candidates have been attacking each other.

Noonan seems oblivious to the damage these sessions do to all the candidates, and the ammunition they provide to Wonderboy's campaign staffers.

As I noted in my prior post, the RNC should have gotten out in front of this disturbing and destructive trend back in the spring of this year. As so-called debates, which really are not any such thing, have become the new political reality television entertainment, and only the GOP is playing, the potential for lasting damage to the party's eventual nominee is huge.

Let's be clear- what's really important is for the GOP nominee to win independent and, in the case of Herman Cain, black votes. To dwell on the attacks of 8 or 9 candidates, representing less than 10 votes, on each other, is to miss the point. The RNC should be soliciting networks to provide formats in which independent and registered Republicans can directly question the candidates. Those millions of votes are what count- not the opinions of other candidates.

Focusing on having candidates tear each other apart is a thinly-veiled insult to voters' intelligence, because it suggests that those voters don't know what is important to themselves, nor how to examine each candidate's positions.

I don't know what Noonan was thinking when she wrote that post. Her old boss, Ronald Reagan, would, it seems, have not approved.

Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment & The CNN Las Vegas GOP Event

2011-10-21T09:56:00.000-04:00

I haven't written anything regarding the Communist News Network's recent Las Vegas "event" for GOP presidential candidates for several reasons.

First, I didn't watch it. I have zero respect for Anderson Cooper and couldn't conceive of him being anything but combative to a group of candidates which Cooper's network so loathes.

Second, I figured, as later video clips proved, that the event- it wasn't a debate, so no use pretending on that score- was constructed by CNN to damage the entire GOP field and help Wonderboy. So there would be no value for me in seeing yet another staged screaming match between the candidates.

Third, as I wrote in this post, I don't care what the candidates say about each other- only what independent voters think about them,

"I think what would be more meaningful to me would be something like the following. A network provides a weekly two-hour slot for its 'candidate of the week.' One of the GOP presidential hopefuls sits on a set with one or two moderators and answers questions from online feeds and a live audience. Moderators provide follow-up questions and/or fill in background on the candidate's prior remarks on the topic. Or contrast their stance with other candidates, etc.

And, for good measure, the original audience/online questioner gets a few minutes of give-and-take with the candidate, so if the latter evades the question, the questioner can complain about that and note it for everyone else.

I really don't care so much what Mitt thinks about Rick. Or what Newt thinks about anyone. Or what Rick (Santorum) does to try to look relevant.

In the end, I care more about how these people interact with prospective voters than how they fence with each other. I don't expect them to agree with each other, so what's the surprise in these bear-baiting formats?"

I spoke with a liberal friend/squash partner earlier this week about the now-famous video clip from the Las Vegas event where Perry and Romney engaged over immigration and the former's bad debate performances.

I contended that the entire event, but especially Cooper deliberately letting the two look petty by shouting over each other, was calculated to hurt the entire field and help the president. My friend responded that Cooper isn't that smart. I said it wasn't Cooper, but the guys talking into his earpiece, directing him to let the catfighting continue.

Then Cooper smirked and said something smarmy, to the effect,

'I didn't think Republicans behaved like that.'

Which brought me to this thought.

Why aren't the top 8 candidates coordinating how they will control so-called debates at which they appear? Didn't anyone's communications directors or campaign managers realize that attending a CNN event was to invite disaster and humiliation?

Perhaps the RNC should get between the candidates and the networks, brokering formats so that the focus is on moderator or audience questions, not candidate-to-candidate criticism. Honestly, voters are smart enough to figure out what they want to know from each candidate. They don't need other candidates to help them on that score.

Networks want to create newsworthy events, which typically means force in-fighting and embarrassing gaffes. The RNC and the candidates should all want to provide voters with opportunities to learn more about each candidate's positions, not how the candidates feel about other candidates' positions.

I would really love to see the RNC chair now step forward and take control of future candidate events, mislabeled as 'debates,' and enforce formats that minimize violations of Reagan's 11th commandment, i.e., Thou shalt not criticize a fellow Republican.

What's Sauce for the Goose- The Case of Harold Koh

2011-10-21T00:13:00.001-04:00

Bill McGurn wrote a revealing editorial in Tuesday's edition of the Wall Street Journal concerning Harold Koh, the Secretary of State's legal advisor.

Koh is being justly pilloried for inconsistent, yes, even hypocritical behavior with regard to how the US fights terrorism.

In brief, Koh, a former Yale law school dean, one of whose students was John Yoo, went to great lengths to persecute and prosecute his former student when Yoo was George Bush's Justice Department Counsel. Yoo defended waterboarding. For that, he has been pursued by the left ever since the mid-years of Bush's administration. Koh-led efforts attempted to disbar Yoo.

Now Koh is justifying the use of Predator drones to kill terrorism targets from a distance, often also killing innocent, unknown bystanders.

All this, apparently, to avoide capturing and, then, having to deal with the discomfort of how to handle such prisoners.

McGurn observes that Koh called Yoo's memos defending enhanced interrogation techniques "torture memos," and, thus, refers to Koh's "execution speech," wherein he defended those drone kills of innocents.

As with so much of Wonderboy's foreign and anti-terrorism policy, this administration refuses to acknowledge how it has, in fact, backed away from its prior, incendiary rhetoric, often continuing and even expanding George Bush's original policies.

McGurn suggests that Koh should, in good conscience, either publicly apologize to Yoo for his past persecution of the latter, or maintain his honor and resign over the principles involved in the Predator strikes.

Instead, Koh does neither. So much for the most ethical administration ever and the continued misbehavior of its members.

OccupyWallStreet (OWS) Bigotry On Video

2011-10-20T00:14:00.024-04:00

Here are two unvarnished videos presenting OWS anti-Semitism. In the first, now probably gone viral, a black LA teacher spouts anti-Semitism.

Next is this anti-Semite at OWS.

Finally, Bernie Goldberg and Bill O'Reilly discuss OWS bigotry earlier this week on O'Reilly's The Factor Fox News program. The woman in the first clip has been fired from her public school teaching job. The two debate the fairness of this. It's a situation of no small import. Should the woman's right to speak out in public, though hate- and bigotted speech, be protected? Or does the fact that she was a publicly-funded teacher curtail that right?

Wonderboy Tries To Rewrite History On His New Stimulus a/k/a "Jobs" Bill

2011-10-19T00:41:00.022-04:00

'Go big, Go bold'

Those were the words Wonderboy used last week in describing his jobs plan as he began his 2012 campaign tour.

Well, trying that in 2009 got him a GOP-controlled House and slimmer Democratic majority in the Senate last November.

Far from 'running the GOP out of town' as he threatened voters will do for not passing Wonderboy's jobs bill, voters are likely to run them out for passing it.

This is just the latest attempt by Obama to try to confuse the electorate and rewrite history. In fact, he even managed to use the Trumanesque "do nothing" Congress line, conveniently omitting that the GOP House has passed bills which are stacked up in Harry Reid's Senate hopper, because the Senate Majority Leader is afraid to bring them to the floor for a vote.

Including, for weeks, the president's cherished jobs bill.

Bills like healthcare repeal, a budget, and spending cuts.
The truth is, voters have seen the trillion dollars wasted on the first stimulus, so they don't want the president and Congress to 'go big' or 'go bold.'

Republicans, both in Congress and those running for the presidential nomination, have sensibly offered as their job-creating actions: freeze/reverse excessive energy-, financial service sector- and healthcare-related regulation; cut spending by tens of billions in each of the next several years; reform the tax code to end preferences and lower rates; end the administration's war on business.

In response, only yesterday on his Virginia bus tour, Wonderboy characterized GOP economic plans as simply allowing companies to pollute and repealing Dodd-Frank, alleging, incorrectly, that "Wall Street" was the source of the 2008 financial crisis. His own plan was described as 'putting teachers back in classrooms.'

More pork-barrel, union-jobs spending isn't going to provide any lasting economic stimulus. And, frankly, neither will a focus just on "jobs." By the way, if teachers were hired by companies that ran outsourced public education, do you think the First Rookie would be so eager to re-employ them?

And why do we want federal funding for local teachers? States and municipalities often must balance budgets. Thus, they make informed tradeoffs regarding local government services affordability. And many states have seen teacher and associated employment growth outpace that of students for years. To simply sidestep sensible local spending constraints by borrowing the money for excess public sector unionized teachers from China, at the federal level, is a bad idea.

What's needed is economic growth, which is brought about by business expansion. Which can, and probably will, entail job creation.

But placing employment growth before economic growth misses the point and reverses cause and effect.

Wonderboy also has become more openly dictatorial, proclaiming in a recent campaign speech,

'If Congress won't pass my jobs bill, we can't wait. We'll find other ways to do it'

Charming.

The BofA Witch Hunt

2011-10-18T00:32:00.011-04:00

How confusing.

First Congress passes Dodd Frank. A law which imposes crushing and expensive regulatory burdens on consumer banking. And generally dissuades banks from doing as much consumer banking activity as they did prior to the law. A normal economic reaction when a producer experiences rises in costs of delivering a service- less is delivered.

So BofA responds by cutting 30,000 net employees and shifting focus from retail to institutional banking, because new legislation has made the former less profitable.

To make up revenues lost by new credit and debit card rules, BofA recently announced- explicitly and transparently- a new $5 fee in any month that a customer uses their debit card.

Wonderboy responded, when asked about the new fee, by attacking BofA for hidden fees.

But it's not hidden. It's a natural and expected response to Dodd Frank, and totally transparent. It's meant to drive customers back to using credit cards for small and mid-sized transactions, which will recoup some of the revenue for BofA, at no cost to customers who would pay the balance in the current period anyway.

Yet now people are protesting this explicit fee, which they have a choice not to incur. And Wonderboy blasts BofA for a fee that meets his own requirements.

A Benefit of Herman Cain's Federal Sales Tax When Collected Via Tax Returns

2011-10-17T12:07:00.000-04:00

I don't know if Cain calls for his 9% sales tax to be collected by retailers or not.

But making it payable via annual federal tax return filing would allow it to be simply implemented.

From reported income, subtract money that increased savings or other investment accounts. Attach usual bank and brokerage, fund management documents, but now record net increases in balances. Those count as savings.

Allow spending on education- tuition, books, fees, etc.- and medical care to be subtracted and exempted as investment, too. In either personal productivity or health.

What's left is spending. Which has a 9% flat levy assessed as tax.

However, I'm not clear as to why Cain, and others, contend that his federal sales tax will somehow access the underground, cash-only tax-evading economy in America.

If one accepts cash and never deposits it in any bank or fund accounts, then it continues, for tax purposes, to not exist. If undocumented cash is deposited in a bank account, then, all other things equal, it will actually shrink the apparent spending level by raising savings without a corresponding rise in income.

It would seem fairly intrusive, though, to have the IRS audit returns in which undocumented deposits are material. For the average American not engaged in tax evasion, deposits are typically traceable to documented income, account transfers, or cash income involving a 1099 form. But for the IRS to detect large scale discrepancies would be to sanction widespread examination of personal bank accounts. Not something I would guess most Americans would desire, simply for reasons of privacy.

Cain's 9-9-9 Plan Gains Support from Ryan & Laffer

2011-10-15T13:23:00.000-04:00

Despite carping from Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, neither of whom I think actually understand Herman Cain's tax code overhaul, both House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan and economist Art Laffer, Reagan's former economic advisor, came out publicly to endorse Cain's 9-9-9 plan.

Ryan, in footage I saw on cable news last week, publicly announced his satisfaction with Cain's tax plan. Coming from Ryan, that's high praise indeed.

Art Laffer endorsed Cain's plan on Brett Baier's Fox News Special Report- see video below. Laffer also echoes my thoughts on why it's useless to attack the plan's sales tax component as being susceptible to being hiked by future Congresses. In short, it's a useless straw man argument.

New Calculations Involving Herman Cain's Presidential Bid

2011-10-14T00:02:00.021-04:00

As I write this early on Thursday afternoon, 13 October, Herman Cain made the front page of the Wall Street Journal for moving out in front of Mitt Romney by a few percentage points in a recent WSJ/NBC News poll of primary voters.

I've written in prior posts that it makes sense to me that GOP voters should nominate the candidate who would draw the most independent voters. But that was before Herman Cain became a realistic choice to win the nomination.

Now, that arithmetic has to be modified.

This became evident to me earlier this week, when Bill O'Reilly discussed the results of the Bloomberg GOP candidate event with Karl Rove. O'Reilly flatters himself as capable of divining the intent of voters, though he claims to be non-partisan. I don't really think he really understands Tea Party members at all. But O'Reilly proclaimed, and sort of bludgeoned Rove into agreeing with him, that Cain is too far right for most independents, while Romney is not.

Therefore, according to O'Reilly's calculations, Romney is the guy the GOP should nominate.

Not so fast, Bill.....

You see, for Cain, the equation is unique among GOP candidates. It looks something like this:

Total General Election Votes = GOP + share of independents + share of black votes.

Whereas all other GOP candidates effectively share the equation, without the red highlighted term, Cain's is different in that he can draw substantial black votes from Wonderboy.

Thus, while other candidates can, in fact, be reasonably evaluated on the share of independents they attract, since registered Republicans can probably be counted on to vote for whomever the party nominates, Cain can offset a lower share of independent voters with black voters on which no other Republican can depend.

Cain has been quite explicit about this segment, provoking charges of racism from other blacks.

But it does change the calculation for GOP voters. And makes Cain's appeal among blacks important for pollsters to begin measure. Because Cain's net additional, non-GOP voter appeal could well exceed Romney's, if one measures the disaffected blacks who, for the very first time, would have a black alternative to a Democratic national candidate, as Jason Riley noted in his recent WSJ column.

The OccupyWallStreet & Related Protests

2011-10-13T00:12:00.081-04:00

Is it just me, or does OccupyWallStreet look and sound like something out of a Tom Wolfe novel? Very much like Bonfire of the Vanities. The politicians and unions all lining up behind the scenes to attempt to maneuver for advantage. Major liberal media celebrities and unions are joining in. Even a few apparently risk-oriented House Democrats, like John Lewis and Frisco Nan.

But interviews with the ordinary crowd members reveal no actual knowledge of what the movement's/event's objectives and demands actually are.

Never the less, some Democratic Congressmen, and even Wonderboy himself speak of common cause with the anarchic crowd.

What disturbs me is that the movement's public calls to echo Egypt's grassroots democracy overlooks the fact that the US has a standing Republic form of government with freely-elected representatives and president.

This entire event seems to be little more than an attempt by the far left to try to take government out of the existing Constitutional institutions and put it into the street, because they don't like the fact that voters rebuked the Democrats last November by cutting their Senate majority and returning the House to GOP control.

It's as if, having had all three key elements of legislation- House, Senate and White House- for two years, they aren't satisfied with the results. So they simply intend to overthrow the Constitutionally-mandated process of federal government by sitting in on Wall Street and elsewhere in major US cities.

To better understand how skewed and out of touch with reality the movement's supporters are, here's an editorial from the weekend Wall Street Journal by SEIU's president, Mary Kay Henry, entitled Why Labor Backs 'Occupy Wall Street.' I've helpfully highlighted Henry's contentions which are seriously at odds with the truth, in red.

"The images of row upon row of stoic airline pilots, fed-up students and thousands of Americans marching through downtown Manhattan have captivated the nation.

Seemingly overnight, the organic, scrappy protests in the financial center of the world have blossomed into a national movement from Chicago to Los Angeles, calling attention to the gross inequality in our society and the unwillingness of our politicians to correct this imbalance.

The Occupy Wall Street actions are a potent example of what is happening across our country as the anger and frustration of ordinary Americans builds. While the media and pundits obsess over what the Occupy Wall Street protester's want, the protesters have already succeeded in shaking our conscience as a nation and forcing a national conversation about everything that is wrong with our economy.

The hard truth is that things are pretty lousy for most Americans right now. And while students, seniors and workers didn't cause our economic collapse, we're the ones paying the price.

It's been three years since Wall Street CEOs crashed our economy. When Wall Street was on its knees, the American taxpayers came to their rescue with trillions of dollars in bailouts and promise from the big banks that they'd invest in our recovery.

Instead, the banks used our hard-earned tax dollars to enrich themselves. They robbed millions of Americans of their jobs and their livelihoods. They refuse to invest in the small businesses that drive America's job creation and growth. And they continue to kick us while we're down by foreclosing on millions of families.

Today, the richest 5% of the population holds 72% of the wealth in our country. We have 25 million Americans looking for full-time work. And those Americans lucky enough to have a job have seen their hours slashed and their benefits cut. I recently met a worker in Chicago who told me he's been forced to feed his family by foraging for food in the dumpsters behind the grocery store by his house. Not because he's out of work but because his hours had been cut back and there simply wasn't enough money to keep a roof over his family's head, pay the electric bill, and put food on the table every night.

We have an entire generation of young people who were promised good jobs if they worked hard, played by the rules and attended college. They kept their end of the bargain and when they graduated they were left with no job prospects and a record amount of debt.

Americans watched in horror this spring as Republican politicians held our country hostage during the debt-ceiling debate to win harmful cuts to our communities and more tax breaks for millionaires. And this week House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor again turned their backs on the American people by refusing to even bring the American Jobs Act up for a vote.

The anger of the American people has been brewing for quite some time, and now that it's boiled over there's no bottling it up. The importance of Occupy Wall Street can't be measured by any set of demands. What's more important to understand are the values that unite the protesters and their authentic understanding of what has gone wrong in our economy.

We can begin to right the wrongs of our economy and respond to the growing demands of the American people by putting our country back to work and by holding Wall Street and big corporations accountable for the damage they've inflicted on us all.

When Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz was asked what one demand on Washington the Occupy Wall Street protesters should make right now, he didn't hesitate a moment before saying: create jobs.

We can't begin to fix what is wrong with our economy without creating good jobs. We have work that needs doing in this country and millions of Americans looking for full-time work. It's time to put the two together to make America a stronger nation. And it's time to use the money being made on Wall Street and in corporate boardrooms across the country to put Americans back to work.

Congress can begin by passing the American Jobs Act and immediately put Americans to work rebuilding our outdated and dangerous roads and bridges and ensuring our kids have first-class schools. We can invest in our communities to keep teachers in our classrooms, police on the beat, health-care workers at our hospitals and clinics, and ensure that we have enough firefighters to protect our communities.

The 2.1 million nurses, janitors, school-bus drivers and other members of the Service Employees International Union stand arm in arm with the peaceful Occupy Wall Street protesters. While unions cannot claim credit for Occupy Wall Street, SEIU members are joining the protesters in the streets because we are united in the belief that our country needs a change.

Nobody can predict what's next for the Occupy Wall Street movement. And no one institution or person should try to exert their pressure on this inspiring collective of people.

The importance of the Occupy Wall Street protests lies in the simple fact that all it takes is a small group of courageous people to light a spark and forever change the arc of history. The auto workers in Flint, Mich., lit that spark in the 1930s through their sit-down strikes and forever changed American industry. The civil-rights activists lit that spark when their sit-ins forced us to confront the racial inequality that poisoned our nation.

We saw that spark in Tahrir Square and across the Middle East this Arab Spring as a few brave people inspired millions of fed-up citizens to challenge their governments and demand better lives. It's what I've witnessed for the past 30 years as a union organizer watching working people stick their necks out and stand publicly for a union to win a chance at a better life for themselves and their families.

And it's what countless Americans see in this growing Occupy Wall Street movement. They see the opportunity to restore the very American notion that each of our citizens deserves a shot at reaching his or her own dreams, of finding a good job, and leaving the next generation better off.

The people are finally speaking. Now it's up to our leaders and CEOs to listen and respond."

I won't refute those highlighted passages point by point. Suffice to say:

-"Wall Street CEOs" did not "crash" our economy. For that, thank Barney Frank, Kent Conrad, and Chris Dodd for pushing Fannie and Freddie to guarantee low-doc, no-doc, low-quality mortgage loans.

-To my knowledge, banks were told to take TARP money, and no managements signed papers agreeing, in exchange, to loan money to questionable businesses at near-zero rates.

-Borrowers of money for mortgages who don't continue to pay those loans knew they'd be in default. They are adults, not children. Nobody 'robbed' them then stole their homes.

-The best, though, is this howler:

"We have an entire generation of young people who were promised good jobs if they worked hard, played by the rules and attended college. They kept their end of the bargain and when they graduated they were left with no job prospects and a record amount of debt."

I can't recall, when I was in college, anyone promising me a "good job" if I worked hard, graduated, whatever. This is a union boss' view of the ideal America- not reality in a free-, or even mixed-market economy.

-Then Henry simply states that it's time to be socialist and forcibly take public company capital for employment, against the shareholders' wills, in the economy as government sees fit.

Of course, that last bit is sort of what Wonderboy & Co. have done with Stimulus I and II (the latter a/k/a The Jobs Act), only instead of taking corporate money directly from those firms, they just borrowed it from China and spent it, expecting to get it through higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

-Henry also confuses the early-mid years of American unionism with some sort of utopia, when it was, in reality, an unsustainable money grab in some then-key industrial sectors. One way they 'changed American industry forever' is drove some of it into bankruptcy, taking the union pensions with them, while driving others offshore.

Good job, Mary Kay!

- How about this passage, dripping with entitlement-speak:

"that each of our citizens deserves a shot at reaching his or her own dreams, of finding a good job, and leaving the next generation better off."

What is to prevent anyone from that shot now? Go talk to Herman Cain. Sometimes you have to make your job, rather than sit still while others hand it to you.

Perhaps if some of Mary Kay's precious union workers hadn't spent so much of their high, unionized wages on vacation homes and pickup trucks, while living lifestyles that caused them to require so much expensive medical care later in life, they'd be in better financial shape to weather the current environment. Perhaps not taken on housing debt they couldn't afford.

This is America, folks. Nobody promises you the good life. You have to earn it.

Come to think of it, maybe I have the wrong Tome Wolfe novel. Maybe the appropriate one to cite is much, much older than Bonfire.

Anyone remember Radical Chic and Maumauing the Flack Catchers?

The Bloomberg GOP Presidential Candidates' Economics Debate

2011-10-12T09:42:00.002-04:00

I managed to watch the first minute or so of Bloomberg's GOP candidates' debate last night, and a little bit more. Mostly to see how disappointing it would be.

Sad to say, my expectations were met, and in some ways, exceeded. I was very disappointed.

As I feared, Charlie Rose, who is looking pretty old and decrepit these days, gave his trademark hound dog look and faux-gravitas tone of voice, then asked Herman Cain what he would do as president to solve the nation's economic problems.

As I listened to Rose's trite question, and Cain's pat '9-9-9' reply, I realized the futility of these sorts of so-called debates.

Bloomberg made a big deal out of declaring that it would have 40 analysts beavering away in real time to uncover flip-flops, lies, or false claims.

Then the first question out of the gate is a straw man question. Isn't it not just ironic, but pointless, to ask a GOP presidential candidate a question which assumes a president has the power to just dictate what he wants, on the day that Wonderboy's own party, which controls the Senate, can't and won't pass his jobs bill?

Despite Bloomberg's various anchors going on and on all day about how the round table format would be so groundbreaking, it changed nothing. Just more silly grasping at anything to look different.

As I surfed between the American League baseball playoff game between Detroit and Texas, and O'Reilly's Factor program from Boston, I heard Rick Santorum fumble the question about economic development in his hometown. How he contended that, sure, all those lost jobs could return.

Nonsense.

That's when it hit me how futile this Bloomberg event was on another dimension. Of the eight candidates at the big round table, only Cain and Romney had actually run businesses. Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann, Santorum, Paul and Huntsman have not, to my knowledge. Huntsman may have worked in his father's business, but he doesn't present himself as a businessman but, rather, a former governor and ambassador to China.

Thus the bulk of the field really can't speak 'off the cuff' about business or economics specifics.

This brought me to my next realization. We're not electing a chief economist or chief business cheerleader. We're electing a president.

And, by the way, only Keynesians would think that it makes sense to have a debate among presidential candidates just about economics, with warnings that they 'want specifics.'

Because non-Keynesians, such as followers of the Austrian school of economics, and/or Milton Friedman, don't believe in government intervention. Thus, no economic details beyond lower tax rates, an overhauled tax code, and less regulatory interference, would be appropriate or forthcoming from this group of eight.

Which is pretty much what every candidate said.

But that doesn't make for a very exciting, nor long so-called debate, does it?

What did get really tiring was hearing Huntsman, Romney, Perry and Bachmann continually using terms like 'innovation,' 'innovators,' small businessmen,' and the like. I wish Bloomberg's moderators- yes, there were two others who were equally ineffectual as Rose- would have banned the use of those terms.

Sadly, when in doubt, every GOP candidate begins to sing the praises of something and someone about which they know very little from experience- innovation and business risk-taking.

So why don't they just shut up and leave it to the people who do it?

I tuned back in around 9PM, halfway through the event, only to learn that the next segment was to be a round robin of each candidate asking another candidate questions- something in which I have zero interest. So I Tivoed the remainder of the event and went back to Detroit vs. Texas.

From what I did see, there were three incidents of note.

The first was Gingrich's forceful criticism of Bloomberg and all media for turning a blind eye to government officials whose behavior brought about the financial crisis. He named names- Dodd, Frank, Geithner and Bernanke. When Charlie Rose, with a bewildered, stunned look, suggested that Gingrich wasn't talking about criminal investigations, the former Speaker shot back that he was indeed suggesting precisely that.

Then Ron Paul weighed in against Bernanke, as well. If Helicopter Ben had been in Spaulding Hall, he'd have been lynched.

Which reminds me of another notable incident. Huntsman derided Cain's 9-9-9 plan, saying he thought it had come off the top of a pizza box. The camera cut to Cain, whose tight-lipped expression dripped silent rage. To be truthful, Huntsman tone and wording suggested, to me, a vague undertone of racism.

Finally, Romney had a weird reaction to a question regarding what he would do if faced with a 2013 European financial meltdown which affected the US. Instead of answering the question, Mitt went two rounds with the moderator claiming that hypotheticals made no sense and he couldn't answer one. He looked weak and confused, as if buying himself time, because after berating the questioner a couple of times, he then launched into what he wouldn't do- bail out individual banks and car companies. Big deal. Thanks Mitt, I never could have figured that one out.

But the Mitt question brought to mind what the format probably should have been. Each candidate onstage with three economic advisors of their choosing. Then a hypothetical or real economic challenge would be read, and each team would have ten minutes to huddle and produce a response.

Bad television, but more realistic simulation of how a sitting president works. We simply don't have choices among perfect, omniscient candidates. They all rely on teams of advisors more specialized than the president. Why go through a pointless exercise in forcing someone like Bachmann or Santorum to try to fabricate detailed economic policies alone in two minutes with the cameras on them?

So, from what I saw among the samples of the first hour, the Bloomberg event was pretty much what I expected- nothing new or remarkable. But it did help me realize the utter futility of asking a bunch of largely free-market presidential candidates to spend two hours discussing, in detail, how, if they were president, they would use the federal government as a Keynesian force in the US economy.

What people really want is to learn more about how these candidates would lead and govern. And governing means working with and through Congress and the states- not just assuming that whatever they say they want to do will magically pass. Voters want to get a sense of values and candor from the candidates, as well as general stands on a wide range of key issues. Not an instant detailed economic plan from a candidate who isn't an economics PhD.

Poor planning and strategy on Bloomberg's part. Poor choice of moderators. Poor choice of format.

More Handwringing by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal

2011-10-12T00:33:00.033-04:00

Peggy Noonan was in rare, full whiny form last Sunday in her Wall Street Journal weekend column. Here are some passages from the piece,

"What I'm seeing is a new convergence of thought among Democrats and Republicans who are not in Washington and not part of the political matrix. They are in new agreement about our essential problems and priorities: that the economy comes first, all other crises (in foreign affairs, in our culture) come second, because they cannot be helped without an economy that is healthy and growing. They all agree—no one really argues about this anymore—the government is going bankrupt. They all agree the entitlement system has to be reformed. Heck, they all respect Paul Ryan, for his seriousness. They all want grown-ups to come forward with ideas that maybe each party wouldn't love but that might do the country some good.

That is what I see in every business and professional meeting, in conversations with Democrats and Republicans: a new convergence of thought among the thoughtful.

Which makes this a promising moment. For once everyone knows what time it is. It's not like 2008, '04 and '00, when establishments were polarized.

But here's the most remarkable thing I saw this week. I watched, by computer, two focus groups of so-called Wal-Mart moms—middle- and working-class women who'd shopped at least once the past month at Wal-Marts. The polling firm Public Opinion Strategies, assembled the groups, 10 women in Orlando, Fla., and 10 in Des Moines, Iowa. In Orlando they were mothers in their 20s and 30s; in Des Moines in their 40s and 50s.

In Orlando they were asked to describe in a word or two how things are going in the country. The responses: "Depressing," "different," "discouraged," "sour" and "bad." Any positive words to describe our country right now? Silence. How, asked the moderator, do you see our economic troubles in your life? "I see it every day in my job," one woman said. Two weeks ago her company put up a posting for a position. Two hundred fifty applicants responded, "all overqualified."

Another: "Most houses in my neighborhood are under foreclosure or for sale." Another: "If I had the financial stability I think I'd just get out of here."

They don't say "unemployment," they said "laid off," and they all had stories of a husband, a father, themselves. One woman's husband left her, so she took the kids to live with her parents. Then her father was laid off, then her brother-in-law.

They're all trying to save money however they can—juggling credit cards, couponing, not eating out, no vacations, changing where they shop, buying the cheapest food in bulk. One woman spoke of donating blood. Another said she wasn't raising her boys for college so much as to be "self-sufficient." She was teaching them how to collect aluminum cans.

How does this time compare with a few years ago when the recession started? "I feel like it's getting worse." Were things better for you in 2008? "Oh yeah," they said, heads nodding. What is your immediate fear? "Saving money for Christmas—that we won't be able to buy Christmas presents." "Losing my job. That's my fear every day." "That my parents are going through all their savings."

They all think the government is lying about the jobless numbers. It's worse than the official reports.

Who are the culprits behind our economic calamity? "The banks and the people who took the loans." But more the banks, because they had, as one woman put it, "the authority." When they gave out the loans, people thought "it must have been OK." People were "lured in" by the banks—don't worry, home values will keep going up—which pocketed the fees and kept walking.

People lampoon the Occupy Wall Street movement as a bunch of marginal freaks, but these women from the heart of the country shared a basic resentment: The banks got bailed out, everyone else was left holding the bag.

How do they feel about Mr. Obama? Silence. Then "indifferent," "disappointed," "great speaker." A woman in Iowa said, "Lukewarm." No one railed against him, there was no anger. There was a lot of "He tried." "He hasn't done the stuff that he said he would," said one woman.

Both groups were feistier about Congress. "They're playing a game." "What have they done? They wasted a lot of time." In Iowa the words they used were "Dysfunctional," "sides," "defensive," "childish" and "can't work together." Are Democrats more to blame or the Republicans? "The same," said a woman, and everyone nodded.

What do they want in a political leader? Someone who cares about "Jane Doe on Main Street that can't pay her electric bill." Someone "with passion not for himself but for America."

Do elected officials in Washington know how you live? In Orlando there was a chorus of noes: "They have a bunch of chefs cook for them." "They're more privileged." "They're compensated above and beyond their salaries. They have health care."

Do they care about you? "No, not so much." "They won't care till they're affected."

What do you want Washington to do? From Iowa: "Fix it." "Start looking at the big picture."

What do you want from leaders. From Iowa: "Someone who isn't hollow."

They all said they care about 2012. They all said they'd vote.

We are in a remarkable moment. Everyone understands the stakes. Everyone wants action. From comfortable professionals to people barely scraping by, everyone wants both parties to work together, to think of our country and not themselves.

And of course everyone really gets this except Washington, which says it gets it and doesn't.

But those who think 2012 is just a clash of big parties had better wake up. They think they're pulling and pushing in a tug of war, but they are dancing on the precipice."

What a bunch of treacle.

This January saw the largest incoming group of House freshman in, what, 80 years? Those 80+ new GOP freshman aren't all having their meals cooked for them by personal chefs. Doesn't Noonan know of the Utah GOP Rep who lives in his office? And he's not the only one.

Yes, people are scared. But Noonan, a political veteran, seems unable to exercise her own judgement and explain to her readers that these so-called Wal-Mart women don't seem to distinguish between the GOP House working to cut spending and reduce government interference in the economy, while the Democrats keep trying to spend, tax and regulate even more.

It's not like two children fighting over nothing important. There are very important ideological differences which Representatives like Paul Ryan articulate.

Shame on Peggy for not bothering to point this out.

What these women complain about regarding Congress applies more, I suspect, to multi-term Senators and Representatives, and less to freshmen of either chamber or party. Those recently-elected members of Congress are likely quite attuned to the economic pain of their constituents.

Even Democrats like Ben Nelson and Claire McCaskill are trying to avoid Wonderboy and move to the center in hopes of being re-elected.

I remain firm in my belief that what some see as gridlock is simply the Congressional pendulum of power moving through the bottom of its arc as the liberal Democrats give way to full Senate and House majorities for a decidedly conservative GOP. Perhaps the Oval Office, as well.

Then Republican majorities will do what needs to be done to move the American economy forward again- cut regulation, remove government interference in health care, energy, autos, and more. Reduce uncertainty involving taxes, regulation and other things government does which cause investors to wait rather than invest.

Noonan writes as if Wal-Mart women know it all, and every Congress member is an aloof, wealthy dunce. That every adult who unwisely signed a mortgage loan for more than they could pay is a victim.

Does Peggy honestly think all of the lenders wanted their borrowers to default? Is she no longer capable of providing objective criticism of the greedy behavior of so many Americans who unwisely spent and lived beyond their means?

That's just not so. Much of what we are now witnessing is a last, violent gasp of 80 years of failed liberal Democratic social policies which have bankrupted our nation.

Does Someone At Fox News Read My Blog?

2011-10-11T00:01:00.006-04:00

After the Fox News/Google GOP candidate debate in Florida last month, I wrote in this post,

"I think what would be more meaningful to me would be something like the following. A network provides a weekly two-hour slot for its 'candidate of the week.' One of the GOP presidential hopefuls sits on a set with one or two moderators and answers questions from online feeds and a live audience. Moderators provide follow-up questions and/or fill in background on the candidate's prior remarks on the topic. Or contrast their stance with other candidates, etc.

And, for good measure, the original audience/online questioner gets a few minutes of give-and-take with the candidate, so if the latter evades the question, the questioner can complain about that and note it for everyone else.

I really don't care so much what Mitt thinks about Rick. Or what Newt thinks about anyone. Or what Rick (Santorum) does to try to look relevant.

In the end, I care more about how these people interact with prospective voters than how they fence with each other. I don't expect them to agree with each other, so what's the surprise in these bear-baiting formats?"

Fox News has initiated something of a pale version of my suggestion. Beginning last week on Brett Baier's 6pm program, one GOP candidate at a time will be a guest in what Baier calls the 'middle seat' among his panel. The first to do so was Michele Bachmann.

It's not enough, but it's a start. Missing are audience participation and a more gritty give-and-take for, say, 5 minutes between a guy like Charles Krauthammer and Bachmann. But it is far better than the beauty contest formats now popular in all the debates.

The Baier format, like my recommendation, allows the candidate to position her/himself against Wonderboy, which is what GOP and independent voters really want to hear. Who cares how Perry and Gingrich differ with each other on air? We're only nominating one of them.

Surely the bulk of interested voters can figure out for themselves, after hearing Gingrich and Perry separately, which they prefer. It won't be decided by how they spar on camera.

Now if only Baier's production staff member who reads my blog will begin to solicit viewer Skype or other videoconference questions from computers to the program, and expand the segment to, say, two half-hours per week, we're much closer to an ideal format.

And, for the record, I don't believe anyone at Fox read my prior linked post. Baier's program's modest nod in the direction of my ideas is, I think, far too limited to suggest it is any more than their own very small attempt to give viewers an alternative presentation of GOP presidential candidates other than the mega-debate farces.

Cain's Threat To Wonderboy's Base

2011-10-10T10:58:00.000-04:00

No less an accomplished black journalist than the Wall Street Journal's Jason Riley, a member of its editorial board, wrote a provocative editorial in last Friday's edition of the paper, entitled Cain's Post-Racial Promise.

Writing of Cain, who is unabashedly not a victim, and harbors no acrimony toward America for racial discrimination as experienced in his youth, Riley explained,

"Black individuals who don't see themselves primarily as victims are a threat to the political left, which helps explain why MSNBC commentators have derided Mr. Cain as a token and why Jon Stewart has mocked him in tones that evoke Amos 'n' Andy or Stepin Fetchit. To secure political victories, Democrats need blacks to vote for them in unison. Independent thinking cannot be tolerated.

No one is hoping more than the White House that Mr. Cain fades away. If he doesn't, Mr. Obama's fear of Mr. Romney winning independent voters next year could turn into a fear of Mr. Cain peeling away black support. Black enthusiasm for the president remains high but has slipped in recent months, and a black alternative to Mr. Obama is not a scenario that Democrats would welcome."

Quite an analysis coming from a black who doesn't even bother with the phrase "African American."

Never the less, I believe the people who are warming to Cain do so only because of his accomplishments and attitudes, not his race. Thus making him doubly-dangerous to Wonderboy.

Imagine seeing both independents and a substantial percentage of black voters desert the president for Cain, enabling the latter to sweep into the White House by a double-digit margin.

Let me add to my thoughts regarding my endorsement of Cain in this recent post. Beyond my list of reasons why I find each other GOP candidate lacking, there's also this simple approach.

Who would I prefer in the following one-on-one matchups?

Romney-Cain: Cain
Perry-Cain: Cain
Bachmann-Cain: Cain

In each case, Cain has attributes I prefer over the other candidate, while typically sharing some positive ones.

For example, he can match Romney and Perry for gubernatorial executive experience, and probably raise Romney on the type of business experience he has.

Cain shares Bachmann's outsider, Tea-Party-esque views, but trumps her on.....executive experience.

Then there's Romney's suspicious flexibility on issues which he discovers are suddenly important. He's less than convincing as a latecomer Tea Party enthusiast. He authored RomneyCare, yet won't just admit it was a mistake.

By contrast, Cain comes to politics with a clean slate and an impressive life story.

And, now we have a respected conservative black journalist suggesting that Cain will be Wonderboy's worst nightmare as the GOP presidential nominee.

That's another big reason to seriously consider Cain for the job.

Peter Orzag On CNBC This Morning

2011-10-07T09:52:00.000-04:00

I know it's not usually considered appropriate to comment on peoples' appearances. But sometimes, in a sort of onomatopoeia manner, a person's appearance speaks volumes about the rest of their self-presentation.

This is true, for me, for Peter Orzag. He was on CNBC this morning, repeating his calls for 'less democracy' in America.

There's no way around it- Orzag presents visually as a ferret. The glasses, body type, hair, facial construction all scream 'geeky ferret.'

A quick look at his bio confirms he has zero experience to suggest he's an expert on governmental affairs or system design.

Listening to him this morning, his comments confirmed his naivete and lack of a sense of history. But it's actually worse than all that.

Like so many liberals, Orzag appeals to non-democratic processes because he's frustrated that voter-driven democracy is so messy. And sometimes elects people whose policies with which he differs.

You know, democracy can be so unfair!

Those damned voters just don't know what's good for them!

Most people don't realize, but Amity Schlaes provided the evidence to support it, that FDR's actual initial motivation for his socialist policies upon election was to remedy US economic inefficiencies. FDR's cabal of progressives took a boat trip to Europe. They oohed and aahed at Italian Fascist efficiency.

Essentially, FDR and his liberal minions grew frustrated with free market participants understandably withholding investment and behaving prudently in the face of economic uncertainty. So they passed legislation to try to force the hand of business owners and investors.

That's what Wonderboy's administration is doing today. And what Orzag wishes would occur with the suspension of our present level of democracy. Their frustration with democracy is the frustration of jackbooted dictators who know what's good for you, dammit! Can't you see that, you simpleton? You could if you voted Democratic!

Now, to hear Orzag worm his way out of his earlier remarks today was to hear him appeal to examples like the Courter military base closings commission.

Suddenly Orzag tells us that Congress 'isn't good with details.' They should just pass, or not pass, the recommendations and rulings of various empowered commissions and panels.

Hell, we already DO THAT, Peter!

Ever hear of these alphabet soups? SEC. NLRB. ICC. FDA. EPA. FTC. CFTC.

The new consumer financial so-called protection, actually product, service and pricing distortion agency.

What I've come to understand is that many liberals, tired of not having their way, resort to complaining that our democracy is too slow, wasteful and incapable of 'getting things done.'

Debate or difference of opinion that results in no action is not an option for these liberal activists.

Something must be done! It just must be!

An older liberal friend taunted me recently by telling me one of his best friends, a lifelong Republican, quite the party because it 'couldn't get things done.'

I retorted that what his friend, and he, was seeing is the movement of a swinging pendulum through the bottom of its arc.

For 2009-2011, the Democrats controlled the House, Senate and White House and tried to ram through programs embodying huge, radical ideological change. Representatives of Americans who disagreed with these changes obstructed these attempts. Thus how tortured the process of how the Democrats were forced to craft ObamaCare- simply due to Teddy Kennedy's much-appreciated (by conservatives), untimely death.

For the past year, the GOP-controlled House has blocked further uber-liberal schemes, such as Stimulus 2, a/k/a Wonderboy's "jobs" bill.

If independent voters remain unhappy with Wonderboy next November, expect to see either or both the Senate and Oval Office go to the GOP, while the House remains in their hands.

Forget about the First Rookie's threat that the House GOP members will be "run out of town" for daring to question and not pass his incredibly bad legislative ideas. Has he forgotten the "shellacking" he and his party took last November? The complete rejection of his first two years in the Oval Office?

Then you'll see the tempo of government activity pick up again, only in the opposite direction to 2009-2011.

Hey, that's democracy. If you think I'm wrong, go read your US history. How several presidents dithered over slavery from 1820 onward. How Jackson's second election was all about the Second Bank of the United States. He basically drew a line in the sand and made most of his first term a fight for his second term on that single issue.

I recently read a review of the 80th, so-called "do nothing" Congress with which Harry Truman had to work for two years. Interestingly, the 80th passed pro-business legislation. It simply opposed Harry's so-called Fair Deal agenda. Again, an ideological difference which our system appropriately allows to slow change and force the two sides to present their cases in the next election cycle.

My point is that ideological gridlock is appropriate, natural and actually quite frequent in American government. It's how we handle large-scale change. If elections don't build up sufficient majorities in Congress and change the White House occupant, then change won't occur. But the change we saw with ObamaCare was just wrong.

Orzag complained that in the 1960s, Republicans and Democrats alike voted on major social legislation. Well, race-related change was long in coming, and actually used, some would say abused, federal power to force Southern states to change laws. Medicare and Medicaid were stupidly-designed programs that lifetime hacks of both parties ignorantly and arrogantly passed.

At least now we have the benefit of informed, more intelligent, principled objection by conservatives to liberal, spendthrift business as usual in the capitol.

Orzag's wrong. He has no credentials whatsoever- he's an economist by training- for making governmental change recommendations. And his prescriptions are characteristically ill-informed and wrong.

Scandals Grow In The Most Transparent Administration Ever

2011-10-07T02:31:00.000-04:00

It's been quite a bruising week for Wonderboy's minions and, by extension, the First Rookie himself.

Attorney General Eric Holder is under pressure because his sworn testimony that he only learned about the illegal administration-operated ATF gun-running operation, Fast and Furious, a few weeks before his testimony this summer, has been proven to be a lie. Instead, a House committee has discovered memos to Holder dating from last year showing him to have been notified of the operation.

Meanwhile, the head of the Energy Department unit responsible for the Solyndra loan has resigned. Recent communications uncovered by the House have shown that two high-ranking members of Wonderboy's financial team, Larry Summers and Tim Geithner, warned him against the Solyndra deal. Now the House is subpoenaing documents dating to Wonderboy's swearing-in day. Apparently there is suspicion that the loan was a pre-arranged deal for bundler Kaiser.

Both scandals are growing even as the countdown to next year's election proceeds.

Wonderboy's press conference remarks on these two matters are beginning to remind me of Nixon's latter years when Watergate was moving closer to his office.

Paul Ryan Reviews Liberal Economist Jeffrey Sachs' "The Price of Civilization"

2011-10-06T00:16:00.054-04:00

Wisconsin Republican Representative, and chairman of the House Budget Committee, Paul Ryan, wrote a review of Jeffrey Sachs' new book, The Price of Civilization, in last weekend's edition of the Wall Street Journal. Ryan entitled his piece America's Enduring Ideal, with the sub headline,

"Jeffrey Sachs is only the latest in a long line of thinkers to reject the values of our commercial republic."

In order to provide my readers with an unedited sense of Mr. Ryan's thoughts and writing style, I've reposted his review in its entirety.

"Free enterprise has never lacked for moral critics. In the mid-18th century, for instance, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau rejected the proposition that the free exchange of goods and services, and the competitive pursuit of self-interest by economic actors, result in general prosperity—ideas then emanating from Great Britain. In a commercial society, according to Rousseau, the people are "scheming, violent, greedy, ambitious, servile, and knavish . . . and all of it at one extreme or the other of misery and opulence." Only a people with "simple customs [and] wholesome tastes" can be virtuous.

In "The Price of Civilization," Jeffrey Sachs carries Rousseau's argument into the 21st century. Mr. Sachs, a development economist at Columbia University, believes that "at the root of America's economic crisis lies a moral crisis: the decline of civic virtue among America's political and economic elite." The book's veneer of economic analysis cannot conceal what is essentially a crusade against the free enterprise ethic of our republic.

Only through a reshaping of our principles and a reordering of the American economy, Mr. Sachs believes, can we become "a mindful society." We must abandon a culture that is defined by hard work and the striving for upward mobility and an economy that has unleashed unparalleled prosperity. Hard work impedes leisure. Ambition is a vice. Economic growth hurts the planet.

The corporation is the antagonist in this morality play. Mr. Sachs refers early and often to widespread "suffering from the decline in corporate tax rates" and properly identifies a pernicious trend that both political parties have fallen victim to over the years: crony capitalism. But it is not just the rapaciousness of corporate interests that disturbs the author. He sees a deeper conspiracy at play. The marketing industry is referred to as the "dark arts of manipulation," and television has been dangerously left "almost entirely to the private sector." Our commitment to limited government and free enterprise has allowed "market values [to] trump social values." We are scolded time and again for letting business interests encourage our faults and fallibilities.

"Through clearer thinking," Mr. Sachs writes, "we can become more effective both as individuals, and as citizens, reclaiming power from corporations." This reclamation will come primarily from punitive tax and regulatory measures. Mr. Sachs is undaunted by any thought that such a regime might worsen unemployment. The trained economist assures us: "Economic theory indeed supports the view that high tax rates can actually spur, rather than hinder, work effort." He argues that financial incentives ought not to matter in a mindful society and is confident that well-intentioned social engineers can suspend the laws of economics.

One need not look far to find the inspiration for the America that Mr. Sachs seeks. He is explicit about his ideal, and it is Europe. America should match the high tax and "active labor market policies" found in the German and Scandinavian economies. The Constitution imposes too many restrictions on government interference for Mr. Sachs, and we'd be better served if we moved toward a "French-style" constitution that consolidated the executive and legislative branches and empowered experts to help us manage the "complexity of our economy." On the most effective means of petitioning one's government, Mr. Sachs sounds eerily Greek (A.D. 2011, not 500 B.C.): "A new political party can be combined with other forms of political agitation—consumer boycotts, protests, media campaigns, and social networking efforts—to put the most egregious leaders of the corporatocracy on notice."

Advocating for the European model seems particularly ill-advised at the moment, given the current state of affairs across the Atlantic. Yet Mr. Sachs is untroubled by the contradictions between the Europe of his imagination and the crisis-ridden continent as it exists today. He writes: "The countries that failed to raise taxes adequately—such as Greece—are now paying the price in a massive fiscal crisis, as in the United States." Too many industrialized countries, in his view, have fallen victim to the "race to the bottom" mentality of lowering corporate tax rates and depriving their governments' coffers of the money needed to pay their mounting bills.

The "price" of civilization, we find out, is quite steep.

A "civilized" society will cost Americans roughly $12 trillion in higher taxes over the next decade. Mr. Sachs concedes that he could lower the bill if the economy were to grow fast enough to stabilize the debt, at which point a roughly $8 trillion tax hike would suffice. The proposed means by which the federal government can expand as the economy shrinks: raise corporate tax rates (and plead with our global competitors to stop reducing their business taxes); raise the top individual income tax rate; raise taxes on investment, energy, bank balance sheets and financial transactions; and impose a national sales tax.

Mr. Sachs is honest enough to acknowledge that the "rich" are not nearly rich enough to pay for his ever-expansive vision of government. We're told that "each of us with an above-average income" (i.e., $50,000 per household) must "understand that if we are prudent, we can make do with a little less take-home pay."

Such appeals to the citizenry to make sacrifices might be more compelling if Mr. Sachs coupled them with calls for spending restraint in Washington. Instead, his budget proposal insists on the need to "augment" government spending by trillions of dollars in the years ahead. Thus the sacrifices of citizens are to be made to increase the size and scope of a federal government that Mr. Sachs admits has demonstrated little aptitude for allocating resources efficiently or even fairly. This conundrum leads him to a conclusion that would be comical if he were not deadly serious: "Yes, the federal government is incompetent and corrupt—but we need more, not less, of it."

Yet at its core "The Price of Civilization" is not about taxes or economics. It is about the "pursuit of happiness" as one academic understands it.

Enshrined in the country's founding documents, "the pursuit of happiness" has long been recognized in America as a natural right to be secured by good government. As the Founders understood it, "happiness" referred to human fulfillment, to a well-lived life of virtue in this world and ultimate fulfillment in the next. In ensuring that its citizens are free to seek their happiness, government was to promote neither hedonism nor materialism. It was to secure the right to pursue happiness by not interfering with either normal commercial transactions or freedom of worship.

In "The Price of Civilization," Mr. Sachs is asking the right questions. What is a life well lived? What should our government's role be in building a more virtuous society? What policies should it pursue to promote fulfilling lives for its citizens? If such questions direct us to the moral wisdom of our cultural traditions, they can indeed help to balance the excesses of capitalism and so help us to extend its benefits to all.

Yet Mr. Sachs's gospel of happiness draws not on the inspired tradition of the Founders but rather on the Utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. In the 1780s, Bentham proposed that "happiness," which he equated with "pleasure," could be mathematically measured. It was not sufficient, he thought, for government to protect our rights if it was to vouchsafe our pursuit of happiness. Government must instead quantify "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" and set policies and goals accordingly. There was a science to satisfaction, Bentham claimed, and it was a puzzle that trained experts could solve.

Channeling Bentham, Mr. Sachs calls for the establishment of a national metrics for life satisfaction and sets a 10-year goal to "raise America's happiness." Although the specific measures are hazy, the steps are clear: For people to be happy, their government must increasingly shield them from the challenges of life. The good life is thus defined as one of ever-more pleasure at the expense of work.

But happiness in this world results not from avoiding challenges but from meeting them. Happiness is the recompense of real effort, whether intellectual or physical, and of earned success. It comes from achievement—from doing something of economic, artistic or emotional value. The satisfaction to be taken in producing valuable things brings with it a lasting sense of personal fulfillment. Mr. Sachs's design for paternalistic government will only impede the pursuit of happiness.

Mr. Sachs is more accurate when he argues that economics is not merely about making money. It must serve the higher cause of human well-being and moral development. He is right to dislike the greed and vulgarity that can accompany bourgeois life. But he is wrong to attribute these phenomena to capitalism uniquely. Discord and imperfection arise from human nature. The question is how they can be contained and redirected. Capitalism, together with our moral traditions, has long offered a solution consistent with individual freedom. Mr. Sachs's approach does not.

Mr. Sachs likely overstates Americans' enthusiasm for restrictions on work, for the denial of constitutionally protected freedoms or for government controls over media and technology. His conception of the good life could perhaps be mutually agreed to in a small, isolated and homogeneous society. But here in the United States it would have to be imposed on a diverse and globally integrated nation of more than 300 million people. That is neither possible nor desirable.

The freedom and independence of the American population can best be guaranteed by allowing the people to govern themselves through their elected representatives; by keeping limits on the size of government; and by encouraging each of us to take responsibility for our own well-being. We can best be aided by our families, communities, churches and local institutions—and by the government only as a last resort.

For, ultimately, Mr. Sachs's quarrel is with our founding principles of equality and liberty. Underlying the arguments in "The Price of Civilization" is a contention that the Constitution is too conducive to freedom, that it endorses an economic system too friendly to growth and the satisfaction of appetite, that it creates political institutions too inattentive to our national character.

In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson defined "a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned." The contrast with Mr. Sachs's idea of "good government" could not be more stark.

The Founders thought of America as exceptional, but Mr. Sachs thinks that this claim is a myth and that the country's present greatness a historical aberration. Our decline is, thankfully, inevitable, he says: "America will not again dominate the world economy or geopolitics as it did in the immediate aftermath of World War II. That was a special historical moment; we can be glad that economic progress throughout the world is rapidly creating a more balanced global economy and society."

It is through this prism of decline that we may better understand Mr. Sachs's calls for an overbearing government to take more earnings from you and make more decisions for you, as well as his instructions for hard-working Americans to restrain their ambitions and accept their current place in life. He seeks nothing less than to replace the vision of the Founders—the ideals of individual liberty that have enabled America to achieve the unrivaled social, material and spiritual flourishing of the past two and a quarter centuries—with one that relies almost solely on the wisdom and beneficence of an intrusive, unlimited government.

The dialogue between capitalism and its critics is an old one, and it will continue. But as citizens of a self-governing nation, Americans must choose from time to time between alternative visions for our future. This book's budget proposals and economic policies are profoundly revealing. They lay bare the real agenda of those who wish us to abandon the American idea and consign our nation to the irrevocable path of decline. If only in that sense, "The Price of Civilization" is a useful contribution to the conversation we must have in order to make informed political choices in the years ahead."

I think Ryan's review speaks for itself. He does an excellent job at three things. First, he casts Sachs' prescriptions for the US as being incredibly socialist, pro-big-brother government, and expensive. Second, he places Sachs in a long line of similarly-reasoning statists who either distrust or despise the 'little people' who, in the US, actually vote for who will govern them. Finally, he ties what appear to be just choices concerning economics and the functioning market economy of the US into, ultimately, a choice of fundamental values by which each person may, or may not, be free to pursue her/his own happiness as s/he sees it.

My own commenst on Ryan's review and, indirectly, Sachs' ideas, takes a different tack.

Jeffrey Sachs' bio includes 19 years teaching at Harvard. In all that time, surely he should have, or could have, sat down with Harvard's Robert Nozick to discuss the nature of the state, utopia and, well, as Nozick's famous book title expressed it, anarchy.

You see, what I see Sachs doing is saying something like this,

'The US is a marvelous society. If we could only just radically change the Constitution or, better yet, just tear it up and run a socialist, command society, it would be perfect. All the resources, size, geographic benefits, and a large population, only requiring the removal of individual freedom, and we've got the perfect society.'

Nozick, in contrast, would probably reply,

'No, Jeffrey. This is the US. If you want to form your envisioned high-tax, high-spending, government-by-command society, you and your ilk should go freely associate elsewhere with your own, new set of rules and form that utopia. But not here, thanks. Those of us here are keeping the Constitution. You must go elsewhere with your own merry band to found your new society.'

Nozick is all for each group of similarly-thinking people to establish its own free association.

So what I don't get, in a theoretical sense, is why progressives keep trying to hijack the US and its Constitution, or simply ignore the latter, rather than go found their own alternative association/society.

Well, I do know why not. Because it's harder in this day and age to collect a few million people, find desirable land that isn't already someone else's country, and found a new society.

Ryan does a service by revealing that Sachs and his kind are trying a stealth hijacking of America, because if they simply produced their entire plan and values publicly, they'd be rejected.

And should be. Because to do what they want, well, they can probably just fly to any of several European nations and feel right at home.

The Paradox of Christie's Decision Not To Run for President

2011-10-05T00:08:00.016-04:00

I find it ironic that Chris Christie's final announcement that he won't seek the presidency next year makes him that much more desirable in many voters' eyes.

In his speech today, he reiterated his sense of a need to fulfill his obligation to New Jersey's residents by completing his term and finishing the job he started. He said it wasn't yet his time.

For many voters, his commitment and sense of duty set him apart.

And if he had announced today that he had changed his mind, and decided to run, he would have been seen by many as simply expedient. Not to mention that he'd have reversed himself on a series of declarations that he was not running.

Which would make him less trustworthy.

So Christie's decision seemed to me to result in the height of irony.

Herman Cain's 1994 Townhall Debate with Bubba Clinton

2011-10-04T00:58:00.001-04:00

Here's the YouTube clip of GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain taking on Bill Clinton in a townhall meeting in 1994, when the latter was pushing HillaryCare.

Notice Clinton going white and his mouth semi-grimacing as Cain shreds Bubba's government-mandated healthcare dreams. Clinton tries to dance his way out of this at the end by spewing some numbers, suggesting that Cain didn't correctly discount health care costs for part-time workers.

Funny, I never heard Clinton come back to tell us that Cain was wrong.

But Clinton's deflated look on camera is just priceless, isn't it?

The Last Resort of Liberals When "Democracy" Fails Them? Suspend It!

2011-10-03T00:18:00.032-04:00

Here's the Notable & Quotable entry in Friday's Wall Street Journal:

"From a Sept. 28 editorial in the Washington Examiner:

Most Americans complain that government is unresponsive to their wishes. But not everyone feels that way. In the space of two days, two prominent Democrats have called for less responsive government that ignores public input.

One of them, former White House Budget Director Peter Orszag, penned a piece this week in the New Republic arguing, as the title says, "Why we need less democracy." Orszag wrote that "the country's political polarization was growing worse—harming Washington's ability to do the basic, necessary work of governing." His solution? "[W]e need to minimize the harm from legislative inertia by relying more on automatic policies and depoliticized commissions for certain policy decisions. In other words, radical as it sounds, we need to counter the gridlock of our political institutions by making them a bit less democratic." . . .

[S]imilar comments by Gov. Bev Perdue, D-N.C., are far more troubling. "I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover," Perdue told a Rotary Club gathering in suburban Raleigh this week. "I really hope that someone can agree with me on that." "

I actually saw the video in which Bev Perdue said what is quoted above. It is a correct quote. The audio appears below, from YouTube. Later, Fox News reported, her press aides claimed she was joking.

Judge for yourself- does Bev sound like she's joking?

Is it not disturbing that the liberal Democrats, having had 2 years of complete control of the federal government, were not satisfied with their accomplishments? Now that they lost the House, and may lose either or both the Senate and White House in 2012, they are agitating to suspend or dumb-down our Republican form of government, usually mis-labeled as a democracy.

We're not talking about a few hacked-up House members. We're talking about the former budget director and one of the 50 state governors.

Okay. Enough Already. I'm Endorsing Herman Cain

2011-09-30T09:03:00.001-04:00

Daniel Henninger wrote this thought-provoking piece in his Wonderland column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. I've reposted it in its entirety, except for videos and images.

You hear the same thing said about Herman Cain all the time: Herman Cain has some really interesting ideas, but . . .

I love Herman Cain, but . . .

But what?

But he can't win.

Why not?

At best, the answer has to do with that cloudy word "electability." Or that Mr. Cain has never held elected political office.

In 2004, Mr. Cain ran for the GOP's U.S. Senate nomination in Georgia. He lost to Johnny Isakson. Last weekend, Mr. Cain ran away with the Florida straw poll vote, winning with 37%. He torched both the "Southern" candidate, Rick Perry of Texas, who worked hard to win the vote, and Mitt Romney, who in 2008 campaigned everywhere in Florida.

The time is overdue to plumb the mystery of Herman Cain's "interesting, but" candidacy. Let's start at the top—in the top-tier candidacy of Mitt Romney.

Though he's got the governorship credential, Mr. Romney's emphasis in this campaign is on his private-sector experience. It's good, despite the knock on Bain Capital's business model. But measured by résumés, Herman Cain's looks deeper in terms of working on the private sector's front lines.

The details of his career path are worth knowing.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Cain was recruited from Coca-Cola in Atlanta, his first job in business, to work for Pillsbury in Minneapolis. His rise was rapid and well-regarded. He joined the company's restaurant and foods group in 1978 as director of business analysis. In the early 1980s, Pillsbury sent him to learn the hamburger business at a Burger King in Hopkins, Minn. Then they assigned him, at age 36, to revive Pillsbury's stumbling, franchise Burger King business in the Philadelphia region. He succeeded. According to a 1987 account in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Pillsbury's then-president Win Wallin said: "He was an excellent bet. Herman always seemed to have his act together."

In 1986, Pillsbury sent the 41-year-old Mr. Cain to turn around their Godfather's Pizza business, headquartered in Omaha. The Herman Cain who arrived there April 1 sounded like the same man who roused voters last Sunday in Florida: "I'm Herman Cain and this ain't no April Fool's joke. We are not dead. Our objective is to prove to Pillsbury and everyone else that we will survive."

Pillsbury sold Godfather's to Mr. Cain and some of his managers in 1988. He ran it until 1996 and served as CEO of the National Restaurant Association from 1996-1999. This June, Mr. Cain visited with the Journal's editors and put the issue of health-insurance availability inside the context of the restaurant industry. He said the restaurant association tried hard to devise a health-insurance program able to serve the needs of an industry whose work force is complex—executives and managers, full-time workers, part-timers, students and so forth. Any conceivable insurance system would require great flexibility in plan-choice and design.

It's from this period that one finds the famous 1994 video, now on YouTube, of Herman Cain on a TV screen from Omaha debating Bill Clinton about his national health legislation during a town-hall meeting. After the president estimates the profitability of Mr. Cain's company, suggesting he can afford the legislation, Mr. Cain essentially dismantles the Clinton math, in detail. "The cost of your plan . . . will cause us to eliminate jobs."

None of this can be put across in the televised debates' explain-everything-in-30 seconds format. Nor is there any chance to elaborate his Sept. 7 debate remark that he admires Chile's private-public social security system. Or his flat-tax "9-9-9" proposal. (Or any of the candidates' policy ideas for that matter.) So voters get nothing, and Mr. Cain flounders.

When Mr. Cain talked to the Journal's editors, the most startling thing he said, and which he's been repeating lately, was that he could win one-third of the black vote. Seeing Herman Cain make his case to black audiences would be interesting, period. Years ago, describing his chauffeur father's influence on him in Atlanta, Mr. Cain said: "My father gave me a sense of pride. He was the best damn chauffeur. He knew it, and everybody else knew it." Here's guessing he'd get more of this vote than past GOP candidates.

Does a résumé like Herman Cain's add up to an American presidency? I used to think not. But after watching the American Idol system we've fallen into for discovering a president—with opinion polls, tongue slips and media caprice deciding front-runners and even presidents—I'm rewriting my presidential-selection software.

Conventional wisdom holds that this week's Chris Christie boomlet means the GOP is desperate for a savior. The reality is that, at some point, Republicans will have to start drilling deeper on their own into the candidates they've got.

Put it this way: The GOP nominee is running against the incumbent president. Unlike the incumbent, Herman Cain has at least twice identified the causes of a large failing enterprise, designed goals, achieved them, and by all accounts inspired the people he was supposed to lead. Not least, Mr. Cain's life experience suggests that, unlike the incumbent, he will adjust his ideas to reality.

Herman Cain is a credible candidate. Whether he deserves to be president is something voters will decide. But he deserves a serious look.

A couple of interesting points.

First, as Rick Scott noted on Fox News before the recent Florida debate, that state's GOP straw poll winner has gone on to win the nomination something like that for the last 3 election cycles. I forget the details, but Scott's point was attention-getting.

Second, I saw a black liberal Fox News Contributor last night on Bill O'Reilly's program call Cain racist for saying he can take one-third of the black votes in 2012. How rich, eh?

Third, Dennis Miller also endorsed Cain this week in one of his O'Reilly program segments. His comedy aside, Miller is typically blunt and on the question of Cain's foreign policy weakness, simply said, in effect, 'could he really be any worse than the guy we already have?'

On a more serious note, though, I do feel Cain is the GOP guy to support. At this point in the campaign, here is my reasoning.

Bachmann has self-destructed by virtue of her big mouth spitting out nonsense faster than her brain can stop it. She makes dumb factual errors in passionate moments, and it's gotten to be more than a nuisance. A liberal friend pointed out that, with Bachmann's lack of executive experience, if elected, she's likely to be surrounded and dominated by a cadre of strong ideologues. Like Wonderboy. And, says my friend, like W was. I disagreed about that, but it's what many believe, especially about W's foreign policy and the way he let Powell and Rice go soft on various rogue regimes.

Perry has proven he's not yet ready for prime time. It's not whether he knows foreign policy. To write that his pussy-footing on Social Security, after the correct and lucid 'Ponzi scheme' remark, was disappointing, is a gross understatement.

I still don't trust Romney. Over lunch yesterday with a very longtime, also libertarian friend, we agreed that Romney wouldn't be so suspect if he would just admit he made a mistake pushing RomneyCare in Massachusetts. That it is breaking that state's budget, and was badly designed. But, then, he'd have to admit that, as analyst-in-chief, which is Mitt's signature theme, he made a mistake.

So, then, you have to wonder whether he'll do a Britney Spears: Oops! I did it again!

Newt is smart and capable of defeating Wonderboy in a debate, but he's an ethically-challenged egomaniac. Doesn't really play well with others.

Huntsman is unexciting, suspect, for me, of simply being a rich man's son who's bought what he has accomplished. And he's more of a Democrat than a Republican on many issues.

Ron Paul is, while well-intentioned, a cranky nut-case. Sort of a much more right-wing McCain.

Rick Santorum, while earnest and smart, was a Senator. No executive experience, too hung up on rigid Catholicism (and I'm an ex-Catholic, so I would know). Like many Senators, good talker, suspect on getting the job done.

My major problem with Cain has been his total lack of political experience in office.

But, after reading Henninger, I'm reminded that, most importantly, like, say, Washington, Eisenhower and Lincoln (yes, I know, Lincoln had political experience. But not governing experience.), Cain has deep, rich life experience.

That's the biggest contrast between Herman Cain and Wonderboy.

And, for what it's worth, Lincoln was elected to captain, and led, a company of Illinois volunteers in the Blackhawk wars.

Then there's the race issue.

Personally, I always believed that America would elect the right black candidate as president when his/her race was not the issue, but his/her experience and qualifications were. Instead, we got the First Rookie, who basically was elected because nearly every black, and many guilt-ridden, middle-class white yuppie voters, who wanted to feel good about their morality and sense of fairness-by-repaying-slavery-with-electing-a-black.

Wonderboy has no serious life experience, and it shows.

Herman Cain, on the other hand, is a guy you'd support because of his accomplishments, irrespective of his race.

And, okay, I have to admit, how amazing would it be to watch Wonderboy have to debate and run against another of his own minority race, only older, wiser and with many more accomplishments? Where will the class warfare, hate and demonizing race rhetoric fit in for Obama in that election race? Pun intended.

And, finally, Cain seems to me to be the quintessential type of first black to earn the GOP presidential nomination. Lincoln's party nominates a man who rises to the task by virtue of his talent and determination, not on the basis of favors given him due to his race.

I believe that Cain's life experience, business experience and success, and overall common sense, put him above the rest of the GOP field running for president.

The Uneven Quality of Presidents

2011-09-29T00:20:00.021-04:00

With all the hand wringing over the current field of GOP candidates for the 2012 presidential nomination, it's tempting to think this is new. That we're facing, for the first time ever, the prospect of a less-than-optimal president replacing an even worse one.

However, as I've written in earlier posts, ever since I voted in my first presidential election, in 1976, for Carter, I've rarely felt I was voting for the best candidate in the nation. Merely the better or best one on the ballot.

I really thought Carter could do the job, and was a worthy candidate. But, of course, he failed. In the next election, I didn't trust Reagan's intellect, so I voted for Anderson, who I didn't think was exactly presidential, but a safer choice than the other two.

I felt comfortable voting to re-elect Reagan, but didn't really think Bush senior, Dole, or Bush the younger were the best the party could have offered. Nor was I thrilled with McCain. He was cranky and over the hill.

Recalling the line of presidents from my youth, I don't think I'd have been particularly thrilled by any of the candidates except perhaps JFK, and probably Goldwater.

But, generally speaking, it's not like the US has had a steady succession of Washingtons and Lincolns for the past 50 or 100 years.

So, regardless of how much the left denigrates Perry, Romney or Bachmann, those candidates, along with Cain, Santorum, even Gingrich, are really no different in caliber than many of those who have held the office they seek.

Don't despair over the quality of the GOP candidate field. It's really no better, nor worse, than we've seen for decades.

Chris Christie's Reagan Library Speech 27September 2011

2011-09-28T09:37:00.000-04:00

For those of you who missed it, or want to see it again, here is NJ Governor Chris Christie's keynote address from the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California last night. His speech is in two parts, with Q&A in two more videos.

Part Two of address

Q&A Part One

Q&A Part Two

I watched as much of it live as I could. First on Fox, which broke for a commercial. So I turned to CSPAN, which is the source for these videos, courtesy of a YouTube channel contributor.

About half way through his address, I began to feel that Christie might announce, or reply to a question in the affirmative, that he had reconsidered running for the GOP presidential nomination. But he didn't.

Instead, it was simply a very presidential address from a state governor with some major, although unfinished, accomplishments.

It's perhaps now easier, since this was a national platform, for other, non-NJ US citizens to see why Christie is so well-regarded among conservatives and conservative pundits. He does seem to state things clearly, display leadership by his actions, and strike a tone that is at once less combative, yet more effective, vis a vis Wonderboy.

As I listened to and watched Christie speak, I was struck by how different is his style than the current Oval Office occupant. None of the black Baptist-style oratorical harangues or phrasing styles. Rather, very much like Reagan, a more reasoned, balanced, deliberate style. Less emotive sing-song linguistic tricks and more substance.

Regarding Chris Christie's Rumored Presidential Run

2011-09-27T10:32:00.000-04:00

I had an impassioned call from a public union employee here in NJ this morning. She is concerned that,

"the anti-Christ is running for president."

Of course, she is referring to this week's rumors that NJ governor and enemy #1 of the state's public sector unions, Chris Christie, may be reconsidering his refusal to run for the GOP presidential nomination.

My friend then insisted that Christie is "never in New Jersey," which I immediately branded as a lie concocted by her union bosses. He may travel around the country to support fellow GOP officials, raise funds, and generally boost voter awareness of himself for some future presidential run. But that's not illegal. And my friend confessed to having no actual personal knowledge of Christie's calendar or travel schedule.

Further, I pointed out to her that, if she really believes her union's screeds against Christie, then she should be glad he might be elected out of his current office.

Then she contended that he "hates New Jersey." This, too, is, of course, a lie. The guy has ceaselessly explained that he ran for governor because he loves his home state and wanted to do what he could to save it from fiscal ruin.

But as to the recent rumors that he's now considering running in the GOP race for the presidential nomination, well, I don't think he's going to enter that race.

Is he tempted by Rick Perry's awful debate performances? Probably. And Perry's troubling off-the-cuff gaffes? Yes.

But don't think that the next Rick Perry won't be Chris Christie when it comes to gaffes. Not to mention Christie's own record.

Perry is a two-term governor of a state which has seen huge, if low-paying, job growth under his governorship.

When you think of Christie running for president, two words ought to come to mind:

Sarah Palin

Like the former Alaska governor, Christie has yet to complete a full term, let alone be re-elected. And his budgetary accomplishments, while important, are fairly modest so far. His fight with the teachers' union, while bearing fruit, isn't yet enough to solve New Jersey's $20B pension funding gap.

Everyone in New Jersey knows that, for Christie's public sector union pension and health care funding crusade to be complete, he has to take on the firefighters and police unions, too. Then get re-elected.

Christie has set New Jersey on a new, post-Corzine and -McGreavey course, but it's not yet enough to declare victory.

Then you have Christie's vulnerability, shared with Rick Perry, on foreign policy issues.

Personally, I think Christie is right to reject efforts to draft him. Even if Tom Kean is correct in saying Christie is reconsidering, I think the current governor will be making a big mistake if he decides, after all, to run for president.

Regarding Ron Suskind's Confidence Men

2011-09-26T00:50:00.020-04:00

Peggy Noonan's column in this past weekend's edition of the Wall Street Journal, entitled Amateur Hour at the White House, began with a reference to Ron Suskind's just-published book, Confidence Men.

She wrote,

"If Mr. Suskind is right, I have been wrong in my critiques of the president's economic policy. None of it was as bad as I said. It was much worse.

The most famous part of the book is the Larry Summers quote that he saw it as a "Home Alone" administration, with no grown-ups in charge. But there's more than that. Most of us remember the president as in a difficult position from day one: two wars and an economic crash, good luck with that. But Mr. Suskind recasts the picture.

He ran meetings as if they were afternoon talk shows. An unnamed adviser says the 2009 stimulus legislation was the result of "poor conceptualizing." Another: "We should have spent more time thinking about where the money was being spent, rather than simply that there was this hole of a certain size in the economy that needed to be filled, so fill it." Well, yes.

The decision to focus on health care was the president's own. It could have been even worse. Some staffers advised him—this was just after the American economy lost almost 600,000 jobs in one month—that he should focus on global warming.

Mr. Suskind's book is controversial, and some of his sources have accused him of misquoting them. The White House says Mr. Suskind talked to too many disgruntled former staffers. But he seems to have talked to a lot of gruntled ones, too. The overarching portrait of chaos, lack of intellectual depth and absence of political wisdom, from a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter at this paper, rings true."

It's worse than that. Last week stories ran regarding Anita Dunn and Christine Romer telling Wonderboy that the anti-female bias in the upper echelons of his administration was so bad it could trigger a lawsuit. Dunn denied the stories and claimed Suskind misquoted her.

Imagine how shocked she must have been when the New York Times wrote that Suskind played the tape of the interview and......he stands vindicated.

My question is, how arrogant must Wonderboy have been to allow such access to be granted, such stories to stream out of his White House. And just in time for the election cycle.

I'm not at all sure Noonan is correct in characterizing Summers' comments as the worst. But the coming weeks should bring more interesting tidbits along similar lines.

Last Night's Fox News/Google Florida GOP Presidential Debate

2011-09-23T09:03:00.000-04:00

I tried to watch last night's Fox News/Google debate from Florida. I really did. It didn't take more than, I think, five minutes before I was channel-surfing. The pace was just too sluggish for me.

God help me, I just can't take the tedious, repetitive questions and evasive answers anymore. If others can, more power to 'em.

No matter who sponsors these things, and what the allegedly ground-breaking format for cutting off run on self-promoting 'answers' and such, I typically watch the next day's Fox News and Bloomberg programs for a digest of the high points of the debate.

Last night, I actually fell asleep during the latter half of the program. At least I think I did. Evidently it was so boring there was no recency effect for my memory.

What I last recall of the debate was former governor Johnson answering a question involving something to do with spending. But the actual topic is unimportant.

What is important is how Johnson replied. He began off-topic. Completely off-topic. Something about promising to send a balanced 2013 budget to Congress. But what I quickly realized, because I've used the tactic myself in business meetings, was that he was thinking in background about his real reply while tossing up canned positions on a somewhat-related point, so that, about 20 seconds into a 60 second reply, he came around to what his mind had rapidly settled on as his answer. I remember this because his 'answer' was prefaced by a qualifier like 'somewhat' or 'options including.' Meaning he didn't really have an answer.

That was pretty much it for me. The last straw. And I don't mean poll.

I think what would be more meaningful to me would be something like the following. A network provides a weekly two-hour slot for its 'candidate of the week.' One of the GOP presidential hopefuls sits on a set with one or two moderators and answers questions from online feeds and a live audience. Moderators provide follow-up questions and/or fill in background on the candidate's prior remarks on the topic. Or contrast their stance with other candidates, etc.

And, for good measure, the original audience/online questioner gets a few minutes of give-and-take with the candidate, so if the latter evades the question, the questioner can complain about that and note it for everyone else.

I really don't care so much what Mitt thinks about Rick. Or what Newt thinks about anyone. Or what Rick (Santorum) does to try to look relevant.

In the end, I care more about how these people interact with prospective voters than how they fence with each other. I don't expect them to agree with each other, so what's the surprise in these bear-baiting formats?

Rick Perry On Social Security

2011-09-22T08:50:00.000-04:00

I caught Sean Hannity's interview with Rick Perry last night. It covered a wide range of topics, but I was particularly interested in Perry's responses on Social Security.

Suffice to say, Perry has no clear idea of what he would do about Social Security. The essence of his replies were to say, about three times, that those on or nearing eligibility for Social Security would get their benefits. For middle-aged, 45 and under Americans, Perry punted.

Clearly, he's smarting from the 'Ponzi scheme' remark. He defended it, but was obviously worried that older Americans think he's for repealing the entire program.

Of course, those few of you who are regular readers of this blog know that, personally, I would repeal it. It's an illegal and ill-advised Ponzi scheme created by idiots nearly 80 years ago. It was badly-designed then, and it's worse now. Most importantly, one must realize it was never going to be solvent as a general-pool, defined-benefit scheme.

Now, I'll allow that Perry mentioned the various solutions others have offered, e.g., a general nod to anything Paul Ryan says. Perry vaguely mentioned an IRA-like personal account to be self-managed, as well as a conventional, government-run account.

Basically, Perry won't commit to any one solution. So he's either just playing politics, truly can't decide what he believes, or both.

Which leads me to this conclusion.

Whether it's Mitt or Rick, either one, flawed as they are, will be better than letting Wonderboy ruin America for four more years, come November of next year.

Lightsquared- The Other Breaking Administration Scandal

2011-09-21T00:43:00.019-04:00

It's not just the Soyndra scandal that is currently breaking in Washington, D.C.

There's also the little matter of Lightsquared.

"LightSquared is owned by the Harbinger Capital hedge fund, headed by billionaire investor Phil Falcone. He visited the White House and made large donations to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Soon after, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted LightSquared a highly unusual waiver that allows the company to build out a national 4G wireless network on the cheap.

The deal has been criticized not only for its 'pay to play' appearance but also because the LightSquared network would interfere with the part of the wireless spectrum that is used by Global Positioning Systems (GPS).

Meanwhile, the White House is facing accusations that it tried to pressure an Air Force general to change his testimony on the GPS interference issue. According to the Washington Post:

GOP staffers of the House strategic forces subcommittee accused the White House of trying to influence the testimony of an Air Force general who was speaking about the project's potential to interfere with the Global Positioning System, the satellite network relied on by the military and private industry. The staffers said Gen. William Shelton revealed in an earlier closed meeting that the White House pressured him to include language in his testimony Thursday supporting LightSquared's venture."

Shelton's accusation is particularly damaging because, according to legal commentators, it involves the administration in orchestrating testimony. A serious matter which is criminal in nature.
Isn't it ironic that Solyndra and Lightsquared are both hitting the administration together? And don't forget the still-lingering Fast and Furious scandal. That's the operation in which Justice oversaw distributing arms to Mexican drug dealers which have killed law enforcement personnel. Eric Holder is, I believe, still stonewalling that one.

The Solyndra Scandal

2011-09-20T00:31:00.026-04:00

The breaking, growing Solyndra solar panel maker scandal is proving to be the sort of embarrassment which could well be the decisive factor in driving Wonderboy's poll numbers into the basement for good.

Yes, we all know about the Bush administration quashing the loan application unanimously, only to see the First Rookie's energy department magically resurrect and pass it early in its tenure. And, yet, current energy staffers claim it was, of course, Bush's fault.

But the more interesting news is the restructuring of loan seniority which occurred in violation of federal law.

We are told that the federally-guaranteed $535MM loan cursed Solyndra, because its absolute seniority to all other debt scared off subsequent lenders. And that is totally plausible.

But we've also learned that George Kaiser, of the famous wealthy California Kaiser family, both donated money to one of Wonderboy's wife's charitable foundations, as well as served as a donation "bundler" for him, was involved.

It seems that sometime after the federal loan guarantee was made, Kaiser's multi-million dollar, pre-existing loan to Solyndra was made part of a debt restructuring which allowed it to illegally leapfrog the federal guarantee in seniority, and then be repaid.

This will be the real juice in the scandal. When the details all come out, the actual $535MM of bad government industrial policy won't be the worst of it, because, well, sadly, that's business as usual in Washington.

No, the real news will be that the self-proclaimed cleanest, most ethical administration in the nation's history will be shown to have nakedly violated federal law to help a big campaign donor/bundler to recover a risky loan from Solyndra before it went bankrupt.

And that news should break just in time for Wonderboy to be entering the last 12 months of his term and attempting to focus on his re-election campaign.

Nothing like a really good scandal to distract a sitting president and turn voters off to his bid for another term. Just ask Dick Nixon- if you could.

The Two GOP House Special Elections Wins

2011-09-19T08:56:00.001-04:00

By now I guess it's old news that the two Republicans contesting special elections in a heavily-Democratic NYC district and a district in Nevada both won.

The NYC district is famous for two reasons. First, it was disgraced Anthony Weiner's home, and, second, it had been represented by a Democrat since 1923.

The national import of these election results was so great as to merit a column from Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal this past weekend. Despite her baseless tendency to ignore the venality of Wonderboy's administration and its various extremely socialist and liberal staffers, Noonan actually became bold enough to claim that these two elections mark a national dissatisfaction with the president.

Indeed, they do. It's almost impossible to believe that, with each passing week, Wonderboy unveils new taxes in hopes that they will rally lower-income voters to him, as he exhorts Congress to pass another stimulus bill. Then he goes out on the stump or commands television coverage for some speech on the same topic.

To say the guy has a tin ear is no longer even remotely sufficient to describe his isolation from the sentiments of the broad US electorate.

But if you needed a barometer to gauge how badly he's doing across America, those two special elections would be hard to beat. One victory in a long-time Democratic stronghold, the other in a district which had just a 55 vote difference in the 2008 presidential election, but went overwhelmingly for the GOP candidate last week.

Kind of evokes Bob Dylan, doesn't it?

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows...

Newt As GOP Opening Act

2011-09-16T00:35:00.032-04:00

I happened to catch some of the exchanges on Fox News' 'The Five,' it's uneven replacement for the departed Glenn Beck program at 5pm, earlier this week, after the CNN GOP presidential debate.

The name of the program is a play on the time of day and the program's composition- five Fox News contributors. Former CNBC options program participant, now-rebranded Fox Business Channel personality Eric Bolling notionally chairs the group, which includes brainless and lone liberal Bob Beckel, former Bush press secretary Dana Perino, Greg Gutfield, and what seems to be a rotation of any of the following: Kimberly Guilfoyle, Andrew Napolitano, Monica Crowley and Andrea Tantaros.

When I saw it, Gutfield was discussing the one-liners exchanged during the debate. Several people gave Bachmann credit for her quick comeback to Rick Perry about what offended her about his HPV vaccination decision.

Gutfield focused on Gingrich and his wonderful retort when someone asked him about voters being scared by Romney's or Perry's remarks concerning Social Security, which was, paraphrased as closely as I can recall it,

'No, not when they're being scared by President Obama every day.'

But Gutfield went on to say that it's pretty clear that Gingrich has these things canned and ready to fire off when appropriate.

Since Gingrich has had so many campaign missteps, and ranks so low among the candidates in the polls, I thought perhaps he could be given the job of being the official GOP debate warm up comedian.

Before the debate, Newt could appear like a talk show host and give a 10-minute monologue. Like the late Johnny Carson or, now, Leno or Letterman, neither of whom I watch, Newt could work through a patter which noted recent Democratic political actions and gaffes, getting laughs as he verbalized zingers which embodied Tea Party and/or conservative viewpoints.

This way, we'd all benefit from hearing Gingrich's humor and wit, without actually worrying that someone might mistakenly elect him president.

Another Bachmann Gaffe

2011-09-15T11:33:00.000-04:00

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal noted another Michele Bachmann gaffe.

It seems that, after sparring with Rick Perry in the recent CNN GOP candidates' debate over HPV vaccinations, Bachmann made the rounds of the talk shows the next morning alleging that the vaccines could cause "mental retardation." The Journal article contended that there is absolutely no evidence to support this very irresponsible and outrageous accusation.

It's bad enough when a candidate's intensity gets in the way of her/his messages. But when Bachmann engages in loose talk about alleged side effects of a vaccine like the one for HPV, it's much, much worse.

Now Michele Bachmann is combining junk/nonexistent science with campaigning. As the Journal editorial pointed out, it would be a very bad thing if Bachmann's wrongheaded allegations cause parents who otherwise would have protected their children from HPV with the vaccine to change their minds and not do so.

It's reminiscent of the British hysteria over a vaccine thought to cause, I believe, autism. Later found to be a totally baseless allegation, as well.

So it seems there is now another reason why I would find it difficult to support Bachmann for president. Her campaigning is looking irresponsible and portrays her very much as not yet ready for prime time.

Wonderboy's Approach To Job Creation

2011-09-15T00:47:00.007-04:00

I heard some of Wonderboy's latest jobs stump speech yesterday afternoon on Bloomberg. It was hilarious.

From the soundbite I caught, his understanding of how businesses create jobs amounted to this,

'....so business owners can get some more money in their pockets and say, hey, I can hire some more people.....'

Hahaha....if only!

What a simpleton the president shows himself to be.

Business owners don't make decisions about the future based on today's cash balances. They don't take near-term income as the basis for long-term investments in hiring or buying capital equipment.

No, those decisions are based on their projections of future sales and costs. Currently, it's looking like the US economy is re-entering a recessionary phase. And taxes for next year and after are highly uncertain. Thus, most business people who can, will defer investments in people or assets until the future becomes clearer and brighter.

But Wonderboy's wrong-headed, simplistic view of economics and business is what you get when you elect a lawyer who has never actually managed anything in his life.

Except, of course, his election campaigns.

There May Be Hope For Truth On Social Security!

2011-09-14T09:32:00.000-04:00

I was watching Fox News last night to see post-debate coverage of CNN's almost-unnoticed 'Tea Party' debate on Monday evening. I actually stumbled across it as it ran live, but mistakenly thought I'd found a rerun of MSNBC's GOP presidential debate of last week, so skipped on to other channels.

Never the less, the general sense of the pundits was that there are now too many fringe candidates in these debates, i.e., Herman Cain, Jon Huntsman, Rick Santorum, Ron Paul and probably Newt Gingrich, too. That the debates have evolved/degenerated into everyone beating up on Perry because he became the front-runner within a week of entering the race.

But something very interesting occurred on Sean Hannity's program last night.

Hannity often has pollster Frank Luntz air live focus group reactions to speeches or debates, then does Q&A with the group to ascertain their motivations and reasoning.

Last night, Luntz polled the group on their reaction to the Romney vs. Perry exchange concerning Social Security. Perry came out and bluntly called the program a Ponzi scheme. But, more tellingly, and a first, as far as I can tell, Perry described the program as, to paraphrase as closely as I can recall,

'An eighty-year old federal program that was badly designed.'

Now, Perry's allusion to SS becoming a state program makes no sense. It's not supposed to be a temporary social welfare service like unemployment or medicare. If you're going to have some national minimum pension assistance, it should be nationally-funded.

That said, Perry is the first candidate to my knowledge to begin to label it an old idea that should be scrapped because it was badly conceived and implemented. He said the purpose was necessary, but not this program.

Here's where it got interesting. Almost all of Luntz' focus group backed Perry and derided Romney as a phony. One guy actually aped Bill O'Reilly's body language lady, Tanya Reiman, noting how often Romney blinked, moves his hands on the podium and looked away when uttering Social Security-related platitudes which the audience said sounded like pandering to Democrats.

In general, they liked and applauded Perry's blunt and honest depiction of SS, while they loathed Romney's sucking up to Democrats and conventional wisdom, lying about the program's integrity.

Maybe there's hope yet for a total restructuring of SS from a general defined-benefit scheme with no limits, to an individual, account-based defined contribution program with payments from the federal government based on a one-year lagged fixed percentage of Treasury receipts. No COLAs or anything like that. The recipients share economic pain or rewards along with employed Americans who fund the program.

I know I'd never be elected on my views. Because, if it were up to me, the transition would be sudden and abrupt. Basically, anyone now drawing SS payments could continue on the program they entered. Everyone else, no matter how close they are to collecting payments, would be put into the new fixed-percentage, defined contribution account scheme.

Period.

The entire program was never a solvent concept. Time to just scrap it quickly and totally.

Rick Perry's Texas Economy

2011-09-14T00:52:00.035-04:00

I've been thinking recently about the comments would-be detractors have made concerning Governor Rick Perry's state's economy.

We know from various reports that Texas has created more jobs than any other single state in the past several years. Perhaps even the decade- I forget. And, more than any one state, I believe over a period of years, Texas has created more jobs than all other states combined.

It sounds like a really good story.

Then Democrats and Mitt Romney weighed in to say that those are low-wage jobs. Wonderboy's education secretary said he pities Texas kids for having to settle for such poor schooling.

Romney, in a recent debate, reminded Perry and viewers that Texas is blessed with gas and oil. Assets for which Rick Perry can take no credit.

Separately, a Texas university economist, while a guest on Tom Keene's noontime Bloomberg program, described the state's social safety net as 'thin.' Jobless benefits are low and of short duration. State spending on social benefits are, on the whole, low by national standards. And, yes, he said the jobs were, on average, low-paying by national standards, as well.

So we are left with the image of a large state which has coped with an enormous net inflow of residents, made the most of its energy resources, kept taxes and spending low, allowing for job creation which has absorbed the bulk of those new residents.

My question is, regardless of what credit Rick Perry does, or does not take for the Texas economy and employment situation, can and does the US, as a nation, want the Texan solution?

If Rick Perry replaced Wonderboy in the Oval Office tomorrow, what would he do to ignite job growth? Cut unemployment benefits? Social Security? Other entitlement spending?

Mind you, personally, I'm all for that. But I'm not sure that's what voters in Massachusetts, Illinois, California and other solidly blue states are expecting.

It's not clear to me that Rick Perry's Texas is a role model for employment strategies that we want to implement nationwide. In fact, regardless of Texas' spending on social programs, we really can't afford Texas-style employment nationwide.

It's not Rick Perry's fault that Texas is not home to more high-value-added, high-paying jobs. Financial service firms aren't chock-a-block in Austin, Dallas or Houston. Nor are many other large, white-collar sector employers which pay high compensation for high-value work.

Which, I think, means that Rick Perry's policies for facilitating job growth in Texas may not really matter much to the rest of the US, unless we are ready to implement, almost immediately, the drastic reduction of federal entitlement programs of which many speak, but none, save Paul Ryan, have really dared describe in detail.

That doesn't mean I wouldn't vote for Rick Perry. But it does mean I'd be cautious about believing he can transfer much of what has worked economically for Texas to the federal level very soon.

Holman Jenkins, Jr. Satirizes Wonderboy's Jobs Speech

2011-09-13T00:18:00.012-04:00

Holman Jenkins, Jr., wrote this amusing editorial in last weekend's edition of the Wall Street Journal. While the alleged speech is unlikely to have actually been writtten, I agree with Jenkins that its sentiments are true. Thus, I thought it worthy of being reposted in its entirety.

An unreliable source provided this early draft of President Obama's speech to Congress last Thursday night:

Members of Congress, honored guests, my fellow Americans:

Jobs are the No. 1 priority of the American people. Jobs are the No. 1 priority of my administration's rhetoric. Jobs have not been the No. 1 priority of my administration's policies, however. Let me explain why.

A British statesman—I believe it was Harold Macmillan—was asked what he intended to do if elected prime minister. He answered, roughly, "Deal with matters that arise." That has not been my approach.

Elections have consequences. We mastered the use of slogans and imagery and won the presidency. Now the power is ours to choose our agenda, and we chose not to be distracted by matters that arise—say, the country's economic crisis. We chose instead to pursue the things that we know should be pursued.

These things are called shibboleths—badges of identity that signify us as "progressives" and entitle us to a sense of superiority. One is nationalization of health care, an emblem of our "caring."

One on which we've made less progress is the displacement of fossil fuels in favor of "green energy," at much higher cost. Accompanying this shibboleth are related shibboleths—about "energy independence," about "global warming"—that, like all shibboleths, are impervious to examination.

Another is union power—labor is good, management is bad. I could go on. These shibboleths are so important that, as you will have seen by now, we will not allow them to be impeded or delayed by matters that merely arise, such as the public's crying need for jobs. So we have blocked drilling for fossil fuels in as many places as possible, protecting Americans from the jobs that would be created.

So we have sacrificed jobs in order to punish Boeing for building a plant in South Carolina that would employ nonunion workers.

So we enacted a health-care plan whose unimaginable complexity and cost can only weigh negatively on every private-sector employer.

I have chosen to pursue this agenda, notwithstanding its untimeliness in the face of matters that have arisen (i.e., the economic crisis), in part because I'm comfortable with it.

Consider my background. I don't know much about business and, frankly, don't care to. You see, I have a self-reinforcing image of Barack Obama. I am high-minded. Business people are greedy and, somehow, lesser. I stay focused on that.

Some might say, "Had I known this I never would have voted for you." A) You weren't listening carefully; and B) that was my intention, my art. To conceal—for instance, by dropping one's Gs—is what it means to be an effective left-wing ideologue in America these days.

I am not anti-business. I get a supreme sense of satisfaction when business leaders approach me and, in a deferential manner, ask for subsidies and regulatory favors that will determine whether their companies succeed or fail. Like solar subsidies. This is the kind of job creation I'm interested in.

My administration has taken flak because of our "investment" of tax dollars in a solar company that last week filed for bankruptcy. Don't be misled. If such companies were profitable and could survive without subsidies, they would not be fit objects of government charity, nor would their leaders approach me with a deferential mien.

Their dependency is what makes them loyal constituents, generous with a campaign donation, willing to go on CNBC and praise our policies. You can always count on me for job creation when it means taking money from independent businesses, those that are answering the call of the marketplace, and giving it to dependent businesses, those that are answering the call of government.

In closing, let us recognize that an election is approaching. The time is upon us when my administration must ratchet up its rhetoric to make it sound like your agenda (jobs, growth) is my agenda.

Indeed, I will begin tonight by junking the more revealing passages of this draft speech and pretending that I place a higher value on job-creating pragmatism than on my progressive shibboleths.

This, I hope, will cause you to re-elect me. Thank you for listening.

Wonderboy's Rose Garden Speech This Morning

2011-09-12T12:08:00.000-04:00

If you happened to catch Wonderboy's Rose Garden appearance this morning to formally send his jobs bill to Congress, you saw vintage campaigning. As well as the man's continuing tin ear/eye when it comes to what concerns the bulk of the nation's voters.

I, of course, turned the volume off. But I saw and heard enough to understand that this morning's carefully-staged event was classic Wonderboy.

He again urged, in contravention of the separation of powers, that Congress simply rubber stamp his bill, with no debate nor changes.

But the visuals were the clue as to how the First Rookie continues to view his mission. Behind him were arrayed, in uniform, all manner of public sector union employees- teachers, firemen, police, etc. The message being, you in the states don't have the right to decide whether to keep or dismiss public union employees. Or to choose to borrow to continue to fund them.

No, the federal government will unilaterally borrow the money for you, then give it to you, provided you continue to employ these public sector union personnel.

Meanwhile, the other spending in his jobs bill is essentially for other union members- those in the construction trades. And at high, Davis-Bacon Act rates, mind you. So you, the taxpayer, will pay the highest amount of money possible to construction workers, thus getting the smallest amount of value for the road, bridges, sewer systems, etc., built with your borrowed dollars.

Wonderboy clearly doesn't care what most voters think of his explicit bias toward union members. Or that he's demanding a second...or third...fourth....how many now?....round of stimulus spending to transfer your tax dollars to favored public and private sector union members.

Interesting how totally insensitive he is to the lesson of last November and the basic complaints of Tea Party members and their kindred voters- that the federal government usurps too much power and money.

Judging by his bill, and his little visual display in the Rose Garden this morning, the First Rookie clearly doesn't care what the bulk of America's voters think of his prejudices.

Wonderboy's New Stimulus....errr....Jobs Package'- "Pass It Now!"

2011-09-09T12:48:00.000-04:00

This morning's financial networks were full of anchors asking everyone in sight:

a)What did you think of Wonderboy's jobs package?
b)Will it pass as proposed?

Pretty funny stuff. The proposals, of course, are simply more public- and labor-union friendly stimulus spending to be paid for by....well....tax hikes and unnamed reductions to planned future spending increases.

Why are all of this president's ideas for jobs targeted on construction, teachers, fire and police? Maybe because that's where the union votes are?

But of course.

"Pass it now???!!!!!"

You've got to be kidding! This from the guy who plotted with Frisco Nan and Harry Reid how to ram through his health care without giving any Congress members time to read the whole thing.

But, don't take my words for these reactions.

God bless Frank Luntz and Fox News for bringing his scintillating focus groups to light. Last night on Hannity's program, Luntz had a roomful of between 40 and 50 voters, split evenly between McCain and Wonderboy supporters in 2008, to react to the jobs speech.

When Luntz asked how many were 'inspired' by the speech, only two people raised their hands. Based on prior remarks, they were certifiable idiots. Really.

The only two people in the entire room who supported the First Rookie were two not-very-bright minority women who looked and talked like they were on welfare already. One got the sense they'd support absolutely anything Wonderboy proposed.

The group overwhelmingly pronounced the proposals in the speech as just more stimulus, more appeals to raise taxes, neither of which will work.

Of the entire room, I believe only 3-4 raised their hands to indicated they'd re-elect the president, and perhaps 2 more were considering it. That's it.

On the subject of "pass it now," all of those commenting remarked that this was merely a rerun of the call to pass ObamaCare sight unseen. Nobody advocated for it.

Honestly, it had to be pretty depressing for Wonderboy's team, and Hannity said as much.

By the way, does anybody else recall that presidents send legislation up to the Hill all the time, have for decades, only to have it cut to pieces and rewritten by both chambers?

Who does Wonderboy think he is so special as to demand immediate passage of his proposals intact?

Last Night's MSNBC GOP Presidential Debate

2011-09-08T10:56:00.000-04:00

It took me a while to realize, by 8:30 last night, that I wasn't watching the GOP presidential candidates' debate. Quickly realizing it wasn't being hosted by/on Fox, I scanned the local public television and major broadcast networks. No luck. Nothing on CNN, either.

Then, in disbelief, I tried MSNBC and found it. I couldn't even name the guy I saw initially moderating, then I cringed when I saw liberal newscaster Brian Williams.

Suffice to say, between the self-serving answers of the candidates and what I assumed would be biased, nasty questions from the liberal hosts, I didn't linger long on the channel. Rather, I intended to view Fox and other networks today for post-analysis.

Sure enough, Michelle Malkin called into Fox News to provide a balanced review of the proceedings. I had missed a question someone asked which opened with,

'How can you sleep at night when.....?'

Malkin noted that Wonderboy would never be treated in that manner. She went on to compare the prior evening's debate with a Democratic candidate debate at a liberal Democratic Mecca, hosted by Fox featuring Rush Limbaugh and herself as moderators.

In effect, I don't think I missed much, nor did anyone else who failed to find the event.

Rhode Island Does Right By Bondholders

2011-08-29T11:30:00.000-04:00

Tucked away in a side column of an early August issue of the Wall Street Journal, in the Money & Investing section, was an article heralding Rhode Island's new law "that places bondholders ahead of other creditors."

In particular, the well-publicized case of Central Falls will now see bondholders receive their entire amount due of $635,000. Retirees, however, may not fare so well as the town filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 9.

The Journal piece explained,

"State officials and lawmakers say the law is needed to lure investors to bonds that will be sold by other Rhode Island municipalities. Without the law, future bond deals in Rhode Island likely would need to carry higher interest rates in order to entice potential buyers scared by the Central Falls bankruptcy filing."

The Rhode Island law is reported to be the first among the 50 states, and, if imitated, might reduce the bankruptcies forecast by analysts such as Meredith Whitney, as municipalities maintained access to bond markets to help them deal with near-term funding problems.

It's nice to see at least one state do the right thing and protect bondholders from elected officials seeking an easy way out that seems to let voters/taxpayers off the hook for their representatives' financial mistakes.

Rick Perry's Leap In The Polls

2011-08-26T00:11:00.015-04:00

Rick Perry's surge past Mitt Romney in last week's GOP voter polls of presidential candidates stunned many observers. If I recall correctly, the former now leads the latter by nearly double digits.

By moving into the lead, Perry returns a spotlight to Texas, home of three former presidents. And, incidentally, a state which teaches creationism, rather than evolution.

I remember being similarly embarrassed when Mike Hickabee was leading GOP polls four years ago, and Arkansas, the state he governed, became known for the same weird educational doctrine.

How in the world, in this century, can any US state really be officially sanctioning the teaching of creationism? How is this possible?

It makes our country a laughingstock when we have serious presidential contenders who were the executives of states with this position on mankind's history. Not to mention makes you question the intellect and attitudes of people who were governors of such states.

Teacher Evaluation Trouble in New York State

2011-08-25T16:44:00.000-04:00

One of the benefits of our federalist system is that states with wacky policies can actually lose residents, business, etc., to more sane, neighboring states.

Take, for example, the case of New York's recent teach evaluation law. A state supreme court judge ruled against a provision of the law allowing schools to fire teachers "whose students persistently get poor marks on standardized tests and other assessments." In other words, teachers who can't exhibit adequate performance on the one thing we actually expect from our schools- children who demonstrate learning.

Today's Wall Street Journal reported that New York Justice Michael C. Lynch,

"specifically rejected the section allowing schools to give teachers the lowest rating if they fail the student performance part of their evaluation, even if they score higher on other measures."

The law which went into effect last year made "40% of a teacher's review" based on their students' achievements.

Essentially, the teachers' union in New York sued the state, claiming the new process relies too heavily on test scores. It appears they won.

For now.

There are, according to the Journal piece, various aspects of the new process which are still subject to collective bargaining. The state will appeal the ruling.

Looking beyond the problem with the teachers' union, one has to feel sorry for New Yorkers living under such idiotic state supreme court judges.

Can you imagine some of the poorer state residents learning that their own state's court system overturned a basic, sensible notion that teachers who can't manage to educate the children under their care to perform well on standardized tests get a pass to continue harming other children, too?

Maybe the New York teachers won this round. But if the ruling holds up, I'd suspect it's one more reason people will flee New York, as the value of even "free" public education declines.

Luddite Economics

2011-08-24T11:18:00.000-04:00

As a person with a substantial academic background in economics and business, it always pains me to hear politicians- of any partisan stripe- talk about jobs as if they are simply created out of thin air. Or to hear officeholders, especially presidents and governors, say 'I created' so many jobs.

Right now, as Republican governor of Texas Rick Perry campaigns, he, and the media, are full of the 'I created' speak. But real conservatives don't believe government creates private sector jobs, per se. Unless, of course, they nationalize something or give money to a company specifically for job creation.

But, mostly, the best one can say about a government executive is,

'S/he orchestrated ab environment of regulatory restraint, moderate taxes and generally favorable conditions for business, thus attracting new companies and facilitating higher employment.'

Further, hearing politicians negatively remark on technology's impact on employment, like Wonderboy did recently, also pains me greatly.

To vilify ATMs, the internet and/or other capital-equipment based productivity increasing tools is to be an economic Luddite.

These inventions either improve existing products and services for customers, lower prices of goods and services, or provide new capabilities, such as online search for and purchase of goods or services. All good things. Things which improve living standards, when measured by consumption and satisfaction per dollar.

That many of these technological improvements or facilitators also result in the elimination of jobs and businesses is simply part of the advance of human civilization.

As a corollary, I think it represents a serious mistake for government officials, e.g., presidents, senators, representatives, governors, to speak of government institutions focusing on 'job creation,' per se.

Since governments don't, and shouldn't, directly create jobs, it would be better to know that those elected officials are working to create environments which are favorable to the growth of existing businesses and the birth of appropriate new ones. Both of which may create jobs.

Yes, ideally one thinks of full employment as a good thing which stimulates economic growth. But that doesn't mean that, say, by borrowing or taxing to raise money, a government entity can then just pay that money to people for "jobs," whatever they may be, and magically create sustained, healthy and productive economic growth.

As I noted in this recent post on my companion business blog,

""All economic problems are about removing impediments to supply, not demand," Arthur Laffer reminds us.

I highlighted Art Laffer's comment because it seems useful to me to focus on the true fundamental nature of man's economic problem: scarcity. Economics has always been, at root, about how to allocate scarce resources for the production of goods and services to satisfy a population's demands, at prices which satisfy both producer and consumer. "

Thus, productivity is a good thing. Producing more goods or services with fewer inputs results in the freeing up of more resources. Perhaps lower prices.

And without productivity growth, there can't be non-inflationary wage growth for workers. Nor, for that matter, non-inflationary growth at all, absent simply adding more resources, such as people or materials.
Productivity increases allow healthy, sustainable and non-inflationary economic growth by releasing resources for other uses, instead of just requiring more resources for a society's economic growth.

Higher productivity is a good and necessary aspect of an economy, not a phenomenon to be lamented or denigrated, as some politicians are in the habit of doing.

Paul Ryan's Formal Refusal To Run for President

2011-08-23T07:46:00.000-04:00

I was busy ferrying a friend from his car's dealership to his home last night, for which he bought me dinner. So I missed seeing any Fox News programs and, thus, also missed coverage of Wisconsin Congressman's official declaration that he won't be entering the GOP presidential race for 2012.

It wasn't until I read this morning's Wall Street Journal editorials that I learned of this recent development. In concert with that editorial's sentiments, I'm happy that Ryan plans to remain in the House, assuming he wins his district again next year (for the eighth time).

Much has been made of Ryan's articulate manner of explaining the necessity of entitlement and tax reforms. But, as we've seen from Wonderboy, there can be an actual loss of force in the Oval Office, whereas being a powerful committee chairman in the House or Senate can be a force multiplier, for good or bad.

In Ryan's case, were the Senate and/or Oval Office to be won by the GOP in 2012, he would definitely be able to extend his influence from his House position.

It's an irony of the American system that a Representative like Ryan has only to win a single district in order to be returned to the House and, if in the majority, have great effect on national policy. Even being a Senator means, for many states, a much more challenging and expensive campaign just to, again, be one of many in a legislature with not really a tremendously larger influence than a Representative, unless the Senate is split closely enough to make every Senator the potential 60th or 41st vote.

When I was growing up in central Illinois, both GOP Congressional leaders lived within 20 miles of me. Bob Michel was the ineffectual House GOP Minority leader, while Everett Dirksen had the same position in the Senate. Neither ever ran for president, but both had surprising influence as a result of holding fairly safe seats for decades in a then solidly-GOP downstate Illinois.

But running for and winning the White House is an entirely different matter. Especially when there is an incumbent, no matter how inept and unpopular. The requirements of running a national campaign is probably not where you want said candidate to get his/her executive experience. And that could well be what happens to Paul Ryan, were he to have acceded to the requests of the GOP fundraisers who tried to recruit him into the race.

As I wrote in an earlier post, I'm reminded of Texas Senator Phill Gramm's run for president in the post-Reagan era. Though he led in money raised, Gramm never escaped the so-called 'green eyeshade' image and a sense he was, as the Wall Street Journal put it, 'running for chief accountant, rather than president.'

Ryan infuses his fiscal messages with more moral and lifestyle content, but, down deep, it's still mostly about wonkish policy details that don't actually play well in presidential campaigns.

Perhaps a different power distribution post-2012 will provide more options for Congressman Ryan. More success in his efforts to actually reverse the growth of entitlement spending. Perhaps a VP slot or a return to Madison to follow Scott Walker as governor. Or perhaps Ryan will depart the political scene, once he's successfully accomplished his work on entitlements.

But the Journal editorial was, I think, correct to congratulate him on knowing his limits and choosing to avoid the temptation of a presidential campaign, no matter how much others wish he'd have agreed.

The Tea Party's Next Challenge

2011-08-22T10:36:00.000-04:00

Yuval Levin and Peter Wehner wrote a useful editorial in Friday's edition of the Wall Street Journal entitled The Tea Party's Achilles' Heel.

They argue, correctly, I believe, that the Tea Party movement will have shown itself to be a one-hit wonder if its constituents don't follow their focus on current federal spending with equally serious attention to reforming and reducing the immense promised, but unaffordable social program benefits in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

The authors note how quickly Michele Bachmann backpedaled on Paul Ryan's sensible budget which included entitlement reforms. That her fellow GOP presidential candidates have also remained largely silent on details of entitlement cuts.

Theirs is, I believe, the only really insightful critique of the Tea Party movement which I've read. Ironically, it comes from the right, not the left, and suggests that movement might not go far enough, instead of branding it a domestically-based group of fiscal terrorists, as the administration and some Democratic Congress members have done.

Bachmann's Fatal Mistake- Gasoline Price Promises

2011-08-19T09:52:00.000-04:00

I think Michele Bachmann is gathering momentum in demonstrating that she truly is not yet ready for national political prime time.

One pundit noted, earlier this week, regarding Paul Ryan's being coaxed by GOP moneymen, to consider a presidential run, that running a national campaign will be far more difficult and complex than running to represent Janesville, Wisconisn in Congress.

Obviously, that goes for Bachmann, as well.

But I think Bachmann just made a fatal error. Last night I saw video of her on one of the Fox News programs promising that, if elected, gasoline prices will be less than $2/gallon.

I was stunned, but not totally surprised. This is Bachmann displaying an inability to distinguish Tea Party desires for less government and more free markets, and raw, fawning populism along the lines of the ancient 'bread and circuses' Roman emperors.

A more mature, wise and seasoned Bachmann would have said, on the same topic, something like this,

'When Obama came into office, gasoline was at $1.75. What are you paying now (over $3)? That's because his deliberate anti-oil, anti-coal energy policies are driving up the price of all fossil fuels except natural gas. But we don't yet put natural gas in our car's fuel tanks.

If I'm elected president, I'll reverse his destructive energy policies. I can't, of course, control the price of gasoline or oil- that's the job of the global free markets, in response to global supplies and demand. But I can promise that I'll return as much of this nation's energy policies to free market principles as possible, eliminate the DOE, and transfer whatever useful information-collection and other elements to their most-productive homes in other federal agencies.

The bottom line is in my administration, we'll make responsible, affordable energy a key policy objective.'

Instead, Bachmann comes off as a modern-day King Canute, commanding the price of US gasoline to fall.

Very foolish.

For me, this pretty much spells and end to her viability as a presidential candidate. This sort of dictatorial lunacy will successfully position and portray her, as I and others have already noted, as the GOP version of Wonderboy. An inflexible, power-mad ideologue.

Wonderboy's Bus Tour

2011-08-18T00:01:00.028-04:00

There is much to find humorous about Wonderboy's Midwestern bus tour this month.

First, I guess, is that he succeeds in appearing to be just another candidate for his own office. What with Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and who knows who else is careening around Iowa and nearby parts in a monster bus, the First Rookie seems like just another of the bunch.

Except that since he actually lives in the White House, it's hard to believe anyone in those states actually believing he is an 'outsider.' Which is what the bus thing is supposed to make his would-be supporters believe.

As we've learned in nearly three years of suffering through his presidency, Obama does not have a common touch. He's not a retail politician in the same vein as Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry. He always comes off as a bit stiff and arch.

Frankly, in that regard, he reminds me of George H.W. Bush, whom I liked. But I thought he lost his re-election on the day that he was caught on camera buying a pair of socks in a mall in Maryland. Saying that he was doing his part to spend money and ease the recession. Marveling at a UPC scanner.

George Sr. just looked totally out of touch with the reality of everyday American life.

So, too, does Wonderboy. Attempting to blame Congress for his own failings. Crying "Get It Done!" as if the federal government's spending binge was the GOP House's idea. So maybe what Obama really means to do is castigate Frisco Nan and Harry Reid for their spending in the last Congressional session? Before last November's election?

Then he's running around complaining that the rich- which is now down to only $200K/year for individuals- don't pay enough taxes! As several Wall Street Journal editorials have noted, Wonderboy rails against "millionaires and billionaires," but it's the "thousandaires" whose money he's really after.

So many muddled messages in the heat of a Midwestern summer. But at least Wonderboy is on the bus. Looking populist. Taking his cue from Give 'Em Hell Harry Truman. Although not everyone could commandeer trains and tracks like Harry did. Compared to his whistle-stop tour in what Karl Rove reminded viewers on Fox News was the last month of the campaign, Wonderboy's using a large bus is decidedly un-Presidential.

More like a country singer's tour bus than what one would expect of a sitting President.

Buffett On Taxes

2011-08-17T00:14:00.033-04:00

What do Wonderboy and his favorite billionaire, Warren Buffett, have in common? They both run organizations which have recently suffered a credit rating downgrade.

But being a billionaire doesn't stop Buffett from being used and quoted by the First Rookie at every opportunity for saying the rich should pay higher tax rates. Or more in taxes- Buffett isn't clear on that. But he seems to mean the former.

In this recent post I quoted Stephen Moore's explanation of Warren Buffett's relatively low effective tax rate. To wit,

"Democrats in Congress routinely cite Mr. Buffett's tax confessions as irrefutable evidence that tax rates on the very rich are too low and the system is unfair. And the system would be unfair, if Mr. Buffett's tax facts were the whole truth. But they aren't.

I don't know the details of Warren Buffet's personal taxes, and he hasn't made them public. But the IRS does provide reliable data on effective tax rates—the overall share of their income that various groups pay in federal income taxes (not including state or local taxes) after accounting for all deductions and exemptions. These are different than marginal tax rates, which are paid on the next dollar of income and now peak at 35% for individuals.

So how does Mr. Buffett arrive at such a low personal tax rate? He may have been referring to a 2010 IRS study of the 400 richest American taxpayers, a list he's probably on. It showed those people paid an effective federal income tax of 18.1% in 2008.

Yet that study crucially omits the corporate income tax, which is mostly borne by the owners of companies.

Mr. Buffett owns about one-quarter of his investment company Berkshire Hathaway, and his shares are worth about $38 billion. This wealth is mostly stored in what are technically called "unrealized capital gains." Eventually when those gains are converted into income, he will pay a capital gains tax. Even so, in 2008 Berkshire paid $3 billion in corporate taxes. And since Mr. Buffett is the principal owner, he shoulders a big share of that tax.

The reason for the light capital gains and dividend tax is that corporations pay up to a 35% tax on their profits before a dime of it is passed on to shareholders. The real tax rate on corporate income paid to individuals through capital gains and dividends is not 15%. It is closer to 45% once you count the tax on corporate profits. If the dividend tax rises to 20% next year from 15% today, then the total tax on dividends paid to shareholders would be closer to 50%, and that doesn't include state and local taxes.

Overall, though, Warren Buffett is wrong on taxes. The tax system is already far too reliant on the wealthy to pay the government's bills. Taxes on millionaires and billionaires are already near a record high in terms of the share of all income taxes paid. And the effective tax rate on this group is much higher, not lower, than any other income category. The best way to balance the budget is for the economy to produce a lot more American success stories like Warren Buffett."

Perhaps it's Wonderboy's complete detachment from the world of business and how the money that the federal government taxes is initially earned that leads him to think Warren Buffett is a guy who creates jobs.

Buffett is a money manager. Doesn't our president realize that? Buffett didn't invent anything. He didn't create a company. In fact, the one with which he's most closely associated, Berkshire Hathaway, is the name of a former clothing manufacturer which Buffett acquired.

If anyone were to be a true poster boy for a wealthy person who created tangible products and wealth, it might be Steve Jobs. Or the Koch brothers- but they're conservatives. So I suppose they wouldn't do.

How about Jon Hunstman, Sr? He's probably conservative, as well.

But Buffett is not the best exemplar of someone who has created much from nothing, and complains that he pays too little in taxes.

Further, even Warren confused the issue when he stated that he was very wealthy, then spoke of his low effective tax rate. You see, taxes are on income. Much of Buffett's wealth is, as Stephen Moore noted, in unrealized gains on Berkshire equity.

Maybe even ol' Warren isn't really clear on just why he pays what he pays. But one thing is sure- Warren always plays nice with the current administration, in order to avoid being the victim of a federal witch hunt. I think the tax issue is no exception.

But he does seem to be misinformed on just what share of taxes paid to the federal government are from very high earners. And when a group is that small, does anyone really believe that a single person in the group represents the views of all of the group?

I doubt it.

One thing of which you can be sure, though. When Wonderboy appears before a crowd of lower- or middle-income people, his rich-baiting calls for more taxes from higher earners is going to sound great. Especially if, thanks to the president's policies, those people have virtually no chance of becoming high earners, and, so, just like the president, evince an attitude of envy and greed when it comes to those who have earned more income than them.

More Reservations About Michele Bachmann

2011-08-16T11:40:00.000-04:00

My prior posts concerning Michele Bachmann (spelled incorrectly in the label) all mention her inexperience as an executive.

In my last post I repeated a concern, recently voiced by Dick Morris, that she risks being the conservative or Tea Party equivalent of Wonderboy- long on ideology, short on experience, and no willingness whatsoever to compromise- ever.

As I listened last night to various pundits on Fox News discuss the Iowa Straw Poll results, perhaps Bernie Goldberg's comments on Rick Perry's and Michele Bachmann's religiosity caused me to reflect anew on that strain of the Republican Party.

Goldberg's point was that, in the modern era of campaigning, no candidate can any longer expect to speak to just the audience in front of her/him. Stand-in hostess of Bill O'Reilly's program, conservative radio talk show maven Laura Ingraham, tried to excuse Bachmann's confused explanations regarding her 'submissive' comment by saying that she said it to a friendly church-going crowd.

Goldberg politely but persistently disagreed with Ingraham, noting that Iowa has a preponderance of Evangelical Christians, but that's not going to be true of the rest of the country, and, specifically, not of New Hampshire.

I think he's got a very important point.

For this election cycle, softer social issues are less likely to matter in unseating Wonderboy than clear, concise stands against larger government with more spending, and for a more vibrant private sector. Jobs aren't really the issue, so much as private sector investment and activity. Ideally, jobs will follow, but, really, how, where and when is something we really just have to leave to the private sector.

But Goldberg's point implies that by wearing her faith and religion on her sleeve, Bachmann is probably making a big mistake. And, more fundamentally, may simply be a really bad choice for GOP voters to make. Her insistence on making religion so prominent in her campaign is probably not a winning approach among independents.

Perry has ten years of gubernatorial experience with which to leaven his own religious focus. I don't personally agree with Dick Morris' semi-prediction that Perry will lose to Bachmann in Iowa, to Romney and Bachmann in New Hampshire, and win South Carolina but become a South-only candidate.

For me, considering what occurred in Iowa, then listening to critiques of Bachmann's actions, statements and attitudes in the past week or so, the real concern is that, somehow, the GOP may end up with the wrong presidential candidate. One who won't attract sufficient numbers of Tea Party-like independents.

Romney, everyone generally acknowledges, is soft on real fiscal conservatism. He gave Massachusetts RomneyCare, and now tries to paper over that gigantic mistake. Don't bet on him having true religion when it comes to Tea Party-style fiscal conservatism.

Perry is very populist in his orientation, but I can't stop thinking, as I listen to him, that the nation just isn't ready for another Texan Republican as president. Maybe unfair, but that's what I think.

I don't think Bachmann is really presidential material because she is so strident about her independent stands, while seeming incapable of articulating more productive solutions she would prefer. I suspect that, like Wonderboy, she's a better campaigner than she would be a president. She might even have difficulty with a Republican-controlled Senate and House which are not as far-right as she is.

Karl Rove mentioned that he's heard stories that Chris Christie and Paul Ryan have been so pressed by influential GOP moneymen that both have promised to reconsider their very public refusals to run for president.

Living in New Jersey, I have a close vantage point on Christie. I agree with his belief that he's not ready. He hasn't even cemented his accomplishments here, and makes the occasional public gaffe, like the now-infamous helicopter ride to his son's baseball game.

Paul Ryan is probably more than ready for the Oval Office. In the classic fashion of a manager who has grown into his boss' job, Ryan has done more presidential work as chair of the House Budget Committee than anyone else in Washington. My only concerns are losing him in the House if he loses the nomination and/or general election, and that he may succumb to the Phil Gramm disease. That is, the president is more than accountant-in-chief. Ryan's strengths look good right now, but when actually voting for president, he may look a little narrowly-described.

Then again, if Ryan can pull the independents away from Wonderboy, who really cares? He might be the guy.

The Iowa Straw Poll Results

2011-08-15T00:15:00.029-04:00

Well, yesterday's Iowa straw poll results are in, and Tim Pawlenty, though finishing third, is already out.

Michele Bachmann took first by 152 votes over Texas Congressman Ron Paul in what was reported as the second-heaviest straw poll turnout ever.

Oh, yes, and Rick Santorum came fourth.

I hadn't written a post on the Republican Ames debates of last week because I personally found it so predictable. But I enjoyed Dick Morris' commentary about it on Fox News. How he called Gingrich 'cranky,' and Ron Paul a 'flake' who totally marginalized himself by declaring it okay to let Iran have nuclear weapons.

Thus, it shouldn't be too comforting to see Ron Paul run such a close second to Bachmann. There's reason to doubt the electability of either among independents, who will of course determine the 2012 presidential election.

Of the two, though, I'd have to guess that Bachmann is the more probable choice among independents.

Unfortunately, some credible stories have come out in the past two weeks depicting Bachmann as a media-seeking, publicity-crazed, rather unattractive person in private. And despite Bachmann's intentions, Pawlenty's criticisms were correct when he noted that for all her efforts, as merely one of 435 Representatives, her so-called 'leadership' against the TARP, the debt limit increase, and ObamaCare, came to naught.

And, of course, Texas governor Rick Perry's entry further complicates things. Romney didn't really take the Iowa straw poll seriously, leaving Bachmann, at best, nipping at Romney's heels. Perry's poll numbers put him among those two, but, then, he has yet to be seriously tested either by other candidates or the media.

My own hunch is that Romney is probably the conventional GOP favorite, sadly, along the 'it's my turn' line. Bachmann is probably more popular and trustworthy among independents.

And, of course, as I've written before, while Bachmann has plenty of passion and very explicit, desirable beliefs for independents, she also shares Wonderboy's lack of executive experience.

Romney is not trustworthy, too glib and a bit too distant and dispassionate, but has the credentials on paper to be a good centrist president.

From here, we'll just have to see which of the three GOP frontrunners capture the hearts of independents.