Tag: politics

Wall Street’s house negro

I warned you from that start that Herman Cain was as stupid as he is corrupt:

“I don’t have the facts to back this up, but I happen to believe that these demonstrations are planned and orchestrated to distract from the failed policies of the Obama Administration,” Cain told the Wall Street Journal. “Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself. It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded, it is someone’s fault if they failed.”

It’s true, Herman Cain doesn’t have any facts. He also doesn’t have much of a brain. Remember, this is the guy who claimed the Federal Reserve doesn’t need to be audited because it performs so many internal audits on itself. The cluelessness, the sheer effrontery, of defending Wall Street and the big banks by pointing to the lack of success of the very people who are being robbed of TRILLIONS in order to prevent Wall Street and the big banks from experiencing the consequences of their egregious failures is simply staggering.

Herman Cain is a corrupt and stupid man who is wholly owned by the banksters. Republicans who support him are either delusional or foolish; the only reason they are enthusiastic about this Wall Street banker’s whore is because they desperately want to prove how post-racial they are. If Cain somehow manages to win the nomination and the election, he will be a bigger and more spectacular disaster than Obama. Although it would certainly be amusing to guess the Vegas line on the over/under of ex-Goldmanites in a Cain cabinet. I’d say three.

What Cain has completely omitted to mention is that the primary failed policy of the Obama administration is its policy of doing whatever Wall Street and the big banks demand of it. And that slavish submission to Wall Street is exactly the policy that would be the guiding policy of any future Cain administration.

50 Ann Coulter quotes

The Right Wing News compiles them. My personal favorites:

44) The common wisdom holds that “both parties” have to appeal to the extremes during the primary and then move to the center for the general election. To the contrary, both parties run for office as conservatives. Once they have fooled the voters and are safely in office, Republicans sometimes double-cross the voters. Democrats always do.

35) This is liberalism’s real strength. It is no longer susceptible to reductio ad absurdium arguments. Before you can come up with a comical take on their worldview, some college professor has already written an article advancing the idea.

24) Liberals use the word science exactly as they use the word constitutional. Both words are nothing more or less than a general statement of liberal approval, having nothing to do with either science or the Constitution.

3) Words mean nothing to liberals. They say whatever will help advance their cause at the moment, switch talking points in a heartbeat, and then act indignant if anyone uses the exact same argument they were using five minutes ago.

Speaking of predictions

This doesn’t bode well for mine if Dick Morris is jumping on board. When is he ever right?

In an interview with conservative radio icon Sean Hannity, former President Clinton adviser and campaign manager Dick Morris stated that, after speaking with a Democratic strategist, he thinks it is “very possible” that President Obama might acquiesce to requests from the Democratic leadership in Congress and bow out of the 2012 race, leaving the door open for him to return sometime in the future.

“I asked a top Democratic strategist the other day and he thought that it was possible that, in January, Harry Reid comes to Obama and says, ‘Look you cost us control of the House last year, you’re going to cost us control of the Senate this year. For the good of the party you have to step aside’” said Morris.

It all makes perfect sense until you realize that it’s Morris talking.

Fat Bastard stays out

Someone in his camp must have a lick of sense. Christie still isn’t running:

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie hasn’t changed his mind: He reaffirmed in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library on Tuesday that he’s not running for president….

Nonetheless, the speech — delivered at a shrine to America’s 40th president, with former first lady Nancy Reagan in the audience — was likely to stoke fresh speculation about his presidential ambitions. The Republican governor warned that the nation’s credibility abroad was being damaged by troubles at home. He charged that an indecisive White House has deepened the nation’s economic pain, and he accused President Barack Obama of preparing to divide the country to win re-election next year.

Christie didn’t spare Congress: In a scathing indictment of Beltway politics, he said the failure to compromise, along with Obama’s lack of leadership, had set the country dangerously off course.

In Washington “we drift from conflict to conflict, with little or no resolution. We watch a president who once talked about the courage of his convictions, but still has yet found the courage to lead,” Christie said.

“We watch a Congress at war with itself because they are unwilling to leave campaign-style politics at the Capitol’s door. The result is a debt-ceiling limitation debate that made our democracy appear as if we could no longer effectively govern ourselves,” he said.

The main problem with Christie is easily seen in his speech. As a politician, he’s just another guy, just another member of the bifactional ruling party. An unwillingness to compromise is not the problem with Congress. They LOVE to compromise and pat themselves on the back for their bipartisanship. If they could get away with it and still get re-elected, they’d play patticakes with each other all day.

Establishment logic

As I expected, Rick Perry is rapidly sinking in the polls thanks to the exposure of his radical support for open immigration. He’s lost 20 points and now trails Herman Cain, 28% to 18%. He’s effectively done. So, what is the solution of the Republican Establishment that backed his belated entry? Naturally, it is to encourage a less conservative and even more radical supporter of open immigration to enter the race:

Former New Jersey governor Tom Kean, who has known Chris Christie since he was a teenager and remains an informal adviser, tells National Review Online that the governor is “very seriously” considering a presidential bid.

“It’s real,” Kean says. “He’s giving it a lot of thought. I think the odds are a lot better now than they were a couple weeks ago.”

Christie remains undecided, Kean says, but is listening closely to pleas from party leaders. The chance for a “Jersey guy” to rise, Kean says, is not something Christie has sought. But now, with the field up for grabs, he is actively mulling a late entry.

If he makes the mistake of throwing his hat in the ring, Christie will melt down even faster than Perry did. Conservatives love seeing his fat, bellicose persona attacking the New Jersey teachers unions. They won’t like it half so much when he starts directing his attacks at them in defense of his moderate to liberal policies.

WND column

Immigration is the Issue

The mainstream media are desperately attempting to gloss over the real reason that Rick Perry self-imploded at the Florida straw poll. It wasn’t that his debate performance was poor, although it certainly was. The reason Rick Perry is imitating Fred Thompson’s rapid decline from favored frontrunner to candidate-in-crisis is because the debate revealed the depths to which his pro-immigration position runs counter to that of most Republicans.

Cain wins Florida

And, as I suggested, Perry’s remarkably stupid pro-immigration position is sinking him:

Every winner of Florida’s Presidency 5 straw poll has gone on to win the GOP nomination. And if that tradition continues this year, Herman Cain will be the Republican nominee in 2012.

He overwhelmingly won the straw poll, nabbing 37 percent of the votes. That put Cain more than twenty percentage points ahead of Rick Perry (15 percent) and Mitt Romney (14 percent). Rick Santorum won 11 percent of the votes, while Ron Paul came in fifth at 10 percent. Newt Gingrich was backed by 8 percent. And Michele Bachmann, who won the Ames Straw Poll, finished dead last at 1.5 percent. Jon Huntsman beat her to come in seventh place with 2.3 percent of the vote.

For Perry, whose campaign very aggressively courted delegates — his campaign hosted a breakfast, sent out direct mail, telephoned delegates, and appointed a leadership commission lead by Florida House speaker Dean Cannon — the distant second-place finish has the potential to curtail the momentum he’s had as frontrunner since entering the race. Many of the straw poll delegates expressed frustration at his poor debate performance Thursday night, along with irritation at his immigration positions.

Cain is a corrupt joke as a presidential candidate, but then, so were Bob Dole and John McCain. Obviously that wouldn’t stop Republicans from putting him up, especially since the party base despises Romney and is quickly coming to dislike Perry. I still don’t see Cain winning the nomination, but Perry’s ongoing meltdown makes it less implausible than before.

Chicago Tribune: Obama should step aside

The drums, they beat:

The vultures are starting to circle. Former White House spokesman Bill Burton said that unless Obama can rally the Democratic base, which is disillusioned with him, “it’s going to be impossible for the president to win.” Democratic consultant James Carville had one word of advice for Obama: “Panic.”

But there is good news for the president. I checked the Constitution, and he is under no compulsion to run for re-election. He can scrap the campaign, bag the fundraising calls and never watch another Republican debate as long as he’s willing to vacate the premises by Jan. 20, 2013.

That might be the sensible thing to do. It’s hard for a president to win a second term when unemployment is painfully high. If the economy were in full rebound mode, Obama might win anyway. But it isn’t, and it may fall into a second recession — in which case voters will decide his middle name is Hoover, not Hussein. Why not leave of his own volition instead of waiting to get the ax?

Why not? Why not indeed?

Putting science back into political science

Now here is a proposal for a scientific approach to politics I would absolutely get behind the idea of bringing back the states as the laboratories of democracy:

What do politicians do when they think they have a great idea? They just go and implement it. It’s like someone thinking he’s got a cure for cancer and immediately injecting it into everyone he can. That’s a madman, not a scientist. You always have to at least try out your idea on monkeys to make sure it doesn’t kill them.

Were farm subsidies first tried on monkeys? Social Security? Bank bailouts? No, the unscientific politicians went straight to trying all their ideas on humans, and now we have a bunch of bankrupt people instead of harmless bankrupt monkeys.

But the problem with testing political ideas on monkeys is that forcing them to go billions into debt would violate animal-cruelty laws. The only ones we’re allowed to do that to are people.

So we have to just observe the effects of the politicians’ policies — but that’s not so simple. Many say the Obama stimulus was a failure; others say we’d be even worse off without it. With the data we have, we can’t prove who’s right.

In science, when testing things on people, you always use a control group. If you have a drug you think will cut cholesterol, you give it to one set of test subjects. If everyone in the group that took the drug turns purple and starts choking but the control group is fine, we scientifically conclude there’s a problem with the drug. We have an economy that’s turning purple and choking. Did the stimulus cause that? If we had a control group that looked fine, we’d know.

So what we need to do is isolate part of the country to be the control group. They’ll be free from new taxes, won’t take part in government programs and regulations and can have all the guns they want. In the rest of America, politicians can go crazy with every Keynesian idea, ban trans fats and salt and just generally control everything. Then we can compare the results of the two groups and finally have a scientific answer on what works.

The only serious problem with the proposal is that everyone with half a brain or more would want to live in the unfortunately named control group. And even the liberals would start to figure it out eventually, as can be seen by their ongoing migration from the liberal states they’ve ruined to more conservative states.

Here’s the ironic thing. Due to their tendency towards the political left and their increasing dependence upon government spending, some of the biggest opponents of a scientific approach to politics would probably be scientists and the science lobby.

But it would certainly be amusing to see all the leftists in the experimental groups arguing that the policy would have worked if only it hadn’t relied on a population full of morons like themselves.

PS – For those who are following the Memorial Debate, I have just sent off my Round Two post to Dominic. So, we’re on schedule.

One and done

It appears to be only a matter of time before Maureen Dowd and the rest of the New York Times collective mind demand Obama’s withdrawal from the 2012 presidential campaign:

The White House team is flailing — reacting, regrouping, retrenching. It’s repugnant. After pushing and shoving and caving to get on TV, the president’s advisers immediately began warning that the long-yearned-for jobs speech wasn’t going to be that awe-inspiring.

“The issue isn’t the size or the newness of the ideas,” one said. “It’s less the substance than how he says it, whether he seizes the moment.”

The arc of justice is stuck at the top of a mountain. Maybe Obama was not even the person he was waiting for.

Hell hath no fury like a Democratic Party sensing their newly regained White House slipping away… to the Third Bush.