Tag: politics

The incoming House Majority Leader is considering whether he can get away with keeping Ron Paul out of the chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee panel that oversees monetary policy in order to protect the Federal Reserve from any uncomfortable oversight:

Five GOP leadership aides, speaking anonymously because a decision isn’t final, say incoming House Speaker John Boehner has discussed ways to prevent Paul from becoming chairman or to keep him on a tight leash if he does.

If this happens, it will be a strong indication that the Tea Party is either going to split in two or split from the Republican Party.  And this should tell you all you need to know about whether the House Republicans are going to govern any differently than they did the last time they were in power.

Mike Potemra posts an email from Claire Berlinski:

Palin is probably the only GOP candidate Obama could beat right now. She runs, 90-year-olds who have never dreamt of voting in their lives will register for the first time to vote against her. And I wouldn’t blame them. I don’t hate her, as some think. I just cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would look at her and think, “I trust her to hold the most powerful office in America at a time of uniquely grave national peril.” It’s mind-boggling.

It’s not mind-boggling, it’s ludicrous. Not the idea of Palin winning the Republican nomination, but the idea that the opinion of a Jewish woman living in Paris, whose family connection to America is but a single generation, is even remotely relevant to the probable primary voting behavior of American Christians living in Iowa, Florida, Texas, and Ohio. And since the “uniquely grave national peril” comes from the Federal Reserve, not a few third world goathumpers who haven’t managed to do so much as take out a single Christmas tree or lemonade stand in nine years, Palin will almost surely continue to become more popular because she is the only Republican politician besides Ron Paul who has been speaking out against Bernanke’s futile attempts to keep the insolvent banks afloat.

I am not a Palin fan myself; I’m a libertarian and Ron Paul is the only Republican for whom I would vote. But Palin has the political starpower and common sense synchronicity with popular opinion that the other candidates completely lack. I mean, Newt Gingrich? Trig Palin has a better chance of being elected president in 2012 than that fat little troll does. John Bolton? Mitt Romney couldn’t even beat the corpse of John McCain. The only Republican who looks capable of beating Palin for the nomination right now is the New Jersey governor, Christie. That’s why I expect to see the moderate elite fire up a Draft Christie campaign soon.

The Washington Post issues another call for an opponent to run against Obama in the Democratic primary. To, you know, “save the Obama presidency”. Right.

But there is a real way to save the Obama presidency: by challenging him in the 2012 presidential primaries with a candidate who would unambiguously commit to a well-defined progressive agenda and contrast it with the Obama administration’s policies. Such a candidacy would be pooh-poohed by the media, but if it gathered enough popular support – as is likely given the level of alienation among many who were the backbone of Obama’s 2008 success – this campaign would pressure Obama toward much more progressive positions and make him a more viable 2012 candidate. Far from weakening his chances for reelection, this kind of progressive primary challenge could save Obama if he moves in the desired direction. And if he holds firm to his current track, he’s a goner anyway.

Seriously, I don’t see how you can look at what has quite clearly in the process of happening over the last six months and not realize that Obama is going to either drop out or get kicked out by the Democrats. No one, least of all the Democratic elders, are in fear of the reaction of the 11% of black voters which has nowhere else to turn and also has one of the lowest turnout rates in the electorate.

Charles Blow initiates a futile embargo:

This is it. This is the last time I’m going to write the name Sarah Palin until she does something truly newsworthy, like declare herself a candidate for the presidency. Until then, I will no longer take part in the left’s obsessive-compulsive fascination with her, which is both unhealthy and counterproductive…. People on the left seem to need her, to bash her, because she is, in three words, the way the left likes to see the right: hollow, dim and mean. But since she’s feeding on the negativity, I suggest three other words: get over it.

I never cease to find it amusing watching one clueless, shallow, and ignorant individual castigate others for their clueless and shallow ignorance. While Blow is correct and the attacks from the Left and the elite moderates of the Republican party only add to Palin’s already formidable popular appeal, it’s far too late to declare a moratorium on discussing her. No one cares if she’s hollow, (she’s a POLITICIAN, after all, and is therefore hollow by definition), no one of any political sophistication believes she’s any more dim than the average politician, and she’s demonstrably far less mean than her critics.

The reality is that there is a high probability that Palin will win the next presidential election if she a) elects to run and b) continues to strongly align herself with the opinion of the majority of Americans. This isn’t because she is a secret genius, but because intelligence is vastly overrated when it comes to the public appeal of politicians. Consider: the two most intelligent presidents of the modern era were Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon. And the last two presidents whose intelligence was methodically denigrated by the media both won second terms.

The main reason Palin enjoys such strong support is very simple and obvious. People do not see her as a Wall Street whore, unlike nearly every other national politician. Yes, she publicly supported the 2008 bailouts as John McCain’s running mate, but charges of hypocrisy are not going to stick because everyone knows that a vice-presidential candidate is supposed to echo the presidential candidate’s opinion, not express his own. Obama, Clinton, Biden, Romney, and every other national political figure who is taken seriously as a presidential candidate are all seen as Wall Street whores, with the sole exception of the New Jersey governor, Christie. Palin may be one as well, but she is not perceived that way now.

To win in 2012, whether Obama drops out or is defeated in the Democratic primaries or not, all Palin has to do is stay on the right side of the masses on immigration and the banks. She’d do better if she’d come out against the ongoing military occupations, but she can’t be harmed on the issue since every other potential rival supports them as well. She’ll come in for tremendous criticism, of course, if she refuses to give way on the two central issues but as Blow is among the first to finally notice, that won’t hurt her in the slightest.

And the lunacy of Government Newspeak. We have truly reached a point of no return if the provision of accurate information to the people about what their supposedly democratic government is doing is equated with terrorism by their so-called leaders:

The incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee says WikiLeaks should be officially designated as a terrorist organization. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), the panel’s presumptive next head, asked the Obama administration today to “determine whether WikiLeaks could be designated a foreign terrorist organization,” putting the group in the same company as Al Qaeda and Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult that released deadly sarin gas on the Tokyo subway.

“WikiLeaks appears to meet the legal criteria” of a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, King wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reviewed by CNET. He added: “WikiLeaks presents a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.”

If WikiLeaks meets the legal criteria of a “U.S.-designated terrorist organization” then so does Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Governments always want to operate in the dark and keep their subjects in ignorance, which is why Julian Assange should not be assailed by the American people, he should be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, regardless of whatever his motivations in making all of this information available to the public might be.

WikiLeaks is nothing more or less than a technological blow for American freedom. Assange is no traitor; the accusation doesn’t even make sense considering that he has absolutely no connection with the United States. But it should come as no surprise to the readers of this blog that the verbal attack against the organization is being led by one of those freedom-loving Republicans.

Moreover, the crocodile tears of those in the media who fear that the release of information to the public will “get people killed” is absolutely ludicrous given their support for the ongoing military occupations that have killed hundreds of thousands more people than any number of leaks possibly could. In fact, to the extent that WikiLeaks permits Americans to force an end to their leaders’ pointless and unpopular wars, it will almost certainly save lives. After all, when one considers that numerous American leaders have waxed bellicose about the need to go to war to prevent Iran getting nukes, wouldn’t it be pertinent for them to know that China is actively helping Iran obtain them?

“More than 250,000 classified State Department reports made public on Sunday reveal that China was urged to stop shipments through Beijing of missiles from North Korea to Iran, and that Saudi Arabia’s monarch urged the United States to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

The Left has never been known for its ability to think through the consequences of its actions:

Anytime anyone says anything libertarian, spit on them. Libertarians are by definition enemies of the state: they are against promoting American citizens’ general welfare and against policies that create a perfect union. Like Communists before them, they are actively subverting the Constitution and the American Dream, and replacing it with a Kleptocratic Nightmare.

The level of ignorance and general lack of intelligence here are rather remarkable. But Mark Ames’s vituperation is well placed inasmuch as he recognizes that libertarians are the implacable enemies of the totalitarian state he worships. To the progressive, the State is God. To the libertarian, the State is Satan, and the battle between the two ideologies is not so much a philosophical struggle as a religious war, given that philososophy requires an amount of thought that is well beyond the average progressive. One has to read Ames’s article in its entirety to fully appreciate its superficiality; he genuinely believes that because the preamble to the U.S. Constitution seeks to form “a more Perfect Union” and promote “the general Welfare”, this somehow translates to a political endorsement of labor unions and government welfare programs, two concepts that not only didn’t exist back then, but stand in the way of “Justice”, “domestic Tranquility” and “the Blessings of Liberty”.

Of course, spitting in response to the presentation of contradictory ideas is probably the highest logic one can reasonably expect from a progressive since they’re not capable of any response that an intelligent observer would find any more coherent or convincing.

Her column entitled Nuking the White House is subtitled: “Would Republicans make Indianapolis collateral damage in their eagerness to wipe out Obama?”

I can’t speak for Republicans, not being one, but I would say no, since Indianapolis never did anything to anyone except Baltimore and it would be unnecessary anyhow since Obama is politically wiping himself out about as fast as is humanly possible. However, I suspect a great many Americans would be quite willing to accept New York City, Washington DC, and Los Angeles as collateral damage.

However, there is an ominous warning to Republicans in her column. It does not bode well for them that the new House Majority Leader didn’t see fit to allow himself to be subjected to a gate rape last week. Keep this in mind if he comes out in support of the TSA and opposes Ron Paul’s new bill.

“The Times’s Jeff Zeleny was on the scene and reported that John Boehner did not wait in line or go through security: he “was escorted around the metal detectors and body scanners, and taken directly to the gate.”

It’s amazing how clueless politicians are when it comes to PR when one considers how much their careers depend upon it. If Boehner had any PR skills at all, he would have opted out of the scan, then shouted “don’t touch my junk” at the first TSA agent to approach him. The crowd would have roared and his approval rating would be in the 80s… among Democrats.

“There’s a little bug inside of me which wants to get the FCC to say to FOX and to MSNBC: ‘Out. Off. End. Goodbye.’ It would be a big favor to political discourse; our ability to do our work here in Congress, and to the American people, to be able to talk with each other and have some faith in their government and more importantly, in their future.”
– Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV)

Remember this the next time an American liberal attempts to tell you that liberals are the defenders of individual human rights.  While it’s true that real liberals support human rights, what passes for “liberal” in modern American terms isn’t liberal at all.  but is progressive, leftist, fascistic, and is absolutely opposed to all individual rights that contradict anything that is perceived to be of benefit to the collective.  “Faith in government” is their religion.