Tag: politics

In which it is proved by the Republican House Majority Leader-to-be, Rep. John Boehner:

Why You Should Vote For Republicans

Americans are speaking out and demanding a new way forward in Washington. Republicans have listened and outlined a new governing agenda in the form of a Pledge to America focused on creating jobs, cutting spending and changing the way Washington does business.

A smaller government

At the core of the Pledge is an idea Washington just hasn’t tried before — that the path to recovery lies in making government smaller instead of making it bigger. To jump-start job creation, the economic uncertainty gripping small businesses has to be eliminated, and the spending binge in Washington has to be stopped.

The Pledge puts forth a clear plan to end the current uncertainty, starting with stopping all looming tax hikes so that small businesses can get back to creating jobs. This is followed by a blueprint for fiscal sanity that begins with cutting spending to pre-“stimulus,” pre-bailout levels, a move that will save taxpayers $100 billion in the first year alone.

Very well. Smaller government sounds good. Saving $100 billion in the first year alone sounds like a lot. Now, what was the federal budget in 2010? According to “A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise” which is the Orwellian title for The United States Federal Budget for Fiscal Year 2010, the 2010 budget is $3.552 trillion. And according to the most recent estimate in July, the deficit alone is going to be $1.47 trillion instead of the $1.171 trillion originally forecast.

So, Republicans are going to cut 2.8% of the federal budget, or if you prefer, 6.8% of the federal budget deficit. In other words, if the nation were a car speeding towards a canyon at 70 miles per hour, the Republicans master plan for saving the passengers would be to slow the car down to 65.2 MPH! And let’s see if what Boehner’s plans are for addressing the four pressing issues I mentioned in today’s column:

1) The economy. He mentioned it. But repealing “the job-killing health care law and” replacing “it with common-sense reforms focused on lowering costs and protecting American jobs” is isn’t even going to begin solving the debt-deflation problem of $52 trillion in public and private debt.

2) The massive mortgage fraud. Nothing. I suspect the Republicans will come out on the side of the banks and sacrifice the rule of law for nothing. But who knows? Boehner didn’t mention it.

3) Immigration. Nothing, although there is just a hint of anti-Ricardian rhetoric detectable in the phrase “protecting American jobs”. Again, Republicans are more likely to be part of the problem than the solution here; Ronald Reagan was signed Ted Kennedy’s 1986 law.

4) The endless wars. Nothing. And they’re for it.

In conclusion, I see no reason not to vote Republican if it amuses you. They’re certainly not going to make things any worse than the Obama-Reid-Pelosi Democrats. So vote how thou wilt, because it will make no substantive difference in the material outcome of the nation’s fate.

It looks like the little mommmyblogger media whore got what she always wanted – TV!

Providing analysis and historical context will be ABC News contributors George Will, Cokie Roberts, Donna Brazile and Matthew Dowd. They will be joined by Ron Brownstein, Editorial Director for the National Journal Group and conservative commentator Dana Loesch.

Good for her, if that’s what she wants. But no wonder conservatives are so hapless. Look at their “opinion leaders”. I’d almost be tempted to watch, just to see the expression on George Will’s face when the mommyblogger makes one of her nonsensical attempts at a point.

That’s what Nate Silver says about the odds for Senate on October 29th. I suggested it would go Republican back on July 14th. Regardless, we’ll see what happens soon enough.

Senate: Republican chances of taking over the Senate are up a tick to 11 percent Saturday from 10 percent Friday.

Needless to say, with regards to the most important issues facing the nation, it doesn’t matter which of the ruling party’s two factions holds the legislative branch. Republicans are even more loyal to the banks than the bought-and-paid-for Democrats thanks to their ideological confusion of corporatism for capitalism. But speaking of my far-fetched predictions, here’s another very interesting poll.

“Half of Democrats Think Obama Should Face Primary. An AP-Knowledge Networks poll finds that 47% of Democrats think Presidential Obama should be challenged for the 2012 Democratic presidential nomination”

There is the evidence. It also proves MPAI, needless to say, as 92% of Republicans believe Congress or Obama are to blame for the current economic slump, (wait, aren’t we in a recovery?), and only around six percent understand that the bankers are to blame. The worst thing is that about 50% of them genuinely think Obama is to blame, when there is no possible way he can be held responsible for it. While he has most definitely exacerbated the situation by his Hooverian response to it, the die was not only cast, but the results were known before he even took office! We already know that the Republican elite has zero desire to force the banks to take responsibility for their criminal and economically destructive actions; this poll indicates that there will be very little grass roots pressure on them to do what they don’t want to do because the voter anger has been successfully redirected to date.

Remarkably, the Democrats are somewhat better in assigning the blame where it belongs. Nearly 25 percent of them hold the bankers responsible, although they clearly don’t recognize that their hero Obama is completely owned by Goldman Sachs. (When the guy is appointing ex-Goldmanites to administration positions outside the Treasury, you know it’s completely out of control.) And at least Bush was in office when the meltdown began, although if he can be blamed for pushing TARP, he can’t reasonably be blamed for the Fed keeping interest rates low and blowing multiple financial bubbles.

Anyhow, it is quite clear that the electoral devastation about to be wreaked upon Democrats by Republicans (which, you may recall, I was one of the first to predict), is not going to have a salutary effect upon the situation because the Republican Party and the greater part of the Tea Party insist on believing that the perpetrators of the primary causal factor were among the victims. They will surely dig in a different part of the hole than did the Democrats, but we can be confident that they will continue making it deeper. The battle between Republicans and Democrats is an internecine battle between the Keynesians known as Neo-Keynesians and the Keynesians known as Monetarists. Both sides subscribe to a false economic theory and both are beholden to the banks, and as both the names and the polls indicate, the Republicans are more strongly beholden to them than are the Democrats.

This means that Obama and the new Republican majorities, (or if I am only half-correct, House majority) will be eager to announce bipartisan cooperation in finding a means of saddling the taxpayer with TARP II, in which the cost of the fraudulent mortgage-backed security put-backs is shifted from the banks that committed the fraud to the taxpayer while their myriad of proven crimes are swept under the carpet. And the passage of that heroic, bipartisan, and much-publicized “reform” will mark the effective end of the Tea Party, even if its zombie corpse remains an animated political identity for decades to come.

It is ALWAYS wise to doubt any assertion made by a progressive, no matter how credentialed:

Jonah Goldberg quotes Robert Reich: “Bill Clinton never mentioned the words `health care reform’ after the 1994 midterms.” Reich’s claim is false — wildly false. A check of the database at the American Presidency Project shows that President Clinton used the phrase on 116 occasions after the midterm.

What’s remarkable is how being shown to be factually incorrect seldom slows them down in the least.

RT notices something:

Is it just my imagination, or is the Tea party dominated by women? I have always regarded the Republican party as the masculine side of the equation, and the Democrat Party as the feminine. The Tea party, which threatens to supplant the Republican party seems to be dominated by rough, opinionated, conservative women. It certainly is where I live, and even in my state, and I get the impression that’s the case nationally. The impetus seems to be coming from women who hold the limelight and get all the work done. Is that because men are abandoning politics, or is it because they have become feminized?

The Tea Party is mostly female because it is a mass entry into politics by a portion of the electorate that has historically been politically ignorant and inert. It is mostly middle class and female because it is made up of people who have the time and resources to get involved with political activism; these are the wives of the middle class men whose economic interests have suffered and are less likely to be able to put in the time and effort involved.

Since it is a female-driven movement, we can be confident that it will quickly lose its focus and be seduced away from its nominal purpose by callous and cold-hearted men, as Karl Denninger has already noted. This assumption is supported by the fact that Sarah Palin is the current darling of the Tea Party, the very woman who suspended her campaign for vice-president in order to permit John McCain to rush back to Washington and help the Bush administration and the Congressional Democrats hold down the American taxpayer for their financial raping by the banking industry. The idea that a woman who supported TARP and the bank bailouts and believes that government inaction is not an option during times of economic difficulty will not turn around and betray a movement of political neophytes at the first opportunity defies belief.

The other reason, of course, is that men are much more skeptical than women. I have said from the beginning that the Tea Party will prove ineffectual and have seen no evidence to alter my thinking in the least. (Remember, I predicted that the Republicans would regain the House and Senate months ago; the Tea Party is a consequential factor, not a causal one.) While many women are finally cognizant of the cancerous state of America, they are still ignorant enough to believe that politics can be the cure. But while it’s not impossible, it is highly improbable.

The fact that many, if not most, Tea Partiers still support The Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism after nine years of near-total futility tells you all you need to know about their eventual effectiveness. Hell, half of them are probably concerned about defending the banks from Obama.

In conclusion, I quote Britain’s finest politician, Daniel Hannan: “[T]he reason there is a Tea Party here is not because of some perverse American characteristic of being anti-tax. It’s that people think that they can do something about it through the ballot box.”

It sounds inspiring. It is inspiring. But the key word there is “think”.

I have to admit, I do find the latest employment incident to be moderately amusing. I mean, it’s not exactly news that NPR is Ground Zero for SWPL political correctness, so its actions are educational in certain regards:

National Public Radio terminated the contract of commentator Juan Williams after he said on Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor” that people wearing Muslim garb on airplanes made him “worried” and “nervous.”

Of course, people wearing Muslim garb on airplanes make everyone, including other Muslims, nervous everywhere from Moscow to New Dehli. This is most likely because Muslims, unlike every other religious group, have been known to blow up airplanes upon which they are flying. And it’s not as if the SWPL management at NPR doesn’t know this, but they would literally rather die than face the cognitive dissonance between reality and their progressive ideology.

It is interesting to learn that Muslims now outrank blacks in the progressive hierarchy, though. It wasn’t all that long ago when blacks were at the top of the pyramid; I wonder if Jesse Jackson could survive his “Hymietown” remark if he made it today. We know from l’affaire de Sanchez that Jews still outrank Hispanics, but the Williams firing calls into question who is presently SWPL America’s Most Favored Minority.