Ron Paul predicts the future

In 2002, not only did Ron Paul predict the recent future of American politics but he presented his prediction in nearly perfect chronological order:

Hat tip to The Council for the National Interest Foundation.

Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain dismiss Occupy Wall Street protesters

Newt Gingrich always seemed like nothing but a loud mouth to me. Now, I know why he is not worth taking seriously:

“We have had a strain of hostility to free enterprise – and frankly, a strain of hostility to classic America – starting in our academic institutions and spreading across this country,” said Gingrich, who is also seeking the Republican nomination.

Herman Cain does not seem any brighter:

For his part, Cain also dubbed the protests anti-capitalist and said demonstrators would be better served targeting the White House.
“I don’t have a lot of patience for people who want to protest the success of somebody else,” Cain said.

Both clowns need basic lessons in economics and politics.

First of all, the Western economies are not free enterprise. If the economies were free enterprise, the parasitic 1% elite would be working with the rest of the 99% of the population instead of living off of government privilege. It is precisely the non-free enterprise machinations which are the cause of the economic instability and the unfair distribution of wealth. It is not “the success of somebody else” that is being targeted but rather it is the unfair success and the special privileges afforded to crony-capitalists that are being targeted.

Second, targeting the White House is probably the single most arrogant recommendation that any American politician can make. How the hell is anybody supposed do that? while going to work everyday to survive? and pay the taxes to fund the parasitic elite? That is the problem: nobody can make any positive change in the White House. Those two old birds could not do it themselves and they have a hell of a lot more time on their hands than the average person!

The ongoing US debt crisis

So, Obama wants Americans to believe that printing more money is going to solve the problem created by printing money. I wonder how that is going to go over.

I predict a Hollywood re-appearance of Snake Plissken is imminent.

Ron Paul, the next US president

Earlier today, Ron Paul’s son, Rand Paul, the recently elected Senator from Kentucky, told Politico he believes his father will run. “I get every indication from looking at his schedule and hearing what he’s doing that I think he probably will,” Rand said. “But that’s his decision to make.”

In April of 2010, a Rasmussen poll found that Paul was in a statistical dead heat with Obama. The current president edged out Paul by 42 points to 41 in a hypothetical 2012 matchup, according to the survey. Irate Democrats accused the polling organization of gaming its results.

In February, Ron Paul won the CPAC presidential straw poll for a second year. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney came in second.

I can see it happening.

Democratic Party Lose Majorities – What’s Next?

Wise words from Morton Kondracke at Cagle Blogs:

At a forum on health care reform’s role in the campaign, Republican pollster Whit Ayres said, “this election is a rejection of Democratic governance, just like 2006 and 2008 were a rejection of Republican governance.

“Independents are particularly upset. It’s not just health care. It’s the auto bailout. It’s the stimulus bill. It’s the $1.3 trillion deficit … The problem is not marketing. It is what (the Democrats) did. It’s taking the country in a direction people didn’t want it to go.”

At the same event, sponsored by the journal Health Affairs, even Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg said the Obama administration and Congress seemed to get “diverted from the public’s No. 1 concern, the economy,” to health care.

“They made the big mistake in 2009 of thinking that the stimulus was going to bring back the economy. They didn’t appreciate how difficult it would be. People thought the stimulus was just a one-shot and not a strategy.”

There is no question about it, Obama and the Democrats are going to lose and lose big tonight  – the next question becomes, are the Republicans going to continue to pore salt into the wounds of Democrats or are they going to take their majority in the House (and possible a majority in the Senate) and attempt to work with Obama to correct a pretty bad situation?

As Richard Albert recently commented in the Huffington Post:

[Here] is the paradox about the fate awaiting the Democratic Party in November: President Barack Obama actually wins if congressional Democrats lose. The President will find himself in a stronger position to face reelection in 2012 if his Democratic Party loses its congressional majority in the 2010 midterm elections.

Knowing this, what are the Republicans going to do next? Put the screws to Obama and their Democratic opponents, or build an opposing (and positive) policy agenda for the next two years?

Eve of the US Election – An Independent on Obama

I am one of those voters that both parties covet – an independent.  I base my voting decisions not upon vitriolic campaign ads but on what I learn from reading and studying.  And I must admit, I am confused by much of what I hear being politicized as we head into the midterms.

Confused because I believe President Obama and his administration have done an admirable job with what they were handed.  Two years ago, we were entering the Great Recession – the worst economic time most of us have ever known.  Eight years of a Bush-Cheney-Rove administration had squandered the $1 trillion surplus left  by the previous president and as a result of two questionable wars (where are those weapons of mass destruction?), a popular but unnecessary tax cut that sapped billions from much needed programs,  and an administration that refused to keep a watchful eye and regulate industries to which it had previous ties and strong support, the incoming administration was dealt a hand not seen since the FDR administration.

Shortly after some of the bailouts were implemented, Ivy League economists applauded the move and wrote that the U.S. had been a mere three weeks away from not just a recession but a depression.  The damage that had been done could not be fixed in a matter of years.  It would take a generation to fix many of the economic ills if indeed, they would ever be completely fixed.

Yet here we are two years later and people are mad that the economy has not been restored and their lifestyles are not back to the way they used to be.  Much of the anger is being fostered and fueled by those angry that they have lost power and control.   As a result these people (a.k.a. Conservatives, Tea Party advocates) make you think that they can fix these problems even though they were the same ones who created them in the first place.  Folks, quit being so soft.  The damage that has been done is going to take a least a decade of extreme sacrifice.  It can’t be fixed in a matter of months or years.  Get used to the fact that things aren’t going to be the same for quite a while.  Thank you Bush-Cheney- Rove.

Don’t get me wrong. I am mad many days as well.  While I am grateful to have job, I have lost benefits, took a pay cut two years ago which yet to be restored, own a house I cannot sell and earn about what I did 15 years ago, all while trying to find a way to fund a college education for my daughter.  So, no, I am not a happy camper either.

But I look at what has been accomplished and I do have a ray of optimism.  While not a fan of tax cuts that would zap much needed funds from a government that has done a decent job of propping up industry, I must applaud the current administration for finding  a happy medium by providing $116 billion of tax cuts for Americans. (Why don’t more people know this?) Unfortunately, most Ivy League economists will tell you that there is no way the economic tsunami can be controlled without a tax increase (thank you again Bush-Cheney-Rove).  The numbers just won’t work.

So as I head to midterms, I ask myself what are the positives that have occurred these last two years and are they sufficient enough to support the current administration?  Here is what I see.

I see a stock market that is up 25%, ranking among the top five highest gains ever for the first two years of a presidency.  I see a housing industry, wrought by prior unregulated mismanagement, beginning to stabilize.  New home sales increased 10% last month.  I see an unemployment rate predicted to go as high as 12-14%, remaining under 10% and dropping as the government begins to push money – albeit far too slowly for many – to small business and the private sector.

I see the automobile industry beginning to recover thanks to TARP money.  Had the auto sector failed, economists agree, the U.S. would have seen not just a recession but most assuredly a depression.  In fact, only about half the TARP money allocated was needed to accomplish  that feat and more than half of that has already been recovered, resulting in the distinct possibility that TARP could actually turn a profit, making it one of the best uses of federal tax dollars ever.  Without that support, the non-partisan Congressional Business Office suggests perhaps another couple of million jobs would have been lost.  Reality is that more jobs have been created in the first two years of this administration than in the entire eight years of the previous administration.

Suffice it to say, the stimulus package is working.  Nevertheless, many somehow feel that things ought to be the way they used to be, which if we care to admit, was a way of overspending on things we felt we deserved or needed or wanted, simply so we could at least appear comfortable, successful and semi-affluent.   So much for appearances.

So I scratch my head.  I read.  I study.  I look a bit to history.  And history tells me that it took FDR nearly four terms to cure the ills of the Great Depression.  I’m not sure I understand why some believe this administration should have been able to right the sinking ship of the prior administration in a matter of months or two short years.  Nevertheless, there are many positive indicators that things are getting better.

I am a positive person.  I am independent voter.  And I am choosing to stay the course.

Editors note: this posting was previously a comment posted in a past thread.

Rand Paul, Racism and Utopia

Wanna a read a great defense and indictment of libertarian utopianism?  (You know you do!)  Well, here’s Julian Sanchez, writing in Newsweek about the Rand Paul dust up.

A taste:

Yet there’s nothing intrinsically racist in the argument in favor of property rights—and indeed, any real liberal ought to at least have some sympathy for it. Strong property rights have often been the friend of unpopular minorities: Jim Crow laws were imposed precisely because racists feared the South’s rigid caste system would collapse if business owners were free to integrate, as historian Charles Wynes noted in his 1961 study Race Relations in Virginia. After that long apartheid imposed on consumer preferences, it might have been too sanguine to hope market forces alone would have ushered in desegregation as rapidly as the Civil Rights Act did. But history is littered with tribal boundaries shattered by commerce, and formal law yielded no instant solution either. (A ban on formal segregation could only do so much in practice where majorities were determined to exclude blacks by means less explicit but barely more subtle than signs announcing “whites only.”)

…

Unfortunately, history happened. Rules for utopia can deal with individual crimes—the mugger and the killer and the vandal—but they stumble in the face of societywide injustice. They tell us the state shouldn’t sanction the brutal enslavement or humiliating legal subordination of a people; they have less to say about what to do once we have. They tell us to respect the sanctity of the property rights that would arise as free people tamed the wilderness in John Locke’s state of nature. They have less to say about the sanctity of property built on generations of slave sweat and blood.

God bless Julian Sanchez.

The Problem With the Palin Hypocrisy Angle on Healthcare

Tonight the US is abuzz with the revelation that former GOP Veep candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin had traveled across the Alaska-Yukon border to utilize the Canadian health care system in the fine northwestern territory. We Canadians have long understood that many of our home-grown journalists get snatched by the big American media so it’s a bit surprising to see that there wasn’t a Canadian around in the newsroom to explain what any Canuck who knows his history would immediately see in this story: if Palin’s family did travel in the mid-1960s, they would not have used the same state-run system that Canada uses today. In fact, quite a bit has changed since Lester Person’s government passed the medicare system into law during it’s brief time in office from 1963-1968, with the legal prohibition of private health care coming in during 1984 and the capping of salaries for doctors later in the 1980s. The system that Palin’s family would have used over 40 years ago would have been only mildly different from the US system at the time, with user fees and private clinics still operating. While it’s fair to guess as to why the family would cross a national border to access health care, one sees a reasonable argument for bad weather as this is Alaska and even the most pessimistic Al Gore devotee would have to admit that global warming hadn’t really taken off in the 1960s yet!

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Matthew Campbell writes for The Politic and is webmaster of Election Target, an online election prediction community.

Rhetoric and Reality in the 2008 Presidential Election

Last week, as I thought about the remarkable rhetorical abilities of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, I was struck by the similarities in their respective paths to the White House.

As candidates, both Reagan and Obama were challengers to the incumbent party candidate. In Reagan’s case, he squared off against President Jimmy Carter of the then-governing Democratic Party. For his part, Obama faced John McCain, a member of the incumbent Republican Party. Both were at first deemed unprepared for a presidential run, but the tide quickly turned in their favour.

Curious, I then expanded the sample size to include all presidential elections since 1980.

What I’ve found is that presidential challengers have defeated the incumbent party candidate on four occasions–and on each of those occasions the challenger won by invoking the rhetoric of redemption.

This may or may not come as a surprise.

But what is interesting, I think, is that there may be a disconnect between rhetoric and reality in the case of the 2008 presidential election. I’ve developed this argument in a bit more detail in my latest piece at the Huffington Post.

Comments welcome, both online and offline.

The H Stands for ‘Hubris’

But we probably already knew that’s what President Obama’s middle initial really stood for.

It’s been a year since the over hyped and under performing ‘stimulus’ package was passed in the U.S., and even with the employment rate still hovering around 10% (it dropped 0.3% to 9.7% in January), Mr. Obama has the gall to trumpet the success of the stimulus package in saving or creating 2 million jobs.

The stimulus package was a mistake.  The very premise of the stimulus package has been proven faulty; the notion that this money needed to be pumped into the economy right away is refuted by the fact that the United States government expects most of the stimulus money to be spent in 2010.

Even their job claims are ridiculous.  Sure, it’s conceivable that 2 million more people would be out of work had it not been for the stimulus, but considering the length and depth of the increased unemployment in the United States over the last 12 months, it’s pretty hard to believe (especially if you accept the idea that the real unemployment rate in the United States is 17%).  Further, the notion of jobs being created was always absurd, and often interpreted creatively.  The administration appears to understand this, and have continued to walk back from their original claims of the job-creating power of the stimulus.  However, on the anniversary of this grand mistake, they are throwing reason to the wind, standing tall on the shoulders of this fiscal albatross.

Even if Barack Obama says it, it does not make it true.

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