Saturday, October 20, 2012
The post Obama America
Three weeks before the election it appears Romney has gained the momentum and Obama is starting to panic. It is time for some "hail Mary" disclosures and the like from the Obama campaign. Should Obama lose, and lose decisively as is possible based where we are now, it is timel to speculate on what could happen after the election. Who would be the winners and losers in a Romney administration. The biggest losers should be the MSM for its complicity in bringing us Obama in the first place and doing its best to keep us misinformed after he was elected. One has to feel for those who have depended exclusively on the MSM for their news over the years because they have been ill-served. Likely the MSM will shrink rapidly in influence after Obama's defeat for, among other reasons, the country will get back on track under a pro business administration, and jobs will begin to materialize. Clearly, and in the knick of time, the unions, especially the government employees unions, will take a big hit. Sweetheart retirement deals will be revisited and scaled down and collective bargaining rights will be challenged and hopefully rolled back. Right to work laws should be passed in many states in order for them to compete with states not burdened with closed shop laws. Teachers unions in particular should be reigned in or simply abolished in order to put in place education reforms necessary to keep American workers competitive in the global marketplace. Government jobs at all levels should be eliminated, probably as many as 1/3d to 1/2 of the current number and of course many of the programs should go the way of the dodo bird as well. In short, government must be scaled back in order to free up the private sector which is the only place productive, wealth generating jobs are created. The statist and collectivist members of Congress should take a big hit too, as their influence will wane in an economy that is expanding and creating jobs.
The Middle East solution by Dennis Pragar
Is there anyone in the West who isn't exhausted, fed up, and frustrated with the nearly seventy year old struggle going on between the Jews and Palestinians over a piece of land the size of the state of New Jersey? Like most people without a dog in this hunt, I have sided with the Israelies over the years and what's more the more I read about the history of the Middle East and it many twists and turns, the more convinced I am that all 180 million of those angry Muslims that surround the 6 million Jews in Israel would do themselves a world of good, materially and spiritually, by putting down their arms and making peace with this tiny country. Israel would welcome that and bend over backward to help the Palestinians build their own state and teach them how to make it work to the benefit of all the people over there. In this 5-7minute video, Dennis Pragar provides a clear picture of what the issue is a path to the future success of this region. Unfortunately this is not likely to happen as long as the Muslim faith remains unreformed to rid it of its decidedly intolerant and militant proclivities. Go here for the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Crowley to the rescue
Candy Crowley, the obese so-called journalist from the left-wing CNN cable network, managed to put the MSM in the spotlight at the Romney-Obama debate October 16. By covering for Obama on the Lybian, Benghazi debacle, Crowley demonstrated how far the media is willing to go to ensure Obama's reelection. In a nutshell they will go to any lengths necessary. In the debate Romney had Obama dead-to-rights on the dis and misinformation put out by the WH and the entire administration for two weeks after the attack, Crowley covered for Obama by claiming he was right in asserting he pronounced the Benghazi attack an act of terrorism on the day after, and by simultaneously changing the subject to another topic for debate saved Obama from the embarrassment of trying to explain why it took him and his acolytes another 13 days to officially declare it an act of terrorism. Obviously it took this long because the administration was trying to create a different narrative than the one dictated by a terrorist attack. Obama's entire foreign policy initiative has been built on appeasing the Arab world by hard lining relations with Israel and coddling the Islamists. His campaign has fully vested in the message we have fostered the Arab Spring, ended two wars in the ME, and put Al Qaeda on the run after killing Bin Laden. Should the attack that cost the lives of four Americans actually be an act of Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism, obviously the campaign claims would be rendered a nullity. And so it took two weeks of spinning an alternative version of events, built around a bogus claim the act of terror in Benghazi was a reaction to a bogus video produced by a Coptic Christian residing in the US. This shameful attempt to mislead the American public in order to protect the Obama reelection campaign was aided and abetted by the "cover" provided by Candy Crowley in the debate and the rest of the MSM by their coverage of these events for the previous two weeks. Not the finest hour for the media in the US and a vivid example of the bias and corruption of the MSM
Thursday, October 18, 2012
For the undecideds
Mark Levin, a pure Conservative with a capital "C", provokes this response from an anonymous commenter on a Powerline blog. It pretty much sums up the Obama debacle of the last 6 years (which includes the 2 years he ran for President while supposedly serving as a US Senator}:
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Everything costs something
Is there's an observer on the socio-political scene with more useful insights than Theodore Dalrymple? In this brief column he dissects the problem with socialism/communism/fascism with a real life experience he had some 20 years ago while visiting North Korea. It's inconceivable to us in the West that the kind of existence Dalrymple describes can be the case and yet we know it is throughout the Middle East, Africa, and the Far East. And yet one senses that a version of this existence is where the Obama forces would eventually take us. Freedom is a slippery slope and giving it up via Obamacare here, Cap and Trade there inevitably leads to dominance of the state and the enslavement of its populace who then become subjects. Something, anything for nothing has a compelling appeal to many who would do well to remember that there really are no free lunches and that everything costs something even if its free.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Econ 101
This simple explanation of the auto bailout by the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, should be shown in all high schools (and colleges, for that matter) throughout the land. It makes the points that every person who has actually been in the business world understands: government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers; using taxpayers moneys for government purposes reduces the capital available to the private sector where real jobs are created; politicians make "investments" in the economy for political reasons and not economic reasons.
This is an effective primer on economics.
This is an effective primer on economics.
Clinton-Obama axis
This article from the New York Magazine pretty much lays out the venality of Democrat politicians. Here we have the specter of Bill Clinton and Barak Obama, who don't trust or like each other, finding ways to use one another to each's benefit. Truly, the deserve each other. Clinton was a disgracefully amoral and low brow President. He brought great disgrace to the WH and country with all his philandering and crass political machinations. What saved his reputation was the Peace Dividend from the end of the Cold War, and the Newt Gingrich led Contract with America. In the former case, the winding down of the Cold War eliminated the need for huge military budgets, and in the latter the huge mid-term win by Republicans prevented Clinton from enacting all the Progressive (Socialist) plans and programs democrats always want to put in place. Obama, as we know, was successful in ramming through several of his socialist programs (Obamacare at the top of the list) before the Tea Party revolution put the brakes on his ambitions. Now they appear to be teaming up to bring four more years of socialism to the country in order to serve their personal and political party's interest. Hopefully Romney can bring an end to nightmare or four more or even more of the destructive politics these prototypical democrat politicians bring to our nation. Enough isn surely enough.
Krugman the liar
PAUL KRUGMAN some , THEN AND NOW
In the Democrats’ effort to brand Mitt Romney a “liar,” former economist Paul Krugman has taken a leading role, as I noted here. Krugman, as a full-time shill for the Obama administration, has tried to put a positive face on Obama’s dismal economic record. See, for example, this post on his New York Times blog, where he talks about the payroll jobs numbers and offers this graph:
If you don’t look at it closely, the chart could give you the impression that the number of payroll jobs has returned to its pre-recession level, which it hasn’t. Clark Judge, for one, made that mistake. Actually, the y-axis of the chart represents the change in the number of nonfarm payroll employees compared to 12 months earlier. It is a counter-intuitive presentation that likely is intended to make the jobs numbers seem better than they are, but what it shows, as Krugman writes, is that approximately 1.8 million payroll jobs have been added in the last 12 months. Here is how Krugman spins Obama’s jobs record:
Again, you want to focus on somewhat longer-term trends, not monthly numbers. Over the past year the employer survey says that we’ve added 1.8 million jobs, or 150,000 a month. …This is substantially more than the number of jobs we need to keep up with population growth, which is currently something like 90,000 a month. (The number used to be higher, but baby boomers are getting old — the same thing that affects the household survey.)So the two survey are saying the same thing: job growth fast enough to make gradual progress on the employment front. Not fast enough; it will take years to restore full employment, and we should, um, end this depression now. But the progress is real.
So that is a pretty positive assessment, focusing specifically on jobs. I wondered: how did George W. Bush’s jobs record during the last year of his first term compare with Obama’s, and what did Krugman say about it then? So I did the math.
You can see the official monthly jobs numbers from 2002 through this month here. They show that from January through September of this year, including the current report which was hailed as great news by the Obama administration, a total of 1,314,000 payroll jobs have been added to the economy. In the first nine months of the fourth year of the Bush administration, January through September 2004, the economy added 1,512,000 payroll jobs. Advantage, Bush.
Of course, that is only the beginning of the story. In September 2004 the unemployment rate was 5.4%, while the Obama administration breathed a sigh of relief that the rate for September of this year came in at 7.8%. Moreover, that figure vastly understates how bad the current employment picture is, as millions have left the labor force and chronic unemployment has skyrocketed. Other economic indicators are worse as well. More Americans are living in poverty than at any time in our history. The price of gasoline in October 2004 was $2.02 per gallon, coincidentally the high point of Bush’s first term. And median household income has fallen dramatically under Obama.
Krugman gives Obama what I would interpret as a B for his economic policies, at least as they relate to employment. So he must have given George Bush an A+, right?
Just kidding. Krugman excoriated Bush non-stop for eight years, using his (Krugman’s) purported expertise to savage Bush’s economic policies. You could find hundreds of instances, but let’s consider this CNN interview in October 2004, titled “A discussion of the disastrous Bush economy and the 2004 Presidential Election.” Here is what Krugman had to say about an economy that was obviously, and by any measure, far better than the one he defends today:
CAFFERTY: So why so glum? The president points out record homeownership, low interest rates, the economy is growing again. We’re producing jobs. The tax cuts put more money in peoples’ pockets. What’s the problem?KRUGMAN: First, net loss of jobs, payroll jobs for any president since Herbert Hoover. Duration of unemployment is close. The time it takes on average for unemployed people to find a new job close to its highest level in 20 years. Jobs have been created over the past year but only just about fast enough to keep up with population growth. This is a situation in which a lot of people are hurting. This is a much worse labor market than we had when he came into office and people feel that. The only thing he can point to is the unemployment rate which while it is lower than the average of the ’90′s, the average of the ’90s is kind of perked up by a couple of years under his father and is well below, is well above the unemployment rate when he came in. I think it is – in a way I think he’s almost making a mistake by making it seem as if things are really great because people can tell it isn’t.
Every data point that Krugman cites is now worse under Obama. I really enjoy what follows, as Krugman sternly explains that presidents shouldn’t make excuses:
ROMANS: Paul, the White House keeps saying is that he inherited this really unusual kind of merger of really terrible situations, the popping of the Internet bubble and then September 11, a global slowdown and that the White House says he actually managed through that very well.KRUGMAN: You know, you can always find an excuse. The thing to say is that each year of his presidency, the Council of Economic Advisers come out with an economic report of the president which forecast great job growth starting right now. Those reports come out each February. Each year they forecast great job growth. It hasn’t materialized and then they go back and say well, that’s because of all these things, but those things didn’t seem to affect their own forecast when they were making them. So we’re about seven million jobs short of where the 2002 economic report of the president said we were going to be. We already knew about the Internet bubble. We already knew about 9/11 then. What has changed since then to explain why we’re seven million jobs short?
One could say the same thing, only more so, about the forecasts the Obama team has made, as reflected for example in this famous chart:
Here is how Krugman assessed the political situation on the eve of the 2004 election:
SERWER: Paul, there are some other feathers in the president’s hat though, including household income which is up and the other thing I want to point to is, isn’t it really most important about where the economy is locally in states? For instance, in Florida the economy is actually not so bad. That could help the president. Isn’t that the better way to look at it?KRUGMAN: We can all try to figure out how the politics is going to play and the truth is we don’t know anything. I think obviously Ohio is very bad for Bush because it has been hit worse than the average. What is — the point is it is not a record to be proud of. It is a record you can spin. It’s not so terrible that you can’t go ahead and try and find some good numbers here and there, but overall let me just put it this way. If a Democrat had this record, oh boy, the Republican chorus about the incredibly terrible performance. It’s not a happy record on the economy.
If Bush’s record on the economy was “not happy,” Obama’s record is suicidal depression. Yet Krugman defends it. He says that those who criticize Obama’s performance are “liars.” So were those who criticized George W. Bush’s far better performance liars, too? Of course not! On the contrary, Krugman never missed an opportunity to brand Bush and pretty much every member of his administration as a “liar” or worse.
Krugman is, of course, one of the most shameless and dishonest political hacks on the planet. But while he is an extreme case, he is not alone. A similar, if less extreme, lack of honesty in assessing Obama’s economic record is endemic across the media formerly known as mainstream.
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