Author: Mark Noonan

Defending the TEA Party

Mark Noonan55 Comments

From NRO’s The Corner:

Sen. John McCain defended the Tea Party against Sen. John Kerry’s “tea party downgrade” remark on Meet the Press this morning.

“We could have reached an agreement a lot earlier, but the members of the House of Representatives had a mandate last November, and it was jobs and the economy and it was spending. And for them to then agree to tax increases and spending increases was obviously a repudiation of the mandate they felt they had from last November,” McCain said.

He said that much of the “dysfunction” in the current political system could be attributed to “the failure of the president of the United States to lead.”…

Some times John McCain can be infuriating, other times he’s just so right.  And gutsy – right now, the MSM/DNC drumbeat is that the TEA Party caused the problem.  Here is a chance for “moderate” GOPers to flee and mumble their agreement.  Not for John McCain – he just told it like it is:  the TEA Party is about cutting government spending.  To have agreed to tax hikes in lieu of serious spending cuts (and what we got in the deal was no where near “serious” enough to warrant signing off on revenue increases) would have been a rank betrayal.

To be sure, Democrats are all about that – in fact, over the past 40 years Democrats have mostly managed to advance their cause by gift of GOPers betraying principle and go along with whatever liberal flapdoodle is the fashion of the moment.  Remember Arlen Specter – that was the sort of “Republican” who was forever cutting the GOP off at the knees.  And that is precisely the sort of Republican the TEA Party people will not be.

Ultimately, we may have to obtain higher revenues in order to get out of this mess – but the fact of the matter is that Democrats will just lie about the spending cuts and greedily spend any increased revenue on their special interests.  In a very real sense, the Democrat leadership in the United States doesn’t care about the United States.  If they did, they would have proposed a real cut in next year’s spending – even if it were a symbolic cut of 10 or 20 billion.  I mean, of course, real cuts – not reductions in the rate of growth, but an actual spending of less money next year than we did this year.  Until Democrats show a real change of heart – show that they care more about America than they do about their own power and wealth – then we simply cannot go along with them…and thus the TEA Party standing firm against any tax hikes was an act of sublime patriotism.  It took away from those who are destroying the United States part of their ability to keep doing it.

McCain sees it; I see it, too.  Eventually, the whole country will see it – and I do believe that this growing understanding of what is really happening will destroy liberalism in 2012.

UPDATE:  In Canada, Saskatchewan gets a “TEA Party upgrade” to it’s bond rating:

…Rather than quickly spending its newly-earned wealth, the provincial government has put its tax revenue toward paying the bills. S&P gave special credit to Saskatchewan for its “low-and-declining debt burden.” As of March 31, the province’s fiscal year-end, Saskatchewan’s debt totalled $4.6-billion, representing 38 per cent of this year’s projected operating revenues and only 8 per cent of its gross domestic product. Canada’s federal debt-to-GDP ratio sits at around 35 per cent…

Rational tax and regulatory policies, a pro-business environment, fiscal responsibility which puts a premium on living within means and paying debt.  This isn’t rocket science, people…

Gold Goes to $1,700 an Ounce

Mark Noonan4 Comments

The signal of absolute no confidence in the fiat money, usury-based economy…from Reuters:

Gold vaulted above $1,700 an ounce for the first time on Monday, after the respective pledges by the G7 and the European Central Bank to quell the turbulence in the financial markets did nothing to put investors at ease…

Of course it didn’t, because the ECB if bankrupt, all its money already having gone to shore up Greece and Portugal and there not being enough money in Europe to bail out Spain and Italy.

Going to be an interesting day – in the “Chinese curse” sense of the word.

Municipal Bonds on the Chopping Block?

Mark Noonan5 Comments

From Zero Hedge:

While the impact on Treasuries as a result of the downgrade may be limited (after all the other side of the Atlantic is about as ugly as the US, so where could $8 trillion in marketable USTs practically go… at least for now), the same may not be said about the far smaller, $2.9 trillion municipal market, which is about to see a blanket downgrade tomorrow as S&P warned on Friday night, and of which Matt Fabian of Municipal Market Advisors earlier said that “There will be hundreds and hundreds of municipal downgrades, which will not do well to bolster investor confidence.” The scary bit: “Treasuries may be able to shake off a real impact from the downgrade. Munis I’m less sure about…

This could be devastating to the already stressed budgets of municipalities – many of them, burdened under bloated pension budgets and other foolhardy spending, are just an ace away from bankruptcy, as it is.  Put a bit more pressure on them and a lot could fail.  And even if they manage to scrape through, this will mean less money for police, fire and schools…and likely further rounds of government worker layoffs (which, in a macro sense, aren’t bad, but are plain and simple lousy for the people losing their jobs).

Learn the lesson – debt is poison.  No government should ever carry any of it – certainly not for anything less important than fighting a World War.  To mortgage the future under the best of circumstances is foolish..to mortgage it in order to keep up a bloated, wasteful government entity is criminal.  The change must come, and we might as well get over the worst of it right away…slash budgets until no more bonds need to be sold, and then rebuild from there.

Did You Ever See a Stock Market Crash?

Mark Noonan40 Comments

The Tel Aviv market gives a good indication of what it looks like – and here’s the really bad news:  Israel’s economy is healthy.

Of course, by the time the markets open tomorrow Bernanke and the boys might have figured out some way to finesse around the downgrade and the spreading crisis in the Eurozone.  I honestly don’t know what will happen tomorrow – but things are looking really dicey both in the short and long term.

We’ve got one heck of a mess and it won’t be easy to get out of…and we need a government which recognizes the mess (no more happy talk about how things are moving in the right direction when they’re not) and has the guts to do what is right.  We need to massively reduce spending, reform taxes and entitlements and free up the wealth-creating capacity of the American economy.  This will infuriate all those special interests who are still living off the carcass of Big Government, but it has to be done.

Out and About on a Sunday Morning

Mark Noonan74 Comments

Poll:  71% support five year ban on ex-Congresscritters lobbying.  I say, make it 10.

Mark Steyn has penned another of his doom-and-gloom articles about the United States.  I’d like to say he’s wrong, but that would be a lie…if we don’t get our debt under control, we’ll suffer a gigantic collapse, and in just a few years (my guesstimate is in 2015).  The bottom line is that we’d better elect someone in 2012 who will see to it that in 2014 we spend less money than in 2012…and I don’t mean “lower rate of growth” in spending, but an actual reduction.  $500 billion would be best, but even if its a mere dollar, it is a start.

Vogue dresses a 10 year old girl like a harlot and we’re actually having a debate about whether this should be.  A healthy society would flog the photographer and the magazine editor and move on  (did you just say, “flog”, Mark?  Yes, I did.  And I mean it – tie them to a post and lay 20 stripes with a bullwhip across their backs…it would carefully instruct them and provide a good lesson to all and sundry).  Add this to that small – but rapidly growing – list of things I’ll keep saying until everyone agrees with me, because I’m right:  we’re poisoning ourselves.  The filth we allow to flow in to our civilization is killing us.  We can easily call a halt…if we just have the courage to do it.

Over at Breitbart TV, a businesswoman carefully explains what is wrong with Obamunism.

Result of the culture of death – the world is short 163 million women.  Really great that we’ve “protected a woman’s right to choose”, huh?  I mean, we’re certain that birth control and abortion aren’t being used by men to determine what sort of children will be born, right?

Downgrade:  Obama will catch the flack.

From IMAO:  All Obama has proved himself to be during the whole time of his Presidency is lazy, ineffectual, duplicitous, pathologically narcissistic, petulant, inarticulate, and – apparently – nicotine-withdrawal-addled.

 

 

 

Understanding the President

Mark Noonan13 Comments

Joseph Rago of the Wall Street Journal talks things over with House Majority Leader Cantor, and comes out with this:

Like Mr. Cantor, President Obama is also a man of deep and strong convictions, and perhaps that’s why they seem to dislike each other so much. Call it, to adapt Freud, the narcissism of big differences. Mr. Cantor cautions that he isn’t a “psychoanalyst”—before politics, he was a real-estate lawyer and small businessman—but he says, “It’s almost as if someone cannot have another opinion that is different from his. He becomes visibly agitated. . . . He does not like to be challenged on policy grounds.”

In a meeting with the Journal’s editorial board Wednesday, Mr. Cantor, 48, gives his side of one of his more infamous altercations with the president. In a mid-July Cabinet Room meeting, Mr. Cantor made a suggestion that Mr. Obama and other Democrats took as impertinent. “How dare I,” Mr. Cantor recalls of the liberal sentiment in the room. He was sitting between Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, “and they were in absolute agreement that [the president] was such a saint for having endured all this.”

“No president has sat here like I have, in these kinds of meetings, with congressional leaders, in this detail,” Mr. Obama said in Mr. Cantor’s recollection, which Democrats dispute. Mr. Cantor says the president also invoked Ronald Reagan “to be a little patronizing of us, because he assumed that anything Reagan did we like.” Mr. Obama then told Mr. Cantor, “Eric, don’t call my bluff,” and walked out…

Maybe this is why Obama has a desire to appoint Czars…it was Czar Nicholas I who stated, at the start of his reign, “I cannot permit that someone should disagree with my views, once he knows what they are”.  Might be that my little joke about His Majesty, Barry I actually hits close to home.  President Obama might be one of those sad political specimens who are driven bonkers by contradiction.  Equally telling, if Cantor has it completely right, is the servility of Pelosi and Hoyer…The One was defied by a Republican, and that was offensive…where does that little worm get off talking like that to Dear Leader?  I wonder if Obama still has the Democrat Congressional leadership enthralled like that?  Is the mere fact that he is black something which will continue to blind them to the facts?  To put it differently, is the election of  a black man so important, to liberals, that the results will be resolutely ignored?

I guess we’ll find out as the next year unfolds.  But if Cantor has read Obama correctly – and other evidence out there indicates he’s at least in the ball park – then Obama will just rigidly adhere to his view and keep bulling ahead, regardless of what happens.  This works out bad for America, because the President should be a man with the courage to admit he has been wrong and then change course.  On the other hand, it works out great for conservatism because it means Obama will just keep driving liberalism over the cliff.

It is a pity that our final wake up from liberalism should have to come like this, but it also might have been inevitable.  So seductive is the idea that you can have it all for nothing that once you fall for liberalism, it would take a complete catastrophe to get you cured of it.  The catastrophe is coming (though the very worst won’t get here until 2015…and not then if we toss Obama in 2012)…but that means the liberation is, too.

Huckabee: Replace Geithner with Trump

Mark Noonan11 Comments

From CNN:

Amid calls by the GOP for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s resignation, one Republican is offering an unorthodox choice for a potential replacement.

“Ask Donald Trump to be Treasury secretary,” Mike Huckabee said on Fox News Channel.

The former Arkansas governor elaborated: “Have Donald Trump take the job for 90 days. It’s a game changer.”…

Trump certainly wouldn’t be worse than Geithner and may end up a lot better.  Certainly, unless Obama really changes course at this point we’re heading for a really bad time.  Even a major course change won’t completely get us out of the soup…but swift action, now, can prevent “bad” from becoming “hideous”.  If not Trump, then someone who has a bit of guts and a bit of knowledge of business.

But I doubt we’ll see it – Obama may call in Underbus to rid himself of a political liability, but I doubt Obama even sees the need for a real change, let alone what that change might entail.

 

Liberal Fascism at Law School

Mark Noonan8 Comments

From Legal Insurrection:

Lawrence Connell is a tenured law professor at Widener Law School in Delaware.  I have noted in prior posts that Connell was accused of a wide range of racist and sexist conduct directed at students in his classes and at Dean Linda Ammons (because of hypothetical examples Connell used in class).

Connell has sued, and also went through a university disciplinary hearing process.  The faculty committee which heard the evidence found that Connell did not violate any university policy with regard to the allegations of racist and sexist conduct…

…In a rational world, the university would seek no or minimal sanctions against Connell since he was completely vindicated of the underlying charges…  But Dean Ammons recommended that the university suspend Connell for a year without pay, which the university accepted.

But Dean Ammons recommendation, accepted by the university, went much further, demanding that Connell submit to a psychiatric evaluation, undergo ”anger management” counseling…and issue an apology…

In the old Soviet Union, this is what would happen to you – if you persisted in dissidence from the reigning orthodoxy, you could find yourself under psychiatric examination.  After all, if it has been carefully explained to you that you are in the wrong – and any man accused of racism and sexism is clearly in the wrong, regardless of the facts of the case – then it is time to knuckle under, accept re-education and become an emasculated cog in the liberal machine.  That Connell hasn’t done this proves he’s crazy…and, so.

This point out the larger problem we have in our legal profession:  those steeped in the liberal worldview don’t know what law is.  Without a rigid application of the law equally, all we have is the worst tyranny – that horrid arbitrariness which leaves the citizen in the dark about what he may or may not do.  That, in turn, breeds a political passivity conducive to dictatorship (which is, when you think about it, the goal of liberalism…even if not a conscious goal among most liberals).  Right now, at that law school, no one knows what is permissible – even if it is clearly laid out in statute, one has to worry that some school bureaucrat will essentially issue an “OSO decree” and send you off to Siberia for a term.

The good news is that we’re likely to see a bursting of the law school bubble pretty soon.  They’ve been churning out so many “lawyers” that the law field is glutted.  This is why you see ever more ads from lawyers willing to sue anyone for anything.  We could have a nice, little collapse which will result in a lot of law schools closing, or at least being reduced in size…and fewer kids willing to enter that market.  That, in turn, may allow someone who knows law to actually have a say in how a law school is run.  Anything is possible…and certainly this liberal fascism on campus can’t go on forever.

The Enemy Strikes Hard in Afghanistan

Mark Noonan22 Comments

From the AP:

A military helicopter was shot down in eastern Afghanistan, killing 31 U.S. special operation troops, most of them from the elite Navy SEALs unit that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, along with seven Afghan commandos. It was the deadliest single incident for American forces in the decade-long war.

The Taliban claimed they downed the helicopter with rocket fire while it was taking part in a raid on a house where insurgents were gathered in the province of Wardak late Friday. It said wreckage of the craft was strewn at the scene. A senior U.S. administration official in Washington said the craft was apparently shot down by insurgents. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the crash is still being investigated…

Hopefully the reaction will be to go very hard after the Taliban unit responsible for this…we dare not let them think they have scored a victory; make them pay a price all out of proportion to our losses.

This is a good time to remind ourselves that while we sit fat, dumb and happy, young men and women are still laying it all on the line for us.  What is our budget debate or debt downgrade or the 2012 election compared to what the armed forces are doing, day after day, with little thanks or note from us?  We have allowed ourselves to be too distracted … and I hope President Obama gets a grip on the Afghan campaign, and brings it back to the forefront of public consciousness.  It is time to win this campaign and then come home…whatever it takes, do it, and let’s have done with these savages in the Taliban.

GOP Wants Open Debt Committee Hearings

Mark Noonan4 Comments

From Newsmax:

Much of Washington’s attention is now focused on the bipartisan congressional committee that will soon be formed to recommend how to reduce the budget deficit by $1.5 trillion. And Republicans are working hard to ensure that the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction holds all its meetings in public, The Hill reports.

Six GOP senators sent a letter to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell Wednesday urging that the committee’s business be “done in a transparent manner through advanced public notification, public attendance and live television broadcasts, . . . not behind closed doors.”

The signers include Sens. Dean Heller of Nevada, David Vitter of Louisiana, Mike Lee of Utah, John Boozman of Arkansas, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin…

Good for them and I entirely agree…let us call witnesses who can explain exactly what we’re spending money on and what we can cut without touching a single social security, medicare, medicaid or military pay check.  Hundreds of billions are being spent each year on perfectly worthless activities (including activities hidden within otherwise worthy programs), and the more exposure we can get, the better our chances of a popular demand for cuts.

The people are on our side in the debt battle – we know it must be cut, all we have to do is show where and how much.  Open committee hearings will give us our best chance.