From the Washington Post:

…New Post-ABC numbers show Obama leading five of six potential Republican presidential rivals tested in the poll. But he is in a dead heat with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who formally announced his 2012 candidacy last week, making jobs and the economy the central issues in his campaign.

Among all Americans, Obama and Romney are knotted at 47 percent each, and among registered voters, the former governor is numerically ahead, 49 percent to 46 percent…

When you’re trailing a GOPer who, to say the least, hasn’t even locked down the GOP base you are clearly starting to suffer from an “anyone but you” attitude among the electorate. Its not that people are wild for Romney, but they are getting wild to replace Obama.

Now, the economy could undergo a major turnaround over the next 12 months and Obama could end up being popular, again…but if the economy is in the same or worse shape come June of 2012, then he’s going to be in very serious political trouble.

Sorta puts the nauseating cherry on top of the ObamaCare poop sandwich, doesn’t it? From DC Caller:

The Daily Caller has learned the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) never had the authority to issue waivers from Obamacare’s annual limit requirements.

Language granting HHS that power was never in the original law. Instead, through new rules and regulations, HHS gave itself the power last summer using a broad interpretation of certain parts of the law…

Liberals – just making it up as they go along. This is no surprise, at all. Once you understand that liberals don’t know what “law” means you are prepared to see all manner of shennanigans. To a liberal, a law is whatever a liberal wants it to be at the moment…and, so, abortion is found in a constitution which never even so much as mentions “privacy” and “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” means “only the police and army are allowed to have guns”; people who illegally cross the border didn’t break the law, they are just “undocumented”… Trust me on this one, if the liberals decide that wearing purple on every second Tuesday is good, they’ll find the requirement in what they call “law”.

Nancy said we had to pass the bill to see what was in it – a more accurate statement would be “we have to pass the law so we can find what we want in it”. They could have passed a law with 2,000 blank pages and you would have got the same thing…and now that I think of it, has anyone seen the actual bill which was passed? I’m not talking a copy or a summary, but the actual bill, itself? Boehner should go ask Nancy where it is…maybe it is just 2,000 blank pages!

Repeal and replace, that is the only way to go: an absolute requirement, in fact, because if we don’t repeal it then liberals will still continue to find whatever they want in it. Doesn’t do any good to just modify it…if you take away the individual mandate in sub-section C, page 96, paragraph Z.1, they’ll just find it, again, in sub-section D, page 114, paragraph A.5.Z-57.6. Or they’ll get a judge to rule that the “general welfare” statement in the Constitution’s preamble requires ObamaCare to be the law of the land. Repeal and replace…and then seize all copies and burn and bury, just to be sure.

Lance Robert over at Zero Hedge says, “yes“:

The media has been replete lately with a variety of different government officials saying that there will not be a third round of Quantitative Easing. Even the great Ben Bernanke himself on April 27th spoke against the possibility of QE 3. This isn’t surprising, of course, because in order for something like QE to have the most effect it needs to be, well, a surprise.

However, I am throwing down the gauntlet and making the call – there will be Quantitative Easing, and a big one most likely, by the end of summer. There I said it; of course, I have actually been saying this for the last couple of months and it doesn’t take much of a real genius to figure it out considering that we are heading into a presidential election year. However, it most likely won’t be called QE 3 since the term QE is now politically and socially almost taboo…

I can’t dissent from that view, at all. The one thing the banksters and bureaucrats cannot handle is an economy in recession in 2012. To their way of thinking, Obama is a sure-thing unless the economy tanks (personally, I think a lot of people are putting too much stock in Obama…even if the economy is better in 2012 than in 2011, he’s very much beatable because so many Americans are growing contemptuous of him; but, we’ll leave that aside, for now) – and, so, they have to keep the economy from tanking. While Democrats talk up more stimulus, the fact of the matter is that the House GOP would have to become suicidal to agree to any such thing…and even if they did, there is no assurance it would get through a Senate filled with Democrats fearful of losing their re-election bids in 2012. Thus, classic tax and spend efforts to “cure” a recession are out…only thing left is to fire up the printing presses.

As the linked article notes, in order for any such printing to have a noticeable effect on GDP growth and employment, it would have to be a pretty large amount. The author guesses in the range of $2 trillion. I can’t say, myself…but if you do dump $2 trillion on the economy all of a sudden, it will have a big effect. The people doing it hope for a lot of short-term, good effect…with the bad stuff only showing up after Obama is safely re-elected. The last two rounds of money printing worked out just like that – short term boost to the economic numbers, giving the appearance of economic recovery, as long as you ignored such bell weathers as the price of housing, new home construction and labor force participation (most of which is rather arcane information that most Americans don’t know about). It certainly blew a hole in my predictions – I didn’t think Bernanke and the boys could keep it up nearly this long.

But will it work like that, again? I’m not so sure. Printing up money is, after all, a way of kicking the problem down the road. It doesn’t solve anything – and, in fact, in the long term it makes things much worse. While some good will be perceived, the fact of the matter is that more money printing will immediately cause oil and other commodities to spike in price, thus forcing consumers to pay more for essentials. Whatever “oomph” we might get from “free” money may be immediately eaten up by the “tax” of rising inflation. Maybe a quarter or two of improved numbers, but then a resumption of the crash – and at an accelerated rate. Do it in July and you carry us through to January…and we fall back in to recession right about the time Obama gives his acceptance speech to the 2012 Democrat convention (on the other hand, if they wait until January then we may be back in full-blown recession and Obama’s numbers may have so badly cratered that even if there is “recovery” by September of 2012, it will be too late). I don’t like the prospects of it – mostly because fiat money is just bad…but doubly bad this time as we might only be allowing the most speculative of money men to make a killing for a short while.

The thing is, if Obama were to change course right now and admit that stimulus and money printing don’t work – and then told us we’ve got four or five bad years to get through but if we get busy making, mining and growing things, then we’ll be back on our feet, he’d probably get re-elected. The refreshing honesty and the “let’s all get together to endure the rough times” would likely boost his appeal to an American people increasingly weary of big promises and small results from government. I doubt that Obama has the courage to make such a move – or, indeed, the wit to see that it is necessary. And all the banksters and bureaucrats can see is rank fear…fear that someone like Palin or Cain or Santorum will win and proceed to gut Big Government, including the “private sector” parts of it (ie, big corporations like GM, big banks like JP Morgan). Fear and ignorance…because make no mistake about it, the people who rise highest in corporate or bureaucratic America are the people least versed in how real life is lived. They simply don’t know what they’re doing – but the theory they were taught in college says spend, spend, spend your way to prosperity.

It’ll be interesting to watch out this plays out. Clueless people running a government off track and an economy which has been strangled. They want this dead cat to get up and walk, and the trick just can’t be done. Meanwhile, frustration and anger grow among the American people and revolution is distinctly in the air. 2012 will be the most crucial election since 1932…and at this point in time, no one can say what, really, will happen.

Gotta say, I like what I hear – he understands the problem. He has hard words for all of us – our sense of entitlement to government benefits is firmly condemned. Our requirement to do our duty – to God, country and fellow man – is emphasized. Whether or not Santorum becomes the next President of the United States remains to be seen – what cannot be doubted is that the next President, if he is to reform America, must agree with Santorum’s understanding of the problem.

Now, the hard part – putting forth a reform plan which will turn Santorum from a dark horse candidate in to a potential nominee. He can’t leave that hanging…he has to tell us what he plans to do, in some detail, or he’ll just be one of a half dozen people vying for TEA Party backing…and lacking money and national clout, he’ll never emerge from the pack. The plan is the thing for Santorum…we’ll see if he delivers.

Victor Davis Hanson explains:

Nemesis is always hot on the trail of hubris, across time and space, and the goddess has been particularly busy in destroying the carefully crafted images of Bono, John Edwards, Timothy Geithner, Al Gore, Eliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Anthony Weiner, and a host of others. What do their tax hypocrisies, sexual indulgences, and aristocratic socialist lifestyles all have in common?

Collectively, they represent a self-appointed or elected global elite that oversees, lectures about — in sanctimonious fashion — the ethical responsibilities of the redistributive state…

The reason our Founders sought to limit the power of the government was not because they feared a jack-booted Gestapo kicking down our doors – the Founders knew of no such things – but because our Founders were incredibly wise to human nature. These were, for the most part, practical men of affairs. Well off, as far as things went in 18th century America, but not fabulously wealthy – men who had to work and scramble to get ahead and thus understood the weakness of humanity. Our inflated opinion of ourselves; our willingness to rationalize our desires; our slowness to give credit where it is due; our penchant for falling in to financial or sexual corruption…men are weak, so don’t give them too much power over other men.

What we have done wrong over this past century is that while men have remained as weak as ever, we have assigned ever more power to them. This is why, in practice, all Big Government programs fail – even if you really could work out to a nicety exactly what should be done, you’d still have to confide the execution of the plan to people just like you…in other words, people who are likely to mess up again and again and again. Remember that – best plan in the world put in to place with the best of intentions: it will still be screwed up. Just can’t get around it – just can’t get around the fact that people will have to carry it out. And the more authority you assign to these screwed up people, the greater the scope of the disaster. Consign a company of soldiers to a dimwit and you might get a company of soldiers wiped out by an error…put an army in to such hands and you might have an entire war lost. See how it works?

But it gets even worse…an army commander still doesn’t command the whole of the country. Now take that witless army commander and put him in charge of health care; of manufacturing; of the legal system…worse and worse and worse it will become. This is why the Catholic Church, quite a long while ago and at the dawn of the super-State ruled that “subsidiarity” must be the rule. Having no illusions about the nature of Man, the Church held – and still holds – that action must take place at the lowest level possible. This is because the closer you are to a problem the more likely you are to find the right solution – and the smaller the error will be if you mess it up on the lowest level possible. There was a reason the Psalmist wrote:

I Put no trust in princes, in mere mortals powerless to save.

When they breathe their last, they return to the earth; that day all their planning comes to nothing. – Psalm 146:3-4

Trust God, but for heaven’s sake don’t trust your fellow men – not even yourself – with too much power. Even if it means something doesn’t get done, better that it should be so than risk putting a complete scoundrel in charge…and you will get that complete scoundrel the more you repose your trust in men.

The good news is that we can fix this – by returning our government to its Constitutional norms. Are you tired of all the Weiners out there making a mess of things? Then take away their power and give it to no one…then you will have seen the last of them. Oh, they’ll still be there…but they’ll only be ruining their own lives, not all of ours.

Just got this feeling that some big news will come out today – but as I have to work and then have a Knights of Columbus meeting later, I might not be able to write something up until late in the day. So, use this thread to discuss all the big stories of today…or to comment on how boring it was this Monday.

Isn’t the definition of insanity, “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”? From The Hill:

House Democrats this week have amplified their calls for new spending on infrastructure and other federal projects in the face of May’s discouraging job-creation figures.

Even as Republicans are insisting on “trillions” of dollars in spending cuts, Democrats maintain that a targeted injection of additional federal dollars in the near-term would go a long way toward reversing the hiring slump. Friday’s disappointing job report, they say, only bolsters their case…

This is seriously what they’ve got – spend more money on infrastructure and federal projects. They expect none of us to notice that, hey, we just spent a lot of money on just that…shouldn’t we have some primo infrastructure, by now? But, this what Democrats will run on…just spend more money; and aren’t those Republicans meanies for not spending?

The real purpose here, of course, is to keep unionized workers on the job through 2012. The last thing Democrats need is a huge pool of campaign cash and political muscle to dry up. So, spend bags of more money – print it up in whatever amount proves necessary. Gotta get Obama re-elected, ya know?

We can crush them. They’ve got nothing. Their plans have fallen off from silly to downright stupid. All we need do is attack, attack and then attack some more. As long as we fight this out, the people will come our way…we offer a future of greatness, they offer another hand out to their special interests. We can win this running away, if we set our selves to the task.

A dire prediction quoted over at Zero Hedge:

…We consider it likely that food inflation will prove to be more pernicious and durable this time than in the Seventies.

Why?

Because, back then, food shortages generating food inflation were almost entirely caused by weather or crop diseases. Today, we still have problems with weather disruptions in key grain-growing regions, but pesticides and herbicides have dramatically reduced crop losses of earlier times. However, we now have man-made assaults on food supplies, and they have every indication of being both dangerous and durable. Politicians cloaking their personal political greed in green garb could easily create food shortages of Biblical proportions.

Indeed. We have the capability not just of feeding the whole world, but of over-feeding it. The last thing which should be suffering inflation is food. We’ve really got the technology on this one nailed down. But a series of short sighted policies ranging from government subsidies to environmentalist idiocy has curbed the ability of the United States and the rest of the world to produce sufficient food. The bowl is getting empty and we’re busy killing off the means of re-filling it.

This doesn’t affect Americans too much. For Americans, higher food prices are really an inconvenience. If food prices spike another 10 or 15%, it will hurt and it will have a severe effect on the economy (more spent on food, less spent on other goods…presto!, recession)…but it won’t ever risk an American’s life. On the other hand, those areas of the world which have short food supplies at the best of times and where people spend half or more of their income just on food would be catastrophically hit if food prices continue to rise. As is usual when liberal elites set to work (in this case, in “saving” the planet) it is the poorest of the poor who suffer the most.

We really need to reform American government from top to bottom. A century’s worth of liberal idiocy has wormed its way in to our institutions and unless we can purge this nonsense we’ll never fully recover. America is supposed to be the economic powerhouse of the world – in food as well as in all other activities. We’ve bound ourselves hand and foot with liberal policies, and now some places of the world are running out of food because of it. Time for a real change – and 2012 just can’t get here fast enough.

Remember the day:

They are almost all gone now, the men who liberated Europe. A few very old men linger on and we are thus privileged to have them with us for a little while. But the day will soon come when all of them will have gone home – gone to be with the brothers they left on the beaches and fields of Normandy. I wonder who will laugh most – those who died there, or those who died many years later?

For us, it is a matter of remembering – what they did and why they did it. We forget too fast these days, especially in the younger generation. We forget that regular, every day Americans quitted their lives and went to liberate people they didn’t know and places they had never been. Evil had risen in the world, and in trusting faith they went forth and did their duty – more than 300,000 of them giving, in Lincoln’s words, “the last full measure of devotion”.

From Reuters:

Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou starts a campaign on Monday to secure a new international bailout by imposing years of austerity on a nation already seething over corruption and economic mismanagement.

Unease is growing within Papandreou’s ranks about the consequences of waves of budget cuts demanded under successive deals with the European Union and IMF — and this could turn into alarm after at least 80,000 Greeks crammed a central Athens square to vent their anger over the nation’s dire state…

To put it in proportion – this is like more than two million Americans showing up in DC to shout defiance at the government. Can you imagine what would happen if such an event took place? More than likely, our government would cave to that level of anger…or, the party on the “out” would swiftly take advantage of it and clean up at the next election.

So, why, then, does the Greek government seem prepared to buck their people and go forward with the bail out? Because if you think the Republicans and Democrats are two sides of the same coin, you’ve never seen nothing like Europe. Over there, all the parties really are the same…with only the most minor differences. The difference between, say, Labour and Tory in Britain is that the Tories will have Britain go bankrupt slightly slower than Labour would. Portugal just tossed out their government because of the bail outs…and what do the winners propose to do? Go forward with the bail outs, naturally.

Everyone of the elite in Europe is simply aghast at all this – the deal was they’d provide lavish benefits and the people would just quietly accept the dictates of government. But now popular revolt is brewing…and you just watch: if this keeps up, the more extremist parties in Europe will start to gain strength. Not because Europeans are particularly extremist, but because of frustration with all the current major parties…no one is speaking up for the people who are to be burdened with taxes for a generation in a vain attempt to pay off bondholders who should have been smart enough not to loan money to States which cannot repay.

It is quite a mess over there – and it where we’re heading unless we get our act together in the 2012 election.