Charlie Cook in National Journal:

Some bright, talented, and highly qualified Republicans are thinking about running for president. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts—all current or former governors—are eminently capable. Regardless of whether you like or agree with them, they are worthy of consideration for the Republican nomination.

How demoralizing it must be, then, for them to look at national polling that shows Donald Trump tied for first place for the GOP nomination…

To Cook, as to most serious political observers, Trump is a joke – and a bad joke, at that. And in a very real sense, they are correct. It is absurd for Donald Trump to consider running for President (doubly so as he’s already indicated that if he doesn’t get the GOP nomination he’ll run as an Independent…if he doesn’t back away from that, he won’t score 1% in New Hampshire). But there he is, front and center in the MSM, certainly looking like he plans to run. The joke is becoming reality – and a lot of people don’t know how to deal with it.

The appeal of Donald Trump is that he’s not “one of the boys”; he’s not part of our political class, held in utter contempt by the American people. Make no mistake about it – while people are dismayed by Obama, there is not much faith placed in the Republican party, either. Our politics is rotten – our politicians have taken the greatest nation in human history and turned us in to a weak, blundering giant. This is not the way America is supposed to be. Trump might not be the answer, but neither is politics as usual. Trump is unusual – in the extreme.

I don’t think Donald Trump will win the GOP nomination. And I don’t think he’ll run as an Independent – because he seems to passionately want Obama out of office and an Independent run by Trump might be the only way Obama can possibly secure a second term (of course, Trump’s ego might get in the way, here, but in Trump I sense a strong worry about America as his motivation). If, however, Trump does win the GOP nomination then it will be because he manages to put forth a series of goals which speak to American aspirations. In other words, if Trump presents a plan the American people can get behind, and no one else does, then he might rise to the stars.

I said some time ago that no one can say for sure what will happen in 2012. We are in a revolutionary political period here. Someone might come out of nowhere and win the whole ball of wax. I was thinking along the lines of someone like Cain, but Trump could do it, too. Don’t hold to old, tired notions of what can and cannot happen. Keep an open mind. Be flexible. A Ruling Class is dying and no one can say what will replace it – only that it is sure to be replaced. Trump has his place in our debates – and an honorable place, too. Don’t consider him a joke – consider him as he is; oppose him or support him because you think or don’t think he’ll make a good President…but don’t write him off, or allow the Ruling Class to tell you what you should think about him – or anyone else in the race.

And Senator Paul congratulates them – from NRO’s The Corner:

Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) tells National Review Online that he supports the 59 House Republicans who broke with leadership and opposed the Boehner-White House spending deal this afternoon. “Are we really cutting anything? What have we cut?” he asks. “The people back home want to know whether we are spending more money this year than last year. I try to look at it in those terms. And I think the people are with us.”…

It is always hard to buck the leadership and so those House Republicans who did stand firm on principal should be encouraged and defended. I’m not one of those who think that the deal was a loss for us – on balance, it was a victory. But more than who won or lost, the most important thing about it is that it shows the Democrats will not go to the mat and have a shut down. Therein lies our strongest weapon and our leverage to get genuine budget cuts – if the GOP leadership realizes it and has the courage to act upon it.

Right now, Big Government liberals have their backs to the wall – the nation is bankrupt, the people are not interested in new spending programs, tax hikes won’t help anyone win an election. Class warfare rhetoric wears thin and Obama is increasingly being tuned out by the American people. As 2012 comes in, Democrats face defeat – and their risk is that what could be a standard political defeat turns in to an electoral wipe out they’ll be a generation recovering from. This is especially the case if the economy slides back in to recession – doubly so if the GOP also finds a first class candidate to oppose Obama. Democrats have this quandary – keep their liberal base satisfied with government spending while also not alienating the center which wants spending cut. This is a circle I don’t think they can square.

And because of that, we hold all the cards – we are the party out of power (our control of the House doesn’t make us “in power”; it is whomever holds the White House who is “in power”); we are the people with a historical identification with low taxes, spending cuts and free market economics; we are a party filled with new members and vibrant, grass-roots organizations. We are not defending a dying status quo – we are the revolution; the breath of fresh air. At least, all this is true if we act as though it is…if we timidly hope to thread the electoral needle just to win in 2012 for the sake of winning, we’ll be resigning most of our advantages. We have to fight, and fight hard, for the real change Americans want.

A dying Ruling Class is defending it’s crumbling bastions; a revolutionary army awaits leadership…what will come in 2012? I don’t really know – I’ve never in my life seen a man and a party more vulnerable to crushing defeat than Barack Obama and the Democrat party. But even the most vulnerable survive if they are not attacked, or not attacked with sufficient sense and vigor. Time will tell if we seized our opportunities.

Noted by Mish:

Greek and Portuguese Euro-based sovereign debt yields hit new highs today with the Greek 10-Year sovereign bond yield topping 13% for the first time in the history of the Euro…

The Portuguese yield is at 9% – and if you go in to it further, you’ll see that investors believe there is a much higher chance of government default in Europe than a corporate default. The European Union is a financial house of cards, just waiting to collapse.

In case you’re wondering, “why should we care?”; the answer is that if the Euro collapses, it takes the global economy down with it – the three pillars of the global economy, right now, are the United States, the European Union and China…all three have massive, structural problems and no easy way out. China’s economy is overheating and various bubbles are already starting to pop (though given that the Chinese government can shoot you if you let the economic cat out of the bag, there is still the ability to believe that things are ok there); the United States economy labors under a mountain of debt and an absurd tax and regulatory regime which positively discourages wealth creation; Europe also has the mountain of debt and in addition to that the beginnings of a massive demographic decline.

This will get very ugly before it gets better.

The perfect answer to rich liberals who say we should raise taxes.

Don’t raise all our taxes – raise yours. Come on, liberals – you think that we should all pay more? Ok, you, first. Money where mouth is, please.

Remember, boys and girls that line from Shakespeare: Treat each man as he deserves and who would ‘scape whipping?

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you. – C. S. Lewis

Its just something I think important – forgive, forgive and then forgive some more. There’s nothing anyone ever did to you which will matter 100 years from now, so forgive it.

Please note: there are no moderate Islamsits.

Is Mitch Daniels sticking a toe in to the 2012 waters?

Poll: 60% of Japanese firms see negative impact from earthquake/tsunami. The effects of that disaster will be large and long-lasting…don’t believe anyone who says in six months or so Japan will be up and running. It just won’t happen – it can’t happen; the damage and the loss of capital (monetary and human) has just been too large.

Sexism! New study indicates women make 8% more than men. Of course, the whole “pay gap” thing was nonsense from the get-go…when you account for different types of education achievement and length of time in the work force, there never was a pay gap. People get paid the same for the same work, period – it’d be asinine to do it any other way.

Just how good could Republicans do in the Senate in 2012 and 2014? Pretty good, actually.

Obama’s budget speech was really, really lousy.

Well, here ya go – from PJStar.com:

…(Illinois) State government is an employer, too, with approaching 70,000 full- and part-time workers. And from that pool there are currently 25,000 open workers’ comp claims. That’s a breathtaking number. It is impossible to believe all of those are legitimate…

That works out to about 35% of Illinois State workers having a workers’ comp claim. Not only is is impossible to believe that they are all legitimate, it is impossible to believe that most of them aren’t bogus. Military units engaged in battle don’t have that high a casualty rate. But this is what unionized employee pools bring – especially when they are on the taxpayer’s dime. You just build up a huge number of people who will game the system as much as possible – and, of course, unions setting up contracts to they can be gamed in the most brazen manner.

And its not just Illinois, of course. Out here in Las Vegas there is a brewing scandal over the way our firefighters have been milking the system. All sorts of arcane rules were put in to place regarding sick leave, overtime and such – and because of this, at lot of people figured out they could do things like call out sick, have themselves called in while they were “sick” and then get paid over time for working their regular shifts. One firefighter called in sick 42 times, but never four days in a row because that would have required a doctor’s note – in the end, he managed to pile up 232 grand in 2009.

Cities and States are going broke largely because of things like this – bloated payrolls and pensions brought about by unions working out slick deals with bought politicians. In the end, the only way to ensure rational fiscal policies at the State and local level is to either do what Walker did in Wisconsin, or just outsource all the city services, as Sandy Springs, Georgia did – to massive savings and vastly improved services.

It is time to stop this – it is time to stop allowing tiny, corrupt minorities to look the public treasury for personal gain. Outsource, privatize and get rid of the unions.

HAT TIP: Mish’s

From Gallup:

Though majorities of blacks (85%) and Hispanics (54%) continue to approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as president, his ratings among these groups slipped in March and have set or tied new lows. His approval rating among whites, at 39%, remains above where it was in the latter part of 2010…

A year ago Obama was backed by 92% of blacks and 65% of hispanics. To be sure, when election day rolls around we can rely upon it that Obama will win 90%, at least, of the black vote. We can also expect that he will win a good majority of hispanic votes. Unless, by some chance, we put together a Rubio/West ticket. But the key is not what percentage he gets, but how many of each group actually show up on election day. It is looking less and less as if Obama will have the gigantic turnout of 2008 – a lot of people are getting dispirited about Obama.

Fundamentally this is because he lied about himself – he lied about who he is and what he would do. He promised everyone the world and has delivered, at best, only tiny, broken bits of the 2008 program. It is to be hoped that the experience of the Obama years will finally start to open African-American eyes – liberalism is a god that failed. It only speaks about concern for the poor and disadvantaged, it doesn’t actually do anything about them. Look where our liberal leaders mostly live – in gated, guarded communities which are overwhelmingly white; and which are priced out of any chance of most minorities living within 10 miles. Obama was supposed to be different – but he’s not. He’s just another rich, white liberal…he just has a tan.

The opportunity for us is to start an aggressive campaign among America’s minority voters – and come up with a genuine plan to address things such as the persistent, black underclass as well as a comprehensive immigration reform bill which will be both just and merciful (I’m working on such a thing, myself, and will have it out in the next few days). While the Obama magic fades, while liberalism continues to fail, this is our opportunity to permanently change the electoral dynamic in the United States among minority voters.

We daren’t let this opportunity slip – we might not get another chance for a generation.

UPDATE: It could be that Obama just sucks really bad at politics, you know?

“Overseas contingency operations”. “Man-caused disasters”. We should have seen this coming a mile away:

…The president also called for undoing the Bush tax cuts for upper-income taxpayers, and for canceling other tax cuts many of them receive such as the mortgage interest deduction — which he called “spending reductions in the tax code.”…

What that means is “tax increase”. The bizarre world of the left in which not taking your money counts as “government spending” and taking more of your money is a “spending cut”.

The good news is that Obama is just going along with what he’s done for two years: a combination of dishonesty and empty rhetoric. The American people have already tuned this out, so his speech today won’t move the political needle, at all. The ball now comes firmly back in to our court and it is up to us to craft a plan and the tactics necessary to illustrate the bankruptcy of Obama and liberalism. I like my plan best, of course – but the main thing is to think about things and come up with something new. Sure, oppose the tax hike proposal – but don’t just oppose it; figure out a way to throw it right back in their faces.

All in all, there is growing inside me a confidence about 2012 I didn’t feel even a month ago. If there was a time for Obama to really put it back together and prepare a genuine response to us, this was it. He blew it. We’ll still get all the nastiness from the Obama campaign as the campaign season developes, but we won’t be fighting on his terms…he’ll be fighting on our territory and without a map or a battle plan.

From AFP:

The US budget deficit shot up 15.7 percent in the first six months of fiscal 2011, the Treasury Department said Wednesday as political knives were being sharpened for a new budget battle.

The Treasury reported a deficit of $829 billion for the October-March period, compared with $717 billion a year earlier, as revenue rose a sluggish 6.9 percent as the economic recovery slowly gained pace…

The government argues that this is a reflection of this, that or the other special circumstance which weren’t foreseen when budget projections were made. Yeah, no kidding. Which is why one has to be very careful when reading projections – the only thing which is consistent about government is that, on the whole, more will be spent than projected and revenues won’t grow as fast as expected. The reason for this is that the government likes to lie to us about this. It is much easier, you see, to get the people to swallow another Big Government pill if you say it will only cost so much – when the real bill comes in, its too late…the money is already spent. As for revenues, government always presumes that the economy is a Magic Money Tree and will provide whatever is necessary – and revenue projections never take in to consideration the negative aspect of increased taxes on economic activity (and they also never take in to consideration the positive aspects of reduced taxes).

Ultimately, only a Balanced Budget Amendment will get this permanently under control. But not just any, old amendment – it will have to be carefully crafted it to “idiot-proof” it from Congressional action. In my view, an amendment should have the following provisions:

1. Set total federal spending as a percentage of GDP in the previous fiscal year. So, if we set it at 20% of GDP and last year’s GDP was $14 trillion, then Uncle Sam cannot spend more than $2.8 trillion dollars. The only way federal spending can go up is if GDP goes up.

2. Remove government spending from calculations of GDP – no fair raising government spending to raise the GDP numbers so you can raise government spending some more.

3. Require a 2/3 vote in Congress for raising the debt ceiling.

4. Forbid the sale of US debt to foreign persons, groups or governments; if you can’t borrow it from Americans, it can’t be borrowed.

5. Set statutory limits on the total dollar value of US currency in circulation at any given time. Someone will have to crunch the numbers, but figure it out and then don’t let the Federal Reserve go on a money-printing spree (and, really, this would just be a first step towards returning to the gold standard for currency).

Do that, and Congress will forever lose the power to bankrupt us. There is still gigantic flexibility in there on what to spend money on – there just won’t be the ability to pretend there is an endless supply of money. Congress will have to set priorities. There is still bags of money to spend ($2.8 trillion isn’t chump change, after all) but not enough for what every dimwit in Congress would like to spend it on.

If we don’t do something along these lines, then we’ll just risk being driven in to bankruptcy at some later date, even if we dodge the bullet this time. The genius of America is to put all sorts of limits on what government may do. Our Constitution had many wise provisions to prevent recklessness on the part of government but over 200 years, ways were found around those provisions. This sort of a Balanced Budget Amendment would take what we’ve learned and apply it to government – it will allow we, the people, to once again be one step ahead of the government.

From Judicial Watch via PJ Tatler:

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that it has obtained documents from the Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) detailing the agency’s massive taxpayer-funded multimedia campaign designed to promote the Affordable Health Care Act (also known as Obamacare) and other HHS policy initiatives. According to the records obtained by Judicial Watch pursuant to a March 23, 2011, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (No. 11-608)), the total cost of the campaign, which targets Obama’s electoral coalition, could reach as much as $200 million.

You can be certain that this is going to be defended an expenditure for “public education” or some such nonsense – but the fact of the matter is that government has no business using taxpayer dollars to try to convince any taxpayer of the merits of a program. If Obama wants this done, he should raise campaign funds for it and clearly identify the effort as a partisan attempt to increase support for his signature issue. Doing it this way turns HHS in to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” trying to hammer in to the public mind the party line.

And this is precisely the sort of thing we should demand stop, even at the cost of a government shut-down. We have to teach these liberals that government doesn’t belong to them – that they don’t have the right to try and change people’s mind using public money. And this is also the sort of thing we have to remember – and when we get a new President on January 20th, 2013, investigations should be launched in to the Obama Administration to find out just what money was spent on and whether any of it violated federal law.