Campaign 2012

The Bankrupt States of America

Mark Noonan53 Comments

From USA Today:

…The big difference between the official deficit and standard accounting: Congress exempts itself from including the cost of promised retirement benefits. Yet companies, states and local governments must include retirement commitments in financial statements, as required by federal law and private boards that set accounting rules.

The deficit was $5 trillion last year under those rules. The official number was $1.3 trillion. Liabilities for Social Security, Medicare and other retirement programs rose by $3.7 trillion in 2011, according to government actuaries, but the amount was not registered on the government’s books… (emphasis added)

The report goes on to note, among other things, that for Social Security to be solvent we’d need to have $22.2 trillion set aside and earning interest.  Clearly, that is an impossible sum – we don’t have it and we can’t get it, ever.  And that is just Social Security – it doesn’t count the cost of Medicare, Medicaid, the upcoming ObamaCare bill, other entitlements and, of course, all the other bloated, wasteful spending which is built in to our government.  And it entirely leaves aside the amount of debt our State and local governments have accrued.  The bottom line:  the United States is bankrupt.

For now, we’re able to play around with this – pretend, that is, that we’re not bankrupt and that money will be there for everything.  But the reality is there – Paul Ryan is right:  we’re heading for the most predictable financial disaster in human history.  Unless we take charge of our nation and reform our taxing, spending and regulations, we’re doomed to an economic wipe out which will make the Great Depression seem like small potatoes.  If you want to see where we’re heading, look at Greece…and land of riots, bank runs and a government which can’t even pony up for the prescription drugs they promised the people of Greece; and I don’t mean “having trouble paying”…the Greek government simply stopped paying for the drugs.  They are out of money.

We’re probably three to five years away from that point…maybe as many as 7 years if we really go flat out with money-printing and financial gimmicks (which would also be disastrous in terms of rapid inflation and other dislocations).  But unless we fundamentally change how things are done, we’re doomed sooner or later (and I think sooner – the latest data from Europe and China indicates they are in recession and I bet we’ve been in recession for a couple months now, but the data are being fudged…they were being fudged in Europe and, especially, China, too…but you can’t “hide the decline” forever).  This is why November 6th is so crucial – a re-elected Obama, even if he’s set with a fully GOP Congress, simply will not make any move to disturb business as usual.  Even if he’s not able to increase spending the fact that we won’t have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate will prevent any budget from being passed…and we’ll be saddled with year after year of “continuing resolutions” which lock in place the bonanza of extra spending Reid and Pelosi piled on in 2009.  Obama must go if America is to avoid catastrophe.

Romney, on the other hand, is enough of a business man to know we can’t go on like this – and while he might want to compromise more with the left than we’d like, an increasingly conservative/libertarian Congress will ensure that a lot of really good policies are enacted.  Additionally, the force of circumstances will push Romney and the Congress towards the radical solutions needed.  It won’t do anyone any good getting a good write-up about bi-partisanship in the Washington Post if failure to act responsibly leads to35% unemployment in 2014.  With their backs against the wall, a GOP government has a good chance of doing something worthwhile.

This is serious, good people – we’re in quite a fix and like Obama’s old preacher used to say, “America’s chickens are coming home to roost”.  We’ve spent too much for too long while harrying wealth creators with a regressive tax and regulatory system.  It is change it, or die.

 

Gingrich Gets it Right

Mark Noonan165 Comments

From CNN:

“I am not for a narrow victory,” he said. “I am for crushing the left in every single way.”

Gingrich was, of course, Matt’s first choice for nominee – he was my 2nd or 3rd (Santorum was always my first).  For me, Romney was a bit back there in the pack but always with the understanding that the crucial necessity is to ensure that Obama leaves office on January 20th, 2013.

The capstone for getting rid of Obama came, in my view, just recently – when it was revealed that in 1991 he was described as being born in Kenya.  Naturally, the Obamatons leaped to in action when this came out and called it a “mistake”.  But I don’t buy that – I call it a lie, instead.   Here is the key to Obama:  he’ll say or do anything to advance himself.  Back when he was just starting out being from an upper class, white Hawaiian family just didn’t cut enough liberal ice – being a foreign born son of a radical anti-British communist!  Well, that did the trick quite nicely.

From “composite” girlfriends in his autobiography (which, it would seem, millions of liberal pinheads bought but few read) to joining Wright’s racist church, Obama has merely crafted a narrative for himself as best suited his immediate needs.  And the cruelty with which he tosses aside old friends like Wright (say what you will about Wright, but have some sympathy:  for 20 years Obama and Wright were close and then Wright got in the way of the newest narrative, and he had to go) is just another indicator of the wrongness of Obama.

I don’t really know what Obama is up to – he’s up to radical leftism, but with what goal in mind, I don’t know:  I suspect there isn’t one in the traditional, political sense.  All we’re seeing now is yet another narrative, this one designed to get Obama re-elected.  After that, he’ll just go on to the next narrative – whatever makes him continue to rise up the ladder in his own estimation.  The trouble is that we need a President – someone who cares less about himself and more about the United States.  A re-elected Obama will not just pursue stupid, destructive policies, but he’ll also ignore any problem which can’t lead to more glory for Obama – and that is a recipe for national and global catastrophe.

Gingrich sees this – and sees more:  Obama must go, but the left as a whole must be crushed.  Our only task as conservatives, patriots and Americans from now until November 6th is to beat these people.  Because if we don’t, we’re going to pay too high a price for failure.

Obama Adds His Name Into Official White House Biographies of Past Presidents

Matt Margolis23 Comments

Have you heard this one yet?

Many of President Obama’s fervent devotees are young enough not to have much memory of the political world before the arrival of The One. Coincidentally, Obama himself feels the same way—and the White House’s official website reflects that.

The Heritage Foundation’s Rory Cooper tweeted that Obama had casually dropped his own name into Ronald Reagan’s official biography on http://www.whitehouse.gov, claiming credit for taking up the mantle of Reagan’s tax reform advocacy with his “Buffett Rule” gimmick. My first thought was, he must be joking. But he wasn’t—it turns out Obama has added bullet points bragging about his own accomplishments to the biographical sketches of every single U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (except, for some reason, Gerald Ford). Here are a few examples:

Many call it creep, narcissistic, etc. etc… Sure, it’s all that. But I think there’s more to it, than Obama’s ego.

If you Google any president in history, their White House biograpy is one of the top five results. Could it be that this is merely a clever Google-bomb strategy?

Unless, of course, you think Obama is above turning the taxpayer-funded White House website into a campaign device.

::::Sniff:::::

Leo Pusateri97 Comments

So… Ol’ Joltin’ Joe Biden gets taken out to the woodshed for just forcing poor, hapless, Barack Hussein Obama to come out of his closet for gay marriage–earlier than he had planned…

This announcement was so unplanned, in fact, that merely hours after the announcement was made, I get a fundraising email from the Obama campaign:

Image

Which has a link, that takes you to this: Image

Yep… that was no doubt a heartfelt, unplanned, sincere, off-the-cuff, “aw shucks, ya got me” courageous coming out of the closet moment for Barry, wasn’t it?

And “Rufus” is so beside himself-just so— :::sniff::: happy.. brings a tear to your eye, don’t it?

Criminy.

Obama Takes Dick Cheney’s Position on Gay Marriage

Matt Margolis78 Comments

So, Obama announces that he’s for gay marriage (did anyone really believe otherwise) with the caveat that states on to decide on the issue. Okay. Hardly a gutsy move, especially when you consider the fact that the the position he’s taking on gay marriage is basically the same that former Vice-President Dick Cheney took… three years ago.

(June 1, 2009) Former vice president Richard Cheney waded into another simmering public debate today, suggesting he supports legalizing gay marriage as long as the issue is decided by the states rather than the federal government.

Cheney, whose youngest daughter is a lesbian with a longtime partner, said during an appearance at the National Press Club that “people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish, any kind of arrangement they wish.”

He said he does not support federal action allowing gay marriages, however. “Historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level,” Cheney said. “It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis.”

Cheney has long departed from conservative orthodoxy on the issue of gay marriage, saying during the 2000 presidential campaign that the matter should be left to the states. He also prompted an uproar during the 2004 race when he appeared to distance himself from a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, which was strongly supported by his boss, George W. Bush.

I don’t recall Cheney getting any praise from those pretending that Obama’s position is so groundbreaking.

Did Obama Wait Nearly A Year To Take Out Bin Laden for Political Reasons?

Matt Margolis229 Comments

Talk about karma… Obama isn’t just experience backlash for politicizing the death of Osama bin Laden, but new details are emerging that contradict the White House version of the story. This week we learned of a memo indicating Obama has preemptively assigned blame to the military had the raid gone bad, and other details about how Leon Panetta had actually issued the order the take out bin Laden, and that Obama was essentially “overruled” in taking action.

Now retired Top General Jack Keane reveals that Obama knew of Osama bin Laden’s location for nearly a year before he was taken out.

One has to ask why would Obama hesitate to act for nearly a year? Was it really about confirmation of the target? Doubtful. I think the answer is obvious, based on Obama’s current reelection strategy to take credit for the raid. Obama wanted to hold off as long as possible in order to gain the most political advantage from bin Laden’s death. He did get a measurable, but short-lived bump in the polls, but Obama is now trying desperately to keep the event in the voters’ minds, which is a hard task when they are preoccupied with losing their jobs or trying hard to afford to fill up their gas tanks.

Obama is lucky that his hesitation didn’t result in bin Laden’s whereabouts being lost again.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan:  Looks like Obama blew the cover of a Brit intelligence asset in order to score a political point.  Liberals, of course, were outraged when the non-covert Plame was “exposed”…bet we won’t hear a peep from them about this.

The TEA Party Lives!

Mark Noonan121 Comments

Reports of the death of the TEA Party are greatly exaggerated – from Slate:

The Tea Party movement is alive in Utah. With representatives from FreedomWorks in the audience, delegates at the Utah Republican Convention managed to force Sen. Orrin Hatch into a June 26 primary. He got 59.2 percent of their votes against Dan Liljenquist, a 38-year-old state senator. Hatch needed 60 percent to avoid the primary. He couldn’t do it. In two rounds of voting, he went from 2,243 votes to 2,313 votes. If he’d gotten 32 more votes, he would have wrapped this up…

Nothing against Hatch – in fact, I’ve met him and he’s intelligent, well informed and a complete gentleman…but he’s also been in DC for a loooong time and he has, at times, “worked across the aisle” which means, really, nothing more than helping liberal Democrats destroy our nation, piece by piece.  Hatch saw what happened to Bennett in 2010 and so has both shifted right as well as worked his GOP base in anticipation of this – but the fact that he couldn’t wrap it up shows (a) that he’s still mistrusted as a DC insider and (b) that he’ll have to fight hard to retain his seat.

The bottom line is that the Second American Revolution continues – we, the people, are not just going sit there and take it.  Hatch is likely to win the GOP primary – but what happened to him will both make a better Senator out of him, as well as show all GOPers in DC that they’d better darn well do the work of the people, not the work of the Ruling Class.

Santorum Drops Out

Matt Margolis204 Comments

Blogging from my phone here, so I can’t speak much yet, but please discuss the latest development in the primary.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan:  CBS has the story.  Santorum was my guy from back when he was polling 0.005% in the Iowa polls.  I never thought he’d get as far as he did and he remains, in my view, the best possible person we could have picked in 2012.  But, such is not to be – congratulations to Mitt Romney for a superbly run primary campaign and I look forward to enthusiastically supporting Romney for the rest of the campaign.   Obama is doomed and America will be rescued.

Obama, the Economy and Campaign 2012: It’s All Lies

Mark Noonan21 Comments

The thing about un-plugging for a little while – especially if you make an effort to really shut your ears to popular culture – is that in the silence, thought can grow.  We are relentlessly bombarded through our waking hours by sounds and images created by others in an attempt to get us to say or do something we might not do purely voluntarily.  This bombardment comes at us so fast that we do not have time to reflect upon what we have just seen – if you do desire to think about things for a moment, another sound or image is thrown at you, demanding your attention, and thus destroying the possibility of thinking through the immediately preceding sound or image.

Hitler only had it half right – it isn’t so much that people will believe a lie if it is repeated often enough (and on a big enough scale), but that people will tend to believe anything which is endlessly repeated to them; truth, or lie.  The trouble is that those who will bestir themselves to endlessly repeating something are precisely those most inclined to lie – because they are desperately trying to extract money or power from people who otherwise would not surrender them.  It is one thing, however, when some huckster is trying to bamboozle us in to spending money on Brand X rather than Brand Y of toothpaste, quite another when someone is trying to trick us in to surrendering great amounts of wealth and/or power.

In the great effort to get us to surrender our power and wealth to government, the Obama Administration has engaged in a series of lies, from day one, in order to deflect us away from the truth of what they are doing.  Obama (or, more accurately, I believe; Obama’s puppet-masters) wanted and wants a specific outcome:  America changed in to a social-democratic State run along European lines with no ability of dissenters to disturb the masters of the State.  You, naturally, cannot run on such a platform in the United States because to do so would be political suicide (it may, even, be political suicide to do so in Europe…its not like the German Chancellor actually ran on a platform of putting German taxpayers on the hook to pay for Greek profligacy…but that is what the German people are getting; and if they toss the Chancellor out at the next election then, guess what?; her opponents are just as committed to bailing out the Greeks as she is).  Unable to speak the truth about himself or his program, Obama has no other choice than to lie if he wishes to advance his agenda to victory.

Yesterday I linked to this chart over at Zero Hedge.  Do take a close look at it – as you can see, the two lines relating to employment track each other quite closely through both recessions and boom times…until 2009.  All of a sudden, after Obama takes office, the lines sharply diverge.  Either we were always getting it wrong in the past, or someone is lying, today.   We were actually given a preview of this before Obama took office – when he and his people starting talking about the number of jobs  which would be “saved or created” by Obama policies.  The “saved” was the key…Obama could claim any number pulled out of a hat:  how could anyone prove that any particular job wasn’t “saved” by Obama?  But the phrase passed mostly un-noticed, even on the right:  but it always was a means whereby no matter what happened, Obama could spin a positive story about his accomplishments, even if he had to lie to do so.  The lie in the Obama Administration isn’t a bug, its a feature:  a crucial feature.  Without lies, Obama has no chance to accomplish his goals.

The MSM is, of course, no help in this.  Outside of a very few outlets, the MSM is entirely in the tank for Obama.  And I mean to the level of absurdity – Rush related a Los Angeles Times report which asserted that the American people are not upset over higher gas prices.  That we’re just grinning and bearing it and are just happily becoming more efficient in our gasoline usage.  The truth of the matter is that we’re all upset about the higher prices – we are grinning and bearing it because there’s nothing we can do about it (at least until November 6th), but to try and cast the American people as ok with the higher prices is idiocy.  But it is peddled by the LA Times as fact…and parroted in the rest of the MSM, as well.  On an on it goes through the MSM – the reality of a corrupt, incompetent government leading us down a path the American people never voted for is ignored…instead, we’re endlessly hammered with a series of alternate reality stories designed to either trick us in to agreeing with Obama or, failing that, at least distracting us from the crucial issues.

It is no accident that over the past few months we have discussed birth control and the Trayvon Martin killing as opposed to discussing the actual issues (did you know that the Obama Administration continues to stonewall on the much-worse-than-Watergate “Fast and Furious” scandal?  Of course you don’t…or, if you do, you have to think about it for a moment…what should be front and center is shoved in to the background, while we talk about whether college kids should have birth control subsidies).  It will be no accident as we head towards November that we continue to talk about birth control, Martin and anything else which can be brought forward – or completely manufactured – by Obama, his cronies and the MSM (I know – same/same) in order to distract us from the issues and (it is hoped by Obama) allow him to slide in to re-election, almost as an afterthought.  Remember that Obama has a goal – he wants to achieve the goal. He couldn’t run on his goal in 2008 and he can’t run on it in 2012; as it turns out, he also can’t run on his record as President because it is lousy…but he still wants to achieve the goal (and the MSM wants him to achieve it, as well).

Over the next 7 months we will all be bombarded by sounds and images designed to distract us, discourage us and, in general, make all of us less effective in our goal:  getting Obama out of office.  All of you reading this have already been hammered by the lies – and you’ll be double and triple hammered by November 6th.  But here’s the thing:  Obama is all lies.  There is no truth to what he says; nor any truth in what his supporters say.  The reality is that the economy is in lousy shape and getting worse; the reality is that nearly a million people have dropped their Democrat party registration since Obama took office (while the GOP has grown in number of registered voters); the reality is that a bunch of senior House and Senate Democrats are retiring this year rather than seek re-election (if they thought the Democrat party had a chance of winning – and thus giving power and wealth to themselves – they’d stay in, simple as that); the reality is that Obama is digging in in Virginia because he knows that if he doesn’t carry that State, he can’t be re-elected (no Democrat won that State since 1964 until Obama won it in 2008…where it just padded his margin; but Carter and Clinton never needed it…why does Obama need it?  Probably because he’s already lost Florida, Ohio and Iowa); the reality is that Obama probably won’t raise the $1 billion he thought he would; the reality is that the DNC will not be providing much (if any) money to down-ballot candidates because they need to reserve all their cash for Obama’s effort; the reality is that the RNC has completely turned-around its fund-raising; the reality is that in the hotly contested GOP primaries, GOP turnout is much higher than in 2008…the reality, in short, is not what Obama and the MSM make it to be.

As we go through the rest of this year, dig deeper.  Do not accept at face value anything reported in the MSM.  Always check it.   And after checking it, turn off the TV/Radio/Computer and think about it for a bit…think it through.  The other day a Gallup poll said that Obama was up by 14 percentage points among “swing State independent women”.  But, wait, Romney allegedly led among that same demographic by 5 percentage points in December.  What gives?  What has happened between December and April to lead to a 19 point swing among a demographic?  A swing which makes this demographic more enthusiastic for Obama in 2012 than they were in 2008?  Do you really think GOP opposition to providing birth control to college kids did that?  Well, that is the narrative they want you to believe – and, presto!, there’s an MSM poll to back it up.   Trust nothing the MSM reports; trust nothing Obama and his team say – they will keep up the drumbeat of lies from now until November 6th, never admitting that doom stares them in the face (well, to cover themselves, the MSM will put out a few reports the last weekend indicating the debacle rapidly approaching…so they can say on November 7th, “hey, we saw it coming”.).  Keep your spirits up, do what you can for the cause…and then just carry on.  We’ve got these people on the ropes and we will  rescue our nation.