Whatever Happened to Compromise?

Retired Spook123 Comments

In the previous thread Robin Naismith Green ended a comment with the following question:

Enough blame how about some action and cooperation between the parties?

To which I responded:

Robin, the Tea Party is forcing the GOP to trend to the right at the same time that the Democrat Party has lurched violently to the left. I’m not sure how you get cooperation between such polar opposites. For example, which of the principles that guide your thinking would you be willing to compromise on? Which of our principles do you think we should compromise on. What is the ultimate goal if we both give up a little? Specifically, can you picture a country where we all get along, and how would you accomplish that when we clearly don’t want the same things. Would the ultimate compromise be to make each of us equally miserable?

And then Amazona added:

Good question. But you need to ask the right questions first. For example, the first step toward working together is agreeing on a goal. Cooperation happens when both sides agree on a goal and then only have to find ways to achieve that goal, which usually involves some give-and-take. What we are seeing, and have seen for quite some time, is goals being thrown under the bus in favor of gross and blatant demagoguery.

Example: Let’s say the Left says its goal is to feed poor children. The Right agrees, this is a worthy goal. Therefore, the next step ought to be rational discussion about how best to do this. But what happens is, the Left says there is one way to do this and only one way, their way, which happens to totally contradict the Right’s objective political philosophy, so letting the Left have its way would not be compromise, it would be capitulation.

So poor children do not get fed. BUT….the true goal of the Left is met, which was never the feeding of poor children but the demonizing of the Right, because once the Right has walked away from an entirely dogmatic and unacceptable position the Left can then trumpet its claim that the Right doesn’t care if children go hungry. And this was the intent from the get-go.

So if you truly want cooperation and true compromise, drop the either/or paradigm, and agree that the goals are shared and the only thing left is to figure out how to meet them.

We often talk about compromise.  Compromise used to be the glue that held our government together and made it work.  It was an historic compromise back in 1983 that extended the solvency of Social Security by 2 decades.  But when George Bush attempted to reform and save Social Security again early in his first term, saying publicly that EVERYTHING was on the table, compromise was nowhere to be found.  It appeared to anyone who was paying attention that for Democrats, the campaign value of being able to say that Republicans wanted to destroy Social Security was greater than actually fixing the program for future generations.

So when exactly did compromise die?  And, unless you’re living under a rock, you’d have to admit that, if it’s not dead, it’s at least in a coma.  Many on the Left cite Newt Gingrich as the single individual who banished compromise from the D.C. lexicon, and in some respects, they would be right.  But David Axelrod’s reference to Gingrich as the Godfather of Gridlock notwithstanding, Gingrich’s compromises with Bill Clinton probably accomplished more in terms of historical, meaningful legislation than any Speaker in my lifetime:

So what did Clinton and Gingrich accomplish during this era of (relatively) good feelings? Here are a few notable bills, each of which passed with broad, bipartisan majorities.

Telecommunications Act, 1996 — described by the Federal Communications Commission as “the first major overhaul of telecommunications law in almost 62 years.” The House passed the final version of the bill by a 414-16 margin, with 236 Republicans and 178 Democrats supporting it.

Welfare reform, 1996 — a landmark bill to end cash payments and instead encourage recipients to find work. The House passed the final version of the bill by a 328-101 margin, with 230 Republicans and 98 Democrats.

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, 1996 — a law that allowed people to change jobs without fearing the loss of their health insurance due to pre-existing conditions, as well as provisions dealing with health information privacy. The House passed the final version of the bill by a 421-2 margin, with 227 Republicans and 193 Democrats.

Taxpayer Relief Act, 1997 — which established a child tax credit, tuition tax credits, and penalty-free withdrawals from IRAs for education expenses and first-home purchases, as well as a decrease in the capital gains tax and limitations on the estate tax. The House passed the final version of the bill by a 389-43 margin, with 225 Republicans and 164 Democrats.

Balanced Budget Act, 1997 — a bill that cut spending in order to balance the budget by fiscal year 2002. The House passed the final version of the bill by a 346-85 margin, with 193 Republicans and 153 Democrats.

My feeling is that today’s lack of compromise is the result of two dynamics: distrust between the parties and the wide chasm that separates their respective agendas.  I’m not sure exactly when the distrust factor entered the picture (at least in terms of modern-day politics), but a good guess would be the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA).

The ratio in the final deal — the Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 1982 (TEFRA) — was $3 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increases. It sounded persuasive at the time. Believing it to be the only way to get spending under control, most of the president’s colleagues signed on. He disliked the tax hikes, of course, but he agreed to it as well.

You don’t have to be a Washington veteran to predict what happened next. The tax increases were promptly enacted — Congress had no problem accepting that part of the deal — but the promised budget cuts never materialized. After the tax bill passed, some legislators of both parties even claimed that there had been no real commitment to the 3-to-1 ratio.

So the question remains: how do we get compromise back?  Or maybe a better question: do we want it back?

The Moment Obama Lost?

Mark Noonan30 Comments

From Powerline, quoting Obama:

The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. Oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, Governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don’t have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.

And so, you know, if Republicans want to be helpful, if they really want to move forward and put people back to work, what they should be thinking about is how do we help state and local governments…

Three days ago the voters of Wisconsin rejected the notion that the people should pony up ever more so that government be flush with cash…and now Obama is asserting that if the GOP wants to be helpful, the way to do it is to get the people to pony up ever more so government can b flush with cash!  This goes beyond stupid – this is an egregious rejection of basic reality.  Whatever else the people might want, more government isn’t it.

If we can’t beat Obama, now, then we might as well close up shop for good.  He’s just proven himself to be completely out  of touch and in opposition to the direction Americans want to go.

Her Eminence, Pope Nancy of the Patriotic American Catholic Church, Speaks

Mark Noonan8 Comments

And, as per usual,  subtracts from the sum total of human knowledge:

…CNSNews.com asked Pelosi, who is Catholic, whether she supported her church in the lawsuits it has filed, which argue that the administration’s regulation violates the freedom of religion guaranteed by the First Amendment.

“What about the 43 Catholic institutions [that] have now sued the administration over the regulation that requires them to provide contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacients in their health care plans?” CNSNews.com asked. “They say that violates their religious freedom.  Do you support the Catholic Church in their lawsuits against the administration?”

“Well, I don’t think that’s the entire Catholic Church,” Pelosi responded. “Those people have a right to sue, but I don’t think they’re speaking ex cathedra for the Catholic Church.  And there are people in the Catholic Church, including some of the bishops, who have suggested that some of this may be premature,” Pelosi said…

Uh, Nance, old gal – ex cathedra is something the Pope does only very rarely and only to rule on matters of doctrine.  The Pope does not rule on how we govern ourselves.  The Church’s opposition to abortion goes back to the earliest days of the Church and thus requires no, new ruling from the Pope on whether it can ever be allowed – and, so, when 43 Catholic institutions sue the US government in order to fight against a government mandate to violate Church teaching then they are not doing something ex cathedra because they don’t have to…but they are very much defending the teaching of the Catholic Church you claim to belong to.

It really does make you wonder – how did someone this ignorant manage to not only get elected to Congress but manage to become Speaker of the House at one point?  Does anyone on the left side of the aisle have any concern for intellectual ability?  Was it really no more than she was a fountain of (sometimes illegal) fundraising and a sure vote for the left?  Is that all it takes to rise high in the Democrat party?  Basic knowledge and honesty play no role?

 

Hate To Say I Told Them So…

Leo Pusateri91 Comments
A “Your Turn” article that I wrote a month or two ago was rejected by the St. Cloud Times editorial board. In it I said that the Right to Work amendment would make it to the Minnesota ballot in November.  I admit that I was wrong about that, though given what happened last night, I believe it will happen next November.
What I was correct about was thus:

…when the union leadership organize angry demonstrations like so many 60s hippie throwbacks or a cadres of Bolsheviks running roughshod in near-riotous mobs, they’re not doing themselves any favors. At the same time, they just don’t seem to have a clue as to just how precarious their position is, or how to fix it.

Up to this point, Minnesota’s teacher and other unions, having had the luxury of being able to act like spoiled teenagers; largely without consequence, have been virtual one-trick ponies in terms of defaulting to in-your-face, thuggish tactics to get demands met.

As Minnesota native Bob Dylan once crooned, “Oh the times, they are a changing. If Minnesota’s unions want to survive, they better damn well change with them.

Randy Krebs, St. Cloud Times editor, stated that my language was too strong.  Sometimes though, the truth hurts.  Those who work in the media, above all, should know this.

My point was that “in your face” demonstrations no longer work.  The unions instead need to focus on winning the hearts and minds of the electorate, and that would need to take place via a positive public relations campaign that you can visit here (See the Mormon Church, for example).  I am a union member, but I am also far-enough removed from the kool-aid drinking, monolithic union culture to know how the public views unions; and that in this economy, there is precious-little sympathy for their ‘plight’ and their propensity to throw temper tantrums over health care benefits, tenure issues, and the like, when many non-union counterparts are worrying about simply finding a job in this rotten economy that the democrat party, abetted by those same union footsoldiers, have created.

The Wisconsin union goons sealed their fate when they laid siege to the Capitol in Madison.  The Wisconsin Democrats sealed their fate when they retreated like ‘Brave Sir Robin‘ across the Illinois border.
There is, thankfully, a different political course upon which we as a nation are embarking; a course in which reason is gaining an equal footing with, and dare I say, is on a trajectory to soon overtake ‘might makes right’ thug tactics.

I’m just wondering how long it will take before the unions (and, incidentally, the media that blindly support them) realize this.  Or will they instead find themselves huddled together, and pouting in a feckless corner of irrelevance as the rest of the world moves (and prospers) beyond them.
UPDATE, by Mark Noonan:  Turns out there is a reason to vote for Obama.

On, Wisconsin!

Mark Noonan22 Comments

According to the polls, Walker will be re-elected (is that the proper term for surviving a recall?) today by the voters of Wisconsin – by 5 to 10 percentage points, depending on which poll you believe (I tend towards the higher margin of victory – not because a poll says so, but because the dynamics of the race are showing increasing GOP support and a collapse of Democrat support).  While various liberal pundits and power brokers have spent the last week or so downplaying the significance of the Wisconsin result the fact remains that the American left poured everything it had in to Wisconsin – first to try and prevent Walker’s reforms from being enacted then in an attempt to undo them, with this recall vote today just being the last gasp.   After all this effort if Walker survives, then this is the death knell for the American left.

The left, since the 1930’s, has used the government to fund the increasing power of the left.  Public sector unions are just this sort of thing on steroids – such unions lobby themselves (essentially) on whether or not government will get bigger while they also ensure that anyone who plays ball with Big Government and the left gets rewarded with wealth and/or political power.  The real reason that government never gets smaller is because the government funds (on a gigantic scale) a vast army of lobbyists who work night and day against the concept of reducing government.  As long as public sector unions have unfettered power to draw money from government workers and use it in support of those politicians who are willing to increase the power and size of government (and thus the power and size of the public sector unions, as well as other leftist groups), so will government continue to grow.   While Walker’s reforms did a lot of things the most important aspect of it was to liberate the workers of Wisconsin government from a de-facto requirement to be a member of the union.

As was reported a few days back, public sector union membership has collapsed in Wisconsin – all due to Walker’s reform which took away the union’s power to deduct dues automatically from and employees pay.  Now the unions have to rely on voluntary subscription…and the workers are showing they want nothing to do with the union.  It was this which really impelled the leadership of the left to go ballistic.  While rank and file liberals are still convinced that Walker just hates workers, the union bosses know that the real issue is whether or not workers like the union.  Events are showing that they don’t – and each person who quits the union takes one more bit of power from the union.  The power to influence elections and lobby for ever larger government is ebbing away from the unions, and thus from the overall left.

This is for the whole ball of wax.  If Walker wins, then the public sector unions are on the ropes – and it then becomes only a matter of time, given our budget crisis, that the rest of government funding for the left goes to the chopping block.  Think about this – the taxpayers provide a great deal of money for Planned Parenthood.  PP spends a great deal of money not only advancing abortion, as a cause, but also attacking Republicans in service of their cause.  Boiled down – though PP pretends to keep the funds separate – the tax dollars of pro-life Americans are being used to fund the political advancement of pro-abortion Americans.  On and on it goes through a whole host of groups…all of them leftist, all of them getting all or part of their funding from the taxpayers, all of them advancing causes which most of the taxpayers oppose.  With fear of the unions gone, more and more politicians will be willing to slaughter liberal sacred cows to balance the budget.

So, get ready first off for a lot of fun tonight – watching crestfallen liberals and making fun of their increasingly bizarre attempts to spin this as not a loss, at all.  But then watch them come blazing back on the attack, knowing that if Obama goes down to defeat, there will be nothing stopping the federal government from duplicating Walker’s efforts.

UPDATE:  So far reports indicate a very high turnout.

UPDATE II:  Still many reports of high turnout and some indications of Democrat ballot box stuffing efforts.  Drudge is saying that early exits indicate Walker by 5 – which is doubly encouraging because it appears that Democrat areas had the higher turnout early on.  It will be what it will be – and I expect Walker will win as his victory margin will be outside the Democrat “margin of fraud”.

Monday Morning Open Thread

Retired Spook62 Comments

Lots going on this week:

The Wisconsin recall election is tomorrow.  How will the outcome affect the general election in November?

George Soros says “90 days to save Euro”.

Washed up and disgraced golfer, Tiger Woods, wins his second tournament of the year and moves up to 3rd in the FedEx Cup point standings.

Romney continues to gain in the polls, especially among women.

Global economy at risk as US, Europe and Asia slow.

Do Economists EVER get predictions right?

Your tax dollars hard at work protecting the nation from terrorists.

The BIG RESET?

Feel free to discuss these topics or anything else of interest.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan:  Lost in Friday’s dismal employment report is this:

Last Friday’s unemployment news crashed the stock market and upended the presidential race. Lost in the excitement, however, was the news that African-American unemployment, already significantly above general levels, rose by much more.

Nationally, unemployment in May rose from 8.1 percent to 8.2. This is bad, especially considering how much time has passed since our economic troubles began, but it is less than catastrophic. As the Root reports, for African-Americans, however, the news was much, much worse. Unemployment among Blacks rose from 13.0 percent to 13.6 percent…

Seriously, black Americans, is Obama really doing a darned thing for you?  Is this the man you’ll really give 90% of your votes to on November 6th?

Ed Schultz’s Campaign for Wisconsin

Retired Spook73 Comments

For those of you who don’t know Ed Schultz, he’s one of Cluster’s favorite comedians, broadcasting his ever-so-popular show from that dynamic comedy channel, MSNBC. The indomitable Schultz is waging a one-man campaign to save Wisconsin from the evil Scott Walker.  I say “one-man” because pretty much everyone else in the lame-street media has abandoned the effort.  But if it’s one thing that ol’ Ed lacks it’s shame and the capacity to be embarrassed.

Now that Wisconsin isn’t collapsing, and in fact is seeing a dramatic economic improvement, it’s somehow no longer Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, and the liberal networks have pretty much stayed away. But Schultz keeps pounding away in a panic, lamenting that not only is Walker “the worst governor in the country,” but that those evil Republicans and their capitalist funders like the Koch brothers are “trying to make it so Barack Obama doesn’t get re-elected and no Democrat ever will be elected into the White House.” Schultz warned, “There’ll never be a Democratic president in our lifetime again.  And when I say in our lifetime, I’m talking about a long, long, long, long, long time.”

We’ll find out in about 3-1/2 days whether or not  Ed’s singular efforts have been successful.  It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall in either case.

Hat-tip to Cluster for the link for this post

 

Doomed to an Economic Depression?

Mark Noonan33 Comments

Lots of bad news out there, today – US unemployment rate rose to 8.2%, Eurozone unemployment rose to 11% (ours is probably right there, too, but the Eurocrats haven’t, it seems,  figured out how to fudge numbers as well as Obama’s Bureau of Labor Statistics has), a host of bad news out of China indicates a possible “hard landing” for that economy, which will take Australia and Canada (major commodity suppliers to China) down with it, what amounts to a bank run in Greece and the start of one in Spain…and, yesterday, I read an article which I hope was a bald-faced lie because it says the derivatives market (something I don’t fully understand but from what I can gather it is nothing but a bunch of ponzi scheme garbage) is leveraged to 10 times global GDP…and there’s simply nothing to back all that garbage up.  So, are we doomed to a Depression?

The answer is “yes” and, also, “it started in 2008”.  For you liberals out there, this will provide you a bit of comfort:  Obama is not at fault for it.  On the downside, though, just about everything he has done has ensured that it not only won’t get fixed, but will actually get worse.  He hasn’t been alone in this, of course – Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve (as well as other central bankers around the world) has piled on the harm with all his money printing.  The problems of the global economy are as follows:

The world uses fake money – money just printed up by central banks and backed by nothing.  Fake money allows insolvent banks and governments to keep themselves afloat but it works out to the systematic stealing of the money of wealth-creators.  If you work hard today and earn a dollar what will happen is a 100th of a penny of it will be stolen tomorrow…that 100th of a penny isn’t so bad, but after 10 years it works out to quite a lot of the dollar you earned.  Fake money essentially allows failure to be masked – what is economically counter-productive can be kept going because you can keep passing fake money through it.  That you are all the while eroding the entire economy does not show up for a while, but show up it will.

We allow governments to pile up debt.  Government debt is not an “investment”.  An investment is when you take some of your own money and provide it to someone else who has worked out a plan to generate more wealth than was put in to it.  So, I have $100,000.00 and I see some guy in a garage with what I think will be a great product and I give the $100,000.00 to him to start up manufacturing – next year, the guy in a garage is a guy in a factory and he pays me back $125,000.00 while he, himself, is worth $250,000.00.  Government spending can provide some useful things, of course, but even when it does it isn’t like that.  A road facilitates commerce but it doesn’t actually return money on the money spent.  If the government spends a billion dollars building a new road its not like the government will get 1.5 billion dollars back on it next year.  True, the economic activity stimulated by the good road will result in a broader tax base but its still not an “I loan you money for your wealth-producing enterprise and I get paid back with interest while your wealth-producing enterprise just goes on and on making more and more wealth”.  So, even in the best of circumstances (a needed road), government spending is not an investment; even less so is government spending an investment when it goes in to things like high paid bureaucrats, subsidies to favored groups, welfare, etc, etc, etc.  It still might be something desired overall but it isn’t an investment.

Even worse, though, when the government spending is not out of current revenues but is borrowed against future revenues.  When we spend tomorrow’s money today on government we are not only not investing but we are de-investing…because every cent borrowed by the government is a cent which can’t be borrowed by persons and enterprises in the private economy who would use that borrowing to create new or expanded sources of wealth creation.  Whatever benefit you might get from such borrowing will be short lived, at best, and may actually harm the economy because the money borrowed by government is all too often to be wasted by the sundry sorts of graft common to government.

What started in 2008 and continues to this day – masked by a gigantic amount of fake money and government debt – is the logical and easily predicted outcome of a system which has at its bottom fake money and government debt.  I’m only astounded that it has kept going as long as it has.  Shows the power of people to blind themselves to reality – and our short-sightedness.  We listen with amusement to tales of what prices used to be…never thinking for a moment that, hey, the reason prices used to be lower is that our money was worth more and what the heck happened to our money?  It is when we create wealth that we get prosperous – when, that is, we make, mine and grow things.  Nothing else does it.  10,000 law degrees, 100 government departments and bureaus and the next 50 social media sites – not a single bit of wealth being created.  The next time a farmer plants a corn crop?  Wealth created.  The next time a miner digs in the earth?  Wealth created.  The next time someone makes a pair of pliers?  Wealth created.

In order for this wealth creation to happen we mush have three things:

1.  Investment money for wealth-creators to start up or expand their wealth creating enterprises.

2.  Reliable money which holds its value over time so that investors can safely invest for long term wealth creation (fake money, on the other hand, moves investors to protect their wealth by looking for the highest rate of short term gain).

3.  A tax and regulatory system which encourages money to flow in to wealth creating enterprises while laying the burden of proof for new regulations upon those who would impose them (not, as now, simply imposing them and then asking the victims to prove they aren’t necessary).

Investment money will primarily come from paying down government debt.  We’ve got $15 trillion of potential investment money sitting in the form of US government bonds.  Entirely wasted there – we need to balance our budget as swiftly as possible so that each year more and more of the $15 trillion becomes available to the private economy.

Reliable money would best come from returning to the gold standard but people have been so relentlessly propagandized against such currency that it would be a hard sell.  Our best option, for now, is to require Congressional action for increasing the supply of money – whatever we do, don’t leave in the hands of central bankers to go “cntrl-p” whenever their Bankster buddies are in trouble.

As you can easily see, neither of those things can be fixed as long as liberals have any say in the matter, let alone any real efforts to tackle tax and regulatory reform.  Essentially, fixing the problem requires a clean sweep of our liberal Democrats – though even if we did that we’d have no end of trouble from the RINOs.  What needs to be done to fix things, after all, is the gutting of a politico-economic which the current beneficiaries don’t want to let go.  A long, hard war is required – but we take each battle as it comes.  The first one comes on November 6th – then we can start actually fixing our economy and emerging from the Depression.

 

The Impending Implosion

Retired Spook128 Comments

The American Progressive movement is soon to collapse upon itself and we can
probably expect the self destruction to be loud and messy – there are signs of it already — everywhere.  The brain trust at MSNBC are getting more shrill by the day, as evidenced by Al Sharpton’s recent tirade; Elizabeth Warren appears poised to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory due to a convenient lie told to further her liberal cred and career; Obama is now known to have told a similar lie to further his standing in the progressive movement including his recent endorsement of same sex marriage; Obamacare is most likely to lose in the SC, as is their lawsuit against AZ; even some democrats are now opposing the incessant attacks on private equity; the “war on women” has gone no where; and now they find themselves the subject of 42 lawsuits on behalf of a very powerful institution in the name of the Catholic Church, and these are just some of the current troubles confronting this regime. Add to that the Euro crisis, the Egypt thing isn’t turning out well and oh yeah, there’s that economy thing, and we’ve got the makings of the perfect storm

Scott Walker winning in WI will hopefully be the beginning of the end for progressives, culminating in November, and most likely we can expect an all out assault on conservatives, decency and common sense by the media, the administration, and by their loyalists, ie; OWS, SEIU, AFL-CIO, etc, throughout the summer. I hope Romney stays focused and on message through what portends to be a very vicious campaign, and I hope conservatives will hold him to account to do the necessary things to get us back on track when he wins. This is an important election in not only rescuing the country, but in hopefully “fundamentally transforming” the Democratic Party of Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, into the party of people like Evan Bayh, Joe Lieberman, Harold Ford and Joe Manchin, and digging back into the past, people like John Breaux and Sam Nunn. Maybe then we can start getting things done.

Thanks to Cluster for the content of this post.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan:

Can you say “meltdown”, boys and girls?  From the LA Times:

Artur Davis, one of President Obama’s earliest supporters and a former co-chairman for his presidential campaign, announced Tuesday that he was leaving the Democratic party for good.

In a post published Tuesday on his website, Davis was vague about his future political endeavors, but declared: “If I were to run, it would be as a Republican. And I am in the process of changing my voter registration from Alabama to Virginia, a development which likely does represent a closing of one chapter and perhaps the opening of another.”

Davis, who represented Alabama’s seventh congressional district from 2003 to 2011, was notably the first member of Congress outside of Illinois to endorse then-Sen. Obama’s 2008 presidential bid. And it was Davis who seconded the official nomination of Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention…(emphasis added)

This is pretty huge – this is the draggled, rotting, tail-end of “hope and change”.

Memorial Day Weekend Open Thread

Retired Spook127 Comments

Just a few of the ongoing stories shaping events as we head into this holiday weekend, where we celebrate the sacrifices of countless generations of selfless Americans to keep us safe and advance the cause of freedom around the globe.

Greece continues to slide toward oblivion with the masses complaining about losing government jobs and bennies and the people who should be footing a good portion of the bill, evading taxes in every conceivable way.  One of the main organizations shoring up the Greek economy is the International Monetary Fund — whose Managing Director has little sympathy for the Greeks.  Will the IMF and the EU continue to prop up the irresponsible Greeks or just let them implode.  What effect will either choice have on the EU and economies beyond Europe?

It looked as though Elizabeth Warren might easily unseat Scott Brown from Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat until it came to light that Warren claimed to be part Cherokee Indian.

However, when Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson, citing a genealogist, announced “In what may be the ultimate and cruelest irony … it turns out that Warren’s great-great-great grandfather was a member of a militia unit which participated in the round-up of the Cherokees in the prelude to the Trail of Tears,” Warren’s candidacy began to implode.

On the scientific front, the privatization of space exploration has begun.

Feel free to discuss these or any other topics.