Less celebrated is the profound misunderstanding inherent in Powell’s ideas which betray a thinly veiled liberal mind. Powell asserts that in order to appeal to liberals, the Republican party must stop listening to Rush, and it goes without saying, all others of his ilk.
What Powell clearly does not understand as a liberal, inexplicably pretending to be a conservative, is that in the market economy of ideas, supply meets demand; this is in contrast to the centrally planned economy of ideas which liberals fantasize where ideas are handed down to workers from the central committee.
Rush, Medved, Hewitt and Hannity have millions more patrons than Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews because they meet demand not create it. Sarah Palin did not push the party to the right in the waning days of the campaign. Conservatives reacted to seeing an actual conservative on the stage. You can put all the conservative talkers in the gulag and there will be new ones tomorrow. Legislate them off the AM dial and they will move to the satellite.
Governor Paterson’s suggested beverage tax in New York, proves the point about the liberal desire to over-reach. The proposed tax revives the nagging discussion about how Americans have become obese victims of fast food advertising and a complete lack of regulation controlling our ability to eat unrestricted quantities of pizza and donuts. Only the government can save us from our own gluttony?
Consider the efficacy of intrusive and regulations in the mortgage market. In order to ensure that no hapless borrowers are victimized while getting a home loan, the process includes about 3,000 impenetrable documents your lawyer couldn’t read in a week. Thanks to this shield of regulation, only half of your neighbors now claim they were the victims of mortgage fraud and bad mortgages are sinking our economy.
Principles made the Republican party great; limited government, lower taxes and a strong national defense. Many Americans still understand their power. If they are now a minority so be it. Powell describes these principles as our “baser instincts.” If only the party of Lincoln could could elevate their thinking to something truly noble and extra-constitutional like dictating the American diet, we would really be on the road to recovery.
The financial world is reeling from another body blow delivered by native son, Bernie Maddof , who stands accused of orchestrating a record breaking Ponzi scheme.
A Ponzi scheme involves paying established “investors” with money taken from new investors to perpetuate a ”business” that does not actually generate promised returns. The only way to prolong the scheme is to continually bring in new investor money. The sham collapses when “management” can no longer bring in new “investors.”
President Bush announced today that he will usurp the ”power of the purse” given to Congress by the Constitution, by giving $14 Billion to the auto industry.
Bush will take money from taxpayers ( investors ) and use the money to sustain two sham companies, GM and Chrysler, which, like Madoff Securities, exist not to enrich shareholders but to sustain the parasitic UAW. In 4 months they will need more cash or they will be forced to declare bankruptcy.
Absent the halo of government benevolence that accompanies all extra constitutional redistribution of wealth these days, what exactly is the difference between White House actions today the actions Bernie Madoff was arrested for?
Comical and vaguely unsettling at the same time to see the reduction of American Capitalism to this scene. “Captains of Industry” driving 10 hours in tiny wind-up clown cars for an opportunity to exhibit greater meekness and contrition before Congress and the American people; neither of which can apparently do basic math. If Alan Mulally makes $20 million a year, the extra 6 hours it takes him to drive to Washington costs the shareholders ( remember the shareholders ) about $60,000. It’s the same kind of logic that makes it okay for Pelosi and Reid to pour $34 billion down the Detroit drain if only the executives are solicitous enough. If they dress up in big clown shoes and wear a dunce cap, can they get more cash? Somehow this self-flagellation is all the political cover needed to compensate for “business plans” which involve taxpayers contributing billions while the automakers keep doing the same thing for a few more months.
Behind the silly stunts and play acting this is a serious high stakes deal in which the Congress is spending money we don’t have to buy the loyalty of misinformed and misguided union voters. The American automakers are bankrupt now not because of the economic downturn but because they are bad businesses. We are not going to right the American economy by artifically animating dead businesses.
Obama is now backing away from his plan to repeal the Bush tax cuts. His campaign promise to pay for $4 trillion in new spending by squeezing the filthy rich (aka those making more than $250k a year) and repealing Bush’s modest tax cuts to the rest of us seemed sound. Astonishingly though, It turns out that raising taxes on anyone in the middle of a recession is not such a hot idea. Reality intrudes and the tax cuts stay.
This actually seems to be part of a larger pattern as Obama transitions into office and, as a conservative, I couldn’t be more pleased. As he fills out his cabinet and makes other appointments, I get the distinct feeling that we could possibly have done worse in some ways if McCain had won. Don’t get me wrong: I fully expect my conservative sensibilities to be deeply offended before long. But it’s interesting that the guy who ran around the world talking about bankrupting the coal industry, raising a civilian army (?), closing Gauntanamo, and causing the oceans to recede appears to be preparing to govern from the center. Funny how things change when you actually have to make the decisions that effect 300 million people’s lives.
Which brings me to President Bush. Liberals love to pronounce him the “Worst President In The History Of Our Country.” And possibly in the history of the universe! Of course history will be the judge of that. And history’s judgment will be based in part on the fact that our country hasn’t been attacked in more than seven years. I was thinking of this as I was reading Mark Steyn’s excellent column on the intricately planned terrorist attack in India this week.
As Steyn points out, there is a reason why this hasn’t happened in America recently. And it’s because when he’s not shredding copies of the constitution and listening in on my phone calls, President Bush is making the hard decisions that are necessary to protect our country. Obama will have to decide if he is going to honor every promise he’s made to those on his far-left flank, or if he’s going to make the same difficult decisions that President Bush has made in order to keep us safe.
It’s probably too much to expect Obama to keep Guantanamo open, but I look forward to the reaction from his multitudes of liberal fans when they discover that his foreign policy is not the ”change” they were hoping for. Faced with out current reality, liberal dreams of “hope” and “change” will likely be dashed. And many of President Bush’s decisions will be validated as Obama decides he has no choice but to continue with the status quo.
Since union labor is working so well for Detroit, expanding their influence in the rest of the economy only makes sense right?
As Holman Jenkins, points out in the WSJ this week, It’s well within the realm of possibility to make cars in the nation that God and capitalism built and earn a healthy profit doing it. Unions however have proven to be a back-breaker. As the financial crisis spins ever more wildly out of control, American auto makers pose a real systemic threat. The threat is almost completely self-imposed and unions are mostly to blame. Detroit will always be a shadow of its former glory, hooked up to life support if it can’t normalize its cost structure.
President elect Obama now must solidify his agenda and that means paying up. Unions are near the front of the payback line and they expect President Obama to support the Employee Free Choice Act, which eliminates private ballots as unions try to organize. It’s obviously a lot easier for the union muscle to target their “recruiting” efforts if they know who is standing in the way of the workers utopia.
It really makes you wonder how all the Americans making cars for Mercedes, Toyota and Honda are surviving the squalor and the depravity of those non-unionized plants. Where are the 20/20 exposes about the abuses and misery of these non-unionized workers? The New York Times can’t even make something up?
The Employee Free Choice Act raises another question. How long until we liberate some other special interest groups by making elections totally free and open and public? When will we address unjust ballot initiatives like proposition 8 by ensuring that everyone can see their fellow citizens’ vote? Isn’t that the only way to ensure fairness and “free choice?”
Beware the politician with statist intentions. The Utopian dream inevitably comes to the same dark end. You can only “share the wealth” until the wealth runs out. Entitlement programs are not self-funding and government is unproductive. The high minded promises and condescending explanations about the need to sacrifice for the good of the country and the patriotic opportunity for “the rich” to pay more taxes, culminate in essential theft on a national scale. America is not immune to the natural laws of cause and effect. The “free ride” ends eventually.
The current Axis of Socialism, Bush Paulson and Bernanke, is only a shadow of things to come.
Many Americans seem to be evaluating the presidential candidates based on their persona or their gifts for oratory while there is so much more at stake. The combination of radical liberal Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches of government has implications that are almost certainly not contemplated or understood.
For many Americans our way of life may be seem inevitable but we are on the brink of giving away our birthright for a mess of pottage.
Politicians, especially liberals, always say “it’s not a slippery slope” when it really is.
Recent government interference in the markets aimed at supressing the inevitable effects of our collective financial excess, offer a shocking example of this principle in practice.
Members of Congress were apparently deluged with opposition to the initial $700 billion government “bailout” of the credit markets. Just days later and incredibly hundreds of billions of dollars in additional spending later, the bills passed; our outrage exhausted.
A few more days of bad fianncial news spawned a new plot to make banks part of the Federal Government for a mere $250 billion; an awesome amount of money to which the public had in the course of a few days become completely desensitized.
Whatever pillar of the economy the Bush, Paulson, Bernanke, Axis of Socialism next propose to annex, expect disinterested yawns from a tired and numb middle class.
It’s got to be frustrating when the facts refuse to align with your world view.
Notwithstanding the determined endless repetition of a dark narrative about the American economy, GDP in the United States grew at an annual rate of 3.3%; strong economic growth.
What is repeatedly astounding is the resilience of the American economy in the face of significant shocks since 2001.
The desperate chase for bad economic news is reminiscent of the waterlogged network pawns sent out to wander along abandoned streets and beaches this morning desperately searching for property damage in the Gulf Coast region.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, will be tried in New York City, in a key test of the White House's strategy of trying terrorist suspects in U.S. civilian courts.
Robert Lipson has attended every Kansas State home game since 1972, bucking up fans even though the team has one of the worst records in college football.
Florida attorney Scott Rothstein's fast rise came to a crashing halt last month after investors alleged that he had sold them stakes in phony employment-dispute settlements.
Suicide car bombs ripped through an office of Pakistan's main spy agency in the country's northwest, killing at least 12 people in what appeared to be the Taliban's latest attempts to target the nation's security forces.
Colombia's top electoral body ruled that millions of signatures endorsing a referendum on President Uribe's second re-election bid are invalid, dealing a major setback to the president's bid for a third term.
