Couple that with a harsher Washington Post piece published in full online (“The party of Ron Paul?” May 24) — which labeled recently adopted planks in the Iowa Republican Party platform “wacky” and “nutty” and gleefully anticipated “a few highly visible fights” erupting over “Paulite positions in the national platform” — and it’s evident the Strib is a more than a little confused about what the Ron Paul revolution is all about.

Let me do what I can to clarify.

First, let’s understand what a “movement” or a “revolution” is. All movements — the Pat Robertson Republican coup in the 1980s, gay rights, women’s suffrage, civil rights and, yes, the Ron Paul movement — follow a common pattern.

Movements all begin at the margins with people who have little or nothing to lose. Unsuccessful movements never expand beyond the sloganeering fringe. Successful movements — those with an intellectual and moral basis — mature to attract a mainstream following.

The gay-rights movement is a great example. Shirtless hunks in leather tutus and motorcycling “Dykes on Bikes” are no longer the point of the gay-rights spear. It’s the gay lawyer/gay accountant, lesbian legislator/lesbian physician — same-sex couples with kids and fundamental concerns about faith, family and freedom — who are now the face of the movement.

Focusing commentary on the remnants of the gay-rights fringe is something the media would never do. But focusing on the fringe of the Ron Paul movement is exactly what the Strib and WaPo commentaries actually do.

Libertarians today are on that cusp between being all about the T-shirt and all about ideas. I was a libertarian before it was cool and a Republican when it wasn’t cool.

As a political force in the 1970s, libertarians had little to lose. They were the folks who couldn’t be Democrats because they believed their money was theirs to spend; but they couldn’t be Republicans because they wanted to spend it on drugs and prostitutes.

Times have changed.

Libertarians today are less about provocative issues and more about reversing the expanding scope of government. Government expansion is bad in itself, but the future consequences are worse: Without defined limits on government, our liberties, our American republic, are truly at risk.

But, says the Washington Post, Americans aren’t buying that argument. If it were, Ron Paul would get more than 15 percent of the primary vote.

The Strib offers its caucus-questioning advice to an implied majority of “voters who believe government remains a useful tool for improving people’s lives.” Unfortunately, that glass-half-empty perspective on the Ron Paul revolution misses a significant point.

In Ron Paul, you have a charisma-challenged old white guy who, without pandering or pushing prejudice, inspires young people with the always sexy message of monetary policy.

A viable presidential challenge built by sticking to principle, not telling people only what they want to hear, is a political story the Strib and the Washington Post would shout from the rooftops — if only the message were a message they wanted to hear.

The power of an idea, personal freedom, doesn’t lie in manufactured popularity.

What about that Paul-inspired “wacky,” “nutty” “constitutional fundamentalism” found in Republican Party platforms?

Sure, abolishing the Department of Agriculture and the Federal Reserve is not going to happen even under a President Paul. But a political party that seriously considers abolishing cabinet-level departments and unaccountable government entities is a political party that probably won’t advocate for a new cabinet-level “Department of the Internet” and is serious about monetary policy.

It’s a party that stands for something.

That brings us to the WaPo admonition that “Paulites” learn to compromise, lest, says the Strib, the philosophical gulf “that’s already proving difficult to bridge by those seeking to govern this state” grows even wider.

One does not compromise principle. It’s a cliché and a fallacy that, given two diametrically opposed points of view, the “truth” must necessarily lie somewhere in the middle.

The Republican problem is buying into the “compromise is good” argument and declaring victory for every move to the left that “could have been so much worse.”

Paulites won’t make that compromise.

Ron Paul delegates to the RNC will support the nominee. However, integral to that support is holding the candidate and the party to the fundamental principles of limited government and personal and economic freedom. Constancy to principle is the ultimate loyalty.

All that said, I urge our media friends to examine the default position that government is good and invite them to think for themselves. The Ron Paul revolution offers the media, the Republican Party and America that opportunity. Take it.

——–

Craig Westover is a Republican activist and a Ron Paul delegate to the Republican National Convention. Follow him on Twitter: @CraigWestover and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/craig.westover.

This article originally appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune May 26. 2012.

Note: Ayotte’s record both prior to and after her election in 2010 has been a solidly conservative one, but Ovide was widely considered the more conservative candidate among grassroots groups in New Hampshire and across the country.

This is not going to make me popular on this site, but I think Palin erred here. While it probably won’t cost her support among her core backers, it does provide more ammunition for critics who think she’s more about media attention than solving the nation’s budget and other problems. And while Ed Morrissey is exactly right that FreedomWorks and other organizations trying to oust Hatch really ought to focus on liberal Democrats first and foremost, the fact is that whoever wins the Utah Republican primary is likely to win the general election – and Liljenquist is the more conservative candidate. While Hatch is a generally reliable conservative vote, a few things cause me to think it’s time for Hatch to go:

First, Hatch was on the air with Laura Ingraham during my brief stint with her show, and he claimed he never voted for creation of the Department of Education (in response to a claim by FreedomWorks). While it is true he voted against the final conference legislation which created the Department, he also voted for a prior version of the legislation in 1979. This could be somewhat misleading, to say the least, since it is very possible that passage of the prior version was important to getting the conference report to the floor of both the House and the Senate.

I reached out to Hatch’s office for comment on the potential discrepancy between the votes, but his press secretary was unable to get back to me before the time of publication. I will update this post if I receive any clarifications.

Second, Hatch’s much-proclaimed lifetime ACU ranking whitewashes that as of late it seems to vary depending on the year. While some of this is likely due to the partisan nature of Congress (many “conservatives” seemed to like big spending under Bush and reclaimed conservatism in 2009), as well as the different legislation “scored” by the ACU in different years, his recent record seems to change with his electoral prospects. A look through his American Conservative Union rating record shows he has gotten more conservative as the 2012 election draws closer, and especially so after the defeat of former Senator Bob Bennett (R-UT) in 2010. Consider:

• 2007 ACU rating: 76%
• 2008 ACU rating: 80%
• 2009 ACU rating: 88%
• 2010 ACU rating: 100%
• 2011 ACU rating: 100%

Third, Hatch’s claims to have brought forth a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution in 1977 is accurate…but that particular BBA included tax increases as a way to balance the budget. It is thus not the same style of BBA often introduced and backed by conservatives – including Hatch – today, so an apples-to-apples comparison is inaccurate. And while I normally don’t hold what someone did over 30 years ago against him or her, Hatch has used his co-sponsorship of that legislation to great effect in campaigning, and it was part of Palin’s endorsement, so it is fair game to note that he wanted tax increases as an option to balance the budget.

Again, all in all, I think getting Hatch out of office despite a generally conservative voting record is not the best use of conservative groups’ time and money. However, that’s how things have played out so far in this election cycle. As such, conservatives have the option of backing a 36-year incumbent with a center-right voting record (not forgetting his transgressions, which include grudgingly advising Bill Clinton to nominate Ginsberg and Breyer to the Supreme Court and his vote for TARP) or a more conservative challenger in a state where the Republican is almost certain to win. I say support the conservative upstart.

[This was originally posted at Race42012.com]

Where the Campaign Must Win to Win

In assessing the electoral power base, the campaign should always keep in focus the major goal of the campaign. It is not to acquire at least “50% plus one” of the votes cast in the fall for Mitt Romney. It is to secure at least 270 electoral votes. Thus, properly targeting the states forms the key strategic element in winning the presidency. These target states are listed below. It is important to note, that not only must the campaign play in formerly Bush 2004 states, it must also expand into areas which President Bush lost in 2000 and 2004. 290 electoral votes should not be a ceiling for this campaign. If the campaign goes well and things break its way, a victory of over 300 electoral votes is not out of the realm of possibility.

Governor Romney starts the election with a solid base of 16 states (West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah) and 131 Electoral Votes (EV).  He can also be fairly confident of capturing (in degree of confidence) South Carolina, Georgia, Montana, Arizona, Missouri, and Indiana for an additional 60 EV. This gives Governor Romney a fairly safe starting point of 191 EV to rely on (although I would keep an eye on AZ, MO, and IN just in case, but if things go right, he won’t have to worry much about them).

That leaves 79 EV short of  the magic 270. President Obama has been said to have a solid blue wall. Sean Trende has pointed out that the wall is not as strong as some would have you to believe. However, barring a collapse of epic proportions, President Obama can safely count on 10 states (Hawaii, California, Illinois, New York, Vermont, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware, Massachusetts) and the District of Columbia for a total of 149 EV. Add to that in order of safety Washington, Maine (excluding the 2nd District), Oregon, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Minnesota, President Obama can safely rely upon 200 EV (remember Maine’s 2nd District leans D and isn’t likely D).

So what’s up for grabs? I have identified 12 states/districts that can be won with varying degrees of possibility. In all honesty, it is difficult to say at this point whether more states will be winnable when things develop further. The states are in order of likelihood of turning from blue to red along with my current assessment as to where they are leaning:

1. North Carolina (15 EV)-Lean R
2. Florida (29 EV)-Tossup/Lean R
3. Ohio (18 EV)-Tossup
4. Virginia (13 EV)-Tossup
5. Iowa (6 EV)*-Tossup
6. Wisconsin (10 EV)-Tossup
7. New Hampshire (4 EV)-Tossup
8. Colorado (9 EV)-Tossup
9. Pennsylvania (18 EV)-Tossup/Lean D
10. Maine 2nd District (1 EV)-Lean D
11. Nevada (6 EV)-Lean D
12. Michigan (16 EV)-Lean/Likely D

Some notes on these rankings. The way things are going now, I believe that Governor Romney will win North Carolina and probably Florida too. However, I am not confident enough to put them in the Governor’s column just yet, though North Carolina is fast approaching that point. Also, I’d be willing to bet that Missouri and Indiana are just as much in play as Nevada, Michigan, and Maine 2 are. The only reason Michigan is on this list is that Governor Romney has close ties to the state and Michigan just elected a Republican governor. Otherwise, I would put the state in President Obama’s column as a likely. In fact, if it weren’t for Governor Romney’s ties to Michigan, I would rate Minnesota as a more likely pick-up opportunity. In 2008, McCain lost Michigan by 17 points, but Minnesota by a little over 10 and according to the Trende article, Minnesota has been quietly trending more Republican over the years, while Michigan has been going the opposite direction.

Also, if you wanted to be really focused on targeted states. I would reduce the list from 12 to 9. I am fairly confident that Governor Romney will win North Carolina, and I am doubtful, but still hopeful about his winning ME 2, Nevada, or Michigan. If one wants to move those states to their respective columns, I see Governor Romney with 23 states and 206 electoral votes and President Obama with 18 states and D.C for 223 EV. 9 states and 109 Ev will probably decide this election.

Just a couple of notes on using campaign resources. If the campaign notes significant movement in New Jersey, Minnesota, or Maine 2, then diverting campaign resources to those areas could have high marginal utility. New Jersey has a popular Republican Governor and the Romney campaign will be reaching South Jersey through its ads in the Philadelphia media market. Minnesota is right next to Wisconsin and if their is movement there, additional investment can be done without too much trouble. Maine 2 is right next to New Hampshire, where campaign resources will already be used. Thus, barring an unforseen catastrophe on either side, I see Governor Romney with a realistic ceiling of 315 EV and a maximum plausible ceiling of 362 EV. I don’t see President Obama eclipsing his performance in 2008 and thus given the EV shifts, I see his max ceiling as 380 (his 2008 totals minus electoral college shift plus Arizona and Missouri).

The media has covered a smorgasbord of articles ranging from birth control to women to gay marriage in 2012. Leftists have denounced the GOP’s supposed “War on Women” in recent months for their opposition to the birth control mandate and support of personhood laws in a growing number of states. Meanwhile, liberal groups throughout the county decried George Zimmerman’s “racial motives” for shooting Trayvon Martin before he got his day in court. Zimmerman might very well be guilty as sin but what happened to innocent until proven guilty? Then, in a “surprise” (and by surprise I mean, no surprise at all), President Obama came out in support of gay marriage just after North Carolina banned the practice and Gallup reported that just over 50% of Americans support the practice. How convenient.

Strangely, most of the biggest news stories in the US in the months leading up to the 2012 election have been social, not economic, issues. The Obama administration’s focus on these issues is not one of genuine concern. Rather, it is nothing but a political ploy. First, social issues tend to be the most contentious. Supporters and opponents of gay marriage, abortion, contraception, etc. tend to be far apart on the political spectrum and the interests groups are generally well-ensconced in their own opinions. Bringing up these issues ignites the numbed passions of Obama supporters, many of whom have resorted to lukewarm support in the face of the President’s less-than-stellar record. This is a far cry from the passionate obsession of the Obama Zombies during the 2008 election. The Administration is looking for any way to re-ignite theses passions and get their supporters to the polls.

Additionally, the focus on social issues places the spotlight back on the Obama Administration, a spotlight that has been solely focused on the GOP contenders in the last several months. Obama is unable to run on his actual record, considering his history of economic failures. Therefore, the President and his supporters have turned the spotlight on issues which can actually garner some support from his liberal allies (all while ostracizing the right of course). It’s as if Obama woke up last week, looked at his record, and said, “Hmmm rising unemployment, falling poll numbers…OH LOOK GAY MARRIAGE…I can use that.” These social issues are merely a distraction from Obama’s abysmal record. They are also a way to refocus the spotlight on the President and sooth his inflated ego.

What this political maneuver shows is the president’s complete lack of accountability. He’s unable to answer for his faults or stand up for his decisions, even when they have failed. When all else fails and Obama cannot ignore the glaring shortcomings of his administration, he simply blames his predecessor. The economy, partisanship, turbulent world situation…all Bush. (Note: Ignore the fact that the average unemployment rate under George W. Bush was about 5%) Joe Biden took this on last week, blaming Bush for our turbulent relations with Iran. There is certainly a high degree of character deficiency in the White House right now. The President and his blind supporters are unable to take responsibility for anything, evidence of political and personal weakness. It’s tough to stand by your decisions honestly and answer for your failures. Yet, for the President of the United States, it is part of his job description. The President is not supposed to “Pass the Buck.” Unfortunately for us, our current Commander-in-Chief is more than willing to “Pass the Buck…Over there.” Oh look, a political distraction!

The temptation is strong to just let this one go.  But it’s actually a perfect example of where Romney is, um, challenged, and why my enthusiasm for him remains tepid.  The short version of my point is that the president has no business restructuring auto companies and trying to guide them through “recovery.”  He is not empowered by any part of the US Constitution to do this, and it’s a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad idea in any case.

If I want the services of someone who’s good at reorganizing auto companies, I’ll invest money in a private business.  That’s not what we elect a president for.  The president of the United States, our highest elected public official, needs to keep his paws off the management of private companies.  When he doesn’t, the window is flung open to cronyism, graft, bad business decisions, and distorted, uneconomic incentives.

The US auto industry keeps snuffling up to the public trough – has been doing so for 30 years now – because it is required by the government to operate under unprofitable conditions.  It is tended by the federal government as an interest of politically connected constituencies.  It has been artificially constrained and incentivized for so many years now that to say it has “recovered” is a wholly political statement, bearing no useful relation to the Big Three’s actual profit-loss or earnings picture, stock price, or any other measure of business health.

In fact, Chrysler’s much-touted “payback” of its taxpayer bailout turned out to involve a shell game in which the US Department of Energy is lending Fiat $3.5 billion so that Fiat can pay off its US Treasury loan and pump Chrysler with cash by exercising an option to buy Chrysler stock.  The Washington Times describes the transaction as follows:

So, to recap, the Obama Energy Department is loaning a foreign car company $3.5 billion so that it can pay the Treasury Department $7.6 billion even though American taxpayers spent $13 billion to save an American car company that is currently only worth $5 billion.

That’s government management in a nutshell.  Romney can’t manage the auto industry better – not from the Oval Office.  No one can.  If he wants to run auto companies, he needs to see if Ford, GM, or Chrysler is hiring.  If he wants to guide them through bankruptcy, he can become a federal regulator or get himself appointed as a bankruptcy judge – and in either case, follow the law on the matter as written by Congress, rather than getting creative and exercising powers the Constitution doesn’t give him.

When Romney speaks of the US auto industry recovering, he is speaking in the language of big, dirigiste government, accepting at face value the short-term effect of a bailout process that has served mainly to perpetuate unprofitable but politically entrenched conditions.  It guarantees that more subsidies will be needed down the road.  The taxpayer had to be billed for getting the Chevy Volt built and maintaining the political sway of the UAW, because those are special-interest mandates that no one would pay for voluntarily.  The bailout under Obama has simply been a pretext for expanding the unprofitable conditions that make the US auto industry unable to truly “recover,” in the sense of not continuing to need bailouts.

A president who doesn’t see this is hard to get excited about.  There is no point in claiming that Romney does see it, when he never speaks as if he does.  About the auto industry bailout, what he ought to say is that it was improperly handled by Obama through executive actions that must not serve as precedents; that it hasn’t turned out to be a good deal for the taxpayer; and that due-process bankruptcy without presidential intervention would have been the right way to proceed and should have been defaulted to.

Romney’s utterances on this topic indicate that he is a big-government politician.  Not only is he not offended by the bailout, he’s not offended by the Obama administration’s dirigiste approach to restructuring GM and Chrysler.  He’s taking credit for it.

In the sense that he would not engage in Chicago-style cronyism, I think Romney would be better than Obama.  (There are a number of other ways in which Romney comes out on the long end of the personal- and professional-integrity comparison.)  But in terms of improper autonomy in the executive, and structural opportunities for cronyism, he would probably either set or confirm some very undesirable precedents while in office.  He needs an active, curmudgeonly Congress to thwart him, early and often.

The president is not the nation’s CEO-in-chief.  Regarding domestic policy, he should talk principle, not business-reorganization specifics.  I’d like to hear more from him on foreign and security policy; on domestic policy, it is far more important to be courageous about the principles of limited government than to be knowledgeable about reorganizing businesses.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

I think it would be safe to say for many on the right, including myself, this whole sideshow is exasperating. If the President is for gay marriage (who’s he kidding) then he should come out (no pun intended) and say so. However, that would be too easy. I see this whole charade playing out in one of several different ways.

1.) Obama is actually against gay marriage, but doesn’t want to tick off his Hollywood supporters and more importantly, he doesn’t want to lose their contributions. Those contributions matter, a lot. But who are we kidding, Obama’s for gay marriage. People actually opposed to gay marriage (like me) don’t say they are “evolving” on the issue.

2.) Obama WILL announce he is for gay marriage some time this year, but he wants to save it for a special occasion. I anticipate this occurs either a.) the day after the Republican National Convention to change the subject (the media will happily oblige) b.) during his speech at the Democratic National Convention (sets SOME sort of second term agenda) c.) during one of the debates (anything to change the subject and/or to catch Romney flat-footed. He’ll aim to have a “The American President” or “The West Wing” moment).

3.) Obama announces he’s for gay marriage after the election. He’ll have more “flexibility” and he won’t have to worry about the fallout from his fully evolved position.

4.) Obama doesn’t change his position at all, he continues with what he has been doing, never coming out in favor of gay marriage, but opposing any pro-traditional marriage initiatives that might come up.

I think 2 & 3 are the most likely. As we’ve seen, the President isn’t shy about trying to change the subject and if he thought that announcing his support of gay marriage would, on balance, help him one iota, he’d do it.

So what to do about it. Well, if I were the Romney campaign, I’d do two things. First, pressure Obama to come out and announce his support for gay marriage. Let everybody know that you’re not buying his faux opposition and that Obama should announce his support for gay marriage. If you put enough pressure on Obama and he is forced to announce his support in May or June and not in the fall, then one giant distraction goes away. Second, Romney should prebut the President on this issue. Like he tried to do in Charlotte in regards to jobs, do so again in regards to marriage. State your support for traditional marriage and attack Obama for his obfuscation. Turn a weakness of yours (lack of authenticity) and turn it around and make it a weakness of your opponent too.

Of course, anything can happen and I shouldn’t be arrogant enough to believe that a Presidential candidate would listen to me (I’d be flattered if he did though).

Btw: While I am opposed to gay marriage, I am under no illusion as to the current course of public opinion. I pretty much agree with this article by Rod Dreher in regards to social conservative opposition to gay marriage. However, sometimes you fight the fights that need fighting even if you end up losing.

P.S.- If you want a rational debate about gay marriage (i.e. Dan Savage isn’t within a 1000 miles of the event) check these out (that means you AP):

Dr. Michael Brown vs. Dr. Eric Smaw

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse vs. Christine Sun

Cross-posted at El Tercer Riel (The Third Rail).

I answer this question multiple times a day. The people who ask this are referring to the fact that my Dad won eleven states, over 900 counties, with over three million votes cast for him. He was Mitt Romney’s primary competition for the GOP nomination. There is often a certain sense of bewilderment when they ask this, but also of respect or even admiration. And don’t worry. I get why this amazes them. Our campaign was overwhelmingly outspent in most states (sometimes more than 10 to 1), we didn’t have the organizational machine of the Romney camp, and we spent months of the race not getting any attention from the national media. In the fall, we were sitting at two percent in the polls and running a presidential campaign with a handful of incredible, dedicated staff and volunteers.  So, is it shocking that we did what we did? Absolutely. Did I believe if anyone could make this happen, it would be my Dad? Yep. We overcame the odds in this race, which is similar to every race he’s won, beating democratic incumbents in the blue state of Pennsylvania.

“But how did you do it this time? What was your secret?”

I hear ya. I could talk about how we strategized about this or that, how we worked tirelessly, or how we stretched every dollar. Fundamentally, our success came down to three things: message, messenger and movement. These aspects are essential to every race that starts at the grassroots level.

A campaign is not simply platforms and policy; it needs a message that inspires people to act. My Dad traveled the country talking about a manufacturing plan to create jobs, a fiscal policy that would lead America to prosperity, ways to make us energy independent, the looming threat of a nuclear Iran, and the importance of the family. He also talked about the importance of our founding documents, that the loss of liberty was the fundamental issue of this race.

My Dad’s message excited the base of the party and spoke to a middle America that was hungry for, well, a kid from a steel town who knows how to work hard. He visited every county in Iowa before the caucus, worked nearly 24/7 with only five days off throughout the entire campaign, and held over 800 town hall meetings nation wide. Americans still value hard work and a real person who is courageous and honest.

With that type of a messenger, we began painting our vision for America. And as any good teacher will tell you, when you begin anything, you talk about what you know. So, we started our campaign out talking about our stories – our immigrant family, our vision for the country, how we got conservative things done in DC, and how we believe in the founding principles that made America great. Then something wonderful began to happen. Our supporters and volunteers believed in the message and that belief turned into action. Money can’t buy that type of genuine enthusiasm. The campaign became about the stories of all the people who came into our lives on this journey. A movement began.

In Iowa, a guy named Chuck volunteered to drive my Dad around to all of his events in a Dodge Ram pickup truck. Chuck is a straight shooting, salt of the earth guy who loves Iowa and its caucus. Even though he’s a top politico in the state, as he’s the former director of the state party, he put the rest of his life on hold to drive the Chuck Truck for our campaign. He believed we could pull off the impossible: a win in Iowa. Hundreds of miles later, his faith was rewarded.

Wendy Jensen was the smallest wisp of a woman with one of the biggest hearts I’ve ever known. In spite of her disability, she made over 5,000 phone calls for the campaign in Iowa and passed away right before caucus night. I know she’d be proud of what we all did, together, in Iowa. That night was for Wendy.

In Oklahoma, we met our best volunteer whose name was Nathanial. He had spina bifida. Nathanial made thousands of phone calls from home for the campaign. Yet as we thanked him for his huge contribution, he thanked us for representing his voice.

While in Missouri, a woman came up to my Dad after an event and handed him eight dollars. These were her daily tips from her job as a pet groomer. She told him this was her contribution to protect freedom.

For each of these stories there’s a thousand more. People all across the nation rose up and made big things happen. We even had a song written for us, called “Game On.”

I remember several months ago when a Romney surrogate claimed that all the significant Republicans in the country had spoken about who should be the GOP nominee. There was outrage among Republicans across America, especially among the half of the country who had not voted yet. A trend started on twitter, a hashtag that said #IAmSignificant. This went viral as everyday Americans “endorsed” my Dad for president because, after all, they were significant too. When I heard the comment myself, I couldn’t help but think of Chuck, Wendy, and Nathanial. To us, these everyday Americans were significant. In fact, they were invaluable.

So when people ask me how we ran a grassroots campaign for president and re-wrote the history books on how presidential races are run, well, the answer is simple: we did it together, against all the odds. But, who doesn’t like a good underdog story? Thank goodness for the Ricks, Rockys and Rudys of this world who remind us of what’s really significant and that all things are possible.

Don’t misunderstand – the GSA and other federal agencies should be held accountable for this and other unethical abuses of the public’s money. As The Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell outlined on April 19, and again on April 23, this is only one of many publicly egregious wastes of taxpayer money in the bureaucracies in D.C. But when it comes down to it, $820,000 is not even a drop in the bucket of fraud/waste/abuse/duplicity. Here are some of the other, more easily ignored abuses:

First off is simple abuse that is acceptable for the well-connected politician but disgraceful and/or illegal for anyone else – small change, but ultimately emblematic of the systemic corruption in the federal government. Case in point is how former Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY) gets a pension and other benefits for the rest of his life, despite resigning in disgrace. President Obama, following in the footsteps of his predecessors, is almost certainly using taxpayer dollars for campaign trips – illegal, but obviously acceptable under both parties. Senator David Vitter (R-LA) was busted for solicitation, but never spent time in jail. He will get a pension and other monetary benefits, same as Weiner.

Antithetical to many conservatives is looking hard at unproductive defense spending. However, the Defense Department is rife with abuse. For example, last October a report by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) outlined how major defense contractors who paid civil fines or settled for amounts of $1 million or greater still received over $500 billion in contracts in the last 10 years. Another report, this one from The Commission Wartime Contracting, estimated that between $31 billion and $60 billion had been lost to poor oversight and/or fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan during our time in those nations.

Outside of fraud, simple inefficiencies abound in the Defense Department. This Forbes piece notes that approximately $100 billion had been spent on weapons programs that were either never used or eventually canceled – all after significant investments. In an informal conversation with a friend who is a military auditor, I was told that a number of contractors take a contract and take a percentage off the top. They then subcontract to another company, which takes a percentage off the top. This subcontractor then subcontracts to another company, and takes a percentage off the top. Finally, several levels down, the contract actually gets fulfilled.

Duplication of federal programs is something that has come to light in the last 15 months. A pair of Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports in 2011 and 2012 found, according to Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), “hundreds of billions” of dollars in duplication in the federal government. ABC News reported that the GAO found many programs were not tested for actually accomplishing their stated goals, and the same applied to a number of tax loopholes, credits, etc. (Several aspects of the 2012 report can be found at the first link, including examples of duplication and the report’s Executive Summary.) Here are some of the juicier parts of ABC’s article:

• GAO found the Department of Defense could save up to $460 million every year by undertaking a “broader restructuring” of its military health care system.
• The military came in for special scrutiny: over $10 billion on defense-wide business systems every year; $49 billion in military and veterans health services; and at least $76 billion since 2005 in urgent processing systems for the military.
• Fifty-eight billion dollars at the Department of Transportation [was spent] for over 100 separate surface transportation programs.
• [A]lmost $1 trillion in government-wide tax expenditures listed by the Treasury Department, some of which the GAO found “may be ineffective at achieving their social or economic purposes.”
• [T]he government has neglected to investigate numerous programs, making the expenditure of some funds not only redundant but wasteful. For instance, only five of 47 job training and employment programs surveyed by the GAO had been studied to evaluate whether outcomes were the result of the program itself or another cause altogether.
• “Little is known about the effectiveness of most programs,” the watchdog observed.
• That point also applies to domestic food assistance, where “little is known about the effectiveness of [11 of the 18 programs] because they have not been well studied,” the GAO said. In fiscal year 2008, for example, the government spent $62.5 billion on those 18 programs.

Of course, no critique of the federal government’s spending habits is complete without highlighting simple stupidity. In fiscal year 2011, improper payments totaled $115 billion in, over three percent of the federal budget. According to a press release from Rep. Todd Platts (R-PA): “An improper payment could be an incorrect payment, an over- or under- payment, and could include a payment to an ineligible recipient, a payment for an ineligible service, a duplicate payment or a payment for a service not received.” Medicare and Medicaid represented over half of these improper payments; in Fiscal Year 2010 alone Medicare cost the taxpayers $48 billion in improper payments.

To be fair, $115 billion is less than what was spent on improper payments in fiscal year 2010… but the $115 billion did not account for many agencies that simply fail to report improper payments. According to Platts: “Although not all agencies are required to report improper payment estimates, some agencies that are required to report do not do so.  The most significant agency failing to report is the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), although both the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the DOD – Office of Inspector General has found that the DOD is at a high risk for improper payments.

The simple fact of the matter is that while Congress and much of the media focuses on the President’s unnecessary and wasteful $52 million gas manipulation task force, or the GSA’s junket, hundreds of billions of dollars are slipping through the system. Perhaps Congress should focus on stopping these abuses of the taxpayer dollars, instead of intentionally misdirecting the attention of the American people to what amounts to literally cents on the dollar of the “fraud, waste, abuse and stupidity” (to quote Senator Coburn) so prevalent in our ever-growing, ever-expensive federal government.

Dustin Siggins is an associate producer with The Laura Ingraham Show and co-author with William Beach of The Heritage Foundation on a forthcoming book about the national debt. The opinions expressed are his own.

Via RCP:

Chris Matthews: Let me ask you about something which is not in the polling, but I want you as experts — Barack Obama is the first African-American president, okay. Is there going to be a reluctance on the part of the voters and the political community that talks politics as we get into November about dumping the first African-American president? Is there going to be something that just wretches people? ‘Wait a minute here, this guy is going to knock out the first guy who got aboard?

Follow the link, where you’ll see Howard Fineman arguing that Obama is held to a higher standard because of his skin color, and you’ll watch as Chuck Todd posits that a Republican To Be Named Later backed out of the race for that very reason.

I respectfully submit that we witness, yet again, the absolute validation of Andrew Breitbart’s final thesis, to wit: that the ambiguous themes of “Hope” and “Change” were really nothing more than ideological beards for the class warfare and racial strife at the heart of Obama’s ideology and subsequent governance.  May I remind you that John McCain run the kind of “submission to history” campaign that Obama so easily crushed in 2008, and which Matthews seems to evoke.

Given the self-evident lack of accomplishment of this regime, there is nothing more left to offer or sell to the American electorate.  There is nothing left but guilt projection.  Whether it’s the fake #WarOnWomen or the economically risible Buffett Rule, the intended result is the same…to shame us into submission.  And now this.  Having abandoned all hope, the leg thrill has now yielded to the guilt trip.

Not only is this tactic useless, but it lacks any factual or historical basis.  May I remind you that after an equally disastrous term, New York City passed judgement on its first African-American mayor.

Bear in mind that New York’s electorate is much more forgiving (and progreeeeesiiiive) than that of the nation as a whole.  Given those realities, I don’t see too many people buying into this phony race guilt meme.  If this is what the media is going with at this juncture, I’m liking our chances.

A Spanish-language version of this post is available at El Tercer Riel (The Third Rail).

Rick Santorum’s withdrawal was supposed to have signaled the beginning of the general election, and the end of this cycle’s silly season.  However, there is still an open spot on the Republican ticket, still news cycle to be filled with speculation, and still deadlines to be met…come rain, hail, sleet, or snow.

Until now, I had seen no need to address this fantasy indulged by the D.C.-and-New York-bassed kommentariat, which seems intent on pushing the Governor of Puerto Rico, Luis Fortuño, for the Vice Presidential nod.  Despite this insistence, I don’t think Fortuño so much as cracks the short list.  Such pieces as these, most recently from The Hill, are not just purely speculative media mind-dealing, they also serve to expose the ignorance of those who are supposed to deliver fact-based analysis.

There is no doubt, given Fortuño’s track record, that Gov. Mitt Romney is right to call him “a solid conservative and a firm leader.” However, I don’t think that neccesarily builds Fortuño’s case for running mate.

The end of any seriousness in The Hill’s piece begins with the notion that Fortuño’s presence would help the party’s Hispanic outreach efforts.  As I’ve noted previously, the coveted “Hispanic vote” is not a monoblock that can be reached with a single message.  Those who think so are usually the ones that have been clamoring for Marco Rubio’s addition to the ticket, as well (despite his continual rejections of the VP nod).  In theory, Fortuño’s impact would likely limit itself to the I-4 corridor, which would be redundant given John Quiñones’ run in FL-9 (and, to a lesser extent, Col. E.J. Otero’s run in Tampa).  In the Northeast, Hispanic voters are used to (and used to voting against) Hispanic candidates.  In the West, there is no factual basis with which to assume that a Hispanic conservative would necessarily bring substantial votes, especially now that Gov. Susana Martínez has tapped out from VP consideration (other than maybe Rubio, I can’t see it).

Fortuño’s executive and Congressional experience best qualifies him to lead Puerto Rico through its particular self-inflicted fiscal challenges, but isn’t a good fit for the Vice Presidency at this crucial historical juncture.  Romney’s running mate is going to have to be able to hit the lame-duck session on the run, and this lame-duck is big enough to choke a horse.  There will be ObamaCare SCOTUS fallout, regardless of the ruling.  In addition, there is a transition whichc hands off the winding-down of two wars…and oh, by the way, Taxmageddon is looming.  This particular transition requires a mastery of the tax and budgeting process that I’m not sure whether Fortuño has attained as Resident Commissioner in Washington, and Tourism Secretary and Governor of Puerto Rico.

Any other election cycle, and Fortuño is definitely on the short list.  But not this one.  Given the magnitude of the mess that is going to need cleaning up, and the need for a clean vetting, I think Romney will play it safe and go with three budget nerds on his short list.  Of these, I expect Jindal to show, Ryan to place, and Portman to win.

A Spanish-language version of this post is available at El Tercer Riel (The Third Rail).

Conservative voters who are alarmed about the direction of government recognize that procedural mechanisms and ephemeral election-year sentiment can’t fix it.  They perceive that our problems with government can only be addressed with moral decisions: difficult decisions made when much is at stake and there are deeply compelling interests in competition with each other.  Moral courage exists for such scary things, and doing the right thing when all of the choices at hand will break someone’s china requires a kind of moral courage that rarely sounds soothing to the ears of a harassed public.  It is more likely to resonate as trenchant, annoying, or painfully necessary.

Many of the voters are down for that this year.  A growing number of them are less put off by the sting of astringent than they are afraid of what will happen if America tries to avoid it.  They aren’t irritated by “moral talk”; they are interested and primed for it.

As regards Santorum’s suitability to this mood, however, a question in my mind is whether moral courage for the hour has to sound particularly theological, oddly detailed, or hectoring.  Along these lines, William McGurn offered Santorum good advice in a column on Tuesday:

[W]hen Mr. Santorum discusses [social] issues, he needs to fold them into his larger narrative about the free society. …

There is, however, one area where Mr. Santorum needs to demonstrate a discipline it’s not yet clear he has. That is the ability to resist the efforts to drag him out of the public questions into the weeds of theological debate.

I would go a bit further and suggest Santorum take a page directly from Ronald Reagan’s book.  This would entail a pivot in emphasis.  John Podhoretz has nicely identifiedwhat we might call Santorum’s “presentation” problem: his tendency, at least in his non-campaign speeches from the past, to dwell on rebuking a fallen America.

The point is central, because rebuke of the past is not a guide to policy for the future – and the “rebuke” theme gets old quickly, as demonstrated by a similar tendency in the current president.  Something like Santorum’s now-infamous “mainline Protestants” comment may get vigorous agreement from a lot of evangelical Protestants, but it isn’t the basis for an action plan or a useful source of vision for national government.  Granted, Santorum made that remark in what was essentially a religious speech at a Catholic college.  But when you’re running for president, your memorable comments need to have a more positive and visionary emphasis.

Fortunately, there’s a lot to be positive about in the American tradition Santorum invokes.  It is also an excellent source of vision.  And one of Reagan’s greatest strengths was in defining and celebrating the important elements of that political tradition: the trademark American idea of government that is limited, constitutional, and federal.

Reagan saved his rebukes for left-wing ideology and policy.  He didn’t approach the American people as a sick society in need of exhortation, even though America was putting up plenty of soft targets in that regard in the 1970s.  Rather, he predicated his political approach on expecting the best of the people.  He spoke often about liberty and small government in terms of their unique power to unleash the people’s virtues.  He couched his message in positive terms, speaking far less about the evils of welfarism, for example, than about the benefits of liberty and opportunity.

With his positive approach, Reagan was unusually convincing on an essential principle: that the people do better with less government.  Santorum may embrace that principle, but it’s not readily associated with him, because he spends so much time talking about things like the societal problems that arise when contraception is considered a cheap “out” from moral decisions about sex and procreation.  He may have good points on that and other topics, but as a practical matter of communication and point-making, those essays in forensic pessimism don’t really advance the argument for political liberty.

Republicans this year should emphasize encouraging the people with reminders of what America was constituted to do right, and what Americans have done right with their freedom.  In 2012, it may be necessary to speak in some explicit detail about the moral principles behind American liberty.  Today’s voters are less likely to have been reared on them than the voters of 1980 were.  But if there’s one thing this primary season has shown, it’s that the voters want that discussion.

That is a tremendous opportunity.  Santorum can seize it best by concentrating on what we’ve got going for us and why we can turn this thing around.  If our focus is on social negatives, and if we are discouraged as to whether we will do good things with liberty and small government, it’s hard to make the case that those conditions frame a better future for the country.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

“Drain the Jacuzzi!”

“This government isn’t too big to fail, it’s too big to succeed.”

“We don’t want an economy built to last, we want an economy built to grow.”

“This is Obama’s Washington.”

I wonder, however, if one of the points she hammered throughout the speech really registered with her audience.  Her signature line in this speech was “The door is open.”  She meant that political conditions are becoming conducive to a renewed commitment to small government and liberty.  People’s mindsets are changing.  We are not governed by the “rules” of political seasons past; the door is open to choosing our candidates and charting our nation’s future on a different basis.  The door is open to not accepting a continuation of the false compromises of previous decades.

(As I go to press, I see that Tina Korbe picked up on this theme.)

I have referred to those false compromises – “compromises” in which the conservative, small-government side gave up virtually everything – as the “old consensus.”  I see it losing, bit by bit, in this primary season.  People are no longer obediently making their political choices within the parameters defined for them by the professional political class.

This doesn’t mean that the voters have ideal candidates with whom to make their statement against the old consensus.  Santorum and Gingrich both have their drawbacks, as Paul always has.  But a critical mass of voters has recognized that Romney is the old consensus, and they are rejecting it.  The CPAC vote was remarkable for Romney’s 38% — because it wasn’t bigger, because Santorum got 31%, and even Gingrich, in a conclave of the politically connected, got 15%.

Everyone outpolled Ron Paul at CPAC, even though he has regularly won the CPAC vote in the past.  This signals a change in the mindset of politically active conservatives – not merely a new perspective that it’s overwhelmingly important to defeat Obama, but a perspective that the core of the conservative movement is shifting, and we need a serious mainstream candidate because it is a life-or-death matter to be effective in the political process.

That obviously doesn’t mean the CPAC voters think we need a “moderate,” leadership- and media-approved candidate.  If it did, they would have gone for Romney, rather than voting 46% for the mainstream candidates who are not Romney – and who are perceived, in many if not all cases correctly, as less satisfied with and enthusiastically “managerial” about the matter of big government.

But the point to take away is that voter sentiment, as it relates to the meaning of different candidates and the basis of government, is changing.

And that, I think, is about half the reason why Sarah Palin didn’t throw her hat in the ring for this campaign cycle.  Her evaluation of political conditions is remarkably accurate and prescient:  she saw, long before most of the voters did, that the game of expectations itself needed to change, and that only we could do it.

What strategic value was there for Palin in participating in the Cynical Media Slime-fest and All-Out Kick-em-in-the-Nads, mud-slinging, business-as-usual, expectations-on-autopilot primary season?

Six or eight months ago, the sea change in the voters’ sentiments and propensities might have been foreseeable, but it hadn’t happened yet.  Those who think Palin could have won lots of primaries on the basis of pre-primary voter sentiments are wrong, I think.  After all, the business-as-usual approach – Karl Rove tells everyone how bad a candidate is, the media magnify his or her every quirk or mistake, the media and some (not all) of the other candidates pile on with allegations that range from hostile spin to outright falsehood – has so far felled our most conservative candidates.

But in the process, the voters have been changing.  That’s what Palin saw before others did.  Do I think she is counting the days to a brokered convention?  No.  There is no one who could reasonably adopt that as a “plan.”  She won’t run this year; that’s my rational assessment as well as my gut feeling.  (I could of course be wrong, although I think some big conditions will have to change more for that to be the case.)

But if she does run, it will not be because she has changed, but because we have.  There are political conditions in which she could run successfully, and conditions in which she couldn’t.  The latter have constituted our political environment up until the last couple of months.

If the conditions are changing now, I believe that is largely because voters are having to wise up to the flaws in our own thinking by going through this ugly spectacle.  We already knew that the media have no intention of giving our candidates a fair shake, and that many in the GOP leadership want to submarine the small-government conservatives.   What many voters didn’t understand is that if we want to select leaders of character, we have to graduate from high school, and overlook the vicissitudes of “presentation” that sometimes make good people look like buffoons to those who see without humility, mercy, or discrimination.  We have to see with better eyes.  We have to think independently of the jeers embedded in the media narrative.  We have to be wiser citizens, placing in political leadership only the hope that is appropriate to free men and women.

We can’t have a candidate who sounds like Mitt Romney, but will lead the way a small-government conservative would.  That’s not an option.  What we’re doing in this primary season is coming to grips with that reality.  I think Palin knew instinctively that we would have to, before it would make sense for her to jump back into the electoral fray.

But, as I said, I think that’s only about half the explanation.  The other half is that Palin is an evangelical Christian.  She believes God has a plan for her life, and that He gives her a certainty in her spirit about the big choices she has to make.  I suspect she has had a peaceful certainty that joining the campaign as a candidate for 2012 was not something she should do.  If she were to analyze it, she might say that God knows better than any of us how the voters’ concerns and expectations are going to change.

Meanwhile, the door is open.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

The reason Romney hasn’t had that much real political success is that he doesn’t have much in the way of a political philosophy.  When political conditions are set for him by outside agency, he’s an effective manager.  His admirable record at Bain, and his achievement in organizing a faltering Olympics for success, attest to that.  But his record as governor of Massachusetts indicates that in a political role, he accepts existing conditions as given, and seeks merely to optimize certain narrow priorities within them.

He is not committed to political principles, but to management.  The two things are different, and one of the worst mistakes Republicans make is to imagine that management trumps political principle.  In fact, the management focus knuckles under repeatedly to political pressure (see Romney in Massachusetts, Schwarzenegger in California, and generations of big businesses facing political activists).  Only philosophical commitment, based on irreducible and non-negotiable ideas, can stand – or prevail – against the assault of demagogic-statist political themes.

It is clear from his passage on “the very poor, the very rich,” etc, that Romney is operating on the vague, complacent mindset conventionalized by left-trending American politics over the last 80 years: that government must “help” certain demographics, while rebuking others; and that no amount of evidence will induce us to change our definition of “help,” or our assessment of the need for it.

What that means in practice is a “cycle of poverty” welfare regime for the very poor; a symbiotic relationship for government with the very rich; a selective dismissal of the impact of government regulation and taxes on our economic conditions; and an incessant, increasingly expensive use of the middle class as a political football.

Those are the factors that have created our current, untenable situation.  Its greatest impact is – as always – on the poorest among us.  The poor have less opportunity today than they did as little as 40 years ago to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” through enterprise and investment as opposed to narrowly-defined “education” and “jobs.”  And the principal reason is that regulation has them surrounded.  It has suppressed job opportunities, made it harder to set up in small business or as an independent contractor, and jeopardized saving by increasing the prices of the goods and services needed for survival.

Impoverishing the middle class with taxation and job-killing regulation hits the poor even harder than it does the middle class.  The middle class is what ultimately employs the poor, by exercising market demand; if it has less purchasing power, the poor lose jobs and business opportunities.  Forcing the price of goods and services up with regulation also hits the poor harder than it hits anyone else.  Policies that seek to suppress the industries and commercial activities disliked by activists hit the poor harder than anyone else.

Government favoritism, toward unions and big business alike, hits the poor harder than anyone else, because it is based on favoring the already connected, and preventing independent “upstarts” – frequently the poor – from competing with them.  Besides distorting markets and costing everyone more in price terms, favoritism also creates a public debt burden, which hits the poor again by adding to the economic discouragement of the middle class.

A separate but intertwined aspect of this issue is the one Newt Gingrich has spoken passionately about:  the debilitating and demoralizing effect on the poor of the very programs that, in Romney’s formulation, keep them “taken care of.”

I truly don’t think Romney means to be cavalier about the poor.  But his wording indicates that his first political instinct is managerial rather than liberty-promoting.  The two postures pull in different directions.  Governments are perennially inclined to try to manage their people.  They don’t naturally respect their people’s liberties and dignity; they have to be ordered to, and kept under constant surveillance and rebuke.  Romney is not the man to do that.  He appears to see the poor, like a lot of other things, as a managerial problem for government.

In the present case, respect for the people would entail acknowledging and revising policies that are socially destructive, and seeing whoever is poor at a given time principally as a “middle-class in waiting,” in need of liberty and opportunity.  It is still possible to offer public assistance without maximizing the disincentives thrown up by government to enterprise and independence for the poor.  The key is to avoid the deadly idea that assistance programs render the poor “taken care of,” as if the poor are a bill coming due.  The poor are people – the source of all creativity and wealth – who will largely respond to and make the most of the same incentives as the middle class and the rich.  America is, if nothing else, a demonstration of the truth of that maxim.

Romney consistently comes off as having an old-school interventionist approach to government.  He also seems to have missed the right’s whole welfare-vs.-enterprise discussion of the 1980s and ‘90s.  He is clearly not someone who would say that for the good of the people and in the interest of our most precious, most empowering commodity – liberty – government needs to stop doing whole categories of things.  Romney doesn’t reflexively or naturally formulate any comment on policy in small-government terms.

It is not, in fact, conservative to think of the poor as “taken care of” by the destructive, self-perpetuating welfare regime in the United States.  Far better for the poor to have the kind of opportunity, and the buying power of their earnings and savings, that they do not have now, but would have if the load of regulatory overreach, predatory taxation, and constituency-tending-by-overspending were lifted on Americans as a whole.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Romney is not a small-government, limited-government conservative.  He will not go on offense against the dangerous principles on which government is being conducted today in the United States.  This is thought by many to be behind his “electability,” but it makes him the most defensive of potential Republican candidates.

RomneyCare is only one example of Romney’s comfort with big government, but it’s an important one.  Romney has continued to defend the principle of an absolute purchase mandate, levied on anyone with an income and a pulse.  The health “insurance” purchase mandate is not like the mandate for driver’s insurance, because citizens can opt out of being drivers.  But avoiding the health-insurance purchase mandate of RomneyCare requires opting out of life (or leaving Massachusetts).

Purchase mandates are not so much a states’ prerogatives issue as an issue of the principles controlling the purpose and scope of government.  RomneyCare is wrong for Massachusetts because it’s bad government.  Of course people in Massachusetts can choose to levy such a mandate if they want, but that doesn’t make it a good idea.  It puts government in an intrusive role that not only invites but demands a spiraling level of intrusion, one that pits citizen against citizen, rent-seekers against taxpayers, and government against liberty.

The US federal government is engaged today in far too many things that promote all three of these conflicts.  Advocacy groups leverage the EPA to prevent business activities that would generate thousands of jobs.  Both unions and big businesses lobby incessantly for regulations and special laws that will ensure they don’t have to face the consequences of unprofitability.  Yet very often, the conditions that make them unprofitable are themselves produced by regulation, rather than market factors.  These sources of cost to the public purse go increasingly uncriticized; the fiscal disaster, we are told, can only be averted by taking more from the taxpayers and further modifying the taxpayers’ behavior.

Health care is, as always, a prime example of this kind of interplay.  Once the premise of public funding for health care is established, everything anyone does becomes a cost issue for the public treasury.  There are some protected categories of behavior, like those that lead to STDs and AIDS, but constituencies arise for controlling people’s eating habits and fertility, and for proclaiming everything under the sun – including the sun itself – to be a public health hazard.  The urgent necessity of controlling what people do is amplified by the centralized, spiraling cost of health-care disbursements.  Few forms of government-brokered activism are as inimical to individual liberty.

Government – not social or economic dynamics – is now the primary means of pitting citizen against citizen.  This needs to change: the scope and independence of federal agencies and the regulatory impulse need to be dramatically reined in.  We can’t afford for the federal government to continue on the premise of the last 80 years.  The basic premise must change.

This doesn’t mean that the changes need to be abrupt, but they do need to be scheduled and prosecuted with determination.  Only someone who believes that, however, will be willing to make the case, and face down the multifarious opposition to reducing the footprint of government on principle.  Reduction on principle means that government can’t come back in 10 years and start regulating again things that it was ordered not to regulate in 2013 (or tighten regulations that were loosened).  It means that the apparatus for reclaiming an over-regulatory posture won’t even be there in 10 years.

Romney is not the man who will do this.  He has coexisted comfortably with the regulatory premise throughout his public life – even during his years at Bain Capital.  He sees a need to change some regulations on the margin, but he is not an advocate of fundamentally changing the premise on which we now regulate ourselves.

Although it’s not the point of this post, I will suggest, for comparison, what a truly deregulatory posture might look like.  Besides eliminating, or at least drastically reducing, the size and charter of the EPA and other federal agencies, a key shift in principle would be requiring that Congress positively approve every new regulation.  We already have the condition in which Congress sets parameters for the regulatory charters of the various agencies – and that is what has gotten us to the current environment of wild, often incoherent overregulation.  It is a good principle to start with, that whatever forms of regulation Congress doesn’t have time to attend to directly, we don’t need anyway.

Much reduction in the footprint of regulation would flow from that.  I also like Rick Perry’s proposal to reduce the amount of time Congress spends in session.  It is shifts in principle like this that will change the basis of government.  Changing that basis is our only hope for arresting the fiscal freight train headed for the mother of all wrecks.  But Romney is not the candidate who will push for the changes we need.

That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be better than Obama.  He would.  But electing Romney will mean at least four more years of playing on defense:  trying to mitigate the score being racked up by the other side, rather than playing on offense to score touchdowns for liberty and smaller government.  That’s why so many of the voters can’t get excited about Romney.  They know we need someone to lead us in a direction of fundamental change – a shift in the principle of government, back toward the limited-government idea of the Founders, plus a very big reduction in its footprint – and they know Romney won’t do that.

I would put the other candidates (with Ron Paul as an outlier) in this order, as to how much they would push for fundamental change: Perry, Gingrich, Santorum.  All three would go further than Romney would in this regard.  If any of these candidates got a Republican-controlled Congress, we could expect some amount of actual reduction in the persistent basis for regulation.

Romney’s approach would be to tinker with it on the margins.  I will vote for Romney if he’s the choice, just as I will vote for any of the other three.  But what we need is a small-government president who will go on offense.  Defense will only stave off the eventual loss.  And as we see with the Republican apathy over Romney, in politics – unlike football – defense isn’t exciting or motivational.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

Romney, the son of a politician, has been running for office, holding office or thinking about running for office for more than two decades. “Just level with the American people,” Gingrich growled. “You’ve been running … at least since the 1990s.”

For some reason, Romney can’t do that. Or at least it seems like he can’t. His authentic inauthenticity problem isn’t going away. And it’s sapping enthusiasm from the rank and file.

Goldberg is right, but the underlying theme that voters need to be reminded of is that during so many important debates fromhealthcare, jobs, Wall Street Reform, confirmations, recess appointments, to taxes the culprits to invoke cloture or side with the Democrats typically are the same:  Senators Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe,  and Scott Brown–the trifecta of RINOs. All from the northeast, too.  See where I’m going with this?

Frankly, Romney, who the mainstream liberal media would like to see win the nomination, has yet to unite the GOP base.  His used car salesman pitch simply rubs people the wrong way.  We’ve seen this over and over again–even John McCain pointed this out and won in 2007′s primary–and now supports him–that should speak volumes to my point.  Romney has always been dogged by this and this is why we have such a large ‘Not Romney’ camp on the right side of the aisle.

The GOP is also paying the bitter price for not having anyone in line to succeed GW Bush.  The party’s internal tug of war will be an historical teachable moment and prepare the party for future elections.  The one saving grace is that, while the Democrats have Hillary, they have no one to succeed her at this point in time.  I say Hillary because she seems to be the only power broker left untarnished by Obama–even though she is an Alinsky kinda girl.

Additionally, the GOP presidential candidate will have a two-pronged mission as the nominee:  to beat the MSM and Obama.  However, enlightened voters now know for sure the media is mostly state-controlled, Obama was never vetted, and that his radical leftist ideology drives his policies, appointments, and regulations out of the mainstream.

Furthermore, the MSM needs Romney to offset Obama.  The formula is quite simple:  RomneyCare is to ObamaCare as Obama’s rhetoric is to Romney’s rhetoric all of which cancel each other out according to how the media sees it.

I’m not buying the media hype over who can beat Obama.  The primary is the primary and the game changes in the general.  Voters are more inclined to vote with their wallets.  We have gas prices averaging at almost $4 per gallon across the country, skyrocketing food prices, record foreclosures, record number of people on food stamps, high unemployment, ObamaCare, crippling regulations, and much more.  So if the MSM thinks that the historic 2010 midterm GOP wave was a whim, think again.  The Right accomplished its key mission of splitting the Congress so that Obama’s agenda could not be rammed through anymore.  Would we have liked the Senate, sure, but in 2012, the job will be finished.  My point is that who do we really want in the Oval Office?  A northeastern Republican who disavows the GOP or not.  We already have someone who does not have the consent of the governed.  Are we really going to take that risk again?

Finally, Romney has always touted RomneyCare as a great model for all the states to implement, but the reality is, the only person who implemented RomneyCare was Obama and now we have ObamaCare.  No thanks.

You can also tell from this message at the president’s campaign website:

This holiday season, we’re giving you a chance to have a little fun at the expense of a Republican in your life by letting them know they inspired you to make a donation to the Obama campaign.

Simply enter their name and email address below. Then, we’ll send them a message letting them know they inspired you to donate. [Emphasis added]

Keith Koffler at White House Dossier writes vis-à-vis the request for contact information:

The effort could help the Obama campaign build a database that would enable it to target Republican voters during the general election campaign. But, more perniciously, it could also become part of an [sic] Democratic effort to influence Republican primary voters to select a candidate Democrats think Obama could most easily defeat.

While Obama does have a troubling history of asking supporters to snitch on his enemies, I see this latest move as far less invidious, as just another sappy hook to raise donations. In fact, the message doubles down on a previous hook—dinner with Obama and his missus—by including the following as a footnote:

Important: By making a donation today, you’ll be automatically entered for a chance to have dinner with Barack and Michelle Obama. By clicking on the ‘Submit’ button below or otherwise participating in the promotion, you agree to be bound by these Official Rules and represent that you satisfy all of the eligibility requirements.

Related Articles

• Would you spend $3 to have dinner with Obama? (Do I hear $2.50)
• Obama’s myth of transparency: game, match, set
• Obama’s latest gaffe: We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad
• OWS alert: Obama’s newest campaign adviser is Wall Street lobbyist
• Where’s Weirdo: Obama’s very special photo op
• Remember when Obama was too cool to joke about?
• Barack Obama: “funniest person alive”
• The real joke behind the White House’s unintended “laugh” line
• Obama administration fights to keep WH visitor logs secret
• Obama new AttackWatch website: Snitches wanted
• Internal WH memo: Few entrants in Obama commencement speech contest

A report from the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) reveals that 47% of Congress members are millionaires, some of them many times over. When you contrast that finding with the percentage of U.S. households with net assets of at least $1 million—a mere 4%—the handwriting on the wall is clear. Extend the number of seats in Congress to roughly 115 million, one for each household recorded in the 2010 census, and we become a nation of mostly very wealthy people. How’s that for wealth redistribution?

Sheila Krumholz, executive director of CRP, writes that “the vast majority of members of Congress are quite comfortable, financially.” That’s putting it mildly. Of the current 250 members who are millionaires, nine of them have over $100 million. One of them, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), is within hailing distance of half a billion dollars, with an average net worth of over $448 million.

Issa, who is the richest, is followed by Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) with $380 million, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) with $232 million, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) with $193 million, and Sen. Herb Kohl (D-WI) with $174 million.

Since there are 531 Congress members in total, that means that 281 members have an average net worth of less than a million dollars. But is anyone in Congress poor? If the records obtained by CRP are accurate and truthful, the answer is a resounding yes. Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-FL) is in debt to the tune of $4.7 million. Rep. Steve Fincher (R-TN) is also reportedly in the red $3.3 million, followed by Rep. Ruben Hinojosa (D-TX), who owes $2.5 million.

But back to the good news: Despite the global economic meltdown and moribund recovery, the estimated median net worth of a current U.S. senator (senators tend to be richer than House members) is up about 11 percent, from $2.38 million in 2009, to $2.63 million in 2010 (the most recent year for which financial data were available).

A complete list of Congress members and where they fall on the wealth continuum is here. You might also enjoy tabbing over to a listing of the most popular investments among members of Congress. I’ll give you a sneak preview: The number one favorite investment vehicle is a company that paid no federal tax in 2010.

Do you think this is what the founding fathers envisioned when they established Congress?

Related Articles

• First Lady spent $10 million in taxpayer money on vacations last year
• Obama’s Agriculture Secretary: Food Stamps create jobs (Video)
• Jay Carney claims unemployment checks create jobs
• ObamaCare, the great job killer
• In midst of recession, new study finds members of Congress getting richer
• Members of Congress own stock in scanner companies: Conflict of interests?
• Clintons looking to buy $11 million Westchester County mansion
• The First Lady’s $80,000-a-day vacation

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

‘Pick your metaphor,’ Carney said at his daily briefing Thursday while dismissing the GOP proposal … as a showy, but ultimately shallow alternative to Obama’s plan. ‘Window dressing or gorilla dust.’

Nakamura spends the next 400 words puzzling over the obscure phrase gorilla dust, which he ultimately traces back to one-time spoiler candidate Ross Perot. Excellent idea for a press secretary: Use figures of speech that no one will recognize.

Actually, it’s a perfect idea for a press secretary to Barack Obama, who himself tends to speak in tongues when communicating. Here is Obama’s own reaction to the GOP alternative:

Tonight, Senate Republicans chose to raise taxes on nearly 160 million hardworking Americans because they refused to ask a few hundred thousand millionaires and billionaires to pay their fair share. They voted against a bill that would have not only extended the $1,000 tax cut for a typical family….

The comment is vintage Obama, which is to say pure straw man argument peppered with a favorite meme, this month’s flavor being fair share. The GOP has espoused support (if for political reasons) for extending the payroll tax cut. They are thus notseeking to “raise taxes on nearly 160 million hardworking Americans.” The bone of contention between the parties is not whether to extend the cut but how to pay for it.

So what did each of the parties propose? The GOP plan called for freezing the pay for federal workers for an additional three years, trimming the federal workforce by 10%, and forcing high-income earners to pay more for programs such as Medicare. The Democratic plan was “the usual”—i.e., raise taxes on the wealthy.

It is understandable that the Democrats would balk at the Republican proposal, which fails to conform to their worldview, where more government means better government. But why feign righteous indignation over what is just the latest example ofan inability of divergent minds to meet?

Related Articles

• Is Obama campaigning on the taxpayer dime—again?
• What could possibly have gone wrong with the Supercommittee went wrong
• Jay Carney claims unemployment checks create jobs
• Liberal news flash: GOP opposes Obama plan to cut taxes
• Jay Carney’s shifting views on presidential vacations and photo ops
• Putting country ahead of vacation
• Obama’s economic “fairness doctrine”

Among Romney’s “strange food habits” are pulling the cheese from his pizza and the skin from KFC fried chicken, prompting Burnett to joke, “I’m glad to hear he’s got vices.”

What are some of his other vices? Well, there’s humility, if you can call that a vice. A relative of Romney confided in Allen that the multi-millionaire likes to “repair” holes in gloves with duct tape rather than throw the gloves away. And then there is Romney’s compulsive need to work out. He’s so committed to personal health that if his hotel has no gym, he’ll run through the hallways. Good thing for him that doesn’t sound weird.

Maybe my reaction to this portrait of the candidate is colored by his testiness and weak performance during his interview with Bret Baier on Tuesday, but these details are distressingly reminiscent of another candidate. They call to mind a candidate so pure of body that he would choke down a waffle for the cameras, though his preference would have been for a bowl of his standard high-fiber gruel—a man whose physical prowess was such that it drew admiration from the press.

That candidate, who went on to become President Barack Obama, has been exposed as a fraud. He may have convinced his acolytes that he runs a tight ship at the White House, where his staff is compelled to endure a “near-mandatory regimen [of] egg-white omelets and workouts with the president’s personal trainer,” but the man was—and for all we know still is—a smoker! Either he’s the unluckiest dude on earth, having gotten caught by the paparazzi time and again stuffing his face with fast food to score political points, or he shares his wife’s addiction to burgers and fries.

The bottom line is that the president of the United States doesn’t need to be Superman. I would have been perfectly content for Obama to live exclusively on milkshakes and candy bars throughout his first term if he made good on his promise to pull the country out of its financial black hole. My vote for the next president will likewise have nothing to do with his diet or affectionate anecdotes showcasing his human side.

Related Articles

• Romney not ready for prime time
• How do you solve a problem like Obama: Let the games begin
• Obama’s myth of transparency: game, match, set
• Poll: 1 in 4 Dems want someone other than Obama as their candidate
• Obama has made good on his promise

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

Sad but true, yesterday the august group of 12 Congress members tasked with doing what Congress as a whole couldn’t admitted failure. The co-chairs issued a statement reading in part:

After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline.

Despite our inability to bridge the committee’s significant differences, we end this process united in our belief that the nation’s fiscal crisis must be addressed and that we cannot leave it for the next generation to solve. [Emphasis added]

Amen to that. Here’s a thought: Why not have the leadership of both houses each appoint three Senators and three Representatives to a serve on special committee charged with making those difficult cuts. You could call it the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. Oh, wait…

In all seriousness, who couldn’t have seen this train wreck coming in August, when the Supercommittee was first formed? And who couldn’t have predicted the editorials and commentaries that would follow the failure? The Los Angeles Times editorializes:

Engaging in self-caricature, the Republicans insisted on no new taxes, a posture they modified slightly to propose $250 billion in new revenues, some offset by their other proposals, including making the Bush-era tax cuts permanent. Democrats, meanwhile, irresponsibly resisted meaningful cuts in domestic programs. Hobbled by their dogmatic opposition to taxes, the Republicans were arguably more intransigent. [Emphasis added]

The New York Times was similarly fair and even-handed in its reaction:

And, naturally, they [the GOP] rejected the proposal from supercommittee Democrats to cut at least $3 trillion from the deficit, because a third of it would have come from higher taxes on the rich. When you hear Republicans claim that Democrats refused to touch their sacred cows of spending, remember that the Democratic offer would have cut $475 billion from Medicare and Medicaid over 10 years, nearly half of which would have come directly from beneficiaries….

These plans actually tipped too far in the direction of spending cuts. By comparison, the Republican offers were risible.

Finally, for comic relief, here is Eugene Robinson:

No, the sun didn’t rise in the west this morning. No, Republicans on the congressional supercommittee didn’t offer meaningful concessions on raising new tax revenue. And no, “both sides” are not equally responsible for the failure to compromise.

As usual, the two parties began with vastly different ideas of what it means to negotiate. Democrats envisioned meeting somewhere in the middle, while Republicans anticipated not moving an inch. This isn’t just my spin, it’s a matter of public record: Before the 12-member supercommittee ever met, House Speaker John Boehner warned that it had better not agree to any new tax revenue.

The stark reality is that both sides hunkered down because neither wanted to face the certain condemnation from their base that was sure to ensue if they made the needed concessions. But the Democrats deserve special blame for introducing straw man arguments into their statements to the press during the three-plus months of failed negotiations. The fiercely partisan Democratic co-chair Patty Murray spoke early and often about the need for the rich to “share the burden” as if the wealthiest Americans were currently getting a free ride rather than picking up the tab on 38% of all tax revenues.

Related Articles

• The power of flat-out self-delusion
• Study: Americans’ incomes have fallen more during recovery than during recession
• Shared sacrifice: Cutting ObamaCare could save $2 trillion
• Obama and the meaning of shared sacrifice
• Solution to the debt crisis: Tap the nation’s “additional income” reserve
• Obama’s economic “fairness doctrine”

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

20111114KMC – Radio Podcast
20111114KMCVid – TV Podcast

*Find The Kevin McCullough Show on our newest affiliate of the month: WGCF-FM – Paducah, KY
(including the ciities of: Paducah, KY., Cape Girardeau, MO., Paris, TN., Carbondale, IL.)

ON THE KEVIN McCULLOUGH SHOW:

1. THE HEADLINE ITEMS:
Well, based on Saturday night’s debate–won by either Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, or Ron Paul depending on who you like, the polling has improved for the former speaker putting him ahead in at least one poll of both Mitt Romney and Herman Cain. Also many are crediting Rick Perry with the best idea from the debate, and showing that he’s the best sport of all the candidates. Ron Paul won in not getting that much time to filet himself. kmcradio@gmail.com

2. THE PRACTICAL DILEMMA:
So are we missing something when thinking and talking about the Penn State scandal. Several pro-family groups are making a big deal about the homosexual element to the sodomy performed on the victims in the matter. But wouldn’t it be just as insidious if it were done to girls as well? PLUS there are much bigger reasons being missed all together by those highlighting the link to homosexuality. Our culture isn’t merely on homosexual-overload, it’s on rampant-unimpeded-sex-in-your-face-all-the-time overload, as the Sasha-visits-the-kiddies issue highlights. Your replies: kmcradio@gmail.com.

3. THE GOD THOUGHT:
“As we seek first the kingdom of God, we will discover that through the good times and the bad, in days of pleasure and days of pain, through our laughter and through our tears, God is at work in us!” CONTINUE: “God Thought” on facebook!

Also able to be heard via a snappy smart phone listening app for the AFR Radio Network at that same time each night 8pm EST. Download Apple’s iTunes AFR’s app here. Android and other smart phones may download here.

2.  That Rick Perry had anything to do with the “leak” of “information” about sexual harassment complaints against Cain to Politico.

3.  That Mitt Romney was behind the “leaks” either.

4.  That the mythical ability to silence baseless innuendo, or spin it and come out smelling like a rose, or avoid it altogether, is a qualification for being president of the United States.

5.  That the left-wing mainstream media act in good faith when they retail these allegations.

6.  That media coverage of such allegations and innuendo is some form of vetted professional activity, rather than just a glorified form of slam book smears and middle-school cafeteria gossip.

7.  That it is incumbent on any of us to take the endless effluvia of the media smear machine seriously.

8.  That it is a sign of intelligence to thoughtfully consider these charges-without-evidence, rather than simply dismissing them.

9.  That the whole circus matters to our choice of president, in terms of illuminating for us the character or abilities of any of the candidates.

10.  That any of these cheap-allegation dramas is even about the candidates, rather than about us, and whether we have any judgment or discrimination when it comes to what we let the media fill our heads with.

If a competent prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich, today’s media can smear one – and then make it look like some innocent ham sandwich over there behind the counter did it.  But the media can only do this because we cooperate with them, by simply accepting every negative, damning, evil thought they suggest to us.

Keeping the barrage up is virtually cost-free for them.  They are not going to stop, no matter how conclusively it is proven that they are full of shinola.  Accepting their cues, and spending day after day discussing things on their terms, is the actual problem.  And that problem starts with us.

There is no corrective for this problem in the mechanics of politics or the media’s M.O.  Politics and the media aren’t going to change.  Period.  We have to decide what our characters and priorities will consist of.  Do we have the strength of mind to say this? – “Don’t bother me with your innuendo about Herman Cain.  I want to talk issues.  We need to cut spending, reduce regulation, and undo all of Obama’s dangerous executive orders.  We need to restore a constitutional balance of power in the federal government.  And that’s just for starters. Iran is closing in on a nuclear weapon.  China is menacing all of Asia.  European security is in jeopardy, and so is ours.  That’s what I want to talk about.  The future of the republic is at stake.”

Who cares if “they” think we’re stupid?  Are we seriously going to let this election degenerate into a suicidal snark free-for-all because someone might think we’re stupid, if we don’t bite on every worm the media dangle on the hook?

Any one of us could be in Cain’s or Perry’s position – or Bachmann’s, or Palin’s, or that of any conservative front-runner past or present.  Ronald Reagan himself wouldn’t have triumphed over this kind of media attack.  He would have looked every bit as caught off guard and flat-footed.  One thing the blogosphere does is amplify cheap, off-the-cuff opinions and send them echoing back to us in chorus, as if “everybody” now thinks Candidate X is toast and his character is in shreds.  Is that really true?  What obliges us to think so, other than the kind of fearful, triangulating approach to our personal opinions that we should have overcome by the time we got our high school diplomas?

Herman Cain hasn’t been convicted of sexual harassment, nor have charges been filed against him.  It would be public record if these things had happened.  It is not a sign of intelligence or moral discrimination for conservative voters to feast on vague allegations against our candidates, which we are told by third parties were made by persons whose names we don’t know, and which never resulted in prosecution or sanction.  As a rule for life, that’s no way to think about morality, law, society, or other people’s characters.

And Cain’s not even my preferred candidate.  But this applies to all of them.  If we wait for cheap “bad news” about other people to cease flowing, we’ll be stuck obsessing over it for all eternity.  It doesn’t have to be true or significant; it will just keep coming.  How much we are preoccupied with evil allegations is up to us.  We only think it’s the media doing this to us.  In reality, we’re doing it to ourselves.  We have the power to say no: we’re not playing any more.  Until we do that, the MSM will have us by the short hairs.

Oh, and one more thing I don’t believe:

11.  That Americans are too foolish and weak-minded to figure this out.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

*Catch the next episode at 8pm EST on radio stations across America or by way of podcast:
20111012KMC – Radio Podcast
20111012KMCVid – Video Podcast

*Find The Kevin McCullough Show on our newest affiliate of the month:
WGCF-FM – Paducah, KY
(including the ciities of: Paducah, KY., Cape Girardeau, MO., Paris, TN., Carbondale, IL.)

ON THE KEVIN McCULLOUGH SHOW:

1. THE HEADLINE ITEMS:
The “Occupy” movement steps forward the next level. In demonstrations on Tuesday going so far as to claim that violence was necessary for genuine economic help to come about. ALSO: The latest excuse for a debate was held by Bloomberg last night, yikes. The swords were out for Cain, we’ll hear from Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum. kmcradio@gmail.com

2. THE PRACTICAL DILEMMA:
A piece in the Atlanta predicts the “End of Men.” A female friend from Washington DC pointed this article out to me yesterday and today we begin a very important discussion of what the essence of this column would end up looking like. Sick of men? Think everybody else is? Your replies: kmcradio@gmail.com.

3. THE GOD THOUGHT:
“There is no second blessing or spiritual experience that can magically propel us to a state where we no longer struggle with sin. That won’t happen until we finally get to heaven. Between now and then we walk the hard road to glory.” CONTINUE: “God Thought” on facebook!

Also able to be heard via a snappy smart phone listening app for the AFR Radio Network at that same time each night 8pm EST. Download Apple’s iTunes AFR’s app here. Android and other smart phones may download here.

Christie suspended the film tax credit program in 2010 to close a budget deficit, but the 2009 season still qualified for the credit.

“I have no interest in policing the content of such projects,” Christie said in a statement. “However, as chief executive I am duty-bound to ensure that taxpayers are not footing a $420,000 bill for a project which does nothing more than perpetuate misconceptions about the State and its citizens.”

To those of you who don’t live in New Jersey, please be advised that orange-dyed overexposed (in every meaning of the word) louts are the exception, not the rule, to the Garden State’s inhabitants.

Jersey Shore is awful enough that companies pay the orange-dyed “stars” not to use their products:

The Situation doesn’t usually require a lot of motivation to lose the shirt. But Abercrombie & Fitch wants him to go one further — the company has offered to pay “Jersey Shore” cast members to stop wearing clothes carrying their brand.

The preppy teen retailer said Tuesday it would pay a “substantial payment” to Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino or any cast member who stops wearing its clothing on the popular MTV reality show because the series is “contrary to the aspirational nature of the brand.”

Coach didn’t like Snooki carrying their purse to the bar, either.

Thank you, Governor Christie for ending the $420,000 Jersey Shore tax break.

And, A&F, you can pay me to not wear your clothes any time, too.

Cross-posted at Fausta’s blog

First the good.  There was a significant little body-language incident that said more about Perry than anything he actually gave voice to.  When Newt Gingrich took the MSNBC panel to task for setting up divisive questions for the candidates, and then called on all the candidates to focus on why ObamaCare is bad rather than being drawn into attacks on each other, some of the other candidates joined the audience in applauding.

But Perry led the applause, in particular for Gingrich’s point about the candidates keeping focused and not letting internecine attacks become the story.  It was a good point, and Perry applauded it vigorously enough to attract the producer’s attention.  The camera on Perry was cued because he did what a leader does:  he enthusiastically endorsed a good point made by another – even by a competitor – because the point was worth taking onboard for the larger effort.

It’s just a second or so of video, but it was a classic gesture of executive leadership.  It seemed to come to him reflexively, from long experience of being in the central chair and not worrying about who has the good ideas, who expresses them in a timely and encouraging manner, and who gets the credit.

It was equally significant as evidence that Perry focuses on the big picture.  If you watch the other candidates, you can see the gears whirring in some of their brains, as reasons crowd in on them for taking exception to one aspect or another of Gingrich’s rebuke to the panel.  You can make a case against some of what Gingrich said, as the bloggers have done in the hours since the debate.

But Gingrich was right:  the thing that matters is that ObamaCare is disastrous, and that it needs to be repealed and replaced – and so does Obama.  Such focused clarity is rarely characteristic of Gingrich himself, but Perry recognized it immediately and endorsed it wholeheartedly.  He was right to, and his gesture made it clear that it is second nature to him to be the leader of an effective team.

Now for the “other.”  I have no objection to Perry referring to Social Security with the words “Ponzi scheme.”  But the reference needs to be formulated better.  Social Security is being run like a Ponzi scheme.  That doesn’t mean the program itself was launched with the criminal objective of a Ponzi scheme.  There are implications from the designation “Ponzi scheme” that don’t apply and cannot apply to Social Security:  e.g., that it’s a criminal enterprise and needs to be summarily shut down, that it preys with felonious intent on the unsuspecting, that it’s deliberately designed to culminate in absconded principals and an empty bank account and unrecoverable losses.

Don’t get me wrong:  I would be prepared to manage our way out of Social Security entirely.  I don’t think we need the program at all, and it certainly should not be the retirement plan of first resort for any American.

But saying that doesn’t mean I want to put a stop to Social Security the way a criminal’s career is halted by arrest and incarceration.  Perry doesn’t either.  No serious Republican candidate does.  There is no one who advocates cutting off payments to today’s seniors who depend on Social Security – which is what would be done if the federal government interrupted a genuine, privately mounted Ponzi scheme, and was deciding how to award any remaining assets.

Taking the “Ponzi scheme” reference national needs to be done in a different way.  The adjustments should be pretty simple:  change the wording to “Social Security is being run like a Ponzi scheme,” rather than saying it “is” one, and make the point that we need to reform the program gracefully.  “Ponzi scheme” leaves the valid and important impression that participants will find all the expected money gone; it’s worthwhile keeping the shorthand.  But I would urge Perry to inflect his discussions of this topic differently.  “Ponzi scheme” need not be emphasized quite so much, as if people haven’t gotten the point yet.  Outside the precincts of the MSM, the point is gotten; it’s time to assume it as understood, and build on it to address, in positive terms, the policy basis for proceeding from here.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

There was much riding on the debut of Gov. Rick Perry in the conversation of the GOP race. A race he came to dominate in less time than any other candidate on the floor.

On display would be not only the aggressive, misleading, and flat out dishonest gamesmanship of Brian Williams of NBC and John Harris of Politico, but the attempts by the other candidates to present Perry as somehow not the guy equipped to run the country.

Couple this with the heart-wrenching circumstances he faces in he and Ron Paul’s home state with wildfires that have devoured more than 1000 homes, and Rick Perry was a man tonight besieged from every angle. The heart, the mind, the friend, the foe… all gunning for him, testing him, and seeing how he would fare.

What the nation saw was a man who thought before he spoke, chose words wisely, and in whatever moment he found himself in, someone who wasn’t merely able to be conversant about the issue, but penetrate the tone, spirit, and focus of the discussion that caused everyone else on the stage to respond… to him!

This would’ve been a win for Rick Perry just on the mathematical equation of judging debates. But considering the increased odds he was up against, the smoothness with which he won, translates into massive points of confidence of those already supporting him, and for those yet decided, his plain speak common sense drew them in.

Odds were this debate could’ve set up a huge battle between Romney and Perry kicking off with Romney landing damaging blows. That picture never happened.

Romney was basically defeated for the night when the discussion turned to Romneycare. His refusal to address the issue, and to pretend to change the subject to giving all fifty states waivers to Obamacare was deflated the moment Bachmann (who touted another strong performance) hit back with “overturn” not “waivers” is the only true solution.

Huntsman–who was given an ungodly amount of time to yammer on about essentially nothing, should be relegated to the ash-heap of 2011, as more or less Cain should be as well.

Just not enough substance, just not enough focus. And with the lightest resumes on the stage both should be sitting down.

WHAT ASTOUNDS ME about this GOP field is the articulate nature that everyone besides Huntsman and to a lesser degree Paul are able to exhibit. I believe Obama, on merits would lose a debate to any of the following: Santorum, Gingrich, Bachmann, Romney, and Perry.

That’s a very deep bench with this level of communication skill. And my only hope is that Gingrich was telling the truth tonight when he proclaimed that the entire stage wants so bad to see Obama beaten, that they would all immediately go to work for the eventual winner.

Whoever the nominee is to be, He/She will NEED that kind of support from such an articulate supporting cast. At the end of the day, Perry won–he won big, and is likely to add to those huge polling leads he has gained in recent days.

But perhaps you disagree–I’d love to know your response and perhaps read it on my nationally syndicated show tomorrow. Drop me an email to weigh in.

Kevin McCullough is a nationally syndicated talk radio host, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR, and best selling author of three books. His most recent being: “No He Can’t: How Barack Obama is dismantling Hope and Change.”

The president, she said, should use his bully pulpit to

bring the gangsters in, put them around the table, and let them know that if they don’t come up with loan modifications and keep people in their homes, that they’ve worked so hard for, we’re gonna tax them out of business. [Emphasis added]

To her credit, at least she didn’t recommend breaking their legs!

One is tempted to note that Waters is currently under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for using her influence to secure $12 million in TARP funds for OneUnited Bank, which was not only a major contributor to her campaign but on whose board her husband served as director. Then again, as Waters would be the first to tell you, OneUnited, which is minority-owned, is not one of the “gangsters.”

Related Articles

• Black politicians’ anger at Tea Party should be redirected at Obama
• Congressional Black Caucus, other blacks losing “hope” in Obama
• Poll: Obama support among blacks, Hispanics slips (VIDEO)
• Maxine Waters follows Rangel’s lead, opts for trial on ethics charges

But there is a big difference between the two situations, and it’s not that today there is no Soviet Union.  The difference is the character of the American people.  I’m not even talking about things like expectations for marriage and father-mother households: I’m talking about our expectations of government and society – or, as we used to put it, man and the state.  We no longer have the character and expectations of a free people, in the way Americans once did.

Before the ‘70s, Americans had not, by and large, bought into the idea of government as an agent of transformation for society or the planet.  In 2011, the evidence is that we have.  We think of government as children think of their parents:  as a source not just of food and shelter but of permissions, of ideas, of counseling and hope and the outlines of what is possible.  As parents transform their children from puling incompetents into people ready to assume a place in society, so government is now expected to both nurture and transform.

Although many warned at the time that government was getting too big and the American character was being undermined, there was still, in the 1970s, a much greater sense of self-reliance than there is now.  In comparison with 2011, there was almost nothing you did in life – for most Americans – that was a matter of “what the government would let you do.”  Constraints and restraints imposed by government were comparatively rare.  In most cases, they were crude and laughable, like Nixon’s wage and price controls in the early 1970s, or the regulation of air travel that prevented competition and kept ticket prices high (and discouraged the less well-off from availing themselves of the airlines, thus producing the wonderfully quiet, roomy, peaceful air-travel environment remembered so nostalgically by today’s senior citizens).

People in the 1970s could tell the difference between being regulated and not being regulated.  Regulation was overt.  It made the news.  Congress shouted and carried on about it – because back then, it had to be introduced and adjusted by Congress, rather than occurring as the result of bureaucratic processes in federal agencies that no more than 1000 average citizens in the entire country could locate on a map.

In 2011, Americans have no idea the extent to which they are regulated, and how much regulation costs them.  Regulation is the “new normal.”  People who can’t imagine dismantling the EPA, or OSHA, or the CPSC or the EEOC, because they vaguely fear that a bottomless pit with dragons lurks beyond the horizon of ever-increasing regulation, are not free citizens who have the mental liberty to make real choices.  Not understanding how much they are regulated, they also have no idea that a “normal” without today’s level of regulation might just be a great normal in which to live.

In the 1970s, Americans were still accustomed to greater freedom of action, and fought each new clamp on it strenuously.  In the 2010s, people don’t realize that the regulatory environment they regard as normal is what is narrowing their future by the day – and they have been trained to fear the very idea of life without incessant regulation.  They have been taught that the alternative to each and every form of regulation is destruction, despair, ruin, chaos, poverty, ignorance, injustice, disease, death, and the triumph of mean-hearted rich people.  As far as they know, there are two options, and only two: regulation, or an endless series of catastrophes.  There is no such condition as a satisfactory, unregulated outcome.  The unregulated life, to update Socrates, is not worth living.

A lot of Americans in 2011 would not elect Reagan, as their forebears did in 1980, because they don’t have the capacity to appreciate the level of genuine freedom voters wanted to return to when they put Reagan in office.  The truth is that when government has become – with our blessing – big enough to threaten Americans with federal prosecution if they resell a drop-side crib at a garage sale,* Americans have yielded up their important liberties, and are no longer eligible to exercise them.

I think Rick Perry looks like a pretty good guy.  If he’s the GOP candidate, I’ll vote for him.  But it’s important to understand that he’s more of a George W. Bush kind of good guy than a Ronald Reagan-type good guy.  He’s for business, for the middle class, for keeping taxes low and letting the people prosper.  But he doesn’t have a visceral antipathy to regulation and the enlargement of the discretionary scope of government.

It may be no accident that he and Bush have both been governor of Texas:  Texas, like much of “Red” America, has gotten to 2011 without having the reckoning with regulation that other states are having.  With its lighter regulatory load, Texas has continued to outgrow its regulatory environment, as California and New York have not.  Texas has been flying straight and level, rather than facing a painful stall-out – and what that means is that Texas’ leading politicians have not had to do the kind of serious rethinking of the trajectory of government that many among Tea Partiers and other right-wingers believe we need.

Don’t mistake me:  I’m a big fan of Texas.  The Blue states (and most of the Red ones, for that matter) should be so lucky.  But Texas is an example of the benefits of not letting things get too bad.  The important factor in Texas, moreover, is Texans.   What much of the country needs, however – not being populated by Texans – is a way back from things that have already gotten too bad.  It needs reversals more serious and fundamental than the gentle, marginal corrections to government that succeed with a more self-reliant citizenry.

The Reagan-era changes, important as they were, have been dwarfed by an unfettered explosion of government since he left office; what’s needed now is a reversal of the trajectory of government even more significant than that of Reagan’s legacy.  I’m not sure enough Americans are ready for that.  Rick Perry may, however, be just the man to hold the line against a worsening of our federal government’s incontinent profile, while the people get themselves sorted out.

He would unquestionably be better than Obama – and one thing I particularly like about him is that he seems to appreciate the scope of what he’s proposing to get into.  The next president’s term is going to be ugly; it’s unlikely to redound to the credit of anyone’s brilliant scheme of government-tweaking and economy-boosting.  Perry seems to have his head screwed on straight in the sense of not believing in more than government can actually do.  My main quibble would be that he hasn’t internalized the inherent danger to liberty posed by regulatory prophylaxis.

He may, with time, shift toward a more transformational political concept than he appears to have now.  Until a critical mass of the people does, the sentiments of individual politicians will have limited impact.  Perry as he is may not be the “Ronald Reagan” America needs today – but he may be as much of one as we are ready for.

* Actual advice from “Mom Houston,” a Houston Chronicle blog:

I want to throw out my old [drop-side] crib but am worried somebody may take it. What should I do?

Take your old crib apart and throw it out in pieces — one side one week, one side another week — so that nobody can rebuild it from the parts left on the curb or in the trash bin.

 

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

In short, you behave the way Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters has in recent days. Following her team’s drubbing in the budget debate, the congresswoman has been looking for someone to vent her spleen on. Ultimately, she selected the Tea Party:

We have to stand up and fight. It’s fight time…. I’m not afraid of anybody. This is a tough game. You can’t be intimidated. You can’t be frightened. And as far as I’m concerned, the Tea Party can go straight to hell.

Damning a portion of the electorate is decidedly behavior unbecoming a member of Congress, but Waters’ job is secure. In 2010 she was elected to her eleventh term with almost 80 percent of the vote in California’s 35th congressional district, this despite an ongoing investigation by the House Ethics Committee into campaign malfeasance. The district’s makeup is 81 percent minority.

Since Waters’ tantrum, the battle cry has been echoed by other members of the Congressional Black Caucus as well as race huckster Jesse Jackson. Rep. Frederica Wilson accused the Tea Party of holding Congress hostage (an original thought) and claimed the group has “one goal in mind, and that’s to make President Obama a one-term president.”Jackson said the Tea Party should be called “the Fort Sumter Tea Party that Sought to Maintain States’ Rights and Slavery.” (Granted, it comes tripping off the tongue, but you have to wonder whether it’s likely to catch on.)

Psychologists have a name for what Waters and her pals are experiencing: impotent rage. It’s a condition that, unchecked, can lead to rash behavior. The solution to uncorking the welled up anger is to find a constructive release for it—a target deserving of contempt.

Waters seemed on the right track initially, when she told a black audience in Detroit during the president’s “listening” bus tour:

The Congressional Black Caucus loves the president….  We’re supportive of the president, but we’re getting tired, y’all. We’re getting tired…. [O]ur people are hurting. The unemployment is unconscionable. We don’t know what the strategy is. We don’t know why on this trip that he’s in the United States now, he’s not in any black community. We don’t know that.

I believe I do know why the president skipped the black community. It is because he takes their votes for granted—probably with good reason. He received 96 percent of the black vote in 2008. His approval rating among blacks is currently at 88 percent. Why should he waste time canvassing for votes he is almost certain to win when he faces an uphill battle in the swing states this time around?

The situation creates a catch-22 for Waters and other black politicians. They can continue to rail out helplessly at forces they have no control over. Or they can accept the bitter reality that the messiah they thought they were electing is either mythical or yet to come. Is it possible that the calls to primary Obama will come from, of all places, the black community? It would certainly represent a healthy first step toward a post-racial America.

Related Articles

• John Kerry: Media should not give equal time to Tea Party
• Tea Party terrorists and the left’s civility pledge
• Congressional Black Caucus, other blacks losing “hope” in Obama
• Poll: Obama support among blacks, Hispanics slips (VIDEO)
• When Maxine Waters criticizes the Tea Party, she may as well be standing in front of a mirror

The bruised egos of Washingtonians, and especially its political class, is another story, at least for those too thin-skinned to take some good-natured ribbing. Much of the comedic jabs were broadcast via Twitter. Here are several (h/t Washington Examiner):

@calebhowe: Breaking: Obama administration points out they ‘inherited’ fault lines from previous administrations.

@comradescott: Evidently the quake occurred on a little known fault line outside of DC called ‘Bush’s Fault.’

@charliespiering: I won’t stop shaking until Obama makes a speech telling me that everything is ok and that he has a plan.

@Ben_Howe: As all of DC leaves work at the same time, the United States experiences a brief economic recovery.

@TPCarney: Krugman says it wasn’t big enough.

@MaizeBlueNation: Fox News claims the Washington monument is leaning to the right, MSNBC claims it’s leaning to the left. More news at 11.

@politicoroger POLITICO had the earthquake story yesterday.

Charles Babbington of Associated Press offers a few more, minus attributions.

S&P has downgraded earthquake to a 2.0.

Rick Perry denies earthquake.

Michele Bachmann vows to bring all U.S. earthquakes down to a 2.9 magnitude.

There was just a 5.9 earthquake in Washington. Obama wanted it to be 3.4, but the Republicans wanted 5.9, so he compromised.

Not all of the barbs came from Twitter. The Wall Street Journal, noting that the quake reached Martha’s Vineyard, where President Obama was in the process of putting, wondered if “the temblor caused his ball to fall from the lip into the cup and help him win the hole, a la ‘Caddyshack.’”

Considering the kind of luck the president has been having lately, I’d be inclined to doubt it.

Related Articles

• Breaking: Earthquake in Virginia reaches as far as NYC and yours truly
• Remember when Obama was too cool to joke about?
• What if the president told a joke and nobody laughed?
• Barack Obama: “funniest person alive”

Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

West’s latest confusing maneuver is quoting General Anthony McAuliffe’s storied response to the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge.  CAIR demanded that West cut off ties with Brigitte Gabriel and Pam Geller.  West sent a letter with the following response (image of letter reproduced at links below):

Dear Mr. Hamze and Mr. Shibly,

I am writing to you with regard your recent letter:

“NUTS!”

                                                Steadfast and loyal,

                                                //S//

                                                Allen B. West

                                                Member of Congress

The West communication is actually less entertaining than the earnest – not to say prissy – explanations of it being circulated at left-wing websites.  (See here and here, for example.)

Ann Althouse puts it this way: 

1-word response not understood by left-wing blog.

And they even see the historical reference. They just can’t put it together.

I don’t think I’d say they don’t understand it.  They’re just bumfoozled by it.  If you’re looking for dueling cases of epistemic closure, we may have one right here.  The right sees the West response, and – because its allusion is so recognizable and pithy – thinks it’s worth a cheer.  The left sees it, thinks first of all that it requires explication, and then proceeds to look squinty-eyed at it.  (It’s not as if the event itself “belongs” to either political faction.  It’s merely a data point from the lore of American tribal consciousness.  The difference is in the perspectives on it.)

I suspect most on the right feel the best homage to West’s statement is brevity in response to it.  As for the reaction from the left, it was captured in the last 10 seconds of this clip from the 1965 movie Battle of the Bulge.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

My colleague Karl writes today about the retirement from the GOP horse race of Tim Pawlenty, and the settling of the race into a “Romney vs. Not Romney” dynamic.  Pawlenty didn’t succeed in being crowned Not Romney in the Iowa straw poll yesterday, but how secure is the tiara on Michelle Bachmann’s head?  Is Rick Perry destined to step into a phone booth and turn into Not Romney?  What will the voters’ judgments be in the bellwether states of South Carolina and Florida?

The whole question is interesting, and begs in turn the question whether the 2012 campaign will be the clear-the-decks, all-bets-off political turning point that many are hoping for.  I think, to begin with, that a lot of people would find the “Not Romney” category an incomplete formulation.  It’s not so much “Not Romney” as “the category voters are looking for that Romney doesn’t fit into.”  Which, granted, has no future as a bumper sticker – but the point is that the thinking of non-Romney voters isn’t “anyone but Romney,” it’s “where’s the candidate who reflects what I want and believe in?”

Rick Perry may fill that bill for an electorally useful number of voters.  I don’t think he’ll have much trouble with Romney in South Carolina, and I’d call it even-Steven for the two candidates in Florida.  There are a lot of retired Northeasterners there to whom Romney appeals, but Perry can expect to do well with Florida’s Cuban-American Republicans, small business owners, and military.  Jeb Bush’s and Marco Rubio’s endorsements will carry weight.  I think I know which way Rubio will go, but I’m not sure what Bush will do.

I’m also not sure Florida will be a make-or-break state.  Assuming its primary is in January (as proposed), the early vote and the likelihood of a close split will mitigate the impact of a loss for either Romney or Perry.  Other states are likely to be more significant tests of the dynamic Karl outlines; the primary schedule has Missouri probably voting in early February, and the very interesting states of Illinois, Tennessee, and Virginia voting in March, along with the Colorado precinct caucuses.  Those states may well be a better test of the electorate’s mood.  Will Romney win where we would expect him to?

The campaign may well come down to the convention vote, as it did in 1976.  It’s very possible Romney and Perry will both have good reason to consider themselves “still alive” when Pennsylvania votes in April, and Indiana and Ohio in May.  (I’m using the proposed primary schedule; not all dates may come off as currently envisioned by the states.)  If Bachmann stays in the race, racking up strong third-place finishes, the likelihood of the decision being delayed to the convention goes up.

It’s tempting to say that the question in 2012 is whether there will be a single Republican brand the voters will line up behind.  I think a more basic question is whether we have reached a tipping point in the popular sentiment that things not only have got to change, but that they already have.  We saw some evidence of that in the primary nod to Christine O’Donnell in Delaware last year, as well as in Florida’s revolt against the national GOP establishment in picking Marco Rubio over Charlie Crist, Nevada’s choice of Sharron Angle to face off against Harry Reid, etc.  There are multiple factors at work in the ongoing saga of Wisconsin, but one of them is the major shift in voter sentiment:  voters are willing to endure civil unrest, and the unhappiness of taxpayer-dependent constituencies, and continue to endorse the political leaders who are standing against those eruptions and doing what the voters asked them to do.

Have we reached the tipping point?  Are voters ready to buck conventional expectations and do things differently?  If they aren’t, and they hand the nomination to Romney, even a GOP win in 2012 will be taken as evidence that politics as usual is what people really want.  Opinions will differ on whether endorsing Rick Perry instead is a signal that voters seek real change.  It’s possible that he will function as a sort of operational pause for GOP voters and the republic:  conservative enough that he’ll get a lot of Bachmann and Palin supporters, but with a standard political resume of reassuring length and girth.  A Perry candidacy could well serve to postpone the kind of transformative reckoning the GOP had between 1976 and 1980.

The coming primary season is likely to be the most significant, informative one the GOP has had in decades.  We will know some things at the end of it that we don’t know today.  The biggest thing, I think, will be whether voters are still hoping to identify a standard-bearer for the “Reagan consensus,” or whether they see a need to rewrite the consensus.  If it’s the latter, my money is on an updated “Coolidge consensus”:  something starker, simpler, and purer than the Reagan consensus.

Are we ready for that consensus to emerge yet?  That is the question.  We’re closer than we were four years ago.  Because words matter, I don’t even want to hazard a guess about 2012.  But I do think there will be a sign one way or the other: whether Sarah Palin gets into the race, and what happens if she does.

J.E. Dyer’s articles have appeared at The Green Room, Commentary’s “contentions,” Patheos, The Weekly Standard online, and her own blog, The Optimistic Conservative.

CNNMoney is reporting that one out of every three White House staffers makes in excess of $100,000 dollars. And perhaps that wouldn’t be terrible if there were only 3, 9, 12, even 90 employees total. But there are 454.

And as the CNNMoney story points out, the list leans to the bigger payday. Only 3 WH staffers are volunteering their time – receiving no pay for the work they perform. (No doubt outside revenue allows them to donate their time to the nation’s cause.) But 21 staffers are raking in $172,000. Including newcomers Jay Carney and Bill Daley.

Supporters of the White House may say that as a contemporary CEO, the President’s salary of $400,000 and his executive team should receive competitive pay.

Yet one of the problems there is that in the world of real business, if anyone had produced the backwards “progress” that his team has, they would be getting pink slips, and taking hair cuts on options until they got the issues “turned around.”

There won’t be a huge outcry from the left on this, which is sad given that they like to play the class warfare game so often. But when you look at the average salary in the White House against the media salary for the American worker–you uncover one more “we’re better than you” scenario. And this where the aura of “us all being in this thing together” is growing thin and shrill for the one in ten workers looking for work who can’t find it, and the one in five American families who are working as hard as they can, but can not cover their most basic living expenses.

Parting question: The fact that CNNMoney is the one reporting on this disparity means “what” in terms of the middle left base that tends to put their trust in the Turner News property that supported Obama blindly through 2008?

I’m Kevin McCullough and that’s how I “Binge Think.”
And sometimes I write things to make you think too…

Share

Where can you find the radio station nearest you to hear Baldwin/McCullough? Simple enough… Click here! Where can you go to see it on television? Check your local listings, or on-screen guide. The fun is just kicking off for our television simulcast this week number 1 of the new Baldwin/McCullough MegaCast:

ON THE BALDWIN/McCULLOUGH MegaCast:
1. Dominique Strauss-Kahn may have caught a huge break in the case against him. Though ironically with all the evidence that has come out against his accuser this week, they still have not dropped the charges as of yet. But Stephen Baldwin wants to know which is worse being judged by a trial overseen by the American press, or living the kind of double standard life that makes you suspect to treatment exactly as the former IMF president is now facing? Your calls: 877.572.8446.

2. When XtreMEDIA this week produced the newest promotional spot for the best-selling “No He Can’t: How Barack Obama is dismantling Hope and Change” it was met with strong criticism by some online. People of faith were saying, “Praying for your leaders is what we should be doing.” So Kevin McCullough wants to know from those who do criticize his new book on such grounds, is it even fair to point out a person’s record? 877.572.8446!

BONUS: Why KMC blames Breitbart for the leak of Weiner’s X-Rated Revelation.

Baldwin/McCullough Resources:

KMC’s BRAND NEW BOOK is now available:

The Kind of Man Every Man Should Be .
MuscleHead Revolution: Overturning Liberalism with Commonsense Thinking .
The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips
The Unusual Suspect: My Calling to the new Hardcore Movement of Faith .

Included in the charges were two counts of heavy focusing, four counts of failure to recognize, one count of felony myth-perpetuating, and a misdemeanor count of weighing in.

The delegates convicted Duncan on all counts, and approved the measure.

Later on, NBI 8 came up for debate. It sought a middle ground among factions within the convention hall arguing for and against approving the NEA board of directors’ early endorsement of President Obama for re-election in 2012.

The delegates will vote on the endorsement by secret ballot on the 4th. The endorsement requires 58% of the vote to pass.

The item proposed a mail-in ballot from delegates next January. It was defeated, but not until there was some debate over the early endorsement.

A little background is necessary. It was in NEA’s mind back in 2007 to endorse a presidential candidate a year before the election, and not wait until July of election year, when traditionally the nominations have been all but wrapped up.

But NEA’s timing was bad. It sought to speed up its endorsement process during the one election cycle when two candidates – Obama and Hillary Clinton – split the Democratic Party right down the middle.

Unable to choose between the two, the union hemmed and hawed and stalled until Obama had clinched the nomination, then endorsed him. Of course, they fully supported Obama in the general election, but I don’t know of a single political analyst who has claimed that NEA was uniquely instrumental in the Obama victory.

Fast forward to today, when the stars seem to finally align for NEA. They have a Democratic incumbent president with no primary challenger, and a host of Republicans they believe will send them back to the day when Pleistocene Man had to teach his children to hunt and fish without the benefit of a state pension.

Except many delegates are not thrilled with Obama and his Secretary of Education. Oh, they’re pretty happy about the money he’s disbursed to save their jobs, but he’s too pally with the education reform wing of the Democratic Party. So they’re trying to come up with a compromise between kissing his rear and telling him to go to hell.

Some of them think they’ve hit upon the solution: getting rid of Duncan. Duncan’s scalp is to be the price of an early endorsement.

But if they think that’s going to happen, they’ve misread Obama, and not for the first time. Here’s something I wrote after last year’s convention:

So here we are, not quite at the stage of open warfare between NEA and the White House, but headed down that road. Neither side shows an inclination to back down. In Congress and in statehouses, the clarity of its Professor Wagstaff stance will benefit the union. Obama and the Democrats will need NEA activism in what promises to be a challenging election year.

But when it comes to public and media relations, NEA’s entrenchment is disastrous. If the union rails against an Obama administration, it signals that it can’t work with anyone short of a hand puppet. An “us against the world” battle cry works wonders for union activism, but it’s problematic because “the world” has a lot more votes.

The teachers’ unions don’t like to be attacked, but what they are really worried about is being ignored. If we ever reach that point, then we’ll know the political climate has truly changed.

Tomorrow, Vice President Biden is scheduled to appear before the delegates. Whatever he says, it won’t reassure the delegates about the general direction of the Obama administration.

Will Obama effectively ignore NEA? Will he win anyway? And if he does, what then would his second term bring to public education? It’s hard to paint a happy picture for the union in national politics under these circumstances.

This isn’t really a surprise is it?

Well, maybe Harvard doing a study that came to some relevantly accurate conclusions is a surprise. But the outcome of the study itself?

And when you think about it, exactly why does it happen?

Very simply put. It’s all about the freedom, money, and reliance…

If what America stands for on “Independence Day” is being independent of other power’s oppression, tyranny, and control of the lives of the individual then July 4th is about the most Republican or Free Market holiday ever to come along.

Democrats on my show this morning took great exception to me implying that Democrats don’t wrap themselves in the flag (or show other forms of patriotism) because they don’t really like the ideals of the original concepts of America’s founders. If the progressives that are led by President Barack Obama are any indication, then what he sees America as is far different than a rebel republic throwing off dependency.

In Obama’s world – it’s more like a great big hug of uber-Government wet kisses. I detail much of this in my new book: “No He Can’t: How Barack Obama is dismantling Hope and Change.”

In Obama’s world – the best America can be, is apologized for, overseas, for months on end, as he began his term. (Is that patriotic?)

Is it a sign of “love for one’s country” to far more often than not see the worst in her?

July 4th parades – of which I’ve normally missed most of my 40-something years on this planet – are filled with red, white and blue, fire trucks, first responders (which here in the NYC can be very moving).

They also include that one moment, where a flat bed truck will be carrying several men (fewer each year) who are aged, some unable to stand who charged Normandy, survived Guadal Canal, or chased Nazi’s out of France.

When that truck appears all the pomp turns into cheers of respect, long loud seasons of applause, and usually with me nary a dry eye.

Then behind them are the Korean, Vietnam, Gulf War and War on Terror vets that fall in, usually walking behind the vehicle carrying the WWII’ers.

Never has any nation on earth spent more resources to bring freedom to more people than all of the rest of the world’s historic militaries combined.

If kids going to July 4th parades tend to come away from them resonating with more original ideas of the founders, if they walk away with a deeper appreciation of the sacrifice it has required to keep us free, and those ideas, and that appreciation are by extension more championed by Republicans, then the study got it dead on.

I wonder if the fact that this study was produced by Harvard would have any impact on the President’s willingness to lend any credence to it?

Heh… who am I kidding, whoops… almost forgot – time to go pick up my welfare check.

I’m Kevin McCullough and that’s how I “Binge Think”
Peddler of Compassion: “Cares Project 2011″
Author: No He Can’t

Stephen and Kevin CARE about your health!

As I was beginning to write my new best-selling book, “No He Can’t: How Barack Obama is dismantling Hope and Change” my heart grew increasingly sad. As I watched the entire health care debate in 2009, the tea-party revolt and the repeal push in 2010, and the reality of where we are now–I grew even MORE sad.

And this is why…

In all of the discussion about repeal, replace, Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, it just felt like the voice of common sense had completely died.

In my book I advocate a serious engagement by the reader into the debate of the day and the “rolling up of the sleeves” to take the process of finding solutions to problems into their own hands and to begin to leverage their abilities of thoughts, behavior, and impact to implement solutions that they find distasteful in the public arena.

It was over a year ago that Stephen and I founded XtremeCharity and through it we have been able to raise awareness and dollars for things like feeding those who were hungry, housing those who are homeless, and getting other resources to people in need.

But we didn’t have any solutions for the challenges of how people were forced to deal with their own health care. The maintenance of costs associated with staying well, or getting well, much less access to doctors that were in the least bit reasonable.

Our frustrations led us on a mission to uncover methods that could be discovered, put into place, and begin to genuinely change the look and process of taking control of one’s health. That mission culminated this morning with the announcement on national television and radio of “The Cares Project 2011.”

Combining free market principles with former top minds in the health care industry, and formulating innovative approaches with health maintenance and control of costs we are significantly reducing the expense of the process, increasing the access to medical resources, and exposing the corruption of outdated systems all at the same time.

Let me give you an example.

Even if you HAVE health insurance drug coverage, even government assistance for drug coverage, did you know that the drug manufacturers, in conjunction with pharmacies, have worked together with lawmakers to rig the prescription drug game? Even if you have a co-pay on your drug benefit–you are likely getting cheated. Here’s how:

Pharmacies are legally allowed to charge you the maximum co-pay on your policy every time you go for drugs. $25, $30, $45 – whatever your co-pay is they are legally allowed (and will) charge you that amount at almost every possible chance. Yet with the emergence of generics and the mass quantities drugs are produced at today some prescriptions will not cost the pharmacy more than $6-$12 to fill.

Well if you have a $45 co-pay and the drug is $6 – the pharmacy is allowed to pocket $39.

So step one of the CaresProject 2011 we wanted to immediately bring down the cost of your out-of-pocket cash, and with the help of a tremendous consortium of talent we have created the CaresCard. AND WE MADE IT AVAILABLE FOR FREE!

When you click and create one, take it with you to your pharmacy. It is honored at 60,000 pharmacies across the nation. There are only 62,000 or so pharmacies (not counting the 3,000 operated in prisons.)

No matter what type of feedback they give you, (positive, inquisitive, or negative) you instruct them to enter the CaresCard2011 into your prescription file into their system. The card, once entered, will automatically provide a trip wire so that if your drug is LESS than your co-pay you will never be charged the higher cost. And if you have no insurance at all it will also automatically discount generics as much as 55% and name brand drugs as much as 15-23%.

Bottom line is, you will IMMEDIATELY begin to save on every prescription you fill. And you IMMEDIATELY begin to put more money directly back into your own pocket. THIS is free market innovation, over turning the apple cart of Big Pharm, Big Government, and Big Brother.

Tomorrow on the show I will roll out the 2nd part of the CaresProject2011 and it will include a feature that will give you access to a U.S. Board Certified American doctor 24 hours a day, 365 days a year — UNLIMITED — for the entire year, for less than the cost of a single office visit.

But for now, please accept our CaresCard2011 as a personal gift from XtremeCharity and let a little hope fill your heart, that no matter how tough these times get, it will be our innovation, our determination to solve the problem, and our incredible charity towards one another as Americans that will ultimately solve the problem.

I’m Kevin McCullough, and that’s how I “Binge Think!”
I’ve been called a “MuscleHead”
And many say I’m full of “Hot Air”

Is Ohio becoming the most pro-life state in the union?

According to this report it seems darned certain to be trying. Reuters reports that the ban goes into place once a fetal heartbeat is detectable.

Fetal heartbeats have been detected as early as five weeks into a pregnancy, though most are consistently screened for at six weeks. In essence this ban eliminates any partial birth abortions, and of course that Satanic practice that President Obama voted in favor of FOUR TIMES in his home state called “Born Alive Abortions.” (In essence infanticide caused by neglect. You know babies dying in soiled utility closets and all…)

Compare the pro-life environment (all stemming from Ohio’s legislature actions) as opposed to the Planned Parenthood issues of Indiana and it might just be the new mid-west capital and champion for the lives of unborn children.

Critics point out that the Ohio legislation doesn’t include exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother.

And why should they?

Is it the child’s fault that he/she was created out of such horrific circumstances?

The bottom line is always about the HUMANNESS of the child, which always seem to somehow go unnoticed. We’re pretty good at understanding or stressing the “rights of the mother.”

And that always leaves me scratching my head wondering, who does protect the most innocent and vulnerable amongst us?

And as a conservative it pains me to admit that in this instance, it appears to be, the government… in the state of Ohio at least.

I’m Kevin McCullough, and that’s how I “Binge Think.”

I think it would make no sense for her to run. I think her chances of winning the nomination are small. The chances of winning the general election are probably nil. I think, for the same reasons you articulated, 60 percent negatives. That’s almost impossible to overcome. And it isn’t as if that is forever. Hillary Clinton had very high negatives at many points in her career. But over time, they tend to soften.

…The problem with her, I think, is that she is not schooled. I don’t mean she didn’t go to the right schools… But when it comes to policies, she’s had two and a half years to school herself, and she hasn’t. And that’s a problem. You want a president who will be able to not have to learn on the job. We’ve already had that… …with President Obama and with others… It’s the lack of effort to school herself and the lack of insight to see that she needs it…

…I think if you’re going to master policy, especially world affairs, you’ve got to know history. As you said, you have to know how things evolved, and she is weak on that. It’s not as if she can’t learn. The fact is it doesn’t appear as if she wants to sort of sit down, spend some months schooling herself, as many people have done in preparing for the presidency. If you’re a governor of any state, you face a narrow range of issues, and you don’t have to deal with the world. It’s incumbent on you to actually learn about it.

So, just to recap, Sarah Palin can’t win against Barack Obama because she has high negatives, she hasn’t “school[ed] herself”, and she’s weak on history. But an incompetent community agitator with no executive experience, no private sector experience and who is an acolyte of Alinsky is qualified because he has a beautiful, cultured speaking voice.

George Will‘s substantive reasons that Sarah Palin can’t win in 2012:

The independent voters have made up their minds about her, and it is a negative judgment they’ve made… After the 2008 campaign she had two things she had to do: she had to go home to Alaska and study, and she had to govern Alaska well. Instead she quit halfway through her first term and shows up in the audience of ‘Dancing with the Stars’ and other distinctly non-presidential venues…

Just to recap: independent voters have a negative opinion of Palin. And the fact that Democrat operatives had filed 18 frivolous lawsuits — all later dismissed — against her (source: Associated Press), which were bankrupting her family, had nothing at all to do with it. That, plus appearing in the audience of Dancing with the Stars, disqualifies her.

Is this really what passes for informed commentary inside the Beltway?

Remember: Krauthammer worked for Walter-Freaking-Mondale in 1980. George Will endorsed Howard Baker in 1980. Both of these guys completely missed the Reagan revolution.

Krauthammer and Will are certainly smart dudes, but their political instincts appear to be for s***.

Palin can win. Bachmann can win. Cain can win. Ryan can win. Santorum can win. Obama is a sitting duck if confronted with a true, articulate Constitutional conservative.

He’s a walking, talking disaster as President. And everyone knows it.

By the way, I’ve been out of town for a while. How are those Stimulus, HAMP, Cash-for-Clunkers, Weatherization, Green Jobs, Obamacare, “Banking Reform”, drilling moratorium, First-Time Home-Buyer Credit, auto company takeovers and QE2 programs working out?

 
Hat tips: Mark Levin and Gateway Pundit.
Cross-posted at: Doug Ross @ Journal.