Fighting to Preserve Liberty in America
Photo by roberthufstutter
One of the knocks on Herman Cain is that he has never held political office and therefore he doesn’t have the necessary experience. I, for one, would like to see a lot more people who have met a payroll go into government, than be governed by those who have never done anything other than live off of a government paycheck. They have no concept of the real world, but love to write the rules the real world must live by.
This is a story you are not likely to hear about from the mainstream media. As previously reported on this site the Obama administration, led by Hillary Clinton, came down hard on the sovereign country of Honduras for upholding their constitution and fighting against a Chavez style, “leader for life” power grab by their president Manuel Zelaya.
Andrew Breitbart is out with a new book Righteous Indignation and he took some time out of his busy schedule to talk with me about the book. The interview runs about 25 minutes.
Here is the video about unions teaching union thuggery that Andrew Breitbart mentions was posted on Brietbart.tv at around the 12:50 mark in the interview.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckWDQbvkjE0&feature=player_embedded
The news reports called it a coup. President Obama called it illegal. Liberty’s Lifeline followed this story with several posts defending the action of the Honduran’s to enforce their laws. The one position we disagreed on was exiling President Zalaya rather than dealing with him within Honduras. Part of the disclosure of WikiLeaks sheds some light on the issue.
As we approach the mid-point of his term we, once again, hear President Obama with another scheme to create jobs. This time he really, really means it. For a mere $50 billion we can build roads, rails and runways and we can create an “infrastructure bank” to boot. I guess the government wants to get into the banking business now that they have swallowed up two thirds of the domestic auto companies and passed a law to take over health care. But, hey, who are you calling a socialist?
The infrastructure bank has supporters: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ed Rendell the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania and Michal Bloomberg the Democratic, Republican, Independent mayor of New York, but they want it to support more projects such as water and clean energy projects. But here’s the really good news, according to the New York Times “They say such a bank would spur innovation by allowing a panel of experts to approve projects on merit, rather than having lawmakers simply steer transportation money back home.” We get a brand new panel of experts to tell us morons what is good for us!
How about this idea, get the Federal government out of the roads, rails and runways business. Unless the road is part of the Interstate highway system, and that means interstate, the feds should stay away from it. If a road within a city needs maintenance, that city and its citizens should pay for it, not taxpayers elsewhere in the country. That’s how the whole process got screwed up. You build my road, I’ll build your road and nobody will know who pays for what, until we find out we are $13 trillion in debt.
One of the good ideas Jimmy Carter had was to deregulate the airlines. Airlines became competitive and prices came down. The problem is that air travel consists of three components: the airlines, the airports and air traffic control. Complete the process, deregulate the airports and air traffic control. If you do that, airports can charge different prices for takeoff and landing slots. No more will we see thirty-two flights all scheduled to take off at 7:30 AM from one airport. Private investors would also have an incentive to build a state of the art air traffic control system.
By the way, what happened to all those “shovel ready” projects from the first stimulus plan? Did we actually finish building all the turtle crossings that this country needs?
On another front, Obama continues to tinker with the mortgage market rather than getting out of the way, letting housing prices find their bottom and then going from there. George Mason economist Anthony B. Sanders said in the New York Times, ““Housing needs to go back to reasonable levels. If we keep trying to stimulate the market, that’s the definition of insanity.” Even Democrats are piling on:
“The administration made a bet that a rising economy would solve the housing problem and now they are out of chips,” said Howard Glaser, a former Clinton administration housing official with close ties to policy makers in the administration. “They are deeply worried and don’t really know what to do.”
Who would have thought that a president and vice president with no executive experience prior to taking office would not know what to do once they got there? After all everyone knew that Obama was a really nice guy with an even temperament, what went wrong? Now we hear that Fannie Mae wants to back mortgages with nothing down. But not to worry, this time they are actually going to require the lenders to check to make sure the borrower has income. I feel better already.
Since this administration seems to like experts how about listening to these experts:
“We have had enough artificial support and need to let the free market do its thing,” said the housing analyst Ivy Zelman.
Michael L. Moskowitz, president of Equity Now, a direct mortgage lender that operates in New York and seven other states, also advocates letting the market fall. “Prices are still artificially high,” he said. “The government is discriminating against the renters who are able to buy at $200,000 but can’t at $250,000.”
It’s time for President Obama and his administration to get his boot off of the neck of the economy. Ours is the strongest most resilient economy in the world, if you set it free. All of the tinkering and the anti-business threats have pushed employers to the sidelines. The uncertainty over the economy has led businesses to take a wait and see attitude.
The rhetoric the Democrats have been trying to muster to save their skins is that “eight years of failed policies,” yada, yada, yada. The reality is that this recession started one year after Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid took over Congress. This recession started in the last year of the Bush administration, not the first seven. This recession has lasted nearly twice as long and counting under Obama than it did under Bush, and it shows no sign of changing anytime soon. A recent poll in Ohio by Public Policy Polling asked respondents who they would prefer to see in the White House right now and the results were George W. Bush 50%, Barack Obama 42%; what does that tell you?
So, Mr. Obama, keeps your hands were we can see them and slowly step away from the economy.
When 300,000-500,000 of your closest friends, depending on who is doing the estimating, show up for a rally on the Washington Mall you would think it was somewhat newsworthy, no? Of course it is, that’s why the New York Times published the story on page fifteen. If you were walking by a newsstand and glanced at the front page, you wouldn’t have know that a half million of your fellow citizens got together with Glenn Beck to restore honor in America. The front page would entice you with:
I guess our friends at the times couldn’t find any fabricated stories of someone shouting the “N-word” at Dr. Martin Luther King’s niece Alveda King, who was one of the featured speakers, to elevate the story to the front page. Perhaps it would have been too embarrassing to mention on the front page that Al Sharpton’s counter-demonstration where “several hundred people packed a football field at Paul Laurance Dunbar High School to stage a rally commemorating Dr. King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.” Yesterday, you would have thought both rallies were the same size with crowd estimates of several thousand for each. Perhaps this shows the true value of racial politics today. America is tired of the race baiting and the false charges. President Obama was elected with hope and change to become the post-racial leader of the country. It appears the country has moved on without his leadership.
In another piece in the Times two Progressive women pine for a “Palin of Our Own”, to win the hearts and minds of America. The problem is America doesn’t want to listen to Janeane Garofalo or Joy Behar sneeringly spouting off about Sarah Palin. As far as any women Progressive politicians, who is there other than Hillary Clinton and we’ve seen that act and passed on it.
In another piece titled “Party Down”, Marc Ambinder tells us about the anti-incumbent mood, “Unlike parties, which often recruit candidates who would appeal to the average voter in a general election, these activists care only about nominating the person who accurately represents their own views and frustrations.” Appeal to the average voter? The problem with the Republican Party in the past is that they have been listening to the main stream media reports about who the “average voter” is. So they have elected so called “moderates” who get their clocks cleaned by real Progressives in the election. The left snickered in their sleeves while growing the government into the bloated, ineffective, couch potato that it is. It alarms those on the left that the Tea Party movement has changed all this and tone deaf incumbents are getting tossed left and right. They have unmasked the average voter to be conservative and by measuring candidates against a conservative yardstick, they have struck a chord with the voters who have long felt ignored and disenfranchised. Now those voters are energized and can’t wait to get to the polls. Reason for panic on the left, indeed.
In today’s New York Times there is a story about Rick Lazio latching on to the Ground Zero mosque issue as his new campaign theme. The first television ads I have seen regarding his run for governor are about this issue. He is strongly opposed. Okay, but he wants us to elect him governor to do what, exactly? New York has a lot of problems, from a state government that is completely dysfunctional to being broke and since everyone seems to agree that the mosque at Ground Zero is not about the right to build there but about the propriety of building there, what does it have to do with the office of governor?
When he pinch hit for Rudy Giuliani running for the senate against Hillary Clinton, after Mr. Giuliani dropped out of the race with prostate cancer, Mr. Lazio took a similar tack. You probably remember their first debate when Mr. Lazio famously walked across the stage to a startled Mrs. Clinton and asked her to sign his pledge on campaign finance reform. She refused and that was his theme. The problem is that although many people feel our political process is corrupt, when it comes to campaign finance reform, most people don’t care about it. Those who care about it are incumbents, who want to cripple those who run against them. Some of the so called “reforms” have politicians spending so much time chasing $50 donations that they can’t do what they were elected to do. Either that or we can only run multi-millionaire candidates who can spend their own money without limits. (Simple solution: let anyone contribute any amount to any campaign at any time and just post the information on the Internet within 72 hours in a database that is fully searchable. Done.) It only took a little time for the novelty of the debate video to fade and Mr. Lazio had no campaign.
Another challenger in this year’s governor’s race, Carl Paladino, one of the aforementioned millionaires, has been hitting the airwaves more frequently and more effectively than Mr. Lazio. He is not a one trick pony. His first ads hit Andrew Cuomo on being a career politician and that he, Paladino, was a business man who knows how to create jobs. What do we desperately need now? Jobs. What are we sick of? Career politicians, like Mr. Cuomo, who played a role as HUD Secretary in the Clinton administration of feeding the real estate frenzy and the subsequent housing collapse that created the financial crisis.
On the mosque situation, agree or disagree with him but Mr. Paladino says exactly what he will do about it. He will take the property away under Eminent Domain (thanks to the activist judges on the Supreme Court who gave us Kelo v. City of New London) and use the property to create a war memorial. He doesn’t just say he will oppose it he tells us what he will do about it.
In the interest of full disclosure, I contributed to Rick Lazio’s senate run in 2000 and I have no connection with the Paladino campaign. But if Mr. Lazio is serious about defeating Andrew Cuomo for governor, he has to find some issues that not only resonate with the people of New York but that are the responsibility of the governor to address. If not, rather than split the conservative vote, he should step aside and help ride the anti-incumbent wave that Carl Paladino is surfing.
Two disparate news items this weekend got me thinking. The main stream media is all abuzz with Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, even to the point of throwing the term royalty around. It is estimated that the wedding will cost $3-$5 million, although Sally Quinn of the Washington post puts the bill at closer to $1 million. The comparison was then made to the cost of Jenna Bush’s wedding, a mere $100,000. This became fodder for The Joy Behar Show. Comedian Judy Gold leaped at the opportunity to take a shot at Bush, “Yeah, well, if he could have found a way for us to pay for Jenna`s wedding, he would have done that, okay, he likes to spend other people`s money.” An interesting perspective on other people’s money that I will return to later.
The other news items was an article in The New York Times, by Bob Herbert titled “A Sin and a Shame,” lamenting that corporations are hording cash and not hiring people and it is all so unfair, in fact, sinful. This is while this government is spending huge amounts of money that someone will have to pay back, massive new programs like ObamaCare that we are still uncovering what that will cost, and enormous tax increases about to kick in on January 1 when the Bush tax cuts expire. Perhaps they are hording cash for a reason? Perhaps they are not hiring because they don’t know what any new employees will cost under these new programs, or for that matter what their existing employees are going to cost? Perhaps it is because the latest economic reports show GDP shrinking and if that continues why would you start hiring if your business is going to slow down with the rest of the economy?
We have two very divergent views of the economy today. One view is held by those who actually work in the private economy and the other view is held by those in the ivory towers of government, which brings me back to the weddings. I really don’t care what the Clintons or the Bushes spend on their daughter’s weddings. It’s their money. But perhaps it is instructive to look at where that money came from.
George Herbert Walker Bush, Jenna’s grandfather, was born into a successful family. His father was a banker and a Senator. But after getting out of the Army after WWII he went to Yale and upon graduation, moved away from that family and settled in Texas to start an oil company. He went into private business and put his own money at risk. What that means, to those who never took that chance, is you may be successful and make a lot of money, you may be successful and make a little money, you may fail and lose your money. Chances are greater that you will lose than win, but that is the American Dream. If you lose, you have to start over by trying to earn and save up what you lost to try again, if you have the guts and drive. Bush succeeded in forming Bush-Overby and later with Zapata Petroleum. He became President of Zapata for ten years and then Chairman for another two, before going into politics. By then he was a millionaire in his own right.
George Walker Bush, Jenna’s dad, attended public school in Midland, Texas, where his parents had settled. He went to private school after the family moved to Houston. He later attended Yale University and became the only president to get an MBA which he did, from Harvard. Like his father, he went into the oil business starting several independent oil exploration companies. He later bought a stake in the Texas Rangers baseball team for $800,000 and was instrumental in building the team’s attendance. He later sold his stake for $15 million. Then he went into politics.
The two Bushes know risk, know about taking chances and became millionaires on their own before going into politics. They also learned lessons about spending money and doing so prudently.
Bill Clinton went into politics almost immediately after getting his law degree. He was Attorney General and then Governor of Arkansas. As governor he had a governor’s mansion. He ran for president and upon winning traded in his governor’s mansion for the Executive Mansion, aka the White House. He had been on the government payroll and living in government provided housing almost his entire working life. The sweat of the people in who paid their taxes paid him. After leaving office, Mr. Clinton was able to write books about his experience and make speeches commanding six figures a pop. His wife did pretty much the same. They lived off the people and ended up very rich. They didn’t create a product or service, they didn’t create jobs, and they didn’t meet a payroll.
I can hear the screams from the left right now, “What do you mean he didn’t create a job or meet a payroll?” Try this test. If Bill Clinton’s opponent was elected rather than Bill Clinton, would there still be a government payroll and government jobs? If yes, Bill Clinton didn’t create them. If either of the Bushes didn’t create their companies would there be jobs at those companies or payrolls? No.
What about some other famous politicians who tell us what to do? Let’s look at Al Gore. Here is another individual that spent the bulk of his career in government. He was a member of Congress, a United States Senator, Vice President and presidential candidate. Today he is very rich. It is said he may become the first “green billionaire”. If he went into his current endeavors before a life in government, would the story be the same? Or is it because of his name, reputation, and connections that he made at the public trough, that he is wallowing in riches, and telling the rest of us to reduce our carbon footprint while his mansions consume ten times the energy of his neighbors?
Charlie Rangel spent most of his life in government. He rose through the ranks and now has a waterfront condominium in the Dominican Republic, writes the tax laws but does not observe them, and is a wealthy man. Conservatives don’t believe in rent control or rent stabilized apartments, but Charlie does. After all, how can poor and middle income people afford to live in places like Manhattan if greedy landlords have their way. So Charlie Rangel who makes $174,000 per year, plus his chairmanship pay, has not one, not two, not three, but four rent controlled apartments. Is he poor or middle class? No, he is the political class. He took three adjoining rent controlled apartments and had them joined together, while the fourth apartment served, illegally, as his campaign headquarters. What about the poor and blue collar workers who could live in Manhattan if three of your four rent controlled apartments weren’t being horded by you? Let them eat cake.
John Kerry is in the news for trying to avoid $500,000 in taxes on his new yacht. Here is another individual who spent his entire working life in government. He can tell the rest of us to pay more taxes while he garners favors spending our money. He is the richest man in the Senate but with prenuptial agreements with his wife he only lists personal assets of between $400,000 and $1.8 million and joint assets with his wife of $300,000 – $600,000. So how does he buy a $7 million yacht? I am not suggesting anything nefarious, it’s obvious his wife paid for it, but do you think he is in touch with someone trying to make a payroll in the private sector? You pay taxes; John Kerry has advisors to figure out how to avoid them.
So those evil corporations started by those evil men like George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush, know the value of a dollar. They know we are not out of the woods yet and so to protect the jobs that their companies still have they are not hiring but are building their rainy day funds. Perhaps Bob Herbert should ask why his employer is shedding jobs left and right. Perhaps this is his safe way of doing so, but on the other hand the New York Times is hardly hording cash. Its circulation is crashing because people like Bob Herbert are so out of touch with the rest of America; no one wants to read his rants any longer.
So perhaps Bill Clinton spends millions on Chelsea’s wedding because he didn’t learn the value of a dollar. He lived of the government for many years and then just held out a basket and it was miraculously filled with more money than he can count. George Bush spent $100,000 on a wedding because he knows how hard it is to earn a dollar. What we need is less of the political class telling us what to do, and then handing us the bill and more entrepreneurial Americans who risk their own money, watch it like hawks, create jobs and generate wealth that they then reinvest in America.
Best wishes to Chelsea and Marc.
The talking points have been established that it was eight years, eight, of failed Bush and/or Republican policies that got us into this mess and President Obama and the Democrats are working hard to get us out of it. Let’s take a closer look.
What blew up in 2008? It was the housing market. The underlying cause of the problem has Democrat/liberal/progressive fingerprints all over it going back to Franklin Roosevelt who created Fannie Mae. Add into that mix Lyndon Johnson privatizing Fannie Mae to hide it from the budget and creating HUD; Jimmy Carter creating the Community Reinvestment Act; Bill Clinton pushing for more home ownership among those who could least afford it, Andrew Cuomo as HUD Secretary pushing Fannie and Freddie to take on riskier mortgages; Barney Frank and Chris Dodd fighting against regulation before they were fighting for it (and where have we heard that formulation before?); and when housing prices run out of gas and the house of cards that the Democrats built collapses, it’s all Bush’s fault.
Let’s look at the timeline. When he took office, President Bush was handed a recession from Bill Clinton resulting from the dot.com bubble. In less than a year we had 9/11. In spite of that, Bush pushed through tax cuts and got the economy to grow through most of his presidency. The Democrats took control of Congress in January 2007 and in December 2007 the economy went into recession. One year later Barack Obama is elected President of the United States. Now, more than a year and a half after Obama is in office the economy looks like it is slipping into a double dip recession, and this is the Republican’s fault? Who has been spending like a drunken sailor? Who wasted almost $1 trillion on a stimulus plan that was so ineffective the Obama administration had to invent a new statistic, “jobs saved”, to hide its dismal performance. They add on ObamaCare, which no one in Congress read before voting on it and no one knows what is in it and so no small business is going to hire anyone until they know what it costs. How is that the Republican’s fault or Bush’s?
We are just a few months away from the tax cuts put in place by President Bush expiring. President Obama wants them to expire. This will place an additional massive burden on small businesses and just about everyone else and he wonders why aren’t companies hiring? The man came into office with no executive experience and the year and a half he has been in office he hasn’t seemed to pick up any. Could it be because he is surrounded by advisors who have little to no executive experience themselves?
To my fellow Americans I say, hang in there it is less than 100 days to vote the bums out. Perhaps not all of them, but at least we can bring in some adult supervision. It’s time to stop steamrolling the American people with the socialist programs and to let “We the People” take back our government.
The Democrats like to point to the Clinton presidency as proof of their fiscal responsibility. It was a period of strong growth, balanced budgets, and prosperity. They then point to the Bush presidency, all eight years of it, and deride it for deficits, and ultimately a very severe financial crisis. But it is worth taking a moment to recall that the federal government is made up of three co-equal branches of government with built in checks and balances. The Congress is not subordinate to the president and it does not work for him. It is an equal branch of government that checks and balances the power of the presidency. For the purpose of this discussion, I will leave out the third branch, the judiciary.
Despite the famous 1992 Clinton campaign slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” the recession had already ended in March 1991. When Clinton took office he had a Democratic Congress and he pushed through a massive tax increase in 1993 without a single Republican vote. We know what happened to Congress in 1994, the Republicans took over for the first time in 40 years. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich tried to pass a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution, which was included in the Republicans’ Contract with America. It passed in the House but failed by one vote in the Senate. After losing this round, Gingrich met with the Republican leadership and put forth the idea of acting as if the amendment had passed and just start submitting balanced budgets. They succeeded in the last three years of the Clinton presidency to produce budget surpluses and decrease the national debt. This included a tax cut by the Republican Congress in 1997, and the economy grew much stronger after the Republican takeover of Congress than under an all Democratic government.
In the 1996 election, the Democrats regained control of the Congress under Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Up until that point the economy had grown steadily under President Bush despite two wars. With Bush in the White House and the Republicans in control of Congress we had tax cuts and seven years of economic growth. In December of 2007 the economy went into recession, almost one year after the Democrats regained control. Now with a Democrat in the White House, and the Democrats in control of Congress we are looking at massive growth in government, a whopping tax increase bearing down on us that will hit on January 1, 2011, and a growing debt that may eventually bankrupt us.
So what is all this talk about eight years of failed Republican policy? Under Clinton and a Democrat Congress it was two years of a tax increase and modest growth. Under Clinton and a Republican Congress it was six years of tax cuts, budget surpluses and strong economic growth. Hmmm….same president, different parties controlling Congress. Under Bush we had seven years of growth and tax cuts with a Republican Congress. Under Bush and a Democratic Congress, recession, fiscal crisis. Hmmm…same president, different parties controlling Congress.
But don’t expect honesty on the campaign trail from the Democrats. It’s just not the Chicago way.
