Rick Perry at CPAC 2012
At CPAC this week, Rick Perry visited the Blogger Lounge and while there spoke briefly about the Keystone Pipeline.
China
Tim Bishop likes manufacturing. The manufacturing of campaign issues, that is. In his effort to manufacture a campaign issue around overseas outsourcing, he got a lifeline from the White House yesterday when President Obama held an “insourcing” forum yesterday to encourage companies to “bring jobs back to America.” An editorial in the Wall Street Journal titled, “Insourcing for Dummies” describes the effort.
Boeing 787 Dreamliner photo by craezer
Yesterday, the House passed a bill that would prevent the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from telling Boeing, America’s largest exporter, that it couldn’t build a factory in South Carolina, a Right-To-Work state. Boeing built a $750 million factory (with their own money, not yours) and hired 1,500 workers, before the NLRB stepped in and called this union retaliation. But no jobs are being eliminated back in Washington state, in fact, Boeing has added 2,000 jobs.
Photo by Dave Makes
Two news items yesterday, when put together, start to tell an interesting story. Warren Buffett invested $5 billion in Bank of America in a private sweetheart deal that will guarantee him a 6% return (that’s $300 million per year) and he is hosting a fund raiser for Barack Obama in New York where the tickets start at $10,000. What’s going on?
Photo by Ted Abbott
Can we now drop any pretense that Joe Biden is anything but a CINO (Catholic in Name Only)? On his latest state visit to China, Biden gave a speech that should be characterized as other than “just Joe being Joe.”
Actual Unemployment vs. Stimulus Sales Pitch
It was a very close race, one of the last decided in the country. Out of 180,000 plus votes the final margin of victory was just under 600 votes. In that election Tim Bishop successfully managed to hide from his record and instead he took advantage of a late Republican primary that was hotly contested and pounced with a campaign of personal attacks on his opponent that was just enough to carry the eight weeks until Election Day. His opponent, Randy Altschuler, wants a rematch and it appears the race will be decidedly different.
With gas prices on the rise, Bill O’Reilly, is once again targeting his favorite whipping boy, The Speculators. Like a 1940′s whodunit, we are told of those evil greedy speculators and how we need more government intervention to reign them in. The question that is never asked nor answered is, where do the speculators go when gas prices fall? If their evil intent is to drive up prices so they can make obscene profits, why would they ever stop?
(This is the second of a series of articles focusing on topics presented at the Cato Policy Perspectives 2011 conference held at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel on Friday, April 8, 2011)
Kicking off the conference, Ed Crane, president of the Cato Institute, talked about American exceptionalism and how President Obama doesn’t believe in that. To illustrate, he gave the example where while in Europe the president was asked if he believed in American exceptionalism, and he hedged by saying he supposed so, just at the Germans believe in German exceptionalism, the British believe in British exceptionalism, and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. President Obama doesn’t think that America is exceptional and to the extent that he might, he is doing everything in his power to root it out.
The other key point that Mr. Crane made concerned people talking about national goals and aspirations. Nations shouldn’t have goals. People should have goals and nations should protect their right to pursue them. Who wants Washington to set some goals and then have individuals reorder their lives to fit into the grand plan? To me that is the essence of the battle between libertarianism and statism. This is also a nice segue into the Cato presentation on education provided by Charles Murray.
