Please enjoy this audio podcast
Click to PlayYour comments and feedback are welcome. Please feel free to share your thoughts below.
[click to continue…]the New York Times
With a week left in the election, Kirsten Gillibrand holds a substantial lead in the polls to be elected to the seat to which she was appointed after Hillary Clinton moved on to the State Department. Liberty’s Lifeline finds this a remarkable situation considering that for most of the past year polls have shown the Gillibrand trailed a generic “someone else”. It would seem that in this year of an anti-incumbent uprising, she would be among the easiest senators to unseat, and yet her race is considered “solidly Democratic”, in other words, in the bag.
If you watched the video of her debates with Joe DioGuardi she seemed overly scripted, delivering pattern Democratic talking points to questions even to the point of ignoring the question to parrot the memorized response. In a “lightening round” that required a yes or no answer, she seemed to struggle to give an answer to some questions that required thought before answering. It almost looked like a game show where she seemed delighted to get an answer right rather than giving answers she actually believed in.
New York state government is a basket case. Earlier this week we were treated to the theater of the governor’s debate featuring such luminaries as Jimmy McMillan of the Rent is 2 Damn High party, and former madam Kristin Davis who seemed smarter on fiscal policy than half of her opponents on the stage. But let us not forget it was a stage and this is New York. Instead of being held at Hofstra University, it should have been held on Broadway, but I digress.
The government itself is one problem, the state pensions are quite another. A problem on the order of $30 billion to $80 billion. Harry Wilson is running for state comptroller. Mr. Wilson made his money on Wall Street, investing and turning around troubled companies. His opponent, Tom DiNapoli was appointed to the comptroller position after his predecessor, Alan Hevesi, was charged misconduct for trading access to the pension in return for favors.
On October 17, 2010 members of TeaParty365 and Media Matters gathered in front of the New York Times headquarters and later in the day at the headquarters of NBC to protest the liberal distortions of those and other main stream media outlets.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fCL_o-WhFo&hd=1
It is interesting to note the tea party members who can be seen (Chinese, black, young white female) are not what the main stream media keep telling us make up the tea parties, while the liberal who stops to curse at the protest is an old white guy. The mainstream media did come to see what was going on and interviewed the organizers of the event as well as this correspondent, but seemed bored and disappointed that some self fulfillling controversy didn’t break out. Attempts to find any footage of their filming after the fact were fruitless.
As has been written here many times before an $8 a week tax cut, the one President Obama brags about delivering to 95% of American taxpayers has gone largely unnoticed according to the New York Times. Gee, it didn’t stimulate the economy and when joined at the hip to $825 billion in debt, can you blame anyone for missing the pocket change?
When reminded, people do seem to recall it, but if you have to remind someone that they are supposed to be better off than they were two years ago, your program probably missed the mark. It will be an interesting two weeks before the election and the whole hope and change thing unravels.
It was the rally we were all waiting for. The left was going to show Glenn Beck a thing or two about how union and community organizers could make things happen. And organize they did; some 300-400 organizations sponsored the rally. While the New York Times said tens of thousands attended the rally they later in the article compared it to the August 28th rally held by Glenn Beck, describing the crowds at Beck’s event as enormous.
Though they hoped to draw an even larger crowd than Mr. Beck, the Times wrote, “Significant areas of the National Mall that had been filled during Mr. Beck’s rally were empty.” Mr. Beck in a broadcast the Thursday prior criticized the rally saying that his supporters paid their own way to attend while for Saturday’s rally the unions and the 300-400 organizations chartered busses to ferry the people to the event, and still they fell short.
The irony was lost on some who attended.
First it was that Bush spent all eight years of his presidency (and was reelected after four of those years) destroying the economy and so we need to give Obama, what, eight years to fix it? Then it was blame Boehner. That didn’t work, because not many people know who John Boehner is. Then it was “the Republicans want to go back to the same old ways that got us into this mess.” Tell that to Arlen Specter, Lisa Murkowski, Mike Castle, Bob Bennett, Charlie Crist, Trey Grayson. Same old, same old? I don’t think so.
Now it is time to go negative. No, I don’t mean campaign ads. That was to be expected as the Democrats do not, repeat, do not want to run on their record, lest it get as ugly on November 2 as a town hall meeting. No, they are going negative on their base. The Democrat heavies are coming out and mocking their base to shame them into coming out and voting for them. Consider some of these gems.
The Obama administration, having stepped in it with both feet to protect their union backers rather than let two of the three U.S. automobile companies go into bankruptcy, are now weighing the sale of the stock owned by us, in an Initial Public Offering (IPO). Their plans are to scale back the offering to prop up the price that they might be able to get in the market so that they can ultimately get most of the taxpayer money they spent, back.
“While both G.M. and the Treasury still hope to reduce the government’s stake in the company to less than 50 percent and rid the company of its Government Motors nickname, that goal may not be met, one of the people said,” according to the New York Times. In saying that, auto analysts are increasingly projecting that the government could get most or all of its remaining $43 billion investment, but it will takes years to accomplish. Uh-oh.
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:
- Graft-Fighting Prosecutor Fired in Afghanistan
- For Obama, Steep Learning Curve as Chief in Time of War
- Upstarts Chip Away at Power of Feudal Pakistani Landlords
- Years Later, No Magic Bullet Against Alzheimer’s Disease
- In Hard Times, One New Ban (Double-Wide)
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.
