President Obama has been on the stump trying to cobble together a coalition that will help keep him in the White House. It matters little what damage his actions might do to America, he has bigger plans and needs more “flexibility” to get them done.

On college campuses he is trying to gin up support by making the interest rate on college loans a campaign issue. The issue is government subsidized Stafford loans. He wants to freeze the current interest rates at 3.4% and he wants the Republicans to fight him on this so that he can create another class warfare wedge issue.

Where have we seen something like this before? Wasn’t the government’s heavy involvement in housing, pushing for everyone to be a homeowner that led to the housing bubble? When that bubble burst, all hell broke loose with it and Obama was able to ride the gush of air into the White House.

Think about the growing debt being accumulated by college students and think about their job prospects in the Obama economy. It is not a pretty picture. What happens if those students upon graduating say, “I can’t find a decent job. I have been duped. I’m not paying back my student loans.” What do you do? Jail them?

Now if interest rates climb, the economic effect will be to curtail borrowing, that is, the old price, supply and demand thing. But if interest rates are kept low, then the demand for more debt will not be curtailed. If the demand for more debt is not curtailed the bubble grows. Four more years of Obama managing the economy will not be a boon to jobs. If we haven’t figured that out yet, we better start studying quickly. There’s a big test coming in November.

I fully appreciate the college financing issue. But the education model is broken. Colleges seem to raise tuition in lock step with increases in government aid, so no progress is made. Colleges also seem to be afraid of not attracting enough students so they fill their course catalogs with nonsense courses that will interest no employer. The amount of debt piling up is frightening, but hey, we have a president to reelect. We’ll fix that later; just like Social Security, Medicare, budget deficits…

The Republicans are right to at least demand cuts in spending elsewhere to pay for this. They know the problem won’t get fixed or even addressed with Obama at the helm. We have to hang on for another six or seven months to cancel Obama’s contract and then prepare to roll up our sleeves and undo the damage he has done.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

George Demos kicked off his Hail Mary campaign to win the Republican nomination to challenge Congressman Tim Bishop in New York’s first Congressional District. As he did the last time around he boasts that he is the only true conservative in the race. His claims, though, are devoid of any facts to base them upon other than him saying so. His kickoff ad is either downright dishonest, or just sloppy. Either one hardly qualifies him to represent anyone.

Demos uses campaign material from incumbent Tim Bishop, an odd source for a Republican, to attack Randy Altschuler who was the Republican nominee against Bishop in 2010. Demos also ran in the primary that year and lost to Altschuler by a wide margin. In the general election Altschuler lost by a whisker, in the closest Congressional race in the country that year.

The video that Demos chose to use was selectively edited. The issue that both Demos and Bishop are trying to run on is Mr. Altschuler’s founding of a business, Office Tiger, that provided back office services to other companies. Some of the work was done overseas, some in the U.S. The video shows Mr. Altschuler talking about some overseas locations, but where he speaks of talent in the U.S. that is edited from the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9A8v8RdMgA

Neither Bishop nor Demos mention that when Altschuler started Office Tiger in 1999, the unemployment rate in the U.S. was 4.2%. That is not an environment with a lot of idle workers standing around. Bishop and Demos want to plant the seed in the minds of voters, who are suffering through the longest period of 8%+ unemployment since the Great Depression, that it is not Obama’s and Bishop’s dismal performance ruining the economy but “outsourcers” who are causing the problem. When Altschuler later sold the company in 2005, the unemployment rate was 5.08%, still rather low. Altschuler then went on to found Cloud Blue, creating more jobs in the U.S., by recycling old technology gear.

So what is Demos’ claim to fame as “the only true conservative?” He has worked as a government lawyer at the SEC. The SEC you may recall could not bring down Bernie Madoff although for ten years an individual named Harry Markopolous practically delivered evidence wrapped up with a bow that Madoff was a fraud. The SEC was also noted for staff that was spending their days looking at pornography on government computers. It was also alleged that Demos had outed a whistleblower at JP Morgan, although the third Judicial District  found an “insufficient basis for a finding of professional misconduct.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement.

So where is all the evidence of Demos’ conservative credentials? Has he created any jobs? Worked for any period of time in the private sector? In these tough economic times what experience does Demos have that indicates he has solutions to our problems? The Republican Party, the Conservative Party, the Independence Party, and many Tea Party groups have endorsed Randy Altschuler.

Demos on the other hand takes a doctored video from a Democrat and uses it to attack a Republican, a direct violation of Ronald Reagan’s eleventh commandment, thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican. He calls himself a winner and Altschuler a loser. Replacing one government employee for another hardly sounds like bold thinking, when most of our issues are government created. However, replacing a government backbencher with someone who grew up in a household headed by a single mother, secured a good education, started a couple of companies, is the kind of breath of fresh air we need in Washington.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

A funny thing happened as Congressman Tim Bishop tries to manufacture a campaign issue. The very thing he is fighting about, we learn that the government has been underwriting with taxpayer dollars.

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) had a program to train people in Sri Lanka high-tech IT skills so that they could better compete in the world economy. Needless to say, such competition would come at the expense of American workers. As a free marketer, I don’t have a problem with private enterprises investing their own money any where they want to. I have a big problem with using taxpayer dollars to train foreigners to take away American jobs.

My first problem is with the morality of taking taxpayer dollars to help take away taxpayer jobs. My second problem is that I don’t find a right to do that anywhere in the Constitution. To his credit Tim Bishop in 2010 fought to stop the program.

In 2010, Bishop compelled USAID to abandon a high-tech training program for outsourcing industry workers in Sri Lanka, with the agency committing to “conduct a review to ensure the project will not take any jobs away from Americans.”

Note the year. Tim Bishop has been in Congress since 2002. This program came to light as a result of investigative reporting by Information Week magazine, in August of 2010. What else was happening in the fall of 2010? Tim Bishop was running for reelection against Randy Altschuler who started a business and later sold it that provided business services to companies with employees in the US and overseas. Bishop won by a whisker, but the outsourcing angle is his last, best hope for his rematch with Altschuler.

The problem is that Congress holds the purse strings and this program could not have been funded without Congress’ approval. What did Tim Bishop know and when did he know it? If he argues he was unaware of the program the question becomes, is the federal government that Tim Bishop loathes shrinking, too big for Congress to properly oversee? If Tim Bishop did know about it, why didn’t he stop it earlier or prevent it from being funded in the first place?

I am reminded of that famous scene in the movie Casablanca, where Claude Rains professes to be “shocked, SHOCKED,” that gambling is going on in the back room as member of the club’s staff comes out to hand him his gambling winnings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM_A4Skusro

Now it turns out a new program has been launched by the Obama administration (again USAID) to train people in the Philippines to speak better English to prepare them for better jobs, such as in outsourced call centers. This is what President Obama said at an insourcing summit:

 ”My message to business leaders today is simple. Ask yourself what you can do to bring jobs back to the country that made our success possible. And I’m going to do everything in my power to help you do it.”

Really? But is anyone surprised that this president says one thing while doing the exact opposite? President Obama and Tim Bishop bailed out GM, which then immediately turned around and increased offshore production.

Instead of funding the training of people in other countries to compete for American jobs, perhaps the focus should be on revising our tax code so that the US doesn’t have the highest corporate tax rate in the world, which makes it attractive to locate operations overseas in the first place. The tax code also traps profits from those operations overseas so that it makes sense for businesses to expand those operations overseas rather than bring the money back to the US (where it will get taxed more as soon as it arrives) to expand here.

Just more hypocrisy from the big government crowd. They don’t fix problems. They screw the American people coming and going. It’s time for a change.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

It the last few days we have heard President Obama ranting about the Supreme Court. This is not anything new. You may also recall his unprecedented calling out of the Supreme Court as the justices sat in front of him during his State of the Union speech attacking them over the Citizens United v FEC case.

The Great Reconciler has also done this in other venues. After Paul Ryan released his budget last year, President Obama invited him to a speech on the budget and with Ryan sitting there devoted his speech attacking the Ryan plan. Very classy. Is this what we hoped and changed for?

Obama and the Constitution

What is most disturbing to me is what Obama is saying about the Supreme Court’s role with regard to the Constitution. What he is saying is approaching downright ignorance and yet he taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. What did he teach his students? Where are these students today? Are they some sort of Manchurian Candidates to be unleashed with their own new-found ignorance upon us as lawyers and judges? Are we watching a bad science fiction movie?

‘I am confident,” announced the president of the United States, “that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” – President Barack Obama, earlier this week.

Unprecedented? What exactly is unprecedented? What is extraordinary? Striking down a law? That capability of the Supreme Court was established by the Marbury v Madison  case in 1803. One hundred fifty-eight acts of Congress have been overturned by the Supreme Court since Marbury. Sounds like a lot of precedent to me.

A strong majority? ObamaCare was passed by a margin of 219 to 212. What would a weak majority be? Actually, since we often hear our liberal friends cry out for bipartisanship, let me point out that there was bipartisan opposition to ObamaCare. Every Republican and thirty-four Democrats voted against it. Only Democrats voted for it.

Passed by a democratically elected Congress? Is there another kind of Congress than a democratically elected one? Also, in order for a review by the Supreme Court, a law by definition has to be passed by Congress. Otherwise it is just a bill and has no effect on anyone. Doesn’t constitutional law professor Barack Obama know any of this? Isn’t he embarrassed to be saying such things? It is clear that most American citizens, sixty-seven percent by some polls, think the individual mandate is unconstitutional. Do they understand the Constitution better than a man who took an oath to preserve, protect and defend it?

I think an effort should be made to find every student who sat in one of Barack Obama’s constitutional law classes. Give them a test on their comprehension of the Constitution. If they fail, force the University of Chicago to refund their tuition for that course and send them to take Hillsdale College’s Constitution 101. It’s a free ten week course and perhaps the students can help out by donating their refunded tuition money to Hillsdale.

We should all be very concerned that this kind of thinking is being taught in our law schools and will one day come back to destroy the Constitution. Some on the left are trying to call any invalidating of ObamaCare as judicial activism on the right. Adhering to the founding principles and the original intent behind the Constitution is not activism, it is the sworn duty of the justices. If you want to know what activism sounds like, go no further than the words of Associate Justice and former chief counsel of the ACLU Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the court should do a “salvage job,” not undertake a “wrecking operation.”

It is judicial activism for the court to try to salvage Congress’ work. It violates the separation of powers. It is the job of the judiciary to interpret the law not make the law. If they interpret the law to be unconstitutional it is not their job to fix it. That’s Congress’ responsibility, but Ginsburg knows full well that the Congress that passed this monstrosity isn’t there any more and will not be there again any time soon. There is a new Congress that was swept in, to a large extent based on the outrage over ObamaCare. Ginsburg is afraid that if the Supreme Court doesn’t salvage it, sending it back to Congress would put the final nail in the coffin. RIP.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

I just got a survey request from my Congressman Tim Bishop. I started to fill it out but it was limited in its responses. Limited to what could easily be tabulated and put into a self-serving graph, but the same limited responses also spoke volumes.

He introduced his survey with two wishes:

I’d like to know how you think Congress can best help your family this year.

I hope you will take a moment to tell me what you believe my priority should be in Congress for 2012.

The first question tells all about what is wrong with Tim Bishop’s thinking, Barack Obama’s thinking, and why we are heading off a cliff. So let me answer the question. Tim, get a copy of the Constitution. Go to a quiet room; sit down and read it. If you don’t immediately grasp the meaning of the document you took an oath to support, may I recommend you buy a copy of The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, it will help explain it to you. It is not Congress’ job to help my family. That is my job. Congress’ job is primarily to defend our borders (think Mexico), interact with foreign nations, and to regulate commerce between the states and with foreign nations; to coin money, not print it without end so that it becomes increasingly worthless (see Bernanke); provide a federal court system and that’s about it. Everything else is left to the states and to the people (see Amendment 10).

To answer the Congressman’s second question, I would say, Tim, stop doing everything else. Stop spending money like there is no tomorrow because there is a tomorrow and my children, and yours too, will have to pay all this debt back. There is no one to bail out the United States of America.

If Barack Obama wanted to be a venture capitalist, perhaps he should have applied for a job at Bain Capital. It is not his job, nor yours, to gamble our tax dollars on your favorite pet project. It is not your job to tell Boeing where they can or can’t locate their factories.

Before I could stop myself I clicked on the link to get to the actual survey and here were Congressman Bishop’s choices:

• Lowering taxes for the middle class
• Access to affordable higher education
• Caring for our veterans when they return home
• Investing in transportation and water infrastructure
• Creating incentives for companies to insource jobs
• Other (where he provides a tiny box to type in your own priority

Let me take them one at a time.

• Lowering taxes for the middle class – Who decides where the middle class begins and ends? Where in the history of this country has class warfare led to greatness? We are perilously close to the point where the majority will pay no federal taxes but will have the power to demand from the minority that they provide and pay for whatever they want. Of course, I expect Congressman Bishop to shoot back that everyone pays payroll taxes. Payroll taxes do not fund the operation of the federal government. In the case of Social Security everyone who pays in expects to get every dollar back and then some. It is a lousy savings plan not a tax that funds government. Medicare/Medicaid is similar in that everyone expects to get it back in the form of free health care if they become impoverished or when they reach sixty-five years of age.
• Access to affordable higher education – This is building the next bubble. At some point students who graduate will not be able to afford to pay their skyrocketing college debts and will default and we will be forced to pick up the tab. Every time the federal government offers scholarship money, say, $1000 to students, you can bet colleges will increase tuition by $1000 shortly thereafter. Higher education is ripe for a new paradigm.
• Caring for veterans when they return home — I would bundle this under providing for the national defense and since that is included in the Constitution that is a legitimate function of the federal government.
• Investing in transportation and water infrastructure — the government doesn’t invest in anything, they spend money. The left which is constantly trying to hide what they are really doing stopped calling spending, spending because it was out of control. By calling it investing, they thought it had a degree of sophistication about it. When you invest in something you expect to get all your money back and a decent rate of return on it as well. We pay gasoline taxes that are supposed to pay for the roads and bridges that are falling down. Where is that money? What happened to it? Secondly, this is not a federal function. Every state has (or should) have taxes on gasoline or tolls on roads to maintain them. Someone in Maine shouldn’t be paying taxes to fix roads in Hawaii. If every state should take care of its own roads and water needs. If a bridge or road or river goes between two states, those two states can join forces to manage those joint properties, it doesn’t require Washington’s meddling. Of course, Tim Bishop will plead that the General Welfare clause of the Constitution calls for such meddling. Not true and here’s why (click for an explanation).
• Creating incentives for companies to insource jobs — This one is simply Tim Bishop’s manufactured campaign issue against his likely opponent. It is not the job or the talent of the federal government to pick winners and losers. Does Tim Bishop really want to send the thousands of auto worker jobs from Toyota, Nissan, and Honda back to Japan? BMW back to Germany? Chrysler jobs to Italy (Chrysler is now owned by Fiat of Italy)? Or does he just want to make American firms uncompetitive and force them to lay off workers. It was a study at Dartmouth University that showed that for every job outsourced overseas, two new jobs were created in America. So why does Tim Bishop want to do the exact opposite of what might actually create jobs here and lower unemployment (Hint: he thinks he can fool the people into reelecting him)

Nothing could be clearer than if we want to get America back on track, this kind of thinking has to go. If I have a problem that government is causing, I want to go first to the mayor of my village, next to the supervisor of my town, then the county executive of my county, then the governor of my state. I don’t need to try to hack through the massive bureaucracy of Washington to get anything done and Tim Bishop is only one of 435 representatives. Why would any sane person want to give away that much control to Washington?

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Andrew Breitbart at CPAC

The shocking news arrived courtesy of Fox News this morning. Conservative lion Andrew Breitbart was dead. In his pursuit of conservative principles and his disdain for the other side, he was fearless.

He grew up as a secular liberal, but had his epiphany during the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearings. He saw how the left was lying and trying to destroy a man with a great American story. After that he became a Reagan conservative with libertarian leanings.

He started working with Matt Drudge helping spread Drudge’s articles across the Internet. He later helped Ariana Huffington create the Huffington Post website. He went on to create his own group of sites including Big Government and Big Hollywood.

I first met him at the 26th Annual Martin Luther King National Holiday celebration sponsored by the Congress of Racial Equality dinner in 2011. He was the chosen to be the master of ceremonies because of the firestorm surrounding the alleged use of the “N-word” during Nancy Pelosi’s famous march to the capital to pass ObamaCare. He was being damned as a racist by every main stream media outlet, and CORE would not let that stand.

He didn’t pull punches as he wrapped up his address to the dinner saying “the GOP sucked,” and then this:

The Tea Party needs you, period. Allen West and Tim Scott did not get elected through the leadership of the Republican Party. They got elected because of the Tea Party and I have been to Tea Parties all across this country and the people who move the crowds, they’re not invited to speak, they just show up and they’re the people that possess the crowds, and that is African Americans; and that is Hispanic Americans who understand that this country has been divided along the grounds of race and creed and we have been pitted against each other by this multicultural model that is nothing short of cultural Marxism.

I next met him at CPAC last year where he was trying to get greater focus on a scandal that was bilking the federal government of over $1 billion in bogus payments to fictional farmers claiming they were harmed by the government in the Pigford case. People who did no more farming than having a potted plant in their backyard were being encouraged to apply for a $50,000 settlement.

In April of last year his publicist contacted me to see if I wanted to interview him about his new book, Righteous Indignation. I called him on his cell phone and he asked if I was going to record the call. I said that I would like to, and he asked me to call him back on a better line so the recording would be a better quality, which I did. He was someone who truly understood the details of getting the message out.

He went to Wisconsin to challenge the protesters who were attacking Scott Walker trying to wrest his state from the grip of public sector unions. He went to Occupy Wall Street to see if this was truly a grass-roots movement, or a

carefully orchestrated effort from the left. Hopefully his untimely death will not delay that film’s release in the next month or two. It took an Andrew Breitbart to make an entrance to the meeting introducing the film in a mask.

He was always a fighter but he was also charming. At CPAC he spoke about being invited by a friend to a Super Bowl party at the home of none other than Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn. He said they were very civil to him and that Bill Ayers was a fantastic cook.

Andrew Breitbart always seemed to be running at hyperspeed. Perhaps God took him from us because he accomplished in 43 years what many others couldn’t complete in 80. He often said that this election was perhaps the most important one in our history. He is counting on us to carry the flag forward. Let’s not let him down. Thank you, Andrew, for the inspiration you gave us to get up and get into the fight.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

At the conclusion of Newt Gingrich’s speech as CPAC a colleague and I discussed the Republican chances for the White House. That day we heard from Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney and Newt and we both agreed that winning in the fall should not be hard. But a couple of conditions had to be met.

The most important condition of all was that no matter who won the nomination, we all had to coalesce behind the nominee and fight hard to win. What that means is that Mitt and Newt have to stop the scorched earth personal attacks. So far, Santorum has avoided getting down in the mud, but with his new ascendancy, he will now be a prime target. Stop it and stop it now. It’s not about you. It’s about dislodging the guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Tell us about your vision and stop hanging labels on each other. Forget the polls showing Obama beating all comers. In January 1980, Gallup had Carter beating Reagan 63% – 32%. This is how Time magazine saw it March of that year:

National opinion polls continue to show Carter leading Reagan by an apparently comfortable margin of about 25%. They also show that more moderate Republicans like Ford would run better against the President. This suggests that Reagan is not the strongest G.O.P. choice for the November election and that he clearly faces an uphill battle. . .

Carter, for all his problems, has the power of incumbency. As President, he can react to challenges by changing the direction of the whole Government, which he has done recently by attempting to balance the budget in the coming fiscal year, a course urged by all Republican candidates. Carter is an undeniably deft—and extremely lucky—politician. He also is a relatively known quantity in the White House, whereas the inexperienced Reagan would require a definite leap of faith by voters supporting him. Says Northwestern University Political Scientist Louis Masotti: “There’s a variation on the old cliché: you don’t change horses’ asses in midstream. You’ve got one, and at least you know its contours.”

Newt Gingrich

Gingrich was on his game at CPAC. He clearly outlined what he would do, within hours, of taking the oath of office. It was vintage Newt. It was Contract with America stuff and the crowd ate it up. This is the good Newt, who is very good. Besides putting down the sword against Romney, Newt needs to clean out his closet. Whatever he did for Freddie Mac, whether good or bad, get it out there now. Just saying you were a consultant is not enough. You can bet the Democrats know what he did and if it looks bad they will protect it like it is gold in anticipation of Newt winning the nomination. Then they will devise a scheme, with their allies in the main stream media, to release it about two weeks before the general election so that it will have maximum negative impact against Gingrich and the Republicans.

If Gingrich can get any bad news out now it will die down and be old news by election day. There is a risk, that it may kill his chance at the nomination, but for the sake of the country, it is better sooner than later.

Rick Santorum

Santorum has done a good job of laying out the moral argument for his candidacy. He has to shift his focus more on where he wants to take America rather than in the dismal place we find ourselves. He has to take a cue from Reagan and Thatcher and express an optimism that will engage his fellow Americans.

He has to avoid joining the Romney – Gingrich food fight. So far he has stayed above the fray, but he is climbing in the polls and that makes him a prime target, particularly for the Romney attack machine. He has to stay clean and ride the wave of disgust that people are feeling for all the mud-slinging.

Mitt Romney

Romney has to stop the attacks. He seems to be the one to fire the first spit ball. In one of the debates, when Santorum called for a ceasefire, Gingrich seemed inclined to go along, but Mitt couldn’t resist one last shot, which Gingrich naturally could not leave alone and off we went. Negative campaigning does work up to the point where we become sick of it and then it is a pox upon all your houses.

Romney also has to loosen up and lose his perpetual sunny disposition, that seems somewhat manufactured. It would be refreshing to see him without the perpetual smile and see some genuine concern for his fellow Americans who are having a tough time. If he doesn’t connect with the common folks, he will never climb above the 25% or so that typically vote for him.

Coming Together and Being Gracious

To get everyone to close ranks behind the eventual winner, we need to care for the ultimate losers. Toward that end I would like to propose a fallback job for each of the four remaining candidates in the administration of the winner. Here they are.

For Ron Paul, I would suggest appointing him Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. He could then freely find out what the heck they are doing there and make recommendations up to and including ending the Fed. For Newt Gingrich, I would suggest appointing him UN Ambassador. What better way to follow up a speech by Ahmadinejad than a critique by Gingrich destroying everything the little weasel said? For Rick Santorum, Secretary of State. He seems to understand there is more to the world than just the Middle East and that we have some work to do in our own hemisphere. For Romney, I would suggest Secretary of the Treasury. Bain Capital was not Goldman Sachs. I think between his finance background and his government executive experience as governor of Massachusetts, he could greatly help get us on the right track.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

At CPAC Marco Rubio showed some of the traits that make him a leading candidate for Vice President no matter who the Republican nominee happens to be. He mixed humor and personal narrative.

Rubio spoke with a degree of awe about arriving in the Senate. He wondered to himself, “How did I get here?” But after spending time in Harry Reid’s do-nothing Senate he looked around and wondered, “How did they get here?”

Getting more serious he talked about President Obama’s State of the Union address and how the president scrupulously avoided talking about his record. Why? Well, Rubio explained, for two years President Obama had a Democrat controlled House and a Democrat controlled Senate, which until the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy and the election of Republican Scott Brown to replace him, they had a filibuster-proof majority. So for two years he got everything he wanted and since then, everything has gotten worse.

So what did Obama say in the State of the Union address? He chose to pit Americans against each other. He is trying to sell the American people on a bill of goods that says we are a zero-sum society. That is, for someone to get ahead, someone has to get pulled down. But that is not true, but Obama needs us to believe it so that he can get people to vote for him.

Rubio then related to his own family saying that he felt his father and grandfather were better men than he, but Rubio has advanced as far as he has because he was born in the greatest country in the world.

He then made a telling point. He said that Republicans try to attract followers by arguing who is more like Ronald Reagan. Do you ever hear Democrats argue about who is more like Jimmy Carter?

What is government’s role, he asked? We should have an understandable tax code so that individuals and businesses can make decisions for business reasons not tax reasons. We need regulatory reform. Yes, we all want clean air and clean water but with sanity. We don’t have an energy policy, we have energy politics. While in office for three years President Obama had no plan for Medicare, but as soon as Republican Paul Ryan came up with a plan, he attacked it.

Summing up, Rubio said that President Obama seems to be a really good father; he seems to be a really good husband; but he is a terrible president. I couldn’t agree more.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

It is becoming increasingly clear that Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich don’t like each other. Okay, okay, they hate each other at a visceral level. If our core goal is to replace Barack Obama, what are we to do?

Mitt Romney has been described as the establishment candidate. Until this past Tuesday, he finished first or second in every primary contest, but he hasn’t closed the deal with conservatives. He has been steady in the mid 20s percentage-wise but cannot seem to break out. He has pulled no punches in his attacks on Newt Gingrich and Gingrich has felt their sting. If Gingrich were to win the nomination I have my doubts that Romney or any hardcore Romney supporters would back Newt. That’s not good.

Newt Gingrich has made some bizarre attacks on Romney using terms like predatory capitalism and demonizing Romney on where he does his banking. This is pretty strange stuff for a conservative. The super pac that is behind Newt produced a film on Romney and Bain capital that was so full of distortions that even Gingrich in the middle of one of the debates said they should correct the errors or pull the film. If Romney were to win the nomination I don’t believe Gingrich or his supporters would work for Romney’s election. That’s not good.

Rick Santorum has stayed clear of the politics of personal destruction. In one of the recent debates he even called for a truce between Romney and Gingrich and the media’s blood-lust to egg them on. He praised both Gingrich and Romney for their accomplishments and then asked the moderator if the focus could be on national issues. That lasted about sixty seconds.

Santorum has won four out of the first seven contests and while the ones he took were not the big ones, he is also running on a shoestring budget. He has taken on RomenyCare beyond the individual mandate. When he runs a campaign appearance he doesn’t make a speech and dash off; he stays and answers questions.  He does not have the ego of a Gingrich who claimed, when his star was rising before Iowa, that he was essentially the nominee, nor has he asked anyone to drop out of the race to clear his way, as Gingrich asked Santorum to do.

Santorum does have to step up his economic game. He will not win on social issues alone. His tax plan calls for greater deductions for having children and zero taxes on manufacturers which smacks of picking winners and losers like the current administration.

This will be the most important election of our lifetime. We have to put winning above personal ambition. If we want a strong conservative who can win, Santorum deserves a closer look.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.

Congressman Tim Bishop continues to push his manufactured campaign issue, with the full union backing of the Communication Workers of America, to fight against outsourced call centers. He calls it a “surgical strike”. I think there are more appropriate names for it.

It’s always fun to listen to someone who hasn’t spent a day outside of academia or government tell the rest of us, a) what the problem is; and b) what the solution is. The first question that I would ask Congressman Bishop is “why is this such an important issue for your constituents?” Answer: It isn’t. There are no major call centers in his district and there are none that I know of that are weighing a move to his district. So why is this his major legislative focus?

He is desperately looking for an issue, any issue, that he can campaign on. He cannot campaign on his record. He cannot campaign on a record of supporting the Obama economic disaster. He cannot campaign on how much the debt ballooned on his watch. So Doctor Bishop wants to do a little surgery and penalize companies who outsource call centers. Since Bishop never held a job that produced anything for a profit he can be excused for not grasping the impacts of his proposed bill.

One of his provisions is to make companies that have outsourced call center jobs overseas ineligible for government contracts. Two of the largest US PC manufactures HP and Dell and they both have call centers overseas. So does Congressman Bishop want the stop the federal government from buying PCs from HP and Dell? Who should they buy them from? Chinese Lenovo, Taiwan based Acer? Japan’s Toshiba? Speaking like a general he says it is a surgical strike. Well surgical strikes are designed to limit collateral damage, and Bishop’s plan is chock full of collateral damage.

Here is how Bishop could really help the situation. First, take a basic economics course. Study how the global economy works and how free global trade helps everyone. Perhaps he should ask his backers at the Communications Workers of America, what they can do to make call centers in the US more cost-effective. Do they have too many work rules in their contracts? Do they force their members to pay union dues to pay for the union to back Bishop and Obama? If their dues were limited to collective bargaining, perhaps employers could afford more call center jobs in the US. Tell Obama we need to slash the corporate tax rate so that companies do not save billions of dollars by locating operations in overseas countries with lower tax rates and then trap those profits overseas so they can’t be brought back to create jobs here.

But that may be too much to ask of Mr. Bishop before November. So here’s a better idea. Step down, and let someone who has actually created jobs take your place.

That’s my opinion; I’d like to know yours. Please comment below.