It’s no secret that I don’t like Eugene Robinson. He’s an opinion writer for the Washington Post who never analyzes his opinions. Robinson is a simple liberal with simple arguments. The rich should be taxed more simply because the government needs more revenue. It’s maddening how shallow liberals are about politics and economics. They’re like sports fans. You can’t convince someone not to be a Red Sox fan.
Today Eugene Robinson is all over Herman Cain. It’s great day to do it. Politico ran a story today about alleged sexual harassment. It’s the type of story you would never see on a Democrat running for president, but since Cain is a black man running for the GOP nomination, and one of the front runners to boot, all bets are off.
Cain’s policy positions range from the ignorant to the unworkable to the just plain goofy — and yet he is running first or second in most polls for the Republican presidential nomination. He trumpets his utter lack of government experience as a selling point and boasts of not knowing foreign leaders’ names. If through some bizarre series of events he were actually elected president, the result would surely be an unmitigated disaster.
Hmm, if a vastly unqualifed person was elected president “the result would surely be an unmitigated disaster.” Eugene Robinson just explained why electing Barack Obama in 2008 was such a bad idea. Robinson hasn’t thought that far ahead (or behind for that matter). Robinson characterizes Cain’s ideas as “ignorant,” “unworkable,” and “just plain goofy.” This is coming from someone who supported ObamaCare and the President’s stimulus bill. Robinson is an expert at supporting inexperienced candidates and unworkable legislation. I guess Cain’s ideas are horrible simply because Robinson believes there are. Amazing!
The greatest causality in the information age is rational thinking. Paul Krugman gets a pass for his hypocritical ravings because he won a Nobel prize in economics for his work in new trade theory. Apparently winning the prize 30 years ago means he can say whatever he wants, and we’re supposed to believe its gospel. I’m not sure why we’re supposed to take Eugene Robinson seriously, but sadly too many people read his crap and think it’s logical.
Last night’s Bloomberg/Washington Post GOP debate was painful. I doubt the debate changes anything, mostly because no one watched it. Bloomberg isn’t a big network. The moderators were terrible and the questions equally as terrible. I really can’t believe I sat through it all. I won’t be able to watch next week’s debate in Las Vegas, but after this I’m thankful.
After four debates with Rick Perry I’m not sure what else can change. Rick Santorum apparently works for Mitt Romney’s campaign. In the candidate question session Santorum directed his question toward Herman Cain and not the current frontrunner. Without a doubt Mitt Romney is the best politician in the race. He almost never answers a question directly. Ask him why his capital gains tax is more liberal than President Obama and he says he doesn’t believe in taxing the middle class. Ask him what he’d do if there was another economic downturn and he says he doesn’t answer hypothetical questions.
The biggest revelation is the fact that Mitt Romney and Herman Cain both think TARP was a good idea. They spin this endorsement by stating that the funds weren’t administered correctly. The hole in this argument is that when that much money is thrown around it’s never administered efficiently. That’s the reason it’s a bad idea. The reason Romney and Cain don’t want to answer a hypothetical question is because they’d do the same thing again. Hop on board the Tea Party Express!
As for Rick Perry, he was a non-entity. It reminded me of Michele Bachmann in the first debate after Perry jumped in the race. Like Bachmann was before, Perry was almost forgotten. Apparently he has a plan coming in a few days regarding energy and a balanced budget amendment. The question is whether he’s capable of communicating it. Last night he wanted to bring up energy every time he was asked a question.
If Rick Perry doesn’t make some headway in the next debate it’s going to be very difficult for his candidacy to go anywhere. Will the Tea Party abandon Herman Cain when they learn he’s a former member of the Federal Reserve who believes that TARP was a good idea and that he wants to bring back Alan Greenspan? Or, is the idea of a Romney administration enough to keep building momentum?
The Governor of North Carolina vetoed a law today that would require identification at the polls. Democrats believe that requiring citizens to identify themselves to vote would lead to voter disenfranchisement. Liberals insist that voter fraud is rare so legislation of this kind isn’t necessary. This is news to me because for a decade all we’ve heard from the left is paranoia about voter fraud. In a Washington Post op-ed earlier this week E.J. Dionne Jr. went even further by claiming that “states are rigging the 2012 election.”
Dionne and other liberals are basing their new found faith in fair elections on a book by ACORN sympathizer Lori Minnite. Minnite has consulted with various liberal labor, advocacy, and governmental organizations, and political campaigns. This is how the liberal narrative works. Find some leftist person at Columbia to write a book and cite the person indefinitely as a non-partisan expert.
Justin Levitt is another “expert” the left cites as a source. Levitte served as in-house counsel to America Coming Together, a group funded by George Soros and labor unions. Isn’t it amazing that Democrats win an election in 2006 and 2008 and suddenly voter fraud isn’t a problem? There are tons of stories from the past ten years about voter fraud that originates from the left.
Also, isn’t it racist to assume that forcing citizens to identify themselves at the polls is going to affect minorities disproportionately? The blog Ancient and Noble Order of Gormogons makes a good point that this type of thinking is “demeaning, and starts from the premise that minorities are simple and childlike.” Why do liberals assume that minorities don’t have identification? Having some kind of identification is a requirement for almost any major service. Trying to associate ID laws to Jim Crow isn’t just dumb, it’s offensive to any rational person, and especially to minorities.
Voter fraud is a problem. It’s been a problem forever. The only reason Democrats oppose poll identification is because they’re the party of voter fraud. If you’re dead, a felon, or an illegal immigrant you’re not supposed to vote. However, all three groups have historically voted illegally for Democrats. Vote early and often. If anyone questions it, call them racists. That’s the left’s modus operandi.
During the Bush administration the common mainstream media meme was that Bush was conservative extremist. The claim always puzzled me because what exactly did Bush do to champion conservative principles? His fiscal record wasn’t conservative. He created new bureaucracies, and his immigration ideas were closer to amnesty than it was to law enforcement. I knew after he left office it wouldn’t be long before members of the press “longed for the good old days of Bush.”
In the early ’90s President George H.W. Bush (41) was another evil republican. Since he lost to Clinton he’s become a statesman and a voice of reason. If there’s no chance you’ll be president then and only then do liberals respect what you have to say. After watching the latest GOP debate, E.J. Dionne Jr. writes a Washington Post opinion piece blabbering on about Bush nostalgia.
That’s why I felt nostalgia for Bush, especially the guy who was a candidate for president in 2000. Unlike this crowd of Republicans, Bush acknowledged that the federal government can ease injustices and get useful things done.
Say what you will about his No Child Left Behind education-reform program. It accepted, correctly, that the federal government has to play an important part in reforming our public schools and held them accountable to a set of standards. To get it passed, Bush worked with two of the most progressive Democrats in Congress, the late Edward M. Kennedy and Rep. George Miller of California. The reform now needs to be reformed, of course, but it was a serious initiative.
And while there are many problems with the way Bush chose to provide prescription drugs under Medicare, he was quite right to believe it had to be done. Any health insurance plan worthy of being called comprehensive needs to provide prescription coverage. Bush didn’t pay for this benefit, and its structure is more complicated and more expensive than it has to be. But Bush did address a real need.
There is is… it’s okay to pass bad legislation as long as it’s a “serious initiative.” This type of thinking is dangerous and it’s stupid. Liberals don’t care if bad legislation is passed because the government can always reform it later. It’s perceptual reform because history teaches that the strong arm of the government never makes things better with more bureaucracy. This nonsense is why Republicans should quit trying to appease the left. It’s a pointless exercise.
What did President Bush accomplish by reaching out to Ted Kennedy? What did he accomplish by creating a prescription drug entitlement? What good came from the massive spending increase in education? The liberals didn’t care, but the nation is going bankrupt because we can’t afford all their “serious initiatives.” E.J. Dionne Jr. is nostalgic because he hates conservatives.
Trying to appease liberals’ Utopian sensibilities is a recipe for economic disaster. In fact, that’s we have right now. Liberals still fail to understand our fiscal situation. They just blame it on the war and tax cuts. Until they get the message there’s a real opportunity for a conservative change in this country. It’s not going to be easy but the liberal status quo and denial are the path to ruin. If the nation elects a new leader that E.J. Dionne Jr. thinks is sensible then we’ve missed a golden opportunity.
There are rumors in the wind that Texas Governor Rick Perry might run for president. Perry would be a high profile candidate and I’m actually a little surprised he hasn’t announced already. Texas is one of the few states that created jobs recently. Perry’s executive record is far superior to Obama’s and the philosophies couldn’t be any different.
I assume he’d be a good candidate just because the left already hates the guy. Just look at the picture the Washington Post used in an article discussing his possible bid for the White House.
I laughed out loud when I saw this for the first time. I can just hear the editors of the Washington Post screaming at interns to find the “evil Hitler” picture of Governor Perry. I can’t even imagine the Washington Post running a similar picture of President Obama. We’ve had four years of award winning photography of Obama. If Governor Perry wants to run for president he’d better be prepared for much worse.
If President Obama loses his bid for reelection next year it will be because of the poor economy. If the election was this November he would be toast, but there’s still a year to go. I don’t expect much to change in the next year, but some positive movement would help Obama’s chances. To get an idea of how bad Obama’s prospects for reelection are just check out this Washington Post poll.
New Post-ABC numbers show Obama leading five of six potential Republican presidential rivals tested in the poll. But he is in a dead heat with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who formally announced his 2012 candidacy last week, making jobs and the economy the central issues in his campaign.
Among all Americans, Obama and Romney are knotted at 47 percent each, and among registered voters, the former governor is numerically ahead, 49 percent to 46 percent.
Romney is up 3 points in survey of registered voters? Ouch! That means a poll of likely voters would be even worse for Obama. Imagine of Obama was up against a candidate that people actually liked? I know, I know, that may never happen, but one can dream.
It’s still a long way out, but Obama needs a lot to go right between now and November 2012. People said the same thing in June, 2007 and he became president. Last year the economy was showing signs of recovery and it really hasn’t happened yet. The President really can’t do much to jump start things at this point. Plus, all the pointless “stimulus” spending has only masked the problems. There’s an even a chance things could be worse next year. If that happens, Obama could face electoral disaster. Time will tell.
The United States Constitution is a wonderful document. Part of the reason it’s been so successful over the past two centuries is because it’s easy to understand. Well, it’s easy for some people. On the left it’s a little more difficult to understand because they want the Constitution to mean different things. The right to privacy is a great example. Another good example is the Establishment Clause, which the left still doesn’t understand and continues to refer to as the “separation of church and state,” though it clearly does not say that.
Ezra Klein took to the Washington Post today to do what every good liberal does… call Republicans stupid.
In reality, the tea party — like most everyone else — is less interested in living by the Constitution than in deciding what it means to live by the Constitution. When the constitutional disclaimers at the bottom of bills suit them, they’ll respect them. When they don’t — as we’ve seen in the case of the individual mandate — they won’t.
This is part of Klein’s reaction to the future of ObamaCare. Wouldn’t his time be better spent discussing how the President of the United States sold his bill. While Obama was trying to pass his colossal Heath Care overhaul he took to the airwaves and said that the mandate wasn’t a tax. Now that the mandate is tied up in courts for Constitutional reasons, the Obama administration is arguing that the mandate is a tax. The President and his cronies are hypocrites of the highest order, but all Klein can whine about is the confusing Constitution. He also took his cringe-inducing argument to the echo chamber over at MSNBC. The Right Scoop has all the details, but here’s an excerpt of what Klein had to say on MSNBC:
The issue with the Constitution is not that people don’t read the text and think they’re following it. The issue with the Constitution is that the text is confusing because it was written more than a hundred years ago.
This issue here isn’t that the right is stupid; it’s that the left doesn’t get it. The Constitution is a protection from the government. The Constitution wasn’t created to be a Toys R’ Us of guaranteed benefits (I don’t want to grow up, etc., etc.). Free speech is a right that was given to us by our Creator, not by some bureaucrat. Having a place to eat and sleep is important as well, but those are the responsibilities of the people, not the state. What we have now is a government that increasingly takes care of everything. That’s not in the Constitution, and the left wants to blame stupid Republicans and the Constitution for being too old.
There was a darn good reason the Founders didn’t want the state to take care of every one of life’s inconveniences. Their wisdom about the dangers of an ever-growing and intrusive centralized federal government, clearly communicated in the Constitution, are being borne out in places like Greece and California.
One of the fascinating aspects about the whole Global Warming debate is the fact that no one talks about adapting to change. The alarmists never tell anyone that, according to their models, the entire world would have to return to a pre-industrial stone age to un-change the climate.
How come progressives who believe wholeheartedly in evolution and adaptation don’t believe mankind can adapt to climate change? Have the earth’s species adapted to a constantly changing climate in past eras? Or, was that whole adaptation thing an illusion? Bjorn Lomborg has an op-ed in the Washington Post that discusses some common sense ideas to reduce the urban heat effect and how mankind has adapted to change in the past.
Since 1930, excessive groundwater withdrawal has caused Tokyo to subside by as much as 15 feet. Similar subsidence has occurred over the past century in numerous cities, including Tianjin, Shanghai, Osaka, Bangkok and Jakarta. And in each case, the city has managed to protect itself from such large relative sea-level rises without much difficulty.
The process is called adaptation, and it’s something we humans are very good at. That isn’t surprising, since we’ve been doing it for millennia.
Lomborg’s argument is reasonable, but no one in the Global Warmongering industry is interested in common sense reforms. The billion-dollar industry is all about taxing and controlling the public. That’s what the state wants and that’s the inevitable conclusion of every leftist organization. It’s also the goal of fascism, socialism, Islamic fundamentalism and any other ism that has produced great human suffering.
I predicted yesterday that progressives would blame the evil insurance companies for the end of child-only health insurance. Thanks to the Washington Post, blaming insurance companies just got easier. The article entitled, “Major health insurers to stop offering new child-only policies” spends eight paragraphs piling on the outrage.
“We’re just days away from a new era when insurance companies must stop denying coverage to kids just because they are sick, and now some of the biggest changed their minds,” Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for America Now, an advocacy group, said in a statement. “[It] is immoral, and to blame their appalling behavior on the new law is patently dishonest.”
This is how progressives roll. It’s patently dishonest to force companies to lose money. The rank stupidity of Ethan Rome is infuriating. The Washington Post spends most of the article reinforcing the liberal line on ObamaCare before throwing this bone:
Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for AHIP, noted that insurers will be accepting children with preexisting conditions in other types of plans.
But, he said, extending such coverage in child-only policies “provides a very powerful incentive for a parent to wait until their child becomes very sick before purchasing coverage.”
It appears that basic economics and phrases like “powerful incentive” are way over the head of progressives. It’s appalling that the press just can’t report this issue in an informed manner. Insurance companies are in business to make money. They’re not providing charity. If liberals are so concerned about this problem they should contribute to their own fund to pay for it themselves.
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