Obama Rating Spike Par For Course

At times the only thing that surprises me is the incoherent gullibility of many in the conservative and moderate movement.  Either that or some liberals that were polled have found some renewed faith in the promised one.

Consider though a couple of stats from the latest poll outside of the 53% approval rating:

• Only 45% approve of his handling of the economy.  Some states hit 18% unemployment this week.
• 56% believe the country is on the wrong track.
• 71% believe that we will have to eventually give up on Afghanistan.

And here are two that are off the charts bizarre:

• 40% polled believe Obama is a moderate.
• 11% polled believe Obama is a conservative.

Seriously, who are these people being polled and what cave do they live in that still have telephone service in which to be selected for polling?  Bare in mind that 3 years ago 55% considered Obama a liberal and at current after selling out Europe’s missile defense to Russia, spending more money in 2 years than Bush did in 6, pushing through a health care bill, backing FCC regulatory control over the Internet, and attempting to push through a massive global warming based energy policy, only 45% consider him liberal.  Explain that one…

So why does Obama suddenly come of as a moderate and receive a bump in approval rating?  My personal guess is that he received a slight resurgence in faith from liberals by way of the missile treaty and allowing gays in the military to be more forthright in their *cough* preferences.  Additionally, he’s probably re-captured some moderates and confused conservatives via his opinion editorial in the Wall Street Journal that came across as pro-business to some.  And you’re welcome to disagree with me, but personally I felt that the Tucson memorial speech was simply another ra-ra campaign speech, which would certainly be seen as favorable by some.

In the end, Obama is a brilliant man, and he puts intelligent people around him.  Everything he is doing to appear to be having a change of heart and open arms toward conservatives and the Republican Party is fake.  And furthermore, it is strategically designed to appear that way.  The reasoning is simple:

1. It makes him look generally more favorable and increases his poll percentages (which obviously is the reason this is being written).
2. If he makes nice then it increases the chance of conservative members of Congress letting down their guard and voting in favor of Obama goals oriented legislation in the future which is a win for his administration.
3. He wins (for the most part) in any case.  If Reps ignore his gestures of working together and finding middle ground, then he bashes the GOP in the next presidential election for working against him.  If Reps work with him, then he uses that to his advantage during the next election and says that the GOP was not really doing anything different.

This is simply par for the course with Obama.  Don’t let the rug get pulled out from under you.

The Party of Oh… Crap

I am a Cowboys fan… Dallas Cowboys.  Let me give you a quick synopsis of what that meant this past year:

Dallas Cowboys start season as Super Bowl contenders, and Jerry Jones hints constantly at looking forward to the Cowboys playing in the Super Bowl at the brand new Texas Stadium (which, of course, is bigger than YOUR stadium).

Dallas Cowboys go 0-2… win 1 game, then lose the next 5.

1-7 for the team that had high hopes.  Many wept, Redskins fans rejoiced; we crumbled.

HOWEVER,

I now get to see what it felt like to be a Skins fan, and watch your rivals crumble under the weight of their own egos and expectations (Well, I got to twice, when the University of Texas precipitously fell to the bottom of the Big 12 South; below Baylor!).  Did anyone pay attention to the events of tonight on Capitol Hill?

I am watching the Democratic Party collapse tonight.  I’m popping popcorn, drinking a Shiner, and laughing at what I am hearing and reading.  Democrats were short of the 60 votes they needed to try and pass the DREAM Act in the Senate, so they shelved it.  Bear in mind, it is being placed on hold temporarily because the democrats have before the end of the year to try and legislate themselves some-million votes nation-wide.  Nevertheless, a victory for Republicans.  Next, Democrats failed to get the 60 votes needed for a procedural motion on the 2011 Defense Authorization Bill, which included the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell provision.  Since that failed, Senators have promised to re-introduce a free-standing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell bill on the floor; but this is not exactly a morale booster for Senate Democrats today.  Finally, Democrats are none-too-pleased with the President and his reaching across the aisle on the issue of tax cuts.  How mad could they be?  Well, Rep. Shelley Berkley acknowledged that someone in the Democratic Caucus hissed “F*** the President” as they debated the bill.  As Ron White says: there’s some good news.  The outcome is that the Democratic Caucus came out and announced their stance on the bill, which follows what was said inside the caucus in the end.

Democrats seemed poised to enter into the wilderness as they relinquish control of the House.  Perhaps Sam Tannenhaus will write a book about the death of legislative liberalism?  But for right now, kick back and enjoy the new “Best Show on Earth,” because in two years, that might be us again…

-rj

Free Press Under-Reported Lobbying Expenses

Really great article over at Daily Caller on the discovery that Free Press under-reported lobbying expenses for lobbying Congress, the FCC, and NTIA.  This is primarily a big deal because Free Press blatantly attacks the right on a daily basis on the grounds of transparency but routinely fails to open up about who is funding them along with much of their activities.

If you aren’t familiar with Free Press, you best get up to speed.  The organization is a socialist playground started by Robert McChesney, a hard core socialist, who famously stated in the socialist magazine Monthly Review,

“…gains will only be made through an enormous class struggle from below. If won, they will not, we underscore, eliminate the evils of capitalism, or the dangers it poses for the world and its people. In the end, there is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles. This is something that the great majority of the population will undoubtedly learn in the course of their struggles for a more equal, more humane, more collective, and more sustainable world.”

So if you aren’t familiar with Free Press or their activities, I greatly encourage you to start watch dogging them, and the post on Daily Caller is a good start.

UPDATE: More on the issue from Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.

-nick

The Facts About Social Security (Update- Transcript Added)

I was recently able to interview James Agresti, the founder of JustFacts.com, about the dark future facing Social Security.

The audio can be heard here. The transcript is forthcoming, and will be up ASAP.

*Originally published at The Daily Caller.

A Bad Idea for Financial Reform

[Editor's Note: The following piece is contributed by David Weinberger.  David is a prominent blogger and works for a leading think tank in Washington, D.C.]

In 1933, Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act to separate investment and commercial banking, the combination of which was one of the culprits behind the 1929 stock market crash. However, included in the act was a provision to forbid banks from certain financial activities, which increased, rather than decreased, financial risk. Finally repealed in 1999, its reincarnation is creeping back through Senator Chris Dodd’s (D-CT) Financial Reform Bill: the Volcker rule.

The Volcker rule, named after former Reagan Administration Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, has damaging unintended consequences. If passed, it will leave many of the problems from the most recent financial crisis unaddressed.

The Volcker rule would effectively forbid any bank or other institution with FDIC-insured deposits from undertaking any proprietary trading. In other words, it would prohibit banks from trading strictly for their self interest; instead it would attempt to allow only trading that directly involves customers.

The question is how does a regulatory commission determine whether banks are trading specifically for their own self-interest or trading on behalf of a customer? To do so would require exceedingly stringent regulation that would hamper economic growth. For example, banks invest to provide supplemental liquidity, which enables them to provide more loans to customers. In order to determine whether or not a bank is directly involving a customer when investing this liquidity would require regulation on virtually every transaction. Regulating every transaction not only slows the number of loans given to customers – impeding overall investment and spending in the economy – but it also diminishes banks’ ability to grow. If it becomes harder for a bank to grow it becomes harder for a consumer to obtain a loan.

Further, banks fund large investments, both for themselves and for consumers, which grow the economy. If the Volcker rule were to become law, it would constrict their ability to do so, and would make it harder for them to compete with major foreign banks that have no such restrictions.

Consequently, over-enforcement will cause banks to earn less, depressing the amount of money available for consumers to borrow. Likewise, under-enforcement will prove meaningless, resulting in more bureaucratic waste at taxpayers’ expense. So given the difficulty of appropriate enforcement, why is the Volcker rule being considered?

The answer is because Congress has misdiagnosed the problem. Congress, in an attempt to implement the Volcker rule, has misconstrued the financial crisis by blaming “greedy banks.” However, just as in 1933, legislation that misdiagnoses the problem will not help prevent another crisis.

The Volcker rule ignores one critically important fact: The 2008 financial crisis did not have to do with banks engaging in risky proprietary trading. Instead, it had to do in large part with non-bank financial institutions that bought mortgages and re-packaged them as securities. These mortgages were then sold off to investors, while rating agencies were paid to rate them AAA even though they weren’t.

As David John of The Heritage Foundation notes, “Both Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the failures of which signaled the 2008 crisis, were significantly smaller than many other financial institutions, and neither they nor AIG was a bank”

Rather, the mortgage-backed securities those institutions dealt were so interconnected in the financial sector that they threatened the entire system, including commercial banks. Default by financial institutions would have caused other institutions to collapse, whose losses would have severely jeopardized the banking industry. Even if the Volcker rule were already in place it would not have prevented the collapse of these institutions nor would it have prevented the crisis altogether. It fails to address the interconnectedness of our financial industry and doesn’t adequately address liquidity standards.

Congress should be addressing new rules in bankruptcy law as well as increasing capital and liquidity standards to help prevent this crisis from happening again. The proposed legislation addresses neither. At the expense of economic prosperity it encourages future taxpayer bailouts. Smart regulation is a good idea, but the wrong regulation will lead to unintended results.

-david

Greece-ing the Skids Toward Dependency

On my drive from work, I was listening to a snippet of NPR where they were discussing the current economic apocalypse in Greece that Glenn Beck warned in his CPAC speech would occur here.  There have been riots in the streets as the Greek government desperately seeks to find ways of ameliorating their budgetary boondoggle.  They are of course frustrated by a plethora of failings and attempted fixes as reported by The Globe and Mail:

Greece will need to cut spending – by 10 per cent of GDP over 10 years – while raising revenue and cracking down on its untaxed black-market economy, which counts for as much as a third of all financial activity in the country. This combination could provoke further unrest, and may foretell similar tensions in Italy and Portugal.

If Greece’s crisis and accompanying political unrest were an isolated case, it might be more manageable, but this week the turmoil seemed to spread across the belly of Europe.

On Tuesday, Spain’s cities were shut down by unionized workers protesting its left-wing government’s plan to raise the retirement age to 67 and cut spending in order to deal with its own serious fiscal situation.

Spain has debt of 54 per cent of GDP and a deficit of more than 11 per cent, plus unemployment levels that approach 20 per cent and a housing-market collapse.

 

What struck me during the NPR report was their emphasis on the retirement age being raised while benefits are to head in the opposite direction in Greece; and at the same time, the story according to The Globe and Mail is that Greece is going to be taking similar steps.  

Riots are occurring in the streets because the government is controlling the retirement benefits of the citizenry.  Scary.

I was listening to the February 23^rd edition of Mark Levin (I do the free podcast a day later while I run, God bless him for making his show free and available) where he talked about being at the mercy of the government.  As these people in Europe see themselves: at the mercy of their government.  “Please sir, can I have some more?”  Where is the dignity and the honor?  I work in a place where I see the day to day sufferings of people who find themselves dependent on a government that only knows of their existence based on a number in a database.  Is this what we want?  To have to go to the government, to Social Security, to your Congress-persons’ offices, to Medicare, and beg for money to exist? 

Tocqueville once lamented about the coming age of rational control.  We look at a leviathan to take away the “pain of thinking” and the “agony of living” as Dr. Mansfield once recounted.  What needs to be explained to people, is that a dependency on government does nothing of the sort!  The people dependent on government might have purged the “pain of thinking” from their lives, but they continue to live in agony as their life is no longer at the will of him or her self or even Providence, but of boards, panels and case workers… How long after Health Care gets passed (should we be so unfortunate) before we are rioting in the streets because we have found ourselves in government bondage? 

-rj

Let’s Look At The Real Issues Facing The Country

Peggy Noonan writes a truly fantastic column in today’s Wall Street Journal. Some of the best bits are below:

The American version [[DS: of Britain's Question Time] might not translate so well. The Brits have a certain tradition of elegance in debate, and enjoy insulting each other. American politicians are more conflicted about obvious aggression, not about feeling it but showing it—it might not play well!—and so they tend to go under or over the line. “You lie!” “Yeah? Well you’re blankin’ developmentally challenged!” We will miss Fritz Hollings, the former Democratic senator who once said to then-Sen. John Glenn, in a presidential primary debate, “But what have you done in the world?”

If an American version could take place regularly, outside Congress and on neutral territory, as the gangs say in “West Side Story,” there could be benefits. It would momentarily force members and the president to focus together on what’s actually happening this week, and, more important, it might force members of Congress to be more familiar with the bills they support. They might actually have to know what’s in them and show a grasp of details. This might tend to produce fewer omnibus bills. “You expect me to know and talk about what’s in that? It’s 2,000 pages! Cut it down to 20 and give it a new name.”

Both our political parties continue, even though they know they shouldn’t, even though they’re each composed of individuals many of whom actually know what time it is, even though they know we are in an extraordinary if extended moment, an ongoing calamity connected to our economic future, our nation’s standing in the world, our strength and our safety—even though they know all this, they continue to go through the daily motions, fund raising, vote counting, making ads with demon sheep, blasting out the latest gaffe of the other team. Our political professionals cheapen everything they touch because they are burying themselves in daily urgencies in order to dodge and avoid the big picture.

America doesn’t need to be told that something bad will happen. America needs to be told what is being done, what will be done and what can be done, how together we’ll get through it, what information and attitude to take into the future. They don’t need to be made anxious, they need to be recruited into a common endeavor.

Instead both parties, understandably and yet wickedly, destructively, irresponsibly, use the nation’s safety as another issue on which to protect their political position.

But the tendency of both parties to default to politics when they think about terrorism—”You’re weak,” “No, you’re bellicose,” “You’re avoiding reality to advance some dreamy geopolitical vision,” “You’re exploiting reality to make cheap points”—cannot be heartening to the public.

The biggest historic gain of this administration may turn out to be that Democrats in the White House experienced leadership in the age of terror, came to have responsibility in a struggle that needs and will need our focus. It wasn’t good that half the country thought jihadism was some little Republican obsession.

But both parties should sober up. The day after the next bad thing, we will all come together, because that is what we do. Republicans and Democrats will work together, for a while.

It would be better to do it now. It is their job to do it now.

My uncle, a Chief of Staff on Capitol Hill, and I were talking about the state of political affairs in this country on Monday, and he pointed out how between an increasingly polarized media and an increasingly polarized political situation in Washington, DC, it is hard to work on the major issues. These issues include but are not limited to Social Security, Medicare, health care, energy and national security. Related to this point, Noonan said:

I think sometimes of the suburbs around Washington, which are planted thick with knowledgable veterans of government—old national-security and foreign-policy hands, patriots of both parties who’ve served within government, in and out of the military. How painful it must be for them to watch all this, knowing what they know and understanding that political party, at a time like this, means nothing. There is so much experience to share, and so much wisdom, from both parties. I wish those old hands had more say.

As I said above, this column is truly excellent. That said, Noonan does miss two key points that my libertarian friend Jon O’Neill pointed out. His first point was that the real issue at hand is that our officials are not following the Constitution. Secondly, we let ourselves be satisfied that the same officials who failed us on 9/11 (I would add that government officials also failed us regarding the economic crash in 2008 and America’s fiscal crisis) will take good care of us and our loved ones. To paraphrase Jon, this is folly.

I think Jon has hit the nail on the head- however, Noonan’s points are still very well-taken. Americans tend to ask “what,” which is important. But it is just as important is to ask “why” and “how.” Without these two, knowing the “what” of any situation is very, very limited.

Republicans Are Focused On The Wrong Target

President Obama’s budget is massive, full of debt and, according to USA TODAY, “…did not propose any major savings in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, the three entitlement programs that consume nearly 40% of federal spending. By 2020, they’ll eat up 46%.” However, Republicans should not concentrate their fire on the president. Congress holds the purse strings to the federal government, and while Obama is an easy target for both Members of Congress and activist groups to go after, it is Congress that will decide what gets spent, and how it gets spent. Going after the president certainly feels good…but it won’t do the job of holding down federal spending. Only going after Congress will do that.

The Heritage Foundation Bloggers Briefing

Rob Bluey, The Director of Online Strategy for The Heritage Foundation, was kind enough to invite me to the weekly Bloggers Briefing held at The Heritage Foundation every Tuesday. Today’s speaker was Representative Mike Pence (R-IN), a leading conservative in the House and the first Member of Congress to have a blog, which can be seen here.

Below are my takes from the event:

1. I met a number of interesting people, including Dan Kotman, Press Secretary for American Solutions and Steve Johnston, Associate Director of New Media for the office of the Republican Whip. I also met bloggers from Think Progress and RedState, and managed to give my card for www.thelobbyist.net to all of these people.

2. Pence spoke and, as always, was excellent (this is the third time since October I have heard him speak in person). He turned down the opportunity to run for the Senate this year, and he said it was because he wanted to lead a “conservative majority” in retaking the House in 2010. When asked if he wanted to run for President in 2012, Pence said of course he did (as he said, “Isn’t that the American Dream?), but that it would depend on the time and circumstances. He also said he was staying because he felt it was his “duty.”

3. The Think Progress blogger- a very brave young man, showing his face and speaking up, I might add- asked Pence about the Citizens United vs. FEC decision by the Supreme Court last week. In short, Pence made two points: first, that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech” means just that. Secondly, he said he agreed with the great conservative writer George Will, in that transparency was the issue at hand, not who can and cannot have freedom of speech. He said he would have no problem with a requirement that all Members of Congress should have to put received funds on their websites at the end of every day.

One thing Pence avoided answering by sticking to the transparency and freedom arguments was the Think Progress blogger’s second question, which was what did Pence think of the ramifications of the SCOTUS decision regarding international funding of campaigns. Pence made reference to the Democrats having to pay back such funding in the 1990s, said foreign funds should not have influence on our elections…and then never really answered the question any further.

4. I managed to put a plug in for www.rightosphere.com. A CATO blogger sitting next to me immediately began asking me about www.Race42012.com, which he said he enjoyed reading.

5. I asked Pence two questions. The first was would he prefer a Republican majority in the House or a conservative majority? He stated that he believed the new conservative majority would be made up of a new generation of leadership in Washington, DC, but never answered the real question I had, which was the difference between conservatives and Republicans.

The second question was what would a new conservative majority in 2011 push for their first step in transparency. While he never directly answered the question, he did reference negotiating bills in front of the public and a couple of other basic points that are slipping my mind at the moment.

6. Four excellent quotes from Pence:

A. On the expected move by President Obama to try to freeze billions of dollars over three years: “I never met a spending freeze I didn’t like.” Pence was also asked when he had first heard about this freeze proposal, and said it was in December, when Republicans recommended it to President Obama at a jobs summit. 

B. “Any gesture at fiscal sanity would be welcome.” Pence said , however, that Republicans would compare that proposed freeze to the laundry list of expected spending programs in tomorrow’s State of the Union speech. 

C. “This isn’t anymore about debates about actuarial perfection – this is about what kind of country we are.” Possibly the best quote of his 50-minute presentation (including Q & A). Pence made the point that the bailout in 2008, the stimulus from 2009, the takeover of the private industry etc. by the government was about who we are as a country regarding the role and size of government, as well as regarding personal responsibility. Regarding the latter, Pence was almost entirely directing his comments at Wall Street.

D. Paraphrased: “Two things have happened [since I came to Washington in 2000]. My opinion of national government has gone down and my opinion of the American people has gone up.”

*Originally posted at THE LOBBYIST.

New Hampshire Democrat Is Sexist?

Why isn’t this major news? A female Democrat insults all male Members of Congress and a giant yawn ensues by the American media (raucous applause broke out in the actual speech, which can be seen at the link above).

Beyond the general stupidity of  what Rep. Carol Shea-Porter (D-NH) said about men, it is a bad strategy in what will be a tough, possibly unwinnable, election. Added to how she acted last year towards her constituents, this strikes me as an unwise strategy in a re-election year she will probably lose.

Fortunately, some blogs and news sources are on the ball, and so Shea-Porter won’t completely get away with it. Here’s hoping she keeps sticking her foot in, so the Republicans can take her seat come November.

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