“It’s one thing about the money. We’d be willing to negotiate the money. [But] he’s trying to take away our human rights.” So says Laurie Bauer, a 51 year old library media specialist in Wisconsin, speaking about the governor’s effort to introduce budget cutting reforms to public sector unions. Really? You want to make this about human rights while simultaneously arguing against right-to-work laws? Wisconsin | Read More »
Anti-business Obama is back in business. There for a while it looked like President Obama was actually going to make friends with America’s businesses. In December he met a group of 20 chief executives, the latest in a series of meetings designed to thaw the icy relations between the White House and business leaders. At the end of the meetings Obama said, “I feel very | Read More »
Warning: Doom and gloom ahead. Following the State of the Union, Slate writer John Dickerson made an interesting observation about President Obama’s mood. President Obama has been more upbeat in 2011 than he said he was going to be. Last year he promised America a tough conversation about cutting the deficit. “If we are concerned about debt and deficits, then we’re going to have to | Read More »
The Democrats’ cynical gamble now looks about as smart as betting on Pittsburgh in the Super Bowl. The gamble was despite voters saying they want to reduce the deficit, when push comes to shove they will vote out the politicians who made the cuts. Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent explained the rationale in a recent post , Don’t look now, but there are increasing signs | Read More »
Democrats love to paint the picture of Republicans cozying up to lobbyists. Their always either eating lunch in some impossibly upscale place where average folk couldn’t even sniff a reservation, or in some dark, smoke filled, bar smoking cigars and sipping Scotch, their pinky finger stuck out for good measure. The story goes, Republicans are in it for the money, Democrats are the ones left | Read More »
The U.S. Senate voted on Wednesday to get rid of a small part of the Obamacare bill. The eliminated provision was a requirement that all businesses submit a 1099 tax form on all purchases of goods and services of more than $600. It was designed to ensure that businesses actually keep up with and pay the taxes they owe. Your probably asking what the heck | Read More »
Judge Vinson just placed himself in the upper echelons of liberal’s shit list. Apparently liberal ideologues just can’t imagine that anyone could find a flaw in their greatest of achievements – Obamacare. “There’s something thoroughly odd and unconventional about the analysis,” said one White House official. Really? The best critique you can come up with is “odd” and “unconventional”? This guy is clearly a legal | Read More »
High speed rail can travel up to 160 miles per hour. Pretty darn fast. The only downside is, it wastes taxpayer money almost as quickly. The budgetary history of government rail projects is an ugly one. In fact, after some cursory research, I could not find one single high speed rail project in the world that didn’t receive an enormous government subsidy. Not one! Japan | Read More »
We’re in deep trouble. There is simply no other conclusion you can take away from yesterday’s CBO Report. In their “Budget and Economic Outlook,” the CBO said that the 2011 deficit will hit $1.48 trillion – nearly 40% higher than estimates the CBO made earlier in the year. That’s even larger than the $1.41 trillion deficit we racked up in 2009. It also represents the | Read More »
In last night’s State of the Union, president Obama took a page out of the Republican playbook. Obama said , “If a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it.” Seems straightforward enough. In fact, it is something that Congressional Republicans have been doing since March. As then-Whip Eric Cantor wrote in an op-ed last October, “House Republicans took an unprecedented | Read More »
Conservatives have spent much of the past week trying to explain exactly why Obamacare is going to bust the budget. We’ve done our best to highlight the unrealistic assumptions , the budgetary gimmicks , and the downright dirty tricks contained in the bill that make it a sur But Democrats dogmatically kept pointing to the CBO report, conveniently ignoring Republicans critique of that very score. | Read More »
If you read yesterday’s New York Time’s expose on Obama’s economic policy, first off, congratulations on making it through because that thing was longer than the healthcare bill; and second, did you come away feeling like you had just read Soap Opera Digest than the Old Grey Lady? Good grief. It was seven pages of gossip – not exactly what I’d expected out of the | Read More »
Democrats are apparently itching to get back into the healthcare fight. Politico reported today, “We welcome, in a certain sense, their attempt to repeal it because it gives us a second chance to make a first impression,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He said the debate will allow Democrats to talk about “the good things that didn’t get a | Read More »
President Obama will soon give his second “State of the Union” speech. Countless newly elected governors have given their “State of the State” addresses. Yesterday the Chamber of Commerce gave their lesser known, but no less important, “State of American Business in 2011.” Shedding the somber economic mood that has haunted America’s business landscape for much of the past three years, Chamber President Tom Donohue | Read More »
“The real tension [in the debt limit debate] won’t be between Republicans and Democrats. It’ll be between Republicans and Republicans.” That was the prescient prediction of Stan Collender, a former staffer for the House and Senate Budget committees and founder of the blog Capital Gains and Games. Indeed, an intra-party debate is already forming about the wisdom of once-again raising the debt limit. It is | Read More »
Representative Steve Israel (D-NY) and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has set his goal for the next election cycle: make Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House…again. Apparently Israel missed the recent Gallup poll showing that since 2009 Pelosi’s favorable/unfavorable ratings have diverged faster than the Red Sea. It would be one thing if those negative feelings were coming solely from the Republican | Read More »
Here’s an insider’s tip into most of the articles you read: writers don’t write their headlines. The reasons are simple. The first is an esoteric concept known as SEO – search engine optimization. This is the science of fitting as many buzz words into a headline as is humanly possible. The second is the desperate desire for clicks. Writers, or at least the good ones | Read More »
Former Bush advisor and Harvard economics professor Gregory Mankiw has some fantastic advice for President Obama if he wishes to work together with Republicans. He encourages him to focus on marginal tax rates rather than tax credits, to spread opportunity rather than spread the wealth, and to “have a beer with a Republican at least once a week.” But one recommendation in particular caught my | Read More »
“There’s nothing in this world so sweet as love. And next to love the sweetest thing is hate,” said American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He’s right. In that spirit, we’ve compiled a list of the top “10 Liberals We Loved to Hate in 2010.” These are people who do the most ridiculous things, say the most absurd stuff, and generally just get under our skin. | Read More »
What do you think President Obama’s top priority should be? If you’re like most people you probably said job creation or fixing the economy. Either would be a logical choice considering the rampant joblessness and overall dire state of our economy. Now normally when you think of top priority, you think of one thing. Namely, the issue that requires your attention first. So what is | Read More »
From the diaries by Erick Investing in math and science is the way to solve the economy. A great idea. And somehow liberals have co-opted it to make it sound like their own. Today’s Los Angeles Times for instance contains an article entitled, “Fixing the Economy the Scientific Way,” arguing that the federal government must spend more money on math and science education. They point | Read More »
Republicans must have been very good girls and boys this year. It seems like every week now they are getting a political gift. Between the election results, the approval of the tax package, and the judicial blow to Obamacare, the conservative stocking is just about jam packed. Well its time to make a little more room under the tree. Yesterday the Census Bureau announced the | Read More »
District Court Judge Henry Hudson gave an early gift to many conservatives this week, ruling that the individual mandate in the Democrats’ healthcare bill is unconstitutional. Before we all toast our eggnog, Hudson’s decision wasn’t the end of this story. Two district court judges have previously ruled that the individual mandate was constitutional (unsurprisingly, they were Clinton appointees). More importantly, Hudson ruled that the individual | Read More »
Yesterday was the first day since I graduated from law school that I actually wish I was back in a law classroom. I would have been willing to undergo three hours of a Socratic-style beatdown to listen to some law scholars debate Judge Hudson’s decision that the individual mandate provision is outside the scope of the Constitution’s Commerce Clause. In dealing the first Constitutional blow | Read More »
Democrats are gamblers. And as it happens, they are bad ones. In gambling parlance they would be called the “fish.” They make bad bets, lose their money, but always come back for more. It happened with the stimulus. They passed historic levels of new spending, betting that it would help the economy recover to the point voters would be willing to overlook the ridiculous pricetag. | Read More »
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