Polemics

John Hawkins writes the most scathing anti-Romney column EVER

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Quin Hillyer of the American Spectator linked to the Anti-Romney post, and he called it “The Most Scathing Anti-Romney Column, Ever”. The actual title of the post is “Five Ways Conservatives Will Have to Sell Their Souls if Romney Wins”.

Excerpt:

If you were trying to come up with the most atrocious candidate imaginable to go toe-to-toe with Barack Obama in 2012, you couldn’t do much better than Mitt Romney. He was an unpopular moderate governor who lost 2 out of the 3 major elections he’s run in and whose signature issue Romneycare is an enormous failure. Moreover, he’s so uninspiring that he makes Bob Dole look like Ronald Reagan and that’s before you consider his incessant flip-flopping that makes it impossible to really know where he stands on any issue.

Romney’s candidacy also runs counter to almost every political trend in the book right now. He’s the antithesis of everything the Tea Party stands for — a moderate establishment-endorsed, principle-free Rockefeller Republican. On the other hand, he’s like a bad guy straight out of central casting for the Occupy Wall Street crowd, a conscience-free 1 percenter who makes $10,000 bets and lectures the public about how corporations are people — while hordes of poor and middle class Americans that he fired trail in his wake telling tales of woe about how Romney made their lives into a living hell.

At one time, I thought both Gingrich and Perry were more electable than Romney. I have, however, reassessed and now believe Gingrich, Perry, Santorum, and even Huntsman, who just left the race, are ALL more electable than Mitt. It’s also worth noting that all of those candidates, including Huntsman, are more conservative than Romney. It’s mind-boggling to consider the fact that if Romney wins, the conservative base will have chosen the guy behind Romneycare over the man behind the Contract with America, America’s premier social conservative, and the best job-creating governor in America, all of whom would also be more electable.

Here we are in what may be, forgive me for the cliché, the most important election of our lifetimes and the GOP may end up choosing a candidate who’s one part Charlie Crist and one part John Kerry as our nominee. If that’s the case, conservatives should certainly vote for him over Obama. After all, Mitt Romney will undoubtedly often do the wrong thing if he becomes President, but Barack Obama will almost always fail the country. So Romney would definitely be the lesser of two evils.

Yet and still, conservatives will probably have to pay a big price if Romney becomes the nominee. Barring an unforeseen miracle, we’re not going to see someone who was a third rate, unpopular moderate governor become a great, popular, and conservative President. The idea that Republicans in Congress will keep Romney in line isn’t borne out by anything that has happened in the last decade. During the Bush years, time and time again, conservatives in Congress abandoned their principles to follow Bush’s lead. It has been much the same under Obama. Many Democrats were willing to take votes that ended their careers because they felt compelled to stick by Barack. Mitt would have little to fear from the Tea Party or the rest of the conservative base either. After all, his thinking will be, if grassroots conservatives still had any sway in the Republican Party, he wouldn’t be the nominee. What are they going to do after he gets the nomination? Vote for Obama? Same goes if he gets elected. No matter how Nixonian Mitt turns out to be, conservatives will still view our own Massachusetts version of Arnold Schwarzenegger as preferable to whatever socialist the Democrats run against him in 2016.

ANNOUNCEMENT: I am now cross-posting some of my posts at John Hawkins’ Right Wing News, since he gave me permission to guest blog there. Right Wing News is one of the top conservative blogs.

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Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal unveils education reform plan

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Here are the details on Bobby Jindal’s new education plan, from New Orleans Online Access.

Excerpt:

 Gov. Bobby Jindal on Tuesday outlined a far-reaching set of proposals aimed at improving education in Louisiana, including a state-wide voucher program for low-income students, an expansion of autonomous charter schools and steps to link a teachers’ classroom performance to their job protections and their compensation. The governor has been promising for months now to make education reform the centerpiece of his second-term agenda.

[…]The voucher program may prove the most controversial aspect of the plan. Jindal is proposing to help pay tuition at private and parochial schools for any child of a low-income family who attends a school that receives a letter grade of C, D or F.

More than 70 percent of Louisiana’s public schools would fall into that category, opening up districts across the state to competition for public funding from private institutions. Parents who opt out of those public schools would be able to take the public funding set aside for their child with them to pay for tuition.

Voucher opponents argue that offering private school tuition siphons money away from public education, but the governor is framing the idea as a way to put decision-making in the hands of parents.

Also toward that end, Jindal is proposing to fast-track the approval of new charter schools for proven charter operators. Charters are publicly funded but privately managed and typically overseen by nonprofit boards. They compete with traditional public schools in their area for students.

Jindal is also proposing to end regular annual pay increases for teachers based on years in the classroom, ban the use of seniority in all personnel decisions and weaken the power that local school boards have in hiring and firing decisions in favor of superintendents.

Teachers coming into the classroom for the first time would also see major changes under Jindal’s plan: districts would have greater flexibility to establish their own pay scales for new teachers and tenure would be set aside only for those who earn high ratings on evaluations five years in a row.

I thought it might be helpful to also post this quick introduction to the issue of school choice, from the Cato Institute.

I don’t agree with the Cato Institute on everything, but they’re right on this issue. The Heritage Foundation also has 3 small videos explaining school choice – with cartoons!

There’s an even longer video narrated by John Stossel that you can watch, that really explains the why school reform matters – and why it’s a conservative issue. Like the sex-selection abortion issue that I blogged about here before, this is an issue that conservatives need to seize on. Here, we can really let our compassionate side show by helping the poorest students, especially those in visible minorities, who simply cannot get a quality education in a public school monopoly that is not responsive to the needs of parents, or their children. This is an issue where we can win – the only losers are the educational bureaucrats and the teacher unions. But the kids are more important.

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Republicans pushing to rescind Democrats’ $100 billion EU bailout fund

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Here’s a shocking story from Matthew Boyle of the Daily Caller.

Excerpt:

When California Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi was the Speaker of the House in 2009, President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats authorized $100 billion in spending as a line of credit for the International Monetary Fund to be used in times of emergency — funds that could now be used to bail out European banks.

As the Eurozone takes a turn for the worse and chatter heats up about more European Union and IMF bailouts across the continent, Republicans in Congress are pushing to rescind the $100 billion set-aside.

That $100 billion is an addition to the $64.4 billion the U.S. Treasury will provide in quotas to the IMF this year. That new funding has not been formally appropriated, but the IMF could request the money whenever it pleases.

[…]McMorris Rodgers is leading the charge, with more than 80 House Republicans, to rescind that line of credit before the IMF takes any more of it. She told TheDC that IMF officials confirmed to her that about $6 billion of the $100 billion has been used to help bail out Portugal, as well as St. Kitts and Nevis, a small Caribbean country.

[…]Europe has fallen into dire financial straits as of late. Just last week, the continent saw several of its countries hit with credit downgrades. Though Greece has received the most attention, McMorris Rodgers warns that Greece is just the beginning of what could be a larger and more out-of-control downward European spiral.

“I think it’s important to recognize that Greece — all the eyes have been on Greece — Greece is a relatively small country,” she said. “You’re talking two percent of the European Union, 11 million people, and yet there’s already been over $300 billion in bailout funds made available to Greece through the European Union and the IMF. That’s more than their entire GDP.

“So, if they [the EU and the IMF] were to continue down that trend, the amount of money we could be talking about is just off the charts.”

As vice chair of the House Republican Caucus, McMorris Rodgers is the highest-ranking Republican woman in Congress. She has sponsored a bill that would rescind the extra bailout funds and use them for deficit reduction. South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint has already gathered more than 20 co-sponsors for the Senate’s version of the legislation.

The U.S. Treasury ordinarily has about $65 billion set aside for international banking emergencies, an IMF credit line that’s already been tapped. Without any approval from Congress, Geithner promised the IMF in an official statement that he plans to double that $65 billion quota.

“Our current quota is about $65 billion and now, so, that raises the question: ‘How are you going to pay for that [doubled quota], Mr. Secretary?’” McMorris Rodgers said.

Bailing out the EU? But we have our own debts to worry about.

Thanks to Obama’s trillion-dollar deficits in 2009, 2010 and 2011, the United States’ gross debt is now more than our GDP. After Obama gets his $1.2 trillion debt limit extension approved, our new credit limit will be $16.3 trillion – which is 107% of our annual GDP. When Obama took office, our debt was at $8 trillion.

How bad is bad?

Greece’s debt to GDP ratio is about 160%, which is higher than America’s 107% ratio – but ours is rising. We can look at Greece and see what is in our future if we don’t fix things now.

USA Today explains how this debt crisis is affecting ordinary Greek citizens.

Excerpt:

Unable to pay off its loans, Greece has been forced to slash its spending and public benefits, raise taxes and rely on bailouts from the wealthier EU nations. Though its new prime minister says the country has a pathway to recovery, Greeks say they aren’t hopeful about a change in their lives anytime soon.

Higher taxes, high unemployment and little economic growth added to reductions in services and pensions that have been part of the attempted solution to Greece’s financial ills have forced people to the brink who have never been there. Greeks have been taking to the streets to protest the changes. The government this week said that 1,580 demonstrations had been held in Athens this year.

“After 34 years of work, I can’t get a pension; I need at least four more years of work,” Katsikadakos said. “Plus, I have to pay 450 euros every month to the state for health insurance and social security, just because I own a company, even when I have zero income.”

About 183,000 businesses will shut down by summer, according to a new study from the General Confederation of Professional Craftsmen. The study expects that 100,000 of those will close in the next month or two, leaving hundreds of thousands of people jobless.

One out of four small- and medium-size-business owners say it’s possible they’ll declare bankruptcy in the next year, according to a recent state survey. If true, it would mean 320,000 lost jobs.

[…]Taxes to pay for the public sector and an expensive pension system have been high. Three new taxes have been added since 2009: a self-employment tax of 300 to 500 euros, a solidarity tax of about 1% to 5% of one’s income and a real estate tax.

This is bad, but what is worse is the effect of this debt crisis on young people in Greece – they are the real victims of their parents’ pattern of voting for the Greek socialist party over and over and over again – with predictable results. Youth unemployment in Greece is now near 50%. The young people are the ones who are having their futures ruined because of the voting choices of their parents.