Tag Archives: Barack Obama

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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Why are gas prices so high? 11 more Solyndras in Obama’s energy program

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Hans Bader reviews Obama’s energy plan.

Excerpt: (links removed)

A liberal Congress must share the blame for this fiasco, since the massive $800 billion stimulus package it passed in 2009 funded these boondoggles. As a Solyndra stakeholder exulted, “there’s never been more money shoved out the government’s door in world history.”  But as the Washington Post noted, energy programs were “infused with politics at every level” under Obama.  His Administration hastily approved subsidies for Solyndra, whose executives are now pleading the 5th Amendment, despite obvious danger signs and warnings about the company’s likely collapse. (Later, federal officials successfully pressured Solyndra to delay its announcement about upcoming layoffs until just after the 2010 election, to avoid embarrassing the Obama Administration).

The Obama Administration also used green-jobs money from the stimulus package to outsource American jobs to countries like China: “Despite all the talk of green jobs, the overwhelming majority of stimulus money spent on wind power has gone to foreign companies, according to a new report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University’s School of Communication in Washington, D.C.”   As the Investigative Reporting Workshop noted, “79 percent” of all green-jobs funding “went to companies based overseas . . .In fact, the largest grant made under the program so far, a $178 million payment on Dec. 29, went to Babcock & Brown, a bankrupt Australian company.” (The stimulus package also funnelled money to left-wing community organizers and liberal lobbying groups.)

What does it mean to you when Obama takes money from consumers and business owners in order to spend, spend, spennd on his campaign fundraisers and other beneficiaries of “green energy”?

Click here to see a graph of gas prices from January 2009.

 

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Nearly 1 million workers vanished under Obama: real unemployment rate at 11%

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From Investors Business Daily. (H/T Doug Ross)

Excerpt:

Initial jobless claims unexpectedly jumped by 24,000 last week to 399,000 as more workers lost their jobs, the Labor Department said Thursday. At the same time, the economy continues to lose workers.

In the 30 months since the recession officially ended, nearly 1 million people have dropped out of the labor force — they aren’t working, and they aren’t looking — according to data from Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the past two months, the labor force shrank by 170,000.

This is virtually unprecedented in past economic recoveries, at least since the BLS has kept detailed records. In the past nine recoveries, the labor force had climbed an average 3.5 million by this point, according to an IBD analysis of the BLS data.

“Given weak job prospects, many would-be workers dropped out of (or never entered) the labor force,” noted Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute in her analysis of the BLS jobs report issued last Friday. “That reduces the measured unemployment rate but does not represent real improvement.”

According to the BLS, the “labor force participation rate” — the ratio of the number of people either working or looking for work compared with the entire working-age population — is now 64%, down from 65.7% when the recession ended in June 2009. That’s the lowest level since women began entering the workforce in far greater numbers several decades ago.

If you adjust for this drop, the unemployment rate would be close to 11%, instead of the official 8.5%.

Stimulus spending doesn’t create jobs. But we know from the past that tax cuts did cut the unemployment rate.