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Story #1 is tells of how the Wall Street people are not donating
to Obama like they did in 2008. #2
covers the latest Battleground poll that is basically a dead heat. But that’s not what it actually says. #3 tells of the latest Rasmussen poll. #4 is about the Democrats war on fossil fuels
and how the Republicans will help bring back the economy by supporting these
fuels that actually work. #5 is an
interesting interview with Jonah Goldberg.
#6 looks at fairness, the left and the results of making fairness a national
goal. #7 relates how Elizabeth Warren
appears not only to not be an Indian descendant, but….
Today’s thoughts
It
seems Iran has released a propaganda picture
of a missile launch but forgot to edit
out of the picture, Jar Jar Binks. I
guess they are looking for the Force to be with them.
The
Wisconsin Democratic Party has canceled
Tuesday’s unity rally after the primary to face off against Scott Walker in
the recall election. It appears there wasn’t
enough unity.
It’s now been
more than three years since the Democratic majority in the Senate last passed a
budget,
(last time was April 29, 2009). During that time, the federal government has
spent $10.4 trillion and added another $4.5 trillion to our total debt.
As part of their civility campaign, David Axelrod has declared they will respond to the GOP’s ‘contract killers’ (Super PAC ads). Civility? Really?
California has gained the dubious distinction as the worst place
to do business according to Chief Executive Magazine. I remember when it was the best, but that was
before it became a progressive stronghold.
1.
The
Romance between Obama and Wall Street is over
…One day in
late October, Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, slipped into the Regency
Hotel in New York and walked up to a second-floor meeting room reserved by his
aides. More than 20 of Obama’s top donors and fund-raisers, many of them from
the financial industry, sat in leather chairs around a granite conference
table.
Messina
told them he had a problem: New York City and its suburbs, Obama’s top source
of money in 2008, were behind quota.
He needed their help bringing the financial community back on board.
For the next hour, the
donors relayed to Messina what their friends had been saying. They felt unfairly demonized for being
wealthy. They felt scapegoated for the recession. It was a few weeks into
the Occupy Wall Street movement, with mass protests against the 1 percent
springing up all around the country, and they
blamed the president and his party for the public’s nasty mood. The administration,
some suggested, had created a hostile environment for job creators.
Messina politely pushed back. It’s not the president’s fault
that Americans are still upset with Wall Street, he told them, and given the
public’s mood, the administration’s rhetoric had been notably restrained.
One of the guests raised his hand; he knew how to solve the
problem. The president had won plaudits for his speech on race during the last
campaign, the guest noted. It was a soaring address that acknowledged white resentment
and urged national unity. What if Obama
gave a similarly healing speech about class and inequality? What if he urged an
end to attacks on the rich? Around the table, some people shook their heads
in disbelief….
Obama has made a lot of enemies and
a lot of people disillusioned. He’s
going down in November.
2.
Battleground Poll:
A Dead Heat
This is a pleasant surprise, but not entirely unexpected. Obama was hurt by politicizing the Osama raid and his "war on women" by the GOP has blown up in his face.
This is reflected in the fact that Obama's 5 point lead over Romney in February is now a one point deficit - 48-47. And the GOP in general is making a comeback as well.
Politico:
The former Massachusetts
governor has opened up a 10-point lead, 48 percent to 38 percent, among
independents in a poll conducted Sunday, April 29 through Thursday, May 3
and a 6-point lead among those who describe themselves as "extremely
likely" to vote in November. Obama led Romney by 9 points overall in
POLITICO's February's poll.
What is interesting is that if you
go to the demographics you will find the Democrats have a 4 point lead over
Republicans in the numbers sampled.
Correcting for this you have 52-43 Romney.
3.
Rasmussen’s
agrees with my comments
The
Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows Mitt Romney earning 49% of the vote
and President Obama attracting 44% support. Three percent (3%) would vote
for a third party candidate, while another three percent (3%) are undecided.
Rasmussen
is using likely voters. As Dick Morris
likes to point out almost all the undecided break for the challenger (Mitt
Romney). Add that 3% to these numbers
and you get Romney 52% Obama 44%. It’s
not even going to be close in November.
4.
Obama’s War on Fossil Fuels
Natural gas is a feedstock for the production of fertilizer, plastics, and many chemical products. Fortunately, America possesses vast reserves of recoverable natural gas. The low price of this gas is one factor spurring companies like Dow Chemical to expand production in the United States rather than send jobs overseas.
How many jobs? According to one reliable estimate, low gas prices resulting from hydraulic fracturing will result in the creation of one million new jobs in the U.S. in the next decade and a half. That is in addition to another half million jobs created by the fracking process itself and the countless other spin-off jobs necessary to support those expanding chemical, fertilizer, plastics, and energy industries. (Canadian oil sands development alone would create 343,000 new jobs in the U.S. That is the same development that Obama is trying to shut down with his veto of the Keystone XL pipeline.)
It all adds up to a renaissance for American industry, with all the benefits of job creation, economic growth, and wealth creation that go with it. As a result of the new natural gas boom and the industrial recovery, American industries will be expanding their workforces. The stagnant industrial wages of the last 30 years should begin to see meaningful expansion. Once again, American industrial workers can look forward to job security and higher wages.
It all sounds like an economic miracle, and it is. So why is Obama trying to kill it?...
The
answer to the last question is that part of the Democratic coalition is the
hard left environmental movement that sees fossils fuels (even natural gas
which is the cleanest) as the equivalent of the serpent that tempted Eve in the
Garden of Eden. But this is one of the
advantages Romney and the Republicans have.
When they come into office expect to see a huge surge in prosperity that
should lock the Democrats out of power for some time.
5.
An Interview with Jonah Goldberg on “The
Tyranny of Clichés”
…Liberals—and this is a point that, you know, people like
E.J. Dionne and Martin Peretz and a lot of liberal intellectuals will concede—liberals don’t have the same relationship
with their intellectual history, with their ideology. They deny that they
have one….
…Liberals claim that
they’re pragmatists, that they’re empiricists, or that they’re fact
finders, that they only care about what
works, and they just wish we crazies on the Right would drop all of these
labels and these ideological, you know, squabbles, so that we could get busy
doing the work the American people sent us to Washington to do and all that
sort of nonsense. And that is a monumental lie.
And it’s
first and foremost a lie liberals tell to themselves. The idea that liberals aren’t ideological is just
nonsense on stilts. And I don’t mind that liberals are ideological.
What I mind is that they won’t admit it. It’s sort of like liberal media
bias. I don’t mind that—I don’t really care that much that the mainstream
media is biased at this point, you know. I mean, that’s something we’ve
learned to live with. What bothers
me is—what really drives me to distraction is the way mainstream journalists
deny that liberal media bias even exists.
And so the tyranny of the clichés is that a lot of clichés
that I go through in the book, they’re not just liberal talking-point clichés;
they are more fundamental formulations that sort of steal ground for
progressive assumptions about the way the world works, man’s place in the
universe, and all of the rest. It’s not just sort of Obama v. Romney kind
of talking points. It’s a more fundamental thing.
You know, John Ralston Saul has this expression “the
unconscious civilization.” And it’s sort of the civilization that maybe a
visitor from Mars would see that we don’t really recognize, because it’s—you
know, our dogma makes a lot of assumptions invisible to us.
Liberals
have an enormous amount of dogma.
They’re far more dogmatic than conservatives are. And it expresses themes—and
they express their dogmatism and their
ideology, not in open and honest exp—you know, declarations of ideological
preference, but in these sort of clichéd buzz phrases and terms and truisms
that they claim aren’t ideological at all.
I mean, there’s no—there’s nothing a conservative regularly
says that is more wildly radically
extremist in its ideological assumptions than, say, violence
never solved anything. I mean, that is the most idiotic, wildly, radically ideological
reality-distorting conviction, if you actually believe it. And yet
they say they believe it, and at the same time they claim that it’s not
ideological at all….
I’m a
great fan of Jonah’s. His keen intellect
is able to parse out Progressive lies.
The cliché of the left that has always bothered me is “War, what is it
good for? Absolutely nothing.” It was a song sung by leftists who have no
idea about history at all. Most of our
technological and medical breakthroughs owe their existence to war.
6.
Fairness
and the Left
As the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Peter Wehner recalled April 12 in a superb essay on Commentary’s website, in 2008 then-Senator Obama advocated a higher capital-gains tax rate. He did so even though lowering that tax rate from 28 percent to 20 percent in 1997 actually expanded net revenues by 124 percent — from $54 billion in Fiscal Year 1996 to $121 billion in FY 2000, according to a Congressional Budget Office report. That tax-rate cut was enacted under tea-party pinup William Jefferson Clinton.
“Well, Charlie,” Obama told ABC’s Charles Gibson during the 2008 campaign, “what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital-gains tax for purposes of fairness.”
For too many liberals like Obama, “fairness” is not about enriching the modest; it’s about impoverishing the moneyed.
Multibillionaire Warren Buffett has energized liberals with his still-unverified claim that his tax rate lags his secretary’s. If that is true, “fairness” could mean slashing the secretary’s taxes to match Buffett’s 11 percent effective tax rate. (Like many 1 percenters, Buffett chooses to derive most of his income from lower-taxed investments rather than higher-taxed wages.) Somehow, reducing the secretary’s taxes never came up. Instead liberals demand the so-called Buffet Rule, an instrument for bludgeoning the successful rather than boosting the downtrodden.
In her final appearance in the British House of Commons, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher skewered this liberal mindset. Feisty as ever, she answered her colleagues’ questions on the gap between the needy and the affluent: “The honourable gentleman is saying that he would rather that the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich,” Thatcher explained on November 22, 1990. “So long as the gap is smaller, they would rather have the poor poorer. One does not create wealth and opportunity that way.”
As
Winston Churchill said, “The inherent vice of
capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of
socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” That is the problem with the left’s
argument about the wealthy getting wealthier.
Prior to Obama’s presidency the rich had gotten vastly richer, but the
poor also were better off. Under Obama
everyone has gotten poorer.
7.
Elizabeth Warrens Real Ancestry
For over a quarter of a century, Elizabeth
Warren has described herself as a Native American. When recently asked to
provide evidence of her ancestry, she
pointed to an unsubstantiated claim on an 1894 Oklahoma Territory marriage
license application by her great-great grand uncle William J. Crawford that his
mother, O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford, Ms. Warren's great-great-great grandmother,
was a Cherokee.
After
researching her story, it is obvious that her
"family lore" is just fiction.
As
I pointed out in my article here on Sunday, no evidence supports this claim.
O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford had no Cherokee heritage, was
listed as "white" in the Census of 1860, and was most likely half
Swedish and half English, Scottish, or German, or some combination thereof. (Note,
the actual 1894 marriage license makes no claim of Cherokee ancestry.)
But
the most stunning discovery about the life of O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford is that
her husband, Ms. Warren's
great-great-great grandfather, was apparently a member of the Tennessee Militia
who rounded up Cherokees from their family homes in the Southeastern United
States and herded them into government-built stockades in what was then called
Ross’s Landing (now Chattanooga), Tennessee—the point of origin for the horrific Trail of Tears, which
began in January, 1837.
So
why is this important? It appears Ms.
Warren was not only living a lie, but benefiting from it as well.
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