WingRight

A good post on The Rosett Report.

An excerpt:

And enough, already, of Barack Obama’s “improbable journey.” He grew up in an America in which, under both Democratic and Republican presidents, his rise turned out to be wonderfully possible — and at lightning speed. What’s really improbable is the destination that in the name of “change” he now promises this nation.

The place to which he would guide us is a land of the free lunch, where the government will wake you up in the morning, tuck you in at night, and pay your bills in between. Healthcare, daycare, college tuition, energy, pensions, jobs … you-name-it, the super-size state will be there, assuring, insuring, investing, redistributing, paying off credit card bills, rebuilding cities, mending lives, saving farms. All of that would of course require a state bureaucracy even more immense and intrusive than the bailout-happy tax-and-spend behemoth we have now. But that’s OK, because under Obama, lobbyists would vanish and special interest groups would melt away. With all Americans holding up “change” placards on cue and chanting “Yes we can,” our dreams would become one.

Tags: Liberal "Solutions", Obama Problems by Publius
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An excellent column by Charles Krauthammer regarding the giant hold in Obama’s past.

Some excerpts:

Barack Obama is an immensely talented man whose talents have been largely devoted to crafting, and chronicling, his own life. Not things. Not ideas. Not institutions. But himself.

Nothing wrong or even terribly odd about that, except that he is laying claim to the job of crafting the coming history of the United States. A leap of such audacity is odd. The air of unease at the Democratic convention this week was not just a result of the Clinton psychodrama. The deeper anxiety was that the party was nominating a man of many gifts but precious few accomplishments — bearing even fewer witnesses.

Eerily missing at the Democratic convention this year were people of stature who were seriously involved at some point in Obama’s life standing up to say: I know Barack Obama. I’ve been with Barack Obama. We’ve toiled/endured together. You can trust him. I do.

Who was there to speak about the real Barack Obama? His wife. She could tell you about Barack the father, the husband, the family man in a winning and perfectly sincere way. But that only takes you so far. It doesn’t take you to the public man, the national leader.

So where are the colleagues? The buddies? The political or spiritual soul mates? His most important spiritual adviser and mentor was Jeremiah Wright. But he’s out. Then there’s William Ayers, with whom he served on a board. He’s out. Where are the others?

The oddity of this convention is that its central figure is the ultimate self-made man, a dazzling mysterious Gatsby. The palpable apprehension is that the anointed is a stranger — a deeply engaging, elegant, brilliant stranger with whom the Democrats had a torrid affair. Having slowly woken up, they see the ring and wonder who exactly they married last night.

Tags: Obama Problems by Publius
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All the early commentary about Sarah Palin focuses on the obvious fact that she’s a woman, evidently smart and outspoken, and a tempting choice for disgruntled Hillary supporters. Palin is also the only one of the four President/Vice Presidential candidates who has run anything bigger than a senate staff.

The most important thing that I see early on is that Gov. Palin is a big proponent of more oil drilling, including at ANWR. I take this to be an indication that McCain is going to move more toward drilling and (could it be?) away from the whole global warming/cap and trade mish-mash.

I think this is a bold, gutsy move on McCain’s part.

Tags: Climate Change, McCain, Oil by Publius
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I kept running out of barf bags during the Democrat convention, but the thing that struck me the most is that in every speech, a Dem sees loser Americans. They say, in so many words, we should pity them and give them a government check.

America is a depressing and awful place in the view of Obamacrats. Everybody is getting screwed, everybody is poor and getting poorer, nobody can see a doctor, mothers cry in the night and no one hears them, children have no futures except working in some gray convenience store running credit card charge slips at subminimum wage, all soldiers are emotionally crippled and left to languish in filthy, underfunded hospitals, polar bears are slipping beneath the waves every thirty seconds.

A Democrat can look at the greatest country in the world, the place where everybody wants to come and live, legally or illegally, and see a Siberian gulag. This is a collection of people who are permanent downers. No wonder they fall for a transparent con artist like Obama - Yes we can! We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!

How can regular Americans look at the Dems and see anything but a giant bunch of losers who have been cutting their Prozac tablets in half for too long?

Tags: Liberal Losers by Publius
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Dynamite ad from the McCain campaign. These guys/gals are really good.

Tags: Obama Problems by Publius
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Organizer in Chief - an excellent article on Obama’s background in community organizing and how that connects with his view of large government programs and the “meanness” of the United States. This is also a description of one of the many ways that Lyndon Johnson screwed up this country.

Here’s a key quote:

Obama’s nomination will be celebrated as a first for African-Americans. But the racial symbolism may obscure the importance of his presidential run to the tens of thousands of government-funded community groups that stand to benefit from an Obama agenda that’s right out of the 1960s. His presidential platform touts programs that would refuel the nonprofit sector, ranging from a commitment to boost money for federal relics like the ineffective and wasteful Community Development Block Grant program (see “America’s Worst Urban Program,” Spring 2005) to a plan for providing “a full network of services, including early childhood education, youth violence prevention efforts and after-school activities . . . from birth to college” to a series of “Promise Neighborhoods.”

[Read more →]

Tags: Liberal "Solutions", Obama by Publius
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News flash, Citizen Obama is going to give his acceptance speech on Thursday from a set that looks like a Greek temple.

In a mixing of visual metaphors, Obama is also going to do something with a mock-up of Air Force One.

This is certainly going to build on Michelle’s “We’re just ordinary folks” theme from the first night.

via The Daily Mail

UPDATE: Here’s a look at Barack’s costume for tomorrow night.

Via The Political Inquirer

Tags: Economy, Environment, Legal, Liberal Hysteria, Liberalism by Publius
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Sorry that it’s taken three posts to wrap up commentary on a New York Times paen to Obamanomics. (See here and here for prior entries)

First topic - the Corporate Income Tax

For now, the people running the party, be they in the Bush administration or the McCain campaign, evidently do not share this concern. They have responded to Obama’s tax proposals with the same kind of attacks that the party has been using since the 1980s. First, they have argued that Obama’s tax increases would end up hitting every income group. Strictly speaking, this is true. Obama’s increase on the corporate income tax would ultimately fall on all stockholders, even poor ones. In practical terms, though, most families own little enough stock that the other features of the tax plan would matter far, far more. That’s why the Tax Policy Center numbers, which include the corporate tax increase, come out as they do.

So if you don’t own stock, then a higher corporate income tax rate doesn’t hurt you? Wrong.

A high corporate income tax comes out of the pockets of the employees more than anyone else. According to a study by the Congressional Budget Office (I know they’re not very accurate, but when they find a bad tax, you know it’s bad), 70% of the corporate tax burden is borne by workers in the form of lower wages and fewer high-paying jobs.

[Read more →]

Tags: Liberal "Solutions", Taxes by Publius
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I’ve already blogged about the bad income analysis contained in a long New York Times propaganda piece for Obama’s economic program. You will not be surprised to learn that there are more problems.

“The market is the best mechanism ever invented for efficiently allocating resources to maximize production,” Obama told me. “And I also think that there is a connection between the freedom of the marketplace and freedom more generally.” But, he continued, “there are certain things the market doesn’t automatically do.” In other words, free-market policy isn’t likely to dominate his agenda; his project would be fixing the market.

And it does seem to need fixing. For three decades now, the American economy has been in what the historian Sean Wilentz calls the Age of Reagan. The government has deregulated industries, opened the economy more to market forces and, above all, cut income taxes. Much good has come of this — the end of 1970s stagflation, infrequent and relatively mild recessions, faster growth than that of the more regulated economies of Europe. Yet laissez-faire capitalism hasn’t delivered nearly what its proponents promised. It has created big budget deficits, the most pronounced income inequality since the 1920s and the current financial crisis. As Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary and Rubin ally from the Clinton administration, says: “We’ve probably done a better job of the last 20 years on the problems the market can solve than the problems the market can’t solve. We’re doing pretty well on the size of people’s houses and televisions and the like. We’re not looking so good on infrastructure and education.”

[Read more →]

Tags: Liberalism by Publius
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In an editorial, Investors Business Daily reports that Russia’s Georgian adventure looks like the last straw for a lot of foreign investors. A giant capital outflow is beginning as foreign investors pull their money out of Putin Village, “fed up with the rampant militaristic nationalism, red tape, corruption and anti-investor sentiment in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.”

As I’ve blogged before, the Russian economy is balanced on a single unstable point - world oil prices. If those go down below $100 and stay there for awhile, Russia is in big trouble. The flashy oligarchs mask the fact that, even with the oil boom, Russia’s per capita GDP is just 2% above where it was when the Berlin Wall fell.

Inflation is currently running at 14%, so monetary policy is also undercutting the economy and acting as a confiscatory tax for the vast majority of Russians who aren’t oligarchs. As Robert Mugabe could tell Vladimir, once you start down the inflation path to solve your problems, you are going into a steep decline. Could Putin put giant clamps on prices and begin to control inflation? I don’t think so. The corruption is so endemic in Russia and black market profits would be so high, that massive amounts of goods would be moving through an underground economy and continuing to increase in price.

If the clamps don’t work, the Russians drink more to forget their miserable existence and the population drops even faster. If the clamps do work, wide-spread shortages of goods cause the Russians to drink more to forget their miserable existence, etc., etc., etc.

The big influx of foreign capital into oil deals has allowed Russia to paper over an inherently declining economy. Now that the foreign capital is headed back home, the truth will come out in a way that the whole world will see. I would be happy to have someone point out a society in steep demographic decline that was ever able to expand its economy in a meaningful way. I don’t think there has ever been one.

Oh, and by the way, about your Russian army, Vlad? Demographic decline means that every year, there will be fewer and fewer 18 year olds to conscript into the military. Your army is going to get much smaller in the next ten years.

Tags: Oil, Russia by Publius
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