Click on WORD or PDF for full content
There is little more important than stopping and the reversing the growth of the federal government. We have been blessed by the present administration. It is so bad, for the next 50 years we can bring out Obama to scare the kids. The question now is whether we will able to reverse course and get the government out of our lives. All the candidates so far can only be expected to slow the growth. Paul Ryan looks to be one who can do the heavy lifting of turning it back. So, any hints he may get in the 2012 race will be well received here. Stephen Hayes writes on why he thinks Paul Ryan is going to run.
… Perhaps more telling was Ryan’s request not to serve on the debt supercommittee created by the recent deal on the debt ceiling. Ryan has become driver of policy in the Republican Party, with a focus on debt and deficits. And virtually everyone assumed he would have a seat on the committee. But Ryan went to House speaker John Boehner and specifically requested to be left off of the panel. In his public statements, Ryan said he needed time to work on budget reform in the House. While there’s little doubt that Ryan is keen to work on reforming a badly broken budget process, a source close to the Wisconsin congressman says he asked to remain off the supercommittee in order to preserve the option of a presidential run. The same source says that Boehner encouraged Ryan to run.
In his interview Friday with Charlie Sykes, Ryan argued that the supercommittee is not the place to debate debt and deficits – the 2012 campaign is. “The reason I don’t think it’s going to get us another grand bargain – or should – is we should not have a system where 12 politicians cut some agreement in a back room that restructures the whole design of the federal government in three months time. This is a decision that should be brought to the American people.” He added: “I think we need to have a discussion and a debate about how we’re going to deal with this debt crisis because that will determine the kind of country we are going to be and the kind of country we are going to be for a long, long time.”
That’s the kind of debate that would take place during a presidential race, of course. Ryan does not see anyone in the current Republican field who is making such a debate the center of his or her presidential campaign. Perhaps not surprisingly, Ryan disagrees with the conventional wisdom that the entitlement reform proposals in his budget plan are poison to Republican candidates across the country. He points to the results of the recalls in Wisconsin last week, where the battles centered on Ryan’s plans for retooling Medicare as much as Scott Walker’s successful and increasingly less controversial budget reforms, as “vindication” for the solutions that House Republicans have put before the American people. …
Jennifer Rubin on why Ryan should run.
… There is another reason for Ryan to run, of course. The current GOP field is, even with the addition of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, uninspiring to many. Who is the guy to go toe-to-toe with Obama and make the conservative case against him in a way that is compelling to the general electorate? The pro-Ryan contingent just doesn’t see anyone. Although the push for a Ryan run preceded by months the entry of Perry into the race, Perry’s comments on Bernanke and Perry’s Texas persona have only heightened fears that he won’t be able to win back the White House for the GOP.
A Republican think-tanker who previously worked in the White House has been among those urging Ryan to run. I asked him why he’s so certain that Ryan is the right man. He replied that it is more than the conviction that Ryan would be a good president. He explained that “this is a match between the man and the moment. What I mean by that is that we’re in a particularly perilous situation economically. In most instances, what we hope for in a president is someone who is capable of making wise and informed decisions that lead to economic growth. Competence and good judgment are enough. But if we are in a period of unusual hardship and unusual challenges — which I believe to be the case — then we need to find someone of unusual gifts and talents.” He adds, “The one public figure who is comparable to Paul when it comes to this skill set is Governor Mitch Daniels. But his decision not to enter the race means we’re now down to one. And Ryan is the one. It’s true that he’s young, that he has no executive experience, and that the hour is growing late. But not too late. The stars, I think, are aligning his way. And now is his time.” …
You can’t make it up! The Buses for the Tour of The One are made in Canada. Ed Morrissey has the story.
The legendary Casey Stengel once lamented about his hapless expansion-season New York Mets, “Can’t anyone here play this game?” Two stories this week prompt the same question about Barack Obama and his political team. First, Obama spent $2.2 million in taxpayer money to buy specially-made buses for a three-state tour about jobs — without actually having a plan to flog. At least the $2.2 million puts some Americans to work, right? Well … North Americans, maybe:
“President Obama is barnstorming the heartland to boost US jobs in a taxpayer-financed luxury bus the government had custom built — in Canada, The Post has learned.
The $1.1 million vehicle, one of two that Quebec-based Prevost sold the government, has been tricked out by the Secret Service with state-of-the-art security features and creature comforts.
It’s a VIP H3-45 model, the company’s top of the line, and is used by major traveling rock bands.
“That’s the more luxurious model,” Christine Garant of Prevost told The Post.”
Barack Obama — rock star. Yes, that’s exactly the kind of image that wins votes in the upper Midwest. That’s bad enough, but buying two buses from a Canadian company while promising to create jobs in the US is the worst kind of optics imaginable. Why not use a manufacturer based in the US? I’m certain that Complete Coach Works in California could use the work, for instance, or North American Bus Industries in Alabama. Setra USA manufactures its buses in Greensboro, North Carolina, a key state that Obama could easily lose in 2012. Wouldn’t a $2.2 million buy there have turned a few heads? For that matter, Obama could have bought them from Motor Coach Industries and picked them up in his home state of Illinois at the start of his tour. …
Michael Barone writes in the Journal about the Midwest economic model that would run the world.
… The Big Three auto companies, economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, could create endless demand for their products through manipulative advertising and planned obsolescence. The United Auto Workers would ensure that productivity gains would be shared by workers and the assembly line would never be speeded up. In those days, 40% of Michigan voters lived in union (mostly UAW) households, the base vote of a liberal Democratic Party that pushed for ever larger governments at the local, state and federal levels. You found similar alignments in most Midwestern states.
Liberals assumed the Michigan model was the wave of the future, and that in time—once someone built big factories and unions organized them—backward states like Texas would catch up. Texas liberal writers Ronnie Dugger and Molly Ivins kept looking for the liberal coalition of blacks, poor whites and Latinos that political scientist V.O. Key predicted in his 1940s classic “Southern Politics.”
History hasn’t worked out that way. In 1970, Michigan had nine million people. In 2010, it had 10 million. In 1970, Texas had 11 million people. In 2010, it had 25 million. In 1970, Detroit was the nation’s fifth-largest metro area. Today, metro Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex are both pressing the San Francisco Bay area for the No. 4 spot, and Detroit is far behind. …
Tony Blankley warns about the liberals’ authoritarian temptation.
… Make no mistake: If our form of government is “broken,” democracy’s critics would “fix” it by castration. In our case, they would castrate the “representative” bit. We have seen this argument before in our history. Put forward by authoritarians and their supporters, it disdains the messy and disorderly process whereby free people thrash out the nation’s decisions.
The current recrudescence of this authoritarian temptation did not start with the debt-ceiling fight. It’s been building for a couple of years. It comes – as it always does – at a moment when the nation faces serious economic or security dangers. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in September 2009 gave early voice to the current authoritarian temptation: “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”
Abraham Lincoln could have been thinking of Thomas Friedman when he worried out loud in the Gettysburg Address whether any nation “conceived in liberty … could long endure.” Lincoln then called the nation to the “unfinished work” of maintaining a nation “of the people, by the people and for the people.” That work goes on today. …
More proof God has a sense of humor. This time from KOMO TV in Seattle. Seems the ‘green jobs” program there is a bust. Someone in the article sounds like a character from the movie Sixteen Candles. (Think Long Duk Dong)
Last year, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced the city had won a coveted $20 million federal grant to invest in weatherization. The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy – able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint – and the announcement came with great fanfare.
McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make it. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods.
But more than a year later, Seattle’s numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program. Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers. Some people wonder if the original goals are now achievable. …
… “People are frustrated and rightly so,” Curtis said. “There’s been sort of a lag time when people graduated from those programs.”
They include Long Duong, 32, who got a certificate in sealing air leaks and insulating walls after he was laid off from a job handling bags at the airport. But he soon found that other men had more qualifications than him, and he took part-time gigs – installing light bulbs and canvassing doors – while waiting for work.
A year later, he’s still looking. …
Three Thousand miles away in Massachusetts, we see politicians who are just as stupid. Boston Herald has the story of the “green company” that filed for bankruptcy protection.
Evergreen Solar Inc., the Massachusetts clean-energy company that received millions in state subsidies from the Patrick administration for an ill-fated Bay State factory, has filed for bankruptcy, listing $485.6 million in debt.
Evergreen, which closed its taxpayer-supported Devens factory in March and cut 800 jobs, has been trying to rework its debt for months. The cash-strapped company announced today has sought a reorganization in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware and reached a deal with certain note holders to restructure its debt and auction off assets.
The Massachusetts Republican Party called the Patrick administration’s $58 million financial aid package, which supported Evergreen’s $450 million factory, a “waste” of money. …