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The optimism of the Wisconsin vote needs to make way for a warning from Peter Schiff.
… In recent months as turmoil bubbled across the debt markets of Europe, the United States had beckoned as a safe haven. But in truth, the problems are as bad, if not worse, on this side of the Atlantic. Ironically, America has not had to deal with its day of reckoning because lesser problems surfaced first in Europe. But when Europe comes to some modest resolution of its problems, or when bond investors realize they have jumped from the frying pan into the fire, there will be no hiding from the unresolved problems here.
As the intoxicating effects of Fed stimulus wear off, the hangover is setting in. To delay the pain, I believe that there can be little doubt that the Fed will unleash its next round of stimulus, in the form of QE3. My guess is the Fed has always known more QE was needed but it has been waiting for the most politically palatable time to announce it. That “stunner” can’t be far off with the data so bad and the elections so near.
Eventually more people will figure out just how precarious America’s fiscal position truly remains. That’s when interest rates will finally rise in the U.S. There is no way to justify record low interest rates in this country given our atrocious fiscal position. I believe interest rates here should approach levels comparable to the more indebted European countries. Once it becomes obvious just how many dollars the Fed is prepared to print to stave off recession, people running into treasuries today will likely suffer buyer’s remorse. When they rethink their assumptions, as buyers of the Facebook IPO clearly have, the Fed will then become not just the buyer of last resort, but the buyer of only resort. Then the Real Crash may finally be upon us.
Now back to the optimism; courtesy of Jennifer Rubin.
I distinctly recall in college reading Jean Francois Revel’s “The Totalitarian Temptation” and thinking, “Well that’s it. The Commies will win — too many dim people in the West.” Communism, however, crumbled in large part because very undim people, including Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, were optimists and staunch defenders of freedom.
So when conservatives today argue that we haven’t the fortitude to defeat Islamic terrorists or to put our fiscal house in order, I am not despondent. Quite the contrary, there is great reason to be optimistic. In fact, there are lots of reasons to be. I’ve got my list:
1. With yesterday’s win, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) showed that self-governance, the ability and will to grasp the reins of power from the few and tame our institutions, is possible.
2. It is becoming conventional wisdom, from the center-left to the center-right, that President Obama blew it when he chose to reject the Simpson-Bowles committee’s recommendations. …
Andrew Malcolm asks why Walker won so big?
“Win” is too small a word for what Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker pulled off Tuesday. So, probably, is victory.
In a referendum on the first half of his first term, the Republican became the first governor in U.S. history to defeat an attempt to oust him from office. The other two recall efforts — against California’s Gray Davis in 2003 and North Dakota’s Lynn Frazier in 1921 –were successful.
Exit polls discovered a significant number of Wisconsin voters bothered by the union-led recall bid for something short of improper conduct. While others were impressed by Walker’s budget surplus and billion dollar in state savings already. And Walker’s national party reputation wasn’t hurt either.
With 99% of the votes counted, Walker received 53% (1,326,658) to Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s 46% (1,150,233) and 1% for a third candidate.
But those numbers understate Walker’s success. He took 60 of the state’s 72 counties and beat Barrett by two more points than he did in 2010. Walker’s lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, also defeated a recall bid. …
Josh Kraushaar spots bad news for the prez in yesterday’s results.
President Obama wasn’t on the ballot in Wisconsin, but Gov. Scott Walker’s decisive victory in last night’s gubernatorial recall is a stinging blow to his prospects for a second term. The re-election was a telltale sign that the conservative base is as energized as ever, that the Democratic GOTV efforts may not be as stellar as advertised, and that the Democratic-leaning “blue wall” Rust Belt states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania will be very much in play this November.
Politico catches Clinton once again trashing Obama’s campaign message.
Last week, former President Bill Clinton disavowed a central theme of President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign. Tuesday, he added that a key piece of the White House’s policy agenda doesn’t make much sense to him either.
With friends like this, Obama’s political enemies don’t need to do too much.
In an interview with CNBC that his office was scrambling to clarify Tuesday night, Clinton sided with congressional Republicans over Obama in calling for Congress to temporarily renew the soon-to-expire Bush tax cuts — but he also heaped praise on private equity companies like Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, pleaded ignorance for his past gaffes and asserted his independence from the Obama campaign message operation.
It was Clinton in full Mr. Hyde mode — in a flashback to the deep and lasting tensions between the Clinton family and the Obama team that still linger from the bitter 2008 primary fight.
The interview was part of a whirlwind television tour Tuesday afternoon, with Clinton spending also granting interviews to NBC, PBS and CBS that followed up on his turn last week on CNN, when he referred to Romney’s business background — which the Obama campaign had spent days tearing apart — as “sterling.” Once again, Clinton was sucking up all the media oxygen and generating dozens of headlines about an intra-party split between the two presidents.
It took Hillary Clinton’s campaign a good part of the 2008 primary season to realize the damage that the former president’s straight talking, can’t-be-muzzled ways could do — after he helped sink his own wife’s chances at the presidency in advance of the South Carolina primary by alienating black voters. It took the Obama campaign only one week to learn the same lesson, as Clinton swung wildly between effective surrogate and major headache.
Talking about the economic crisis in Europe and the persistent economic malaise in the United States, Clinton told CBNC that extending the Bush-era tax cuts across the board was “probably the best thing to do right now.”
Obama has made raising taxes on upper earners a signature part of his reelection pitch — and Republicans were quick to exploit the daylight between the two Democratic presidents. …
WSJ OpEd notes the administration’s hard time at the Court this year.
As the world awaits the Supreme Court’s ruling on ObamaCare, there’s a larger story that the pundits are missing: the court’s rejection of the Obama administration’s increasingly extreme claims on behalf of unlimited federal power.
This term alone, the high court has ruled unanimously against the government on religious liberty, criminal procedure and property rights. When the administration can’t get even a single one of the liberal justices to agree with it in these unrelated areas of the law, that’s a sign there’s something wrong with its constitutional vision.
Let’s take these cases in order:
First, in Hosanna-Tabor Church v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the government sued a church school that fired a teacher for violating one of the church’s religious tenets: threatening to sue over an employment dispute rather than resolving the disagreement internally. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission claimed this violated the Americans with Disabilities Act because the firing was related to the teacher’s health issues.
The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 in January that punishing a church for failing to retain an unwanted teacher “interferes with the internal governance of the church, depriving the church of control over the selection of those who will personify its beliefs.” Such interference, it concluded, violates the First Amendment’s Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses. …
Roger Simon compares Elizabeth Warren to another Ms. Warren, the madam in one of Bernard Shaw’s plays; Mrs. Warren’s Profession.
… Warren can be an Indian if she wishes; she can exploit bank foreclosures if she wishes. Eliot Spitzer can bust hookers while employing them and end up with a television show. Who knows — Elizabeth may end up with her own reality show now, her own version of “Flip This House” called “Flip This Tepee”?
It’s their profession — modern liberalism. They can be capitalists while the rest of us rot under taxes and government regulation. Socialism for thee but not for me.
And it pays better than the original Mrs. Warren’s. You can even get tenure at Harvard, no questions asked. Just check the right identity square. No one will know. And if they suspect, they can’t prove anything. After all, ancestors.com only goes so far.
USA Today OpEd in high dungeon over fake Indian claims.
… For several years, Warren falsely identified herself as a Native American — a designation that raises serious questions about how such a misrepresentation might have advantaged her in obtaining a professorship at the Harvard Law School at a time when it was being attacked for its lack of diversity.
But when Brown attacked her claim, Democrats rallied their defense and Warren responded with a lot of feisty talk.
“If that’s all you’ve got, Scott Brown, I’m ready. And let me be clear. I am not backing down. I didn’t get in this race to fold up the first time I got punched,” Warren said of her GOP opponent’s non-stop efforts to keep this issue before voters.
Brown is a go-along-to-get-along Eastern Republican who kowtows to the GOP’s right wing. His voting record ought to offend most Massachusetts voters, who are liberal. But his right-wing ideological rigidity could prove to be less of an issue for a decisive bloc of voters in the Bay State than Warren’s identity crisis. Her assertion that family tales and the high cheekbones of some relatives led her to believe she had Native American blood coursing through her veins is laughable. That many Democrats, obsessed with unseating Brown, treat what she did as meaningless is lamentable. …