Eeny Meeny Miny Moe 4 Lap Dogs In A Row

Anybody But Romney, But Who?

Jeffrey Lord successfully locates Romney squarely in the progressive wing of the Republican Party for The American Spectator here, but doesn't really explain how the supposedly dying wing of the party keeps getting its people nominated for president.

Not only that, Republican progressives dominate in the Senate, which can only mean one thing: Republican progressives owe their electoral success not to Republicans but more broadly to Democrats and independents who interfere in their primaries and occasionally vote for them in the general. The relatively small size and influence of the Tea Party in the US House underscores this point, despite its role in giving the House back to the GOP in 2010. Narrower constituencies elect representatives.  

The way forward is for the Tea Party to narrow them further still.

Which is another way of saying the Tea Party needs to work for greater representation for the individual American's interests. What better way than by insisting on the originalist interpretation of the very idea of representation? The Tea Party should be demanding an end to a fixed House delegation of 435 members, a Republican fast-one pulled on the country back in the 1920s at the height of the progressives' influence. The Tea Party should call for expanding the House to its original constitutional proportions of one representative to every 30,000 of population.

I can think of no quicker, more sane and just way to wrest control of government away from the political parties as presently configured and return it to the people where it belongs.

We need 10,267 members in the US House.

And surely you know what that means? Instead of dividing 538 or so electoral votes to win the presidency, he or she would be fighting for a majority of 10,367 electoral votes. The growing and wildly disproportionate and unconstitutional electoral influence of the Senate since the 20s would thus be ended at a stroke because their 100 electoral votes would be up against 10,267 others, not just 438.

And so would be ended the Senate's ability and power to cram down our throats odious nostrums like Obamacare, gays in the military, START and any number of other progressive, enlightened ideas rejected by the vast majority of Americans. 

Tim Carney Draws Blood and Larry Kudlow Proves it By Losing His Cool

Kudlow didn't like being exposed for a hypocrite, and beat up on the young guy (video here) just to show who's in charge, but the point still stands:

Republicans shill for high finance and free trade at the expense of Main Street and American manufacturing workers. Protestations that government must not pick winners and losers to the contrary, it's high time in this country that American business and American government started picking America to win instead of some libertarian notion of the bottom line, which is poison to our communities.

Tim Carney speaks up against it here, noting how Rick Santorum's populism has rankled Kudlow.

A Brief History of Third Parties' Performance in Presidential Elections

2008  2.0 million votes  1.5 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes

2004  1.2 million votes  1.0 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes

2000  3.9 million votes  3.7 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes  Nader

1996  9.7 million votes  10  percent of the vote  0 electoral votes  Perot

1992  20  million votes  20  percent of the vote  0 electoral votes  Perot

1988  0.9 million votes  1.0 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes  Paul

1984  0.6 million votes  0.7 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes

1980  7.1 million votes  8.2 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes  Anderson

1976  1.6 million votes  1.9 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes  McCarthy

1972  1.4 million votes  1.8 percent of the vote  1 electoral vote    Hospers

1968  10  million votes  14  percent of the vote  46 electoral votes Wallace

1964  0.3 million votes  0.5 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes

1960  0.5 million votes  0.7 percent of the vote  15 electoral votes  unpledged Democratic

1956  0.4 million votes  0.7 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes

1952  0.3 million votes  0.5 percent of the vote  0 electoral votes

1948  2.6 million votes  5.4 percent of the vote  39 electoral votes Thurmond

I'm cool with that

                 

Social Spending on 'The Worker' Ruined Germany Before 1933, Not War Reparations

So Oswald Spengler:

"For this part of the political wage also - insurance of every kind against fate, the building of workers' dwellings (no one thinks of demanding these for farm labourers), the construction of playgrounds, convalescent homes, libraries, and the special terms for food, railway journeys, and amusements - is all paid for directly or indirectly by taxation of "the rest" for the working man. This in fact is an essential part of the political wage, and it receives very little thought. At the same time the national wealth of which we are given the amount in figures is an economic fiction. It is calculated - as "capital" - from the yield of economic undertakings or from the market prices of interest-bearing shares, and it falls with these when the value of the working factories is threatened by the burden of high wages. A factory that is thus made to close down is, however, of no more value except for the scrap-heap. Under the dictatorship of the trade unions, Germany's economic system had in the four years 1925-29 to meet an extra load of 18,225,000,000 marks annually in respect of increased wages, taxes, and grants for social purposes. This means one-third of the national income spent one-sidedly. One year later the sum had grown to far beyond twenty milliard marks. What are two milliards for reparations compared with this? It endangered the financial position of the Reich and the currency. Its drag on the economic system was not even taken into account when the effects of wage-Bolshevism were in question. It was the expropriation of the whole economic system in the interests of one class."

What Republicans and Karl Marx Have in Common Today: Free Trade

"Generally speaking, the protectionist system today is conservative, whereas the Free Trade system has a destructive effect. It destroys the former nationalities and renders the contrast between proletariat and bourgeoisie more acute. In a word, the Free Trade system is precipitating the social revolution. And only in this revolutionary sense do I vote for Free Trade."

-- Karl Marx, 1847

Self-Denial is Hard When Faced with Self-Indulgence

"[The] vulgar luxury of great cities - little work, much money, and still more amusement - exercised a fatal influence upon the hard-working and simple men of the open country. They learnt to know of needs of which their fathers would never have let themselves dream. Self-denial is hard when one has the opposite before one. The flight from the land set in: first the farm-hands and maids went, then the farmers' sons, and in the end whole families who did not know whether or how they could hold the paternal heritage in the face of all this distortion of economic life. It has been the same in all Cultures at that stage. ... The depopulation of the villages began in England in 1840, in Germany in 1880, in the Middle West of the United States in 1920. The peasant is tired of working without wages when the town offers him wages without work. So away he goes - to become a 'proletarian.'"

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, July 1933

Here's to Tony!

Suddenly I'm Big in the Ukraine

Tony Blankley, Burkean Conservative, Succumbs to Stomach Cancer, Aged 63

He had just phoned a good one in on the Acela under the influence of a Bloody Mary at 9 in the morning last November, and famously kept peacocks, sometimes appearing to dress like one by American standards. Of course "American standards" is an oxymoron, but he became one of us still after the war when his parents moved here from England.

He enjoyed himself, as a conservative should, as even the Good Book teaches:

Behold [that] which I have seen: [it is] good and comely [for one] to eat and to drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labour that he taketh under the sun all the days of his life, which God giveth him: for it [is] his portion.


May he rest in peace.

Obituary here.

So Little To Say Today . . .

. . . and so much time to say it in.

And there it is!

Jackie on MLK, Jr.: CBS Reports Her View of Him as a "Phony", ABC? Not so much.

(Updated from Sept. 2011)

Stories here and here.

On Don Wade and Roma on wlsam.com, Diane Sawyer of ABC went out of her way, as have many others on the left as the story has come out, to say that Jackie was simply speaking under the awful spell of J. Edgar Hoover.

Uh huh.

Let's see, Diane Sawyer is married, since 1988, to Mike Nichols, grandson of the communist anarchist Gustav Landauer.


Liberalism in the defence of plagiarism knows no vice.

Unemployment Falls To 8.5 Percent in December, November Revised Up to 8.7 from 8.6

The data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics are reported here.

For 2011 through November the reported rate of unemployment has been revised higher four times and lower four times. As revised, unemployment has averaged 8.99 percent in 2011 through November:

If this were touted as an economic recovery by a George W. Bush administration, everyone would be laughing out loud and the Democrats would be calling for his head.

Obama and the Democrats have been utter failures. They should all resign.

Tea Party Takes To The Skies

Story and video here.

Carmen Tisch Arrested in Tush Attack on Abstract Expressionist Oil Painting

America's finest

Story here.

Sen. John McCain, Who Approved 'A Tale of Two Mitts' Then, Now Endorses Gov. Romney

“It’s with some nostalgia that I return to this place that I love so well. I’m really here for one reason and one reason only and that is to make sure we make Mitt Romney the next president of the United States of America. And New Hampshire, and New Hampshire is the state that will catapult him onto victory in a very short period of time. That’s why I’m here.”

See the video here.

I don't know what's worse, Mitt Romney's flip flops or John McCain's.

Here's a recounting of 61 of the latter's, and that's just through June 2008. In the 2010 Arizona Republican primary, it cost McCain $21 million to convince Arizona's Republicans to vote for him again, flip-flopping even more all the way if that were possible, as recounted here:

Moving sharply to the Right, the senator supported the controversial new immigration law in his home state that opponents said would discriminate against legal residents of Hispanic descent.

The move was in contrast to failed legislation he had drafted in 2006 that would have provided a path to citizenship for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants and had dismissed the effectiveness of building a fence on the US-Mexico border. This year he filmed an advertisement with a border sheriff which delivered a message to the federal government of: “Complete the danged fence.”

In a further bid to please the party’s Right-wingers, who tend to vote in party primaries, the senator also reversed his support for a repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on homosexuals in the military. He then distanced himself from a measure to cap carbon emissions that he had been developing with Sen Joe Lieberman, an independent Democrat.

“What McCain did was recognise he had a real race to run and move to the right,” said Martin Frost, a commentator who was formerly a Democratic congressman in Texas.


Americans have the lowest opinion ever of the US Congress not because of gridlock, partisan bickering, or even its fantastic personal wealth, but because of the utter faithlessness of the men and women who populate it.

And people don't like to be reminded too much how these chameleons represent them all too well.

Alas, we have the government we deserve. 

James Pethokoukis Trots Out His August 2010 Surprise as a January 2012 Surprise

Involving a supposed mass refinancing of GSE-backed mortgages.

Rush Limbaugh fell for it on his show today, but it's a recycled attempt at a story to which there was nothing when it first appeared a year and a half ago, and there's nothing to it now unless . . . Obama makes another very quick recess appointment, and a bunch of lenders agree to take huge hits.

Fat chance, I say.

Aside from the political toxicity of the former (even The New Republic thinks Obama's recent appointment was unconstitutional), I can't imagine how lenders are just going to agree to eat half of the losses associated with rewriting mortgages at today's lower interest rates, especially with the stiffer Basel III bank capital rules now taking effect: "[T]he plan would have an immediate fixed cost to the government of . . . $242 billion with half that cost split equally between the government and lenders." 

Linda Lowell at housingwire.com, among others, knew the story was malarkey way back when here.

For Pethokoukis' August 2010 version, see here. For the January 2012 version, now see here.

Remember the Much-Hyped Japanese Economic Threat to the US of the 1980s?

Nikkei 225 1970-2011

Refresh your memory a little bit here.

Four Week Moving Average of Initial Claims for Unemployment Falls Below 375,000 For First Time Under President Obama

To 373,250. The last time we had a number close to that was July 5, 2008: 373,000.

Break out the party hats!

The numbers are here.

The World's Richest 1 Percent

For the US in 2005, almost 10 percent of its people were among the richest in the world.

For Germany, almost 5 percent.

For France, under 5 percent.

For Italy, over 5 percent.

For Great Britain, 5 percent.

For Canada, over 6 percent.

For Korea, 4 percent.

For Japan, 1.5 percent.

For Brazil, 1 percent.