Did an IRS employee illegally leak the donor list of a conservative organization to one of its left wing opponents?
Did contributing to Mitt Romney’s campaign last year cause the IRS to target you for an audit?
At the moment the data is anecdotal, but it appears that Coburn’s office might be accumulating some interesting information.
Guess who: “He is incompetent, dishonest and not interested in the actual work of governing.”
Seems an apt and accurate description to me. And the man who wrote it was an Obama voter in 2008.
Leftwing civility: The death threats against Mitt Romney continue to pour out from Twitter.
Leftwing civility: Threats to assassinate Mitt Romney exploded after last night’s debate.
Leftwing civility: For seventeen days Facebook approved and allowed a “Kill Mitt Romney” webpage to exist, despite numerous complaints.
To quote the webpage itself:
“This is a page advocating the murder of Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney.”
Lucky Sarah Palin didn’t comment about this or people might have gotten violent!
Clint Eastwood explains the background behind his Republican convention speech.
Take away quote: “President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”
A website, ScienceDebate.org, submitted a wide range of questions to Barack Obama and Mitt Romney about their plans for science and technology, and the answers, shown in a side-by-side comparison, are interesting, though in general they demonstrate the ability of politicians to speak for a long time without saying much.
This ability to blather is especially apparent to their answers to the question 12: “What should America’s space exploration and utilization goals be in the 21st century and what steps should the government take to help achieve them?” Neither candidate adds much to what was said in the Republican and Democratic party platforms, making it obvious that neither really cares or knows that much about this subject.
Overall, however, the answers do reveal the basic and fundamental differences between the two candidates, which can be seen in their answers to the very first question about encouraging innovation:
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If you depend on the conservative commentary about Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech yesterday at the Republican convention to find out how he did, you would have no doubt that this was the greatest and most effective speech since Genesis. To quote just one report:
Paul Ryan’s speech, in two words? Nailed it. Everything that I like (and surmise that others will like as he becomes more and more familiar to them) about Paul Ryan was on perfect display during his half hour-ish on stage. He was intelligent without being intimidating; he was stern and serious but still optimistic and even funny; and he hinted at his wonkiness without getting into jargon and maintained his approachability. But the most beautiful thing about Paul Ryan as the potential vice president of the United States is his uncanny knack for breaking through populist myths and shrill leftist attacks and instead communicating the merits of free-market economics and small government, all without being shrill or polarizing.
Because I’m not spending a lot of time watching these conventions, mostly because they really are nothing more than public relations events staged by both parties, I didn’t see the speech live. After reading reports like the one above, however, I decided late last night to go to youtube and dig up Ryan’s speech and see this amazing performance for myself.
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The Republican Party, as part of their national convention taking place in Florida this week, yesterday released their party platform for the upcoming election campaign.
Normally, I don’t waste my time with party platforms. No one really reads it, and no president ever follows it. Granted, it can give you a general sense of where a party and candidate is headed philosophically, but this is politics. If you think philosophy is their number one priority then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you.
However, this document is helpful to us, at least when it comes to the nation’s space effort, as it actually devotes one entire (though short) section on the subject. Considering how vague Mitt Romney has been on what he will do with NASA and space, and how schizophrenic the Republicans in Congress have been, any hint on how they might approach this particular program should they win the election is helpful.
Here is the entire statement of the Republican party platform on the subject of space exploration:
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Romney on Thursday: “My healthcare plan I put in place in my state has everyone insured.” Also, it is an “important accomplishment” that is “working, by and large, pretty well.”
Oy. Romney apparently still does not realize that Romneycare is as politically toxic as Obamacare, which probably explains why he has not been able to pull ahead of Obama in the polls. It also once again explains why Republicans looked long and hard for an alternative before finally settling on Romney.
Nonetheless, Romney has been very clear about his opinion of Obamacare itself. He considers it an improper overreach of the federal government and a bad law. He has also been very clear about what he will do about it once in office: Repeal it. For this reason, voters will eventually choose him, even if the moment they finally make that choice will be in the voting booth on election day.
Mitt Romney’s energy policy proposal, announced today, would redirect science funding towards basic research, according to this mostly positive analysis from the generally liberal journal Science.
Personally I’d like to get the federal government out of all this. Let the private market decide where the money should be spent for research. Moreover, we still have that federal debt to pay off. Where will Romney get the money?
Racists! 400 economic experts have signed a petition supporting Romney’s economic plans.
They also condemned the efforts and future proposals of the Obama administration.
Leftwing civility: An elderly leftwing protester spits in the face of at Romney supporter at a campaign event today.
When the left made the accusation that a tea party protester had spat at a Democratic Congressman during the healthcare debate, Andrew Breitbart offered a $100,000 reward for anyone who could provide video proving it happened. Three years later that award remains unclaimed, since the only videos of the event show nothing of the sort took place. Today, not only was this disgusting act actually done by a Democratic protester, in mere hours the video is all over the internet.
Tells us something about who are the uncivil ones in this debate.
More horrors revealed: Mitt Romney once ran a Nazi torture cult! And that’s not all. Click the link for more.
Thank God we have a vigilant press to find out these important facts, before the election.
The choice of the electorate in November: “Are they prepared to listen to reasoned arguments articulated by Ryan about the need for entitlement reform, or will they succumb to simplistic liberal cant about pushing grandma over the cliff?”
Sadly, at this moment in the campaign we don’t know what the electorate will do. What we do know is that the Democrats are going to use some of the most absurd, hateful, and despicable attacks against both Romney and Ryan, as they did in 2008 against Sarah Palin and have so far against Romney. It is their idea of civility.
It’s official. Romney has picked Paul Ryan has his running mate.
It appears that at 8:45 am tomorrow (Saturday) Mitt Romney will name his vice presidential pick, and the rumors are saying it will be Paul Ryan.
If so, this will be further evidence that Romney is serious about dealing with the out-of-control federal budget. Of all the elected officials in Congress, Paul Ryan is probably the most educated and clear-headed about the budget situation, and has been willing to put his political head on the chopping block to take risks to deal with the problem. He is also one of the most articulate, intelligent, and thoughtful politicians I have seen in years. He will run rings around Joe Biden in any debate.
The only negative I see for this pick is that it will take Ryan out of the House, where he was in a position to wield a great deal of influence on budget matters. As vice-president he will not have as much power.
I’ve embedded below the fold a video of Paul Ryan describing clearly the budget problems posed by Obamacare during the White House summit called by President Obama. It is only one example, but it is worth watching to gauge the merits of this man. Also, read this long article on Ryan’s background and history.
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The horrible rumors continue to swirl! Where was Mitt Romney the night JonBenét Ramsey was murdered?
More bad news for Romney: A new report proves the candidate fed a 20-month-old baby to crocodiles!
Read the whole thing. The story is tragic and horrifying.
I lived through the 1980 election, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and I was struck at the time by the fact that next to no one among the political scientists who made a living out of studying presidential elections, communism in eastern Europe, and Sovietology saw any of these upheavals coming. Virtually all of them were caught flat-footed.
This is, in fact, what you would expect. They were all expert in the ordinary operations of a particular system, and within that framework they were pretty good at prognostication. But the apparent stability of the system had lured them into a species of false confidence – not unlike the false confidence that fairly often besets students of the stock market.
There were others, less expert in the particulars of these systems, who had a bit more distance and a bit more historical perspective and who saw it coming. The Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik wrote a prescient book entitled Can the Soviet Union Survive 1984? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn predicted communism’s imminent collapse, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan suspected that the Soviet Union would soon face a fatal crisis. They were aware that institutions and outlooks that are highly dysfunctional will eventually and unexpectedly dissolve.
In my opinion, none of the psephologists mentioned above has reflected on the degree to which the administrative entitlements state – envisaged by Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives, instituted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and expanded by their successors – has entered a crisis, and none of them is sensitive to the manner in which Barack Obama, in his audacity, has unmasked that state’s tyrannical propensities and its bankruptcy. In consequence, none of these psephologists has reflected adequately on the significance of the emergence of the Tea-Party Movement, on the meaning of Scott Brown’s election and the particular context within which he was elected, on the election of Chris Christie as Governor of New Jersey and of Bob McDonnell as Governor of Virginia, and on the political earthquake that took place in November, 2010. That earthquake, which gave the Republicans a strength at the state and local level that they have not enjoyed since 1928, is a harbinger of what we will see this November.
I agree. However, the author misses one point. There is no guarantee that the American public will vote rationally. Obama might still win. However, the big government welfare state that he and the left believe in is still bankrupt and about to fall apart, no matter what happens in November. The only real question is whether we will honestly face the disaster brewing before us and begin the process of fixing it now, or we will make believe it isn’t there and allow it to overwhelm us in its collapse.
Either way, the federal government is about to go bankrupt, and if we don’t do something about it that bankruptcy will take everything else down with it.
Attack of the Cookie Monsters.
The sad part is that the author provides documentation for every single silly attack, none of which have the slightest significance in the greater scheme of our present-day problems, where we have a federal government going bankrupt and a Senate and President who routinely flout the law for political reasons.
The perspective of one man running for President:
[W]hat exactly accounts for prosperity if not culture? In the case of the United States, it is a particular kind of culture that has made us the greatest economic power in the history of the earth. Many significant features come to mind: our work ethic, our appreciation for education, our willingness to take risks, our commitment to honor and oath, our family orientation, our devotion to a purpose greater than ourselves, our patriotism. But one feature of our culture that propels the American economy stands out above all others: freedom. The American economy is fueled by freedom. Free people and their free enterprises are what drive our economic vitality. [emphasis mine]
Sounds good to me, though we should all reserve the right to remain skeptical of anything a politician says. It is what they do that matters. Nonetheless, that Romney is making freedom a central part of his platform is further proof that he recognizes the trends and, like any politician, wants to be on the cusp of that wave. Or to once again repeat the words of Milton Friedman, “The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.”
I say “Please!” and I say it loudly. Picking Ryan for number two would reverse Ronald Reagan’s biggest mistake, picking moderate George Bush Sr. as his VP. The result of that bad choice was 12 years of Bush rule in the late 1980s and in the 2000s, during which there was little effort to rein in the power or size of government. In fact, the Bushes did a lot to increase government’s power and size.
Picking Ryan as VP would place a competent fiscal conservative into the limelight and make such a person a leading contender for the Presidency in future years. It would also help demonstrate again that the 2010 election was a trend, not a fluke.
Not good: The man tapped to head Romney’s transition team should he win the election favors implementing Obamacare on the state level.
The Romney campaign responded to say that Romney intents to repeal Obamacare fully once in office. Still, to pick this man to head his transition team is worrisome.
“Santorum talked himself out of the nomination.”
As did all the conservative alternatives to Romney:
The auditions are just about over. Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum all had their chances to be the conservative champion of the nation. Each blew it in his own special way. They soared like rockets and faded away.
In Santorum’s case, it was this:
Late-breaking voters went overwhelmingly for Mitt Romney in today’s Michigan primary as Rick Santorum’s robocalls to Democratic voters, who failed to turn out in big numbers, apparently encouraging Republicans to turn out to back the former Massachusetts governor.
If you are going to run as a conservative, don’t campaign using Democrat Party talking points: Santorum tried to win Democratic union votes by criticizing Romney for not backing the auto bailout. Since the auto bailout is generally despised by conservative voters, they heard this and abandoned Santorum in droves.
