Tone deaf: In order to do a fifteen minute campaign photo-op on Memorial Day, Obama shut down the Vietnam Memorial to everyone, including veterans, for seven hours.
Good news: According to a new poll, the number of voters who consider themselves independents is now the highest in seventy-five years.
If you call yourself independent, it means you intend to keep an open mind about who to vote for. It means you have decided that loyalty to party affiliation is not a reason to vote for a candidate. It means that you have decided to reject conventional wisdom and go your own way.
It doesn’t necessarily mean you will make a wise decision, but it does mean that on the whole the American electorate has decided our government needs a new approach, and that knee-jerk loyalty to the established political parties is not the way to get it.
The surest sign that the Democrats will lose the recall vote there today: “Mainstream media escapes from Wisconsin.”
What could go wrong? The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has asked the Utah state legislature for permission to scan the license plates of all cars driving on Interstate 15.
Worse, they are already scanning plates in Texas and California, and plan to add Arizona to the list.
I especially like this quote from a Utah legislator in response to the request. “I’ll be quite frank with you. A lot of us in Utah don’t trust the federal government.” Do tell.
Repeal it! More colleges have announced plans to drop their student healthplans due costs imposed by Obamacare.
Lenoir-Rhyne University of Hickory, N.C., the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., and Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa—all private liberal-arts colleges—have told students they are dropping school-sponsored limited-benefit insurance plans starting in the fall. The three colleges said students’ premiums would have gone up roughly tenfold, and they said they could no longer justify making students sign up if they didn’t have their own insurance. [emphasis mine]
And if they don’t drop their healthplan?
The State University of New York at Plattsburgh said its 2011-2012 premium was $440 for a plan that covered up to $10,000 for each injury or sickness. Officials said the premium for the coming year would be $1,300 to $1,600 for a plan that meets the new requirements. The school will continue to require students to carry insurance, either through the school or not.
How’s that hope and change working out for you, students?
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.
McCarthyism of the left: Blackballing Nat Hentoff.
Bipartisan corruption: A bank run by an Obama fund-raiser has gotten an Republican-led House committee to exempt that bank from provisions of the Dodd-Frank act, saving the bank $300 million.
Any law that allows legislators to grant individual waivers isn’t a law at all but a form of extortion: Pay up or you won’t get your exemption. Dodd-Frank, as well as much of all the legislation passed by Congress in the past decade, should be repealed so that everyone gets the exemption.
In his first two years in office, Democrats gave Mr. Obama everything he wanted, save for cap and trade and union card-check, which would have done even more harm to job creation. They passed stimulus, ObamaCare, multiple housing bailouts, Dodd-Frank and more.
Even after Republicans took the House, they gave Mr. Obama the payroll tax holiday he demanded first for 2011 and again for 2012. Far from some new fiscal “austerity,” overall federal spending hasn’t declined. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve has delivered monetary stimulus after stimulus—QE I, QE II, Operation Twist, and 42 months of near-zero interest rates with the promise of 30 months more.
Mr. Obama has had the freest run of policy of any President since LBJ. So maybe the problem is the policies.
Maybe Milton Friedman was right that “temporary, targeted” tax cuts don’t change the incentives to invest or hire because people aren’t stupid. Maybe each $1 of new federal spending doesn’t produce a “multiplier” of 1.5 times that in added output. Maybe the historic burst of regulation of the last three years has harmed business confidence and job creation. And maybe the uncertainty that comes from helter-skelter fiscal and monetary policy has dampened the animal spirits needed for a durable expansion.
As I said yesterday, though no president or Congress is entirely to blame for the state of the economy, they both can do great harm if they make decisions that interfere with the freedom of the market. And sadly, having the government interfere with the freedom of the market has been Obama’s mantra since the day he took office.
The scientist suing JPL because he thinks he was fired due to his religious beliefs wants $1.36 million, according to court papers filed early last month.
Not good: The Labor Department announced today that the U.S. economy only added 69,000 jobs in May, the fewest in a year.
The unemployment rate went up slightly as well, Labor also adjusted downward the number of jobs created in the past two months to terribly comparable numbers.
While no president is ever entirely responsible for the state of the economy, Barack Obama’s policies have certainly done significant harm. High regulation, Obamacare, and a clear hostility to private enterprise in all fields except space exploration has helped produce what appears to be the longest period with a floundering economy in my lifetime.
The trial of seven earthquake scientists in Italy on charges of manslaughter for not correctly predicting the earthquake in L’Aquila continued yesterday with each of the defendants testifying.
The trial will not resume again until the fall.
