> If Mitt Romney is elected and secures Republican control of both houses of Congress, the U.S. could be poised for a vertiginous economic snap back.
Worth a read if you want to see how President Obama has been damaging the U.S. economy.
Category: Politics
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Why Obama will never be as Bad as FDR
At least he’s got that going for him.
Vice President Biden just made something up? Shocking.
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RTP Mentions on Limbaugh’s Radio Show
> But do you remember six months ago, maybe not that long, three months ago we were told that North Carolina was gonna determine the election. And particularly, specifically what they call the Research Triangle. There were 49,000 yuppies. Remember this story? Forty-nine thousand people who live in this triangle area, Raleigh-Durham, they were gonna determine the outcome of the election. It was a serious analysis. I’m not making fun of it. It was people who were dead serious about it. It was a very persuasive case that they were making.
> Obviously it was prior to the Democrat convention, and it talked about the circumstance over in Charlotte and Obama having trouble with the black vote and that that Research Triangle area, yuppies over there, whoever they are, the great undecideds, the independents, whatever the makeup was. I don’t remember. I shoulda looked the story up. I shoulda gotten it from the archives. I just remembered this on the fly, just remembered it now. Everybody said the whole election could turn on North Carolina and those 49,000 people. Let’s just assume that they’re right and the election’s over, folks. He-he-he-he-he-he-he.
Shoot. I was so close to casting the deciding vote in the entire election.
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The AARP In Bed with President Obama
The AARP tries to distance itself from President Obama:
> “While we respect the rights of each campaign to make its case to voters, AARP has never consented to the use of its name by any candidate or political campaign,” the group posted in a statement. “AARP is a nonpartisan organization and we do not endorse political candidates nor coordinate with any candidate or political party.”
when in reality, they get huge benefits from Obamacare
> “Thanks to its cuts to Medicare Advantage, Obamacare is expected to expand the number of seniors buying “medigap” supplemental insurance plans,” The Washington Examiner explained in an editorial. “AARP controls 34 percent of the market for such plans. According to a 2011 House Ways and Means Committee report, AARP stands to make between $55 million and $166 million from Obamacare in 2014 alone.”
I wonder how the AARP’s members would react if they learned that their dues were going to lobby for legislation that is going to cost them hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. My guess: they would not be pleased.
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Why Libertarians Should Vote for Romney
> One can point to individual unhappy results from Republican-appointed justices, but it is a mathematical certainty that Obama-appointed justices will flip the Court on these critical issues of the rights of individuals against the government—none more critical than First Amendment protection for political speech. Once that falls, the game is over and libertarians have lost permanently. This alone is a dispositive libertarian case for Romney, even before one gets to the difference between a Romney and Obama on economic freedom and regulation
As [David Bertstein said](http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/volokh/mainfeed/~3/qjbA7wAt960/), food for thought.
> The lie is that America’s military might has tamed the Taliban.
> “There is this narrative coming out of Washington for the last two years,” Logan said. It is driven in part by “Taliban apologists,” who claim “they are just the poor moderate, gentler, kinder Taliban,” she added sarcastically. “It’s such nonsense!”
I am sure once President Obama is done campaigning he can refocus on the problems in the Middle East. Until then, we can count on his friends in the media to not make it a big issue.
> 5. Obamacare: Many doctors oppose the Obamacare plan, and many have said they will stop taking Medicare patients. This ends Medicare as many people currently experience it. While Ryan’s proposals to fix the health behemoth also included cuts to Medicare, the money was to go to shoring up Medicare’s trust fund – not to finance Obamacare.
> Obamacare is fertile ground for Ryan. He can describe how the president’s health plan is helping stifle job creation, as businesses struggle against the law’s new regulations and higher taxes. He can cite the most recent NFIB survey of small business optimism, that has edged lower once again in the past month, and the decline in new-business start-ups. As much as the Obama administration has paid lip service to their enthusiasm for the private sector and for small firms in particular, their policies have buried the animal spirits of our entrepreneurs.
I really hope Congressman Ryan mops the floor with Vice President Biden.
> Let’s get real. The unemployment data reported each month are gathered over a one-week period by census workers, by phone in 70% of the cases, and the rest through home visits. In sum, they try to contact 60,000 households, asking a list of questions and recording the responses.
> Some questions allow for unambiguous answers, but others less so. For instance, the range for part-time work falls between one hour and 34 hours a week. So, if an out-of-work accountant tells a census worker, “I got one baby-sitting job this week just to cover my kid’s bus fare, but I haven’t been able to find anything else,” that could be recorded as being employed part-time.
> The possibility of subjectivity creeping into the process is so pervasive that the BLS’s own “Handbook of Methods” has a full page explaining the limitations of its data, including how non-sampling errors get made, from “misinterpretation of the questions” to “errors made in the estimations of missing data.”
What is the over / under for the next report? 8.3%?
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Obama v. Gravity
> One theory I’ve had about this election is particularly relevant right now. I call it “Barack Obama vs. gravity.” The basic idea is this: Team Obama has had one overriding goal this cycle — to keep the president ahead of Mitt Romney in the polls.
> The reason is simple: Obama is, and always has been, something of a bandwagon candidate. A major theme in 2008 was always that supporting Obama enabled the voter to be a part of history, encouraging others to join in the process. But for that theme to work, the perception had to be that Obama was, in fact, going to win.
Mr. Trende’s theory make a lot of sense. It will be interesting to see if President Obama is now in a downward slide from which he cannot recover[^fn1].
[^fn1]: Which is kind of appropriate, considering he has put our economy in almost such a slide (I think we can recover if he is not re-elected. I doubt we will recover for quite some time if he remains in place).
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America’s Best Governors
Maine comes in at #3, so congratulations to my family and friends who helped Governor LePage get elected. Hopefully, come November, we can elect someone in North Carolina who can raise our ranking for next year.
> Well, who knew Mitt Romney’s October Surprise would be mopping up Denver with Barack Obama. I still haven’t been able to calculate how many calories Mitt Romney consumed eating Barack Obama’s lunch that day.
“President Romney” has a nice ring to it. I hope he can keep it up over the next few weeks.
Mr. Ponnuru is more optimistic than I am about the debate. I have a fear that it will be a fairly even contest and the media will spin that as “Ryan underperforms in the debate.”
Of course this is what is going to happen. The next 4 years are going to be a real eye-opener for people.
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Zuckerman Tears Down Obama
> It is all very well to raise a sword and cry “Forward!” but to what? Campaigning and barnstorming, at which Obama is very good, is no substitute for brainstorming to evolve a cohesive set of plans to deal with the current crisis. Yes, he inherited a financial crisis that he had no part in causing. But after the most stimulative fiscal and monetary program in the country’s history—he racked up almost $5 trillion in deficits in four years, which had previously taken us 205 years to accumulate—we have had at least a retreat from the edge of the cliff with some emergence of occasional green shoots in the desert.
But President Obama is such a “cool” guy. That counts for something, right?
Roku allows for native viewing[^fn1].
[^fn1]: On an interesting note, their recommendation that you use an iPhone or iPad with Airplay to view it on your AppleTV makes me think that they will have a non-Flash streaming option for iOS devices.
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The $5 Trillion Tax Attack is a Fiction
Shocking. I never would have guessed President Obama would mislead people.
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President Obama’s “Best” Lines
> “If I don’t have this [economic recovery] done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”
Well, now that we have under 8% unemployment, he can stick around, right?
I agree with Jack Welch that something smells funny about this report.
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Debate Excuses
Solid takedown of some of the “reasons” for why President Obama lost the debate.