Archive for November, 2009

Dan Sherrier

Remember that ordeal in New York recently? When the Republican establishment backed a left-leaning candidate, until conservatives led by Sarah Palin rallied around a third-party candidate who held views more strongly in line with their values?

Pundits had a field day with that one, as they carried on about the GOP being taken over by the “radical right,” which sought to purge the party of moderates.

Sorry, not progressive enough. Gotta go.

This was hailed as a horrible situation for the Republican Party that would no doubt favor the Democrats in elections. The general tenor equated to “those stupid conservatives, sabotaging their own party!” followed by a “Ha! Ha!” similar to that bully kid from The Simpsons.

DNC Chairman Tim Kaine said in a Nov. 4 statement, “However, perhaps the most consequential race of the night was the special election in the 23rd Congressional District of New York in which the Republican candidate, a moderate, was purged from the Republican Party by the most extreme elements of the conservative right wing including Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Read the rest of this entry »

Bruce Fisher

Jim Hightower, the former Texas politician and veteran political wit, was fond of excoriating political moderates as he was of skewering Republicans.

“Ain’t nothin’ in the middle of the road but yellow lines and dead armadillos,” he’d say. In the blue states, the curious phenomenon of middle-of-the-road economic policy in 2009 may turn politics red in 2010.

More of the same.

That’s because trillions of American tax dollars spent on “stimulus” spending have gone into bailing out banks rather than into buying America any new jobs.

And the political effect is terrible for congressional Democrats, who are getting angrier and angrier, just like their constituents. By the time of the next congressional elections in 2010, the political impact of the economic policy decisions of George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretaries, Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner, could destroy Obama’s majority support in Congress.

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Dan Calabrese

I was going to write a column about how stunningly ineffective President Obama has been at governing, pretty much since the day he took office. But as I went to construct my argument, I realized that what it actually demonstrates is how well the Constitution works, and how smart the Founders were.

Nice work, Tom.

Consider: The only significant bill Obama has signed has been the $787 billion stimulus package. In other words, he persuaded a Congress controlled by massive Democratic majorities to spend a pile of money. How much skill does that take?

And that one piece of legislation has – to say the least – not accomplished its purported purpose, since the economy remains weak and unemployment is still rising.

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Bob Franken

With all the reports coming out that recommend we scale back on life-saving medical exams there is one we might soon see from still another group of experts.

This one concerns depression. It concludes that diagnosis, medication and counseling won’t work anyway, so why bother trying. After all, the best we can expect from dealing with negative feelings are false positives.

What's the use?

They’ll certainly be startled by the intense political emotions, best described as anger turned outward. Republicans, in particular, will be screaming about how this is just another example of health care rationing contemplated by President Obama.

That is the main conclusion from the landmark Study About Depression (SAD). It is sponsored by the Foundation of Undermine Necessary Knowledge (FUNK), funded exclusively by the insurance companies. Read the rest of this entry »

Herman Cain

Mr. President, I had hoped that I could wait at least to the end of your first full year in office to break this bad news to you, but your latest pronouncement had me screaming at my TV, so I knew I had to tell you now.

In a Fox News interview on November 17, 2009 with White House Correspondent Major Garrett, you said:

Hate to break it.

“There may be some tax provisions that can encourage businesses to hire sooner rather than sitting on the sidelines. So we’re taking a look at those. I think it is important though to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession.”

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Bruce Fisher

The American cities that are suffering worst in this recession are the ones whose economies are tied closely to General Motors and Ford and their supply chains. A recent survey by the Brookings Institution finds that five of the 21 large metros in the Great Lakes region—Dayton, Detroit, Grand Rapids, Toledo and Youngstown—rank among the 20 weakest metro economies in the country.

Economic indicator.

Akron, Cleveland, Cincinnati and a couple of other car-towns aren’t quite as badly off, but that’s rather like saying that someone with swine flu isn’t as badly off as somebody with stage III lung cancer. Freshwater towns like Rochester and Pittsburgh, and to a lesser extent Buffalo, Syracuse and Madison, are where housing hasn’t collapsed, where unemployment is up but not catastrophically so, and where there is something else other than car-making that undergirds the economy.

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