Preserve the Status Quo?

Heads, they win. Tails, we lose:

South Carolina, please choose wisely.

Via i-am-john-galt

Romney's Bain Helped Obama With Auto Bailout... UPDATE: Story Retracted

Here's your free-market capitalism:

Revealed: Bain & Company advised Obama on auto bailout, recommended cutting dealerships...

Does it matter that Romney hasn’t worked for Bain & Company in nearly 20 years or are the optics of this one bad enough to make it newsworthy regardless?

...The NYT reported recently that to this day, as part of the deal he negotiated when he left, Romney still gets a share of Bain Capital’s profits.

Uhm, let's see... Romney's cronies at Bain (a company Romney co-founded) worked with Obama on Obama's fiat-market, counter-capitalist, union-appeasing, jobs-killing auto bailout. Does that look bad? Why yes, yes it surely does.

Call it the Obamney Bailout.

x-posted

Update:

...this is what really ticks me off. We're told what a great capitalist Romney is and if we attack him, we're attacking capitalism. So, then why did his firm engage in so much socialism and still manage to screw up businesses, after pocketing tons of cash for themselves? This doesn't sound like the kind of capitalism I believe in. The taxpayers often took part of Romney's risk, or bailed out his mistakes, as with a pension fund, but he always managed to feather his own nest pretty damned well. This is what's wrong with America, not what's worth defending...

Stay tuned...

UPDATE:

STORY RETRACTED

Senator JimDemint on the Daily Show

Senator Jim DeMint speaking in Iowa. DeMint image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr

Cross-posted at the Left Coast Rebel

Over at Memeorandum, Think Progress thinks they have a juicy a-ha moment concerning Senator Jim DeMint. DeMint was on Jon Stewart's Daily Show and countered Stewart's argument for the goodness and federal-wonderfulness that is the fed education program Head Start.

Why doth the Think Progress troll protest so much against this:

The problem we have is from the federal level, it’s very hard to do things well. I mean, you don’t find too many federal programs that are working…When we politically manage the programs, the money is not distributed well and there’s no evidence — I mean we spent trillions trying to help poverty in America. But we don’t cure poverty, we subsidize it when we make people dependent on the government and make it harder for them to get up the ladder.

The clincher here -- and the truth -- is that the War on Poverty actually makes it harder for poor and lower-income Americans to move up the economic ladder. It takes away their drive, their spirit and eventually their life-meaning and humanity. How is that liberal? And, how is that compassionate, conservatives republicans?

Here's video of DeMint on the Daily Show:



LBJ's Great Society and "War on Poverty" are anything but over 40 years later. Always be eternally weary of politicians preaching a "war" on anything; as a rule anything the government declares war against -- the "War on Drugs" and the "War on Poverty" being the two biggest examples -- actually exacerbate, accelerate and increase the problem they were created to solve. Government is not eloquence; it is forcing of unintended consequences.

For anyone that doubts this assertion, please read this report at the Cato Institute: "Nine Trillion Didn't End Poverty, What to do?"

Pass this along, too, from Dan Mitchell at Cato:



"My argument is simple: in the real world, social welfare programs create a perverse incentive structure and leave out the most important aspect of getting out of poverty which is economic freedom and opportunity."

More at Cato on the failure that is Head Start here and here.

Figures that lib Jon Stewart didn't get the memo that his example of Head Start as the crown jewel of the effectiveness of the Leviathan federal government -- the same government that federal supremacy folks like Stewart think that we (but not them) must all swear allegiance and eternal subservience to -- is an out-and-out failure.

Updated: Even that loathsome Joel Klein agrees with me. I guess even a busted clock is right twice a day:

According to the Head Start Impact Study, which was quite comprehensive, the positive effects of the program were minimal and vanished by the end of first grade. Head Start graduates performed about the same as students of similar income and social status who were not part of the program. These results were so shocking that the HHS team sat on them for several years, according to Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution, who said, "I guess they were trying to rerun the data to see if they could come up with anything positive. They couldn't."

I wish we as tax-paying Americans could rerun the data (and turn back the clock) with our mulit-generational, multi-trillion experiment with the welfare state. If the entitlement-welfare state had never been created, we wouldn't be facing this down and we wouldn't have enslaved and broken the spirit of millions across this nation.

Aside from the mountains of debt created, the human toll is the most tragic unintended consequence of the welfare state.

*Related thought (via RK): The perversion of the implicit marginal tax rate is a cruel trap for lower-income Americans.

Update x2 (via LCR): Just found this gem at Liberty Unbound, "Hurting the Poor, Helping the Rich."

Excerpt:

Statism helps wealthy corporations in many ways — not by giving them tax breaks as the modern liberals complain, but by giving them rent-seeking handouts such as farm subsidies and defense contracts. Ending all subsidies and all pork barrel spending would be a huge loss for rich people with political connections, yet the modern liberals have bamboozled the poor into thinking that statism actually helps the poor and hurts the rich. On Wall Street, the SEC’s maze of rules makes legal compliance so difficult that it is virtually impossible for newcomers to compete with the old established investment banks. Established businessmen use taxes and regulations to stifle competition from start-up entrepreneurs and up-and-coming small businessmen who can’t afford to hire compliance lawyers and tax consultants, as their old money rivals can. Yet small business is precisely the engine of opportunity for hard-working ambitious people from poor backgrounds.

Read the rest.

Romney's Kinsley Gaffe

Wikipedia:

In U.S. politics, a Kinsley gaffe is an occurrence of someone telling the truth by accident... The term comes from journalist Michael Kinsley, who said, "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth."

Mitt Romney's Kinsley gaffe comes in his defense of his work at Bain Capital:

“In the general election I’ll be pointing out that the president took the reins at General Motors and Chrysler – closed factories, closed dealerships laid off thousands and thousands of workers – he did it to try to save the business,” Romney said Wednesday on CBS.

President Obama has publicly touted his plan to “retool and restructure” the auto companies as “an investment in American workers.” Romney was strongly opposed to the auto bailouts, but on Wednesday likened the president’s strategy to his own.

“We also had the occasion to do things that are tough to try and save a business,” he said.

Watch the video.

It's an awfully awful comparison, but I suspect there's more truth in Romney's statement than he would care to admit.

With all of the cronyism and government bailouts at Bain, I fear that Romney’s accomplishments there exemplify the beauty of capitalism in the same way that Romneycare exemplifies the beauty of free markets.

UPDATE: OMG, this is worse than I thought...

Revealed: Bain & Company advised Obama on auto bailout, recommended cutting dealerships...

Does it matter that Romney hasn’t worked for Bain & Company in nearly 20 years or are the optics of this one bad enough to make it newsworthy regardless?

...The NYT reported recently that to this day, as part of the deal he negotiated when he left, Romney still gets a share of Bain Capital’s profits.

Uhm, let's see... Romney's buddies at Bain (a company Romney co-founded) worked with Obama on the fiat-market, counter-capitalist, jobs-killing auto bailout. Does that look bad? Yes it does.

Call it the Obamney Bailout.

Obama States Choose Romney

More good news for Mitt Romney. After a tie with Rick Santorum in Iowa, Romney wins big in his own back yard, New Hampshire.

Note that both Iowa and New Hampshire are Obama states: New Hampshire went for Obama by 10 percentage points in November '08, and Iowa went for Obama by almost the same margin.

Reflecting a bit further back in recent history, you probably remember that the winner of Iowa's caucuses failed to win the GOP nomination in 2008. New Hampshire, however, was successful in launching McCain's ill-fated bid for the White House.

I hope the folks in New Hampshire and Iowa have experienced some kind of enlightenment in the last four years.

More (potential) good news for bonny Prince Mitt: Five of the next six GOP contests will be in Obama territory. The next six elections will be in South Carolina, Florida, Nevada, Maine, Colorado and Minnesota. Of those states, only South Carolina rejected Obama in the general election in 2008.

Even more good news for Romney: Three of the next six contests will be held in Romney states. Nevada, Maine and Minnesota all went for Mitt over McCain in 2008.

Yes, following in John McCain's footsteps, Mitt Romney appears to be the man whose turn it is.

Who can blame the Republican party for choosing Mitt? With the technocratic warmth of Mike Dukakis, the home field advantage of Al Gore, the aristocratic appeal of John Kerry — and the progressive instincts of all of the above — Mitt Romney is a no-brainer.

Yay, GOP!

Update: Insanity

SpiceGirl-in-Chief

This is the punk who takes credit for killing Osama bin Laden and saving our economy form a Great Depression.


(A photoshop job, but it might as well be real.)

A Metaphor

Crown Prince Wins by 8... Update: Santorum Certified Winner

The crown prince of the GOP establishment insiders club won in Iowa by 8 votes. But after spending the better part of a decade wooing Iowa voters with millions of bushels of corn cash, he failed to win as many votes in 2012 as won in 2008, missing the mark by 6 votes:

Romney 2008: 30,021

Romney 2012: 30,015

Santorum 2012: 30,007

UPDATE:

Rick Santorum -- who trailed by a mere 8 votes in the initial tally -- actually beat Romney by 34 votes, according to the certified vote totals.

Iowa: Can Romney Match His 2008 Performance? UPDATE: No

In 2008, Romney got 25.2% of the vote in the Iowa Republican caucuses. Four years later, as I write this, Romney is stuck at 23.6%, just behind Rick Santorum. If Romney can't muster 25% of the vote after all these years of campaigning and spending massive amounts of money, what does that say about this crown prince of  GOP establishment insiders?

Update:

Popular vote for Romney 2008: 30,021
Popular vote for Romney 2012: 29,657 (99% reporting)

Update II:

Romney's blogger groupie doesn't get it (via Jacobson).

Update III:

Photo finish...

Conservative Dad: Pretty vs Hot

For a long time, I've been planning to start a category of posts dedicated to topics of interest to conservative dads. Tina Korbe has a post packed with good points that have inspired me to launch my "conservative dad" series. The whole post is worth your time, so go check it out. With my two-year-old daughter's future in mind, I've selected a few key points:

"Why what women wear actually matters..."

Truthfully, I didn’t plan to write about this. We’re not a fashion blog — and, by and large, I don’t think what folks wear does matter. But, this morning, I read a brief blog post headlined “The Death of Pretty” — and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. This is a rather long excerpt, but it’s too good to not be shared (the whole piece is worth your time, too!):

"...pretty is dying.

"People will define pretty differently. For the purposes of this piece, I define pretty as a mutually enriching balanced combination of beauty and projected innocence.

"Once upon a time, women wanted to project an innocence. I am not idealizing another age and I have no illusions about the virtues of our grandparents, concupiscence being what it is. But some things were different in the back then. First and foremost, many beautiful women, whatever the state of their souls, still wished to project a public innocence and virtue...

"By nature, generally when men see this combination in women it brings out their better qualities, their best in fact. That special combination of beauty and innocence, the pretty inspires men to protect and defend it.

"Young women today do not seem to aspire to pretty, they prefer to be regarded as hot. Hotness is something altogether different. When women want to be hot instead of pretty, they must view themselves in a certain way and consequently men view them differently as well.

"As I said, pretty inspires men’s nobler instincts to protect and defend. Pretty is cherished. Hotness, on the other hand, is a commodity. Its value is temporary and must be used. It is a consumable.

"Nowhere is this pretty deficit more obvious than in our 'stars,' the people we elevate as the 'ideal.' The stars of the fifties surely suffered from the same sin as do stars of today. Stars of the fifties weren’t ideal but they pursued a public ideal different from today."

It’s so true — and it’s so sad...

...somewhere between childhood and adulthood — or, sadly, sometimes in the midst of childhood — girls begin to think it’s an embarrassment to be innocent, to be naive.

It’s not an insult to be called naive, though — not really. The first definition of the word is “having or showing unaffected simplicity of nature or absence of artificiality.” What’s wrong with that? To encounter the natural and artless — to escape cynicism and ugliness — is to be refreshed. Yes, it’s foolish to ignore ugliness — for it’s real and revealing. But we have such a limited amount of time in a day: Why not look to the beautiful, the good, the true at least as often as we look to anything else?

Here's the rest.

I would add that on another part of this spectrum (or perhaps on an entirely different plane) is a group of girls and women who may be neither pretty nor "hot," but who strive like rough men to be crass, brash and crude.

Pretty, hot... or crude?

I hope my daughter makes the right choice.