Monthly Archives: April 2011

Predicting the Presidential Race

More Kenetic Military Actions

BY RICH GALEN

Reprinted from mullings.com

 About the time President Obama was goofing it up at Google, he was also approving a fairly dramatic escalation in America’s involvement in Libya by agreeing to utilize armed Predator Drones to rain fire down on Mohamar Gaddafi’s forces.

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Governing Drunk on Partisanship

BY TONY BLANKLEY

Reprinted from RealClearPolitics and Washington Times

If future historians look back on the ruins of the American economy after a U.S. bond crisis struck in the second decade of the 21st century, many causes will be noted. Obviously, it will be seen that for decades before the catastrophe, the U.S. was spending vastly more than it could afford on government health and retirement programs.

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“Send In the Clowns…They’re Here”

BY RICH GALEN

Reprinted from mullings.com

 To succeed in America – to truly succeed in America – you have to be more than excellent at what you do; you have to be a carnival barker making certain that every single person in each of the 50 states knows that you are excellent at what you do.

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Count the M&Ms

BY FRANK HILL

Reprinted from telemachus.com

 There has been a lot of braying and bleating from the President to the leaders in Congress about the significance of this most-recently passed budget agreement that averted the shutdown of the federal government yesterday.

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Another Jacksonian Era

BY RICH GALEN

Reprinted from mullings.com

The deal to head off a government shutdown Friday night got done because a guy named Barry Jackson said it was done. Not one second before.

I have no – zero – inside info on what in the press world is known as a “tick-tock” who said what to whom, and when they said it. I am not one of Barry Jackson’s pals. I’m not even sure who they might be.

But, I have known Barry Jackson for about 15 years and I know this: He has the ability to focus in on a problem not like a laser – that would be too diffused; but like the beam of sub-atomic matter zooming around a particle accelerator.

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Get New Scorecard for Judging Value

BY RICH GALEN

Reprinted from mullings.com

We need a new way of keeping score when it comes to government spending. The only test is: How much did we spend on a program last year and how much more (or, rarely, less) are we spending this year.

There is no mention of whether the program in question is working well, badly, or not at all. There is no consideration of whether there is a more efficient way to deliver whatever services or goods are involved in the program.

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Shut Down Government

BY RICH GALEN

Reprinted from mullings.com

Over the 12 years of writing MULLINGS, I have often strayed – sometimes pretty far – from Conservative Orthodoxy.

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Obama Reality: Conventional President

BY JOHN FEEHERY

Reprinted from the feeherytheory.com

President Obama emailed his supporters that he is running for re-election. I guess he did that as a way to tell young voters (who largely powered his initial election campaign) that he is still with them.

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Sunset Every Law

BY JOHN FEEHERY

Reprinted from the feeherytheory.com

As anybody who ever watched Schoolhouse Rock in the 1970’s knows (“I am just a bill, I am only a bill and I am sitting here on Capitol Hill, but I hope to be a law one day, oh, yes I know that I will, but today I am still just a bill”), it is awfully hard to make a law in this country.

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Nothing Small About Spending Cuts

BY JOHN FEEHERY

Reprinted from the feeherytheory.com

It is easy to be fairly nonchalant about the current budget battle that has consumed the Congress.

Pundits (myself included) have pointed out that the tens of billions of dollars being discussed is chump change, especially if you consider the trillions of dollars that we owe to the Chinese.

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What Would Jefferson Think?

BY FRANK HILL

Reprinted from telemachus.com

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York was recently caught on tape talking about how to describe all Republican efforts to reduce federal spending as ‘extreme’ and ‘dangerous’.

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Congress:History is Calling, Please Answer

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

In the spring of 1981 Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman sat for weeks at a long table in room H-228 of the Capitol, his beady eyes peering over stacks of thick, black 3-ring binders containing the detail on most every federal program.

Stockman was holding over budget negotiations with his former colleagues in the House of Representatives. His mission was to cut spending, cut taxes, increase defense, and help his President, Ronald Reagan, usher in a new era of smaller, limited government, entrepreneurial innovation, individual freedom, and global prestige.

Piece of cake.

Few if any at the table, maybe with the exception of Jack Kemp, knew they were making history at the time. But they were, in the same way congressional leaders did for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and Roosevelt’s New Deal and McKinley’s and Teddy Roosevelt’s regimes of political and regulatory reforms.

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