Two bits, four bits, six bits a Euro
(This article was first published at The American Thinker on 05/23/2010.)

Despite the best efforts of the Democrat troika of Obama, Pelosi & Reid to lead the American economy down the spiraling path of European socialism, Larry Kudlow at The National Review suggests that we might soon be cheering again for King Dollar:

Amidst all of the fear, panic, and growing stock market doom and gloom, I’d like to offer an important silver lining. It’s a little piece of economic optimism. Look no further than the sharply rising U.S. dollar….For the moment, we are witnessing price stability. Not inflation, not deflation, but price stability. Would that it would last….the greenback’s surge relative to other paper currencies is depressing energy and other commodity prices….Gasoline prices have dropped 2.4 percent, despite the fact that we’re heading into the busy summer driving season. When was the last time gas prices fell heading into Memorial Day? http://www.nationalreview.com/kudlows-money-politics

While what passes for the current crop of American political leadership deserves precisely zero credit for the dollar’s resurgence, at least the Geithner-Summers-Obama hand on the wheel of economic state is held somewhat in check by the genius of the checks and balances built into our political system by the founding fathers. The American economic system still looks good compared to what’s left in the bottom of the European shake-and-bake bag. Gerald Warner at the UK Telegraph, as usual, doesn’t sugar coat it:

The European experiment has failed and is only artificially being kept alive on a life-support system of taxpayer-funded bailouts. The euro is now a zombie currency….We live in an age of mass communication: people have noticed that Europe has a few little local difficulties. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100040178/the-eu-is-as-doomed-as-its-currency-lets-get-out-from-under-this-collapsing-monstrosity/

Everybody, that is, except the geniuses in the American Democrat party. One would think the lemmings at the back of the socialist stampede over the cliff would have an advantage over their European brethren who are already hurtling down the abyss. Yet, even in the face of strident voter opposition to their demented policies, Democrats continue to call for more spending, more debt and more government. Any fool can see where socialism has led Europe.

As Warner suggests, the establishment of the European Union and its currency was merely an attempt to establish an expensive ruling elite, regardless of its economic and political viability. Even in the face of ruin, the Euro-nannies resist taking the appropriate medicine:

The real-life solution to the crisis would have been to let Greece and the other PIG nations default on their debt and restructure it; to return to the drachma, peseta, etc and devalue. The euro was never a real currency: it has failed and the longer the Euro-fanatics delay in recognising that reality the more they will be punished.

…there is no “if” about it – Euroland is down the plughole. The question is: how much longer is Europe going to court economic collapse that could regress its living standards by a generation, to placate the power-mad fantasies of the Unholy Roman Emperors in Brussels? The fundamental, structural flaw in the euro from its inception was that it was a currency invented to give an appearance of substance to a political aspiration – it was Brussels Monopoly Money.

Hopefully the strength of the American dollar, based upon it being issued by the strongest and most stable political and economic machine the world has ever known, will survive the current assault on it by the power-mad fantasies of the Unholy American would-be emperors from Chicago and San Francisco. I suppose we will have to wait for the time to force California and New York to default and restructure their debt. At least until we can start throwing the bums out in November.
Ralph Alter blogs at Right on Target www.rightot.blogspot.com

Vermont: If at first you don't secede...

(This article was first published at The American Thinker on 02/02/2010.)
Despite being wildly over-represented in Congress considering their pint-sized population and their woeful insignificance to all but the maple syrup, macrame' plant-hanger and lib-tard industries, it looks like Vermonters would like to secede. A collection of native moon-bats has formed the ""left-libertarian, anti-big government, anti-empire, antiwar,...small is beautiful" Second Vermont Republic with plans to unhook the Green Mountain State from the tenous tether to sanity maintained by its inclusion in our 50 states.You see, Vermont, like Texas (I bet you never thought you would see those three words strung together), was an independent republic before it ever became our 14th state. Originally a French possession, Vermont was the booby prize awarded to the British in 1763 for their victory in the French and Indian War. From 1777 to 1791 Vermont was a power unto itself led by it's fierce militia. Called The Green Mountain Boys, their army was comprised of itinerant furniture makers including Ethan Allen and his crafty young recruits, Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders.After more than two centuries of statehood, however, the hearts of Vermont's Ben & Jerry's-swilling populace was broken by Barack Obama. The secessionist party's gubernatorial candidate is currently the owner of Radio Free Vermont and states the case for those northeasterners desirous of opting out of the U.S. of A.:
"People in Vermont in general are very antiwar, and all their faith was in Obama to end the wars. I ask people, 'Did you get the change you wanted?' They can't even look you in the eyes. We live in a nation that is asleep at the wheel and where the hearts are growing cold like ice." The secessionist movement already commands the support of 13% of Vermont's voters. If supporters for the state's drive to legalize the use of marijuana for the treatment of sandal fungus, windmill pox and solar panel blindness succeed, pundits expect support for secession to rise to near unanimity. The well-organized movement has a slogan: "Imagine Free Vermont." I guess living in those monts verts inspires a desire to take the high ground, with the iconoclasts from Montpelier (population 7,760) believing they have cornered the market on morality:
"The U.S. government, they said, was an immoral enterprise - engaged in imperial wars, propping up corrupt bankers and supersized corporations, crushing small businessmen, plundering the tax-base for corporate welfare, snooping on the private lives of citizens - and they wanted no more part of it."In addition, the free-thinkers from the Burlington Mutineer Factory believe that by going even greener, the residents of Vermont can cast off their corporate oppressors and achieve energy and economic indepence:
" (they can do so) with a tax structure reformed to incentivize small business and industry (and to make life difficult for large out-of-state corporations). By 2020, they foresee Vermont producing at least 75% of its own electricity and heat, using wind-, solar-, biomass- and hydro-power....(furthermore they believe that) current U.S. law enables multinational corporations to abuse Vermont as a "resource colony." Citing a 2008 study by the University of Vermont, Wagner says the state stands to gain over $1 billion a year in revenue by taxing equitably the corporate behemoths that exploit Vermont's "commons," which includes everything from the state's groundwater, surface water, wildlife and forests, to the public spectrum of the airwaves. Pardon my cynicism, but if Vermont wanders off on its own, it won't be 12 months until their native deposits of snow and Stowe-bud run out and the Birkenstock Flannel Revolution comes a cropper. That's not to say I don't like the idea of Vermont's secession: I say let 'em yoke themselves to the Mexifornians and the Tundra-Pinkoes from Wisconsin and go over the falls in a troika-barrell.

American Francophiles

(This article first appeared at The American Thinker on 01/30/2010.)
Barack Obama and his allies a gauche would like to model our national economy after that of the Social Democrat statopias of Western Europe, with the model of France being a particularly attractive model for leftists. A reading of the auto-biography of Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (Harcourt, Brace & Company 1948) suggests that the American national psyche has already gravitated toward the francophilic.Merton spent the better part of his life in cloistered monasteries, practicing a mixture of fierce Christian faith and a meditative practice that drew from the ways of Eastern spirituality. As a child, he lived in France and came to revile it and the change in the character of the French people as their sense of cultural smugness blurred their sense of place in both the world and the universe.
"..I suppose the most shocking thing about France is the corruption of French spirituality into flippancy and cynicism; of French intelligence into sophistry; of French dignity and refinement into petty vanity and theatrical self-display; of French charity into a disgusting fleshly concupiscence, and of French faith into sentimentality or puerile atheism." (pg 51 TSSM)If one were to substitute the words "America" and American for the words, "France" and "French," one would have a clear picture of the dissolution of the American character, particularly as represented in the politically correct worlds of academia and journalism.Only a return to a focus on educational principles grounded in the thorough study of history, religion and the humanities can prevent our continued slide into the economic and social morass currently inhabited by the nearly bankrupt, demographicly dead-end states of Western Europe.

Americans Wake Up to Obama's Lies

(This article first appeared at The American Thinker on 01/20/2010.)
As much as Barack Obama professes his admiration for our 16th POTUS, Abraham Lincoln, B.O. still seems determined to disprove one of Honest Abe's most famous bromides:"You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time."(Abraham Lincoln ) The fact that this duplicitous non-achiever was elected in the first place proves his ability to fool nearly all of the people some of the time. Despite a near total lack of credentials, a voting record vacillating between rad-lib and "present," and a passel of communists, terrrorists, anti-Semites and criminials in his close circle of friends, Obama rather easily fooled nearly all of the people in our great land. Especially those who went to journalism school.The increasingly tin-tongued Speechifier-in-Chief seems deterrmined to flay the dead horse that Obamacare has become, just as he continues out in front of the politically correct nit-wit national security apparatus he has constructed, believing that he merely needs to find the right way to parse his promotion of these bankrupt ideas so his intellectual inferiors can finally "get it."Well, we're getting it, all right. The latest Rasmussen poll demonstrates just how much of America Obama has lost. When asked whether B.O.'s proposed freeze of discretionary federal spending would help much, fully 9% of respondents agreed that it would while 81% of those polled believed that the freeze would be little help, if any. I'm sure Joy Behar, Keith Olbermann and Henry Waxman are still on board. After all, Lincoln did state that you can fool some of the people, all of the time. The starry eyed residents of Lib La-La Land are snug in their tin-foil hats with their Obama blankie to keep them safe and warm. It appears that all Obama has left is the true believers. After nearly a year of B.O.'s fork-tongued pontificating, he is reduced to fooling almost none of the people, all of the time.

Time to Take on the Unions

(This article first appeared at The American Thinker on 01/25/2010.)
The self-actualizing tea-party/townhall movement continues its remarkable job on the national political scene. Nudged by talk radio and the alternative media punditocracy, conservatives have put boots on the ground and cash in the coffers for deserving Republican candidates in New Jersey, Virginia, and Massachusetts. The near miss in the effort to elect Conservative Doug Hoffman in N.Y. District 23 may not have gone for naught either. There is another election coming there soon.
The efficacy of the movement has been based on its speed, mobility, and ability to generate cash. Once a vulnerable target like Martha Coakley has been identified, action follows swiftly and effectively. The fact that the special elections that have been held were isolated from the normal brouhaha of a full national election with hundreds of races and candidates has facilitated the effectiveness of the conservative response. The question becomes: How can conservatives approach the national political landscape now that it has proven susceptible to focused effort and amenable to the conservative message?
The dearth of additional special elections in the near future will allow the conservative movement to target the underlying causes of our ailing national economy and diminished national pride. No other single cause has been more disruptive to our economy and the principles of the American Dream than the pernicious undermining of commonsense capitalism by the greedy bullies in the teachers', auto workers', and public sector unions.
The restrictions placed upon corporate political donations by the McCain-Feingold Act simply facilitated the ability of the huge labor unions to use their cash to purchase the Democratic Party lock, stock, and Obama. SEIU's Thug-in-Chief Andy Stern was the most frequent visitor to the Obama White House reported on the W.H. Visitor list. Do you suppose he showed up empty-handed every time?
Labor unions provided protection to workers from the sharp practices of powerful companies in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Since the 1950s however, the American labor movement has taken unfair advantage of a political climate, opening doors to political influence denied others. Through collective bargaining, the unions have negotiated contracts that have bankrupted our auto industry, destroyed our public schools, and bloated state and federal government payrolls with unconscionable pension, benefit, and payroll costs.
Needless to say, it's impossible to run a company or the government when you can't fire incompetent workers, are manacled by ridiculous work rules, and pay pensions to fifty-year-olds nearly equal to their highest salary when fully employed. How did anyone ever believe that this business model would work?
Of course, the Democrats and their union pals have the solution: They want to make everybody a union member. When quizzed about the wide difference between wages for American union members and those not in unions, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis provides what passes for critical thinking on the Obama team:
As workers across the country have seen their real and nominal wages decline as a result of the recession, these numbers show a need for Congress to pass legislation to level the playing field to enable more American workers to access the benefits of union membership. This report makes clear why the administration supports the Employee Free Choice Act," a bill that would make it easier to unionize.
The report cited by Ms. Solis is the annual report of the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics on union membership, which was released last Friday. It reveals that private-sector union membership continues to decline as private businesses with unionized labor forces falter, reduce their workforce, go bankrupt, or find a way to escape the unions. Government union membership, however, continues to grow, reaching 37.4% of the total government workforce. There are significant political ramifications to this continued growth.
Meredith Jessup at townhall.com quotes senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Fred Siegel:
At the same time the country is being squeezed, public-sector unions are a rising political force in the Democratic Party," he said. "They depend on extra money for the public sector, and that puts the Democrats in a difficult position. In four big states -- New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California -- the public-sector unions have largely been untouched by the economic downturn. In those states, you have an impeding clash between the public-sector unions and the public at large."
And therein lies the opportunity for conservative action. All across America, people of nearly every walk of life have been forced to sacrifice during the current recession. Yet the American Labor Union movement seems to think that its members should be the only ones to get through this trough without getting a haircut. It's time for the tea-party movement to encourage our elected officials to get out the coarse clippers.The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision has deprived private-sector labor unions of a key advantage over their employers, who are now able to fund election advertising. A coalition of citizens hurt by union dominance can be effective at the polls.
Ronald Reagan provided us with a blueprint demonstrating how American capitalism should deal with greedy and ineffective labor unions. On August 3, 1981, 13,000 unionized members of the Profession of Air Traffic Controllers Organization went on strike after the Federal Aviation administration refused to provide them with a 25% pay increase combined with a 20% shorter work week. President Reagan called the strike illegal and worked with air traffic managers to develop a contingency plan to cover for the striking unionists.
To the chagrin of the strikers, the FAA's contingency plans worked. Some 3,000 supervisors joined 2,000 nonstriking controllers and 900 military controllers in manning airport towers. Before long, about 80 percent of flights were operating normally. Air freight remained virtually unaffected. (Reagan stood his ground and fired all of the strikers.)
In carrying out his threat, Reagan also imposed a lifetime ban on rehiring the strikers. In October 1981, the Federal Labor Relations Authority decertified PATCO." Don't you love a happy ending? There really isn't another solution. Let's encourage our elected officials to commence wholesale pruning of the bloated state and federal workforce. At the same time, we need our best conservative legal minds to help discover a way to decertify the labor unions that continue to suck the lifeblood from the productive members of American society.

Barack Obama is Box Office Poison

Apparently it has never occurred to our political pollsters that Barack Hussein Obama is the Bradley Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_effect personified. While our floundering POTUS continues to garner approval numbers hovering in the 50% range, his policies are judged much more harshly by polled Americans. The Real Clear Politics average http://www.realclearpolitics.com/, for instance, reports B.O.’s job approval average at 49.4%. His hand-maidens in Congress however, receive only 24.5 % approval and of those asked about the direction in which our country is going, only 35.9 % believe we are headed down the right path. Just exactly who do they think is holding the steering wheel?

Obama was surrounded by wily operatives supremely attuned to the public mood during the 2008 campaign, taking maximum advantage. He won the Presidency despite a total lack of useful experience and principles precisely contrary to those needed to manage the executive branch of American government. Those same advisors have suddenly become tin-earred and hard-of-thinking, having either completely misread the wishes of the American populace or completely disregarded them. The misleading trope of “Obama’s popularity” is getting old. In the super-charged atmosphere of political correctness foisted upon us by the Kennedy/Cronkite media and their allies in academia, the polling dissonance cited above suggests that most folks just don’t feel comfortable reporting their dislike for the Lyin’ Hawaiian.

Barack Obama continues to infuriate those on both ends of the political spectrum, while merely providing major disappointment to those in the center. The combination of his narcissism and his love affair with the sound of his own voice have led him to completely over-expose himself to the point where the law of diminishing returns has kicked in. One or two Obama speeches might be inspiring. But according to the Political Hotsheet at CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/01/20/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry6119525.shtml Barack Obama gave a combination of 411 speeches, addresses and remarks. How can America not be tired of his visage?

To cap it all, an informed observer would have to believe that a likeable President in his first term would have some useful coat-tails to extend to those members of his party in need of a little boost when elections roll around. Well, despite B.O.’s large expenditure of Presidential capital as a fund-raiser, the formerly silver-tongued orator has provided precisely zero tangible help to struggling Dems in need of a lifeline. Obama attended 28 fundraisers to churn up electioneering cash for his party in his first year in office. Compare that to the 6 fund-raisers attended by George W. Bush in the same period. In addition, the Big O attended 7 campaign rallies for his party in year one. And here’s the rub:

“The rallies were for Gov. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds, D-Va, and U.S. Senate Candidate Martha Coakley, D-Mass. All of them lost. “ (Ibid CBS)

Obama has even lost the approval of most of our children. Time for Kids http://www.timeforkids.com/TFK/teachers/wr/article/0,27972,1954215,00.html provided a survey to 9-13 year olds in American schools and asked the kids to grade the President. Here are the results:


Obama's Grades:
A: 19%
B: 30%
C: 24%
D: 10%
F: 16% (Ibid TFK)

That’s right, 50% of the kids gave Obama a C or worse for his first year performance, with 16% giving him an F. Obviously B.O is not the guy you want to invite to pull you out of the ditch into which the Democrats have driven themselves.
After Scott Brown’s brilliant election victory in Massachusetts, it’s not just the Blue Dogs whose prognosis for re-election in 2010 looks grim. If Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts seat wasn’t safe, there are no safe Democrat seats. Regardless of the dire straits they find themselves in, you can bet that the Democrat campaign trails will be strictly Obama non grata.

Who Vetted Martha Coakley?

(This article first appeared at The American Thinker on 01/18/2010.)
The utter lack of seriousness on the part of the Democrat Party in Massachusetts looks likely to complicate matters significantly for the Washingtonians stumbling toward Obamacare. It seems unlikely that anyone in the bastion of liberalism on the Bay vetted
the unpalatable machine hack, Martha Coakley, who is running for the Chappaquiddick Memorial Senate seat. Where were the media stormtroopers who rushed to vet Sarah Palin when they pronounced the McCain campaign's review of Governor Palin's background insufficient? Clearly the Democrats took this one for granted, foisting a grating and belligerent candidate upon their unsuspecting allies in the media and labor union confederation.

Hopefully it is too late to rescue the under-prepared shrew from the Dan Quayle school of spelling http://blog.masslive.com/thefray/2010/01/martha_coakley_ad_misspells_massachusetts.html from ignominious defeat. Coakley's arrogant dismissal of questions from the press, her head-in-the-sand belief that Afghanistan is terrorist-free and general cluelessness combine with her thin-lipped Calvin Coolidge demeanor to provide as unattractive a candidate for national office as one could imagine.

It's a good thing the Democrats were unable to sober up one of the Kennedys long enough to contend for what should have been a win in a walk. Here's to a Brown Tuesday.