If California is really where national trends start, the nation is in trouble. The good news, though, is that an anti-big-government revolt may be brewing out there.
[Update]
Michael Barone: Are Americans getting cold feet over Obama economic proposals? Let’s hope so, finally.
…better than Obama’s first one. It’s not hard.
If they want a “second stimulus,” step one would be rescinding the first one.
Here.
We got a Wii fit a few months ago, and it tells me that my BMI is high, though within the normal range (23.5), and it’s always encouraging me to set a goal to lose weight, but I don’t think that 170 lbs on a 5’11” frame is overweight, particularly when my waist size is only a couple inches more than it was when I was a kid. We ought to start debunking this.
So far that you can’t even see it from there. A devastating analysis that I hope everyone on the Augustine panel reads. And note that this is something that the press, even the space press, rarely, if ever, talks about.
It would help a lot of the government wouldn’t keep stomping them down.
But you can’t waste a crisis, and if you haven’t accomplished everything you want with it yet politically, you have to sustain it, just as the Roosevelt administration did, for years. Let’s hope that we’ll be on to them this time around.
[Update a few minutes later]
Will we be saved by California?
The California morass has Democrats in Washington trembling. The reason is simple. If Obama’s health-care plan passes, then we may well end up paying for it with federal slips of paper worth less than California’s. Obama has bet everything on passing health care this year. The publicity surrounding the California debt fiasco almost assures his resounding defeat…
…The federal picture is so bleak because the Obama administration is the most fiscally irresponsible in the history of the U.S. I would imagine that he would be the intergalactic champion as well, if we could gather the data on deficits on other worlds. Obama has taken George W. Bush’s inattention to deficits and elevated it to an art form.
The Obama administration has no shame, and is willing to abandon reason altogether to achieve its short-term political goals. Ronald Reagan ran up big deficits in part because he believed that his tax cuts would produce economic growth, and ultimately pay for themselves. He may well have been excessively optimistic about the merits of tax cuts, but at least he had a story.
Obama has no story. Nobody believes that his unprecedented expansion of the welfare state will lead to enough economic growth. Nobody believes that it will pay for itself. Everyone understands that higher spending today begets higher spending tomorrow. That means that his economic strategy simply doesn’t add up.
Well, it does to some of the economic illiterati in my comments section. As I said, let’s hope the rest of us figure it out by next November.
There seems to be a civil war brewing among the Iranian clerics:
“This crack in the clerical establishment, and the fact they are siding with the people and Moussavi, in my view is the most historic crack in the 30 years of the Islamic republic,” said Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian Studies Program at Stanford University. “Remember, they are going against an election verified and sanctified by Khamenei.”
The president will be very disappointed. He was so looking forward to discussing nuclear weapons with Ahmadinejad and demonstrating the power of his silver tongue. What will he do if he doesn’t have a comfortable, familiar dictator to prostrate himself before? These damned people, wanting their freedom. They’re so inconvenient.
We went downtown this morning to the tea party by the federal building on Broward. It wasn’t a huge turnout (my guess is that there were not more than three or four hundred people at any given time) but the crowd was enthusiastic, and creative with their signs, with a lot of cars driving up and down the street with their own signs, bullhorns and car horns. It was mostly a fiscal protest. I saw only one “Choose Life” sign, and a couple related to foreign policy. There was no obvious news coverage.
I shot video of this band playing some Dixieland. I may Youtube it later.
A little street theater.
The other Barry.
This guy say’s he’s running for Senator as an Independent. He doesn’t have a web site yet, but he’s got a few months to get started. He’s Jewish, born in Brooklyn during the war, and claims to have known Jack Kennedy, who he said wouldn’t recognize the Democrats today. “The Chicago machine has taken over the country. Obama is a Stalinist, and knows exactly where he wants to go. I’ve known a lot like him in my day.”
Can’t accuse him of not being a straight talker.
Ask the manufacturers:
More than 17 percent of those who answered said they would have to shut down their business because there is no way they could handle the kinds of increases being predicted.
The unscientific poll taken of Manufacturing & Technology eJournal readers from June 28th through July 1st drew 943 responses.
OTHER CHOICES INCLUDED:
Would raise the price of my product or service to customers (22 percent);
A combination of price increases, personnel cuts and reductions in pay and benefits (20 percent);
Switch to a 4-day workweek (15 percent);
Layoff workers (14.5 percent).
But hey, what do they know?
Set aside some time for someone (or multiple someones) to read aloud the Declaration of Independence to the assembled. It will be a powerful moment, I can guarantee you.
Assuming you haven’t already thought of this, of course.
[Saturday morning update]
Happy Independence Day! For a lot of us, who still care about liberty, it takes on more meaning than usual this year.
Maybe this is one of those rare times that a politician really is resigning to spend more time with their family. If any politician would do that, it seems like this one would. In any event, I’m sure that the press and the Democrats are proud of themselves for chasing her out of politics.