National politics
Republicans, Democrats, and bears, oh my.
In this current recession, the fiscal pain is spread across the entire country, but some states are doing better than others. Forbes magazine has done a state-by-state analysis and found that states that vote liberal Democrat the most (i.e. “Blue” states)are suffering the worst, while Red states are doing the best.
The top 5 worst states—Illinois, New York, Connecticut, California, and New Jersey—and eight of the top 10 (add in Massachusetts, Ohio, and Wisconsin) are all very blue states. The top 5 best states are Utah, New Hampshire, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia. While New Hampshire and Virginia are said to lean Democratic, New Hampshire is a very fiscally conservative state, which still doesn’t have an income tax and which doesn’t have a “professional” legislature perpetually in session.
(Solidly one-party means that the party has an advantage of 10 percent or greater in party affiliation over the other; leaning means a 5- to 10-percent advantage.)
Forbes’ metrics for each state included unfunded pension liabilities, changes in tax revenue, credit ratings, debt as a percentage of Gross State Product, debt per capita, growth expectations for employment and the state economy, net migrations and a “moocher ratio” that compares government employees, pension burdens and Medicaid enrollees to private-sector employment.
None of the 10 worst states are solidly Republican and only one, Mississippi, leans slightly Republican, i.e. less than 5-percentage-point advantage in party enrollment.
And why are we doing so much worse?
It comes down to stronger unions and a larger appetite for public programs, according to Kent Redfield, professor emeritus of political studies and public affairs at the University of Illinois’ Center for State Policy and Leadership.
Strong unions, by their endorsement power, create an incentive in Democrat politicians to throw pork in the direction of union members, like big construction projects and more social services. And Democrats generally like Nanny Government that creates a program for every human need, not to mention the rampant nepotism, patronage, and corruption that overwhelming one-party by either party typically brings.
We shouldn’t discount the effect that differtent industries have on the rankings. Many of these bastions of unionism are also big manufacturing centers, which are doing the worst in this recession. Agricultural Nebraska is going to do much better than automaking Michigan, for instance.
[Link via Bluegrass Pundit]
The special election to replace the late US Sen. Ted Kennedy is one week from today and Democrats are saying that, if Republican Scott Brown were to beat the odds and win, they plan to defy the law and stall his swearing-in until after a vote on the Democrats’ healthcare “reform” boondoggle. That way, interim Sen. Paul Kirk can be the key 60th vote to ensure passage of the bill, where Brown would be a reliable vote against it.
The justification for the delay is that the Massachusetts Secretary of State has to certify the election, which they claim would take at least 10 days to give absentee ballots time to be counted. But that hasn’t always been the case.
In contrast, Rep. Niki Tsongas (D-Lowell) was sworn in at the U.S. House of Representatives on Oct. 18, 2007, just two days after winning a special election to replace Martin Meehan. In that case, Tsongas made it to Capitol Hill in time to override a presidential veto of the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.
This isn’t the first time the Democrats have played politics with a US Senate in Massachusetts seat. In 2004, when John Kerry was the Democrat nominee for president and Republican Mitt Romney was governor, the Democrat legislature changed the law to take away the governor’s ability to appoint a replacement in case of vacancy, but in 2009 when Ted Kennedy was dying and Democrat Deval Patrick was governor, the Democrat legislature changed the law back so that the appointment power was the governor’s again.
That’s par for the course in Masscahusetts where the will of the people is regularly denied. When voters overwhelmingly voted to reduce a “temporary” tax increase that had been in effect for more than a decade, the Legislature simply ignored them. When voters demanded the right to vote on whether we want the bizarre construction of same-sex “marriage”, both the Legislature and the courts denied them the right. What’s so frustrating is that voters who are being denied their participation and representation in their own government fail to get outraged enough to vote out the politicians who are taking advantage.
Maybe it will become so blatant that even the blindest Democrat partisan will wake up and vote in his own best interest.
Photo credit: http://flic.kr/p/7kUonn
And, as sure as the rain, that’s what we got. In Culture of Corruption
This isn’t 300-pages of ranting and raving, full of hatred and plain ol’ partisan dislike for the president of another party. Instead, Malkin takes us through the list of Obama cronies, all his appointees (including the record number of failed appointees), the fundraisers, the hangers-on, the cozy politicians, and the special interest groups that have his ear. Malkin has meticulously researched her subject: 300 pages of text are followed by more than 70 pages of endnotes, documenting each fact.
It’s the sheer enormity of the list of corruption and ethical failings that make Malkin’s point. Anyone one (or a few) of these instances would be unfortunate, but by the time I was halfway done with the book I couldn’t believe how much of it there was and how much of this the media had turned a blind eye to. And as I said, it’s not just partisan raving. Republicans come in for a fair share of criticism, including those who are not on the Obama team. But it’s Obama’s circle that bears the most scrutiny.
Not every item listed is a potential crime, far from it. Many could be just marked up to imprudence or even just the way business is done in Washington. But that’s just it: Malkin shows clearly through direct quotes how Obama promised the exact opposite while running for the office. He promised the most ethical administration in history. Instead, it may be the most ethically challenged. The sheer mass of page after page of insider dealing lobbyists buying influence, politicians getting sweetheart deals for buddies at taxpayer expense. It’s the worst kind of politics. I just wish more people read books like these. I wish we could have read it before the election.
But read it now and be informed and tell your friends and family. Maybe in 2010 we can reduce this party’s stranglehold on DC, curbing their lust for power, and in 2012 we can put someone else in office who really will have the most ethical administration in history. We can always hope.
Sarah Palin’s new book, “Going Rogue: An American Life”
(I haven’t decided whether Palin would make a good president or not, but I’m going keep an open mind, read her book, and consider who else jumps into the race for 2012.)
Anyway, since Palin’s a conservative pro-life woman who commits the cardinal sin of being attractive as well, the Left must destroy her. Predictably the Associated Press offer a fact check of the book and its claims. A fact check, mind you, that required 11 reporters to come up with six claims of inaccuracy.
Yet even six is an exaggeration. Jamaes Taranto of the Wall Street Journal says two of the alleged “errors” aren’t even errors and the third is just opinion. While Palin says in her book that she didn’t “often” stay in pricey hotels as governor, the AP team finds one expensive hotel she stayed in. She didn’t claim that she never stayed in an expensive hotel.
Palin also says she was a victims’ advocate in the decades-long Exxon Valdez trial and that she was happy the final appellate rulings went in favor of the people. But the AP says she was unhappy that the punitive damages against Exxon were reduced and that it took so long for the lawsuit to be resolved. Those are not contradictory claims. The AP is the one that is wrong here.
Finally, Palin says that it’s not ambition, but altruism that led her to run for political office and then leave the Alaska governorship early, while the AP claims that “Going Rogue” has the earmarks of the typical pre-campaign manifesto of a politician preparing for a run for president. That may eventually turn out to be the case, but the AP can’t claim it as a “fact” and an “error” for Palin to claim otherwise unless they have evidence that she’s said otherwise or that they can read her mind.
When it comes to the Associated Press’s “FACT CHECKs”, the reality is that they’re less about facts than they are about the further erosion of journalistic objectivity and integrity by much of the mainstream media. To wit: Where is the honest and objective “FACT CHECK” on Obama’s autobiography?
President Obama has chosen his Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, to replace David Souter. As expected she’s very liberal and she’s not a pro-lifer by any means. But then we couldn’t have expected anything else from the most pro-abortion president ever, and anyway she’s replacing another liberal member of the court and so the conservative-liberal balance remains.
So, it’s interesting to see the abortion-related criticism against Sotomayor coming from’pro-abortion groups. It’s not that she’s too pro-life, there’s certainly no evidence of that. No, it’s that she’s not quite rabidly pro-abortion enough.
In a 2002 case, she wrote an opinion upholding the Bush administration policy of withholding aid from international groups that provide or promote abortion services overseas.
“The Supreme Court has made clear that the government is free to favor the anti-abortion position over the pro-choice position,” she wrote, “and can do so with public funds.”
In a 2004 case, she largely sided with some anti-abortion protesters who wanted to sue some police officers for allegedly violating their constitutional rights by using excessive force to break up demonstrations at an abortion clinic. Judge Sotomayor said the protesters deserved a day in court.
Judge Sotomayor has also ruled on several immigration cases involving people fighting deportation orders to China on the grounds that its population-control policy of forcible abortions and birth control constituted persecution.
In a 2007 case, she strongly criticized colleagues on the court who said that only women, and not their husbands, could seek asylum based on China’s abortion policy. “The termination of a wanted pregnancy under a coercive population control program can only be devastating to any couple, akin, no doubt, to the killing of a child,” she wrote, also taking note of “the unique biological nature of pregnancy and special reverence every civilization has accorded to child-rearing and parenthood in marriage.”
And in a 2008 case, she wrote an opinion vacating a deportation order for a woman who had worked in an abortion clinic in China. Although Judge Sotomayor’s decision turned on a technicality, her opinion described in detail the woman’s account of how she would be persecuted in China because she had once permitted the escape of a woman who was seven months pregnant and scheduled for a forced abortion. In China, to allow such an escape was a crime, the woman said.
In my quick read of these summaries I see only a judge abiding by the law, who doesn’t undermine it just because she might not like the pro-lifers’ position. Did these radical abortion groups want her to rule against the pro-lifers who thought police used excessive force, to deny them their day in court simply because she doesn’t like their politics? I suppose it’s some small— very small—measure of comfort that she’s not one of those judges who rules on a whim. (What does it say for our society that we have such low expectations for our jurists?) Was she supposed to deport the Chinese woman to a country that would subject her to a forced abortion?
I say this reveals a lot about those who support so-called abortion rights in this country, that these groups don’t really care about women having a choice, but that they view pregnancy and childbirth as evil by default.
Meanwhile, the White House, instead of telling the bloodthirsty mob of Moloch-worshippers to back off, has tried to placate them with assurances of Sotomayor’s reliable vote on any abortion-related case that would come before the Court.
But White House officials appeared eager to send a message that abortion rights groups do not need to worry about how she might rule in a challenge to Roe v. Wade.
“He did not specifically ask, as we’ve stated for the past several days,” Gibbs said. “But as I just said, I think he feels — I know he feels — comfortable, generally, with her interpretation of the Constitution being similar to that of his.”
Win one for the blood-red horde.
Photo credit: Official White House photo.
