Hennessy's View

Maureen Dowd’s having trouble slathering make-up on her favorite pigs these days. Her President—the man for whom she surrendered all pretense of intelligence, wisdom, and self-control—is flailing.

And Maureen Dowd is going all wobbly.  Wobbly on Obama. Wobbly on America.  Wobbly on life.  Here’s an exceprt:

On the razor’s edge of another recession; blocked at every turn by Republicans determined to slice him up at any cost; starting an unexpectedly daunting re-election bid; and puzzling over how to make a prime-time speech about infrastructure and payroll taxes soar, maybe President Obama is wishing that he had thrown the game.

Maureen Dowd makes a big mistake in blaming Obama alone for America’s jobless carnival of mayhem.  It’s not all his fault.

Let’s not make the same mistake made by Dowd and her friends.  Barack Obama did not wreck the American Job Machine.

His Democrat Party did.

Face it.  When the Democrats took overwhelming control of Congress in 2007, unemployment was 5.5 percent.  When John Boehner pried the Speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi’s dry, cold claw, unemployment stood at 9.9 percent.  (Source)

That’s a 44.4% increase in the unemployment number.

For two years, Democrats controlled the House, the Senate, and the White House.  What did they do with that power?

They created a new entitlement.  Even after admitting that the existing spending programs were unsustainable, Democrats invented yet another new entitlement.

Sure, George W. Bush and the Tom Delay Republicans had their problems.  But they’re not around THIS TIME.

We are living under a 100 percent Democrat economy now. The GOP’s grasp on 1/2 of  1/3 of the government can’t undo 4 years of Democrat damage.

We have a Democrat in the White House and Democrats running the Senate.  It’s not the Republicans in the House preventing Obama from moving the economy forward; it’s the Democrats in the Senate and White House frightening natural risk-takers into keeping their job-creating money in their pockets.

I can see only one solution to the continuing unemployment nightmare facing people in America. That’s to finish the work started in 2010 by turning over the Senate and the White House.

Popularity: 1% [?]

“It” could refer to anything. Anything at all. 
In this case, though, I’m referring to unemployment.  Well, maybe I’m referring to the economy overall.
Unemployment rate rises to 9.1%, 54K jobs added « Hot Air
Obama has increased regulation, seized entire industries (auto, student loans, commercial banking, medicine), and borrowed more money faster than all previous presidents combined. 
Obama is a one-dictator disaster.  And an incompetent one at that.
If you don’t have a job, Obama made it worse.
If you have a job, Obama made it worse.
If you live in America, Obama made it worse.
Unless you’re a communist college professor or union boss, Obama made it worse.

Technorati Tags: unemployment, debt, borrowing, economy, obama, peggy noonan

Popularity: 1% [?]

This is an important conversation in an important race.  Please watch.

Ed talks about regulation, taxes, debt, Race to the Top, and more.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Take a look at Drudge.

I’ll wait. The day doesn’t really matter.  It’s always full of stuff that makes you think rivets are flying out of the planet like a jalopy in a cartoon.

• Two girls beat another girl into convulsions over the course of eight minutes while cowardly young men quiver in fear.  (But an old lady steps in and protects the victim.)
• Syrian security opens fire on demonstrators killing 90.  (But it’s Good Friday.)
• U.S. Dollar collapses as fear of government debt makes everything American worth less. (But Greece and other European countries even worse.)
• Japan warns that earthquake aftermath could cause them a double dip.
• U.S. spending could hit debt ceiling in a week.

These are everyday headlines from an abnormal time. Times as odd as a football bat.

Abnormal Times Breed Abnormal Leaders

The next president or two cannot be ordinary.  As much as we like the underdog and plain, common sense, everyman, there are times when Providence and history conspire to demand a GIANT of a person.

The Depression and World War II would have crush Truman.  Not that Roosevelt’s policies were right, but his stature was.  he was a giant.

Winston Churchill was a giant.

We’re in another era that calls for giants. At least one—one in every country that hopes to survive.

France had no giants in the 1930s.  Nor did Poland or Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, on and on.  The countries without giants fell to monsters.

The World Thirsts for Leaders

You know the difference between the Depression-WWII era and now?

All the giants of that era are dead.  So are most of the people were young then, the ones who fed their families during the Depression, then conquered the monsters in the war.  They’re mostly gone. And those that remain are too old to fight.

The Baby Boomers are the age that Roosevelt was during the last crisis era.  Gen X is Truman’s age, Eisenhower’s, Patton’s, and Bradley’s.  Gen Y will become the heroes of this era when the history’s written 40 years from now.

But if we don’t get some national GIANTS, who knows what language that history will be written in.

Is Trump the Giant?

I’m not saying Trump’s my first choice. Nor will I pretend I believe he’s an ideological Tea Partier.  I bet he can’t tell you how many Constitutional Amendments there are.  I bet he’s not conversant about Article I Section 8, nor about the 9th and 10th Amendments.  I’d be surprised to learn that he knows the issue in Wickard v. Filburn.  Has he read The Federalist?

As dear and important as those things are to us in the Tea Party movement, I’m not sure how important they’ll be in the next four years.  I’m not sure how important anything we’re talking about today will be four years from now.

The United States on the verge of defaulting on its loans.  U.S. Treasuries are on the verge of being dumped.  The U.S. Dollar’s value is plummeting.  The Fed holds $trillions and doesn’t know what to do with it. George Soros is pushing to issue his own international currency.

The U.S. economic system is about to collapse under 70 years of illegal government activity funded with irresponsible, Ponzi scheme borrowing.

The next president better be Churchill and Reagan, Lincoln and Washington rolled into one.

Stardom and Chutzpah

In modern America, two qualities are indispensible for national leaders: stardom and chutzpah. That’s just be accepted. Those qualities alone are no guarantee of success.

Success requires strength, decisiveness, and a bit of national pride.  These are the qualities Obama lacks.

I see only two potential candidates with all of these qualities:  Sarah Palin and Donald Trump.

That disturbs a lot of people. Left, right, and center.

Can you name another giant personality with the will and resources to challenge for the world’s highest office?

P.S.  If you haven’t read this post, please do.

Popularity: 2% [?]

When Barack Obama became president in January 2009, he began a campaign to weaken America. I’m not talking about military cuts; I’m speaking of America’s stature.  Barack Obama famously refused to acknowledge American Exceptionalism in 2009. He bowed to kings and princes, then denied doing so, then bowed again and again. His White House has driven down the dollar. Timothy Geithner, Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury, warns that the world economy must “rebalance” with less reliance on America.

Barack Obama is short-selling America.

The results of a US President talking down his own country are stark.  America is losing prestige, and the office of our president loses prestige right along with the rest of us. 

Asian Embarrassment

In the last week, Barack Obama got a taste of the new, devalued USA.  In South Korea and Japan, Obama was no longer treated as first among equals, but us the kid at the far end of the table.  Having trashed America’s swagger and replaced it with a lilting prance, Obama learned that it’s not so fun to be a relatively young leader of relatively young nation whose prestige has taken a major blow.

From a Wall Street Journal editorial, we see just how far the USA has fallen under Obama’s presidency:

Has there ever been a major economic summit where a U.S. President and his Treasury Secretary were as thoroughly rebuffed as they were at this week’s G-20 meeting in Seoul? We can’t think of one. President Obama failed to achieve any of his main goals while getting pounded by other world leaders for failing U.S. policies and lagging growth.

For Obama, now, there is nowhere to turn.  American voters have rejected his domestic policy. His base has turned against his handling of Afghanistan. The world leaders, seeing him as weak, are planning world economic policy more or less over Obama’s head.

Stagflation

But there’s more. Obama’s economic policies promise to do two things: 1) perpetuate high unemployment and 2) increase inflation.  In fact, the Fed’s stated policy, which Obama defended twice in Asia last week, is to use Demand-Pull inflation to grow the US economy. 

We’ve seen this before.  In 1978 to 1982, America suffered a malaise brought about by bone-headed economic policies from a president who believed America had gotten too big for its breeches.  Jimmy Carter’s policies produced high unemployment, flat growth, and runaway inflation.  The term for this economic condition is “stagflation.”

True, Bernanke is a Bush appointee and the Fed is independent from the White House.  But Treasury Secretary Geithner and President Obama are full participants in an economic policy that threatens to revisit the disastrous years of 1978 through 1982.  Being unemployed, underemployed, or underpaid is bad enough. When the cost of necessary goods and services rise quickly, things get worse fast for the economically challenged.  And signs of stagflation are everywhere.

Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute wrote in a WSJ op-ed that several inflationary signals surfaced in October:

Producer prices rose at an annual rate of 5.5% in September and 4.8% in August. The broad price index for GDP rose at an annual rate of 2.3% in the third quarter, up from 1.9% in the second quarter and 1% in the first.

For ordinary folks trying to make ends meet, the prospect of inflation is frightening.  Already the weak dollar has driven up the price of gasoline and food—the two things we all need to survive.  The two things the government omits from its consumer price index.  In the past week, gasoline prices in the St. Louis area jumped $0.25 overnight. 

The Next Congress

There is little the 112th Congress can do to repair the economic damage, but it can lay the foundation for the next president and the 113th Congress. I encourage all members of the next Congress to follow Arthur Laffer’s prescription of extending the Bush tax cuts, repealing Obamacare, eliminating incentives for idleness, and push free trade. 

Popularity: 1% [?]