WHY USING GOVERNMENT TO JUMP-START THE ECONOMY NEVER WORKS
Last Friday (11/09), President Obama said, "We can't just cut our way to prosperity. If we are serious about reducing the deficit, we have to combine spending cuts with revenue -- and that means asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes." Mr. President, with all due respect, you continue to be wrong on both assertions. The president and many of his Keynesian supporters believe that the reason we are having slow growth and very little job creation is because of a lack of sufficient demand. This is why they passed their $833 billion stimulus bill and have promoted other big-spending projects. These endeavors have not worked -- and will not work -- because they have misdiagnosed the problem. The real problem is malinvestment. An excellent explanation of specifically how financial regulations misallocate resources, reduce the level of investment, undermine good management practices and increase the risk to the entire financial system can be found in a new book by John A. Allison, former chairman and CEO of BB&T (the ninth-largest financial company in the United States), entitled "The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure: Why Pure Capitalism is the World Economy's Only Hope".
THE PETRAEUS ESPIONAGE FILE
I may have awakened him. The late James Jesus Angleton, once the chief of CIA counterintelligence, sounded kinda groggy to me after I got him-loud and clear!-on my famously untrustworthy ouija board. Of course I have no idea whether he gets to sleep at all. I don't quite know exactly "where" he is, after all, and he doesn't answer direct questions on the subject. Anyway, there he was, and I started right in. ML: So what am I supposed to think about Petraeus? JJA: That you're living in a country where espionage is rampant. ML: Huh? JJA: Have you read those stories about the "software breakdowns" in the Romney get-out-the-vote program "Orca"? ML: Sure, it didn't work, passwords didn't work, it was a gigantic snafu. JJA: Uh huh. And has anyone raised the possibility that the Romney organization was penetrated in order to introduce "fatal errors" in their computers?
A REVOLUTION OF DISOBEDIENCE
When we began the Washington Rendezvous last Friday (11/09), all of us were still shell-shocked. By the time it ended on Sunday, we were determined to not let the travesty of this absurd election stand. We first agreed that the stupidest thing to do is form a circular firing squad, like so many pundits and others are doing, pointing the finger of blame at Mitt Romney, the RNC, or other Republican targets. The blame does not lie with Romney, who was the smartest, most decent, and most capable presidential candidate we could possibly have nominated. The blame lies with the idiots who voted for Zero, the CorruptMedia, and the Dems who rigged the voting machines. I believe it was the latter who stole the election and that Romney was the legitimate winner. Regardless, the bottom line is that at least half of America did not and does not want this Chicago fascist as its president. So secondly, we agreed that scores of millions of Americans are mad as hell about this Fascist Fraud in the White House. The question is: what do we do about it? The answer is we - this means you, Tea Partyers - organize and conduct a Revolution of Disobedience.
YOU HAVE TWO YEARS TO LIVE
[This letter is in lieu of the Half-Full Report this week, as the HFR glass today is totally empty. I'd like to encourage all TTPers to both email and fax a printed copy of this letter to the District Office of any nearby GOP Congressman or Congressman-elect, and ask any patriotic friend of theirs to do the same.] An Open Letter to the Incoming Republican House Members of the 113th Congress Dear GOP House Members and Members-Elect - Congratulations to you all for surviving the absurd calamity of November 6th. You need to know what's in store for you. To put it bluntly, you have two years to live. Politically live as the House Majority, that is. You are going to be demonized and destroyed by the Chicago Gangsters who run the White House and the presstitutes of the CorruptMedia. Your chances of retaining your majority in 2014 are 0%. The question is: what are you going to do with these two years? Realize that the political outcome will be the same no matter what you do. While many of you may individually survive and be reelected in 2014, collectively your majority will be gone and you'll all be just minority schmucks. So if you plan to cringe, compromise, and cooperate with the gangsters just to be reelected as a minority schmuck, why not just quit now, resign and collect your pension - rather than continue a charade in order to keep your perks of power for a little while longer, and all that while you'll have to look into the mirror every morning and see a coward? Why not, then, see someone of courage in that mirror instead? There is a power that only you - a majority of members of the House - have that neither the Senate, the President nor any of his agencies, nor even the Supreme Court has. If you choose to exercise it, you will be feared and respected, instead of being Obama's poodles. But far more importantly, you will have done your patriotic duty to protect your country from the lethal damage Obama is poised to inflict upon it.
WAS IT STOLEN?
[Note by JW: We are being asked to believe that Romney got close to three million fewer votes in 2012 than John McCain got in 2008. That's not possible. This election is a fraud. I don't know exactly how - rigging voting machines, hacking tabulation software, not counting military absentee ballots, whatever. What I do know is that it is totally beyond believability and into the realm of ridiculously absurd that Romney actually got any fewer votes than McCain in 2008, much less millions fewer. Thus the answer to Dave's question must be Yes.] I hate going down a birther road, but yes I believe the election was stolen, and the implications of that are very bad. First of all, Obama received 10 million less votes than he did in 2008. The part that is unbelievable is that Romney received 3 million less votes than McCain. At the end of the day, Obama won in the 4 critical swing states by 500,000 votes. But it is worse than that. We can look at who voted. By examining the number of Independents and their preference shift among actual voters, we know that 5 million Independents changed their votes from Obama to Romney. So Romney started the day 2.5 million votes ahead of where McCain was in 2008. This means that 5.5 million Republican voters are not accounted for. They didn't show up at the polls, or their votes were not counted. We know now that no subgroup of the coalition decided to sit out. So the current attempts to blame the Social Conservatives are stupid. All of our groups showed up to vote at the rates they did in 2008. For this to be true, over 10% of Republicans needed to decide not to vote this year, who did vote in 2008. Does that make any sense?
KNOW WHERE YOU STAND AND STAND THERE
I was, of course, hoping to write a celebratory column today. We are in for some trouble over the next four years, and each of us should be aware of the reality facing us, and accepting of the circumstances. By accepting I do not mean that we like it, or that we make believe that it's just fine. I simply mean that the truth is the truth, and we all function better when we accept this fact of life. In every area of life, there are things we have control over or influence on, and many more things that we do not. I have no control over what a debate moderator does, but I can ridicule the obvious bias; I have no control over how other people vote, but I can know my principles, speak my mind, and seek to build bridges of influence rather than repelling people with ad hominem attacks. Today, so that we can remember our principles, and in so doing become stronger, more resilient, and more effective in maintaining our republic over time, I want to identify several of the principles that Obama has wrong, and that we have right.
AMERICAN SEPPUKU
I'm in an airport in Europe waiting to fly back to a country that is no longer mine. It's 9am here, 3am in the East Coast, and Romney has conceded. I'll be all day getting back, so I thought I'd put down a few words before boarding time. The science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein once wrote a book entitled Stranger In A Strange Land. I'm that stranger now, America is that strange land. A majority of my fellow Americans performed seppuku yesterday, plunging the tonto ceremonial short blade into their country's abdomen and disemboweled it. America died yesterday, right before our eyes. Right now I am incapable of understanding or explaining how this could possibly happen. I went to bed last night sure I would be flying off to a joyous celebration at our Rendezvous, where we would plan together the rebirth of American freedom. I woke up to my horror realizing that I'm headed to a funeral instead. Yet that funeral for our country, as heartbreaking as that is, must not be our funeral. The most important thing we must do at this moment is commit to survive - for ourselves, our families, for our loved ones. We are facing a national and historic tragedy of monstrous proportions. But we must not let it be our personal tragedy. So rather than our Rendezvous in Washington this weekend be, as we hoped, Preparing for the Nobama Future, it will now be Surviving the Obama Future. We have to face the reality of what has happened, and figure out how to personally triumph over it. This must be our first priority. Only then can we even begin to figure out how to rescue our country. It's like the airline flight attendant telling you, in an emergency, to place the oxygen mask over yourself first, and then over your child. It's at a time like this that I most clearly remember sitting on my grandfather's knee as a young boy and him telling me the Wheeler Family Motto. I suggest that it be the TTP Motto today: There is a solution to every problem The sun will shine after every storm The soul's highest purpose is to be of good cheer. I'm on my way to the Rendezvous - and I hope you will be too.
OBAMA’S KATRINA
When property damage, lost business, and the extra expenses of families who have to live in hotels are added up, Hurricane Sandy is expected to cost between $30 billion and $50 billion. That would make it the second most expensive storm in history, after Katrina, which cost $108 billion. The Federal Emergency Management Agency coordinates U.S. disaster relief efforts with state and local governments, and private charities such as the Red Cross. In Sandy's the immediate aftermath, politicians -- and the CorruptMedia -- pronounced themselves well pleased with the government's response. That opinion isn't shared in many hard hit communities. The government's response is being called Fakakta FEMA in Staten Island.
CONTROLLING SPENDING REQUIRES CONTROLLING CONGRESS
The media focus has been on the presidential campaign, but the makeup of the U.S. Congress is likely to have an equal or perhaps even greater impact on your future economic well-being. The president often is blamed for the deficit by folks on both the right and the left, but under the Constitution, it is those in Congress who must approve all taxing and spending, and thus they are directly responsible. In the 32 years since President Reagan was first elected, the Democrats have controlled both houses of Congress for 12 years, the Republicans controlled both for 10 years, and for 10 years, one party controlled the House and the other party controlled the Senate. The chart below shows the average deficit, government spending and real economic growth (as a percentage of gross domestic product) under Democratic, Republican and split control. Deficits, on average, were 3 times larger when the Democrats were in control of one or both houses of Congress than when the Republicans had control of both houses. Also, government spending was higher and real economic growth was lower under the Democrats and under split control.
HALF-FULL REPORT 11/02/12
All devotees of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged know how the book ends: the apocalypse of socialism, symbolized by the electricity failing in Manhattan and the great city plunged into darkness, permits John Galt to begin the resurrection of freedom and capitalism. Thus it was a very eerie experience to see the lead headline on Drudge one week before America's most fateful election (10/30) NYC GOES DARK, with a picture of the post-Sandy New York skyline black. Mitt Romney is no John Galt (who is?), but he'll do for now. And who could have guessed that the October Surprise we all were scared of turned out to be an Act of God on Romney's side? Of course, our hearts and prayers go out to all those suffering from the destruction of Sandy. Yet the Zero/Democrat Ineptocracy has made that suffering worse - people eating of dumpsters, looting, gun and fist fights - then added insult to injury by racing off to campaign in Wisconsin after a phony photo-op with the fatso governor of New Jersey. Zero's uncaring incompetence is on glaring display for every voter in America, and is a final nail in his electoral coffin next Tuesday. Make no mistake: Hurricane Sandy is a disaster for Zero.