THE ENERGY OF LIBYA
We are witnessing in Tripoli today what it takes to get rid of a brutal dictatorship determined to keep power at all costs, and how the dictator's thugs will continue to desperately fight on as they face inevitable doom. We will witness the same struggle here in the US in 2012. The Demagogue Party and its moocher minions will put up a ferocious struggle to maintain their power and paychecks - and they will lose as surely as has Muamar Gadaffi. For they fight with lies, deceit, and thuggery, while we have unstoppable technology and no-longer-deniable truth. The key to it all is energy.
THE BLACK DILEMMA
Election of our nation's first black president is delivering an unexpected message to our black population. Blacks are discovering that what a man or woman does -- their actions -- is what matters, not the color of their skin. It is not hard to understand why black Americans were happy that a black man was elected president of the United States. It was kind of final and most grand announcement that racism has finally been purged from America. But for the highly politicized parts of black America this was certainly not the only message. Because for the highly politicized parts of black America, the point has always been to keep race in American politics. For black political culture that dominated after the civil rights movements, the point was not just equal treatment under the law, but special treatment under the law. Plus the assumption that more black political power -- defined by more blacks holding office -- would mean that blacks would be better off. Now blacks have a dilemma. We have a black president and blacks are worse off. Not just a little, but a lot worse off.
A GLOBAL REALIGNMENT?
Who would have thought just 18 months ago that a member of the eurozone, the most elite club of economies in Europe, could have a worse credit rating than Pakistan? And yet this is the case for Greece today, perched on the verge of a debt restructuring; two other eurozone countries (Ireland and Portugal), meanwhile, are already in Europe's intensive care unit, receiving large bailouts. And who would have thought that a rating agency would dare question the sacred AAA credit rating of the United States, the sole supplier of global public goods such as the international reserve currency (the dollar) and a financial system that serves as the nexus of international capital flow? There are, of course, several custom-made reasons for these developments. But together, they speak to major realignments that are fundamentally changing the character of the global economy and how it functions. Three things in particular have had a significant influence, and they will continue to shape the world we live in for years to come.
THERE IS NOTHING LEFT FOR THE LEFT BUT INTIMIDATION
There were few jobs in ancient Greece more fraught with peril than that of messenger, because if a king was unhappy with the content of a message, he often took out his displeasure on the person who carried it. The custom of killing the messenger was so widespread that in his play Antigone, Sophocles (496-406 BC) used it as a metaphor for lashing out at the innocent. After Shakespeare used it twice (in Henry IV and Antony and Cleopatra), the metaphor became entrenched in the English language. It's been ages since a ruler actually killed a messenger, but Democrats seem to want to revive the practice. There's nothing else left for them to do.
HOW ABOUT DOING COST-BENEFIT FOR REAL, MR. OBAMA?
It is widely recognized that excessive regulation is unnecessarily killing jobs. The question has been what to do about it. The president is telling us he is trying to do everything possible to create jobs. Members of his administration have acknowledged that regulations that do not meet a cost-benefit test cost jobs - as everyone with a basic understanding of economics realizes. Yet the cost-benefit studies that are done by these regulatory agencies are little more than jokes, with grossly incomplete and incompetent analyses. Here's a simple way they can be done for real. How about it, Mr. President?
HALF-FULL REPORT 08/19/11
Let's start with a trio of quotes. On Monday (8/15) in Decorah, Iowa, President Zero explained why he has been a total economic failure: "We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again. But over the last six months we've had a run of bad luck." Which recalls the observation of Lazarus Long in Robert Heinlein's 1973 sci-fi classic Time Enough For Love: "Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. "Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck'." And on Wednesday (8/17) in Bedford, New Hampshire, Texas Gov. Rick Perry explained: "America's crisis is not bad luck, it's bad policies from Washington DC... Our economic plan shouldn't depend on luck, it should depend on sound economic fundamentals."
THE PHANTOM PROBLEM OBAMA USES TO KILL OUR ECONOMY
Former Vice President Al Gore went on a profanity-laced tirade at the Aspen Institute Aug. 4 against the rising number of Americans who are skeptical about man-made global warming. Mr. Gore's alarmist predictions have proved false. Polar ice caps are larger. The polar bear population is increasing. The wildlife biologist upon whom Mr. Gore relied for his claim the polar bear is endangered, Charles Monnett, is suspected of fraud. The rise in sea levels -- which has been going on since the end of the last ice age -- is slowing down. Mr. Gore can respond only with curses, and ever more hysterical predictions of imminent doom. His credibility is in tatters. In the public mind, he's gone from Nobel Prize winner to Chicken Little. Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming is a "contrived phony mess that is falling apart of its own weight," says Texas Gov. Rick Perry. It's the most harmful hoax in history, because President Barack Obama bases job-killing policies on it.
PALIN, PERRY, AND THE ROLLING STONES
On June 12, 1964, at Big Reggie's Danceland Ballroom in Excelsior, Minnesota (on Lake Minnetonka west of Minneapolis), The Rolling Stones gave a performance during their first American tour. They were little-known back then (everyone was into Beatlemania), they were drunk, played poorly, and got booed off the stage by the audience of 300. The next morning, Mick Jagger went into Bacon's Drug Store to fill a prescription. Standing in front of him was a local character named Jimmy Hutmaker, Excelsior's retarded town mascot whom everyone befriended. Jimmy wanted his usual morning pick-me-up, a cherry coke - but the fellow who manned the soda fountain said they were out of cherry syrup, so he gave Jimmy a regular coke. Whereupon Jimmy turned to Mick, shrugged his shoulders, and said, "You can't always get what you want." Jagger never forgot what "Mr. Jimmy" said, and used it to create an achingly extraordinary rock and roll masterpiece. The song has been haunting me for the last several days. I have listened to it a score of times during breaks reading a particular book. And thus I have arrived at a conclusion: However much we want Sarah Palin, what we need is Rick Perry.
OBAMA AND PROVERBS 16:18
When it's clear you've made a mistake, it's usually wise to admit it. The unwillingness of Democrats to do this could cost them dearly in the next election. Democrats have made a lot of mistakes in the last few years, none bigger than Obamacare. Democrats knew Obamacare was unpopular. That's why they passed it on a sneaky parliamentary maneuver in the dead of night. But Democrats assumed Americans would like Obamacare better once they learned more about it. Democrats assumed wrong. Opposition to Obamacare has hardened. Respondents in a Rasmussen poll Aug. 8 favored repeal, 54 percent to 40 percent. A plurality has favored repeal every month since Obamacare passed. No wonder. Every promise President Obama made about his health care plan has proved to be false.
THREE REQUIREMENTS FOR A CONSTITUTIONAL FIX
Can an amendment to the U.S. Constitution fix the deficit problem? Polls show most Americans think we need a balanced-budget amendment. Yet serious scholars of the issue understand that the deficit is merely a symptom of the problem, namely, that people want more benefits from government than they wish to pay for. Various forms of balanced-budget and tax-and-spending-limitation amendments have been proposed. Almost everyone realizes that an amendment must be flexible enough to deal with national emergencies, such as a major war. But if the amendment is too flexible, politicians will quickly find ways around whatever limitations on spending, taxing and deficits are imposed. And the more tightly drawn any proposed amendment is, the more difficult it will be to pass it because an effective amendment will limit the powers of the very people who are required to vote for it. As we struggle to try to devise a constitutional fix to the structural problem of destructive debt, spending, regulation and taxation, it would be useful to consider the following. Call them Rahn's Three Requirements for A Constitutional Fix: