From CNSNews:

The Archdiocese of New York, headed by Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., headed by Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the University of Notre Dame, and 40 other Catholic dioceses and organizations around the country announced on Monday that they are suing the Obama administration for violating their freedom of religion, which is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

The dioceses and organizations, in different combinations, are filing 12 different lawsuits filed in federal courts around the country.

…

“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.” (Gerald Ford)

In The Debt Bomb: A Bold Plan To Stop Washington From Bankrupting America, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) explains how Washington’s career politicians, staffers, and lobbyists have set the nation up for fiscal failure.  Pulling few punches, Coburn targets sacred cows of each party and explains that rather than being in gridlock (as the media claims is the case), Congress has spent the last several decades (and especially the last 15 years) working to expand influence and re-election capabilities regardless of party.

Opening with a story about how America’s rising debt could cause first a financial, and then a military crisis by 2020, Coburn reminds readers that this country is only as powerful as its finances will allow it to be.  In this fictional-but-likely future, foreign investors decide in 2014 that America is no longer a viable financial investment.  Over a span of days, this new consensus works its way into the value of the dollar, sinking it by 50% and increasing inflation.  Riots become widespread, the National Guard is deployed, and the G-20 meets to tell the U.S. that tax rates will double, retirement ages will leap precipitously, and means-testing will be the order of the day on benefits.  Finally, in 2019 — two years after employment finally drops from 24% — China invades Taiwan and informs the U.S. that if we stop the invasion, the U.S. will lose both financially (as China dumps our debt) and militarily (as both nations perhaps engage in a nuclear exchange).

Unlike other authors, Coburn takes on the debt from a series of critical angles, not just partisan ones.  This is done in a way that breaks through the fog of D.C.-speak and explains in plain terms the corruption all too present in Washington.  The impacts of the debt on the unemployment rate, national security, retirement, social welfare, personal freedom, tax rates, energy reform, and morality each have portions of chapters (in some cases, whole chapters) dedicated to them.  Additionally, Coburn aims to show just how much smaller government could be if we just eliminated fraud/waste/abuse/duplicity from the federal government…as much as one-third, or over $1 trillion per year (nearly $3,900 for every American every year).  If nothing else, the disgust readers should have for their elected politicians is a victory in and of itself, and it should lead to a successive series of efforts by voters to term-limit members of Congress.

The most important reforms Coburn addresses are those related to duplication/oversight, military spending, taxes, and entitlements.  With an envious lack of ego, Coburn looks at the problem from the perspective of an outsider involved in the process rather than as an elitist insider who knows all the answers.  Does the senator have answers?  Yes.  Does he think his are the only ones?  Absolutely not.  While his own oversight reports and Back in Black solutions are regularly mentioned both in chapters and in an addendum, Coburn praises Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI), among others, for truly working to find a way to defuse our debt bomb.

The inside baseball Coburn exposes should embarrass both members and their constituents.  Earmarks, personal discussions, and careerism are all brought to the fore, but nothing is more “inside baseball” than the debate that took place leading up to the debt ceiling compromise last August.  The utter dysfunction of Congress is laid bare in Coburn’s descriptions of what happened.  Meeting after meeting and discussion after discussion led to a deal that not only didn’t cut spending, but actually grew spending by $2 trillion over ten years…and still left our nation’s credit rating downgraded.

In the final pages of the book, Coburn writes the about “the left’s counterfeit compassion.”  Accurately, Coburn notes:

[W]e hear a lot of talk about caring for the poor but very little evidence that the policies they espouse are working. In fact, the evidence shows government is harming the poor more than helping. Imagine, for instance, if a conservative proposed a Medicaid reform that would result in 40 percent of doctors not seeing Medicaid patients, and 65 percent of specialists denying care to Medicaid patients. And then imagine if this same reform would cause Medicare patients to be rejected at a rate higher than that of private insurance. Finally, imagine if this reform idea would cause the bankruptcy of Medicare and the likely denial of benefits in five years.

These are all actual policy realities and are a direct result of the left’s “compassion” for the poor.  As Coburn has often pointed out in other mediums, it is better to dictate spending and other reforms internally rather than have drastic changes dictated by external forces, as is the case with Greece.

Like any book, this effort has its flaws.  Impressively, only one sentence stands out as factually imprecise — Coburn says on Page 211 that the payroll tax holiday now in its second year “is cannibalizing” Social Security.  However, the holiday law is written so that the impact on the life of Social Security is canceled out with deficit transfer payments from the Treasury, so the size of the Social Security Trust Fund is left unaffected.

(Note: In a series of e-mail exchanges, The Debt Bomb co-author and Coburn Press Secretary John Hart disagreed with my assessment of the tax holiday’s effect on the Social Security Trust Fund, though he did not dispute that general fund transfers are taking place.  Hart pointed out that a number of economists, columnists, and others from across the political spectrum believe that the payroll tax holiday will change how Social Security’s funding is both considered and applied in the future.  While this is certainly a defensible contention, this is technically separate from how the funding for the payroll tax holiday law was applied in 2011 and will be applied in 2012.)

Additionally, while he rightly goes after inflation as theft and the Wall Street crisis as both a government policy failure and a failure of morality, Coburn spends too little time on the Federal Reserve’s impact on our debt and no time on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), for which Coburn himself voted.  (Note: In a phone conversation, Hart explained that Dr. Coburn did not want the book to be about him and his voting record, but instead about the debt problem the nation faces.  Hart noted that Coburn is open to answering questions about his vote for TARP, something I noticed personally last year when the senator not only answered my question about his vote for TARP, but also said in a follow-up discussion that if he “couldn’t defend” that vote, he didn’t belong on Capitol Hill.)

Two other notable critiques: several chapters get lost in the myriad of examples of fake partisanship, fraud, and dishonesty in Congress.  While these examples are important, and should disgust Americans, they also divert the reader’s attention from the larger point of the chapters.

The other concern with this book is its language regarding how Coburn balances separating the person from the politician.  On the one hand, he is blunt in denouncing corruption, careerism, and those who sustain the fiscal status quo; calls many politicians “double-minded”; and in fact targets a number of politicians and special interest leaders in both parties by name (such as ATR’s Grover Norquist, FreedomWorks’ Dick Armey, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [D-NV]).  However, Coburn also says, “Everyone in Washington wants to do the right thing.”  Coburn is a master of holding to principle while still working with members of all political stripes in a gentlemanly manner — though he is also not one to mince words, especially in this book — but it was difficult to discern how Coburn could hold any respect for those members of Congress who are being “double-minded” and are working purposely for re-election instead of for the benefit of the nation.

All in all, The Debt Bomb is an invaluable addition to the public debate.  Doctor and Senator Tom Coburn is one of the few members of Congress who both knows the severity of the debt problem the nation faces and is willing to risk his reputation to fix it.  Be it via highlighting fraudulent spending in Medicare, Defense Department corruption, or how Congress would rather add more costly programs for election reasons than make existing programs more efficient, nobody is safe in this book.  This includes the voting electorate, which is often ignored in media portrayals of Beltway Bubble battles.

While Coburn largely praises voters for seeing through the Beltway Bubble in recent years when it comes to the Tea Party, earmarking, and entitlement reform, he also lays responsibility on our shoulders in the form of holding elected officials responsible for their actions, and for enacting term limits through the ballot box.  After all, careerism — which Coburn says is the core reason for Washington’s unconstitutional expansions of power and influence — can be truly defeated only by an educated electorate.  Above all else, that is the goal of this book: to end careerism, bring the federal government back to within the limits of the Constitution, and slash spending.  Unlike other politicians, Coburn’s intent is not to hold onto power, but instead to see America avoid the fate of Rome, Napoleonic France, the USSR, and other great powers that collapsed not due to a lack of military might, but instead because of a failure of fiscal responsibility.

-Originally published at American Thinker.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

-Dustin Siggins is a policy and politics blogger and the co-author of a forthcoming book on the national debt with William Beach of The Heritage Foundation.

A spokesman for Romney, Ryan Williams, was invited by VP Joe Biden to sit at his table at a restaurant for a few minutes. ABCNews picks up the story:

Williams said he asked the vice president why he was in coal country, challenging him on his support of the coal industry. According to Williams, Biden refused to answer when he asked the vice president why he believes coal is more dangerous than terrorism.

“He disagreed with that and didn’t want to answer my questions,” said Williams…

What did Williams think of the encounter and the VP? “Biden was ‘very cordial’ and ‘seems like a nice man.’”

What did Biden think of the encounter? His press secretary tweeted, “So nice of @RyanGOP to join us for dinner at Naples Spaghetti House in Steubenville http://pic.twitter.com/6UxchYIX.”

What did Ted Strickland, the Democratic Governor of Ohio have to say about it? “The vice president did not seem to be the least bothered by it. … I wasn’t bothered by it, I didn’t perceive it being out of line in any way or inappropriate in any way. I think politics can be fun and enjoyable. They can be a little spicy at times.”

And finally, what did the Obama Campaign press secretary have to say about it? She tweeted, “Staffer apparently doesn’t believe the press is capable of asking questions, shouts his own at the candidate. #classy.”

Biden enjoyed the exchange. Williams enjoyed the exchange. Strickland enjoyed the exchange. The Obama Campaign staffer throws a snit.

Mitt Romney’s staffer proved to be unafraid of taking the fight to opposition but does so in a cordial manner. Barack Obama’s staffer proved to be prickly, thin-skinned, and unconcerned about accuracy of details.

The first rule of organizations: any organization tends to take on the characteristics of its leader.

Earlier this week Crisis Magazine was kind enough to publish an opinion piece by me on strategic thoughts about the pro-life movement. While many comments beneath the piece, as well as in its repost at Hot Air, were complimentary, a number were very critical. In particular, three substantive, articulate and important points were made multiple times, and I would like to continue the conversation by responding to them.

The first rebuttal was made by Hot Air commenter Crosshugger, and it was probably the response that struck hardest since clearly I misstated my intention:

Crosshugger is correct, of course; nothing is bigger than God. I do believe God can convict people through His word, and I must rephrase one of my arguments from the original piece: I do not believe we should abandon religious arguments. I was making an unstated distinction, and that reference was to people who are not Christians. The Word of God has the power to convict them, but arguing from the Bible until they have those convictions is not effective.

The next point came from commenter Joe_Doufu at Hot Air. It is the most succinct and humorous of all the comments:

We’re winning!
We’d better change tactics!

In the piece at Crisis, I stated that while the pro-life movement is certainly winning, I believe emphasizing certain tactics would change the minds of the American public more quickly than others. The longer we take to convince the public to be pro-life, the more babies, mothers and families will suffer. Therefore, I think we should complement existing strategies in order to save the greatest number of lives possible. So while Joe Doufu would normally be correct, I think millions of lives could be saved by implementing certain strategies more often.

The third argument came most aggressively from my fellow Race42012 contributor Adam Graham. In short, Adam accused me of being an armchair quarterback. While I have admittedly only participated in one march and two prayer vigils in front of abortion clinics, this assessment is inaccurate. I have been writing regularly on the topic since college, and have been proactively engaging in discussions and debates to convince pro-abortion friends, acquaintances and strangers on a near-daily basis since before then to change their minds. While it’s a different kind of involvement than prayer vigils, or lobbying state or federal legislators, I don’t think it’s any less valuable.

My own father pointed out after reading my initial post that I denigrated people who try to affect positive change in different ways. For this I apologize; it was never intended in this way. I was trying to add to our movement, not take from the wonderful work done across the world by millions my fellow pro-life men and women.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

-Dustin Siggins is an associate producer with The Laura Ingraham Show and co-author with William Beach of The Heritage Foundation on a forthcoming book about the national debt. The opinions expressed are his own.

One of the first questions to ask when we approach polling is: who are we trying to poll? And related to that, what is this poll trying to tell us? When we approach election polling, then, one of the most important questions is: who is going to vote in this election?

We know from the 2010 Census data that there are around 230 million Americans who are eligible to vote. And although it is more difficult to track, we know that there are somewhere around 170 million Americans who are actually registered to vote. And we know that in the 2008 election, as a reference point, around 130 million Americans actually voted.

So which group of people should pollsters target as their sample pool? This debate is a classic one, and it usually boils down to pollsters choosing one of three basic voter models: adults (or voting age/eligible voter populations), registered voters (RV), or likely voters (LV).

Polling adults or eligible voters is obviously the easiest method: you dial a phone number, and if someone who is 18 or older (and not a disqualified felon, depending on the state) answers the phone, you poll them. Simple. Polling registered voters is almost as easy and requires just one extra step: asking the respondent if they are registered to vote. Since only roughly 70% or so of eligible Americans are actually registered, this means you have greater than a one in four chance of not finding someone you can poll at every number you dial, making polling a lengthier and more costly effort. However, the argument in favor of RV polling sees the flipside of that statistic: since only 70% of eligible Americans are actually registered to vote, a registered voter sample will inherently give a more accurate result (especially the closer to an election a poll is conducted, when the likelihood of eligible voters actually going out to register declines).

And then there is the likely voter model. Where adult and RV models are based on objective data (even though the pollster is relying on the respondent to honestly self-report both pieces of data), likely voter models begin with those same two questions and then introduce an element of subjectivity to the polling strategy. The idea is simple: only about 75% of Americans who are registered to vote actually go and do so – so in order to get the most accurate results possible, there must be a way to determine which registered voters are going to make the effort to show up in the voting booth. And trying to figure that out has resulted in as many different likely voter screens as there are weighting practices.

Read on: (more…)

Since general election polls are starting to pour in now, I thought it would be timely to review some basics of polling so our conversations can begin on the same page. The first thing that is vitally important to understand about polls is the idea of weighting.

The whole polling industry is based on the statistical concept of using a smaller, random sample to draw valid conclusions about the opinions of a much larger population. This concept helps explain how polling companies can use a sample of 900 to help explain how 130 million people will vote.

Now – theoretically speaking – with every additional person who is polled, the margin of error of that poll decreases accordingly. But those models assume that your random sample is also a representative sample. What happens when that isn’t the case? For instance, let’s say we have a population of about 1,000 people, and prior studies and voter registration records and such show that the population is split 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans. If we take a poll of 100 people out of this population, it is within the realm of possibility that we end up with responses, for example, from 80 Democrats and 20 Republicans.

If we did, we could go ahead and publish the poll results – and they would be wildly off and our reputation as a pollster would be damaged. Instead, knowing what we know, we can go ahead and make those results look more like what they ought to look like, based on our population data. We can take the results of those 20 Republicans and multiply it by 2.5, and take the result of the 80 Democrats and divide it by 1.6 – making it look like our final sample was indeed 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans when it actually wasn’t.

Now while some people and would-be pundits decry companies engaging in such “tinkering” with their polls, given the inherent nature of random samples I don’t think any serious person would say pollsters should not make adjustments to their numbers from time to time – with the end goal being achieving a representative sample as well. Here’s where it gets complicated, though: the example given above is an incredibly basic, elementary version of weighting a poll. Let’s get more complex here.

Read on: (more…)

This week’s fascinating and consequential oral arguments on the Affordable Care Act’s mandate have sparked considerable discussion and have prompted proponents of the mandate to make the following argument: no, requiring people to purchase health insurance doesn’t leave the door open to compelling other transactions because the health insurance market is, in important ways, unique.  Noah Feldman makes this case succinctly at Bloomberg:

What, Kennedy wanted to know, is the limiting principle on the government’s ability to regulate? There is a good, sharp answer to this wholly reasonable question. And although Verrilli did not quite manage to make it, he may be able to do so on Wednesday, when the court discusses whether the mandatory coverage provision can be severed from the rest of the law if, indeed, the court wants to strike the mandate down.

The answer is that health care insurance is different because if the healthy people fail to get themselves coverage, it becomes extremely difficult — under some conditions, impossible — for the insurance market to operate. That is, as the healthiest people leave the pool, the market for health insurance starts to unravel, as people who would buy it at a price where the insurance companies would be willing to provide it will be unable to do so.

Is this true?  Leaving aside the other, perhaps less consequential, ways in which health insurance differs from other markets, is this particular distinction accurate?  Will the health insurance “unravel” absent a mandate?  It’s worth noting, for starters, that only one state in the union currently has a mandate and the health insurance market has yet to unravel.  But I’ll be charitable and assume that by “unravel” he simply means “function inefficiently”.  Let’s consider this lesser claim.

On the one hand, it is undeniably true that- as in other insurance markets- those who use more of the service that policies are insuring against are subsidized by those who use less of it.  If my home goes up in flames, I will more than recoup my monthly fire-insurance premiums.  If my home never goes up in flames, I will never recoup those premiums.  The vast majority of home-owners in the latter category end up subsidizing the small number in the former category.  You could say, of course, that the fire insurance market would “unravel” if those whose homes are not on fire “leave the pool”.  But this would not strike anyone as particularly coherent.

Now, in one sense health insurance really is different- it’s not insurance.  At least not as currently constituted.  Insurance does not cover predictable, routine expenses (check-ups, immunizations, MRI’s).  Perhaps there are good reasons for the existence of a market that allows people to, in monthly installments, cover routine (but costly) expenses, while also hedging against large risks.  But it is not true, as the government contends, that everyone effectively participates in this market.  As Chief Justice Roberts pointed out yesterday, a “minimum coverage” provision that requires insurance companies cover things like “substance abuse treatment” is not narrowly tailored to cover health care everyone will, or might, eventually need.

The government is- and not even particularly cleverly- conflating a number of different things here.  They are conflating genuine health insurance- something like catastrophic insurance, hedging against unforeseeable risk- with what I’ll call “health care coverage”.  If healthy people leave the “health care coverage” market, premiums may go up for everyone still in the market (though, as I’ll explain later, even this isn’t inherently true) but it is not clear why we should care about this from a constitutional perspective.  There are alternatives to the “health care coverage” market which would work just fine, absent a mandate, and the government has no right to say that something clearly unconstitutional is now permissible because they’ve artificially privileged this market relative to the alternatives.

Let’s consider a fictitious market.  Everyone needs food.  What if A & P established a program which allowed a family of four to pay $400 a month to buy a food coverage policy.  This policy would provide a 90% discount on all food items in the store (assuming a cap of some kind, to prevent over-consumption or stockpiling).  In addition, in the event of indigency (a family member loses a job, unexpected expenses arrive such as a sick family member, etc), you would be entitled to a 99% discount and a 50% policy reduction for up to a year.  This fictitious market has all the essential features of the health coverage market.  It covers routine, predictable, and necessary expenses and it also hedges against large risks.  What if the federal government decided this was a very nice way of acquiring food and decided to privilege this market in various ways?  Further, what if the government decided that by privileging this market they could massively scale-back their anti-poverty programs (people who have lost a job, if they enter this market, are much less likely to starve, rendering programs like food stamps somewhat superfluous)?  Would it make sense to say that people not in this market are really in this market because, after all, everyone needs food, and therefore the federal government is justified in requiring you to actually enter this market, lest it “unravel”?

No, because there are obvious alternatives.  Here’s one: people pay for their routine food costs and, if indigency strikes, the government provides food vouchers.  Oh dear, this alternative seems to ring a bell.  An obvious alternative in the health care sector: families are required to- through health coverage or out of pocket payments- cover all health expenses up to 25% of their combined income.  Beyond that, the government pays.  There may be reasonable free-market objections to such a policy.  There may be reasonable anti free-market objections to such a policy.  But it is an obviously constitutional alternative to requiring the purchase of health care coverage.

Here’s another obvious alternative, which makes health care coverage even less unique: detach health care coverage from employment, so that health coverage is portable.  How does this change the market?  It gives health coverage companies a number of obvious ways to defray risk.  For instance, they could privilege those who bought policies early.  Blue-Cross could say, “Those who purchase our policy before the age of 25 will get an increasing rate reduction, relative to those in the same risk pile”.  This doesn’t work so well when health insurance is changed when people move from job to job.  But it strikes me that this would draw lots of young, healthy people into risk pools.  So something odd is going on here.  The government has privileged a method of health care delivery, which is far from the only conceivable method of health care delivery; regulated it in various inefficient and unnecessary ways, and then come to Supreme Court and said, “we’re in a fix of our own making- surely the Constitution doesn’t apply”.  Yes friends, it does.

-Matthew E. Miller can be contacted at Obilisk18@yahoo.com

In all the flap over the GOP nomination contests and the daily pronouncements of the carny barkers, todays’s US Supreme Court decision upholding the Constitutional rights of individual American citizens may have gone unnoticed.

Today the Court ruled unanimously (9-0) in favor of an Idaho couple and against the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to usurp their rights to judicial review and to private property.  The case is particularly interesting and noteworthy because it involved an attempt by the EPA do deny private property rights to this couple by administrative fiat and attempted to deny them recourse to the Courts.

The Supreme Court today ruled in favor of an Idaho couple who had been battling the Environmental Protection Agency in an effort to build their dream home.

Four years ago, Mike and Chantell Sackett bought property to build a home near a lake in Bonner County, Idaho. After obtaining local permits the Sacketts began work, pouring in some land fill. But their work came to a screeching halt when they were visited by officials from the Environmental Protection Agency.

The couple was slapped with a compliance order asserting that the land is subject to the Clean Water Act and that they had illegally filled protected wetlands. They were told to stop filling in the lot, and to restore it to its pre-construction condition or face thousands of dollars in potential liability.

The Sacketts sought to challenge the EPA’s finding in court, but were told that that they needed to go through a permitting process first, and only after the EPA moved to enforce the order could they seek judicial review.

Today, a unanimous Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision and found that the Sacketts may bring a civil action under the Administrative Procedure Act, which provides for judicial review of “final agency action for which there is no other adequate remedy in court.”

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for a unanimous court, said that since the EPA’s decision was final, and “since the Sacketts have no other adequate remedy in court, they may bring their suit under the APA.”

The decision is a victory for property rights advocates. Attorneys for the Pacific Legal Foundation, who represented the Sacketts in court, issued a statement calling the decision a “precedent-setting victory for the rights of all property owners.”

“The United States Supreme Court today held that landowners have a right to direct, meaningful judicial review if the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency effectively seizes control of their property by declaring it to be ‘wetlands’,” the group said.

“The EPA used bullying and threats of terrifying fines, and has made our life hell for the past five years,” Mike Sackett said in a statement.  ”It said we could not go to court and challenge their bogus claim that our small lot had ‘wetlands’ on it. As this nightmare went on, we rubbed our eyes and started to wonder if we were living in some totalitarian country. Now, the Supreme Court has come to our rescue, and reminded the EPA – and everyone – that this is still America, and Americans still have rights under the Constitution.”

This case is reminiscent of the kinds of bureaucratic abuses of power that characterized the 1970′s during the Nixon-Ford-Carter era and that led (in at least one case) to the Supreme Court clipping the wings of the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration for their practice of searches of private property without a judicial warrant—a case that also began in the State of Idaho back in 1977.

The Pacific Legal Foundation was instrumental in providing counsel and representation to Mr. and Mrs. Sackett in their protracted battle with EPA dating back to 2007.  Many may not be familiar with the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF); yet, it is the original conservative, pro-individual property rights legal assistance organization.  It was founded in California, circa 1972, and financed by members of Ronald Reagan’s “kitchen cabinet”—the dozen or so conservative businessmen that advised and helped finance Reagan’s political career from the beginning.   One of the leading early financiers and enables of PLF was John Wayne.  I first became acquainted with PLF in 1975 when they provided invaluable help to conservatives in Congress who were successfully opposing the federal land use planning legislation being pushed by extreme environmentalists and the Nixon-Ford Administrations.

As I have written and commented on this site previously, there are conservative activists who only make noise and then there are those who make a difference.  PLF has made a difference. So today we won one both for The Gipper and for The Duke, but most importantly for the basic rights of American citizens in the face of arrogant government power.

Tomorrow is primary day here in the once-great-but-rapidly-declining State of Illinois, and I am planning to be a good citizen and cast my vote in the Democratic primary. There are two reasons for doing so.

First, the lesser of the two reasons — it lets me avoid having to choose between Tweedlebad and Tweedleworse. Though I will of course vote for the Republican nominee in November, having to vote for any of these guys twice in one year is more than should be asked of anyone.

The bigger reason is that I got redistricted and I just can’t resist the opportunity to vote for Debbie Halvorson. Okay, that’s a lie. Halvorson is almost the definition of a political hack and thoroughly demonstrated her supine submission to Nancy Pelosi in her one term in congress (she was the representative of my old district and was thrown out in 2010 after promising to oppose Obamacare unless abortion restrictions were inserted, but then reneged). But then consider the incumbent Halvorson is trying to unseat in the new district … Jesse Jackson, Jr.

So my decision is, should I vote as a Republican and choose among Romney, Santorum, et al.,  or vote as a Democrat and choose between Halvorson and Jackson?

Go, Debbie, go!

In preparation for his next budget, Paul Ryan has released this trailer:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwDai5NtXa0&list=UUHPaSWprI94UTePSMv0tqnw&index=1&feature=plcp[/youtube]

Good thing we’ve got our A-Team on the field.

March 5 (Bloomberg) — The Obama administration will extend mortgage assistance for the first time to investors who bought multiple homes before the market imploded, helping some speculators who drove up prices and inflated the housing bubble.

That’s right — taxpayers will be on the hook to help speculators who recklessly contributed to the real estate bubble.

The program pays banks to reduce monthly payments for landlords who rent out each house/unit or “have plans to fill them” (plans? who knows how this gray area will be defined). The measures will include cutting interest rates, stretching terms, and forgiving principal.

So now we are going to bailout real estate speculators.  What about stock speculators?  Where does it end?  This is disgusting.  If the GOP candidates don’t jump all over this, something is wrong.

Read more.

The Washington State caucuses are scheduled to convene in about a half-an-hour and will run until 2pm PST (5pm EST). Results should immediately begin to trickle in at that time.

As is stands, Romney leads Santorum 76.9 to 20.9 on Intrade to win.

Please make your predictions, or post any interesting WA related news in the comments!

Mitt Romney:

Ann and I are deeply saddened by the passing of @AndrewBreitbart: brilliant entrepreneur, fearless conservative, loving husband and father.”

Rick Santorum:

What a powerful force. It’s almost — you think of anybody out there who’s more energy, and just, out there constantly, driving and pushing. What a huge loss, in my opinion for our country, and certainly for the conservative movement. My prayers go out to his family. I’m really sorry to hear it.

Newt Gingrich:

Andrew Breitbart was the most innovative pioneer in conservative activist social media in America. He had great courage and creativity.

R4’12 offers our most sincere sympathies to the family and friends of this great American.

As of this writing, the race stands at Romney to win at 64.4 on Intrade.

And as always, have at it in the comments

The polls will close in Michigan at 8pm EST, so our Michigan results open forum will go live at 7:30pm EST. Arizona’s polls will close two hours later at close 8pm MST (10pm EST), and our Arizona results open forum will go live at 9:30 EST.

In the meantime, consider this an open thread.

In the upcoming Michigan primary on Tuesday, the delegates will be awarded as follows:

• Two delegates for the statewide winner; and
• Two delegates to the winner of each of the fourteen Congressional districts in the state.

(If that seems odd to you, it is. And it’s because Michigan jumped too far forward, busting the RNC-approved calendar, so they are being stripped of half their delegates. Prior to that punishment, 14 delegates were to be awarded to the statewide winner and 3 each to the winner of each CD.)

At any rate, Michigan now looks like decently safe Romney territory once again after the electorate there flirted with the idea of voting for Rick Santorum. More and more folks – Larry Sabato, Nate Silver, Intrade investors, and others – are now overwhelmingly predicting a Romney victory there in four days. So now the talk has turned to trying to forecast how many congressional districts Santorum could win and still manage to salvage a decent showing out of the Wolverine State. There have even been those across the blogosphere who are suggesting Santorum could win a majority of CD’s while losing the state.

I’ll say this delicately: that is ludicrous.

The idea sounds good in theory: Romney draws most of his support from the Detroit area – Wayne and Oakland County and the surrounding counties in eastern Michigan – while Santorum draws most of his support from the more conservative western and northern parts of the state. So could Santorum have a shot at taking a slew of delegates by winning those congressional districts while losing the state?

Not a chance. I’ve argued that here before with regards to other states – and here are the numbers showing why.

First, I went back to the 2008 primary and looked at the county-level results from the McCain-Romney race in Michigan (green is Romney, blue is McCain):

After that, I grabbed the newly redrawn map of the Michigan congressional districts:

Then I overlaid the two and created a spreadsheet showing what would have happened had the delegates been awarded in 2008 like they are about to be in 2012. And guess what? Despite McCain’s strong showing in half the counties in the state, here’s what the congressional district breakdown came in as:

In other words, the final tally for delegates in 2008, using the 2012 system, would have been Romney – 26, McCain – 4.

There is no way that Santorum gets anywhere close to Romney’s delegate total in Michigan, because of one simple truth: whoever wins the state wins a vast majority of the congressional districts. It was true in California in 2008, when McCain won by 7% but swept the 53 congressional districts – and it is true in Michigan as well.

As you can see from the table above, Romney’s weakest CD’s are 1 and 6 — the upper peninsula and the southwest corner of the state. If Santorum wins any delegates, that’s where he will most likely pull them from. And that’s assuming Romney doesn’t run any stronger on the upper peninsula than he did in 2008, since he only lost it by 600 votes out of around 70,000 cast.

To get any more than those four delegates, Santorum will have to outperform McCain ’08 in CD2 or CD4, his next best chances. After those four CDs, it gets pretty close to impossible to figure out where else he has a shot. And even district 2 has Ottawa and part of Kent Counties – where Romney will be trying to run up the score.

So all of this to say: had Santorum held onto his lead in Michigan, he would have had a great shot of winning many of the Congressional Districts. Now that Romney is back in the lead, however, the Senator should not be counting on many delegates out of the Wolverine State. And this Michigan maxim holds true for other states that divide their delegates proportionally as well. Something to keep in mind, anyway, as you play with delegate calculators and as you read (and post your own) predictions about the upcoming primary contests.

(You can download a copy of my Michigan spreadsheet I used as the basis for this article here.)

The latest “bail out” of the Greek economy should fool no one. The agreement is a band aid on top of a band aid, and only delays an eventual collapse of the Greek situation and further deterioration of the whole European economic crisis.

The seeds of this financial disaster in Athens were sown at the very beginning of the European unity experiment when, soon after World War II, the visionary dream of Jean Monnet and others was to create an economic structure that would be followed by a political structure, each step that would unify the continent and eliminate a millenium of violent conflicts between the nations originally created by the various barbarian tribes which lived in the region.

As Euroskeptics have warned throughout the many decades of the development of the European Common Market to the present European Union, the strategy at the outset, however well-meaning, was flawed. It was understandable that, after two unspeakably violent and murderous wars in the 20th century, following countless brutal conflicts over many centuries in the region, there was a desire to restructure the continent so that instead of jealousy and revenge, religious persecution and totalitarianism in many forms, there would be commercial cooperation, tolerance, mutual respect and democracy.

M. Monnet and his colleagues, however, proceeded to construct a top-down structure of the New Europe. Perhaps knowing that modern democratic forms were mostly unknown to the populations of the various surviving nations of Europe, they did not have confidence in the European masses, and assumed a paternalistic attitude of recreating the region without building what we Americans call “grass roots” support. It is probably true that the only major European nation which resisted this, and only gradually found its way fully into the Union (minus accepting the Euro, the new currency of most of the continent) was Great Britain which had been the mother (albeit a reluctant one) of the American democracy. (Most Americans, for whatever shortcomings U.S. democratic structures have, would find the political process which Europe has taken to be unthinkable and unworkable.)

I am not suggesting that Mr. Monnet’s impulse and goals were not good ones, even necessary ones. After so much human slaughter and suffering, there had to be a better way to conduct the affairs of this large and important part of the world. Democratic capitalism, a child of the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, in fact was born in the cities of northern Europe. But another child of Europe, socialism, had greater influence on the new nations of the continent, and a new form, the social welfare state, emerged as the dominant economic model. In this model, the needs of the populace were relegated more and more to the central government of each national state, particularly in providing unemployment insurance, education, health care, industrial controls, taxation, old age pensions, etc. Prominent economic theories in this period asserted that these costs and services could be provided indefinitely by postponing growing debt resulting from them into the future. (The same theories were temporarily put in practice on the other side of the Atlantic, but soon after the Viet Nam War were primarily rejected as destructive to an ongoing healthy economy.)

In Europe, however, the economic model was increasingly imposed on the intranational structure that was becoming more and more political as well as financial. But two main factors were working against this process. First, of course, the economic model was fundamentally flawed. At some point, the accumulated national debts would be confronted by the “Piper” who would demand to be paid. The notion that debt could be put off indefinitely was a fantasy. Second, although it was an obvious improvement to eliminate passports, tariffs and other impediments to free trade and passage between the European nations, the top-down structure did not accommodate over time the different languages, traditions and customs, and self-interests of each component of the New Europe, the former nations developed over centuries from the original barbarian tribes. One major reason this happened, I have suggested, was that the “visionaries” who created the New Europe had done so without building and receiving a slow and careful approval from the populations of each nation. As long as the New Europe was bringing apparent prosperity, of course, objections were relatively few and isolated. But as the original group of nations, most of them recovering nicely from the catastrophes of world wars (thanks in part to long-term economic and military aid from the U.S.), were expanded to poorer nations, economic crisis became inevitable. Large waves of immigration from outside Europe to provide labor for the post-war European boom profoundly has complicated this crisis, as Europe evolved from its traditional Catholic and Protestant constituencies to much more secular ones whose traditions were challenged by the immigrants.

In short, there is now an economic and political crisis in Europe which cannot be resolved by “bailouts” and other economic sleights of hand. The problems are not only endemic in the newer “Euro” nations of Greece, Portugal and Spain, they now reach farther and farther into Germany, France and The Netherlands, some of the more successful economies, as well as Italy, chronically one of the financial and political “trouble spots” of Europe.

Whether now or at some “postponed” date, the “Piper” will have to be paid. Those who will have to pay include most of the citizens of Europe, i.e., the pensioners, the shareholders, the small businesses and those dependent on public welfare. These are most of the voters in Europe, and thus we understand why the politicians continue to delay resolving the crisis.

The United States is not immune from many of these problems, nor more immediately, would it be unaffected by a worsening of the European crisis. Americans hold European debt and American business depend on European trade. This is why the Obama administration acts in ways that resemble European administrations.

Behind the “bailouts” is a massive deception, that is, that everything will turn out all right if only we can postpone dealing with the Piper who wants to be paid. Greece is the focus of today, but the crisis will emigrate quickly wherever it can, like a river exceeding its banks, like a volcano emitting lava in all directions.

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-Please visit Mr. Casselman’s personal site. 

America used to be “the land of opportunity” where Americans were “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Many Americans were able to achieve “The American Dream” with ingenuity and hard work.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve read several stories of changes in America that have caused me to write this blog. Here are just a few examples:

Most of us are aware of Obama’s contraception mandate that goes against religious freedom. But, are you aware that Matt Bowman of the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) points out that exemptions are being granted to various organizations, including unions, but religious ones still face a mandate?

I read an article pointed out by a fellow HucksArmy member earlier this week informing us Collecting rainwater now illegal in many states as Big Government claims ownership over our water

In Dependence at an all-time high Neil Boortz says:

It’s no secret that more Americans are dependent on government than ever before. The Heritage Foundation released its 2012 Index of Dependence on Government. The results emphasize our slide toward a European welfare nation.

This week, I read an article that got me even more upset. Food Inspector Confiscates Kid’s Homemade Lunch

NONE of our GOP presidential candidates are perfect. EVERY one of them has something that goes against some conservative views. Our liberties are being trampled on and instead of uniting together against the Democrats’ socialistic agenda – Republicans are fighting against each other.

Republicans had a better chance of defeating Obama before campaigns and Super PACS resorted to tearing their fellow soldiers down. Why can’t all of that money be used to point out the positives for their chosen candidate instead of negatives against their opposition?

The Republican Party and America needs a leader that will stand up and show us why he is the one to lead the fight to restore our liberties that are being taken away one by one.

I’m ready to fight to keep our freedom. America needs a Patrick Henry willing to lead the charge, “Give me liberty or give me death!” – before we are no longer a free Republic.

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-Please visit Donna’s personal site. 

Within a few days of the debate over the Obama birth-control “insurance” mandate, I developed a sinking feeling that the GOP, including all of the presidential candidates (except for Ron Paul) are missing the real point and missing the opportunity to use the mandate as a didactic example of why government run health care is a bad idea.  By devolving into the more narrow debate over contraception per se as opposed to focusing on the larger and more basic problem with government defined and directed health care coverage, the GOP may have inadvertently fallen into an Obama strategic trap.  John Cochrane,  a professor of finance at the University of Chicago and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, penned an excellent op-ed in the February 9 edition of the Wall Street Journal discussing the controversy and the pitfalls in the way the debate has been framed.  Here are a few excerpts from Professor Cochrane’s op-ed:

When the administration affirmed last month that church-affiliated employers must buy health insurance that covers birth control, the outcry was instant. Critics complained that certain institutions should be exempt as a matter of religious freedom.

Critics are missing the larger point. Why should the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) decree that any of us must pay for “insurance” that covers contraceptives? I put “insurance” in quotes for a reason. Insurance is supposed to mean a contract, by which a company pays for large, unanticipated expenses in return for a premium: expenses like your house burning down, your car getting stolen or a big medical bill. Insurance is a bad idea for small, regular and predictable expenses.  There are good reasons that your car insurance company doesn’t add $100 per year to your premium and then cover oil changes, and that your health insurance doesn’t charge $50 more per year and cover toothpaste.  You’d have to fill out mountains of paperwork, the oil-change and toothpaste markets would become much less competitive, and you’d end up spending more.  How did we get to this point? It all leads back to the elephant in the room:  the tax deductibility of employer-provided group insurance.

How did we get to this point? It all leads back to the elephant in the room: the tax deductibility of employer-provided group insurance. If your employer pays you $100 less in salary and buys $100 of group insurance for you, you don’t pay taxes on that amount. Hence, the more insurance costs and covers, the less in taxes you seem to pay. (Even that savings is an illusion: The government still needs money and raises overall tax rates to make up the difference.)

To add insult to injury, this tax deduction does not apply to portable, guaranteed-renewable individual insurance. You don’t get the tax break if your employer gives you the $100 and you buy a policy—a policy that will stay with you if you get sick, leave employment or get divorced. The pre-existing conditions crisis is largely a creature of tax law. You don’t lose your car insurance when you change jobs.

Why did HHS add this birth-control insurance mandate—along with “well-woman visits, breast-feeding support and domestic-violence screening,” and “all without charging a co-payment, co-insurance or a deductible”—to its implementation of a provision of the new health-care reform law? “Because it promotes maternal and child health by allowing women to space their pregnancies,” says the HHS advisory panel. Because these “historic new guidelines” will make sure “women have access to a full range of recommended preventive services,” says the original HHS announcement. To “increase access to important preventive services,” echoes White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

Notice the doublespeak confusion of “access” and “cost.” I have “access” to toothpaste because I have two bucks in my pocket and a competitive supplier. Anyone who can afford a cell phone can afford pills or condoms.  Salting mandated health insurance with birth control is exactly the same as a tax—on employers, on Catholics, on gay men and women, on couples trying to have children and on the elderly—to subsidize one form of birth control.

If the government wants to subsidize birth control, OK, pass an explicit tax, and sensibly subsidize all birth control. And face the voters on it. The tax rate and spending debates that occupy the media are a small part of the effective taxes and spending that the government achieves by these regulatory mandates.

There is also the issue of religious freedom. Our nation is divided on social issues. The natural compromise is simple: Birth control, abortion and other contentious practices are permitted. But those who object don’t have to pay for them. The federal takeover of medicine prevents us from reaching these natural compromises and needlessly divides our society.

Now here is Cochrane’s conclusion which gets back to my point of inadvertently falling into an Obama trap:

The critics fell for a trap. By focusing on an exemption for church-related institutions, critics effectively admit that it is right for the rest of us to be subjected to this sort of mandate. They accept the horribly misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and they resign themselves to chipping away at its edges. No, we should throw it out, and fix the terrible distortions in the health-insurance and health-care markets.

Sure, churches should be exempt. We should all be exempt.

As you probably noticed, R4’12 was down for a time today due to a server issue with our hosting company. I have been informed that this issue has been resolved and that no further interruptions should occur. Please accept my apologies, and thank you very much for your patience.

If ID requirements are discriminatory, America is a lot more racist than we thought.

Department of Hypocrisy: While Attorney General Eric Holder battles photo ID requirements at voting
precincts, American citizens cannot enter the Justice Department’s headquarters without showing photo
ID.

A bunch of racists in South Carolina are trying to hold down blacks by forcing them, and everybody else, to show photo identification before they can vote.

Astonishing!

Luckily, Attorney General Eric Holder is on it. As he declared in Columbia, S.C., last Martin Luther King Day, the Palmetto State “failed to meet its burden of proving that the voting change would not have a racially discriminatory effect.” Holder’s deputy, Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez, blocked this provision on December 23, citing “the racial gap that presently exists among photo identification holders in the state.” Specifically, “8.4% of white registered voters lacked any form of DMV-issued ID, as compared to 10.0% of non-white registered voters.” This 1.6-percentage-point gap can mean only one thing: racism.

As a black man, I say, “Power to Holder!” I just hope this brave public servant can find the time to fight all the racists who are imposing on blacks, and everyone else, the extreme indignity of showing ID cards. This undue burden parallels the colored water fountains and lunch counters that vanished 48 years ago. As Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz explained: Photo-ID advocates “want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally — and very transparently — block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote Democratic.”

The horror!

Holder should start by cleaning house in his own building.

A bunch of racists at the Justice Department expect blacks, and everybody else, to show picture ID. Justice’s website repeatedly states: “Photo ID is required to clear security at all locations.” As Jeff Aronson observed in the New York Post: “Before a citizen can enter the US Department of Justice’s office to complain about the need to produce a photo ID before voting, that citizen will need to produce a photo ID to gain entry.”

Such bigotry!

Holder can curb ethnic bias at once by scrapping his department’s photo-ID rule.

Next, Holder should visit Washington’s Union Station. A bunch of racists decided that “Amtrak customers 18 years of age and older must produce valid photo identification when . . . onboard trains, in response to a request by an Amtrak employee,” and under other particular circumstances. Amtrak’s website lists this regulation, which is targeted at blacks, and everyone else.

For shame!

If Holder tours any American airport, he can watch a bunch of racists in the Transportation Safety Administration demand that blacks, and everyone else, show photo ID before boarding passenger jets. The TSA could not care less about centuries of anti-black oppression. Instead, their agents just sit there, waiting for passengers to reveal their picture-ID cards.

What prejudice!

Meanwhile, a bunch of racists determined that blacks, and everyone else, must display photo ID before buying certain over-the-counter cold remedies that contain ephedrine and other precursors of an illegal drug. According to the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act of 2005, consumers must present “an identification card that provides a photograph and is issued by a State or the Federal Government.” If Holder entered any Walgreen’s, he could witness this injustice.

Fortunately, we know the names of the racists who approved this law.

After this measure passed the House on December 14, 2005, the Senate adopted this measure on March 2, 2006. The senators who voted to rob the dignity of blacks, and everyone else, included such sitting and departed Democrats as Nevada’s Harry Reid, New York’s Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton, Massachusetts’s Edward Moore Kennedy, and Illinois’s Dick Durbin and . . . wait a minute: Barack Obama. Hey, how did that happen?

I hope Attorney General Holder is well rested. Battling this outrage will keep him quite busy indeed.

A December Rasmussen survey discovered that 70 percent of likely voters — roughly 92 million people — would make blacks, and everyone else, “show photo identification such as a driver’s license before being allowed to vote.”

What a bunch of racists!

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— New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. The piece first appeared at National Review Online. 

Romney supporters would no doubt like something to take their minds off their misery today, and I always do my best to keep my Romney pals happy, So here’s a bit of distraction.

Advertising Age has an article listing the ten biggest game-changing political ads of all time. The experts consulted in creating the list are pretty much hall of famers themselves: Roger Ailes, Joe Trippi, and Mike Murphy.

It’s an interesting list. My immediate thought when I saw the headline of the article was ‘Daisy’ and ‘Morning in America’ and those two indeed hold the top spots. Here’s ‘Daisy’, probably the nastiest (and most effective) attack ad of all time, for those too young to remember it:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDTBnsqxZ3k[/youtube]

Most of the ads are viewable at the link.

1. Daisy (LBJ 1964)

2. Morning in America (Reagan 1984)

3. Tank Ride (Bush 1988)

4. Yes, We Can (Obama 2008)

5. Man in the Arena (Nixon 1968)

6. America First (Bush 1992)

7. Hound Dog (Mitch McConnell, Kentucky Senate 1992)

8. Dean for America (Dean blog 2003)

9. Windsurfing (Bush 2004)

10. Sleeping Bear (Lieberman, Connecticut Senate 1988)

Polls across most of Florida are now open as of 7:00 am eastern time (the rest will open at 7:00 am central time).

As of yesterday afternoon, 600,000 votes had already been cast (308,416 absentee ballots and 283,250 early voters). That matches the total number of votes cast in the South Carolina primary.

Consider this your open thread for the day – it will be updated as time allows throughout the day. Polls close at 7:00 pm eastern/central time.

—–
Update #1: 8 1/2 hours until the first polls close

Here’s a compilation of all the final polls coming out of Florida — someone will have a little egg on their face when the day is over:

InsiderAdvantage: Romney +5 (36-31)
PPP: Romney +8 (39-31)
War Room Logistics: Romney +10 (40-30)
Mason-Dixon: Romney +11 (42-31)
Quinnipiac: Romney +14 (43-29)
NBC/Marist: Romney +15 (42-27)
SUSA: Romney +15 (41-26)
Rasmussen: Romney +16 (44-28)
Suffolk: Romney +20 (47-27)
We Ask America: Romney +22 (50-28)

RealClearPolitics Average: Romney +13.0
Pollster.com Average: Romney +8.5

—–
Update #2: 6 hours until the first polls close
Today isn’t only the Florida primary, fellow political nerds. It is also the filing deadline for the year-end FEC fundraising reports. We’ll be back later tonight with an official Q4 fundraising leaderboard, but here’s what we know so far: Huntsman’s daddy pumped $2 million into Junior’s campaign via his Super PAC; Rick Perry raised less than $3 million in Q4 (!) and blew through his entire cash on hand totals during the December leadup to Iowa; Gingrich’s Q4 haul neared $10 million.

Oh, and according to a new “study” released this morning, the Florida campaign over the past week has been measurably the most negative in modern political history, with 92% of the advertisements being attack ads. Yikes.

——
Update #3: 2 hours until the first polls close
This is the Hour O’ Exit Polls, folks, so post ‘em when you see ‘em. CNN, ABC, and the NYT should be releasing some information, among others.

The Drudge siren announces some (leaked) exit poll results:

• Romney – 46%
• Gingrich – 32%
• Santorum – 12%
• Paul – 7%

Other numbers:

• 70% identify as conservatives;
• 37% said Romney ran a more unfair campaign, compared to 34% who said Gingrich did;
• 45% said electability was the most important factor in choosing a nominee (experience – 20%; character – 17%; being a “true conservative” – 13%)
• 67% said the debates mattered in who they voted for;
• 40% are age 65 or older

Update: NYT exit poll numbers peg the race at a 44-30 lead for Romney, the same 14% margin that Drudge is reporting.

A source inside one of the GOP candidate’s campaigns tells Andrew Breitbart that they have seen numbers indicating a 47-34 Romney lead — a similar margin.

Romney is winning seniors by a 15% margin over Gingrich.

On occasion, having nothing better to ponder, one asks oneself questions such as: “Is it possible for Newsweek to sink any deeper into self-parody?”

Any rational person would, on such an occasion answer: “No, Self, surely there are no further depths to be plumbed.”

Which just goes to show how a rigid adherence to rationality can, sometimes, lead one astray.

Today, Politico reported that Sen. Rand Paul took the initiative to demonstrate his personal commitment to cutting government spending:

Freshman Sen. Rand Paul is making good on his promise to cut federal spending. The Kentucky Republican and tea-party favorite said Thursday he’s returning $500,000 to the U.S. Treasury — money from his operating budget that his office never spent.

The half million dollars represents about 16 percent of Paul’s annual budget, and he contends no senator has returned as much to taxpayers.

Obviously, $500,000 amounts to a drop in the bucket. Still, with all the broken promises and reneged commitments we see from our elected officials, it feels refreshing to see one quite literally put his money where his mouth is.

Real Clear Politics Senior Elections Analyst and author of “The Lost Majority“, Sean Trende, will be delivering the Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute this evening. This is an absolute “don’t miss’ for political junkies like us here at R4’12.

Here’s AEI’s preview:

After decades of relative stability, American politics has descended into seeming chaos. This is exemplified by the 2008 and 2010 elections, when a once-solid Republican majority was replaced by a seemingly permanent Democratic majority, which was in turn replaced by a large Republican majority only two years later. In this Bradley Lecture at AEI, Sean Trende, senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics.com, places these elections in the larger scheme of American politics and explains how the radical shifts in our politics we’ve seen in the past few election cycles are really the norm and the previous stability the exception. Both parties have lost their majorities recently because America’s two-party system is flexible and makes a permanent majority for any party impossible. Looking forward to 2012, Trende explains how the demographic and political shifts of the past decade can be expected to play out.

Mr. Trende’s speech will be telecast live on C-SPAN II at 5:30pm EST. You can also view it online here.

And if you haven’t purchased Sean’s book yet, you can purchase it here.

If punditry were like many religions, and had saints, my late and dear friend Tony Blankley would be one of the very few from its ranks to be named one. As it is, if there is a real heaven, Tony is. as I write this, checking in at the gate to receive well-earned eternal rewards for an exemplary and rich, if slightly abbreviated, life.

I count myself as one of his friends, but there are family members and other friends who knew him longer and better. His life story is as varied and rich as few others I’ve known, and I know few others who simply enjoyed it more thoroughly and with such lifelong awe at its civilized pleasures, its frightening dangers and its sheer unpredictability.

But I began by citing Tony’s saintliness, and that’s because beyond his unlikely and marvelous resume, the fascinating characters and figures he knew and worked with, his always distinctive manner, and his eloquent voice, aloud and in print, Tony was one of life’s rare totally decent and good men, an old world gentleman because he cared to be so, and a loving family member or friend because it was in his DNA.

British-born, Tony emigrated to the U.S. as a child with his parents. His father had been Winston Churchill’s accountant, but decided after World War II to come to Hollywood and establish a new successful career. Young Tony, in this environment, was soon cast in movies and television series of the 1950’s, appearing, with famous stars. But Tony was not destined for an acting career. After attending law school he did go to work for another former actor, Ronald Reagan, and after campaigning for him, served as a prosecutor in the California attorney general’s office for ten years. When Reagan became president, Tony went to work as one of his speech writers, and then worked for the Secretary of Education. In that position he met a young congressman named Newt Gingrich. Tony then became Gingrich’s press secretary and adviser, serving Gingrich through his speakership. (There are some of Tony’s friends who think if Newt had ALWAYS taken Tony’s advice, he would still be speaker.) Tony soon had the reputation as one of the best, as well as one of the most congenial, on either side of the aisle in his business.

After the Gingrich speakership ended, Tony was invited by John F. Kennedy Jr. to join the staff of his new magazine George as an editor, and after that, Tony was named as editorial page editor of The Washington Times. In full disclosure, Tony soon invited me to contribute an almost weekly column to the Times. We had met when Newt was speaker, and stayed in touch over time, but I was a bit surprised, albeit very pleased, to become a contributor under his editorship because I was known as a political centrist, and not as a a Republican or doctrinaire conservative. It did not matter to Tony who quickly filled the Times’ editorial pages with a variety of provocative writers. Tony read everything I wrote in advance, but instructed his staff to publish everything I submitted, after spelling and typo corrections, and occasional shortening when I had gone on too long. In seven years of writing op eds for Tony, only one was rejected, and that because a delay in publication made it out of date. He was this freelanceer’s dream editor.

My best memories of Tony, however, were the little adventures we had together. Some were at the Hay Adams Hotel dining room, to where on every visit I made to the nation’s capital, Tony would invite me for breakfast. Breakfast with Tony Blankley at the Hay Adams Hotel was a magical experience. He would arrive always impeccably dressed in one of his custom-made suits (along with our mutual friend Michael Barone, Tony was easily one of the best-dressed pundits in America), and we would enjoy the Hay Adams lavish power breakfasts (the only restaurant I know which serves fresh-squeezed guava juice). Ostensibly, the breakfasts were for Tony to get my out-of-the-beltway midwestern perspective, but the truth is I learned far more from him than he could have possibly obtained from me. Our two-hour breakfasts covered Tony’s account of recent political history of Washington, DC since the Reagan years. inside stories of famous and often pretentious politicians, and most of all, as I had come to learn, Tony’s incredibly well-informed and prescient insights about what was happening in the world.

We had other great occasions together. One of them was an all-night phone conversation on Election Night, 2000, especially in the wee hours as the incredible result was becoming clear. Another occasion was when I hosted Tony in the Twin Cities for the 2008 Republican convention held in St. Paul, and I took Tony from party to party. (We were more like fun loving teenagers at Disnyeworld than two older blase pundits.) Most memorable, perhaps, was a symposium I organized in 1999 on the theme of public communication, and to which I invited Tony as Newt’s former press secretary, and Mike McCurry, as President Clinton’s former press secretary to share the podium and speak about media at the highest level in Washington. The result was classic. It was broadcast on C-SPAN, and someone from the major networks saw it, asking both Tony and Mike subsequently to do a network show together for a time.

There was much more than can be retold here. Tony always carried with him an impish and sophisticated sense of humor, a genuine intellectual openness, a caring personality and old world gentlemanly charm. I think his history as a DC staffer (albeit for Reagan and Gingrich), and his talk show appearances, may have led some to underestimate Tony’s original and visionary mind. The best evidence of that is his recent books ”The West’s Last Chance” and “American Grit” which, in my opinion, will outlast a lot of books by “official” historians and analysts whose work is currently trendy and popular. My sadness at his early loss is thus not only personal and selfish (one gets to have few friends in a lifetime like Tony), but also because he had more books with more profound insights to give, insights I might suggest, that might have been critical to the survival of a civilization and a republic whose best traits Tony Blankly stood for and practiced every day of his exemplary life.

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-Please visit Mr. Casselman’s personal site.

The outlook section of the Christmas Day Sunday edition of The Washington Post offered another one of their “Five Myths about —-” op-ed pieces.  I have found most these op-eds to be reasonably accurate and politically unbiased.  Yesterday’s subject was former British Prime Minister (and American Conservative heroine) Margaret Thatcher.  “Five Myths about Margaret Thatcher” is consistent with what I had heard from both British acquaintances and from some of the senior Reagan staff who knew her well.  One of the most important attributes cited was her gift for choosing her battles wisely and avoiding those she could not win.  This knack was a key contributor to her overall success.  It is also something to which contemporary American conservatives and Republicans might want to pay close attention.  This was an important attribute of Ronald Reagan’s and was one of the foundations of his success in politics and as president; he used his political capital wisely.  The Post op-ed closes with a nice succinct discussion of Thatcher’s political philosophy and those who would falsely blame her (and Reagan) for the financial crisis of 2008.  In debunking the myth that “Thatcherism” caused the global financial crisis, it closes with the observation:

Thatcher stood for thrift, sound money and balanced budgets, powered by private enterprise.  The uncontrolled explosion of debt in Western economies that followed her time in power would have appalled her.

Well said.  It should appall each and everyone one of us.  Following is the complete article:

Five myths about Margaret Thatcher

By Claire Berlinksi, Published: December 22

1. The Iron Lady never backed down.

Not true. Her genius was her gift for choosing her battles wisely and avoiding those she couldn’t win. In 1981, for example, the National Union of Mineworkers — Britain’s most powerful union — threatened to strike. Despite urgent warnings from her advisers, Thatcher had made no preparations to withstand a conflict with the miners, and she capitulated immediately to their demands. She spent the next three years preparing to take them on: Her government stockpiled coal, devised schemes to smuggle strategic chemicals into power stations, changed the trade union laws and infiltrated MI5 spies into the miners’ inner circle.

When another strike loomed in 1984, she was ready. Previous mining strikes had ended after only weeks. Not this one. Over the course of a year, as Britain waited to see who would break first, Thatcher proceeded to crush the strike with a brutal, calculating ruthlessness that stunned the public. Neither labor nor the unions ever recovered.

 

2. Thatcher was prim, dowdy and moralistic.

Not at all. As a number of her colleagues told me, she has a ribald sense of humor and was quite unconcerned when her ministers got themselves into sordid adultery flaps. One of her civil servants, for example, remembered desperately trying to finesse a compromise between Thatcher and her chancellor, the Cabinet minister responsible for the economy, during a dispute over the budget.

His delicate diplomacy was upended when Thatcher came back to No. 10 Downing St. from the House of Commons, apparently quite drunk, and discovered her chancellor holding a secret strategy meeting. She strode in uninvited, kicked off her shoes, tucked her heels under herself and declared, “Well, gentlemen, let’s just settle this now, shall we?” She “held court like a queen bee,” the civil servant said — and thus was it settled in her favor.

Afterward, the others could be heard muttering among themselves, “Phwoar, wasn’t she sexy tonight?” French president Francois Mitterand is said to have called her Brigitte Bardot with Caligula’s eyes.

 

3. She was against European unification.

Yes, she is known as the great Euroskeptic. But the peculiar truth is that for most of her career, she was a passionate advocate of European unification. In 1975, she led the Tory faction of the “Vote Yes” campaign in referendum to determine whether Britain should stay in the Common Market, the precursor to the modern European Union. The Single European Act of 1986, which revised the Treaty of Rome to expand the power of the European Economic Community, as the Common Market was then known, was her initiative.

Thatcher was an ardent Europhile, in fact, until the issue of the single currency came up. That, she believed, would require one European economic policy, leaving Britain without access to the key economic instruments of a sovereign government.

In October 1997, then-Labor Chancellor Gordon Brown announced that the Treasury would set five tests to ascertain whether the economic case for joining the euro had been made. Thatcher might as well have written the test. The case was never made. History has obviously proved her right.

 

4. No one would meddle with Britain if she were still in power.

It is often said that if only Margaret Thatcher were in power, Britain wouldn’t be in this mess — “this mess” being whatever has just gone wrong. When the British Embassy in Iran was stormed recently, many in the British media rushed to insist that this would never have happened if Thatcher were in charge. GOP presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Michele Bachmann have invoked her legacy to imply their ferocity when asked how they would formulate policy toward Iran.

But in 1979, President Jimmy Carter asked Thatcher for “the strongest possible remonstration or action” to pressure Iran, asking Britain to reduce its diplomatic staff in the country. Thatcher responded that she did not believe it “wise to make a political point of any reduction, partly because we doubt whether the Iranians would be much impressed and partly because of the risk of retaliatory action against those remaining.” In 1984, Moammar Gaddafi loyalists opened fire on demonstrators from the second floor of the Libyan Embassy in London, killing a young British policewoman. The shooters were permitted to leave the country. They were not arrested and tried, despite howls of outrage from the British media.

Why not? Because Thatcher feared reprisals against British citizens in Libya. This is precisely the sort of thing that would never happen if Thatcher were still in power, except that in this case, Thatcher was in power.

 

5. “Thatcherism” caused the global financial crisis.

This is among the most muddled ideas about Thatcher. It is true that failure of regulation was a significant factor in the 2008 financial collapse and it is true that Thatcher promoted deregulation. As leader of the Opposition, she once interrupted a droning speech by a fellow Tory about the “middle path” the party must follow. She extracted a copy of free-market thinker Friedrich von Hayek’s “The Constitution of Liberty” from her briefcase, held it up before the audience, then slammed it on the table. “This,” she said, “is what we believe!”

But the deregulation she pursued had nothing to do with the lack of oversight that contributed to the meltdown on Wall Street. Before Thatcher, commissions of civil servants decided, for example, what sorts of cars Britons should drive. That was the kind of regulation she ended. She was a passionate proponent of regulation that makes free markets function properly — otherwise known as the rule of law.

Thatcher supported stringent bank regulation. Consider the 1986 Financial Services Act which, contrary to its reputation, closed loopholes in investor protection laws, boosted the enforcement power of regulators, and applied the same investor protection standards to a broad range of securities and investment activities.

Thatcher stood for thrift, sound money and balanced budgets, powered by private enterprise. The uncontrolled explosion of debt in Western economies that followed her time in power would have appalled her.

Claire Berlinksi, a journalist in Istanbul, is the author of “There is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.”

 

14 days until Iowa…

Intrade

Romney to win GOP nomination: 68.0
Ron Paul to win GOP Nomination: 8.3
Gingrich to win GOP nomination: 7.8
Huntsman to win GOP nomination: 6.5
Obama to win reelection: 51.5
Iowa Caucuses Winner: Paul 41.5 – Romney 32.9 – Rick Perry 10.0
New Hampshire Primary Winner: Romney 73.5 – Paul 15.7 – Huntsman 7.0
South Carolina Primary Winner: Romney 48.9 – Gingrich 18.0 – Perry 15.0

Polling:

Obama Approval (RCP): 45.8% / 50.0% (-4.2%)
GOP Nomination (RCP): Gingrich +4.5
Gallup Daily Tracking GOP Nomination: Gingrich 26%, Romney 24%

And as always, have at it in the comments. Anything goes…