For the second time, people opposed to one of the Republican presidential candidates have misappropriated the name of a prominent Iowa pro-life organization attack the candidate in the state that holds the fist caucus tomorrow.
In December someone used the name of Iowans for Life on fliers distributed at events in the Hawkeye State to attack pro-life former House Speaker Newt Gingrich with claims that he is not prolife on abortion.
Now, Iowans for Life’s name has been falsely attached to fliers disparaging pro-life former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum — who has cruised to a third place standing in the state that leads off the campaign to replace pro-abortion President Barack Obama. “Iowans for Life has once again been subject to fraudulent use of its name for the purpose of negative rhetoric targeting a candidate in the presidential campaign,” the group told LifeNews on Sunday. “This second deceitful usurping of Iowans for Life’s name was aimed at Senator Rick Santorum.”
First Newt, now Santorum? I suspect the Perry campaign was responsible for both of these cheap smears. As I remarked Saturday, if desperation was a cologne fragance, they’d reek of it.
Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.
This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.
First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.
Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.
I grasp that Krugman is correct in the sense that he depicts accurately a mentality present in the bulk of our policy makers. I also gather that returning to a fundamentally valid fiscal approach is going to hurt, hurt, hurt. What Krugman and the rest of his ilk have absolutely never done is shown why citizens should quietly accept what amounts to an acceptance of theft. What is the moral basis for your argument, which appears to be pure pain avoidance?
I’m not saying our system is unethical, for it has been accepted for decades. My question in the title could be restated:
“How can those members of society who still cling to a notion of ‘right and wrong’ that is stronger than ‘Did Congress spew some legislation?’ be reconciled to your notion of debt?”.
If we agree that “debt” does not mean what, say, George Washington would have thought it means, then please publish the re-definition of the term. You, and our policy makers overall, are abusing the term “debt” in a manner similar to the way some would like to abuse the term “marriage”, which gets at your second point.
When the demographics start to go bad, as with Japan, the argument that we “owe it to ourselves” becomes as foolhardy as tampering with the word “debt”. While not totally out of the childbearing range, I’ll be blessed to hit the replacement rate, personally. Stacy is picking up the slack, but who will help his kids carry the “debt” load, Paul? Your cat? Debt is debt, marriage is marriage, and the Progressive attempts to freebase these symbols are ++ungood.
Americans are going to sober up about debt, Paul. The “or not” alternative is untenable. Also, your ideas.
Now to be fair, Krugman covered himself in 2003 in a credible way he said “unless we slide into Japanese-style deflation, there are much higher interest rates in our future.” Thus, I do not fault Krugman’s forecasting ability. What I do fault is that despite a 180 degree about-face, one thing remains constant in all of Krugman’s writings, anyone who disagrees with him is portrayed as a mendacious idiot. In truth, Heritage today and Krugman 2003 both have legitimate concerns about the long-term debt situation of the United States and it would have been to the credit of Krugman 2012 had he acknowledged that point more fairly.
Rick Santorum made a bold prediction here Friday night: The Pittsburgh Steelers will go all the way to the Super Bowl for a rematch with the Green Bay Packers.
The former Pennsylvania senator was enjoying a rare moment of relaxation on the campaign trail here in Iowa, where voters will gather Tuesday night to cast the first real votes that count toward the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. Santorum was wearing a University of Iowa Hawkeyes cap at the Okoboji Grille, where he gathered with supporters to watch the Hawkeyes play the Oklahoma Sooners in the Insight Bowl. When he arrived at the restaurant in Johnston, a suburb of Des Moines, Santorum was swarmed by reporters, photographers, and TV cameramen who have swooped down on his campaign in the past week as polls began indicating that he was surging ahead in the pack of GOP candidates.
Most of the reporters had left the restaurant (and the Hawkeyes were well on their way to a 31-14 loss to the Sooners) by the time I had the chance to ask Santorum about his beloved Steelers. “We will beat the Browns this week,” he said, sitting in front of a half-finished platter of nachos. “My prediction is, both the Patriots will lose to the Bills and the Ravens will lose to the Bengals and we will be the Number One seed in the AFC playoffs.”
But while the underdog-turned-contender was willing to risk prognosticating the NFL all the way to the Super Bowl, he has remained hesitant to predict how he’ll finish in Tuesday’s caucuses. Santorum obviously wants to exceed expectations, but the poll numbers and media buzz surrounding his campaign are making it hard to suppress those expectations. . . .
You can read the whole thing at The American Spectator, and I hope readers are not offended by my practice of linking my columns here, but I sometimes get the feeling that if I didn’t link and quote my own columns, no one would. Here, for the record, are my previous four columns from Iowa:
God knows that, having started reporting the “Santorum Surge” weeks before anyone else noticed it, I certainly don’t deserve any credit for my foresight now that the surge is headline news all across the country. In fact, conservative bloggers who ridiculed me for writing about Santorum a month ago are now linking and quoting MSM reports about the Iowa caucuses rather than quoting anything I’ve written. Continue reading The Familiar Pattern Emerges Again →
As many of you read yesterday in the news (link here for the story) I was considering supporting an effort to change the rules to allow the full range of presidential candidates on Virginia’s ballot on March 6th.
I obviously feel very strongly that Virginia needs to change its ballot access requirements for our statewide elections. However, after working through different scenarios with Republican and Democratic leaders to attempt to make changes in time for the 2012 Presidential election, my concern grows that we cannot find a way to make such changes fair to the Romney and Paul campaigns that qualified even with Virginia’s burdensome system. A further critical factor that I must consider is that changing the rules midstream is inconsistent with respecting and preserving the rule of law – something I am particularly sensitive to as Virginia’s attorney general.
My intentions have never focused on which candidates would be benefited or harmed, rather I have focused on what is best for Virginia’s citizens, as hundreds of thousands of Virginians who should have been able to make their choices among the full field of presidential primary contenders have had their number of choices reduced significantly.
My primary responsibility is to the people of Virginia, and how best to fulfill that responsibility in these particular circumstances has been a very difficult question for me. I believe consistency on the part of public officials is an important attribute. And I believe that Virginians are best served by an attorney general who consistently supports the rule of law. That leads to my conclusion that while I will vigorously support efforts to reduce the hurdles to ballot access in Virginia for all candidates, I will not support efforts to apply such changes to the 2012 Presidential election.
I do not change position on issues of public policy often or lightly. But when convinced that my position is wrong, I think it necessary to concede as much and adjust accordingly.
Sincerely,
Ken Cuccinelli II
Attorney General of Virginia
The whole idea, while not without a certain appeal, sounded like a bridge too far, at least for 2012.
In a way, the situation as-is has some appeal as a litmus test. Understood, a Santorum campaign is under-funded. Yet the Tea Partiers, arguably, could have been leveraged more.
Alan Greenspan, a free-market hero, blundered horribly in failing to regulate shadow banking, followed by another Republican appointee, Ben Bernanke. They forgot the old adage that the job of a central banker is to take away the punch-bowl just as the party is getting good. If they had acted to pop the housing price bubble earlier, they probably would have been lynched–it’s easy to beat them up with hindsight–but they still deserve a lot of blame.
These were mistakes, to be sure, but do they imply that America has suffered an “unprecedented failure” of its conservative elite? Just what sort of conservative elite did Ross Douthat have in mind? The victors of the Cold War and the authors of the Reagan economic boom set the tone for an enormous expansion of conservative intellectual life. How could we have done it better?
More disturbing, I think, is the extent to which America has suffered not a failure of the elites, but a failure of the people. Do we measure up to the founders of this country? The fact that Americans fought a revolution against Britain in the first place continues to astonish me. When in all of history have prosperous men with property–farms and businesses–risked their lives and fortunes to establish a better political order? Only a spiritual grandeur of a depth we barely can imagine today can explain it. When in all of history has a country gone to war and sacrificed a 5% of its total population to suppress slavery? The evangelical zeal that sent the North to war, singing of the grapes of wrath in the apocalyptic vision of Isaiah 63, surpasses our understanding today.
Some of that sense of American purpose awakened after 9/11, and the conservative elite misspent the spiritual energy of Americans in the Quixotic pursuit of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Ron Paul is not the only candidate to state this plainly. Newt Gingrich has said the same thing.
What sets Mullah Ron Paul apart is something malicious, in my judgment: the assertion that a conspiracy of malefactors is responsible for the economic pain of the American people, and if these malefactors (for example the Federal Reserve) were to go away, the pain would disappear. That is demagoguery of the most insidious kind.
There is no truth-telling here: to absolve Americans of their greed, indolence, and cupidity in the great home price bubble of 2008-2006 is the biggest lie of all. Americans caught a ride on a $6 trillion wave of foreign capital inflows, and thought the free money would be there forever. The smartest kids got MBA’s and law degrees instead of learning engineering.
Why are we bashing Greenspan and Bernanke? The Federal Reserve is, to quote Thomas Sowell, “A cancer” The best those blokes can do is coax the tumor into growing more slowly. The unfortunate thing is that the ugliness of Ron Paul’s remarks is going to get blended with the idea of curbing the Federal Reserve, and thus it will be OK for our conservative elite to continue their failing ways, and protect the Fed.
The Federal Reserve is the crossroads of the Iron Law of Bureaucracy and moral hazard, he said, easing himself quantitatively. Ahhhh!
Do you have a reference for this claim? It would be very interesting to see where Ron Paul offered:
the assertion that a conspiracy of malefactors is responsible for the economic pain of the American people, and if these malefactors (for example the Federal Reserve) were to go away, the pain would disappear
Again, I’m no apologist for the fellow, but I don’t think he offered any magic wand in “End the Fed”. The conspiracy has been the tacit one of the Iron Law mentioned above. Significantly curbing the Federal Reserve isn’t going to reduce the net pain of fiscal policy, but, removing power from un-elected, opaque officials would at least be in keeping with the spirit of representative government for which we claim to clamor.
And what’s this noise?
There is no truth-telling here: to absolve Americans of their greed, indolence, and cupidity in the great home price bubble of 2008-2006 is the biggest lie of all.
Mister, I have not been late on my mortgage these 12.5 years. That a group of folks, along with Fannie/Freddie, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, the Federal Reserve, and some bad banks, engineered a vast wealth transfer since the Community Reinvestment Act was signed is not an indictment of “Americans”. Conservatives who were in office and want to claim anything like the title “conservative” are not exactly at fault, either; but neither are they blameless, having been in office as the crime went down. The conservative elite is so afraid to scare the horses that you’re a kook if you talk about chopping a trillion out of the budget. Say Social Security is a Ponzi scheme? Yeah, you’re out of consideration.
Our conservative elite is so interested in playing ball-control offense that it is in jeopardy of repeating 2008.
“Ten days ago I was at 5 percent [in the polls] and every question I got was ‘Why don’t you pack it up and endorse another candidate?’ And now they’re saying ‘You’ve got to win [in Iowa] to exceed expectations.'”
— Rick Santorum on NBC’s Meet the Press
JOHNSTON, Iowa
One of the stupid assumptions pundits keep making about Rick Santorum is that he’s got nothing happening beyond Iowa.
There is no need to call out by name the people who have been promoting this counter-factual nonsense that Santorum is “another Huckabee,” who will do well in Iowa on the basis of his support among hard-core evangelical Christians and accomplish nothing meaningful thereafter. This myth has become a sort of conventional wisdom among some conservative pundits, a talking point promoted by advocates of the campaigns of Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry, who have insisted that only their well-funded “brand name” candidates have the wherewithal to fight Mitt Romney for the GOP nomination. And it’s high time for people to begin critically examining that conventional wisdom because:
Conservatives: Why let a bunch of losers dictate strategy to you? Why outsource your thinking to people who are only repeating what they’ve been told by paid campaign operatives? Why not examine the facts and think for yourself?
But I’m getting ahead of myself here. What I want to point out is that, while Rick Santorum has campaigned relentlessly in Iowa, it isn’t as if he has ignored New Hampshire. In fact, Santorum’s campaign manager Mike Biundo is a veteran of New Hampshire politics with strong Tea Party connections, as was pointed out by ABC News a year ago:
Biundo is a seasoned Granite State political operative who most recently helped Republican Frank Guinta defeat incumbent Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter in state’s 1st Congressional District. Biundo also served on Guinta’s successful campaign for mayor of Manchester and has been involved in politics for two decades.
“I am thrilled to have Mike a part of our team. His experience and knowledge will be invaluable in New Hampshire,” Santorum said in a statement. “As I continue on this journey, it is important we determine our ability to build grassroots support and Mike will be an integral part of this process.”
Biundo served on the presidential campaigns of former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson and Pat Buchanan, who won the New Hampshire primary in 1996. He is also a veteran of grassroots organizing in the crucial early primary state and led the New Hampshire Advantage Coalition, a group promoting limited government.
“As former Senator Santorum continues to consider a run for president, I am pleased to have the opportunity to play a part in that process,” Biundo said in a statement. “The Senator’s fiscally responsible approach to government and vision for America’s future will play well here in New Hampshire.”
Biundo was originally hired to run Santorum’s New Hampshire operation and is now national campaign manager and it is a national campaign. Santorum is already running this new TV ad in New Hampshire:
That’s a pretty strong signal that, while Santorum is now in the midst of an all-out final push here in the Hawkeye State, his campaign hasn’t neglected the rest of the country.
As I mentioned Friday, the plan is that if Santorum does well here — as he clearly expects to do now — his Iowa field director Jake Braunger will hopscotch ahead to South Carolina with two-and-a-half weeks to work on the “ground game” there before that state’s Jan. 21 primary. Given the possibility that Rick Perry is supposed to be the candidate to beat in South Carolina, and Perry may suffer a humiliating fifth-place finish in Iowa (and may not even try to compete in New Hampshire), there is a chance that Santorum could come into South Carolina with a wave of momentum, looking like the most viable conservative alternative to Romney.
We talked about this Saturday on Granite Grok’s “Grok Talk” podcast with Skip Murphy and Mike Rogers, and I’d urge you to listen to that because one of the things we talked about was the danger of looking too far ahead in the campaign, trying to base decisions on hypothetical suppositions about what will happen two weeks or two months in the future. Too many people, I suggested to Skip and Mike, began their 2012 calculations by asking, “Who can win?” And they ruled out the potential of a candidate like Rick Santorum (or Ron Paul, for that matter) to have an impact on the results.
We are now about 48 hours away from Tuesday’s caucuses, and I hesitate to predict what’s going to happen Wednesday until I know what happens Tuesday. But those who have pre-emptively dismissed Santorum as a possible contender for the final “Not Mitt Romney” role in this campaign may need to re-examine their calculations. And the sooner, the better.
