Mott's Blog

Why are the Democrats trying to pass a healthcare bill that meets none of the announced objectives of the White House,  that is opposed by an angry majority of likely voters, that will likely cost them control of the House and maybe even the Senate, and that the country manifestly cannot afford? One is reminded of Dr. Johnson's famous statement about dogs who walk on their hind legs: "One wonders not so much how they do it as why their bother?" Of course, Democrats bother with this leftist drivel because they have convinced themselves that this is the only moment in years where it may be possible. They selectively look at the polls, normally the ones that are of "adults" and heavily tilted toward Democratic Party weighting (using data now quite obsolete and meaningless). Democratic Members of Congress who are in tough districts and states, no doubt, are more nervous. Maybe their aides are telling them that there is time for voters to forget by November 2010. ...

The fraility of the anthropomorphic climate change theory is illustrated by the very exercise the East Anglia alarmists tried to pull off. Lacking any historical data that shows temperature changes have been caused by elevated greenhouse gas levels, the alarmists are struck with trying to make a weak hypothesis stick: that the warming trend in the last hundred years cannot be explained by other factors, so it must be greenhouse gases. This hypothesis is about as weak as it gets in science. We do not understand the climate variables well enough to reconstruct past climate changes, let alone explain what is happening now. Several cyclic trends in climate occur with reularity over geological time. These are also affected in major ways by solar cycles, including the notoriously weak solar cycle 24 that we are now experiencing. Various "feed backs" among the many factors involved confound simple linear models. Lacking any direct evidence that greenhouse gas levels cause any cl...

The biggest question for those of us who have been vocal skeptics of the UN process and recommendations is why did it take so many years for anyone in the "legacy press" to pick up on how things worked? We have seen for years that the governments and foundations that control the research have deliberately sought out alarmist research. For example, glacier studies are typically done on the glaciers that are retreating and not the ones that are advancing (about equal in number); studies on the seasonal ice areas on the poles, ignoring the increased net ice mass in Antarctica for example. There has been a massive thumb on the scales in the academic world that has preordained what the outcome of research was supposed to be. "Researchers pound the global-warming drum because they know there is politics and, therefore, money behind it. . . I've been critical of global warming and am persona non grata," Dr. William Gray , Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado S...

Those of us that went through universities can easily remember the wild-eyed radicals that we encountered. They believed in Marx more than the Soviet Politibureau did. If they weren't Marxists, they were often completely irrational anarchists or black nationalists. I spent many an afternoon at the University of Iowa "Soap Box Sound-off" arguing with them. These goofballs seemed real on campus, but as we grew up and went on to other things in life, their crackpot pronouncements seemed more and more remote from our lives and the reality that we lived in. Barrack Obama never left those days. His autobiography opens describes his infatuation with leftist radicalism. His "community organizing" days were simply the campus radical let loose on the guilible folks willing to blame everyone else for their problems. His rise to big city politics was steeped in the university and black nationalist communities. He sought out Rev. Wright where he, his wife and young children...

The classic military blunder often revolves around underestimating the enemy's strength and then refusing to adjust the plan, committing troops and assets to a losing proposition. It always starts with a commander convincing himself that the battle is too important to avoid and that fighting another day in better circumstances is somehow not possible. Think about Martin Sheen's portrayal of Robert E. Lee in Gettysburg (1993) as Longstreet (Tom Berringer) tries to convince him to forgo the frontal assault. Graphic: Hougoumont portion of Battle of Waterloo. S ource: timegun.org Just about everyone, including me, predicted that Obama's reaction to the growing resistance to Democrats' health care legislation would be to try to tough it out. This appears to be happening, perhaps even more stridently than expected. As Victor Davis Hanson notes: "Because of his inexperience and unfamiliarity with political hostility, I think Obama will press ahead on the present ...

If Republicans stick to the principles of Reagan and add the intensity of the Tea Party movement and town hall crusaders, the 2010 election will be another 1994. I predicted this a little while back, relying on the increasingly clear exposure of the Obama post-partisan campaign message as the Big Lie. Polls now show even more shifts in the public seeing Obama as a committed liberal, tax-and-spend big government advocate. Morevoer, it is also more clear that he and his Deocrat leftist colleagues on the Hill have little patience for debate, discussion or facts in pursuit of their quest for bigger and more intrusive government. Pundits that said the Reagan message was outdarted, just five or six months ago, hould be hiding under their desks or writing mea cupas en masse. Besides movement on the generic ballot, something like twenty percent in six months, polls now show voters in all groups believe that Obama will not keep his pledge to avoid new taxes on the middle class. Voters also pr...

The majority of almost every demographic now oppose the main tenets of the amorphous Obama health care debacle . While it would be expected that those with jobs and those with insurance would be less than enamored with plans to increase their costs and reduce their coverage, opposition has now extended to senior citizens, who decisively oppose the plans. From Carol's Closet: read her Tampa report! The crowds in and recently outside Congressional town hall meetings, reflect a broad consensus among the public, especially the likely voting public, that the Obama grand scheme is a mistake or far worse.Like the polls, Congressional mail is running five or ten to one against the proposals. It is no surprise that angry constituents, especially those of members of Congress that run on fiscal responsiblity, feel angry and betrayed. The classic bait-and-switch" has to be Barrack Obama's campaign promise of "returning to fiscal responsibility." The atmospherics of this dup...

As the new RNC ad " The Experiment " notes, in just 200 days Obama has dropped to earth from the clouds, losing his halo and his wings. The state legislator (yes, it was just four years ago) propelled into the limelight by his gift for using a teleprompter and a well-conceived, albeit ambigous message, has run aground. Absolutely nothing in his man's background should have trigger any other expectation. Photo from LewWaters Having never orchestrated a single major piece of legislation in the state capitol or in Washington, why would anyone be prized at his ineptitude in handling cap-and-trade and healthcare? Why would anyone be surprised that Obama lies and misrepresents about the healthcare bill, when he cannot even tell a straight story about his personal history ? It is increasingly obvious that this guy is in "way over his head." Maybe the best test of his character and ability will be how he handles the specter of defeat. Bill Clinton, a truly masterful p...

From the Hot Air blog , a truly well-stated summary of "who we are" from Dr. Zero : "We don’t like having to fight desperate battles to save our freedom and future from socialist politicians every ten or twenty years. We don’t like having our time wasted with trillion-dollar statist fantasies, when our government is already trillions of dollars in the red. We’re tired of checking the papers each day, to see which group of us has been targeted as enemies of the State. We’re growing impatient waiting for the Democrats to come up with ideas that don’t require their supporters to hate someone. We’ve had our fill of “progressives” who act as if we’re living in 1909, and none of their diseased policies have ever been tried before. "We believe government should be punished for failing to live up to the expectations of its citizens, not the other way around. We don’t think people who destroy thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in market value should get a pass becaus...

It is a long way to November 2010. However, the trends lines are starting to get pretty well-defined. Here are some facts that should cheer up Republicans: 1. In mid-year elections, the White House incumbent party almost always loses seats in Congress; 2. Polling in elections where the candidates have been identified for 2009-2010 show Republicans leading in places that traditionally have been held by Democrats (New Jersey and Connecticut() or battlegrounds (Virginia); 3. The generic ballot (what party will you vote for in Congress) has shifted dramatically in favor of Republicans: Rasmussen reports 42% GOP to 39% Dem on July 28, 2009. This is a 3 point GOP lead and has shifted from a seven point GOP deficit in January 2009; 4. The generic ballot always has overstated the Democratic side in recent years. This may be the registered voters vs. likely voters effect, but it should scare Democrats. In 1994, when the GOP retook Congress in a dramatic election landslide, the generic ballo...

Inexplicably the media and the GOP in the 2008 election eventually gave Barrack Obama a pass on his personal history of association with radicals, including race-baiter Reverend Wright . The GOP candidate urged Republicans not to run the videos and use the quotes. All of this despite that fact that this racist Wright character was Obama's minister for 20 years, married the Obamas, that Michelle stated she and the daughters never missed a Sunday service, and that Obama wrote in his book that he took tapes of Wright's sermons to college to study them. Obama even described Wright as his "spiritual advisor" and had him on the campaign in an official capacity before someone figured out who he was. Now after his apparently premeditated support for Professor Henry Lewis Gates, President Obama has opened up the issue again in my opinion. All of the evidence now slowly emerging indicates that Professor Gates was an arrogant jerk who himself made racist remarks about t...

As I have noted here in several posts over the past two years, Americans are fundamentally conservative, especially the likely voters. Liberalism - except for a few urban pockets - is largely in hiding. Obama hid his agenda in talk of a new era of non-partisanship. Sotomayer hid her judicial liberalism by parroting all the things that conservatives wanted to hear. Liberals are no longer safe to walk the streets as liberals, but often use a code word - "progressive." The economic crisis has been, in the White House's words, "too good a crisis to waste." Rather than try to sell their liberal policies on their merits, the Left has use every subterfuge it can grab. The "stimulus" was to save jobs, while it was designed to throw money at Democratic special interest groups, a classic "trickle-down" strategy that has never worked to create jobs. See Mott's Blog, " INCREASING GOVERNMENT SPENDING ON INFRASTRUCTURE WILL NOT FIX THE ECONOMY,...

Can the White House double the national debt in less than a year, while making meaningless comments about the need for fiscal discipline? Yes, we can............... Can we quadruple the annual federal budget deficit after criticizing the previous Administration for running a budget deficit? Yes, we can......... Can we increase the federal budget that goes just to pay the interest due on government indebtedness from a third of all revenue to half of all revenue? Yes, we can..... Can we do all of this with no clear plan for how this spending will help the economy? Yes, we can.... Can we use the coercive power of government to force spending on projects that benefit our special interest group friends, political cronies, relatives, and those that we promised to give handouts to in exchange for their votes? Yes, we can.... Can we claim that this massive increase in spending and borrowing will create a net number of jobs, despite all the studies that have shown this has never happened befo...

Merriam-Webster's Dictionary defined over-extended as " to extend or expand beyond a safe or reasonable point." The definition applies precisely and accurately to where Barrack Obama is now and the position into which he has financially put the country. Sustainability is ironically a favorite word of the President and many liberals, while the shelf life on their ascendancy to power seems to be starting to show an expire date. Very basic parts of the Obama Presidency are distinctly minority positions, i.e. massive deficit spending, higher taxes, governmnet-sponsored health care, more cash for corporate bail-outs and take-overs, and the apologetic and tepid foreign policy. This is no surprise to many folks, including me, who have noted that Americans are consistently more conservative than liberal and have not embraced any "new majority" for a Leftist agenda. Gallup reiterated this point this month with a new poll showing the same ideological split. See also Pe...

During the campaign some of us said that Obama was a con artist, pretending to be post-partisan, but a thoroughly doctrinaire Democratic liberal. A guy who never bucked his party on a single issue. Now it appears he has no stomach at all to stand up to Democrats in Congress who have rushed through giant pork barrel spending bills one after the other in the name of economic recovery (without ever, yet addressing problems in banking and housing, where the crisis started). We questioned his maturity and experience to be the leader of the free world. Remember when the President of France, Mr. Sarkozy,, suggested that Obama's position on Iran was too weak for the French to accept? Sarkozy described Obama's views as ‘utterly immature’ and comprised of ‘formulations empty of all content.’” Now the President of the United States stumbles on the protocol of a meeting with the Prime Miniser of the UK, looking like the state senator he was but a few years ago. Remember when Obama pro...

In the Wizard of Oz, the visit to the Emerald City found Dorothy, her dog Toto, and other companions before the Mighty, All-Powerful Oz. The uncooperative little dog pulled back the curtain from near the huge stage to reveal an elderly man running the mechanical controls to create the illusion of the intimidating Oz. Just days into office, the curtain seems to have been pulled on Barrack Obama. An unlikely candidate for President, with just 120 days in the US Senate as experience, thrust into an electoral lead by economic events caused by his own party (CRI and federal buy-ups of mortgage paper), Obama has made his first policy push to be the "stimulus package." This package largely came from Obama's party in Congress, eager to start public hand-outs to improve their own political fortunes with constituencies ready for more pork. To those that follow it, what was missing was a really detailed analysis of where stimulus might be effective in the short run and how much it ...

To my surprise, Republicans in the House found their voice....finally. They united with some Democrats who flipped to oppose the trillion dollar boondoggle bill. Last year, before the financial woes, pork barrel was a bad name....now it is the answer to all of our problems if you believe the Left. Uh...excuse me the "post-partisan progressives" as they now want to be called. The Heritage Foundation has an excellent article echoing my arguments of the futility of using public works spending to create jobs and economic growth. http://www.heritage.org/research/budget/bg2208.cfm It might be helpful to remember that Hoover's first response to the Great Depression was to enormously increase federal public works spending. FDR picked this up with a fervor and nothing worked to reverse the problems for more than a decade. Good arguments can be made that economic polices of that era lengthened the depression. Let's go to work creating new investment in long-term better paying...

Randy M. Mott To allay concerns that they are “tax and spend” liberals, for several years the American Left has referred to government spending on infrastructure or education as an “investment.” In a philosophical sense this is accurate, but it does not change the character or effects of such spending. The Obama Administration coming into office promising to create a massive number of new jobs by government spending programs. Historical data overwhelmingly supports the opposite conclusion, the net effect of government spending is neutral at best and more frequently negatively correlated to employment. While we can “hope” that this broad body of empirical research is wrong, that is unlikely to “change” the results for future spending plans. Another corollary to the liberal creed is that anything stimulating business investment is a “trickle-down” theory that does not work for the poor and middle class: a notion equally at odds with all empirical data. These twin myths remain part of...