Mott's Blog

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...

If you ever fired an M-16 you can see that Governor Palin seems to know what shes doing by the picture alone. See her leading arm flexed and tight pulling the weapon into her shoulder and her right arm relaxed on the trigger. This is not just a poise for the photographers, the woman knows how to shoot. Her history verifies this. Governor Palin's authenicity on this and other issues is the mark of someone who has had a real life outside of politics. Senator McCain similarly has had an heroic life before politics. Our forefathers envisioned that our political leaders would be citizens first and politicians second. James Madison assumed that Representatives would be "called for the most part from pursuits of a private nature and continued in appointment for a short period of office." David Walker, Comptroller General (head of GAO), observed correctly in a speech in 2006: ...the founders didn't believe in full-time politicians. After all, our first elected ...

Many politicians have so latched on to the alleged human cause of climate change that a crisis is looming when the data goes the other way. Evidence is now clear that we are experiencing global cooling . Unless the environmental movement and renewable energy business refocus the rationale for their policy arguments, a crisis is looming on the horizon. AccuWeather's Expert Senior Forecaster Joe Bastardi has stated: "People are concerned that 50 years from now, it will be warm beyond a point of no return. My concern is almost opposite, that it's cold and getting colder." “… as North America emerged from its coldest and snowiest winter for decades, the US National Climate Data Center, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a statement that snow cover in January on the Eurasian land mass had been the most extensive ever recorded, and that in the US March had been only the 63rd warmest since records began in 1895.” Christopher Booker, ...

The pattern is now getting pretty clear. Democrats nominate a liberal candidate who tries to obscure his tendencies and , for a while, he is successful as long as he is perceived as none of the above. Bill Clinton was a master of obscuring his liberal credentials and displaying a “third way.” Barrack Hussein Obama, who reads a mean teleprompter speech, lacks this finesse. Voters in the Great American Middle, now the largest group, have been slow to warm up to Obama, despite the press hype and the unprecedented campaign war chest. His strongest support - among young voters - is eroding from loss of enthusiasm as he runs to the middle and reverses himself on many issues, showing to the idealistic that he is indeed what Rev. Wright, his ex-mentor, said, simply “a politician.” Obama ran best as an unknown commodity that could be a vague template for anyone upset about something that wanted “change.” The more familiar he becomes, the more restricted his audience is. Polling data now show a...

The now famous quote by Barrack Hussein Obama that Americans could save more oil by properly inflating their tires than we can get offshore has emerged as a real campaign issue. "There are things that you can do individually though to save energy," Sen. Barrack Obama, D-Illinois, said. "Making sure your tires are properly inflated, simple thing, but we could save all the oil that they're talking about getting off drilling, if everybody was just inflating their tires and getting regular tune-ups. You could actually save just as much." LINK "The Department of Energy’s designated economist on this issue indicated that, of the 130 billion gallons of fuel that the Transportation Research Board (TRB)2 estimated were used in passenger cars and light trucks in 2005, about 1.2 billion gallons were wasted as a result of driving on underinflated tires." GAO, "Underinflated Tires in the United States" February 2007, p. 2. Thus, the DOE uses a savings fig...