Via Newsbusters : MSNBC’s Martin Bashir on Monday wondered if Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum support ” a return to the days of slavery ” after the two GOP hopefuls signed a pledge on upholding traditional marriage. . . . Bashir covered the language in a “marriage vow” put together by the Family Leader, a conservative social group in Iowa. In their pledge, the organization suggested, “a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.” Now, regardless of the historical inaccuracies in the pledge (most slave families weren’t allowed to stay together), it’s disingenuous to suggest Bachmann and Santorum would sit down and sign a pledge advocating for slavery to return. Additionally, although the pledge was clearly poorly worded, it didn’t advocate bringing back the institution (or anything close to that). Keep reading…
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MSNBC’s Martin Bashir On Bachmann: Does She Support A “Return To The Days Of Slavery?”…
Say anything you want about Mitt Romney, but at least he isn’t flip flopping this time around. Instead of disavowing his support for Romneycare, he fully embraced the monstrosity, albeit on a state level. Now, amidst the growing disquiet over the outrageous ethanol subsidies, and following Tim Pawlenty’s mea culpa on the issue, Mitt Romney is doubling down on his support for this odious subsidy. Jonathan Weisman of the Wall Street Journal reports : It was an odd setting for a policy pronouncement, but on the sidewalk outside the Historical Building here, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney embraced ethanol subsidies. It came just days after and blocks from where his rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Tim Pawlenty , said the subsidies should be phased out. “I support the subsidy of ethanol,” he told an Iowa voter. “I believe ethanol is an important part of our energy solution for this country.” Iowa leads the nation in the production of corn, a main source of ethanol. Iowa is certainly the leader in fleecing the rest of the nation with their corn welfare. Romney definitely gets points for honesty and for his cognizance of the political climate in Iowa. However, he would be better suited to take his corn show on the road and embark on challenging Barack Obama for the Democrat nomination. That way, his political calculations would coincide with the policies that he is seeking to represent. Ethanol subsidies are an anathema to every principle that conservatives embrace. These bailouts for the rich are price-hiking market-distorting government interventions that benefit few at the expense of everyone else. At a time when we are trying to offer the public an intellectual and moral distinction between the pro-jobs pro-consumer nature of the free market versus the regressive and insidious policies of bailouts and corporate cronyism, Mitt Romney is muddling the battlefield with pale pastels. At a time when some of those very subsidies are fueling high energy and food prices and are impelling trickle-down unemployment, Romney wants to preclude one of our most effective lines of attack against Obama. The ethanol industry is unique in that it is insulated from the free market by government imposed subsidies, mandates, and tariffs. The mandates are killing our cars and the tariffs are blocking the use of more efficient sugar-based ethanol from Brazil. Mitt Romney might want to divulge to the public if he is in favor of the mandates and tariffs as well. After all, the same demographic in Iowa that would support the subsidies, would support the other two sacred stools of ethanol. It would be interesting to hear how the Republican “frontrunner” squares his conservatism with a policy that is an utter imprecation to everything conservatives have fought for. And last time I checked, the ethanol policies were promulgated primarily from the federal government. You can’t use the federalism argument to ameliorate every liberal policy, can you?
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Mitt Romney Still Loves His Ethanol, Especially in Iowa
And Obama’s inching closer at breakneck speed to his goal of completely destroying the US economy. (CNSNews.com) — The national debt has passed another historical milestone, topping $14.3 trillion for the first time ever, according to data released by the U.S. Treasury late Monday afternoon. When the Treasury opened for business on Friday, April 15, according to the Treasury’s Bureau of the Public Debt, the national debt stood at $14.27 trillion ($14,270,792,119,184.89). By the close of business Friday, the debt had climbed to $14.31 trillion ($14,305,336,580,992.11), an increase of $34.54 billion ($34,544,461,807.22). Friday’s $34.54-billion jump in the national debt almost equaled the $38.5 billion the Republican House leadership said would be cut from spending for the remainder of this fiscal year by the continuing resolution that the Congress passed on Thursday and President Obama signed Friday. The federal government is now perilously close to hitting its legal limit on debt. At the close of business Friday, according to the Daily Treasury Statement published Monday afternoon, the Treasury only had legal authority to borrow another $40.821 billion. (The legal limit on the debt that Congress and President Barack Obama set last February is actually a bit lower — at $14.2940 trillion — than the total federal debt of $14.3053 trillion that the Treasury reported for the close of business Friday. The total debt reported by the Treasury can exceed the current legal debt limit of $14.2940 trillion because a small portion of the total federal debt is exempted from the limit. As of the close of business Friday, the portion of the debt that is subject to the legal limit had reached $14.253179 trillion.)
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Shattering Records Right & Left: National Debt Tops $14.3 Trillion
Gallup mentions the most obvious point – the President has slipped from his historical approval rating among African-Americans (usually around 92%) all the way down to 85%* – but it kind of obscures a detail on the graph with regard to Hispanic voters. They acknowledge that the President is currently at a low with 54% of those voters, but Gallup does not point out that Obama’s approval rating dropped by double digits with those voters over a year ago and hasn’t really come back since. For that matter, the real story from that graph is that the President has a 39% approval rating among whites; his approval rating among those voters at the beginning of his term was somewhere just above 60%. Andrew Malcolm is right to couch all of this in terms of it merely being worrisome for the President; after all, it’s early days yet. But he’s also right that Obama should be worrying about this, given that hyper-enthusiasm is precisely what his campaign needs if they seriously plan to raise a billion dollars for the 2012 campaign. In fact, i think that the billion-dollar number is going to end up being a bit of an albatross for the President: it will require a constant, probably grueling, emphasis on fundraising in order to work, and it has already forced the President to formally re-enter the electoral arena months early. In other words, the President may have been better off if he had decided not to try to beat his high score. One last detail: the Gallup poll shows Obama’s approval among 18-29 year old voters to be 54%. In April of 2009 that number was 74% . This is not incompatible with the categories mentioned earlier (96% for African-Americans; 85% for Hispanics; 57% for whites), but it still represents a significant erosion of support among a key demographic for the President. One that is currently expected to be fueling most of the enthusiasm for Obama’s 2012 campaign, in fact; so it seems unusual that Gallup didn’t mention it at all … Moe Lane ( crosspost ) *Is that meaningful? Yes and no: high African-American turnout was a key factor in flipping several Red states in 2008, but there are plenty of viable Democratic re-election strategies that don’t rely on Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida in order to work. On the other hand, the Midwest isn’t looking very friendly to Obama these days, either.
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Gallup: Obama slips with African-Americans, Hispanics…
John , I hate to be so disagreeable that I disagree even about the nub of our disagreement but here’s what I see as the central question: Did the people who wrote and more importantly ratified the Constitution intend to confer upon the president the power to launch wars and initiate major non-defensive military action without congressional approval? My argument throughout this debate has been that they did not and that the evidence to the contrary is so thin that people who support lots of wars — Max Boot, for example — are forced to inflate various skirmishes to make it appear as though their views on presidential war-making have been the historical norm. That said, the Rivkin/Casey op-ed does at least attempt to make an originalist argument.
