Romney's Biggest Mistake

By 10 pm on November 6, 2012 it was becoming painfully obvious to conservatives that the election was, for all intents and purposes, over and Barack Obama would be serving a second term as President of the United States.  Everyone playing Monday morning quarterback will tell you that Mitt Romney made mistakes.  What these mistakes were is already a heated topic of discussion by people on both sides of the aisle.  Some will say Mitt went too soft, while others will say he just could not make that connection with the lower and middle classes.  As all the election data comes together, it is obvious that Mitt Romney did make one huge mistake that far overshadows any other.  That mistake was believing in the American people.

Mitt Romney believed the American people were smart.  He honestly believed that the American people were smart enough to realize that a president that has had his way for four years was still somehow campaigning on what he would do if given the chance.  He believed that the American people were smart enough to realize that the slight upticks in the economy were not because of Obama's regulations and fiscal policies but in spite of them.  He didn’t feel that he had to present this to the American people in a harsh, mud slinging, negative way.  Instead his approach was based more on presenting a better alternative, a better America.  He did this in a no-nonsense and yet never condescending way.  Polls consistently show that people overwhelmingly disdain negative attack ads when asked face to face.  Romney took them at their word, and unfortunately the actual results of many a political race have proved negative ads have quite a different effect when a person is behind the voting curtain.  This race was no different.

Romney also believed that the American people, as a whole, are not satisfied being subsidized by the government.  He believed that 16 million more people on food stamps is a horrible statistic that should outrage Americans.  He never believed in stripping away the helping hand but instead instituting a plan where people would get themselves back to work.  He believed that Americans would jump at the opportunity to have a life where the sky is the limit, not one where you are capped by a welfare check.  A nation where people are constantly striving to improve their lot in life so that next year has the possibility of being better than the last, not because the government gives you a slightly larger handout, but because the government no longer impedes or punishes your success.

Mitt Romney truly believed in the American people.  Today it is obvious he was mistaken.

Calvin Parker
@murph_clp on Twitter

Matt Damon's For Redistribution- Who'da Thunk It?

After all, Matt Damon is an admitted student of the works of Howard Zinn, who was outed after his death as a lifelong Communist. So should we really be surprised when Damon says that the rich need to be taxed more heavily for federal programs to remain afloat? It's about as shocking as the revelation that Oliver Stone believes in conspiracy theories.

I'll admit, though, Damon's pretty damn likeable. He clearly cares about children and the little guy,and believes in redistribution for the right reasons. But socialism has not repeatedly failed and been responsible for over 120 million deaths in the last century because its followers were bad guys. It has repeatedly failed and been responsible for over 120 million deaths in the last century because good men were misguided enough to hand over their liberty to a government that they believed to be benevolent. And Matt's just that misguided.

There is too much simply wrong in his controlled tirade to nitpick it all, from his ignorance of former tax legislation to his ignorance of how businesses reinvest profits and spur job growth. So just watch and shake your head at a nice guy looking very, very stupid.

William Sullivan


Matt Damon on debt limit: 'I'm so disgusted,' 'it's criminal' the wealthy are not paying more from Nicholas Ballasy on Vimeo.

Inconvenient Logic...

Who's the Maximalist Here, Jay?

Last week, when asked if the president would embrace Senator McConnell’s invitation to Capitol Hill to discuss the budget impasse, White House spokesman Jay Carney was direct in giving his opinion of the Senator’s offer. “What the Senator invited the President to do was to hear Senate Republicans restate their maximalist position. We know what that position is. And he also invited him to hear… what would not pass. That's not a conversation worth having. What we need to have is a conversation about what will pass. ”

His use of the word “maximalist” immediately creates a glaring “pot and kettle” moment for the White House spokesman. Three more times during this interview, Carney applied the term “maximalist” to describe Republican opposition to the president. The suggestion of this redundant reminder, of course, is that while the president is willing to make concessions and compromise, Republicans are bullheadedly “drawing lines in the sand.” Yet what is our gracious president actually offering his opposition? He demands that Republicans defy their constituents and be willing to embrace tax hikes and trillions of dollars in new debt over the coming decade- and if they do not, he won’t even talk to them. He’ll just plug his ears, and run off to Pennsylvania to attend a fundraiser like he did last week.

It's hard to think of a more "maximalist" position than that. So the implication that the president’s position is conducive to compromise while Republicans are just stubborn as mules must be the result of a deceptive political campaign to vilify opposition.

And as we’ve come to expect of the Obama administration, that’s exactly what it is.

William Sullivan

As The World Burns...

The Middle East is in a state of unprecedented upheaval that could plunge the world into war. Europe is in chaos due to vast budget shortfalls. Oil prices are poised to breach the ceiling previously known. The dollar is primed for collapse, and several currencies are being touted as a possible new trading standard.

Meanwhile, in America, public sector unions are fighting for their life to retain the influence they hold in deciding how public money will be spent. And their supporters are pulling out all the stops. Pro-union lawmakers are going AWOL and shirking the civic responsibility they have sworn to uphold. Our pro-union president is seeking to apply his federal influence in the fray, though he has no Constitutional right to do so. And pro-union lawmakers call for blood in the streets to get what they want.

But aside from unscrupulous union supporters, what is being done in Wisconsin is exactly how our government was meant to work. The state's budget shortfall has been directly linked to the collective bargaining rights of the unions in that state: strong-arming unions manipulated politicians to promise more in deferred benefits than it is possible to pay now that the bill is due. To reconcile this, officials have been elected by the people to plug the fiscal hole that the unions have created. To do this, Governor Walker of Wisconsin has suggested that public servants begin contributing 5.8% to their own pension funds, and that they pay for 12% of their healthcare premiums. Oh yeah, and the unions have to give up the collective bargaining rights that led to this mess in the first place.

This is all to be voted upon by elected officials, and it is constitutionally sound. Consider this to be our republic's way of giving shareholders, i.e., taxpayers, a say in how the business they have invested in is run.

Democrats are crying foul in this instance because Republican leaning police and firefighters in Wisconsin were not asked to make any such adjustments. It is as if they believe that unions and the entire public sector of Wisconsin should all be subject to equal accountability for the collective public pension problems, regardless of which segment caused the problems or which segments have performed better than others. (Need more proof that Democrats today are socialists?) But the fact is, it is entirely possible that the state funded teachers' pension is collapsing while that may not be the case for firefighters and cops who rely on city or county pensions.

The municipal troubles in our nation are incredibly different everywhere you look, so the problems in Wisconsin do not necessarily translate to problems in California, while problems in California don't necessarily translate to problems in Texas. And beyond that, Texas' problems don't necessarily translate to Dallas or Houston's problems. And even further beyond that, Houston firefighters' problems don't necessarily translate to Houston police officers' problems.

The issue certainly isn't black and white. So we need to be reasonable, and allow each city and state to take their own approach to handle the problems with public sector pay and benefits based on the type and severity of each problem. However, we also need to be steadfast in addressing these problems, because is clear that most municipalities, if not all, do have problems that endanger taxpayers.

If there is one universal flaw in public compensation, it is the very notion of the defined benefit. There can be no question that defined benefits cannot exist with birth rates and life expentancies as they are* without perpetually increasing tax liabilty. In my opinion, they must be amended across the board in favor of defined contribution plans. How quickly that transition must take place will depend upon the solvency, or lack thereof, of each municipality.

But we who would seek to amend troubled defined benefit programs are not calling for blood in the streets like the pro-union Democratic legislators that are so quick to decry the "hate speech" on talk radio while implicitly suggesting pure violence in the name of their cause. As much as we in the private sector would like to end public sector unions' noxious existence, we instead choose to elect politicians that would fulfill our wishes constitutionally, and right each ship, respectively.

And Walker is just doing what he was elected by the people to do; right the fiscal ship of Wisconsin. Of course, given that there are idiots among the protesting teachers holding signs that say "Egypt supports Wisconsin workers," maybe the proper action for Walker should be to just fire them all and hire from among the millions of unemployed to take their place. If teachers there think that protesting against a ~5% contribution to the retirement fund they will eventually collect is anything like revolting against a Middle Eastern Islamic dictatorship, the replacements could not possibly be any dumber than the teachers they already employ.

William Sullivan

* William G. Shipman, a leading global expert regarding Social Security, is one of many voices heralding the unsustainable nature of defined benefit plans, and is currently working with legislators to reform Social Security for the private sector. You will find incredible evidence of the flawed nature of defined benefits in today's world here.

TIME Magazine Fails Again

It seems that TIME magazine does everything it can to capitalize on trending popularity, truth be damned. And thanks to a rising tide of conservatism in this country and the fact that the magazine is pot-committed to the Obama administration, they’ve stooped to a new low with their latest cover, “Why Obama [Heart] Reagan,” which shows smiling images of each president enjoying a friendly embrace.

Obviously, this is meant to capture the attention of young liberals that love Barack Obama, and validate their suspicions that he desperately seeks bi-partisanship with Republicans. Perhaps TIME expects that young liberals will buy just about anything if it’s said in the right tenor and from the right pulpit, and given the fact that a relatively unknown community organizer and junior senator became president on the wave of popularity among this group, I can’t say I blame them. But as far as older liberals and all conservatives, it’s amazing that TIME could have thought they could get this one by the goalie. It is nothing less than an insult to our intelligence, so inarguably untrue that it could only be the result of deliberate fabrication or the innocent result of the TIME editors' stupidity.

Any sane person could go on for hours about the differences between the two. Obama is a proponent of expansive and powerful government, while Reagan viewed such a government as the most dangerous threat to American liberty, and particularly when it comes to the healthcare industry that Obama just consigned to federal administration. Reagan believed America had a responsibility to foster the notion of individual freedoms and limited government by globally exercising "leadership through strength," whereas Barack Obama believes that he should bow to foreign diplomats and apologize for America’s arrogance by quietly homogenizing our position with the rest of the globe.

The two could not be any more different, and even if Obama did "learn" something from Reagan as this cover implies, there is not one shred of evidence that he implemented any of it. If TIME really wanted to correlate Obama with a figure of the late twentieth century, and if the magazine had an ounce of integrity, that cover would have read, “Why Obama [Heart] Carter.” It would be far more believable, and Americans would not have to look past the crisis in Egypt to see the parallel. Both have vocally demonized American-friendly regimes as “enemies of the people,” and both have effectively opened the door to allow fundamental Islamic theocracies to take power in opposition to Western freedoms and Israel.

William Sullivan

Amnesty and the Social Security Paradox

Republican governor Charlie Crist, who is running for a Florida Senate seat as an independent after trailing badly in the primary to candidate Marco Rubio, has argued that Social Security and immigration reform go hand in hand, and that the support of immigration reform is a useful step in assuring the solvency of Social Security funding. He uses this argument to campaign for a much shorter path to citizenship for illegal aliens.

The broad idea behind this strategy is that while immigration reform is a heated conflict where two sides of an ideological debate clash, the preservation of Social Security is an endeavor that will likely find backing in the prized body of independent voters. He appears to believe that saving Social Security is a cause that a great number of Americans can rally behind.

There are two problems with this strategy.

First, Americans are sick of hearing that the answer to their prayers is comprehensive federal overhaul, and the legislation of amnesty for illegal aliens would be exactly that. Beyond this, there is a growing anxiety about the taxpayer liability represented by illegal aliens, as millions of them take advantage of healthcare, education, and welfare programs that they are not entitled to exploit as non-citizens.

Second, many Americans are not exactly enamored with Social Security in general. Particularly, younger Americans view it as a complex and obscure investment, and few of them believe that they will reap the benefits of their investment.

Crist’s is among latest suggestions to offer fast tracks to citizenship or amnesty to illegal aliens, which would require them to contribute more into Social Security and thereby help to rectify the universally recognized fiscal shortfall of the Social Security Trust Funds.

On the surface, this seems like a rational hypothesis. If more money goes into the Social Security piggybank, it would seem that there will be more money to spend on the benefits of the program. But this logic is tragically flawed. By legalizing these aliens we would be increasing the burden upon the system by drastically increasing the number of those receiving Social Security benefits. Providing unjustified payment to millions of new recipients that have paid a pittance into the system is not only logistically destructive, but it is also ethically unjust to those who spent their entire lives funding the system.

Beyond this, it is also obvious that the massive influx of low-income wage earners would drain Social Security rather than increase its solvency, because they will inevitably receive far more in benefits than they would contribute to the system.

Amnesty for illegal aliens will certainly not stabilize Social Security, despite the liberal agenda telling us that it will. They appear to be desperately seeking the means to protect Social Security funding, but paradoxically, it is the policymaking of the left that provides the greatest obstacle to the application of more useful solutions.

If immigration law were more tightly enforced, for example, employers would likely offer increased wages for unskilled American laborers. Higher wages and more American workers would yield increased contributions. As another example, if extended entitlement programs like welfare were limited rather than expanded, more Americans would be encouraged to join the workforce, thereby increasing American employment and increasing contributions.

The most significant boon for Social Security would be for Americans to increase fertility rates to assure replacement levels to sustain the system. But even that possibility is stifled by liberal sensibilities. For decades, a European-style agenda has caused a decline in fertility rates that has assured that Social Security cannot support itself, the result of incessant campaigns about detriment to the planet’s resources or carbon footprints. All the while, Democrats in America strive to provide unlimited contraception, and some even advocate federally funded abortions as means to keep our population from growing.

Honestly, it seems apparent that it is the liberal agenda that is both the creator and destroyer of Social Security.

Of course, none of this will be addressed once Congress finds the “appetite” to tackle immigration reform. But I can assure you that we will see the left spewing variations of Crist’s argument that amnesty could provide a boost to Social Security funding. They will suggest in broad tones that it makes sense fiscally, and supporters will be assured of this belief over and over by Barack Obama’s soothing tenor. And educated by nothing beyond the left’s propaganda, legions of zealots will argue the soundness of the idea, and chant their mundane mantra about opposition to amnesty being choreographed by racists.

The argument tying Social Security and immigration reform has taken definite shape, and I would wager it will become common rhetoric for Democrats in their march to legislate amnesty for illegal immigrants. After all, what better way to make a push for amnesty than to argue that we could save Social Security for all Americans by levying a mandatory tax upon the fifteen to twenty million illegal aliens that are working in this country? That way, a massive federal program like Social Security could appear sustainable and illegal aliens could be granted amnesty and a legitimate vote in future elections.

Talk about two birds for the Democratic Party.

William Sullivan

To Democrats, dissent is no longer patriotism

America witnessed a tremor in the political landscape in 2009. We know it as the Tea Party movement, a grassroots response to resist massive federal expansion.

As federal oversight in the banking, insurance, auto, energy, and healthcare industries have all been flagship issues for this administration and its supporters, it comes as no surprise that the Tea Party movement has encountered fierce resistance. Since its inception one year ago, "tea partiers" have been razed by the news media. Liberal pundits across the networks ignored the substance and reasoning for the widespread protests, and rather made sophomoric jokes about “tea-bagging.” They made accusations of political lobbies "astroturfing," and stoked racial sensitivity by perpetuating a lack of minority participation to discredit the movement as a "whites-only" club. (1)

Even elected representatives showed contempt for the apparent disapproval of these constituents. Nancy Pelosi also called the movement “astroturf,” and reduced the protest attendees to little more than Neo-Nazi racists. (2)

With many loyal media outlets by their side, Democrats just plugged their ears, kept chanting their mantra, and hoped their negative slights against the tea partiers would drown out the loud voices of dissent. They could not have been more wrong.

In fact, the attacks may have helped the Tea Party's cause. Perhaps people noticed the movement more because, deep down, Americans knew that there was something incongruous about the Democrats’ blistering attacks upon the tea partiers. After all, the liberal establishment had spent the latter half of the Bush years peddling the slogan, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Then, in the very moment that this administration encountered opposition to its own proposed policy, dissent had lost its “patriotism” and had become the destructive plot of racists, insurance lobbyists, and ordinary people that are just too stupid to know what’s good for them.

Also ironic is that when prominent liberal Democrats like John Kerry and Ted Kennedy found themselves quoting this maxim with regularity, it was falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson with equal regularity. (3) They apparently felt that if the phrase could invoke the spirit of the founding fathers, it would legitimize their resistance to the Iraq War.

But the thing is, if the Democrats truly believed that the ideals of the founding fathers are the litmus test for legitimate dissent, they could not find the tea partiers’ cause more reasonable. Their argument today is remarkably similar to that of the American colonials in 1776. Largely comprised of taxpayers, today's tea partiers feel that they are facing the inevitable prospect of increased tax burdens, and that they lack the representation to avoid such intolerable mandates. But rather than seeing their dissent as patriotism, Democrats feel that the the Tea Party movement should be the subject of ridicule and scorn.

It seems that Democrats want to selectively choose when citizens should adhere to the doctrine of patriotic objection, and are willing to reshape the terms when convenient. One can’t help but draw a parallel to Orwell’s iconic interpretation of elitism and tyranny. In Animal Farm, we see a ruling party amend the principle “All animals are equal” to become “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” (4) It seems that upon encountering the inconvenient objections of the Tea Party, this Democratic administration also felt the need to amend its ideology, and “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism” has become “Objecting to George W. Bush was the highest form of patriotism, but in 2010, we should all just agree with hope and change."

William Sullivan

(1) http://www.businessandmedia.org/articles/2010/20100216095241.aspx

(2)http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2009/08/05/pelosi_town_hall_protesters_are_carrying_swastikas.html
(3)http://volokh.com/posts/1146554363.shtml
(4)http://www.george-orwell.org/Animal_Farm/index.html