True Mitt

It’s fascinating to hear the Republican spinmeisters minimize the prolonged presidential primary bloodletting by comparing it to the 2008 campaigns between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

To be certain, the Obama/Clinton battle was fierce into June. But what was also certain was that most of the followers of Clinton would eventually vote for Obama. More importantly, most of the Obama supporters would have supported Clinton had she won the primary.

I don’t think that comparison would apply to the current battle among the remaining four Republican presidential hopefuls.

Clearly the GOP is a bitterly divided nation. The religious conservatives are following the Santorum banner. The business and party establishment types are coalescing around Romney. Meanwhile, those who aspire to live in a future lunar colony are sticking with Gingrich.

And let’s not leave out Ron Paul. The way the votes have been tabulated during the Republican primary, we may yet discover he’s actually won all of the primaries and caucuses.

The bottom line for the GOP is that the fervent supporters of these candidates are far less likely to vote for an intra-party rival in the fall against President Obama.

President Obama is a strong leader

President Obama accomplished what his predeccesor failed to do. He got Bin Laden.

It wasn’t all that simple. President Obama sent in a Seal Team into the heart of Pakistan, our off again, on again ally. The team attacked Bin Laden’s compound which bordered a very important Pakistani military base.

There were so many ways that operation could have gone wrong. It didn’t.

That might have been the most courageous presidential decision in the history of the American republic.

There is a lot of coverage out there of the Republican presidential candidates criticisms of President Obama.

I just hope all of the voters realize how courageous President Obama was with his decision to attack Osama Bin Laden’s compound.

Confronting Iran is about winning the people

Or at least keeping them on the sidelines of any U.S. confrontation with their government.

The Straights of Hormuz has become a focal point for possible military intervention by the United States to keep open the flow of oil to the rest of the world. Iran has threatened to close that crucial avenue of world oil transport if further sanctions against them proceed.

The government of Iran would love an outside military threat to rally their people, rather than face the consequences of an economy ravaged by the sanctions of the West, anxious to thwart Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon.

Our best strategy is to keep the people of Iran whose population is young and identifies more with the West than previous generations, on our side.

The last thing we need is an attack on a U.S. Navy warship which provokes a massive retaliatory strike against Iran, killing innocent Iranian civilians.

A war with Iran would bring asymmetrical, multidimentional challenges to our war-fighting and anti-terrorism capabilities.

We should stand up to Iran but we need to do it smartly.

House GOP defiant vs. Obama plan to lower taxes

What? Wait a minute. Have I got this straight? The skeptics who’ve said that the GOP is literally against everything the president is for, won a convert in me.

The GOP brand is smaller government and lower taxes. But the House Republicans, on Tuesday, were willing to raise income taxes on 161 million Americans on January 1st because it was President Obama’s idea.

So much for the brand. The Republican zealots in the U.S. House of Representatives, who were willing to lay down on train tracks in front of an oncoming freight train rather than raise taxes on billionaires and oil companies, have just lost the election of 2012.

They are toast because of this fiasco. They were willing to throw 161 million Americans under the bus rather than agree with President Obama on one of their core principles. The House GOP was willing to further cripple the economic recovery by taking an extra $1000 in taxes away from most American families.

In 2010, voters thought they were electing conservatives. Instead, they got crazies.

FBI should head homeland security function

The Department of Homeland Security appears to be an unnecessary and expensive bureaucratic speed bump when it comes to our national security.

The FBI should be responsible for this function.

Certainly there are times when the U.S. Secret Service should be in charge of security events and the Department of Defense should be in charge of defense related emergencies but there is a real concern that we’ve overreacted as a country in terms of budget and oversight of our national security.

U.S. Approach to China Makes No Sense

President Obama is fresh from the Asia Pacific Economic Conference. There, he made a number of very public pledges to increase the U.S. military presence there. I don’t know how he plans to pay for that, especially in light of the fact that the Congressional “Super Committee” failed to reach any agreement on budget reductions. That failure is to trigger huge cuts in government spending (in 2013).

The Defense Department is targeted for huge cuts under the “sequestration” default budget.

Sending Secretary Clinton to Myanmar and promising to station 2500 U.S. Marines in the Crocodile Dundee section of Australia are mere annoyances to the Chinese.

The only real U.S. threat to Chinese hegemony to the Asia Pacific region is a well coordinated government compromise to deficit reduction and an aggressive economic strategy in the region.

Right now the U.S. government looks like a bunch of bickering school children. We are in paralysis.

The Democrats won’t budge without an increase in taxes for the rich. The Republicans think their oath to tax hater Grover Norquist is more important than their oath to the U.S. Constitution.

Washington gridlock is nothing more than an invitation to the Chinese to be more aggressive in their own backyard.

The other problem we’ve got with the Chinese is that they’ve financed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at a time that the Bush tax cuts sharply reduced revenues.

And all those repayments to China are financing their military buildup.

America must engage China economically. That’s the battle we need to win, right now. Because if we don’t win it, we will no longer afford the best military in the world anyway.

Our leaders need to lead.

Time for Occupy Wall Street 2.0

I honestly believe there is some sort of romantic nostalgia among social activists for the good old days of the late 60′s and early 70′s political protest movement. I think there is a lot of that nostalgia among people who lived through that period. The young want to re-create those moments and the old want to support them from afar.

The latter group looks upon the last few decades as politically passionless. Both young and older social activists believe that the cause of social justice was sold out.

I think that’s why you’ve seen so many well to do capitalist converts from the 60′s and 70′s, all too anxious to help out with the logistics and legal bills of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Guilt is a powerful force.

But the movement is at a crossroads. Does this become a Woodstock without the music? A 1968 Democratic Chicago Convention, without the convention? Where are we going with this?

Municipal officials are confronted with the public health and safety problems of tent cities which have outlived their welcome and over-stressed the supply of porto-potties.

It’s time for the movement to change structurally. It’s time for this to become a political movement versus a campout. It is also time for the movement to align with local governments like the ones in Portland, Oregon and Oakland, California where most of their officials are in total agreement with the movement’s political values. After all, there is no value in clashing with local officials in these cities. These guys are former hippies, not the original Mayor Daley.

The movement should not alienate their natural allies. But that is exactly what will occur if Occupy Wall Street intends to tax already overburdened municipalities who lack the funds and infrastructure to continue the campout.

Get out of the tent and campaign. March, organize, write letters to the newspapers. Blog. Raise funds to support political candidates who support the cause.

Demand that the U.S. Department of Justice prosecute those who pushed this economy into recession; those who put so many Americans into financial jeopardy.

Do that and you’ve got yourself a movement.

Fanny, Freddie and Newt

We’ve all been told that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac hold at least 50% of America’s home mortgages. And we also know that the taxpayers are on the hook for more than $170 billion in federal bailouts as a result of the mortgage meltdown.

Today we found out two more troubling pieces of information. 1). Fannie and Freddie’s executives have received millions in bonuses since the federal bailout occurred. 2). Both of these entities paid millions to Newt Gingrich for consulting.

The former speaker consulted both Fannie and Freddie before the mortgage meltdown which precipitated the economic crisis America’s trying to rescue itself from.

Gingrich is the latest Romney alternative in the GOP presidential sweepstakes. He’s the guy who took a cruise to Greek Islands a few months ago when most of his staff deserted him. But fortuitous circumstances have propelled him back to second place in some Republican primary polls. Translate: Bachman, Perry and Cain are flaming out.

Just what advice did Newt give that was worth all that money? And how could such a learned man not have prevented the mortgage meltdown and its ensuing economic catastrophe the GOP is now trying to lay at President Obama’s feet?

What’s even more puzzling is the testimony from Freddie and Fannie’s top execs who defend the millions of dollars in bonuses as a way to recruit top talent in the financial services industry. What top talent would that be?

Congress is trying to limit the compensation of executives of both firms.

But why not tie compensation to performance? Ah, but that, in the words of the late John Houseman, would be, “making money the old fashioned way.”

Morning walk at North Beach – Hampton, New Hampshire 11/12/11

It’s Crunch Time for GOP

Rick Perry wants to eliminate three federal agencies but can’t remember the third one. He has to ask for a lifeline from Ron Paul in a televised debate.

Ron Paul comes across as the crazy uncle at the family picnic.

Herman Cain, even without the sexual harassment allegations, doesn’t seem to know anything about foreign policy or economics.

Michelle Bachman doesn’t exactly know where the Revolutionary War Battle of Concord actually took place (hint: Concord, Mass.). She’s a harsh critic of government but worked as an IRS attorney. No kidding. She also said Governor Rick Perry’s program to inoculate Texas teens against sexually transmitted disease caused brain damage to young girls even though there is absolutely no evidence of the kind.

Mitt Romney should have been a lawyer because he can (and has) represented both sides of every major political issue of our time.

I’d like to comment on the rest of the herd (of GOP presidential candidates) but their names escape me.

If you add all this up with the actions of the House GOP members this spring who would rather have the United States of America go off a cliff rather than compromise on a debt reduction plan, I think you have a recipe for defeat in November, 2012.