Thursday, May 31, 2012

Palin's Winning Endorsements "setting up a scenario for a 2016 presidential run."



Diana Prichard at iVillage gets it right !

Is Sarah Palin the GOP’s New Political King (and Queen) Maker?

The original Mama Grizzly is proving that her endorsement carries huge clout among some conservative voters


PETER KRAMER/NBC
It’s not often you see political ads for a candidate featuring the picture of another politician, but that’s precisely what’s been helping one Texas candidate gain traction. And the politician whose face graces his online ads – Sarah Palin – is being given credit for every inch his campaign advances. Palin may not be running for elective office this year, but others are turning to her in hopes that the uber-conservatives who love her will love them, too.
The ‘mavericky’ former Governor of Alaska has always been a Tea Party favorite, but no one could have predicted how powerful her endorsements would be just four short years after her debut on the national stage.  Texas State Senate candidate Ted Cruz was trailing his opponent by 12 points until he got Palin’s blessing. Then donations started flooding into his campaign. Palin has also given her official stamp of maverick-ness to Richard Mourdock, a contender for Richard Lugar’s U.S. Senate seat in Indiana, as well as Deb Fischeran underdog in Nebraska’s GOP senate primary. Both won their respective primary races after Palin agreed to work on their behalf.
Coincidence? Not likely.
Palin beamed with pride on her Facebook page about those outcomes. “As recently as a week ago, Deb Fischer was dismissed by the establishment. Why? Because she is not part of the good old boys’ permanent political class. The message from the people of Nebraska is simple and powerful: America is looking for real change in Washington, and common sense conservatives like Deb Fischer represent that change,” Palin wrote.
So is Sarah Barracuda the new political king (and queen) maker? From where I’m sitting, Sarah is looking better and better every day. She’s been true to her anti-establishment roots through thick and thin, and seems to be choosing candidates that fit that same bill. If Palin plays her cards right, her political clout could make her a major player at the Republican National Convention. And with every win, her endorsements mean that much more, possibly setting up a scenario for a 2016 presidential run.
Diana Prichard is a red-leaning freelance writer living and working a blue state. She authors Cultivating the Art of Sustenance. Follow her on Twitter: @diana_prichard.
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The Most Significant Blogpost In The History Of The Internet. Pt.1;Politics/Economics/Morality



Reproduced below is a highly significant article which, in these times of economic and social dislocation, offers a path and prescription for national renewal. Of course there are points to disagree with, but the conclusion is unarguable.

An analysis in three parts follows below post 

For those who are old enough to have lived through numerous cycles of economic booms and busts, the article will give pause. At "the end of history" where all the economic "isms" have been tried, Gary North shows that now is the time to pursue policies above and beyond partisanship.

North shows that through booms and busts the human spirit and the nation state survives. Sometimes abashed, sometimes ludicrously euphoric but, where a democracy includes a fairly regulated capitalism, progress evolves-despite zigs and zags on the way.

The "end of history" was about the triumph of capitalistic market forces. Later discussion considered that history was not quite done as the welfarism vs non-welfarism debate had not worked itself out just yet. However, this post Fukuyama debate, which includes high tax/low tax arguments, could be considered a minor digression, given that history has allowed this generation a unique opportunity.

2016 affords an unparalleled time for national renewal. After North sets out the argument against politics and economics as neither impediments, nor paths to renewal, his morality based prescription is expanded upon further in the discussion that follows in parts two to four subsequent to this post.

By all means visit Mr.North's site and links to his other sites
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Don't Worry About Your Kids' Economic Future, Worry about Yours

Politics / US DebtMay 26, 2012 - 05:32 AM

I read that Americans who have spoken to poll-takers express the fear that their children will not live as well as they have. Here is an example. The poll was taken in October 2011.
More than two-thirds of voters say the United States is declining, and a clear majority think the next generation will be worse off than this one, according to the results of a new poll commissioned by The Hill.
A resounding 69 percent of respondents said the country is "in decline," the survey found, while 57 percent predict today's kids won't live better lives than their parents. Additionally, 83 percent of voters indicated they're either very or somewhat worried about the future of the nation, with 49 percent saying they're "very worried."

The results suggest that Americans don't view the country's current economic and political troubles as temporary, but instead see them continuing for many years.
The usual explanation relates to the poor economy. Other explanations include the environment, the educational system, the national debt, Asian competition, illegal immigration, and moral decline.
I have not seen any poll relate this pessimism to concern over declining medical technology, rising computer prices, a crash of the Internet, rising bandwidth costs, declining automobile safety, dead spots in cell phone communications, rising book prices, declining IQ scores, or astronomical plane fares.

In other words, Americans think their children will live longer, enjoy better communications, travel more inexpensively, and not get dumber. The better informed respondents know of the Flynn effect. It appears that people born later over the last century keep getting better at taking exams, or else they are actually getting smarter. Wikipedia summarizes.
The Flynn effect is the name given to a substantial and long-sustained increase in intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world. When intelligence quotient (IQ) tests are initially standardized using a sample of test-takers, by convention the average of the test results is set to 100 and their standard deviation is set to 15 IQ points.  
When IQ tests are revised they are again standardized using a new sample of test-takers, usually born more recently than the first. Again, the average result is set to 100. However, when the new test subjects take the older tests, in almost every case their average scores are significantly above 100.
This has taken place in other countries. It means that each generation does better at taking exams. Since there is no inheritance of acquired characteristics, we must seek other explanations for this rise. One explanation surely does not fit: children keep getting less intelligent.

Before a child is born, parents hope for two things: (1) the child will be healthy; (2) the child will be of normal intelligence. Parents of teenagers can be confident that the nation's children and grandchildren will live longer, be healthier, and be better at taking IQ tests. So, why the pessimism?
Let us discount the likelihood of the following: (1) a pandemic, (2) nuclear war, (3) a collision with an asteroid.

This leaves the following: (1) the rising cost of energy, (2) rising taxation, (3) Federal Reserve policy, (4) tighter job markets (immigration and Asian competition), (5) the federal debt, (6) cultural and moral decline.

I will skip over cultural and moral issues, because most of these issues are separate from government policies. I can think of no federal program that will reform Americans' morals, and I shudder to think of the bureaucracy that would be set up to try.
Oldsters have been complaining about moral and cultural decline ever since the Puritans arrived in Massachusetts. At some point, it's old news. If there is a looming tipping point, we can't forecast it accurately. Surely, an agency in Washington can't.

I am in favor of closing down government welfare programs that subsidize personal irresponsibility. This should begin with crony capitalism. Some single mother in Detroit is not the primary source of moral hazard in America. Let's start with the FDIC, the Import-Export Bank, farm price supports, Social Security, Medicare, and the Federal Reserve System.

RISING ENERGY COSTS
This threat is real, but we have a price system to deal with it.
For anyone who has invested in natural gas over the past few years, the energy crisis seems to be on hold. He has lost a great deal of money. Prices have collapsed.
There may be a technological breakthrough. I hope so. Meanwhile, the price system offers us ways to cut consumption. Worldwide oil consumption peaked in 2004. It is still high: about a billion barrels every 12 weeks. But the free market provides incentives for consumers to conserve and inventors to get busy.

This much is clear: rising energy costs are the result of increased consumption, which is the result of increased production. We have to get richer to afford expensive oil.
We will cut back on some consumer goods in order to buy energy. We will have time to adjust our budgets. This is a long-term problem.
In any case, the high cost of energy is going to hit the Third World and Second World before it hits America.

RISING TAXATION
Not for Americans. Americans will not tolerate rising taxes. The most that the federal government has extracted out of Americans since 1947 is 20% of GDP, and usually this has been lower. Here is a chart that shows this.
What about total taxation? It has risen to the 35% range. (This does not count the cost of regulation.)

Government expenditures have risen since 2000. But this has been covered by borrowing.

Parents should not worry about their children's growing tax burden. One election cycle can take away that burden. A new Congress comes in and pulls the plug on any program that a majority of voters – "the kids" – decide is squeezing them.
Think of this as the ice floe solution. Some tribes in the arctic used to stick granny on a floating piece of ice, gave her three days' rations, and wished her bon voyage.
My recommendation: Don't worry about the kids. Worry about your golden years.

FEDERAL RESERVE POLICY
Our kids are not going to take the brunt of this. We are. What the FED has created, in conjunction with fractional reserve banking and the FDIC, is a system of moral hazard and crony capitalism on a scale never before seen. Add to this witches brew the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan, and the People's Bank of China. Don't cry for the kids. Our problems are more immediate.

TIGHTER JOB MARKETS
With every extension of the division of labor since the day that Cain went off to seek his fortune, job markets have been tightening. There are more people looking for work. But an amazing phenomenon has paralleled this development. More employers are looking for workers.

Markets clear when left free to clear. Employers bid against employers. Workers bid against workers. Employment remains high as long as employers and workers are free to bid, free to choose, free to move away, and free to start a business. I mean "free" as in "under no legal restrictions."

Lots of Chinese workers want to compete to sell us trinkets that we don't need and parts that we can hire others to assemble. China is a nation that sends out boxes with this sign: "Some assembly required." The money is in the assembling and marketing. Think iPhone. Think iPad. For that matter, think "Detroit Big Three."

Dell Computers is in trouble, according to its recent share price. Hewlett-Packard will lay off 27,000. What does that mean for you and me? Cheaper computers.

Agriculture has faced this problem for 300 years. "How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree" – or any other town larger than 500? Answer: you aren't. This is why 2% of Americans live on farms, and why food is so small a portion of our household budgets. If we were willing to stick with unprocessed foods, that portion would be even lower. A "paleo" diet – which is not paleo; it's capitalist – could be based on eggs and not much else. Eggs are cheap.

Tighter job markets are great for people who specialize. This takes productivity. There is increasing productivity. It also takes capital. It takes education. All of these are available at some price.
For unproductive people with poor work habits, low IQs, and no skills, times will get tougher. But why shouldn't they get tougher? The market rewards workers who produce efficiently. That is what free market pricing is all about: incentives to produce more efficiently.

This was what uncompetitive farmers have faced. We need incentives to go out and find some way to serve customers. Necessity is the mother of invention. Go to the Book of Proverbs for insights here. Or go to my commentary on the economics of the Book of Proverbs.

Some parents are worried about the fact that the $100,000+ they spent to send a child to college to get a degree has not paid off. The job market is rotten for people with useless B.A. degrees in the humanities. Furthermore, the child could have gotten this degree on his own for under $15,000. All this is a commentary on the lack of parental financial wisdom, not a comment on the child's future at age 40 or 50. Maybe the child will know better than to follow his parents' example.

Year after year, decade after decade, for over two centuries, economic growth in the northern hemisphere of the West has increased by at least 2% per year. This has made every generation richer than the previous one. Bad government policies have slowed this down (1929-47). World wars have slowed this down. But it has continued most of the time.
Now the process has spread to China and India. There will be more people with output to trade with. This is like getting a better class of people moving into the neighborhood. Property values will rise.

THE FEDERAL DEBT
See "Rising Taxation."

LIBERTY
Liberty is what enables people to improve their situations. Liberty is increasing.
As I wrote recently, we are not on the road to serfdom. We are on the road out of serfdom.
We have been on this road out of serfdom for a thousand years. We are not going to turn around and go back. The nation that adopted Marxist Communism first was Russia in 1917. Serfdom had been abolished in Russia only since 1861. Capitalism had barely begun in cities. It was nonexistent in rural areas, where most Russians lived.

As for Communist China, Mao's triumph in 1949 was not a triumph over capitalism. It was a triumph over traditional bureaucracy – the oldest and most developed bureaucracy on earth. The only bureaucracy to come close to matching it was the Czar's in 1917. Marx was completely wrong about the future. Communist revolutions came in nations that had not yet adopted bourgeois capitalism. The mode of production did not produce the inevitable revolution: from feudalism to capitalism to socialism to communism.

The revolutions were not led by proletarians. Educated bourgeois sons led peasant societies into Communism in the name of proletarianism, just as a pair of educated bourgeois sons invented Communism in the first place.
We are seeing the extension of economic liberty in Asia. Asia is booming. We are seeing the contraction of economic liberty in Western Europe. It is in a recession.

The United States has lower taxes than most industrial nations. It is easy to start a business here. Innovators still come here to prove their points in the market.
If California tightens the screws, Texas beckons. If Vermont tightens the screws, New Hampshire beckons. We can click a link to find out which state is where a small businessman wants to be.

CONCLUSION
Whether our children will be better off than we are has far more to do with their morals than the federal government. The federal government can be evaded. It can be replaced. It can be de-funded. It can go belly-up.

The heart, mind, and soul of a nation are the hearts, minds, and souls of its people.
The problem with big government is bad morality.
The problem with central banking is larceny in the hearts of the voters. They want bailouts. Who gets bailed out? Rich bankers. Surprise!
The problem with public education is tax funding. That can be cured by a few dozen sites like Khan
Academy's site.

What we need is a moral transformation, We need voters who will vote against "except." "Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote."


PARTS TWO TO FOUR ARE IN THE POSTS FOLLOWING THIS ONE BELOW IT

The Most Significant Blogpost In the History Of The Internet;Part 2;The Path To National Renewal





PART  2; MORALITY IN POLITICS IS THE PATH TO NATIONAL RENEWAL


Mr. Gary North in part 1 of this series has shown that politics determines economic policy, and that nations and individuals survive the ebb and flow of the natural business cycle. Nations also survive the ebb and flow of whatever prevailing political culture directs economic policy.

Thus whichever political party directs the economy people will survive whatever degree of mismanagement ensues.

Therefore welfarism will ebb and flow to a greater or lesser degree at any one time as will booms and busts. That being the case it is reasonable to state that governments should be directed by people too whom morality is their absolute touchstone. All their social and economic policies must first pass the test of their inherent ethical and moral composition.

No matter the degree of animosity between Republican and Democrat partisans, surely nobody could argue with North's conclusion that a morality based political agenda is important?

Perhaps it might be argued that morality is one path amongst many, but accepting  that premise leaves  open whatever other prescriptions are on offer to being divorced from a moral element.

Simply, all paths to renewal have to be based on morality, and thus North's conclusions will suffice without any modification.

Looking towards the 2016 elections, on the R.S. McCain premise of a Romney "disaster" in Part 3. what might be the mechanism to effect a morality led national renewal? In the concluding Part 4. of this analysis a possible vehicle is presented.







The Most Significant Blogpost In The History Of The Internet Pt.3;R.S.McCain,Conservatives&Romney

R.S. McCAIN AND CONSERVATIVES OBLIGATION TO THE ROMNEY CAMPAIGN


In the light of Mitt Romney being the presumptive Republican nominee, the outstanding conservative journalist Robert Stacy McCain addressed the question as to what the conservative voters response should be.


McCain firstly expressed his forebodings (AT THIS LINK) of the Romney versus Obama outcome without mincing any words;


"Yesterday, after Rick Santorum quit, my 13-year-old son Jefferson asked, “Does this mean I have to stop bad-mouthing Mitt Romney?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It doesn’t mean you have to start good-mouthing him, but you have to stop bad-mouthing him.”
Then I went on to explain that, having been saddled with a nominee whom we had opposed with all our might, we cannot be held responsible for the inevitable disaster. Therefore, on Wednesday, Nov. 7, we will be ready to demand an accounting from those responsible.
Could I be wrong? Is there actually a chance that Mitt could win? This is a possibility that must be considered, at least as a hypothetical.

In a few weeks, when I’m covering the general election campaign, I’m going to have to try to convince myself that this is not an absurd exercise in political futility, that “President Romney” is actually within the realm of the possible, and that a Romney administration might conceivably accomplish something meaningful for the preservation of the American Republic. It is nonetheless important to emphasize that today — April 11, 2012 — I am overwhelmed by a bone-deep certainty that those who actually believe such things are fools, who are wasting their time and efforts, and now asking us to waste ours, too.
Then, when it’s all over, and people ask me, “What went wrong?” I’ll point them back to this post and say, “It was doomed from the outset.”

In a subsequent article (full article AT THIS LINK) McCain then addressed the conservative's voting position in respect of the Romney candidacy;

"Here’s the thing I want to get across to our readers: Whenever Republicans lose a presidential election, the first thing the GOP Establishment does is to focus blame on conservatives. This is why Sarah Palin was scapegoated for the 2008 defeat, because treacherous swine like Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace, who get paid to win elections, don’t want to accept responsibility for their own failures.


It is therefore an urgent necessity — however painfully ironic — that hard-core grassroots conservatives give their maximum effort to help Romney defeat Barack Obama, because if Team Mitt loses this election, you will be blamed. Your honor as a conservative, to say nothing of the future of our Republic, thus requires from you even greater labors than you would have made if Rick Santorum had won the nomination.
Like I said, “painfully ironic.”

The article by Gary North that commenced this presentation, which places morality above electoral and economic considerations, would seem to lead one to support McCain's premise that conservatives should work for, and vote for Romney.

Of the two candidates Romney's recently stated positions more represents the conservative viewpoint that ethics and morality are transcendent. In the social sphere, abortion and same sex marriage are two major issues where there is an undisputed difference between Romney and Obama.

McCain's second point is that if conservatives do not support Romney in the campaign, and in November, they will be blamed by the GOP establishment for his defeat. McCain uses the clear example in the quote above of how Palin received this treatment (even though CNN's exit polling in 2008 showed that she was actually a positive influence on voters considerations).

These are powerful arguments, lets put the shoe on the other foot to show why. If Palin were the nominee instead of Romney, and the Romney supporters stated they would not work for her and would stay at home in November, the Palin supporters would, with great reason, feel aggrieved and betrayed and would blame the subsequent defeat on the Romneyite establishment. 


Further, after the inevitable loss, the conservative element (blamed for "splitting the party") would be unlikely to have another shot at a candidate of their preference getting the nomination again for a generation. It took from 1964 till 1980 for the GOP to run with another conservative after Goldwater.

Sadly for conservatives they are in a lose/lose situation. If they don't support Romney, the blame for the loss will not fall on the Romneyite faction but on the conservatives and, once again, they will face being out of power for a generation. There is however one exception to this apparent unfair rule of political life, and that is when conscience and faith supersedes all other considerations.

If Romney were of any other faith beside being a Mormon, then McCain's strictures and warnings would be indisputable, no matter how bitter a pill they would be for conservatives. If, as with Gary North, morality is above politics then the moral law, which for Christians finds its base in the true Christian faith, is the one allowable exception to the demand for all Republicans to support Romney.

If a Christian advises that their faith states explicitly that "another Gospel" is hostile to the foundations of the faith (which it is as with St.Paul) then on the grounds of conscience they must be excluded from condemnation for not voting for Romney. 


If Romney lost a close election because a substantial number of Christians had to follow their faith,which is above the politics of the moment, the "blame game' could not apply. It follows that
the conservative element must be allowed a shot at the 2016 nomination free from such attacks. If they are successful in gaining the nomination, the establishment wing must support their candidate or be accused of putting self-interest above all moral considerations.

If R.S. McCain's is correct, that the Romney nomination will be an "inevitable disaster" then the margin of loss will be so great that conservatives of conscience would not be blamed for the loss. Looking forwards from that point, what qualities might conservatives look to for their 2016 candidate? That question is addressed in the Part four conclusion of this post.