Poor Greece is on the verge of defaulting on its bills and declaring bankruptcy.  Credit rating agencies S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch long ago downgraded Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain (the PIGS) and gave them negative outlooks, with Greece getting Cs across the board.  (Cuba, Pakistan, and Burkina Faso are a few of the nations with better ratings than Greece.)  If Greece runs out of money and fails to pay €14.5 billion to service its debt on March 20, European markets could be badly shaken.

Greece’s financial woes are the result of its unsustainable social welfare entitlement state, whereby working adults are promised generous pensions and early retirements, and younger generations must cough up the money to pay for these goodies, though they won’t receive similar benefits when they retire.  (Sound familiar?)  The government has been borrowing to subsidize these pensions, but it’s not enough—partly because Greece has one of the lowest birthrates in the world, and partly because swaths of young educated Greeks are fleeing the country and emigrating elsewhere to find work.  read more »

In 2008, Mitt Romney bested John McCain in both the Minnesota and Colorado caucuses by huge margins, and was part of a three-way split in Missouri.  Just a week ago he lost all three.  So what’s different in 2012?

The fundamental difference between the current race for the Republican nomination and the 2008 version is that Romney is viewed as the “least conservative” of the field – vs. 2008, when McCain held (or at least shared) that title.  The result?  Romney has had a harder time attracting conservatives, and many of them have spent the better part of the last year trying on other candidates.

Given Santorum’s recent wins, and his new status atop some national GOP polls, it should be a validation of his strategy to stay focused on conservative issues.  For Romney and Gingrich, it should remind them that they need to lay off of attacking each other and get back to the issues.  Everyone knows that both of them (and a good many of their supporters) think that the other is suspect.  Some think both of them are.  Some even have suspicions about Santorum.  But, baring divine intervention, one of them will be the Republican nominee, and as they say in NASCAR, “you’ve got to run with what you brought to the track”.  read more »

Michael Barone titled a recent column “Romney Appeals to White Collars, Santorum to Blue.”  Santorum’s appeal to blue-collar workers—at least those who believe in hard work, small government, personal responsibility, and self-driven upward mobility—is highly suspect.

Santorum woos primarily conservative voters who obsess over opposing abortion and gay marriage.  These voters would gladly hand over the country to a big government “compassionate conservative,” so long as he channels his policies on social issues from holy men in white collars.

Mitt Romney downplays social issues relative to Santorum (which isn’t hard) and focuses on economic issues, emphasizing his private sector business experience running Bain Capital and the Salt Lake City Olympics.

How are “blue collar voters” supposed to get excited about a candidate whose strongest campaign positions are outlawing abortion and gay marriage rather than stopping the federal government from micromanaging our economy via taxes, regulations, and shovel-ready-job-killing “green” initiatives?

Santorum boosts “faith-based initiatives”—basically welfare redirected toward religious rather than secular agencies.  He calls for expanding Medicare, and authored a “Social Security Guarantee Act” that promises never to cut seniors’ benefits—in fact increases them every year.  read more »

That Means NO to your Parties & your Candidates !

The ruling class elites and their redheaded step-children the GOP have fought over my vote for 145 years and both of you have promised everything and delivered nothing but failure and economic slavery to your bloated leviathan called the U.S. Government.  read more »

As our friend Matt Drudge would say… developing. Sorry, Matt, I don’t have that kind of patience. Somewhere between 60 and 76 per cent of Americans identify themselves as ‘Christian’. There’s another 2.1 per cent of the population that are Jewish. Together, we comprise the largest Judeo-Christian nation in the world. We also represent the largest voting demographic in the nation. You wouldn’t know it by the way we act sometimes, but it’s a fact nonetheless.

Obama has stirred up a veritable fire-ants’ nest of opposition from the country’s Christians, Jews, and not a few Hindus and Muslims as well, according to reports. It’s good to see these disparate churches standing up and speaking out. At long last, some in the religious community are beginning to see what we’ve been warning them about… An assault on the first amendment for one is an assault on all.

One of the most obvious and telling effects among the religious community is the reaction of ‘socially conscious’ so-called progressive Catholics. These Catholics voted in large numbers for the ‘Anointed One’ in 2008. Conservative groups polling these folks find them splitting away from Obama as the Maoist’s threat to the mother church has been revealed.  read more »

The media have been aghast over GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney’s remark in an interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien last week that the very poor in this country can go to hell.  The comment supposedly reinforces Romney’s image as a cold, heartless country club Republican who eats orphans for breakfast.

Of course Romney said no such thing; what he said was, “I’m in this race because I care about Americans.  I’m not concerned about the very poor—we have a safety net there.  If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it.  I’m not concerned about the very rich—they’re doing just fine.  I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90 to 95% of Americans who right now are struggling.”

Only a party with a very dull, tiresome axe to grind would willfully misunderstand the obvious meaning of Romney’s response.  (Then again, this is the party that heard “I like being able to fire people…  If someone doesn’t give me a good service… I want to say, ‘I’m going to go get someone else to provide that service to me’” as proof of a sadistic streak.)  read more »

Why is that Republicans and far, far too many people who lay a claim to conservatism just can’t see that Mr Milquetoast Romney is just another in a long line of failures engineered by the establishment Repubics. While Romney is holding forth with vapid generalities, which incidentally seem to have been the hallmark of his political career, Obama is honing his carving knife getting ready to fillet Mr Milquetoast over his Romneycare which is, as has been faithfully reported, the template for MaoBama’s slave-state.

Then there’s the entire shopping list of Mitt Romney’s left-of-center propensities. Everyone seems to have given Romney a pass on his totally liberal stand on most issues. This is a graphic illustration of the ‘blinders’ that seem to be standard issue for the Repubics of the Rockefeller, Ford, Dole, Bush, Rove wing of the Republican Party. While we’re at it, let us not forget that awe-inspiring failure John McCain, another entitlement pick of the Beltway entrenched establishment.  read more »

Much has been written about 2012 GOP presidential primary frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich’s weaknesses as candidates.

Less has been written about how they stand up next to each other, and whom the comparison favors.  A close look at their records makes it clear that Romney can only benefit from Gingrich staying in the race as long as possible.

Gingrich will likely help Romney in two ways: first, by making Romney seem more conservative to hesitant members of the Tea Party wing of the GOP.  This will happen via Gingrich’s patchwork quilt of liberal positions on such issues as Romney’s role at Bain Capital (“Exploitive!”), Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity (“Right-wing social engineering!”), and Nancy Pelosi’s cap-and-trade bill (“Bipartisan!”).

Second, Gingrich may push Romney to the right on some issues, nudging his competitor to come out more forcefully for the conservative aspects of his platform and commit to them more unwaveringly as campaign promises.

(This is in contrast to the advantage Romney gains by Ron Paul staying in the race, which is for Paul to make Romney seem like a spring chicken with a manly laugh instead of an old goat with a girlish giggle.)

Newt’s attacks on Romney from the left will help Romney develop defenses against the charges the Obama campaign will inevitably fling at him in the general election.  read more »

If I were psychic I couldn’t have made a better call. I make no metaphysical claims… quite the contrary. Ever since the 2010 elections, the Republicrats and the Lame Stream lap dogs of the Obama regime have been at great pains to convince us, convince you, that we were an aberration, a momentary phenomenon, a freak of nature. We would soon be absorbed into the Republican establishment, which would once again rule all of us rubes with wisdom… nay, true sagacity.

We talked at great length about Mitt Romney and the central and overriding fact that he is a big government Republican in the establishment mold. Worse yet, he’s moderate to liberal on most issues that really matter to fully 60% of the citizens of this country that consider themselves to be conservative.

That’s the one thing that Mitt Romney is not. No matter what the repeated battery from his PACs… those unaccountable political garbage grinders behind which Mr. Milquetoast can hide, while devastating anyone who is perceived as a threat to his vanilla Republicrat candidacy. Ask Herman Cain.  read more »