United Liberty

With the release of his new book, Decision Points, many conservatives and Republicans are making a big deal over George W. Bush’s return from political exile. While I understand that they may be looking at Barack Obama’s presidency, where we’ve seen out of control spending and the Constitution often ignored. It doesn’t make much sense to look back longingly at Bush, who spent like a drunken sailor and treated the Constitution and Bill of Rights like an afterthought.

While I’m not a fan of Michelle Malkin, she is cautioning Republicans not to get too nostalgistic over the return of the Big Spender from Crawford:

The problem, of course, is that Bush nostalgia is indelibly marred by his disastrous domestic policy legacy of big government, big spending, and betrayal of core fiscal principles — the very impetus for the Tea Party movement upon which he now heaps glowing praise.

Take yourselves back to 2007. The headline on my blog on December 3, 2007:

Hillary and Bush agree: Government should bail out homeowners.

I was honestly surprised to see Eliot Spitzer pop up on cable news and writing articles at Slate. Given his explicitly hypocritical behavior, taking in a high class prostitute while campaigning on fighting prostitution, I couldn’t see how anyone would look at him as a legitimate.

Now this green goblin appears to be back and seeking more elected office:

It turns out former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) made a good choice by staying on the sidelines this year and not attempting a political comeback.

A new Marist Poll finds that nearly two-thirds of registered New York State voters — 66% — do not want him to run for statewide office this year while just 28% want him to throw his hat into the political ring.

Said pollster Lee Miringoff: “Eliot Spitzer’s attempt to reconnect with New York voters is not paying off in the short-run. He has become more visible lately but not more electable.”

Some, like Bill Clinton, are able to survive sex scandals, while others, like John Edwards, don’t. Clinton, however, was a pretty decent president and never posed as a political warrior against playing “find the cigar” with overweight interns.

An audit reveals some rather interesting web-surfing going on at government offices:

On a day when President Obama argued for more government regulation over the financial industry, a new government report reveals that some high-level regulators have spent more time looking at porn than policing Wall Street.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to be the sheriff of the financial industry, looking for financial crimes like Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. But the new report, obtained by ABC News, says senior employees of the SEC spent hours on the commission’s computers looking at sites like naughty.com, skankwire, youporn, and others.

The investigation, which was conducted by the SEC’s internal watchdog at the request of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, found 31 serious offenders over the past two and a half years. Seventeen of the offenders were senior SEC officers with salaries ranging from $100,000 to $222,000 per year.

One senior attorney at SEC headquarters in Washington spent up to eight hours a day accessing Internet porn. When he filled all the space on his government computer with pornographic images, he downloaded more to CDs and DVDs that accumulated in boxes in his offices.

An SEC accountant attempted to access porn websites 1,800 times in a two-week period and had 600 pornographic images on her computer hard drive.

Another SEC accountant attempted to access porn sites 16,000 times in a single month.

In one case, the report said, an employee tried hundreds of times to access pornographic sites and was denied access. When he used a flash drive, he successfully bypassed the filter to visit a “significant number” of porn sites.

I know what you’re thinking: man that Pete is a positive guy. I like to describe myself as realistic, with a bit of fatalism throw in. Either way, I find it hard to look at the economic landscape and have any hope. It is especially dreadful when politicians have to get re-
elected, AND said politicians consult certain “economists”.

Economists have for years looked at what is happening in a society and sought to come up with solutions as to how an economic crisis can be “fixed”. The problem is, like in all fields, you have good economists, and you have the not so good (The latter seem to be the ones that always find their way onto the public payroll).

In extremely broad terms economists can be split into two categories:

If you are a student of American history your eyes should be opening as to which economist is most often chosen by our elected officials. The real question is “why”?

Well, why wouldn’t a politician pick economist #2?

A new Bloomberg survey shows that 77% of investors believe that Barack Obama is anti-business:

The global quarterly poll of investors and analysts who are Bloomberg subscribers finds that 77 percent of U.S. respondents believe Obama is too anti-business and four-out-of-five are only somewhat confident or not confident of his ability to handle a financial emergency.

The poll also finds a decline in Obama’s overall favorability rating one year after taking office. He is viewed favorably by 27 percent of U.S. investors. In an October poll, 32 percent in the U.S. held a positive impression.

Ironically, this survey comes the week President Obama unveiled his financial sector overhaul, which was met with skepticism by investors as stocks fell to the lowest point of the year.

We often hear Blue Dog Democrats referred to as “fiscal conservatives” and we’re told about their concerns about the budget deficits.The guys over at National Taxpayers Union have put together a spreadsheet showing how Blue Dogs or otherwise vulnerable districts have voted on TARP, the auto bailout, the “stimulus,” the budget and ObamaCare (among a few other votes).

If you live in one of these districts, I’d encourage you to support their opponent in 2010. These Blue Dogs are not fiscal conservatives. They are part of the Culture of Debt in Washington, DC.

Over the last few months, I’ve not been surprised to read that recent events have thrown a bit of doubt on the Efficient Markets [EM] theory. As defined in an article this weekend in the Financial Times, EM is “the theory … that market participants are governed by rational expectations and markets are self-correcting.”

If I understand this theory correctly, the correlation in practicality is that the most prudent long-term investment portfolio for the modest, ordinary investor, i.e. the one with the best risk-security ratio, would be something with a lot of Dow-type common stocks, because the collective markets take all factors into account quicker than any individual can do it.

Investors are worried about the size of our debt:

The nation’s debt clock is ticking faster than ever — and Wall Street is getting worried.

As the Obama administration racks up an unprecedented spending bill for bank bailouts, Detroit rescues, health care overhauls and stimulus plans, the bond market is starting to push up the cost of trillions of dollars in borrowing for the government.
[…]
The trouble is that government borrowing risks crowding out private investment, driving up interest rates and potentially slowing a recovery still trying to take hold. That is why the Federal Reserve announced an extraordinary policy this year to buy back existing long-term debt — $300 billion over six months — to drive down yields. The strategy worked for a while, but now the impact of that decision appears to be wearing off as long-term interest rates tick up again.

That is the question asked by Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight. Besides noting the obvious anti-tax and anti-big government rhetoric, Silver notes a few subtle shifts in policy:

— Republican insiders are increasingly uncertain about whether gay marriage, which was such an important issue for the party over 2000-2004, is any longer a winning issue at all for them. Reaction to the Iowa Supreme Court decision was surprisingly muted in conservative circles. Meanwhile, at least one prominent Republican presidential candidate, Utah’s John Huntsman, has come out in favor of civil unions (although not gay marriage itself).