New York Political Report

Posted on Monday, 4th August 2008 by John Martin

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Posted on Friday, 21st March 2008 by Don Eagle

The sorry state of the debate on race in this country is due to the so-called leaders of the African/American people. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have been in the vanguard of this grotesque misuse of power and the privilege of leadership. To this list we have to now add the name of Jeremiah Wright but sadly we now add the name of Snator Barak Obama, Democrat of Illinois.

 Senator Obama had the chance to do something about this and genuinely advance the cause of racial division in the USA. Sadly he all he could do was produce a political stump speech that had at its heart the sole purpose of getting himself out of a political trap of his own making.

 There was a unique opportunity last week for Barak to reach out to all people of color in America and to then include in a vast coalition of Americans who want genuine racial harmony. The trouble was that in order to do that he had to reach out to Conservative African/Americans. People like Clarence Thomas, Condaleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder and J.C. Watts. These are the people of color who are routinely and often accused of being a ’sell out’ and an ‘Uncle Tom.’ There follows that there needs to be a reconcilliation of liberal and conservative people of color before there can real national advancement for America. There has to be an end to the discrimination and bigotry against these amazing (Conservative) Americans. There needs to a truly inclusive debate about race in America that is not limited to just those on the left as currently exists.

Right now, and what seems like forever, Republicans and Conservatives have been barred from taking part in this debate and so long as this situation continues there can be no real result. It is after all simply a monologue of prejudice and bigotry such as we have now all heard from Dr Jeremiah Wright.

 Senator Obama’s opportunity was to make a break from his pastor and lead the nation in a new direction but he couldn’t do it. He is linked in so many ways to Dr Wright’s theology of hate and prejudice.

 Many African/Americans have known the kind of prejudice that I have no doubt that Dr Wright has encountered throughout his life but few have given in to hate the way that he. Clarence Thomas and Janice Rogers-Brown were born, and grew up in, the segregated south. Thier experience was much worse that anything than encountered by those who grew up in the grinding poverty of Alabama and the Carolinas. Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson were publicly humiliated because of the color of their skin but they never gave into hatred. They all knew it was counterproductive to the advancement of their people.

 On this score of being a genuine leader Barak Obama has failed this test.

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Posted on Saturday, 8th March 2008 by Don Eagle

Just why do they do it?   

Kingsley Pearce

March 7^th, 2008

I have to confess I love listening to Ann Coulter. OK, what self-respecting conservative doesn’t? It’s a guilty pleasure and I love as much as a good beer on a hot day. I have some of her books and a cd collection, one of which I often play in my Jeep. There is one bit that really got me. It’s the moment when Ms Coulter condemns conservatives for saying nice things about liberals Democrats. Apart from the examples she gives I have never heard any conservatives say nice things about the liberal Democrats. That was at least until last week when I heard it from a most unexpected quarter.

Dr Arthur Laffer, who to me and I think most conservatives, is the greatest economic intellectual in the world today committed the aforementioned sin of praising left wing figures in what can be little more than a feeble attempt to curry favor with some non-descript, feeble minded left wing, pseudo-intellectual. The offending pseudo-intellectual on this occasion was Quentin Hardy and they were, at the time, appearing on CNBC’s Kudlow and Company.

So just what was Dr Laffer’s sin? I cannot be sure what forced it out of his mouth but he launched into a short but effusive praise of President Clinton’s economic performance. According to the good doctor, Bubba did some good things as president. To say that I was staggered is a massive understatement. The idea that Bill Clinton had the slightest idea of what was happening outside in the Oval Office in the real world is simply laughable.

Of course, that the Clinton years are looked on as some golden era of economic advancement is almost certainly to be blamed on all of us. Yes, you heard it right. We did it. We failed to argue against the debauchery of the 1990’s. Unlike the Democrats we seem to have some aversion to denouncing our political opponents, the American left for their incompetence, dishonesty and subversion.

The American media wasted no time in naming the 80’s as the decade of greed. They should have referred to the 1990’s as the decade of deceit and dishonesty. It was deceit and dishonesty that was the first and cardinal rule of the Clinton White House but of course with the Main Stream Media being so heavily in the tank for the Clintons there is no way they were going to do that. But it is something that we should have done.  Why we didn’t do it is not really a mystery to me but I will write about that another time because it is an extensive problem that still continues.

From the dishonesty of Hillary Clinton’s travelgate scandal to the massive national embarrassment of the Monica Lewinsky travesty the entire history of this misbegotten administration was an ongoing scandal in which a culture of deceit and dishonesty was cultivated. Everything about the so called Clinton economic miracle was based on a lie. The simple fact of the matter was that Bill Clinton was the luckiest president in the history of the United States of America.

Clinton came to office just as the economy was beginning to gather steam after the Federal Reserve had been furiously cutting rates to save Alan Greenspan’s hide after he missed the onset of yet another economic downturn.

In this sense it is instructive to closely examine both the beginning and the end of the Clinton Administration. Bill Clinton came to office just as unemployment was beginning to decline and the economy was expanding. The entire economic boom of the 90’s was driven by the expansion of personal computers, the increased sales of cell phones and the blue sky boom in internet companies. All you had to do was build a website and float a company with that name. It was called, if you had forgotten, the dot com boom. The trouble was that most of these companies were based on no business plans or as was more usually the case no intention to make a profit from a real business but simply separate foolish and greedy investors from their money.

It was against this background that the Administration and Congress made their biggest mistake of all time to simply satisfy the greed and arrogance of one of the most incompetent Presidents in American history. In the late 1990’s both the Office of Management and Budget and the General Accounting Office issued reports that stated that if tax and spending were left alone the Federal Budget would come into balance by 2002/2003. It was all good news but Clinton with little of substance to his Presidency had to act. He proposed tax increases and cuts to military expenditure that would accelerate the balancing of the Federal Budget so that it would happen while he was still President.

The end result should have been easy to see but it wasn’t. That end result was inevitable. Increased taxation was starting to cut heavily into declining profits because Alan Greenspan was again getting it badly wrong and was raising interest rates. At the start of the year 2000 the Dow Jones and the NASDAQ was starting to go into freefall. Look at the figures. The US economy was sliding into recession 12 months before George W. Bush had even been sworn into office.

The last 3 economic quarters of the Clinton term were in recession. The second quarter was clearly negative, the third quarter was barely positive by about 0.1% and the last quarter was once more negative. That was the scenario faced by George W. Bush in January 2001. Airlines were now in deep financial crisis, retail stores had absolutely no pricing power and manufacturing was in deep decline. So much for a strong economy.

Yet it is against this background that the best economist in the country, Dr Arthur Laffer, sought to curry favor with a nondescript, second rate hack journalist working out on the left coast for Forbes Magazine. Why? Because Art Laffer is a really good guy and was trying to find common ground with Quentin Hardy, the aforementioned journalist.

Did it work? Well of course it didn’t. It never does and it is an important reminder to all of us that the liberal Democrats of this country have no respect for us and only want to see our political demise. Any concession to their stupid and ignorant arguments does us no good at all.

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Posted on Thursday, 14th February 2008 by Don Eagle

And yes here it is. The Empire State of which we are all so fond and proud has just been listed in the top 5 of the states in the USA. The not so good news is that this is not a place where we want to be.  

This is the list of states that people are leaving. That’s right, people, our friends, family and neighbors are getting out while the getting is good. People are going to states that they personally decide, free of any political considerations, are much better than the great state of New York.

The simple fact of the matter is that they states they are going to have much lower rates of taxation and where the intrusiveness of regulations are much lower than they are here.

Now just about most of the really smart people I know realize that if a state has taxes, property, sales or income, higher than a state nearby then people will go there. Here is the example. A lot of people who once lived in Boston MA decided that it would be better to live in Nashua, New Hampshire. The reason is that New Hampshire has no state income or sales tax. If you happen to work in Boston then the commute is just 55 minutes. There are people in other American cities drive a lot further than that just to get to work.

So where are the cities where people are moving to??

The top 5 on this list. North Carolina leads the way followed by Nevada, Alabama, Oregon and South Carolina. The top 5 states that people are leaving are Michigan (where they have just raised business taxes once again) followed by North Dakota, New Jersey, New York at number 4 and at 5 is the state of Illinois.

The one thing all these top 5 states have where people are moving to is that they have low state income taxes and in some cases no state income tax. The state that people are leaving have in common high taxes intrusive regulations and high state debt.

 So could the last person out of New York please turn out the lights.

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Posted on Wednesday, 30th January 2008 by Don Eagle

Of course the he is Governor “Idiot” Spitzer. He of the “everything changes on day one. He, who spoke in his TV ads of integrity and character. This is the Governor Spitzer who rode to the Governor’s mansion on the back of blackmailed Wall Street businesses, aided and abetted by the national, state and local media that carried his election slogans as hard news.

New York, worn down by excessive taxation, stupid regulations and fleeing businesses, is still an economic joke. It is one of the few states of the union that continues to experience a decreasing population that puts it at odds with the rest of the country.  New York once proudly proclaimed as the Empire State is now a sick economic joke. And if it weren’t bad enough that the state of New York has become a social welfare state where it is becoming increasingly untenable to run a profitable business all we are getting is more regulations, increased taxes, road tolls and fees.

Tolls on the I-90 Thruway are set to rise again against all economic commonsense and concepts of fairness to New York’s long suffering motorists. Paid for long ago the I-90 is now seen simply as nothing more than a source of revenue. As if it weren’t hard enough to transport freight around and through the state, the idiots in Albany have now decided that the Thomas Dewey Highway is now simply nothing more than a source of tax revenue. If ever there was a case for supply side economics then the state of New York has qualified ahead of any other state in the union with the possible exception of Michigan. Yes another Democrat controlled state. What a surprise. Why is it that the Democrat run states are the ones in economic chaos???

After a year of Troopergate spy scandals, driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, increased tolls on the I-90, executive avoidance of independent inquiries, missing (read destroyed) emails, increased expenditure and one of the most partisan New York administrations in decades what have we got to show?

We still have one of the largest per capita budget deficits in the country with no plan or schedule to reduce and eliminate it. We still have one of the worst high school graduation rates in the country despite the fact that we spend more per student in this state than in most other states. The regulations continue to astound and confound anyone in business making the possibility of interstate relocation even more financially viable.

The trouble is that Governor Spitzer has no economic knowledge or experience of his own. Had he run his own business in New York he would know and understand what to do. Instead he resorts the old time Democratic practice of tax and spend. Wasn’t it that kind of approach that got us into this mess in the first place? The trouble is that like most Democrats, Idiot Spitzer is obsessed with convincing both himself and us that he is the smartest person in the world. Therefore it is inconceivable that he can be wrong about anything. His attitude of try ‘anything’ and see if it works is so incredibly stupid and it shows but Governor Idiot can’t see it. He undoubtedly thinks that we just haven’t taxed and spent enough. If only those interfering Republicans would see the socialist light then he could lead all New Yorkers into the command economy utopian paradise.

So here is the message for Governor Spitzer. Look all around the world and see that where economies are most free, tax is low, regulations are least intrusive and where Government doesn’t think it is the answer to every problem you will see that is where the ordinary people are the most prosperous.

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Posted on Friday, 18th January 2008 by Don Eagle

I normally wouldn’t want to publish anything from another website but the one below is just too good to pass up. The Business and Media Institute posted this list on it’s web site and I couldn’t have put it better.

 One of those things that really irritates most of us is how the old media tries to manipulate its news coverage to move public opinion to the way that most of them think. You know what I mean. Global warming is destroying the world; the US economy has been on the brink of a recession for the last 18 months and they just stand there cheering on every so called economic experts while censoring every economist who disagrees with the story they want you to see.

The Media’s Top 10 Economic Myths of 2007
Compiled by the Business & Media Institute

 10. Airlines are solely to blame for the unfriendly skies.
Media myth: Blame the airlines for all those flight delays; never mind the obsolete government-run agency creating the gridlock.

9. Consumer spending is the be-all, end-all of the economy.
Media myth: Without excessive consumer spending – especially at Christmastime – the U.S. economy will collapse.

8. The stock market is trouble, whether it goes up or down.
Media myth: One day the stock market can’t sustain growth; the next, we’re just one drop away from another crash.

7. Anyone who ‘denies’ global warming shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Media myth: Global warming could cause a ‘century of fires,’ just as it has created allergies and ended winter fashion. If we don’t do something now (i.e. spend hundreds of billions of dollars), it’s only going to get worse.

6. You’d better not eat/drink that!
Media myth: Forget the right to eat as you please; the nanny-state knows better.

5. Most Americans are losing their homes.
Media myth: Americans everywhere are losing their homes to foreclosure, and the housing bust is going to ruin the economy.

4. “Going Green” is good for America and business.
Media myth: Businesses are much better off if they go green, and that’s what people really want anyway.  

3. Lenders are responsible for everyone’s debts.
Media myth: Drowning in red ink isn’t your fault; blame the guy who loaned you the money.

2. Free health care would be great!
Media myth: To save our children and the 47 million uninsured Americans, and to keep up with the rest of the world, we must have government-run health care.

1. The U.S. Economy is in recession.
Media myth: The U.S. economy is nearly in, or is in, a recession.
 

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Posted on Friday, 11th January 2008 by Don Eagle

Hillary Care Mk II - Hillary Care has been designed to fail!

So here we go again. Not content with the public humiliation she suffered on her first try to socialize America’s health care system Mrs Clinton wants to take another crack at it.

Having worked, in Australia, as a press secretary for Dr Michael Wooldridge who was from 1996 to 2001, Australia’s Federal Minister for Health, I am more than well aware of just how a universal system of health care can universally lower the standards of health care. As an immigrant in the USA I am very impressed with the way in which private health care makes available a wide range of preventative health services at little or no cost. In Australia as in all other universal schemes such screenings and examinations are invariably rationed. Rationed is an interesting word in health care. If the USA does go down the well of Hillary Care or any of the other so called government partnerships currently being unashamedly proposed by just about all the Democrat candidates for president the American public needs to realize that many if not all these preventative health care measures will be ‘rationed’.

Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. Hillary Care has been designed to fail. It has been designed to encourage more amendments, more expenditure, more regulations and more control of the patient/doctor relationship. After all: He who pays the piper calls the tune! It was ever thus and ever will be.

In Australia Medicare, which under the John Howard Government is a model of expenditure control as far as universal health care schemes go, the federal government’s contribution to universal health care claims more than a third of its entire annual budget. Now if the population of the USA is 15 times that of Australia, and it is, the math becomes very easy and there is simply no way that the bill for Hillary Care can come in at 110 billion dollars. On her morning talk back radio show, Laura Ingraham is at least on the right path. Her estimate is to multiply it by a factor of 3.  Good try Laura but I think you are as usual being far too generous to the Democrats.

To this point I have talked only about the cost and I haven’t even bothered to go into the labyrinth of state government expenditure of state managed hospitals. That’s another cute little secret that is waiting for everyone somewhere down the well into which the Clintons are now trying to drag us. Hospitals and their management are not cheap. At this time in America they are at least more responsive to their customers (patients) than governments ever have been. Ask the veterans how good their treatment has been under successive administrations. Its not that US Presidents don’t care about care for veterans, it’s just that the massive and bloated bureaucracy gets in the way of delivering a high standard of health care. And that’s the way it!

Many years ago, while he was still alive, my father needed a hip replacement. In America that is a simple and straight forward procedure. In Australia that is anything but simple. Oddly enough in all the countries with universal health care a hip replacement is considered to be an elective operation. That is to say, not necessary or not really that important. For anyone who has required such an operation the pain is real and the need for a replacement is anything but elective. It is vitally important to the sustaining of anything remotely a quality of life. So my father was advised that his ‘elective’ procedure to relieve him of extreme pain would take place in 2 years time. Not 2 weeks or even 2 months which would have been bad enough but 2 years!!!

This is just one of an appalling litany of pain, degradation and humiliation to which most people have had to suffer in the name of so called fairness and equality. The failings of universal health care are many and varied. They range from ambulances driving around the major cities looking for a hospital that has an available bed and a doctor with sufficient skill to look after them to people who don’t have to pay for a doctor’s visit calling on one to come to their home at 3 in the morning to care for a child that is running a fever.

To understand that one you need to comprehend that people who are not employed or are otherwise poor enough receive a government health care card the entitles them to receive medical care without any form of co-payment. It is an incentive to disregard the consequences of poor health decisions. Decisions like poor diet, smoking, excessive consumption of alcohol, use of illicit drugs and narcotics are just a few of the issues to which the so called poor and underprivileged. Now I am a strong believer in the price mechanism to achieve any market goal. When you have to pay for the consequences of you behavior you will be more likely to alter that behavior but I am completely opposed to any government telling me what is in my own best interests. That is something between me and those with whom I freely choose to associate.

The prospect for combating Hillary Care or one of its variations is bleak. The main stream media is fully on board for this one. Early in his occupation of the ABC news anchor chair, Charles Gibson resorted to a flagrant abuse of national health statistics to mount and sustain an argument for a European style national health care regime. Most of the MSM are down for the fight on this one and the ‘news’ is going to be colored to support the Democratic Party argument. Get ready for ‘all the health economists are in agreement in support of Hillary Care’ and ‘the health insurance debate is over’.  So we’re going to be called Hillary Care deniers who just want to deny high quality health care to children, people of color and women. Yore all evil and have no social conscience.

We have all heard before but you’re going to hear it all again. The misuse of the statistics, the accusations and the greater good to which we need to sacrifice are about to rise again. The fact is the USA has the greatest system of private health insurance which has been supplemented by a Medicare system to ensure that everyone can receive adequate health care.

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Posted on Friday, 11th January 2008 by Don Eagle

A good friend of mine, a Republican, was telling me a couple of weeks ago that what the GOP needed was to turn to good solid Reagan Conservatism. Another friend of mine, a Democrat, told me that what the Republican Party needs is another Reagan. As an immigrant to the USA I only ever saw Ronald Reagan from the distant shores of Australia. Even then I was only ever permitted to see him through the prism of the left wing Australian media.

I now know that there was so much more to President Reagan than we were allowed to see while he was still in the White House.  In the days of 24 hours news and analysis, cable television, the internet and you tube it seems that politicians are just 2 dimensional cardboard cutouts of what they think we want them to be. The sad truth is that we are looking for the perfect candidate. Today, even the Democrats, who once cursed him with there every breath, are trying to claim his heritage.

Here is the thing: What the Republican Party needs is a candidate who believes in the same things that Ronald Reagan believed in. What the Republican Party needs is someone who genuinely believe that the United States is the last best hope for peace in the world. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, “America is not the problem, America is the solution!” It has been for a hundred years and it will be for the foreseeable future.

The Conservative Ronald Reagan believed in standing up for what he believed in even if it went against the prevailing elite opinion. He believed in American exceptionalism. He believed that one person can make a difference. He believed that America’s best days were still in front of us and not fading into the past.

Reagan believed in fighting communism and the evil Soviet empire when the prevailing academic and media opinion wanted us to continually negotiate with the USSR. Reagan didn’t. His idea was to stand up to them and test their resolve. The end result of the Reagan Administration was the defeat of Soviet Communism and the realization in Beijing that the only solution to their problems was capitalism.

All across the world communism and so many different forms of tyranny have fallen into the trash heap of history. Only the USA still stands.

In 1980 there was talk, after the failings of Jimmy Carter, that the Presidency had become too much for one man. After all, President Carter was so smart, so brilliant that if he couldn’t do the job then no one could.

Ronald Reagan didn’t believe that for one moment. Didn’t he tell us that he didn’t want Jimmy Carter’s job. He wanted to be President of the United States of America and what a President he was.

So what is Reagan Conservatism? It is the belief that the American people are capable of anything they set there minds to. It is the belief that the American people will prevail against all forms of tyranny. It is the belief that the American people can do it for themselves without relying on government welfare. It is the belief that no matter what attacks we suffer we will always rise up and defend ourselves.

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Posted on Friday, 21st December 2007 by John Martin

Thank You troops

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Posted on Thursday, 20th December 2007 by Don Eagle

Campaign finance – ethical problems.

Norman Hsu.

Planted questions

Smears about drugs and Obama

   Wikipedia gives a definition to the term ‘Plausible deniability’ which satisfied me as I pondered the latest gafts from the Hillary Clinton campaign on Senator Obama’s alleged drug use. Of course Mrs Clinton made no mention of this. It was a very senior campaign aide who duly resigned (or was that fired) allowing Mrs Clinton to say that, of course she had nothing to do with these terrible smears. “Plausible deniability is the term given to the creation of loose and informal chains of command in governments and other large organizations. In the case that assassinations, false flag or black ops or any other illegal or otherwise disreputable and unpopular activities become public, high-ranking officials may deny any connection to or awareness of such act, or the agents used to carry out such act.” Wikipedia.The problem for Hillary Clinton is that there have been far too many such denials and admissions of ignorance in a very short period of time leading us to the position where plausible denial is rapidly becoming implausible denial.Let’s go over some of the more obvious ones. Illegal campaign donations. This is a really good one to start with because it is one most favored by the Clintons themselves. The belief here in the Clinton ca,paign is that it doesn’t matter where the money comes from or how dirty it is just so long as no one catches you taking it. No one should be surprised that the Clinton Campaign has had to give back more illegal campaign donations than all the other campaigns (Democrat and Republican) combined!While the story of the Norman Hsu is typical of the Clinton’s fast and loose assiciations with donors of dubious reputations is widely known and his criminal past widely known it seems that Mrs Clinton had no idea that he was so deeply involved in in arranging so many illegal contributions to her campaign.Planting questions at Town Hall meetings.That Hillary got away with denying any knowledge of this one staggers the imagination. It is transparently obvious that Mrs Clinton must have known all about this one all alomg because she must have known who to ask. Why would her staff go to all that trouble of planting someone with a question for which their candidate was well prepared and not let her know or at the very least prompt her to choose the person they had chosen. Quite simply it doesn’t pass the smell test. Yet there she was on national television ‘innocently proclaiming her abundant ignorance. Whatever Hillary Clinton might be, it is not ignorant. Perhaps deceitful, dishonest and devious might be better descriptions but then again the 1990’s, as we all saw, were about deceit and dishonesty. That is one that I will have to talk about very soon.Let us then come to the smears and politics of personal destruction of Senator Barak Obama. I won’t bother you with the latest details of Billy Shaheen’s attempts to paint the Illinois senator as a drug trafficker were the Clinton technique of personal destruction at its most crude and obvious. This one has Bill and Hillary’s fingerprints all over it. Plausible Deniability?? Not a chance. This time it must be declared that the New York senator in her campaign for her party’s presidential nomination has crossed the line and her continual denials and admissions of ignorance can only be described as implausible deniability. Let me know what you think. 

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