Posted on By: Fred

Cheer-up, America! The Case for American Optimism

Look for moments of maximum pessimism. To the legendary value investor Sir John Templeton, this was the secret to learning how to buy low and sell high.

In recent months, I’ve been feeling the pessimism in a big way. You probably have too. Watching the scroll of headlines on cable news channels this summer, I thought I was in an overdone disaster film. Riots break out across the globe, screamed a Drudge headline. Markets were crashing. An earthquake cracked the Washington Monument. In my hands, Mark Steyn’s new book After America — a rollicking read that makes a strong case that we should prepare for the apocalypse — arrived perfectly timed with the S&P’s downgrade of the United States’ credit rating. The end, surely, seems nigh.

Continue Reading
Posted on By: Fred

FACT CHECK: Are rich taxed less than secretaries?

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama makes it sound like there are millionaires all over America paying taxes at lower rates than their secretaries.

“Middle-class families shouldn’t pay higher taxes than millionaires and billionaires,” Obama said Monday. “That’s pretty straightforward. It’s hard to argue against that.”

The data tells a different story. On average, the wealthiest people in America pay a lot more taxes than the middle class or the poor, according to private and government data. They pay at a higher rate, and as a group, they contribute a much larger share of the overall taxes collected by the federal government.

Continue Reading
Posted on By: Fred

The media’s love affair with a disastrous president

As the bad economic news continues to emanate from the United States — with a double-dip recession now all but certain — a reckoning is overdue. American journalism will have to look back at the period starting with Barack Obama’s rise, his assumption of the presidency and his conduct in it to the present, and ask itself how it came to cast aside so many of its vital functions. In the main, the establishment American media abandoned its critical faculties during the Obama campaign — and it hasn’t reclaimed them since.

Continue Reading
Posted on By: Fred

The Wacky World of Liberal Fundamentalism

The candidacies of Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, Bible-affirming Christians, predictably have ignited the liberal media’s zeal for exposing their allegedly odd if not wacko religious beliefs (see here). Support for some version of creationism, a faith in the efficacy of prayer, and actual belief in scriptural condemnation of homosexuality (among other religious views) are taken as prima facie evidence of presidential unsuitability. To be sure, millions of Americans (assumed to be ill-educated trailer-court denizens with rotting teeth and beer guts) may share these odd inclinations, but, at least according to liberal pundits, holding them betrays a lack of intellectual sophistication plus an aversion to modern science. Such antediluvian fundamentalism should, say the experts, have gone extinct with the Scopes Monkey Trials.

Continue Reading
Posted on By: Fred

Obama’s worst nightmare

President Obama can see the writing on the wall: His days in the White House are numbered. This is the real meaning of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s entry into the Republican presidential race. The GOP now has a candidate who can not only defeat Mr. Obama, but crush him.

For months, the mainstream media anointed Mitt Romney as the presumptive front-runner. The former Massachusetts governor is their ideal GOP candidate – a moderate technocrat from the Northeast, who flip-flopped on abortion and gay rights and enacted universal health care in his state. He is a Rockefeller Republican wolf in Reaganite clothing. His strongest asset is his business background. In a moribund economy, Mr. Romney came across as the only competent, experienced nominee who could kick-start the private sector. No longer.

Continue Reading
Posted on By: Fred

Raging At The Dying Of Their Light

Twice in recent years pleasant social events have been shattered by rage-filled outbursts when liberal men of a certain age learned that I disagreed with their views. In each case the rage with which perfectly polite disagreement was expressed suggested to me that more than political differences were involved. As time has passed, I have come to believe that the reactions I received represented a rage at the dying of all that which these men had embraced in the absolute certainty of the righteousness and soundness of their views, and their right to have them automatically accepted as the approved model for all right thinking people.

Continue Reading
Posted on By: Fred

Why I’m Still Glad John McCain Lost In 2008

Our country is in crisis. Not the kind of crisis liberals invent out of mid air but the kind that results from the implementation of their policies and brings a country to its knees (and proves the president a rank amateur and many of the legislators unsuited for office). We are in debt, we have an energy crisis, we have high unemployment, and we’re more worried about whether our enemies think we’re nice that we are with crushing them with our military might.

In a word: times are crazy.

Continue Reading
Posted on By: Fred

Tea Party, Fix Your Gaze On 2012

Debt Battle: The Tea Party has proved its power — and its principle. Now it’s time to declare an imperfect battlefield victory in 2011 and regroup for the more important struggle of defeating President Obama in 2012.

Champions of smaller government, low taxes and a freedom-driven economy shouldn’t expect whatever the end result of “Boehner 2.0” is to be worth very much cheering, especially after Harry Reid’s Senate gets through with it.

Continue Reading