Congressman Ron Paul disavows letters which he says he did not write (syndicated columnist Gary Weiss, The Street – Freeman website, Dec. 28, “Ron Paul captures the crackpot vote").
Contrast that Christmas-sized portion of hate doled to Paul to your handling of Barack Obama.
In
2008, there was no criticism of then-Sen. Obama’s associations with
anti-Semites and felons, to include Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and
Father Pfleger. In contrast, Weiss convicts Paul without trial.
Paul
is the only candidate to question both parties’ refusal to discuss the
bipartisan commitment to the Federal Reserve Bank and its creation of
income inequality by diverting wealth from the public to Wall Street.
As
Nicola Matthews and James Felkerson of the Jerome Levy Institute
reveal, in the past few years the Fed has purchased $29 trillion in
assets. The assets were financed with dollars the Fed printed from thin
air.
We have not felt the effects because central banks prop up the dollar.
To the extent that the toxic assets are less than the $29 trillion, there is a loss to the public, likely in the trillions.
The entire American GDP is about $14 trillion.
But that’s the least of it.
By tripling the money supply since 2008 (from $800 billion
to nearly $3 trillion), the Fed and the two major parties have opened the door
to the money center banks increasing the American money supply 30-fold.
The potential instability exceeds that of the 1930s.
So far, only Paul has raised these issues.
Maybe I can see Weiss’ point:
Why discuss the Fed when there are plentiful opportunities in the op-ed market
to call Paul, R-Texas, and his supporters names, but few to discuss substantive
issues?
Several people from the Kingston/Rhinebeck Tea Party have commented on Congressman Hinchey's assault and battery of Kingston Freeman reporter Bill Kemble.
One notes:
>Mo needs a "Time Out". We make our kids sit on the first step when they misbehave. Mo has been misbehaving for a long time.
He is too powerful and too arrogant. It's time for Mo to Go.
Let's put him on the first step This November.
Another provides some additional evidence about the assault:
>And they were right next to me when it happened. Kemble was showing Hinchey a paper from Tivoli about a plan to bring ferry service to the "Hinchey Hotel" and Hinchey got all flustered." He had a glare in his eye that could kill. I looked away for a moment and then from the corner of my eye saw Hinchey shoving Kemble. While one of Hinchey's staff was trying to get Hinchey to back off I yelled, "let me get my camara" and Hinchey took off. Hinchey actually shoved Kemble into someone who was headed into the bathroom. A friend of mine who was in the lobby saw it as well.
>I recall it was only about two years ago that Hinchey had a similar encounter with someone at a gun show in Rosendale where he grabed a guy by the neck. I understand from people who knew him as a teenager that this is the same type of behavior that as a teenager led a judge to give him a choice between going to jail or enlisting in the military."
>YNN television (h/t Robin Yess) describes the spin that Hinchey's campaign is putting on his violent behavior here. It is ironic that the Democratic Party condones violence among its elected officials but criticizes anyone whose lifestyle choices are politically incorrect.
George Phillips has questioned Congressman Maurice Hinchey's involvement in a real estate project in Saugerties called the Partition Street project. Hinchey has long claimed that he has brought "pork" to the Ulster County economy. The problem with this claim is that the Ulster County economy's growth has been zero since Hinchey was elected. While the rest of the nation has gained 20% in employment, Ulster County's employment number has not grown at all; it has been two percent over Hinchey's eighteen year tenure. The stagnant economy is directly related to the regulation and high taxes, and specifically the environmental regulation that Hinchey has put into place. In other words, Hinchey has directly cost Ulster County 17,000 jobs. Stupidly, he has been advertising that he has brought 1,000 "green" jobs into the county. Given that the county's job growth has been nearly zero, Hinchey appears to be unable to figure out that a gain of 1,000 jobs compared to a loss of 18,000 jobs yields the result of his 18 years in office: a loss of 17,000 jobs. Moreover, and even more disgustingly, Hinchey and his cronies appear to have benefited financially from many of the "pork" projects that he paradoxically claims have helped the Ulster County economy. Paradoxically because the Ulster County economy has underperformed the national economy by 20% over Hinchey's 18 year tenure.
Hinchey started out life as a Saugerties "tough guy" with a pack of cigarettes tucked in his rolled up shirt sleeve. In the video above, Hinchey's aggressive, authoritarian nature shines through. Authoritarianism is linked to antisemitism, of which Ed Koch has recently accused Hinchey. It is not surprising, then, that Hinchey actually became violent following the above video clip and physically attacked left-wing Kingston Freeman reporter Bill Kemble. According to hotair.com:
After the shooters turned off their cameras and started to break down, Hinchey made a beeline for Kemble and got in his face, according to a YNN videographer who was on the scene. The congressman poked Kemble in the chest aggressively, according to the YNN staffer.
I spoke with Kemble briefly this afternoon, and he told me Hinchey “put his hand on my throat” and then “realized what he had done and walked away.” The YNN shooter told me he did not witness this part of the altercation.
It is amazing and disappointing to my opinion of the electoral process that an individual as ugly as Maurice Hinchey has been given access to the reins of power in Washington. From the likes of Hinchey totalitarianism is born.
Phil Orenstein of Democracy Project has blogged in support of Steve Levy's candidacy for governor. According to the video below, Mr. Levy has a strong record in Nassau County. He is a Democrat who aims to run as a "post partisan" candidate. Academics coined the term "post modern" a generation ago and "post partisan" is indubitably a corollary. Indubitably.
I am not yet convinced that Mr. Levy is the candidate of choice. We need to ask more questions.
Mr. Levy's candidacy is controversial. Mike Long, the head of the Conservative Party, suggested in the New York Post yesterday that given the massive failure of the Democratic Party to manage the state's economy competently, the Republicans ought not nominate a Democrat. This is the very sort of thing I had previously feared from Republicrat Edward F. Cox. Also, the article reports allegations that there is a corrupt deal involving Edward F. Cox's son, Chris Cox, who like his father desires a nepotism deal, and Suffolk Republican Chair John Lavalle:
"There has long been a rumor that Cox, Levy and Suffolk Republican chair John LaValle have a domino-style deal going, with the main goal being to get Chris Cox nominated in his own seven-way primary in Suffolk. Ed Cox has strenuously denied it."
If so, this is not the sort of candidacy the Tea Party ought to support. We need clarification of Mr. Levy's relationship to Ed Cox and John Lavalle.
Which is not to detract from Levy's record. Levy's website says that he has delivered "six consecutive operating budgets, each with a General Fund tax freeze or tax cut." He says in the video that he has cut spending for two consecutive years. His website adds that he "has delivered three operating budgets with spending lower than the previous year's adopted levels -- a record that is unprecedented in Suffolk County and extraordinarily rare in any level of government anywhere."
In his blog, Orenstein points out that in his Op Ed in the New York Post Levy said "no" to:
"the exorbitant pay and pensions of the County police officers, who are the highest paid police force in the world, (which) shows he is one of the rare politicians with backbone. We need a courageous figure to govern a state with the nation’s most dysfunctional legislature. Could Levy be a ray of light for our troubled state on the verge of fiscal disaster?"
We'll see. So far, the jury is out.
Despite the allegations of insider shenanigans, according to the Daily News Levy has already taken the initiative to develop a relationship with the Tea Party. The Daily News writes that Levy will hold an informational video conference with New York's Tea Parties.
According to his site, Levy has called for a state of emergency because of New York's incompetently managed budget. In a year when there was deflation, the state increased spending by nine percent, according to Levy. New York voters are undoubtedly to blame, electing the same tax-and-spend Democrats like Ulster County's Kevin Cahill year after year. New Yorkers never saw a wasteful or corrupt Democratic Party scheme that they could not support. Newspapers like the Kingston Freeman in my county are also to blame, refusing to take any initiative in demanding fiscal responsibility and providing ongoing propaganda for the massive waste in Albany. Millions have left this state, and the remaining population is mostly on the dole, but what do the editors of the Freeman care? When Wall Street crumbles, which it will, there is going to be a serious problem, with greedy unions and corrupt contractors clawing at each other for state handouts that are no longer available. New Yorkers will, undoubtedly, blame everyone but their greedy selves.
I am concerned that I did not see a prominent statement on Mr. Levy's site of the two chief fiscal issues facing the state: (a) the badly mismanaged Medicaid system, whose waste likely amounts to in excess of 15% of the entire state budget (yes, it is fair to say that 15% of the entire New York State budget is attributable to Medicaid waste) and (b) the egregious handling of the state's unions, specifically the Service Employees International Union and the New York State Union of Teachers in facilitating massive waste. I can blame Democrats like Ulster County's Kevin Cahill for the waste, but the fact is that during 12 years of the Pataki administration things only got worse. Governor Pataki failed to live up to his mandate, failed to curtail Medicaid waste, failed to rein in the bloat associated with the SEIU and failed to rein in administrative waste in the schools. What plan does Mr. Levy have to offer?
The Kingston Freeman editorialized in favor of President Obama's speech to school students. I wrote the following response:
Dear Editor:
Your editorial about Obama's speech is symptomatic of a division in American politics that is intensifying. Your Tuesday edition is riddled with it. The United States was built on the concept that private initiative and freedom maximize social welfare and that Americans ought to be free from government violence. Of course, the idea that government can be "violent" when it compels payment of taxes is alien to those on one side of the divide. But because of laissez-faire, the absence of government, the nation became the richest in the world, drawing huddled masses even as real wages grew two percent per year until the 1970s, when the effects of government expansion in the 1960s and expansion of Federal Reserve Bank power in 1971 began to take hold.
In the late 19th century, in part because Americans were awed by the German university and sent thousands of bright graduate students there, America's elite began to reject laissez-faire and began to advocate centralization and government violence, i.e., forcible extraction of taxes, redistribution of wealth (supposedly in the name of equality but inevitably toward the wealthy), and a wide range of failed government boondoggles that benefit the upper middle class at the expense of blue collar workers and small business. For the last century, newspapers and universities thus have advocated state expansion at the expense of freedom, individual initiative and entrepreneurship.
Thus, Pierre Angiel experiences bad advice from a government office about a badly designed government benefit plan, and, defying logic, his conclusion is to advocate total government control over all benefits. Patti Gibbons writes about corrupt and incompetent government in Kingston. And you editorialize that people who disagree with the President's statist ideology are wrong to shield their children from him.
President Obama was associated with hard leftists like Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger prior to his election. Other than this and his confused health care proposal, his policies largely mirror those of George W. Bush. In fact, his promise of change with respect to the Iraqi War and economic policy are belied by his reappointment of President Bush's Secretary of Defense and Federal Reserve chairman. The assumptions that have driven both Bush's and Obama's presidencies are that subsidies to big business via monetary policy, corrupt bailouts. expansion of failed government programs at the expense of America's working population, and in general, big business socialism, are essential. Along with many Americans, I submit that the specter of big business socialism that Bush and Obama represent is a threat to this nation. President Eisenhower, who was not addressing school children, made a similar point about the military industrial complex.
Americans are right to shield their children from President Obama's version of Bush socialism. America is a nation based on freedom, not devotion to authority. We ought not permit Big Brother access to the classroom.
Sincerely,
Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D. Town of Olive, West Shokan 845-657-8460
I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.
