Explanation of the State of the Union Address

The above is the cover of this week's Globe Magazine. According to the Globe's website:

"President Barack Obama has blown $10 million on drunken White House parties, Washington insiders tell GLOBE. This week's Special Report rips the lid off the Commander-in-chief's outrageous antics, including boozy conga lines and dinners featuring $150-a-pound Japanese beef! It's must reading for every American."

Roots of American Political Parties -- and What to Do about Them

Town of Olive Conservative Party chair Chris Johansen sent me this link by Ryan Burgett of the Classical Liberal site. Burgett gives a fine thumbnail sketch of the origins of the Republican Party. The Republicans were traditionally the big government party and the Democrats were motivated by the populism of William Jennings Bryan to adopt the Republican perspective from the working man's point of view. Of course, that would be squaring the circle. The Democrats have been as much the party of the rich as have been the big government Republicans. The chief avenues of subsidy to the rich are the Federal Reerve Bank, which is responsible for the super-sized advances in the stock market since the 1940s and government regulation that serves to protect large industry, which has lower per unit compliance costs, from smaller competitors.

The solution to this is not just what Burgett concludes, vote your conscience. Rather, it is to get involved with the nomination process and demand that any and every candidate whom you support reveal their true beliefs.

Two litmus tests:

1. "Where do you stand on the 2008-9 bailout of Wall Street? Would you in similar circumstances have liquidated the investment banks or paid them trillions via TARP, the bailout monies and the hidden subsidies from the Federal Reserve Bank that have been much larger?"

2. "Outline specific steps that you will take to cut government waste."

If a candidate cannot answer these two questions clearly, he or she is not a good candidate.

The Worst State of the Union Address in Modern Times

Calling last night's state of the union address the worst in modern times, Jim Crum just sent me this link to Politics Daily, which offers a useful analysis of the spectacle:

"What made the speech a bit bizarre, and somewhat alarming, is how detached from reality the president is. After having spent much of his time blaming his predecessor for his own failures, he said he was "not interested in re-litigating the past." Barack Obama lamented waging a "perpetual campaign" – even though that is what the president, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gibbs and others in his employ do on a daily basis. He said, "Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, is just part of the game" – yet his White House has played that very game with zest and delight."

Ann Coulter Is a Right-On Woman

Don't worry, I'm not drawing any analogies to Sappho. Rather, I am referring to Coulter's outstanding post on World Net Daily yesterday about the Democrats' cozy relationship with Wall Street. Obama's recent pretense of criticizing Wall Street amounts to crocodile tears. Some sources put the dollar value of the Bush-Obama welfare subsidies to the Street at $14 trillion, an order of magnitude greater than any other corrupt subsidy in the history of the world.

Coulter quotes a book that I am putting on my to-be-read list: Peter Schweizer's "Architects of Ruin". Coulter notes that the Dems bailed out Wall Street with respect to Mexico's debt defaults:

"Clinton's treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, former chairman of Goldman, demanded that the U.S. bail out Mexico to save his friends at Goldman. He said a failure to bail out Mexico would affect 'everyone,' by which I take it he meant 'everyone in my building.'"

On the other hand:

"At congressional hearings on Clinton's proposed Mexico bailout a decade later, Republicans Larry Kudlow, Bill Seidman and Steve Forbes all denounced the plan to save Goldman Sachs via a Mexican bailout."

But let us not get overly partisan. Recall that it was George W. Bush who proposed last year's and 2008's massive bailout, the biggest in history. And it was Richard M. Nixon who was responsible more than anyone else for the inflationary late 1970s.

But Coulter is showing considerably more anti-Fed spunk than I've seen from any mainstream commentator since my days with Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party (just kidding, my students think I'm that old).

Let us hope that Fox News, which applauded the bailout in 2008 when it mattered, will take a fresh look at its policies on money and the Fed.