Category: US Politics
The analysis published under this category are as follows.Saturday, June 07, 2008
Personal Reflections on the Crisis in America- Reagon and Clinton- Part2 / Politics / US Politics
“The Reagan Revolution”After Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency, I worked for two years at the U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs, which was an extension of the White House consumer office. The president's special assistant for consumer affairs was now Virginia Knauer, who had held the same office under President Richard Nixon, and for whom I wrote speeches and reports. We were afraid that with the Reagan cuts of the federal civilian budget our office would be abolished, but that didn't happen.
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Friday, June 06, 2008
Personal Reflections on the Crisis in America- Carter White House and Monetary Reform - Part1 / Politics / US Politics
I moved back to Williamsburg a year ago, after retiring from the federal government, in order to live write at the home of my elderly mother. She resides near the Restored Area, a half-mile from the reconstructed colonial Capitol. At this site on May 15, 1776 , the Second Virginia Convention voted 112-0 to instruct its delegates in Philadelphia to enter a motion for independence. If the U.S. was born in Philadelphia , it was conceived here.Read full article... Read full article...
Wednesday, June 04, 2008
Obama Victory and America's Two Party Dictatorship / Politics / US Politics
Each election cycle, hope springs eternal. Candidates promise change and voters buy it. Intelligent ones. People who know better or should. The current campaign highlights it. A surge is building for Obama, not for what he is. For what people think or hope he is - a populist, progressive, man of the people, a new course for America.After the final June 3 primaries and "rush of superdelegates," according to The New York Times, they're stuck with him. The Times reports that he crossed "over the threshold (to) the 2118 delegates needed to be nominated...." Obama marked the occasion as his chance to "bring a new and better day to America (as) the 'Democratic' nominee for president of the United States of America."
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Tuesday, June 03, 2008
Sowing More Big Government with the Farm Bill / Politics / US Politics
Recently Congress sent the latest Farm Bill to the president. The bill features brand new federal programs, expansion of existing subsidies, more food stamps and more foreign food aid. This bill hits the taxpayer hard, while at the same time ensuring food prices will remain elevated. The president vetoed the bill, citing concerns over its costs and subsidies for the wealthy in a time of high food prices and record farm income. Nevertheless, this over-reaching, government-expanding Farm Bill will soon be law.Read full article... Read full article...
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Investigate Big Congress, Not Big Oil / Politics / US Politics
With gasoline prices exceeding $4 a gallon in some states, politicians are responding as usual: Blame Big Oil First. Several prominent senators have once again summoned industry leaders to Capitol Hill, subjecting them to yet another barrage of rhetorical questions, interruptions, accusations, and sermons. The lawmakers' goal, claims Sen. Patrick Leahy, is to identify "causes of the rising price of oil on which Congress can act." But the foregone conclusion is that "price gouging," "collusion," and "market manipulation" by Big Oil, or speculation by financiers, is responsible.Read full article... Read full article...
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
After Hillary, Voting for Obama's Slick Rhetoric? / Politics / US Politics
This general election more than most will test the courage of voters to avoid lesser-evil strategic voting that has propped up our two-party plutocracy. People with intelligence and conscience must resist peer pressure and the temptation to vote against John McCain by voting for Barack Obama.Of course, a McCain presidency that pursues much of the same policies and values of the totally inept and morally bankrupt Bush administration is something to loathe. But lesser-evil voting sustains our corrupt political system.
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Friday, May 02, 2008
Barack Obama Buckles Under Media Pressure / Politics / US Politics
Obama is "outraged" - After weeks of blistering attacks by the media, Barak Obama held a press conference yesterday and made it official; his friendship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright is over, terminated, kaput. He would no longer associate with a man who believed that the United States of America could do horrible things to its people or that 9-11 might have been the result of US foreign policy. As Obama said, that's just "outrageous".Read full article... Read full article...
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Barack Obama's Uncomfortable Itch Problem / Politics / US Politics
I finally figured out why Obama so often looks uncomfortable, impatient and annoyed. He never seems to be a regular guy. One who can enjoy his public opportunities at local eateries and indulge himself like a real American enthralled with delicious unhealthy foods. To joyously let loose and just be a happy black guy able to live in a millionaire´s McMansion and have a shot at being president after hardly learning how to be a senator. Why?Read full article... Read full article...
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Hilary Clinton Knocks Out Barack Obama / Politics / US Politics
Now is the time for Hilary Clinton to take a bold position that in one brilliant, courageous stroke shows the nation that she is more willing to pursue true reforms of the two-party plutocratic political system than Obama is.With this position she can reveal that all the Obama talk about change is just a clever campaign strategy to seduce people who rightfully are fed up with politics as usual.
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Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Political log Rolling in Clinton Country / Politics / US Politics
It was just an old-fashioned case of political log rolling. In this case, the Clinton campaign approached a Democratic county commissioner and held up a political carrot-if the commissioner, the only Democrat of the three commissioners, would endorse Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, they would do their best to provide President Bill Clinton as a speaker in the commissioner's county.Read full article... Read full article...
Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Obama's Capital Gains Tax is a Tax on Economic Growth / Politics / US Politics
Obama proposes to raise capital gains taxes. Only a thoroughgoing economic illiterate could sincerely declare that such taxes would not damage the US economy. (Economic policies that damage the economy do not bother Dems so long as their media pals can lay blame at the at the feet of capitalism or Republicans).Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, April 07, 2008
US Presidential Investment Politics: Jobs and The Economy / Politics / US Politics
Who wants to be a president; the President of the United States? Social Security reform is the winning ticket. Research supports the thesis that Social Security reform would provide all the lubrication necessary to get our economic ball bearings rolling in the right direction. Economies do not grow, or increase employment, when job providers are taxed and regulated unmercifully, throttling their energy, creativity, and profitability. Consumer spending pushes the economy; we need to do more than hand out a few hundred bucks.Read full article... Read full article...
Monday, April 07, 2008
Will the US go Protectionist? / Politics / US Politics
It's a ritual that repeats every four years, first during the US Presidential primaries and then later the election itself – the candidates stomp the prairies, and industrial heartlands, with promises to better the lot of the American worker in today's global economy. Fair trade not free trade is a particularly popular slogan. Then comes the election and the installation of the new President and it is more or less business as usual: more free trade agreements, more Doha rounds and more mock battles between the Executive and Legislative branches over environmental and health and safety standards, which are the codes words official Washington uses for its fairly mildly protectionists policies. Globalisation supported by huge commercial and financial interests pushes ahead remorselessly.Read full article... Read full article...
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Clinton-Obama Fracas Ignores Voter Call for Revolution / Politics / US Politics
What should be the real issue of the 2008 presidential election is being lost in the noise of the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama fracas. According to polls, three-fourths of Americans say the country is headed in the wrong direction. This is an astounding statistic. At other times and in other places, revolution would be in the air.
But is there any indication that something truly substantial might change starting with the election of a new president eight months from now? Something that would take the U.S. in a radically new direction?
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Sunday, March 09, 2008
US Elections- Why the Press Corp Keeps Getting it Wrong / Politics / US Politics
Shortly before the primary votes this past week, Newsweek called Barack Obama's surge to the Democratic nomination “inevitable.” It also called for Hillary Clinton to “start campaign for Sen. majority leader.” Newsweek was one of only dozens of national media that made that “analysis.” But the voters had their own ideas.Read full article... Read full article...
Sunday, March 02, 2008
US Election Make or Break Tuesday for Democrats Clinton and Obama / Politics / US Politics
It makes a refreshing ' CHANGE' as we have heard so many times over recent months, to have a real election campaign especially given today's hand picked Russian pseudo-election which effectively re-elects Putin for another 8 years.Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, February 28, 2008
US Election Investor Political Priorities - A Survey / Politics / US Politics
Here we are, in the midst of a presidential campaign, trying to select a new leader for what is still the most economically powerful nation on Earth. The candidates are kissing all the babies they can get their palms on and smiling until their cheek muscles ache; but will they be able to produce any of the changes they talk about? Do we really want them to?Read full article... Read full article...
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Obama Beating Clinton - Hope Prevails Over Help / Politics / US Politics
Hope mongering has been working much better than experience mongering. Now, the rest of the story….As befits American culture, politics is all about slick selling to the masses. Hillary Clinton is selling Day-1 help to victims and sufferers. Barack Obama is selling effervescent hope to yes-we-can dreamers. This media hyped horse race is like a fight between diet Coke and diet Pepsi, artificially sweetened candidates devoid of real nourishment.
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Monday, February 18, 2008
President Bush's African Safari to Find Friendly Faces / Politics / US Politics
President Bush is in Africa this week, sulking because he didn't get his way.In one of the rare times the past seven years, the House of Representatives, now under Democrat control for the first time in 12 years, defended the Constitution and refused to allow the President to bully it with a program of fear mongering. He really tried, though.
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Monday, February 18, 2008
The Democrats and the US Economy: Facts and Fallacies / Politics / US Politics
Democrats are doing what they do best: promising what they cannot possibly deliver, particularly when it comes to the economy. Listening to Dems pronounce on the economy is tantamount to "cruel and unusual punishment". What these clowns don't understand is that economics is a highly theoretical discipline with particular characteristics of its own, the main one being that economic problems tend to require long chains of complex reasoning. It is this inherent difficulty that gives rise to an abundance of fallacies and explains why people, seeing only the immediate effects of a particular policy or investment decision, tend to fall into the fallacy of composition and assume the same must hold for the economy as a whole.Read full article... Read full article...