HALF-FULL REPORT 05/25/12

For the first time ever, the HFR Hero of the Week is a dyed-in-the-wool Dem. A bio summary:

Played varsity football at and graduated from Stanford, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Yale Law School J.D.  Home town controlled by corrupt Dem crooks, ran against the machine, elected mayor in 2006, had previous crook mayor prosecuted who was sent to federal prison. 

City one of the most crime-infested in America, as mayor he reduces murder rate to lowest since 1941.  Saves a woman’s life whose home was on fire, suffering second-degree burns.  Reelected to second term in 2010, numerous awards for city’s progress on economic revival and reducing drugs, crime and unemployment.

On Sunday, May 20, he appeared on NBC’s Meet The Press, denouncing on national television Zero’s Romney-is-a-vampire campaign ad as "nauseating":

"We’re getting to a ridiculous point in America. I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people invest in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses.  This kind of stuff is nauseating to me."

Yes, he’s the Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Cory Booker.

Of course, he’s still a Dem and in racial solidarity with Zero, so when the BM exploded in condemnation (Chrissie Tingle-Leg had a meltdown), he tried to walk back his remarks and re-pledged undying absolute total unwavering complete support for His Zeroness.  Too late, the massive mischief couldn’t be undone, as Zero Campaign HQ went into full damage control mode.

That effort had to go into overdrive when prominent Dems defended Booker and said he was right.  Lib BM journalist Bob Schieffer of CBS said, "Mitt Romney is not the robber baron the Obama folks would have you believe."  Commiecrat Van Jones tweeted "An urban mayor who nearly DIED saving neighbor from a fire, has earned right 2 demand integrity & courage from other leaders."  Dem Senator Mark Warner stoutly defended Bain Capital.

The RNC took immediate advantage of the gift-wrapped opportunity, sending out "I Stand with Cory!" emails and web ads.  Another week, another campaign disaster for Zero.

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More disasters.  In the Dem primaries on Tuesday (5/22), Zero didn’t even have an opponent in Kentucky, yet 42% of Dems refused to vote for him, voting for "Uncommitted" instead.  In Arkansas, his opponent was a nobody who got 41%.  No wonder the lefties at The Politico are complaining that Obama Stumbles out of the Gate.  They even sadly report that Romney is out-fundraising Zero, $402 to $340 million so far, and puzzled that Zero has found "fundraising to be harder than expected."

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And the attack on Bain Capital and private equity?  Even The WaPo is laughing at that, saying today (5/25) that "Obama’s Public Equity Record Is the Real Scandal." 

Zero, the WaPo reports, has wasted "billions of taxpayer dollars in private businesses… (that) have turned out to be unmitigated disasters – leaving in their wake bankruptcies, layoffs, criminal investigations and taxpayers on the hook for billions."  After listing "just a few of Obama’s public equity failures," it then condemns Zero’s massive corruption:

"71 percent of the Obama Energy Department’s grants and loans went to individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party. Collectively, these Obama cronies raised $457,834 for his campaign, and they were in turn approved for grants or loans of nearly $11.35 billion."

This is in the liberal BM bastion of the Washington Post today.  The demonization of Romney the Capitalist is failing, and the realization of Zero the Crook is finally beginning. 

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On Wednesday, Mitt Romney did something very interesting.  He declared war on the Teachers Unions.  You might want to peruse his entire speech to the Latino Coalition in DC as it’s really good, but here’s the war declaration:

"Imagine if your enterprise had a 25% to 50% failure rate in meeting its primary goal.  You would consider that a crisis.  You would make changes, and fast.  Because if you didn’t, you’d go out of business.  But America’s public education establishment shows no sense of urgency.  Instead, there is a fierce determination to keep things the way they are.

Here we are in the most prosperous nation, but millions of kids are getting a third-world education. And, America’s minority children suffer the most.  This is the civil-rights issue of our era.  It’s the great challenge of our time… 

The teachers unions are the clearest example of a group that has lost its way.  Whenever anyone dares to offer a new idea, the unions protest the loudest. Their attitude was memorably expressed by a long-time president of the American Federation of Teachers: 

He said, quote, ‘When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of children.’

The teachers unions don’t fight for our children.  That’s our job.  And our job keeps getting harder because the unions wield outsized influence in elections and campaigns…  the teachers unions are one of the Democrats’ biggest donors – and one of the President’s biggest campaign supporters.  So, President Obama has been unable to stand up to union bosses – and unwilling to stand up for kids. 

President Obama has made his choice, and I have made mine: As president, I will be a champion of real education reform in America, and I won’t let any special interest get in the way.  We have to stop putting campaign cash ahead of our kids."

Note Romney’s two-fer:  Going straight after the Dem’s teacher union cash cow, while giving this speech to a Hispanic audience whom he tells the education of their kids is the real civil rights issue today (not the Dems’ pathetic claim it’s homosexual marriage).  This guy is not dumb.

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Wander into any Washington watering hole now and spot a gaggle of GOP Hill staffers or think-tankers engaged in a voluble debate, you can bet what the subject is:  who will be Romney’s VP pick?  The standard joke is that it will be an IBWG (ib-wig):  an Incredibly Boring White Guy, no Palin out-of-the-blue shockers.

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels has taken himself out of the running.  There’s a lot of talk now about Ohio Sen. Rob Portman.  If Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker wins and blows away the Dem recall on June 5 as expected, there will be a feeding frenzy of focus upon him.

There’s another white guy getting attention now, but he’s far from boring – General David Petraeus, currently Zero’s Director of the CIA which Zero has screwed repeatedly.

I don’t think it’s going to be any of these, indeed any white guy at all (although Walker stands the best chance among them).  I don’t think it will be Marco Rubio, for as good as he is in many ways, he has no executive experience in either government or business.  That’s a necessary condition for Romney.

It almost has to be a governor with solid achievements, who will be his liaison to all the other Pub governors with whom he’ll work to devolve fed power back to the states.  It could be Walker, it could be New Mexico’s Susana Martinez.  The odds are increasing, however, that the governor who’ll get Romney’s call will be Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.

Besides being an exceptional governor and fully capable of organizing a Romney "Second Cabinet" of GOP govs, Jindal is clearly the guy to spearhead Romney’s education reform program.  Last month (4/12), Jindal achieved for his state what is being called "the most sweeping education reform in American history." 

It’s been dubbed Schoolhouse Rocked, and Jindal wiped the floor with the Louisiana teachers unions in the process.

It’s not a done deal by any means, and any announcement is a long ways off, but do not be in the least surprised the ticket ends up being Romney-Jindal.

Oh, and about that foreign policy thing for a VP pick.  The most important foreign policy issue the US faces is the one with Red China.  There is only one country in all Asia capable of standing up to China – prickly, testy, hard-to-get-along-with India.  Can you imagine how pro-America India would be with an Indian-American (his parents were born in India’s Punjab; he was born in Baton Rouge) as Vice-President? Big geopolitical deal.

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Let’s wander over to Europe.  Romney sure could put a pledge by David Cameron to good use.  The British Prime Minister is promising to light a bonfire of government regulations to get his government bureaucrats out of the way of Britain’s economy.  Entire huge volumes of rules and regs are to be put to the torch.  That’s the kind of book burning we can get behind.  Romney should promise just such a bonfire of his own. 

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Meanwhile, it was Caught in Catch-22 Day in Brussels on Wednesday (5/23).  EU leaders confabed there about how to solve their euro crisis and accomplished precisely nothing.  New French President Francois Hollande led a "Latin Bloc" with Spain and Italy in tow to browbeat Angela Merkel into bankrupting Germany in a bailout of deadbeats like Greece.

Merkel was polite and demur, while letting her Northern Bloc allies (leaders of  Holland, Finland, and Estonia) to thank Hollande for sharing.  It seems clear they are willing to take the hit of a Grexit – Greece leaving the euro, called by some Drachmageddon. 

Greeks, meanwhile remain in total denial over its reality (isn’t that true of all moochers?) – so much so that most of them have kept all their money (now in euros) in their local Greek bank accounts rather than yank them and put them somewhere else like Bulgaria.

All those stay-behind euros are going to be drachmatized and worth pennies.  It’s going to be a cold shower wake-up for a lot of folks on this side of the Atlantic about what gigantic unrepayable debt can do to a currency.

And it’s not stopping in Grece.  Spain’s banks are downgraded and the government has to borrow billions at 6.3% to pay its bills.  Italy is close behind.  France has parliamentary elections in mid-June, with Communists set to get a lot of seats as they’re mad Hollande isn’t hard left enough. The French economy hasn’t got a chance.

It’s going to be ugly, with the full impact on our economy in our faces by October.  Zero will scream, "It’s not my fault!  Things are beyond my control!"  Everyone will tune him out.

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The best discussion of the EU Crisis this week is by Janet Daley of the London Telegraph.  Her words apply equally to Zero’s vision for America.  The mandarins of Brussels want "a fictional currency that can be expanded at will to prop up an ideological delusion."  That delusion is the mandarins’ "insistence that the EU be a vehicle for democratic socialism."

As a consequence, "unfeasibly enormous social security and entitlement promises were made on the basis that the free market would always provide. Nobody bothered to ask what would happen when the market faltered or fluctuated (as genuinely free markets do) or when the sense of entitlement outgrew the wealth that could be created."

"How long," she asks, "will freedom survive in the face of mass rage at the loss of the economic security that has come to be seen as a basic human right?"

Not long in Greece.  How long in America?  Right now, the producers still outnumber the moochers. We have one last chance to retain and even expand that ratio in November.  If America blows that chance, the ratio will flip, for that is Zero’s goal.  Then the EU’s fate and worse will be ours. 

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President Cowpie.  Zero added to his long list of earned nicknames – President Evolve, President I Killed Bin Laden, President Gutsy Call, President On My Behalf – last night (5/24) in Iowa when he accused Romney of giving voters "a cowpie of distortion" on deficit spending.

Emperor Hussein really stepped in it with that one.  His entire presidency has been nothing but "a cowpie of distortion."  Now for him to pose as a fiscal conservative is simply Orwellian – Krauthammer labeled his ludicrous claim that federal spending, under his administration, has risen at the lowest pace in 60 years "an unbelievable distortion of the truth… the whopper of the year."

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Well, we’re one week away from the Seascape Rendezvous.  I’m so looking forward to having a marvelous time with fellow TTPers.  For now, hope you all have an enjoyable Memorial Day weekend.  Originally called Decoration Day after the custom of decorating Civil War soldiers’ graves with flowers, Memorial Day is when we commemorate and honor all American soldiers who have died in battle.

There will be many platitudes by many politicians on Monday regarding how the soldiers buried at Arlington and other military cemeteries died so we can be free.  Some will be heartfelt and the tears accompanying them genuine.  Some will not.  It’s hard to believe that those of Emperor Hussein’s will be.

For you and me, perhaps the best way to honor our soldiers’ sacrifice is to take a quiet moment of solitude and express to ourselves the gratitude we feel in our hearts.  The lesson they teach us is simple and profound:  freedom is worth dying for.

There are many US military cemeteries across America and elsewhere.  Here is a photo collection of 20 US Military Cemeteries in Europe where 104,366 American soldiers are interred.  We are here because they are there.