The primary field really is bad–for Democrats. As the media and voters scrutinize the Republican contenders, it is easy to forget how weak and unpopular the incumbent is. Polls suggest a majority of Americans want to replace President Barack Obama in 2012, and Democrats are hitting the panic button–even as Obama enjoys a slight bounce in approval–because they realize he has failed.

In the end-of-the-year countdown spirit, here are the top ten Democrats who would be better presidential candidates than Barack Obama in 2012:

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10. Rep. Harold Ford, Jr.

Losing his Senate race in 2006 seems to have freed the former Tennessee congressman to speak his mind. He has bucked liberal dogma on foreign policy and the Keystone XL pipeline, and offers independent, common sense ideas.

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9. Sen. Joe Manchin

West Virginia’s junior senator can tout his experience as governor and his victory in a tough political climate. He appeals to independents with his opposition to climate change legislation, and his criticism of his own party’s stalling in the Senate.

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In 1978, New York City was crumbling and the leading indicator of America’s seemingly irreversible decline. The South Bronx, once a thriving middle-class neighborhood, had became a national symbol of urban horror. From 1960 to 1980, New York’s murder rate tripled. Out-of-control spending had brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy, leading to a state takeover of its finances. The city’s subway was plauged by crime, graffiti, and equipment breakdowns.

On July 13th, 1977, the city reached its nadir when a 24-hour blackout gave way to mass looting. Bushwick, a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, was practically burned to the ground.

Then in 1978, Edward Irving Koch became New York’s 105th Mayor.

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From the Associated Press:

The floats were there, the music and dancing, too—all the usual staples of one of the world’s oldest and largest gay pride parades. But this year, something new joined the spectacle on the streets of New York City: proposals and wedding plans.

New York’s parade turned into a carnival-like celebration of same-sex marriage Sunday as hundreds of thousands of revelers rejoiced at the state’s new law giving gay couples the same marital rights as everyone else.

“We’ve been waiting to get married in Central Park for years, and now we got here just in time for history to be made,” said Bryce Croft of Kettering, Ohio, who attended the festivities with her partner, Stephanie Croft.

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Most Americans are unaware (although readers of my website, AtlasShrugs.com, are well aware) of the atrocity that is taking place at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. The New York Times reported last Sunday that “a dispute” is taking place over the remains of 9/11 victims, “between some of the victims’ families and the officials planning the National September 11 Memorial and Museum underneath where the twin towers stood.”

The dispute has arisen, says the Times, because “officials plan to take the remains seven stories below ground and place them in the new museum behind a wall with a quotation from Virgil about never forgetting, studded in letters of World Trade Center steel. But the families, appalled by the idea of remains that could belong to their loved ones being turned into a lure for tourists, want them kept in a separate above-ground memorial that would be treated like hallowed ground.”

The remains of the victims of the September 11th Islamic attack on this country do not belong to those ghouls at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum (Ground Zero mosqueteer Daisy the Khan is on their advisory board). Sally Regenhard, who lost her son Christian on 9/11, explained: “I personally feel I’ve been robbed of access to where my son’s remains are potentially being buried. My entire family, we will never go in there. This is a post-traumatic stress situation waiting to happen.” Rosemary Cain, whose son George, a firefighter, was killed on 9/11, said that putting the remains in the museum was “like a freak show.”

However, the president of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, Joe Daniels, was fine with the freak show: “What the families need most and what the public needs most is a memorial they can come to to pay their respects at.” The hubris of this creep. He is going to tell the 911 family members what they need.

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All across the land, it would seem that there is but one story to be written regardless of the locale – and budget cuts are that story.  For years, rational legislators and commentators have warned American voters, and those legislators that have thrown economics to the wind, that spending beyond our means will lead to government meltdowns – and so it is today.

Here in California, during the recent State of the State by California Governor Jerry Brown – remarkable only for its brevity – Brown demanded more tax increases to “solve” the State’s now perennial budget crisis.  In doing so, he decried politics as usual but demanded policies as usual.  California has become the tax and spend capitol of the world (outside of Washington DC) and its budget next year will feature a $7.65 billion in debt repayment alone – more than it spends on public universities and more than the overall budget of 21 states.  By comparison, Wisconsin’s $137 million deficit seems quaint compared to California’s $20 billion+ deficit.

Brown also falsely claimed in his State of the State that no one was giving ideas on where else to cut and that if Republicans (and voters) didn’t go along with his tax hikes, he would cut deeper into education.  Brown didn’t offer to cut the state bureaucracy – he threatened to cut education funding – as Democrats are wont to do in order to scare voters.

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Wisconsin. Ohio. Michigan. New Jersey. New York. Budget-battle showdowns are coming soon to a statehouse near you.

Thousands of angry school teachers, union members, and their sympathizers have descended on capitals to fight against reducing pay and benefits for public employees. The protesters are up against a new crop of governors who are hell-bent on spending cuts to deal with deficits that may rise to combined $125 billion in the next fiscal year.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) is looking for public employees to pay $500 million towards benefits they’re currently receiving for free.

New Jersey’s Chris Christie is proposing public employees pick up 30 percent of their health care premiums. Wisconsin’s Scott Walker wants public employees to pay at least 13 percent of their health care premiums. And he wants state workers to start contributing to their retirements for the first time.

This newfound fiscal discipline comes after a virtually unchecked binge over the past 10 years during which state expenditures exploded by more than  80 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars, including big bumps in overall worker compensation.

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As the entire nation confronts the problem of unfunded mandates and bloated government spending, individual states are doing the same.

Republican governors Chris Christie (New Jersey) and Scott Walker (Wisconsin) are letting government unions know that they can no longer expect to receive the kind of benefits and pensions they were falsely promised by union leaders and past state politicians whose campaigns were funded by union coffers. These governors are handling the displaced anger of union members who are only beginning to experience a little of what private sector workers have known for years. They know that increasing taxes will only cause businesses to leave their states and wreak further hardship on taxpayers already reeling from a struggling economy. Governors Christie and Walker are letting union members know that they are not entitled to exceptional treatment when the state is “broke.”

Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo (New York) wants to cut his state’s budget for the first time in 17 years. He proposes to fire nearly 10,000 state workers unless they agree to $450 million of savings, and plans to close a $10 billion deficit without raising taxes or borrowing. His proposed cuts include Medicaid spending and aid to schools. Cuomo’s message is clear: the state of New York can no longer spend beyond its means.

On Wednesday, Connecticut’s new governor, Democrat Dannel Malloy, presented his first budget, one that includes a $1.5 billion tax hike in the first year and only slightly less in the second year of the two-year cycle. The tax increase is one of the largest in the state’s history, and one that will hit, primarily, middle class families. The governor hopes to raise income taxes, the state sales tax, and taxes on cigarettes, gasoline, alcohol, and estates. Malloy’s budget would eliminate a $500 property tax credit, a “tax-free” shopping week prior to school’s opening, and a sales tax exemption for clothing, haircuts, pet grooming, non-prescription drugs, car washes, and many other items and services. The governor and his advisers are referring to this tax hike as “shared sacrifice” in a state that is already one of the highest taxed in the nation.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss Jeffrey Immelt’s new job and the fiscal crisis facing many states.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

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Higher Taxes Wouldn’t End Some Deficits
Where the New Jobs Are: In Texas, not California.
Pej: Bankruptcy for the States?
Ben on the Cost of Medicaid to States
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The experts charged with determining when recessions begin and end tell us that the latest of these unpleasant events ended a while ago. Technically, they are no doubt right. But that does not mean that the economic crisis we have been facing is over. I suspect that we have thus far only seen its first act. The drama to come may be far, far worse. To see why, one must recognize that economic downturns come in two different forms.

The economists who study recessions tend to think about them in turns of the business cycle – and rightly so, for in most cases it is the business cycle that produces the downturn. In the course of such a cycle, boom builds upon boom and bust upon bust. It is a bit like a game of crack the whip. Downturns occasioned by the business cycle are caused by overproduction. When businesses have more stock than they can sell, they stop producing and lay off workers. The workers laid off and no longer getting paychecks cut back on their consumption, and this in turn reduces the demand for goods and services and causes other businesses, which find their products and services no longer as much in demand, to curtail their efforts and lay off another set of workers. And so the recession grows, building on itself, until some businesses find that they have underproduced or underprovided for the services in demand. Then, the same process takes place in reverse with stepped-up production and a stepped-up provision of services requiring stepped-up employment, which occasions more consumption requiring another round of stepped-up production and provision of services and a further increase in employment and so forth – until production and provision once more overshoot demand. In the absence of perfect knowledge, human beings living in commercial societies are fated to suffer from an oscillation of this sort – between boom and bust.

When Barack Obama became President, his economic advisors appear to have been on automatic pilot and to have taken it for granted that this was the sort of recession that they were up against. And so they opted for a remedy that – if applied in the proper fashion, at the proper time, and  in the proper amount – might serve to hasten an economy’s recovery from a recession occasioned by the business cycle. That is, they sought to prime the pump – to increase consumption by artificial means, to borrow money from the future, put it in the pockets of certain citizens, and hope that they would spend it right away and thereby put others back to work.

Such was, at least, their pretense. In practice, of course, the so-called “stimulus bill” was a targeted measure – a massive pay-off designed to reward the public-sector employees and unionized workers involved in infrastructure construction who make up core constituencies within the Democratic Party and to do so at the expense of those whose taxes the Democrats intended in the future to raise. Obama’s advisors did not worry much about the manner in which the “stimulus” was to be applied, its timing, and amount, however. For they took it for granted that the expenditures would do no immediate damage to anyone and that the economy would bounce back quickly in any case, as it always does when the downturn is caused solely (or at least primarily) by the business cycle.

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With most of the media focusing their 2010 election coverage on whether or not Republicans will reclaim one or both houses of Congress, the 37 states that are about to elect (or re-elect) a governor get lost in the shuffle.

If Republicans do as well as projected, most observers expect gridlock to descend upon Washington D.C.  That means the real action and drama will be at the state level, where newly-elected governors will have to deal with high unemployment, shrinking budgets and public employee unions that will fight as if very existence is at stake (which it is).

Here’s a brief overview of what’s at stake for the governors of three states.

Michigan: The Wolverine State’s manufacturing-based economy has been ravaged by free trade agreements and obstinate unions.  Since 2000, Michigan has lost over 900,000 jobs.  The current unemployment rate is 13 percent, and unlikely to drop below double digits any time soon.

The state’s public employee pension funds are awash in red ink.  The Mackinac Center reports that the state has underfunded pension plans by almost $12 billion.  The state’s next governor will almost surely be Michigan businessman Rick Snyder who ran under the slogan, “One tough nerd.”  Come November 3, Mr. Snyder will face one tough job.

Ohio: Like its neighbor to the north, the Buckeye State is barely hanging on.  The unemployment rate is 10 percent, which only exacerbates the state’s “structural budget shortfall” that could reach $8 billion by 2012.  On top of that, the State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) has $40 billion in unfunded liabilities.

On the bright side, Ohio was recently awarded $400 million in federal funds from the Obama administration’s “Race to the Top” initiative. The bad news: after four years, that money will dry up.  Since Ohio spends “49 percent more on district-level bureaucracy than the national average,” there will have to be some big changes to the public education system.

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New York Attorney General and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo is proving a canny politician the further he progresses in his career.  Thursday, the son of former Gov. Mario Cuomo trashed outgoing Gov. David Paterson’s budget plan, saying he opposes plans to tax soda and hike taxes on cigarettes, and favors cutting spending in order to close the state’s $9 billion budget gap.

According to the Syracuse Post-Standard, Cuomo also indicated Thursday that as Governor, he would bring down state spending by eradicating state agencies and cutting spending on education, health care and Medicare.

New York’s deficit is expected to reach as much as $15 billion next year, with many observers blaming Paterson’s big spending approach for the situation.

Republican candidate for Governor Rick Lazio has been bashing Cuomo for failing to detail how he would close the budget deficit, just as Paterson has been dancing around various proposals to deal with New York’s current budget crisis.

Just days ago, taxpayer groups and convenience store owners breathed a sigh of relief when Paterson backed off his plan to raise cigarettes by $1 per pack, following Republicans in the State Senate signaling that they would vote against any bill including tax increases.

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The Hysteria of the political establishment and the media that covers it is incredible. I’m not a politician and I don’t talk like one .On March 23rd ,I went on the Curtis Sliwa Show on 970AM the Apple in New York City to discuss my opposition to Obamacare.

Source: CATO Institute

Here is what I actually said:

“This day, the day that that bill was passed, will be remembered just as 9/11 was remembered from history. It was an attempt by these people in Washington to defy the Constitution it is clearly in conflict with all of the basic precepts of the constitution.”

Within minutes liberals were insisting that  this madman from Buffalo had compared the passage of Obamacare with the tradgedy of 9/11. Why would reporters willfully misrepresent what I said and political hatchetmen like Congressman Jerrold Nadler attack me when I made no such comparison? Why would they smear me?

Any fair-minded person could see that I merely said both days would be widely remembered like JFK’s murder or the Space Shuttle Crash or the1929 stockmarket crash. Why would the pundits and commentators twist my words and seek to make me out an insensitive rube from upstate?

The political class in Albany and New York City know the taxpayers are finally fed up and a reform revolution that returns power to the people is rising. They want to discredit me before voters get a chance to learn my  common sense platform or my record of always doing what I say I’m going to do in business and civic life.

Congressman Nadler dismissed my criticism of the constitutionality of the Health Care Bill passed by Congress noting that he is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. That does not make him the final authority on this flawed law.

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While most of the public is consumed by the health care-death-march spectacle, Senators Bob Corker and Chris Dodd are making serious progress on the Senate’s “financial services reform” legislation. The legislation was dead just a couple weeks ago, but Sen. Corker thought he could snag a seat at the grown-up table and stepped forward to ‘cut a deal.’

As is the new DC operating procedure for major legislation, there are almost no firm details on the current language. We know there will be a large new federal bureaucracy, somewhere within government, to provide “consumer protection” for financial products. We know there will be a $50 billion tax on banking customers to provide a permanent bailout fund, or as Sen. Corker would describe it, a “wind-down” fund. Unfortunately, we also know that the bill will do nothing to reform Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, who continue to drain billions from the U.S. Treasury.

We’re told the Corker-Dodd Bailout Bill is a necessary response to the financial melt-down triggered by the collapse of the housing bubble. But, if it doesn’t take even small steps to reform Fannie and Freddie, then, simply, it isn’t a serious proposal. Its like rebuilding the porch on a house, while ignoring it’s cracked foundation.

Washington politicians would rather ignore this, but the housing bubble was the result of very explicit government policy. Throughout the 90’s and early 2000’s, officials from both parties became addicted to forever pushing homeownership rates higher than the laws of economics would otherwise allow.

If you want to identify the roots of the homeownership-cult among elected officials, fire-up the way-back machine and check out a little report issued by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in the early 90’s. Under the leadership of Richard Syron, then-President of the Boston Fed (more on him later), the report was the result of discussion among the bank’s staff and the usual collection of academics and professional activists. It was to make recommendations to the nation’s bankers on addressing alleged discrimination in mortgage lending.

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Those liberals, reformers, good-government types, New York Times editorial writers and Albany Times Union reporters who were toasting the conviction of long time New York Republican Senate Leader Joe Bruno, will soon have the smile wiped from their elitist faces. Joe Bruno has committed no crime and his exoneration will likely come from the U.S. Supreme Court.

I speak from the point of view of an attorney with a passion for the protections of the law.

In 1770, a rowdy mob of Massachusetts colonists accosted and provoked British soldiers until they responded with lethal force and committed the Boston Massacre.   The soldiers were arrested and placed on trial where their convictions seemed imminent out of sheer populace outrage.  One bold lawyer rose in their defense, John Adams, who in his closing argument reminded the jurors that “the law no passion can disturb.  Tis void of desire and fear, lust and anger . . . it is deaf, deaf as an adder to the clamours of the populace.”

Today the populace is clamoring at Joe Bruno.  They protested – protested! – His recent defense fund fundraisers, and blogs, abound with smug joy at the Senator’s conviction.  Meanwhile, the facts and flaws of the case have disappeared into the ruckus.   Nary a soul concerns itself with the serious constitutional misgivings of a law that has floundered through the federal circuit courts because no knows what it means.  Consider the helpless inquisition of Judge Jacobs in the Rybicki case, now Chief Judge of the Second Circuit – the same federal circuit hearing the Bruno case:

How can the public be expected to know what the statute means when the judges and prosecutors themselves do not know, or must make it up as they go along?

Or consider Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who says that “it is simply not fair to prosecute someone for a crime that has not been defined until the judicial decision that sends him to jail.”

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One of the last people you’d expect to be a catalyst for the near collapse of history’s most advanced financial system is the secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Though not the masterminds of the nation’s economic woes, Andrew Cuomo and Mel Martinez were willing musclemen for the Congressional and White House driven mandates that housing be made more affordable to all through government subsidy.

Those mandates, policy stemming back to the 1960s, were driven by compassion, but have turned out to be the chief cause for the current rampant rates of default, foreclosure, and economic pain striking particularly hard at low-income families.

Such is the story Charlie Gasparino tells in his new book, The Sellout: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System. Gasparino notes that Cuomo as much as boasted in the late 1990s about forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to expand their subprime mortgage portfolios. Not slowing down, the George W. Bush appointed Martinez carried the ball forward with great speed, presiding over a period of time where Fannie and Freddie grew to hold a combined $1 trillion in subprime mortgages.

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Despite the few voices of caution, risk and leverage had become a national fixation, embraced both on Wall Street and in government. The SEC and the Fed, the main regulators in charge of monitoring the buildup of risky assets on the banks’ books, together with the rating agencies, were the modern-day equivalents of Nero fiddling as Rome burned.The fire in this case was the massive and rapid buildup of mortgage debt on the balance sheets of the banks; by 2006 it was approaching $1 trillion and heading higher without so much as a peep from the traditional watchdogs.

Still, the risk taking and leverage went beyond the brokerage houses and the banks. The GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were in the game as well. By now, Fannie and Freddie had fully and completely conceded their original mandates to the whims of the Washington political class, which demanded “affordable” housing for all, even those who couldn’t afford it. The politicians were giddy with Fannie and Freddie’s conversion from staid mortgage banks to subprime lenders that would make Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of the largest subprime lender in the markets, Countrywide Financial, envious.

It was an evolution that took years in the making. As HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo boasted in one report in the late 1990s that the new mandates he was imposing on Fannie and Freddie to ramp up subprime lending “could be of significant benefit to lower-income families, minorities, and families living in underserved areas.”

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Media coverage of ACORN and that organization’s illegal activities in New York, California and elsewhere has largely ignored one of ACORN’s most successful projects; New York’s Working Families Party (WFP). 

Because of the unique nature of New York State election law, candidates are allowed to be endorsed and appear on the voting machine ballot as the candidate of multiple parties, winning the cumulative total of all votes cast for that candidate on multiple party lines.  Minor parties such as the Conservative, Liberal and Right to Life Party have played significant roles in New York politics.

The Working Families Party is not about working people or families and it isn’t really a party.  The WFP is a wholly owned subsidiary of ACORN.  Bertha Lewis co-chair of the Working Families Party is the Executive Director of New York ACORN.  New York ACORN leader, Steven Kest was the moving force in forming the party and WFP headquarters are located at the same address as ACORN’s national and New York office at 88 Third Avenue in Brooklyn, New York. 

WFP is essentially a money funnel which pays for an aggressive door to door canvas.  Largely funded by unions, the WFP is ACORN’s “political arm” in New York State.  Candidates supported by the Working Families Party and issues supported by ACORN are both advocated on the door steps of target voter homes as they share one major voter canvas. 

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