Has either party been faithful to a consistent set of principles?  The Republican frontrunners have fallen all over themselves in internecine warfare accusing each other (not without good reason) of flip‑flopping.  Meanwhile, the President has escaped the spotlight on the issue of his own constancy of principle.  In point of fact, as the incumbent, he should be closely monitored on this subject, since his principles can translate quickly into active government policy.

The criteria used for making appointments to Administration jobs might be a pretty good measure of presidential principle.  Given that Congress is totally dysfunctional, and that the single-digit approval rating our federal legislature has earned from the American people is overly generous, we might have expected the President to be particularly judicious in his appointments to the various executive branch positions that wield such influence in both domestic and foreign affairs.

While it is not unusual for Presidents to reward campaign donors with prestigious federal appointments, many Obama supporters expected better of this President. They were confident that Obama would be as repulsed as they were by the approximately 200 federal appointments of donors and bundlers Bush had made during his eight years in office. Not so.

According to I-Watch, the on-line publication of the non-partisan Center for Public Integrity, President Obama had, at the mid point of his first term, matched Bush’s eight-year record of doling out Administration jobs to donors and bundlers. Overall, 184 of 556, or about one-third of Obama bundlers or their spouses joined the administration in some role. But the percentages are much higher for the big-dollar bundlers. Nearly 80 percent of those who collected more than $500,000 for Obama took “key administration posts,” as defined by the White House. More than half the 24 ambassador nominees who were bundlers raised $500,000.

The big bundlers had broad access to the White House.  In all, during Obama’s first two years in office, campaign bundlers and their family members account for more than 3,000 White House meetings and visits. Half of them raised $200,000 or more.

Bundlers often have ties to companies that stand to gain financially from the president’s policy agenda, particularly in clean energy and telecommunications.  For example, Level 3 Communications quickly snared $13.8 million in stimulus money.

Two of the President’s top appointees found themselves at loggerheads just two weeks ago when Obama appointee, FDA Commissioner Dr. Margaret Hamburg was over-ruled by Obama appointed HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius.  Commissioner Hamburg approved, following two years of scientific study, making the Plan B One-Step pill available to all females of childbearing age without a prescription. Not so fast, said Secretary Sibelius to the delight of the pro-life movement.  So here we have a faceoff between two top Obama appointees, one taking a position strongly endorsed by the liberal pro-choice community, and the other exercising her veto power to over rule FDA Commissioner Hamburg, to the cheers of the conservative pro-life community. While we understand and are sympathetic to Secretary Sibelius’s position given that about 10% of girls are subject to pregnancy at age eleven, the President’s strongly stated approval of his HHS Secretary’s veto serves to temper his heretofore pro-choice image as the 2012 presidential campaign gets underway. Pro-choice women’s groups were steaming mad.

“We expected this kind of action from the Bush administration, so it’s doubly disheartening and unacceptable that this administration chose to follow this path,” said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America. “We had a major opportunity to improve young women’s access to contraception, which is the best way to reduce the need for abortion, and the Obama administration missed the mark.”

Another example, perhaps the most hideous of them all, was the outright extortion of Boeing to restrict it from what should be its right to move some of its production to a right-to- work state.  The Wall Street Journal in its December 7th editorial put it quite succinctly:

“The damage here goes well beyond Boeing, which presumably understands the tradeoffs.  The NLRB is exposed as one more federal agency that can’t be trusted to make honest decisions.  The ability of the 21-right‑to‑work states, which passed such laws under the 1947 Taft‑Hartley Act, to attract businesses from pro‑union states will also be eroded.  The AFL‑CIO may cheer that message, but in practice the result is likely to be that more companies simply send jobs overseas where there’s no NLRB.  Congratulations.”

Even the National Park Service seems to have been enlisted in the president’s desire to play both sides of every controversy. When the police in most major US cities finally concluded, “enough is enough” and moved in to halt what was becoming a public health problem, Mayor Vincent Gray had local Washington, DC police evict “protestors” across from the District Building (city hall).

Lo and behold the next day, the protesters reappeared at, among other places, “Farragut Square” two blocks from the White House, having erected tents (which were almost completely unoccupied). The explanation given to city officials by the National Park Service was that this was federal land, which the city does not control. Several city council members do not believe that explanation and it is difficult for us to accept the explanation that the Park Service wasn’t co-opted for political purposes.

Interestingly the President has been on a campaign swing, which the White House has billed as an attempt to explain his jobs plan.  This bus tour is taking place in battleground southern states.  Apparently people in non‑battleground states don’t need Mr. Obama’s explanation.  We know that incumbents have the advantage of a bully pulpit, but traditionally it isn’t used solely to advance reelection prospects.

Policies that could not pass Congress have been enacted through expansion of the powers of several agencies.  The EPA, the NLRB, the FCC, and the FDA are all usurping the authority of the national legislature in unprecedented power grabs.

Mr. Obama in an effort to find a long‑term resolution to our ballooning debt appointed a bi‑partisan commission headed by former Senator Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles.  The commission recommended a strong pro-growth plan, which included increased tax revenue and spending cuts.  Mr. Obama reviewed the report and never mentioned it again.

The whole tone of this peculiar election year and Mr. Obama’s behavior is best described in Dan Henninger’s December 8^th Wall Street Journal column.  He notes that the press described Mr. Obama’s speech in Osawatomie Kansas as “delivered by the President of the United States, but the person really delivering it was actually the [head of the] Democratic Party.”  Mr. Henninger also noted that:

The Osawatomie speech sounded like what you’d expect to hear in Caracas or Buenos Aires.  As in:  “The free market has never been a license to take whatever you can from whomever you can.

It is quite sad that our first African American leader, the man who hopefully would make race irrelevant in selecting our president, so personally appealing and so promising to many, who was going to bring us together once he took the reins of power, has proven to be just another ordinary politician.

By Hal Gershowitz and Stephen Porter

There is a long 20^th century history of Wall Street protests in America.  After all, Wall Street is the financial center of the country. Today, we’re in a financial crisis so Wall Street (or its financial center equivalent in other cities) is the logical place to protest, right?

Actually, we think it’s a poor second to Lafayette Park across from the White House — where the current crisis was hatched and nurtured.  No, this isn’t an anti Obama screed.  His predecessors (several of them) are far more to blame for the current economic disarray in which we find ourselves, although we think his proposed remedies are anything but remedial.

“Occupy Wall Street” and “Wall Street Greed” are great memes.  They are highly memorable and easily passed on as a rallying cry. Unsurprisingly, President Obama and the left has sought to adopt them.  Of course, the protestors are an outgrowth of the wider sense of entitlement many young people have developed (including quotas disguised under the term “diversity”).  As George Will stated in his column in The Washington Post on October 13, 2011:

“Demands posted in [Occupy Wall Street’s] name include a ‘guaranteed living wage income regardless of employment’; a $20‑an‑hour minimum wage (above the $16.00 entry wage the UAW just negotiated with GM); ending ‘the fossil fuel economy’; ‘open borders’ so ‘anyone can travel anywhere to work and live’; $1 trillion dollars for infrastructure; $1 trillion dollars for ‘ecological restoration’; ‘free college education’, and forgiveness of ‘all debt on the entire planet.”

But abuses by Wall Street are an affect, not the cause of the current economic disarray. As anyone who has read our essays knows, we carry no brief for Wall Street excesses or those of the various Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE’s) that are the real culprits. But Wall Street was simply the vehicle by which the White House, Congress, the Fed and the Washington bureaucracy carried out very ill advised objectives. As is well known by now, the seeds of our current discontent were sowed a quarter century ago when President Jimmy Carter signed the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA).  This legislation and the regulatory policies that it set in motion may have been well intentioned, but as history teaches, roads paved merely with good intentions often lead where no one wants to go.

The government, whether controlled by Republicans or Democrats, has for a quarter century pursued the altruistic but terribly flawed policy that every American should own his or her home.  It seemed a win/win for every politician and every voting homeowner.  How noble.  How naïve.

As is so often the case when government promotes a central-planning-agenda-driven initiative, sooner or later it winds up distorting the marketplace to the general detriment of the people. That’s why we consume outrageous acreage of arable land growing food to burn for fuel.  Welcome to modernity. That’s why farmers are paid not to grow crops, and that’s why banks were rewarded not to concern themselves with creditworthiness when considering mortgage applications.  Unlike ethanol and farm subsidies, however, increasing the percentage of home ownership in America seemed like a no brainer.  What could be possibly wrong with that?  Well, as it turns out, plenty. It was a very dangerous objective to pursue.  Economic growth produces the household income that enables people to own rather than rent their own homes.  Pushing people into home ownership in the absence of their ability to afford to buy a home is an exercise in very expensive futility.

Sam Zell, one of America’s most astute real estate investors observed in a recent interview that the economy performs best when homeownership, as a percentage of all households, falls with within a range of 62 to 64 percent.

Zell writes:

“The political system encourages a much higher level, without regard to affordability. This time, we took home ownership to 69 percent, which means that people who simply cannot afford houses were able to buy them. Every time we go above that 62 to 64 percent range, there are economic consequences, and this time was no different.

There was also another political element to the residential market collapse. In 2000, Fannie and Freddie carried no subprime loans, and they carried very few subprime loans until the financial steamboat in 2004, whereupon Barney Frank told us to encourage affordable housing and he would protect us from defaults. So, Fannie Mae went from 0 in subprime loans to 40 percent. These political drivers of the financial crisis are overlooked.”

Isn’t it ironic that this is the same Barney Frank who co-authored the Dodd-Frank bill, which now forms the basis of all bank and financial regulation.  Is this a great country or what?

The mischief promulgated by Freddie and Fannie cannot be overstated.  These government-sponsored enterprises take a back seat to no one when it comes to abuse, and, let’s face it, greed. While Wall Street deserves its share of criticism, let’s dwell for a moment on government as an instigator and an enabler at the very center of the housing crisis.

During the Clinton years, the President appointed some of his Administration’s top people to senior executive positions at Fannie Mae. For example, he placed his former budget director, Franklin Raines, into the CEO slot at Fannie Mae. Jamie Gorelick, a Clinton Administration senior lawyer was handed the Vice Chairmanship at Fannie Mae.  Clinton then went on to appoint others to board positions at Fannie.  Executives’ compensation formulas were quickly restructured in order to incentivize them to maximize the number of mortgages Fannie Mae purchased.

Compensation wasn’t the only thing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac restructured. They showed they could work the political system with contributions as effectively as any Wall Street banker. They specifically targeted those who they knew would make strong allies.  Chris Dodd who chaired the Senate Committee with oversight responsibility for Fannie and Freddie’s operations was the largest recipient of the GSE’s largess. Democratic heavyweight, John Kerry was next in the handout recipient line and none other than Democratic Senate newcomer Barack Obama quickly shot up to third place in the campaign piggyback sweepstakes.  On the House side, oversight heavyweight Barney Frank was a regular recipient of the GSEs’ handouts and extolled the virtues of these houses of cards up until the time they came tumbling down.

Given that Fannie’s earnings are a function of the spread between its cost of borrowing (to buy these mortgages) and the fees it receives from the mortgages it purchases, they enjoyed a license to, shall we say, do very well as long as homeowners made their mortgage payments. Fannie Mae was, in effect, living off of the illusion that the government backed it, so its cost of borrowing was rock bottom.

So what drove the GSE’s rush into subprime mortgages? The key, of course, is that the restructured senior executive compensation was based on the profitability of the enterprises (the spread between the GSE’s rock-bottom borrowing costs and the interest paid on the mortgages they held).  So in the ten years from 1994 to 2004, Raines earned $90 million in salary and bonuses.  Gorelick who was appointed by Clinton in 1997 to her post at Fannie Mae (having had no prior financial experience) pocketed, in short order, another $26 million.  All the while, Fannie Mae’s top twenty-one executives averaged $1 million each.

Well, with that kind of juice swirling around, Fannie Mae, which became the single greatest market for so many of the lousy mortgages the banks were writing (pursuant to government policy and pressure) wasn’t above bending an accounting rule here and there.  By the time the SEC finally lowered the boom on Fannie Mae, it had found that they had misstated earnings by about $10.6 billion from 1998 through 2004.  The result was a company (of sorts) whose managers engaged in one questionable maneuver after another, including two transactions with investment banking firm, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. that improperly pushed $107 million of Fannie Mae earnings into future years. The aim, the Office of Housing Enterprise Oversight said, was always the same: To shape Fannie Mae’s books, not in response to accepted accounting rules, but in a way that made it appear that the company had reached earnings targets, thus triggering the maximum possible payout for Raines and other top executives.

While the housing crash that triggered the current economic crisis cannot be laid at President Obama’s feet, it is disingenuous of him to try to paint, at every opportunity, President Bush with that odious stain.  Bush, in September 2003, according to the New York Times (yes you read that correctly) pushed for the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade earlier.

From the NYT:

“Under the Bush Administration plan, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored companies that are the two largest players in the mortgage lending industry,

The new agency would have the authority, which now rests with Congress, to set one of the two capital-reserve requirements for the companies.  It would exercise authority over any new lines of business.  And it would determine whether the two are adequately managing the risks of their ballooning portfolios.

The plan is an acknowledgment by the administration that oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — which together have issued more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt — is broken.  A report by outside investigators in July concluded that Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics have said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates.

Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.”

Yes, Wall Street hopped onto the mortgage gravy train and, in the process, mortgaged themselves to the hilt.  When the system crashed under the weight of all the shameful mortgages that were written, the American taxpayer came to the rescue and received a loud raspberry in return.  That’s surely worth a protest.  But all of this is the result of horrid policy, developed, pampered and nurtured in Washington. All things considered, Zuccotti Park in New York isn’t a bad place to protest, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Lafayette Park in Washington.

I never thought it would come to this. I never imagined a time post 2000 when I would actually lament a return to the past. But here we are, facing a recession as deep and even longer than the one in the early 1990s. A recession that ushered in none other than the Comeback Kid – President William Jefferson Clinton.

His was a presidency that brought us DNA samples; Don’t ask, Don’t tell; school uniforms; and wagging fingers regarding a certain intern.

But set all that aside (if you can), and recall some of the fiscal successes of his presidency, and it’s easy to long for those days again.

Yes, the United States enjoyed years of growing surpluses during the Clinton presidency – many of which could be attributed equally to the Republican Congress – but pair them together, and it’s easy to see why the country could use another Bill Clinton in place of the current Oval Office occupant. Here’s why:

Trade policy.

I lead with this because it’s easily the quickest thing President Obama could accomplish to help set the economy on the right footing again. President Clinton bucked the powerful labor unions and even some of the most liberal wings in his party to push through Trade Promotion Authority during his tenure. For the first time, the Administration had the power to negotiate trade deals and send them to the Congress for an up-or-down vote. TPA was a signature legislative jewel in the crown of the Clinton presidency, and it took none other than Clinton himself to put his own political capital on the line to marshal it through the Congress.

Clinton was a master of acknowledging the concerns of labor rights yet channeling them into meaningful legislation. It was not enough to just fight and lose the battles. Clinton needed to win. And when it came to trade, and the United States’ continued dominance on the world commercial scene, he was one of the best trade envoys for the nation.

He didn’t always welcome freer trade policies, but in the end, he reasoned that expanded trade with the rest of the world was a net benefit for U.S. workers and manufacturers. President Obama would do well to emulate Clinton’s behavior in this regard, especially since many in Congress have teed up three free trade agreements (Korea, Panama, and Colombia) for him to carry over the finish line. Just as it took Clinton to move Trade Promotion Authority, so it will take the leader of the Democratic Party again to lead his members to pass these FTAs this year.

Bipartisanship.

Bill Clinton proved bipartisanship was more art than science. Here again, he didn’t always practice it, but when he did, it was a thing of beauty, and it worked.

Remember “triangulation”? The practice of leveraging support from the opposition party – or even a smaller minority in your own – to move legislation or force compromise was sheer Clintonian. Frankly, that’s how consensus-building should work in this town. It’s one of the few ways to move public policy, and chances are it yields positive outcomes. We’ve entered an era where 60-votes is the goal, when super-majorities are the only numbers that matter, and yet it’s evident they are nearly impossible to secure.

Bill Clinton would never have endorsed a Super Committee for debt reduction. Why? Because he wouldn’t have been a part of the solution. His ego was larger than that. Plus, the numbers were decreased, meaning he’d have less elected leaders to motivate or coax. Sure, the Clinton White House had plenty of special commissions. But one that dealt with such an important topic would never have been relegated to just 12 individuals.

Remember “It’s the economy, stupid!”? It was the single-largest issue facing President Clinton in the 1990s, and it’s the same today facing President Obama. Clinton threw everything he had at the problem, even if it meant borrowing votes from the other side of the aisle. He gave to get.

Just this week, however, the Obama Administration has signaled a shift left, away from the middle where compromise is forged and consensus is found. That does not bode well for a bipartisan solution when clearly one is needed.

“The era of Big Government is over.”

One thing is evident regarding the Clinton years, he knew when he had been beat. Following the loss of both houses of Congress in 1994, the president rightly declared, “The era of Big Government is over.” He spent the next several years resisting that fact, but enacting policies that matched the statement. Remember welfare reform in 1996? It took a Republican Congress to force a liberal president to enact that landmark law. Yet it took a chief executive to do his part.

President Obama knows the era of big government in 2011 is over. It took the Tea Party to prove to him this fact. Now, he must repeat the steps of Clinton and work with Republicans to enact meaningful, center-right policies that reflect the will of this nation. Resistance is futile. Just look at the imminent loss of the Democrat-controlled Senate in 2012, and perhaps even the loss of Obama’s own job if he’s not careful in these upcoming months.

To quickly recap, Krugman wrote:

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te [sic] atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

Such a passage makes me wonder if liberals of Krugman’s ilk even hear themselves? I know Krugman thinks Bush is a “fake hero,” because he hates him with a blinding passion. But he wedges W in there as almost an afterthought among his parade of “fake heroes” — ” … and even George W. Bush.” Before that, Krugman calls Rudy Giuliani a “fake hero.”

Now, Giuliani would be the first to reject the “hero” label, because he knows who the REAL heros are. He saw many of their dismembered bodies in the rubble of the WTC. He went to funerals for months on end. But what Giuliani did was of enormous value to the city of New York and the nation: He stayed calm in the face of enormous chaos and fear. And he acted as a leader — as did Bush.

Giuliani suffers in the measure of Krugman (as did Bush) for the same reasons. Both men were non-liberals (non-Democrats) who earned the admiration of the people. Krugman thought he’d be able to belittle Bush for the entirety of what he thought would be one quick term as a “pretender” who “stole” the election from Gore. Only now, of all days (but without comment), does Krugman feel the urge to scratch that long-neglected itch.

And with Giuliani, Krugman is settling an old score of the New York liberal elite. Krugman takes such a cheap shot at Giuliani because he was the REPUBLICAN mayor who — long before 9/11 — made New York City livable again, destroying the status quo of liberal governance of Gotham by the likes of David Dinkins. If Giuliani was remembered only for cleaning up the city, Krugman would still resent him — but with less vitriol. Because Giuliani ratified his wisdom and civic leadership — on a national scale in the wake of 9/11 — the man is simply due for this vicious slur that Krugman could no longer keep inside.

If Krugman thought this post would diminish Bush or Giuliani, he was (as usual) sadly mistaken. He only diminished himself.

Lets not forget the lessons in civility that our dutiful media and President Obama conveyed in the wake of the Tucson tragedy. The vitriol does not seem to have died down.  Perhaps this video will help remind people what’s lurking out there on the Twitter public timeline about all you “Sons of Bitches” and “Hobbits” of Terror.

I’ll leave you with a message from the video’s creator:  “All tweets posted to Twitter are public. Therefore, I will not remove this video, names or any details that were publicly available. If you can’t stand by your hate, then you should have never said it.”

I’ve noticed that many of my Liberal friends constantly harped on George W. Bush’s faith in Jesus.  They wrung their hands in terror that something would be implemented that would…be really bad.  Ultimately, they just didn’t like his religion being foisted on them, although when pressed, they had trouble specifying exactly what would result from the President’s faith.

Now, we’re seeing the same fears being sounded over Gov. Perry’s faith. The message is that Liberals don’t want to be forced into believing something they don’t want to believe in, or that some religiously-driven policy will be enacted against their own interest, or that it will somehow restrict their personal freedom.

That is perfectly reasonable, and I agree with them completely.

The irony is that the Liberal approach to policy in general is cloaked behind its own ideological philosophy.  It may not be an established religion, but Conservatives and Libertarians are equally opposed to some policy being put in place that restricts freedom, that forces them to believe something they don’t want to believe in, or that is against their own interest.

And I naturally agree with them, as well.

In the case of Liberals, it isn’t called Christianity.  It’s called “fairness”.  Just like Christianity, it carries its own set of rules about an idealized view of the world and how to achieve it.  For every complaint the Left may have about Christians pushing their views on others, the Right has a legitimate set of complaints about the Fair-ites pushing their views on them.

The difference is that Christianity has rarely been actively forced into public policy, and when it has, it does not impact personal freedom in this country.  The country was founded on Judeo-Christian tenets, after all.  Sure, there’s the occasional attempt to restrict abortion rights via some state legislation.  I don’t support that legislation because it’s folly to begin with, never has a chance of passing, and is strictly political that only serves to further divide.  But there are those who consider abortion to be murder, and that position is well within the bounds of morality and the public interest.  Who wants murder to be legal?  Liberals, however, exclusively see it as an assault on a woman’s freedom, without once respecting the Christian view that it has nothing to do with that, and that there are plenty of easier ways to restrict women’s freedom were that the goal.

Regardless, I get why people are upset about an attempt to restrict abortion, seeing it as an attempt to restrict personal freedom.  Well, guess what?  A lot of folks are upset about Liberal attempts to restrict their personal freedom.  Yet Liberals belittle those concerns because they are done to make things “fair”.

The Fair-ites endorse policies that directly restrict freedom, and seek punitive action for those who have earned things such as status, wealth, comfort, a large radio audience, and good health care.  The Fair-ites seek to seize those assets and give them to others who have not earned them, and to do so by force.  They insist on imposing their own morality by taxing the rich for their “fair share”, and by combining it with their ignorance of economics, this makes things even worse for the economy.  They even name their attempt to censor free speech as the “Fairness Doctrine”, because they hate that Conservatives have achieved great (and earned) success in radio.

Folks, there’s a reason Superman stood for “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” and not “Truth, Fairness, and the American Way”.

In short, Christians believe that “what’s mine is yours”, and leave it to one’s personal convictions whether or not to share (which they do, in vastly greater amounts than Liberals).   Fair-ites believe that “what’s yours is mine”, and seek legislation and regulation to accomplish this – all the while conveniently forgetting that Conservatives freely and willingly give more to charity than Liberals (and if you’re Joe Biden, you give almost nothing and it consists mainly of old clothes.  Such a class act).

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Left’s quasi-religious movement known as “Global Warming”.   Here they have a God (Al Gore), whose Gospel they try to spread to the heretics (which includes those who may simply be on the fence about man-made global warming), a Bible (“peer-reviewed studies”), proclamations about the unerring word of the Bible (“the science is settled”), an Apocalypse prophecy (“The world is going to be submerged under melting glaciers”), sin and absolution (“carbon emission” and “carbon offsets”), infidels (“Global warming deniers”), Apostates (“Bjorn Lomborg”), call for sacrifice (“hybrid vehicles” over “gas guzzlers”), ritual (“recycling”), Puritans (“Man is bad, we have caused global warming and must suffer to make amends”), control and imposition of authority (“environmental studies prior to construction”), and the AntiChrist (“Lord Monckton”).

Global Warming Alarmism seeks and has actually succeeded in doing that which has only been feared of Christianity:  to restrict our freedom by forcing us to engage in behavior that we may not want to engage in “for the greater good”, to over-regulate to the point where jobs are lost and the economy tanks further, and to insist upon the insertion of the ideology into our daily lives – whether we like it or not.

But here’s the most delicious part of this entire discussion.  I wrote a memoir about an extraordinary teacher named Edwin Barlow.  He was a follower of the Scholastics, who used reason to support their belief in God.  Reason and faith are not mutually exclusive.  And yet, Liberals seem to reject both faith and reason in favor of irrational fear and emotion.

So for Liberals who fear the Christian will force his religion upon you, I ask one simple question:  George Bush had both houses of Congress for four entire years.  Name one religious-based policy that was foisted on you personally from which you suffered.

Now, for Conservatives who fear the Liberal will force his religion on you, I ask one simple question:  Barack Obama had both houses of Congress for two entire years.  Name ten Liberal-based policies that were foisted on you personally from which you suffered.

Hint: The second question is much easier to answer than the first.

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Pejman Yousefzadeh and Elizabeth Blackney to discuss the GOP presidential debate in New Hampshire, and John Mearsheimer’s new book, “Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics.”

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:

Bachmann, Gingrich, and Romney. Oh My! And Then There’s Rick Perry.
Exciting Things About Tim Pawlenty
The Awful, No Good, Very Bad Republican Presidential Debate
A tweet from Ben Domenech about the debate
CATO Speech: Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics
Why leaders lie
The Case of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer

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