First, take a look at the first three-place shows by %
in IA, NH, SC and FL in 2008, and IA and NH in 2012:

Iowa
08/Huckabee-34, Romney-25, Thompson-13
12/Romney-24, Santorum-24, Paul-21

New Hampshire
08/McCain-37, Romney-31, Huckabee-11
12/Romney-39, Paul-23, Hunstman-17

Results summary....

Romney, 2 firsts, and 3 seconds; McCain, 3 firsts.
And no one in any of these six contests won as much as Romney, 39%, this year in NH, with a 16-point spread over number two Ron Paul, about twice the next highest (1st/2nd) point spread among the six contests, which Huckabee had over Romney in 2008 in IA. And McCain’s point spread in his three first place wins ranged from only 3 to 6%.

So why is Romney getting so much grief for not being able to achieve some kind of loving consensus behind his candidacy in the early contests, when McCain did no better and arguably worse by the same measure in 2008?

A divided Republican Party
The fault, I would argue, lies not in Romney, but in a Republican Party more divided than it has been since Barry Goldwater’s supporters shouted down Nelson Rockefeller at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in 1964.

Romney has the Olympic-sized challenge of trying to corral four herds of conservative cats:

–Main Street/Wall Street balanced budgeteers
–Christianist culture warriors
–Latter day libertarians
–Big government, war-making neo-cons

Ronald Reagan, it is true, had to deal with the first three of those (with neo-cons waiting in the wings.) But he had three unifying, threatening menaces to fuse together the warring camps: The Soviet Reds, big government red ink, and Republicans seeing red whenever they contemplated the Internal Revenue Service. So he was able to pull off the feats of driving up big deficits, hated by Main Street, with anti-Commie defense spending; placating culture warriors with soothing lip service; and mollifying deficit-hawk economic libertarians with big tax cuts--while still keeping them all together in an electoral coalition.

Republicans have lost the Commies as their unifying bete noire; the Christianists lost the culture war Pat Buchanan declared in 1992, reaching their apogee in 1994 when they helped the GOP win back the House, and are now reduced to begging for attention; latter day libertarians like Ron Paul are now focused on keeping the government out of bedrooms and Baghdad, as well as bank accounts; and the oxymoronic “big government conservative” neo-cons have infuriated the economic conservatives of all stripes, including the Tea Partiers.

With that internecine warfare, Mitt Romney has little choice but to try to please all the internal factions with rhetoric, just as Bill Clinton had to herd left-liberal and identity politics felines in 1992 as a “New Democrat,” while triangulating to appeal to the center of the general election electorate. Obama has tried to do the same thing, but without Slick Willy’s political skills and his ability to seduce women, men and pets (I think Dee Dee Myers said that.)

The amazing thing in this Republican primary cycle is not that Romney is not loved; it’s that he is traversing the GOP mine field fairly skillfully, while running a reasonably good general election campaign during the primary season.

Among presidential wannabe's dubbed by the press as the seven dwarfs, the top three contenders got about three-quarters of the Iowa caucus vote--a congressman, a senator, and a Massachusetts governor (considered cold and analytical.) I'm referring, of course, to 1988: Dick Gephardt, Paul Simon, and the eventual nominee, behind whom the party coalesced, Michael Dukakis.

I understand why political journalists, pundits and conservative Republican ideologues hallucinate that the 2012 GOP contest isn't over, because they have professional and philosophical stakes in keeping it going. (It's called "confirmation bias" in scientific research.) But it's obviously ready for a fork! Is it difficult for any experienced observer to recognize the two issues that will unify the party behind Romney, a disastrous economy, and GOP hate for Obama?

A general election campaign is...duh!...about appealing to the center, and Romney has perfectly positioned himself to run toward the independents he'll need to challenge the incumbent, saddled not only with a disastrous economy, but with a base distressed about a 2008 peace candidate-turned 2009 war maker.

1988 was a very different year, with America at peace and a solid economy, but even with that, the third Reagan term could have been denied if Dukakis hadn't run one of the truly horrible campaigns in the modern era of presidential races. Second time around, Romney is running an excellent race, this time resisting his 2008 blunder of pandering to the social conservatives. He is staying on his economic message--letting Ann and the boys showcase his "family values."

Romney is making one big mistake, being hawkish on Iran, ignoring the overwhelming centrist opposition to more interventionism, which Ron Paul's support is reflecting.

Obama got a virtual free pass to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. four years ago with a nasty septuagenarian as his opponent. But the guy with industrial strength hair, a picture-perfect family, and a clearly moderate record is bad news for the incumbent, whose party is already on the ropes from 2010. As for the "health care mandate," it doesn't hurt Romney. It just neutralizes the mandate question, and lets him still run to the right, and to the center, with a promise to repeal the federal version.

And by the way....
The Iowa "ceiling" for the sitting Massachusetts governor in 1988: 22 percent, and he came in third! And in his neighboring state of New Hampshire, the Massachusetts Miracle governor and eventual Democratic nominee ended up with just 36% of the vote, with Dick Gephardt and Paul Simon splitting 38% (Romney has been around 40% in recent NH surveys.)

A libertarian alert: At their peril, both political parties and the press ignore the emerging libertarian center reflected in Ron Paul's youth brigade. I explained how Obama could have appealed to the classical liberalism of Jefferson (the founder of the Democratic Party!), now known as "libertarianism," in this piece for Reason.com in mid-September 2008.

It amuses and appalls me how clueless journalists--protectors of conventional wisdom and defenders of the status quo--ridicule libertarianism and treat it as unworthy of serious consideration, as something Martian-like descending from the heavens. For them, I would recommend my libertarian Democrat manifesto. As Dave Barry would say (he did write something like this but I can't find the damned quote): "You gotta' hand it to American journalists. They almost always get all their facts right. But they almost never get the story."

No worries, Mitt Dukakis.
Even if Gin-grinch steals Iowa Xmas,
it's 1988 deja vu all over again.

Just saw latest polls from Iowa 2012 GOP nomination contest
via “POLITICO Breaking News”--
“With just over a month to go, a new Des Moines Register poll of likely Iowa caucus voters released Saturday shows Newt Gingrich surging to first place, at 25 percent. Ron Paul is in second place, with 18 percent, while Mitt Romney has fallen to third place, at 16 percent. Michele Bachmann had 8 percent, as did Herman Cain, who suspended his campaign Saturday. Rick Perry and Rick Santorum were tied at 6 percent.”

Take a look at the final results in 1988 (when I worked for Paul Simon as communications director, so I remember it well):

February 8, 1988
Dick Gephardt (31%), Paul Simon (27%), Michael Dukakis (22%)
Bob Dole (37%), Pat Robertson (25%), George H. W. Bush (19%)

If I were Mitt Romney, I wouldn’t lose a lot of sleep over the Des Moines Register poll. The third place guys were the nominees. Deja vu all over again? A Massachusetts governor vs. the (sort of) incumbent?

We almost never elect, let alone nominate, sitting members of Congress for president: Garfield, 1880; Harding, 1920; Kennedy, 1960; and Obama, 2008. And, although Gingrinch is not sitting in Congress, he is the embodiment of a congressional approach to governance, complete with a K Street after-life and an appetite for Tiffany bling. He has never run anything except his mouth. The Grinch could steal Iowa just after Christmas, but the good little boys and girls of the Republican Party will be welcoming Santa Mitt for a late New Hampshire Christmas and New Year's Eve Party.

Pastor Perry--Godsend
to Mormon Mitt?

by Terry Michael

If he gets past Romney for the nomination, Perry's Bible-thumping may be the diversion from a hell-ish economy President Barack Obama needs to fire up a secularist Democratic base and appeal to younger, less religious independent voters -- especially as Perry's "job-producing" record is increasingly revealed as that of a tax-revenue-bestowing, special-interest corporatist, rather than a free-market conservative.

In a 2007 survey of 35,000 adults, Pew Research found a quarter of 18- to 29-year-olds had no religious affiliation. And one in 10 Americans self-identified as either agnostic, atheist or "secular unaffiliated." In both the Republican Party and the general electorate, God doesn't have the influence he used to, four decades after religious conservatives began pushing back through politics against abortion and the sexual revolution.

Arguing that Perry's candidacy helps Romney will seem counterintuitive if you believe bowing before TV preachers is key to a Republican nomination. In a few early contests, evangelicals dominate, starting with Iowa where Southern Baptist preacher, Gov. Mike Huckabee, won in 2008, but with only 9% more than Mormon Romney (34% to 25%). Huckabee quickly fizzled, unable to parlay Iowa victory into South Carolina success two weeks later.

Perry is making a mistake of first-time presidential candidates, pandering to perceived power brokers in his party's base -- forgetting others are tuned in, including independents essential to November victory. Introducing religion at a high decibel level, as he did with his Aug. 6 seven-hour God-a-thon, Perry offers Romney the opportunity to underscore an important defensive message about his Mormon faith: "I'll keep my religion out of my politics." Romney could invade Perry's home court and make a Kennedy-style speech to Texas Protestant preachers to drive home the point.

Religious conservatives' influence peaked in 1994, when Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition turned out believers to win the U.S. House for Republicans, rejecting not just HillaryCare but the '60s lifestyle they believed Bill and Hillary Clinton embodied. But move forward to 2010, and the surge that reclaimed the House for the GOP was all about the economy stupid, not social issues. It was a Democratic defeat by Tea Partiers distressed about crashing home equity and 401(k) values, with ObamaCare iconic for spending they felt was killing the economy.

The "social issues" frame has undergone seismic change in the 21st century, with significant Republican and independent support for same-sex marriage, or at least civil unions, as well as gay military service.

The religious pandering mistake Perry is making is like Romney's in 2008, when he ran away from libertarian-ish views on gay rights and abortion, opening himself to a flip-flop charge that still hounds him. Romney could have sold "family values" by showcasing his big attractive family, and noting he was one of the few monogamists in the oft-divorced Republican field.

Romney learned his lesson (it can take a trial run) and now stays away from cultural issues, focusing on three themes: jobs, jobs and jobs. He knows after Iowa comes not only South Carolina, but New Hampshire (which he is almost sure to win) and mega-states with big delegate prizes, like his birth place Michigan; or Florida, where he came close to McCain in 2008; and delegate-rich New York and California, where Republicans are more secular.

Perceived inordinate influence of religious conservatives ignores they are concentrated in the South, where Republicans already have a near-electoral college lock. Obama won the presidency with only 55 Old Confederacy electors from Virginia, North Carolina and Florida (with its huge influx of Northerners). But he still would have won, with 310 electoral votes, without a single Southern state.

Republicans and GOP-leaning independents in the rest of the country have more moderate-to-libertarian views on social issues. Example: Only a third of Republicans, according to a May 2011 Gallup poll, believe abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.

The 2012 voters won't be your mother's electorate when it comes to religion. Independents hold the key to presidential elections in our equally partisan-divided country. They may not be partial to another swaggering, born-again Texas governor who seems to be suggesting God talked him into running. They may be more receptive to a free-market-friendly candidate like Romney, or even the incumbent -- rather than a Texas career politician for the past 27 years, with lots of ties to lobbyists.

Too Cute to fail?
Surveying the 2012 GOP
presidential field

The 2012 Republican presidential wannabes may not have Mount Rushmore-ready leadership skills, but they're an unusually fine-looking bunch of politicians.

And that’s not even counting two of the hottest, but as yet undeclared candidates: Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the not-gay caballero on the Rio Grande, and former Wasilla Mayor Sarah Palin, the not-Tina Fey, briefly employed as Alaska’s chief executive.

Observing this mind-numbing, made for cable-babble political pageant, those in the business of reporting politics as a spectator sport might ask, “Are these future commanders-in-chief just too cute to fail?”

At least in my 64-year-old memory (a brain area not usually employed by the modern electorate), we have the most physically attractive line-up of potential presidents any political party has ever produced. Not just Perry and Palin, but Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann, and Jon Huntsman, too.

The rest of the field, unfortunately, look more like those science and math club members who couldn’t find a date to the prom. There’s the very white ex-Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, the clearly black pizza mogul Herman Cain, and veteran congressman and weird uncle-look-alike Ron Paul, plus the thoughtful, tri-athletic former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, who smokes nothing more than salmon, but doesn’t mind if you do. Oops! I almost forgot former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who resembles the Pillsbury dough boy and whose politics are just as malleable.

Voters have always considered physical attributes when selecting a chief executive. For example, tall has always been in. An instructive Wikipedia article on presidential stature reveals that the average American male was slightly over five feet nine inches in 2005, but only 14 of our 43 presidents have been under five feet 10 inches while 18 have been 6 feet tall or more. We’ve always wanted to look up to our leaders, beginning with the father of our country, 6-foot-tall George Washington, the seventh-tallest president in history. Honest Abe Lincoln was an impressive six feet four inches, tied for tallest with overbearing Texan Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Imposing height was easy to convey, even in the non-visual, print-mediated political discourse of the first one and one-half centuries of the Republic, when leaders were nominated mostly by peers who had seen them in-person, and who then touted them in newspapers to the unwashed masses.

It could be just coincidence that the first television era, mass-communicated leader was a man with Hollywood good looks, the six-foot-tall John Fitzgerald Kennedy, with the lovely Jackie at his side. But it's probably more than likely a handsome, beautiful, or otherwise attractive face will become increasingly useful to would-be presidents, when we are digitally assaulted nearly every moment of our sleepless lives with youthful beauty. How much time do tens of millions of voters spend each day looking at the appropriately-named Facebook?

That doesn’t mean that a pretty face is the only thing that matters to the electorate. Most presidents have also been able to string seven words together to form a complete sentence (George W. Bush notwithstanding.) But since video killed both the print and radio stars of American politics in the late 1970's, no real dogs—other than actual cute puppies—have inhabited the White House.

So how will the top five real and potential candidates for the GOP nomination in 2012 fare in the upcoming beauty contest?

Romney and Perry both have square jaws and industrial-strength hair. Bachmann and Palin are cougar babes in anybody’s book. And Huntsman has the lean features and silver highlights of an aging rock star. That’s about as far as I wanna’ go with that, so you fill in the blanks.

Of course, a plain face with a brain could theoretically emerge as the Republican nominee. But it’s doubtful the Party of Lincoln will make the mistake they did in 2008, and nominate another short, pasty-faced old geezer. Not when the GOP has to run against the Jack-and-Jackie fashionistas now occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Terry Michael is director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism. His writing is collected at his "thoughts from a libertarian Democrat" website, www.terrymichael.net.

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A July 4th
Postcard to the President

It’s been a tough few years for us anti-interventionist libertarian Democrats (all six of us). Our split-every-difference, poll-driven, focus-groping president has started an elective second war in Afghanistan, continued (but pretended not to) an inherited disaster in Iraq, and initiated a third pointless, congressionally unauthorized, guns-a-blazing big adventure in the play land of an aging drag queen in Libya.

Sixty-something anti-war baby boomers will recall a bit of 1965 black humor in the disappointing aftermath of Democratic peace candidate Lyndon Johnson’s trouncing of Republican war hawk Barry Goldwater: “They told me if I voted for Goldwater in 1964 we’d be at war in Vietnam within a year. They were right. I did, and we were.”

The most recent Democratic president—a Nobel Peace Prize winner, no less!—announced his own war less than a year after inauguration, bravely speaking to an audience of approving teenage West Point cadets in December 2009. Bowing to demands of the military-industrial-congressional complex after several months of hand-wringing, President Barack Obama chose a theater for his military adventure not far from those Vietnam jungles, a few B-52 or F-16 flying hours across South Asia, in the tribal hills of the sort-of nation state of Afghanistan. There came the new boss, just like the old boss.

So the joke can now be updated: They told me if I voted for McCain in 2008, we’d be in a perpetual state of war within a year. They were right. I did and....well, you know the punch line.

As a Jeffersonian-Madisonian Democrat, and like so many modern left-liberal Democrats, my enthusiasm for Obama’s nomination and election turned almost entirely on his anti-war talk. I was hopeful he wouldn’t turn out to be another Lyndon Johnson. That was hoping against nothing but hope, and talk. Like Johnson, Obama rammed over-reaching social welfare legislation through a Democratic Congress, while starting his own congressionally undeclared war of choice. But unlike LBJ, he didn’t exhibit even the partial saving grace of a bold initiative on civil rights. Our half-black and half-white, half-Kansan, half-Kenyan-American, finger-to-the-wind leader half-heartedly side-stepped the arguably most important American civil rights issue of the 21st century by waffling on same-sex marriage and avoiding a bold Truman-like executive order on gays in the military, timidly lagging behind the changing culture.

Hoping-against-hope is about all we voters have when we are confronted with two candidates with no informing political ideologies or philosophies. It’s why we usually don’t select a chief executive directly from Congress, an institution that rewards those who daily try to convince the National Association of This and the American Council of That he’s on both their sides. We did it only in 1880 with Speaker James Garfield, in 1920 with Sen. Warren Harding, and in 1960 with seductive Sen. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, before we were faced in 2008 with two split-every-difference nominees, Sen. Obama and old-and-intemperate “war hero” Sen. John McCain, who never met a war or a position he didn't embrace.

Is there a way forward? A way out of the deep muddy in which our president finds himself, unable to manage the marketplace (no president can) and too cautious to exercise his power not to intervene in the affairs of the rest of the world?

Maybe, but it would have to come from a principled politician of Obama’s own party, and perhaps own state, even his inner circle. Someone willing to mount the bully congressional pulpit and break with his president. That’s a task especially worth pondering on the Fourth of July, 235 years after a few good men risked not just their political careers but their very lives for a new-world experiment in liberty.

Born in Jefferson County, Illinois, former Democratic National Committee press secretary Terry Michael has observed politics in Washington, DC since 1975, when he arrived in the capital with newly elected Rep. Paul Simon of Barack Obama’s adopted home state of Illinois. His “thoughts from a libertarian Democrat” are at www.terrymichael.net.

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

As one who founded (22 years ago) and continues to operate a journalism-related non-profit/501(c)(3), I offer this commentary and some suggestions with regard to the NPR fund-raising debacle and the continuing debate over taxpayer funding of "public" broadcasting. I do so as an admirer of great reporting by dedicated journalists at both NPR and PBS, and their local stations.

Let me begin by observing and commenting on what an NPR spokeswoman had to say about a fund-raising employee (Betsy Liley, NPR's senior director of institutional giving), who suggested the corporation might shield a donor with anonymity:

An NPR spokeswoman, Anna Christopher, had no comment on the phone recording. But she said: "All donations, anonymous and named, are reported to the IRS. NPR complies fully with all tax and financial disclosure regulations."

Those are weasel words. I know them when I see them, having spent 16 years as a political press secretary.

Running a 501(c)(3), I am familiar with filing Form 990's. I've spent countless hours filling them out for over two decades. We list our donors over $5,000--names, addresses and amounts--on Schedule B of the Form 990--but the IRS does not make that public! When we post a copy of WCPJ's Form 990 on our web site, we voluntarily include the Schedule B...
http://www.wcpj.org/annual_report/Form990_2009_WCPJ.pdf
...because we believe in full transparency.

For two decades, we have made complete PUBLIC reports of every single donation and every single expenditure, by line-item. That should be REQUIRED BY LAW for all organizations that claim tax exemptions, and particularly by those to which donors can make tax deductible gifts. Over the last 22 years, several individual donors have asked that their names not be released by WCPJ. In each case, the gift was $500 or less, and we listed the amount with the word "Anonymous" in our regular reports of gifts, making the judgment that the donor either didn't want to be solicited by others, or just didn't want to brag about his giving. In no case have we ever accepted an anonymous gift from an institution.

The Washington Center for Politics & Journalism has never sought a government grant and never will, as long as I lead it. We (I) do it the old-fashioned way, begging benefactors to give money if they believe in our mission. And then we let everyone decide whether a gift or an expenditure compromises that mission.

With that background, here are my suggestions to NPR, PBS, CPB, et al......

(1) Wean yourselves off taxpayer crack. Tell the politicians who give you government grants that doing so compromises your ability to cover them objectively. You would never accept politicians making grants to The Washington Post, so why should you get them? Ask legislators and presidents to phase out federal funding for all "public broadcasting" over the next three years, which will give you a reasonable amount of time to come down from your addiction.

(2) End the fiction that "support provided by" is not advertising. That is a euphemism, which allows your benefactors to hide the amounts of their donations in the secret part of your Form 990 filings. Accept advertising, but publicly disclose every cent you get from advertisers, just as your reporters expect politicians to do so, when they file their FEC reports on campaign contributions. Your listeners and viewers can then decide for themselves whether your reporting has been compromised by your benefactors. That transparency occurs everyday in the profit-making newspaper and magazine business, when a reader can decide for himself whether The New York Times or Newsweek is being influenced by money it gets from advertisers who appear right next to news, analysis and opinion reports.

(3) Continue to operate as non-profits, if you must. You can do that and still take money from advertisers, as well as donors. Doing so frees you from that awful pressure of having to make a profit by satisfying customers--though a lot of good profit-making newspapers and broadcast networks still deliver excellent reporting to their customers, despite seeking that filthy lucre.

Call this Terry Michael's three-step program for ending the addictions of "public" broadcasting.

The End of the American Century
It's time to practice Jeffersonian
libertarianism at home and abroad

Though its first decade began with a security nightmare in lower Manhattan and ended with an economic collapse blocks away on Wall Street, the 21st century can still bring greater peace, prosperity, and individual liberty if American libertarians seize this moment in history. We must echo President Dwight Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” warnings in his January 17, 1961 farewell address and we must counter the “American Century” conceit still plaguing us from Henry R. Luce’s Life magazine editorial of February 17, 1941, the 70th anniversary of which is now upon us.

The contrast between Eisenhower’s historically informed wisdom and Luce’s jingoistic missionary zeal offer an opportunity for serious discourse beyond the empty choices presented by bloated government liberals and big government conservatives. Both “sides” pretend they want to downsize the fat federal beast, just as they both sell interventionist foreign policy with flag-waving “support the troops” propaganda.

More alike than not, Democrats and Republicans serve the narrow interests of the “government affairs representatives” who infest Washington’s K Street lobbying firms. They pander to both the procurers of middle- and elderly-class entitlements and to the rent seekers from scare-mongering national security industries, who profiteer from a permanent state of empire-building and elective warfare.

Unfortunately, it has now become mantra for 2012 Republican nominee wannabes to drop a Luce-style reference to “American exceptionalism” into every nascent campaign speech, op-ed, and FOX News cable-babble. They're attempting to create a GOP theme to counter the second-term ambitions of what the populist, nativist right considers a “less-than-American” president, Barack Obama, who made the mistake of saying in an April 2010 press conference outside the U.S. that, "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."

Obama qualified that remark to assure his worldwide audience that he, too, worships at the altar of the High Church of American Exceptionalism, but it was too little, too late. The neo-con artists, think tank directors, and weekly journal editors who live for an endless state of war seized on Obama’s words. They went on the attack to please their oil and defense-contractor friends, in service to the interests of the religiously-defined nation-state of Israel, and supported by the Rapturist hallucinations of certain domestic Christian fundamentalists eager to ascend into the clouds to meet Jesus via their self-fulfilling prophecies about Armageddon in the Holy Land.

Those of us blessed with the classical liberal meme stream inherited from the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason can do the human race a favor by using the Eisenhower and Luce anniversaries as a teaching moment. We can illuminate just how much liberty has been lost due to today’s permanent state of warfare, which not only Eisenhower in 1961, but James Madison two centuries earlier, warned against. We can define how Luce’s pre-war jingoistic “American Century” proclamation, in his immodestly named Life magazine, contributed to a post-war sense of New World entitlement. Luce’s conceit encouraged Americans to think of ourselves as God’s policemen to the world, and to obsess about our right not only to whatever our rapidly expanding middle-class incomes could buy, but also to what politicians could hand out via federal, state, and local taxes—and a massive deficit-spending spree.

“American exceptionalism” is a slogan used in many ways. With modesty, it describes an exemplar nation, setting an example for indigenous movements for liberal democracy and free markets (perhaps even in Egypt and Iran right now). But more often, it is employed by warmongers and nation builders to justify the projection of American hard power. This approach has been sorely abused by many presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, and—sorrowfully, for me—Barack Obama, who now echoes President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s anointment of America as “the indispensable nation.”

As we witness the rise of great middle classes around the globe, empowered by the democratization of information, finance, and technology, America is at a stage of history when we should disenthrall ourselves from the notion we are at the center of human existence. We have become the problem in so many places because of our over-bearing presence. We need to step back and put the individual, not our nation-state, at the center of the universe.

Executive director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism, Terry Michael’s writing is collected at his “thoughts from a libertarian Democrat” personal web site, www.terrymichael.net.

Mr. Obama's war
Why don't anti-war Democrats
support soldiers, straight and gay?

Liberal Democrats in Congress fought hard for open service by homosexual soldiers, persuading some Republican politicians that it was politically smart to catch up with a fast-moving culture. So now, when will the theoretically anti-war party in Congress use its constitutionally mandated war powers to legislate against President Obama's elective atrocity in Afghanistan? When will they speak out for bringing home from that corrupt hellhole all the troops, straight and homosexual, young men and women, lingering in harm's way for no discernible national purpose after routing the Taliban a decade ago?

Mr. Obama was nominated by Democrats and elected by partisans and independents precisely because he presented himself as the noninterventionist in a field dominated by "liberal internationalist" warriors like Joseph R. Biden and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Inscrutably to those who thought they were electing an anti-war president, he then proceeded to form a government with a vice president and a secretary of state from the "neo-con lite" wing of the Democratic Party, the foreign-policy "experts" who are part of a self-proclaimed Beltway consensus perpetuating the liberty-threatening permanent state of war James Madison counseled against two centuries ago.

That consensus has another name, the military-industrial complex, which general and Republican President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell address 50 years ago this coming Jan. 17, in the year Mr. Obama was born. Eisenhower is said to have called it the military-industrial-congressional complex in an early draft but to have decided not to gratuitously offend the branch of government at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Liberal congressional Democrats came to power in 2006 - just as Mr. Obama did in 2008 - in an electoral wave that rejected George W. Bush's war of choice in Iraq. They next averted their eyes as Mr. Obama caved to the military, industrial and congressional money machine, with a December 2009 West Point speech as stomach-churning for anti-war liberals and libertarians as was Mr. Bush's "Mission accomplished" stunt on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier six years earlier.

With substantial majorities in both the House and Senate, liberal congressional Democrats in 2009 abdicated their responsibility to reject Mr. Obama's war, just as in 2003 unprincipled conservative congressional Republicans colluded to pass the biggest social-welfare legislation since the Great Society, Mr. Bush's budget-busting prescription-drug pander to the elderly. Like the oxymoronic "big-government conservatism" that rendered many Republicans non-voters in 2006, Mr. Obama's interventionism left millions of Democrats demoralized in 2010.

Democratic apologists will claim Mr. Obama just did in Afghanistan what he said he would do in the campaign. Such courtesans conveniently forget that he also declared he would not insist that every American be required to buy health insurance. In each case, he was engaging in heat-of-the-moment tactics of a presidential nominating campaign, not usually known for producing thoughtful public policy when it comes time to govern. Just months after taking office, Mr. Obama reversed himself on a key element of his signature domestic-policy initiative, the insurance mandate at the center of lawsuits against the implementation of health care "reform." So, what hindered him - after months of public and private hand-wringing over Afghanistan - from concluding that America had no further business in "the graveyard of empires" with a government as corrupt as can be imagined?

The year 2011 brings another anniversary in addition to the 50th of Eisenhower's echoing of the Founders' disdain for standing armies, arms profiteering and the liberty infringement that results from fear-mongering employed to scare up popular support for spending blood and treasure. Twenty years before Ike's address, in the Feb. 17, 1941, issue of his immodestly named Life magazine, publisher Henry R. Luce christened the last 100 years of the second millennium "The American Century."

The son of Presbyterian missionaries, Luce represented the zealous strain of American exceptionalism, advocating the spread of liberal democracy with military intervention. It contrasted with the more modest view of America as an exemplar nation, encouraging adoption of our political and economic systems by imitation through indigenous movements for liberal democracy and free markets.

A debate over those two visions of the shining city on the hill is worth having today. Some countries may take exception to the "indispensable nation" status for America proclaimed by Bill Clinton in the last democratic administration, a grandiose vision now touted by his wife, the current secretary of state. Other citizens of the world may disagree and ask us to kindly mind our own damned business. But it takes at least two parties to engage in such serious discourse. Some of us therefore must ask: Where the hell are the anti-war Democrats?
______________________________________________

Terry Michael is a former press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, who teaches college journalists about politics and writes "thoughts from a libertarian Democrat" at terrymichael.net.

My tart-tongued mother, of Scotch-Irish mixed-with-German descent, and with Southern Illinois wisdom to boot, would have had some good advice for President Barack Obama’s political message consultants had she lived to see the craziness of 2010 politics: "You can't turn shit into Shinola." And not just this bizarre year but every year, her son tells his political journalism students, "Money follows message. Not the other way around."

To summarize: No amount of dirty Chamber of Commerce foreign money—conjured up by the White House a few weeks ago in a vain attempt to fire up left-liberals—could create the crappy set of electorally damaging facts that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid visited on both the Democratic base and the relatively apolitical center of American politics over the past 22 months.

In other words, "It's the policies, stupid!" that have created the forthcoming November disaster for Democrats, not some failure to communicate.

In "White House Goes Into Bunker Mode," written October 25 from his new position as Washington bureau chief for The Daily Beast, former Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz quotes White House communications director Dan Pfieffer: "There’s an alternative story here that we’re trying to tell. But there’s an element of spitting in the ocean."

In his piece, Kurtz raises the question of whether, in our data-wired world, a U.S. president is just another guy salivating in the political meme stream or whether Obama’s best and the brightest are only making excuses for their poor messaging.

The answer is neither.

Former George W. Bush press secretary Dana Perino gets it pretty much right, also quoted by Kurtz: "I remember being in a meeting where someone said, 'We have a communications problem with Iraq.' I said, ‘No, 89 soldiers were killed this month in Iraq. That's your problem.'"

The Democratic Party’s problem is that the leader it elected to end a war is keeping 50,000 "non-combatant" troops in the country George W. Bush elected to attack, sacrificing the lives of over 4,000 Americans and 100,000 Iraqis. Obama also decided to wage his own elective war in Afghanistan, complete with a George W. Bush-style speech at West Point last December, further demoralizing his liberal base.

After dissing his most reliable supporters, Obama added insult to the Great Recession injury with a big government health care takeover. Pelosi and Reid joined him in a politically tone-deaf assault on centrist voters, many of whom helped elect congressional Democrats in 2006 and Obama in 2008. Already furious with Bush's bailing out of bankers, and scared to death about losing home equity and retirement fund value, the center reacted with Tea Party vengeance to ObamaCare’s corporate welfare for Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Hospital.

In denial, the K Street wing of the Democratic Party now pats itself on the back for Great Legislative Achievements, and claims that secret Karl Rove/Chamber of Commerce money is keeping their story from being told to those stupid, gullible voters—conveniently forgetting their own big bucks patron saint of a few years ago, George Soros. Not at all stupid, Soros refused to throw his good money after the Democrats’ bad policy message, proclaiming a few weeks ago, "I can't stop a Republican avalanche."

There's also the inconvenient truth about which party has actually spent the big money in 2010. As Politico's Jeanne Cummings reported on October 27, "The money race totals come to $856 million for the Democratic committees and their aligned outside groups, compared to $677 for their Republican adversaries, based on figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics."

It remains to be seen whether Obama stays in the bunker after November 2nd. Will he receive the message that Democrats and a majority of independents are tired of the liberty-infringing, permanent state of warfare that one of the party's co-founders, James Madison, warned against two hundred years ago? Will he follow Bill Clinton, himself brought back to earth from a failed healthcare "reform" in 1994, and re-proclaim that the era of big government is over?

As a libertarian Democrat, I'm going to hope—perhaps against hope—that Obama will. It’s time to pull Democrats kicking and screaming into the 21st century by returning to the classical liberal philosophy of the party’s founders, Jefferson and Madison.

Transported across time, those Virginia gentlemen might offer this advice to their wounded Democratic Party leaders: "Assure liberty by keeping government as far away as possible from the balance books, the bedrooms, and the bodies of those you represent. Nurture pluralistic democracy and free markets on this earth by example, understanding that neither can be planted by armed force on political ground lacking indigenous human cultivators for growth. Affirm the moral authority of the inalienable rights we are guaranteed by fashioning public policy for individuals, not tribal identity groups."

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As a former press spokesman for the Democratic National Committee now teaching college journalists about politics, I find shameless, maybe even shameful, my party’s tarring of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - a Washington, D.C. neighbor of President Barack Obama, a block from The White House across Lafayette Park. That’s saying a lot in a cabble-babble and net-nutty environment, where shame no longer seems to inhibit even the worst behavior. But trying to paint the business lobby as a Chamber of Horrors that's using dirty money from foreigners, is worse than shameful for this former operative. It’s stupid politics.

Ever since the Republican-inspired Progressive Era morphed into Wilsonian Democrat social-engineering progressivism 100 years ago, the Democratic Party has tried to portray itself as a little bit holier than the party of Mammon. We have liked to think of ourselves as the tribune of the “little guy,” standing against those fat cat Republicans who live on George Babbitt’s Main Street or reside on that greedy, seedy Wall Street.

So it’s not surprising Obama’s political advisors would attempt to boost the spirits of a sagging Democratic base with a little pre-Halloween, pre-election demonizing of the lobby that President William Howard Taft inspired. A human symbol for detractors of big business, the elephant-sized Taft used his annual message to Congress in December 1911 to encourage creation of what became the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, so business could speak to him in a single voice.

With a little help from Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt in the 1920s, the negative image of the Chamber is almost in the DNA of liberal Democrats. In the fictional Zenith, Ohio Chamber of Commerce bulletin, Lewis' George Babbit writes:

...and as it's the best way of fighting the unions, every business man ought to belong to....the Chamber of Commerce. So any selfish hog who doesn't join the Chamber of Commerce ought to be forced to."

In the Republican genome, Big Labor is encoded as their bête noire, and they periodically try to pump up the GOP base with images of cigar-chomping labor goons at the AFL-CIO, the umbrella group of international unions headquartered just a block down the street from the Chamber and White House in the Capital.

When you see vilification of Big Labor or Big Business, with the Chamber and the AFL-CIO as icons, you can pretty much guess a political party is admitting, like a stand-up comedian, “I got nuthin’.” And with that historical context in mind, let me explain why Democrats have nothing with this attack on Main Street.

The simplest way to understand why demonizing the Chamber is a fruitless tactic might be to think of the 2006 mid-term election. The Republican base was demoralized with an increasingly unpopular president, who had embraced a budget-busting, big government piece of health legislation - more pharmaceuticals for old people. Democrats hated Bush and abhorred his war. And independents leaned left, also hating on Bush and the war.

Does any of that sound familiar in 2010? Now Democrats are demoralized with an increasingly unpopular president, who has burdened our psyches with more endless war to replace the one we elected Obama to end. Republicans hate Obama and his budget-busting piece of health legislation - corporate welfare for insurance and drug companies. And independents now lean right, also hating on Obama and his health care “reform.”

The old lawyer joke applies. If you don’t have the law, pound away at the facts. If you don’t have the facts, pound away at the law. If you have neither, pound on the table.

But no amount of pounding on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is going to save Democrats from the self-inflicted wounds of endless war and over-reaching social legislation. As a libertarian Democrat (about six of us), I have a formula that might help Barack Obama and other Democratic leaders re-connect with our base and reach out to independents of the 21st Century, to replace the spent ideology of progressivism. The short version goes something like this:

The government should assure liberty by staying as far away as possible from our bank accounts, our bedrooms, and our bodies. Spread pluralistic democracy and free markets by example, understanding that neither can be planted by force on political real estate lacking indigenous cultivators for their growth. Restore the moral authority of mid-20th century civil rights, fashioning public policy around individuals, not tribal identity groups.

You can read the full version of the formula here.

Director of the Washington Center for Politics & Journalism, Terry Michael is a former Democratic National Committee press secretary (1983-1987). His opinion writing is collected at his “libertarian Democrat” web site, www.terrymichael.net.

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It’s not the economy, it’s the war, stupid!

I’m talkin’ to you, Democrats in the House and Senate. Scores of you are about to lose your jobs, while the rest forfeit coveted committee chairmanships because you don’t realize the way to avoid defeat is to appeal to your base with an anti-war message.

No smoke and mirrors in the next seven weeks will convince Republican, independent, and conservative-leaning centrists—the motivated voters of 2010—that President Barack Obama and the congressional Democrats have a plan to restore home equity and retirement savings, stimulate investment, and reduce unemployment. Those are functions of the business cycle, impacted by the irrational exuberance that fueled the illusion that real estate and stock values could rise forever. Tea Partiers may irrationally blame Democrats for most of that pain, but they’re certain big government—especially ObamaPelosiCare—is making things worse.

The left-liberal political consultant-driven neo-populism, which Democrats have been trying to sell to a dwindling number of the Industrial Era (it’s over!) “working class” voters for decades, is folly. Waging class warfare against “the rich”—foolishly defined as anyone earning over $250,000—will do next to nothing to inspire the Democratic base, while refusing to extend the George W. Bush administration’s tax cuts only stokes the election day fury of Tea Party activists.

Every election is about energizing the base while winning over independents. But mid-terms, particularly for the House, have more to do with firing up loyalists, because most districts have been gerrymandered as Democrat or Republican. The Democratic base is in despair and inclined to stay home, just as it did in 1994 after HillaryCare gave Newt Gingrich the opening he needed to energize Clinton-haters and cultural and economic conservatives.

We usually see reelection rates over 90 percent for incumbents. This is due to Baker v. Carr (1962) demanding equal population districts, computers making it possible to configure districts block-by-block to determine partisan outcomes, and politicians waging year-round campaigns with taxpayer-financed staffs.

So, Democrats, if you can’t control the anger of Tea Party activists, who are mad as hell about losing economic security, what can you do?

You can motivate your base by taking on your own president, energizing those voters who are mad as hell that the leader they elected to end a war decided to ramp another one up instead.

In a matter of months, Obama succumbed to the military-industrial-congressional complex and placed thousands more young men and women in harm’s way in the corrupt non-state and graveyard of empires known as Afghanistan. The very year Obama was born, in fact, Dwight Eisenhower warned us of the threat to liberty posed by a huge standing army and the arms profiteers who fuel a perpetual state of war. Ike echoed James Madison, who helped found the Democratic Party with Thomas Jefferson, and who alerted us two centuries ago, “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” A former constitutional law professor, Obama apparently never internalized that observation by the architect of our Constitution.

As they face doom, congressional Democrats need to show guts—and political intelligence—and tell their base they intend to fight like hell to end the madness in Afghanistan, and bring home the 50,000 “advisors” Obama left in Iraq.

Democrats, like Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, abdicated responsibility when they made no principled case against the Iraq War in its run-up, just as the Democrats of the 1960's proved gutless by allowing President Lyndon Johnson to sacrifice thousands of young men in Southeast Asian jungles. Congressional Democrats have averted their eyes once again, remaining all but silent last year when Obama gave a George W. Bush-style war-making speech at West Point.

If Democrats need polls to stiffen their spines, the Associated Press-GfK survey last month reveals 58 percent of Americans oppose the war in Afghanistan, while only 38 percent support it. More significantly, the numbers of those most likely to vote based on the issue rests resoundingly with opponents, with 35 percent strongly opposing the war while only 17 percent strongly favor it. The numbers on Iraq are even more anti-war, with 65 percent opposing and only 31 percent supporting. (For the few politicians who prefer sound arguments to polls, they can cite Andy Bacevich’s excellent new book, Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War.)

Democrats, give your base a reason to vote this November. Not so Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid can keep their jobs, but because you have a duty to oppose the "American exceptionalist" militarism that typifies the Republicans—and which has unfortunately seized the mind of still another Democratic president.

A former press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, Terry Michael now teaches college journalists about politics and writes at his “libertarian Democrat” web site www.terrymichael.net.

Read original here....

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“Man Accused of spraying semen led a normal life. Suspect never had any issues. Showed no indication of bizarre behavior.”

You just read the headline and sub-heds for a story in the Metro section of last Sunday's (August 15, 2010) issue of the ink-on-dead-trees edition of The Washington Post. It led the front page of a section charged with reporting important District of Columbia news. It did so only four weeks until a local election, featuring a Post-endorsed young mayor who seems to think DC’s treasury is his personal piggybank for friends--though you wouldn’t necessarily know much about that from the meager space devoted to Mayor Adrian Fenty’s alleged transgressions. But I digress....

Don't Eat the Rich,
President Obama

Terry Michael | July 31 , 2010

WASHINGTON -- Keeping the Bush tax cuts from expiring at the end of the year would be both good policy and good politics for President Barack Obama.

If he wants to avoid a double-dip recession, fend off double-digit unemployment and retain a Democratic majority in at least one house of Congress, the president needs to embrace tax policy focused on the political center. He can throw out a little populist red meat to his demoralized base, but he'd better not taunt the middle-class Tea Party monster ready to devour left-liberal congressmen. The president can skewer Wall Street, but not eat the rich.

There may be a good time to raise taxes on the super-wealthy, but Dec. 31, 2010, when the Bush tax cuts expire, sure as hell isn't one of them. Obama's market-savvy fellow Democrat and Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D, N.D.) acknowledges that. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner understands it, even if he can't say it. Job-producing investment demands it.

Anybody with a lick of political economic sense knows the Great Recession was not caused by low tax rates. It was the mortgage meltdown, stupid! Housing-bust-driven loss of home equity and mutual-fund retirement savings are the caffeine that stimulated the aging Baby Boomer, vote-rich, amorphous Tea Party. ...

In Defense of Libertarianism
An open letter to left-liberals

Terry Michael | May 28, 2010

To my left-liberal Democrat friends:

As you engage in intellectual dishonesty using Rand Paul’s silly comments on the 1964 Civil Rights Act to misrepresent libertarianism, perhaps you might want to consider a little history of the political philosophy of the founder of our party, Thomas Jefferson, the original libertarian. Let me help you escape your ignorance about libertarianism without a capital L, a political philosophy far from conservatism.

As a child of the 1960s, I was one of you. I wore a “Madly for Adlai” button, delivered Kennedy brochures on my newspaper route, and defended Medicare in speech class. Growing up in the Bible Belt, I was the only kid in town to subscribe to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a near-communist rag according to neighbors who read the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, for which a young Pat Buchanan was writing editorials.

After three years of reporting, I became a press secretary, arriving in Washington in 1975 with Rep. Paul Simon who embodied the Progressive Era. He believed programs, regulations, and social “science” expertise could lift the poor and end corruption.

Read more here....

Original Reason HTML Link or Reason PDF

******************

Lies of the Ethics Industry
How the champions of "good government" suppress speech
and sow cynicism

Down the Health Care Wormhole

How ObamaPelosiCare
will saddle future generations
with a public policy disaster

If we can put a man on the moon, we can re-write the basic laws of supply and demand and get more quality health care, dispensed by fewer providers per patient, at lower prices for all Americans. Sure we can. Just like we ended poverty with the Great Society, and like we’ll impose liberal democracy on the corrupt oligarchy ruling a collection of tribes known as Afghanistan.

Landing humans on the lunar surface looks like an easily do-able dream when set beside many of the ideologically and anecdotally driven social, economic, and foreign policy nightmares cooked up by public officials in the last half-century of big government. That truth is explored in the appropriately titled book, If We Can Put a Man on the Moon...: Getting Big Things Done in Government (though, it should be noted, the book doesn’t advocate getting big things done by big government).

Published last year, it was co-authored by former Reason Foundation privatization analysts John O’Leary and William D. Eggers. Together, the authors bring experienced insight about how good, bad, and really awful public policy ideas are generated, and then how those ideas should be tested in terms of design, adoption, implementation, achievement of intended results, and periodic review.

Read more here....

A Nanny State Assault on Internship Programs
The trouble with the Labor Department's one-size-fits-all agenda.

As if I didn’t have enough to worry about raising money for my non-profit college journalism education program in this lousy economy, the nanny state is now threatening my Politics & Journalism Semester with one-size-fits-all regulations written for the blue collar employment era.

Twenty-one years ago, I founded, and still run, a semester-in-Washington effort to teach real world politics (maybe an oxymoron) to college journalists who want to be political reporters. In spring and fall classes of 16 weeks each, I give my dozen students a twice-weekly seminar series featuring top political practitioners and political journalists. The rest of the week, they work in news bureaus as interns, usually unpaid. Few of them receive college credit, and many have already graduated. I guarantee each a $3000 living expense stipend if they aren’t paid, and don’t charge any tuition or fees. Generally, my “graduates” have nothing but praise for the experience, reflected in hundreds of them making personal donations to our 501(c)(3) non-profit, which has a budget of about $250,000 per year.

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Elective Wars.
Brought to you with a little help from
our friends in the MainStreamMedia.

Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) let his anger get the best of him recently, when he exploded at America’s press for obsessing on a disgraced congressman while blood and treasure is spilled for a corrupt U.S. client government in Afghanistan. But Kennedy got it mostly right, despite his over-the-top angry tone.

Years ago, America’s now decimated newspapers and broadcast news divisions shut down all but a handful of foreign bureaus, leaving international coverage to flag-waving Cable TV anchors, embedding themselves with troops to market their “shows.” American journalism has scant resources--and even less will--to investigate foreign affairs.

With military boosterism substituting for intelligent foreign policy coverage, America’s mainstream media has made itself the propaganda organ for a phony bi-partisan, military and congressional industrial complex.

"We've got a government in a box, ready to roll in," Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, told The New York Times last week about the largest military offensive since an American-led coalition invaded the country in 2001. Six thousand U.S. Marines, plus British and Afghan forces, descended on a Taliban stronghold in Marja, in the southern Helmand Province, a mission described as a "test" of America’s new counter-insurgency strategy designed to win over civilians and establish order, all while chasing away or killing Taliban fighters.

Government in a box? What a foolish thing to say, what hubris. Ironically, it’s probably more truth than the general wanted to reveal about American manipulation of the Afghan "government." But what should we expect when we put a military commander—underscore the word commander—in charge of a nation-building folly. Apparently, the general thinks you can bring in a government as easily as he requisitions more meals-ready-to-eat for his troops.

Of course, we’ll get a result as tasty as those MREs. The outcome will be what any intelligent observer with a sense of history will understand--a client government in name only, in a failed non-state, rife with corruption. If that sounds familiar, you probably know what we tried unsuccessfully with an earlier American client regime, in “South” Vietnam in the early 1960s. And it’s what another general touted by the Military Industrial Complex, David Petraeus, did with his rent-a-bad-guy “counterinsurgency strategy” in Iraq, heralded by neocon loonies as the “victory” for their elective war.

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On first year failures
of President Barack Obama....
(from RT TV, February 12, 2010)

A Back to the Future
Jeffersonian Liberalism
How the Democrats can thrive in the Information Age

Hopes dashed by the first-year bumblings of Barack Obama and three big GOP victories in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, Democratic campaign strategists, policy-mongers, and populist fire-breathers are touting formulas for party renewal. Nothing new here. Re-branding has been a cottage industry for Democrats since Lyndon Johnson dashed liberal dreams of wealth redistribution with his war in the 1960s, and mush-mouthed Democrats abandoned the toxic “L” word and started calling themselves “progressives" in the 1970s and 1980s.

While short-term thinking, focused on the November election, will dominate Beltway chatter about re-tooling Obama's legislative agenda, Democrats desperately need a new informing ideology to replace the 19th and 20th Century brand of statist programmatic liberalism rejected by the political center, in a choice-demanding information age.
..... Read all here:
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Health Care Reform (HCR) died Jan. 19 in Massachusetts, shortly before his 19th birthday. He was a victim of a mass suicide pact by economic left-liberals swilling Kool-Aid ..... Read all here:
Original Washington Times Link or PDF File

Pastor Perry--Godsend to Mormon Mitt?

by Terry Michael

Too Cute to fail? Surveying the 2012 GOP presidential field

A July 4th Postcard to the President

The End of the American Century It's time to practice Jeffersonian libertarianism at home and abroad

Mr. Obama's war Why don't anti-war Democrats support soldiers, straight and gay?

Don't Eat the Rich, President Obama

Terry Michael | July 31 , 2010 WASHINGTON -- Keeping the Bush tax cuts from expiring at the end of the year would be both good policy and good politics for President Barack Obama.

In Defense of Libertarianism An open letter to left-liberals

******************

Lies of the Ethics Industry How the champions of "good government" suppress speech and sow cynicism

Down the Health Care Wormhole

How ObamaPelosiCare will saddle future generations with a public policy disaster

A Nanny State Assault on Internship Programs The trouble with the Labor Department's one-size-fits-all agenda.

A Back to the Future Jeffersonian Liberalism How the Democrats can thrive in the Information Age

Pastor Perry--Godsend
to Mormon Mitt?

Too Cute to fail?
Surveying the 2012 GOP
presidential field

A July 4th
Postcard to the President

The End of the American Century
It's time to practice Jeffersonian
libertarianism at home and abroad

Mr. Obama's war
Why don't anti-war Democrats
support soldiers, straight and gay?

Don't Eat the Rich,
President Obama

Terry Michael | July 31 , 2010

WASHINGTON -- Keeping the Bush tax cuts from expiring at the end of the year would be both good policy and good politics for President Barack Obama.

In Defense of Libertarianism
An open letter to left-liberals

Lies of the Ethics Industry
How the champions of "good government" suppress speech
and sow cynicism

How ObamaPelosiCare
will saddle future generations
with a public policy disaster

A Nanny State Assault on Internship Programs
The trouble with the Labor Department's one-size-fits-all agenda.

A Back to the Future
Jeffersonian Liberalism
How the Democrats can thrive in the Information Age