Entries for November 2009

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

It is starting to look like President Barack Obama, aided and abetted by former Vice President Al Gore, Sens. Barbara Boxer, and John F. Kerry and others, may have lied this nation into a war against man-made global warming.

Preliminary analysis of the contents of thousands of E-mails and documents taken from the computer archives of the Climate Research Unit at England's University of East Anglia—possibly by a hacker, possibly by a whistleblower—indicate a number of the world's most important scientists engaged in research designed to prove that global warming really does exist may have been cooking the books.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Just in time for the holiday pollster Scott Rasmussen has found yet another reason for Republicans to be thankful.

According to Rasmussen's latest national telephone survey, the GOP has extended its lead in the Congressional generic ballot test to seven points, representing almost a complete flip from just one year ago. Respondents said they would vote for the generic Republican congressional candidate over the Democrat by 44 percent to 37 percent in the next election.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Thanksgiving is a time for family and for reflection, a time to kick back and consider all the ways in which we, as Americans, have been blessed over the previous year. Now, just in time for the holiday the folks at the Americans for Tax Reform Foundation have released a mini-study pointing out one way in which we can be "unthankful."

According to them, nearly half the cost of a typical Thanksgiving dinner for 10 people is taxes. Using figures provided by the American Farm Bureau Federation, ATRF's Center for Fiscal Responsibility has determined the typical tax bite comes to just under 41 percent of the total cost of the meal.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

California has, for some time, been rather inhospitable to Republicans.

The state where Reagan once reigned is now considered one of the most liberal in the nation. California has not voted Republican for president since 1988. All but two of the statewide elected officials are Democrats. The congressional delegation is majority Democrat. And in the state legislature, one-party Democratic rule is considered regular order.

Once a national symbol of entrepreneurial spirit and the ability of a man or woman to remake themselves into a success on the order of their ability, the state is now mired in a morass of taxation, regulation, spending, and debt that should serve as a cautionary tale for the rest of America. Whether the damage caused by the amalgam of labor unions, trial lawyers, state bureaucrats and career politicians who actually run the state can be reversed depends on the caliber of candidate who can be enticed to enter the arena.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Showing new signs of life after the embarrassing debacle in New York's 23rd Congressional District, U.S. Rep. Pete Sessions and the National Republican Congressional Committee are already pounding some senior Democrats whose vote in favor of Nancy Pelosi's healthcare package may make then vulnerable at the next election.

In new ads designed to run in North Dakota, Arkansas and South Carolina, the committee is raising the issue of the votes Democrats Earl Pomeroy, Vic Snyder and John Spratt cast in favor of Pelosicare by using the words of fellow Democrats who voted against it:

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's pivot from healthcare to jobs was not quite as smooth as she had hoped.

Buffeted by increases in the unemployment figures in the weeks and months since the stimulus bill passed and was signed into law, the Democrats had hoped to have a healthcare bill to talk about at the next election in order to blunt criticism that they have mismanaged the economy.

Now it's beginning to look like it won't do much good. Most all of the national surveys cite jobs or "jobs and the economy" as the No. 1 issue among likely voters in the next election. And try as she might to change the subject, Pelosi still has some unfinished healthcare business on her side of the Capitol.

By Peter Roff, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

There were few economists who really believed, despite the promises that the money would go to shovel ready projects that could begin immediately once the funding came through, that the stimulus would really create any net jobs. But something needed to be done, they said, especially in light of the Obama administration forecast that, without it, unemployment would rise about 9 percent for the first time in several decades.

Well, in what must have come as a surprise to the White House, they got both: the stimulus and unemployment up over 9 percent for the first time since the Reagan recession of the early 1980s.

It was a neat trick, managing to achieve both—but an even neater trick was the White House's invention of the idea that the impact of the stimulus be measured but the number of jobs "created or saved" by the federal largess pouring out of the treasury in its wake.