Every Sunday morning on my blog at FranklinNOW.com, I post a list of highly recommended columns from the previous week. Here is this week’s compilation that should keep you busy:
“(Scott) Walker is running for governor hoping to galvanize what he calls a ‘Brown Bag Movement.’ He visits workplaces around the state during lunch hour and after a short speech takes questions from the workers who show up to hear him. Every seat has a brown paper lunch bag with a short saying. ‘I have to brown bag it so I can pay Wisconsin’s taxes’ or ‘I’d be eating out if government wasn’t gobbling up all of my money’ or ‘Wisconsin is Tax Hell!’
It’s cheesy, but, like the salary ad, it seems to be working. When I mentioned to a Washington-based political reporter that I was headed to Wisconsin to profile Walker, he said: ‘Oh, the Brown Bag guy’.”
Is it time to listen to Paul Ryan’s economic prescription?
“Who is this guy? It would be no surprise if he turned out to be a wealthy financier who had taken up budget policy as a retirement hobby (like Peter G. Peterson) or a professional forecaster whose views on consumer spending are bearish (like Gary Shilling). The surprise is that Ryan is an elected official. He’s running for election to a seventh term in Congress, representing a district with a razor-thin Republican edge south of Milwaukee.
Mess with Social Security? Are voters ready for this? Maybe they are. Those trillion-dollar deficits can’t go on much longer.”
“Wonder why voters will hand the GOP a crushing victory in November? It’s the trust, stupid.”
It’s the stupid season, stupid
“If you vote for Tom Barrett because you think Scott Walker gleefully employs racists at the highest levels of his campaign, you’re stupid, and shouldn’t be voting. If you vote for Russ Feingold because you think Ron Johnson will make it even slightly harder for you to kill animals and people with barely regulated deadly weapons, you’re stupid.”
“Now we know why the country has become ‘ungovernable,’ last year’s excuse for the Democrats’ failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?
Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. Majorities — often lopsided majorities — oppose President Obama’s social-democratic agenda (e.g., the stimulus, Obamacare), support the Arizona law, oppose gay marriage and reject a mosque near Ground Zero.
What’s a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument. The most venerable of these trumps is, of course, the race card.”
“I hereby present—with full chromosomal immunity—a rundown of things women have been doing to totally screw themselves since winning the right to vote.”
“The problem today is that the economy is not being left alone. Instead, it is haunted by uncertainty on a hundred fronts. When rules are unintelligible and unpredictable, when new workers are potential threats because of Labor Department regulations, businesses have little confidence to hire. President Obama’s vaunted legislative record not only left entrepreneurs with the burden of bigger government, it also makes it impossible for them to accurately estimate the new burden.
In at least three big areas—health insurance, financial regulation, and taxes—no one can know what will happen.”
Public pensions and our fiscal future
“Few Californians in the private sector have $1 million in savings, but that’s effectively the retirement account they guarantee to public employees who opt to retire at age 55 and are entitled to a monthly, inflation-protected check of $3,000 for the rest of their lives.”
Pols clueless on Ground Zero mosque
“The angry national debate over Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s intention to build a mosque two blocks north of the horror of 9/11 at Ground Zero has been further fueled by supporter Nancy Pelosi declaring, ‘I join those who have called for looking into how … this opposition to the mosque is being funded.’ If one of her sleuths knocks on my door, this opponent will readily state that I need no outside funding as a reporter who is deeply investigating the motivation of Imam Rauf’s choice of this site of mass murder for the mosque.”
“The hypocrites. Leftists say outrageous things on the radio routinely, things they truly mean, too, and those remarks never see the light of day on ABC, CBS and NBC. Talking about the N-word is wrong but wishing death on political enemies is OK when the rhetorical bombs are dropped on conservatives. The
Media has a new report chronicling who the real radio hatemongers are. Research Center
Start with …”
