One example:

When [restaurant chain] CKE’s health-care advisers, citing Obamacare’s complexities, opacities and uncertainties, said that it would add between $7.3 million and $35.1 million to the company’s $12 million health-care costs in 2010, [CEO] Puzder said: I need a number I can plan with. They guessed $18 million — twice what CKE spent last year building new restaurants. Obamacare must mean fewer restaurants.

Continue reading →

I wish this were a joke:

You may not have seen the show “Diary of a Single Mom” co-starring Billy Dee Williams, but your tax dollars helped pay for it.

Through the federal economic stimulus program, a company owned by actor-director Robert Townsend was paid more than $230,000 to produce and direct the Web-based show, records show. Other production costs on the show paid to different vendors total more than $700,000.

The money came through an award by the Department of Commerce to One Economy Corp. for more than $28 million last year to help boost broadband Internet service in underserved areas across the country.

One Economy is using more than $1.5 million of that money to create programming such as “Diary of a Single Mom,” which the group says will help provide an incentive for people to connect to the Internet.

PoliPundit, February 19th:

All these unsavory [Arab] governments are/were friends of the United States government. They will be replaced by motley Democratic governments that may or may not support terrorism against us. Buckle up. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Reality, December 2nd:

By the time the rural vote emerges from the Nile Delta and Sinai early next month, the hard-core Islamists will be sitting pretty. In the so-called Facebook Revolution, two-thirds of the Arab world’s largest nation is voting for the hard, cruel, bigoted, misogynistic song of sharia.

It’s not really one nation:

If Germany is paying the bills, shouldn’t it call the shots? But it shouldn’t be paying the bills for the follies of foreign countries or calling the shots. Greeks should be governed by Athens, no matter how dreary and dysfunctional this time-tested arrangement might strike Berlin as being.

The European elite claims that a reinvigoration of the nation-state will again risk war. Nonsense. Democratic nation-states didn’t precipitate World War II, the totalitarian ideology of Nazi Germany did. Are we supposed to believe that without the glue of the euro, Angela Merkel’s Germany would again roll Panzers across Nicolas Sarkozy’s France? Even without the EU, Europe would still be bound by trade, NATO, and a mutual commitment to international norms.

What Europe doesn’t share is a nation. No one speaks a language called European. There are no generic European monuments, although euro bank notes feature pleasingly fictional ones. Nor are the likes of Wellington or Napoleon generic European heroes. There aren’t pan-European political parties and never will be; voters in Denmark will always care more about their own affairs than the issues roiling Cyprus, and vice versa.

This suggests the cold comfort if the current crisis becomes the occasion for a shotgun fiscal union: Like the euro itself, it will never work.

Ramesh Ponnuru explains:

Romney isn’t merely the candidate who is likely to win the Republican primaries. He’s the candidate who should win them. That’s why he’s likely to win.

We all know the knocks on Romney. His health-care plan in Massachusetts was Obamacare in one state. He’s a flip-flopper. Inauthentic. His conservative detractors say he’s the establishment/moderate candidate — or worse. (Actual Thanksgiving conversation in the Ponnuru home: Conservative brother-in-law: “So, which of these characters are you supporting?” Me: “I think Romney’s the best of the bunch.” Him: “I didn’t know you were a Democrat.”)

It’s true that Romney took a sharp right turn when he moved from state to national politics. But it’s also true that in 2008 he was the candidate behind whom Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, among other conservative notables, said that the conservative movement should rally in order to stop John McCain from getting the nomination. He has not moved left since that time. His positions on policy questions are almost all the same as they were then. On a few issues he has moved right: He now favors a market-oriented reform to Medicare, for example.

If Romney was to McCain’s right then, he is still. He’s to George W. Bush’s right, too. Bush never came out for the Medicare reform Romney has endorsed. Bush never said that Roe v. Wade should be overturned, either. Romney has. Romney’s long list of policy advisers includes people who are, within their fields, roughly in sync with the politics of the Bush administration or to its right; almost nobody is significantly to its left.

If Mitt Romney becomes president, he will almost certainly be dealing with John Boehner as speaker of the House and Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader. While they, too, have their conservative detractors, they are the most conservative congressional leaders Republicans have had in modern times, and they will exert a rightward influence on the Romney administration. If they send him legislation to repeal Obamacare, cut taxes, or reform entitlements, he will sign it where Obama would veto it. If at some other point in his presidency a liberal-run Congress sends him tax increases, he will veto them where Obama would sign.

Yesterday, Rasmussen had Obama’s job approval at a net of -24, matching his all-time low. Only 19 percent strongly approved of the job he’s doing.

Even Jim Cramer can recognize a sucker trade:

We need more Jon Corzines.

That’s the only way to put it when you look at these bond auctions in Europe. Italy prices some bonds at 7.8%, and we need Corzine in there snapping them up for MF Global, with leverage. We need someone showing people it is a good bet and putting some flex behind the muscle.

Unfortunately, MF Global went bankrupt doing so. Instead we have the Italian people stepping up and getting a decent return on their money as part of a ‘Buy Government Bonds’ ploy by the Italian government. An individual sucker is born every minute. We need some more institutional suckers now.

I am thinking about MF Global, courtesy of a great article from Bloomberg, where it looks like Corzine himself thought he had a big score in short-term European paper. And if there were enough money and credit in the world, it actually might have paid off, given the silly system of using one currency to price all bonds, good and bad. That means that when the bonds came due — notes, actually — Corzine would have been paid in full.

Good trade.

But now these are longer-dated pieces of paper that are being sold, and there are no Corzines left to buy.

Says hyper-liberal Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA):

“Newt has never been one to engage mind before opening mouth. He engages mouth before engaging his mind sometimes, most of the time. That doesn’t bode well for him at all. I think there’s some, what I’m picking up around here is there’s a lot of quiet, silent cheering in the Obama Administration and the Obama campaign for Newt to get the nomination. It would be just be heaven-sent if he got the nomination.”

“I’m going to need another term to finish the job,” says Obama. Shudder.

(via Hot Air)

Jim Geraghty (just another RINO squish, I guess):

Most of Newt’s big initiatives since leaving office have had this big talk, little action pattern: the task force on U.N. reform, the Hart-Rudman Commission (it talked a lot about terrorism in 1999, but nobody was listening). I suppose you could argue that his Center for Health Transformation was an exception, as it helped create the prescription drug benefit for Medicare… but then again, a lot of conservatives see that as another unfunded expansion of an entitlement program. He proposed U.S. efforts to remove Yassir Arafat from power in April 2002. Bold idea, went nowhere (became moot in late 2004). Later that year, he attacked Walter Mondale (the Democrats’ Senate candidate in Minnesota after Paul Wellstone was suddenly killed in a plane crash) by saying that Mondale wanted to privatize Social Security and raise the retirement age. He constantly blurts these things out, and because he’s a former speaker, there are rarely any lasting consequences. As the Republican nominee or as the American president, there would be big consequences.

[...]

A couple people wondered when we would see a similar list of Mitt Romney’s deviations from conservative thinking. Well, there’s this thing that Tim Pawlenty called “Obamneycare,” and he used to emphasize that he was pro-choice, and he used to boast that he was an independent during Reagan-Bush and… what’s that? You’ve heard all of that? Yeah, me too. In fact, we spent most of 2007 and the beginning of 2008 hashing this stuff out. The primary difference (no pun intended) between last cycle and this cycle is that the enactment of Obamacare has put the issue of the individual mandate front and center, and Romney’s view is that we must fight all the way to the Supreme Court to ensure that the federal government never thinks it has the authority to make us buy health care… so that the states are free to make us buy health care, instead.

Ann Coulter was on Glenn Beck this morning, and explained why Mitt Romney would be a more conservative president than George W. Bush, especially on illegal immigration.

She officially endorsed Romney on Tuesday’s Hannity. I suppose this makes Coulter just another liberal, cocktail-party-loving, establishment RINO. Just like Rush Limbaugh, Jim DeMint, and Tom Tancredo, who all endorsed Romney in 2008.