Now, in fairness though I’ve got to say that Canada’s interests here are a little bit different. And particularly, I might as well be frank, particularly in light of the…of the interim decision at least on Keystone. …. Our energy [issue] is the necessity of diversifying our energy export markets. We can not be, as a country, in a situation where really our one energy partner could say no to our energy products. …. when it comes to oil in particular, we do face a significant discount on the marketplace because of the fact that we’re a captive supplier. We have made it clear to the people of Canada, one of our national priorities is to make sure that we have the infrastructure and the capacity to export our energy products outside of North America.

– Canadian PM Stephen Harper

One of Barack Obama’s most obnoxious and arrogant campaign promises was his pledge to “restore America’s image throughout the rest of the world.” Well, it appears I’ll have to eat crow on this one. President Barack Obama has totally turned back the clock on how America is viewed abroad. This is particularly true with respect to Mexico and Canada.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper brims with great frustration at how he has been treated by our current US President. It’s almost as if someone has hit a “Reset” Button back to the Jolly Old Days of The Oregon Boundary Dispute.

Read More →

I’ve previously looked in detail at the breakdown of GOP primary votes here, here and here; for purposes of this series, I’ve broken out the votes in three groups – the five conservative candidates (Santorum, Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann and Cain), the two moderate candidates (Romney and Hunstman) and the libertarian (Paul) – for reasons explained in the first post. In my second post, I detailed the signs to look for to see whether and when Romney would start putting the race away with the voters rather than simply plodding through the accumulation of delegates.

After the March 24 vote in Louisiana and Tuesday’s votes in Wisconsin, Maryland and DC, we can see the signs of that momentum shift, but only slightly, with stubborn resistance to Romney still continuing. Not-unrelatedly, we can see the collapse of Newt Gingrich’s campaign to levels even lower than he was getting in February, the last time he went a month without being on the ballot in any Southern state (recall that Newt was not on the Missouri ballot). Let’s start with the month-by-month running tally:

Read More →

Our sister company Regnery Publishing (we’re both owned by Eagle Publishing, Inc.) sent me a new book to read. I am really bad these days about not reading all the books I get in — sometimes up to a dozen a week from various publishers and authors. But this one caught my eye.

Katie Pavlich, Townhall’s News Editor, has a book out entitled Fast And Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal and Its Shameless Cover-Up.

I think the media has spent more time doctoring 911 calls in the Trayvon Martin matter than focusing on what has happened along the border with Mexico. There has been some coverage and it probably would not have come to light except for CBS News’s initial reporting, but the scandal — and it is a scandal — has mostly flown under the radar.

In fact, the whole war on our Southern border, the kidnappings and killings spilling over into our country, etc. really have not made major, sustained national news.

Katie Pavlich’s book, comes in at 194 pages of text, then copious end notes and indexing, provides all the background you need to know to understand what happened and what is and is not being done.

Here’s the thing — a lot of conservative activists are focused on the scandal, but many have their facts jumbled, which makes it even harder to explain just how terrible a situation it is. Katie focuses on the facts, explains what happened, and has really produced a good primer on the subject for anyone in the press or activist community who wants to understand the extent of Operation Fast and Furious.

Click here now to order a copy of the book. If you are talking about this or want to understand the scandal, you need this book.

Download audio here

Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Matt Lewis to discuss the Veepstakes, how Marco Rubio and Susana Martinez could make an impact on the ticket, and whether the Supreme Court’s decision in the Obamacare case could play a role in who Mitt Romney picks.

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:

Romney veepstakes: Will personal connection be key?
Johnson: Romney-Martinez would be ‘Palin-esque’
Matt Lewis at the Daily Caller
Matt K Lewis.com

Follow Brad on Twitter
Follow Matt on Twitter

Subscribe to The Transom

The hosts and guests of Coffee and Markets speak only for ourselves, not any clients or employers.

In a story about the White House in damage control mode over the President’s rather stupid remarks on the Supreme Court, Reuters reports the following:

“What he did was make an unremarkable observation about 80 years of Supreme Court history,” Carney told reporters during a White House briefing dominated by the topic.

and

The president, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, qualified the remark a day later by stressing he meant action by the Court on a matter of commerce, a legal distinction that cut little ice with his critics.

and

“Since the 1930s the Supreme Court has without exception deferred to Congress when it comes to Congress’s authority to pass legislation to regulate matters of national economic importance such as health care, 80 years,” Carney said.

What Reuters did not bother to report is that, in fact, the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional a piece of legislation that passed with a bipartisan majority via the commerce clause just 17 years ago.

In referencing Carney’s spin twice and the President’s explanation, would it not have been worthwhile for the news organization to actually point out the undisputed fact that both Barack Obama and Jay Carney are wrong?

Heck, even NBC took time away from doctoring 911 tapes to point out that fact. You would think Reuters would actually, after three times broadcasting the White House spin, simply report an actual fact in contradiction to the spin.

What a miserable question to have to ask about Nebraska Attorney General and Republican Senate Candidate Jon Bruning — in effect is he, at best, a creepy pervert and at worst a monster. But before you pick up pitch forks and torches against me for asking the question, you need to understand that this is Jon Bruning’s own tortured logic in the Nebraska Senate Republican Primary.

Jon Bruning, the Attorney General of Nebraska all but accused his primary opponent, Don Stenberg, of being a pedophile. Bruning did so in a Senate primary debate when the debate kept coming back to Jon Bruning still defending Barack Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder.

I wish I were making it up, but I am not. Even the Democrats in Nebraska had to jump in and point out that based on Jon Bruning’s “evidence” about Don Stenberg, Jon Bruning is guilty of the same.

I warned each and every one of you that Jon Bruning had a reputation for being a hot head who would meltdown under the pressure of a campaign. As appalling as it is, he has done so. If he’s resorting to suggesting his primary opponent is a pedophile to distract from inconvenient facts about his support of Eric Holder, to what new depths will the man sink in a general election? To what extent will he embarrass the GOP?

Read More →

RedState Morning Briefing
April 5, 2012

Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get
the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge.

Read More →

It’s a valid question, I think, given the way that Lawrence O’Donnell viciously and insultingly went after Mormonism last night on that network. Goodness knows that I have my problems with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. And I have no intention of converting to the LDS faith any time soon, or indeed at all. But to say “Mormonism was created by a guy in upstate New York in 1830 when he got caught having sex with the maid and explained to his wife that God told him to do it” in the pursuit of crude partisan purposes is an insult that splatters far beyond its designated target (in this case, Mitt Romney).

Read More →

Tonight, where are the cries and screams about women at the Masters? And what of Barack Obama’s conforming while using the word exceptionalism?

I’ll break it all down for you from 6pm to 9pm ET.

Listen live right here and call in at 1-800-WSB-TALK.

Consider this an open thread.

The above video from the RNC compares Obama’s 2011 speech on the House budget to Obama’s 2012 speech on the House budget. The orator in Chief is often accused of rehashing used talking points in speeches, both from lack of imagination, and due to the fact that, having failed to tackle any problems effectively, he constantly has to address the same problems. As you can see above, it’s a valid criticism.

But I’ll say this for Obama: The above video from the RNC compares Obama’s 2011 speech on the House budget to Obama’s 2012 speech on the House budget. The orator in Chief is often accused of rehashing used talking points in speeches, both from lack of imagination, and due to the fact that, having failed to tackle any problems effectively, he constantly has to address the same problems. As you can see above, it’s a valid criticism.

What’s worse than Congress picking winners and losers and distorting the free-market with bailouts, stimulus, and tendentious interventions on behalf of specific industries?  Unelected members of the Federal Reserve doing the same through monetary policy.

It is amazing to watch how many Republicans will speak with such conviction against Keynesian fiscal stimulus policies, yet they will fervently promote monetary stimulus policies by the unaccountable Federal Reserve.  Their support for near-zero interest rates, quantitative easing, bailouts, and intervention in the housing sector has muddled our message against Obama’s anti-free-market policies.  Moreover, in this time of record commodity prices, pro-(monetary) stimulus Republicans preclude us from showing how government intervention on behalf of special interests distorts the markets, depletes savings, and devalues the currency – a winning political argument if there ever was one.

Richard Fisher, president of the Dallas Fed and frequent dissenter on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), recently said that he is “personally perplexed by the continued preoccupation, bordering upon fetish, that Wall Street exhibits regarding the potential for further monetary accommodation—the so-called QE3, or third round of quantitative easing.”  He explained that Wall Street has become hooked on “monetary morphine” based on the previous expectation that the Fed will always come through with stimulus measures.  We need to break this addiction.

Undoubtedly, our complex economy would be restricted by a pure gold standard, but it’s not too much to ask that we reform the Federal Reserve to end its interventions in the economy and promote a strong dollar.  Advocating some reform to our 30-year old mandates on the Fed it not tantamount to advocating for ending the Fed.  Senator Mike Lee is introducing a bill, the Federal Reserve Modernization Act (S.2247), to do just that.  Here are the major provisions of the bill:

Read More →

From the diaries.

America is addicted to chocolate.  Foreign chocolate.

A majority of us consume chocolate each day.  Although the U.S. produces only 6% of the world’s cocoa, we consume more than 20%.

The threat is obvious.  It’s time for government to step in and promote alternatives.

Any day, President Obama will be barnstorming the country to tell us, “If we really want chocolate security and chocolate independence, we’ve got to start looking at how we use less cocoa and use sources that we can renew and that we can control, so we are not subject to the whims of what’s happening in other countries.”

Today, we are at the mercy of Africa, which produces over 75% of the world’s cocoa.  That’s an unstable source, which means our chocolate dependency undermines national security.

Each of us probably began with that first innocent M&M but now it’s an unsustainable $13-billion a year habit.  The average American eats 11 pounds of chocolate per year.  We gain weight from chocolate.  Pimples get blamed on chocolate.

Fortunately, alternatives exist.  With proper federal loans and subsidies these can relieve our cravings and wean us from our addiction to chocolate.

Read More →