“When Mitt Romney Came To Town” Film: Operation Inoculation

Mitt Romney knows he has one large electoral problem, and it’s his time spent as CEO of Bain Capital during the 1980s and 1990s. If there’s one thing the left and Obama know how to demagogue against (disingenuously, perhaps, but that’s for another day), it’s big-business “Wall Street Fat Cats”. But that specific line of attack only really hurts him with the left-wing Democrat base, which he need not worry about. It’s the Republican base he has to fear, even though it has traditionally resisted this attack, as “Wall Street Greed” has traditionally been seen by conservatives as an ugly but necessary part of free-market capitalism.

To that point, this 25-minute short film, “When Mitt Romney Came To Town”, is an intriguing case in what may be one of the most sophisticated Presidential campaign “black-ops” we have ever seen. The film tells the story of a few examples of Romney’s “creative destruction” at Bain Capital, through the eyes of blue-collar workers whose jobs were eliminated due to the “corporate raiding” of Mitt’s firm.  Watch for yourself, and you’ll see this takes a decidedly left-wing tone: it says, essentially, “Romney destroyed the lives of thousands of poor helpless blue-collar workers”. It’s a tone that, while dramatic, does not really resonate with the Republican base, which generally accepts the thesis that bankruptcy and “creative destruction” are a legitimate part of the free market. So the question is: why would Newt Gingrich be so foolish as to use this film to try to rally the conservative base against Romney? 

While countless conservative commentators have rightly chastised Gingrich and Rick Perry for promoting the left-wing populist angle used in this film to attack Romney (conservatives do not want their candidates to be seen as attacking capitalism), most have gone a step further and given Mitt Romney the ultimate weapon in securing the Republican nomination: they’ve told conservative voters to LAY OFF BAIN! Only Sarah Palin, in her numerous Fox News appearances in recent days, has refused to declare Bain “off-limits”, and has advised voters to take a close look at Mitt’s record – in particular, his claims of job creation, and his possible use of his corporate takeovers to attract government subsidies and bailouts. In fact, last night on Sean Hannity’s program, she used the key word that I think explains what’s going on here: inoculation.

Which gets me to my theory: this film was subversively created by the Romney campaign itself, in order to achieve this desired result of inoculation on Bain. The reason he needs to create the meme out there that “an attack on Bain is an attack on capitalism”, is because of the aforementioned Governor Palin, and her rallying the Republican base around the cause of Crony Capitalism. The Tea Party base of the party is now wise to the concept of statism, cronyism, corporatism, and corruption coming from the big-business side of the economy. The type of capitalism Romney engaged in with Bain is a problem with the Tea Party base not because he put people out of work (many types of capitalism involve the elimination of jobs), but because the businesses and jobs themselves were not a factor at all in the business decisions of Bain, just collateral damage that, on the aggregate, has been extremely harmful to America. Jobs, and the businesses themselves, were irrelevant to the partners at Bain. What Bain and other corporate raiders actually do is not “turn around failing companies. It’s the search for opportunities on balance sheets, stock prices, and regulatory environments, to exploit through political connections and complex financial instruments, to create paper profits, and damn the consequences.

It’s a complex discussion that can take volumes to fully explain. But what Romney’s campaign has discovered it needs to hide is the fact that the profits at Bain usually could not occur without the exploitation of political contacts, regulatory loopholes, and questionable complex financial tactics. So while Newt and Perry were foolish enough to take the bait on this film’s apparent attack on capitalism itself, Palin will continue to try to drag them back from the edge of self-destruction by rescuing the narrative. Romney’s problem is a Crony Capitalism problem, and he knows it. That’s why it’s no coincidence, this film was produced by Jason Killian Meath, a former business associate and 2008 campaign leader for Mitt Romney himself. Romney’s team, consisting undoubtedly of many brilliant and experienced tactical political operators, is loving the effect this film is having. Mission accomplished? We’ll see how successful the savviest political minds, including Governor Palin, are at rescuing the narrative.

“What Just Happened?” – 90 Seconds on the US Financial Meltdown

UPDATE: Don’t believe me? How about one of America’s leading economists, who happens to also be African-American, Thomas Sowell: “Do Facts Matter?”

If you want to cut to the chase, and understand the root problem of the current US financial meltdown, watch this 90-second video:

As the sharp drop in US consumer confidence takes its toll on my own business, I’ve had a chance to read quite a bit about what has happened. Here’s my take, in layman’s terms:

Democrat social engineers in US elected office – starting with Jimmy Carter and his Community Reinvestment Act, and Bill Clinton’s radical expansion of government-mandated sub-prime loans through Fannie & Freddie in the late 1990s – created a real-estate bubble fuelled by irresponsible people receiving credit they could never repay unless home prices continued to rise forever. But as the Clinton-era rules created positive fiscal and political incentives to keep the bad loans going, the risks were ignored by the issuing banks. The issuing banks, and their enablers at Fannie & Freddie, assumed that, in the case of a meltdown, they would be bailed out. 

In order to hide the extreme risk of this mass of bad loans, the Mortgage industry conspired with Wall Street investment bankers to hide these loans amongst a variety of better-quality assets in Asset-Backed Commercial Paper, spreading the risk throughout the world.

When the Bush White House, and certain Republican congressional leaders, raised the alarm about this powderkeg of a problem starting in 2001, they were thwarted time-and-again by dissembling, corrupted Freddie & Fanny-connected Democrats (as shown in the video), and possibly some connected Republicans as well, although I’ve never seen names. Said politicians knew the whole ponzi scheme would eventually blow up; but Plan B was always in their back pocket: BAILOUT at the hands of taxpayers.

The bottom line: every penny of this nearly-trillion-dollar bailout is essentially a socialist transfer of wealth, from hard-working American taxpayers and international investors, to irresponsible non-working fools who will continue to be propped up in homes they never should have owned in the first place.

In other words: a massive back-door welfare scheme, who’s bill has finally come due.

Saddam’s Nuclear Program, 1975-2008. RIP in Blind River, ON

So 550 tons of yellowcake uranium – which, if refined to weapons-grade, could have been used to produce as many as 140 nuclear bombs – was removed from Iraq over the past year, and and arrived last week in the Port of Montreal, on the way to its ultimate destination, the Cameco uranium processing plant in Blind River, Ontario (a small outpost town on the shores of the Lake Huron narrows, about a five-hour drive from either Detroit or Toronto), to be converted to fuel for the province’s nuclear power plants. The world’s press yawns. Any story that, in any way, supports President Bush’s decision to take out the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003, is certain to be buried far behind, say, the latest update on whether or not the Obamas are going to buy a dog.

The most confounding aspect of this story is the fact that knowledge of Saddam’s nuclear ambitions, and his massive stockpile of Uranium, has always been common knowledge to those who wanted to know! Randall Hoven writes a brilliant column on the topic at American Thinker: “The 500 Tons of Yellowcake”, discussing the great danger such a stockpile poses to its handlers, the potential for its weaponization, and the nonsensical attacks by the “Bush Lied, No WMDs” crowd that should know better. Hoven correctly states that little comfort should be taken in the fact that the Uranium was “monitored” by the UN from the conclusion of the 1991 Gulf War, until the inspectors were kicked out in 2003:

…even Charles Duelfer concluded that Saddam had every intention of getting back into the WMD business as soon as he could end the sanctions regime, which he was busy doing with oil-for-food bribes.

I think it neither illogical nor bizarre to think Saddam had WMD or WMD programs in 2003.  I still believe he did, in a “preponderance of the evidence” sense.  And I believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he would have been back in the WMD business by now, if not by 2004, had we not invaded.

That he sat on 550 metric tons of yellowcake under UN “safeguard” is about as comforting to me as knowing the convicted child rapist next door has a case of duct tape (dual use, by the way) that the police check up on every week.

As we Ontarians spend the next few years powering our televisions, refrigerators, computers, and tools with Saddam’s former stockpile, we should thank the lord for George W. Bush’s courage in standing up to Jacques Chirac and the “International Community”, who, in the name of money, oil, and old-fashioned anti-Americanism, would have been saying “let’s negotiate” today as the Iraqi tyrant held a 550-tonne sword above our heads.

And you Cameco people – handle with care, eh?

AWOL Paul Martin justifies the unjustifiable: Analysis by Steve Janke

The Prime Minister Canada has so quickly forgotten, has not been forgotten by NDP leader Jack Layton. Layton has called for Martin’s resignation from Parliament because – get this – Martin has not registered a single vote in this entire Parliamentary session! Spending a little too much time with his friends from China, perhaps? 

Steve Janke has more at his always-revealing (but sometimes overly earnest) blog on Canadian politics, Angry in the Great White North.

One Question Dona Cadman Must Answer

Let me see if I’ve got this right:

1) In 2004, despite being the popular incumbent, Chuck Cadman gets screwed out of the Conservative Party nomination in his riding of Surrey North by an ethnic insta-Tory voting block. When the party refuses to overturn the result, an enraged Cadman runs as an independent, and wins the election in a landslide.

2) In 2005, while terminally ill with cancer, Cadman becomes the center of the Canadian political universe as the deciding vote in the epic battle to topple the Paul Martin minority government. Through dozens of interviews each day both before and after the vote, Cadman never even hints at a bribe being offered by any party.

3) Mr. Cadman saves the Martin Liberal government with his vote. He passes away soon after.

4) In the wake of her husband’s death, Mr. Cadman’s wife, Dona, endorses the NDP candidate in her riding, family friend Penny Priddy, who won handily in the January 2006 election.

5) Later in 2006, Dona seeks the Conservative nomination in Surrey North to contest the next election against Ms. Priddy, and wins the nomination over a local lawyer.

6) In 2008, as part of the pre-release hype of a biography of her deceased husband, Dona Cadman announces that in 2005, the Conservative Party offered her husband a bribe of a $1,000,000 life insurance policy to vote down the Liberal government.

Dona, you owe Canada an answer to this question: if the Conservative Party of Canada offered, essentially, a $1m bribe to your husband, and if this supposed bribe so offended your husband as you have described:

WHY DID YOU CHOOSE TO RUN FOR THE CONSERVATIVES IF THEY ARE AS CORRUPT AS YOU SAY THEY ARE?

If they are corrupt, then why did you freely choose to run for a corrupt party? And if they are not corrupt, then why are you allowing this smear to fester for two days now?

Brian Mulroney vs. Karlheinz Schreiber

Please, if you disagree, tell me why I should care about this cat fight.

Canadian media: what you’re doing is called Onanism. Look it up.

Comrade Miller and his Bolshevik army: Seizing wealth from the Toronto Kulaks

When David Miller ran for Mayor of Toronto back in 2003 on a platform of “Clean Up City Hall” and “Stop the Bridge to the Island Airport” (a bigger non-issue there’s never been), certain reasonable, rational people close to me were big supporters. I remember saying to them (and they remember, too): this guy is bad, bad news – a socialist demagogue beholden to union labour and the artsy-fartsy extreme left. I remember the response: you’re crazy, you don’t know what you’re talking about, he’s a good guy, he’s going to do a great job.

Those people hate him more now than even I do.

David Miller, after coasting through a zero-issues re-election campaign in 2006, has finally shown his true nature: a Marxist-Fascist with a smiling face. Everything he says is clouded in the context of the modern socialist world view: that the rich are keeping the poor down; that the poor are victims of social pathologies like violence and addiction because the rich keep them down; that equality must be achieved by seizing the wealth hoarded by the rich; and that a privledged class of enlightened, educated bureaucrats will create the paradise of equality on earth in this lifetime.

Now, there’s several problems with this world view. One, it’s a fraud – in our society, there is nothing keeping the poor down. There are tens of thousands of stories in Toronto alone of people who have risen up from poor, depraved families to rise to a position of dignity and happiness. As long as people are willing to work hard and persevere, and avoid the social pathologies of their communities, they have every chance in the world to succeed. Only when they are convinced they have no chance (usually by leftist politicians pimping for votes, and “community leaders” pimping for money) do they fall prey to the victim mentality.

Second, it’s destructive and twisted. It imposes the victimhood mentality on the “poor” (who, in today’s world, generally have cable TV, cell phones, and share an obesity epidemic), and demonizes the “rich” (which, to Miller’s crew, includes anyone with a home, a business, and a traditional family). It removes any sense of personal responsibility from the irresponsible class, while casting aspersions on the responsible class of people who, more often than not, earned their place through hard work and perseverance. It encourages jealousy and a sense of entitlement in the “poor”, and drives a wedge between them and the people who, deep down, they admire most.

It is in this context that I review what happened in Toronto City Council yesterday. Miller and his cronies packed the house with apparatchiks from the Labour and Arts communities, decked them out in yellow scarves (does yellow now mean “tax me…I’m stupid”?), and, through back-room dealing and a major sellout by the Toronto Board of Trade, turned what was shaping up to be a tax revolt into a major victory for the Bolsheviks over the Kulaks, through the imposition of a new land-transfer tax that both decreases the value of homes, and adds another obstacle in the way of those who dream of becoming a homeowner. The yellow-scarf-wearing Bolsheviks? They whooped and cheered as the vote was completed, dancing on their cash-grab victory, enjoying the moment as they stuck it to “the rich”.

What is a Kulak, you ask? In the Soviet Union, they were the peasant landowning class – often dirt-poor themselves, but generally farmers who committed the sin of actually accumulating some wealth in their lifetimes, even if it was a dusty acre of Ukranian potato land. In Toronto 2007, we are the Kulaks – the family homeowners, working insane hours and making great sacrifices in order to build a better life, and to pay off the countless hands in our pockets.

The Toronto Kulaks are not respected by the Miller crowd. We don’t take public transit (try taking a two-year-old to pre-school on a rush-hour bus); we are greedy (exploiting workers in our businesses); we are classless (we don’t go to gallery openings or sip lattes in Bloor West Village); and we think crime might just be caused by criminals (it’s caused by lack of social services and middle-aged white guys who feel their pain, stupid!). Therefore, it is OK to stick it to them time-and-again.

The new land transfer tax needs to be seen in the context of Miller’s world view. It is a seizure of wealth from Kulaks, to pay the Toronto Bolsheviks. No, not the proletariat – this money ‘aint going to the poor. It’s going to cronies – the artsies and the unions, who get to keep their obscene subsidies and wages without talk of a single bite. The unions – many of whose workers are homeowners, too – could care less about a bite on the value of their members’ properties. They saved their dues base, and saved the way-above-market rates and ridiculous contractual stipulations afforded to them by a Marxist voting block at Council.

Think the Kulak analogy is a stretch? From Wikipedia’s entry on the term:

Often those declared to be kulaks were not especially prosperous. The average value of goods confiscated from kulaks during policy of “dekulakization” in the beginning of 1930s was only $90-$210 per household ^[1]. Both peasants and Soviet officials were often uncertain as to what constituted a kulak, and the term was often used to label anyone who had more property than was considered “normal” according to subjective criteria.

In May 1929 the Sovnarkom issued a decree that formalised the notion of “kulak household” (кулацкое хозяйство). Any of the following characteristics defined a kulak ^[1] :

• usage of hired labour;
• ownership of a mill, a creamery (маслобойня, butter-making rig), or other complex equipment, or a complex machine with mechanical motor;
• systematic letting of agricultural equipment or facilities for rent;
• involvement in commerce, money-lending, commercial brokerage, or “other types of non-labour occupation”.

Joseph Stalin liquidated millions of Kulaks during his reign of terror. Miller simply wants to kill our lifestyle, through a death by a thousand cuts. Yesterday it was a land transfer tax; next it will be road tolls, sin taxes, parking space levies, garbage bin fees, and user fees at libraries and community centres. After all, anything is justified for the Bolsheviks to keep their perks as they perform miracles and save the world.

Did I mention he’s an extreme narcissist?

Arrested Leaker Jeff Monaghan (a.k.a. “Bones” the Anarchist) Sells Out to Play the Victim Card

So this is the trash that the RCMP took out of the Ministry of the Environment the other day? A 30-something anarchist poseur who calls himself “Bones”, who spent his days earning a living off the government payroll, while devoting the rest of his time comparing Harper to Hitler in a band whose logo glorifies 9/11-style attacks on Ottawa, promoting books like “Bomb the Suburbs” , raising money for terrorist detainees, and leaking secret documents to the press. (Hat tip to Steve Janke for much of the background info.)

What I want to know is: how many more Jeff Monaghans are working in our bureaucracy? How many Jeff Monaghans are actively subverting the Harper government? And how many sophomoric losers who never made it mentally out of undergrad pot parties are out there preaching against organized government while making their living sucking off our government’s teat? Sad and pathetic, but completely unacceptable nonetheless.

If this was a “Witch Hunt”  then I’ve just become a big fan of Witch Hunts.

Belinda Stronach: Free Again to Flit

Fly, fly, butterfly! We hardly knew ye. Now get back out there on the road with the Davos crowd on daddy’s dime, fluffing Bill and Bono and saving Africa from Malaria by keeping DDT banned.

Add another to the list of sinking-ship-jumpers, otherwise known as Liberal MPs who see the writing on the wall…

QuickPost: Al Gore Hypocrite; 50,000 Muslims Support Violence; Liberal Ethno-Politics Endangers Nation

Hello Folks,

Having been away on a business trip to Las Vegas – a town that is now using pornified blackjack dealers as a new way to entice gamblers – it’s been a dry few days on the blog. A couple of interesting stories forwarded by readers:

On the Al Gore front, we see subtle media bias being perpetrated by the AP (thanks Mario):

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Al Gore, a leading voice against global warming, is being criticized by a conservative group that claims his Nashville mansion uses too much electricity. A Gore spokeswoman said the former vice president invests in enough renewable energy to make up for the home’s power consumption.

In other words, the story is NOT that Al Gore is a hypocritical energy hog ( a fact PROVEN by electrical records, not a “claim”). The story, according to the AP writer, is that a “conservative group” is trying to smear pure-old Al. Of couse, neither Gore nor his spokesperson were identified by their political philosophy.

If you haven’t read it yet, check out Licia Corbella’s brilliant analysis of last week’s Muslim-Canadian opinion poll, “Disturbing reality buried” (thanks Marian):

So, let’s err on the side of caution here. Let’s subtract the margin of error — 4.4% — from 12%. That comes to 7.6%, so let’s say, just to be really non-alarmist, we round that down to 7%. That still means 49,000 Canadian Muslims believe conducting a terrorist attack on their own country — Canada — is justified.

And finally, here’s one from the National Post’s Jonathan Kay, who earns back a bit of my respect here by taking on the ethno-politics of the Liberal Party that has hijacked our national security for crass partisan opportunism, “National Security vs. Liberal ethno-politics” :

Today (Feb. 27), Parliament is expected to vote on the expiring Anti-Terrorism Act provisions. And if everything goes to script, a whipped Liberal caucus will stand with the peacenik extremists in the Bloc and NDP to water down our national security — all to cement dubious intra- Liberal alliances. It will be interesting to see how many Liberals (if any) have the guts to stand up to Dion, who’s declared that he won’t sign the nomination papers of any dissenters.

Being shunned by your own is a steep price to pay for a politician. But by paying it, principled Liberals will not only be striking a blow against terrorism, but also the corrosive scourge of ethno-politics eating away at their party.

Well, we now know how many Libs have a matching set of cojones – ONE! Congratulations, Tom Wappel, you get credit where credit is due (click here to send him an e-mail of support). My big question is: why could Irwin Cotler only go half-way, and not truly stand up to Dion? Perhaps it is because there’s only room for one principled pants-wearer in the family…