Libertarian Leanings

Opening Day For The Diamond Aces

The New Hampshire Diamond Aces will open their 2011 baseball season this afternoon at 1:00 at White's Park in Concord against the New Hampshire Grays.

The Aces and the Grays are member teams in the New England Legends Baseball League which is open to any players who will have reached their 50th birthday before the end of the calendar year in which they begin play.

Update:  We lost our opener to the Grays by a score of 11 to 5.  Believe it or not the game was much closer than the score would indicate.  It was a seesaw affair until the Grays got a big hit with two outs in the seventh -- a bases loaded 3-run double. 

DaTechGuy On DaRadio Today

Pete's guests today are Kerry Picket of the Washington times, Bill O’Connell author of Liberty’s Lifeline: Engaging the Grassroots Movement to Stop the Erosion of American Freedoms, and guest blogger and radio personality Brian Henchey.  

The show airs from 10:00 to noon on WCRN AM 830 Worcester.  Anyone is welcome to join in the roundtable discussion by calling in at 508-438-0965 or by joining Pete after the show at 1:00PM at Linguine’s Italian Eatery on Route 20 Boston Post Road, Marlborough. 

Jobs! Jobs! Jobs!

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley writes in today's Wall Street Journal,

In October 2009, Boeing, long one of the best corporations in America, made an announcement that changed the economic outlook of South Carolina forever: The company's second line of 787 Dreamliners would be produced in North Charleston.

In choosing to manufacture in my state, Boeing was exercising its right as a free enterprise in a free nation to conduct business wherever it believed would best serve both the bottom line and the employees of its company. This is not a novel or complicated idea. It's called capitalism.

Boeing has since poured billions of dollars into a new, state-of-the art facility in South Carolina's picturesque Low Country along the Atlantic coast. It has created thousands of good jobs and joined the long tradition of distinguished and employee-friendly corporations that have found a home, and a partner, in the Palmetto State.

...

That is apparently too much for President Obama and his union-beholden appointees at the National Labor Relations Board, who have asked the courts to intervene and force Boeing to stop production in South Carolina. The NLRB wants Boeing to produce the planes only in Washington state, where its workers must belong to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers.

Like almost every other administration policy decision, this one is motivated by Obama's compulsion to garner maximum political gain.  How remarkable, that Obama is actively preventing private sector job growth at a time when so many Americans need jobs.  To state the obvious, Obama is what's wrong with the economy now.

Rove's Got His Number

Obama's number that is:

It's clear Mr. Obama likes campaigning more than governing. And for this president, campaigning means knocking down straw men and delivering a steady stream of misleading attacks. It means depicting opponents as indecent, heartless people who take special delight in targeting seniors and autistic children. It means basking in the adulation of a partisan crowd rather than engaging in the difficult work of passing bipartisan legislation.

Bruins Beat Canadiens In OT

Nathan Horton scored on a slapshot at 5:43 in overtime of Game 7 to give Boston a 4-3 victory over the Montreal Canadiens, advancing the Bruins to the Eastern Conference semifinals.

Horton scored on his only shot of the night off a pass from Milan Lucic, setting off a celebration on the Bruins bench and in the stands. It was Boston's third overtime win in the series, including Game 5 on Saturday night when Horton scored 9:03 into the second extra period.

"He's been saving it for seven years, right?" Bruins coach Claude Julien said with a smile. "So he had a lot of game-winning goals in him."

Conference semifinals begin on Saturday at 3:00 in Philadelphia where the Bruins will face off against the Flyers.  The Flyers knocked Boston out of last year's playoffs with four straight wins after the Bruins had built a 3-0 series lead.

Power Lust

Obama's lust for power is on display once again.  The adminstration is working up an executive order that will require company executives to disclose political contributions as a condition for doing business with the federal government.

Suppose that during the civil rights movement segregationist governors ordered all state contractors to disclose their political donations in an attempt to expose civil rights supporters to harassment and retaliation. The Supreme Court would have had none of it.

In NAACP v. Alabama (1958), the court barred Alabama from forcing the NAACP to disclose its members. Those justices would have struck down a similar effort to force the release of the NAACP's financial supporters. They would have rightly viewed it as an infringement of the constitutional right to free association and free speech.

Today President Obama is ignoring the lessons of the civil rights era he claims to revere. According to a draft executive order leaked last week, Mr. Obama plans to require any company seeking a federal contract to disclose its executives' political contributions over $5,000—not just to candidates, but to any group that might make "independent expenditure" or "electioneering communication" advertisements.

Campaign vs. Country

As the UAW has done for the American auto industry, the White House will do for the rest of he American economy.  Although work on a Boeing 787 assembly plant in North Charleston, South Carolina has progressed so far that it is scheduled to open this summer, the National Labor Relations Board has decided to prevent the company from building airplanes there.  The NLRB is responding to a complaint that claims Boeing is building the plant in a "right to work" state in retaliation against union workers in Washington.

Lamar Alexander explains what this means.

But now unions want to make it illegal for a company that has experienced repeated strikes to move production to a state with a right-to-work law. What would this mean for the future of American auto jobs? Jobs would flee overseas as manufacturers look for a competitive environment in which to make and sell cars around the world.

It's happened before. David Halberstam's 1986 book, "The Reckoning"—about the decline of the domestic American auto industry—tells the story. Halberstam quotes American Motors President George Romney, who criticized the "shared monopoly" consisting of the Big Three Detroit auto manufacturers and the UAW. "There is nothing more vulnerable than entrenched success," Romney warned. Detroit ignored upstarts like Nissan who in the 1960s began selling funny little cars to American consumers. We all know what happened to employment in the Big Three companies.

Even when Detroit sought greener pastures in a right-to-work state, its "partnership" with the United Auto Workers could not compete. In 1985, General Motors located its $5 billion Saturn plant in Spring Hill, Tenn., 40 miles from Nissan, hoping side-by-side competition would help the Americans beat the Japanese. After 25 years, nonunion Nissan operated the most efficient auto plant in North America. The Saturn/UAW partnership never made a profit. GM closed Saturn last year.

Nissan's success is one reason why Volkswagen recently located in Chattanooga, and why Honda, Toyota, BMW, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai and thousands of suppliers have chosen southeastern right-to-work states for their plants. Under right-to-work laws, employees may join unions, but mostly they have declined. Three times workers at the Nissan plant in Smyrna, Tenn., rejected organizing themselves like Saturn employees a few miles away.

Clearly, the Obama administration is following the money.  Obama really would prefer the economy to start growing, but he doesn't want that as much as he wants the union money.  Cash from mandatory union dues will find its way into Democratic campaign coffers, and that's more important than anything.  The White House will do whatever it can to keep that gravy train rolling.  But by turning his attention to raising a billion dollar war chest Obama has given up on fixing the economy and is now betting he can buy the election in spite of it.  And that's going to take a lot of money.

Who's Looking for John L. Perry?

Traffic was up a bit yesterday.  For some reason there is renewed interest in John L. Perry who wrote a foolish article a year and a half ago that speculated on the possibility of a military coup against President Obama.  The article appeared in Newsmax but it was quickly taken down.  It was Perry's last article in Newsmax.  

I wrote a post on John L. Perry at the time with whatever I could find out about the guy, which wasn't much.  From what I did find, I decided if anything he was a left winger.  And now people are looking for him again, and I'd really like to know why.  

Left to my own speculations on it I would guess that some left winger is stirring up rumors, hoping to stoke the rage in the fever swamps towards the Tea Party.  But Obama doesn't need to worry about a coup.  Who needs to stage a coup with the 2012 election coming?

Obama's Enemies List

From the Wall Street Journal:

Here's another reason to think the 2012 campaign is underway with a vengeance: If a company wants a federal government contract, from now on it will first have to disclose if the company or its executives gave more than $5,000 in political donations.

This latest federal rule comes courtesy of a new executive order now being drafted in the White House. The order would implement parts of last year's Disclose Act, which failed to pass Congress but was a favorite of Democrats because it would deter political contributions by business after last year's Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision. White House press secretary Jay Carney confirmed last week that the order is in the works after former Federal Election Commission official Hans von Spakovsky obtained a copy of the draft.

Obama don't need no stinking congress.

Tax The Rich

And what happens?

There’s a reason federal tax revenues since World War II have hovered around 18 or 19 percent of gross domestic product, regardless of tax rates. The reason is that higher rates tend to result in less taxable income. You figure out why in Tax 1.

Michael Barone suspects that Barack never took the Tax 1 course in law school.  Or maybe that he's just decided to ignore it.

But perhaps Barack Obama understands this. In 2008, he told ABC’s Charlie Gibson that he wanted to raise capital-gains rates even if the government got less revenue because of “fairness.”

Obama's attitude hasn't changed since his conversation with Charlie Gibson, and that bodes ill for the economy and jobs, which is bad news for those at the low end of the economic scale.  But let's not forget that Obama's policies are, above all else, intended to enhance Obama's power.  The poverty stricken are potential foot soldiers in Obama's legions, so it should come as no surprise that his policies are likely to add to their ranks.  Good luck with that strategy.