I WANT HILLARY TO RUN IN 2012

Them fiscally responsible Republicans shut down the government because they could not have their way with Clinton.

As for Hillary, once they have the fever to serve, I believe they will always run, if there seems a good chance they will win.

That's your interpretation of the facts. It takes two to Tango. In any event the spending cuts that created the budget surplus were proposed and enacted by a Republican Congress and signed by a Democrat President.

I agree, that's usually true. However, I doubt it in this case for the reasons I gave.

I find it odd that Republicans always claim to be fiscally responsible in order to rein in the wastrel Democrat administrations, but spend a hell of a lot more than any Democrat ever thought of when they are in office.

I would like that someone with pizzazz would show up soon from the democrat/independent side of the aisle. Someone representing me is unlikely, but maybe that will happen long after I'm gone, but now would not win the next election. So, just give me some democrats I don't dislike.

Running for president is hard on the body and family and soul if we have souls (that's a sort of quote), and our hearts, and takes too much money and too much compromising to build up money.

This is a sucky way to run a country, the money accumulation and all that means, to get elected.

I have just two choices: Elizabeth Warren and an independent, Bernie Sanders. I also like Al Franken, but he hasn't the experience or support.

Maybe thats an advantage for Al rather than a disadvantage.

What do you mean by "when they are in office"? I infer you are referring to presidencies, which, since the ill fated Jimmy Carter, have all involved two Presidential terms. That means eight years of inflation, or a roughly 27% increase in the price of everything between administrations. In those terms every successive presidency has involved greater spending than its predecessor.

I believe better indicators are the average rate of GDP Growth; the rise in our national debt as a % of GDP; and the real employment rate, measured as the percent of the workforce by age that is employed. On those measures Democrat Administrations, particularly the current one, don't look good at all.

Looking back at annualized growth in federal spending, the biggest spender was Ronald Reagan (8.7%) followed closely by Bush II (8.1%), Bush I (5.4%), and Bill Clinton (3.2%). As a matter of fact, even Clinton’s low of 3.2% federal spending growth is nearly two-and-a-half times higher than President Obama’s 1.4% during his first term in office. Reagan and George W. Bush’s spending was over five times as high as President Obama, and yet they are considered avatars of fiscal responsibility by conservatives of all shapes and sizes. There are two specific reasons conservatives portray the President as a big spender, and as is usually the case with anything Republicans or their conservative think tanks characterize, they lie, and one of the biggest purveyors of mendacity is the Heritage Foundation.
http://www.politicususa.com/2012/12/27/obamas-record-destroys-republicans-big-spending-democrat-propaganda.html

You are ignoring all that I wrote. Take a look at GDP growth & real employment data.

Whatever limitations on Government spending are in place now are a result of the actions of the Republican House, where spending bills originate.. The current President has allowed the entire government budgeting process to lapse. The Harry Reid Senate hasn't attempted a budget reconciliation with the House in six years, and the few budgets the President has submitted weren't even voted on by the Senate his party controls, because they were so unrealistic. Obama's credibility in launching new government spending programs is zilch. His ineptitude, deceit and failure to accept responsibility for what the executive Branch of the government does under his supposed leadership are a new low in the history of our Presidents.

I am glad you blame the limitations on current spending on Republicans. Because it is strangling infrastructure, jobs and wages.

As subtle as a bugle call, the marketing effort now underway for Hillary Clinton's new book is the clearest indication to date that she is in fact running for president in 2016.

With just two weeks to wait for the official release (June 10), Simon & Schuster got that crucial advance copy of Hard Choices out to reporter Mike Allen in time for his post-Memorial Day Playbook column at Politico, guaranteeing notice in the political world on the day after the holiday weekend.

Meanwhile, the author herself booked her first interview with People magazine, guaranteeing cover splash not just in bookstores but in the far-more trafficked drugstores, groceries and 7-Elevens from Weehawken to Wasilla. Simon also announced that the initial printing of 1 million had already sold out, following an excerpt in Vogue magazine.

For those who would rather watch and hear, digital Hillary was chatting up the book, and there was an audio excerpt from her "author's note" explaining that this wasn't a book for Washington insiders or foreign policy wonks — it was for reading by American families.

The first purpose of all this is to sell books, of course, but in this case the ultimate pitch goes so much further. The Wall Street Journal called it a first draft of a 2016 convention speech, and it was surely written and edited with that prospect in view.

Consider the tome itself. It is intended to exude gravitas, beginning with its heft. Rest assured, when you drop this 656-page memoir-cum-manifesto on your coffee table, it will land with the thump of history.

Did someone say substantive? The cover is gray, the gaze of the author direct and steely-eyed. Then there's the two-word title, summing up the tough, ultraprepared persona — plenty ready for more decision-making ahead. As she shares in her author's note:

"In the end, the title that best captured my experiences on the high wire of international diplomacy and my thoughts and feelings about what it will take to secure American leadership for the 21st century was Hard Choices."

So the book sets the table for her next choice: to run again for president. The book may not prove she's running, but it is exactly the book she would want to publish if she were. And the argument she is making is, finally, that if and when she makes that call, voting for her ought to be an easy choice.

Think about it. If Clinton were not running, what sort of book might she have written? If she had seen her last campaign, what motives might there be? Score-settling? Money? Both objectives would be better served by a different, less-dignified book that got down and dishy.

Surely this woman has much to say of a personal nature about noteworthy people all over the world. And what an audience that might draw! First to hear her unload on her adversaries and antagonists, but even more for her take on her husband, her feelings about 2008 and the Obama presidency, and all the world leaders with whom she's met. A million copies would not begin to measure that book's appeal.

In some quarters, of course, Clinton's 2016 plan has never been in doubt. Yet even as a cottage industry has flourished around her prospective candidacy, another has sprung up in opposition. The latter has expanded in recent weeks, spurred by the speculations of prominent Republican operatives such as Karl Rove and Reince Priebus.

It should surprise no one to see Rove, a former top adviser to President George W. Bush, and Priebus, the current chairman of the Republican National Committee, pooh-poohing Clinton's prospects. But the purpose seems to be making a no-go narrative plausible, possibly to encourage Democrats to join in. Several have, including Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.

But that storyline now seems utterly last week, buried under a million copies and a media blitz.

Well we learned yesterday that our GDP actually declined during the last quarter. Our GDP is a measure of the collective economic activity of all Americans, and it is relatively stagnant under a regime of inept but ever expanding regulation, and misguided efforts to suppress independent economic initiatives and reward indolence and dependence on government programs that usually work very badly.

How quickly we forget the end of George Bush's term, stagnate would have been a hopeful dream.

Before anyone says, "how long you all going to blame Bush, blah... The point is that deregulation sure didn't work so I don't know why you all keep trotting it out there as though its never been done before.

Your historical perspective is seriously deficient.

One could also trot out a very long list of past and ongoing failures of highly regulated and centrally planned economies. Indeed the overwhelming weight of the historical evidence points clearly to the superior performance of free economies.

You know using big sounding words do not mean the words have merit. You should keep that in mind from time to time.

Anyway,

Financial Crisis Was Avoidable, Inquiry Finds

And giving all our money to the big corporations, while stifling the working man, a Republican holy mission, is the main root of the ineptness.

Which were the "big sounding" words? Historical? perspective? deficient? I'm at a loss.

Most of the major events and disasters of history were in theory preventable, but they happened anyway. Moreover most were also repetitions of earlier similar events.

But how would such a list be relevant to anything? No American politician is calling for a highly regulated or centrally planned economy. Even Elizabeth Warren is demanding no more than banking regulations and safety-net extensions about as broad as, say, Canada's.

I believe we are well on the way to becoming a highly regulated economy, and the results show in our agonizingly slow and feeble recovery from an otherwise unremarkable economic cyclical reversal. I also believe that the somewhat vague reference I made to the central tendencies of the historical results of such economic system will bear up very well under scrutiny.

You have simply defined what is going on as eminently reasonable. That is your right as a matter of opinion, but you don't have a right to your own facts.

I was in Calgary a few weeks ago meeting with some business partners, and can assure you that the regulatory regime under which they operate is vastly more liberal than ours. Indeed they find our growing self-imposed sclerosis quite amusing.

America's agonizingly slow and feeble recovery is perfectly typical in an economy that had a financial meltdown like the one in 2008 --- the kind of meltdown that doesn't happen in financial systems as regulated as Canada's, or as regulated as in most Western countries during the Bretton-Woods era. But when such regulations are absent and the meltdowns do happen, six years of slug is the rule, not the exception. America took that long after the banking panics of 1929 and 1930. Sweden took that long in the 1990s. Japan took even longer after its meltdown in the 1990s; basically, it still hasn't recovered from it.


I have done nothing of the kind. All I'm saying is that, eminently reasonable or not, today's American liberals are pushing for nothing even close to the socialist economies of the Eastern Block during the Cold War. And that's what terminology like "highly regulated and centrally planned economy" is conventionally taken to mean. You're the one who erected a scarecrow doubling as strawman here.