Archive for July, 2011
According to the latest Gallup Poll.
Mitt Romney is the leader for the GOP nomination among the current field of official candidates, supported by 27% of Republicans, compared with 18% for Michele Bachmann. However, Rick Perry would essentially tie Romney, with Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani close behind, in a scenario in which all three of these undecided candidates entered the race.
The results are based on a July 20-24 Gallup poll. Eight of the 11 Republicans included in the poll have announced their official candidacies. Giuliani, Palin, and Perry are not official candidates but are still actively considering becoming candidates even though the first nominating contests are less than seven months away. Any of the three would start from a relatively strong national position, with all registering at least double-digit support in the poll.
Nothing really has changed on this national poll. We continue to have an unsettled GOP field with Sarah Palin playing the “Wild Card.”
Texas Governor looks like the most likely unannounced candidate actually throwing his hat in the ring. Sarah and Rudy – well, not so much.
But, who knows?
I continue to maintain that if Sarah Palin runs, then so will Rudy Giuliani. If she doesn’t, then Rudy supports Rick Perry and Bachmann fades as the anti-Romney candidate.
Romney is the nominal front-runner for the Republican nomination, though his status is weaker now than a month ago and could be weakened further by the entry of a candidate like Perry, Palin, or Giuliani. Still, none of those potential candidates’ support exceeds Romney’s at the moment.
The time for any other candidates to enter the race is running short, though there is a precedent for candidates jumping in after Labor Day, as in 2003 (Democrat Wesley Clark) and 2007 (Republican Fred Thompson), though neither candidate fared well in the early primaries and caucuses.
Tags: Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Polling, President 2012, Rick Perry, Rudy Giuliani, Sarah Palin
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Posted by Flap in Twitter
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These are my links for July 26th from 15:02 to 17:22:
Tags: #catcot, #tcot, Pinboard Links
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Why the Board is proceeding and wasting taxpayers money on a law that will face a referendum is pure Democratic politics.
But, oh well.
Debate over the 90-day interim period during which Amazon gathers signatures for the voter referendum to repeal the law was a hot issue today between board members. Because the office of legislative counsel issued a recent opinion which said the law would be suspended the minute Amazon qualifies the issue for the ballot, Republican board members George Runner and Michelle Steele
said the BOE should not implement the tax yet.
At issue was whether the new law would or should even take effect.
However, board members Betty Yee and Jerome Horton, Democrats, insisted that because ABx1 28 was already signed into law, it needs to be upheld by the board unless and until it is repealed either by the voters, or in a court of law.
Yee wanted to abandon discussion of the interim period, and instead pushed ahead for implementation of the tax, beginning with an “interested parties” process discussing the need for rule making to implement and clarify the provisions of the bill.
The Board voted 3-2, siding with Yee and Horton to have obtain an opinion from the Attorney General explaining how the referendum process will affect the tax, and to begin the meetings to discuss implementation.
This move is just the beginning of a long litigious process.
Signature gathering is on-going and it is just a matter of time before the referendum folks and the California Attorney General are sued to try to remove the referendum from the ballot - before and then after it qualifies.
The campaign consultants, communications strategists and the lawyers are all going to get rich while I no longer earn a few bucks from selling Amazon books and media on flapsblog.com.
Wonderful….. Tags: Amazon Tax, Internet Sales Taxes
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Posted by Flap in Dilbert
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According to the latest Reuters/Ipsos Poll.
Showing an intensity of interest among Americans who often ignore the intricacies of policy in Washington, 83 percent of those polled said they were either very or somewhat concerned about the potential for a U.S. debt default on August 2.
The poll found that 56 percent of Americans want to see a combination of government spending cuts and tax increases included in a deal to bring down the U.S. budget deficit and permit a vote to raise the country’s $14.3 trillion debt ceiling.
This is the approach favored by Obama and his fellow Democrats to begin to put America’s fiscal house in order.
Republicans oppose tax increases and instead want to cut back deeply on spending, saying the federal budget has gotten out of control.
“It does seem to be that the popular narrative is falling on the side of the president on this one,” said Ipsos pollster Julia Clark.
In the poll, 19 percent said the best approach is only to cut existing programs, and 12 percent said only raising taxes would be the favored solution.
Obama’s Democrats and their Republican rivals have so far failed to forge agreement and are pursuing competing debt plans to avert a potentially disastrous default.
But, that is not saying that American voters know what is best for the economy or the government, especially with the President telling them he will only tax the rich.
So, for the debt-ceiling impasse, who do the voters blame?
The Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 31 percent of respondents held Republican lawmakers responsible for the debt impasse, 21 percent blamed Obama and 9 percent blamed Democratic lawmakers.
Along those lines, 29 percent said Republican lawmakers should give the most ground in the negotiations, a quarter said Obama should and a fifth said Democrats should.
The debt debate has potential consequences for the 2012 election year when Obama is seeking a second term as president.
People who identified themselves as political independents, who Obama needs to win re-election, tended to side with the Republicans. The poll found that 29 percent of independents said Obama should give the most ground in the negotiations, while 13 percent said Republicans should.
This is the polling the Democrats will argue places the voters on their side of the debt-limit argument. But, I do not think this will move the narrative for the GOP. The GOP will NEVER accept tax increases, but they may swallow some tax reform.
In fact, in a breaking piece of news, the GOP House Leadership has just announced that they will have to re-write the Boehner proposal in order to obtain 218 votes for passage. Senator Harry Reid has already stated that in the Senate the Boehner proposal is DOA.
So, if the GOP already knows that if they are getting the blame for this financial impasse in an economic climate that Obama now owns, they may be MORE inclined to compromise and just call it a day.
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These are my links for July 26th from 13:45 to 14:54:
- Is US Debt Downgrade Inevitable? – Democrats and Republicans will present their own version of budget cuts later in the day on Monday, but is the estimated $2.7 trillion in cuts being proposed enough to avoid a credit rating downgrade?
Credit watchdogs at Standard & Poor’s have warned that unless $4 trillion in cuts are made, with long term sustainable fiscal policies to balance the budget, the US will lose its coveted AAA status within 90 days. Moody’s said the same thing this month, only gave the US 12 to 18 months to get its financial house in order before getting dropped from the triple-A list.
US government debt is considered the safest in the world. A lose to triple A status would cause every money market and Treasury bond fund to change its covenants that, until now, require holding AAA rated debt only.
“You’ll want to buy stock in a printing press company because if the US loses its triple A status, funds will be printing millions of notices to shareholders explaining the sudden and extraordinary change in its investment profile away from triple A debt and allowing for double A in their portfolios,” says Ron Weiner, president and CEO of RDM Financial Group in Westport, Conn, a $600 million asset manager.
While the market is not pricing in a default on US debt obligations, it is definitely pricing in the likelihood of a downgrade.
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Looks like it….
- Great news: Downgrade could come as soon as Friday – Barack Obama has spent the last several weeks warning that a failure to raise the debt ceiling by the “drop-dead date” of August 2nd would cause a ruinous downgrade of Treasury bonds and an economic disaster for the US. However, the downgrade may come sooner than that, because the debt ceiling is actually a secondary condition to the ratings agencies. The problem, as they see it, is not that America can’t pay its debts next month, but that America has grown its debt to such a degree that we can’t pay them in the long run without serious restructuring of the federal government — and this administration refuses to consider it:
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Read it all
- Debt-Ceiling Chicken by Thomas Sowell – The big news, as far as the media are concerned, is the political game of debt-ceiling chicken that is being played by Democrats and Republicans in Washington. But, however much the media are focused on what is happening inside the Beltway, there is a whole country outside the Beltway — and the time is long overdue to start thinking about what is best for the rest of the country, not just for right now but for the long haul.
However the current debt-ceiling crisis turns out, the current economic turmoil in financial markets around the world should cause some serious thoughts about the long run, and about the whole idea of a national-debt ceiling.
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- Leadership by Default – They used to say that Richard Nixon had a “secret plan” in the 1968 presidential campaign to end the Vietnam War. Pres. Barack Obama outdid Nixon with a secret plan to control the deficit.
He kept telling us of all the virtues of his plan. It was balanced, responsible, courageous, and fair. It was just very, very secret.
Obama favored a $4 trillion “grand bargain” that now looks dead. It allegedly contained $3 trillion in cuts and $1 trillion in new revenues over ten years. But no one could learn with any certainty what the specific new cuts were, or the specific new revenues. They were the great mystery at the heart of the debt-limit debate.
How extraordinary is the spectacle of the president of a country beset with a debt crisis who claims to have a big, game-changing plan to alleviate it — that he keeps all to himself. He’d whisper it in the ear of House Speaker John Boehner behind closed doors in the White House, but the erstwhile champion of transparency didn’t dare make it public.
Why was the president who rode into the White House on a wave of overexposure, who wrote two memoirs and is constantly on TV, so shy and retiring about this one matter? Few things would be more galvanizing in the nation’s budgetary politics than a liberal Democrat breaking ranks on entitlements. It would make possible changes heretofore unthinkable, and partly redeem Obama’s promise of post-partisan government.
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Yeah, pretty ridiculous for the transparency President
Tags: Debt-Ceiling, Debt-Limit, Obama, Pinboard Links, Sowell
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