I just wanted to go on the record that what has happened in Cyprus, with the seizure of bank accounts, is a trial balloon. If the world give it a collective shrug, that a first world central bank seized money from its citizens with no due process, then it will happen again, and it could happen here even. But as of right now, it is no longer safe to hold significant assets in a bank account, and I would recommend removing significant amounts of cash from the bank asap.

Mark my words. This will happen again, perhaps before the year is out.

I suppose I ought to make some predictions for the upcoming year. It’s not an election year, so I suppose the predictions won’t be about any election results (well, regular election results). But we can have some fun nevertheless. Feel free to play along at home or in the comments:

Q: What new products will Apple release?
A: Since I have already stated that they will do a watch and it has since appeared in print that they are in fact working on one, I’ll stick with that. I’ll also stick with my earlier prediction of an iPhone nano. Regarding a TV I’ll say this, if they so come out with a TV, it will be reminiscent of the new iMac, super thin with tapered edges.

Q: What will happen with the fiscal cliff?
A: We will go over it, and eventually negotiations will cease as everyone slowly realizes that this is exactly what the President wants. In other words, there will be no deal.

Q: What will happen with the debt ceiling?
A: Boehner will extend it in exchange for some token concessions or even promises of concessions some years out.

Q: How much longer does Boehner remain speaker of the house?
A: He’ll be out by Memorial Day.

Q: Who will replace Boehner as speaker of the house?
A: It will be a dark horse. Somebody unexpected.

Q: Is Hillary Clinton actually sick? What is she up to?
A: She is not sick. I think she is just done with politics, and wants out. She especially doesn’t want to answer for what happened in Bengazi, because she’s being set up to be the fall guy when she doesn’t think that what happened was her fault.

Q: Will David Gregory be prosecuted for violating Washington DC’s gun laws?
A: You’re kidding, right?

Q: Will any new gun control laws be passed at the federal level as a result of the Newtown massacre?
A: No new gun laws will pass the house, thus no new gun laws will pass.

Q: Will Scott Brown win the special election for John Kerry’s seat in Massachusetts?
A: I’m going to say no on this one. Radicals are pretty energized and they won’t let him win again. Plus Brown pissed off a lot of his base, making them less than energized.

Q: What will the price of bitcoins be at year’s end?
A: Around $30.

I guess that’s it since I can’t think of anything else. Let me know what you think. We’ll revisit this in a year as usual.

I think I did pretty well last year. Here goes:

Q: Who will be the Republican nominee for President:
A: Mitt Romney
Result: Correct, Mitt Romney was the nominee for President.

Q: Who will win the apparent Romney-Obama matchup?
A: Obama.
Result: Correct, Obama did win the matchup.

Q: What will the electoral map look like?
A: Almost identical to 2008, though Florida may flip to the Republican column. NH will also flip. I should emphasize that this is true if Romney is the nominee, as predicted above. If Romney is not the nominee, then the electoral map will be very different.
Result: More or less correct. NH and FLorida did not flip, but Indiana did.

Q: Will the Euro survive 2012?
A: Probably, though it will be very weak by year’s end.
Result: Probably incorrect. Euro does not appear to be going anywhere.

Q: Will Scott Brown win re-election?
A: No, but it will be a close election.
Result: Correct.

Q: Who will Ron Paul endorse in the general election?
A: He will not endorse either the Republican nominee nor Gary Johnson.
Result: Correct.

Q: What percentage of the vote will Gary Johnson get in 2012?
A: Around 2%. He will break 1 million votes.
Result: Johnson did break 1 million votes, but thsi was only about 1% of the vote.

Q: Will SOPA pass and be put in to law?
A: Yes.
Result: I was wrong on this one, though it’s probably only a matter of time before something like it happens.

Q: Will the next major terrorist attack be carried out by Americans against their own government?
A: Yes, though it certainly won’t happen until after the election, and not likely to happen in 2012.
Results: No major terrorist attacks yet. This prediction was made too early. But let’s wait and see what happens as Obamacare is rolled out.

Q: What price will Bitcoins be in $US at year end?
A: $50
Results: Way off, we’ll be lucky to break $15 by year end.

So there’s this link on Drudge saying that Obama is threatening to use his State of the Union Address to vilify Republicans on the fiscal cliff or some other such nonsense. Well, there’s an easy way to deal with that:

Deny him the opportunity.

The President cannot speak to the House and Senate except by way of an invitation. So far as I understand it, he can’t even step foot onto the floor of the House without an invitation. So play hardball: deny him the invitation.

Every State of the Union address from Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson was written, not delivered as a speech. Wilson, a progressive who understood theatrics, began the modern tradition of delivering the address as a speech. But there is no requirement for the address to be delivered as a speech, or for the House to let the President deliver a speech.

So turn him down. And if you really want to show him up, have Boehner deliver a speech himself instead. Of course, you’d need balls to execute such a move, and one wonders whether our teary eyed leadership has such gumption. But we can always fantasize, can’t we?

And so it was, yea verily, when some 5,000 years ago, or so, as there are some disputed among theologians, the Earth was born. And some seven days after the birth of the Earth, all the plants and animals had been born. Mankind was vegetarian, of course. And by mankind we mean the only two of the human species who cohabited the Earth with every animal that ever existed, dinosaurs included. They lived in Missouri. At some point, the first man and woman decided that they wanted knowledge of how the world worked, which the acquired not by observation of the world around them, nor by hunting and eating meat and growing their brains, but rather by eating from a magic tree. And upon gaining said knowledge, they noticed that their genitals were exposed, and that they enjoyed eating meat. So they set forth, and populated the Earth.

A small tribe of people, who existed at the nexus of three major continents, Asia, Africa and Europe, was made up of some 13 tribes, some of whom departed from their homeland never to return. As it turns out, those very people were the original settlers of the American continents. In their homeland they were known as the Jews. In their new land, they became the Nephites and the Lamanites. One of them was white, and they got eliminated by the dark skinned Jews, who had completely lost their way with the Lord. At some point, the last white man alive in North America (before the arrival of Columbus) wrote down the history of these lost Jews on gold tablets, ad buried them in the hills of upstate New York.

Some 128 years after Columbus became the first non-Jewish white man to set foot in the Americas, religious zealots from England landed in Massachusetts. They nearly died in their first winter, but the Jews, who the pilgrims thought were from India, helped show them how to farm the land, and thus they had a bounteous feast that year. The centerpiece of their meal was a bird that the English speaking peoples had mistakenly named believing it has originated in the Ottoman Empire. This is the bird that we typically eat this time each year.

Some 210 years after the pilgrims arrived in North America, a man named Joseph Smith discovered the tablets buried by the last white North American Jew/Indian, and he launched the only true church according to the wished of Jesus Christ, all others being an abomination. Joseph Smith himself ran for President of the United States, as sort of a theocratic candidate. He lost obviously, but not before he made a prophecy: that someday the US Constitution would be “hanging by a thread” and that it would be a member of his Church who would become president, and set things right.

Almost 200 years later, the US Supreme Court declared that the power to tax includes the power to tax not for the purpose of raising revenue to act upon its enumerated powers (as the constitution says), but rather that it can be used to compel behavior in the citizenry. The case which was being decided was over a bill designed to eventually socialize the medical care industry, such socialism being well outside the framework of the Constitution or the thinking of any of the framers.

And so it came to pass that a Mormon was running for president, just at that moment, when the constitution was hanging by a thread. But alas, something was amiss. This Mormon had himself implemented a miniature version of this form of socialism in the state in which he was governor. And when running in the primaries, he had said that he didn’t want to repeal the offensive law, but just to fix the most offensive portions of it. And after obtaining the nomination, rather than going hard against the man after whom the legislation is colloquially named, he went hard after the most strict constitutionalist in the Republican party, the Ron Paul acolytes, who were playing by the rules to gain positions in the party to prepare for an eventual Rand Paul presidential run. Got that? Going against the man who is eviscerating the constitution, use kid gloves. Going against the Ron Paul folks, go for blood. Perhaps they weren’t white and delightsome enough for him.

Eric Fehrnstrom, the Mormon candidate’s campaign manager or whatever you want to call him, was so devoted to the Mormon candidate that he was fond of saying to the rest of the staff that they should all feel privileged, thankful even, to have had the opportunity to work with such a great man.

Whatever.

So what am I thankful for this year? That we’re rid of that douchebag once and for all.

Obviously, Romney is going to win handily tomorrow. The question is why? More specifically, how did I get it so wrong:

If Republicans lose the independent vote 58% to 42%, they will lose. And that’s not even considering the fact that Mihos in fact took 7% of the vote for himself. I think we could expect similar results if Gingrich goes rogue and runs third party.

So I hope you’re a bit more informed about Mitt Romney’s electability now. Nominating Mitt Romney will, I believe, lead to a massive loss in November. My hope is that is doesn’t have an effect down ticket.

More or less, Obama ran the entirely wrong race in all the wrong ways.

Back in 2004, when Bush beat Kerry, I was in a car with some liberal friends who asked me what I thought of the election. I told them that I thought Howard Dean would have had a better chance of beating Bush, a thought which intrigued them. They asked me to elaborate, which I did. I told them that in an election between someone who believes in something, and someone who believes in nothing or whom at least appears to believe in nothing, the something will win every time. I told them that Bush was a poor President who was very beatable. But Kerry, rightly or wrongly, came across as a guy who believed in nothing. And as a result he was seen as unfit to lead, and so voters stuck with what they knew, despite their reservations about the current President.

Given the poor state of the economy and the generally poor performance of Obama as President, the best he could have hoped for was a scenario similar to 2004, in which the challenger is deemed unacceptable for some reason. In some sense, the Obama camp knew this, which is why they went so negative so early in the campaign. But the way in which they did it was completely idiotic, to put it mildly.

Evidently, the Obama camp lives inside its own echo chamber. Instead of going after Romney as a man who changes his views on a whim, who apparently believes in nothing, an accurate and potent criticism of the man, they decided to try to portray him as a right wing extremist.

Because the Republicans spent the entire primary season wringing their hands over Romney because they were concerned about nominating someone too right wing.

Romney was the quintessential politician who believed in nothing, who ought to have been beaten by anybody who believes in something. Instead he was portrayed by the Obama camp as someone who believed in something, just something different from Obama.

This blunder more or less handed the election to Romney. But that was only the beginning.

It would seem as if the Obama team really spent the election shitting its pants over the Tea Party. In case you were unaware the Tea Party is more or less un by middle aged middle class women. This marks a very dangerous fissure in the Democratic coalition. If middle class women peel away as a reliable source of votes, the Democrats are in trouble. So they spent their entire convention screaming about birth control and abortion. It was absurd and certainly didn’t convince anyone of anything. More importantly, it squandered another opportunity to show how Romney is a guy who believes in nothing.

Finally, for reasons that puzzle me, they failed to go after the Mormon angle in the way I assumed they would, namely by pointing out that Romney proselytized what was then a racist religion for two years. Obama surrogate Andrew Sullivan has only just mow started asking those questions, way too late.

So say hello to President Romney. I don’t hold out much hope that he’ll be any good as president. But he certainly can’t be as bad as Obama has been.

UPDATE: So obviously, I shouldn’t have written this, and should have just stuck with my original prediction. I certainly appears that Obama simply had a better ground game in the battleground states, and got turnout that was at or near 2008 levels, something that I wasn’t considering could seriously take place. Now we all have to brace ourselves, for the implementation of Obamacare and the debasement of the currency. It’s gonna get ugly.

UPDATE 2: Ira Stoll mirrors my thoughts.

If you’re wondering what this is about, watch here.

So it’s been a while since we’ve added to the Grand Plan here on the samaBlog. And I’ve had this notion ruminating in my head since the Obamacare decision came down. But I haven’t had the spare cycles to devote to writing this until now. So excuse me if this seems a few months late.

So the Roberts Obamacare decision comes down to this: the power to tax as expressed in the 16th amendment to the Constitution is unlimited, and any objective that cannot be met by using any of the enumerated powers can be coerced of the citizenry by means of the tax code. So while the commerce clause doesn’t give congress the right to compel people to buy insurance, the tax code in effect does.

It goes without saying that this interpretation of Congress’ power to tax, an interpretation which contradicts Supreme Court rulings from the time of the 16th amendment’s adoption, grants effectively unlimited powers to Congress to compel or outlaw whatever behavior it so chooses, so long as it is clothed in the power to tax. Anybody with half a brain can see how such a power is incompatible with the idea of a free society, and can and likely will lead to abuse in the future. And so we ought to propose the tax rectification Amendment, which would read more or less as follows:

The power to tax is limited to raising revenues to enable the federal government execute the enumerated powers given it by this constitution. Congress may not, under any circumstances, require abusive or excessive taxation, or taxes which are which encourage changes in the behavior of the citizenry.

I am not a Constitutional scholar, and I would be open to better wording from someone who has been trained in the art of such things, but you get the drift.

The problem with such an amendment, of course, is that it would not just invalidate Obamacare. It would lay waste to much of the tax code as it currently exists. I am in favor of such destruction, but it seems to me that many in congress are not, especially on the Democrats’ side of the aisle, given their proclivity towards Obamacare (and telling people what to do generally). And so should the Tax Rectification Amendment be rejected, we shall motivate those who differ from us by exercising our newfound powers under the Roberts decision, and enact the Tax Rectification Act. The Tax Rectification Act, of course, is just a series of punitive taxes against hot button cultural items that are adored by the SWPL crowd. I came up with a few ideas off the top of my head. Surely by the time the new congress takes power, we can come up with a mile-long list that will infuriate the left. But here’s my start for now:

• 100% tax on organic produce
• $1,000,000 annual excise tax on food trucks
• $1,000,000 annual excise tax on any restaurant or food establishment that does not serve meat
• $2,000,000 annual excise tax on any restaurant or food establishment that does not serve animal products of any kind
• $1,000,000 annual excise tax on every institution that performs abortions. Couple with a $10,000 excise tax on every abortion performed
• 500% sales tax on any sticker, flag or other item sold with a rainbow on it
• $10,000,000 excise tax on every motion picture produced in the United States
• $1,000 excise tax on bicycle helmets
• $500/lb excise tax on the production and sale of tofu
• $100 excise tax on every bumper sticker produced
• $1,000,000 annual excise tax on medical marijuana dispensaries

I could go on, you get the drift.

But you object, and exclaim, “But Rob, I despise Obamacare as much as you. But I enjoy some or many of these things on this list too. I watch movies, and eat at food trucks, and ride a bicycle..” To which I say: you’re missing the point. The point is not to actually put all these things out of existence, but rather to tell those on the other side that we are willing and able to use this new fangled power in crazy ass ways to destroy the things that you hold most dear. And that the longer you wait on ratifying the Tax Rectification Amendment, the more likely you will reap irreparable damage to those you hold dearest. So Join with us and pass the amendment. Yes you lose Obamacare, but you also gain the assurance that we won’t tax the accouterments of the SWPL lifestyle just out of spite. Indeed, it is designed to give those on the other side a newfound appreciation of why limited government is a good thing. And such an appreciation will only have good consequences over the long term.

Or should it be, Moron Romney?

So you may or may not be aware, but a lot of the Ron Paul folks have been organizing to become delegates for the Republican National Convention in Tampa in August. Why are they doing this? Well, they have no illusions about who the nominee is or who they will be voting for. What they are doing is making a long term play: they are attempting to grab control of the party apparatus so that they can help pave the way for a Rand Paul nomination for President. They assume that Romney will lose in this election cycle, but on the off chance that he wins, they’re prepping for Rand Paul’s nomination in 2020.

So this caused something of a minor embarrassment for Romney when his delegates all LOST the delegate elections in his home state of Massachusetts. So what did Romney do in response? Well, he cheated, changed the rules, and got the delegates booted. You can read the full story here and here.

I seem to remember him having done something similar to this before, to a gubernatorial candidate, Christy Mihos…

Look, Romney is an imperious prick, who thinks very short term and is entirely risk averse in all the wrong ways. Instead of trying to win these new delegates over, instead of welcoming them to the Republican party, he tried bullying them and then cheated and got them thrown out of the party.

It may not have occurred to you or those of you in the Romney camp, but the left is already cooking up a plan to delegitimize the election should Romney manage to pull a rabbit out of the hat. Just google “republican voter suppression” and see what comes up (UPDATE: in fact, here’s an article from today’s paper!). And in the midst of this plan, Romney goes ahead and does what? Suppresses the votes of Ron Paul Republicans trying to win delegate seats. This after having previously done much the same thing with regards to Christy Mihos. Way to establish a pattern and throw fuel on the fire. Does it not occur to him that he’s playing right into this meme?

Oh forget it.

I was giving some thought to voting for Romney after the Roberts decision. Now I’ll prolly just stick to my plan to vote for Gary Johnson.

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