"We should do what we can to wake people up, but reality is far more eloquent than we can ever be."
-- Dagny on the TTP Forum

I'm afraid Dagny is right. America probably won't wake up until the OPM (Other Peoples' Money) suddenly runs out, quite possibly with the dollar blowing up and all the drastic consequences (how do we then import oil?) thereof.

Although we don't know yet which candidate will win the Republican nomination or whether that candidate will replace BO, we already know enough to foresee some near future consequences that will occur whoever wins.

Whether BO wins another term or one of the plausible Republicans wins, the five most important existentially threatening problems and their outcomes will be the same.  These are the shapes of things to come.

Well, he had to crack under the pressure sooner or later, and thank heavens it's sooner.  Everyone on Capitol Hill this morning can't stop talking about it.  Boehner and Reid have just been told to expect a momentous announcement from the White House. 

At 9pm EDT this evening, the President will announce on national television that, due to the overwhelming difficulties the nation faces which have proven impossible for him to solve because Republicans refuse to cooperate, he is resigning the presidency effective immediately.  Good luck, America, he will say, you'll have to solve your problems without me.

And yes, today is April Fool's Day.

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So let's talk about fools - and their luck.  Zero just might pull Libya off.  He'll have David Cameron to thank for it, and MI6, which is disintegrating Gaddafi's regime via defections.

Conservative contempt for Zero is so bottomless that many don't want him to succeed even when it's in our clear interests that he do so.  He was right in saying the US could not stand by while Gaddafi perpetrated genocidal slaughter upon his own people, and wrong in not solving the problem immediately by an assassination strike on Gaddafi.

So now he owns this war which has to be won - for if Gaddafi stays in power he will "return to international terrorism and resume his nuclear weapons program," warns John Bolton who is nobody's fool.  When asked about the rebels fighting Gaddafi and if they might be radical Islamists, John responded,

"Yes, there is uncertainty about them - but when there is Muammar Gaddafi on one side and uncertainty on the other, you pick uncertainty."

How many times have you heard the president and the congressional Democrats say Americans who make less than $200,000 a year have not had, and will not have, any of their taxes increased? Unfortunately, it is not true, and it is likely to become a whole lot worse.

The 111th Congress has already enacted $352 billion in net tax increases and may, in the upcoming lame-duck session, enact the largest tax increases in history, which will hit every man, woman and child - as well as every business in America.

The president and most congressional Democrats have been claiming they will make sure no one making less than $200,000 per year will face a tax increase when all of the "Bush tax cuts" expire on midnight Dec. 31. Given they have not been truthful about the tax increases they already have enacted, why should anyone believe these new claims?

During a workout last weekend, I watched and listened as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan bemoaned our "crumbling schools." Sorry, but it's not our schools that are crumbling, Mr. Secretary: It's our values. 

But we can't even discuss the problem honestly and have to trim the conversation to keep it within politically correct patterns. Well, when yet another survey trumpets that the U.S. has fallen to sixth place in teaching math or science, or that we're fifteenth in education overall, my reaction is "Okay, break those scores out by specific school locations." 

Generally, our suburban and many small-town schools still deliver competitive (if less than optimal) educations. Our statistics skew sharply downward because of the appalling conditions in the inner-city and barrio holding pens and teacher's-union bunkers we pretend are real schools.

The left, for political advantage, has written off poor blacks and browns educationally-confining them in schools that are now about the unionized teachers, not the students.  And let's be honest: Conservatives have made no serious attempts to reform those schools, either.

If Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and their fellow members of Congress were children, what might they have done?

Children like to spend other people's money on themselves and their friends without thinking about how it was earned and the hard work that went into earning it. A childlike mind might believe in the fantasy that you can take money from the pocket of someone who worked hard to earn it, give it to someone who didn't earn it and that, magically, everyone will be better off. A fully developed, mature brain would understand that voting to enact laws without having read or understood them was irresponsible and likely would lead to bad consequences

Free-market democracy cannot succeed if those who hold elective office act and vote like children. We can do better.

Until recently, most politicians, pundits and others among the "smart people" insisted that Election 2012 was all about jobs, jobs, jobs. The more broad-minded contended that the related issues of the lousy economy and the imperatives of deficit reduction also might feature. But that was all that mattered, especially in the presidential contest.

Then, GOP candidate Herman Cain, a successful businessman who has risen in the polls in no small measure on the strength of his claim to have actually created jobs, gave an interview in which he seemed unaware that Communist China has the bomb.

Without skipping a beat, the intelligentsia denounced him as unfit to serve on the grounds that a man who was not proficient in national security and foreign policy matters could never become president. The jobs-jobs-jobs leitmotif gave way, at least for a time, to a new theme: The White House is no place for on-the-job-training about the nation's defense.

How quickly they forget. What Barack Hussein Obama knew about U.S. security policy before he became president amounted to little more than the anti-colonialist sentiments of his father and the virulently anti-American agitation of Palestine Liberation Organization flak Rashid Khalidi, terrorist William Ayers, revolutionary Saul Alinsky and radical pastor Jeremiah Wright.

Mankind seems to be programmed not to remember the reasons for economic success and failure - and these lessons seem to need to be relearned every few years. The normal course of events is for free and prosperous economies (particularly under democracies) to move toward less freedom - more government spending, taxation and regulation - until the burden of government brings growth to a halt or near-halt.

In 1900, Australians enjoyed the highest per-capita income in the world. But then they retreated behind high tariff walls in a misguided attempt to protect manufacturing industries, created a judicial-based wage-determination system as a way to redistribute income in the name of fairness and engaged in excessive economic regulation. All of those measures slowed economic growth and reduced Australia's global per-capita income standing from No. 1 to No. 14.

Will Australians regain their economic footing before they allow themselves to fully re-embrace statism and end up with the disastrous policies of the Obama administration? The jury is out. But, President Obama is perhaps useful to the extent that his policies serve as a bad example for the rest of the world.