I'm sufficiently happy with my first fortune-cookie job in February of '09 to undertake a second, with predictions great and small, to wit:
1. The abolition of the light bulb will be repealed. It always was madness that the useless "Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007" included a provision outlawing the incandescent light bulb as of 2012. They're light bulbs: they're harmless, they cost a matter of pennies each, and they're so towering a monument to ingenuity and improvement that the image of the light bulb is the very symbol for genius inspiration. No American government can possibly be acting as intended by the Founders if it busies itself with the likes of abolishing the light bulb. But the House of Representatives now is to be re-taken by Republicans, and those Republicans will move to repeal the ban before the impossible enforcement of it commences, polls will show something over two-thirds support for repeal, and the ban will necessarily die, if not before Obama leaves office on January 20 of 2013 then very shortly thereafter.
2. This is probably so uncontroversial as to go without saying, but I thought it would only be appropriate to put on the record here that Republicans will hold the House of Representatives and gain the Senate in 2012. The Democrats were only saved in the Senate in 2010 by the fact that the third of the Senate that was up for re-election happened to be Republican seats or sufficiently Democratic seats to have survived a Republican year like 2004, when Republicans held the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The Democrats' margin was made in '06 and '08, which were high-water marks for them, and artificially high, at that, and those seats that took them from minority to majority will be up for grabs in '12 and '14. The next two years will be the last for Democratic control of the Senate for some time.
And the House Democrats affirmed their new status as minority not long after the midterms, in re-electing Nancy Pelosi to lead them, Pelosi being the most reviled figure in national politics and government and one of three authors of the greatest disquiet in American society in at least a generation. Something like re-nominating Carter against Reagan for '84. That lot won't be entrusted again with a House majority anytime soon.
3. Obama will be a one-term president, that much seems assured to me and has all along. His 2008 campaign was a fraud and he is singularly unsuited to the American presidency. The next president of the United States will be whomever is nominated for president by the Republican Party in 2012, but that question is an open one. Already there are maybe a dozen prospects, but I'm prepared now to venture out onto a limb and predict that the next Republican nominee for president and indeed the next president of the United States will be one Rick Perry of Texas.
Yes, my forecast two years ago was for Mark Sanford of South Carolina, but that ought not be held against me: Sanford might even have been the prohibitive favorite today if he hadn't got himself ruined by taking off for Argentina one fine day in 2009 to take up with an Argie gal he liked better than his wife back in SC, which Charles Krauthammer diagnosed as subconscious self-sabotage, in his capacity as a former psychiatrist.
So barring another unscheduled Argentine vacation, Rick Perry it is. Perry is now the longest-serving governor in the second-largest state in the Union. That he is a governor at all is a boon, but he is a particularly successful one. He has kept a balanced budget in a juggernaut state with no state income tax, and between August of '09 and August '10, "half of all the net new jobs created in the United States...were created in Texas," so says the National Review. Perry is solidly conservative and forcefully anti-Obama. He's sufficiently old without his seniority being anything approaching a liability, and he looks the part of president of the United States, for whatever that's worth, and it's not nothing. He's a Methodist, which I count among the "presidential denominations", though after Obama I suspect even a Mormon president would be a relief to the nation. And Rick Perry is a former airman, a Vietnam-era veteran of the United States Air Force. There's a presidential profile for 2012 if I've ever seen one.
Perry is not often counted among the prospective Republican candidates for president, but then John McCain was running third and fourth in the Republican primary polls in October of '07 when I reckoned him for the 2008 Republican nominee, and anyway at this point Perry is arguably better off in the shadows. The nation isn't ready for another presidential race just yet; no need of making everyone sick at the sight of you before it's even time for declarations of candidacy and fundraisers and debates and interviews.
4. The next Republican president, with his Republican Congress, will re-institute America's manned space program. Obama cancelled America's manned space program for the first time since there's been such a thing as manned space flight, not by presiding over the end of the 1970s-vintage shuttle program, which is in fact overdue for retirement and was scheduled to be retired, anyway, but by cancelling the replacement for the shuttle, which was called Constellation.
Constellation was inaugurated under the Bush Administration, and that may be the first clue as to why Obama ordered it cancelled. But the bigger reason seems plain enough to me, which is that Obama has an inveterate hostility to American greatness and to all those things that make for national greatness, including especially domination in rocketry which Obama and the Left like to fret will lead to a "weaponization of space", as if space isn't "weaponized" by military satellites and ballistic missiles already, and as if an American capitulation in space would make space any less "weaponized" by the Chinese and Russians.
Obama cancelled Constellation and with it America's manned space program for the same reason that Neil Armstrong came out of his seclusion along with two other Apollo commanders to oppose that cancellation, pleading that it would put America on "a long downhill slide to mediocrity." If you're the sort of person who takes it as read that America is the problem in the world, that it's a fundamentally wicked and stupid and greedy and abusive nation -- and Obama's personal history gives us every reason to believe that he is precisely that kind of person -- then "a long downhill slide to mediocrity" is the most politically-viable way of neutering and diminishing America, to where it is left to take orders from the more "enlightened" in the world, and no longer has it so good or has any capacity for venturing out into the world in the defense and promotion of its interests and values.
But Obama's red herring that America simply can no longer afford Constellation is an absurdity. At this point Constellation would be costing the United States something over $3 billion a year; Obama's worse-than-useless stimulus ended up at $862 billion, and with about 40 percent of that still unspent, Obama was calling for $266 billion more. Obama never came down against anything because it cost too much; he's against Constellation because he's against an American manned space program. For crying out loud, Obama put $2.5 billion over five years into NASA for the study of "global warming". Besides which, the American taxpayer has invested $9 billion in the program already, and the cancellation itself is supposed to cost $2.5 billion.
When the shuttle program expires and there is no Constellation program to replace it, America will have no heavy capacity for making it out of earth's atmosphere, and will be dependent on Russia for its space business, at $50 million per astronaut just to get to its International Space Station and back. There's $3 billion in the United States budget for a proper space program like America has had since there's been any such thing, and what America cannot afford is to cede space to the Chinese and Russians.
5. Obama-care will not stand. Michael Barone, who is as sober as he is encyclopedic, has called Obama-care the most unpopular major national legislation to be passed since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and that led in part to the Civil War. It's a plain bad bill, for a start. Megan McArdle, who is an economist and by no means a Republican partisan, has concluded that Obama-care is "unstable, politically and practically." Quite. When over a hundred companies and institutions need exempting from a national law as just the first phases come into effect, then what you've got hold of is a bad law.
And Obama-care is the only social program ever to be enacted against the will of the people and with not a solitary vote from the minority opposition. Indeed, some 34 Democrats voted against the thing in the House. There was a consensus on Obama-care, both in the nation at large and in Congress, and it was that the bill ought not be passed. In the event, the final bill had to be passed by parliamentary manoeuver to circumvent the 60-percent threshold in the Senate.
The states are about to go into revolt against the mandates in Obama-care. In these midterm elections just past, Democrats were turned out of the state legislatures in what may be the largest-ever turnover at the state level since the founding of the Republic, with something like 680 seats switching from Democrat to Republican, and those Republican legislatures will become little battlefields in the war against Obama-care. And Obama-care may well be holed below the waterline by the Supreme Court if it strikes down as unconstitutional the "individual mandate" compelling the American people to buy health insurance -- and not some bare-bones health insurance, approximate to liability insurance for cars, but the comprehensive kind, as determined by the Health and Human Services Director and enforced by the IRS. Oh, yes: Obama-care will not stand.
1. The abolition of the light bulb will be repealed. It always was madness that the useless "Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007" included a provision outlawing the incandescent light bulb as of 2012. They're light bulbs: they're harmless, they cost a matter of pennies each, and they're so towering a monument to ingenuity and improvement that the image of the light bulb is the very symbol for genius inspiration. No American government can possibly be acting as intended by the Founders if it busies itself with the likes of abolishing the light bulb. But the House of Representatives now is to be re-taken by Republicans, and those Republicans will move to repeal the ban before the impossible enforcement of it commences, polls will show something over two-thirds support for repeal, and the ban will necessarily die, if not before Obama leaves office on January 20 of 2013 then very shortly thereafter.
2. This is probably so uncontroversial as to go without saying, but I thought it would only be appropriate to put on the record here that Republicans will hold the House of Representatives and gain the Senate in 2012. The Democrats were only saved in the Senate in 2010 by the fact that the third of the Senate that was up for re-election happened to be Republican seats or sufficiently Democratic seats to have survived a Republican year like 2004, when Republicans held the House, the Senate, and the presidency. The Democrats' margin was made in '06 and '08, which were high-water marks for them, and artificially high, at that, and those seats that took them from minority to majority will be up for grabs in '12 and '14. The next two years will be the last for Democratic control of the Senate for some time.
And the House Democrats affirmed their new status as minority not long after the midterms, in re-electing Nancy Pelosi to lead them, Pelosi being the most reviled figure in national politics and government and one of three authors of the greatest disquiet in American society in at least a generation. Something like re-nominating Carter against Reagan for '84. That lot won't be entrusted again with a House majority anytime soon.
3. Obama will be a one-term president, that much seems assured to me and has all along. His 2008 campaign was a fraud and he is singularly unsuited to the American presidency. The next president of the United States will be whomever is nominated for president by the Republican Party in 2012, but that question is an open one. Already there are maybe a dozen prospects, but I'm prepared now to venture out onto a limb and predict that the next Republican nominee for president and indeed the next president of the United States will be one Rick Perry of Texas.
Yes, my forecast two years ago was for Mark Sanford of South Carolina, but that ought not be held against me: Sanford might even have been the prohibitive favorite today if he hadn't got himself ruined by taking off for Argentina one fine day in 2009 to take up with an Argie gal he liked better than his wife back in SC, which Charles Krauthammer diagnosed as subconscious self-sabotage, in his capacity as a former psychiatrist.
So barring another unscheduled Argentine vacation, Rick Perry it is. Perry is now the longest-serving governor in the second-largest state in the Union. That he is a governor at all is a boon, but he is a particularly successful one. He has kept a balanced budget in a juggernaut state with no state income tax, and between August of '09 and August '10, "half of all the net new jobs created in the United States...were created in Texas," so says the National Review. Perry is solidly conservative and forcefully anti-Obama. He's sufficiently old without his seniority being anything approaching a liability, and he looks the part of president of the United States, for whatever that's worth, and it's not nothing. He's a Methodist, which I count among the "presidential denominations", though after Obama I suspect even a Mormon president would be a relief to the nation. And Rick Perry is a former airman, a Vietnam-era veteran of the United States Air Force. There's a presidential profile for 2012 if I've ever seen one.
Perry is not often counted among the prospective Republican candidates for president, but then John McCain was running third and fourth in the Republican primary polls in October of '07 when I reckoned him for the 2008 Republican nominee, and anyway at this point Perry is arguably better off in the shadows. The nation isn't ready for another presidential race just yet; no need of making everyone sick at the sight of you before it's even time for declarations of candidacy and fundraisers and debates and interviews.
4. The next Republican president, with his Republican Congress, will re-institute America's manned space program. Obama cancelled America's manned space program for the first time since there's been such a thing as manned space flight, not by presiding over the end of the 1970s-vintage shuttle program, which is in fact overdue for retirement and was scheduled to be retired, anyway, but by cancelling the replacement for the shuttle, which was called Constellation.
Constellation was inaugurated under the Bush Administration, and that may be the first clue as to why Obama ordered it cancelled. But the bigger reason seems plain enough to me, which is that Obama has an inveterate hostility to American greatness and to all those things that make for national greatness, including especially domination in rocketry which Obama and the Left like to fret will lead to a "weaponization of space", as if space isn't "weaponized" by military satellites and ballistic missiles already, and as if an American capitulation in space would make space any less "weaponized" by the Chinese and Russians.
Obama cancelled Constellation and with it America's manned space program for the same reason that Neil Armstrong came out of his seclusion along with two other Apollo commanders to oppose that cancellation, pleading that it would put America on "a long downhill slide to mediocrity." If you're the sort of person who takes it as read that America is the problem in the world, that it's a fundamentally wicked and stupid and greedy and abusive nation -- and Obama's personal history gives us every reason to believe that he is precisely that kind of person -- then "a long downhill slide to mediocrity" is the most politically-viable way of neutering and diminishing America, to where it is left to take orders from the more "enlightened" in the world, and no longer has it so good or has any capacity for venturing out into the world in the defense and promotion of its interests and values.
But Obama's red herring that America simply can no longer afford Constellation is an absurdity. At this point Constellation would be costing the United States something over $3 billion a year; Obama's worse-than-useless stimulus ended up at $862 billion, and with about 40 percent of that still unspent, Obama was calling for $266 billion more. Obama never came down against anything because it cost too much; he's against Constellation because he's against an American manned space program. For crying out loud, Obama put $2.5 billion over five years into NASA for the study of "global warming". Besides which, the American taxpayer has invested $9 billion in the program already, and the cancellation itself is supposed to cost $2.5 billion.
When the shuttle program expires and there is no Constellation program to replace it, America will have no heavy capacity for making it out of earth's atmosphere, and will be dependent on Russia for its space business, at $50 million per astronaut just to get to its International Space Station and back. There's $3 billion in the United States budget for a proper space program like America has had since there's been any such thing, and what America cannot afford is to cede space to the Chinese and Russians.
5. Obama-care will not stand. Michael Barone, who is as sober as he is encyclopedic, has called Obama-care the most unpopular major national legislation to be passed since the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and that led in part to the Civil War. It's a plain bad bill, for a start. Megan McArdle, who is an economist and by no means a Republican partisan, has concluded that Obama-care is "unstable, politically and practically." Quite. When over a hundred companies and institutions need exempting from a national law as just the first phases come into effect, then what you've got hold of is a bad law.
And Obama-care is the only social program ever to be enacted against the will of the people and with not a solitary vote from the minority opposition. Indeed, some 34 Democrats voted against the thing in the House. There was a consensus on Obama-care, both in the nation at large and in Congress, and it was that the bill ought not be passed. In the event, the final bill had to be passed by parliamentary manoeuver to circumvent the 60-percent threshold in the Senate.
The states are about to go into revolt against the mandates in Obama-care. In these midterm elections just past, Democrats were turned out of the state legislatures in what may be the largest-ever turnover at the state level since the founding of the Republic, with something like 680 seats switching from Democrat to Republican, and those Republican legislatures will become little battlefields in the war against Obama-care. And Obama-care may well be holed below the waterline by the Supreme Court if it strikes down as unconstitutional the "individual mandate" compelling the American people to buy health insurance -- and not some bare-bones health insurance, approximate to liability insurance for cars, but the comprehensive kind, as determined by the Health and Human Services Director and enforced by the IRS. Oh, yes: Obama-care will not stand.
