Conservatives are losing their lead on social and economic ideology. This trend does not favor the GOP. The war hawks are a major problem, but it’s also time to wake up on the social issues and actually reduce the size of government. Here are the recent Gallup numbers for you:

More Americans continue to identify themselves as conservatives than as liberals on economic and social matters. However, the conservative advantage on each dimension is shrinking from higher points in recent years, down to 21 points on economic policy and four points on social policy.

The results are based on Gallup’s annual Values and Beliefs poll, conducted May 8-11. Currently, 34% of Americans say they are conservative, 35% say moderate, and 30% say liberal on social issues. On economic issues, 42% say they are conservative, 34% say moderate, and 21% say liberal. The four-point conservative lead on social ideology and 21-point lead on economic ideology rank as the smallest Gallup has measured in the 14 years it has asked Americans to describe their views on those issue dimensions separately, although the 21-point conservative lead on economic policy was also found in 2007 and 2008.

President Obama’s West Point foreign policy speech earned the president few new friends. The effort was largely directionless and lacking in foundation. Given that unpleasant introduction, here is Cato Institute’s Director of Foreign Policy Studies Chris Preble’s abridged take.

‘It was pretty weak tea, but not objectionable. There was more good than bad. I knocked him for talking about burden sharing with allies without really being serious about it.”

“The pledge to support the Syrian opposition is too little, too late. And we shouldn’t be supporting them in the first place. There isn’t a compelling national interest. But at least he is not talking about the US military getting involved directly.”

“There is nothing that he could have said that would have satisfied the neocons. But they might have liked it if he talked about being more interventionist, and then didn’t follow up.”

Chris Preble is the author of the widely acclaimed The Power Problem—How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free . I have written a mini series on Mr. Preble’s book, which you can read here: Part I, Part II, Part III . One of my favorite foreign policy analysts, Andrew J. Bacevich, has said about The Power Problem: “Here is a book that Dwight D. Eisenhower—the general and the president—would have greatly admired.”

Pictured Right: VA Secretary Shinseki meeting with AFGE and AFGE National VA Council in March 2009

Not unlike the public schools scandals in which teachers and administrators fudged test scores in order to get more money for themselves and their schools, the VA scandal has much the same reek—only more putrid. The VA has been paying, with taxpayer funds, salaried employees who are not doing work related to administrating to vets, but instead related to performing union work. Jillian Kay Melchior writes in NRO here that Georgia representative Phil Gingrey’s office obtained through the Freedom of Information Act the list of these taxpayer-funded union reps at VA offices around the country. “Employees across the federal government are paid full-time or part-time to perform work for their various unions, but perhaps nowhere is the practice more offensive than at the overburdened VA.”

Too many clerks have been filing fraudulent forms. The carrots for lowering wait times are bonuses and potential promotions for managers and administrators. Peggy Noonan notes in the WSJ, “What was meant to be an incentive for productivity became an incentive to lie.”

According to the VA inspector general’s report on the Phoenix VA Medical Center, with the shortage of doctors, nurses and aides, scheduling clerks dealt with Eric Shinseki’s 14-day requirement by falsifying the numbers. Furthermore, the VA’s 2014-2020 Strategic Plan reports that the workforce is swollen with mid-level managers and administrators—all aging. One-third of the VA’s 332,000 AFGE union-dominated employees, including about 50% of the department’s senior executives, are eligible for retirement. Perhaps that is another reason no one has wanted to spill the beans.

And then there is the president himself. Mr. Obama, a man of many words, promised in 2008 that he would clean up the mess at the VA that has been going on for many years. In “The VA Scandal Is a Crisis of Leadership,” Ms. Noonan asks, “Why didn’t it work? He (Obama) told it to! His background was one of privation, but as an executive he acts like a man who grew up with 10 maids. Let them do it, I’m too busy thinking.” Thinking, perhaps, not of the cheating and dysfunction within the VA, but of his own political back.

Eric Shinseki’s head has rolled, but to what end? Politicians can now sanctimoniously boast that they have done something. Wouldn’t it be nice to hear, just once, from Mr. Obama and members of Congress, the buck stops here? Better yet, wouldn’t it be nice if they meant it? Obama has had six years and Congress decades to right the wrongs at the VA. What’s next? We Americans just lie down like lambs and allow the status quo to continue?

Many thanks to the government’s (White House) recently released National Assessment for clarifying why Key West is so peculiar. According to National Assessment, it’s most likely from the ramifications of climate change in the U.S. The assessment assess that global warming will “increase mental illness” in our cities.

As Cato’s Patrick J. Michaels points out, the obvious implication to the assessment is that people in Richmond, Virginia, are crazier then those in Washington, D.C. So it only stands to reason that they must be really loony in, say, Miami. As Key West residents for over two decades, Dick and I can assure you that everyone is singularly unique in our Southernmost City. But we tend to think that it’s not from climate change, but rather from personal preference. Key West, only 90 miles from Cuba and 150 from Miami, is off the charts, yes.

Read our posts on KW and come visit this superb city to see for yourself why everyone is bonkers to be here. And if you need help traveling through the Keys, download my friend Margo’s terrific app for places to go and people to see from Key Largo to Key West (Key West Insider app). Have fun.

But now on to Mr. Michaels and the futility of the EPA…

The politics of scaring people to death over climate change are probably more dangerous than the weather. And research suggests that the more people read that some “scientists say” the world is about to end, the less they believe them.

Chalk it up to apocalypse fatigue. By my best guess, global warming is the eighth environmental Armageddon I have lived through. Who even remembers that, according to some of our most esteemed scientists, “acid rain” was going to cause an “ecological silent spring”? Like so many global catastrophes, it was a bit exaggerated.

But what about all the weird weather plaguing the country? What the alarmists don’t tell you is that not since records were kept in the 1860s have we have gone this long without a Category 3 hurricane’s crossing our shoreline. They omit that there’s no evidence of an increase in weather-related damages once you adjust for the fact that there are now more people with more expensive stuff to hit. Even the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, so often cited to justify our futile policies, acknowledges that one.

Go to Cato.org to read more from Mr. Michaels and other Cato scholars on why the EPA regulations “will have absolutely no impact on climate change.” And oh, be prepared to be persona non grata at your next Boson/Cambridge cocktail party. Cheers!

Most investor have forgotten what 2008 felt like. The numbers were not pretty, especially for those who took a 50% loss. Dick Young explains in his March 2014 Intelligence Report (subscription required).

It’s impossible to have it all ways. In order to craft an investment portfolio that can act as an all-weather armadillo, you must be willing to forgo potentially substantial upside rewards to balance against the horror of a downside wipeout. If you are retired or saving for retirement in the not-too-distant future, you can easily get a knot in your stomach when you look at the basic math of downside portfolio protection. By example, when you lose 50% on an investment, you must make 100% the next trip to the plate just to get back even. And that’s without considering the negative drag of expenses and taxes on your gain, as well as the fact that you have not earned enough net-net to make my mandated 1% quarterly draw. I cannot impress upon you enough how ugly things can get—and fast. For a big percentage of investors, the mindset to take a deliberate and laser-focused armadillo-like approach is never achieved. For this unfortunate crowd, the ticking time bomb has already been set. What awaits is the explosion and ensuing financial carnage for the sad family.

President Obama, referring to Europe as a cornerstone of U.S. security, wants Congress to authorize a $1 billion slush fund for European security. I doubt Thomas Jefferson would have agreed with the president. Quite simply, we are decades past the time Europe should be funding its own defense. The president is using the catchy phrase “European Reassurance Initiative” to put his plan forward. Obama is on the wrong track, as Cato Institute’s Chris Preble clarifies here.

Americans seem to be awakening to the folly of foreign military intervention. After all, how tragic have American interventionist efforts been in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya? See any winners there? History does not support the value of military intervention, never mind outright nation building. The American people did not support the president on Syrian intervention and, we can only hope, will speak up to keep the U.S. out of any form of military adventurism in Eastern Europe, notwithstanding the president’s catchy tag line.

Preble writes:

President Obama is in Poland today, a visit that coincides with the 25th anniversary of that country’s liberation from communism. His four-day European tour will include a D-Day remembrance, meetings with G-7 leaders, and a possible encounter with Russian President Vladimir Putin in France, all while the crisis in Ukraine rages on.

Moments after stepping off Air Force One in Warsaw, with F-16s as a backdrop, the president sought to reassure our European allies, stating that America’s commitment to their security was “a cornerstone of our own security and it is sacrosanct.” He detailed the increased support America has provided, including a larger presence in the region, and later announced that he would ask Congress to fund a “European reassurance initiative” to the tune of $1 billion.

This is exactly the wrong approach. American taxpayers have been subsidizing the defense of European allies for too long. And they have reacted as one would expect—by spending less.

In fact, only three NATO countries – Estonia, Greece, and the United Kingdom – spent the NATO-mandated 2 percent of GDP on their defense in 2013, and even those three barely met the threshold. That is compared to the United States, which spent 3.7 percent of its GDP on defense, a figure that excludes national security spending in the Departments of Energy, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs.

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Much of what is being put forth by the Obama administration as well as the media about the just-released Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl appears to be questionable. For example, Susan Rice’s statement that Bergdahl “served with honor and distinction” has raised a furor with those soldiers who served with the sergeant. They believe that Bergdahl, before falling into the hands of the Taliban while on duty in Afghanistan, deserted his post, which could be classified as an act of treason.

The Obama administration claims there was no time to consult with Congress about Bergdahl’s release because he was seriously ill and the government had to move fast. But Senator Dianne Feinstein, who runs the Senate Intelligence Committee, maintains that she “heard no evidence that Sgt. Bergdahl was in immediate medical danger that made it necessary to act without consulting Congress.” Still, as Charles Krauthammer asks in National Review, why is Congress exercised over a war power, where its claim is weakest? After Obama’s 23 violations of his own ACA, after Obama enacts by executive order the DREAM Act, after Justice unilaterally rewrites drug laws, Congress now is affronted over the lack of a 30-day notice of a prisoner swap?

“Disconcerting” is what the WSJ calls the mockery coming from Qatar about the administration’s claim that the five former senior Taliban intelligence and military officials will be under close supervision and their ability to move about will be constrained. Reuters reports one source as saying the five men will be able to “move around freely within the country” before they leave. Another inconvenient truth is that several thousand U.S. troops will still be in Afghanistan when the Taliban killers do leave Qatar, and the Afghan-Paki border will still be a sanctuary for al Qaeda.

Perhaps President Obama, by hosting the parents of Sgt. Bergdahl in the Rose Garden, was hoping to deflect from his administration the disgrace of the VA scandal by turning the swap into a foreign-policy triumph. But little could be more removed from the truth than Ms. Rice’s pronouncing that the swapping of five Taliban leaders for one POW under dubious circumstances is “a great day for America.”

In his former life as a newly elected senator, Mr. Obama’s took umbrage with George W. Bush’s disregard of parts of laws passed by Congress. But as former judge Andrew P. Napolitano asks in the Washington Times about this president who thinks he can enforce only the laws he likes, “Did we break away from a king, who thought his powers were given to him by God, 240 years ago, only to elect a president who behaves like a king?”

Remember when President Obama infamously chastised Eric Cantor with “elections have consequences,” followed by “I won”?

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Remember the Building 18 scandal? No? Well refresh your memory here. We’re talking 2007, and the target is Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. I remember the mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, Walter Reed horror story like it was yesterday, and I am not even a U.S. senator like John McCain or Bernie Sanders, the crack duo who introduced the new veterans health package Tuesday. That’s Tuesday 2014, keep in mind.

I remember the Walter Reed national disgrace in part because of all the publicity Don Imus gave the disgraceful conditions at Reed. And who was a frequent Imus radio guest back in the old days? Well, John McCain. Imus has a legendary kids ranch in Arizona where McCain is, of course, senator. So the two had plenty to gab about on air. Suffice to say, the black mold foulness and overall wretched conditions at Walter Reed were well known to Senator McCain. I do not want to be unfair or unpleasant about a national war hero and a man who ran a strategy packed campaign for president of the United States not long ago but…

OK, so better late than ever, right? Not really. As you may have read, the current national disgrace centers on another VA facility, which happens to be based, darn it, in Arizona, John McCain’s home state. This time we’re talking about a little bit more than belly-up cockroaches and mouse droppings. It is alleged that as many as 40 veterans may have died while waiting for an appointment at the Phoenix hospital.

Seven long years have passed since the nationwide Walter Reed VA scandal before the U.S. Senate wakes up. And who rings the wakeup bell? Why, John McCain. Our American Federal Republic form of government is broken. It is that simple. Europe is in the same fix but multi-party systems in countries like France and England have given voters a way to speak out, and speak out they have as witnessed in the recent European parliament elections. It is long past time we Americans had a similar option.

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