Bynon/LeBoutillier 2011 Predictions on New Years Day

Don't forget to tune into BYNON/LEBOUTILLIER, the world's first international talk radio show, on New Years Day in New York on WABC radio and on the 'Net on www.wabcradio.com from 4-5 PM. And on AM640 Toronto and AM640.com in Canada throughout the weekend.

This week's show features Predictions for 2011:the Headlines That Will Be Written In 2011—from politics, the economy and world events—with special expert guests from London, India and the Amazing Kreskin in New York.

Please listen! And please have a wonderful, happy and healthy 2011!

The First International Talk Radio Show


On Christmas Day a revolutionary and ground-breaking new radio show will be launched:

BYNON/LEBOUTILLIER—the first international talk radio show–broadcasting simultaneously from New York City and Toronto and heard all across North America and in the United Kingdom—will make its debut. Heard on WABC in New York—and on wabcradio.com on the ‘net—and on AM640 in Toronto and 640toronto.comBYNON/LEBOUTILLIER is co-hosted by award-winning Canadian broadcaster Arlene Bynon in Toronto and former US Congressman and long-time New York talk radio host John LeBoutillier in New York City.

The format of BYNON/LEBOUTILLIER is to break news from the United States, Canada and the world – with live guests from across the globe.

Bynon/LeBoutillier’s Christmas show—“Please Be Home for Christmas”—is devoted to talking to soldiers who cannot be home for Christmas. We will talk to a British Leftenant Colonel from his Helmand Province base and a Canadian Captain from his outpost in Kandahar. And we also will hear from a Kansas wife who still waits for her U.S. Air Force Colonel husband who was shot down and captured in Laos in 1965.

This debut of BYNON/LEBOUTILLIER will air on Christmas Day on WABC from 5-6 PM in New York and at 7 AM and 2 PM in Toronto.

The second BYNON/LEBOUTILLIER show—“Predictions for 2011”—with guests from India, London and New York City—will air on New Year’s Day from 4-5 PM on WABC and at 7 AM and 2 PM on AM640 in Toronto.

Politics 2010

As 2010 comes to an end, a few observations:

1) TIME MAGAZINE proved its irrelevance and reinforced why it is in terminal decline by naming Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of FACEBOOK—featured in THE SOCIAL NETWORK hit movie this past summer—as its 2010 PERSON OF THE YEAR. Are they kidding? In a year of Tea Party political revolution and Wikileaks treachery and heroic Chilean miners, this man is the most important man of 2010?

2) American politics has now disintegrated into near-anarchy. If a Republican Member of Congress even talks about working with President Obama, he/she is demonized. The word “compromise” is banned from our vocabulary—to be replaced by finding “common ground.” How exactly are we going to get anything done like tax cuts and soon–hopefully—spending cuts if we will not work with the (elected) White House? Isn’t politics the art of getting as much of what you can get now and then, in the next election, trying to win more power to do even more?

I hear some talk radio hosts and Sarah Palin and others decrying this tax cut deal. Interesting. These are the same people who were totally in the tank for G.W. Bush and a Republican Congress who were more liberal and fiscally irresponsible than anyone we have seen on the political scene in years! But now they’re fiscal conservatives?

I love almost all conservative talk radio hosts, but they got all flummoxed up with Bush. And because of Bush we have Obama. If Bush had ruled properly, there is no way someone so outside the American political mainstream as Barack Obama would ever have won the White House. But G.W. Bush blew it so badly that the country reacted by going to the other extreme. Thus, we have Obama.

3) No, the tax deal isn’t perfect. But the GOP—not the Tea Party movement—has been fixated on tax cuts over everything and anything else. Wasn’t the lesson of 2010 that we need to cut the National Debt and reduce the size of government? Isn’t our precarious fiscal situation in part responsible for the mess our national economy is in? Yet the GOP pushes these tax cuts over debt reduction—and in that conflict will come the imminent Civil War inside the GOP and the conservative movement.

4) I proudly voted in Congress in 1981 for the Reagan Tax Cuts—with one HUGE reservation: where were some spending cuts? We never had them!!! Yes, we were in a Democratic House, but couldn’t the GOP have tried harder to cut government? So, while the tax cuts did indeed reinvigorate the national economy, the Federal Government exploded in size. And we are today paying for that constant spending–which happened again under G. W. Bush and a GOP Congress: tax cuts, two wars with no one paying for them and then this idiotic Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit–an entitlement put in by Republicans!!!

5) No wonder the Tea Party has come along. And no wonder the Republican Party cannot find its way.

6) The Tea Party movement, not Mark Zuckerberg, should have been the PERSON OF THE YEAR. The Tea Party is the only entity keeping a fiscal eye on the ball in DC.

Person of the Year

On Wednesday TIME MAGAZINE will name its Person of the Year. As a friend of mine put it, “that is the only issue of TIME worth reading anymore.”

So, who should be the Person of the Year—and who will be the Person of the Year?

Any objective observer of the entire year would pick the Tea Party as the Person/Thing/Movement of the Year. The Tea Party movement has revolutionized American politics and thus re-focused DC on debt, deficits and the faltering American economy. The Tea Party has begun a revolution inside the Republican Party. And they have only just begun; they will be even more potent in 2012.

However, the TIME MAGAZINE inside-the-Beltway-and Northeast-DC-to-Boston corridor sees Julian Assange and the Wikileaks treasure trove of USG documents as the biggest story of the year. They would probably name him as Person of the Year except he is facing sexual assault charges in Sweden so they will instead make it Wikileaks as the event/revelation of the year. (TIME ran into big trouble years ago when they named Ayatollah Khomeini and lost a substantial part of their subscriber base. So they are probably gun-shy about naming someone who may soon be a criminal.)

Another alternative is the story of the heroic and inspirational Chilean miners. Their story captured the world’s imagination and it ended well. This is the safest choice for TIME’s editors. But it is also bland and soft and corny—and won’t sell as many magazines as a controversial story.

TIME could also do something like the iPad for revolutionizing technology or the New Orleans Saints for resuscitating the morale of the Gulf Region.

Or TIME could do the BP Oil Spill to re-visit the dangers of off-shore drilling.

But in the end the liberal TIME editors will most likely want to do Wikileaks. The TIME editors secretly love Assange and what he has done to the US Government. The American media loves leaks. And this is the biggest leak story—ever!

Assange himself is a tricky person to cover. Is he a hero—or a villain? A rapist or the victim of a government set-up? Will he be indicted by the US Government for the publication of Secret documents? No one is saying. The word is there is no law governing the publication of this material.

Look for Wikileaks to be the Person/Thing/Leak of the Year—on Wednesday.

And, as a result, look for hundreds of other hacksters to try to emulate Assange; they see hacking into government computers as a heroic public service.

Other governments and corporations and intelligence agencies and foreign ministries better be on the lookout as their computers are no longer safe.

Why the Tax Deal?

My first thought when the news broke on Monday night about the deal to extend the Bush Era Tax cuts: The Republicans secretly placed a new script on President Obama’s TelePrompTer: “I now love tax breaks for millionaires!”

Barack Obama finally became an engaged President. He made a deal designed to get the economy moving by 2012 so that he can get re-elected. The fact that the Left hates this deal shows that Obama is trying to seize the center—again—and win the 2012 election.

Obama’s first two years of massive federal spending—corporate takeovers, TARP and the Stimulus Bill—failed miserably to generate private sector economic growth. And time is running out for him to wait for the economy to start growing.

As a friend of mine put it, 9% unemployment is the over/under for Obama’s re-election chances. Above 9% and he is toast (unless the GOP nominates Palin) and under 9% and he has a fighting chance to be re-elected on the argument that “I have gotten our economy back on track.”

Now Obama has channeled Ronald Reagan with his payroll tax cut and agreement to keep the Bush Ear tax cuts in effect and even to cut the estate tax rates. No wonder the Left is going nuts! Their great hope—Barack Obama—is more Reagan and Bush than they can stomach!

The only loser in this arrangement is the long-term financial viability of our nation as another almost-one trillion dollars will be added onto the already staggering $14Trillion debt we are carrying.

But the President and the GOP leadership decided it was more important to juice the economy now—in advance of the 2012 election (after all, everyone in the House is up for re-election in 2012, too)—and worry about the debt later.

If it works, Obama can get himself re-elected in 2012. If it does not work, the consequences for both parties will be catastrophic. The anger that catapulted the Tea Party Movement to political prominence this year will compound itself into a “throw ‘em all out” fury in 2012.

It May Take A Depression

The United States of America is on the verge of national bankruptcy—in reality if not technically. The printing press can—for a while—disguise how insolvent we are becoming. But we are indeed headed in the direction of Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain and other governments which are broke.

We have maxed out our national credit card. A 14 trillion dollar national debt—which requires a one trillion dollar annual interest payment—is a national disgrace.

And you can thank both political parties for it. Yes, the Republicans are as equally responsible as the Democrats for thirty years of profligacy.

OK. Let’s not spend valuable time looking backwards; let’s instead figure out how to solve the problem:

1) The just-completed Commission on the National Debt was a terrific first step on the road to having DC address the problem. They began the process of educating the American people on the specific solutions on both the spending and revenue ends of this problem;

2) The Tea Party Movement of the last year has heroically led the way on these Big Concepts: federal spending must be cut, the deficits eliminated and the debt paid down. That is the only way to save our nation.

3) But the Tea Party Movement never had to deal with the specifics of how to do this. They did not have to put meat on the skeleton of Debt Reduction;

4) Make no mistake: cutting programs and raising revenue are now the predominant political issue of our time.

5) Friday’s devastatingly bad jobs numbers reinforce the hopelessness of the American economy today. We are not going to regenerate a once-vibrant economy while saddled with so much debt—federal, state and personal.

6) But—and this is the Big BUT—making the cuts in entitlements and the Pentagon and agreeing to changes in taxes that can be called “raising taxes” is where things will get very, very difficult because many of the same people in the House and Senate who created this ongoing disaster are the ones deciding how to fix it.

7) Every single item in our federal budget has been put there over the years through a concerted, detailed and orchestrated lobbying campaign often supported by powerful political constituencies and huge campaign contributions. To now remove, cut-back, re-jigger or alter any of them is going to cause a war inside DC.

8) The President—who has spent money like a madman during his first two years—has an opportunity now to re-make his so-far disastrous presidency: He can either remain a detached, hard-left liberal who has lost the American center and is a greatly reduced figure after the mid-terms or he can transform himself into a leader who seizes this debt issue as his issue and re-makes the national debate on terms that help him. And, politically, he can salvage his presidency and even get himself re-elected if he does this correctly. He will have to take on the hard left and the hard right—but in the process will re-take the more-valuable center—in order to do this.

9) The debate on how to fix our debt problem has begun. What we do not yet know is who will star in this debate. Will it be Barack Obama, who has no expertise in federal budget issues or in economics but is the POTUS and thus can command any stage any time he wants? Will it be GOP rising star Paul Ryan, the incoming chairman of the House Budget Committee? Or will it me someone not yet on our radar screen?

10) Whoever it is, the issue—saving our national economy—is the issue of our lifetime.