Free Republic

Mitch Daniels: Indiana Republicans Should Drop the Right to Work Bill Color me extremely disappointed with Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels right now: Gov. Mitch Daniels signaled this afternoon that Republicans should to drop the right-to-work bill that has brought the Indiana House to a standstill for two days and imperiled other measures. Daniels told reporters this afternoon that he expects House Democrats will return to work if the bill dies. It would be unfortunate if other bills are caught up in the turmoil, he said. He will not send out state police to corral the Democrats, the Republican governor said....

Alternate headline: “Mitch Daniels’s dark-horse presidential bid dead on arrival.” Here’s what he told the Weekly Standard per the profile Ed flagged yesterday: Beyond the debt and the deficit, in Daniels’s telling, all other issues fade to comparative insignificance. He’s an agnostic on the science of global warming but says his views don’t matter. “I don’t know if the CO2 zealots are right,” he said. “But I don’t care, because we can’t afford to do what they want to do. Unless you want to go broke, in which case the world isn’t going to be any greener. Poor nations are...

First the infamous proposed “truce” on social issues, now this. No wonder he’s David Brooks’s candidate of choice. Alternate headline: “Mitch Daniels continues quixotic bid to disqualify himself from Republican nomination.” Daniels recited from Kahn’s book: “It would be most useful to redesign the tax system to discourage consumption and encourage savings and investment. One obvious possibility is a value added tax and flat income tax, with the only exception being a lower standard deduction.”“That might suit our current situation pretty well,” said Daniels, who served as George W. Bush’s Office of Management and Budget director and was a senior...

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels opened the door Thursday to supporting both a value added tax and a tariff on imported oil, bold proposals that could cause trouble for him with conservatives as he flirts with a long-shot bid for the presidency. The Republican, staying mum about his 2012 plans, was the guest of honor at a dinner sponsored by the conservative Hudson Institute. He received an award named for Herman Kahn, the legendary nuclear theorist who founded the respected institute 49 years ago and helped inspire the character “Dr. Strangelove” in the movie by the same name. Daniels recited from...

From Andrew Romano's great new profile of a Mitch Daniels he portrays as pragmatic and principled (kind of oxymoronic, but one of Daniels' principles appears to be pragmatism). To wit, his suggestions: Let’s raise the retirement age, he says. Let’s reduce Social Security for the rich. And let’s reconsider our military commitments, too. When I ask about taxes—in 2005 Daniels proposed a hike on the $100,000-plus crowd, which his own party promptly torpedoed—he refuses to revert to Republican talking points. “At some stage there could well be a tax increase,” he says with a sigh. “They say we can’t have...