Better Than Anything Shakespeare Ever Wrote!

Conan Obrien's $40 million bonus, for not dissing NBC, should be appropriated by Obama. It is repugnant. It is offensive. It is outrageous. Maybe Conan should go work for Goldman Sachs? (See 1 below.)


Dem wits up for re-election look like a bunch of pathetic wusses. They are caving, falling on their swords. Reid now says the Senate health care bill has a year of shelf life. Pelosi, who was on fire, now resembles one of Gore's melting ice bergs. She's become cool to pressing forward. Even Dodd just jumped ship and he 'ain't' even running having shut the door on his own re-election. These are the turkeys who are and have been running our nation. A rather pathetic group and we are not even near Thanksgiving.

Even Feinstein, who castigated the CIA, along with Pelosi - who said they lied to her - are beginning to attack their own president's administration for trying the recent terrorist airplane bomber in a civil court.

Many Dem wits standing for re-election will try to do their best to change their spots but can they do so in a way that will prove convincing? Clinton carried it off because he was slick and glib but the average politician cannot measure up to Clinton's guile and/or glib ability.

Is Obama's anger for real and why is he not angry with himself?

Politicians are human but when they get weak kneed in public after walking around like puffed peacocks, the kindest thing you can do is just shake your head in abject disgust.

Will Obama throw Holder under the bus? Probably not yet, but Eric Holder's days could be numbered if he continues being the radical top dog at Justice. What Holder has accomplished is the blinding of our interrogation capability because we no longer interrogate terrorists since they clam up on their lawyer's advice and as Scott Brown said, we are paying their attorneys.

Obama has modeled our fight against terrorists after the Marquis of Queensberry's Rules.

Maybe everyone Obama throws under the bus could be sent to Guantanamo. I am sure it will still be open three years from now.

Scott Brown's victory sent water over the Democrat's Far Left dam and now every day a new crack seems to appear in Obama's. But we can at least take comfort from the fact that Obama lacks management experience, came into office with a thin resume but he has oh such outstanding rhetorical skills. And don't forget Obama graduated from Harvard Law School, taught law and was a community organizer.

That should be even enough to scare Jihadists!

But then Romney had a resume that was overwhelmingly thick with significant accomplishments in the field of finance, management and politics.

Oh I forgot, McCain was Obama's opponent and all he had was the character of a true hero, a long period of service in the Senate and a rich wife who demanded they adopt some immigrant kids.

Then we get to Biden versus Palin and of course Biden is a head and shoulders Shampoo above the Alaska bubble head!

Have I missed something? Oh yeah, I forgot. Obama got a Nobel Peace Medal but then so did Arafat and Carter!

Finally, GW looks smarter and smarter with each passing day. GW seems to have learned what an old Alabama politician once said to a reporter who dogged him when he was 'runnin' for office while faced with a paternity suit!

Jim Folsom replied: "When they throw mud on your Sunday shirt, leave it alone. It will dry and fall off."

GW has kept his tongue and allowed Obama to keep stubbing his toe.

When it comes to learning about human nature the current political drama is better than anything Shakespeare ever wrote.
(See 2 below.)

Iranian sanctions down the tube. Oh well, never had much doubt they would be allowed to go nuclear. (See 3 below.)

Dick

1) Obama's financial reform falls short
By: Jonathan R. Macey


The one thing everyone agrees on about the Massachusetts Senate election is that it showed voters are frustrated and furious at politicians. President Barack Obama is rapidly joining Congress as a primary target. And after his Thursday news conference on bank regulatory reform, Obama may deserve to be the focus of this anger.

Instead of bringing real change, Obama’s plans seem more likely to do the opposite of what he says he wants.

Obama said that large financial institutions almost ruined the U.S. economy because they took “huge, reckless risks in pursuit of quick profits and massive bonuses.” Unfortunately his latest solution, long on political rhetoric and short on substance, is likely to make the financial system more fragile and more susceptible to government bailouts.

You do not have to be a financial genius to figure this out.

First, Obama proposes to limit the scope and size of large financial institutions. But he ignored suggestions to break up the existing financial behemoths, like Goldman, already in the “too big to fail” category. Instead, his proposed law would simply prevent other, smaller institutions from getting larger.

Of course, this only benefits existing companies, by shielding them from competition. And, of course, these existing companies would still be too big to fail.

So, when Obama says: “I'm also proposing that we prevent the further consolidation of our financial system,” he should not be surprised when people notice the word “further.” The problem isn’t further consolidation of the banking industry. The problem is the consolidation we already have. This is one big reason for the public’s anger.

Obama also wants to prevent financial institutions from operating “hedge funds and private equity funds while running a bank backed by the American people.” This sounds good - but only for a second. It doesn’t take much longer to realize that some of the biggest bailout recipients - like Bear Stearns and AIG - weren't taking deposits. And they got bailouts anyway.

We are long past the point at which anybody could believe that the government safety net extends only to federally insured banks. Well, maybe long past the point at which anybody outside of the administration believes that.

In other words, it solves nothing to restore the old wall between investment banking and commercial banking if the federal government is going to continue to bail out both sides of the wall.

This scheme gives us all of the inefficiencies of the old, balkanized financial system and none of the advantages of limiting the government’s exposure.


True, bank stocks tanked on the news of Obama’s proposals. But just because his proposals are bad for banks doesn’t mean they are good for taxpayers.

Obama’s proposals were not entirely counter-productive though. He did, finally, endorse the plan to prohibit proprietary trading of financial securities, including mortgage-backed securities, by commercial banks funded with depositors’ cash. This is the plan Paul Volcker has been advocating for a decade or so.

Unfortunately, unless it is part of a broader reform package, this isolated reform won’t do much. The problem remains that Obama, along with his Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, and his top economic advisor Larry Summers, all support extending the government safety net beyond commercial banks. They want it to cover all sorts of other financial institutions - including insurance companies, hedge funds and investment banks that can continue to trade in derivatives and other risky financial instruments.

Merely limiting commercial banks’ proprietary trading activities will not come close to solving the basic problem. The big problem is not excessive risk-taking by commercial banks, it is the excessive risk taking by any and all financial institutions that are going to be bailed out by taxpayers if the risks turn bad.

Obama was right Thursday when he said that U.S. taxpayers were “forced to rescue financial firms facing a crisis largely of their own creation.” But his proposal does not fix this. To do that, the government needs to figure out a way to make a credible commitment to stop bailing out banks.

And the only reasonable way to do this is to break up the banks into pieces that are too small to bail out. Something else that Volker has been pushing for. He has long said that banks are too big to fail are too big to exist.

To be blunt, Obama was not exactly telling the truth when he said, “Never again will the American taxpayer be held hostage by a bank that is too big to fail.” Financial behemoths eligible for bailouts because they are too big to fail are sure to continue to do exactly what the president claims he is preventing them from doing - which is to “take risks so vast that they posed threats to the entire system.”

Jonathan R. Macey, the Sam Harris Professor of Corporate Law, Corporate Finance & Securities Law at Yale Law School, is the author of “Corporate Governance: Promises Kept, Promises Broken.”



2)Obama's Suckers
By James Lewis

Obama's formula for suckering white folks: Don't make any sudden moves.

This was usually an effective tactic, because (white) people were satisfied as long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved -- such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time.


Bill Clinton often used the actor's trick of suddenly dropping his voice low on TV so you had to listen carefully. This way, you felt drawn into his voice. It's like those kissing-distance close-ups the TV people like to do for the big rock stars of the Left. On television, Bill's seductive act worked magic with millions of women and gays -- that sudden, lip-biting, voice-cracking Arkansas drawl: "I kay foh yuh, bayyby." If you've been watching Obama this week, you've seen him imitating Clinton imitating Elvis chasing Ann-Margaret.

I had a friend who shook hands with Clinton for about ten seconds at a big airport in 1992. It was a mystical apotheosis for my friend, but probably not for The Great Pretender himself. When I told my friend that Clinton was a cheat and a liar and a scammer, his answer was, "But he loved me." Yes, another teenybopper for Elvis.


In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was attacked as the ugliest politician in the country. It didn't matter. He had a shrill, high-pitched voice, like an old-fashioned country preacher who used to speak in a high wind to a hundred farmers around a horse-drawn wagon. It didn't matter, because the country was tearing itself apart and it needed a leader. People could still tell the difference then.


Lincoln told a lot of painful truths about the evil of slavery and the need to keep the nation whole. Americans followed him through the toughest times, not because he acted seductively to all the suckers watching TV, but because they actually understood what he said. His message vinegar, not honey, but the people knew that he was telling the truth. Americans at that time were adults. They were reluctantly persuaded to vote Republican for the first time in history, knowing that it might lead to civil war. They needed a real leader to bring the country through such a living hell. Six hundred thousand men had died from it by the time Lincoln was shot. Today, we still see bitterness among millions of blacks and some whites from the pus-filled boil that Lincoln was called upon to lance.


So who was a greater president: B. Clinton or A. Lincoln?


And is Obama really "another Abe Lincoln"?


Give me a break.


Obama is basically Bill Clinton before his hair got gray and he had a heart attack. If you were paying attention in 1992, Bill Clinton was turned into a superhuman rock idol by the floozies of the media, just like Obama. Clinton grew up in Hot Springs, AR, where the Chicago wise guys used to go to play the horses. Clinton's daddy was AWOL, just like Obama's, and Mom liked to play poker and drink. He grew up as a talented con-artist and serial seducer -- the perfect training for a politician who can't bear close examination.

Bill's political mentor was J. William Fulbright (Dixiecrat, AR). Fulbright showed him how to make the Great Identity Change between being a segregationist demagogue and a liberal demagogue. If you hear "Fulbright" today, you think "Fulbright Scholarships," a shining light in the firmament of liberalism. Fulbright was able to remake his image with a lot of help from the media. Clinton learned those tricks, and he showed how to flip the demagogy the other way, to tar white folks in general as racists -- except for the white Democrats who pay off the Black Caucus.


Who says you can't buy divine forgiveness anymore? Harry Reid isn't a racist in the liberal media because he pays the piper. Republicans are racists because they don't. It's the money, honey.


That's the modern Democratic Party: the Dixiecrats of the Left. That's why they keep playing the race card, and now, with the solid support of the media, they also get to play the Gender Card, the Class Card, and the Way-Out Sex Card. The Dixiecrats scapegoated all the blacks, and today the Democrats scapegoat the whites (and the Christians, the conservatives, the heterosexuals, the men, and people who work for a living). A demagogue is still a demagogue. This is called "progress" by the Left. It's exactly the same as the games being played by the Leftists in Europe.


Under Bill and Hillary, the White House became a favor-selling machine, with organized crime and other dubious figures from Macao, Indonesia, and China paying to get into the game. Obama received an amazing amount of untraceable money through his campaign website, and a lot of that could have come from Saudi oilionnaires. If you wonder how NASA could ever be corrupted to the extent that climate-faker James Hansen has become the official ideologue for global warming, all you need to do is look at Bill Clinton's Veep Algore, who helped to "reorganize government" during the Clinton decade. Algore raked in his own Nobel Peace Prize, just like the Bamster did.


Bill = Hillary = Algore = Barack. Arkansas and Tennessee have Southern mobs. Chicago has the biggest mob ever. The Red Corruptocrats have become Green Corruptocrats. Between Bill and Barry, Hillary and Al, we know all we need to know about the Democrats today.


What's the difference between Obama and Clinton? Not much. Obama is better in the soaring rhetoric department because he can make himself believe he is Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. But both men go into seduce-the-suckers mode when they get into trouble.


Right now, Obama knows he's in big trouble, so this week he made a switch from Lenin to Elvis. Obama has described this act as "don't make any sudden moves to scare the white folks."


We've learned to spot Obama's Comrade Lenin act. Now we need to spot Obama as Elvis. If we can learn that he has two acting styles, we may save the country yet. But don't fall for Obama's new act that yes,"we've made mistakes." Maybe we tried too hard.


Don't count these characters out. They don't change in one week. Obama is just playing a different card.


Next time you see the Bamster on TV

3) Bubble bursts on Iran nuclear options
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

NEW YORK - A much-anticipated meeting of the "Iran Six" nations at the weekend to discuss the next steps for sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program ended without any progress.

The New York meeting's failure to reach a decision has been blamed on China, which sent a low-level representative in an open gesture to oppose new sanctions on Iran. It bursts the bubble of unity among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - the United States, France, Britain, China and Russia - who, along with Germany, constitute the "Iran Six".

The stage is now set for non-UN sanctions by the United States, which, along with Israel, has proposed "crippling sanctions"


against Iran in the belief that it could use its atomic energy program to make nuclear weapons. Tehran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes and in line with its rights under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

"There have been ongoing negotiations and messages are being exchanged so we have to just wait," Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told a news conference in Tehran on Monday. "There are some minor signs indicating a realistic approach, so any probable developments or progress can be discussed later."

At this stage it is unclear what the content of any new sanctions to be adopted by the UN would be, and even the US has shown some signs of ambivalence. The alternative to further sanctions is the recognition of Iran's rights as long as it remains transparent and in full cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

It is more likely than not that China kept the other powers from getting carried away by rhetoric against Iran, as their words often do not match their policies or intentions.

With the war in Afghanistan going badly for the US, and troubling signs hovering over Iraq, the last thing the US government wants is worsening regional security triggered by tough action against Tehran. The Israelis appear to have recognized this, as they have downgraded some of their media blitz against Iran lately, although Israel hasn't given up on the idea of the "crippling sanctions" which their allies in the US Congress are seeking through legislation banning the export of petroleum products to Iran.

That legislation, already passed in the House of Representatives, is now pending in the US Senate and sources tell the author there is serious opposition to it from senators who prefer giving diplomacy a longer chance, instead of resorting to coercive tactics that may backfire with the Iranian population, which would be affected by sanctions. Still, the bill may be adopted, in light of the failure over the weekend and the determination of pro-Israel US lawmakers to punish Iran for what they perceive to be its steady march toward nuclear weapons.

However, that perception isn't shared by some key figures in the US intelligence community, who recently said they had not seen any evidence that Iran had decided to develop nuclear weapons. This, together with the unraveling of disinformation on Iran's atomic energy program, such as the fake neutron trigger document, have strengthened the arguments of those in favor of "normalizing" the Iran nuclear dossier as long as the nation remains faithful to its NPT obligations and the terms of its safeguard and verification agreement with the IAEA.

"The West should stop this useless game of coercion toward Iran that has no legitimacy," says a Tehran University political science professor who advises the Iranian government on international issues. He added that a real "shift in world public opinion" in Iran's favor was beginning to take place, despite negative press over last June's presidential elections and the subsequent suppression of street demonstrations.

"China is making this bold statement today about no more sanctions because they are smart and they can see the new drift of public opinion in the international community that says 'where's the smoking gun?' to support the sanctions or even war with Iran," the professor said.

Whether or not world opinion is shifting, what is beyond doubt is that as of today, the proponents of sanctions on Iran, especially neo-conservatives such as John Bolton, who has set up the United Against Nuclear Iran, have failed to provide tangible evidence to back allegations of a "nuclearizing Iran", and instead rely on disinformation routinely published by Israel-friendly media in the US and in Europe.

After the weekend meeting in New York, momentum for a more vigorous push to normalize Iran's nuclear file is likely to be generated, putting the IAEA, as well as the UN, to new tests. Barring the unforeseen, pressure on the IAEA to take a stand in favor of normalizing Iran's file will most likely grow. It will be a litmus test of the IAEA's new director general to withstand the full force of contrary pressures. In his first press interview as the agency's new head, Yukiya Amano said clearly that there was no evidence Iran was manufacturing nuclear weapons. His predecessor, Mohamed ElBaradei, has been making similar statements since leaving office last month.

For its part, Iran can take further proactive steps to assure the outside world of its peaceful intentions, such as promising to adopt the intrusive additional protocol of the NPT in return for the normalization of Iran's file.

The Tehran University professor tells the author that some members of Iran's parliament informed him they would be willing to pass legislation on both the additional protocol and the Iran-IAEA subsidiary agreement if world powers agreed to treat Iran "equally and respect Iran's right have a nuclear-fuel cycle like other nations around the globe". Logically, this should come as welcome news to some Western diplomats who seek a mutually satisfactory resolution of the Iranian nuclear standoff.

Yet, in the US nothing short of a complete dismantling of Iran's enrichment facilities would satisfy hawkish politicians who take as an article of faith the argument that Iran is pushing ahead with a nuclear weapons program. The big question is whether or not President Barack Obama can withstand the pressure exerted by these and the wealth of pro-Israel lobbyists who want the heat kept high on Iran.

The evidence so far suggests that the mere fear of appearing weak or in "appeasement" toward Iran will keep Obama away from the only viable option that is not so far kept open on Iran, despite talk of having "all options on the table". That option is the normalizing of Iran's file in the absence of any evidence of militarization. That peaceful option needs to be brought into the open now that efforts at the UN to impose more sanctions have fizzled, thereby narrowing the range of options.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry, click here. His latest book, Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) is now available.