A Littany of Purposeful Destructive Obama Policies.

From a Conservative friend in response to my recent memo. (See 1 below.)
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This shows many pictures of what the BP oil spill has done to the area wild life and sea creatures. Far worse than anything I have been exposed to on TV. (See 2 below.)
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William McGurn blows the cover off Obama's disingenuous immigration rhetoric and actions. In typical fashion Obama is absent when it counts, undercuts when present and blames others all the time when, in fact, he is the one who is being partisan. (See 3 below.)
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Amity Shlaes suggests Obama could learn some useful things from history regarding building confidence during a depression and economic downturn. Business will not respond when frightened, being attacked and thus, uncertain (See 4 below.)
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Berwick, Obama's recent recess appointee, admires Cuba's medical system. The only problem is it is falling apart according to Bret Stephens.

Just another appointment of a radical who Obama wants to bury into the bowels of government so he can implement his nefarious goal of destroying our nation one legislative act at a time. (See 5 below.)
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Shutting down all drilling because of specious reasoning will deepen unemployment and make us further dependent upon foreign energy. Another destructive and wrong headed policy of the Obama-Salazar bureaucracy. (See 6 below.)
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John Bolton offers three suggestions how Congress, if it is truly serious about Iran and N Korean nuclear efforts, can counter Obama's nebulous efforts. (See 7 below.)
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John Fund has written an article about the Aspen Idea Festival and thoughts by participants on how to improve education: "Ever since its inception in 2007, the Aspen Ideas Festival has been a proving ground for thinkers who want to break with liberal orthodoxy on certain subjects. One is education. The event, sponsored by the Aspen Institute, has been a annual refuge for Democrats who would like more choice and competition in K-12."(See 8 below.)
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Brian Riedl provides some truth serum about what is causing our budget deficits. It is not GW's tax cuts, which actually generated significant income, but unbridled spending.

Riedl offers three reasons why Obama's blame shifting is patently false if anyone cares to take off their partisan hat and dig into facts supported by figures and not false assumptions and overblown political rhetoric. (See 9 below.)
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An Ann Rand disciple says the October Surprise is an around the corner second depression that is being orchestrated for us by those who only want to remain in office so as to garner more power over our lives. (See 10 below.)
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Victor Sharpe writes a very interesting and insightful article explaining the genesis of the Mosque War and about those who seek to overtake us. (See 11 below.)
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Obama's rule is based on an obeisance to special interests. (See 12 below.)
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Is another naval showdown in the making as the Israeli Navy makes contact with the Libyan ship heading its way? (See 13 below.)
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Dick

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1)The Obama-Netanyahu meeting does not signify any change in Obama’s attitude. For the leftist ideolog, there is no truth, hence, language has no truth content. Language used is only to be judged by the effect on the listener. The listener were Jewish Democrats-voters and contributors. Obama’s ploy will be effective.
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2)This President has never managed or led any thing in his life...we need to vote him out along with his Democratic Congress...This ever shows the left wing media jumping on Obama's lack of leadership...What a mess!!!

Click here: gulf
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3)Obama's Immigration Fakery In 2007, then-Sen. Obama helped derail an immigration bill he claimed to support. He's no more serious about a bipartisan bill today.
By WILLIAM MCGURN..

Many of us in the press have had a field day noting Sen. John McCain's (R., Ariz.) transformation from immigration maverick to the Wyatt Earp of border control. Fair enough.

Back when it counted, however, Mr. McCain was the only Republican presidential candidate to back the last real chance we had for passing a bipartisan immigration compromise. Meanwhile, a man who claims to favor immigration reform but helped derail that 2007 effort gets a free pass. Today this same man is at it again, calling for a new bipartisan effort even as he diminishes the likelihood of any such reform with his continued partisan snipes.

The man is Barack Obama.

Earlier this month President Obama gave us his speech on comprehensive immigration reform. Since then, observers have commented on its similarity to the Oval Office address given by George W. Bush four years earlier. As someone who had a hand in the Bush speech, let me point out two striking differences.

First, President Bush actually wanted an immigration bill, and indeed many of his conservative critics loathed him for it. Second, because he knew that such a bill required bipartisan support, he did not disparage members of the other party.

Wait a minute. Hasn't Mr. Obama told us how he "reached across the aisle in the Senate to fight for comprehensive immigration reform"? Well, yes, those are his words. The back story, however, suggests another face to our president. For then-Sen. Obama also favored a series of amendments that were plainly recognized as bill-killers—spurning not only Mr. Bush and Mr. McCain but the Democratic architect of that compromise, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D., Mass.).

One such amendment was Mr. Obama's own, which aimed to substitute family ties for education and skills when determining who gets green cards. That led to what the Associated Press called a "heated exchange" with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.). Mr. Graham accused Mr. Obama of undercutting Democrats and Republicans working for reform—contrary to his lofty campaign rhetoric about Americans coming together.

"So when you are out on the campaign trail, my friend, tell them about why we can't come together," said Mr. Graham. "This is why."

Mr. Obama's mischief did not stop there. Though his own amendment failed, he supported another poison pill by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D., N.D.). Mr. Dorgan's target was the guest-worker provision, another key to GOP and business buy-in.

His effort provoked a vigorous response from Mr. Kennedy about what getting rid of a guest-worker provision means. "It means," said Mr. Kennedy, "you are going to have border guards who are going to be chasing after landscapers out in the middle of the desert and racing after people who might be working in gardens."

"Who," Mr. Kennedy asked, "is the senator from North Dakota trying to fool?"

That May, Mr. Dorgan's bid to phase out the guest-worker program failed by one vote, with Mr. Obama absent. But the amendment came up again two weeks later. This time it passed, 49-48, with Mr. Obama and Mr. Kennedy on opposite sides. Without Mr. Obama's "yea" vote, that amendment would not have passed.

Mr. Obama wasn't the only one playing the game, of course. Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), normally no friend of union-label legislation, was frank about why he voted alongside Mr. Obama here. "If it hurts the bill," he told the Washington Post, "I'm for it."

The idea that these amendments were bill-killers was not just a GOP talking point. On ABC News the night after the Dorgan amendment passed, Charles Gibson noted the inherent fakery: "a lot of the senators who think and say most strongly that something has to be done to reform immigration are the ones voting for these killer amendments."

Similarly, here's the lead sentence in a Politico dispatch that May: "The biggest threats to an immigration bill spearheaded by Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy have come from within: Twice this week, senators from his own Democratic Party were poised to back amendments that could have killed the fragile compromise."

Today history repeats itself. Again Mr. Obama preaches bipartisanship—while using his signature immigration speech to stigmatize Republicans. Again he calls for America to move forward—while the lawsuit filed against Arizona makes that all but impossible. And again too America finds itself polarized by a president whose whole claim to office was his ability to transcend the partisan divide.

Give the man credit. In 2007, Mr. Obama figured out how to get the support of Latinos (by speaking in favor of an immigration bill) while keeping the support of labor (by voting for amendments designed to ensure an immigration bill would never pass). In like manner, he now parades as a bipartisan reformer while his actions poison the chances for any bipartisan bill for years to come.

Guess what? It's still working for him.
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4)FDR, Obama and 'Confidence.' Demonizing business deepened the Great Depression. The White House can learn from Roosevelt's mistakes
By AMITY SHLAES

What is confidence and why is it missing? The concept seems to be driving Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner crazy this summer. You can hear that when you listen to him talk about the poor quality of the current recovery. Last week, on PBS's "NewsHour," for example, he said the administration was working hard to restore "a basic sense of confidence to American businesses and American families."

Mr. Geithner is gradually discovering that to recover, the market needs a specific kind of confidence. It is not something Washington can hand down. It is not even demand confidence—the confidence of the consumer who wants to shop. The confidence relevant to recovery is the confidence of the investor and the saver. It comes only when an administration in Washington demonstrates reliability and restraint.

Unfortunately the importance of this specific version of confidence tends to take a while to sink in. And that in turn tends to delay general recovery. This is what the painfully halting education of another U.S. Treasury secretary long ago, Henry Morgenthau Jr., makes clear.

Morgenthau started out in government with no notion of confidence at all. It was
1933, and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew he confronted an economic crisis. But the president didn't feel like working with the critical old Wall Street crowd. His first Treasury secretary, an establishment businessman named William Woodin, fell ill. Woodin's withdrawal did not upset Roosevelt, who liked to pilot the national ship himself. "I think father wanted to be his own Secretary of the Treasury," James Roosevelt would later write.

Over the summer of 1933, FDR found himself relying increasingly on someone he was sure would say "yes"—Morgenthau, his timid old Dutchess County neighbor who held a post at the Farm Credit Administration. With the aid of his "yes" man, Roosevelt launched a novel gold purchase program. The plan was to drive up the general price level by buying gold. Each morning, FDR set the gold price target, personally. This in turn was supposed to help farmers, who would get higher prices for commodities.

Theoretically, Roosevelt's idea of reflating can be defended. More money might mean more growth.

But the exposure to investors that Morgenthau was getting through the gold purchase project of 1933 was already teaching him something. Investors didn't like the arbitrariness. It took away their confidence. One day Morgenthau asked FDR why the president had chosen to drive up the price of gold by 21 cents. The president cavalierly said he'd done that because 21 was seven times three, and three was a lucky number. "If anyone ever knew how we really set the gold price through a combination of lucky numbers etc., I think they would be frightened," Morgenthau wrote in his diary. And they were: In the second half of 1933 a powerful stock rally flattened.

Morgenthau was named acting Treasury secretary and then, in December 1933, Treasury secretary. The gentleman farmer was terrified. He knew he was underqualified. The Treasury post, after all, had been held by great figures, most notably by the budget-balancing, tax-cutting Andrew Mellon. Loyal to Roosevelt, Morgenthau believed it was his job to defend the president whenever necessary. That was often.

For example, when an old professor of Roosevelt's, the much esteemed Oliver Sprague, resigned his post at Treasury because he disapproved of Roosevelt's effort to push up prices by buying gold, Morgenthau testily told the press that "It's a free country." Morgenthau added that "the Sun will rise in the morning," meaning the departure of Sprague was in the scheme of things insignificant.

FDR also wanted Treasury to investigate Mellon's tax returns and prosecute him for tax fraud. Morgenthau enthusiastically sicced the attorneys on the septuagenarian even after they advised him that there was no case.

Yet over time Morgenthau internalized several principles. One was the old gold-standard principle that a balanced federal budget is basic to market confidence. Another was the market's conviction that government consistency is mandatory too. FDR liked to bait and attack business. Morgenthau's diaries show that in the mid-1930s Morgenthau started to fight back. He also began to quarrel with Federal Reserve Chairman Marriner Eccles.


Some of these Treasury-Fed squabbles were personal. Morgenthau and Eccles behaved in an undiplomatic fashion that both Mr. Geithner and Chairman Bernanke would know better than to adopt. "There's never any use talking to you, Marriner," Morgenthau exploded at Eccles in one meeting. "You get irritated every time I come over and present anything," Eccles snapped back, threatening to leave.

But there were also policy components to the tension. Eccles was becoming what today we call a "Keynesian," a disciple of demand-side economist John Maynard Keynes. He wanted the government to put more money in the downturn of 1937. Then consumers would have the confidence to shop. Eccles also favored government discretion—a banker, he had himself crafted the modern Fed and its license to tinker with the dollar. Morgenthau was becoming a grotesque of his predecessor, Mellon. He sought a balanced budget and wanted to improve business confidence.

Scholars have spotlighted the monetary tension, arguing that in 1937 or 1938 Eccles was essentially right—taken together, the federal government was "too tight." But the second tension, the tension between activism and a stable environment, was just as important.

The battle came to a head in that 1937 downturn, so much mentioned today. Morgenthau, like Mr. Geithner now, found himself with the awkward duty of presenting this bad news to his president. But the timorous Morgenthau pulled himself together and spoke truth to power about confidence. "You can do something about public utilities," he said. "You can do something about the railroads. You could do something about housing. Above all, you must do something to reassure business." In public, Morgenthau likewise made his view clear: "We want to see private business expand. We believe that much of the remaining unemployment will disappear as private capital funds are increasingly employed."

Wall Street laughed at the Roosevelt flunky. But Morgenthau found an unlikely supporter for this concept in Keynes, who wrote to FDR the next year that he couldn't understand FDR's desultory persecution of utilities: "What's the object of chasing them around the lot every other week?"

Morgenthau remained torn between loyalty to FDR and loyalty to office. But from then on, he expressed his disgust for arbitrary intervention. Referring to an agriculture department program that killed swine in order to reduce supply and drive up prices, Morgenthau once commented, "I think from the day we started killing pigs there has been a curse on this administration."

The recovery that followed the 1937-38 depression within the Depression is often credited to expansionary policy—monetary, especially. But the evidence suggests that a new respect for market confidence also helped. Sensing that the U.S. would engage in battles overseas, FDR called off his attack on companies at home and made them allies.

To attribute this shift to the flawed Morgenthau alone would be silly. But the vacillating Treasury secretary played a role in exposing what was wrong. We are left to wonder what the mid-1930s recovery would have done had there been a conservative, market-oriented secretary in office. The pity was that the lesson took half a decade. Perhaps Mr. Geithner might like to read up on Morgenthau's progress. Treasury secretaries who forget the past condemn us all to repeat it.

Miss Shlaes, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" (HarperCollins, 2007), is writing a biography of Calvin Coolidge.
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5)Dr. Berwick and That Fabulous Cuban Health Care The death march of progressive medicine.
By BRET STEPHENS

Heaven forbid that anyone accuse Donald Berwick—lately of Harvard, newly of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, with $800 billion under management—of being an admirer of Cuba's health-care system. In the matter of CastroCare, progressives of Dr. Berwick's stripe are rarely at a loss for superlatives. But suggest that ObamaCare is a step in the Cuban direction, and these same people will accuse you of rank scare-mongering.

We don't scare-monger in this paper. And for the record, nothing in Dr. Berwick's published record indicates he has ever praised the Cuban system.

But note that when the health-care bill became law in March, Fidel Castro emerged from semiretirement to praise it as a "miracle." Note also that Dr. Berwick has made himself notorious by warning of "the darkness of private enterprise," admitting his "love" for Britain's socialized National Health Service, and insisting that "excellent health care is by definition redistributional."

Without imputing a mutuality of views, then, it's worth noting a certain mutuality of respect. So it's a good time to check in on the state of the Cuban health-care system. That's just what Laurie Garrett, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, does in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

Lest anyone mistake Ms. Garrett as a raving opponent of the Cuban system, she praises Cuba for offering "an inspiring, standard-setting vision of government responsibility for the health of its people." Cuba's (reported) success in reducing the incidence of child mortality and tropical diseases, she adds, is "laudable."

Just one problem: The system is in an advanced state of collapse. It is bankrupting the state and driving doctors out of the medical field and the country. Its ostensibly egalitarian nature disguises a radically inegalitarian reality, with a tiny number of well-appointed clinics catering to paying medical tourists and senior Party apparatchiks while most Cubans take their chances in filthy, under-resourced hospitals.

Consider the facts as laid out by Ms. Garrett. There are 73,000 physicians licensed to practice in Cuba. This allows Cuba to boast of having the best doctor-patient ratio in the world, with one doctor for every 170 people, as opposed to one for every 390 in the United States.

Yet reality belies the statistics. Slightly more than half of all Cuban physicians work overseas; taxed by the Cuban state at a 66% rate, many of them wind up defecting. Doctors who remain in the country earn about $25 a month. As a result, Ms. Garrett writes, they often take "jobs as taxi drivers or in hotels," where they can make better money. As for the quality of the doctors, she notes that very few of those who manage to reach the U.S. can gain accreditation here, partly because of the language barrier, partly because of the "stark differences" in medical training. Typically, they wind up working as nurses.

As for the quality of medical treatment in Cuba, Ms. Garrett reports that hospital patients must arrive with their own syringes, towels and bed sheets. Women avoid gynecological exams "because they fear infection from unhygienic equipment and practices." Rates of cervical cancer have doubled in the past 25 years as the use of Pap tests has fallen by 30%.

And while Cuba's admirers love to advertise the country's low infant mortality rate (at least according to the Castro regime's dubious self-reporting) the flip-side has been a high rate of maternal mortality. "Most deaths," Ms. Garrett writes, "occur during delivery or within the next 48 hours and are caused by uterine hemorrhage or postpartum sepsis."

Sound inviting? The number of ostensibly serious people—Michael Moore not being one of them—who think so is nothing short of astonishing. On a visit to Cuba last October, Margaret Chan, the director general of the World Health Organization, said that Cuba "has the right vision and the right direction. Health is a state policy and health is seen as a right of the people." In 2005, one prominent New York Times editorialist headlined a column "Health Care? Ask Cuba." Health care was probably also what former Secretary of State Colin Powell had in mind when he noted that "Castro has done some good things for his people."

Now, to repeat, Dr. Berwick is nowhere on record endorsing Cuban-style health care. And ObamaCare, with its million flaws, is not CastroCare.

But it remains the case that for all those for whom "free" health care has been, as Teddy Kennedy once put it, the cause of their lives, the Cuban system has been a touchstone—proof, supposedly, that socialized medicine is, as Dr. Berwick has said, the only "just, equitable, civilized and humane" answer when it comes to addressing the dilemmas inherent in health-care delivery.

The truth is that socialism and related forms of command-and-control technocracy work as well in the health-care market as they do in every other. Which is to say, not at all. When better-heeled Americans start flying to offshore medical centers for their facelifts and bypasses (performed by expat American doctors) while poorer folk make do in ObamaCare's second tier, then perhaps the real lessons of the Cuban system will begin to sink in. Even, perhaps, among Dr. Berwick's progressive friends.

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6)The New-Old Drilling Ban: Salazar to Gulf workers: Move to Egypt

When it comes to a showdown between jobs and ideology, the Obama Administration never fails to choose the latter. The latest example is Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's decision yesterday to reimpose a ban on Gulf drilling after the courts had declared his first moratorium illegal.

Federal Judge Martin Feldman in late June halted the Administration's six-month deep water drilling moratorium, saying it was arbitrary, ignored science and underestimated the economic harm to the Gulf region. Last week the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate the ban.


Mr. Salazar's response is to fiddle with the ban's details in the hope of passing judicial muster. Instead of banning all drilling deeper than 500 feet, he now bans all drilling by floating rigs (the only equipment that drills in deep water). He also set a firmer moratorium deadline of November 30. The bottom line is that deep water drilling remains off-limits for months to come.

Mr. Salazar hopes this ban will fly in the courts because he now has an "extensive record" showing that drilling "would pose a threat of serious, irreparable, or immediate harm or damage to the marine, coastal and human environment." None of that impressed Senator Mary Landrieu (D., La.), who slammed the new-old ban, pointing out that industry had safely drilled 42,000 other Gulf wells, making the BP spill the "exception." She also noted that the ban threatened tens of thousands of Gulf jobs.

Even as Mr. Salazar retooled his moratorium, the first deep water drilling rig was preparing to leave the Gulf in the wake of the U.S. ban. Diamond Offshore said it is relocating its Ocean Endeavour drilling rig to Egypt, immediately, in a contract that will run at least through mid-2011. Diamond CEO Larry Dickerson said "We greatly regret the loss of U.S. jobs that will result from this rig relocation."

No doubt Louisiana will, too, not that the Obama Administration seems to mind
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7)Beyond the Obama Nuke Policy : How Congress and opinion leaders can counter administration weakness on North Korea and Iran.
By JOHN R. BOLTON

After considerable behind-the-scenes squabbling, late last week the U.N. Security Council finally condemned the unprovoked March 26 attack on a South Korean ship that killed 46 sailors. Unfortunately, Chinese and Russian pressure produced a statement so weak that it didn't actually finger North Korea as the perpetrator, nor did it mandate any concrete response. Pyongyang declared victory.

Just days before, Congress passed more sanctions against Iran. But neither these, nor the recent Security Council sanctions, nor further EU measures will prevent Iran's progress toward becoming a nuclear state. CIA Director Leon Panetta admitted as much during ABC's "This Week" on June 27 when asked about U.N. sanctions.

As Tehran and Pyongyang can plainly see, President Obama's nonproliferation strategy is intellectually and politically exhausted. But U.S. exhaustion will not lead to stasis. North Korea and Iran will continue their nuclear and ballistic missile programs in the face of our feeble policy.

So are we consigned to two more years of growing danger? Not if Congress and opinion leaders take steps without White House leadership, beginning with these three initiatives:

First, they must demand increased intelligence collection on the North Korea-Iran connection. Where possible without compromising sources and methods, this information should be disseminated to increase public awareness.

Pyongyang has been a major proliferation player in the Middle East for some time, selling missiles and technology throughout the region. For over a decade, Iran has done extensive ballistic missile testing on its behalf. Pyongyang's reactor in Syria—destroyed by Israel in September 2007—was likely financed by Iran, and other joint programs may still be underway in Syria and Burma.

Although North Korea and Iran may be slipping off the front page, their nuclear and ballistic missile cooperation is almost certainly progressing. These proliferation threats are not separate, and a better understanding of the level of joint activity would reveal a much more realistic picture for the U.S. and its allies. Stepped up intelligence gathering and enhanced congressional and public discussion might even awaken the Obama administration.

A second step is to increase political support for an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile facilities. Slowly, but now with increasing certainty, analysts have come to understand that Iran is going to become a nuclear-weapons state sooner rather than later. Arab states have understood this for some time and have hoped for a pre-emptive U.S. strike. But that will not happen under Mr. Obama absent a Damascene conversion in the Oval Office.

What outsiders can do is create broad support for Israel's inherent right to self-defense against a nuclear Holocaust and defend the specific tactic of pre-emptive attacks against Iran's Esfahan uranium-conversion plant, its Natanz enrichment facility, and other targets. Congress can make it clear, for example, that it would support immediate resupply and rearming to make up for Israeli losses in the event of such an attack. Having visible congressional support in place at the outset will reassure the Israeli government, which is legitimately concerned about Mr. Obama's likely negative reaction to such an attack.

Third, opinion leaders should prepare China for Korean reunification after Kim Jong Il. Kim's demise could lead to chaos. But with the right planning, his death could also set the stage for reunifying the Korean Peninsula. With the White House essentially mute on this subject, Congress and others must bring the discussion about post-Kim North Korea to the fore and highlight the opportunity it provides to topple the entire regime.

Congress can emphasize its determination to minimize the impact of possible refugee flow from the North by pledging the fullest humanitarian assistance. Moreover, nonofficial conversations about possible U.S.-South Korean military intervention to stabilize the North after Kim's death could reassure China that our intention is not to disadvantage Beijing but to peacefully end the North's tyranny. Many Japanese and South Korean leaders already agree with this course and can help China understand that its legitimate interests are best served by addressing the inevitable.

These three suggestions are merely openers. But with White House proliferation policy comatose, we must search elsewhere for second-best alternatives. Until 2012, second best is all we have.

Mr. Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad" (Simon & Schuster
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8)Getting Schooled in Aspen: Bill Gates attacks "fraudulent" accounting that hides the cost of teacher pensions
By JOHN FUND

Ever since its inception in 2007, the Aspen Ideas Festival has been a proving ground for thinkers who want to break with liberal orthodoxy on certain subjects. One is education. The event, sponsored by the Aspen Institute, has been a annual refuge for Democrats who would like more choice and competition in K-12.

"The education system is built on the three pillars of mediocrity: lockstep pay, lifetime tenure and seniority," was Joel Klein's assessment at this year's Festival. He ought to know -- he's the chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, the nation's largest school system.

John Fund discusses Robert Gibbs's comment yesterday that GOP could take the House. Also, Joe Rago discusses President Obama's meeting with business leaders.
.This year, Mr. Klein also had some backup from a friend (and former rival in the Microsoft antitrust case), Bill Gates, who has devoted much of his time to education since stepping down from full-time work with the company in 2006. Undermining public education, he said, is a system that channels too much money to pensions for retired teachers. He predicts that state and local governments will have to lay off 100,000 active teachers in the next couple of years. "I'm very much against that," said Mr. Gates who noted that many of the teachers who lose their jobs will be younger, more motivated teachers at the bottom of the seniority system.

Mr. Gates said a big part of the problem is "fraudulent" state budgeting systems, which fail accurately to account for the cost of pension promises. A legislator who "says 'yes' doesn't feel any pain at all," he said. Thus the "accounting fraud" that lets politicians treat generous teacher pensions as a free lunch rewards them for spending more on retired teachers than on current students.

Mr. Gates hasn't been a big fan of implementing full school choice through a voucher system. But his Gates Foundation has spent some $4 billion in the past few years promoting the creation of smaller neighborhood high schools and charter schools, which are public schools that operate outside of the straitjacket of teacher union contracts. Here's hoping he continues his plain speaking about education and perhaps comes better to appreciate how vouchers might aid his hope of cracking open the existing system
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9) The Bush Tax Cuts and the Deficit Myth:Runaway government spending, not declining tax revenues, is the reason the U.S. faces dramatic budget shortfalls for years to come
By BRIAN RIEDL

President Obama and congressional Democrats are blaming their trillion-dollar budget deficits on the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. Letting these tax cuts expire is their answer. Yet the data flatly contradict this "tax cuts caused the deficits" narrative. Consider the three most persistent myths:

The Bush tax cuts wiped out last decade's budget surpluses. Sen. John Kerry (D., Mass.), for example, has long blamed the tax cuts for having "taken a $5.6 trillion surplus and turned it into deficits as far as the eye can see." That $5.6 trillion surplus never existed. It was a projection by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in January 2001 to cover the next decade. It assumed that late-1990s economic growth and the stock-market bubble (which had already peaked) would continue forever and generate record-high tax revenues. It assumed no recessions, no terrorist attacks, no wars, no natural disasters, and that all discretionary spending would fall to 1930s levels.

The projected $5.6 trillion surplus between 2002 and 2011 will more likely be a $6.1 trillion deficit through September 2011. So what was the cause of this dizzying, $11.7 trillion swing? I've analyzed CBO's 28 subsequent budget baseline updates since January 2001. These updates reveal that the much-maligned Bush tax cuts, at $1.7 trillion, caused just 14% of the swing from projected surpluses to actual deficits (and that is according to a "static" analysis, excluding any revenues recovered from faster economic growth induced by the cuts).

The bulk of the swing resulted from economic and technical revisions (33%), other new spending (32%), net interest on the debt (12%), the 2009 stimulus (6%) and other tax cuts (3%). Specifically, the tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 are responsible for just 4% of the swing. If there were no Bush tax cuts, runaway spending and economic factors would have guaranteed more than $4 trillion in deficits over the decade and kept the budget in deficit every year except 2007.

The next decade's deficits are the result of the previous administration's profligacy. Mr. Obama asserted in his January State of the Union Address that by the time he took office, "we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program."

In short, it's all President Bush's fault. But Mr. Obama's assertion fails on three grounds.

First, the wars, tax cuts and the prescription drug program were implemented in the early 2000s, yet by 2007 the deficit stood at only $161 billion. How could these stable policies have suddenly caused trillion-dollar deficits beginning in 2009? (Obviously what happened was collapsing revenues from the recession along with stimulus spending.)


Second, the president's $8 trillion figure minimizes the problem. Recent CBO data indicate a 10-year baseline deficit closer to $13 trillion if Washington maintains today's tax-and-spend policies—whereby discretionary spending grows with the economy, war spending winds down, ObamaCare is implemented, and Congress extends all the Bush tax cuts, the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) patch, and the Medicare "doc fix" (i.e., no reimbursement cuts).

Under this realistic baseline, the 10-year cost of extending the Bush tax cuts ($3.2 trillion), the Medicare drug entitlement ($1 trillion), and Iraq and Afghanistan spending ($515 billion) add up to $4.7 trillion. That's approximately one-third of the $13 trillion in baseline deficits—far from the majority the president claims.

Third and most importantly, the White House methodology is arbitrary. With Washington set to tax $33 trillion and spend $46 trillion over the next decade, how does one determine which policies "caused" the $13 trillion deficit? Mr. Obama could have just as easily singled out Social Security ($9.2 trillion over 10 years), antipoverty programs ($7 trillion), other Medicare spending ($5.4 trillion), net interest on the debt ($6.1 trillion), or nondefense discretionary spending ($7.5 trillion).

There's no legitimate reason to single out the $4.7 trillion in tax cuts, war funding and the Medicare drug entitlement. A better methodology would focus on which programs are expanding and pushing the next decade's deficit up.

Declining revenues are driving future deficits. The fact is that rapidly increasing spending will cause 100% of rising long-term deficits. Over the past 50 years, tax revenues have deviated little from their 18% of gross domestic product (GDP) average. Despite a temporary recession-induced dip, CBO projects that even if all Bush tax cuts are extended and the AMT is patched, tax revenues will rebound to 18.2%of GDP by 2020—slightly above the historical average. They will continue growing afterwards.

Spending—which has averaged 20.3% of GDP over the past 50 years—won't remain as stable. Using the budget baseline deficit of $13 trillion for the next decade as described above, CBO figures show spending surging to a peacetime record 26.5% of GDP by 2020 and also rising steeply thereafter.

Putting this together, the budget deficit, historically 2.3% of GDP, is projected to leap to 8.3% of GDP by 2020 under current policies. This will result from Washington taxing at 0.2% of GDP above the historical average but spending 6.2% above its historical average.

Entitlements and other obligations are driving the deficits. Specifically, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and net interest costs are projected to rise by 5.4% of GDP between 2008 and 2020. The Bush tax cuts are a convenient scapegoat for past and future budget woes. But it is the dramatic upward arc of federal spending that is the root of the problem.

Mr. Riedl is a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
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10) The October Surprise Is Coming
By Pamela Geller

The October Surprise. We all know it's coming. In what shape, idea, form -- who's to say? Evil always surprises. Its goals are constant, the ultimate objective never changes, but inevitably it manifests itself as the savior of the day, the savior of man. The 2008 Democrat October Surprise that ushered in the first hardcore radical post-American president in American history was the "economic collapse." Oh yes, that was a beaut.


The time before that, the moochers and the looters tried to fake Bush documents -- except that the conservative blogosphere caught them red-handed, so they missed their mark.


But the party of haters, infiltrators, anti-capitalists, the party that is anti-freedom and anti-individual rights, is going to have to pull off something really catastrophic to stay in power this November. And they will, because it is abundantly clear now that they despise the premise of America and they mean to replace it with statism, the source of untold, incomprehensible human misery for centuries.


Ayn Rand wrote of statism that


a statist system -- whether of a communist, fascist, Nazi, socialist or 'welfare' type -- is based on the ... government's unlimited power, which means: on the rule of brute force. ... Under statism, the government is not a policeman, but a legalized criminal that holds the power to use physical force in any manner and for any purpose it pleases against legally disarmed, defenseless victims.


With chilling prescience, Rand said, "The basic principle and the ultimate results of all statist doctrines are the same: dictatorship and destruction. The rest is only a matter of time."


Only a matter of time.


We have a long and terrible fight in front of us. The fight is as big as the idea, the foundation, the being of this great nation, the fight for America. Yes, it's as big as all that, and the enemy is ruthless, unscrupulous, and evil -- and willing to do whatever it takes to assume absolute control. They build nothing, produce nothing, create nothing, invent nothing. They steal. They demand. They demoralize. They are destroyers.


What will October's Surprise be? Political analyst Jack Wheeler has an idea. "A Second Great Depression," he says, "is the Democrat Party's path to power":


Our country is faced with an impending economic catastrophe, a Second Great Depression. It is being brought about on purpose by a political party that cares only for keeping and expanding its power, and looks upon prosperity as a threat to that power.


You think the Democrats aren't really that bad? Think again. Wheeler points out that they're "now being threatened with being thrown out of power." And what did they do when faced with a loss of power the last time? "If that party is evil enough and fascist enough to cause an economic catastrophe," Wheeler says, "it is certainly evil and fascist enough to cause a physical catastrophe, an Ultimate October Surprise, that will frighten and enrage voters enough to preserve its power in November."

Wheeler speculates that this could take the form of "another 9/11, a massively horrific terrorist attack, perhaps even nuclear." Or it could involve Obama's obvious and gross mishandling of the Gulf oil crisis, the full extent of which is (of course) being covered up in the lapdog media. And whom would the Democrats blame for whatever crisis they trump up? Whom else? The attack will be used, Wheeler suggests, "to raise suspicion about the dangerous Tea Party people and anyone who is 'anti-government,' enough for people to rally around their Zero-led government in fear and confusion." And it will ultimately provide "further rationales for emergency government powers."


Could this really happen? Well, we know there have been October Surprises in the past, and each election ups the ante. We have to make sure this doesn't happen. We are Americans. We are free people. We must resist. As one reader of my website, AtlasShrugs.com, wrote to me, "the political tools of truth, exposure, ridicule, disparagement, impeachment, criminal prosecution, and politically-incorrect anger must be added to our arsenal of peaceful weapons against tyranny. ... We must make history by living our freedom, or surely we will die."


And we have seen the Democratic Party decimate our health care system, banking industry, and automobile sector, and introduce sharia (Islamic) finance into the public sector. They are capable of anything.


Yes. And there is some comfort to be found in the fact that decent, rational men, statesmen, exist and speak the truth. They represent our last hope, a vestige of reason and sanity in this era of the modern barbarian. These are the men who need to take the reins of their respective nations. Bolton 2012: The stakes couldn't be higher.

Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs website and former associate publisher of the New York Observer. She is the author of The Post-American Presidency (coming July 27 from Simon & Schuster).
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11)The Mosques of War
By Victor Sharpe

Of the three monotheistic religions, Judaism is considered the mother faith and the other two, Christianity and Islam, her daughters.


The first daughter, Christianity, under the influence of the early church fathers, rejected the mother and distanced herself from Judaism , even to the extent of changing the Sabbath from the seventh day, Saturday, to Sunday and renaming it the Lord's Day. Seventh-Day Adventists retain Saturday as their Sabbath.


The younger daughter, Islam, under Muhammad, turned on both the Jewish and Christian tribes of Arabia, who declined to accept that Muhammad was the Messenger of God and the "Seal of all the Prophets." Both Jews and Christians rejected the claim of the new faith that it alone ushered in "God's final revelation."


After Rome embraced Christianity under Constantine, the Church fathers increasingly used temporal powers to discriminate against the Jews and proscribe and mock the practice of their faith. In time, this led to the horrors of the Crusades, the Catholic inquisition, forced conversions, pogroms, and ultimately, to the Holocaust.


Islam's followers tolerated those they called the "people of the Book," the Jews and Christians, whose faith was based upon the Bible. But Islam, too, practiced forced conversions, pogroms, massacres, and the discrimination of Jews and Christians through the practice of dhimmitude, whereby the "infidels" were forced into second-class status and forced to pay a tax, the jizzya, as a penalty for remaining outside the Islamic faith while under Muslim control.


Like Christendom, Islam often forced the Jews to live in ghettos, called mellahs. Islamic authorities were the first to coerce Jews into wearing distinctive and often humiliating clothing, preceding the German Nazis by centuries. The Nazis and their European allies forced the Jews into wearing a yellow Star of David, thus marking them for death.


But history is replete with accounts of both daughter religions fighting each other for centuries over territory. When not slaughtering each other, they both often turned upon the hapless and stateless Jews, who, for the most part, had no allies and were unable to defend themselves.


The mother has ample reason to weep at the ferocious degradation and scorn her daughters have heaped upon her with such violence and ingratitude. But many Christians -- not all -- have come to the realization that biblical Jewish roots are inextricable from their own and that their faith is fatefully incomplete without an acknowledgment of those roots.

Islam, too, is immensely indebted to Judaism. According to Abraham I. Katsh, author of Judaism and the Koran,


... like the Jew, the Moslem affirms the unity of God, that He is one, eternal, merciful, compassionate, beneficent, almighty, all-knowing, just, loving and forgiving.


Like Judaism, Islam does not recognize saints serving as mediators between the individual and his Creator and both faiths believe that each individual is to follow a righteous path and secure atonement by improving his or her conduct and by practicing sincere repentance. But there is another essential and integral part of Islam not shared with Judaism: Jihad.


As Katsh points out in his book, originally written as far back as 1954,
the duty of Jihad, the waging of Holy War, has been raised to the dignity of a sixth canonical obligation, especially by the descendants of the Kharijites. [...]

To the Moslem, the world is divided into regions under Islamic control, the dar al-Islam, and regions not subjected as yet, the dar al-harb.


Between this 'area of warfare' and the Muslim dominated part of the world there can be no peace. Practical considerations may induce the Muslim leaders to conclude an armistice, but the obligation to conquer and, if possible, convert never lapses. Nor can territory once under Muslim rule be lawfully yielded to the unbeliever. Legal theory has gone so far as to define as dar al-Islam any area where at least one Muslim custom is still observed.


Thanks to this concept, the Moslem is required to subdue the infidel, and he who dies in the path of Allah is considered a martyr and assured of Paradise and of unique privileges there.


Here one can understand clearly that peace -- true and lasting peace -- between Islam and nations that adhere still to Judeo-Christian civilization, or to Hinduism, Buddhism, or all other faiths, is a forlorn and baseless hope.


The "peace process" between Israel and the Palestinians, for example, is thus a grand illusion, endlessly fostered by Western politicians and diplomats, along with self-deluded Israeli leaders, who all refuse to see a reality that has existed since Islam's creation in the 7th century.


And it is in one abiding respect that this endless spiritual and temporal conflict is seen in its most practical and historical context -- the conversion of places of worship into mosques.


The result has been that since the time of Muhammad, synagogues, churches, Hindu temples, Zoroastrian temples, and pagan shrines have been all too often violently converted into mosques.


After the conquest of Mecca in the year 630, Muhammad transformed the Black Stone in the Ka'aba, which ancient pagan Arabs had worshiped, into the paramount Islamic holy place. It became known as the Masjid al-Haram, or Sacred Mosque.


During the Arab invasions of neighboring lands in the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond, under the new banner of Islam, numerous synagogues and churches were converted into mosques. In Damascus, Syria, the church of St. John is now known as the Umayyad Mosque. Also in Syria, the mosque of Job was originally a church.


The Islamic tide swept into Egypt, and many Christian Coptic churches were converted into mosques. From North Africa, the conquests continued into Spain and Portugal, where again churches were converted into mosques. Interestingly, many churches had been built upon the sites of earlier Roman temples. But during the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula by Christian armies -- the Reconquista -- these same mosques were reconverted into churches.


In Gaza, the Great Mosque of Gaza was originally a Christian church. In Turkey, the Hagia Sophia Church was converted in1453 into a mosque and remained so until 1935, when it became a museum. Indeed, the Ottoman Turks converted into mosques practically all churches and monasteries in the territories they conquered.


The most well-known mosques, built upon previous non-Muslim holy sites, are the Al-Aqsa mosque on Jerusalem's Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, also built upon the site of the two biblical Jewish Temples.


There are four holy cities of Judaism: Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias. Hebron is the second-holiest city, and in it is the burial place of the Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs, known as the Cave of Machpela, where Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and Leah are buried.


Herod the Great constructed an enclosure for the burial site. During the later Christian Byzantine period, a church was built upon the site, but this was destroyed in 614 by the Persians. Later, the Arab-Muslim invaders built a mosque in its place.


Jews were not permitted to worship at their nearly-four-thousand-year-old holy place by the Muslim Arabs. They could only ascend to the seventh step leading to the tombs. Indeed, they were refused this right as a place of worship from the 7th century until 1967, when Israel liberated the territory from the Jordanian occupiers. Even before the Israeli liberation, a horrifying massacre of Jewish residents in Hebron by their Arab Moslem neighbors took place in 1929 while under the British Mandate of the geographical territory known as Palestine.


Prior to the present-day Palestinian Authority assuming control of the city of Nablus, which was the ancient biblical Jewish city of Shechem, the Tomb of Joseph, the biblical figure, was a place of Jewish pilgrimage. When it was handed over to the PA, as one of seemingly endless Israeli concessions, the tomb was desecrated by a Moslem mob, which proceeded to convert it into a mosque.


On the Indian subcontinent, Hindu temples were similarly converted into mosques. Lately, Hindu nationalists have reconverted some mosques into temples, and, as in so many other parts of the world, considerable bitterness exists between Moslems and members of other faiths or those of no faith.


Mosques now occupy vast numbers of places of worship for other faiths. In Algeria, the Great Synagogue of Oran is now a mosque after the Jewish population was driven from Algeria. Many other synagogues throughout the Arab world are now mosques from after the Jewish inhabitants were expelled.


In the 1974 invasion of Cyprus by Turkey, many Greek Orthodox churches in northern Cyprus were converted into mosques. And the process continues.


Saudi Arabia invests endless billions of dollars to build mosques throughout the world. The international blanketing of cities with mosques is just another expression of jihad. In western Europe, most famously renamed Eurabia by the writer, Bat Yeor, there may soon come a time when there will be more minarets than steeples.


Perhaps the most egregious and blatant example of Islamic triumphalism is the planned construction of a giant mosque in New York, almost upon the site of the horrific destruction of the Twin Towers by Moslem terrorists acting in the name of Allah.


The proposed mosque is to be opened in 2011 on the very anniversary of the September 11, 2001 atrocity -- a flagrant insult to the memory of the thousands of innocents who died at the hands of Moslem fanatics and believers, most of them Saudis.


But this, after all, is what jihad is all about. Subdue the "infidel" at all costs. The Islamic obligation to conquer and convert the unbeliever must never lapse. Its tangible manifestation can also be characterized as the mosques of war.



Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of Volumes One and Two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.
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12)The First Special Interest
By Russell Nagelkirk

President Barack Obama, and the clutch of conspirators he calls advisors, would do well to recall what the first special interest was. They won't, because they have an agenda: not to see that the laws are faithfully executed, as the executive branch is supposed to, but to establish a new form of government.


The founders' goal was to form a government that would serve all the people, so that even the evils embraced by habit, culture, and commerce, such as slavery, would eventually fall to the pressures of ideals with stature, principles that would continually call out our better angels. The people of the United States, forming a perfect union (disparate peoples made into a whole), will fight for and defend great ideas that they know serve all of us. Slavery could not stand in this environment. The voice of its defenders faltered. The voice of a people of character prevailed. People of character are defined not by physical characteristics, but by their willingness to live by devotion and duty to moral precepts. Slavery went away not because blacks ended it -- slavery went away because good people did. A blemish on our national character was removed because the foundational principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution apply to all men, and people of integrity knew it. If we were to live according to the principles set forth at the founding, this evil could not remain.


We stand as a country where the intent was that all men would enjoy the same rights and liberties. However, there is a responsibility that comes with that, which is that the expression of my freedom does not diminish the freedom of another.


But that great foundational principle is not one that Obama lives by, advocates, or defends. He is a special interest president, there to reward and defend the support of certain groups. For the unions, he overcomes the rights of secured creditors to hand ownership of GM to them, then he refuses to waive the Jones Act so that unions will hold sway in the gulf. For liberal blacks, he refuses to prosecute black racists of the New Black Panther Party (a horrid hypocrisy) if their victims are white. For abortion rights advocates, he opposes any limits on abortion, even to the detriment of survivors of failed abortions. For Hispanics who illegally enter America and seek handouts, he sues Arizona to prevent them from prosecuting illegal immigrant crime.


If you are a special interest, Obama is your guy. The only thing he asks for in return is unqualified power. It doesn't matter what is best for America. It is not about duty and devotion to principles that protect and serve all men equally. It is about using the power of the presidency to serve the special interests of a group and exacting a price for the help. The interests of the group trump the rights and liberties of the ordinary man, and the power of the president becomes greater than both. This is the path to tyranny. The plan is to harness the support of powerful special interests to serve the dual purpose of fracturing society and redirecting powers initially given to the individual to the president himself.


Obama buys power by offering privileges and protection to his pals. President Dwight Eisenhower said, "A people that values its privileges above its principles soon looses both."


What a travesty in the making. Obama uses special interests to gain power over a man's soul. This was done once already. It was called slavery, and the first special interest was the white man.


If the rights to life, liberty, and property are not owned by the individual, then the individual is a slave. As it happened then, it should happen now: Good people should act out of duty and devotion to the moral imperative of being a free people and work to restore a homeland where it is recognized and affirmed that all men are created equal.
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13) Israel navy makes contact with Libya-sponsored Gaza aid ship

The Al-Amal, carrying 15 pro-Palestinian activists, 12 crew members and 2,000 tons of food and medicine reportedly ignores Israeli request to divert to Egyptian port of El-Arish.
By Anshel Pfeffer

The Israeli navy on Tuesday made radio contact with a Libyan-sponsored ship sailing for Gaza in defiance of a maritime blockade, a military spokeswoman said.

"The navy just began its process of trying to stop the ship," she said. "At this time the process of communicating with them has begun."

An Israeli ship warned the Moldovan-flagged, Greek-registered Al-Amal that it was entering a closed military zone.

The ship, which left Greece on Saturday afternoon, was commissioned by the Gaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation, headed by Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi, second son of Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi.

"The ship's captain was asked by the gunboat crew to go to El-Arish port instead, stressing that the vessel will not be allowed to go into Gaza at all," the foundation said in a statement on its website.

"The captain and the head of the foundation's team on board affirmed that the Ship's sole destination is Gaza, asserting that it is carrying humanitarian aid and has no other purpose whatsoever, while the gunboat is still present near the ship," it added.

Meanwhile, Israeli forces prepared to board the boat, seeking to avoid confrontation. Six weeks ago, nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed when navy commandos stormed a Turkish aid ship, prompting international condemnation and two national inquiries.

Israel Radio reported that the government was also exploring diplomatic channels in an attempt to persuade the Al-Amal to turn back.

The Al-Amal, carrying 15 pro-Palestinian activists and 12 crew members and 2,000 tons of food and medicine is expected to arrive off the coast of Gaza by Wednesday morning.

On Monday the Foreign Ministry advised the defense establishment to wait until the ship approaches or enters the coastal strip's territorial waters before making any attempt to stop it, to avoid the risk of breaking international law.

Aboard the 92-meter vessel are a crew of 12 from Haiti, India and Syria, under the command of a Cuban-born captain. Most of the activists on board are from Libya, except for one Nigerian, one Algerian and one Moroccan.

In Gaza, preparations for the ship's arrival were already underway on Tuesday, with local residents adorning the main harbor with Libyan flags and posters bearing the image of the Libyan leader.
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