Newest campaign slogan
If you voted for Obama in 2008 to prove you're not a racist,
you'll have to vote for someone else in 2012 to prove you're not an idiot.
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Dennis Miller is a comedian who has a show called Dennis Miller Live on HBO.
Although he is not Jewish, he recently had the following to say about the Middle East situation. (See 1 below.)
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What happens when QE2 ends - some thoughts. (See 2 below)
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And then there is the story about suburbanites. (See 3 below.)
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Some people drink and go on a binge. Our president just spends to get there.
But Obama is no dummy as this article suggests. We are the dummies for electing him and now we have wooden nickels to show for it.(See 4 and 4a below.)
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Dick
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1)Here we go:
The Palestinians want their own country. There's just one thing about that:
There are no Palestinians . It's a made up word. Israel was called Palestine
for two thousand years. Like 'Wiccan,' 'Palestinian' sounds ancient but is
really a modern invention. Before the Israelis won the land in the 1967 war,
Gaza was Owned by Egypt , the West Bank was owned by Jordan , and there were
no Palestinians.'
As soon as the Jews took over and started growing oranges as big as
basketballs, what do you know, say hello to the 'Palestinians,' weeping for
their deep bond with their lost 'land' and 'nation.'
So for the sake of honesty, let's not use the word 'Palestinian' any more to
describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy at deaths until someone
points out they're being taped. Instead, let's call them what they are:
'Other Arabs Who Can't Accomplish Anything In Life And Would Rather Wrap
Themselves In The Seductive Melodrama Of Eternal Struggle And Death. ' I
know that's a bit unwieldy to expect to see on CNN. How about this, then:
'Adjacent Jew-Haters .' Okay, so the Adjacent Jew-Haters want their own
country.
Oops, just one more thing: No, they don't . They could've had their own
country. Anytime in the last thirty years, especially several years ago at
Camp David . But If you have your own country, you have to have traffic
lights and garbage trucks. And Chambers of Commerce, and, worse, you
actually have to figure out some way to make a living.
That's no fun. No, they want what all the other Jew-Haters in the region
want: Israel . They also want a big pile of dead Jews, of course that's
where the Real fun is -- but mostly they want Israel .
Why? For one thing, trying to destroy Israel - or 'The Zionist Entity' as
their Textbooks call it -- for the last fifty years has allowed the rulers
of Arab Countries to divert the attention of their own people away from the
fact that they're the blue-ribbon most illiterate, poorest, and tribally
backward on God's Earth, and if you've ever been around God's Earth, you
know that's really saying something.
It makes me roll my eyes every time one of our pundits waxes poetic about
the great history and culture of the Muslim Mid east. Unless I'm missing
something, the Arabs haven't given anything to the world since Algebra, and,
by the way, thanks a hell of a lot for that one.
Chew this around and spit it out: 500 million Arabs; 5 Million Jews.
Think of all the Arab countries as a football field, and Israel as a pack of
matches sitting in the middle of it. And now these same folks swear that if
Israel gives them half of that pack of matches, everyone will be pals..
Really? Wow, what neat news.
Hey, but what about the string of wars to obliterate the tiny country and
the constant din of rabid blood oaths to drive very Jew into the sea? Oh,
that? We were just kidding.
My friend, Kevin Rooney, made a gorgeous point the other day: Just reverse
the Numbers. Imagine 500 million Jews and 5 million Arabs. I was stunned at
the simple brilliance of it. Can anyone picture the Jews strapping belts of
razor blades and dynamite to themselves? Of course not.
Or marshaling every fiber and force at their disposal for generations to
drive a tiny Arab State into the sea? Nonsense.
Or dancing for joy at the murder of innocents? Impossible.
Or spreading and believing horrible lies about the Arabs baking their bread
with the blood of children? Disgusting.
No, as you know, left to themselves in a world of peace, the worst Jews
would ever do to people is debate them to death.
However, in any big-picture strategy, there's always a danger of losing
moral weight. We've already lost some. After September 11th our president
told us and the world he was going to root out all terrorists and the
countries that supported them.
Beautiful. Then the Israelis, after months and months of having the
equivalent of an Oklahoma City every week (and then every day) start to do
the same thing we did, and WE tell them to show restraint.
If America were being attacked with an Oklahoma City every day, we would all
very shortly be screaming for the administration to just be done with it and
kill everything south of the Mediterranean and east of the Jordan .
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2) What Happens When QE2 Ends?
As government agencies go, few have a bigger influence, of course, than the Federal Reserve, whose policies affect the prices of everything from a 30-year mortgage to a double skim latte, not to mention the outlook for economic growth, jobs and inflation. So when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke signaled last year that the Fed would buy as much as $600 billion in Treasury bonds, it was bound to make waves—among Fed fans and critics alike.
But now that the central bank's bond-buying binge is drawing to a close, even some of the Fed's toughest critics are nervous. The program—which policy wonks call quantitative easing, but nearly everyone else calls QE2—was designed to keep bond prices high and interest rates low. It is credited with propping up the economy and, in turn, boosting the stock market. Technically, the Fed is in the midst of its second round of bond buying—hence the 2—since the financial crisis struck in 2008. When the first round ended in spring 2010, both stocks and bonds tumbled.
INFLATION'S SPLIT PERSONALITY
Inflation is on the rise in many emerging markets and is even spreading to more-established economies such as Britain's. Yet U.S. inflation has been tame, confounding some analysts. Tad Rivelle, the chief investment officer at Metropolitan West Asset Management, says it's only a matter of time before higher commodity prices lead to some sticker shock in U.S. store aisles.
But Joe Zidle, an investment strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, says wages are a bigger factor. Slow salary growth, a side effect of high unemployment, can act as a brake on inflation.
Producers will be hard-pressed to raise prices on goods if no one has more money to spend. Zidle doesn't see consumer prices picking up until unemployment falls to around 5 percent. "As long as you've got five to six people competing for every job, you're not likely to see inflation," he says.
Nevertheless, many experts regard a third round, or QE3, as highly unlikely. Some of them worry that in June, when the second round is scheduled to end, there could be a huge hole in the Treasury bond markets. "Who will step up to the plate on July 1 to buy them?" asks Bill Gross, the portfolio manager of the $240 billion Pimco Total Return fund, the world's biggest bond fund. Recently, he has been buying the debt of nations with emerging markets and, more dramatically, getting rid of all the U.S. government debt in his giant bond fund. "You don't want it to be like musical chairs," Gross says, "when the music stops and you're the one looking around for the last chair."
Tad Rivelle, the chief investment officer at Metropolitan West Asset Management, a fund company that specializes in fixed income, has been among the critics of the Fed's low-interest-rate policy. He thinks low rates have contributed to commodity-price inflation and will probably eventually lead to higher consumer prices in the U.S. QE2 has "distorted" the bond markets and kept Treasury bond interest rates "abnormally low," says Rivelle. Once the Federal Reserve's buying dries up, he expects long-term rates to rise and Treasury prices to fall, because bond prices and interest rates move in opposite directions.
Many experts predict stocks will be more resilient than bonds. Although equities tumbled after the Fed wrapped up QE1 in 2010, "the economy is much stronger now," says Joe Zidle, an investment strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The Fed's low-interest-rate policies "succeeded in turning skeptical investors into confident investors," he adds. The ultralow interest rates have made stocks a more attractive alternative to bonds, Zidle says, while rising sales and profits at many S&P 500 companies should sustain stock prices.
EXPERTS EXPLAIN: WHAT IS QUANTITATIVE EASING?
The Fed's controversial policy expires in June. But did it work? ( Watch video .)
Zidle recommends focusing on areas of the market that could benefit from higher commodity prices and a stronger economy, such as technology, energy, materials and the industrials sector. If bond yields do creep up after QE2 ends, then bonds could start siphoning money away from stocks, Zidle says, but he doesn't see that happening until the yield of the 10-year Treasury is around 5 percent. Many strategists are predicting that the yield of the 10-year Treasury will rise to around 4 percent by the end of the year, up from 3.4 percent recently.
Strategists also say that if the end of QE2 leads to higher yields on U.S. bonds, that could prove to be a positive trend for the U.S. dollar, because it could attract more foreign investment. "I believe the biggest dilemma the U.S. will face is stopping the dollar from rising too much," says Jim O'Neill, the chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management. That might be disappointing to the many investors who have plowed money into foreign stocks and bonds, which often benefit from weakness in the dollar. O'Neill, a well-known fan of emerging-market stocks, has become less bullish recently on emerging-market bonds, which have gotten popular with some American investors who became fed up with the prolonged period of low interest rates. He says that if bond yields rise in the U.S. then some investors might move money back, and "that could be bad for emerging markets' debt."
To be sure, investment strategists aren't recommending switching to an all-stock diet. "Two of the biggest buyers in the Treasury market are going to go on strike this year," says David Kelly, the chief market strategist for mutual funds at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. While there's a chance they could change their minds, Bernanke and the rest of the Fed leaders (Big Buyer No. 1) have clearly signaled their intentions to wrap up QE2 in June. And Kelly says individual investors (Big Buyer No. 2), who plowed money into bonds after the financial crisis, have also begun moving money back to stocks. Generally, he sees that as a good trend. But he cautions investors against taking that too far. "You need some exposure to bonds" for diversification, he says. "They will be defensive if the weather turns nasty."
Of course, that might be cold comfort if rates shoot higher in the short term, which would be a painful process for investors who own a big chunk of bonds. "Bondholders have had a great time the last 30 years," as bond prices marched steadily higher, says Gross. "But eventually you have to pay the piper." Even then, there'd be one winner: American savers, who could finally get a return that isn't microscopic from a savings account or a money market fund.
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3)God and lawn Care
God said: "Francis, you know all about gardens and nature. What in the world is going on down there on the planet? What happened to the dandelions, violets, milkweeds and stuff I started eons ago? I had a perfect no-maintenance garden plan. Those plants grow in any type of soil, withstand drought and multiply with abandon. The nectar from the long-lasting blossoms attracts butterflies, honey bees and flocks of songbirds. I expected to see a vast garden of colors by now. But, all I see are these green rectangles."
St. FRANCIS:
It's the tribes that settled there, Lord. The Suburbanites. They started calling your flowers 'weeds' and went to great lengths to kill them and replace them with grass.
GOD:
Grass? But, it's so boring. It's not colorful. It doesn't attract butterflies, birds and bees; only grubs and sod worms. It's sensitive to temperatures. Do these Suburbanites really want all that grass growing there?
ST. FRANCIS:
Apparently so, Lord. They go to great pains to grow it and keep it green. They begin each spring by fertilizing grass and poisoning any other plant that crops up in the lawn.
GOD:
The spring rains and warm weather probably make grass grow really fast. That must make the Suburbanites happy.
ST. FRANCIS:
Apparently not, Lord. As soon as it grows a little, they cut it-sometimes twice a week.
GOD:
They cut it? Do they then bale it like hay?
ST.. FRANCIS:
Not exactly, Lord. Most of them rake it up and put it in bags.
GOD:
They bag it? Why? Is it a cash crop? Do they sell it?
ST. FRANCIS:
No, Sir, just the opposite. They pay to throw it away.
GOD:
Now, let me get this straight. They fertilize grass so it will grow. And, when it does grow, they cut it off and pay to throw it away?
ST. FRANCIS:
Yes, Sir.
GOD:
These Suburbanites must be relieved in the summer when we cut back on the rain and turn up the heat. That surely slows the growth and saves them a lot of work.
ST.. FRANCIS:
You aren't going to believe this, Lord. When the grass stops growing so fast, they drag out hoses and pay more money to water it, so they can continue to mow it and pay to get rid of it.
GOD:
What nonsense. At least they kept some of the trees. That was a sheer stroke of genius, if I do say so myself. The trees grow leaves in the spring to provide beauty and shade in the summer. In the autumn, they fall to the ground and form a natural blanket to keep moisture in the soil and protect the trees and bushes. It's a natural cycle of life.
ST.. FRANCIS:
You better sit down, Lord. The Suburbanites have drawn a new circle. As soon as the leaves fall, they rake them into great piles and pay to have them hauled away.
GOD:
No!? What do they do to protect the shrub and tree roots in the winter to keep the soil moist and loose?
ST. FRANCIS:
After throwing away the leaves, they go out and buy something which they call mulch. They haul it home and spread it around in place of the leaves.
GOD:
And where do they get this mulch?
ST. FRANCIS:
They cut down trees and grind them up to make the mulch.
GOD:
Enough! I don't want to think about this anymore. St. Catherine, you're in charge of the arts. What movie have you scheduled for us tonight?
ST.. CATHERINE:
'Dumb and Dumber', Lord. It's a story about....
GOD: Never mind, I think I just heard the whole story from St. Francis.
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4)Obama's Permanent Spending Binge
If government got by with 20% of GDP in 2007, why not in 2021, when GDP will be substantially higher?
By JOHN B. TAYLOR
Americans are clamoring for a fact-based debate about the budget, but the numbers they're hearing from Washington are terribly confusing. Here's an example: Speaking at a Facebook town hall meeting here on Wednesday, President Obama sometimes talked about saving $4 trillion, at other times $2 trillion, and he varied whether it was over 10 years or 12 years, never mentioning any one year.
A simple chart, like the one nearby, would greatly clarify the debate. It shows total federal government spending year-by-year for the two decades starting in the year 2000. Spending is shown as a percentage of GDP, which is a sensible and quite common way to assess trends: When the percentage rises, government spending rises relative to total income or total goods and services produced in our economy.
For the past decade, the chart shows the recent history of government spending. For the next decade—the window for the current budget—it shows three different spending visions for the future.
The uppermost line shows outlays under the official budget submitted by Mr. Obama to Congress on Feb. 14. The lowest line shows the House Budget Resolution submitted by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan on April 5, while the third line shows year-by-year outlays I estimated from the 12-year totals in the new budget proposed by the president on April 13.
The chart clearly reveals a number of important facts that are not coming up in town hall meetings. Most obvious is the huge bulge in spending in the past few years. In 2000 spending was 18.2% of GDP. In 2007 it was 19.6%. But in the three years since 2009 it's jumped to an average of 24.4%.
Second, and perhaps even more striking, the chart shows that Mr. Obama, in his budget submitted in February, proposed to make that spending binge permanent. Spending would still be more than 24% of GDP at the end of the budget window in 2021. The administration revealed its preference in the February budget for a much higher level of government spending than the 18.2% of GDP in 2000 or the 19.6% in 2007.
Third, the House budget plan proposed by Rep. Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) simply removes that spending binge—it gradually returns spending as a share of GDP back to a level seen only three years ago.
When I show people this chart they ask why Washington is even having the debate. They say: If government agencies and programs functioned with 19% to 20% of GDP in 2007, why is it so hard for them to function with that percentage in 2021, when GDP will be substantially higher and with many opportunities for reforms and increased efficiencies? And if GDP and employment grow more quickly, as they would if private investment increased as a result of lower government spending and debt, then that 19% to 20% share of GDP could provide much more in the way of public goods.
Fourth, the chart shows that the second Obama administration budget, submitted a week after the Ryan House budget, is substantially different from the first administration budget. It is highly unusual for an administration to decide to submit a second budget, and the effect of this revision is to move the administration's spending vision closer to that of the House. But it still leaves a big chunk of the spending binge in place.
Fifth, and perhaps most important for economic growth, the chart shows that the House budget effectively deals with the deficit and brings the debt down as a share of GDP without a tax increase. Under the current tax system, revenues as a share of GDP were 18.5% in 2007, so that the budget deficit was only 1.1% of GDP that year. With higher real incomes moving people into higher tax brackets, it is quite likely that under the current tax system revenues will be higher as a share of GDP when the economy fully recovers, perhaps in the 19% to 20% range.
This means that the House budget plan, with spending in the same range, approximately balances the budget with no increase in taxes. This is good news for economic growth. In contrast, balancing the first or even the second Obama budget requires substantial tax increases—more than the administration has yet to propose.
Mr. Taylor, a professor of economics at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of "Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged and Worsened the Financial Crisis" (Hoover Press, 2009).
4a)Wall Street Journal Sizes up Obama - They've Got Him Figured Out
A "deadly" article regarding Obama, at the Wall Street Journal, which today is the most widely circulated newspaper in America .
By Eddie Sessions:
"I have this theory about Barack Obama. I think he's led a kind of make-believe life in which money was provided and doors were opened because at some point early on somebody or some group (George Soros anybody?) took a look at this tall, good looking, half-white, half-black, young man with an exotic African/Muslim name and concluded he could be guided toward a life in politics where his facile speaking skills could even put him in the White House.
In a very real way, he has been a young man in a very big hurry. Who else do you know has written two memoirs before the age of 45? "Dreams of My Father" was published in 1995 when he was only 34 years old. The "Audacity of Hope" followed in 2006. If, indeed, he did write them himself. There are some who think that his mentor and friend, Bill Ayers, a man who calls himself a "communist with a small 'c'" was the real author.
His political skills consisted of rarely voting on anything that might be deemed controversial. He went from a legislator in the Illinois legislature to the Senator from that state because he had the good fortune of having Mayor Daley's formidable political machine at his disposal.
He was in the U.S. Senate so briefly that his bid for the presidency was either an act of astonishing self-confidence or part of some greater game plan that had been determined before he first stepped foot in the Capital. How, many must wonder, was he selected to be a 2004 keynote speaker at the Democrat convention that nominated John Kerry when virtually no one had ever even heard of him before?
He outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton in primaries. He took Iowa by storm. A charming young man, an anomaly in the state with a very small black population, he oozed "cool" in a place where agriculture was the antithesis of cool. He dazzled the locals. And he had an army of volunteers drawn to a charisma that hid any real substance.
And then he had the great good fortune of having the Republicans select one of the most inept candidates for the presidency since Bob Dole And then John McCain did something crazy. He picked Sarah Palin, an unknown female governor from the very distant state of Alaska . It was a ticket that was reminiscent of 1984's Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and they went down to defeat.
The mainstream political media fell in love with him. It was a schoolgirl crush with febrile commentators like Chris Mathews swooning then and now over the man. The venom directed against McCain and, in particular, Palin, was extraordinary.
Now, nearly a full 2 years into his first term, all of those gilded years leading up to the White House have left him unprepared to be President. Left to his own instincts, he has a talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. It swiftly became a joke that he could not deliver even the briefest of statements without the ever-present Tele-Prompters.
Far worse, however, is his capacity to want to "wish away" some terrible realities, not the least of which is the Islamist intention to destroy America and enslave the West. Any student of history knows how swiftly Islam initially spread. It knocked on the doors of Europe, having gained a foothold in Spain .
The great crowds that greeted him at home or on his campaign "world tour" were no substitute for having even the slightest grasp of history and the reality of a world filled with really bad people with really bad intentions.
Oddly and perhaps even inevitably, his political experience, a cakewalk, has positioned him to destroy the Democrat Party's hold on power in Congress because in the end it was never about the Party. It was always about his communist ideology, learned at an early age from family, mentors, college professors, and extreme leftist friends and colleagues.
Obama is a man who could deliver a snap judgment about a Boston police officer who arrested an "obstreperous" Harvard professor-friend, but would warn Americans against "jumping to conclusions" about a mass murderer at Fort Hood who shouted "Allahu Akbar." The absurdity of that was lost on no one. He has since compounded this by calling the Christmas bomber "an isolated extremist" only to have to admit a day or two later that he was part of an al Qaeda plot.
He is a man who could strive to close down our detention facility at Guantanamo even though those released were known to have returned to the battlefield against America . He could even instruct his Attorney General to afford the perpetrator of 9/11 a civil trial when no one else would ever even consider such an obscenity. And he is a man who could wait three days before having anything to say about the perpetrator of yet another terrorist attack on Americans and then have to elaborate on his remarks the following day because his first statement was so lame.
The pattern repeats itself. He either blames any problem on the Bush administration or he naively seeks to wish away the truth.
Knock, knock. Anyone home? Anyone there? Barack Obama exists only as the sock puppet of his handlers, of the people who have maneuvered and manufactured this pathetic individual's life.
When anyone else would quickly and easily produce a birth certificate, this man has spent over a million dollars to deny access to his. Most other documents, the paper trail we all leave in our wake, have been sequestered from review. He has lived a make-believe life whose true facts remain hidden.
We laugh at the ventriloquist's dummy, but what do you do when the dummy is President of the United States of America ?
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