Anthony Weiner Circumsised By The Truth!

I have met Larry Sabato and he is one of the best.

I agree with Sabato but believe/hope enough Jews will shift along with a comparable shift in black voters to cut the ground out from under Obama and possibly cost him re-election.

Here are Larry's views.(See 1 below.)

This is the thinking of another friend and memo reader: "The shrewdest strategy for Palin and other Republicans would be to make their centerpiece platform an attack on the "liberal news media for unbalanced reporting and for editorializing news" and then to repeatedly give examples. This strategy would tap into America's inherent distrust of the printed media as proved by polls.

The irony is that the media would have to report the attacks on itself, thereby deepening its spiral decent while elevating the Republican candidate to "David" in David vs Goliath.

[Of course, no one is going to listen to this "non-professional political strategist!]"

Finally, this from a dear friend and fellow memo reader who happens to be of the Christian faith: "Dick, you know that like you I am very concerned about the long term viability of the State of Israel and exasperated by such a large portion of the US Jewish population who continue to ignore what Obama and his administration are doing to apparently accelerate their demise with the help of the Palestinians.

And while some of the current polls indicate that maybe some of them might not vote again for Obama, in my opinion, there are still too many in my book who still want to ignore his policies. Maybe a different strategy is needed. Recently a New York race was lost because the electorate didn't know the whole truths about Medicare. But between their ignorance and the TV commercial about Ryan pushing grand-ma over the cliff, the voters made their choice.

With that said, why wouldn't a campaign orchestrated by a well known Rabbi, obviously a non liberal one, who would paint a picture of a possibility of another Jewish Holocaust, this time carried out by the Palestinians and condoned and promoted by Obama. When you think about it, such is very plausible when you consider everything you hear and read about the Muslim brotherhood clerics public disclosure of their desire to eliminate the Jewish people. And while I am not Jewish, as a Christian I would hate to see the Holy City decimated if the Palestinians were to take control of the land we now know as Israel.

Dick, obviously I am very frustrated about the whole Jewish/Israeli situation."
---
Mordant humor to get us through the day:

"I called my stockbroker and asked him what I should be buying.

He said, "If the current administration is in office much longer, canned goods and ammunition are your best bets."

Paul Ryan Vows to Continue Kevorkian’s Work - Medicare to be Replaced with ‘Kevouchers’

In a somber Congressional ceremony, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) eulogized the late Dr. Jack Kevorkian today, vowing to “honor his legacy by continuing his good work.”

“Dr. Kevorkian tried to ease the transition of seniors into the great beyond,” an emotional Rep. Ryan told his colleagues in the House of Representatives. “Here in Congress, we have the opportunity – one might even say the obligation – to continue Kevorkian’s work on a grander scale.”

As a first step to memorialize the work of Dr. Kevorkian, Rep. Ryan said that his new budget plan would replace Medicare with a system of so-called “Kevouchers” that could be redeemed for cyanide pills, nooses and bullets.

In other political news, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) suffered another setback today, in the form of these harsh words of criticism from former President Bill Clinton: “In my day, we’d show it to ‘em in person.”

The avalanche of ridicule suffered by Rep. Weiner in recent days finally drew some push back from a member of the congressman’s staff.

“It is time for all of these babyish ‘wiener’ jokes to stop,” said new Weiner spokesman Hugh G. Rection

Sexist!

What is the difference between a battery and a woman?
A battery has a positive side.

Why is a Laundromat a really bad place to pick up a woman?
Because a woman who can't even afford a washing machine will probably never be able to support you.

Why do women have smaller feet than men?
It's one of those 'evolutionary things' that allows them to stand closer to the kitchen sink.

If your dog is barking at the back door and your wife is yelling at the front door, who do you let in first ?
The dog, of course. He'll shut up once you let him in.

Scientists have discovered a food that diminishes a woman's sex drive by 90%..
It's called a Wedding Cake.

Why do men die before their wives?
They want to.
---
This from one of my long time friends, memo reader and excellent attorney: "This is why the Obama Administration is so scary: (1) they make arguments like this – in open court -- against human liberty and for government control, and (2) they don’t even realize how ludicrous their arguments are." (See 2 below.)
---
It could happen and this would just choke the BBC and The Guardian!

It is interesting to note the following in the family tree of Kate
Middleton, wife of Prince William:

Kate's mother is Carol Middleton, daughter of Ronald Goldsmith and Dorothy
Harrison (both Jews)

The parents of Dorothy Harrison are Robert Harrison and Elizabeth Temple
(both Jews), the latter a descendant of the Myers family (traditional
English Jews in the 19th century)

Bottom line: Princess Kate is a Jew on her matrilineal side, and as a
consequence, the future king of England will be a Jew according to Jewish
Law and tradition.

(Following is the Spanish translation)

Interesante el arbol genealogico de Kate Middleton, esposa del Principe
William:

La madre de Kate es: Carol Middleton: hija de Ronald Goldsmith y DorotyHarrison(judios)

el padre y la madre de esta: Robert Harrison y Elizabeth Temple: (judios)
>
> y antes descendientes de la familia Myers: (judios tradicionales ingleses
del siglo 19)

Resumiendo: la Princesa Kate es judia por parte de la madre, en consecuencia
el futuro rey

de Inglaterra podra ser considerado como judio por la tradicion judia!!!...
---
A professor discusses N Korea and is unsettled. (See 3 below.)
---
Obama's economic program and QE 2 have been a bust according to this writer. (See 4 below.)

Meanwhile, Dorothy Rabinowitz is taken to task for failing to understand the significance of long term focus. (See 4a below.)
---
Mubarak in jail and Egypt is in the tank. Another misguided Obama stratagem. (See 5 below.)
---
Another politician mouths that meaningless phrase "I take full responsibility..."
This time Anthony Weiner is the one circumcised by the truth. (See 6 below)
---
Dick
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)2. Sabato Website: Jews Won’t Abandon Obama in 2012

President Barack Obama’s recent speech calling on Israel to accept the country’s 1967borders as a starting point for talks with the Palestinians has raised speculation that Jewish voters could turn against Obama and the Democrats in 2012.

But such a scenario “is not very realistic for at least three reasons,” according to Alan I. Abramowitz, senior columnist for the Crystal Ball website of Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

First of all, political opponents — in particular, Hillary Clinton’s campaign — questioned Obama’s commitment to Israel in 2008. But Jewish voters still supported Obama in the general election at about the same rate they had supported other Democratic presidential candidates in recent elections.

One poll showed that 78 percent of Jewish voters cast their ballots for Obama over John McCain.

Secondly, Jewish loyalty to the Democrats is based largely on the liberal views of most Jews on domestic policy issues, Abramowitz asserts.

Between 1992 and 2008, 82 percent of Jewish voters interviewed in several surveys said they leaned toward the Democratic Party, compared to just 43 percent of all other white voters.

Jewish voters “hold solidly liberal views on a wide range of domestic policy issues, and especially on social issues such as abortion, that have undermined support for the Democratic Party among some of its traditional supporters,” Abramowitz writes.

Thirdly, the rightward tack of the Republican Party in recent years has made a significant shift of Jewish voters into the GOP camp highly unlikely.

Moderate-to-liberal Republicans including Nelson Rockefeller in New York and Edward Brooke in Massachusetts regularly won a large share of the Jewish vote, but in today’s GOP “there are almost no liberals or moderates,” Abramowitz observes.

He concludes: “There is almost no chance that the ultimate victor in the Republican nomination contest will be able to significantly increase the GOP share of the Jewish vote beyond the relatively small minority of conservative Jews who have been voting for Republican candidates in recent years.”
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Obama’s Top Lawyer: If You Don’t Like The Individual Mandate, Earn Less Income
By AVIK ROY

Philip Klein of the Washington Examiner has been following some of the oral arguments in the constitutional challenges of Obamacare’s individual mandate, which requires all citizens to buy health insurance. Over at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati, Neal Kumar Katyal, the acting Solicitor General, was charged with defending the law. (Generally speaking, the job of the Solicitor General is to represent the federal government in Supreme Court cases.)

Katyal, when asked about the individual mandate, pointed out that the mandate “only kicks in after people have earned a minimum amount of income,” so what’s the big deal? “Someone doesn’t need to earn that much income.” More from Klein:

During the Sixth Circuit arguments, Judge Jeffrey Sutton, who was nominated by President George W. Bush, asked Kaytal if he could name one Supreme Court case which considered the same question as the one posed by the mandate, in which Congress used the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution as a tool to compel action.

Kaytal conceded that the Supreme Court had “never been confronted directly” with the question, but cited the Heart of Atlanta Motel case as a relevant example. In that landmark 1964 civil rights case, the Court ruled that Congress could use its Commerce Clause power to bar discrimination by private businesses such as hotels and restaurants.

“They’re in the business,” Sutton pushed back. “They’re told if you’re going to be in the business, this is what you have to do. In response to that law, they could have said, ‘We now exit the business.’ Individuals don’t have that option.”

Kaytal responded by noting that the there’s a provision in the health care law that allows people to avoid the mandate.

“If we’re going to play that game, I think that game can be played here as well, because after all, the minimum coverage provision only kicks in after people have earned a minimum amount of income,” Kaytal said. “So it’s a penalty on earning a certain amount of income and self insuring. It’s not just on self insuring on its own. So I guess one could say, just as the restaurant owner could depart the market in Heart of Atlanta Motel, someone doesn’t need to earn that much income. I think both are kind of fanciful and I think get at…”

Sutton interjected, “That wasn’t in a single speech given in Congress about this…the idea that the solution if you don’t like it is make a little less money.”

Katyal is more right than he knows. The mandate, combined with Obamacare’s exchange subsidies, will create profound disincentives for individuals to make more money; i.e., become more economically productive. This will crimp tax revenues and slow economic growth, leading to higher unemployment and larger budget deficits. All for a policy that will only exacerbate the free-rider problem.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)Uneasy quietness on peninsula
By Andrei Lankov

Early this year, this author was quite anxious about the future of South-North Korean relations and, frankly, even about the future of peace on the Korean Peninsula. The situation was clearly moving in the wrong direction, so for the first time in decades, an escalation into a full-scale war appeared possible (albeit clearly avoidable).

In the past year two major military provocations by the North have been unsettling. Frankly, the oft-used word ``provocation” is misleading in this case: North Korean policy planners were not going to provoke the South into any irrational or excessive response. They just wanted to show that they cannot be ignored or, to be more precise, that the price of ignoring them is higher than the price of providing them with aid and other concessions.

What the North wants to achieve is clear: North Korean strategists want Seoul (and for that matter Washington) to restart generous and essentially unconditional aid programs which had been discontinued in 2008. Contrary to common perception, they don’t need this aid and money because they are desperate and on the brink of collapse, but rather because they feel increasingly uneasy about their growing dependence on China, now their only sponsor.

The South Korean government has not bowed to the pressure and did not restart aid after the attacks. This is a laudable decision but one should consider that the refusal to interact with the North may mean that new attacks are likely to occur.

Seoul politicians have convinced themselves that the uncharacteristic quietness of the North is a result of their tough and uncompromising approach. Indeed, after the Yeonpyeong-do attack last November, there was no shortage of bellicosity on the southern side. And it seems for a change, South Korean politicians and generals are indeed serious when they say that massive retaliatory counter-strikes will be implemented in the case of another North Korean attack. It seems they believe that North Korea is cowed by their willingness to take on North Korean naval bases, military headquarters, artillery positions or whatever military planners will designate as targets.

But this is an illusion (probably a dangerous one). The South Korean military still cannot damage any assets which are of real value to North Korean decision makers. South Korean strikes can probably kill a number of helpless North Korean soldiers and officers (maybe even a disposable general or two). But the lives of these people are of no value for the tiny Pyongyang-based elite. After all, this is the elite whose members merely a decade ago sacrificed the lives of at least half a million people during the famine. The loss of military equipment is also not a big deal for North Korean military planners who understand that their rusty, old tanks are not going to win a major war anyway.

The only thing North Koreans are afraid of is a major war which they have no chance of winning. This is exactly the reason why North Koreans have refrained from provocations the past few months. American military interventions in Libya and the sorry fate of Osama bin Laden have demonstrated to the North that President Obama is not afraid to shoot-to-kill. They might be afraid (mistakenly perhaps) that a new large-scale provocation might lead to a full-scale U.S. intervention and this is the only thing they really fear.

However, this fear of a possible attack is not going to last, especially if Colonel Gaddafi and his supporters manage to stay in control of Western Libya. Sooner or later, the usual calculations will be taken seriously again and North Korean policy planners will assume that a large-scale U.S. intervention is not likely.

Once this happens, North Korean generals will probably return to the plans they, in all probability, discussed in January and February, and resume preparations for another small-scale military operation. Contrary to what Seoul’s leaders want to believe, such operations are a low risk initiative for Pyongyang. In the worst case scenario, the North will lose some marginal assets while in the best case scenario they will acquire aid from South Korea, which will greatly enhance their strategic position in dealing with the outside world.

Of course, this is a gamble. It is possible that a chain of new ``provocations” will indeed wear down South Korean public opinion, making the South Korean government restart aid to the North. But it is also possible that South Korean public opinion, already unusually hostile toward the North, will become even more so and already frozen economic relations will become even more ossified. Nevertheless, speaking objectively and cynically, for North Korea’s policy planners the entire game makes perfect sense: losses are small whilst the gains might be big.

We should not therefore be misled by the current quietness on the Korean Peninsula. The refusal of Seoul and Washington to deal with North Korea comes at a significant price. Sooner or later this price will have to be paid.

Prof. Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. He can be reached at anlankov@yahoo.com.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4) Government-Assisted Economic Suicide
By Monty Pelerin


Quantitative Easing ends in June, according to Ben Bernanke's initial commitment. As June begins, the ending seems in doubt despite Fed statements regarding its imminent demise. These comments are perfunctory propaganda and will ultimately prove to be as premature as those of Mark Twain's misreported death. Twain eventually died; so too will QE. It just will not do so now, at least on a permanent basis.

There will likely be a face-saving pause, after which a new "crisis" will be discovered or imagined. The recent plunge in the stock market is a likely excuse if it continues, although nowhere in the Fed's charter does it suggest that "pumping" financial assets is a proper role.

There is no economic case for quantitative easing, nor has there ever been one. Quantitative easing is simply a political gimmick. Knowledgeable economists understood that QE2 would not produce economic improvement. "Rented" government economists (political mercenaries) argued for it on behalf of their bosses.

The results are now in and there are no surprises. Brett Arends of MarketWatch summarized it thusly:

QE2 has created a massive new bubble in dollar-based financial assets, from stocks to gold. Meanwhile, it has had zero visible effect on the real economy.

QE made matters worse in the sense that it prevented adjustments in relative prices and the liquidation of misallocated resources. These adjustments are necessary for any recovery to occur. As expressed by Pater Tenebrarum:

... the Fed managed to quickly arrest and reverse the liquidation of malinvestments. While this has averted more short term pain in 2009 -2010, the economy is now once again faced with having to deal with a distorted and discoordinated production structure that needs to be realigned with reality.

The political case for inflation or loose money is simple. It covers over (temporarily) the seriousness of underlying economic problems. It has been used in this country since the 1930s, when Keynesian economics provided "legitimacy" for interventions. Similar interventions have been documented for more than a thousand years in other countries. Nowhere have they worked other than to defer problems for an eventually bigger day of reckoning.

Look at some of the outcomes resulting from QE2:

•The working labor force dropped as a percentage of the total labor force.
•The unemployment rate was virtually unchanged.
•Housing prices continued their downslide.
•Growth in the economy slowed from 2.6% to 1.8% in the most recent quarter.
•The rise in the stock market of 26%, according to Mr. Arends, was primarily a result of the deterioration in the value of the dollar.
•Those who owned stocks had gains, but gave part of the gains back due to the rise in prices, especially of imported goods.
•Wage gains trailed reported CPI inflation meaning the poor became worse off.
•Non-investors in the stock market were made worse off as a result of higher prices.
•The US government further added to the debt burden of the public with virtually nothing to show for it other than speculative financial markets.
•The US dollar continued to lose value relative to other fiat currencies.
•Precious metals and other hard assets continue to increase in dollar value.
•The latest job report (May) showed only 54,000 private jobs created, of which reportedly half were jobs at McDonald's.
Supporters claim QE2 created 700,000 new jobs. Mr. Arends points out that, if true, each new job cost $850,000 to create. To put this dubious (desperate) employment claim in perspective, the US economy normally creates about 1.5 million jobs during a six-month period. That is double what is claimed for the stimulus and generally occurs without any help from the government or the Fed. That amount of growth is necessary merely to keep pace with normal growth in the labor force.

A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis questioned the validity of monetary policy as a policy tool for the economy. It determined that economic growth was higher in slow monetary growth periods:

Ironically, economic growth was higher in the years of slow money growth (3.7 percent) than it was in the years of rapid growth (3.2 percent). The same was true for industrial production. Meanwhile, the consumer price index rose 5.1 percent in years of above-average monetary growth and just 2.6 per- cent in below-average years.

The blogger using the name Tyler Durden commented on this Fed study:

QE not only does not result in relative economic outperformence (the opposite), it simply leads to higher inflation, and subdued economic growth. And the Chairman of the Federal Reserve was not aware of this data?

The blogger Mish provided his view of QE independently of the Fed findings:

Wages have not gone up, nor have housing prices, nor has employment, yet the Fed persists with failed policies that slowly destroy the middle class.

The Daily Reckoning commented on prices:

Import prices are also rocketing higher - up 2.2% in April, after a 2.6% jump the previous month. Year-over-year, import prices are up a hefty 11.1%. But once again, the trend is accelerating. For the first four months of this year, import prices have increased at a 26.7% annualized rate!

Pimco, the world's largest bond fund, was an early supporter of government interventions. The principals, Bill Gross, Paul McCully, and Mohamed El-Erian are Keynesian-activist government types. Bill Gross is now one of the biggest critics of US economic policy. According to Bloomberg:

The Federal Reserve's quantitative easing policy failed to meet the "ultimate objective" of boosting employment and economic growth, said Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer at Pacific Investment Management Co.

The Washington Post, long-time cheerleader for big government, now allows statements indicative of the despair and confusion amongst liberal ranks:

The economic recovery is faltering, and Washington is running out of ways to get it back on track.

All these comments/findings are consistent with sound economic theory. The St. Louis Fed data are consistent with centuries of data from around the world. Easy money does not work. If continued too long it always ends with destruction of the currency and social fabric of a nation.

The absurdity that printing money can improve the well-being of a people was demolished concisely by Ludwig von Mises:

If it were really possible to substitute credit expansion (cheap money) for the accumulation of capital goods by saving, there would not be any poverty in the world.

Despite centuries of economic wisdom and experience, the US government has pursued Keynesian nostrums for about 80 years. These policies failed during the Great Depression, despite the myths created by statist historians. While Keynesianism is bad economics, it is good politics. It enables politicians to cover up economic problems at least for a while. That is Keynesianism's great appeal -- it is a political rather than economic appeal. After all, governments do not solve problems; they either create them or hide them. Keynes provided the toolkit to do both.

The last three years have been an attempt to bury monstrous economic problems with government interventions. George W. Bush got away with it in the early 2000s with a credit explosion that appeared to solve immediate economic problems. Problems were not solved; they were hidden and in the process new and bigger ones were created. The most notable of these was the current housing crisis. Prior political regimes are no less guilty of the same behavior.

There are three problems with the Keynesian approach:

1.The economy never properly "heals" from the excesses of the prior boom. As a result, distortions and misallocations of resources and employment do not correct and are carried forward as potential seeds for the next downturn.
2.Each monetary and fiscal intervention must be larger than its predecessor since the problems to be covered up grow bigger and bigger over time.
3.At some point even the ability to produce "newspaper" economic numbers (as opposed to sound growth) ends because
◦a. distortions in the economy become so great as to preclude proper functioning, or
◦b. the need for ever-increasing doses of resources outgrows the economy's capacity to provide them.
The US has reached point 3. Pater Tenebrarum believes point 3a has been reached:

If the economy can not even maintain a 'statistical recovery' in the face of massive monetary pumping and deficit spending, then this shows that the preceding credit expansions have fatally weakened the economy's ability to generate true wealth. The problem is no longer just cyclical, it has become structural.

According to Whether Tenebrarum, no amount of additional stimulus can remedy this problem. It really doesn't matter, because point 3b has also been reached -- we are out of resources. The Federal Reserve has more than tripled its balance sheet in the last three years. Additionally, the Federal Government has created about $5 Trillion in new debt to fund Keynesian stimuli.

There is nothing to show for squandering all these resources other than an increasingly insolvent government, an increasingly impoverished population, and a woefully imbalanced economy. It is time to face up to the fact that eight decades of Keynesian politics has hollowed out the economy, leaving us with massive distortions, imbalances, and unserviceable debt. More of the same medicine will only make each of these conditions worse.

The economic adjustments required now rival those of The Great Depression. They cannot be avoided by anything the government can do. Government can only make matters more intractable.

My guess is that politicians will choose to do more QE. They need to continue to hide the true nature of the economy however possible. It is all they know and all that stands between them and riots in the streets.

The end is known. Its timing and severity are not. Markets, rather than cowardly politicians, will determine both.



4a)Losing Dorothy Rabinowitz
By Ed Kaitz


Eric Hoffer once wrote that the "1960s were decisive" in generating the subsequent feeling that "our economic system and our civilization are nearing their end." Hoffer argued that the "murder weapon was forged in the radical-chic salons of Manhattan and Washington, and in the word factories of our foremost universities."

In other words, America's very existence was being threatened by a generation of self-centered, perpetual undergraduates who refused to grow up: "a horde of educated nobodies who want to be somebodies and end up being busybodies" as Hoffer put it.

The same phenomenon of post-60s perpetual immaturity was brilliantly encapsulated by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Buchanan in his 1977 book Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes. Buchanan noted that the 1960s "zeitgeist" included "a general erosion in public and private manners, increasingly liberalized attitudes toward sexual activities, a declining vitality of the Puritan work ethic" and, among other things, "an explosion of the welfare rolls[.]"

The economist Buchanan argued that a good portion of the 60s zeitgeist was a product of the "Keynesian conversion of the public and the politicians" from the old ethic of long-term saving and investment to the immediate joys of inflationary spending:

It prompts behavioral responses that reflect a generalized shortening of time horizons. "Enjoy, enjoy"-the imperative of our time-becomes a rational response in a setting where tomorrow remains insecure and where the plans made yesterday seem to have been made in folly.

Indeed, it was John Maynard Keynes himself who famously said "in the long run we are all dead." What Keynes meant, according to F.A. Hayek, is that "it does not matter what long-range damage we do; it is the present moment alone, the short run - consisting of public opinion, demands, votes, and all the stuff and bribes of demagoguery - which counts."

After concluding that "it was not philosophy alone that confused Keynes - it was also economics," Hayek made the timeless observation that "morals are concerned with effects in the long run."

It was hard not to take solace in the mature wisdom of philosophers like Hoffer, Buchanan, and Hayek after reading the rather immature blueprint for "Republican victory" offered by the Wall Street Journal's Dorothy Rabinowitz over the weekend.

Rabinowitz's essay seems curious not only in its contempt for Republicans who take a long-term view of our nation's fortunes, but in its disconnected outbursts, its many contradictions, and the general lack of thoughtfulness on display throughout.

In "The Republican Who Can Win," Rabinowitz argues first that the successful Republican candidate will have to "speak in the voice of Americans who know in their bones the extraordinary character of their democracy, and that voice will have to ring out steadily." In addition, he "will have to have a vision of this nation, and its place in the world, that voters recognize, that speaks to a sense of America they can see and take pride in."

When one hears abstractions like "in their bones" and "extraordinary character" and "vision of this nation," a normal deduction would be that ideology should play a powerful role in any successful Republican candidate's campaign -- taking pride in America's unique limited government tradition for example.

For Rabinowitz however, "Americans aren't sitting around worried to death about big government" and any politician who takes a "fevered tone" about cutting spending and government programs will betray an "ideological tinge" that threatens the sort of "pragmatism that inspires voter confidence." Huh?

In addition, Rabinowitz says that the successful Republican candidate "would avoid talk of the costs of our spendthrift ways." He should be extremely wary of mentioning our children and grandchildren:

He would especially avoid painting images of the pain Americans feel at burdening their children and grandchildren. This high-minded talk, rooted in fantasy, isn't going to warm the hearts of mature voters of mature age - and they are legion - who feel no such pain. None. And they don't like being told that they do, or that they should feel it, or that they're stealing from the young.

Rooted in fantasy? The great philosopher and economist Joseph Schumpeter argued in his 1942 masterpiece Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy that the economic performance of capitalism "stands out only if we take a long-run view; any capitalist argument must rest on long-run considerations. In the short run, it is profits and inefficiencies that dominate the picture. In order to accept his lot, the leveler or the chartist of old would have had to comfort himself with the hopes for his great-grandchildren."
What's so brutally ironic about all of this is that if short-term, immediate gratification is the recipe for warming Dorothy's heart, then according to Schumpeter Ms. Rabinowitz is unwittingly fueling the demise of the very economic system that produced her opportunities and lifestyle.

Schumpeter famously argued that the "capitalist order tends to destroy itself and centralist socialism is a likely heir apparent[.]" The reason the capitalist order decomposes is that more and more people begin to realize that sacrificing and saving for family and children "fade out from the moral vision" because of cost/benefit considerations of rational utility:

With the decline of the driving power supplied by the family motive, the business man's time horizon shrinks, roughly, to his life expectation. And he might now be less willing than he was to fulfill that function of earning, saving and investing even if he saw no reason to fear that the results would but swell his tax bills. He drifts into an anti-saving frame of mind and accepts with an increasing readiness anti-saving theories that are indicative of a short-run philosophy.

That "short run philosophy" was provided by none other than John Maynard Keynes. For Keynes, money was to be spent and enjoyed, not hoarded or saved. Government spending would provide jobs, stimulate consumption, and help people break free from long-term, miserly virtues like thrift and abstinence. In a 1930 essay called "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren" Keynes argued that mankind was very close to "solving its economic problem." In other words, material abundance would finally help to eviscerate previously "distasteful" human values such as saving and the Puritan work ethic:

We shall be able to rid ourselves of many pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semipathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

"As a feminist, a bisexual, a Malthusian, and a champion of the sexual revolution," Keynes, according to historian Chrisopher Lasch, understood that "civilized opinion demanded an expansion of the range of private choice. The notion of duty was outdated; one's highest duty was to oneself." It was conditions of scarcity, in other words, that demanded a now outmoded work ethic that required selfless saving for future generations. Our grandchildren's materially abundant future, according to Keynes, would contain less pathology and more healthy experimentation.

Joseph Scumpeter noted with some poignancy that "the family home used to be the mainspring of the typically bourgeois kind of profit motive." There was a "romance and heroism" in the "founding of a family" that provided the family breadwinner with a powerful impetus to endure the "heavy personal sacrifices" that went along with work, investing, and parenting.

According to Dorothy Rabinowitz, however, legions of "voters of mature age" should feel "no such pain" about the "plight of future generations." None. Like the childless Mr. Keynes, Ms. Rabinowitz may have had no children. There is nothing in her WSJ bio about husband or family.

Ms. Rabinowitz uses a physician analogy in her essay to argue what exactly the successful Republican candidate will look like. She says that like a good doctor, a good candidate will "show deliberation and care in the choice [of treatment]" for our ailing economy, which will give Americans confidence in both "the treatment and the doctor."

When "conservatives" fail to see politicians as the patients and the people themselves as the physicians then something is terribly wrong in our country.

Indeed, in his Discourses Niccolò Machiavelli also discussed physicians and government. He noted that in the process of time the original goodness of a Republic is corrupted, and "such a body must of necessity die unless something happens which brings it up to the mark. Thus our medical men, speaking of the human body, say that 'every day it absorbs something which from time to time requires treatment.'"

The most effective treatment, according to Machiavelli, "for men who live together under any constitution" is to "make frequent renovations possible" and restore the Republic to its original constitution. "Without renovation" says Machiavelli, "these bodies do not last."

Words of wisdom for "voters of mature age" who still have an "ideological tinge."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5)The Revolution Blows Up
By Niall Ferguson

The Revolution Blows Up
Egypt’s stock market is tanking and its rich are taking their money to Zurich. Will an economic plunge ruin the Arab Spring?


I recently sat at the desk where John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, his coruscating 1919 polemic against the Versailles Treaty. I asked myself what Keynes would be writing if he were with us today. I think the answer is The Economic Consequences of the Arab Spring.

The point of Keynes’s original tract was that the victors of the First World War were bungling the peace. The punitive reparations they were demanding of Germany, he argued, would plunge that country into an economic crisis. After that would come the political backlash.

“If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe,” Keynes concluded prophetically, “vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of reaction and the despairing convulsions of revolution, before which the -horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing.”

True, we are not demanding reparations of the people of the Middle East and North Africa. But ask yourself: what are we doing today to help them achieve a successful transition to liberty and prosperity? The answer is, not enough.

It is now nearly six months since the Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi made himself the fuse for a regionwide revolutionary explosion. His self-immolation not only toppled Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, but also his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak. A wave of protest swept through Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, and Syria. Rebellion turned into full-blown civil war in Libya. The same seems close to happening in Yemen.

Touring Egypt After the Revolution Western journalists flocked to Cairo’s Tahrir Square and wrote euphoric articles echoing William Wordsworth’s lines on the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!” With a blithe disregard for historical accuracy, they dubbed it the Arab Spring, an allusion to the (unsuccessful) 1968 Czech uprising against Soviet communism.

Well, it’s not so blissful now, and least of all for the youthful Arabs who began this revolution.

This crisis had economic origins. Young people took to the streets because of rising food prices, high unemployment, and the corruption that pervades economic life in the region. Expensive food has been a global phenomenon in the last two years. So the key to the revolution was the disproportionately high unemployment of young Arabs and their dissatisfaction with a parasitical state. Last year 90 percent of the unemployed in Egypt were young (15 to 24). The unemployment rate among high-school and college graduates in Tunisia was 24 percent, far above the official rate.

For some countries in the region the revolution has brought an economic windfall in the form of sharply higher oil prices. The oil exporters of the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain) have thus far been earning enough from their black gold to buy off or coerce their populations into behaving themselves—though oil alone is no guarantee of stability, as is clear in Libya and Yemen. Elsewhere, however, the economic consequences of the Arab revolutionary wave have been almost entirely negative.

In a report published last month, the Institute of International Finance predicted that growth in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia will fall from 4.4 percent in 2010 to -0.5 percent this year. Egypt’s economy will contract by 2.5 percent, Yemen’s by 4 percent.

This is partly because revolutions themselves cause damage and disrupt work. Egypt’s Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics estimates that the economic losses incurred when the crowds thronged Tahrir Square were about $1.7 billion. Add to that the subsequent losses in export earnings and revenue from tourism (journalists rush in where holidaymakers fear to tread). Then comes the cost of the ongoing disruption due to strikes and the enforced return of more than a million migrant workers fleeing war-torn Libya.

The big story, however, is capital flight. Egyptian businessmen complain of soaring crime in the cities, the difficulty of carrying out normal transactions, and, above all, nerve--racking political uncertainty. Rich Arabs do not trust this revolution. Since January they have been rushing to get their cash into safe havens, some arriving in London or Zurich with suitcases full of cash. According to Reuters, the country’s foreign--exchange reserves fell by as much as a third in the first three months of the year. Al-Hayat newspaper estimates that $30 billion has left Egypt since the onset of the Arab Spring.

To put that figure in perspective, the World Bank has offered to give Egypt up to $1 billion in each of the next two years (if the government meets certain conditions), and to lend a further $2.5 billion. The U.S. government has pledged $2 billion in the form of loan guarantees for American businesses and partial debt forgiveness. But foreign investors continue to shun the region. The Egyptian stock market is currently trading at 23 percent below its pre--crisis peak.

The bottom line is that economic conditions have gotten worse, not better, as a result of the Arab Spring. Inflation is now above 12 percent in Egypt. Unemployment is up, too.

None of this should surprise us. Such is the life cycle of revolutions. What begins with euphoric crowds soon slides into a second phase of economic paralysis. The same happened in France after the initial “bliss” of 1789 and in Russia after 1917. In each case, exuberance at the overthrow of the old regime was swiftly succeeded by exasperation at the decline in living standards. And that was what gave the political extremists their opportunity to peddle their radical ideology of war against internal and external foes. Yesterday, the Jacobins and Bolsheviks. Tomorrow, I fear, the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda.

As Keynes might have written, nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of reaction and revolution, before which the horrors of the late war on terror will fade into nothing.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6)Rep. Anthony Weiner: 'The Picture Was of Me and I Sent It'

Anthony Wiener: 'I am Not Resigning'
By CHRIS CUOMO, CHRIS VLASTO and DEVIN DWYer

Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York said today he has engaged in "several inappropriate" electronic relationships with six women over three years, and that he publicly lied about a photo of himself sent over Twitter to a college student in Seattle over a week ago.

"I take full responsibility for my actions," Weiner said. "The picture was of me, and I sent it."

The announcement came as ABC News prepared to release an interview with Meagan Broussard, a 26-year-old single mother from Texas who provided dozens of photos, emails, Facebook messages and cell phone call logs that she says chronicle a sexually-charged electronic relationship with Weiner that rapidly-evolved for more than a month, starting on April 20, 2011.


ABC News reached out to Weiner earlier today for comment about his possible ties to Broussard, but he did not respond to requests for an interview. At a press conference later, Weiner confirmed Broussard was one of the women with whom he sexted.

Broussard's story had threatened to expose the secret online life of one of the House Democrats' most popular members, and a man many considered a leading candidate for mayor of New York City.

It also raised new questions about Weiner's explanation for how a photo of a man's groin area ended up on his public Twitter feed on May 27. Today the congressman said he accidentally sent the image to a woman, Gennette Cordova, who was following him on Twitter, as a joke.


Meagan Broussard, 26, provided ABC News with photos, emails, Facebook message and phone call logs she says chronicle a sexually-charged electronic relationship with a man identifying himself as Anthony Weiner.

"I just chuckled," Broussard, a nursing student, said of her reaction to Weiner's initial response to the Twitter incident. "It would be one thing if he came out and said, 'Hey, so what?' But now he's saying he got hacked?"

Broussard said she received the same photo of a man's crotch on May 18 in an email from a man who she then believed was Weiner.

Weiner told ABC News last week that the Twitter incident was a "prank" on him, but he neither confirmed nor denied at the time that the photo depicted his body. "I am reluctant to say anything definitively about this," he said of the photo.

Broussard, who describes herself as disinterested in politics and previously unaware of Weiner, said that she has never met the congressman in person and doesn't "think he's a bad guy." And, she said, she actively participated in "sexting" -- as she has done frequently with other men online -- with the man she presumed to be Weiner.

During one flirtatious Facebook chat last month, Broussard said, she issued the man on the other end a challenge.

"I asked him to take a picture and write 'me' on it so I would know," Broussard said in an interview.

The reply, she says, came moments later. Email records provided to ABC News by Broussard show that at 3:08 p.m. on May 5th she received a message from anthonyweiner@aol.com, which is listed as an email address for Weiner on one campaign document found online.

The message included an image of a man, who appears to be Weiner, sporting a tie and a wedding band, holding up the message "me" on a piece of white paper.

"I didn't think it was him," she says. "I thought for sure, 'why would someone in that position be doing this?'"

Broussard said she wanted to come forward now out of concerns for her own image as an aspiring nurse, and that of her 3-year-old daughter, should her identity be leaked online. More than a dozen photos sent by Broussard to anthonyweiner@aol.com and a second account she believed was Weiner's were obtained and licensed from her by ABC News.

"I have my own life, my own things where I'm from and I just wanted to go ahead with them. I thought I could just be private about it, but there's no reason for me to hide," she said. "I didn't do anything wrong. I don't know him. I'm just putting my story out there before anyone else tries to."

Broussard said she confided about her experiences with several close friends, including one with Republican political ties. The man, whom she declined to identify, encouraged her to share her story with Matt Drudge and conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart.

Breitbart, who first published details of Broussard's story on Biggovernment.com, shared her identity with ABC News.

Broussard said her first contact with Weiner occurred on April 20 after she "liked" a YouTube clip of one of Weiner's speeches that had been posted to his Facebook page.

She also commented -- "hottttt" -- on the link, which is still publicly visible on Weiner's page and has received hundreds of other comments from Facebook users.

Weiner "almost immediately" added Broussard as a Facebook friend through his personal profile account, she said. And she accepted his request.

According to Broussard, the two immediately began messaging through Facebook chat, eventually exchanging "hundreds of messages," many of a sexual nature.

Because of how Facebook messaging works, ABC News was not able to view records of the alleged chats.

He would say "just good morning, how are you doing, what are you doing today? What are you wearing? What do you like? You know, in the bedroom, you know, that sort of thing," she said.

During one Facebook chat conversation, Broussard said she voiced uneasiness with the electronic relationship, to which she says Weiner replied, "you are not stalking me....I am stalking you."

In another conversation, Broussard said she asked Weiner, "Why are you so open? I said, I'm not an open book like that."

"He replied, 'I'm an open book. Maybe too open,'" she said.

Occasionally while chatting through Facebook, the two would simultaneously use email to exchange photos, she said.

Two images Broussard received from anthonyweiner@aol.com on May 4 and May 5 show what appears to be Weiner's face.

One, sent under the subject line "Me and the pussys," appears to show Weiner seated on a sofa in an undershirt next to cats; the other appears to depict Weiner in an office holding the white piece of paper. Both appear to have been sent via Blackbery, according to email records.

Later in the month, Broussard received three, more graphic images from the address RockOh77@yahoo.com, which she said was Weiner's online alias.

A Google search for the "RockOh77" email address returns only one website – a profile for the user name on Invisible.ir, which is described as a web tool that allows "hiding your images from others." On the page are three previously-unseen thumbnail photos of a bare-chested man that appears to be Weiner.

On May 18, Broussard received an image from the RockOh77 account that shows a man's erect penis. Two days later, she received a shot of a bare-chested man sitting at an office desk. The man in the photo shares facial features with Weiner, and personal photographs in the background resemble his known aquaintances.

"I don't think he has any control over what he's doing in this area," Broussard said. "I don't think someone can be that open in that amount of time."

The relationship between Broussard and Weiner only ventured out of the digital world once, she said, when a man identifying himself as Weiner called by phone from a number associated with Weiner's New York congressional office on the afternoon of May 18.

"The day he called he just said, 'Who in the world would be acting like me?' laughing about it," she said.

"You're an internet rat, aren't you?" Broussard said she asked him, to which Weiner just sort of giggled.

Then, she says, the conversation got personal. "He heard her [Broussard's daughter] in the background, I think, and he said, 'Oh is that --' and then he said her name, and I said, 'yeah, it's her birthday,' and that kind of freaked me out because you had to pilfer through my Facebook to find out her name."

After they hung up, Broussard said she called the number back to see if it was actually him. A Weiner office receptionist answered, she said. Broussard provided a record of the call to ABC News.

Their last correspondence, she says, was through Facebook message on May 27, just hours before the alleged "hack" of Weiner's Twitter account occurred.

"Are you offline?" Broussard wrote at 3:37 pm. "Crashed back up," Weiner replied at 4:21 pm. Broussard last sent messages via Facebook and email to the man she believed to be Weiner on May 31, but has not received replies.

"I don't think he's a bad guy. I think he's got issues just like everybody else," Broussard said. "Everyone's standards are different, but to be elected to Congress and sit there all day on Facebook and chatting?"
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------