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Just as I have been writing Obama is far more vulnerable than his captive press and media mavens want us to believe.
The poll also is bad news for Sara Palin whom Obama's press and media mavens want you to believe is running for the presidency. I suspect old Sara is having fun jerking the jerks in the press and media around, adding chits to her position as a king maker and a possible run for the Senate from Arizona. (See 2 below.)
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Obama's economic advisor has resigned. Apparently, Goolsbee is tired of bringing Obama bad news. Working for a man who does not understand capitalism and economics must have proven very frustrating. (See 3 below.)
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'Nobeler' Paul Krugman needs to read Amity Shlaes' book. (See 4 below.)
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After Obama made his '67 Border pronouncements I warned it would lead to many deaths. The parade of death has begun and I suspect will intensify. Assad, however, was listening and has used Obama's remarks to pay Syrians to attack Israel resulting in some attacker deaths. Why? Because Assad needed to take the spotlight off his own brutality against his own citizens.
Obama and Sec. Clinton continue to believe they can reform Assad by catering to him.
More imbecilic foreign policy mistakes.(See 5 below.)
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Obama - our 'what me worry president' - is not concerned about 'double dip' because he has a job - at least for another few years. (See 6 and 6a below.)
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Why the military dress code? (See 7 below.)
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Dick
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1)Accusation That Voter ID Is Racist Demeans Blacks
By Dennis Prager
While dining out last week, I periodically looked up at one of the television monitors to see the score of the first game of the NBA finals. As there was no sound on to interrupt diners' conversations, the monitor was in caption mode: One could read rather than hear the words spoken. At the conclusion of the game, an announcer was interviewing a member of the victorious Miami Heat players. I saw from the captions the player saying the words "they isn't."
Closed captions display the words spoken. They don't correct for poor grammar.
All I could think was: How can a grown man in America today say "they isn't" rather than "they aren't"?
First, how is it possible for anyone to graduate an American elementary school, not to mention a high school or, most incredibly, attend college, and leave with an inability to conjugate the verb "to be"?
Second, has anyone -- a parent or another relative, a teacher, a friend, a coach -- in that player's life ever corrected his grammar?
I assume that the answer to the second question is "No."
And I assume that the answers to both questions are related: The left, which dominates our culture and educational institutions, has too often lowered standards for black Americans. Even worse, it has declared that if you are black, "they isn't" is not only not to be corrected, but many in academia have declared it an acceptable form of English, i.e., Ebonics, or Black English.
It doesn't end.
I saw "they isn't" the same week the Democrats and others on the left virtually unanimously condemned all Republican attempts in state legislatures to pass legislation requiring voters to show a photo ID. The Democrats labeled it a means of "disenfranchising" blacks. Many Democrats compared it to Jim Crow laws.
"Jim Crow, move over -- the Wisconsin Republicans have taken your place," charged Wisconsin Democratic State Sen. Bob Jauch, referring to his state's new voter ID law.
It is hard to imagine a more demeaning statement about black America than labeling demands that all voters show a photo ID anti-black.
This is easily demonstrated. Imagine if some Democratic politician had announced that demanding a photo ID at the voting booth was an attempt to keep Jewish Americans from voting. No one would understand what the person was talking about. But why not? Jews vote almost as lopsidedly Democrat as do blacks. So why weren't Jews included in liberal objections to voter ID laws?
We all know the answer. Jews are generally considered intelligent and therefore no one would assume that obtaining a photo ID was demanding too much of even poor Jews (yes, there are poor Jews). Therefore, one can only infer that the argument that demanding photo ID for voting will disenfranchise many blacks suggests that many blacks lack the capacity to obtain a photo ID.
If that is not a legitimate inference, then only one other inference is possible: The argument is made solely in order to score political points by portraying black Americans as victims of Republican racism. Of course, that argument simply takes us back to the original question: Why does requiring a photo ID to vote prevent blacks from voting?
It is, however, effective. Calling Republicans racist has worked for half a century and will not be abandoned until it is universally recognized as the libel that it is.
What we have in both instances -- the poor grammar that too many blacks use and the argument that demanding a photo ID is too hard on blacks -- is not Republican racism. What we have are two more examples of the destructive consequences of leftist policies on black America.
It is difficult to overstate the negative impact making lesser demands on individuals, especially members of select groups, has on them. The message is as clear as day: We expect less of you. Why? Because we think less of you.
Do most of those on the left really think less of black Americans?
Given the lack of demands, given the rationalization for poor speech (before the left took over education, both blacks and whites spoke and wrote far better), given the advocacy of lowering standards for blacks from everything from civil service tests to college admissions and given other examples, it is hard not to conclude that many on the left really do think black Americans are not equally capable of excellence (outside of sports and entertainment). It is what George W. Bush called "the soft bigotry of low expectations."
If this is not the case, there are two other explanations.
One is guilt. White liberals are so filled with guilt over historic American maltreatment of blacks that they have somehow concluded that making the same demands of blacks as of all other Americans is somehow unfair.
The other is political opportunism -- portray liberals and their policies as the saviors of black Americans. Aside from its constituting cynical exploitation, the problem is that in order to portray oneself as another person's savior, one must portray the other as in need of saving.
Conservative Americans, on the other hand, actually believe there is no difference between black and non-black abilities, and therefore see only harm in depicting a substantial percentage of the black population as essentially incapable of obtaining a photo ID.
Which group has more respect for black Americans? The answer is obvious. And one day, most black Americans will know the real answer to that question. That will be the beginning of the final stage of black liberation, as well as the end of the Democratic Party as we now know it.
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2)Obama loses bin Laden bounce; Romney on the move among GOP contenders
By Dan Balz and Jon Cohen
The public opinion boost President Obama received after the killing of Osama bin Laden has dissipated, and Americans’ disapproval of how he is handling the nation’s economy and the deficit has reached new highs, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The survey portrays a broadly pessimistic mood in the country this spring as higher gasoline prices, sliding home values and a disappointing employment picture have raised fresh concerns about the pace of the economic recovery.
Washington Post-ABC News poll data. Get the latest from PostPolitics.
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By 2 to 1, Americans say the country is pretty seriously on the wrong track, and nine in 10 continue to rate the economy in negative terms. Nearly six in 10 say the economy has not started to recover, regardless of what official statistics may say, and most of those who say it has improved rate the recovery as weak.
New Post-ABC numbers show Obama leading five of six potential Republican presidential rivals tested in the poll. But he is in a dead heat with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who formally announced his 2012 candidacy last week, making jobs and the economy the central issues in his campaign.
Among all Americans, Obama and Romney are knotted at 47 percent each, and among registered voters, the former governor is numerically ahead, 49 percent to 46 percent.
Overall, about six in 10 of those surveyed give Obama negative marks on the economy and the deficit. Significantly, nearly half strongly disapprove of his performance in these two crucial areas. Nearly two-thirds of political independents disapprove of the president’s handling of the economy, including — for the first time — a slim majority who do so strongly.
In another indicator of rapidly shifting views on economic issues, 45 percent trust congressional Republicans over the president when it comes to dealing with the economy, an 11-point improvement for the GOP since March. Still, nearly as many, 42 percent, side with Obama on this issue.
The president has sought to point to progress on the economy, particularly in the automobile industry, and to argue that the policies he put in place at the beginning of his term are working. But the combined effects of weak economic indicators and dissatisfaction among the public are adding to the political pressures on the White House as the president’s advisers look toward what could be a difficult 2012 reelection campaign.
Meanwhile, Romney emerges in the new survey as the strongest current or prospective Republican candidate in the 2012 presidential field. Although he is by no means in a secure spot, on virtually every measure, the former governor appears better positioned than any of his rivals.
In contrast, the poll brings more bad news for former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, whose bus tour along the East Coast last week renewed speculation that she might join the race.
Almost two-thirds of all Americans say they “definitely would not” vote for Palin for president. She is predictably unpopular with Democrats and most independents, but the new survey underscores the hurdles she would face if she became a candidate: 42 percent of Republicans say they’ve ruled out supporting her candidacy.
More than six in 10 Americans say they do not consider Palin qualified to serve as president. That is a slightly better rating for the former governor than through most of last year, but is another indication of widespread public doubts about a possible presidential run.
The Post-ABC poll asked Republicans and GOP-leaning independents whom they would vote for if a primary or caucus were held now in their state. Romney topped the list, with 21 percent, followed by Palin at 17 percent. No one else reached double digits, although former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has suddenly shown interest in becoming a candidate, is close, at 8 percent. Without Palin in the race, Romney scores 25 percent, with all others in the single digits.
In another measure of the field, Republicans chose Romney as the only one of a dozen possible candidates they would “strongly consider” for the party’s nomination as opposed to stating that they definitely would not vote for him. He and Palin scored equal numbers of respondents who said they would strongly consider supporting them, but Palin has more than double the percentage who have ruled her out.
Other candidates fared poorly on this count, including former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), whose campaign got off to a rocky start; Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.), a libertarian who has a passionate following but many detractors; and former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.), who announced his candidacy on Monday.
The Massachusetts health-care plan enacted under Romney remains a potentially serious problem in the former governor’s bid. By nearly 2 to 1, Republicans oppose the plan, with strong detractors far outnumbering solid supporters. But there is some potential for him to frame the matter: Almost four in 10 Republicans expressed no opinion about the state’s program.
Overall dissatisfaction with the GOP field remains high, with as many respondents saying they are unhappy with their choices as say they are satisfied. At this time four years ago, nearly seven in 10 Republicans said they were satisfied with their field of candidates.
In head-to-head matchups with Obama, Palin trails by 17 percentage points, the worst of the six possible candidates tested. The president leads Gingrich and former Utah governor Jon Huntsman Jr. by 10 points. He runs 11 points ahead of former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty and 13 points ahead of Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.).
Romney owes his relatively good standing against the president to support from independents. He and Obama garner roughly equal percentages from those in their own parties. But independents split for Romney 50 percent to 43 percent.
The president continues to receive positive marks as a strong leader, but the 55 percent rating marks a low point of his presidency. He gets mixed reviews on empathy and on sharing the same values as respondents.
The telephone poll was conducted June 2-5 among a random national sample of 1,002 adults. The results from the full survey have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
Polling manager Peyton M. Craighill and polling analyst Scott Clement contributed to this report.
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3) Goolsbee says goodbye
By Alister Bull and Caren Bohan
Top White House economist Austan Goolsbee said on Monday he was stepping down, marking the exit of one of President Barack Obama's top aides at a time when new signs of weakness have emerged in the economy.
Less than a year after he was named chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Goolsbee plans to return to his teaching job at the University of Chicago, the Obama administration said in a statement. He will be back in Chicago in time for the start of the next school year.
Goolsbee's departure leaves Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner as the sole remaining senior member of Obama's original economic team, as the president is under pressure to persuade Americans that he has a plan to boost growth.
Obama could be vulnerable on the economy as he fights for re-election next year and must convince voters his policies will succeed. Analysts say that recent disappointing data has called the vigor of the economic recovery into question.
Goolsbee has been one of the administration's more visible spokesmen on the economy. Lately he has emphasized his view that the recovery remains solidly on track, despite a report on Friday showing tepid jobs growth and a rise in the unemployment rate in May to 9.1 percent from 9 percent in April.
"He has helped steer our country out of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and although there is still much work ahead, his insights and counsel have helped lead us toward an economy that is growing and creating millions of jobs," Obama said in a statement.
Goolsbee, who advised Obama's campaign for the Senate in 2004 and his 2008 presidential campaign, was seen as one of the administration's best communicators and his sudden departure will clearly be a loss for the White House.
Republicans, who see voters' worries over the economy as their best chance of defeating Obama next year, seized on the news.
"With anemic job growth, plunging economic confidence, and no real plan to rein in the deficit, this departure is just the latest sign that the president has no answers for Americans concerned about the economy," said Brendan Buck, spokesman for Republican House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner.
In addition to the gloomy May jobs report, other data including disappointing reports on housing and manufacturing have suggested the recovery was losing momentum.
Republicans are also battling with Obama's Democrats over curbing the country's long-term deficit and have demanded deep spending cuts in return for agreeing to raise the $14.3 trillion debt limit before an August 2 deadline.
At the beginning of this year, Goolsbee warned that a failure by Congress to raise the nation's borrowing limit could be "catastrophic" for the economy, a line the White House has repeated in the months since then as it negotiates with Republicans over legislation to lift the debt ceiling.
Senior administration officials, playing down the reasons for his exit, said Goolsbee was departing to preserve his post as a tenured professor in Chicago, which could have expired if he had stayed much longer in Washington.
Before being promoted to CEA chairman last September, Goolsbee served as one of the three members of the Council of Economic Advisers, whose main function is to provide economic forecasts for the president.
He also was a staff economist to the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, an outside panel of economic advisers led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.
Larry Summers, former director of the White House National Economic Council, stepped down at the end of last year to return to his teaching job at Harvard University.
Christina Romer, his predecessor as CEA chair, left last August, also to return to academia, and Peter Orszag resigned as White House budget director last July.
From Chicago, where he will teach at the Graduate School of Business, Goolsbee will also serve as an outside adviser to Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, according to an administration official.
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4)What Paul Krugman Misses About 1937 Redux: Echoes
By Amity Shlaes
What if it just keeps going? That’s the question Americans are asking as they consider last month's 9.1 percent unemployment rate, still so high 33 months after the crash of September 2008. Scholars of economic history are asking another question: Are we repeating 1937?
That year, when Americans were expecting their economy to finally pull out of the Great Depression, the stock market dove again, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropping from the 190s in March 1937 to less than 100 in March 1938. Nonfarm private unemployment, the measure of Roosevelt's industrial economy, increased to more than 18 percent. Industrial production plunged by a third.
The problem then was monetary, some economists now say. Paul Krugman, in his New York Times column on June 2, argued that monetary and fiscal tightening caused the 1937 downturn, and might be squeezing the breath out of the economy now, precluding job creation. Krugman cites Gauti B. Eggertsson of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, who recently published blog posts and papers noting that the later 1930s, as now, saw higher commodity prices. Officials considered these rising prices a signal of inflation, and pressed for tightening. They erred.
This version of history holds, to some extent.
Or: Up to a point, Lord Krugman. After spending heavily during the 1936 election, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was now feeling more like a thrifty "Dutch householder," as the journalist Anne O'Hare McCormick wrote, and his administration cut executive-branch employees. His Treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, claimed that the government had "licked the Great Depression." Tax increases, themselves a form of fiscal tightening, were passed into law. In January 1937, Americans began to make their first payments into Social Security, taking away cash that workers might have spent on food, housing, clothing, liquor or cigarettes.
On the monetary side, the Fed doubled reserve requirements on banks, seeking to make them less vulnerable to failure. What the Federal Reserve didn't anticipate was that this would make the banks nervous, leading them to amass yet more reserves and taking money out of circulation. The Fed and the Treasury also fiddled with the gold-standard system for fear of inflation.
But two other factors are omitted from this narrative. The first is the price of labor. The Wagner Act, the great modern labor statute, became law in 1935. It made possible the closed shop, under which only unionized workers were allowed into a unit. In 1937, after Roosevelt was safely elected, labor leader John L. Lewis and his Congress of Industrial Organizations began using their new power to its full extent. Labor's tour de force in this period is memorialized in the photos we still recognize today of sit-down strikes at the General Motors Co. plant in Flint, Michigan. Strike days in 1937 totaled 28 million, up from 14 million during the election year.
Such labor stoppages, and the threat of more, led companies to raise wages more than they could afford to. Harold Cole of the University of Pennsylvania and Lee Ohanian of the University of California, Los Angeles, have demonstrated that wages in the latter half of the 1930s were well above trend for the entire century. Employers also hired less: Even as unionization increased, nonfarm unemployment did as well.
The second under-discussed issue is what scholar Robert Higgs has called "regime uncertainty." Roosevelt's victory in 1936 had been so convincing that people believed he might do anything. FDR reinforced this suspicion with an inaugural address so aggressive that modern presidential advisers would never allow it on the teleprompter. Roosevelt told the nation he sought in government "an instrument of unimagined power." That scared markets and small businesses.
Roosevelt relished hunting down big firms through regulatory action and blaming new sectors, such as utilities, for slowdowns -- on some days. Other days, he invited business leaders into the Oval Office and talked about partnership and a "breathing spell."
This inconsistency itself posed a problem. The diary of an Ohio lawyer named Daniel Roth, which was recently republished, captures the pervasive anxiety of the period. "We are having a bad steel strike in Youngstown and the mills have closed," Roth wrote on June 22, 1937. "The state and federal governments seem to support the labor unions and there has been a complete breakdown of law and order. Business is very quiet."
From the U.K., John Maynard Keynes wrote to FDR that it was all right to nationalize utilities or to leave them alone -- but what, Keynes asked, was "the object of chasing the utilities around the lot every other week?”"
In this respect, the 1938 midterm gains by Republicans were important because they signaled to Americans that there were limits to Roosevelt's power. And Roosevelt's decision to turn his attention to Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, and away from the supposed excesses of big business, contributed as much as anything else to the eventual recovery.
Addressing these last two areas in today's economy is not hard. To make employment less expensive, the government can undo the health-care law, our modern version of the Wagner Act, so that employers needn't worry that hiring implies accepting costs they can't control or even predict. Another boost to hiring would be a more reasonable National Labor Relations Board, not the current one, which chases companies such as Boeing Co. around the equivalent of Keynes's lot trying to drive up wages. Another would be to cut taxes for employers, big and small. Uncertainty would diminish if both parties publicly committed to a smaller and less intrusive government.
The problem isn't a single "Mistake of 1937" or "Mistake of 2011." It is the mistakes, multiple, of both periods.
(Amity Shlaes, a Bloomberg View columnist and a senior fellow in economic history at the Council on Foreign Relations, oversees the Echoes blog. The opinions expressed are her own.)
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5)Obama’s blunder haunts
Apparently large numbers of Palestinians have taken President Barack Obama at his word when he said he wants Israel to return to its 1967 borders. How else to explain the near invasion by Palestinian protesters of the Golan Heights, taken by Israel during the Six-Day War.
Since that time the Golan has provided a buffer zone between Israel and Syria, although one insufficient to protect the Jewish state from rockets launched by Hezbollah terrorists when they are so inclined.
Perhaps to provide a needed distraction from the slaughter of its own people on the streets of Syria and the murder and torture of Syrian children at government hands, the Assad regime apparently allowed and/or encouraged Palestinians who live in refugee camps near that border to begin marching on Israel’s northern border over the weekend. By Monday the Syrians had resumed manning their own checkpoints and the protesters dwindled to a precious few.
But such is the power of words — especially words spoken in Washington. A return by Israel to its 1967 borders would also give back the Golan Heights to Syria.
Is that really what Obama wants?
To reward one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships for its “good behavior” by handing off land that Israel has turned into an extraordinary wine growing region?
The Syrian Foreign Ministry issued a statement Monday insisting Palestinian and Syrian demonstrators at the border were reaffirming their natural and legal right to liberate and return to their land.
Perhaps it’s time Obama issued yet another “clarification” of his remarks.
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6)Obama: "I'm Not Concerned About A Double-Dip Recession"
"I'm not concerned about a double-dip recession, I'm concerned that the fact that the recovery we're on is not producing jobs as quickly as I wanted to happen. Prior to this month, we have seen three months of very robust job growth in the private sector. And, so we are very encouraged by that. This month, we still saw job growth in the private sector, but it slowed down," President Obama said at a press conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
6a)
Is there something in the Hudson River water?
With millions of Americans worried about 9.1% unemployment and a sputtering economy, it is shameful the Democrat leadership in Washington is more concerned about saving the jobs of disgraced Democrat members of Congress.
The latest example of the Democrats' "jobs we saved" charade is Representative Anthony Weiner. Just like with Congressmen William Jefferson ($80k in the freezer) and Charlie Rangel (failure to pay taxes) -- Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat leaders' only Jobs Plan is to save their own jobs.
Congressman Weiner's actions and deception are unacceptable and he should resign. We do not need an investigation to know he lied and acted inappropriately, we need a resignation.
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7)Why did the British wear red coats in battle?
During the recent royal wedding, the millions around the world saw that Prince William chose to wear a uniform that included the famous British "red coat." Many people have asked, "why did the British wear red coats in battle?"
A long time ago, Britain and France were at war. During one battle, the French captured a British Colonel. They took him to their headquarters, and the French General began to question him.
Finally, as an afterthought, the French General asked, “Why do you British officers all wear red coats? Don’t you know the red material makes you easier targets for us to shoot at?”
In his casual, matter-of-fact, way, the officer informed the General that the reason British officers wear red coats is so that if they are shot, the blood won’t show, and the men they are leading won’t panic.
And that is why, from that day forward, all French Army officers wear brown trousers.
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