Happy Holloween. The economy and misguided riff raff on Wall Street is scary enough.
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Someone answered me regarding whether our Republic will survive.
By survive, I mean as a society ruled by our Constitution, citizens enjoying the freedoms intended as a consequence and a continued bright future under a Capitalistic economic order allowing for free markets, less government control etc.
Were I to narrow my concerns to six they would be:
a) The burden of debt, government overreach and senseless rules and regulations
b) The destruction of our currency
c) The destruction of our public education
d) The destruction of the family unit
e) The failure to protect our borders.
f) Abdication of the press of their responsibility to inform factually. (See 1 below)
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One down and a lot more to go. (See 2 below.)
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This article suggests Obama does not understand his job as president. That may be the case but I would suggest he does understand his role is and that is to radically change our nation in keeping with his radical philosophy.
Maybe Obama truly is "The Manchurian Candidate?"
Does Obama siding with anarchists qualify him for that designation? (See 3, 3a and
3b below.)
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Have small town Americans recaptured their instinctive good sense? (See 4 beow.)
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Have a great weekend and if you come upon a protester who does not understand what he is protesting about buy him a Rolex and make him a true Wall Street capitalist!
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Dick
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1) Obama Is the shepherd I did not want.
He leadeth me
Beside the still factories.
He restoreth my faith in the Republican party.
He guideth me in the path of unemployment
For his party's sake.
Yea, Though I walk through the valley of the bread line,
I shall fear no hunger, for his bailouts are with me.
He has Anointed my income with taxes,
My expenses runneth over.
Surely, poverty and hard living will follow me all the days of my life,
And I will live in a mortgaged home forever.
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WILL USA SURVIVE?
The folks who are getting the free stuff, don't like the folks who are paying for the free stuff, because the folks who are paying for the free stuff can no longer afford to pay for both the free stuff and their own stuff.
The folks who are paying for the free stuff want the free stuff to stop, and the folks who are getting the free stuff want even more free stuff on top of the free stuff they are already getting!
Now... The people who are forcing the people who pay for the free stuff have told the people who are RECEIVING the free stuff, that the people who are PAYING for the free stuff, are being mean, prejudiced, and racist.
So... The people who are GETTING the free stuff have been convinced they need to hate the people who are paying for the free stuff by the people who are forcing some people to pay for their free stuff, and giving them the free stuff in the first place.
We have let the free stuff giving go on for so long that there are now more people getting free stuff than paying for the free stuff.
Now understand this. All great democracies have committed financial suicide somewhere between 200 and 250 years after being founded. The reason? The voters figured out they could vote themselves money from the treasury by electing people who promised to give them money from the treasury in exchange for electing them.
The United States officially became a Republic in 1776, 235 years ago. The number of people now getting free stuff outnumbers the people paying for the free stuff. We have one chance to change that. In 2012. Failure to change that spells the end of the United States as we know it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 2)Western sources confirm Qaddafi was captured in Sirte and died of wounds
Western sources confirm the NTC report that Muammar Qaddafi was captured Thursday, Oct. 20 in or near Sirte. There are conflicting reports of his condition. He was saidto be wounded in two legs, according to an NTC official. According to Arab sources, he died of wounds possibly from a NATO air strike on his convoy as he was in flight from Sirte, one of his last strongholds. The State Department has not been able to confirm the report of Qaddafi's capture or death. Rebel troops are celebrating the end of the 42-year Libyan ruler although there is no independent confirmation of Qaddafi's capture or death.
Earlier Thursday, the NTC claimed to have achieved complete control of the city after long months of siege against fierce resistance. For weeks, he was believed be hiding in Libya's southern desert.
As long as Qaddafi was at liberty, the interim government was prevented from establishing its legitimacy and a stable administration. His capture completes the rebel victory. The interim regime must decide whether to try the deposed ruler before a local court or hand him over to the international court.
For the rebel forces, Qaddafi's capture or death would be a major psychological and political triumph. However, Libya remains bitterly polarized between pro- and anti-Qaddafi factions with scores of rival militias and hundreds of tribes at each other's throats. Qaddafi's demise rather than promoting unity and ending the conflict could trigger wider civil bloodshed.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3) Mr. President, Do You Recall What Your Job Is?
By Jim Yardley
Listening to President Obama speak at event after event, the question that continues to come to mind is this: does this guy understand what his job actually is?
The president continually sounds very much like a fire marshal. He sounds like that guy who has the job of discovering the root cause of a fire, determining if it had been set deliberately, and if it had been, identifying the perpetrator and bringing him to justice.
This is an important function, to be sure, and in no way is it a minor responsibility. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama seems confused about his job responsibilities. In 2008 he was not elected to be the nation's fire marshal.
He was hired to be the nation's chief fireman.
In short, his job is not to allocate blame for the fire. His job, to put it quite simply, is to put the damn fire out.
We didn't elect the man to view the fire from some Olympian height until it burns itself out from lack of fuel, and only then sally forth and (predictably) identify Republicans protecting millionaires and billionaires as those who were vigorously rubbing two mortgage derivatives together and started the fire in the first place. But America has dozens of fires blazing away every single day.
We have 14 million men and women out of work.
We have younger children who appear to be unable to improve their standardized test scores no matter how much money is channeled to the teachers' unions. We have older children who appear equally clueless when asked why they are "occupying" Wall Street or what they hope to accomplish.
We are continuing to lose tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs to Mexico and various countries in the Far East, and nothing suggested as a cure by the president or by unions that supported and helped elect him in 2008 has the slightest chance of reversing that trend.
We find ourselves utterly dependent on energy from nations that are our avowed enemies and hate us and everything we stand for with a religious fervor or, perhaps more accurately, because of a religious fervor.
Hundreds of thousands of our people, who invested in the American Dream of owning their own homes, dutifully making their mortgage payments, and adding to the equity in their homes to help fund their retirements, now find that their dreams have turned to dust and they are in many cases shackled to their residence, with no escape hatch in sight.
Yes, Mr. President, you will get agreement that both political parties are complicit. But then, if you had surrounded yourself with a fire department of real adults, they could have told you that there is only one law rooted in the Washington political scene that has ever worked perfectly: the Law of Unintended Consequences.
It would seem unlikely that Barack Obama could possibly put all these fires out, but it would at least be possible to get one or two under control. Instead of seeking to assign blame for the economic meltdown that most of the world is enduring right now, perhaps Mr. Obama could admit (to himself, at least) that George Bush was no better or worse than the forty-one men who came before him. Admit that George W. was not some evil genius who destroyed the American economic engine just to cause Obama heartburn and ruin his backswing. Once that demon is defeated, perhaps the president could get on and do the job he was hired to do.
Obama has some great speechwriters on his payroll, so get them to give him the words to actually, well, lead. Lead in real reductions of endlessly inflating government spending. Not nickels and dimes (which would still be a lot more than what has turned out to be the pennies that we are told are "drastic cuts"), but significant reductions. Drastic spending reductions are defined, for the purposes of this thought experiment, as spending less in inflation-adjusted dollars next year than you spent this year. Spending more than you spent last year, but less than you wanted to spend this year, is not, repeat not a cut in spending.
As an example, Obama could try to inspire the governors of the fifty states (or fifty-seven...whatever) to follow his lead in terms of reducing government payroll, health care, and pension costs without terminating one single government worker. All he has to do is a double-freeze. First freeze government wage rates until such time as the private-sector average wage exceeds the government employee average wage. Second, issue an executive order freezing all civilian hiring, for both civil service and non-civil service positions.
Normal attrition from an aging workforce should be accelerated by the disincentive of remaining in a job with no potential raises for a significant length of time. The result would be a reduction in government payrolls, and associated benefit costs of somewhere in the 30% to 40% area within ten years. Since the current total compensation for federal civilian employment is approximately $259.3 billion, a cut of between $78 billion and $104 billion would be a lot more than just nickels and dimes.
In addition to the immediate cash outlay reduction, there would be a subtle byproduct that could be of even more long-term benefit. Parkinson's Law, first articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson in 1955, holds that "work expands to fill the time available for its completion" and that a sufficiently large bureaucracy will generate enough internal work to keep itself "busy" and so justify its continued existence without commensurate output.
It's interesting to note that Mikhail Gorbachev commented that "Parkinson's Law works everywhere." By reducing the number of federal employees, we also reduce the amount of time for them to get into mischief that tends to retard economic development and creates demands on limited revenues to administer their newly minted idiocies.
The wage freeze might also discourage graduating high school seniors from going to college and majoring in government doubletalk and blame-shifting. Perhaps they could find another, more rewarding, major. Perhaps one like "working for a living like your parents do."
If Obama actually did that, there might even be more than a couple of Republicans who might decide to vote for him. Maybe even Ron Paul.
Will steps like these extinguish all the fires licking at the foundations of our democracy? Of course not, but they would be a start at containing the spread of the flames, and right now, that's about all we can hope for.
Jim Yardley is a retired financial controller, a Vietnam veteran, and an independent voter.
3a) Communism's African-American Soviet Republic
By Paul Kengor
Organized Communism has long targeted black Americans, an ongoing effort which has survived the fall of the USSR. Kudos to Peter Wilson, who here at American Thinker highlighted the manifesto of the Revolutionary Communist Party, who are in their glory with the occupation of Wall Street by their Marxist brethren and the usual assortment of easily manipulated liberal/progressive dupes -- the dependable, university-trained foot soldiers who fill the streets.
Readers of Wilson's post surely were shocked by what they read. Are there really people who believe these things? You bet there are. I deal with it constantly -- and it's nothing new at all.
Perhaps the most stunning element of the Revolutionary Communist Party's manifesto is the call for black Americans to unite into a separate, autonomous republic in the American South. Wilson cited the Revolutionary Communist Party's constitution, which called upon African-Americans to forge an autonomous region comprising "the southern part of the former imperialist United States of America." That decision would be made by a special vote in which only African-Americans would be eligible to participate.
Insane? Yes. The concept is fortunately insane to African-Americans as well as all Americans. But I'm here to tell you it isn't anything new.
From 1922-30, the Soviet Comintern and American Communist Party launched a long-term effort to relentlessly target black Americans. The Comintern ordered the American Communist Party to identify black causes in the Jim Crow South in particular. This push to recruit black Americans is one of the most salient features littered today throughout the declassified Comintern Archives on Communist Party USA (CPUSA).
U.S. government investigators learned about this effort only well after it was launched. Here, too, we can thank the anti-communist investigators that liberals still demonize and portray as slack-jawed McCarthyites: the House Committee on Un-American Activities (run by Democrats, incidentally), the Senate Judiciary Committee (also run by Democrats), J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, and Harry Truman's Office of Attorney General (also run by Democrats). Only then did we learn the full scope of what communists were up to in exploiting black Americans.
We learned that the effort began when the Soviets in 1922 approved a huge $300,000 subsidy to the American Communist Party for purposes of agitation and propaganda among black Americans. Three years later, in 1925, the Comintern selected a small group of 12 black Americans to come to Moscow for training.
That was just a warm-up. In 1930, at a Comintern conference in Moscow, a resolution was passed calling for the creation of a Soviet-directed and controlled "Negro Republic" among America's Southern states. Yes, that is correct: the Soviet Comintern, working through American communists, actually crafted plans to create a "separate Negro state," or a segregated "Negro Republic," in the South. The plan was to foment an African-American rebellion within the South, which would join forces with a workers' uprising in the North -- when the revolution was deemed ripe. Together, black Americans and communist Americans would then occupy and lay siege to the United States, reconstituting the entire nation as a Soviet sister state.
That was the strategy. The current thinking of the Revolutionary Communist Party is not all that revolutionary. These people have been around for 100 years.
For the record, testimony to this plan was provided by several former African-American communists in sworn testimony before Congress beginning in November 1939 and continuing through the 1950s. Congress published the testimony in several reports, including a major December 1954 investigation titled "The American Negro in the Communist Party."
The best source was William Odell Nowell, a heroic black American who earned the eternal enmity of his erstwhile comrades when he told Congress about the secret Soviet-directed scheme. In 1929, Nowell had been sent to Moscow as a CPUSA representative, where he participated in several meetings held by the Comintern's "Negro department." Those discussions led to the issuing of a resolution from the Comintern's executive committee to CPUSA formally establishing the program to organize black Americans into a southern "Negro Republic." Nowell testified that this "Negro state" would be under direct control of the Soviet leadership -- that is, Joseph Stalin's leadership.
Nowell was just one of many characters tasked with nothing short of a full communist revolution among black Americans. The scheme included self-styled white "progressives" from the north, such as Sol Auerbach, a Party hack who likewise trained in the USSR. Using his Party name, James S. Allen, Auerbach headed to the South in mid-July 1930 to launch a Party newspaper, the Southern Worker, to agitate and mobilize African-Americans to separate from the rest of America.
Once on the ground in the South, American communists searched for political, cultural, and social causes to exploit and sow racial division. The goal was to turn these causes into full-fledged CPUSA campaigns to quietly recruit black Americans under the banner of the Soviet hammer and sickle.
Their timing was exquisite. When a genuine civil-rights tragedy, the case of the Scottsboro boys, hit in 1931, CPUSA was on site and ready for action. The comrades wasted no time converting the Scottsboro case into a major communist campaign.
And how fruitful was that effort?
It was that particular recruitment tool -- CPUSA's cynical Scottsboro campaign -- that caught the attention and began drawing into the Communist Party a young journalist and editor in Atlanta named Frank Marshall Davis, who decades later would advise a Hawaiian adolescent named Barack Obama.
Alas, that's a longer story for another day.
Do you think this stuff matters? They never go away. Whether CPUSA or the Revolutionary Communist Party, they never go away. They merely lie in wait to exploit the next crisis, whether in the Jim Crow South or in the efforts of Barack Obama and the Wall Street mob to demonize "millionaires and billionaires."
Paul Kengor is professor of political science and executive director of the Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. His books include "The Crusader."
3b) TheJob Destroyers
By Michael Goodwin
With each passing day, the Occupy Wall Street movement is picking up steam. The growing roster of A-list supporters at home and from around the globe is impressive, if that’s the right word.
Iran’s chief mad mullah, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, loves the protests, the government of China applauds them, and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is positively gung-ho.
Naturally, the American Nazi Party favors the lusty attacks on the “Judeo-capitalist banksters” while the Socialist Party USA and the Communist Party USA are happy passengers on the anti-Wall Street bandwagon.
Because you should judge a man by his allies, our president might want to reconsider the villainous company he is keeping. Despite his claim that protesters reflect a “broad-based frustration about how our financial system works,” the people sleeping in Zuccotti Park are not there to help him create middle-class jobs or save the ones that exist.
If they were, America’s crackpot foreign and domestic adversaries wouldn’t be cheering. Their support reveals what the movement is really about.
Plain and simple, the movement is about destroying capitalism, which most protesters see as the enemy. They don’t want to fix the financial system. They want to bring it down.
Movement leaders don’t want the economy to grow, which would mean the Big Bad Banks would be healthy enough to lend and Evil Corporations would be healthy enough to borrow. They want to redistribute wealth, not create it.
They hope banks and corporations go belly-up, except, of course, for those that produce cool stuff they like. The cool stuff, actually, all stuff, should be free because profits are filthy.
For the Wall Street campers, housing grows on trees and storks deliver small businesses. They oppose banks making money on home mortgages and loans to entrepreneurs. Pollster Doug Schoen finds a third are willing to use violence to get their way.
It is bad enough that Obama is trying to recruit this destructive cult for partisan purposes. It is even worse that he is not alone.
Mitt Romney, the probable GOP presidential nominee, foolishly gave credence to the protesters’ distorted vision that American society consists of a few haves oppressing a multitude of have-nots, with nothing in the middle.
“I don’t worry about the top 1 percent,” Romney told a New Hampshire audience. “They’re doing just fine by themselves. I worry about the 99 percent in America. And so I look at what’s happening on Wall Street, and my own view is, boy I understand how those people feel ... The people in this country are upset.”
Yes, yes, about 75 percent of Americans are upset about the economy and the lack of jobs. But it verges on insanity to say that the protesters in lower Manhattan are typical examples of that angst, and thus deserving of mainstream support.
To endorse the radical movement’s sentiments is to deny reality and make the jobs crisis worse. More taxes, debt and regulation would kill the future. If new entitlements are created, it’s game over.
Obama already has made the financial system a pinata. Now that it’s spilled its candy -- Goldman Sachs is losing money, hooray! -- he wants to beat it to death to get four more years. He certainly doesn’t need Romney’s help.
As I noted Sunday, New York City has about 3.7 million jobs, yet fewer than 500 committed leftists are holding the city hostage with their Woodstock tent city. Everybody knows they are torturing the First Amendment, but nobody has the guts to say “Enough!”
Mayor Bloomberg has come up especially small in this emergency. He laments the protesters selfishness in harming local businesses and residents, yet is too timid to forge a solution.
So he dispatches a garrison of New York’s Finest to baby-sit a group of hooligans who occasionally attack them, spew anti-Semitic rants and turn the streets into toilets. And working New Yorkers pick up the exorbitant tab for the stand-off.
Someday, there might be a comic angle to this drama, but not yet. For now, Occupy Wall Street is shaping up as a tragedy that will doom the hopes of millions of Americans who simply want an honest government and a decent job.
Israel’s ‘killer’ gamble
Even as they often ignore Palestinian attacks, American leaders have a knee-jerk habit of demanding that Israel take “risks for peace.” Perhaps they will admit the prisoner swap with Hamas qualifies as the mother of all risks.
Israel’s compact with its citizen-soldiers led it to turn over 1,027 Palestinians arrested on serious charges, some for multiple murders. In exchange, Israel got back one lone soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was 19 when he was kidnapped in 2006.
With the recidivism rate among jihadists released from America’s prison at Guantanamo Bay 25 percent, it is almost certain that some of the terrorists released will return to their murderous ways.
Consider that more than 280 were serving life sentences. One man masterminded a hotel attack during Passover that killed 30 people, one seized a bus and drove it off a cliff, killing 16, and another participated in a coffee-house massacre that killed seven. A woman set free helped a suicide bomber attack a Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem that killed 15 people.
In his address to the nation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reported that he delivered Shalit to his parents and said, “I have brought your son back home.”
But he called the release of so many killers “a hard day” for the victims’ families and added: “Any released terrorist who returns to terrorism -- his blood is upon his head. The State of Israel is different from its enemies: Here, we do not celebrate the release of murderers. Here, we do not applaud those who took life.”
For all its difficulty, the swap offers proof of Israel’s distinction. It is long past the time for all America’s leaders to recognize the values that make her our one true ally in the Mideast.
Putting $$ where your Web is
A reminder for the Warren Buffetts out there who want to pay more taxes: The Department of the Treasury accepts voluntary payments to lower the national debt.
Just go to the Web site www.pay.gov and follow the links to Treasury.
Happy giving, and thanks.
Sagging intellect
So Susan Sarandon called Pope Benedict “a Nazi.” It just proves some people will say anything when the career and the jowls are sagging.
‘Speechless’ O
Top headline of the day: “Obama’s Teleprompter Stolen.”
After that softball set-up, the story writes itself.
Love to work at nothing
Reader Don Gill spiesamissing link in the Wall Street protesters. “Just awild guess but if yougrab a few and did some background checks into their upbringing, I’ll bet you find their parents did a lousy job of passing on the work ethic,” hewrites. To judge fromthe mailbag, he is not alone in that view.
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4)Visits to small towns expose Obama’s big problem
By Charles Hurt
The whole problem with false prophets in politics is that eventually they are almost always exposed.
And so President Obama returns to small towns in Virginia and North Carolina, the apex of his improbable and stunning 2008 campaign victory.
It was in those traditionally Republican states that he convinced voters that he was some kind of new politician, a different sort of Democrat. Post-partisan, we were told. He believed in personal responsibility, free markets and yearned to move America beyond racial divisiveness and distrust.
And he managed to quell accusations that he was some kind of foreigner with contempt for average Americans who just want to work hard, earn their money and be left alone.
He even managed to beat back the firestorm that erupted after he told his crowd in San Francisco that small-town people are “bitter” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
Boy, were we duped. Turns out, the only slip-up in San Francisco was that he accidentally said precisely what he meant. As Americans have clung to their guns and religion in these hard times, he has clung to his beloved socialism and big government.
After a failed stimulus, Mr. Obama is trying to ram through more stimulus. He attacks Republicans for thwarting his latest effort. He conveniently — and dishonestly — leaves off that his latest effort died in the Senate, which is controlled by his own party. It was Democratic defections that killed the bill.
Oozing with contempt, Mr. Obama now wants to break his bill into “bite-sized pieces. Maybe they just couldn’t understand the whole thing at once,” he said of Republicans.
And then in a whip of tomfoolery bold even by Washington standards, Mr. Obama now says he opposed ending the massive new budget-busting long-term-care entitlement program included in Obamacare. This, just days after his administration announced it was killing it because it was so massively expensive.
I mean, how stupid does he think these voters are?
Well, apparently they are on to him.
Polls show that his support has collapsed in both North Carolina and Virginia, especially among highly valued independent voters. Even Democrats (a startling 21 percent of the North Carolina populace) are walking.
This campaign swing has been littered with Democratic politicians avoiding Obama like the plague. This includes former Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine, who is running for the Senate in Virginia.
It is a wonder that his campaign would waste five minutes worrying about states like North Carolina and Virginia.
The only remaining question is how many more of those states he won over are already too far gone.
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