What about Egypt? Is the West going to continue funding radicalism? (See 1a below.)
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Lloyd Marcus has personally experienced the consequences of big brother government and its crippling dependency effect upon his own dysfunctional family. Notwithstanding the tragic consequences, Obama keeps moving in the same direction. It is difficult to disengage from dependency and Obama seems more interested in their votes than their survival and dignity.
Another tragic chapter to our Republic's long history. (See 2 and 5 below.)
Furthermore, anyone who believes sugar coated reports emanating from government bureaucracies runs the risk of a diabetic portfolio. (See 2a below.)
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Obama's foreign policy initiatives are a combination of drone attacks interspersed with apologies. Indifference towards Iranian protesters but support of NATO in Libya while demonstrating wrenching confusion about whether to close Guantanamo. Strong rebuke of Israel mixed with weak sanctions against Iran and a lot of hot air threats and the list is endless.
The recent comment by our esteemed Sec. of Defense, Panetta, telling Israel to get to the 'damn' table is just another instance of Obama's deceitful treachery. Israel and Likud have agreed to negotiate anything and everything. Obama knows Abbas is the failed partner not Netanyahu and Israel. Abbas also knows he can rely upon Obama to apply continued pressure on Israel because Obama will exercise none against Abbas and the Palestinians.
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Obama is a weasel and the messages he thrives on sending are conflictual in nature and thus carry little weight and in some instances actually are downright laughable and dangerous.(See 3 below.)
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Our president has chosen to run a somber black campaign.
Hope and change failed so lets trot out fairness!
While Obama campaigns against the rich he makes some richer by paying off supporters with tax payer money on projects that sound good but are turn out to be vehicles for laundering money. Obama is like a Maytag Dryer on the spin cycle. What a pathetic and corrupt liar and fraud.(See 4, 4a and 4b below.)
This is worth clicking on again. In it you will see Bill Whittle doing an amazing and interesting job of soaking the rich but still falls short of Obama's spending: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=661pi6K-8WQ
Re-elect Obama at our peril! (See 4c below.)
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The post office has been decimated by more efficient capitalist competition leaving the APO to serve the most costly routes while delivering the least profitable type of mail etc.
More pink slips for predominantly black union workers.
Is this just another indication of the colorful world into which our Republic is sinking? (See 5 below.)
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1984 de-ja vu! (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1) US diplomatic bid to defuse Syrian trigger for regional war
The US, France and Britain went into concerted diplomatic action to contain the Syrian crisis before it detonated a regional conflict and deteriorated into civil strife more horrendous and dangerous than the Iraq war. At the same time, Syria and its neighbors have sharply intensified their war preparations, fully expecting diplomacy to fail. Military and Washington sources report their pessimism emanates from the conviction in the region that even if Bashar Assad and his family pretend to cooperate, they will fight to the last Syrian before they actually relax their grip on government.
The US and allies launched their bid for a negotiated end to the Syrian impasse launched last week. A number of Western agents infiltrated Syria from Lebanon and Jordan and entered the embattled cities of Homs, Hama and Idlib in the north, Deir al-Zour and Abu Kemal in the east and Daraa in the south. Their mission was to unite the deeply divided opposition factions and local rebels into a coherent front. The Assad regime chose to turn a blind eye.
Building on that groundwork, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called together Tuesday, Dec. 6, in Geneva the leaders of Syrian opposition groups operating in different European capitals, as well as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and urged them to overcome their differences and back the US-Western peace initiative.
She explained, our sources disclosed, that the administration had resolved to up the diplomatic, economic and military pressure on Bashar Assad. President Barack Obama, Clinton announced, had personally instructed all parts of the American administration to starting referring to his regime as the “Assad gang.”
On Wednesday, Dec. 7, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman was due in Beirut to set up a base of operations there after coordinating the American step with Israel's government and military leaders in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
As part of the drive for negotiations, Washington and Paris returned their ambassadors to Damascus after an absence of six weeks. Their task is to open direct channels to President Assad and sound him out on their proposal for him to accept an orderly transition of power in order to avert a regional war and save his country from plunging further in to civil strife.
The US and French Presidents Obama and Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron are of one mind about pursuing diplomacy for ending Assad's rule even though not the slightest sign of willingness to cooperate has come from the presidential palace in Damascus. Even the Arab League's proposal to send monitors into Syria met with conditions that were deemed tantamount to a rejection. ,
This initiative has had no effect on the hectic military preparations going forward in the region in anticipation of an imminent outbreak of armed hostilities.
The Syrian armed forces staged a large-scale war game Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 3-4, in the eastern part of the country.
Israel Defense Forces reciprocated by organizing an extensive exercise of the 51st Battalion of the Golan Brigade on the Golan border with Syria Tuesday, Dec. 6.
Both practiced tactics for repelling invading foreign forces and moving the battle into enemy territory.
The Syrian security and military leadership turned out in full to observe the Syrian armed forces' performance, while on the Israeli side, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gant were in conspicuous attendance – as were TV cameras on both sides of the border.
The Israeli army spokesman uncharacteristically made a point of highlighting a visit Minister for Home Front Defense Matan Vilnai paid Tuesday to the Haifa oil refineries to inspect Israel's emergency fuel reserve. He announced that a battery of the home-made anti-missile Iron Dome may be posted at the refineries.
Tuesday also saw unusual activity in the Lebanese capital: Hizballah's Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah emerged from his bunker after three and-a-half years to declare before a Shiite audience assembled for the Ashura ceremonies that Hizballah’s support for Bashar Assad is absolute.
In his capacity has leader of Iran's Lebanese Shiite surrogate, he pledged that Hizballah would provide the regime in Damascus with all the help it required.
1a)Egypt's Sham Election
By Daniel Pipes and Cynthia Farahat
According to Egypt's elections committee, the Muslim Brotherhood won 37 percent of the vote of the first round of voting in Egypt; and the Salafis, who promote a yet more extreme Islamist program, won 24 percent, giving them together a jaw-dropping 61 percent of the vote.
This stunning result prompts two questions: Is this a legitimate or rigged outcome? Are Islamists about to dominate Egypt?
Legitimate or rigged? No one took seriously Soviet elections with their inevitable 99-percent returns for the Communists; and while the process and outcome of the Egyptian elections are less blatant, they deserve similar skepticism. The game is more subtle, but it's still a game, and here is how it's played:
The Muslim Brotherhood (founded in 1928) and the military dictatorship (ruling Egypt since 1952) have a parallel ideology and a long history that makes them simultaneously rivals and allies. Over the decades, they off-and-on cooperated in an autocratic system bound by Islamic law (Shari'a) and in oppressing liberal, secular elements.
In this spirit, Anwar El-Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, and now Mohamed Tantawi tactically empowered Islamists as a foil to gain Western support, arms, and money. For example, when George W. Bush pressured Mubarak to permit more political participation, the latter responded by having 88 Muslim Brotherhood members elected to parliament, thereby warning Washington that democracy = an Islamist takeover. The apparent weakness of non-Islamists scared the West from further insisting on a transition to political participation. But a close look at the 2005 elections finds that the regime helped the Islamists gain its 20 percent of the seats.
Today, Tantawi and his Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) still play this tired old game. Note the various methods: (1) Reports of electoral fraud have emerged, for example in Helwan. (2) SCAF has, according to the prominent Islamist Safwat Hijazi, offered a "deal" to the Islamists: it shares power with them on condition that they turn a blind eye to its corruption.
(3) The military has subsidized both the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi political parties during the recent parliamentary elections. Marc Ginsburg reports on a SCAF slush fund totaling millions of dollars in "the form of 'walk around' money, clothing and food giveaways" that enabled hundreds of local chapters of Islamist political organizations to buy votes. Ginsburg tells of a SCAF emissary who "met secretly with representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist oriented political movements last April to establish local political 'action committee' bank accounts to funnel an underground supply chain of financial and commodity support."
Other Middle Eastern dictators, such as the Yemeni president and Palestinian Authority chairman, also play this double game, pretending to be anti-Islamist moderates and Western allies while, in fact, being toughs who cooperate with Islamists and repress true moderates. Even anti-Western tyrants like Assad of Syria and Qaddafi of Libya play the same opportunistic game in times of need, portraying massive uprisings against them as Islamist movements. (Recall how Qaddafi blamed the Libyan insurrection on Al-Qaeda lacing teenagers' coffee with hallucinatory pills.)
Salafis won nearly one-fourth of the votes? Something fishy here.
Dominate Egypt? If the military colludes with Islamists to remain in power, obviously it, and not Islamists retains ultimate control. This is the key point that conventional analysts miss: the recent election results allow the military to keep power. As aspiring Egyptian politician Mohamed ElBaradei correctly notes, "it is all in the hands of SCAF right now."
True, if Islamists control the parliament (not a sure thing; the military could yet decide to reduce their percentage in future rounds of an unusually complex voting procedure open to abuse), they acquire certain privileges and move the country further toward the Shari'a – as far, anyway, as SCAF permits. This maintains the long-term trend of Islamization underway since the military seized power in 1952.
What about Western policy? First, press SCAF to build the civil society that must precede real democracy, so that the modern and moderate civilians in Egypt have a chance to express themselves.
Second, instantly cease all economic aid to Cairo. It is unacceptable that Western taxpayers pay, even indirectly, for Islamizing Egypt. Resume funding only when the government allows secular Muslims, liberals, and Copts, among others, freely to express and organize themselves.
Third, oppose both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis. Less extreme or more, Islamists of every description are our worst enemies.
Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum and Taube fellow at the Hoover Institution. Ms Farahat is an Egyptian activist and co-author of a book about the Tahrir Square protests.
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2)The Ultimate Devastating Price of Government Dependency
By Lloyd Marcus
The devastating price of government dependency. I witnessed it up close and personal in the late '50s, when I was a child. Both of my mom's sisters had five kids each by various men who simply deposited their seed and moved on. Thus, both of my aunts were totally dependent on government. They lived in the projects.
The oldest of five children, I remember when my parents and four siblings also lived in the projects. We moved out to a black suburb when dad broke the color barrier into the Baltimore City Fire Department and became a firefighter.
Still, it was a treat whenever I was permitted to sleep over at my cousins' home in the projects in the exciting city.
The atmosphere at my welfare-dependent cousins' home was strikingly different from mine -- a subtle sadness which made me feel a little sorry for them. I felt that they envied me and my siblings for having a dad who actually lived with us. I remember seeing large cans and boxes of generic foods, peanut butter, powdered milk, meat, and cheese. As a child, I felt food was weirdly important to them. My siblings and I could go into our fridge anytime we desired. My cousins' fridge was off-limits without permission.
Despite lots of extremely loud talking and laughter in their homes, both my aunts appeared chronically angry and bitter, with short, explosive tempers. A threat of violence constantly loomed over life in the government projects inside and outside of the home.
If you add up the financial value of what my welfare cousins received for "free" from the government (housing, food, and health care) their annual income probably far surpassed that of my dad. And yet, I considered my cousins poor. They perceived themselves to be poor as well.
Of my ten welfare-dependent cousins, only one remarkably "made it." He worked his way through college and became very successful. The other nine never ventured off the government plantation, seduced as they were by the false promise of security. Consequently, they succumbed to alcohol and drug abuse and out-of-wedlock births. Four of my cousins' lifestyles caused them to suffer early deaths.
Clearly, my two aunts' choice, or at least their perceived lack of any option beyond totally relying on government for their survival, came at a devastatingly high price -- the self-image and spirit of themselves and their children.
This tragic scenario sponsored by mostly Democrats has been playing out in the black community for at least fifty years.
A black man in the Oval Office affords the Democrats a unique opportunity. They can scream racism whenever anyone disagrees with or opposes any of Obama's policies. Thus, his presidency is a golden opportunity to spread their destruction of the black family nationally, to all Americans.
Why would the Democrats desire to do this, you ask? In a nutshell, it is all about them. The more Americans dependent on government, the more Democrats are empowered. Also, the Democratic Party enthusiastically embraces all who hate America. Pure and simple.
The Democrats, supported by the liberal media, are well on their way to transforming America into a giant government-controlled plantation of dependent lifelong indentured servants.
For example: under Obama, a record number of Americans receive food stamps. Another Democrat tactic to increase the number of Americans dependent on government and voting Democrat is to keep extending unemployment benefits -- the timeframe is now up to 92 weeks, or almost two years. What incentive is there for the unemployed to aggressively pursue a job when they know they can sit on their butts and receive a check for two years? Rather than encouraging Obama to reduce ridiculously costly regulations on small business, which would create jobs, Democrats and their media partners are pressuring the Republicans to join them in further extending unemployment benefits.
Beginning in public school and continuing through college, liberals have indoctrinated our children, teaching them that America is unjust, that capitalism is evil, and that they are entitled to the fruit of other peoples' labors. On top of it all, only government can make things fair and right. Liberal indoctrination birthed the Occupy movement -- losers hating achievers and demanding their "fair share."
Meanwhile, 47% of Americans, almost half the country, are exempt from paying federal income taxes. Despite the rich paying most of the taxes already, Democrats are screaming for the rich to pay more.
But here is my point. There is a scary question on the minds of decent Americans. The question is whether we have "the tipping point" -- the point where teachers and professors have stolen the minds of too many of our youths; the point where Democrats have made so many Americans dependent upon some form of government handouts that a majority surrender their freedom, liberty, and culture to big government.
Nothing in life is free. While my cousins received free cradle-to-grave government handouts, they paid a devastating price for their dependency. They lost themselves -- their self-esteem, pride, and dignity. They lost the joy of success after failure. They lost the pursuit of their dreams. They lost the experience of developing their God-given gifts and talents. For perceived security, my cousins willingly remained slaves on the Democrats' government plantation.
Here is what Ben Franklin had to say about folks who worship security: "He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security."
Due to the lack of American history taught in our public schools, I would not be surprised if a student asked, "Ben Franklin -- ain't he the guy who dated J-Lo?"
I do not fear for America because I believe that God still has us in His Hands. However, I am extremely concerned that we have culturally and morally lost our way.
Today, it is no longer embarrassing to depend on welfare for survival. Many feel justified, demanding that government rob the rich to redistribute to them in the name of fairness and compassion. These suckers are clueless to the truth that the confiscated funds go to public-sector unions, which recycle the funds back to the Democratic Party via union dues.
But here is the rub. You government dependency junkies do not get off scot-free. Remember, nothing in life is free. You ultimately pay a devastating price for your class envy, laziness, hatred, and fear. In the process, you lose yourself.
Lloyd Marcus, proud unhyphenated American, is the chairman of The Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama and the spokesperson for the Tea Party Express. Please help Lloyd spread his message by joining his Liberty Network. Lloyd is singer/songwriter of the American Tea Party Anthem and author of Confessions of a Black Conservative, foreword by Michelle Malkin. LloydMarcus.com
2a)Jim Rogers: Government ‘Always' Lies, Tweaks Inflation and Jobless Data
By Forrest Jones and Kathleen Walter
Unemployment and inflation rates are worse than the numbers that hit the newswires suggest because the government is able to tinker with the methodology to sugarcoat how bad the economy really is, says international investor Jim Rogers.
"The government lies about the numbers that they put out. Don't take your advice from any government, or you are going to go bankrupt," Rogers told Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview when asked if unemployment rates will ever return to pre-recession levels.
The official unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent in November from 9.0 percent in October not due to strong gains in hiring by due to a shrinking labor force, as would-be job seekers quit looking for permanent work, the government reports.
Even so, the figure is probably much higher, Rogers adds.
"They make their unemployment figures look better but that's because they jiggle the numbers. If you use independent sources for unemployment, you will see we have serious problems still despite the government jiggling the numbers."
Inflation rates are also misleading, Rogers adds.
Officially, the consumer price index rose 3.5 percent on year in October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although inflation stripped of volatile food and energy prices came to an annualized increase of 2.1 percent.
The Federal Reserve tends to focus heavily on the latter when setting interest-rate policies and insists inflation rates are hovering within comfort zones.
The government lies about that also, Rogers says.
"Anybody who buys, who goes shopping knows that prices are going up. Buy food, education, insurance, just about everything that we buy, prices are going higher and the government tells us there's no inflation," Rogers says.
"Some independent measures say it's over 6 percent already ... it's going to go much higher because they keep printing money, and as long as they keep printing money, it's going to get worse. So prepare yourself for much higher inflation."
The Federal Reserve has expanded the money supply in an effort to ward off crippling deflation and spur investment and ultimately, hiring.
Such polices have weakened the dollar and applied inflationary pressures to the economy, while unemployment rates remain high, critics charge.
"The problem is having any system that is dictated and where the government has a monopoly — that leads to the problems because they (the governments) always learn to cheat and lie."
Meanwhile, fiscal and monetary stimulus policies have swollen the government's balance sheets, making debt burdens so heavy that the U.S. is moving into dire straits.
"America is actually in worse shape than Europe. Europe as a whole is not a big debtor. The U.S. as a whole is the biggest debtor in the history of the world plus we have our own states, which have big problems: Illinois, California, New York," Rogers says.
"In Europe they've got some states that have serious problems such as Greece, Ireland, etc. But as a whole they are in better shape."
"The reason we are looking at Europe right now is because their debts are coming mature as we speak and soon they are going to be coming due in America, and we are going to have those problems, too."
Don't look to either one political party to save the day, as both Republicans and Democrats are both guilty of spending beyond their means.
"As far as I am concerned, a pox on both of their houses. Mr. Bush did the same thing. The debt skyrocketed under Clinton. The debt skyrocketed even more under Bush. Debts under Mr. Obama, they've gotten worse and worse and worse. The Republicans talk a very good game right now and I hope that they are right when they say we are not going to let spending go higher. I hope that they are right about it," Rogers says.
Even Ronald Reagan wasn't as fiscally disciplined as he should have been.
"When Reagan was president, the national debt doubled. Here was a man if anybody in the past 50 years who said 'we're not going to do this anymore,' and the debt doubled under Reagan."
© Moneynews. All rights reserved.
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3)Obama and the Hezbollah Terrorist
By DAVID B. RIVKIN, JR. And CHARLES D. STIMSON
In Jan. 2007, Ali Musa Daqduq helped kill five Americans in Iraq. He may soon be released into Iranian custody.
Call it the triumph of ideology over national interest and honor. Having dithered for nearly three years, the Obama administration has only a few weeks to bring to justice a Hezbollah terrorist who slaughtered five U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2007. Unfortunately, it appears more likely that Ali Musa Daqduq will instead be transferred to Iran, to a hero's welcome.
In the early evening of Jan. 20, 2007, in the city of Karbala, south of Baghdad, five black SUVs approached the location of a regular meeting between U.S. and Iraqi military officers. Inside the vehicles, which mimicked U.S. transports (to avoid heightened scrutiny), were a dozen individuals dressed in U.S. military uniforms and bearing U.S. weapons. Their drivers spoke English.
Upon reaching their target, the occupants opened fire on the Americans. One U.S. soldier was killed on the spot. Four others were kidnapped, tortured and executed.
The mastermind of this brutal attack? Ali Musa Daqduq, a Lebanese national and Hezbollah commander. U.S. forces captured him in March 2007, and, in interrogation, he allegedly provided a wealth of information on Iran's role in fomenting, training and arming Iraqi insurgents of all stripes.
With U.S. troops set to exit Iraq at the end of December, all detainees in American custody there have been transferred to the Iraqis except for Daqduq. He is set to be turned over in a matter of weeks. Based on past experience with released detainees who were in Iranian employ, U.S. officials know that Daqduq will promptly re-emerge in Iran, shaking hands with dignitaries and leading parades, before rejoining his Hezbollah colleagues.
This outcome would be an insult to the American servicemen who have lost many comrades to insurgents such as Daqduq, who consistently failed to comply with the laws of war. Indeed, the Iraq war is the first conflict in modern history where the U.S.—having complied with the laws of war by promptly prosecuting American troops believed to have violated those laws—did not bring to justice a single one of the hundreds of captured enemy combatants who have killed Iraqi civilians, American soldiers and contractors. Impunity for war criminals debases the laws of war, violates our international legal obligations, and is inconsistent with American values.
We have already failed to stop Iran's nuclear-weapons program. We have also failed to punish Tehran for facilitating the deaths of American soldiers, or for plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington. Allowing Daqduq to slip through U.S. hands would further reinforce the impression of American impotence. That will have serious repercussions, measured in diplomatic defeats and lost lives.
There is an obvious solution: Transfer Daqduq from Iraq to Guantanamo Bay to be tried by a military commission there. But this is where the Obama administration's rigid ideology comes into play—beginning with flawed, self-defeating legalistic arguments.
A successful prosecution of Daqduq would be relatively easy. He killed American soldiers and, as an unprivileged belligerent, has no combatant immunity. Yet the administration purports to be troubled by our lack of an extradition treaty with Iraq. It also points out that the Iraqis have refused to accord the U.S. legal custody of Daqduq, although the U.S. has him in physical custody. The Iraqis, of course, are being pressured by the Iranians not to accommodate this legal-custody request.
Yet we don't need an extradition treaty with Iraq to transfer Daqduq, a Lebanese citizen captured by American forces in a war zone. Since his capture occurred when the U.S. and other coalition members were the occupying power in Iraq, there is ample basis in existing international law for the American exercise of legal jurisdiction over him.
A more serious obstacle is the administration's policy of eschewing military tribunals. Earlier this year, the administration considered bringing Daqduq into the U.S. to face trial in a civilian court. In response, six Republican senators wrote President Obama, warning against trying Daqduq in federal court, and urging the president to refer him to a military commission.
The administration briefly flirted with the idea of a military commission, perhaps in Charleston, S.C. or at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. That idea seems to have been dropped after a Nov. 8 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told Attorney General Eric Holder that if the administration were to bring Daqduq to the U.S. for a civilian or military trial, "all hell would break loose."
The administration believes that bringing anyone new, even high-value detainees, to Guantanamo is inconsistent with the goal of eventually closing the facility. This proposition is absurd, and not only because that facility remains vital and relevant to this day. It raises the question of whether administration's detention policy is actually shaped by a crass political calculus of not antagonizing its liberal base in advance of what promises to be a difficult 2012 election.
The administration should press the Maliki government in Baghdad harder to allow the U.S. to maintain custody of Daqduq following the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. If the Iraqis still refuse, the administration should unilaterally transfer Daqduq to Guantanamo to face justice.
While the Maliki government may protest publicly, it will rejoice privately, since Daqduq's rendition would demonstrate Washington's resolve in the face of Tehran's pressure. Allowing him to go unpunished is both inexcusable and dangerous.
Mr. Rivkin served in the Justice Department during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Mr. Stimson, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, was a deputy assistant secretary for detainee affairs at the Defense Department.
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4)Obama Takes Populist Swing
President Says GOP Policies Threaten Middle Class; Republicans Blame Him
By LAURA MECKLER
President Obama called for Americans to get a "fair shot" at advancement to the middle class, deriding the "breathtaking greed of a few" and chastising Republicans who he said enabled them. Laura Meckler has details on The News Hub. Photo: Reuters
Adopting a sharply partisan and populist tone, President Barack Obama on Tuesday painted a picture of the American middle class under siege from wealthy interests, drawing an explicit comparison to the industrial monopolies of an earlier era.
In a gamble, Mr. Obama largely put aside optimism about the U.S., a tone he struck at his State of the Union address in January, and instead worked to embrace the anger and skepticism emanating from much of the electorate.
Too many children can no longer expect to join the middle class, the president said, no matter if they work hard and play by the rules. "That's inexcusable. It's wrong. It flies in the face of everything we stand for," he said in a speech at a Kansas high school.
His language, borrowing explicitly from Theodore Roosevelt, was unsparing, blaming "the breathtaking greed of a few" for the financial crisis and deriding "huge bets, and huge bonuses, made with other people's money on the line." Republicans and their policies, he suggested, enabled irresponsibility.
Republicans responded that Mr. Obama should be held responsible for the economic bad times. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said Mr. Obama had "his hands on the economic throat of the country," and likened the president to Jimmy Carter, who lost re-election amid a steep economic downturn, rather than Mr. Roosevelt.
The president's tone sets the stage for the themes of his re-election campaign, and the likely GOP response. The speech will escalate charges the president is engaging in class warfare, a complaint heard from business executives he has been trying to court as well as Republicans.
The White House views the speech as an opportunity to set out a clear contrast in visions heading into 2012 and to deflect blame for the economy to a swath of sources. It marks a sharp shift from the summer, when he tried and failed to cut a deficit deal with Republicans. Since then, he has taken a sharper partisan tone culminating in Tuesday's remarks.
Referring to Republicans, Mr. Obama said, "they want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years. And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules. I am here to say they are wrong."
The president spoke in Osawatomie, Kan., the same town where, in 1910, Mr. Roosevelt, a Republican on his way to becoming an independent, delivered his "New Nationalism" speech. There, Roosevelt called for the government to do more to counter the power of concentrated wealth.
Mr. Obama cited health-insurance companies, mortgage lenders and financial firms. For too many Americans, he said, hard work no longer pays off, while those "at the very top" have grown wealthier than ever before. The president has periodically bashed Wall Street before, but Tuesday's speech was more sweeping and went beyond any one industry to say that the middle class as a whole was being left behind in part due to corporate greed and wrongdoing.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last month found three in four Americans say the nation's current economic structure is "out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country," among similar sentiments. Such feelings have helped fuel both the tea-party and Occupy Wall Street movements, and Mr. Obama nodded to both.
Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist who has advised several presidential campaigns, said that because everyone knows the economy is terrible it is smart for the president to acknowledge it up front. "It's a short route to connecting with voters," he said.
It is a risk, however, to embrace economic woe, rather than rise above it, given voters' tendency to punish incumbents who preside over bad times. Mr. Obama prepares to stand for re-election amid persistent unemployment and anemic economic growth that have put particular burdens on the middle class.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) said he agreed with much of Mr. Obama's diagnosis of the problems in the American economy, but not with his remedies, such as increasing taxes on wealthier Americans. "Where we ought to be focused is increasing income mobility," he said. "You don't accomplish that by taking away from those who have been successful."
Mr. Obama has tried several different tacks this year. At the outset, the White House talked mostly about "winning the future" with a State of the Union speech focused on innovation. During the summer, the president portrayed himself as the "adult in the room," bidding to rise above the bickering in Congress over the debt ceiling to push a big, bipartisan deal.
As part of the latest strategy, Mr. Obama and his Democratic allies in the Senate have forced a string of votes that won't pass, but that put Republicans on the record taking positions that can be used in future campaigns. Recent examples include votes on extending a payroll tax cut by increasing taxes on millionaires and a push to confirm the head of the administration's consumer financial protection agency.
Republicans have vowed to block any nominee until the new agency is restructured. "He's setting up a vote he knows will fail so he can show up afterward and say he's shocked," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said on the Senate floor.
In one case, White House pressure seems to be gaining in Congress. GOP leaders say they are willing to extend the payroll tax cut, and the parties are now debating the details, mostly how to offset lost revenue.
"I think there certainly is ample evidence that the Democrats are winning this debate," Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), told reporters Tuesday. Republicans, he said, are "being picked apart."
—Naftali Bendavid and Jonathan Weisman contributed to this article.
Write to Laura Meckler at laura.meckler@wsj.com
4a)A Lesson in Fairness For Obama
Election '12: President Obama this week started testing his new campaign theme, replacing "hope and change" with the equally vacant promise of "fairness." Apparently he hopes Americans can be fooled twice.
In a talk Tuesday at the site of Teddy Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" speech, Obama repeatedly invoked the notion of fairness. "We are greater together," he said, "when everyone engages in fair play, everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share."
The problem is that fairness, just like hope and change, can mean anything anyone wants it to.
For Obama, fairness obviously means more taxes on the rich, more regulations heaped on private industry, and more government spending to give people "a fair shot."
As he put it, "there's been a certain crowd in Washington," who say "if only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger (and) jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else. ... It doesn't work. It's never worked."
Obama apparently slept through the 1980s, when Reagan's tax-cutting, free-market policies unleashed an economic powerhouse that drove two decades of growth, produced record low unemployment and improved prosperity for everyone.
But by Obama's own measure, the country has gotten more "fair." The richest 1% now pays almost 40% of all federal income taxes, up from 25% two decades ago, while the bottom half pays only 2%, down from 6%. The federal regulatory state has never been as big, and government spending as a share of the economy is at record levels.
What's unfair is what these policies have produced — a woeful economic recovery that's hurt the middle class the most.
In fact, as IBD reported recently, the only winners since Obama took office have been corporations (profits are up 68%) and Wall Street investors (the Dow's up more than 45%). The rest of the country has gotten the shaft.
Household income has dropped almost 7% since the recession ended in June 2009. Unemployment is higher than when Obama took office, home prices are lower, inflation is creeping up. And income inequality — which was flat during the Bush years — has started to rise.
Obama might think he can distract the public from this pathetic record by yammering on about "fair play," hoping nobody notices that he's just offering more of the same failed policies.
In all fairness, we hope voters prove him dead wrong.
4b) Subject: Billion dollar bailout crook from what family?
President John F. Kennedy's nephew, Robert Kennedy, Jr., netted a $1.4 billion bailout for his company, BrightSource, through a loan guarantee issued by a former employee-turned Department of Energy official.
It?s just one more in a string of eye-opening revelations by investigative journalist and Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer in his explosive new book, Throw Them All Out.
The details of how BrightSource managed to land its ten-figure taxpayer bailout have yet to emerge fully. However, one clue might be found in the person of Sanjay Wagle.
Wagle was one of the principals in Kennedy's firm who raised money for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. When Obama won the White House, Wagle was installed at the Department of Energy (DOE), advising on energy grants.
From an objective vantage point, investing taxpayer monies in BrightSource was a risky proposition at the time. In 2010, BrightSource, whose largest shareholder is Kennedy's VantagePoint Partners, was up to its eyes in $1.8 billion of debt obligations and had lost $71.6 million on its paltry $13.5 million of revenue.
Even before BrightSource rattled its tin cup in front of Obama's DOE, the company made it known publicly that its survival hinged on successfully completing the Ivanpah Solar Electrical System, which would become the largest solar plant in the world, on federal lands in California.
In its Securities and Exchange Commission filings, BrightSource further underscored the risky nature of the Ivanpah venture and, more broadly, the company's viability:
Our future success depends on our ability to construct Ivanpah, our first utility-scale solar thermal power project, in a cost-effective and timely manner. Our ability to complete Ivanpah and the planning, development and construction of all three phases are subject to significant risk and uncertainty.
Ironically, in 2008, Kennedy wrote a CNN article praising Obama as reminiscent of his famous father and uncle. The article, titled "Obama's Energy Plan Would Create a Green Gold Rush," proved prophetic. However, the 'green gold rush' came in the form of $1.4 billion of taxpayers? money flowing into the pet projects of rich venture capital investors like Kennedy, not average citizens.
What's more, BrightSource touted the Ivanpah project as a green jobs creator. Yet as its own website reveals, the thermal solar plant will only create 1,400 jobs at its peak construction and 650 jobs annually thereafter. Even using the peak estimate of 1,400 jobs, that works out to a cost to taxpayers of $1 million per job created.
As Schweizer writes in "Throw Them All Out," a billion dollars in taxpayer money is being sent to wealthy investors to bail them out of risky investments. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
4c)The Last Incarnation of Barack Obama
If there was any doubt where President Barack Obama's ideological heart lies, yesterday he let it be known loud and clear in a wide-ranging speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. President Obama is at his core a dyed-in-the-wool progressive who sees the federal government as the answer to all of America's problems. And he is charging full steam ahead on this far-left course toward Election Day 2012, despite the total failure of his big-government policies and an American people who have flatly rejected the message he is trying to sell.
True to form, President Obama yesterday did what he does best: He delivered a flowery speech and flexed his rhetorical muscles. It's a talent that won him the presidency, but unfortunately it hasn't won the future for the American people. And that's because the President's underlying philosophy is terribly flawed. After three years of a massive expansion of government, the enactment of Obamacare, hundreds of billions of dollars in failed stimulus spending, government ownership of General Motors, a Big Labor/pro-unionization onslaught, threats of even higher taxation, the promulgation of more unnecessary regulations, and a total failure to confront the entitlement challenge, the verdict is in on President Obama's record and the soundness of his statist, progressive philosophy. Deficits are soaring, the economy is stagnant, 13.3 million Americans are out of work, and job growth is flat. Not surprisingly, the President’s speech did not touch on those facts.
Instead of confronting the reality of America under his watch, President Obama hearkened back to the days of Bull Moose progressive Theodore Roosevelt, citing him as his model of good governance, quoting his 1910 "New Nationalism" speech and calling for "fairness" in America--along with more infrastructure spending, more federal education programs, more regulations, and higher taxation on job creators to redistribute wealth and pay for his big government programs. And in order to raise the temperature of his rhetoric--and inflame the passions of his audience--the President fell back to his class warfare ways, demonizing the haves in order to win over the have-nots while painting a picture of an America where "unfairness" reigns and opportunity cannot be found.
Matthew Spalding, vice president of The Heritage Foundation's B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics, explains why President Obama's reliance on class warfare and his perverted view of "fairness" is so contrary to what America is really about:
There are no class distinctions in America. That's why Steve Jobs could start an adopted child in a broken home, start Apple in a garage and become a billionaire eight times over. The real distinction here is caused by the rise of a new governing class of experts, bureaucrats and political elites who insist on ruling us to enforce "fairness" rather than letting us govern ourselves under the rule of law.
Indeed, the new fairness inevitably leads to bureaucratic favoritism, inequalities based on special interests and undue political influence. The real class warfare, as Paul Ryan argued in his recent speech at The Heritage Foundation, is caused by "a class of governing elites, exploiting the politics of division to pick winners and losers in our economy and determine our destinies for us."
Ironically, the President's conception of America--that it is a land of no opportunity--stands in stark contrast to his own personal story, which he even trumpeted in his speech. Barack Obama came from meager beginnings and now sits in the Oval Office. There are countless stories of other Americans who have risen and found success on their own merit in this fertile land. But speaking to America's rugged individualism and the notion of achieving success without the helping hand of the government would not serve President Obama's progressive agenda. In his world, the government is the giver of all things, the defender of the middle class, and the architect of prosperity. Likewise, success is not something to be championed but to be demagogued in the name of the expansion of the state.
Over the past three years, we have seen the President articulate many ideas and cloak himself in many different philosophies. Of late, he has even called himself a tax-cutter and posed as a deficit hawk, all while calling for massive amounts of new spending. But with yesterday's speech, he has emerged in his truest incarnation--a hard-line progressive to the core. The speech fits perfectly with reports that the Obama 2012 campaign has come to the realization that it will lose white blue-collar voters by large margins and is concentrating instead on cobbling together a coalition of culture elites and racial minorities. The abandonment of the middle class--or, rather, the fact that the middle class has abandoned him--puts in context this latest incarnation of the President as he prepares to run next year.
This is not the way to lead America to prosperity, to stand the economy on its feet, or to put the millions of unemployed Americans back to work. Rather than make government bigger and more intrusive, now is the time to make it smaller and more responsible so that entrepreneurs can achieve what Washington cannot manufacture: new jobs, new ideas, and a better America for future generations. But that America is quite different from the one President Obama envisions.
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5)Postmaster General Says Post Office Is Broke, May Be Forced To Close Next Year
By Kirsten West Savali
The current recession has negatively affected the viability of organizations, the livelihoods of employees and their families, and is beginning to create–if it hasn’t already–an ominous environment that is inoculated by skepticism, fear, and above all, hopelessness.
The United States Post Office is the latest organization looking to inundate those aforementioned sensibilities into the lives of 120,000 of their employees.
Postmaster General, Patrick Donahoe, believes that in order for the post office to remain afloat, in other words–keep its doors open, “it needs to layoff 120,000 workers, close thousands of post offices, and end Saturday mail deliveries forever.”
Donahoe was so sure about his assumptions that he pleaded his case to Congress on Tuesday.
At a recent Senate hearing, Donahoe told a panel that the post office will “miss a $5.5 billion payment to its retiree health fund due at the end of the month.”
Moreover, the post office is currently facing a, “$10-billion net loss this fiscal year and was near its borrowing limit.”
In order to eradicate this financial hardship, the post office, according to Donahoe, must give 120,000 employees the pink slip.
If not, the post office will be completely broke “by the end of next year” and may be forced to close its doors.
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6) The Orwellian American Left
David Limbaugh, PatriotPost.us
As I heard Barack Obama and his propaganda minister, Jay Carney, endorsing tax cuts as a vehicle for economic growth, I was reminded, again, of George Orwell's "1984" and the striking similarities between his Oceania and the American left's vision for America.
Oceania's Big Brother regime had "four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided," the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love and the Ministry of Plenty. Each department was dedicated to the opposite principle suggested by its title. "Truth" disseminated lies. "Peace" promoted war. "Love" enforced uniformity of thought. And "Plenty" manipulated the economy to impoverish the people while enriching the ruling class. God was expelled and absolute truth abolished, while "doublespeak" was promoted.
Oceania's Thought Police was the Ministry of Love's enforcement arm, while the Ministry of Truth undertook the task of rewriting history in service to the Party slogan, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
Today the left has a Ministry of Truth, because it knows that twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservatives than as liberals and so has to disguise its policies to deceive the majority. Its Ministry of Peace would be better-named the Ministry of Bipartisanship, which, in the name of reaching across the aisle with a friendly hand, slices it off with a partisan dagger. Its Ministry of Love is more aptly named the Ministry of Tolerance, which dictates one way of thinking and demonizes dissenters. The Ministry of Plenty is alive and well in the Obama administration's cadre of economic advisers.
The liberal establishment's Ministry of Truth extends throughout our culture, having taken over our educational institutions, the arts and the sciences. How slavishly our academics hew to the Party slogan. They have planted themselves in positions of cultural influence to "control the present," in order to rewrite the past (to conform to their dogma), for purposes of "controlling the future."
Our professors of history, economics, political science, sociology, psychology, philosophy, journalism, law, the hard sciences and other fields deride Western civilization and characterize our founders as Christian-mocking deists devoted to enlightenment principles of the philosophes. They speciously tie our unique freedoms to our "secular" founding to argue that we must banish God from the public square, lest we lose our liberties. In the name of academic inquiry, these academic and cultural "Thought Police" indoctrinate and intimidate students who dare deviate from their thought mandates.
Their textbooks tell us that Franklin D. Roosevelt not only was not a domestic liberal but also saved capitalism through socialism. (Talk about "doublespeak.") They say his New Deal spent us out of the Great Depression, while current historians not housed in the Ministry of Truth tell us it exacerbated our economic woes. Based on the ministry's revisionism, Keynesian economists were empowered to reflect those myths in their textbooks for a half-century. Armed with their revised lessons from history, Obama's Ministry of Plenty advocated passage of the "stimulus" bill, which was doublespeak for "rampant redistribution to its allies, sucking the oxygen out of the private sector and suppressing the economy."
The left's Ministry of Truth, with the full-throated support of the "unbiased" mainstream media, has given us such Orwellian originals as "pro-choice" while suing an 80-year-old prayer-warrior for standing outside Planned Parenthood's abortion factory to share important information with pregnant mothers to help them make a fully informed choice. The ministry seeks to shut down conservative talk radio, with the "Fairness Doctrine." It forbids private ballots for employees to vote anonymously on union membership for the purpose of intimidating them to join -- in the name of the "Employee Free Choice Act." It boasts of "budget cuts" when it slightly reduces the rate of increases in spending. It calls the budget-busting Obamacare legislation the "Affordable Care Act." It calls a bill that would further expand unemployment a "jobs bill." It fabricates and manipulates a consensus on "climate change" and ostracizes dissenters as science-averse. (In Oceania, science had "almost ceased to exist.") It conspires with its Ministry of Tolerance to describe political dissent from its effort to legalize homosexual marriage as "hate" and to brand political conservatism as "racism." While the rapacious Obama administration recklessly squanders our national wealth in its lust for power, its ministries of Plenty and Bipartisanship vilify the wealthy -- who are paying a disproportionate share of taxes -- for not paying their fair share. The Ministry of Plenty, while presiding over the destruction of the private sector, castigates job creators for hoarding all the wealth.
2012 won't be so much about two competing visions as it will be a contest of truth. Without the left's Orwellian ministers and their deputies in the press and academia, it would be a historic blowout and rejection of their vision. I'm betting it will be anyway.
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Dick
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1) US diplomatic bid to defuse Syrian trigger for regional war
The US, France and Britain went into concerted diplomatic action to contain the Syrian crisis before it detonated a regional conflict and deteriorated into civil strife more horrendous and dangerous than the Iraq war. At the same time, Syria and its neighbors have sharply intensified their war preparations, fully expecting diplomacy to fail. Military and Washington sources report their pessimism emanates from the conviction in the region that even if Bashar Assad and his family pretend to cooperate, they will fight to the last Syrian before they actually relax their grip on government.
The US and allies launched their bid for a negotiated end to the Syrian impasse launched last week. A number of Western agents infiltrated Syria from Lebanon and Jordan and entered the embattled cities of Homs, Hama and Idlib in the north, Deir al-Zour and Abu Kemal in the east and Daraa in the south. Their mission was to unite the deeply divided opposition factions and local rebels into a coherent front. The Assad regime chose to turn a blind eye.
Building on that groundwork, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called together Tuesday, Dec. 6, in Geneva the leaders of Syrian opposition groups operating in different European capitals, as well as Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and urged them to overcome their differences and back the US-Western peace initiative.
She explained, our sources disclosed, that the administration had resolved to up the diplomatic, economic and military pressure on Bashar Assad. President Barack Obama, Clinton announced, had personally instructed all parts of the American administration to starting referring to his regime as the “Assad gang.”
On Wednesday, Dec. 7, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman was due in Beirut to set up a base of operations there after coordinating the American step with Israel's government and military leaders in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
As part of the drive for negotiations, Washington and Paris returned their ambassadors to Damascus after an absence of six weeks. Their task is to open direct channels to President Assad and sound him out on their proposal for him to accept an orderly transition of power in order to avert a regional war and save his country from plunging further in to civil strife.
The US and French Presidents Obama and Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron are of one mind about pursuing diplomacy for ending Assad's rule even though not the slightest sign of willingness to cooperate has come from the presidential palace in Damascus. Even the Arab League's proposal to send monitors into Syria met with conditions that were deemed tantamount to a rejection. ,
This initiative has had no effect on the hectic military preparations going forward in the region in anticipation of an imminent outbreak of armed hostilities.
The Syrian armed forces staged a large-scale war game Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 3-4, in the eastern part of the country.
Israel Defense Forces reciprocated by organizing an extensive exercise of the 51st Battalion of the Golan Brigade on the Golan border with Syria Tuesday, Dec. 6.
Both practiced tactics for repelling invading foreign forces and moving the battle into enemy territory.
The Syrian security and military leadership turned out in full to observe the Syrian armed forces' performance, while on the Israeli side, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gant were in conspicuous attendance – as were TV cameras on both sides of the border.
The Israeli army spokesman uncharacteristically made a point of highlighting a visit Minister for Home Front Defense Matan Vilnai paid Tuesday to the Haifa oil refineries to inspect Israel's emergency fuel reserve. He announced that a battery of the home-made anti-missile Iron Dome may be posted at the refineries.
Tuesday also saw unusual activity in the Lebanese capital: Hizballah's Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah emerged from his bunker after three and-a-half years to declare before a Shiite audience assembled for the Ashura ceremonies that Hizballah’s support for Bashar Assad is absolute.
In his capacity has leader of Iran's Lebanese Shiite surrogate, he pledged that Hizballah would provide the regime in Damascus with all the help it required.
1a)Egypt's Sham Election
By Daniel Pipes and Cynthia Farahat
According to Egypt's elections committee, the Muslim Brotherhood won 37 percent of the vote of the first round of voting in Egypt; and the Salafis, who promote a yet more extreme Islamist program, won 24 percent, giving them together a jaw-dropping 61 percent of the vote.
This stunning result prompts two questions: Is this a legitimate or rigged outcome? Are Islamists about to dominate Egypt?
Legitimate or rigged? No one took seriously Soviet elections with their inevitable 99-percent returns for the Communists; and while the process and outcome of the Egyptian elections are less blatant, they deserve similar skepticism. The game is more subtle, but it's still a game, and here is how it's played:
The Muslim Brotherhood (founded in 1928) and the military dictatorship (ruling Egypt since 1952) have a parallel ideology and a long history that makes them simultaneously rivals and allies. Over the decades, they off-and-on cooperated in an autocratic system bound by Islamic law (Shari'a) and in oppressing liberal, secular elements.
In this spirit, Anwar El-Sadat, Hosni Mubarak, and now Mohamed Tantawi tactically empowered Islamists as a foil to gain Western support, arms, and money. For example, when George W. Bush pressured Mubarak to permit more political participation, the latter responded by having 88 Muslim Brotherhood members elected to parliament, thereby warning Washington that democracy = an Islamist takeover. The apparent weakness of non-Islamists scared the West from further insisting on a transition to political participation. But a close look at the 2005 elections finds that the regime helped the Islamists gain its 20 percent of the seats.
Today, Tantawi and his Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) still play this tired old game. Note the various methods: (1) Reports of electoral fraud have emerged, for example in Helwan. (2) SCAF has, according to the prominent Islamist Safwat Hijazi, offered a "deal" to the Islamists: it shares power with them on condition that they turn a blind eye to its corruption.
(3) The military has subsidized both the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafi political parties during the recent parliamentary elections. Marc Ginsburg reports on a SCAF slush fund totaling millions of dollars in "the form of 'walk around' money, clothing and food giveaways" that enabled hundreds of local chapters of Islamist political organizations to buy votes. Ginsburg tells of a SCAF emissary who "met secretly with representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist oriented political movements last April to establish local political 'action committee' bank accounts to funnel an underground supply chain of financial and commodity support."
Other Middle Eastern dictators, such as the Yemeni president and Palestinian Authority chairman, also play this double game, pretending to be anti-Islamist moderates and Western allies while, in fact, being toughs who cooperate with Islamists and repress true moderates. Even anti-Western tyrants like Assad of Syria and Qaddafi of Libya play the same opportunistic game in times of need, portraying massive uprisings against them as Islamist movements. (Recall how Qaddafi blamed the Libyan insurrection on Al-Qaeda lacing teenagers' coffee with hallucinatory pills.)
Salafis won nearly one-fourth of the votes? Something fishy here.
Dominate Egypt? If the military colludes with Islamists to remain in power, obviously it, and not Islamists retains ultimate control. This is the key point that conventional analysts miss: the recent election results allow the military to keep power. As aspiring Egyptian politician Mohamed ElBaradei correctly notes, "it is all in the hands of SCAF right now."
True, if Islamists control the parliament (not a sure thing; the military could yet decide to reduce their percentage in future rounds of an unusually complex voting procedure open to abuse), they acquire certain privileges and move the country further toward the Shari'a – as far, anyway, as SCAF permits. This maintains the long-term trend of Islamization underway since the military seized power in 1952.
What about Western policy? First, press SCAF to build the civil society that must precede real democracy, so that the modern and moderate civilians in Egypt have a chance to express themselves.
Second, instantly cease all economic aid to Cairo. It is unacceptable that Western taxpayers pay, even indirectly, for Islamizing Egypt. Resume funding only when the government allows secular Muslims, liberals, and Copts, among others, freely to express and organize themselves.
Third, oppose both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis. Less extreme or more, Islamists of every description are our worst enemies.
Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum and Taube fellow at the Hoover Institution. Ms Farahat is an Egyptian activist and co-author of a book about the Tahrir Square protests.
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2)The Ultimate Devastating Price of Government Dependency
By Lloyd Marcus
The devastating price of government dependency. I witnessed it up close and personal in the late '50s, when I was a child. Both of my mom's sisters had five kids each by various men who simply deposited their seed and moved on. Thus, both of my aunts were totally dependent on government. They lived in the projects.
The oldest of five children, I remember when my parents and four siblings also lived in the projects. We moved out to a black suburb when dad broke the color barrier into the Baltimore City Fire Department and became a firefighter.
Still, it was a treat whenever I was permitted to sleep over at my cousins' home in the projects in the exciting city.
The atmosphere at my welfare-dependent cousins' home was strikingly different from mine -- a subtle sadness which made me feel a little sorry for them. I felt that they envied me and my siblings for having a dad who actually lived with us. I remember seeing large cans and boxes of generic foods, peanut butter, powdered milk, meat, and cheese. As a child, I felt food was weirdly important to them. My siblings and I could go into our fridge anytime we desired. My cousins' fridge was off-limits without permission.
Despite lots of extremely loud talking and laughter in their homes, both my aunts appeared chronically angry and bitter, with short, explosive tempers. A threat of violence constantly loomed over life in the government projects inside and outside of the home.
If you add up the financial value of what my welfare cousins received for "free" from the government (housing, food, and health care) their annual income probably far surpassed that of my dad. And yet, I considered my cousins poor. They perceived themselves to be poor as well.
Of my ten welfare-dependent cousins, only one remarkably "made it." He worked his way through college and became very successful. The other nine never ventured off the government plantation, seduced as they were by the false promise of security. Consequently, they succumbed to alcohol and drug abuse and out-of-wedlock births. Four of my cousins' lifestyles caused them to suffer early deaths.
Clearly, my two aunts' choice, or at least their perceived lack of any option beyond totally relying on government for their survival, came at a devastatingly high price -- the self-image and spirit of themselves and their children.
This tragic scenario sponsored by mostly Democrats has been playing out in the black community for at least fifty years.
A black man in the Oval Office affords the Democrats a unique opportunity. They can scream racism whenever anyone disagrees with or opposes any of Obama's policies. Thus, his presidency is a golden opportunity to spread their destruction of the black family nationally, to all Americans.
Why would the Democrats desire to do this, you ask? In a nutshell, it is all about them. The more Americans dependent on government, the more Democrats are empowered. Also, the Democratic Party enthusiastically embraces all who hate America. Pure and simple.
The Democrats, supported by the liberal media, are well on their way to transforming America into a giant government-controlled plantation of dependent lifelong indentured servants.
For example: under Obama, a record number of Americans receive food stamps. Another Democrat tactic to increase the number of Americans dependent on government and voting Democrat is to keep extending unemployment benefits -- the timeframe is now up to 92 weeks, or almost two years. What incentive is there for the unemployed to aggressively pursue a job when they know they can sit on their butts and receive a check for two years? Rather than encouraging Obama to reduce ridiculously costly regulations on small business, which would create jobs, Democrats and their media partners are pressuring the Republicans to join them in further extending unemployment benefits.
Beginning in public school and continuing through college, liberals have indoctrinated our children, teaching them that America is unjust, that capitalism is evil, and that they are entitled to the fruit of other peoples' labors. On top of it all, only government can make things fair and right. Liberal indoctrination birthed the Occupy movement -- losers hating achievers and demanding their "fair share."
Meanwhile, 47% of Americans, almost half the country, are exempt from paying federal income taxes. Despite the rich paying most of the taxes already, Democrats are screaming for the rich to pay more.
But here is my point. There is a scary question on the minds of decent Americans. The question is whether we have "the tipping point" -- the point where teachers and professors have stolen the minds of too many of our youths; the point where Democrats have made so many Americans dependent upon some form of government handouts that a majority surrender their freedom, liberty, and culture to big government.
Nothing in life is free. While my cousins received free cradle-to-grave government handouts, they paid a devastating price for their dependency. They lost themselves -- their self-esteem, pride, and dignity. They lost the joy of success after failure. They lost the pursuit of their dreams. They lost the experience of developing their God-given gifts and talents. For perceived security, my cousins willingly remained slaves on the Democrats' government plantation.
Here is what Ben Franklin had to say about folks who worship security: "He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security."
Due to the lack of American history taught in our public schools, I would not be surprised if a student asked, "Ben Franklin -- ain't he the guy who dated J-Lo?"
I do not fear for America because I believe that God still has us in His Hands. However, I am extremely concerned that we have culturally and morally lost our way.
Today, it is no longer embarrassing to depend on welfare for survival. Many feel justified, demanding that government rob the rich to redistribute to them in the name of fairness and compassion. These suckers are clueless to the truth that the confiscated funds go to public-sector unions, which recycle the funds back to the Democratic Party via union dues.
But here is the rub. You government dependency junkies do not get off scot-free. Remember, nothing in life is free. You ultimately pay a devastating price for your class envy, laziness, hatred, and fear. In the process, you lose yourself.
Lloyd Marcus, proud unhyphenated American, is the chairman of The Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama and the spokesperson for the Tea Party Express. Please help Lloyd spread his message by joining his Liberty Network. Lloyd is singer/songwriter of the American Tea Party Anthem and author of Confessions of a Black Conservative, foreword by Michelle Malkin. LloydMarcus.com
2a)Jim Rogers: Government ‘Always' Lies, Tweaks Inflation and Jobless Data
By Forrest Jones and Kathleen Walter
Unemployment and inflation rates are worse than the numbers that hit the newswires suggest because the government is able to tinker with the methodology to sugarcoat how bad the economy really is, says international investor Jim Rogers.
"The government lies about the numbers that they put out. Don't take your advice from any government, or you are going to go bankrupt," Rogers told Newsmax.TV in an exclusive interview when asked if unemployment rates will ever return to pre-recession levels.
The official unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent in November from 9.0 percent in October not due to strong gains in hiring by due to a shrinking labor force, as would-be job seekers quit looking for permanent work, the government reports.
Even so, the figure is probably much higher, Rogers adds.
"They make their unemployment figures look better but that's because they jiggle the numbers. If you use independent sources for unemployment, you will see we have serious problems still despite the government jiggling the numbers."
Inflation rates are also misleading, Rogers adds.
Officially, the consumer price index rose 3.5 percent on year in October, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, although inflation stripped of volatile food and energy prices came to an annualized increase of 2.1 percent.
The Federal Reserve tends to focus heavily on the latter when setting interest-rate policies and insists inflation rates are hovering within comfort zones.
The government lies about that also, Rogers says.
"Anybody who buys, who goes shopping knows that prices are going up. Buy food, education, insurance, just about everything that we buy, prices are going higher and the government tells us there's no inflation," Rogers says.
"Some independent measures say it's over 6 percent already ... it's going to go much higher because they keep printing money, and as long as they keep printing money, it's going to get worse. So prepare yourself for much higher inflation."
The Federal Reserve has expanded the money supply in an effort to ward off crippling deflation and spur investment and ultimately, hiring.
Such polices have weakened the dollar and applied inflationary pressures to the economy, while unemployment rates remain high, critics charge.
"The problem is having any system that is dictated and where the government has a monopoly — that leads to the problems because they (the governments) always learn to cheat and lie."
Meanwhile, fiscal and monetary stimulus policies have swollen the government's balance sheets, making debt burdens so heavy that the U.S. is moving into dire straits.
"America is actually in worse shape than Europe. Europe as a whole is not a big debtor. The U.S. as a whole is the biggest debtor in the history of the world plus we have our own states, which have big problems: Illinois, California, New York," Rogers says.
"In Europe they've got some states that have serious problems such as Greece, Ireland, etc. But as a whole they are in better shape."
"The reason we are looking at Europe right now is because their debts are coming mature as we speak and soon they are going to be coming due in America, and we are going to have those problems, too."
Don't look to either one political party to save the day, as both Republicans and Democrats are both guilty of spending beyond their means.
"As far as I am concerned, a pox on both of their houses. Mr. Bush did the same thing. The debt skyrocketed under Clinton. The debt skyrocketed even more under Bush. Debts under Mr. Obama, they've gotten worse and worse and worse. The Republicans talk a very good game right now and I hope that they are right when they say we are not going to let spending go higher. I hope that they are right about it," Rogers says.
Even Ronald Reagan wasn't as fiscally disciplined as he should have been.
"When Reagan was president, the national debt doubled. Here was a man if anybody in the past 50 years who said 'we're not going to do this anymore,' and the debt doubled under Reagan."
© Moneynews. All rights reserved.
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3)Obama and the Hezbollah Terrorist
By DAVID B. RIVKIN, JR. And CHARLES D. STIMSON
In Jan. 2007, Ali Musa Daqduq helped kill five Americans in Iraq. He may soon be released into Iranian custody.
Call it the triumph of ideology over national interest and honor. Having dithered for nearly three years, the Obama administration has only a few weeks to bring to justice a Hezbollah terrorist who slaughtered five U.S. soldiers in Iraq in 2007. Unfortunately, it appears more likely that Ali Musa Daqduq will instead be transferred to Iran, to a hero's welcome.
In the early evening of Jan. 20, 2007, in the city of Karbala, south of Baghdad, five black SUVs approached the location of a regular meeting between U.S. and Iraqi military officers. Inside the vehicles, which mimicked U.S. transports (to avoid heightened scrutiny), were a dozen individuals dressed in U.S. military uniforms and bearing U.S. weapons. Their drivers spoke English.
Upon reaching their target, the occupants opened fire on the Americans. One U.S. soldier was killed on the spot. Four others were kidnapped, tortured and executed.
The mastermind of this brutal attack? Ali Musa Daqduq, a Lebanese national and Hezbollah commander. U.S. forces captured him in March 2007, and, in interrogation, he allegedly provided a wealth of information on Iran's role in fomenting, training and arming Iraqi insurgents of all stripes.
With U.S. troops set to exit Iraq at the end of December, all detainees in American custody there have been transferred to the Iraqis except for Daqduq. He is set to be turned over in a matter of weeks. Based on past experience with released detainees who were in Iranian employ, U.S. officials know that Daqduq will promptly re-emerge in Iran, shaking hands with dignitaries and leading parades, before rejoining his Hezbollah colleagues.
This outcome would be an insult to the American servicemen who have lost many comrades to insurgents such as Daqduq, who consistently failed to comply with the laws of war. Indeed, the Iraq war is the first conflict in modern history where the U.S.—having complied with the laws of war by promptly prosecuting American troops believed to have violated those laws—did not bring to justice a single one of the hundreds of captured enemy combatants who have killed Iraqi civilians, American soldiers and contractors. Impunity for war criminals debases the laws of war, violates our international legal obligations, and is inconsistent with American values.
We have already failed to stop Iran's nuclear-weapons program. We have also failed to punish Tehran for facilitating the deaths of American soldiers, or for plotting to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington. Allowing Daqduq to slip through U.S. hands would further reinforce the impression of American impotence. That will have serious repercussions, measured in diplomatic defeats and lost lives.
There is an obvious solution: Transfer Daqduq from Iraq to Guantanamo Bay to be tried by a military commission there. But this is where the Obama administration's rigid ideology comes into play—beginning with flawed, self-defeating legalistic arguments.
A successful prosecution of Daqduq would be relatively easy. He killed American soldiers and, as an unprivileged belligerent, has no combatant immunity. Yet the administration purports to be troubled by our lack of an extradition treaty with Iraq. It also points out that the Iraqis have refused to accord the U.S. legal custody of Daqduq, although the U.S. has him in physical custody. The Iraqis, of course, are being pressured by the Iranians not to accommodate this legal-custody request.
Yet we don't need an extradition treaty with Iraq to transfer Daqduq, a Lebanese citizen captured by American forces in a war zone. Since his capture occurred when the U.S. and other coalition members were the occupying power in Iraq, there is ample basis in existing international law for the American exercise of legal jurisdiction over him.
A more serious obstacle is the administration's policy of eschewing military tribunals. Earlier this year, the administration considered bringing Daqduq into the U.S. to face trial in a civilian court. In response, six Republican senators wrote President Obama, warning against trying Daqduq in federal court, and urging the president to refer him to a military commission.
The administration briefly flirted with the idea of a military commission, perhaps in Charleston, S.C. or at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. That idea seems to have been dropped after a Nov. 8 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham told Attorney General Eric Holder that if the administration were to bring Daqduq to the U.S. for a civilian or military trial, "all hell would break loose."
The administration believes that bringing anyone new, even high-value detainees, to Guantanamo is inconsistent with the goal of eventually closing the facility. This proposition is absurd, and not only because that facility remains vital and relevant to this day. It raises the question of whether administration's detention policy is actually shaped by a crass political calculus of not antagonizing its liberal base in advance of what promises to be a difficult 2012 election.
The administration should press the Maliki government in Baghdad harder to allow the U.S. to maintain custody of Daqduq following the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. If the Iraqis still refuse, the administration should unilaterally transfer Daqduq to Guantanamo to face justice.
While the Maliki government may protest publicly, it will rejoice privately, since Daqduq's rendition would demonstrate Washington's resolve in the face of Tehran's pressure. Allowing him to go unpunished is both inexcusable and dangerous.
Mr. Rivkin served in the Justice Department during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. Mr. Stimson, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, was a deputy assistant secretary for detainee affairs at the Defense Department.
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4)Obama Takes Populist Swing
President Says GOP Policies Threaten Middle Class; Republicans Blame Him
By LAURA MECKLER
President Obama called for Americans to get a "fair shot" at advancement to the middle class, deriding the "breathtaking greed of a few" and chastising Republicans who he said enabled them. Laura Meckler has details on The News Hub. Photo: Reuters
Adopting a sharply partisan and populist tone, President Barack Obama on Tuesday painted a picture of the American middle class under siege from wealthy interests, drawing an explicit comparison to the industrial monopolies of an earlier era.
In a gamble, Mr. Obama largely put aside optimism about the U.S., a tone he struck at his State of the Union address in January, and instead worked to embrace the anger and skepticism emanating from much of the electorate.
Too many children can no longer expect to join the middle class, the president said, no matter if they work hard and play by the rules. "That's inexcusable. It's wrong. It flies in the face of everything we stand for," he said in a speech at a Kansas high school.
His language, borrowing explicitly from Theodore Roosevelt, was unsparing, blaming "the breathtaking greed of a few" for the financial crisis and deriding "huge bets, and huge bonuses, made with other people's money on the line." Republicans and their policies, he suggested, enabled irresponsibility.
Republicans responded that Mr. Obama should be held responsible for the economic bad times. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said Mr. Obama had "his hands on the economic throat of the country," and likened the president to Jimmy Carter, who lost re-election amid a steep economic downturn, rather than Mr. Roosevelt.
The president's tone sets the stage for the themes of his re-election campaign, and the likely GOP response. The speech will escalate charges the president is engaging in class warfare, a complaint heard from business executives he has been trying to court as well as Republicans.
The White House views the speech as an opportunity to set out a clear contrast in visions heading into 2012 and to deflect blame for the economy to a swath of sources. It marks a sharp shift from the summer, when he tried and failed to cut a deficit deal with Republicans. Since then, he has taken a sharper partisan tone culminating in Tuesday's remarks.
Referring to Republicans, Mr. Obama said, "they want to go back to the same policies that stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for way too many years. And their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules. I am here to say they are wrong."
The president spoke in Osawatomie, Kan., the same town where, in 1910, Mr. Roosevelt, a Republican on his way to becoming an independent, delivered his "New Nationalism" speech. There, Roosevelt called for the government to do more to counter the power of concentrated wealth.
Mr. Obama cited health-insurance companies, mortgage lenders and financial firms. For too many Americans, he said, hard work no longer pays off, while those "at the very top" have grown wealthier than ever before. The president has periodically bashed Wall Street before, but Tuesday's speech was more sweeping and went beyond any one industry to say that the middle class as a whole was being left behind in part due to corporate greed and wrongdoing.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last month found three in four Americans say the nation's current economic structure is "out of balance and favors a very small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country," among similar sentiments. Such feelings have helped fuel both the tea-party and Occupy Wall Street movements, and Mr. Obama nodded to both.
Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist who has advised several presidential campaigns, said that because everyone knows the economy is terrible it is smart for the president to acknowledge it up front. "It's a short route to connecting with voters," he said.
It is a risk, however, to embrace economic woe, rather than rise above it, given voters' tendency to punish incumbents who preside over bad times. Mr. Obama prepares to stand for re-election amid persistent unemployment and anemic economic growth that have put particular burdens on the middle class.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) said he agreed with much of Mr. Obama's diagnosis of the problems in the American economy, but not with his remedies, such as increasing taxes on wealthier Americans. "Where we ought to be focused is increasing income mobility," he said. "You don't accomplish that by taking away from those who have been successful."
Mr. Obama has tried several different tacks this year. At the outset, the White House talked mostly about "winning the future" with a State of the Union speech focused on innovation. During the summer, the president portrayed himself as the "adult in the room," bidding to rise above the bickering in Congress over the debt ceiling to push a big, bipartisan deal.
As part of the latest strategy, Mr. Obama and his Democratic allies in the Senate have forced a string of votes that won't pass, but that put Republicans on the record taking positions that can be used in future campaigns. Recent examples include votes on extending a payroll tax cut by increasing taxes on millionaires and a push to confirm the head of the administration's consumer financial protection agency.
Republicans have vowed to block any nominee until the new agency is restructured. "He's setting up a vote he knows will fail so he can show up afterward and say he's shocked," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said on the Senate floor.
In one case, White House pressure seems to be gaining in Congress. GOP leaders say they are willing to extend the payroll tax cut, and the parties are now debating the details, mostly how to offset lost revenue.
"I think there certainly is ample evidence that the Democrats are winning this debate," Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), told reporters Tuesday. Republicans, he said, are "being picked apart."
—Naftali Bendavid and Jonathan Weisman contributed to this article.
Write to Laura Meckler at laura.meckler@wsj.com
4a)A Lesson in Fairness For Obama
Election '12: President Obama this week started testing his new campaign theme, replacing "hope and change" with the equally vacant promise of "fairness." Apparently he hopes Americans can be fooled twice.
In a talk Tuesday at the site of Teddy Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" speech, Obama repeatedly invoked the notion of fairness. "We are greater together," he said, "when everyone engages in fair play, everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share."
The problem is that fairness, just like hope and change, can mean anything anyone wants it to.
For Obama, fairness obviously means more taxes on the rich, more regulations heaped on private industry, and more government spending to give people "a fair shot."
As he put it, "there's been a certain crowd in Washington," who say "if only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes — especially for the wealthy — our economy will grow stronger (and) jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everyone else. ... It doesn't work. It's never worked."
Obama apparently slept through the 1980s, when Reagan's tax-cutting, free-market policies unleashed an economic powerhouse that drove two decades of growth, produced record low unemployment and improved prosperity for everyone.
But by Obama's own measure, the country has gotten more "fair." The richest 1% now pays almost 40% of all federal income taxes, up from 25% two decades ago, while the bottom half pays only 2%, down from 6%. The federal regulatory state has never been as big, and government spending as a share of the economy is at record levels.
What's unfair is what these policies have produced — a woeful economic recovery that's hurt the middle class the most.
In fact, as IBD reported recently, the only winners since Obama took office have been corporations (profits are up 68%) and Wall Street investors (the Dow's up more than 45%). The rest of the country has gotten the shaft.
Household income has dropped almost 7% since the recession ended in June 2009. Unemployment is higher than when Obama took office, home prices are lower, inflation is creeping up. And income inequality — which was flat during the Bush years — has started to rise.
Obama might think he can distract the public from this pathetic record by yammering on about "fair play," hoping nobody notices that he's just offering more of the same failed policies.
In all fairness, we hope voters prove him dead wrong.
4b) Subject: Billion dollar bailout crook from what family?
President John F. Kennedy's nephew, Robert Kennedy, Jr., netted a $1.4 billion bailout for his company, BrightSource, through a loan guarantee issued by a former employee-turned Department of Energy official.
It?s just one more in a string of eye-opening revelations by investigative journalist and Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer in his explosive new book, Throw Them All Out.
The details of how BrightSource managed to land its ten-figure taxpayer bailout have yet to emerge fully. However, one clue might be found in the person of Sanjay Wagle.
Wagle was one of the principals in Kennedy's firm who raised money for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. When Obama won the White House, Wagle was installed at the Department of Energy (DOE), advising on energy grants.
From an objective vantage point, investing taxpayer monies in BrightSource was a risky proposition at the time. In 2010, BrightSource, whose largest shareholder is Kennedy's VantagePoint Partners, was up to its eyes in $1.8 billion of debt obligations and had lost $71.6 million on its paltry $13.5 million of revenue.
Even before BrightSource rattled its tin cup in front of Obama's DOE, the company made it known publicly that its survival hinged on successfully completing the Ivanpah Solar Electrical System, which would become the largest solar plant in the world, on federal lands in California.
In its Securities and Exchange Commission filings, BrightSource further underscored the risky nature of the Ivanpah venture and, more broadly, the company's viability:
Our future success depends on our ability to construct Ivanpah, our first utility-scale solar thermal power project, in a cost-effective and timely manner. Our ability to complete Ivanpah and the planning, development and construction of all three phases are subject to significant risk and uncertainty.
Ironically, in 2008, Kennedy wrote a CNN article praising Obama as reminiscent of his famous father and uncle. The article, titled "Obama's Energy Plan Would Create a Green Gold Rush," proved prophetic. However, the 'green gold rush' came in the form of $1.4 billion of taxpayers? money flowing into the pet projects of rich venture capital investors like Kennedy, not average citizens.
What's more, BrightSource touted the Ivanpah project as a green jobs creator. Yet as its own website reveals, the thermal solar plant will only create 1,400 jobs at its peak construction and 650 jobs annually thereafter. Even using the peak estimate of 1,400 jobs, that works out to a cost to taxpayers of $1 million per job created.
As Schweizer writes in "Throw Them All Out," a billion dollars in taxpayer money is being sent to wealthy investors to bail them out of risky investments. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
4c)The Last Incarnation of Barack Obama
If there was any doubt where President Barack Obama's ideological heart lies, yesterday he let it be known loud and clear in a wide-ranging speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. President Obama is at his core a dyed-in-the-wool progressive who sees the federal government as the answer to all of America's problems. And he is charging full steam ahead on this far-left course toward Election Day 2012, despite the total failure of his big-government policies and an American people who have flatly rejected the message he is trying to sell.
True to form, President Obama yesterday did what he does best: He delivered a flowery speech and flexed his rhetorical muscles. It's a talent that won him the presidency, but unfortunately it hasn't won the future for the American people. And that's because the President's underlying philosophy is terribly flawed. After three years of a massive expansion of government, the enactment of Obamacare, hundreds of billions of dollars in failed stimulus spending, government ownership of General Motors, a Big Labor/pro-unionization onslaught, threats of even higher taxation, the promulgation of more unnecessary regulations, and a total failure to confront the entitlement challenge, the verdict is in on President Obama's record and the soundness of his statist, progressive philosophy. Deficits are soaring, the economy is stagnant, 13.3 million Americans are out of work, and job growth is flat. Not surprisingly, the President’s speech did not touch on those facts.
Instead of confronting the reality of America under his watch, President Obama hearkened back to the days of Bull Moose progressive Theodore Roosevelt, citing him as his model of good governance, quoting his 1910 "New Nationalism" speech and calling for "fairness" in America--along with more infrastructure spending, more federal education programs, more regulations, and higher taxation on job creators to redistribute wealth and pay for his big government programs. And in order to raise the temperature of his rhetoric--and inflame the passions of his audience--the President fell back to his class warfare ways, demonizing the haves in order to win over the have-nots while painting a picture of an America where "unfairness" reigns and opportunity cannot be found.
Matthew Spalding, vice president of The Heritage Foundation's B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics, explains why President Obama's reliance on class warfare and his perverted view of "fairness" is so contrary to what America is really about:
There are no class distinctions in America. That's why Steve Jobs could start an adopted child in a broken home, start Apple in a garage and become a billionaire eight times over. The real distinction here is caused by the rise of a new governing class of experts, bureaucrats and political elites who insist on ruling us to enforce "fairness" rather than letting us govern ourselves under the rule of law.
Indeed, the new fairness inevitably leads to bureaucratic favoritism, inequalities based on special interests and undue political influence. The real class warfare, as Paul Ryan argued in his recent speech at The Heritage Foundation, is caused by "a class of governing elites, exploiting the politics of division to pick winners and losers in our economy and determine our destinies for us."
Ironically, the President's conception of America--that it is a land of no opportunity--stands in stark contrast to his own personal story, which he even trumpeted in his speech. Barack Obama came from meager beginnings and now sits in the Oval Office. There are countless stories of other Americans who have risen and found success on their own merit in this fertile land. But speaking to America's rugged individualism and the notion of achieving success without the helping hand of the government would not serve President Obama's progressive agenda. In his world, the government is the giver of all things, the defender of the middle class, and the architect of prosperity. Likewise, success is not something to be championed but to be demagogued in the name of the expansion of the state.
Over the past three years, we have seen the President articulate many ideas and cloak himself in many different philosophies. Of late, he has even called himself a tax-cutter and posed as a deficit hawk, all while calling for massive amounts of new spending. But with yesterday's speech, he has emerged in his truest incarnation--a hard-line progressive to the core. The speech fits perfectly with reports that the Obama 2012 campaign has come to the realization that it will lose white blue-collar voters by large margins and is concentrating instead on cobbling together a coalition of culture elites and racial minorities. The abandonment of the middle class--or, rather, the fact that the middle class has abandoned him--puts in context this latest incarnation of the President as he prepares to run next year.
This is not the way to lead America to prosperity, to stand the economy on its feet, or to put the millions of unemployed Americans back to work. Rather than make government bigger and more intrusive, now is the time to make it smaller and more responsible so that entrepreneurs can achieve what Washington cannot manufacture: new jobs, new ideas, and a better America for future generations. But that America is quite different from the one President Obama envisions.
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5)Postmaster General Says Post Office Is Broke, May Be Forced To Close Next Year
By Kirsten West Savali
The current recession has negatively affected the viability of organizations, the livelihoods of employees and their families, and is beginning to create–if it hasn’t already–an ominous environment that is inoculated by skepticism, fear, and above all, hopelessness.
The United States Post Office is the latest organization looking to inundate those aforementioned sensibilities into the lives of 120,000 of their employees.
Postmaster General, Patrick Donahoe, believes that in order for the post office to remain afloat, in other words–keep its doors open, “it needs to layoff 120,000 workers, close thousands of post offices, and end Saturday mail deliveries forever.”
Donahoe was so sure about his assumptions that he pleaded his case to Congress on Tuesday.
At a recent Senate hearing, Donahoe told a panel that the post office will “miss a $5.5 billion payment to its retiree health fund due at the end of the month.”
Moreover, the post office is currently facing a, “$10-billion net loss this fiscal year and was near its borrowing limit.”
In order to eradicate this financial hardship, the post office, according to Donahoe, must give 120,000 employees the pink slip.
If not, the post office will be completely broke “by the end of next year” and may be forced to close its doors.
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6) The Orwellian American Left
David Limbaugh, PatriotPost.us
As I heard Barack Obama and his propaganda minister, Jay Carney, endorsing tax cuts as a vehicle for economic growth, I was reminded, again, of George Orwell's "1984" and the striking similarities between his Oceania and the American left's vision for America.
Oceania's Big Brother regime had "four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided," the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love and the Ministry of Plenty. Each department was dedicated to the opposite principle suggested by its title. "Truth" disseminated lies. "Peace" promoted war. "Love" enforced uniformity of thought. And "Plenty" manipulated the economy to impoverish the people while enriching the ruling class. God was expelled and absolute truth abolished, while "doublespeak" was promoted.
Oceania's Thought Police was the Ministry of Love's enforcement arm, while the Ministry of Truth undertook the task of rewriting history in service to the Party slogan, "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
Today the left has a Ministry of Truth, because it knows that twice as many Americans identify themselves as conservatives than as liberals and so has to disguise its policies to deceive the majority. Its Ministry of Peace would be better-named the Ministry of Bipartisanship, which, in the name of reaching across the aisle with a friendly hand, slices it off with a partisan dagger. Its Ministry of Love is more aptly named the Ministry of Tolerance, which dictates one way of thinking and demonizes dissenters. The Ministry of Plenty is alive and well in the Obama administration's cadre of economic advisers.
The liberal establishment's Ministry of Truth extends throughout our culture, having taken over our educational institutions, the arts and the sciences. How slavishly our academics hew to the Party slogan. They have planted themselves in positions of cultural influence to "control the present," in order to rewrite the past (to conform to their dogma), for purposes of "controlling the future."
Our professors of history, economics, political science, sociology, psychology, philosophy, journalism, law, the hard sciences and other fields deride Western civilization and characterize our founders as Christian-mocking deists devoted to enlightenment principles of the philosophes. They speciously tie our unique freedoms to our "secular" founding to argue that we must banish God from the public square, lest we lose our liberties. In the name of academic inquiry, these academic and cultural "Thought Police" indoctrinate and intimidate students who dare deviate from their thought mandates.
Their textbooks tell us that Franklin D. Roosevelt not only was not a domestic liberal but also saved capitalism through socialism. (Talk about "doublespeak.") They say his New Deal spent us out of the Great Depression, while current historians not housed in the Ministry of Truth tell us it exacerbated our economic woes. Based on the ministry's revisionism, Keynesian economists were empowered to reflect those myths in their textbooks for a half-century. Armed with their revised lessons from history, Obama's Ministry of Plenty advocated passage of the "stimulus" bill, which was doublespeak for "rampant redistribution to its allies, sucking the oxygen out of the private sector and suppressing the economy."
The left's Ministry of Truth, with the full-throated support of the "unbiased" mainstream media, has given us such Orwellian originals as "pro-choice" while suing an 80-year-old prayer-warrior for standing outside Planned Parenthood's abortion factory to share important information with pregnant mothers to help them make a fully informed choice. The ministry seeks to shut down conservative talk radio, with the "Fairness Doctrine." It forbids private ballots for employees to vote anonymously on union membership for the purpose of intimidating them to join -- in the name of the "Employee Free Choice Act." It boasts of "budget cuts" when it slightly reduces the rate of increases in spending. It calls the budget-busting Obamacare legislation the "Affordable Care Act." It calls a bill that would further expand unemployment a "jobs bill." It fabricates and manipulates a consensus on "climate change" and ostracizes dissenters as science-averse. (In Oceania, science had "almost ceased to exist.") It conspires with its Ministry of Tolerance to describe political dissent from its effort to legalize homosexual marriage as "hate" and to brand political conservatism as "racism." While the rapacious Obama administration recklessly squanders our national wealth in its lust for power, its ministries of Plenty and Bipartisanship vilify the wealthy -- who are paying a disproportionate share of taxes -- for not paying their fair share. The Ministry of Plenty, while presiding over the destruction of the private sector, castigates job creators for hoarding all the wealth.
2012 won't be so much about two competing visions as it will be a contest of truth. Without the left's Orwellian ministers and their deputies in the press and academia, it would be a historic blowout and rejection of their vision. I'm betting it will be anyway.
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