Romney Juggernaut Begins To Take Its Toll!

What happens when Progressive Liberal economics determines spending? (See 1 and 1a below.)
---
For whatever reason, more money, bigger mistakes by others etc, the Romney Juggernaut has begun to take its toll.

Yesterday, in explaining his loss, Santorum told the audience we do not need a manager we need someone to turn the government inside out and free business. This is political rhetoric that might fool some but in order to turn government inside out you need someone to manage this and Romney has proven more than capable at managing difficult undertakings.

Romney will become the ultimate candidate and, in time, will prove to be likeable, believable, acceptable and someone more than Obama's equal. "Anyone Else" will eventually win the day and if not then God help America.

I am not suggesting Romney is the best candidate among all Republicans but he is more than adequate, has a record to prove that to be the case and is a decent person who conduct will embellish the Oval Office rather than diminish it. He was willing, as with others, to undertake the difficult effort and that is critical.

If nothing else Romney's appointments will be sane nor is it his style to pit American against American! What a refreshing change - talk about change!(See 2, 2a and 2b below.)

What Obama's appointments remind me of is how insular and un-world traveled Jimmy Carter was when he became resident.  Most of his important staff choices were drawn from associates in Georgia and came to be called "The Georgia Mafia." Their record of achievements turned out to be both a disaster for Carter and a disservice to the nation.  You had a yahoo on the staff who insulted women, a banker who dealt under the table and the list is full of other undistinguished people.  However,they were not as radical as Obama's.  I will give Jimmy that. I personally knew some of them as I have mentioned in previous memos and for sure they did not understand economics.
---
Wake up Christians! (See 3 below.)
---
Now we have Biden telling us Obama's Osama raid decision was the most impressive and gutsy military action and decision in 500 years. Either Biden has not read history, read it and is blind or he proves the point, I have been making, this administration has a thin dossier of successes.
---
A blow by blow of what took place in Toulouse.  Meanwhile, the Obama Administration has outlawed the use of terrorists in describing radical Islamists.  I do not see Christians, Jews or members of most other religious sects running around killing innocent people. It seems to be a full occupation of many who embrace Islam.Am I missing something? Is Obama missing something? You decide. (See 4 below.)
---
Dick
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)California's Greek Tragedy
No one should write off the Golden State. But it will take massive reforms to reverse its economic decline.
By MICHAEL J. BOSKIN and JOHN F. COGAN

Long a harbinger of national trends and an incubator of innovation, cash-strapped California eagerly awaits a temporary revenue surge from Facebook IPO stock options and capital gains. Meanwhile, Stockton may soon become the state's largest city to go bust. Call it the agony and ecstasy of contemporary California.

California's rising standards of living and outstanding public schools and universities once attracted millions seeking upward economic mobility. But then something went radically wrong as California legislatures and governors built a welfare state on high tax rates, liberal entitlement benefits, and excessive regulation. The results, though predictable, are nonetheless striking. From the mid-1980s to 2005, California's population grew by 10 million, while Medicaid recipients soared by seven million; tax filers paying income taxes rose by just 150,000; and the prison population swelled by 115,000.

California's economy, which used to outperform the rest of the country, now substantially underperforms. The unemployment rate, at 10.9%, is higher than every other state except Nevada and Rhode Island. With 12% of America's population, California has one third of the nation's welfare recipients.

Partly due to generous union wages and benefits, inflexible work rules and lobbying for more spending, many state programs and institutions spend too much and achieve too little. For example, annual spending on each California prison inmate is equal to an entire middle-income family's after-tax income. Many of California's K-12 public schools rank poorly on standardized tests. The unfunded pension and retiree health-care liabilities of workers in the state-run Calpers system, which includes teachers and university personnel, totals around $250 billion.

Meanwhile, the state lurches from fiscal tragedy to fiscal farce, running deficits in good times as well as bad. The general fund's spending exceeded its tax revenues in nine of the last 10 years (the only exceptions being 2005 at the height of the housing bubble), abetted by creative accounting and temporary IOUs.

Now, the bill is coming due. After running a $5 billion deficit last year and another likely deficit this year, Gov. Jerry Brown's budget increases spending next year by $7 billion and finances the higher spending with income and sales-tax hikes. Specifically, he's proposing a November ballot initiative raising the state's top income tax rate to 12.3%, making it the nation's highest, and raising the basic state sales tax rate, already the nation's highest, to 7.75% from 7.25%.

While Mr. Brown deserves credit for some earlier spending cuts to reduce a large inherited budget shortfall, the budget fails to address long-run structural problems, counting on a cyclical economic recovery and stock bubble for a bailout until the next self-inflicted crisis. Moreover, he's thus far failed to embrace a bold reform agenda to save money, improve services, and restore confidence among the state's beleaguered taxpayers and bond holders.

The ballot initiative's $31 billion, multiyear "temporary" tax increase is larger than the "temporary" hike it replaces and its income-tax hike is retroactive to Jan. 1, 2012. Worse, it doubles down on excessive reliance on high-income taxpayers, especially their stock options and capital gains, which are taxed as ordinary income. During economic good times, it's not unusual for the state to collect one-half of all income-tax revenue from the top 1%. This extreme progressivity leads to boom-bust cycles of rapidly rising revenue followed by complete collapse. Not surprisingly, the revenue is all spent on the upswing, forcing disruptive "emergency" cutbacks on the way down.

The state's progressive tax-and-spend experiment is broken, threatening basic services, from courts and parks to education and health care for its most vulnerable citizens. Mr. Brown's tax initiative only exposes the state to an ever more dangerous roller-coaster ride.

No wonder many Silicon Valley CEOs say they won't expand in California because of high taxes and burdensome regulation. And no wonder net migration has recently reversed, with hundreds of thousands of workers and their families leaving the state in search of better opportunities.

California still ranks first in technology, agriculture and entertainment among the 50 states. But it is near the bottom in business and tax climate and state bond ratings. It's a complex picture, but at its core is the high-tax welfare state run amok.

Many Americans fear the federal fiscal train wreck will turn us into Greece. But, barring major change, they need look no further than California to see what this future portends. Relying on ever-higher taxes to fund payments to an outsized population of benefit recipients is a recipe for exporting prosperity. That is one California trend that other states emulate at their peril.

No one should write off California. It still has great strengths. And it can turn some of its short-term challenges, such as the pressures from ethnic and linguistic diversity (the state is now 37% Hispanic and 13% Asian), into long-term strengths in the global economy. But the political class must face up to the reality that services will have to be far more carefully targeted; the tax system overhauled with lower rates on a broader base of economic activity and people (almost half of all Californians pay no state income tax); and inefficient state programs reformed to spend less and produce far better outcomes.

Mr. Brown is a man of ideas, having run for president in 1992 on a bold flat-tax agenda. Instead of still more antigrowth tax hikes, he should break the grip on the state legislature of his party's special interests—public employee unions, trial lawyers, teacher unions and extreme environmentalists.

A California renaissance—building on the best reforms in budgeting and taxes, education and welfare, crime prevention and pensions by such leaders as Rudy Giuliani, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Andrew Cuomo—is still possible. What it requires is a governor with the vision, determination and political will to see it through.

Messrs. Boskin and Cogan are, respectively, professors of economics and public policy at Stanford University, where they are both senior fellows at the Hoover Institution.


1a)ObamaCare's Costs Are Soaring
We already know the rosy budget estimates used to sell the law were wrong.
By RON JOHNSON

One year after the passage of ObamaCare, this paper published an op-ed I wrote ("ObamaCare and Carey's Heart") about how America's health-care system saved my daughter's life, and describing how implementing this law will limit innovation, lead to rationing, and lower the quality of care. Now, two years out, I would like to focus on the budgetary disaster.

As a candidate, Barack Obama repeatedly claimed that his health-care plan would lower annual family health-insurance premiums by $2,500 before the end of his first term as president. But the Kaiser Family Foundation recently reported that the average family premium has increased $2,200 since the start of this administration.

Then there is the higher cost to taxpayers. The CBO's initial estimate in March 2010 of ObamaCare's budget impact showed it saving money, reducing the federal deficit by $143 billion in the first 10 years. But that positive estimate was largely the product of gimmicks inserted into the bill by Democratic leaders to hide the law's true cost.

Sure enough, the administration last October announced it would not implement one of those gimmicks, a long-term care program called the Class Act, because it was financially unworkable. The loss of the premiums that would be collected to finance the Class Act wiped out $70 billion of the supposed deficit reduction projected by CBO. And last month the administration's proposed fiscal 2013 budget included $111 billion in additional spending for the premium subsidies in the health law's insurance exchanges—further eroding any confidence in the original ObamaCare projections.

This would not be the first time a government program exceeded its projected cost. When Medicare was passed in 1965, for example, the federal government estimated it would cost $12 billion in 1990. Medicare actually cost $110 billion in 1990.

In the case of ObamaCare, one of the principal sources of the lowball estimate used to justify the law is related to the insurance exchanges. The CBO originally estimated that one million Americans would lose their employer-sponsored care and be forced into the exchanges.

But a McKinsey & Co. study in June 2011 showed that 30%-50% of employers plan to stop offering health insurance to their employees once the health law is implemented in 2014. Last week the CBO breezily dismissed this and other studies on the ground that "it is doubtful that any survey conducted today could provide very accurate predictions of employers' future decisions."

As someone who purchased group health insurance for over 31 years, I fully understand why the McKinsey study is more credible than the CBO.

Why? Because the decision employers face under ObamaCare is straightforward: Do they pay $20,000 per year for family coverage, or do they pay the $2,000 penalty to the government?

It is not as if dropping health coverage will expose their employees to financial risk. They will thereby make employees eligible for huge subsidies in the health-care exchanges—$10,000 if their household income is $64,000 per year. In a competitive environment, ObamaCare provides the incentive for employers to drop coverage.

According to the CBO, 154 million Americans are covered under employer-sponsored plans. What would be the cost to taxpayers if 50% of those individuals lost their coverage and became eligible for subsidies? The answer is difficult to calculate, but CBO's answer is basically: Don't worry, revenues will increase automatically to cover those costs (for example, employees' taxable incomes will increase when they lose employer-provided coverage).

In reality, as government assumes a greater share of health-care costs, pressure to cut payments to providers will be enormous. Reduced government reimbursements to providers will cause massive cost-shifting to those remaining in the private health-insurance market. More employees will lose coverage. Before long, we will have what the left has long sought—a single payer health-care system modeled after Medicaid.

In recent testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told me that America's health insurance system is in a "death spiral." She failed to acknowledge that implementation of ObamaCare will be the cause of that death spiral, and American taxpayers will be left to pick up the tab.

In a June 2009 speech to the American Medical Association, Mr. Obama promised: "If you like your health-care plan, you'll be able to keep your health-care plan. Period. No one will take it away, no matter what." I'm not sure what you would call that statement, but whatever you call it, it was a doozy.

Mr. Johnson, a Republican, is a senator from Wisconsin.


1b)Suzanne Collins' "The Hunger Games" Illustrates the Horrors of Big Government
By John Tamny

It says here that HBO’s The Wire, which ran from 2002-2008, is the greatest television drama of all time. The show, essentially an historical-fiction style documentary on the tragedy that is Baltimore (MD), notably appealed to all sides of the political spectrum.

Liberals of the American variety seemed to like it for revealing how very crushing and insurmountable poverty is, conservatives perhaps liked it for televising the human error frequently behind poverty, not to mention the corruption inside media and government, and then libertarians including this writer surely enjoyed it for laying out the totally ineffective nature of the “war on drugs”, and the sheer incompetence of government.

It’s said about The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’ blockbuster novel that will be released in movie form this Friday, that it appeals to a broad demographic ranging from teens to senior citizens. If so, it’s fair to assume that a not insignificant portion of the book’s devotees see a political message within. Cue up the hateful comments, but my libertarian instincts tell me the novel is a boisterous comment about the certain horrors of big government.

To provide background for those who’ve not yet read the book, The Hunger Games takes place in a post-modern North America where society has collapsed thanks to drought, famine and war. The country is Panem, which has a major city called Capitol run by the governing elite. Those in power oversee twelve districts.

Each year at the pleasure of brutal politicians desperate for sadistic entertainment, two representatives from the twelve districts engage in a televised game of survival whereby only one person comes out alive. Though the novel has a variety of characters, most of the story centers on Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, Hunger Games representatives from District 12 (presumably West Virginia), and their efforts to emerge from the games alive.

On its face the book reveals the oppressive cruelty that is big government. Indeed, while the global political class and their enablers in the media to this day try to explain away droughts and the resulting famines from an “Act of God” point of view, the simple truth is that economically free countries don’t suffer them.

Though food is surely the most essential, life-enhancing good on the planet, it’s plentiful in the most barren of climates where it’s not grown or farmed owing to the free-trade truth that we trade products for products; all manner of non-perishable items exchanged for food with great regularity. Simply put, visitors to Arizona don’t witness distended bellies among the citizenry due to a lack of farmers, instead Arizona is prosperous and its citizens well fed for the latter pursuing all manner of work the product of which enables them to freely exchange the fruits of their labor for other goods, including groceries.

Those who were around in the ‘80s doubtless remember the droughts that allegedly created a famine in Ethiopia, but the greater truth is that Ethiopian citizens at one time exported food so plentiful was it; the famine that properly tugged at our heartstrings a function of a brutal dictatorship that socialized agriculture. It was said after Great Britain left India that famines in the former Jewel in the Crown became a thing of the past, but the truer reality is that “famines” were redefined to whitewash the socialist basket case that India became once independent. “Inflation” is presently low in the United States, but that’s only true insofar as the commodities most sensitive to monetary error have been removed from the calculation. Droughts and famines are an inevitable effect of overbearing, interventionist and greedy governments.

As for war, though history says most have economic underpinnings, it is governments and politicians that start wars. This tells us that the horrific country that is Panem is the result of initial government error of the warring kind that led to something much worse.

Back to the malnourishment that pervades Panem, and underlies the story, Katniss muses at one point early on “What it must be like, I wonder, to live in a world where food appears at the press of a button? How would I spend the hours I now commit to combing the woods for sustenance if it were so easy to come by?” Well, in countries where individuals are allowed to keep the product of their work and trade it freely, food can essentially be had at the press of a button, or in modern parlance, with the click of a mouse.

Alternatively, as Bastiat long ago observed, when goods don’t cross borders, armies eventually do. A lack of free trade not only means we get to enjoy much less of the world’s plenty, but it also means we have no rooting interest in the ability of others to produce for us so that we can produce for them. Instead, suffering from a lack of what we want with no avenue to get what we want, we go to war in order to forcibly take that which would otherwise reach us through voluntary, mutually wealth-enhancing exchange.

Panem is essentially a society at war, in this case a war for food. This scenario is happily one that Americans are unaware of owing to our ability to largely produce surplus in order to consume the surplus of others irrespective of country, but one that other countries have sadly known all too well thanks to oppressive government. A hapless, interventionist, warring government is the only kind that could have fostered the societal crack-up that is Panem, and then Panem reflects – if possible – politicians even more inept pouring gasoline onto the proverbial fire.

Gale Hawthorne, Katniss’s best friend back in District 12, ably fills the role of wise government skeptic. Katniss imagines him saying in response to the government’s efforts “to plant hatred between the starving workers of the Seam and those who can generally count on supper”, that “It’s to the Capitol’s advantage to have us divided among ourselves.” Of course it is.

Free societies, personally and economically, don’t rely on government. Instead, a natural harmony eventuates as self-interested individuals create what they’re best at so that they can trade their production for that of others. The problem for political types under such a scenario is that people realize not only that they don’t need government, but that even those who can’t provide for themselves are taken care of thanks to the benevolent doings of those who can.

In the U.S., assuming a better world where special interest groups didn’t regularly descend on Washington seeking that which natural market forces won’t provide them with, the plain truth is that politicians would invent them. Divided societies give politicians an important role whereby their decisions about the allocation of resources to the politically connected weaken a society, thus boosting their status as our allegedly benevolent Nanny. Second, with the productive ever eager to achieve no matter the barriers placed in front of them in a world where government, as opposed to market forces dictates action, politicians know that the best and brightest will similarly have to go to great lengths to please them in order to keep more of what they earn.

In Panem food, something we take for granted, is scarce thanks to power hungry politicians. Even more than monetary debasement, the creation of food scarcity through unnatural barriers to production and trade is the easiest way for politicians to divide the citizenry, and to be fair, often results from monetary debasement. And with hunger a constant burden, politicians have created a situation whereby the brutalized citizens of Panem will do anything to eat, including killing their fellow citizens in government-organized games that so thrill the Capitol politicians.

Of course the Hunger Games not only entertain the politicians, they’re also the Capitol’s way of, as Katniss puts it, “reminding us how totally we are at their mercy.” Panem’s citizens know that if they desire any kind of comfortable life with good housing and plentiful food, they must not only participate in the Games, but also be the last one standing. Wealth in this Dystopian nightmare of a country is not earned by fulfilling the needs of others, but results from pleasing politicians through the murder of others.

We’re thankfully a very faint shadow of Panem in the United States, but increasingly we live at the mercy of politicians irrespective of party. If this is doubted, try to evade your taxes, and when you get a letter from the IRS asking for them, ignore the letter. Eventually you’ll be visited by government officials who, if not carrying guns, will be backed by those who do.

Republicans might say that at least Republican politicians seek to lower our rates of taxation, but think about that for a moment. When politicians promise lower tax rates, they’re implicitly telling all of us that they have the power to charge us as much or as little as they want to for our work. A nation founded on deep skepticism of government and politicians now has leaders who “grant” us the right to keep more of our money.

Taking this further, both parties, consciously or subconsciously realizing “we are at their mercy”, offer us tax breaks if we live as they want us to. If you buy a house your mortgage interest payments will be tax deductible, give to a charity and it’s similarly tax deductible, and then in Rick Santorum’s case if you “make things” as a manufacturer, or have kids, zero corporate tax rates (manufacturing) and tax deductions (per child) are in your future. Mitt Romney will “grant” you a lower tax rate on capital gains for instance, but only if you’re not rich. President Obama is bolder in his presumption that we’re at his mercy and that we need to pay his government even more in the way of tribute. Yes, we’re under the thumbs of politicians, and The Hunger Games shows the extremes of where this can lead when they’re handed too much power. Democrat and Republican partisans beware.

Closer to the book’s end, Katniss thinks about her “fury against the cruelty, the injustice they [the rulers] inflict upon us”, and wonders if there’s some “way to take revenge on the Capitol.” While considering this, she remembers Peeta’s words “I keep wishing I could think of a way to…to show the Capitol they don’t own me. That I’m more than just a piece in their Games.” Absolutely. Excessive government IS ownership, of the fruits of our labor, and our personal freedoms. Katniss and Peeta are ultimately fighting to get their lives back from the greedy hands of the politicians in the Capitol.

Back in the real world, something similar is at work. Though agreement is not uniform, and our government not nearly as oppressive as the one in The Hunger Games, many Americans simply want to be left alone, to get their lives back. The Hunger Games seems to channel this natural, and very American, urge to be free.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Barack's People
By William L. Gensert


Barack Obama has assembled a frightening assortment of appointments, friends, and associates. The following few are merely the tip of the sword Barack Obama wields in his plan to transform America in his own image.

Reverend Jeremiah Wright

The racialist black supremacist of "god damn America" fame presided over the Obama's marriage as well as baptizing Sasha and Malia. Barack and Michelle perched in a pew, listening while the Right Reverend Wright preached racialism and hatred from the pulpit, for 20 years. He may not deserve the "Right" or the "Reverend," being decidedly unrighteous and un-entitled to reverence. Yet the president heard nothing from his "spiritual mentor," the man who actually coined the phrase "audacity of hope," the title of the president's hugely successful second autobiography. When you are a truly great man, one just won't do.

Rick Perry once hunted at a club where, 25 years ago, a racial epithet was scrawled on a rock by the front gate; he was labeled a racist. Yet Obama listened for decades while a man preached vile racial hatred from the pulpit, and like Sgt. Shultz from Hogan's Heroes, he knew nothing and saw nothing.

Terrorist Bill Ayers

A founding member of the Weather Underground and unrepentant terrorist, he and his wife planted explosives in federal buildings in 1970s. He hosted one of the first fundraisers for our transformational messiah. He was just a guy in the neighborhood, the president has claimed. A neighborhood in which a convicted felon, Antoin Rezko, helped our future president buy the mansion he could not afford for less than it was worth.

Yet Ayers' style of writing bears remarkable similarities to the president's first autobiography Dreams from My Father, but not to anything else the president has ever penned before or after, thin though the selection may be, limited by a decided lack of production from the smartest man to ever hold the office.

The Fluke and the Flounder

Barack Obama can call Tea Party members "tea-baggers" with impunity, but when a conservative calls a 30-year-old fluke, introduced as a "young coed" and law student, claiming to spend a $1,000 a year on birth control, a "slut," it is unacceptably uncivil. Is it any wonder the nation has so many lawyers? Law school sounds like a lot of fun.

Floundering around for a policy, Obama telephoned the fluke for the good of his daughters. Even a "slut" like Laura Ingraham or that "bag of meat" Michelle Malkin would have no problem with his support of his floundering daughters.

He had to hurry because Malia had to get down to spring break in war-torn Mexico with her entourage of special friends and 25 specially selected Secret Service agents. At thirteen years old, she should be free to attend a bacchanalian event for college students in pursuit of drugs and sex. I would provide a link, but the articles about the trip keep disappearing from the internet...what a transparent surprise.

Attorney General Eric Holder, Esq.

Is there a better personification of Barack Obama and his disastrous, demagogic administration than Attorney General "my people" Eric Holder and his Department of Justice? He is the only leader today more odious than Barack Obama, if only because he is unabashedly racist, whereas Obama pretends not to be.

Holder believes that his people deserve preference in all things, and that the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans, due to the Fast and Furious program, designed by minions, are unimportant. The death of one Democrat is a tragedy -- hundreds of dead Mexicans are a statistic. They're not his people, or our people, or anything of importance for that matter. Their children, wives, lives, and forestalled futures are unimportant. After all, they can't vote for Barack until they get over the border and into the polling place, where they will be readily accepted without ID.
Their expiration doesn't count, but their votes do. Holder battles selflessly against opposition to the illegal immigrant vote. Standing at the polls in SEAL Team 6 imitation gear, talking about killing white babies, and other various insanities get a pass from Eric, but asking for ID does not.

This is a man who believes that the only people capable of bigotry are white people. Therefore, he displays unabashed racism in every instance. Some people are just more equal than other people.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu

"Our Nobel Prize-winning Energy Secretary Steven Chu" is how Obama always introduces his "I don't own a car" disciple. By taking the extra second to point out the greatness of another Nobel laureate, the president compliments himself with every introduction.
Chu gives himself an A- on spending green energy funds wisely -- despite all the bankruptcies -- and a higher grade on controlling gasoline prices, despite the almost $5-a-gallon price. Talk about grading on a curve.

Chew on this: the noble Mr. Chu dreams of an America where the price of gasoline is as high as it is in Europe -- $10 gasoline, no problem; $20 even better. How many tens of billions of dollars has Chu flushed down the green energy toilet since his appointment? Well, it was a low-flow toilet, and he had to work really hard to get all that money to go down the drain. Maybe he deserves that A-.

Mentor Derrick Bell

Derrick Bell, a racial radical, whom Investor's Business Daily called the Jeremiah Wright of Harvard, has called Louis Farrakhan a "hero." He was also Barack Obama's favorite professor -- introduced by our post-racial president as a man Americans needed to open their "hearts and minds to." He was deeply involved in Critical Race Theory and the supposition that all minority ills are due to white supremacy and that the only solution is the destruction of the foundations of the nation.

He was also an anti-Semite, railing against "Jewish neoconservative racists" forever "undermining blacks in every way they can."
Rashid Khalidi

Because no rogue's gallery would be complete without a sharia-espousing Islamist. Barack Obama, ever vigilant against prejudice toward religious minorities, has no problem with sharia calling for the stoning death of women who were raped or who committed adultery, while labeling a request for religious recusal from paying for another's contraception and abortions as a war on women.
Safe School Assistant Deputy Czar Kevin Jennings

Mr. Jennings, entrusted by our president to ensure a safe school environment, has admitted to failing to report the statutory rape of a 15-year-old boy, who had sex with an older male. He has also praised a notorious backer of NAMBLA, an acronym which stands for North American Man-Boy Love Association. No explanation needed -- the organization stands for exactly what its name says it does. Advocating pedophilia apparently does not disqualify you from serving in the Obama administration.

Some bitter clingers might think that Jennings' history would preclude a high-level Obama administration appointment, but even though it would keep him from working at McDonald's -- many customers and employees are children -- it doesn't prevent him from being appointed by Barack to ensure the safety of children in schools.

Van Jones, the resigned green jobs czar, wants more violence from the OWS crowd and believes that Bush was the brains behind 9/11.

Queen Kathleen Sebelius has proven herself to be a sebaceous cyst on American health care and business, dictating life and death to mere mortals -- if only we could have all been aborted before she had to deal with our dissent.
Lisa Jackson, destroying our future, one industry at a time...see my next article.
The list goes on and on.

One thing about Barack: he is consistent. Almost all the appointees are outliers, unqualified in their own peculiar way, and almost to a person enemies of American prosperity and exceptionalism.
After all, America, as a nation, is saved or created only at the discretion of Barack Obama, the one we've been waiting for...just look at his people.



2a)Ted Nugent: Holder Promotes Outrageous Lie to ‘Brainwash’ People Against Gun
By Paul Scicchitano

Conservative rocker and gun enthusiast Ted Nugent denounced U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s “outrageous lie” in encouraging fellow Democrats to “brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way” to turn them against guns with the same tactics used against smoking.

“Eric Holder's call for brainwashing America about guns comes as no surprise to anyone paying attention to this administration,” Nugent, a member of the board of directors of the National Rifle Association, told Newsmax exclusively on Monday.

A 1995 video featured on Sunday at Breitbart.com showed Holder addressing the Woman’s National Democratic Club when Holder was U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

“What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun any more — in the way we changed our attitudes about cigarettes,” Holder said in remarks broadcast on CSPAN 2 at the time.

Holder pointed to the success of anti-smoking campaigns and sought to engineer the same type of social change with respect to guns.

“When I was growing up, people smoked all the time — I mean both my parents did. But over time, we changed the way in which people thought about smoking, and so now we have people who cower outside of buildings and kind of smoke in private and don’t want to admit it,” he told the group. “That’s what I think we have to do with guns — really change the way in which people think about guns.”

But Holder, acknowledging that such a task would be difficult, called for a coordinated effort with city leaders as well as the creative community.

“We are quite frankly fighting something that appears every day on television, on the radio, in our popular music, in movies that these kids are exposed to,” he said at the time. “It will be an effort that will entail things that I’m really not familiar with. I think I’m a pretty good lawyer, but we need to get really innovative creative things that are going to grab the attention of these kids and change — as I said — the way in which they think about guns.”

Nugent, a Newsmax contributor, countered that guns are not the problem. “Everyone knows there are no bad guns, only bad people,” he insisted.

Holder, the first African-American to hold the position of attorney general, served as a judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia before President Bill Clinton appointed him as a U.S. attorney. He was appointed later to the position of deputy attorney general.

“This outrageous lie about guns continues to ignore the untold millions of Americans who have defended themselves and stopped violent crimes with this perfect common-sense, constitutionally protected tool,” Nugent said.

© 2012 Newsmax. All rights reserved


2b)Romney Will Bore, and Win, as Mr. Establishment
By Ramesh Ponnuru

It is a question that must have occurred to many candidates over the years: How can I be losing to this guy?

Two versions of it have been asked of the Republican presidential race: Why doesn’t anyone seem to be able to defeat a front-runner as obviously flawed as Mitt Romney? And why hasn’t Romney been able to score crushing victories against such obviously flawed challengers?

To put both questions together: Why is this field so -- inevitable word -- weak?
The pasting that Republicans took in the elections of George W. Bush’s second term, in 2006 and 2008, made it a thin field from the start. Note that of the three candidates who have won in the primaries -- Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich -- the last time any of them triumphed in an election for any office was 10 years ago, when Romney won the governorship of Massachusetts.

Still, there were other Republicans who survived those years and could have run: Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, Jeb Bush, John Thune and others. Why didn’t they? There were, of course, specific considerations behind each decision. Daniels let us know that his family objected to a run; Bush is said to think that the nation isn’t yet open to another Bush presidency.

Other calculations would have been common to all of the candidates. On the one hand, President Barack Obama looked beatable during 2010 and 2011, when they would have been mulling it over. Getting the nomination, on the other hand, may have seemed more daunting.
Establishment versus Insurgents

Almost every Republican nomination contest sees a division between establishment-oriented candidates and conservative insurgents. (The great exception in recent decades was in 2000, when the establishment candidate, George W. Bush, faced an insurgent from the left in John McCain.) The balance of power is held by those voters -- sympathetic to both the insurgents and the party establishment -- who describe themselves to pollsters as “somewhat conservative.”

The establishment always wins these fights, for several reasons. Its candidates make the necessary accommodations to stay acceptable to the center of the party. Voters who want a conservative insurgent almost invariably fail to settle on one candidate to play that role. They also sometimes favor candidates who, for one reason or another, just aren’t plausible nominees. These candidates may, for example, never have won a statewide election anywhere, like Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann. Temporary enthusiasm from the pro-insurgent portion of the party can make such candidates appear to be leading for a time, but the party’s sober center always rejects them in the end.

So if you are a would-be contender for the nomination, you have to assemble a winning coalition without the rightmost third of the party, who are going to spend their votes on no-hopers. That means, in practice, you will have to become the establishment candidate yourself. Something like this thought process is what moved Romney, who was one of the conservative insurgent candidates in 2008, to position himself that way this time.

For someone like Thune, the fight against Romney starts to look a lot harder. He has his vulnerabilities, but he has also run for president before. He has a national organization, a national financial network and national name recognition. You have none of these things.

Tim Pawlenty tried to run the kind of candidacy that Barbour, Thune and the others would have run: a campaign designed to be plausible to the party establishment but also a few steps to Romney’s right. But he wasn’t far enough to Romney’s right to excite the anti-Romney insurgent vote, and he couldn’t reach parity with Romney in establishment support. So the Pawlenty campaign died early.
Competitive with Obama

If Romney hadn’t run, it is entirely possible that one of these potential candidates would have entered the race and ended up beating back conservative insurgents more decisively than Romney has. Maybe Pawlenty himself would have done it. But Romney ran, which meant that he would have the establishment slot pretty much all to himself. Republicans were left with a very typical establishment-versus-insurgent contest, but the establishment candidate was weaker than usual.

The primary calendar weakened him further. Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard points out that when McCain won Florida in 2008, he acquired enough momentum to win the Super Tuesday primaries days later. This time, Romney won Florida and saw his polls go up -- and then nothing much happened for weeks. Momentum dissipated.

So here we are. The 2006 and 2008 elections reduced the number of people who could compete in the primary-within-the- primary to be the establishment Republican candidate. Romney crowded out the rest. Well before Iowa (BEESIA) or New Hampshire (BEESNH) held their contests, he had thus become the likely nominee -- even though he didn’t, and doesn’t, have the affections of the party faithful. His remaining opponents can do well among the party’s “very conservative” voters but have too little appeal to the rest to win majorities themselves.

That’s why the field seems weak. But Romney’s flaws don’t doom him in the general election: Even amid today’s Republican strife, the polls show him competitive with Obama. If Romney wins in November, the field won’t look quite so weak in retrospect.

(Ramesh Ponnuru is a Bloomberg View columnist and a senior editor at National Review. The opinions expressed are his own.)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)Muslim Persecution of Christians: February, 2012
By Raymond Ibrahim



Half of Iraq's indigenous Christians are gone due to the unleashed forces of jihad, many of them fleeing to nearby Syria; yet, as the Assad regime comes under attack by al-Qaeda and others, the jihad now seeps into Syria, where Christians are experiencing a level of persecution unprecedented in the nation's modern history. Likewise, some 100,000 Christian Copts have fled their native Egypt since the overthrow of the Mubarak regime; and in northern regions of Nigeria, where the jihadi group Boko Haram has been slaughtering Christians, up to 95 % of the Christian population has fled.

Meanwhile, the "big news" concerning the Muslim world in the month of February—the news that flooded the mainstream media and had U.S. politicians, beginning with President Obama, flustered, angry, and full of regret—was that copies of the Koran in Afghanistan were burned by U.S. soldiers because imprisoned Muslim inmates were using them "to facilitate extremist communications."

Categorized by theme, February's batch of Muslim persecution of Christians around the world includes (but is not limited to) the following accounts, listed in alphabetical order by country, not severity.

Church Attacks

Algeria: Armed men raided and ransacked a church formally recognized since 1958, dismantling the crucifix above the premises. The pastor and his family, trapped inside, feared that "they could kill us." The pastor "has been repeatedly threatened and attacked since being ordained as pastor in 2007. In the summer of 2009 his wife was beaten and seriously injured by a group of unknown men. Then, in late 2011, heaps of trash were thrown over the compound walls while an angry mob shouted death threats."

Egypt: Thousands of Muslims attacked a Coptic church, demanding the death of its pastor, who, along with "nearly 100 terrorized Copts sought refuge inside the church, while Muslim rioters were pelting the church with stones in an effort to break into the church, assault the Copts and torch the building." They did this because a Christian girl who, according to Islamic law, automatically became a Muslim when her father converted to Islam, fled and was rumored to be hiding in the church.

Iran: Iran's Ministry of Intelligence has ordered the last two officially registered churches holding Friday Farsi-language services in Tehran—Farsi being the nation's language—to discontinue the language: "Friday services in Tehran attracted the city's converts to Christianity as well as Muslims interested in Christianity, as Friday is most Iranians' day off during the week." Banning church use of Farsi prevents most Iranians from hearing the Gospel.

Kazakhstan: A new report notes that "Churches are being raided, leaders fined and Christian literature confiscated as the Kazakh authorities enforce new laws intended further to restrict religious freedom in the country."

Kuwait: A parliamentarian is set to submit a draft law banning the construction of churches. Originally, Osama al-Munawer announced on Twitter his plans on submitting a draft law calling for the removal of all churches in Kuwait. However, he later "clarified," saying that existing churches can remain, but the construction of new ones must be banned.

Macedonia: A two-century-old Christian church famed for its valuable icons was set on fire in response to "a carnival in which Orthodox Christian men dressed as women in burkas and mocked the Koran." Earlier, "perpetrators attacked a[nother] church in the nearby village of Labunista, destroying a cross standing outside" and "also defaced a Macedonian flag outside Struga's municipal building, replacing it with a green flag representing Islam."

Nigeria: A Muslim suicide bomber forced his way into the grounds of a major church, killing two women and an 18-month-old child during Sunday morning service; some 50 people were injured in the blast. In a separate incident, Muslims detonated a bomb outside a church building, injuring five, one critically: "The bomb, planted in a parked car, was left by suspected members of Boko Haram, which seeks to impose sharia (Islamic law) throughout Nigeria."

Pakistan: A dozen armed Muslims stormed a church, seriously wounding two Christians: one man was shot and is in critical condition, the other risks having his arm amputated; another church member was thrown from the roof, after being struck repeatedly with a rifle butt. "The extremist raid was sparked by charges that [the] church was trying to evangelize Muslims in an attempt to convert them to Christianity. The community several times in the past has been the subject of assault and the pastor and his family the subject of death threats." As usual, the police, instead of pursuing the perpetrators, have opened an investigation against the pastor and 20 other church members.

Syria: Some 30 armed and masked jihadis attacked a Catholic monastery—unprecedented in Syria's modern history—demanding money. According to the Catholic Archbishop of Damascus, "the situation in the country is spiraling out of control as the armed opposition spreads its influence to different regions of the state."
]

Bangladesh: Three American Christians were injured after their car was attacked by a Muslim mob that suspected they were converting Muslims into Christians: at least 200 angry locals chased the missionaries' car and threw stones at it, leaving three with cuts from broken glass.

Egypt: Rather than punishing the perpetrators who opened fire on and ran tanks over Christians protesting the constant destruction of their churches, the government arrested and is trying two priests in connection to the Maspero massacre. And although Egypt's new parliament has 498 seats, only six are Copts, though Copts make up at the very least 10% of the population, and so should have approximately 50 seats. Finally, evincing how bad the situation is, Coptic protesters organized a demonstration in front of Parliament to protest "the disappearance and abduction of Coptic girls."

Indonesia: The Islamist Prosperous Justice Party complained about the Red Cross' symbol of a cross, saying it is too identifiable with Christian culture and traditions. Red Cross volunteers and activists rejected the claim, saying that any changes to the logo would be "tantamount to giving in to the extremists."

Iran: A pastor of a major house church movement began serving a five-year prison sentence for "crimes against the order." According to one activist, "His 'crimes' were being a pastor and possessing Christian materials." He is being beat in jail and getting sick, to the point that his hair has "turned fully gray."

Israel: A mob of some 50 Palestinian Muslims stoned a group of Christian tourists atop Jerusalem's Temple Mount, wounding three Israeli police officers in the process. The attack is believed to have been instigated by the former Muslim mufti of Jerusalem.

Pakistan: Yet another Christian woman, a teacher, has been targeted by Muslims due to allegations that she burned a Koran. A mob stormed her school in an attempt to abduct her, but police took her into custody. Also, a Christian student who missed the grade to get into medical school by less than 0.1% would have earned 20 extra points if he had memorized the Koran—though no bonus points for having similar knowledge of the Bible.

Turkey: A new report notes that "Christians in Turkey continue to suffer attacks from private citizens, discrimination by lower-level government officials and vilification in both school textbooks and news media," adding that there is a "root of intolerance" in Turkish society toward adherents of non-Islamic faiths: "The removal of this root of intolerance is an urgent problem that still awaits to be dealt with."

Turkmenistan: A 77-year-old Christian man was detained and questioned by police for six hours after he tried to print copies of a small book of Christian poetry. He was forced to write a statement and banned from travelling outside his home region while the case is being investigated.

Uganda: Not long after a pastor was attacked with acid and blinded by "Allahu-Akbar" screaming Muslims, his friend, another pastor, was shot at by "Islamic extremists,"
in what is being described as "a new wave of persecution against Christians in Uganda."

Murder, Apostasy Issues, and More

Egypt: Two Christians were killed "after a Muslim racketeer opened fire on them for refusing to pay him extortion money." The local bishop "hold[s] security forces and local Muslims fully responsible for terrorizing the Copts living there, who are continuously being subjected to terror and kidnapping."

Iran: After enduring five months of uncertainty in a prison, a Christian convert who was arrested in her home by security authorities has been sentenced to two years in prison by the Revolutionary Court in Tehran. Authorities further arrested six to ten Christian converts from Islam while they were meeting for worship at a home in the southern city of Shiraz. And Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani awaits execution for refusing to renounce Christianity.

Nigeria: A 79-year-old Christian woman and choir singer was found dead at her home, her throat slit with a note in Arabic left on her chest reading: "We will get you soon," a message believed to be directed at her son, a pastor at a local church.

Somalia: Al-Shabaab Muslims beheaded a 26-year-old Muslim convert to Christianity who had worked for a Christian humanitarian organization that the terrorist organization had banned. He is at least the third apostate to Christianity to be beheaded in Somalia in recent months.

Turkey: A 12-year-old boy, Hussein, publicly professed his Christian faith by wearing a silver cross necklace in school. Accordingly, Muslim classmates began taunting and spitting on him. When the boy threatened to report one of the bullies, the bully's father threatened to kill him. His religion teacher beat him severely: "Like in most Islamic countries, students of all faiths are required to attend Islamic studies in school. Those who refuse to recite the Koran and Islamic prayers are often beaten by the teacher. And so it was for Hussein. He said he was punished regularly with a two-foot long rod because he wouldn't say the Islamic Shahada."


Because the persecution of Christians in the Islamic world is on its way to reaching epidemic proportions, "Muslim Persecution of Christians" was developed to collate some—by no means all—of the instances of Muslim persecution of Christians that surface each month. It serves two purposes:

Intrinsically, to document that which the mainstream media does not: the habitual, if not chronic, Muslim persecution of Christians.

Instrumentally, to show that such persecution is not "random," but systematic and interrelated—that it is rooted in a worldview inspired by Sharia.

Accordingly, whatever the anecdote of persecution, it typically fits under a specific theme, including hatred for churches and other Christian symbols; sexual abuse of Christian women; forced conversions to Islam; apostasy and blasphemy laws; theft and plunder in lieu of jizya (tribute); overall expectations for Christians to behave like cowed "dhimmis" (barely tolerated citizens); and simple violence and murder. Oftentimes it is a combination thereof.

Because these accounts of persecution span different ethnicities, languages, and locales—from Morocco in the west, to India in the east, and throughout the West, wherever there are Muslims—it should be clear that one thing alone binds them: Islam—whether the strict application of Islamic Sharia law, or the supremacist culture born of it.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4) 

Myriam Monsonego. 8 years old. This was actually the "enemy" of the pro Palestinian Islamic Fundamentalist, that heinously killed her in cold blood. 

Not in self defense, not advocating for peace, science, technology or the peaceful coexistence of all beliefs, 

faiths and ideologies.... Rather for what? 

   

Jonathan Sandler was the first one to be shot at short range by the killer. He was holding his son Gabriel in his arms. Gabriel was hit and fell to the ground and then Arieh followed.

According to eye-witnesses, the gun then jammed, temporarily putting a halt to the rampage but the killer swiftly changed weapons and headed into the school. He grabbed Miriam as she tried to escape, grasped her hair and shot her.

Then, as she bled to death on the floor, he lifted up her head and fired two additional bullets. 

Now tell me these crazed people pray to the same G-d as the rest of us:
-----------------------------------------------------

Toulouse - Heartbreaking details of the cold-blooded shooting of three children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse on Monday have emerged from CCTV footage of a massacre that has caused an outpouring of revulsion and grief in France.

The images show how the lone gunman wearing a motorcycle helmet hunted down individual children after opening fire at the school gates in an attack that left four dead and a teenager fighting for his life.

Eight-year-old Myriam Monsonego clutched her satchel as the killer chased her through the school gates and into the courtyard. He pulled her towards him by her hair and raised a gun to shoot her.

The video footage appears to show that, at that moment, his gun jammed.

Determined to carry out his killing spree, he kept hold of the girl, changed weapons from what police identified as a 9-mm pistol to a.45 calibre weapon, and delivered a shot to her temple at close range.

He then turned, calmly walked out of the school gates, mounted a powerful Yamaha scooter and sped away.

Moments later, an older pupil carried Myriam’s body to her father, Yaacov Monsonego, a rabbi and the principal of the school, who had been praying in the synagogue before the start of class when shots broke out. He cradled his daughter in his arms as she died.

The first victim was Jonathan Sandler, a 30-year-old rabbi and teacher at the Ozar Hatorah school, who was shot outside the school gates as he attempted to shield his two young sons, Aryeh, 6, and Gavriel, 3, from the gunman.

CCTV footage from a camera at the gates reportedly showed that one of the boys was shot as he crawled away on his hands and knees while his father and brother lay dying on the pavement.