My wife and I attended a fund raiser this evening for Romney and the speaker was Mike Hukabee.
Hulabee is Arkansas' equivalent of Will Rodgers. Homey, common sense and easy to follow.
What he basically said this evening resonates with me because Obama's campaign and presidency has been based on trashing success. That is as un-American as anything I know.
Obama wants the unwashed to feel jealous of those who are successful. This is sick!
Romney's owes his success to his own talents, to hard work, probably some luck and a lot of help from those he chose as associates and a supportive wife. That is the 'affirmative action' that defines Romney. Romney's achievements are the personification of The American Dream. This is what brought the author of the book I am reading, to America (Luigi Zingales: "A Capitalism for the American People."
Obama looks down on Romney and disparages his success because that is what failures do. They blame everyone else. That is what Obama is all about and when the message in a Capitalistic nation is to p--- on success the time for change is immediate. (See 1 below.)
Probably the most telling part of Huckabee's comments were when he said he was supporting Catholics because when a president can bring the government down on a religious group and dictate what they can think and what they can and cannot do then next it will be everyone in the room.
This is also what the Chick Fil A dust off is all about. It is called free speech.
If you follow the illogic of the mayors who disagree with Dan Cathy, then you have to also assume they could tell Barbara Streisand she could not show her films in their city either.
That is demagoguery at its best and that is what Obama and his thugs are all about folks! So wake up America before it is too late! (see 1a below because worth re-posting.)
Probably the most telling part of Huckabee's comments were when he said he was supporting Catholics because when a president can bring the government down on a religious group and dictate what they can think and what they can and cannot do then next it will be everyone in the room.
This is also what the Chick Fil A dust off is all about. It is called free speech.
If you follow the illogic of the mayors who disagree with Dan Cathy, then you have to also assume they could tell Barbara Streisand she could not show her films in their city either.
That is demagoguery at its best and that is what Obama and his thugs are all about folks! So wake up America before it is too late! (see 1a below because worth re-posting.)
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Amb. Michael Oren is no bomb thrower type. His warning should be heeded but seems not to be the case. The consequences will be increasingly dire for failing to heed his simple message. (See 2 below.)
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Finally smoke this:
Dick
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1)
Obama Recovery Is Worst In Post WWII History
By JEFFREY H. ANDERSON
Posted 08/06/2012 06:58 PM ET
Posted 08/06/2012 06:58 PM ET
A core dispute in this presidential campaign is over how to evaluate President Obama's economic record.
On the one hand, it's not fair to blame Obama for the slow growth in the first six months of his presidency, which was mostly a product of conditions he inherited.
On the other hand, it's not convincing for Obama to suggest — as he routinely does — that he should be evaluated on the basis of whether the recovery has been better than the recession. Recoveries, by definition, are better than recessions.
So rather than holding Obama responsible for a recession he inherited, or praising him simply because that recession didn't continue perpetually, the fairest measure of his economic stewardship is this one:
How does the Obama recovery compare to other recoveries from similar downturns across the decades?
On that basis, the Obama recovery can only be graded as a tremendous failure — as it has produced the worst rate of economic growth of any recovery in the past 65 years.
Over that span, we've had 10 previous recessions and 10 previous recoveries. According to the federal government's own Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), average real (inflation-adjusted) GDP growth in the first three years after those recessions was 4.6%.
During the Obama recovery (which began three years ago, in July 2009), average real GDP growth has been just 2.2% — less than half the historical norm. Of the past 11 recoveries, the Obama recovery has been the worst.
Getting Worse
The 10 stronger recoveries involved Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, and George W. Bush — in other words, every other postwar president.
Some might suppose that this is because the 2008-09 recession was a particularly long and debilitating one. But the historical record shows that the pattern is generally as follows: the worse the recession, the stronger the recovery.
Indeed, if we limit our comparison to the five longest recessions in the past 65 years (each of which lasted at least 11 months), we find the following: During the four pre-Obama recoveries from such recessions, average real GDP growth in the first three years was a whopping 5.9% — dwarfing the 2.2% figure under Obama.
What's the difference between 5.9% and 2.2% growth? Over the past three years, our GDP has been, on average, about $15 trillion annually. A 3.7% shortfall, therefore, equals about $555 billion a year, or $1.6 trillion over three years.
If you divide that evenly among the roughly 300 million Americans, it works out to a shortfall of more than $5,000 per person — or more than $20,000 for a family of four.
Nor are things getting better. Over the first two years of the Obama recovery, average real GDP growth was 2.2%. During the third year, it remained at 2.2%. So far in 2012, it has been 1.8% annualized. In the most recent quarter, it was 1.5% annualized.
No Jobs
Moreover, these poor results are despite Obama's $787,000,000,000 "stimulus" — a remarkable explosion of deficit spending at the expense of future generations of Americans, who will have to pay that money back.
If all of this weren't bad enough, the Obama recovery has also been a dismal failure in terms of employment.
According to the BLS, the employment-population ratio — the percentage of Americans who are employed — was 59.4% during the last month of the recession (June 2009). That figure has now actually dropped to 58.4%. Three years into the "recovery," a lower percentage of Americans are employed than during the recession.
In marked contrast, in the last four pre-Obama recoveries from recessions spanning at least 11 months, the average improvement in the employment-population ratio over the same span of time was 2.6 points — a swing of 3.6 points from Obama's tally of minus 1.0%.
If 3.6% more Americans were employed today, that would amount to more than 10 million people.
For the better part of four years, Obama has spearheaded unprecedented levels of government spending, regulation, and control over Americans' lives. He has championed Obama-Care, unleashed the Environmental Protection Agency, promoted crony capitalism and adopted policies decidedly at odds with Main Street.
The experiment has been tried, the evidence is in and the verdict is clear: This is by far the worst economic recovery in the past 6-1/2 decades.
• Anderson is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.
1a)Barack Obama Runs On Empty And Toward Defeat
1a)Barack Obama Runs On Empty And Toward Defeat
The social experiment that was Barack Obama's election and presidency is over. Way over.
As one who was born in the heart of Boston and worked the political world of Washington for 20 years, I know quite a few Democrats. Some are family, and many are close friends. Most voted for Obama in 2008. None at this point is inclined to vote for him in 2012.
Why? Because they view him as an abject failure across the board and have decided to put the welfare of their families and themselves before the empty rhetoric of the Obama campaign before it's too late.
Because of my time in Washington and past positions there, I also know and am friends with quite a few journalists. I speak with many on a regular basis, and it's safe to say that the majority of them lean left politically.
That said, in off-the-record conversations with my left-leaning journalistic friends, not one believes Obama is going to win re-election. Not one. While most believe Mitt Romney to be a weak candidate, they are still convinced that he will comfortably defeat Obama on Nov. 6.
These liberal and jaded journalists privately admit that Obama has been exposed for what he is: an overhyped, self-invented candidate with no real-world experience who has been frozen into inaction by the enormity of the office he holds.
Obama has no domestic policy to speak of. He has no foreign policy to speak of. He has no jobs program to speak of. His signature health care plan is driving doctors out of the field, crippling small businesses and putting thousands of Americans out of work.
The Obama of 2012 has nothing positive to run on. Nothing. And guess what? He, more than anyone else in his White House or campaign, knows it.
He knows his election and presidency were social engineering gone wrong. He knows his biography is unraveling faster than the baseball that Roy Hobbs crushed into the rain in the movie "The Natural." He knows that he has run out of all options but one: Go negative on Mitt Romney 24/7 and hope a heretofore compromised mainstream media will once again unethically act as his surrogate.
Unfortunately for Obama, two massive holes exist in his "demonize Romney with an assist from the media" campaign tactic.
First, most Americans who are paying attention to this contest have come to the conclusion that Romney is a very decent and moral person who does have a fairly impressive business background coupled with some other real-world experience.
Second, as mentioned above, more and more members of the Journalists In The Tank For Obama club seem to be having second thoughts. As one of my friends in that club said, "Hey, we have kids in school, have to pay mortgages and want to keep our jobs just like everyone else."
In 2008, Obama won a fairly impressive victory against an incredibly weak and inept Republican challenger. To pull off that victory, Obama had pull a significant number of Republican and independent voters away from John McCain. To his credit and to his ability to spin himself along with the American voters' sense of fairness and history, Obama did just that.
In 2008, Obama was an unformed piece of pottery clay molded into shape by his own false rhetoric combined with a media narrative that sought to canonize him in anticipation of having his face carved into Mount Rushmore.
Today, in 2012, Barack Obama stands on his own — an unqualified man who did not have the gifts to grow into the presidency.
While noble in many respects, the social experiment that was Barack Obama's election and presidency is coming to its natural and expected conclusion.
• MacKinnon is a former White House and Pentagon official and author of the memoir "Rolling Pennies in the Dark."
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2)Time Is Short For Iran Diplomacy
Iran is the world's leading terror sponsor without nuclear weapons. With them, it can commit incalculable atrocities.
By MICHAEL OREN
Nearly two decades ago, Israel started alerting the world about Iran's nuclear program. But the world ignored our warnings, wasting 10 years until the secret nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz was exposed in 2002. Then eight more invaluable years were lost before much of the international community imposed serious sanctions on Iran.
Throughout that time, the ayatollahs systematically lied about their nuclear operations, installing more than 10,000 centrifuges, a significant number of them in a once-secret underground facility at Qom. Iran has blocked International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors from visiting its nuclear sites, refused to answer questions about the military aspects of its program, and rejected all confidence-building measures. Iran has tested long-range missiles capable of reaching any city in the Middle East and, in the future, beyond.
Iran is also the world's leading state sponsor of terror. It has supplied more than 70,000 rockets to terrorist organizations deployed on Israel's borders and has tried to murder civilians across five continents and 25 countries, including in the United States. In July, Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed five Israeli tourists, among them a pregnant woman, in Bulgaria. Iran's forces have attacked American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its agents are operating in Yemen, Africa and South America. By providing fighters and funds, Iran is enabling Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to massacre his own people.
Iran has done all this without nuclear weapons. With them, it can commit incalculable atrocities anywhere in the world, beginning with Israel. As the chief of staff of the Iranian military recently stated, "the Iranian nation stands for the full annihilation of Israel." Last week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said "the annihilation of the Zionist regime is the key for solving the world problems."
Accordingly, Israel believes that Iran is far from forfeiting its nuclear ambitions. Our conviction is based on Iran's record of subterfuge and terror together with its genocidal rhetoric. It also reflects the inability of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany (the "P5+1") to negotiate a compromise with Iran.
In their first round of talks with Iranian officials, late in 2009, the P5+1 demanded the suspension of all enrichment activities in Iran and the transfer of its stockpiles, then enriched to 3.5%, abroad. Iran rejected those conditions and escalated its enrichment process to 20%, which can be enhanced to weapons-grade in a matter of weeks.
Iran now has amassed roughly 225 pounds of 20% uranium and 11,000 pounds of 3.5%, sufficient for almost five nuclear bombs. Rather than stand by its initial demands, however, the P5+1 is now seeking merely the cessation of Iran's 20% enrichment, the removal of its 20% stockpile, and the closure of the facility at Qom. Arguably, this would be the first stage in the phasing out of Iran's nuclear program. But Iran has rejected even this preliminary gesture.
Iran will continue to drag out the negotiations while installing more centrifuges. These, according to the IAEA, are spinning even faster. The sanctions, which have dealt a blow to Iran's economy, have not affected the nuclear program. Meanwhile, more of Iran's expanding stockpile will be hidden in fortified bunkers beyond Israel's reach.
No country has a greater stake than Israel in using negotiations and economic pressure to dissuade Iran from developing nuclear weapons. We appreciate the determination of President Obama and the U.S. Congress to advance the sanctions and their pledge to keep all options on the table.
At the same time, the president has affirmed Israel's right "to defend itself, by itself, against any threat," and "to make its own decision about what is required to meet its security needs." Historically, Israel has exercised that right only after exhausting all reasonable diplomatic means. But as the repeated attempts to negotiate with Iran have demonstrated, neither diplomacy nor sanctions has removed the threat.
A combination of truly crippling sanctions and a credible military threat—a threat that the ayatollahs still do not believe today—may yet convince Iran to relinquish its nuclear dreams. But time is dwindling and, with each passing day, the lives of eight million Israelis grow increasingly imperiled. The window that opened 20 years ago is now almost shut.
Mr. Oren is Israel's ambassador to the United States.
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