Even during a period of an ugly presidential campaign one can find beauty - Dagny and Stella!
Internal polling results have to be discouraging for Axelrod and Obama but our new granddaughters are delighted with the trend and Ryan's selection.
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Since I am not going to be asked by Romney the type of acceptance speech he should make I would suggest the following:
a) He should let the American people know he understands the negative impact Obama's failed policies have caused but not in a carping way and cite a few examples.
b) Then, Romney should set forth no more than six proposals that , with the help of a co-operative Congress, he and Ryan will seek to pass and let the American people they are willing to touch the third rail of politics:
1) Eliminate as many policies/programs as possible that are restricting capital formation in order to make America more competitive.
2) Replace the over 70,000 pages of our current tax code and with one flatter, simpler and broader in terms of its impact. A code that also eliminates as many special exemptions as possible.
3) Reduce government's monopoly over energy and education and introduce policies that have proven they work.
4) Introduce similar common sense approaches to health care and other Social benefit programs so we can reduce waste, increase performance and lower our deficit trajectory.
In the matter of unemployment: Benefits should be tied to the recipient receiving job re-training and recipients should be drug free. If placing the programs on a sound footing means modifications for future participants so be it.
5) Bring similar common sense management techniques to The Pentagon so as to reduce the cost of our military, institute long run contracts to reduce equipment costs and finally, avoid over taxing our armed forces by engaging them in no win battles. If we do engage, then, we do so to accomplish our objective swiftly and fully.
6) Retake our foreign policy and base future funding on rewarding those who align themselves with our goals and aspirations. This means substantially reducing our funding of The U.N. and giving foreign aid to those who take our money and then vote against us.
Romney should avoid promises. Rather make the pitch that, if elected, he needs a Congress that will co-operate and finally the task ahead requires citizen participation and sacrifice.
Doing these 6 things, more or less, simultaneously will engender a spirit among the business community and entrepreneurs to start investing and hiring. A new simplified tax code will unleash capital that has been frozen, and slowly, but surely, the wheels of our nation's economic wagon will begin to roll. It will take time, it may entail some pain as various tax and politically privileged oxen will be gored but the recovery will assuredly become self-fulfilling.
In terms of addressing the theoretical like-ability problem, I repeat, that will come in time as voters get to know Romney as well as his substantive selection - Ryan.
Above all Romney, be yourself and hope your opponents continue to be themselves.
Likability it is that old 'gravitas' canard the Liberal media and press love to tag Republicans with while they ignore the utter incompetence of their own protected and sheltered candidates.
It is a trumped up charge designed to raise doubts and to favor their own.
Palin may not have been a perfect choice but the beating she received from the press and media and the pass Biden received proves my point about 'gravitas' nonsense and bias!
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2016 goes into wider distribution and is captivating audiences. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
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CBS does the unusual. They allow a program to reveal the side of Romney most do not know.
"CBS and is not typical for one of the major media stations. You will have to wait for the short commercial at the beginning of the clip.
Glimpse of a change in the thinking of the CBS News team....this is the Most positive segment that CBS has ever had on an opponent of Barack Obama. It is short, but makes the point being missed by most Of Romney's critics.
Doing business the Mormon way - CBS News Video
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The first guy slept with Bob and comes to breakfast the next morning with his hair a mess and his eyes all bloodshot.
They said, "Man, what happened to you? He said, "Bob snored so loudly, I just sat up and watched him all night."
The next night it was a different guy's turn. In the morning, same thing, hair all standing up, eyes all bloodshot.
They said, "Man, what happened to you? You look awful! He said, 'Man, that
Bob shakes the roof with his snoring. I watched him all night."
The third night was Fred's turn. Fred was a tanned, older cowboy, a man's man. The next morning he came to breakfast bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
"Good morning!" he said. They couldn't believe it. They said, "Man, what happened?"
He said, "Well, we got ready for bed. I went and tucked Bob into bed,
patted him on the butt, and kissed him good night. Bob sat up and watched me all night."
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De ja vu all over again? (See 2 below.)
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You can thank Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy and Mayor Wagner for the public Union problems that have mushroomed and are overwhelming more and more city and state budgets (See 3 below.)
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Dick---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)Anti-Obama Movie Stuns Hollywood For #4; Other Newcomers & Holdovers Weak Friday; Only ‘The Expendables 2′ Can Break $10M
Because of Friday’s very weak box office, there was finally clarity for the Top 10 film rankings this morning. As predicted, Millenium/Lionsgate’s holdover The Expendables 2finished in first place Friday and this weekend. It’s followed by Universal’s 2-week-old The Bourne Legacyin second place. New movies didn’t perform. But the shocker was Rocky Mountain Pictures’ political documentary 2016 Obama’s America which expanded into theaters across America this weekend after a very limited release and wound up
in 4th place. That’s stunning because it’s playing in 2/3 fewer theaters across North American than the other wide release actioners. (See below for more details). Due to its hot pre-sales, the pic is proving frontloaded, and its ranking will fall steeply by end of Sunday. But the doc made its point: its new cume after this weekend should make it the #1 conservative documentary (bestingExpelled: No Intelligence Allowed’s$7.7M). The pic is based on conservative author and commentator Dinesh D’Souza’s New York Times bestselling 2010 book The Roots Of Obama’s Rageand co-directed by D’Souza and John Sullivan and produced by Academy Award winner Gerald R. Molen (co-producer of Schindler’s List). Its success comes because of savvy marketing on the eve of the Republican National Convention August 27-30. Exhibitors are reporting busloads arriving at theaters around the country in pre-organized trips. It also employed much of the same marketing techniques used to garner attention and support for faith-based films, understandable since the audience is overlapping. Its campaign included advertising nationally over the past two weeks on talk radio and cable news channels including Fox News Channel, A&E, History and MSNBC. ”Yes, I also didn’t believe it when I first saw the film taking off in pre-sales on Tuesday,” an exhibition insider tells me. “Because there’s not a lot of new product that’s taking off.”
Among this weekend’s new films, Sony Pictures’ newcomer Premium Rush is a disappointment, while Open Road’s Hit And Run (which opened Wednesday) takes a bad fall, and Dark Castle/Warner Bros’ new release The Apparitiondidn’t stand a ghost of a chance as a parting present for producer Joel Silver. “It’s exhausting working with numbers this bad,” one studio exec griped Friday. No new pic will even break $10M. Total moviegoing for the weekend adds up to only $75M, or -13% from last year. The Top Ten based on Friday estimates:
1. The Expendables 2 (Millenium/Lionsgate) Week 2 [3,355 Runs] R
Friday $3.7M (-64%), Weekend $12.3M, Cume $51.2M
Friday $3.7M (-64%), Weekend $12.3M, Cume $51.2M
2. The Bourne Legacy (Universal) Week 3 [3,652 Runs] PG13
Friday $2.7M, Weekend $8.8M, Cume $84.9M
Friday $2.7M, Weekend $8.8M, Cume $84.9M
3. ParaNorman (Focus Features) Week 2 [3,455 Runs] PG
Friday $2.3M (-50%), Weekend $7.8M, Cume $27.5M
Friday $2.3M (-50%), Weekend $7.8M, Cume $27.5M
4. 2016 Obama’s America (Rocky Mountain) NEW [1,091 Runs] PG
Friday $2.2M, Weekend $5.7M, Cume $8.6M
Friday $2.2M, Weekend $5.7M, Cume $8.6M
5. The Campaign (Warner Bros) Week 3 [3,302 Runs] R
Friday $2.2, Weekend $7.0M, Cume $64.2M
Friday $2.2, Weekend $7.0M, Cume $64.2M
6. The Odd Life Of Timothy Green (Disney) Week 2 [2,598 Runs] PG
Friday $2.0M (-40%), Weekend $6.8M, Cume $26.8M
Friday $2.0M (-40%), Weekend $6.8M, Cume $26.8M
6. The Dark Knight Rises (Legendary/WB) Week 6 [2,606 Runs] PG13
Friday $2.0M, Weekend $7.0M, Cume $422.1M
Friday $2.0M, Weekend $7.0M, Cume $422.1M
8. Premium Rush (Sony) NEW [2,255 Runs] PG13
Friday $1.9M, Weekend $5.6M
Friday $1.9M, Weekend $5.6M
9. Hope Springs (Sony) Week 3 [2,402 Runs] PG13
Friday $1.7M, Weekend $5.6M, Cume $44.6M
Friday $1.7M, Weekend $5.6M, Cume $44.6M
10. Hit And Run (Open Road) NEW [2,870 Runs] R
Friday $1.4M, Weekend $4.3M, Cume $5.5M
Friday $1.4M, Weekend $4.3M, Cume $5.5M
12. The Apparition (Dark Castle/WB) NEW [810 Runs]
Friday $1.1K, Weekend $3.2M
Friday $1.1K, Weekend $3.2M
FRIDAY 2 PM: The anti-Obama movie 2016 Obama’s America went into wider release around America today and is opening right now in first place at the domestic box office. That’s quite a feat since the Rocky Mountain Pictures political documentary is still playing in only 1,090 North American theaters – or about 1/3 as many theaters as actioner The Expendables 2 (3,355 theaters). But these political documentaries like faith-based films are frontloaded. The Stallone pic from Millenium/Lionsgate still will end Friday and the weekend #1.
Both online ticket-sellers Fandango and MovieTickets.com showed advance buying for 2016 Obama’s America were accounting for 35% to 28% respectively before this weekend. It opened on July 13th in a preview on a single screen in Texas grossing almost $32,000 during its opening weekend, then expanded into 61 theaters including New York and Los Angeles. In August, the film widened to 169 theaters nationwide and expanded again this weekend. Distribution experts expect 2016 Obama’s America to fare similarly to that Kirk Cameron faith-based movie Fireproof. It was #1 in Fandango’s advance sales and did remarkably well during its opening Friday – but then ended up somewhere around #4 at the box office for the weekend.
Last weekend, 2016: Obama’s America grossed a strong $1.2M in 169 venues for a cumulative gross as of Thursday of $2.8M. It’s the #2 biggest indie documenatry of the year behind only The Weinstein Company’s Bully ($3.2 million) and already the #12 political documentary of all time. It will rise a lot higher in the rankings after this weekend.
2016 Obama’s America detractors decry it as a slick infomercial heavy with conspiracy theories. But D’Souza says he made the film to motivate moviegoers to question what an Obama second term would look like, and credits liberal documentary maker Michael Moore for the structure of the film: “When he released Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004 ahead of the election, it sparked intense debate. I learned some lessons from Michael Moore, and hopefully he might learn some lessons from me about handling facts.
1a)Box Office Mojo shows that "2016: Obama's America" was the fourth-highest grossing film on Friday, taking in $2.255 million, and trailing only "The Expendables 2," "The Bourne Legacy," and "Paranorman." What's more, its per-theatre gross of $2,067 is almost twice that of "Expendables," and well over double every other film in Friday's top ten.
The film also seems assured of becoming the highest grossing post-1982 political documentary coming from the political right.
Here is Box Office Mojo's top ten in the political documentaries genre:
Just a few more days of grosses above $1 million, which seems virtually assured, and "2016" will top Michael Moore's "Roger and Me" and Ben Stein's "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" and jump to sixth on the list.
As Scott Whitlock at NewsBusters noted this morning, we've already seen a negative reaction to the movie at the Washington Post, which thought the falsehood-infested "Fahrenheit 9/11" was a great movie.
So ... will the rest of the establishment press engage in deliberate neglect or open hostility?
Pass the popcorn.
1b)Review: 2016: Obama's America
By Matthew May
At the conclusion of his film 2016: Obama's America, producer and star (or featured narrator, if you will) Dinesh D'Souza asks viewers whether we will pursue the American dream or Barack Obama's dream.
That dream, as D'Souza argues, is the defeat of oppressive colonialism that manifested itself in the rise of the United States as the dominant world power at the expense of the third world. In short, Obama seeks to right the wrongs identified by the most radical Communist sympathizers and activists of the post-World War II world, with Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. chief among them. D'Souza, utilizing Obama's first autobiography, Dreams from My Father, takes viewers along for a journey into Obama's upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia, and then to his alleged self-discovery in Kenya at his father's grave.
One aspect of the film that D'Souza may or may not have intended to come across is the fact that Obama's childhood story is actually quite sad. As the movie restates, Obama was shuffled about from Hawaii, Indonesia, and back to Hawaii. His father abandoned him and his mother to gallivant in North America and at Harvard, fathering several children by different women, all the while abusing some of those women and drinking heavily. D'Souza portrays the elder Obama as a frighteningly selfish and irresponsible lout.
Obama at times lived with his mother and her husband, Lolo Soetoro, in Indonesia. Interestingly, as D'Souza points out, Soetoro worked for an oil firm and was virulently anti-communist. However, Obama's mother rejected Soetoro and made it plain that Obama Senior's politics were honorable, Soetoro's dishonorable.
After a time, young Obama was shipped back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents there. Obama never really had a foundational home base, and his childhood brings to mind the term dislocated. In many respects, Obama was a lost little boy.
Along the way and throughout his life, as D'Souza shows, Obama has had a string of surrogates influencing him, people D'Souza calls "Obama's Founding Fathers." These include the Communist writer and activist Frank Marshall Davis, terrorist Bill Ayers, anti-Israeli crank Edward Said, Jeremiah Wright, and Brazilian Communist professor Roberto Unger. This series of father figures were in and out of his life at various intervals. The common thread among them, unfortunately, is that they marinated the young man in the swill of Marxist, anti-colonial propaganda, endorsed by the near-mystical specter of his missing father, that can be diluted thusly: the United States of America represents the greatest threat to mankind in the world and must be taken down.
D'Souza argues that Obama's policies can be easily traced to this worldview. Critics will no doubt huff that D'Souza is engaging in ridiculous pop psychology, particularly in his attempt to parallel his own experiences with colonialism in India to those of some of Obama's surrogates and of Obama's father. Perhaps. Yet the contempt with which Obama has treated Great Britain (notably his attempts to link his grandfather as a "servant" to the U.K. and opposition to Great Britain concerning the Falklands) and Israel, and his tacit and overt support for radical Islamic actions in the Middle East as the work of freedom-fighters, makes D'Souza's assertions compelling. So do, D'Souza argues, Obama's actions concerning the winnowing of the American nuclear arsenal to ostensibly level the nuclear playing field while dangerous governments in Russia, North Korea, and Iran increase their weaponry. It is the implementation of the theories expressed by Obama's father, Davis, and many of the president's surrogates.
D'Souza assembled an impressive roster of interviewees for the film, including AT contributor Paul Kengor, author Shelby Steele, scholar Daniel Pipes, Obama's half-brother in Kenya, and many others who deliver their insights into Obama's background and his policy choices from a number of different perspectives. Pipes sums things up succinctly when saying of Obama, "He doesn't think well of America."
D'Souza also includes conversations along his travels with lesser-known figures who knew Obama's father well and were acquainted with Obama's mother in Hawaii, as well as a specialist in the psychological aspects of children of absentee fathers. D'Souza mentions that the Brazilian Communist and Harvard professor Unger declined to be interviewed for the film; it would have been interesting to know other names from the left D'Souza attempted to get on camera.
Political reporters and commentators who participated in the mythmaking of the 2008 campaign and afterward should, after seeing this film, leave the theater kicking themselves for a missed golden opportunity. Had a one of them put into practice a third of the investigative scrutiny D'Souza applied to Obama's background, he or she could have gained everlasting fame and fortune. He or she would have also rendered a great service to his or her country, regardless of whether the electorate would have heeded the warning.
D'Souza's movie is significant and engrossing. The tactic of taking Obama's words in his book Dreams from My Father is keen. D'Souza leaves alone the very real possibility that Ayers wrote or re-wrote large portions of Dreams, though if he had pursued that line, it would have led back, as AT contributor Jack Cashill has demonstrated, to one of the "Obama Founding Fathers."
While one can look upon Obama's childhood and upbringing as sad tale, it is also true that he is a child of privilege who was afforded a lavish education from high school on. As D'Souza argues, Obama realized that Americans of goodwill were willing to help him advance -- in college, in law school, in politics -- and he capitalized on that help to present himself as a figure of unity while harboring the resentments of his surrogates. He had his chances, and he made his choices.
Obama chose to associate with, study under, emulate, and work alongside the worst this nation has to offer. D'Souza's film is but a visual version of what readers of this site have known for years: Barack Obama may be a natural-born American citizen, and he may be the American president. He may be from America, but he is not of America. Neither is his dream.
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2)One does not usually think of the conventions of the major U.S. political parties as having any particular impact on Jewish history. But 68 years ago, the Republican National Convention adopted a plank that would shape the future of U.S.-Israel relations and redefine the role of Jewish voters in American politics.
This surprising turn of events was the result of efforts by an unlikely trio: a former president, a maverick journalist-turned-congresswoman and the father of Israel's current prime minister.
The race for the 1944 GOP nomination was settled early. After his sweeping win in the Wisconsin primary, New York Gov. Thomas Dewey was set to get the party's nod.
There were, however, several surprises in store when the Republicans gathered in Chicago at the end of June. One was the choice of Connecticut Rep. Clare Boothe Luce to deliver the keynote address — the first time a woman had been given that honor by either major party.
Luce, a former editor of Vanity Fair and war correspondent for Life, was one of the GOP's rising young stars. The charming and charismatic Luce had a knack for turning a clever political phrase. Her description of postwar liberal visions of a universal world order as "globaloney" instantly became part of the political lexicon.
Former President Herbert Hoover hailed Luce as "the Symbol of the New Generation."
The other major surprise of the convention was the party's decision to actively seek the support of Jewish voters. In the presidential elections of 1936 and 1940, 85% of American Jews had supportedFranklin D. Roosevelt. "The problem with you people," Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg once complained to a group of pro-FDR Jewish leaders, "is that every time the Great White Father [Roosevelt] waves his hand, you jump right through the hoop."
But by the spring of 1944, many Jews were deeply frustrated by the Roosevelt administration's failure to aid European Jews fleeing the Nazis, and FDR's refusal to press the British to open Palestine to Jewish refugees.
Even the fervently pro-FDR American Jewish Congress challenged the president. An editorial in its official journal, addressing the Allied leaders, declared:
"You cannot recompense a people for its millions left to be butchered by the enemy through your indifference to their fate and the red tape of bureaucratic approach to the matter of their rescue." The editorial said those Jews who had managed to escape from the clutches of the Nazis "escape[d] also from the indifference of the democratic nations, from the inhumanity of certain of their policies, from their strict adherence to rigid immigration regulations."
The growing bitterness in the Jewish community opened the door to Benzion Netanyahu, a young Zionist activist from Jerusalem who had come to the U.S. to mobilize public support for creation of a Jewish state. (Netanyahu, whose son, Benjamin, is Israel's current prime minister, passed away this year at the age of 102.) At a time when most mainstream Jewish leaders backed Roosevelt and ignored the Republicans, Netanyahu cultivated ties to Hoover, Luce, Sen. Robert Taft of Ohio and other senior GOP figures. He urged them to include a pro-Zionist plank in their 1944 platform. So did Cleveland rabbi and Zionist leader Abba Hillel Silver, who was close to Taft.
In an interview some years ago, Netanyahu told me that on the eve of the convention, Luce called him to say, "I'm going now, to do your work at the convention."
Luce was a member of the convention's resolutions committee, and Taft was its chairman. With Hoover's encouragement, the committee adopted a resolution urging the Allies to "give refuge to millions of distressed Jewish men, women and children driven from their homes by tyranny," by opening British-controlled Palestine to "unrestricted immigration" and then establishing a Jewish state.
Prominent Jewish supporters of FDR and the Democrats, especially Rep. Emanuel Celler of New York and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, feared the GOP plank might break the Democrats' lock on the Jewish vote. At the Democratic Convention in Chicago the following month, Wise warned a Roosevelt administration official that their failure to adopt a pro-Zionist plank to match the Republicans "will lose the president 400,000 or 500,000 votes."
Wise was referring to the large Jewish population in New York state. With its 47 electoral votes — the largest in the nation at the time — New York would be crucial to FDR's 1944 reelection bid. The fact that New York's governor was the Republican nominee meant it might become a battleground state. The party leadership heeded the warnings from Celler and Wise. The Democrats adopted a plank endorsing "unrestricted Jewish immigration and colonization" of Palestine and the establishment of "a free and democratic Jewish commonwealth." Now both parties stood unequivocally in support of rescue and statehood.
This was the beginning of the "Jewish vote" as a factor in U.S. presidential politics. For the first time, both parties recognized that Jewish votes might be up for grabs, and that Jewish concerns needed to be addressed to attract the support of Jewish voters.
The two 1944 planks also represented the birth of bipartisan support for a Jewish state. With both parties in agreement, the path was clear for America-Israel friendship to become a permanent part of American political culture.
Rafael Medoff is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and the coauthor with Sonja Schoepf Wentling of the new book "Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the 'Jewish Vote' and Bipartisan Support for Israel."
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JESSICA HILL/AP
Pro-union protesters in Wisconsin.
With Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan as his running mate, the conventional wisdom is that the presidential election is now a referendum on the size of government. If so, it’s a national stage for a debate that has already been taking place in state capitols from Albany to Sacramento about the burden of public sector unions.
Neither conservatives nor liberals disagree that these unions raise wages and employment for their members (i.e., firefighters, teachers and police). But research I recently completed finds a solid empirical relationship between public sector unions’ concentration and the size and cost of state government, suggesting that what’s good for the public sector employee goose might not be good for the taxpayer gander.
Over the last three decades, union membership in the private sector has fallen precipitously, from 24.2% in 1973 to just under 7% in 2011. Over the same period, public sector union membership jumped by 14 points, from 23% to 37%.
The different directions of these trend lines have much to do with the nature of public sector employment. For instance, unlike the private sector, public sector wages that exceed an employee’s productivity don’t directly threaten employment — if you need proof of this point, head down to your local DMV office.
The excess cost of overpaid public employees is deflected onto taxpayers. Many states, including my home state of California, are learning the hard way that there’s a limit to this tax-and-spend cycle.
The stability of public sector employment is reflected in Bureau of Labor Statistics job tenure data, which find that median tenure for a government employee is anywhere from 37% to 97% higher than in the private sector. And recent research published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives concluded that the salary and benefits of state and local government employees is as much as 21% higher than of private sector employees doing similar work.
And the political power of public workers is undeniable: The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees spent $87.5 million in the 2010 election, leading all independent groups.
Tenured, well-paid and politically powerful — all would suggest a link between union concentration and the size and cost of government. My study tested this hypothesis, and over the period of 2003 to 2010 found that a 10% increase in public union membership expands government by as much as 4.25%.
The effect of this relationship on taxpayers is obvious, but there’s also a clear effect on a state’s business climate. Business owners small and large must navigate the higher taxes and debt along with the regulatory maze and Escher-like tax codes favored by government bureaucracies.
Chief Executive magazine publishes an annual survey of 650 CEOs on the best and worst states in which to do business. All 50 states are evaluated on metrics like taxes, regulation, quality of the workforce and living environment (where 1 is best and 50 is worst).
I compared these rating to public union density, yielding an unsurprising conclusion: Expanding union memberships worsen business climates.
States where union membership was highest (New York, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, Hawaii, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Michigan, Washington and California) averaged 43.4 on the business climate index; the states with the least union concentration (North Dakota, Texas, Idaho, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Virginia and North Carolina) averaged 13 on the business climate index.
Public unionism trends should be a concern for those interested in creating job opportunities outside of government, but also to union members, since they rely on businesses, their employees and customers to pay for the very government they are so expert in expanding.
Fewer opportunities in business threatens their livelihoods, too — biting the hands that feed them.
Marlow is a professor of economics at California Polytechnic State University.
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