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Obama is confused about the exact percent of president he is. (See 1 below.)
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An article about the "Chick fil A" saga.
It is not an issue to take lightly because it goes to the essence of free speech and enterprise and basic unrestricted commercial challenges.
We are being crippled by PC'ism's stranglehold in this country and narrow agendas of various groups seeking to exploit loopholes in the law and bigger loopholes in the passive brains of our collective society.
Dan Cathy sells a delicious chicken sandwich but he is not about to become a chicken. That said, the liberal-progressive fox are in the hen house.(See 2 below.)
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Sowell: "Obama vs Obama part 2" (See 3 below.)
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A certain White House visitor? (See 4 below.)
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The Importance of walking
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QE3, potentially a lot more logs on an already roaring fire. (See 5 below.)
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Michele has a difficult time getting off her racial broom! (See 6 below.)
She also describes how Obama has been fighting for us as he struggles with the presidency. (See 6a below.)
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Why can't Obama get it? Does he want to get it? (See 7 below.)
The speech Obama should have made at The U.N. but due to his confused state is incapable of doing so. (See 7a below.)
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Roger Luchs writes about "Hope and Chains." (See 8 below.)
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Let's hear it for those skewed polling results. Romney's victory will be shades of Truman's
9)(See 9 below.)
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The Jewish New Year has ended, Ahmadinejad has spoken and Netanyahu will be responding.
Meanwhile Obama has given a typical speech leaving no doubt where he hides - behind words.
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Dick
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1)The 10% President
The annotated Obama: How 90% of the deficit becomes somebody else's fault.
A question raised by President Obama's immortal line on CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday—"I think that, you know, as President, I bear responsibility for everything, to some degree"—is what that degree really is. Maybe 70% or 80% of the buck stops with him? Or is it halfsies?
Nope. Now we know: It turns out the figure is 10%. The other 90% is somebody else's fault.
This revelation came when Steve Kroft mentioned that the national debt has climbed 60% on the President's watch. "Well, first of all, Steve, I think it's important to understand the context here," Mr. Obama replied. Fair enough, so here's his context in full, with our own annotation and translation below:
"When I came into office, I inherited the biggest deficit in our history.1 And over the last four years, the deficit has gone up, but 90% of that is as a consequence of two wars that weren't paid for,2 as a consequence of tax cuts that weren't paid for,3 a prescription drug plan that was not paid for,4 and then the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.5
"Now we took some emergency actions, but that accounts for about 10% of this increase in the deficit,6 and we have actually seen the federal government grow at a slower pace than at any time since Dwight Eisenhower, in fact, substantially lower than the federal government grew under either Ronald Reagan or George Bush.7"
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Footnote No. 1: Either Mr. Obama inherited the largest deficit in American history or he won the 1944 election, but both can't be true. The biggest annual deficit the modern government has ever run was in 1943, equal to 30.3% of the economy, to mobilize for World War II. The next biggest years were the following two, at 22.7% and 21.5%, to win it.
The deficit in fiscal 2008 was a mere 3.2% of GDP. The deficit in fiscal 2009, which began on October 1, 2008 and ran through September 2009, soared to 10.1%, the highest since 1945.
Mr. Obama wants to blame all of that on his predecessor, and no doubt the recession that began in December 2007 reduced revenues and increased automatic spending "stabilizers" like jobless insurance. But Mr. Obama conveniently forgets a little event in February 2009 known as the "stimulus" that increased spending by a mere $830 billion above the normal baseline.
The recession ended in June 2009, but spending has still kept rising. The President has presided over four years in a row of deficits in excess of $1 trillion, and the spending baseline going forward into his second term is nearly $1.1 trillion more than in fiscal 2007.
Federal spending as a share of GDP will average 24.1% over his first term including 2013. Even if you throw out fiscal 2009 and blame that entirely on Mr. Bush, the Obama spending average will be 23.8% of GDP. That compares to a post-WWII average of a little under 20%. Spending under Mr. Bush averaged 20.1% including 2009, and 19.6% if that year is left out.
Footnotes No. 2 through 4: Liberals continue to claim that the main causes of the current fiscal mess are tax rates established in, er, 2001 and 2003 and the post-9/11 wars on terror. But by 2006 and 2007, those tax rates were producing revenue of 18.2% and 18.5% of GDP, near historic norms.
Another quandary for Mr. Obama's apologists is that he has endorsed nearly all of these policies. The 2003 Medicare drug benefit wasn't offset by tax hikes or spending cuts, but Democrats expanded the program as part of ObamaCare.
The President also extended all the Bush tax rates in 2010 for two more years in the name of helping the economy, and he now wants to continue them for people earning under $200,000, which is where 71% of their "cost" resides. The Iraq campaign was won and beginning to be wound down when he took office, and he himself surged more troops in Afghanistan.
Footnote No. 5: Mr. Obama keeps dining out on the excuse of the recession, but that ended halfway through his first year. The main deficit problems since 2009 are a permanently higher spending base (see Footnote No. 1) and the slowest economic recovery in modern history. Revenues have remained below 16% of the economy, compared to 18% to 19% in a normal expansion.
The 2008 crisis is long over. The crisis now is Mr. Obama's non-recovery.
Footnote No. 6: Even at face value, Mr. Obama's suggestion that he is "only" responsible for 10% of what the government does is ludicrous. Note that in addition to his stimulus, what he calls "emergency actions" include his new health-care entitlement that will cost taxpayers $200 billion per year when fully implemented and grow annually at 8%, even using low-ball assumptions.
But the larger point concerns executive leadership. Every President "inherits" a government that was built over generations, which he chooses to change, or not to change, to suit his priorities. Mr. Obama chose to see the government he inherited and grow it faster than any President since LBJ.
The pre-eminent political question now is whether to reform the government we have to make it affordable going forward, or to keep growing the government and raise taxes to finance it, if that is even possible.
Mr. Obama favors the second option, though he pretends he can merely tax the rich to do it. Nobody who has looked honestly at the numbers believes that—not his own Simpson-Bowles commission and not the Congressional "super committee" he sanctioned but then worked to undermine.
At every turn he has demagogued the Romney-Ryan proposals to modernize the entitlement state so it is affordable, and he personally blew up the "grand bargain" House Speaker John Boehner was willing to strike last summer.
Footnote No. 7: Mr. Obama's posture as the tightest skinflint since Eisenhower is a tutorial in how to dissemble with statistics. The growth rate seems low because he's measuring from the end of fiscal 2009, after a one-year spending increase of $535 billion. That is the year of his stimulus and thus spending is growing off a much higher base. The real annual pace of government growth is closer to 5%, and that doesn't count ObamaCare.
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In another news-making bit with "60 Minutes," which the program decided not to air, Mr. Obama conceded that "Do we see sometimes us going overboard in our campaign, mistakes that are made, areas where there's no doubt that somebody could dispute how we are presenting things, that happens in politics."
Note the passive voice, as if the President's re-election campaign is disembodied from the President. If Mr. Obama's campaign seems dishonest enough that even Mr. Obama is forced to admit it, this is because it's coming from the top.
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2)McGurn: The Chick-fil-A War Is Back On
Welcome to the new intolerance.
Sometimes there comes along an idea so wrongheaded that even Michael Bloomberg and the American Civil Liberties Union can't support it.
So it was this summer, when the Democratic mayors of Boston and Chicago declared Chick-fil-A unwelcome in their cities because the mayors disagree with CEO Dan Cathy's support for "biblical marriage." New York Mayor Bloomberg called the threats "inappropriate." A spokesman for the Illinois ACLU suggested that they were unconstitutional to boot.
Now the controversy is back, after a Chicago alderman announced that Chick-fil-A had agreed to stop supporting "antigay organizations." After two days of confusion, Mr. Cathy this weekend said Chick-fil-A had "made no such concessions." No matter who is telling the truth, this much we know: The targeting of Chick-fil-A is but one front in an ugly campaign where the goal isn't so much to prevail in a political argument as to buffalo opposing voices into silence.
Chad Crowe
We saw this in California recently, when individuals who had contributed to Proposition 8—a ballot initiative backing traditional marriage—found gay-rights activists pressuring their employers. We saw it in the campaign to get corporations to withdraw from the American Legislative Exchange Council, a pro-market organization of state legislators that found itself branded racist for supporting state voter-ID and stand-your-ground laws. We saw it even earlier, in 2005, when the Schwab financial services firm came under fire for supporting the libertarian Cato Institute and Social Security privatization—not to mention similar efforts to get corporations to withdraw from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
In one sense, these examples are all different. In the Proposition 8 case, activists targeted individuals; the Chick-fil-A matter, by contrast, involves a private company threatened by government officials, while the attacks on Schwab and ALEC zero in on the donations of large, publicly traded companies.
In the most critical sense, however, the goal is the same. Whether the means involve Federal Election Commission disclosure requirements, Securities and Exchange Commission rules on shareholder resolutions, or simply tagging those with opposing views as "hate groups," the object is clear: to limit debate by forcing one side off the playing field.
For a long time, the prevailing idea was that you encourage free speech with regulations ensuring full transparency. While this may sound fine in theory, in practice these requirements can conflict with the right of people to come together in free association. Certainly that was the Supreme Court's understanding in 1958, when it rejected the state of Alabama's demand that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People turn over its membership list.
In like manner, Bradley A. Smith says that what he saw as head of the Federal Election Commission under George W. Bush led him to conclude that some of our government requirements limit rather than encourage free speech. "Today we have too many people saying not only 'I disagree with you,' but 'I hate your message and you shouldn't be allowed to say it,'" notes Mr. Smith, who now runs the Center for Competitive Politics. "The more ruthless then use disclosure laws to seek out and target those who hold contrary views."
Mr. Smith says that many Americans who favor disclosure do not perceive that these requirements might make them targets. For example, if you were a gay-marriage supporter working in the midst of an evangelical Christian business in a deep-red state, would you want your boss and co-workers to know you gave $100 for a gay-rights referendum? Obversely, if you were a young professor at Harvard up for a tenure vote, how comfortable would you be with your colleagues' knowing you had contributed to a tea-party initiative?
At the corporate level, the browbeating takes a different form. In general the idea is to manipulate whatever levers are available (e.g., shareholder resolutions) to expose, isolate and demonize some recipient of the company's giving. Each time a company cries "Uncle!," you trumpet the news—"Six More Companies Dump ALEC" read a recent headline on a website supporting such tactics—to make the remaining supporters feel isolated and vulnerable.
In other words, the Supreme Court in Citizens United may have upheld the speech rights of corporations in law, but these assaults on corporate giving seek to deny anyone who speaks up for smaller and more limited government the funding and wherewithal necessary to mount a public argument.
In short, under the false flag of better governance, the activists are working hard to impose standards and codes that would make it impossible for American business—and individuals—to support any but the most politically correct causes. For all the lofty words about accountability, did the drafters of our public-disclosure laws really intend them to be used by activist groups to get people fired for holding unfashionable views?
Welcome to the new intolerance. Chick-fil-A is only the beginning.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3)Obama Versus Obama: Part II
Nowhere is the contrast between Barack Obama, as defined by his rhetoric ("Obama 1") and Barack Obama as defined by his actions ("Obama 2") greater than in his foreign policy -- and especially his policy toward Israel.
What if we put aside Barack Obama's rhetoric, and instead look exclusively at his documented record over a period of decades, up to and including the present?
The first thing that is most striking about that record is the long string of his mentors and allies who were marked by hatred of the United States, and a vision of the world in which the white, Western nations have become prosperous by oppressing and exploiting the non-white, non-Western nations.
The person most people have heard of who matched that description has been Jeremiah Wright, whose church Barack Obama attended for 20 years, and was still attending when he began his campaign for the presidency. But Jeremiah Wright was just one in a series of mentors and allies with a similar vision and a similar visceral hostility to the West.
Barack Obama was virtually marinated in that vision from childhood. His mother clashed with her Indonesian husband when he began to move away from his earlier anti-Western radicalism and to work with Western businesses investing in Indonesia.
As a counterweight to whatever ideological influence her Indonesian husband might have on her son, she extolled the virtues of his absent Kenyan father, who remained a doctrinaire, anti-Western socialist to the end.
After Barack Obama was sent back to Hawaii to live with his grandparents at age ten, his grandfather introduced him to a black man named Frank Marshall Davis, who had a long career of anti-American, anti-white propaganda that included a stint as a member of the Communist Party. Davis was Obama's mentor on race throughout his adolescent years, until Obama left for college.
The progression of such mentors and like-minded contemporaries continued as Obama went through Occidental College, Columbia University and the Harvard Law School.
These included Professor Edward Said at Columbia, a spokesman for Palestinian terrorists, and Professor Derrick Bell at the Harvard Law School. Bell was an advocate of so-called "critical race theory" -- an uncritical mishmash of notions by a man who said that he saw his role as deliberately annoying white people. Barack Obama literally embraced Professor Bell at a public gathering.
After Obama went out into the world and worked for a time in a private business, he regarded himself as being, in his own words, "a spy behind enemy lines."
Later, when he began his political career by running for state office in Illinois, his campaign began with a fundraiser in the home of Bill Ayers, who had been a domestic terrorist who planted bombs in public places, including the Pentagon.
When this association was later revealed, Obama said that he was still a child during Ayers' years as a terrorist. But Obama was by no means still a child when Ayers defended his years of terrorism in a statement that appeared in the New York Times -- ironically, on September 11, 2001.
This is not the Barack Obama that most voters saw and elected President of the United States in 2008. What they saw was a carefully crafted image of a bright, articulate, energetic and genial fellow who would heal our racial and partisan divides. His likability was high and remained so, even after many became disappointed with his policies.
His geniality has carried him over many rough spots. But have you ever heard of a grumpy confidence man? Geniality is a prerequisite for the job.
What many regard as a failure of Obama's foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, may well be one of his biggest successes. His desire to redistribute wealth domestically is part of a larger ideological vision that includes a redistribution of power internationally.
Obama has long said that the United States plays too large a role internationally. His policies suggest that Islamic countries need a larger role. The troubling question is whether he still sees his own role as "a spy behind enemy lines" in the White House.
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Who Is White House Visitor Hisham Altalib?
On Friday, March 30, 2012, Hisham Y. Altalib visited the White House. According to visitor logs, Altalib was received by Joshua DuBois, the director of President Obama's Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Four days later, White House officials welcomed a foreign delegation of the radical Sharia-enforcing Muslim Brotherhood from Egypt.
The White House meeting with overseas Muslim Brotherhood leaders was reported in April by a few mainstream journalists and questioned loudly by conservative media. But the White House confab in March with U.S.-based Altalib -- which appears to be a prep session with the global Muslim Brotherhood's American advance team -- has received no attention until now.
So, who is Hisham Yahya Altalib? What is his agenda?
And why exactly did the Obama administration conduct domestic "faith-based" outreach with this Muslim Brotherhood figure in Virginia, who just happens to be 1) tied to bloody jihad and 2) a major contributor to the left-wing Center for Constitutional Rights, the group of jihadi-sympathizing lawyers who helped spring suspected Benghazi terror plotter Abu Sufian bin Qumu from Gitmo?
Altalib is an Iraqi-born Muslim identified by the FBI as a Muslim Brotherhood operative before he moved to America in the 1970s to earn an advanced electrical engineering degree from Purdue University in Indiana. By his own account, Altalib "soon became active in Islamic work in North America, which continues to this day."
He was the "first full-time director of the Leadership Training Department of the Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada (MSA)" -- a longtime Muslim Brotherhood front group whose explicit goal is to "conquer" America through Islamic propagandizing.
Altalib is also a founding member of the SAAR Foundation and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). Last year, his online biography proudly notes, he was "awarded the ISNA (Islamic Society of North America) Community Service Award." The Saudi-subsidized ISNA is regarded as the primary U.S. umbrella group for Muslim Brotherhood fronts and was named specifically by the global MB godfathers as a key player in their "Grand Jihad" strategy of infiltration from within.
SAAR was founded in Herndon, Va., in 1983 as part of a radical Islamic charity front for Saudi financiers called the SAFA Group. The feds raided SAAR's offices in 2002 as part of Operation Green Quest. Investigators confiscated 500 boxes and seven trucks' worth of documents illuminating the network's terror ties to the Al Taqwa Bank (a Swiss-based Muslim bank suspected of funding the 9/11 plot) and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Altalib worked for one of Al Taqwa Bank's main owners, Youssef Nada. Altalib's more prominent Muslim Brotherhood partner, Jamal Barzinji (one of the champions of the Ground Zero mosque), also worked for Nada. FBI and Customs officials believe SAAR/SAFA laundered money for a plethora of violent Muslim terrorist groups, from Hamas and Hezbollah to al-Qaida and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Along with several other leaders of the "Ikhwan" (brothers), Altalib and Barzinji established the International Institute of Islamic Thought in Herndon, Va., in 1985. Global Muslim Brotherhood thug Yusuf al-Qaradawi -- the fire-breathing, fatwa-issuing Jew-hater and violent jihad proselytizer -- inspired IIIT's mission: the "Islamization of social sciences."
According to Steven Merley of the Hudson Institute's Center on Islam, Democracy, and the Future of the Muslim World, IIIT has 14 affiliated offices across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, who put 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Omar Abdel Rahman behind bars, notes that IIIT was a demonstrated unindicted co-conspirator in the feds' Holy Land Foundation terror financing case. IIIT supported convicted terror aides Sami Al-Arian and Abdel Rahman Alamoudi.
Altalib, Barzinji and IIIT were also all listed in funding statements from the Center for Constitutional Rights as major donors giving in the $25,000 to $49,000 range.
CCR is the umbrella group providing more than 500 pro bono lawyers to Gitmo detainees. They have regularly dismissed national security concerns about Gitmo recidivism as "irresponsible ... scare stories." That's exactly what they did after one of CCR's clients, Libyan terror leader Abu Sufian bin Qumu, was sprung in 2007.
Fast-forward five short years. Qumu is now the lead suspect in the 9/11/12 attack on our U.S. consulate in Benghazi that resulted in the murders of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, consular official Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs/private security contractors Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. In the wake of this month's terrorist attacks on our Egyptian embassy, Libyan consulate and Afghan air base, the jihad helpers at CCR are stone silent.
This administration's idea of domestic "faith-based outreach" is tea with Muslim Brotherhood community organizers who have embedded themselves in American life for four decades with the express intent of "eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within." Meanwhile, our commander in chief is squawking to the world about YouTube videos. The Ikhwan are laughing their bloodstained robes off.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5)Goldman Sachs: QE3 May Total $2 Trillion
The Federal Reserve's latest quantitative easing program (QE3) could last until the middle of 2015 and total $2 trillion, Goldman Sachs economists say.
The Fed has announced that it will buy $40 billion a month of new mortgage-backed securities for an indefinite period.
The central bank also said it will re-invest funds from maturing government securities. And it will continue Operation Twist, which entails buying long-term Treasurys and selling short-term Treasury paper.
Put all that together, and you may get $2 trillion, Goldman economists estimate in a report obtained by CNNMoney.
They also forecast that the Fed won’t raise the federal funds rate – currently zero to 0.25 percent -- until 2016.
The Fed is unlikely to halt QE3 until the unemployment rate dips to 7.5 percent from 8.1 percent currently, Goldman’s economists say.
The central bank sees the rate in a range of 6.7 percent to 7.3 percent for 2014. If that’s correct, QE3 could terminate by mid-2014.
But the Goldman economists are skeptical. “If the recovery continues to disappoint, additional steps are possible," they write. "These include an increase in the pace of asset purchases.”
Adam Parker, chief U.S. equity strategist for Morgan Stanley, sees a good chance for further easing, too.
“We wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the Fed dramatically augment this program (i.e., QE4) before year-end, particularly if economic and corporate news continue to deteriorate," he writes in a report obtained by Business Insider.
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In a recent speech to the Congressional Black Caucus, Michelle Obama invoked images of slavery, and essentially accused America of being a racist country. Does America deserve better than to hear how racist we still are from the First Lady? Join Bill Whittle, Stephen Green and Scott Ott as they share their frustration with the race-baiting in the presidential campaign.
6a)Obama's Struggle
By Cindy Simpson
On the campaign trail, Michelle Obama often employs the word "struggle." It was actually Mrs. Obama's peculiar pronunciation -- "shtruggle" -- that first drew my attention to the frequency of her usage. At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, her speech referred to some form of "struggle" nine times. Last week, speaking in Durham, Michelle referred to "struggle" five times and as a theme of her address, prompting BuzzFeed to title its report "Michelle Obama: Barack 'Has Been Struggling With Us.'"
Besides noting Michelle's obvious exaggeration of struggling "every day" while visualizing frequent photos of her husband golfing or rubbing celebrity elbows, a very politically incorrect mind might also recall other famous politicians' "struggles," such as Hitler's notorious Mein Kampf, which translates as "My Struggle." Of course, the politically incorrect and very brave Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders also documented the struggle for his life after criticizing Islam (which also translates as "struggle") in Marked for Death. Wilders, in his controversial film Fitna, actually dared to compare the Quran with Mein Kampf (as did another famous politician, Winston Churchill, in his book From War to War). (Note: The Bavarian government has plans to republishMein Kampf in 2016, and an Arabic translation has reportedly been a bestseller in Middle Eastern countries for several years.)
Of course, the general concept of "struggle" itself can be either good or bad depending on what one is struggling against, or conversely, struggling for, as well as how the struggle is carried out.
Whether Obama personally ever had or now has a life of "struggle" hinges on how one defines or measures the term and which parts of his "composite" history or lifestyle are considered. Michelle charmingly recalled Obama's dumpster-dive coffee table and dates in his rusty car. But Obama's attendance at an elite private school in Hawaii, an expensive college in California earning "mediocre" grades, and the highly selective Ivies of Columbia and Harvard Law; his appointment as Harvard Law Review president (without a resume of articles); his college trip to Pakistan; his several-month "retreat" to Bali to write an account of his "struggle to understand the forces that shaped him" (for which he received large advances); his purchase of a residence in Chicago's pricey Hyde Park; and a few short years of professional then public experience leading to an incredibly rapid ascent into the most powerful office in the world -- well, none of this portrays a "shtruggle" to most folks.
Although blessed with a life of such good fortune (and once with "deep humility," admitting that he has a "gift" for "phenomenal" speeches), Obama is not known for a long record of giving of his personal time or money to either his extended family or private charity. Michelle must have been referring to her husband's shtruggle, as a community-organizer/politician who believes in wealth redistribution, to design and sell programs that raise taxes and "spread the wealth" (of other people) around.
To make government-run wealth-spreading seem like "the right thing to do," "what works," and all about "fairness" should be a struggle for the president of the United States, who is supposed to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and operate within its limitations. This is especially, as economist Thomas Sowell noted in his editorial "Fallacy of Redistribution Has Grave Economic Impact," considering the long and grim history of "examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty."
In a recent interview, Obama asserted that his policies were right and that his biggest mistake was that his storytelling failed to inspire people. In other words, he struggled to wrap up his redistributive philosophy with adequately attractive packaging. Regardless, his job is made easier by a large bloc of adolescent-minded voters who fail to look beyond bumper-sticker slogans, mainstream media manipulation, and enticing "fair share" payouts dangled outside the voting booth.
Redistributive policies have helped to dig our nation into a hole of trillions of dollars of debt -- a hole inhabited by millions of unemployed, dependent, and worried Americans. Obama, while frequently changing or ignoring the rules that he proclaims everybody else should have to play by, holds up fairness cards and perks for bureaucrats and cronies in one hand -- while the other seems to slap the hands of citizens who have avoided the hole or successfully built their own way out of it.
Though Michelle assures voters that Obama has been shtruggling to get out of that hole right along with them, we also see him skipping intelligence briefings and jobs council meetings while struggling to squeeze in more rounds of golf and appointments with "Pimp with the Limp," David Letterman, basketball stars, and Hollywood celebrities.
Lavish fundraisers garner lots of money from wealthy donors for the Obama campaign, but Sowell noted that government "can only confiscate the wealth that exists at a given moment. You cannot confiscate future wealth -- and that future wealth is less likely to be produced when people see that it is going to be confiscated." However, Obama hasn't let that fact stop him as he racks up an enormous debt that our nation's future generations will struggle to repay.
Another inconvenient fact is that all redistribution or fairness programs, no matter how well-intentioned, are inherently unfair to someone -- at the very least to the citizens forced to subsidize them. And there will always be the person who is a dollar short or over, or only a day or street away to qualify for the benefit or be subject to its requirements. Because all such programs have to start and stop somewhere, redefining the point where unfairness -- and a real struggle -- begins.
Sowell also noted the struggle of establishing and carrying out redistributive programs in a democracy versus in a dictatorship. Tocqueville is credited with the observations that a democracy will last only until politicians discover that they can bribe the public with the public's money, or a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves the treasury. Looking at recent statistics, we've almost reached that tipping point. And we all know what can fill the vacuum when a democracy fails.
"Mitt Romney and I are not running to redistribute the wealth," Paul Ryan recently said on the campaign trail in Virginia. "Mitt Romney and I are running to help Americans create wealth." Romney declared: "We believe in free people and free enterprise, not redistribution."
Obama struggles to fulfill his dreams of transforming America into some sort of socialist state. Romney's struggle is to convince voters that the Romney/Ryan vision will restore America's economic prosperity and preserve the liberty and freedom of its citizens. America's very survival may depend on whose vision wins the election struggle of 2012.
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7)Israel Must Be 'Eliminated'
Netanyahu has to take Iran's words seriously. Why doesn't Obama?
'To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle."
—George Orwell
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaks at the United Nations today, which also happens to be Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. The timing is apt because when it comes to Iran and Israel, the hardest thing for some people to see or hear is what Iranian leaders say in front of the world's nose.
"Iran has been around for the last seven, 10 thousand years. They [the Israelis] have been occupying those territories for the last 60 to 70 years, with the support and force of the Westerners. They have no roots there in history," Mr. Ahmadinejad told reporters and editors in New York on Monday.
"We do believe that they have found themselves at a dead end and they are seeking new adventures in order to escape this dead end. Iran will not be damaged with foreign bombs. We don't even count them as any part of any equation for Iran. During a historical phase, they [the Israelis] represent minimal disturbances that come into the picture and are then eliminated."
Note that word—"eliminated." When Iranians talk about Israel, this intention of a final solution keeps coming up. In October 2005, Mr. Ahmadinejad, quoting the Ayatollah Khomeini, said Israel "must be wiped off the map." Lest anyone miss the point, the Iranian President said in June 2008 that Israel "has reached the end of its function and will soon disappear off the geographical domain."
He has company among Iranian leaders. In a televised speech in February, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei called Israel a "cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut," adding that "from now on, in any place, if any nation or any group that confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help. We have no fear of expressing this."
Major General Hassan Firouzabadi, chief of staff of the armed forces, added in May that "the Iranian nation is standing for its cause that is the full annihilation of Israel."
This pledge of erasing an entire state goes back to the earliest days of the Iranian revolution. "One of our major points is that Israel must be destroyed," Ayatollah Khomeini said in the 1980s.
Former Iranian President Akbar Rafsanjani—often described as a moderate in Western media accounts—had this to say in 2001: "If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists' strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality."
So for Iran it is "not irrational" to contemplate the deaths of millions of Muslims in exchange for the end of Israel because millions of other Muslims will survive, but the Jewish state will not.
The world's civilized nations typically denounce such statements, as the U.S. State Department denounced Mr. Ahamadinejad's on Monday. But denouncing them is not the same as taking them seriously. Sometimes the greatest challenge for a civilized society is comprehending that not everyone behaves in civilized or rational fashion, that barbarians can still appear at the gate.
Thus we hear in U.S. and European policy circles that Israel is overreacting to such publicly stated intentions because Iran would never act on them and, in any case, Israel has its own nuclear deterrent. But no one believes Israel would launch a nuclear first-strike to wipe out Tehran, and an Israeli counterstrike would be too late to protect Israel from being "eliminated."
The tragic lesson of history is that sometimes barbarians mean what they say. Sometimes regimes do want to eliminate entire nations or races, and they will do so if they have the means and opportunity and face a timorous or disbelieving world.
No one knows that more acutely than Israeli leaders, whose state was founded in the wake of such a genocide. The question faced by Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and other Israelis is whether they can afford to allow another regime pledged to Jewish "annihilation" to acquire the means to accomplish it. The answer, in our view, is as obvious as Mr. Ahmadinejad's stated intentions.
In his U.N. speech Tuesday, President Obama took a tougher-than-usual election-season line against Iran, stating that "the United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon." But the cold reality is that after nearly four years of failed diplomacy and half-hearted sanctions that he opposed until Congress forced his hand, neither Iran nor Israel believe him.
Someone should put Orwell on the President's reading list before it's too late.
7a)The Message Obama Should Have Sent
Forget about a 'red line.' Try a warning to Iran in black-and-white.By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ
On Monday in New York, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promised that Israel will be "eliminated," a variation on his previous threats to the nation's existence. He was in town for the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, a gathering that reliably sees leaders issuing pronouncements that, even if not new, at least are given a bigger stage. On Tuesday, the first day of the gathering, President Obama delivered a speech that also struck familiar notes, including the statement that "a nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained." He moved no closer to giving a signal of what he might consider an intolerable development in Iran's advance toward a nuclear weapon.
For months, U.S. and Israeli officials have debated whether Mr. Obama should publicly announce a "red line" that, if crossed by Iran, would prompt an American military response. Announcing such a threshold publicly or privately might be helpful, but it may not be necessary for the president to specify what would constitute such a red line (a certain degree of uranium enrichment, for example, or other evidence of weaponization).
Instead, Mr. Obama has another good option: Tell the Iranian leadership that under no circumstances will it ever be permitted to develop or acquire nuclear weapons, and that the U.S. is prepared to take decisive military action to make sure of this.
Such a statement wouldn't tip the president's hand regarding a precise red line, but it would send a clear message that Iran's efforts to develop nuclear weapons are futile and ultimately will lead to disaster for Iran's rulers.
Mr. Obama's prior statements—that containing a nuclear Iran is not an option; that a country committed to wiping Israel off the map, promoting terrorism and arming Hezbollah and Syria can't be allowed to have nukes—have been strong. But Iran's leadership still doesn't seem to believe that an American military option really is on the table.
Iran's skepticism is understandable in light of some Obama administration rhetoric. This week the president himself characterized Israeli concern over Iran and threats of military action as mere "noise." Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has repeatedly and emphatically outlined the dangers of military action against Iran, and this month Vice President Joe Biden criticized Mitt Romney for being "ready to go to war" with Iran.
Being ready for war with Iran, after all, might be the only way to deter that country from going nuclear.
Were Mr. Obama to affirm America's dedication to blocking Iran's nuclear ambitions through military force if necessary, he would maintain his flexibility to act while putting pressure on Iran's mullahs. He would not be acknowledging, as some fear, that the combination of sanctions and diplomacy is failing. Rather, he would make this combination more effective by convincing Iran's leaders that there is no good reason for them to continue bringing the economic pain of international sanctions onto their country. The message is that their sanctions-provoking projects are pointless because the U.S. will never allow Iran to become a nuclear power.
A policy of sanctions, diplomacy and an absolute dedication to the use of force if necessary has a far better chance of working than sanctions and diplomacy alone. Sanctions have certainly made life difficult in Iran, at least for the general population, but they haven't slowed the regime's nuclear march. Meanwhile, Israeli leaders have been forced to consider unilateral action in the absence of America's clear commitment to stopping Iran before it's too late.
There are many ways to communicate American preparedness, including by increased military planning and exercises. But there is no substitute for a firm commitment, unambiguously stated by a president whose subordinates do nothing to blur the message and, if anything, signal a steely resolve.
There are those who argue that an American president should never make a threat that he may not want to carry out. But President Obama has already committed his administration to preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons, which necessarily means employing the military option if all else fails. He has also told the world that he does not bluff. If that is true, then there is no downside to his stating U.S. policy and intentions explicitly.
Mr. Dershowitz is a law professor at Harvard. His latest book is "Trials of Zion" (Grand Central Publishing, 2010)
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8)Hope and Chains
By Roger D. LuchsJoe Biden's comment "They gon' put y'all back in chains" has shone a light on a truth the Democratic Party and its adjutants in the media have suppressed for over half a century. That is that the party's electoral victories have been built upon the suppression of the aspirations of many of the nation's most disadvantaged American citizens: blacks living in the nation's inner cities. A look back at the party's history reveals how this came to be.
The Democratic Party was founded in the early 1830s, to challenge what its members thought were concerted efforts to grant the federal government additional powers to expand commerce. Their opposition, the Whig Party, believed in a stronger central authority to develop needed infrastructure and incentives. But the issue of slavery tore the Whigs apart, and many of its former members joined others in establishing the anti-slavery Republican Party.
The South's defense of slavery and its bitterness over the North's destruction of its way of life gave rise to "the solid South" voting bloc, which endured as a potent political force for over a century. The nascent American progressive movement tied its fortunes to the Democratic Party early in the twentieth century because, like their Southern brethren, progressives were suspicious of what industrialization had wrought, including the formation of well-capitalized corporations so critical to growing economies.
As it happened, the nation's first progressive president, Woodrow Wilson, was a Southerner. He was born and raised in Virginia and spent his formative years in the South. In an era when social Darwinism fed into segregation's guiding principle, that all men are not created equal, Wilson fit right in. He was an ardent segregationist, and his administration reinforced separation of the races in the public realm.
Despite this, Wilson sought black support for his run for the presidency. He promised blacks that if they voted for him, he would take up their cause. Many did. But once in office, he reneged. He hounded blacks in the federal government out of their jobs and appointed Southern segregationists in their place. He even reversed the Navy's longstanding policy of integration and took steps to insure that the nation's armed forces followed suit. Wilson's handiwork would take decades to overcome.
It can be fairly said that the Republicans presidents who served between the end of Wilson's term and the inauguration of the nation's second "progressive" president, Franklin Roosevelt, did little to reverse Wilson's policy on race. Yet at the same time, they did not engage in a Wilsonian "bait-and-switch."
Roosevelt, as it turns out, was more receptive to addressing societal abuses of black Americans and took some limited steps to assist them. But to maintain Southern support for his New Deal agenda, Roosevelt largely left Wilson's policies intact. In kind, Roosevelt refused to support his wife's crusade for an anti-lynching law. Southern blacks remained on their own in the face of the mob.
In a less brutal vein, New Deal agencies continued the federal tradition of treating blacks as second-class citizens. But in spite of this, many blacks found jobs in New Deal projects and were grateful for that. Thus, in ever greater numbers, they switched their allegiance to the Democrats.
Notwithstanding this shift, white Southerners exercised an unbending influence on Democratic politics and, over time, rose to chair the most powerful committees in Congress. Their positions and clout ensured that those advocating equal rights for black Americans would for the foreseeable future run into a stone wall.
It was the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that portended the eventual demise of the status quo in race relations. One of the South's own, Lyndon Johnson, foresaw that black support for Democrats might dissipate if the party's position on civil rights remained frozen in time. But Johnson's Southern compatriots resisted his taking up the cause for a comprehensive civil rights statute. In the end, of course, Johnson prevailed, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law, but it is telling that, to achieve passage, Johnson had to secure massive Republican support and strong-arm Southern Democrat holdouts to cease their obstruction of what he called "the nigger bill."
Johnson then turned to pushing through Congress his "Great Society" agenda. Its supporters naively believed that if sufficient funds were spent on federally engineered anti-poverty programs, the government could lift the poor into a middle-class lifestyle.
Dissenters, including one of Johnson's assistant secretaries of labor, thought otherwise. Daniel Patrick Moynihan believed that there was something far more fundamental at play. After studying the matter intensely, Moynihan concluded that slavery and segregation had led to the breakdown of black family structure, and moneyalone could not put it back together again. Unfortunately, Moynihan experienced the sort of derision and charges of racism that have become a staple of Democrat electoral politics. His findings fell on deaf ears.
Over the ensuing years, prominent Democratic leaders from the South aged and faded from the scene. Their successors were largely from the Northeast states and the West Coast, and these new Democrats' worldview was informed by a different war and the urban riots that followed the murder of Dr. King. For them, their own experiences marked "the end of history," their ideas for addressing the nation's "shortcomings" definitive and unassailable. But it would take time to translate those ideas in policy, and so, in the meantime, they chose to do nothing to alienate their party's key constituencies. Despite the increasingly obvious failures of the Great Society, and the havoc it was wreaking on its intended beneficiaries, its programs and their progeny became untouchable. So long as the inner-city poor were dependent on federal "largesse," they were not going anywhere.
Southern whites, however, had no interest in playing this game, and they balked at the idea of concentrating even more power in Washington. As time went by, they voted in ever greater numbers for Republicans. This forced the Democrats to come up with a new strategy for attracting voters and dollars. In this vein, they made identity politics one of their key political weapons, looking increasingly to narrowly focused interest groups already in their base to do some of the heavy lifting. Soon enough, though, the party found itself dependent on those very interest groups it had intended to harness to its cause, and it was those groups that gave the marching orders. Average citizens became more of a burden to Democrats than a benefit, and so organizations such as labor unions and pro-choice groups took charge.
This turnabout presented the Democratic Party with a number of irreconcilable conflicts. Most recently, we've witnessed the divergence of the pro-choice lobby and Catholic institutions appalled by being forced to include birth control in insurance policies for their employees.
But before this, another even more prominent conflict arose. It pitted the teachers' unions against one of the Democrats most reliable voting blocs: black inner-city residents. As the school choice and school reform movements gained steam, many inner-city parents recognized that these might provide the tools to advance their children's futures. Teachers in the public schools, on the other hand, saw these movements as a mortal threat and demanded that the Democrats maintain the status quo. And the Democrats obliged. Black children were consigned to "the back of the bus" while the teachers' pay, benefits, and jobs remained sacrosanct.
That this was the party's choice was unashamedly announced by President Obama early in his term. He quite publicly proclaimed that he was ending of the District of Columbia's school voucher program. No reason was given, nor did Obama find one necessary. He and his like-minded "progressives" more often than not had the means to send their own children to prestigious private schools, often located in the suburbs, so what difference did the pleas of the parents of voucher recipients make to them? For all practical purposes, then, Obama's decision was a replay of Wilson's reneging on his promise to blacks after he was elected and Roosevelt's refusal to back anti-lynching legislation. Between the progressive agenda and quest to transform the United States into a European-style social welfare state and the future of disadvantage black children, the choice was obvious. One ignorant child is a tragedy, a million a statistic.
It is truly ironic that a party which had for most of the 19th century enforced a doctrine of separate and unequal should, in the 21st century, impose an almost identical state of affairs dressed up in contemporary guise. Indeed, this is an especially remarkable twist, given that in the antebellum South, it was a crime to teach slaves to read and write. There is no such crime on the books today, because slavery is long gone. But in a moral sense, the crime has been revived, its victims there for all to see.
Biden's pander, then, was more than just a crude campaign ploy. It was also a signal that the Democrats have no intention of abandoning the enduring fiction of their own creation -- that the future welfare of black Americans is safe in their hands, and a return to servitude is just one election away.
9)GOP takes aim at ‘skewed’ polls
The Romney campaign and other Republicans say polls showing President Obama with a significant lead over their candidate are inaccurate.
They argue many mainstream polls skew in Obama’s favor because of sample sizes that base 2012 turnout projections on 2008, when Democrats — and Hispanics, blacks and young voters in particular — turned out in record numbers.
“I don’t think [the polls] reflect the composition of what 2012 is going to look like,” Romney pollster Neil Newhouse said in an interview.
Democrats counter that the sample sizes used in polls are accurate because there is no reason to think the makeup of the 2012 electorate will be proportionately different than in 2008. They also point to census data that shows minorities making up a greater share of the population, something driven by the surging Hispanic population.
“With African-Americans, there’s no question they will turn out at the same rate, for reasons that are obvious,” said Anna Greenberg, senior vice president at liberal research group Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.
“Moreover, given demographic changes in this country, four years later now there are more minority and younger voters, just by natural demographic changes alone. We’ve seen a more and more diverse electorate over time,” she said.
Whether polls are accurately reflecting the race is critical to how it is reported, and to decisions on how millions of dollars in campaign funds will be spent in the six weeks before Election Day.
According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, Obama enjoys a 3.7-percentage-point advantage over Romney in the race.
But Newhouse argues the RCP average, which is designed to neutralize outlying polls, is just an average of skewed polls that have a built-in bias for Obama.
“Averaging bad polls that include skewed samples will get you a skewed result,” Newhouse told The Hill.
Nobody disputes that Obama maintains big leads over Romney among blacks, Latinos and younger voters, but Republicans argue the economic downturn that has hit these groups hard is likely to lower their turnout in 2012, especially since 2008 turnout was boosted by the historic implications of electing the nation’s first black president.
As a result, they say, polls projecting similar turnout among these voters are inaccurate.
Dick Morris, the political consultant and pollster (who writes a column for The Hill), wrote last week that pollsters using 2008 turnout models in weighting their samples are likely to be incorrect given the turnout results that year.
Blacks made up 14 percent of the electorate in 2008, when they had traditionally cast about 11 percent of the vote, while the Latino share of the electorate rose by 1.5 percent and college-aged voters doubled their share, Morris wrote.
The problem with the polls, say conservatives, is the assumption most pollsters make on the party identification of the 2012 electorate.
In 2008, Democrats had a 7-percentage-point advantage in party identification over Republicans, which was close to the final margin of victory Obama had over Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
Newhouse and other Republicans say it’s foolish to expect a similar proportion of Democratic voters in 2012. They argue a smaller proportion of Democrats are likely to come to the polls in November, while a larger proportion of Republicans eager to deny Obama a second term can be expected to vote.
Polls that assume the makeup will be the same as 2008 don’t take this into account, they say.
“You had an extraordinary 2008 turnout among rural evangelicals, but Republicans stayed home in larger numbers,” Newhouse said. “This time you have a more enthused and energetic Republican electorate, and because of that, you’re not going to see the margins go up, you’ll see it narrow. So instead of a 7 [percentage-point advantage for Democrats], I anticipate something smaller than that.”
Those defending the accuracy of polls showing Obama with a lead argue Team Romney is overestimating the proportion of Republicans who will make up the 2012 electorate, and underestimating the proportion of minorities.
Among Hispanics in particular, Greenberg said Romney’s tack to the right during the GOP primaries had recharged the group “after a fair amount of softness the last couple of years,” and that Democrats had seen a sustained increase in enthusiasm across the board since the convention earlier this month.
Greenberg acknowledged voter identification has narrowed, but she said Democrats still have a 5-point advantage.
Veteran GOP consultant Roger Stone, who in recent years has worked on libertarian causes, argues the polls are correct because any benefit Romney gets from lower turnout by Democratic voters is likely to be evened out by softer conservative turnout.
“Romney doesn’t have a lock on conservatives,” Stone said. “And he’s losing some, just a couple of points, to [Libertarian candidate] Gary Johnson. That’s a problem.”
Some Democrats argue that polls that show Romney and Obama running neck and neck are skewed because not enough of those polled rely on cellphones.
“If there’s less intensity among Democrats, that’s balanced out by lack of cellphones in samples done by [conservative polling outlet] Rasmussen,” Stone said. “They’re under-sampling cellphone users, who we know are usually young, black, Latino or lower-middle-class working people.”
“The race is always going to be perceived as competitive, which it still is,” Stone said. “But the president has a slight edge.”
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