Obama and Biden Nation Molesters! "All You Need Is Bow!

This is an article worthy of repeating if you will only take the time to read it! We, in part, elected Obama because we wanted to be free of color bias. We got tarred instead! (See 1 below.)
---
Tom Sowell on Clinton's brass. (See 2 below.)
---
Obama and Biden claim, when it comes to foreign policy, they possess gravitas and the Romney/Ryan combo are novices and dangerous.

The Beatles wrote a huge success entitled"All You Need Is Love."

If I have the time I would like to write a parody entitled" All You Need Is Bow."

 Well let's observe the Obama/Biden record.

They begin by apologizing to the world for America's behavior. They bowed to various dictators. They undercut Mubarak, they undercut Israel, they supported the Palestinians by claiming the way to peace was to even the playing field, they undercut Poland and the Czechs. They stood behind the allies in Libya, they allowed the Iranians to protest and did nothing. They have condoned the slaughtering of Syrians and they told Putin to wait till they were re-elected. Iran continues to press forward in terms of their nuclear program and N Korea continues to thumb their nose at us as does Pakistan.

 Obama and Biden have turned our foreign policy into a chain by which we have become a Gulliver of our own making - a pitiful and feckless giant.

Meanwhile, whatever remaining friends we have in the region they too are frightened by our feckless policies and feel powerless and thus are moving towards Iran's embrace and within Iran's orbit. To make sure their feckless foreign policy will be effective Obama-Biden have  run down our fleet and plan to further weaken our military.

Then yesterday, Obama and Biden allowed some lower embassy official to apologize to those protesting against the fact that we allow freedom of speech.

In fact, today in an address Sec. Clinton basically repeated the same apology.

 Our embassy is attacked and our ambassador and some other officials are killed and, again, no markers are laid down by Obama and Biden. Instead, more empty words followed by a trip to Las Vegas to campaign.

Today we have evidence of what I warned about several days ago - 'watch the media and press coordinate their 'surround the wagons' support of their anointed candidate.

The questions put to Romney yesterday, we now know, were linked and pre-packaged.  And when asked about Romney's comments,Obama snidely pointed out that when you are president you must wait for facts like he has done on so many occasions starting with his  premature  attack on the Cambridge policeman.

You would hope applauding pigeons would awake but such is highly unlikely because they are incapable of connecting dots, reasoning on their own and coming to conclusions that are insightful. 

Why is this the case? Because these pigeons attend public schools, until they drop out,  that are controlled by teacher unions who could care less about their charges. Teacher Unions are interested in power, self aggrandizement and high incomes with no accountability. Liberals support them because these same public unions re-launder their out sized compensation and pensions to help re-elect those same liberal   politicians who helped them stick it to the public. (See 3 below.)

If the above is not sad enough when you turn to the domestic economic picture it is equally distressing.

Weakest recovery in modern history because of more debt, more regulations, more uncertainty, more anti- Capitalist pronouncements, more food and energy inflation, more unemployment and more empty words - yet, the pigeons keep applauding.

 Meanwhile,Obama and Biden claim they have earned the right to four more years. Their appeal is akin to a child molester asking to be served up more victims. The only difference is Obama and Biden are victimizing an entire nation. (See 3a and 3b below.)

 This from a long time friend and fellow memo reader: "Being a Southern gentleman, when going shopping, I often let my wife off at the door and then go park the car. (Before cell phones, this meant she had too much time alone in wallet hostile territory.) On the way out of the store, I open the door for my bride. She will sometimes then start walking to the car with me in tow. Only problem is, she doesn’t know where I parked the car. Sometimes, I will let her go on for a while before she realizes she can’t find our SUV among the ubiquitous sea of SUVs. Thus it is with our fearless leader-O. Leading from the rear means others must follow from the front. The ones in front often just go their own way, not knowing wither they go."

 An e mail sent to me by a dear friend, neighbor and fellow memo reader. (See 3c below.)
---
Dick
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Iran Has Obama in a Headlock
By James Lewis

 Iran's Armageddon cult now has Obama at its mercy. After appeasing the sadistic regime in Tehran for almost four years Obama only has to make it through the next two months without the Middle East blowing up, and he's set for life.

This is the last electoral test of his career, and maybe also the first real election he's ever had to endure. Obama's political bind puts the mullahs in charge for the next two months, rushing to an irreversible grab for nuclear weapons. Obama will not do anything to stop them, because that would mean taking a career risk. He has never taken a risk that might endanger his political career. Never. 

As a result, the United States has all the capability for destroying Iranian nuclear weapons before they break out, but we won't use our might, because Obama cares about himself more than the safety of the world. Israel is a pawn in this game, but the real stakes are the Muslim Ascendancy -- world power for the rising nuclear caliphates of the Muslim Middle East: Egypt, Turkey and Iran. Israel is the scapegoat for a rising great power struggle, in which the left has taken sides against civilization.

If that seems harsh, read Paul Johnson's life of Winston Churchill or Niall Ferguson's fine book Civilization: The West and the Rest --- and you see it happening again, right in front of our eyes. The Russians, the Muslims and the Chinese read history. Liberals don't read history, because they prefer to live in delusion. It's a choice.

 I once played a chess game with an Israeli military guy, who only used his pawns to beat me in a dozen moves. I'm a middling chess player, and he put me in a Zugzwang, a double bind, where I could not use my strong pieces, the queen, bishops and knights. It was clever and fast. He had counted all the pawn moves and I was caught unawares. The mullahs practice chess moves on each other, with real human lives at stake.

They are not "spiritual leaders" -- they are medieval Popes, bloody-handed thug politicians who kill in the name of God. Thirty years ago Khomeini suckered Jimmy Carter and Zbig Brzezinski in Iran until he was ready to humiliate them. The US Embassy occupation was Khomeini's way of humiliating the United States, to show we were a paper tiger.

Then Reagan took over and the US diplomats were released in record time. The mullahs are sadistic, but they backed down in the face of overwhelming power. Obama won't use the only kind of power they will recognize, so that the Saudis, who hate the mullahs, are being driven into their arms.

 Today the mullahs have Obama in a Zugzwang, a double bind. He can't act against them because they've got his number by now. He can't afford not to act, because millions of sleeping US voters might finally wake up to his dangerous failures in the Middle East, not to mention our faltering economy. Rather than driving events, Obama has been cornered.

In typical Obama fashion he is blaming the victim, the people of Israel. BHO has always been on the side of Third World dictatorships. Three years after his famous speech from Al Azhar University in Cairo, swinging the United States behind the Islamist Ascendancy, the United States Embassy in Cairo has been sacked by a mob. Syria is killing its own people with the active help of Iran and Russia.

All over the Muslim world hateful Islamist throwbacks are taking over. Guess who is to blame? Yes. In police states there are no "spontaneous" mob assaults on the embassy of a friendly power, with cops standing by and doing nothing. We pay a couple of billion per year to keep Egypt afloat, and now we have cynically pulled down the moderates in that country. This is Jimmy Carter's embassy crisis all over again, and it's no accident.

Muslim Bro Morsi just went to Tehran to show common cause with the Islamic fascists over there. His fascism suits theirs, like Hitler and Mussolini, even if they are Shiites and he is a Sunni, enemies for the last thousand years. In Egypt, Coptic Christian churches have been burned, and priests killed. Egyptian tanks -- US-made main battle tanks -- have been sent into the Sinai Desert near the Israeli border. Turkey is now run by a neo-Ottoman gang of thugs. Insanity is running amok again, and the New York Times can't see anything wrong. But that's the New York Times for you.

Obama has just publicly refused to meet with Benjamin Netanyahu while he is in our country attending the UN General Assembly. Too busy, says our hero. It's too hard to schedule. The Democratic Convention surrendered to American Muslims with an elaborate prayer meeting, while dropping God and Jerusalem from their official platform. American Jews are fast losing power and influence, and radical Muslims are bringing Shari'a to America.

 You can see it happening. Most American Jews are still brain-locked, because they are liberals. Half of American Jews will still vote for Obama rather than admit they were wrong -- disastrously wrong -- about liberalism ever since the radicals took over in 1968. Obama's surrender signals are understood all over the world, except at home.

The United States no longer stands for freedom and democracy. Those are capitalist bourgeois values, and Obama sneers at you if you hold them dear. "If you built a small business you didn't make that." You are the subject of the state, which means you're under Obama and his commissars.


When Obamacare takes over, your very life will be at their mercy. The United States now stands with the forces of destruction, the forces of women's oppression. American feminists couldn't care less, because they don't care about women, any more than Stalin cared about peasants and workers. The twenty-year genocidal Sudanese regime is sitting on the UN Human Rights Commission, along with Iran and other sadistic tyrannies.

The nuclear horse is out of the barn in Asia and the Middle East, while America and Europe are being driven into bankruptcy by the same ruling elite that bashes its democratic opponents, the real enemy in their eyes. Obama leaks word that his favorite bedtime reading is "American declinism" -- a good thing, apparently, to our worst president. If you point out those facts you're a racist, and the average American is more afraid of being accused of racism than murder.

After only four years in power Obama has the ship of state rocking dangerously back and forth, with Arctic icebergs floating ever closer. The ship's captain is drunk on power and ego, and his inner circle hate the ship.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs just told the world he would not want to be "complicit" in Israel's effort to defend itself from a genocidal enemy. "Complicit." Yes, that's what he said, and in this gang you know the word is coming from the top. The Democrats are run by leftist radicals who want to turn America upside down -- that's what the word "revolution" means. They have fielded organized Occupy mobs, with central training, slogans, and tactics and a media claque. They have shape-changed the ACORN thuggery under different guises, and our obedient media can't seem to figure it out.

The Occupistas have trashed downtowns all over the country, just for practice, and in some places racist flash mobs have attacked whites and Asians. The left has raw demagogues at its disposal --- Jeremiah Wright, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton. They make their living from racial blackmail. Obama and his minions have turned this election into the first trash-talking campaign in living memory.

Without a shred of evidence Mitt Romney has been called a felon, a tax-cheat, a corrupt capitalist, a hater of women. The left gets away with it, and that tells them they are in control. Nobody dares to oppose them since they control the Organs of Propaganda -- the media and the schools.

Israel is now scheduled to be the sacrificial lamb for Obama's declinist sabotage. But Japan also depends on American defense guarantees, and so do Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea. Europe is defenseless without us. China just grabbed millions of square kilometers of mineral-rich ocean, by turning one tiny island into a Chinese "city." Obama said nothing. 

This is the Carter-Reagan election of 1980, where we barely escaped Jimmy Carter's "declinism" by the skin of our teeth. It's the Chamberlain-Churchill struggle that saved Britain from the Nazis, after dreadful suffering. It's the surrender of the Sudetenland to Hitler, and the Yalta surrender to Stalin. Mind-locked ideologues like Obama always make things worse. They surrender to aggressive radicals, hoping the crocodile will swallow them last.

But nuclear crocodiles don't have to play nice. Obama wants to be historic, and he is.

He will be remembered, not as the first black president of the United States, but as the worst black president of the United States. That is unfortunate, but history will judge by performance even if the voters are suckered.

 If we luck out, we might be able to elect future presidents based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin. -
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2) The Brass Standard
By Thomas Sowell

 Politics takes a lot of brass. And Bill Clinton is a master politician. His rousing speech at the Democrats' convention told the delegates that Republicans "want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place." That is world class brass.

Bill Clinton's own administration, more than any other, promoted an unsustainable housing boom, which eventually and inevitably led to a housing bust that brought down the whole American economy. Behind all the complex financial processes that reached to Wall Street and beyond, there is one fundamental fact: many people stopped making their mortgage payments.

 Why did that happen?

Because mortgage loans were made to people who did not meet the long-established qualification standards for getting a mortgage loan.

And why did that happen?

Because the Clinton administration threatened lawsuits against lenders who did not approve mortgage loans to minority applicants as often as to white applicants. In other words, racial quotas replaced credit qualifications. A failure to have racial statistics on mortgage approvals that fit the government's preconceptions was equated with discrimination.

 Attorney General Reno said that lenders who "closely examine their lending practices and make necessary changes to eliminate discrimination" would "fare better in this department's stepped-up enforcement effort than those who do not." She said: "Do not wait for the Justice Department to come knocking." Clinton's Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had similar racial quota policies, and began taking legal actions against banks that turned down more minority applicants than HUD thought they should. HUD said that it was breaking down "racial and ethnic barriers" so as to create more "access" to home ownership. It established "goals" -- political Newspeak for quotas -- for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy mortgages that the original lenders had made to "the underserved population."

In other words, the original lenders could pass on the increasingly risky mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- and, ultimately, to the taxpayers. Other federal agencies warned mortgage lenders against having credit standards that these agencies considered too high. And these agencies had many powers to use against banks and other lenders who did not heed their warnings.

 The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, for example, issued guidelines for "non-discriminatory" lending which warned lenders against "unreasonable measures of creditworthiness." Lenders should have standards "appropriate to the economic culture of urban lower-income and nontraditional consumers" and consider "extenuating circumstances."

In other words, when some people don't come up to the lending standards, then the lending standards should be brought down to them. What was the evidence for all the lending discrimination that the government was supposedly trying to prevent? Statistics. In the year 2000, for example, black applicants for conventional mortgage loans were turned down at twice the rate for white applicants. Case closed, as far as the media and the government were concerned. Had they bothered to look a little deeper, they would have found that whites were turned down at nearly twice the rate for Asian Americans. Had they bothered to check out average credit scores, they would have discovered that whites had higher average credit scores than blacks, and Asian Americans had higher average credit scores than whites. Such inconvenient facts would have undermined the whole moral melodrama, reducing it to a case of plain economics, with lenders more likely to lend to those who were more likely to pay them back. Once lending standards were lowered, in order to meet racial quotas, they were lowered for everybody.

 Deadbeats of any race could get mortgage loans, and most were probably not minorities. Democrats like to blame the "greed" of business, rather than the policies of government, for problems. But lenders don't make money by lending to individuals who don't pay them back.

That is what government forced lenders to do, beginning under the Clinton administration. And the eventual collapse took down the economy. It takes brass to defy the facts. And Bill Clinton has brass. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)Foreign Policy to Move up in Importance in Presidential Race
 By Jackie Gingrich Cushman

 So far, the presidential race has focused on the economy, health care and jobs. Events this week are likely to change the course of the presidential election. Foreign policy will increase in importance and focus. As the United States marked the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks this past Tuesday with ceremonies, prayers and memorial services, demonstrators gathered at the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. They were protesting an online video filmed in California by Sam Bacile, a self-described Israeli Jew.

 According to CNN, "In a series of disjointed scenes, filmmakers depict Prophet Mohammed as a child molester, womanizer and ruthless killer." Based on reports at the time of my filing Wednesday morning, four American personnel were killed in the attack in Libya, among them U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens. In Cairo, several protesters climbed over the embassy walls and, according to CNN Producer Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, tore down the American flag. Protesters raised a black flag over the U.S. embassy compound bearing the words, "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his messenger."

 By international law, embassies are considered territory of the country that they represent. The U.S. embassy in Egypt is U.S. territory. Invading a U.S. embassy is tantamount to invading the United States. The U.S. embassy in Cairo released the following statement that same day. "The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims -- as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy.

Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others." No mention of the protesters in Cairo tearing down our flag or raising theirs. The Obama administration has noted that the statement was not approved internally. It will be interesting to see if there will be ramifications or changes in language. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released the following statement the same day about the Libyan attack. "I condemn in the strongest terms the attack on our mission in Benghazi today. As we work to secure our personnel and facilities, we have confirmed that one of our State Department officers was killed. We are heartbroken by this terrible loss. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and those who have suffered in this attack. ... Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind."

 This statement was stronger and more forceful, noting that the attacks were not justified. Deciding that the statements were not enough, the campaign of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney released this statement late Tuesday night: "I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi," it says. "It's disgraceful that the Obama administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks." President Obama released his own statement Wednesday morning, "I strongly condemn the outrageous attack on our diplomatic facility in Benghazi, which took the lives of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens. ... They exemplified America's commitment to freedom, justice and partnership with nations and people around the globe, and stand in stark contrast to those who callously took their lives. I have directed my administration to provide all necessary resources to support the security of our personnel in Libya, and to increase security at our diplomatic posts around the globe.'"

 It is too early to tell how these events will shape the presidential race. Much will be determined by how both camps respond to unfolding events and actions from other countries and involved groups. What might resonate best with the American people: strength without chest thumping, calm determination rather than agitation, resoluteness versus caution and weakness.

3a)Romney is right: Libya debacle belongs in debate
By Rich Lowry

 When a U.S. Embassy gets stormed by protesters overseas, it’s usually a matter of public concern. It might occasion headlines and commentary. Even debate between presidential candidates. Unless one of the candidates is President Barack Obama and the other is Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

Then, everything changes. In the immediate aftermath of the deadly attacks on U.S. diplomatic installations in Egypt and Libya , the political debate fastened on the propriety of Romney criticizing the administration for its initial response. You know — important stuff. Forget the dead body of our ambassador to Libya , Christopher Stevens, who had been instrumental in aiding the rebellion. Forget the desecration of the embassy’s flag in Cairo .

Forget the question of what we’re going to do to find the perpetrators or respond to two governments unable or unwilling to fulfill their most basic international responsibilities. The reports from earlier this week about how Obama would use foreign policy as cudgel against Romney had barely faded when the media pack turned around and declared politics must stop at the water’s edge, thank you very much.

 The old complaint about Romney was that he didn’t talk about foreign policy.

The newly minted complaint about Romney was that he did talk about foreign policy. He gets it coming and going, and everywhere in between. As demonstrators gathered on Tuesday — supposedly in response to an anti-Islamic film promoted by Pastor Terry Jones of Florida — the U.S. Embassy in Cairo released a statement that was atrociously weak and unabashedly stupid. The release condemned “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims — as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.”

Further, it rejected “actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

 The first thing to say about this is that it shamefully aped the reasoning of efforts to restrict free speech in order to protect Muslim sensibilities. As Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute wrote of the statement, “It essentially upholds the Muslim anti-blasphemy standard that the Egyptian government applies in its ban on ‘insult to heavenly religions,’ and that has long been championed by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in U.N. resolutions calling for the universal criminalization of religious defamation and in its campaign against all forms of ‘Islamophobia.’"

 The second is that if the statement was meant to appease the mob, it didn’t work. Mobs usually don’t check out the websites of their targets on the off-chance that something just posted there might dissuade them from trying to burn the place down. The embassy reaffirmed its statement via Twitter even after protesters had stormed the compound. At one point, the embassy had to tweet, pathetically, “Of course we condemn breaches of our compound; we’re the ones actually living through this.”

 Late Tuesday night, Romney condemned the thoroughly condemnable embassy press release. In a rapid confirmation of Romney’s wisdom in doing so, the White House threw the embassy’s statement under the bus: “It doesn’t reflect the views of the U.S. government.” Overnight, we learned that not one, but four embassy officials, including the ambassador, had been killed in the Libya attack. On Wednesday morning, Romney made a statement and took questions from reporters. He confounded and outraged the assemblage — and liberal pundits everywhere — by not backing off his criticism of the press release that had been implicitly seconded by the White House. No one should get the vapors over Romney’s critique. Matters of war and peace are inherently political and should always be fodder for political campaigns.

Does anyone remember the Vietnam War? I’m sure Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon would have loved a rule that put debating it off limits. Instead, the protesters and politicians who opposed the war have been lionized for four straight decades. In 1980, the foreign-policy debate didn’t stop because Americans were held hostage in Tehran . Nor did it stop in 2004 because Americans were fighting and dying in Iraq .

Sen. John Kerry used the occasion of the 1,000th death in Iraq to attack everything about the war. One of his ads included the graphic: “2 Americans beheaded just this week.” In the normal course of things, a state of crisis elevates the foreign-policy debate. While maddening and tragic, the embassy attacks won’t have the enduring significance of Vietnam or Iraq . They do shine a light, though, on the deteriorating U.S. position in the broader Middle East .

 The signature Obama foreign policy success has been killing people — Osama bin Laden with a Special Forces raid and a bunch of other Al Qaeda terrorists with drones. Otherwise, we are worse off than when Obama took office. Consider: Relations with Israel are poisonous. We lost an ally in Egypt , and the revolution there may yet prove Iran 1979 redux. Iraq is sliding into the orbit of Tehran and perhaps back into chaos. Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon. We have made progress in the Afghanistan War but may throw it away with an arbitrary withdrawal, and the Pakistanis hate us more than ever. Some of this is the president’s fault, some of it is the drift of events. But it’s not the record of a modern-day Metternich.

 If this isn’t the time to talk about this record, when is the right time? For the press, politics doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. It stops wherever is most convenient for Obama’s reelection campaign. Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.


3b)Wall Street Rallies 200 Points After Fed Launches QE3


The stock market staged a huge rally Thursday after investors finally got the aggressive economic help they wanted from the Federal Reserve. The Dow Jones Industrial Average spiked almost 240 points at one point and closed 1.6 percent higher.

The gain pushed the Dow above 13,500 for the first time since December 2007, the beginning of the Great Recession, and to within about 600 points of its all-time high.

In an open-ended step, the Fed said it would spend $40 billion a month to purchase mortgage securities because the economy is too weak to reduce high unemployment.

The central bank also extended its pledge of super-low interest rates into 2015, and promised to keep "highly accommodative" monetary policy in place even after the economic recovery strengthens.

It was the package known as QE3 — a third round of quantitative easing, in market-speak. And it was just what investors were hoping for.

"They're saying that the punch bowl, the fuel for the economy, isn't going away — it's going to be here as long as you need it," said Tony Fratto, a former aide to President George W. Bush and managing partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, a policy consulting firm in Washington.

The Dow rose 206 points, or 1.6 percent, to close at 13,540. It gained as much as 239.98 points earlier in the day.

The broader Standard & Poor's 500 index was up 24 points at 1,460, and the Nasdaq Composite Index was up 41 points at 3,155.

David Abuaf, chief investment officer at Hefty Wealth Partners, said the Fed package was what the economy needed. He said that he expects investors to keep shifting from safer assets like government bonds to stocks. That could push stock prices higher, kicking off a cycle of increased wealth and increased spending.

"People will feel more confident, consumers will buy more goods and GDP growth will increase," he said, referring to the gross domestic product, or economic output.

The stock market had already enjoyed a summer rally, in part because investors were betting on more Fed action. The Dow has climbed about 1,100 points since the start of June.

Still, stocks spiked Thursday in industries across the economy. Materials companies, which tend to do well when the economy picks up, enjoyed the biggest gain — 2.6 percent as a group. Bank stocks also surged.

This is the third round of bond-buying by the Fed since the financial crisis struck in the fall of 2008. The goal is to lower long-term interest rates, get people to borrow and spend more and push them into stocks.

If history is any guide, stocks could rally a bit more. In the three months following March 2009, when the Fed said it would expand its first round of buying, the S&P 500 rose 18 percent. In the three months after the central bank hinted at a second round of buying in August 2010, the S&P rose 14 percent.

Some economists and investors have warned that the bond-buying will have a limited impact because interest rates are already near record lows.

The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell slightly to 1.78 percent from 1.79 percent late Wednesday. It had spiked to 1.84 percent as investors sold bonds after the Fed announcement.

The dollar fell slightly against major currencies, and the price of gold climbed to its highest level since February — $1,767 an ounce, a gain of $34, or almost 2 percent.

Investors kept an eye on turmoil in the Middle East. Protesters stormed the U.S. Embassy compound in Yemen's capital earlier in the day, and there was violence around the U.S. mission in Cairo. The U.S. ambassador to Libya was killed Tuesday.

In other news Thursday, the Labor Department reported that the number of people seeking unemployment benefits jumped last week to the highest level in two months, though the figures were skewed in part by Hurricane Isaac.

The figures come after a disappointing jobs report last week. Employers added only 96,000 jobs in August, far below the average 226,000 a month added in the January-March quarter.

The government also said that wholesale prices rose 1.7 percent in August, the most in three years. They were driven up by higher costs for gas and food. Removing the impact of energy and food, however, the increase in prices has been mild.

Among stocks making moves, Pall Corp. rose $4.68, or 8 percent, to $62.85. The company, which makes filtration equipment, posted net income that beat Wall Street predictions.

Apple climbed $10.06, or 1.5 percent, to $679.80On Wednesday, the company unveiled an iPhone with a bigger screen and faster connectivity.

On Wednesday, the Dow rose to a four-year high after Germany's highest court rejected calls to block the creation of Europe's rescue fund for indebted governments.

The Fed action combined with the Middle East turmoil pushed crude prices slightly higher Thursday. Oil was up $1.11, or 1.1 percent, at $98.12 on the New York Mercantile Exchange. 



 3c) Comments from a man formerly involved in the media world. This is his open letter regarding the various embassy attacks: "My fellow Americans: Throughout the world an Embassy is considered sovereign territory of the country which occupies it. Our embassies are in fact American soil. President Obama disgraces everything we Americans believe by continuing to campaign in his shirtsleeves. His responsibility as President is to be in Washington directing the resolution of the two attacks our Embassies , and rapidly retaliating with force and occupation. That is what he swore to do in accepting the office of president.

 His word and his sacred oath to uphold the constitution and defend the United States of America obviously mean nothing to him. Makes you wonder what his actual objectives are. "Oh say do you see ..." Obama does not even know the words! Much less their meaning.

 Now where was this guy born and raised? Who cares!! His actions speak. He obviously is not an American Patriot nor an admirer of all things American. Or a commander in chief who is affronted by an attack on his country and the deaths of United States Citizens.

You might also remember the words to the Marines hymn "... to the shores of Triploi ..." Just how does this President explain his cowardly 'stay out campaigning' to his armed forces? And just where is the media that needs to ask that question? Damn it Obama at least have the decency to get back to Washington and lead a counter attack.

 Obama is living in the land of his ego, and intoxicated with a love of power and both come above all including his sworn duty in his mind! I for one hope Mr. Romney will step up and clearly and simply say what should be done... Now. This situation has gone beyond politics.")
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------