The Chicago teachers’ strike is an awkward dinner conversation between President Barack Obama and his former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.   Many of the policy prescriptions in the new Chicago teachers’ contract designed to create more accountability are supported by the Obama administration.
As the Chicago teachers’ strike continues, we’ve learned that they make $71-76,000 a year and they turned down a 16% pay increase, which amounts to $11,360.  They work nine months out of the year, but say that this strike is benefits oriented.  However, given that ABC World News didn’t even air this story last Sundayand most of the media, with the exception of CBS, failing to mention the compensation statistics in their broadcast – suffice to say that the  media will probably ignore the fact that almost 40% of Chicago’s public school teachers send their kids to private schools.

I’m not against public education, but the fact that these teachers make enough to send their kids to private schools shows that Chicago’s public teachers are aware of the serial failure within the system.  Second, it shows that these teachers have zero confidence in their own respective school district.  Why are the teachers going on strike?  Aren’t the contentious measures they’re squabbling about aimed at enhancing accountability that will make their institutions of learning better for the students?  It appears this strike, like most union strikes, are defined by these three words: give. me. more.

However, given the state of public education and that of Chicago, it’s not alien for public school teachers to ship their kids to private institutions.  According to The Washington Times in September of 2004, they quoted the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which found that:
 More than 1 in 5 public school teachers said their children attend private schools.
In Washington (28 percent), Baltimore (35 percent) and 16 other major cities, the figure is more than 1 in 4. In some cities, nearly half of the children of public school teachers have abandoned public schools.
In Philadelphia, 44 percent of the teachers put their children in private schools; in Cincinnati, 41 percent; Chicago, 39 percent; Rochester, N.Y., 38 percent. The same trends showed up in the San Francisco-Oakland area, where 34 percent of public school teachers chose private schools for their children; 33 percent in New York City and New Jersey suburbs; and 29 percent in Milwaukee and New Orleans.
John Stossel at Fox Business reiterated this point on September 11:
Union teachers know that many of their colleagues aren’t great teachers. Only 12% of American students attend private schools, but, 39% of Chicago public school teachers send their children to private schools. Anti school-choice politicians are no less hypocritical: President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Jesse Jackson, Hillary Clinton and Al Gore (to name just a few) all send or sent their children to private schools.
Now thousands of Chicago children are kept out of school. Your supermarkets and movie theaters aren’t closed because of strikes. That’s because private companies have competition. Government monopolies don’t.
Moreover, for all the teachers’ complaining, when will the media report that Chicago teachers instruct less than any other “large metro area” in the country according to Illinois Policy Institute?

Christopher Chantrill


Well, well, well.  So the mighty Rahmbo has met his match in the sweet-talking president 
of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis.  All that bravado, the stabbing of knives, the mailing of dead fishes, none of that seems to scare the union teachers, who decided to stay on strike Sunday.
There is something more important than saving public education for "the children."  It is Barack Obama's reelection.  So even as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel threatens court action to send the teachers back to work, the chances are he will do whatever it takes to get the issue out of the way for his former boss.
But I am not discouraged.  The teachers' unions, and government employee unions in general, are our friends.  They will do what conservatives cannot do "on our own."  They will demolish big government as we know it.  Why?  Because the union teachers hate their jobs.
Liberals are running around these days extolling the wonder years of the 1950s.  They remember when the workers had good union jobs at good wages.  But Michael Barone recently poured cold water on their nostalgia.
As it happens, I grew up in Detroit and for a time lived next door to factory workers. And I know something that has eluded the liberal nostalgiacs. Which is that people hated those jobs.
That set me to thinking.  Now I know why the private-sector unions did such a good job of destroying the good jobs at good wages in the unionized steel industry and have half way destroyed the jobs in the unionized auto industry.  Once you have started what our lefty friends call a "movement of resistance" against some evil oppressor the movement will not rest until it has destroyed the target of its rage.  Once you set up a union and teach the rank and file to hate the bosses, then you have created a monster that will not stop until it has won final victory or final defeat -- just ask Joe Soptic.
The factory workers had a perfectly good reason to be angry.  The factory system turned them into mechanical robots.  They hated that and so they formed labor unions to fight the system that had humiliated them.  They fought and they fought, eventually inventing the weekend and the good jobs at good wages of which we have all heard tell.  They even got the politicians to lend a hand by writing pro-union labor laws that tied the bosses up in red tape.  But they ended up destroying those good jobs and those good wages.  Because they hated those jobs and everything associated with them: the bosses, the assembly line, the foremen, Frederick Taylor, and the infernal speed-up.
The union workers ended up like the woman scorned.  Nothing would satisfy them but to destroy the people that had humiliated them, even if they destroyed themselves in the process.
But, as the Frankfurt School lefties pointed out,  the problem is not just the mechanical factory system, the bosses, and the unjust domination of the workers.  Every system of "instrumental reason" is a system of domination, a means to dominate nature and other men.  That goes for bureaucratic government just as much as the evil robber barons of the factory system.  The system dominates government workers just as much as factory workers.
You and I may sit in front of our computers wondering why the Chicago teachers and the Wisconsin state workers, the California local government workers and the rest of the 20 million government workers just don't get it.  Are they dumb or something?  Don't they understand that there is No. More. Money?
It doesn't matter.  They hate their jobs.  They will keep marching and demonstrating and bullying politicians, and they will keep electing leaders like Karen Lewis, and they will keep winning themselves ridiculous pensions, and they will keep wrecking the school system, and the health care system, and the child-welfare system, until the whole thing collapses.
But what about the "little people?"  What about the children in those lousy Chicago schools?  What about the children neglected by the failing child welfare system?  What about the ruin we call Medicaid?
Politicians like Rahm Emanuel don't care about the little people.  They just care about getting elected.  They don't care about debt or default the economy or the security of US embassies.  They just care about the next election.
But it really doesn't matter.  Let the politicians win their elections, and let the union leaders win fabulous benefits for their members right up until the moment that the government goes belly up and the voters realize that they have been had.
The problem is what comes after that.  Will the man on the white horse turn the economy around and restore prosperity like Ronald Reagan, or will he ruin the country like the Kirchners ruined Argentina?
Christopher Chantrill is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his usgovernmentspending.com and also usgovernmentdebt.us

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2)

Disgrace in Benghazi
By
Mark Steyn



So, on a highly symbolic date, mobs storm American diplomatic facilities and drag the corpse of a U.S. ambassador through the streets. Then the president flies to Vegas for a fundraiser. No, no, a novelist would say; that’s too pat, too neat in its symbolic contrast. Make it Cleveland, or Des Moines.

The president is surrounded by delirious fanbois and fangurls screaming “We love you,” too drunk on his celebrity to understand this is the first photo-op in the aftermath of a national humiliation. No, no, a filmmaker would say; too crass, too blunt. Make them sober, middle-aged midwesterners, shocked at first, but then quiet and respectful.

The president is too lazy and cocksure to have learned any prepared remarks or mastered the appropriate tone, notwithstanding that a government that spends more money than any government in the history of the planet has ever spent can surely provide him with both a speechwriting team and a quiet corner on his private wide-bodied jet to consider what might be fitting for the occasion. So instead he sloughs off the words, bloodless and unfelt: “And obviously our hearts are broken . . . ” Yeah, it’s totally obvious.

And he’s even more drunk on his celebrity than the fanbois, so in his slapdashery he winds up comparing the sacrifice of a diplomat lynched by a pack of savages with the enthusiasm of his own campaign bobbysoxers. No, no, says the Broadway director; that’s too crude, too ham-fisted. How about the crowd is cheering and distracted, but he’s the president, he understands the gravity of the hour, and he’s the greatest orator of his generation, so he’s thought about what he’s going to say, and it takes a few moments but his words are so moving that they still the cheers of the fanbois, and at the end there’s complete silence and a few muffled sobs, and even in party-town they understand the sacrifice and loss of their compatriots on the other side of the world.

But no, that would be an utterly fantastical America. In the real America, the president is too busy to attend the security briefing on the morning after a national debacle, but he does have time to do Letterman and appear on a hip-hop radio show hosted by “The Pimp with a Limp.” In the real State Department, the U.S. embassy in Cairo is guarded by Marines with no ammunition, but they do enjoy the soft-power muscle of a Foreign Service officer, one Lloyd Schwartz, tweeting frenziedly into cyberspace (including a whole chain directed at my own Twitter handle, for some reason) about how America deplores insensitive people who are so insensitively insensitive that they don’t respectfully respect all religions equally respectfully and sensitively, even as the raging mob is pouring through the gates.

When it comes to a flailing, blundering superpower, I am generally wary of ascribing to malevolence what is more often sheer stupidity and incompetence. For example, we’re told that, because the consulate in Benghazi was designated as an “interim facility,” it did not warrant the level of security and protection that, say, an embassy in Scandinavia would have. This seems all too plausible — that security decisions are made not by individual human judgment but according to whichever rule-book sub-clause at the Federal Agency of Bureaucratic Facilities Regulation it happens to fall under. However, the very next day the embassy in Yemen, which is a permanent facility, was also overrun, as was the embassy in Tunisia the day after. Look, these are tough crowds, as the president might say at Caesar’s Palace. But we spend more money on these joints than anybody else, and they’re as easy to overrun as the Belgian consulate.

As I say, I’m inclined to be generous, and put some of this down to the natural torpor and ineptitude of government. But Hillary Clinton and General Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the secretary of state’s weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly disrespectful of Mohammed and the chairman of the joint chiefs’ telephone call to a private citizen asking him if he could please ease up on the old Islamophobia.

Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher’s teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam. The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: That’s not a spontaneous movie protest; that’s an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower’s response to it. Secretary Clinton and General Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a “safe house,” and switched their attentions accordingly. How did that happen? The United States government lost track of its ambassador for ten hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they’ve investigated Mitt Romney’s press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.

For whatever reason, Secretary Clinton chose to double down on misleading the American people. “Libyans carried Chris’s body to the hospital,” said Mrs. Clinton. That’s one way of putting it. The photographs at the Arab TV network al-Mayadeen show Chris Stevens’s body being dragged through the streets, while the locals take souvenir photographs on their cell phones. A man in a red striped shirt photographs the dead-eyed ambassador from above; another immediately behind his head moves the splayed arm and holds his cell-phone camera an inch from the ambassador’s nose. Some years ago, I had occasion to assist in moving the body of a dead man: We did not stop to take photographs en route. Even allowing for cultural differences, this looks less like “carrying Chris’s body to the hospital” and more like barbarians gleefully feasting on the spoils of savagery.

In a rare appearance on a non-showbiz outlet, President Obama, winging it on Telemundo, told his host that Egypt was neither an ally nor an enemy. I can understand why it can be difficult to figure out, but here’s an easy way to tell: Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, said some years ago that America risked being seen as harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend. At the Benghazi consulate, the looters stole “sensitive” papers revealing the names of Libyans who’ve cooperated with the United States. Oh, well. As the president would say, obviously our hearts are with you.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the local doctor who fingered bin Laden to the Americans sits in jail. In other words, while America’s clod vice president staggers around pimping limply that only Obama had the guts to take the toughest decision anyone’s ever had to take, the poor schlub who actually did have the guts, who actually took the tough decision in a part of the world where taking tough decisions can get you killed, languishes in a cell because Washington would not lift a finger to help him.

Like I said, no novelist would contrast Chris Stevens on the streets of Benghazi and Barack Obama on stage in Vegas. Too crude, too telling, too devastating.
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3) Marc Faber: Federal Reserve Policies Will ‘Destroy the World’


By Forrest Jones

Loose monetary policies pushed through by the Federal Reserve as well as at other central banks will literally "destroy the world" by sending the global economy swelling, bursting and then tanking, said Marc Faber, publisher of the Gloom Boom & Doom Report.

The Fed recently announced plans to stimulate the U.S. economy by purchasing $40 billion a month in mortgage-backed securities from banks, a monetary policy tool known as quantitative easing that pumps liquidity into the economy in a way that pushes down interest rates to encourage investing and hiring.

Critics say the tool basically prints money out of thin air and also plants the seeds for mounting inflationary pressures down the road.

The policy measure also weakens the dollar while sending stock prices higher, but once the sugar high ends, expect markets and the economy to pop since all that liquidity won’t help the average American and fuel the underlying demand for goods and services that the economy lacks.

“The fallacy of monetary policy in the U.S. is to believe that this money will go to the man on the street. It won’t. It goes to the Mayfair economy of the well-to-do people and boosts asset prices of Warhols … .Very happy. Very good for the Fed. Congratulations, Mr. Bernanke. I’m happy,” Faber told Bloomberg TV.

“My asset values go up but as a responsible citizen I have to say the monetary policies of the U.S. will destroy the world.”

The United States isn’t alone when it comes to expansionary monetary policies.

Other big central banks are pushing through their own policies, as well.

“The Europeans will print money. The Chinese will print money. Everybody will print money and the purchasing power of paper money will go down,” Faber said.

Such policies should send investors opting for stocks over bonds.

“I don’t like bonds. I don’t particularly like equities, but I think equities are a better space to be in than bonds,” Faber added.

Other high profile investors have criticized the Fed’s policies as well.

“The dollar will go down in value and inflation will start rearing its ugly head,” billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump told CNBC.

Meanwhile, quantitative easing will do little to jolt the one area of the economy that threw the country into recession and continues to dampen recovery — housing.

Interest rates are already low as it is, and the Fed’s liquidity injections won’t spark the demand the sector and the broader economy need to see.

“Mortgage rates are already very low,” Trump said.

“But the banks aren’t lending. So it doesn’t make any difference.



3a)Deflation's Here, and the Downward Spiral Has Started
By Frank Ryan


Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, and Finland have been issuing short term government notes at negative interest rates since mid-year 2012!
This dangerous precedent has happened before.  Most recently, Japan experienced negative interest rates in the 1990s.  The effects of the economic quandary in Japan and the efforts to restore growth were so misguided that the Japanese are still attempting a recovery.  In almost twenty years, Japan has yet to make a full economic recovery. 
The United States and the European Union are next and are headed into the same disaster as Japan unless decisive action is taken now.
Alan Greenspan clearly understood the growing dangers in the economic world in his book, The Age of Turbulence, in which he explains the continuing saga of an increasingly turbulent world economy. 
Deflation is characterized by falling prices, falling incomes, declining value of real estate, and an inability to fund government debt and unfunded obligations.
Deflation has begun, and governments continue to push the "cliff" date as far into the future as possible when only quantitative easing is considered by the Federal Reserve and more government spending is considered by the White House.
Unfortunately, current fiscal and monetary policies of most Western nations are merely moving us farther up the fiscal cliff rather than away from it.
In Scranton, Pennsylvania, for example, declining real estate prices for an overburdened tax base on top of substantial unfunded liabilities of a "rust belt" city forced the mayor to cut all municipal pay to minimum wage.
Similar situations will occur for bankrupt cities and municipalities in California.  Should the unfunded mandates and obligations not be cut, an increasing tax burden on property will merely reduce property values further. 
At this point, the death spiral of deflation begins, and our economy will collapse.  Economic recovery will be difficult at best because deflation's spiral is so difficult to reverse.  Buyers are rewarded with even lower prices by waiting to purchase goods and services.
After the negative interest rates, collapsing real estate prices, state and local government pensions, the education bubble will then bust. 
At the university level, for example, the burgeoning student debt and the substantial increase in tuition rates are making the reality of higher education a nightmare for many rather than the dream the youngster was promised.  Increases in tuition beyond the general inflation rate have been going on for decades.  That trend is about to end.  Many universities are increasing aid due to this reality.  Tuition increases are not sticking in the marketplace as was once commonly accepted.  The next step is for tuition to fall.
Students and parents will begin to question the value of the degreee.  Schools are already being audited because they allegedly failed to accurately reflect opportunities for students upon graduation.  This action is just the beginning. It will follow that schools either reduce tuitions or lose students.  However, the fixed costs at universities are so great that schools will have no alternative except to reduce tuitions to keep enrollment up. 
During the First Depression (1930s), Keynesian economic theory proposed fiscal policy measures to stimulate an economy and argued that negative interest rates, while possible, would be unusual.   Unfortunately, this White House does not consider any solution other than a Keynesian one.
In our current Second Depression (circa 2008), a German economist in 2009 proposed Keynesian Economics 2.0, arguing for a monetary approach to solving our current economic quagmire.
These academic exercises fail, however, to consider the tragic effects of misguided fiscal and monetary policy as the potential cause of the current economic disaster.  
The federal government's perception is that government spending creates demand.  The monetarist believes that lower interest rates stimulate demand.  
Both fiscal and monetary policies have some merit under many circumstances; however, when those circumstances do not exist any longer, following the historical policies of more spending and lower interest rates will trigger a horrific deflationary cycle, as seen in the real estate and banking industries in Japan.
Deflation has devastating effects in every aspect of life.     
First, anyone with debt will find it more difficult to repay the debt in a deflationary cycle.  Incomes and prices will fall, making debt repayment difficult or impossible.
Second, organizations with high fixed cost such as airlines, hospitals, automobile manufacturers, drug and pharmaceutical companies, governments, and sports teams, to name just a few, will find that they must reduce prices in order to cover their fixed costs or lose customers.  While this strategy works in the short run, the economic consequences of the lower prices will ultimately translate into lower pay.
Third, once the deflation cycle starts, the ability of a society to pay for things such as Social Security, retirement benefits, unfunded obligations, and any type of retiree health care cost will be impaired.  The deflationary spiral will prevent any of these organizations from increasing prices. 
Chairman Bernanke is using the Federal Reserve -- quantitative easing and a cheap monetary policy -- to dampen the effect of the recession we are currently in.  His doctoral thesis, however, clearly indicates that it is the uncertainty that is causing the economic dislocation.
To avoid all of the negative issues of deflation, it is essential that our elected leaders and the Federal Reserve work immediately to eliminate uncertainty and reduce wasteful spending within our economy.  Failure to do so will lead to substantial deflation.
The time to act is now.  Decisive action must be taken to end the uncertainty.  The Federal Reserve and our federal government must understand that no decision -- i.e., gridlock -- is, in fact, a decision.
The Age of Turbulence will look calm in retrospect should government not act now!
Col. Frank Ryan, CPA, USMCR (Ret.) served in Iraq and briefly in Afghanistan.  He specializes in corporate restructuring and lectures on ethics for the state CPA societies.  He has served on numerous boards of publicly traded and non-profit organizations. 
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4)What Obama Thinks of Americans
By Ed Lasky

We know how Barack Obama feels about Mitt Romney. He holds him in contempt -- and, speaking through his proxies, has all but called him a felon, tax cheat, and murderer.
Who cares?  Trash talk is Obama's political lingua franca.  He relishes delivering these insults face-to-face while shielded by the respect his victims have for the office of the presidency -- a reverence he does not share.
What should be important is how he feels about us: the American people.  And how should this impact the so-called likeability gap between him and Romney as election day approaches?
In 2008, Americans questioned Barack Obama's feelings towards Americans.  His famous gaffe was the tipoff:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them[.]
So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Yawn -- everyone knows about that broad-based insult.  And everyone certainly knew that Obama's "moral compass," Pastor Jeremiah Wright, Jr., had scathing views of America and toward Americans.  One was explained away as a "gaffe" and the other explained away by claims that Obama was never in the pews when a stream of anti-America invective poured forth from Wright -- an excuse belied by Obama's own words in a newspaper interview and by keen investigative work by Stanley Kurtz in his book Radical-in-Chief (pages 320-3).
But Obama's condescension towards broad swaths of Americans was presaged years before, and it has deepened and widened over the years.  In 1990, he said that "suburbs bore me."  By implication, suburbanites bore him but do have their uses -- donations and votes, for example.
But Barack Obama has never been able to keep his feelings towards Americans hidden for long.  Americans don't see the contempt too often, though, because Obama's speechwriters are more circumspect than he is on the stump.
The truth comes out Washington-style: as "gaffes."
There is a stream of insults that has flown forth over the past few years -- and have been all but smothered by the media.  That is an anomaly, of course -- because if there has ever been a "man bites dog" story that should compel media coverage, it would be a politician -- let alone a president -- who, instead of delivering paeans to the people, rebukes them repeatedly.
What have these insults been?  What do they reveal?  And, more importantly, why should we vote for a man who holds such a low opinion of Americans?  And why do Americans like a man who clearly does not like many of us?
The Dirty Laundry List
"I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."  Obama must have realized how this might be interpreted, so he added some nice-sounding verbiage, but the deed was done.  Bill Clinton had proclaimed in his second inaugural address that "America stands alone as the world's indispensable nation" (italics mine).  Barack Obama does not agree -- and moreover, he says we are not a model for the world and in fact have reasons to atone to it.  And Obama has assumed for us the role of atoner in chief.
Very early in his presidency (in 2009), Obama did apologize at least five times, and perhaps as many as ten times, within the first six months of his presidency.  We are not worthy of respect.
Furthermore, Americans don't think clearly.  When the red tide of the 2010 midterms became visible, Obama refused to accept responsibility that Democratic policy was at fault.  On the contrary, the people were.
President Barack Obama said Americans' "fear and frustration" is to blame for an intense midterm election cycle that threatens to derail the Democratic agenda.
"Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we're hardwired not to always think clearly when we're scared," Obama said Saturday evening in remarks at a small Democratic fundraiser Saturday evening. "And the country's scared."
This was echoed recently by Michelle Obama, who depicted undecided voters as "confused" and "knuckleheads."
People who watch Fox News (the most widely watched cable news outlet -- and one Obama has appeared on, opposite Bill O'Reilly, over the years) are a "little stubborn" and don't understand Obama's policies. For good measure, he told Republicans in 2009 (pre-Sandra Fluke) that  you "just can't listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done" -- as if Republicans just are mindless robots marching to Limbaugh's tune.
Why should that matter, since Americans are poor listeners anyway?
President Obama recently said that the biggest mistake of his first term was not being a good enough story-teller, explaining that he needs to be better communicate to the American people as to why his policies mattered.  (His verbal tic "let me be clear" when he prefaces a point reflects the view that Americans need to pay better attention.)  Paul Ryan had some funwith this criticism during the Republican National Convention.
Was the animated version of Obama's story about his agenda "The Life of Julia" dumbed down enough for hapless Americans?  The Julia fiasco was mocked not just for its approach (the moral of the story is that all one has to look forward to is a life of dependency), but also for apparently leaving some important facts on the cutting room floor, resulting in a collection of "bogus" assumptions.  Is this the type of story we are told to absorb?
Many of the stories that Obama does tell us, from his own life story (filled with fabrications) to the auto bailout "success" fairy tale to the broken promises regarding ObamaCare and  the incessant  peddling of tall tales known as Mediscare, lean a bit more toward fiction than fact.  Should we trust a man who shamelessly abuses the facts of his own mother's death for political purposes?  As Victor Davis Hanson writes, "[i]f a writer will fudge on the very details of his own dying mother's seeking to obtain healthcare, then he will fudge on almost anything."
How true.
Policeman "acted stupidly" when they did their duty and investigated whether a friend of Barack Obama's (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) was committing a crime.  Since Gates is black, Obama commented that there is a "long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately."  So policeman not only act stupidly, but also are motivated by racism.
Barack Obama see a more pervasive sense of racism stalking the land than was evident when he gave his famous 2004 "There is no white America, no black America" speech at the Democratic National Convention.  He commented recently that elections are tight when you have a name like "Barack Obama."  This is not the first time he has cast aspersions on Americans.  Back in 2008, he said Americans might be reluctant to vote for him because, referring to himself, "he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."  His grandmother was fearful of black youths because she was a "typical white person," and he quoted approvingly in his book The Audacity of Hope that "white men's greed runs a world in need."
Republicans are "bomb-throwers" and "hostage takers" who sip Slurpees while driving the economy into a ditch.  If they want to help, though, they have to sit in the back of the bus.  From there, at least they won't be able to excavate moats and fill them with alligators to kill Hispanics slipping across the border from Mexico.  Republicans are members of the Flat Earth Society, though, so how worthwhile would their input be anyway?  Might as well stick with the Slurpees -- if Mayor Bloomberg permits.
Guess that whole "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America" thing was "just words" back in 2004.
Why has the economy been so weak -- fueled only by endless printing of money by the Federal Reserve?  Obama says it is not his fault because he believes that "all the choices we've made have been the right ones."  The fault lies elsewhere.  Someone else is always at fault, but this time, Obama's scapegoats expanded beyond the Arab Spring, Republicans, Congress, ATMs, tsunamis, and George Bush to include all of us.
Americans have gotten "a little soft, and we didn't have the same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades."  A few weeks later, Obama riffed off the theme when he said, "[W]e've been a little bit lazy."  Well, that is partly true: Obama has admitted in a rare moment of candor to being a bit lazy himself.  Others might agree with him about his ownlaxity.
Americans are not just lazy, but also gluttons.  In 2008, Obama told Americans that "we can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times...and then just expect that other countries are going to say 'OK.'"  Then he won the election, moved into the White House, and promptly moved the thermostat up to "greenhouse levels" because he doesn't like wearing suits and has nostalgia for his days in Hawaii.  Hypocrisy is endemic to Washington.
We have "lost our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do things that built the Golden Gate Bridge."  Tellingly, when people aspire to do great things, they use the metaphor of a moon shot.  Obama did not -- perhaps because he eviscerated our space program, which was symbolic of our ambition, our imagination, and our willingness to do great things.
Nor have African-Americans been spared the condescension.  Obama resented calls that he work harder for them, so he told them to stop complaining and "take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes. Stop complaining. Stop grumblin'. Stop cryin'."
We are an ungrateful people.  When the Tea Party emerged to oppose the fiscal hole his profligacy was digging America into, Obama noted that he had cut taxes (a deal reached with Congress) and ridiculed their concerns: "You would think they'd be saying thank you."  Perhaps protesters had realized that the impact of relatively small tax cuts were being dwarfed by the debt accumulated under Obama's reign.  New York Times journalist Jodi Kantor writes in her book, The Obamas, that there is a palpable sense of grievance on the part of the Obamas; the small group of people they rely upon reinforce the idea that "the American public just did not appreciate their exceptional leader."  We are not worthy.
Even liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has criticized the condescension that radiates from the president.
And yet the condescension streams forth.
Jews should "search their souls" over Israel's seriousness to make peace -- or at least that's what President Obama seemed to be saying when he pompously hectored a group of Jewish leaders.  The man who claimed to know more about Judaism (and many other topics besides -- see "Competitor in Chief," regarding his zeal to declare his superiority) should know better.  Jews , if anything, have been introspecting for thousands of years.  Hence the large number who become psychiatrists, philosophers, psychologists, and the like.  Sometimes they introspect to a fault and become Woody Allen.
Meanwhile, for Muslims, we have a speech to the Islamic world filled with praise, encomiums, and a great deal of mythmaking, and then there was the deep bow to the Saudi king.
Obama has made derogatory comments regarding vast swaths of America: greedy doctors who are coming after your tonsils and amputating limbs so they can become wealthier, "fat cat" bankers, workers in the oil and gas industry, corporate jet owners, Supreme Court justices, insurance companies, veterans riven by flashbacks and wracked by depression... even the Democratic base gets mocked for its lethargy and inability to buck up.  And of course, last but not least, there are all those "who did build that."
America is a target-rich environment for our insulter-in-chief: few Americans are spared derogatory remarks and characterizations from the man they elected president.  (For even more examples see here, here, and here.)
Barack Obama can dish it out, but he can't take it.  He is notoriously thin-skinned and prickly when it comes to criticism of his own actions.  His Velcro-attached friend and adviser, Valerie Jarrett, serves to shield him from meeting with anyone who may damage his ego.  The spin regarding his bravery in choosing the second coming of the Lincolnesque "Team of Rivals" as Cabinet members has faded along with Obama posters; even New York Times liberal columnist Roger Cohen thinks that these people were chosen for their craven willingness to be "Obama's Team of Idolizers."
When criticized, he complained that "they talk about me like a dog."  This whining from the president of the United States.  Ronald Reagan faced far worse criticism, name-calling, and insults, yet cheerfully brushed it all off, since he had larger concerns than his own ego.
Why does Obama look down on so many Americans?
Dinesh D'Souza has speculated that an ideological inheritance from his biological father led him to being anti-American; Paul Kengor cites an early mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, who may have led him down the path of anti-Americanism.  His childhood in Indonesia and his own mother's influences may have given him an anti-colonial and anti-imperialistic bent -- he sometimes does seem to view Americans as his mother, an anthropologist, might have, as Spengler has noted.  He admits to having sought out anti-American radicals in his college years; the elitism and sense of entitlement that are part of the academic atmosphere that he breathed in for years may have played a role (after all, anyone who name-drops Reinhold Niebuhras his favorite theologian and leaks to the New York Times that he reads Thomas Aquinas while ordering drone strikes might have a hard time respecting the average American.  Perhaps the sense of superiority is just a reflection of his narcissism writ large -- the New York Times' Jodi Kantor wrote recently about Obama's overwhelming need to show and tell how muchmore talented he is compared to those around him (see also my earlier column, "President Put-Down").  Regardless, it's clear that Barack Obama has a pejorative view of Americans.
The Yes We Can 2008 campaign slogan must have referred only to our ability to be swayed to vote for Obama, since he seems to think we lack the ambition and imagination to do much more.  Isn't that the Story of Julia?  We are soft and lazy and easily confused, and fearful and bitter, and we fear foreigners and grasp only for God and guns.  We are fit only to be subject to Obama's derogation.
Why does this view of Americans matter?  A country is only as good as its people.  If Obama has so little faith in our potential, if he is so certain that America is on the decline (recall in 2008 that he was seen reading The Post-American World, written by his friend Fareed Zakaria), he will adopt policies to "manage" (and some would say accelerate) this decline.  He is what might be called a "declinist."
Given his desire to "spread the wealth" and not create the wealth, Obama's goal of redistribution is made clearer.  Even more government control is coming.  We can expect -- as Obama has all but declared -- a second term that will make the overreach and intrusiveness of the first term seem benign in comparison.  After all, declared the Democrats recently, we allbelong to the government, to be ruled from on high.
Mitt Romney, however, has a problem. There is a "likeability gap" between him and Obama.  Why people find Barack Obama likeable -- even likeable enough -- is a mystery.  Have Americans not heard the serial insults leveled at them over the years?  Are they taken in by the smiles and beer-drinking by Barack Obama that seem to happen only when a camera is nearby and as election day approaches? Do we swoon over the staged spectacle of the Kiss-Cam moment at a basketball game a few months ago?  Is that how America votes?
Have  the ever-unreliable media just smothered all these dismissive and derogatory comments, sending them to the cutting room floor to join the stammering and the multiple mistakes (Austrian is the language of Austria, Hawaii is in Asia, West Virginia is near Arkansas) of the president that occur regularly when he is unplugged from the teleprompter (see Bret Stephens, "Is Obama Smart: A case study in stupid is as stupid does" and "Obama Is Not That Bright" by Jack Kelly)?
Aren't journalists supposed to inform us?  Don't people bemoan the scarcity of informed voters?
So here is an idea that may be akin to a Hail Mary pass for the Romney campaign -- and in particular for super-PACs.
Most of Barack Obama's insults toward Americans are on video.  The media's obsession with Barack Obama and his own desire to be filmed for posterity have created a vast amount of raw material that can be used to compile commercials that reveal how little respect Barack Obama has for Americans.  The compilation would make Jimmy Carter seem Reaganesque.
And it would prompt Americans to ask a question before they cast their votes: do we really want to give our vote and show our faith in a man who has so little faith in us or our future?
Or do we want to support Mitt Romney, a man who instead does "Believe in America"?
Karl Rove -- are you there?


4a)Mitt Tells Voters in Video to Drop Dead
By 

Sure it was a dumb move for Romney to denounce half of America. But he was just channeling today’s GOP


Let’s cut right to the chase. Is Mitt Romney’s caught-on-video denunciation of half of America worse than Barack Obama’s infamous “cling” comments of 2008, when he was similarly caught in flagrante? You bet it is. Not even close. The Romney video, brought to light by David Corn of Mother Jones, shows the candidate at his smug worst, while Obama was at least trying to express some empathy in his remarks. And while you never know with Romney whether he really believes something he says or is just trying to placate the audience before him, in this case it almost doesn’t matter. He’s made himself the avatar of the forces that do believe it.
For the record, just so you have it handy, here is the key passage, recorded as Romney spoke to well-heeled supporters earlier this year, after he’d secured the nomination: “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what ... These are people who pay no income tax.”
I was surprised at my own reaction as I first read those words. I found myself taking personal offense. This is something I’ve never done as a political journalist. I just removed that instinct from my system years ago. I have two jobs, to give opinions and hopefully more-or-less accurate analysis. You think about things personally, you can’t do either one, especially the second. But as I read this, I thought: “You ignorant, pathetic man. I am none of those things.” And if I thought it—I who have trained myself never to have those thoughts—I can imagine what millions of others thought.
Can he really believe this? It’s incomprehensible. And yet it’s not. This is the story conservatives have been telling themselves over and over in the Tea Party age. All Democrats are moochers, and all moochers are Democrats. It has become an absolute article of faith among the kind of middle- and upper-middle-class people you see at Tea Party gatherings. More shockingly, conservative intellectuals spout this gibberish as well—for example, Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute.
People on the right will blame the media. But the real culprit is the words themselves. They slander millions of hard-working Americans.

But somehow I wouldn’t have thought the rich, the kind of people presumably at this fundraiser, really believed this stuff. Apparently they do. And it makes me think on balance that Romney, who by nature prefers believing nothing, has actually come to believe it too. An inevitable consequence, I suppose, of campaigning among these people for all these years. You marinate a cherry in cheap whiskey long enough, the stink attaches.
Obama’s 2008 comments, which sent the right into a blind rage, weren’t nearly as callous as this. Here they are, read them. He was trying to explain to well-heeled backers in San Francisco why working-class white people weren’t voting for him, and he basically said he understood why: “In a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it. And when it's delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama, then that adds another layer of skepticism.” That’s empathy. If he’d said “angry” instead of “bitter” and “lean on” instead of “cling to,” there’d have been no controversy at all.
This was the day Romney was retooling his campaign, remember? After the appearance of a Politico piece Monday morning that was just terrible for the Romney campaign—people working on or closely with a campaign never give background quotes like some of those given for this story until they’re pretty sure they’re going to lose—the campaign sent out word that it was reset time. The team would now focus tightly on a new strategy, to make the campaign a referendum on “status quo versus change.” Contempt for half the electorate certainly qualifies as change.
That’s how it’s gone with this campaign, and that’s how it will likely continue to go. Starting from the top down, they just aren’t good enough at this. Watching this campaign, I now have the feeling I get watching a football game when the home team, the better team, is leading by about four points with 6:00 to go. It’s close. The visitors could certainly win. But somehow you just feel they don’t have it in them. They make too many mistakes, and the home team makes far fewer.
It’s hard to judge the impact of this comment just yet. That will depend on how hard the Democrats run with it. They sure ought to have fun with it. I would expect we’ll see “Obama voter—and I’m not a victim” and “I pay a higher tax rate than you, Governor!” signs at rallies by tomorrow. Indeed, the average person pays more in mere payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare (15.3 percent) than Romney paid in total taxes for the year he released his returns (13.9 percent).
I suspect an impact that’s fairly big. People on the right will blame the media. But the real culprit is the words themselves. They slander millions of hard-working Americans. And the final point: In a way, it’s not even mostly Romney’s fault. It’s the fault of the party and movement that introduced and spread this toxic propaganda in the first place. When Romney is licking his wounds on Nov. 7, that party and movement will fire all its arrows at him. He’ll deserve a lot of them. But they will have buried him with the ignorance and rage they demanded he adopt. His chief crime will have been his weakness in failing to confront them.

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