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After watching pigeons applaud for three days this great line by Bob Hope came to mind: "1 Attached file
More info from Steve Oppenheimer running for statewide Public Service position. (See 2 below.)
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Some commentary on Obama's tired and worn acceptance speech. (See 3 below.)
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It ain't working pigeons! What are you applauding your own unemployment? (See 4 below.)
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Texas ingenuity. (See 5 below.)
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George Will is bewildered. (See 6 below.)
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It ain't working pigeons! What are you applauding your own unemployment? (See 4 below.)
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Texas ingenuity. (See 5 below.)
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George Will is bewildered. (See 6 below.)
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Dick
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)On Iran, a Full Range of Obama Failures
By Seth Mandel
3)President Obama Fails to Make the Case for Re-election in Charlotte
4)Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
By Walter Russell Mead
WHAT A BRILLIANT IDEA!!
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)On Iran, a Full Range of Obama Failures
By Seth Mandel
The news from Israel over the weekend has left no doubt that President Obama’s failure on Iran has been one of both words and deeds. Not only did Obama refuse to speak publicly against the regime at the most opportune moments, but his administration has also trotted out high-level appointees to undermine the credibility of a Western threat to use force if sanctions and diplomacy continue to fail. (Gen. Martin Dempsey may or may not have beenspeaking for the administration, but Leon Panetta most certainly does.)
Those are the words; unfortunately, the deeds match them. Obama has consistently sought first to prevent, then delay, then weaken tough sanctions against Iran. At times, the president has even faced down a united Senate to oppose sanctions. At the UN, we once could count on help from Turkey on international sanctions; in the age of Obama, the international coalition on this issue continues to fray. And then there was this weekend’s announcement that the U.S. dramatically scaled down joint military exercises scheduled for this fall, and is withholding certain military assistance (once the Obama administration’s claimed trump card when criticized over U.S.-Israeli relations). Message received, say the Israelis:
The White House at the weekend reiterated its commitment to Israel’s security, but this drew a withering response from the Israeli source: “It’s hard to explain the gulf between the White House’s comments about the commitment to Israel’s security and the comments made by the US chief of staff,” the official said. “What matters are not words but deeds.”
An Israeli military source and a political analyst were more direct when speaking to Time, the publication that first broke the story:
“Basically what the Americans are saying is, ‘We don’t trust you,’” a senior Israeli military official tells TIME….
In the current political context, the U.S. logic is transparent, says Israeli analyst Efraim Inbar. “I think they don’t want to insinuate that they are preparing something together with the Israelis against Iran – that’s the message,” says Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. “Trust? We don’t trust them. They don’t trust us. All these liberal notions! Even a liberal president like Obama knows better.”
Even Obama knows better than to develop trust between allies—such a post-modern presidency! The irony is, telling Israel they’re on their own only makes a strike more likely. If the U.S. made a convincing case that the Obama administration will take care of Iran no matter what it entails—even, yes, a military strike—then the American timeline would predominate. But if the Obama administration spends its time trying to wash its hands of the whole thing, then the decision rests solely on Israel’s shoulders. And the if the decision is Israel’s, then so are the timelines and the judgments used to determine the course of action.
Additionally, the American decision to scale down military assistance considered vital to Israel’s defenses in the event of a post-attack flare-up in the region sends a message to Iran as well. And that message is not one of a united Western front, nor is it that the Iranian regime’s time to drop its quest for the bomb is running out. The Obama administration has made clear it does not necessarily stand by agreements made between previous American administrations and Israel. But going back on its own word tells America’s allies that they cannot factor in Obama’s support when planning ahead.
If the president thinks this will lead to order, not chaos, he is not much a student of history. And if he thinks this will lead to peace, not war, his lesson may come at the expense of those who possess the knowledge he lacks, but who lack the power he possesses.
1a)
New York Times Proves Clint Eastwood Correct — Obama Is Lousy CEO
Rich Karlgaard - Forbes, September 3rd, 2012
A Sunday New York Times front page story — New York Times! — might have killed President Obama’s re-election hopes.
The story is called “The Competitor in Chief — Obama Plays To Win, In Politics and Everything Else.” It is devastating.
With such a title, and from such a friendly organ, at first I thought Jodi Kantor’s piece would be a collection of Obama’s greatest political wins: His rapid rise in Illinois, his win over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, the passage of health care, and so on.
But the NYT piece is not about any of that. Rather, it is a deep look into the two outstanding flaws in Obama’s executive leadership:
1. How he vastly overrates his capabilities:
But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities. The cloistered nature of the White House amplifies those tendencies, said Matthew Dowd, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, adding that the same thing happened to his former boss. “There’s a reinforcing quality,” he said, a tendency for presidents to think, I’m the best at this.
2. How he spends extraordinary amounts of time and energy to compete in — trivialities.
For someone dealing with the world’s weightiest matters, Mr. Obama spends surprising energy perfecting even less consequential pursuits. He has played golf 104 times since becoming president, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, who monitors his outings, and he asks superior players for tips that have helped lower his scores. He decompresses with card games on Air Force One, but players who do not concentrate risk a reprimand (“You’re not playing, you’re just gambling,” he once told Arun Chaudhary, his former videographer).
His idea of birthday relaxation is competing in an Olympic-style athletic tournament with friends, keeping close score. The 2009 version ended with a bowling event. Guess who won, despite his history of embarrassingly low scores? The president, it turned out, had been practicing in the White House alley.
Kantor’s piece is full of examples of Obama’s odd need to dominate his peers in everything from bowling, cards, golf, basketball, and golf (104 times in his presidency). Bear in mind, Obama doesn’t just robustly compete. The leader of the free world spends many hours practicing these trivial pursuits behind the scenes. Combine this weirdly wasted time with a consistent overestimation of his capabilities, and the result is, according to NYT’s Kantor:
He may not always be as good at everything as he thinks, including politics. While Mr. Obama has given himself high grades for his tenure in the White House — including a “solid B-plus” for his first year — many voters don’t agree, citing everything from his handling of the economy to his unfulfilled pledge that he would be able to unite Washington to his claim that he would achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Those were not the only times Mr. Obama may have overestimated himself: he has also had a habit of warning new hires that he would be able to do their jobs better than they could.
“I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”
Though he never ran a large organization before becoming president, he initially dismissed internal concerns about management and ended up with a factionalized White House and a fuzzier decision-making process than many top aides wanted.
Kantor’s portrait of Obama is stunning. It paints a picture of a CEO who is unfocused and lost.
Imagine, for a minute, that you are on the board of directors of a company. You have a CEO who is not meeting his numbers and who is suffering a declining popularity with his customers. You want to help this CEO recover, but then you learn he doesn’t want your help. He is smarter than you and eager to tell you this. Confidence or misplaced arrogance? You’re not sure at first. If the company was performing well, you’d ignore it. But the company is performing poorly, so you can’t.
With some digging, you learn, to your horror, that the troubled CEO spends a lot of time on — what the hell? — bowling? Golf? Three point shots? While the company is going south?
What do you do? You fire that CEO. Clint Eastwood was right. You let the guy go.
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2)
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Toward the end of President Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte last night, he said something unusual. He paused and remarked. "I am no longer a candidate. I am the president." The audience cheered. It was as if Mr. Obama was trying to draw water from the campaign well of 2008. Was he insecure? Did he feel he wasn't qualified to be president? Many felt he was not back then. Was he pleading with the audience to not allow the Republicans to take it away? Did he have to remind the audience that he has actually governed for nearly four years? Or did he remind them because his presidency has been one long candidacy? It was some or all of the above, with his famous "I" statements thrown in for recognition.
This is a tired presidency. Obama's performance in Charlotte felt like a reunion of buddies trying to recapture the magic of years ago. The Obama true-believers with beatific smiles on their faces were in need of some "hair of the dog" from 2008 to keep them going. They got it in a rambling speech filled with one-liners from a president who did almost nothing to defend his actual record. The president offered "bold, persistent experimentation" for the future without defending why that recipe had not only failed but scared more the half the population. He pleaded that "our problems can be solved" and "not always by another government program." But he did not explain why "another government program" always seems to be the medicine.
Are you sick of the work "invest?" For clarification purposes it means "raise taxes." Someone should go through every speech in Charlotte and change "invest" to "tax" to get the real meaning. Obama regaled the audience with private sector stories, people who have succeeded. After all, this is America. But the key to understanding the Charlotte Democrats and Obama is this. The private sector gets their rhetoric. Government gets the money, programs and effort.
Democrats are the party of government. What unites Americans, they unashamedly told us, is government. Citizenship means, not the endless and layered private and community associations touted by de Tocqueville in Democracy in America, but loyalty and praise for the federal government and its programs. Obama said the usual "we believe that anybody can become the next Steve Jobs" but went on to say "it is within our power to do that." The context and implication is that government or federally provided student loans or some other hand-out will do that. He already said "You didn't build that." He tells now that yes, we, the government, can. He ironically proclaimed that "government is not the source of all our problems." How about some?
On energy, President Obama was disingenuous. He claimed that "we cut oil imports" during his time in office, when the actual figures show we are more dependent on foreign oil since January 2009. He touted energy development and output, when most of the output was due to higher energy prices and new technology, much of which he opposes. He made no attempt to defend his dismal record in shutting down energy production. He did, however, address "the threat to our children's future." Was this the exploding national debt? No. Climate change.
On tuition costs, Mr. Obama pledged to cut them in half while refusing to address the real cause, the dangerous reliance on government subsidized student loans which have driven college costs through the roof. How he planned to reduce them he didn't say.
On foreign policy, truth was hard to find. He praised his administration for ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the easy part of war. In the former, more Americans have been killed since he took office than before. He counted the military as "making us safer and more respected" in the world, as if our brave women and men in uniform live to serve his foreign policy interests. One gets the feeling from many Democrats that the military are props in their culture war. On Israel, he said that our support "must not waiver" though waiver it has. Mr .Obama also appeared to equate defense spending with wars, as if a strong military got us into them instead of preventing them. Dangerous thinking there.
But he did address reductions in spending a $1 billion agreement with Republicans and a $4 billion reduction in oil subsidies, pocket change in Washington these days. He accused Republicans of wanting government to do "almost nothing." Really? Perhaps in his view "cutting something" and doing "almost nothing" are nearly identical. Democrats and Obama touted "saving the auto companies" when in fact what really happened was that Mr. Obama wiped out existing GM stockholders and gave 60% of the company to the unions. and GM is still in need of tens of billions of dollars. The stock has no dividend and is going nowhere.
Finally, there appeared to be modest adjustment to the Obamamania of 2008. Hope and change is now "faith and hope." The president appeared to be asking "do you still believe in me?" Are you willing to trust your own eyes or my words? He mentioned the path ahead would be harder and longer but did not disabuse many Americans of this hard fact: President Obama himself has made it harder and longer through exploding debt, choking regulation, profligate spending and a misguided attempt to remake the nations health insurance industry. This is the kind of "Forward" most Americans disbelieve in.
Many of the delegates seemed to be distracted, tired and bored by the time Mr. Obama took the stage. But that was not going to deter him from one more shot. At the end, he gave one more try for the medicine of 2008. "The election four years ago was not about me. It was about you." He seemed to be asking, "Are you still with me?" Are you willing to overlook four years and do it all again? In the view of many who heard his speech, that question remains unanswered for most of us outside the camp of true believers.
Jay Haug is the author of Beyond the Flaming Sword. He can be reached at cjcwguy@gmail.com
3a) The Empty Chair Accepts His Nomination
By William L. Gensert
Barack Obama is no Barack Obama. When it has been shown there is nothing there -- repeatedly and in a fashion that all but the most devoted minions refuse to see -- it becomes difficult to ignore. This is not the same man who ran for President in 2008. He was an illusion then, but today, Americans have no illusions. "Hope and change" has become "what the hell happened?"
There has been much talk in the press about Clint Eastwood's performance last week at the Republican National Convention, but the honest among them have to admit that the empty chair was a perfect metaphor for Barack Obama -- because there really is not much there.
Politicians are renowned for their ability to talk and talk and talk -- all without saying much. Yet, wasn't this one supposed to be different? Wasn't he by now, supposed to have amassed a record of accomplishment that would put mere mortals to shame? Weren't we readying Mount Rushmore for the man?
In another era, someone might have asked. "Where's the beef?" Nowadays, the only beef as far as Barack is concerned is the Wagyu steaks he has flown in for parties at the Whitehouse.
He can't talk about accomplishments, because he has none. Sure, he passed the Stimulus and Obamacare and Dodd Frank, but it is hard to sell any of this as success when it is all hugely unpopular and terrible policy. To most Americans, it doesn't compute.
The stimulus was a pork-laden exercise in rewarding backers of Barack through investment in crony capitalist green-energy pipe dreams and transfer payments to cities and states to help avoid having to reckon with their bloated public union payrolls (big Obama supporters). Because if you vote Barack, you should never have to go back, to a day when government wasn't bleeding the taxpayer dry with exorbitant salaries and pensions for public sector employees -- if there ever was such a time.
So...he didn't talk about the Stimulus, but he did mention his bailout of GM and Chrysler and how they can't make cars fast enough. Yet...surprisingly, saving GM -- or more precisely the UAW, has cost taxpayers more than $25 billion and GM is headed for bankruptcy, yet again. He didn't mention that. But then, why would he?
Obamacare, a multiple thousand page legislation destroying medical care in America, is ever more unpopular by the day. It turns out, you can't keep your insurance provider, even if you like it, and taking $716 billion out of Medicare cannot be portrayed as good for seniors. And...shock of all shocks, premiums will not go down and Obama's dream of transformation will cost taxpayerstrillions to implement. But at least it's named after him...there is that.
He didn't mention Obamacare, but he did talk about sick and dying kids who are now at least happy to be sick and dying with him as President. You see it is all relative.
Dodd Frank, another multiple thousand page legislation, has solved nothing, except making it impossible for people to get mortgages and businesses to get financing.
He didn't mention Dodd Frank, but he did mention greedy banks. Those bastards ruined everything -- don't you know?
The economy -- he couldn't brag about the longest sustained period of 8%+ unemployment since World War II, or the weakest recovery from a recession since World War II, or declining incomes and falling family net worth. And what could he say about the price of gasoline? The "all of the above" trope is hard to support since he canceled the Keystone XL pipeline.
The economy and unemployment were unmentioned except to say we are on the right track -- because of him, but then you knew that. Didn't you?
What about spending, having blown out the budget and added $5 trillion to the national debt in less than 3 ½ years? It would have been hard to paint that as anything but failure.
Yet, he talked about tackling deficits...at some later date. Got off his back...can't you see he is busy transforming the world?
He couldn't talk about leading the Democratic Party to the presidency and super majorities in both the House and Senate. The Republicans took the House in 2010, in an admitted "shellacking," and will probably take the Senate in less than 2 months. With his record and lack of ideas, it's amazing he is still competitive in the Presidential race. Then again, we only have the main stream media's word for that, as well.
It would almost be easy to feel sorry for Barack Obama having to give his acceptance speech with the record he has. Well...Americans might feel sorry for him, if he hadn't spent the last 3 ½ years torturing us with demagoguery, bad policy, overbearing regulation and the demonization of dissent...all while he partied and played golf like it was 1999.
What could he say? The nation got an acceptance speech from our President which lists no accomplishments and no plan for a way "forward." He talked about who he is -- or at least who he pretends to be. He talked about what he wants America to be, without giving any details for how he plans to make that happen.
Of course, no Barack Obama speech would be complete without him saying ala Richard Nixon. "I'm the President." And he did. For such a disappointing leader, he refuses to disappoint -- at least on that front.
You see, "forward" is a dream, much like Obama himself. With nothing to tout or propose, he talked about the vision. Many will find his speech compelling, because millions believed the dream that was Barack Obama, and many still do. But when you have nothing to brag about and no idea what to do, how long can Americans make believe there is any reason to give this man another term? Eastwood was right, when someone doesn't do the job, sometimes, you have to let them go.
Certainly, the media will be awash with plaudits from pundits for a speech well-delivered and well-received.
Yet, in reality, it was a speech from an alternate universe, where Barack is still king, where all that ails America was caused by those who came before and everything now is on the right track, because of him. And because of him, through him and in him, the unity of the nation is intact -- forever and ever.
He has no plan for the future, but he knows his opponent is scary. "Vote for me. I may be terrible, but the other guy is worse," is not a reason to give the man 4 more years to fail further.
In the end, it was an empty speech delivered by an empty suit.
It's sad that Barack Obama turned out to be an empty chair, but he built that. He has no one to blame but himself.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4)Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
By Walter Russell Mead
Many observers wondered last night why President Obama seemed a little off his game; his acceptance of his party’s presidential nomination will not be remembered among his all time greatest hits. This morning’s jobs numbers may be the reason why. Last night the President already knew that the morning would bring a cold shower of bad news and undercut any claims he hoped to make about the path the economy was on.
There is a small ray of comfort for the White House in the headline jobless figure; the report won’t be seen as an unmitigated disaster. At least the headline number went down, but the commentariat will focus relentlessly on the deep economic weaknesses the numbers reveal. Slow job growth is the worst possible area of weakness right now, and the disappointing August numbers on top of the downward revision for July are, from the Democratic point of view, a major buzz kill. Add to that that the average number of jobs created in 2011 is now below the average level for 2010, and the narrative of a slow but developing recovery has been holed below the waterline — at least until another month brings another set of numbers and, possibly, a more hopeful message.
We will have to wait another few days to see whether the Democratic convention moved the needle on the polls. But the economic background of the fall campaign has now been established in a way the White House cannot welcome. Whatever we are doing hasn’t worked yet; it’s not even close.
Knowing these numbers as he set out to make his case for re-election last night may have helped the President avoid a triumphalist speech that would have looked bad this morning. But the cold weight of bad numbers may also have dulled his delivery as he kicked off his official campaign.
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5)
WHAT A BRILLIANT IDEA!!
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