---
---
My computer guru, Paul LaFlamme, has arranged for my booklet to be available in book form in several weeks. More on that in the next memo!
----
Hope you will buy my booklet and read it and if you like it send to those on your own e mail list and I invited your comments. Thanks, Me
Dick, I read your book this weekend. I hardly know where to start. You did an excellent job of putting into one short book a compendium of the virtues which only a relatively short time ago all Americans believed. It’s a measure of how far we have fallen that many Americans, perhaps a majority of Americans, no longer believe in what we once considered truisms. I think your father would have agreed with every word, but the party he supported no longer has such beliefs.
I would like to buy multiple copies of your booklet..
You did a great job. I know your parents would have been proud and that your family today is proud.
Mike
You wrote a great book. The brevity is one of its strong points and I know it was hard to include that in and still keep it brief. Your father in haste once wrote an overly long letter to our client, then said in the last sentence, “I’m sorry I wrote such a long letter, but I didn’t have time to write a short one.”
"A Conservative Capitalist Offers: Eleven Lessons and a Bonus Lesson for Raising America's Youth Born and Yet To Be Born"
By Dick Berkowitz - Non Expert
I wrote this booklet because I believe a strong country must rest on a solid family unit.Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" has morphed into "A Confused, Dependent and Compromised Generation."
I hope this booklet will provide a guide to alter this trend.
Please Buy My Booklet - Half The Proceeds Go To "The Wounded Warrior Project!"
You can now order a .pdf version from www.brokerberko.com/book that you can download and read on your computer, or even print out if you want.
---
| |||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||
---
---
A Rabbi importunes for Jews to awake! (See 1 below)
--
Tom Sowell on cheap politicians, the cost of bad calls and the NFL. (See 2 below.)
----
Mona Chasen chastens Obama and chases Biden for his Osama is dead. GM is alive. (See 3 below.)
---
Small sampling big conclusion! (See 4 below.)
---
Tom Sowell on cheap politicians, the cost of bad calls and the NFL. (See 2 below.)
----
Mona Chasen chastens Obama and chases Biden for his Osama is dead. GM is alive. (See 3 below.)
---
Small sampling big conclusion! (See 4 below.)
---
Dick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)Wake Up, Jews!
Rabbi Aryeh Spero
No doubt, it's hard for people to give up their lifelong attachments and identity. But there are moments in history when a turning point arrives, and those with eyes to see and ears to hear recognize it. Many Jews have made political liberalism their religion and personal identity and the Democrat Party their unexamined home and comfort zone. But everything changed early September.
Rarely do modern-day political conventions startle. The Democratic National Convention, however, was earthshaking and a warning to Jews to wake up. Democrat delegates decided to stick it to Israel. We no longer care, they roared, if Israel remains a Jewish state; flood her heartland with millions of so-called Palestinians whose goal is to make the state Islamic. We will not condemn Hamas for targeting Jewish population centers with rockets. Jerusalem is not Israel's indivisible capital but should be divided, like Berlin was. Such was the undeniable sentiment of the delegates at the Convention.
After objections from outside the Convention, the chairman reinstated support for Jerusalem. But he was resoundingly booed. The world saw how those boos far outweighed the yeas. My fellow Jews, the boos were for you; those boos were for Israel, a successful Israel that sticks in the craw of a leftist, socialist mindset that sees Israel not as the beacon of freedom and accomplishment she is, but as something outside the leftist ideological orbit. Sure, they will take your contributions and your votes, but they don't want your Israel, and they expect you to forgo distinctly Jewish needs on the altar of leftism. We saw not liberalism, but hardcore leftism, and we saw a home where the welcome mat is quite conditional and worn out.
The prophet Daniel saw the writing on the wall. All too often throughout our history, we Jews, and especially heads of major Jewish organizations, have failed to see the writing on the wall. We are afraid to see that which is a game-changer, and so we deny events we wish were not happening. After all, who wants to change the comfort zone?
It was a convention, like the last four years of the Obama administration, reveling in class warfare. Class warfare, like Occupy Wall Street and other scapegoating calls, has never been good for the Jews. We are often the scapegoat of those envious. Knowing this, Ahmadinejad scheduled a meeting with Occupy, a movement endorsed last year by many bigwigs in the Democratic Party and even President Obama himself. Jihadists and much of Islam want to delegitimize the concept of a Jewish state by tarnishing Jews as “those rich capitalists” unworthy of a state among the community of nations.
Too often, we Jews have been beguiled into believing that Jews in positions of power have our interests at heart. Debbie Wasserman Schultz is but the latest who would have us think she is “doing what is good for the Jews” when, in fact, she is doing and will continue to do what is good for Debbie and her power base. Similarly, the heads of the major Jewish organizations have been conspicuously silent — a silence that would not prevail if a Republican were doing the things to Israel Obama is doing.
Job openings are way down; 50% of college graduates, our children, can't find jobs; and Mr. Obama will continue to weaken national security and thus the safety of our families…and continue to make it more difficult for Israel to survive. For many, all this is secondary and expendable for their more important agenda of abortion on demand and gay marriage. How frivolous; how irresponsible!
We can determine what truly is important to a person when he is forced to choose between two values. Since when is it a Jewish value to condemn Israel to misery just so one can be assured of abortion at any time, under any circumstance? Most of your grandparents would have chosen Israel over abortion and gay marriage. As our sages tell us: “The wages of immorality are further immorality.”
President Obama has no time to meet with Israel's Netanyahu, whose country is under imminent nuclear threat from Iran. Israel's concern about a possible nuclear Holocaust is, for Mr. Obama, dismissed as mere noise, while his delegates at the U.N. on Sept. 24 are ordered to sit and listen to the vile noise of the Holocaust-denier and Iranian Jew-hater-in-chief. It is clear that Mr. Obama's underlying sympathy is with the Muslim Brotherhood and its spread and influence around the world. He is coaxing us to accept Islamic attitudes and norms. This speaks volumes — to those willing to see the facts as they truly are.
My friends, get off the train, now. The track is pointing in a very dangerous direction. You will not prevail over the trend; on the contrary, you will become part of the trend. As an elder clergyman, I'm horrified as I watch many Jews — young and old — slowly evolve into proponents of positions unwholesome, dangerous, and destined toward spiritual and physical suicide.
True, you will be forced to stop your demonizing of Republicans. You may have to vote for Romney, a candidate singular in his passion and love for Israel as a living concept, an indivisible Jerusalem, and for Israelis and Jews as Jews. You will have to wipe away the gruesome fantasies you have concocted about Republicans and conservative Americans. That's OK. In fact, it is a nice thing to do and is good for the soul.
Rabbi Aryeh Spero is author of Push Back: Reclaiming our American Judeo-Christian Spirit
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Cheap Politicians
Now that the National Football League has apparently learned that it can be costly to hire cheap officials, perhaps the rest of us should learn the same lesson when it comes to government officials, whose bad calls can do a lot more damage.
2)Cheap Politicians
Now that the National Football League has apparently learned that it can be costly to hire cheap officials, perhaps the rest of us should learn the same lesson when it comes to government officials, whose bad calls can do a lot more damage.
What do we do when we want a better car, a better home or a better bottle of wine? We pay more for it. We definitely need a lot better crop of public officials. Yet we insist on paying flea market prices for people who will be spending trillions of tax dollars, not to mention making foreign policy that can either safeguard or jeopardize the lives of millions of Americans.
Any successful engineer, surgeon, or financier would have to take a big pay cut to serve in Congress. A top student from a top law school can get a starting salary that is more than we pay a Supreme Court justice.
No doubt many, if not most, government officials are already paid more than they are worth. But the whole point of higher pay is to get better people to replace them.
We may say that we want people in Congress, the courts or the White House who have some serious knowledge and experience in the real world, not just glib tricksters who know how to pander for votes. But we don't put our money where our mouth is.
Let's face it. You're not likely to get a good suit of clothes at a flea market. And you're not likely to get the cream of the crop to go into the government when they would have to accept a big drop in income to do so.
There are always going to be warm bodies available to fill the jobs in government. We have lots of warm bodies there now. There will also always be some people who are willing to sacrifice their family's economic security and standard of living, in order to get their hands on the levers of power.
These are precisely the kinds of people whom it is dangerous to have holding the levers of power.
Can we afford to pay members of Congress, the President of the United States, and federal judges the kinds of money that would enable us to tap a far wider pool of far more knowledgeable people with successful real world experience? We can't afford not to. Cheap politicians are expensive in their reckless spending of tax money. It is the ultimate in being penny-wise and pound-foolish.
To get some idea of the cost, ask yourself: How much would it cost to pay every member of Congress, the president, and every federal judge a million dollars a year?
There are 535 members of Congress, so a salary of a million dollars a year would cost $535 million, or just over half a billion dollars. There are 188 federal appellate judges and one President of the United States. That's 189 more people, bringing the total number of people to 724, and the total cost to $724 million, at a time when people in Washington are talking trillions.
That is less than one percent of the annual cost of the Department of Agriculture. Put differently, we could pay all of these 724 officials a million dollars a year each -- for an entire century -- for less than it costs to run the Department of Agriculture for one year.
If we limited how long any given individual could hold office in the government -- preferably one term -- we could have highly knowledgeable people with real world experience in charge of taking care of the nation's business, instead of spending their time doing things to get reelected.
They would be a lot harder for special interests to bribe with campaign contributions, when high officials would face no more campaigns after getting elected. We don't need career politicians.
The best crop of public officials this country has ever had were in the generation that founded the United States of America. Most of the Founders had careers outside of politics.
Is all this a realistic prospect in the world today? Of course not! What is the most realistic prospect today is the status quo today.
But the New Deal was not a realistic prospect three years before Franklin D. Roosevelt took office. It was not a realistic prospect in 1775 that the American colonies would become an independent nation a year later. The whole point of discussing new ideas is to get people thinking about them, so that they might become realistic prospects in the future.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)An Ambassador Died. Obama Lied.
-"Bush Lied, People Died" they chanted. When the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- information that was believed by the intelligence agencies of our major allies; that was described by the Clinton-appointed head of the CIA as a "slam dunk"; and that was agreed to by heads of state and leaders of the Democratic and Republican parties -- turned out to be badly mistaken, George W. Bush was branded a liar.
Even Democrats such as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Tom Daschle, and Ted Kennedy, who had warned about Saddam's WMD program on various occasions, quickly scurried to the "Bush lied, people died" slander when the intelligence proved inaccurate.
Neither Bush nor Secretary of State Colin Powell lied about Iraq. They received bad information. Error is part of the human condition. So is venality, and that is what marked the Democrats' scurrilous attacks on Bush when the intelligence failure came to light. They could have reasonably criticized Bush for not being more skeptical of intelligence reports, but no, they resorted to slurs.
On the 11th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, an al-Qaida-linked band of terrorists attacked our consulate in Benghazi, Libya and killed our ambassador and three other Americans. President Obama and his entire administration denied that the attack had anything to do with the anniversary of al-Qaida's greatest victory, attributing the attack to spontaneous rage at an Internet video. On September 13, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, "The protests we're seeing around the region are in reaction to this movie. They are not directly in reaction to any policy of the United States or the government of the United States or the people of the United States." They stuck to this story for more than a week, even as evidence accumulated that it was false.
If it were a simple matter of bad information, the administration had ample opportunities to modify its initial response to the tragedy. As Eli Lake reported in The Daily Beast, intelligence agencies were confiding within 24 hours that the attacks seemed pre-planned. Intercepts showed that an al-Qaida affiliate boasted of its success to another al-Qaida group on September 12. "There was very good information on this within the first 24 hours," an intelligence official told Lake. Skeptical Republicans with military experience like John McCain and Mike Rogers also observed, in those first hours after the attack, that RPGs are not usually carried to "spontaneous" protests.
Nevertheless, five days after the attacks, and long after it was clear that the consulate (along with a safe house half a mile away) had been targeted by terrorists, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice toured five Sunday morning TV shows to deliver the administration's line that the murder of our diplomats was a case of mob violence that had been "hijacked by extremists." Appearing on ABC's This Week, Rice said, "Our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous -- not a premeditated -- response to what had transpired in Cairo." Jay Carney repeated that spin at White House briefings.
Except that, as CBS reported, there was never any protest at all in Benghazi about the Internet movie. It was a straight-up terror attack. Only on September 20 did Carney finally acknowledge the obvious -- "It is, I think, self-evident that what happened in Benghazi was a terrorist attack. Our embassy was attacked violently, and the result was four deaths of American officials."
Why would the administration attempt to deceive the world about a terror attack?
Two possibilities suggest themselves. The Obama administration has substituted a bumper sticker, "Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive," for a foreign policy. They've been hoping that the death of bin Laden would be seen as total victory over Al-Qaeda and jihadism. A brazen and successful attack against Americans in Libya, including the first assassination of an ambassador in more than three decades, undercuts that self-satisfied narrative, suggesting that, while bin Laden is dead, bin Ladenism is very much alive.
The second explanation is that this administration has relied on the supposed appeal of Barack Obama's persona in place of American military and diplomatic strength. That appeal is proving chimerical, and the administration will go to great lengths to disguise that reality.
But whatever the rationale, the facts are clear: The administration purposely misled the country, and has so far not been held accountable.
To find out more about Mona Charen and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4)Morning Jolt - October 2, 2012
By Jim Geraghty
Here’s your Tuesday Morning Jolt.
Enjoy!
Jim
Washington Post Bases Screaming Page-One Headline on Poll with 161 Respondents
Come on, Washington Post. Come . . . on. Come on!
As they say on ESPN’s NFL coverage, “Come on, man!”
You can’t make the basis of your headline -- your screaming, top story, above-the-fold right-side-of-the-page headline, “Race Is Tight, But Not in Key States” when you’re working with a sample of 161 people. You just can’t.
Well, I guess you can, but when you do that, you strengthen the arguments of the folks who think all of the pollsters this cycle are corrupt, biased, putting their fingers on the scale, and putting out unrealistic or inaccurate numbers to help the Obama campaign create the perception of an impending landslide, trying to depress Republicans and win over undecideds with the bandwagon effect. I don’t think all pollsters are alike; I contended that much of what we were seeing was a combination of groupthink -- that a political environment even better for Democrats than 2008 was quite possible, instead of extremely unlikely -- and a steadfast refusal to acknowledge that conservatives and Republicans might be much more likely to refuse to respond to a pollster. To borrow a phrase from your former sportswriter Michael Wilbon, putting a poll with a margin of error of eight percentage points -- and then not mentioning that to readers at all in the article -- is “sorry, no-account” partisan spinning on your front page.
Look at every national poll in the Real Clear Politics average: at least 400 respondents, usually 500 to 600, sometimes many more. Look at all the state polls -- roughly same sample size, roughly same margin of error -- three, four, maybe five percentage points once in a while.
Bryan Preston: “The Post should probably have not published that poll at all. They could have published it honestly with a disclaimer that its sample size was among the smallest ever used in a presidential poll. But that disclaimer would have robbed the story of its shock value, and this is the MSM we’re dealing with.”
A Bold New Form of Media Bias
In light of the Washington Post basing its front-page headline on a survey with an astonishingly small sample and an astonishingly high margin of error, it is good to sum up what we’ve seen from the press in recent weeks.
ONE: For about eight days, the Obama administration told the public that their best assessment of the murder of our ambassador in Libya and three other Americans was that it was the result of a spontaneous protest against a tape mocking Islam on YouTube. This explanation sounded funny from the beginning -- even in a place like Benghazi, who brings rocket-propelled grenades and mortars to a protest? -- and it seemed surprising that so many in the administration, including U.N. ambassador Susan Rice and White House press secretary Jay Carney seemed to dismiss the idea that a terror attack against American targets on September 11 was a serious possibility. Subsequent reports have revealed astonishingly insufficient security for a site with American lives and American intelligence. The administration’s sustained focus on the YouTube tape seemed to make little sense, outside of a desire to deflect from the continued pervasiveness of anti-American rage in the Middle East and signs of a resurgent al-Qaeda, themes that greatly complicate the argument of the Obama campaign. As of Friday, 17 days after the attack, the FBI had still not reached the consulate site to conduct a forensic investigation.
To their credit, certain places like CNN and ABC News have pursued this story with more vigor than their critics acknowledge.
On a related note, violent protests and threats of violence against American embassies continue, barely mentioned or acknowledged by most venues of the U.S. press. I guess it isn’t newsworthy until someone dies again.
TWO: Univision, a Spanish-language channel, has done in-depth, detailed, long-form television journalism about the “Fast and Furious” program, showcasing that the violence from the “walked” guns was much worse than previously claimed by the government, and demonstrating the cost in human lives in searing images. (Moe Lane talks a bit about it here.) This report is much more vivid, detailed, and outraged than anything from almost all of the U.S. media, which accepted an inspector general’s report that claimed that repeated warnings and information kept coming up from the field agents but somehow mysteriously never reached the attorney general. The report claimed that both acting Deputy Attorney General Grindler and Counsel to the Attorney General and Deputy Chief of Staff Wilkinson were informed about the connection between the firearms found at the scene of fatal shootings and Operation Fast and Furious, but neither believed “the information was sufficiently important to alert the Attorney General about it.”
THREE: With unemployment above 8 percent for 44 straight months and GDP growth slowing to 1.25 percent, BuzzFeed declares “one of the central mysteries of 2012” is “How did we stop focusing on the economy?”
FOUR: Day after day, our troops in Afghanistan are targeted and killed by the Afghan troops they are supposed to be training. This barely merits more than periodic brief mentions in the national press. As Walter Russell Mead puts it:
If George W. Bush were president now, and had ordered the surge and was responsible for the strategic decisions taken and not taken in Afghanistan over the last four years, the mainstream press would be rubbing our noses in his miserable failures and inexcusable blunders 24/7. The New York Times and the Washington Post would be treating us to pictures of every fallen soldier. The PBS Newshour would feature nightly post-mortems on “America’s failed strategies in the Afghan War” and every arm-chair strategist in America would be filling the op-ed pages with the brilliant 20/20 hindsight ideas that our pathetic, clueless, failed president was too dumb and too cocky to have had.
Ace of Spades observed something we’re seeing in this cycle that is different even from the hope-and-change euphoria of Obama’s 2008 coverage:
Let me explain why this is different than previous bias.
Previously, the press has been both biased in a partisan way and an in an ideological way, but usually the partisanship was driven by ideology. As you may have noticed, the press are great fans of gay marriage and abortion, and they shape their coverage to put the best possible face on these positions, and the worst possible face on opponents. (To the extent they feature contrary voices at all.)
That's bias, of course. We've gotten used to that.
But in the Benghazi debacle, there is no possible ideological grounding to explain their bias. There is, I trust, no ideological movement that advocates for intelligence failures and the deaths of good-guy diplomats. There is no ideological movement in favor of reckless incompetence bordering on malice in providing security for consulates abroad (which, as a legal matter, are considered US territory).
There is no ideological movement -- or at least there was not before -- championing the government's right to lie to the public about its failures in order to avoid accountability.There is no room here where one can say, "Ah well, they can't help but be pulled a bit to the left by their own beliefs." Because no one champions the right of government to let people be murdered and then lie about it.
This isn't ideological bias, then. This is pure advocacy for a political party. Obama's embarrassment is not an ideological issue -- or should not be. I hope we can all agree that a president should attend security briefings -- especially as 9/11 approaches -- and provide adequate warning and security for US government personnel. I hope we can all agree that the government does not suddenly gain a Right To Shamelessly Lie about its failures, simply because it finds it politically advantageous to do so.
But, as Nina Totenberg's chuckle indicates, the press now in fact believes exactly these things -- so long as the president we're talking about is Democrat, and Obama in particular.
A Journey to Glenn-Beck-istan
Big things are going on in Irvine, Texas. As I mentioned yesterday, I spent Monday flying to Dallas to tape an appearance on Glenn Beck’s new Internet and Dish Network Channel, The Blaze TV.
Beck’s new studio, I am told, operates on the largest stage of the largest U.S. movie studio outside of Hollywood and New York. In the lobby, they have a massive model battleship from the television miniseries The Winds of War, the bench from Forrest Gump, extremely old television cameras, and the tree from the set of Barney the Dinosaur. The “green room” where guests wait is the set from a cantina from some old Western.
Once inside the actual studio, where Beck tapes his programs, it is otherworldly -- you get some sense of the scale on television, but it’s like a political and history guru’s funhouse – there are antique toys all around, historical knickknacks, the Oval Office set from various JFK movies rebuilt and refurbished with a replica of the infamous returned Churchill bust. With all of the dramatic light and shadows, it’s like Frank Capra and David Lynch collaborated on set design. If we had the time, I could have wandered and explored for hours. I understand Beck rents the studio and built the set with his own money, and if he aimed to create an environment that looks nothing like anything else on television -- imagine if Stephen Colbert’s set mated with ESPN’s NFL 32 sports-bar set and the offspring spread itself out over a space the size of half a football field -- mission accomplished. The programming is subscriber-based, and is underwritten by various sponsors.
My segment airs today; it is a lengthy, nearly hour-long roundtable discussion about the state of the race, the polls, and the upcoming debates with, among others, former senator Rick Santorum. I don’t want to talk out of school, so I’ll just say that Santorum is trying really, really hard to be a good soldier for the Romney campaign. Whether you love Santorum or hate him, let’s all recognize that it must be extremely challenging to go all-out for the guy who beat you, who you clearly thought was an inferior choice to yourself, and who periodically makes decisions you strongly disagree with. From what I can see, the former Pennsylvania senator is sucking it up and doing his part.
No comments:
Post a Comment