Hope you will purchase one of my booklets and support my efforts to raise money for The Wounded Warrior Project.
Please make check for $10.99/copy to Paul La Flamme for a soft cover version and half the cost is deemed a donation to The Wounded Warrior Project. (Add $2.50 for postage and handling.)
If you want a pdf version you can download the cost is $5.99.
Click on Brokerberko.com
This is just one 'hero family' you are helping.
May God Bless them and bring them peace!
Dick
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There are times when less said is better.
Dick
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'Candy' Crowley came across more like a 'sour ball'. The bias from liberal media and press types is so blatant they do not even seem to care about being discriminating (See 1 below.)
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Romney's tax deduction ceiling plan is creative and demonstrates the kind of 'forward' thinking we should expect.
From Obama his 'forward' campaign slogan is more of the same and that means we will continue to progress backward. (See 2 below.)
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Monday we will witness the last of the debates and the focus is on foreign policy.
I would like to make these few observations because the Obama crowd is going to emphasize their 'vast' experience over Romney's ' novice' status.
a) Obama had no foreign experience when he entered the Oval Office and that has been constantly evident as he ricochets from one failure to the next in this area.
b) You cannot disconnect domestic fiscal and monetary conditions from foreign policy. A weakened economy constrains one's foreign policy initiatives. Ask the Russians. Reagan understood this.
c) When a president lies to the American public, as Obama has vis a vis the recent Libyan assassinations, credibility in virtually all areas is undercut.
Obama's pledge to Israel , in my view never had much standing, and has even less now.
d) Finally, the fact that Obama has expunged the word 'terrorist' from official policy suggests he does not, yet, understand the gravity and/or nature of the problem we face concerning radical Islamism.
Bad movies are not the underlying cause.
Whether purposeful or not Obama lives in a demonstrated dream land.
D'Souza suggests Obama wants to clip America's wings in the area of foreign policy and his very actions and policies are designed accordingly. (See 3 below.)
Perhaps Obama has come up with his own version of a "Hail Mary" negotiation one on one with Iran to take everyone's mind off Libya. As I reported earlier, Israel apparently has not be apprised of this last effort .
It would be great if Iran and the Mullah's could be trusted but now that their casino is under a mountain I doubt Iran will quit gambling particularly now that they know America , the Great Satan, is nothing short of being a little wimp. (See 3a below.)
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Dick
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) Jim Hoft of The Gateway Pundit put together a list of reasons how Candy Crowley showed her blatant bias toward Mr. Obama:
She gave Barack Obama 9% more time. (3+ min.)
- She interrupted Mitt Romney 28 times during the debate (Obama only 9 times).
- Her questions were personally picked to help Obama.
- She asked Romney to compare himself to Bush (but did not ask Obama to compare himself to Carter).
- She corrected Mitt Romney, even though she was wrong (unusual if not unprecedented for a Moderator to correct a debater).
- She contaminated the debate with her own views.
- Crowley's false fact check saved Obama (but she did not correct Mr.Obama when he misspoke).
- She injected herself into the hottest part of the debate.
- She told Mitt Romney to "sit down" during one heated exchange (never asked that of Obama).
- She clearly showed her bias against Romney.
P.S. Mrs. Obama broke the rules of political debate by initiating applause for her husband; many others followed her lead. ('Mainstream media' turned their heads and didn't report it).
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2)Romney's Tax Deduction Cap
An idea to finance reform and avoid political trench warfare.
The Obama campaign and the press corps keep demanding that Mitt Romney specify which tax deductions he'd eliminate, but the Republican has already proposed more tax-reform specificity than any candidate in memory. To wit, he's proposed a dollar limit on deductions for each tax filer.
During the first Presidential debate, Mr. Romney put it this way: "What are the various ways we could bring down deductions, for instance? One way, for instance, would be to have a single number. Make up a number—$25,000, $50,000. Anybody can have deductions up to that amount. And then that number disappears for high-income people. That's one way one could do it."
In an October 1 interview with a Denver TV station, Mr. Romney mentioned a cap of $17,000 and said "higher income people might have a lower number." His campaign stresses that these dollar amounts are "just illustrative" and that there are other ways to reduce deductions that in any case would have to be negotiated with Congress.
But details aside, the tax cap is a big idea, and potentially a very good one. The proposal makes economic sense to the extent that it helps to pay for lower marginal tax rates. Lower rates with fewer deductions improve the incentive for investing and taking risks based on the best return on capital rather than favoring one kind of investment (say, housing) over another. This would help economic growth.
The idea may be even better politically. The historic challenge for tax reformers is defeating the most powerful lobbies in Washington that exist to preserve their special tax privileges. Among the biggest is the housing lobby that exists to preserve the mortgage-interest deduction—the Realtors, home builders, mortgage brokers and the whole Fannie Mae FNMA -0.73% gang.
But don't forget the life insurance lobby (which benefits from the tax exclusion on the equity buildup in policies), the tax-free municipal bond interest lobby, the charitable deduction lobby and more. Each one will fight to the death to preserve its carve-out, which means that reformers have to engage in political trench warfare to succeed.
This is one reason President Obama wants Mr. Romney to be more specific: The minute he proposed to limit the mortgage-interest deduction, the housing lobby would do the Obama campaign's bidding by running ads against Mr. Romney's plan. Mr. Romney is right not to fall for this sucker play.
By limiting the amount of deductions that any individual tax filer can take, Mr. Romney is avoiding this lobby-by-lobby warfare. He'd let individual taxpayers decide which deductions they want to take up to the limit. In effect, the deductions would compete with one another as taxpayers decided which one was most important to them.
The political left should have a hard time opposing this because reducing deductions would hit high-income taxpayers the hardest. Out of the 140 million tax returns in 2009, the last year such data are available, only 45 million itemized their deductions. The non-itemizers, who take the standard deduction ($11,900 for joint filers in 2012), would be held harmless by the Romney cap. Most of these are lower- or middle-income earners.
Associated Press
The nearby table shows that the dollar value of deductions rises with incomes. Filers who itemized and earned between $10,000 and $40,000 in 2009 had average itemized deductions of roughly $16,000. This means they would on average lose nothing under a Romney cap. The average deduction amount rose to about $22,000 for incomes between $75,000 and $100,000. Filers with $1 million in income had average deductions near $173,000, and those who earn $10 million or more had deductions of about $4.3 million.
Another benefit is that the Romney deduction cap would cost taxpayers more in states with the highest tax burdens. Think of California, Illinois, New Jersey and New York.
The current tax code allows filers to deduct state income tax, real-estate tax, and some sales taxes from federal tax. This rewards states for raising taxes. Under the Romney cap, many upper-middle-class filers wouldn't be able to write off all their state taxes. This would create political pressure to cut state taxes.
We realize the tax cap isn't perfect and carries some risks. The tax code would not become any simpler. Liberals would also pocket the limits on deductions for the wealthy and immediately try to raise rates again. But that political risk exists for any reform short of repealing the 16th Amendment. Our preference would be to eliminate all such deductions and lower rates as far as possible, but we shouldn't make a perfect reform the enemy of the much better.
By the way, Mr. Obama has also called for limiting tax deductions for high-income filers. His budgets have endorsed allowing them to take write offs at a rate of 28% instead of 35%. The big difference is that Mr. Romney wants to dedicate the revenue gain from capping deductions to cutting tax rates. Mr. Obama wants to use the money to pay for more spending.
The larger point is that Mr. Romney is serious about reform and has put on the table a serious idea for how to finance and achieve it. That's far more than Mr. Obama has proposed about anything in a second term.
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Posted By Josh Rogin
A poll of Egyptians conducted last month shows that they have increasingly positive views of Iran, believe that both Iran and Egypt should obtain nuclear weapons, and still trust their own military more than any other institution in Egypt.
The poll of 812 Egyptians, half of them women, was conducted in a series of in-person interviews by the firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner and sponsored by the Israel Project, a pro-Israel advocacy organization with offices in Washington and Jerusalem. According to the poll, Iran is viewed favorably in Egypt, with 65 percent of those surveyed expressing support of the decision to renew Egypt-Iran relations and 61 percent expressing support of the Iranian nuclear project, versus 41 percent in August 2009.
Sixty-two percent of those polled agreed that "Iran and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are friends of Egypt," though 68 percent held unfavorable views of Shiite Muslims.
Iran's deputy defense minister said recently that the Iranian regime is seeking more military cooperation with Egypt. "We are ready to help Egypt to build nuclear reactors and satellites," he said on the occasion or Egyptian President Mohammed Morsy's meeting with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last month. Morsy's office has said the two didn't discuss military cooperation.
Eighty-seven percent of respondents want Egypt to have its own nuclear bomb.
Israel Project CEO Josh Block told The Cable that the statistics show the effect of Morsy's outreach to Iran and the danger of regional proliferation of nuclear weapons if Iran is successful in obtaining a nuclear bomb.
"Very scary to people opposed to proliferation of nuclear weapons, let alone to unstable countries in the world's most turbulent part of the world, is the 87 percent who want Egypt to build nuclear weapons," he said. "Morsy's dangerous embrace of Iran is leading a surprising shift in favor support for Tehran, which has for decades been seen by Egyptians as their top threat, as well as for their work on nuclear weapons."
Egyptians are overwhelmingly focused on the dire state of their domestic economy. Only 2 percent of those polled said that "strengthening relations with other Muslim countries" should be one of Morsy's top two priorities, and 45 percent agreed with the statement that "Egypt needs to focus on things at home and should be less involved in regional politics."
Nevertheless, 74 percent of those polled said that disapprove of Egypt having diplomatic relations with Israel -- an increase from 26 percent in August 2009 -- and support for a two-state solution to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at only 30 percent. Seventy-seven percent agreed that "The peace treaty with Israel is no longer useful and should be dissolved."
Block blamed that result at least partially on the stance of leading Egyptian politicians like President Morsy, who has indicated recently he does not plan to abrogate the Israel-Egypt peace treaty but whose Muslim Brotherhood party identifies Israel as a racist and expansionist state.
"The fact that Morsy and other leading politicians in Egypt regularly express disdain for the peace treaty leads to such decay in public attitudes," Block said. "Then again, nearly half the public voted for a presidential candidate who openly declared his intent to travel to Israel and support for the Camp David accords."
Block was referring to retired Air Force general Ahmed Shafiq, who served as prime minister under Hosni Mubarak and was defeated narrowly in a runoff election earlier this year.
The poll found that 64 percent of Egyptians still feel warmly about the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which ran Egypt in the interim period before Morsy was elected, and 81 percent approve of the job they are doing. Forty-nine percent of Egyptians polled felt warmly about Morsi, and 43 percent felt warmly about the Muslim Brotherhood.
Forty percent felt warmly about the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, but only 11 percent felt warmly about the Salafist Nour Party, a hard-line Islamist party that fared well in the parliamentary elections.
American politicians fared poorly in the poll, but among them Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the most popular at 25 percent favorability. President Barack Obama scored 16 percent and Republican nominee Mitt Romney only 8 percent, although only half of Egyptians polled knew who Romney was. (Ahmadinejad's favorability rating? Forty-three percent.)
Most Egyptians don't seem to buy Romney's line that Obama has "thrown Israel under the bus," but they're not too happy about his handling of the region, either.
Asked, "Do you think that President Barack Obama is more on the side of Arabs or more on the side of Israel?," 68 percent of Egyptians said Israel, and 60 percent said that Obama's presidency had been "a negative thing" for the Arab world.
39% of the Egyptians polled expressed interest in learning more about Israel, especially it's political system. The Israel Project runs an outreach program to the Arab world, focusing on social media. Its Facebook page is called "Israel Uncensored."
3a)Obama’s ‘Agreement’ With Iran
Just in time for the debate between President Obama and Governor Romney on foreign policy, the New York Times is reporting that the White House and the mullahs in Iran have “agreed” to what the Times says would be “one-on-one negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.” Fox News is reporting that the White House is denying the report. The Times calls the agreement a “last ditch diplomatic effort to avert a military strike on Iran.” It looks to us like a last-ditch diplomatic effort to avert the election of Governor Romney as the 45th president.
We’ve said it before, but let us say it again — the Sun is opposed to a diplomatic settlement with Iran’s regime. Such a settlement would leave the mullahs free to try to evade whatever limits they might, ostensibly, accept. It would leave them free to back Hezbollah and Hamas and other enemies of Israel. It would leave them free to deny democracy to their own citizens. And it would leave them free to threaten not only Israel but the rest of the Middle East and to work on an entente with Egypt, among others, to encircle the Jewish state.
Even discounting for our own view, the agreement to talk being reported by the Times this evening is troubling on its face. One could call it a kind of diplomatic October surprise, save that it’s not all that surprising. It seems just like the desperate kind of politics over to which this administration has given itself. It is a mark of cynicism that the administration is prepared to unveil this kind of demarche on the eve of the one formal presidential debate in respect of foreign policy.
This is a moment for Mr. Romney to remember the lessons of Munich. It is not necessary to liken the mullahs to Hitler to keep in mind that the big mistake at Munich turned out to be not simply the deal that was made there, though that was mistake enough. The mistake was going to Munich in the first place. The mistake was in the delusion on the part of Prime Minister Chamberlain and Premier Daladier that there was no danger in simply talking with Hitler. In the end the talking was the appeasement.
We’ve made that point before in these columns. But it was never so timely as it is this evening. The betting is that in the debate at Boca Raton, Mr. Obama is going to try to paint Mr. Romney as trigger happy and bent on yet another war. This is what Vice President Biden attempted in his debate with Congressman Ryan. This is a moment to remember is that there being too hardline is rarely the route to war. The more traveled road to war is being too eager to appease.
To say that we’re against a diplomatic settlement is not the same as saying the only solution to the Iranian threat lies in war. The ideal way to resolve this standoff is for the democratic factions in Iran to defeat the mullahs at home. That is a point President Reagan made a part of his global strategy. President Bush grasped the point, as well. If the Obama administration is supporting a strategy, it is doing so with such secretly that it has not been picked up the press in the West. That would be understandable and even admirable, but it can only be undercut by sitting down and trying to cut a deal with the very mullahs who need to be overthrown.
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