Though the words Conservative and Capitalist are in the title, the booklet is non-political in nature.
If you find my memo efforts of interest and maybe even challenging , whether you agree or not, then please support my effort to raise money for The Wounded Warrior project and buy my book expressing my thoughts on raising children.
Please make your check for $10.99/copy to Paul laFlamme for a soft cover version and deduct half the cost as 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 WWW.Brokerberko.com
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George Will and the gimme society.
America has morphed into a dependent society.(See 1 below.)
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"The British Commentator" returns to discuss the ass-whooping Seal Team 6 put on OBL and the aftermath.
The last minute is hilarious. This guy is good. Gotta love the Brits.
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Stella Paul believes Obama's handling of the Libyan episode is related to his desire to undercut freedom of speech. (See 2 below.)
What we know:
a) Because two superb reporters for CBS and FOX dug we now know the White House and the various terrorist response departments and agencies knew 'real time' what was happening in LIbya.
b) We know Obama said he issued orders to protect those being attacked.
c) We know those being attacked requested help on three occasions.
d) We know from Gen Petraeus, who is the CIA Director, he never got a request for help.
e) We know Leon Panetta, Sec. of Defense, told us that you do not send troops into harms way unless you have facts.
f) We know four Americans were already in harm's way and were seeking help
g) We know Amb. Rice, and Sec, Clinton, as well as President Obama's press Secretary and the President himself, continued to state a vulgar movie was responsible for the attack when in fact they had evidence the attack was planned and organized by terrorists
h) We know the Administration is stonewalling three Committees seeking information and are refusing to send documents and films.
i) We know the President is either covering up executive failure and or lying to the American people.
j) Worst of all, the Liberal press and media have ignored the significance of executive incompetence and possible lying because they want Obama re-elected .
I submit the consequence of the Libyan assassinations and the failed response on the part of Obama and his crowd of deniers has cost him dearly in terms of votes. (See 2a below.)
and what the election is all about: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/331967/conservatism-calling-michael-walsh
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Gravitas versus acting presidential.
In times past the Liberal press and media used the word 'gravitas' to explain why Republican candidates did not measure up when compared with their favored Democrat candidates.
By lacking 'gravitas,' the implication was that Reagan and GW were too dumb to be president but Dukakis and Gore were qualified. etc.
'Gravitas' has now been supplanted by 'acting presidential.' I have seen the definition of what 'acting presidential' means but once again Obama has it and Romney does not.
In the final analysis, 'gravitas' and 'acting presidential' are simply concocted tags allowing the Liberal press and media folks to characterize their favorite candidates according to some contrived definition of their own choosing.
My advice. - don't get sucked in by it.
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A little manipulation going on? (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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The Gimme Society: The entitlement state mugs our descendants
By George Will
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The election-eve mood is tinged with sadness stemming from well-founded fear that America's new government is subverting America's old character.
Barack Obama's agenda is a menu of temptations intended to change the nation's social norms by making Americans comfortable with the degradation of democracy. This degradation consists of piling up public debt that binds unconsenting future generations to finance current consumption.
So argues Nicholas Eberstadt, an economist and demographer at American Enterprise Institute, in A Nation of Takers: America's Entitlement Epidemic. This booklet could be Mitt Romney's closing argument.
Beginning two decades after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, who would find today's government unrecognizable, government became a geyser of entitlements. In 2010, government at all levels transferred more than $2.2 trillion in money, goods and services to recipients $7,200 per individual, almost $29,000 per family of four. Before 1960, only in the Depression years of 1931 and 1935 did federal transfer payments exceed other federal expenditures.
During most of FDR's 12 presidential years, income transfers were a third or less of federal spending. But between 1960 and 2010, entitlements exploded from 28 percent to 66 percent of federal spending. By 2010, more than 34 percent of households were receiving means-tested benefits. Republicans were more than merely complicit, says Eberstadt:
The growth of entitlement spending over the past half-century has been distinctly greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones. Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential but in any given year, it was on the whole over 8 percent higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat. The Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George W. Bush administrations presided over especially lavish expansions of the entitlement state.
Why, then, should we expect Romney to reverse Republican complicity? Because by embracing Paul Ryan, Romney embraced Ryan's emphasis on the entitlement state's moral as well as financial costs.
As evidence of the moral costs, Eberstadt cites the fact that means-tested entitlement recipience has not merely been destigmatized, it has been celebrated as a basic civil right. Hence the stunning growth of supposed disabilities. The normalization and then celebration of dependency help explain the unprecedented exit from gainful work by adult men.
Since 1948, male labor force participation has plummeted from 89 percent to 73 percent. Today, 27 percent of adult men do not consider themselves part of the workforce: A large part of the jobs problem for American men today is not wanting one.Which is why labor force participation ratios for men in the prime of life are lower in America than in Europe
One reason work now is neither a duty nor a necessity is the gaming defrauding, really of disability entitlements. In 1960, an average of 455,000 workers were receiving disability payments; in 2011, 8.6 million were more than four times the number of persons receiving basic welfare benefits underTemporary Assistance for Needy Families. Nearly half of the 8.6 million were because of mood disorders or ailments of the musculoskeletal system and the connective tissue.
It is, says Eberstadt, essentially impossible to disprove a personal claim to be suffering from sad feelings or back pain.
In 1960,Eberstadt says,roughly 134 Americans were engaged in gainful employment for every officially disabled worker; by December 2010 there were just over 16. This, in spite of the fact that public health had improved much, and automation and the growth of the service/information economy had made work less physically demanding.
Eberstadt says collecting disability is an increasingly important American profession.
For every 100 industrial workers in December 2010, there were 73 workers receiving disability payments. Between January 2010 and December 2011, the U.S. economy created 1.73 million nonfarm jobs but almost half as many (790,000) workers became disability recipients. This trend is not a Great Recession phenomenon: In the 15 years ending in December 2011, the United States added 8.8 million nonfarm private sector jobs and 4.1 million workers on disability rolls.
The radiating corruption of this entitlement involves the collaboration of doctors and health care professionals who certify dubious disability claims. The judicial system, too, is compromised in the process of setting disability standards that enable all this.
America's ethos once was what Eberstadt calls optimistic Puritanism,combining an affinity for personal enterprise with a horror of dependency. Nov. 6 is a late and perhaps last chance to begin stopping the scandal of plundering our descendants wealth to finance the demands of today's entitlement mentality.
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2)
Mission Accomplished: Obama Gets Americans Killed to Kill the Constitution
By Stella Paul
Are you surprised that Vogue's Anna Wintour is squeezing fashionistas to go all out for Obama? It makes sense, since the icy-eyed editrix knows style, and Obama certainly has a presidential style that's all his own. After all, Obama is the only commander-in-chief to ever manipulate Americans into getting killed so that he can kill the Constitution.
We first saw Obama's murderous stylings in Operation Fast and Furious, a brazenly criminal scheme in which he cuddled up to Mexican drug gangs, giving them thousands of state-of-the-art firearms. Obama's narco-killer partners then obligingly used their new presents to murder U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and ICE Agent Jaime Zapata, as well as hundreds of Mexican men, women and children.
The grieving parents of the four Americans just slaughtered in Libya might want to contact the parents of slain ICE Agent Jaime Zapata and get the name of their lawyer. Mary and Amador Zapata have filed a $25 million wrongful death suit against the U.S. government, claiming that Jaime Zapata informed his supervisors he had misgivings about the safety of his Mexican trip, but was ordered to go anyway. "All of these legitimate concerns were put aside... and agents Avila and Zapata were required to follow orders," the lawyers wrote. Sources say Zapata was investigating Fast and Furious at the time of his murder.
Sound familiar? It should, because Obama has now refined his Fast and Furious killing techniques into the wildly successful butchery of Benghazi. Let's review what we know. First, Obama denied repeated requests for more security from the increasingly desperate Libyan ambassador, Christopher Stevens. Second, he blithely skipped 60% of his intelligence briefings, including every single one in the critical week leading up to 9/11. (Just to be consistent, he also skipped his briefing on 9/12, the day after the murders of Ambassador Stevens and three other brave Americans.)
And, in a moment that will surely go down in American history, on 9/11/12, when terrorists launched their fatal attack on our Benghazi consulate, Obama denied any military support to the surrounded Americans, ensuring that they would die. As Tyrone Woods, Glenn Doherty, Sean Smith, and Ambassador Stevens engaged in a brutal seven-hour battle to the death, Obama abandoned them to waft off to a contented night's sleep in his feather-soft presidential bed.
The next day, Obama awoke to the rousing news that his ambassador had been raped, killed, and dragged through the Libyan streets by a triumphant mob. With his Mission Accomplished, Obama celebrated by jetting off to Las Vegas, later yukking it up with David Letterman and partying with Jay-Z and Beyoncé.
"They refused to pull the trigger," said Charles Woods, father of the murdered ex-Navy SEAL, Tyrone. "Those people who made the decision and who knew about the decision and lied about it are murderers of my son."
The tragedy of brave heroes like Tyrone Woods, Glenn Doherty, Brian Terry, and Jaime Zapata is that they were doomed to serve under Barack Hussein Obama. And Obama's signature style is to foment bloody anti-American chaos abroad that justifies ditching the Constitution at home.
It's a constant irritant for aspiring tyrants like Obama that we Americans retain a certain fondness for the Constitution. The solution is to bully us out of it with vivid theatrics that lead to hysterical moral hectoring. So Fast and Furious became the prop to shame Americans into abandoning our Second Amendment right to bear arms. Always glad to help, Obama's media operatives repeated his cynically contrived claim that "90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that lay in our shared border. So we have responsibilities as well."
And now we get to Obama's recent Libyan charade. Both he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton immediately pretended to believe that the murderous 9/11 terrorist attacks on our Mideast embassies were caused by Americans' excessive use of free speech. Everything had been lovingly prepared for such an eventuality. An obscure anti-Mohammed YouTube video by an unknown filmmaker had been pre-selected (and possibly doctored) to serve as scapegoat.
And so, as our Cairo embassy was assaulted by terrorists, Obama's minions were primed to go: tweeting an apology to the homicidal mobs outside their doors that "The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims." Hillary followed through, using taxpayer funds to broadcast apologies for American free speech on Pakistani television, and Obama grandly materialized before the UN to proclaim the single strangest sentence ever uttered by an American president: "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."
And, thus, with a midnight knock on his California door, the offending filmmaker was arrested and hustled into federal custody until after the election. Remember the first reports about his ethnic identity? We were told he was an "Israeli Jew" whose film was funded by "100 Jewish donors." How marvelous it would have been for Obama if he could have successfully convinced us that brave Americans were killed because of incitement by rich Jews!
Alas for Obama, that particular story fell apart, but his attack on our First Amendment rights proceeded beautifully with the help of his celebrity acolytes. George Clooney handsomely pouted that freedom of speech was "unfortunate" because it allowed "idiots" such as the jailed filmmaker to speak. And Bette Midler tweeted her sincere hopes that the filmmaker would be "charged with murder."
Meanwhile, in London, we were treated to an exciting preview of what might unfold in a second Obama term, when 10,000 Muslims protested outside Google headquarters, demanding that Google take down the offending video.
The whole phony shebang was engineered to intimidate us, so that the next time there's a Times Square bomber or Fort Hood assassin, you and I will stop to worry before we speak. Will Bette Midler tweet calls for our arrest? Will thousands of Muslims camp on our doorsteps, howling for our heads? Maybe we better just forget about our First Amendment rights and shut up and take it.
The Americans martyred in Libya died to advance Obama's anti-Constitutional agenda. In the wake of that catastrophe, Obama's popularity has plummeted, along with his re-election chances. No longer the dashing cool guy in the perfectly-tailored suit, Obama may soon be wearing Hawaiian shirts full-time, as he lounges around his brand-new beachfront estate in Oahu. Personally, I'd rather see him model the latest orange jumpsuit in Guantanamo.
2a)
Gallup: Romney, GOP Lead in Early Voting!
By Paul Scicchitano
With “Frankenstorm” threatening the final days of the presidential race, Gallup released a new poll today showing that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney is leading President Barack Obama in early voting, something that had been a key part of the Obama campaign strategy.
Meanwhile, Gallup also reported that more Republicans than Democrats have already voted by a margin of 19 to 15 percent. “When those who intend to vote before Election Day are factored in, the gap is similar: 37 percent of Republicans vs. 33 percent of Democrats,” according to the polling organization.
“Romney currently leads Obama 52 percent to 45 percent among voters who say they have already cast their ballots,” Gallup reported. “However, that is comparable to Romney's 51 percent to 46 percent lead among all likely voters in Gallup's Oct. 22-28 tracking polling."
The race is tied at 49 percent among those who have not yet voted but still intend to vote early, suggesting these voters could cause the race to tighten. "However, Romney leads 51 percent to 45 percent among the much larger group of voters who plan to vote on Election Day, Nov. 6,” said Gallup.
Moreover, Gallup found that 15 percent of registered voters nationwide have already cast their ballots in this year's election, which is up sharply from only 5 percent a week earlier.
“The overall percentage either having already voted or planning to vote before Election Day has also increased — to 33 percent, from roughly 25 percent in each of the prior three weeks,” Gallup noted.
The Obama campaign, which benefited from early voting in 2008, has focused heavily on urging supporters to vote early in this election as well. Earlier polling data compiled by Reuters/Ipsos in recent weeks showed Obama with a 54 to 39 percent lead among voters who already have cast ballots.
“Early voting could play a pivotal role if it results in higher turnout among a particular candidate's supporters than would otherwise be the case if everyone waited for Election Day,” according to Gallup. “As a result, the presidential campaigns are urging their supporters in swing states, in particular, to lock in their vote now, lest anything interfere with their ability to turn out on Nov. 6. There are reports that Hurricane Sandy has disrupted early voting in parts of the East; but given the relatively low rate of early voting in that region, this may not have a major impact on early voting overall.”
Gallup also noted that it is not clear whether a focus on early voting will ultimately pay off for either campaign.
“At present, early voting appears to be a convenience that older voters are using disproportionately; they may welcome the opportunity to vote by mail rather than in person on Election Day,” said Gallup. “It is also relatively common in the West and among postgraduates, groups that may have better access to information about how to navigate the early voting process. Some states not only encourage early voting, but mandate it, thus accounting for regional differences. However, despite the hype, it doesn't appear that early voting will have a major impact on the U.S. popular vote, or be much more prevalent than it was four years ago.”
Among the findings by Gallup:
• Early voting is most prevalent in the West, followed by the South and the Midwest, but is relatively light in the East.
• Washington and Oregon not only encourage early voting, but are mandating it.
• One in four voters in the West say they have already voted.
• Thirty percent of voters in the West plan to vote before Election Day.
• The combined 55 percent of early voters in the West compares to 40 percent in the South, 23 percent in the Midwest and 9 percent in the East.
• Early voting is strongly related to age. Some 26 percent of seniors are most likely to have already voted compared to 7 percent of voters aged 18 to 29.
• Postgraduates are more likely to vote than voters with an undergraduate degree or less.
• Adults with no college education are least likely to vote early.
Reuters contributed to this report.
© 2012 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
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The last big economic indicator left to see before the election is the October jobs report, which is due on Friday. Or is it? The Department of Labor suggested this morning that the jobs report might be a little, er … delayed:
The U.S. Labor Department on Monday said it hasn’t made a decision yet on whether to delay Friday’s October jobs report, the final reading on the labor market before next week’s federal elections.
A Labor official said the agency will assess the schedule for all its data releases this week when the “weather emergency” is over.
They’re not alone, either. The Census Bureau may hold off on its scheduled economic reports until next week. Construction spending was due on Thursday and probably wouldn’t have had any impact on the election, but the report on factory orders was also scheduled for Friday, and that might have had an impact on the general opinion of the state of manufacturing.
Given that we just had a big outlier in the household survey, and even Obama’s advisers painting that as “too optimistic” as a way to lower expectations on the jobless-rate number due in four days, it seems rather convenient that these two bureaucracies might take a pass on reporting October numbers on time. The hurricane certainly will impede business, but the government is supposed to plan for such contingencies — and the absence of this data might end up looking worse than the data itself.
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