Tuesday, June 4, 2013

The White House - The Home of The Whoppers!

Now that it is evident, government is basically out of control along with spending, it is understandable why  the Obama Administration would like government to be larger.  This way Obama, not only can take more control over our lives but also, can continue to claim it  too large and therefore he cannot possibly be held accountable for knowing what is happening.

The White House - The Home of The Whoppers! (See 1 below.)

Carney is  appropriately named. Yes, he is either a liar or is so far out of the loop he has become a credibility victim.

If The Tea Party beliefs are so off the wall, so nutty and dangerous to our nation's survival why are the progressives so taken up with threatening them, squelching them and investigating them?

The best way to destroy nut cases is simply ignore them. When McCarthy fell from grace he drank himself to death.



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Cogent observation! (See 2 below.)
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Has Apple hired into a rotten one?  (See 3 below.)
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Has Obama's administrative and executive incompetence led to China;s rise?  (See 4 below.)
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Sowell on Immigrant discussion in the abstract. (See 5 below.)
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A perspective on chicken differences! (See 6 below.)
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One man's view of how the Bernanke bubble will end and Bernanke will be gone and someone else will have to deal with what he created and the consequences.  (See 7 below.)
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Dick
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1) A tale of two Barack Obamas

The Oklahoman Editorial

CALL it a tale of two Obamas.
The first President Barack Obama appeared recently in Moore after the tornado. ThatObama said Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator Craig Fugate came to Moore “at my direction.” That Obama proclaimed, “We've helped to register more than 4,200 people for disaster assistance, and we've approved more than $3.4 million in direct aid.”

The same Obama was front and center on May 2, 2011, to announce the killing of terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden. Obama declared, “I directed” the CIA to focus on bin Laden and that “I met repeatedly with my national security team” as the bin Laden hunt progressed. He stressed, “I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action ...” That attack, he repeated, occurred “at my direction.”

I did this. I did that. We provided. Action was taken at my direction. This President Obama would have Americans believe he oversees every major action of the federal government, particularly when a specific action is politically popular.
But then there's the Obama who appeared after it was revealed the IRS had targeted conservative and pro-Israel groups with audits and extreme scrutiny, that the Justice Department was investigating reporters for the crime of journalism, and that the government's response to the Benghazi embassy attack was misleading and lackluster, at best.
That Obama can barely tell you where the public restroom is located, let alone who's in charge.
On the IRS issue, Obama claimed, “I first learned about it from the same news reports that I think most people learned about this. I think it was on Friday.”
On Benghazi, Obama painted a picture of a White House with little direct knowledge or power. “Here's what we know: Americans died in Benghazi. What we also know is clearly they were not in a position where they were adequately protected.” Well, thanks for clearing that up!

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2) Eric Hoffer Revisited
By Fred Gottheil

In 1968, a year after Israel's stunning victory over the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq -- which put Israel in control of the Sinai, Judea, Samaria, the Golan, and their populations -- Eric Hoffer, pre-eminent American philosopher and the 1983 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, had this to say about the political aftermath of its military achievement:
The Jews are a peculiar people. Things permitted to other people are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions, of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it; Poland and Czechoslovakia did it; Turkey drove out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchmen; Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese -- and no one says a word about refugees. But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. ...  Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.
Hoffer's observation, made 45 years ago, appears to be as true today as it was then.  The political elites of the world, with few notable exceptions, continue to ignore the slaughter and displacement of non-combatants in conflicts occurring in almost every region of the world.  The explosive belt has joined the modern arsenal of poison gas, land mines, AK-47s, and the machete, all of which have taken the lives of millions of defenseless people.  International terrorism, much of it Islamic in origin, continues to undermine civil society, notably in the Middle East and Africa.  Each year, hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern and African refugees spill out of troubled countries into adjacent troubled countries and are, for the most part, virtually ignored by the world's political elites.
And while these atrocities continue unabated, the attention of the world's elites is still drawn to one people only, and in one conflict: the Jews, in defense of the Jewish state.  The epitome of this freakish absurdity is embodied in the activity of the United Nations.  U.N. resolutions condemning Israel for violations of space and human rights are the staple diet of that world organization.  One might expect renegade states like Somalia and Iran to endorse those resolutions -- and they do -- but they are often partnered with the likes of a Sweden and Norway.
Hoffer wouldn't have been at all surprised.  He had written in that same piece from which the lengthy quote above was drawn: "The Swedes did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore, and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway."  Hoffer was not disposed to drawing fine distinctions among anti-Semites. 
The Palestinians, then, are lucky in this one respect: they are at war with the Jewish state.  Had Palestinians been in conflict with any other people -- Peruvians, for example -- nobody would have given them a hoot.  Certainly not the United Nations.  After all, why should any attention, let alone international aid, be given to a group of people busy blowing up Peruvians?  And if the Peruvians, in self-defense, are successful in disposing of those Palestinian terrorists, the response from the world's political elite might well be to applaud the Peruvians, and justifiably so.
But it's the Jews in the battle, so the script reads differently.  And never mind that public opinion polls show considerable Palestinian support for Palestinian terrorism against Israeli citizens.  Never mind that thousands of rockets continue to be fired from the Gaza Strip into Israel since Israel disengaged completely from the Strip in 2005.  Never mind that Israel built a security fence along its West Bank border instead of choosing, as others might, to rid the region of its belligerent population.  That matters not.  What matters is that they are Jews.  And that was Hoffer's blunt but truthful observation.
And he made another which is as well worth considering today as it was in 1968.  Hoffer ended his short essay saying: "I have a premonition that will not leave me: as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us."

After it was revealed the Justice Department had obtained phone records, as well as personal and work email records, of reporters at The Associated Press and Fox News, and even labeled one reporter a criminal “co-conspirator,” Obama simply announced that Attorney General Eric Holder would review the department's “guidelines governing investigations that involve reporters” and report back by July 12.
In all three cases, Obama issued vague denunciations of alleged abuses and failures, but the in-charge presidential persona seen in Moore was nowhere to be found. With the flip of a switch, Obama went from authoritative CEO to out-of-the-loop intern.
Clearly, Obama wants to have it both ways, claiming to be an in-charge leader one moment, then a powerless bystander the next, based on crass political considerations, not his actual involvement in any activity.
Given that Oklahomans are benefitting from federal disaster response, some will no doubt argue we should ignore this administration's failures elsewhere. But Americans have a right to expect competence and ethics in all parts of government at all times.
In Moore, Obama declared, “When we say that we've got your back, I promise you, we keep our word.” The value of this promise shouldn't be tied to which of the two Obamas stands behind the podium at the time. Given what happened to four Americans in Benghazi who had reason to think the government really had their backs, skepticism is justified.
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When Barack Obama began putting his team together, he sent the clearest message on what to expect from his administration with one nomination in particular. No, it wasn’t Hillary Clinton at State and the rather silly “team of rivals” message he tried to send by hiring fellow Democrats. It wasn’t his decision to keep Robert Gates as defense secretary, since it was still unclear what national security policy Gates would be presiding over.

The clearest message he sent was in choosing Lisa Jackson to lead the Environmental Protection Agency–a foreshadowing of suffocating regulation and government control, unaccountable bureaucracy, and a defiant secrecy that would make a mockery of the rule of law and standards of transparency. Jackson–who has just been hired by Appleas an environmental advisor–may have shamelessly pursued unconstitutional power grabs and earned a congressional investigation for using an alias email address in her dog’s name while at EPA, but none of that would have been a surprise to those in Jackson’s previous jurisdiction: New Jersey.

Before coming back to the federal EPA, Jackson ran the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection during the Corzine administration (before becoming Corzine’s chief of staff). Though Jackson seems to have steered clear of the corruption around her, the state’s environmental apparatus has played an important role in Jersey’s corrupt state Democratic machine, which went something like this: miles of red tape were backed up by the use of obscure and blatantly irrelevant laws to make building a structure–home or commercial–in many cases close to impossible. That enabled politicians and bureaucrats at various state agencies to go looking for bribes and kickbacks to cut through that tape or to change zoning laws to increase favored property values.

The regulations won bureaucrats high marks from environmental lobbies, but they didn’t actually make anybody safer because they were bypassed by greasing the wheels. When such corruption schemes were busted, as one high-profile one was in 2009, suddenly thousands of residents all over the state had no idea if their buildings were safe, because the building inspectors were also bribed. And then on top of that, the corrupt politicians routinely win the endorsements of the environmental groups that push for the rules that don’t get enforced, encourage corruption, and reduce everyone’s safety.
Welcome to New Jersey.

None of this is to suggest that Jackson has ever done anything illegal, only that her penchant for regulation doesn’t accomplish its goals but does enable corruption and makes life more difficult for honest folks. A good example of the latter is this Star-Ledger column from 2008 by Paul Mulshine, explaining what happened to Hunterdon County homeowner Nick Scamuffa. He spent $12,000 and got all the necessary permits to install a wood-burning heating system at his home. Soon county officials egged on by Jackson’s DEP showed up unannounced and demanded he shut the heating system down without explaining to him what laws he’d crossed.

He wasn’t the only one, and soon hundreds of residents with such heating systems–all perfectly legal–were demanding answers. These homeowners soon found out that they were being hassled under a 1977 law regulating commercial wood-burning heating systems that “specifically excludes one- and two-family dwellings.” But the NJ DEP decided that since the wood-burning furnaces sit outside the main structure, they could pretend they were commercial and harass Scamuffa’s 80-year-old mother (and hundreds like her) into deactivating her home heating system.
When Mulshine got an air-quality official at the DEP on the phone to explain, he said there are newer furnaces that burn cleaner than the old ones. Mulshine scoffed:
That’s great. And if the DEP wants to push for a law requiring that new technology in new construction, that would be a valid issue for the Legislature to consider. But this heavy-handed enforcement occurred on Jackson’s watch at DEP, which she headed until this month. And if this is typical of the approach she plans to take as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, then everybody in America is going to get a chance to see what it’s like to live in New Jersey.
I don’t think they’re going to like it quite as much as we do.
That’s about right. The Wall Street Journal’s Joseph Rago sums up Jackson’s tenurethis way in a reaction to the news of her new job at Apple: “At the EPA Ms. Jackson proved to be an especially abusive and willful regulator, even for the Obama administration, and her epic rule-making bender continues to drag on economic growth. But nothing about her career suggests any expertise in technology; prior to her EPA posting Ms. Jackson was a political functionary in New Jersey and New York.”

So why would Apple hire her? Rago suggests that Apple executives, who are being dragged in front of congressional committees for obeying tax laws and making money, might think bringing Jackson on board would insulate them from the political attacks. At the Washington Examiner, Tim Carney asks:

“Will Jackson’s job be about chasing subsidies for the renewable investments Apple is already making?” Whatever the reason, if her past experience is any indication, even with the best of intentions it will be counterproductive and costly.
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4)Weak U.S. Policy Has Bankrolled China's Rise

China’s newly installed president, Xi Jinping, will visit California in early June for direct talks with President Obama over how best, the White House says, to “enhance cooperation, while constructively managing our differences.”
There’s certainly a lot to talk about. America’s goods and services trade deficit with China has skyrocketed since 2001, reaching $315 billion in 2012. We’ve lost tremendous manufacturing capacity to China in that time. And most recently comes news that China has hacked into some of our top weapons systems.

Sadly, our ballooning trade deficit and the loss of 5.5 million manufacturing jobs over the last decade hasn’t been enough to rouse the concern of America’s policymakers. But maybe the news that some of our key defense industrial supply chains run through China will make them finally take notice.
According to a new study, we now rely on Chinese companies for some key military hardware, including both the rare earth metal needed for night-vision technology and Hellfire missile propellant (one of our military’s most effective and widely used weapons). We also rely almost entirely on China for the high-tech magnets needed to construct jet fighters, submarines, and satellite systems.
But just as China has happily become an exclusive source for many of our critical defense materials, it has ramped up a sophisticated cyber-espionage campaign to steal American economic data and military secrets. It was only last week that we learned the details of a confidential list of advanced weapons system designs compromised by China-based hackers.
We can add that bombshell to the mounting pile of evidence of institutionalized Chinese cyber-espionage. But while that nation’s aggressive hacking strategy is alarming, our government’s trade policy toward Beijing remains puzzling. In essence, we are bankrolling China’s ability to spy on us and expand its military capabilities, thanks to the huge trade deficits we continue to run.
The Obama administration has responded to the hacking scandal by stepping up its rhetoric, including after a February report tied the People’s Liberation Army to a string of computer attacks on American businesses. National Security Adviser Tom Donilon publicly criticized China for its cyber-espionage in a March speech, and also raised the issue again in a recent meeting with his Chinese counterpart.
Not surprisingly, none of this finger-pointing has halted the hacking. And it hasn’t drawn much more than shrugs from Chinese leaders and mechanical accusations of American hypocrisy from their party media organs. Notably, however, few of our official protestations have acknowledged that our economic and national security interests regarding China are inextricably intertwined.
It all begs a simple question: When will the administration make that connection?
President Obama has an opportunity to do so this week. China’s economic and cyber-policies are designed to promote its own success while disregarding, if not clearly undermining, our own. And our current complaints have done little to alter this course. So if we really want to get Beijing’s attention, why not change our trading terms?
When he sits down with President Xi at the Sunnylands estate in Rancho Mirage, Obama should demand China stop directing, sponsoring, or supporting online intrusions into American assets, both public and private. What’s more, he should also make clear that Beijing’s continued anti-competitive trade practices (everything from dumping and illegal subsidization to technology transfers forced upon American companies operating within its borders) will be challenged at the WTO. And he should demand a halt to China’s ongoing practice of currency manipulation.
Doing so would be less apocalyptic than many suggest. In the instances where the U.S. has threatened to unilaterally address the undervalued Chinese yuan -- whether by a simple procedural Senate vote on currency in 2005 or by mustering international pressure against Chinese policy ahead of a G-20 meeting in 2010 -- Beijing has responded not with an all-out trade war but by modestly correcting its exchange rate.
And regarding our stolen weapons-systems designs, that’s part of a larger problem that American policymakers have failed to address: China is not acting as a responsible power, and our hands-off approach to its thefts and violations of trade law have done little to dissuade from the present course.
In California, Obama must make clear to Xi that there will be consequences for these actions that go beyond our stern disapproval. He must make clear that continued economic and national security theft will significantly lighten China’s pocketbook.
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5)Abstract Immigrants

One of the many sad signs of our times is the way current immigration issues are discussed. A hundred years ago, the immigration controversies of that era were discussed in the context of innumerable facts about particular immigrant groups. Many of those facts were published in a huge, multi-volume 1911 study by a commission headed by Senator William P. Dillingham.

That and other studies of the time presented hard data on such things as which groups' children were doing well in school and which were not; which groups had high crime rates or high rates of alcoholism, and which groups were over-represented among people living on the dole.

Such data and such differences still exist today. Immigrants from some countries are seldom on welfare but immigrants from other countries often are. Immigrants from some countries are typically people with high levels of education and skills, while immigrants from other countries seldom have much schooling or skills.

Nevertheless, many of our current discussions of immigration issues talk about immigrants in general, as if they were abstract people in an abstract world. But the concrete differences between immigrants from different countries affect whether their coming here is good or bad for the American people.

The very thought of formulating immigration laws from the standpoint of what is best for the American people seems to have been forgotten by many who focus on how to solve the problems of illegal immigrants, "living in the shadows."

A recent column in the Wall Street Journal titled "What Would Milton Friedman Say?" tried to derive what the late Professor Friedman "would no doubt regard as the ideal outcome" as far as immigration laws were concerned.

Although I was once a student of Professor Friedman, I would never presume to speak for him. However, he was a man with the rare combination of genius and common sense, and he published much empirical work as well as the analytical work that won him a Nobel Prize. In short, concrete facts mattered to him.

It is hard to imagine Milton Friedman looking for "the ideal outcome" on immigration in the abstract. More than once he said, "the best is the enemy of the good," which to me meant that attempts to achieve an unattainable ideal can prevent us from reaching good outcomes that are possible in practice.
Too much of our current immigration controversy is conducted in terms of abstract ideals, such as "We are a nation of immigrants." Of course we are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of people who wear shoes. Does it follow that we should admit anybody who wears shoes?

The immigrants of today are very different in many ways from those who arrived here a hundred years ago. Moreover, the society in which they arrive is different. The Wall Street Journal column ends by quoting another economist who said, "Better to build a wall around the welfare state than the country."
But the welfare state is already here-- and, far from having a wall built around it, the welfare state is expanding in all directions by leaps and bounds. We do not have a choice between the welfare state and open borders. Anything we try to do as regards immigration laws has to be done in the context of a huge welfare state that is already a major, inescapable fact of life.

Among other facts of life utterly ignored by many advocates of de facto amnesty is that the free international movement of people is different from free international trade in goods.

Buying cars or cameras from other countries is not the same as admitting people from those countries or any other countries. Unlike inanimate objects, people have cultures and not all cultures are compatible with the culture in this country that has produced such benefits for the American people for so long.
Not only the United States, but the Western world in general, has been discovering the hard way that admitting people with incompatible cultures is an irreversible decision with incalculable consequences. If we do not see that after recent terrorist attacks on the streets of Boston and London, when will we see it?

"Comprehensive immigration reform" means doing everything all together in a rush, without time to look before we leap, and basing ourselves on abstract notions about abstract people.
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6)Difference between Chicken Salad and Chicken Shit

Chicken Salad

President George W. Bush's speech after the capture of Saddam Hussein:

"The success of yesterday's mission is a tribute to our men and women now serving in Iraq . The operation was based on the superb work of intelligence analysts who found the dictator's footprints in a vast country. The operation was carried out with skill and precision by a brave fighting force. Our servicemen and women and our coalition allies have faced many dangers in the hunt for members of the fallen regime, and in their effort to bring hope and freedom to the Iraqi people. Their work continues, and so do the risks. Today, on behalf of the nation, I thank the members of our Armed Forces and I congratulate them!"


Obama's speech after the killing of Osama bin Laden:
"And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the Director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network. Then, last August, was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan . And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, andIauthorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad , Pakistan ."

Obama did not once acknowledge our brave men
and women who fight for our country....and that my friends is chicken shit!!
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7)
How the Bernanke Asset
Bubble Ends
By Dr. Steve Sjuggerud

Yasushi Mieno made it his personal mission to prick the largest bubble in financial history.

He succeeded.

You may not know his name… but you need to understand his story. It will help you understand exactly when to get out of this incredible stock-market and real-estate boom before it busts.

Let me explain…


Stocks continue to soar – up 16% so far this year. U.S. home prices are up 12% in the last 12 months.

Longtime readers understand why asset prices are moving higher. It's the Bernanke Asset Bubble.

Remember, this is the simple idea that asset prices – like stocks and real estate – can soar to unimaginable heights, thanks to the Federal Reserve's commitment to printing money and keeping interest rates at zero for years.

Of course, this won't end well. But we need to hold on as long as possible. Based on history, we need to hang on until we see the nextMieno…

Mieno took over Japan's central bank on December 17, 1989. At the time, Japan was in an insane stock-market and property bubble…

To give you an idea of how extreme Japan's asset bubble was, the real estate grounds of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo were supposedly worth more than the entire real-estate value of California.

Mieno thought Japan's asset bubble had gotten ridiculous. So he made it his personal mission to prick Japan's bubble in stocks and real estate.

Just one week after taking office – on Christmas Day 1989 – he raised interest rates. Four days later, Japan's benchmark stock index – the Nikkei – reached its all-time peak. It then started falling.

But the property market didn't fall…

So Mieno raised rates again. And again… and again. He raised them a total of six times until they reached 6% in August 1990.

That did the trick. Property prices started to collapse, too.

Japan has never recovered… Property prices and stock prices are still dramatically lower today – 23 years later – than they were in 1990.

So will the same thing happen in the U.S.? When is it time to start worrying that the current boom will end?

In the past, I've answered those questions with a number… The boom will end "when inflation rises above 5%."

But we also need to look out for the next Mieno in the U.S. – the next government official who is powerful enough to change things… and decides that stocks and real estate must come down.

Just as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has single-handedly pumped up the U.S. stock market and real-estate market today, Mieno single-handedly brought down Japan's stock and property markets in 1990.

Bernanke is our Bubble Man. His policies are putting money in our pockets through the stock and real-estate markets.

But who is the next Mieno? Who is the person who will take it all away from us?

I try to have the answers for you here in DailyWealth – or at least give you my best guess – but I don't know yet.

I CAN tell you he or she likely won't get here before 2015. As I've explained before, the Bernanke Asset Bubble will continue at least that long.

And until the next Mieno arrives, we have the opportunity to make a lot of money…

Good investing,

Steve
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