Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Obama Adept At Making Everyone Share Misery Equally!


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Americans have to be exhausted.

First, they went through a wrenching period while Pelosi and her crowd of Democrats shoved Obamacare down the throats of the nation only to find, after they began to read the monstrosity they passed, it was not at all the blessing proposed.  In fact, now even union bosses do not want to be part of the calamity and one Democrat Senator called it a train wreck.

During the period Obamacare was being debated, drafted and passed, Obama ran around the world making speeches, questioning whether America was worthy of being loved and telling our enemies he was going to change us into a more cuddly entity. To insure he meant what he was telling his Muslim brothers he picked several public fights with Israel and never lost a minute blaming GW for everything under the sun.

Americans were not enamored with Obama's machinations so they ran a bunch of Democrats out of office and turned The House over to The Republicans as a reminder they had not become completely brain dead.

Meanwhile,Obama continued playing race cards, campaigning instead of leading , withdrawing from Iraq and  acting confused when it came to Iran's nuclear threat, Libya and the Arab Spring. Nevertheless, America re-elected him because the better candidate could not satisfactorily demonstrate he knew what he was doing and could not adequately explain why he was better qualified to improve the nation's fortunes or maybe he did and no one was listening or cared.

As Obama began his second term, Obamacare became unraveled along with Egypt, scandals have broken out like acne on a teenager and Obama continued to play golf as if he never heard of the Oval Office, as he kept on campaigning and denying. That said, he is finding it harder to lay blame elsewhere but then Zimmerman came along.

Everything Obama does between now and Nov. 2014 will be geared towards recapturing The House and holding onto The Senate in order to insure his presidency has a remnant of a legacy.

After eight years, I daresay Americans will have been put through the wringer with all of Obama's attempts to change our nation so we no longer recognize ourselves.  I will leave it to the voters to decide whether the trauma inflicted upon us has been worth the mountain of debt created to mesmerize us, to make us less loved and feared, weaker and less relevant.

Who knows what they will decide.  Perhaps they will continue along their path of self destruction and self-delusion and elect Queen Hillary.  Perhaps they will decide The Constitution served us well for several hundred years but is no longer  suitable in an age of technology and human lunancy. 

It is difficult for these aging yes to see voters returning to the eternal verities that served us so well, ie. classical education, accepting personal responsibility, respecting the law, electing those with political integrity, an open display of patriotism and placing the interests of the nation above all others.

Next week Obama will resume the campaign trail telling America the rich are getting richer while the middle class and poor are shrinking and getting poorer.  Obama is focused on policies that inflame the pie rather than grows the pie .  Porter Stansberry explains it this way: "...Socialist programs don't cure income inequality... They merely destroy wealth by reducing incentives for building businesses and encouraging dependency. That's why societies with lots of government spending typically have few civil institutions and a small middle class..."

Obama is incapable of standing aside and allowing the free market and capitalism to grow us out of the mess he and his progressive  ideologues have created because if he did  some people would become very wealthy and that would be unfair.  Fairness is a far more worthy goal than success. Obama would rather see everyone share misery equally and at this he is proving to be very adept.

From Obama's viewpoint the worse he makes things the more he can blame Republicans betting most Americans are gullible, aggrieved and feel disenfranchised enough to believe this tripe.  Ask most black Americans if they are economically better off after 6 years of Obama and most will admit they are not but they will also deny Obama and his policies are the cause.  They will tell you Republicans did not want Obama to succeed, white people want blacks to fail and the system is stacked against them yet they cannot explain why Asian Americans have progressed.

Workers were sold a bill of goods by union bosses who told them they could strike, get increased wage packages and retirement benefits and never look back.  Management believed they could succumb to these never ending  demands, not spend on modernization and continue in business.  
Where are Bethlehem, Republic Steel, Anaconda, Westinghouse and the list is endless?

Detroit proves Shakespeare was right about something being rotten. He just had the wrong geographic location. (See 1 below.)

Obama, you cannot buy love nor should you waste time and money trying! (See 1a below.)

It's your economy, stupid. (See 1 b below.)
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It is Hillary's time!  The press and media have reversed course. 

Their mission now is to put old icing on their stale cake. (See 2 below.)'
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Dick
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1)The Tragedy of Isolation
By Thomas Sowell |

In the 20th century, Western intellectuals' two most dominant explanations of disparities in economic, educational and other achievements were innate racial differences in ability (in the early decades) and racial discrimination (in the later decades).
In neither era were the intelligentsia receptive to other explanations. In each era, they were convinced that they had the answer -- and dismissed and disparaged those who offered other answers.
Differences in mental test scores among different racial and ethnic groups were taken as proof of genetic differences in innate mental ability during the Progressive era in the early 20th century. Progressives regarded the fact that the average IQ test score among whites was higher than the average among blacks as conclusive proof of genetic determinism.
A closer look at mental test data, however, shows that there were not only individual blacks with higher IQs than most whites, but also whole categories of whites who scored at or below the mental test scores of blacks.
Among American soldiers given mental tests during the First World War, for example, white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi scored lower on mental tests than black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Pennsylvania.
Among other groups of whites, those with average mental test scores no higher than the average mental test scores among blacks included those in various isolated mountain communities in the United States, those living in the Hebrides Islands off Scotland and those in isolated canal boat communities in Britain.
Looking at achievements in general, people living in geographically isolated environments around the world have long lagged behind the progress of people with a wider cultural universe, regardless of the race of the people in these isolated places. When the Spaniards discovered the Canary Islands in the 15th century, they found people of a Caucasian race living at a stone age level.
Many mountain communities around the world have also been isolated, especially during the centuries before modern transportation and communications.
These mountain communities were often not only isolated from the outside world but also from each other, even when they were not very far apart as the crow flies, but were separated by rugged mountain terrain.
As distinguished French historian Fernand Braudel put it, "Mountain life persistently lagged behind the plain." A pattern of poverty and backwardness could be found from the Appalachian Mountains in the United States to the Rif Mountains of Morocco, the Pindus Mountains of Greece and the mountains and uplands of Ceylon, Taiwan, Albania and Scotland.
Cultural isolation due to geographic factors afflicts not only peoples isolated in mountains or on islands far from the nearest mainland, but also peoples isolated by deserts or in places isolated by a lack of navigable waterways -- or even by a lack of animal transport, as was the situation in the Western Hemisphere when Europeans arrived and brought horses that were unknown to the indigenous peoples.
Cultural isolation can also be due to government decisions, as when the governments of 15th century China and 17th century Japan deliberately isolated their peoples from the outside world. At that time, China was the leading nation in the world. But it lost that lead during centuries of isolation.
Sometimes isolation is due to a culture that resists learning from other cultures. The Arab Middle East was once more advanced than Europe but, while Europe learned much from the Middle East, the Arab Middle East has not translated as many books from other languages into Arabic in a thousand years as Spain alone translates into Spanish annually.
Against this background, racial and ethnic leaders around the world who promote a separate cultural "identity" are inflicting a handicap on their own people. Isolation has held back many peoples in many lands, for centuries. But such social and cultural isolation serves the interests of today's ethnic leaders.
They have every incentive to promote a breast-beating isolation. It is a sweet-tasting poison.


1a).U.S. Funds Buy No Love at Afghan College

JALALABAD, Afghanistan—Nangarhar University is a symbol of American largess: U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for dormitories, classrooms and computer labs.
Increasingly dominating the campus of Afghanistan's second largest university, however, are Islamist activists who openly sympathize with the Taliban.
"The Taliban are the people who are defending this country," said Hamad, a leader of the self-appointed Nangarhar University student council that organizes regular demonstrations against the U.S. and President Hamid Karzai's government. "The foreign troops are invaders."
The council is described by other students as a well-organized group that can muster hundreds of protesters on a moment's notice. Afghan and U.S. officials are taking note: Nangarhar University student demonstrations, which routinely block the main highway connecting Kabul to Jalalabad and the Pakistani border, feature the white flag of the Taliban and the green flag of Hezb-e Islami, the movement of anti-U.S. warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
The students sometimes also fly the black banner used by al Qaeda. Afghanistan's national flag, explains Hamad, a 24-year-old Islamic-studies student from the northern province of Baghlan who didn't want to have his full name used, "has not maintained its integrity."
The student militancy sweeping Afghan campuses ahead of the U.S.-led coalition's withdrawal next year isn't limited to Nangarhar. In late May, hundreds of students rallied outside the Afghan capital's prestigious Kabul University to protest against legislation that criminalizes violence against women. "That demonstration really made me worried, that's where you can see the radicalization of the youth," said Najla Ayubi, a women's rights activist and former judge.
This rise of extremism among Afghan students—some of the biggest direct beneficiaries of U.S. assistance—underscores the lack of goodwill that more than a decade of American taxpayer money has bought here. It also harks back to a potent precedent in recent Afghan history. Many of Afghanistan's mujahedeen warlords who combated the Soviets, each other and the U.S. over the past three decades, including Mr. Hekmatyar, started out in politics as student activists in the 1970s.
U.S. and Western officials often cite the boom in school and college enrollments as a key sign of progress in Afghanistan since the Taliban regime's downfall in 2001. A decade ago, Afghanistan had a dozen poorly funded colleges that were under the sway of local warlords; today it has 32 public universities and at least 76 private higher education institutions.
The international community's investment in the Afghan university system is part of a larger development portfolio: Since 2002, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent a combined $934.4 million on education here.
Much of the focus of the U.S. education strategy has hinged on teacher training, particularly for girls' education. In recent years, the U.S. government has spent $10 million on education faculty buildings around the country; constructed provincial teacher training colleges at a cost of $23 million; and provided over $60 million in support to the country's Ministry of Higher Education. Other Western allies spent on universities, too.
But gratitude is in short supply at Nangarhar University, even among ordinary students who aren't involved in student politics. "The Americans have done reconstruction, but they've insulted Afghan culture," said one of them, Sajjed Bahar, a literature student from Khost province. "They support our university, but in the meantime, they kill students."
Students in Nangarhar said they were particularly incensed by the killing earlier this year of a fellow student in Wardak province. The student was abducted and later found with his throat cut, an incident for which the Afghan government blamed secret militias working for the U.S. special-operations forces. While the U.S.-led coalition said the allegations of illegal detention, torture and killings in Wardak were untrue, Mr. Karzai ordered U.S. special-operations units out of the province's Nerkh district after the incidents.
Current and former U.S. officials say they have taken note of the radicalization at Nangarhar University and other campuses. "We are definitely aware that there are these sort of unsavory elements at the university," said a U.S. official, adding: "If you have a society that is in upheaval—evolving and developing—you're going to experience similar things in the university."
Abdul Azim Noorbakhsh, spokesman for Afghanistan's Ministry of Higher Education, added that campus activism was part of the development of a robust political debate. "This is civil society and democracy," he said.
Situated just northwest of Jalalabad, eastern Afghanistan's largest city, Nangarhar University was founded in 1962, its campus originally built with Soviet assistance. Today, it has nearly 10,000 students, many of whom are crowded into spartan, three-story dormitories.
Naeem Jan Sarwary, vice chancellor for student affairs, said the university depended heavily on USAID as well as the local Provincial Reconstruction Team, a U.S. military-led development team, to provide Internet servers, computer laboratories, sports equipment and scholarship money. International donors helped provide housing for the school's 500 female students.
Such assistance helps offset shortfalls in the school's regular operating budget, which is provided largely by the central government. Gul Agha, the vice chancellor for administration, said the school's monthly "ordinary budget" of 20 million afghanis (around $360,000) to cover payroll for 450 faculty members and other costs often doesn't arrive on time, or is underfunded.
The activists at Nangarhar University, students say, are drawn largely from the school's Shariah faculty, which produces preachers and Islamic judges. Their student council—also known informally as the "mosque committee"—is organized out of the university's on-campus mosque, where they often announce their protests.
These activists described their opinions on a recent visit by two Wall Street Journal reporters to the university's campus—after first probing the reporters about their own religious beliefs and their views on Islam.
"The invaders have often killed innocents intentionally," said Sadaqat, a senior activist who didn't want to give his full name. "And they've continued their oppression of the innocent people of Afghanistan."
Describing how the protests are organized, Mr. Sadaqat said the members of the mosque committee usually consult with the rest of the student body. "Whenever there is an issue, we present the issue when the students come for prayers in the mosque. Then we hold a jirga [assembly] and talk about it. All students who stay in the dorms are involved in the decision-making," he said.
Muhammad Sabir Momand, the head of Nangarhar University, said the protests blocking the road were limited to a small minority of a few hundred ideologically committed students. Mr. Momand said he had encouraged student protesters to keep their demonstrations on campus and not block the roads.
"I have told them that if they want to protest, do it on the university campus, and I will let representatives of the press in to hear your message," he said. Investigating antigovernment activities was the responsibility of Afghanistan's security agencies, not of the university, he added.
According to other students, however, the core group of radicals often successfully exerts pressure on the rest of the student body.
"When first-year students come here, they are vulnerable—they are the target for recruitment," said Ahmad Aqbal, a political science student at Nangarhar University who doesn't share the militant ideology. "They tell you, 'If you join us, you'll pass your exams.' "


1b)Krauthammer On Obama: "This Is His Economy And He's Pretending He's Just Stumbled Upon It"

I find it astonishing that he goes around making speeches in which he deplores the state of the economy, the growing income inequality, chronic unemployment, staggering middle class income, and it's as if he has been a bystander, as if he's been out of the country for the last five years. It's his economy; he's the president. 

He's talking as if this is the Bush economy, I don't know, the Eisenhower economy, and he just arrived in a boat and he discovers how bad the economy is. This is a result of the policies he instituted. He gave us the biggest stimulus in the history of the milky way, and he said it would jump start the economy. The result has been the slowest recovery, the worst recovery since World War II, and that is the root of all of the problems he's talking about, the income inequality -- the median income of the middle class of Americans has declined by 5% in his one term. So who's responsible for that? Those were his policies. He talks about this in the abstract and he actually gets away with it in a way that I find absolutely astonishing, it's magical. This is his economy and he's pretending he's just stumbled upon it. And the policies he proposes are exactly the ones he proposed and implemented in the first term.
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2)HILLARY FOR PRESIDENT!
The liberal press, apparently unchastened by their guy Barack’s disastrous term in office, is gearing up for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 run. Is America really yearning for an old lady president? I guess we will find out. I didn’t believe it for a long time, but it now seems clear that Hillary is determined to reign in the White House until close to her 80th birthday. The Democrats don’t mind; they are a geriatric party and don’t have a plausible candidate who is any younger.
But I digress. We already knew that a movie titled Rodham is in the works. It will focus on Hillary’s role as a 26-year-old staffer on the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate. Since Hillary played no perceptible role in the Watergate affair or its aftermath, the movie could make for a boring couple of hours. On the other hand, actresses like Scarlett Johansson, Reese Witherspoon and Amanda Seyfried are reportedly in the running for the role of Ms. Rodham–because, I guess, they look so much like Hillary.
But that isn’t all; far from it. We also have the CNN movie that is described as a feature-length documentary on Mrs. Clinton’s life. CNN’s press release suggests how objective it is likely to be:
CNN Films announced today that it has commissioned a feature-length documentary on Hillary Rodham Clinton from Academy Award-winning director and producer Charles Ferguson. The documentary, currently in pre-production, will take a comprehensive look at the professional and personal life of one of the most powerful women in American politics. It is expected to premiere in 2014 with a theatrical run prior to airing on CNN.
“I am very excited to be making a film about Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose fascinating life and work embody so many of America’s, and the world’s, hopes and challenges. I am delighted and extremely grateful that CNN Films has given me this remarkable opportunity.”
Charles Ferguson is the founder and president of Representational Pictures, Inc. Ferguson produced and directed “No End in Sight: The American Occupation of Iraq” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007. The film, which marked his directorial debut, won several awards including the National Society of Film Critics, New York Film Critics Circle Award, Toronto Film Critics Association Award, and Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award. Ferguson’s critically acclaimed second film “Inside Job” debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in 2010 and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Film.
“Inside Job?” Hmm. Wikipedia explains: “The film is described by Ferguson as being about ‘the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption.’” There is a certain irony here–the Clinton administration represented the highest-flying moment for the financial industry, with Wall Street titan Bob Rubin as Clinton’s Secretary of the Treasury. Some say that the Clinton administration was the puppet of the financial industry. But somehow I don’t think the Hillary “documentary” will remind us of that bit of history.
Is that it for Hillary promotion? Nope: NBC has announced a four-hour miniseries on Ms. Hillary:
NBC announced here on Saturday that it was preparing a four-hour mini-series based on the life of Mrs. Clinton and hoped to broadcast it before any possible formal declaration that she was running. That would avoid the possibility of other candidates demanding equal time, said Robert Greenblatt, NBC’s top entertainment executive.
Well, that makes sense. They certainly wouldn’t want to have to produce a miniseries about a Republican!
Mr. Greenblatt said NBC bought the project even though it had no script yet, though the deal came with a star attached: Diane Lane, who was nominated for an Academy Award in 2003 for her leading role in the film “Unfaithful.” The Clinton project will be written and directed by Courtney Hunt, who was nominated for an Oscar for writing the film “Frozen River.”

NBC’s release described the project as a mini-series that would “recount Clinton’s life as a wife, politician and cabinet member from 1998 to present.” That would include her run for the presidential nomination in 2008.
The NBC release also said, “The script will begin with Clinton living in the White House as her husband is serving the second of his two terms as president. In the years following, she would eventually become a United States senator, run for president and, ultimately, serve the country as secretary of state.”
This is the kind of publicity that money literally can’t buy. If a man of real accomplishment and virtue like Mitt Romney had had this kind of media support, he might have carried 47 states. But one wonders: how will these multiple filmmakers fill up the hours? NBC reportedly will focus on Hillary’s years as Secretary of State. But what accomplishments, exactly, will it cover? The infamous “overcharged” button? The State Department’s several sex scandals? Syria? Libya? (Does anyone remember what role Hillary played, if any, with respect to the overthrow of Gaddafi?)
Or maybe Benghazi. Aye, there’s the rub.
The lovely and talented Katie Pavlich–her generation’s Megyn Kelly, perhaps–appeared on Fox & Friends this morning to comment on the NBC miniseries. Her appearance is brief but effective:The funny thing about Hillary Clinton is how vastly her reputation exceeds her accomplishments. In reality, the only reason anyone has heard of her is that she married Bill Clinton. Otherwise, she would have toiled away as an obscure, reasonably competent if obnoxious lawyer. She was a relatively unpopular First Lady who is best remembered for being embarrassed by her husband’s serial infidelities. She served a brief term as a Senator from New York, a role in which she achieved nothing. Then she lost the Democratic nomination to Barack Obama, and punched her ticket during a singularly unsuccessful stint as Secretary of State. Never has she had an original thought, formulated a successful strategy, or stepped out of the shadow of her singular husband.
But none of that matters: Hillary already has the establishment’s enthusiastic backing as she prepares for her next presidential run.
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