Putin never stuck his finger in Sarah's eye and had he tried I suspect she would have bitten it off and kicked him below the Mason Dixon Line. As for Obama, he put his tail between his legs on the Leno show and characterized Putin, the man who not only has bested him at every turned but rubbed his nose in it as well, as a school child who pouts.
How sad for America to be represented by this dunce. And everyone feared Sarah. Sarah stands head and shoulders above Obama.
To my mind there is nothing wrong with The Tea Party when it comes to their general stance on matters pertaining to foreign policy, military preparedness, defense of our nation, and fiscal sanity.
Where they go off the deep end, get tagged by Leftist extremists, their news and media lackeys and get painted as being the tail that wags the Republican Party, is in the realm of social issues.
Goldwater was right when he said: ' extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.' It is political insanity and suicidal! This phrase not only killed his own candidacy but has been proven time and again to be poison in elections Conservatism should have won hands down but did not because extreme flirtation in social matters goes against the grain of most Americans.
When you become overzealous regarding stances on religion, abortion etc. you do not win votes from middle America you frighten them away and make yourself easy pickings for being tagged and relegated to the loser's corner.
If Republicans have a death wish then all they need do is look to the mess being created in Georgia's Senatorial Race, how the extremists helped kill Romney, though he did a good job of it himself. You cannot go extreme to win the nomination and then revert to being centrist in the general election. It smacks of two facedness and there already is enough of that in politics on both sides of the aisle! (See 1 and 1a below.)
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After losing the initiative trying to lead from the rear is Obama about to act and once again be a day late and a dollar short? Is Obama preparing to stick his finger in Putin's eye? Stay tuned! (See 2 below.)
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Crushing educating children the liberal and progressive way. Jabbed by the PC stiletto! (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)The American Dream: Not This Way
By Christopher Chantrill
The maddening thing about being a conservative these days is watching our liberal ruling class, rotten to the core, prancing around the public stage acting all pure and innocent -- and getting away with it. I suppose that's why God invented divine justice, so that people could at least hope that the bad actors would get their just deserts.
But divine justice doesn't always work. I just finished up watching most of Wagner's four-opera Ring Cycle here in Seattle. What begins with great lordly pride and high hopes ends up in everything going wrong and the betrayal of the good guys. The bad guys get their just deserts in the end, but only because the whole of civilization gets flushed down the toilet with them when the fat lady sings. That's not quite my idea of divine justice.
What about us? In one week we have the president dodging and weaving on the illegal delay of the ObamaCare employer mandate. We have Jeff Bezos approved as a good guy by all the beautiful people for buying the Washington Post. We have the U.S. retreating from the Middle East. We have the student loan program turning into an utterly corrupt political slush fund. Will the rest of America get flushed down the toilet with the corruptocrats?
In his latest pivot to the economy, President Obama talks about growing the economy from the middle out. Again. It's a good line and it comes right out of the Obama campaign research for 2012, for the focus groups told the Obamis, according to Peggy Noonan, what "the American middle class has been thinking the past few years: The guys at the top and the bottom are taken care of while I get squeezed."
You have to admire the president's conjuring skills. Day in and day out he manages to distract the American people from the truth that his over-under Democratic coalition of billionaire subsidy whores and the poor benefit whores is the real problem. He almost seems to have people convinced that top-down big government of liberals, by liberals and for liberals, is really good for the middle class.
There's a reason the president can get away with this. When a Democratic president gives a speech and says that "I believe that the way you grow the economy is from the middle out" the mainstream media does not write the paragraph that always accompanies such a speech by a Republican president: "But critics say," the paragraph begins. "But critics say that the president's economic policies are more likely to benefit well-connected campaign contributors and government union members than ordinary middle-class wage-earners in the private sector." Somehow the critics are tongue-tied where Democratic political claims are concerned.
It's no use whining. Republicans and conservatives don't get to set the political weather; in 2013 it is still liberals that get to define reality and liberals that get to teach our children in school. We conservatives only flourish when the failure and corruption of the liberal ruling class is knee high even to a low-information voter. As in 1980. As in 1994. Like maybe real soon.
As a result, people don't understand that Obama politics and Obamanomics and executive orders and QE and deficits and top-down bureaucracy can never deliver them the American Dream.
Yet left-of-center thinkers are no slouches when it comes to critiques of the liberal administrative state. James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State argues that modern states want their people to be legible so the rulers can control them.
Then there is Michel Foucault. His Discipline and Punish argues that the modern state is a power project that features "three primary techniques of control: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination. To a great extent, control over people (power) can be achieved merely by observing them."
Normalizing judgment requires national standards in education and health care and diet against which people can be observed and graded, and the modern state does not punish so much as "correct deviant behavior" as the PC police demonstrate daily.
Jürgen Habermas has critiqued modern administrative systems as inherently dominating and hegemonic; they need to be balanced by communicative negotiation and action in the person-to-person lifeworld.
This is not completely lost on President Obama. He says that he is "pro free market;" he says he is for growing the economy from the middle out. But his policy always enlarges the administrative state and its dominating systems.
Obviously the president says the right things because he knows the American people want to hear them.
He says he's for the American Dream while he and his willing accomplices to everything they can to destroy it.
Christopher Chantrill (mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com) is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. See his usgovernmentspending.com and also usgovernmentdebt.us. At americanmanifesto.org he is blogging and writing An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism. Get his Road to the Middle Class.
1a)Unpopular Republicans See Gains in ’14 Elections
As hundreds of U.S. lawmakers fan out to their home districts this month, there is a genuine political conundrum.
Approval ratings for Congress are at an all-time low, rivaling those of junkyard dogs. Republicans are seen as the main villains; the party’s standing with the public keeps falling.
So what’s the outlook today for next year’s congressional elections? Republicans will hold the U.S. House, conceivably even adding to their 233-to-200 majority. They seem certain to pick up U.S. Senate seats, with an outside chance to gain the half-dozen needed for control.
There are many explanations: the voter profile of the off-year electorate, the way House districts are drawn, the fact that most of the competitive 2014 Senate races don’t favor Democrats, the deteriorating enthusiasm for President Barack Obama.
Events could change those prospects. Republicans may overplay their hand by shutting down the government in a budget dispute this autumn or by undermining the U.S.’s good faith and credit in refusing to raise the debt ceiling. They overreached in 1998 with the planned impeachment of President Bill Clinton and ending up losing seats.
Voter Alternatives
Republican pollster David Winston foresees a good Republican year but warns it is far from assured: “There is an opportunity, not an outcome,” he says. “Voters aren’t looking for an opposition party; they are looking for an alternative.”
To date, on issues such as Obama’s health-care measure -- which House Republicans have voted to repeal or defund 40 times -- they are short on alternatives. Still, Winston and others agree with the assessment of Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman that the Republicans have a “built-in midterm turnout advantage.”
Compare, as Wasserman does, the compositions of the electorate in 2010, a banner year for Republicans, and in 2012, when Obama and Democrats did well. Last year, almost 1 in 5 voters were younger than 30; two years earlier, this age cohort made up only 12 percent of the electorate. The reverse is true of those older than 65: One in 6 presidential-year voters were senior citizens; in 2010, it was 21 percent.
That makes a huge difference because more than half of young voters vote Democratic these days, and, with a few exceptions, similar percentages of senior citizens prefer Republicans. Older voters, Wasserman notes, “are less transient, have grown deeper roots in their local communities and pay much more attention to nonpresidential years.”
A similar pattern when it comes to race and religion helps Republicans in off-year contests. The electorate is more white, more evangelical, and less black and Hispanic.
Redistricting, which Republicans dominated after the last election, gives an advantage to start, as Democrats tend to congregate more heavily in fewer districts.
As a result, though Democrats won the overall popular vote for the House in 2012, they ended up 17 members shy of the majority. To pick up that many seats, according to Mark Gersh, long the party’s foremost analyst on House elections, they might have to win the popular vote by as much as three to four percentage points next year.
There are some heavily populated blue, or Democratic, states where seats are in play. Democrats, however, scored major gains last time in those states, such as New York andIllinois, picking off the low-hanging fruit.
Senate Races
The Senate isn’t affected by redistricting, but this year, the draw is bad for Democrats. After New Jersey’s special election in October, which Democrat Cory Booker is favored to win, 20 of the 34 seats that will be up next year are currently held by Democrats. Moreover, almost all the most competitive contests are in red, or Republican-dominated, states: Arkansas, Louisiana, West Virginia, South Dakota, Alaska and Montana -- states that went decisively for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney last year.
The two Republican-held Senate seats that afford Democrats the best chance for a pickup also are in red states. In Georgia, the incumbent Republican is retiring and Michelle Nunn, the daughter of the popular former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, is running. It isn’t improbable that a right-wing Republican congressman will emerge from the crowded primary field. There is also Kentucky, where Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, faces a Tea Party challenge from the right and would likely face the state’s Democratic secretary of state in the general election. Even in the most favorable circumstances, Kentucky is a tough slog; Obama lost the state by 23 points.
Two Democratic Senate leaders, Nevada’s Harry Reid and New York’s Chuck Schumer, outsmarted themselves in one race, South Dakota, pressuring Brendan Johnson, a U.S. attorney and son of retiring incumbent senator Tim Johnson, not to run in order to clear the way for former Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin. She didn’t run and neither did Johnson, whom top South Dakota Democrats believe would have been the stronger candidate. Now, Republicans are heavy favorites to win that seat.
Adding to the headwinds is a malaise among core Democrats. The number of people who think the country is on the wrong track is growing, as are negative attitudes about the economy. Although the president is much more popular than Republicans, his job-approval rating -- in the mid-40 percent range -- is the lowest for any second-term president at this juncture since Richard Nixon. That makes it hard to gin up a base next year.
“Democrats are better off only in comparison to Republicans,” says Fred Yang, a Democratic pollster.
Whatever the outcome next year, Yang says Republicans should remember that their problems are more deep-seated: “They may win some battles; they’re losing the war.”
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2)Dempsey in Israel, Jordan, to tie last ends before Obama decides finally on US military action in Syria
Chairman of the US Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey arrived in Israel Monday, Aug. 12 for critical talks with Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Defense minister Moshe Ya’alon and Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, followed by parallel talks in Jordan. He has come to lay the ground ahead of President Barack Obama’s final decision to embark on limited US military intervention in the Syria civil war.
The Obama plan, if it goes forward, would involve Saudi Arabia, Emirates, Israel, Jordan and possibly Turkey.
Military sources reveal 11 high points .
1. US, British, French, Saudi and United Arab Emirates will establish a no-fly zone over central and southern Syria, stretching from the Jordanian-Israeli borders up to and including Damascus.
2. The Israeli Air Force will provide these forces with air cover from Syrian air space.
3. A 40-kilometer deep military buffer zone will be drawn from the Jordanian-Israeli borders up to the southern and western outskirts of Damascus. The military units controlling this zone will hold the entire area of the capital within artillery range.
4. The southern Syrian town of Deraa, where the Syrian uprising sprang up, will be declared capital of Liberated Syria.
5. President Obama has determined that there will no American troops in the buffer zone or anywhere else on Syrian soil, only special Syrian rebel forces.
6. Those forces will consist of 3,000 fighters trained in Jordan by US military instructors. They will be headed by Jordanian special forces and operate under US officers based in Jordan.
7. To host them, the US Army has just finished building in the Hashemite Kingdom a huge training camp and logistical system, All the weapons and equipment required to train and arm the rebel force are already stacked there.
8. The American operational command center for the Syrian operation is already in place in Amman led by US Brig. Gen. John Wright, who at 57 is a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.
9. The US air force units for imposing the no-fly zone over Syria are already in position at Middle East locations and ready to go at 36 hours’ notice.
10. A Druze unit trained by US military instructors will be a key component of the special rebel force. It was put up by the million-strong community which populates 120 villages and towns in the Jabal al-Druze area of southern Syria. They are situated in a commanding position overlooking the Syrian-Jordanian-Iraqi border triangle.
11. US forces deployed in the Middle East, especially in Jordan and Israel, will stand ready for possible reprisals against American, Israeli, Jordanian or Turkish targets, if ordered by Syrian President Bashar Assad in retaliation for the no-fly and buffer zones.
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3)Are We Serious About Education?
Two recent events -- one on the east coast and one on the west coast -- raise painful questions about whether we are really serious when we say that we want better education for minority children.
One of these events was an announcement by Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., that it plans on August 19th to begin "an entire week of activities to celebrate the grand opening of our new $160 million state-of-the-art school building."
The painful irony in all this is that the original Dunbar High School building, which opened in 1916, housed a school with a record of high academic achievements for generations of black students, despite the inadequacies of the building and the inadequacies of the financial support that the school received.
By contrast, today's Dunbar High School is just another ghetto school with abysmal standards, despite Washington's record of having some of the country's highest levels of money spent per pupil -- and some of the lowest test score results.
Housing an educational disaster in an expensive new building is all too typical of what political incentives produce.
We pay a lot of lip service to educational excellence. But too many institutions and individuals that have produced good educational results for minority students have not only failed to get support, but have even been undermined.
A recent example on the west coast is a charter school operation in Oakland called the American Indian Model Schools. The high school part of this operation has been ranked among the best high schools in the nation. Its students' test scores rank first in its district and fourth in the state of California.
But the California State Board of Education announced plans to shut down this charter school -- immediately. Its students would have had to attend inferior public schools this September, except that a challenge in court stopped this sudden shutdown.
Why such a hurry to take drastic action? Because of a claim of financial improprieties against the charter schools' founder and former head, Ben Chavis.
Ben Chavis has not been found guilty of anything in a court of law. Nor has he even been brought to trial, though that would seem to be the normal thing to do if the charges were serious.
More important, the children have not been accused of anything. Nor is there any reason for urgency in immediately depriving them of an excellent education they are not likely to get in their local public schools.
What Ben Chavis and the American Indian Model Schools are really guilty of is creating academic excellence that shows up the public school system, both by this school's achievements and by the methods used to create those achievements, which go against the educational dogmas prevailing in the failing public schools.
If it seems strange that there would be a vendetta against an educator who has defied the education establishment and thereby improved the education of minority students, the fact is that Ben Chavis is only the latest in a long line of educators who have done just that -- and aroused animosity, and even vindictiveness, as a result.
Washington's former public school head, Michelle Rhee, raised test scores in that city's school system and was demonized by the education establishment and politicians. She has left.
Years ago, high school math teacher Jaime Escalante, whose success in teaching Mexican American students was celebrated in the movie "Stand and Deliver," was eventually hounded out of Garfield High School in Los Angeles. Yet, while he was there, about one-fourth of all Mexican American students -- in the entire country -- who passed Advanced Placement Calculus came from that one school.
Marva Collins, who established a very successful private school for black children in Chicago, doing so on a shoestring, was likewise the target of hostility when she was a dedicated teacher in the public schools.
Other examples could be cited of educators who produced outstanding results for minority students -- in New York, Houston and other places -- and faced the wrath of the education establishment, which sees schools as places to provide jobs for teachers, rather than education for students, and which will not tolerate challenges to its politically correct dogmas.
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