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Netanyhu responds to PLO Terror. (See 2 below.)
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More emotional crap liberals perpetrate and conservatives have yet to learn how to combat.
This emotional pitch sells because more people are dependent upon government than their own abilities and since government has dumbed the nation down reasoning is no longer an intrinsic skill.
Thus, voters are much more prone to accept lies and distortions, which,of course, is the initial step towards the demise of a once free people. Their unwillingness to take risks in the mistaken belief freedom and hard work are preferable to dependency will ultimately become their death knell.
a) Though government is going deeper in debt there is nothing government spends money on that can be cut because every dime is necessary to fund dependency.Yes, there is some waste but it is nominal.
b) Big government is needed in order to assume the responsibilities it has committed to and which Americans want and need.
c)Washington knows best and is better at taking care of the needs of free people because capitalism benefits the greedy who have no interest in helping their fellow man. The capitalistic system,which helped build our nation,is no longer capable of providing for our welfare only government can perform this essential act.
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Tom DeLay understands something far too many Republican politicians do not. DeLay was unwilling to lay down, he fought and won. He refused to be intimidated by a dishonest prosecutor. (See 3 below.)
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Tom Sowell again. (See 4 below.)
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Ed Lasky again. (See 5 below.)
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Wall Street vs Politicians. Who controls? (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1)
If you watched Fox News you would think the Republicans in the House, and Ted Cruz in particular, are out of their minds. Charles Krauthamer called their plan to defund ObamaCare a "charade". They basically made it sound as if there is no chance of the Cruz plan working.
However, on the Mark Levin Show, Ted Cruz explained a part of the plan Cruz admitted that the chances of doing anything in the Senate are very low. He admitted the ObamaCare defunding would be stripped from the CR by the Senate and it would be sent back to the House. (Though it would be great if he can force Senate Democrats to have to vote on it!)
Now, this is where the new information comes in. Up until now, and if you watched Fox News or any other station, we were led to believe the only options that would be left to the House after the CR came back from the Senate would be to either pass the CR or shut down the government. Neither of which would turn out well for the Republican or for our movement.
Cruz explained the next step would instead be for the House to start sending one CR at a time back to the Senate that funds part of the government, but not ObamaCare. So, for instance, they would pass a CR that funds Social Security and Medicare and send it to the Senate. What is the Senate going to do? Refuse to fund Social Security and Medicare? No way. Then the House sends a CR to fund the Military. Same thing happens. The Democrats will have no choice but to pass these CR's. If the Senate tries to add Obamacare to any of the CR's, the House votes it down and sends back another CR without ObamaCare. They repeat the process until the entire government is funded at sequestration levels, with the exception of ObamaCare. The Republican's never do anything to shutdown the government, but the Senate is in a position to be responsible for shutting down the government if they don't approve the individual CR's. If they refuse and keep sending back a single CR, it is they that will be shutting down the Government - while we will be protecting the American people from the economic and healthcare damage of ObamaCare. That my fellow Partiots is the "power of the purse" writ large!
I don't think even a handful of Republican House members understand this is the plan. Cruz sure waited long enough to spell it out!
Everyone knows ObamaCare is a disaster, but they need to know what the Republicans are doing to stop it. Public opinion is going to be critical. Republicans have offered better health care reform bills, such as the The American Health Care Reform Act.
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2)Israel's Stunning Response to Palestinian Aggression
By Daniel Pipes
In retaliation for the shooting on September 22 of an Israeli soldier, Sergeant Gabriel Koby, 20, killed by a sniper with a shot to the neckwhile patrolling in Hebron, the government of Israel has allowed the immediate resettlement of Beit Hamachpela (“House of the Patriarchs”) a three-story apartment building in that city near the Cave of the Patriarchs and close to where Koby was shot. Hebron’s Jewish community had purchased most of the building in March 2012 but its members were expelled from it by the Israeli government a few days later on the grounds that they lacked a residential permit. They subsequently won a lawsuit permitting them to return but did not have authorization to do so.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented, “Whoever tries to uproot us from the city of our forefathers will achieve the opposite. We will continue to fight terrorism and hit the terrorists with one hand, and we will continue to strengthen the settlement enterprise with the other hand.” Economy Minister Naftali Bennett noted that “we know how to build and settle. Not to kill. This would be the appropriate Zionist answer [to the violence].”
Comments:
(1) As someone who has long argued for a more robust Israeli response to unprovoked violence, this decision strikes me as very appropriate. It signals to the Palestinians that killing Israelis marches them exactly backwards. Next time, the Israeli response should be even more robust; as Aaron Lerner suggests, that could mean the settlement of a new neighborhood. This message would quickly get through and violence would abate.
(2) The Palestinian Authority did not condemn this attack, nor another one a day earlier, when an Israeli soldier, Tomer Hazan, also 20, was lured to his death in the West Bank, pointing again to the PA’s complete unsuitability as a “peace partner” for Israel. The farcical negotiations sponsored by John Kerry and overseen by Martin Indyk should be suspended until Mahmoud Abbas makes a convincing apology and takes steps to insure that such misbehavior is never repeated.
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3)Tom DeLay to Newsmax: 'I Never Lost My Good Name'
By John Gizzi
Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay tells Newsmax that he is planning a book and a lecture tour now that an appellate court has overturned the criminal conviction that put his career on hold for seven long years.
"Oh, man, I'm so full of joy!" exclaimed DeLay, 66, referring to last week's 2-to-1 ruling by a Texas Court of Appeals that deemed his 2010 money laundering conviction "legally insufficient."
"The Lord is so good to me and he deserves all the glory," said the Texas Republican.
In an exclusive interview with Newsmax, the former congressman said that the events of the last few days "are getting me geared up to come out and do things again."
Among the first of his projects will be writing a book with Jerome Corsi, best-selling author and one of the "Swift Boat" veterans who wrote "Unfit for Command," a book that raised questions about John Kerry's Vietnam service when he was the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004.
"I've spent a lot of time with him and our book is tentatively entitled 'Shut Her Down,'" DeLay said. "It's about the revival of the Constitution and how to return power from all those federal programs to the states, which have sovereignty."
Anticipating he also will make some money on the lecture circuit, Delay said, "You'd really be surprised to learn the number of people who have asked me to speak somewhere in the last two days."
Responding to reports in the Washington Post that quoted him saying, "I could do it" regarding congressional enactment of a continuing resolution that defunds Obamacare, the onetime master tactician of the House bristled.
"I never said 'I could do it' or claimed I could have gotten it through Congress," said DeLay, nicknamed "The Hammer" for his ability to line up votes for controversial measures in the House. "In fact, I have deliberately stayed out of the recent debate. I'm not involved."
At a time when House Republican leaders such as Speaker John Boehner are under fire from the right for not pushing a conservative agenda and younger tea party House members are criticized for driving their colleagues to the right, the Texan won't get into name-calling among the Republican side of the aisle he once dominated.
As he put it, "Speaker Boehner and the Republicans have a very hard job to do and I have praised the entire House Republican Conference for what they're doing on the (continuing resolution). I'm very supportive."
DeLay quit the House in 2006 after the charges were brought. He wasn't convicted for four more years. Last week the appeals court overturned all convictions.
DeLay recalled how he was at a prayer meeting in Washington Thursday when he learned of the news, and later went to the House floor. Boehner, he said, "was one of those who congratulated me. He always said I went through an awful time. Other Republicans came up and hugged me. And several Democrats shook hands with me, including [Minority Whip] Steny Hoyer."
DeLay is unworried about Republican lawmakers holding firm against funding Obamacare to the point of letting a government shutdown occur. He recalled when the government shut down twice in 1995 and Bill Clinton emerged on top over the House Republican leadership led by then-Speaker Newt Gingrich.
"But we eliminated more than 100 programs, agencies and offices," he said. "And we got Clinton to cut spending and eventually sign welfare reform after vetoing it twice.
"Because of the government shutdown, Clinton thought we were crazy. And for six years, Clinton never signed one major bill that he initiated. We held control of Congress throughout his presidency.
"It's amazing what you can accomplish when you control the part of Congress with power of the purse," DeLay said.
DeLay said he has been a legal target of Democrats in Texas and Washington since the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee filed ethics charges at the then-majority leader in 1996.
Several of those cases have been funded by prominent left-of-center bankrollers, including George Soros. Over the years, he said, his defense has cost $12 million.
" I don't have much money myself," said the former exterminator, "but I do have friends who helped me."
Newsmax asked DeLay about the famous quote of former Secretary of Labor Ray Donovan in 1987 after his own acquittal on corruption charges: "Which office do I go to to get my reputation back? "
"I don't feel that way, because I never felt my reputation was hurt," he told us, "God was with me the entire time. So I don't have to go anywhere to get back my good name. I never lost it.
"
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4)
High Risk, Low Yield
By Thomas Sowell
This has been the worst time, politically, for President Barack Obama since he took office. Recent polls reveal that public confidence in both his domestic and foreign policies has been falling, amid revelations about their defects and dangers. Even people who once supported and defended him have now turned against him.
There have even been rumblings against Barack Obama in the Congressional Black Caucus and among labor unions that were a major factor in helping him get elected and re-elected.
Two of President Obama's own former Secretaries of Defense have publicly criticized his gross mishandling of the Syria crisis, which has emboldened America's enemies and undermined our allies around the world.
As ObamaCare continues to go into effect, step by step, its high costs and dire consequences for jobs have become ever more visible -- as have the lies that Obama blithely told about its costs and consequences when it was rushed into law too fast for anyone to see that it would become a "train wreck," as one of its initial Democratic supporters in the Senate has since called it.
As more and more revelations have come to light about the cynical and dangerous misuse of the Internal Revenue Service to harass and sabotage conservative political groups, the lies that the Obama administration initially told about this, as part of the coverup, have also been exposed.
So have the lies told about what happened in Benghazi when four Americans were killed last year. Their killers remain at large, though they are known and are even giving media interviews in Libya.
With Congressional investigations still going on, and turning up more and more revelations about multiple Obama administration scandals, the political problems of this administration seem to loom ahead as far out as the eye can see.
What could possibly rescue Barack Obama from all these political problems and create a distraction that takes all his scandals off the front page? Only one thing: the Republicans.
By making a futile and foredoomed attempt to defund ObamaCare, Congressional Republicans have created the distraction that Obama so much needs. Already media attention has shifted to the possibility of a government shutdown.
Politically, it doesn't matter that the Republicans are not really trying to shut down the government. What matters is that this distraction solves Barack Obama's political problems that he could not possibly have solved by himself.
Should ObamaCare be defunded? Absolutely. It is an economic disaster and will be a medical disaster, as well as destroying the Constitution's protections of American citizens from the unbridled power of the federal government.
For that matter, President Obama deserves to be impeached for arbitrarily waiving laws he doesn't like, in defiance of his oath of office and the Constitution's separation of powers.
Chief Justice John Roberts also deserves to be impeached for his decision upholding ObamaCare, by allowing the government's taxing power to override all the Constitution's other provisions protecting American citizens from the arbitrary powers of government.
But, for the same reason that it makes no sense to impeach either President Obama or Chief Justice Roberts, it makes no sense to attempt to defund ObamaCare. That reason is that it cannot be done. The world is full of things that ought to be done but cannot in fact be done.
The time, effort and credibility that Republicans are investing in trying to defund ObamaCare is a high risk, low yield investment.
Even if, by some miracle, the Republicans managed to get the Senate to go along with defunding ObamaCare, President Obama can simply veto the bill.
There is a United States of America today only because George Washington understood that his army was not able to fight the British troops everywhere, but had to choose carefully when and where to fight. Futile symbolic confrontations were a luxury that could not be afforded then and cannot be afforded now.
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5)Obama the Storyteller
By Ed Lasky
President Obama unwittingly disclosed his modus operandi in a single statement back in 2012. The sentence explains why he has been able to both win elections and been such a failure once in office.
In the summer of 2012, President Obama refused to take responsibility for failures during his first term. As is his wont, he blamed others. In this case it was not the "usual suspect," Republicans, but all Americans. He told CBS News; Charlie Rose that his biggest mistake of his first term was not being a good enough storyteller:
"The mistake of my first term. . .was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. And that's important. But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times."
Mitt Romney mocked his answer, "Being president is not about telling stories. Being president is about leading, and President Obama has failed to lead."
But why wouldn't Obama think that success was based on telling stories? After all, his ability to tell stories was key to his string of election victories. He never had much of a record to run on (many Americans overlooked or did not care that his career was marked by "voting present" when not claiming credit for work he did not do) so to fill up a sparse resume he created stories.
As many politicians have done, he published a book "Dreams from My Father; A Story of Race and Inheritance" that served as the foundation of his political biography. Many of his early supporters -- and later ones as well -- were inspired to support him after reading the book. But a book by the Washington Post reporter and highly-regarded biographer David Maraniss confirmed reports from others (including New York Times reporter Janny Scott in her own book, "A Singular Woman," about Obama's mother) that the book was filled with "errors" -- characters that never existed or were "composites," incidents that never happened, girlfriends that never existed, mentors that were misidentified, and more. There was a pattern in the book that became a pattern when Obama became a politician and then the President
Perhaps the most disturbing fabrication in Obama's book was the tale that he routinely used when pushing ObamaCare and while on the campaign trail of his own mother's death. He blamed insurance companies for denying treatment. This was a blatant lie that he knew was a lie since he served not just as her son but as her lawyer.
During the 2008 presidential debate he peddled this fiction:
For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with insurance companies because they're saying that this may be a pre-existing condition and they don't have to pay her treatment, there's something fundamentally wrong about that.
Why was this lie more important than any others?
It was a foundational lie; a talisman for all that would follow for, as Victor Davis Hanson so keenly noted, a man who would lie about his own mother's death would "fudge" about anything, and do so shamelessly.
And so he has.
The storytelling worked for years. Indeed, they lifted him from a lowly state senator in Illinois to the highest office in the land. Such rags to riches stories are part of the American creed and often are celebrated. But another part of American history has been the role of con men.
He relied on his promises to, not to put too fine a word on it, dupe enough voters to put an X next to his name. When he was subjected to scrutiny, his critics were described as, inevitably, racists or birthers -- beyond the pale. He told people not to be "bamboozled" -- one of many instances of his practice of projection. To his base of low information voters, his words "hope and change" and "we are the ones we have been waiting for" were all the information they needed to cast their votes. Listeners swooned to the telepromptered mush regurgitated by him during his campaigns. It was manna from heaven. No wonder he is so welcome in Hollywood: moviemakers and Obama both manipulate people to suspend their disbelief.
Sadly, one of the features of modern technology is that it allows people to construct so-called "silos" around themselves -- narrowcasting "news" to them in such a limited and partisan way they see no need to look elsewhere for those pesky things known as facts. Wasn't the animated Life of Julia campaign just a juvenile fairytale, targeting the youth brigades that voted en masse for Obama? Why does the fable of the Pied Piper come to mind when considering how much harm Obama's policies have caused the youth who so yearned to believe in him?
But the chickens seem to have come home to roost, as Jeremiah Wright might trumpet.
Americans have finally seen the scandals emerge from the cocoon the media has wrapped around the White House. And his defenses are failing him. His storytelling has run its course, or so it seems. America does not view these as "phony scandals" -- there is phoniness aplenty in Washington these days but not when it comes to the range of scandals that have finally come to light.
The IRS scandal was not the work of a few wayward Cincinnati employees but extends far higher and deeper than Obama would have us believe. The IRS may be the most reviled part of the government and impacts many peoples' lives. The abuse of its powers to punish people who oppose Obama or desire reform in government strikes almost all Americans as just wrong and unfair in the most elemental sense.
Benghazi is not going away -- even if the media and Democrats treat the victims' families so disgracefully by ignoring their entreaties and dismissing their grief (compare and contrast the lionization of Cindy Sheehan for the years she attacked President Bush) and try to gag witnesses. Americans do care when people serving their nation are killed through the negligence of their leaders and those same leaders try to pin the blame on some gadfly in California.
All of his promises regarding Obamacare have been proven, as we approach its implementation and the other pesky thing known as reality intrudes, false.
His storytelling skills are failing him to such an extent that he says things easily proven to be lies ("I did not set a red line"). The toll of his storytelling has shown-he has run out of material.
The NSA scandal festers -- even if it takes foreign media to cover the topic because Obama has made America allergic to more government overreach and surveillance in his quest to expand his power over America while turning us into a banana republic, as Mark Steyn has written.
Granted, Obama has had some success in sending various scandals down the memory hole. Fast and Furious sadly seems to have vanished from the radar screens. Attorney General Eric Holder stonewalled and stalled the enquiring Republican minds in the House and ignored subpoenas. When that tactic started failing, President Obama rushed to shield Holder and the Department of Justice by invoking, in another example of Obama overreach, executive privilege.
But there are signs that the memory hole may be filling up. Perhaps the media has been offended by years of personal mistreatment by Obama's people. The surveillance of the Associated Press scandal may have been the straw that broke their collective back. The news that the Justice Department had been snooping into their phone records made big media the victims, for a change, instead of the rest of America. Certainly Benghazi victims and their survivors can be safely ignored but how dare the administration challenge the sanctity of journalists?
Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel (or pixels by the googolplex, in the updated version) is a cliché well-known in Washington. So the media suddenly seems more receptive to covering the lame duck in the White House who has mistreated them. Duck-hunting season has begun in Washington.
However, a different dynamic is at work. Successful con men, like sharks, need to keep moving They can move to an area, find and score against the marks and suckers, and move on to find a new group of innocent victims. But Obama has now been on the national stage for 7 years now; there is nowhere left to hide, no new suckers to find. Reality is there for all to see.
The media has taken note that Obama has been unable to move the needle on a range of issues (the nomination of Larry Summers, immigration, Syria, gun control, ObamaCare, the environment). Edward-Isaac Dovere wrote recently in Politico that "Barack Obama has still never really sold the American people on anything but himself." He did this by telling stories about himself and his plans -- stories peddled to the naïve and besotted ones. But Obama also has a history of fulfilling one of his promises -- that when others bring a knife to a fight to a political fight, he brings a gun. Character assassination of all his political opponents is a recurring motif. Was Romney really a felon, a tax cheat and murderer? Are Republicans all members of the Flat-Earth Society, birthers, greedy miscreants, racists and warriors against women? Yet he can deliver an error-ridden paean to the glories of Islam in Cairo, characterize terrorism as "man-made disasters," depict the Fort Hood massacre as "workplace violence" and use foggy language and euphemisms to fudge facts when it comes to dealing with America's adversaries.
He and Democrats have been flooding the airwaves and YouTube networks with this nonsense for years. Good stories need villains.
After 5-plus years of this invective, repeated ad nauseum, more and more people are tired of him. They no longer flock to their TVs to see him or crowd auditoriums to watch him. He should be glad he will not be running for election ever again. People are tuning him out.
So how has he responded? He has been hiring more storytellers and mythmakers to serve as his spinners.
One way he has reacted is by reaching out to the media and co-opting them by hiring an unprecedented number of the most well-connected to work for the White House (officially!). Recently, Richard Stengel, the top editor at Time for seven years, landed a new job at the State Department. He was at least the 15th major journalist to join Team Obama. They join siblings of the Presidents of ABC News and CBS News who work at the White House, including Ben Rhodes, who may have played a key role in the Benghazi cover-up.
Will this ploy work? How can Republicans respond?
Unfortunately, the GOP lacks good storytellers. John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Michael McConnell and others on the right might be fine men but can Americans relate to them as they did the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan?
Reverence for the office of the President should not shield this president from criticism. He certainly dishes it out, so why not let him have it as well? Obama has shown himself to be is unusually sensitive to criticism, whimpering that his opponents "talk about me like a dog." Even leaving aside the implied charge of racism in allegedly being treated as nonhuman, what President has ever whined in such a way?
When a bully has a glass jaw, doesn't that present a tempting target?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------\6)Who Rules: Politicians or Wall Street?
By Christopher Chantrill
Want to get the voters riled up for the next election? Blame the banksters. The politicians had a grand old time blaming the greedy bankers for the Crash of 2008, and President Obama was still at it last week with his Five Year Anniversary Speech. You know the kind of thing: "tough new rules on big banks... new protections that cracked down on the worst practices of mortgage lenders and credit card companies." And not a word about the CRA. What is not to like?
Now Scott Rasmussen is all riled up that the politicians serve Wall Street over Main Street. They rescued the big banks in 2008 with TARP & Co. even though the average Main Street American hated it. The financial and political elite just ignored public opinion and saved Wall Street over Main Street. So Wall Street rules. And I suppose that the Republican Party is the party of Wall Street.
If that is so then why does Nancy Pelosi complain that "Democrats put forward 140 votes, while just 65 Republicans supported President Bush's approach" in the initial vote on TARP? Wouldn't that suggest that the Democrats are the party of Wall Street and the Republicans have to be dragged kicking and screaming into voting to bail out the banksters?
I get into all kinds of trouble with this, because I maintain that it's the political class that owns Wall Street and not the other way around. Why is that? Because the money that politicians borrow through Wall Street gives them power: power to buy votes, power to finance world wars, power to pay off supporters. Look at the most successful borrowing operation in world history.
Using the Bank of England and selling the National Debt to everyone from Dukes to naval lieutenants in nautical fiction, the Brits went from a National Debt of 10 percent of GDP to 250 percent of GDP in a little over a century. Why did they do this? Because the Jews on Lombard Street were importuning them like Shakespeare's Shylock? Because the bankers had the Whig grandees in a head-lock? Not at all.
Britain's grew its gigantic National Debt to finance a century-long war against the French, ending, as we all know, in the Battle of Waterloo. The battle wasn't won on the playing fields of Eton, by the way, it was won with credit, sound, solid credit that could sustain a National Debt at 250 percent of GDP.
We all know what happens when the ancien regime doesn't have good credit. You get inflation, riots, and bloody revolution.
Now you know why the political elite, to Scott Rasmussen's dismay, ignored public opinion and bailed out Wall Street in 2008. It was not because they "served" Wall Street, but because without Wall Street there is no credit, and without credit there is no government. As long as the government can sell its debt, and spend money on its wars and its supporters, then all is well, and the ruling class can pat the bankers on the head and indulge them in their country estates and their beautiful wives.
Of course, any government understands the importance of beating up on the bankers after a financial crisis. Big fines was the usual policy back in 18th century France, and today nothing has changed. But don't forget that all the Wall Streeters ever get are those estates in the Hamptons and the right to contribute at political fundraisers. It is the politicians that get to be president and win the world wars and spend the government into insolvency. The bankers are just the middle-men.
Last week Bubbles Ben Bernanke choked on his forward policy guidance about "tapering" the Fed's bond-buying program, and decided not to taper after all. Is the Fed "serving" Wall Street? Probably not. Most likely Bubbles Ben is worried about Main Street. So we have the delicious spectacle of left-liberal President Obama -- who really only cares about hosing money at the Democratic Party faithful -- reduced to hosing money at Wall Street in order to keep Main Street from collapsing. Now we learn that in the first four years of the Obama economy the rich have prospered and the median American has lost ground, with the young, minorities and single women hardest hit.
Nobody is proposing that the bankers are really choirboys. Here's a story about Goldman Sachs cashing in on the ethanol scam. You want a war on fossil fuels? The bankers will be right there at your elbow, like innkeeper Thénardier, with their "Reasonable charges / Plus some little extras on the side!"
But if you have a problem with the economy, get a clue. Blame the politicians, not the bankers.
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