Wednesday, July 31, 2013

A Recipe For Disaster For His Own - Can/Will Republicans Respond?

If the scandals are so phony why the need to allegedly scuttle/stonewall them?  (See 1 below.)
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Another  Golf Joke:

Jim decided to tie the knot with his longtime girlfriend.

One evening, after the honeymoon, he was cleaning his golf shoes.

His wife was standing there watching him.

After a long period of silence she finally said: "Honey, I've been thinking, now that we are married  it's time you quit golfing. Maybe you should sell your golf clubs."

Jim gets this horrified look on his face.

She says, "Darling, what's wrong?"

”There for a minute you were sounding like my ex-wife.”

"Ex-wife!" she screams, "I didn't know you were married before!"

Jim says ”I wasn't!“
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The black population I grew up with in Birmingham were conservative and very close to their church.  As WW 2 progressed, many blacks from the south moved north where better and more jobs were available. Most never returned after the War, and, post desegregation, black culture changed and their conservative orientation became diluted. The Republican Party, which had every philosophical right to retain their vote, lost it because of inattention, stupidity and lack of effort.

The article below suggests, post Obama, the black vote could again become more fluid.  Whether Republicans will grasp that fact and do anything about it remains to be seen. Jack Kingston has a deserved following among his black constituents because he addresses their issues, appears before them and his staff provides excellent service.

It does not take rocket science to break down barriers. Some southern Republicans, as the article suggests,  have been effective but most believe penetration is hopeless and do not even make the effort. Black voters hold deep seated grievances, some rational some not, but ignoring them simply reinforces their blind embrace of The Democrats whose policies have been destructive and counterproductive whether blacks realize this or not or are even capable of or willing to admit it.

As I have said so often, Obama has been an unmitigated disaster for his own people but they cannot see beyond his color. He plays them like a violin while violating their dignity. His policies have made them more dependent and increased their unemployment and that is a recipe for generational disaster.(See 2 below.)
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My friend, John Podhoretz, has misgivings regarding Kerry's peace initiatives.  (See 3 below.)
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Can Hillary put a winning strategy together?

It would be nice to believe voters would demand such but she may not need  to do so.  Why?  Because the press and media will spin for her, women will gush for her and Republicans might find the odds beyond daunting regardless of whomever they select.

Anatomical voting may win the day once again over rational thinking. (See 4 below.)
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Out of town for next week!
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Dick
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1) Issa Accuses White House, IRS of Stonewalling on Targeting Probe
By Todd Beamon



Rep. Darrell Issa accused the Obama administration and its new IRS chief on Tuesday of obstructing his panel's investigation into the agency's targeting of tea party, conservative and religious groups.

If "the IRS continues to hinder the committee's investigation in any manner, the committee will be forced to consider use of compulsory process," the California Republican, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wrote in a letter to Internal Revenue Service Acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel.

The letter, which was reported by The Washington Times and CNN, was also signed by Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who also sits on the committee.

The letter, however, did not elaborate on exactly what steps Issa's panel might take, though he noted that impeding congressional investigators could result in prison terms of up to five years.

"Obstructing a congressional investigation is a crime," Issa and Jordan stressed in the letter.

"Despite your promise to cooperate fully with congressional investigations, the actions of the IRS under your leadership have made clear to the committee that the agency has no intention of complying completely or promptly with the committee's oversight efforts," the letter said.

"The systematic manner in which the IRS has attempted to delay, frustrate, impede, and obstruct the committee's investigation raises serious concerns about your commitment to full and unfettered congressional oversight," the document said.

The Issa-Jordan letter came on the same day when another House panel, the Ways and Means Committee, released an analysis showing that conservative groups faced more probing questions than did liberal groups seeking the same tax-exempt status.

Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp told the Times that conservative groups were asked three times as many questions, and were less than half as likely to get approval from the IRS.

Like the oversight committee, Camp said his investigators were also waiting on the IRS to turn over more information.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," he told the Times. "We have received less than three percent of the documents responsive to the investigation."

Meanwhile, an IRS spokeswoman, Michelle Eldridge, told both the Times and CNN that the agency was "aggressively responding to the numerous data requests we've received from Congress.

"We are doing everything we can to fully cooperate with the committees, and we strongly disagree with any suggestions to the contrary," Eldridge said.

The letter claimed, for instance, that the IRS has handed over only 12,000 of the more than 64 million pages of documents initially identified as potentially relevant to the investigation into the alleged unfair targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

"This incredibly slow pace of production has been an unnecessary attempt to frustrate the committee's oversight efforts," Issa and Jordan said in the letter.

Eldridge contended, however, that "while the volume of raw data collected ... is quite high, it is a misleading figure to use in order to determine the volume of material the IRS will ultimately produce."

"The vast majority of it is completely unrelated to the congressional investigations," she said.

"Once the data is limited to the time period in question, and the issue in question, we expect the final tally of produced documents will be far lower — in the neighborhood of 460,000 documents or fewer."

Eldridge said that 70 of 1,500 or so attorneys in the IRS chief counsel's office were currently working full time to respond to congressional inquiries into the matter.

It is a "time- and labor-intensive review process," she said.

In addition, the Issa-Jordan letter also complained that documents produced by the IRS "contain excessive redactions that go well beyond those necessary to protect confidential taxpayer information."

The letter also asserted that a senior IRS official — Cindy Thomas — had been "affirmatively prevented" from providing congressional investigators with relevant documents in her possession.

Additionally, Issa blasted the agency for allegedly trying to "carefully orchestrate the public release" of information contained in a 30-day review of the matter back in June — before providing the information to the committee.

Capitol Hill Republicans have long insisted that after President Barack Obama was first elected, the IRS started unfairly targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.

Democrats, however, argue the IRS improperly scrutinized groups on both the left and right as part of a clumsy attempt to administer vague election-related tax laws.

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2)In post-Obama America, small inroads with blacks would be big for GOP
By James Rosen and Kevin Thibodeaux
Down in Monroe, La., hard by Black Bayou Lake, U.S. Rep. Rodney Alexander wonders why Republican leaders in Washington haven't sought his advice on their initiative to improve the party's anemic standing among African-American voters.
Compared with his Republican peers in the House of Representatives, Alexander is unusually adept at drawing black votes.
"It's something they should have been doing to begin with," Alexander said of his party's new outreach to black voters.
Alexander's congressional district is one-third black, the largest share among the 234 House districts held by Republicans — none of whom is African-American.
Nationwide, nine in 10 black voters chose Democrats over Republicans in congressional races in November, and 93 percent of African-Americans supported President Barack Obama over GOP nominee Mitt Romney, exit polls showed.
Alexander drew 43 percent of his African-American constituents' votes, four times more than the typical Republican lawmaker gets, on his way to winning easy re-election in November, according to a McClatchy analysis of the outcome in 93 virtually all-black precincts in his district.
"You would think (the GOP) leadership would recognize that someone who gets 78 percent of the vote in a 33 percent black district might ask me how I do that, but you're the first person who's asked," Alexander told McClatchy.
Eleven of the 234 Republican House seats are in districts where at least one-quarter of eligible voters are African-Americans, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. Those districts are all in the South, spread among Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Virginia.
McClatchy was able to obtain November 2012 precinct-level election results, broken down by race, for six of the 11 districts. McClatchy analyzed 193 precincts with an average of 94 percent African-American voters in those six districts.
Support for the white Republican lawmakers among black voters in the 11 districts varies widely, from Alexander's 43 percent and the 30 percent standing enjoyed by fellow Louisianan Rep. John Fleming, to virtually no support — in the 1 percent range — for Reps. Tom Rice of South Carolina and Martha Roby of Alabama, according to the McClatchy analysis of 187 African-American precincts in their districts.
Alexander and the other lawmakers who represent those districts have some ideas for their GOP colleagues about how to court black voters: Go into their communities, avoid inflammatory language, don't come across like a big shot and answer all questions forthrightly no matter how tough.
"I don't think you'll find anybody at my town hall meetings who thought that I used harsh rhetoric," said Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina.
While Republicans' outreach to Hispanics has received broad attention of late, the Republican National Committee, led by chairman Reince Priebus, has launched a less-heralded bid to break Democrats' electoral stranglehold on African-American votes.
Under Priebus' new motto "Open for Repairs," the initiatives are part of Republicans' broader rebranding effort following Obama's decisive defeat of Romney with strong support from women, youth, blacks, Hispanics and Asians.
"Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country," a task force of GOP leaders concluded in a March report.
As they begin to look toward the post-Obama era, even modest improvements among African-American voters could bring Republicans big electoral gains.
President George W. Bush got 16 percent of the Ohio black vote in 2004, helping him carry the decisive state in his narrow re-election win. Only 3 percent of African-Americans in Ohio voted for Romney in November, by contrast, and the former Massachusetts governor had drop-offs among blacks in Florida, Virginia and other swing states that he lost.
Republicans, though, face formidable challenges in their quest to increase support among African-Americans:
—Their intense criticism of Obama is viewed by many blacks as personal and hostile, likely offsetting any steps they take to build goodwill with African-Americans.
"Today it's racial because you have a black man in the White House and they are determined to make him a failure," said James Bradford, a black constituent of Alexander in Jonesboro, La. "They are attacking every program that affects black folks. That may not be their intention, but that's what they're doing."
—The GOP-controlled House of Representatives has voted 37 times to repeal what Republicans deride as Obamacare, even though the Senate Democratic majority makes those votes purely symbolic. Voting dozens of times to repudiate Obama's signature legislative achievement strikes blacks as political overkill.
—Most congressional Republicans' desire to slash government spending has led them to target safety net programs that disproportionately impact African-Americans because a larger proportion of blacks than whites are poor.
David Bositis, who has tracked black voting for two decades while doing extensive polling and focus groups among African-Americans, said Republican officeholders in the South are setting their party back among blacks for years by blocking the enactment of the 2010 landmark health insurance law.
"Black support for Medicaid expansion is 90 percent, and yet these state legislatures and governors are not going to expand Medicaid," said Bositis, an analyst with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. "There will be dead black people because of them."
The Republican National Committee task force recommended developing "best practices of Republicans who were successfully elected in districts with a high population of African-American voters."
That description fits Alexander, a sixth-term congressman who suggests one good practice: Stop using rhetoric that offends many blacks.
As Exhibit A, Alexander offered Romney's "47 percent" campaign claim that most Obama supporters view themselves as victims who are on the government dole because they don't take responsibility for their lives.
"I supported Romney, but I was very disappointed he said that," Alexander said. "It hurt all of us (Republicans). That's one reason the Republican Party gets in trouble sometimes — assuming that if you are in need of help, you are asking for something you don't deserve."
Republicans don't expect a mass political conversion of African-Americans anytime soon. But especially once Obama leaves office, they see an opening for the party of Lincoln. It must start, party leaders say, with baby steps: Republican candidates going into black communities, explaining their positions and asking for African-Americans' votes.
In South Carolina, Mulvaney didn't fare nearly as well as Alexander among the blacks who make up one-quarter of his constituents, the ninth-biggest share among all Republican House members. Mulvaney drew just 4 percent of their votes in November, according to a McClatchy analysis of 19 heavily African-American precincts in his district.
Yet Mulvaney has attended town hall meetings hosted by the local branch of the NAACP, most recently in February, when he spent two hours answering questions from a mostly black audience of about 60 people. "I'm not doing this to try and get votes," Mulvaney told McClatchy afterward. "I'm doing this because these are people I represent."
Melvin Poole, a tax-preparation firm owner and head of the Rock Hill, S.C., branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said Mulvaney gained some respect and may have picked up a few votes.
People were impressed that the second-term lawmaker walked into Freedom Temple Ministries church in Rock Hill without aides or notes, carrying only a bottle of water, and then spent so much time there.
"He got some real tough questions — about the Affordable Care Act, about the budget cuts, about jobs," Poole recalled. "He didn't cut us off and run out of the building. He stayed until every question that anybody had was asked and answered. He was really down to earth. It was like standing next to a guy in the park and just talking."
Mulvaney was surprised in January when he attended Obama's second inauguration at the U.S. Capitol and a reporter asked him why he was there, given that most of his fellow Republican lawmakers were absent.
"That's absurd," Mulvaney responded. "Forty-five percent of the people I represent voted for this gentleman, so I'm going to come and represent them at this very important proceeding."
In Mississippi, Rep. Gregg Harper was the only one of three white Republican House members who attended an emotional memorial service last month at Arlington National Cemetery for Medgar Evers on the 50th anniversary of the civil rights leader's murder.
"What happened in that murder was a great tragedy," Harper told McClatchy. "It's part of our history — not one that we're proud of, but to see where we've come is pretty remarkable. And I just wanted to be there to pay my respects."
Echoing Mulvaney, Harper added: "I didn't do that hoping I might pick up minority voters. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do."
Some Southern states' responses to the Supreme Court's June 25 decision weakening the 1965 Voting Rights Act also might hinder Republicans' progress with African-Americans.
Republican leaders in several Southern states covered by the high court ruling, including Texas and North Carolina, have indicated they will move forward with voter ID laws that the Justice Department or federal courts had blocked or restricted. Leading civil rights groups argue that such laws depress the black vote by requiring driver's licenses or other forms of identification that relatively fewer African-Americans possess.
"It is hardly reaching out to blacks to push these harmful laws forward, particularly since there is no voter fraud that needs to be addressed with drastic legislation that disenfranchises African-Americans," said Garrard Beeney, a New York lawyer who represented the NAACP and other groups in the South Carolina voter ID case.
In Washington, the GOP rebranding task force recommended that the Republican National Committee hire black communications and political operatives to head the African-American outreach, which it has done. The GOP leaders made a slew of other proposals:

  • Establish ties with the NAACP and other civil rights groups.
  • Recruit party members at historically black colleges.
  • Develop a training program for African-American Republican candidates.
  • Create a database of black leaders.
  • Promote black staffers "who should be visible and involved in senior political and budget decisions."
  • Assemble a "surrogate list" of African-Americans to appear in black news media.
For Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican and possible 2016 presidential candidate, these steps are all well and good, but he's focused on more concrete measures.
Paul and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., are pushing a bill to authorize judges to disregard mandatory minimum sentences for an array of federal crimes, many of them drug-related. Such sentences, which give judges no leeway in setting punishment even for relatively minor crimes, have helped swell the country's inmate population, with a disproportionate impact on young black men.
Paul is developing separate legislation to prevent federal grants to police and sheriff departments from being tied to arrest rates, which he says leads officers to detain a disproportionate number of African-Americans.
"We think it's at the very least implicitly racist, and we're going to put a stop to it," Paul told McClatchy. Mulvaney, the South Carolina Republican, has learned to vet his language closely when speaking with African-American and Hispanic constituents — and to free it from Republican ideological baggage.
"In those ethnic groups, the word 'community' has a very powerful cultural meaning," he said. "To many white Republicans, we respond to that word as a synonym for the government. We sit here, and we extol the role of the individual over the role of the community, because many of us equate community with government. And I think by doing that, we alienate some folks to our message."
Mulvaney, though, thinks it will take a "transformational figure" to draw significant numbers of blacks to the Republican Party.
Mulvaney believes that such a figure will have to be an African-American. He names Sen. Tim Scott, a fellow South Carolinian who is the only black Republican in Congress, and J.C. Watts, the former college football star and lawmaker from Oklahoma.
Scott dislikes focusing on the color of his skin, much like Obama. He does, though, believe that his personal story of having risen from an impoverished childhood to a prominent place in American politics could gain him an audience that other Republicans don't have.
"It's really taking the time to share my personal journey, which has a lot of roadblocks, a lot of hurdles and a lot of failure, and connecting that to the American dream and how it is available to all of us," Scott said in an interview.
"And perhaps if pain and failure lead forward, I have an opportunity to share that with others," Scott said. "I hope to be part of bringing that message to (South Carolina) and maybe one day to the nation."
While Watts remains a loyal Republican, he's skeptical that his party's new push for African-American loyalists will have much staying power.
"The key is to put teeth into it and to be real about it," Watts said last month while attending the North Carolina Republican Convention in Charlotte. "I'll believe it when I see it."
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Kerry’s pathetic peace talks


Back in the 1960s, dorm rooms across America featured a cutesy wall poster that read, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” The similar question to be asked in light of the big-nothing event this week in Washington is: “What if they gave peace talks and nobody cared?”
You may not even know that so-called “peace negotiations” began yesterday between Israel and the Palestinians under the stage management of Secretary of State John Kerry.
There was a time when you would have known — oh, would you have known. The fact of the talks would’ve screamed at you from the front pages, would’ve begun every nightly newscast, would’ve been the subject of every editorial, every op-ed, every talking-head panel.
Now? Bupkis. That’s the Yiddish word for “nothing,” and it’s the mot juste for what’s going on here.

The urgent need to negotiate a peace between the two parties has always been based on a widely held theory that has been utterly discredited by recent history. The theory held that instability and tension in the Middle East was driven by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so solving it was the key to moving forward in the region.
Who on earth thinks that now? The Arab world has been on fire for 2 1/2 years now as a result of events and circumstances having absolutely nothing to do with Israel or the Palestinians. For more than two years, Islamists and would-be democrats and military-junta types in Egypt have been enmeshed in a titanic roundelay in which Israel does not figure.
Syrians are locked in a horrifyingly bloody civil war in which all the violent dysfunctions of the Arab world are now in play.
For once, no one is blaming the Jews, or acting as though the way to calm the storm is to create a Palestinian state.
(Many of those who preached this false gospel actually don’t want the storm calmed: They want Assad to fall in Syria, and they want the streets of Cairo to remain under siege so that neither the Army nor the Muslim Brotherhood feels it has the right to dominate Egypt.)
Meanwhile, back over where the peace talks are going to be happening, the Palestinian Authority is saddled with an increasingly dysfunctional government. The president, Mahmoud Abbas, can’t find himself a prime minister to run the place. The man in the job, the respected economist Salam Fayyad, quit earlier this year; his replacement lasted all of two weeks. The post is unfilled at what we are told may be a hinge moment in world history.
So, yeah.
Abbas has been governing illegally since 2009, after he canceled an election he feared he would lose. And this is the man — politically compromised at best with no one credible to back him up — who is going to make a highly complex deal with the Israelis? Please.
The Palestinian political system is cleaved in two, just as the land controlled by the Palestinians is divided. The Palestinian Authority rules over the West Bank; Hamas rules over the Gaza Strip. They hate each other.
Hamas has no interest in a deal with Israel; its stated purpose is the destruction of the Jewish state. And the Palestinian Authority has made it clear for the greater part of two decades that it can only accept a deal with Israel in theory, not in practice.
So here we are: Civil war in Syria, Egypt on fire and John Kerry trying to broker a deal with Palestinians who can’t deal and an Israeli prime minister who seems willing to go along with the charade (including releasing more than 100 terrorists from prison, a move the Israeli public hates) to make nice with the new man at Foggy Bottom.
This summer spectacular is already a bigger bomb than “The Lone Ranger.”
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4)The challenges that face Hillary Clinton
By Douglas Shoen
Young people are the core constituency that elected Obama twice — and in America, those under 30 simply do not have a chance at achieving the same success as their parents. Even if you look just at student loans, a small piece of the challenge affecting younger people, total outstanding loans topped $1 trillion for the first time in 2011. That’s a tremendous amount to pay back, especially with so few available jobs. Unless Clinton develops an agenda that speaks directly to young people’s needs and concerns, she will fall short.
More generally, she needs to develop a unifying agenda that seeks to reduce economic inequality, which has reached all-time highs, through growth-oriented policies. This cannot be done through redistributive policies of the type Obama repeatedly articulates.

Rather, it can be accomplished only with an agenda focusing on economic growth, tax reform and energy independence through the continued development of a multifaceted domestic energy industry — the kind of agenda that can attract a critical mass of support in both parties. She needs to move off fairness and redistribution to emphasize growth and tax policies that encourage investment.
Such an agenda would offer a stark, and arguably welcome, contrast with the administration’s incoherent populist program dedicated to more stimulus, higher taxes and, ultimately, redistribution of wealth.

Rather than dividing and polarizing America, as both parties have done, Clinton needs to take a different approach. She must emphasize the essential unity and singularity of the American experience in promoting a new and attainable American dream. To be sure, this will have different specific policy components for various groups: enterprise zones for impoverished communities, immigration reform and a renewed commitment to vocational training and community colleges to give everyone a fair shot at succeeding. She also will have to emphasize training and retraining for workers who have been marginalized by the current economy.

This approach would stand in sharp contrast to the president’s, with his recent emphasis on redistribution above all else and very little talk of tax reform and economic growth. While Obama has been hiding behind terms like “broken Washington” and “ineffective government,” Clinton has the opportunity to offer specificity and a clear, long-term vision for America.

Beyond America’s borders, Clinton needs to go back to the approach she took on foreign policy before her presidential campaign, when she spoke clearly and directly about coercive diplomacy. The United States has increasingly found itself in a weakened position, whether in Middle East hot spots like Egypt and Syria or toward rogue states like North Korea and Iran. NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s quest for asylum only accentuates the impression of an administration playing catch up on the international stage.

Politicians typically fight the last war. In the next campaign, Clinton will most likely be sadly mistaken if she thinks that trying to reprise the Obama 2012 campaign will maximize her chances of victory. Obama, after all, got only 51 percent of the vote running against a particularly inept candidate whose résumé and rhetoric directly played into the president’s class-based campaign. It may well help her in the primaries to have a super PAC run by two aging veterans of the Democratic left, Harold Ickes and James Carville, and staffed by two young veterans of the Obama campaign, Jeremy Bird and Mitch Stewart, but it provides little confidence that Clinton is planning to develop the type of inclusive, growth-oriented, optimistic message she will need in 2016.

Put simply, Clinton must provide clear evidence that she understands more than just the suffering the American people have faced in these past few difficult years. She must transcend Washington’s deepening partisan divisions and speak fundamentally about the need to unify and revitalize America with a set of policies that put her not on the left or the right but above the current political divide. That’s how she can win.
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Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Are Female Democrats Just Plain Horny?



Will Biden run as Hillary's Vice President?  Is the fix in?  Will 'Ole' Joe be a good lap dog, eat crow and suck it up for his Party?  Time will tell.
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Netanyahu understand the world's sycophants have bought into Palestinian grievances in order to curry favor with  Arabs/Muslims in the hope they will be let off the terror hook agenda.

The problem with concessions to Arabs is they only serve to increase their appetite for more.

The pressure Kerry is placing on Netanyahu will boomerang if history is a guide.
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Democrats capture the feminine vote yet many of their current candidates are up to their 'balls' in sex scandals.  Are female Democrats just plain horny?  What makes them gush over Bill Clinton while ignoring his abuse of women? Does the name Weiner mesmerize them?

Maybe with a nickname like Dick I should switch parties and get into politics!  (See 1 below.)
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Dick
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1)Sex scandals draw ire of Dem party elders
By 


Wherever Anthony Weiner goes on the streets of New York these days, he's surrounded by reporters, microphones and cameras - a crush that would ordinarily signal intense interest in a surging campaign. For the beleaguered Weiner, it portends his likely demise.

But he presses on, despite the loss of his campaign manager, blunt face-to-face criticism from tough New Yorkers, and a new Quinnipiac University poll showing him in fourth place. "I'm taking a bet basically that people are more interested in hearing solutions to their problems than hearing about things in my background,” he told one reporter Monday. “And we'll see if that's the case."

Even his wife, in her loyalty to her husband, is now being criticized for risking the presidential hopes of her mentor, Hillary Clinton.

In a “Today” appearance Monday morning, NBC Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell said, "This is getting to the point where it is really splashing up against the Clintons because it's almost unavoidable that people are making comparisons."

In a broader sense, the Weiner sex scandal, coupled with those of San Diego mayor Bob Filner and New York comptroller candidate, Eliot Spitzer, now compose a trio of targets for Democratic Party elders -- who are visibly growing weary of the scandals. Last week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said, "The conduct of some of these people that we're talking about here is reprehensible, is so disrespectful of women."

On Sunday's “Meet the Press,” David Axelrod, former senior adviser to President Obama, said of Weiner, "He is not going to be the next mayor of New York, he is wasting time and space."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein on CNN's “State of the Union” was equally critical of San Diego Mayor Bob Filner. "I don't think that somebody who is lacking a moral compass really sets a role model or really will provide the kind of leadership that San Diegans want," she said.

That combined criticism for three of the party's heavy hitters represents a sea change from what some believe is a scandal double-standard.

"I do think there is a double standard," Karl Rove told Fox News on Monday. "If a Republican is involved in a sex scandal, it's used to depict the entire party as hypocritical because it's a party of traditional family values. When Dems do this kind of stuff,  it's general entertainment and in some instances a basis for getting them back into politics," he said.
There are cases of Republicans who have survived sex scandals. South Carolina's former governor Mark Sanford won a congressional seat this term after being censured when he admitted to a secret affair. Louisiana Sen. David Vitter also survived marital  indiscretions. Even Bible Belt Republican Congressman Dan Burton, who admitted to fathering a child out of wedlock, was re-elected to seven terms before retiring.

But political redemption requires penance. Scandal survivors have some traits in common -- a willingness to admit their faults, and to seek forgiveness, or psychological help. Denial doesn't work, especially in New York, where the concentration of tabloid media is an unrelenting obstacle to resurrecting one’s political career.
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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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