In the hot tub but where are the virgins?
This memo was written before I left for Litchfield and before Navy Seals killed bin Laden. I congratulate our intelligence forces, our elite Seals and even Obama on the assumption he did, in fact, initiate the directive to kill the world's number one terrorist. Two views! (See 1 and 1a below.)
That said, I also am reminded of the fact that GW laid the interrogation and intelligence foundation that allowed Obama to take the action he did. Yet, Obama and and his Left Wing friends vilified GW and Cheney, accusing them of destroying our Constitutional freedoms and making us the scourge of the world.
Now Obama is a hero.
---
Trump may have smoked out the fact that Obama was apparently born in Hawaii but several facts remain that go to the very essence of the man and why he must be removed from office. They are:
a) The fact that his father was Muslim and Obama was influenced, as all children are, by their parents, suggests he has unrealistic leanings towards Islamism.
b) That Obama belonged to a church whose reverend displayed an antipathy towards Western Culture and Obama remained a member of that church for 20 years resigning only after it began to have questionable and negative campaign consequences.
c) Many of Obama's past and close associations were avowed radicals and some even Communists and even his wife's comment about not being proud of our nation reflect threads of attitudes that run throughout the fabric of the man's character and thinking. (See 2 below.)
d) Obama's formal education was in two of the more extreme liberal and elitist colleges and many of his professors were far leftists in their thinking and teachings.
e) With the above as a background it is quite evident their cumulative influence is constantly revealed in Obama's actions and policies.
This is why he seems to have a lesser view of our nation's uniqueness and sees America as a negative force upon the world stage. This is apparently why he takes comfort in dissing our British and Israeli allies. This is why he seeks to appease our foes and believes they are more benign than radical and one can appeal to their better nature as if terrorists and radical Islamists have a better nature.
Obama has mixed feelings about the use of force in executing policy and seems to believe empty threats are more effective and that Iran will bend to them, Syria's dictator will cease slaughtering Syrians and Qaddafi will leave with his tail between his flowing robes.
Obama is also full of himself and has an inflated view of his abilities and effectiveness and yet, is most aggressive and outright ruthless when it comes to intruding government into our lives and our economy - witness his recent reluctance to defend Boeing's decision to move a plant to South Carolina which his government is thwarting, Obama's going out of his way to strip General Motors' bond holders of their legal and contractual rights and his constant defense of unions policies which both have had a bankrupting effect on state finances as well as a crippling one on their education systems.
I have yet to mention "Obamascare!"
Obama's selection of unelected czars, appointments of administration bureaucrats who also trample on our Capitalistic system and an Attorney General who failed to pursue Black Panther law breakers and continues his investigation of CIA personnel for their intelligence operations is further evidence of a president and his administrative appointments who are outside the mainstream.
Finally we have a president who swore to defend and protect yet recently played favorites when responding to tragedies in Alabama while dragging his feet regarding raging fires in Texas and a president who even brought a law suit against Arizona's for defending their own borders after the federal government, Obama's government, failed to do so.
We also have a president who, in less than a full term, has spent more money and accomplished less economically speaking than any of his predecessors and who has displayed petty racial and partisan pique against those who oppose his thinking and who offer legitimate and debatable alternatives to his questionable and destructive policies.
Just recently Obama has chosen to politicize government bids. (See 3 below.)
Finally, we have a president, whose three year term in office, is witnessing a complete reversal of our influence in the Middle East. A president who refuses to allow development of our nation's known and available energy resources yet remains comfortable allowing Americans to enrich Muslim and Arab nations leaving us strategically vulnerable.
And this is why I consider Obama not only one of the worst presidents but the most dangerous and this is what Republican candidates should be presenting as reasons why Obama must be turned out of office.
As for Donald Trump, if he thinks churlish behaviour and vulgarity is the way to The Oval Office, if Trump believes theatre is the road to follow then he too demeans the very office he seeks and which Obama currently occupies. Obama by his own actions has embarrassed us as a people and made us smaller and less influential as well. Is Trumps's mission to trump Obama?
We are a great nation which bankrupted itself by an unwillingness to pay for unobtainable and irrational progressive domestic goals. We are a nation which has spent itself in foreign matters, many of which were based on indefensible premises where we aligned ourselves with corrupt leaders and we dispensed our treasures only to further enrich those who failed to serve the interests of their people.
Obama came to office attacking everything his predecessor achieved and then embraced and expanded upon that of which he complained. (See 4 below.)
Again, just more reasons why Obama does not deserve an opportunity to further destroy our nation.
Obama is the personification of "The Peter Principle" and because he has the power to pursue his inflated ego and feelings of self-importance we must remove him from office or suffer the continued dire consequences. (See Porter Stansberry's abbreviated comments in 5 below.)
---
Is this what progressives and political correctness has brought upon us? You decide. (See 6 below.)
---
Slick idea? You decide. (See 7 below.)
---
Dick
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1)Skulking Towards bin Laden: Obama Overridden by Military and Intel Officials in Takeout of OBL?
As Obama continues to politicize and mine the take down of Osama Bin Laden and the outrageous "Islamic burial" that followed, new details emerge of his reluctance and refusal to sign off on the mission. It is the height of hypocrisy and crass opportunism to draw out the release of the death photos so as to prolong the news cycle on the story, and to neglect the tornado-ravaged parts of the country -- instead, Obama campaigns at Ground Zero on Thursday for an "O-victory lap," while it appears Obama may have been dragged kicking and screaming to the OBL operation.
The story that follows is deeply disturbing, but hardly surprising. When news broke that Obama rejected bombing the complex last month, one had to wonder why. It was reported that Obama feared collateral damage, despite being assured that the walls of the complex were high enough so that no civilians would be killed. Instead, he risked losing Americans in a mano-a-mano raid.
A reluctant American president who was ultimately overridden by senior military and intelligence officials to finally take out terrorist Osama Bin Laden… Ulstermann (hat tip CO)
1a)The bin Laden Raid and the 'Virtues of Boldness' Paul Wolfowitz on the death of Osama, the pro-democracy Arab Spring, and the importance of U.S. leadership
By JAMES TARANTO
One morning when he was deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz had breakfast at the Pentagon with a group of congressmen. His boss, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "was talking about the difficulties of predicting the future and the dangers of surprise," Mr. Wolfowitz recalls. "He said, 'You know, historically every time we think the threat has gone away, something comes along and surprises us.'" Mr. Wolfowitz's next meeting was interrupted by the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Soon after, the Pentagon was evacuated after being hit by another hijacked aircraft.
Recent months have brought new surprises, as a wave of pro-democracy demonstrations has swept across the Arab world. Then, this week, President Obama announced that al Qaeda's leader was dead.
"The most striking thing is that even before Osama bin Laden was killed, he seemed largely irrelevant to the Arab Spring," Mr. Wolfowitz says when I ask about the confluence of the two events. "I don't know of a single instance of these Arab freedom fighters holding up pictures of bin Laden. I know many instances of them displaying American flags in Benghazi or painting 'Facebook' on their foreheads in Cairo. The idea of freedom . . . is absolutely contradictory to what bin Laden stood for, which was . . . taking Muslims back to some medieval theocracy and encouraging people to die not for freedom but to go to paradise and to kill innocent people along the way. The contrast is really striking."
The Arab Spring is a source of satisfaction to Mr. Wolfowitz, whose advocacy of democracy promotion as a "fundamental point of strategy" made him a demon figure for the antiwar left. Typical was a speech delivered by an obscure Midwestern state lawmaker in October 2002, as Congress considered military action in Iraq: "What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by . . . Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne."
The speech was typical, but the speaker turned out not to be. Barack Obama left the Illinois Senate in 2004 and now sits in the Oval Office. When I dropped in on Mr. Wolfowitz this week, we sat in a conference room at the American Enterprise Institute, the think tank he joined after a stint as president of the World Bank. He is now an outside critic of the administration in power—albeit, at 67 and with several decades' experience conducting foreign policy under six presidents, a more seasoned one than the 41-year-old Mr. Obama was.
He says that pro-democracy sentiment in the Mideast caught President Obama by surprise as early as June 2009. That was when Mr. Obama spoke in Cairo in what the administration touted as "a new beginning" in U.S. relations with the Muslim world. The White House transcript shows that the president was interrupted by applause when he said: "The fourth issue that I will address is democracy." Mr. Wolfowitz observes that Mr. Obama "stumbled on the next sentence," which began: "I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years . . ."
Mr. Wolfowitz imagines what went through the president's mind: "He realized, 'There's something not quite right here. I'm about to say it's controversial, and . . . they've applauded the mere mention of the topic.' Which says that people do somewhat distinguish between the idea of democracy and freedom and the idea of the United States."
The president then cited the Iraq war and declared: "No system of government can or should be imposed [on] one nation by any other." To Mr. Wolfowitz, that is a straw man: "We did not go to war in Afghanistan or in Iraq to, quote, 'impose democracy.' We went to war in both places because we saw those regimes as a threat to the United States." Once they were overthrown, what else were we going to do? "No one argues that we should have imposed a dictatorship in Afghanistan having liberated the country. Similarly, we weren't about to impose a dictatorship in Iraq having liberated the country."
Mr. Obama also missed the mark in 2002 when he characterized Mr. Wolfowitz as an ideologue. In fact, his views on democracy are the product of practical experience, not visionary theorizing. In his early years in government, in the 1970s, he dealt "with pretty much entirely security issues" at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. "I had a very cautious view of regime change, to put it mildly," he adds, noting that in 1979 pro-American dictatorships in both Iran and Nicaragua fell to hostile and more repressive tyrannies.
World-wide, he says, democracy had been "in constant retreat" since the end of World War II. "If you looked around the world in 1981, you could say free, democratic institutions are a luxury that only the developed world enjoys—that is to say, the Anglo-Saxon world plus Western Europe plus Japan."
That began to change when Ronald Reagan came to Washington. Mr. Wolfowitz joined the State Department and helped bring about democratic transitions in South Korea and the Philippines. The 1980s and '90s saw democratic advances elsewhere in East Asia as well as in Latin America, Eastern Europe and parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
By the end of the 20th century, the Arab Middle East had become an outlier—the least democratic region in the world. If that is changing at last, Mr. Wolfowitz believes it is because Arabs have been inspired by progress elsewhere—by "seeing so many other people enjoying freedom."
But has the Arab Spring occurred because of the Iraqi experience or in spite of it? When I ask Mr. Wolfowitz, he is hesitant: "It's a fascinating question, and one should probably simply . . . say it's in the category of the unknowable."
Pressed to elaborate, he does so judiciously: "I think Iraq took so long and was so bloody and is still so uncertain that it would be hard to say that it has inspired people." But he argues that if Saddam Hussein were still in power, "the last thing he'd want to see is democratic revolutions anywhere." Because Saddam would be "actively supporting" fellow dictators, "we very likely would not be seeing what's happening. . . . The absence of Saddam is a huge weight off the Arab world."
He does see a source of inspiration in Tunisia, where the Arab Spring began. "If there's any country in the Arab world that should be in the position that South Korea was . . . that is to say, a country with a large enough middle class and sufficiently advanced institutions that it should be able to manage a transition to democracy, Tunisia's the one—arguably the most advanced country in the Arab world. . . . Tunisia's way ahead of Iraq in terms of what it could potentially do."
Mr. Wolfowitz sharply criticizes the Obama administration for its response to the Mideast's democratic wave. "On Iran, it was just terrible. To me the analogy is in 1981, when martial law was declared in Poland. . . . Reagan saw it as an opportunity to drive a wedge into this opening, and he and the pope went at it. . . . You had a similar opportunity in Iran in June of 2009," after the stolen election set off massive protests, he says. "What did we do? We sat on our hands. Why?" Because the Obama administration "entertained this hope that we could negotiate with the regime, and therefore we didn't want to antagonize them. . . . Which, by the way, isn't even a smart way to negotiate. It suggests such an eagerness to negotiate that the other guy knows he has you."
"Egypt we just bungled completely," he adds. "I mean, our position was always three days behind whatever was actually going on." As for Syria, "we've failed under both [the Bush and Obama] administrations to recognize how hostile [Bashar] Assad is to everything we want to accomplish in that region," even when Assad backed foreign fighters killing American soldiers in Iraq. "Now he's clearly declared himself as an enemy of his own people. At the very least, symbolism matters, and the symbolism of leaving an American ambassador in Damascus. . . . He should have been out a long time ago."
Then there's Libya, where the Obama administration has intervened militarily with the desire, if not exactly the mission, to topple a dictator. "I think they did the right thing with the military action," Mr. Wolfowitz says. But he faults the manner in which it has been done. Mr. Wolfowitz would give the rebels weapons, training, diplomatic recognition and help with communications, possibly to include jamming Libyan state television.
Instead, "we have let [Moammar Gadhafi] regain the momentum three or four times now in the course of this thing, and it's a war of momentum. If it bogs down, then you have a stalemate, which becomes a playground for the worst elements in the Arab world. It risks repeating what we did in Bosnia, where we had this arms embargo on both sides, but it simply empowered the aggressors. . . . There's just no sense of urgency in this administration on the issue."
All these specifics add up to a forceful critique of "leading from behind," as an unnamed presidential adviser memorably described the Obama foreign-policy approach in an interview with The New Yorker last month. "I think part of what is needed in dealing with everything from Iran to Syria to Libya to even our friends like the Egyptians is to realize that we should be leading a little bit more from the front than from behind," Mr. Wolfowitz says.
"When you have freedom sweeping the Arab world, and you have people willing to risk their lives not as suicide bombers to kill innocent people, but to save lives and to gain freedom, the United States, first of all, should recognize generally speaking which side of that issue we're on. . . . There are all kinds of ways it can end badly, but that would seem to me to be even more reason to be deeply engaged—to find people who want it to end the right way and to support those people, rather than holding back."
Yet Mr. Wolfowitz tempers his criticism with forbearance. "I think there's a learning curve," he says. "I think they're climbing up the learning curve." He takes encouragement in the president's "gutsy call" of sending men to finish off bin Laden in person rather than dispatching him with a missile. "Obama has just made the toughest decision of his presidency, arguably," Mr. Wolfowitz says. "It wasn't a simple decision. . . . He was in a position where he'd have to take responsibility for it if it went badly. It's gone well. I hope he's learned some of the virtues of boldness."
Mr. Taranto, a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board, writes the Best of the Web Today column for OpinionJournal.com.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)Valerie Bowman Jarrett (born November 14, 1956) is a senior advisor and assistant to the president for Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs for the Obama administration. She is also a Chicago lawyer, businesswoman, and civic leader. Prior to that she served as a co-chairperson of the Obama-Biden Transition Project.
Personal: Jarrett was born in Shiraz, Iran to American parents James E. Bowman and Barbara Taylor Bowman. Her father, a pathologist and geneticist, ran a hospital for children in Shiraz, as part of a program where American doctors and agricultural experts sought to help jump-start developing countries' health and farming efforts. When she was five, the family moved to London for one year, returning to Chicago in 1963.
In 1966 her mother, Barbara T. Bowman, was one of four child advocates that created the Erikson Institute. The Institute was established to provide advanced knowledge in child development for teachers and other professionals working with young children.
As a child she spoke Persian and French.[3]
Jarrett graduated from Northfield Mount Hermon in 1974. She earned a B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1978, and a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from the University of Michigan Law School in 1981.[citation needed]
In 1983 Jarrett married Dr. William Robert Jarrett, son of famed Chicago Sun-Times reporter Vernon Jarrett. She attributes her switch from a private to a public career to their daughter Laura's birth and her own desire to do something that would make the daughter proud.[4]
To one reporter's e-mailed question about her divorce, she replied, "Married in 1983, separated in 1987, and divorced in 1988. Enough said."[4] In a Vogue profile, she further explained "We grew up together. We were friends since childhood. In a sense, he was the boy next door. I married without really appreciating how hard divorce would be."[4] William Jarrett died of a sudden heart attack in 1993.[4]
Career: Chicago politics. Jarrett got her start in Chicago politics in 1987 working for Mayor Harold Washington[5] as Deputy Corporation Counsel for Finance and Development.[6]
Jarrett continued to work in the mayor's office in the 1990s. She was Deputy Chief of Staff for Mayor Richard Daley, during which time (1991) she hired Michelle Robinson, then engaged to Barack Obama, away from a private law firm. Jarrett served as Commissioner of the Department of Planning and Development from 1992 through 1995, and was Chair of the Chicago Transit Board from 1995 to 2005.[6]
Business administration: Until joining the Obama Administration, Jarrett was the CEO of The Habitat Company, a real estate development and management company which she joined in 1995. She has been replaced by Mark Segal, a lawyer who joined the company in 2002, as CEO. Daniel E. Levin is the Chairman of Habitat, which was formed in 1971.[7] Jarrett was a member of the board of Chicago Stock Exchange (2000–2007, as Chairman, 2004–2007).
She is also the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University of Chicago Medical Center,[6] Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the University of Chicago and a Trustee of Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry.[8] Jarrett serves on the board of directors of USG Corporation, a Chicago based building materials corporation.
Jarrett's previous year's income, in a 2009 report, was a $300,000 salary and $550,000 in deferred compensation from The Habitat Executive Services, Inc. The Wall Street Journal also reported she disclosed payments of more than $346,000 for service on boards of directors that reflect her political ties, and work in Chicago real estate and community development. She was paid $76,000 for service as a director of Navigant Consulting, Inc. a Chicago-based global consulting group with governmental clients. She received $146,600 from USG, and $58,000 to serve on the board of Rreef American REIT II, a real estate investment trust based in San Francisco. The Chicago Stock Exchange, Inc., paid her $34,444.[9]
Advisor to Barack Obama: Obama speaks to Jarrett and other aides during a senior staff meeting in August 2009.Jarrett is one of President Obama's longest serving advisors and confidantes and was "widely tipped for a high-profile position in an Obama administration."[10][11]
“ Unlike Bert Lance, who arrived from Georgia with President [Jimmy] Carter and became his budget director, or Karen Hughes, who was President [George W.] Bush's communications manager, Ms. Jarrett isn't a confidante with a particular portfolio. What she does share with these counterparts is a fierce sense of loyalty and a refusal to publicly say anything that may reflect poorly on the candidate — or steal his thunder.[10] ”
On November 14, 2008, President-elect Obama selected Jarrett to serve as White House Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Relations and Public Liaison.[12]
Jarrett is one of three Senior Advisors to President Obama.[13] She holds the retitled position of Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement,[13] managing the White House Office of Public Engagement, Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, Office of Urban Affairs, and Chairs the White House Commission on Women and Girls, and White House Office of Olympic, Paralympic, and Youth Sport.[14] She said that the 2011 report Women in America which the administration produced for the Council on Women and Girls would be used to guide policy-making.[15]
Relationship with President Obama: In 1991 Miss Jarrett, as Deputy Chief of Staff to Mayor Richard Daley, interviewed Michelle Robinson for an opening in the mayor’s office, and offered her the job immediately.[16] Ms. Robinson asked for time to think and also asked Jarrett to meet her fiancé, Barack Obama. The three ended up meeting for dinner. After the dinner, Michelle took the job with the mayor's office, and Valerie Jarrett reportedly took the couple under her wing, “introduc[ing] them to a wealthier and better-connected Chicago than their own,” and taking Michelle with her when she left the mayor’s office to head Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development.[16][17]
References^ Terry, Don (July 27, 2008). "Insider has Obama's ear: What's she telling him?". Chicago Tribune. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/chi-072708-jarrett,0,1640738.story. Retrieved 2008-08-23.
^ King, John (November 9, 2008). "Obama wants Valerie Jarrett to replace him in Senate". CNNPolitics.com. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/11/09/source-obama-wants-valerie-jarrett-to-replace-him-in-senate/.
^ Kantor, Jodi (November 23, 2008). "An Old Hometown Mentor, Still at Obama’s Side". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/24/us/politics/24jarrett.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp. Retrieved November 24, 2008.
^ a b c d Barack's Rock, Jonathan Van Meter, Vogue, October 2008; accessed December 15, 2008.
^ "Campaign 2008: The Family Friend: Valerie Jarrett". Newsweek. May 19, 2008. http://www.newsweek.com/id/136349. Retrieved 2008-08-23.
^ a b c University of Chicago News Office (June 13, 2006). "Valerie Jarrett to lead expanded Board of University of Chicago Medical Center". Press release.
^ "Habitat promotes veteran to CEO" by Alby Gallun, ChicagoRealEstateDaily.com (Crain's), Feb. 5, 2009. Retrieved 4/5/09.
^ "Valerie Jarrett Profile". Forbes.com. 2008. http://people.forbes.com/profile/valerie-b-jarrett/56351. Retrieved August 23, 2008.
^ "Hedge Fund Paid Summers $5.2 Million in Past Year" by John D. McKinnon and F. W. Farnum, wsj.online, April 4, 2009. Retrieved 4/5/09.
^ a b Belkin, Douglas (May 12, 2008). "For Obama, Advice Straight Up: Valerie Jarrett Is Essential Member of Inner Set". Wall Street Journal. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121055336572783989.html?mod=special_page_campaign2008_topbox.
^ Bai, Matt (August 10, 2008). "Is Obama the End of Black Politics?". New York Times Magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/magazine/10politics-t.html?em=&pagewanted=all.
^ Kantor, Jodi (November 14, 2008). "Obama Hires Jarrett for Senior Role". New York Times. http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/obama-taps-jarrett-for-senior-role/. Retrieved January 18, 2010.
^ a b "Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett". The Administration: White House Staff. WhiteHouse.gov. http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/staff/valerie_jarrett/. Retrieved January 29, 2009 Valerie B. Jarrett is Senior Advisor and Assistant to the President for Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Liaison.
^ Kantor, Jodi (November 14, 2008). "Longstanding Obama Adviser Gets Senior Role at the White House". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/us/politics/15jarrett.html.
^ Stolberg, Sheryl (March 1, 2011). "White House Issues Report on Women in America". The New York Times. http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/white-house-issues-report-on-women-in-america/. Retrieved March 5, 2011.
^ a b Van Meter, Jonathan (October 2008). "Barack’s Rock". Vogue. http://www.style.com/vogue/feature/2008_Oct_Valerie_Jarrett/.
^ Draper, Robert (July 26, 2009). "The Ultimate Obama Insider". New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/magazine/26jarrett-t.html.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3)Obama's 'Gangster Politics' The president is about to order companies that do business with the federal government to disclose their political donations.
By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL
Like this columnist President Obama has officially kicked off his 2012 re-election campaign, and don't Republicans know it. The president is expected any day now to sign an executive order that routs 70 years of efforts to get politics out of official federal business.
Under the order, all companies (and their officers) would be required to list their political donations as a condition to bidding for government contracts. Companies can bid and lose out for the sin of donating to Republicans. Or they can protect their livelihoods by halting donations to the GOP altogether—which is the White House's real aim. Think of it as "not-pay to play."
Whatever you call it, the order amounts to the White House brazenly directing the power of government against its political opponents—and at a time when the president claims to want cooperation on the budget and other issues. Senate Republicans from Mitch McConnell to Susan Collins are fuming, warning this is one political sucker punch too far, an unabashedly partisan move that will damage Senate work.
Minority Leader McConnell in an interview calls the order the "crassest" political move he's ever seen. "This is almost gangster politics, to shut down people who oppose them. . . . I assure you that this going to create problems for them in many ways—seen and unseen—if they go forward."
That might not matter to a White House that's already monomaniacally focused on 2012Democrats are obsessed with the money game, in particular rubbing out any GOP opportunities that came with the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision to restore some corporate free-speech rights. Democrats last year tried to ram through the Disclose Act, designed to muzzle those new corporate rights, while allowing unions to continue spending at will.
When the party failed to get the bill through even an overwhelmingly Democratic Senate, the White House stepped up. The draft order, which came out last month, would require federal bidders to supply a complete list of all political contributions made by the company, its political action committee, and its senior executives—going back two full years. (Richard Nixon would be impressed.) More astounding, the order requires the list to include donations made to third-party political groups—disclosure that is not currently required by law, and that is, as a result, surely unconstitutional.
Ever audacious, the White House is spinning this as "reform," claiming taxpayers deserve to know how federal dollars being paid to contractors are being spent in campaigns. This might hold (a drop of) water if the executive order also required all the (liberal) entities that get billions in taxpayer dollars via federal grants and funding—unions, environmental groups, Planned Parenthood—to disclose also. It doesn't.
The whole reform language is "Orwellian," says Ms. Collins. It's a measure of the order's naked political nature that she's leading the pushback—spearheading a GOP letter to the president and briefing Republican senators at a policy lunch this week. This is the same Susan Collins who has bucked her party in the past on campaign-finance issues, voting for McCain-Feingold.
The administration's argument that this is about disclosure is "a fraud," she declares. The very notion "offends me deeply," she says, since the order undermines decades of work by her and others to ensure federal business is free of corruption of political influence.
The politics of the order have been so ugly that she argues the media has missed the equally profound policy implications. It's the "equivalent of repealing the Hatch Act," she argues, the seminal 1939 law designed to weed out federal pay-to-play.
It has taken decades to create a federal contracting system based on "best prices, best value, best quality," Ms. Collins says, and the effect of the Obama order is to again have "politics play a role in determining who gets contracts." Companies may choose not to bid, which will reduce competition and raise government costs. And the order puts "thousands of civil servants" who oversee contracting "in an impossible situation."
The White House hasn't bothered to respond to Ms. Collins's letter, though Mr. Obama has had plenty of time for campaigning. In recent weeks he's held fund-raisers in Chicago, California (six events in two days) and New York, while next week he heads to Texas. Supporters are bragging the campaign may break the $1 billion threshold, money that will go even further if the White House can simultaneously use its executive order to dry up Republican donations.
The GOP has stayed mum on what it will do if Mr. Obama chooses to inject that level of partisanship into Washington's current debates. His Osama bin Laden victory notwithstanding, Americans remains unhappy with the president's performance on jobs, the economy and debt. If the president wants to shut down the possibility of bipartisan accomplishment on those fronts, a raw, election-motivated attack on Republicans is one sure way to do it.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
4)Bush Attorney General Slams Obama Terror Policies
The killing of Osama bin Laden was a great victory for the U.S. intelligence community, but it may well be the last one because of the Obama administration’s refusal to use tough tactics such as waterboarding on terror suspects, former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey warns.
The information that led U.S. agents to bin Laden could not have been obtained without stringent interrogation methods, Mukasey writes in The Wall Street Journal.
Michael Mukasey: Obama administration demoralizes intelligence personnel.
“Consider how the intelligence that led to bin Laden came to hand. It began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [KSM], who broke like a dam under the pressure of harsh interrogation techniques that included waterboarding. He loosed a torrent of information — including eventually the nickname of a trusted courier of bin Laden,” writes Mukasey, who was the nation’s top law enforcement officer under President George W. Bush from 2007 to 2009.
The Obama administration prevents intelligence officers from doing their work to the best of their ability, he said.
“Policies put in place by the very administration that presided over this splendid success promise fewer such successes in the future. Those policies make it unlikely that we'll be able to get information from those whose identities are disclosed by the material seized from bin Laden. The administration also hounds our intelligence gatherers in ways that can only demoralize them,” he said in the opinion piece published Friday.
Practices such as waterboarding, in which a suspect’s head is held underwater until he believes he is drowning, are used only in extreme cases in which agents know the prisoners have vital information, Mukasey said.
“The harsh techniques themselves were used selectively against only a small number of hard-core prisoners who successfully resisted other forms of interrogation, and then only with the explicit authorization of the director of the CIA. Of the thousands of unlawful combatants captured by the U.S., fewer than 100 were detained and questioned in the CIA program. Of those, fewer than one-third were subjected to any of these techniques,” he said.
Mukasey quoted former CIA Director Michael Hayden as saying that, “as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government's knowledge about the structure and activities of [al-Qaida] came from those interrogations.”
Far from resorting to illegal methods to obtain information, Muksaey said, the Bush administration “put these techniques in place only after rigorous analysis by the Justice Department, which concluded that they were lawful.”
The Bush administration's decision to call these methods “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which he described as “absurdly antiseptic,” gave rise to unfounded suspicions that the phrase must be a euphemism for something truly beyond the pale.
The former attorney general said that, in April 2009, the Obama administration released previously classified Justice Department documents on the interrogation techniques — “thereby disclosing them to our enemies and assuring that they could never be used again.”
The current administration, in deciding to turn interrogation duties over to the FBI instead of the CIA, had not ensured that its new policies were properly in place, Mukasey said.
Thus, he said, when Omar Faruq Abdulmutallab was caught trying to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009 with explosives hidden in his underwear, no one was quite sure how to handle him. The Nigerian national was read his Miranda rights, like an ordinary criminal suspect, but “no one had yet gotten around to implementing the new program.”
Although the administration had not yet determined how to handle terror suspects, it had found time to pursue investigations against CIA employees who already had been cleared of any wrongdoing, Mukasey said.
“Yet the Justice Department, revealing its priorities, had gotten around to reopening investigations into the conduct of a half-dozen CIA employees alleged to have used undue force against suspected terrorist,” Mukasey wrote in the WSJ.
Those investigations had been closed formally two years earlier, with no charges filed. Years later, he said, the investigations drag on with no charges in sight, with “prosecutors chasing allegations down rabbit holes, with the CIA along with the rest of the intelligence community left demoralized.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
5)Weekend Edition
Where you want your money when the chaos hits
In today's essay, we again court disaster by returning to a very sore subject – the state of our government's finances and the risks we face as our "End of America" scenario unfortunately unfolds with scary precision…
Just as the massive inflation that began in the spring of 2009 begins to drive up consumer prices, a Justice Department task force is formed to investigate the rapidly rising price of gasoline – a favorite whipping boy of the political class.
Says the Associated Press: "The Justice Department will try to 'root out' cases of fraud or manipulation in oil markets." The timing is perfect. The government, like a lazy hound dog, knows when to show up at the kitchen door. It's feeding time, gents.
But do you think the Justice Department will announce a thorough investigation into the activities of the Federal Reserve? Nope. Do you think they will bother to explain to the American people how the Federal government used all its powers and trillions of dollars in new money to save Wall Street's biggest banks, to bail out highly leveraged insurance companies, and to prop up our country's automakers? No, no, and no.
Do you think anyone will explain how, by creating trillions in new money and credit, the government gave commodity speculators a risk-free one-way bet – practically forcing them to build up massive speculative positions? Absolutely not.
Instead, the boys (and girls) at Justice will round up the usual suspects – small-time oil traders and market makers. It's all their fault, don't you know?
You have far better things to do with your time than parse the comments of our august chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke. As such, you might not recall that last summer, on August 27, at a private meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, he announced the Federal Reserve would resume buying U.S. Treasury bonds in large amounts – amounts equal to roughly 70% of all U.S. Treasury issuance. This has allowed the Federal government to fund nearly all its deficit spending and the growing costs of financing its enormous debts, with its own paper currency.
In not so many words, our Federal Reserve chairman was telling our creditors: Go pound sand. We will never pay you back in sound money, you stupid, pitiful fools…
The following table makes the point…
Total return since August 27, 2010
Global Asset:
140.4% Silver
92.5% Blackstone – Wall Street Casino
75.1% Corn
56.9% Las Vegas Sands – Nevada Casino
39.0% Crude Oil
38.2% Russell 2000 Index (Broad Stock Market)
36.3% CRB Commodities Index
35.8% Coal
35.1% Soybeans
31.8% Nasdaq
30.1% Copper
27.2% S&P 500 (Large-Caps)
25.2% Dow Jones Average (Large-Caps)
21.1% Gold
18.3% Financial Sector SPDR Fund (Big Banks)
13.9% Annaly Capital Management
5.6% Producer Price Index
2.3% Consumer Price Index
-2.2% Investment Grade Corporate Bond Fund
-2.6% 10-Year U.S. Treasury Bond Total Return
-10.6% U.S. Dollar Index
Within 10 percentage points of the change in crude oil, you'll find almost all commodities (the CRB index), almost all stocks, almost all U.S. energy (coal), almost all food (soybeans), and the world's most ubiquitous industrial metal: copper.
"Why not order the Justice Department to investigate these markets, too?" we ask (with sarcasm intended). By the way, you may wonder about our inclusion of the world's largest casinos in a table clearly intended to show the impact of our dishonest and decrepit monetary policies. Casinos typically boom during periods of rapid inflation, as money becomes impossible to save and speculating (gambling) becomes widely embraced by the general public. That's a little-understood fact… and it may become very important to investors as this hyperinflation becomes more and more intense.
Hyperinflation…? Yes, that's right. It's underway already, and it's going to get worse and worse.
Look at the table above. What has done the best since the Fed turned on the money spigot? The one form of sound money most sensitive to a monetary crisis – silver. As early as May 2006, I explained to my subscribers why silver would boom – because of the silver ratio – as the dollar collapsed. That's exactly what's happening today.
Meanwhile… look at the bottom of the table. There lies the world's legacy fiat paper reserve currency – the U.S. dollar. As I've explained time and time again in my various reports on the "End of America," the current inflation spells the end of the U.S. dollar standard around the world. That's not a prediction anymore: It is happening right now, as you read this.
This table is clear and scary enough… but then there are the President's comments last week about these matters, which, to me, were simply surreal. In reference to the soaring price of gasoline, OBAMA! told a group of supporters in Reno, Nevada: "We are going to make sure that no one is taking advantage of the American people for their own short-term gain."
I'm assuming this line was delivered with a straight face… and to a cheering crowd.
But… maybe not. Did anyone in the crowd understand the irony of the President's position? OBAMA! just explained the essence of capitalism – the factor that makes it work – but used it to define criminal activity. Even a 10th-grade economics student understands capitalism works because, through the miracle of free exchange, private vices (short-term gains) are converted into public virtues – goods and services people want.
It's surreal to watch the President of the United States say things like this… things that could have been lifted from the speeches of Hugo Chavez.
A confession, dear subscribers. I've worked hard on my newsletters for 15 years. I've taken financial risks to build this business, while giving up dozens of other lucrative opportunities. But… I realize now, after listening to the President, selling newsletters "takes advantage" of the American people (and about 100 other types of nationalities who subscribe from around the world) for my own short-term gain. I feel ashamed.
So, I have a special request for the President… I am willing to give up my post and to renounce my "greed." My entire staff is willing to do the same. But before we leave our work, we need the President to help us find a few dozen folks who have our skills and work ethic, but are happy to work for free. Somewhere out there, we know, Mr. President, there are people noble enough to toil endlessly at jobs – like customer service, research, sales, marketing, general manager, designer, I.T., etc. – for nothing in return and no hope of building any personal wealth… lest they "take advantage of the American people."
We hope you'll help us find them, Mr. President, because our current path of seeking one short-term gain after another has simply left us exhausted.
What will we do next…? The new thing in America: We're going to live at the expense of our neighbors. For the first time in modern history, the government is paying out more money, in cash, to citizens, than it is taking in taxes. We spent $2.3 trillion on direct benefits to taxpayers last year, while the government's total income was only $2.2 trillion. Roughly 60% of all Americans now receive some significant financial benefit from the government. Meanwhile, less than 50% of all people pay any federal income taxes. And roughly 10% of all taxpayers foot virtually all the significant income taxes levied.
Some of you, gentle readers, must think this is the way things ought to be. When polled, 75% of Americans say Medicare shouldn't be cut under any conditions. And roughly 75% say raising taxes on the rich is the best way to solve the budget crisis.
I don't agree with these sentiments. I don't think it's appropriate or Constitutional to charge one citizen a different rate of tax than another. We all ought to be equal under the law, regardless of our income.
Likewise, I don't believe the government ought to be involved in paying for medicine. Why not? When is the last time in history a government did a good job distributing a highly complex, incredibly expensive good or service that had an essentially endless demand? The track record isn't promising.
But you should feel free to completely ignore my opinions on these matters because they're completely irrelevant. The fact is, these policies – the politicians' efforts to narrow the tax base while greatly expanding the role of the government in our society – are bankrupting us. By printing money to pay for these expenses, we will cause the complete collapse of our currency – as the table above ought to make clear to anyone paying attention.
Forget everything else you know about the budget problems and focus on these facts…
It doesn't matter that you've paid into Social Security and Medicare. That's like investors arguing Bernie Madoff owes them money. It may very well be true – but it's totally irrelevant. Likewise, it doesn't matter that "income inequality" is supposedly at a new high. It's not, but why argue? It doesn't matter – taxes won't solve that problem.
What does matter…? Consider this: Even if you collected 100% of the income of all the people who make more than $250,000 a year, the U.S. government would have still run a deficit last year. Even if you doubled the entire amount of income taxes collected, the Federal government would have run a deficit last year. There is no way to balance our budget, no way to prevent the literal bankruptcy of our country and the runaway hyperinflation that would result, unless we dramatically cut the government's budget. We have no choice, as you'll see.
The U.S. government has never succeeded in collecting more than about 20% of GDP in taxes. Yes, that's true. The higher the marginal rates of income taxes (the more you ask the rich to pay), the more inefficient the tax system will become and the greater the burden on GDP growth, which is the main driver of all tax revenue. There is no free lunch. To collect 20% of GDP in taxes isn't easy. It will require a broad-based, flatter income tax or something akin to it. Collecting more than 20% of GDP has, so far, been impossible. I wouldn't plan on it.
Our GDP is roughly $14 trillion today. So no matter how you organize the tax base, you end up with $2.8 trillion to spend. And you can't spend that much, because you've got interest payments and (gasp!) debt repayments to make.
Yes, that's right, America: You borrowed all this money, and our creditors actually expect to be repaid. Interest payments and principal reductions of our debt will have to come first and should total around $500 billion each year. If interest rates go up, we'll have to spend more than this. Sorry. That's the price we have to pay if we expect to maintain control of our economy and not allow our children to end up as house-boys and maids in Shanghai. That leaves us with roughly $2 trillion to spend.
Here are our current expenses: Medicare and Social Security are now spending $1.5 trillion and, if left alone, will quickly grow to far more than the entire tax base. The military spends over $700 billion (that we know of) each year. Domestic social programs (food stamps, Department of Education, etc.) cost $500 billion. Federal pensions cost more than $200 billion a year. So… we've got $2 trillion to spend… but our bills are running to $3 trillion per year, and they're scheduled to increase, substantially.
Thus, we will have to cut at least $1 trillion from the budget – immediately – and be prepared to continue cutting on discretionary spending and the military for at least the next decade. That will mean cutting about one out of every three dollars the government spends today. Unless we balance this budget, there's no longer any doubt our currency will be destroyed, our savings lost, and the assets of our country stripped by foreign creditors.
So… what's more important to you? The lies you've been promised, or trying your best to restore this country to its founding principles? That's what we've got to decide.
These facts, by the way, are common knowledge to all the planning people in Washington. So… what are the politicians doing? They're condemning capitalism by complaining about "short-term gains." They're investigating the free exchange of oil contracts and calling oil traders "criminals." Oh… that's right… they also spent months trying to cut $60 billion from the budget – about six cents on the dollar of the cuts required to balance our budget. Those "cuts," by the way, were actually just smoke and mirrors budget moves that won't reduce the actual amount of spending by a penny, nor even reduce our deficit.
Here's my question… and I mean this sincerely… how bad do things have to get in this country before the average voter wakes up and realizes that he can't actually live at the expense of his neighbor? How long will it take before it dawns on regular people that, like it or not, the rich can't pay for the entire burden of government? And what will happen when the average person who believed the lies he's been told by his government realizes there's no way any of those false promises can be delivered…?
Unfortunately… my bet is that things in this country are going to have to get a lot worse before our leaders in Washington – on both sides of the aisle – do anything that even remotely resembles actual leadership. So the next time you're thinking about selling your silver or cashing in your gold, just go back over these numbers above and ask yourself, how long will it be before Congress decides to gut the budget and begins to actually repay our creditors?
Oh… one more thing to consider. Last week, we saw S&P threaten to downgrade the sovereign credit of the U.S., something completely unthinkable to the world's financial system just three years ago. We saw the University of Texas take possession of nearly $1 billion of gold, a trend I believe could cause a run on the world's bullion banks (like JPMorgan) and a panic unlike anything we've seen since the Great Depression. We've recently witnessed the world's largest bond investor (PIMCO) begin to actively short the U.S. Treasury market – an unprecedented situation in the history of the United States. And we're only a few weeks away now from the end of the Fed's so-called "QE2" debt-monetization binge.
No one knows what will happen to the Treasury market or interest rates when the Fed steps away from the market bidding. And yet… despite all these things… the Volatility Index (the "VIX"), which tracks "fear" in the markets, recently broke down to new lows, showing total complacency in the equity markets.
I have a simple prediction to make: A year from now, we'll be talking about how eerily calm the markets were before the end of QE2… and all the chaos that's happened since.
When the chaos hits, you'll want to be invested in high-quality equities with pricing power and healthy dividends. There are two main reasons this group of stocks will protect you during inflation. First, these companies can raise prices to counter inflation. Second, they can raise their dividends faster than inflation.
Regards,
Porter Stansberry
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
6)HIGH SCHOOL -- 1957 vs. 2010
Scenario 1:
Jack goes quail hunting before school and then pulls into the school parking lot with his shotgun in his truck's gun rack.
1957 - Vice Principal comes over, looks at Jack's shotgun, goes to his car and gets his shotgun to show Jack.
2010 - School goes into lock down, FBI called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors called in for traumatized students and teachers.
Scenario 2:
Johnny and Mark get into a fist fight after school.
1957 - Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up buddies.
2010 - Police called and SWAT team arrives -- they arrest both Johnny and Mark. They are both charged with assault and both expelled even though Johnny started it.
Scenario 3:
Jeffrey will not be still in class, he disrupts other students.
1957 - Jeffrey sent to the Principal's office and given a good paddling by the Principal. He then returns to class, sits still and does not disrupt class again.
2010 - Jeffrey is given huge doses of Ritalin. He becomes a zombie. He is then tested for ADD. The family gets extra money (SSI) from the government because Jeffrey has a disability.
Scenario 4:
Billy breaks a window in his neighbor's car and his Dad gives him a whipping with his belt.
1957 - Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college and becomes a successful businessman.
2010 - Billy's dad is arrested for child abuse, Billy is removed to foster care and joins a gang. The state psychologist is told by Billy's sister that she remembers being abused herself and their dad goes to prison. Billy's mom has an affair with the psychologist.
Scenario 5:
Mark gets a headache and takes some aspirin to school.
1957 - Mark shares his aspirin with the Principal out on the smoking dock.
2010 - The police are called and Mark is expelled from school for drug violations. His car is then searched for drugs and weapons.
Scenario 6:
Pedro fails high school English.
1957 - Pedro goes to summer school, passes English and goes to college.
2010 - Pedro's cause is taken up by state. Newspaper articles appear nationally explaining that teaching English as a requirement for graduation is racist. ACLU files class action lawsuit against the state school system and Pedro's English teacher. English is then banned from core curriculum. Pedro is given his diploma anyway but ends up mowing lawns for a living because he cannot speak English.
Scenario 7:
Johnny takes apart leftover firecrackers from the Fourth of July, puts them in a model airplane paint bottle and blows up a red ant bed.
1957 - Ants die.
2010 - ATF, Homeland Security and the FBI are all called. Johnny is charged with domestic terrorism. The FBI investigates his parents - and all siblings are removed from their home and all computers are confiscated. Johnny's dad is placed on a terror watch list and is never allowed to fly again.
Scenario 8:
Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Mary. Mary hugs him to comfort him.
1957 -“ In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing.
2010 - Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces 3 years in State Prison. Johnny undergoes 5 years of therapy.
This shows how ignorant we have become!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
7) A man doing market research for the Vaseline Company knocked at the
door and was greeted by a young woman with three small children running
around at her feet.
"I'm doing some research for Vaseline. Have you ever used the product?"
She said, "Yes. My husband and I use it all the time."
"If you don't mind my asking," he said, "what do you use it for?"
"We use it for sex," she said.
The researcher was a little taken a back.
"Usually people lie to me and say they use it on a child's bicycle
chain or to help with a gate hinge. But, in fact, I know that most
people do use it for sex. I admire you for your honesty. Since you've been
so frank so far, can you tell me exactly HOW you use
it for sex?" The woman said, "I don't mind telling you at all.
My husband and I put it on the doorknob and it keeps the kids out."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
