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Has Obama become the Grinch who replaced Gingrich and stole Christmas?
As The Holiday Season draws near and we are within two weeks of Christmas and Hanukkah and three of a New Year, I thought I would take a few minutes to discuss the state of our union.
There is a new poll suggesting Obama has made race relations worse and many commentators argue Obama missed a great opportunity to make them better. His failure to do so began with his attack on a Cambridge Police Officer who"Acted stupidly."
That comment by Obama also, in my humble opinion, not only revealed his bias, born out of sitting in a church where the Minister publicly stated he hated America and Obama's wife stating she was not proud of our country, but it gave insight into Obama's temperament and judgement.
Behind Obama's cool facade lurks a hot head who is quick to judge! Characteristics not particularly endearing for a president.
Obama's appointments and confidants reflect his own personality and beliefs and have served to reinforce the downside to Obama's personality etc. Holder, Sharpton, a constant parade of liars who appear before Congress and either take the Fifth or engage in selective amnesia and the list is endless.
More recently, an MIT professor named Gruber stated,on videos, Americans are stupid and he helped grease the tracks for Obama to lie about what he was doing to our health care coverage.
As for the economy, administration statistics suggest unemployment has dropped and the economy is recovering. There is some truth to this assertion but when we look behind this veiled curtain we note family incomes and buying power have not kept pace with increased costs and in order to save the economy from going off the cliff even further, The Fed destroyed retiree returns by driving interest rates to virtual zero. The consequence has been, until recently, to send the stock market soaring further widening wealth disparity between the haves and have nots.
Obama has paid obeisance to Greens and Education Unions thus, hindering America from becoming energy independent and improving educating our lower classes.
Obama's social engineering has increased our nation's debt at a faster rate and amount than any predecessor and this will cripple flexibility not only of future generations but will also increasingly harm those Obama blames Capitalism and Capitalist greed punishes.
Our borders remain penetrable and, once again, Obama challenges Constitutional restrictions on Executive authority simply because Congress failed to accommodate his pique regarding illegal immigration legislation.
Add to the above the fact that our military is in the process of being downsized to levels not seen since WW 2, and rising concerns seem justifiable..
When one turns their attention to Obama's off shore accomplishments we find America's influence ebbing, our allies doubtful of our intentions and Iran within a 'smidgeon' of going nuclear.
In almost 6 years, Obama has perfected his goal of transforming America resulting in polls showing his popularity and our trust in him at lows.
Citizens are marching in protest, rioters are destroying businesses and disrupting life and members of Obama's own party are expressing their own contempt for his policies. I have yet to mention the rise of ISIS and terrorism in contradiction of Obama's claim al Qaeda was dead along with bin Laden.
Furthermore, Obama cites Christmas, not the Constitution, as the basis for his gift to America of 5 million illegal immigrants. Additional Obama gifts remain the bashing of our police and Israel!
So Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah America. My gift to you is two more years of Obama!
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Did Feinstein time her release of the CIA investigation in order to get Gruber off the front page and TV? I suspect not but when it comes to Democrats, Obama and politicians in general it is hard to trust anything they do. (See 1 below.)
It has all come down to black and white! (See 1a below.)
And then there is that other side! (See 1b below.)
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Caroline Glick clicks! http://www.israpundit.org/
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I am often bemused and pleased when my memos highlight matters that subsequent WSJ Op Ed's comment about. This leads me to believe I am on the right track. (See 2 below.)
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Do Wall Street and Main Street have anything in common? (See 3 below.)
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Iran, the$64 question!
Retiring Rep. Bachman may not have exercised exquisite decorum but she was right! (See 4 below.)
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Dick
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)More Videos: Gruber Talks About Writing Obamacare; Said Under Oath He Didn't Write It
By Katie Pavlich
When MIT professor and Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber testified in front of Congress earlier this week about the lack of transparency used to deceive the American people about the Affordable Care Act, he claimed under oath, "I am not the architect of Obamacare." For reference, the dictionary definition of "architect" is "the deviser, maker or creator of anything."
During an exchange with Republican Rep. Cynthia Lummis, Gruber said he did not "draft the legislation" and argued he was simply an adviser to the White House before Obamacare was pushed through in 2010.
But now new video dug up by investment advisor Rich Weinstein, the man behind Grubergate, shows the Obamacare architect boasted on numerous occasions about writing the legislation.
March 20, 2010 just one day before President Obama signed Obamacare into law: (comments 3:55 time mark).
Another video found by American Commitment President Phil Kerpan shows Gruber telling his students at MIT that he has a bias because he "wrote part of the law."
When Jonathan Gruber testified in front of the House Oversight Committee earlier this week, he took an oath to tell the truth. During his testimony, he tried to claim he didn't write Obamacare, yet his own words repeatedly prove otherwise. As a reminder, lying under oath is a crime.
1a) Al Sharpton was in Sears.
He was there to protest the fact that most all of the washing machines were white.
So the clerk called the store manager, who asked, “What’s the problem here, Reverend?"Sharpton pointed at the machines and loudly bemoaned the fact that most of them were white.
The manager replied, “Well, Reverend, it's true that most of the washing machines are white, but if you'll open the lids, you'll see that all the agitators are black."
1b) Little Guy....
Hello. Don’t recognize me? That’s OK; I understand.
My name was Antonio West. I was the 13-month old child who was shot in the face at point blank range by two black teens, who were attempting to rob my mother, who was also shot.
I think my murder and my mommy’s wounding made the news for maybe a day, and then disappeared.
A Grand Jury of my mommy's peers from Brunswick, Georgia ruled the black teens who murdered me will not face the death penalty... too bad it was me who got the death sentence from my killers instead, because Mommy didn’t have the money they demanded.
See, my family made the mistake of being white in a 73% non-white neighborhood, but my murder wasn’t ruled a ‘hate crime’. Oh, and President Obama didn’t take a single moment to acknowledge my murder.He couldn’t have any children who could possibly look like me - so why should he care?I’m one of the youngest murder victims in our great Nation's history, but the media didn’t care to cover the story of my being killed in cold blood.
There isn’t a white equivalent of Al Sharpton, because if there was he would be branded a ‘racist’. So no one’s rushing to Brunswick, Georgia to demonstrate and demand ‘justice’ for me. There’s no ‘White Panther’ party, either, to put a bounty on the lives of the two black teens who murdered me. I have no voice, I haveno representation, and unlike those who shot me in the face while I sat innocently in my stroller - I no longer have my life. Isn’t this a great country?So while you’re out seeking ‘justice for Trayvon’ and Michael Brown, please remember to seek ‘justice’ for me.
Tell your friends about me, tell you families, get tee-shirts with my face on them, and make the world pay attention, just like you did for Trayvon.
I won’t hold my breath. I don’t have to anymore.
2)
Unfree Speech on Campus
A new study shows too many colleges still behave like censors.
GETTY IMAGES
Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky famously postulated that the test of a free society is the ability to express opinions in the town square without fear of reprisal. Most American colleges wouldn’t pass that test, according to a new report by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (Fire).
The foundation reports that 55% of the 437 colleges it surveyed this year maintain “severely restrictive” policies that “clearly and substantially prohibit protected speech.” They include 61 private schools and 180 public colleges. Incredibly, this represents progress from Fire’s survey seven years ago when 75% of colleges maintained restrictive free speech codes.
Perhaps the biggest breakthrough for First Amendment advocates this year was a Virginia law that bars “free-speech zones” on public campuses. As Fire explains, free-speech zones are a common tool that administrators use to restrict demonstrations to remote areas of campus. Colorado Mesa University limits free speech to “the concrete patio adjacent to the west door of the University Center.”
Such restrictions are unconstitutional, and many public colleges have lifted their quarantines after being threatened with lawsuits. In January a University of Hawaii administrator tried to stop students from handing out copies of the U.S. Constitution outside the campus’s free-speech zone. After students sued, the university revised its policies to allow free speech in “all areas generally available to students and the community.”
Meantime, campus speech police continue to stretch the bounds of what they prosecute under the banner of threats and intimidation. New Jersey’s Bergen Community College in January placed a professor on leave for posting an allegedly “threatening” picture on Google+ of his seven-year-old daughter doing yoga in a Game of Thrones T-shirt that read “I will take what is mine with fire & blood,” a quote from the TV show.
At McNeese State University in Louisiana, students can be punished for bullying if they make “remarks that would be viewed by others in the community as abusive and offensive,” regardless of whether that’s their intent. The University of West Alabama bans “cyberbullying,” which can include sending “harsh text messages or emails.” Would that include scathing evaluations that professors email to students?
Many colleges are also blurring the definition of harassment, which the U.S. Supreme Court in 1999 defined in the educational context as unwelcome, discriminatory conduct “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.”
Yet Colorado State University-Pueblo defines “harassment” as anything that inflicts “psychological and/or emotional harm upon any member of the University community through any means, including but not limited to e-mail, social media, and other technological forms of communication.” Sony ’s Amy Pascal should count herself lucky that she’s not a student at CSU after her emails were released by hackers.
Notice how colleges are extending their speech clampdown to the Web and social media. The Internet policy at Athens State University in Alabama now bans “[c]reating, displaying, transmitting or making accessible threatening, racist, sexist, and offensive, annoying or harassing language and/or material.” Note to the wise: Don’t tweet anything from the Onion. Actually, don’t tweet at all.
Colleges of all places should be encouraging free inquiry and debate. They betray their values, and America’s, when they fail Sharansky’s basic test of a free society.
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3) Can Wall Street and Main Street Be Aligned?
Friday turned out to be a good day for both Main Street and Wall Street. The impressively strong U.S. monthly jobs report, instead of leading to a selloff in stocks, contributed to a record high for equity markets by the end of the day. If this new alignment persists, it could be quite consequential in several different ways.
At first, it didn’t look as if it would turn out that way. When the jobs numbers came out, U.S. stock futures fell reflecting the knee-jerk reaction to sell equities in anticipation of shifts in Federal Reserve policy. But the markets regained their composure, recouping the losses and more.
This positive market reaction is unusual given recent trends. For quite a while, good news for Main Street, while reinforcing a much-hoped-for economic recovery, has been regarded as bad news for Wall Street.
That is because markets would typically interpret good data as accelerating the Fed’s exit from its policies of extraordinary monetary stimulus and, therefore, pulling the rug from under financial assets that have depended heavily on such support, including very low interest rates. By contrast, bad news on the economy would be treated by investors as good news because it helped prolong the sizable liquidity support provided by the central bank.
Now the economy is looking at its best employment year since 1999. In addition to substantial positive revisions for prior months, the U.S. economy created an impressive 321,000 new jobs in November, the best monthly addition since January 2012, for a total of 2.6 million new jobs this year. And the month’s employment gains were broad based, leading to the highest diffusion index since January 1998.
November’s robust job creation was accompanied by wage growth, something that has been lacking for too many years now. This helps the economy by boosting consumer income, including among the more challenged segments of society. And it gives companies greater confidence to invest in new productive capacity. All of this contributes to growth, and there nothing the U.S. economy needs more than high, durable and inclusive growth.
In addition to its beneficial economic and social effects, high growth could help reduce political polarization in Congress. It might also lead to the stronger fundamentals that validate high equity prices. And in doing so, it would make it more probable the Fed can normalize monetary policy without triggering disruptions in markets that would also drag the economy down.
The hope, admittedly based for now on only one data point, is that this new pattern persists: That the U.S. maintains solid jobs and wage growth; and that financial markets continue to respond positively, facilitating an orderly normalization of monetary policy and leading to a solid validation of asset prices.
. . .
In addition, there is an important international challenge. With the increasing divergence that results both from contrasting economic circumstances among countries and from monetary policies heading in different directions, the global system needs to accommodate this reality without breakage — and this won’t be easy if the only adjustment that takes place occurs through large moves in the currency markets.
Yes, there are still domestic and international challenges ahead. Yet it is better to have these challenges than remain mired in a low-growth world where the fortunes of Main Street and Wall Street were so misaligned.
This positive market reaction is unusual given recent trends. For quite a while, good news for Main Street, while reinforcing a much-hoped-for economic recovery, has been regarded as bad news for Wall Street.
That is because markets would typically interpret good data as accelerating the Fed’s exit from its policies of extraordinary monetary stimulus and, therefore, pulling the rug from under financial assets that have depended heavily on such support, including very low interest rates. By contrast, bad news on the economy would be treated by investors as good news because it helped prolong the sizable liquidity support provided by the central bank.
Now the economy is looking at its best employment year since 1999. In addition to substantial positive revisions for prior months, the U.S. economy created an impressive 321,000 new jobs in November, the best monthly addition since January 2012, for a total of 2.6 million new jobs this year. And the month’s employment gains were broad based, leading to the highest diffusion index since January 1998.
November’s robust job creation was accompanied by wage growth, something that has been lacking for too many years now. This helps the economy by boosting consumer income, including among the more challenged segments of society. And it gives companies greater confidence to invest in new productive capacity. All of this contributes to growth, and there nothing the U.S. economy needs more than high, durable and inclusive growth.
In addition to its beneficial economic and social effects, high growth could help reduce political polarization in Congress. It might also lead to the stronger fundamentals that validate high equity prices. And in doing so, it would make it more probable the Fed can normalize monetary policy without triggering disruptions in markets that would also drag the economy down.
The hope, admittedly based for now on only one data point, is that this new pattern persists: That the U.S. maintains solid jobs and wage growth; and that financial markets continue to respond positively, facilitating an orderly normalization of monetary policy and leading to a solid validation of asset prices.
. . .
In addition, there is an important international challenge. With the increasing divergence that results both from contrasting economic circumstances among countries and from monetary policies heading in different directions, the global system needs to accommodate this reality without breakage — and this won’t be easy if the only adjustment that takes place occurs through large moves in the currency markets.
Yes, there are still domestic and international challenges ahead. Yet it is better to have these challenges than remain mired in a low-growth world where the fortunes of Main Street and Wall Street were so misaligned.
4)-Congress: The Last Line of Defense in the Iran Talks
Congress brought Iran to the table. Now it needs to bring them to a deal.
Now that the United States, its allies and Iran have agreed again to extend nuclear negotiations, the onus is now on Congress to take on the responsibility of making Tehran pay for its continued nuclear intransigence. Iran continues to run out the nuclear clock and treat Western concessions to its demands as permanent—making further diplomatic progress conditional on greater Western “flexibility.”
Obama administration officials are on record committing to a deal that will“dismantle” “a lot” or substantial portions of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. But Congress is concerned that the goalposts appear to be moving, with the Obama administration signaling flexibility on a range of issues that will make it more likely that Iran will be left with the infrastructure it needs to build a bomb.
By contrast, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is standing firm. He has made it clear that any deal Tehran signs must not cross his “red lines,” which include increasing Iran’s uranium enrichment capacity to nineteen times what it is today, and getting full and immediate relief from all international sanctions.
Of course, a negotiated agreement is the preferred solution to peacefully prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear-weapons capacity. But Iran does not appear to be ready to compromise. Moreover, Iran’s record of nuclear deception, role as the leading state sponsor of terrorism and egregious human-rights abuses inspire little confidence in Tehran’s commitment to honor whatever agreement is reached.
Lest we forget, Iran is at the negotiation table because Congress passed tough economic sanctions that hammered its economy, and many of them over the Obama administration’s objections. But Congress’ work is not done. It must ensure that Iran does not retain the essential elements of its nuclear infrastructure to develop a nuclear weapon and continue gaming the international community.
Congress can help achieve this goal by laying out clear parameters for what constitutes an acceptable deal, putting in place “sanctions-in-waiting” to increase American leverage, establishing a strict timeline for the conclusion of a nuclear deal to stop Iran from running out the clock, and ensuring that a final deal is put to a vote in Congress. These ideas already are part ofexisting legislative proposals.
However, there is even more that Congress can do before any final nuclear deal is reached. The administration reportedly has studied the issue of how the president might suspend the “vast majority” of sanctions after a deal while bypassing Congress. Congress should resist this by designing a “sanctions defense” firewall before any deal is reached. This will signal to the administration how much it can give up in the negotiations and, after a nuclear deal is reached, help the administration enforce it (even if it is not inclined to do so) against Iranian noncompliance.
These measures are likely to play an important role, because senior administration officials may be reticent to respond to evidence of Iranian cheating after a deal is struck, primarily because a deal would make American policy path-dependent—beholden to a deal it made, regardless of subsequent developments. But reticence could also stem from fear that vigorous enforcement could lead to Iranian countermeasures, such as a vigorous resumption of the nuclear program or even taking actions that could upset the balance in an already volatile Middle East.
Indeed, reports suggest a growing U.S.-Iranian “détente” and possible American-Iranian coordination to weaken the Islamic State.
The Iranians reportedly are insisting on the immediate lifting of UN sanctions, which President Obama called “nonnegotiable.” Based on press reports, however, it appears that the Obama administration, and perhaps the EU and UN Security Council, are designing a phased-program of sanctions relief, using “suspensions” and snapbacks, where sanctions will be suspended and then reimposed in the event of Iranian noncompliance.
Reimposing sanctions is harder than it sounds. Amongst the United States, EU and UN, there are bound to be significant disputes on the evidence, differing assessments of the seriousness of infractions, fierce debates about the appropriate level of response and concerns about Iranian retaliation.
It’s also important to remember that when sanctions were first implemented, it took years before a critical mass of international companies terminated their business ties with Tehran. Once strictures are loosened, with so many international companies positioning to get back into Iran, it will be very difficult to persuade these companies to leave again. The Iranian regime will also adopt countermeasures to minimize its economic exposure to Western pressure when it anticipates that it will violate any nuclear agreement.
Iran has already enjoyed substantial economic benefits from the ongoing negotiations that improved macroeconomic conditions. The Obama administration seriously underestimated the value of sanctions relief provided as part of the November 2013 Joint Plan of Action and did not account for the psychological impact on Iran’s macroeconomic environment. As a result, the Iranian economy has shown signs of stabilization, as reflected in modest GDP growth, a stabilization of Iran’s currency and a significant drop in inflation.
As Iran’s economic recovery becomes more durable, and less susceptible to snapback sanctions, economic pressure will diminish as an effective tool for responding to Iranian nuclear noncompliance. This will make it more likely that the United States will be forced to choose between either tolerating Iranian cheating, or using military force to respond to violations—which is wholly unrealistic, given that the regime tends to cheat incrementally, not egregiously.
Congress has a vital role to play here. It can protect and enhance U.S. economic leverage. This leverage will be essential to reaching and enforcing a deal that is bound to fall short of its own bipartisan requirements. And it could be the last line of defense to punish the full range of Iran’s illicit and dangerous activities. By defending the sanctions house it built, Congress can make the difference between a nuclear-armed Iran (and an ensuing regional nuclear-arms race) and a more secure and stable region.
Mark Dubowitz is the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and head of its Center on Sanctions and Illicit Finance.
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