===
Sent to me by a dear friend and fellow memo reader who misses RODNEY DANGERFIELD
===With my old man I got no respect. I asked him, "How can I get my kite in the air?" He told me to run off a cliff.***************My wife only has sex with me for a purpose. Last night she used me to time an egg.****************It's tough to stay married. My wife kisses the dog on the lips, yet she won't drink from my glass!***************Last night my wife met me at the front door. She was wearing a sexy negligee. The only trouble was, she was coming home.****************A girl phoned me and said, 'Come on over. There's nobody home.' I went over. Nobody was home!***************A hooker once told me she had a headache.****************If it weren't for pickpockets, I'd have no sex life at all.
*****************I was making love to this girl and she started crying. I said, 'Are you going to hate yourself in the morning?'
She said, 'No, I hate myself now.'************
I knew a girl so ugly... they use her in prisons to cure sex offenders.*****************My wife is such a bad cook, if we leave dental floss in the kitchen the roaches hang themselves.*****************I'm so ugly I stuck my head out the window and got arrested for mooning. **********
The other day I came home and a guy was jogging, naked. I asked him, 'Why?' He said, 'Because you came home early.'**********My wife's such a bad cook, the dog begs for Alka-Seltzer.****************I know I'm not sexy. When I put my underwear on I can hear the Fruit-of-the-Loom guys giggling.*************My wife is such a bad cook, in my house we pray after the meal.**************My wife likes to talk to me during sex; last night she called me from a hotel.****************It's been a rough day. I got up this morning and put a shirt on and a button fell off. I picked up my briefcase, and the handle came off. I'm afraid to go to the bathroom.****************I was such an ugly kid! When I played in the sandbox, the cat kept covering me up.*************I could tell my parents hated me. My bath toys were a toaster and radio.*****************I'm so ugly my father carried around a picture of the kid that came with his wallet.****************When I was born, the doctor came into the waiting room and said to my father, "I'm sorry. We did everything we could, but he pulled through anyway."******************I'm so ugly my mother had morning sickness AFTER I was born.**************I remember the time that I was kidnapped and they sent a piece of my finger to my father. He said he wanted more proof.********************Once when I was lost, I saw a policeman, and asked him to help me find my parents. I said to him, "Do you think we'll ever find them?" He said, "I don't know kid. There's so many places they can hide."*******************I'm so ugly, I once worked in a pet shop, and people kept asking how big I'd get.*******************I went to see my doctor. "Doctor, every morning when I get up and I look in the mirror I feel like throwing up. What's wrong with me?" He said: "Nothing, your eyesight is perfect."*****************I went to the doctor because I'd swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. My doctor told me to have a few drinks and get some rest.*******************One year they wanted to make me a poster boy -- for birth control.************************My uncle's dying wish was to have me sitting in his lap; he was in the electric chair.
Who can eat silver?
|
INCORRECTLY ATTRIBUTED
Origins: In June 2015, an op-ed entitled “The Black Dilemma” was circulated online along with an attribution to the Baltimore Sun newspaper:
Read more at http://m.snopes.com/politics-soapbox-black-dilemma/#4bSqjRfxE8ohUaoo.99
Another dear friend and fellow memo reader said he totally agreed with the content regardless of the incorrect attribution: "I think Ian Duncan nailed it. It’s a black culture issue, not a white issue. I first visited black Africa with Henry Kissinger in 1976. I spent 3 weeks in Zambia and Zaire (now back to being Congo again I believe). I was stunned by what I saw. My impression was, wow, no wonder the blacks in the U.S.A. are so screwed up, look where they came from. You can’t change people by changing continents. I agree that white people in general don’t hate black people... It’s a problem blacks need to fix. Whites can’t fix it for them. The theme of Duncan’s article is very similar to that of Jason Riley’s book, "Please Stop Helping Us”. I mentioned the book to you previously..."
===
Several Candidates are being criticized by the PC press and media frauds for using the words "Anchor Babies." Apparently these candidates rejected the suggestion. The Fourth estate has also become the enemy because their bias and hypocrisy are so evident.
===
Will it be Biden and a radical native American for VP? (See 1 below.)
Carville continues to defend Hillarious and even has something nice to say about Trump. (See 1 a below.)
==
El Erian sees the same factors pressuring the market as I do but he is somewhat more optimistic regarding the prospect of a global crisis not occurring. (See 2 below.)
===
Gramm on how Obama transformed America. (See 3 below.)
===
The son of one of my old friends and doctors from Atlanta wrote this. Both are fellow memo readers. (See 4 below.)
===
Dick
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Does Secret Meeting Signal Biden-Warren Ticket?
Political pundits are abuzz with the possibility of a Joe Biden-Elizabeth Warren 2016 ticket in the wake of an unannounced meeting between the two on Saturday.
Biden, 72, has told friends that if he does run for president, he will serve only one term, making an early announcement of his vice-presidential running-mate a strong possibility. If elected, he would be the oldest incoming president.
The vice president left his home in Delaware to meet with the Massachusetts senator at his official residence at the Naval Observatory for about two hours, CNN reported.
The two supposedly discussed only policy issues over lunch, but speculation is growing about whether Biden might be looking to tap Warren, her state's senior Senator, as his running mate for next year's election.
Many Democratic activists still would like to see her name somewhere on the ballot — as does at least one Biden confidant, The Boston Globe reported.
"I think that would be a great ticket," longtime Biden adviser Larry Rasky told the newspaper. But an aide to Warren wouldn't confirm to the Globe whether the senator would accept such as role. She has repeatedly ruled out a presidential run herself.
"Meet the Press" moderator Chuck Todd opened his show wondering whether Biden might be "sending a not-so-subtle message of perhaps what his dream ticket could look like."
"On behalf of political reporters everywhere, and not for ideological and partisan reasons, I would like to ask Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren to run as a ticket," USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page said later on the same show during a roundtable discussion. "I think that would be fantastic to cover. I'm 100 percent in favor."
"You and the RNC," Todd laughed, implying the Republican establishment would like see Biden team up with the far-left Warren in a general election.
On CNN's "State of the Union," GOP hopeful Ben Carson was asked if a Biden-Warren ticket would cause him any concern.
"No, it doesn't," Carson told guest host Jim Acosta. "You know, I am happy with whatever they come up with, because I think that this election will be an excellent opportunity for the American people to make a clear choice. I don't think it is going to be muddied."
Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, meanwhile, suggested the ticket was good for the Democrats, but wondered whether Biden's boss was on board.
"The press goes from one thing to another, and it never amounts to anything," Carville told host John Catsimatidis Sunday on "The Cats Roundtable" on AM 970 in New York. "If you recall, a year ago all we were talking about was Benghazi. Well, we had seven congressional committees that said there weren't anything to it."
"I like the vice president. … I know very few people who don't like him," Carville said. "But he's done it twice, and he hasn't had the best track record doing it."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We haven't seen one of two things that we need. Either we need better economic news to calm concerns about an accelerating global slowdown, or some policy intervention, not from the ECB or the Fed ... but that holds in the emerging world," El-Erian told CNBC on Sunday.
"The emerging world is being hit in two ways: one is a demand shock and two is in terms of trade shock. They are commodity exporters and commodities have come down," El-Erian said.
Meanwhile, he said that the U.S. Federal Reserve might not raise interest rates in September against a backdrop of slowing global economic growth.
"It's a really tough policy call," El-Erian said in an interview with Reuters. "Not only do domestic indicators conflict with external ones, but the Fed itself has only a partial handle on the economy — and inevitably so. This is a time of significant policy uncertainty, particularly given that what's on the table is a policy regime change — namely the first interest rate hike in over nine years."
China, the world's second-biggest economy, showed unexpectedly weaker growth in factory output, investment and retail sales in July. Its central bank also surprised markets by pushing the yuan lower on Aug. 11 in the nation's biggest devaluation in two decades. China's yuan dropped by a cumulative 4.4 percent against the U.S. dollar last week, causing waves around global markets.
In addition, economic growth in the euro zone slowed in the second quarter as France stagnated and Italy lost momentum, data released on Aug. 14 showed.
El-Erian said the U.S. central bank is operating without the support of other policymakers. "And its models haven't done a great job of predicting economic developments, and understandably so given all the structural changes here and abroad," he said.
Will it be Biden and a radical native American for VP? (See 1 below.)
Carville continues to defend Hillarious and even has something nice to say about Trump. (See 1 a below.)
==
El Erian sees the same factors pressuring the market as I do but he is somewhat more optimistic regarding the prospect of a global crisis not occurring. (See 2 below.)
===
Gramm on how Obama transformed America. (See 3 below.)
===
The son of one of my old friends and doctors from Atlanta wrote this. Both are fellow memo readers. (See 4 below.)
===
Dick
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Does Secret Meeting Signal Biden-Warren Ticket?
Political pundits are abuzz with the possibility of a Joe Biden-Elizabeth Warren 2016 ticket in the wake of an unannounced meeting between the two on Saturday.
Biden, 72, has told friends that if he does run for president, he will serve only one term, making an early announcement of his vice-presidential running-mate a strong possibility. If elected, he would be the oldest incoming president.
The vice president left his home in Delaware to meet with the Massachusetts senator at his official residence at the Naval Observatory for about two hours, CNN reported.
The two supposedly discussed only policy issues over lunch, but speculation is growing about whether Biden might be looking to tap Warren, her state's senior Senator, as his running mate for next year's election.
Many Democratic activists still would like to see her name somewhere on the ballot — as does at least one Biden confidant, The Boston Globe reported.
"I think that would be a great ticket," longtime Biden adviser Larry Rasky told the newspaper. But an aide to Warren wouldn't confirm to the Globe whether the senator would accept such as role. She has repeatedly ruled out a presidential run herself.
"Meet the Press" moderator Chuck Todd opened his show wondering whether Biden might be "sending a not-so-subtle message of perhaps what his dream ticket could look like."
"On behalf of political reporters everywhere, and not for ideological and partisan reasons, I would like to ask Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren to run as a ticket," USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page said later on the same show during a roundtable discussion. "I think that would be fantastic to cover. I'm 100 percent in favor."
"You and the RNC," Todd laughed, implying the Republican establishment would like see Biden team up with the far-left Warren in a general election.
On CNN's "State of the Union," GOP hopeful Ben Carson was asked if a Biden-Warren ticket would cause him any concern.
"No, it doesn't," Carson told guest host Jim Acosta. "You know, I am happy with whatever they come up with, because I think that this election will be an excellent opportunity for the American people to make a clear choice. I don't think it is going to be muddied."
Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, meanwhile, suggested the ticket was good for the Democrats, but wondered whether Biden's boss was on board.
1a) Carville on Trump: 'I Just Can't Get Enough of Him'
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton's latest issues with her private email server are just the latest media frenzy in a long line of stories that have never succeeded in bringing down the Clintons, says their longtime adviser James Carville.
"The press goes from one thing to another, and it never amounts to anything," Carville told host John Catsimatidis Sunday on "The Cats Roundtable" on AM 970 in New York. "If you recall, a year ago all we were talking about was Benghazi. Well, we had seven congressional committees that said there weren't anything to it."
The press constantly cycles from one story to another, but the stories never seem to harm the former secretary of state or her husband, former Pesident Bill Clinton, he said.
"It started here with this Whitewater thing and spent $85 million, and, of course, it was nothing," he said. "Then the press just talks to each other and they spin themselves up into some kind of crazy frenzy, and you just gotta let things burn out."
Carville, who will be 72 on election day and who currently lives in New Orleans, said he is doing "servant work" for Clinton's campaign, attending fundraisers and making media appearances, but said his role is much diminished from the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign where he was in the campaign headquarters every day "directing traffic."
He said that though running for president was "really, really hard," most candidates take it too seriously. He likes GOP front-runner Donald Trump for taking an opposite tack.
"Say what you will about Trump … I can't get enough of him," Carville said. "Every time he's on TV I'm looking, 'cause it's like a NASCAR race. You never know what's going to happen. … He blurts out whatever's on his mind. He's a pretty damn good salesman, to tell you the truth."
With talk of Vice President Joe Biden considering joining the race in the face of a flagging Clinton campaign, Carville said he welcomes him – or anyone else – into the race, but believes Clinton will defeat them.
"It started here with this Whitewater thing and spent $85 million, and, of course, it was nothing," he said. "Then the press just talks to each other and they spin themselves up into some kind of crazy frenzy, and you just gotta let things burn out."
Carville, who will be 72 on election day and who currently lives in New Orleans, said he is doing "servant work" for Clinton's campaign, attending fundraisers and making media appearances, but said his role is much diminished from the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign where he was in the campaign headquarters every day "directing traffic."
"Say what you will about Trump … I can't get enough of him," Carville said. "Every time he's on TV I'm looking, 'cause it's like a NASCAR race. You never know what's going to happen. … He blurts out whatever's on his mind. He's a pretty damn good salesman, to tell you the truth."
With talk of Vice President Joe Biden considering joining the race in the face of a flagging Clinton campaign, Carville said he welcomes him – or anyone else – into the race, but believes Clinton will defeat them.
"I like the vice president. … I know very few people who don't like him," Carville said. "But he's done it twice, and he hasn't had the best track record doing it."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2) El-Erian: September Rate Hike Is Now a 'Really Tough Policy Call'
Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz SE, warns that the global-market sell-off might not yet be over.
"We haven't seen one of two things that we need. Either we need better economic news to calm concerns about an accelerating global slowdown, or some policy intervention, not from the ECB or the Fed ... but that holds in the emerging world," El-Erian told CNBC on Sunday.
"The emerging world is being hit in two ways: one is a demand shock and two is in terms of trade shock. They are commodity exporters and commodities have come down," El-Erian said.
Meanwhile, he said that the U.S. Federal Reserve might not raise interest rates in September against a backdrop of slowing global economic growth.
"It's a really tough policy call," El-Erian said in an interview with Reuters. "Not only do domestic indicators conflict with external ones, but the Fed itself has only a partial handle on the economy — and inevitably so. This is a time of significant policy uncertainty, particularly given that what's on the table is a policy regime change — namely the first interest rate hike in over nine years."
In addition, economic growth in the euro zone slowed in the second quarter as France stagnated and Italy lost momentum, data released on Aug. 14 showed.
El-Erian said the U.S. central bank is operating without the support of other policymakers. "And its models haven't done a great job of predicting economic developments, and understandably so given all the structural changes here and abroad," he said.
El-Erian added that he doesn't believe a global crisis is brewing.
"The classic combination of contagion and market overshoots is brewing. Started with emerging market currencies and has been spreading through corporate and equity markets."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The classic combination of contagion and market overshoots is brewing. Started with emerging market currencies and has been spreading through corporate and equity markets."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3) How Obama Transformed America
His progressive legacy won’t last because he passed vague laws and abused his executive power to impose policies that are unpopular.
How did Barack Obama join Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to become one of the three most transformative presidents in the past century? He was greatly aided by the financial crisis that erupted during the 2008 campaign. This gave the new president a mandate and a large Democratic congressional majority that fully embraced his progressive agenda.
Having learned from previous progressive failures, President Obama embarked on a strategy of minimizing controversial details that could doom his legislative efforts. But no factor was more decisive than his unshakable determination not to let Congress, the courts, the Constitution or a failed presidency—as America has traditionally defined it—stand in his way.
Americans have always found progressivism appealing in the abstract, but they have revolted when they saw the details. President Clinton’s very progressive agenda—to nationalize health care and use private pensions to promote social goals—was hardly controversial during the 1992 election. But once the debate turned to the details, Americans quickly understood that his health-care plan would take away their freedom. Even Mr. Clinton’s most reliable allies, the labor unions, rebelled when they understood that under his pension plan their pensions would serve “social goals” instead of maximizing their retirement benefits.
In its major legislative successes, the Obama administration routinely proposed not program details but simply the structure that would be used to determine program details in the future. Unlike the Clinton administration’s ill-fated HillaryCare, which contained a detailed plan to control costs through Regional Healthcare Purchasing Cooperatives and strictly enforced penalties, ObamaCare established an independent payment advisory board to deal with rising costs. The 2009 stimulus package was unencumbered by a projects list like the one provided by the Clinton administration, which doomed the 1993 Clinton stimulus with ice-skating warming huts in Connecticut and alpine slides in Puerto Rico.
The Obama stimulus offered “transparency” in reporting on the projects funded but only after the money had been spent. Similarly the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial law defined almost nothing, including the basis for designating “systemically important financial institutions” that would be subject to onerous regulation, what bank “stress tests” tested, what an acceptable “living will” for a financial institution looked like or what the “Volcker rule” required.
In addition to a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, Mr. Obama benefited from unprecedented Democratic support in Congress. Congressional Quarterly reported that “Obama’s 98.7% Senate success score in 2009 was the highest ever,” surpassing LBJ’s 93%, Clinton’s 85% and Reagan’s 88%. Reagan’s budget, tax cuts, Social Security reform and tax reform programs all had significant bipartisan input and garnered the strong Democratic support they needed to become law. But ObamaCare had no bipartisan input and did not receive a single Republican vote in Congress. The Obama stimulus package received no Republican votes in the House and only three Republican votes in the Senate. Dodd-Frank received three Republican votes in the House and three in the Senate.
Voters used the first off-year election of the Obama presidency to express the same disapproval that they had expressed in the Clinton presidency. Democrats lost 54 House and eight Senate seats in 1994, and 63 House and six Senate seats in 2010.
Mr. Clinton reacted to the congressional defeat by “triangulating” to ultimately support a bipartisan budget and tax compromise that fostered broad-based prosperity and earned for him the distinction of being one of the most successful modern presidents. Mr. Obama never wavered. When the recovery continued to disappoint for six long years he never changed course. Mr. Clinton sacrificed his political agenda for the good of the country. Mr. Obama sacrificed the good of the country for his political agenda.
The Obama transformation was achieved by laws granting unparalleled discretionary power to the executive branch—but where the law gave no discretion Mr. Obama refused to abide by the law. Whether the law mandated action, such as income verification for ObamaCare, or inaction, such as immigration reform without congressional support, Mr. Obama willfully overrode the law. Stretching executive powers beyond their historic limits, he claimed the Federal Communications Commission had authority over the Internet and exerted Environmental Protection Agency control over power plants to reduce carbon emissions.
When Obama empowered himself to declare Congress in “recess” to make illegal appointments that the courts later ruled unconstitutional, he was undeterred. In an action that Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon would have never undertaken, Mr. Obama pushed Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid to “nuke” the rights of minority Senators to filibuster judicial nominees and executive appointments by changing the long-standing 60-vote super majority needed for cloture to a simple majority.
American democracy has historically relied on three basic constraints: a shared commitment to the primacy of the constitutional process over any political agenda, the general necessity to achieve bipartisan support to make significant policy changes, and the natural desire of leaders to be popular by delivering peace and prosperity. Mr. Obama has transformed America by refusing to accept these constraints. The lock-step support of the Democrats’ super majority in the 111th Congress freed him from having to compromise as other presidents, including Reagan and Mr. Clinton, have had to do.
While the Obama program has transformed America, no one is singing “Happy Days Are Here Again” or claiming it’s “morning in America.” Despite a doubling of the national debt and the most massive monetary expansion since the Civil War, America’s powerhouse economy has withered along with the rule of law.
The means by which Mr. Obama wrought his transformation imperil its ability to stand the test of time. All of his executive orders can be overturned by a new president. Obama Care and Dodd-Frank can be largely circumvented using exactly the same discretionary powers Mr. Obama used to implement them in the first place. Republicans, who never supported his program, are now united in their commitment to repeal it.
Most important, the American people, who came to embrace the Roosevelt and Reagan transformations, have yet to buy into the Obama transformation. For all of these reasons it appears that the Obama legacy rests on a foundation of sand.
Mr. Gramm, a former Republican senator from Texas and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Michael Rubenstein
The executive branch of the U.S. Government — yes, the same one administered by President Obama — appears to be looking closely into the conduct of Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting Hillary Clinton.
Following a request in late July by inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence agencies, the FBI has begun investigating the potential mishandling of classified information by Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State. Despite her best efforts toignore, deny, deflect, misdirect, and redirect criticism over her decision to conduct official business through a private email server, and then to scrub the server clean, the wheels of justice have started to turn on Clinton.
Perhaps this development seems reasonable. After all, if an official who is charged with safeguarding our nation’s most sensitive communications circumvents policies and procedures designed to protect them, then something should be done about it.
Then again, the agency that can do something is the Department of Justice. Under President Obama, this agency does not have a track record of objectivity. Consider the lack of accountability for the Operation Fast and Furious gun-running debacle, the IRS targeting of conservative advocacy groups, the self-dealing and gross malfeasance by VA bureaucrats, and the strong-arming of investigative journalists. While a few political appointees have been eased out of their jobs under pressure from lawmakers, DOJ has not pursued charges against any ringleaders of the scandals. If there still are investigations underway, DOJ is setting new standards for foot-dragging. When is the last time we heard from the White House about any of these shameful episodes?
It’s not as if DOJ couldn’t move quickly if it wanted to. Take the events in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore over the past year. When white police officers harmed unarmed blacks, the government found a way to move federal investigations — and their resolutions — to the front of the queue.
When it suits a political agenda, the White House is all in. In 2009, President Obama appointed a special prosecutor to investigate possible abuses by intelligence agencies in the wake of 9/11. None of the alleged abuses occurred on his watch, so there was little political risk to the move (even if he later elected to quash any charges to avoid friction with the intelligence apparatus).
But when it comes to wrongdoing within his own administration, the president demurs. In the case of IRS misconduct, he flatly dismissed the idea of a special prosecutor. “I think we’re going to be able to figure out exactly what happened, who was involved, what went wrong,” he told the press, “and we’re going to be able to implement steps to fix it.” More than two years later, we are no closer to resolving the issue or restoring confidence in IRS impartiality.
From the very start, this administration has used a cherry-picker approach to law enforcement. The letter of the law matters little when it comes to our immigration or drug statutes. States are free to legislate in direct opposition to federal prohibitions against the sale of marijuana and cities are free to shield illegal aliens from ICE detention, all without fear of reprisal from the feds. Despite laws on the books he once claimed tied his hands, President Obama issued executive orders blocking authorities from deporting whole classes of undocumented immigrants. Defenders called it “prosecutorial discretion.” Of course, when Arizona or Texas employed measures to beef up inadequate border security, no such discretion could be found. The Obama administration came down hard.
All of which makes the probe into Clinton’s email practices curious. Why would the president green-light an investigation of his would-be successor if he has the power to quash, or at least to slow-walk it? Some attribute the decision to the independence and integrity of his new attorney general. Others see Frank Underwood-style maneuvers behind-the-scenes to engineer a Joe Biden candidacy. There may be a bit of truth in both explanations, but my bet is simply that there is fire behind the smoke. Hillary has tested the limits of our collective tolerance for the Clinton way of doing business. Even President Obama lacks the stomach to run interference on this one.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment