This from a very dear friend, a true patriot and fellow memo reader: "

Please forgive me for the long silence: I certainly find myself in full agreement with you on virtually all issues, especially regarding our hopeless foreign policy and our lack of support for Israel. I also enjoy the photos of your family. It is in fact a shame that you really didn't run for president!... B--"

===

I understand the philosophical schism within the Republican Party plays to the advantage of the Demwits.

I also understand that, regardless of philosophy, in order to get re-elected and enjoy the fruits and power of office it is far easier and more preferable to dispense goodies, run deficits and patronize constituents with government largess than to restrain oneself and to be fiscally conservative because you are playing with other people's money . The temptation to spend "OPM" is a powerful magnet. Denial does not equate with favoritism and garnering votes.

Withdrawal from the government's udder requires a degree of patriotism and sacrifice that lends itself to feelings of being disadvantaged, of victim hood. Particularly is this so when you have traded a work ethic, self-respect for living on the dole. Then there are those truly in need of assistance and making Solomonic decisions of who should receive versus those who should not causes great tremors in the Halls of Congress. After all, the perks and power of political office are, themselves, most comforting. It is not everyone who can vote themselves foreign of the impact of the laws reserved only for the governed.

However, what I cannot understand is why would any rational, red blooded American want to continue the legacy of Obama. His domestic policies have failed, his shovel ready and energy programs were boondoggle bound from the start, his foreign policies have been unmitigated disasters, our military has been weakened to the point where we can and are being challenged and defeat by our enemies, who have risen in power and represent legitimate threats, is no longer an unimaginable dream. Yes, our very freedoms are at risk, our allies justifiably no longer trust us, believe in our word or self-proclaimed commitments and our abdication of leadership has created vacuums which have made the entire world less secure.

Every day America is being dissed.

What we face once again is the battle between aggression and passivity. As long as Obama is president expect passivity because he believes morality is on our side and retreat will eventually triumph! (See 1 and 1a below.)

Meanwhile, elect Bernie, Hillarious or Doofus, should he run, and you will get an adherence to Obama's legacy which only a masochist would tolerate and/or embrace.

For the first time in several campaigns, Republicans have a slate of truly qualified candidates who are capable of running meritorious campaigns unlike McCain and Romney, who, had he been elected, would have probably been an outstanding leader but proved incapable of bringing himself to fight for the prize.

The American voter finally is being given a real choice between leadership and nonsense ,between the perpetuation of our Republic and all the virtues Norman Rockwell's so aptly portrayed in his historical illustrations of "The Four Freedoms" versus Socialism's dark prospects, Hillarious' constant lies and deception and Doofus' likability but inability to ever be right on major issues.

Hopefully the eventual Republican nominee will offer legitimate hope born out of rational solutions that take our nation back to its Constitutional roots which have served us well for centuries. If voters are incapable of renouncing their attachment and embrace of failure and dependency then we deserve what we get for "the enemy is us."

Though God may Bless America, God cannot save us from ourselves. That is the task before us in 2016 and whether we can rise to the occasion remains to be seen.

This from a dear and long standing friend and fellow memo reader who is not a butterfly:

The Butterfly Effect

"In Chaos Theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic, nonlinear system can result in large differences in a larger state."

In other words, a butterfly flapping its wings in Texas can cause a typhoon in the Japanese Sea later.

Think about it, in mid-20th Century America , an 18 year old hippie, freshman slut in a Honolulu college had sex with an older, alcoholic Kenyan politician on a student visa, who had a wife and child back in Africa.

And from this "roll in the hay" comes the collapse and dissolution of the United States of America in the 21st Century.


Interesting isn't it.

It makes you a firm believer in the "butterfly effect."

===

Tom Sowell's simple lesson in basic economics. (See 2 below.)

and

Another argument in support of why the bottom is below where we are. (See 2a below.)

===

Hillarious opposes building a pipeline while ignoring the fact that America is already covered in pipelines.

I guess she would oppose building new railroad routes as well.

Obviously her decision is not based on economic logic but is a bribing payoff to Obama and his love affair with anyone Green.

Hillarious has concluded union votes and energy independence does not matter.

This is further proof why her election would validate a continuance of Obama's miserable legacy.

Hillarious finds herself trapped between needing The White House and keeping Biden out while trying to create a distinction between herself and Obama's failed presidency.

In a recent interview Hillarious , three times, could not respond to how she would be different.

===
Humorous ads:

MEMORIES :

"I can usually remember Monday through Thursday.
If you can remember Friday, Saturday and Sunday,

let's put our two heads together."

and

SERENITY NOW :"I am into solitude, long walks, sunrises, the ocean, yoga and
meditation. If you are the silent type, let's get together,

take our hearing aids out and enjoy quiet times."----------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------

Dick

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

An Unteachable President

For Obama, it isn’t the man in the arena who counts. It’s the speaker on the stage.

BRET STEPHENS

Barack Obama told the U.N.’s General Assembly on Monday he’s concerned that “dangerous currents risk pulling us back into a darker, more disordered world.” It’s nice of the president to notice, just don’t expect him to do much about it.

Recall that it wasn’t long ago that Mr. Obama took a sunnier view of world affairs. The tide of war was receding. Al Qaeda was on a path to defeat. ISIS was “a jayvee team” in “Lakers uniforms.” Iraq was an Obama administration success story. Bashar Assad’s days were numbered. The Arab Spring was a rejoinder to, rather than an opportunity for, Islamist violence. The intervention in Libya was vindication for the “lead from behind” approach to intervention. The reset with Russia was a success, a position he maintained as late as September 2013. In Latin America, the “trend lines are good.”

“Overall,” as he told Tom Friedman in August 2014—shortly after ISIS had seized control of Mosul and as Vladimir Putin was muscling his way into eastern Ukraine—“I think there’s still cause for optimism.”

It’s a remarkable record of prediction. One hundred percent wrong. The professor president who loves to talk about teachable moments is himself unteachable. Why is that?

Some of the explanations are ordinary and almost forgivable. All politicians like to boast. The predictions seemed reasonably well-founded at the time they were made. Mr. Obama wasn’t really making predictions: He was choosing optimism, placing a bet on hope. His successes were of his own making; the failures owed to forces beyond his control. And so on.

But there’s a deeper logic to the president’s thinking, starting with ideological necessity. The president had to declare our foreign policy dilemmas solved so he could focus on his favorite task of “nation-building at home.” A strategy of retreat and accommodation, a bias against intervention, a preference for minimal responses—all this was about getting America off the hook, doing away with the distraction of other people’s tragedies.

When you’ve defined your political task as “fundamentally transforming the United States of America”—as Mr. Obama did on the eve of his election in 2008—then your hands are full. Let other people sort out their own problems.

But that isn’t all. The president also has an overarching moral theory about American power, expressed in his 2009 contention in Prague that “moral leadership is more powerful than any weapon.”

At the time, Mr. Obama was speaking about the end of the Cold War—which, he claimed, came about as a result of “peaceful protest”—and of his desire to see a world without nuclear weapons. It didn’t seem to occur to him that the possession of such weapons by the U.S. also had a hand in winning the Cold War. Nor did he seem to contemplate the idea that moral leadership can never safely be a substitute for weapons unless those leaders are willing to throw themselves at the mercy of their enemies’ capacity for shame.

In late-era South Africa and the Soviet Union, where men like F.W. de Klerk and Mikhail Gorbachev had a sense of shame, the Obama theory had a chance to work. In Iran in 2009, or in Syria today, it doesn’t.

Then again, that distinction doesn’t much matter to this president, since he seems to think that seizing the moral high ground is victory enough. Under Mr. Obama, the U.S. is on “the right side of history” when it comes to the territorial sovereignty of Ukraine, or the killing fields in Syria, or the importance of keeping Afghan girls in school.

Having declared our good intentions, why muck it up with the raw and compromising exercise of power? In Mr. Obama’s view, it isn’t the man in the arena who counts. It’s the speaker on the stage.

Finally, Mr. Obama believes history is going his way. “What? Me worry?” says the immortal Alfred E. Neuman, and that seems to be the president’s attitude toward Mr. Putin’s interventions in Syria (“doomed to fail”) and Ukraine (“not so smart”), to say nothing of his sang-froid when it comes to the rest of his foreign-policy debacles.

In this cheapened Hegelian world view, the U.S. can relax because History is on our side, and the arc of history bends toward justice. Why waste your energies to fulfill a destiny that is already inevitable? And why get in the way of your adversary’s certain doom?

It’s easy to accept this view of life if you owe your accelerated good fortune to a superficial charm and understanding of the way the world works. It’s also easier to lecture than to learn, to preach than to act. History will remember Barack Obama as the president who conducted foreign policy less as a principled exercise in the application of American power than as an extended attempt to justify the evasion of it.

From Aleppo to Donetsk to Kunduz, people are living with the consequences of that evasion.

1a)

Obama’s ‘Dangerous Currents’

Putin and Iran corner the U.S. on Syria, as world disorder spreads.

One sotto voce argument the Obama Administration made for its nuclear deal with Iran is that Russia and Iran would return the favor by cooperating to settle the Syrian civil war. As so often in this Presidency, the opposite is turning out to be true.

Mr. Obama said the U.S. departure from Iraq in 2011 would reduce “the tide of war,” but war has returned with a vengeance. He said a “reset” would improve relations with Russia, but tensions are far worse than when he took office. He said the U.S. could safely wind down its military operations in Afghanistan, but on Monday the Taliban took control of the city of Kunduz from the Afghan government.

Even Mr. Obama, addressing the U.N. General Assembly on Monday, had little choice but to acknowledge the rising tide of disorder. “We come together today knowing that the march of human progress never travels in a straight line,” he said. “Dangerous currents risk pulling us back into a darker, more disordered world.” In particular, he added, “we see some major powers assert themselves in ways that contravene international law.”

.

Nowhere is that clearer now than in Syria, the catastrophe that has killed more than 220,000, nurtured the Islamic State caliphate, and is now flooding Turkey, Jordan, Europe and the U.S. with millions of refugees. Far from cooperating with the U.S.-led Syria strategy,Mr. Putin and Iran are moving to replace the U.S. coalition and strategy with their own.

Mr. Putin said Monday that he will soon introduce a resolution at the U.N. Security Council calling for a coalition against Islamic State in Syria on Russian and Iranian terms. This means supporting Bashar Assad’s regime in Damascus against all opponents, including those few trained and armed by the U.S.

This follows the weekend news that Iraq’s government, supposedly allied with the U.S. coalition, will share intelligence with Russia, Syria and Iran. It’s hard to fault Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi for the decision. He’s watched for a year while the U.S. coalition has made little progress against Islamic State. His decision risks putting Baghdad further under Tehran’s sway, and pushing more Iraqi Sunnis into Islamic State’s arms. But desperate leaders will act in desperate ways.

The Putin-Tehran goal in Syria is part of a strategy to build an arc of influence that extends from Western Afghanistan through the Eastern Mediterranean. It seeks to diminish U.S. influence in the region, pushing on the open door of Mr. Obama’s desire to leave. The goal is to isolate U.S. allies in Kurdish Iraq and Israel, while forcing the Sunni Arabs to accommodate the Shiite-Russian alliance or face internal agitation and perhaps external conflict.

The White House knows all this but so far is doing little more than protest. Mr. Obama told the U.N. Monday that “there cannot be, after so much bloodshed, so much carnage, a return to the prewar status quo” in Syria. He added that “realism also requires a managed transition away from Assad and to a new leader.”

But how is Mr. Obama going to achieve that result? Mr. Putin is establishing facts on the ground each day as he builds up Russian air and tank deployments in Syria. While claiming to target Islamic State, Russian planes can target anyone Assad deems an enemy, creating tens of thousands more refugees. And Mr. Putin publicly laughs at the feeble U.S. efforts to build a pro-Western anti-Islamic State coalition.

Secretary of State John Kerry hopes to convene a new Geneva dialogue on Syria, but Mr. Assad has less reason than ever to compromise. He knows Russia and Iran, aided by Hezbollah’s footsoldiers, will at a minimum establish an Alawite protectorate in western and southern Syria. And even if Mr. Assad were to step into some other role in a diplomatic gesture, what prominent Sunni Syrian is going to serve in an Alawite successor government knowing it will effectively be run out of Tehran?

While Mr. Obama may keep harrumphing, Mr. Putin no doubt believes the U.S. President lacks the will to challenge Russia and Tehran. Even if the U.S. vetoes Mr. Putin’s U.N. resolution, Mr. Obama is likely to accept Russia’s presence in Syria and thus eventually the survival of Mr. Assad or some other Tehran-Moscow factotum in Damascus. By the time he leaves office Mr. Obama may claim it was all his idea.

***

Even as he concedes the growing world disorder, Mr. Obama still won’t admit that his policy of American retreat has created a vacuum for rogues to fill. He exhorted the U.N. on Monday that “I stand before you today believing in my core that we, the nations of the world, cannot return to the old ways of conflict and coercion. We cannot look backwards.”

Oh, yes we can, as the once promising world order deteriorates on Mr. Obama’s watch.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The 'Affordable Housing' Fraud

By Thomas Sowell

Nowhere has there been so much hand-wringing over a lack of "affordable housing," as among politicians and others in coastal California. And nobody has done more to make housing unaffordable than those same politicians and their supporters.

A recent survey showed that the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco was just over $3,500. Some people are paying $1,800 a month just to rent a bunk bed in a San Francisco apartment.

It is not just in San Francisco that putting a roof over your head can take a big chunk out of your pay check. The whole Bay Area is like that. Thirty miles away, Palo Alto home prices are similarly unbelievable.

One house in Palo Alto, built more than 70 years ago, and just over one thousand square feet in size, was offered for sale at $1.5 million. And most asking prices are bid up further in such places.

Another city in the Bay Area with astronomical housing prices, San Mateo, recently held a public meeting and appointed a task force to look into the issue of "affordable housing."

Public meetings, task forces and political hand-wringing about a need for "affordable housing" occur all up and down the San Francisco peninsula, because this is supposed to be such a "complex" issue.

Someone once told President Ronald Reagan that a solution to some controversial issue was "complex." President Reagan replied that the issue was in fact simple, "but it is not easy."

Is the solution to unaffordable housing prices in parts of California simple? Yes. It is as simple as supply and demand. What gets complicated is evading the obvious, because it is politically painful.

One of the first things taught in an introductory economics course is supply and demand. When a growing population creates a growing demand for housing, and the government blocks housing from being built, the price of existing housing goes up.

This is not a breakthrough on the frontiers of knowledge. Economists have understood supply and demand for centuries -- and so have many other people who never studied economics.

Housing prices in San Francisco, and in many other communities for miles around, were once no higher than in the rest of the United States. But, beginning in the 1970s, housing prices in these communities skyrocketed to three or four times the national average.

Why? Because local government laws and policies severely restricted, or banned outright, the building of anything on vast areas of land. This is called preserving "open space," and "open space" has become almost a cult obsession among self-righteous environmental activists, many of whom are sufficiently affluent that they don't have to worry about housing prices.

Some others have bought the argument that there is just very little land left in coastal California, on which to build homes. But anyone who drives down Highway 280 for thirty miles or so from San Francisco to Palo Alto, will see mile after mile of vast areas of land with not a building or a house in sight.

How "complex" is it to figure out that letting people build homes in some of that vast expanse of "open space" would keep housing from becoming "unaffordable"?

Was it just a big coincidence that housing prices in coastal California began skyrocketing in the 1970s, when building bans spread like wildfire under the banner of "open space," "saving farmland," or whatever other slogans would impress the gullible?

When more than half the land in San Mateo County is legally off-limits to building, how surprised should we be that housing prices in the city of San Mateo are now so high that politically appointed task forces have to be formed to solve the "complex" question of how things got to be the way they are and what to do about it?

However simple the answer, it will not be easy to go against the organized, self-righteous activists for whom "open space" is a sacred cause, automatically overriding the interests of everybody else.

Was it just a coincidence that some other parts of the country saw skyrocketing housing prices when similar severe restrictions on building went into effect? Or that similar policies in other countries have had the same effect? How "complex" is that?

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

2a)Why This Isn't the Bottom

Kevin Cook here for Steve...

Stocks took a pounding Monday as the Healthcare sector acted like it wanted to steal the Energy sector's title as Most-Hated. That's what happens when the strongest stocks of the bull market suddenly surrender to political headwinds. There are lots of profits -- and lots of margin calls -- to get wrung out of the exuberance.

And the odds are good that we haven't seen the worst yet. Last Wednesday, I presented a "top ten" list to Zacks insiders of the catalysts for new lows in this correction. I'll share the Cliff's Notes of my 4 most controversial negative catalysts...

1) Recession fear & "valuation re-set" brings 14X next year's $125 EPS = S&P 1750

2) Flash Correction of Aug 24 is "a crime that the market will return to the scene of"

3) Q3 earnings decline of 6% is not yet priced-in to market until S&P 1875

4) Buybacks have exceeded free cash-flow for first time since 2009.

Bottom line: While I am nibbling on select stocks that look like great bargains right now, I am still mighty cautious given how far this correction can extend. So I am saving lots of dry powder. My bet is that a great big "buyable" low is coming to an October near you.

Best,

Kevin Cook

Senior Stock Strategist, Zacks Investment Research

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Middle East and Other Musings

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

You Have To Be A Masochist To Validate Obama's Legacy!

An Unteachable President

For Obama, it isn’t the man in the arena who counts. It’s the speaker on the stage.

Obama’s ‘Dangerous Currents’

Putin and Iran corner the U.S. on Syria, as world disorder spreads.

.

***

The 'Affordable Housing' Fraud

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