The Fed - Act of Desperation? Gibbs - A Disgrace!

Liberal media and press recently unfrocked themselves and their innate bias became exposed for all to see. (See 1 below.)
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Hezballah and Hamas are possibly preparing to fight each other as Lebanon gets squeezed between Syria and Iran. Could it spill over into Israel? (See 2 below.)
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How do you feel about liberal elitists considering and treating you like a bigot?
See 3 below.)
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The Fed just decided to monetize 14% of our projected deficit. Will it work? Probably not because of the high unemployment level.

There are those who believe deflation talk has been overdone.

I see Fed's action as one of desperation.

And then more evidence of pension abuse by our vaulted public servants.

Stay tuned. (See 4, 4a, 4b, 4c and 4d below.)
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Welcome to the world of shariah! (See 5 below.)
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Throwing money at black Americans - will it solve their problem? Amy Wax has written "Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century."

Wax disputes those who believe racism caused problems for black citizens and thus eliminating racism will solve their problems.

Obviously any prejudicial attitude creates negative effects but the most important factors that will improve the fortunes of blacks, and all citizens for that matter, is education,lifting oneself by their own bootstraps and a change in self-defeating cultural habits.

Government funding has proven mostly a disaster, has created dependency and helped to break up what historically was a stable black family environment. (See 6 below.)
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Press Secretary Gibbs, like the president he serves, is probably the worst we have seen in a very long time. Now Gibbs is attacking the Far Left members of Obama's own party. Meanwhile, Rangel just defended himself whining on the House Floor and Waters said she ain't going to take it in the ear either.

Pelosi brings Congress back to spend more billions to bail our teachers and cuts food stamps to pay for it.

Obama and Democrats have become a laughing stock and with the passing of each day they demonstrate their utter contempt for taxpayers and their executive and legislative incompetence.

November cannot come soon enough.(See 7 below.)
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Dick

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1)The Pleasures of Racism, Selfishness, and Fear
By Jed Gladstein

For those who don't pay attention to how America's mainstream media actually functions nowadays, the recent JournoList scandal may prove a bit shocking. JournoList was a listserv[1] created by Ezra Klein, a sanctimonious young man who regularly appears on MSNBC. Mr. Klein writes for the Washington Post, which owns the JournoList email archive.


According to Mr. Klein, the JournoList forum was created for members of the mainstream media as a "wonkish, [2] fun, political yelling match." During its existence, it accumulated tens of thousands of emails from its roughly 400 participants. Recently, it was discontinued when its contents were leaked to the public.[3]


Some of the JournoList emails reveal that the mainstream media has been deeply complicit in deceiving the American people about Mr. Obama.[4] Other emails reveal that some of the luminaries in the mainstream media are both cruel and churlish. But what is perhaps most significant is that some of the emails show that the mainstream media is afflicted with a disability that might best be described as a form of social psychosis.[5]


For example, one of the JournoList participants is a woman by the name of Katha Pollitt. Ms. Pollitt is a writer for The Nation magazine, and is also published by The New Yorker, Harper's, Ms., and The New York Times. In commenting on the Tea Party movement, Ms. Pollitt had this to say:


"... today's US rightwingers have nothing concrete to offer people. Just the pleasures of racism and selfishness and fear."


At the level of political theory, Ms. Pollitt's comment seems woefully devoid of verisimilitude. She makes an implicit assertion that the proper role of our national government is "to offer" something to the American people. This kind of thinking is what leads to a totalitarian nanny state. In our country, the proper domestic function of the federal government is to maintain a minimum structure of national rules that ensures the maximum amount of personal freedom consistent with lawful behavior. Beyond that, the Founders intended that the federal government should stay out of the way of the states and the American people, leaving them free to determine how best to secure their own happiness.[6]


Ms. Pollitt's comment also reveals that she, like so many of her JournoList colleagues, is trapped in a state of pathological projection[7] about "racism and selfishness and fear." Despite many weeks of claiming that the Tea Party movement is racist, nobody in the mainstream media has been able to produce one iota of evidence to substantiate the charge. As for selfishness, surely there is nothing more selfish than expecting millions of hard working Americans to shoulder the burden of ever-expanding government programs for a permanent welfare class and tens of millions of illegal aliens in order to empower the left -- yet, that is precisely what the mainstream media wants Americans to do. And, as to fear, it takes only a cursory glance at the JournoList emails to see how central that emotion is to the gestalt of Ms. Pollitt and her JournoList colleagues.


Considering the evidence, an objective observer must conclude that when it comes to "the pleasures of racism and selfishness and fear," the mainstream media and their cultural Marxist heroes beat the Tea Party hands down!

1 A listserv is electronic mailing list software that allows someone to send an email and reach a whole group of people.


2 The word "wonkish" is apparently an adjective meaning bookish.


3 In criminal law, when someone runs away after a crime is committed, it is considered evidence of scienter, a Latin word that refers to a person's awareness of having done something wrong. So, too, in civil law, when a manufacturer of a product abandons a product's design after the product causes injury, such after-the-fact conduct may be introduced into evidence to prove that the product was originally defective or unsafe.


4 It is with good reason that the JournoList members considered the mainstream media to be the "non-official campaign" for Mr. Obama.


5 I use the word psychosis in its generic sense here, denoting a loss of contact with reality. In psychiatry, psychosis refers to a mental state characterized by delusional thinking and distorted perceptions of reality.


6 The Constitution of the United States would not have been ratified unless the Founders included the Bill of Rights, also known as the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution. The Tenth Amendment provides "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people." The Ninth Amendment provides "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."


7 Psychological projection is the unconscious act of denial of a person's own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world. It involves imagining or projecting one's own thoughts or feelings onto others. Projection is considered to be one of the most profound and subtle of human psychological processes, and extremely difficult to work with, because by its nature it is hidden. It is the fundamental mechanism by which people keep themselves uninformed about themselves.
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2)Lebanon's crisis strikes discord in Palestinian Gaza

Beirut is caught in a vice between pro-Iranian and pro-Syrian factions over the Saudi move to pull Syria away from its support for the Lebanese Shiite Hizballah and Tehran's counter-moves. In Palestinian Gaza, military sources report, this conflict is reflected in the strains breaking surface between the ruling Hamas, whose political secretary Khaled Meshaal is based in Damascus, and the Jihad Islami, Tehran's Palestinian arm.

Both have put their armed men on the ready for a showdown which could end in the carving-up of the densely populated, tiny (360 sq. km.) Palestinian enclave.
Exclusive sources report that Saturday night, Aug. 7, Hamas' Ezzedine al-Qassam and Jihad's Saraya al Qods-Jerusalem Battalions ordered a general mobilization.
Except for Israeli military units stationed near the Gaza border and certain intelligence circles, this brink-of-factional war went unnoticed in Jerusalem and Israel's media, which are preoccupied with unending domestic political disputes.
Military sources, however, call the situation in the Gaza strip "explosive" thanks to the extreme steps the two feuding Palestinian factions have set in motion:
1. Their two armed forces have called up reserves, corralled them inside towns across Gaza and are holding them ready to step into flare-ups as reinforcements;

2. The two armed groups are under orders not to rest: they must stay in uniform, hold their side arms ready and keep awake.

3. Both Hamas and Jihad have broken open their weapons stores and are distributing arms around neighborhoods they regard as loyal bastions.

4. Both threaten to use against each other the missiles they have stocked up for attacking Israel;

Sources are holding tight in the hope that outbreaks of violence building up in the Gaza Strip do not spill over the border into Israel.

2a)In Lebanon, a Power Struggle and Pitiable Choices
A young prime minister pays court in Syria, while Iran also jockeys for more influence
By MICHAEL YOUNG


It's unclear whether Hezbollah had a role in the exchange of fire last week between the Lebanese and Israeli armies along their common border. Yet here in Beirut there is suspicion that the "Party of God" may have prompted an army officer to order his men to fire at the Israeli soldiers to reaffirm that Hezbollah alone controls Lebanon's border. The incident might be best understood as part of a power play between Syria on one side and Hezbollah and Iran on the other.

Although Damascus and Tehran are allies, Syria and the pro-Iranian Hezbollah are struggling for domination over Lebanon. It's not personal, just business.

Hezbollah's principal contract is with Tehran, and its weapons are there to retaliate for any Israeli or American attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. But the party also serves a broader purpose as an Iranian military extension into the Mediterranean. To surrender this and return to being an adjunct of Syria in Lebanon appeals little to Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah. It does him even less good in the eyes of his patrons, who have spent what is estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more, to arm Hezbollah.

Meanwhile, the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad is making a bid to reimpose its hegemony over the Lebanese, which it lost five years ago. To do that it needs to bring Hezbollah back into line with Syrian priorities—to show that Damascus, not Tehran, rules again in Beirut.

Syria's 29-year-old military presence in Lebanon came to an abrupt end following the assassination in 2005 of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. The public outcry forced the only serious suspect, Syria, to withdraw its army.

The Syrians never reconciled themselves to that departure and sought to prevent the emergence of a sovereign Lebanese state and effective government. Because Syrian soldiers and intelligence agents were no longer on the ground, the Assad regime came to rely on Hezbollah to destabilize Lebanon, handing the party, and Iran, major sway over the country's affairs.

This development so alarmed Arab states, above all Saudi Arabia, that early last year King Abdullah decided to "reconcile" with Syria after years of mutual hostility. The Saudi calculation was a cynical one: Mr. Assad would be given latitude to reassert Syrian domination over Lebanon in exchange for curbing Iran's influence here. The Saudis would press Saad Hariri, the son of Rafiq who became prime minister late last year, to mend fences with Damascus. This was a golden opportunity for Mr. Assad to reverse his 2005 Lebanese setback while earning an apparent certificate of innocence from the victim's family.

Politically dependent on the Saudi regime, Mr. Hariri had little choice but to accept. He knows who killed his father, but his most immediate foe in Lebanon is Hezbollah, and he hoped that the new rapport with Syria would allow him to counterbalance Hezbollah while buying him time to consolidate Lebanon's state institutions. Mr. Hariri's gamble may fail, but he might still have one trump to play, and it explains why Hezbollah is so nervous.

Nasrallah recently said that he believed that the special United Nations tribunal investigating the Hariri assassination was likely to indict Hezbollah members. The accusations are false, he said, the tribunal just an "Israeli project" to undermine Hezbollah. The implication was clear: Mr. Hariri must sever Lebanon's ties with the tribunal, which is a mixed Lebanese-international court. Any indictment, he knows, could weaken his party.

Nasrallah seemed doubly put out by the fact that Damascus might escape accusation. That's because Serge Brammertz, a Belgian judge who led the U.N. investigation between 2006-2008, failed to adequately explore Syria's involvement.

Mr. Brammertz's German predecessor, Detlev Mehlis, had no doubts about Syria's role and recommended the arrest of Syrian suspects. Mr. Brammertz did, however, follow up on other leads, among them telephone analyses allegedly pointing to a Hezbollah role in surveying Hariri's movements. Mr. Brammertz's Canadian successor, Daniel Bellemare, may announce these and other leads in the coming months and perhaps even indict suspects.

Mr. Assad will gain much traction from selling his return to Lebanon as a way of stifling Hezbollah. But that's an illusion. The Syrian leader will not disarm Hezbollah, nor will he break with Iran, because that would deny him the ability to exploit regional rivalries.

Even if the Hariri tribunal momentarily makes Hezbollah more pliable, the Assad regime also would like to see the investigations go away to make sure Syria will not be implicated. Yet Mr. Assad does not want an open conflict over the matter, one that might pit Mr. Hariri's Sunni community against Hezbollah's Shiite community. He prefers "Lebanese" measures to scuttle the tribunal, which he can negotiate with the Saudis or even Mr. Hariri.

At a recent summit in Beirut with King Abdullah, Mr. Assad signed a statement defending Lebanon's stability and calling for all differences to be settled within the national unity government. This was a warning to Hezbollah not to intimidate Mr. Hariri on the tribunal issue or try to bring down his government. The border clash was possibly Hezbollah's way of voicing displeasure, and a reminder to Syria that Hezbollah remains its sole military stick against Israel.

The Lebanese could be pitied for having to choose between Syria and Iran, were it not their own divisions that brought about this situation. Damascus and Tehran will probably avoid open confrontation, even as they wage an understated struggle, lately through competing Lebanese intelligence agencies. But there may yet be vigor in the fisticuffs, because neither state is timid when it comes to power games. This cannot make Lebanon any more stable or the border with Israel more secure.

Mr. Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star in Beirut, and author of the recently published "The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon's Life Struggle" (Simon & Schuster).
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3)Are Americans Bigots? Attacking the motives of those who disagree with elite opinion has become all too common.
By WILLIAM MCGURN

When in 1983 Ronald Reagan characterized the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," the reaction from his betters was swift. Writing in the New York Times, Anthony Lewis called it "primitive"—and wondered (naturally) what the Europeans would think. A headline in Time referred derisively to "The Right Rev. Ronald Reagan." All agreed on one thing: this kind of black-and-white moralizing had no place in American politics.

Now cut to today, where moralizing about the ugly motives of the American people has become common. Whether it's a federal judge declaring there exists no rational opposition to same-sex marriage, a mayor railing against those who would like a mosque moved a few blocks from Ground Zero, a Speaker of the House effectively likening the majority of her countrymen who did not want her health-care bill to Nazis, or a State Department official who brings up the Arizona law on immigration in a human-rights discussion with a Chinese delegation, the chorus is the same: You can't trust ordinary Americans.


In his ruling on California's Proposition 8, federal district court Judge Vaughn Walker gives us the most dressed-up version. Not only does he find the state initiative upholding traditional marriage unconstitutional, his opinion maintains that those who disagree—the majority of California voters—can be motivated only by bigotry.

Among his many findings of "fact" are gems such as these: "Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians." "[T]he evidence shows beyond debate that allowing same-sex couples to marry has at least a neutral, if not a positive, effect on the institution of marriage." "The evidence shows conclusively that moral and religious views form the only basis for a belief that same-sex couples are different from opposite-sex couples."

At least when Ronald Reagan invoked the evil empire, he was talking about a totalitarian system. He also took pains to distinguish between the Soviet system, which he thought irredeemable, and the Russian people, whom he believed wanted the same things we do.

Judge Walker, of course, is not alone. In New York City we have a mayor who preens how an Islamic Center built close to Ground Zero is exclusively a test of religious liberty. Surely it is possible to respect religious liberty and nonetheless believe that with a bit of neighborly solicitude, we might reach a workable accommodation by moving the center a few blocks. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg prefers to see the 61% of New York residents who disagree with him as people who ought to be "ashamed of themselves."

Are there these feelings and expressions on the right? And are some Americans bigots or racists? No doubt. Yet it is striking that the language and examples here do not emanate from the activist fringe. They come from those representing some of our leading institutions.

When asked about the legitimacy of grass-roots opposition to the health-care bill, for example, Nancy Pelosi dismissed protestors as people "carrying swastikas." Her counterpart in the Senate called them "evil mongers." How convenient. If turning up to protest a health-care bill makes someone a Nazi or an evil monger, there's no point to having a real debate, is there?

These kinds of remarks, moreover, tend to be amplified by a press corps that seems to share many of the same prejudices. Look at Internet listserv JournoList. In this group, participants felt free to urge various outrages—notably, manufacturing a charge of racism for purely political purposes. They did so, moreover, comfortable that no one would find such suggestions beyond the pale.

Take the Washington Post. When the JournoList emails hit, we learned that the reporter assigned to cover conservatives actively loathed them. Sometimes it spilled out, as when he tweeted that opponents of same-sex marriage are bigots. (He later offered a limited apology.) Does it not say something when the hometown paper of our nation's capital cannot seem to find a reporter who can control his contempt for beliefs held by millions of ordinary Americans?

American history confirms the need for leaders willing to make strong moral criticisms of their opponents and society. Certainly we could not progress without them. Still, the most successful—Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, et al.—have been those who appealed to the decency of their fellow citizens.

As the controversy over the planned Islamic Center near Ground Zero escalates, we have had many secular sermons on the need to recognize that the vast majority of Muslims should not be confused with the terrorists. No argument there. But how much more fruitful our own debates might be if the Judge Walkers, Mayor Bloombergs and Speaker Pelosis could extend that same presumption of decency to the American people.
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4)The False Fed Savior
Monetary policy can't make up for failed fiscal and regulatory policy

As the Bible says, we know that our redeemer liveth. And on Wall Street and Washington these days, the economic redeemer of choice is the Federal Reserve. When the Fed's Open Market Committee meets again today, markets are expecting a move toward easier money that is supposed to prevent deflation, re-ignite a lackluster recovery, revive the jobs market, and turn water into Chateau Petrus.

It's a tempting religion, this faith in the magical powers of Ben Bernanke and monetary policy, but it's also dangerous. It puts far too much hope in a single policy lever, ignores the significant risks of perpetually easy money, and above all lets the political class dodge responsibility for its fiscal and regulatory policies that have become the real barrier to more robust economic growth.

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The latest impetus for easing comes from July's weak jobs report, which has fed the growing fear that the U.S. is following Japan into a deflationary spiral. Deflation—a falling price level—is as undesirable as inflation and is best avoided.

But is deflation really a clear and present danger? While the consumer price index has declined in the last three months, the overall price level rose by 1.1% over the 12 months that ended in June. Commodity prices in particular have remained strong, reflecting higher demand as the global economy continues to recover, especially in Asia. Average hourly earnings are also slowly rising again in the U.S., assuming you have a job. Even the biggest deflation-phobes count the odds of it occurring at only one in four.

The Japan analogy is especially rich, coming as it does from those who have urged America to heed the same spending stimulus policies that also failed in Japan. Tokyo careened into deflation even as it embarked on a two-decade Keynesian spending spree that has sent its debt to GDP ratio nearly to 200%. Among those who urged Japan on: Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers, then at the Clinton Treasury, now at the Obama Treasury and White House. The real Japan analogy to the current U.S. economy is the failure of spending stimulus.

The deflation alarmists also give the impression that the easy-money antidote is a free lunch. We'd have thought the aftermath of the last deflation scare, circa 2003, would have exploded that bromide. To fight what turned out to be the illusion of falling prices, the Fed maintained negative real interest rates from 2003-2005, creating a huge subsidy for credit and the start of the housing mania.

As for the current moment, the Fed has maintained its nearly zero interest rate target for 20 months, while expanding its balance sheet by some $2 trillion. By any definition this is historically easy monetary policy, and not without costs of its own. Zero interest rates punish savers, who in turn can create new investment distortions as they desperately search for higher yield. Zero rates also favor government borrowers, which can finance their deficits at historically cheap rates, over private investors.

Stanford economist Ron McKinnon has suggested that the extended zero rate policy has also created a "liquidity trap" by stifling the interbank lending market and thus the incentive among banks to extend retail and corporate credit. St. Louis Fed President James Bullard recently issued a similar warning about the impact of the Fed's promise to keep rates near zero for an "extended period," even as he urged the Fed to pursue more "quantitative easing" (buying bonds directly) as an alternative.

Above all, the easy money solution misdiagnoses the real U.S. problem. The economy doesn't suffer from a shortage of money. It is suffering from a shortage of confidence and animal spirits. Banks have plenty of reserves to lend, while U.S. corporations have repaired their balance sheets enough that they have something close to $2 trillion in cash on hand. Even the U.S. consumer is saving more. The problem is that Americans won't invest more or take more risks amid Washington policies that are hostile to private markets and have created only greater uncertainty and higher costs for doing business.

Regular readers of these columns know the litany: Taxes on capital and incomes are set to rise sharply next January, and again in 2013 to finance ObamaCare; record levels of government spending have created the expectation of still higher taxes and borrowing in the future; the health-care and financial industries are being turned upside down by new rules to be written in the coming months; politically directed credit and subsidies have distorted the energy, automobile and other markets, favoring some companies and business models over others; antitrust policy is punishing successful companies like Intel; and now the FCC is proposing to rewrite the rules for Internet and telecom investment.

Amid such a political assault, it is a tribute to American business that it is willing to take any risks at all.

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This is the real root of our current economic malaise—the conceit of Congress and the White House that more government spending, taxing and rule-making can force-feed economic expansion. Now that this great government experiment is so obviously failing, the politicians and the Wall Street Keynesians who cheered the stimulus are asking the Federal Reserve to save the day. Mr. Bernanke should tell them politely but firmly that his job is to maintain a stable price level, not to turn bad policy into wine.

4a)The Pension Bell Tolls. Want $600,000 a year in retirement? Work for the government.

For an illustration of everything wrong with the nation's public pensions, look no further than the compensation in Bell, California.

Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo stepped down three weeks ago after news broke that he was making $800,000 a year to oversee the blue-collar town of 40,000. Now the Los Angeles Times reports that records show Mr. Rizzo's compensation was double that amount—some $1.5 million a year. That number included the 28 weeks of vacation and sick time Mr. Rizzo was allowed annually—at a cost of $386,000. Good work, if you can get it.

Mr. Rizzo's comp also spiraled up thanks to the city's contributions to his pension and other retirement plans. Mr. Rizzo is in line to collect at least $600,000 annually in guaranteed pension payouts upon retirement, thanks to California's generous formulas based on time served and compensation. Those payouts—which could add up to tens of millions of dollars over Mr. Rizzo's lifetime—help explain why the Golden State is currently $6.2 billion in the hole for retiree pension and benefit payments.
According to the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, a nonprofit that advocates pension reform, Mr. Rizzo is hardly alone. The foundation lists 9,111 retired California government workers receiving pensions in excess of $100,000 a year. The top earner, one Bruce Malkenhorst, receives $510,000 a year for his tenure as city administrator of Vernon, California (population, 91). Not including health benefits.

These paydays are the inevitable result of the dominance of government unions in city and state politics. While most private workers have 401(k)-type plans that rise and fall in value with economic growth, unions negotiate guaranteed payouts that stay lucrative whether or not the cities can afford them. California Attorney General Jerry Brown is investigating the Bell episode, but he'd enhance his chances to become the next Governor if he proposed more ambitious pension reform.

4a)Fed, Citing Slowdown, to Buy U.S. Debt
By Mary F. Calvert

Acknowledging that the recovery has slowed, the Federal Reserve on Tuesday announced that it would use the proceeds from its huge mortgage-bond portfolio to buy long-term Treasury securities.

By buying government debt, the Fed is taking a small but unmistakable step to maintain the large amount of money that it pumped into the economy, starting in 2007, to prop up the financial and housing markets.

The amount of money involved is about $10 billion a month — a small fraction of the roughly $700 billion in Treasury debt sitting on the Fed’s balance sheet — but the move sets the stage for the possibility of large-scale asset purchases by the Fed in the fall if the recovery were to continue to weaken.

More than anything, the announcement was a signal to the markets that the Fed was concerned about the pace of the recovery, and had shifted from its more optimistic assessment earlier this year, that economic growth was sufficiently strong to begin thinking about how to gradually return to normal monetary policy.

For now, the Fed is saying, normal is a ways off. “Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in June indicates that the pace of recovery in output and employment has slowed in recent months,” the Fed said in a statement.

The Fed bought $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, and another $200 billion in debts owed by government-sponsored enterprises, primarily Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and completed the purchases in March. The Fed had planned to allow the size of that portfolio to shrink gradually over time as the debts matured or were prepaid. Instead, the Fed will reinvest the principal payments in longer-term Treasury securities.

The central bank said it would continue to roll over its holdings of other Treasury securities as they mature.

In its announcement, the Fed left unchanged its benchmark short-term interest rate — the federal funds rate, the rate at which banks borrow from one another overnight — at zero to 0.25 percent, the level it has been at since December 2008.

In a new qualification to its previous statements, the committee said it still expected a “gradual return” to normal economic conditions, “although the pace of economic recovery is likely to be more modest in the near term than had been anticipated.”

On Wall Street, shares regained some lost ground after the announcement.

Bruce McCain, the chief investment strategist at Key Private Bank, said the Fed “steered the middle ground” with the decision, while acknowledging the weakness that the market had been seeing in the economy.

“The fact that they committed to reinvesting was a little bit more than some had been looking for,” Mr. McCain said, “but at the same time it basically holds constant the size of their balance sheet.”

“Given the uncertainty, hopefully the middle ground calms nerves and keeps people confident enough to go ahead and spend the money that they have in productive ways,” he said, adding that the position suggested that the Fed did not expect an “enormous wave of economic weakness.”

Joshua Shapiro, the chief United States economist at MFR Inc., said the Fed’s announcement “appears to mainly be designed to provide itself with political cover against a backdrop of a gut-wrenching economic correction that shows no sign of ending anytime soon.”

He added: “Of course, if the economy deteriorates significantly further, today’s announcement could represent a down payment against more aggressive actions somewhere down the road.”

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which runs the trading desk through which the Fed conducts open market operations, released technical details on the transactions after the Fed meeting.

At its last meeting, in June, the committee downgraded its outlook and openly discussed the prospect of deflation — a declining spiral of demand, prices and wages — but cautioned that it was only likely to act if the situation took a serious turn for the worse.

Since that meeting, the Fed chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, and other Fed officials, had used cautious language in describing the state of the economy and the likelihood of new action by the central bank. In testimony before Congress last month, and at a speech in Charleston, S.C., last week, Mr. Bernanke said the economic recovery was continuing.

The Federal Open Market Committee’s vote on Tuesday was 9 to 1. The dissenter was Thomas M. Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

Mr. Hoenig has dissented repeatedly, asserting that the Fed’s stated policy of maintaining an “exceptionally low” level of the fed funds rate for an “extended period” was “no longer warranted.”

He dissented again, for the fifth time, on Tuesday, both on the extended-period language and on the decision to reinvest the mortgage-bond proceeds.

“Given economic and financial conditions, Mr. Hoenig did not believe that keeping constant the size of the Federal Reserve’s holdings of longer-term securities at their current level was required to support a return to the committee’s policy objectives,” the Fed said in a statement.

4b)Fed to Keep Balance Sheet From Shrinking
By LUCA DI LEO And IAN TALLEY

Federal Reserve officials moved to prevent the Fed's huge balance sheet from shrinking, an attempt to spur the U.S. economy's recovery and avoid deflation.

At the end of a policy-meeting Tuesday, Fed officials said they would reinvest the proceeds from expiring mortgage-backed securities into longer-term U.S. Treasurys.

In the closely-watched statement that followed the meeting, U.S. central bank officials acknowledged that the pace of the recovery had slowed in recent months.

While the Federal Open Market Committee expects the gradual improvement in the economy to continue, officials said the "pace of the economic recovery is likely to be more modest in the near term than had been anticipated."

Since Fed officials last met June 22-23, signs have been growing that the one-year-old recovery from the worst recession in decades is losing momentum. The economy shed jobs for the second month in a row in July amid a small rise in private-sector employment. The unemployment rate remains painfully high, providing little hope that Americans will boost shopping again any time soon.

With unemployment still so high, some officials had started to worry the economy runs the risk of falling into a Japan-like deflationary environment if no action was taken.

The latest move by the U.S. central bank represents just a tweak in its strategy for managing its huge portfolio. But it's a significant one since it could be a step towards new large purchases of both government bonds and mortgage-backed securities.

Currently, the proceeds of expiring mortgage bonds are not being reinvested, with the result that the Fed's balance sheet would have slowly shrunk over time. This amounted to a slight tightening bias in the policy stance.

Michael Feroli, economist at J.P. Morgan Chase, said the Fed's latest move indicates the central bank is "very concerned about the sustainability of the recovery."

The Fed said it will release more details about the reinvestment operation later Tuesday.

The Fed's decision to purchase longer-maturity Treasuries as opposed to shorter maturity debt indicates the central bank is comfortable with a larger balance sheet for longer, said Dan Greenhaus, economist at Miller Tabak & Co.

Some Fed officials have reservations about restarting full-blown asset purchases because they're not sure they can drive down long-term rates further from already low levels. Average rates for a 30-year mortgage fell last week to 4.49%, according to Freddie Mac, the lowest rate since the 1950s. Holding many more securities could also cause problems further down the road.

In response to the economic crisis, the Fed bought roughly $1.7 trillion in mortgage and Treasury debt in 2009 and earlier this year. The program is estimated to have cut long-term rates by around half a percentage point, although Fed officials are divided on its effect.

The Fed had an incentive to move early because deflation is harder to fight than inflation, especially now that short-term interest rates are already close to zero. When there's inflation, a central bank can at least raise rates as high as needed to counter rising prices.

A new Wall Street Journal survey out Tuesday found that by a two-to-one margin Wall Street economists see deflation as a bigger threat to the U.S. economy over the next three years than inflation. The previous April survey found economists were split 50/50 over whether inflation or disinflation posed the bigger risk over the next year.

The Fed also reiterated that it expects the benchmark short-term interest rate it uses to steer the economy to remain close to zero for an extended period due to low inflation and high unemployment.

Kansas City Fed President Thomas H. Hoenig was once again the only dissenter out of the 10 voters at the Federal Open Market Committee meeting. He voted against the central bank's decision for the fifth time this year, arguing that the economy is recovering modestly and that the pledge to keep rates near zero for an extended period limits policy flexibility.

Fed Vice Chairman Donald L. Kohn participated in what is likely to be his last FOMC meeting. He's been the second-highest-ranking Fed official since June 2006 and has been working at U.S. central bank for some 40 years.

Mr. Kohn is due to be replaced by San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen, who was nominated by the White House but is awaiting confirmation from the Senate, along with two other Fed board members.

4c)The Pension Bell Tolls. Want $600,000 a year in retirement? Work for the government.

For an illustration of everything wrong with the nation's public pensions, look no further than the compensation in Bell, California.

Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo stepped down three weeks ago after news broke that he was making $800,000 a year to oversee the blue-collar town of 40,000. Now the Los Angeles Times reports that records show Mr. Rizzo's compensation was double that amount—some $1.5 million a year. That number included the 28 weeks of vacation and sick time Mr. Rizzo was allowed annually—at a cost of $386,000. Good work, if you can get it.

Mr. Rizzo's comp also spiraled up thanks to the city's contributions to his pension and other retirement plans. Mr. Rizzo is in line to collect at least $600,000 annually in guaranteed pension payouts upon retirement, thanks to California's generous formulas based on time served and compensation. Those payouts—which could add up to tens of millions of dollars over Mr. Rizzo's lifetime—help explain why the Golden State is currently $6.2 billion in the hole for retiree pension and benefit payments.

According to the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility, a nonprofit that advocates pension reform, Mr. Rizzo is hardly alone. The foundation lists 9,111 retired California government workers receiving pensions in excess of $100,000 a year. The top earner, one Bruce Malkenhorst, receives $510,000 a year for his tenure as city administrator of Vernon, California (population, 91). Not including health benefits.

These paydays are the inevitable result of the dominance of government unions in city and state politics. While most private workers have 401(k)-type plans that rise and fall in value with economic growth, unions negotiate guaranteed payouts that stay lucrative whether or not the cities can afford them. California Attorney General Jerry Brown is investigating the Bell episode, but he'd enhance his chances to become the next Governor if he proposed more ambitious pension reform.

4d)Pensions and the Public
By Kevin Drum

One of the conservative causes du jour is the parlous state of public employee pensions these days. And there's no question that this really is a problem. Thanks to years of overoptimistic economic projections and the habit of politicians to prefer future cost increases to current cost increases, public pension funds are pretty seriously underfunded right now. That means taxpayers are going to have to come up with many billions of additional dollars to fund pensions at the levels that have been promised to public workers.

Now, there are a few things to say about this. First, the really sky high pensions you hear horror stories about tend to be limited to public safety workers: police, fire, sheriff's deputies, etc. (Here in California, the really egregious salary/pension issue is with state prison guards, for reasons I won't bore you with, but for the most part we're talking about police and fire workers.) The reason this matters isn't that money spent on public safety "doesn't count," but that most people — including most conservatives — are OK with paying generously in order to maintain high public safety standards. So it's worth keeping in mind that this is largely what we're talking about.

Other public workers often get good but not great pensions. But even at that, they mostly get these pensions in lieu of Social Security, and they get them to make up for generally lower pay than in the private sector. There's some question about whether public workers continue to be paid less than comparable private sector workers, but in the past, when these pension funds were set up, there's not much question that they were.

Beyond that, though, Jon Cohn raises a key point about the role of public sector unions in bargaining for decent pensions for its workers:

To what extent is the problem that the retirement benefits for unionized public sector workers have become too generous? And to what extent is the problem that retirement benefits for everybody else have become too stingy?

I would suggest it's more the latter than the former. The promise of stable retirement — one not overly dependent on the ups and downs of the stock market — used to be part of the social contract. If you got an education and worked a steady job, then you got to live out the rest of your life comfortably. You might not be rich, but you wouldn't be poor, either.

Unions, whatever their flaws, have delivered on that for their members. (In theory, retirement was supposed to rest on a "three-legged stool" of Social Security, pensions, and private benefits.) But unions have not been able to secure similar benefits for everybody else. That's why the gap exists, although perhaps not for long.

I should confess here that I'm not a big fan of public employee unions. On my own personal scale of sympathy, I strongly support private sector service unions, I moderately support private sector industrial unions, and I only barely support public sector unions. So no one should expect me to go to the mattresses for public sector benefits. Still, Jon is right: one of the favorite tactics of conservatives is to set the middle class at war with itself. It's sort of the mirror image of corporate compensation committees, which keep CEO pay forever rising because no one wants their CEO to be paid less than average. With middle-income workers, by contrast, the CEO class exploits jealousy toward better compensated unionized workers in order to ratchet things down. The grocery clerks don't want to accept an insurance copay? Well, I have an insurance copay, so why shouldn't they? The truckers don't want to switch their pensions to a 401(k)? Well, I have a 401(k), so why shouldn't they? Etc., etc., ever more disheartening etc.

This is a tactic that works pretty well. As union density has shriveled in the private sector, workers don't really aspire anymore to getting a "good union job," as they often did in the past. It's not even on their radar. Instead, they see a small and privileged group of workers who are better off than them even though they don't work any harder, and instead of wondering why their own pay and benefits are so low, they simply become resentful of this coddled class.

Private sector union density has gotten so low that it's not clear how much they can do about this attitude — and the odds of increasing union density more than a point or two seem cosmically slim. So now it's going to be a war of taxpayers against unionized public employees. It won't be hard, especially in lousy economic times, to convince envious clerks and factory workers that these guys need to be brought down a peg or two. It's just human nature. But wouldn't it be better if all these envious clerks and factory workers were instead asking why their pay and benefits haven't kept up with overall economic growth — which, after all, is all that public sector workers have accomplished? I don't know what the future of unions is in America, but for now they're really the only ones who are asking that question and putting some muscle behind it. Until someone else starts doing a better job of it, we still need them.
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5)Coming to grips with shariah
By Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

Suddenly, it seems, everyone is talking about Shariah. In particular, growing controversies over proposed mosques at Ground Zero and other sites are becoming powerful "teaching moments" - raising awareness about the repressive theo-political-military-legal doctrine that animates the builders and that their fellow adherents seek to impose on the entire world.

This is a most welcome development in light of the grave and growing threat posed by this agenda and the concerted effort being made - here and elsewhere, through violent jihad and the stealthy kind - to realize that goal.

Unfortunately, too many Americans still remain unaware of the magnitude of the danger we face from Shariah. Worse yet, their ability to comprehend this threat, let alone respond appropriately to it, is being seriously disserved by people who know better - or should. Specifically, the public is being seriously misled by 1) some journalists and politicians who are obscuring the true nature of Shariah and 2) Shariah practitioners who engage in deliberate deception to facilitate the penetration of their doctrine into Western societies.

As an example of the former, consider the article that led the New York Times front page on Sunday entitled "Battles around Nation over Proposed Mosques." It accurately reported that Americans from the Ground Zero neighborhood in Lower Manhattan to San Bernardino are expressing growing concern about Muslim mosques that "seek to replace the U.S. Constitution with Islamic Shariah law."

Yet, the Times proceeded to dismiss the idea that such mosques are a problem. It cited "interfaith groups led by Protestant ministers, Catholic priests, rabbis and clergy members from other faiths [who] have defended the mosques." One such individual was quoted as saying that the opponents "have fear because they don't know" those involved in such mosques.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg went even further last week declaring that those critical of the construction of a permanent symbol of Shariah adherents' victorious destruction of the World Trade Center "ought to be ashamed of themselves" for being intolerant. Moreover, he categorically rejected the idea that it was reasonable, let alone necessary, to determine the source of funds for the $100-plus million mega-mosque near Ground Zero.

In other words, the Mayor seemingly is indifferent to whether the funding for the mosque sponsored by the Cordoba Initiative (named for the capital city of the Moorish conquerors of Spain and the site where they triumphally transformed a Catholic church into a massive mosque) might be the Saudis, with their version of Shariah known as Wahhabism.

This cavalier attitude is absolutely stupefying insofar as two years ago this month, the New York Police Department issued a report warning that Wahhabi mosques in America were incubators for "homegrown" Islamic radicals.

The Mayor has a duty to know a lot more than he evidently does about Shariah. He certainly has an obligation to figure out whether - as is true of, by some estimates, 80% of the mosques in America - the Ground Zero Mosque is going to fit the profile of a Wahhabi-associated facility.

The challenge of assuring public awareness of the Shariah threat would be hard enough if the only impediment were ill-informed politicians and journalists. Matters are made much worse by the skill with which Shariah's adherents dissemble, or simply lie.

For example, the New York Times article cited Camie Ayash, a spokeswoman for the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Tennessee - the sponsors of a proposed 52,000 square foot mosque that has precipitated an intense local backlash. It reported that Ms. Ayash "lamented that people were listening to 'total disinformation' on Islam." She then engaged in a classic example of real disinformation - or what Shariah calls taqqiya - claiming, "There's no conflict with the U.S. Constitution in Shariah law."

Now, even the most superficial review of Shariah shows that statement to be preposterous and misleading. In fact, among other Constitution-affronting features, Islamic law prohibits democratic law-making. It requires the replacement of constitutions and governments like ours with a global theocracy governed by Islamic law. It brutalizes women and otherwise treats them as second-class citizens and authorizes the murder of homosexuals and apostates.

Shariah is, in short, wholly incompatible with our legal system, freedoms and way of life.

Then, there was this gem from Ihsan Bagby, an associate professor in Islamic Studies at the University of Kentucky. The Times quoted him as saying that while "radicalization of alienated Muslim youths is a real threat, the youth we worry about are not the youth that come to the mosque[s]."

Look no further than the NYPD report for a reality check. It reported that: "This [Shariah] ideology is proliferating in Western democracies at a logarithmic rate. The Internet, certain Salafi-based non-governmental organizations, extremist sermons/study groups, Salafi literature, jihadi videotapes, extremist-sponsored trips to radical madrassas and militant training camps abroad have served as "extremist incubators" for young, susceptible Muslims - especially ones living in diaspora communities in the West." (Emphasis added.)

Americans across this country are struggling to understand the true nature of the threat we face from Shariah. They are entitled to straight talk about the extent to which it is being insinuated, promoted and legitimated not only in mosques but by financial institutions, banks, academic institutions and government agencies. Those who fail to provide such unvarnished truths are part of the problem, and should be treated accordingly.
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6)What Hope?
By John McWhorter

This book is depressing because it is so persuasive. There is a school of thought in America which argues that the government must be the main force that provides help to the black community. This shibboleth is predicated upon another one: that such government efforts will make a serious difference in disparities between blacks and whites. Amy Wax not only argues that such efforts have failed, she also suggests that such efforts cannot bring equality, and therefore must be abandoned. Wax identifies the illusion that mars American thinking on this subject as the myth of reverse causation—that if racism was the cause of a problem, then eliminating racism will solve it. If only this were true. But it isn’t true: racism can set in motion cultural patterns that take on a life of their own.

Wax appeals to a parable in which a pedestrian is run over by a truck and must learn to walk again. The truck driver pays the pedestrian’s medical bills, but the only way the pedestrian will walk again is through his own efforts. The pedestrian may insist that the driver do more, that justice has not occurred until the driver has himself made the pedestrian learn to walk again. But the sad fact is that justice, under this analysis, is impossible. The legal theory about remedies, Wax points out, grapples with this inconvenience—and the history of the descendants of African slaves, no matter how horrific, cannot upend its implacable logic. As she puts it, “That blacks did not, in an important sense, cause their current predicament does not preclude charging them with alleviating it if nothing else will work.”

Wax is well aware that past discrimination created black-white disparities in education, wealth, and employment. Still, she argues that discrimination today is no longer the “brick wall” obstacle it once was, and that the main problems for poor and working-class blacks today are cultural ones that they alone can fix. Not that they alone should fix—Wax is making no moral argument—but that they alone can fix.

A typical take on race has no room for stories such as this one. In 1987, a rich philanthropist in Philadelphia “adopted” 112 inner-city sixth-graders, most of them from broken homes. He guaranteed them a fully-funded education through college if the kids would refrain from drugs, unwed parenthood, and crime. He even provided tutors, workshops, after-school programs, summer programs, and counselors when trouble arose. Forty-five of the kids never made it through high school. Thirteen years later, of the sixty-seven boys, nineteen were felons; the forty-five girls had sixty-three total children, and more than half had their babies before the age of eighteen. Crucially, this was not surprising: The reason was culture. These children had been nurtured in communities with different norms than those that reign in Scarsdale.

What this means, Wax points out, is that scrupulous recountings of the historical reasons for black problems are of no significant use in finding solutions. She notes:

The black family was far more stable 50 years ago, when conditions for blacks were far worse than they are today. Black out-of-wedlock births started to climb and marriage rates to fall around 1960, long after slavery was abolished and just as the civil rights movement gained momentum. Perhaps a more nuanced explanation for the recent deterioration is that the legacy of slavery made the black family more vulnerable to the cultural subversions of the 1960s. But what does this tell us that is useful today? The answer is: nothing.

One of the most sobering observations made by Wax comes in the form of a disarmingly simple calculus presented first by Isabel Sawhill and Christopher Jencks. If you finish high school and keep a job without having children before marriage, you will almost certainly not be poor. Period. I have repeatedly felt the air go out of the room upon putting this to black audiences. No one of any political stripe can deny it. It is human truth on view. In 2004, the poverty rate among blacks who followed that formula was less than 6 percent, as opposed to the overall rate of 24.7 percent. Even after hearing the earnest musings about employers who are less interested in people with names like Tomika, no one can gainsay the simple truth of that advice. Crucially, neither bigotry nor even structural racism can explain why an individual does not live up to it.

There are those who would beg to differ, but Wax is especially good at showing the flaws in their arguments. The Implicit Association Test (which tests split-second mental associations) does show that people subtly associate black people with negative adjectives—but also that people with those biases do not necessarily act on them and sometimes even favor blacks in their actions. Moreover, a study by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas showed that poor women (many of them black) decided not to marry their children’s fathers not because the men didn’t have jobs, but because of their undependable behavior.

The weakness—and sadness—of this fine book is that it has no prescription. Wax makes a series of arguments—stop focusing on the past, think about culture rather than structure, criticize failure and emulate success—but she does not tell us how to accomplish these goals. The task is certainly huge. The focus on culture that Wax champions would be one in which a black family would be deeply ashamed of the man with two “baby mamas” who works only “odd jobs” and largely gets by selling drugs. But the implacable present-day fact is that in his actually existing community today that man is considered less than ideal but still quite normal. He is loved and accepted, not least as a consequence of the latent meme that only so much can be expected of black people because of the oppressiveness of The System. Hence as Wax notes, Tavis Smiley could produce a whole volume called The Covenant With Black America, urging blacks to “hold leaders to account” and include a mere two lines about out-of-wedlock child-rearing. The black radical is considered, even if “a little crazy,” as “having something to say.” Many black church audiences are now eager to get an earful of Jeremiah Wright.

Wax stipulates that the government should do all that it can to ensure equal opportunity, which includes providing decent education and enforcing civil rights laws. I would say that there is somewhat more that the government can do, given the historical circumstances. Programs to ease ex-cons back into society could do infinitely more for black inner-cities than suing car companies over small differences in loan deals. Those who think that Obama has no “black agenda” are unaware of how many black people attend the community colleges to which he has given extra (if insufficient) funding.

Still, at the end of day, as Wax puts it:

The government cannot make people watch less television, talk to their children, or read more books. It cannot ordain domestic order, harmony, tranquility, stability, or other conditions conducive to academic success and the development of sound character. Nor can it determine how families structure their interactions and routines or how family resources—including time and money—are expended. Large-scale programs are especially ineffective in changing attitudes and values toward learning, work, and marriage.

It would have been rather callous if anyone wrote this a few years past the Great Society heyday, when little could be known as to whether a New New Deal was going to turn black America upside down. But now these truths must be stated.

The typical way of having one’s cake and eating it too here is to say that we need to think about both government help and self-help. But in practice this too often becomes a handy way to focus on the comforts of underdoggism while genuflecting to the obvious but undramatic logic of self-direction. Wax usefully asks: “Is it possible to pursue an arduous program of self-improvement while simultaneously thinking of oneself as a victim of grievous mistreatment and of one’s shortcomings as a product of external forces?” To the extent that our ideology on race is more about studied radicalism than about a healthy brand of what Wax calls an internal locus of control, her book provokes, at least in this reader, a certain hopelessness. If she is right, then the bulk of today’s discussion of black America is performance art. Tragically, and for the most part, she is right.

John McWhorter is the author of Our Magnificant Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English and teaches at Columbia University.
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7) White House unloads anger over criticism from 'professional left’
By Sam Youngman

The White House is simmering with anger at criticism from liberals who say President Obama is more concerned with deal-making than ideological purity.

During an interview with The Hill in his West Wing office, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs blasted liberal naysayers, whom he said would never regard anything the president did as good enough.


“I hear these people saying he’s like George Bush. Those people ought to be drug tested,” Gibbs said. “I mean, it’s crazy.”


The press secretary dismissed the “professional left” in terms very similar to those used by their opponents on the ideological right, saying, “They will be satisfied when we have Canadian healthcare and we’ve eliminated the Pentagon. That’s not reality.”


Of those who complain that Obama caved to centrists on issues such as healthcare reform, Gibbs said: “They wouldn’t be satisfied if Dennis Kucinich was president.”


The White House, constantly under fire from expected enemies on the right, has been frustrated by nightly attacks on cable news shows catering to the left, where Obama and top lieutenants like Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have been excoriated for abandoning the public option in healthcare reform; for not moving faster to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay; and for failing, so far, to end the ban on gays serving openly in the military.


Liberals have criticized Obama and his staff for moving to the middle and bargaining on healthcare reform, as well as the financial regulatory overhaul and even the $787 billion economic stimulus package, which some liberals said should have been larger.


Just last week, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow described Obama political adviser David Axelrod as a “human pretzel” for his explanation of the administration’s position on gay marriage. Axelrod had explained that Obama opposes same-sex marriage but favors equal benefits for partners in gay relationships.


Attacks from liberal political groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), which raises money for liberal candidates and causes, are also frustrating to the White House.


Adam Green, one of PCCC’s founders, repeatedly blasted Obama for a “loser mentality” during the healthcare debate, criticizing the president and Emanuel for not trying harder to include the public option in the final healthcare legislation. The group even ran ads accusing Obama of ignoring the will of the millions who voted for him by courting the support of Republican Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe.


PCCC is now pressing Obama to nominate Elizabeth Warren, a hero to the left, as the first head of the new consumer protection office created by the Wall Street reform bill.


While visibly frustrated, Gibbs did not specifically name any of the White Houses’s liberal detractors by name.


Green said in an e-mailed statement Monday afternoon, “When Republicans opposed the stimulus and when Joe Lieberman opposed the overwhelmingly popular public option, the president could have barnstormed across their states and demanded they support policies that their constituents wanted — but instead he caved without a fight,” Green said.


Gibbs’s tough comments reflect frustration and some bafflement from the White House, which believes it has done a lot for the left.


In just over 18 months in office, Obama has passed healthcare reform, financial regulatory reform and fair-pay legislation for women, among other bills near and dear to liberals.


Obama is also overseeing the end of the Iraq war, with the U.S. on schedule to end its combat operations by the end of this month.


He’s also added diversity to the Supreme Court by nominating two female justices, including the court’s first Hispanic. Yet some liberal groups have criticized his nominees for not being liberal enough.


“There’s 101 things we’ve done,” said Gibbs, who then mentioned both Iraq and healthcare.


Gibbs said the professional left is not representative of the progressives who organized, campaigned, raised money and ultimately voted for Obama.


Progressives, Gibbs said, are the liberals outside of Washington “in America,” and they are grateful for what Obama has accomplished in a shattered economy with uniform Republican opposition and a short amount of time.


Obama reached out to the left — including through a private lunch with Maddow and other liberal commentators — earlier this summer.



In late July, Obama made a surprise video appearance, with an assist from Maddow, at the NetRoots Nation convention in Las Vegas, where the professional left had gathered to grouse about its disappointment in the president.


“I hope you take a moment to consider all we’ve accomplished so far,” Obama said, telling the impatient audience, “We’re not done.”


The lack of appreciation or recognition for what Obama has accomplished has left Gibbs and others in furious disbelief.


Larry Berman, an expert on the presidency and a political science professor at the University of California-Davis, said he has been surprised that liberals aren’t more cognizant of the pragmatism Obama has had to employ to pass landmark reforms.


“The irony, of course, is that Gibbs’s frustration reflects the fact that the conservative opposition has been so effective at undermining the president’s popular approval,” Berman said.


“And from Gibbs’s perspective, and the White House perspective, they ought to be able to catch a break from people who, in their view, should be grateful and appreciative.”
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Better Listen Up Congress, Because We are 'Fed' Up!

We have the best health care in the world so why not use that as a foundation on which to build a comparable opportunity for others? That did not square with Obama's plan to remake America so now Obama's healthcare ambulance is rolling off the highway into a ditch of his own making.

So what to do? Again he is making the wrong decision by resorting to scare tactics and lies about the effect of what he is proposing. No wonder his ideas are meeting resistance. There is no Right Wing Conspiracy, it is simply American's beginning to realize they are being taken down a path they do not like and by someone they are increasingly beginning to justifiably distrust.(See 1, 1a and 1b below.)

Bullying and lying seems to be Obamas' strong suit and it will get him and our nation in a lot of trouble. Both articles posted in previous memos. (See 2 and 2a below.)

Buckle up, Congress is driving us over a cliff. (See 3 below.)

This letter was read on the Glenn Beck show and is worth reading if you have not heard its content. The writer speaks my sentiments and the sentiments of millions who have been far too silent but we are beginning to be heard loud and clear. Listen up Congress - we are 'fed' up! (See 4 below.)

Dick

1)Support Slips for Health Plan:Obama Push Faces Growing Doubts in Poll; Overhaul Advances in House, Senate.
By LAURA MECKLER

Support for President Barack Obama's health-care effort has declined over the past five weeks, particularly among those who already have insurance, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found, amid prolonged debate over costs and quality of care.

In mid-June, respondents were evenly divided when asked whether they thought Mr. Obama's health plan was a good or bad idea. In the new poll, conducted July 24-27, 42% called it a bad idea while 36% said it was a good idea.

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Among those with private insurance, the proportion calling the plan a bad idea rose to 47% from 37%.

Declining popularity of the health-care overhaul reflects rising anxiety over the federal budget deficit and congressional debate over the most contentious aspects of the legislation, including how to pay for it. The poll also shows concern over the role of government in determining personal medical decisions.

Trying to regain momentum, Mr. Obama is shifting his pitch to new consumer-protection rules for insurance companies, part of a bid to win over Americans who already have coverage.

David Axelrod, one of the president's top advisers, acknowledged that the White House's months-long focus on controlling medical costs hasn't worked. "Consumer protections are a lot more tangible," he said.

On Wednesday, Democratic leaders in the House reached accord with conservative party members to move their bill through the last of three committees, although the full House won't vote on the measure until at least September. "Failure is not an option," said California Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman.

The White House is eager to show progress and build public support before Congress breaks for summer, when opponents plan to continue their campaign. "If this bill hangs out there over the August recess my guess is it will get shredded," House Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio), said.


In the Journal poll, only two in 10 people said the quality of their own care would improve under the Obama plan; just 15% of those with private insurance thought it would. Twice as many overall, and three times as many with private coverage, predicted their own care would get worse.

"You can't pass a substantial health reform unless privately insured people see there's a benefit for them," said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducts the poll with Democrat Peter D. Hart.

Support for former President Bill Clinton's health plan hovered in similar territory in 1994 on its way to defeat. But the Clinton plan never made it as far in Congress as the Obama effort has this year. Indeed, the poll showed strong support among respondents for ideas common to all of the pieces of health-care legislation being considered by Congress.

When given several details of the proposal, 56% said they favored the plan compared with 38% who oppose it.

The description given to poll respondents didn't include a public-insurance plan, which divides the public, nor specifics about what income levels might be taxed to fund the plan.

The poll had a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points for the overall sample.

Mr. Obama has focused sharply on cost control for businesses and Americans who have seen premiums rise faster than wages.

But those efforts have been hurt by the debate in Washington, which has been dominated by the $1 trillion, 10-year price tag for covering the uninsured. That makes it hard to persuade people that the bill will lead to reduced costs, said Mr. Axelrod.

"People are properly skeptical about any proposals out of Washington that speak to cost because they've been singed by past experience," said the senior Obama adviser.

At a town hall meeting in Raleigh, N.C., Wednesday, the president outlined a series of policies, many of which the insurance industry has agreed to accept.

The president said, for example, he wants rules that would require insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions, cap out-of-pocket expenses, bar insurers from dropping people who become seriously ill, ban annual or lifetime coverage caps, and allow adults to stay on their parents' plans through age 26.

The Blue Dogs -- a key group of conservative Democrats -- agreed to terms of Obama's health-care proposal. The development is a boost for the president, WSJ's Laura Meckler reports.
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"If you've got health insurance, then the reform we're proposing will also help you because it will provide you more stability and more security," Mr. Obama said.

On the question of how to pay for the measure, the poll found only one idea with majority support: a surtax on the rich, the approach taken in the bill moving through the House, but which isn't expected in the Senate version.

Public support for fining businesses that don't offer insurance dropped from last month, with half of those polled now in favor. Only four in 10 liked the idea of taxing insurance companies that offer particularly generous health plans, an idea that has gained currency in the Senate Finance Committee.

The poll found that Mr. Obama's overall ratings have fallen amid worries over the economy, with the decline due almost entirely to dwindling support by Republicans. His score is solid by historical standards but no longer at the high-flying levels of his early weeks.

Overall, Mr. Obama's ratings fell on a series of measures. His job approval now stands at 53%, down from a high of 61% in April. That is three points higher than President George W. Bush had in June 2001, following a contentious election victory.

The proportion of people who said it was very or fairly likely that Mr. Obama would bring "real change" dropped to 51% from 61% in February. The share of those who said he could be trusted to keep his word fell to 48% this month from 58% in April.

Mr. Hart, the Democratic pollster, said rising concerns over employment and the economy explained Mr. Obama's falling ratings.

"He seems embroiled in so many of the issues of the day without much sense of relief on the economic front," he said.

The poll also found a rising sense of partisanship. More than three in 10 surveyed said the current Congress has been more partisan and divided than in the past, compared with just 11% who said it has been less partisan.

In February, people were more likely to blame Republicans by a two-to-one margin. This month, they were divided over who to blame, with most saying both parties were at fault.

On other issues, the poll found:

Strong support for Sonia Sotomayor, Mr. Obama's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. Forty-four percent of people said they strongly or somewhat supported her confirmation with 30% opposed.

Falling support for the economic stimulus plan, with 34% in favor, down from 44% in February; 43% now say it is a bad idea.

Two-thirds of people said they knew enough about the controversy surrounding the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. to form an opinion. Of them, about one in three said both Mr. Gates and the police officer were equally at fault, 27% said Mr. Gates was more at fault and 11% said the officer was more to blame.


1a) Obama Has Aura but Doesn't Know How To Legislate
By Michael Barone

Aura dazzles, but argument gets things done. Consider the debate on the Democrats' health care bill and the increasingly negative response to Barack Obama's performance. Democrats have the numbers to pass a health care bill -- 256 votes in the House, 38 more than the 218 majority; 60 votes in the Senate, enough to defeat a filibuster. But they haven't come up with the arguments, at least yet, to put those numbers on the board. It's something not many predicted that bright January inauguration morning.

We knew that day that Obama was good at aura, at generating enthusiasm for the prospect of hope and change. His inspiring speeches -- the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in Des Moines, the race speech in Philadelphia, the countless rallies in primary and caucus and target states -- helped him capture the Democratic nomination and then win the presidency by the biggest percentage margin in 20 years.

But it turns out that Obama is not so good at argument. Inspiration is one thing, persuasion another. He created the impression on the campaign trail that he was familiar with major issues and readily ticked off his positions on them. But he has not proved so good at legislating.

One reason perhaps is that he has had little practice. He served as a legislator for a dozen years before becoming president, but was only rarely an active one. He spent one of his eight years as an Illinois state senator running unsuccessfully for Congress and two of them running successfully for U.S. senator. He spent two of his years in the U.S. Senate running for president. During all of his seven non-campaign years as a legislator, he was in the minority party.

In other words, he's never done much work putting legislation together -- especially legislation that channels vast flows of money and affects the workings of parts of the economy that deeply affect people's lives. This lack of experience is starting to show. On the major legislation considered this year -- the stimulus, cap-and-trade, health care -- the Obama White House has done little or nothing to set down markers, to provide guidance, to establish boundaries and no-go areas.

The administration could have insisted that the stimulus package concentrate spending in the next year. It didn't. It could have insisted that the cap-and-trade bill generate the revenue that was supposed to underwrite health care. It didn't. It could have decided either to seek a bipartisan health care bill or insist that a Democratic bill be budget-neutral. It didn't -- and it still hasn't made this basic policy choice.

Most of Obama's top White House staffers are politics operatives, not policy wonks. The one leading policy wonk on health care, Budget Director Peter Orszag, has either missed signals of danger or has failed to communicate their seriousness to his colleagues. On Feb. 25, Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Elmendorf, a Democratic appointee, signaled in testimony to the Senate Finance Committee that the CBO would not credit health care bills with the budget savings the administration was promising.

Orszag, as a former CBO director himself, should have realized what this meant, which is that Democrats would have to shape their bills accordingly. They didn't, and were stunned when CBO came out in June and this month with estimates of little or no savings.

And someone in the White House should have taken note when 40 Blue Dog Democrats signed a letter dated July 9 warning that they wouldn't vote for anything like the health care bills being considered in committee.
Without those 40 votes, Democrats don't have a majority in the House. It's unusual for dissenting members of the majority to set down such a public marker. Predictably, they haven't backed down so far, despite foot-stomping by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a chat session with Obama.

Obama's July 22 press conference was intended to rally support for the Democrats' health care bills. It didn't. The president eschewed serious arguments and rattled off campaign-type talking points. Those used to be enough to elicit cheers from enthusiastic audiences in Iowa and Virginia.

But aura can only take you so far, particularly when you diminish it by disrespecting the Cambridge police department. Being president means being more than commenter-in-chief. You need to know how to legislate. You need not just aura but argument.

1b) HEALTH-CARE 'COMPROMISE':BLUE DOGS GET TAKEN
By GRACE-MARIE TURNER


HOUSE Democrats are playing a game of Whack-a-Mole as they try to devise a health-reform bill to re-engineer one-sixth of our economy, but the latest "agreement" announced Wednesday makes no progress in repairing the deeply flawed legislation.

Dissident "Blue Dog" Democrats on the key House Energy and Commerce Committee had been holding the bill hostage to a list of a dozen demands, saying it costs too much and fails to address systemic problems in the nation's ailing health-care sector.

But yesterday, after days of negotiations with congressional and White House leaders, a spokesman for the group, Rep. Mike Ross (D-Ark.), announced an agreement he said would reduce the bill's cost, increase the number of small businesses exempt from its requirements and weaken a government-run insurance plan that would compete with private insurers.

But the Blue Dogs clearly made a deal for the sake of making a deal.

The best part of the agreement is that it delays any vote in the full House until after the August recess, so people can digest the details. When they head home this weekend, House members are sure to hear from incensed constituents alarmed about the impact of "reform" on their care.

All the other "concessions" granted to the Blue Dogs don't add up to much. Start with the cost of the bill, which they supposedly reduced by $100 billion: Problem is, the total price tag still will be nearly $1 trillion.

Not many Americans are going to believe that spending $1 trillion more on health care will somehow lower its costs. In fact, the director of the Congressional Budget Office testified that a similar bill before the Senate would "significantly expand" health costs, increase the deficit, and drive the nation more deeply into debt. The Blue Dogs' agreement does nothing to alter that fundamental fact.

And Americans don't believe the promises of politicians that they'll be able to keep the doctors and health coverage they have now. Numerous studies have shown that tens of millions of Americans are sure to lose their private insurance as government strong-arms them out of business.

The Blue Dogs said they got an agreement that government will "negotiate" its prices with doctors and hospitals. But government doesn't negotiate; it dictates prices.

Seniors are increasingly alarmed because they have learned that much of the "savings" to pay for health reform will come out of reductions in Medicare spending. They rightly fear that the government will start rationing their health care.

And Americans know that, once the reform plan is in place, tax increases won't just hit the rich but the middle class as well.

A sleeper issue that has received very little attention so far is the "individual mandate." Once the American people find out that the federal government is going to force them to purchase a health-insurance policy that it designs and compel them to pay premiums it sets -- and fine them if they don't comply -- they'll realize how deeply health "reform" will intrude into their lives.

There are no assurances that other House Democrats will go along with yesterday's deal. And the Senate is even further from an agreement than the House.

Meanwhile, President Obama has scaled back his pitch for sweeping health reform involving universal coverage and huge cost reductions. In speeches yesterday, he became a pitchman for insurance market reforms and "consumer protections" -- the lowest common denominator of health reform.

The president clearly will fail in his attempt to steamroll the House and Senate to vote on a bill before leaving for the August recess. And this may foretell failure for his sweeping reform agenda as well.

House Republicans put some new chips on the table on Wednesday in unveiling their own health reform plan, with a likely price tag of $700 billion. It offers a mix of tax credits and deductions to help people buy insurance, gives people more options to purchase private health insurance, and includes medical malpractice reform. It also avoids unpopular mandates on individuals and businesses to buy coverage.

Lawmakers should prepare to head back to the drawing board when they return in the fall with new ideas and feedback from constituents fresh in their minds.

Grace-Marie Turner is presi dent of the Galen Institute, a re search organization focused on market-based health-reform ideas.

2).The President Takes a Hard Line on Israel:Yet he doesn’t want to be seen as ‘meddling’ in Iran
By MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS

In foreign policy, President Barack Obama has demonstrated a disturbing propensity to curry favor with our adversaries at the expense of our friends.

The Czechs and Poles are rightly concerned that they will be sacrificed on the altar of better U.S. relations with Russia. And the Israelis fear that the Obama administration’s desired opening to the Muslim world will be achieved at their expense. Mr. Obama’s attempted bullying of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a case in point.

Mr. Netanyahu was sworn in as Israel’s prime minister on March 31. Shortly thereafter, the Obama administration confronted Israel’s new leader in a very public way regarding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, an area partially controlled by the Palestinian National Authority. This was an extremely unusual way for an American president to greet the new leader of a liberal democracy that’s a close ally of the U.S.

The Obama administration was not satisfied with a series of understandings crafted by the Bush administration that, while not freezing settlements, had nonetheless achieved a significant reduction in settlement construction. During a May press conference with the Egyptian foreign minister, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that Mr. Obama “wants to see a stop to settlements—not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.”

Subsequently, Mr. Obama demanded that Israel freeze construction in east Jerusalem. Of course, Mr. Netanyahu rejected Mr. Obama’s demand. He declared that Jerusalem is an open, undivided city “that has no separation according to religion or national affiliation.” Mr. Netanyahu added that “we cannot accept the idea that Jews will not have the right to live and purchase in all parts of Jerusalem.”

If Jews were prohibited from buying property in New York, London, Paris or Rome, there would be an international outcry. Why, Mr. Netanyahu wondered, should the standard be different for Jerusalem?

Mr. Obama is woefully wrong if he believes that his confrontational style will provide an incentive for the Palestinians and the members of the Arab League to resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute. It will simply reinforce the long-standing Arab belief that the U.S. can “deliver” Israel if it only has the will to do so, thereby reducing Arab incentives to make concessions in direct negotiations with Israel.

As if on cue, Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian National Authority, announced that he would not negotiate on any issue with the new Israeli government until Mr. Obama’s settlement conditions are met.

In addition to the building freeze in Jerusalem and the West Bank, Mr. Abbas insisted on four other unilateral, non-negotiable concessions: First, an independent Palestinian state; second, that Israel pulls back to its pre-June 1967 borders, minus a Palestinian land bridge between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; third, a Palestinian “right of return” to Israel; and fourth, resolution of all permanent status issues on the basis of the 2002 Abdullah plan calling on Arabs to normalize relations with Israel in return for Israel’s withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders. The “right of return,” in particular, is a non-starter.

If Mr. Obama seeks a Palestinian Arab state, he is going about it the wrong way. The fact is that Mr. Netanyahu has endorsed a two-state solution and an end to the expansion of settlements in the West Bank—as long as the Palestinians accept Israel as a legitimate Jewish state and cannot militarily threaten it. Israel has been willing to accept a two-state solution since the United Nations partition resolution for Palestine in 1947, but the Arabs have refused. They are not interested in creating a separate Palestinian Arab state but in destroying Israel as a Jewish state.

The Obama approach in the Middle East is predicated on what might be called the Arab “grievance narrative,” which holds that Israel was created as a result of Western guilt about the Holocaust. It is also based on the idea that, as the president suggested in his Cairo speech, there is moral equivalence between the Holocaust and Palestinian “dislocation.”

Such language illustrates an inability to make distinctions. Arabs launched a war against Jewish self-determination and the state of Israel long before any Israeli “occupation” of their lands. When Israel seized land in a defensive war, it was the Arabs, not the Israelis, who kept Palestinian “refugees” in limbo for three generations to await Israel’s destruction.

As Mr. Netanyahu reminded Mr. Obama after the latter’s Cairo speech, the Arab claim that Israel was a land grab by the great powers to salve the collective conscience of the West after the Holocaust is a slander. On the contrary, he observed, Israel’s right to its homeland rests on the longstanding historical connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. This right was ratified by the unanimous and legitimizing votes of the League of Nations and the U.N. Security Council’s permanent members, and validated by over 60 years of Israel’s successful, democratic statehood.

Israel’s “right to exist” was expressed best by Israeli diplomat Abba Eban in 1981. He wrote, “Israel’s right to exist, like that of the United States, Saudi Arabia, and 152 other states, is axiomatic and unreserved. Israel’s legitimacy is not suspended in midair, awaiting acknowledgment. . . . There is certainly no other state, big or small, young or old, that would consider mere recognition of its ‘right to exist’ a favor, or a negotiable concession.”

Mr. Netanyahu might also have added that Israel’s control of the West Bank (territory that should properly be called “disputed” rather than “occupied”), was the result of defeating the Arab powers who initiated the Six Day War of 1967. The status of aggressors and defenders is not interchangeable. Neither is the status of victorious powers and defeated ones.

Nonetheless, Israel has taken unilateral steps toward peace, steps not reciprocated by the Palestinians. When Israel unilaterally disengaged from the Gaza Strip, dismantling 21 settlements and displacing over 9,000 residents, it conducted the most comprehensive test of the “land for peace” concept in the history of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Yet Israel was rewarded with the creation of a terrorist enclave governed by Hamas, rather than the peaceful, responsible neighbor Israel would need in order to accept a Palestinian Arab state.

Unlike Hamas, the corrupt Palestinian National Authority that holds sway in the West Bank has nominally accepted Israel’s right to exist but has never given up the “right of return” for Palestinian “refugees.” That right, if implemented, would mean the end of Israel’s existence.

Peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians requires compromises on both sides. U.S. pressure on Israel, without any on the Palestinians, will not achieve the desired outcome.

Earlier this summer, the president justified his decision to downplay even rhetorical support for the Iranian protesters who rose up against their government and its fraudulent election. He did not wish the U.S. to appear to be “meddling” in Iranian affairs. He apparently feels no similar constraint when it comes to Israel.

Mr. Owens is editor of Orbis, the quarterly journal of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

2a) Obama Lied Early And Often About Israel
By Jonathan Mark


Here’’s an item from the Los Angeles Times, April 10, 2008, during the campaign: “Even as he won support in Chicago’s Palestinian community, Obama tried to forge ties with advocates for Israel. In 2000, he submitted a policy paper to CityPAC, a pro-Israel political action committee, that among other things supported a unified Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a position far out of step from that of his Palestinian friends. The PAC concluded that Obama’s position paper “suggests he is strongly pro-Israel on all of the major issues.”

Obama’s campaign volunteers within Jewish organizations and the Jewish media pointed to endorsements such as that one, endorsements over the course of seven years, to assuage Jewish fears about Obama.

Now here’s an item from this week: Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, was summoned to the State Department to be scolded because Jews were building a house in Jerusalem.

Obama’s supporters often said “Bush lied.” Did Obama lie? When he was telling Jewish audiences for the better part of seven years that he believed in a united Israeli Jerusalem, did he mean it? Or can we trust Ali Abinemeh, editor of Electonic Intifada who wrote in March, 2008:

“Over the years since I first saw Obama speak I met him about half a dozen times, often at Palestinian and Arab-American community events in Chicago including a May 1998 community fundraiser at which Edward Said was the keynote speaker. In 2000, when Obama unsuccessfully ran for Congress I heard him speak at a campaign fundraiser hosted by a University of Chicago professor. On that occasion and others Obama was forthright in his criticism of US policy and his call for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

“The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing.

“As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, ‘Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.” He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, ‘Keep up the good work!’”

Clearly, Obama wasn’t being upfront. He said so himself. Either he was telling lies to the Jewish PACS or he was telling lies to American Palestinians. And most Jewish journalists and most Jewish leaders were OK with that. They wanted him to win anyway. They exerted more energy debunking anonymous e-mails about Obama than they did on examining and publicizing Obama’s habit of saying one thing to Zionists and another thing to anti-Zionists, such as his friends at Electronic Intifada. Now that he’s president he’s finally being upfront. Most Israelis don’t like it. Most American Jews don’t care.


3) Health Care Reform: Fasten Your Seatbelts -- Congress is at the Wheel
By Walter Shapiro

The truest legislative assessment of the prospects for health care reform was uttered by none other than Bette Davis in "All About Eve:"

"Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy night."
Just when it seemed like Congress was going to slink into its August recess with everything in suspended animation, both Senate and House negotiators reported unexpected progress Wednesday afternoon in easing bills through key committees.

The Senate Finance Committee proudly announced that it had whacked $100 billion off the projected 10-year, $1-trillion cost of the proposed legislation. The House Energy and Commerce Committee also reported that it had cut a deal with moderate Blue Dog Democrats to limit the sweep of the bill and to curtail the scope of a government-run health plan that would compete with private insurers.
While Barack Obama's August deadline had long ago drifted off on a summer's breeze, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confidently issued a mid-afternoon statement, promising that the legislation would emerge from the Energy and Commerce Committee this week. But then liberals on the committee rebelled at the concessions to the Blue Dogs over watering down the public option – thereby postponing, at least until Thursday, work on the bill.

(We interrupt this story to offer an updated Surgeon General's warning: "Trying to follow these legislative machinations is dangerous to your health and sanity.")
The best way to understand the health care battles ahead is to remember what Vermont Sen. George Aiken shrewdly recommended as the American strategy at the height of the Vietnam War: "Just declare victory and go home." The White House and the congressional Democratic leadership are too committed to passing a bill to ever admit defeat. So whatever ungainly, mud-caked mess finally emerges from the legislative quagmire, Obama and Company are going to face an irresistible temptation to declare victory and call it health care reform.

Media consultants and pollsters who advise vulnerable Democratic legislators are reluctant to antagonize the White House by talking on the record about the political pressures that their clients face in backing Obama on health care. But before this legislative crusade is over, many Democrats elected from traditionally Republican states or districts will face a long, dark night of the soul over the health care bill.

The political dangers for Democrats come in all shapes and sizes. There is what might be called the Page 579 Problem – a minor provision buried in the intricacies of the health care bill could morph into a potent symbol of governmental excess when demonized in 30-second Republican attack ads. Sticker shock may also be an obstacle. No matter how it is paid for, voters may balk at the federal government spending, say, $900 billion for anything (even free drinking cups from the fountain of youth). Another political risk could come from the Medicare meltdown as voters over 65 (quite happy with their government-run medical care, thank you) angrily protest any potential cutbacks in their favorite program, wedged in under the guise of reducing overall health care costs.

The truth is that – no matter how many town meetings and press conferences Obama holds – health care reform will remain an abstraction until there is an actual bill summary that voters can analyze. That is why polls during this phase of legislative jousting should be viewed with caution since they are riddled with hypothetical questions. (A New York Times/CBS News poll released Wednesday found that 46 percent of the voters approve and 38 disapprove of the way Obama is handling health care.) But the real political test will come in the fall. A Democratic strategist explains, "Then the big question that voters will ask about the bill is 'What's in it for me?'"

Beneath the widespread altruistic belief that health care is a basic human right lays a self-interested personal cost-benefit analysis. This was equally true during Bill and Hillary Clinton's ill-fated 1993 drive to pass health care reform. As pollster Stan Greenberg, who advised Clinton during his first term, recalls in a New Republic article, "Judging whether the plan would help or hurt one's family suddenly became the dominant predictor... of support for or opposition to the Clinton health care plan."

Top Democrats make the argument to each other that if the party this time around cannot pass health care reform – the Holy Grail since Harry Truman – it will face a rebellion from voters for over-promising and legislative ineptitude. As 34-year-old Virginia Democrat Tom Perriello, who defeated a six-term GOP incumbent in 2008, puts it, "The most important thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the freshman class got elected by running for problem-solving over partisanship." Perriello, who supports the public option, is staunchly in favor of reform even though he is among the 60 Democratic incumbents targeted by a Republican National Committee radio ad that ridicules Obama's proposals as "a dangerous experiment."
There are actually Democratic insiders who believe that passing health care reform is more politically important going into the congressional elections than even the economy. In contrast, Republican pollster David Winston, who advises the congressional GOP leadership, persuasively argues, "This is ultimately going to be an election about jobs. And there's going to be one number that people will follow – and that's the unemployment rate."

An under-appreciated problem facing Democrats in passing legislation is that many of the benefits will not kick in until after Obama runs for a second term in 2012. Yes, not until after the 2012 elections. Under the original and more liberal version of the House bill, the uninsured would not receive government subsidies to purchase their own health insurance until 2013, nor would the public plan be established until then. (Medicare, in contrast, was up and running 11 months after Lyndon

Johnson signed the legislation in 1965).
Part of the delay would be from the sheer complexity of setting up the elaborate system of rewards and penalties that will be needed to move the nation close to providing health care for all Americans. If, for example, large employers would be mandated to provide health insurance for their workers, that requirement could not be levied overnight. Also, under current congressional budget rules, the longer it takes for a program to fully take effect, the less the purported cost would be over 10 years. So as the health care legislation inevitably gets whittled down during House and Senate negotiations, the phase-in period is apt to be further extended in order to reduce cost estimates.

Obama is also grappling with the "Why Now?" dilemma. At a town meeting Wednesday in Raleigh, N.C., the president repeated his refrain that the status quo is unsustainable. "If we do nothing," Obama declared, "I can almost guarantee you your (health insurance) premiums will double over the next 10 years, because that's what they did over the last 10 years." It is nearly impossible to argue with this long-term math. The problem for the president – and the congressional Democrats – is that it is hard to create a sense of this-is-the-moment urgency to pass legislation designed to ward off problems that are still just over the horizon.
None of this is designed to argue that Obama-style health care reform is unattainable in political terms or undesirable in policy terms. But even with lopsided Democratic congressional majorities, even with the president's mastery of the bully pulpit, even with Wednesday's small-step legislative progress, the legislative struggle over the next few months will be daunting. So fasten your seatbelts -- the real action on Capitol Hill has only just begun.

4) We, The People, Are Coming!!

This 53 year old mother and grandmother has given us a voice. (Her letter was read on the Glenn Beck show.)

GLENN BECK: I got a letter from a woman in Arizona. She writes an
open letter to our nation's leadership: I'm a home grown American
citizen, 53, registered Democrat all my life. Before the last
presidential election I registered as a Republican because I no longer
felt the Democratic Party represents my views or works to pursue
issues important to me. Now I no longer feel the Republican Party
represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. The
fact is I no longer feel any political party or representative in
Washington represents my views or works to pursue the issues important to me. There must be someone. Please tell me who you are. Please stand up and tell me that you are there and that you're willing to fight for our Constitution as it was written. Please stand up now.

You might ask yourself what my views and issues are that I would
horribly feel so disenfranchised by both major political parties.
What kind of nut job am I? Will you please tell me? Well, these are
briefly my views and issues for which I seek representation:

One, illegal immigration. I want you to stop coddling illegal
immigrants and secure our borders. Close the underground tunnels.
Stop the violence and the trafficking in drugs and people. No
amnesty, not again. Been there, done that, no resolution. P.S. I'm
not a racist. This isn't to be confused with legal immigration.

Two, the TARP bill, I want it repealed and I want no further funding
supplied to it. We told you no, but you did it anyway. I want the
remaining unfunded 95% repealed. Freeze, repeal.

Three: Czars, I want the circumvention of our checks and balances
stopped immediately. Fire the czars. No more czars.. Government
officials answer to the process, not to the president.. Stop trampling
on our Constitution and honor it.

Four, cap and trade. The debate on global warming is not over.
There is more to say.

Five, universal healthcare. I will not be rushed into another
expensive decision. Don't you dare try to pass this in the middle of
the night and then go on break. Slow down!

Six, growing government control. I want states rights and
sovereignty fully restored. I want less government in my life, not
more. Shrink it down. Mind your own business. You have enough to
take care of with your real obligations. Why don't you start there?

Seven, ACORN. I do not want ACORN and its affiliates in charge of
our 2010 census. I want them investigated. I also do not want
mandatory escrow fees contributed to them every time on every real
estate deal that closes. Stop the funding to ACORN and its affiliates
pending impartial audits and investigations. I do not trust them with
taking the census over with our taxpayer money. I don't trust them
with our taxpayer money.. Face up to the allegations against them and get it resolved before taxpayers get any more involved with them. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, hello. Stop protecting
your political buddies. You work for us, the people. Investigate.

Eight, redistribution of wealth. No, no, no. I work for my money.
It is mine. I have always worked for people with more money than I
have because they gave me jobs. That is the only redistribution of
wealth that I will support. I never got a job from a poor person.
Why do you want me to hate my employers? Why—what do you have against shareholders making a profit?

Nine, charitable contributions. Although I never got a job from a
poor person, I have helped many in need. Charity belongs in our local
communities, where we know our needs best and can use our local talent and our local resources. Butt out, please. We want to do it
ourselves.

Ten, corporate bailouts. Knock it off. Sink or swim like the rest
of us. If there are hard times ahead, we'll be better off just
getting into it and letting the strong survive. Quick and painful.
Have you ever ripped off a Band-Aid? We will pull together. Great
things happen in America under great hardship. Give us the chance to innovate. We cannot disappoint you more than you have disappointed us.

Eleven, transparency and accountability. How about it? No, really,
how about it? Let's have it. Let's say we give the buzzwords a rest
and have some straight honest talk. Please try—please stop
manipulating and trying to appease me with clever wording. I am not
the idiot you obviously take me for. Stop sneaking around and meeting in back rooms making deals with your friends. It will only be a prelude to your criminal investigation. Stop hiding things from me.

Twelve, unprecedented quick spending. Stop it now. Take a breath.
Listen to the people. Let's just slow down and get some input from
some nonpoliticians on the subject. Stop making everything an
emergency. Stop speed reading our bills into law. I am not an
activist. I am not a community organizer. Nor am I a terrorist, a
militant or a violent person. I am a parent and a grandparent. I
work. I'm busy. I'm busy. I am busy, and I am tired. I thought we
elected competent people to take care of the business of government so that we could work, raise our families, pay our bills, have a little
recreation, complain about taxes, endure our hardships, pursue our
personal goals, cut our lawn, wash our cars on the weekends and be
responsible contributing members of society and teach our children to be the same all while living in the home of the free and land of the
brave.

I entrusted you with upholding the Constitution. I believed in the
checks and balances to keep from getting far off course. What
happened? You are very far off course. Do you really think I find
humor in the hiring of a speed reader to unintelligently ramble all
through a bill that you signed into law without knowing what it
contained? I do not. It is a mockery of the responsibility I have
entrusted to you. It is a slap in the face. I am not laughing at your
arrogance. Why is it that I feel as if you would not trust me to make
a single decision about my own life and how I would live it but you
should expect that I should trust you with the debt that you have laid
on all of us and our children? We did not want the TARP bill. We
said no. We would repeal it if we could. I am sure that we still
cannot. There is such urgency and recklessness in all of the recent
spending.

From my perspective, it seems that all of you have gone insane. I
also know that I am far from alone in these feelings. Do you honestly
feel that your current pursuits have merit to patriotic Americans? We
want it to stop.. We want to put the brakes on everything that is
being rushed by us and forced upon us. We want our voice back. You have forced us to put our lives on hold to straighten out the mess
that you are making. We will have to give up our vacations, our time
spent with our children, any relaxation time we may have had and money we cannot afford to spend on you to bring our concerns to Washington.
Our president often knows all the right buzzword is unsustainable.
Well, no kidding. How many tens of thousands of dollars did the focus group cost to come up with that word? We don't want your overpriced words. Stop treating us like we're morons.

We want all of you to stop focusing on your reelection and do the
job we want done, not the job you want done or the job your party
wants done. You work for us and at this rate I guarantee you not for
long because we are coming. We will be heard and we will be
represented. You think we're so busy with our lives that we will
never come for you? We are the formerly silent majority, all of us
who quietly work , pay taxes, obey the law, vote, save money, keep our noses to the grindstone and we are now looking up at you. You have awakened us, the patriotic spirit so strong and so powerful that it had been sleeping too long.. You have pushed us too far. Our numbers are great. They may surprise you. For every one of us who will be there, there will be hundreds more that could not come. Unlike you, we have their trust. We will represent them honestly, rest assured…
They will be at the polls on voting day to usher you out of office. We
have cancelled vacations. We will use our last few dollars saved. We
will find the representation among us and a grassroots campaign will
flourish. We didn't ask for this fight. But the gloves are coming
off. We do not come in violence, but we are angry. You will
represent us or you will be replaced with someone who will. There are candidates among us when he will rise like a Phoenix from the ashes that you have made of our constitution.

Democrat, Republican, independent, libertarian. Understand this.
We don't care. Political parties are meaningless to us. Patriotic
Americans are willing to do right by us and our Constitution and that
is all that matters to us now. We are going to fire all of you who
abuse power and seek more. It is not your power. It is ours and we
want it back… We entrusted you with it and you abused it. You are
dishonorable. You are dishonest. As Americans we are ashamed of you.
You have brought shame to us. If you are not representing the wants
and needs of your constituency loudly and consistently, in spite of
the objections of your party, you will be fired. Did you hear? We no
longer care about your political parties. You need to be loyal to us,
not to them. Because we will get you fired and they will not save
you.

If you do or can represent me, my issues, my views, please stand up.
Make your identity known. You need to make some noise about it.
Speak up. I need to know who you are. If you do not speak up, you
will be herded out with the rest of the sheep and we will replace the
whole damn congress if need be one by one. We are coming. Are we
coming for you? Who do you represent? What do you represent?
Listen. Because we are coming. We the people are coming.