Somehow truth continues to elude Obama. (See 1 below.)
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Let's look at some employment cost facts.
I do not claim to be an expert analyst but having spent over 50 years in Wall Street I do have some facility with figures so let's analyse Obama's job claims.
If you take the 4 million plus jobs Obama claims to have created and divide them into the $5 trillion plus debt Obama incurred, it cost about $1,250,000 to create each job. Assuming this job creation was spread over 4 years then the average cost was around $625,000 on an annualized basis.
I do not know what salary each job Obama claims he created brought to the employed but I do know the income created was less than prior wages earned on average.
The return on the cost of creating these jobs, therefore, could not produce enough tax revenue to the government to justify the cost.
In other words, it would have been cheaper had Obama mailed a check for $50,000 each year to the 4 million people he claims to have put to work and I suspect even that figure would be more than their salary.
Second, a large number of these created jobs were not in the private sector but in the public sector. I mention this because these jobs are not sustainable over time. Why? Because they were based on subsidies Obama made available to states, cities etc. to either employ police, teachers firemen etc. On an ongoing basis most states, cities etc.are required to balance their budgets and they cannot afford these new hires unless the subsidies continue which they are not.
Now let's look at Clinton's role as the DNC's 'Key Note Speaker.' Here I am being more subjective but I submit Clinton has agreed to become a door mat for Obama in the hope that those who are likely to flee voting for Obama again will be told it is ok to do so and you can walk on me.
It is well known there is no love lost between Bill and Barak so it appears Bill is being a loyal Dalmation, ie take one for Barak!
Obama must believe by associating with Clinton the economic achievements of Clinton will rub off on him. As I have often said in psychiatry it is known as 'association with the aggressor.'
Obama surely swallowed his pride to ask Bill to pull his chestnut out of the fire. But, as we know, Obama will stop at nothing to win re-election even if it means having Bill come to his rescue!
See 2 below.)
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No one should doubt the U.S. is more capable, militarily speaking, of attacking Iran than Israel. The question is whether Obama will do so. or will, like so many Obama failed initiatives, will he let this one slide as well. (See 3 below.)
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Daniel Pipes is coming to Savannah to speak October 10 and urges The West 'wait out the Syrian Civil War.' (See 4 below.)
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Sowell returns to Obama's dream theme! (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)TERRY ANDERSON, A BLACK LOS ANGELES TALK RADIO HOST, WENT DOWN A LIST OF THINGS SENATOR OBAMA HAS SAID THAT AREN'T EXACTLY CORRECT.
1.) Selma March Got Me Born - NOT EXACTLY, your parents felt safe enough to have you in 1961 - Selma had no effect on your birth, as Selma was in 1965.
(Google 'Obama Selma ' for his full March 4, 2007 speech and articles a bout
its various untruths.) ! !
2.) Father Was A Goat Herder - NOT EXACTLY, he was a privileged, well educated youth, who went on to work with the Kenyan Government.
3.) Father Was A Proud Freedom Fighter - NOT EXACTLY, he was part of one of the most corrupt and violent governments Kenya has ever had.
4.) My Family Has Strong Ties To African Freedom - NOT EXACTLY; your cousin Raila Odinga has created mass violence in attempting to overturn a
legitimate election in 2007, in Kenya . It is the first widespread violence in decades. The current government is pro-American but Odinga wants to
overthrow it and establish Muslim Sharia law. Your half-brother, Abongo Oba ma, is Odinga's follower. You interrupted your New Hampshire campaigning to
speak to Odinga on the phone. Check out the following link for verification of that....and for more.
Obama's cousin Odinga in Kenya ran for president and tried to get Sharia Muslim law in place there. When Odinga lost the elections, his followers
have burned Christians' homes and then burned men, women and children alive in a Christian church where they took shelter... Obama SUPPORTED his cousin before the election process here started. Google Obama and Odinga and see what you get. No one wants to know the truth.
5.) My Grandmother Has Always Been A Christian - NOT EXACTLY, she does her daily Salat prayers at 5am according to her own interviews. Not to mention,
Christianity wouldn't allow her to have been one of 14 wives to1 man.
6.) My Name is African Swahili - NOT EXACTLY, your name is Arabic and 'Baraka' (from which Barack came) means 'blessed' in that language. Hussein is also Arabic and so is Obama.
Barack Hussein Obama is not half black. He is the first Arab-American President, not the first black President. Barack Hussein Obama is 50% Caucasian from his mother's side and 43.75% Arabic and 6.25% African Negro from his father's side.
While Barack Hussein Obama's father was from Kenya , his father's family was mainly Arabs.. Barack Hussein Obama's father was only 12.5% African Negro and 87.5% Arab (his father's birth certificate even states he's Arab, not African Negro).
7.) I Never Practiced Islam - NOT EXACTLY, you practiced it daily at school, where you were registered as a Muslim and kept that faith for 31 years, until your wife made you change, so you could run for office.
8.) My School In Indonesia Was Christian - NOT EXACTLY, you were registered as Muslim there and got in trouble in Koranic Studies for making faces(check your own book).
February 28, 2008. Kristoff from the New York Times: Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it'll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as 'one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.' This is just one example of what Pamela is talking about when she says 'Obama's narrative is being altered, enhanced and manipulated to whitewash troubling facts.'
9.) I Was Fluent In Indonesian - NOT EXACTLY, not one teacher says you could speak the language.
10.) Because I Lived In Indonesia , I Have More Foreign Experience - NOTEXACTLY, you were there from the ages of 6 to 10, and couldn't even speak
the language. What did you learn except how to study the Koran and watch cartoons?
11.) I Am Stronger On Foreign Affairs - NOT EXACTLY, except for Africa (surprise) and the Middle East (bigger surprise); you have never been
anywhere else on the planet and thus have NO experience with our closest allies.
12.) I Blame My Early Drug Use On Ethnic Confusion - NOT EXACTLY, you were quite content in high school to be Barry Obama, no mention of Kenya and no mention of struggle to identify - your classmates said you were just fine
13.)An Ebony Article Moved Me To Run For Office - NOT EXACTLY, Ebony has yet to find the article you mention in your book. It doesn't, and never did,
exist.
14..) A Life Magazine Article Changed My Outlook On Life - NOT EXACTLY, Life has yet to find the article you mention in your book. It doesn't, and never
did, exist.
15..) I Won't Run On A National Ticket In '08 - NOT EXACTLY, despite saying, live on TV, which you would not have enough experience by then, and you are all about having experience first.
16.) Voting 'Present' is Common In Illinois Senate - NOT EXACTLY, they are common for YOU, but not many others have 130 NO VOTES.
17.) Oops, I Miss-voted - NOT EXACTLY, only when caught by church groups and Democrats, did you beg to change your misvote.
18.) I Was A Professor Of Law - NOT EXACTLY; you were a senior lecturer ON LEAVE.
19.) I Was A Constitutional Lawyer - NOT EXACTLY, you were a senior lecturer ON LEAVE.
20.) Without Me, There Would Be No Ethics Bill - NOT EXACTLY, you didn't write it, introduce it, change it or create it.
21.) The Ethics Bill Was Hard To Pass - NOT EXACTLY, it took just 14 days from start to finish.
22.) I Wrote A Tough Nuclear Bill - NOT EXACTLY, your bill was rejected by your own party for its pandering and lack of all regulation - mainly because
of your Nuclear donor, Exelon, from which David Axelrod came.
23.) I Have Released My State Records - NOT EXACTLY, state bills you sponsored or voted for have yet to be released, exposing all the special
interests pork hidden within.
24.) I Took On The Asbestos Altgeld Gardens Mess - NOT EXACTLY, you were part of a large group of people who remedied Altgeld Gardens . You failed to mention anyone else but yourself, in your books.
25.) My Economics Bill Will Help America - NOT EXACTLY, your 111 economic policies were just combined into a proposal which lost 99-0, and even YOU voted against your own bill.
26.) I Have Been A Bold Leader In Illinois - NOT EXACTLY, even your own supporters claim to have not seen BOLD action on your part.
27.) I Passed 26 Of My Own Bills In One Year - NOT EXACTLY, they were not YOUR bills, but rather handed to you, after their creation by a fellow Senator, to assist you in a future bid for higher office.
28.) No One on my campaign contacted Canada about NAFTA - NOT EXACTLY, the Canadian Government issued the names and a memo of the conversation your campaign had with them.
29.) I Am Tough On Terrorism - NOT EXACTLY, you missed the Iran Resolution vote on terrorism and your good friend Ali Abunimah supports the destruction of Israel .
30.) I Want All Votes To Count - NOT EXACTLY; you said let the delegates decide.
31.) I Want Americans To Decide - NOT EXACTLY, you prefer caucuses that limit the vote, confuse the voters, force a public vote, and only operate
during small windows of time.
32.) I passed 900 Bills in the State Senate - NOT EXACTLY, you passed 26, most of which you didn't write yourself.
33.) I Believe In Fairness, Not Tactics - NOT EXACTLY, you used tactics to eliminate Alice Palmer from running against you.
34.) I Don't Take PAC Money - NOT EXACTLY, you take loads of it.
35.) I don't Have Lobbyists - NOT EXACTLY, you have over 47 lobbyists, and counting.
36.) My Campaign Had Nothing To Do With The 1984 Ad - NOT EXACTLY, your own campaign worker made the ad on his Apple in one afternoon.
37.) I Have Always Been Against Iraq - NOT EXACTLY, you weren't in office to
vote against it AND you have voted to fund it every single time.
38.) I Have Always Supported Universal Health Care - NOT EXACTLY, your plan leaves us all to pay for the 15,000,000 who don't have to buy it.
39.) My uncle liberated Auschwitz concentration camp - NOT EXACTLY, your mother had no brothers and the Russian army did the liberating.
So, who EXACTLY is this Obama guy and what is he trying to sell us?! Please get to work now...not enough of your loved ones and friends know about this
2)Why Barak Obama Needs Bill Clinton By Peter Boyer
Clinton will be there for Obama in Charlotte. But the big-tent, business-friendly wing of the party 42 built is long gone. How the death of Clintonism could be a major hurdle for the president this fall
When Bill Clinton takes center stage at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte this week, he will make a characteristically forceful case for the party’s other big dog, Barack Obama, arguing that a second Obama term is a vital necessity, and sounding for all the world as if the current president has no greater admirer than the man from Hope.
Candidate Obama meets with Clinton in his Harlem office in 2008 (Mario Tama / Getty Images)
Every Democrat in the arena, and many beyond, will know better.
The relationship between the 44th president and the 42nd has been an uneasy one since 2008, when Obama denied Clinton a third turn in the White House by defeating Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. That bitterly fought primary campaign inflicted real wounds—including the suggestion by Obama’s side that Clinton slyly tried to help his wife’s chances by inserting race into the contest. Public reconciliation, and the top job at State for Hillary, followed, but the rift never really closed. Clinton is said to occasionally brood over the fact that Obama has not eagerly availed himself of the counsel of the party’s best political mind (Clinton’s). For his part, Obama cannot have failed to notice that Clinton has hardly faded from the scene, operating, through his Clinton Global Initiative, what sometimes seems a sort of shadow presidency.
Nor could Obama have been cheered when Clinton complicated the incumbent’s key campaign offensive this spring by declaring Mitt Romney’s business career “sterling,” or when Clinton said that the Bush-era tax rates should be extended, including for the very rich.
Nor But Obama knows that he needs Clinton to lift a convention that many Democrats are pointedly avoiding, and to help rescue an imperiled reelection bid that will be nothing like the relatively easy ride that Clinton enjoyed in 1996.
So, Clinton will be in Charlotte, but Clintonism—that brand of centrist New Democrat politics that helped make him the first president of his party to win reelection since FDR—will be mostly missing. Conservative and centrist Democrats, so critical to Clinton’s efforts to reform welfare, balance the budget, and erase the image of the party as being reflexively anti-business, have nearly vanished.
Their absence complicates Obama’s bid for reelection, and his chances for an effective second term, if he gets one. Clinton’s brand of liberalism was designed to win elections, and brought Democrats back after a generation in the wilderness; Obama’s brand of liberalism produced the line that became the Republicans’ favorite refrain last week in Tampa: “You didn’t build that. The New Democrat movement began to die on Dec. 12, 2000, when the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore, effectively giving the presidency to George W. Bush. With Al Gore out of the picture, the party took an ever-more-stridently leftward turn, and by 2004, what Howard Dean called “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” was in full ascent. The energy in the party resided in the antiwar left, reawakened by Iraq, and by 2008, candidates in the Democratic presidential primary were expected not only to oppose the war, but to apologize for ever having supported it—and all but Hillary Clinton did (no apology was required of Obama, who’d opposed the “dumb” war from the start).
The left’s complaint about Clintonism was that it made the party less distinct from the GOP—which, in effect, it did. When Clinton, Gore, and other Democratic centrists joined the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s, their purpose was to find a way to sell a liberal program to a nation that consistently rejected it, by moderating the program. The DLC emphasized private-sector growth and government efficiency, personal responsibility, and an affirmation of mainstream values. The chief prize was the Reagan Democrat—that white, working-class voter who was increasingly going Republican in places like Clinton’s Arkansas.
Clinton called those voters “the forgotten middle class,” and he appealed to them not only with his New Democrat policy program, but by relating to them personally, and grounding his own political identity in their experiences. The main thrust of that ’92 convention, and of much of the campaign thereafter, was to introduce Clinton to America as “the man from Hope,” who never knew his father, and whose mother left him with her parents while she attended nursing school. “He devoted his candidacy to that forgotten middle class, it was a conscious strategy,” says Paul Begala, a key Clinton strategist, who now advises the super PAC supporting Obama (and who is a contributor to The Daily Beast).
Although anti-Clintonism wasn’t the overt theme of Obama’s 2008 candidacy (it is surprising, in retrospect, the degree to which “Hope and Change” seemed agenda enough in that referendum election), Obama’s presidency has seemed, in key regards, a repudiation of the New Democrat idea. Clinton Democrats embraced business; Obama attacked private equity. A New Democrat would have championed the Keystone XL Pipeline; Obama, yielding to environmentalists, has resisted it. Although Obama campaigned in coal country in 2008 as a friend of the industry (and of all those blue-collar jobs associated with it), his Environmental Protection Agency has established regulations so severe that one administration official admitted, “if you want to build a coal plant you got a big problem.” Many of the workers affected by such policies are swing-state voters, who are also keenly sensitive to values issues. Obama’s health-care mandates on contraception may help him with single women and urban voters, but it might hurt him among Catholics in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act; Obama stopped enforcing it, and then declared himself a supporter of gay marriage—the day after North Carolinians voted a traditional definition of marriage into the state’s constitution.
Clinton’s 1992 convention. Pollster Doug Schoen says Obama has “substituted class warfare for Clintonism.” (Les Stone / ZUMA-Newscom)
“I think the New Democrat movement can be saved,” says Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council. “We do go through cycles. But it would have been a lot better if we had had a second New Democrat president to cement it.”
Clinton’s ’92 convention belonged nearly as much to From and his DLC as to Clinton. He was profiled in The Washington Post (“The Life of the Party”), cheered by strangers who knew he was somebody important, and jeered by the liberals he’d helped to supplant (“he doesn’t know shit from Shinola,” declared Ohio Sen. Howard Metzenbaum). “It was the best week of my life,” From says.
From is now quietly working as a consultant, commuting from his home in Annapolis to an office in Washington, D.C., several days a week. The DLC is defunct, having closed its doors early last year. Although there are some prominent New Democrats serving in the Obama administration (former CEO Bruce Reed is now Joe Biden’s chief of staff), From says he has little contact with the Obama team. He will not be going to Charlotte, which is probably just as well; he says he scarcely recognizes the party he once shaped. A founding tenet of the DLC held that “We believe the Democratic Party’s fundamental mission is to expand opportunity, not government.” The era of big government isn’t over anymore.
“It seems to me that you have the growth on the coasts of cultural liberals, and they’re a big part of the party now,” he told Newsweek. “And the other part of the party is the people who, as government has gotten bigger, are on the other end of government checks. In this case, it’s not just all the liberal interest groups, even though they’re a big part of it, but it’s everybody. It’s corporate America, with the corporate welfare, too. It’s everybody.”
Avoiding Charlotte over Labor Day will be easier for some Democrats than others. Larry Kissell is a Democratic congressman representing North Carolina’s 8th District, which includes the Charlotte suburbs. His living room is only an hour’s drive from the convention, but still, he will not be attending.
Kissell is one of a vanishing breed—a white Southern Democrat—whose political life would be easier with a centrist in the White House. Kissell, a former textile worker and high-school civics teacher, lost in his first try for Congress, but was swept into office in the 2008 Obama wave. Almost immediately, North Carolina turned sharply rightward, with voters giving both branches of the state legislature to Republicans for the first time in more than a century. It was to those Republicans that the chore of redistricting the state fell, and Kissell’s 8th, already a Republican-leaning district, became more pronouncedly so. The Hill newspaper called him the most vulnerable Democrat in Congress.
The problem for Democrats like Kissell, says Bill Daley, who served as Clinton’s commerce secretary and as Obama’s chief of staff, is that the party has come to be defined by its Washington players, like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, rather than by its more moderate governors, as in Clinton’s day.
“Even those moderate Democrats who got elected and went to Washington, then had to vote with the party line, and the party line is perceived as Washington-Democrat-liberal—and I think that has hurt,” Daley says. “There’s going to have to be a refocusing, away from the Senate and the House in Washington, because despite the best intentions when a guy or a woman gets there as a so-called moderate, they’re either forced to be with the Republicans, as part of a very small group [of defectors], or they’re forced to be with the Democrats and the big group, and that kills you back home.”
Kissell has insistently tried to maintain an independent posture in the House.
He voted against Obamacare, and supported Republican efforts to repeal the president’s health-care reform, citing the fact that the program is partly paid for with money taken from Medicare—something he promised his constituents he would oppose. “The message from the district was, We need a representative, not of the party, but of this district,” Kissell says. His stance has cost him with Democrats back home, one of whom is waging a write-in campaign against Kissell this fall. He is undeterred. He opposed Obama’s position on the Keystone XL Pipeline (“We don’t have an energy policy. We need an energy policy. But if we make a few good decisions, we can create North American energy independence”), and he hopes that voters back home will send him back to Washington, even if they vote for Romney. “They are intelligent people,” he says. Kissell doesn’t like talking about what he calls “Washington issues,” and, in his conversation with Newsweek, he avoided mentioning Obama by name.
He will not be able to avoid the subject of Obama as he campaigns in his district. When he travels to the town of Laurinburg, for example, Kissell may notice the sign outside Champs Restaurant, expressing a sentiment widely held by small business owners across North Carolina, and beyond: “Mr. President, we built our business and paid taxes for roads and services.”
One of Kissell’s former Democratic colleagues in the House has gone beyond skipping the convention in Charlotte. Artur Davis, who represented Alabama’s 7th District (stretching from Birmingham to the rural west) has defected from the Democratic Party, is campaigning for Mitt Romney, and was a featured speaker at the Republican convention in Tampa. This is a notable development, not least because Davis, who is black, had been a rising star in the Democratic Party, an early supporter and friend of Barack Obama’s, who seconded Obama’s nomination at the 2008 convention.
Davis lost a race for governor in Alabama in 2010, and it was about then that his new political awakening began. Obama had once claimed to be a New Democrat, but Davis says he came to realize that Obama, by inclination and experience, was not capable of Clintonian triangulation. “The big difference between Barack Obama and Bill Clinton is that Clinton had to build a political career in a state that was drifting to the right,” says Davis, who, like Obama, was schooled at Harvard Law. “In every election, Bill Clinton had to figure out how to get people who had voted for Richard Nixon, who were voting for Ronald Reagan, to vote for him. In contrast, Barack Obama’s political career was built in a Democratic state with a weak Republican Party, where his essential political purpose was figuring out how to rally the Democratic base around him ... In 2008, because of the collapse of the Bush administration’s popularity in the second term, Obama never had to do what Clinton had to do regularly in his political career, which was to figure out how to construct some kind of other political case that appealed to conservative-leaning voters.”
Another critical distinction between Obama and Clinton is Clinton’s unalloyed love for the game of politics. Begala remembers Clinton holding his staff captive in the basement of the Arkansas governor’s mansion while he conducted policy seminars lasting late into the night; but Clinton also obsessed as much about the nuts and bolts of electioneering as any local precinct captain.
Obama is a different sort of political creature, one famously capable of projecting a grand vision, but it can seem a distanced one, delivered from on high. “You often get the sense that he was born at Harvard Law School, or in the Oval Office,” says Begala. That may work with academics, the media, and NPR listeners, but it plays into Al From’s critique that Democrats are becoming the party of elites and dependents.
Obama has also seemed to govern at a remove, which leaves it to others to define his presidency. There’s a danger in this. “What he did poorly—and, in part, it was because he wasn’t an experienced leader because he’d come from a legislative background—was he let Congress basically write the stimulus and health-care bill,” says former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell. “It would have been much better, with the level of popularity that he had coming into office, if he had written both bills and kept out a lot of the junk and the extraneous stuff that were in both bills, and sat down with the Republicans on health care. And on stimulus, if he’d said, ‘OK, give me your ideas.’?”
With a terrible economy as his greatest vulnerability, Obama has lately taken to claiming Clinton’s economic approach as his own (“we’ve tried our plan, and it worked”)—a reach that galls some Clintonites. “What David Axelrod and Obama have done is they have substituted class warfare for Clintonism,” says Doug Schoen, a Democratic political analyst and pollster (including for Newsweek and The Daily Beast) who has advised both Clintons. “At every juncture, they have substituted class-based politics—resentment of the rich, taxing the rich—for fiscal discipline, and prudence.” It is the view of such centrists that Obama missed his chance to make a bold claim to fiscal responsibility when he declined to champion the recommendations of the debt commission that he appointed—the so-called Bowles-Simpson plan. “It was a failure in leadership,” says Rendell. “It was an instance of politics trumping substance.”
Artur Davis argues that the post-Clinton Democratic Party has willingly set a course toward the model of the fringe -European left. “I do see the Democratic Party slipping in that direction, of becoming a self-conscious vehicle of the left, that is more concerned about developing a righteous leftist platform than one that has a particular project to govern.”
Other Democratic centrists, of course, hold a less dire view of Obama’s tenure, even while disagreeing with some of his policy positions and rhetoric. Jim Hunt, the former governor of North Carolina, became the New Democrat prototype in two separate eight-year stretches in office. He was an early adopter of workfare, but he was also a firm believer in government investment in schools and infrastructure. Like Clinton, Hunt believed an alliance with business was critical to achieving liberal programs, and says that if the Democrats allow themselves to be maneuvered into an identity as the pro-government, anti-business party, “that would be a terrible mistake for our party—that’s why we mainstream moderate Democrats, who are pro-education and pro-business, have got to stay involved in this party.”
Hunt has winced over some of the president’s rhetoric, but he stoutly defends Obama to skeptical Carolinians, reminding them of the drastic circumstances that faced Obama when he entered office. “We were within inches—inches—of a depression the month that this man came into office,” he says. “In January of 2009, the country lost 750,000 jobs ... yes, I want us to come back to the time when we are moving toward cutting that deficit and cutting that debt dramatically. But it’s gonna take awhile to get back to it. Gosh A’mighty, it took us 10 years and a world war to get out of the Depression. So this man has been leading under terribly difficult circumstances, trying to just get us off of our back.”
Ed Rendell, who has criticized the president (objecting, for example, to the Obama campaign’s attack on private equity), also argues that Obama has been constrained by an unprecedented obduracy in his Republican opposition. “I can’t ever recall a newly elected president being faced with the leader of the other party’s caucus saying ‘Our No. 1 priority is to make this president a one-term president,” says Rendell, citing the remark made by Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, that exemplified the fierce partisanship that has attended Obama’s tenure. “That McConnell would say that in the first nine months of Barack Obama’s tenure is absolutely stunning, disgraceful, disgusting—you name the term.”
Bill Daley, too, faults Republicans, saying that hyperpartisanship denied to Obama the grand compromises that were available to Bill Clinton. When Clinton found accord with his nemesis, Newt Gingrich, he knew that Gingrich, as leader of the Republican Revolution, would be able to bring his members along. Not so the current Republican House leaders in their dealings with their Tea Party members. “They didn’t owe a thing to John Boehner or Eric Cantor,” Daley says. “They rode into leadership on this wave that they did not create.”
Daley doubts that there will be time between now and the election for Obama to craft a message that convinces those working- and middle-class Democrats and independents whom Clinton inspired. “I don’t think you can fix anything now with all this crazy business between the convention and the election, and with three debates,” he says. Begala disagrees. “It’s not too late,” Begala says, especially if Obama figures out the right story to tell—his own. “It’s basically a three-part story: I inherited a helluva mess, I’ve done a good job, and I’ve got a better way. I would take that second module out. Instead of saying, ‘I’ve done a real good job’—I think he has, but voters don’t want to hear that now—I think he should say, ‘I get it. I know you’re in pain, I’ve been there. I know the look in a single -mother’s eyes when she is wondering if she is going to be able to pay the rent, because I saw it in my mother’s eyes, and I will carry that in my heart every day. I have been there, and I have made it. You can make it, too. And here’s how.’?”
Obama, whose father was absent, and who was raised by a single mother and who, for a time, relied on food stamps, has downplayed his own very Clintonian tale. “It’s very much available to him, I can’t say why he doesn’t do it,” Begala says. “It’s so interesting to me that the guy who has written the most literate presidential autobiography since I don’t know who, has somehow lost the narrative thread of his character, the character in his play.”
It is possible that Obama’s joining hands with Clinton in Charlotte, and Clinton’s prominent role in the closing weeks of the campaign, signals a centrist turn in a second Obama term. Doug Schoen thinks not. “This is political artifice,” he says. “It is designed to achieve a short-term political result. This is not a change in philosophy.”
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3)Former CIA chief tells Haaretz: Decision on Iran strike can wait
Iran will achieve nuclear-weapons capability no earlier than 2013 or 2014, says Michael Hayden, adding that the U.S. would be better equipped to launch a military operation against the Islamic Republic than Israel.
A decision on attacking Iran need not be taken at present, as current assessments point to its achieving nuclear-weapons capabilities no earlier than 2013 or 2014, former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Michael Hayden told Haaretz on Monday. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4) Wait Out the War in Syria
By Daniel Pipes
WT title: "Stay Out of Syria: Intervention Is a Trap"
Bashar al-Assad's wretched presence in the Presidential Palace of Damascus may, contrary to Western assumptions, do more good than harm. His murderous, terroristic, and pro-Tehran regime is also non-ideological and relatively secular; it staves off anarchy, Islamist rule, genocide, and rogue control of Syria's chemical weapons.
As Syria's civil war intensifies, Western states are increasingly helping the rebels overthrow Assad and his henchmen. In doing so, the West hopes to save lives and facilitate a democratic transition. Many Western voices call for more than the non-lethal aid now being offered, wanting to arm the rebels, set up safe zones, and even join their war against the governmen
The Presidential Palace in Damascus.
Helping the rebels, however, neglects a fundamental question: does intervention in Syria against Assad promote our own interests? This obvious question gets missed because many Westerners feel so confident about their own well-being that they forget their security and instead focus on the concerns of those they perceive as weak and exploited, whether human (e.g., indigenous peoples or the poor) or animals (whales and snail darters). Westerners have developed sophisticated mechanisms to act on these concerns (e.g.,responsibility to protect, animal rights activism).
For those of us not so confident, however, fending off threats to our security and our civilization remains a top priority. In this light, helping the rebels entails multiple drawbacks for the West.
First, the rebels are Islamist and intend to build an ideological government even more hostile to the West than Assad's. Their breaking relations with Tehran will be balanced by their helping to forward the barbaric force of Islamism's Sunni forces.
Syrian Islamist rebels and a flag with the Islamic declaration of faith, the shahada.
Second, the argument that Western intervention would reduce the Islamist thrust of the rebellion byreplacing materiel pouring in from Sunni countries is risible. Syria's rebels do not need Western help to bring down the regime (and wouldn't be grateful for it if they did receive it, if Iraq is any guide). The Syrian conflict at base pits the country's disenfranchised Sunni Arab 70-percent majority against Assad's privileged Alawi 12-percent minority. Add the assistance of foreign Islamist volunteers as well as several Sunni states (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar) and the Assad regime is doomed. Assad cannot subdue the ever-widening rebellion against his rule; indeed, the more his troops butcher and maim, the more defections occur and his support shrinks to its Alawi core.
Third, hastening the Assad regime's collapse will not save lives. It will mark not the end of the conflict, but merely the close of its opening chapter with yet worse violence likely to follow. As Sunnis finally avenge their nearly fifty years of subjugation by Alawis, a victory by the rebels portends potential genocide. The Syrian conflict will likely get so extreme and violent that Westerners will be glad to have kept a distance from both sides.
In July 2012, Syria's Foreign Ministry Spokesman Jihad Makdissi announced the regime's readiness to use chemical weapons against foreign enemies.
Fourth, the continuing Syrian conflict offers benefits to the West. Several Sunni governments have noted the Obama administration's reticence to act and have taken responsibility to wrest Syria from the Iranian orbit; this comes as a welcome development after their decades of accommodating the Shiite Islamic Republic. Also, as Sunni Islamists fight Shiite Islamists, both sides are weakened and their lethal rivalry lessens their capabilities to trouble the outside world. By inspiring restive minorities (Sunnis in Iran, Kurds and Shiites in Turkey), continued fighting in Syria could also weaken Islamist governments.
When the regime falls, the Alawi leadership, with or without Assad, might retreat to ancestral redoubts in Latakia province in northwestern Syria; the Iranians could well supply it by sea with money and arms, permitting it to hold out for years, further exacerbating the confrontation between Sunni and Shiite Islamists, further distracting them from assaulting others.
The one exception to the policy of non-intervention would be to secure Syria's vast chemical weapon arsenal, both to prevent terrorist groups seizing it and Assad from deploying it in a Götterdämmerung scenario as he goes down, although this difficult mission could require as many as 60,000 foreign ground troops deployed to Syria.
Nothing in the constitutions of Western states requires them to get involved in every foreign conflict; sitting this one out will prove to be a smart move. In addition to the moral benefit of not being accountable for horrors yet to come, staying away permits the West eventually to help its only true friends in Syria, the country's liberals.
After reading Barack Obama's book "Dreams from My Father," it became painfully clear that he has not been searching for the truth, because he assumed from an early age that he had already found the truth -- and now it was just a question of filling in the details and deciding how to change things.
Obama did not simply happen to encounter a lot of people on the far left fringe during his life. As he spells out in his book, he actively sought out such people. There is no hint of the slightest curiosity on his part about other visions of the world that might be weighed against the vision he had seized upon
As Professor Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School has pointed out, Obama made no effort to take part in the marketplace of ideas with other faculty members when he was teaching a law course there. What would be the point, if he already knew the truth and knew that they were wrong?
This would be a remarkable position to take, even for a learned scholar who had already spent decades canvassing a vast amount of information and views on many subjects. But Obama was already doctrinaire at a very early age -- and ill-informed or misinformed on both history and economics.
His statement in "Dreams from My Father" about how white men went to Africa to "drag away the conquered in chains" betrays his ignorance of African history.
The era of the Atlantic slave trade and the era of European conquests across the continent of Africa were different eras. During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, most of Africa was ruled by Africans, who sold some of their slaves to white men.
European conquests in Africa had to wait until Europeans found some way to survive lethal African diseases, to which they lacked resistance. Only after medical science learned to deal with these diseases could the era of European conquests spread across sub-Saharan Africa. But the Atlantic slave trade was over by then.
There was no reason why Barack Obama had to know this. But there was also no reason for him to be shooting off his mouth without knowing what he was talking about.
Similarly with Obama's characterization of the Nile as "the world's greatest river." The Nile is less than 10 percent longer than the Amazon, but the Amazon delivers more than 50 times as much water into the Atlantic as the Nile delivers into the Mediterranean. The Nile could not accommodate the largest ships, even back in Roman times, much less the aircraft carriers of today that can sail up the Hudson River and dock in midtown Manhattan.
When Obama wrote that many people "had been enslaved only because of the color of their skin," he was repeating a common piece of gross misinformation. For thousands of years, people enslaved other people of the same race as themselves, whether in Europe, Asia, Africa or the Western Hemisphere.
Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before the first African was brought in bondage to the Western Hemisphere. The very word "slave" is derived from the name of a European people once widely held in bondage, the Slavs.
As for economics, Obama thought that Indonesians would be worse off after Europeans came in, used up their natural resources and then left them too poor to continue the modern way of life to which they had become accustomed, or to resume their previous way of life, after their previous skills had atrophied.
This fear of European "exploitation" prevailed widely in the Third World in the middle of the 20th century. But, by the late 20th century, the falseness of that view had been demonstrated so plainly and so often, in countries around the world, that even socialist and communist governments began opening their economies to foreign investments. This often led to rising economic growth rates that lifted millions of people out of poverty.
Barack Obama is one of those people who are often wrong but never in doubt. When he burst upon the national political scene as a presidential candidate in 2008, even some conservatives were impressed by his confidence.
But confident ignorance is one of the most dangerous qualities in a leader of a nation. If he has the rhetorical skills to inspire the same confidence in himself by others, then you have the ingredients for national disaster.
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Israeli security risks mount from Obama's so called friends. (See 1 below.)
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I am in total disagreement with this article. Why? Because in my opinion the answer given begs the question. Banks are willing to make loans but there is too much uncertainty and not enough consumer demand to warrant a lot of loans.
Furthermore, with interest rates where they are why would banks want to lock themselves into a risk when they can borrow from the government arbitrage and get about the same return but risk less.
Finally, most corporations are flush with cash and corporate liquidity and world economic conditions are flaccid at best. You decide (See 2 below.)
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Obama must think Brokaw and the "greatest generation' were behind the times and lived in a wimpy past!
Obama cannot make a positive unless he uses a negative foil. He always has to tear down to make his point. Sick leadership!
My father in law came home from WW 2, with two Purple Hearts, one Silver Star, Two Bronze Stars, several various theater citations, opened a business , sent his two kids to college and sat in front of a black and white TV with ears and watched sports played by athletes that did not take dope enhancing drugs.
He did not complain about his entitlements, he did not expect the government to do anything for him and he received a $50 disability check /month because of his wounds.
Clint was right to tell Obama GFY!
You decide (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)Egypt confronts Israel with 6,000 Sinai Islamists as an approved militia
Egyptian tanks at Rafah terminal
To keep the truce with the Islamist terrorist networks in Sinai in place, while avoiding a large-scale military operation to suppress them, Egypt is now releasing dozens of jailed Salafist gunmen in batches every few days, so feeding the Islamists a steady supply of reinforcements. Cairo is also in negotiation with Bedouin tribal elders to grant a body of 6,000 Al-Qaeda-linked Salafi gunmen the status of an approved, independent militia. Armed with up-to-date Egyptian weapons, this militia is to be charged with responsibility for maintaining security in the peninsula. This may be a neat way out for Egypt and let the Morsi government off the hook of grappling with the violent Islamist networks infesting Sinai. But it leaves Israel squarely face to face with a whole new terrorist outfit which has the freedom to choose between operating in the service of Al Qaeda or Cairo – or playing both sides. Israeli security circles on the southern front familiar with the Sinai security situation explain that the Egyptian army’s claim Monday, Sept. 3 that it pulled “another 20 tanks” out of the peninsula, marking the tail end of its putative counter-terror military offensive, was therefore the reverse of welcome news for Israel. All the same, out of certain diplomatic considerations, Israelis officials are collaborating with the US and Egypt in drawing a veil over this dangerous downturn in security along its southwestern border.
Yet some Israeli media have suggested sympathetically that the Egyptian army was forced to slow down its counter-terror operations for lack of intelligence on the armed cells’ whereabouts.
An Israel officer serving in the sector retorted angrily that every Egyptian and Israeli officer serving anywhere in or near Sinai knows exactly where the gunmen are skulking and their training facilities located. “The trouble is that Egyptian officers who go past those places look the other way,” he said.
The only action the Morsi government has taken on the quiet is to place a security buffer strip along the Egyptian-Israeli border off-limits to civilian traffic.
Our military sources report this strip has been dubbed “The American Highway” of Sinai, because its 260 kilometers were paved in secret by US military engineers. It runs from the MFO peacekeepers' Mediterranean base at Sheikh Zuweid in northern Sinai down to Taba, providing a safe route for the peacekeepers, most of them members of the US 82nd Airport Division, between their northern base and their headquarters at Sharm el-Sheikh.
Large sections of the American Highway run parallel to Israel’s Route 12 from Nitzana to Eilat, Israel’s southernmost town.
Egypt no doubt intended this buffer strip to serve additionally for keeping terrorists at a distance from its border with Israel. But IDF observers in that area see very little Egyptian military activity for keeping it sterile and closed to hostile movements.
Once the Salafis are organized in a militia and formally recognized as such by Cairo, it will be that much harder to keep them from breaching the buffer strip abutting the Israeli border.
Even though it's been nearly five years since the onset of the financial crisis, the economy continues to suffer from its effects. GDP growth remainslacklusterandunemploymentseems to havestalled above 8%, nearly twice the so-called natural rate.
With the campaign season in full swing, it's easy to blame politics. If you're a Democrat, you likely pin it on the Republicans for their refusal to underwrite fiscal stimulus akin to the New Deal. If you're a Republican, meanwhile, you probably think the stunted recovery has more to do with big government and overburdensome regulation.
In reality, however, if you were to isolate only one group, the responsibility lies most on the banks, gatekeepers of the nation's credit. The purpose of the banking industry is simple: to accept money from depositors like you and me, and reallocate it to businesses and entrepreneurs who use it for productive purposes such as investing in capital improvements and expanding production.
With this in mind, it should be no surprise that the trend in deposits and loans have traditionally paralleled each other; when one goes up, so does the other. But as you can see in the chart below, this relationship has broken down since the onset of the financial crisis. While deposits continue to rise, loans remain at precrisis levels.
Source: FDIC statistics on depository institutions.
The explanation for this breakdown is threefold. First, until recently, many banks had been reluctant to make new loans while they're still working through the toxic mortgages dating to before the crisis. While more traditional lenders like New York Community Bancorp (NYSE:NYB) have been able to rein this in, the nation's largest banks remain ominously weighed down.
In the case of Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) -- the nation's second-largest lender by assets-- a staggering7.5% of its loans are noncurrent. This is double the industry average and over seven times the 1% level that an otherwise healthy institution would report. And the nation's third-largest bank by assets, Citigroup (NYSE: C) , has a staggering $100 billion in potentially toxic loans squirreled away in a much maligned division known as Citi Holdings.
Second, banks are operating under the twin clouds of regulatory and economic uncertainty. On the regulatory side, the biggest banks remain pitched over the implementation of Dodd-Frank, and most particularly its so-called Volker rule, which seeks to prohibit them from speculating with depositors' money in a manner reminiscent of Glass-Steagall. On the economic side, alternatively, all eyes are on Europe, which seems to be on the brink of failure every other week.
Finally, and for understandable reasons, lenders are stockpiling high-quality liquid capital. In the aftermath of the crisis, as already noted, rising loan losses caused many banks to watch as their capital levels depleted. This is the reason so many banks have failed over the last few years, the largest of which, Washington Mutual, was seized by federal regulators in September 2008 and sold to JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) shortly thereafter.
In addition, due to important lessons learned over the last few years, both domestic and international banking regulators are starting to require that banks hold more and better assets in reserve to help protect against similar crises in the future. Under the new regime, known as Basel III, banks may soon be required to hold 4.5% of common equity, up from 2% in Basel II,
and 6% of Tier I capital, up from 4% in Basel II, relative to risk-weighted assets. According to a study from the OECD, this could lower global GDP growth by 0.05 to 0.15 percentage points annually.
Waiting for the recoveryIt isn't an exaggeration to say that credit is the lifeblood of our economy. It allows consumers to buy houses and cars, and companies to finance current operations and expansion. Indeed, as we learned when the credit markets seized in the depth of the financial crisis, business literally comes to a stop without credit greasing the wheels of commerce. It's for this reason that all investors should keep one eye on trends in this area, as it's likely here that we'll first see signs of recovery and progress.
“The Greatest Generation” is a term coined by journalist Tom Brokaw to describe the generation that grew up in the United States during the deprivation of the Great Depression, and then went on to fight in World War II, as well as those whose productivity at home made a decisive material contribution to the war effort. My father served in the Pacific during World War II and my mother worked in a factory at home.
President Obama just slammed their values at a rally in Urbandale, Iowa, by declaring that “the agenda set out by nominee Mitt Romney and other speakers in Tampa was ‘better suited for the last century.’” He went on to say:
“It was a rerun. We’d seen it before. You might as well have watched it on a black-and-white TV. . . If you didn’t DVR it, let me recap it for you. Everything is bad, it’s Obama’s fault, and Gov. Romney is the only one who knows the secret to creating jobs and growing the economy.”
How many times have we heard President Obama blame present economic conditions on George Bush? But that’s the least of the historical fiction and insults in his “black-and-white TV” campaign quip.
It was that black-and-white-TV generation that created the moral, economic, and political capital that he and his leftist minions are squandering and attacking. It was the WW II generation and its children that built a nation that was a beacon to the world.
That generation was not perfect, but it was the generation that made home ownership a reality for most Americans and put men on the Moon. It was that generation that saw the inequities among the races and did something about it that many in the Democrat Party opposed, including Al Gore’s father.
Obama and Co. are all about reestablishing racial divisions to score political points. If a Republican had used the phrase “black-and-white TV,” Obama’s surrogates and the slurping media would have read racial overturns in it. It’s gotten that bad.
Obama went on to say that Romney “did not offer a single new idea, just retreads of the same old policies that have been sticking it to the middle class for years.” Here’s a “new Idea” comment that could become a Democrat campaign slogan:
“I wouldn’t have to seal ‘if the government gave us more money.’”
It was an embarrassment for most people in the black-and-white-TV generation to “go on relief.” Not anymore. It’s a badge of honor to make the rich pay their “fair share.”
Sometimes old ideas like saving for a down payment and pulling your own weight are the best ideas that never change. We’re not chronological snobs where only new ideas are the right ideas. The majority of people in the black-and-white-TV generation would never have thought of killing their pre-born babies or normalizing homosexuality. These new immoral trends are said to be “progressive values.”
Forcing banks to lend money to people who couldn’t afford a down payment is a new idea that had terrible ripple-effect economic consequences. It was the Democrats who came up with the policy for the government to guarantee no-collateral loans if they went bad. And they went bad by the tens of thousands and it nearly destroyed the housing industry.
Staying out of debt is an old idea that has served prosperous nations well. The principle goes back to biblical times where debt is akin to slavery, no matter who’s doing the lending, the rich or the government (Prov. 22:7).
So give me some of those black-and-white-TV values. Give me Father Knows Best rather than The New Normal. Give me the black-and-white-TV Andy Griffith rather than the supporter of Obamacare Andy Griffith.
