September 23, 2012



September 23, 2012

Charles Krauthammer reflects on the foreign policy debacles of this administration.

... It’s now three years since the Cairo speech. Look around. The Islamic world is convulsed with an explosion of anti-Americanism. From Tunisia to Lebanon, American schools, businesses and diplomatic facilities set ablaze. A U.S. ambassador and three others murdered in Benghazi. The black flag of Salafism, of which al-Qaeda is a prominent element, raised over our embassies in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Sudan.

The administration, staggered and confused, blames it all on a 14-minute trailer for a film no one has seen and may not even exist.

What else can it say? Admit that its doctrinal premises were supremely naive and its policies deeply corrosive to American influence?

Religious provocations are endless. (Ask Salman Rushdie.) Resentment about the five-century decline of the Islamic world is a constant. What’s new — the crucial variable — is the unmistakable sound of a superpower in retreat. Ever since Henry Kissinger flipped Egypt from the Soviet to the American camp in the early 1970s, the United States had dominated the region. No longer.

“It’s time,” declared Obama to wild applause of his convention, “to do some nation-building right here at home.” He’d already announced a strategic pivot from the Middle East to the Pacific. Made possible because “the tide of war is receding.”

Nonsense. From the massacres in Nigeria to the charnel house that is Syria, violence has, if anything, increased. What is receding is Obama’s America. ...

... At their convention, Democrats endlessly congratulated themselves on their one foreign policy success: killing Osama bin Laden. A week later, the Salafist flag flies over four American embassies, even as the mob chants, “Obama, Obama, there are still a billion Osamas.”

A foreign policy in epic collapse. And, by the way, Vladimir Putin just expelled the U.S. Agency for International Development from Russia. Another thank you from another recipient of another grand Obama “reset.”

 

 

Noemie Emery has more.

... Most of all, he gave the back of his hand to the Iranian dissidents in 2009 who came so close to deposing their leaders, trusting instead in his mythical powers to coax the fanatics in power to reason. Now that he's failed -- and who could have guessed it? -- his refusal to stand with Israel in the face of Iran's threats to destroy it make a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran that much more likely. And when violence broke out on Sept. 11, Obama's response was to arrest an American citizen who had made a tacky film about Muslims, not much worse than those made about Catholics by many Americans, transgressing the man's constitutional right to free speech.

Disliked and distrusted by those in his world, he isn't respected by those in the other, who express their contempt without reservation. A "Barack Obama" with his name and his skin who was in his heart more like Reagan or Kennedy might have won these worlds over.

He wasn't. He didn't. He had his chance, and he blew it. And now he should go.

 

And Mort Zuckerman covers Obama's domestic debacles.

How do you recover from a recovery? Just how bust the nation's "recovery" has been is painfully documented in the latest news, just two months before the election. The Census Bureau validated what middle-class Americans know all too well from their week to week, month to month struggle to make ends meet. The typical family is back to where it was in 1995. The analysis of annual data collected by the bureau indicates that median income in 2011 had fallen to $50,054, the fourth straight year of decline in well-being, and that's adjusted for inflation. In political terms, the Obama administration can truthfully say that the erosion had begun before the president took office, while Mitt Romney can point out that the administration spent four years of fumbling and quite failed to stop the rot.

At the same time we were clobbered by the Census numbers, the latest unemployment report landed with a dull thud: The advance figure for unemployment claims for the week ending September 8 was 382,000, up from the previous week's revised figure of 367,000. The four-week moving average was 375,000, up 3,250 from the prior week's average of 371,750.

These are marginal negative movements, but they underline that the recovery touted by the administration has been the weakest in modern history. Nobody is entitled to blow a trumpet because the unemployment rate for August can be headlined at 8.1 percent, down two digits from July's 8.3 percent. That's a drop brought about not by more jobs but because 360,000 people left the workforce. It muffles the fact that 5 million people have now been out of work for 27 weeks or more. That's roughly 40 percent of the unemployed. Another 2.6 million people were marginally attached to the labor force, and over eight million people have given up looking for a job, so they are not counted because they had not searched for work in the prior month. ...

 

John Kass says welcome to stagflation.

... QE3 will not have much of an effect on the real economy, but it will raise inflationary expectations. (It already has, as since June 2012, the implied inflation rate imbedded in TIPS is up by nearly 50 basis points.)

Inflation is taxation without legislation. It is not market-valuation friendly. ...

... Economic bellwether FedEx's (FDX) announced yesterday that the company is reducing its EPS guidance for its May 2013 year from a range between $6.90 and $7.40 to a range between $6.20 and $6.60. ...

... demand from Chinese consumers "is not increasing at a significant rate, contrary to everybody's hopes" and he is "somewhat amused" by observers of China who "completely underestimate" the impact of China's export slowdown.

Stagflation is at our door.

 

 

Obama says he can't change Washington from inside. David Harsanyi reminds us of 2008 campaign promises.

Today, at a Univision forum President Barack Obama said this: “The most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside.”

That’s quite the change from what he’s said before, in fact, in many ways it was the core of his argument in 2008.

In 2008, in Bristol, Va., for instance, presidential candidate Barack Obama promised: “We are going to change how Washington works. They will not run our party. They will not run our White House. They will not drown out the views of the American people.”

In the 2008 Obama campaign guide, Blueprint for Change, feel free to turn to the section titled (page 17): “BARACK OBAMA AND JOE BIDEN’S PLAN TO CHANGE WASHINGTON.”

Here is again in 2008: “Washington is broken. My whole campaign has been premised from the start on the idea that we have to fundamentally change how Washington works.”

And, at a rally in April 30, 2008, the president said: ”I do not believe change will happen unless we change our politics in Washington.”

 

 

The Right Scoop likes Romney's rapid response to the latest Obama excuse.

Fantastic Romney response to Obama’s claim that he can’t change Washington from the inside, that it can only be changed from the outside. Romney tells the crowd that Obama has already thrown in the white flag of surrender on changing Washington from the inside so we’ll give him a chance to change it from the outside in November. BAM!

 

 

Yale prof David Gelernter writes about the election in PowerLine. He writes along the line of Pickerhead's thoughts which are that Romney will win, but the really discouraging thing is the election is close. What is wrong with this country? The worst president ever and he has a chance? He should be at just 15 percent in the polls; supported by bigoted blacks and fools from the criminal class that makes up the education industry.

... Remember that Obama has demonstrated the competence of Carter with the integrity of Nixon. He has given us persistent unemployment and a pathetic recovery, Obamacare people don’t want, a pipeline project knifed in the back without explanation while money disappears down the great Green sinkhole, a staggering debt and huge yearly deficits, poisoned relations with Congress, an incompetent Department of Justice, states and cities wrestling with financial collapse across the country, schools that keep getting worse—not to mention calamitous security leaks, the Middle East in flames and Iran’s terrorist government closer to nuclear weapons every day.

Carter for all his sanctimonious incompetence had a certain humility.  He announced that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had opened his eyes to the evil of Communism–sad but honest.  And Carter was never suspected of personal corruption.  Of many contenders, the White House leaks will most likely emerge as the biggest Obama scandal.

Romney will win this election.  But the wacko-left Culture Machine won’t fall silent; the schools and colleges won’t suddenly become patriotic, serious, politically neutral.  The entertainment industry won’t discover open-mindedness regarding Judeo-Christianity and the Bible.  Nor will mainstream churches and liberal synagogues suddenly catch on to the moral and spiritual greatness of America. Unless conservatives start taking education and culture seriously, an election day will arrive in which the outcome is never in doubt, because at least 51 percent of the electorate has been trained which way to vote.  At which point the GOP might as well close shop and take the rest of the century off.

 

 

Gateway Pundit does a job on the creepy new Obama flag.

... If the image looks familiar it could be because the red stripes resemble the bloody Benghazi hand prints.  The bloodstained walls at the US consulate revealed that the US  officials were dragged to their death by   terrorists. ...

 

 

James Taranto has more on the flag.

... It seems we have a president who thinks the national symbol is the bald ego. Bier notes that the campaign previously used the "no red states, no blue states" slogan on Twitter, to promote a T-shirt. It shows a colorful map of the 48 contiguous states--well, of some of the 48 contiguous states. Obama's face blocks Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and South Dakota; almost all of Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota and North Dakota; about half of New Mexico, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming; and the southeast corner of Montana. If his head gets much bigger, it will eclipse the entire country.

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Washington Post

Collapse of the Cairo Doctrine

by Charles Krauthammer

In the week following 9/11/12 something big happened: the collapse of the Cairo Doctrine, the centerpiece of President Obama’s foreign policy. It was to reset the very course of post-9/11 America, creating, after the (allegedly) brutal depredations of the Bush years, a profound rapprochement with the Islamic world.

Never lacking ambition or self-regard, Obama promised in Cairo, June 4, 2009, “a new beginning” offering Muslims “mutual respect,” unsubtly implying previous disrespect. Curious, as over the previous 20 years, America had six times committed its military forces on behalf of oppressed Muslims, three times for reasons of pure humanitarianism (Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo), where no U.S. interests were at stake.

But no matter. Obama had come to remonstrate and restrain the hyperpower that, by his telling, had lost its way after 9/11, creating Guantanamo, practicing torture, imposing its will with arrogance and presumption.

First, he would cleanse by confession. Then he would heal. Why, given the unique sensitivities of his background — “my sister is half-Indonesian,” he proudly told an interviewer in 2007, amplifying on his exquisite appreciation of Islam — his very election would revolutionize relations.

And his policies of accommodation and concession would consolidate the gains: an outstretched hand to Iran’s mullahs, a first-time presidential admission of the U.S. role in a 1953 coup, a studied and stunning turning away from the Green Revolution; withdrawal from Iraq with no residual presence or influence; a fixed timetable for leaving Afghanistan; returning our ambassador to Damascus (with kind words for Bashar al-Assad — “a reformer,” suggested the secretary of state); deliberately creating distance between the United States and Israel.

These measures would raise our standing in the region, restore affection and respect for the United States and elicit new cooperation from Muslim lands.

It’s now three years since the Cairo speech. Look around. The Islamic world is convulsed with an explosion of anti-Americanism. From Tunisia to Lebanon, American schools, businesses and diplomatic facilities set ablaze. A U.S. ambassador and three others murdered in Benghazi. The black flag of Salafism, of which al-Qaeda is a prominent element, raised over our embassies in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Sudan.

The administration, staggered and confused, blames it all on a 14-minute trailer for a film no one has seen and may not even exist.

What else can it say? Admit that its doctrinal premises were supremely naive and its policies deeply corrosive to American influence?

Religious provocations are endless. (Ask Salman Rushdie.) Resentment about the five-century decline of the Islamic world is a constant. What’s new — the crucial variable — is the unmistakable sound of a superpower in retreat. Ever since Henry Kissinger flipped Egypt from the Soviet to the American camp in the early 1970s, the United States had dominated the region. No longer.

“It’s time,” declared Obama to wild applause of his convention, “to do some nation-building right here at home.” He’d already announced a strategic pivot from the Middle East to the Pacific. Made possible because “the tide of war is receding.”

Nonsense. From the massacres in Nigeria to the charnel house that is Syria, violence has, if anything, increased. What is receding is Obama’s America.

It’s as axiomatic in statecraft as in physics: Nature abhors a vacuum. Islamists rush in to fill the space and declare their ascendancy. America’s friends are bereft, confused, paralyzed.

Islamists rise across North Africa from Mali to Egypt. Iran repeatedly defies U.S. demands on nuclear enrichment, then, as a measure of its contempt for what America thinks, openly admits that its Revolutionary Guards are deployed in Syria. Russia, after arming Assad, warns America to stay out, while the secretary of state delivers vapid lectures about Assad “meeting” his international “obligations.” The Gulf states beg America to act on Iran; Obama strains mightily to restrain . . . Israel.

Sovereign U.S. territory is breached and U.S. interests are burned. And what is the official response? One administration denunciation after another — of a movie trailer! A request to Google to “review” the trailer’s presence on YouTube. And a sheriff’s deputies’ midnight “voluntary interview” with the suspected filmmaker. This in the land of the First Amendment.

What else can Obama do? At their convention, Democrats endlessly congratulated themselves on their one foreign policy success: killing Osama bin Laden. A week later, the Salafist flag flies over four American embassies, even as the mob chants, “Obama, Obama, there are still a billion Osamas.”

A foreign policy in epic collapse. And, by the way, Vladimir Putin just expelled the U.S. Agency for International Development from Russia. Another thank you from another recipient of another grand Obama “reset.”

 

Washington Examiner

Man of the world

by Noemie Emery

In 2007 and 2008, Barack Obama ran for president as a world citizen, multiracial and multicultural, created by nature and the Almighty to bring healing and peace to the world.

Muslims, Andrew Sullivan said, would see in his face a different America: "A brown-skinned man whose father was an African ... who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama's face gets close."

Flash forward to 2012, and his brown face is being incinerated in effigy on several continents, while mobs of hysterical Muslims shout death to his African name. George W. Bush never saw such an outbreak of fury. If an Iraqi once threw a shoe at President Bush, this is an entire store full of footwear. The man of the world found the world turned against him. What in the world had gone wrong?

What could and did was foretold in his 2008 speech in Berlin, when he told the hysterical crowds in attendance that the Wall had come down when (and because) "the world stood as one." But the world was never as one, then or ever: The world was as two, and the Wall had come down because one world (that led by the United States and the Atlantic Alliance) had, through force, threats of force and several hair-raising near-clashes, forced the communist world to its knees.

It was in the failure of this man of the world to embrace his role as the leader of one part of the world against the more dangerous other that the seeds of his failure were planted. Instead of raising the West, he has tried to merge the two sides and make them seem equal, stressing the flaws of the West and its allies, not taking democracy's side.

From the start, he went out of his way to stiff the democracies, dissing the Anglo-American alliance, returning a bust of Winston S. Churchill to sender, giving a DVD of his speeches as a most thoughtful gift to the Queen. He dissed the Poles when they felt under threat from the Russians, treated the Israelis as the moral equivalents of the people who threaten them and pulled out of Iraq before the training wheels were off of the bicycle, endangering those who helped us get rid of al Qaeda and putting their lives there at risk.

Most of all, he gave the back of his hand to the Iranian dissidents in 2009 who came so close to deposing their leaders, trusting instead in his mythical powers to coax the fanatics in power to reason. Now that he's failed -- and who could have guessed it? -- his refusal to stand with Israel in the face of Iran's threats to destroy it make a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran that much more likely. And when violence broke out on Sept. 11, Obama's response was to arrest an American citizen who had made a tacky film about Muslims, not much worse than those made about Catholics by many Americans, transgressing the man's constitutional right to free speech.

Disliked and distrusted by those in his world, he isn't respected by those in the other, who express their contempt without reservation. A "Barack Obama" with his name and his skin who was in his heart more like Reagan or Kennedy might have won these worlds over.

He wasn't. He didn't. He had his chance, and he blew it. And now he should go.

 

 

US News & World Report

Welcome to the Modern-Day Depression

We need to recover from the Obama economic recovery

by Mortimer B. Zuckerman

  

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How do you recover from a recovery? Just how bust the nation's "recovery" has been is painfully documented in the latest news, just two months before the election. The Census Bureau validated what middle-class Americans know all too well from their week to week, month to month struggle to make ends meet. The typical family is back to where it was in 1995. The analysis of annual data collected by the bureau indicates that median income in 2011 had fallen to $50,054, the fourth straight year of decline in well-being, and that's adjusted for inflation. In political terms, the Obama administration can truthfully say that the erosion had begun before the president took office, while Mitt Romney can point out that the administration spent four years of fumbling and quite failed to stop the rot.

At the same time we were clobbered by the Census numbers, the latest unemployment report landed with a dull thud: The advance figure for unemployment claims for the week ending September 8 was 382,000, up from the previous week's revised figure of 367,000. The four-week moving average was 375,000, up 3,250 from the prior week's average of 371,750.

These are marginal negative movements, but they underline that the recovery touted by the administration has been the weakest in modern history. Nobody is entitled to blow a trumpet because the unemployment rate for August can be headlined at 8.1 percent, down two digits from July's 8.3 percent. That's a drop brought about not by more jobs but because 360,000 people left the workforce. It muffles the fact that 5 million people have now been out of work for 27 weeks or more. That's roughly 40 percent of the unemployed. Another 2.6 million people were marginally attached to the labor force, and over eight million people have given up looking for a job, so they are not counted because they had not searched for work in the prior month.

Are they lazy good-for-nothings? Maybe a handful, but most are decent Americans eager to work. The average period of unemployment is close to 40 weeks. Imagine the sense of futility that must overcome people who month after month fill in forms, go for interviews if they're lucky, and end up as they started—with nothing to show because there are approximately 4.5 unemployed workers for every job. Fewer Americans are at work today than in April 2000, even though the population has grown by 30 million people since then. Think about that.

A reality check is offered by the unemployment numbers the government calls U-6. It measures people who have applied for a job in the last six months and also includes people who are involuntary part-time workers—government-speak for people whose jobs have been cut back to two or three days a week or who are working part-time because they have been unable to find a full-time job. That number is almost 15 percent. Include the eight million people who have simply given up looking for a job and the real unemployment rate is closer to 18 or 19 percent. These are the brutal facts behind the Census report on median income. It is no surprise when annual wage increases have dropped to an average of 1.6 percent, the lowest in the past 30 years.

There are other distressing aspects in the numbers. For example, older people are not leaving the workforce at the same rate as in the past. Instead, they are seeking to bolster their savings as an antidote to the stomach-churning decline in their net worth, 75 percent of which has come from the decline in the value of their home equity. They hope to retire with dignity but now are willing to do that at an even later date. Ironically, since the recession began, employment in the age group of 55 and older is up 3.9 million, even as total employment is down by five million.

The so-called quit rate has sagged to the lowest rate in years. Quite simply, the baby boomer population is delaying its exit from the workforce and thus creating a huge bottleneck in terms of youth unemployment. Prospects for older people out of work, however, have sharply deteriorated, especially for those who have been unemployed for any length of time. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute wrote recently in the New York Times that a worker between the ages of 50 and 61 who has been unemployed for over a year has only a nine percent chance of finding a job in the next three months. A worker who is 62 or older and similarly unemployed has about a six percent chance.

This trend has displaced young workers, who now face double-digit unemployment and more life at home with their parents. Many young couples realize they can't afford to start a family, and the result is that the birth rate has just hit a 25-year low of 1.87 births per woman. And job prospects for young workers aren't very good. Layoff announcements have risen from a year ago and hiring plans have dropped dramatically.

Workers won't feel the labor market is recovering until hiring is occurring at a recovery level pace of at least 300,000 more hires per month than we are seeing now. And when it comes, there will be a cloud to that silver lining. The job openings are mostly low-wage jobs that haven't been exposed to global competition. More than 40 percent of new private sector jobs are in low-paying categories such as leisure and hospitality, bars, and restaurants.

This is, in effect, the modern-day Depression. Take two issues, Social Security disability and food stamps. Roughly 15 percent of the population, a record, representing over 46 million Americans, are in the food stamp program, compared to the 7.9 percent participation from 1970 to 2000. And about 400,000 people have been signing up each month over the past four years. In addition, a record 11 million-plus Americans are now collecting federal disability checks. Half of them have come on board since President Barack Obama took office. This is another sign of the Depression-like times that we are in. It is not as visible today as it was back then because there are no bread or soup lines. That is simply because checks have replaced those lines. But it doesn't take away from the fact that millions of people who had good private sector jobs are now dependent on the government for life support.

Which candidate has the better answer? Romney has declared, without much detail, that he will create 12 million jobs in his first term. It sounds great, but it is actually no more than what Moody's Analytics predicts are already likely (and its forecast includes extending the Bush tax cuts for those earning less than $250,000, not quite the same as what Romney is planning). Meanwhile, it is clear that the ill-designed stimulus has not worked. True, things would likely have been worse. But the president left too many decisions to a pork barrel Congress: Less than 10 percent of the stimulus funds were pegged for infrastructure of lasting value.

The White House website proclaims that "from day one President Obama has focused on efforts that can help small businesses grow and expand." That is a tall one. The president pivoted late to jobs, having expended much energy and political capital on his healthcare reform bill. When he did unveil the $447 billion American Jobs Act before a joint session of Congress last year, it was without any attempt to garner Republican support. While it included many good things, it also included tax increases and regulations the president knew were anathema to the opposition, leading the Fiscal Times to call the bill "a scam," designed for the election to complete the portrait of an obstructionist Republican Party.

It's right and understandable that the outrages in Libya, Egypt, and Yemen have commanded attention and may yet command more. But at base the economy is the fundamental challenge that will determine America's strength as well as its resolve.

The economy is slowing to a growth rate that will be close to zero in the second half of this year, according to a recent AEI report, which also notes that 2012 is the third year of stalled recoveries. No incumbent president has ever won re-election with unemployment rates as high as they are likely to be in November. A job is the most important family program, the most important social program, and the most important economic program in America. The unemployment and income statistics are intolerable for a compassionate and wealthy nation.

 

 

The Street

Who's That Knocking?

by Doug Kass

Fixed Income

The notion that QE3 will meaningfully improve housing activity and prices by targeting the purchase of mortgage-backed securities is flawed.

Since early summer, when speculation about more easing was making the rounds, mortgage-backed securities yields have declined by about 30 basis points relative to Treasuries. But longer-dated Treasury yields have risen by about 35 basis points. As a result, 30-year fixed mortgage rates have actually modestly increased over the past few months.

Fixed and variable mortgage rates are already at generational lows, and mortgage spreads are already at near-record lows. The spread between agency mortgage rates and Treasury bond yields now lies at a near-record low of 1.04%, compared with a long-term average of 1.60%.

As I have written extensively over the past 12 months, housing has already embarked on a durable and consistent recovery before QE3 was announced. That recovery is less a function of more easing and more a function of already-low mortgage rates (this week's 30-year fixed rate is about 3.70%), record affordability, a modest recovery in jobs growth, an improvement in household formations, the improved economics of home ownership over renting and other factors.

QE3 will not have much of an effect on the real economy, but it will raise inflationary expectations. (It already has, as since June 2012, the implied inflation rate imbedded in TIPS is up by nearly 50 basis points.)

Inflation is taxation without legislation. It is not market-valuation friendly.

Individual Equities

Economic bellwether FedEx's (FDX) announced yesterday that the company is reducing its EPS guidance for its May 2013 year from a range between $6.90 and $7.40 to a range between $6.20 and $6.60.

In doing so, the company pared back its June forecast for 2013 U.S. real GDP to +1.9% from +2.4% and reduced its projections for global real GDP growth for this year and next year to +2.3% and +2.7%, respectively, from +2.4% and +3.0%, respectively.

So slowing growth is seen by FedEx, but, at the same time, the company announced an increase in shipping rates to +5.9% on Jan. 7, 2013, though lowering of the fuel surcharge will reduce this to a +3.9% increase.

Meanwhile, FedEx's CEO seems to agree with me that China is the canary in the coal mine. He said in the release, "The locomotive that has driven China's growth is its export industry" but the situation in Europe, as well as tepid growth in the U.S., is sapping steam from it.

According to Smith, demand from Chinese consumers "is not increasing at a significant rate, contrary to everybody's hopes" and he is "somewhat amused" by observers of China who "completely underestimate" the impact of China's export slowdown.

Stagflation is at our door.

 

 

 

Human Events

Obama can’t ‘change’ Washington? That’s not what he said in 2008

by David Harsanyi

 

 

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Today, at a Univision forum President Barack Obama said this: “The most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside.” (video below)

That’s quite the change from what he’s said before, in fact, in many ways it was the core of his argument in 2008.

In 2008, in Bristol, Va., for instance, presidential candidate Barack Obama promised: “We are going to change how Washington works. They will not run our party. They will not run our White House. They will not drown out the views of the American people.”

In the 2008 Obama campaign guide, Blueprint for Change, feel free to turn to the section titled (page 17): “BARACK OBAMA AND JOE BIDEN’S PLAN TO CHANGE WASHINGTON.”

Here is again in 2008: “Washington is broken. My whole campaign has been premised from the start on the idea that we have to fundamentally change how Washington works.”

And, at a rally in April 30, 2008, the president said: ”I do not believe change will happen unless we change our politics in Washington.”

 

The Right Scoop

BOOM! Romney tells crowd we’ll give Obama a chance to change Washington from the outside in November!

 

Fantastic Romney response to Obama’s claim that he can’t change Washington from the inside, that it can only be changed from the outside. Romney tells the crowd that Obama has already thrown in the white flag of surrender on changing Washington from the inside so we’ll give him a chance to change it from the outside in November. BAM!

 

 

 

Power Line

David Gelernter: Don’t say we didn’t warn you (or Dammit, wake up!)

by Scott Johnson

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David Gelernter is professor of computer science at Yale and the author, most recently, of America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats), just published by Encounter Books. He wrote “Why do we live in America-Lite?” for us, briefly summarizing the themes of his new book.

Professor Gelernter returned to expand on the themes of his book in “What keeps this failed president above water?” and in “A modest proposal.” Today he offers timely thoughts on the presidential contest that also bear on the themes of his new book:

There is a mystery about this election.  The slanted national press and Romney’s weaknesses are well understood, but a large gap separates these explanations from the fact that needs explaining: this election will be close.  How is that possible when Obama has shown himself to be the worst president in modern history?  And when Romney (on the other hand) is unexciting but safe, serious, solid—just the right sort of man to shelter all sorts of tempest-tost Americans in a storm?

Americans are not a skeptical people.  But we could use a double shot of skepticism right now.  Half of what experts say about this ongoing campaign makes no sense.  Romney does make mistakes, does have weaknesses–but in light of recent presidential history, they are trivial.  Obama is said to have great personal strengths, and he has—but not the ones he is said to have.

Romney’s weaknesses, harped on by the Establishment and some conservatives, are insignificant in the larger scheme.  Reagan was often inarticulate and sometimes fumbling off-the-cuff; so were both Bushes.  Romney is said to be unlikeable, but he won the nomination although Republican primary voters were a tough audience for this moderate-minded businessman.   How dislikeable could he be? 

And what does it matter, anyway?  Nixon was thoroughly dislikeable, but he demolished likeable McGovern and beat Humphrey, one of the nicest guys in US political history.  Ford was more likeable than Carter; Ford lost too.  And then there is Obama’s snide arrogance.  Romney might not be warm and folksy, but at any rate he is never mocking, patronizing, abrasive—in fact his handlers would love to see some mocking abrasiveness from Romney, and he tries, but just can’t bring it off. He is not a mocking or abrasive or arrogant man.

And yet polls show that Obama is likeable and Romney is not. 

Time to ask whether these popular responses to poll-takers don’t sound just a bit rehearsed; not quite convincing. It used to be that black candidates did better in polls than elections: people wanted to impress poll-takers with their open-mindedness.  That effect has disappeared.  But a generation that wants to seem good might easily give birth to a generation than wants to be good.  And the whole American Establishment has busied itself since the end of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s defining “good” in terms that exactly match Barack Obama.

Haven’t we all been taught that globalism is good and patriotism silly? That oil wells are bad and “renewable energy” good? That fighting to defend your friends or your honor is bad, but apologies are the staff of life?  That Judaism, Christianity and the Bible must be kept away from public life lest they infect it? That “experts” and intellectuals are America’s natural leaders?  That America is far less sinned against than sinning, that Africans, Arabs and other “less-developed” people are more virtuous than we?  That the greatest American hero of all was a black civil rights leader?–who was also a devout Christian, but we hear a lot less about that angle.

The press is slanted, but everyone knows that.  What really matters is that American culture is slanted.

Remember that Obama has demonstrated the competence of Carter with the integrity of Nixon. He has given us persistent unemployment and a pathetic recovery, Obamacare people don’t want, a pipeline project knifed in the back without explanation while money disappears down the great Green sinkhole, a staggering debt and huge yearly deficits, poisoned relations with Congress, an incompetent Department of Justice, states and cities wrestling with financial collapse across the country, schools that keep getting worse—not to mention calamitous security leaks, the Middle East in flames and Iran’s terrorist government closer to nuclear weapons every day.

Carter for all his sanctimonious incompetence had a certain humility.  He announced that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had opened his eyes to the evil of Communism–sad but honest.  And Carter was never suspected of personal corruption.  Of many contenders, the White House leaks will most likely emerge as the biggest Obama scandal.

Romney will win this election.  But the wacko-left Culture Machine won’t fall silent; the schools and colleges won’t suddenly become patriotic, serious, politically neutral.  The entertainment industry won’t discover open-mindedness regarding Judeo-Christianity and the Bible.  Nor will mainstream churches and liberal synagogues suddenly catch on to the moral and spiritual greatness of America. Unless conservatives start taking education and culture seriously, an election day will arrive in which the outcome is never in doubt, because at least 51 percent of the electorate has been trained which way to vote.  At which point the GOP might as well close shop and take the rest of the century off.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

 

Gateway Pundit

New Obama Flag Looks Eerily Like Blood-Stained Walls at Benghazi Consulate

by Jim Hoft

Talk about poor timing…

The Obama Campaign recently released their perfected version of the US flag.

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You can purchase your O-flag at the Obama Campaign website for $35.

If the image looks familiar it could be because the red stripes resemble the bloody Benghazi hand prints.  The bloodstained walls at the US consulate revealed that the US  officials were dragged to their death by   terrorists.

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Grim scene: Bloodstains at the main gate believed to be from one of the American staff members of the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. (Daily Mail)

 

 

WSJ

The U.S. of O.

The Obama cult is back!

by James Taranto

Yesterday we had some fun at the expense of the Obama campaign's latest effort to attract voters whose age and IQ are both in the 18 to 29 range. The campaign instructed its followers to write messages on their right hands then upload to Facebook or Twitter photos of themselves pledging allegiance to the Dear Leader. The hashtag, #forall, echoes the final words of the real Pledge of Allegiance.

Seeing this in action, it's creepier than we first realized. National Review's Daniel Foster highlights a photo of campaign manager Jim Messina with writing on both his hands: "Obama" on the left, "Care" on the right, positioned so you read them in that order. The smile on his face is terrifying; he looks like somebody who shouldn't be allowed near the immature people for whom the campaign is meant.

The Washington Examiner notes that actress Jessica Alba, in a campaign email, makes it explicitly a pledge of allegiance to Obama:

"Growing up, my classmates and I started every day with a ritual: We'd stand up, put our right hand over our hearts, and say the Pledge of Allegiance," explains Alba. "To me, that gesture was a promise. A promise to be involved and engaged in this country's future. A promise to work for liberty and justice--and for affordable education, health care, and equality--for all."

Along similar lines, blogger Jeryl Bier calls attention to a tweet from @BarackObama, the campaign account, promoting "a poster to say there are no red states or blue states, only the United States." That's a line from then-state Sen. Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention.

 

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I pledge allegiance . . .

Click on the link and you end up on a page at Store., which offers prints of four campaign artworks. Two of them, titled "Our Stripes," are a parody of the American flag. The red and white stripes are shown as streaks of paint, which strikes us as inoffensive artistic license. But the blue field with 50 white stars is replaced with the "O" campaign logo. It's not the United States of America anymore, but the United States of Obama.

Bier also observes that the Obama parody flag has only nine stripes: "I wonder which of the four original colonies went for McCain in 2008?" But if you construe the white spaces above and below the "flag" as stripes, that brings the total to 11, which would fit with excluding South Carolina. No red states indeed.

It seems we have a president who thinks the national symbol is the bald ego. Bier notes that the campaign previously used the "no red states, no blue states" slogan on Twitter, to promote a T-shirt. It shows a colorful map of the 48 contiguous states--well, of some of the 48 contiguous states. Obama's face blocks Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and South Dakota; almost all of Colorado, Illinois, Louisiana, Minnesota and North Dakota; about half of New Mexico, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming; and the southeast corner of Montana. If his head gets much bigger, it will eclipse the entire country.

 

 

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