Preacher/Soldier Revolutionary War

They Preached Liberty

The passion of American ministers for political freedom in 1776 reflected their belief in religious toleration.

By JOSEPH LOCONTE

On Sunday morning, Jan. 21, 1776, at a church in Woodstock, Va., Rev. Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg brought his sermon to a dramatic and unexpected crescendo. His text was taken from the book of Ecclesiastes. "The Bible tells us 'there is a time for all things,' and there is a time to preach and a time to pray," said Muhlenberg. "But the time for me to preach has passed away; and there is a time to fight, and that time has now come."
Stepping down from the pulpit, the minister took off his clerical robes to reveal the uniform of a colonel in the 8th Virginia Regiment of the Continental Army. He had been personally recruited by George Washington. Outside the church door, drums sounded as men kissed their wives goodbye and strode down the aisle to enlist. In less than an hour, 162 men from Muhlenberg's congregation joined the patriot cause.
The "fighting parson" was a common sight in the American Revolution. Why? Because American Christianity—anchored in a Protestant understanding of religious freedom—gave its blessing to democratic self-government.
For many evangelical ministers, unconstrained British rule not only represented an oppressive monarchy that trampled on their civil rights. It supported a national church, the Anglican Church, which they feared would impose its doctrines and practices on the colonies if given half a chance. As dissenting Protestants, American churchmen were as passionate about religious liberty as they were about republican (or "Whig") political principles. "By combining Whig political theory with religious doctrine," explains historian James Hutson in "Religion and the Founding of the American Republic," "the preachers forged an especially powerful weapon to mobilize opposition to British policies."
Despite their theological differences, colonial Americans shared a singular doctrine about the nature of religious faith: It could not be imposed by force but must be embraced freely by the mind and conscience of the believer.
In this, preachers such as Elisha Williams of Wethersfield, Conn., drew as readily from political philosophers as they did from the Bible to defend a "natural and unalienable right of private judgment in matters of religion." English philosopher John Locke was quoted frequently in evangelical sermons, not only for his political writings on the right of revolution, but also for his defense of religious freedom. "If the Gospel and the apostle may be credited," Locke wrote in "A Letter Concerning Toleration," "no man can be a Christian without charity, and without the faith which works, not by force, but by love."
It is now widely assumed that religious toleration—a hallmark of the secular, democratic West—grew out of the 18th-century Enlightenment. This may be true in much of Europe, but not in the United States. The evangelical preachers who supported the Revolution knew their Bible and believed it. They insisted that the gospel of Jesus upheld the rights of conscience in religious matters—Jesus never coerced anyone into following him, they pointed out—and that republican government would collapse without it.
Liberty of conscience became part of the American Creed. Embraced universally by the nation's clergymen, it quickened the thirst for political freedom. "There is not a single instance in history in which civil liberty was lost, and religious liberty preserved entire," warned John Witherspoon, the only minister to sign the Declaration of Independence. "If therefore we yield up our temporal property, we at the same time deliver the conscience into bondage."
With convictions like that, it is no wonder the American Revolution brought the minute man and the minister side by side into the fray.
Mr. Loconte is professor of history at the King's College in New York City. His latest book, "The Searchers: A Quest for Faith in the Valley of Doubt" was published in June by Thomas Nelson.

F & F - Holder Deserves to Get Fried

Holder Deserves Contempt Slap For Fast And Furious

Posted 06/28/2012 06:27 PM ET

Scandal: The House vote to hold the attorney general in contempt is well-deserved for someone with a track record of incompetence and lying to Congress. He serves and protects a president just as unworthy.
It has been a mystery to us how baseball great Roger Clemens could be put on trial for lying to Congress but Attorney General Eric Holder was not. Holder has under oath made many misstatements of fact and contradictory statements and concealed documents on a life-and-death matter.
Hiding the documents that show who ordered and approved Operation Fast and Furious, the Obama administration gun-running operation that killed Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and ICE Agent Jaime Zapata, is far worse than steroids in baseball.
Now a bipartisan vote, including by some Democrats, holds Eric Holder in contempt of Congress, and it's completely justified.
Holder had the audacity to try to plea-deal with House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, saying he would provide a "fair compilation" if Issa canceled permanently contempt proceedings, certified Holder was in full compliance with subpoena requests and accepted the documents offered sight unseen.
Issa properly responded no deal.
Holder is a man whose story keeps changing and whose department does likewise. On Feb. 4, 2011, Assistant Attorney General Ron Welch, in response to the investigations by Rep. Issa and Sen. Chuck Grassley of the gun-walking program run out of ATF's Phoenix office, wrote a letter stating that the "allegation that ATF 'sanctioned' or otherwise knowingly allowed the sale of assault weapons ... is false."
After a series of Friday document dumps exposed the Justice Department's deceit, Deputy Attorney General James Cole, in another letter to Congress, wrote, "Facts have come to light during the course of this investigation that indicate the Feb. 4 letter contains inaccuracies." In other words, the Justice Department lied to Congress.

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"It's Groundhog Day, and Brian Terry's family and taxpayers are still waiting for Fast and Furious answers from the Justice Department," Issa said earlier this year during hearings on the Fast and Furious gun-running scandal. "We will not wait until the next Groundhog Day to get answers for the American people."
Holder denied responsibility for and knowledge of Fast and Furious while he and his defenders sought to give him credit for stopping it. In May, he said he learned of it a few weeks earlier. Then how could he have stopped it in December 2010?
Or maybe the documents show something else, such as presidential involvement. After all, President Obama invoked executive privilege after claiming he never participated in any discussions of Fast and Furious or received any memos.
So why executive privilege if the executive was not involved, and why now instead of when documents were first requested?
This administration has no problem parading secrets on the hunt for Osama bin Laden, our double agent in Yemen or our involvement in using computer viruses to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program.
What's in the withheld documents that's considered more important than these secrets? A smoking gun on the floor of the Oval Office perhaps? Is Obama protecting his office or himself?
As House Oversight Committee Chairman Issa wrote to Obama on Monday: "Your privilege assertion means one of two things: Either you or your most senior advisers were involved in managing Operation Fast and Furious and the fallout ... or you are asserting a presidential power that you know to be unjustified solely for the purpose of further obstructing a congressional investigation."
If Holder and this administration are blameless and Fast and Furious was just tragically mismanaged, then provide the documents to show that.
We've seen and heard enough to suggest otherwise, that there is indeed something being deliberately hidden.
The families of Brian Terry and Jaime Zapata deserve to know the truth, as do all Americans, about how agents serving their country were murdered with weapons provided by their own government.

HCare Hidden Taxes

Obamacare's Hidden Taxes

Posted 06/28/2012 07:02 PM ET

Taxation: The high bench has confirmed that ObamaCare's individual mandate is a massive tax on the American middle class. But let's not forget the 20 other new taxes that are embedded in the law.
Though President Obama never sold it as a tax hike, the Supreme Court ruled the mandate is exactly that. Unfortunately, the majority argued it's legal under Congress' taxing authority.
Forcing citizens to buy health insurance "is absolutely not a tax increase," Obama insisted in 2009. Earlier, he assured the public that raising taxes on the middle class to support his health care plan was "the last thing we need in an economy like this." "Folks are already having a tough enough time," Obama added.
Indeed they are. But his plan, which subsidizes some 30 million uninsured, amounts to a $1.8 trillion whammy on working families. And that's just for starters.
The court was silent about the 20 other different taxes hidden in ObamaCare, more than half of which affect families earning less than $250,000 a year.
The new taxes, which cost some $675 billion over the next decade, include:
• A 2.3% excise tax on U.S. sales of medical devices that's already devastating the medical supply industry and its workforce. The levy is a $20 billion blow to an industry that employs roughly 400,000.
Several major manufacturers have been roiled, including: Michigan-based Stryker Corp., which blames the tax for 1,000 layoffs; Indiana-based Zimmer Corp., which cites the tax in laying off 450 and taking a $50 million charge against earnings; Indiana-based Cook Medical Inc., which has scrubbed plans to open a U.S. factory; Minnesota-based Medtronic Inc., which expects an annual charge against earnings of $175 million, and Boston Scientific Corp., which has opted to open plants in tax-friendlier Ireland and China to help offset a $100 million charge against earnings.

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• A 3.8% surtax on investment income from capital gains and dividends that applies to single filers earning more than $200,000 and married couples filing jointly earning more than $250,000.
• A $50,000 excise tax on charitable hospitals that fail to meet new "community health assessment needs," "financial assistance" and other rules set by the Health and Human Services Dept.
• A $24 billion tax on the paper industry to control a pollutant known as black liquor.
• A $2.3 billion-a-year tax on drug companies.
• A 10% excise tax on indoor tanning salons.
• An $87 billion hike in Medicare payroll taxes for employees, as well as the self-employed.
• A hike in the threshold for writing off medical expenses to 10% of adjusted gross income from 7.5%.
• A new cap on flexible spending accounts of $2,500 a year.
• Elimination of the tax deduction for employer-provided prescription drug coverage for Medicare recipients.
• An income surtax of 1% of adjusted gross income, rising to 2.5% by 2016, on individuals who refuse to go along with ObamaCare by buying a policy not OK'd by the government.
• A $2,000 tax charged to employers with 50 or more workers for every full-time worker not offered health coverage.
• A $60 billion tax on health insurers.
• A 40% excise tax on so-called Cadillac, or higher cost, health insurance plans.
All told, there are 21 new or higher taxes imposed by Obama's health care law — and 21 more reasons to repeal it.

HCare - Up to the Voters Now

It's Now Up To Voters To Throw Out The ObamaCare Mess

Posted 06/28/2012 07:02 PM ET

Health Care: Ignoring the Constitution it swore to defend, the Supreme Court has affirmed ObamaCare, making the already important fall elections even more critical. A new president and Congress are needed to rid the country of this meddlesome law.
By a 5-4 vote, the court ruled that the individual mandate is not allowed under the Constitution's Commerce Clause. But it stunningly decided, right out of the ether, that Congress has the power to impose the mandate as a tax — even though Congress never defined it as a tax.
In essence, the Supreme Court's majority rewrote the law for the president and the Democrats who passed the bill. This wasn't lost on the dissenting justices. In their opinion, the court decided "to save a statute Congress did not write" and one the public does not expect.
The president even denied the mandate is a tax.
ObamaCare authors and supporters claimed that the Commerce Clause was the constitutional foundation for the mandate. The argument that it falls under Congress' power to tax was used only when the administration was forced to defend the law in court.
The argument is a thin one. The purpose of a tax is to raise revenues, not compel certain government-approved behavior. While ObamaCare is riddled with trillions in revenue-raising taxes, the cost of ignoring the individual mandate is not among them. Failure to comply with the mandate is met with punishment, a fine intended as a coercive act. That's not a tax.
Chief Justice John Roberts, the George W. Bush appointee who wrote the majority opinion, acknowledged that calling the mandate a tax isn't "the most natural interpretation of the mandate."
But, as if he were trying to help the White House's defense of the legal challenge, which had taken a desperate turn in the courts, he said that the interpretation needed to be only "fairly possible."

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Judicial activism? Yes, it was right there on shameless display in the biggest court decision since the Franklin Roosevelt era. As the dissenters said, a ruling that keeps ObamaCare in place is "strained," "invented" and "amounts ... to a vast judicial overreaching."
There is speculation that Roberts sided with the justices on the left because he didn't want his to be the court that struck down a president's signature legislation and upset what he sees as a collegial relationship between the branches of the government. If so, he is not a man equipped with the proper temperament to be a Supreme Court justice, much less chief justice.
The dissenting judges colorfully called the mandate-as-a-tax a "a creature never hitherto seen in the United States" because it is "a penalty for constitutional purposes that is also a tax for constitutional purposes." They further noted that the Supreme Court has "never held — never — that a penalty imposed for violation of the law was so trivial as to be in effect a tax."
The dissenters — Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy — pointed out as well that the fine imposed for failure to comply was never intended to be a tax by its authors, as "the statute repeatedly calls it a penalty."
Calling it a tax not only tortures reasoned thought, but also means that candidate Barack Obama broke his promise that he wouldn't raise taxes on anyone earning less that $250,000 a year.
But that's OK. He'll never be called on it by the media. He will be too busy soaking up the press' fawning adulation in the glow of his victory.
The distinction between the Commerce Clause and the power to tax might make a lawyer happy. But what the court has done is give Congress the power to do whatever it wants, to impose any mandate and abridge any freedom as long as it says the legislation falls under its power to tax. Let the implications of that sink in.
While it's easy to condemn the court for its abuse of constitutional standards, we have to remember that four justices said the "central provisions of the act — the individual mandate and Medicaid expansion — are invalid."
They noted, "It follows, as some of the parties urge, that all other provisions of the act must fall as well."
Those justices also had a problem with ObamaCare's "dramatic expansion of the Medicaid program," which they said "exceeds Congress' power to attach conditions to federal grants to the states."
Finding both the individual mandate and the Medicaid expansion unconstitutional, they wrote that the entire law should be invalidated.
Had a single justice, say one appointed by President George W. Bush to defend constitutional liberty, grasped ObamaCare's obvious conflicts with the American system and had not chosen this case to try to make a novel legal argument, the outcome would have been flipped. But one man's poor judgment has helped an unnecessary burden on the country become more deeply entrenched.
With a majority of the Supreme Court refusing to protect American freedom from a predatory Congress, it is now up to the voters to restore lost liberty. They have to fire the president and turn Congress over to lawmakers who respect limited government and will pass policies that will in fact bring down medical costs and expand coverage. Health care must be left to the private sector, not commanded and controlled, and consequently choked, by a central planning committee.
Patients deserve full authority over their medical care. They don't need, nor do they deserve, congressional mandates, decrees from bureaucratic planners and costs driven higher by poor government policy. Affordability and wider coverage are possible, but they have to be promoted by policies that make sense, not a muddle.
If the court won't throw out this mess, then the voters will have to throw out its architects. We hope average Americans will be smarter in November than five highly educated justices were in June.

CJ Roberts - SCOTUS Respectibility

Roberts Rules To Avoid The Appearance Of Politics In His Court

By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
Posted 06/28/2012 06:13 PM ET

It's the judiciary's Nixon-to-China: Chief Justice John Roberts joins the liberal wing of the Supreme Court and upholds the constitutionality of ObamaCare. How? By pulling off one of the great constitutional finesses of all time.
He managed to uphold the central conservative argument against ObamaCare, while at the same time finding a narrow definitional dodge to uphold the law — and thus prevented the court from being seen as having overturned, presumably on political grounds, the signature legislation of this administration.
Why did he do it? Because he carries two identities. Jurisprudentially, he is a constitutional conservative. Institutionally, he is chief justice and sees himself as uniquely entrusted with the custodianship of the court's legitimacy, reputation and stature.
As a conservative, he is as appalled as his conservative colleagues by the administration's central argument that ObamaCare's individual mandate is a proper exercise of its authority to regulate commerce.
That makes congressional power effectively unlimited. Mr. Jones is not a purchaser of health insurance. Mr. Jones has therefore manifestly not entered into any commerce. Yet Congress tells him he must buy health insurance — on the grounds that it is regulating commerce. If government can do that under the Commerce Clause, what can it not do?
"The Framers ... gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it," writes Roberts. Otherwise you "undermine the principle that the Federal Government is a government of limited and enumerated powers."
That's Roberts, philosophical conservative. But he lives in uneasy coexistence with Roberts, custodian of the court, acutely aware that the judiciary's arrogation of power has eroded the esteem in which it was once held.
Most of this arrogation occurred under the liberal Warren and Burger courts, most egregiously with Roe v. Wade, which willfully struck down the duly passed abortion laws of 46 states. The result has been four decades of popular protest and resistance to an act of judicial arrogance that, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, "deferred stable settlement of the issue" by the normal electoral/legislative process.
More recently, however, few decisions have occasioned more bitterness and rancor than Bush v. Gore, a 5-4 decision split along ideological lines. It was seen by many (principally, of course, on the left) as a political act disguised as jurisprudence and designed to alter the course of the single most consequential political act of a democracy — the election of a president.
Whatever one thinks of the substance of Bush v. Gore, it did affect the reputation of the court. Roberts seems determined that there be no recurrence with ObamaCare. Hence his straining in his ObamaCare ruling to avoid a similar result — a 5-4 decision split along ideological lines that might be perceived as partisan and political.
National health care has been a liberal dream for a hundred years. It is clearly the most significant piece of social legislation in decades. Roberts' concern was that the court do everything it could to avoid being seen, rightly or wrongly, as high-handedly overturning sweeping legislation passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president.
How to reconcile the two imperatives — one philosophical and the other institutional? Assign yourself the task of writing the majority opinion. Find the ultimate finesse that manages to uphold the law, but only on the most narrow of grounds — interpreting the individual mandate as merely a tax, something generally within the power of Congress.
Result? The law stands, thus obviating any charge that a partisan court overturned duly passed legislation. And yet at the same time the Commerce Clause is reined in. By denying that it could justify the imposition of an individual mandate, Roberts draws the line against the inexorable decades-old expansion of congressional power under the Commerce Clause fig leaf.
Law upheld, Supreme Court's reputation for neutrality maintained. Commerce Clause contained, constitutional principle of enumerated powers reaffirmed.
That's not how I would have ruled. I think the "mandate is merely a tax" argument is a dodge, and a flimsy one at that. (The "tax" is obviously punitive, regulatory and intended to compel.) Perhaps that's not how Roberts would have ruled had he been just an associate justice, and not the chief. But that's how he did rule.
ObamaCare is now essentially upheld. There's only one way it can be overturned. The same way it was passed — elect a new president and a new Congress. That's undoubtedly what Roberts is saying: Your job, not mine. I won't make it easy for you.

Islamist Extremist Invited to WH

Obama Administration’s Breathtaking Arrogance on Questions about Inviting a Terrorist to Washington

Posted By Andrew C. McCarthy On June 27, 2012  

One should always hesitate before jumping to the conclusion that the something that just happened is the worst thing that has ever happened — history usually has many worse “worsts” ready to hand. Still, if there has been a more breathtakingly arrogant performance by an administration official in the modern history of the United States than the one Jen Rubin reports on at the Washington Post today, I can’t think of it.

The Obama administration recently issued a visa to an Egyptian named Hani Nour Eldin, an operative of a foreign terrorist organization — formally designated as such under U.S. law — so that the administration could consult with the jihadist about Egypt’s future under the governance of Eldin’s pals at the Muslim Brotherhood. This is not speculation: Eldin brags about being a member of the organization and the administration concedes the visa was issued and the meeting happened.

Outrageous as this sounds, it does not do the outrage justice. The terrorist organization in question, the Islamic Group (Gama’at al Islamia), is the group led by Omar Abdel Rahman, the notorious “Blind Sheikh” currently serving a life sentence in U.S. federal prison for his foundational role in forming the jihadist cell that carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and was later thwarted while attempting simultaneously to bomb several other New York City landmarks. (I handled the case for the United States, back when its government thought jihadists should be prosecuted rather than cultivated.)  The Blind Sheikh’s cell, essentially, was a U.S. branch of the Islamic Group (IG).

Moreover, the IG has committed numerous atrocities the goal of which has been to extort the United States into releasing the Blind Sheikh from prison. These include the barbaric murders of several dozen tourists in Luxor, Egypt, in 1997. The IG, in conjunction with its allies in al Qaeda, has openly and repeatedly threatened violence against the United States if the Blind Sheikh is not released and repatriated to Egypt. A staple of the Egyptian Islamic Ascendancy Arab Spring is the now routine and hostile IG-driven demonstration outside the U.S. embassy to demand the Blind Sheikh’s release. So seriously has our government heretofore taken the IG that the Bush Justice Department prosecuted the Blind Sheikh’s lawyer, Lynne Stewart, for material support to terrorism over her communication of messages from the Blind Sheikh to IG members in Egypt.

Despite being 70 years old, Stewart was ultimately sentenced to ten years in prison for consulting with and advising the IG. The Obama administration is now doing essentially the same thing Stewart was doing but calling it “foreign policy.” The administration is actively aiding and abetting members of a terrorist organization with a hellacious record of violence and threats of violence against the United States. That is not just a departure from American policy against negotiating with terrorists; it is a serious violation of federal law.
Such an abomination is this that even the Obamedia has been roused from its slumbers to question the administration about it. As Jen recounts, the inquiries Friday were put to State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland.

The transcript Jen produces is jaw-dropping. Nuland quips that, when word of the visa’s issuance became public, the administration only “pledged to [the press] that we would look into it” — not that the most transparent administration in history would actually report back on what was uncovered about how and why the visa to the terrorist operative was issued. One incredulous reporter responded, “I don’t recall you saying when you said you were going to look into it, that you weren’t going to tell us what the results of the investigation were. I missed that part.” The laugh-a-minute Ms. Nuland’s responded, “That’s true. You did.”

AFP further notes, in a story bearing the astonishing title, “US justifies visa for Egypt Islamist,” that Nuland claimed the administration had no “reason to believe that [Eldin] — who at the time of his application was a member of parliament — would pose a threat to the United States.” That’s rather obnoxious.

The law of material support to terrorism does not make an exception for members of the terrorist organization that the State Department, in its infinite wisdom, thinks are probably not dangerous. (This, by the way, is the same State Department that used to use convicted terrorist financier Abdurrahman Alamoudi as an emissary.) Moreover, the fact that a country whose population is 75 percent Sunni supremacist decides to elect terrorists to its parliament is of no consequence as far as American criminal law is concerned: The IG is a terrorist organization, and assisting its members is a felony regardless of what parliament they belong to. The designated terrorist organization Hamas is the government of Gaza; members of the designated terrorist organization Hezbollah hold political office in Lebanon. Is the Obama administration saying that once terrorist organizations launder themselves through the rinse-cycle of “sharia-democracy” they are no longer terrorist organizations? If so, somebody better let Congress know, because our statutes still seem to say that supporting members of designated foreign terrorist organizations is a crime.

But then again, why bother with Congress when you’ve convinced yourself that you can rule like a dictator, when the Congress is content to let you walk all over it, and when Mitt Romney doesn’t appear to think national security is an issue worth campaigning on?

Does Turkey BELONG in NATO ????

Turkey To Call for NATO Intervention Against Syria?

NATO ought not exist at all, and if it must exist, surely Turkey’s Islamist government — friend of Iran, financial backer of the Hamas terrorist organization, facilitator of operations against Israel — has no business being in it. Now, Turkey appears poised to exploit its NATO membership to force the Western intervention in Syria that the Muslim Brotherhood and allied Islamists have been calling for.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a Sunni Islamic supremacist with longstanding ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Sunni supremacist organization. The Brotherhood is leading the mujahideen (called the “opposition” or the “rebels” by the mainstream media) that seeks to oust the Assad regime in Syria — dominated by the Alawites, a minority Shiite sect. Unsurprisingly, then, Turkey’s government has taken a very active role in abetting the Brotherhood’s operations against the Syrian regime, which have also been joined by al-Qaeda and other Sunni militants.

On Friday, a Turkish air force jet entered Syrian air space, and Assad regime forces shot it down. Turkey claims the jet “mistakenly” cruised over Syria, and that, by the time it was taken down, it was in international air space over the Mediterranean. One need carry no brief for Assad to conclude that, given the interventionist drum-beat for no-fly zones and direct military and logistical aid to the “opposition,” Syria rationally took the presence of a Turkish military aircraft in its air space as a provocation. Turkey insists it was not “spying” — that this was just an accident to which Syria overreacted. That would be a good argument if the regime were not under siege and if the Syrian and Turkish governments had not been exchanging hostile words (mostly, threats from Erdogan) for months. That, of course, is not the case.

The Obama administration, from its first days, has cozied up to the Muslim Brotherhood — both Brotherhood branches in the Middle East, and Brotherhood satellite organizations in the U.S., such as CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America. Obama has also been quietly supporting the Syrian mujahideen: coordinating with repressive Islamist governments in Turkey and Saudi Arabia to arm and train them, and reportedly dispatching the CIA to facilitate this effort. But it has thus far resisted calls for more overt participation — calls by pro-Brotherhood progressives in both parties for something along the lines of what Obama did in Libya, meaning: without congressional approval and toward the end of empowering virulently anti-Western Islamists.

There is no U.S. national security interest in Syrian intervention: both the savage regime of Assad (whom the Obama administration saw as a “reformer” until about five minutes ago) and the Syrian mujahideen’s Sunni supremacists are enemies of the West and of our ally, Israel. It is in our interests that both be weakened, which is best achieved by butting out while they slug it out between themselves. Since there is no good outcome for us, it makes no sense to jump in on the side of one set of America’s enemies, making them stronger.

Still, there is little doubt that Obama — who regards Erdogan as his best friend and strategic partner in the region — is inclined to jump in on the Brotherhood’s side. He would have done so already if the November election were not looming. In light, however, of the democracy-promotion debacles in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, which have forged the creation of sharia regimes that persecute religious minorities and reject Western democracy, Americans are not buying democracy-promotion as a rationale for being dragged into yet more internecine Islamic conflict.

Nor are Americans convinced by the interventionists’ best argument: Syria is the cat’s paw of Iran, our implacable enemy, and therefore Assad’s overthrow, which would be a bitter pill for the mullahs, is a compelling U.S. interest. Yes, Iran is a huge problem, but we should then deal with Iran directly — not in a proxy war that elevates the Muslim Brotherhood, whose ascendancy in neighboring Egypt is already destabilizing the Sinai and profoundly threatening Israel. Consequently, if Syrian intervention is to be sold to the public — I won’t say “sold to Congress,” because Obama and the interventionists are unconcerned about such trivial constitutional details — the administration will have to come up with another excuse.

Merkle Puts O in His Place

Germans Look To Obama Only As An Example Of What Not To Do

Posted 06/26/2012 06:51 PM ET

Europe: When the biggest spender in all history bluntly gets told to pay off his own debts before he starts lecturing others, it's a sure sign the adults have taken charge in Germany and the U.S. is being judged by its results.

President Obama must have been taken aback by the forcefulness of German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble's statement to German public broadcaster ZDF Sunday: "Mr. Obama should first of all take care of reducing the American deficit, which is harder than in the eurozone," he said. "People are always very quick at giving others advice."

Schaeuble was reflecting sentiment in fiscally responsible Germany, which is being pressured by Obama to do what he did and ramp up spending, because he really believes such spending equals economic growth.

And how's that deficit spending working out? After shelling out a record $15 trillion since Obama took office, the U.S. remains mired in the weakest economic recovery in history. That's what the president bought with his stimulus, his takeover of the health care system and his vast new regulatory regime.

Yet that hasn't stopped him from telling Germany to follow his lead.From Schaeuble's point of view, however, Germany doesn't need advice from Obama — who's been AWOL on Europe's crisis up until now — other than as a cautionary example of what not to do.

If Obama's record isn't bad enough, the Germans have no doubt noticed how the president is slipping in the polls and how his urging of Germany to spend more may be less about saving Europe than saving himself.
In Mexico last week, Obama expressed concern how Europe could affect his reelection prospects. But that reportedly didn't cut much ice with Angela Merkel.

"Look, Mr. President," the chancellor replied in the words of an expert quoted in the New York Times. "I have some problems that I need to respond to that don't correspond to your need to be reelected."

Is Country Unravelling?

Is the Country Unraveling?

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On June 25, 2012 @ 1:20 am In Uncategorized | 139 Comments

The Thrill Is Gone

The last thirty days have made it clear that Barack Obama is not going to win the 2012 election by a substantial margin. The polls still show the race near dead even with over five months, and all sorts of unforeseen events, to come. But after the Obama meltdown of April and May, I don’t think he in any way resembles the mysterious Pied Piper figure of 2008, who mesmerized and then marched the American people over the cliff. Polls change daily; gaffes and wars may come aplenty. But Barack Obama has lost the American center and now he is reduced to the argument that Mitt Romney would be even worse than he has been, as he tries to cobble together an us-versus-them 51% majority from identity groups through cancelling the Keystone Pipeline, granting blanket amnesty, ginning up the
“war on women,” and flipping on gay marriage.

Mythographer in Chief

The Obama memoir is revealed not really to be a memoir at all. Most of his intimate friends and past dalliances that we read about in Dreams From My Father were, we learn, just made up (“composites”); the problem, we also discover, with the president’s autobiography is not what is actually false, but whether anything much at all is really true in it. If a writer will fabricate the details about his own mother’s terminal illness and quest for insurance, then he will probably fudge on anything. For months the president fought the Birthers who insist that he was born in Kenya, only to have it revealed that he himself for over a decade wrote just that fact in his own literary biography. Is Barack Obama then a birther ^[1]?

Has any major public figure (57 states, Austrian language, corpse-men, Maldives for Falklands, private sector “doing fine,” etc.) been a more underwhelming advertisement for the quality of a Harvard education or a Chicago Law School part-time billet? Has any presidential candidate or president set a partisan crowd to laughing by rubbing his chin with his middle finger as he derides an opponent, or made a joke about killing potential suitors of his daughters with deadly Predator drones, or recited a double entendre “go-down” joke  
^[2] about a sex act?

From Recession to Recovery to Stasis

As we see in New Jersey, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin, the cure for the present economic malaise is not rocket science — a curbing of the size of government, a revision of the tax code, a modest rollback of regulation, reform of public employment, and holding the line on new taxes. Do that and public confidence returns, businesses start hiring, and finances settle down. Do the opposite — as we see in Mediterranean Europe, California, or Illinois over the last decade — and chaos ensues.

Obama took a budding recovery in June 2009, and through massive borrowing, the federal takeover of health care, new expansions of food stamps and unemployment insurance, the curtailing of oil and gas leasing on public lands, new regulations, and non-stop demagoguery of the private sector slowed the economy to a crawl ^[3]. His goal seems not to restore economic growth per se but to seek an equality of result, even if that means higher unemployment and less net wealth for the poor and middle classes. Obama hinted at that in 2008 when he said he would raise capital gains taxes even if it meant less revenue, given the need for “fairness.” Indeed, equality is best achieved by bringing the top down rather than the bottom up. Nowhere is the Obama model of massive borrowing, vast increases in the size of the state, more regulations, and class warfare successful — not in California or Illinois, not in Greece, Spain, or Italy, not anywhere.

To Be or Not to Be a Fat Cat?

Culturally, Obama might at least have played the Jimmy Carter populist and eschewed the elite world that had so mesmerized Bill
Clinton. Instead, Obama proved a counterfeit populist and became enthralled with the high life of rich friends, celebrities, high-priced fundraisers, and family getaways to Martha’s Vineyard or Costa del Sol. He somehow has set records both in the number of meet-and-greet campaign fundraisers and the number of golf rounds played. As Obama damned the fat cats and corporate jet owners, he courted them in preparation to joining them post-officium. It simply is unsustainable for a Hawaii prep-schooled president to talk down to black audiences in a fake black patois in warning about “them,” only to put on his polo shirt, shades and golf garb to court “them” on
the links.
\
The Great Divide

Race? We live in a world where either the president or the attorney general will too often weigh in, and clumsily and in polarizing fashion, on any high-profile white/black legal matter. By now we got the message that we are all cowards ^[4], are not nice to Mr. Holder’s “people,” are racists in wanting audits of his performance, and are the sort of enemies the president wants punished.

We live in an age of a daily dose of the provocateur Al Sharpton ^[5] and the nearly daily shrill accusations of the Black Caucus. No president ever entered office with more racial goodwill and no president has so racially polarized the country. Anyone who read the racially obsessed Dreams From My Father or reviewed the race-baiting sermons of the demented Rev. Wright ^[6] could have predicted the ongoing deterioration in racial relations. We live in an age in which criticism of the president is alleged racism, creating an impossible situation ^[7]: the country is redeemed only if it elects Obama, and stays redeemed only if he is reelected. How strange to read columnists one week alleging racism, and on the next warning us about the Mormon Church.

The most recent de facto amnesty is not just politically cynical, but unworkable. Consider that Obama himself warned on two earlier occasions that it would be legally impossible to do what he just did, and so he did not do it — even when he had Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress — until he was at 50/50 in the polls in a reelection fight. If we are to extend to roughly one million illegal aliens blanket amnesty on the premise that they are in or have graduated from high school and have not been convicted of a crime, then are we to deport now those who dropped out of high school (the Hispanic drop out rate in general in California is over 50%) or who have been arrested and convicted? Will this loud and public effort by the Hispanic elite to achieve amnesty for over 11 million illegal aliens moderate the MEChA/La Raza university writ that the United States is a culpable place — for how can they desire so what they so criticize? Given that Asians are now the largest immigrant group (almost all arriving legally, with either education, skills, or capital), will yet another group adopt lobbying efforts as well to increase the numbers of kindred arrivals, given that immigration policy is now predicated on ethnic and identity politics?

The Age of Transparency?

Solyndra, the reversals of the Chrysler creditors, the GSA mess, the Secret Service embarrassments, and Fast and Furious were not the new transparency. But Securitygate ^[8] proved a scandal like none other in recent memory, trumping both Watergate and Iran-Contra — albeit ignored by the press. Usually administrations fight leaks from self-proclaimed whistleblowers, but do not themselves aid and abet violators of government confidentiality to promote a pathetic (reading Thomas Aquinas while selecting drone targets?) narrative of heroic wartime leadership.

Usually liberal reporters convince themselves into thinking they publish leaks as a way of speaking “truth to power,” not as near accomplices in promoting a partisan agenda. Usually leaks happen after events, not in the middle of an ongoing war against terrorists. How odd that the Obama administration has done more harm to the country than did Wikileaks. Why would the president not release subpoenaed documents to the U.S. Congress while he leaked national security secrets to the world?
Appointments? Where does one find the like of an Anita Dunn (her hero was Mao), the truther Van Jones, or Al “Crucify” Armendariz ^[9]?
 Do we remember guests to the Bush White House being photographed flipping off portraits of Bill Clinton ^[10]? Usually Treasury secretaries are models of tax probity, not tax violators themselves. Why is the secretary of Labor issuing videos inviting illegal aliens to contact her office when lodging complaints against employers? Even John Mitchell did not violate so many ethical standards as has Eric Holder, who sees nothing wrong in appointing an Obama appointee and Obama campaign donor to investigate possible Obama administration legal violations. Why was grilling Alberto Gonzalez not racism, but doing the same to Eric Holder supposedly is? From where did “Shut the f— up” ^[11] National Security Advisor Thomas Donilon appear? Fannie Mae and K Street? Do Commerce secretaries usually drive Lexuses as they promote U.S. industry?

A Patch of Blue

Can there be good news in this era of Obama’s managed decline? In fact, we have two good reasons to rejoice. One, never has the hard Left had such an ideal megaphone as Barack Hussein Obama: his identity was constructed as multicultural to the core. He put liberals at ease through his comportment and chameleon voice (ask either Harry Reid or Joe Biden). He ran hard left of Hillary Clinton and promised everything from shutting down Guantanamo to ending renditions, bringing aboard the likes of a Harold Koh from Yale and Cass Sunstein from Chicago. He was young, hip, self-described as cool, and was hailed as the best emissary of the radical liberal vision of any in decades. Historians hailed Obama as the smartest president who ever held office, disagreeing only whether he was JFK or FDR reincarnate.

And what happened? In less than 40 months, Obama destroyed the greatest bipartisan good will that any recent president has enjoyed, and has done more to discredit Keynesian neo-socialist politics than have all of talk radio, Fox News, and the internet combined. In just two years, he took a Democratic Congress and lost the House in the largest midterm setback since 1938. In other words, the people — fifty percent of whom either do not pay federal income taxes or receive some sort of state or federal entitlement or both — saw the best face of modern neo-socialism imaginable, and they were not quite sold on it.

Second, it is hard to screw up America in just four years. Look at it this way: gas and oil production has soared despite, not because of, the federal government. The rest of the world — the unraveling European Union, the Arab Spring, Putin’s Russia, aging Japan, authoritarian China, the recrudescent Marxism in Latin America — reminds us of American exceptionalism. The verdict from Wisconsin is that the statist model is over ^[12]. The public union, big pension, non-fireable employee model is left only with an “après nous, le déluge“ ^[13] sigh. The private sector is not doing fine, but shortly will be when it is assured taxes won’t soar, energy will be cheaper, and Obamacare will cease. The irony is that the last four years have reminded us of what we still can be, and how we differ from most other places in the world.

Political Glossary

A Political Glossary

By Thomas Sowell

6/26/2012

Since this is an election year, we can expect to hear a lot of words -- and the meaning of those words is not always clear. So it may be helpful to have a glossary of political terms.
One of the most versatile terms in the political vocabulary is "fairness." It has been used over a vast range of issues, from "fair trade" laws to the Fair Labor Standards Act. And recently we have heard that the rich don't pay their "fair share" of taxes.

Some of us may want to see a definition of what is "fair." But a concrete definition would destroy the versatility of the word, which is what makes it so useful politically.

If you said, for example, that 46.7 percent of their income -- or any other number -- is the "fair share" of their income that the rich should have to pay in taxes, then once they paid that amount, there would be no basis for politicians to come back to them for more -- and "more" is what "fair share" means in practice.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

"Racism" is another term we can expect to hear a lot this election year, especially if the public opinion polls are going against President Barack Obama.

Former big-time TV journalist Sam Donaldson and current fledgling CNN host Don Lemon have already proclaimed racism to be the reason for criticisms of Obama, and we can expect more and more other talking heads to say the same thing as the election campaign goes on. The word "racism" is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything -- and demanding evidence makes you a "racist."

A more positive term that is likely to be heard a lot, during election years especially, is "compassion." But what does it mean concretely? More often than not, in practice it means a willingness to spend the taxpayers' money in ways that will increase the spender's chances of getting reelected.

If you are skeptical -- or, worse yet, critical -- of this practice, then you qualify for a different political label: "mean-spirited." A related political label is "greedy."
In the political language of today, people who want to keep what they have earned are said to be "greedy," while those who wish to take their earnings from them and give it to others (who will vote for them in return) show "compassion."

A political term that had me baffled for a long time was "the hungry." Since we all get hungry, it was not obvious to me how you single out some particular segment of the population to refer to as "the hungry."

Eventually, over the years, it finally dawned on me what the distinction was. People who make no provision to feed themselves, but expect others to provide food for them, are those whom politicians and the media refer to as "the hungry."

Those who meet this definition may have money for alcohol, drugs or even various electronic devices. And many of them are overweight. But, if they look to voluntary donations, or money taken from the taxpayers, to provide them with something to eat, then
they are "the hungry."

I can remember a time, long ago, when I was hungry in the old-fashioned sense. I was a young fellow out of work, couldn't find work, fell behind in my room rent -- and, when I finally found a job, I had to walk miles to get there, because I couldn't afford both subway fare and food.

But this was back in those "earlier and simpler times" we hear about. I was so naive that I thought it was up to me to go find a job, and to save some money when I did. Even though I knew that Joe DiMaggio was making $100,000 a year -- a staggering sum in the money of that time -- it never occurred to me that it was up to him to see that I got fed.

So, even though I was hungry, I never qualified for the political definition of "the hungry." Moreover, I never thereafter spent all the money I made, whether that was a little or a lot, because being hungry back then was a lot worse than being one of "the hungry" today.
As a result, I was never of any use to politicians looking for dependents who would vote for them. Nor have I ever had much use for such politicians.

Politicians seem to have a special fondness for words that have two very different meanings, so we are likely to hear a lot of these kinds of words this election year.

"Access" is one of those words. Politicians seem to be forever coming to the rescue of people who have been denied "access" to credit, college or whatever.

But what does that mean, concretely?
It could mean that some external force is blocking you from whatever your goal might be. Or it could mean that you just don't have whatever it takes to reach that goal.

To take a personal example, Michael Jordan became a basketball star -- and a very rich man. I did neither. Was that because I was denied "access" to professional basketball?

Anyone who saw me as a teenager trying to play basketball could tell you that I was lucky to hit the back board, much less the basket.
By the first definition, I had as much "access" to the NBA as Michael Jordan had. Nobody was blocking me. They didn't have to block, because I was not going to make the basket -- or the NBA -- anyway.


Making a distinction between external and internal reasons for failing to reach one's goal would clarify the meaning of the word "access." But clarification would destroy the political usefulness of the word, along with the government programs that this word is used to justify.

For years, politicians and the media went ballistic over the fact that different groups had different approval rates for mortgage loans. This was supposed to show that some racial groups were denied "access" to mortgage loans, and especially access to the most desired loans with the lowest interest rates.

No one even asked the question: Denied access by which definition of "access"?

Political crusaders don't pause to define words. Their shrill rhetoric suggested that external barriers were the problem. And that meant government intervention was the solution, to smite the wicked and deliver "social justice" (another undefined term).

When statistics showed that blacks were turned down for conventional mortgage loans at twice the rate of whites, that was the clincher for those saying that "access" was the problem and that racial discrimination was the reason. Since this fit the existing preconceptions in many quarters, what more could you want?

Other statistics, however, showed that whites were turned down for conventional mortgage loans at nearly double the rate for Asian Americans. By the very same reasoning, that would suggest that whites were being racially discriminated against by banks that were mostly run by whites.

But this unlikely conclusion never surfaced, because the second set of statistics seldom saw the light of day in the mainstream media, even though both sets of statistics were available from the same sources.

To publish the second set of statistics would undermine the whole moral melodrama in the media, and the political crusade based on it.
Statistics on the average credit ratings of people in different racial groups likewise seldom saw the light of day. The average credit ratings of whites were higher than the average credit ratings of blacks, and the average credit ratings of Asian Americans were higher than the average credit ratings of whites.

But to lay all these facts before the public and say, "We report, you decide" might well result in the public's deciding that banks and other financial institutions prefer lending to individuals who were more likely to pay them back.

Also lost in media stories was the fact that many, if not most, of the financial officials who actually made loan approval decisions never laid eyes on the people who applied, but based their decisions on the paperwork sent by those who dealt directly with the applicants.
Equal "access" does not automatically lead to equal outcomes, either in lending institutions or in basketball, or anywhere else. But words like "access" have led to much political success and much economic disaster, the housing market being just one example.

Andrew Klavin on Obama's Character - NOT

The Contents of Obama’s Character

Posted By Andrew Klavan On June 25, 2012 

As everything President Obama touches turns to crap, we begin to hear more and more leftist attacks on Mitt Romney the man. Andrea Mitchell on leftist network NBC ^[1] dishonestly edits a tape ^[2] to make Romney seem “out of touch.” Joe Williams from the leftist website Politico ^[3] crazily suggests Romney is only comfortable ^[4] around white people. Lawrence O’Donnell ^[5] on the leftist cable net MSNBC ^[6] moronically attacks Mrs. Romney for riding horses. And just about every leftist everywhere from the New York Times ^[7] all the way up to some ostensibly legitimate news sources decries the fact that the Republican candidate for president is, horror upon horrors, a Mormon ^[8].

Really? I mean, while believing in the Angel Moroni may be kind of odd, believing in Barack Obama is just plain magical thinking. The jobs “created or saved,” ^[9] the new tone ^[10] in Washington, the health care “reform,” ^[11] the new approach to the Middle East ^[12], the Russian reset ^[13] — sure, all religions have their hard-to-swallow miracle tales but most of them don’t do this kind of real-world damage.

But of all the weird, creepy and false left-wing religious tenets the Obama administration has forced down this nation’s throat, none is as impossible to swallow as the myth of the president’s superior character. Listen, I’ll make no claims for Mitt Romney on this score. From a distance, he seems a decent person enough but I don’t know him and I’m willing to stipulate he’s no better than any other politician. But on the very surface of it, based on his own words and actions and what we know, President Obama clearly does not live up even to that exceedingly low standard.

In many ways, the political “character issue” is a nonsense, a phrase invented by the media as an excuse to expose people’s sex lives. But the real sins that people commit in moments of physical intimacy — sins of personal unkindness, dishonesty and self-degradation — are none of the public’s business. Bill Clinton committed adultery in the Oval Office with a woman half his age and shame on him, but what’s it to me? That satisfying swell of righteous indignation we feel in the presence of others’ personal weaknesses is mostly a psychological ruse to keep us from focusing on our own — that’s a loose translation of Gospel wisdom ^[14], I know, but a fair one.
No, the parts of a politician’s character that matter to the voter are revealed in his relationship to the American people and the principles of American liberty and law. These are the areas in which Obama has shown himself to be a man unsuited to his office. Here are three examples.

1. He lies to us constantly about who he is. Not in the way most politicians lie, spinning and shading events with self-serving half-truths. He lies with the arrogant bravado of a con man messiah. My grandfather was tortured by the British ^[16]. My parents met because of the march in Selma ^[17]. My white girlfriend wanted to be black ^[18]. These aren’t lies that were forced out of him in a rough moment to defend himself from controversy — like the lie about terrorist William Ayers being just a guy in the neighborhood, or the one about never having heard the hate-mongering of Jeremiah Wright — these are intentionally crafted falsehoods. They were meant to do exactly what they did: to recreate Obama in the image of the black savior leftists had been waiting for, the man who would relieve them of the disfiguring guilt arising from their dreadful history of racism ^[19] and justify the disastrous havoc their policies have wreaked ^[20] on African-Americans.

2. He does not believe in the American way. When he is not lying, when he thinks he’s among friends, when he inadvertently announces his radicalism because it runs so deep he doesn’t even realize it is radicalism, when he thinks he can get away with it because it’s good politics, Obama reveals his philosophy to be antithetical to the exceptional American project of limited government, personal liberty and free enterprise. The Constitution needs to be falsely interpreted to allow wealth redistribution ^[21].  The free market doesn’t work ^[22]. His actions should not be hampered by Congress ^[23]. The Supreme Court has no right to overturn his laws as unconstitutional ^[24]. America is arrogant ^[25] overseas. He can decide unilaterally which laws will be enforced ^[26]. He can override the free practice of religion ^[27] if he thinks the issue is really, really important. Again and again, he reveals himself to be wholly a product of the anti-American, anti-liberal and anti-democratic left ^[28] at odds with the principles of our founding.

3. He has no clue how things actually work. Even if socialism did work, it would be wrong because it would strip people of the fruits of their labor and the property rights on which liberty depends. Thankfully, it doesn’t work, which makes the moral issue moot. But Obama has no clue of what’s been tried and found wanting. He surrounds himself with ideologues and tunes out anyone who’s ever made an honest dime in the real world. Thus every single idea the “progressive” president puts forward is a regressive throwback to notions that have been failing miserably for more than seventy years. The stuff he believes is just plain dopey. He thinks technology ^[29] is the cause of unemployment. He does not understand that only private jobs create the wealth that makes public jobs possible ^[30]. He thinks that wind and solar energy ^[31] should be subsidized and fossil fuel production ^[32] suppressed. He insists on bringing the European social model ^[33] to the U.S. even as the model implodes in front of our eyes.

So go ahead, tell me that Mitt Romney is rich and I should hate him for it. Tell me that he’s white and I should hate him for that. Tell me that his wife rides horses or that he said something nasty when he was fifteen or that — omigod! — he’s a Mormon. Whatever his foibles and flaws, it seems pretty clear that Romney has the character to be president. Barack Obama has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he does not.

Fair Share Eaquals PAY MORE

In Politics, Paying A 'Fair Share' Of Taxes Really Means More

By THOMAS SOWELL

Posted 06/25/2012 05:34 PM ET

 

Since this is an election year, we can expect to hear a lot of words — and the meaning of those words is not always clear. So it may be helpful to have a glossary of political terms.

One of the most versatile terms in the political vocabulary is "fairness." It has been used over a vast range of issues, from "fair trade" laws to the Fair Labor Standards Act. And recently we have heard that the rich don't pay their "fair share" of taxes.
Some of us may want to see a definition of what is "fair." But a concrete definition would destroy the versatility of the word, which is what makes it so useful politically.

If you said, for example, that 46.7% — or any other number — is the "fair share" of their income that the rich should have to pay in taxes, then once they paid that amount, there would be no basis for politicians to come back to them for more — and "more" is what "fair share" means in practice.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

"Racism" is another term we can expect to hear a lot this election year, especially if the public opinion polls are going against President Barack Obama.

Former big-time TV journalist Sam Donaldson and current fledgling CNN host Don Lemon have already proclaimed racism to be the reason for criticisms of Obama, and we can expect more and more talking heads to say the same thing as the election campaign goes on.

The word "racism" is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything — and demanding evidence makes you a "racist."
A more positive term that is likely to be heard a lot, during election years especially, is "compassion." But what does it mean concretely? More often than not, in practice it means a willingness to spend the taxpayers' money in ways that will increase the spender's chances of getting reelected.

If you are skeptical — or, worse yet, critical — of this practice, then you qualify for a different political label: "mean-spirited." A related political label is "greedy."
In the political language of today, people who want to keep what they have earned are said to be "greedy," while those who wish to take their earnings from them and give them to others (who will vote for them in return) show "compassion."

A political term that had me baffled for a long time was "the hungry." Since we all get hungry, it was not obvious to me how you single out some particular segment of the population to refer to as "the hungry."

Eventually, over the years, it finally dawned on me what the distinction was. People who make no provision to feed themselves, but expect others to provide food for them, are those whom politicians and the media refer to as "the hungry."

Those who meet this definition may have money for alcohol, drugs or even various electronic devices. And many of them are overweight. But, if they look to voluntary donations, or money taken from the taxpayers, to provide them with something to eat, then they are "the hungry."

I can remember a time, long ago, when I was hungry in the old-fashioned sense. I was a young fellow out of work, couldn't find work, fell behind in my room rent — and, when I finally found a job, I had to walk miles to get there, because I couldn't afford both subway fare and food.

But this was back in those "earlier and simpler times" we hear about. I was so naive that I thought it was up to me to go find a job, and to save some money when I did. Even though I knew that Joe DiMaggio was making $100,000 a year — a staggering sum in the money of that time — it never occurred to me that it was up to him to see that I got fed.

So, even though I was hungry, I never qualified for the political definition of "the hungry." Moreover, I never thereafter spent all the money I made, whether that was a little or a lot, because being hungry back then was a lot worse than being one of "the hungry" today.
As a result, I was never of any use to politicians looking for dependents who would vote for them. Nor have I ever had much use for such politicians.

The Blamer's 2012 Strategy

June 24, 2012

Obama’s ‘They’-Did-It Campaign

by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online

The next five months should be interesting — given that Barack Obama is now experiencing something entirely unique in his heretofore stellar career: widespread criticism of his performance and increasing weariness with his boilerplate and his teleprompted eloquence.

Starting with his Occidental days, and going on through Columbia, Harvard, Chicago, the US Senate, and the 2008 campaign, rarely has Mr. Obama faced much criticism, much less any accountability that would involve judging his rhetoric by actual achievement.

Yet what worked for so long now does no longer. Obama simply cannot run on 40 months of 8 percent-plus unemployment, a June 2009 recovery that sputtered, $5 trillion in new debt, serial $1 trillion-plus annual deficits, and dismal GDP growth. Few believe any more that what he and the Democratic Congress passed in the first two years of his administration worked — and fewer still that the Republicans are to blame in the last 17 months for stopping him from pursuing even more disastrous policies. He cannot turn instead to the advantages of Obamacare, a dynamic foreign policy, national-security sobriety, a scandal-free administration, or stellar presidential appointments. The furor over security leaks makes it harder to keep conjuring up the ghost of Osama bin Laden.

What then to expect if the race remains tight or Obama finds himself behind?

1. There will be lots more “the dog ate my homework” excuses for the dismal economy. The troubles in the EU, the Japanese tsunami, the East Coast earthquake, ATM machines, Wall Street, inclement weather, the Republican Congress, the Tea Party, and George W. Bush have pretty much been exhausted. But there is always hurricane season, a Greek exit from the euro, or a Middle East flare-up. Expect sometime before October to hear that a new “they” upset the brilliant recovery and is to blame for the chronic economic lethargy. One of the strangest aspects of Obama’s rationalizations is their utter incoherence and illogic: He brags that America pumped more oil and gas under his watch, even as he did his best to stop just that on public lands; he brags that he put in fewer regulations than did Bush, even as he boasts that he reined in business; he brags that he had to borrow $5 trillion to grow government in order to save the country, even as he claims he reduced the size of government. Why does Obama try to take credit for things on Tuesday that he damned on Monday? Is his new campaign theme: Despite (rather than because of) Obama?

2. Mitt Romney is a tough target. If Obama once loudly admitted to abuse of coke, Romney quietly confesses to avoidance even of Coca-Cola. His personal life is blameless. His family seems the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting. And Romney has more or less succeeded at most things he has attempted. No matter, he is Mormon. Expect legions of Obama surrogates to focus on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, especially its supposed endemic racism, sexism, and homophobia. Religious bigotry is not especially liberal, but the race/class/gender agenda trumps all such qualms, and in any case Obama and his team have never claimed to be especially tolerant or fair-minded in using any means necessary to achieve noble ends. Whereas the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Trinity Church were off the table in 2008, Mormonism will be very much on it by late summer.

3. We will read and hear about race 24/7. Racism is not an easy sell today, given that without tens of millions of white voters, Barack Obama would not have been elected. Nor is it easy to condemn America as racist when the white vote in 2008 was split far more evenly than were the 96 percent of African-American voters who preferred Barack Obama. Nonetheless, racial relations are at an all-time low. Almost weekly a member of the Congressional Black Caucus levels yet another bizarre charge of racism, and a Hollywood actor or singer blurts out something that would be deemed racially offensive were he not African-American; the polarization over the Trayvon Martin case threatens to overshadow the polarization over the O. J. Simpson trial; flash mobbing in the inner cities is as much daily fare on the uncensored Internet as it is absent from the network news; and both Barack Obama (the Skip Gates affair, the Trayvon Martin quip, the “punish our enemies” call, etc.) and Eric Holder (“cowards,” congressional oversight is racially motivated, “my people,” etc.) have made it a point to make race essential, not incidental, to their governance. If in 2008 liberals celebrated the election of Barack Obama as proof of a new postracial harmony, in 2012 a tight race will be cited as greater proof of a new ascendant racism. The idea that to elect Obama wins the nation racial exemption, and to defeat him earns condemnation, is illogical. No matter: By late fall, expect a desperate Obama administration to be dredging up the charge overtly, nonstop, and in person.

4. We should look for new furor against the “system” in direct proportion to the praise heaped on it in 2008 for being redeemed. The polls, if unfavorable, will be described as innately biased. The uncivil Rush Limbaugh, talk radio generally, Fox News, and tea-party bloggers, we will be lectured, are subversive, peddle hate, foment violence, and should be silenced. Whereas David Brooks, David Frum, Peggy Noonan, and Christopher Buckley were recommended reading in 2008, given their balanced and fair-minded critiques of George W. Bush and their appreciation of Barack Obama, in 2012 we will learn that they are right-wing attack dogs for losing their enthusiasm for the first-class mind and temperament of Barack Obama. Whereas a Pat Buchanan on MSNBC railing against Bush’s war and McCain’s neocon advisers was a reminder of how the libertarian Right has positive affinities with the liberal Left, in 2012 such a paleocon “racist” must be kept off the airwaves. Voter-registration laws and voter-ID requirements, remember, are designed to exclude the oppressed and must be relaxed. Advertising has warped American politics. Super PACs are Romney conspiracies. If big Wall Street money went for Obama in 2008 and thereby won investment banking and the stock market exemption from charges of greed and corruption, in 2012 investors may swing to Romney and thereby incite calls to rein in “big money” and furious op-eds about the toxic mix of politics and cash. If Romney outraises Obama, we will hear again the calls for public campaign financing, which were ignored when a cash-flush Obama renounced public financing in 2008. In 2008, academics, foundation people, the Hollywood crowd, journalists, and liberal politicians confessed that they had fallen in love again with an America that had proved it was not hopeless after all; in 2012, America may prove unsalvageable, with thousands vowing to move to Canada.

5. Suddenly around October the world will become absolutely unsafe. In these dangerous times, Americans must forget their differences, come together, and embrace a bipartisan unity — given that it may be necessary, after all, to hit the Iranian nuclear facilities, since we’ll have learned that the bomb may be a reality by, say, mid-November. Just as we have been reminded that Barack Obama has saved us by his brave decisions to use double agents in Yemen, computer viruses in Iran, Seal Team Six in Pakistan, and philosophically guided Predator assassination hits, so too a strike against Iran may suddenly be of vital national-security interest, though keenly lamented by a Nobel laureate nose-deep in Thomas Aquinas. Cancellation of the Keystone Pipeline delighted greens; the war on the war on women pleased feminists; gays are now on board after Barack Obama decided he really did favor gay marriage; Latinos got nearly a million illegal aliens exempted from immigration law. And yet all those partisan gifts have not yet resulted in a 50 percent approval rating or a lead over Mitt Romney. Something more dramatic is needed, given that there are only so many Obama heroics that can be cobbled together and leaked from classified sources.

We do not know who is going to win the 2012 election, only that it will be closer than the 2008 one — and if Obama keeps it up at his present rate he may destroy the Democratic party for a generation. There is no longer an incumbent George Bush to blame. Romney is a feistier candidate than was John McCain. Fundraising is no longer lopsided. The novelty of the first African-American president has become passé. And “hope and change” has been replaced by a concrete record of three and a half years. Given those realities, if his being an unknown quantity was a reason to vote for Barack Obama in 2008, his being all too familiar will be cause for rejecting him in 2012.

©2012 Victor Davis Hanson

LOFTB Price to Book Evaluaation

Price to Book Method of Estimating A Stock’s Fair Market Value

March 27, 2012 By Bill Bullington

 

 

Price to Book Video (YouTube} 

 

 

 

This technique is just one more way to quickly evaluate a stock to determine how over- or underpriced it may be. In my first book, I used an earnings-based approach in which we took a look at the sales and profit margins to estimate earnings. It’s a good approach and I use it most of the time. However, no single approach will make you fully aware of all the stocks that could be bargains. So think of this as just another weapon in your arsenal to help you to become a better investor.

Like the first method, it’s pretty quick once you get the hang of it, and it’s extremely effective. Like the first book, this material isn’t written for financial professionals—it’s written specifically for non-financial people. My goal is to take some very complex material and translate it into simple ideas that you can use to become a better investor. I’m sure some CPAs and PhDs in finance will be upset with my translation of their arcane accounting methods, but that’s their problem. There is no way to calculate the exact fair market value of a company using mathematical equations, no matter how sophisticated the model. If there were, we’d all be working for the first PhDs who came up with those models.

In reality, there are just too many factors that can and will change, preventing us from calculating an exact estimate of a stock’s fair market value. Still, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. The real goal is to enable ourselves to quickly determine whether a stock is overpriced, and therefore extremely risky, or if it may be undervalued – and thus a potentially profitable investment.

Once you’ve filled out a large number of the worksheets (find them here: Excel Worksheet and PDF), you will very likely have developed the ability to perform the calculations in a minute or two. How cool is that?
Incidentally, knowing how to perform the analysis in this report will help you evaluate mutual funds or exchange traded funds. By comparing stocks in funds you are interested in with your estimates of fair market value, you may be able to evaluate how aggressive the portfolio managers are being with their investors’ money. Let’s say you like a particular fund. You do the analysis on the top ten holdings. Lo and behold, each and every one of those stocks is selling for more than twice the estimated fair market value (this was the case with lots of high-flying funds in the late 90s). Now you know to look for a different fund! If on the other hand you find that the stocks are reasonably close to your estimates of fair market value and the fund has an acceptable track record, you may have found a great fit for your investment portfolio.

By the way, you can pull up most mutual funds’ holdings on their company’s website. Thank the investment gods that Al Gore created the Internet. Just so you know, if everyone had been doing this in the late 90s, the Internet bubble wouldn’t have popped—because it wouldn’t have blown up to begin with. Investors would have seen how grossly overpriced the stocks in the most popular funds were and would have started selling sooner. But greed is a strange phenomenon.

At any rate, to utilize this approach, you only have to know a couple of definitions and a simple formula you’ll use to calculate the estimated fair market value of any stock. Here are the definitions:

LOFTB’s Book Value (per share) – The theoretical value investors would receive if a company was liquidated. You’ll need to look up a company’s financial statements to perform this calculation. I like to use the website money.msn.com for this information (MSN pulls the information from financial statements filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission – it’s hard to get better data than that!).

To calculate LOFTB’s Book Value per share, simply divide the entry labeled Total Equity on the company’s balance sheet by the Diluted Weighted Average Shares, which is found on the income statement.

In fact, let’s use Microsoft as an example. For the most recent quarter ending 12/31/2011, Microsoft’s balance sheet showed a Total Equity of 64 billion dollars. If we divide the 64 billion dollars in equity by the Diluted Weighted Average Shares of 8.465 billion, we arrive at an LOFTB Book Value of $7.56 per share (64/8.465).

Accordingly, if Microsoft were to be liquidated, each shareholder would get an equal share of the equity in the company and would receive about $7.65 per share. This is where the CPAs and finance professors start to get upset with me. They know that if Microsoft, or any other company for that matter, were to get into such deep financial difficulty that it had to be liquidated, shareholders may or may not receive full Book Value as payment. In some cases, they may actually get more than book value because of some hidden assets that wouldn’t necessarily show up on normalized balance sheets. And you know what? They’re right!

On many occasions, companies that have been liquidated have provided values that were significantly different than the values that were reported on their financial statements. Still, the accounting boards require that companies provide a reasonably conservative estimate of what the assets are actually worth for reporting purposes, so we are going to stick with this strategy for now. Our goal is not to be perfectly exact — it’s to be relatively close. Remember, anyone who thinks they’re perfect has obviously never been in a serious long-term relationship. You are presumably going to have a serious relationship with your portfolio.

So, if Microsoft were liquidated, would you be happy to get its Book Value as payment? Probably not, since its current share price is a little over $30. In reality, Microsoft is probably not going to sell for its Book Value unless it encounters big financial problems. Your guess is as good as mine as far as when that might happen.

Anyway, since we probably won’t be buying Microsoft for the price of its Book Value—unless it gets into big trouble financially—we need to estimate just how much we should be paying. To do that, we need to learn our next definition- LOFTB’s Return on Equity.

LOFTB’s Return on Equity – For our purposes, I’m going to define Return on Equity as the amount of profit the company makes in a given year, expressed as a percentage of Book Value. Again, I’m simplifying to make a point, so just keep your panties on straight, all you CPAs and financial people reading this! I’ll address the technical difficulties of this approach a little later in the report.
For now, let’s go back to our example of Microsoft. Microsoft reported $2.76 per share in profits over the last four quarters. If I divide $2.76 of profit into $7.56 of Book Value, I get a Return on Equity of 37%. In other words, $2.76 of profit is being produced by $7.56 of Book Value, and that works out to be slightly more than 37%. I have a tendency to repeat things when I want you to pay extra attention to them, if you haven’t noticed. It means I think it’s important! (Then again, it could be a result of all the concussions I had playing football in college, but that’s another story).

If you’ve ever wondered why people invest in companies, now you know. In theory, every dollar invested in Microsoft is currently earning more than 37% per year, which is a lot more than the return on a ten-year treasury or a Certificate of Deposit at the bank.
Additionally, the high Return on Equity is why Microsoft probably won’t sell for its Book Value any time soon. In fact, the relationship between the Book Value and fair market value can be calculated by using the following example.  Pay attention because this is what you were looking for:

How to Estimate the Fair Market Value of a Stock!

I’m going to use the average rate of return on a ten-year Treasury note in my formula for estimating the fair market value of a stock, which is somewhere between 5-6%. I like to use 5%* and I’ll explain why later, but for now, let’s move forward with the example.
*ten year treasuries are currently paying 2%. I like to use the longer term average of 5% because it’s a more conservative approach.
Microsoft’s Return on Equity is 37%, and 37% is 7.4 times greater than 5%. Consequently, Microsoft earns 7.4 times more money than a 10-year Treasury note would normally pay in interest for every dollar of Book Value it has.

To put it another way: If you thought that Microsoft could maintain its 37% Return on Equity, you might be willing to pay 7.4 times Book Value for shares in the company.

If I multiply Microsoft’s Book Value of $7.56 by 7.4, I come up with a fair market estimate of $55.94. In other words, if I bought all of the shares of Microsoft for $55.94 and got to keep the profits of $2.76 per share, I’d be earning the equivalent of the ten-year Treasury note’s long term average of 5%.

If I paid any more than $55.94, I would be earning less than 5%. I probably don’t want to do that. Why? Because if I purchased a company and got to keep the profits, I’d want to make sure I could earn at least as much as someone who invested in treasuries.

On the other hand, if I bought every share of Microsoft and paid less than $55.94 per share, I’d be earning more than the long-term rate of return on ten-year treasuries. In fact, Microsoft currently sells for roughly $30 per share. If I owned all of the shares at that price and got to keep the earnings per share to myself, I’d have earned a rate of return over 9% in the last twelve months ($2.76 is 9.2% of $30)!

Since Microsoft is currently selling for $30 per share, it may be undervalued, incidentally.
You may be asking yourself why Microsoft is selling for so much less than its estimated fair market value. You’re probably even a little suspicious that this formula doesn’t work at all—and that’s normal. After all, why would something so obviously mispriced stay that way, if everyone knew about it?

The answer is relatively simple. The reason Microsoft isn’t selling for a higher price has a lot to do with the confidence of the investment community. When you know that Microsoft should be selling for $55 per share and it’s selling for $30, then it’s obvious that investors are nervous about its future prospects. Maintaining a 37% Return on Equity is not easy to do, and the investment community’s confidence level in Microsoft’s ability to do so in the future is clearly being questioned. The perception may change, however, and this is where the opportunity may occur. If Microsoft does maintain its high rates of return and the confidence of the investment community is restored, it may go all the way to $55 or higher. I can remember a time when Microsoft sold for more than 16 times its Book Value!

So that’s the challenge: do you think Microsoft will continue to grow and be as profitable as it has in the past? If so, Microsoft may be significantly undervalued. On the other hand, if Microsoft gets in trouble—say, it gets busted for spying on people using its operating system and an honest politician (one can always dream) finds out about it—it might be in trouble. As I like to say, in the realm of all possibilities, all things are possible. (I’m sure Microsoft isn’t tracking all of your activity, by the way – at least I hope not).
So let’s summarize what we’ve covered.

• To come up with an estimate of fair market value of a company using the LOFTB Price to Book Value approach, you first need to calculate LOTFB’s Book Value and LOFTB’s Return on Equity.
• Next, divide the LOFTB Return on Equity by 5 to find LOFTB’s Fair Price to Book Ratio.
• Finally, multiply LOFTB’s Book Value by LOFTB’s Fair Price to Book Ratio to arrive at the estimated fair market value of the company’s stock.

I told you this was simple.
I’m kidding again. I know it’s not simple for beginners. Don’t fret; it took me a while to understand this concept as well. It’s the reason I’m including videos and the worksheets. Practice makes perfect!

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