BMB YAB MIDEAST is YOUR's

You Broke Mideast, Mr. President, Now You Own It

 Posted 09/21/2012 06:53 PM ET

 

With the Middle East now more hostile to U.S. interests than ever, the "Arab Spring" has become a major political liability for the president. Try as he may, he can't distance himself from it.
Betraying his frustration with Cairo's Muslim Brotherhood, which egged on U.S. embassy rioters, President Obama said, "I don't think we would consider them an ally, but we don't consider them an enemy."
But in a May 2011 speech at the State Department, Obama essentially took credit for Islamists' rise to power as part of his broader Mideast strategy to help free them from the "repression" of despots, while ending their "suspicion" and "mistrust" of America from the war on terror.
"That's why, two years ago in Cairo," the president expounded, "I began our engagement based upon mutual interests and mutual respect."
The main beneficiary of his "engagement" was the radical Muslim Brotherhood, which has called for jihad against America and the destruction of Israel. The main loser was steady U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak.
The following timeline reveals how Obama sided, tragically, with the enemy from day one:
2009: Obama travels to Cairo to deliver apologetic speech to Muslims, and infuriates the Mubarak regime by inviting banned Brotherhood leaders to attend. Obama deliberately snubs Mubarak, who was neither present nor mentioned.
He also snubs Israel during the Mideast trip (and still hasn't stepped foot inside the borders of America's closest Mideast ally).

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2009: In the speech, Obama blames Mideast hostility toward Israel and the West on "colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims." He also vows to withdraw U.S. troops from Muslim lands and push for creation of a Palestinian state, proclaiming:

"The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. ... It is time for the settlements to stop." Music to the ears of the anti-Semitic Brothers, who applaud wildly.

2009: Obama appoints a Brotherhood-tied Islamist — Rashad Hussain — as U.S. envoy to the Saudi-based Organization of the Islamic Cooperation, which works closely with the Brotherhood.

2010: Hussain immediately travels to Egypt to meet with the Brotherhood's grand mufti, and is followed by Obama, who makes another trip to Egypt.

2010: Secretary of State Clinton lifts visa ban on Egyptian-born grandson of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. Tariq Ramadan, a suspected terrorist on the U.S. watchlist, is warmly received in Washington.
(Clinton's closest adviser, Huma Mahmood Abedin, happens to have extensive Brotherhood ties in the region.)

2011: The White House fails to back Mubarak in a coup organized by the Brotherhood.

2011: The White House sends intelligence czar James Clapper to Capitol Hill to whitewash the Brotherhood's extremism. Clapper testifies the group is a moderate, "largely secular" organization.

2011: Clinton sends her special coordinator for Middle East transitions, William Taylor, to Cairo to give Brotherhood leaders special training to prepare for the post-Mubarak elections.

2011: In a shocking first, the State Department formalizes ties with Egypt's once-outlawed, terror-tied Brotherhood, letting diplomats deal directly with Brotherhood party officials in Cairo.

April 2012: The administration quietly releases $1.5 billion in military aid to the new Egyptian regime and vows to secure additional billions from the IMF and World Bank. It also taps the Overseas Private Investment Corp., a U.S. agency, to underwrite $2 billion in private investment in Egypt and other Arab Spring states. More, it forgives up to $1 billion in Egyptian debt.

June 2012: Clinton grants visa to banned Egyptian terrorist who joins a delegation of Brotherhood officials from Egypt to meet with Obama's deputy national security adviser to demand the release of the Egyptian Blind Sheik terrorist imprisoned for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

July 2012: Pledging "a new partnership," Obama invites Egyptian President and Brotherhood hardliner Mohammed Morsi to visit the

White House in September. Morsi is expected to demand Obama free the Blind Sheik, who happens to be a key Brotherhood leader, as well as the hero to the lead 9/11 hijacker and the current al-Qaida kingpin, both Egyptians themselves.

Shockingly, the administration has issued nondenial denials when asked if it has negotiated the release of a convicted terrorist rivaling Osama bin Laden in importance and reverence among al-Qaida followers.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King, R-N.Y., is investigating what could be the biggest scandal of Obama's presidency. He says federal agents recently approached his staff to complain that Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are actually considering Morsi's request to free the Blind Sheik, as Omar Abdel Rahman is known, from a maximum security federal prison in North Carolina.

King says he has no doubt a deal is in the works. Former assistant U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy, who actually prosecuted the sheik nearly two decades ago in New York City, believes Obama has secretly signed off on the deal to appease the Brotherhood, and is waiting until after the election to announce it.

"I think the plan has been to agree to the Blind Sheik's release, but not to announce it or have it become public until after the election," said McCarthy, author of the new book, "Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy." "That is consistent with Obama's pattern of trying to mollify Islamists."

The Brotherhood's sudden rise to power in Egypt and Tunisia — and soon, in a possible domino effect, Yemen and even Syria and Jordan — didn't happen organically. It was orchestrated by a U.S. president sympathetic to its interests over those of Israel and his own country.

American Capitalism GONE (Pravda)

The irony of this article appearing in the English edition of Pravda (Russian on-line newspaper) defies description.  Why can a Russian newspaper print the following yet the American media can't/won't see it?

  
 American Capitalism Gone With A Whimper 
 
It must be said, that like the breaking of a great dam, the American  descent into Marxism is happening with breathtaking speed, against the backdrop of a passive, hapless sheeple, excuse me dear reader, I meant people. 
  
True, the situation has been well prepared on and off for the past century, especially the past twenty years. The initial testing grounds was conducted upon our Holy Russia and a bloody test it was. But we Russians would not just roll over and give up our freedoms and our souls, no matter how much money Wall Street poured into the fists of the Marxists.
   
Those lessons were taken and used to properly prepare the American populace for the surrender of their freedoms and souls, to the whims of their elites and betters.
  
First, the population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics. Americans know more about their favorite TV dramas than the drama in DC that directly affects their lives. They care more for their "right" to choke down a McDonalds burger or a Burger King burger than for their constitutional rights. Then they turn around and lecture us about our rights and about our "democracy".  Pride blind the foolish. 
  
Then their faith in God was destroyed, until their churches, all tens of thousands of different "branches and denominations" were for the most part little more then Sunday circuses and their televangelists and top protestant mega preachers were more then happy to sell out their souls and flocks to be on the "winning" side of one pseudo Marxist politician or another. Their flocks may complain, but when explained that they would be on the "winning" side, their flocks were ever so quick to reject Christ in hopes for earthly power.  Even our Holy Orthodox churches are scandalously liberalized in America.
  
The final collapse has come with the election of Barack Obama.  His speed in the past three months has been truly impressive.  His spending and money printing has been a record setting, not just in America's short history but in the world.  If this  keeps up for more then another year, and there is no sign that it will not,  America at best will resemble the Weimar Republic and at worst Zimbabwe. 
  
These past two weeks have been the most breath taking of all.  First came the announcement of a planned redesign of the American Byzantine tax system, by the very thieves who used it to bankroll their thefts, losses, and swindles of hundreds of billions of dollars.  These make our Russian oligarchs look little more then ordinary street thugs, in comparison.  Yes, the Americans have beat our own thieves in the shear volumes.  Should we congratulate them?
  


(This article "snoped" TRUE


These men, of  course, are not an elected panel but made up of appointees picked from the  very financial oligarchs and their henchmen who are now gorging themselves on  trillions of American dollars, in one bailout after another.  They are also usurping the rights, duties, and powers of the American congress (parliament).  Again, congress has put up little more than a whimper to their masters.
  
Then came Barack Obama's command that GM's (General Motors) president step down from leadership of his company.   That is correct, dear reader, in the land of "pure" free markets, the American president now has the power, the self-given power, to fire CEOs and we can assume other employees of private companies, at will.  Come hither, go dither, the centurion commands his minions.
  
So it should be no surprise that the American president has followed this up with a "bold" move of declaring that he and another group of unelected, chosen stooges will now redesign the entire automotive industry and will even be the guarantee of automobile policies.  I am sure that if given the chance, they would happily try and redesign it for the whole of the world, too. Prime Minister Putin, less then two months ago, warned Obama and UK's Blair, not to follow the path to Marxism, it only leads to disaster.  Apparently, even though we suffered 70 years of this Western sponsored horror show, we know nothing, as foolish, drunken Russians, and so let our "wise" Anglo-Saxon fools find out the folly of their own pride.
  
Again, the American public has taken this with barely a whimper...but a "free man" whimper.
  
So, should it be any surprise to discover that the Democratically controlled Congress of America is working on passing a new regulation that would give the American Treasury department the power to set "fair" maximum salaries, evaluate performance, and control how private companies give out pay raises and bonuses?  Senator Barney Frank, a social pervert basking in his  homosexuality (of course, amongst the modern, enlightened American societal  norm, as well as that of the general West, homosexuality is not only not a  looked down upon life choice, but is often praised as a virtue) and his  Marxist enlightenment, has led this effort.  He stresses that this only affects companies that receive government monies, but it is retroactive and taken to a logical extreme, this would include any company or industry that has ever received a tax break or incentive.
  
The Russian owners of American companies and industries should look thoughtfully at this and the option of closing their facilities down and fleeing the land of the Red as fast as possible. In other words, divest while there is still value left. 

The proud American will go down into his slavery without a fight, beating his chest, and proclaiming to the world, how free he really is.  The world will only snicker.
  
 Stanislav Mishin© 1999-2009... PRAVDA.Ru . When reproducing our materials in whole or in part, hyperlink to PRAVDA.Ru  should be made. The opinions and views of the authors do not always coincide with the point

AARP Love Affair with Obamacare

Strassel: The Love Song of AARP and Obama

Newly released emails reveal the 'nonpartisan' group's stealthy White House alliance on health care.

• By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

When Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan address the AARP on Friday, good manners will no doubt keep them from asking this question: How can that lobby claim to speak for American seniors given its partisan role in passing ObamaCare?
Thanks to just-released emails from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, we now know that AARP worked through 2009-10 as an extension of a Democratic White House, toiling daily to pass a health bill that slashes $716 billion from Medicare, strips seniors of choice, and sets the stage for rationing. We know that despite AARP's awareness that its seniors overwhelmingly opposed the bill, the "nonpartisan membership organization" chose to serve the president's agenda.
The 71 pages of emails show an AARP management taking orders from the White House, scripting the president's talking points, working to keep its board "in line," and pledging fealty to "the cause." Seniors deserve to know all this, as AARP seeks to present itself as neutral in this presidential election.

 

The emails overall show an AARP leadership—Policy Chief John Rother, Health Policy Director Nora Super, Executive Vice President
Nancy LeaMond, Senior Vice President David Sloane—that from the start worked to pass ObamaCare, before crucial details pertaining to seniors had been addressed. This crew was in constant contact with Mr. Obama's top aides, in particular Nancy-Ann DeParle and Jim Messina.

As early as July 2009, Mr. Sloane was sending the administration—"as promised"—his "message points" on Medicare. Ms. DeParle assured him "I think you will hear some of your lines tomorrow" in President Obama's speech—which he did. Mr. Rother advised the

White House on its outreach, discouraging Mr. Obama from addressing seniors since "he may not be the most effective messinger [sic] . . . at least to the McCain constituency." Better to manage these folks, he counsels, through the "authoritative voices of doctors and nurses."

AARP had long lambasted cuts in fees to Medicare doctors because reduced payments would mean fewer doctors who accept patients with the insurance. Yet in its campaign for ObamaCare, it argued the money the health law strips from Medicare—by imposing price controls on hospitals—would improve "care." When the organization tried to sell the line to its own people, it didn't go well. Ms. Super told Obama officials in June 2009: "It was actually a heavy lift for us to convince many at AARP that Medicare 'savings' (which they read as cuts) is not bad for beneficiaries." Note the "savings" quote marks.

Even in November 2009, as the ObamaCare debate progressed, Ms. LeaMond worried that the Medicare spin wasn't working against public criticism of the bill. She emailed Mr. Messina and Ms. DeParle that she was "seized" with "concerns about extended coherent, strong messaging by Republicans on the Medicare savings." To pull off the legislation, she mused, "we"—the White House and

AARP—will need a "concerted strategy."

Lobbying for Seniors, or for Obama?

The emails AARP didn't want its members to read.

In August 2009, AARP had already unveiled a national advertising blitz for ObamaCare, to ensure that "every member of Congress knows the 50-plus community wants action to fix what's wrong with healthcare." The group made this claim despite weeks of daily tracking showing its members in revolt against the president's plan.

July 23, 2009: AARP reported to the White House that 1,031 members called in against the proposed health-care changes; 77 called in support. July 28, 2009: 4,174 opposed; 36 in support. July 29, 2009: 2,656 opposed; 23 in support. Mr. Sloane told the White House that AARP lost 1,897 members in a single day "in disagreement over our position on health reform." All the reports to Team Obama were accompanied by AARP's request to keep the information "close," apparently so word didn't leak that seniors hate ObamaCare.

And the ad blitz went on.

Was AARP sending these tracking reports to its outside board of directors—its governing body? Maybe not: AARP staff seemed to view the board as a problem. In June 2009, Ms. Super emailed Obama budget guy Keith Fontenot: The AARP board is meeting, she said, and we "need to get their buy-in on several proposals," including the president's Medicare cuts, which "as you might imagine, they are a bit concerned about." Could he share ideas with her? "It would really help get them on Board."

When Mr. Rother was asked in December 2009 by the White House to attend an event with Mr. Obama, he declined. "I am presenting to my Board on health reform" on the same day, he wrote. "I think you want me to keep my Board in line, so please understand my need to regret."

AARP was, however, on 24-hour alert to do the White House's political bidding. Typical is a March 2010 email exchange about Rep. Larry Kissell, a North Carolina Democrat who remained a "no" vote as ObamaCare neared its endgame. Labor boss Andy Stern emailed Mr. Messina—"Kissel [sic] a Problem"—and advised bringing in the AARP guns. Mr. Messina forwarded the note to Ms. LeaMond, with the word "Help." "On it," she quickly responded. Soon after: Does Mr. Messina want AARP to have its board chairman arrange a meeting, or just call the congressman "right away?" "Both?" Mr. Messina asked. "Will do," she assured him. Rep. Kissell voted no.

In an interview, AARP spokesman Jim Dau and Legislative Policy Director David Certner noted that the lobby was committed to health-care reform long before Mr. Obama's election, that it pushed for policy additions to the bill that were crucial for seniors, and that it did not endorse legislation until AARP's priorities were met. They said that the board was kept informed and that AARP faced similar criticism when it worked with the GOP on a drug benefit in 2003.

"We get criticized, but we never take our eye off the ball when it comes to pursuing things that are good for our members," says Mr. Dau. "We make no apologies for our advocacy."

AARP's ardent efforts on behalf of ObamaCare bear a resemblance to the work of the drug and health industry in 2009—with one significant difference. Those industries' backroom dealing was motivated by financial self-interest. What motivated AARP, given that its membership of 37 million people 50 years old and older was clearly opposed to ObamaCare, since they recognized that it would hurt them? The answer appears to be: pure ideology.

In October 2009, Ms. Super expressed frustration that the Senate might strip more spending from the bill. She declared to colleagues:

"I'm heading up to the House now where at least Democrats are Democrats (sort of)." Ms. Super is now working for Mr. Obama's Health and Human Services Department.

In November 2009, Mr. Rother declined a White House request to have an AARP person take part in a roundtable. "I think we will try to keep a little space between us and the White House," he explained, adding that AARP's "polling" shows the organization is more "influential when we are seen as independent." He wanted "to reinforce that positioning," said the man working daily to pass ObamaCare, since "the larger issue is how to best serve the cause." Mr. Rother has left AARP and now leads the liberal National Coalition on Health Care.

When the health-care reform bill passed the House in March 2010, Ms. LeaMond exuberantly emailed Mr. Messina: "This is the new AARP-WH/Hill—LeaMond/Messina relationship. . . . Seriously, a great victory for you and the President."

But not one for America's seniors, who had looked to AARP to oppose ObamaCare's cuts and rationing. That's worth remembering come the next AARP bulletin to seniors offering its "balanced" view on issues.
Write to kim@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared September 21, 2012, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: 

The Love Song of AARP and Obama.

VOLT Makes You Vomit

Are the Chevy Volt’s sales being inflated by “giveaway” leases?

posted at 10:41 am on September 21, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

The Chevy Volt, which the Obama administration has hailed as the vanguard of its green-energy subsidy efforts, has had a bad month in the news.  While GM announced a sales record for the plug-in hybrid for August, Reuters pointed out that the company was losing around $49,000 per vehicle in those sales, pouring red ink into an automaker that can’t deal with the money it already owes taxpayers.  Fox News then reported that the sales record came in part because the Department of Defense began ramping up purchases of the Volt, making it look like another bailout was in process.
Earlier this week, Forbes discovered how GM was able to claim a record in the first place.  The company has been practically giving away Volts in its lease program:

GM is giving away rent-a-Volts. While the claim of 2800+ sales in August is certainly enough to still the Volt’s critics, at least until Election Day (which is all that really matters to the current management), that number is an automotive Potemkin Village, concealing enough rot to make any czar, car or otherwise, proud.
With additional subsidies from GM (that would be you and me), Chevrolet dealers in August were offering two-year Volt leases for as little as $250 down and $199/month.  Fully 2/3s of the “sales” were leases, leaving around 925 cars that were truly sold.  Prior to the giveaway leases, GM says that 40% of 2012 sales were also leases.  The number remains the same—an average of about 925 cars really sold each month for this year.
Automotive News recently reported that the feds have purchased 182 Volts so far in 2012.  Now we’re down to 900 real sales per month..  Corporate (fleet) sales are conservatively estimated at 5% of the total, putting the consumer number closer to 850.

Two years at $199 a month and $250 down amounts to $5,026.  What happens at the end of two years?  Either the lessee buys the vehicle, or the dealer takes it back to sell as a used car.  The car becomes a write-off for GM, while the dealer pockets most of the proceeds, according to Forbes. The big loser? Taxpayers, who both own GM stock and pay the bill for all the subsidies, as well as the write-off losses in deductions from taxable corporate income.
The truth is that there isn’t much of a market for the Volt, and there probably wouldn’t be any without the massive subsidies provided by taxpayers.  It’s not difficult to determine why.

• Sustained value — There isn’t any in the Volt. For the sticker price — even with the subsidies — it’s underpowered and undersized compared to the rest of the market.  Thanks to a massive battery replacement cost at somewhere around the 8-year mark, there won’t be any trade-in or resale value for the car, either, which is why lessees are highly unlikely to buy the car from GM at the end of the two-year lease.  Without that battery replacement, the Volt becomes an underpowered, undersized, and overly expensive internal-combustion vehicle.
• Energy — Much is made of the cleanliness of the plug-in chargeability, especially in ads for the Volt and the Nissan Leaf.  But about half the energy to recharge the battery comes from coal, which is the main contributor to American electrical production.  The internal-combustion engines in most cars are more efficient at using gasoline, with the ability to control emissions better, too.  Thanks to a raft of new EPA regulations on coal, electricity production will be declining since other technologies aren’t ready to take its place in terms of mass-production capability, which means that the lengthy recharge will end up costing consumers more than a trip to the gas station — and that gets more pronounced the more vehicles we move away from gasoline and onto an already-limited electrical grid.
• Environment — Apart from the concerns above, the manufacture of these batteries — and especially their disposal — will create massive environmental problems.  Rare-earth elements necessary to their production are rare indeed in the US, which means we will have to increase our dependence on Asia for those commodities.  The manufacture of battery arrays is notoriously bad for the environment, and we’re now talking about multiplying the need per car.  Disposal is even worse; it will make the environment more toxic rather than less, and the long-term prospects for manufacturing aren’t good unless we find greater reserves of these elements.

The concept of the electric vehicle has been around a long time, but has never been suitable for mass production, except as golf carts with limited use.  We shouldn’t close our eyes to the possibilities of these kinds of vehicles, but neither should we subsidize inefficiency and counter-productive technologies in the vain hope that we can make up massive losses by selling in large volume, which is the kind of thinking that put GM in need of a bailout in the first place.  We should be looking at other fuel options, such as hydrogen or natural gas (a vehicle technology that’s also been around for decades) rather than continue to throw money away on a failure.

O's Roanoke Doctrine

Obama's Roanoke Doctrine: Profit Must Be Rewarded With Confiscation

By CHARLES R. KESLER
Posted 09/17/2012 07:04 PM ET

In a so far lackluster campaign, Republicans have landed few punches except against President Obama's memorable slur last July that "you didn't build that."

"Those ads taking my words about small business out of context — they're flat-out wrong," Obama complained in a reaction ad.

Actually, he hadn't mentioned "small" business in that part of his speech in Roanoke, Va.; he was speaking of millionaires. In the preceding paragraph, he had compared his policies to Bill Clinton's, who'd asked "the wealthy to pay a little bit more" in taxes. This wasn't a request, however; it was an order.

At any rate, the results were splendid, according to Mr. Obama.

"We created 23 million new jobs, turned a deficit into a surplus, and rich people did just fine. We created a lot of millionaires."

Who is this "We" who created so many jobs and millionaires? It's the same We who hovers over the notorious sentences that Mr. Obama complains were ripped out of context. If "you've been successful, you didn't get there on your own," he said. And eight sentences later, "If you've got a business — you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

His defenders claim he was talking about "roads and bridges," mentioned in the preceding sentence. Fair enough, though in that case he should have said "you didn't build those." Perhaps his grammar slipped; but the meaning is clear enough.

Who is the "somebody else" who builds the roads and bridges, employs the "great teacher" you had, and invents the Internet? It's We, the government, and if you think your own intelligence or hard work played a decisive role in your success — well, you need more public schooling.

Paul Ryan is precisely correct, then, to criticize Obama for advocating "a government-centered society."

Few would disagree that government's job is to supply genuine public goods like roads, bridges and national security. But the president regards individual economic success as itself a kind of public good, and not primarily a matter of talent, insight, pluck and the vicissitudes of the marketplace.

How strange that the great advocate of "Yes, We Can" says to entrepreneurs, in effect, "No, You Didn't."

It's less strange when you consider his assertions in a still larger context, one that for political reasons he would rather ignore: American liberalism's long-standing criticism of individualism itself.

Writing at the dawn of modern liberalism, Woodrow Wilson argued that government didn't originate in a social contract between free and equal individuals, as the Declaration of Independence presumed, but instead grew out of primitive patriarchal and tribal relationships.

"Government came, so to say, before the individual." In the beginning, "the individual counted for nothing; society ... counted for everything." Any rights that individuals possessed came not from nature or God but from their membership in a group. There were no "individuals" by nature, hence no individual or natural rights.

When in advanced societies individual rights eventually emerged, they remained a by-product of group development. John Dewey put it bluntly:

"The laws and institutions are not means for obtaining something for individuals, even happiness. They are means of creating individuals. ... Individuality in a social and moral sense is something to be wrought out."

In other words, individuals do not create and ordain government; government creates and ordains individuals. "You didn't build that" because We built you! Each person, in liberalism's view, is a kind of ongoing government project.

In his influential form of this argument, John Rawls, whose book "A Theory of Justice" was all the rage at Harvard Law School when

Mr. Obama was a student, held that justice required imagining yourself in an "original position" behind "a veil of ignorance" occluding all knowledge of your talents, intelligence and interests.

The point was to encourage everyone to think of his abilities, virtues and possible economic success as disconnected from justice and somehow randomly distributed.

"There are a lot of smart people out there," after all, and "a whole bunch of hardworking people out there," too, to quote the president. He didn't want any American to take pride in individual merit because, as Rawls taught, no one really has a right to one's own talents or to other "advantages" like smarts or a work ethic.

Accordingly, you don't deserve to profit from these without giving something back, not out of charity or gratitude but, in effect, out of guilt over the arbitrary inequality of it all. Fairness requires, therefore, redistributing some of the proceeds of your luck to the "least advantaged," who are morally worthy even if some of them spend their days, as Rawls noted, idly counting blades of grass.

So you didn't build that because you, a free man or woman, either do not exist outside the fostering state or have no right to your own talents and accomplishments without begging the state's pardon. No wonder so many Americans rightly sensed the radicalism in

President Obama's Roanoke Doctrine. In context, it is even more apparent.

• Kesler teaches government at Claremont McKenna College. His new book, "I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism," was just published by HarperCollins (Broadside Books).

Republicans Need to Talk CLEARLY

Inarticulate Republicans Let Democrats Get Away With Lies

By THOMAS SOWELL
Posted 09/17/2012 07:04 PM ET

The first time I saw Chris Christie on television, shortly after he became governor of New Jersey, my immediate reaction was, "My Gosh! A Talking Republican!" It was almost like seeing a talking giraffe or a talking salamander.
Technically speaking, Republicans do talk, but talking is definitely not their strong suit. Nor do they seem to have put a lot of thought into what they say or how they say it. The net result is that articulate Democrats can get away with the biggest lies, without any serious rebuttal from most Republicans.
I have not heard any Republican official or candidate even try to answer a standard claim of the Democrats, that "deregulation" is the reason the housing market went haywire and brought down the economy.
Therefore, according to the Democrats, Republicans who want to restore a free market are just trying to "go back to the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place."
That sounds very persuasive, if you don't know the facts — and it sounds like pure hogwash if you do.
But facts don't speak for themselves. And if we wait for the Republicans to speak, the whole country can be in big trouble.
The "deregulation" gambit is not new. It was tried out years ago, in California, when some of the most heavy-handed regulation of the electrical utility companies forced them to charge less for electricity than they had to pay to buy it.
After this led to their financial collapse, and then to power failures and blackouts that outraged the public, the Democrats' response was that this was all due to — you guessed it — "deregulation."
It is the same story today on the national level. Federal agencies with powers of economic life and death over banks and other lenders forced these lenders to lower their lending standards.
The words of the regulators themselves are a matter of public record, and they sound like something out of "Alice in Wonderland." They ought to be quoted, to give the lie to claims that "deregulation" is the reason for the housing boom and bust.
Some people think that nonsense is too silly to answer. But not answering it can just allow nonsense to prevail — to the detriment of the whole country.
Much as I admire the approach of Congressman Paul Ryan, I cringed during one of his speeches when he said — in just one sentence — that none of his reforms would deny benefits to people already getting Social Security. When the truth is just a passing blip on the screen and the lies go on at great length, guess which one is likely to prevail politically.
Vulnerable people, depending on that monthly Social Security check, need to hear that you understand that they paid into Social Security for years when they were working, and that it would be unconscionable to now cheat them out of what they paid for.
Policy wonks already know that nobody in his right mind has proposed any such thing. But, if you depend on the votes of policy wonks to win elections, be prepared to lose in a landslide.
One of the biggest of the election-year lies is that Republicans want to sacrifice the poor in order to have "tax cuts for the rich." That would be grossly immoral — if it were true.
Unscrambling the confusion in that argument can involve work. But if people on welfare can be expected to work, surely people running for high office can put in a little work too — including the work of explaining in plain words what is totally false about the "tax cuts for the rich" argument.
I know it can be done because I have done it. You can see my essay on the subject on my website (tsowell.com) under the title "Tax Cuts."
But so long as Republicans don't seem to feel any urgency about refuting the Democrats' claim that they just want to help the rich at the expense of the poor, they are courting defeat on Election Day.
Why lose to a lie because you didn't bother to explain the truth?
Some of the time that was spent at the Republican convention trying to "humanize" Mitt Romney could have been better spent debunking the Democrats' talking points.
After all, we are not going to be voting for a buddy-in-chief in the White House, but for someone with some clear ideas about what this country needs — and who is willing to share those ideas with us in plain English.

The Republican Platform 2012

A Fundamental Transformation: Our Loss Of Religious Liberty

By PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY
Posted 09/17/2012 07:04 PM ET

 

House Speaker John Boehner was quoted during the Republican National Convention as saying, "Have you ever met anybody who read the party platform? I never met anybody."

Scoffing at the party's platform is the typical attitude of establishment-backed politicians who don't want to be bothered with addressing the hopes and goals of grass-roots voters. Downgrading the platform is the mark of losing candidates, such as Bob Dole and John McCain.

A committee of one man and one woman from each state writes the Republican platform. Those who have already been elected from their state as delegates to the quadrennial National Convention elect them. It is a very democratic (small d) process.
Most of the members of the 2012 Republican Platform Committee in Tampa, Fla., had never served on a platform committee before, and many had never before been to a Republican National Convention. Their product is a reliable statement of what grass-roots voters care about.

The Republican platform writers were upfront about social issues, conspicuously ignoring Gov. Mitch Daniels' foolish attempt to call a "truce" about social issues. The grass-roots are smart enough to have figured out that social issues motivate voters and cause the enormous spending and debt that Barack Obama has piled up, a statistical fact that establishment gurus like to ignore.

Our nearly trillion-dollar-per-year, 70-plus programs of cash and benefits handouts to people living below a designated poverty line are a fiscal issue caused largely by the social issues of marriage-absence and illegitimacy. Yet President Obama unilaterally and illegally increased this spending by gutting the work requirement for welfare recipients, which is our only real hope of reducing the fiscal cost.

Recognizing how social issues motivate their members, the Democrats warmly embraced them in their platform. The Democratic platform states: "The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right." Most Democratic Convention speakers, regardless of their topic, proclaimed their fidelity to abortion rights.

The Republican platform states: "We assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We oppose using public revenues to promote or perform abortions or fund organizations which perform or advocate it and will not fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage."
For the first time, the Democrats' platform strongly supports same-sex marriage. It states: "We support marriage equality and support the movement to secure equal treatment under law for same-sex couples."

On the other hand, the Republican platform states: "Congressional Republicans took the lead in enacting the Defense of Marriage Act, affirming the right of States and the federal government not to recognize same-sex relationships licensed in other jurisdictions. We reaffirm our support for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman."
When the Democratic Party platform came to the convention floor for approval, it omitted the name of God (which had been in previous Democratic Party platforms).

A motion was made to put God back into the platform, a motion that required a two-thirds majority to pass.

The chair called for a voice vote, and the Ayes and Nays sounded equal. The chairman looked baffled and called for a second vote.

Again the Ayes and Nays sounded equal. Looking flustered, the chairman called for one-third vote, which again sounded equally divided.

The chairman then read a pre-scripted ruling from the teleprompter, which was obviously false. He said the motion received a two-third affirmative vote and was adopted, and rapidly moved on to other Convention business.

It's important for all Americans to know that at least half of the Democratic National Convention delegates voted to ban "God" from their party platform.

With public opinion polls running about even for the Obama-Romney race, people keep asking what a second term for Obama will mean to the United States. He gave us a significant clue when (not realizing his microphone was on) he told the Russian president that, after reelection, he will have "more flexibility" to give the Russians what they want on anti-missile defenses.

Obama will also have "more flexibility" to limit our religious freedom. We can expect him to finish his job of banning religious freedom and "fundamentally transforming" us into a totally secular state where we will be denied the First Amendment's "free exercise" of religion we have always known.

QE3

Bernanke's QE3 Is Evidence That Obamanomics Has Failed Dismally

By LAWRENCE KUDLOW
Posted 09/14/2012 07:06 PM ET

 

About 30 years ago, Paul Volcker launched a monumental monetary effort to bring down inflation. As Fed chairman, he sold bonds, removed cash from the economy, and cared not one wit about rising interest rates.

And it worked. Gold plunged, King Dollar soared, and the drop-off in bank reserves and money extinguished high inflation — and actually launched a multi-decade period of very low inflation.

This week, current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke embarked on an absolute reversal of Volcker's policy. He is launching a monumental effort to buy bonds and inject new money into the economy in order to reignite economic growth and job creation.

It's like history is repeating itself, but in reverse. Gold is soaring, the dollar is falling. Something's wrong with this picture.

Bernanke's QE3 is an unlimited Fed effort to buy mortgage bonds with new cash. The plan — which starts immediately — envisions $40 billion of bond purchases and money-creation per month, coming to $480 billion over the next year. And there are no limits to these purchases. These operations are open-ended. This could last for years — maybe in perpetuity — until job creation shoots way up and unemployment comes way down.

Nothing like this has ever been used by our nation's central bank. The Fed's balance sheet, which has ballooned from around $800 billion to $2.5 trillion under Bernanke, will go to $3 trillion, or $4 trillion, or who knows how high?

But here's the rub: More money doesn't necessarily mean more growth. More Fed money won't increase after-tax rewards for risk, entrepreneurship, business hiring, and hard work. Keeping more of what you earn after-tax is the true spark of economic growth. Not the Fed.

In the supply-side model, the combination of lower marginal tax rates, lighter regulation, and a downsized government in relation to the economy is the growth-igniter.

Money, on the other hand, determines the value of the dollar exchange rate and subsequently the overall inflation rate. A falling dollar (1970s) generates higher inflation, a rising dollar (1980s and beyond) generates lower inflation.

This is the supply-side model as advanced by Nobelist Robert Mundell and his colleague Arthur Laffer. In summary, easier taxes and tighter money are the optimal growth solution. But what we have now are higher taxes and easier money. A bad combination.

The Fed has created all this money in the last couple of years. But it hasn't worked: $1.6 trillion of excess bank reserves are still sitting idle at the Fed. No use. No risk. Virtually no loans. And the Fed is enabling massive deficit spending by the White House and Treasury.

Now, one key political point is that Bernanke's desperate money-pumping plan to rescue the economy is a very blunt admission that Obamanomics has completely failed. The president is asking voters to give him more time, which is a very weak argument.

But his Fed chairman is essentially saying we are running out of time and have to embark on this massive monetary action. Mitt Romney should use the Bernanke argument, but not the Fed solution.

Some argue that Bernanke so desperately wants a victorious Obama to reappoint him, that he's printing money and driving up stock prices on the eve of the election. I prefer not to believe this cynical interpretation. As an old ex-Fed staffer, I would argue that it's not a
political agency.

Although I have to admit, on the eve of the election, the question is going to be asked.

More to the point, the Achilles' heel of the Bernanke plan is the collapse of King Dollar, the result of printing so many new ones for so long. That, in turn, will drive up commodity prices, especially energy and food, and will do great damage to the middle class, which is already suffering from income declines and rising living standards.

This is what happened in 2011, when QE2 did more harm than good to the economy. Middle-class savers and retirees will also get their heads handed to them because of rock-bottom interest rates. And bank lenders may withhold credit since the difference between short and longer rates is so narrow there's no incentive to make loans.

So at the end of the day, Obama's economic program of tax, spend and regulate has been a dismal failure. And now his Fed chairman is acting dramatically to bail him out. Guess what? It won't work.

O's Response to Libya

Obama's Ham-Fisted Response To The Attacks On The U.S.

By MARK STEYN
Posted 09/14/2012 07:06 PM ET

So, on a highly symbolic date, mobs storm American diplomatic facilities and drag the corpse of a U.S. ambassador through the
streets.

Then the president flies to Vegas for a fundraiser.

No, no, a novelist would say; that's too pat, too neat in its symbolic contrast. Make it Cleveland, or Des Moines.

The president is surrounded by delirious fanbois and fangurls screaming "We love you," too drunk on his celebrity to understand this is the first photo-op in the aftermath of a national humiliation.

No, no, a filmmaker would say; too crass, too blunt. Make them sober, middle-aged Midwesterners, shocked at first, but then quiet and respectful.

The president is too lazy and cocksure to have learned any prepared remarks or mastered the appropriate tone, notwithstanding that a government that spends more money than any government in the history of the planet has ever spent can surely provide him with both a speechwriting team and a quiet corner on his private wide-bodied jet to consider what might be fitting for the occasion.

So instead he sloughs off the words, bloodless and unfelt: "And obviously our hearts are broken ..." Yeah, it's totally obvious.

And he's even more drunk on his celebrity than the fanbois, so in his slapdashery he winds up comparing the sacrifice of a diplomat lynched by a pack of savages with the enthusiasm of his own campaign bobbysoxers.

No, no, says the Broadway director; that's too crude, too ham-fisted. How about the crowd is cheering and distracted, but he's the president, he understands the gravity of the hour, and he's the greatest orator of his generation, so he's thought about what he's going to say, and it takes a few moments but his words are so moving that they still the cheers of the fanbois, and at the end there's complete silence and a few muffled sobs, and even in party-town they understand the sacrifice and loss of their compatriots on the other side of the world.

But no, that would be an utterly fantastical America. In the real America, the president is too busy to attend the security briefing on the morning after a national debacle, but he does have time to do Letterman and appear on a hip-hop radio show hosted by "The Pimp With A Limp."

In the real State Department, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo is guarded by Marines with no ammunition. But they do enjoy the soft-power muscle of a Foreign Service officer, one Lloyd Schwartz, tweeting frenziedly into cyberspace (including a whole chain directed at my own Twitter handle, for some reason) about how America deplores insensitive people who are so insensitively insensitive that they don't respectfully respect all religions equally, respectfully and sensitively, even as the raging mob is pouring through the gates.

When it comes to a flailing, blundering superpower, I am generally wary of ascribing to malevolence what is more often sheer stupidity and incompetence. For example, we're told that, because the consulate in Benghazi was designated as an "interim facility," it did not warrant the level of security and protection that, say, an embassy in Scandinavia would have.

This seems all too plausible — that security decisions are made not by individual human judgment but according to whichever rule-book sub-clause at the Federal Agency of Bureaucratic Facilities Regulation it happens to fall under.

However, the very next day the embassy in Yemen, which is a permanent facility, was also overrun, as was the embassy in Tunisia the day after. Look, these are tough crowds, as the president might say at Caesar's Palace. But we spend more money on these joints than anybody else, and they're as easy to overrun as the Belgian Consulate.

As I say, I'm inclined to be generous, and put some of this down to the natural torpor and ineptitude of government. But Hillary Clinton and Gen. Martin Dempsey are guilty of something worse, in the secretary of state's weirdly obsessive remarks about an obscure film supposedly disrespectful of Mohammed and the chairman of the joint chiefs' telephone call to a private citizen asking him if he could please ease up on the old Islamophobia.

Forget the free-speech arguments. In this case, as Secretary Clinton and Dempsey well know, the film has even less to do with anything than did the Danish cartoons or the schoolteacher's teddy bear or any of the other innumerable grievances of Islam.

The 400-strong assault force in Benghazi showed up with RPGs and mortars: that's not a spontaneous movie protest; that's an act of war, and better planned and executed than the dying superpower's response to it. Clinton and Dempsey are, to put it mildly, misleading the American people when they suggest otherwise.

One can understand why they might do this, given the fiasco in Libya. The men who organized this attack knew the ambassador would be at the consulate in Benghazi rather than at the embassy in Tripoli. How did that happen? They knew when he had been moved from the consulate to a "safe house," and switched their attentions accordingly.

How did that happen? The U.S. government lost track of its ambassador for 10 hours. How did that happen? Perhaps, when they've investigated Mitt Romney's press release for another three or four weeks, the court eunuchs of the American media might like to look into some of these fascinating questions, instead of leaving the only interesting reporting on an American story to the foreign press.

For whatever reason, Clinton chose to double down on misleading the American people. "Libyans carried Chris' body to the hospital," said Secretary Clinton. That's one way of putting it.

The photographs at the Arab TV network al-Mayadeen show Chris Stevens' body being dragged through the streets, while the locals take souvenir photographs on their cell phones. A man in a red striped shirt photographs the dead-eyed ambassador from above; another immediately behind his head moves the splayed arm and holds his cell phone camera an inch from the ambassador's nose.

Some years ago, I had occasion to assist in moving the body of a dead man: We did not stop to take photographs en route. Even allowing for cultural differences, this looks less like "carrying Chris' body to the hospital" and more like barbarians gleefully feasting on the spoils of savagery.

In a rare appearance on a non-showbiz outlet, President Obama, winging it on Telemundo, told his host that Egypt was neither an ally nor an enemy. I can understand why it can be difficult to figure out, but here's an easy way to tell:

Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam, said some years ago that America risked being seen as harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend. At the Benghazi consulate, the looters stole "sensitive" papers revealing the names of Libyans who've cooperated with the U.S. Oh, well. As the president would say, obviously our hearts are with you.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, the local doctor who fingered bin Laden to the Americans sits in jail.

In other words, while America's clod vice president staggers around pimping limply that only Obama had the guts to take the toughest decision anyone's ever had to take, the poor schlub who actually did have the guts, who actually took the tough decision in a part of the world where taking tough decisions can get you killed, languishes in a cell because Washington would not lift a finger to help him.

Like I said, no novelist would contrast Chris Stevens on the streets of Benghazi and Barack Obama on stage in Vegas. Too crude, too telling, too devastating.
© Mark Steyn, 2012

O A Communist of the "New Kind"

Barack Obama Is a Dangerous Leftist of a New Kind, not a Communist, Muslim, Marxist, or Socialist

Posted By Barry Rubin On September 10, 2012 @ 2:08 pm In Uncategorized | 26 Comments

Barack Obama is not a communist, a fascist, a Muslim, a Marxist, a Progressive (in the pre-1920s meaning of that word), or even a socialist. Obama and those who control much of America’s academia, mass media, and entertainment industry — plus a number of trade unions and hundreds of foundations, think tanks, and front groups — are believers in a new, very American form of leftism. It is very statist, very dangerous for freedom, and economically destructive. But we first have to identify what “it” is. Our difficulty in doing so has been a huge reason why we have not persuaded more people — though goodness knows a lot of people have woken up and now realize that there is a huge problem here.
Yet calling Obama those various names doesn’t persuade a large portion of the American population because they sense that these definitions aren’t accurate. They can come up with valid counter-arguments or be fed phony ones by schools and media. And all of those who rage in the comment sections of websites aren’t persuading anyone of anything except, perhaps, that Obama’s opponents are delusional. You may not like hearing that, but it’s the truth.
I’m amazed and amused by people who say that Obama cannot be a leftist because he–gasp!–appointed people from Wall Street to his cabinet and favors certain specific companies and banks. Excuse me, but you are merely saying that by engaging in corruption and getting some favored capitalists to give him big campaign donations in exchange for favors, Obama shows that he isn’t an “honest” leftist. Íf the left can get support from some such people, it would be foolish to throw away the chance. Refusing to act like that was how the Old Left and the New Left of the 1960s behaved, and we saw what happened to them.
We are in a totally new era. The nineteenth and early twentieth century debates and categories no longer hold. Indeed, when the New Leftists climbed out of the wreckage of the 1960s to early 1970s, they realized this and successfully built something very new. (If you are looking for a “prehistoric” founding document in terms of some important themes, albeit very much altered, read the original Weatherman Manifesto and then delete all the hysterical parts. Dress it up in a suit and tie and seat it behind the desk of a professor, foundation director, reporter, or politician.  I don’t have the space here to explain this point in detail.)
Let’s start with the word “socialist.” The European socialist (or social democratic) movement was strongly anti-communist. Did they hate their countries? Remember, these were the people who remained patriots during World War II — that’s one of the main reasons they first broke with the communists. The European socialists gave up the idea of abolishing capitalism many decades ago. While some parties were further to the left (notably in Spain and Sweden), most had settled into relatively moderate positions. When was the last time they nationalized anything?
Moreover, remember that European statism is as much of conservative origin as of socialist origin. Consider France, a country whose high degree of centralization goes back to feudal times and Napoleon, not to mention the Gaullists. America is very exceptional all right, but only because it broke with both European conservative and leftist models. The welfare states there were the results of multi-partisan efforts.
Have European socialists — I’m not talking here about left-wing academics and journalists — fallen in love with Barack Obama? Not at all. They might like Obama more than George W. Bush, but they liked Bill Clinton even more. Not only do they not see Obama as a comrade, but they could probably give him good advice about why his policies will inevitably fail. They may not have the answers for their own countries, but they understand capitalism and how to make it work (and they want to make it work) far more than he does.
So here’s a key point: Obama and his ideological comrades–let me call them the New New Left (NNL)–are to the left of almost all of the European socialist parties.
Are Obama and company a Marxist group or a bunch of communists (referring to the movement begun by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and run thereafter by Joseph Stalin)?
Well, certainly there are parallels and ideas taken from that movement. But in many ways they have turned Marxism on its head. Let me give one critical example.  Marxists held that material conditions were primary and would determine the course of history. The NNL rejects this and argues that it can use ideas and modern methods of advertising, educational indoctrination, a takeover of most media, and so on to bring about the fundamental transformation of America. They draw mainly from a deviant form developed by such people as Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School. But they have learned the most by taking mainstream American techniques and putting them towards the service of radical ideology.
Moreover, in contrast to the NNL, Marxists saw the “bourgeois” government as an inevitable enemy. Impossible to change, it could only be overthrown. The NNL sought to take over that government and use it to force “revolution” from above. The Marxists focused on the proletariat; while working with some (mostly government workers’) trade unions, the NNL bases itself on certain elements of the upper middle class while trying to buy off crony capitalists and the poor, who Marx called the lumpenproletariat. Well, of course, the result is a disaster when an anti-capitalist regime takes over a capitalist system. How can the system do anything but crash? The pilots are motivated by something that blends deliberate suicide with incompetence, and an ideology that ensures a crash. And they will never ever get better because they are just uninterested in learning what to do that works.
So what are we dealing with here? A radical leftist movement pretending to be liberal, growing out of the New Left of the 1960s, painfully aware of how the far left miserably failed in American history, and trying to create a twenty-first century stealth leftism. The first step was to gain hegemony in the key institutions that created ideas, rather than the factories that created material goods. They succeeded brilliantly.
The next step was to shape millions of Americans, especially young Americans, to accept their ideas that the United States was a force for evil in the world, a failed society, a place of terrible racism and hatred for women, and a country where the vast majority didn’t have a fair chance because the system was unfair. In fact, if you take away the varnish rhetoric, they argue that America is a virtual dictatorship of a small minority of wealthy people who just set everything up for their own convenience. Obviously this parallels both Marxist and non-Marxist historical leftism.
The fact that their description of America has so little to do with the actual country makes it all the more impressive that they’ve been able to sell this set of ideas. Having one of their indoctrinated products become president was a special bonus. That doesn’t mean Obama was backed by some conspiracy or singled out for highest office. There are thousands of such people who are in positions of power, including one-third of the Democrats in the House of Representatives. Obama just perfectly fit the needs of the moment.
Is Obama a Muslim? Of course not, and there is no evidence that he is no matter how much you jump up and down and holler about it. On one side, Obama is– like his NNL colleagues–rather obviously a cynical atheist who has no serious religious belief.
On the other side, he certainly had close contact with Islam and functioned as a Muslim in Indonesia. It is worth mentioning that generally speaking, Indonesia has about the most moderate form of Islam in the world. Note how in his autobiography, Obama describes his Muslim step-father’s tolerance for “pagan” Indonesian practices. This would be virtually unimaginable in any other country.
Coming from that experience, Obama fancies himself an expert on Islam with a special rapport and sympathy for Muslims.  His policy is a disaster because he refuses to recognize that non-al-Qaeda Islamists are extremely anti-American, totalitarian, and anti-democratic. Does Obama want to help Islamists take power? In many cases, yes, but that isn’t because he’s a Muslim but because he falsely believes–encouraged by various “experts”–that this would tame them and cause them to like America and become democratic.
Has this kind of thinking happened before? Absolutely yes. In the 1950s, the U.S. government decided that Arab nationalists would be anti-communist modernizers, but they turned out to be bloodthirsty anti-American tyrants. In the early 1990s, both the U.S. and Israeli governments decided that helping Yasir Arafat would transform him into a statesman who just wanted to have his own country and settle down to fixing potholes.
Note that even if Obama were to be defeated in the election, the far left’s relative monopoly over mass media, academia, many schools, and much of publishing and entertainment would not be affected. The left wing’s control over the Democratic Party might also not be affected, because that would require a revolt by courageous people, further motivated by disastrous defeat, of which so far there is no sign whatsoever.
Obviously, only so much can be said about these things in 1000 words and these are central themes in a book I hope to complete before year’s end called Silent Revolution. But unless we can persuasively explain what is going on and avoid being labeled–at least by anyone who has been duped but wants to be honest–as a bunch of crazy name-callers, there’s just going to be more years  of the same.

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Article printed from Rubin Reports: http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin

TERRIFYING NEW "NORMAL"

The Terrifying New Normal

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On September 3, 2012 @ 6:04 pm In Uncategorized | 185 Comments

The World We Don’t Question
I’ve witnessed two of the most radical developments in my lifetime the last four years — changes far greater than those brought on by the massive new increases in the national debt, the soaring gas costs, the radical decrease in average family income, the insolvent Medicare and Social Security trajectories, or the flat housing market.
One is the fact of less than 1% interest rates on most savings (well below the rate of inflation), and the other is an epidemic of 20-something unemployment. All that is the new normal ^[1].
Why Save?
The hallmark advice of retirement planning was always to scrimp, save, and put away enough money to make up for retirement’s lost salary, increasing medical bills, and the supposed good life of the “golden years.” If a couple had saved, say, $300,000 over a lifetime (again, say, putting $500 away each month for 30 years at modest compounded interest), then they might expect a so-so annual return at 5% of about $15,000 a year on their stash, or about $1,250 per month.
In other words, perhaps Mr. and Mrs. Retiree could find enough with Social Security to live okay and pass on the principal to their kids. But well aside from the fact that many Americans have been laid off, taken pay cuts, lost home equity, had their 401(k)s pruned, or had to take care of out-of-work relatives, there is no 5% any more on anything, not even 2% or  in most cases 1%.  Saving money means nothing really in terms of return, only the realization that inflation eats away the principal each year.
To earn a decent return, the retiree has had to wade into bonds, stocks, and real estate buying and selling, with all their attendant risks that loom larger after 65. The old American idea of receiving a fair so-so interest on a little money in the savings account vanished. And no one seems to care.
The Federal Reserve perhaps had its reasons to keep interest rates low, given the massive spending, 2008 collapse, and the anemic “recovery,” but whatever the purported aims, the policy is not working. Yet cheap money proves to be no stimulus, even at rock-bottom interest rates. Firms don’t seem to think that near-zero interest (and the banks now have a rather scandalous margin between what they charge for ordinary loans and what they pay in interest) balances out the new anxiety over tax hikes, more regulations, and spiking energy costs. (Did Obama believe that employers simply existed to pay ever more taxes for his growing technocracy to redistribute?)
In classical Roman Republican terms, near-zero interest (and calls for “cancellation of debt and redistribution of property”) represented a vast transfer of wealth from those who saved to those who owe. Imagine a contemporary version of Catiline yelling, “If elected, I promise we won’t pay those SOB one-percenters any more than a third of a percent on their not-pay-their-fair-share stashes.” At least that way we might have known what we were dealing with.
The Really Lost Generation
Few seem to note that those who receive nothing on their retirement savings don’t retire so easily. And when they don’t retire, jobs don’t open up — which brings us to my next observation: the lost generation ^[2] of those between 21 and 30, who at various ages and periods came into the workplace the last four years. Many have 8% plus student loans. I doubt half of those will ever be paid off, given the epidemic of unemployment in this cohort.
Unemployment rates of those 16-24 are now officially over 50%. Even the cohort between 16 and 29 suffers from 45% unemployment. In short, in four years we have become Europeanized ^[3]: young people with no jobs who are living at home and putting off marriage and child raising — a “lost” generation in “limbo,” etc. etc. They may have a car, borrow their parents’ nicer car for special occasions, watch their parents’ big screen TV, and have pocket change for a cell phone and laptop by enjoying free rent, food, and laundry, but beneath that thinning technological veneer there is really little hope that they will ever be able to maintain that lifestyle on their own in this present day and age. Meanwhile, just like some Middle East tribal society, “contacts,” “networking,” and “pull” are the new gospel, as parents rely on quid pro quos to offer their indebted, unemployed (and aging) children some sort of inside one-upmanship in the cutthroat job market.
Note that as a poor substitute for a job, we institutionalized something called the “internship.” The best I can tell (I get weekly barrages of inquiries from young people wanting to “intern”), you would enjoy the work of free workers who in exchange for their uncompensated labor gather skills and influence that translate at some nebulous date into real work. How odd that the government that fines an employer who does not duly pay proper overtime wages is not interested in the tens of millions of youth who are working largely as Spartan helots.
These new realities fall heavily on the young male. Traditionally, he was in charge of taking charge — working two jobs to acquire enough to seed a marriage and family or buy a house, striving to be the protector of the household, and accruing experience in his late twenties that would translate into needed promotions in his thirties that would later on pay for braces, kids’ camp, and college tuitions.
No more. We have become emasculated Italians, our economy ossified and socialized to such an extent that few are taking risks to open new businesses in Illinois, build a pipeline across Nebraska, plant a 600-acre irrigated field, or open a timber mill or mine in California. Only so many of the unemployed can land a government job monitoring delta smelt populations or suing to shut down another power plant. In other words, I don’t think Barack Obama at the convention this week is going to be bragging too much about “millions of new green jobs,” more subsidies to Solyndra clones, another stimulus, keeping the deficit at $1 trillion plus, another federal takeover, more juicy details about Obamacare, higher taxes on the greedy, another gas lease denied, or yet more pipelines tabled. He may wish to continue all that ^[4], but he surely won’t wish to tell us so.
The new model for the next generation is to cobble part-time work together, intern, occasionally draw on unemployment, send out resumes hourly, and hope for something to turn up (preferably in government, state or federal). We all witness the reality behind these statistics firsthand. When we travel we see more and more older people at work, often well into their 70s. I know 50 or so young offspring of friends, relatives, and associates who are desperately trying to find work.
Some other symptoms: There is a new backlash at colleges ^[5], which habitually lie to students about the value of their degrees and care more that their offices of diversity are staffed well and their vice provosts for external relations are hitting all the necessary conferences — at least far more than they worry that their tuition increases have yearly soared well beyond the rates of inflation. The federal government, of course, has masked such excess with subsidized loan-sharking. I asked some young people recently what their various (and all had confusing loan “packages”) “subsidized” student loan interest rates were. Most said between 6 and 9% (as their parents get .25% of their own savings).
I don’t know where this all leads. The aging baby boomers are not going to have the retirements that they envisioned, and their children are not going to have the good jobs their baby-boomer parents enjoyed. The more I talk to those my age (58), the more I hear that they are madly trying to save money, buy an extra house, get a good used car — all for their children who may not otherwise ever have a savings account, a home, or reliable transportation. The ancient wisdom was always “don’t spoil your kids,” “no one helped me after 18,” and “keep it up and they will never fend for themselves.” All true.
But these days, the game has changed somewhat — or rather been downscaled: the PhD is not being hired for anything other than part-time teaching; the JD is reduced to the law library gofer; the freshly minted MD is the equivalent of a salaried, high-paid nurse; the credentialed high-school teacher is subbing; the engineer is a draftsman; the carpenter is cobbling together home repair mini-jobs. The new plum job ^[6]? Landing one of those federal or state regulatorships, inspectorships, or clerkships, which are paid for with borrowed money,  produce little, and grow as those they audit and fine shrink.
In other words, we are seeing the proverbial chickens coming home to roost in an economy that has run up $16 trillion in debt, regulated its way into paralysis ^[7], hounded the private sector, and demonized profit-making. The strange thing about the 2008 disaster was not just that hand-in-glove with Wall Street banks Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae created a huge real estate bubble and then watched it pop (one inflated through private speculation and government-backed sub-prime loans), but that the blame went not to the intrusive, incompetent federal government or even to a Goldman-Sachs-like bundler (a firm from whom Obama got more campaign money ^[8] than did any other prior presidential candidate), but to the vague “private sector” — as if the well-driller or timber man had somehow collapsed the economy. The result was that Obama’s medicine from 2009 onward was worse than the original disease ^[9].
Oh, one other thing. We don’t see any more of those funny, though obnoxious, bumper stickers  with the words “We are spending our children’s inheritance” on huge Winnebagos as they zoom by. Perhaps that’s because there are not so many inheritances any more or the children (now in their late 20s) are inside the Winnebago on vacation with their parents. Or maybe the parents sold the Winnebago and are working at Starbucks.
Finally, where does all this lead? To a great deal of pressure and expectations upon a Mitt Romney, whom a growing number of people seem willing to entrust with the remedy to Obama’s Hellenic malady. The more Obama tsk-tsks saving the Utah Winter Olympics or creating a Bain Capital, the more the strapped public may say “bring it on.” ^[10]

(Thumbnail on PJM homepage based on a modified Shutterstock.com ^[11] image.)

THE PARTY O DISMANTLED

Strassel: The Party that Obama Un-Built

Where is the next generation of Democrats?

• By KIMBERLEY A. STRASSEL

Julian Castro is no Barack Obama. And for that, Democrats have themselves to blame.

The focus of this week's Democratic convention was President Obama. Lost in the adulation was the diminished state to which he has brought his broader party. Today's Democrats are a shadow of 2008—struggling for re-election, isolated to a handful of states, lacking reform ideas, bereft of a future political bench. It has been a stunning slide.

The speech by Mr. Castro, the young and charismatic mayor of San Antonio, was the Democrats' attempt to recapture the party optimism that then-Senate candidate Obama sparked at the 2004 convention. John Kerry didn't win, but that year marked the start of an ambitious Democratic plan to revitalize the party.

In 2006, Nancy Pelosi muzzled her liberal inclinations to recruit and elect her "Majority Makers"—a crop of moderate and conservative Democrats who won Republican districts and delivered control of the House for the first time in 14 years.

Democrats in 2006 also claimed the Senate, with savvy victories in states like Montana and Virginia. The party thumped Republicans in gubernatorial races, winning in the South (Arkansas), the Mountain West (Colorado), and in Ohio (for the first time since 1991). A vibrant candidate Obama further boosted Democratic ranks in 2008.

By 2009, President Obama presided over what could fairly be called a big-tent coalition. The Blue Dog caucus had swelled to 51 members, representing plenty of conservative America. Democrats held the majority of governorships. Mr. Obama had won historic victories in Virginia and North Carolina. The prediction of liberal demographers John Judis and Ruy Teixeira's 2004 book, "The Emerging Democratic Majority"—lasting progressive dominance via a coalition of minorities, women, suburbanites and professionals—attracted greater attention among political analysts.

It took Mr. Obama two years to destroy this potential, with an agenda that forced his party to field vote after debilitating vote—stimulus, ObamaCare, spending, climate change. The public backlash, combined with the president's mismanagement of the economy, has reversed Democrats' electoral gains and left a party smaller than at any time since the mid-1990s.

Of the 21 Blue Dogs elected since 2006, five remain in office. The caucus is on the verge of extinction, as members have retired, been defeated in primaries waged by liberal activists, or face impossible re-elections. The GOP is set to take Senate seats in North Dakota and Nebraska, and maybe to overturn Democratic toeholds in states from Montana to Virginia. There is today a GOP senator in Massachusetts. Republicans claim 29 governorships and may gain two to four more this year.

As for the presidential race, Republicans are in sight of taking back Virginia and North Carolina and are competitive in supposedly new Democratic strongholds like Colorado and New Mexico. The GOP is also making unexpected inroads in Wisconsin and Iowa. The real story of the Obama presidency is the degree to which he has pushed his party back toward its coastal and urban strongholds.

All this was vividly on display in Charlotte this week. While the party's most vulnerable members aren't in outright mutiny against Mr. Obama, more than two dozen didn't risk attending the convention. In contrast to last week's GOP celebration of reformist GOP governors, the Charlotte podium was largely dominated by activists (Sandra Fluke, Lilly Ledbetter), the liberal congressional faithful (Mrs. Pelosi, Harry Reid), and urban mayors from failing states (Los Angeles's Antonio Villaraigosa, Chicago's Rahm Emanuel).

 

While the GOP has feted its upcoming stars—including minority governors like New Mexico's Susana Martinez and Louisiana's Bobby Jindal—the president has done little to nurture his down-ballot partners. Where is the next generation of Democrats?
 
Which brings us to Mr. Castro. Mr. Obama lit up the political scene in 2004 with a lofty convention speech that told a heartfelt story, appealed to the best of America, and never once mentioned George W. Bush.

Mr. Castro, by contrast, was tasked by the Obama team with laying out the bitter Democratic themes of this election. His own eloquent story was weighed down by his job of ridiculing Mitt Romney, lauding government, and stoking class warfare. The comparisons of Mr. Castro in 2012 with Mr. Obama in 2004 are misplaced; Mr. Obama has made them impossible.

Mr. Castro must be wondering what chance he has of higher office in Texas, which today has not one statewide elected Democrat. It's a question for Democrats across wide sections of the country.

The liberals who supported Mr. Obama's expansion of the entitlement state are pinning everything on Mr. Obama's re-election, assuming it will cement their big-government gains and allow them to grind back congressional majorities in the future.
But contemplate the situation if he loses. Consider a Democratic Party that may hold neither the White House nor Congress, that has disappeared in parts of the country, and that has few future Obama-like stars. Compare that to 2008. This is the party Barack Obama un-built.
 
Write to kim@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared September 6, 2012, on page A13

UnAmerican Auto Bailout

Obama's (Un)American Auto Bailout

By MICHELLE MALKIN
Posted 09/05/2012 06:35 PM ET

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Cue "Fanfare for the Common Man" and rev up the Government Motors engines. Wednesday was Great American Auto Bailout Day at the Democratic National Convention.
Party propagandists prepared a prime-time-ready film touting the "rescue's" benefits for American workers. UAW President Bob King sang the savior-in-chief's praises.
But like all of the economic success stories manufactured by the White House, the $85 billion government handout is a big fat farce.
"I said I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back," Obama bragged on the campaign trail.
Here's the inconvenient story they won't tell you:
GM is once again flirting with bankruptcy despite massive government purchases propping up its sales figures. GM stock is rock-bottom. Losses continue to be revised in the wrong direction. According to the Detroit News, "The Treasury Department says in a new report the government expects to lose more than $25 billion on the $85 billion auto bailout. That's 15% higher than its previous forecast."
The claims that GM paid back its taxpayer-funded loans "in full" — a story peddled in campaign ads narrated by Hollywood actor Tom Hanks — were debunked by the Treasury Department's TARP watchdog this summer.
GM still owes nearly $30 billion of the $50 billion it received, and its lending arm still owes nearly $15 billion of the more than $17 billion it received.
Bailout watchdog Mark Modica of the National Legal and Policy Center adds: "In addition to U.S. taxpayers anteing up, Canada put in over $10 billion, and GM was relieved of about $28 billion of bondholder obligations as UAW claims were protected. That's an improvement of almost $90 billion to the balance sheet, and the company still lags the competition."
While the Obama administration wraps the auto bailout in red, white and blue, it's foreign workers and overseas plants that are reaping redistributive rewards.
GM has increased its manufacturing capacity in China by an estimated 55% after the bailout, according to industry watchers.
GM's Dan Akerson crowed at the Beijing auto show earlier this year: "One of our aims is to help grow a new generation of automotive engineers, designers and leaders right here in China."
The U.S. auto giant's ventures with the Communist regime include Shanghai OnStar Telematics Co., Ltd.; GM China Advanced Technical Center; FAW-GM Light Duty Commercial Vehicle Co., Ltd., in Harbin, Heilongjiang; FAW-GM's Changchun plant in Changchun, Jilin; FAW-GM Hongta Yunnan Automobile Manufacturing Co., Ltd., in Qujing, Yunnan; and Shanghai Chengxin Used Car Operation and Management Co., Ltd.
In Europe, the UAW's appointee to the Government Motors Board of Directors, Steve Girsky, recklessly pushed the feds to hold onto GM's failing German-based Opel AG.
The Great American Auto Bailout has been subsidizing this hemorrhaging enterprise while Obama failed to deliver on his 2008 campaign promise to salvage plants like the one in GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan's hometown of Janesville, Wis.
According to Forbes magazine, "GM Europe, comprised mostly of Opel and its sister brand, Vauxhall, lost $617 million in the first half of 2012, on top of a $747 million loss in 2011 and a $1.8 billion loss in 2010. In all, GM has lost almost $17 billion in Europe since 1999."
While Team Obama lambastes GOP rival Mitt Romney for outsourcing, Government Motors is now planning to invest $1 billion over the next five years — not in America, but in Russia.
That's on top of $7 billion total in China, close to $1 billion in Mexico, and $600 million for a shirt sponsorship deal with Manchester United, the British soccer club.
The DNC will put a rank-and-file U.S. autoworker on stage to back up Big Labor's cheerleading of the deal.
Rest assured, this human shield will not tell viewers how Obama and the union bosses colluded to pervert bankruptcy law and shaft some 20,000 nonunion Delphi auto parts workers.
The forgotten victims saw their pensions erode by up to 70%; their health benefits disappeared. The first lady is radio silent. Obama consigliere Valerie Jarrett ducked questions about the Delphi injustice from the Washington Times here in Charlotte.
Only in a fantasyland where America has 57 states, "JOBS" is a three-letter word and bailouts are "achievements" does Obama's rescue math add up.
"Now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs, not just in the auto industry, but in every industry," Obama vows.
God help the American worker.

Rove "Map" Update 09/05

Now, it's Nevada, Michigan shifting torward Romney in Rove electoral map

By ANDREW MALCOLM
Posted 09/05/2012 10:08 AM ET

Karl Rove's newest State of the Race commentary:
"Mitt Romney gained ground in two important swing states according to polls conducted during the week of the Republican National Convention.
"Both Nevada and Michigan moved from "lean Obama" to "toss up" status. Barack Obama strengthened in one state, Connecticut, which moved from "lean Obama" to "safe Obama." This gives Mr. Obama 184 "safe" Electoral College votes with four states (41 EC votes) that "lean" in his favor going into the Democratic National Convention.
"While Mr. Romney has 146 "safe" EC votes and four states (45 EC votes) in his "lean" column. With this week's additions of Nevada and Michigan, the number of "toss up" states is the highest since this map began in April, with nine states (122 EC votes) too close to call for either candidate."
BACKGROUND: We launched a special new feature in this column last month. From now through election day we will be publishing the famous electoral map of the presidential race designed and researched by veteran political strategist Karl Rove.
It's a custom-made 50 state-by-state breakdown of the race at this moment in time, based upon the latest polls from each state. (Scroll down for Rove's full methodology.)
You may want to bookmark each of these maps (Here's the first week's map. Here's the second map, Here's the third published on Aug. 14. And the fourth published here on Aug. 28. Then you can refer back and track any changes in all 50 states as the campaigns unfold from now through both party conventions and on through the entire fall's general election contest up through Nov. 6.
This map will now appear weekly through election day.
This new feature comes thanks to special permission from Rove, whose website is Rove.com and Twitter handle is @KarlRove. We recommend following him and regularly checking his website, which contains a variety of information on the presidential contest, polls and other links.
The deputy chief of staff and senior adviser to former President George W. Bush also has a free weekly newsletter on politics including his Thursday columns for the Wall Street Journal. Subscribe on his site's homepage.
NOTE: Texas has been changed to "safe Romney" status in order to get an accurate outlook of the playing field. As Joe Trippi and I discussed on Special Report last week, this is a safe GOP state that has not been polled in recent history and will unlikely have many presidential polls conducted in the days remaining until the election. Its 38 Electoral College votes have been moved to previous "safe Romney" totals as well as is reflected in the map's trend line.

NBC News

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Rove's Methodology:

For each state, the map uses the average of all public telephone polls (internet polls are not included in the average) taken within 30 days of the most recent poll available in each state. For example, if the most recent poll in Ohio was taken on April 15, 2012, the average reflected on the map includes all polls conducted between March 15 and April 15, 2012.
States within a three-point lead for the Republican or Democratic candidate are classified as toss-ups; states between a five-to-eight-point lead for the Republican or Democratic candidate are classified as "lean" for that candidate; states outside the eight-point lead are allocated to the respective party. Please note: for some states, the most recent polls available at this time are up to one year old and other states with no polling yet available have been classified Republican or Democrat based on their 2008 results.