Mr. Bell, 68, is an unlikely tribune for social conservatism. His main interest has always been economics. He was “an early supply-sider” who worked on Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns of 1976 and 1980 and Jack Kemp’s in 1988. In 1978 he ran an anti-tax campaign for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey, defeating Republican incumbent Clifford Case in the primary but losing to Democrat Bill Bradley.
Even now his day job is to advocate for the gold standard at the American Principles Project. But he’s been interested in social issues since the 1980s, when “it became increasingly clear to me . . . that social issues were beginning to be very important in comparison to economic issues,” in part because “Reaganomics worked so well that the Democrats . . . kind of retired the economic issues.”
Social conservatism, Mr. Bell argues in his forthcoming book, “The Case for Polarized Politics,” has a winning track record for the GOP. “Social issues were nonexistent in the period 1932 to 1964,” he observes. “The Republican Party won two presidential elections out of nine, and they had the Congress for all of four years in that entire period. . . . When social issues came into the mix—I would date it from the 1968 election . . . the Republican Party won seven out of 11 presidential elections.”
The Democrats who won, including even Barack Obama in 2008, did not play up social liberalism in their campaigns. In 1992 Bill Clinton was a death-penalty advocate who promised to “end welfare as we know it” and make abortion “safe, legal and rare.” Social issues have come to the fore on the GOP side in two of the past six presidential elections—in 1988 (prison furloughs, the Pledge of Allegiance, the ACLU) and 2004 (same-sex marriage). “Those are the only two elections since Reagan where the Republican Party has won a popular majority,” Mr. Bell says. “It isn’t coincidental.”
Even without immediate gains among minority voters, Mr. Bell sees social issues as the path to a GOP majority in 2012. They account for the George W. Bush-era red-blue divide, which Mr. Bell says endures—and, he adds, red has the advantage: “There was one state in 2000 that Bush carried that I would say was socially left of center, and that was New Hampshire,” the only state that flipped to John Kerry four years later. “By 2004, every state—all 31 states that Bush carried—were socially conservative states.” Those states now have 292 electoral votes, with 270 sufficient for a majority.
By contrast, not all the Kerry states are socially liberal. “The swing vote in the Midwest is socially conservative and less conservative economically,” Mr. Bell says, so that “social conservatism is more likely to be helpful than economic conservatism.”
The roots of social conservatism, he maintains, lie in the American Revolution. “Nature’s God is the only authority cited in the Declaration of Independence. . . . The usual [assumption] is, the U.S. has social conservatism because it’s more religious. . . . My feeling is that the very founding of the country is the natural law, which is God-given, but it isn’t particular to any one religion. . . . If you believe that rights are unalienable and that they come from God, the odds are that you’re a social conservative.”
This is a very important read. This problem of leftist Jews being reflexively anti-Semitic to rabidly so is something that this writer has witnessed first hand, mostly from radicalize academics and students. I am glad that more and more people are speaking out against this problem as I have witnessed these people act as if they are a defense attorney for genocidal jihadists. The people who I have seen with this problem seem irrational to the point of mental illness.
The 1930s Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson asked “Is there another People on Earth so emotionally twisted that they consider everything their nation does despicable and hateful, while every murder, rape, robbery committed by their enemies fill their hearts with admiration and awe?”
This is Jew Flu – the virus of Jewish Anti-Semitism, and its Jewish Anti- and Post-Zionist mutations, afflicting a small but inordinately loud minority of Hebrews.
Its modern symptoms are a rejection of Israel’s identity as a Jewish state and a dismissal of its right to defend itself militarily, while embracing the goals of its nihilistic Arab enemies. Those infected with the virus wildly inflate Israeli sins real or imagined, while excusing or rationalizing Palestinian anti-semitism and outrages against Jews.
Those afflicted with Jew Flu often view the notion of Peoplehood as an artifice, which implies a rejection of Jewish national self-determination and acceptance of the 90-year-old Palestinian Arab contention that Jews are not a nation but merely members of a religion, and as such don?t merit a national home of their own.
Is Jew Flu a bona-fide illness? Michael Welner, a psychiatrist at New York University, suggests that Jewish Anti-Semitism is akin to a personality disorder, enabling a person to “derive some psychological benefit from this pathological thinking.”
What causes Jew Flu? Harvard psychiatrist Kenneth Levin argues for twin culprits: so-called ‘Stockholm Syndrome’, where “population segments under chronic siege commonly embrace the indictments of their besiegers however bigoted and outrageous”, as well as “the psychodynamics of abused children who blame themselves for their situation and believe they could mollify their tormenters if they were ‘good’.”
Julie Ancis, a psychology professor at Georgia State University says that it isn’t “uncommon for a minority group with a history of oppression and persecution to possess internalized self-hatred regarding their cultural/religious identity.”
I’m no therapist, but that won’t restrain me from proposing my own theory for the ultimate cause of Jew Flu. More on that later.
Since the defamations of Jew Flu victims are propagated across the Internet and are extensively documented and challenged in many fine books and articles, repeating them here would be redundant.
Suffice it to say that Noam Chomsky, Daniel Boyarin, Joel Kovel, Avrum Burg, Ilan Pappe, Steve Quester, Jacqueline Rose, Tony Judt, Naomi Klein, Michael Neumann, Ben Ehrenreich, (the apparently “outed”) Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and their ilk, spout pronouncements eerily similar to the propaganda routinely ejaculated by representatives of Fatah, Hamas or Hezbollah.
At the same time, a hearty “shout out” is due those who have made it their business to forcefully rebut the Jewish defamers, including Andrea Levin, Edward Alexander, Alan Dershowitz, David Solway and others. Those interested in a quick and free primer on Jew Flu should download Alvin Rosenfeld’s UJA-sponsored brief, “Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism”.
History
Jew Flu, of course, isn’t new: It has lurked in our midst for millennia. Jews collaborated with Greeks, Romans and Inquisitors; Bolshevik self loathers displayed savagery towards their brethren; their prophet Karl Marx was described by author Rafael Patai as the “most influential of Jewish self haters”, who thought “Israelite faith” most repugnant, and whose rabid anti-Semitism was attributed by the historian Simon Dubnow to “the natural hatred of the renegade for the camp he deserted.”
Incredibly, certain young Jews in Weimar Germany, members of a certain Association of National-German Jews were sufficiently maddened by Jew Flu to attempt to “identify and ingratiate (themselves) with the Nazi Party”.
Jew Flu developed its anti-Zionist strain in the decades preceding the creation of Israel: renowned philosopher Martin Buber of Hebrew University and others actually justified the Palestinian Arab pogroms of 1921, 1929 and the late 30s, urging that desperate Jewish holocaust refugees be permitted to enter Palestine only with Arab permission.
In 1944, and with the destruction of European Jewry proceeding apace, Lessing Rosenwald, the President of the American Council for Judaism equated the ideal of Jewish Statehood with the concept of a racial state “the Hitlerian concept”.
Following remission during the post-Holocaust years, Jewry experienced a relapse of Jew Flu in the aftermath of the ’67 Six Day War. In the U.S., young Jewish radicals of the New Left branded Israel a fascist, colonial power while praising Arab countries as progressive and revolutionary – unsurprising since many were Soviet client states.
They remained largely silent as Soviet tanks crushed the 1968 Prague Spring – presumably a ‘progressive’ development.
New Left sentiments found expression in Israel even during the aftermath of the traumatic Yom Kippur War; at a Tel Aviv reception in late 1973, my mother found herself amid a chatty crowd of cocktailing cultural figures casually dismissive of their own country’s right to exist.
The infection among Israel’s cultural elites intensified through the Lebanon War and the two Intifadas that sandwiched the delusional Oslo era. As author Aharon Meged lamented in 1994, there existed “an emotional and moral identification by the majority of Israel’s intelligentsia, and its print and electronic media, with people committed to our annihilation.”
Epitomizing this “moral identification” were the certain prominent Jewish journalists who, according to Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea, crucially failed the so-called ‘lynch test’, by exhibiting an inability to ever criticize Palestinian terror, even following the widely televised gruesome execution of two Jews by a Palestinian mob in Ramallah In 2000.
Metamorphosis
It was at this time that Jew Flu claimed a childhood friend of mine. We’d come of age together in the early ’80s, like-minded Zionists, he more “Kahanish” in temperament. Immigrating to Israel the day after graduation, he’d serve in the IDF, settle in Jerusalem, marry, spawn a brood, and settle into the life of an Israeli academic, where anti Zionist stances are common and open identification as an Israeli patriot is tantamount to career suicide.
Infection struck during the Oslo years: before the millennium was out, the youthful Kahanist yeshiva boy had morphed into a militant Jewish Anti Zionist, mindlessly spouting hackneyed and malicious anti-Israel canards on leftwing and Arab websites, and regularly consorting with a posse of Arab academics in Ramallah.
This episode recalled a scene from “Radio Days”, the Woody Allen movie in which an uncle fasting on Yom Kippur indignantly watches the Jewish communists next door brazenly barbecuing. In Holiday suit he marches out the front door to scold the Reds on their evil ways, only to return shortly after chewing on a chicken drumstick, indignantly decrying religion as the opiate of the masses.
Those like my friend afflicted with Jew Flu deny their infection, contending that criticism of Israel isn’t Anti-Semitism or even Anti-Israel.
Helpfully, Natan Sharansky formulated his so-called 3D litmus test to clearly distinguish mere Israel critics from Jew Flu victims, and has allowed me to diagnose my old friend.
As it turns out, the afflicted regularly engage in at least one of the following -Demonization (comparing Israeli actions to Nazism and referring to Arab refugee camps as Auschwitz);- Double Standards (singling out Israel for human rights abuses while ignoring the blatant human rights violators such as Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestinian Authority, North Korea, Cuba, China, Myanmar etc); and Delegitimization (denying Israel the fundamental right to exist as a Jewish state)
During March 2002, Jihadist suicide murderers were exploding on Israeli buses every other day, massacring and maiming hundreds of Jews in a cascade of latter-day pogroms; savage images of Haim Nahman Bialik’s monumental poem, “City of Slaughter” blazed across the broken land.
125 Jews were massacred and hundreds were wounded by Palestinian suicide murderers that month. Yet unsurprisingly my stricken friend declined comment.
My friend seems to amuse his Arab colleagues: Appearing at a conference some years ago at Cairo’s American University, an Egyptian fellow panelist quipped to the audience that our mutual friend was “more pro-Palestinian than me – I am more pro-Israel than him.”
Incidentally, this college has since instituted a ban on Israeli academics.
At this point allow me to complicate things: It’s easy to assume that those struck with Jew Flu would be contemptuous of Jewish religious observance. They often hold Marxist views, which would imply an atheist outlook.
Yet what one should one make of my friend who performs Kiddush on Friday nights, fasts on Yom Kippur and uses two sets of dishes in his kosher kitchen? Would such Jewish customs be performed by an anti-Semite?
Knesset speaker Avrum Burg is a lifelong modern orthodox Jew, a skull capped davener whose Jew Flu was latent for years but burst out into the open when he took to smearing Israel in Nazi-like browns.
Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin are pleasant, prominent and yarmulked professors of Jewish history who don tefilin daily, daven on Shabbat and holidays and are easily mistaken in appearance for West Bank settlers.
Yet Daniel is comfortable vilifying Israel regularly as a violent outlaw state. And Jonathan admitted to me some years ago during an especially sweaty Simchat Torah “hakafa” on the Lower East Side that his views are identical if not even more radical than Daniel’s (if that was possible.)
Actually, it is interesting that the views of such radical yet observant Jews resemble the tenets of Catholic Liberation Theology. But could such a trio be accused of outright anti-Semitism?
The Burgs and Boyarins of this world have long revered another devout Jew, the departed Yishayahu Leibowitz, a renowned scholar, recipient of the Israel Prize, and editor of the Hebrew Encyclopedia, a Jerusalemite who habitually referred to drafted Israeli soldiers who happened to be defending his charmed way of life as “Judeo-Nazis”.
Was Leibowitz an anti-Semite?
Submitting their pronouncements to the Sharansky test demonstrates that even tefilin wearing, kosher food eating Kiddush reciters can speak and write like anti-Semites.
Prognosis
But back to the elusive cause of Jew Flu: what makes one Jew vulnerable and not another? Wouldn’t a far larger proportion of Jews fall prey to Jew Flu if, say, Stockholm syndrome was the culprit? Is there a prime mover, some physiological or neurological smoking gun pointing to a root cause?
There may be. David Brooks recently reported in the New York Times on research by a Haifa University team led by Reem Yahya who studied the brains scans of Arabs and Jews while showing them images of hands and feet in painful situations.
Brooks reports that “the two cultures perceived pain differently. The Arabs perceived higher levels of pain over all while the Jews were more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than their own.”
This phenomenon was epitomized by Rosa Luxemburg, a prominent Bolshevik and Jew Flu victim. “I have no room in my heart for Jewish suffering,” declared Rosa the Red. “Why do you pester me with Jewish troubles? I feel closer to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations of Putumayo or the Negroes in Africa… I have no separate corner in my heart for the ghetto.”
And then there’s the modest story Ahmad the cabbie related to me last week as we drove through Eilat-like Palm Springs: Ahmad’s brother in Nablus was employed for many years by an Israeli Jewish building contractor. When the outbreak of Intifada in 2000 permanently barred Ahmad’s brother from work in Israel, his Jewish boss continued to pay the brother’s salary for five years.
The intriguing research out of Haifa suggests that Jews may very well be inherently altruistic. But while exhibiting more sensitivity to another group’s pain is one thing, embracing the goals of people openly committed to one’s destruction is a form of madness.
So here’s my ultimate theory for the cause of this nefarious virus: Jew Flu is a condition in which being “more sensitive to pain suffered by members of a group other than (one’s) own metastasizes into a malignant emotional and moral identification with people committed to (one’s) annihilation.”
In an age and time when I find most of my college students unfamiliar with the story of Adam and Eve or the origin of the phrase, “judge not lest ye be judged,” I enter discussions about religion with some caution. Almost universally my students do not believe that religious belief is necessary for morality, and seem to be offended by the very concept.
But when one discusses the speeches of our earlier presidents, as I do in my composition classes, it is necessary to address religion’s role.
So last week, as we discussed George Washington’s Farewell Address, I asked students to recall the major points he made. Because several of them had already studied the speech in high school, they listed points most emphasized by teachers: his cautions about foreign entanglements, factional discord, and debt. Not many recalled his injunction to use the Constitution as a safeguard against “internal enemies.” Only one recalled his reminder about the importance of religion.
Although it does not take up much of the speech, it is an important passage, and one worth recalling in today’s age when libertarian ideals seem to motivate most college students and when many conservative pundits caution us about focusing on social issues.
But Washington reminds us, as do the other Founding Fathers, of why the Constitution is necessary in the first place.
The Constitution is structured according to a vision of mankind as inherently flawed, as marked by Original Sin. This view of human nature is what sets apart those who established the longest-lasting Constitution from the utopian idealists who see human nature as essentially good. Those human beings who are flawed by selfishness or irrationality (as they see it) can be shaped by the right social and political forces—and woe to the man who resists the efforts by the utopian theorists to make him good! We have seen that in the death tolls of such schemes.
But in Washington’s view, because character alone cannot be trusted, a division of powers helps provide checks against branches of government and of individuals. Washington echoes James Madison.
Yet, even with such multiple safeguards and a contract that stands beyond the immediate interests of parties, Washington still reminds us of the importance of religion. He calls “religion and morality” the “indispensable supports” of the “dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity.” In fact, he implies that patriotism is impossible without “these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens.” It’s a sentence I emphasize. I ask students if they agree. Of course not, they almost unanimously say. One does not need to be religious to be patriotic. One does not need to believe in God to be moral.
Washington continues: “The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them.”
Notice that Washington calls on the “mere politician” to respect religion and morality. Washington then claims, “A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity.” (It’s no wonder that moderns who ascribe to the notion that religion is a private affair that should be divorced from political life would rather forget George Washington or wipe him from the history books.)
Furthermore, Washington maintains that morality emerges from religion, as he asks a rhetorical question: “Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?” This leads to my question of why we ask those who testify in court to place their hands on the Bible. This inspires more looks of consternation among students who have been educated in the idea that any kind of insistence on religious faith is an expression of “intolerance.”
Washington finally ends that paragraph by stating point blank, “And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
That is about as unequivocal a statement as one can get.
Earlier in the speech, Washington had cautioned about regional animosities. Reminding them of the common “religion, manners, habits, and political principles” they shared, Washington encouraged citizens to adopt the identity “American”.
This is where students are apt to point out the changes that have taken place in over 200 years. The United States is no longer as homogenous as it was back then, when the vast majority of Americans belonged to various denominations of Protestantism. Students echo the standard line about “diversity” that infuses our educational establishment. They parrot the notion that it is an expression of “intolerance” to state that our nation is based upon a common moral and religious foundation of Judeo-Christian principles.
Yet, in spite of their constant exposure to “diversity” and a “globalism,” students have almost no ability to place our form of government and society into a global context. I remind students of the historical fact that Christianity introduced the notion that all people are equal in the eyes of the Creator. I ask students about our most basic laws. Why are parents who abuse or kill their children prosecuted? After all, in Greek and Roman culture, the father had the prerogative of allowing his infant child to die of exposure. Why do we take care of our elderly, even beyond the point of their “usefulness” to us? After all, Eskimos and other primitive societies, simply abandoned the weak and elderly, sending them off on ice floes. Apparently, students today don’t hear about such practices, while they are constantly bombarded about the “social injustice” of our economic system.
So, why, I ask, do our laws follow this Judeo-Christian injunction against killing? Other primitive societies, and now professors of ethics, like Peter Singer at Princeton, do not see anything unethical about killing handicapped infants.
When looks of horror register on the faces of students when I tell them about Singer’s proposal to allow parents to kill handicapped children, I tell them that their recoil at the thought of killing babies indicates the fact that even if they are not practicing Christians or Jews they have imbibed the values of a Judeo-Christian culture that values life. Those like Singer, quite significantly, begin by rejecting the Bible, which provides the premise that life is sacred.
The professor who works in a non-tenured position, as I do, broaches such topics with trepidation, lest any student (often called the “customer”) complain to the administration.
But I was pleasantly surprised when several students told me how much they had enjoyed and appreciated the discussion about religion in Washington’s speech. One, who is a Hindu, stayed after class, to tell me this.
Yet, if and when they follow today’s political debates in the news, students are likely to hear attacks upon Republican candidates’ religiosity and lack of respect for the “separation of church and state.” This is especially true about Rick Santorum who has been most outspoken about the importance of religion in public life.
In the classroom students are likely to hear views like those of Georgetown University Professor Jacques Berlinerblau, who charges Republicans with “secular-baiting” in his blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education. He claims Newt Gingrich pioneered the genre and Mitt Romney took it a “milestone” in its “evolution.” It is Santorum, however, whom he charges with demonizing Secularism, by reminding audiences of the atheistic nature of the “’French Revolution, moving onto the facists, and the Nazis and the communists and the Baathists.’”
Instead of considering the historical veracity of Santorum’s statement, Berlinerblau attributes nefarious and crazy motives to Santorum: “It is easy, lucrative, and even pleasurable, to pulverize sinister Secularism. It rallies the base, secures contributions, and helps conservative voters focus on demonic (i.e., liberal, Democratic) forces possessing our political system.” Running with his theory, Berlinerblau assigns an all-or-nothing faith in “divine revelation,” as if Santorum imagines he has a direct line to God. Berlinerblau then posits that religionists like Santorum might hear different things from God and thus have no basis upon which to decide policies. Such “anti-secular rhetoric,” he maintains, is “at its core . . . a demagogic evasion” (italics retained).
After he has whipped himself up to making Santorum a dictatorial theocrat, Berlinerblau concludes ominously, “Santorum and others will keep baiting secularism, and evading difficult issues, until someone stops them.”
In class, it will be worth reminding students about how the French Revolutionists and the Soviet Communists did first kill all the priests and nuns. It will be worth reminding students of the freedom voters have in drawing upon religious principles when they exercise their right to vote—in spite of many professors’ desire to simply “stop” people of religious faith, like Rick Santorum.
After a public television appearance Rick Santorum let a group of reporters have at him for an extended interview. Some of them tried to ask one “gotcha” question after another. Rick knocks each one out of the park. This is most educational.
The elite media always asks Santorum questions about gays or sex because they want you to believe that this is all he talks about. The facts are that Rick Santorum has a range of conservative policy initiatives he is proposing.
Have GOP officials in the state of Maine have stolen the Maine caucuses for Romney?
This is disturbing.
Via Political Arena contributor Warren Roche:
In Waldo County, Maine vote totals from 17 of the county’s 18 towns were reported by Maine state GOP officials as zero votes cast which is clearly not true. The one Waldo County town where results have been reported is the town of Belfast, Maine. The only reason why Belfast’s votes were counted was because someone from Belfast (see this video) checked on the state GOP’s website to see results and saw that ALL 18 towns in Waldo County, including Belfast, showed zero votes cast for anyone! The Belfast caucus counted their votes publicly and everyone in Belfast KNEW that Ron Paul had won Belfast with Romney coming in 3rd. When Belfast GOP officials checked with the state GOP they were told the report of zero votes was in error and would be corrected. When the person from the Belfast GOP asked what results the state GOP had for Belfast the state GOP representative read back vote totals which reported the opposite of the actual vote, showing Romney winning Belfast with Ron Paul coming in 3rd!
Two Maine counties, Washington and Hancock, postponed their caucuses due to weather. Those caucuses will be held this Saturday, February 18. Yet, according to the Maine GOP, Romney has already won Maine, albeit by only 194 votes.
Video via WXIX TV in Maine:
Meanwhile, Waldo County Republicans have called for the censure of Maine State GOP Party Chairman Charlie Webster for his part in this fraud.
Sanjay Wagle was a venture capitalist and Barack Obama fundraiser in 2008, rallying support through a group he headed known as Clean Tech for Obama.
Shortly after Obama’s election, he left his California firm to join the Energy Department, just as the administration embarked on a massive program to stimulate the economy with federal investments in clean-technology firms.
Following an enduring Washington tradition, Wagle shifted from the private sector, where his firm hoped to profit from federal investments, to an insider’s seat in the administration’s $80 billion clean-energy investment program.
He was one of several players in venture capital, which was providing financial backing to start-up clean-tech companies, who moved into the Energy Department at a time when the agency was seeking outside expertise in the field. At the same time, their industry had a huge stake in decisions about which companies would receive government loans, grants and support.
During the next three years, the department provided $2.4 billion in public funding to clean-energy companies in which Wagle’s former firm, Vantage Point Venture Partners, had invested, a Washington Post analysis found. Overall, the Post found that $3.9 billion in federal grants and financing flowed to 21 companies backed by firms with connections to five Obama administration staffers and advisers.
Obama’s program to invest federal funds in start-up companies — and the failure of some of those companies — is becoming a rallying cry for opponents in the presidential race. Mitt Romney has promised to focus on Obama’s “record” as a “venture capitalist.” And in ads and speeches, conservative groups and the Republican candidates are zeroing in on the administration’s decision to extend $535 million to the now-shuttered solar firm Solyndra and billions of dollars more to clean-tech start-ups backed by the president’s political allies.
White House officials stress that staffers and advisers with venture capital ties did not make funding decisions related to these companies. But e-mails released in a congressional probe of Obama’s clean-tech program show that staff and advisers with links to venture firms informally advocated for some of those companies.
David Gold, a venture capitalist and critic of Obama’s investments in clean tech, said that even if staffers had been removed from the final decision-making, they had the kind of inside access to exert subtle influence.
“To believe those quiet conversations don’t happen in the hallways — about a project being in a certain congressman’s district or being associated with a significant presidential donor, is naive,” said Gold, who once worked at the Office of Management and Budget. “When you’re putting this kind of pressure on an organization to make decisions on very big dollars, there’s increased likelihood that political connections will influence things.”
Why would Obama want to fund the umbrella organization that oversees Hamas, the PLO, parts of Hezbollah and other terror organizations? The Muslim Brotherhood is who Obama helped to take over Egypt and Libya and they have been using armored military vehicles to mow down Christians and people who protest actions by the new government that Obama helped put in place. The Muslim Brotherhood has promised Sharia Law, persecution of women and swears to have war with Israel.
Obama has been arming the middle-east with weapons sales (including 125 M1 Tanks to Egypt) and now wants to hand them $800 million of your money while Americans are losing their homes. Be sure to look at the “related” section below.
Here is perhaps the world’s greatest living historian Prof. Niall Ferguson predicting what a disaster this would likely blow up into back in late February 2009 and time has proved Prof. Ferguson to be spot on:
The White House announced plans on Monday to help “Arab Spring” countries swept by revolutions with more than $800 million in economic aid, while maintaining U.S. military aid to Egypt.
In his annual budget message to Congress, President Barack Obama asked that military aid to Egypt be kept at the level of recent years — $1.3 billion — despite a crisis triggered by an Egyptian probe targeting American democracy activists.
The proposals are part of Obama’s budget request for fiscal year 2013, which begins October 1. His requests need the approval of Congress, where some lawmakers want to cut overseas spending to address U.S. budget shortfalls and are particularly angry at Egypt.
Related:
Islamic militants receive two-thirds vote in Egypt – LINK
AP: Egyptian Women March Against Abuse by Military – LINK
Well well well, who didn’t see this coming? The readers of my former college blog knew all about it as we explained how ObamaCare is designed to increase costs and insurance to such a point that the only “solution” would be a total government take over. Even Nancy Pelosi said that the bill was designed to make them “cry out for a public option”.
[I have nine pages of posts and links devoted to this subject on my old college blog starting HERE. To verify that we got it right and called it early just start on this link and proceed forward. Figuring out that ObamaCare was designed to do exactly this, and recognizing that the behavior incentivized by the program creates an economic death spiral – technically called an adverse selection spiral – which is designed to burden the system with such costs and regulation that it will collapse, was not difficult. It did not take an MIT Economist to see what so was obvious in the structure of ObamaCare and quite frankly this editor rejects the idea that Prof. Gruber just figured this out in some grand revelation recently. Anyone with some decent economics training could see this coming a mile away; yes it has always been that obvious – Editor.]
Medical insurance premiums in the United States are on the rise, the chief architect of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul has told The Daily Caller.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Jonathan Gruber, who also devised former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s statewide health care reforms, is backtracking on an analysis he provided the White House in support of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, informing officials in three states that the price of insurance premiums will dramatically increase under the reforms.
In an email to The Daily Caller, Gruber framed this new reality in terms of the same human self-interest that some conservatives had warned in 2010 would ultimately rule the marketplace.
“The market was so discriminatory,” Gruber told TheDC, “that only the healthy bought non-group insurance and the sick just stayed [uninsured].”
“It is true that even after tax credits some individuals are ‘losers,’” he conceded, “in that they pay more than before [Obama’s] reform.”
Gruber, whom the Obama administration hired to provide an independent analysis of reforms, was widely criticized for failing to disclose the conflict of interest created by $392,600 in no-bid contracts the Department of Health and Human Services awarded him while he was advising the president’s policy advisers.
UPDATE – CNBC’s Jim Cramer: CEO’s scared to hire because of ObamaCare. Moving more operations overseas
The Obama administration rebuffed a senior Chinese police official in southern China who sought to defect, turning him away after his presence became known to Chinese security forces.
An administration official familiar with China affairs said the botched defection of Wang Lijun, a vice mayor and chief crime investigator in Chongquing, was mishandled not only by local American officials in China but also by White House and State Department officials in Washington unwilling to upset China by granting Wang refuge in the consulate.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.) chairman of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on oversight and investigations, said in an interview last night that the administration’s handling of the Wang case is something the subcommittee will investigate.
“There seems to be repetitive examples of people trying to help the United States who end up suffering,” Rohrabacher said, noting Pakistan’s prosecution of a Pakistani doctor who helped U.S. intelligence locate and kill al Qaeda leader Osama bin Ladin.
In the case of Wang, it appears “the State Department is either clueless or duplicitious regarding the very nature of the gangster regime in Beijing.”
The official said Wang’s defection would have provided a windfall for U.S. intelligence agencies that currently lack insight into the secretive world of Chinese leadership politics.
The attempted defection of Wang played out amid international intrigue involving what officials say is a major power struggle within the senior ranks of the outwardly placid Chinese Communist Party.
The struggle pits a hardline nationalist faction headed by Wang’s boss, regional Party Secretary Bo Xilai, and central authorities in Beijing, led by current President Hu Jintao.
Two U.S. officials said Wang supplied the consulate with information related to corruption within the highest ranks of the Party, including information about Bo.
Bo is the son of a founding communist revolutionary who is a hardline anti-American, neo-Maoist leader and is seeking a seat on the nine-member collective dictatorship that rules China. The officials cautioned that details of the attempted defection and power struggle are murky.
Imagine what the Chinese government will do to this man. Read more HERE.
The EPA announced new rules mandating the use of 36 billion gallons worth of renewable fuels (like ethanol) by 2020.
This summer President Obama needlessly instituted, not one, but two outright drilling bans in the Gulf of Mexico.
After rescinding his outright offshore drilling ban, President Obama has refused to issue any new drilling permits in the Gulf, a policy that the Energy Information Administration estimates will cut domestic offshore oil production by 13% this year
Interior Secretary Salazar announced that the eastern Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic coast, and the Pacific coast will not be developed, effectively banning drilling in those areas for the next seven years;
Interior Secretary Salazar announced new rules making it more difficult to develop energy resources on federal land.
All of these policies raise gas prices at the pump by either: 1) decreasing the availability of domestic energy supplies, or 2) increasing regulatory costs on gasoline production.
Chuck Norris gives the opposition research short list on Rick Santorum. Some of these shots are not totally fair and some of them do apply to Newt as well, but still it is a comprehensive short list.
The shot against Medicare Part D is just wrong headed. Medicare Part D is a great success as it is a well run voucher like system that came in 40% under budget. If all of Medicare was ran like Part D it would solve most of the Medicare problem.
Santorum was a serial earmarker, requesting billions of dollars during his time in the Senate, and not reversing his position on earmarks until he was out of Congress in 2010. As recently as 2009, Rick said, “I’m not saying necessarily earmarks are bad. I have had a lot of earmarks. In fact, I’m very proud of all the earmarks I’ve put in bills. I’ll defend earmarks.”
Santorum voted to raise the national debt ceiling five times
Santorum voted for the 2005 highway bill that included thousands and thousands of wasteful earmarks, including the Bridge to Nowhere. In fact, according to Club for Growth, “in a separate vote, Santorum had the audacity to vote to continue funding the Bridge to Nowhere rather than send the money to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.”
Santorum voted for CAFTA, which removes duties on textile and apparel goods traded among participating nations, resulting in nearly ALL textile companies leaving the South.
Santorum voted for Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (though he now says he will repeal it), which imposes job-killing federal regulations on businesses.
Santorum voted against the National Right to Work Act of 1995, which would have repealed provisions of federal law that “require employees to pay union dues or fees as a condition of employment.”
Santorum voted for HR 3448 – Minimum Wage Increase bill, which allows punitive damages for injury or illness to be taxed, allows damages for emotional distress to be taxed and repeals the diesel fuel tax rebate to purchasers of diesel-powered automobiles and light trucks.
Santorum voted to confirm President Bill Clinton’s nomination of Alan Greenspan to be chairman of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System for a fourth four-year term.
Santorum voted for Medicare prescription drug benefit known as Medicare Part D, though critical of it now. It is the largest expansion of entitlement spending since President Lyndon Johnson, which now costs taxpayers more than $60 billion a year and has almost $16 trillion in unfunded liabilities, according to Club for Growth.
Santorum voted in 1997 to support the Lautenberg Gun Ban, “which stripped law-abiding gun owners of their Second Amendment rights for life, simply because they spanked their children or did nothing more than grab a spouse’s wrist,” according to a press release from Dudley Brown, executive director of the National Association for Gun Rights.
Santorum voted in 1999 for a bill “disguised as an attempt to increase penalties on drug traffickers with guns … but it also included a provision to require federal background checks at gun shows,” again according to Dudley Brown’s release.
Santorum “came to anti-gun Arlen Specter’s defense in 2004 when he was down in the polls against pro-gun Republican Pat Toomey. Specter won and continued to push for gun control during his years in the Senate,” per Brown.
Santorum voted for an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934 that requires television broadcast providers to give their lowest rates to political candidates.
Santorum actively supports the Global Fund, which was created by the United Nations to fight HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, but also “channels a large portion of its funds through Planned Parenthood’s affiliates around the world and through a British group Marie Stopes International (the largest chain of abortion mills in the UK, with 66,000 abortions a year.)… to operate in Cambodia, Fiji, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Burma, Kenya, Tanzania, and other countries,” according to the pro-life Gerard Health Foundation that provides millions of dollars to pro-life groups.
Santorum boasted of teaming up with Joe Lieberman, Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton in his 2006 political ad for re-election to the U.S. Senate, which he lost to Democrat Bob Casey Jr. by the largest margin of victory ever for a Democratic Senate nominee in Pennsylvania and the largest margin of victory for a Senate challenger in the 2006 elections.
Santorum opposed the tea party and its reforms in the Republican Party and conservative movement just a couple years ago saying, “I have some real concerns about this movement within the Republican party … to sort of refashion conservatism. And I will vocally and publicly oppose it.”
It’s the headline that a President facing re-election with a dismal economic record didn’t want to see:
1.2 million people driven out of the workforce in a single month!
A frantic White House exploded into damage-control mode, as a deeply shaken President Obama retreated into his chambers. Nervous spokesmen fanned across the airwaves to stammer apologies, search for silver linings among the storm clouds, offer campaign boilerplate about “hope and change,” and desperately search for some way to blame George Bush for an absolute unemployment disaster that occurred over three years after he left office…
What’s that, you say? You didn’t see that headline? Well, of course not, silly. All you’re seeing in the headlines is good news, because the official, heavily-massaged U-3 unemployment rate fell to 8.3 percent. Fewer people in the workforce means the percentage of unemployed people in the workforce drops.
A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55%. Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million.
No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month! So as the labor force increased from 153.9 million to 154.4 million, the non institutional population increased by 242.3 million meaning, those not in the labor force surged from 86.7 million to 87.9 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation.
As for the quality of jobs, as withholding taxes roll over Year over year, it can only mean that the US is replacing high paying FIRE jobs with low paying construction and manufacturing. So much for the improvement.
Now, I suspect that while a lot of people dropped out of the workforce last month, part of what we’re seeing here is some numerical mutation that caused an abnormally large chunk of the labor-force reduction from the past year to be piled into a single month. There was some decent overall job creation in January, with about 243,000 jobs added to non-farm payrolls, and a nice 50,000 job bump in the manufacturing sector. That total is good enough to modestly outpace current population growth. With the usual backwards adjustment to previous months, it looks like the final quarter of 2011 pretty much kept pace with population growth.
However, the fact remains that even as we get back to the (dismal) 8.3 percent U-3 unemployment we last saw in February 2009, the work force is about half a million people smaller in absolute numbers, and that doesn’t include the increase in the working-age population over the past two years. Throw them in, and you’re looking at roughly 1.5 million jobs completely vaporized, to the point where they don’t even count in the official, widely-reported unemployment statistics.
Famed economist Dr. John Lott comments:
A 1.2 million drop out of the labor force is the record for any one month. And 500,000 a month dropping out of the workforce because they are just giving up because there jobs just aren’t out there. This is something we have not seen before. People just start giving up.
“This is what President Obama would call a “teachable moment”. The teachable moment here is when we elect a president who brings this progressive philosophy to bear to government, they decide how our rights are to be granted and given and organized. And if they clash with our first amendment right of religious freedom or something else then we know who wins in that exchange. This is much much bigger than about contraception or something like that, this is about religious freedom, first amendment rights, and how this progressive philosophy of fungible rights or a living, breathing constitution really clashes and collides with these core rights that we built our society and country around,”.
Mika Brzezinski, MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”: “New government data shows profits for America’s largest financial firms are once again reaching record highs not seen sense before the financial crisis of 2008. In fact, Wall Street firms have earned more in the first two and a half years of the Obama presidency than all 8 years of the Bush presidency. Over 85 billion dollars in profits compared to 77 billion.”
Joe Scarborough: “Wait — you mean in the first two years they made more than in eight years than in the Bush administration?”
Brzezinski: “That’s correct.”
The facts are that while Obama claims to be against Wall Street and is a champion of the poor against the rich, he is in Wall Street’s back pocket. The Dodd-Frank bill and these other regulations passed in the name of defending the poor, actually tilt the playing field to his donors, expend the power of the federal government to pick winners and losers and Lord help you if you are a part of the smaller competition. I explored this subject for years in great detail on my old college blog.
Related:
Top All-Time Donors, 1989-2012 – Hint: Most goes to Democrats – LINK.
Top 20 Industry Money Recipients This Election Cycle – Who is in the back pocket of Wall Street? – LINK.
Corruption You Can Believe In: Failed Sub Primes and Mortgage Fraud Lenders Funneled Money to Dodd & Obama the Most. Fannie & Freddie Gave $200 Million to Partisans-Most Went to Democrats! Dodd, Obama Among Top Recipients. Republicans Attempted to Pass Reforms-Blocked by Democrat Leadership! – LINK.
Hypocrite! Elizabeth Warren Takes Wall Street Cash! – LINK.
Corruption: Most Stimulus Funds Spent in Democrat Districts – LINK.
The taxes Democrats propose to “soak the rich” always seem to miss those who they demagogue for not paying their fair share. They have been “soaking the rich” for decades and keep missing the target. Why? – LINK.
Four years ago, the ABC, CBS and NBC morning shows celebrated the “rock star” Democrats running to replace George W. Bush, and no candidate set journalists’ pulses racing faster than Barack Obama. Now, after three years of high unemployment, trillion dollar deficits and an onerous new health care law, how are those newscasts covering Obama’s re-election campaign and the candidates vying to replace him?
To find out, Media Research Center analysts examined all 723 campaign segments which aired on the three broadcast network weekday morning programs from January 1 to October 31, 2011, using the same methodology we employed to study campaign coverage on those same programs for the same time period in 2007.
Four years ago, the network coverage promoted the Democratic candidates and cast their strong liberal views as mainstream. This year, our study finds the networks are disparaging the Republican candidates and casting them as ideological extremists:
Labeling:
– This year, network reporters have employed 49 “conservative” labels to describe the Republican candidates, compared with only one “liberal” label for President Obama.
– Four years ago, when Obama was a relatively unknown candidate, the morning shows also provided just a single “liberal” label to describe his ideology, and never once labeled Hillary Clinton, John Edwards or the other Democrats as “liberal.”
Agenda:
– By a 4-to-1 margin, ABC, CBS and NBC morning show hosts have employed an adversarial liberal agenda when questioning this year’s Republican candidates. But those same hosts’ questions for President Obama leaned in his direction, with mostly liberal-themed questions.
– Four years ago, questions for the Democratic candidates tilted by more than two-to-one to the left, a friendly agenda.
Tone:
– In 2007, Democratic candidates were regularly tossed softball questions. This year’s interviews with Republicans have been much more caustic, with few chances for the candidates to project a warm and fuzzy image.
– Despite the poor economy and low approval ratings, the morning shows continue to treat Barack Obama as more of a celebrity than a politician, airing positive feature stories about the President and his family — a gift not bestowed on the conservative Republican candidates.
During the 2008 campaign, the network morning shows acted as cheerleaders for the Democratic field. This time around, they are providing far more hostile coverage of the various Republicans who are running, while treating Obama’s re-election campaign to the same personality-driven coverage that was so helpful to the then-Illinois Senator four years ago.
If the real decisions in our democracy are to be in the hands of voters, then the news media owe viewers a fair and unbiased look at the candidates in both parties. That means asking the candidates questions that reflect the concerns of both sides — liberals and conservatives alike. And the syrupy coverage awarded year after year to the Democrats’ celebrity candidates in no way matches the pretense of journalists holding both sides equally accountable, without fear or favor.
Even at 15 percent, the rich will pay more. For argument’s sake, someone who earns $100,000 would pay $15,000 in taxes, while someone who makes $100 million would pay $15 million. Delicate calculations confirm that $15 million exceeds $15,000. The rich will pay more dollars in taxes, but as a proportion of income equal with everyone else. Hello, “fair share.”
Gingrich also would chop America’s corporate tax from 35 percent (the industrial world’s second highest, after Japan’s) to a flat 12.5 percent, which would tie Ireland’s as the lowest and most competitive among developed nations. Coupled with immediate, 100 percent expensing of capital purchases, such a stimulus would unleash dramatic economic expansion — rather than the Obama-style “stimulus” that yields bankruptcies, layoffs, and FBI raids.
Compared to Gingrich’s gutsy blueprint, Romney’s exhibits the caution that has made the former Massachusetts governor the “Oh, well, if we must” choice, even among his supporters.
While Romney would ditch the death tax and cut the corporate tax to 25 percent, he would preserve today’s income-tax rates. He would scrap taxes on interest, capital gain, and dividends, but — echoing Obama — only for those making less than $200,000. – [Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton – the vast majority of those who make over $200,000 in what the IRS calls “earned income” are small and medium sized businesses. Mitt’s plan is so mild that it cannot do the economic heavy lifting to get us out of this morass. Speaking in economic terms, Obama’s plan is an economy killing machine and Mitt Romney’s is only marginally better.]
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
Fact: Since taking office, President Obama’s entire energy agenda has made a gallon of gas more expensive:
Political Arena 