“I sure am….he is not the only one vilified, though, look at Newt Gingrich, what’s going on with him, via the establishment’s attacks. They’re trying to crucify this man and rewrite history, and rewrite what it is that he has stood for all these years. It’s not just Ron Paul. I believe it is also Newt Gingrich that the establishment, that the liberal media, certainly that the progressives and Democrats don’t like.”
Obama sugar daddy #2 Warren Buffet, who says that the rich should pay more while Obama demands increases in a tax that the super rich don’t even pay, but small and medium sized businesses do… well Buffet not only goes to great lengths to shield his money from taxes, but he owes almost a billion dollars – LINK.
Sabra Feldman:
Instead of complaining about tax cuts for the “wealthiest Americans” or not, why not set up a voluntary tax for the “wealthiest Americans”? Then, the government can track which of the wealthiest Americans, particularly Obama’s wealthiest supporters, are willing to pay it.
The biggest problem that Mitt Romney has is that the arguments in favor of his candidacy have been paper thin and largely circular.
He’s the “most electable” candidate because his supporters keep saying he’s the most electable. He’s “inevitable” because his supporters say he’s inevitable. “He’ll be conservative in office” despite governing as a moderate because his supporters say he’ll be conservative in office.
None of these arguments hold up under a bare minimum of scrutiny. Mitt has lost 2 of 3 major races he’s run so far (His record would have been 1-4 if he had run for governor again in 2006), he’s only won 1 out of 3 primaries up until this point despite having every advantage, he’s only pulling about 30% of the vote nationally, and there’s no reason at all to think that a guy who’s famous for shifting his positions would suddenly turn into Ronald Reagan once he gets into office.
Moreover, it’s hard not to notice the double standard that’s been going on during the primary. Every candidate in the field who pulls ahead of Mitt gets savaged by the mainstream media and his allies in the conservative press, while Mitt hasn’t even had a basic vetting. Furthermore, when Mitt bombed Newt into the ground with vicious negative ads in Iowa, despite the fact that Newt had been running a positive campaign, we were told, “Politics ain’t beanbag.” On the other hand, when the remaining candidates gave Mitt the same treatment he had dished out after New Hampshire, this was supposed to be some sort of unconscionable attack on capitalism that was hurting the guaranteed winner of the primaries. That’s horseflop.
Given that Ted Kennedy beat Mitt in 1994 with attacks on Bain Capital, how ridiculous is it that the most basic questions about his time there still hadn’t been brought up and perhaps worse yet, that Romney still doesn’t seem to have particularly good answers for some of those questions?
Given all the attention to the ethics matter, it’s worth asking what actually happened back in 1995, 1996, and 1997. The Gingrich case was extraordinarily complex, intensely partisan, and driven in no small way by a personal vendetta on the part of one of Gingrich’s former political opponents. It received saturation coverage in the press; a database search of major media outlets revealed more than 10,000 references to Gingrich’s ethics problems during the six months leading to his reprimand. It ended with a special counsel hired by the House Ethics Committee holding Gingrich to an astonishingly strict standard of behavior, after which Gingrich in essence pled guilty to two minor offenses. Afterwards, the case was referred to the Internal Revenue Service, which conducted an exhaustive investigation into the matter. And then, after it was all over and Gingrich was out of office, the IRS concluded that Gingrich did nothing wrong. After all the struggle, Gingrich was exonerated.
WASHINGTON (AP) — It was a wish list, not a to-do list.
President Barack Obama laid out an array of plans in his State of the Union speech as if his hands weren’t so tied by political realities. There can be little more than wishful thinking behind his call to end oil industry subsidies – something he could not get through a Democratic Congress, much less today’s divided Congress, much less in this election year.
And there was more recycling, in an even more forbidding climate than when the ideas were new: He pushed for an immigration overhaul that he couldn’t get past Democrats, permanent college tuition tax credits that he asked for a year ago, and familiar discouragements for companies that move overseas.
A look at Obama’s rhetoric Tuesday night and how it fits with the facts and political circumstances:
OBAMA: “We have subsidized oil companies for a century. That’s long enough. It‘s time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that’s rarely been more profitable, and double-down on a clean energy industry that’s never been more promising.”
THE FACTS: This is at least Obama’s third run at stripping subsidies from the oil industry. Back when fellow Democrats formed the House and Senate majorities, he sought $36.5 billion in tax increases on oil and gas companies over the next decade, but Congress largely ignored the request. He called again to end such tax breaks in last year’s State of the Union speech. And he’s now doing it again, despite facing a wall of opposition from Republicans who want to spur domestic oil and gas production and oppose tax increases generally.
Be sure to read on to see the rest of “fact checking” from the normally in the tank for Obama AP just rips this SOTU to pieces.
My thoughts while watching:
Obama: It was wrong, it was irresponsible…
– which is why you were pressuring banks to make those bad loans when you worked for ACORN.And the Dodd-Frank bill is forcing banks to do the same thing again!!
Obama: I will work with anyone
Editor: YOUR Senate leadership has refused to pass a budget in almost three years!!!
Obama: Masterlock is made in Wisconsin
Editor: Maybe those Master Locks can keep the EPA and the government looters out….
Conservative writer Sabra Feldman: Unbelievable. Obama just said that, during his time in office, “over 1,000 jobs came back over here.” 1,000 manufacturing jobs? What, is he kidding? What about the millions of manufacturing jobs that moved to China, Korea, and other countries, and the hundreds of thousands of R&D jobs that went mostly to India and China? Just to get the currently-unemployed out of work, 1,000 jobs would have to return here 15,000 times.
Chuck DeVore: Obama in state-of-the-union: proposes to tax multinational firms more. Word of advice: businesses don’t pay taxes, consumers do.
Obama: Mandate that kids stay in school to graduate or till 18
– wow the good students will flood out to private schools. ..hey wait…
Chuck DeVore: Obama advocates more Federal intervention in local education, federal money with strings attached.
Obama: Open more land for drilling
Editor: Open them for drilling but them stop them from actually drilling by halting the permit process with thousands of impossible regulations and lawsuits from your eco-whackies.
Obama: More Green Jobs money from Congress!
Karen Mayhew-Reagan: Full of new jobs, like those found at Solyndra.
Editor: All this clean energy stuff that fails but makes his pals rich with our money so they can donate back to Obama…
Obama: equal pay for equal work!
Chuck DeVore: Obama Calls for equal pay for equal work – you mean like how WNBA players get paid the same as NBA players?
Editor: It means he wants to hire more government employees until WNBA players make the same as NBA players….err until NBA players make the same as WNBA players? NO it is NOT – men and women doing the same job. Two lawyers at the same firm. Two admins in the same university office etc. It is the govt setting wages….
Obama: One place to go for all mortgages!
He is talking about a full nationalization of the mortgage industry… OMG.. And now he is saying don’t destroy the free market LOL
Olga Mancuso: I’m having a brain stem hemorrhage…please send the death panels. If I could snort my scotch I WOULD to numb my brain quickly….
Editor: A Living will – the Banks have already been turned into virtual GSE’s… who the heck does he think he is kidding??? Prosecute who? Bawney Frank?? I think not… more like scape-goating.
Chuck DeVore: Obama calls for banks to write a “living will” as to how they’ll pay if they go bust (will be used against them in court by Federal prosecutors).
Editor: To prosecute them for doing what the government forced them to do in the first place.
Karen Mayhew-Reagan: I make 72k year, my husband is unemployed. How dumb does this guy think I am?
Obama: Put aside partisanship and lets work together!
Mark Souder: The gall. Attacks Republicans all night but then calls for bi-partisanship. The gall
Mark Souder: We work as a team, you rich insider-trading, oil-dripping heasrtless Republicans – we need to work together.
Editor: It is so typical of him. He asks for bi-partisanship after locking Republicans out and lying about them.
Ted Welsh: He is now on record as suceeding in and /or for doing all the things that the conservatives have been demanding. Oh, except that the government will run it all. Man what a con.
Obama: US and Israel are closer than ever!
Chuck DeVore: Obama says US and Israel are closer than ever. (Saying so, makes it so, I suppose)
Editor: Well Chuck, that whole 1967 thing really fired up the warm fuzzies….
Obama: America is back!
Mark Souder: He didn’t mean America was back. He meant that big government is back. The “era of big government is over” is, well, over.
The WaPo and AP fail to mention the John Kerry connection.
(Politico) — A former CIA officer was charged Monday with disclosing the identity of a covert CIA officer and with telling journalists the name an agency officer involved with the interrogation of alleged Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah.
The Justice Department charged that John Kiriakou, 47, who worked as a CIA officer from 1990 to 2004, revealed the information to journalists and that one reporter passed some of the secrets onto attorneys representing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
Kiriakou’s case is the sixth leak-related criminal prosecution brought since President Barack Obama took office, a figure that exceeds the number of such cases in all previous administrations combined.
“Safeguarding classified information, including the identities of CIA officers involved in sensitive operations, is critical to keeping our intelligence officers safe and protecting our national security,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement. “Today’s charges reinforce the Justice Department’s commitment to hold accountable anyone who would violate the solemn duty not to disclose such sensitive information.”
CIA Director David Petraeus said Monday that “CIA fully supported the investigation from the beginning and will continue to do so.”
Petraeus also reminded CIA personnel of their duty to keep secret matters secret.
Ultimately, “the investigative team concluded that no laws were broken by the defense team,” the complaint says. It adds that defense attorneys never told the terror suspects the names of those in the photos.
However, the investigation — assigned to U.S. Attorney in Chicago Patrick Fitzgerald to avoid conflicts with Justice Department lawyers working on prosecuting Guantanamo pirsoners — focused on government employees who might have leaked the identities of the officers.
Kiriakou worked for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigator from March 2009 to April 2011, according to Senate records.
Sarah is spot on. A total Rookie mistake that will be used against Newt if he is the nominee. This was David Gregory looking to generate sounds bites for Obama to use in commercials later.
If/When Newt is the nominee and Christie endorses Newt this sound bite will be used against both Newt and Gov. Christie’s reelection.
Notice that you don’t see John McCain on the Sunday shows bashing his fellow Republicans any more. He used to all the time. He learned his lesson.
Not to mention that this new narrative on “Newt being an embarrassment” relies on a series of incomplete facts. This is just Mitt Romney out to destroy his opponents again and it really doesn’t matter what the full facts are.
…..That targeting has taken a sinister turn–a criminal one, in fact–as the Des Moines Register reports:
A Des Moines man has been arrested after police say he used, or tried to use, the identity of Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz in a scheme to falsely implicate Schultz in perceived unethical behavior in office.
Zachary Edwards was arrested Friday and charged with identity theft.
The Iowa Department of Public Safety issued a news release saying Schultz’s office discovered the scheme on June 24, 2011 and notified authorities.
Iowa blogger Shane Vander Hart has more, including this mug shot of Zachary Edwards, a Democratic operative:
Edwards is a former Obama staffer who directed “new media operations” for Obama in five states during the 2008 primaries. Thereafter, he was Obama’s Director of New Media for the State of Iowa. In the Democratic Party’s lexicon, “new media” apparently includes identity theft.
Edwards now works for LINK Strategies, a Democratic consulting firm with extraordinarily close ties to Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin. Its principal, Jeff Link, has served as Harkin’s campaign manager and chief of staff. Link, too, is a former Obama staffer. The LINK Strategies web site says that Jeff Link “served as a media consultant to the Obama for President Campaign, coordinating branding, all paid media and polling in 25 states, including seven battleground states (VA, NC, FL, CO, NM, NV, MT)….”
That Edwards allegedly tried to steal the Secretary of State’s identity in order to frame Schultz for “unethical behavior in office” is no coincidence. Iowa Democrats, as Kevin Hall of the Iowa Republican points out, have mounted a campaign of false accusations against Schultz…..
A top Palestinian Authority religious leader claimed in a sermon at a major Fatah event that Muslims are obligated to kill the Jews.
Mufti Hussein
The Mufti Muhammad Hussein presented the murder of Jews by Muslims as a religious Islamic goal while celebrating the 47th anniversary of the Palestinian Authority’s Fatah faction.
An appointee of Palestinian Authority Chairman and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, the Mufti made the claim at an official Fatah event marking the founding of the largest faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), also led by Abbas, as well.
Citing what he said was the Hadith (the Islamic tradition attributed to Muslim prophet Muhammad), the Mufti claimed “The Hour [of Resurrection] will not come until you fight the Jews. The Jew will hide behind stone or trees. Then the stones or trees will call: ‘O Muslim, servant of Allah (G-d), there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ ”
Although a video of the speech was previously available on YouTube, it has been removed because it violated the site’s Terms of Service for violence.
A poll sponsored by the Israel Project found that 73 percent of Palestinian Arabs “believe” this Hadith, according to the findings of a July 2011 study by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner.
The moderator who introduced the Mufti also reiterated another “Islamic belief” — that the Jews are descendants of apes and pigs,” according to a broadcast on PA TV translated by the media watchdog agency Palestinian Media Watch (PMW).
“Our war with the descendants of the apes and pigs (ie: the Jews) is a war of religion and faith,” the moderator said.
The Mufti added to the moderator’s statement,saying that Islam’s goal is to kill the Jews.The same cleric preached in a sermon at Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque in 2010 that the Jews are “enemies of Allah.”
The National Bureau of Economic Research scored the recession as ending in June, 2009. Yet, today, in the 49th month since the recession started, there has still been no real recovery, like recoveries from previous recessions in America.
Unemployment actually rose after June, 2009, and did not fall back down below that level until 18 months later in December, 2010. Instead of a recovery, America has suffered the longest period of unemployment near 9% or above since the Great Depression, under President Obama’s public policy malpractice. Even today, 49 months after the recession started, the U6 unemployment rate counting the unemployed, underemployed and discouraged workers is still 15.2%. And that doesn’t include all the workers who have fled the workforce under Obama’s economic oppression. The unemployment rate with the full measure of discouraged workers is reported at www.shadowstats.com as about 23%, which is depression level unemployment.
Today, over 4 years since the recession started, there are still almost 25 million Americans unemployed or underemployed. That includes 5.6 million who are long-term unemployed for 27 weeks, or more than 6 months. Under President Obama, America has suffered the longest period with so many in such long-term unemployment since the Great Depression.
Notably, blacks have been suffering another depression under Obama, with unemployment today, 49 months after the recession started, still at 15.8%. Black unemployment has been over 15% for 2 ½ years under Obama. Black teenage unemployment today is over 40%, where it has persisted for over 2 years as well.
Hispanics have also been suffering a depression under Obama, with unemployment today still in double digits at 11%. Hispanic unemployment has been in double digits for three years under President Obama. Over one fourth of Hispanic youths remain unemployed today, which also has persisted for years.
The Census Bureau reported in September that more Americans are in poverty today than at any time in the entire history of Census tracking poverty. Americans dependent on food stamps are at an all time high as well.
Real wages and incomes have been falling so steadily under Obama and his confused, throwback, Keynesian/neo-Marxist Obamanomics, that the Census Bureau also reported that real median family income in America has fallen all the way back to 1996 levels.
Compare Obama’s lack of a recovery 2 ½ years after the recession ended with the first 2 ½ years of the Reagan recovery. In those years under Reagan, the American economy created 8 million new jobs, the unemployment rate fell by 3.6 percentage points, real wages and incomes were jumping, and poverty had reversed an upsurge started under Carter, beginning a long term decline.
While Obama crows about 200,000 jobs created last month, the most for a month during his entire Administration, in September, 1983 the Reagan recovery less than a year after it began created 1.1 million jobs in that one month alone. Under Obama, we are still almost 6 million jobs below the peak before the recession started over 4 years ago! In the second year of the Reagan recovery, real economic growth boomed by 6.8%, the highest in 50 years.
The chief excuse of the Obama apologists is that what we have suffered was not just a recession, but a financial crisis, and, they argue, recovery from a financial crisis takes a lot longer than recovery from a recession. But that is not the experience of the American, free market, capitalist economy.
The experience of the American economy is reported in full at the National Bureau of Economic Research, as cited above – recessions since the Great Depression previously have lasted an average of 10 months, with the longest previously 16 months, and the deeper the recession the stronger the recovery. That is the standard by which the performance of Obamanomics is to be judged. Which of those American recessions was a “financial crisis” that breaks the pattern?
If you were trying to come up with the most atrocious candidate imaginable to go toe-to-toe with Barack Obama in 2012, you couldn’t do much better than Mitt Romney. He was an unpopular moderate governor who lost 2 out of the 3 major elections he’s run in and whose signature issue Romneycare is an enormous failure. Moreover, he’s so uninspiring that he makes Bob Dole look like Ronald Reagan and that’s before you consider his incessant flip-flopping that makes it impossible to really know where he stands on any issue.
Romney’s candidacy also runs counter to almost every political trend in the book right now. He’s the antithesis of everything the Tea Party stands for — a moderate establishment-endorsed, principle-free Rockefeller Republican. On the other hand, he’s like a bad guy straight out of central casting for the Occupy Wall Street crowd, a conscience-free 1 percenter who makes $10,000 bets and lectures the public about how corporations are people — while hordes of poor and middle class Americans that he fired trail in his wake telling tales of woe about how Romney made their lives into a living hell.
At one time, I thought both Gingrich and Perry were more electable than Romney. I have, however, reassessed and now believe Gingrich, Perry, Santorum, and even Huntsman, who just left the race, are ALL more electable than Mitt. It’s also worth noting that all of those candidates, including Huntsman, are more conservative than Romney. It’s mind-boggling to consider the fact that if Romney wins, the conservative base will have chosen the guy behind Romneycare over the man behind the Contract with America, America’s premier social conservative, and the best job-creating governor in America, all of whom would also be more electable.
Here we are in what may be, forgive me for the cliché, the most important election of our lifetimes and the GOP may end up choosing a candidate who’s one part Charlie Crist and one part John Kerry as our nominee.
Gloat Alert! One has to love it when the big guy quotes you and/or mentions your work.
This very writer has written multiple pieces about how John Kerry paid an effective federal tax rate of 12.34% on $5,072,000 income in 2003. I wrote the first piece and posted it in the IUSB student newspaper, The Preface, in 2004. I also posted my piece on Bill O’Reilly.com message boards and mentioned that while the productive rich pay a massive tax rate, the very few super rich do not pay much. O’Reilly did a story on the air on this subject but never gave me credit. [I imagine that one of his staffers saw my piece and presented it as his own work.]
Later when I started writing for the now famed IUSB Vision Web Log I wrote multiple pieces referencing this subject. A simple Google search shows some examples.
Google “John Kerry” 12.34% and you will see multiple pieces by yours truly – LINK.
As the Republican presidential candidates and their mouthpieces prattle on the TV from sunny South Carolina, I look up from the screen and out the window and sigh, a conservative heretic at rest, staring at all that cold Midwestern snow.
There’s a yellowed sketch tacked to the wall of my work space, a cowboy Ronald Reagan smiling in eternal optimism. And on a bookshelf is a dusty, dog-eared copy of Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind.”
Surrounded as I am by such dry artifacts of forgotten times, I sometimes wonder why I keep them. It could be self-mockery, or something like the way an amputee decides to keep the unused boot in the closet, out of sight, but near.
And still, I can’t ditch this feeling that I might be boiled in oil for the heresy I’m about to spout:
President Barack Obama will win re-election in 2012.
The reason he’ll win?
He knows who he is. And the Republican politicians don’t know who they are. They’ve forgotten what they’re about, or perhaps like some isolated tribe, they’ve lost the language necessary to explain it to themselves.
Their voters know this and don’t really believe them anymore.
And that’s why Obama will win.
And the Republican establishment that seeks to unseat him?
Their guy Mitt Romney calls himself a conservative. But he’s really a John Kerry in Republican clothing, right down to the phony laugh, and his past flips and flops will haunt him in defeat.
Shouldn’t the Romney types form their own party and call themselves the Corporatists? They’re often mistakenly called “pro-business moderates” by news organizations, but that’s not quite accurate.
For all the rhetoric about opposing regulation on business, they’re not opposed to those regulations that crush their competitors.
But do they know why their party is adrift? Can they even articulate the problem? I doubt it.
What’s bothersome is that I disagree with almost every single Obama policy, often vehemently, because what he’s doing amounts to feeding handfuls of steroids to the federal leviathan gorging on our individual rights and freedoms.
But being anti-Obama isn’t enough to vote him out. Republican voters have to believe, and I don’t think they do. They see the game unfolding. And they don’t want to be suckers again.
I just saw the Reuters poll showing Mitt Romney with a 21 point lead in South Carolina.
The poll is a joke for two reasons
1- Because half of the sample were Democrats. Why would you poll Democrats about a REPUBLICAN primary??? (Answer: to reflect the candidate the media wants to run against Obama.)
2- The sample was merely “registered voters” and not “likely voters” which skews the sample to the left. Since “Motor Voter” almost every non-voting Joe is registered to vote.
“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
Political Arena 